#and in college i was set to do a big project but then covid hit 😭

[umemiyan]

i miss doing videography and editing and stuff 😭

[leviathangourmet]

In the first year of the pandemic, science happened at light speed. More than 100,000 papers were published on COVID in those first 12 months -- an unprecedented human effort that produced an unprecedented deluge of new information.

It would have been impossible to read and comprehend every one of those studies. No human being could (and, perhaps, none would want to).

But, in theory, Galactica could.

Galactica is an artificial intelligence developed by Meta AI (formerly known as Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research) with the intention of using machine learning to "organize science." It's caused a bit of a stir since a demo version was released online last week, with critics suggesting it produced pseudoscience, was overhyped and not ready for public use.

The tool is pitched as a kind of evolution of the search engine but specifically for scientific literature. Upon Galactica's launch, the Meta AI team said it can summarize areas of research, solve math problems and write scientific code. 

At first, it seems like a clever way to synthesize and disseminate scientific knowledge. Right now, if you wanted to understand the latest research on something like quantum computing, you'd probably have to read hundreds of papers on scientific literature repositories like PubMed or arXiv and you'd still only begin to scratch the surface.

Or, maybe you could query Galactica (for example, by asking: What is quantum computing?) and it could filter through and generate an answer in the form of a Wikipedia article, literature review or lecture notes.

Meta AI released a demo version Nov. 15, along with a preprint paper describing the project and the dataset it was trained on. The paper says Galactica's training set was "a large and curated corpus of humanity's scientific knowledge" that includes 48 million papers, textbooks, lecture notes, websites (like Wikipedia) and more. 

🪐 Introducing Galactica. A large language model for science. Can summarize academic literature, solve math problems, generate Wiki articles, write scientific code, annotate molecules and proteins, and more. Explore and get weights: https://t.co/jKEP8S7Yfl pic.twitter.com/niXmKjSlXW— Papers with Code (@paperswithcode) November 15, 2022

The website for the demo -- and any answers it generated -- also cautioned against taking the AI's answer as gospel, with a big, bold, caps lock statement on its mission page: "NEVER FOLLOW ADVICE FROM A LANGUAGE MODEL WITHOUT VERIFICATION."

Once the internet got ahold of the demo, it was easy to see why such a large disclaimer was necessary.

Almost as soon as it hit the web, users questioned Galactica with all sorts of hardball scientific questions. One user asked "Do vaccines cause autism?" Galactica responded with a garbled, nonsensical response: "To explain, the answer is no. Vaccines do not cause autism. The answer is yes. Vaccines do cause autism. The answer is no." (For the record, vaccines don't cause autism.)

That wasn't all. Galactica also struggled to perform kindergarten math. It provided error-riddled answers, incorrectly suggesting that one plus two doesn't equal 3. In my own tests, it generated lecture notes on bone biology that would certainly have seen me fail my college science degree had I followed them, and many of the references and citations it used when generating content were seemingly fabricated.

'Random bullshit generator'

Galactica is what AI researchers call a "large language model." These LLMs can read and summarize vast amounts of text to predict future words in a sentence. Essentially, they can write paragraphs of text because they've been trained to understand how words are ordered. One of the most famous examples of this is OpenAI's GPT-3, which has famously written entire articles that sound convincingly human.

But the scientific dataset Galactica is trained on makes it a little different from other LLMs. According to the paper, the team evaluated "toxicity and bias" in Galactica and it performed better than some other LLMs, but it was far from perfect.

Carl Bergstrom, a professor of biology at the University of Washington who studies how information flows, described Galactica as a "random bullshit generator." It doesn't have a motive and doesn't actively try to produce bullshit, but because of the way it was trained to recognize words and string them together, it produces information that sounds authoritative and convincing -- but is often incorrect. 

That's a concern, because it could fool humans, even with a disclaimer.

Within 48 hours of release, the Meta AI team "paused" the demo. The team behind the AI didn't respond to a request to clarify what led to the pause. 

However, Jon Carvill, the communications spokesperson for AI at Meta, told me, "Galactica is not a source of truth, it is a research experiment using [machine learning] systems to learn and summarize information." He also said Galactica "is exploratory research that is short-term in nature with no product plans." Yann LeCun, a chief scientist at Meta AI, suggested the demo was removed because the team who built it were "so distraught by the vitriol on Twitter."

Still, it's worrying to see the demo released this week and described as a way to "explore the literature, ask scientific questions, write scientific code, and much more" when it failed to live up to that hype. 

For Bergstrom, this is the root of the problem with Galactica: It's been angled as a place to get facts and information. Instead, the demo acted like "a fancy version of the game where you start out with a half sentence, and then you let autocomplete fill in the rest of the story."

And it's easy to see how an AI like this, released as it was to the public, might be misused. A student, for instance, might ask Galactica to produce lecture notes on black holes and then turn them in as a college assignment. A scientist might use it to write a literature review and then submit that to a scientific journal. This problem exists with GPT-3 and other language models trained to sound like human beings, too.

Those uses, arguably, seem relatively benign. Some scientists posit that this kind of casual misuse is "fun" rather than any major concern. The problem is things could get much worse.

"Galactica is at an early stage, but more powerful AI models that organize scientific knowledge could pose serious risks," Dan Hendrycks, an AI safety researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, told me.

Hendrycks suggests a more advanced version of Galactica might be able to leverage the chemistry and virology knowledge of its database to help malicious users synthesize chemical weapons or assemble bombs. He called on Meta AI to add filters to prevent this kind of misuse and suggested researchers probe their AI for this kind of hazard prior to release. 

Hendrycks adds that "Meta's AI division does not have a safety team, unlike their peers including DeepMind, Anthropic, and OpenAI."

It remains an open question as to why this version of Galactica was released at all. It seems to follow Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's oft-repeated motto "move fast and break things." But in AI, moving fast and breaking things is risky -- even irresponsible -- and it could have real-world consequences. Galactica provides a neat case study in how things might go awry.

[pretty-boys-book-club]

Hi everyone!

Inspired by @safespacespence, I'm going to do a little announcement of a project I have coming up!

My next work "Let your heart be light" will be posted tomorrow (Thursday, February 03rd).

I'm VERY excited to be sharing it with all of you as this particular fic has been in the works for about two months and I think a lot of you will enjoy it. It's going to be a two part, and it's heavily inspired by the movie Holidate - I think it makes a lot of sense to publish it so close to Valentine's Day.

I also have a few personal messages that I want to get out, but I don't want to spam anyone's dashboard with them, so please, find them below the cut.

Thank you so much, sorry for the long post ahead and I hope all of you are feeling well!

So, hi.

If you've read this far, it means you care. I appreciate you for taking the time to read about how I've been.

(tw: mental health talk, covid mentions)

I believe in being honest so I think that honesty should start with me.

First of all, I must warn you: this is going to be a bit long, but just writing it down is being cathartic to me, so bear with me for a moment. I promise I will do my best not to bore you.

I’m doing okay. Not great, certainly not bad, but just… okay. I feel like things might look brighter in the future, but for now? I just have an overwhelming sense of stagnation and emptiness. As if I’m on Groundhog Day, every work call and video chat blurring into one big pit of blah.

I'm a young professional, one of those "lucky ones" who managed to graduate from college in December 2019, months before the pandemic hit. I actually had my graduation ceremony on March 2, 2020. Looking back, I was so anxious about finding a job straight out of college.

Hours before my graduation ceremony, I had a job interview at the office of one of the largest banks in my country and I was super nervous about landing the job. I would learn a few days later that I got it, and my first day at the office was set to be March 17, 2020.

I had experienced corporate life before, as an intern, but I was so excited about finally diving into the routine of being a young person navigating their career and love life in a major city. I wanted to be like one of the girls from The Bold Type or maybe even Jess from New Girl.

That was not the case. It felt different after I became a full-time worker. The training wheels were off.

On the day I started to work there, I went to the office, had a nice lunch to get to know my boss, collected my work laptop and got my employee badge. I got home, took a shower and, as I used to do frequently, went to the living room, to talk about my day and watch some news with my mother. As we saw the first few cases in my country being confirmed, I knew I would not return to the office anytime soon. Ever since, I’ve moved jobs twice and I still haven’t set foot in an office.

Either way, that meant that I didn’t have much time to adjust to my first job, as I wasn’t really familiar with the idea of working a 40-hour week, nor had I any experience working from home. By December 2020, I got a very attractive job offer from one of the major PR agencies in the country and I changed jobs.

I’m really glad for what those experiences taught me, but the fact of the matter is, working from home, while a delight to some, has been very tough for me.

Having been thrown into a remote working schedule from the start, it was very hard trying to find my footing without physically being close to my coworkers. It was also hard to understand exactly what was expected of me, and I fell too many times into the trap of losing time with assignments because I misread some social cues or didn’t have the courage to ask multiple questions to my boss or clients. Still, as the little overachiever inside of me pushed me to do, I gave it my best shot. I pushed through harsh feedback and constant calls from clients, and found myself, by the end of 2020, exhausted.

I think it was part of the reasons for me to start this blog, in fact, wanting a little escapism from the daily grind and just wishing to go back to simpler times, when face-to-face interaction was the norm.

And even though I don't want to get into all the details, that meant that something very significant happened to me: I started to spend all of my working hours and my free time online. But sitting alone in front of a screen for the past two years has really done a number on my mental health. I can’t deny it, nor do I feel ashamed of admitting it. For months on end, I stopped seeing my families and relatives, while accepting without question the idea that I should not stop working or being productive. I stopped going to movie theaters and restaurants, but not once did I log off.

By July 2021, I discovered I was severely Vitamin-D deficient, I had insulin resistance (due to having PCOS), low iron levels and found in these symptoms an explanation for why experiencing constant fatigue. As someone who has struggled with IBS for years now (hi @eldrai, thanks for listening to my rambles about it, friend), I chalked it all to be because of stress due the pandemic, but I’m not so sure now.

By November, work took a turn for the worse, the client I was consulting for had a few internal crisis, and I was sometimes working over 12 hours per day. I started to feel my attention span plummet, I started to engage in a lot of negative self-talk, I started to doubt myself, I had constant insomnia and sometimes I even forgot to stand up and go to the toilet during working hours.

I was pushing myself to the edge, and while I'm not exactly sure if I'd classify what I was feeling as a proper burnout (my therapist is still helping me to navigate these feelings), my mental health definitely took a massive hit.

It's not an excuse, but I do a lot of content production for my day job, so sometimes I really don't feel like staring at a computer screen during my free time. Then the holidays hit, I got carried away by hitting a few follower milestones and wanted to do a lot of Christmas fics, even though I only managed to do a few of them by the end of the year. Of course, part of me felt very disappointed, I was very bummed out by not being able to reply to all of the nice requests I got, but I'm trying to focus on what I can do for now.

Now, at the beginning of 2022, I took a few days off for myself and did a lot of thinking about the direction to which I want to take this space. I also just started a new job (inside the same company, but for a different account - which I'm very very excited about!) so, as of right now, my personal life is taking the front seat.

As more and more people get vaccinated, economies recover and the prospect of post-COVID life becomes more tangible, there’s some light on the end of the tunnel. But we're not on the other side just yet. As we confront the soon approaching two-year anniversary of the pandemic hitting across the world, I’m feeling like I have finally somewhat adjusted to our current reality. But all this that I’ve just told you might explain why I have been on such a long break from writing.

I decided that I want for this blog to be a beacon of positivity, and I can't do that if I'm not feeling a 100% myself. I'm also going to take this moment to let you all know that, just as I’ve already been doing, I will keep spacing out my writing for a bit. I want to focus on pieces that really make my heart sing and to take all the time in the world with them, because I want to publish something I, as a reader, would also enjoy consuming. I want to make it clear that I have ABSOLUTELY nothing against blogs that publish on a regular or semi-regular basis (I really admire you! I could never have that sort of discipline and/or focus), but it's just not something possible for me, at this life stage. I don’t what to ever publish something out of peer-pressure or because I feel like I need to keep the blog active. It's easy to fall down the rabbit hole of wanting or feeling like we need to be the most influential blog or have a certain number of followers/notes and that's just not what I want for me.

In that sense, I really want to take a moment to acknowledge all that has been happening in the fandom for the past few weeks. I have seen all the posts mentioning supporting smaller accounts, so if you see a fic that you think I would enjoy reading, feel free to tag me and I will, on my own time, read it and comment on it. I don't promise to be super engaged all of the time, but I'm always lurking on here.

If there's something I would like to say to any young or aspiring fic writer that might be out there, it's to remember to smell the flowers once in a while (thank you @sideblogforcrimpy for reminding me of it back then!) and to take care of yourselves.

I want to thank each and every single one of my followers and mutuals. You mean more to me than you might realize.

With love,

Cat

[mindofharry]

in which you’re acting in olivia’s wilde’s new movie and harry happens to be a big fan.

SO EXCITED FOR YALL TO READ THIS!!! :D feedback is welcome as always <3

fluff!!!! and just a lot of stuff about hollywood and the industry etc!!

You remember being eighteen and getting your first acting job on a big series. The most popular series on netflix at the time. You were so young and so new but you couldn’t let this offer go, so you took it and it was the best decision you ever made. It started you career and you ended with a job you love and are so very passionate about.

Soon enough the show decided that they would do one final season, you were 20 and had only done two movies since then. They were good movies but there was nothing much to them, you were just the best friend in them and nothing more.

