#i saw someone from the film society at my uni there and she was like “well i know who youre watching this film for”

[atlas-dr0wned]

so mad that uni got in the way of me being active on here when wicked came out i wouldve been even more annoying about jeff goldblum than usual

[otterskin]

I didn't like the LOKI show, no matter how hard I try, and it's messing with me.

My mother died at the end of December. A lot of other bad things happened as well, like the severe brain injury of my father.

I didn't cry. There was so much to do. I did it. And even then, when there was nothing left to do, I didn't cry.

I found distractions.

Today I went to see the Green Knight after a tough week at a new job that had me leave my father in another province even though he still needs help. I was trying to get back to the life I'd dropped.

I loved the Green Knight. The Arthurian Legends are as dear to me as Norse Mythology, and my copy of them had the Green Knight on the cover. The film was truly excellent, evoking the feel of the story whole still doing something unique and very A24. I cried at one point, like I did when watching the first THOR, because of how much it meant to see something I'd loved since the very first years of my existence finally make it to the big screen and be...right. It's own thing, it's own artistic product, but right.

Then I opened a tab in a browser and saw I had some messages on a website I comment on. It was just some minor criticism of the LOKI show I'd posted beneath an article and how it handled certain things.

I was downvoted. Berated. Hated. Lumped in the ad hominem twitter users who attacked the director and writer (I'd never, ever!) Told I was biphobic because I wanted to see more of a queer lens (I even addressed how difficult it is for bi people in queer cinema and society in general in my criticisms of the romance, but even that wasn't good enough - just disliking it was 'bad'.) I was told I just wanted my 'fanfic' made (I never made any laundrylist of plot points I demanded). I was accused of being a begrudged shipper (ha! If anything I'm an anti-shipper). I was told that I should love the show, it was awesome, and I was bad for not thinking so.

And I started to cry.

I don't cry. Only at movies. Not at real life. I didn't cry at my grandparents's funerals, I didn't cry when I was left with the body of my mother in the hospital room and my brother cried on my shoulder. I didn't cry when working through my dad's severe new disabilities as I realized how much he had lost. I didn't cry while realizing how messy my parents' finances were. I didn't cry when my mother's friends called me in the middle of the night and cried into the phone. I didn't cry when saying goodbye to my dog and going back to a rundown apartment with a terrible smell so I could go to work in a dark room for hours at a time.

But now I'm crying and writing this.

I've realized why. During everything, I looked forward to the LOKI show. The first THOR is deeply nostalgic to me and I watched it often in my first year of Uni when I was away from home. It tied in thematically to what I was going for. Thor 2 came out before I went on exchange, and while I disliked it overall, talking about it was a welcome distraction from my anxieties. Thor 3 was nerve-wracking, but it also came out during my first major job which I was struggling with, and I saw it so many times in theatres...it was such a huge comfort.

Looking forward to LOKI wasn't just a distraction. It was like a promise. A promise that I'd make it till then and see it and maybe it'd give me some comfort.

That's on me. That's a personal thing. It's an unreasonable expectation.

But I needed it, all the same.

Then it came out.

I tried. I really tried to like it, to forgive it, but the problems are things I've criticized for too long in so many other things. I always try to be respectful about, I never go ad hominem and attack the creators, only critique their work and I always mentioned what I liked but...

I didn't like it.

I have no urge to rewatch it.

And the Green Knight...the Green Knight was everything I wanted and needed it to be. It didn't let me down, though I've been anticipating it about as long as the LOKI show. They're very different, obviously, but in my heart they share the same compartment.

And after a very trying day...I realized how badly I needed to rewatch a Loki show I liked. But I can't even enjoy THOR or Thor:Ragnarok anymore. It's like everything I did like has been poisoned.

This thing that got me through immense pain is causing me pain. I don't want to be toxic. I'm sure it's in me. I try so hard not to wallow in disappointment, but to not even be allowed to talk about my problems without being lumped in with abusive online monsters...

I can't do it. I just can't.

This is supposed to be an escape, not another trial.

