#humans are tool users motherfucker

[generallyjl]

.

[thegutterbunny]

Leftism Tires Me.

I'm just gonna put this here because nobody's gonna see it anyways. I'm just trying to organize my messy ass thoughts. Lately, I've been feeling really disillusioned with leftism, but I don't have the proper words for why. Every time I try to google "leftists are annoying" or something all I get is right wing shit. A lot of this is based on experiences I've both IRL and Online. A lot of this is me struggling to put feelings to words. I feel like my personality just doesn't JIVE right with leftists. I'm pretty materialistic, I love stuff. Mostly books, games, kink gear, and clothes. I drool at other people's wardrobes and goth decorated bedrooms. I don't really care which online stores are the "bad ones". I DO want them demonias. They look cool. I like fan servicey/sexy character designs. They're hot. I want more hot characters that aesthetically appeal to me that I can gawk at. I hate when twitter users and talking heads pretend like they are above such "base tastes". I think people are too uptight about having a squeaky clean record of consuming media. Steering away from problematic artists and art into an ever-shrinking circle of "safe" art and artists. It should depend on what you're personally comfortable with, I think. I've dropped artists that I think are reprehensible. Not ever out of some sense of morality and duty, but because they gross me out and I can't look at them the same. Other artists do or have done terrible things, but that adds to the flavor somehow. Makes them more interesting and worth diving into. Sometimes it even humanizes them. Sometimes the art is SO GOOD I just don't give a shit. The constant emphasis on the collective over the individual is off putting to me. I think rules based on morality always end up having to be made arbitrarily because when building a moral system you ALWAYS run into contradictions and inconsistencies. This is because morality is this thing we made up. We don't find morals in nature. They weren't "discovered". Morality isn't divine. Morality is a TOOL. Which is why this idea that being a small part of something "larger than myself" freaks me the fuck out. Sacrificing pieces of myself... Be it my time, my identity, my aspirations, and my body to a machine called "revolution" is off-putting in an existential way. "Your feelings matter until they don't" is that unspoken leftist creed. Philosophers and philosophy enthusiasts are the most annoying irritating motherfuckers to be around. OH HOW I HATE THEM. NEVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER VENT OR SPILL YOUR GUTS TO A PHILOSOPHY NERD. NEVER MAKING THAT MISTAKE AGAIN.

Sometimes I feel like leftists are more concerned with defending leftism itself than actual people and their feelings. They sanctify the lens they view the world through other then the people they view through that lens. They can be just as biased, stubborn, and incurious as everyone else. Look, not everyone has the time or energy to look through constant studies or be scholars, I get it, but summa y'all just unthinkingly latch onto narratives and refuse to unclutch only because everyone else around you has latched onto the narrative too. The amount of times I've seen someone latch onto a narrative without even thinking about it... Just based on vibes... FUCK. This last one... Speaking as an autistic person... Is rough. Leftist spaces are SUPER cliquey and ran by the same Social Capital rules as anywhere else. There are the same invisible lines to tread here as anywhere else that torture me as someone who's blind to where they lay. Break and self censure yourself to fit in. Nobody's in disagreement. It's just you, and if you disagree we'll all quietly and silently move away from you without a word like everyone else. It depends on the exact space you're in. Whatever friend group or discord server, the feel can "change". People with the most charisma are rewarded with attention, admiration, and a feeling of belonging. Being awkward, shy, quiet, or having the neurodivergent "stench" makes to ostracized. Just. Like. Everywhere. Else. FUCK. YOU.

OK that's enough schizo posting. There's even more I could touch on, but I'm tired and I wanna play Silent Hill 2. If anyone who's read this has the time, what's the diagnosis? What should I do with myself? Am I beyond saving or whatever? I don't even want to "leave leftism" or whatever the fuck, but there's so much... Pressure... here. So much judgement. I want something better for myself but I look everywhere and I can't find it.

[marcusrobertobaq]

I actually ain't against the option of "remaining a machine", i don't blame in Connor remaining a megacorporation dirty work dog like the android he was made for, after all, people in the world blindly believing and following an entity, group and leadership propaganda to the point of devotion without questioning or questioning but believing it's the right thing to do ain't uncommon at all.

(no shade at the android rebels, they just wanna be free... even if they don't dare questioning 'em leadership but in the less of 2 evils u fight for something that u think will be good to ya. It's the rule)

Even tho "opening eyes" and seeing beyond the "program" is one of the metaphors for deviancy in the game i really don't blame mfs that wanna remain in the comfort zone where they know where they're walking - even if they know they're being played like a piano fucking with "their own kind" thinking they're different anyhow or even the lack of "giving a shit" about being something besides a tool.

He got the right of thinking androids shouldn't rebel and be hostile against humans (damn, Daniel it's the perfect propaganda) and that this rebellion gonna be bad for humans - it will. The issue starts when u believe in CyberLife and that they're just even tho it's literally busine$$ and intere$t$, they don't care about "humans" and some situations mfs are now is 100% 'em own fault to begin with - including an android like this that can literally bypass AA just cuz they're obeying orders from Cyber motherfucking Life itself directly, that can hurt humans.

But in the end everybody is doing something cuz they think it's the right thing to do according to 'em values of general advantages vs disadvantages, also called morals to some people although i'm taking a more gray approach in this 9 vs 6 bullshit cuz that's how i roll.

Well, u do it, u like it or regret about it. But androids ain't people, they shouldn't worry about things like that, right? Guns don't kill people, people kill people. Wrong would be a gun saying to 'em user "no, i won't shoot >:@". Problem is when the user is aware the gun got the possibility of sayin' this cuz they made the fucking gun.

[coquelicoq]

i hope kathony kept mr. brookes in lemon cake for the rest of his days. i hope they made him the bridgerton family jeweler. i hope he was the godfather of every single one of their children. this is the only happily ever after i will accept and i am not taking questions at this time💕

part v of bridgerton characters as text posts

[Image description: 10 stills featuring characters from season 2 of the TV show “Bridgerton” with tumblr text posts edited in.

1: Kate is sitting in a room at the palace watching Edwina and Anthony plan their wedding with the Queen. The text post by tumblr user BitchyCode reads “where's my oscar for acting like i'm not falling apart”

2: Penelope is eavesdropping on two gossiping footmen at a ball. The text post by GrandEstrology reads “I don't wanna get involved in the drama I just wanna know 103% of the information on what happened”

3: Anthony smirks at Kate after being welcomed to the soiree she had deliberately not invited him to. The text post by greelin reads “[looks fondly at character] ah, there he is. that motherfucker. what a tool”

4: Edwina looks up at Kate on her wedding day with angry tears in her eyes. The text post by greelin reads “i may be short but that doesn't mean you're not about to experience the wrath of a god”

5: Lady Mary stands up to her parents at dinner. The text post by XiaoGuiWang reads “with all due respect, which is none,”

6: Close-up of Penelope's hand holding a quill as she writes an anonymous gossip sheet exposing her best friend Eloise's scandalous activities. The text post by BisexualCrabKing reads “* writing in my diary using a glitter gel pen * i'm losing my sense of humanity”

7: Eloise stands between Penelope and Kate at Lady Danbury's soiree, grimacing as she watches gentlemen show off their questionable talents. The text post by ghirahime reads “am i too judgemental or is everyone annoying: an autobiography by me"

8: Portia gazes woefully at her reflection in the mirror while bemoaning her family's dire financial straits. The text post by KeyBoardE reads “having a million dollars would improve my life by 100%”

9: Mr. Brookes stands between Kate and Anthony, looking pleased with himself after placing the betrothal ring meant for Kate's sister onto Kate's finger. The text post by joey-wheeler-official reads “Hot wedding idea, the worst man, it's his duty to try and prevent the wedding at all costs.”

10: Edwina glares up at Anthony, supremely unimpressed, after handing his bouquet off to a footman. The text post by ArabWife reads “I'll get over it I just gotta be dramatic first"

/end ID]

[luvkirby4ever]

Of birds and morons:  a look into Mother 3′s most intricate unspoken running joke/motif

Shoutout to @amphibizzy for convincing me to talk about this.  There’s so much Mother 3 meta that I want to talk about- maybe next time I’ll make a video essay to spare you all from reading so much >o<

Tldr; Duster and Wess have bird motifs that don’t quite translate over well, making Wess’s mannerisms slightly less harsh in context but outs him as surprisingly superstitious.  May be a nod to Japanese mythology, too.

So, a starting point.  Did you know that at beginning of chapter 7 after Ionia joins you (still tied up at this point) that if you go back and talk to Wess he says something rather strange?

For clarity, the entire original conversation reads "Washi no inemuri uranai ni yoreba kyou wa TRIPLE LUCKY da yo.  Jishin o motte daikatsuyaku shinasai."  which translates as “According to my sleep divinations, today is triple lucky.  Go forth with great confidence.”

Weird, right?  Since when has Wess believed in something like fortune telling through dreams?  Is that why he believed Alec’s dream of Hinawa?  And what does this have to do with birds?

Be sure to remember this.

Part 1:  Cleaning crew bird boys

So now let’s take a step back and look at the easiest part of all this.  In all of Mother 3, there’s only 1 bandana that Flint can equip (the manly bandana that Lighter gave him), otherwise the only characters than can equip bandanas are Duster and Salsa.  The bandanas (except the manly one) all have a bird names, with the types being the chick, sparrow, rail (the kana used refers to the water rail, a type of bird), swallow (also a bird), crow, kite (also a bird), and Horus (the Egyptian god whose head resembles a falcon).

Now that’s all well and good, but let’s say that’s not good enough.  Wess and Duster’s connection with watching over the Hummingbird Egg seems pretty solid with Duster’s bird bandanas but let’s go deeper.

When Wess snaps, he consistently refers to Duster as “aho” (moron) and “anoaho” (that moron).  Which is needlessly cruel, but... also a pun.  Yes, that’s right.  The game totters around the joke that Duster is bird-brained, through which Wess is the main spark and Duster is the conduit.  And for the record’s sake this isn’t me excusing Wess’s actions- I’m making an intricate webcomic about his relationship with Duster and him learning how to be a better person for a reason, after all- but I’ve literally heard nobody else talk about this so I honestly think people don’t know about it.

In Japan, “aho” means “moron”, but it is also the onomatopoeia for a crow’s cawing.  There’s a trope known as the “idiot crow” in Japanese media based on this.  What will happen is that something dumb will happen and a crow will fly by and caw “aho aho!”.  Which means “caw caw” but also means “moron moron”.  Thus the joke.  So Wess’s “aho aho!”-ing and using “anoaho” makes him sound like an old crow, commentating on Duster’s mistakes.

Will I get banned from the fandom for making a Homestuck “caw caw motherfucker joke with Wess or-?”

This also feeds into Duster being a bird- “aho” (”moron”) is also used in the word “ahoudori” (”albatross”).  Which is a bird, of course.  And it’s no coincidence either- albatross are known as “idiot birds” in Japan- that’s what “ahoudori” literally translates to.

One more thing that I’ll add to the “Duster’s a bird” pool aside from making a “HEY GUYS LOOK HE’S A FEATHER DUSTER” joke is that his “aho” bird-ness lends him to more “you are ____ type of bird” jokes, which is actually extrapolated by Lighter in game.

In the Japanese version Lighter says “Sugoshi CONDOR?  Iya sakatta.  Sugoshi hagetaka?  Gaahaahaaha.”  This translates as “[You’re] a bit condor-ish?  No, that’s not it.  [You’re] a bit vulture-ish?  Gahaha.”

A bit “vulture-ish”?  Why does he say that?  And why did Mato translate it as going bald?  Because it’s another wordplay pun!  Much like how “ahoudori” (”albatross”) is literally “idiot-bird”, “hagetaka” (”vulture”) is literally “bald-hawk”.  But even more than that, “hagetaka” (a noun) is similar to “hageru”, the verb for “to bald”.  Since “hageru” is an ichidan verb, you can conjugate it as “hageta” to say “balded”.  And then you tack on “ka” at the end to make the statement a question.  So, in short:

Hagetaka=vulture

Hage=bald

Taka=hawk

Hageru=to bald

Hageta=balded

“Hagetaka?”=“Have you balded?”

Hagetaakaa=the “balding eagle” enemy on Mr. Oriander

Damn, Lighter!  That’s a choice pun.  Now, whether or not he was mostly doing it to make a bird joke, to note that Duster looks balder without an afro, or genuinely comment on Duster’s hairline is anyone’s guess.  But hey thanks for the bird fodder Lighter!

Part 2:  Idiots don’t catch colds

If there’s one Japanese idiom you’ve heard, it’s probably that one.  It’s a funny little superstition- the idea that you’re so dumb that your brain lacks to capacity to get a cold- but surprisingly it may be a belief by which Wess operates.  And yes, this still has to do with birds!  In a roundabout way!

Wess being the type of person to believe in magical dreaming and superstition was a very hard concept for me to process at first after I read that “triple lucky” bit during a Mother 3 playthrough.  With the exception of Duster-related things, Wess seems like a fairly understanding and reasonable person:  he tells Flint to be careful and consider his family before rushing off to confront the Mecha-Drago, he wants to help search for Hinawa, he’s adamantly opposed to Fassad’s BS and is one of the only villagers to actively oppose him, and he even tells Duster (upon inputting “no” during a dialogue tree in early chapter 2) that Duster can target any hatred or resentment he may have towards him, since by Wess’s logic that doesn’t matter as long as their mission succeeds.

So if anything he’s a bit crass and willing to sacrifice his own pride/comfort/personal relationships for the greater good, but his convictions are strong and seemingly grounded in his own sense of justice and logic.  Which is why I always took him as someone who wouldn’t believe in PSI, magic, or anything supernatural like that.  But since he *does* seem to believe in that sort of thing, let’s break down what we know:

Wess refers to Duster as a moron

Duster’s IQ is often tied with Boney’s for lowest party member IQ

Wess tells Kumatora in chapter 3 that “morons like that don’t get hurt or sick”

Duster canonically doesn’t catch fevers while Kumatora and Lucas do

In Japan, there’s the idiom “idiots don’t catch colds”

Wess claims to have dreams with fortune telling powers

Says Lucas will have a “triple lucky” day

Lucas proceeds to successfully pull 3 out of the 7 needles before the chapter is over

It’s almost as if Wess wants Duster to be a moron, because superstitiously Duster would be safer that way.  Hm.  It’s also strange that Wess almost seems magical, which may have legitimately been viable at some point since Wess was planned as a playable character for a long while (Therefore he could have been a PSI user with thunder attacks to replace his bombs).  There’s an Earthbound 64 screenshot of Wess being alive while Duster is fainted and even all the way up through Mother 3 you can still access data suggesting Wess was a normal party member from the debug room (I could make a whole post on that- you can use a glitch to pull up all of his stats except HP and PP).

So Duster may be a bird and Wess an old, superstitious crow with maybe some sort of ambiguous connection to magic... but so what?  Well,

Part 3:  It’s Yo-kai time!  (Yatagarasu, Kotengu, and Karasutengu)

This is a much more speculative section, though I try to be reasonable.

You know, I skimmed over the fact that Duster’s final and best bandana is the Horus Bandana, named after the Egyptian deity with a falcon head.  Horus’s right and left eyes represent the sun and moon, respectively.  His left eye (the moon one) was injured in a fight, explaining the moon’s phases.  Funny, considering that Duster also has a left side injury.

But perhaps Horus isn’t the only ancient deity that we can talk about.  I propose the most compelling case, Yatagarasu:

(He’s the bird sitting atop the bow)

Yatagarasu is the Japanese name of a myth that originated in China.  He’s a 3-legged crow that is representative of the sun.  Specifically in Japan, he represents the will of heaven and divine intervention.  He symbolizes guidance, as well as rebirth after tragic stuff like battle/war.

Yatagarasu is prominent enough that there’s a Yu-gi-oh card and a Persona based on him too, which is pretty cool.  But even cooler is that he sounds a lot like what the Egg of Light, Wess, and Duster were responsible for.  The Egg was responsible for the rebirth of their lives for the citizens of Tazmily.  And Wess and Duster’s task to protect the Egg for reasons they don’t understand for the sake of a village that doesn’t appreciate their work seems like they’re doing god’s work, so to speak.

An important thing about Yatagarasu too is that it defies the normal Japanese superstition that crows are bad luck.  Yatagarasu is a harbinger of good.  I’m not sure if any of this was intentional or not, but I think comparing Duster, Wess, and the Egg of Light to it is a pretty solid theory.