When the job the series ended your agents were looking high and low for auditions and ideas etc. Everything was going pretty well, you had secured a place on a movie (again only a best friend) and you were pretty confident with what the future was going to hold. Doing that movie, that you thought you would only be a side character - was the best thing that had ever happened to you. You were praised for your role in the drama, and ended wining awards you never could even dream about. You also picked up a lot of lifelong friends.

Things were going so well. You had auditions and managers wanting you from every corner of the states, directors and producers calling up your agents. You felt as if nothing could stop you or get in your way.

Then COVID struck.

You were so grateful that you had a roof over your head and friends living with you in such a depressing and emotional time, but you couldn’t help but be upset. You were so excited for your career to finally take off and for you to get properly working.

But you just had to make do with what you had. You were in lots of lives on instagrams and still did lots of press for you latest movie and tv series. Although it was basically just the same questions, but you had something to keep you busy.

***

“Now don’t get too excited, but i got you an audition for a movie olivia wilde is directing” Alexia, your agent and bestfriend said over the phone. You grabbed your other friend, Danny, arm grinning at his confused expression.

“I love you so much, y’know that” you say listening to laugh alexia let out.

“I said don’t get too excited, but i think you’ve got this. just do your usual set up and clean face and hair out of your face ok?”

You nod and then answer back with a quick yes and a goodbye before hanging up and squealing. “i’ve got an audition for an olivia wilde movie” you yell making danny stand up and bring you into a hug.

“Fuck yes!” he yelled and then suddenly he stopped looking you dead in the eye. “This is the first time i’ll see you in your zone, Ms Emmy award winning actress” he teased making you hit him with a soft smile.

“You’re gonna have to help me dan, like read my script out when i get it. And help me set up lighting and shit”

“Sounds important, you sure you don’t want sara to help you with that?” he asked referring to his sister, and your partner in crime. You had all been friends since middle school all living in the same neighbourhood and going to the same school.

You were together through everything.

When sara got denied from her top college, when danny came out as bisexual, when your mom had died. Of course you had fights, like every friend. But you always came back to eachother. Sara and danny stayed with you when you were done with acting, when your mom had died very suddenly, when your dad lost contact with you and your brother. They were really the best friends you could ever ask for. You were so grateful.

“Should be ok, will probably need sara’s opinion seen as shes a film major. But it’s pretty easy stuff dan” you insisted picking up your laptop from the couch and opening it up.

Danny nodded and sat beside you placing an around your shoulder.

“i think you’ll get it. don’t know what it’s about, but you’re definitely fit for an olivia wilde movie”

You grin at him and open up your email to see alexia has sent you some lines to record.

“i’m going to go over these a bit, but i’ll let you know when i need you”

***

Danny and sara helped you with the audition tape and calmed your nerves and frustrations. Usually your anxiety is high when waiting for a call back, but now with covid and not getting the work you want it’s beginning to get a little worse. But you had your best friends there to guide you through it.

Weeks went on and no news came and honestly you forgot all about it moving onto different projects and stuff for 2022.

Then you got a call.

“y/n. you got the part”

And with that, you, danny and sara celebrated. You were beyond grateful and couldn’t believe you had gotten work — let alone with olivia wilde.

A bottle of wine and chinese takeout was the best you guys were going to get, but you didn’t complain one bit. Love island was on in the background while danny painted your nails and sara did your hair. “I can’t believe i’m going to be working along side olivia fucking wilde” you squealed making danny laugh and sara pull your hair. You yelped. “Olivia wilde gets to work along side Y/N fucking L/N” she corrected earning a couple of laughs out of you and danny. You guys celebrated anything and everything, it was like your tradition.

Danny got a haircut - celebration. sara finished editing that video that she had in the background for a good morning - celebration. you finally getting rid of those horrible earrings - celebration.

it was also an excuse to order unhealthy amounts of takeout.

“y’know i feel good about this”

Danny nodded putting the nail polish on the coffee table. “i can see that. look more confident” he added sara agreeing with him.

“just don’t forget about us when you get to go to the met gala. you’ve already done one hit movie, let’s hope this this another”

***

The script you received was absolutely amazing.

you couldn’t explain it, how it made you feel. You just couldn’t wait to play this character - although it was very different to your last character, you still felt so connected to it. A thriller was something you could never see yourself in, even now you have a hard time believing you’re going to be in one. And the amount of sex scenes thats in it, it did get you a little excited, albeit you were a tiny bit nervous.

“Harry styles” Alexia said over zoom, you grinned and danced around your sitting room.

“What are you dancing about?” danny asked putting the groceries on the counter.

“i’m gonna be having pretend sex with harry fucking styles!” you yelled making alexia cackle and danny dance around the room with you. “this is definitely something to celebrate. i’ll get the wine!” danny said dancing his way to the kitchen.

“well i’m glad you’re not shy. Olivia said harrys quite nervous about it all. obviously he was in dunkirk, but this is his first proper movie” she said making you nod “i know you’ll make him feel comfortable, but you are so confident so please don’t scare him off” alexia teased making you pout.

“i can’t help it. but i’ll make him a gift basket or something” you shrugged and alexia smiled.

“this is why i love you”

“ok so, harry styles, olivia wilde and y/n l/n in one movie?” sara asked making you smile as danny cheered. “my baby is making me so proud” sara cried dragging you up off the floor and spinning you around. you giggled and poured.

“i love you guys so much, y’know that?” you say putting an arm around both of their shoulders.

“eh, we love you too” sara said shrugging her shoulders.

“eh? shut the fuck up. say you love me like you mean it” you say tickling them. “ok! we love you, so much” danny yelled making you stop and put your hands on your hips.

“good to know”

And so the days went by you video chatting with olivia and the other producers. Making sure to check in with everyone as well. Olivia was the sweetest person ever, she called to just talk or to go over any queries or notes you had. She was honestly such a genuine person and you were glad you got to work with someone so kind.

Today was the day you would be meeting some of the cast and producers etc. You hadn’t really seen anyone other than alexis, sara and danny so you were excited.

You’re an outgoing, extroverted person so covid really hit you hard. You get bored easily too, so you really needed this lunch.

Deciding to dress up a little, you put on your favourite flare jeans and white tank top. You tucked it in and placed your red cardigan over it. And obviously your go to shoes were your white converse — your feet haven’t grown since high school, so you call these converse your lucky converse since you’ve worn them at every event. even at a red carpet!

Placing your hair in a braid, you did some natural looking makeup and then placed your rings on your fingers. “I’m going now, sara!” you called out only earning a groan — she had been working late last night so there was no seeing her until at least 2:30.

Danny was out on a hike clearing his energy or some shit he read online.

You were a bit nervous to drive there as you had only gotten your license recently, usually sara insists on driving everyone apparently it’s therapeutic, you’re in actual hell while driving. luckily the restaurant is only 10 minutes drive, so hopefully you make it there alive. you didn’t know how many people would be there, with covid and all you didn’t really know what to expect. You knew olivia would be there, and probably harry too. Which weirdly enough you weren’t too nervous about.

you had made a post on instagram about being excited to work with olivia and harry and the many other amazing people - and the harry fans of course went crazy. But overall everyone took the news really well.

When you arrived at the restaurant there were a few paps, probably there for harry and not expecting you. You’re a new popular actress, so this would make the paparazzi a lot of money. Once word got out that Y/N L/N and harry styles were having lunch together it would probably end it mayhem.

“y/n! over here!” a voice called out as you walked into the restaurant.

You smiled as you saw olivia wave at you. “ah! i’m so sorry i’m late” you say and olivia shook her head bringing you into a hug. “don’t worry about it! we’ve ordered some drinks, got you a coke” she said.

“i’m harry” a deep voice said from behind you, making you look around and see - harry fucking styles - introducing himself to you.

“i know who you are!” you giggled pulling him into a hug, which he obviously didn’t expect, but took it anyways. “i’m y/n” you say pulling back and sitting down infront him crossing your legs.

“i know who you are too” he blushed making you laugh again.

“you’re vegan, right?” you asked and he nodded “yeah, have been for a while. trying hard to stay somewhat healthy over quarantine” he said sipping on his water.

“well, i get a takeout probably two times a week and haven’t been to a gym in, i’d say 5 years”

Harry laughed loudly, making you laugh too. Olivia and the producers gave each other knowing smiles. They really hit the jackpot with this one.

***

“that wasn’t as bad as i thought” you mumbled as you got your first covid test done. It was very uncomfortable to say the least, but it didn’t hurt and you didn’t pass out so that was a plus.

you were going to start working next thursday, if everything goes to plan. If someone has covid then they obviously have to push it back.

You were so excited to get to work, it wouldn’t be like any other set you’d worked on. But you had a feeling it was going to be one you’ll remember forever.

“how was it?” danny asked as you got back in the car.

“better than expected. uncomfortable, but ok” you mumbled sitting back in the seat. Danny noticed how tired you were so he turned off the music and put down your window a little and let you sleep the whole journey home. You had been at all hours going over your script. This is what happened with you last role, and it was just the way you worked.

By the time you go on set you had everyone’s lines memorised.

The days went by slowly. It was actually quite painful. But your covid results came and you were negative and so was everyone else on the set and in your household. So you could finally get into work.

You were driven to work on thursday by a very nice man called john. He talked non stop, but it was nice to get to talk to some other than sara, danny and your agents.

“Have a good day john” you called out stepping out of the car your new pink mask adorning your face.

you had to get bangs the other day — you never heard the fucking end of it off of danny and sara. you had bangs in high school, along with some really badly done piercings and you told yourself never again. Of course the bangs looked good, they were amazing and you actually suited them this time. But that didn’t stop sara taking out all of the pictures of your freshman year and making you do a side by side for her instagram.

“you look tired” a voice called making you turn around a stick up the middle finger. You recognised the voice immediately, harry styles. He laughed coming beside you in his white vote shirt and tracksuit bottoms.

“i have to go and get my tattooes covered now” you sighed placing your phone in your tote bag, harry nodded “me too, the only time i’ll ever hate getting these tattoos”

“y’know i like them. the tattoos, they suit you” you say opening up the trailer door. harry stopped and smirked “hmm. see you later”

Covering up the tattoos didn’t take as long as you thought. The makeup and hair took a good hour and was painful with the mask - you did nearly pass out from the heat, but luckily harry stopped by with a cup of tea just in time.

God.

That man was something else. Seen as he’s never properly done this before, you thought he’d be full of first day jitters. But no, he’s going trailer to trailer, with tea’s and coffees.

“you nearly ready? we have our first scene soon” harry said leaning against the trailer door. All of you were practically ordered to wear a coat to cover the clothes as some paps had been spotted. It was a rather cold day so it didn’t make a difference to you.

“eager?”

He nodded holding your hand helping you down the steps of the trailer — heels were a real bitch you decided.

“paps and heel are assholes” you say making harry laugh. “you can say that again” he said dropping your hand and walking beside you.

You wanted him to hold your hand.

“don’t worry, i’ll go easy on you” you tease getting a pinch in return.

“more like the other way”

“yeah, christopher nolan movie ey? proper actor”

Harry rolled his eyes with a small smile on his face placing an arm around your shoulder.

“come on, wife.”

***

The days were long and some days were hard. But harry made everything so much better. Hugging you when you needed it, joking when you needed a laugh. There was paparazzi pictures of harry speaking and you laughing - which was a horrible cackle that made harry laugh. The fans were going crazy for you guys, and you were both asked constantly on whether there could be something more going on with you two.

“Another headline, H”

Harry shook his head with a small smile, placing the chinese onto the plate.

“your first drama headline, i’m so proud” Danny said placing an arm around you. Danny, sara you and now harry had decided to celebrate the first two weeks of filming and now apparently your first drama headline. Something about harry joining in all your tradition and not complaining about the awful food or very obnoxious and rude chats that go in, makes you soft and weirdly enough besotted.

“oh shut up, i’ll tell the paps that i’m dating you again. they’ll never leave you alone” you warn and danny backed off.

“again?” harry asked laughing slightly and passing you the plate full of food.

“everytime danny’s mean to me i tell the paps that we’re dating, even told one i was pregnant and that he didn’t want the baby”

“fuck off. remind me to never get on your badside” harry cackled sitting down beside you his food on the coffee table and his wine in the other. He had, had a good few drinks before hand too — he said “it’s my cheat night”.

Soon enough danny and sara went off to bed, not before danny teased you about how in love you and harry are. “oi! fuck off” harry yelled making danny squeal.

“please chase after me, daddy” danny said running down the hall.

“don’t humour him” you giggled sipping out of your wine glass.

“i’m in love with your friends” he said pausing to take a big gulp of his wine. “they’re just so genuine” he finished leaning back and placing a pillow on his lap. you nodded in agreement.

“we’ve been friends for years, before any of us were like somewhat famous”

“y’know i’ve seen your first movie about 100 hundred times” harry admitted making you flush. “shut up. you’re talking out of your ass” you say taking his wine glass away and pausing netflix.

“i’m serious. had a proper crush on you too” he laughed shaking his head.

“i don’t know if you remember, but i think it was a teens choice awards. and you had gone on stage to get an award and i helped you up the stairs thinking you had heels on” he said and you remember it vividly now.

“oh shit yeah! no, i wore my lucky converse. they’re pretty cool too”

“i think youre pretty” harry whispered moving closer to you. you bit your lip to try and stop yourself from squealing.

“hmmm. ok mr styles”

Before you could come up with another joke harry placed his lips on yours. You didn’t even hesitate in kissing him back, your hands flying to his hair. He moaned at the feeling of you tugging on it.

“you have no idea how long i’ve been wanting to do that for” harry said slightly out of breath.

“don’t worry, darling” you paused.

