#also scott what the FUCK don't say shit like that in interviews come on

[goodluckclove]

Migration Patterns Excerpt: Levi Flashback

If anyone wants a peek at Doctor Scott Levi Kaufner's official, physical introduction in Songbird Elegies, here it is!

It's a flashback from Regina's perspective. You can hopefully gain the following from this text:

Levi, like his son, is known for potentially thoughtless impulses. But Doctor Kaufner will loudly joke to avoid talking about, or being talked out of his terrible ideas, where his son will just straight up say the bullshit he wants to do and then do it.

Levi and Regina are absolutely the horniest couple in the entire fucking series Jesus Christ. I don't get Actually Spicy in the excerpt because I am incapable of actual erotica, but I cannot stress enough that these two were so fucking down bad for each other.

You aren't a real wife guy unless you're ready to go toe-to-toe with an eldritch being on behalf of your spouse's comfort

songbird taglist hop on hop off

@kuebiko-writing @cartoonghosts 

@atlasthecactus @aroaceghosties 

@booksntea6982 @xarrixii 

@mushroommanchanterelle @whoevenknowswhatimwriting

@fukurouonthesea

Time fracturing so deeply that is was almost physically tangible, Regina thought about Levi. The memory hit, so sharp and sudden, that she recoiled as subtly as she could.

Putting her head in her hands, she

came home from working at the Center in the early summer feeling like shit. The exhaustion from three days straight of client interviews, reading and reading the inner motives of countless troubled people was bad enough. But it was particularly hot that day, hotter than what made sense for this time of day and this early in the season. Her eyes buzzed nauseatingly. Her vision stank of rot.

Midway walking up the drive reality flickered as she blacked out.

When she came to she was on the couch in the living room with a quilt tucked around her. Levi was sitting on the arm at the end, staring into space with the intensity he captured as his mind sparked in countless ways at once. Without directly looking, he somehow knew she was awake.

“It doesn’t look like a gift,” he observed her without turning his head, still revealing his exhaustion and mania. “What you can do. What everyone here can do. It doesn’t seem like a gift anyone would actually really want.”

Regina scoffed. Her voice hurt when she responded. “Nobody calls this a gift,” she croaked. “Who have you heard say something like that?”

Levi got quiet. His scowl deepened. Regina realized he didn’t need to answer her question in words.

She tried to sit up before a pulsing headache sent her retreating back to the couch.

“Would you get rid of it if you could?” Levi asked.

Regina closed her eyes and pressed her arm over them, granting further, merciful darkness. “I don’t know how to answer that, baby,” she groaned.

“Your magic. Do you need it to play piano?”

“I need – to see? To read music, at least. Unless I decide to finally take that class on Braille notation.”

Levi cut in the moment she was finished talking. “That’s the coloboma. That’s not your magic, do you need your –?”

“No, Levi. This might come as a shock, but my variant doesn’t do jack shit without a human being.”

Silence. Regina snapped too quickly. Her head just hurt.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Do you need it for work? If you couldn’t read people the way you do, would you still be able to work at the Center?”

Levi didn’t appear at all affected by her harsh tone moments earlier. Regina let out a tired snicker. “Uh, Nico cares more about my – I don’t know. My degree. I think I’m also still the only one at the Center with their CRC Certification,” she moved her arm and grimaced, even with her eyes still closed. “I hate this light.”

“Make it darker, please,” Levi muttered.

There was a sharp burst. A tinkling like a thousand small bells. The bulbs of the light fixture in the center of room shattered all at once, thin glass pooling in the bottom of the large, opaque shade that covered them. It was darker now, at least.

Levi let out a small sigh. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m still getting used to...sorry.”

Regina opened her eyes, blinking hard in the new shadows of the room around them. Without the light it was easier to take in a long, much-needed breath.

“The variant makes things slightly quicker,” she said. “Helps us form a strategy on how to approach clients sometimes. But so would asking a few more questions. All this, it really just – just moves the conversation along slightly more efficiently.”

Her husband thought about that. He fiddled with the crimson leather of his Devotional, something he toyed with far more frequently than his wedding ring. “Would you get rid of it if you could?” He asked again.

She sat up slightly, and this time was able to maintain the action. Levi had that look on his face that usually meant he was planning something. Without context, this only provoked a fraction of what Regina imagined was the justifiable amount of worry.

“Be mindful, Levi,” she warned.

He blinked, blinked several times in rapid succession, and then stopped blinking entirely for a while. Someone’s been spending too much time around birthrights.

“I could ask…” he began, words vague.

“Levi.”

That’s all she said. That’s all she could think to say, being that she could barely comprehend what the doctor was offering. He finally fully looked at her,. Regina expected the emotional strain of a man who found his wife passed out in the yard and had to somehow drag her inside.

The anger – calculate, resolute, far more calm than anything that made sense coming from Levi – came as a surprise. Regina knew immediately that it was probably a bad sign.

They just looked at each other. At some point the tension in Levi snapped out of existence. Maybe he could tell what she saw in him. He smiled sweetly and gave her foot a loving squeeze.

“Pizza, yeah?” Without waiting for an answer he took his phone and began dialing. “Pizza pie. Pizza pizza pie.”

“Levi,” Regina attempted again. “You really shouldn’t –”

“A New York slice!” Levi exclaimed in an exaggerated, superfluous Brooklyn accent. “Hey! I’m walkin’ here! Walkin’ to a New York slice!”

He smiled, satisfied at his own little joke. Regina knew there wasn’t any more pushing to be done – at least, not before she regained some of energy.

Levi ordered too much pizza from their usual place, as he always did. He once again complained about the dough, as if the place wasn't running mostly off the profit from his ongoing business. He smiled and cooed while lightly stroking Regina’s back in the way she liked so much.

Gradually she lost interest In her suspicions and dread. All of that felt less present than the broadness and warmth of Levi’s chest. The tides of his hands charting her spine and the muscles of her back with anatomical precision. How he moaned – soft, melodic, the only time when the man wasn’t off-key – the moment she slipped her fingers down to cup the bare skin of his hip and pull him closer.

In the afterglow, warm with newly-coursing blood and in the cocoon of their tousled sheets, Regina thought back to the look on Levi’s face. For the brief expanse of time between dialing the pizza place and having them pick up the call, his amicable smile fell. He gazed distractedly ahead of them with an expression Regina had never seen before.

Knowing she said she wouldn’t – knowing she promised herself she never would – she worked up the strength to make that push to pull back everything that covered what he was refusing to put into words.

Levi warbled in the back of her mind. Maybe he knew she would do this. Maybe it was the only way he’d be able to communicate this. It didn’t matter either way.

I’m doing it anyway, he said.

[chaos0pikachu]

Hi Chaos,

I keep seeing people post about x director and their thematic parallels and storytelling, and I can't help but think that it's the writer who does all those things!!! And it's so frustrating seeing the director get the credit for the screenwriters' work. I am also in the TVDU fandom, and to this day, I've never seen the director get the credit for what is clearly a writer's work. We praise, and we curse at the writers every time. We know their names by heart. Even in kdrama fandoms, I've seen the writer get the credit they deserve. So I'm just baffled by why the director is being credited with 'making' or 'writing' a show in the eyes of the public. I understand that they are more visible than the writers, but its only a matter of looking it up on MDL. (And the only writer who gets full credit for her work, MAME, is also cursed/called names by a lot of people). ( Can't forgive the fact that MAME did not write the TT show. What's the difference, you ask? I point you to Big Dragon, Kinnporsche (positive), Step by Step (negative). ) (Sorry, I feel very passionately about this.)

Lol nah I love this chaotic passion and I love how folks are so open about how Mame is treated in fandom is weird, actually yes spill those feelings to me it's safe here

I've written and rewritten this answer like five different times b/c it got so long but fuck it under a read more cut for other stuff but here's my general gist on this: I think it comes down to a few factors - visibility, apathy, ignorance and probably other stuff but I'm not a behavior scientists I'm just a bitch with a blog. As always y'all take what I say with some season salt mix

So, visibility.

It's really easy to credit whichever person is the most visible on a project with a majority of the work. We understand, as people, that many many folks work on these shows, but it's much easier to attribute the bulk of the project with a few individuals.

Actors used to be at the forefront of this, in recent years as social media has chipped away at the fourth wall, writers and directors have also risen in prominence in the discussions of film. But like, producers can and do have a huge impact on the way I project takes form and shapes yet you hardly ever see fans talking about x, y, z producers' influence on a project.

I think the only times I see a producer come up in discussions of a project is Kevin Feige (almost universally positive) and Kathleen Kennedy (almost universally negative). And that's really b/c both of these ppl are visible - they're a part of the promotional tours, they're walking the premiere carpets, they're giving interviews, etc. But it's all very bias b/c fans look at a singular body of work - Feige's case Marvel films, Kennedy's case Star Wars - of both of these producers and b/c they made either things they liked or hated.

But like, a quick bit of research and you'd see Kennedy has been a producer on some amazing and even classic projects: Gremlins, Back to the Future I & II, The Goonies, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Schindler's List, ET, The Color Purple, Hook, Jurassic Park, The Sixth Sense.

She's even been a producer on the Star Wars things people did like: The Mandalorian, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Andor, and The Acolyte. She's been a longtime collaborator of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas and has eight Oscar nominations as a producer but she was a producer for some mid Star Wars films and she's the devil incarnate. I don't even care that much about Kennedy or Star Wars shit but I'm not gonna pretend there's not bias in her case that's similar to how fandom views and treats Mame.

