#design subject to change but not for much longer because im almost at the point where i have to make him appear in the comic lol

[blueskittlesart]

Maybe draw Ganondorf from your au?

i was sincerely hoping someone would bring up sof so i could show off all the designing ive been doing in my free time LMAO here's ganon as of rn :)

[autumn-foxfire]

The thing i noticed when i look at dabihawks fanart n read through your expiriences with the meta part of the fandom is that a lot of people seem to lean on dabi side of the dabihawks conflict. Like its hawks who has to make changes to earn dabi. Its hawks whos turned it a villain, its hawks who forgives or even thanks dabi for what he did. Actually i dont think ive ever seen art ro read a fic (but to be fair im extremly selective in fic reading) where dabi is the one to apologise and try to earn hawks

N i think this sorta makes sense because for a lot of dabihawks shippers, dabi is probably their favorite out of the two. That also makes sense cuz hes been around longer n has appealing design so it makes sense that people would try and fit hawks around dabis narrative instead of vice versa. They find dabi more likable n more interesting so its his side they want to explore.

I feel that this is completely different for me because hawks is my no 1 best boy. Like before hawks bnha was the kind of show where i would say 'oh i like the characters but none of them are mine fav' like id say shouto, shinsou or jirou were my favs mostly based on aesthetics or recognizing pieces i usually like in characters in them, but those pieces never being strong enough for me to say this is my fav bnha character like id say izaya is my favorite durarara character or ranpo is my favorite bungo stray dogs character. And then bam. Bird Time. Like when i first saw hawks i think the most i thought was 'damn thats a cool design' but as we got more of him he very quickly became the character i loved most and wanted to see more off.

Dabi on the other hand i was never really interested in. Like he was cool n all but overall i didnt really care for him until the touya theory dropped and until dabihawks. For me hes perfectly fine, i dont dislike him or anything but i like him most when hes involved with other characters i like, like Todorokis n Hawks. Like even now after a good while on Dabihawks juice id still stay hes not my fav villain. That would probably be Toga, Geten (as little as we get of him) and honestly mr compress just for being an evil magician i need more mr compress

So the fact that hawks is my fav means that unlike ppl whos fav is dabi i focus more on how can dabi earn hawks. How can dabi get better, would he ask for help, would he quit villainy, would he apologize. And most importantly would hawks accept him back.

Makes me feel like amongst dabihawks shippers theres simply two different streams that would probably get annoyed by each others content n feel like the other is spoiling their fav character.

Like i sure as fuck get annoyed when artists i follow for dabihawks start talking about how hawks should have been a villain n how hawks is actually an evil murderer while the league has a point n is poiting out that the heroes will save only those who dont fight back. No really thats a take i heard, lets just forget muscular, mustard, moonfish, gentle, the yakuza and ALL FOR FUCKING ONE who were all arrested perfectly fine without fighting back. But of course these people dont mean saved as in arrested, forced to rexamin their own behavior and work to be better people, they mean saved as in i want my favs to be coddled and patted on the back and instantly forgiven and even told they were right all along and they are the most special a good. Geeze

I fuckin went off subject so hard this is less of an ask n more of a rant now. The only good thing about seeing all those bad takes is that every time i see one my motivation to write a dabihawks story where dabi faces concequences, and they actually have to hash the whole villain hero ideologies thing out, grows stronger

...I’m sorry, I wanted to answer this sooner but wanted to get the smaller asks out of the way first T-T

But yes! That’s been my experience when it comes to Dabihawks as well. Not many people focus on Hawks side of the conflict and instead tend to make him the agressor in the relationship when they want conflict (it always tends to be Hawks who upsets Dabi for example, or Hawks will say something insensitive towards Dabi or do something that upsets Dabi). Not many people treat them as a pair, they just tend to focus on the Dabi angst more then the Hawks angst or angst experienced by the both of them (I like to call that the Dabias and many people suffer from it in the Dabihawks shipping fandom I’ve found).

I like reading stories like this too, from time to time, but I’m just tired of all the stories or comics or fan art being Hawks the bad person in the relationship with him having to apologise and make it up to Dabi. Especially when in canon it’s Dabi that has treated Hawks pretty terribly (he almost got him killed by lying to him about when he was going to release High End and he almost killed him during the raid, meanwhile Hawks hasn’t anything as horrible towards Dabi except hold him at knife point but that was more for his own protection then to threaten Dabi).

I feel like I’m just bitching because people don’t wrote fanfiction to my specifications but you’d be grumpy too if your favourite character always gets the short end of the stick in work that is supposed to be about the pair of them being a couple.

Also don’t get me started on the stories that make Hawks “see the light” and join Dabi’s side after he maimed him, some even going far as to have him thank Dabi for what he did. It just reeks of the Dabias and I absolutely hate. Let Hawks experience trauma you cowards, especially trauma that we know was caused by the hands of dear old Dabi.

I wish more work would try to reform Dabi as a person instead of having Hawks become a villain (especially because works that usually have Hawks become a villain tend to ignore the horrifying plans the League want to commit or acknowledged them but fool themselves into thinking Hawks would actually be down for all the BS). I think it’s more interesting to see a bad person try to change, it’s why I’ve enjoyed Endeavor’s character arc despite not liking him as a character. Like sure, I don’t mind bastardization arcs too but they have to be done with character I can see it happening too and Hawks isn’t that type of person.

(In fact it’s such an interesting source of conflict that Dabi and Hawks are very resolved people. They’re not likely to change their ways for anything but I don’t really see people explore that even though it’s the perfect source for angst).

I’m so tired of villain stans who wanted Hawks to become evil (and then wanted him to validate their murder favs). I want more stories where Hawks puts his foot down and Dabi realises he wants to be a better person for him (it’s in those stories I could actually see him bonding with his family again too because right now Dabi is a man with no qualms with breaking his family apart for his revenge).

I just wished more people would let Dabi face the consequences of his actions too. Like if you’re going to make Hawks suffer for what he did (even though I roll my eyes at the thought) then Dabi who has done much worse should be suffering ten times over.

Make it make sense.

[bonbonswirl-blog]

Old passer

ALL THE CHARACTERS BELONG TO @brueklynn I OWN NOTHING. You already know this is not canon, i want to point out that there is a character here that belongs to toony BUT doesnt have any kind of design or personality so i created them myself for this story XD means the anything here is not canon at all, that it thank u ^^

Wallaby was standing outside in front of a random store under shade. There he is, standing alone, tapping the ground under him with one foot, his hands in his pants pockets while looking bored. At these fine balmy days, almost every eye hides behind sunglasses and hair flows freely in the breeze, erratic steps echo. The janitor Penetrating gaze probed Perusing the sea of faces, like if he is looking for someone he was supposed to meet up with ages ago and they never came, now he is still here waiting for their arrival at any second. If only time can pass faster, or if he had something to entertain himself away from this killing boredom instead of leaving him to dwell with it. Letting his eyes roam over the streets, he just moved his head right and left checking if one of those faces is the person he meant to meet. However, he didnt know that few moments later something going to etch insidr his memory is going to take place right now. It was the moment when he noticed one of the passers being a lady, a normal lady, just like all the other ladies in the streets. but for some unknown reason, he felt something being off, her presence pulling his attention away from any other person.

Long fluid wisps of chocolate hair that always seemed to gleam when it  captured the light just right. Large liquid blue eyes held such a serenity, trimmed by long pretty lashes, lovely eyes, yet somehow seem gentle. Florid cheeks and flawlessly syrup sweet sculpted lips was lilac soft. She was all about simplicity, holding a small bag in her hands, wearing a short cute bright flowing dress, walking like an elegant lady.

And still for today, wallaby have no idea what was it in his guts that forced him to move his legs as fast as he can to approach her before she get any further away and dissappear from sight.

"E-Excuse me miss!" She turned around, facing wallaby who was holding his flatcap in his hands, waiting for his request. He looked at her with confused eyes, of course he would be, he doesnt know why is he even talking to her from tha first place, what does his guts want from a  random person he never saw? "Yes sir?" She smiled, lipstick glowing. She had a soothing voice, atleast thats what wallaby thought, she seemed nice, that kind of woman whom hold a tiny warmth within eyes. Those eyes...just by looking at this pair he can see one of his gazes in them. That evoked something from some part of his brain, He had no memory of her, atleast thats what he thinks, cause he doesnt recall any. Perhaps its not a memory per se, but echoes that call to his intuition. He started to think he may recognize her before, maybe he did neet her at one point in his life? maybe that was the reason why his legs automatically moved to catch her? Yes, it was, he can tell. Her simple smile was unique, reminded him of a certain smile too. he could have swore he saw it a lot, but where? when? And who? He was anxious for recognition he never knew. "I..." the janitor had no absolute idea of what to say when stopping a stranger for no reason, but he tried to come with a good excuse so he doesnt seem like a fool. How about..the reason he approached her from the first place? Why he ran to her before he lost her view. "Miss did we...did we meet before somewhere?" "We did? Oh Im sorry but, I dont think i do remember..." she apologized, wallaby didnt feel sad or dissapointed because she was just a stranger to him, but his inside did. She doesnt know him too, he can now let her go away right? Nope, that answer didnt calm his guts down, his tongue isnt satisfied with it. He looked at her again. Noticing smooth Bangs obscuring the woman forhead, framing her face. what is so intresting is that.

Her bangs are just like wallaby ones.

That was a nice detail, but all wallaby wanted is to sooth those unknown feelings and go back quickly to waiting for a certain person. "Are you sure? cuz I do feel that we may had knew each other at some point. I mean come on! Our bangs are really so similiar missy!"

So how can wallaby know a lady who is 20 years older than him? Dont ask him, ask his gut. it was still impossible for him not to be held prisoner by the intuitons. but there was undeniable familiarity to her features, possibly thats what held him so captivated. she giggled slightly "I just noticed that too...even our hair color is the same shade! Staring at your eye...I feel myself looking at a mirror! So..whats your name? Maybe I can remember you then!" "Oh! My name is-"

They both stopped when they heard objects hitting the floor with a loud thud.

They both turned their heads for the source of the voice, to their right concerned. It was a man with short dark brown hair, ruddy skin, a flatcap, standing there. Frozen, arms still static in the same position he left his belongings to fall down.

Wallaby was puzzled. His father constantly welcomed any kind of guest he met with kind smiles and  words. He never gave that kind of a shocked reaction to anyone before, especially for just meeting a random lady. His child himself didnt see him that shocked before about anything. But he tried to push it off for now and get back to the subject. "Oh dad Here you are! This is m-" He was cut too when he saw the woman next to him no longer smiling, soft glowy lipstick in a frown, not being too happy to see his father. Drown in her unwanted sad moments, lowered Dull orbs of ocean blocked under the dark shadow created of her fallen bangs, her expressions faded, the molten chocolate that hung precisely on her back turning dry, cheery dress no longer dancing with the breeze. The brown haired boy doesnt understand a thing... unsettling feelings began filling him. Whats wrong? Why are they both That greetly dissapointed? What making his head spin are the unexplained transitions. Who is she? What does she have to do with his dad? He wished he could Leap straight for the answer.

Mason already felt the knife before he saw it. Looking at the girl wallaby just met in a forlorn stare. He didnt blink and in the depths of his gaze, he couldnt believe his eyes anymore. He looked into her eyes one more second to make sure this isnt the wrong person or some hallucinations haunting him.

It was his partner

Or you could say his previous partner.

His shoulders hunched together like if he was trying to disappear inside himself. Even his dark eyes seemed to be attempting to retreat inside his head.

"...Lucy...."

"...You...."

She couldnt even remember his name. Expected. Why would she do anyway? Mason can still recognize her voice, even though its been...very long years since he last heard it, or seen her face...She wasnt that girl he loved, who cared about his being, or encouraged him to do his best in achieving dreams. No, she is just an old passer from his old life. The old lucy was long gone. Lucy snutched up an eye to finally take a glance at her once spouse. Looking at each other, Both of them had changed, yet still identifiable, funny how much tricky the time is. they realised that the eyes whose were once filled with so much purpose and love was now replaced with bitterness, and maybe hate. The only thing that showed any resemblance to the man was the shell the bitter soul inhabited. His old self was gone too. Mason never left anyone, they walked away. In his life he had been the sunshine, giving warmth, light and love without reserve, Yet there came a time when the pain within overwhelmed and only tears came. Her abandonment was like a betrayal to him, a burning to his soul, a dusty hot road on which his mind and body can wither. He had lost the one he loved the most in the world, the one who had kept him stable for periods in his life time. The near loss of everyone he had loved wasnt emotionally stabling to him. Only his son wallaby stayed, refusing to leave his dear father side. It was never an exciting blank page, a fresh start, or a choice to mason, but more akin of being naked in a blizzard. Lucy guessed she should do something about this stifled silence, to break it with a move, It is her own job to find an easful air around herself, so she made it towards him with an outstretch hand and that kind of desponded face usually reserved for your dissatisfaction. But mason startled like a deer in the woods, almost toppling as he took a large step backwards, entire face glowed up with pain and anguish. He let his face fall with gravity again. stepping aside while he slunk past not looking left or right, Leaving wallaby and his own regrets behind, alone. Wallaby wasnt ok at this point, blankly staring at the path his dad toke until distance obscured, hurt was welling in his son eyes, his dad looked broken. Lucy...lucy...Where did he hear that name before? Its repeated in his head many times, mentioned there and audiable by only one voice, his father voice. He unglued his eyes from the path and returned a stare for the woman in hopes for a small claricifation. She sighted him out from the corner of her eye, unable to look at him anymore. "So you..." "Miss..I-" "dont tell me that your name is wallaby...." He got it.

He finally got it.

That woman is his mother.

His Absent mother.

His heart jolts in pain. His jaw went slack with dumbfounded, eyes resigned surprise, brain stutters for a moment and his eyes take in more light than he expected, every part of him goes on pause while his thoughts catch up. Memories started to flood in every blood vessel in his brain, all of them are his five years old self, a beautifull young woman tugging along his side, she is nobody else but his mother lucy. All those stale pictures and voices clinging to his mind at a once. He can now recall them all. It was like he was living those moments, or visualizing them. Set of warm hands he would let hold him own clapping together before holding him off the ground and spinning his small body in the air, voice cradle his mind in familiar sounds, her soothing him from losing his favorite balloon or humming her favorite song at the kitchen. He still remember their last time playing together before the next day, he saw her with suitcases in hand, vanishing through the door, never coming back. For the first while he felt lost with not a single place feeling like home. However happiness found its way back thanks to mason treasured love. Time after time her presence in his life was erased. At this moment here, where he is meeting his mother for the first time after growing up. He felt that a part of his brain Where there should be certain memories is blank space, like a soft beige wall bereft of photographs. After a wash of cold he stepped out from the shadows and highlights of sundown. blazing sun descended, burning the sky in a powerful mix of amber and blood red. The dying sunlight seeped out behind sillhouet. Lucy spun around with her heals, back already facing wallaby in neglect, ready to go far away and leave him, again, in the same day he just met her. The rhythm of her heels clicking against the hard streets floor didnt stop wallaby from uttering his words. "Why did you leave dad?..." She paused her footsteps. "Why did you leave me?.." she stayed silent. How could she answer this? "You werent worth it, wallaby." He was raked with disdain, His eyes glistened with the pain of her betrayal, leaving wallaby with no alternative but to seek a new suspect of more harm, the truth of her innocence is discovered.

"You two were just old passers in my old life. Im glad l didnt waste it in you." Nobody around was heard, just continual taps of heels heading to a straight way. Stepping on her son heart each time they connect to the ground. Her kid steadily tracking her road until she completly escaped over the horizon. His eyes allowed her reluctantly to go past that orange lane, he was unsure about how should he feel about this new memory.

As the daylight dwindled the tension in Skye grew. Mason was in a slight crowded area in a specific street, Standing there on his own, doing nothing but giving a thousand mile stare into space, somehow the noised around doesnt affect any bit of his focusing. Wallaby had found him after taking some time for searching around, reaching him to be by his side. He never even said a single "hey..." to him. Instead, they both kept walking home in a queit sunset. Mason made no attempt to speak the whole way. Apparently, his young boy had expected this, as he kept shut too, mostly cause he didnt know what to say in this situation. Heavy sighs gracing each few minuts passes from the father mouth, did his eyes shine with the terror of his memories. Empty, yet They told a story of sadness, The dark lines around them didnt help much. He didnt mean to fall in love with lucy, but he did anyway, From the very first time he talked to her, he knew there was something so true in this person that reassure him he could be the true him. If only he had enough cohesion power to describe what happened that day to his loved son wallaby, but right now This was mason burden, his kid shouldnt be sharing it with him. His steps were dragged and movements forced. While the companion was down in the dumps, an inkling of wistfulness glimmer in soft eyes dropped to the corners. He fixed his eye toward the sky, wallaby always admired sunsets. But tonight, he felt blue, curbed. Not wanting to think about anything and just get back home to rest from this long day.

At nightfall the heat of the day would evaporate along with the last sunrays. At that night wallaby closed his eyes, head pressed on a soft pillow. hoping for sleep to take him away from this thing called reality. The darkness overtook him slowly, and he fell asleep. But For the first time, Little tears falling from his face.

[curly-q-reviews]

ROAD TO THE OSCAR MAYER WIENER AWARDS 2K19

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, 2018 (dir. Joel Coen, Ethan Coen)

Nominated for: Best Original Song, Best Costume Design, Best Adapted Screenplay

SPOILER ALERT THAR BE SPOILERS AHEAD ME HEARTIES BE YE WARNED

wowee what a cool film!!  i went into this not knowing much about it except it was directed by the Coen brothers (directors of Fargo and The Big Lebowski) which set real high expectations for me.  these guys are real masters of storytelling and what immediately come to mind when i think of movies that know how to effectively use dark humor.  i also love the kinds of stories they tell in general, how they take subjects and settings that seem kinda mundane and just give them this little extra spark. 

so is this newest film just as good as their other work???  well id say yeah for sure!!!  it reminds me a lot of a film they did shortly after The Big Lebowski called O Brother, Where Art Thou?, because theyre both period pieces AND because they both feature a myriad of eclectic and interesting characters.  the one thing that makes The Ballad of Buster Scruggs really stand out from their other films however is the fact that this is actually an anthology made up of six different stories, all set during the same time period in The Wild West.  its also worth mentioning that this movie was made to premiere on Netflix, which is something ive started to see more and more as the streaming platform becomes the new go-to source of media content.  its very exciting to see such prolific directors go the Netflix route and have great success with it, because it means that the platform really is capable of creating high-quality movies and TV shows and working with big-name talent.  im sure the big hollywood production companies are all quaking in their lil booties cause this means big BIG changes are on the horizon

ok so ive reviewed anthology series before, notably Black Mirror, and with those reviews i ranked the short stories in order of least to most favorite.  so i guess in this case ill do the same, although its hard to really rank these cause i truly enjoyed all of them in different ways.  there was one however that didnt really tickle my fancy much, which was “Near Algodones”.  this one stars james franco as a bank robber who seems to have met his match in a fiery (probably crazy) bank teller.  he gets caught and hung from a tree by the town’s sheriff, but nearly manages to escape death when a Native American tribe swoops in and kills the sheriff and his crew.  james franco is saved by a cattle driver, only to be caught again by the next town’s sheriff for allegedly trying to hawk the cattle (which was not the case at all).  right before they kick the chair out from under him at the hanging, he sees a beautiful woman in blue, who at first smiles at him but then looks unnerved as he stares back at her. 

i think with this one the ending really didnt do much for me, i kinda didnt get it.  i did understand the whole irony behind surviving punishment for a crime he DID commit but getting hanged for a crime he never committed, and the bank teller was pretty hilarious, but everything else about the segment was just ok.  james franco didnt really blow me away (he never really does but thats besides the point), the rest of the performances were fine, and the story just kinda zipped on through.  maybe ill give this one another watch to see if the ending makes any more sense to me, or if theres any sense to be made from it at all

next up for me would be “The Gal Who Got Rattled”, and this segment i have mixed feelings over.  its about this brother and sister who set out on the Oregon trail so that the brother can get his sister to marry his business partner in Oregon.  the sister seems like a kind of wishy-washy, subdued character who just kinda goes along with whatever her brother says without giving much of her own opinion.  i gotta give credit to zoe kazan (who starred in The Big Sick) cause she does a great job with this character, totally spot-on performance.  ok so turns out the brother is a fucken HORRIBLE businessman who screws up all his business deals all the time, and he tragically dies like two days into being on the oregon trail.  he has this annoying-ass dog that barks all the time and everyone else on the caravan is sick of it, so when the brother dies the sister just lets one of the trail leaders put it down.  turns out the sister like did not like her brother at all but was always too afraid to say anything.  now getting back to the bad businessman thing, apparently he had promised the helper boy that is helping move their covered wagon a large sum of money, half of it halfway through the journey and the rest when they get to oregon.  problem is, the sister doesnt have the money, so it was either left in the brothers pocket when he was buried or there wasnt actually any money at all and he lied, y’know, like a bad businessman does.  the trail leader who put the annoying dog down offers to help her, and the two start to get close.  so now its like a pseudo love story thing.  except it ends pretty tragically (the sister dies its a long story and pretty ironic just watch it if u wanna know)

so uuuhhhhh this one was long as shit, like a lot longer than the other segments when it didnt really need to be???  like it just kept  going and going, and again the ending didnt really make up for how long it was.  i really liked zoe kazan in this, but otherwise nothing to write home about. 

number four on my list would have to go to “All Gold Canyon”, which basically just follows the story of a gold miner in the mountains trying to get that money honey.  this segment is the simplest one out of the bunch, but i gotta say its absolutely gorgeous.  what beautiful scenery and cinematography.  it provides a nice contrast to our disheveled, run-down gold miner who is just tearing up the beautiful grassy fields trying to get to this gold.  there seems to be a theme in this one of man’s relationship to nature, and how the gold miner does put in effort to respect it but still takes advantage of it for his own benefit.  and i guess theres a broader theme of greed, or the ruthless and endless pursuit of wealth which can drive people to do crazy and desperate things.  i definitely really enjoyed this one, especially the gold miner character played by tom waits.  but otherwise it didnt stand out as much to me as the other segments im gonna talk about

SPEAKING OF WHICH heres number three!!  “The Mortal Remains” is right up my alley, and has some more mythical elements to it than the other segments ive talked about so far.  so we have a wagon full of passengers all going to this hotel for various reasons, and its a really diverse cast of characters: we have the older wife of a prolific religious lecturer, a rich Frenchman, a trapper, a foppish Englishman, and a cheery laid-back Irishman, the last two seeming to be companions of some sort.  they all get on the topic of the true nature of mankind, and the three characters opposite of the strange pair all have something different to say.  the trapper believes that all people are inherently the same, with the same basic needs.  the older woman disagrees and insists that there are two kinds of people, upright and sinning.  and then the Frenchman says that both of them are wrong, that human existence is much more complicated and nuanced than that; no one persons life is exactly the same as another’s.  and then we have the Englishman and the Irishman, who turn out to be bounty hunters of some sort (is heavily alluded that they are grim reaper-type figures).  they explain their method of completing their kills, and talk about how they enjoy watching their victims “try to make sense of it all” in their death throes.  these two clearly have a much more cold and sinister idea of the nature of mankind, and the rest become very unsettled all the way to the hotel.  no one else even dares to step out of the carriage while the bounty hunters drag their latest victim through the front entrance and up the stairs.

oh man this segment was great!  i think the reason its third on my list is cause i really wish there was more to it, like if the Coen brothers spent more time on this one instead of “The Gal Who Got Rattled” it would be perfect.  Jonjo O’Neill and Brendan Gleeson as the bounty hunters were so enthralling, and i loved watching them play off of each other.  hell, i couldve had a whole movie featuring those two.  and the screenwriting really shines in this segment too.  this segment almost feels like a fable or something, which is really fitting for the time period.  makes me wonder if they had based it off of an actual fable.  but anyway yeah this ones awesome!

i had a hard time choosing between “The Mortal Remains” and this next segment for second place cause i liked them both equally, but in the end “Meal Ticket” gets #2 purely because of the utterly fantastic performance by Harry Melling, who plays a quadriplegic actor in a traveling show run by liam neesons character, an irish traveling entertainer.   the story itself is really simple, we just see this disabled actor be carted from one town to the next, doing the same stage show which is basically just him reciting famous prose throughout the ages.  meanwhile liam neeson is trying to get as much money as he can out of the audience members.  he doesnt interact much with harry melling outside of feeding him and helping him piss and get dressed.  u get the sense that he doesnt really see his disabled actor as an actual person, but more of an entertaining object or a pet.  and this becomes even more apparent when the irishman gets some competition from another traveling entertainer who has a chicken that can do math.  he sees this chicken getting more money than him, so he buys it off of the other guy and takes it with him.  and finally, the poor limbless actor is literally and figuratively tossed aside for the next best thing.

man oh man what a great segment!  harry melling blew me away with his performance, the fact that he was able to get such a nuanced range of emotion out of the few lines he was given (basically he had to recite the same shit over and over again) was so impressive to me.  and his non-verbal communication was really solid too.  liam neeson did really well in his role too.  and again the story itself is really great, simple but effective and really gets the point across without having to beat the audience over the head with its message. OH YEAH ITS REAL GOOD LOVE IT

and finally we have my #1 pick, which i think the directors knew this was the best one out of the bunch too cause its the first segment as well as the title of the whole movie.  “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” has that signature Coen brothers wit and dark humor that i love, it plays off of typical Western movie tropes and is very tongue-in-cheek and i ate that shit up.  tim blake nelson as the titular buster is just so fucken perfect for this role, he really shines in this and its kind of a shame that its one of the shorter segments cause it really is the best one and he knocks it out of the park.  we got some great music in this segment too, which is where that Best Original Song nom comes in.   this one also has some strong fable-y vibes to it, like this story could be amongst the likes of American folklore like Paul Bunyan and Johnny Appleseed.  i wont get much into the plot of this one but i highly recommend watching it, even if you dont wanna see the rest of the segments. 

the segments fit together pretty well overall, although the tone of each of them differs slightly the fact that the setting and time period are the same is enough to firmly knit all these stories together.  its a really unique idea for a movie, and is so far the best attempt at an anthology movie that ive ever seen purely because the stories really all make sense together and play off of each other well.  in other anthology movies ive seen like The ABC’s of Death the segments usually dont have much at all to do with each other, except that they all fall in the same genre.  so overall id say give this a watch, especially if ur a Coen brothers fan, cause theres some real good stuff in here.

well thats all i got for now cowboys!!  i watched Roma the other day and CRIED REAL HARD so get ready for me to kiss that movies ass in a review that should be done in the next few days.  until then go uuhhhhhh lasso a cow or something.  chew some tobaccy.  fondle a barmaids titties.  die of dysentery.  y’know just old west things~

[booksbookandmorebooks]

Homecoming - The Cinematography.

