#as top do facebook 2016

[queersatanic]

[This post is a series of images from an infographic by the Slow Factory Foundation originally posted May 2021. The first image is a photo with text over it. The photo shows a massive fireball in the middle of a group of buildings, with a massive black cloud rising from the flames that is bigger than the buildings themselves. The building just behind the fireball is low, rectangular, and lit up bright orange. Behind that building, there is a city lit up at night. Hundreds of buildings stretching into the distance, a thousand glimmering lights.]

What is happening in Palestine is not complicated; it's settler colonialism & ethnic cleansing.

Debunking Misinformation around Palestine.

Myth ❌ Palestine and Israel are in "conflict."

Fact ✅ What is happening in Palestine is settler colonialism, military occupation, land theft and ethnic cleansing. A conflict means there is equal footing, which is not the case. There is an active oppressor (Israel) and an oppressed (Palestine). A colonizer (Israel) and a colonized (Palestine). This is not a conflict.

[Three images of headlines with the word 'conflict' crossed out in red ink.]

Note: According to the Congressional Research Service,

Israeli military occupation has been supported by US aid with $3.8bn a year paid for by U.S. tax dollars since 2016 for the next 10 years.

It's also supported by other colonial countries including Canada, Australia, France and Belgium.

Myth ❌ Before Israel came to Palestine, it was "just a desert" and Israel made the desert green.

Fact ✅ Before the occupation of Israel, Palestine had green, rich and lush land. In fact, Palestine respected the biodiversity of their Indigenous land: Palestinians were producing 92% of Palestine's grain, 99% of its olives and 95% of its melons to name a few.

Since Israel's occupation, biodiversity has decreased. Israel removed Indigenous plants from the land to plant European Invasive species. This phenomenon is called green colonialism, which has been discussed in depth by many, including Naomi Klein in "Let Them Drown."

Myth ❌ Sheikh Jarrah is the only neighborhood in Palestine that is in danger.

Fact ✅ Israel has been gradually stealing Palestinian land, destroying and ethnically cleansing entire Palestinian villages, violently displacing families and building illegal settlements on top them since the first Nakba ('catastrophe' in Arabic) in 1948, where almost 600 Palestinian villages were destroyed, Palestinian history erased and half the Palestinian population were expelled from their homes.

Myth (cont'd.) ❌ Sheikh Jarrah is the only neighborhood in Palestine that is in danger.

Fact ✅ Over the past few decades, the state of Israel has continued the settler colonial project, and Sheikh Jarrah is the latest and not the last neighborhood being violently threatened with dispossession, which Israel has no legal right to do.

[Images of a map showing the drastic decrease in Palestinian landmass from 1946 to 2019. In 1946, Palestine was 99% Palestinian land. In 1947, it decreased to 40%. In 1967, to 30%. And in 2019, less than 20% of Palestine is Palestinian land. The remaining areas are being encroached on by occupied Palestinian land, meaning occupied by Israelis. The rest is Israeli land.]

The mainstream media has been supporting these myths by spreading misinformation that conceal Israel's ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestine by saying it's a two-sided conflict, framing Palestinian resistance as terrorism and normalizing the state of Israel.

To learn more about Palestine and the ongoing fight for liberation, follow Palestinian-led organizations, media and frontline activists. [@Instagram / Facebook]

@theimeu / Institute for Middle East Understanding ( IMEU )

@eye.on.palestine

@palestinianyouthmovement / Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM)- حركة الشباب الفلسطيني

@jewishvoiceforpeace / Jewish Voice for Peace

@visualizing_palestine / Visualizing Palestine

@wolpalestine [Censored by Meta]

@mohammedelkurd / Mohammed El-Kurd

@muna.elkurd15 / Muna Nabeel Elkurd

@nouraerakat / Noura Erakat

Sources & Suggested Reading

Freedom is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis

Let Them Drown by Naomi Klein

Black Power and Palestine by Michael Fischbach

Orientalism by Edward Said

The Question of Palestine by Edward Said

Palestine by Joe Sacco

"Zionist Logic — Malcolm X on Zionism" in The Egyptian Gazette, Sept. 17, 1964

On Palestine by Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappé

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappé

[End of images]

[phoenixwrites]

I grew up conservative and Republican. I'm talking, serious conservative values, as in, my father considered Fox News "too liberal" a news source. My dad could forgive me leaving Christianity, but me registering Democrat? That was a bridge too far.

I saw a post essentially claiming that Trump is the only conservative choice for the election, the only one who truly cares for the American people. And it riled up my Old Guard Republican feelings (however latent) because no. However Republican and conservative you are (a minority on this website, I know), Trump is not and never has been Republican and conservative. You are deluding yourself.

Why do I say that?

Let's go down the list. (Please be aware, I am not defending conservatism--that ain't my political ideology anymore for the whole "they're trying to take away my loved ones' rights" issue. But for the sake of rhetorical strategy, bear with me.)

The claim that Trump isn't a part of the liberal elite is absurd. Trump has never felt dirt underneath his fingernails. Trump has never struggled to pay bills. Trump has paid for multiple abortions of his many affairs and mistresses. He is a draft dodger who mocked war heroes. He is a failed Hollywood celebrity that is grasping at fame. There is a reason Never Trump was popular among conservatives during the 2016 Republican primary.

My Vietnam veteran father warned me in 2008 that Putin wanted to reclaim the Soviet Union, that he was a dangerous dictator that put out hits on foreign journalists. Now he's posting videos of Putin doing judo on Facebook. It is insane that to me that the Republican party is so obviously doing a 180 after warning us for thirty years about Russia.

Trump only started caring about the pro-life movement when he realized he could manipulate them. His voting record is pro-choice. He has paid for abortions, had multiple affairs, and yes, is a serial rapist. None of this is pro-life.

Trump has insulted veterans, dishonored Arlington, and didn't have the balls to fight in Vietnam himself, ran away from the draft like a scared little boy. Now, sixty years later, he has the gall to attack Vietnam veterans and make claims on who is and isn't a war hero? He expects me to believe he gives two shits about veterans? Nah.

Trump does not care about Christianity or protecting Christian freedom. This is a big one. You are falling for a con. Trump is not and never has been a Christian; he just saw a malleable voting block. He has never asked for forgiveness from Christ the Savior and considers doing so weak. He has no relationship with Jesus. He does not pray. He had to have multiple "lessons" on Christianity with top Evangelical pastors to make him more palatable to Evangelicals.

Evangelical conservative Russell Moore penned multiple op-eds where he expressed bewilderment and betrayal that his community was blindly supporting a serial rapist that was antithetical to traditional Christian values. He isn't the only one. A large chunk of Evangelicals are sick and tired of defending a lying, cheating, coward and deluding themselves that he loved Jesus.

A significant portion of Trump's former cabinet has refused to endorse him. I cannot stress to you how wild that is to me. One thing about Republicans? They always vote for their candidate. No matter how much they dislike the candidate--that was the whole thing in 2016. A huge chunk of conservatives disliked Trump and thought him vile, but voted for him anyway because that's what you do when you're a Republican. The fact that so many are breaking away and calling him a danger to the republic? That's a big screaming deal.

Women are not safe around Trump. That used to be important to conservatives, protecting women from rapists--that was my dad's main reason for teaching me to shoot competitively.

If you support Trump, whatever. That's your insane delusional business.

But don't pretend that man is any kind of conservative or gives two shits about what true conservatives care about.

And if I may quote my Evangelical mama, "That man is going to Hell and I look forward to it."

[writers-potion]

hi!! im working on a story that takes place at a 2012 public high school - the issue with that is that i was not in high school in 2012 lmao. do you have any tips on how to keep it feeling realistic?

Well, neither was I!! But here are some tips:

Define Your General Setting

Sure, high school has a different feel compared to an average town/city setting. However, it is still a part of the bigger community, and will be impacted by external factors.

What part of the world are your writing about? What's the general economy like? What's the most common occupation of the kid's parents? What's the prevailing fashion/art/music style?

Your teens will be impacted by the popular culture and trends of the time, so start by outlining the general setting!

Fashion

I think this is where schools have changed the most. There are going to be some overlaps between early 2010s and late 2000s, so if you think in the direction of Y2K fashion, it should fit.

On a general note, I think 2010s fashion was vibrant, with lots of colors and flashy items...

Side fringes and backcombed/straightened hair were still very popular

most girls had huge messy sock buns on top of their heads

boys had the Justin Bieber cut.

Jack Wills and Hollister were pretty popular, and a lot of girls had a Paul's Boutique jacket and a Jane Norman bag for their PE kit (or one of the Hollister bags with a topless guy on).

Converse were universally cool, and there were lots of imitation brands.

Open flannel shirt over a t-shirt was a pretty popular outfit.

Skinny jeans and band t-shirts

bright chunky rubber band bracelets.

Vans were cool among the alternative kids.

Getting different colours on your braces was cool.

Most of the boys had at least one of those t-shirts with the buttons and the mismatched cuffs.

School-uniform-wise, short ties with big fat knots were cool, and hard kids would pluck a stripe or two out of their tie.

Tucking in shirts was initially not cool, then it became cool to tuck at the front but not the back.

Lots of boys wore black trainers, and lots of girls wore those ballet pumps.

Girls doing their lips with their foundation, with a thick ring of black eyeliner and spidery clumpy mascara - and having a visible orange line where your foundation met your neck was common.

Multiple ear piercings were popular with the alternative crowd

Belly button piercings were big for girls

Just search up some pictures on Google, you should get plenty of "Early 2010s teen fashion starter pack"

Social Media

Smartphones were already popular, and with the introduction of Snapchat(2011) and Instagram(2010), the social media hype was just starting to boom

Facebook and Twitter were popular - basically everyone was on it

TikTok(2016) and Discord(2015) didn't exist yet

Pictochat

Phones were allowed in the classroom, but phones/laptops weren't an important part of school work like it is now.

Digital Devices

Phones-wise, most people had pretty basic dumbphones (although they were just called mobiles back then), and not everyone carried them all the time

Blackberry (BBM), Nokia, LG Cholate, iPhone if you're rich enough

Most kids were on PAYG phones, so you'd run out of credit sometimes (i.e. no more calls or texts) and have to go to a physical shop to top up. Nobody really had data, and there was always a moment of panic if you accidentally opened the web browser on your phone because it was so expensive. Wifi became a thing around 2012.

Nintendo DSes: Mario Kart, Animal Crossing, Nintendogs

iPods or another MP3 Player

Slag

Slang-wise, Urban Dictionary is a good resource.

Fleek, peng and YOLO were popular with some crowds. Leetspeak was a thing online, especially in nerdy communities. Emoji were starting to take off 

rawr" (or "rawr means I love you in dinosaur") and "xD" as a laughing face 

Music

One Direction, Jedward, Katy Perry, Carly Rae Jepson, Justin Bieber, JLS, Little Mix, Beyonce, Paramour, My Chemical Romance, Bring Me The Horizon, Black Veil Brides, Ke$ha, Eminem, The Killers, OMI, Gotye, Bruno Mars, Macklemore, Skrillex, deadmau5, blink-182, Green Day, Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj, Rihanna, Lana Del Rey.

Fandom Stuff

Twilight was huge, then Hunger Games.

Harry Potter was everywhere all the time, people would go to midnight releases for the books and movies.