So let’s briefly skim over Kotengu and Karasutengu, which are lesser Tengu with bird-like faces.  (For my own reference there’s really good write ups here and here about them.)  For the most part the important thing is that they are bird/crow yokai, but one intriguing thing I found is that Kotengu is that they tend to live like hermits (like Wess and Duster), carry items/weapons stolen from humans (the thief aspect), and collect magical items (the thief tools).

Conclusion:

So do I think Wess and Duster are supposed to represent bird tengu?  I don’t know!  Maybe not completely deliberately, but I definitely believe in the strength of the bird motifs (especially crow Wess).  I had drawn a silly little picture about it 2 years ago for Inktober, in fact...

Whatever the case, I hope someone out there appreciates the info dump.  There’s a lot of Mother 3 stuff I’ve examined meticulously so that my Mother 3 webcomic, DutyBound, can be the best it can be.  Sometimes there’s so much info I want to share but nobody who will listen, though!

So if anyone ever wants to hear some more crazy in-depth Mother 3 meta, I’m your guy >.<

[bluethepaladin]

What do you have against Bex? (Can u also provide evidence thanks 💜)

When I first got this ask, I was tempted to play it off as a joke and say “the fact she exists,” and leave it at that. But I feel like it’s important to stay informed. And if you genuinely don’t know, I’ll give you the complete rundown. It’s long, it’s messy, and it’s nasty, so bear with me.

First, and introduction. When I talk about Bex, I’m referring to the actress Bex Taylor-Klaus, who is the voice actor (or VA) of the character Pidge in the show Voltron Legendary Defender on Netflix.

It all began a while ago when Bex liked a comment of a picture. The picture involved a ship called Shei//th. I censored the name so it doesn’t show up in the tags of that on tumblr. But essentially it’s a ship between two characters, Takashi Shirogane, a 25 year old pilot who is the leader of the team, and Keith Kogane, one of the other “paladins” or fighters on the team. People like me find this ship to be distasteful, since Shiro is an adult, and the others are teens (it’s actually a bit messier than that, since an official Voltron source listed Keith as 18, but the producers of the show, Lauren Montgomery and Joaquim Dos Santos, said they were not consulted on the book so there’s some question as to whether it’s canon or not). Either way, the consensus by most reasonable people is that it’s probably not a healthy thing to depict in children’s media, when you consider the considerable age difference, the power imbalance (leader, senior officer with someone they are in charge of), and finally, the iconic line by the character of Keith himself when he defines their relationship as a familial one.

Nonetheless, the ship persists, as nasty things on tumblr are wont to do. There’s a lot of shipping discourse on tumblr between two distinct groups which can be labelled as “antis”–people who are not in favor of any Shiro/paladin ships, or what has become to be known as “shaladins”–people who ship any variation of Shiro with the paladins.

Here is where Bex got involved. On Instagram there was a picture of a black shoe and a red shoe together and the joke was about the shoes being a prophecy that Shei//th would be canon. A joke, mostly, considering all the evidence above. But here’s where Bex got herself in trouble. She liked a comment on the picture where someone said “Keith is a power bottom confirmed.”

Obviously, this caused a bit of an uproar within the fanbase, especially between the discourse between antis and shaladins. Shaladins were celebrating that an Official Voltron Source liked their ship, and antis were angry about that acknowledgement of the ship at all by official sources, and the sexualization of a kid’s show (more on this later.)

So of course this sparked the discourse on tumblr. One user, @lancehunks, who was receiving asks about Bex, tagged her in the replies.They were definitely unfavorable. 

and 

and a few more. 

Bex, being the big strong, adult, woman she is, decided that she could not take this obviously grievous insult to her name [sarcasm], and decided to reblog them all and respond to them. Keep in mind, that @lancehunks was just 13 years old. And Bex (22) decided that these were appropriate responses:

Yep, you read that right. Not only an adult but employed on a kid’s show! To a 13 year old! The target audience of the very show she’s a part of! (Oh, the hypocrisy). But wait, there’s more:

Just in case you’re confused, let me tell you the many, many reasons why this is unacceptable. 

 Bex is an adult. You’d think she’d be a little more mature by now just in general. It’s the internet and there are trolls.

The person she was addressing was 13!!!! Do I think it was mature to tag Bex in all those posts? No. But it’s… behavior that you can expect from 13 year old’s on the internet. If we swore at and tore down every single one of them every time they did something dumb, we would need a lot more therapists for teens in the world. Plus it’s really disingenuous to pretend that we wouldn’t have done something similar when we were younger if we were in that position.

Bex is famous. While she’s certainly not on the caliber of massive A-List stars like Tom Holland or Zendaya, she has a fanbase that exceeds the normal person’s friend group. Just because she’s been on TV before, she has groupies that will support her no matter what, who will troll for her, who uncritically and unconditionally worship her. I’m not a Bex fan, nor do I really care to know her well enough to know just exactly how many fans she has, to be certain she does have them. When she publicly reblogged those words, that “motherfucker,” those fighting words, she weaponized her fanbase. What I mean when I say that is her behavior gave her groupies permission to behave the same way. By targeting someone who didn’t like her (a thirteen year old!!!!!), she opened the gates to her fans and groupies doing the same thing, to a kid.

This lead to some terrible things happening. The 13 year old was getting death threats, sexual violence threats, and nsfw content, all because Bex just couldn’t let it go. 

What does this mean? Finish it? Finish the kid? If you’re so sick of the fighting, then why did you even respond in the first place? Bex is the one who escalated the situation. Bex is the one who caused the fighting in the first place (by that I mean the fighting between the two that night, the fighting between antis and shaladins has been going on for as long as the show).

There we go. Now he have something resembling dignity. But unfortunately the damage was done, and user @lancehunks deleted their blog. As a direct response to Bex’s actions. Bex caused a 13 year old to leave tumblr. 

When hearing this news, Bex offered a half-assed apology:

This is the most insincere apology I have ever seen. “The internet has Bad things on it and it’s YOUR fault for seeing them” is not an apology. The best part is that she’s a big fat hypocrite. “Sometimes, when it’s harmless, the best thing I can do is shake my head and keep scrolling.” So why didn’t you Bex? Why didn’t you keep scrolling instead of targeting a 13 year old?

In light of recent political events, though there’s one thing that stands out to me: 

Sound like anybody you know? The esteemed President, perhaps?

*disclaimer* I am in no way claiming that Bex is a Trump supporter. I don’t know enough about her–and I don’t want to know enough about her–to know where she leans politically. I’m just drawing the attention to the similarities in moral equivalency going on, here.*

Sure you targeted a 13 year old and weaponized your fanbase, but someone tagging you in a snarky post is just as bad, right? (Wrong.)

You’d think that would be the end. You’d think that Bex would be capable of living and learning, or maybe even just taking her own advice, and keep scrolling. But here we go again.

The next bit of drama started when the possibly canon guide book was released, stating Keith’s age as 18. There was a big celebration on the shaladin side because technically, that would make it “legal” for Keith and Shiro to have sex. Besides the fact that legal ≠ moral, again, Voltron is a kid’s show. But on tumblr this time, Bex posted this.

This time, the discourse surrounding Bex was a little different., This time, the discourse mostly focused on the fact that even if Shiro and Keith disregarded canon and morals and the fact that it’s a kid’s show ever did get in a relationship, the only thing that matters is how they like to have sex.

This is a problem for a lot of reasons. There’s a culture, pretty prominent on tumblr of women, mostly white, who are obsessed with gay sex. They write fanfiction and p*rn solely for their own personal gratification. This, of course, is a gross misinterpretation to wanting LGBT+ representation. If you aren’t a mlm (an acronym for men-loving-man, that includes many sexualities) then writing p*rn about is sexualizing them, using them as a tool to get yourself off, and not like complex human people. Mlm are more than how they like to have sex. In fact, that shouldn’t be a part of a discussion for anybody except between willing partners. This also feeds into the popular and damaging stereotype that gay men are predatory by nature.

So, as a whole, not good. 

And again, we have a whole situation escalated by Bex. The worst part is, to people who tried to explain this to her, the only response they were given was a gif:

So once again, a minor dared to express their distaste for Bex on tumblr. But this time, they didn’t tag her. This time, they censored her name. But Bex found it anyway. And she decided to do the exact same thing that led to a minor leaving the website, and to stop watching the show. 

Have no fear, this time though. This time, Bex is going after a 14 year old, at least she’s not going after kids anymore, right? [sarcasm]

Some final notes. 

Bex claims to be an LGBT+ rights activist. I’m also pretty sure she’s a lesbian herself (again, I already know too much about her, I’m not looking to get to know her better.) So, you’d think, as someone who wants equality for LGBT+ people and communities, she’d have the wherewithal to listen to specific subsets of that group when they say something about themselves, like, for example, young mlm who don’t appreciate being sexualized by a white woman. So I couldn’t help but laugh out loud when I saw this on her blog:

Now, I happen to agree with the above statement, but it’s so ironic, so hypocritical that Bex is talking about the sexualization of anything. Because kid’s shows aren’t safe from her sexualization and mlm certainly aren’t. How can one person be so incredibly oblivious? A mystery that I don’t have any interest in solving. 

I also want to address something a little more devious and a little more dark. I personally know of at least 12 different people who sent Bex asks, politely explaining some of the things I’ve talked about here, or relaying how her words hurt them personally. Bex never answered any of them. But she did answer this:

Just to be perfectly clear, I do not condone or encourage hatemail. Do not send people anything wishing them death or harm in any way. I have never sent nor do plan on sending hatemail, and you should be ashamed of yourself if you do.

However, this is incredibly nefarious. Bex doesn’t answer any of the many asks she got that were polite, but proved her wrong. She didn’t answer any of the young mlm who gave her their personal stories and who weren’t anonymous. Instead, she publishes this. And she did this on purpose, to make her look innocent, to make her look like she’s the one being attacked. I get hatemail every single day too. Things along similar lines to this. I block the user. Delete them, One, because I don’t want to expose my followers to that kind of negativity on a daily basis, two, a mature person knows that deleting them is the best kind of revenge because the user will be constantly looking for a response and they will know they had no effect on me and three, because if you do that, eventually they stop. This is intentional on Bex’s part to make the people who don’t like her look bad. I don’t like Bex at all, and I certainly do not support that message. Any reasonable person wouldn’t. Also the fact that it’s an anonymous message adds a certain air of doubt as to who sent it. 

The point is, Bex is purposely ignoring polite and well-meaning people and posted this to “prove” she’s the one on the “good” side because no good person would send that message.

This is also worth noting: 

This was posted after the lancehunks debate but before the power bottom comment she made. In this post, Bex admits that a relationship between Shiro and any of the paladins is predatory in nature. She said that. Her words. And then after that she said that Keith was a power bottom. 

The last thing I want to say, is that Voltron is a kid’s show. It’s rated US-TV-Y7. Which means for years 7 and older. Regardless of the ship, there should be no sexual content, be it fanart, of fanfiction of Voltron characters at all. We are all collectively responsible for keeping content age-appropriate for the target audience. So, stop it. All and any ships. 

For minors, this is my advice to you:Bex is a predator, a hypocrite, and a liar. Do not engage with her. Block her. Do not tag her in any of your posts. She has a history of targeting minors. Protect yourself. Do not engage.

[musevassal]

A Hard Truth

Okay, Westerners, I feel it is finally time to level with you about something. It might be tough to hear this, but I think you can handle it. Just know, I tell you this out of love and a desire to improve the conditions you live it.

You are eating salad wrong. Put down the fork. There is a better way.

There, I’ve finally said it, and I feel much better for having done so.

Seriously, people, the goddamned fork is entirely the wrong tool for the job here. Think about it. You get those last pieces of lettuce laying at the bottom of the dish; too thin to spear, too small to fold in half, just sliding around mocking you! And maybe some fucked-up sociopath put corn or some kind of beans in the salad. What then fork users? Huh?! What now?!

I tell you what now: you’re stuck there trying to coral those little shits like a toddler.

Don’t even get me started on cherry tomatoes. Little motherfucker skids out from under the fork points and sprays dressing up into your eyes as it does. Mocking you all the way.

But it doesn’t have to be this way! Chopsticks, I say! Chopsticks!

The correct implement for eating salad is chopsticks. You have now been told. If you persist in this fork nonsense, you have no one but yourself to blame for your suffering.

Now, the ethnocentric among you might be looking to get choleric and competitive about this, and I’ll leave you to it. That’s fine. I’ll even provide you with some low-hanging fruit as a balm for your wounded cultural pride.

Why is it that cultures that eat so much rice do so with chopsticks? Isn’t a spoon the right tool for the job here? (Shout out to the Thais for figuring this one out.)

It’s a good question. (However, keep in mind that rice is supposed to be sticky, and there are chopstick techniques to deal with the issue, so it’s not as clear cut as you’d expect.)

Be that as it may, this doesn’t change the truth I’ve laid on you today.

Put down the fork and eat your salad with chopsticks like a civilized human being.

[monkey-network]

Good Stuff ~ Stray Thoughts: The Emoji Movie

If anyone says anything, I’ll plot to make the Meme Movie a reality

They really had to make a gag out of a studio logo. Hoo boy.

The Smartphone: the CIA’s perfect stalking device. #tapeyourcams

Addie McCallister? The 14th prettiest girl in Gotti High School? Why does she look like that one girl from Paranorman?

My world never revolved around a phone. I just had a laptop. Lucky bastards.

Who threw a paper airplane in the classroom? Fuck is this, 2002?

The main character literally called himself a tool. Great start.

Wait, the devil emoji’s supposed to be purple. Can you not even emoji right, movie?

Anyone can be meh for long periods of time. Just watch a D&D stream.

How do donuts reprodu--nevermind, I already figured it out

“Monkey business”. Okay, one point for the movie.

A emoji fart joke. Alex, you’re---you just suck

No, I don’t wanna imagine emojis having buttholes

I would ask how does a poop emoji poop, but then I realize that they’re releasing a toxic part of themselves and I feel worse for thinking that

Few seconds in, and Maya Rudolph already gave us an uncomfortable character

This machine looks slow. Like, I’ve not seen a single person in real life text one emoji at a time at a snail’s pace

Ah, elitism. Just what I wanted in my kids film

“Words aren’t cool.” This kid sounds like a perfect bullying target

I’d say “Goddammit Gene, you had one job.” But how would you feel if it’s your first and your God is literally pointing you out?

Okay, Patrick Stewart helped this movie get another point.

Great Gene, you screwed up messenger, however that happened

I would ask why the eggplant is apparently never used in this world, but I remember the cucumber emoji exists. That’s some 2038 thinking

Jailbreak? More like Jailbait. Swiggedy Swooty.

Hi-5 is a wanker.

Did they just use sleeping corpses as disguises?

Yes Gene, suffer in that black hole.

Awwww, cute emoji DOGGOS! Okay, 3 points for the movie

Okay, that Facebook joke hit way too close to home

Who tries to hide a piracy app? Seriously, if I don’t wanna pay more to watch cartoons online, I’ll gladly go to Kimcart--FBI, OPEN UP!

I would ask why trolls are actual beings in this world, but then I remember the internet can house the most disgusting people on the planet without having to show a face so I’ll let it slide

“Hack Daniels” I’m either still high or that was clever

Hey, it’s Chloe Price except I don’t want her dead. Also, why is she messing with dem holograms anyways? “Stimming” Oh, everything makes sense now.

*record scratch* Hold up. They’re falling down into an app but the apps aren’t layered on top of each other? *sigh* Lost one point, movie.

I would be mad at the obvious Candy Crush product placement, but I’m even more mad because Soda Saga is clearly the BETTER version

We get it, movie. Hi-5 is the fat one

You know, Alex, you wouldn’t be as befuddled if you didn’t have the volume up high, or screen lock off, or the phone on. How do you teenager poorly?

 Ah murder, just what I need in my kids films

The Cloud. I remember when that felt like a safe place to hide your NSFW art.

Wait, why Drupbux of all sites? Mega.nz is kinda better.

Jeez Jailbrick, Gene was just finishing your idea, he wasn’t taking it. Don’t be such a Tumblr user

I don’t get the point of Pen Pineapple Apple Pen. It’s just a dude dancing while wasting two good looking fruits by stabbing ink in them.

Okay, Gene’s parents are a highlight of this movie

KITTY!!! Also, Jailbreak got a weave.

Just Dance? Pfft, baby ass game. Only true gamers play Michael Jackson: The Experience.

Oh my god, they actually made an MJ joke. Bravo, movie.

These motherfuckers did not just put Wham! as a part of their soundtrack. I’m taking away another point.

“Throw some sauce on that dance burrito”? I would’ve gone with “Shake some spice on them boogie cookies” but whatever works.

