#i remind myself that no one hates me as much as everyone hates elon musk

[wirewitchviolet]

OK I guess I'm talking about this loser a little. In the screenshot that is, the person posting this seems perfectly fine. First though I kinda want to highlight the one tag originally on here and this first comment because those are pretty relevant:

Anyway, story time. One of the less fun things about me is I find myself pretty regularly asking people around me if they could please stop CONSTANTLY ambushing me with screenshots of the social media feeds of far right creeps who have a history of targeting me, specifically, for years. In particular, this applies to the one nazi/pedophila-advocate who changed his last name to something long long and greek to encourage people making fun of him to get maybe-racist while doing so (who mercifully does seem to have fallen off people's radar), the former British TV writer who prior to becoming a cartoon villain petitioning the government to defund a children's charity because transphobia ate his brain that badly spent something like a year or two clumsily trying to get into my pants and those of several other trans women, and this loser here.

Just about a decade ago, when neo-nazis were really starting to kick it into high gear against trans people and were really all in with that one twitter hashtag I don't want to mention while talking about this and would prefer nobody reblogging this go and add, I and a couple other trans gals ended up forming this little support group for people who were really in the thick of dealing with that hate mob and needed some friendly voices. Since we were all being really heavily stalked, we had a policy that nobody else be invited in without the unanimous consent of everyone in the group. That policy was ultimately pretty short lived, because eventually we threw an invite to someone who was a bit of a celebrity victim of this crap, who just sort of decided that notoriety came with special privilege and authority, and was also kind of the worst judge of character I've ever met. Said person immediately tossed invites to a number of other people they considered good people, which included a few shady characters who have since become fairly notorious, most notably, the scumbag in the screenshot above.

The real kicker of course was being told quite some time later that he was considered "good people" worth inviting to the support group of mostly-pseudonymous-trans-women dealing with murderous nazi stalkers in spite of knowing that he wrote a high school essay about how much he loved and respected Hitler. While he was at the time half-assedly doing the anti-fascist thing in an effort to ride the coattails of our celebrity member, he was also absolutely spying on the rest of us, and while he didn't ever get anything out of it (this being MOSTLY a group of very good eggs and all... not in that sense but come to think yes also in that sense), he sure as hell did his pathetic best to absolutely ruin the lives of everyone who was in there legitimately for years after.

So, yeah, I am really not a fan of seeing his face, because it reminds me of all the awful things he did to me, and various other people I'm still quite fond of, and ALSO because it reminds me of this former friend of mine who invited him in and put everyone's lives at risk... and the various other things that former friend did to wreck people's lives, like bringing some other terrible and dangerous people into our lives, and... kind of skipping town with a rather large amount of money that was meant to be shared around. Lot of ugly history.

But again, since we're on the subject, yeah guy's a really weird pathetic idiot. Before he became like... a professional licker of Elon Musk's boots or whatever the hell is going on there, he was trying to make a living in a managerial position at some would-be videogame news site, but couldn't work out how to maintain employees who came to him with demands like "I would prefer not to be stalked and sexually harassed by coworkers" and "I would like to actually be paid for writing articles for your for-profit website." He rather famously had a very public saga about sleeping in a bed filled with thousands of ants and failing to understand people's advice to solve this problem by not having food on it. In the brief period I was forced to interact with him on a daily basis, he needed to have the most basic things explained to him on a daily basis. Like I'm not kidding about not knowing what to do about an employee being sexually harassed. He was asking everyone he knew how to make her be quiet about that "talk to and/or fire the people harassing her" was a completely alien concept to him. And yes, I do believe he in fact does not know basic math and somehow blames this like all his other problems on trans people.

