#i could never in say an mfa program :'D

[ofgentleresolve]

me, bowing to lynnie ( @uroborosymphony )'s writing prowess like:

[fayes-fics]

So I was reading the spicy chapter of your 1940s AU and call me a kill joy but I’m a stickler for historical accuracy when reading anything from ye olden days. Anyway, today I learned that they did have a version of modern day condoms in 1939, and also in 1937 cup bras (only ranging from A, B, C, and D) were invented for department stores. I know this might sound so dumb, but I appreciate how you put historical accuracy into your scenes. Anyway, I thought I’d share just in case anyone was also curious!

Ps. You’re writing this fantastic, and I was wondering if this is just your hobby or do you get paid for this?? Because I genuinely think you should consider becoming an actual published author. I’m not kissing ass when I say if you got your 1940s AU printed and started selling it, I would buy one so fast.

- 🪩anon

Hi 🪩anon! (love that choice of emoji!)

I greatly appreciate your message. 🫶

It may sound silly, but I actually went down a rabbit warren of research for this fic as much as I could - about many things including jazz in pre-war Paris, the boat and train journeys used in the fic, and yes condoms in 1939. I was searching academic resources to ensure such things existed and were available to at least the rich man, such as Benedict, if not the masses. But yes I discovered, as you did, that latex and rubber condoms were available, but lots were still rinse and reuse. I do know from my grandma a little about underwear in that time period, she used to complain about the bras from back in her youth 😂

Anyway… you are so very kind about my writing 🥹 writing is just a stress relief/hobby for me, I’m a data/systems person. Never been paid a cent for the 500k+ words I’ve posted, wouldn’t that be nice? Lolol.

A coworker of mine (who hasn’t read my writing, cos uhhh just HELL NO lolol) has suggested if I’m serious about it that I apply for the MFA Writers program that they are taking, but it’s pretty expensive. I have considered writing something non fanfiction, but so far have not produced anything I like enough to approach anyone about yet. Maybe one day, but tbh I struggle to see I could have the talent 🫶

Anyway I’ll stop wittering on. Thank you so much for your wonderful message, it means a lot 🥹🫶😁🧡🧡

[bloodybells1]

ON SCORDATURA

When I was eighteen, I was really into heavy metal and had been practicing the electric guitar for four years. I was devoted to music theory and looked up to guitarists like Steve Vai. I played loudly and fast, emulating the popular style of playing when heavy metal was at its apex of popularity. You might say that I was a “shredder.” 

My passion for technique took an unexpected turn, however, when I became fascinated by the classical guitar. I don’t exactly remember when it hit me, the inspiration to explore this type of playing. It might’ve been born from reading the name of Andres Segovia in the magazine interviews of my favorite guitarists. (Also, I listened to a lot of Jethro Tull, and the intro to one of his songs is a quotation of a popular classical guitar score by Bach, the “Bourée in E Minor.” I started teaching it to myself by ear, but soon realized I needed help adjusting to the new technique). 

One day I made the decision that I wanted to take the plunge into the classical world. I purchased a cheap nylon string, looked for a tutor and, once I found one in Chapel Hill, NJ, I started taking lessons and practicing every day.

I was enthralled by the new possibilities in this style of playing. I was discovering a wealth of textures and styles I’d had no previous idea about. My parents had not listened to classical music, so all of this was foreign to me. But I fell in love with the genre all the same.

I loved how old this practice was, how its provenance dated back to before there was electricity. I loved the deceptive simplicity of paper scores, how the mere act of sight-reading might open up varied worlds of expression, limited only by the player’s willingness to learn the technique and the player’s ability to perform.

My tutor included Renaissance lute scores in his homework for me. These scores contained instructions for alternative tuning arrangements of the strings. This changes the whole grid of the fretboard. Each string has been tightened or loosened to different notes, so all the note relationships are changed. If you wanted to play the same material you would have to relearn it with new fingerings. 

But that wasn’t the point. The scordatura was designed to make available new sonorities. These lute pieces dating back to the Renaissance had a “harpier” texture, with open notes ringing out in different keys and mixtures of notes in registers I didn’t often hear in guitar music with traditional tuning. It was rather exotic, like the simple act of turning a screw on a taut string had turned this plain old Spanish guitar into some new, esoteric instrument.

My experience with classical guitar, and specifically the scordatura my tutor taught me, was a factor later in life when I played bass guitar professionally in the mid 2000’s. Not only do I think that it made me flexible enough to feel confident learning to play another stringed instrument, but it also influenced my tuning. I utilized what’s called Drop D tuning, a simple type of scordatura that lowers the heaviest string by two notes. It gives you two extra lower notes you wouldn’t normally have with the standard tuning—where the lowest note is E. 

Heavy metal guitarists love this tuning because of how much heavier it makes the music sound and because it ends up making power chord configurations a one-finger job instead of two, and you can play those heavy power chord riffs much more quickly with just one finger. 

Drop D was useful to me, however, because of how it enabled me to interact with the songwriting. My band’s music was dark and a lot of the songs were in D minor. So having a lower D available permitted me to create pedal tones and deeper support functions for chords and textures that were already using that scale a lot. It added depth and character to the music because of this sort of flexible shadow figure moving around underneath the guitars and the keyboards.

I had a profound experience with scordatura later in 2014, while I was in acting school. One of our school productions was a kind of fantasia on Nabokov’s Pale Fire. The novel is already a bit of a fantasia itself, so the production was very post-modern. 

The director, Alex Harvey, staged it brilliantly. One of his ideas was that my character would play passages on the piano between scenes. The score was from a series called Revelation by composer Michael Harrison. 

Harrison had contrived a bespoke scordatura for the score. An assistant, a specialist who could interpret unconventional concert pieces like these, was hired to transform the school’s simple upright Yamaha, an instrument more often used as accompaniment for students singing from the American Songbook, into a piece of avant-garde machinery. 

I had already begun learning some of the passages before the piano had been prepared. They sounded ok, but not extraordinary. Once the tuner was finished and the specific tuning had been accomplished, however, I began learning the pieces in earnest and it was, well, it was a revelation. 

Harrison’s scordatura was wild. Some keys adjacent to each other were tuned only fractionally sharper than their predecessor on the keyboard, thereby creating a tonal cloud or wash between the two that sounded a little like an untuned guitar, but in a shimmery, beautiful way. Other keys were tuned a whole fifth from their predecessor, thereby jumping up very far between two adjacent keys. The two extremities canceled each other out to create a distinct sense of balance and harmony, a kind of timbral mist floating in the ether. 

As I worked on the score I had a sense that I didn’t know what was happening. It was difficult for me to anticipate and conceptualize the piano with this exotic construction. Yet, reading through the score and performing it, the idea was actualized. A whole new musical sensibility was borne out of this tuning. It was thrilling to put into action such a strange and beautiful arrangement.

What would a trumpet sound like if one could alternate its tuning? It’s a ridiculous notion: it would require bending metal, destroying the instrument in the process. Scordatura is likewise impossible for woodwinds. Ditto, percussion. A timpani, the most obvious exception, is in fact quite flexible and can even be tuned during performance. The percussionist puts their ear to the skin and lightly taps so as to enable them to change the tuning without disturbing the performance of other orchestra members. But you can’t do that with, say, tubular bells.

Stringed instruments and the piano are different than all the other instruments. The oscillators, the strings themselves, are adjustable. Coupled with the fact of their polyphony, it’s plain why these instruments, especially the piano, are so popular. They are great adapters. They can be brought back to their mean and reset for future use in other circumstances. The ubiquity of these instruments, across genres, in barrooms and conservatories alike, is explained by their ability to avail themselves. 

And what about the voice? How supple are the cords? Can they be stretched or loosened like the strings of a guitar? Is there a scordatura possible for the human vocal mechanism?

It’s debatable: vocal training, primarily through work in breathing, does fortify ones range by bolstering the lower and upper parts of the register with more support. But your vocal cords are your vocal cords. Even on a guitar, you can’t detune the strings too much. It affects the timbre: the fretboard is designed with a natural state of tension and that string that is being detuned is only thick enough to perform in a certain range before the slackening of the string makes it flap against the fretboard—or before the tightening warps the fretboard. 

Vocal cords are similar in this way. Just like with a guitar, once you start “detuning” your voice, you invite corruption of the sound. Your voice cracks when you try to go too low. 

When Olivier tackled Othello he tried to lower his voice through vocal training. Obviously, considering all of the other garish and offensive effects—the blackface, the funny walk, the stupid dialect—he should’ve known better than to engage in minstrelsy, but he also should’ve known about the corruption of his voice. Not all instruments have that level of flexibility. 

He should’ve known that not everything is available. 

What about the human being itself? Can it be construed as an instrument? one that might likewise permit a certain scordatura? 

My feeling is that in this case the change is permanent. And, like with a trumpet, one risks destruction. The human being is not a stringed instrument. 

I can attest to a certain kind of “permanent” scordatura of the body and mind. It was possible for me to “detune” myself, but it was a commitment to a new state. I won’t ever be able to “go back” to my original tuning. It involved deep structural shifts and I came close to collapse—and in fact did collapse—many times. The instrument—the body and the mind—was constantly at risk of crumbling and warping under the stress of the transformation. Slackening a string is one thing. Shortening or elongating a valve is another. 

What is therapy but a type of spiritual scordatura? The patient comes in with a limitation in place and leaves with that “bar” set somewhere else. Thresholds are repositioned. Pain that was once unbearable can be stomached. New life experiences are   permitted because the mind has been opened to their possibilities. It is a fact that the change is permanent, but after we recognize the evolution we would never want to “detune” back to where we were. 

I have a long history with therapy and it is without question the source of all of the appetite for change that I’ve experienced. In teaching me about healing, it motivated me to seek out other forms of healing. I credit it with helping me gain acceptance to the prestigious MFA program in Acting which I entered in 2012 at NYU, the beginning of three years wherein this process of permanent scordatura would be hastened. 

I had many illnesses. Some would find treatment through the program’s vast assortment of exercise techniques addressing body misalignment and spiritual imbalance. Yoga classes, Feldenkrais, Alexander technique, chakra work, these were all deployed to “tune” the bodies in class. 

Voice and speech exercises as well helped bring awareness of lifelong limits, expressed through the mouth and in the breath. It was unnerving to encounter these intimate facts about how one walks, how one talks, how one moves, how one breathes. 

Most people would never submit themselves to this level of scrutiny. A fellow alumnus with additional experience in the military often jokes that an MFA at NYU Grad Acting is actually more oppressive than boot camp because at least in boot camp you let your anger and hostility grant you relief—you can growl and yawp and hunch over and adapt to battlefields—whereas actors, despite undergoing similar rounds of abuse, must look smooth and collected and relaxed in order to perform well on stage. It really was a double whammy of having my being constantly interrogated in various invasive manners, all while being denied any permission to sublimate the tension.  

I had my own motivations to undergo this training. I was desperate to have a classical training in the theatre. But I was also subconsciously motivated towards healing. Despite the horrors of these ordeals, the modalities that are therewith deployed are part of a healing experience that, having undergone them, I wouldn’t trade for anything. Had I known what I was getting myself into beforehand, I don’t know that I would’ve jumped in the pool. But I’m glad I didn’t know because I cherish the experience.

I had a problem with keeping my mouth only partially open which our singing teacher was constantly bringing my attention towards. She had taught me that this was a defense mechanism, a strategy of containment, a means of keeping the world from having access to my heart. (Of course, keeping your mouth closed is also a problem for sound projection on stage, but that’s more technical). 

During one afternoon class, singing “Lonely Room” from Oklahoma, I broke down into tears as the teacher kept coaxing me to open my mouth more and more. There I was, a man pushing 40, with tears streaming down his eyes, opening his mouth wide, not even singing the words, just the vowels, but doing something that was so psychically threatening, something that I could never bring myself to do, something simple, like opening a mouth. The limit had been expanded.

There was an element of bodily restructuring to all of this as well. I had done a number on my body during those years of my professional musicianship, when I toured the world in a famous band. And so by this point, I was aware that a shift was needed from the effects of years spent in front of cameras and abusing drugs and traveling and losing sleep. Alice Miller’s book, The Body Keeps the Score, is instructive in this regard. Somatization of traumas explain a great deal of certain physical ailments. In my case, they played out structurally, on my bones and on my muscles and in my central nervous system. 

These changes are subtle to the layperson. But they are profound for the student. When I look at how I held my body in old photos, it is obvious to me that there was something wrong. On the stage, with a heavy instrument hanging from my shoulder, it wasn’t perceptible. The lights and the postures have a way of masking the truth. But in the more candid and private shots—the Polaroids and the exposures from my disposable camera which my friends and I took in our apartments—I see evidence of a lot of tension. Shoulders crept upwards towards my ears; chest muscles held; an exploded solar plexus; a chin pointing up. It was a mixture of a lot of holding, a lot of somatization in the fibers, with a learned posture organized to communicate the persona I wanted everyone to see: a demiurge or rockstar. 

I came into grad school as though off an assembly line, where the factory had riveted and hammered onto my body and psyche its lessons. It was a capitalistic factory but it was also a societal one, one that bore the hallmarks of the dogged problems which elude solution: childhood trauma, dog-eat-dog meritocracy, bullying, etc. 

So now I was this product getting recalled, but I was going to another factory for refurbishment. One that also had rivets and hammers, but ones which were designed to break open the right parts.