High School Musical was popular, then that crowd migrated to Glee and Mean Girls.

The Olympics were in London in 2012

Other Stuff

Reese's peanut butter cups, Marshmallow Fluff, Nerds, etc. 

Veganism wasn't well-known, but still there were a few

Lots of casual homophbia, kids jsut genuinely not knowing rather than truly hateful towards it

Here are some movie suggestions, that shows school like in early-mid 2010s quite well:

Easy A

The Duff

LOL

For YA Novels - Be Timeless

Before you start doing any of the things above, remember this if you're writing a YA novel: The key of this genre is to feel somewhat timless, taking readers back to their high school years no matter when and where they've gone through it.

High school is the phase where many people feel awkward, unsure of themselves, feeling special in their own head but knowing that they're not really.

And it's not like the problems just disappear when we hit adult life. A major reason why YA novels are so popular is that they address themes that are repeatedly felt by the general human being, often in a such a direct, straightforward way that provides vicarious satisfaction.

[bharv]

Not to be an old person on the internet but I sometimes find it so hard to express how much the world has changed in 15 years to young people. 2009 feels like a different planet to me (for context that’s when I graduated so it’s to me when I started adult life.)

So off the top of my head things that were SO different:

Globalisation just wasn’t a thing yet. The UK would get films up to a year after America. There was more crossover than when I was a kid but it was still not easy to access American shows.

However pirating was still very good lmao.

There was no Netflix. No streaming at all. 2009 was when podcasts began to crop up and it was a huge deal, but it was limited to iPods and only people with access to professional studios could do them. It took about 5 years for it to become a bit more democratised, but you still needed extremely expensive equipment to do it. Even as recently as 2016 if you weren’t based in a city you were screwed because remote recording was terrible.

And on that note, no smartphones. Or at least very few smartphones. I’d say by 2011 most people had them but it was still something for rich people at this point. You would take a tiny camera on nights out and then upload all the pictures to your computer.

Social media was rife, but not in the way you know it now. Twitter and Facebook were the big deals, but they had only really started to blossom. Before they it was all about MySpace. People became big on Twitter through being funny and cultured and it was actually really good.

If you were over a British size 14 you could not buy clothes. Online retailers were few and far between - ASOS at this point was still called As Seen On Stars and was making dupes of runway clothing. America WAS more ahead here but due to no globalisation getting clothes delivered to you from the states was a fucking nightmare. I remember trying on Levi’s in the UK and them not getting over my knees (and they were around £100 quid compared to $20, because again, no globalisation)

There were SO many ways to have fun for free. Free galleries, free gigs, stuff for under a fiver. You might have been broke but there were more ways around the system then than there are now.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Ben Appel

Published: Nov 15, 2024

Over the past eight years or so, we’ve heard a lot of stories about people being canceled for daring to express ideas that deviate from the prevailing, batshit crazy orthodoxies around race and gender. They’ve been publicly shamed, had their lives threatened, and quite a few of them have lost their jobs. Many people who typically vote blue had become so repulsed by the Democratic Party’s progressive wing that they either withheld their votes last week or decided to cast them for Trump.

Having borne close witness to woke’s destruction,1 which I wrote about in last week’s newsletter, I’m one of those Democrats who didn’t vote. And, as I also said in that newsletter, I can’t help but feel relieved that the Democrats lost. It’s like a spell has been broken. (Well, almost.)

A lot of people feel very differently. They’re calling it the end of democracy. The arrival of fascism. “Last week was America’s last presidential election,” I’ve heard.

I’m friends with a lot of these folks on Facebook, which looks like the polar opposite of my feed on X, where many are saying they feel similarly to me. My Facebook friends are grief-stricken—as grief-stricken as they were in November 2016, if not more so. And I empathize with them. I worry, too, about the next four years. But, unlike them (it seems), I’ve completely lost faith in the party that, as a “good, liberal gay person,” I’m supposed to blindly support. And I’ve completely lost faith in the liberal media that props that party up. I mean completely and utterly lost faith. I read impassioned write-ups in legacy media outlets about the problem with Trump’s latest cabinet picks and I think, OK, yeah, you could very well be right. But do you seriously expect me to take your word for it? Do you actually think I would still believe a single thing you say, after all the lies you’ve shamelessly told? I mean, come on. You even deny the reality of sex!

Countless conservatives have been screwed over by woke, but many good, hardworking, liberal Americans who cast their vote for Harris last week have too. Liberal Americans who can’t be entirely blamed for signing off on the excesses of the illiberal left. Why do I think they can’t be blamed? Well, for one, everyone is so goddamn busy. They’re busy with kids and spouses and jobs. They have health scares and parents with Alzheimer’s and cars making weird noises. If you think about it, it’s kind of a big ask to expect everyone to know that most if not all of the news outlets and institutions they’ve venerated for decades had been captured by a backwards ideology. Yes, maybe some of these ideas sounded nuts to them. Maybe somewhere in the back of their minds, they periodically thought, Well that doesn’t seem right. But then it was 8pm and the dishes were piled up in the sink and their youngest hadn’t even started his homework yet.

Not to mention that, day after day, woke scolds were hammering into their brains that if they didn’t go along with these ideas and promote them to others, they were “very bad people.” This is what “good” is now. “Good” is telling little boys who like Barbies they’re actually girls and then giving them the same drugs that are used to castrate sex offenders. “Good” is telling a young black boy that the entire world is against him and that he could keep trying, sure, but he’ll probably end up dead or in jail anyway. “Good” is telling 15-year-old girls that, yes, it’s totally normal for you to want a mastectomy, let’s go see if we can make that happen. “Good” is convincing vulnerable white people they’re inherently evil.

On top of that, they were shamed for dating or befriending or even liking the social media posts of anyone who doesn’t follow the orthodoxy. Those people are transphobes. They’re white supremacists. Every minor objection was a “right-wing dog whistle.”

It’s the oldest trick in the cultists’ playbook: Cut off your followers from all outsiders and their ideas.

People talk about the cult of Trump, and there is a cult of Trump. Watching nearly the entire GOP collapse around him on bended knee has been a strange thing to witness.2 But a lot of people who voted for Trump didn’t vote for Trump. They voted against the Democratic Party. They voted against woke.

It’s that damn Newton’s law again. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. The woke cult and the cult of Trump. The cult of Trump and the woke cult.

Back and forth, back and forth. Left and right are pushed further and further apart, each side fighting to drag the center along with them.

So what’s the solution?

Break the cultists’ rules. Befriend and date people on the other side. Dare to (gasp!) like their social media posts. And talk to people. Believe it or not, there might be a lot of reasons why a Latino voter chose Trump other than, “Oh wow, turns out Latinos are racist.” A Brooklyn mom who wants universal healthcare isn’t necessarily an anti-American commie. And the white lady who doesn’t want her 19-year-old daughter to have to compete against males in sports might not actually want to “eradicate all trans people.” She might just know what fairness is. And she might just love her daughter.

So maybe start there? It’ll be uncomfortable, sure, but that’s the easy part. The hard part comes when you have to admit where you were wrong.

-

1 I considered not using “woke” to describe what I’m talking about here but it’s just so damn succinct and everyone knows precisely what I mean when I say it.

2 I am absolutely not saying that all Trump voters are cultists, just like I would not say that all Democrats are cultists.

==

The Dems will keep losing until they learn this lesson.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." -- George Santayana

[mylittled0ve]

𝙄 𝙒𝙖𝙨 𝘾𝙤𝙪𝙣𝙩𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙊𝙣 𝙁𝙤𝙧𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙧, 𝙉𝙤𝙬 𝙄’𝙡𝙡 𝙉𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙧 𝙆𝙣𝙤𝙬

warnings: loss of significant other, swearing, mention of God/religion, probably more but i suck at this

a/n: Chris is older than he is IRL in this story.

this is based solely off of an experience i had of my own. writing this has helped me get out some feelings, and i hope you enjoy it. this is my first time writing like this, so take it easy on me. 😅

Chris had always loved to ride.

He had grown up with his parents, his older brother, most of his family, on motorcycles. So, when he turned 17 in 2016 and immediately began looking for his perfect bike, you weren’t surprised at all. Nervous, yeah. But not surprised.

Chris was a “bull in a china shop”. He was wild, he was reckless, and lived every single day like it was his last. It’s no secret that motorcycles are extremely dangerous. You hated to think about it, but every time he climbed on his gorgeous, candy apple red 2007 Harley Davidson Road King, you always prayed that God would keep him safe. He would text you, “Getting on my bike baby, I love you.” and you always replied with, “I love you more, please be safe.” and he would then shoot back a quick, “Always.”

He had always told you that if he lost his life on his bike, that he went out happy and doing what he loved.

It was October 27th, 2021. Unusually cold for that time of year, so you had offered to take Chris to work instead of him riding his motorcycle (his only means of transportation), even though that meant you would be late yourself, but you didn’t mind.

“C’mon, Chris. I’ll text my manager and tell her I’ll be late. She won’t mind. Just let me run you to work, it’s below freezing outside.”

“Y/n, I’ll be fine. You know I’ve ridden in colder temperatures. I’ll throw on some layers, and even my full face helmet. I’ll take Uncle Jake’s bike, it has the windshield and it’ll cut out some of the wind.”

You continued to try to protest, but he had made up his mind.

He walked with you to your car, which he had already cranked up and had it warming up for you, and opened the driver’s door.

“I promise I’ll be okay, baby. I’ll see you tonight, maybe we can go eat Mexican for dinner” Chris told you as he wrapped his arms around you and pulled you in for a kiss.

“I love you, let me know when you leave and when you get to work. Please be safe.”

“Always. I love you more.”

“No way, José,” you protested with a grin. “I love you the most.”

Chris shook his head, squeezed you tight, and pressed one more kiss on the top of your head.

“Get going, now. We woke up late enough as it is.”

We had woken up 30 minutes later than we should’ve, it was just so cold in the house and his morning snuggles were the best part of your day. Chris’ house was a good 30 minute drive to your work, and you weren’t a morning person anyway.

“Okay, okay. I love you!” You yelled to him as you got into your car, and started down his driveway.

He waved you on with his cheeky, 5-star grin, and blew you a kiss.

And that was the last time you saw him alive.

It was around 7:50am and you had just gotten to work and gotten settled. You checked your phone and noticed you had a Facebook message from Chris’ boss. He worked for a small company building fences with just two other guys, one being his boss, the owner.

“Hey, where’s Chris? Have you talked to him? It’s not like him to not show up without letting me know something.”

You immediately pick up your phone to call him, but it rings a few times, then it goes to voicemail. The boy never charged his phone.

“We did wake up a little late, he may be running a little more behind than usual, but let me check his location.”

You pull up Chris’ location in Apple Maps, and notice he’s on the road his boss lives on, but he doesn’t seem to be moving.

“It looks like he’s at your house, maybe?” You reply.

Your phone rings, and it’s his boss calling from Facebook messenger.

“Hello?”

“Hey, y/n. He’s not at my house, but his location says he’s on the road I live on?”

“Yes,” you reply, hands growing sweaty and heart starting to beat faster than normal.

“I’m gonna ride down the road and see if I see him, stay on the phone with me.”

“Okay.”

You feel in your gut that something isn’t right. It’s not like Chris to be late for work, even when we wake up late. And it’s definitely not like him to not let anyone know anything.