I needed the LOKI show to be good, so I could come out of the dark into the light, or at least walk through the night with a lantern ahead of me. And instead it was just more darkness, and it's not even entirely its own fault. It's the online discourse. It's the uncalled for harassment of Herron and Waldron. It's the taunting jabs at people who didn't have a good time as if we're all jerks. It's having people roll their eyes when you point out things that made you uncomfortable in the story, it's feeling slightly gaslit when you find something gross that the story intended to be gross and then being told it's not gross, actually.

I'm sorry. I don't want to cause pain. I just...

I needed it to be good. And unlike Thor 3, which delivered me respite in a dark time...it let me down. Worse, it's hurt me.

I said I don't cry, only at the movies. Something about them lets me cry in a way nothing else does. I can't cry at a funeral, but I can cry in a movie theatre at the drop of a hat. It's a release valve, a way for me to process things.

I think I was waiting for LOKI to give me permission to cry. To give me something that could release this pain in me. And instead, it just gave me more.

I never should have given it that power. I didn't want to. But I had to, to get through this.

I'm putting away the few THOR pieces of tat I have. I feel foolish. I always knew it was a capitalist piece of art, chucked from creator to creator with no creative shepherd, which in itself was stressful.

The fandom is no sanctuary for me either, since I'm primarily interested in the family dynamics and I'm sick of 'Odin is an ABUSIVE MONSTER' stories or even unrelated fics and posts just dropping in hate for him that's not at all canon but seems to be very popular to the point where people think it is. Especially since I often read these stories when I need to think of home and my father. Or, most pleasantly of all, when I get called an abuser or abuser-enabler because I say I like Odin as a character. I also can't really bear to deal with anything to do with Sylvie, whom I had high hopes for as someone who wants more female tricksters, but instead I got this...this Mary Sue that's very hard to criticize without being yelled at. I swear I'm coming at her writing as a feminist and I don't hate anyone, I don't, I just...sigh. She's just personally frustrating to me and not being able to discuss it without being called names sucks.

Not to mention I'm asexual, and I always struggle with romance in media being pushed as the 'ultimate relationship more important than any other'. Part of the reason I liked THOR so much was that romance was not the main feature of THOR and definitely not THOR 3 (while my disliked Dark World was all about it, and so is LOKI). And when I criticize the romance, I get called a prude (guilty, I guess), a troll, or, my favourite, just 'a hater'.

I don't want to hate. Who wants that poison in their veins? I'm here because the Thor series HELPED me because I LOVED it. And now I look at the things I used to love and I...don't, anymore.

So much is asked of me right now. I can't willingly invite this painful thing to sit on my chest as well, especially since the world is already shoving it into my face without my doing anything, in ads, in news, in everything.

I suppose that's why I've leaned even more into Odin lately. He was untouched by the LOKI series (though not the Simpson special, which worries me). He's a trickster, he's queer, he's nuanced, he's 'misunderstood' (that old cliche, but he's misunderstood and misrepresented by the people always yelling about how this or that character is misunderstood, which amuses me, except when it gets to me), and he's in many ways free to make my own.

I still have some stuff I'm going to publish that's practically finished. Finnesang has a lot more written for it but needs some major sit-down time for re-writes and edits. Lokabrenna is practically done, just needs tweaks and Beta. I'll be here a little longer.

But I think I'm going to have to step back for now and put my passions into other things.

I will be back. After all, after Thor 2 came Thor 3. Maybe Love and Thunder will right the ship and Thor can still be awesome, and maybe eventually a creative I love will come to work on the franchise. Really, that's the key for me - I loved Branagh before THOR, and loved Waititi before Thor, and disliked Waldron's work (though I gave him every benefit of the doubt and hoped and prayed to be wrong - sadly, it was what I expected.)

But...if LOKI season 2 is more of this, more romantic tropes I hate and Loki being an afterthought in his own show and his family being devalued for new characters...I can't do it. I can't watch something I used to love just throw that all away for something I dislike.

My tears are finally drying. I wrote a lot of this while the screen was blurry, so I hope there's no grammar or typo too embarrasing. I'm not sure I have the strength to re-read it. Sorry for the rant. It helped me feel better.

Thank you all. I hope I feel differently someday.

[dmitri-smerdyakov]

The Fantastic Beasts Franchise and JK Rowling

Alright, so...hi everyone.