I stretched and stretched. By the end of the three years I was essentially exiting with a new body. The myth about the seven year cellular regeneration in one’s body is instructive here. For it truly was the case that new grooves in my brain and muscular and skeletal patterns had taken hold. One of my teachers said during my final evaluation that I had come in to school looking like a clothes hangar with legs but that I now looked graceful. 

Even my scoliosis—a condition I was born with and which I will contend with for the rest of my life—was discovered in acting school. I had had no idea about it before one of the teachers told me that I persisted in leaning downwards to my right. My spine curves in the shape of a sidewards C. It’s a genetic condition. Of course, hanging a ten-pound instrument off my shoulder and letting the weight pull me down to the ground so that I could look cool every night didn’t really help either.

The modalities in the movement and vocal training classes in acting school are designed to build awareness and flexibility in the body and the mind. The purpose of this is to permit the actor to be resilient enough on stage so as to be present and believable. So it has a practical purpose and a real-world application. 

I had other problems which these modalities could not fix, but which their steady application, encouraging honesty and reflection, revealed. There were addictions and mental illness issues which I’d had no idea about before entering grad school but which were inflamed by the pressure inside. I then had to deal with them. Immediately, since they threatened the goal of getting my MFA. 

The cocaine abuse of my years in the music industry haunted me in the form of paralyzing panic attacks and circadian disruptions which complicated my ability to perform in school. The years spent pursuing rampant and anonymous sexual congress created inappropriate obsessiveness with orgasms and romance. Naturally, given that my peers were all considerably younger than I was, this last part wasn’t all that abnormal. But it interfered nonetheless. I was no spring chicken but I was acting like one. I had to double down on sex addiction meetings and on therapy.

It all came to a head inside the cloistered walls of the conservatory. It came to a head when Alex Harvey, the director of the Nabokov rendition, had to massage my shoulders backstage as I collapsed in tears during one of many nervous breakdowns. It came to a head when in a movement class, during an unfamiliar physical exploration, an early painful memory of abandonment that had long been forgotten had been recalled and sent me to the floor sobbing. 

I’m grateful that I had the means to address the issues. I had to juggle that with the demands of the curriculum. It was not easy. But I’m proud of my accomplishment and I’m proud of the new person this all made me become.

It is possible to “detune.” I think a better way of looking at it is “retuning.” It is a permanent scordatura and it therefore should not be taken lightly.

[kelseywood94]

“Women can’t use their feminine wiles to manipulate computers” [GMS Brief]

They say women are from Venus and men are from Mars, anything a man can do, a woman can do better and some say men are lunatics and women are idiots. None of this is true.

The same can be said about a woman’s ability to use a computer has nothing to do with the fact she is a woman. I have highlighted a couple of graphic design legends below who have contributed to the success of typography throughout the technological era, those who took design and made it digital. 

Carol Twombly  

The design world is fully immersed in the work of Carol Twombly and is often the first thing we see when we start typing within any Adobe program without us even knowing it. Twombly worked at Adobe Systems from 1988 and her type designs are some of the most iconic within Adobe, having created several typefaces such a Myriad, Trajan, Adobe Caslon, and Charlemagne, designers can be thankful to her and for her creative flair never failing.  

Twombly grew up engrossed in ancient art and practices, pursuing skills in basket-weaving, jewellery making, painting and drawing before following her architect brother’s lead and studying at The Rhode Island School of Design. Initially, Twombly, decided to study sculpture but quickly moved over to pursue a career in Graphic Design. It was here she was introduced to typeface design by her professor, Chuck Bigelow and his partner, Kris Holmes.  

She continued to study this intricate art, falling in love with the process of designing type before graduating and working in a design studio. She was one of the first members of a new Digital Typography program at Stamford and later received a Master's in computer science & typographic design. After four years working in Bigelow & Holmes’ studio, Twombly won a competition with her first type design, Mirarae, and became a full-time type designer with Adobe Systems soon after where she spent 11+ years on the Adobe Originals program.  

Twombly’s designs are some of the most iconic Adobe typefaces – Caslon, Lithos, Trajan, Charlemagne – and these fonts were developed with Twombly’s keen eye for artistic heritage. Studying and translating ancient artifacts such as the Ancient Roman stone carvings on Trajan’s column; Anglo-Saxon texts boasting Carolingian art (combined with her love for calligraphy) created Charlemagne; or Greek inscriptions turned to the modern-day equivalent known as Lithos before collaborating with Robert Slimbach to produce her first solely original design, Myriad.  

In 1994, Twombly became the first woman (and 2nd American) to be presented with the Prix Charles Peignot award by the Association Typographique International, a milestone for a promising designer, less than 35 years of age. Despite creating so many digital typefaces that maintained their traditional roots, it was these roots that Twombly decided to get back to when she left Adobe in 1999.  

Kris Holmes  

Kris Holmes studied calligraphy, modern dance, visual arts, lettering, type design and she has a BA in Art from Harvard and an MFA in animation from UCLA Film school - some could say she was fully immersed in the world of type design and it is all these experiences that crafted her into the incredibly well-known designer she is today. Her work has been used in many magazines such as Scientific American & Fine Print, in public locations such as Ghirardelli Square and awarded many accolades such as the Frederic W. Goudy Award in typography (Rochester Institute of Technology).  

With over 300 typefaces under her belt, it is important to note her most well-known work is seen daily in the world of computing. Along with her partner, Chuck Bigelow (Bigelow & Holmes), Holmes created the Lucida Grande typeface family (the first original type suitable for low-res laser printing), the scripts for Java 2 operating systems (a multilingual font in twelve styles, five languages, consisting of 10,000 characters total) and the system fonts for Apple OS X – New York, Monaco, Geneva, and Apple Chancery.  

Other clients came from all kinds of computer platforms – Microsoft, Adobe, HP, and ITC – and Holmes, being the leading artist at Bigelow & Holmes, worked on the creation of over 100 digital typefaces that remain today, some of the most viewed type designs in the world.  

REFERENCES USED  

Laura Webber “Women typeface designers” RIT Scholar Works  

“Carol Twombly” Adobe  

“Carol Twombly: Her brief but brilliant career in type design”  

Laura Webber “Women typeface designers” RIT Scholar Works  

"History of Bigelow & Homes” Bigelow & Holmes  

“About Us” Lucida Fonts  

“Kris Holmes” Identifont  

[greenishbucket]

my 2017 writings that I like

tagged by @chocolatechipcookiesplease :)  thanks!!! 

all of my (posted) fic is from 2017 as I only first started to write and actually post tentatively in March, then went fuck it and posted a bunch and managed to amass 54,903 words in exactly 9 months as of today :o I must like some of them!! I’m gonna pick 7 because it’s a number in 2017.

in order of posting:

Supersymmetry (Dark Matter)

Jack is glad for every wireless and every letter, for every time that he looks out to the green mountains and the winding road to Castleton while he waits and waits and then: Gus’ voice fond in the hallway, Isaak bounding to greet him even in his age, something in Jack’s chest easing for at least a little while.

They’ll go the beach as they do every year. Even as Jack’s heart beats in his throat with fear, even as Gus’ hand is cold in his and his cheek forever icy and unchanging under Jack’s lips, as they stand and look out at the sea together Jack always takes a moment to be fiercely thankful.

as I’ve said before, this bit was the second part of the fic I wrote despite it being the ending because the middle of the fic was just ????? but I knew it had to get to here somehow, and so it felt/feels important. I think I like the image of the green mountains and winding road and the contrast between the feeling in the yearly sea visit in canon and the feeling here, specifically that he’s fiercely thankful. ah, Jack.

holding you again (Glee)

When Sam and Mercedes have their first dance Tina has to pull out Brittany’s crumpled tissue from her purse again because they’re radiant under the dancefloor lights, their hands gentle but sure on each other, and then she has to laugh around her tears when Sam pulls out the old body roll move and Mercedes acts like she’s embarrassed. 

In spite of this being a Tina/Quinn fic, a ship that fascinates me, several of the bits that I like most are to do with Tina wrt the other Glee kids and here it’s about Sam/Mercedes because they’re goofy and gentle and love each other :( and I think I got that right here? Anyway second place to the Rachel/Jesse/Jake/Mike grinding on the dancefloor extravaganza bit later in the fic.

We’ll Find a Way to Survive (Check, Please!)

Lardo feels herself tearing up again. “Shits.”

Shitty shrugs like he hasn’t probably thought it over for months and mumbles, “Only if you wanna, man. It’d be pretty fucking great to have you.”

“Shut up, I’d be coming for that crazy good BU painting and sculpture MFA program,” Lardo says, meaning yes yes yes please and thank you.

“Got your back, bro,” Shitty says, meaning love you.

They grin stupidly at each other for a bit over the pixelated screen. Lardo’s still wrapped up in a hoodie, spit-filled decaying rice for dinner, head pulsing with crying and her face itchy with tears and it’s all still unclear as fuck but at least there’s something now. The beginnings of a plan. Lardo still can’t believe sometimes that she really gets to date her best friend, they’re really doing this and it’s as good as she’d ever hoped. It seems stupid now to think she had to go this alone, when Shitty’s sitting with her after a long as fuck day and giving her a reality check.

“God, I wish we could make out now,” she says because sure, romance, but God she wishes they could make out now.

I adore the Lardo/Shitty dynamic but I’m so unsure about my ability to get it right, especially Shitty because his dialogue is so off the wall, but here I think I got as close as I’m gonna get. Lardo being supported and finding security! Words having hidden emotional depth because saying you love someone directly is both embarrassing and unnecessary! Sure, romance, but making out! Love those kids.

Something About You (Check, Please!)

Larissa stays in the kitchen a little longer once Camilla goes. Her hair feels too close and hot around her face, messed a little where Camilla’s hand might have been in it for a second, and she resists the impulsive urge to chop it all off. She ties it back in a painfully tight pony tail and returns to the party. 

I’ve never felt satisfied with this fic despite how much I like the concept because I had a finished draft that got deleted and I’m pretty sure I recreated it to the letter but I don’t know for sure, and it eats at me! But this bit I added in post-deletion disaster, and so I can like it without reservations. I always think of Lardo’s urge to chop it off linking in some way I haven’t grasped yet to her getting the (confirmed not hetero) chop around Kenya times.

if you only knew what the future holds (Rivers of London)

“This was actually really cool,” Abigail said as we reached the door of her flat, Nightingale charged with the other two. I hadn’t knocked yet, and Abigail hadn’t moved to get her key.

“You sound surprised,” I said.

She shrugged. “Just thought it might be fun to have something to do, you know I get bored. But it was actually fun. Next year?”

Privately, I thought she’d probably be too old by next year for her parents to think it necessary she be accompanied by an adult or for her to think it wasn't unbearably uncool, but it was a nice idea. Anything to try and keep her out of magic at least a little bit. “If you want,” I said.

Abigail grinned and slipped her key into the lock and said, brightly, “Great, there are some pixies in Southwark Park that only come out on Bonfire Night, I want to talk to them again. See you around!”

Writing fic in first person is the RoL thing and it’s a tricky adjustment but also fun! I like this bit about the pixies because 1) I love Abigail 2) I love the Abigail + Peter dynamic 3) it took me by surprise because I had no idea what they were going to say as I wrote this scene. Always nice!

Late Night (Check, Please!)

Ford feels exposed when she gets up with only her underwear on, despite Larissa still naked on the bed, so she pulls on her shirt from earlier and slides her glasses back on. It’s strange for everything to be back in focus now and when she looks over at Larissa she realises she’s even prettier than Ford had remembered her being. She has to push back against a sudden bashfulness, turning to run down the stairs before she says something embarrassing.

The kitchen feels very quiet and sterile compared to the bedroom, the floor cool under Ford’s bare feet and everything in place where Ford’s aunt left it that morning. Ford realises as she’s filling up two tall glasses with water that she’s going to have to figure out how to wash her sheets without her aunt noticing, or maybe just burn them and buy replacements.

My first foray into writing explicitish sex, yikes! I don’t think I can comment on the actual sex description because imo it was fairly functional on a scale of funcitonal description to flowery/very sensual but here I like the coming back to reality awkwardness of post-sex and the jarring feeling of the rest of the house being as it was/the rest of the world existing unchanged. 

For Always (Check, Please!)

Ford wipes at the juice with her thumb for her, amused and apologetic, and says, “I’m going to shower and then we should eat.”

Lardo holds up her apple.

“Actual breakfast, I’m starving,” Ford clarifies. “Plus those apples are all mushy and grainy, I meant to cut them up for the birds the other day.”

Lardo shrugs; the apple tastes a little weird, but not too bad.

I enjoy detail and domesticity, which this fic has in droves because I also enjoy indulging myself. Here I like the domesticity of planning food and that in this exchange Ford is doing all the talking and Lardo doesn’t say anything; I know she’s eating an apple, but in my head it’s a very capable and intelligent reflection of her canonically not being chatty even with people she’s comfortable with! :D

That’s all! @mildredmost if you want :)

[40countdown]

This is it! The Final Episode! The Last Installment! The Swan Song of the Blog! I’m 40 as hell already! (01-14-18)

Original Goals 

Looking back at the goals I laid out in the first post for this blog… I didn’t do bad.

Body Goals:

My weight is where is should be.. Weigh in 158.5  

The 2 inches off the waist didn’t happen. Ha! The waist is as trashy as it was but probably no worse.. since I never measured with tape I have to judge based on which pants I can or can not button and how uncomfortable it is to put a sock on.. which still tends to fluctuate after a few good or bad weeks.. but I’d say I’m right about where I started.