“Oh, my God. Oh, my fucking God, y/n. All I see are blue lights, fire trucks, ambulances. Something’s happened, it’s got to be him.”

You immediately tell him you’re on the way, and run out the door with a “it’s an emergency, I’ll call you in a few minutes!” to your boss.

You’re shaking, sweating, nauseous, and begging God that Chris is okay. There’s a million thoughts running through your mind. You call your mom, and she, of course, tells you that you’re in no position to drive, and has you meet her so she can take you to Chris. The drive to get to him is almost 45 minutes, and the entire time, you’re doing your best not to hurl in your mom’s car while still absolutely begging God to spare his life.

By the time you get to the scene of the crash, there’s an ambulance blocking the road, with Chris in the back. There’s also a helicopter landed in the overgrown field, ready to life flight him to a larger hospital than you have in your town. His mom, dad, his brothers, Nick, Chris, & Justin, and his best friend, Nate are also there, doing anything they can to distract you from looking into the back of that ambulance, while also trying to mask their own emotions, but you do it anyway. And he’s there. Lifeless, receiving vigorous CPR from a first responder.

And that was when you knew. No one had to tell you, you knew.

It’s been 3 years, 4 months, and 4 days since your best friend had been taken from you.

An older lady had abruptly stopped to turn in the middle of the rural road, and Chris couldn’t stop fast enough. He had hit her in her driver’s door, flew over her car, and into the ditch. His body couldn’t handle the trauma and he had gone into cardiac arrest almost immediately after the accident.

The doctors, nurses, EMTs, and other first responders had worked on Chris for over 2 hours before he officially pronounced dead; longer than they should have, but it was a small town, and they knew him themselves.

There’s not a day that’s gone by in the last 40 months that you haven’t thought of him, looked at his photos, or replayed the hundreds of videos you have of his contagious laughter.

The night before Chris passed, you were talking about your future wedding. You weren’t even engaged, but he loved to remind you daily that he was going to marry you.

“I don’t even know who my bridesmaids will be. I don’t even know if I like anyone that much,” you huffed from the passenger seat of your car.

“Well, I know Nick and Matt will have to share the ‘best man’ title, or that’ll be a huge fight. Of course there will be Nate, Justin, and maybe one more,” he laughed back at you.

“I guess I better start making some friends.”

He looked at you and laughed, and kissed the back of your left hand that he was holding.

“I’m so lucky to have you. You, Hayden, and Dawson.”

He had taken on the “step-father” role to your 4 year old daughter and your 2 year old son with ease, primarily because he was still a kid at heart himself. He adored dancing with them around the living room, helping Hayden pick out her outfits for preschool each night, and snuggling Dawson to sleep at night. They thought he hung the moon, and in your eyes, Chris did just that. He had saved you, and you would never be able to thank him enough.

“Thank you for loving us, especially me, with all of my baggage.”

“I’d take you and your baggage over anything or anyone, any day,” he smiled back at you.

You snapped out of your flashback, tears pooling in your eyes, wishing you could go back to that night just one more time.

Living without him was like desperately waiting for rain in a drought, it’s a whole different type of heartache. You never really get over it, you just have to learn to live with it, and you’ve spent the last 3 years trying so hard to cope with the cold, empty bed next to you. You don’t ever want to move to a new home because you don’t want to live in a place where the walls haven’t heard his laughter, the floors haven’t met his dancing feet, and the front door hasn’t heard the roar of his motorcycle.

You were still somewhat close with his family. Matt had taken his death the hardest, shutting out the world and everyone around him. You still think you’ve only heard him speak Chris’ name maybe twice since that day. You and Nick talk maybe once a month, see each other every once in a blue moon. You two love to talk about old memories and tell each stories about something stupid Chris said or did. His mom and dad still call your kids their “bonus grands” and send gifts for holidays. Things have changed, but that was the inevitable.

Doing life without Chris has changed me. I’m just not the same person anymore, but how could I be? One thing that will never change is the love that you hold in your heart for him. Nothing, no matter how much time passes, could ever change that. You will make sure the world never forgets Christopher Owen Sturniolo, and never forget how much your love continues to grow for him each day. Grief is just love with nowhere to go.

❤️ The video below is an actual video of me & the love of my life, who this story is based on. ❤️

leave me any feedback you may have, but be gentle, i lived through this, just changed the names. 🥺

thank you @blushsturns for all of your advice & feedback ❤️

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Pat Byrnes :: @thePatByrnes

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

July 5, 2024 (Friday)

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUL 06, 2024

For all that certain members of the media continue their freakout over Biden’s electability after his appearance in last Thursday’s event on CNN, it is Trump and his Republicans who appear to be nervous about the upcoming election. 

Journalist Jennifer Schulze of Heartland Signal noted today that as of 8:00 this morning, the New York Times had published 192 pieces on Biden’s debate performance: 142 news articles and 50 opinion pieces. Trump was covered in 92 stories, about half of which were about the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling. Although Trump has frequently slurred his words or trailed off while speaking and repeatedly fell asleep at his own criminal trial, none of the pieces mentioned Trump’s mental fitness. 

But for all of what independent journalists are calling a “feeding frenzy,” egged on by right-wing media figures, it seems as if the true implications of Project 2025 are starting to gain traction and the Trump campaign recognizes that the policies that document advocates are hugely unpopular. 

On July 2, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts assured Trump ally Steve Bannon’s followers that they are winning in what he called “the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” In March, Roberts told former Trump administration official and now right-wing media figure Sebastian Gorka about Project 2025: “There are parts of the plan that we will not share with the Left: the executive orders, the rules and regulations. Just like a good football team we don’t want to tip off our playbook to the Left.” 

This morning, although Roberts has described Project 2025 as “institutionalizing Trumpism,” Trump’s social media feed tried to distance the former president from Project 2025. “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it,” the post read. Despite this disavowal of any knowledge of the project, it continued: “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.” 

In what appeared to be a coordinated statement, the directors of Project 2025 wrote on social media less than two hours later that they “do not speak for any candidate.”  

Aside from the fact that “[a]nything they do, I wish them luck,” sounds much like the signaling Trump did to the Proud Boys when he told them to “stand back and stand by,” Trump’s assertion and Project 2025’s response can’t possibly erase the many and deep ties of the Trump camp to Project 2025. Juliet Jeske of Decoding Fox News noted that Trump’s name shows up on more than 190 pages of the Project 2025 playbook. 

Rebekah Mercer, who sits on the board of the Heritage Foundation, was one of Trump’s top donors in 2016; her family founded and operated Cambridge Analytica, the company that misused the data of millions of Facebook users to push pro-Trump and anti-Clinton material in 2016. Trump’s national press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, has appeared in a Project 2025 video. Trump’s own super PAC has been running ads promoting Project 2025, calling it “Trump’s Project 2025,” and many of its policies—killing the Department of Education, erasing the separation of church and state, ending renewable energy programs and ramping up use of fossil fuels, deporting immigrants—are also Trump’s.

Project 2025’s director, Paul Dans, as well as both of its associate directors, Spencer Chretien and Troup Hemenway, were in charge of personnel in Trump’s White House, and the theme of Project 2025 is that “people are policy,” by which they mean that hand-picked loyalists must replace civil servants. Trump’s former body man John McEntee, who reentered the White House as a senior advisor after having to leave because he failed a background check, was in charge of hiring in the last months of the Trump White House; he helped to draft Project 2025. Key Trump ally Russell Vought wrote the section of Project 2025 that called for an authoritarian leader; he is also on the platform committee of the Republican National Convention. 

If indeed Trump knows nothing about Project 2025 and has no idea who is behind it, his cognitive ability is rotten. As former chair of the Republican National Committee Michael Steele wrote, “Since [Project 2025] is designed to institutionalize Trumpism and you know nothing about it, then why do you echo some of its policy priorities during your rallies? Coincidence? And how exactly don’t you know that Project 2025 Director Paul Dans served as your chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management, and Associate Director Spencer Chretien served as your special assistant and associate director of presidential personnel? And folks say we should be worried about Biden.”

Trump’s attempt to distance himself from Project 2025 indicates just how toxic that plan is with voters. As political scientist Ian Bremmer dryly noted, it seems that “the second [A]merican revolution apparently [is] not polling as well as the first in internal focus groups.” Former Republican strategist Rick Wilson was even more direct, saying that Trump was trying to distance himself from Project 2025 because “most of it polls about like Ebola,” the deadly virus that causes severe bleeding and organ failure, and has a mortality rate of 80 to 90%.

The extremism of the MAGA Republicans was on display in another way today as well after The New Republic published a June 30 video of North Carolina lieutenant governor Mark Robinson, currently the Republican nominee for governor of North Carolina, saying to a church audience about their opponents—whom he identified in a scattershot speech as anything from communists to “wicked people” to those standing against “conservatives”—"Kill them! Some liberal somewhere is gonna say that sounds awful. Too bad!... Some folks need killing! It's time for somebody to say it.” 

Today the Vatican turned against one of those extremists when it excommunicated pro-Trump archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, who was the Vatican’s diplomat to the U.S. from 2011 to 2016, for “schism” after he refused to recognize the authority of Pope Francis. Viganò has repeatedly attacked Francis’s Catholic Church for being “inclusive, immigrationist, eco-sustainable, and gay-friendly.”

Also today, Trump’s lawyers asked Judge Aileen Cannon, who is overseeing Trump’s criminal trial for retaining hundreds of classified documents, to dismiss charges that can no longer be prosecuted in light of the Supreme Court’s decision that a president cannot be charged for crimes committed while engaging in “official acts.” They also called the case “politically motivated” and asked Cannon to stop the case entirely in light of Justice Clarence Thomas’s suggestion that Special Counsel Jack Smith was not properly appointed.

The other big news today was that the U.S. added 206,000 jobs in June, bringing the total number of jobs created under this administration to 15.7 million. Last month’s numbers were, once again, higher than economists expected and, according to economic analyst Steven Rattner, above job growth levels before the pandemic. He added that these jobs are not simply a bounceback from the depths of the pandemic: 6.2 million more Americans are employed now than before Covid hit. 

Poking fun at the calls for Biden to step down, conservative lawyer George Conway posted: “Biden needs to RESIGN NOW before any more of these terrible job things are created.”

In a speech today in Madison, Wisconsin, Biden vowed to stay in the race, and the speech appeared strong enough that right-wing extremists, including Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) and activist Laura Loomer, posted on social media—falsely—that he was having a medical emergency aboard Air Force One. Tonight, George Stephanopoulos of ABC interviewed Biden without a teleprompter or notes, focusing only on Biden’s age without any questions about policy. ABC News posted the interview transcript with the president’s conversation portrayed the “g”s dropped off the words and with other colloquial pronunciations spelled out, as if it were dialect. Trump, whose words the press tends to turn into clean prose, has refused to do an interview under the same conditions.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[ceasarslegion]

Uncle story?

Oh boy!

So the first thing i need to say about my uncle is that he is an idiot. Terminally stupid and also the most self-righteous bastard I've ever met. Truly deadly combo.