And I can also confirm that yes, he and a lot of other "big names" in right wing spaces actually does make living off of saying the most profoundly stupid things in public. People actively maintain accounts on the weird nazi site he posts these things on and follow him to screenshot this stuff and/or confirm it's real. The cargo culty thoughts on popularity those crowds have makes him a Big Deal to... well Elon Musk apparently, and whoever's paying him for opinions lately. He lives on that, and bends people's ears with that. So yeah, while usually the whole "don't feed the trolls" thing is BS and an excuse to blame victims for the behavior of their abusers and such, in this one specific case, no really, there is, via convoluted means, some real benefit to be had for just completely ignoring this particular piece of human garbage. Particularly for me, a seriously traumatized trans woman who otherwise keeps having her PTSD triggered by people pointing and laughing at this nazi clown instead of a plethora of available non-nazi clowns.

PEMDAS is a conspiracy according to far-right idiot and friend of Elon Musk.

[themuller13]

We are in a pokey costumier’s workshop somewhere in the bowels of the Almeida theatre in Islington in north London. It’s not much more than a broom cupboard really, and Ben Whishaw sits on a stool amid the clothes and faceless Styrofoam wig-stands sipping a cup of tea. He seems happy.

All actors — particularly once they become successful — like to go on about how much they just love doing theatre. With Whishaw this is genuinely, honestly true. Ever since he arrived, fully formed, as Trevor Nunn’s Hamlet aged only 23, he has continued to return to the stage even as his screen career has blossomed. It’s almost impossible for him to do TV without being at least nominated for some award — Criminal Justice, The Hour, London Spy — and his film roles are as varied as they are acclaimed: John Keats in Bright Star, Keith Richards in Stoned and supporting turns in Suffragette and The Danish Girl. There are also his regular gigs as Q to Daniel Craig’s James Bond and, of course, the voice of Paddington Bear. Yet for all that here he is, backstage and back in rehearsals, drifting contentedly through the organised chaos of theatre company life.

“I love that about doing plays,” he says softly. “I love being part of a group of people, part of a troupe. It suits me. There’s no etiquette. It’s a profession that is really accepting of everyone’s oddities.” He smiles. “All sorts of people are actors.”

What sort of person is Whishaw? This has not always been an easy question to answer. Over the years a composite image has emerged of a fierce talent who is nevertheless guarded, opaque and fragile. His appearance (skinny, elfin) and manner (gentle, modest) add to this perception. Only, he explains, we’ve got the wrong idea. “Sometimes I get really annoyed because people think I’m going to be cute. And nice. And I’m not very nice sometimes. And I’m not very cute really,” he says, frowning in a way that, to be honest, is quite cute. “There’s this notion that I might be sensitive and shy. Which is partly true. But I can be grumpy and angry and irritable.”

He chuckles and drinks his tea. Still, it’s only fair to point out that these preconceptions about Whishaw are not totally unfounded. Now 36 years old, he says that during his twenties he struggled badly with performance anxiety. “I suffered a lot of awful, terrible nerves and stomach pains,” he says. “Really debilitating things. You realise that other people are dependent on you doing well. Money. All sorts of things become part of the equation. I remember not sleeping because I was so stressed.”

For a very long time he was by his own admission anxious about submitting himself to scrutiny. We knew he grew up in Hertfordshire, went to Rada and has a non-identical twin brother who doesn’t act? Beyond that? Not loads. Talking about himself is still not his favourite thing in the world. “I find interviews quite nerve- racking,” he says apologetically, but explains that he’s trying harder to not get stressed about them or to second- guess what people might make of him. He stops and regards me with what looks a lot like sympathy. “I understand,” he says. “It’s the pressure of your job to capture an essence of somebody, which I suppose is very difficult.”

He thinks he used to use his reputation for shyness as a defence mechanism. “Maybe you can end up playing a role or something?” he says. “Behaving in a certain way because you think people are going to expect that of you. And it becomes a place that’s quite comfortable because you’ve been there before. So you just trot it out again.”

One big change — perhaps the big change — came in the wake of Whishaw coming out as gay in 2011. “I definitely feel like I’m more relaxed as a person,” he says. “I don’t know if that makes you a better actor or more available or anything, but it’s certainly lovely not to have to be worrying about keeping something private. That’s a really, really good feeling. It makes me realise that I spent a long time — too long, really — in a private agony about something. About it.”