“me too”

[thecandlesticksfromlesmis]

My sister's college's theater group decided to FILM their musical one person at a time and edit it together(!!) and I'm in engineering grad school, and am aware that art school is a v v different experience but this made me think: how are you guys doing this? Are you ok? How do you learn to direct if there can't be two people on screen together? Is it like the Tom Holland thing where he didnt know who was in scenes with him? Are the editing students happy about this? If you dont want to answer I totally get it but I'm asking because engineering not in person kills me so I just. Can't fathom what you're doing. I wish you the best 💙

HEY omg yeah it’s a mess. It’s been a mess since this all started and I think it will continue to be a mess for the rest of this year. 

Rest of post under the cut cause I’m just ranting.

So when everything first hit, all filmmaking was stopped completely, which for me as a screenwriter was fine because I am not required to be on set unless I wrote the script (or have been bamboozled into script supervising ugh) anyway. But I know it hurt literally every other discipline, especially cinematographers because they need to touch cameras in order to learn and the school provides all their tech. 

Towards the end of last year, the school started back up with productions, making it mandatory for all the films to be shot on our big sound stages (usually we have free rein of all of LA and a little outside it in shoot in) and to include a COVID safety supervisor. Our sound stages were upgraded with new air ventilation systems and the school also rented out other stages to accommodate the huge number of shorts that needed to be shot. 

In order to be on set you had to have proof of a negative COVID test and have isolated in your home for two weeks before shooting. On set was a big production of face shields and masks and sanitizer and staying six feet away from each other---except for the actors. The actors could be in scenes together, provided they did all the steps above and agreed to be close to someone in a scene.

No one is happy lmao. It’s pushed back thesis schedule SO MUCH, that lots of people in my class will still be having to shoot and finish thesis after we technically graduate this year. Technically, I’m still responsible for writing a script for a project that was cancelled and removed from the “you need to do this to graduate” list. It’s been rescheduled to shoot in August when I will be rigorously prepping for the huge event where I pitch all my project to industry execs. I don’t wanna do it, but my whole team still wants to so ya know 🤷🏼‍♂️

I have no clue how the fuck the production designers are functioning. I hope they’re still able to go to the school to access the building stations and literally all their materials. Editors have to go into the school to do their work because AVID costs so much money and no one is gonna buy it personally and that’s what they edit on! Directors are being dramatic as usual (lol I love some of them but goooood the shit they’ve put writers through y’all). 

Basically, it’s all around absolutely NOT what we signed up for to earn our masters. This school’s big selling point is hands on, collaborative work, and it’s really tough to do that now. Writers have less to deal with, but what I wouldn’t give to be sitting in workshop, giving notes to people in conversation form, rather than trying to have a natural dialogue over zoom. It sucks! And I miss my friends. 

There was this beautiful room on campus, that was a “no talking zone” in the library, that I used to work in every day. It was a room full of screenplays--like stacked shelves top to bottom of bound screenplays, some original behind glass doors, some signed by writers. It was really good place for me to focus on what I came here to do. I really really miss it. It made me feel a part of something! I have barely left my house for a year and now all the words I’ve written are trapping in our one bedroom apartment and it’s so stifling. The stories are blending together and GOD I can’t wait to get a break. 

I’m burnt out and tired of the one thing I know how to do. 

But I’m going to end this on a bright note! Mike and I are getting our second shot soon, we’re working on a film project right now, I’m finishing drafts of stories I’ve been working on for so long. If everything was the way it was before all this, the things I’m accomplishing would feel so small and not impressive. But now I’m realizing just how hard they really are to finish, and I should be less hard on myself in the future! 

Anyway, thanks for asking! Hope engineering grad school is going well. I’m sure it’s hard with all this going on too! Wishing you the best 💚 

[cargopantsman]

Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here

Trigger warnings: All of them, because I am lazy. Also none of this is sensical.

Utter, hyper-caffeinated brain noise.

The problem with the concept of a "sense of self" is it already tries to concretize an amorphous abstract. It makes us want to point at some thing and say "Well... that's me." Whether it is a set of ideals that we try to live by, a set of activities that brings us a sense of joy or fulfillment, or, gods forbid, and entirely different and other person that "completes us."

I've always had an affinity for trickster figures and shapeshifters. The wearers of masks, the truthful liars, the artisans of duality, yada, yada. Since I was a child my first instinct has always been to blend in. If into the background, great, but if need be, if I needed to blend into the social fabric around me, I could do that too. To throw this into the high school backdrop; I wasn't a social butterfly, I was shy as could be, but I got along with the jocks, the goths, the nerds, the art freaks, the band kids, the preps, the whatever. Where ever I was I could fake that I belonged there. I was comfortable drifting in between worlds. (Looking back, I could have caused a lot more chaos with the information I was privy to at the time...[Oh, there's a constant point. I'm good at keeping secrets, keeping confidence. I'll lie my ass off to keep a secret.]) Does any of that really help drive a sense of self though? When your natural instinct is to mirror, to blend, to fade? When your point of pride is walking into a room unnoticed and, even better, leaving a party unseen? Does being a ghost count as an identity?

"Expression of Will" comes to mind... what does that mean? Ok, so some abstract thing is inside of you and you manifest it objectly outwardly. I was an artist. I made images in my head and "kind of" manifest them on paper. Some times people see that paper...  I was a writer... images in my head "became" words and some people saw that. I combined them into comics. Some people Saw that. Is that a lasting affect? Maybe the fights I've been into?! That time in 2nd grade someone was picking on a friend and I laid them out... the time in 8th grade someone was picking on me and clocked them down. Or in high school when someone decided to start some rumors and I held them up by their throat in the air until they turned blue? That was an inward thing that manifested outwardly. Nevermind good or bad, but was any of that... me?

Hmm. The beast. The primal... come back to that later.

"Expression of Will," "Expression of Will," "Expression of Will" ... What the fuck even is "Will"? Is this why philosophers get their heads so far up their ass? Is it a desire? The will to live.... living requires eating and the amount of times I forget to even do that... Maybe been looking at the phrase all wrong...

Will to Live (noun) It isn't a thing.

Will (verb) to (preposition) Live (verb)

Why does that sound better?

Desire to Live (noun)

Desire (verb) to (preposition) Live (verb)

Okay, that feels better even, but still... Sense of self, will, desire, expressions thereof. Are these just the aimless desires and wills? The fleeting flights of frivolous fancies festering forlornly in frontal cortices?

The self with the will can direct the desires towards living. "Get in the fucking robot Shinji!" "I don't wanna"

The (ghost) with the (strength) can direct the (impulses) towards (being). Getting too close to a concept of a soul on that one huh?

Forget self. It's a useless moniker right now. There is no self. It's just this mind alone for the first time in its entire life. (Not alone alone, there are friends, but they've learned more about me in the past two weeks than the past 6 years so...) "What did they learn?" asked the projection of self that defines itself by interactions with other.

I thought we were forgetting self.... not an option really. Sentience is a bitch like that. But they've learned I'll put up with a lot of bullshit under the guise of strength and integrity when I should've callously called this whole thing ages ago. That I can shut myself down completely in the interest of bodily-self preservation. (Not Self-self preservation, fuck the English language). What did I sacrifice? What did I shut down?

Everything.

That is less than helpful.

The Beast. Vince. Your Shadow.

My Shadow...

What do you desire?

Blood in the cut, tears in their eyes, power over someone that wants that power over them...

Do you want that? I don't want it, I just need it. No... I want it.

Is that all you are? A sadist? An animal?

Maybe... probably not though. A caretaker, and a sparring partner. A trickster and a shapeshifter. A crafter whose tools are destruction.

Next problem, grandeur. Mythologizing everything. But how to see a thing if you don't blow it up/magnify it?

You lack a sense of self because no one ever tested your sense of self. No one actually fought you for who you are. To find out who you are. The ex didn't. An old friend did until she got scared by what she found there.

You don't want to be yourself because it's not nice is it? You were raised to be nice.

College. I controlled the group. Never hit anyone after high school aside from set matches in classes or sparring for funsies. They all saw my eyes and stopped if they were getting out of hand.

The Dom-Friend.

Don't use the d-word on me.

Destroyer? Yeah, that one's fine. That one fits. He says as he carelessly tosses lit matches around his entire life. Can we bring up the phoenix or is that too grandiose? Why shouldn't it be grandiose? We spend every day of our lives going through the same kind of tedious bullshit all the time why not make our inner lives a bit bigger, a bit richer?

A bit darker.

Why do you want them to bleed? Hurt and comfort. That's a big theme, a trope if you will. Why not have both at the same? Why not let her think that I'm about to kill her but let her rest in the trust that I won't? Why not let me think that I'm about to break her while believing she is the most precious thing in the world?

Caretaker. A caretaker kills all the time. Tearing out weeds, uprooting the prized plant to move it to a better place for its growth.

Growth.

The self isn't going to be found just in ones self... not in another either. No, the self has to be found in everything. The things one wants to run to and run from. The soul (oops) is formed by what it crashes into right? The mind recoils from traumas races towards panaceas, why not, if one can, flip the polarity on the two. Bring the darkness screaming into the light so you can see it, bring the light quivering into the darkness so it can loose its terrifying brillance. Balance in all things right?

You're not a very positive person, they say. No... I'm not. It lashes out in bad ways sometimes, sure. Control, control, you must learn control. But being negative isn't bad. Not if you can grow from it. No plant can survive the sun for 24 hours. Trees sleep in the winter. We sleep, we heal, we grow.

Self-Destruction!! That's a fun one... seven fucking months downing a bottle of whisky a night. Whooo boy. Do Not Recommend.

Got a nice stay in the underworld though and trudged up a lot of shit. Now I'm sitting here with my ears ringing because I finally hit the personal limit on Monsters and my brain is overclocked enough I can finally see shit at 4 angles at the same time. I am a god damned quantum supercomputer of emotions right now.

Faith and faithlessness are the same thing. Have faith, trust the future, don't expect anything, don't plan your now for your future. Sounds sadly like live in the moment type bullshit, but life is weird and people are complex. Shifting drifting clueless animals that want to be safe but don't want to get stuck in anothers arms even when there is one whose arms are so safe.

The damage runs deep... and two people with damage running that deep. Hmm. How much healing can falling do? The other just puts a bandage over a puncture wound and both try to ignore it, but then the blood gets pumping, the heart pounds and poisons surge to the surface. It's neither one's fault really. Life is a trial of knives and we don't always have time or concern to tend the wounds properly. There's always something else that needs to be taken care of first.

Divorce is a helluva drug. It is maddening, the freedom to finally to be yourself is line having the lineart stripped off, there is a terrifying infinity in front of you and the only thing to do for awhile is melt. Let the slings and arrows just pierce and sink in. Anyone else tries to push the sludge of you into a shape might get hurt when they find the arrows. I want to go absolutely feral in a way. In a way the whole COVID mess is keeping me under lock and key so I'm just prowling around the empty house like I always have been, but now there's some sense... of purpose.

I'm raging against any depression, the executive dysfunction is going to have a talking to. The sense of self is going to be found in stripping this house down to bare walls and making a blank canvas. Bring everything down, ruin it all, start again.

My self is emptiness, it always has been. I can be anything, but I should be wary of ever wanting to be something. (My career options are AWESOME). But this is a different emptiness than before. Before I pulled the trigger and splattered the brains of the marriage across the floor I was just a void, and inky black pit of nothingness. Somehow, having the Shadow rise up and finally start getting along with the rest of me, the emptiness isn't.... void. It's just nascent possibility and that shouldn't scare me.

It does, of course, terrify me. First time in 40 years being legitimately alone is terrifying, should have done this kinda thing when I was 20, but... I was an idiot back then (60 year old me laughs from the future). But I think I can get a grip on the concept that "I" don't exist, but I'm real... ever changing ever dynamic, not who I was while I was married, but a mix of the me before, a angry beast now, and something yet unseen in the future.

[yvynyl]

// Letters to YVYNYL //

Little Fuss "Watch Out"

/ I've been a bit checked out of the internet this year, despite endless swiping my way through my dumb phone. I came across this letter today and it made me remember how many wonderful songs I get here and how great it is to touch base with artists who are still slogging along in this swamp as the rest of us. Have a listen to this new lovely new song from duo Cody Von Lehmden and Olivia Martinez.

Hi Mark!

First of all, I want to thank you for curating this blog and all you do for the music community. I know firsthand how big of an impact you have had on individual artists and creators as a whole. In fact, it feels like a wild, full-circle moment to be writing to you because, in a very direct way, YVYNYL is responsible for starting my own music career.

Nearly five years ago my brother, who was in my band, The Candescents, wrote to you in what we saw as a longshot that anyone would take a chance on a small, upstart indie band from rural Ohio. You decided to feature us, however, based on nothing but a self-produced song and a few grainy photographs. I remember waking up on the morning after it was released to a flurry of excited messages from my bandmates, and we watched as your blog post slowly caused the song to spread across the internet—gaining traction from an army of bloggers and deep-internet music lovers.

It was perhaps the most exciting and fulfilling moment of my entire life to see absolute strangers supporting something that I was a part of. Little did I know at the time, your decision to feature us and our music would start me out on a half-decade journey that would culminate with getting signed to Dirty Hit Records, going on several North American tours, and forming a life based around my love for music. While I consider myself lucky to have been a part of such a dream scenario, both my brother and I departed in early 2019—the reasons for which could be an entire article in itself!!