M’kay, this ‘Just dance’ scene has so much wrong

Jailbreak said “Slay”

Emoji booty shaking

We go from Wham! to Christina Aguilera like a bipolar mixtape

They add stock sound effects for no reason

The Emoji Bop: or Kidz Bop’s take on Peek A Boo

Beyond the predictable shocker of Jailbreak wearing a weave, I almost saw some upskirt. Yes, I’m sinking my dignity to a pretty good low. Also, I like her better with the wig on.

Turn your phone off, Alex! God, you deserve to be ridiculed and shoved in a locker!

Why do they need the fa- Hand emoji? He honestly added nothing to this journey.

“Well what good is it to be number 1 if there aren’t any other numbers?” Ugh, that sounds like something I would want to say. 

You know I would be mad at the Spotify product placement if it wasn’t for the fact that I illegally download music.

The Struggle of Mortality. I am digging this.

Okay, now I’m mad at the Spotify product placement. What is with this movie and its trash ass music? Thirty. Minutes. LEFT!

What group of friends like to go to the phone store? The humans are the worst part of this movie.

“Stereotype”? When has birds coming around to the sound of music ever been a bad thing? 

Honestly? Better love story than the Hunger Games. (Talking ‘bout the meh parents, BTW)

Obligatory action scene

Drupbux? Malware protected? HA HA HAA! No.

It’s TJ Miller’s career: Up in flames

So Jailback’s plan was basically me trying to guess a password for an account I forgotten ages ago? Dumbass.

Jailbreak can look up old emails? PERFECT! We can incriminate the Clintons once and for all.

The password is his crush’s name? Okay, Alex.... is kind of a creep.

The cloud looks generic as fuck

Huh, this is an actually good turning point. A predictable one, yet good nonetheless. How did people take this as sexist?

Will Gene and Jailbreak just sex already? Wait, how do emojis do it? They got such big hea-oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

I would be cackling my ass off at the Twitter logo if--no, that is straight up the 2nd dumbest thing in this movie.

How will Alex recognize that the malfunction is gone? Computers don’t just magically look better when you erase all the viruses in them. God, this plan is stupid. Smiler’s just a psychopath, like a Cable News Exec.

She fuggin’ dead.

Alex...is a guy that would fuck up a cup of coffee

So lucky Gene was able to emote in time before everyone dies

“I like that you’re one of those guys that can express his feelings.” So let me get this straight, heheh, I can pick up chicks....with gifs? Movie, you’re blowing my mind.

Because you can stop a factory reset like it’s nothing.

Hi-5 is still a wanker.

Again, with this trash music? Flog yourself, movie, I’m tired of you.

YEAH! DANCE PARTY because nobody died! YEAH, MORTALITY!

Okay, second highlight of this film is the credits theme ‘Good Vibrations’. The OST is shit except for this.

So, I honestly enjoyed this movie, be it me laughing at it or the genuinely good moments that reside in the heap of mediocrity and shamelessness. The humans, the “villain”, and the soundtrack is all that I really hate about this film, otherwise I’d watch it again if I had the time and “opportunity”. But, since I actually liked this film, I’m gonna have to go into hiding. You never know when [KNOCK! KNOCK! KNOCK!] Oh god, I’m gone.

[arecomicsevengood]

I Got My Twitter Account Suspended

I don’t know how many people who follow me on Tumblr also follow me on Twitter. While this Tumblr is mostly for comics reviews, my Twitter account was primarily used for jokes. It has been suspended, and will not be reinstated, because apparently I used threatening or violent content that violates Twitter’s terms of service. I am vaguely aware of the fact that sort of left-leaning joke accounts have been targeted by white supremacist types, who use bots and algorithms to flag people and shut them down. Honestly, I should probably have quit Twitter because of the fact that it being such a haven for white supremacists essentially makes all users complicit. But I was addicted to the feed of news and jokes and friendship. (I never had enough of a following to get addicted to the dopamine rush of approval people felt from a successful tweet.) It is almost certainly going to be good for my attention span to not use the site anymore.

The closest thing to a violent, threatening post I wrote within the recent past was “We joke a lot about bringing back the guillotine on this site, but let me remind you, literally any sharp blade is an effective tool for killing the rich“ which I stand by as both a joke and a statement of fact. Another vaguely violent joke I can see as I continue to scroll down my timeline (a privilege currently I alone possess) is “Proud of the work I do at the "Make A Wish, Motherfucker" Foundation, where I fulfill the dying wishes of the people I, a violent cop, kill“

Anyway, it seems totally possible the job of policing reported content is handled by algorithms and not actual human beings capable of parsing jokes. Also, my apologies if no one reading this finds these examples of jokes funny. I hope you appreciate that generally I don’t attempt humor in my essays.

[aviationfiction]

XXIV

Dante St. James

“Do you ever listen? Your ego often leaves you looking like a mixture between a jackass and an idiot. That leaves me with the job of having to clean up your shit. Shut the fuck up listen sometimes.”

I hadn’t realized I slammed my hand down on the wooden table’s firm surface until a faint stinging filtered throughout my hand and surprisingly lingered behind. The once cool darkened conference room suddenly felt like a blistering summer day as I stood to my feet and turned my gaze away from the two men who lingered behind once the lower tier members of ranking made their exit more than fifteen minutes ago. I too had every intention on walking out with the small crowd but instead I was called back to listen to a heap of bullshit from the only people in the room I share a bloodline with. The smug smirk on Richard’s face was not only there to further agitate me but also as a sign of his contentment as he laxly rested in his seat at the head of the table glaring between his preferred son and myself. These are the moments that he lives for; confrontation, tension, and wars of words. Since we were children, he’d always warn Matthew and I that neither one of us need to be comfortable in any aspect of our lives because human beings and the world thrives off of competition, so we need to be vultures ready to pounce on our prey whether they are the strongest or the weakest of kind. What he never quite stated but I know he quietly endorses is my older brother and I having that same demeanor toward one another. The reality within it is knowing that through it all he will stand by, coach, and be a cheerleader for only one of us and it’s certainly not me. I’ve always felt that he’s waiting for one of us to take the other out in terms of success and influence. I’ve done that but it’s not acknowledged and it won’t be unless Matthew regains that power and knocks me down. There’s no love in this shit. I’m biologically his son but emotionally, I’m nothing more than his most valuable tool.

“I do listen. Do you ever lighten the fuck up? I agreed with your point. What more do you want me to say?”

“If you know so much then handle that shit yourself. What am I standing here for? I could have left out and went about my business.” Every supervisor and department head walked out of the conference room more than fifteen minutes ago and as I began to head out right behind them, I was summoned back to the table by Richard for what I knew would be the cause of a migraine and a ruined day. The migraine’s already brewing and the more I sit here stomaching their identical demeanor, the more this day trickles into the category of a bad one.

“No. We need to continue figure out how the fuck we’re going to get this Apple account. I want to sign them.” Richard sternly slapped his hand down on the manila folder containing endless documents that I’d done more than enough research for.

“We don’t need to be figuring out anything. You gave that account to your son. He should be figuring it out. He’s been working on this since what? January. It’s August and how much progress has he made? Let him keep that so he can continue pretending like he has a lot of work on his plate although we all know the truth.” The smirk on my brother’s face was one of that I expected and he nonchalantly shrugged his shoulders. He knows that he lacks motivation and the drive to do anything. It’s been that way for a few years now. I carry the company on my back and they celebrate the success harder than I do. I do the brunt of the work and they stand next to me as if we’re some dynamic trio conquering the industry one day at a time. Initially, he was the man around here and he still is to some degree but it’s not for his work ethic and the respect he’s gained from it, but rather because he aims to be personable and most of all because he’s playing under the skirt of everything with a decent face and dreamy eyes for him. Without any regard for his vulnerable and loyal wife at home, he toys with woman after woman whether it be here at the London office or back in the states at the main branch and he does it with so much finesse that most think nothing of it…at least not on the surface. If ask me, he’s more passed around than the women who throw themselves at him.

“I have a life little brother. You not having one is a reflection of the type of person you are. I work to live. I don’t live to work. I can and will admit that you work your high yellow ass off. There’s not a single person on the planet who will deny that you do but you do so because you don’t have shit else to do. You’re a CEO of this company and yet you have turned yourself into a slave for it and then what did you do? Instead of being an investor in outside businesses, you’re out there opening up restaurants and nightclubs to further add onto your workload. Whose fucking fault is that? You’re a lifeless log; just dull. You’re not rich. You’re wealthy. What do you have to show for it? A lavish penthouse apartment that you barely sleep in because you’d rather be traveling around every week? A jet plane that you’ve yet to take somewhere tropical for a vacation? I don’t give a fuck what your bitter ass has to say about me. I was at this company before you were. I handled what I need to handle.”

“Bitter? That’s the last word that should be flying out of your mouth. You’ve been bitter since you met me big brother. We all know this.”

“Are you two done behaving like bitches? Can we talk business now?” Richard quickly interjected his urge to cease the growing spat and I glanced in his direction with a small smirk because he’d only done so because he knew I was on the verge of treading into a territory that would put the past on the table and would not only leave Matthew fuming, but also Richard having to be at his son’s mercy for yet another strategic tactic to repay him for the way he’d done to his now deceased mother and their family. For as long as Richard and my mother are paying for it, I’d be paying for it by association. “As I said to you before, it’s going to be hell to land an Apple account because they already have a monstrous PR department that is constructed of hundreds of professionals and interns working to craft just about whatever they need to present their products to the public. They don’t need us and it’s going to take one hell of an angle to manipulate them into believing that they do. Apple has a cult following. They can release the same phone a million times and slap a different number behind it for the sake of creating a false difference, and people will still camp outside of an Apple store for days just to have that product. They built themselves upon simplicity and making sure all of their products are user friendly. They’ve mastered how to entice people with that simplicity. What exactly are we supposed to be offering?”

“That’s for you to figure out.”

“No that’s for Matthew to figure out.”

“You just said yourself that your brother’s been working on the account since January. He’s gotten no where. Now it’s time for you to take it somewhere and get the shit done in the manner that I know you can. You’re not only the architect. You are the builder.”

“And yet when it’s all said and done, there’s a ton of motherfuckers along side me when it’s time for the ribbon to be cut. Shit, the scissors aren’t even in my hand.”

“Everyone in this room is a CEO. In addition to that, we’re a family. When one of us wins, we all win.”

“Is that so?” My snicker was loud enough for the both of them to hear and I stood to my feet to ease some of the tension tightening multiple areas of my frame.

“Yeah it is so. You’ve yet to grasp the concept of what a family is which is why you don’t have one your damn self. Until you do, you’re going to be alone and miserable. You’re turning thirty years old and you don’t have a wife nor are you anywhere near having one. You don’t even have a girlfriend.” My eyebrow raised at his statement. He presented the perfect opportunity for me to introduce Autumn to my so called family without them ever being within her presence but I’d rather not use her as a defense mechanism to some bullshit claim. That’s not the proper way of speaking of a woman of her kind; a woman that means so much to me. Instead, I’d rather them believe what they want and look like the idiots that they are later on.

“You don’t have a family Matthew. You have a wife who waits at home while you screw other women. You have a wife who sulks and cries over you and who is sadly trying to create a life with you but you’re so unfocused on doing so that she has to settle for hoping that it happens before she’s too damn old to bare a child. What other family do you have? Richard and Elizabeth? You can pretend all you want, but you resent her and that’s why she kisses your ass. That’s why your father does the same. As far as your concerned, your family is in the urn resting on the shelf in your home office. That trickles into Richard’s story. You don’t have a family either. You have a wife who you were once having an affair with and you got a bastard child out of it, while your actual wife was dying. As soon as that wife’s body was ash, you moved your mistress and bastard son to the United States like the shit was normal and created nothing but a dysfunctional and fucked up situation. All in all, it affected him and in turn, it left me to fend for my damn self. Then to top it off, it got me shipped here. Shit, I was born here but I might as well call London home. That’s what y'all call family? It sounds like bullshit to me but hey, I suppose opinions vary. I’ll take the account because that’s what the fuck I do; fix his shit, handle yours, and make the both of you look incredible. Just don’t ever talk to me about some family shit, because we’re not a family.”

“You need to see a damn therapist. I often dismiss your mother when she talks about it, but I see that she knows what she’s talking about now. You’re so angry but over what? You’ve never wanted anything because you had everything you wanted and needed. You’ve gone to the best schools. We took care of you. Yes, there were problems but every family has problems. Your treat your mother like she’s the scum of the earth and you think that shits okay? You walk around like your the poster child for morals and yet you have endless grudges that you’re holding onto and you do this just about every single time you’re within the presence of any one of us. What the fuck do you want Dante? You want people to kiss your feet and worship the ground you walk on? You want apologies? I am never going to apologize for who I am. I am not going to apologize for how I raised you because standing in front of me is an ivy league educated multimillionaire. I did my fucking job. You talk to me when you have your own kids and they turn out like my boys have. Until then, man the fuck up. There’s no room for your emotions around here. Find you a woman and take that shit home to her.” In an abrupt and swift manner, he tossed the file towards my end of the table. He awaited a response, but he got nothing from either one of his heirs.

“Snakes don’t apologize for being snakes.”

A deafening silence loomed between the three of us as I snatched the folder off of the table and finally made an exit. Though they’re heading back to the states within a couple of hours, they can’t get out of town quick enough for me. I’m at my most content point when I’m either on the opposite side of the country or on another continent and they’re no where within reach. Had I knew they too were going to be at the London office for a few days, I would have waited to show up. Now that we’ve had the meetings and I’ve completed both seminars that were on my schedule, I’m done with this building and I can enjoy being here with the only person that I want to be here with.

Teddy Pengergrass’ women wooing voice could be heard as soon as I unlocked the door to the Belgravia, London four bedroom apartment I own on the prestigious end of Eaton Place. I wasn’t adamant on finding a properly here when I reached out to a real estate agent three years ago. It was supposed to be a leisure process and if I should find something worth it over a course of time, I’d look into it and possibly make a purchase. Funny enough, it didn’t take much time at all. While here on business, he’d given me a call and invited me out to take a look at the redesigning process of the stucco fronted maisonette and I immediately gravitated towards the intimate setting and the sophistication of the place. He’d shown me the photographs of the property before the renovations began and it would have been something I passed on, but their extension of the room sizes and plans for high ceilings influenced my decision. The last step was a walk through with a highly esteemed UK interior designer. The vision was all that I needed to hear. With about a two months process behind me, I purchased the properly and it’s where I reside whenever I’m here. Only three people knows about this apartment and now there’s a fourth who has made it feel like home more than it has before. We’ve only been here for four days and the aroma of her mouthwatering meals, the soulful music she plays, and the aura of her being has breathed life into the place and has enticed me with a lifestyle that I’ve been yearning. What’s petrifying and staggering all at once is the normalcy. I’ve lost the millionth battle I’ve had with my mind and heart to slow down my thoughts and longing when it comes to this woman and what we’ve been sharing because it’s still so new, but everything about this feels just and I want to do nothing more than do everything within my power to turn this into my reality for all of my days.

Come and go with me. Come on over to my place.

Her alluring voice meshed with Teddy’s and I couldn’t peel my eyes away from her unbelievable physique as her hips swayed from side to side while the material of an old Columbia University t-shirt of mine teasingly rose and fell with each move. I ogled those flawless thighs and froze in place as her plump backside matched the movements of her hips. She hadn’t stopped stirring whatever she was preparing in the pot in front of her but the aroma of that and whatever she concocted with barbecue sauce and garlic couldn’t distract me from what I craved for in an indescribable manner. In every moment that we’ve spent together in this apartment, I’ve cherished the quality time while mentally dealing with the torture of my yearning to taste her. The visions of her thighs wrapped around my head while I become intoxicated and entranced off of her savory nectar have played out in my head more times than I can count and I’m left flustered when reality sets in. Though I do my hardest to refrain from pondering about it out of consideration for my own sanity, I am assured in my belief that to be inside of her is to fall at her mercy. I have never been fixated on anything throughout my nearly thirty years of living but I know the woman who has rocked my world with just her presence in my life has the capability to change that.

I want her.

I’m aching for her.

“You’re home!” Her excitement easily put a smile on my face and she quickly placed the spoon down on the cutting board that she’d placed beside the stove and sauntered her way over to the kitchen’s entry way. As she ran her hands over my shoulders and eventually wrapped her arm around my neck for a hug, I tightly wrapped my arms around her waist and took in my feel of her warm body and the sweetness of her scent. Her tender lips met mine and she wrapped them around my bottom lip for one of her playful and yet flirtatious kisses that tends to be yet another tortuous act of hers. A faint moan slip past my lips when I felt her tongue running along the slit between them and I obliged her request for me to open my mouth. The intensity arose as our tongues met and my hand eased down to caress the backside that I’d just been admiring as she swayed. A thong. That’s all she had on under it and those flutters filled my core with an uncontrollable intensity when she didn’t stop me from slipping my hand under the shirt to caress her smooth skin and eventually toy with the lace material.  