And on the flipside she's been a producer on shit or mid projects - like the Star Wars films and Signs, the Flintstones - which is just typical. You work long enough in the industry and you'll make or work on mid to bad projects. See Ridley Scott's career of epic highs & epic lows.

[It's interesting to me that Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni get all the credit for shows like The Mandalorian but Kennedy gets no credit whilst on the flipside JJ Abrams gets like no blame for how mid to bad Force Awakens & Rise of Skywalker were but Kennedy did get blame. And I'm speaking broad strokes here, yes I'm sure JJ did get some cranky posts about his part in RoS but in general Kennedy got more.]

Which leads me to the next factor, ignorance.

I think ppl are gonna like take offensive to that word but I'm using it super neutrally ignorance is just a lack of knowledge.

We're all ignorant about stuff like fuck don't ask me about how sales tax works I don't know. Lacking knowledge is just a fact of life we can't be experts on every single facet of the world, life, etc it's impossible and that's fine. Just own up to the fact you don't know and if you want to know do some research because learning can actually be really cool and fun and shit. Except sales tax I'm not learning all that.

But from my general observations of BL fandom well a lot of people are ignorant on how film making works. Hell a lot of ppl outside of BL fandom are ignorant about how film making works - the implosion in the 911 fandom is showing out re: this lmao literally right now - and again, that's fine. It's really Not A Big Deal. I'm no by-the-by expert either. I think the grind comes when folks try to be Breadtubers and others take said posts as gospel knowledge when by my observations it's a lot of opinion and/or misinformation.

[idk what yaoi framing is but it isn't a real film making thing; comics and film are two different mediums y'all]

I saw this a lot in the BBC Sherlock fandom ppl with very strong voices claiming x, y, z is how television works and, well it wasn't lol like this very consistent argument I see in migratory conspiracy shipping circles is actors and showrunners just be lying in interviews to "hide the big romantic plot twist" for said MCS and that's just not true. It's not trueeeeee that's not how PR and marketing works. So many MCS fandoms pull out the "we were baited b/c they posted The Ship on twitter" and harass the showrunners who have nothing to do with the official twitter. That's an entirely different department of the show/film. Marketing is a different department from the film crew.

But most people don't know this or don't consider this b/c a lot of folks don't know the inner workings of film, or publishing.

Like whoever runs the Seven Seas social media is in a totally different department from who's acquiring licenses for titles and who's editing the books themselves. Likewise yelling at a showrunner b/c the trailer for an episode advertised a scene you were excited about and then the scene wasn't in the episode? Not the showrunners fault they don't cut the promos that's a different department entirely.

I'm not knocking ppl for not knowing stuff like this, it's not like it's inherently common knowledge. Like hell if I know how the education hierarchy works I don't work in education. The issue - if it can be called that - comes in when people make assumptions is all and spreading misinformation.

In the case of Mame you're right she didn't write Tharnype on MDL she isn't even listed as a producer (idk if she is and it's listed elsewhere personally I find MDL very unreliable since it's fan edited) the show is just based on her novel but she's the one who gets all the hyper focused critique not the actual screenwriter nor director. Similar for any other Me Mind Y show. They're all just considered "Mame's work" and not like, a group project (which is what film making is lol).

Now, I'm no expert on how the Thai film industry works. I imagine the hierarchy aspects are, if not the same, at least similar to American film hierarchy. Meaning producers, and directors have a lot of power in terms of what gets put on screen.

I will say from what I've seen folks do wear multiple hats on Thai productions so like the director might also be the screenwriter, or the screenwriter might also be a producer, etc so that could also add to some of the overlap in credits.

I don't use the term "apathy" as a negative here. Fandom is first and foremost a hobby and a hobbyist space. I do not research every single show or film I watch either. Hell I struggle with watching as many BLs as other people who are just straight up powerhouses with how much they can watch.

Not being interesting in the deep ins and outs of How A Thing Is Made isn't a bad thing, focusing on only "the faces" of the project isn't something I'm gonna hold against people either.

I do think if you're going to be giving a Roger Ebert style critique or go for a more academic reading of a piece of media then yeah, you might have more of a burden to do some research if only to not spread misinformation. Or at least, to properly give credit where credit is due.

Personally, I'm of the mind fandom - in general not just BL fandom or whatever - is to concerned with like, "being right" about the media they watch and being seen as pseudo authority figures at times. That Big Name Fan aspect of it all, the social clout that comes with it - saw this with a lot of bbc sherlock wank - and genuinely, bro who fucking cares?

It bothers me when fans feel guilty for liking a thing big voices in fandom claim are Bad, Wrong, in a breadtube voice like who caaaaaares there's so many shows I could break down via film techniques for why I dislike them but like I'm so lazy bro it's not that real if you like 2gether I'm so happy for you light up like a firework baby

[unless you like star trek into darkness and then your wrong pikachu has spoken es lo que es]

anyway idk where I'm going with but yeah those are my general thoughts I guess on why ppl might attribute or heavily focus on the director vs the screenwriter of a project

[targwh0re]

Thoughts on Teen Wolf the Movie while watching it (SPOILERS) pt.1

Before I even start let me say that they should've just made it another 12 or 10 or hell even an 8 episode mini series

Should've opened with Isaac instead of Liam and Hikari in Japan smh. He was the last one to have the triskele box, how tf did Liam get it? (I do understand that Daniel Sharman couldn't be in the film but still...at least give me an explanation)

I don't care what they say, Hikari was supposed to be Kira and Hikari wasn't supposed to even exist. Liam and Hikari are clearly what Scott & Kira Should've been, minus the restaurant in Japan, if they'd done the right thing and brought Kira back in the last season. He said he'd wait for her😭. (Though I Stan the actress for not coming back when they were going to pay her white female castmates more than her. Honestly fuck them for that)

Why does Liam own a restaurant in Japan. How did we get here in our lives. Liam u supposed to be protecting Beacon Hills. Also idk what career I though Liam would get but it definitely wouldn't have been restaurant owner. I can see him as a coach maybe (at Devonford Prep in honor of Brett; huh maybe I did know what career I thought he'd have🤔)

Damn y'all really keeping Nogi with teas and spices. Ig hiding it in plain sight works idk 🤷‍♀️

Why Liam fall like that 😭

Damn Nogi really reminding me of the Witch from Narnia when she appeared in that ice wall thing in the second movie

also if Nogi can talk through that thing, why hasn't he manipulate someone into setting him free already

Though that Nogi was like a regular fly, not a firefly...

Scott being call "The Alpha" like they'll never know🤫 also like I thought Monroe went international w/ her hunting. Ain't no way Scott's just chillin all carefree enough to put his name on a business.

Yeah Scott save that doggie...oh and the little grl too. Also this would've been better plot wise if this was a flashback of Scott saving a little Hikari, it would explain how she's randomly apart of the pack now

Love how Scott's animal clinic looks like a mixture of Deaton's vet place and Derek's loft

Scott talking about having kids one day was how I knew they'd give him Eli at the end. Like wtf, he should be raised by his family, by other born wolves who know about the werewolf history that Derek did. Like hello we got great uncle Peter, auntie Cora, and hell even cousin Malia. Derek WOULD NOT want his SON raised by an ARGENT!

"I didn't see it. I took my eyes off the road for like two seconds to change the song on my ipod"

Wooo spooky 👻

I said ah oop jump scare Chris "I never use the front door" Argent

Poor Chris no parent ever deserves their child to die before them

Bardo! and who stayed up all night doing research about Bardo for you, huh, Mr. McTruealphaman. KIRA!

Yes papa Argent, say fuck

Well Jeff Davis said he wanted the timeline to work out so that Eli was born before Derek returned to Beacon Hills in an interview (idk where it is and I'm too lazy to find it) and after the series finale timeskip in the last season it was 2017, its now 2026 so technically it's been 11 years Scott my boy

Look at me out here fixing the timeline for everyone😁

"I got a feeling the real answers are in Beacon Hills" Yeah no shit Chris, everything's gotta do with Beacon Hills

Scott your the alpha. Be the alpha. Quit asking other people to to decisions for you, for the love of God

So Scott I understand why you left Beacon Hills but are we going to address what happend to Monroe and the internatipnal hunters Corp? No?...okay then

Chris why did you leave mama McCall. Jeff u really out here breaking everyone up. Should've got w/ Papa Stilinski so Scott and Stiles could be brothers fr "oh what could've been"

Why the pack break up? not gonna give me an explanation again...okay I'm sensing a pattern here

Yeassss!!! Business woman Lydia, we knew u could do it. And she looks very snazzy in that white outfit with her ponytail if I do say so myself. Funny how the banshee's business has to do with sound lmao it's perfect.

Lyd!😭 Thats Mrs. Martin-Stilinski to you! Shit at least call her Lyds so that you don't sound like your calling her a lid💀

Damn u think Lydia would've learned to look at stuff by now before handing it out. Nah but on a real note I feel like she should have a better understanding of her abilities by now, and have expanded on them, and had more control of them but that might be just me

I SAID ITS MRS. MARTIN-STILINSKI Ray or whatever ur name is!

Oooo the automatic writing again

Yayyy Eli Hale! In my head Eli is a nickname for Elijah, just like Derek is a nickname Frederick (if you known you know🤣)

Hale Auto?! Ain't no way. Derek ain't a mechanic. I refuse. Terrible career choice for the man. He's rich, he ain't even gotta work

Maybe Malia could be a mechanic but I doubt it, ooo a Park Ranger would be perfect.