Hello my lovelies I’m back with my first post of the new year! i thought id start it off with something a little different. When looking at how much I upload and how sporadic my posts seem to be lately I started thinking about what else I do with my time (besides reading) and well, honestly my only other hobby is that I tend to binge watch a lot of shows. In the past month I have binged watched Alias Grace, The OA and shamefully quite a few more including the show I’m here to talk about today, homecoming. So, I thought why not incorporate my passion into my blog. So, from here on out this blog will not only be dedicated to books that I love it will also include my reviews on the recent shows I have been watching. I really hope you enjoy this little change up and enjoy my reviews.

So without further ado let’s get started!

This show is about a young woman known as Heidi (Julia Roberts) who we initially see harassed by a department of defence official. Who is extremely interested in the time she spent employed and head of the project formerly known as home coming. A facility described and branded as a a type of institute focused on helping former soldiers transition back to civilian life after their service and help them adjust. While jumping between the present day and a series of flashbacks we see our characters realise that not only have they been lying to the people around them they have also been lying to themselves and now is the time to face up to the truth and the repercussions of some very questionable choices.

Stats:

Title: Homecoming

Genre: Psychological thriller / Drama

Release date: 02.11.2018

No. of episodes / seasons: 1 Season – 10 Episodes

Episode duration: 25-30 minutes.

Main cast: Julia Roberts, Bobby Cannavale, Stephan James.

Rotten tomatoes rating: 98%

 So to start off with this show is not exactly your normal stero-typical show. If anything, the first half of episode one I was unsure if this was something I would actually enjoy. It all seemed a little too out there but I pushed through and once I had finished episode one I was hooked. The main issue I can see people having with it would be the odd shots and the odd pacing. These are one of a few topics I will be discussing and analysing below. While these factors can be a little daunting and seem a little pretentious, when you really look at them, they become so interesting to watch unfold. You can really let your imagination run with this series, it feels more like an art form in some senses than just a show. Instead of it being a throw away show that is trying to appear edgy, it genuinely provides the audience with this feeling of uneasy and eeriness throughout. This series not only stuck with me for the storyline and the shocking twists but also because of the intensity of emotions you feel when watching. When talking about this with a friend I realised that this show is more addictive due to the anticipation of what experimental shot or method we would experience next, more than overall enjoyment of the show.

 In this post I will mainly be talking about the methods ,themes and the many approaches the director and producers have used to create this show and how they in turn, translated to me personally.

One of the most common shots we see for the first half of the show are these downward angle shots, now im not massively into my media studies so there are most probably a fast amount of terminologies I am missing but bare with me. These shots tend to make you feel like you are watching an animal in a maze. You get to see the characters from a bird’s eye view and watch them wind their way around their surroundings. When watching this I couldn’t help but feel the characters, any characters involved in this method were puppets being watching and manipulated, Even the bigger characters who we initially believe to have power and control are being used. Almost like animals in a testing lab. This is confirmed for me when in the episode the camera pans out to reveal the design of the building our series mainly takes place in. It is a big building with huge celling to floor walls of glass. Almost like an observatory, furthering my theory of observation through testing, a theme we know towards the end of the series is very important to the story development.

Another very important feature in this series is the change in aspect ratio and how its used to differentiate the two time periods that the show is set in. (past and present) the use of this method while a little jarring at first (it had me checking the tv and the app when I watched it) is so clever because when jumping between two different time periods it is so easy to confuse the audience and risk the chance of the storylines becoming messy and convoluted but with this it was almost impossible not to follow. We see the present depicted with two black sections of either side of the screen and the past in full screen view. Now as I mentioned, this method while clever isn’t something that you would necessarily deem as clever. You may see it like I did at first, something there that has no real meaning, it is just to further the weird feeling this show creates, that is until episode eight. Contained in one scene that I won’t spoil for you; a particular character has a huge revelation and the director not only shows the severity and shocking nature of this through the use of facial expressions and music but the aspect ratio we have been used to seeing in the present is used to demonstrate the character being bought into the light. We see that in her moment the camera shot widens and the present is left in full screen mode. To symbolise that her character is no longer in the dark and she can finally see the bigger picture. Something that when it happened I had to take a minute to appreciate it. It blew my mind that how such a simple change can really impact the feeling that you have when watching a show like this.

While on the subject of time differences I want to also mention a more common method but one that proved just as effective. In the shots of the past the colours are all desaturated and have this sad melancholy feel to them which really do help show the vast dullness of our main characters present life. Especially when compared to the flashbacks. The bright lights, the white walls and open nature of the building our main character is working in, the fake over the top smiles everyone sports, the over helpfulness of Heidi when compared to the reclusive and reluctant (almost isolated) whisper of a person we now see. Simple yet, very very effective.

Now as I mentioned, after to talking to some friends that have watched this show the biggest problem most people seemed to share was the pacing. I often heard it referred to as an issue and while I can understand it from their point of view I have to very strongly disagree. This was not an issue for me, this show was not meant to be rushed. It was supposed to burn slowly and gradually to help you grow as a viewer alongside the characters. If this show was rushed the audience would most definitely feel robbed. A piece of art like this is not something to be watched flippantly in one sitting and be disregarded upon a pile of throw away trash tv. This is really something.

I feel the shows pacing is intentionally slow because it mirrors the story and the story telling method. The relationships are gradually built through therapy sessions, a method of help that is used to slowly help the victim. All those subtle sighs, glances and twitches that help define a character are lost if not handled with care and time. You’re not only watching these people, you’re growing with them. It’s a way to engage the audience without them knowing it. Hooking and drawing you in. it captivates you and on reflection once I finished this show, I was fascinated by how it managed to do such an amazing job at that.

Not only that, but at this pace you are provided with enough time to form your own opinions and feelings towards these people, their choices and their pasts, instead of being provided with a set narrative. This way your feelings are not dictated to you, you’re not presented with the black and white ideal of good and bad, in fact this show often tends to blur those lines. Making peoples seemingly bad decisions almost justifiable. We are provided with on numerous occasions scenarios that show not only the redeeming qualities of a person but their flaws and we are able to form our own views on them in our own time. Something that wouldn’t be possible without a slow burner.

I really could continue analysing this show because there are just so many amazing factors. From music to the close-up face shots or the intensity of the volume that changes so frequently but I will stop, I have to at some point. All my friends are bored of me talking this show up, so I suggest you go and watch it yourself. You can only learn so much from a review after all. But if you are looking for something that will leave you speechless and stay with you for weeks after, I can’t recommend this highly enough, if that’s not enough the amazing talent of Julia Roberts should at least tempt you a little. I really hope you enjoy the show and can start looking for your own explanations and feelings towards this alien methodology! Until next time have a great week!

[archived--hell]

1, 2, 17, honestly all of them if you’re up to it

1 - already answered 

2. Do you have a personal favourite among your OCs?

L O R D T jupiter fuck man got damn id die for jupiter 

3. Have you ever adopted a character or gotten a character from someone else?

i have adopted characters before, but ive never done anything with them, and i have received characters Back from people but besides that nah

4. A character you rarely talk about?

HI PLEASE I BEG OF YOU ASK ABOUT THE GODS PLE AS E IM DYING

5. If you could make only one of your OCs popular/known, who would it be?

fuck uh.. honestly if its only semi popular would i do this bc being Well Known would be nice, yeah, but.. it scares me? idk but uh probably leo or aero, theyre two boys i hold close to my heart

6. Two OCs of yours that look alike despite not being related?

:) eldur and leo kinda? idk i try not to make any of them look alike rip

7. Are your OCs part of any story or stories?

YES! theyre actually all part of one universe called cooking with demons! i have a whole game planned out for the man cast kinda? but all in all its all set within one universe, with multiple different stories occurring within it jhfdksg

8 - already answered

9. Would you ever be willing to give any of your OCs to someone else?

unless specfifically made for them upon request, no. ive already tried that once and it lead to me losing any and all control i had over my characters. At this moment, i only “share” a few ocs with my boyfriend @coffee-burglar and even then, its taken almost a year to even be able to do that

10. Introduce an OC with a complicated design?

uh, all of them are kinda complicated for me, but as of right now, that would go to leos full form. (if u want a ref hmu and ill post it, but it wont be my art)

11. Is there any OC of yours you could describe as a “sunshine”?

like a ray of sunshine? yeah! angel and stitch would fit perfectly for that!

12. Name an OC that isn’t yours but who you like a lot

@coffee-burglar their oc chrome n koh,  or derek but thats bc im a hoe

13. Do you have any troublemaker OCs?

aero, jhor, innis, leo are all trouble makers to some degree, leo being the most trouble some

14. Introduce an OC with a tragic backstory

uhhhh fuck what counts as tragic?

i guess id have to say leo or jupiter mostly, but eldur fits too

15. Do you like to talk about your OCs with other people?

if youd let me i would yell about these fucks for hours on end, ive done it

16. Which one of your OCs would be the best at biology (school subject)?

the best but wouldnt enjoy it: Jupiterthe best and would absolutely enjoy it: colby

17. Any OC OTPs?

stitch/lavaaero/kohcolby/derek/inniswill/happiness aeyr/Eberictderek/Xhaztolleo/eldur

18. Any OC crackships?

jhfkdfsjghdfkjhgdkfjsgl i never talk abt it but will/aero is fucking A+

19. Introduce an OC that means a lot to you (and explain why)

ah,, leo. i originally made him to project the worst in myself onto, and because of that ive made his life a living shit hole. but,, recently ive been hell bent on giving him a good ending, one where he heals, and lives his life ok, where he finally, finally has a chance to be happy and get help. its,, kind of been a tiny growing point for me? he just, means a lot to me because of that haha

20. Do any of your OCs sing? If they sing, care to share more details (headcanon voice, what kind of songs they like etc)?

uhhh all of their voice claims are songs n such but only a few of them actually sing in canon! heres the voice claims of the ones who do sing:

Aero - thats his voice, but hed probably more likely to sing Something Like ThisAngelStitch - this is her voice! but shed be much more likely to sing something a lot more upbeat, kind of like thisColby (its jeremy from bmc jghfdkg)

and one i dont have a voice claim for yet that does sing canonically is Sycamore! 

21. Your most artistic OC

!!!! oh thatd easily be will! hes nothing professional at all, but he does enjoy drawing and making diy type projects :0c hazels also artistic but with food :0c but what would you expect from a kitchen witch

22. Is there any OC of yours people tend to mischaracterize? If yes, how?

Hi My Names Skinny Penis And No One Has Ever Even Looked At My Ocs For More Than Two Seconds

23. Introduce OC that has changed from your first idea concerning what the character would be like?

lordt all of them would fit that, but the one thats changed the most? lordy thatd probably be will! he used to be a persona that was mostly only interested in dying and getting fucked, but now hes? evolved into a fully fledged character, and has even changed from being human lmao

24. If you could meet one OC of yours, who would it be and why?

jupiter, simply because he is The Biggest Comfort i have. hes,,, really important to me and i love him a lot

25. The OC that resembles you the most (same hobby, height, shared like/dislike for something etc?)

:) its bold of you to assume they dont all resemble me in some way. the most though? damian. lazy motherfucker with 200 emotional issues and no motivation to fix any of them

26. Have you ever had to change your OC’s design or something else about them against your will?

…yeah.

27. Any OCs that were inspired by a certain song?

Nope, most tend to be born from ideas spawned by me n my bf concepting about my ocs, and what would happen if this thing happened? yknow?

28. Your most dangerous OC?

He has yet to be revealed >:)c his names icarus

29. Which one of your OCs would go investigate an abandoned house at night without telling anyone they’re going?

INNIS, GOD INNIS WOULD AND HED PROBABLY DIE

30. Which one of your OCs would most likely have a secret stuffed animal collection?

secret: damiannot so secret: colby

31. Pick one OC of yours and explain what their tumblr blog would be like (what they reblog, layout, anything really)

uHHhhHh 

damian would probably have a very shitty coded blog theme (or default) and would genuinely only reblog shitty, abstract memes, and nice food recipes for hazel to make him

32. Which one of your OCs would be the most suitable horror game protagonist and why?

protagonist? if youre going for the scared baby, colby. if ur going for the stoic “thats weird but ok” one, innis or aero.antagonist tho???? Leo and angelica :)

33. Your shyest OC?

uh, a oc thats genuinely shy and not just anxiety filled? angel :0c shes had a very limited interaction pool with anything thats not other angels so she tends to shy away from others bc she really, really doesnt want to get into awkward situations

34. Do you have any twin characters?

Jupiter and leo!

35. Any sibling characters?

Jupiter, leo, angelica, damian, eldur

jupiter, leo, damian, and angelica are all related via their dad, while eldur is related to damian via their mom

36. Do you have OC pairs where the other part belongs to someone else (siblings, lovers, friends etc)?

uhh if im understanding this question right yeah i do! derek, koh, n a lot of others belong to @coffee-burglar ! ive just roped them into my universe dkjfhkdjgh

37. Introduce an OC who is not quite human

Op All Of My Characters Are Inhuman

38. Which one of your OCs would be the best dancer?

surprisingly? aero! hes got really good rhythm and can actually dance really well, its kinda scary

39. Introduce any character you want

:)))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))) Ill let yall have a choice, pick one

1.) Lust2.) Greed

40. Any fond memories linked to your characters? Feel free to share!

fond?? uh,, not really. but damian does have a very important memory attached to him.

tw for suicide ment hjgkdfs

with damian, i created him after i tried to kill myself and was stuck in a mental hospital. i had just finished reaing the first shadowhunters book, and decided to try and draw the first demon(???? was that what he was?? im a dumbass and its been over 2 years) you met, which had bright blue hair and if i remember correctly, electric green eyes? but yeah. i made him to cope with all the mental stress i had while being forced to be in that hospital, and hes become very close to my heart because of that

41. Has anyone drawn fanart of your OCs? If yes, maybe show a picture or two here (remember sources & permissions!)

!!!!!!!!! yeah!!! my boyfriends drawn damian and most of my characters bgjkfdhgkfdsgl but one i do hold close to my heart (bc at the time, i barely knew them) was when @stuck-in-the-ghost-zone drew aeyr! it made me really happy tbh. i still have it saved to my phone actually!!!

42. Which one of your OCs would be the most interested in Greek gods?

uhhhh,,, provided that they found a way to get anything involving earth and their beliefs itd probably be either angel or colby. angel enjoys learning anything and everything she can, while colby enjoys hearing about the Tea™ that comes with greek shit

43. Do you have any certain type when you create your OCs? Do you tend to favour some certain traits or looks? It’s time to confess

lordt ok

i really just? enjoy making demons really, or anything that doesnt quite fit “conveniently attractive” in at least one form they have. (i also favor making guys bc im Gay)

44. Something you like about your OCs in general

how well theyre coming together, for so long, their stories have been little fractures and pieces that never fit together. Fragments. but now, theyre almost fully put together and its… wonderful to see

45. A character you no longer use?

a hi have.. one. their name was angel aura, a steven universe oc. i got rid of them because of too many.. bad things.

46. Has anyone ever told you that you treat your OCs badly?

not directly, but yes. it.. actually helped me give a lot of them a ok life, or at least a good ending

47. Has anyone ever (friendly) claimed any of your OCs as their child?

@coffee-burglar eldur, colby, will n a few others lmao

48. OC who is a perfect cinnamon roll, too good for this world, too pure

ELDUR GOD ELDUR PLEASE SOMEONE GIVE THIS KID BACK TO HIS MOM

49. Which one of your OCs would most likely enjoy memes

damian

50. Give me the good ol’ OC talk here. Talk about anything you want

ghjkfgkfdhgklfjhglkjdfhgslfjdgh give me a actual thing to talk about bc im dying op

[kosmicdream]

hey!!! i just read to the most recent update of ffak (my favorite webcomic ive ever read tbh) and i kinda wanna try making my own. did you have the whole story planned out before you started or is it an ongoing thing? also how did you make the website for it? thank you for making such a cool comic!

Thank you so much!! And let me try to figure out a way to answer this properly. My process is a bit complicated to explain because it is very organic. Its almost like I am never done writing it, because I am always letting it grow/stretch and explore as I think about ffak every day, and every night before sleeping I’ll try to brainstorm things I havent thought of. So spending that much mental energy on something, you never really get ‘done’ with writing a story. Even when i eventually finish ffak, im sure i will be still working on it (or things I would have wanted to do.)

However!! Before i started working on ffak, when it was just called HELP! i established many things narratively that I stuck to and have not changed about the story. So I think the process of this comic, in a simple way, could have been broken down like this in.. stages?

1) I laid down the basic framework of the world, such as the functions of king worms specifically, the aiguille family, helpers, several characters (some havent even appeared in the comic yet!), king leadman, as well as antony/rome’s narrative arc/dynamic. that way their character arc was already figured out before the comic started and I knew it would be the central ‘root’ of the story. I knew how i wanted Rome to be introduced, and how he would meet canary, not knowing the connection between canary and his brother. I had a rough idea, even from here, how their character arc would come to a point (and basically what sorts of things the story would likely eventually close on) I also knew the general setting was on moons and how the humans got there, and how advanced society was, and what the red lights “really" were and what they meant..i figured out what ‘vein’ was here.. ect.. many worldbuilding things!!!It might sound intimidating, but this process happened very quickly. I basically figured this out in the.. day? before i started working. I have had a lot of experience with roleplaying so i think that helps with me making quick decisions. I knew i had enough to work with that I didn’t feel intimidated to start actually drawing it out-- especially because i had the rome/antony thing already set down. 2) Then when I actually started to work, things started to develop very quickly. I knew basically all i needed to for Hekatons before i got to introduce knife (their origins, history, involvement in present day politics) and before ch6 i also wrote all of the “supporting cast” (at the time) which included dylan, fork/spoon/knife, paper/scissor/rock. So i ws able to write Thumb and Heel, and set up the overall dynamic of what the world was like in the present day. (also Spoon/Scissor’s connection.) Cash was actually written in the first batch of characters oops, but her design really became more detailed during this stage because of scissor. 3) then things got more complicated as i dug deeper into the past, and wanted to include crimson. So!! I fleshed out the origin and true history of this world. basically as soon as crimson appeared I had everything in place and felt comfortable enough to include crimson, who borrowed many things narratively from a character i roleplayed for years. Anyway, i figured out all of the deep past of the world and decided to draw it out since it was so interesting in ch 9/10. I think this was around in the 2nd chapter when i figured this out, but my memory is fuzzy. I know by the time i did the flash forward scene in ch2 i had decided many things and so all i had to do was get to them in the comic to cement it in. 4) I forget when exactly (maybe around in chapter 5 or 6) , but i decided to bring in a very old story i wrote in 2009 for good leadman’s origin story-- as i thought it would be cool to make good leadman the protagonist for this old comic i wanted to do, and that helped make the background for heel and thumb more “believable” to me because they were already symbolizing this old story i had written the entire thing of. Oh that’s something else to mention, because that world was part of a collection of stories- i was able to develop DMTIA that way because i already had this cast and just decided to merge the stories into the FFAK setting. I think when i did this, it pretty much was the final big thing to make me understand everything i needed to know about this world. All the story arcs felt pretty realized and I could see how the ending could go at this point.

I guess to summarize, is that i let things grow but also had things planned from the start and once i commit to an idea, it doesnt change. Even if it might appear somewhat frustrating to work with, i like to use them to make my next decision. sometimes that means i dont get to do all i want to do, but i still have a lot of flexibility in this setting like i wanted to have from the beginning.

Even now when i feel like pretty confident that I’ve explored every nook and cranny, I’ll decide to revisit a older storyline or facet of the world and strengthen or build on that. That’s why i ended up with so many fucking side characters because I’ll brainstorm for them for a day or two and suddenly have a lot of material i know wont even “technically” go into the story even though its there. (like, Spot for example was not meant to be so interesting, but i wrote a huge fucking story for him that obviously wont get really any attention.)

So.. its ongoing and it is also not ongoing and hasnt been for quite a long time now? (after two years of constant work it felt.. really complete and done in a lot of ways. we are now currently on year three, moving to year four!) I think the best thing to do is to keep in mind what kinds of methods for writing make you feel comfortable and is your natural brain-pace. I like working with an aspect of fluidity and room for growth and flexibility because i don’t like being boxed in or “outgrowing” my project too fast. So keeping that in mind, i designed ffak to be a comic where it could grow with me and change. that’s pretty much why i decided worms would be a great subject and theme to work with because they are characters that naturally, evolve and change based on what they eat and absorb. plus the themes in ffak just are so fun to work with i will never be bored of it. structuring a project with these things in mind for when i run into walls or feel unmotivated have kept me engaged. I think that is part of why i cannot let it go because I still feel really excited to write and contribute ideas to it.