“I can feel tension in your back. Did something happen at work?” She pecked my lips twice after she asked her question and she continued to kiss them while awaiting an answer. I didn’t enter the door with a frown on my face, we’re pouring affection out towards one another, and yet she knows. I didn’t say anything and yet she knows. As I continued to caress her, I could help but to bury my face into the nape of her neck.

“I had an argument with Matthew and his father.”

“You mean your older brother and your father?” She ran her hand over my head and gently dug her fingers into my slightly grown out hair as I huffed.

“No. I meant it exactly how I said it; Matthew and his father.”

“About what?”

“Business. Family shit. It’s always business when it comes to Richard. All he’ll ever give a shit about is lacing his pockets. As far Matthew, when I point out the shit that he doesn’t do right or bring to the table he immediately goes on the attack. His direct aim is usually the personal shit.”

“Like what?” As she pulled herself back, she held into my shoulders and the concern written all over her face was exactly what I didn’t want. I’d rather she not sympathize over my life because I don’t feel sorry for myself. Sure, I’m indifferent about a number of things but I rarely sulk over what is out of my control as far as I’m concerned. I’m learning more and more everyday that no matter what I say, I don’t have the power to make any of them take a good look at themselves in the mirror and realize where they fucked up so why should I hold out hope for apologies and reparations? I don’t believe we’ll ever be a proper family and I’ve come to terms with that. There are people in my life who genuinely love me and though there’s only three of them, that’s more than enough.

“He usually attacks my personal life because it’s the only angle that he assumes I’m sensitive about. He calls me lifeless and dull. He claims that my whole life revolves around working which is why I’m single and can’t find love. He often says I’m not interesting enough to be involved with anyone. Oh and there’s also the assumption that I’m bitter. I’m not sure over what though. He’s yet to blurt out whatever bullshit scenario he has for that claim.” Her head cocked back in disapproval and her arms slowly fell away from my neck as the frown on her face intensified. Her disdain for my brother and his words transitioned to the back of my mind as I zeroed in on her striking face. I’ve yet to figure out the proper word to describe her beauty. I’m still astonished and in awe of it.

“How the fuck can he say something like that when he refuses to actually be a big brother and get to know you? Those are all assumptions because you’re a professional and not only do you work your ass off, but you’re successful at all that you do. That’s a testament to your hard work and dedication to that company. If anything, they should have nothing but the utmost respect for what you bring to the table and how much you uplift the business that your father built from the ground and up. You are one hell of a son and I know you’d be one hell of a brother if he’d put aside the differences that he has with your parents and embrace you. You didn’t have shit to do with what happened between those three adults at the time. You were a baby.” I reached out to caress her face and nodded my head at all she’d expressed to me. Not only did it all make sense and stand as the truth, but it warmed me to know that she genuinely understands my family dynamic and rather than judging it, she stands by me in accord with my emotions but also remains hopeful for a better and far more positive future for all of us.

“Sounds nice baby but it’s not that simple for him. Matthew takes that resent me out on me for whatever reason. While I am still very much so sympathetic to what happened back then, it was a lot more intense when we were kids. Though he could barely tolerate me, I had his back and resented both my mother and Richard for what they did. Shit, I still do have ill feelings towards the both of them about it because they owe him an apology before owing me one. Matt was mourning the death of his mother and Richard sprung a new wife and kid on him with no regard or warning. There’s a million different emotions that a person has to go through when some shit like that happens and none of them are positive. I get it. I even took a lot of his lashing out and bullying without having much of a response  but the older I got, the less I could tolerate it. Being sent here all those years for school really sparked not only a change within me, but it furthered the forced independence that I already had.” She returned to the stove and I learned against the kitchen’s island as she turned to the task of putting her cooking skills to work. We’ve gone out to dinner one time since we’ve been here and it’s because she continues to prefer to cook. I’ve gone to the office with a stomach full of breakfast, small portions of dinner leftovers for lunch at my own doing because it’s so damn good, and then I return in the early evening to a full course dinner either just being finished up or done and awaiting me. To say I’m spoiled is an understatement. How the hell am I supposed to go back to my place in New York and eat turkey sandwiches and takeout we fly back to New York?

“I know you were born here but did you like it here when you were sent to that boarding school? I think it’s bullshit that they sent you there by the way. So for that particular point, I don’t care if you ended up loving it or hating it the whole way through. They should have never done that to you unless you were interested in going.”

“Initially I was highly upset about it. It was sprung on me out of no where. I thought we were coming over here for a vacation and next thing I know we were at the Westminster School for an orientation. I went from being confused as fuck to crying my eyes out. I think that’s the hardest I’ve ever cried in my life. I pleaded with them not to enroll me in that school not even knowing that they’d already done so and I’d be coming back in a couple of weeks. When we flew home, I became stoic about it. I didn’t have shit to say and I remember not even hugging or kissing either one of them when I returned for the start of the school year.” My mind followed my mouth as the visuals of all of those moments replayed. “I didn’t hate it. I didn’t love it either. I did grow to appreciate it and I got to know myself which is what made me love it out here. It’s a safe haven because of the peace. I’d finally entered an environment that was healthy and when I’d return home for vacations, I wanted to do nothing more than return not for the school part, but for the peace. I’d gotten accepted into Oxford and Cambridge. I considered going but the desire to be back in the city at college won, so I came back. By that time, I was able to live on campus and eventually have my own apartment so it wasn’t that big of a deal.”

“You made the most out of a screwed up situation. I didn’t think you’d do anything else. That’s admirable.”

“We’ve both done that.”

“And for record, you are an incredible man. From the very first moment you and I spoke with one another, I’ve been nothing but intrigued by all that you are. You’re one of the most interesting people that I’ve ever met and that’s my honest truth. Matthew can’t speak for all of these women out here who literally fawn and lust over you. I’ve seen it first hand. He also cannot speak for me and what I feel. There’s no negating how you make me feel. I did well if I must say so myself.”

I’d been smirking at all she’d said until her final line. It was then that we shared a laugh.

“I appreciate all that you said baby, but you did well? If I’m not mistaken it was me who pursued you.”

“But it was me who kissed you.” When she turned her head she tried her hardest to wink her eyes and failed as she usually does. Between that and the multiple strands of hair falling out of her sloppily done ponytail, I couldn't help but to deem my lady to be a cutie within this moment.

“Yeah, but I was going to ask you out regardless.”

“Was going to, would’ve, could’ve, and should’ve. Those are hypotheticals at this point suga. I did the kissing.”

“You started it. I finished it. How about that?” She took a second to ponder on my truce to the playful back and forth and nodded her head.

“I’ll take that. Are you hungry? You want to eat?”

“Yeah. I’d like to. I haven’t eaten since early this afternoon. I’m sure the tension headache I’ve had for a couple of hours is also part hunger headache.”

“A tension headache from the bickering with your father and brother?” I nodded my head while she shook hers. “I have some aspirin upstairs. You want to take two?”

“Nah. I hate taking medication. It’ll go away on it’s own.”

“I hate taking medication too but you know, I’m all fucked up so I have no choice but to do so.” Though she nonchalantly chuckled at her own description of herself, I couldn’t find the funny in it. I couldn’t even crack a hint of a smile. The description of her being “fucked up” is absurd. I know some fucked up people and she’s anything but that. More than anything, I want Autumn to recognize that she’s a human being and nothing is ever perfect. We going to go through good and bad, amazing times and possibly the most terrible shit that a human being can go through. That’s life. It doesn’t make us fucked up, unless we’re living without morals and goodness within our hearts. Flaws and all, she has to love herself and champion herself as a survivor rather than the “fucked up” person that she thinks she is.

“You’re not fucked up. You’re incredible.”

“You’re biased.”

“I’m a truth teller and I’m confident in what I say. I’m one hundred percent sure there are others who can and will vouch for that particular truth.”

“You’re still biased and that’s alright. I like you biased. I think I have a remedy for that headache. Follow me Mr. St. James.”

My eyes traveled over every curve of her body as she trailed ahead of me while humming along to whatever song was faintly playing behind us. The torture worsened as she ascended up the steps, leaving me to use every aspect of my willpower to refrain from peaking under the t-shirt to catch a peep of the intimate parts of her. I’d worn that shirt around campus a couple of times. Hell, just about every senior had it but not myself nor any senior woman looked that damn good in it. Had I never went to Columbia and saw Autumn wearing the shirt in the manner that she’s wearing it now, I not only would have enrolled, but I also would have majored in whatever she was studying, made sure I was housed in same dorm building she lived in, and would have been all over her every move until she was mine. Sure, I would have been one out of the thousands vying for her attention, but I damn sure would have been the victor in the end.

“I want you to use that aromatherapy lotion I left on the counter in the bathroom once you get out of the shower. Remember when you said I smelled good when I got in the bed last night? It was that. It’s not too feminine either so you can get away with it. Besides, you’re not going anywhere else today so who else will smell you?” My mouth fell slightly agape as she carefully used her hands to push the upper portion of my blazer off of my shoulders. She then stepped around my body and completely removed it.

“You went shopping today?” I’d panned my eyes over to the bags in the corner to distract my raging mind from the work of her hands. The heat arising within my core ravaged a portion of my self control and with no sense of ease, the subtle stiffening and pulsating of my flesh worsened my need for her.

“I did. I went to Selfridges and Topshop. Since you told me we’re going to see an outdoor show tomorrow, I needed something that suited that type of setting. Oh by the way, your Coutts World card is sitting inside of my wallet and I didn’t spend a dime on it. You’re going to stop spoiling me. I told you that I was alright. What the hell is Coutts World anyway? There’s no bank in the United States with that name.” I returned my gaze to her as she loosened and pulled my tie over my head. Though I knew the stubbornness within her would cause her to refrain from using the credit card, I still left it behind because she needs to understand that I am absolutely earnest when I say that I’m going to look after and take care of her.

“It’s the bank to the Royal Family.”

“And how the hell did you pull off being a member of the bank to the Royal Family? Is Queen Elizabeth signed to your firm? Are you and Prince William golfing buddies?” My fingers met one of the loose strands of her hair and I chuckled at the playful sarcasm. I’ve actually met William. We’re not golfing buddies though. I don’t play golf.

“You need a million dollars and connections to the right people.”

“Dante…” She halted her task and stared at me as if I’d stated the most ridiculous statement she’d ever heard in her life.

“What?”

“Seriously? A million dollars? That’s how much you spent?”

“No. That’s amount of money you need in the account to have the card. Honestly, I don’t really give a shit about it. I think that was just a moment of me being frivolous. People typically do that with materialistic shit and I did it with some fancy United Kingdom bank. Now that I have a residence here, I suppose it serves a purpose.” I slowly pulled my lip in-between my teeth as she concentrated on unbuttoning the pure white dress shirt. As she did so, I imaged myself peeling off the layer covering her.

“Baby if you continue to take off my shirt, then I’m going to have to remove yours.” The air in the spacious room heightened to a unbearable sweltering as her movements delayed in paced. The breath she inhaled seemingly served as her last for that moment because her chest no longer matched the heaving of mine. As my eyes bore into the alluring set facing me, I shamelessly showcased the burning desire for her and the glimmering flicker within her own further enticed me. I reached for her skin and slowly eased my fingers up the smoothness of her thigh once she closed the small gap in-between us and her supple lips meshed into mine.

“Take your shower. Your plate will be waiting for you.” She kissed me once more.

As I watched her exit the master bedroom, I finished the task she started, left every article of clothing in the middle of the floor and scurried to the shower. As the cool water washed over my head and cascaded down the rest of body, I knew I’d be in there long enough for that plate of food to lose its warmth. 

I needed it.

I’d yet to figure out every flavor Autumn used in the chicken, but each one left my taste buds craving for endless bites of the dish. She created her own barbecue sauce and has sworn to secrecy about it’s recipe as if I can cook and would attempt to make it. She did confirm my guesses of honey, ginger, and garlic and promised that she’d make an entire bottle of it for my refrigerator if I decided that I wanted to use it as a sauce on the boring takeout I tend to grab on my way in. To further spoil me, she had baked macaroni and cheese and fresh string beans as my side dishes. Stacey’s probably going to curse me out if I tell her that her baked macaroni and cheese officially has some competition. I don’t know what Autumn put in it, but whatever it was had me gobbling down the plate she made for me and the rest of what was on hers as well. I’m one hundred percent sure I’m having the leftovers as a middle of the night snack. I’ll take the stomachache that may come with it.

“What do you love about this movie?” Love Jones. We’d it made through the nearly two hour film a half an hour ago and somehow, we were lazily watching it all over again. Somewhere between the ending and the film restarting, my body end up in between Autumn’s legs and my shirt hit the floor. Because I hadn’t followed the directions of covering parts of my body with her lavender lotion, she took it upon herself to put it all over my upper body. As her hands smoothly caressed and soothed me, I randomly massaged her left foot with both of my hands.

“Who doesn’t love an unconventional love story? Two people not looking for love and yet somehow they find one another.”

“Isn’t that how love works though?”

“Not always. It’s not just that aspect of it that I appreciate. People tend to put superficial shit in love far too much for my liking. Darrius and Nina don’t. Their attraction and eventually their love is built upon natural attraction and lust, genuine interest, and organic fun. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with impressive and even lavish courting but it’s bullshit when all of the things that I just named aren’t the foundation.”

“He stalked her though. He was on some creep shit when he stole her address.” She playfully mushed my head and though my back was turned to her, I know she rolled her eyes.

“Shut up. It’s a movie. I know people get stalked in reality, but I’m going to sum that up to just being a sensationalized part of the movie.”

“Okay, now onto the sex. They were lying to one another.”

“How so?”

“Because they both told their friends that it was nothing more than sex knowing damn well it was more than that. People use that it’s just sex excuse for certain situations knowing damn well they’re lying to themselves.”

“You’d know better than I would.” Her slick response earned me lightly squeezing her foot. I attempted to look back at her as she chuckled at her own joke and accepted defeat by returning to my relaxed state against her chest.

“I never caught feelings.”

“So you were the one stringing women along huh?”

“I didn’t string anyone along. I’m not that kind of a guy. That’s Mike’s thing. He doesn’t know how to let women down easily. That’s why he’s had a million girlfriends.”

“I can see that for him. Though he’s a joker, he’s really a nice guy.”

“Yeah, he is. Also, Nina in this movie is the kind of woman that I don’t like.”

“And what kind of woman is that Mr. St. James?” The way my last name rolled off her tongue and the way her hands deeply massaged my shoulders left me struggling to create clear thoughts. She was yet again taking my body on an emotional roller coaster.

“The kind that allows her friends to ruin her relationship.”

“Did you not see his friends telling him to play it light and not to get serious?”

“You didn’t let me finish. I was just about to say I don’t think women should like that type of guy either. People shouldn’t allow their friends to dictate their actions within a relationship because often times that advice is the wrong way to go about it. No one on the outside is going to know your relationship the way you know it, so respect that sacred boundary and check the outside influences at the door.”

“I agree. What if it’s good advice though?”

“Good advice is alright. Spiteful advice or some advice that’s filled with your friends own insecurities? Nope.”

“Heather’s in love with you. You sending her those flowers really worsened that. Now when she texts me, she texts me to greet the both of us. She’s developed a fetish for telling me to let you breed me because you’re so great. I shouldn’t be listening to that advice right?” Our laughter was loud. I didn’t expect to hear anything that coming out of her mouth and I’ve yet to meet Heather to really figure out her personality, but if statements like that are apart of it, I’m sure to be entertained.

“Actually, I think that sounds like pretty good advice.” Once again, she lightly mushed my head and sucked her teeth in the midst of my laugher. I’ve always pictured myself with three or four children. Though I don’t know for sure, I do have this feeling that I’m going to have more daughters than sons and I’m alright with that. I’d love to be a hands on father; the guy at every PTA meeting taking notes alongside my wife and being the embarrassing parent at the school plays and sporting events. I want to be the not paying attention to the directions when poorly assembling my children’s toys dad. I want to do the awful camping trips and the fun family vacations all over the globe. I want to happily record those first steps and first words, be the best dressed dad at the father-daughter dance, scare the hell of their prom dates, and cry my eyes out at their weddings. I want to teach my son how to be a better man than I ever could’ve been. I want to dust him off when he falls, encourage him to go after all that he aspires to be, and most of all teach him to always respect and champion women.

“Are you ready for kids?”