Love how Eli just hotwired that jeep😂. Oh and just let me say this here and get it out of my system. Eli is similar to both Stiles and Scott when they were younger but he is NOT STILES. Yes he's sarcastic and a little delinquent but do you guys know how many teenagers are sarcastic little delinquents? Alot. It's a teen thing. I was the same way (minus the crimes😂) and still am sarcastic af. Love Eli as Eli, not a mini or replacement for Stiles. Love u guys to death but we went into this knowing there was no Stiles.

Jeff Davis: No Stiles.

Us: No Stiles?

Jeff Davis: No Stiles!

Boys gonna pop a damn wheelie in fucking Roscoe

Love how Parrish just calls Mason instead of tailing him

I'm fucking dead💀they was all too scared to tell Derek (me too thou bc sourwolf is scary😶)

Why is Mason a deputy? Feel like he should be working at Lydia's, like he's right under her is what I'd say he should be doing. I could see Corey, his husband, maybe being a deputy though. *gasp* or a cute little school teacher🥺

I stand by what I said earlier, Malia should be a park ranger and I add to that by saying that she should be the consultant and not Derek (though i understand they had to reintroduce his character) she spent a lot of time in those woods, and she's more intune with her animal side than anyone else

Derek still sexy af

serial arsonist...wolf pack also has a serial arsonist. I swear to God they should've just made it a spin off instead of its own thing

You definitely should call Stiles, he's head of his own supernatural devison in the FBI👍

Love how Derek was like a fugitive for most of the series and now he works w/ the police. Eli taking up that criminal mantel now😂

I mean...is it really grand theft auto if he took it from his own dads shop🤷‍♀️🤣

Derek's got ptsd from the jeep

Eli wanted to race that grl, I now headcanon that's how he flirts. Just like his daddy he's like haha look I'm better than you at something "you wanna see some real speed bitch" (flashbacks to when Derek flirted with Paige by being an ass with that basketball, like grl just wanted to play her cello in peace and quite)

Love how Derek just like slashed the tires. Really said "i don't think so. My names Derek hale. I go way back" (I'm so sorry to anyone reading this)

Part 1-5

[denimbex1986]

'I'm at home in London, currently in my kitchen. It's fine. It's a bit of a weird time, but I'm kind of determined that when it's all over I'll get something out of it, you know? It's the first time in a long time that I've been able to stop, so if people I love are able to remain healthy then I feel kind of grateful.

People keep talking about the eerie calm, but I don't think it's the calm that's eerie, it's the fact it's happened so quickly, because stuffing ourselves into a tube five days out of seven is pretty eerie, I think. There's loads of eerie stuff the other way too.

I've got a few daily activities to stay calm. The main one is avoiding freaking out. I decided to have five things that I'm going to do every day and if i don't do them I'm not going to freak out. The best thing that I did was listen to Mo Gawdat. He wrote a book on happiness [Solve For Happy] and Elizabeth Day interviews him on her podcast. He just speaks with an incredible humanity, generosity, wisdom and calm about what this could be and how rather than following the herd we should focus on what we do and think ourselves. The majority of us are safe, he says – though he doesn't minimise the pain that some people are going through – and it's really been beneficial. It's brilliant. Elizabeth Day has just interviewed the great philosopher Alain de Botton too. Both are just guys who have great overviews.

I encourage all people to use the mute button on social media more, by the way. We are surrounded by so much information at the moment. I do not need to see a picture of an empty shelf in a supermarket, because that signifies to me that you, my friend, are an empty shelf.

This is the first pandemic we've had with social media and there's so much information. It's brilliant, Instagram, but you suddenly become aware, when your world becomes smaller, that you just don't need to engage. And people's misery seems to be the same as their showing off – people seem to show off their misery as much as their fabulousness. There are some people on Instagram who make you think, “That person is invading my daily life and I haven’t even met them!” So to be able to decide “I don't need you at this time”… there's something good about that. It's about looking to console people, rather than be consoled.

I suppose one thing I'd really like to change after the pandemic is people's attitude to what social media actually is. The point is about real connection, not just to filter the fuck out of everything.

With Zoom and being able to be online all the time, maybe there is a way of staggering traffic into the office, for instance. Maybe you don't need to be in work for 9am every day. It makes you realise things can change. Good stuff will come out of it, I think. Shaking things up and making people question who they are outside of their day-to-day persona: that's not a bad thing. The question is what makes you genuinely happy? What do you miss?

I am missing dressing up and occasions and all that stuff. But I've always been a big fan of the nonevent. Like the day after a wedding or at a funeral, when you don't expect anything specific and you're allowed to be whatever you want.

I had a Zoom conversation with one of my friends the other day and we showed each other all the shit clothes we're wearing right now. We did a little fashion show. It's amazing how it moves to the background in a situation like this, clothes and all of that stuff. There's a great freedom in that.

I went to a surprise Zoom birthday last week and it makes you realise what you bring to a party. You've got to bring something! Dressing up and having a sense of occasion is usually what you bring to a party, but in Zoom land you've got to bring more than that – you've got to bring the party! You can't just stand there.

I find on Zoom after two drinks I'm hammered and then you come off the call and you find yourself in your apartment swaying around and your like, “Jesus, I'm absolutely gone. Who else will I Zoom?”

Sometimes you need to stop and look at what's outside work – what's important. It sounds like a cliché, but that's a really big one for me.

Both my sisters put me on to Ryan Heffington's dance classes. He's based in LA and he's just full of joy and it's really stupid. He asks you to pick up bits of your laundry and swing them around. He's got some “punch the president” moves. The music is really fun, really camp. It's on LA time, but it stays up until the next day. But he’s a really brilliant choreographer and he leads you through the moves so it's not all high-octane. Afterwards you just feel really brilliant!" [Follow Ryan Heffington on Instagram here.]

I'm in love with my resistance bands. You can do so much with them. In this time when everyone's in their head, it's important to keep the exercise up. I never really used these before because I always went to the gym, but I've found out that you can break a sweat at home! You can do all sorts of things with these – you stretch them as much as you can.

I've been watching a lot of Tiger King, obviously, but I've also been watching Making The Cut, that new show with Heidi Klum and Tim Gunn. It's amazing. I love a design show – I loved Project Runway, I liked Next In Fashion – but the judges in this are Naomi Campbell and Carine Roitfeld, so it's proper high fashion. I love all that kind of stuff.

People keep saying, “Stay connected,” and I think that's important, but the person you're spending all your time with is yourself. And If I'm not checking in with what's going on with me, and I'm constantly Face Timing people and looking outwards rather than inwards… you go a bit nuts. So it's been a good time to meditate. I've had a mixed experience with meditation, but as things have gone a bit more mental I've needed a still space. And with all this information, I've found that if you look inwards and find peace, you're able to take that peace to the world. It doesn't feel hippy-dippy to me; it feels scientific. If you get better at finding the calm in yourself, I think it's easier to make sense of what's happening.

In terms of grooming I'm using Murdock's sea salt spray, because it's the only bit of sea I'm going to get right now!'

[thesearchforbluejello]

I know this has been a topic of discussion lately and I'm by NO means the first person to say it, but 1x04 definitely just gave us a big hint at the rest of the show and this is why:

I was a pretty outspoken critic after the first two episodes of them having chose Love Me Again as the theme song even though I've discovered I absolutely love 95% of John Newman's entire discography, the reason being that it just to me didn't seem to fit the show at all. I mean, besides the kickass vibe.

As others have pointed out, Frankie's fairly impressive fuck-up in 1x04 and Will's dramatic exit at the very end of the episode shows us that, yes, the song is going to absolutely hit the nail on the head.

Additionally, as others have been discussing as well, Scott Foley actually pointed out in an interview (I can't seem to source this, can anyone else?), we should be anticipating an on-again-off-again relationship rather than slow burn.

I started wondering in 1x03 since every choice in this show is so deliberate (thank god, finally some good fucking food) that the theme song was carefully chosen as well and we might start seeing some push-and-pull between Frankie and Will regarding who is into whom and who's making the mistakes as they do start to get closer.

In short, all of you who've been discussing this and pointing out the evidence, I agree 100%. I was seriously doubting we'd get anything except slow burn until I watched 1x04 but when you look at the theme song, Scott Foley's comment, and the fact that we're 4/13ths of the way through this season and already have some pretty obvious directionality pointing us towards a fantastic trainwreck that I'm super excited for that is sure as hell not slow burn, you can definitely see that the on-again-off-again plotline is looking a lot more likely.

I think we should also consider what Whiskey Cavalier isn't, namely the other shows it's been compared to before it even started, two of which have had 4+ seasons of slow burn before anything happened with the built-in ships. I could talk for hours about how there seem to be a lot of conscious choices by the writers in Whiskey Cavalier to separate themselves from these other shows and subverting the expectations we may have had based on those predecessors while still keeping the formulaic set up the show is built on (a formula that's classic, at this point, and that they twist just enough to make it still fresh and satisfying, another topic I could talk for ages about). Regardless, it makes sense that we'd be seeing an on-again-off-again relationship rather than slow burn, because we'd be expecting it. We're also in an age of tv where shows that started sucking ten years ago are still on the air, shows that are wholly original and intruiging are cancelled after a single season, and shows that have die-hard fanbases are cancelled at the peak of their popularity, so no one is safe. It makes sense to do something that's different yet compelling, episodic yet character-based and basically impossible not to invest in.