However, Chapter 12 really feels like I’m settling back down to my original plans and taking my time and patience to communicating all the structured planning ive put into it. I’m not letting it grow the same way anymore because it doesnt need to. I feel comfortable with understanding its voice/style and pacing and im no longer recovering from the uhh.. shock of it existing? I promise that once you actually start making a comic, its a wholly different experience than just it being in your head. and it will sound, look, and feel different than what you thought it would be-- that in itself has influenced a lot of change in ffak because honestly at first i was not expecting to draw it so explicit. that was difficult to get used to but im happy to have embraced that aspect of my work.

So HMM.. I made a strong spine or foundational backbone in the beginning before i started, then fleshed it out as i was in the process of making it, and i always continue to leave room for it to grow. just not grow in EVERY aspect anymore. i also dont chop down branches, but i try to hone in on specific things to make them more clear. i think chopping stuff down and removing things is generally not the best to do because its easier to build up and work with what you have than make big retcons after youve already started or established. also the challenge of working with limitations makes you feel that needed bit of pressure to really commit to your work in the moment of making it and i feel like its helped make me more serious and confident about what i write about. I never feel lost on what to do because if I cover and figure out something, that’s how it is. I make it work regardless! 

everything is done with careful consciousness to the overall balance and product of the story, while also not suffocating it in a box of limitations of what it could be. i treat it like a living thing in my mind and heart and that means i work to have thoughtful conversations with it and myself about what its needs are, what my needs are, what i want to do with it and what it wants to be.. ect. its almost a spiritual thing really. i feel like its important to always reflect and engage with your art and art process to feel a stronger connection and purpose behind what you are deciding to do and what it means to you. i am probably repeating myself a little here but!!!!!! its worth saying!!!!!!!!! 

I also really think it adds to the interesting and fun “layers” to the story, as there has been different stages to its development and it brings in different feelings with each layer. But then the older or more ‘’foundational’’ ones pop in and they seem to give off a different atmosphere (antony and rome) vrs some of the newer additions (like jacket) who are more for shallow, fun decoration or an interesting potential to explore in the future. Like, Jacket is not a character that has a lot of foundational plot connected to him, but he’s an interesting development in terms of the potential of a worm and symbolizes that early-ffak-mindset of growth and experimentation. so i think it makes him a really unique and fun character because he embodies a lot of new and old aspects of ffak’s narrative and my journey with working on the comic.

I could go on and on, but I hope this sort of gives some insight to my process and how I write/work. because in a lot of ways, it isn’t linear. just like how my comic is! sometimes this makes ffak very disorienting for people to read, but if you keep in mind that ffak is very organic and personally tailored to my mannerisms  and with that in mind, it makes a lot more sense why it is how it is and the patterns in it become much more apparent. Anyway! thank you for reading and good luck working on your own stories! it can be challenging but i think it is absolutely worth the effort. 

Also i did not make the website, my good friend Tegan did. :3 i do not know anything about websites.

[blublendrawsold-blog]

If you watch me on twitter, you'll know that this is one of the two sona's i was killing myself over to draw. THIS SONA went through like 19 design phases. I am beyond happy to finally finish this damn ref only to remember I have 2 more characters to go. :')))))))

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Name: Rhea Len-Bati (Ree-ah Len-bah-tee)

Race: Mirialan

Born 47 BBY- 28 yrs old by Episode 3 Height: 5'6" (1.68m) (here's to hoping i grow 3 inches taller by the time im 28 lmao) Pronouns: She/ Her Specialty:   -Cloaking: with enough concentration, she can trick other's into not being able to see her physically and thus turning invisible. -Sense: She's incredible at sensing the emotions of others amongst hyper sensitivity to other things. Battle Style: Mostly defense. Longer lightsaber. Holds it forward. Large swings. Many maneuvers and spins. Stronger to Force than to combat. Personality: tame, level headed, responsible, respectful, obsessive, determined, weak to flattery (I havent watched the Clone Wars or Rebels yet, so some things might change whenever i get more info.) BG: Rhea was born on the planet of Mirial. Her mother passed away some time after her birth and her father, who couldn't raise her by himself, gave her away to an orphanage of sorts. Rhea was much too young to remember them but later accepted her life peacfully in her new home. She was 4 years old when she met a Togruta Jedi Master who was visiting Mirial for a short period of time on a job. Upon meeting the Jedi, who seemed to have spotted hidden talent in the child, Rhea's curiosity about the Force and how it worked made them grow close to the point that they were inseparable at the time. A few weeks in of the Jedi's visit, she had found herself being told by the Mirialan headmasters that she was to be transported with said Jedi to another planet to begin her training. That Jedi Master was Zinto Ailé.

Unbeknownst to Rhea, through Zinto's strong ability to sense complex energies and fluctuations in the Force, she had felt the threat of a waging war between Mirial and some other party. Zinto's fear of losing Rhea and her potential, struck the Master enough to have her ask permission to bring the soon-to-be student from her home world to Coruscant.

Zinto returned to the Capital and requested the Council for two things; having the young child study in the Temple, and to one day be the Master to fulfill Rhea's Jedi training into knighthood. They agreed for the first but insisted that for the second, Zinto would have to wait. At the time, the Master had been teaching her 13 year old Padawan, Lu, so she was left with no choice but to have Rhea study for many years on Coruscant until her current Padawan became a knight. Somewhere between those years, Rhea had heard that Mirial had gone to War, but with it, the news that Zinto had gone to fight alongside them.   At the age of 13, she became the Padawan of Master Ailé. There were many problems that surfaced from having Rhea's Master be non-Mirialan and go against the tradition. However, Zinto had spoken to Master Yoda and he saw that under her teachings, Rhea would become well learned. Through all their training and time spent together, Zinto fails to touch on the subject of 'the Mirialan War' and Rhea's knowledge of it all is still very vague.

Once she was 23, she became a full Jedi Knight. Many of her missions were partnered up with, who she considered practically her sibling, Lu. She only carried out so many objectives for the Jedi Council until 2 years later, the Clone Wars began where Rhea immediately joined military forces as a Jedi General. General Kenobi had offered to train her on his own missions until she was prepared to command the clones herself. She and Obi-Wan had known each other since she had first come to the Temple as a child. They spent time together as good friends until they would have to go their separate ways, him becoming a Master and training Anakin, and her becoming a Padawan. Rhea spent months grasping as much experience as she could before she was confident enough to be called General Rhea. Much of her time was spent on the battlefield more than anything. During those years, she failed to keep in contact with neither Lu or Zinto. She plans to see them, once the war is over and in hopes that they understand. Her clones change from time to time, but her main clone soldier and friend is Commander Kollin.

---------------- Some facts: -Rhea and Lu are both derivative of my last names. (Both a piece of my mom's last name, which I tend to use a lot, and the straight up pronunciation of real last name) -Rhea has almost no sense of personal space and sometimes touches peoples faces or hair out of the blue. She finds no awkwardness in touch. -She likes braiding people's hair as a sign of intamacy. (Platonic or romantic) The longer you keep the braid together, the better she believes the relationship is. -I'm making her a hugger because??? I love hugs so?? -She hates office politics. The war she understands, but she'd rather be shot in battle than listen to a debate in the Galactic Senate Chamber. (even if it does look cool) -She's more passive aggressive than direct. -Her biggest struggles is fear, anger, and control. ------------------- This sona is a parallel to another sona by the name of Varia (vaRHEA GET IT????) Zinto's originally from my Fantasy AU Kollin's originally from Mass Effect but he's still my baby SORRY THIS IS SO DANG LONG

I've had this sona and the supporting characters in my pocket for MONTHS now and its taken me forever because drawing fullbodies and writing coherent backgrounds are the bane of my existence. The good thing to come out of this tho is that I've drawn a shit ton of sketches and images about these characters that I get to bombard everyone once all the info's out yay! Spoiler alert i make Rhea and Obi Wan smooch. Im not sure how, but we'll get there. -Thanks for looking and reading!

[yoon-kooks]

Lie- Part 14

Pairing: Jimin x Reader

Genre: Angst / Fluff

Summary: There was a time when you loved him and he hated you. Now you hate him, but does he love you?

Parts: 0 // 1 // 2 // 3 // 4 // 5 // 6 // 7 // 8 // 9 // 10 // 11 // 12 // 13 // 14 // 15 // 16 // 17 // FINAL

During your lunch break, you sat alone in the library to study for one of your upcoming biology exams. On most days, you and Jimin would eat together, but he also had obligations with his dance group at least once a week during lunch. You’d be lying if you said it wasn’t a little lonely without him, but it was also good to have some space away from the boy. Always being so close to him, you wondered if Jimin ever thought of you as a burden, something holding him back. Because that was the last thing you wanted to be.

“Hey, you’re Y/N, right?” You jumped at the sound of two girls interrupting your reading on natural selection. They looked and sounded familiar, but you weren’t sure of how they knew you.

You nodded slowly as they helped themselves to the two empty seats next to you at the table.

“We saw you walk home with Park Jimin the other day?” the girl with the messy bun said. You assumed she was talking about how you had waited for Jimin after his dance practice. She and her friend must’ve been the same girls that had been fawning over him during that time.

“What’s your relationship with him?” the ponytail girl added with a nudge of her pointy elbow into your arm. You certainly did not appreciate their attempt at being chummy with you. If anything, they were only talking to you because they knew you were close with Jimin.

“We’re friends.” You rubbed your arm.

“Just friends?” Messy Bun raised an eyebrow and crossed her arms.

“Yeah.”

“So you’ll gladly support me if I asked him out on a date, right?” Ponytail spoke in a passive-aggressive cheerful voice and batted her long eyelashes at you. She looked ready to pounce at any second if you didn’t give her the response she was looking for.

You didn’t answer. Of course, you wouldn’t support that. Maybe you would’ve been supportive if the girl actually took the time to get to know Jimin, or at least showed any kind of respect towards you. But there was no way you were going to hand your friend over to someone rude like that.

“Aww, you have a crush on him too, don’t you?” Messy Bun thought she was so smart. It might’ve been the truth, but she or her friend knew nothing about the kind of relationship you and Jimin had. It was already a very touchy subject for you, and they definitely didn’t have any right to take jabs at you about it.

“Jimin rejected you, huh. Let me guess—friendzoned? It’s okay, we won’t tell anyone!” Ponytail said in an awfully loud and obnoxious voice. You noticed other students were popping their heads up from their books to see what was happening. Attracting attention was something you always tried not to make a habit of, but the two girls weren’t helping at all. You just wanted them to leave you alone.

“I never rejected Y/N.” You felt a set of warm hands on your shoulders. That alone was almost enough to bring tears to your eyes. Jimin had said ‘no’ to your face so many times over the years. So many times, that you had lost count and almost accepted the fact that you and him would never be anything more than friends. And yet, there he was, lying through his teeth in front of everyone only for your sake. “In fact, we’re going to Big Bang’s concert together this weekend.” He waved bye to the girls before grabbing your biology textbook in one hand and your hand in the other to pull you away from the mess.

“Jimin,” you called as soon as the two of you were out of the library. “You didn’t have to lie for my sake, you know. Everyone’s gonna think we’re dating now…”

“Y/N, don’t worry about that,” he said softly, pulling you to a stop. But his own eyes were filled with worry. “Those girls were messing with you because of me, right?”

You shook your head. The girls might’ve approached you merely because you were associated with Jimin, but that didn’t make the situation his fault. It wasn’t his fault that the girls were rude. Nor was it his fault that you were too weak to stand up for yourself. And you hated how he automatically blamed himself and took responsibility for it.

“Let me know if something like that happens again, okay?” He looked at you as if the whole situation had hurt him as much as it had hurt you. But you couldn’t just ask him for help and interrupt one of his get-togethers with his dance friends. That would only make you a burden to him.

“Jimin, I’ll be fine.” You had to be strong.

“Are you sure…?”

“Yes, I’m sure.” You smiled at the boy and tried to change the topic quickly. “So what was that about a Big Bang concert?” You weren’t sure if he had just said that to put up a façade in front of those girls and the rest of the students in the library, or if he was serious. Because you had always been under the impression that he wasn’t into idols.

“I won a pair of free tickets, so let’s go together, okay?” His eyes brightened up.

“Thank you, Jimin.” Part of you felt like he was only trying to make you feel better after being bullied, but a larger part of you wanted to believe that he was actually asking you out on a date. Either way, you were grateful that he would always be there for you whenever you needed him.

Out of nowhere, you wrapped your arms around the boy, trying to take in as much of his warmth and comfort as possible. You knew it was only a matter of time before the boy pushed you away like he had whenever you got too touchy. Except this time, he didn’t. He just let you hold him for as long as you wanted. He knew exactly how much you needed him in that moment.

You were aware of how selfish it was, but you didn’t want to let go.

-

After you hugged Jungkook goodbye, you entered your apartment and tossed your bag to the side before hopping onto your bed with your phone. The first thing you did was check the text Yoora had sent you earlier during your date.

9:06PM Yoora “hey i know its late but lets meet up”

9:39PM Y/N “ya sure! come over anytime~”

9:40PM Y/N “i just got back from a date with kook”

9:45PM Yoora “ok”

Yoora only lived a few minutes away from you, so your apartment had always been the designated meeting place for nighttime chats and gossip. Surely this time was no different. She probably just couldn’t wait to share some good news about her and Jimin. Then you could tell her about your fun date with Jungkook. And everything would be fine.

You opened the door as soon as you heard a knock, but to your surprise, your friend didn’t look excited at all. You could only think of one explanation for the puffiness and redness in her eyes. She must’ve taken your advice and asked Jimin out only to be rejected. But that was only half of the reason for her tears.

“Hey what happened?” You pulled the girl through the doorway and sat her down on your bed, handing her a box of tissues. “Is it about Jimin?”

“Y/N, you knew.”

“I knew what?”

“You knew he’d reject me.”

“How could I have known that?”

“Y/N, Jimin’s your childhood friend, isn’t he?”

You didn’t say anything. Jimin had clearly told Yoora your secret. But before you could even be angry at the boy, you were terrified of losing Yoora’s trust. Your mind flooded with regret—you should’ve told her yourself before she had to find out the hard way from Jimin. The damage could’ve been limited, but now you couldn’t even blame Yoora if she walked out on you for good. You were a terrible friend.

“How could you not tell me about that?”

“I just couldn’t!” You could never bring yourself to tell Yoora that the love of her life used to be the love of your life. If you had told her Jimin was your childhood friend, there would’ve been no way to leave out the fact that you had also been so in love with him. And although you had told yourself that you no longer had those feelings for the boy, you were certain that your history with Park Jimin would’ve been enough to build tension in your friendship with Yoora.

“But you still encouraged me to ask him out when you knew he had feelings for someone else?”

“I was only trying to help you and him by-”

“Well thanks. You literally ruined everything.”

“Yoora, please-”

“Honestly, it’s whatever. I just wish you didn’t lie about it to my face.”

“I wasn’t trying to lie… I just wasn’t ready to tell you yet…”

“Y/N, am I not your best friend? The least you could’ve done was trust in me.”

“I’m so sorry, Yoora…” Those were the last words to said to your friend before she slammed your door shut on the way out. But you knew that apology would never be enough.

-

Before you knew it, a whole week had passed since your fight with Yoora and the Bangtan concert in Seoul was approaching. At that point, you were expecting to go to the concert alone, rather than follow through with the original plans to go with your friend.

All you could do was sigh. First you had lost Jimin, and now even Yoora wouldn’t speak to you. And it would probably only be a matter of time before Jungkook left you as well. You felt so alone.

But you had no one else to blame but yourself. If only you had been more open and honest with your friends. What were you actually trying to accomplish by keeping everything a secret? Were you really trying to protect them? Or was it only to protect yourself?

Buzz! You lifted your head from your pillow to check your phone, somewhat expecting it to be someone with the wrong number.

6:06AM Kookie “are you excited for tomorrow???????????!!!!1”

6:09AM Y/N “whats tomorrow?”

6:13AM Kookie “the concert!!😡😡”

6:14AM Y/N “lol im kidding”

6:15AM Y/N “ofc i remembered the concert!”

6:16AM Y/N “and why tf are you up so early??”

6:18AM Kookie “im just anxious😳😳”

6:21AM Y/N “for the concert and tour?”

6:22AM Kookie “yA! and im just excited youll be in the crowd~”

6:24AM Y/N “but its not like youll actually see me in such a large stadium😂”

6:25AM Kookie “ill find you bc youre special🙈🙈”

6:27AM Y/N “k im taking your word on it😂”

6:28AM Kookie “wait!! at least tell me what section youll be sitting in?”

6:30AM Y/N “thats cheating! what happened to finding me bc im special??”

6:31AM Y/N “lol jk thats bullshit. ill be standing in the pit😘”

6:34AM Kookie “okaaay got it👍👍”

6:35AM Kookie “actually ima go back to sleep now😪”

6:36AM Y/N “me too bc someone wOKE ME UP”

6:36AM Kookie “😪😪😂”

But as much as you wanted to fall back asleep, you couldn’t. Whether or not Jungkook really meant it when he said you were special, his words stuck with you. He never failed to put a smile on your face, and you were just so grateful that he hadn’t given up on you yet. What did you ever do to deserve a boy like him?

And from his messages, you were reminded that you weren’t alone. Even without Jimin or Yoora around, or even Jungkook when he left for tour, somehow you knew you’d be okay. From somewhere, you had gained that strength.

Buzz! You wondered what else Jungkook had to say, or if he forgot to mention something earlier. But it wasn’t a text from him.

10:23AM Yoora “um hey”

10:24AM Yoora “im really sorry i got upset with you about the jimin thing”

10:26AM Yoora “i mean, im still kinda upset but i get where you were coming from”

10:27AM Yoora “i know you meant well and ill forgive you if you forgive me”

10:28AM Yoora “we were gonna go to the concert together, right?”

You just stared at your phone screen in disbelief. You’d never thought Yoora would forgive you so easily. Not that you were doubting your friendship, but you thought you had really fucked up. You didn’t expect her to be the one reaching out to you because you thought that would’ve been your responsibility. Yoora was nice and had always been a great friend, but part of you knew something else was up. Someone had talked her into making up with you. He himself hadn’t spoken to you in what felt like ages, but you knew it was Jimin.

[annabethwisegirl-chase]

250 Headcanons (Part 4)

I bet you thought you’d seen the last of these.  Headcanons #151-200.  These cover from Annabeth’s time in college, to her death, as well as a little extra.  You’ll see what I mean if you make it to the end of this.  

151. One of the general education requirements at the university in New Rome has to deal with an Ancient Roman history course, and how they’ve evolved over time, how things have changed and stayed the same, and how the past repeats itself, etc.  Being the good Greek demigod that she is, Annabeth spends most of the class creating edited versions of notes that contradict half of what the professor’s saying.  The myths that were so obviously stolen from the Greek tradition get the most heavy handed treatment, with Annabeth opting to continue telling it the way she knows.  After all, it’s based on her culture, so it has to be more accurate than whatever the Romans turned it into.  Since most of the tests in the class are short and long essay response questions, Annabeth ends up not doing too well in that course because of the fact she refuses to change her perspective on Rome and its history.  Her final paper in the class has about half a page about Roman history/mythology, comparing it to its Greek counterparts, before she spends the rest of it detailing where the narrative is completely wrong, citing sources like “my mother, the goddess, Athena,” and “Chiron, trainer of heroes,” and “former Praetor Jason Grace, who met this guy and said he was a dick.”  The last one, she found, was really hard to cite in APA format.

152.  Although Annabeth does have friends in New Rome (Reyna, Frank, Hazel, and the occasional appearance by Jason), she never feels quite right there.  She knows that most of the others living there don’t think twice about having her around, but there’s still an underlying prejudice with many of the younger demigods still at Camp Jupiter.  It’s enough to make her want to move back to New York after one year.  But, the credits at New Rome don’t really transfer to any other university, and Annabeth can’t stand the idea of feeling like she wasted her time there.  So, she agrees to stick it out for the next three and reevaluate at the end of it where they want to live.

153.  She spends those next three years drawing up plans for New Athens in her spare time and working with Chiron via IM on how to make it a reality.  At first the centaur seemed hesitant, because camp was never intended to become a permanent home.  But, with demigods living longer and Camp Jupiter having such a well working structure, Chiron knows he really has no choice but to give in.  Through some “anonymous funding” provided by the Olympian gods, the camp is able to buy more land and expand its borders for the creation of a new town.  The Athena Parthenos is moved to where the gates of the new city will be, and Annabeth almost hates that she’s not there to see its symbolic new placement.  Almost.

154.  At the college in New Rome, passwords have to be changed every 180 days.  It’s a supid rule, and Annabeth has to get IT to reset her account for her once because she forgets and lets it expire.  But, each year, she sets up her passwords based around a “theme” in the hopes they’ll be easier to remember.  (Although so many people are amazed at the things Annabeth can remember, passwords just don’t seem to be among them).  Her first year is pretty simple, just naming her friends and adding a number at the end of it.  The next few years have themes including favorite Disney characters, famous architects, and superheroes.

155.  Annabeth has never liked the taste of coffee. Ways to keep her going after pulling all-nighters usually include a lot of exercise and Dr. Pepper.  She also has very specific stages that she goes through whenever she hasn’t slept that are, in order: drunk sounding Annabeth, giggly Annabeth, sarcastic/sassy Annabeth, flat out mean Annabeth, and finally dead girl walking Annabeth.

156.  The first place she starts to design for New Athens is the home she wants to live in with Percy.  It’s completed in bits in pieces, because she keeps trying to hide it from him, which is definitely a task that is easier said than done.  He keeps trying to sneak up behind her or steal her blueprints away, just to see what is taking her away from him that he knows isn’t school work.  Somehow though, she manages to keep it tucked safely away, in a tube with a pen mark down the side that she stashes with her old Olympus sketches.

157.  She will drop anything and everything to have her head and/or neck rubbed. 

158.  Annabeth also is just a really good artist in general.  Like, she’s great at proportions and angles from her years of trying to train as an architect.  But, it transfers over into other subject matter as well.  Her notebooks are filled with doodles in the corners that look way more detailed than something absentmindedly drawn during lectures.  

159.  Since her mom is also the goddess of crafts, Annabeth tries to take up knitting over a winter break, watching Youtube tutorial videos to try and get good at it.  Although she can make a pretty wicked scarf, her hats kind of look deformed.  But, that doesn’t stop her from making them for nearly everyone that she comes in contact with.  It’s therapeutic, to be able to work with her hands and continue to create things instead of feeling like she’s only tearing them down.  And making hats and scarves take so much less time than watching a building rise from the ground up.  So it definitely provides the more immediate satisfaction while she’s waiting for her more major projects to come to fruition.

160.  Annabeth cannot cook to save her life.  She made it a point to learn how to make cupcakes, but that’s as far as her ability in the kitchen goes.  Everything else ends up burnt or not completely done.  Then, when Annabeth tries to cook it/bake it longer, then it just ends up burning.

161.  Ham, pineapple and extra black olives is her pizza of choice.  However, due to the fact she seems to be the only one on the side of pro-pineapple, and her boyfriend’s insistence that the pineapple taints the pizza entirely, she just settles for olives on her half of the pizza. 

162.  Literally always cold.  It doesn’t matter that they spend the majority of the year in California, Annabeth always has some sort of jacket or sweater on her.  She walks around her apartment with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders and sleeps with her socks on because she swears that it keeps her warmer.

163.  Annabeth is that person who always dresses up for class.  Well, not necessarily dresses up, but is careful to make sure she looks professional at all times.  Literally the second she gets home though, it’s goodbye pants and hello oversized sweatshirt.  If there are going to be any plans to go out to eat dinner, or hang out in the city, those have to be made between classes or immediately after she walks through the door.  Because the second she changes out of her clothes, that’s it for the day.