“I’m turning thirty in a week. I don’t want to wait too long but I have a few things to get in order before I start bringing lives into the world. I’ll give it another two years.”

“Kids before marriage?” Silence fell between as our hands continued to lull one another. I wasn’t sure of the job I was doing, but with the way slumber was creeping throughout my frame, I was left to believe she was doing a better job.

“Marriage first.”

“You’re getting married in two years?”

“Yeah.”

As she lifted her left leg to make herself more comfortable under my weight, I couldn't refrain from turning my head to plant a kiss along her inner thigh. Her giggle was ammunition and I did it once more as she playfully ran her hand over my face.

“The lavender is working on you. You’re sleepy talking right now.”

“You’ll say yes.”

“I’m not sure if I’m going to remarry.” I yawned while listening to her response. My confidence didn’t falter at the pessimism.

“A nice sized wedding. The United States has beautiful places but a destination wedding is the goal.”

“I’ve already been married. It looks kind of stupid for a person who has already been there and done that to be having a big wedding as if they’re doing it for the first time.”

“A two or three week long honeymoon.” I couldn’t bother to respond to that statement. She couldn’t be serious and if she was, I refused to take it as such.

“That’s a lot of sex.”

“That’s the plan.” I couldn’t join her in her laughter because I’d grown too tired to do so. My hazy eyes were just about completely shut as she ran her fingers through my hair. What kind of a spell has she put on me?

“Autumn Nicolette Dupont St. James.”

“That’s a long ass name Dante Elliott St. James.”

“It sounds sophisticated.”

“It sounds like sleepy talk.”

“You like Malibu?”

“Hate it.”

“You’re lying.” I listened to her endearing giggle as she covered my eyes with her hands.

“You’re right. I’m lying. I like Malibu, London, New York, Paris. Wherever. I like it wherever you are.” I moved my head so the tips of her fingers would meet my lips and I kissed them.

That was all I needed to hear.

I told Calvin I’d come out and watch him headline the V Festival about a month ago and though I was near opting out of attending, telling Autumn made me stick to my promise. The ridiculous crowd of people had me wondering if I suffered with a mild case of claustrophobia and the stint of marijuana reminded me of those packed wall to wall college parties I’d attend at the frat and sports houses during my time at Columbia. I attend concerts from time to time, but festivals? I wouldn’t say they’re my thing. Even with these All Access passes hanging around our necks and the opportunity to literally be anywhere we preferred the entire time we’re hanging out here, I still feel smothered.

“He was so awesome.” Autumn screamed loudly for Calvin as he stepped down from the DJ booth and exited the stage. Though I’d heard her, my eyes were on the various male gazes taking in her chosen attire for the night. The shorts she bought from Top Shop turned into a kitchen table project. She spent the morning cutting them up and distressing them to her liking. I couldn’t quite figure out how they were supposed to look as she was working on her design, but once she put them on this evening, I choked on the Gatorade I was sipping. She paired them with a neon green sports bra and Converse All Stars of the same color. She, unlike myself, blended right in with the festival goers and because of it, they gravitated towards her far more than they did me. She’d been pulled in for group photos with randoms, complimented on her attire, and fawned over by men; young and older.

“He’s talented, but I’m not familiar with the majority of the records that he played.”

“Because you don’t listen to pop radio.” She’s right. I don’t. I like the option of streaming radio stations and them being filtered by genre.

“What do you want for dinner?”

“Lets go to that Mexican place and get takeout. I want tacos.”

“You don’t want to eat inside? It stays open late.”

“No. I just want to go home.”

I glanced in her direction as she readjusted her bag over her shoulder and my fingers tingled once she laced her hand with mine. She left it up to me to guide us out of our hectic surroundings and I did so without much issue. The driver’s navigation through the never-ending traffic proved to be far more difficult to deal with than the crowds of people and it only made me wish we left at least a half an hour early so we’d be able to get a head start. We arrived at La Bodega Negra twenty minutes before closing and was able to get those that she craved. We’d eaten half of them on the way back to the house and the other half while in bed. After having stood out there watching three acts prior to Calvin’s plus his own headlining set, we didn’t want to do anything more than lazily lay in bed with the rest of dinner. Instead of a movie, our lounging around was to the sounds of her favorite soul playlist.

“Do you visit your family when you’re here?”As she lay there tucked into my left side, I played with the loose ends of her high ponytail as it rested on my chest.

“I don’t know them.” I quickly released her hair so I wouldn’t mistakenly tug on it as she flipped over. Her chin met my chest and she stared up at me with curiosity.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know them. I’ve never met my mother’s folks.”

“None of them?”

“No. I can’t speak for when I was a baby but as far as my memory goes, I don’t remember ever meeting any of them. Her parents are alive. She speaks with them occasionally from what I know. She has a brother but he lives in the Netherlands or Switzerland. It’s one of them. I’ve never met him either but I do remember speaking with him. I was maybe thirteen or fourteen.”

“Why has she never taken you to meet your grandparents?” Her finger tips trailed up my chest and eventually trickled up to my face.

“They don’t want to meet me.”

“Why?”

“Their daughter had a fling that turned into an ongoing affair with a black man. From that came a child out of wedlock. They had a lot to be disappointed about but I believe the black part really stuck.” Racism is prevalent everywhere; even in the places you don’t believe it should hold any weight. Sure love is love and the color of skin shouldn’t be a influential factor, but you’d be surprise how much it comes into play within certain circumstances. There are a ton of white people who have no issues with blacks until they’re “stepping out of their place” and in this case, that’s what Richard did when courting their daughter. To make matters worse, he didn’t do so in the proper manner. She was a sexual object for him that eventually turned serious. After having gotten her pregnant, he continued to live a double life for three years and they knew about it. Instead of her walking away from him and starting over with someone else, she agreed to move to the United States and marry the man that influenced her to morph into a fool. The disappointment in Elizabeth St. James is what my grandparents and I share in common aside from blood relationship.

“What is it with your family members taking things out on you that you have absolutely nothing to do with? It pisses me off.” Before she could turn over in frustration, my arms locked around her waist.

“Human beings are complicated.”

“No, they’re full of shit. I’ll be damned if I don’t accept my grandchild over their parents decisions. That’s nonsense and I hope they’re rotting with that guilt on their minds. I’m going to pray they reach out to you before they’re deteriorating in a cemetery.”

“Don’t you think you should fix your relationship with your brother before you two are deteriorating in a cemetery?” Her fingers halted as a huff slipped past her lips and she peered at me as I awaited a fair response.

“I love my brother. I don’t want you or anyone else to mistake that. I love him and if Isaac needs me for anything, I’m there no matter what. I’m going to always have his back though I rarely feel like he has mine. I don’t mind us sitting down and clearing the air but the issue with that is the man doesn’t know how to be respectful and he looks down on me. I can’t stand that. As much as he thinks I need to grow up, he needs to do the same as well. I’m tired of people telling me that I need to grow up. I’m working on it.”

“Who else is telling you that?” I reached for her ponytail yet again and watched as she contemplated giving me an answer. The hesitance was clear.

“Who else?”

“I got into an argument with Andreas during Heather’s reception.” As my movements halted, she quickly shook her head. Once she sat up, I was expecting her to exit the bed but instead she lifted her right leg over and straddled my lap.

“It’s not that big of a deal. I was outside having a breather and he decided to come out there to be the asshole that he is. We had a spat and I walked away from him. The growing up thing was mentioned. He’s said it before. I think for me, one of the biggest issues I have is not understanding where I’ve gone wrong. Sure, I should have finished school and I did get married at a very young age. Maybe I should have lived life a bit more before making such a major decision. Other than that, I just don’t know where I went wrong. I think about it every single day.” Her eyes lowered as her once relaxed body tightened. “I can’t remember every single day of my marriage but I try to think about all of the fights more than the good times, so I’ll know what to improve because I don’t want to repeat myself. I’d hate to hear you call me out for the same things that he did.”

“And I don’t want to ever leave you disinterested or feeling like you’re not a priority in my life. I don’t want you to ever feel like I’m putting my career over you or like this isn’t serious to to me. See? We both have insecurities.” As I pulled her down closer, I planted soft kisses on her forehead, cheeks, and eventually her lips.

“You have nothing to be insecure about. I trust your intentions.”

“And I trust yours.” It was her turn to kiss me. As her warm lips brushed across mine, they so did with a loss of innocence and instead with a newfound fiery. The worries that tormented our minds ceased and left our frames drunk off passion. As her hips slightly swayed against the lower half of my body, the euphoric warmth exuding from between her thighs heightened and awakened every fiber of my being. An initial shock halted her movements as my stiffened fleshed pressed against her and yet she didn’t shy away. She stared down at me, almost sympathetically, as I did my best to mask not only the desire but the discomfort.

“I can help.” Before I could open my mouth to respond, she placed a finger to my lips and shook her head. “Let me help.”

I couldn’t refrain from widening my eyes as she slowly pushed herself down until she was sitting on my legs and her face was aligned with my stomach. As the tips of her fingers lifted the t-shirt to expose my skin, her lips kissed along my torso in such a teasing manner that I suddenly had the urge to halt her actions. My flinching is what I thought served as a warning, but instead it further enticed and increased her efforts. Our eyes met once more and I searched for possible signs of apprehension as her hands latched into the sides of my cotton Nike shorts and the Hanes boxer briefs under them. As she tugged both barriers away, her eyes locked on what she’d been searching for as it sprang out to greet her and relieve me. My ragged breathing worsened as her finger tips grazed it’s surface and a grunt slipped past my lips once her entire hand laced around it and worsened the jolting pulsations. The warmth of her tongue tortuously ran around the most sensitive surface and I flinched once more as the searing heat of her lips slowly trailed down in a soul snatching suction until I’d met the back of her throat.

My heart thrashed against my heaving chest in a racing that left my mind with a hint of a panic and yet in a state of passion that I’d yet to reach within in other year of my life. Though I wanted to do nothing more than close my eyes as my body willingly submitted itself to her, I couldn’t. They remained opened, locked on the movements of her mouth and the slithering of her tongue as it traced every bulging vein she could visibly find and feel. The warmth of her finger tips brushed over other portions of me leaving behind death ridden flutters and chills that forced my hand at stillness. She mingled with my soul; taking it into her possession in a match that only God could craft. I’d never felt so safe…so secure…so assured…so ensured.

My surroundings were hazy.

My sense of self was lost.

My purpose lied with her.

Time halted. I’d lost track of just how long she’d been taking in her fill of me but it’d been long enough to deepened the grunts I couldn’t withhold and leave my fingers laced in her hair. There was a method to her madness and I could barely remain on track with it as my body simultaneously intensified and weakened to her touch. My lips quivered. My body turned into a furnace; warmer than the wildest fire and glistening from perspiration of fervor. As she silently called for me, an onslaught of waves flushed through my frame and an inevitable force ripped through my core as I continuously shuddered in response to the release she’d given me.

She continued for just a while longer, lapping up and savoring what was left of me, and slowly released me from the source of such wild pleasure. I’d become temporarily paralyzed and lost in a trance that only she was capable of giving me as she returned to her side of the bed and laid back against the pillows. Marvin Gaye’s voice was a soother for the both of us; as the moment we shared lingered within the room and our beings.

Time wasn’t on my side as I awaited my body’s return to reality from such a euphoric high. Once my mental state normalized, I wanted to do nothing more than have my own fill of her. The possibility was cut short when I glanced over at a sleeping Autumn.

I was left to run my fingers along the smoothness of her skin as she peacefully slept along side me and I accepted that as the only fill of her I’d be having for the remainder of the night.

I had no desire to sleep and so I didn’t. My eyes and fingers remained on her throughout the remainder of the nightfall and even as hues of the sun’s rays peaked beyond the wavering clouds. I’d only left her side for a cup of coffee and when I returned to the bedroom with it, my attention returned to the most beautiful being I’d ever laid my eyes on.

Days ago, I’d been thinking about how quickly I’m falling in love and if I’m in the wrong for doing so but I now know what I refused to knowledge then.

I already fell.

[neon-nocte]

Ok I have finished the season of the AM Archives:

(Heavy spoilers)

I’m still in the denial stage about green. Hmmm.

When he was telling sam that he “may never have enough” time re: getting over Joan, in my head I was like “wow this is killing me” and now I’m like “wow what an ironic choice of words”

Even though I’m not generally in favor of the concept of getting back together with one’s ex, part of me was rooting for Owen & Joan! Intellectually I know that they could never go back to the way things were bc of the whole Mark situation — but the exes to co-directors dynamic and the unresolved romantic tension made me kindaaa want them to get back together, someday, after enough time has passed for them to rebuild trust and friendship. And look where we are now.

It’s about the yearning

Joan/Jackson is not a pairing I expected at the beginning of this show, but I dig it. Though it would be a good healthy idea for Joan to consider the concept of a work/life balance & maybe try to pursue some relationships (friendships & romance alike) with people outside work... just a thought hun you’re the therapist here :)

That bit where Joan pulled Jackson aside before he went to get the shipamine from the lab and he was all like “but I’m not just anyone to you, Joan”... like, what kind of smooth ass motherfucker... I wish I had that kind of game

I like where this whole Sam/Mags thing is going (god knows I’ll never complain about more wlw ships in my fiction)... but also mark :(

Even though losing his ability for some indeterminate amount of time/potentially forever is not necessarily a good thing, it would solve one issue in Mark & Sam’s relationship — the whole him taking her power and time traveling without being able to get back shit — so that timing kinda just bites

Mark visiting his & Joan’s parents is :( but also it all makes so much more sense. Like how he was triggered by their intolerance towards atypicals and went right back into his trauma state, which is a big reason why he volunteered. Plus he was trying to help out another atypical which is so kindhearted of him even if it was reckless and caused unnecessary drama with his sister :,(

Ok Oliver was a DELIGHT he was so hilarious and also a great narrative tool to add some lighthearted dialogue into those very intense episodes. Plus I’m a big fan of Kristian Bruun from ye ol’ orphan black days so it was cool to hear his acting in a different medium!

Helen really had me fooled for a moment.., I was like wow it IS fucked up that the AM had her on tier 5 for just a radio mishap. But that episode was called “think twice” so really I shoulda known 👀. Great villain and also super interesting about the way human brain activity works in a similar way to the radio frequencies

On a somewhat unrelated note, I’m always saying that if I were more apt for science I’d totally swap my psych minor for a major and go into research... if the atypical world was real I think I’d LOVE to work in the AM researching the neurology and/or genetics of atypical biology... the fact that I think about these things is how we KNOW that I was raised by sci-fi nerds

When Wadsworth showed up and was immune I was like OH SHIT WE GOT A BADASS OVER HERE

Wadsworth and Helen’s friendship is very 😭 you know?

Joan calling Sam family meant... A Lot™️

Samantha Barnes you’re doing great sweetie

This is off topic but do you ever think about that time in TBS when Sam said something I don’t remember but then Joan responded with a very scandalized “Samantha!” because I think about that a lot when I think about the two of them

I liked the parallelism of Owen being very “some of these people are locked up for a reason” and then changing his views to lean a little more towards Joan’s perspective, and Joan being very “gotta release them all like reverse Pokémon” and then Helen happened and her views shifted a little towards Owen’s 😭

Anyway 10/10 listening experience even though my luminary app is not quiteeee as user friendly as apple podcasts but hey artists gotta get paid. Gonna continue to be in denial about Owen until I have some happy romance to distract myself with when the Caleb/Adam book comes out

Arielle binges The AM Archives

Well, folks, now that season one has been uploaded in its entirety, I’ve jumped on my Luminary free trial to listen to the AM Archives and I’m through episode 7. Unsurprisingly, I’ve got Too Many thoughts:

Owen! Fucking! Green! I adored him and his cheery, amoral self back in the bright sessions days and my love for him is only growing. Owen being a celebrity around the halls of the AM! Joan’s window mural story! The whole “Agent Green, Agent Green?!” bit — he’s such a delight and he’s trying to make up for his mistakes and I’m sure as hell one sucker for a redemption arc.

I literally gasped out loud when we were first introduced to Alice. Love love love all the name drops & connections to TBS characters. Alice is hilarious and after hearing about her indirectly from Caleb in TBS it’s wonderful to get to know her.

Also re: Alice, it’s interesting to think about the hereditary link in atypicals — why is Caleb an empath and his sister someone with super strength? What makes someone develop one power over another? If I’m not mistaken Chloe’s power was more closely related to her mom’s than Caleb & Alice’s are.