TL;DR 1) Scott Foley should probably be careful what he says in interviews, 2) I am sick of comparisons between WC and other shows, but the comparisons do yield some interesting observations, 3) I think we all know now why they chose that theme song and I couldn't resist that pun sorry, 4) It's looking super likely that we're going to see an on-again-off-again struggle at forming a stable relationship between Will and Frankie and I'm both worried about the ability for that plotline to flourish in today's tv climate and super friggin excited to see where this show goes.

[morlock-holmes]

What exactly are we trying to solve?

The incuriosity and fuzziness with which people look at the west coast homelessness crisis drives me fucking batty.

Now look, I admit up front that I am also both incurious and wool-headed about this issue, but I work in a fucking restaurant for minimum wage. If you write a book about the fucking homeless crisis or run the city government I expect you to think a little bit harder than the average schmoe on the street, and I think that's reasonable.

One thing that pisses me off about the way people talk about homelessness is that they don't seem to know why it's bad, or what it would look like to solve it. Which I know sounds crazy but hear me out.

Scott Alexander helpfully reviews San Fransicko for me so I don't have to punch any holes in my drywall, but I want... Well, actually I was composing this as I finish Alexander's review, and I got to his utilitarian discussion at the end that cuts to the heart of the matter:

Along with all the problems and preaching, San Fransicko offers solutions. These won’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s read this far: they’re basically the Amsterdam plan presented earlier. Break up open-air drug markets. Force addicts into rehab by threatening prison sentences for noncompliance. Ban camping on streets and force the homeless into shelters. Offer permanent housing when appropriate, but make it contingent on good behavior. Have a strong psychiatric system with ability to commit people who need it, and enforced outpatient treatment when appropriate.

Would these work?

I’m pretty sure they would work well for housed people and the city as a whole. Homeless people would no longer block the streets and assault passers-by; they would be safely out of sight in shelters or in mental institutions. A new generation of tough DAs would crack down on crime. Stores could reopen, and citizens could walk the streets without fear. It’s hard for me to imagine this not working.

...

I have to admit - I talk a good utilitarian talk on this, but I don’t know if I live up to my ideals. An addictionologist interviewed in San Fransicko heaps contempt on well-off liberals who get the benefits of virtue-signaling while externalizing the costs onto poor people in bad areas:

[You] sit in the suburbs and feel smug about the fact that you oppose the war on drugs and have a Black Lives Matter sign in your yard. But you don’t have homeless people taking a crap on your front stoop every day or [have] all your packages stolen every single day

So I imagine - what if I lived in the worst parts of SF, had people crap on my front steps every day, had all my packages stolen, and (by the bounds of this hypothetical) wasn’t allowed to move to the suburbs, ever? I think I would last two weeks before I sacrificed all of my principles on the altar of “less human feces, please”.

Maybe, as a lefty, I'm supposed to read that and gasp and say, "How can you be so heartless?" or maybe I'm supposed to say, "Gosh, when you get right down to it, doesn't the poor guy have a point?"

But instead I'm going to ask:

Do you have any studies showing how effective those policies are at getting rid of human feces?

I'm not being a smart-ass, I'm genuinely wondering how Alexander didn't notice that so much of the criticism he himself quotes in Shellenberger's book has nothing to do with any of that stuff.

This is the particular quote from Shellenberger that caught me up short:

"An experiment with 249 homeless people in San Francisco between 1999 and 2002 found those enrolled in the city’s Housing First program, Direct Access to Housing, used medical services at the same rate as those who were not given housing through the program, suggesting that the Housing First program likely had minimal impact on the participants’ health."

Did it have an impact on how often they took a shit on a public sidewalk? Did it have an impact on the amount of litter they dumped on streets? Did it have an impact on time spent chasing people around and screaming obscenities? Did it have an impact on how often they injected heroine in the subway? Did it have an impact on how many sidewalks they blocked with tents?

All that fucking soul-searching, all that "Gosh, perhaps to solve the problem we simply must be cruel" and this reluctant commitment to reducing the effect of homelessness on tourists and housed locals, and realizing that, gosh, we might have to sacrifice the well-being of homeless people if that's what it takes, an utter commitment to ignoring anything but the reduction of social harm from mass camping...

And the criticism of DAH is that it doesn't improve the health outcomes of the people enrolled in it?!

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?

This kind of goalpost shifting is RIFE within the discussion of west coast homelessness, where opponents of current policies or even speculative ones waffle back and forth about whether or not they give a shit about the health of the homeless or not.

Before all that soul-searching I quoted this is Scott's assessment of Housing First policy:

Conclusion: Housing First seems to work in getting people housing. It probably also helps people use fewer medical services, and it might or might not save money compared to not doing it (probably more likely when treating very severe cases, less likely in areas with high housing costs). It probably doesn’t affect people’s overall health or drug use status very much.

So... Housing first policies probably actually do a pretty damn good job at making the Homeless less obnoxious to tourists and housed people in a number of concrete ways related to litter, camping, public defecation, etc.?

There's good reason to think, pending further research, that they might actually do a pretty good job at reducing some of the problems that, after all that soul-searching, we decided were the only priorities we have?

I'm furious and unhappy at the way Portland is being covered by tent cities, mounds of trash, and grafitti. But I have this utterly baffling conversation with people where they go,

"This camping is shameful, the city should crack down on it!"

"So, get people into stable housing"

"Well, if you get people into stable housing it only puts a band-aid on the problem, they still can have health and behavioral problems that are really important."

And I always go, "Right, but I thought we were trying to reduce camping."

There's this kind of baffling goal-post moving. Alexander has a lot of paragraphs of hand-wringing over whether or not we should accept that sometimes we have to be TOUGH and HARD to really solve these problems, and accept that we may just have to care less about what Homeless people do or want, but he somehow hasn't noticed that he actually has very little data on whether or not Shellenberger's preferred policies work better than what he calls "Housing First" in terms of these metrics.

This is a wild guess and armchair psychologizing, but what seems to be happening is that in cities like San Francisco or Portland, as the problem gets worse, you, as a relatively better-off housed person, start thinking of Homelessness less and less in purely charitable terms with worries about how it effects the homeless, and more and more things like, "I don't like crossing the street because the sidewalk I was going to use is blocked by tents and piles of garbage" and "I don't like how often people chase after me screaming obscenities" and that feels somehow hard and uncompassionate, so you sort of start to assume that the only way to solve these problems is through policies that also feel hard and uncompassionate.

But I'm going to be honest, the case for that strikes me as extremely flimsy and I don't think I've ever seen anybody make it in a very convincing way.

[stcveskent]

their little miracle; chris evans

pairings: chris evans x reader

warnings: fluff and a bit of swearing

request on wattpad

_____

its been 8 months,since you heard that you would be giving a little miracle of yours and chris, soon. You still remember the day when both of you saw the baby for yhe first time, as it moved around your belly.

you remember how Chris held your hand when he saw your baby, and said, "it's ours" while crying, you remember the day when he found out it was a baby girl, and he was so happy, and when he told his family about it, they were crying too, because their son's dream came true. Since then he never left your side. Well, he haven't announced it on the internet too . He used to talk to your baby, late at nights, when she won't let you sleep, by endless kickings.

"Hey honey, don't do that to Mama." He says, slowly, and calmly as you laid down next to him, and his hands on your belly rubbing it gently.

"I won't leave your side, y/n." He whispered softly and kissed you. During those times, when Chris got intimate with you, for eg, he would kiss you more often, and lay next to you all the time, hold your hands all the time, you used to blush alot, as if it was a school crush, you could say it was the hormones.

"i love you so much." He says and you smile.

"I love you too and more." You reply and he wraps his arm around you, and kiss your head, and then you gasped as soon as your baby kicks you, because you were giving all the attention to her daddy and not her and even daddy didn't give her attention.

"alright baby, i love you too." He says as he keeps a hand on your belly and you laughed at how your daughter already had control over her Dad, even before her birth.

your smile grew wider, as all those thoughts came to your mind, and Chris noticed how you were smiling, and thinking about some things. He smiled looking at how adorable you looked.

"what're you smiling at, sweetheart." He asks as he comes closer, and kisses you gently.

"thinking of how our girl, already has control over her dad." He smiles as he heard you, it was a very different feeling for both of you.

"Well, trust me, the queen has more control than the princess." He says referring to you and you roll your eyes.

"oh stop!" You said as both of you chuckled, just then, to ruin the moment his phone rang. He groaned, and you laughed at him.

"Always messing up my moments, with my queen." He said, and you blushed at how he made you feel so good.

"Chris, i'm sorry to call you now." His manager spoke, as chris answered.

"No its fine, Joshua? what did you need?" He replied.

"Well, the agency has been calling up alot, for your photo shoot, and i tried to decline it, because you wanted to stay with your wife, but they aren't listening , and said you're their hope."

"alright fine! I'll do it."

"ah thank god!! I'll arrange the dates and timing and inform you."

"Alright!" Chris says as he ends the conversation and looks at you, smiling.

"What's wrong?" You asked

"I have to stay away from you for a couple of hours."

"and what would be the reason?" You asked as he sits next to you and pull you closer to him, and you put your head on his shoulder.

"There's this photo shoot they need me to do it and I honestly don't wanna stay away from you, even if its for a couple of hours, you're now close to your date, I can't just leave you here all alone, when you'd need me." He spoke.