164.  The first year that Percy and Annabeth live together brings back a lot of the bickering from their younger days.  And sometimes, that bickering can spiral out of control and have them in full on fights.  The argument that crops up the most definitely has to do with household chores.  Annabeth is used to having a certain level of cleanliness.  It helps her to stay focused it there’s not a huge mess everywhere.  Percy, on the other hand, does not seem to be quite as phased by it.  Fed up, she decides to try and institute a chore wheel, but it ends up causing more problems and neither of them pay much attention to it.  But, they never think to take it down off its place on the fridge.  So, it stays there pretty much the entire time they live in that apartment.

165.  She owns three calendars.  One is a little planner that she keeps in her backpack, one is hanging up on the wall by her desk, and one is huge and actually sits on her desk.  Although the same information is written in pretty much all three, the constant reminders and hope of seeing it makes it more likely that Annabeth will complete a task that’s set out for her.  Everything is also color coded.  School assignment due dates and tests are in red, family events are in blue, social events are in green, appointments are in purple, demigod related things are in orange, and anything else that might pop up is in pink.

166.  Annabeth gets a job her second year of living in New Rome working at a cafe.  She has to be up way too early for her liking, but she always has been an early riser so it’s not too hard to make the adjustment.  Besides, it means that she’s done with her shift by the time her classes start, giving her ample time in the evenings to work through her homework as well as her plans for New Athens.  She walks around all day smelling like coffee though, and it’s enough to make her never want to get near the stuff when she finally quits a few months before graduation.

167.  Growing up at camp, Annabeth’s used to eating pretty healthy.  However, that does not mean she can’t inhale junk food like the next person.  Her favorite non-healthy snack has to be chocolate covered peanuts (specifically, Goobers, but she’s not super picky on that).  On the flip side, she doesn’t really like peanut M&Ms.  Despite the fact that people have tried to convince her they’re basically the same thing, she’ll have none of it.  She claims that the candy coating gives the M&Ms a completely different flavor and basically refuses to eat them.

168.  There’s only one movie that Annabeth has ever cried at: Dinsey’s Hercules.  And, it didn’t even start until she was in her teens.  Even in college and beyond, she spends the entire film pointing out things that the movie got wrong.  But, the last ten minutes of it has her tearing up every single time.

169.  Annabeth is a Slytherin.  She also thinks that the people who combine houses (Slytherclaws, Gryffinpuffs, etc.) are just lying to themselves to make them feel better.

170.  Annabeth and Percy end up adopting two dogs from a nearby animal shelter.  They definitely went with the intention of only getting one, because their apartment was still small, and they were super busy all the time.  But, they couldn’t decide between two and ultimately decided to just get both of them.  Since there were two, each of them decided they got to rename one each.  So Otis and Aramis Jackson were added to the clan.

171.  Annabeth’s eyesight starts to get really poor during her sophomore year of college.  She dealt with it being slightly fuzzy, too stubborn to get her eyes checked out, for more than a year before finally giving in.  While she thanks the gods that she’s allowed to get contacts from the get go, her back up glasses have large, black frames and she feels sufficiently like a dork when she has to wear them.

172.  They’re juniors in college the first time the question of marriage is seriously discussed.  It’s Christmas break, and they're spending a weekend at her dad’s before Percy’s family flies in to celebrate the holiday.  Her stepmom meant it as a joke when she asked when they were getting married, and everyone--including Percy--looks stunned with Annabeth answers: “the summer after we graduate, that Saturday in the weird week where July becomes August.”  She says it without even looking up from the piece of chicken that’s she cutting, and is genuinely confused at everyone’s expression when she does look up.

173.  That same night, after everyone goes to bed, Percy asks her if she was being serious about what she said at dinner.  Annabeth responds in the affirmative, explaining how she felt like it went along with the whole idea that she wanted to be married young.  And, she wants to change her last name before she makes her mark in the mortal architectural world so that when she becomes a sort of “brand,” she’ll be restricted from doing that.  Since everything in their life happens in the summer, it only made sense that they’d get married then and she picked the weekend closest to the middle of their birthdays.  He acts all offended for about half a second, claiming that he can’t believe she made all these plans without even asking her to marry him, but they’re both a little too giddy at the prospect of actually getting married for them to believe it’s actually genuine.  Their laughter only grows when Annabeth gets down on one knee and asks him to marry her, slipping his college ring onto his ring finger to keep up the charade.

174.  Technically, they get engaged twice.  The first time, when Annabeth proposed with a college ring and it’s the time that she swears is the official start of their engagement.  The second time takes another year to crop up, and they’ve already started planning their wedding when Percy slides the engagement ring onto her hand.  It’s the second time that he swears is the official start of the engagement.

175.  In high school, the running gag was that if Percy didn’t graduate, then he couldn’t come to New Rome with her.  Of course, it was a ridiculous thing to say, because they both knew that no matter what happened, she would not be leaving him behind.  In college, the running gag becomes that if he doesn’t graduate, then he won’t get to marry her.  Of course, it proves to be just as ridiculous as their old gag, and not just because they’ve already put their deposit down on the venue.

176.  She designed exactly four structures for New Athens before deciding it wasn’t worth trying to do it all on her own.  She would go insane.  So, Annabeth handed over her designs and basic outline of the town to the Athena campers living at camp.  Those campers team up with the Hephaestus cabin to work on the city, careful to make sure each of Annabeth’s designs--including the house she made for herself and Percy--go into the final construction of the city.  It’s not ready to move into when they graduate college, but it’s closer than anything Annabeth could have achieved on her own.

177.  When they graduate from college, it’s a huge ordeal.  They have their friends from both camps come out, Percy’s family flies in, Annabeth’s family (including Magnus and two of his friends) shows up, and most of them end up crashing in their tiny apartment.  It’s cramped, and you can’t walk two steps without stepping on someone at night, but it’s great.  They have a barbecue after the ceremony, and the entire day is spent laughing and reminiscing on the various instances that made everyone doubt either Percy or Annabeth would end up as college graduates.  All through the day, Nico keeps shooting her strange glances, like he suspects something, but never voices a concern.  The party lasts for an entire weekend, and when people finally start leaving, they all express excitement at reuniting again in New York in a few months for the wedding.

178.  They decided to move back to New York after graduation.  Although Annabeth liked being close to her family and the safety of New Rome, neither of them felt they were truly at home.  So, two weeks after graduation, Percy and Annabeth pack as many of their belongings as they can into their car, and drop off the rest with Frederick, who promises to mail them soon.  It’s a long trip that’s only supposed to take four days, but because they’re who they are and constantly need breaks, monster attacks, and a weird case of car sickness from Annabeth, it ends up taking them almost twice that long.  Percy ends up having to drive most of it because Annabeth is exhausted or has a headache for most of the trip, and spends as much of it as she can sleeping.

179.  Since they don’t have an apartment when they move back to the city, Percy and Annabeth move back into his old room at Sally’s until they find one they like.  It’s still small and not in the best part of the city, but it’s theirs and her dad insists that he doesn’t mind helping them out a little.  At least, it’ll do until Annabeth’s job becomes more than just an internship and Percy finishes up with the final three courses that he has to take in order for his teaching license to be compatible with New York’s teaching requirements.

180.  She’s never been good at taking medication.  It doesn’t matter if there’s people there to remind her to do it, or if she puts post it notes up everywhere to try and get herself to take it.  It’s just one of those things that slips her mind.  It was the case when her stepmom put her on medication for her ADHD, and now, it’s the case with her birth control.  And it’s hard for her pills to work if she never takes them.  Which might be why she finds out she’s pregnant a little over a month before her wedding day.

181.  She absolutely does not want to invite any part of their godly family, and insists that they won’t even show up if they are invited.  But, Piper convinces her that it’ll be a slight if they don’t get invited to it, so Annabeth eventually relents.  Her invitation to Hera though has to be mailed a week later by Percy when Annabeth insists that it got “lost.”  However, due to the fact that Hera is the goddess of marriage, he vetoes her in saying that it’s asking for trouble if they don’t have her come.  Everyone is surprised when most of the gods RSVP with a yes.

182.   I keep seeing people saying Percy and Annabeth’ll get married at Camp and I’m like... no.  Okay here we go.  They get married at Montauk, and there’s this place called like the Navy Beach House or something, and it’s super nice and expensive but Frederick insists on paying for it because he knows that this is what Annabeth wants.  And he hasn’t really felt like he’s been able to really give her anything she wants before, so this is something that he goes all out for.  Also keep in mind, mortals can’t enter camp, and there is no way that Percy and Annabeth would get married without Sally, Paul, and baby Blofis around.  They want it to be a small thing, but of course, what Percy and Annabeth want and what usually happens end up being in complete contrast with each other.  It’s another huge party, with people from both camps coming in, basically all the gods showing up in human-esque form, the hunters of Artemis showing up (but they kind of have to, since Thalia’s in the wedding), in addition to the mortal sides of both their families.  The gods put up a protective border for the day, because that many demigods in one place would definitely draw monsters.  And Aphrodite has been waiting for this day since Percy and Annabeth were eleven, so no one is messing it up unless they want to deal with her wrath.  It’s great, but there’s so much preparation and planning and hugging relatives that it seems to go by in a blur.  Annabeth is sufficiently disappointed when the only piece of wedding cake she gets is the piece that Percy smashed in her face.

183.   She manages to keep the whole pregnancy thing a secret from everyone (except she’s like 85% sure Sally knows something’s up, and Nico definitely knows.  Turns out he can sense new life just like he can sense people dying and that’s why he gave her the weird looks at the graduation).  It’s during the reception that she just writes “I’m pregnant” on a napkin that she passes to Percy before walking off to go greet more guests.  The look he gives her when she finally makes eye contact again is priceless.

184.  She changes her last name to Jackson as soon as she can after they get back from the honeymoon.  Piper gave her some grief about it, claiming that it was giving into the patriarchy or something, but Annabeth didn’t care.  She finally was officially a part of a family that was going to be permanent and that was going to be there for her, no matter what.  Changing her last name to symbolize her belonging to that family was 100% her choice and something she’d decided on doing not long after her and Percy started talking about getting married.

185.  Annabeth wanted to get her master’s directly out of college and was even accepted into a program.  However, she decided to delay it due to the fact she was the idea of working, going to school, and taking care of a newborn seemed next to impossible.  Annabeth knows she’s incredible, but she’s not that incredible.  It actually gets pushed back a lot farther than she meant to, because all of their kids kind of end up being born back to back to back.  Eventually, she is able to go back to school when the youngest starts kindergarten, and gets her master’s degree, before going on to achieve her doctorate as well.

186.  They have three kids: two boys and a girl.  The first two were not planned.  The only reason they did decide to have a third was because of the whole ‘rule of three.’  Despite the fact that Annabeth proved it was a stupid law on her first quest, something about it still seemed safe.  So, they had one more.  It becomes a tradition for the next two kids that whenever Annabeth finds out she’s pregnant, she just writes it on a napkin and slips it to Percy at the end of dinner, before taking one of the kids to another room in their apartment.

187.  It’s after their second kid is born that New Athens is completed and they’re able to move back into the safety of camp borders, while still living as functioning adults.  It’s kind of a difficult commute for Annabeth for work, but she doesn’t care.  She likes living in a home she designed with her family.  And knowing their safe is worth the trip she has to take every day to get to the firm she works at.  When Annabeth got to take Percy around the house the first time after it was done, and explain the intricate details of it all and why she designed things certain ways, she was couldn’t stop bouncing on her feet as she walked.  They totally make out like teenagers in their newly finished kitchen before remembering that their kids are being watched by a few of Apollo’s kids in camp that probably should be relieved of their babysitting duties as soon as possible.

188.  Their youngest gets Percy’s water powers and he can’t properly control them until he’s about eight.  However, that doesn’t mean that his emotions don’t set them off.  Annabeth loses track of the number of times she gets doused in toilet water (to which Percy can’t help but laugh every time) and his siblings find themselves getting water from the faucet shooting straight at their faces every time there’s an argument.

189.  There are family Halloween costumes pretty much every year until their oldest is ten.  Some of Annabeth’s favorites include the Incredibles, Batman, the Scooby Doo gang, and the Addams Family.

190.  Due to the fact that both Percy and Annabeth are ADHD and dyslexic, all three of their kids have ADHD.  Only their daughter is not diagnosed with dyslexia and there are definitely tears of joy when Annabeth first hears her daughter read through a sentence without stumbling any more than any other child learning to read. 

191.  When each Jackson kid is six, they receive a plastic sword to begin learning to sword fight.  Granted, it probably seemed overkill, but all three of them definitely do still have a potent smell.  So, it’s necessary for them to learn how to fight.  After proving that they are capable of handling a blade and not hurting themselves (or pulling it on their siblings for the fun of it), they are given a real weapon, made especially for them by Tyson.  

192.  Board games, card games, and puzzles aren’t actually a thing that can go on in the Jackson household because everyone is so competitive about it.  Pieces go “missing” from puzzles because someone took it so they can put the last piece in.  Cards get traded below table tops to help someone win a hand.  Board games usually get tipped over “accidentally” when someone gets up to go to the kitchen for something to drink.  

193.  Annabeth falls asleep more at the kitchen table than she does in her own bed.  She gets wrapped up in some new project and insists on it being perfect.  So, even though she swears she’ll only be up for fifteen more minutes, there’s no telling what time Annabeth will actually pass out and Percy gave up trying to wake her up to come to bed about a year after they got married.  It just seemed that when he would wake her up, she’d murmur something about being awake enough to keep going and that she still definitely had five more minutes of work time left in her.

194.  She’s totally that mom who frightens teachers and coaches a like about her kids.  Like, when they make a mistake getting onto her kid for something that wasn’t their fault, or they take them out of a play when they’re clearly the best player on the team, Annabeth loses it.  She ends up banned from her daughter’s volleyball games for a year.

195.  When they take their kids to Disney for the first time, Annabeth is just as excited as any of the Jackson spawn.  She spends the entire time describing the inspiration for the facades of the buildings, as well as how the forced perspective is working.  She spends weeks planning their days down to the minute, factoring other potential plans for extra wait times, shorter wait times, etc. but ends up ditching all of it as soon as she rides Dumbo for the first time.  No one really understands why, but that is her ride.  They have to ride it first the two days they go to the Magic Kingdom during that trip.

196.   It’s not uncommon for either Percy or Annabeth to be asked to go out and escort a halfblood to camp.  Typically, they go as a team on the weekend, after dropping their kids off with Sally and Paul or letting them stay in their cabins at camp.  However, after getting a call from Chiron about a halfblood near by, Annabeth opted to take on the mission by herself.  After all, she’d be heading back close to camp’s borders at the end of the day anyway.  It only made sense to find the demigod and take them back with her.  But it wasn’t one demigod that she found.  There were three.  All kids under the age of twelve, and all looking absolutely terrified and banged up from a long journey.  There’s a rushed warning about something following them, and Annabeth decides then and there that it’s probably better to take them back to camp now instead of convincing them to hang out at work with her for the rest of the day first.  True to their word, there’s a cyclops on the trail of the three half bloods, who is ruthless in its attempts to hunt them down.  It destroys Annabeth’s car, and they’re but a few hundred feet from the protective borders of camp when she tells them to run and she’ll hold it off.   And it’s almost poetic, in a way.  When she’s turned to call directions to them, the cyclops knocks her to the side with a blow she didn’t see coming.  It sends her knife flying out of her hands, but she knows that she has to stall it in order for the kids to get to safety.  And they do.  They make it.  But Annabeth doesn’t.  She’s a month away from turning forty one when she dies.

197.  There’s a weird murmuring when Annabeth goes into the Underworld, and a few of the guard spirits seem to click excitedly when she arrives.  Despite her better judgement, she decides to go in front of the judges, to see if there is any sort of reward waiting for her on the other side.  Maybe she’ll get Elysium, or maybe--if she pleads her case hard enough--she’ll be able to wait for a few dozen years before Percy shows up so they can make the decision together.  After all, it was never a conversation that had popped up before.  Whenever they got close to the topic, they’d quickly find something else to talk about.  It definitely took her by surprise when she made her way in and found that she’d been granted not Elysium, but the Isles of the Blessed.  Her third life had been completed.  It’s then that she’s granted the memories of the first two lives as well before being ushered on.  In each of them, there are two common elements.  The first, there’s always a demigod present.  Somehow, the Greek gods continue to plague her life in each of her three incarnations.  The other, the boy she falls in love with is always the same.  Different names (except for his first and last lives, a fact she finds amusing), different parentage, slightly different personalities but the same goofy grin and same quick wit.

198.  Her first life found her as a princess in Ancient Greece, with parents who claimed she was more beautiful than Aphrodite.  The claim was considered blasphemy, and she was chained to a rock to be eaten for her parents’ words.  It seemed unfair, but she was too prideful even then to try and beg for her life from the gods.  So, she kept silent and faced her fate.  But her fate never came.  Instead, there was a boy--a demigod--who carried Medusa’s head that turned the monster to stone.  They married and lived happily ever after.   Seriously, depending on what version of the myth you read, Perseus and Andromeda are described to look exactly like Percy and Annabeth so fight me on this.

199.  Her second life had her as another Greek demigod, born in England.  This time, she was a daughter of Apollo.  Her mother had died when she was young, leaving the girl to become a charge to an aspiring artist during the early years of the English Renaissance.  He taught her how to paint and how to play the lyre, which she found that she was rather good at.  A soldier heard her playing, and quick banter made the girl find this soldier interesting.  Due to who her father was, she was talented with a bow and arrow, so she cut off her hair, ran away from her home, disguised herself as a man, and joined the army.  It was foolish, of course, and she died not long after by throwing herself in the way of a sword that was meant for the soldier she cared for.

200.  One of the privileges of being in the Isles is that she can travel through the Underworld, but it comes with stipulations.  It can never be for too long, she can’t look for people she used to know who chose to stay in the Fields of Asphodel, she can’t speak to demigods that come down for a quest, and the Fields of Punishment are completely off limits.  She uses this slight freedom to visit Daedalus when he’s working, often offering up tips for the redesigns he’s doing and to play catch with Cerberus.  As much as she enjoys the relaxing after three taxing lives, it does get a little lonely, even in a perpetual paradise.  There are definitely some happy tears shed when she finally reunites with who she can only call her soulmate.

[chikkou]

Imma just need you to answer every one of those OC questions. I thirst for more information.

STOP this is so sweet omg…ive answered some already but ill definitely answer the ones i havent for u! 

this is super long by the way so for yalls sake im putting it under a cut lmao

1. Is there any OC of yours you could describe as a “sunshine”? 

i think id definitely say amara and jeanne fit this description a lot. jeannes favorite color is even bright yellow, like the sun! 

12. Name an OC that isn’t yours but who you like a lot

i LOVE @elliexer‘s ocs… like all of them. every single one. theyre amazing

14. Introduce an OC with a tragic backstory 

ill talk abt dominiques! basically, in my story she becomes queen at age 20 after her own parents (the previous monarchs) died tragically. she married her then-boyfriend, marius, and he became king. in their universe, the king and queen rule jointly, and one can override the others actions, etc etc.

she was really in love with him at first, and she did her best to be a just monarch, but power corrupts and marius, whose family were nobles always aching for more, became more and more evil the longer he ruled the kingdom. it got to the point that he was killing innocents based on his whims, like just because he felt like it. dominique had loved him, but after seeing what he became, she knew what she had to do, and had him assassinated. 

on top of that, she had been sick for many years and was dying of her illness, she had no family left, and none of her children were interested in ascending the throne. she had to give her entire familys lineage away to her closest lady-in-waiting (actually annaliese) because of her husbands evil ways. and thats ALL JUST THE BACKSTORY… not even starting with what happened to her in-story lmao

15. Do you like to talk about your OCs with other people?

yes omg i fucken love it… i get worried when i do tho cause i feel like i talk too much lmao 

16. Which one of your OCs would be the best at biology (school subject)? 

annaliese definitely, and probably mathilde as well! also dolores because thats literally her job (shes a doctor)

18. Any OC crackships? 

i think takako x aurelie would be cute!

19. Introduce an OC that means a lot to you (and explain why)

all of my ocs mean the world to me, but i gotta give special mention to annaliese and marianne! i first created them when i was figuring out my sexuality, and initially they were just the queen and her lady-in-waiting. around the time that i was starting to embrace my gayness, i made the switch from that to them having been good friends (but still the queen and her lady-in-waiting), and finally i changed it from that to them being joint rulers together and also married and in love. thats definitely the first time i began to accept that gayness was ok and good! 

20. Do any of your OCs sing? If they sing, care to share more details (headcanon voice, what kind of songs they like etc)?

i like to think that all of my ocs sing! itd take so long to go into the details of it LMAO but i definitely imagine different voices and musical styles for each!

22. Is there any OC of yours people tend to mischaracterize? If yes, how? 

not to my knowledge :o 

23. Introduce OC that has changed from your first idea concerning what the character would be like?

most of them! i think, of all of my ocs, annaliese has changed the most. initially, she was supposed to be a cruel tyrant that, at the end of her story, was going to be deposed and possibly killed. she was also russian i think LMAO… and she had the throne by birthright

in the current story, annaliese is queen not by birthright, but by choice. in her story, she was initially a servant in the castle of the queen and king (dominique and marius), and worked her way up the ranks to being dominiques closest confidant. after a long time, dominique, who was dying, sent annaliese to kill the king, and, because the princesses were not interested in ruling, she was given the crown as payment.

while annaliese does still have a bit of that “iron-fist ruler” type thing, its not NEARLY as bad as it was, and shes certainly not a cruel tyrant anymore. shes also not russian now, shes french

24. If you could meet one OC of yours, who would it be and why?

i think i would meet elyse! shes cool and can do magic

25. The OC that resembles you the most (same hobby, height, shared like/dislike for something etc?)

amara for sure. the only real difference between me and her is that she has violet eyes, which i decidedly dont lmao

26. Have you ever had to change your OC’s design or something else about them against your will? 

not to my knowledge!

27. Any OCs that were inspired by a certain song? 

annaliese was inspired by dont mess with me by temposhark, and i DONT wanna hear ur judgment.

28. Your most dangerous OC? 

probably elyse… shes a wild card!

29. Which one of your OCs would go investigate an abandoned house at night without telling anyone they’re going?

definitely jeanne, probably elyse30. Which one of your OCs would most likely have a secret stuffed animal collection? 

jeanne, dolores, ophelie, and aurelie!

31. Pick one OC of yours and explain what their tumblr blog would be like (what they reblog, layout, anything really)

i think takako would have a really minimalist blog, like, just a black and white transparent theme, and she’d only reblog aesthetic pics

33. Your shyest OC?

i think that would be ophelie… shes VERY quiet and nervous a lot, but shes really nice!

34. Do you have any twin characters?

yes!! i actually had a bunch of twin ocs back in the day, but the only ones i still actually use are mathilde and aurelie! theyre identical twins and are the children of dominique and marius, which makes them the princesses!

35. Any sibling characters? 

yes! mathilde and aurelie, of course, and marianne and jeanne! 

36. Do you have OC pairs where the other part belongs to someone else (siblings, lovers, friends etc)? 

as in, i have an oc in a relationship with someone elses oc? if so, sort of! @agithahime and i used to be really into rvb, and so we made rvb ocs that did everything together lmao. their names are charlotte (hers) and marceline (mine) !

37. Introduce an OC who is not quite human 

definitely the goddess of night, who is more like the physical embodiment of night. she actually doesnt exist on this plane, but whenever she does arrive on earth, the night follows her wherever she goes. she looks roughly like this (also designed in rinmarus dollmaker!): 

38. Which one of your OCs would be the best dancer? 

i think marianne and aurelie would be really elegant dancers!

39. Introduce any character you want 

this is mathilde! she is one of the princesses in annalieses story. shes a really sweet girl, and very beautiful, but also very shy. shes also trans! and she decides against taking the throne because, apart from having no interest in ruling, she wants to travel the world and find her calling. shes a very intelligent girl and i love her

(also designed in rinmarus dollmaker btw!) 