So that’s good. He’s also “become really obsessed with this amazing Buddhist nun who teaches meditation practice that is all about acceptance of whatever comes up. About being OK with things being uncomfortable.” This has also helped him to become more sanguine. “You see yourself. Your own mad thoughts, your repetitive thoughts and your own blind spots. It’s very easy to think that everyone else is nuts and you’re sane, but you’re really not,” he says cheerfully.

Madness, as it happens, permeates the play he is about to appear in. Against, by Christopher Shinn, is about a Silicon Valley tech magnate called Luke who believes he is in communication with God, who has given him the task of ending all violence on Earth. It’s a powerful work — occasionally frightening and certainly not the satire it could be — with this well-meaning but eerily detached protagonist at its centre.

“He is vaguely modelled on someone like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos, and he’s involved in AI and rockets and thinking about the future. But before the play begins he has had this revelation and God has spoken to him and issued an instruction to him to ‘go where there is violence’. So we meet someone at the beginning of the play who is a changed man.”

Whishaw says that, to prepare for the role of Luke, he spent a lot of time on YouTube. “I did begin by watching a lot of TED Talks, people being interviewed, Elon Musk showing people around his factory. And actually, in that sense, it feels very much a play of the moment because there are so many of these people talking about mankind with a messianic, visionary zeal. But the biggest challenge is trying to understand what it feels like to really, truly believe you have been spoken to by God. That’s the thing. That’s the centre of it.”

Whishaw admits what most actors don’t: that he’s competitive when it comes to his career and getting the roles he wants. “I’m definitely competitive, yeah. And I definitely want things for myself. Yeah. Definitely. And I think that’s good.” Has he ever gone up for parts and missed out on them, and felt angry about it? Pissed off? “There are one or two things,” he says a little airily, smiling to himself. “One or two things where I’ve thought . . . I could have done that. I should have done that.”

For a long time he was down to play Freddie Mercury in a forthcoming biopic. The Queen guitarist, Brian May, had said that he hoped Whishaw would get the role, because “he’s fabulous, a real actor”, but that’s fallen through, Whishaw says. He was up for it, but he says there’s no hard feelings. “I don’t really understand what happened myself, but just one day I wasn’t doing it. And somebody else was. And it’s fine. It was just one of those funny things that happen sometimes in the way that films get made.”

Whishaw will be back in the theatre in the new year when he plays Brutus in Julius Caesar, one of the eagerly awaited productions in the first season of Nicholas Hytner’s new London start-up venue, the Bridge Theatre. He has also just finished filming Mary Poppins Returns, a sequel to the classic 1964 musical in which he plays a grown-up Michael Banks. The film is released at the end of next year. “I sing in it,” he says, but then backpedals slightly. “Well, it’s more like talking-singing. It’s Emily Blunt playing Mary Poppins and my sister, Jane, is played by Emily Mortimer. It was wonderful fun.” In fact, he says that doing these big Hollywood numbers are invariably a laugh. “I don’t think a job is more noble or valuable for not being fun. Although I think I used to.”

Playing Michael Banks was a particular pleasure given that Mary Poppins was the first film he saw. “My dad taped it off the telly. I watched it in the way that my niece and nephew watch Frozen. Over and over and over again.”

In 2012 Whishaw entered into a civil partnership with the Australian composer Mark Bradshaw. They met during the filming of Bright Star and live together in east London. “We’re quite weird. Music relaxes me, but it doesn’t relax Mark because it’s Mark’s thing,” he says, meaning that the last thing Bradshaw wants at the end of a long day of listening to music is to listen to more music. “So we always have a tussle about when I can play my music. He’ll hate me for saying that.”

Bradshaw produced the score for the latest season of Top of the Lake, the crime drama featuring Elisabeth Moss. Whishaw says that he recently gorged on it. “I just watched the whole thing in one day and what Elisabeth Moss did in it was really inspiring to me. I thought: ‘F***! That’s reminded me why this job is such a great thing to do.’ ” Was the music any good? He nods with faux-solemnity. “The music was good as well.”