"Chris, i'll be fine, you're worrying too much, babe. I can manage on my own, honey!"

"I know you can, i just don't want to be away from you and our daughter." You smiled as he said that, how your daughter's and his bond was so strong.

"babe!!" You squeeled and hugged him and he kissed you multiple times. Just then the phone rings and he groans again.

"Its the agency, i'll have to take it, i'm so sorry!!"

"Its fine, honey." You said and he answered the call, going into the living room to talk while you watched some TV

"Thank you so much, Chris for joining us!" He said and chris smiled.

"The pleasure is all mine!"

"Is there any arrangements we can do for you?" Just as those words left his mouth, he smiles thinking of an idea.

"Yes! Could i get my wife with me? I want her to be next to me."

"Ofcourse sir! It's our pleasure to have her with us, and we can have some couple photoshoot too!"

"Thank you! See you, soon!" He says and walks to you.

Chris comes back to you and tells you that he's made arrangements for you to come with me, you denied at first but he made you to agree to it, typical christopher  and then the day comes when you had to go with him. You were nervous about something which he had completely forgot about. Announcing about your little miracle.

As soon as both of you entered, the photographers welcomed you both so warmly, and as expected they were shocked by the news, and they were happy for both of you.

As soon as chris finished his part of the work, you two had to pose together, it was all cute with him, and then the photographer requested that you should have a photo or two of your own with your bump and Chris happily agreed to it.

Just after you completed your work, you told Chris, that now seems to be the right time to tell everyone about it. No , only family and some of his close friends knew about this, so he was just concerned about how his fans and co workers would annouce, but you knew things would fall back into a perfect position.

"I posted it." He said and breathed.

"i did too!" You said and smiled.

Just a second later, yours and his phone were filled with notifications, hundreds to thousands, and all were really happy about it, because all of them understood that this was Chris's dream and you could only turn into his reality.

a week or two has passed, Chris had to go through a lot of press , and interviews where the main interest was your pregnancy. As you waited for him to get over with the last interview for the month, and after that he promised he'd take a break, he comes to you.

"How was it?" You asked as he kissed you and sat next to you.

"It was good, i was happy to tell them, how you made me happy, and they obviously wanted you, but i said you were resting."

"Thank you —*gasps* oh shit!" You said and his eyes came out if his eye sockets.

"Baby what happened?!"

"She's coming omg!! My water broke!!!" You said and he panicked, he was roaming around the house finding the baby bag, and you felt contractions, which were going on for a day which you tried to ignore.

"Chris where the fuck are you?!" You yelled, as the contractions hit you again.

"I found it!! Let's go." He said as he helped you get up and rush you to the hospital, through out the ride he didn't leave your hand, and just made you breathe, but it was true, when you're about to give birth, your temper loses, and poor Chris had to listen.

Now you were in the waiting room, with him and yours and his family started to visit you both.

"Hey!" Your mom said and rushed to hug you as you breathed.

"Hey Mom! I'm good? Are you?" You asked and she laughed at you.

"I know, the temper, i gave birth to three kids!" She said and hugged Chris, and he chuckled and stopped as soon as you gave him a death glare.

"come on! my little girl needs a break, how are you feeling honey?" Your dad says and you roll your eyes.

"P A I N!" You said and then your siblings laugh at you.

"Y/n , for real, you need to calm down, also guess what i already have done half of the preparations for my niece!!" your brother says while your sister argues with him that it was she who did it, and that made you laugh, and Chris smile looking at you.

His mother stayed longer with you but then you told her to go, because she looked tired, and she agreed, time passed and you were ready to deliver the baby, Chris started to breathe heavily, he was nervous, more than you.

"Its gonna be fine, babe!" You said and he nods

"I'll be next to you the whole time." He says and you nod.

Slowly the doctors start to give you instructions to how to push till they count till 10 and you agree to it, clearly understanding their instructions.

"Push!" They said and you pushed while your groaned and your grip on chris's hand tightened.

"You're doing amazing honey!" He encouraged and honestly, that made you stay strong till the end.

Just few more pushes later, the cries of your baby girl were heard and you sighed as both of you burts into tears. They laid your little miracle on top of you as Chris adored both of you, he starts to wipe his tears, and the doctor takes your little girl away.

"No where are you taking her!" Chris says and you chuckled at him.

"they're cleaning her, she'll be back soon, with us." You said and he looked at you with  a smile.

"You did so good today!" he says and you smiled at him.

"It wasn't possible without you." You said and he shook his head.

"You're the most strongest women i've ever seen, and  how beautiful you look today! Your glowing baby!" He says and you laugh as he pressed his lips onto yours in a sweet and filled with love kiss.

"I love you so much." He says

"I love you more!" You reply and they bring the baby back to you, and Chris holds her, tears falling from his eyes, as he met his daughter.

"She's so beautiful just like her Mama!" He says and you feel your tears falling.

"Daddy loves you and your Mama so much! He'll do everything to protect both of you!" He says as he holds her in his arms and kisses her multiple times on her head.

"Okay now, Mama also needs attention!" You said and he laughed and kissed you again, and just then you met your family, already waiting and excited to greet their grand child, neice and goddaughter.

Yours and Chris's mother couldn't hold back tears and were crying with joy, while Scott hugged you and cried and you were crying because he was crying , which made everyone laugh and later Scott Shanna, Carly and your siblings already started giving suggestions for the baby names for your little miracle.

It was the best day of your life, you for the first time witnessed how one life can bring so much happiness to so many people, and you were only concerned about your husband, who was on cloud 9 because of his happiness and you couldn't stop smiling because of him. You won't be able to forget this day ever!

------

done with your request!!hope you liked it❤️

also, but Daddy!Chris is making me cry😭😭

[chrisevansluv]

Here is the 2012 Detail Magazine interview with chris evans:

The Avengers' Chris Evans: Just Your Average Beer-Swilling, Babe-Loving Buddhist

The 30-year-old Bud Light-chugging, Beantown-bred star of The Avengers is widely perceived as the ultimate guy's guy. But beneath the bro persona lies a serious student of Buddhism, an unrepentant song-and-dance man, and a guy who talks to his mom about sex. And farts.

By Adam Sachs,

Photographs by Norman Jean Roy

May 2012 Issue

"Should we just kill him and bury his body?" Chris Evans is stage whispering into the impassive blinking light of my digital recorder.

"Chris!" shouts his mother, her tone a familiar-to-anyone-with-a-mother mix of coddling and concern. "Don't say that! What if something happened?"

We're at Evans' apartment, an expansive but not overly tricked-out bachelor-pad-ish loft in a semi-industrial nowheresville part of Boston, hard by Chinatown, near an area sometimes called the Combat Zone. Evans has a fuzzy, floppy, slept-in-his-clothes aspect that'd be nearly unrecognizable if you knew him only by the upright, spit-polished bearing of the onscreen hero. His dog, East, a sweet and slobbery American bulldog, is spread out on a couch in front of the TV. The shelves of his fridge are neatly stacked with much of the world's supply of Bud Light in cans and little else.

On the counter sit a few buckets of muscle-making whey-protein powder that belong to Evans' roommate, Zach Jarvis, an old pal who sometimes tags along on set as a paid "assistant" and a personal trainer who bulked Evans up for his role as the super-ripped patriot in last summer's blockbuster Captain America: The First Avenger. A giant clock on the exposed-brick wall says it's early evening, but Evans operates on his own sense of time. Between gigs, his schedule's all his, which usually translates into long stretches of alone time during the day and longer social nights for the 30-year-old.

"I could just make this . . . disappear," says Josh Peck, another old pal and occasional on-set assistant, in a deadpan mumble, poking at the voice recorder I'd left on the table while I was in the bathroom.

Evans' mom, Lisa, now speaks directly into the microphone: "Don't listen to them—I'm trying to get them not to say these things!"

But not saying things isn't in the Evans DNA. They're an infectiously gregarious clan. Irish-Italians, proud Bostoners, close-knit, and innately theatrical. "We all act, we sing," Evans says. "It was like the fucking von Trapps." Mom was a dancer and now runs a children's theater. First-born Carly directed the family puppet shows and studied theater at NYU. Younger brother Scott has parts on One Life to Live and Law & Order under his belt and lives in Los Angeles full-time—something Evans stopped doing several years back. Rounding out the circle are baby sister Shanna and a pair of "strays" the family brought into their Sudbury, Massachusetts, home: Josh, who went from mowing the lawn to moving in when his folks relocated during his senior year in high school; and Demery, who was Evans' roommate until recently.

"Our house was like a hotel," Evans says. "It was a loony-tunes household. If you got arrested in high school, everyone knew: 'Call Mrs. Evans, she'll bail you out.'"

Growing up, they had a special floor put in the basement where all the kids practiced tap-dancing. The party-ready rec room also had a Ping-Pong table and a separate entrance. This was the house kids in the neighborhood wanted to hang at, and this was the kind of family you wanted to be adopted by. Spend an afternoon listening to them dish old dirt and talk over each other and it's easy to see why. Now they're worried they've said too much, laid bare the tender soul of the actor behind the star-spangled superhero outfit, so there's talk of offing the interviewer. I can hear all this from the bathroom, which, of course, is the point of a good stage whisper.

To be sure, no one's said too much, and the more you're brought into the embrace of this boisterous, funny, shit-slinging, demonstrably loving extended family, the more likable and enviable the whole dynamic is.