I must also start by clarifying that this is not the same openly gay uncle who is a Scottish lord and ran for mayor of a small Saskatchewan town because he was bored and won and then showed up to all the official things in a top hat. That is technically my great uncle and on my dad's side. We must not smear that uncle's name due to confusing him with my mom's brother who is too stupid to realize how stupid he is and thinks the fact that no one can understand what the fuck he's ever talking about is a sign of intelligence.

So my uncle is openly gay. And he lives in the UK as a dual dutch-canadian citizen. He is engaged to an Israeli man (do not discourse on this post. I mention his nationality to highlight something else I will mention. Just some guy who doesn't even live there is not responsible for a certain conflict going on). He also grew up in Dubai but family went back to Canada for a spell around when he entered high school. He works as a travel agent last time I checked, but he can never hold down a job for more than a few months without getting fired so who knows at this point.

You're with me, yes? Gay, immigrant, fiance from another country, grew up in the gulf?

This motherfucker. Said he would vote for Trump if he were american and that brexit was a good idea. And is anti-immigration. And thinks feminism is cancer. And once tried to convince my mom that men across the UK were being arrested for "stare-rape" which is apparently when you just look at a woman in public and she can then claim you raped her with your eyes. And thinks pride is pedophilic. And thinks bisexuality is just people who want to be special and can't pick a side. And the only person he's still on speaking terms with in my immediate family is my grandma who is just as toxic as he is stupid.

My dad once said, word for word, while a few drags into a blunt: "if I ever see [uncle] again, I'm going to beat the shit out of him for what he said about my son." I don't know what exactly happened to get him kicked out of my parents apartment when they cut ties with him during a visit, but I know it was a screaming match over something to do with me. I had long moved out at that point so I wasn't there to see it. And this is coming from the mouth of the same guy from my red bull and snickers post, my dad is not a violent or scary guy and I've never seen him lay a hand on anybody.

My uncle and I used to be really close when I was a kid because he's a very artistic person, and I was too. We were the two creatives in the family. Also as a queer kid who didn't know he was trans yet I was naturally drawn to queer masculine influences. This fell apart pretty quickly when I started like, growing into my own person instead of a carbon copy of the people around me. He was steadily becoming dumber and dumber to me but it really came to a head in 2016

So trump wins the US election. I am still living in Abu Dhabi at this point and I had just graduated high school in June of that year. My boss is American. She is devastated and says she's going home early that day because she needs a few hours to process what's gonna happen now. At my desk I make a Facebook post saying that if any of the americans I knew refused to vote over your own self-righteous bs that I don't want to talk to you again because you clearly cared more about having the moral high ground than sucking it up for the people who trump will go on to hurt. This post is a big hit among my Arab majority peers.

This goes on without incident. 3 months later my uncle comments a big essay on it sucking trumps dick and saying some pseudo-qanon shit about Hillary Clinton. I respond citing actual sources and hit him where it hurts: Mike pence's then-plan to divert AIDS research funding into conversion therapy.

I go back to work (I am at work when the response happens too). About an hour later my phone buzzes on my desk. I open it to an essay twice the size in my messenger DMs from him crytyping about how I've changed and turned into such a whiny SJW, how I'm no longer the same person i was when I was 11 (damn I hope so), how I'm such a bully now (YOU CAME ONTO *MY* POST 3 MONTHS LATER???), and uh, no word of a lie, that he can't be racist because he dated a black man in high school. I. I never mentioned race in the post or my response to him. He brought that up on his own.

I ended up calling him out on it by replying to his public comment with "hey if you're gonna cry about how you're not racist in my inbox for pages and pages on end like that because someone said you were being stupid at least do it in the same place you were flaunting your idiocy, damn."

We didn't talk for a good couple years after that. And then something came up and we talked again for a bit, I don't remember exactly what anymore but we had to interact in person for it. I was willing to be civil, he started by doing the equivalent of crossing his arms and pouting until I said sorry for how mean I was to such a sensitive little muffin on the internet. Very mature guy I'm related to here isn't he. Insane how he's the uncle and I'm the nephew huh

This lasted for a good 2 weeks. Because the pokemon sun and moon leaks happened and I showed him the character models for red and blue and joked that they looked like a newlywed couple on their honeymoon in Hawaii. Pokemon was one of the few things we could still agree on at this point, so i was trying to bridge a gap with a family member with it. Thinking that he would appreciate the joke as a gay man.

He exploded at me. Like full on screaming exploded at me over that. He yelled about how homophobic I was, that i had no right to call myself queer because I hadn't been sexually assaulted or threatened to be murdered (HE HASNT EITHER??? LIKE HE VERY MUCH HASNT 😭😭😭 also you are making a LOT of assumptions about the life of someone you made NO effort to be a part of despite him giving you every olive branch you could possibly grab), that it was insulting to every gay person in the world to say that the best representation we deserved was pokemon (THATS NOT WHAT I SAID??? Also what's wrong with a gay pokemon character 😭 how is that insulting 😭😭) and that I had no idea what it was like to suffer for my identity. He said this while I was living in a place where queer people got executed for being moral degenerates btw.

Something in me snapped that day and I responded with "oh tell me more about how hard your life was in your dubai villa with an in-ground pool and a hired nanny. I'll truly never suffer as much as you have. Tell me more about how you threw the first brick at stonewall."

My parents had to stop themselves from laughing at that response and steered me out before my uncle could explode even more, and I never talked to him again.

[hopelesslyhopeful11]

It’s VassIAN, not VassIEN: The Correct SJM Ship

I’ve seen the argument that Vassa and Lucien (VassIEN) will end up together and it makes no sense from an SJM standpoint. Not when Vassa and Jurian (Vassian) are right there!!

1. I present to you, honorable citizens, the evidence as told by text and SJM herself:

Exhibit A. Vassa was able to see through Jurian immediately (Chapter 54 of ACOWAR)

From Feyre with Rhysand; Cassian with Nesta; Rowan with Aelin, SJM notoriously writes about how her endgame couples are able to see through one another clearly. And Jurian has a history of being unreadable and even his best friend of years, Mor, wasn’t able to see through him, but this mortal queen he just met can? Seems more than a coin-winky-dink to me

Exhibit B. They are at each others throats just as SJM likes to write for many other endgame couples.

As you can see here, SJM loves writing couples (top images is from bottom left image is from Chapter 17 of ACOWAR) who are constantly at each others throats in a good way. She even admits so in this interview and her Facebook comment back in 2016 but the specific quote is “As soon as Nesta sat down at the table with Cassian, it was DONE for both of them—I literally could not keep them from each others throats (in the best way possible)”

Exhibit C. The banter is classic SJM endgame material.

The teasing and tension is screaming from the page. SJM says that banter is a clue for her endgame couples. What more do we need?

Exhibit D. They are two people working together to build the same vision for the future of their kingdom and people and honestly the same reactions to things

To mortals who are already working well together to build their kingdom in a good balance and have shown that they have endgame potential? Yeah it just makes sense

Exhibit E. Unreadable faces making pretty damning cases.

Across the maasiverse, people have unreadable faces when they are trying to mask emotions, I.e. Rhys all of ACOMAF and Nesta in ACOWAR—ACOSF. So what is Jurian hiding? Given everything else, one could safely bet his true feelings for the Firebird Mortal Queen.

In conclusion,

creds to @acourtdelaluna for her help with these points!!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This day in history

On OCTOBER 23 at 7PM, I'll be in DECATUR, presenting my novel THE BEZZLE at EAGLE EYE BOOKS.

#20yrsago HOWTO break Google Print DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20041011120549/http://vitanuova.loyalty.org/weblog/nb.cgi/view/vitanuova/2004/10/07/2

#15yrsago Japanese court overturns Winny ruling, says file-sharing software is legal even if used for infringement https://web.archive.org/web/20091009232138/http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/national/news/20091008p2a00m0na016000c.html

#15yrsago Robert E Howard collection, HEROES IN THE WIND: revisit your heroic past https://memex.craphound.com/2009/10/08/robert-e-howard-collection-heroes-in-the-wind-revisit-your-heroic-past/

#10yrsago Sore losers: How casinos went after two guys who found a video poker bug https://www.wired.com/2014/10/cheating-video-poker/

#10yrsago Fixing the unfixable USB bug https://www.wired.com/2014/10/unpatchable-usb-malware-now-patchsort/

#10yrsago 20 meaningful things you can do about climate change http://thischangeseverything.org/twenty-things-you-can-do-to-address-the-climate-crisis/

#10yrsago 10% of Americans have 10 or more alcoholic drinks every day https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/09/25/think-you-drink-a-lot-this-chart-will-tell-you/

#10yrsago $35 Firefox OS smartphone – back to the drawing board https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/10/testing-a-35-firefox-os-phone-how-bad-could-it-be/

#5yrsago For the first time ever, taxes on the 400 richest Americans were lower than taxes on everyone else https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/06/opinion/income-tax-rate-wealthy.html

#5yrsago Supreme Court greenlights lawsuit over Amazon’s wage-theft from warehouse workers https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-amazon-com/u-s-supreme-court-rejects-amazon-warehouse-worker-wage-appeal-idUSKBN1WM1FI/

#5yrsago Bernie Blindness: a subreddit for noting the way press narratives ignore or smear Bernie Sanders https://www.reddit.com/r/bernieblindness/top/

#5yrsago Checkm8: an “unstoppable” Iphone jailbreaking crack https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/developer-of-checkm8-explains-why-idevice-jailbreak-exploit-is-a-game-changer/

#5yrsago After an injunction against Pacifica radio, New York’s WBAI is back on the air https://twitter.com/2600/status/1181423565389942786

#5yrsago How the “Varsity Blues” admissions scam punished deserving, hard working kids so that mediocre kids of the super-rich could prosper https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/08/how-the-varsity-blues-admissions-scam-punished-deserving-hard-working-kids-so-that-mediocre-kids-of-the-super-rich-could-prosper/

#5yrsago Facebook’s 2016 election billboards: Buy all your elections with us! https://twitter.com/MarietjeSchaake/status/1180166896294887424

#5yrsago Podcast: Why do people believe the Earth is flat? https://ia601006.us.archive.org/35/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_311/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_311_-_Why_do_people_believe_the_Earth_is_flat.mp3

#5yrsago The cloud vs humanity: Adobe terminates every software license in Venezuela, keeps Venezuelans’ money https://helpx.adobe.com/la/x-productkb/policy-pricing/executive-order-venezuela.html

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

[the-rewatch-rewind]

I love Poe Party too much to feel like any words will do it justice, but I keep trying.

Script below the break.

Hello and welcome back to the Rewatch Rewind! My name is Jane, and this is the podcast where I count down my top 40 most frequently rewatched movies of the last 20 years. And today I will be discussing number 13 on my list: Shipwrecked Comedy and American Black Market’s 2016 mystery comedy Edgar Allan Poe’s Murder Mystery Dinner Party, directed by William J Stribling, written by Sean Persaud and Sinéad Persaud, starring Sean Persaud, Sinéad Persaud, Mary Kate Wiles, Sarah Grace Hart, Joey Richter, Lauren Lopez, Ashley Clements, Tom de Trinis, Blake Silver, and a whole bunch of other incredibly talented and underrated actors.

Edgar Allan Poe (Sean Persaud) wishes to impress the beautiful Annabel Lee (Mary Kate Wiles), so he enlists the help of his ghost roommate Lenore (Sinéad Persaud) to throw a murder mystery party for Annabel and a group of famous authors. But then guests start actually being murdered.