I don’t know how many people follow this blog anymore because my main blog of operation is now @alwaysahiccupandastrid - I still try to keep this blog relatively active though, just because it was my original blog, I’ve had it since I was 13, and I have so many memories attached to it.

I’m aware that a lot of the people who follow me, especially since late 2016, do so because a) I was a loud and proud Fantastic Beasts fan, b) I wrote some Newtina and Jakweenie fic, and c)...I don’t know. I literally don’t know why people bother following me anywhere because I don’t feel like I have a lot to say. But, anyway, many people probably follow me due to Fantastic Beasts and my posts/fanfics within the fandom.

Those who follow my active blog will already know my feelings and thoughts, but because of the fact many things about this blog - me, the posts for the last four-ish years, the url itself - are Beasts related, I felt it was necessary to come and write an actual post here instead of just reblogging things and calling it a day. I’ve always been very outspoken online, but I’ve been avoiding a certain topic of conversation on this blog for years now, and I’m finally in a place where we can discuss it.

I am, of course, talking about the hot topic that is JK Rowling.

Back in the days between FBAWTFT and FBTCOG, I was a very outspoken defender of JK Rowling and her decision to defend Johnny Depp’s inclusion in the films. Now, this is something I still stand by to this day, and due to the evidence that has since come out, I’m even more steadfast in the opinion that keeping Depp was a great decision. I am fully in support of him and the way he’s currently battling against his abuser. But that’s not what I’m here to talk about right now. As I was saying, back in the day, I was outspoken about the opinion that “we don’t know the full story” etc., and as a result I received very colourful anon messages. Now, to my knowledge, none of these were about JKR being a TERF/transphone, but I think it’s important to mention that at the time I scoffed at the idea she could be one. I openly admit that I didn’t listen to what other people - including actual trans individuals - were saying about JKR and her transphobia because I frankly didn’t want to admit it. I didn’t want to admit that the person who wrote something that saved my life could be so hateful and a bad person - that, and at the time I passed it all off as “wokeness out of control”.

It is now 2020. Up until last Saturday night, I was still in support of JK Rowling - I didn’t agree with some of the stuff she had said, but I was trying to be positive and have hope by telling myself that she didn’t mean to be transphobic, that she just didn’t know what she was doing was wrong, even though the evidence clearly showed otherwise (I.e. her liking transphobic / radfem tweets). I said to my followers on my Beasts page that instead of cancelling people outright, we should be attempting to educate them instead, and if they choose not to learn then fine. And, being 100% obvious, I didn’t want to admit it because I frankly already was feeling annoyed at two different Beasts cast members for different reasons: Ezra Miller (for choking a girl) and Dan Fogler (for his tweet about BLM - admittedly that was probably him being well intentioned but not saying it right). So yeah, I didn’t want to cancel another member of the Beasts “family”.

I had JKR’s tweets on notifications, and for the most part over the last few weeks, it was all about the Ickabog. However, on Saturday night I noticed that she had suddenly tweeted something completely different, and I looked at it. Given that I had adamantly defended her and said “freedom of speech” for so long, it’s telling that my first thought upon seeing her tweet was literally “for fuck sake, Jo, why”.

I won’t post her tweets here but to sum that first tweet up, it was her being annoyed over the term “people who menstruate” being used in an article instead of “woman”, and mockingly saying “there used to be a word for that” before pretending she didn’t know the word. She knew that tweeting it would start arguments and anger, and yet she still made the decision to do so. Her follow up tweets frankly dug the hole deeper; she tried to defend herself by saying, to sum it up, “I have a butch lesbian friend who agrees with me” “I just care about women’s rights!” And “IF trans people were marginalised I’d march with you!” (“If”, of course, being the real kicker here because what do you mean IF. They ARE. Every DAY.)

Since then, JKR has written an essay on her website defending herself and her opinions, and yes, I read it. I read it a few times, in fact. At first, I felt my anger simmer and felt I had been too hasty to make anti JKR jokes, that I was wrong...but then I read it again properly and realised that what she had written was a piece that turned herself into the victim, and that despite putting on the appearance of her saying she supports trans people, including the phrases “I support trans people” and “of course trans women are real women”, she still spewed much transphobic vitriol and hate. She cited no sources for any of her proclamations or statements about statistics, implied that trans men transition to escape their “womanhood”, that trans women are men in dresses, that trans women are dangerous to “real” women (aka cis women) and shouldn’t be allowed into women’s changing rooms or toilets. There was also the autism comment, and the implication of autistic girls somehow not being able to make decisions or whatever.