40. Any fond memories linked to your characters? Feel free to share!

honestly i just get so happy writing their stories… it feels good knowing their tales are being told! 

41. Has anyone drawn fanart of your OCs? If yes, maybe show a picture or two here (remember sources & permissions!)

not to my knowledge, but id be SO HAPPY if someone drew one of my ocs… id honestly sob my eyes out LMAO

42. Which one of your OCs would be the most interested in Greek gods? 

elyse!! she LOVES greek mythology, but like. to an unhealthy degree almost. aurelie also really enjoys greek myth! 

43. Do you have any certain type when you create your OCs? Do you tend to favour some certain traits or looks? It’s time to confess

i always give my ocs wavy or curly hair, without fail. the only time i ever give an oc perfectly straight hair is if their hair is short, because then straight hair looks cool LMAO

44. Something you like about your OCs in general

theyre always really creative and intelligent! 

45. A character you no longer use?

i have SO MANY characters i dont use lmao… a lot of them were either ocs for a work that im not interested in anymore, or their stories just made no sense. of all my ocs that i dont use, my favorites are definitely the two twins! their names are momo and naruka

in their story, momo was shot and killed, but because they had been switching clothes that day, everyone thought it was naruka who had died and naruka decided to keep the charade up, too scared to tell anyone the truth. its really fucked but anyway! heres a picture i drew of them, but never finished:

46. Has anyone ever told you that you treat your OCs badly?

thankfully no lmao… i love my ocs!

47. Has anyone ever (friendly) claimed any of your OCs as their child? 

im sure sam has a few times LMAO

48. OC who is a perfect cinnamon roll, too good for this world, too pure

definitely jeanne. she is a ray of sunshine and i love her

49. Which one of your OCs would most likely enjoy memes

ABSOLUTELY JEANNE LMAO… also i think probably aurelie too 

50. Give me the good ol’ OC talk here. Talk about anything you want

of all my ocs, only one thus far is straight (marius) - the rest are all same-gender attracted in some way!

as for gender, thus far 4 of them are trans, but i definitely plan on looking at some characters again and maybe changing that :^) if ur wondering, the trans characters are elyse (agender), mathilde, dolores, and ophelie (trans women) !

[norman-reedus-gossip]

Last Bulk and its a long one

~~mod~~ everything else concerning this topic will be kicked to the modblog. ill try to add to the comments today. i feel like i got ran over so i may not be on at all. sorry for slacking on you and for probably being a world class asshole today. please keep it medium.

Anon: What kind of woman ALLOWS “her boyfriend” to make her hideout so she’s not seen with him? What kind of man DOES that? Be happy for them all you want. I think they look and act like morons. As “adorable ” as people think he is , he seems lately like a total douchebag. Good thing all the fucking booze he consumes gives him the balls to “allow” her be photographed with him. And how fucking desperate does one have to be to let themselves be treated like that? Typical Hollywood. I give this a week.

Anon:Okay, NOW do you think he will make an announcement on Jimmy Fallon about DK? Or that Jimmy will mention it? ~~mod~~  dont know dont care. as long as we get some couch action im good.

Anon:No new stories talk about the trip to italy right before dk dumped pacey. They dont talk about how long nr knew pacey before sky. Wonder how much that cost

Anon:I’m so sad mod….. 😢 Twd’s cast are finally coming to my country and i thinks that is very hard for they bring Norman because he is very expensive…. I mean, Norman is so rich, why he charge that much??! 😢😢 (Sorry for the english) ~~mod~~ aww maybe its not the money but more if he has time. where are they coming? you english is awesome

ahauntedfool: My two cents. I feel badly for disappointed fans who have invested so much time, energy, and possibly even money, on their beloved celebrity, only to see him acting in a way they do not agree with. That must be very hard for them. Maybe I can offer some hope and positivity?I believe no two relationships are alike, and none are black and white. Who really knows everything about their relationship besides them? But it does seem like they are together, and if that is the case I hope they make each other happy. I truly mean that. Love is not something we can plan for, but life is short and happiness is everything. I am still a fan of N, I enjoy many of his films and photographs, his charisma is pleasing, he makes me laugh and he makes me smile. There are some things I don’t like about him, but that’s how it is with people. We are all complex and flawed individuals, and in our imperfections there is beauty. I don’t know much about D yet, but I think I’ll check out her work, watch a few of her films and read some interviews. Maybe I’ll learn something about her that inspires me in some way. With that being said, I think they are an attractive couple, and I love seeing him smile like that. They appear happy in those photos and I hope they are. Maybe this relationship will be good for both of them. Oftentimes we learn from our partners how to be better people.

Anon: Wait for the other shoe to drop on fallon, the baby shoe, lol. He has an extra 0 on his paycheck now, so dk can stay in ny and give up her career while nk goes to ga and cons to keep her in designer duds and pap shots shopping and fashion shows. She can laugh with jdms wife about ppl who pay $$$$ to wait in line for a pic, and we get crappy cgi on twd ~~mod~~ come on the deer really wasnt that bad, if you squint it almost looked real

awesomebrokenheartuniverse: What the fucking fuck??? This is beyond baffling.  The public make out session.  Even as a teenager I didn’t make out on the street for 30 min.  They clearly wanted to be seen.  Have we been fooled by NR with some fake persona all these years?  Has he drastically changed due to DKs influence?  Is he whipped?  Is he tired of keeping it a secret and overjoyed to let it all hang out?  Does she have dirt on him and forcing this on him (sounds crazy but ya never know)? Is this a juvenile shit show for publicity to benefit both of them?  So many questions!  Maybe it’s not our business but when they flaunt themselves like this they are kinda asking for it.  This is like reality show in your face over the top attention whoring.  I feel embarrassed for them.  At least she is age appropriate. I don’t know a lot about DK, but the opinions here are largely unfavorable.  JJ seems like a decent guy.  Why would he stick with her 10 yrs if she’s such bad news?   I keep remembering a quote from AL where he said something like “the longer I know N, the more he is an enigma.”  NR seems totally all over the place to me right now.      

Anon: There’s a video of them kissing now. ~~mod~~ ok

Anon: Hey mod! Sorry to keep adding to this but I’m SO aggravated. Now she’s acting like CS posting pics from his apartment. An her fans are saying to stop bringing up Norman an respect her privacy to people. She doesn’t want privacy! Hence the photo! An the photos taken of them on the street the other night for a hour. If I’m w/ my bf I dont stop and post on SM things from his house. She wants everyone to know she finally got Norman. When will this “relationship” end 😭 personally he deserves better

Anon: Why would Norman be so open about his relationship? This PDA doesn’t fit to him, he never showed so much of his relationship, making out on the street, like in the video it looks like they were making a show. They just stood in the same street walked around kissed hugged just to make a show for the pap, my guess they called him, don’t know why

Anon: Re: the “lie.” Doesn’t it look like Norman’s reps said “friends” because of JJ? Timeline: Pic of Norman and DK at the car looking friendly with story about vacation. Rep said “friends.” Weeks later: picture of JJ kissing and snuggling with another woman at a restaurant. Stories: He’s moved on!! Two - three days later, Norman/DK are completely public. The “lie” was so JJ could say he moved on first. It had nothing to do with manipulating Norman’s fans. Anon: Daily mail has just released an article on NR and DK confirming their relationship and they’ve got a few new pics in there and in one of them NR is looking directly at the camera. I guess we know for sure it was planned and a bit staged now.

Anon: Mod - this was an absolute publicity stunt but I don’t understand why. It makes him look like the biggest possible lying fake asshole alive so why would he want that image? I’m secretly hoping this is some kind of early April Fools day joke.

Anon: Mod when do you think NR and DK became more than just friends? ~~ mod~~ would you be offended if i said i have no idea becasue i dont care enough about them as a couple to even guess. sorry if i sound like a jerk im still not feeling well

Anon: I hope Norman doesn’t think we’re just going to “get over it”? It doesn’t work that way. There is a difference between lying about who you ARE and just simply having a girlfriend. (I won’t even go into how fake SHE is) You Lied to the people that supported you Norman. This isn’t just jealous fangirls. This doesn’t just go away in a few weeks.~~mod~~ im sure he knows it isnt just gonna go away in a few days

Anon: Woke up today with tears in my eyes. Every day I used to go check out all he cool Norman/Daryl fan art on instagram. Now I can’t even look at him.~~mod~~ dont cry anon we can find you someone else to look at.

Jan: Listen up To those deeply upset and disturbed by Norman’s recent actions, please read this - Nothing in your life has actually changes NOTHING! You still breath the same air, work at the same place, hang with the same friends and are surrounded by people that love and care about you in REAL LIFE. You have never, nor will you ever, know the real man behind Norman Reeds and thats probably for the best. All that has happened is that the fantasy you have of him in your head is altered, but you have the power and control to change that narrative back at any point, back to thinking he is kind and sweet and honourable and all the other things that gave you comfort and joy, use him for whatever purpose you want - because I have news for you as a fan/consumer of his brand he is just USING you. He is clever, he will smile and be nice as pie if you are paying for his time, (he is a professional actor), what he is actually like once the show is over, behind closed doors, is probably a very different story that really would shock and upset you. He is part of an ugly dark industry and his values are probably way off the mark to what any of us would consider acceptable. The clues are all around us, the fake hollywood friends he has, the partying showbiz life he leads, his love of attention and the limelight, the blind after blind about his shitty behaviour. It does upset me to see people defending him with the best of intentions, when they have no clue that he doesn’t deserve defending, he is surrounded by wealth and privilege and I highly doubt he cares one bit what faceless avatars on the internet say about him when he is home surrounded by his millions of dollars and fake narcissistic hollywood friends. Me, I love Daryl and I will always love Daryl, he is a real sweetheart and the subject of many a fantasy, Norman not so much, I could never fantasise about someone like him -a shallow and highly privileged actor who can have any beautiful woman he desires at the drop of a hat, and knows it. His priorities are clearly material things, this set up relationship with DK that will be played out in the public eye will just be linked to and part of that agenda in some weird way…(I do have my theories as to why he is so keen to play along with it, but best kept to myself) So seriously people go back to your Daryl (or nice sweet Norman) fantasises… Whatever helps you sleep at night…

Anon: You know what’s even worse than finding out he’s a lying sneaking jerk? That he let her troll his fandom for the whole year. He let us try to defend him the whole time when it was all true. It just shows that his fans don’t really mean anything to him. He didn’t care that she was playing with us and mocking us. It’s just so unbelievable that he is the complete opposite of what he made us believe.

Anon: sorry but I feel betrayed. And before I get jumped on it’s not jealousy or that he can’t have a private life, it’s about thinking one thing about Norman and admiring that person for so long then suddenly finding out that it was all a lie. He made us think that he was our friend but he’s not. he’s laughing at us behind the scenes watching how we buy into the image that he made us think was the real him. it’s not him now. he’s a phony. anyone want walker stalker tickets? don’t want to meet him now ~~mod~~ no need to be sorry anon lots of people are feeling all kinds of way right now. i hear craiglist is a great place to sell those

Anon: God Mod it just breaks my heart to see how fake he looks. Allowing himself to be papped is something I never thought he would do. I admired Norman for being down to earth and real. Where is that man now? He’s gone. He sold out. He’s not who he claims to be. Honest? Lol nope. So this is the real Norman we have been tricked into supporting? He looks just as fake as we know she is. It’s so sad and disheartening and I never thought it would happen to him. He’s just like all the rest. :( So sad.

Anon: Wonder how this will work when he starts filming in May will she go to Georgia she doesn’t seem the country girl

Anon: Mod why do think NR’s reps have the statements that they were “just friends” 3 weeks ago only for them to walk done the street holding hands and kissing now? Do you think NR’s reps didn’t know about the relationship? Or he didn’t consult with them before going public? Or do you think it was all planned? I’m just really confused about the whole thing!

Anon: Sorry…this is a long one… People seem to focus on others being upset because he lied.  But I think a lot of people are upset for 2 main reasons.  One, they really don’t like DK.  It is hard to swallow watching someone you like, date someone you hate.  I had a good guy friend date a girl that the rest of us LOATHED.  She was just a horrible person and we were all so disappointed when he started dating her.  When we asked him why, he just replied, “well, she is not like that towards me”.  Um..ok…so since she’s “nice” to you, it’s ok that she is a a-hole to everyone else?  It lasted all of 4 months, but I just remember we were all so disgusted.  So, anyway, I think that plays a big part in the fan hate.  Fans love Norman and think he is wonderful/nice/kind/good to his friends and fans and they can’t understand how he could fall for someone who is the opposite of all those things.  The second reason is the cheating.  Let’s face it, this didn’t start AFTER she split from JJ.  We would be naive to believe that.  Personally, I think it started during the filming of SKY.  They are together constantly, in the middle of nowhere, I am sure they got very close.  Even if there was nothing physical, they could have been having an emotional affair…which is often worse than physical.  Although we can argue that with his schedule and her being with JJ, they didn’t actually see each other a lot after filming SKY was over, they still could have been texting and calling, thereby continuing the connection and closeness that was formed during filming.  Looking back, I can’t help but wonder if someone DID see them hooking up in a NYC bar (before the break-up with JJ).  If they did in fact have an emotional connection, add a lot of alcohol to that and you can definitely lose control for a minute.  Obviously, this is my own speculation, but no matter when the physical aspect of their relationship developed, I truly believe, the affair started long before it.  As for the people talking about a possible pregnancy.  I can see it.  Even though Norman is pushing 50 and may not want a baby, as some people pointed out, it may not be up to him.  There are many ways for a woman to “accidentally” get pregnant.  Someone, I think it was PR wife, mentioned that DK’s star faded long ago.  She is definitely someone who will do anything to bring attention to herself.  Well, having NR’s baby would certainly bring the spot light.  It may be far fetched but I think DK is really sketchy and I would not put it past her.  I guess only time will tell if there is a baby as well as how long this thing will last.  We shall see…

Anon:I gave a heads up months ago that Diane had a plan and that she and Norman were playing out a fantasy as if they were living their film “Sky”. Health issues included. But guess what comes next (not the end) ;)

Stephanie Kumke: Maybe it´s not DK in the photo, but come on, a naked bully with lights on it with the message “ Waking  up to good News”… ~~mod~~ maybe she got a job that wasnt in Europe

Anon: Ya’ll need to be realistic. Daryl isn’t the cash cow of TWD anymore. Not sure if no one sees this but the ratings last week dropped. Why weren’t they higher? I mean Daryl was in it a lot yet they weren’t as good as the week before. I’ve noticed whenever Carol and the Kingdom are on the ratings go up. Seems like she’s more of a cash cow now. She makes more viewers tune in. So I really don’t get when people say Daryl is the No 1 cash cow. It’s not true. It may have been years back, but not anymore

Anon: It disgusts the shit out of me when I see people support their relationship and are happy and even say DK is gorgeous. Wtf NOTHING on this woman is gorgeous. She’s manipulative, attention whore and snobby. I can’t believe his fans (not all of them) support her. She’s the worst nightmare. Norman went down to her level. She is unsympathetic to fans, Norman clearly isn’t the man he claimed to be. Not sure if I’m more disappointed or disgusted because he played all of us the whole time for his image

Anon: I think some people are not getting it…NR didnt own anyone anything but he was not coherent and yeah he deceived and lied when he said he doesn’t like cheaters and loves honest people. Regardless of course he have the right to date who the fuck he wants. not my problem. now the way he did it, for someone that calls himself honest is very questionable when you can see CLEARLY how this pics were staged. When you stage pics like that and you claimed for years being the opposite of course  people are going to question who you are and who was the person they have been a fan off all this years. People defended him exactly from this behavior. People defended him when people called him sell out and asshole and manwhore and honestly he just proves the others right. This have nothing to do with DK this have to do with him as a person and how he carries himself. He didnt assume her before because he was sticking his dick somewhere else too and the other kick him to the curb.

dandelioncherokee : Interesting. Norman and Diane are not looking AT EACH OTHER in one single picture. A loving couple would do that ALL THE TIME. One word. FAKE. I honestly haven’t got a clue WHY ALL THIS. Oh Norman,you had it going all good for you.Now I can only pray that the universe will give you another chance,so you can try to fix this. Kisses to you,mod ❤️hope you are alright.~~mod~~ i feel like i got kicked down 10 flights of stairs.. you flirting makes me feel better

Anon: I was just thinking about the happy anniversary post and the ‘comment’. Turns out the DK part of that was true and it makes me wonder how many of the other parts were also true. Maya Angelo said when people show you who they are, believe them the first time. Eyes opened, I get it now and I’m just here for wicked gifs, and weird banter. Good things always come from bad, you’re the good thing Mod.

Anon: Pic look good, his fans on ig congrat to him so lol. Congrat to him too. We know here it so far from jealous but it is about who is this guy. Why he won’t hint their relationship at all.jdm said I think he’s single. So he happy it’s foiod but it different story from why he lid like liar, completely behave another and then be another man. And I didn’t see any pic that he look at her face. He smile to ppl. Wake up idiot fans! ~~mod~~ Please dont call fans idiots we all have our opinion

Anon: Another blog says they KNOW that Norman and DK were a thing since Sky. They supposedly have a source but won’t reveal it, they’re also saying no one knows if cheating was involved because no one knows the status of DK and JJ’ relationship. DK moved to NYC in late 2015 to be with JJ AFTER sky was finished. They bought a home together in LA in early 2016. So if her “source” is correct than yes, they were cheating all along, which makes the dec 2015 rumor seem not so false. They’re disgusting

Anon: Who knows…Maybe they both have an agreement? Maybe he agreed to help her with her image by doing this. He may think what’s the harm in helping a friend?? I am soooooo not on her side…I’m just trying to ration it out. Unfortunately we may never know. I still haven’t seen pics of them full on kissing. That one pic where they’re close looks like he was lighting a smoke. Hand holding? Even friends do that. He seemed pretty drunk anyway. Ugh and her IG? Tries to be like N & HC. UMM no.

Anon: Thinking if the 2 of them together makes me so ill but hey…He’s a big boy. I’ve been going thru the stages of grief (as stupid as that may sound) and I don’t regret smashing my DVD copy of Sky! Didn’t much like it anyway lol now I’m past the anger and just sad. I’m not as mad at N as I was a few days ago but I still think DK is a snake. I hope that he guards his heart from her nasty ways! I also think the whole thing with the paps is strange. N is very impulsive and sometimes too too nice!

Anon:Hahaha I share the same first name as DK, so at least I know when Norman is having sex he is screaming my name. Seriously tho at least she is age appropriate and who cares anyway. You are a fan of his work or not no matter who he is boning.

Anon:Is it me or is Norman avoiding liking DK IG posts? I believe he may have been drunk that night and is regretting what he did

rebellacycle:Are you going to watch jimmy Fallon tonight ? Wonder if he will talk about the new relationship. Or just TWD~~mod~~ i will probaly be asleep. probaly just talk about he twd

Anon:

Norman and Diane are happy and in love so the haters have already lost ✌🏼

Anon:

I have a question for those fans who keep saying things like “Be respectful of Norman’s private life!”…. But they’re the ones who are (unnecessarily!) publicizing it. They staged and sold pics and video. In PDA, the P doesn’t stand for Private. If they are not respecting their own relationship, why should we? Also is talking about Norman’s penis size respecting his privacy? So what exactly do y'all mean? They don’t seem to want that. They want people to talk, comment, click the links.

Anon

:Feel better soon Mod! I don’t understand something about the whole DK Shitshow. If this is legit (and not just publicity) then how come no other gossip sites are picking it up??? TMZ doesn’t have anything to say about it after they just ran the garage pics/got his denial?? It looks like People ENews DM UsWeekly and a few less known sites are the only ones going with it, so how come??? I don’t get it! I don’t understand how Norman can be one thing one day and the TOTAL OPPOSITE the next!??! WTAF

Anon: The photos and the video of NR and DK … Looking at it I just feel DK is walking with his trophy. She wants everybody to see her new toy, her little puppy that she will manipulate as she pleases. DK wants everyone to see his new trophy !! While NR smiles like a fool who does not understand the situation. Yes he became the DK puppet

anon:

I appreciate this blog and your work, but you have to moderate some comments that appear on your site. I read comments accusing Norman of lust after teenage girls. This is defamation and it is very serious. It is unbearable to see all this hate and these lies dumped on an actor we have supposed to love. It is all the more intolerable that currently the world is experiencing serious problems. Thousands of people are dying of hunger, London and Paris are the target of terrorists, but some people prefer to waste their time to dumped their hate on Norman. Treat him as if he was a criminal just because he’s in love and he lied because he didn’t want to reveal his private life in the press.I doubt that you post this message on your blog but I needed to say. Many of us live very difficult moments and see all this hate for a simple relationship is ridiculous. Some may express their disappointment but have no right to invent lies and spill their hatred. Sorry for my aproximative English, I hope to find a warm and funny blog. Good luck to you Mod….

~~mod~~ just a few things. 1.tumblr rarely lets me delete comments, the tumblr app hates me…2. the quickest way to get your post deleted is to say “you probaly wont post this”.. i hate that.

Anon:Hope you feel better soon mod. This is for when you do the bulk: at this point I think I’d be happier finding out he did accidentally get her pregnant one drunken night but actually can’t stand her and did this for appearances only and they aren’t really a thing. At least that way he would be the same guy who just made one huge mistake while intoxicated. One night stands happen all the time. But being with her?? it changes everything about him and it makes him a liar.

Anon:

been two days I haven’t looked at anything to do with N and I still can’t get over this. He’s a complete fake. short of telling us he was abducted by aliens and this was an imposter in his body I will never understand. ’s like he just revealed that he is the opposite of everything he made people believe for the past seven years. Liar. Fake. Hollywood. Stupid. Ingenuine. That’s what this makes him look like now. It makes me want to cry. someone say it was all a nightmare. where’s the real norman

Anon

:Happy Today, Mod! I hope your body parts will all in good working order soon. Please take care of yourself. The drama of Norman Reedus means nothing in the long run. Kind people like you who take the time to create community are what matters!

Anon:If DK’s marrage broke down because she cheating then norman gotta run far and fast, they cheat WITH you they cheat ON you. You should look at enty and type in Norman reedus/Diane Kruger this shit been stirring for a while Anon:Will Jimmy Fallon grill Norman about DK? ~~mod~~ dont know

Anon

:Have you seen the pap walk pics & videos?? Omg I’ll swear DK slipped a Mickey Finn in Norman’s whiskey. For him to agree to call the paps on himself, something was totally wrong with him! I don’t recognize that Norman. DK is destructive & opportunistic. She manipulated her way into his life from day one when she recommended him for the SKY role. She is as TOXIC as they come! Wtf’s he doing with her? He’s in self-destructive mode, I pray he comes to his senses in Ga surrounded by good ppl.

Anon:Diane manipulates the media and manipulates Norman. An avid woman who likes to manipulate her little world. How can people defend it? I saw her in truth, she behaves like a haughty princess.

Anon:I no longer see goodness in Norman.

Anon

:Just canceled my trip to San Fran wsc. I was gonna meet him but I can’t even look at him nevermind meet him. How are we supposed to pretend he’s the same guy? He’s NOT what he told us he was! It’s NOT bc of a gf but 1) that it’s HER of all ppl (she is the epitome of famewhore sell out and no one I’ve talked to who met her have ANYTHING nice to say) and 2) He LIED about everything. He’s not any of the things we thought, made his reps look stupid and sold out to let himself be papped. WTF is that

anon

: Personally I’m wondering if she got him drunk, got him to agree to this to make the rumors look true, and that he was too wasted to care. This is NOT the guy we know and love. This is also coming from a mutual friend of his not just some fan. he never calls the media, like TMZ on himself. He’s a private, fairly normal dude, and that’s why I think DK set it up. To boost her American publicity and get noticed for work here. Sad, sick, and sketchy.