So, first of all, I realize that this isn’t technically a movie; it’s an 11-episode webseries available to watch for free on YouTube, which you should absolutely pause this podcast to do if you haven’t seen it yet (link in the show notes). But there is a feature cut that’s about an hour and 45 minutes long, and that’s what I counted as a movie. If I’d kept track of the number of times I watched each episode, I’m sure that even my least-watched episode would easily beat number one on this list. But as for the feature cut, I watched it 12 times in 2017, three times in 2018, four times in 2019, twice in 2020, and three times in 2021. To a certain extent, every movie on the Rewatch Rewind has changed my life in some way, but this one has changed my life to a degree that I would never have believed possible. Every single day of the last seven plus years of my life would have looked different if not for Edgar Allan Poe’s Murder Mystery Dinner Party. All of the guests I have had on this podcast who are not my siblings, I met either directly or indirectly because of this show. So fasten your seatbelts: this episode is going to be a ride.

My journey to Edgar Allan Poe’s Murder Mystery Dinner Party, or Poe Party for short, or Edgar Allan Poe’s Murder Mystery Invite-Only Casual Dinner Party/Gala for Friends Potluck for long, began years before the project itself was even written. In the late 2000s-early 2010s, my sister was relatively plugged into the YouTube scene, at least compared to me, and she first introduced me to a group called Team Starkid around 2009-2010-ish. At the time, they were a bunch of college theater kids who had put together a Harry Potter parody musical and on a whim posted it to YouTube, where it went viral, so they started making and posting other musicals – which they are still doing. I feel like I might still have discovered Poe Party if I hadn’t been a Starkid fan, but that definitely helped. A more crucial step on my road to Poe Party started on April 9, 2012, when my sister posted a link to a new YouTube video on my Facebook wall, with the message, “Fictional vlogs by Lizzie Bennet. (actually Hank Green.) There’s only one so far, but I’m kind of crazily excited for this!” Hank Green, of course, along with his brother John, is basically one of the fathers of YouTube. I don’t think I’d seen a ton of their videos at that point, but I was familiar with and liked them. And of course, I knew Lizzie Bennet was the main character in Pride and Prejudice, a story that I loved very much – more on that in a future episode. So I was also very excited for this new show, called The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, but I could not have imagined the intense emotional journey it would take me on, through two short episodes a week (plus spinoffs) for almost a year. There had never been a TV show that I was more invested in than LBD. I was double majoring in college and working part time, but the main thing I cared about was these modern Pride and Prejudice characters. The show was clearly very low-budget, but I was blown away by the writing and acting. I was particularly impressed by the person playing Lizzie, Ashley Clements, and the person playing Lydia, Mary Kate Wiles. And, like, it wasn’t just me – LBD had a huge following for what it was. Not, like, millions of fans, but hundreds of thousands by the end. As the finale approached, the producers launched a Kickstarter to release the show on DVD and – ostensibly – pay significantly more to the cast and crew who had been incredibly underpaid. If you’re at all interested in hearing more about that, I highly recommend checking out The Look Back Diaries on Ashley Clements’s YouTube channel; she just did a whole deep dive into the show and its aftermath in honor of its 10th anniversary that I found fascinating. But anyway, coincidentally, right around that same time, Starkid also launched their first Kickstarter, since most of them had graduated from college and no longer had access to the same resources but wanted to keep making more musicals. So they were raising money for Twisted, a Wicked-style villain redemption retelling of Aladdin, which sounded interesting. I had never pledged to a Kickstarter before, but I backed both the LBD DVDs and Twisted on the same day: March 25, 2013, according to my emails.

After that, I kept following Starkid and some of the cast members of LBD, but not particularly closely. In early 2014, Mary Kate Wiles was in a webseries called Kissing in the Rain that I think I watched part of at the time, and I thought it was fine, but I wasn’t particularly into it (imagine, me, an aromantic, not particularly into a show about kissing!) and there was a lot of other stuff going on in my life so I honestly can’t remember if I saw all of it when it was first coming out. I definitely couldn’t have told you that it was on a channel called Shipwrecked, or even the name of the actor she was kissing. But in May of 2014, a new Kickstarter launched for a series called Muzzled the Musical, which was going to feature several cast members from LBD as well as Joey Richter from Team Starkid (Lauren Lopez also ended up being in it but I don’t think that was known during the Kickstarter). And I thought, whoa, cool, worlds colliding, and backed it. And promptly all but forgot about it.

A lot of strange, confusing, and rather upsetting things happened in 2015 that I don’t really want to get too deep into here, but I will say that in hindsight most of them had to do with a combination of amatonormativity and heteronormativity, and I started feeling pretty bad about myself. Before then I had managed to convince myself that I was too young to seriously fall in love anyway, but suddenly I was 25 years old and had never had any interest in dating anyone, and I felt like there was definitely something wrong with me. I didn’t exactly want to change, since I liked not dating, but I had always thought that that would just automatically change when I got older, and facing the fact that it wasn’t changing meant facing the fact that I didn’t know what the point of my life was. I liked my job but I didn’t want it to be my sole purpose. I loved movies, but that didn’t feel like it mattered. All my life I had taken in the message that finding a spouse and creating a family was what made the struggle of life worth it, and I felt lazy for not even trying to pursue that. I remember hearing at some point in my late teens that if you didn’t find your significant other in college, you needed to look online, but I didn’t even know what I would be looking for. And I truly don’t know where this line of thinking would have ended up if it had gone on much longer uninterrupted – I may have discovered my identity a bit sooner, or I may have ended up hurting someone by trying to pursue a relationship I ultimately didn’t want, or I may have just continued to spiral – but what actually happened was I got an email in late October that that random fantasy musical series I had backed on Kickstarter a year and a half earlier was being released on YouTube.

So I watched Muzzled, and it was very fun and silly, but the main thing I got out of it was, man I miss the Lizzie Bennet Diaries. So I finally opened that DVD set I’d gotten from the Kickstarter, and I binge-watched the whole show (I didn’t count it as a movie because there’s no feature cut, and also it is very long). And then I re-watched the whole thing with the DVD-exclusive commentary. And then I thought, I wonder what this cast has been up to lately, so I started searching for them on YouTube. And that’s when I learned that Mary Kate Wiles had been posting two videos per week on her channel for years, and I had been missing it. As I got caught up on her videos, I learned that I had just missed a Kickstarter for a musical she was going to be in called Spies are Forever, made by the Tin Can Brothers, which were a group of people who were also involved with Starkid, and that she seemed to be getting ready for a new Kickstarter with a group called Shipwrecked Comedy, the same people who had made that kissing show. They had also made a show called A Tell Tale Vlog about Edgar Allan Poe and the valley girl ghost Lenore who was haunting him, in which Poe had been played by Sean Persaud (the guy from Kissing in the Rain, who was apparently dating Mary Kate in real life) and his sister Sinéad (who was in the second half of Kissing in the Rain, which I definitely hadn’t watched before). Mary Kate had made a brief appearance in A Tell Tale Vlog as Annabel Lee, and this new show was going to be related to that, but bigger. I was so intrigued by this new project that I started supporting Mary Kate on Patreon to ensure that I didn’t miss any updates about it.

The Poe Party Kickstarter launched on February 2, 2016. By then, I had watched and enjoyed everything on Shipwrecked’s YouTube channel, but that Kickstarter video was my favorite thing they had made. I initially pledged the same amount that I had given to the Lizzie Bennet DVDs, thinking that would be my final pledge, but I ended up giving almost six times that much by the end of the campaign. Every $5,000 they raised, they revealed a new character and cast member with a poster, and each reveal made me more excited. Joey Richter was playing Ernest Hemingway?! Ashley Clements was playing Charlotte Brontë?! Lauren Lopez, who frequently played male characters, was playing George Eliot, a woman with a male pen name?! They got Jim O’Heir from Parks & Rec?! And then, as if the reveals weren’t enough, they had weekly 4-hour livestreams that I found incredibly entertaining. It had become clear that Shipwrecked Comedy now consisted of four people: Sean, Sinéad, Mary Kate, and Sarah Grace Hart, who had played Emily Dickinson in a stand-alone video and would be reprising that role in Poe Party. Various other cast members showed up in the streams with the Core Four, and I distinctly remember thinking, if these people are this entertaining to watch when they’re just hanging out, this show is going to be so amazing! In the second livestream of the campaign, they started writing people’s names on papers to stick on the wall if they pledged or raised their pledge during the streams, which was an excellent incentive, but I would have kept raising mine anyway, because I was desperate for this show to get made. Apart from a few weird troll messages, the stream chat was full of lovely conversations between people who seemed like my kindred spirits. I had never felt more at home in a community. And I had never been more excited than when the Kickstarter exceeded its goal.

And I’m telling you all of this because I need you to understand how astronomically high my hopes and expectations for Poe Party were. Some of the movies I’ve talked about so far ended up in my top 40 partly because I had fairly low expectations going into them and was pleasantly surprised, but that was absolutely not the case here. I had seen excellent work from several of the people involved before, and they seemed particularly dedicated to this project, and I knew they were going to make something incredible. I also desperately needed something in my life to go really well, and this seemed like it might be it, although I knew it wasn’t fair to put that kind of pressure on these independent filmmakers. I tried to temper my expectations, reminding myself that they had only raised a little over $72,000, and Kickstarter was going to take a chunk of that, and some of it had to go to perk fulfillment, so they weren’t going to have nearly enough to make anything super fancy. They released some prologue videos that were very fun but also very small, and I tried to tell myself that the actual show was also going to be small. And I kept reminding myself how long Muzzled had taken to come out, and that I was probably going to have to wait a while for Poe Party too, so I needed to chill. But then in late July – only four and a half months after the Kickstarter had ended – Shipwrecked released a trailer for Poe Party, which said it was starting in less than a month, and there was no tempering my expectations after that. The trailer looked fabulous. It was witty and clever and dramatic and intriguing, the music was perfection, and, shockingly, it looked like an actual studio movie. Not like a super high-budget one, but like they had at least a million dollars. Certainly way more than $60k. My already-ridiculously-high expectations soared to new heights. Part of me was sure I was setting myself up for disappointment, but I couldn’t help it.

And then it was August 22 and the first episode (Chapter 1: The Bells) dropped and it was so much better than I was hoping for. First of all, the look set the tone perfectly. The lighting was exquisite, and the location – incidentally the same house where Muzzled was filmed – was perfect. And then there was the writing. One thing the Persauds had mentioned during the Kickstarter was that they were inspired by the movie Clue, which will be featured in a future episode of this podcast, so I was expecting similar vibes to that, but I was not expecting there to be so many direct references to Clue. All of them made me extremely happy. It felt like the show was made specifically for me. It was like Clue, but even better. I already loved every single character and knew I would be sad to see some of them get murdered. It was also very clear from even just that first episode that this was going to fall into the “everybody was having way too much fun” category of film that I love. But while most movies like that tend to have pretty weak stories and just overall mediocre scripts, and the cast having fun makes up for that, Poe Party was different. The writing was fantastic, AND the acting was perfect, AND it looked gorgeous, AND everybody was having fun. Again, I tried not to have unrealistic expectations, I tried to tell myself that not every episode could be quite the banger that the first one was, but I was still incredibly excited for the rest of the show. And I was not at all disappointed. Somehow it just kept getting better. The running joke about everyone forgetting Emily Dickinson was there or who she was just kept getting funnier. Ditto the joke about George Eliot thinking she needed to convince everyone she was a man when everyone was clearly fine with her being a woman. I remember at one point, when around three or four chapters were out, Mary Kate tweeted that they were working on editing her favorite part of the show, and I thought, surely it doesn’t get better than what I’ve seen already. But it turned out she was talking about chapter 8, and yes, it absolutely was better. The constables, Jim and Jimmy – played by Jim O’Heir and Jimmy Wong – and everyone else trying to fool them, are so delightful to watch. Even though chapter 8 features probably the second saddest death in the series, it’s overall the funniest episode. This show touches an incredibly wide range of emotions and moods, especially considering it takes place in one house over one night.