I’m going to get straight to the point: I don’t support JK Rowling or her radical feminism.

As someone who is a proud feminist (libfem?), I can honestly say that never have I felt threatened or like I was being silenced by the inclusion of trans women in feminist spaces or conversation. Never. In my second year at sixth form, I was in charge of the LGBTQ+ club until a new leader with better leadership skills could step in, and - put simply - that year, the club was made almost entirely of first year transgender students. Even though I had called myself a trans ally for years, I realised there was a lot I didn’t know, and I learnt quite a lot from these students. I continue to still learn today. They were some of the nicest and most intelligent people I got the chance to meet, and I can truly say that at no point was I ever worried to be in a room alone with a trans woman, nor was I concerned about which bathroom they went in - bathrooms are bathrooms. Speaking of bathrooms...when I was at uni during a particularly tense rehearsal a few weeks before our final show last year, a guy in our group made me cry and I ran to the women’s bathroom to escape. Not only did the other girls come to comfort me, but you know what? The guy came in and apologised profusely to me. Did any of us girls give a shit about having a guy in our toilet? Absolutely not. It’s a fucking toilet. And, on that note, I was never worried about a trans woman or even a cis man attacking me in the toilets. You know who DID attack me in the toilets regularly? Other cisgender women.

As a feminist, I fully support trans women and am not threatened by the inclusion of trans women in women’s spaces or in women’s rights discussions. While I agree that cis women and trans women inevitably go through different struggles, at the end of the day, we all identify as women and are women. I think that if your feminism is so threatened by the existence of trans women - TERFs, RadFems, JKR, looking at you - then your feminism is flimsy and not feminism at all.

As a woman, I find it highly offensive that JKR and many RadFems focus so much of womanhood and feminism on an involuntary biological function that, frankly, many of us would rather do without. Yeah, I’m talking about periods - no matter how proud I am to be a woman, I still fucking hate periods and would get rid of mine if I could without erasing my chance of having kids someday. I can hear the RadFems accusing me of “internalised woman hatred” for saying I hate my periods, but you know what, they suck and they hurt and fuck them. The fact that JKR (also the the radfem movement) reduced “women” to just people who menstruate and can have children, and vice versa, is incredibly offensive and misogynistic. For a start, trans men menstruate, intersex people can, non binary can etc. Next, not even ALL cis women have periods - women who are menopausal, young women who haven’t started puberty yet (some do start very late), some women don’t have regular cycles, some women have medical problems that affect their cycle, some women are on birth control that can stop their cycles. So the idea of women being defined as “those who menstruate” is offensive not only to trans/intersex/non binary individuals but also to cis ones too.

As I write this, I’m a 22 year old woman who is still learning and changing every day, and one of the things that I’ve found myself thinking about recently - especially since we’re in lockdown and we have nothing BUT time to think - is about myself and my identity as a woman. What prompted this was when I saw Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s beloved book, “Little Women”, which I’ve since read, for my birthday back in January, and I left the cinema feeling exalted and powerful with my own identity as a woman. (I’ll be returning to LW in a bit)

After some thinking, I’ve realised some things. For me, my identity as a woman is not just because once a month my uterus decides to shed; I do not identify as a woman just because I have certain physical features. I am not a particularly feminine person either, and I’m what some may call a “tomboy” (a phrase I actually don’t mind but I know a lot of people do for understandable reasons since it’s a phrase designed to differentiate people who don’t conform to society’s expectations etc) because I prefer video games and more geeky stuff to shopping or dressing up or make up.

For me, there is no one way a person has to be or appear in order to identify as a woman. Women are beautiful, complex human beings; we are not defined by our genitalia, by an involuntary biological process. Women are strong, intelligent, and interesting people - no two are the same. For example, some decide to raise families, some choose to pursue a career, some do both - all of these are valid and none are more “feminist” or “womanly” than the others, because it’s our as women. I guarantee that if you lined up every single woman in the world - cis AND trans - no two would be the exact same.