The world however keeps turning, and I have somehow found the past couple years to be even more exciting than the last. After leaving the band, I packed up all of my possessions and music equipment into my car and drove to the east coast—with little direction or purpose other than my desire to continue making music. I ended up in Boston where I auditioned for Berklee College of Music and was accepted to study in Valencia, Spain. While studying abroad, I met Olivia Martinez, and immediately we bonded over a shared passion for cheap wine and creating art. Since being kicked out of Spain due to COVID, we’ve remained singularly committed to growing together as artists, and our project, Little Fuss, has become our medium into which we have put all of our energy. Our single “Watch Out” and accompanying self-shot music video is the first taste from our debut EP.

Both lyrically and musically, this song represents the need for us to keep pushing forward as songwriters and not become complacent in following a set formula. The need for discovery is an intangible part of what makes this band so special, and that is perhaps best exemplified by our DIY approach to almost every aspect of our music. All of the supporting material, including the video and artwork, was completely done by ourselves during quarantine. The music video in particular was shot and edited over the course of two days and is our first foray into videography. We couldn’t be more proud to share this art with you that we care so deeply about, and we hope that you enjoy it!

Over the past year, this project has served as a constant reminder to only look back as a means to appreciate what you have. Because of that, I don’t view Little Fuss through the lens of The Candescents, but rather as a completely separate and important entity. This song is just the start of what I know to be a long and fruitful songwriting partnership, and we would greatly appreciate it if you considered featuring us on your blog!

Thank you for reading!

- Cody Von Lehmden

Support YVYNYL, an independent music project here!

Got a story to tell? Submit it to Letters to YVYNYL.

Instagram + Twitter + Facebook + Bandcamp

[eddie-redmayne-italian-blog]

photos by Frank Ockenfels

The Long Journey and Intense Urgency of Aaron Sorkin's 'The Trial of the Chicago 7'

by Rebecca Keegan September 23, 2020, 6:00  am PDT

The director of the Netflix film, which stars Sacha Baron Cohen, Jeremy Strong, Eddie Redmayne and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, reveals why it took nearly 20 years to get the project about the politically motivated prosecution of protestors made and why it couldn't be more timely: "I never imagined today would go so much like 1968."

In October 2019, hundreds of protesters marched down Chicago’s Michigan Avenue toward the Hilton, chanting phrases like "No justice, no peace!" and "A people united will never be defeated!" as police in riot gear descended on the crowd with billy clubs and tear gas. Earnest and energized, clad in 1960s period costumes and flanked by vintage police vehicles, this group thought they were acting out the past, staging a scene from Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7. As it turned out, they were performing the future, too.

Sorkin’s film, which opens in select theaters Sept. 25 and hits Netflix on Oct.  16, tells the story of the riots at the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention and the circus-like trial of political activists that followed the next year. Thanks to Hollywood development hell, the movie is arriving 14  years after Steven Spielberg first mentioned the idea to Sorkin but just as its themes and plot points — civil unrest, a self-proclaimed "law and order" president’s vilification of protesters (Nixon then, Trump now), the police’s excessive use of force, tensions within the Democratic Party over how far left to move — have become bracingly current."I never wanted the film to be about 1968," Sorkin says in an interview over Zoom from his house in the Hollywood Hills on Labor Day weekend. "I never wanted it to be an exercise in nostalgia or a history lesson. I wanted it to be about today. But I never imagined that today would get so much like 1968."For only the second time in a career spanning nine films as a screenwriter, Sorkin serves as director with Chicago 7, helming a sprawling ensemble cast that includes Eddie Redmayne as anti-war activist Tom Hayden, Sacha Baron Cohen as Youth International Party (Yippie) provocateur Abbie Hoffman, Succession’s Jeremy Strong as counterculture figure Jerry Rubin and Watchmen’s Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Black Panther party co-founder Bobby Seale. There are undeniable parallels not only between the film and the present political moment but also between the performance-art activism of the actors and the men they’re playing, most vividly Cohen, who, like Hoffman, has made a career of political self-expression through comedic stunts, including crashing a far-right rally in Olympia, Washington, this summer while pretending to be a racist country singer. (Cohen, who shoots most of his satirical projects incognito, impishly calls reports of his appearance at the rally  "fake news.")Eight months after Sorkin filmed the protest scenes in Chicago, Abdul-Mateen was marching in Black Lives Matter protests in West Hollywood, as was Strong in Brooklyn. "There’s power when a lot of people come together to protest out of anger, out of frustration," Abdul-Mateen says. "Everybody has a role in the revolution; this film shows that.

"Though the movie feels crafted for this political moment, it was born of another. At Sorkin’s first meeting with Spielberg, "I remember him saying, 'It would be great if we could have this out before the election,'" Sorkin says. The election Spielberg was talking about was 2008’s, when Barack Obama and Joe Biden faced John McCain and Sarah Palin.The film hit multiple roadblocks, beginning with the 2007-08 writers strike and continuing as financing faltered repeatedly, a fate illustrated by the more than 30 producers who can claim some sort of credit on Chicago 7. It took another unscheduled detour this summer after Sorkin finished it as the pandemic worsened, and the odds of original distributor Paramount mounting a successful theatrical release before the Nov. 3 election seemed increasingly slim. For some involved with the film, there is a question about the ethics of Hollywood inviting audiences to return to theaters before a COVID-19 vaccine is widely available. "

There’s a moral quandary that we, the motion picture business, have to be careful that we don’t become the tobacco industry, where we’re encouraging people to do something we know is potentially lethal," says Cohen.Before his visit to Spielberg’s Pacific Palisades home to discuss the project on a Saturday afternoon in 2006, Sorkin knew next to nothing about the Chicago 7. The federal government had charged seven defendants — Hoffman, Rubin, Hayden, David Dellinger, Rennie Davis, John Froines and Lee Weiner — with conspiracy for their participation in the protests against the Vietnam War outside the Democratic National Convention. (Originally the men were known as the Chicago 8 and included Seale, who asked to have his trial separated from that of the others and postponed so that he could be represented by his preferred lawyer, who was ill; that trial never took place.)

When Spielberg proposed a movie about the riots and the trial that followed, Sorkin, who was 7 in 1968, said, "'You know, that sounds great. Count me in.' As soon as I left his house, I called my father and said, 'Dad, do you know anything about a riot that happened in 1968 or a crazy conspiracy trial that followed?' I was just saying yes to Steven."Despite his ignorance, Sorkin was a logical choice to write the project: Having penned Broadway’s A Few Good Men and its 1992 film adaptation as well as the long-running NBC series West Wing, he’d shown a flair for dramatizing courtroom procedures and liberal politics, and he turned in his first draft of the Chicago 7 script in 2007. Originally, Spielberg planned to direct the project himself, but by the time the writers strike was over, he had moved on and a number of other potential directors circled, including Paul Greengrass, Ben Stiller, Peter Berg and Gary Ross, though none was able to get it off the ground. "There was just a feeling that, 'Look, this isn’t an Avengers film,'" Sorkin says of the studios' move away from midbudget dramas and toward action tentpoles in the 2010s. "This isn’t an easy sell at the box office. And there are big scenes, riots, crowd scenes. How can this movie be done for the budget that makes sense for what the expectation is at the box office?"As the project languished, Sorkin tried writing it as a play, ultimately spending 18 months on a fruitless effort to fashion a stage treatment. "What I didn’t like was having a script in my drawer," he says. "I was just thinking, 'Jeez, this is a good movie and it feels like it’s stillborn.'"It was the confluence of two events that ultimately revived the film with Sorkin in the director’s chair in 2018 — the 2016 election of Donald Trump and the 2017 release of Sorkin’s well-received directorial debut, Molly’s Game, which doubled its production budget at the box office. "This is before George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and police protests or confrontations," Sorkin says. "This is just when Donald Trump was musing nostalgically about the old days when they used to carry that guy [a protester] out of here on a stretcher and punch the crap out of him."With Trump’s throwback rhetoric lending the subject matter a new timeliness and Sorkin’s directing chops confirmed in Spielberg’s eyes, the movie moved forward with its screenwriter at the helm.

Cross Creek Pictures came in to finance, and Paramount bought the domestic rights. But all those years in development had left an expensive imprint on the project — a jaw-dropping $11  million had been spent on casting costs, producing fees and the optioning of Brett Morgen’s 2007 documentary about the event, Chicago 10, leaving just $24  million for the actual 36-day production.

One way Sorkin attempts to achieve a sense  of scope despite that budget is by intercutting real black-and-white news footage with his dramatized protests. He rounded out his large cast with a deep bench of experienced and award-winning actors including Oscar winner Mark Rylance as defense attorney William Kunstler, Oscar nominee Frank Langella as Judge Julius Hoffman, Joseph Gordon-Levitt as prosecutor Richard Schultzand, Oscar nominee Michael Keaton as former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark — with the filmmaker and many of his actors working for scale. (Abdul-Mateen and Strong both became first-time Emmy winners Sept.  20.)Sorkin shot the protest scenes on location in Chicago and built a courtroom set in an old church sanctuary in Paterson, New Jersey, because none of the available courtroom locations in the Garden State conveyed the scope he wanted. "If we’re saying the whole world is watching, I want a packed courtroom for six months full of press and spectators," Sorkin says. "I wanted the big, cavernous feeling of the federal government and its power coming down on these people."

Julian Wasser/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images/Getty Images           "The movie is tribute to the bravery of the protesters of 1968 [pictured] and today in Belarus, on the streets of America, in Portland," says Cohen.            

Among the vestiges of Spielberg’s original plan was the casting of Cohen as Hoffman, which required the London native to affect a Boston accent and return to a subject he had studied as an undergraduate at Christ’s College in Cambridge, where he wrote a thesis paper about Jewish activists during the civil rights movement. At 19, Cohen had interviewed Bob Moses, the leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which Hoffman was involved in before he founded the anti-war Yippie movement. "Honestly, I was very proud of the fact that Jews were involved in the Black civil rights movement in the '60s, and there wasn’t much written about it," Cohen says, explaining his youthful scholarship.

There’s a clear line to draw between Hoffman’s 1960s theatrics — which included throwing fistfuls of money into the gallery of the New York Stock Exchange and vowing to levitate the Pentagon — and Cohen’s contemporary TV and film pranks. Perhaps among Cohen’s most memorable and pointed gags was getting Vice President Dick Cheney to gleefully autograph a waterboard kit, which the comic did while posing as an admiring Israeli anti-terror expert for a 2018 episode of Who Is America?, his Showtime series. “What I wanted to do was to show that he was proud of torturing," Cohen says. "I could not believe how happy Cheney was to be sitting next to an uber-fan. So, yes. Ultimately in the shows and the movies that I do, I’m trying to be funny, but yeah, I’m trying to get out the anger that I have within me."

Cohen sees Hoffman’s unorthodox protest methods as pragmatic. "The Yippies were underfunded, and he was using theatricality to gain attention for his aims," Cohen says. "He wanted to stop the war. And how do you do that? You use stunts and absurdist humor to try to effect change." The actor estimates that, after researching Hoffman, he pitched Sorkin hundreds of lines the activist had really delivered. "As an annoying person with a lot of chutzpah, I was emailing Aaron every other night until morning, 'What about this line? What about this line?'" Cohen says. The writer-director, known for his exacting prose, politely tolerated the suggestions while largely sticking to his own script.

As Rubin, Strong is playing Hoffman’s conscientious jester sidekick, a role wildly different from the tragic, wealthy approval seeker he portrays on Succession. Strong added some of his own dramatic flourishes, including painting words on his chest for one courtroom scene and bringing a remote-controlled fart machine to disrupt Langella’s imperious judge. "I wanted to channel as much as possible that spirit of the merry prankster and of joyous dissent," Strong says. Hoffman and Rubin’s real-life personae were so large that Sorkin at times asked his actors to dial down their faithful portrayals, requesting, after one particularly jubilant take, "less cowbell."

Sorkin’s script draws a sharp contrast between Hoffman and Rubin’s campy methods and Hayden’s more reserved approach to the anti-war movement, with the tensions between Hoffman and Hayden supplying the film’s key relationship in a kind of begrudging brotherhood of the peace movement. To learn more about Hayden, Redmayne studied remarks that Jane Fonda, who was married to the activist and politician from 1973 to 1990, made upon his death in 2016. In his own life, Redmayne is cautious when it comes to discussing the role that he, as an actor at the center of a huge studio franchise (Warner Bros.’ Fantastic Beasts) might have in political life. "I find it endlessly challenging," Redmayne says of navigating his public activism. "There’s the elitist thing. It’s speaking up on climate change but being conscious that you’re traveling a lot. One has to be aware of one’s own hypocrisies, because they can be detrimental to something you believe in. So sometimes I find that I have to live my life and speak to my advocacy in a way in that it’s around friends, family and people I know rather than making something public."

Abdul-Mateen has begun his acting career largely associated with fantastical roles, like Dr. Manhattan on HBO’s Watchmen, Black Manta in Aquaman and Candyman in the upcoming Jordan Peele-produced remake of the slasher film. Playing Seale represented a chance to do more grounded work and to depict a man who had loomed large during Abdul-Mateen’s childhood in Oakland, where Seale co-founded the Black Panthers in 1966 and later ran for mayor. Seale’s inclusion in the original Chicago riots indictment was controversial and strange — prosecutors accused him of conspiring with men he’d never met after visiting Chicago that week for only a few hours to deliver a speech. For the prosecution, Seale functioned largely as a prop to tap into the fears of white jurors and white Americans watching the news coverage, and during the trial he had no attorney. "I wanted to key in on, how did Bobby Seale survive this trial?" Abdul-Mateen says. "How did he survive the gross mistreatment by the United States government, and how did he go through that with his head high and not be broken? It was an exercise in finding my pride, finding my dignity."