(this is from today at the gym when I registered for a thing... :D) 

The elbow miraculously healed.. the pain is gone but last week I noticed it was radiating heat like a nuclear reactor so.. I might wanna get it checked out.. or maybe I just have a hot laser in my elbow from the spider bite. #superpowers

We all know that I pissed away any chance of being “11 months smoke free” a long time ago, but I recommitted to ruining that goal this past week during vacation/birthday celebrations when I torched 2 full packs of Marlboro Reds. I really do think the 2 Tough Mudders I’ve signed up for will help keep me from reaching for the reds in my weaker moments.

Blood pressure has not been checked but I’d be surprised if it’s great after the birthday week vacation I’ve had of all night bars and all day food closing out with a delicious “brisket burnt ends” sandwich from The Joint.

Career Goals:

Documentary is not finished, but it is much closer and I’m more fired up about it than ever! This one is gonna hit like a Bruce Lee kick, y’all. I aim to complete and submit to festivals by the end of March and that is still absolutely manageable with my much lighter spring semester schedule.

Longer term job offer.. I got that since I got the full time job offer this past August which I’ve accepted. I also did get accepted to an MFA Screenwriting program, but I declined to go in favor of the job and the chance to actually finish the film.

Feature film script.. I know exactly what I want to write next but.. that goal seems insanely over ambitious looking back.. I definitely assumed everything would go much faster with the doc than it did, but.. I’ll say now that by this time next year I fully expect to have achieved that goal. Can’t wait to write again!

Heart/Mind Goals:

I aimed at 7000 minutes and 20mins/day average.. The phone won’t tell me how many minutes unless I sit and add up each day.. but it does say 21 mins/day avg for the year, which is crazy! I touched on what I feel like I get out of meditation a few times earlier so I won’t yammer on rewording the same thoughts, but it feels good to know I’ve been able to take a small step in the direction I think is good for me. I want to do much longer sits this year.

Elliptical/Sauna.. 

I’m sure I also averaged 20/mins in the sauna for the year but the elliptical I walked away from in favor of shorter runs on the treadmill so.. I sorta traded that and my phone doesn’t track the treadmill so.. you’ll have to take my word that I feel I probably did also get that average. I was in the gym a LOT this year. Ha!

Fed My Head:

I aimed at 12 audiobooks and I did 17. I would love to do even more but editing requires the focus of all the faculties I possess.

I certainly however did not “read more than 10 books.” I read chunks of a lot of books mostly relating to preparing film syllabi and keeping my head in the film problem solving space. But I just finished of Year of Magical Thinking, given to me by my dad after my friend Palma died. It’s a tough read b/c of what the author went through, and not at all what I expected from the title, but I would recommend it for anyone who cares about people :)  

A Very Special THANK YOU to Scott McCarthy 

Owner of Balance Strength and Fitness Center www.balancefitnesstraining.com

Scott voluntarily gave me a 4 day workout routine. He tailored it to my situation, a slowly healing elbow and someone who can’t spend 3 hours in the gym everyday.. and while my food and beer habits probably prevented me from losing the belly flab, I definitely gained noticeable muscle in my arms, chest and legs. So, I’m certainly stronger than I’ve ever been and in a pretty well rounded way. Without Scott’s workout plan I’m sure that I would’ve waffled from one thing to the next w/o seeing any results, but with it, I had just the right amount of workout 4 days a week and I was able to push myself each time I walked into the gym. And it was great to know that I had a map from someone who looks like the Incredible Hulk and has been training people for 20 years. He just moved into a new place and upgraded the gym that he owns. He also knows a ton about nutrition and will happily call bullshit on a lot of fads that come through, but he’ll tell you exactly why it’s bullshit. Much Respect! Scott! I owe you some video work, brother! Let’s coordinate and we’ll put some cool spots together for the gym. If you (dear reader) are in the Delaware area and want to get real about training stop reading this and drive directly to his gym… unless it’s really late. Then just go FIRST THING TOMORROW!

Final Thoughts..

I want to thank every single person who read this thing even once and especially those of you who shot me a little word of encouragement or a book suggestion along the way privately or publicly. I truly do believe as an experiment it was successful even if all the goals weren’t met b/c I did have the idea of being held accountable for my actions in mind probably more than you’d imagine. And while it didn’t keep every cheeseburger or cigarette out of my face, it did get me to meditate on weeks where I might not have at all. And the fact that I mediated a few times or ate healthier a few times to be able to report that I had done so doesn’t make me feel like I’m somehow a fake. I was as honest as I could be about everything I did and in the case of food, exercise and mediation in service of the audience.. I still get the benefit of each thing even if it isn’t coming from some pure unpolluted source of willpower. I think there’s a bit of horseshit in most ideas that swirl around purity anyway, so.. I’m good with using the blog in the way that I did.

I’m also glad to be done. Ha! I’m happy that I stuck with it for the full year, but.. I’m looking forward to returning to keeping my shameful failures quiet like everyone else online. When I get time I will probably go back and read through the entire year and there’s a chance I might gain some personal insights from that, so I look forward to doing that. And after a borderline belligerent 10 days in New Orleans to celebrate the fact that I’m still standing at 40, I’m also looking forward to getting back to regular exercise (which I did none of in Nola even tho I brought the running shoes :D) as well as returning to eating more like an athlete in training than an idiot with a death wish. I did yoga Thursday and got back in the gym for the first full workout of the new year today - one week after getting back from vacation.

Goals for 2019:

Heart/Mind

Some kind of dinner with people once or twice a month Keep a daily food and exercise journal Mediate 30mins/day Listen to 20 Books Read 5 Books

Career

Get the film sold at a festival Finish a feature screenplay and get lead cast attached  

Body

Zero Cigarettes Lose most of the belly flab - I just signed up for an 8 week fitness challenge at my gym :) Maintain Gym routine (4-6 days/week weights, 2-3 mile runs 1-2 days/week) Keep doing yoga once a week Keep an eye on Blood Pressure

Food

Take probiotic stomach supplements for a year.  Beef no more than once a week (taper down to once a month by end of year) Quit fast food. AKA - quit being gross, AKA quit using my organs as an industrial sludge filter    

Eat more good for your gut stuff in general (straight copying my cousin on his cabbage soup/quinoa moves)  

Booze

Alcohol limited to dinner with friends and 1 glass of wine with dinner (I did this wine w/ dinner thing for a stretch of time in the past. It worked and I like it). Not drinking makes it a lot easier to quit smoking as well - I once quit both for 9 months.. I did the one glass of wine/night all last week. It worked. And I’m cutting beer completely for the next 8 weeks so as to get fucking shredded to maximum and win $750 from this god damn fitness challenge.

I think a big part of why some people find it hard to finish writing books.. or anything is b/c they don’t feel like the end is good enough.. and maybe this end is lacking. I put off writing it for a couple weeks b/c I wanted to make it special in some way.. I wanted it to feel like an amazing ending.. but done is better than perfect and I am now done. I love y’all! I really do! Thanks for all the support!

And remember.. “when things look bad and it looks like you’re not gonna make it, then you gotta get mean. I mean plumb, mad-dog mean. ‘Cause if you lose your head and you give up.. then you neither live nor win. That’s just the way it is.” - (fictional character) Josey Wales  

Get Mean in 2019 ;)

[amorremanet]

OC asks/questions: 8, 15, 21, 25, 32? Also if that's not already too much: finish the sentence meme for Lucy?

Okay, I did intend to do the finish the sentence meme, but as it stands, it’s almost 4AM and I’ve been binge-watching old Outside X-Box list videos to stay awake, so…… I’ll get back to that one

8: What’s the most common physical characteristic of your OCs? What about personality trait?

Physically, a lot of my OCs are ridiculously tall. I blame having my concept of average human heights skewed when I was a child, due to having several ridiculously tall relatives, and then having my ideas further skewed in my adolescence by a mix of shoujo and magical girl anime/manga (where the hottest characters, like Tenou Haruka, or designated love interest characters, like Chiba Mamoru and Kashino Rei, the “troubled but cute” pretty boy from MARS, are tall), and the Vampire Chronicles (where most of the vampires are tall, beautiful, and incredibly gay or bisexual)

Personality-wise, “troubled but cute” is probably my most overused character type. Even more specifically, “troubled, but cute, and they have a good heart, they’re trying their best, but they’re still troubled and sometimes (often) make incredibly bad decisions because I felt like it would be a fun time to make them do so”

15: Do you have any AUs? — Short answer: yes. Longer answer: yes, and some of them are going to be canon, because I have the self-restraint of a magpie, and figured that…… eh, whatever, screw it, I’m nixing several of the other more credulity-straining and ridiculous elements of the by-its-very-nature ridiculous and credulity-straining superhero genre, so I can have a canon multiverse if I please. Which I do, because it’s fun. For me. Anyway, some of the canon AUs are:

The AU where most of the major points are still the same, but also, Silent Hill. Not that it will actually be called, “Silent Hill” because of blah blah copyright, but I primarily got the idea of, “horrible demonic monsters conjured out of people’s guilt and psychological issues” from the Silent Hill series, and I’m not going to pretend I didn’t.

Also, unlike Silent Hill proper, the nasty pieces of work in this universe do not have the decency to just stay confined to one small town in Middle of Nowhere, Maine. They’re everywhere.

Anyway, some of the characters from this AU get dragged into the prime timeline (tentatively) in book three, as part of a Totally Brilliant (not really) scheme by a handful of the fascist supervillain douchebags to distract that annoying ragtag band of misfit anti-fascist heroes from the actual evil plan going on. Nobody is happy about this.

Especially not when some of the monsters decide to join in on the universe-hopping fun-times. Whoops.

The AU where a lot of the major points are more or less the same, but human technology is more advanced and, in keeping with some of the more idealistic mid-20th century sci-fi concepts, while our cast in the prime timeline are dealing with neo-fascism and shit, humans in this AU are getting welcomed into It’s Not The Federation From Star Trek Because I Don’t Want to Get Sued, But It Is Basically The Same Idea, and dating aliens.

Pete’s AU counterpart got into what is basically an alien university’s MFA program in theatre. He’s the first Terran to do so, period. He has an alien boyfriend, he has never been to rehab (though, uh. He’s still an addict. And still using. So, there’s that), and his prime-timeline counterpart is going to initially think he’s pretty awesome, and progressively get super sick of basically everything about him.

The AU where Seb, Pete, Stephen, Josie, and Todd are essentially a boy band. Because of reasons. Anyone who gets dragged into the prime timeline from this AU is going to be really confused by literally everything else, because this AU is probably the closest one to how our own universe works, so like…… Imagine that you abruptly get yanked into [pick a superhero comic book universe], after a lifetime of believing that it’s all, “just stories.” It would be confusing and more than a bit alienating.

Which is not to say that this AU is all rainbows and kittens or whatever, but the problems facing the main cast are things like, “Everyone in the band has to be closeted because there’s still homophobia and transphobia,”

“Pete and Josie have probably never gotten treatment for their respective eating disorders, and Stephen may well have developed one from the fact that, boy bands are generally not allowed to have fat members, which would also mean that he’s ridiculously unhealthy since his body’s happy, healthy place? Just so happens to be fat,”

“On one hand, Todd and maybe Pete have probably never had substance abuse problems. But on the other hand, Seb still has and it’s probably very seriously exacerbated by several factors,” and so on.

Which isn’t to say that those things aren’t important and complicated problems, or that the prime timeline characters DON’T have to deal with similar things just because they’re in a superhero world (since…… they DO have to deal with those things or at least very similar ones)

But there’s a pretty significant difference between things like, “trying to stay clean” and, “trying to prevent a bunch of neo-fascist supervillain douchebags from staging a bullshit fake attack at a debate between potential Republican nominees for the US presidency, which will probably end up killing a bunch of people if it’s allowed to go on, and is part of a longer-running, slow-burn scheme to essentially make this dickbag senator from Virginia the President-in-All-But-Name”

And the boy band AU characters are super-unprepared to deal with the latter sort of problem

The AU where it’s a vaguely cyberpunk dystopia because I felt like it, that’s why.

The AU where instead of superpowers, everyone has magic

Which is going to frustrate Lucy to no end, when she has to meet her AU self from this universe, because sure, this AU has different systems and rules for how the magic works, but no one can tell her what the Hell makes it go aside from, “idk, it’s magic” and that’s not an acceptable explanation to her

—But, as she’s going to hear from someone, this isn’t actually any different from how superpowers work in the main timeline, like? They know that the superpowers are caused by genetic mutations. They can figure out different ways of handling said superpowers and systems of how to approach and understand them……

But if we look at Josie’s telepathy/empathy, Lucy’s hemokinesis, Sara Grace’s super-speed and neato super-voice tricks, Seb’s “they don’t call it lycanthropy but only because that’s already a thing; it’s essentially lycanthropy with a shot of therianthropy, animal empathy, and a healing factor that would make Deadpool jealous,” Yael’s ferrokinesis and magnetism powers, All-Star Doctor Delphi’s status as the resident flying brick with heat vision, Elizabeth’s telepathy/telekinesis, Conrad’s telepathy/mental manipulation, Julian’s empathic abilities and emotional manipulation that can be a super-effective Jedi Mind Trick and then some when used effectively, Sylvia and Vince’s essentially omni-shapeshifting, the fact that Annie can turn her own tears, saliva, and blood into all kinds of fun chemicals (from toxins and acids, to myriad medicines), ET CETERA?

……Yeah, uh. In the end, the best explanation that anyone has for why any of that works, in-universe, is essentially, “Because it just does.”

So… essentially the same explanation as, “A wizard did it,” but it’s pretending to be scientific.