Sample exchange from today's lunch of baked ziti at a family-style Italian restaurant:

Mom: When he was a kid, he asked me, 'Mom, will I ever think farting isn't funny?'

Chris: You're throwing me under the bus, Ma! Thank you.

Mom: Well, if a dog farts you still find it funny.

Then, back at the apartment, where Mrs. Evans tries to give me good-natured dirt on her son without freaking him out:

Mom: You always tell me when you think a girl is attractive. You'll call me up so excited. Is that okay to say?

Chris: Nothing wrong with that.

Mom: And can I say all the girls you've brought to the house have been very sweet and wonderful? Of course, those are the ones that make it to the house. It's been a long time, hasn't it?

Chris: Looooong time.

Mom: The last one at our house? Was it six years ago?

Chris: No names, Ma!

Mom: But she knocked it out of the park.

Chris: She got drunk and puked at Auntie Pam's house! And she puked on the way home and she puked at our place.

Mom: And that's when I fell in love with her. Because she was real.

We're operating under a no-names rule, so I'm not asking if it's Jessica Biel who made this memorable first impression. She and Evans were serious for a couple of years. But I don't want to picture lovely Jessica Biel getting sick at Auntie Pam's or in the car or, really, anywhere.

East the bulldog ambles over to the table, begging for food.

"That dog is the love of his life," Mrs. Evans says. "Which tells me he'll be an unbelievable parent, but I don't want him to get married right now." She turns to Chris. "The way you are, I just don't think you're ready."

Some other things I learn about Evans from his mom: He hates going to the gym; he was so wound-up as a kid she'd let him stand during dinner, his legs shaking like caged greyhounds; he suffered weekly "Sunday-night meltdowns" over schoolwork and the angst of the sensitive middle-schooler; after she and his father split and he was making money from acting, he bought her the Sudbury family homestead rather than let her leave it.

Eventually his mom and Josh depart, and Evans and I go to work depleting his stash of Bud Light. It feels like we drink Bud Light and talk for days, because we basically do. I arrived early Friday evening; it's Saturday night now and it'll be sunup Sunday before I sleeplessly make my way to catch a train back to New York City. Somewhere in between we slip free of the gravitational pull of the bachelor pad and there's bottle service at a club and a long walk with entourage in tow back to Evans' apartment, where there is some earnest-yet-surreal group singing, piano playing, and chitchat. Evans is fun to talk to, partly because he's an open, self-mocking guy with an explosive laugh and no apparent need to sleep, and partly because when you cut just below the surface, it's clear he's not quite the dude's dude he sometimes plays onscreen and in TV appearances.

From a distance, Chris Evans the movie star seems a predictable, nearly inevitable piece of successful Hollywood packaging come to market. There's his major-release debut as the dorkily unaware jock Jake in the guilty pleasure Not Another Teen Movie (in one memorable scene, Evans has whipped cream on his chest and a banana up his ass). The female-friendly hunk appeal—his character in The Nanny Diaries is named simply Harvard Hottie—is balanced by a kind of casual-Friday, I'm-from-Boston regular-dudeness. Following the siren song of comic-book cash, he was the Human Torch in two Fantastic Four films. As with scrawny Steve Rogers, the Captain America suit beefed up his stature as a formidable screen presence, a bankable leading man, all of which leads us to The Avengers, this season's megabudget, megawatt ensemble in which he stars alongside Scarlett Johansson, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr., and Chris Hemsworth.

It all feels inevitable—and yet it nearly didn't happen. Evans repeatedly turned down the Captain America role, fearing he'd be locked into what was originally a nine-picture deal. He was shooting Puncture, about a drug-addicted lawyer, at the time. Most actors doing small-budget legal dramas would jump at the chance to play the lead in a Marvel franchise, but Evans saw a decade of his life flash before his eyes.

What he remembers thinking is this: "What if the movie comes out and it's a success and I just reject all of this? What if I want to move to the fucking woods?"

By "the woods," he doesn't mean a quiet life away from the spotlight, some general metaphorical life escape route. He means the actual woods. "For a long time all I wanted for Christmas were books about outdoor survival," he says. "I was convinced that I was going to move to the woods. I camped a lot, I took classes. At 18, I told myself if I don't live in the woods by the time I'm 25, I have failed."

Evans has described his hesitation at signing on for Captain America. Usually he talks about the time commitment, the loss of what remained of his relative anonymity. On the junkets for the movie, he was open about needing therapy after the studio reduced the deal to six movies and he took the leap. What he doesn't usually mention is that he was racked with anxiety before the job came up.

"I get very nervous," Evans explains. "I shit the bed if I have to present something on stage or if I'm doing press. Because it's just you." He's been known to walk out of press conferences, to freeze up and go silent during the kind of relaxed-yet-high-stakes meetings an actor of his stature is expected to attend: "Do you know how badly I audition? Fifty percent of the time I have to walk out of the room. I'm naturally very pale, so I turn red and sweat. And I have to literally walk out. Sometimes mid-audition. You start having these conversations in your brain. 'Chris, don't do this. Chris, take it easy. You're just sitting in a room with a person saying some words, this isn't life. And you're letting this affect you? Shame on you.'"

Shades of "Sunday-night meltdowns." Luckily the nerves never follow him to the set. "You do your neuroses beforehand, so when they yell 'Action' you can be present," he says.

Okay, there was one on-set panic attack—while Evans was shooting Puncture. "We were getting ready to do a court scene in front of a bunch of people, and I don't know what happened," he says. "It's just your brain playing games with you. 'Hey, you know how we sometimes freak out? What if we did it right now?'"

One of the people who advised Evans to take the Captain America role was his eventual Avengers costar Robert Downey Jr. "I'd seen him around," Downey says. "We share an agent. I like to spend a lot of my free time talking to my agent about his other clients—I just had a feeling about him."

What he told Evans was: This puppy is going to be big, and when it is you're going to get to make the movies you want to make. "In the marathon obstacle course of a career," Downey says, "it's just good to have all the stats on paper for why you're not only a team player but also why it makes sense to support you in the projects you want to do—because you've made so much damned money for the studio."

There's also the fact that Evans had a chance to sign on for something likely to be a kind of watershed moment in the comic-book fascination of our time. "I do think The Avengers is the crescendo of this superhero phase in entertainment—except of course for Iron Man 3," Downey says. "It'll take a lot of innovation to keep it alive after this."

Captain America is the only person left who was truly close to Howard Stark, father of Tony Stark (a.k.a. Iron Man), which meant that Evans' and Downey's story lines are closely linked, and in the course of doing a lot of scenes together, they got to be pals. Downey diagnoses his friend with what he terms "low-grade red-carpet anxiety disorder."

"He just hates the game-show aspect of doing PR," Downey says. "Obviously there's pressure for anyone in this transition he's in. But he will easily triple that pressure to make sure he's not being lazy. That's why I respect the guy. I wouldn't necessarily want to be in his skin. But his motives are pure. He just needs to drink some red-carpet chamomile."

"The majority of the world is empty space," Chris Evans says, watching me as if my brain might explode on hearing this news—or like he might have to fight me if I try to contradict him. We're back at his apartment after a cigarette run through the Combat Zone.

"Empty space!" he says again, slapping the table and sort of yelling. Then, in a slow, breathy whisper, he repeats: "Empty space, empty space. All that we see in the world, the life, the animals, plants, people, it's all empty space. That's amazing!" He slaps the table again. "You want another beer? Gotta be Bud Light. Get dirty—you're in Boston. Okay, organize your thoughts. I gotta take a piss . . ."

My thoughts are this: That this guy who is hugging his dog and talking to me about space and mortality and the trouble with Boston girls who believe crazy gossip about him—this is not the guy I expected to meet. I figured he'd be a meatball. Though, truthfully, I'd never called anyone a meatball until Evans turned me on to the put-down. As in: "My sister Shanna dates meatballs." And, more to the point: "When I do interviews, I'd rather just be the beer-drinking dude from Boston and not get into the complex shit, because I don't want every meatball saying, 'So hey, whaddyathink about Buddhism?'"

At 17, Evans came across a copy of Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha and began his spiritual questing. It's a path of study and struggle that, he says, defines his true purpose in life. "I love acting. It's my playground, it lets me explore. But my happiness in this world, my level of peace, is never going to be dictated by acting," he says. "My goal in life is to detach from the egoic mind. Do you know anything about Eastern philosophy?"

I sip some Bud Light and shake my head sheepishly. "They talk about the egoic mind, the part of you that's self-aware, the watcher, the person you think is driving this machine," he says. "And that separation from self and mind is the root of suffering. There are ways of retraining the way you think. This isn't really supported in Western society, which is focused on 'Go get it, earn it, win it, marry it.'"

Scarlett Johansson says that one of the things she appreciates about Evans is how he steers clear of industry chat when they see each other. "Basically every actor," she says, "including myself, when we finish a job we're like, 'Well, that's it for me. Had a good run. Put me out to pasture.' But Chris doesn't strike me as someone who frets about the next job." The two met on the set of The Perfect Score when they were teenagers and have stayed close; The Avengers is their third movie together. "He has this obviously masculine presence—a dude's dude—and we're used to seeing him play heroic characters," Johansson says, "but he's also surprisingly sensitive. He has close female friends, and you can talk to him about anything. Plus there's that secret song-and-dance, jazz-hands side of Chris. I feel like he grew up with the Partridge Family. He'd be just as happy doing Guys and Dolls as he would Captain America 2."