I want to make it clear that I would still love Poe Party even if I’d stumbled upon it years after it came out, and even if I didn’t recognize any of the actors. The show is excellent enough to stand on its own. But being part of it from the Kickstarter, being familiar with some of the actors, and being online as it was coming out, certainly enhanced my enjoyment of it. Shipwrecked had a weekly “competition” of sorts where they would give a vague prompt and people would make fan art or write fan fiction and post it on social media (#PoePartyFTW), and each of the four members of Shipwrecked would pick their favorite to re-post. I wrote a fic after each of the episodes, and several of them got chosen by Shipwrecked, and I hadn’t felt that good about myself in years. I loved the show so much that I couldn’t confine it just into weekly fics; I was shouting about it on every social media platform. I also started weekly speculation Tumblr posts, using Clue references as my guide, many of which led me astray – I was convinced there must be a secret passage between the kitchen and the study that didn’t turn out to exist – but I did figure out part of the solution relatively early on. While the mystery aspect of Clue is ultimately nonsense if you think about it too hard, Poe Party actually tracks. And if you’ve listened this far and you still haven’t seen Poe Party, please go watch it now, because I’m going to start getting into story specifics and spoilers, and I think everybody should get to see it once without knowing what’s coming. (I’m also going to spoil some of Clue, so you could go watch that too if you want, although I don’t feel like Clue spoilers matter that much.)

In her episode of A Tell Tale Vlog, Annabel mentioned that she had started seeing a banker named Eddie, and then in the Poe Party Kickstarter video, she asked Edgar if she could bring Eddie as her plus one to his party. So Eddie (played by Ryan W. Garcia) shows up late to the party with Annabel, and then becomes the first murder victim. EXCEPT, spoiler alert: he’s actually NOT DEAD, and is, in fact, one of the murderers. And from the very first episode, I recognized Eddie’s similarities to Mr. Boddy in Clue, who is also not dead when you first think he is, and I was therefore suspicious of him from the get-go. But I was still very much open to any possibility (or so I thought) because the Persauds had done an excellent job of making everyone at least somewhat fishy. But there was one thing I was not prepared for, and that was the end of chapter 9. Because it absolutely never occurred to me that Poe’s beautiful Annabel Lee would die, and I’m honestly still kind of devastated about it, even understanding why it had to happen, and at the time I was almost inconsolable. Mary Kate Wiles had led me to this brilliant show, in which she played the kindest, most likable character, only to be brutally murdered? Some fans at the time had thought Annabel might be the killer, which I never did, and honestly I would have been kind of angry if she had been because we need to have more genuinely nice characters in things. I was upset that she died, but I would have been more so if she’d turned evil. (Not that I have anything against MK playing villains – I’m all for it, under the right circumstances. And thankfully the Persauds know when the right circumstances are.) And like, okay, I know I complain about too much romance in stories, but Annabel’s “It was always you” as she died in Edgar’s arms – that got me. Annabel had been planning to marry Eddie because he was more respectable than the unhinged poet she actually loved, and I think that that whole trying to fake the life you think you’re supposed to have thing spoke to me. I had been so tempted to try that, and this was almost as clear of a message as the constables’ “Don’t Do Murder”: Don’t Fake Romance.

At that point, I was pretty much convinced that Eddie must have had something to do with this; why would anyone else kill Annabel? Also, chapter 9 reveals that Annabel wrote the invite list, and I thought it made sense that Eddie, her boyfriend, could have told her whom to include, especially since it had already been established that most of the guests had some connection to Eddie. The prompt for that week’s Poe Party FTW competition was “Confession,” so I decided to try something different from the short stories I’d been submitting, and I re-wrote the poem “Annabel Lee” from Eddie’s perspective as if he was the murderer. And I know this episode is already longer than most of my solo episodes and I have a lot more to say, but I’m still proud of this poem (even though it’s not completely accurate, since it turned out that Eddie didn’t kill everybody), so I need to share it with you:

It was many and many a month ago,

           In her cottage by the sea,

That I first read the words that Edgar wrote

           For my girlfriend Annabel Lee;

And he said that she lived with no other thought

           Than to love and be loved by he.

“He’s just my friend and I’m just his friend,”

           She quickly explained to me;

But we loved with a love which was worse than love –

           I and my Annabel Lee –

With a love that was founded on secrets and lies,

           Fueled by jealousy.

And this was the reason that, later on,

           Faced with opportunity,

I took advantage of an offer made

           To innocent Annabel Lee;

For when Lenore asked whom to invite

           To that cad’s dinner party,

Annabel deferred to my input

           Which I gave most willingly.

All authors, not half so worthy as bankers,

           Who had e’er quarreled with me –

Yes! – they were the ones (no one would know;

           I’d met them all secretly)

That Edgar would invite to his house that night,

           At the behest of “his” Annabel Lee.

For our love it was weaker by far than the love

           Of vengeance I carried in me –

           Of justice toward those who’d wronged me –

And neither the psychics who bring back the dead,

           Nor the cops fresh from Academy,

Can hinder my murderous plan; no one can!

           No, not even my Annabel Lee.

As I watch them point fingers I find my gaze lingers

           On the beautiful Annabel Lee;

When they mention invites, she suspects, knows she’s right,

           Out the door runs my Annabel Lee;

Can’t let her get away: who knows what she might say?

So I kill her – I kill her – my eleventh kill today.

           Instead of revealing me,

           Her last breath says it was always he.

So yeah. I was deep into this. But then nobody in Shipwrecked chose it that week, and I thought, okay, maybe it wasn’t that good, or, maybe my theory is laughably far off the mark. Maybe Eddie’s too obvious. Maybe he really is dead. Then in chapter 10, Charlotte Brontë confessed, and revealed that her sister Anne had been there the whole time helping, and at that point I was pretty sure Eddie was also involved again. We clearly saw that Annabel’s killer was wearing pants, unlike either Brontë sister. And then it was Halloween and the finale finally arrived, and I was right about Eddie, but I was still completely unprepared for how awesome that final chapter would be. I think there was still a small part of me that didn’t believe it was possible for the end to live up to the buildup of the first ten incredible chapters. But it absolutely did. The finale was everything – everything, I say – that I wanted it to be and much more. The evil slow clap. The revolving villain trio of creepy neck touching. The flashbacks. The fights. The pet rock’s revenge. The literary references. And of course, the surprise reveal of Jane Austen, played by Laura Spencer, who had also played Jane Bennet in the Lizzie Bennet Diaries. The episodes were posted at 9 am on Mondays, when I was at work, so I couldn’t watch them right when they dropped, but after the first one I couldn’t wait until I got home either. My work’s wifi blocked YouTube, and I had an extremely limited data plan at the time, so on my lunch break I would walk to the McDonald’s down the street and watch the new episode using their wifi. And when the camera panned to Jane Austen, it was all I could do not to yell “OH MY GOSH IT’S LAURA SPENCER!” in that McDonald’s. I definitely audibly gasped, but I don’t think anyone noticed. The thing is, I would have still been blown away by the finale without that extra surprise. But that’s what Shipwrecked does. They make things that can appeal to a wide audience, and then they sprinkle in some extra treats for people who have been following them for a while. Of course, LBD was not a Shipwrecked project, but finding Shipwrecked through LBD is a fairly common path. And I’m still so impressed with how well they kept Laura as Jane Austen a secret. As a Kickstarter perk, I’d had a video chat with the Core Four that summer, and I’d mentioned that Jane Austen was my favorite author, and I was disappointed that she wasn’t going to be in Poe Party, and they were just like, “Yeah, we thought about including her, but we figured she would be too similar to Charlotte Brontë,” and betrayed not a SINGLE HINT that she was, in fact, in the show. Which is another thing Shipwrecked does: make a very specific, deliberate plan about what to reveal when, and stick to it.

As another example of that, the Poe Party Kickstarter had reached a stretch goal to produce an epilogue. I had completely forgotten about that, but other backers remembered and started asking about it after the finale. Shipwrecked was pretty cagey with their answers, but then directed us to a mysterious Twitter account that was dropping strange clues. I watched as the Shipwrecked fan Facebook group decoded them and ultimately unlocked the epilogue a day before it was released publicly. The epilogue is not included in the feature cut, and now I don’t really think of it as part of the show. Chapter 11 ends so perfectly – Poe stares at the floor as the heartbeat grows louder, a floorboard creaks, fade to black: chef’s kiss. But at the time I was feeling so many overwhelming feels about this show that I desperately needed that epilogue. I was so utterly relieved to see Annabel and HG thriving as ghosts. And I was so thrilled to be surrounded by such a great fandom, who all worked together and helped each other to solve the puzzles – it was a beautiful weekend. And it was also the last weekend before Donald Trump was elected president of the United States and I had to face the fact that the country was more broken and divided than I’d wanted to believe, which definitely adds to my nostalgia for that epilogue adventure.

The show may have ended, and the world may have been falling apart faster than usual, but I could not have gotten Poe Party out of my head even if I’d wanted to, which I didn’t. For over a decade I’d been searching for something that felt like a classic movie, but with some modern sensibilities, and these independent filmmakers had made exactly what I was looking for, zillions of times better than I’d imagined it. That clever, witty dialogue, perfectly delivered by quirky characters, almost felt like it came from a 1930s screwball comedy. But it also felt fresh and new and different from anything I’d seen before. It had so many similarities to Clue – in fact, I taught myself how to make gifs, or [other pronunciation] gifs, in order to highlight specific parallels between Poe Party and Clue – and yet remained unique. Where Clue was mostly just comedy, Poe Party was comedy, tragedy, romance, and intrigue, and absolutely nailed all of those. (Sadly no ravens, though, they didn’t have the budget for that.) Anyway, the series held up shockingly well upon rewatch, and I could not get enough of it. And despite the socially anxious part of my brain that remains convinced that everyone always is annoyed with me, that I have nothing worthwhile to say, that I should just shut up and stop bothering others with my existence – people seemed to like what I was posting about Poe Party. Other fans would engage me in conversation, and I started making internet friends for the first time. And, shockingly, the members of Shipwrecked seemed to genuinely appreciate what I was saying as well. After the finale had aired, Mary Kate reblogged my Annabel Lee poem on Tumblr and said, “I legitimately thought this was brilliant, and only didn’t choose it that week because of spoilers. Every single fic Jane wrote for this ftw has been wonderful, and I have so enjoyed them all, but this was above and beyond.” And maybe it sounds like I’m just boasting at this point, but the reason I’m sharing this is because a year earlier I had felt like a failure of a human who had no place in the world, and now this incredible actress/producer I greatly admired, who had just made my new favorite show, was saying that I had enhanced her experience of releasing it. People were liking and appreciating me, just for being myself and enthusiastically enjoying a movie. And I no longer felt like I was supposed to change who I was.