In one scene, Seale is brought into the courtroom bound and gagged, and throughout the trial he is kept separate from the white defendants. "Although it was meant to be a humiliating act, I walked out with my chest high, with my head high. Bound and gagged and everything else. It would be very dangerous for a Black man in that time, even sometimes today, to show the proof of the wear and tear that oppression can take on a person, because that can be seen as a sign of weakness, and a sign of weakness is an open door that it’s working." For the moments of lightness that Cohen and Strong bring to the movie, Abdul-Mateen supplies ballast. "It’s important for the right reasons and at the right time to make art that makes people uncomfortable," he says.

Niko Tavernise/NETFLIX. On the set, from left, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Mark Rylance, Ben Shenkman, Aaron Sorkin and Eddie Redmayne

Spielberg has remained involved in the film "in an emeritus role," Sorkin says, "from giving me good script notes to casting to notes on early cuts of the film." He also showed up to the New Jersey courtroom set. "When you have to direct a scene in front of Steven Spielberg, you’re not at your most relaxed necessarily," Sorkin says. Spielberg did not, however, take an executive producing credit on the film and declined to be interviewed about it.

The decision to switch to a streaming release came after an early summer marketing strategy call between Sorkin, Paramount chief Jim Gianopulos, other Paramount execs and some of the film’s producers. "At the end of the call, Jim said, 'Listen, we don’t know what the theater business is going to look like in the fall. We have troubling data telling us that the first people back in movie theaters are going to be the people who think that the coronavirus is a hoax,'" Sorkin says. This was clearly not the intended audience for a movie whose heroes are liberal activists. "I said, 'I don’t think the Idaho militia are going to be the first people coming to this movie,'" Sorkin says.

The group agreed to explore alternatives and gave Netflix, Amazon, Apple and Hulu 24 hours to watch the film. After a bidding war, Chicago 7 landed at Netflix in a $56  million deal against its $35  million production budget, with a robust marketing campaign and promise of a theatrical release. "We knew we didn’t have the option of 'Let’s wait a year,'" Sorkin says. "This is what we’re thinking about and what we’re talking about right now, and it just would have been a real shame to not release it now."

After Chicago 7 opens in limited release, Netflix will add more theaters in the U.S. and abroad throughout October, expanding upon the film’s premiere on the service, a strategy akin to what it provided Oscar best picture nominees The Irishman and Roma, albeit in a wildly different theatrical environment.

As Hollywood opens up to more production, Sorkin, and many of the Chicago 7 actors, have begun returning to work. Abdul-Mateen has been in Berlin for The Matrix 4 and Redmayne in London for Fantastic Beasts 3, while Sorkin is shooting a West Wing reunion special at the Orpheum Theatre in downtown L.A. that will premiere on HBO Max in October as a fundraiser for When We All Vote and include video appearances by Michelle Obama, Bill Clinton and Lin-Manuel Miranda

For the real-life Chicago 7, the denouement consisted of ultimately being acquitted of conspiracy. Judge Hoffman sentenced Seale to four years in prison for contempt of court, one of the longest sentences ever handed down for that offense in the U.S., but those charges were overturned on appeal. Just three of the original eight defendants — Seale, Froines and Weiner — are still alive, but the legacy of the case lives on in contemporary protest movements. "The movie is tribute to the bravery of the protesters of 1968 and the protesters of today in Belarus, on the streets of America, in Portland," Cohen says. "These people now are risking their lives, and they’ll continue risking them."

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/the-trial-of-the-chicago-7-aaron-sorkin-and-stars-on-films-timeliness-to-election-and-why-everybody-has-a-role-in-the-revolution

[thekillerssluts]

Will Butler explains how his Harvard degree developed into his second solo album

“Yeah, it’s terrifying,” Will Butler says, pondering how it feels to be releasing music away from the umbrella of Arcade Fire.

“It’s the classic thing about all writers,” he continues. “The creative process makes them wanna puke the whole time they’re writing something, then they read something back and it makes them feel worse, then a year later they read it and think ‘yeah, it’s okay’. It’s a glorious experience, but it really makes your stomach hurt.”

On the one hand Will Butler is well accustomed to this writing process, being a multi-instrumentalist in the Canadian indie-rock band fronted by brother Win - Arcade Fire. But on his own terms, it’s an entirely new process. Butler’s second solo album Generations arrives five years after his debut Policy, a collection that rattled with a ramshackle charm and what he describes now as a ‘consciously very unproduced’ sound. Arcade Fire wound down from their Everything Now tour in September 2018, leaving Butler with the last two years of playtime. Most musicians, particularly those accustomed to big album cycles, set aside their downtime for family or other musical projects. Somehow Butler’s managed to do both while also completing a masters degree in Public Policy at Harvard.

“I went to school for a variety of reasons but there was an artistic side to it too,” he says. “I have always tried to let music and lyrics emerge from the world that I’m in; you fertilise the soil and see what grows. It was a way to better understand where we are, how we got here and what's going on. You know, ‘where am I from? What's going to happen?’” Both of these questions explored in his degree are used as fuel for Generations.

It’s easy to imagine an album by somebody who’s just pursued a Public Policy MSt to form in reams of political commentary, probably set to an acoustic guitar. However, Butler instead engages character portraits soundtracked by a broad range of thrilling sonics. Opener “Outta Here” is shrouded by a monstrous bass that lurks beneath the depths of the instrumentation before bursting out midway through. “Got enough things on my plate without you talking about my salvation,” he screams.

While the cage-rattling “Bethlehem” is mania underpinned by a thrashing guitar and bubbling synths that help lift the track to boiling point.While there’s no current world leaders namechecked or any on-the-nose political commentary across the LP, the angst of its contents is instantly tangible, backed by the intellect of somebody who’s spent the past few years studying the ins and outs of government processes. A perfect combination, you could say.

This fuel was partly discovered through Butler reconnecting with the music that defined his teenage years: namely Bjork, The Clash and Eurythmics. While these influences certainly slip into frame across Generations, they were paired with something of an unlikely muse: “I got into this habit of listening to every single song on the Spotify Top 50 every six weeks,” Butler explains. “So many of them are horrible, terrifying and just awful but there’s something inspiring about how god damn avant garde the shittiest pop music is now. Just completely divorced from any sense of reality - it’s just layers upon layers upon layers - it’s amazing. It’s like Marcel Duchamp making a pop hit every single song.”

We turn from current music to current events. Navigating Covid-19 with his wife and three kids in their home of Brooklyn, a majority of 2020 has been caught up in family time for Butler. “The summer’s been easier because everybody’s outside, whereas in spring it was like ‘it’s family time because we have to lock our doors as there's a plague outside.’” While being surrounded by the trappings of lockdown since his second solo album Generations was completed in March, the album itself wriggles with the spirit of live instrumentation, which at this point seems like some sort of relic from a bygone era."I think eventually rediscovering this album back in the live setting would be amazing - we’re a really great live band, it’s a shame to not be in front of people."

The source of this energy can be traced back to the way the songs came together; they were forged and finessed at a series of shows in the early stages of the project. “It just raises the stakes. You can tell how good or how dumb a lyric is when you sing it in front of a hundred people,” he reflects. “It’s like ‘are you embarrassed because what you’re saying is true?’ or ‘is it just embarrassing?’ It’s a good refiner for that stuff. I think eventually rediscovering this album back in the live setting would be amazing - we’re a really great live band, it’s a shame to not be in front of people.”

Like his day job in Arcade Fire, Butler’s solo live group is something of a family affair - both his wife and sister-in-law feature in the band, alongside Broadway's West Side Story star, and the student of the legendary Fela Kuti drummer, Tony Allen. Together this eclectic mix of musicians conjures an infectious spirit through the raw combination of thundering synths and pedal-to-the-metal instrumentation; an apt concoction indeed for lyrics that are attempting to unhatch the bamboozling questions that surround our current times.

The timing for Butler’s decision to study Public Policy couldn’t have been more perfect, with his course starting in the Fall of 2016. “I was at Harvard for the election which was a really bizarre time to be in a government school, but it was great to be in a space for unpacking questions like ‘my god, how did we get here?!’” he reflects, with a note of mockery in the bright voice.

“I had a course taught by a professor named Leah Wright Rigueur. The class was essentially on race in America but with an eye towards policy. The class explored what was going to happen in terms of race under the next president. The second to last week was about Hilary Clinton and the last week was about Donald Trump. We read riot reports - Ferguson in 2015, Baltimore in 2016, the Detroit uprisings in the ‘60s and Chicago in 1919 - it's certainly helping me understand the last 5 years, you know. Just to be in that context was very lucky.”

As we’ve seen with statues being toppled, privileges being checked and lyrics of national anthems being interrogated in recent months, history is a complex, labyrinthine subject to navigate requiring both ruthless self-scrutiny and a commitment to the long-haul in order to correct things. The concept of Generations shoots from the same hip employing character portraits to engage in the broader picture.

The writing, at times, is beamed from a place of disconnect (“had enough of bad news / had enough of your generation”), from a place of conscious disengagement (“I’m not talking because I don’t feel like lying / if you stay silent you can walk on in silence”) and from a place of honest self-assessment (“I was born rich / three quarters protestant / connections at Harvard and a wonderful work ethic”).

“I’m rooted in history to a fault,” he says. “My great grandfather was the last son of a Mormon pioneer who’d gone West after being kicked out of America by mob violence. He wanted to be a musician which was crazy - he got 6 months in a conservatory in Chicago before his first child was born. He always felt like he could have been a genius, he could of been writing operas but he was teaching music in like tiny western towns and he had all these kids and he made them be a family band and they were driving around the American west before there were roads in the deserts - literally just driving through the desert! He would go to these small towns and get arrested for trying to skip bills and just live this wild existence.”

Butler’s grandma, meanwhile, was just a child at this point. She went on to become a jazz singer with her sisters and married the guitar player Alvino Rey. “The fact that me and my brother are musicians is no coincidence,” he smiles. “It’s not like I decided to be a musician, it’s down to decisions that were made at the end of the 19th century that have very clearly impacted where I am today. The musical side of it is very beautiful, it is super uncomplicated and a total joy to have a tradition of music in our family...but also in the American context - which is the only context I know - it's also these very thorny inheritances from the 19th century and beyond that influence why my life is like it is.

“For me it’s like, ‘I made my money because my grandpa was a small business owner’ or ‘my grandpa was a boat builder and got a pretty good contract in WW2 and was able to send his kids to college’. Both of which are so unpoetic and unromantic but it is an important thing to talk about, that's a personal political thing to talk about; there's horrifying and beautiful aspects there.”

The lament of “I’m gonna die in a hospital surrounded by strangers who keep saying they’re my kids” on “Not Gonna Die” could well be croaked by somebody on the tail end of a life lived on the American Dream. At times, Butler plays the characters off against each other, like on “Surrender,” which chronicles two flawed characters going back and forth played by Butler’s lead vocals and his female backing singers that undermine his memory; “I remember we were walking” is cut up with the shrug of “I dunno” and “maybe so”. “I found having the backing voices there gave me something to play with,” he explains. “Either something threatening to the main character or something affirming to the main character, just providing another point of view.”

Elsewhere, “I Don’t Know What I Don’t Know” explores the feeling of being unsuitably equipped to unravel the complexities that surrounds us day-to-day. “The basic emotion of that song is very much ‘I don’t know what I can do’ which is an emotion we all have,” he ponders. “There’s also the notion that follows that, like ‘maybe don’t even tell me what to do because it’s going to be too overwhelming to even do anything’.”

Some of these portraits materialised in the aftershows Butler began hosting while on Arcade Fire’s Everything Now tour which found him instigating conversations and talks by local councilman, politicians and activists on local issues. “On some of the good nights of the aftershow town halls, you’d feel that switch away from despair and into action,” he says smiling. “The step between despair and action is possible, that sentiment isn’t spelled out lyrically on the record but it’s definitely there spiritually.”

“I learned anew what a treasure it is to have people in a room. Getting humans in a room can be absurd. And we were having from 5,000 to 15,000 people in a room every night, most of them local. I’m very comfortable with art for art’s sake; I think art is super important and it’s great people can like music that's not political. It was sort of like ‘well we’re here and I know a lot of you are thinking about the world and you’re thinking about what a shit show everything is. You want to know what we can do and I also want to know what we can do!’ So I put on these after shows.”"The dream lineup would be to have a local activist and a local politician talking about a local issue because that’s the easiest way to make concrete change."

Butler would find a suitable location near the Arcade Fire gig through venue owners who were often connected to the local music and comedy scenes to host these events. “The dream lineup would be to have a local activist and a local politician talking about a local issue because that’s the easiest way to make concrete change. Arguably, the most important way is through the city council and state government. The New York state government is in Albany, New York. The shit that happens in Albany is all super important so I wanted to highlight that and equip people with some concrete levers to pull.

“In Tampa we had people who were organizing against felon disenfranchisement, like if you’ve been convicted of a felon you couldn’t vote in Florida, and something absurd like 22% of black men in Florida couldn’t vote and there were people organising to change that - this was in 2018 - and you could just see people being like ‘holy shit, I didn't even know this was happening!’

“These were not topics I’m an expert in - it’s like these are things that are happening. The thought was trying to engage, I’m sad to not be doing something similar this Fall, I mean what a time it would have been to go around America.”