Someone knocks on the door to say it’s time to go back to rehearsals. Whishaw seems slightly relieved, but he’s trying his best. “In the past I might have been very defensive about a whole load of things. And I’m telling myself not to be that,” he says. He’s still shy and sensitive and all the rest of it, but nothing like he used to be. “I’m probably a little bit more confident in myself. A bit more relaxed in myself. More relaxed in my own body.” He is, despite his protestations, every bit as cute and as nice as we imagine. He’s also a brilliant actor. All said, there are worse things to be. Against is at the Almeida, London N1 (020 7359 4404), to September 30

[thecloudupblog]

Q&A With Broke Face

1. Where are we talking from today? I am currently writing from the kitchen table as I've been gently nudged out of my home studio, dubbed Found Sound Laboratory, by my daughters and their friends while they have an impromptu jam session on drums, an old Casio (named Casios Clay), pink ministrat, and a cheap radio shack mic plugged into an even cheaper tremolo amp. It's polyphonic insanity that sounds better than anything I could spend months trying to perfect in GarageBand. 2. Where did you get your artist name from? BrokeFace is a name that came out one day while I was writing lyrics and I dug it. It's become a persona I can use to really get to the crux of something I'm meditating on. I personally might not be able to point out a very painful truth about me to myself, which I consider one of my responsibilities as a writer, but BrokeFace has that freedom and it's been quite liberating, if not a little harrowing. 3. Music-wise what are you working on right now? Are you currently promoting a single or album? I am currently finishing an album titled Dirty White. It's a mixtape of pieces I've been working on since I started writing my own music about 4 years ago. I've recently felt a very strong sense of what my sound is, which is something I haven't been able to grasp since I began to make my own music. As I was putting the album together, it was shaping up to be a chronicle of that journey. I was also able to find a through-line sound wise so, to me, the album sounds like one long song that goes all over the map but feels whole as well. I haven't figured out what to release for singles but Love Beast, Grasshoppers, and Swear Off are strong songs. 4. Who or what were the most significant influences on your musical life and career? Well, the Dirty White album is very much influenced by albums like Beasties Check Your Head, Radiohead's O.K. Computer, Kendrick Lamar's Damn, and to some extent Zappa and P-Funk as well as Prince. There's a Purple Rain cover on the album. As a child growing up in the Massachusetts suburbs near Plymouth, I first started piano then, wanting to be John Bonham, on to the drums, but slowly realized that John Paul Jones was the spirit of Zeppelin. Those discoveries, along with all of the music of the 50s and 60s (Rock (Chuck Berry), r&b (Otis, what?!), Jazz (Monk), country, (Dolly), et al.) got me wanting to learn all instruments so I picked up keys, bass, guitar and anything else I could get my paws on, including the accordion which made its way,  almost unrecognizable, on to a couple of ambient songs on the album. In the 90s I was taken over by all the music coming out from Pixies to GnR to INXS to cheesy stuff too (I'll sing Seal's Kissed By A Rose at the top of my lungs if it comes on so watch out). At the same time, my brother gave me the Zappa albums Sheik Yerbouti and Chunga's Revenge which blew my mind. Then, I heard Rage Against the Machine which lead me to Public Enemy and Tribe Called Quest and there was no getting me back once I start down that road. Today, I have really opened up to everything and anything. I'm absorbing music at an insane rate and it's awesome, there is so much good stuff out there. 5. Who are your favorite musicians? Right now I'm going back to school to get a music composition degree so I'm deeply entrenched in the classics. It's cliche, but JS Bach was insane. Insane. You listen to his stuff and you hear Metallica's One, you hear Wu-Tang busting out polyphonic layers over some harpsichord beats. It's still in everything. Other than that, I'm listening to Kendrick, TV on the Radio, Lizzo! (New album is so good), my girls turned me on to Mattiel, Nathy Peluso, Ariana Grande. I think Cardi B's tunes are pretty good, the production is great on her stuff. And sorry but I like LilNasX's song C7osure (damn you Spotify for your algorithm!). I would like to say I hate Charlie Puth, but I don't have much say to what songs get stuck in my head. I really dig MF Doom and everyone he worked with like King Ghidorah (Tic, Tic is amazing). Black Star May have an album soon so I'm mostly freaking out until that happens. Vampire Weekend's new album is good. Kevin Abstract is good. I've also been going through old tunes I liked as a teenager and seeing if they hold up - Smashing Pumpkins were so good... that C&C Music Factory, though... 