I mentioned “Little Women” earlier, and as I was pondering over what makes me identify as a “woman”, I thought a lot about a certain quote from the 2019 film that has stayed with me since it was first said in the release of the trailer. It’s spoken by Jo March to her mother, and I’ve started to understand what for me makes me a woman.

For me, being a woman is all of this: having minds, hearts, souls, ambition, talent, and being beautiful each in our own ways. Women are capable of love and empathy, capable of desire, capable of the most complex and human feelings and emotions, and coming out the stronger for it.

Sex is one thing; gender identity is another.

I won’t dissect every single thing JKR wrote in her essay, but I will just say this: her comments regarding autistic girls are extremely tone deaf and she does not speak for those with autism. I’m going to be honest and admit something here I haven’t before: I have not been diagnosed with autism or aspergers but I AM currently on the waiting list to see someone who COULD diagnose me. Apparently I show signs of a potential diagnosis, so...we’ll have to see. But I have friends who are autistic, and they’re disgusted by JKR trying to use them to support her TERF arguments. Autistic and other neurodivergent people are absolutely capable of making decisions and are NOT people who need to be babied or have their hands held, to be told who they are. It’s incredibly ableist of JK Rowling frankly.

I would also like to point out... I’ve seen people saying “but she doesn’t hate autistic people, Newt is autistic!!!” - yes, but JKR didn’t write him as autistic. Eddie Redmayne chose to play Newt as autistic - JK Rowling didn’t do shit.

It’s also time that I acknowledge that both Potter and Beasts inevitably hold JKR’s problematic views, and that by denying her ownership of her work, we’re not holding her accountable for the horrible things she’s done. This includes - but is not limited to -:

Anti-Semitic stereotypes in the goblins

Lycanthropy being used as a metaphor for AIDS - an illness that is heavily associated to the gay community, and also there was the panic of the AIDs crisis in the 90s where much misinformation and homophobia was generated and spread because of it.

Adding further to the lycanthropy point, one of the infected individuals - Greyback - is stated to have a sick preference for infecting children. Not only are werewolves tied to harmful gay/AIDs stereotypes, but also to the disgusting and frankly wrong notion that gay people are pedophiles.

The only Asian character is called Cho Chang. Cho Chang. That’s two steps away from outright just calling her “Ching Chong”. It’s not a name an actual Asian person would have.

The Goldstein sisters are probably distantly related to Anthony Goldstein, who JKR confirmed (on Twitter of course) is Jewish, meaning that Tina and Queenie are most likely Jewish too (and Goldstein is a Jewish surname). However, despite the fact that the first FBaWTFT is set DURING Hanukkah in 1926, there’s zero signs of them celebrating or observing it. Maybe that’s more on set design than anything else, but come on - if I, a fanfic writer, can do some research, JK/the crew of a major movie can too!

Adding on from that, gotta love how one of the JEWISH main characters then decides to join the Wizarding world equivalent of Hitler. I already had problems with Queenie’s characterisation in CoG, but that’s the icing on the cake.

POC/Black characters - in both series but since I’m a Beasts blog... Seraphina Picquery, a Black female president serving a term during a MAJOR wizarding world crisis, is severely reduced to have only 3 lines in CoG. Nagini’s only purpose is to be the only friend of Credence, a white man, before he joins Wizard Hitler and abandons her; she’s also an Asian character who we know one day permanently becomes a SNAKE, and who goes on to actually have a piece of Voldemort’s soul inside of her?? And some do see her as his slave, though you could argue that she’s actually the only being that he holds any love or respect for. Leta Lestrange is a half-black woman who is killed/literally sacrifices herself for TWO WHITE MEN, and who’s death was literally confirmed to have been added in last minute.

Also, the whole Lestrange storyline was fucking nasty: white Lestrange Sr imperius-ed a black woman (Yusuf Kama’s mother), raped her, and she then died in childbirth. I’m sorry, what the fuck??

In Harry Potter, Seamus is a terrible stereotype of an Irish person - he likes to blow things up. Look up the IRA and their bombings. Fucking Irish stereotype. As someone with Irish grandparents and who is proud of their Irish heritage, this really pisses me off.