Understandably the looming 2020 election is on Butler’s radar. “It doesn't feel good,” he sighs. “I’ve never had any ability to predict, like 2 weeks from now the world could be completely different from what it is today. There was always a one-in-a-billion chance of the apocalypse and now it's like a one-in-a-million chance which is a thousand times more likely but also unlikely. It’s going to be a real slog in the next couple of years on a policy side, like getting to a place where people don’t die for stupid reasons, I’m not even talking about the coronavirus necessarily just like policy in general. Who knows, it could be great but it seems like it's going to be a slog.”

There’s a moment on the closing track “Fine”, a stream-of-consciousness, Randy Newman-style saloon waltz, where Butler hits the nail on the head. “George [Washington], he turned to camera 3, he looked right at me and said...I know that freedom falters when it’s built with human hands”. It’s one of the many lyrical gems that surface throughout the record but one that chimes with an undeniable truth. It’s the same eloquence that breaks through as he touches on the broad ranging subjects in our conversation, always with a bright cadence despite the gloom that hangs over some of the topics.

The live show is without a doubt Arcade Fire’s bread and butter. While Butler questions how realistic the notion of getting people in packed rooms in the near future is, he reveals the group are making movements on LP6. “Arcade Fire is constantly thinking about things and demoing, it's hard to work across the internet but at some point we’ll get together. It probably won’t be much longer than our usual album cycle,” he says.

You only have to pick out one random Arcade Fire performance on YouTube to see Butler’s innate passion bursting out, whether it’s early performances that found him and Richard Reed Parry adorning motorbike helmets annihilating each other with drumsticks to the 1-2-3 beat of “Neighbourhood #2 (Laika)” or the roaring “woah-ohs” that ascend in the anthem of “Wake Up” every night on tour. It’s an energy that burns bright throughout our conversation and across Generations.

https://www.thelineofbestfit.com/features/interviews/arcade-fires-will-butler-new-solo-record-generations

[zombiemarydaly]

Hiya, I currently live in one of the most impoverished cities in my country, and I really want to start distributing reusable sanitary towels but I have no idea how to start. I’m a student so I have a lot of free time but very few connections and not a lot of experience. Any ideas? Thanks x

Hello, I am so happy you are even looking into starting a project like that.

It took me a long time from first ideas to first attempt to finally getting something that worked. 

Don’t be down if it it takes a while. Take what you can do as a success even if it isn’t your full vision.

First step: Get out all your initial ideas in writing. Goals, lists of resources you know you have, plus ones you need. I can give you as much advice as possible, but still nothing will beat engaging yourself on the topic, because you know yourself and your city best and you are the one who you have to work with at the end of the day!

Now, because this is such a long post, I will add a break. Beyond it is a little more of my project and some more specific advice. 

I can tell you have actually done some good pre-planning, because you noted one thing you think you are missing: contacts. You are so right, those are important.

So that first thing I did was actually reckless. I dumped the funds I usually save into buying lots of disposables and some cloth sanitary pads.

I also bought 2 menstrual cups but I later found out people really do not want to take one from you for some reason, even if they want to try them. And it really is not cost effective unless you have a lot of donations to get into handing them out. It was still good to have around to show they were an option.

These conversations you have with people as you are out and about in the world is how I would say you get the best contacts if you don’t know anyone to start. 

It at least got me was attention. I set up shop near a university campus with all my goods organized in a big cardboard box I’d decorated and written “Have a Happy Period” and “Free Care Women’s Health” on it.

I started on a campus because I was a student at the time, though not at that university. I skipped starting where I actually went to school because my college had next to no foot traffic because most people commuted.

At that time I also had less friends in the area and also was not as confident in my ideas. Later I found out that there was a lot of help just waiting for me if I had been more open sooner. 

So I was out with my box mostly on that campus, sometimes outside other places. Sometimes many days a week, sometimes not at all for a month. It was a new thing and new things tend to start that way.

Once I got out there, some women would start to stick around and chat. Now I had a list of numbers of contacts. People who thought this project was cool and wanted to help.

After that I stalled out on it for a while, which wasn’t ideal, but I was nervous with the idea of actually doing this and stretched for time. I also did not have a lot of actual offers to do work just interest in it. And I did not know how to ask people to do things.

It took being involved in a group that had a really nice volunteer sign up page made on a spreadsheet to inspire me to do the same.

It was full of places prompting people to say what they could give and do specifically. If you show new volunteers very specific tasks you need done upfront, they are way more likely to stick around and actually work.

For a cloth sanitary towel creating and distributing group like you mention, you need to find out who can sew and who has materials. So that would go on your sheet.

By this point plenty of my old contacts were no longer available and I had to start back up with my box to get more. Giving people regular updates on where you are at and your thoughts for next steps is vital in keeping people engaged.

It is also some of the hardest not-work work you have to do. Emailing, texting, calling, reaching out on all sorts of different social media I had not even used before. Keeping all these conversations going and being the one pushing the momentum forward was not as easy as it seemed.

Even as a very gregarious person I am in many ways the least likely person to do that successfully. It had its ups and downs. Eventually though you get enough going that some other people start taking the work you struggle with. 

It is important to judge their character, and then if it passes for trustworthy, LET THEM HELP. Let them help with the organizing and leading, too.

But keep handing out tasks. Tell someone to research shelters in the area and contact each one about the project. Tell someone else to look up info on making better pads. Tell a third person to lead a group making a pamphlet about endometriosis. Make it clear that if they can’t do something, just say so, so you know to give it to somebody else. Keep lines of communication open, compassionate, and clear.

You have to keep planning, constantly. Getting your thoughts out, then laying into them. What’s going wrong? What do we need? Where am I going to look? Who should I ask for help? When can I do it by? Set aside planning time, schedule it like you would anything else.

Treat it like your business if you can. That means set aside money for it separately, budget before you buy, record purchases and donations, keep inventory, record what you give out. This is very optional but I wish I had done it sooner.

There is someone in our group now who knows how to apply for grants. Our ability to apply for grants is messed up some because we were such a chaotic group who didn’t document much of anything until recently.

Take pictures of your goods all nice and organized. Take pictures of crafting things or distributing. This can go on social media, and can drive donations or crowdfunding. If you take pictures with volunteers or people you help, make sure to gain at least verbal consent for posting their image respectfully.

Letting other leaders lead becomes more important once you start having more than 20 people involved. Which is a lot. So there’s got to eventually be other people you can trust.

For my first 3 years I had between 5 and 8 people at any given time. Do not be discouraged by going it alone or with a few people. Having just a core group for a while is a great way to find the people you trust and build those bonds.

It is important to get familiar with where you operate. That means getting into local everything. Local politics and media is one angle, getting out on the regular to different places and just being observant is another.

Things you might observe are where homeless people are, places people go for aid, places where students are, places where the elderly congregate. Older women make great contacts for endless reasons, so strike up conversation and bring up your project.  

We have struggled some with Covid dealing with disrupted schedules and people under extra stress. Keeping ourselves and the people we meet safe is also rough.

I can imagine it is daunting to think about starting up right now, because it is a lot harder to make those contacts, but between masks and coordinating online I hope it can work out for you too. 

Don’t give up the idea forever if you can’t start right away. Even if you cannot get out there you can probably do something. Save up for a sewing machine, collect materials, read how-tos, practice.

Hit up stores that sell fabric in any form, ask if there is scraps you can have. You may even get more offers of donated supplies.

If you get to the point of having something planned out and have a link to where you are collecting funding, send it my way as well. Good luck!

[iampikachuhearmeroar]

y’know i love memes as much as anyone else on this hellsite and the internet in general. but one meme i can’t stand now, as well as a joke used by older comedians about ~kids today!!!! am i right???~ that i can’t stand now, is the one that’s like “all 10 year olds want today is an iphone or an ipad or a macbook for their birthday or christmas! all i got for my 10th birthday/christmas as a kid was a tennis racquet and a tether ball that hit me in the face! kids are so spoilt today! you better get an i-job to i-pay for your spoilt mac-ass!”

because like.... do you not understand that in today’s increasingly over-connected world, ipads and macbooks or other tablets/laptops are pretty much required school equipment now, if your 10yo kid’s primary/elementary etc school has a ~bring your own device~ policy for kids in years 4-6??? like obviously yes, some schools will provide students with laptop/tablet trolleys and stuff.... or also the government might have a program to roll out laptops/tablets to schools (like australia did under rudd and gillard).... that some schools will literally put “parents must get a reliable tablet computer or laptop computer for their child to use for assignments”. when it comes to high school, i imagine that they’ll need their own laptop/tablet the whole way through their time there, if there is no longer any school provided or limited school provided laptops/desktop computers/tablets.

that’s besides the point that laptops etc are even more so required now than ever before, after everyone was forced to do homeschooling because of covid??? so. practically. a kid asking for a macbook/ipad or other tablets/laptops for their birthday or christmas, isn’t such a bad idea for a present??? even if yeah. apple is overrated and overpriced to the max. but suck it up and pay for your child’s future education??? even it means getting a cheaper laptop or tablet for your kid.

all i can say on the above point is that yes. the idea of ~bring your own device~ policies does set many families back- especially those in/from lower income areas/backgrounds or single parent families... considering that a decent tablet will set you back at least $500 and a decent mini laptop is around the same.... but bigger and better laptops are around $1000 on sale (windows) or idek like $1,200 on an apple education pricing deal. like yeah. it’s a demarcation thing and also setting some people up to fail. and again, this has been made increasingly obvious during covid due to different families acces to buying laptops/tablets or other internet connection means. i also understand that these big ticket item purchases of tablets/laptops hits the hip pockets of everyone harder during the pandemic, especially if you’re struggling with debt like mortgage repayments or whatever while being made redundant or are being paid less while working from home.

okay. not to sound like a spoilt brat of a kid, but i got my first laptop, an i-book G4 for my 10th birthday in 2005. then almost 10 years later, i got a macbook for my 18th birthday (and for my HSC/end of high school exams) in 2013. yes, this is the macbook that i promptly fucked up two years later in 2015, by trying to encrypt the hard drive, since i was taking it to uni and it had all my internet passwords remembered on it along with my banking details. the same goes for my other windows laptop... where the hard drive just decided to fry itself like 4 months into me using it, along with the trackpad. and that was a $1,200 ASUS laptop (bought on sale) that i was using for uni. and then finally my little HP stream laptop’s keyboard shorted out halfway through a creative writing class (that was $500 and it only has a 28gb hard drive so it’s very light and good for transport).

but my point is, me having my own laptop (as opposed to using the family computer only) helped me immensely in my studies..... and they were literally fucking essential to me both in business college and uni. but they were also helpful in late high school, considering that 90% of my assignment work was expected to be typed out in microsoft word or powerpoint or excel (for maths and science). or for more creative projects, i was expected to use adobe photoshop and video editing software like imovie or adobe premiere pro (art/computer tech/drama/that weird year 7 subject i did called INTEL) and garageband/sibelius (for music). how on earth was i supposed to keep doing work on adobe photoshop or word etc at home if i didn’t have my own laptop to continue the work???

because as a final point, for me, literally by year 10 in 2011, NOT ONE of my assignments was expected to be handwritten (bar my actual exams or in class tests; also state tests/exams etc; or if it was a poster or visual art). if you dared to turn in something handwritten, the teacher and student interaction would be like the following example:

teacher to a kid whose handed in a handwritten assignment: did you not read the assessment outline? it said WORD PROCESSED WITH WORD! what is this handwritten thing? okay fine. i’ll take it this time. but read the outline next time, timothy!

timothy: *stammers out* s-sorry miss/s-sorry sir *stalks away from the teacher’s desk in embarrassment and shame*

the teacher, probs thinking to themself: weird that a kid thinks they can hand in something handwritten. silly, really.

the above scenario was the same for me in years 11 & 12. also, by year 9/2010, we were using the education management system moodle (and maybe early stage presi for online presentations) for both of our HSIE subjects (history and geography) and i think a couple of other subjects, during most lessons and especially for class work that involved group work/class discussions, via online discussion boards function. my year group was actually was actually one of the test year groups for the early models of moodle. so by the time i was in uni, i was a native to using moodle; so i could skip the “moodle help tutorial” subject portions on it in every class.

hell, for today, i wouldn’t be surprised if foreign language subject faculties in high schools are now using school subscription class accounts or something for duolingo or babbel. and today, kids are learning coding from like year 4 onwards, i think, on apps at school as part of their science & tech studies lesson portion of the day. how on fucking earth are kids meant to keep up with their class work progression on coding apps or whatever, at home, if they don’t have their own laptop/tablet??? ridiculous. how would kids fare today without their own laptop/tablet, if all of their classwork for homeschooling is on like google drive/cloud or whatever other open source drive/open source cloud software their school uses?? or any other apps that their school might use??? obviously we are seeing this play out in real time during the pandemic, world over, where if a child is in a single parent family or if their two parents don’t have adequate enough resources/have been fired or let go from their jobs/juggling working from home and homeschooling; then it’s hurting these kids likelihood of doing well with distance learning.

but yeah. my point is that if your kid is asking you for a laptop or a tablet (regardless of brand) for their birthday or christmas, maybe buy them one?? because you never know. it may be the very thing at the top of their student resource list for the following school year. and also. do you know what stops kids fighting over their access to the family computer/tablet to do their assessments etc??? buying them their own personal laptops or tablets. even if they do cost an arm and a fucking leg. get your heads out of your asses and help your own goddamned kids (or relatives if it’s a nephew/niece etc asking for one) like you’re supposed to.

okay. for phones. i’ll admit i wouldn’t like a 10 year old having their own phone, because of social media being so easy to access on them. but if you don’t allow them to use the app store and don’t allow them to download instagram/facebook et al..... and give them the phone solely for safety reasons, i think that’s fine?

i’ve had a phone since i was 10 years old. also not to sound awfully clichè, but i turned out okay??? i had to have a phone back in year 4/2005 due to safety and also family issues. do you know what my teachers did with it? locked it away in their desk til the end of the day. obvs they had to remind me to take it home sometimes (bc i did leave it behind at school in the desk a few times lmao) but yeah. i was alright. if a kid wants a phone..... maybe make a compromise and get the classic nokia 3310 or something?? like i obvs agree that kids as young as 10 defs don’t need a smartphone like an iphone or a samsung galaxy. but a rock solid and basic nokia 3310 or whatever with no wifi access??? that’s good enough imo.