East needs to do his business, so Evans and I take him up to the roof deck. Evans bought this apartment in 2010 when living in L.A. full-time no longer appealed to him. He came back to stay close to his extended family and the intimate circle of Boston pals he's maintained since high school. The move also seems like a pretty clear keep-it-real hedge against the manic ego-stroking distractions of Hollywood.

"I think my daytime person is different than my nighttime person," Evans says. "With my high-school buddies, we drink beer and talk sports and it's great. The kids in my Buddhism class in L.A., they're wildly intelligent, and I love being around them, but they're not talking about the Celtics. And that's part of me. It's a strange dichotomy. I don't mind being a certain way with some people and having this other piece of me that's just for me."

I asked Downey about Evans' outward regular-Joe persona. "It's complete horseshit," Downey says. "There's an inherent street-smart intelligence there. I don't think he tries to hide it. But he's much more evolved and much more culturally aware than he lets on."

Perhaps the meatball and the meditation can coexist. We argue about our egoic brains and the tao of Boston girls. "I love wet hair and sweatpants," he says in their defense. "I like sneakers and ponytails. I like girls who aren't so la-di-da. L.A. is so la-di-da. I like Boston girls who shit on me. Not literally. Girls who give me a hard time, bust my chops a little."

The chief buster of Evans' chops is, of course, Evans himself. "The problem is, the brain I'm using to dissect this world is a brain formed by it," he says. "We're born into confusion, and we get the blessing of letting go of it." Then he adds: "I think this shit by day. And then night comes and it's like, 'Fuck it, let's drink.'"

And so we do. It's getting late. Again. We should have eaten dinner, but Evans sometimes forgets to eat: "If I could just take a pill to make me full forever, I wouldn't think twice."

We talk about his dog and camping with his dog and why he loves being alone more than almost anything except maybe not being alone. "I swear to God, if you saw me when I am by myself in the woods, I'm a lunatic," he says. "I sing, I dance. I do crazy shit."

Evans' unflagging, all-encompassing enthusiasm is impressive, itself a kind of social intelligence. "If you want to have a good conversation with him, don't talk about the fact that he's famous" was the advice I got from Mark Kassen, who codirected Puncture. "He's a blast, a guy who can hang. For quite a long time. Many hours in a row."

I've stopped looking at the clock. We've stopped talking philosophy and moved into more emotional territory. He asks questions about my 9-month-old son, and then Captain America gets teary when I talk about the wonder of his birth. "I weep at everything," he says. "I emote. I love things so much—I just never want to dilute that."

He talks about how close he feels to his family, how open they all are with each other. About everything. All the time. "The first time I had sex," he says, "I raced home and was like, 'Mom, I just had sex! Where's the clit?'"

Wait, I ask—did she ever tell you?

"Still don't know where it is, man," he says, then breaks into a smile composed of equal parts shit-eating grin and inner peace. "I just don't know. Make some movies, you don't have to know…"

Here is the 2012 Detail Magazine interview with chris evans:

The Avengers' Chris Evans: Just Your Average Beer-Swilling, Babe-Loving Buddhist

The 30-year-old Bud Light-chugging, Beantown-bred star of The Avengers is widely perceived as the ultimate guy's guy. But beneath the bro persona lies a serious student of Buddhism, an unrepentant song-and-dance man, and a guy who talks to his mom about sex. And farts.

By Adam Sachs,

Photographs by Norman Jean Roy

May 2012 Issue

"Should we just kill him and bury his body?" Chris Evans is stage whispering into the impassive blinking light of my digital recorder.

"Chris!" shouts his mother, her tone a familiar-to-anyone-with-a-mother mix of coddling and concern. "Don't say that! What if something happened?"

We're at Evans' apartment, an expansive but not overly tricked-out bachelor-pad-ish loft in a semi-industrial nowheresville part of Boston, hard by Chinatown, near an area sometimes called the Combat Zone. Evans has a fuzzy, floppy, slept-in-his-clothes aspect that'd be nearly unrecognizable if you knew him only by the upright, spit-polished bearing of the onscreen hero. His dog, East, a sweet and slobbery American bulldog, is spread out on a couch in front of the TV. The shelves of his fridge are neatly stacked with much of the world's supply of Bud Light in cans and little else.

On the counter sit a few buckets of muscle-making whey-protein powder that belong to Evans' roommate, Zach Jarvis, an old pal who sometimes tags along on set as a paid "assistant" and a personal trainer who bulked Evans up for his role as the super-ripped patriot in last summer's blockbuster Captain America: The First Avenger. A giant clock on the exposed-brick wall says it's early evening, but Evans operates on his own sense of time. Between gigs, his schedule's all his, which usually translates into long stretches of alone time during the day and longer social nights for the 30-year-old.

"I could just make this . . . disappear," says Josh Peck, another old pal and occasional on-set assistant, in a deadpan mumble, poking at the voice recorder I'd left on the table while I was in the bathroom.

Evans' mom, Lisa, now speaks directly into the microphone: "Don't listen to them—I'm trying to get them not to say these things!"

But not saying things isn't in the Evans DNA. They're an infectiously gregarious clan. Irish-Italians, proud Bostoners, close-knit, and innately theatrical. "We all act, we sing," Evans says. "It was like the fucking von Trapps." Mom was a dancer and now runs a children's theater. First-born Carly directed the family puppet shows and studied theater at NYU. Younger brother Scott has parts on One Life to Live and Law & Order under his belt and lives in Los Angeles full-time—something Evans stopped doing several years back. Rounding out the circle are baby sister Shanna and a pair of "strays" the family brought into their Sudbury, Massachusetts, home: Josh, who went from mowing the lawn to moving in when his folks relocated during his senior year in high school; and Demery, who was Evans' roommate until recently.

"Our house was like a hotel," Evans says. "It was a loony-tunes household. If you got arrested in high school, everyone knew: 'Call Mrs. Evans, she'll bail you out.'"

Growing up, they had a special floor put in the basement where all the kids practiced tap-dancing. The party-ready rec room also had a Ping-Pong table and a separate entrance. This was the house kids in the neighborhood wanted to hang at, and this was the kind of family you wanted to be adopted by. Spend an afternoon listening to them dish old dirt and talk over each other and it's easy to see why. Now they're worried they've said too much, laid bare the tender soul of the actor behind the star-spangled superhero outfit, so there's talk of offing the interviewer. I can hear all this from the bathroom, which, of course, is the point of a good stage whisper.

To be sure, no one's said too much, and the more you're brought into the embrace of this boisterous, funny, shit-slinging, demonstrably loving extended family, the more likable and enviable the whole dynamic is.

Sample exchange from today's lunch of baked ziti at a family-style Italian restaurant:

Mom: When he was a kid, he asked me, 'Mom, will I ever think farting isn't funny?'

Chris: You're throwing me under the bus, Ma! Thank you.

Mom: Well, if a dog farts you still find it funny.

Then, back at the apartment, where Mrs. Evans tries to give me good-natured dirt on her son without freaking him out:

Mom: You always tell me when you think a girl is attractive. You'll call me up so excited. Is that okay to say?

Chris: Nothing wrong with that.

Mom: And can I say all the girls you've brought to the house have been very sweet and wonderful? Of course, those are the ones that make it to the house. It's been a long time, hasn't it?

Chris: Looooong time.

Mom: The last one at our house? Was it six years ago?

Chris: No names, Ma!

Mom: But she knocked it out of the park.

Chris: She got drunk and puked at Auntie Pam's house! And she puked on the way home and she puked at our place.

Mom: And that's when I fell in love with her. Because she was real.

We're operating under a no-names rule, so I'm not asking if it's Jessica Biel who made this memorable first impression. She and Evans were serious for a couple of years. But I don't want to picture lovely Jessica Biel getting sick at Auntie Pam's or in the car or, really, anywhere.

East the bulldog ambles over to the table, begging for food.

"That dog is the love of his life," Mrs. Evans says. "Which tells me he'll be an unbelievable parent, but I don't want him to get married right now." She turns to Chris. "The way you are, I just don't think you're ready."

Some other things I learn about Evans from his mom: He hates going to the gym; he was so wound-up as a kid she'd let him stand during dinner, his legs shaking like caged greyhounds; he suffered weekly "Sunday-night meltdowns" over schoolwork and the angst of the sensitive middle-schooler; after she and his father split and he was making money from acting, he bought her the Sudbury family homestead rather than let her leave it.

Eventually his mom and Josh depart, and Evans and I go to work depleting his stash of Bud Light. It feels like we drink Bud Light and talk for days, because we basically do. I arrived early Friday evening; it's Saturday night now and it'll be sunup Sunday before I sleeplessly make my way to catch a train back to New York City. Somewhere in between we slip free of the gravitational pull of the bachelor pad and there's bottle service at a club and a long walk with entourage in tow back to Evans' apartment, where there is some earnest-yet-surreal group singing, piano playing, and chitchat. Evans is fun to talk to, partly because he's an open, self-mocking guy with an explosive laugh and no apparent need to sleep, and partly because when you cut just below the surface, it's clear he's not quite the dude's dude he sometimes plays onscreen and in TV appearances.