Lucy does not like being confronted with this hypocrisy, but she’s just gonna need to put on her big girl shoes and deal with it.

The AU where I don’t actually have most of the details about it worked out, but in the prime timeline’s December 2007, it abruptly became the new home of All-Stars member Penumbra (nee Victoria Brandt) and supervillains Dr. Neutron and Necrotara. They all got dumped in it when Penumbra stopped them from unleashing a super-plague on New York City… by opening up a rift in space-time, throwing them into it, and plunging after them because that was the only way she knew to seal it before it ate New York.

This AU will also get dragged into the prime timeline, though: 1. that’s more of an accident because Titus, Dezi, Eddie, and Tamsin have no goddamn idea what they’re doing and are meddling with forces they can’t control (especially not Dezi and Eddie, who have no powers to speak of and are miserably inept at pretty much everything);

and 2. It’s a bigger deal to the All-Stars than to the main cast, especially to Ruby Marvel (Penumbra’s on-off girlfriend), Zephyr Haze (who really looked up to Penumbra, and she was one of the few team members who believed that he was ready to be anything more than Doctor Delphi’s sidekick), and Slingshot (her on-off boyfriend, who has totally failed to move on from what happened, and if not for Captain Firebrand and Platinum Man revoking his ability to get into R&D without a babysitter, he likely would’ve broken space-time to get Penumbra back years ago)

Like, I’m not saying, “He has handled this like Silver Age Spiderman trying to kill the Green Goblin as vengeance for Norman Osborne murdering Gwen Stacy.”

I’m saying, “Slingshot has handled Penumbra’s effective death like that thing I just said magnified by a power of ten because, as far as he knows, getting her back into the prime timeline could potentially be cataclysmic, and he does not care. He has also spectacularly failed to listen to any and all attempts at getting him to respect her choice here, and the only reason he hasn’t gone full grimdark like a mid-90’s to mid-2000’s Dark Age drama-bomb of toxic masculinity and manpain? Is that he isn’t allowed into R&D at All-Stars Tower without a babysitter.”

However this AU works, Adelaide’s AU counterpart is going to be kind of a mess at getting dragged into the prime timeline, on one hand because her prime timeline self doesn’t have powers but decided to affiliate herself with a bunch of heroes anyway (while dumpster fire AU!Adelaide has superpowers and has been a hero and it’s gone Other Than Well for her), and on the other because her prime timeline brothers are alive and haven’t gotten killed by her supervillain nemeses

Dumpster fire AU!Adelaide is going to be more of a mess over a lot of things like, “On one hand, her little brother lived past 20 and swears he’s got a good life and his boyfriend is nice (yay!), but on the other, he’s a mentally ill recovering addict and also a superhero and for some reason, her prime timeline self is, as far as dumpster fire AU!Adelaide can tell, just okay with this”

And, “Her prime timeline self has a niece who actually knows what it’s like to have a father in her life, because dumpster fire AU!Adelaide’s Max got killed off while Linda was pregnant and Linda is probably a great single mom, but dumpster fire AU!Adelaide wouldn’t know because after Seb and Ambrose had both gotten killed (albeit by different villains), the common theme that emerged was the boys getting killed by supervillains and having a superhero sister, and okay, Linda did not explicitly blame Adelaide (Linda’s feelings about all of this are conflicted and messy)

“—but dumpster fire!Adelaide decided that the best thing to do was to basically cut herself off from friends, family, and loved ones, barring her AU’s Pete, who has become her co-hero, and a dog, because like her baby brother, Adelaide loves dogs and sometimes uses them as a substitute for interpersonal contact and connections”

Prime timeline Addie is seriously weirded out by her AU self’s complete lack of chill. Which says a lot, because Addie-prime actively repels anything that even vaguely resembles chill.

The AU where Margot and Seb didn’t get to be friends in undergrad, and her parents never disowned her, and she wound up filthy rich in her own right and having far fewer near brushes with death…… but also wound up: closeted and basically leading a double-life to keep from getting outed; very lonely; more miserable than she would like to think; and taking more than a few cues from Adrian “Ozymandias” Veidt of Watchmen

—Which is to say that, while she still doesn’t have any literal superpowers, she is deeply closeted and convinced that the only way to save humanity from itself might just need to involve doing something extreme that successfully makes humanity put aside their differences and unite against a perceived larger threat (and also distracts them so that Margot and her loosely affiliated AU associates can, “solve the underlying problems” unimpeded)

As prime timeline Margot will definitely point out: ideas like that literally only work on paper or in theory. In practice, humans are chaotic and messy and impossible to predict with any real accuracy, so there is no possible way to guarantee that killing a bunch of people and blaming it on aliens or whatever will make everyone decide to get along and sing songs underneath of a rainbow like some vintage Coca-Cola commercial.

Oh, and if Ozymandias AU!Margot actually thinks that nobody will notice if she and her cohorts, what, like…… use the world banks to redistribute the world’s wealth and make sure that the 1% can’t get it back (which would include AU!Margot herself and her cohorts, even though most of them don’t know she’s planning to do that), change a bunch of laws and policies they don’t agree with, and institute some kind of secret shadow government over the entire world?

Here’s a hint, Ozymandias AU!Margot: people will definitely notice that, and a lot of them won’t be too keen on letting you get away with it.

Furthermore, not only will people definitely notice that, but it won’t actually fix things as much as you want it to do. It would have some benefits, sure, and some of the ideas you’re trying to put into practice here are not inherently bad — like redistributing the wealth and putting hella restrictions on the same patterns of capitalist exploitation that made you rich in the first place — but one of the underlying flaws in AU!Margot’s approach is that, again, she’s ignoring the human element of everything

In other words: sure, redistributing the wealth is a nice idea and it would definitely have some positive benefits, but you cannot magic away the scars of aforementioned capitalist exploitation by throwing money at them, nor should you expect people who have been exploited, dehumanized, murdered, etc. under said patterns to not be upset about their suffering just because they now have money.

More generally, expecting people to always react in predictable ways is a bad idea. Expecting people to be okay with things that you erroneously think you would totally be okay with, if you were in their position is a bad idea. Behaving like a supervillain, even if you think you’re doing it for the right reasons and even if there might be some temporary short-term benefits? Is a BAD IDEA (especially when your plans have some major, egregious oversights).

Also, ew, Ozymandias AU!self, but out of all the ladies with whom you could be having a secret affair, why the fuck are you having it with your AU’s Melanie Drake (the firstborn daughter of the guy who the prime timeline Biggest Bad wants to put in power as his puppet, who is, herself, an active and enthusiastic participant in fascist supervillain hijinks).

In Ozymandias AU!Margot’s defense, her universe’s Melanie still has the conviction that everything she’s doing is for the Greater Good, but although she hasn’t gotten away from her nuclear reactor meltdown of an abusive shit-show family, she did come to believe in a different vision of, “the Greater Good.”

I mean. The nicest thing that can be said about it is that her vision of, “the Greater Good” isn’t a fascistic one and is, much like Ozymandias AU!Margot’s entire scheme, largely born out of good or at least okay-ish intentions, but really fucked up wrt the execution. But it’s not like Ozymandias AU!Margot is having a secret sexy affair with a neo-fascist supervillain.

She’s…… uh. Having a secret sexy affair with someone else who, in their AU, considers herself to be, “one of the heroes that this world needs but won’t accept,” and both of them are pretty fucked up, morally and ethically speaking, though not so much so that they wouldn’t be horrified by the Melanie of the prime timeline (who is, in fairness, pretty horrific. She’s also engaged to Titus, who is equally horrible but for some different reasons)

Anyway, the point is that Margot-prime super doesn’t expect any Melanie to be the secret girlfriend for any of her AU selves, and she’s really not happy about it, but also biased due to shit like, “Melanie-prime is an actual facts fascist supervillain”

And shit like, “Melanie-prime has hurt Margot-prime’s friends, and no, she doesn’t care that it was always in a superhero vs. supervillain fight, or that Seb has a healing factor, or that Pete accidentally made shit get violent on at least one occasion by running his mouth when he knew that he should have shut up, or that Lucy has run headlong into situations where a little bit of chill could’ve gone a long way and then people started throwing punches, la la la, go away context, Margot can’t hear you, Melanie has hurt her friends And That’s Terrible”

The mundane AU where, in addition to not being superheroes, Seb and Stephen met each other about ten years earlier and were a lot less gun-shy about being super into each other, not least because neither of them had been burned too badly in romance before (even given that they’d both had some negative experiences with it), and while both of them still had some big deal underlying issues with self-esteem, neither of them played any weird little head-games with himself to the tune of, “Oh, I shouldn’t voice my interest because he’s probably not interested in me because reasons, he’s probably just being nice”

On one hand, this AU wound up sparing both of them certain shitty experiences that their prime-timeline counterparts dealt with in their 20’s (not all of them, granted, and like — this AU’s Seb is still a recovering addict, and this AU’s Stephen has still dealt with a ton of bullshit about body image and fatphobia).

But on the other, they broke up and it’s…… amicable? Mostly? But still kind of emotionally tense for several reasons, not least of which is how instead of playing any, “he’s probably not really interested” head-games with themselves at the outset of their relationship and working through it, they were together for a long time, and danced around the idea of getting married…

…but neither of them told the other about wanting to get married because each of them thought that the other would never be into that idea because Reasons. Presumptions were made, miscommunication ensued, they eventually split up, each of them took it as a definite sign of, “I was right, he never would’ve been into getting married,” and they’ve mostly moved on and repaired the non-romantic friendship parts here.

Until they get dragged into the prime timeline and find that their counterparts are significantly more messed up as individuals but actually making a relationship work, but also at a point of, “They’ve been having some issues that have nothing to do with the superhero thing, and each of them is kind of seriously thinking about proposing but keeps getting cold feet about it”

Watching your alternate universe selves get engaged in the middle of a drag show on one of their birthdays is…… special.

Doing so after telling one or the other of them why you ever broke up is…… uh. Let’s just call it, “double special” and move on.

Also, powerless AU!Seb…… will be really conflicted about his prime timeline self being a superhero, partly out of concern (since this hero business seems to be working out okay, but it all sounds stressful and dangerous, and yes, Seb-prime literally can’t get intoxicated anymore — at least, not on any of the, “normal stuff,” i.e., “psychoactive substances that were not created by other mutants” — but…… how is being a superhero NOT a relapse trigger waiting to happen. To paraphrase Joan Watson, how is being a superhero NOT a giant gun filled with drugs and alcohol, pointed right at Seb-prime)

…partly out admiration (because the superhero stuff actually is working out decently, and powerless AU!Seb has to respect his prime timeline counterpart’s hijinks and dedication to helping people)

……and partly out of jealousy and getting kicked in the, “you’re kind of a worthless fuck-up, aren’t you?” feelings

because yes, powerless!Seb has found his own bliss in academia, and he is more or less at peace with it, most of the time……

but he’s torn because he wants to be helping people, and he largely went down the academic track to help himself

—which, in this case, means, “to something to work on and do with himself that wouldn’t feel like a complete waste of time, even if it didn’t exactly make him feel fulfilled, because he needed something to do other than, ‘try to find peace and sobriety by isolating himself from as much of life as possible,’” so it’s not like he is being selfish in a way that actively screws over anyone else; he is being selfish in a way that displays self-preservation—

—and okay, powerless!Seb has a list of things that he tries to tell himself about how this life-choice isn’t antithetical to the idea of helping people because he mentors students, and his research helps in X or Y or Z convoluted fashion, and he uses his access to academic databases to get around paywalls for other people who don’t have that access and to then hook them up with what they need……

But that’s still not the kind of helping people that he wanted to get into and it doesn’t really feel like he’s helping anyone, and it’s a pretty big kick in the stomach for him to get yanked into the prime timeline and see Seb-prime… actively helping other people as a superhero and ostensibly doing better at staying sober because of the superhero thing, rather than in spite of it, and what the fuck, how is this FAIR, how come he can do that and powerless!Seb CAN’T)

Even without the part where Seb-prime literally can’t get intoxicated on, “the normal stuff” anymore, the situation is a lot more complicated than powerless!Seb thinks it is, but in fairness to him, he’s probably only been stuck in this unfamiliar timeline for two weeks, max, when he has this little jealousy-induced meltdown

He probably ends up getting helped to chill out by Stephen-prime, which is its own messy and confusing kettle of monkeys for both parties because of intricate, complicated ontological questions like, “Is it cheating if I don’t actually do anything with my (ex-)boyfriend’s alternate universe counterpart, but feel attracted to him and definitely THINK about doing things with him?”

……The sad part is that all four of these losers WOULD actually make that complicated question, but it would be less because of the actual thorny issues about being and the nature of existence, and more because all of them would have a mental double-standard like, “Well, if I did it, then it would definitely be wrong, but it wouldn’t be wrong if my boyfriend did it because of reasons”

Seb and Stephen-prime may not need to deal with that specific question but the whole underlying, “Things that other people are allowed to do are wrong when I do them because of reasons” business is something they have to suck it up and work on, as individuals and in the context of their relationship

The AU where Josie actually got to go into fashion design, because they didn’t have their entire career ruined before it began by a mix of a douchebag ex-boyfriend whose parents were in good with Anna Wintour, and an abrupt, stress-triggered anorexic relapse that led to an even more stressful superpower awakening

Keeping with the, “mirror mirror on the wall, it’s fuck with my characters o’clock, let’s go…… all” theme among a lot of these AUs and the different respective versions of the characters, fashionista AU!Josie has a lot of things that Josie-prime wants and a lot of aspects of their life make Josie-prime jealous, but they are actually a huge mess in their own right

I’m still working out how, exactly, they are a huge mess, and so far, all I’ve really thought of is that it would amuse me if they were dating their AU’s Todd, but I’m not sure where I want to go with that and it’s also not actually going to be an issue for a while yet, so the idea has time to percolate

and the canonical coffee-shop AU.