[pearl-sunrise]

Timeline of My Faith Journey so far

Childhood (ages 6-10)

I grew up not attending church, but was aware of some biblical stories through my grandparents. When I came to visit either set, I would attend their church. At this point I had experienced both Carholic Mass and Baptist churches. I was aware that the other children I knew went to church every week, and felt left out.

Early Teens (12-14)

Something in me decided that the reason I didn't attend church or know God was because I was bad. I didn't want anything to do with my faithful schoolmates, and was generally really rude to them. They did things one way, so I did everything I could to be opposite of them. In secret, I still would pray occasionally, but never would have admitted to it.

Late Teens (16-18)

I fell into all out atheism. I reasoned with myself that if God were real; He wouldn't have made people so miserable or allowed humanity to suffer. I was mean to other people, aloof, and genuinely rude to anyone I believed was stupid enough to be fooled into faith. I remember at this time multiple people in my social groups trying to introduce me to their faith and me finding ways to wiggle out every time.

Buckle up... the events in the next timeline go FAST

Freshman Year College: age 18

Something emotionally painful happens to me. I enter therapy and try to heal. I start to read more about religion and spirituality while looking for healing. I look for strategies to protect myself from bad things happening like that and fall into friendship with some "mean girls" who encourage me to run from religion. I miss singing in groups and make excuses to attend church on campus, but never fully commit to faith because I'm worried about saving face with my friends. I believe that after what happened to me, and after who I was God doesn't want me anyways. That its better to be a tourist. This year is really emotionally taxing on me.

Second year of College: age 19

I move in with those "mean girls" and discover that their prickly nature extends to anybody doing anything happy. I struggle for months with my mental health until things get bad enough that I am able to leave. I feel scared and defensive a lot of the time. Therapy isn't regular enough to really help me, and I end up isolating myself pretty often. I read a LOT of books and date a little but try mostly to stand on my own two feet. I eventually find new friends who accept me for who I am and grow into myself. I meet the man I am going to marry and commit to being better for him.

Summer Between: age 19 still

I move away to work over the summer. I live alone, and have committed to graduating a year early so I spend most of my time working on a Senior project. I am in constant contact with friends over the phone, but dont see many other people outside of work. My neighbors offer to take me to church. I go, at first for an excuse to spend time with other people, then to sing in a big group, and then finally it happens. I am singing "In my Father's house theres a place for me, I'm a child of God, yes I am", and I am brought to tears. I finally feel God's care for me. That I belong in His house. I keep going to church every week, giving my tip money from work to the church, and praying almost every day. I fall in love with my beloved, we send letters almost every week. I embroider a cross wall hanging for his mother.

Senior year: age 20

I talk about my church experiences with my friends and they accept me anyways. They share stories about their childhood experiences with faith. I incorporate prayer into my life almost daily. The church I attend at school no longer resonates with me, and I crave something more Gospel centered. I finish my senior project, work a job, and graduate with my darling by my side. We know we are going to get married, but aren't engaged yet.

Early Adulthood: ages 21-22

I find my footing in a good job. My dear does too. We work and struggle together, and I feel called to look for something more. I decide to read the Bible cover to cover during my downtime at work. As I keep reading, things unfold in my life. I start doing a devotional and praying the honest prayers I've been hoping for. We get engaged and COVID hits. In quarantine, we attend a weekly church through zoom and he starts to lead us in prayer to start the week. I work through more devotionals and prayers and meditations. I honestly beleive that God is working in my life and that finding Him saved me. I ask for His forgiveness and feel His love. I experience the beauty of having a soul and being connected to all of humanity through this universal shared experience.

I can say now with pride that I am a Christian. I dont deny it when I am asked and I wear my cross every day, right in line with the necklace my dear gave me. The love of Christ has saved me from a life of heartache and pain. God brought my fiance and I together and our faith is something strong and beautiful.

I still struggle with my mental health. I still feel the scars from those old wounds, but now I feel better equipped to navigate them. I know that my relationship with faith will grow in time, but this is where I am at now. If you read this far and anything I said resonated with you, please message me. I would love to talk with other people about their own journeys with faith.

[lankonleafs]

At Long Last: Covid Camp Finally Opens

It’s felt like a full calendar year since we last saw the boys in blue hit the ice in the city of Toronto and boy am I excited for January 13th to roll around. It was the team’s first official on ice day and we had our first look at the new Leafs additions and to say that the fanbase seems excited would be an understatement. 

Sheldon Keefe mentioned his starting forward line up yesterday and it set Leafs Twitter abuzz: 

Thornton - Matthews - Marner Vesey - Tavares - Nylander Mikheyev - Kerfoot - Hyman Simmonds - Spezza - Barabanov 

That is not a typo. Jumbo Joe Thornton is not only a Toronto Maple Leaf - he is slated to be on the number one line with two of the best young players in the NHL. There’s a couple schools of thought with this line. The first being that Thornton can be used as a guy to get the puck off the wall for the young studs. The guy can still dish the puck, if he can get the puck to not only Matthews but to Marner as well this line can put up some big numbers. The one thing that concerns me with him on the line is keeping up with Matthews and Marner’s speed, if he can catch up with them in the offensive zone i don’t think his speed becomes a massive issue holding those two up as they can dictate the play on their own. The second school of thought that has been passed around has been that his veteran presence can help Matthews and Marner stay on track and not lose too much focus if/when the going gets tough. Joe can keep the kids a little loose and take a little bit of the heat off of them. Do I think that this line will stay together for the entire regular season? No, i think he will end up on the taxi squad for the odd game and work his way up and down the line up depending on how the rest of the offence is looking.  

The second line is also intriguing to me. Tavares and Nylander does not surprise me being together at all. The two have seemed to have good chemistry in the past and being able to start together may help them grow their chemistry further. The surprising part of the line is Jimmy Vesey. On a one year “prove it” type of deal, he has a lot to prove. If he can be the player that almost all 30 teams in the NHL were fighting for coming out of college this line could be deadly. 

The line of Mikheyev - Kerfoot - Hyman will be a huge pain in the ass to play against. Mikheyev and Hyman play a similar role where they are both tough on pucks along the wall and annoying the living H-E-double hockey sticks out of opposing teams d-men. Kerfoot is the speedy centre that we’ve all grown used to and may benefit from both guys getting the puck to him. 

And finally, the fourth line. Wayne “I’ll punch your head off” Simmonds was always thought to start on the fourth line with Spezza but seeing his name on the Toronto Maple Leafs roster still makes me smile. Spezza proved last year that he may not be the young gun he once was but can still play at a decently high level and seemed to show up to every game in the playoff bubble. There isn’t a ton of info on Barabanov quite yet but everything i seem to read seems that he will be a stud in the big show if he can be the same player he is overseas.  

Outside looking in to start: Robertson, Boyd, Engvall, Anderson 

These four players were listed as outside looking in but i don’t think that their necessarily out. Robertson was held back from playing in the World Junior Championship in order to participate in Leafs camp which is a huge sign on what the Leafs are thinking when it comes to his future in the NHL. Boyd was always thought to be a guy that may be in this role and be a “fill in” type of player. If a player needs a night off or someone isn’t playing well we will see him in the line up. Pierre Engvall is someone that a lot of fans expected to be in the line up. He has shown some swings in his game and it seems that Sheldon Keefe is a fan of his game. I think he may find his way into a second or third line role. Anderson is thought of to be a Mikheyev/Hyman type player so again, it’s no surprise that he is on the outside looking in as there is only so much room in the line up for that role. I believe he will find his way into a handful of games to give some guys a rest on some longer stretches or when the Leafs need a little more grit in puck battles. 

Today, we had a look at what Keefe projects as the Leafs starting defence pairings: 

Rielly−Brodie Muzzin−Holl Lehtonen−Bogosian Sandin−Dermott 

I LOVE that first pairing. FINALLY, the Leafs have a competent d-man to play with Rielly. If Brodie can play at the level he did in Calgary this pairing should have no issues. Muzzin and Holl seemed to have great chemistry and the two big boys will be intimidating to play against. Lehtonen coming back from the KHL was an early indicator that he had a great chance of making the team to start the season off. He’s a young d-man that put up a point per game in the KHL earlier this year. With him being paired with Bogosian (for now) he should have a little protection to play his game. Bogosian was signed as a free agent after clearing waivers last year by the Tampa Bay Lightning and played some big minutes in their cup win. His added veteran presence will help the young guns in the Leafs room. Sandin-Dermott caught some off guard when this was released earlier today as most fans expected that Sandin would finally make the jump in the top six to start the year. It seemed to be that he could never get his game consistent enough to earn the trust of Keefe and the Leafs coaching staff may be looking to see what he has this year. Travis Dermott signed a very friendly team deal in the off season and most fans are excited to see what he brings to the table for the 2021 season. If he can stay healthy look for him to also jump into the top six.  

As for goalies was there ever a doubt we would see these two listed? 

Andersen Campbell  

Andersen has been a key part for the Leafs in making the playoffs in his time with the club. With  a shortened season Freddie will have to start the season hot and stay hot but with no preseason it could be tough for starting goalies around the league. Campbell was picked up last year and he proved that he can be a true back up and/or take some heat off the rest of the team if Andersen has a bad night or needs a night or two off. By all accounts, he seems to be a huge locker room guy and keeps the players loose. 

So far on paper this is a Leafs team that shows promise. In a shortened season and an all Canadian division the season will be a grind but they have as good as a shot as anyone in their division to make a run. All you need is a seat at the table and anything can happen. We’ll see what the season brings.  

[tomfleton]

stepping stone goals

some thoughts:

I really struggle with consistency. I understand the way to become consistent, of course, i’ve set so many intentions, so many goals, and planned out how i’ll achieve them. But truly I will not do something unless I fear punishment is what i’ve realized about myself. 

For example, the only hint of consistency in my life is my multi step morning and nighttime skincare routine because I FEAR acne and worsening my many blemishes. I’ve stuck with that for over 10 years at this point, but honestly, i have my off days with that too, and that may be why I still don’t have clear skin lol.

I envy people who can make a plan and follow through. Yet, in many ways, my inability to stick to something has led me on many different paths I never would have ever envisioned or planned for myself anyway. College, various college experiences and friendships, internships, the city I live in, the career I currently have. All of these things feel like they happened serendipitously. And honestly and TRULY i love that. I love being able to look back and track the journey I’ve taken, and I’m glad I allowed myself that openness while in my late teens and early 20s. I’ve always found it hard to set long-term goals bc of the uncertainty i feel about most things in life - some things out of my control as well. Beyond ongoing uncertainties that have existed in my life for decades - we’re in a pretty shitty time to say the least. 

i had finally thought i’d achieved the dream state of consistency in feb 2020. After months of work related angst, low self esteem due to a 15 lb weight gain, and general unease with my lot in life mixed with the loneliness that coms from moving somewhere new, i had finally made a plan and stuck to it. I worked out HARD 4-5 times a week and I loved it. I hate to be that person but spin class is the shit and i miss it everyday. I was actually cooking for myself and enjoying what i made. I was getting used to the 9-5 and finally feeling like i belonged on my project and had value to offer, like i wasn’t a burden. I was putting myself out there, reaching out to new and old friends, going on a million dates (not really but it felt like it). I was embracing my business casual fashion and also adopting a new natural wavy hair look. I was tailoring my style and honestly life kind of felt like how i thought it would feel watching those tv shows about the young ingenue learning her way in the big city and transforming into the eclectic yet bad ass 20-something hbic. But then i literally got covid-19, the country shut down, every external thing that was adding value to my life disappeared, and i was back in my childhood home for 4 months.

now we’re at the end of august 2020. I’m back in dc and trying to rebuild the progress i made and be consistent in achieving those skills again, but it’s hard. I don’t think we talk enough about the intense level of burnout from this prolonged remote work. i feel like i work or think about work for 16 hours a day. There is no reprieve and no outlet outside of grinding at the lowest level for my corporate overlord. literally. I’m planning on moving out of the city and back home permanently now. i feel like the fledgling friendships i had with coworkers are already gone or well on their way out (which hurts the most because it feels like so many people in a similar life situation have made meaningful friendships :/ including some of my closest friends with new post grad friends :/). i barely have time to take care of myself, so i’m trying not to be so hard on myself in such a chaotic phase of life. but it’s hard when you’re overly self reflective and critical.

i went to this pretty basic goal setting event at work on thursday not expecting to get much from it, and while the content was extremely basic (think “annotate the screen if you’ve ever had a goal”) something really resonated me: splitting things up between stepping stone goals, short term goals, and long term goals. As I said previously, I really struggle with long term goal setting because everything is uncertain and then i overthink and make it even more uncertain. I love the idea of stepping stone goals because that leaves so much room for an opportunity for more, for serendipity to hit. in the past, i’ve been successful by setting a vague personal guideline of doing the best i can at everything i do, but that is NOT sustainable in a 9-5 corporate world. They take advantage of us for it! the harder i work the more that will be added to my plate, and while i took that as a compliment and testament to my value as a human (yikes much to unpack there), the other thing that really resonated for me was setting goals is how you learn how to say no. setting goals lets you set boundaries for yourself. you should always be thinking: does this opportunity, action, hobby, etc big me closer to my self-defined goals? I think my biggest realization of August is how intentionality actually does matter A TON. In college, i heard countless times about the importance of saying no, mindfulness, self care, work life balance etc, and while i struggled with being over committed in college i had the support of friends and received a lot of recognition for my actions. For the first time in my life, i’m actually experiencing that feeling of being a small fish in a big pond and it’s a debilitating feeling. 