From a distance, Chris Evans the movie star seems a predictable, nearly inevitable piece of successful Hollywood packaging come to market. There's his major-release debut as the dorkily unaware jock Jake in the guilty pleasure Not Another Teen Movie (in one memorable scene, Evans has whipped cream on his chest and a banana up his ass). The female-friendly hunk appeal—his character in The Nanny Diaries is named simply Harvard Hottie—is balanced by a kind of casual-Friday, I'm-from-Boston regular-dudeness. Following the siren song of comic-book cash, he was the Human Torch in two Fantastic Four films. As with scrawny Steve Rogers, the Captain America suit beefed up his stature as a formidable screen presence, a bankable leading man, all of which leads us to The Avengers, this season's megabudget, megawatt ensemble in which he stars alongside Scarlett Johansson, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr., and Chris Hemsworth.

It all feels inevitable—and yet it nearly didn't happen. Evans repeatedly turned down the Captain America role, fearing he'd be locked into what was originally a nine-picture deal. He was shooting Puncture, about a drug-addicted lawyer, at the time. Most actors doing small-budget legal dramas would jump at the chance to play the lead in a Marvel franchise, but Evans saw a decade of his life flash before his eyes.

What he remembers thinking is this: "What if the movie comes out and it's a success and I just reject all of this? What if I want to move to the fucking woods?"

By "the woods," he doesn't mean a quiet life away from the spotlight, some general metaphorical life escape route. He means the actual woods. "For a long time all I wanted for Christmas were books about outdoor survival," he says. "I was convinced that I was going to move to the woods. I camped a lot, I took classes. At 18, I told myself if I don't live in the woods by the time I'm 25, I have failed."

Evans has described his hesitation at signing on for Captain America. Usually he talks about the time commitment, the loss of what remained of his relative anonymity. On the junkets for the movie, he was open about needing therapy after the studio reduced the deal to six movies and he took the leap. What he doesn't usually mention is that he was racked with anxiety before the job came up.

"I get very nervous," Evans explains. "I shit the bed if I have to present something on stage or if I'm doing press. Because it's just you." He's been known to walk out of press conferences, to freeze up and go silent during the kind of relaxed-yet-high-stakes meetings an actor of his stature is expected to attend: "Do you know how badly I audition? Fifty percent of the time I have to walk out of the room. I'm naturally very pale, so I turn red and sweat. And I have to literally walk out. Sometimes mid-audition. You start having these conversations in your brain. 'Chris, don't do this. Chris, take it easy. You're just sitting in a room with a person saying some words, this isn't life. And you're letting this affect you? Shame on you.'"

Shades of "Sunday-night meltdowns." Luckily the nerves never follow him to the set. "You do your neuroses beforehand, so when they yell 'Action' you can be present," he says.

Okay, there was one on-set panic attack—while Evans was shooting Puncture. "We were getting ready to do a court scene in front of a bunch of people, and I don't know what happened," he says. "It's just your brain playing games with you. 'Hey, you know how we sometimes freak out? What if we did it right now?'"

One of the people who advised Evans to take the Captain America role was his eventual Avengers costar Robert Downey Jr. "I'd seen him around," Downey says. "We share an agent. I like to spend a lot of my free time talking to my agent about his other clients—I just had a feeling about him."

What he told Evans was: This puppy is going to be big, and when it is you're going to get to make the movies you want to make. "In the marathon obstacle course of a career," Downey says, "it's just good to have all the stats on paper for why you're not only a team player but also why it makes sense to support you in the projects you want to do—because you've made so much damned money for the studio."

There's also the fact that Evans had a chance to sign on for something likely to be a kind of watershed moment in the comic-book fascination of our time. "I do think The Avengers is the crescendo of this superhero phase in entertainment—except of course for Iron Man 3," Downey says. "It'll take a lot of innovation to keep it alive after this."

Captain America is the only person left who was truly close to Howard Stark, father of Tony Stark (a.k.a. Iron Man), which meant that Evans' and Downey's story lines are closely linked, and in the course of doing a lot of scenes together, they got to be pals. Downey diagnoses his friend with what he terms "low-grade red-carpet anxiety disorder."

"He just hates the game-show aspect of doing PR," Downey says. "Obviously there's pressure for anyone in this transition he's in. But he will easily triple that pressure to make sure he's not being lazy. That's why I respect the guy. I wouldn't necessarily want to be in his skin. But his motives are pure. He just needs to drink some red-carpet chamomile."

"The majority of the world is empty space," Chris Evans says, watching me as if my brain might explode on hearing this news—or like he might have to fight me if I try to contradict him. We're back at his apartment after a cigarette run through the Combat Zone.

"Empty space!" he says again, slapping the table and sort of yelling. Then, in a slow, breathy whisper, he repeats: "Empty space, empty space. All that we see in the world, the life, the animals, plants, people, it's all empty space. That's amazing!" He slaps the table again. "You want another beer? Gotta be Bud Light. Get dirty—you're in Boston. Okay, organize your thoughts. I gotta take a piss . . ."

My thoughts are this: That this guy who is hugging his dog and talking to me about space and mortality and the trouble with Boston girls who believe crazy gossip about him—this is not the guy I expected to meet. I figured he'd be a meatball. Though, truthfully, I'd never called anyone a meatball until Evans turned me on to the put-down. As in: "My sister Shanna dates meatballs." And, more to the point: "When I do interviews, I'd rather just be the beer-drinking dude from Boston and not get into the complex shit, because I don't want every meatball saying, 'So hey, whaddyathink about Buddhism?'"

At 17, Evans came across a copy of Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha and began his spiritual questing. It's a path of study and struggle that, he says, defines his true purpose in life. "I love acting. It's my playground, it lets me explore. But my happiness in this world, my level of peace, is never going to be dictated by acting," he says. "My goal in life is to detach from the egoic mind. Do you know anything about Eastern philosophy?"

I sip some Bud Light and shake my head sheepishly. "They talk about the egoic mind, the part of you that's self-aware, the watcher, the person you think is driving this machine," he says. "And that separation from self and mind is the root of suffering. There are ways of retraining the way you think. This isn't really supported in Western society, which is focused on 'Go get it, earn it, win it, marry it.'"

Scarlett Johansson says that one of the things she appreciates about Evans is how he steers clear of industry chat when they see each other. "Basically every actor," she says, "including myself, when we finish a job we're like, 'Well, that's it for me. Had a good run. Put me out to pasture.' But Chris doesn't strike me as someone who frets about the next job." The two met on the set of The Perfect Score when they were teenagers and have stayed close; The Avengers is their third movie together. "He has this obviously masculine presence—a dude's dude—and we're used to seeing him play heroic characters," Johansson says, "but he's also surprisingly sensitive. He has close female friends, and you can talk to him about anything. Plus there's that secret song-and-dance, jazz-hands side of Chris. I feel like he grew up with the Partridge Family. He'd be just as happy doing Guys and Dolls as he would Captain America 2."

East needs to do his business, so Evans and I take him up to the roof deck. Evans bought this apartment in 2010 when living in L.A. full-time no longer appealed to him. He came back to stay close to his extended family and the intimate circle of Boston pals he's maintained since high school. The move also seems like a pretty clear keep-it-real hedge against the manic ego-stroking distractions of Hollywood.

"I think my daytime person is different than my nighttime person," Evans says. "With my high-school buddies, we drink beer and talk sports and it's great. The kids in my Buddhism class in L.A., they're wildly intelligent, and I love being around them, but they're not talking about the Celtics. And that's part of me. It's a strange dichotomy. I don't mind being a certain way with some people and having this other piece of me that's just for me."

I asked Downey about Evans' outward regular-Joe persona. "It's complete horseshit," Downey says. "There's an inherent street-smart intelligence there. I don't think he tries to hide it. But he's much more evolved and much more culturally aware than he lets on."

Perhaps the meatball and the meditation can coexist. We argue about our egoic brains and the tao of Boston girls. "I love wet hair and sweatpants," he says in their defense. "I like sneakers and ponytails. I like girls who aren't so la-di-da. L.A. is so la-di-da. I like Boston girls who shit on me. Not literally. Girls who give me a hard time, bust my chops a little."

The chief buster of Evans' chops is, of course, Evans himself. "The problem is, the brain I'm using to dissect this world is a brain formed by it," he says. "We're born into confusion, and we get the blessing of letting go of it." Then he adds: "I think this shit by day. And then night comes and it's like, 'Fuck it, let's drink.'"

And so we do. It's getting late. Again. We should have eaten dinner, but Evans sometimes forgets to eat: "If I could just take a pill to make me full forever, I wouldn't think twice."

We talk about his dog and camping with his dog and why he loves being alone more than almost anything except maybe not being alone. "I swear to God, if you saw me when I am by myself in the woods, I'm a lunatic," he says. "I sing, I dance. I do crazy shit."

Evans' unflagging, all-encompassing enthusiasm is impressive, itself a kind of social intelligence. "If you want to have a good conversation with him, don't talk about the fact that he's famous" was the advice I got from Mark Kassen, who codirected Puncture. "He's a blast, a guy who can hang. For quite a long time. Many hours in a row."

I've stopped looking at the clock. We've stopped talking philosophy and moved into more emotional territory. He asks questions about my 9-month-old son, and then Captain America gets teary when I talk about the wonder of his birth. "I weep at everything," he says. "I emote. I love things so much—I just never want to dilute that."

He talks about how close he feels to his family, how open they all are with each other. About everything. All the time. "The first time I had sex," he says, "I raced home and was like, 'Mom, I just had sex! Where's the clit?'"

Wait, I ask—did she ever tell you?

"Still don't know where it is, man," he says, then breaks into a smile composed of equal parts shit-eating grin and inner peace. "I just don't know. Make some movies, you don't have to know…"

If someone doesn't want to check the link, the anon sent the full interview!