The canonical coffee-shop AU is a horrifying dystopia where the bad guys won before most of the main cast were even ten years old — like, that AU’s Lucy and Sara Grace literally have no conscious memories of life ever being any different, they were that young when everything went to Hell — and that AU’s version of Senator Huntington (R-Virginia), the aforementioned Biggest Bad, took a lot of cues from Brave New World about how to run his dystopia

Like, there are several things that he would nix

e.g., the ostensible sex-positivity and alleged sexual equality of Aldous Huxley’s dystopia that is, in its own way, just another way of creating sex/gender-based INequality and blah blah blah

That would go right out the window because as far as dystopias go, wrt sex and the (im)morality thereof? Huntington thinks that Margaret Atwood’s Republic of Gideon from The Handmaid’s Tale had more or less the right idea, though he would also acquiesce that, if you want it to work, you’d need to build up to that, rather than dumping it on everyone all at once

He would also nix some of the more scientific aspects of the BNW dystopia, because he realizes that they’re not actually as likely to work out decently as Huxley seems to have thought in the novel

Like, Huntington would definitely still want there to be several strata of social inequalities that all serve to support a big pyramid that he can be on top of

……but he wouldn’t want to have those things artificially created in a lab because he thinks that sex is the best way to control a lot of the people under his power because even the ones who aren’t “perverts” — which, to him, means basically everyone who isn’t a heterosexual who only ever wants to have sex in the missionary position for the express purpose of procreation — are still “weakened” by their dependence on human connections (read: any desire to have meaningful human connections), and all of them inevitably want those connections to be expressed through sex because they’re all idiots in the end

For the record: Huntington’s attitude about sex is derived from the attitudes of real-world right-wing Christians in the States who love to play the game of shaming anyone who has any sexual desires, ever, because even though they also say that said desires come from God because they’re expressions of love and whatnot, they could just as easily come from Satan if the preacher in question doesn’t approve of them, personally.

The religious aspect only seems pasted-on whenever Huntington talks about any of this because…… Well, for him? It is. He doesn’t actually believe in God, or Jesus, or much of anything beyond his own power and his own right to have whatever he wants because he showed up and decided he deserves it.

Any time he talks about God or religion, he’s merely catering to his constituents by playing a version of himself who DOES believe in God because he’s reasonably certain he would never hold any elected office if he didn’t project the image of being a righteous, God-fearing man who is filled with the love of Jesus. But I digress.

So, yeah. Brave New!Huntington wouldn’t want to have all of his social inequalities baked into the population due to how people are grown in laboratories, but the general idea of, “keep the populace medicated into submission, throw them some bread and circuses and maybe a bit of pasted-on happiness, don’t let them think for themselves but give them the illusion of thinking for themselves, etc.”? Huntington is all about that.

Another reason why he vetoes the, “let’s grow all humans in laboratory test tubes lmao” idea is that he figures he can better play into the idea of all people being essentially equal, which helps keep the populace docile as long as they believe in it, if he lets them handle their own relationships and procreation. Like, regulate it in certain ways, and only give The Gay Agenda (i.e., everyone who isn’t straight) as much wiggle room as will keep them from noticing that equality is a lie, but don’t interfere too much because getting hung up on all that interpersonal drama keeps them from noticing the actual problems

Either way, the canonical coffee-shop AU is a horrid, dystopian hellscape and the main cast’s counterparts in that AU are okay with their lots in life — where, for example, Conrad actually is just a wacky eccentric uncle and not using that façade to try and teach Marie a kiddie version of Why Fascism Is Totally Cool, just in case she ends up being a mutant too, and Julian is a provocateur in that he argues with anyone who tries to sit in His Spot at the coffee-shop, rather than because he uses his platform and charisma to pick at prejudices and stir the pot in ways that incite violence — because they’re all drugged, they’re all being lied to, some of them don’t remember life ever being anything else, and when some of them get yanked into the prime timeline, uh.

Well.

That will be interesting to me, personally, because there’s going to be a lot of disagreement among all involved parties about all of this and what it all means

But ngl, this canonical AU literally started because I was reading coffee-shop AU superhero fics, looking at my own ragtag bunch of superheroic misfits, and going, “God, what WOULD it take for them to actually exist in a coffee-shop AU? Because the conventional coffee-shop AU set-up wouldn’t even allow for any of them to be recovering addicts or abuse survivors, much less actively upset about any injustices in the world (beyond maybe being a Soapbox Sadie type for a scene or two before getting swept up in the inevitable romance that will dominate literally everything about the fic) or affected by shit like homophobia, racism, ableism, sexism, etc. (because if we dealt with those issues, it might not be sexy or romantic, or at the very least, it would seriously distract from the OTP and their amazing love story). The most anyone is ever allowed to be in a coffee-shop AU is pleasantly eccentric or Troubled But Cute With The Emphasis On Cute”

Which is all a long-form way of saying that I came up with an entire canonical dystopian coffee-shop AU in a thought exercise that came out of being tolerant of coffee-shop AUs but also really bored with them and low-key frustrated about their dominance of fanfiction things for the past few years because while I understand the appeal of the escapism that’s inherent in most of them (and there are some that I even enjoy), I find it kind of depressing that so many of them end up being such that you could probably find and replace the names of one fandom’s characters with another fandom’s characters and it would essentially be the same story, and all of the things that drew people to the original stories will be gone while almost none of the problems of the original stories will actually be fixed (—and at that, the most likely, “fixing” is probably going to be, “a white cis M/M otp is injected into things where, in their respective canon, they are Just Dudes Bein’ Bros”)

……Which is a long-form way of saying that I did the thing out of frustration with coffee-shop AUs (and probably a bit because rereading all the classic dystopian lit pieces at once isn’t really the best idea ever, whoops)

21: Describe each of your OCs as shittily as possible.

okay, I did these all out of order, and after going in so hard on the AUs and polyships questions, it’s 3:15 in the morning and I’m just going to phone this in

Sebastian: yes, he’s a human disaster and a serious mess, but at least he’s trying, okay

Pete: local man delivers scathing verbal smackdown and makes you say, “thanks” for the honor

Margot: the mean chain-smoking lesbian with a heart of gold that your parents didn’t warn you about but should have, probably

Josie: local goth makes everyone else look under-dressed, feels bad about things

Todd: hipster garbage who isn’t nearly as underground as he thinks

Lucy: okay but have you guys considered how superpowers could be used to address public health crises

Stephen: the human embodiment of that moment when you get so excited about the punchline of the joke you’re telling that you laugh at it preemptively and can’t finish the joke but hey, at least everyone is smiling now, right

Sara Grace: local ballerina princess will probably never get over her physical inability to cuddle every cat on the planet

Conrad: “hey why are you getting upset i’m just trying to deny your right to be considered fully human unless you fit my specific ideas about what that is lmao”

Julian: sinnamon roll that you bought at a backwoods gas station at three in the morning, then lost on the floor of your car for two years, and now it’s all grody and probably a biohazard

Annie: perpetually screaming, just at life in general

Adelaide: she’s not telling you what to do, she’s just saying that her way is probably better even when it likely isn’t

Yael: is probably your favorite Jewish lesbian grandma, unless you think that she should chill, in which case not so much

Max: had his younger sister be his best man when he got married, out of his depth with most things, *glinting glasses of intimidation*

25: What sorts of symbols/items/~aesthetics~/colours represent each OC?

and it is now 3:30 and I’ve got absolutely nothing for this one beyond the fact that Margot, Josie, and Pete all wear a lot of black

Josie because they’re still something of a teenage goth queen at heart despite being a responsible adult

Margot because it’s both professional and somewhat intimidating, which she likes because she’s compensating for only being 4’11”

and Pete says it’s because he works in the theatre, which isn’t wrong, but even if he didn’t, he’d still wear a lot of black because he thinks it looks good on him (which is fair enough because it does)

Conrad and Max are associated with gray (though Conrad is also associated with white and “that annoying shade of blonde that is very nearly white but not exactly; the Draco Malfoy or Any Given Member Of House Targaryen shade of blonde”)

Sebastian gets a lot of dog associations (partly because he has six of them and partly because he is, as mentioned, essentially a werewolf though that does slightly depend on your definition of, “werewolf”)

and Stephen loves hot pink and eye-searing acid green, sometimes simultaneously

32: Do you have any polyam ships with your OCs?

Well, I already sort of went there in the AUs question, but personally, I would love Seb-prime/powerless!Seb/powerless!Stephen/Stephen-prime — but in general, I always love any and all ships that involve selfcest, whether they’re polyships or not, so I don’t really think this one counts

The polyship that I’ve probably given the most thought to so far is Seb/Stephen/Todd, and ngl, I’ve given it said thought largely due to the fact that……… well.

I wouldn’t call them a love triangle, exactly, but let’s be real: SMeyer and SCollins didn’t want to call Bella/Edward/Jacob and Gale/Katniss/Peeta, “love triangles” either, and while I’d agree that the latter case is a bit more complicated due to how Katniss spends the majority of the series having no interest in either one of the boys involved, the Twilight example is definitely a love triangle, and anyway, my point is that I’m no better than SMeyer and SCollins about going, “Oh, it’s not a love triangle!” because I fear the messy associations that come with accusations of writing love triangles even when I am blatantly doing so

And in general, I do believe in the sentiment of, “Less love triangles, more functional polyamory” — but the, “functional” part of that is a big reason why Seb/Stephen/Todd is not going to canonically go in the polyamory direction. It could, and given the canonical multiverse, there are definitely a few universes where it does

But in the prime timeline, a polyamorous relationship with those three would probably be a disaster — and frankly, a lot of it would be on Todd because Seb and Stephen both also have issues with communicating, self-esteem, honesty (with Stephen’s issue being more that he encourages everyone else to be honest while also trying to at least partially censor his own feelings in the interests of keeping the peace, while Seb’s issue is that he constantly lies to himself to try and convince himself that everything is fine because he feels like he’d just muck up everything for everyone by ever being Not Fine), and a laundry list of other things

But they’re also trying to work on those things.

Stephen is at a better place, wrt self-awareness and working on things, than Seb is, but he’s also been working on it longer and, for all the missteps he’s admittedly had in it because that’s just a part of this process for everyone, he didn’t have to deal with things like, “the aftermath of being kidnapped and shot by ecoterrorist ex-boyfriend who was not happy about getting dumped by a junky”

Or things like, “help, my brother’s unctuous brother-in-law keeps trying to befriend me after I drunkenly sucked his dick at my brother’s wedding reception and unwittingly broke up the marriage that I didn’t know the brother-in-law had, he keeps trying to befriend me despite my vocal lack of interest in being friends with him, also he’s been telepathically fucking with me for about eleven years”

Todd, on the other hand, has the self-awareness of a toothbrush, and that is a massive insult to toothbrushes.

He has worked on SOME things about himself, but usually only to the extent that he needs to work on them in order to feel like he’s doing an okay job on his own sobriety (which, in fairness, he is, but acting like sobriety is his only problem ever is disingenuous as Hell), and he isn’t working on most of his non-sobriety-related problems because, bless his heart, he doesn’t realize that they are problems.

I mean, this is a guy who is going to crash Seb and Stephen’s first morning after by showing up on Seb’s doorstep on a Sunday morning with a bunch of junk from his apartment, going, “Hey, so, I don’t mean to be a buzzkill when you look weirdly happy for once because it’s good that you look happy, I support you being happy, but also I might be getting kicked out of my place tomorrow and may also have been lying to you for several months about whether or not I needed money because I was totally sure that I could get everything figured out and then I didn’t but I didn’t want you to worry or try to pay for everything like a sugar daddy just because you CAN pay for it, and anyway, is one of your spare rooms open and…… oh. Hi, Stephen. ……He’s pretty shirtless for coming over for breakfast, isn’t he. Why are you wearing a shirt and he’s not.”

“Because he wasn’t cooking bacon and I was?”

“…………*slowly puts two and two together and realizes what he’s crashing* Ohhhh. Um. ……I can go bug Pete or Margot—”

“They don’t have room for you at their places—”

“So, can I stay?”

“Yes, obviously, but can we also talk about this? Like, maybe not right now, but in general, there are a lot of things that I’d like to talk about here???”

“………Why? Do you want to, like, charge rent or something?”

“No, god, why would I want to do that to you, but????”

So, yeah.