I’m an Atlanta native so after hearing Jackson’s stories from the Atlanta division of the AM, boy howdy am I glad this shit is fictional lmao

Sam and Joan’s friendship is such a pleasure. It’s easier to see, distilled as it is in the AM work environment as compared to the TBS audio recording format. I love love love seeing how Sam has grown since the early TBS days and working alongside Joan (and Owen) is such a good fit.

When Sam was asked if she ever dated Joan, and then not long after was asked if she ever dated Chloe — A) being very vocally affectionate about your platonic friends is a Mood and B) ok Sam’s sexuality is a Very Interesting Thing. One of the things I was drawn to when I discovered TBS back in 2017 was the whole “everybody’s queer!” vibes — Caleb & Adam’s romance, Chloe being ace, Mark being bi, the whole Damien/Mark fiasco, the potential crush that Joan once had for Wadsworth (idk if this is canon but it’s certainly my interpretation)... I really liked how it was done in a way that was both explicit and implicit, matter-of-fact but also fluid & subtle. Anyway what I’m trying to say is I think it’s cool that even tho we’ve only known Sam to be romantically interested in one (1) person (a man who as far as we know is cis) it’s still relevant for both the audience and the characters not to assume she’s straight. Also sets the stage for the future potential outcome of her & Mark’s relationship imploding (much like the pyrokinetic)...

Which brings me to Mark. I have such protectiveness for him that definitely stems from TBS being very Joan’s-POV-centric in format. He’s back and reckless as ever, isn’t that the saying? I’m very disheartened by the fact that he very clearly didn’t want Joan to know he was back, and that fact that he REFUSED TO INFORM HER when he volunteered for a very dangerous experimental drug trial is just ridiculous. Like I get it, he’s been through some serious fucked up tramautic shit, and maybe this is his way of “reclaiming” the act of being experimented on by the AM. He may not be the therapist in the family but come on, he’s got to know that these decisions are gonna bite him in the ass. You don’t just come back from being a band tour photographer, not tell your sister, do a very dangerous thing, and still not tell your sister. That’s no way to rebuild the broken trust between them. Anyway I care about Mark so much and I just need him to COMMUNICATE with his fucking sister & girlfriend (though of course I recognize that Joan & Sam HAVE awfully betrayed his trust before but that’s not the point here)

That’s all I came to say, I’m really fired up about Mark and Sam and Joan and Owen and I also really adore the new characters that weren’t in TBS. soon there’ll be a part two to this once I get through the second half of the season and GOD I bet I’m gonna find some of my thoughts here hilarious once I’ve finished it

[nancygduarteus]

The Viral Video Star Behind the Fitness Fad That May Replace CrossFit

“Bro, what kind of muscles you have?” asks Ido Portal in a short video introducing his philosophy. He’s barefoot and shirtless, his long hair pulled back as he tumbles across the frame and does handstand push-ups in the rain. “No—bro, what kind of patterns you have? Can you flip? Can you invert? Can you crawl?”

The 48-year-old Ido Portal has spent the past three decades honing a physical credo and method that’s now practiced by thousands of people all over the world—from office workers, to former CrossFitters, to NBA players, to the ever-controversial UFC titan Conor McGregor. Known as The Ido Portal Method, or simply “movement,” his approach purports to take the “most potent” parts from a range of physical disciplines by shedding the dogmas that often accompany them. As he puts it: “I want the contents, not the container.”

Videos of Portal in motion began circulating in certain physical circles in the mid-2000s—entrancing clips in which he flows along the floor like liquid, playfully combining capoeira-inspired flips, hand-balancing, and animalistic movements. But it’s only in the past few years (in no small part thanks to McGregor’s influence) that his profile has exploded, his following has expanded, and his business has revved up.

Star athletes reportedly pay Portal six-figure sums for two weeks of in-person training. He spent chunks of the past year doing “movement design” (something akin to choreography) for a multi-million dollar Bollywood film, and is set to star in a mini-series in which he works with elite athletes in sports ranging from surfing to fighting. (Some of his closest students have landed similarly glitzy gigs, with two recently serving as advisers to the current season of Israeli Ninja Warrior.) Portal has been called a “guru” and a “movement master” more times than I can count; one interviewer even called him “the smartest man in the world.” But the question—hotly debated on Reddit and on MMA blogs—endures: Is there value in the movement, or is Portal simply slinging snake oil?

“Most people don’t have the user manual to their own machinery,” Portal told me emphatically when we connected over Skype. “Your being is a physical being. You brush your teeth everyday, you need to move everyday. It doesn’t take five minutes, and it does take a certain education.”

Portal seems like the the right guy to be dispensing such an education. He appears in control of every vertebrae and muscle fiber, he’s charismatic, and he looks the part. (“Why do all these movement teachers look like Jesus?” comedian, MMA commentator, and member of the Intellectual Dark Web Joe Rogan once joked.) For years, Portal tied his hair in a topknot and was so jacked he says he was once asked to shed muscle for a photoshoot. These days he’s ponytail-less and a bit less buff—he told me his muscles were getting in the way of evolving his movement practice in certain directions—but his body-fat percentage still hovers in the single digits and he can bust out a one-arm handstand or helicopter at will. The only clear sign he’s aging are the flecks of grey in his dark-brown beard.

And he is, fittingly, always on the move. Born and raised in Haifa, Israel, for the past decade he’s been effectively nomadic, carrying his possessions on his back as he brings his method across the globe. A few weeks before we spoke, he’d been leading a movement camp in Phuket. The week before it was Seoul. Next up: Cyprus. In between camps, he works with elite athletes—from Olympic swimmers, to MLB players, to professional mixed martial artists—applying his broad perspective to their sport to try to give them that extra edge. That might mean focusing on spinal articulation for a swimmer, or developing a baseball pitcher’s shoulder mobility through oft-neglected hanging work. Portal described himself as an “information-and-systems broker, mobilizing knowledge from one discipline to another.”

In Tel Aviv, much of this work takes place in what looks like a CrossFit box, but with more free floor space. The walls of the Ido Portal movement school are covered in handprints, scuff marks, and phrases like isolation → integration → improvisation and Let them DIRTY the walls, motherfucker! The equipment scattered about is basic: gymnastics rings, monkey bars, wooden sticks, tennis balls. As Portal—who tends to be either barefoot or in basic canvas shoes—puts it: “The more expensive the toys, the cheaper the mover.”

Some 700 people have joined the school since it opened in late 2014, he said. Throughout the day, you’ll find muscular men and women bouncing a tennis ball against a wall with their fists, working on inversions, experimenting with different kinds of squats, or slowly swinging a dowel while a partner evades it using spinal waves and soft acrobatics. Or, to hear Portal tell it, in each session students “step into the cloud of movement and attack a subject” by doing drills or challenges, “maybe it’s coordination, or speed ... ” Training in “movement” might look or sound frivolous to outsiders, but Portal and his tribe are nothing if not serious about it. “It’s not some hippie concept as many people make it out to be,” he said. “I am a radical person, for the good and the bad.” He and his “inner tribe” train from six to ten hours a day.

“How many movements did you learn today? This week?” he challenged me. “A contemporary dancer might learn hundreds of new movements in one class ... and the neurological connections being made, the type of brain that is being developed ... ” Portal has long preached that learning new, complex movements betters the brain in ways straightforward cardio or weights do not—and some recent research supports this. One 2015 study found that adults who undertook a regime loosely based on freestyle wrestling performed better in cognitive tasks than people who spent the same amount of time performing tiresome brain-training tasks or gutting it out on a stationary bike. Similar benefits have been seen in those who practiced Tai Chi as compared with brisk walking. But Portal believes his method is superior to other forms of training. “It makes you smarter, I know it, I feel it,” he told me. “There is no more potent tool to make people sharper, more complex, more ethical, more realistic.”

Portal presents his approach as a sort of atavistic antidote to our lifestyles—a bent that aligns him with the recent “evolutionary fitness” movement. Chief among the movement is Erwan Le Corre, the former parkourist and founder of the popular “MovNat” (a portmanteau of the French term for “natural movement”). Supposedly modeled after the challenges faced by our hunter-gatherer forebears, Le Corre’s wilderness workouts involve vaulting across rivers, heaving boulders, and climbing trees. Though Portal’s approach is perhaps more palatable for the urban set, the men lament similar things: Our 9-to-5 cubicle jobs, smartphone addiction, hyperspecialization in sports, and the rising obsession with fitness for aesthetic purposes have robbed us of our capacity to truly move, leaving us empty.

At the heart of movement culture is an emphasis on play. Animals and kids play as they navigate the world, Portal often says, but as adults we channel this instinct in futile or destructive directions. “That workmate of yours who’s always clicking his pen? That’s his body screaming, ‘Let’s play! Let’s play!’” he said in a recent interview. Portal frequently cites a Dutch text from the 1930s called Homo Ludens or “Man the Player,” which argues that play preceded mankind and is central to thriving societies.“ Most people think play is juvenile” he told me, “but it’s actually a training tool of all animals and must be undertaken with utmost seriousness.” Which explains why he’s as inspired by monkeys as he is by guys who break orbital bones for a living.

Portal lizard-crawled into the popular consciousness in 2015, when he was recruited as the “movement coach” of soon-to-be UFC “champ champ” Conor McGregor. The brash Dubliner was just beginning his rapid rise from little-known fighter to the UFC’s most-bankable star when, in 2013, he tore his ACL. While recovering, he started to look at training through a new lens: He discarded his more-conventional workouts, he studied footage of predators hunting their prey (and he got the ink to match—his sprawling chest tattoo depicts a crowned gorilla devouring a human heart). “I learned a lot more about how important balance is, how important control of the body is," he told Esquire. McGregor came across videos of Portal in motion and, fascinated, sought out the Israeli.

Numerous UFC fighters had dabbled in broader training before Portal appeared on the scene, aiming to improve not just their conditioning, but those qualities that sit somewhere between striking and the ground game. Carlos Condit had been frolicking outdoors with Le Corre since 2014, and Georges St-Pierre had been training gymnastics for years. Back in 1999, jiu-jitsu-legend-turned-MMA-star Rickson Gracie showcased his own discipline-melding workouts in the documentary Choke. But Portal’s approach—thanks to his loud-mouthed star student and his own habit of calling out doubters on social media—was immediately much more polarizing.

When videos emerged of the Israeli brandishing a pool noodle to test McGregor’s reflexes, the fighter Nate Diaz taunted McGregor for “playing touch-butt with that dork in the park” and criticized Portal, “that goofball with the ponytail,” for using the exposure to promote his own schtick. (McGregor would soon suffer his first UFC loss at Diaz’s hands, by second-round rear-naked choke, before winning a bloody rematch months later.) Sports writers and keyboard warriors mocked the seriousness with which Portal spoke about silly-looking drills. “Using the chaotic trajectory of a flying card to keep [Conor McGregor] sharp” reads Portal’s caption for a video of him flinging playing cards at the Irishman in preparation for his boxing bout against all-time great Floyd Mayweather. Here’s McGregor “risking a severe paper cut as he gets ready for his megafight,” one sports blogger rejoined. McGregor’s cartoonishly loose-armed warm-up, a product of his work with Portal, was memed to no end.

Some MMA commentators have suggested that any gains Portal provides might be mental. But McGregor credits movement training with his ability to ”fight in many stances, from many different angles,” with feeling “loose but connected at the same time.”(“I’m more a squeeze of the lime at the end of the dish,” Portal said about his own influence.)

As McGregor racked up wins with Portal in his corner—most memorably knocking out longtime champ Jose Aldo in a record 13 seconds—Portal says he was inundated with coaching requests. “I got some NBA players, some NFL players reaching out,” he told SBNation. “Tony Robbins reached out.”

“Whatever you do, don’t call him a guru or a master of movement,” a couple of his students told me seriously. “He hates that.” When we spoke, Portal emphasized that movement can’t be mastered—it’s too encompassing. “When people say ‘I’ve got it,’ I think, you’ve got nothing; you didn’t get shit,” he once put it, ”That only shows me how much they didn’t get it.”

Portal may shun the “movement guru” title, but his narrative about how movement culture came to be only bolsters this image. As he tells it, his method was born of a personal quest of sorts. Growing up in the beachy city of Haifa, he was an active kid, practicing kung fu. At 15, he took up the Afro-Brazilian martial art of capoeira. Skeptical of the dance and drumming aspects of the discipline, he was dragged to his first class by a friend but quickly became hooked. “I was living it, training night and day,” he told me—not just mastering the techniques, but dressing the part and learning Portuguese. Within a couple of years, he’d earned himself the nickname “The Missionary” for his radical dedication, and had started an academy in the basement of his family home.

Feeling constrained by the limits of the martial art, Portal soon began experimenting with other disciplines. While dabbling, he came to the “epiphany” that he wasn’t satisfied with any one realm, but was obsessed with movement as a whole. So, Portal says, he embarked on a years-long journey to find a movement teacher. “After countless searches, I could not find anyone who HONESTLY could represent that title,” he writes on his website. He decided he would become the movement teacher the world lacked, by continuing his travels and curating knowledge from experts in an array of fields.

Portal’s old blog recounts stints training with former U.S. junior national gymnastics team coach Christopher Sommer, balance expert Claude Victoria, and circus performer Yuval Ayalon, as well as a “crazy year” spent working as a physical theater performer in Bangkok and Berlin. He has cited as influences “strength sensei” Charles Poliquin and paleo patriarch Robb Wolf (who, Portal told me, sent him money to keep his capoeira school afloat when funds were tight). Over the years, he’s practiced boxing, jiu jitsu, and yoga; learned from parkourists, dancers, and osteopaths. All the while, he read voraciously—about speed, coordination, “the riddle of the fight”—and documented his evolving method on a blog and, later, on Facebook and Instagram.

In the mid-2000s, Portal founded a new training space in Haifa where he and his devoted capoeira students began experimenting with movement outside of the martial art. He built a “special-ops unit” of movers, he told me, doubling the gym fees and “eliminating all the unnecessary ... the people who weren’t willing to train many hours a day, six or seven days a week.” When he began traveling frequently to teach hand-balancing workshops and perform physical theater, he closed the school. But his students weren’t content to stop training; one of his closest students, Odelia Goldschmidt, started a small training group in a local park called “The Freaks.” Shortly thereafter, her brother Roye opened the movement facility in Tel Aviv and helped start a mentorship program to pass on Portal’s methods. (Each of the 40 mentees check in with Portal regularly, receive personalized programming, and attend a couple week-long camps each year.)

Critics in the MMa sphere often attribute attribute Portal’s fame to McGregor’s star power or the Israeli’s cult of personality, rather than the substance of his ideas. But the rise of movement culture maps onto a broader shift toward more-functional approaches to fitness. Beginning in the 1970s, Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Nautilus machine helped usher in an approach to training that privileged form over function. By the 2000s, the fitness pendulum had swung so far in this direction that even kids’ figurines were more jacked—scale up a GI Joe Extreme doll from that era to the height of 5ft 10 and his chest would’ve been just three inches smaller than Schwarzenegger’s at his steroid-inflated peak. In 2003, the word “bigorexia” appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary, and a decade later, a condition called muscle dysmorphia—anorexia’s brawnier counterpart—abruptly entered the DSM.

A forceful countercurrent to this image mania emerged in the 2000s, led by CrossFit. Within a decade, thousands of mirrorless “boxes” had spread across the country, whose trainers touted “functional fitness” through daily workout challenges drawing from gymnastics, Olympic lifting, and sprinting. Soon, freerunning and parkour gyms began cropping up, and a number of more-traditional gyms traded machines for floor space and some battle ropes, to allow for more bodyweight work. Tough Mudders, Spartan Races, and their ilk made a take on Le Corre’s favored training format—the outdoor obstacle course—more accessible, and continued an emphasis on a more versatile body.

Then, in 2013, David Epstein’s best-selling The Sports Gene prompted fevered discussion about the “epidemic of hyperspecialization” in sports. Epstein pointed to a spate of studies showing greater rates of injury and burnout among high-school students who honed in on a single sport before their teenage years. Even more compelling, his book debunked the so-called “10,000 hours rule” to mastery, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers in 2008. Epstein cited research showing that those who entered the topmost rung of their field tended to dabble across disciplines further into their teen years than those who topped out at a sub-elite level. Kids who played a range of sports for longer tended to develop “physical literacy,” Epstein explained, which meant they were quicker to pick up the skills of the sport they ultimately settled on quicker than peers with a narrower sporting background. Epstein advocated that kids and teens do the very things Portal preaches for adults: experiment with a range of disciplines, play in unstructured ways.

In Just Move, a 2017 documentary about movement culture, one of Portal’s students says the community aims “to bring movement and life and everything we do out there to as many people as possible.” And in the past couple of years, his inner tribe has begun to fulfill this prophecy. Movement schools have cropped up around the world—in Boulder, New York City, Miami; in Europe, Hong Kong, Brazil, and Australia—mostly started by the students of the Ido Portal mentorship program.