In early 2017, I got the rest of my Kickstarter perks, including behind-the-scenes goodies that featured not one but two fabulous commentaries. I love them both, but the second one is particularly chaotic in the best way. Ashley Clements and Ryan W Garcia, true to the villainous characters they played in the show, keep derailing the conversation and it’s incredibly amusing. The commentaries are over the feature cut, so many if not most of the views that I counted were with one of the commentaries. And I also bought the feature cut without commentary so I could show it to other people and still count it on my list. Now I tend to watch it episodically because I want the Shipwrecked YouTube channel to get more views for the algorithm, although I’m not sure that actually helps. But anyway, the feature cut and commentaries and other bonus features are still available to rent or buy on shipwrecked.vhx.tv, which I will also link in the show notes, if you’re interested.

Also in 2017, the first episode of Poe Party was shown at a festival near me, so I got to meet the Core Four members of Shipwrecked and some fans in person. That was very exciting, but I was also extremely nervous, although I didn’t need to be. The Shipwrecked people were so lovely and actually wanted to talk to me and the other fans who were there. And then I got to see Poe Party win some awards, which was awesome. And then a few months later, Shipwrecked launched another Kickstarter, and I pledged even more to it than I had to Poe Party even though the goal was lower, and then they kept making more stuff and I kept supporting it, and also continued to love everything they made (yes, even the Fart Feud with the Tin Can Brothers). I continued to support Mary Kate on Patreon, and I also started supporting other cast members on Patreon, like Whitney Avalon who had played Mary Shelley and does a lot of her own stuff on YouTube, and of course Ashley Clements, as I’ve mentioned previously, and as soon as Shipwrecked finally got their own Patreon, I was all in at the top tier. And, like, I don’t want to go on about this too much, because I do truly believe that I would love their work even if I’d never interacted with them, but I don’t know that I’d be quite the die-hard, take-all-my-money-to-make-more-things Shipwrecked fan that I am, if I hadn’t had so many wonderful interactions with the members of Shipwrecked over the years. I didn’t set out to become friends with them, but I kind of have – although I still feel a little weird and presumptuous to claim that. I feel like this will sound to some people like an out-of-control parasocial relationship, but like, it’s not that, because they do know me. Other people in my life have referred to Shipwrecked as “the people you pay to be your friends,” but it’s not that either: I give them money so they can keep making things, and we also happened to hit it off as friends – which again feels like a presumptuous label, but I can’t come up with a more accurate word. They make what they love and I love what they make, so it’s not that surprising that we’d get along. And for similar reasons, it’s not surprising that I’ve made so many very close friendships with other Shipwrecked fans. Our love for these projects brought us together, and then turned out to be far from the only thing we have in common.

I feel like I’m talking way too much about my own personal experiences, I’m so sorry if this is boring. Back to Poe Party itself. I’ve hinted at it already, but I need to emphasize again both how incredible the script is, and how amazingly the cast brought it to life. The story was so well thought out: every scene, every character, every moment was there for a reason. Like, I thought George Eliot disguising herself as a man was just a nod to female authors having to use male pen names, but then that turned into an important clue that led to the Brontës. Yes, you can poke plenty of holes in Poe Party if you want to – not all of the characters based on real people were actually alive at the same time, some of the technology is anachronistic, etc – but none of that stuff really matters. It’s clearly meant to be silly and fun, so you don’t really need to know what year it is. But the fact that they managed to write something silly and fun that didn’t completely devolve into absolute nonsense is so incredibly impressive. Sean and Sinéad wrote an absolutely brilliant script, and then they assembled the perfect cast for it. Every actor is on the exact same page about what this project is, and they each know exactly how their character fits in. Even when they’re in the background, everyone is giving 100%. I want to especially shout out Joey Richter, since Ernest Hemingway is drinking all night, and Joey did a tremendous job of tracking how drunk he was supposed to be. By the finale he’s having to slap himself to stay awake in the background, and it’s hilarious. Everyone else is also a delight to watch, and I feel like I’m still noticing little background moments I hadn’t clocked before. There aren’t very many close-ups, which I think was mainly because they didn’t have the budget for the time it would take to shoot them, but it works perfectly because a lot of the funny moments become even funnier when you can see multiple characters’ reactions at once. If you’re watching the background acting closely enough, you may notice a few instances of people almost breaking, but personally I just choose to interpret that as the characters finding it difficult to keep it together when other characters around them are being silly, and who can blame them? I appreciate that the writers and director trusted the cast enough to let them play around and improvise, because some great ad-libbed lines ended up in the final cut, and many more went into the best blooper reel ever, which is 24 minutes long and I love every second of it. There are some moments from the bloopers that I find myself saying sometimes when I’m watching the actual show – Ashley’s “Don’t be mean to me!” is probably the one I quote the most.

There is definitely romance in Poe Party – the whole reason for the party is because Edgar is in love with Annabel. Lenore and HG Wells develop feelings for each other over the course of the evening…until he dies. And several other characters flirt with each other. But none of the romances end well, and throughout the story, there is a lot of emphasis on friendship, and acquaintanceship, and other types of relationship. And that’s a running theme in most of Shipwrecked’s projects. There hasn’t been a kiss in any of them since Kissing in the Rain. Of course, much of the Poe Party fandom was, and is, into shipping characters with each other – for any listeners who may not be terminally online, shipping characters means that you want them to be in a romantic relationship with each other. I joined in somewhat, mostly because I felt like I was supposed to, but I couldn’t have articulated that at the time. And, as I mentioned earlier, I was particularly fascinated by the Eddie/Annabel dynamic, but I was only able to fully comprehend how much I needed the “don’t fake romance” message in hindsight. This show and its fandom made me feel less alone and adrift, but I still didn’t figure out I was aroace for a few more years. Although it was friends I made in the Shipwrecked fan community who first really helped me understand and accept that part of my identity, so I can still say that Poe Party was an important step on that journey.

I want to say so much more about this utterly brilliant show – I don’t feel like I’ve even come close to doing it justice here – but there truly are no words to adequately express my love for it. It still holds up nearly 7 years later, but Shipwrecked has come a long way since then. When their most recent webseries, Headless: A Sleepy Hollow Story, was about to come out, they said it made Poe Party look like it had been done by a bunch of kindergarteners, and I was upset at the Poe Party slander, but once I watched that series, I understood what they meant. Headless is so far above and beyond, but unfortunately it came out too recently to make it into my top 40. Currently they’re releasing an audio narrative called The Case of the Greater Gatsby, which should be on the same platform you’re listening to this on. That is a sequel to their short film The Case of the Gilded Lily, which I will be discussing in a future episode. I really hope that someday Shipwrecked gets the level of recognition they deserve – their fandom is still relatively small, although we are mighty and devoted. At the very least, I hope that the current strikes will help enable them to make a living from writing and acting.

Thank you for listening to me discuss another of my most frequently rewatched movies, or at least attempt to. Following this will be a two-way tie of movies I watched 25 times, both of which feature Cary Grant, my favorite leading man apart from Sean Persaud. As always, I will leave you with a quote from the next movie: “Hi! Mellow greetings, ukie-dukie!”

[coochiequeens]

Good News for women in literature

CNN — 

The 2024 Nobel Prize in literature has been awarded to Han Kang, a South Korean author, for her “intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”

Han, 53, began her career with a group of poems in a South Korean magazine, before making her prose debut in 1995 with a short story collection.

She later began writing longer prose works, most notably “The Vegetarian,” one of her first books to be translated into English. The novel, which won the Man Booker International Prize in 2016, charts a young woman’s attempt to live a more “plant-like” existence after suffering macabre nightmares about human cruelty.

Han is the first South Korean author to win the literature prize, and just the 18th woman out of the 117 prizes awarded since 1901. The prize, announced in Sweden on Thursday, carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million).

In a statement posted to Facebook on Thursday, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol described Han’s win as “a great achievement in the history of Korean literature” and a “national occasion.” He added: “Han has turned the painful scars of our modern history into great literature.”

Much of Han’s work poses the question, voiced by a character in her 2019 novel “Europa,” whose protagonist is wracked by nightmares: “If you were able to live as you desire, what would you do with your life?”

Although many of Han’s protagonists are women, her prose works are often narrated from the perspective of men.

“Before my wife turned vegetarian, I’d always thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way,” her novel “The Vegetarian” begins. “However, if there wasn’t any special attraction, nor did any particular drawbacks present themselves, and therefore there was no reason for the two of us not to get married.”

A selection of Han Kang's books on display at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. Jessica Gow/AP

Originally written and published in Korean, “The Vegetarian” was translated by Deborah Smith, who was 28 at the time. Smith, by her own admission, was “monolingual until the age of 21,” and only chose to pursue Korean due to a lack of English-Korean translators.

The Swedish Academy lauded Han’s work for her “unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead.” Through her “poetic and experimental style,” the Academy said, Han “has become an innovator in contemporary prose.”

Anna-Karin Palm, a member of the Nobel Committee for literature, said readers unfamiliar with Han’s work should begin with “Human Acts,” a 2014 novel reflecting on the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, when more than 100 civilians were killed during pro-democracy demonstrations led by students in the South Korean city.

“Human Acts” shows how “the living and the dead are always intertwined and how these kinds of traumas stay in a population for generations,” Palm said at Thursday’s announcement ceremony.

But Han’s “intense, lyrical” writing almost acts as consolation in the face of this historical violence, Palm added. “Her very tender, precise prose in itself almost becomes a counterforce to the brutal noisiness of power,” she said.

Han’s novels rocketed up South Korea’s bestseller lists following the announcement. As of Friday morning, her books occupied all of the top 10 spots in popular online retailer Yes24’s chart for Korean titles. The bookseller told CNN over the phone that three of them — “Human Acts,” “The Vegetarian” and “I Do Not Bid Farewell” — had racked up combined sales of 70,000 units during the 14 hours immediately following the news.

At the Seoul flagship of bookstore chain Kyobo Book Centre, shoppers welcomed Han’s win. “I’m very proud of her,” high-school teacher Choi Ji-hye told CNN, adding that she had been “shocked” to hear the news.

For engineering student Kim Jee-heon, meanwhile, the announcement sparked a newfound interest in the author’s work. “This is my first time hearing about her, but… I was really amazed to hear that a Korean woman writer had won the prize, so I came here to look for her books.”

Elsewhere, several high-profile figures paid tribute to the novelist via social media, including musicians RM and V, members of the K-pop group BTS. “I read ‘Human Acts’ in the army,” the latter wrote on Instagram Stories. “Congratulations!”

Before the announcement, Ellen Mattson, another member of the committee, detailed how the judging panel sets about selecting each year’s literature laureate.

“We start with a very long list of around 220 names,” Mattson said. “Then we have to navigate through this enormous mass of names – and there we need the help of experts from different parts of the world.”

Eventually, the committee reaches a collection of “about 20 names,” which is then narrowed down to a shortlist of five authors. “That’s where the real work starts,” Mattson said.