6. What have been the greatest challenges/frustrations of your career so far? I think it was the point at which I was writing music and not knowing what my sound was so I was all over the place but not finding a connection between them all. I found myself asking everybody around me if something sounded good or just completely hiding it away and not showing anyone. Which was extremely frustrating, like I was ashamed of just being me. It's a much longer connection to many things throughout my life where I looked to others to approve of what I did, when they said I probably shouldn't do something that I was getting into, I made the mistake of listening all the time and not knowing the right kind of person to listen to, or most importantly, not finding my inner will. Dirty White is very much a turning point from that unsure area to the "oh, this is my voice, it was here all along" and just owning it, which is so fulfilling. Dirty White explores a great deal of having a voice taken away, whether I watch it being taken from people most susceptible to the overpowering and unequal distribution of wealth, or I watch white men, like myself, take their own voice away as they slip into their own protective skin color and economic place. This album is really my own meditation on my feeling of impotence when it came to bringing needed change to us as humans. I joke sometimes, get a white, liberal man mad enough, he'll start a podcast. I made an album. It doesn't fix everything but it feels like a start and maybe it will help someone, who knows. 7. As a musician, what is your definition of success? Getting up every day and being aware as much as I can be; aware of when I'm present, when I'm not, of what my gifts are and how I can cultivate them so they can help me and others. Awareness affects everything I do; writing music, hanging with my family, friendships, work. It puts the quality of life into whatever quantity of life I may have left. 8. What is your idea of perfect happiness? Being awake for all of it, all of what life is, whether it is joyful or unpleasant, which goes in tandem with the success question. Happiness is a very interesting term that I spend a great deal of time meditating on - how it's defined for the purposes of consumerism, which controls our lives and the hot button political topics of today; economic racism, women's control of their body, wars with oil-rich countries, etc. Maybe another album is in there. 9. What is your present state of mind? I always have musical ideas happening in my head but I have, like any other person does, a very full schedule where I'm not working on music, so that can feel hectic, but at least I feel, right? I made the intro song on Dirty White, called Crazy Diamonds, as a wake-up song for myself. Like, literally something to wake up to. It is over the top in its good feelings and positive reinforcement, which kind of prepares the listener for an album that gets into some deep, dark areas. Like doing some cardio before going into therapy, get the blood moving. I need that positivity reminder because I can get overwhelmed and just want to be cynical and binge watch Netflix. That thing where you 'just say positive things until you feel better' works for me and that's where I am right now; calmly hectic with cynical positivity. It helps to have a rhythm and keep busy at all times. This album is built around rhythm, the first song is morning or springtime and it works through the darkest part of night/winter to the very last song being the sunrise of the next day/return to spring. It may sound like it was super planned but I'm not that good, it really fell together in that way naturally. 10. What is your most treasured possession? Two gifts every day when I open my eyes. Also, I really like coffee. 11. What do you enjoy doing most? Writing music while my kids make an insane amount of noise around me. I use their sounds to make ambient beats and all kinds of craziness. When you can't have silence, make music from the noise. 12. Where would you like to be in 10 years' time? Making music and being aware. That sounds boring. How's this; living on an Elon Musk owned space station with my family and friends, floating around the earth like that Fhloston Paradise cruise ship in Fifth Element and we get free lodging because I'm part of the house band. Mos Def, relaxing from his retirement, is the band leader and a still-alive Tom Waits provides spoken word and other noises while I, like some crazy Dick Van Dyke a la Mary Poppins, supply beats and ambient sound with the Roots and Keith Richards as a backing band. Keith is in better shape than all of us and the ship is propelled by our music. That sounds better. 13. Where you @ online? Instagram - @BrokeFaceMusic Twitter - @Broke_Face SoundCloud - https://soundcloud.com/user-920314086