Matt Bernstein and Zack Finer were both heavily involved in CrossFit when friends sent them YouTube videos of Portal in motion. Intrigued, they reached out to him, attended camps and workshops, and quickly became hooked on his method. They started introducing elements of Portal’s method to their personal-training clients and, after a few years, left their respective jobs and cities to start a movement school together in Boulder, Colorado. They told me more than thirty people uprooted their lives so they could regularly train with them, and talked at length about the various ways Portal’s approach had impacted their lives for the better. “Ido’s nickname for me was ‘the refrigerator,’ because I had the build and athletic prowess of one,” said Finer. “The stuff I can do now, I would never have dreamed about doing years ago.” (Their Instagram profiles feature videos of them nailing inversions, working on acrobatic maneuvers, and learning to balance a soccer ball on their head for a minute, among other things.)

Bernstein added: “CrossFit is physically hard, but [Portal’s method] is physically challenging, it’s intellectually challenging, it challenges your ego ... a lot.” (This, too maps onto a larger trend: A 2015 study by students at the Harvard Divinity School noted that as feelings of loneliness have risen and young Americans have become less religiously affiliated than ever before, “spaces traditionally meant for exercise have become the locations of shared, transformative experience.”)

But such personal transformations aren’t accessible to just anyone. Portal makes no bones about the fact that involvement in the community requires a significant investment of both time and money. In a 2013 Facebook post, he wrote that his movement camps were for the “got money and a ton of motivation and willing to travel kind of person” (for the “no-money, little motivation, want to fuck around kind of person” he recommended Zumba). In 2015, he lost fans in the parkour world and beyond when he announced he wouldn’t train vegans, saying they wouldn’t be able to keep up with his meat-eating “tribe.” The dozen or so movement schools that have cropped up in these past few years have made Portal’s methods more readily available. But even now, those wishing to take part in one of his camps are required to sign non-disclosure agreements and fork over between $600 and $1000 for two to three days.

“I’m willing to elevate the crowd by providing them with some of the things I’ve found to be useful. But I’m not willing to be pulled down by them into some watered-down thing—some P90X, some CrossFit-certification weekend event,” Portal told me, when I asked if he seeks to spread his method further. “If [the public] come with me, that’s fine, but I’m not going to them.” He added: “Sometimes I think, let’s let the trend die already for God’s sake, and have only the really hardcore practitioner group.”

When we spoke, Portal kept emphasizing that his approach has to be experienced, not just described. “It sounds very vague because there is nothing that I can say beyond these descriptive words,” he said. Maybe Portal’s elusiveness is just a way to convince outsiders he’s offering something new and revolutionary, as some have argued. Maybe its just another cultish fitness fad with a short shelf life. Maybe you could achieve similar results, and the promised “paradigm shift,” training some other discipline multiple hours per day—like dance or martial arts.

All of these “maybes” are good for business: How will you know, Portal and his followers insist, unless you try it?

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/08/ido-portal-the-player/566687/?utm_source=feed

[ionecoffman]

The Viral Video Star Behind the Fitness Fad That May Replace CrossFit

“Bro, what kind of muscles you have?” asks Ido Portal in a short video introducing his philosophy. He’s barefoot and shirtless, his long hair pulled back as he tumbles across the frame and does handstand push-ups in the rain. “No—bro, what kind of patterns you have? Can you flip? Can you invert? Can you crawl?”

The 48-year-old Ido Portal has spent the past three decades honing a physical credo and method that’s now practiced by thousands of people all over the world—from office workers, to former CrossFitters, to NBA players, to the ever-controversial UFC titan Conor McGregor. Known as The Ido Portal Method, or simply “movement,” his approach purports to take the “most potent” parts from a range of physical disciplines by shedding the dogmas that often accompany them. As he puts it: “I want the contents, not the container.”

Videos of Portal in motion began circulating in certain physical circles in the mid-2000s—entrancing clips in which he flows along the floor like liquid, playfully combining capoeira-inspired flips, hand-balancing, and animalistic movements. But it’s only in the past few years (in no small part thanks to McGregor’s influence) that his profile has exploded, his following has expanded, and his business has revved up.

Star athletes reportedly pay Portal six-figure sums for two weeks of in-person training. He spent chunks of the past year doing “movement design” (something akin to choreography) for a multi-million dollar Bollywood film, and is set to star in a mini-series in which he works with elite athletes in sports ranging from surfing to fighting. (Some of his closest students have landed similarly glitzy gigs, with two recently serving as advisers to the current season of Israeli Ninja Warrior.) Portal has been called a “guru” and a “movement master” more times than I can count; one interviewer even called him “the smartest man in the world.” But the question—hotly debated on Reddit and on MMA blogs—endures: Is there value in the movement, or is Portal simply slinging snake oil?

“Most people don’t have the user manual to their own machinery,” Portal told me emphatically when we connected over Skype. “Your being is a physical being. You brush your teeth everyday, you need to move everyday. It doesn’t take five minutes, and it does take a certain education.”

Portal seems like the the right guy to be dispensing such an education. He appears in control of every vertebrae and muscle fiber, he’s charismatic, and he looks the part. (“Why do all these movement teachers look like Jesus?” comedian, MMA commentator, and member of the Intellectual Dark Web Joe Rogan once joked.) For years, Portal tied his hair in a topknot and was so jacked he says he was once asked to shed muscle for a photoshoot. These days he’s ponytail-less and a bit less buff—he told me his muscles were getting in the way of evolving his movement practice in certain directions—but his body-fat percentage still hovers in the single digits and he can bust out a one-arm handstand or helicopter at will. The only clear sign he’s aging are the flecks of grey in his dark-brown beard.

And he is, fittingly, always on the move. Born and raised in Haifa, Israel, for the past decade he’s been effectively nomadic, carrying his possessions on his back as he brings his method across the globe. A few weeks before we spoke, he’d been leading a movement camp in Phuket. The week before it was Seoul. Next up: Cyprus. In between camps, he works with elite athletes—from Olympic swimmers, to MLB players, to professional mixed martial artists—applying his broad perspective to their sport to try to give them that extra edge. That might mean focusing on spinal articulation for a swimmer, or developing a baseball pitcher’s shoulder mobility through oft-neglected hanging work. Portal described himself as an “information-and-systems broker, mobilizing knowledge from one discipline to another.”

In Tel Aviv, much of this work takes place in what looks like a CrossFit box, but with more free floor space. The walls of the Ido Portal movement school are covered in handprints, scuff marks, and phrases like isolation → integration → improvisation and Let them DIRTY the walls, motherfucker! The equipment scattered about is basic: gymnastics rings, monkey bars, wooden sticks, tennis balls. As Portal—who tends to be either barefoot or in basic canvas shoes—puts it: “The more expensive the toys, the cheaper the mover.”

Some 700 people have joined the school since it opened in late 2014, he said. Throughout the day, you’ll find muscular men and women bouncing a tennis ball against a wall with their fists, working on inversions, experimenting with different kinds of squats, or slowly swinging a dowel while a partner evades it using spinal waves and soft acrobatics. Or, to hear Portal tell it, in each session students “step into the cloud of movement and attack a subject” by doing drills or challenges, “maybe it’s coordination, or speed ... ” Training in “movement” might look or sound frivolous to outsiders, but Portal and his tribe are nothing if not serious about it. “It’s not some hippie concept as many people make it out to be,” he said. “I am a radical person, for the good and the bad.” He and his “inner tribe” train from six to ten hours a day.

“How many movements did you learn today? This week?” he challenged me. “A contemporary dancer might learn hundreds of new movements in one class ... and the neurological connections being made, the type of brain that is being developed ... ” Portal has long preached that learning new, complex movements betters the brain in ways straightforward cardio or weights do not—and some recent research supports this. One 2015 study found that adults who undertook a regime loosely based on freestyle wrestling performed better in cognitive tasks than people who spent the same amount of time performing tiresome brain-training tasks or gutting it out on a stationary bike. Similar benefits have been seen in those who practiced Tai Chi as compared with brisk walking. But Portal believes his method is superior to other forms of training. “It makes you smarter, I know it, I feel it,” he told me. “There is no more potent tool to make people sharper, more complex, more ethical, more realistic.”

Portal presents his approach as a sort of atavistic antidote to our lifestyles—a bent that aligns him with the recent “evolutionary fitness” movement. Chief among the movement is Erwan Le Corre, the former parkourist and founder of the popular “MovNat” (a portmanteau of the French term for “natural movement”). Supposedly modeled after the challenges faced by our hunter-gatherer forebears, Le Corre’s wilderness workouts involve vaulting across rivers, heaving boulders, and climbing trees. Though Portal’s approach is perhaps more palatable for the urban set, the men lament similar things: Our 9-to-5 cubicle jobs, smartphone addiction, hyperspecialization in sports, and the rising obsession with fitness for aesthetic purposes have robbed us of our capacity to truly move, leaving us empty.

At the heart of movement culture is an emphasis on play. Animals and kids play as they navigate the world, Portal often says, but as adults we channel this instinct in futile or destructive directions. “That workmate of yours who’s always clicking his pen? That’s his body screaming, ‘Let’s play! Let’s play!’” he said in a recent interview. Portal frequently cites a Dutch text from the 1930s called Homo Ludens or “Man the Player,” which argues that play preceded mankind and is central to thriving societies.“ Most people think play is juvenile” he told me, “but it’s actually a training tool of all animals and must be undertaken with utmost seriousness.” Which explains why he’s as inspired by monkeys as he is by guys who break orbital bones for a living.

Portal lizard-crawled into the popular consciousness in 2015, when he was recruited as the “movement coach” of soon-to-be UFC “champ champ” Conor McGregor. The brash Dubliner was just beginning his rapid rise from little-known fighter to the UFC’s most-bankable star when, in 2013, he tore his ACL. While recovering, he started to look at training through a new lens: He discarded his more-conventional workouts, he studied footage of predators hunting their prey (and he got the ink to match—his sprawling chest tattoo depicts a crowned gorilla devouring a human heart). “I learned a lot more about how important balance is, how important control of the body is," he told Esquire. McGregor came across videos of Portal in motion and, fascinated, sought out the Israeli.

Numerous UFC fighters had dabbled in broader training before Portal appeared on the scene, aiming to improve not just their conditioning, but those qualities that sit somewhere between striking and the ground game. Carlos Condit had been frolicking outdoors with Le Corre since 2014, and Georges St-Pierre had been training gymnastics for years. Back in 1999, jiu-jitsu-legend-turned-MMA-star Rickson Gracie showcased his own discipline-melding workouts in the documentary Choke. But Portal’s approach—thanks to his loud-mouthed star student and his own habit of calling out doubters on social media—was immediately much more polarizing.

When videos emerged of the Israeli brandishing a pool noodle to test McGregor’s reflexes, the fighter Nate Diaz taunted McGregor for “playing touch-butt with that dork in the park” and criticized Portal, “that goofball with the ponytail,” for using the exposure to promote his own schtick. (McGregor would soon suffer his first UFC loss at Diaz’s hands, by second-round rear-naked choke, before winning a bloody rematch months later.) Sports writers and keyboard warriors mocked the seriousness with which Portal spoke about silly-looking drills. “Using the chaotic trajectory of a flying card to keep [Conor McGregor] sharp” reads Portal’s caption for a video of him flinging playing cards at the Irishman in preparation for his boxing bout against all-time great Floyd Mayweather. Here’s McGregor “risking a severe paper cut as he gets ready for his megafight,” one sports blogger rejoined. McGregor’s cartoonishly loose-armed warm-up, a product of his work with Portal, was memed to no end.

Some MMA commentators have suggested that any gains Portal provides might be mental. But McGregor credits movement training with his ability to ”fight in many stances, from many different angles,” with feeling “loose but connected at the same time.”(“I’m more a squeeze of the lime at the end of the dish,” Portal said about his own influence.)

As McGregor racked up wins with Portal in his corner—most memorably knocking out longtime champ Jose Aldo in a record 13 seconds—Portal says he was inundated with coaching requests. “I got some NBA players, some NFL players reaching out,” he told SBNation. “Tony Robbins reached out.”

“Whatever you do, don’t call him a guru or a master of movement,” a couple of his students told me seriously. “He hates that.” When we spoke, Portal emphasized that movement can’t be mastered—it’s too encompassing. “When people say ‘I’ve got it,’ I think, you’ve got nothing; you didn’t get shit,” he once put it, ”That only shows me how much they didn’t get it.”

Portal may shun the “movement guru” title, but his narrative about how movement culture came to be only bolsters this image. As he tells it, his method was born of a personal quest of sorts. Growing up in the beachy city of Haifa, he was an active kid, practicing kung fu. At 15, he took up the Afro-Brazilian martial art of capoeira. Skeptical of the dance and drumming aspects of the discipline, he was dragged to his first class by a friend but quickly became hooked. “I was living it, training night and day,” he told me—not just mastering the techniques, but dressing the part and learning Portuguese. Within a couple of years, he’d earned himself the nickname “The Missionary” for his radical dedication, and had started an academy in the basement of his family home.

Feeling constrained by the limits of the martial art, Portal soon began experimenting with other disciplines. While dabbling, he came to the “epiphany” that he wasn’t satisfied with any one realm, but was obsessed with movement as a whole. So, Portal says, he embarked on a years-long journey to find a movement teacher. “After countless searches, I could not find anyone who HONESTLY could represent that title,” he writes on his website. He decided he would become the movement teacher the world lacked, by continuing his travels and curating knowledge from experts in an array of fields.

Portal’s old blog recounts stints training with former U.S. junior national gymnastics team coach Christopher Sommer, balance expert Claude Victoria, and circus performer Yuval Ayalon, as well as a “crazy year” spent working as a physical theater performer in Bangkok and Berlin. He has cited as influences “strength sensei” Charles Poliquin and paleo patriarch Robb Wolf (who, Portal told me, sent him money to keep his capoeira school afloat when funds were tight). Over the years, he’s practiced boxing, jiu jitsu, and yoga; learned from parkourists, dancers, and osteopaths. All the while, he read voraciously—about speed, coordination, “the riddle of the fight”—and documented his evolving method on a blog and, later, on Facebook and Instagram.

In the mid-2000s, Portal founded a new training space in Haifa where he and his devoted capoeira students began experimenting with movement outside of the martial art. He built a “special-ops unit” of movers, he told me, doubling the gym fees and “eliminating all the unnecessary ... the people who weren’t willing to train many hours a day, six or seven days a week.” When he began traveling frequently to teach hand-balancing workshops and perform physical theater, he closed the school. But his students weren’t content to stop training; one of his closest students, Odelia Goldschmidt, started a small training group in a local park called “The Freaks.” Shortly thereafter, her brother Roye opened the movement facility in Tel Aviv and helped start a mentorship program to pass on Portal’s methods. (Each of the 40 mentees check in with Portal regularly, receive personalized programming, and attend a couple week-long camps each year.)

Critics in the MMa sphere often attribute attribute Portal’s fame to McGregor’s star power or the Israeli’s cult of personality, rather than the substance of his ideas. But the rise of movement culture maps onto a broader shift toward more-functional approaches to fitness. Beginning in the 1970s, Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Nautilus machine helped usher in an approach to training that privileged form over function. By the 2000s, the fitness pendulum had swung so far in this direction that even kids’ figurines were more jacked—scale up a GI Joe Extreme doll from that era to the height of 5ft 10 and his chest would’ve been just three inches smaller than Schwarzenegger’s at his steroid-inflated peak. In 2003, the word “bigorexia” appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary, and a decade later, a condition called muscle dysmorphia—anorexia’s brawnier counterpart—abruptly entered the DSM.

A forceful countercurrent to this image mania emerged in the 2000s, led by CrossFit. Within a decade, thousands of mirrorless “boxes” had spread across the country, whose trainers touted “functional fitness” through daily workout challenges drawing from gymnastics, Olympic lifting, and sprinting. Soon, freerunning and parkour gyms began cropping up, and a number of more-traditional gyms traded machines for floor space and some battle ropes, to allow for more bodyweight work. Tough Mudders, Spartan Races, and their ilk made a take on Le Corre’s favored training format—the outdoor obstacle course—more accessible, and continued an emphasis on a more versatile body.