In fairness, Todd has a lot of good points. But he is also really bad at a lot of the things that you NEED if you don’t want a polyamorous relationship to completely implode — like communication, honesty, self-awareness, etc. — and he’s only going to start working on any of this when he finally realizes that…… oh. He’s jealous of Stephen and has been jealous of all of Seb’s previous boyfriends too, but in most of those cases, he also had some other reason to dislike them

For example: Harry was cheating on Seb with a Julliard violinist (who knew that Harry was also sleeping with Seb, but Seb had no idea that Harry’s violinist friend was his “real boyfriend”);

Francis was an ecoterrorist and admitted as much on their first date (though, as Seb has pointed out to several people, what kind of ecoterrorist actually admits to being one on a first date, so he feels he was justified in not believing Francis here), then shot Seb in the back, after kidnapping him and holding him for ransom in a basement in Ossining, all because Francis didn’t appreciate being dumped, especially not by a junky;

Josh didn’t really see the difference between rough sex and domestic violence, and was inadvertently responsible for Seb being the first family member to show up for the birth of his niece…… because he took Seb to the ER after giving him a concussion that made him seem to lose consciousness during sex (not that Josh stopped fucking him during), and then left him there “because he had something big to handle for work” (i.e., because he didn’t want to be there in case anyone called the cops), and while Seb was going to leave, he happened to see Max and Linda checking in and decided to just stay;

Rémy liked erotic asphyxiation but did not like asking for consent, and also had a thing for giving his partners rohypnol (again, without their consent), and he got away with it with Seb because, by the time they dated, Seb was no stranger to having intoxication-induced blackouts, and it was easy to tell him that he must’ve had too much to drink (and because of the way his half-latent healing factor and toxin filtering handled rohypnol, it was basically impossible for him to tell the difference between that and any of his more usual mixes of intoxicants);

Byron was a supervillain henchman-for-hire and also had a stunning lack of boundaries;

and Julian was mostly just annoying when he and Seb dated, and the worst part, at the time, was that they both tried to be helpful and supportive for each other but actually wound up exacerbating a lot of their respective issues, and now, he’s one of the less-bad exes but only because, “sends drunk texts to a recovering addict and unsolicited dick pics” is clearly on a very different level from, “gave Seb a concussion and ditched him at the ER” and, “literally shot him in the back”

(and then, when his involvement with the baddies comes out, he sort of skyrockets up the list of bad idea exes, but in fairness to Seb here, Julian didn’t get recruited by said baddies until after the second time that they broke up).

So, yeah, Todd has not been short on legitimate reasons to hate a lot of Seb’s boyfriends, and said legitimate reasons have allowed him to avoid dealing with his own jealousy for a while.

The fact that he and Seb have full-on dated before also helped for a while, as did the standing friends with benefits/“it’s complicated” that they’re in at the start of the story…… but see, Todd has always kind of been hoping that this would turn back into romance at some point

See, for all he isn’t self-aware about most things, he’s done enough work on himself to know that he is still in love with Seb (who does reciprocate but has an easier time reading Latin, or Proust in the original French, than he does of knowing what his feelings are doing and being able to verbalize it effectively)

So, Todd’s been leaving their relationship open-ended so he won’t have to feel like he’s tying Seb down to something Seb might not want. The idea that Seb might actually want it does occur to Todd, but he also dismisses the idea as completely ridiculous and silly, all out of some ridiculous idea that of course Seb wouldn’t want to be with him again for real, not until he perfectly self-actualizes in some completely unattainable way (which he doesn’t realize is completely unattainable because, bless his heart, Todd doesn’t get that he will never be satisfied with his ridiculous and ill-defined goalposts on the path to becoming his idea of what Seb’s perfect version of him is)

This is made all the worse by the fact that all Seb wants Todd to be, and all that he has ever wanted Todd to be, is himself.

He has said so practically since their first ever conversation, and the romantic subtext was there for him from the start of it all because when he went up to the cute bespectacled chubby guy in the Pink Flamingos t-shirt after the freshman orientation week meeting of the campus LGBTQ student union, Seb totally meant to ask Todd out.

Unfortunately, he got nervous, excited, an odd and potent mix of tongue-tied and rambling, and overwhelmed by how starved he was to make more friends (seeing as his only friend, at that time, was Pete, who was about an hour or so north, once you factor in getting to Grand Central, taking the Metro North to the right stop, and then either meeting him at the station or getting to his campus)

So, the romantic intentions got rather garbled and turned into a platonic-sounding coffee invitation, and as much as Seb had wanted to ask Todd out, he was okay with this at the time because he was en eighteen-year-old extrovert who’d spent his last two years of high school with only one real friend, who wasn’t even at his school because Pete was already in college, and in a school environment that was so emotionally shitty that his parents saw facilitating his trips down to see Pete and all their weird misadventures in the City not as a special treat but as what they needed to do for the sake of their son’s wellbeing

Either way, Todd misses the, “be yourself, that’s it, that’s all he has ever wanted, you colossal tool” point by a long-shot

So, by the time the story starts, Todd is working (he thinks) on his amazing and totally foolproof plan to become exactly what Seb deserves even if (he maintains) Seb doesn’t realize that he deserves it, Seb feels like there’s no way that Todd is still into him and feels like Todd is probably only hooking up with him until someone better comes along and is a hopeless romantic who’s pessimistic about love but also about most things in general, and their lack of talking about things is a Problem

It’s a Problem that Pete calls Seb out on, though in fairness, he brings that up less as a dig at the relationship and more because it’s part of Seb’s larger problems

But then, as part of his, “I am totally going to get my shit together, yeah!” “““plan””” (read: half-baked notion that he is at least really committed to), Seb decides to ask Stephen out (because Pete was just going down a list of things Seb could work on and one of them was, “Figure out your shit with Todd and either work things out with him or move the fuck on instead of mooning over him like you’re fucking twelve,” and Seb did the impulsive thing to go, “Oooh, look, not mooning over Todd now, am I”)

Seb doesn’t expect it to go anywhere because he doesn’t think Stephen could actually be interested in him literally ever, so he’s trying not to get his hopes up or end up feeling anything — except he does both of those things AND, due to how the events play out leading up to things, Seb’s just realized that he does still have feelings for Todd, and now, he’s not sure what to do and has to figure out his shit

The final nail in the coffin is that Todd, after several weeks of blowing off Seb’s attempts to talk about things (because you don’t need to talk about things if you just pretend they’re fine and stay the course, right?), gives him what is essentially an, “It’s not you, it’s me” line, and because, “It’s not you, it’s me” is so often used to break up with someone gently (including by Seb in different previous relationships), Seb takes it as them being done romantically and decides that they should stop having sex, too, so he can get serious with Stephen.

So, Todd has to live with the fact that he’s the one who opened the door to let Seb get serious with Stephen, and deal with his jealousy, which he can’t get out of at least recognizing because he can’t find a single thing about Stephen that indicates that he isn’t as kind and good as he seems. It’ll be good for him. He gets to grow as a person thanks to fucking this up for himself and unwittingly getting one of his best friends to commit to an actual decent relationship.

Then there’s the issue of Todd and Stephen’s leg of the relationship, but once Todd sorts his shit out about being a jealous little turd, they will actually get along just fine

They will probably end up having a bonding moment where they get laughing about weird or mildly irksome but not troublesome things that Sebastian does, because I love scenes like that

But, still. As a poly ship, I don’t actually see them working out in the prime timeline.

[acecademia]

How did you pick your colleges? What jobs do you think you will look at after you graduate?

Hi, nonny!

My processes were pretty different for all of my school picks, so I'll break those down individually. This got really long (like wow, I just kept writing), so it's below the cut.

Undergrad:

I didn't get into my first-choice school (which was way too expensive anyway). My second choice school admitted me, but it was also stupidly expensive. They offered me about $80k in scholarship money, but it would have only funded like 3 semesters.

But you see, nonny, I graduated from a public high school in Texas. And Texas has this super weird thing where if you graduate from a public high school in the top 10% of your class, you get automatic admission to all of the state-funded universities in Texas (except UT Austin which has a special exemption and only takes the top 7(?) percent). Well, I was in the top 10% of my graduating class (not super hard considering there were over 600 students in that class), so I only applied to three schools: two private universities and one public because I was guaranteed admission to that one. It was also the same one my brother went to, they had my intended major, the freshman dorms were new and nice, and they offered me a full-tuition scholarship with a small stipend. I was already planning to go to grad school at that point, and it made more sense to me to pick a school that would minimize my undergrad debt because I knew that grad school was going to get expensive. So that's the school I picked ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

My brother was a senior there when I was a freshman and then did his master's there, so he graduated with his MFA the semester after I graduated with my BA. That was also a perk of going to that school--I had someone I knew and could count on if I had a flare-up of one of my myriad medical issues. I'm mostly apathetic about that school, but I did meet some fantastic people there, including some really great friends.

MLIS:

I applied to three schools: Illinois, Dominican University (the one in Illinois, near Chicago), and--this is the funny one--UMD (where I'm now a doc student). I got into all three of them, amazingly. I'd only had a chance to visit Dominican and Illinois, and while Dominican was great, I just got a vibe from Illinois. I remember turning to my mom while we were in Champaign visiting the campus and saying, "I can see myself here." And she looked at me and said, "I can see you here, too." Dominican sent me an acceptance in like under 48 hours which was crazy, but then I got the admission email from Illinois and was like "welp. there we go!" And then a little while after I'd accepted my offer from Illinois, I got the Maryland acceptance.

When I was applying to MLIS schools, I had a few limitations. Firstly, I had to pick a school that was accredited by the ALA. Secondly, I needed to pick a school that had a youth services specialization because that was my area of interest. Thirdly, there was a fairly limited range of states that I was willing to go to school in. I didn't want to go to school in Texas because a) I don't like Texas, b) I was very tired of being in Texas, c) I have terrible allergies in Texas, and d) my last semester of undergrad was when they passed Campus Carry which allowed students to carry a concealed handgun on campus. So like... no thank you. I basically just picked a handful of states that I liked and looked at programs in those states. I looked at US News & World Report for school rankings and tried to see which schools had good reputations. (Now, I would not recommend using US News & World Report school rankings--they're honestly just based on popularity rankings from other schools and they're not always super accurate.) Illinois was number one for MLIS and for youth services specifically. The latter, in particular, was definitely a deserved ranking, but not every ranking is really deserved.

I also based a lot of my decision on those visits. I went to an informational session for prospective students at Dominican University. It was nice. Pretty. Cool library. I wouldn't have disliked going there, but I didn't really vibe with it. Part of that might have been that it was--surprise, surprise--a religion-affiliated school. Specifically, it was Catholic, which my dad loved, but I didn't really jive with it. Maryland was a great school, but honestly? Once I toured Illinois, I kind of fell in love. That tour was one that I set up on my own, and the woman who talked to me and showed me around was one of the academic advisors and actually has become a friend of mine. I just felt like I fit there, and the Center for Children's Books was also a huge point in its favor because I live for youth lit. So when I got my admissions offer there, I made my decision. It was definitely the right choice for me.

PhD:

I applied to six programs across five schools: Illinois (where I was an MLIS student at the time), CU Boulder, UT Austin (both Info Sci & Media Studies programs), UNC-Chapel Hill, and UMD. Originally, I'd only planned to apply to two or maybe three programs, but one of the professors who was helping me prep my application materials kept pushing me to apply to more programs. I hadn't taken the GRE for my master's program because the programs I applied to had an option to waive that requirement if your undergrad GPA was high enough, which mine was. I'd planned to apply to PhD programs that didn't require GRE scores either. There was also the consideration of costs. Costs to take the GRE, costs to send GRE scores to schools, and application fees. But my professor pushed me, and I took the GRE with under 72 hours' notice. Altogether, I spent over $750 on applications, the GRE test, and sending GRE scores, which was about $500 more than I had originally planned on spending. But it gave me more options, and I'm glad that I did take that advice and apply to more schools.

CU Boulder, both UT Austin programs, and Illinois all turned me down without an interview. I got interviews at both UNC and UMD. For UMD, it was one video interview with my potential (now actual) advisor. With UNC, there was a video-turned-phone interview (due to technical difficulties) with a whole committee including one of my potential co-advisors. I then had a phone call with the other potential co-advisor which was supposed to last like 20-30 minutes, and I think we talked for like an hour. They were both really cool, but I also liked UMD and my potential advisor there. I was super torn.

The plan was to visit both schools. I set up a visit independently with UNC and planned to go to the admitted PhD students event at UMD. ...And then covid happened. So I had another one-on-one video chat with each of my potential advisors at UNC. I also went to like three different admitted student events for PhD students at the UMD iSchool and got to chat with my potential advisor a couple of times. There were a lot of factors that went into making the decision including the advisor (which is honestly like one of the biggest factors to consider--a bad advisor or even just one you don't click with can make your PhD experience awful), funding, opportunities for students, program structure, support, program size, location, cohort size, and a million other things. There was a lot of thought that went into it. I never got to physically visit either school, and I went back and forth on this decision to a point where I was insanely stressed out. Eventually, my dad and I had a chat, and he helped me think through it. And then I picked UMD.

After a year of an online PhD, I feel confident in my decision. I think I would have liked UNC, and the advisors there were really cool. I hope to meet them in the future at a conference or something. But I do believe that I made the best choice for myself. I really like my advisor--she's super supportive and genuinely cares. My cohort mates are really great, the faculty I've interacted with have all been great, and I feel like I've grown a lot this year. I'm really excited to see where this path leads me!

If you're interested in PhD programs and what that application and decision process involves, Casey Fiesler has a great playlist of resources you can check out!

[dinafbrownil]

Must-Reads Of The Week From Brianna Labuskes

The Friday Breeze

Newsletter editor Brianna Labuskes, who reads everything on health care to compile our daily Morning Briefing, offers the best and most provocative stories for the weekend.

Happy Friday! A quick programming note: We are closing up shop for Thanksgiving, so I will be leaving you to your turkey and pumpkin pie next week. But never fear, I’ll be back in your inboxes Dec. 6, as we barrel out an outrageous pace toward the end of the year.

Speaking of outrageous pace, is everyone doing OK after this news-filled week? If you’re feeling stressed you missed something health-related while distracted by the approximately 13 billion big stories going on simultaneously, relax, I’ve got you covered.