Each committee member then has to “read everything by these five writers” as they begin to home in on a single winner.

Announcing the award, Mats Malm, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said Han was “having an ordinary day” and had “just finished supper with her son” when he phoned to congratulate her.

“She wasn’t really prepared for this, but we have begun to discuss preparations for December,” he said. The Nobel Prize award ceremony takes place in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death in 1896.

[akatsuki-shin]

"Love and Deepspace" MC Costume P4P

Heya guys~

I'm working with my friend on a little P4P project for LaD MC's Casual Outfits.

For now, we are opening pre-order for these two costumes since they are the top choice in our previous Interest Check.

My friend is the model in these pictures and she is also the one who'll personally tailored the costumes. She is a professional cosplayer and costume maker who's won WCS (World Cosplay Summit) back in 2016.

You can check out her gallery and portfolio here:

Instagram @freamai and @fairymagicosmaker

Facebook Page: Fairy magic costume-maker

I'll mostly be doing the admin and organizing stuffs (so if you decide to join and receive confirmation emails and stuffs, that would be me lol)

I'll attach the PO Form link and her profile in the reply.

Will we open another P4P for the other MC outfits? It would depend on the situation and result of this first project, but probably yes because there are a few other casual outfits that receive a lot of votes in our Interest Check.

Lastly, sharing is very much appreciated. Thank you so much in advance for your help. ^^

If you have questions, don't hesitate to poke me~

------

👇 Keep reading to see the clearer version of the samples, size chart, and costume details 👇

[darkmaga-returns]

October 29, 2024

How Media Continue To Discredit Themselves

Do they not understand how boring this nonsense is?

How Russia, China and Iran Are Interfering in the Presidential Election (archived) - New York Times Eight years after Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election, foreign influence with American voters has grown more sophisticated. That could have outsize consequences in the 2024 race.

Written by three 'journalists' and published at the top of the NYT's homepage the intro reads:

When Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, spreading divisive and inflammatory posts online to stoke outrage, its posts were brash and riddled with spelling errors and strange syntax. They were designed to get attention by any means necessary. “Hillary is a Satan,” one Russian-made Facebook post read.

Posts like that 'one Russian-made Facebook post' (seen by how many?) 'interfered' in the 2016 election and were the reason for Hillery's loss?

Now, eight years later, foreign interference in American elections has become far more sophisticated, and far more difficult to track. Disinformation from abroad — particularly from Russia, China and Iran — has matured into a consistent and pernicious threat, as the countries test, iterate and deploy increasingly nuanced tactics, according to U.S. intelligence and defense officials, tech companies and academic researchers. The ability to sway even a small pocket of Americans could have outsize consequences for the presidential election, which polls generally consider a neck-and-neck race.

U.S. presidential election campaigns spend billions of dollars on fine tuned advertisements aimed at carefully targeted micro-audiences. It isn't even plausible that social media posts by this or that foreign actor could have comparable effects.

Russia, according to American intelligence assessments, aims to bolster the candidacy of former President Donald J. Trump, while Iran favors his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. China appears to have no preferred outcome.

Should we not be especially afraid of the 'sophisticated' and 'difficult to track' foreign interference by China because it has no preferred outcome?

Here is the NYT's example for it:

This year, a deepfake video of a Republican congressman from Virginia circulated on TikTok, accompanied by a Chinese caption falsely claiming that the politician was soliciting votes for a critic of Beijing who sought (and later won) the Taiwanese presidency.

How could a fake video of a Republican congressman with Chinese caption that was used to discredit a Taiwanese politician influence a U.S. election in which China has 'no preferred outcome'? What is the logic therein?

I have no idea. Nor has the New York Times. It just claims that it does.

Whoever works in western media which carries nonsense like the above should contemplate how much they are contributing to this:

For the third consecutive year, more U.S. adults have no trust at all in the media (36%) than trust it a great deal or fair amount. Another 33% of Americans express “not very much” confidence.

[fanfic-recs-01]

Reddie Fics

This is just a list of all the Richie Tozier/Eddie Kaspbrak fics I like on AO3, if you have any recs for me feel free to send me some!

Updated 9/19/23

Runaway Now and Forevermore by AlexSW97

~Richie and Eddie run away together in 1994 and return to Derry in 2016 as actual bickering husbands.~

richie tozier: not an asthmatic by walmartofficial

~“I’m getting word that I’m not allowed to tell this joke,” he tells the audience, “but it was gonna be about eating ass, if that wasn’t clear.”~

move in, mess my place by bebe8s

~Stan motions to the two new guys in the room. Eddie doesn't even have time to focus on Bill, because he's too distracted by the lanky boy sprawled out across his bed. With his dark curls and pale skin, it's undeniable. It's the guy from last night.

"Well, hello there, princess." Richie says with a smirk, and Eddie can feel the flush in his cheeks.~

walk me home in the dead of night by QueenWithABeeThrone

~Richie Tozier met Eddie Kaspbrak for what they both thought was the first time in a shitty New York dive bar, sixteen years ago.~

fruit from a forbidden tree by glorious_spoon

~a week before he's supposed to get married, Eddie hooks up with a stranger in a bar, and it changes the trajectory of his life.~

we belong to the sound of the words by ShowMeAHero

~Eddie’s got a messenger bag across his shoulders and, when they’re brought out to Richie’s autograph table, he’s glad he brought it. It’s full of tissues, hand sanitizer, granola bars, mini water bottles, zinc tablets, lozenges, and anything else he could think to grab. The con floor is fucking packed, and Richie’s got a whole goddamned line of fans waiting for him that scream and cheer when he comes out.~

Put Those Colors On by TheMightyChipmunk

~Set in a universe where you don't see color until you hear your soulmate laugh, Eddie really doesn't think Richie is funny. I wonder how that's going to work out for them.~

cherry cordial by ShowMeAHero

~He’s staring down hard at his phone, scrolling aimlessly through Facebook without reading anything, when someone bumps into him. Whoever it is grabs the pole, their hands brushing against each other’s.

Right in his ear, the guy says, “Fucking shit, you’re hot.”~

walk through fire for you by hyruling

~His eyes properly well up now. Richie has only seen Eddie cry a handful of times in his adult life, so he’s fairly concerned. He drops down to sit across from Eddie and takes his hands in his.

“Eddie baby, now you’re scaring me, why are you crying?”

Tears track down Eddie’s cheek, and he all but wails, “Cause you’re engaged!”~

Morphine by inoubliable

~They all crowd around Eddie's bed, their faces shimmering a little. Eddie has to squint to make out their features, and he laughs once he does. They all look so worried. Eddie feels great.

"Oh my God," Stan says, at the same time that Richie says, "He's high."~

Lips Like Fire by yallreddieforthis

~When Richie finally convinces the Losers Club to light up with him he needs to find an... 'alternative way' to get Eddie high without giving him an asthma attack.~

The 'Do Not Fucking Touch Me' Tour by loserchildhotpants

~Richie Tozier's taken up writing his own material for once, and it could absolutely ruin him~

anything for a fan by zach_stone

~It was fine, though. Just a stupid little celebrity crush; a safe, inaccessible outlet for Eddie’s deeply suppressed gay thoughts. He could pine away over Trashmouth Tozier from the comfort of his living room, clicking on video compilations with titles like “Top 10 Trashmouth Interview Moments” and only feel vaguely guilty.

And then, of course, he gets a call from Mike Hanlon in Derry.~

nor rivers drown it by theparadigmshifts

~"We promised to confide in each other, and cherish each other, and sustain each other, and all that jazz.”

Stan stares at her, blinks twice.

"And right now, that means going back to your horror-show hometown, and facing your trauma, and potentially killing a demon. Together."

Or: When Mike calls from Derry, Patty answers the phone instead.~

lost inside a moment (with you) by anniebibananie

~In which Richie is always pretending to be Eddie’s boyfriend, Eddie fucking hates it, and finally Eddie decides two can play that game (it is not a total disaster… depending on your definition of total disaster).~

Everywhere, All At Once by EvieSmallwood

~Eddie bites his lip, tucking his hands deeper inside the pockets of his sweatshirt. It’s actually not even his, it’s Richie’s; a faded band logo, a hole by the collar, the faint smells of cigarette smoke and laundry detergent.... it’s like Richie’s with him, which is all Eddie really wants.

Which could be why he’s walking to Richie’s house at one in the morning.~

Party Foul by sundaise

~Crashing a stranger’s birthday party isn’t usually a part of Eddie’s weekend plans. Neither is unknowingly chatting up the cute dark haired comedian... who happens to be the roommate of said birthday boy.

“So, how do you know Stan?”

Eddie’s blood runs cold with shock as soon as the innocent question leaves his lips. “Oh, uh,” he shrugs nonchalantly, like it’s no big deal, “I’m dating his roommate.”~

Must Love Dogs by TheMightyChipmunk

~When Eddie sees a dog, he's gotta pet it. Even when he is stuck in traffic.~

I Didn't Know There Were Wizards in California by spotlightonmringenue

~Will ignores a timid reply from his classmate, his focus fully on this strange interloper that could be his best friend’s twin.

Evil twin, as Dustin would say, his voice low and incriminating. Ultraman type shit. Will considers relaying the situation on their upcoming weekly call to make the current situation less unsettling.~

Playing for Keeps by LogicalBookThief

~Richie and Eddie go on a game show for couples. Nobody expects them to be such a dream team. And nobody suffers as much as the host.~

[moorishflower]

🎶✨Put 5 songs you actually listen to and tag 10 of your favourite followers to do the same 🎶✨

Hey thanks for the tag @signiorbenedickofpadua! :D

Ghost - Square Hammer I love all of Ghost's music but Square Hammer is the one I keep going back to. It's just such a BOP!

The Mountain Goats - Cubs in Five The desperate surety that Darnielle puts into this song gets me every single time. At the time this was written, in 1995, the Chicago Cubs hadn't won a world series since 1908. Happy to say that they finally won again in 2016, so there is hope of being loved again. <3

Hozier - Like Real People Do Honestly my favorite Hozier song. The background behind it, that this is from the perspective of a bog body but also a metaphor for a new relationship, is SO compelling.

The High Kings - Springhill Mining Disaster Mining history is a hobby interest of mine, and this is my absolute favorite cover of the Springhill Mining Disaster (also called The Ballad of Springhill). Originally written and composed by Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl in 1959, just a year after the disaster itself happened, it's been covered by everyone from Peter, Paul and Mary to U2 to The Dubliners. A lot of people consider Luke Kelly's (lead singer of The Dubliner's) version to be the best, but there's something about George Murphy's voice. He did his own cover of Springhill Mining Disaster on his album "The Ballad of Archie Thompson," which I looked for EVERYWHERE, but it was out of production. I ended up posting on his facebook fan group to see if anyone would be willing to sell or burn me a copy, and Murphy HIMSELF messaged me and ended up mailing me one of his own CDs. Absolute top lad.

Peter Gabriel - My Body is a Cage Another instance where the cover is better than the original. Sorry Arcade Fire fans, but Gabriel made this his own. Also, the episode of House M.D. that used it was pretty good.

I'm only gonna tag a couple people prob not the full ten <3 @fishfingersandscarves @xx-vergil-xx @landwriter @dancinbutterfly @cuubism @avelera and anyone else who sees this and wants to share! And now, to sleep with me~