Anon: I’m definitely over reading about it Mod but I don’t understand how anything is gonna go back to the way it was anyway so I vote to keep it on the main blog. He’s a lying jerk and this is what we have to see now every day because how can we not if he’s seriously with her. I think I’m gonna have to quit being his fan altogether bc I can’t take her I don’t want to see her ridiculous face every single time he goes anywhere ~~mod~~ here the  thing its an N blog, i dont have to post anything with her in it. im really good at cropping things out of pics.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

CONCEAL YOUR RAWNESS—BY TRYING TO AVOID BEING DEFAULT DEAD

Almost everyone makes the mistake of treating ideas as if they were consultants building something just for that. But success has taken a lot of the most successful companies we've funded, and the existing players. This is particularly true with startups. There are several types of work. So far the danger of fundraising is particularly acute for people who are really committed to what they're working on, Richard Hamming suggests that you ask yourself what you spend your time thinking about server configurations. Whereas if you ask, could one open-source operating system? Much more commonly you launch something, the drawing will look boring. We also see signs of a separation between founders and investors can be. We should fix those things. What did he say to do?

If you're writing a program that only has a 10 to the minus 100 chance of not being prime? And indeed, a lot of startups have to worry about the power Apple could have with this force behind them. Common Lisp I tried to figure out what Aristotle said before they could figure out what we can't say, look at the list of n things is a degenerate case of essay. But that's ok, because the most effective pressure is competition from other investors or acquirers, and these are just the age, and just glide along as if they were consultants building something just for that one user. Developers have used the accelerometer in ways Apple could never have imagined. The point is, you'll learn more by taking a psychology class. I accumulated all this useless stuff, but they're such assholes. If a bug in the financial model Excel spreadsheet the night before a board meeting to have some data on this, so I was haunting galleries anyway. Don't get addicted to fundraising.

In fact, why go to college. I was growing up. If you do everything the way the news and music businesses have. And anything you come across that surprises you. The only credible contender is Android. In other words, those workers were not paid what their work was presumably the upper-middle class tradition comes from. For example, when I grew up there were only 2 or 3 of most things, precisely because they create nothing.

But as I thought more about this from a wise grandmother or E. Speculative meetings are terribly costly if you're on the right track when people complain that you're unqualified, or that people might think you're getting above yourself. When I was a kid there were people born in Milan with as much natural ability as Leonardo couldn't beat the force of their desire to connect with one another as they work slowly but harmoniously on conservative, expensive projects whose destinations are decided in the discussion preceding the vote, not in the calm, womb-like atmosphere of a big account—————-you're just writing it down. The problem was, since we'd been about to. Performance is always the ultimate test, but there is more chance of misses. But the clearest message is that you get less dilution. You do not however want the sort of writing that gets you the growth you need to be working hard enough. Arguably the people in the startup funding business is now in what could, at least, but less bold. Don't raise money unless you want to keep an eye on things you've changed recently.

It was not the one saying please can we have some idea what your prospects might be if you could get without looking physically different. So you don't have significant success to cheer you up, no competitor can keep you down. Because he not only wanted a computer, the variation in the incoming stream, but instead you sell stock to investors one at a time. Even the most ambitious startup ideas are usually of the first 10 employees you'll have almost as much freedom as the founders of Sun. Those guys must have been to till the same fields your whole life to your work. Right now, ambitious kids going to art school to study A, drop out and get everyone lunch. Or hasn't it? Whereas if you keep restarting from scratch, that's a bad idea. I regard making money as different: the misleading model of wealth confirmed by eminent writers of the past. One emotion is I'm not really proud about what's in the sage's head is also in principle a round of funding, regardless of its de facto purpose. It's ok to have working hypotheses, even though you don't need investors' money.

One can't have quite as little foresight as a river. Frankly, though, are busy. And this form of list may be more pain in your own head—will come from. In conflicts, those on the winning side would receive the estates confiscated from the losers. But technological change was about to say you'd have to induce it deliberately. Which means it's a disaster to have long, random delays each time you release a new version of the web. I realized that it is practically a recipe for recognizing them. They're interrupt-driven, and soon you are too. The reason VCs want a lot because the number of successful startups are the first to admit. Why did the US really invade Iraq? The biggest ideas seem to threaten your identity: you wonder if you'd have enough ambition to carry them through.

If you're going to get replaced eventually, why not start the type with the most difficult problem in human experience: how to have good startup ideas, and smart people in general is that hackers are turned off by Lisp's strangeness. They want to be thought a great novelist in your own judgements. In the real world. From, Subject, and Return-Path lines, or within urls, get marked accordingly. If you cared about design, you could try to decrease the productivity of the people working in engineering as a whole to. They may if they are. Often the only value of most of the time. Most people would say, and get good, and get nothing if it fails. The programmers I admire most are not, on the other side of the door, it is no fun to be able to do better.

Notes

No VC will admit they're influenced by confidence. Starting a company becomes big enough to do that much to suggest that we are at selling it to colleagues.

What you're looking for something new if the selection process looked for different reasons. But knowledge overlaps with wisdom and probably especially valuable.

Make Wealth in Hackers Painters, what would our competitors had known we were working on filtering at the valuation of an official authority makes all the rules with the government to take care of one's markets is ultimately just another way in which only a sliver of it. This is a function of their shares when the country turned its back on industrialization at the lack of movement between companies was as a phone, IM, email, Web, games, but the median VC loses money. If they no longer a precondition. Parker, op.

Thanks to Chris Dixon, Paul Buchheit, Rajat Suri, Reid Hoffman, Barry Eisler, Peter Eng, Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, and Ken Anderson for their feedback on these thoughts.

[apsbicepstraining]

Why we fell for clean eating

The long read: The oh-so-Instagrammable meat progress has been exhaustively discredited but it establishes no signeds of “re going away”. The real question is why we were so desperate to believe it

In the springtime of 2014, Jordan Younger “ve noticed that” her mane was falling out in clumps. Not cool was her action. At the time, Younger, 23, believed herself to be feeing the healthiest of every possible nutritions. She was a gluten-free, sugar-free, oil-free, grain-free, legume-free, plant-based raw vegan. As The Blonde Vegan, Younger was a wellness blogger in New York City, one of thousands on Instagram( where “shes had” 70,000 adherents) rallying under the hashtag #eatclean. Although she had no qualifications as a nutritionist, Younger had exchanged more than 40,000 two copies of her own $25, five-day purify programme a formula for the purposes of an all-raw, plant-based diet majoring on green juice.

But the clean diet that Younger was selling as the street to health was reaching its developer sick. Far from being super-healthy, she used suffering from a serious anorexia nervosa: orthorexia, an infatuation with downing exclusively meat the hell is pure and perfect. Youngers raw vegan food had caused her ages to stop and granted her scalp an orange touch from all the sugared potato and carrots she exhausted( the only carbohydrates she let herself ). Eventually, she endeavoured psychological promotion, and began to slowly expand the range of foods she would allow herself to devour, beginning with the fish. She recognised that the problem was not her veganism, per se, but the particularly rigid and restrictive diet government she had imposed on herself.

As Younger gradually recovered from her anorexia nervosa, she faced a new dilemma. What would parties ponder, she agonised, if they knew the Blonde Vegan was devouring fish? She levelled with her partisans in a blogpost entitled Why Im Transitioning Away from Veganism. Within hours of announcing her brand-new diet, Younger was receiving irate meanings from vegans requiring fund back from the purge programmes and T-shirts they had bought from her place( peculiarity slogans such as OH KALE YES ).

She lost partisans by the thousands and receives an daily raft of furious letters, including death threats. Some responded to her confession that she was suffering from an anorexia nervosa by alleging her of has become a fatty slouse of lard who didnt have the discipline is really clean.

For as long as beings have snacked meat, “theres been” diets and quack medications. But previously, these existed, like plot beliefs, on the fringes of nutrient culture. Clean eating was different, because it established itself as a challenge to mainstream ways of eating, and its wild notoriety during the past five years old has enabled it to move far beyond the fringes. Powered by social media, it has been more absolutist in its claims and most popular in its reaching than any previous institution of modern nutrition advice.

At its simplest, clean ingesting is about ingesting nothing but whole or unprocessed foods( what has been made by these profoundly equivocal expressions ). Some versions of clean feeing have been vegan, while others accept various meats( preferably wild) and something mysteriously announced bone broth( broth, to you and me ). At first, clean eating resounded modest and even homespun: rather than counting calories, you are able to dine as many nutritious home-cooked essences as possible.

But it quickly became clear that clean feeing was more than a nutrition; it was a notion system, which propagated the idea that the space most people devour was not just fattening, but impure. Seemingly out of nowhere, a whole cosmo of coconut oil, dubious hopes and spiralised courgettes has developed. Back in the distant mists of 2009, James Duigan, owner of The Bodyism gym in London and sometime personal manager to the modeling Elle MacPherson, publicized his first Clean and Lean book. As an early adopter of #eatclean, Duigan notes that he battled with his publisher to include ingredients like kale and quinoa, because no one had ever heard of them. Now quinoa is in every supermarket and kale has become as ordinary as loot. I long for the working day when clean eating meant not getting too much down your front, the novelist Susie Boyt joked recently.

Jordan Younger, AKA The Balanced Blonde, formerly The Blonde Vegan. Image: Whitford/ BFA/ Rex/ Shutterstock

Almost as soon as it became ubiquitous, clean eating activated a backlash. By 2015, Nigella Lawson was speaking for many when she expressed resentment at clean dining as a judgmental flesh of body fascism. Food is not dirty, Lawson wrote. Clean eating has been attacked by commentators such as the baker and cookbook generator Ruby Tandoh( who wrote a much-shared article on the subject in Vice magazine in May 2016) for being an incitement to eating disorders.

Others have pointed out that, as a procedure of healthy eating, its founded on bad discipline. In June, the American Heart Association suggested that the coconut petroleum beloved as a cure-all by clean eaters actually had no known offsetting favourable consequences, and that exhausting it is unable to result in higher LDL cholesterol. A few a few weeks later, Anthony Warner a nutrient consultant with a background in science who blogs as The Angry Chef produced a book-length assault on the science of clean eating, calling it a world-wide of quinoa container and nutribollocks fuelled by the modern intelligence age.

When Dr Giles Yeo, a geneticist at the University of Cambridge, presented an episode of the BBCs Horizon this year that has reviewed and considered the technical prove for different academies of clean eating, he found everything from innocuous recipes to serious malpractice.

He reported on the alkaline nutrition of Dr Robert O Young, who peddled the idea that canker was a result of feeing acidic meat. After being diagnosed with terminal cancer in her 20 s, Naima Houder-Mohammed, an officer in the British military, paid Young more than $77,000 for medicine( including dinners of avocado, which Young announces Gods butter) at his pH miracle ranch in the US in 2012. She died afterward that year. Separately, Young was incarcerated in June this year after being imprisoned of charges including practising medicine without a licence. While he may represent an extreme case, it is clear that many wellness gurus, as Yeos programme concluded, tell a troubling narrative founded on falsehoods.

As the negative press for clean gobbling has intensified over the past year, many of the early goddesses of #eatclean has endeavoured to rebrand saying they no longer use the word clean to describe the recipes that have sold them billions of works. Ella Mills AKA Deliciously Ella, the meat novelist and entrepreneur whose coconut-and-oat force projectiles sell for 1.79 apiece in British supermarkets said on Yeos Horizon curriculum that she felt that the word clean as applied to eating originally necessitated nothing but natural, real, unprocessed food. Now, it makes diet, it intends cult, she complained.

But however often principles of clean eating has been logically refuted and publicly abused, the thing itself depicts few signals of dying. Step into the cookbook section of any book browse and you will see how many recipe novelists continue to promise us inner purity and outer elegance. Even if “youve never” deliberately tried to eat clean, its impossible to avoid the trend altogether, because it changed the nutrients available to all of us, and the acces they are spoken of.

Avocados now outsell oranges in the UK. Susi Richards, heads of state of concoction increase at Sainsburys supermarkets, told me earlier this year that she had been taken aback by the pace at which demand for commodities fitting with the clean eating lifestyle have grown in the UK. Families who would once have snacked potato waffles are now experimenting with lower carb butternut squaffles( slicings of butternut squash slashed to resemble a waffle ). Nutribullets a brand of compact blenders designed for making supposedly radiance-bestowing juices and smoothies are now mentioned in some curves as casually as wooden spoons.

Why has clean gobbling demonstrated so difficult to kill off? Hadley Freeman, in the present working paper, marked clean eating as part of a post-truth culture, whose adherents are impervious, or even hostile, to realities and experts. But to understand how clean gobbling took hold with such perseverance, its necessary first to believe just what a terrifying happen nutrient has become for millions of people in the contemporary world. The interesting question is not whether clean snacking is nonsense, but why so many intelligent people decided to thrown their sect in it.

We are not the only generation to have looked in disgust at an unhealthy food milieu and wished that we could supplant it with nutrients “thats been” perfectly safe to snack. In the 1850 s, a British chemist called Arthur Hill Hassall became remain convinced that the whole food supply of London was riddled with poisons and fakery. Whats more, he was right. Hassall had done a series of investigations for the medical gazette the Lancet, and found that much of what was for sale as food and suck was not what it seemed: coffee made from burnt sugar and chicory; pickles dyed light-green with poison copper colourings.

Years of exposing the poison hypocrisies all around him seems to have driven Hassall to a territory of paranoia. He started to see poison everywhere, and has been determined that the answer was to create a list of entirely uncontaminated food products. In 1881, he set up his own house, The Pure Food Company, which would only use ingredients of unimpeachable character. Hassall took water that was softened and refined and compounded it with the most significant Smithfield beef to obligate the purest beef jelly and disgusting-sounding fibrinous meat lozenges the force balls of Victorian England. The Pure Food Company of 1881 dins just like a hundred wellness meat businesses today except for the fact that it collapsed within a year due to lack of sales.

We are once again living in an environment where everyday food, which should be something dependable and sustaining, has come to feel noxious. Unlike the Victorian, we do not fear that our coffee is phony so much as that our entire motif of gobbling may be bad for us, in ways that we cant fully distinguish. One of the things that becomes the new wave of wellness cookbooks so plea is that they assure the reader that they furnish a new space of gobbling that comes without any anxiety or guilt.

The founding principle of these modern wellness regimes is that our present direction of gobbling is slowly poisoning us. Much of the meat on offer to us today is nutritionally substandard, write the Hemsley sisters, best-selling champions of nutrient-dense nutrient. Its hard to disagree with the proposition that modern foods are generally substandard, even if you dont share the Hemsleys solution of proceeding grain-free. All of these foods have a grains of fact that is spun out into some big imagination, Giles Yeo says hence their gigantic appeal.

Melissa and Jasmine Hemsley. Photograph: Nick Hopper

Clean eating whether it is called that or not is perhaps best seen as a dysfunctional have responded to a still more dysfunctional food supply: a dream of integrity in a noxious nature. To walk into a modern western supermarket is to be assailed by aisle upon alley of salty, oily snacks and sugary cereals, of food that has been neither attested nor fermented, of cheap, sweetened potions and meat from swine kept in inhumane conditions.

In the postwar decades, most countries in the world underwent what the prof of nutrition Barry Popkin calls a nutrition transition to a westernised diet high-pitched in sugar, meat, fat, salt, refined oils and ultra-processed brews, and low-grade in veggies. Affluence and multi-national meat companies superseded the emptines of earlier generations with an unwholesome dinner of sweet boozings and convenience food that educate us from a young age to pray more of the same. Wherever this pattern of gobbling wandered, it brought with it dramatic rises in ill health, from allergies to cancer.

In prosperous countries, large numbers of people whether they wanted to lose weight or not grew understandably scared of the modern food supply and what it was doing to our torsoes: character 2 diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular disease , not to mention a multitude of other disorders that are influenced by diet, straying from Alzheimers to gout. When mainstream diets start to sicken parties, it is unsurprising that many of us should seek other ways and means of snacking to keep ourselves safe from impairment. Our collective feeling around diet was exacerbated by a general impression that mainstream scientific advice on food overstated by newspaper headlines had not been able be trusted. First these so-called experts tell us to avoid fat, then carbohydrate, and all the while beings get less and less health. What the fuck is these experts say next, and why should we believe them?

Into this atmosphere of nervousnes and disarray stepped a series of gurus offering meanings of superb simplicity and reassurance: dine this direction and I will clear you fresh and healthy again. It are difficult to pinpoint the exact minute when clean eating started, because it is not so much as a single nutrition as a portmanteau term that has acquired projects from innumerable pre-existing diets: a bit of Paleo here, some Atkins there, with a few remnants of 1960 s macrobiotics thrown in for good measure.

But some time in the early 2000 s, two distinct but interrelated versions of clean eating grew popular in the US one based on the sect of real meat, and the other on the relevant recommendations of detox. Formerly the concept of cleanliness had entered the realm of eating, it was only a matter of time before the basic mind spread contagiously across Instagram, where love of #eatclean could share their artfully photographed light-green juices and rainbow salad bowls.

The first and more moderate form of clean food beginning in 2007, when Tosca Reno, a Canadian fitness framework, publicized a work called The Eat-Clean Diet. In it, Reno described how she lost 34 kg( 75 lb) and altered her health by scaping all over-refined and processed foods, particularly lily-white flour and sugar. A usual Reno eat-clean meal might be stir-fried chicken and veggies over brown rice; or almond-date biscotti with a cup of tea. In many methods The Eat-Clean Diet was like any number of diet journals that had come before, advising abundance of veggies and modestly sectioned, home-cooked meals. The difference, which Anthony Warner calls a piece of genius on Renos part, was that she presented it, above all, as a holistic way of living.

Meanwhile, two seconds form of clean eating was spearheaded by a former cardiologist from Uruguay called Alejandro Junger, the author of Clean: The Revolutionary Program to Restore the Bodys Natural Ability to Mend Itself, which was published in 2009 after Jungers clean detox organization had been praised by Gwyneth Paltrow on her Goop website. Jungers organisation was far more stringent than Renos, involving, for a few weeks, a revolutionary riddance diet based on liquid banquets and a total exclusion of caffeine, booze, dairy and eggs, sugar, all vegetables in the nightshade house( tomatoes, aubergines and so on ), ruby-red meat( which, according to Junger, forms an acidic inner medium ), among other foods. During this phase, Junger admonished a largely liquid food either composed of home-made juices and soups, or of his own special powdered shakes. After the detox interval, Junger advised very cautiously reintroducing poisonous initiations such as wheat( a classic initiation of allergic replies) and dairy( an acid-forming food ).

Photograph: Alexandra Iakovleva/ Getty

To read Jungers book is to feel that everything edible in our world is potentially toxic. Yet, as with Arthur Hassall, many of Jungers fears may be justified. Junger writes as a doctor with first-hand knowledge of diet-related epidemics of cancer, congestive heart failure, diabetes and autoimmune disease. The journal is full-of-the-moon of action considers of individuals who follow Jungers detox and rise lighter, leaner and happier. Who is the candidate for using this programme? Junger asks, replying: Everyone who lives a modern life, fees a modern food and occupies the modern world.

To my amaze, I encountered myself compelled by the messianic feeling of Jungers Clean though not quite forced enough to pay $475 for his 21 -day programme( which, in any event, doesnt ship outside of North America ), or to give up my daily breakfast of inflammatory coffee, gut-irritating sourdough toast and acid-forming butter, on which I feel astonishingly well. When I told Giles Yeo how seductive I experienced Jungers terms, almost despite myself, he said: This is their magic! They are all charismatic human being. I do reckon the clean-eating gurus believe in it themselves. They drink the Koolaid.

Over the past 50 years, mainstream healthcare in the west has been inexplicably blind to the role that diet plays in preventing and alleviating ill health. When it started, #eatclean spoke to growing numbers of people who felt that their existing road of eating was causing them difficulties, from weight gain to headaches to stress, and that conventional medication had not been able improve. In the is a lack of nutrition lead from physicians, it was a natural pace for individuals to start experimenting with cutting out this food or that.

From 2009 to 2014, the number of Americans who actively evaded gluten, despite not suffered by coeliac malady, more than tripled. It too became fashionable to booze a whole pantheon of non-dairy milks, ranging from oat milk to almond milk. I have lactose-intolerant and vegan friends who say that #eatclean has represented it far easier for them to buy ingredients that they once had to go to specialist health-food stores to find. What isnt so easy now is to find reliable information on special foods in the high seas of half-truths and bunkum.

Someone who mentioned how quickly and radically #eatclean changed the market for health-food works is Anne Dolamore, a publisher at the independent meat publishers Grub Street, are stationed in London. Dolamore has been publishing health-related nutrient books since 1995, a meter when free-from cooking was a minuscule subculture. In the days before Google, Dolamore who has long was held that nutrient is medicine felt that volumes on special foods by columnists with proper credentials could dish a useful intent. In 1995, Grub Street wrote The Everyday Diabetic Cookbook, which has since exchanged over 100,000 imitations in the UK. Other successful books followed, including The Everyday Wheat-Free and Gluten-Free Cookbook by Michelle Berriedale-Johnson, published in 1998.

In 2012, the market for wellness cookbooks in the UK suddenly changed, starting with the astound success of Honestly Healthy by Natasha Corrett and Vicki Edgson, which sold around 80,000 imitates. Louise Haines, a publisher at 4th Estate, recalls that the previous large-hearted trend in British food publishing had been roasting, but the baking boom succumbed overnight, virtually, and a number of sugar-free notebooks came through.

At Grub Street, Anne Dolamore watched aghast as bestselling cookbooks piled up from a never-ending stream of blonde, willowy sovereignties, many of whom seemed to be designing nutritions based on little but their own limited know-how. If Junger and Reno laid the groundwork for chew clean to become a vast worldwide trend, it was social media and the internet that did the rest. Almost all of the authors of the British clean gobbling bestsellers started off as bloggers or Instagrammers, many of them beautiful women in their early 20 s who were genuinely convinced that the nutritions they had developed had antidote them of various types of chronic ailments.

Keep your chia seed smoothies off my Instagram feed

Every wellness guru worth her Himalayan pink salt has a floor of how changing what you eat can change their own lives. Food has the power to see or divulge you, wrote Amelia Freer in her 2014 bestseller Eat. Nourish. Glow.( which has sold more than 200,000 facsimiles ). Freer was guiding a busy life as a personal assistant to the Sovereign of Wales when she realised that her paunch looked and appeared as if it had a football in it from too many snatched dinners of cheese on toast or factory-made food. By giving up treated and convenience food( margarine, yuck !) along with gluten and carbohydrate, Freer claimed to have found the secrets to searching younger and find healthier.

Perhaps the best-known diet-transformation legend of all is that of Ella Mills possessor of more than a million Instagram adherents. In 2011, Mills was diagnosed with postural tachycardia syndrome, a condition characterised by dizziness and extreme wearines. Mills embarked blogging about nutrient after discovering that her evidences radically improved when she swapped her sugar-laden food for plant-based, natural foods. Mills who used to be a model obligated following a free-from food seem not drab or robbed, but deeply aspirational. By the time her first notebook appeared in January 2015, her vast following on social media facilitated her to sell 32,000 mimics in the first week alone.

Amelia Freer. Image: S Meddle/ ITV/ Rex/ Shutterstock

There was something equivocal about the road these books were sold. What they were selling alleged to be an alternative to a sordidly commercial nutrient industry. If its got a barcode or a predict, dont buy it, wrote Freer. Yet clean eating is itself a wildly profitable commercial enterprise, promoted employing photogenic young bloggers on a multi-billion-dollar tech pulpit. Literary agent Zoe Ross tells me that around 2015 she began to notice that the market was rubbing Instagram for copycat plays specifically very pretty, very young girls pushing curated meat and lifestyle.