One of those 13 billion big stories was, of course, the latest Democratic debate. But the candidates might be feeling some health care fatigue like the rest of us because, although they hit their talking points, they moved quickly on to subjects beyond “Medicare for All.” That came as a slight surprise, since earlier in the week Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) released a plan on how to move more gradually into such a system than she’d previously discussed. Warren’s new blueprint would start by offering a more generous, subsidized government plan for some Americans and pass MFA by the end of her third year.

The Associated Press: Democrats Spar at Debate Over Health Care, How to Beat Trump

The New York Times: Elizabeth Warren Vows to Expand Health Coverage in First 100 Days

Meanwhile, California Gov. Gavin Newsom has already walked the fine line that the progressive 2020 candidates are attempting when it comes to universal health care. He also ran on the idea of a single-payer system and has been navigating what happens when political slogan meets reality ever since he was elected. Could his experience offer insight to the Warrens of the world?

Politico: Does Gavin Newsom Have the Answer to Democrats’ Health Care Fights?

The Friday Breeze

Want a roundup of the must-read stories this week chosen by KHN Newsletter Editor Brianna Labuskes? Sign up for The Friday Breeze today.

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The White House was left scrambling this week after President Donald Trump made an unscheduled visit to Walter Reed Medical Center last Saturday. The speculation over Trump’s health spread like wildfire, and the White House’s attempts to frame the trip as Part One of the president’s annual physical were widely mocked by late-night hosts. Officials later shifted the story, saying it was just a routine checkup, but the damage had been done.

Side note (because I was curious, and you might be, too): During his tenure, then-President Barack Obama in 2014 made an unscheduled Saturday trip to Walter Reed, as well. The reason? A sore throat. (h/t WSJ.)

Politico: Trump Says Media Panicked Melania Into Thinking He Had a Heart Attack

CMS Administrator Seema Verma has said that the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on outside communications contractors was meant to spread awareness of CMS’ policies. But emails obtained by Politico show that some of the discussions between those contractors and federal officials focused on getting Verma high-profile features in magazines like Glamour, winning recognition for her on “Power Women” lists and getting her invited to attend prestigious events.

Politico: Contractor Proposed Glamour Magazine Profile for Medicaid Chief

In other news, this heartbreaking story takes a look at families of developmentally disabled beneficiaries who are stranded on waitlists because the state slashed its Medicaid funding.

St. Louis Post Dispatch: In Missouri, People Who Can’t Speak and See Wait in Line for Help 

A new Trump administration rule would force hospitals to reveal the prices they negotiate with insurers for all their procedures, as part of a larger strategy to increase transparency in health care. As you might imagine, hospitals and insurers were very much not pleased and have already promised a legal fight. The negotiations have always been shrouded in mystery, and revealing them would be tantamount to exposing trade secrets, they say.

The New York Times: To Lower Costs, Trump to Force Hospitals to Reveal Price of Care

A Wall Street Journal investigation has revealed that 1 in 4 of the doctors involved in the 163 malpractice claims against the Indian Health Service that the government settled or lost since 2006 had a history of medial mistakes and regulatory sanctions that should have raised red flags in the hiring process. At least 66 of the patients died as a result of the alleged malpractice.

The Wall Street Journal: The U.S. Gave Troubled Doctors a Second Chance. Patients Paid the Price.

The Department of Justice planned to announce a plan Friday to combat chronic and underreported violence against Native American women. The DOJ has faced criticism after past investigations found that thousands of missing-persons cases are missing from the agency’s logs. The proposal includes a plan to hire coordinators across the country who would be responsible for developing protocols for a more coordinated law enforcement response to missing-persons cases.

The Associated Press: AG Barr to Unveil Plan on Missing, Murdered Native Americans

If you want to get a look at drugmakers’ behavior during the start of the opioid epidemic, look no further than what’s going on in China, apparently. An Associated Press investigation reveals that the tactics being employed there by a Sackler-owned company mirror the ones that spawned a crisis — as well as thousands upon thousands of lawsuits. That includes things like telling doctors that OxyContin is less addictive than other opioids and representing the drug as safe for chronic pain.

The Associated Press: Oxy Sales in China Driven by Misleading Addiction Claims

Meanwhile, county officials in Ohio struggle with incredibly tough decisions when it comes to reuniting children who were taken away because of a parent’s addiction. If the wrong choice is made it can — and has — ended in the death of a child.

The New York Times: The Parents Passed a Drug Test. Should They Get Their Children Back?

In more lighthearted news: You think your mistakes at work are put on blast? This poor dude’s decimal error made national news.

The New York Times: Whoops. Judge Reduces J&J Opioid Fine After Mistaking Thousands for Millions

A big, federal study showed that drugs are just as effective at saving lives as surgeries for blocked arteries. But here’s the thing, other studies have already shown this, and yet doctors still perform them. Why? Hint, hint: It just might have something to do with the fact that those procedures pull in the big bucks (though doctors say it’s because past studies were poorly designed).

The New York Times: Surgery for Blocked Arteries Is Often Unwarranted, Researchers Find

In the miscellaneous file for the week:

• South Dakota’s new slogan to combat drug use in the state was thoroughly dragged through the social media wringer this week. “Meth. We’re on it,” was lambasted as both tone-deaf and ridiculous. But, the governor pointed out, it got your attention, didn’t it?

(Sioux Falls, S.D.) Argus News Leader: ‘Meth. We’re On It.’: South Dakota Spends $449K on New Anti-Meth Ad Campaign

• Who better to take notes from on addiction than Big Tobacco? In the early days, Juul executives were bragging about the “leg up” they got from cigarette research.

Los Angeles Times: Juul Took a Page From Big Tobacco to Revolutionize Vaping

• They’re billed as “quiet rooms,” but the isolated timeout spaces found in schools across Illinois seem far more troubling than the name suggests. Children are being kept in these rooms, locked up, alone and terrified — and the practice of doing so is often under-monitored by state officials.

ProPublica/Chicago Tribune: The Quiet Rooms

• And so the pendulum swings: As more is discovered about CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) and the neurological damage done by playing football, many youth leagues have been banished. But the cultural roots of the sport run deep, especially in Texas where the game is making a comeback.

The New York Times: A Small Town Gave Up Tackle Football. It Came Storming Back.

Hope everyone has a restful holiday. See you in December!

from Updates By Dina https://khn.org/news/friday-breeze-health-care-policy-must-reads-of-the-week-from-brianna-labuskes-november-22-2019/

[keithdiamondphoto]

Presentation of Design Solution

I knew that any MFA program would get harder as it progressed closer to the end and yet here I was at the start of the second to last month looking at another Mastery Paper. I was not sure how this was going to turn out because I was and am just simply burnt out from writing. I have APA permanently embedded in my brain. I have nightmares about the format. There is one thing I have noticed happening to me with writing over the last three months that I have never felt in my life. I feel like I’m on autopilot these days. It is almost like I am writing in an unconscious state. This expository essay from this month was no different. The craziest thing is that this might have been my best paper I have ever written, ever! I’m calling this my take away number one this month. I will attach a link to this paper if anyone would like to read it.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aLLThL9WurOGMr_QLgMB72NhccOpDapP/view?usp=sharing

Now after saying all that about my writing and my paper let me tell you how I hit a wall and the momentum just came to a screeching halt. We were introduced to our new assignment and new platform for this assignment. It was time to start laying out our Thesis Presentation websites where we were going to get to tell about our successes and struggles of selected projects we completed during this program. My second take away for the month is from having to use a website like WIX. I was not impressed of the clunky function ability. It was very hard to layout the content with consistent spacing. If you put images into a grid you could add text for hover over display but if you just added a single image it was not possible. Videos of a certain size or higher had to go through another program in order to add them. On your published site you get to see this floating banner telling every viewer to click here to try WIX. This banner wasn’t static. It floated and followed the viewer as they scrolled the content. Never use WIX personally.

My take away number three comes from how to write for a thesis presentation. I don’t know if I was just tired, If it was the death of a family member during this time, if it was being forced into a referee position because the death caused a family feud that was fueled by money, or if it was being slammed at work with four projects at the same time, but I misunderstood the writing style for this assignment. I worked so many hours on the first version just to get told that it wasn’t close and there was a lot that needed to change. The instructor was great though. He spent the time to try to explain it in multiple ways so that I could get a handle on the expectations. I feel that if there would have been some examples of student work to review It would have been much clearer and I wouldn’t have written four different revisions before getting to my final version that I turned in on time barely. All I had to do was conduct more research that matched up with my writing, site it all correctly, trash can 60% of the content I had originally, and add more supportive content to everything I kept. I am still only about 70% confident about the work I turned in and I will not know how I did until I get into my next class. Here is the link to my Thesis Presentation if anyone would like to review it.

https://www.hkthesisdesign.org/

[derickandveronica-blog]

D #6.5 The art of being stupid; or, Baby’s First Graduate School Statement of Intent!

I believe the art of performance is irreducibly personal. My purpose for applying to X, and by extension my need to be a playwright, has to do with a sensitivity to  my environment and comes from a young place. My mother told me at an early age that I would be a very good architect or interior designer. I was constantly sketching little floor plans in my pocket-size Mead notebooks, terribly scaled, couches the size of the garage and what not, though precise at that. At the time, I had no idea what this, coupled with a habit of stumbling through lip-syncs behind our shed to Hannah Montana’s “Nobody’s Perfect,” could have bode for my future. While I also wrote fiction, it was never with so much care as those lopsided McMansion sketches and baseless “arm choreography.” Writing was stimulating and time-passing, but I agonized over the puzzle pieces of the more tangible and visual: replacing and shifting all the furniture in my bedroom every couple of weeks, throwing away old clothing that wasn’t very old, even once compulsively painting my whole room yellow because I thought it’d feel sunnier that way (it only washed out the sun.)

I believe these were all aesthetic impulses, albeit ill-informed ones, of puzzle and of play that then somehow converged in playwriting. I have to call it playwriting and not dramatic writing because I’m usually more interested in playing and building than I am writing. I see plays as visual landscapes in new dimensions, which is why I tend to “collage with words” rather than come up with a story in a first draft, or it’s why I design posters for my plays before I’ve even finished the first draft. I find doing things in reverse, the “wrong” way, is very healthy for my creativity. While playwriting might sometimes beg a little more sophistication than this, what I value in playwriting is the power of stupidity.

In the seventh grade, our physics teacher told us that stupid was “not making a mistake, but the repetition of that mistake.” (I now realize how audacious this statement was, more of a demand, really.) Theatre could be the patron saint of stupidity. We don’t just repeat mistakes in the theatre; we repeat them nightly, intentionally and not so, and this is something I prize. Theatre is above all an act of love for humanity. Because I am such a visual person, I sometimes think my words are my weakness as a playwright. There’s something aggravating yet poetic when I hear them in the mouths of others. I don’t think playwriting and architecture are so different after all, but here is the key difference: wabi-sabi is vital to the ritual of theatre, whereas there seems no room to behold one’s mistakes in a life devoted to architecture.

My affinity for the fantastical and playful is underscored by a burning desire for my voice to be heard. I sought out every available opportunity for myself in the theatre department at Sarah Lawrence, participating as a playwright (occasionally as actor or choreographer) in departmental readings and productions, student-led theatre festivals, and independently organized reading series. The graduate MFA program at Sarah Lawrence has a multidisciplinary focus and emphasizes devised theatre, which affects the undergraduate coursework and productions. An overwhelming majority of students are multidisciplinary theatre artists. Though I am before anything else a playwright, I find this exciting because I succeed as an artist when I can be alone and surrounded, in the mixed company of actors, dramaturges, directors, and designers. It takes a village to write alone, and I have not found another graduate program that seems to understand that this is not contradictory but imperative, not only that, but another program that makes such a concept integral to its curricular mission.

I write with fury and passion. My mind is always on and I am relentless with a rewrite. I’ll hack a script in half and turn it upside-down and flip it inside-out all in a single go. But I still need to learn to take a real risk, and for me that’s being able to put all my eggs in one basket, going through three and five and ten rewrites on one project, and then having the patience to stay near the play and water it, treat it with sunlight, and show some tenderness or tough love to my own words. To look at a play and say it’s really truly finished and know how to explain it to directors and producers. Being in direct contact with other budding artists in a rigorous program geared toward playwrights who aspire to write professionally is the perfect risk for me as an early-career playwright.

The X and Y offer opportunities in and outside the classroom to work directly with students of different disciplines. I’m especially excited to meet and build my artistic muscle with students in the design program, who are often amazing dramaturges without realizing it. I expect to meet people with whom I will share work for the rest of my life, with whom I can learn to represent myself in the rehearsal room, and with whom I can share friendship. I maintain that theatre is never impersonal, and often my closest friends are those with an unstoppable desire to create, with whom I can play and be stupid! Often therein spores the genius of playwriting; playing is in the name after all. The X is the future of theatre, filled with high-caliber artists who have loud and incredible voices. To write myself into being at X would be to write myself into a new world of theatre, one where I strongly believe that I belong. This is the next piece of the puzzle.

[igsy-blog]

BBC 100 books (with commentary)

thanks for the tag @thegreatorangedragon  As an English major I was compelled to read a lot of these, and I may only have skimmed/read chunks of some of them if I could get away with it....

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen: not my favorite Austen, actually (Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility are 1 & 2) The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien - OMG, SO many times. My siblings and I had rituals around the reading of LOTR.

Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte.  Yes - it’s OK Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - Yes!  My kids grew up to them and the experience was almost as good as the books.  But I also really enjoyed watching Rowling mature as a writer over the course of the series.  I don’t ask for perfection from my writers, but warmth and growth.  :-)  Also, they got my stubborn non-reader sons to READ. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee  - like probably every other person who went to MS/HS in the US. The Bible - yes, and twice all the way through.  once at about 10, and then more recently along with Slate’s Blogging the Bible (ok it was just the Old Testament).  That was a stage on my journey to my current fallen-catholicness 
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte - yes, but prefer the Pat Benatar song :D Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell - yes and really need a re-read 
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman - No, keep meaning to. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
.  Yes, and can I say I love Dickens - LOVE Dickens - but I hate this book.  I think it’s always assigned because it’s shortish.  I regularly reread the glorious messes that are Pickwick Papers, Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities, and my fav, the insane Our Mutual Friend (but ONLY the Lizzie Hexam/Eugene Wrayburn segments). Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - and the sequels.  I think Jo’s Boys might actually be my favorite. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
.  yes - I am pretty sure??? Catch 22 - Joseph Heller.  read enough of it to count Complete Works of Shakespeare - William Shakespeare; yes! my mom was a Zefferelli Romeo & Juliet junkie - we had the album of the film - and I must have heard it 3 dozen times before I was 7.  She bought a complete works and I read all of it over the years. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier. No 
The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - Yes.  My husband’s favorite book.  And I really liked the Rankin-Bass film, when I was young.  Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk  No Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - yeah The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger  Realllly?  This is a good book but I’m not sure it belongs on this list.  First novel and feels fresh out of an MFA program.  My other complaints I won’t say here because I tend to get very snarky about this book. (Another book I read around the same time [mid-oughts] was Then We Came to the End, the debut novel of Joshua Ferris - much better, like DeLillo without the air of self-importance.) Middlemarch - George Eliot; love me some Eliot (but prefer Silas Marner, mainly because of a very good tv adaption). Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell - Again: really?  I read this book because I spent the summer between HS and college in a really small town with a teeny library and I basically read my way through the fiction stacks.  Won’t say more than that, because I would get political. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald Yes, but not a favorite. Bleak House - Charles Dickens. A great, great book for which two amazing miniseries have been done in my lifetime.  But rightly criticized, IMO, for the annoying tone of its first-person narrator, Esther.  Dickens was dazzlingly, spectacularly wrong in writing about women.  Not to mention other groups.  But my god did he skewer institutions on behalf of the (British) poor - none better. This book wins for the Jo’s death scene and its sweeping, bitter, critique of church and state and society and everything - and so human.  “Dead!  And dying thus around us, everyday.”  I was 12 when I first read that, recovering from chicken pox, and I sat straight up in bed.  This is the book that made me a socialist. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy This is so horrible, but I haven’t! The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams.  Yes, fun, but not a favorite. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh - No.  I started to and have a copy at work, for some reason I don’t even remember.  But not enough to county Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky  No :( Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck.  Yes, oh and my grandma’s family were Okies.  Everyone in my family has a copy of the Sacramento Bee front page story sneering about the dust bowl immigrants arriving in town and my great-grandmother is mentioned by name (though they mistakenly think she is her widowed father’s wife).  I love Cali, and Sactown, but we have a long history of being not-so-welcoming to everyone at certain times (was it in the 80s where the “Welcome to California, Now Go Home” bumper stickers were everywhere?).

Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - yes The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame - yes but so long ago I don’t remember it at all Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy yes. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens.  Yes, not his best by far.  Another “easy” read like Great Expectations Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - and many other of his works, when I was trying NOT to be an atheist - Mere Christianity, his sci-fi trilogy and Til We Have Faces, a retelling of my favorite myth, Psyche and Cupid.  I like the more obscure books in this series best - The Silver Chair and The Horse and his Boy. Emma - Jane Austen Persuasion - Jane Austen - oh, here it is!


The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis .... uh, yes The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - was a group read at work a couple of years ago.  recommend. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres 
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne - yes Animal Farm - George Orwell - another book I want to re-read. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown - nope 
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez; YES A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving 
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins ... did I?  I’m pretty sure. Or was it The Moonstone? Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery.  YES.  Anxiously awaiting the new adaption.  Why is it so hard to get Anne of Windy Poplars on kindle?  That is the funniest one.  And Rilla of Ingleside so heartbreaking 
Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy 
The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood, yes and ever so long ago.  Another book to re-read soon (haven’t started watching the series yet) Lord of the Flies - William Golding Atonement - Ian McEwan; LOVE this book and his writing in general.  He also wrote the screenplay, and the movie and the book are a perfect match in tone. 
Life of Pi - Yann Martel No, but on my list Dune - Frank Herbert - no Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons - yes, Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen - yay! 
A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon 
A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens - my intro to Dickens, though not his best Brave New World - Aldous Huxley - starting to get depressed at all this dystopian fiction that needs to be re-read as a primer for the present times 
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - lives at my desk at work.  Not even a favorite book of mine, but I love diving into his words every once in a while Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov The Secret History - Donna Tartt The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold  - when I saw the movie it reminded me why I wasn’t into reading the book Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - plot better than the story 
On The Road - Jack Kerouac Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy - yeah, I had to read so much Hardy Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie - no, want to though 
Moby Dick - Herman Melville; I can’t even think about this book without remembering our class discussion of the “circle jerk” chapter.  I remember literally nothing else. 
Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - meh Dracula - Bram Stoker 
The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett  - an ALL-TIME favorite Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson Ulysses - James Joyce; all hail the master, and the bastard responsible for my sick dependence on the em-dash The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome Germinal - Emile Zola Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray - unfortunately, yes Possession - AS Byatt A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens; of course Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell The Color Purple - Alice Walker - excellent The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry Charlotte’s Web - EB White: yes The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Yes.  I prefer Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter series hands-down, but despite her association with Tolkien, Lewis, et al, she got squashed between Conan Doyle and Christie.  Her Gaudy Night is one of my top five books.

The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad - yeah The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery heck, yeah The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks Watership Down - Richard Adams yes A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole - my kids read this book in HS, so I have a copy lying around, but have never read it A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas Hamlet - William Shakespeare - yes, probably too many times.  What are my favorite Shakespeare dramas?  Maybe King Lear, Richard III? Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl. yes 
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

[flexgallery]

Flex Gallery: The Work of Greg Oberle

In response to a lack of public art opportunities during winter, on January 11th, I launched Flex Gallery, a mobile public art space located on my left arm. For the project, I sent canvas armbands to six artists, requesting they turn them into artworks. Each artist works in a wide variety of media, and I provided them with no themes or limitations other than the dimensions of the band. In February for two weeks, I wore the most bizarre armband yet, the work of Greg Oberle, a local artist and member of the Collective Artspace. I spoke with him last week to learn more about his work and hir creative process.

Zachary Johnson (ZJ): How did you get started as an artist?

Greg Oberle (GO): My education really stated in high school. I took AP studio art twice because I’d run through all of the courses my high school had offered. And I went to U of M and studied industrial product design for three years, and everybody kept telling me, why don’t you just be an illustrator because you always seems most enthusiastic about the drawing stage of products? Not that the ideas were lacking, I just always was sinking all my time into the rendering. That was when I decided to switch over to Kendall in 2008. I finished with a degree in illustration.

But as you can see with this project, I really take almost more from industrial design coursework than I do the drawing. I still love to play with sculpture and things occasionally happen in 3-D like this.

ZJ: What has your career as an artist looked like since graduation?

GO: So after graduating in 2010, I briefly worked at a bank…and it was a really challenging environment. Authority’s always been a problem for me. So, having left that job behind, I decided I would do absolutely anything creative to be self-employed. So I’ve done illustration, graphic design, some sculptural projects, but over time the most regular niche I’ve fallen into has been working with restaurants, doing murals and illustrations and installations. Signage, menu design, all of that, and that’s all based in Detroit, so I spend a lot of time on the east side. So that’s what funds all of my other little side projects.

Reflecting on the past six years of freelance, I don’t know if I should be proud or infuriated that my portfolio is all over the map, stylistically and in terms of medium. I think it’s made me comfortable saying yes to things that I don’t necessarily know how to do because I’ve become adept at [problem solving] – I thank my industrial design background because I really appreciate problem solving, so I don’t get intimidated anymore by going well outside my comfort zone and working backwards. I like that way of working so much that in client meetings, I tend to deliberately think of some odd weird thing that I want to try, I’ll try to push that. To give myself something to wrestle with.

ZJ: When you’re not at work and you can work on whatever you want, what do you make?

GO: Sometimes my brain feels like a big messy, three-dimensional Venn diagram and new intersections are occurring all the time. The brief overlap of what’s occurring tends to take me in one direction briefly and then I shift immediately away from that. So, it’s all over the place. It’s drawing. It’s painting. It’s sculpture. My personal feelings come out in this work. I tend to be a bit grotesque, whimsical, off the wall, fantastical in my personal work.

I could tell you a funny story about what happened for ArtPrize last year. I experienced my first encounter with censorship. It was for a really great space called Michigan House. They had another local artist and I commissioned to come in and they told us both, like, “you do you.” After the fact they were saying, “Well, we were really thinking you were going to do a mural.” I bought seven ceramic lawn ornament lambs and affixed baby arms to their rear ends. Each arm was holding a leash that was connected to the next arm — it was this really bizarre inappropriate parade, and the work was up for a whopping hour before enough complaints were filed that they took it down. So, I was paid, and I performed, and I brought the work but it made everybody really uncomfortable, so I took it down. So, these [pieces on the armband] are actually the scraps from that. I still felt motivated to tinker in that realm.

ZJ: Besides the materials coming from your ArtPrize project, what was some of the other inspiration behind the armband you created?

GO: On a semi-regular basis I tend to deal with – I still feel very childlike in many ways. The world very often doesn’t make sense to me or I find it really disturbing or scary, but also delightful. So sometimes I tend to combine elements of adulthood with elements of childhood and show how strange it is to make that transition but still have one foot back into younger years. It’s not like it’s more innocent, but…in some ways I think we grow up too fast.

And I think too I’m a little antagonstic in my nature, and sometimes I like to make things that make me laugh and make other people question my sanity. I don’t think I have a very good sense of humor, so sometimes I like to try and make something that makes me laugh or makes other people laugh. Can I tell some kind of joke through a piece?

ZJ: Do you feel you begin more with materials and start experimenting from there, or do you start with concepts and let them dictate your materials?

GO: It’s very much one or the other. Sometimes things are finished before I even have a chance to think about what it is I’m doing or why and other times it’s more cerebral; I have something I want to say and that forces the decisions along.

ZJ: So, you, Maddie, Angelica, Megan, and I are all part of this project and members of the Collective Art Space. Why did you decide to join it?

GO: It was out of excitement for the people who were getting involved. I was friends with Rachelle [one of the co-founders], first and foremost. So she was the one who invited me, and I hadn’t been a part of the Grand Rapids art community until joining. I haven’t actively gone to seek it out, and I’ve spent so much time on the other side of the state working on those projects that are site-specific… So It’s been an opportunity to embrace the local scene a little more and meet new people.

ZJ: What’s next for you as an artist?

GO: I have some very loose and free ideas right now. I’m thinking more about interior design. Working with these architects and interior designers for restaurants has made me see spaces differently. And given me a taste for what it might be like to think about the whole space rather than just the wall that’s been given to me. I’ve even started investigating MFA programs for interior design. If I were to ever decide to move into more of a career format with my work, I think I would consider that. Then I’ve also on-and-off painted professionally with a company that does interior/exterior commercial painting, and as much as I tend to not like it very much and find it pretty tiring, all the different materials that we use have given me new ideas for ways to work. It’s really interesting being in that world of construction because it’s not one I’m really familiar with, but now when I see good work I acknowledge it.

And the methods and tools behind construction are really interesting to me now. So I’ve even thought about hiring some of these contractors to help me build different kinds of surfaces or potentially even designing whole sculptures. I was recently in a space where they had updated an old warehouse and because of the way they wanted to orient the floor plan, it was kind of at an angle to all the pipes, so there were all these really funny corners where the drywall was cut in these strange ways just to fit these pipes crisscrossing the rooms, and I thought that was beautiful. So I was envisioning working with a dry-waller and someone who knows plumbing to work to build some kind of crazy piece that I could install.

ZJ: Can you think of something you’ve seen in your life that was particularly visually striking?

GO: I studied abroad in Ghana when I was a junior at U of M, and we were there for a little over a month working to develop recycling programs in the bigger cities. I kept remarking to myself and to others in the group, to the point that they were tired of hearing it, the sky there just seemed like a different color, and the Earth too was this really rich red. It was the first time I’ve been abroad and felt like I was in a strange place, like otherwordly – and it was beautiful.

And then Japan too. Japan was another place where I found a lot of peaceful moments, more than I usually get. I’m a pretty hyper, anxious person, so it always stands-out to me when I’m in a place, or with people, or standing in front of a work of art that makes me suddenly feel relaxed. It’s almost startling.

The family I stayed with in Horishima took me to the coast on the west side of the main island, and we went on a one-night, two-day fishing trip, where they woke us up at 3:45 in the morning to get out to the boats and go to this little island chain to fish. And it was communal sleeping; everybody slept in this little main room in this tiny working fishing village on the tatami mats, with futons, the whole deal. And that was really beautiful and special. I never get up that early. Seeing the sun rise on the ocean with the topography of these quintessentially Japanese islands – like something out of a Miyazaki movie, that was something pretty incredible.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Posts by Zachary Johnson are also available via instagram and tumblr under the name Vis Ed.