Then, in 2013, David Epstein’s best-selling The Sports Gene prompted fevered discussion about the “epidemic of hyperspecialization” in sports. Epstein pointed to a spate of studies showing greater rates of injury and burnout among high-school students who honed in on a single sport before their teenage years. Even more compelling, his book debunked the so-called “10,000 hours rule” to mastery, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers in 2008. Epstein cited research showing that those who entered the topmost rung of their field tended to dabble across disciplines further into their teen years than those who topped out at a sub-elite level. Kids who played a range of sports for longer tended to develop “physical literacy,” Epstein explained, which meant they were quicker to pick up the skills of the sport they ultimately settled on quicker than peers with a narrower sporting background. Epstein advocated that kids and teens do the very things Portal preaches for adults: experiment with a range of disciplines, play in unstructured ways.

In Just Move, a 2017 documentary about movement culture, one of Portal’s students says the community aims “to bring movement and life and everything we do out there to as many people as possible.” And in the past couple of years, his inner tribe has begun to fulfill this prophecy. Movement schools have cropped up around the world—in Boulder, New York City, Miami; in Europe, Hong Kong, Brazil, and Australia—mostly started by the students of the Ido Portal mentorship program.

Matt Bernstein and Zack Finer were both heavily involved in CrossFit when friends sent them YouTube videos of Portal in motion. Intrigued, they reached out to him, attended camps and workshops, and quickly became hooked on his method. They started introducing elements of Portal’s method to their personal-training clients and, after a few years, left their respective jobs and cities to start a movement school together in Boulder, Colorado. They told me more than thirty people uprooted their lives so they could regularly train with them, and talked at length about the various ways Portal’s approach had impacted their lives for the better. “Ido’s nickname for me was ‘the refrigerator,’ because I had the build and athletic prowess of one,” said Finer. “The stuff I can do now, I would never have dreamed about doing years ago.” (Their Instagram profiles feature videos of them nailing inversions, working on acrobatic maneuvers, and learning to balance a soccer ball on their head for a minute, among other things.)

Bernstein added: “CrossFit is physically hard, but [Portal’s method] is physically challenging, it’s intellectually challenging, it challenges your ego ... a lot.” (This, too maps onto a larger trend: A 2015 study by students at the Harvard Divinity School noted that as feelings of loneliness have risen and young Americans have become less religiously affiliated than ever before, “spaces traditionally meant for exercise have become the locations of shared, transformative experience.”)

But such personal transformations aren’t accessible to just anyone. Portal makes no bones about the fact that involvement in the community requires a significant investment of both time and money. In a 2013 Facebook post, he wrote that his movement camps were for the “got money and a ton of motivation and willing to travel kind of person” (for the “no-money, little motivation, want to fuck around kind of person” he recommended Zumba). In 2015, he lost fans in the parkour world and beyond when he announced he wouldn’t train vegans, saying they wouldn’t be able to keep up with his meat-eating “tribe.” The dozen or so movement schools that have cropped up in these past few years have made Portal’s methods more readily available. But even now, those wishing to take part in one of his camps are required to sign non-disclosure agreements and fork over between $600 and $1000 for two to three days.

“I’m willing to elevate the crowd by providing them with some of the things I’ve found to be useful. But I’m not willing to be pulled down by them into some watered-down thing—some P90X, some CrossFit-certification weekend event,” Portal told me, when I asked if he seeks to spread his method further. “If [the public] come with me, that’s fine, but I’m not going to them.” He added: “Sometimes I think, let’s let the trend die already for God’s sake, and have only the really hardcore practitioner group.”

When we spoke, Portal kept emphasizing that his approach has to be experienced, not just described. “It sounds very vague because there is nothing that I can say beyond these descriptive words,” he said. Maybe Portal’s elusiveness is just a way to convince outsiders he’s offering something new and revolutionary, as some have argued. Maybe its just another cultish fitness fad with a short shelf life. Maybe you could achieve similar results, and the promised “paradigm shift,” training some other discipline multiple hours per day—like dance or martial arts.

All of these “maybes” are good for business: How will you know, Portal and his followers insist, unless you try it?

Article source here:The Atlantic

[southaustinlocation]

Sexscapes: The Internet Gives a Voice to the Perverts of the World

Ever since it reached a level of general western-world ubiquity sometime in the 2000s, it has been widely accepted that the internet is one of humanity’s most ingenious inventions. The ways humans interact and connect with one another world-wide has been changed so fundamentally that to describe them would seem futuristic and absurd to twenty-year old incarnations of my now aged grandparents. Sites like Wikipedia, Google, and YouTube have not only entered the lexicon, but have also become invaluable research tools for the average individual curious to discover more about the world at large. Soon, it seems, it will be difficult even to find a cellular phone plan that doesn’t require paying for round-the-clock internet access as part of the basic contract.

For the first time in the history of our species, information and knowledge have become more or less democratized [though it can be argued that inherent class discrepancies lead to the fact that those who are unable to afford internet access, i.e. the bottom rung of the socioeconomic strata, now face more obstacles than ever when attempting upward social and economic mobility], and it would seem the average internet user has few excuses not to continue their education far past their formative school years.

But the human capacity for perversion should never be underestimated.

According to some not-so-groundbreaking research (mine), the internet, along with being one of the final bastions and troves of limitless, easily accessible knowledge available to an increasingly apathetic and dumbed-down populace, is used primarily for two main purposes: “trolling” (the sending of inflammatory or provocative messages purposefully crafted with the expectation that this initial message will elicit equally negative responses, or, if the troll is particularly lucky or adept, the commencement of an all out “flame-war”); and, of course, the viewing of pornography. Both of these purposes being symptoms of the altogether larger first-world problems of boredom and a general and ever growing inability to empathize with other sapient beings.

However stark and socially pertinent, none of this should come as particularly surprising or new information. Since pretty much its first widespread public use, the internet and perversion go together like cops and child molesters in prison (the metaphor, of course, falling short at the fact that, unlike prison, where police officers and pederasts meet up in protective custody—the smaller, secluded group of the prison at large—the perverts of the internet are the general population). Hell, one of my first experiences with the internet was when I was twelve and I didn’t have it, but my next door neighbor did, so every afternoon I’d go over to his house and, sitting in the side room of the garage where his family computer was kept, we’d burn through his AOL hours disc by logging onto AOL Instant Messenger and asking strangers if they “got pics?” Then, after inevitably getting bored with this game, searching for naked pictures of the girl from Seventh Heaven (no, not Jessica Biel, who actually had semi-nude photos published in Gear magazine around this time, but the slightly more homely Beverley Mitchell, for some reason).

But that was back in the Wild West frontier days of World Wide Web-based perversion and sexual curiosity. These days, perverts are no longer cloistered away to obscene chat sites. Instead, with the inception of so-called “porn 2.0”—tube sites such as Youjizz, YouPorn, PornoTube, PornTube (distinct from “PornoTube”—common mistake), FuckTube and BookpornTube (compelling name, I must admit, though surprisingly unliterary in the final analysis)—the perverted majority of the internet finally have a way to truly interconnect with one another: rubbing them out to the same videos as thousands of other horny people.

Someone, however, decided the perverts of the interweb weren’t connected enough by these shared masturbatory stimuli. Somewhere down the line, apparently, the question was asked at a pornographic video tube site board meeting: what happens when the trolls of the internet are given a medium with which they can broadcast far and wide to other trolls and pervert-trolls, just how they, as an individual and lonely troll caught in the vastness and potentially infinite wisdom of cyberspace, feel about a particular pornographic video? This led to the somewhat alarming decision to begin including “comments” sections for each video on many of the more popular tube sites.

In an effort to try and better understand the perverts of the internet (myself included), I decided, at great risk to my personal sanity and computer security, to browse through a varying array of these comment sections to see what I could glean from the pervert-trolls of the internet. Interestingly, the results actually managed to be profoundly disturbing in ways that superseded my already sordid expectations. With the hopes of not encouraging additional traffic to any of the sites, many of which are hosted in foreign countries, thus allowing the sites to avoid prosecution for the hosting of copyrighted material and in turn denying profit to the hardworking men and women of the pornographic industry (yes, that previous sentence was completely serious), I will be withholding the names of the sites in question, though I will be providing my notoriously stringent editor with URLs for all of the videos in question. Videos will be chosen the same way I choose which Wikipedia articles I’m going to read to kill time: I will start at the homepage and see what looks interesting until I’m inevitably led down a wormhole sticky with wasted-time and shame and regret.

##

Video One: “Retail Store Creampie”

The Video:

I’ll start first with what appears to be a short excerpt taken from a longer film. The video has seven comments and an overall rating of 88.50% with 554 “Good” votes, and 72 “Bad” votes. The video is four minutes and six seconds long and depicts a young woman in a green shirt getting plowed by a guy with a shitty tattoo on his ribs. Throughout the video she makes some fake moany noises and says things like “fuck me.” Also, she’s getting banged in a store on a clearance rack for some reason. Pretty standard porn territory.

The Comments:

Comments range from the coherent, if subject-ambiguous, “nice cock. Love his pussy pounding, wish it was me,” to people being pissed about false advertising in the title of the video, “not a creampie stupid,” and, “THAT WAS NOT A CREAMPIE MOTHERFUCKERS!!!” Then there is the somewhat baffling, “can’t stand those fake moans, quiet moans are hot, but not those fake-ass American-hoe ones. FUCK YOU AMERICAN ASSHOLES. WHITEPOWER!!!”

(Reader, take note that this last comment, left 07/31/2010 at 1:12 am, is a classic example of trolling. Notice how the comment doesn’t make sense, but implores others to reply defensively.)

What I learned:

The art of trolling is alive and well in porn comments. Also, if your video promises a creampie (sex act—you can look it up your damn self), you’d better deliver. Otherwise, people will call you names like “stooped.”

Video Two: “Barely Legal Casting”

The Video:

With a total of twenty-four comments, this video has 1,484 votes with an 86% positive rating and 1,714,761 views. It was added to this particular site eight months ago which means that this video is watched roughly 7,030 times per day. The video is part of the “Backroom Casting Couch” series of videos. It is a “reality” porn series, where a middle-aged dude, face always blurred out, has unprotected sex with women, many of them girls who appear to be amateurs and in their late teens. In this video the man asks a girl who claims to be eighteen, but could pass for fifteen, a whole bunch of awkward questions about sex, which she answers in a way that either highlights a strong history of character acting, or simply belies her actual sexual greenness. The man then proceeds to have her strip in front of the camera, ostensibly as part of a casting process. After sexing her up against a wall, he ejaculates on her face in a close-up that is really just creepy and left me feeling not aroused, as porn should, but rather cold inside.

The Comments:

Highlights include the somewhat racist, “have you ever done any black chicks? Or are you afraid that they’ll find out & shoot you? LOL” by someone named Bonezz_11 (his profile picture shows a shirtless dude with sunglasses and a visor blowing out some sort of smoke, and under “more info” he is listed as a twenty-two year old male who has been actively using this particular site for over two years and has watched 2,224 videos, giving him an average of three porn videos per day); the perverted, “daddys girl exploited, love it,” and, the misogynistic, “she looks hot with a dick in her mouth, but other than that, not so cute. too tiny,” by Freaknasty831, whose profile picture is an erect penis.

What I learned: (Besides how many porn videos Zach Bonezz_11 watches per day.)

That the American public education system is profoundly failing to teach its youngsters that riddling your text with comma splices makes you look like a total dumbass.

But, my porn comment research did lead me in an educational direction. Additional research into the authenticity of the Backroom Casting Couch series revealed that the male “star” of the videos is an Arizona man named Eric Whitaker, and that he totally has Herpes Simplex Virus Type I (he released proof through his Twitter account for some reason). The girls in the video are paid a flat fee up front, and are fully aware that they are entering Whitaker’s sleazy as hell Scottsdale office to have sex on camera, though apparently Whitaker has no qualms about knowingly spreading his Herpes, an offense which in the state of Arizona could possibly be considered aggravated assault.

Since June 2011, the greasy fuck Whitaker has been on the radar of sex crime detectives.

Next month Anderson continues to probe the porno-troll world and stumbles across a sex scandal involving a senator’s daughter.

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[mindthump]

Facebook Streams a Murder, and Must Now Face Itself http://ift.tt/2pGToYK

The video is shaky, like so many other handheld Facebook Live videos. A steering wheel fills the foreground, and a bright sunny day bobs by outside the car’s windows. The man filming drives slowly, narrating as he goes. He isn’t talking to just anyone, though anyone could be watching; he is talking to one woman, whom he blames for what’s about to happen next. He stops the car. “I found somebody I’m ’bout to kill,” he says, opening the door. “I’m ’bout to kill this guy right here, the old dude.” A chime sounds, reminding him that he’s left the keys in the ignition. He ignores it, and heads across the street to confront the man. Within seconds, the single most horrific act ever to appear on Facebook Live will be broadcast. A random murder, on Easter Sunday.

The entire video is 57 seconds long. Less than a minute: That’s all it takes to broadcast a cold-blooded homicide to thousands of people around the world. And all it takes to raise questions about the limits and responsibilities of a platform that has pledged to reflect humanity in its purest form.

When Facebook launched Facebook Live just under a year ago, Mark Zuckerberg told Buzzfeed that “we built this big technology platform so we can go and support whatever the most personal and emotional and raw and visceral ways people want to communicate are as time goes on.” Well, Facebook Live has certainly succeeded in that effort, though some of that communication may be rawer and more visceral than the company had anticipated. Since its launch, Live has provided an unedited look at police shootings, rape, torture, and enough suicides that Facebook will be integrating real-time suicide prevention tools into the platform. And though murders have been captured by witnesses on Facebook Live—and people have even been killed as they were streaming to the service—this appears to be the first time a killer has streamed themselves committing a homicide.

In the video, a man that Cleveland police have identified as 37-year-old Steve Stephens gets out of his car and approaches an elderly shopper carrying a grocery bag. Stephens demands his target repeat a woman’s name—the woman who he is apparently making this video for. By this point the barrel of the gun is visible in the frame, and the victim senses that something is very wrong. As Stephens fires a single shot, the camera jostles away, so it actually misses the one moment he was seemingly so intent on capturing—but when it pans back, his victim is lying in a pool of blood. “That motherfucker dead ’cause of you,” Stephens concludes, addressing his intended audience.

Homicide suspect Steve Stephens.Cleveland Police/AP

In a brief press conference held at 6pm CT—also broadcast on Facebook Live—Cleveland police chief Calvin Williams claimed that, while Stephens had asserted that he had killed 13 people today, law enforcement officials had found no evidence of any other murders; Robert Goodwin, 74, seems to be the only victim. Then again, when this article was published, Stephens was still at large, the subject of a massive manhunt by federal and state authorities. “We have brought everything to bear on this,” Williams said. “Everybody is out there looking for Steve.” Presumably, when authorities do find Stephens, it will be in part because of clues embedded in the video he so freely shared: the make and model of his car; details of his physical appearance; what he’s wearing.

And when the manhunt is over, and the grieving begins, so too will Facebook’s soul-searching.

Facebook is not the first media company to struggle with the prospect of unwittingly broadcasting real-time violence. When news anchor Christine Chubbuck killed herself on live TV in 1974, the station was unable to stop the event from airing, but never showed the footage again. The number of viewers who actually saw the event was minimal. Facebook has taken similar steps, pulling Stephens’ video shortly after it aired. “This is a horrific crime and we do not allow this kind of content on Facebook,” the company said in a statement. “We work hard to keep a safe environment on Facebook, and are in touch with law enforcement in emergencies when there are direct threats to physical safety.”

But Facebook, of course, is a decentralized system, with millions of freelance “reporters” with unfettered access to the public. By the time they removed the video, thousands had already watched it, and it lives on in other corners of the internet. Meanwhile, the company has resisted calls to use its algorithms to censor videos like this before they are ever posted–not just because it does not want to be accused of violating speech rights, but also because training computers to identify murder at the moment it happens is hard. Facebook has long relied on an army of humans to scour videos uploaded to its site. With Live videos, that job goes from hard to impossible—not even Facebook employees can watch a video before it posts.

Currently, Facebook relies on other Facebook users to flag Live videos that need to be taken down. But that means that someone has to watch the horror before others can be spared it. The onus falls to the viewers, not the company, to determine what is appropriate, what should be shared, and what should be flagged for removal. Traditional media companies have finely-wrought guidelines and policies to help them make these decisions, but Facebook depends on us to do it. And now it might very well be time for the company to roll up its own sleeves and get to work.

After all, if Facebook hopes to reflect humanity, today’s murder suggests that it will sometimes show us things we’d prefer not to see. On Sunday, as the video continued to spread, and the helicopters circled the skies over Cleveland looking for Stephens, another video spread across social media: a news reporter’s conversation with Goodwin’s grieving children. “He could give you the shirt off his back,” his son says into the camera. The public cycle of pain and love and incomprehensible sorrow continued, in real-time, unfiltered.

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