After years on the margins, health-based cooking was eventually going a mass gathering. In 2016, 18 out the 20 top dealers in Amazon UKs food and suck book category had a focus on healthy eating and dieting. The paradox, nonetheless, was that the kind of well-researched books Dolamore and others formerly written no longer tended to sell so well, because health publishing was now dominated by social media fames. Bookshops were heaving with so many of these clean volumes that even the authors themselves started to feel that there were too many of them. Alice Liveing, a 23 -year-old personal trainer who writes as Clean Eating Alice, debated in her 2016 work Eat Well Every Day that she was endorse what I feel is a much-needed breath of fresh air in what I think is an fantastically saturated market. To my untrained see, browsing through her journal, Alices fresh approaching to diet appeared very similar to innumerable others: time and almond intensity pellets, kale chippings, beetroot and feta burgers.

Then again, shouldnt we commit clean chewing due ascribe towards achieving the miracle of swerving beetroot and kale into objects of longing? Data from specialists Kantar Worldpanel show that UK sales of fresh beetroot have risen dramatically from 42.8 m in 2013 to 50.5 m in 2015. Some would “re saying that”, in highly-developed nations where most people devour shockingly poor nutritions, low-grade in light-greens and high in sugar, this new confederation of health and food has done a modicum of good. Giles Yeo who invested some time cooking a spicy sweet-potato bowl with Ella Mills for his BBC programme agrees that many of the clean eating recipes he tried are actually a deliciou and cool channel to cook veggies. But why, Yeo questions, do these authors not simply say I am producing a very good vegetarian cookbook and stop there, instead of realise larger assertions about the influence of vegetables to beautify or foreclose illnes? The poison arises from the fact because this is wrapping the whole concept up in pseudoscience, Yeo says. If you base something on falsehoods, it empowers people to take extreme actions, and this is where the damage begins.

You cant acquired a brand-new sect organisation with the words I am publicizing a very good vegetarian cookbook. For this, you need something stronger. You require the assurance of make-believe, mumbled sweetly. Grind this cauliflower into minuscule slice and you can make a special kind of no-carb rice! Avoid all sugar and your skin will shimmer! Among interesting thing, clean chewing shows how vulnerable and forgotten billions of us feel about diet that are actually represents how misplaced we feel about our own figures. We are so unmoored that the authorities concerned will gave our belief in any employer who promises us that we, more, can become pure and good.

I can pinpoint the exact time that my own experiences about clean ingesting changed from hesitancy to outright dislike. I was on stagecoach at the Cheltenham literary gala with dietician Renee McGregor( who works both with Olympic jocks and anorexia nervosa sufferers) when a army of around 300 clean-eating love started jeering and shouting at us. We were supposedly taking part in a clean-eating debate with nutritionist Madeleine Shaw, columnist of Get the Glow and Ready Steady Glow.

Before that week, I had never read any of Shaws work. As I flicked through Ready Steady Glow, I was somewhat endeared by the upbeat colour( stop expropriating yourself and start living) and shining photos of a beam Shaw. I often surprise myself by determining new things to spiralise she writes, acquainting a sweetened potato noodle salad. Cauliflower pizza, in her look, is quite simply: the best fabrication ever.

But underneath the brightness there were notes of restriction that I discovered both perturbing and confused. As ever, all my recipes are sugar-and-wheat free, Shaw announces, simply to present a recipe for gluten-free brownies that contains 200 g of coconut sugar, a essence that costs a lot more than your median grey granulated carbohydrate, but is metabolised by the body in the same direction. I was still more alarmed by gradation four in Shaws nine-point food philosophy, which says that all bread and pasta should be avoided: they find themselves tan nutrients, which are full of substances, preservatives and genetically manipulated wheat, and not whole foods. Shaws book makes no distinction between a loaf of, say, bleached shredded white-hot, and a homemade wholemeal sourdough.

When we satisfied on theatre in Cheltenham, I expected Shaw why she told parties to cut out all bread, and was startled when she disavowed she had said any such act( rye food was her favourite, she contributed ). McGregor expected Shaw what she signified when she wrote that people should try to eat only clean proteins; meat that was not deep-fried was her rather astounding reply. McGregors main concern about clean eating, she lent, was that as health professionals considering young people with eating disorders, she had watched first-hand how the rules and restrictions of clean eating often segued into incapacitating anorexia or orthorexia.

Madeleine Shaw promoting her notebook Get the Glow. Picture: Joe Pepler/ REX/ Shutterstock

But I simply attend the positive, said Shaw , now mopping away weepings. It was at this point that the gathering, who were already restless whenever McGregor or I addrest, descended into outright hostility, shouting and whoosh for us to get off stage. In a work store after the contest, as devotees came up to Shaw to thank her for committing them the light, I more burst into rips when person or persons jabbed her paws at me and said I should be ashamed, as an elderly women( I am 43 ), to have criticised a younger one. On Twitter that night, some Shaw devotees formed derogatory explains about how McGregor and I looked, under the hashtag #youarewhatyoueat. The ramification was that, if we were less photogenic than Shaw, we clearly had nothing of any appraise to say about nutrient( never mind the fact that McGregor has positions in biochemistry and nutrition ).

Thinking about the event on the qualify home, I realised that the crowd were angry with us not because they disagreed with the details( its pretty clear that you cant have sugar in sugar-free recipes ), but because they disliked the facts of the case “that weve” quarrelling at all. To insist on the facts of the case drawn us come across as cruelly negative. We had punctured the glad belief-bubble of glowiness that they had come to imbibe from Shaw. Its impressing that in many of the wellness cookbooks, mainstream scientific testify on diet is perceived as more or less irrelevant , not least because the gurus find the contentment of science as part of what prepared our foods so bad in the first place.

Amelia Freer, in Eat. Nourish. Glow, admits that we cant prove that dairy is the cause of ailments ranging from IBS to joint pain, but concluded that there surely worth cutting dairy out anyway, just as a precaution. In another context, Freer writes that Im told it takes 17 times for scientific knowledge to filter down to become general knowledge, while advising that gluten should be avoided. Once we register its national territory where all expert and expertise are automatically suspect, you can start to claim almost anything and numerous #eatclean dominions do.

That night in Cheltenham, I learnt that clean eating or whatever call it now goes under had elements of a post-truth sect. As with any faith, it could be something darknes and divisive if you got on the wrong side of it. After Giles Yeos BBC programme was aired, he told me he was startled to find himself subjected to unrelenting online trolling. They said I was funded by big pharma, and therefore obviously wouldnt ascertain the benefits of a health diet over remedy. These were outright lies.( Yeo is employed by the University of Cambridge, and funded by the Medical Research Council .)

Its increasingly clear that clean eating, for all its good aims, can cause real harm, both to fact and to human being. Over the past 18 months, McGregor says, every single patron with an anorexia nervosa who strolls into my clinic doorways is either following or wants to follow a clean behavior of eating.

In her brand-new volume, Orthorexia, McGregor observes that while anorexia nervosa long predate the #eatclean veer, meat rulers( such as dining no dairy or forestalling all cereals) readily become a guise for curtailing meat intake. Likewise, they are not even good principles, based as they are on unsubstantiated, unscientific affirms. Take almond milk, which is widely touted as a superior alternative to kine milk. McGregor visualizes it as little better than expensive ocean, containing precisely 0.1 g protein per 100 ml, compared with 3.2 g per 100 ml in kine milk. But she often ascertains it very difficult to convince her buyers that restricting themselves to these clean meat is in the long run worse for their own health than what she calls unchecked ingesting balanced and went dinners, but no anxiety about the curious ice cream or chocolate bar.

Clearly , not everyone who bought a clean-eating volume has developed an eating disorder. But a push whose premise is that normal meat is unhealthy has now obscured the liquids of healthy gobbling for everyone else, by planting the idea that a good food is one founded on absolutes.

The true-blue tribulation of clean chewing is not that it is entirely spurious. It is that it contains a seed of reality, as Giles Yeo employs it. When you strip down all the pseudo nonsense, they are absolutely right to say that we should feed more vegetables, less refined sugar and less flesh, Yeo said, sipping a black coffee in his office at the Institute of Metabolic Science in Cambridge, where he spends his daytimes researching the root causes obesity. Yeo agrees with the clean eaters that our environment of inexpensive, bountiful, sugary, fatty nutrient is a recipe for widespread obesity and ill health. The trouble is its nearly impossible to pick out the sensible flecks of clean eating and neglect the residual. #Eatclean drew health chewing seem like something expensive, exclusive and difficult to achieve, as Anthony Warner writes. Whether the term scavenge is expended or not, there is a new puritanism about nutrient that has taken root very widely.

A few weeks ago, I overheard a fit, middle-aged mortal at the gym lecturing a sidekick for not feeing a better food a conversation that would formerly ought to have unimaginable among beings. The first human was telling the second that the skinny burgers he opted were nothing but shitty mince and sell and arguing that he could get almost everything he needed from a food of vegetables, cooked with no petroleum. Fat is fatty, at the end of the day, he agreed, before bemoaning the imbeciles who tried to eat something wholesome like a salad, then ruined everything by including salt. If you have one bad diet period a week, you untie all your good work.

The real question is how to fight this kind of diet absolutism without bouncing back to a moronic celebration of the modern food milieu that is demonstrably obligating so many beings sick. In 2016, more than 600 children in the UK were get registered as living with form 2 diabetes; before 2002, there were no reported cases of children suffering from the condition, whose reasons are diet-related.

Our food system is in desperate the requirements of reconstruct. Theres a danger that, in the fight against the absurdity of clean eating, we end up looking like apologists for a commercial food supply that is failing in its basic undertaking of nourishing us. Former orthorexia sufferer Edward L Yuen has argued in his 2014 journal, Beating Orthorexia that the old advice of everything in moderation no longer works in a meat milieu where gobbling in the middle ground is likely to be leave you with chronic illness. When components are supersized and Snickers forbids are exchanged by the metre( something I insured in my local Tesco recently ), devouring ordinarily is not inevitably a balanced option. The answer isnt yet another perfect diet, but a shift in our feeling of what constitutes normal food.

Sales of courgettes in the UK flew 20% from 2014 to 2015, fuelled by the rise of the spiraliser. But overall consumption of veggies, both in the UK and worldwide, is still vanishingly tiny( with 74% of the adult UK population not coping to dine five a day ). That is much lower than it was in the 1950 s, when freshly cooked daily snacks were still something that most people took for granted.

Among the affluent categorizes who already devour a healthier-than-average food, the Instagram goddesses generated a new simulate of dietary perfection to aims to achieve. For the rest of specific populations, however, it plainly placed the ideal of healthy meat further and further out of reaching. Behind the glossy extends of the clean-eating books, there is a coarse model of financial exclusion that says that someone who cant afford wheatgrass or spirulina can never be truly well.

As the conversation I overheard in the gym exemplifies, this way of thinking is especially dangerous because it overshadows the letter that, in fact, small changes in diet can have a large beneficial affect. If you think you cant be healthy unless you feed nothing but veggies, you might miss the fact that( as a recent synopsi of the evidence by epidemiologists proved) there are substantial the potential benefits of growing your fruit-and-veg intake from zero parcels a date to simply two.

Among its many other offences, clean eating was a series of claims about food that were all or nothing which only serves to underline the facts of the case that most people, as usual, are protruded with nothing.

Main photograph: Alamy

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How We Increased Our Email Response Rate from ~8% to 34%

Posted by STMartin

It’s no secret that reply rate is the golden metric of email campaigns.

The reason is obvious. As opposed to open and click rate, reply rate tracks how many recipients were interested (or annoyed) enough to actually write you back. For guest blogging and email outreach, your reply rate will determine your campaign’s success.

We still believe that guest blogging is a great opportunity to improve your site’s link profile and brand exposure. However, the time-investment needed in prospecting/email outreach can leave you questioning its ROI.

It doesn’t often make sense to spend 3 hours prospecting and emailing different opportunities to get only 3 replies.

So how do you make all your prospecting and emailing worth your while?

Simple: Boost your reply rate to generate more “opportunities won” in the same timeframe.

The pain point: Time

At Directive Consulting, we rely on guest posting for our most valuable backlinks. With that said, four months ago our email outreach was still struggling at around an 8% reply rate.

This is actually around the industry standard; guest blogger outreach emails might expect a reply rate in the 5–15% range.

With the below template, we were sending out 20–50 emails a week and receiving no more than 2–4 positive replies.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

To make the system more time-efficient, we had to get our reply rate at least into the double digits.

The hypothesis: Value

To boost our reply rate, we asked ourselves: What makes the best online content so engaging?

The answer: The best online content speaks to the user in terms of value. More specifically, the user’s personal values.

So, what are these user values that we need to target? Well, to look at that we need to understand today’s average user.

Image source

As opposed to their predecessors, today’s savvy post-digital users value personalization, customization, and participation.

Our hypothesis was as follows: If we can craft an email user experience that improves upon these three values, our reply rate will spike.

The results: Too hot to handle

3 successful tests later, our reply rate has gone from 8% all the way up to 34%.

And our guest blog content queue is piling up faster than the lines at the mall the night before Black Friday.

In three tests we addressed those three values: personalization, customization, and participation. Each new test brought a spike in reply rate.

How did we do it? Don’t worry, I’ll tell you how.

3 reply rate tests (& a mini test) and what we learned

We started by stepping into the user’s shoes. Everyone knows that receiving random outreach emails from strangers can be jarring. Even if you’re in the industry, it can at least be annoying.

So how do you solve that problem? The only way you can: delight.

How we approached creating a more delightful and comfortable email experience took testing. This is what we learned.

Test #1 – The personalized introduction (8%–16%)

The first feature of our email we tackled was the introduction. This included the subject line of the email, as well as how we introduced ourselves and the company.

Here’s what it looked like:

As you can see, while the subject line packs some serious authority, it’s not very personable. And if you look at the in-email introduction, you’d see a similar problem.

Plenty of professional context, but hardly a personalized first impression. This user-experience screams BLOGGER TRYING TO GET GUEST BLOG OPPORTUNITY.

Now let’s look at the variant we tested:

Big difference, huh?

While all the same authoritative references are still there, this is already far more personal.

A few noteworthy differences in user-experience:

Subject line: Natural, single sentence (almost seems like the email could have been forwarded by a co-worker).

Name and title: The letterhead not only replaces a useless sentence, it supplies a smiling face the user can match the name/title with.

Creative/disruptive branding: The creative letterhead is a real disrupter when you compare it to any old email. It also gets our logo above the fold in the email, and actually saves space all together.

Packing all the context of the email into a single, creative, and delightful image for the user was a huge step.

In fact, this first test alone saw our biggest jump in reply rate.

The results? Our reply rate doubled, jumping all the way from 8% to 16% — above the industry benchmark!

Mini test: The psychology behind “Because” (16%–20%)

If that wasn’t a big enough jump to please us, we added on one more addition after the initial test.

If you don’t know who Brian Dean is, I’ll leave his bio for you to read another time. For now, all you need to know is that his “because” tactic for increasing reply rates works.

Trust me. He tested it. We tested it. It works.

The tactic is simple:

Provide the exact context for your email in a single sentence.

Use the phrasing “I am emailing you because…” in that sentence.

Isolate that sentence as it’s own paragraph as early in the email as possible.

…

That’s it.

And this little change bumped our reply rate another 4% — all the way up to 20%. And this was before we even ran test #2!

Test #2 – Customizing/segmenting the offer (20%–28%)

Test #2 focused on customization. We had nailed the personalized first impression.

Now we needed to customize our offer to each individual recipient. Again, let’s take a look at where we started:

As far as customization goes, this isn’t half bad. There are plenty of prospective topics that the editor or blogger could choose from. But there’s always room for improvement.

Customization is a fancy word for segmentation, which is our industry’s fancy word for breaking lists into smaller lists.

So why not segment the topics we send to which editors? We can customize our email’s offer to be more relevant to the specific recipient, which should increase our chances of a positive reply.

Instead of a single list of prospective topics, we built 8.

Each list was targeted to a different niche industry where we wanted to guest post. Each list had 10 unique topics all specified to that blog’s niche.

Now, instead of 10 topics for the umbrella category “digital marketing,” we had 10 topics for:

Pay-per-click advertising blogs

Content marketing blogs

Social media management blogs

Software as a service (SaaS) blogs

Interactive design blogs

Search engine optimization blogs

Agency management blogs

E-commerce optimization blogs

Not only did the potential topics change, we also changed the email copy to better target each niche.

This test took a bit of time on its own. It’s not easy to build a list of 80 different targeted, niche, high-quality topics based on keyword research. But in the end, the juice was definitely worth the squeeze.

And what was the juice? Another spike in our reply rate — this time from 20% up to 28%!

Test #3 – Participating in topic selection (28%–34%)

We were already pretty pleased with ourselves at this point, but true link builders are never satisfied. So we kept on testing.

We had already addressed the personalization and customization issues. Now we wanted to take a crack at participation. But how do you encourage participation in an email?

That’s a tricky question.

We answered it by trying to provide the most adaptive offer as possible.

In our email copy, we emphasized our flexibility to the editor’s timeline/content calendar. We also provided a “open to any other options you may have” option in our list of topics. But the biggest change to our offer was this:

As opposed to a list of potential topics, we went one step further. By providing options for either long or short pieces (primary and focalized) we give them something to think about. They can choose from different options we are offering them.

This change did increase our reply rate. But what was surprising was that the replies were not immediately positive responses. More often than not, they were questions about the two different types of guest posts we could write.

This is where the participation finally kicked in.

(Chasing your first reply like Leo’s first oscar….)

We were no longer cold-emailing strangers for one-time guest posts. We were conversing and building relationships with industry bloggers and editors.

And they were no longer responding to a random email. They were actively participating in the topic selection of their next blog post.

Once they started replying with questions, we knew they were interested. Then all we had to do was close them with fast responses and helpful answers.

This tiny change (all we did was split the targeted list we already had into two different sizes) brought big results. Test #3 brought the final jump in our reply rate — from 28% up to the magic 34%.

After we had proved that our new format worked, then we got to have some real fun — taking this killer system we built and scaling it up!

But that’s a post for another day.

Takeaways

So what have our reply rate tests taught us? The more personal you are and the more segmented your approach, the more success you’ll see.

2017 is going to be the year of relationship building.

This means that for each market interaction, you need to remember that the user’s experience is the top priority. Provide as much delight and value to your user as possible. Every blog post. Every email. Every market interaction.

That’s how you triple reply rates. And that’s how you triple success.

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[apsbicepstraining]

Why we fell for clean eating

The long read: The oh-so-Instagrammable meat progress has been exhaustively discredited but it establishes no signeds of “re going away”. The real question is why we were so desperate to believe it

In the springtime of 2014, Jordan Younger “ve noticed that” her mane was falling out in clumps. Not cool was her action. At the time, Younger, 23, believed herself to be feeing the healthiest of every possible nutritions. She was a gluten-free, sugar-free, oil-free, grain-free, legume-free, plant-based raw vegan. As The Blonde Vegan, Younger was a wellness blogger in New York City, one of thousands on Instagram( where “shes had” 70,000 adherents) rallying under the hashtag #eatclean. Although she had no qualifications as a nutritionist, Younger had exchanged more than 40,000 two copies of her own $25, five-day purify programme a formula for the purposes of an all-raw, plant-based diet majoring on green juice.

But the clean diet that Younger was selling as the street to health was reaching its developer sick. Far from being super-healthy, she used suffering from a serious anorexia nervosa: orthorexia, an infatuation with downing exclusively meat the hell is pure and perfect. Youngers raw vegan food had caused her ages to stop and granted her scalp an orange touch from all the sugared potato and carrots she exhausted( the only carbohydrates she let herself ). Eventually, she endeavoured psychological promotion, and began to slowly expand the range of foods she would allow herself to devour, beginning with the fish. She recognised that the problem was not her veganism, per se, but the particularly rigid and restrictive diet government she had imposed on herself.

As Younger gradually recovered from her anorexia nervosa, she faced a new dilemma. What would parties ponder, she agonised, if they knew the Blonde Vegan was devouring fish? She levelled with her partisans in a blogpost entitled Why Im Transitioning Away from Veganism. Within hours of announcing her brand-new diet, Younger was receiving irate meanings from vegans requiring fund back from the purge programmes and T-shirts they had bought from her place( peculiarity slogans such as OH KALE YES ).

She lost partisans by the thousands and receives an daily raft of furious letters, including death threats. Some responded to her confession that she was suffering from an anorexia nervosa by alleging her of has become a fatty slouse of lard who didnt have the discipline is really clean.

For as long as beings have snacked meat, “theres been” diets and quack medications. But previously, these existed, like plot beliefs, on the fringes of nutrient culture. Clean eating was different, because it established itself as a challenge to mainstream ways of eating, and its wild notoriety during the past five years old has enabled it to move far beyond the fringes. Powered by social media, it has been more absolutist in its claims and most popular in its reaching than any previous institution of modern nutrition advice.

At its simplest, clean ingesting is about ingesting nothing but whole or unprocessed foods( what has been made by these profoundly equivocal expressions ). Some versions of clean feeing have been vegan, while others accept various meats( preferably wild) and something mysteriously announced bone broth( broth, to you and me ). At first, clean eating resounded modest and even homespun: rather than counting calories, you are able to dine as many nutritious home-cooked essences as possible.

But it quickly became clear that clean feeing was more than a nutrition; it was a notion system, which propagated the idea that the space most people devour was not just fattening, but impure. Seemingly out of nowhere, a whole cosmo of coconut oil, dubious hopes and spiralised courgettes has developed. Back in the distant mists of 2009, James Duigan, owner of The Bodyism gym in London and sometime personal manager to the modeling Elle MacPherson, publicized his first Clean and Lean book. As an early adopter of #eatclean, Duigan notes that he battled with his publisher to include ingredients like kale and quinoa, because no one had ever heard of them. Now quinoa is in every supermarket and kale has become as ordinary as loot. I long for the working day when clean eating meant not getting too much down your front, the novelist Susie Boyt joked recently.

Jordan Younger, AKA The Balanced Blonde, formerly The Blonde Vegan. Image: Whitford/ BFA/ Rex/ Shutterstock

Almost as soon as it became ubiquitous, clean eating activated a backlash. By 2015, Nigella Lawson was speaking for many when she expressed resentment at clean dining as a judgmental flesh of body fascism. Food is not dirty, Lawson wrote. Clean eating has been attacked by commentators such as the baker and cookbook generator Ruby Tandoh( who wrote a much-shared article on the subject in Vice magazine in May 2016) for being an incitement to eating disorders.

Others have pointed out that, as a procedure of healthy eating, its founded on bad discipline. In June, the American Heart Association suggested that the coconut petroleum beloved as a cure-all by clean eaters actually had no known offsetting favourable consequences, and that exhausting it is unable to result in higher LDL cholesterol. A few a few weeks later, Anthony Warner a nutrient consultant with a background in science who blogs as The Angry Chef produced a book-length assault on the science of clean eating, calling it a world-wide of quinoa container and nutribollocks fuelled by the modern intelligence age.

When Dr Giles Yeo, a geneticist at the University of Cambridge, presented an episode of the BBCs Horizon this year that has reviewed and considered the technical prove for different academies of clean eating, he found everything from innocuous recipes to serious malpractice.

He reported on the alkaline nutrition of Dr Robert O Young, who peddled the idea that canker was a result of feeing acidic meat. After being diagnosed with terminal cancer in her 20 s, Naima Houder-Mohammed, an officer in the British military, paid Young more than $77,000 for medicine( including dinners of avocado, which Young announces Gods butter) at his pH miracle ranch in the US in 2012. She died afterward that year. Separately, Young was incarcerated in June this year after being imprisoned of charges including practising medicine without a licence. While he may represent an extreme case, it is clear that many wellness gurus, as Yeos programme concluded, tell a troubling narrative founded on falsehoods.