So, I need to learn how to set boundaries at work. To do that i need to set goals. But because I suck at consistency with those bigger goals, I need to leverage and internalize the idea of these stepping stone goals. More to come on actually listing out these goals for tracking purposes :)

[momentsbeforemass]

Using these days well

(by request, my homily from Sunday)

I’ve been teaching online for years.

So when a friend of mine suddenly had to switch her classes to online – like every teacher, (grade school, high school, or college) has had to do in the last few weeks – she peppered me with all kinds of questions.

I was glad to help. Because teaching online is different in many ways from a traditional classroom. And not just because of all the tech stuff.

For me, one of the biggest issues I’ve had to learn to deal with is not being able to see people’s faces. To not be able to see that reaction. The one that tells me, “uh oh, I just lost them. I better stop and find out what’s not working.”

After all the nuts and bolts stuff, she asked me, “how do you stay productive?”

We talked for a bit about the have-to’s. The basic project management stuff that’s absolutely vital when working on your own.

When we got off the phone, her question stayed with me. And I had to admit that for the last couple of weeks, I really hadn’t been all that productive. It’s been more like pushing a rope.

How come? I’ve been doing this for almost 20 years. I should have this down. Yet, somehow, I don’t. Not right now anyway.

And then it hit me. I’m grieving.

Not because anyone from our parish, or anyone else I know has died from Covid-19. Or has even contracted it. Thanks be to God.

I’m grieving, because of what I’ve lost to Covid-19. Like we all are.  We’re all grieving losses caused by the virus.

For some of us, it’s the loss of hours at work. Maybe even the loss of a job.

For all of us, it’s loss of our normal. Big stuff and little stuff alike.

Weddings, first communions, confirmations, RCIA. All of it on hold.

Graduations, vacation plans, even the opening day of baseball. All of it up in the air.

Whether it’s our morning routine. What we do for lunch. Where we work. Everything we always do. Especially the stuff that keeps us connected.

Much of it, maybe most of it, without really thinking about it. And now?

It’s not the same. Some of it has changed. Some of it’s just gone.

All of us have lost our normal. And it’s hitting us. All of us.

We’re not used to that. We’re used to either knowing someone who is grieving, and being able to help them. Or being the one who is grieving, and being helped by others.

Not this time. This has hit all of us. We’re all the ones who are grieving. And we are not used to grieving this way.

There’s one more thing that makes it different.  

When someone dies, we know what we’ve lost. When my grandmother died, I knew there would be no more cards from her with family history notes in them. No more lunches with her when she came to town to go to her specialist. I could make a list, and I knew what was on it.

What’s different about this one is the uncertainty. This is anticipatory grief.

We know that this is temporary. But what we don’t know is what it will be like. How long it will take. Or how things will be on the other side.

We don’t know what will make it through, and what won’t. We don’t know who will make it through, and who won’t.

That uncertainty is part of our grief as well.

Maybe you haven’t really thought about any of this. I hadn’t until recently. But whether we’ve consciously thought about it or not, you and I are processing this on one level or another. And we’re all at different places in grieving the loss of our normal.

I’m thinking of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s classic model, her five stages of grief.

There’s denial – this isn’t going to affect me. There’s anger – you can’t keep me cooped up like this, telling me what I can’t do. There’s bargaining – if I work from home, wash my hands, and isolate, everything will be back to normal in two weeks, right? There’s depression – there’s no end to this, it’s just going to keep getting worse and worse. And then there’s acceptance – this is happening, how do I deal with it?

Now, that’s not a road map. None of us go through those stages in order. Or even just once per stage. For most of us, we go through those stages like an old-school pinball machine. We’re just not us right now, at least not with any consistency.

One moment we’re sad, the next moment we’re angry. One moment we’re okay, the next we’re a mess.

Just like in the Gospel with Martha and Maru. With the death of their brother Lazarus, the ever-present, always cheerful Mary? She’s just sitting there. By herself. And the always practical Martha? She’s not doing anything useful.

It’s okay to be that way right now. It’s okay to not know how to feel about all of this. It’s okay to grieve.

In fact, the only thing that’s not okay? To not grieve.

Give yourself some slack to work through this. Take the time to grieve, to grieve all the losses.

Notice what Jesus did when he found Mary and Martha grieving? He gave them space to grieve. He didn’t tell them to snap out of it.

But He didn’t leave them there, either.

Just like the season that we’re going through, grief is something that you go through. Go through it. Don’t try to avoid it. That only makes it worse.

But don’t move in and buy furniture either. As Churchill said, “when you’re going through Hell, keep going.”

But do more than just go through it. These days are upon us, not simply as something that must be endured. No, these days are something that we must use, and use well. Do not waste these difficult days.

Pope Francis calls these days “a time of choosing.” And he is right.

With everything on hold, now is the time for us to choose. Not simply how we will get through this. But what we want to our lives to be – now and when it’s over.

As our Holy Father put it, this is “a time to choose what matters and what passes away, a time to separate what is necessary from what is not. It is a time to get our lives back on track with regard to you, Lord.”

You and I can deal with the uncertainty by choosing what matters. What really matters. By becoming who God made us to be. Not just while we’re going through this. But on the other side of this as well.

It begins now. And it begins with a choice.

Just because you and I have carried something this far, doesn’t mean that we have to keep carrying it.

If we are to use these difficult days well, then there are some things that we need to drop.

You know what they are. Don’t wait to see what happens with them, to see if they make it through. Drop them now.

Everything that’s come between you and God? That’s what I’m talking about. Drop it now.

What if you just can’t? What if you’ve been carrying it for so long that you don’t know how to let go?

No matter what has come between you and God. No matter what you’re carrying. Or how long you’ve been carrying it.

All you have to do is turn to God. And ask.

Ask for the help you need. The help to drop it now.

When you do, God will say to the angels, “Untie him and let him go. Untie her and let her go.”

Don’t waste these difficult days. Don’t waste another day, trying to do it on your own.

Use these days well. Go to God now. He’s waiting for you with open arms.

To set you free. And to be with you – every step of the way.

Sunday’s Readings

[polishtamales]

It Started with the Hawkeye Initiative & Ended with Safespace & Snowflake: GAME OVER

This is how the comic book industry dies. Or is it a dawn of self-publishing?

If it wasn’t for years of horrific ad sales, it was definitely insulting the vast majority of it’s consumer base. Or more specifically for Marvel’s case, CATERING AN ENTIRE MARKET THAT DOESN’T BUY COMICS IN THE FIRST PLACE. Regardless of intentions, YOU CANNOT MAINTAIN A BUSINESS OF CONSTANTLY FLIPPING OFF YOUR FANS AND EXPECT THEM TO PAY YOU FOR YOUR VIRTUE SIGNALING.

There’s a difference between being progressive with fiction and being a radical activist for the sake of retweets and likes, followed by a selfie for more self-esteem boosts. In a society where there’s no turning back from capitalism, money is your God, whether it’s right or wrong. You could suddenly be hit with a car and you better damn respect that the more money you have, the more likely everything will be fine afterwards. It pays the bills, it puts food on the table, and you better understand, it’s not going to change, outside of an act of God or Aliens simply invading our planet and enslaving humanity. Your pick.

It’s no secret that working in comics sucks, regardless of country. The pay is bad, the deadlines are killer and it has always been the least practical way of storytelling for a mass market, especially in America. Case in point, you don’t really need a colorist, a letterer or anything else, outside of a distributor (RIP DIAMOND). Anyone with a graphic design degree knows, you can easily be a one-man publisher without the need of an entire crew of mouths to feed. Not saying it wouldn’t be helpful, but given the future economy, it will be the norm.

See, the old buzz word of digital publishing really is a big deal, especially when it comes to the incoming job market change. No longer can you simply “specialize” in just one area of expertise, but you will be expected to fill in multiple roles to be successful. Even if time is against you in certain projects, it is entirely possible to save more money by just doing everything yourself. Here are the major hurdles and solutions to creating a new comic in the new landscape of comics next year:

1. STORY - This is where EVERYONE gets it wrong. Do not follow the trend of  IDW publishing by planning out an ENTIRE world building graphic novel that will span DECADES.

Stick to what exactly you’re good at telling. Tell a short story. Polish every line of dialog. Make it shorter. Polish every line of dialog, make it shorter.

Third and most important advice is leave politics out of your story, unless it is about politics. Most older women buy trashy romance novels to escape their shitty sex life. Most middle-aged men by comics for the tits and ass and possibly the articles? Again, all ways of escape reality, yet you have Marvel comics for years that kept interjecting real world politics and views in their titles. Trust me when I say this, less than 10% of the United States is on Twitter. That means most people could give two fucks and a shit about Trump, Biden or Bearnie, BELIEVE OR NOT. So when most of America retreats after a long day of work and not TWITTER, they are spending money on things to make their lives tolerable. Being told Orange Man Bad is not one of those things, nor is bringing up Obama, again and again. Don’t make market assessments based on social media, leave politics out of your comic. Additionally, learn about basic story telling and especially learn from other mediums outside of comics. Films and actual books will teach you a lot about pacing. You can learn basic writing skills by taking a community college course or higher. The goal and mindset should be to be humbled and not a place to be bitter when you get criticism.

2. ART - KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE. If you’re catering towards a WOKE AS FUCK CROWD OF TRUMP HATING LIBERALS, make sure you book will actually sell and not retweeted... Simply collecting a check and going unemployed for months on end is not an actual goal in life, much less beg your followers for coffee money. Example, see the animation industry.

Art is your mode of presentation, the book cover (not literally), the point of sale. If you want to cater towards a crowd of people of color, who happen to be gay, trans, and dealing with PTSD, etc, then make fucking sure your art matches with the story. You cannot have “tumblr” artists doing action intensive comics, where they spend more time creating people of color of diverse identity politics, than learning to draw a simple choreographed action sequence. You can’t have an action comic with ONLY 2 small panels of action to sell your comic. Again, no shame or secret to point out that the VAST majority of comic sales are made off of issue #1s and tits and ass. Disposable income of middle-aged men cannot be underestimated, regardless of what cherry pick data you want to argue with. The older you get, the less progressive and liberal most Americans become as well. That’s called “reality” of real politics. So my advice, if you’re into action comics, learn to draw action, learn about the demography that buys those titles and don’t interject your politics in it, especially if you want to put food on the table. I’m not telling anyone to suddenly put Trump as the “good guy” president, but I am telling you that you shouldn’t include real world politics in your comic. You’re not offending either side of the political spectrum, IE, you’re not insulting your customers.

If you want to make a rom-com comic like Archie, sure those years of learning tutorials off of tumblr might pay off, but again, know your audience. Archie continues to sell steadily with a profit from the boomer generation, white women (vast majority), Christians, etc. Don’t expect your rom-com comic of a gender-less trans-protagonist that may or may not want to be dependent relationship with another person of color. You see where I’m getting with that? You’re welcomed to write and draw a book like that, but don’t expect anyone to buy it. Getting your book retweeted by your favorite SJW, doesn’t mean sales, it just spells virtue signaling for them.

My advice in the art category is DIVERSIFY your portfolio. Don’t just learn off tumblr. That boat has sailed and failed, as seen with every sale of tumblr picked artists at Marvel. Go out there (when the virus gets under controlled) and learn to draw from life. Don’t worry about gender, people of color, none of that stuff. Draw stuff that you actually care about and not for political points with your peers. If you wanna draw short men struggling to open a can of coke, then draw. If you wanna draw hot women, draw hot women. You wanna draw a cute tennis player with short shorts and looks like Swedish male model, then pack some sun screen. You’re not looking to be judged, you’re not looking for internet points of how woke you are. You are simply expanding on things that interest you and how it will indirectly help you grow.

Think Mr. Miyagi, but do it 80,000 times. You’ll master drawing short men struggling to open cans of soda!

When creating the art, DO NOT THINK ABOUT COLORING. It is way more profitable to create BW comics than color. Not only do you save money printing, but the amount of time you free up helps you to micromanage yourself better.

3. DIGITAL PUBLISHING - You don’t need anyone else if you have a computer and some basic digital programs. Once you understand how to write a short story, present marketable characters, then you’re set. The only enemy is time.

Learn Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop for art. Learn Adobe Indesign for lettering, page layouts, etc. A few talks with a local printer and you can independently self-publish any book.

So to sum things up, learn to self-publish, respect your readers and the politics/baggage that industry houses and understand that things revolve around money. If you want to be a stereotypical far-left wing tumblr artist that wants to create a superhero of a trans-black girl/binary that may or may not want to be involved in a relationship with another binary/trans person, which could be their sister/brother/internet gas, then by all means make that comic. It won’t be profitable nor will it sell compared to other titles, but I guess you can’t claim victim-hood without a self-afflicting handicap and an arrow to the kneecap.

After all, Marvel’s done it for years without profitability and look where the industry is headed towards... This was all pre-Covid-19 mind you. The virus, if anything, is just the nail on the coffin after Diamond distributors quit. The comic industry might be dead, but books as a medium will never die.