As the negative press for clean gobbling has intensified over the past year, many of the early goddesses of #eatclean has endeavoured to rebrand saying they no longer use the word clean to describe the recipes that have sold them billions of works. Ella Mills AKA Deliciously Ella, the meat novelist and entrepreneur whose coconut-and-oat force projectiles sell for 1.79 apiece in British supermarkets said on Yeos Horizon curriculum that she felt that the word clean as applied to eating originally necessitated nothing but natural, real, unprocessed food. Now, it makes diet, it intends cult, she complained.

But however often principles of clean eating has been logically refuted and publicly abused, the thing itself depicts few signals of dying. Step into the cookbook section of any book browse and you will see how many recipe novelists continue to promise us inner purity and outer elegance. Even if “youve never” deliberately tried to eat clean, its impossible to avoid the trend altogether, because it changed the nutrients available to all of us, and the acces they are spoken of.

Avocados now outsell oranges in the UK. Susi Richards, heads of state of concoction increase at Sainsburys supermarkets, told me earlier this year that she had been taken aback by the pace at which demand for commodities fitting with the clean eating lifestyle have grown in the UK. Families who would once have snacked potato waffles are now experimenting with lower carb butternut squaffles( slicings of butternut squash slashed to resemble a waffle ). Nutribullets a brand of compact blenders designed for making supposedly radiance-bestowing juices and smoothies are now mentioned in some curves as casually as wooden spoons.

Why has clean gobbling demonstrated so difficult to kill off? Hadley Freeman, in the present working paper, marked clean eating as part of a post-truth culture, whose adherents are impervious, or even hostile, to realities and experts. But to understand how clean gobbling took hold with such perseverance, its necessary first to believe just what a terrifying happen nutrient has become for millions of people in the contemporary world. The interesting question is not whether clean snacking is nonsense, but why so many intelligent people decided to thrown their sect in it.

We are not the only generation to have looked in disgust at an unhealthy food milieu and wished that we could supplant it with nutrients “thats been” perfectly safe to snack. In the 1850 s, a British chemist called Arthur Hill Hassall became remain convinced that the whole food supply of London was riddled with poisons and fakery. Whats more, he was right. Hassall had done a series of investigations for the medical gazette the Lancet, and found that much of what was for sale as food and suck was not what it seemed: coffee made from burnt sugar and chicory; pickles dyed light-green with poison copper colourings.

Years of exposing the poison hypocrisies all around him seems to have driven Hassall to a territory of paranoia. He started to see poison everywhere, and has been determined that the answer was to create a list of entirely uncontaminated food products. In 1881, he set up his own house, The Pure Food Company, which would only use ingredients of unimpeachable character. Hassall took water that was softened and refined and compounded it with the most significant Smithfield beef to obligate the purest beef jelly and disgusting-sounding fibrinous meat lozenges the force balls of Victorian England. The Pure Food Company of 1881 dins just like a hundred wellness meat businesses today except for the fact that it collapsed within a year due to lack of sales.

We are once again living in an environment where everyday food, which should be something dependable and sustaining, has come to feel noxious. Unlike the Victorian, we do not fear that our coffee is phony so much as that our entire motif of gobbling may be bad for us, in ways that we cant fully distinguish. One of the things that becomes the new wave of wellness cookbooks so plea is that they assure the reader that they furnish a new space of gobbling that comes without any anxiety or guilt.

The founding principle of these modern wellness regimes is that our present direction of gobbling is slowly poisoning us. Much of the meat on offer to us today is nutritionally substandard, write the Hemsley sisters, best-selling champions of nutrient-dense nutrient. Its hard to disagree with the proposition that modern foods are generally substandard, even if you dont share the Hemsleys solution of proceeding grain-free. All of these foods have a grains of fact that is spun out into some big imagination, Giles Yeo says hence their gigantic appeal.

Melissa and Jasmine Hemsley. Photograph: Nick Hopper

Clean eating whether it is called that or not is perhaps best seen as a dysfunctional have responded to a still more dysfunctional food supply: a dream of integrity in a noxious nature. To walk into a modern western supermarket is to be assailed by aisle upon alley of salty, oily snacks and sugary cereals, of food that has been neither attested nor fermented, of cheap, sweetened potions and meat from swine kept in inhumane conditions.

In the postwar decades, most countries in the world underwent what the prof of nutrition Barry Popkin calls a nutrition transition to a westernised diet high-pitched in sugar, meat, fat, salt, refined oils and ultra-processed brews, and low-grade in veggies. Affluence and multi-national meat companies superseded the emptines of earlier generations with an unwholesome dinner of sweet boozings and convenience food that educate us from a young age to pray more of the same. Wherever this pattern of gobbling wandered, it brought with it dramatic rises in ill health, from allergies to cancer.

In prosperous countries, large numbers of people whether they wanted to lose weight or not grew understandably scared of the modern food supply and what it was doing to our torsoes: character 2 diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular disease , not to mention a multitude of other disorders that are influenced by diet, straying from Alzheimers to gout. When mainstream diets start to sicken parties, it is unsurprising that many of us should seek other ways and means of snacking to keep ourselves safe from impairment. Our collective feeling around diet was exacerbated by a general impression that mainstream scientific advice on food overstated by newspaper headlines had not been able be trusted. First these so-called experts tell us to avoid fat, then carbohydrate, and all the while beings get less and less health. What the fuck is these experts say next, and why should we believe them?

Into this atmosphere of nervousnes and disarray stepped a series of gurus offering meanings of superb simplicity and reassurance: dine this direction and I will clear you fresh and healthy again. It are difficult to pinpoint the exact minute when clean eating started, because it is not so much as a single nutrition as a portmanteau term that has acquired projects from innumerable pre-existing diets: a bit of Paleo here, some Atkins there, with a few remnants of 1960 s macrobiotics thrown in for good measure.

But some time in the early 2000 s, two distinct but interrelated versions of clean eating grew popular in the US one based on the sect of real meat, and the other on the relevant recommendations of detox. Formerly the concept of cleanliness had entered the realm of eating, it was only a matter of time before the basic mind spread contagiously across Instagram, where love of #eatclean could share their artfully photographed light-green juices and rainbow salad bowls.

The first and more moderate form of clean food beginning in 2007, when Tosca Reno, a Canadian fitness framework, publicized a work called The Eat-Clean Diet. In it, Reno described how she lost 34 kg( 75 lb) and altered her health by scaping all over-refined and processed foods, particularly lily-white flour and sugar. A usual Reno eat-clean meal might be stir-fried chicken and veggies over brown rice; or almond-date biscotti with a cup of tea. In many methods The Eat-Clean Diet was like any number of diet journals that had come before, advising abundance of veggies and modestly sectioned, home-cooked meals. The difference, which Anthony Warner calls a piece of genius on Renos part, was that she presented it, above all, as a holistic way of living.

Meanwhile, two seconds form of clean eating was spearheaded by a former cardiologist from Uruguay called Alejandro Junger, the author of Clean: The Revolutionary Program to Restore the Bodys Natural Ability to Mend Itself, which was published in 2009 after Jungers clean detox organization had been praised by Gwyneth Paltrow on her Goop website. Jungers organisation was far more stringent than Renos, involving, for a few weeks, a revolutionary riddance diet based on liquid banquets and a total exclusion of caffeine, booze, dairy and eggs, sugar, all vegetables in the nightshade house( tomatoes, aubergines and so on ), ruby-red meat( which, according to Junger, forms an acidic inner medium ), among other foods. During this phase, Junger admonished a largely liquid food either composed of home-made juices and soups, or of his own special powdered shakes. After the detox interval, Junger advised very cautiously reintroducing poisonous initiations such as wheat( a classic initiation of allergic replies) and dairy( an acid-forming food ).

Photograph: Alexandra Iakovleva/ Getty

To read Jungers book is to feel that everything edible in our world is potentially toxic. Yet, as with Arthur Hassall, many of Jungers fears may be justified. Junger writes as a doctor with first-hand knowledge of diet-related epidemics of cancer, congestive heart failure, diabetes and autoimmune disease. The journal is full-of-the-moon of action considers of individuals who follow Jungers detox and rise lighter, leaner and happier. Who is the candidate for using this programme? Junger asks, replying: Everyone who lives a modern life, fees a modern food and occupies the modern world.

To my amaze, I encountered myself compelled by the messianic feeling of Jungers Clean though not quite forced enough to pay $475 for his 21 -day programme( which, in any event, doesnt ship outside of North America ), or to give up my daily breakfast of inflammatory coffee, gut-irritating sourdough toast and acid-forming butter, on which I feel astonishingly well. When I told Giles Yeo how seductive I experienced Jungers terms, almost despite myself, he said: This is their magic! They are all charismatic human being. I do reckon the clean-eating gurus believe in it themselves. They drink the Koolaid.

Over the past 50 years, mainstream healthcare in the west has been inexplicably blind to the role that diet plays in preventing and alleviating ill health. When it started, #eatclean spoke to growing numbers of people who felt that their existing road of eating was causing them difficulties, from weight gain to headaches to stress, and that conventional medication had not been able improve. In the is a lack of nutrition lead from physicians, it was a natural pace for individuals to start experimenting with cutting out this food or that.

From 2009 to 2014, the number of Americans who actively evaded gluten, despite not suffered by coeliac malady, more than tripled. It too became fashionable to booze a whole pantheon of non-dairy milks, ranging from oat milk to almond milk. I have lactose-intolerant and vegan friends who say that #eatclean has represented it far easier for them to buy ingredients that they once had to go to specialist health-food stores to find. What isnt so easy now is to find reliable information on special foods in the high seas of half-truths and bunkum.

Someone who mentioned how quickly and radically #eatclean changed the market for health-food works is Anne Dolamore, a publisher at the independent meat publishers Grub Street, are stationed in London. Dolamore has been publishing health-related nutrient books since 1995, a meter when free-from cooking was a minuscule subculture. In the days before Google, Dolamore who has long was held that nutrient is medicine felt that volumes on special foods by columnists with proper credentials could dish a useful intent. In 1995, Grub Street wrote The Everyday Diabetic Cookbook, which has since exchanged over 100,000 imitations in the UK. Other successful books followed, including The Everyday Wheat-Free and Gluten-Free Cookbook by Michelle Berriedale-Johnson, published in 1998.

In 2012, the market for wellness cookbooks in the UK suddenly changed, starting with the astound success of Honestly Healthy by Natasha Corrett and Vicki Edgson, which sold around 80,000 imitates. Louise Haines, a publisher at 4th Estate, recalls that the previous large-hearted trend in British food publishing had been roasting, but the baking boom succumbed overnight, virtually, and a number of sugar-free notebooks came through.

At Grub Street, Anne Dolamore watched aghast as bestselling cookbooks piled up from a never-ending stream of blonde, willowy sovereignties, many of whom seemed to be designing nutritions based on little but their own limited know-how. If Junger and Reno laid the groundwork for chew clean to become a vast worldwide trend, it was social media and the internet that did the rest. Almost all of the authors of the British clean gobbling bestsellers started off as bloggers or Instagrammers, many of them beautiful women in their early 20 s who were genuinely convinced that the nutritions they had developed had antidote them of various types of chronic ailments.

Keep your chia seed smoothies off my Instagram feed

Every wellness guru worth her Himalayan pink salt has a floor of how changing what you eat can change their own lives. Food has the power to see or divulge you, wrote Amelia Freer in her 2014 bestseller Eat. Nourish. Glow.( which has sold more than 200,000 facsimiles ). Freer was guiding a busy life as a personal assistant to the Sovereign of Wales when she realised that her paunch looked and appeared as if it had a football in it from too many snatched dinners of cheese on toast or factory-made food. By giving up treated and convenience food( margarine, yuck !) along with gluten and carbohydrate, Freer claimed to have found the secrets to searching younger and find healthier.

Perhaps the best-known diet-transformation legend of all is that of Ella Mills possessor of more than a million Instagram adherents. In 2011, Mills was diagnosed with postural tachycardia syndrome, a condition characterised by dizziness and extreme wearines. Mills embarked blogging about nutrient after discovering that her evidences radically improved when she swapped her sugar-laden food for plant-based, natural foods. Mills who used to be a model obligated following a free-from food seem not drab or robbed, but deeply aspirational. By the time her first notebook appeared in January 2015, her vast following on social media facilitated her to sell 32,000 mimics in the first week alone.

Amelia Freer. Image: S Meddle/ ITV/ Rex/ Shutterstock

There was something equivocal about the road these books were sold. What they were selling alleged to be an alternative to a sordidly commercial nutrient industry. If its got a barcode or a predict, dont buy it, wrote Freer. Yet clean eating is itself a wildly profitable commercial enterprise, promoted employing photogenic young bloggers on a multi-billion-dollar tech pulpit. Literary agent Zoe Ross tells me that around 2015 she began to notice that the market was rubbing Instagram for copycat plays specifically very pretty, very young girls pushing curated meat and lifestyle.

After years on the margins, health-based cooking was eventually going a mass gathering. In 2016, 18 out the 20 top dealers in Amazon UKs food and suck book category had a focus on healthy eating and dieting. The paradox, nonetheless, was that the kind of well-researched books Dolamore and others formerly written no longer tended to sell so well, because health publishing was now dominated by social media fames. Bookshops were heaving with so many of these clean volumes that even the authors themselves started to feel that there were too many of them. Alice Liveing, a 23 -year-old personal trainer who writes as Clean Eating Alice, debated in her 2016 work Eat Well Every Day that she was endorse what I feel is a much-needed breath of fresh air in what I think is an fantastically saturated market. To my untrained see, browsing through her journal, Alices fresh approaching to diet appeared very similar to innumerable others: time and almond intensity pellets, kale chippings, beetroot and feta burgers.

Then again, shouldnt we commit clean chewing due ascribe towards achieving the miracle of swerving beetroot and kale into objects of longing? Data from specialists Kantar Worldpanel show that UK sales of fresh beetroot have risen dramatically from 42.8 m in 2013 to 50.5 m in 2015. Some would “re saying that”, in highly-developed nations where most people devour shockingly poor nutritions, low-grade in light-greens and high in sugar, this new confederation of health and food has done a modicum of good. Giles Yeo who invested some time cooking a spicy sweet-potato bowl with Ella Mills for his BBC programme agrees that many of the clean eating recipes he tried are actually a deliciou and cool channel to cook veggies. But why, Yeo questions, do these authors not simply say I am producing a very good vegetarian cookbook and stop there, instead of realise larger assertions about the influence of vegetables to beautify or foreclose illnes? The poison arises from the fact because this is wrapping the whole concept up in pseudoscience, Yeo says. If you base something on falsehoods, it empowers people to take extreme actions, and this is where the damage begins.

You cant acquired a brand-new sect organisation with the words I am publicizing a very good vegetarian cookbook. For this, you need something stronger. You require the assurance of make-believe, mumbled sweetly. Grind this cauliflower into minuscule slice and you can make a special kind of no-carb rice! Avoid all sugar and your skin will shimmer! Among interesting thing, clean chewing shows how vulnerable and forgotten billions of us feel about diet that are actually represents how misplaced we feel about our own figures. We are so unmoored that the authorities concerned will gave our belief in any employer who promises us that we, more, can become pure and good.

I can pinpoint the exact time that my own experiences about clean ingesting changed from hesitancy to outright dislike. I was on stagecoach at the Cheltenham literary gala with dietician Renee McGregor( who works both with Olympic jocks and anorexia nervosa sufferers) when a army of around 300 clean-eating love started jeering and shouting at us. We were supposedly taking part in a clean-eating debate with nutritionist Madeleine Shaw, columnist of Get the Glow and Ready Steady Glow.

Before that week, I had never read any of Shaws work. As I flicked through Ready Steady Glow, I was somewhat endeared by the upbeat colour( stop expropriating yourself and start living) and shining photos of a beam Shaw. I often surprise myself by determining new things to spiralise she writes, acquainting a sweetened potato noodle salad. Cauliflower pizza, in her look, is quite simply: the best fabrication ever.

But underneath the brightness there were notes of restriction that I discovered both perturbing and confused. As ever, all my recipes are sugar-and-wheat free, Shaw announces, simply to present a recipe for gluten-free brownies that contains 200 g of coconut sugar, a essence that costs a lot more than your median grey granulated carbohydrate, but is metabolised by the body in the same direction. I was still more alarmed by gradation four in Shaws nine-point food philosophy, which says that all bread and pasta should be avoided: they find themselves tan nutrients, which are full of substances, preservatives and genetically manipulated wheat, and not whole foods. Shaws book makes no distinction between a loaf of, say, bleached shredded white-hot, and a homemade wholemeal sourdough.

When we satisfied on theatre in Cheltenham, I expected Shaw why she told parties to cut out all bread, and was startled when she disavowed she had said any such act( rye food was her favourite, she contributed ). McGregor expected Shaw what she signified when she wrote that people should try to eat only clean proteins; meat that was not deep-fried was her rather astounding reply. McGregors main concern about clean eating, she lent, was that as health professionals considering young people with eating disorders, she had watched first-hand how the rules and restrictions of clean eating often segued into incapacitating anorexia or orthorexia.

Madeleine Shaw promoting her notebook Get the Glow. Picture: Joe Pepler/ REX/ Shutterstock

But I simply attend the positive, said Shaw , now mopping away weepings. It was at this point that the gathering, who were already restless whenever McGregor or I addrest, descended into outright hostility, shouting and whoosh for us to get off stage. In a work store after the contest, as devotees came up to Shaw to thank her for committing them the light, I more burst into rips when person or persons jabbed her paws at me and said I should be ashamed, as an elderly women( I am 43 ), to have criticised a younger one. On Twitter that night, some Shaw devotees formed derogatory explains about how McGregor and I looked, under the hashtag #youarewhatyoueat. The ramification was that, if we were less photogenic than Shaw, we clearly had nothing of any appraise to say about nutrient( never mind the fact that McGregor has positions in biochemistry and nutrition ).

Thinking about the event on the qualify home, I realised that the crowd were angry with us not because they disagreed with the details( its pretty clear that you cant have sugar in sugar-free recipes ), but because they disliked the facts of the case “that weve” quarrelling at all. To insist on the facts of the case drawn us come across as cruelly negative. We had punctured the glad belief-bubble of glowiness that they had come to imbibe from Shaw. Its impressing that in many of the wellness cookbooks, mainstream scientific testify on diet is perceived as more or less irrelevant , not least because the gurus find the contentment of science as part of what prepared our foods so bad in the first place.

Amelia Freer, in Eat. Nourish. Glow, admits that we cant prove that dairy is the cause of ailments ranging from IBS to joint pain, but concluded that there surely worth cutting dairy out anyway, just as a precaution. In another context, Freer writes that Im told it takes 17 times for scientific knowledge to filter down to become general knowledge, while advising that gluten should be avoided. Once we register its national territory where all expert and expertise are automatically suspect, you can start to claim almost anything and numerous #eatclean dominions do.

That night in Cheltenham, I learnt that clean eating or whatever call it now goes under had elements of a post-truth sect. As with any faith, it could be something darknes and divisive if you got on the wrong side of it. After Giles Yeos BBC programme was aired, he told me he was startled to find himself subjected to unrelenting online trolling. They said I was funded by big pharma, and therefore obviously wouldnt ascertain the benefits of a health diet over remedy. These were outright lies.( Yeo is employed by the University of Cambridge, and funded by the Medical Research Council .)

Its increasingly clear that clean eating, for all its good aims, can cause real harm, both to fact and to human being. Over the past 18 months, McGregor says, every single patron with an anorexia nervosa who strolls into my clinic doorways is either following or wants to follow a clean behavior of eating.

In her brand-new volume, Orthorexia, McGregor observes that while anorexia nervosa long predate the #eatclean veer, meat rulers( such as dining no dairy or forestalling all cereals) readily become a guise for curtailing meat intake. Likewise, they are not even good principles, based as they are on unsubstantiated, unscientific affirms. Take almond milk, which is widely touted as a superior alternative to kine milk. McGregor visualizes it as little better than expensive ocean, containing precisely 0.1 g protein per 100 ml, compared with 3.2 g per 100 ml in kine milk. But she often ascertains it very difficult to convince her buyers that restricting themselves to these clean meat is in the long run worse for their own health than what she calls unchecked ingesting balanced and went dinners, but no anxiety about the curious ice cream or chocolate bar.

Clearly , not everyone who bought a clean-eating volume has developed an eating disorder. But a push whose premise is that normal meat is unhealthy has now obscured the liquids of healthy gobbling for everyone else, by planting the idea that a good food is one founded on absolutes.

The true-blue tribulation of clean chewing is not that it is entirely spurious. It is that it contains a seed of reality, as Giles Yeo employs it. When you strip down all the pseudo nonsense, they are absolutely right to say that we should feed more vegetables, less refined sugar and less flesh, Yeo said, sipping a black coffee in his office at the Institute of Metabolic Science in Cambridge, where he spends his daytimes researching the root causes obesity. Yeo agrees with the clean eaters that our environment of inexpensive, bountiful, sugary, fatty nutrient is a recipe for widespread obesity and ill health. The trouble is its nearly impossible to pick out the sensible flecks of clean eating and neglect the residual. #Eatclean drew health chewing seem like something expensive, exclusive and difficult to achieve, as Anthony Warner writes. Whether the term scavenge is expended or not, there is a new puritanism about nutrient that has taken root very widely.

A few weeks ago, I overheard a fit, middle-aged mortal at the gym lecturing a sidekick for not feeing a better food a conversation that would formerly ought to have unimaginable among beings. The first human was telling the second that the skinny burgers he opted were nothing but shitty mince and sell and arguing that he could get almost everything he needed from a food of vegetables, cooked with no petroleum. Fat is fatty, at the end of the day, he agreed, before bemoaning the imbeciles who tried to eat something wholesome like a salad, then ruined everything by including salt. If you have one bad diet period a week, you untie all your good work.

The real question is how to fight this kind of diet absolutism without bouncing back to a moronic celebration of the modern food milieu that is demonstrably obligating so many beings sick. In 2016, more than 600 children in the UK were get registered as living with form 2 diabetes; before 2002, there were no reported cases of children suffering from the condition, whose reasons are diet-related.

Our food system is in desperate the requirements of reconstruct. Theres a danger that, in the fight against the absurdity of clean eating, we end up looking like apologists for a commercial food supply that is failing in its basic undertaking of nourishing us. Former orthorexia sufferer Edward L Yuen has argued in his 2014 journal, Beating Orthorexia that the old advice of everything in moderation no longer works in a meat milieu where gobbling in the middle ground is likely to be leave you with chronic illness. When components are supersized and Snickers forbids are exchanged by the metre( something I insured in my local Tesco recently ), devouring ordinarily is not inevitably a balanced option. The answer isnt yet another perfect diet, but a shift in our feeling of what constitutes normal food.

Sales of courgettes in the UK flew 20% from 2014 to 2015, fuelled by the rise of the spiraliser. But overall consumption of veggies, both in the UK and worldwide, is still vanishingly tiny( with 74% of the adult UK population not coping to dine five a day ). That is much lower than it was in the 1950 s, when freshly cooked daily snacks were still something that most people took for granted.

Among the affluent categorizes who already devour a healthier-than-average food, the Instagram goddesses generated a new simulate of dietary perfection to aims to achieve. For the rest of specific populations, however, it plainly placed the ideal of healthy meat further and further out of reaching. Behind the glossy extends of the clean-eating books, there is a coarse model of financial exclusion that says that someone who cant afford wheatgrass or spirulina can never be truly well.

As the conversation I overheard in the gym exemplifies, this way of thinking is especially dangerous because it overshadows the letter that, in fact, small changes in diet can have a large beneficial affect. If you think you cant be healthy unless you feed nothing but veggies, you might miss the fact that( as a recent synopsi of the evidence by epidemiologists proved) there are substantial the potential benefits of growing your fruit-and-veg intake from zero parcels a date to simply two.

Among its many other offences, clean eating was a series of claims about food that were all or nothing which only serves to underline the facts of the case that most people, as usual, are protruded with nothing.

Main photograph: Alamy

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