Let’s not forget the whole Native American cultural appropriation. That truly speaks for itself.

So here is where I speak candidly to everyone who follows me and/or sees this post. While Beasts is no longer my No. 1 fandom these days, it and Potter still hold a huge piece of my heart. I have 5 wizarding world tattoos, so much merchandise, and I can safely say that being a fan of both series has shaped me as a person. Both of those series helped me get through the darkest days of my life, including bullying at school, my Nan passing away, and my mental health struggles.

This is why what’s happened has impacted me so much and broken my heart. For me, it feels like it’s tainted now because of Jo and her views. I know that we should separate the art from the artist, but when her views are so clearly woven into the very fabric of the Wizarding world, it’s a huge problem.

Here’s another part of the dilemma - I do not wish for the Beasts films to be cancelled. I’m well aware that the *cough* people who dislike me will say I’m trying to be negative, trying to boycott the series blah blah blah, but that’s truly the last thing I want. I still love the story, the characters, the soundtrack, and I want to know how it ends, if only for my own piece of mind. It’s also important to add that by boycotting Beasts, it’s also harming the hard working thousands of others who worked on the films: the cast, the crew, the extras, the musicians, etc., not to mention the fans who actually are invested in the series and have taken solace in it. It’s not fair for them to all suffer over the actions of one TERF.

This is one of my biggest worries, however: the Fantastic Beasts films do NOT have a good reputation as it is. The second film was boycotted by some due to Depp, and now there’s talk of people boycotting number 3 because of JK Rowling. Lots of people already talk hatred about it, and this will only fire that hatred up even more.

There’s also talk of Eddie Redmayne potentially being kicked from the franchise due to a “leak” that he doesn’t want to work with JKR anymore, but this could be sensationalist news reporting. But if it came down to it, I can honestly say that I would rather continue to have Eddie play Newt than keep JKR as a writer. Eddie has done more for Newt than even JKR has, and if he goes, then that will be the last straw for me within the fandom. That will be when I take a sharp exit out, sell my FB merch and have my tattoos covered.

To add, the Fantastic Beasts scripts are...not great. Or, at least, what we saw on-screen wasn’t. Maybe that’s David Yates being the literal worst (fuck you, Yates, you suck) and cutting all the parts with strong female characters, but I honestly don’t think that JKR can write screenplays well at all. I think she’s clearly better at writing books, and that’s fine - books obviously allow for more time to explore characters and story/plot arcs etc, and film scripts offer way less of those chances. I don’t think screenplays allow her to write what she needs to in order to tell the story she wants to, hence why CoG was kind of a hot mess. So maybe it’s just that she’s not suited for screenplays and should stick to books.

Honestly, I kind of just wish that WB would hire another person to finish writing the Fantastic Beasts movies - obviously they’d have to keep JKR on board to tell them the actual plot, but get someone who can actually write screenplays and not be problematic to write them.

By now I’ve gone on long enough that I’ve forgotten my original intent while writing this, so I’ll try to sum up and end now. In short, I am extremely disappointed in JK Rowling and do not support her or her views any longer.

I don’t know how any of you guys are feeling but I would be interested to hear other people’s thoughts, especially other Fantastic Beasts fans. I want to also add that, as always, my DMs and inbox are always open - if not here, then always at @alwaysahiccupandastrid where I’m more active nowadays.

Finally, you guys don’t need me - a white cis woman - to tell you this but you’re all valid and magical and fuck JK Rowling. Her characters would all be ashamed of her, and the characters we grew up with would not stand for the bigotry and vile hatred she spreads under the guise of ““protecting women””. Several of the amazing actors from Potter and Beasts have spoken out against her and her tweets: Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Bonnie Wright, Katie Leung, Chris Rankin, Eddie Redmayne. Some have been...less inspiring (Tom Felton, Evanna Lynch, looking at you two 👀)

I’m sending love to everyone right now. I wish I could say something more useful but I’ve spoken enough - I’ve made my opinion clear. I love you all, please stay safe.

[freewalkerstudio]

I find the intersections of cultures interesting, specifically the intersections of cultures we are born into and the cultures in which we choose to participate. These chosen cultures may speak to us on many levels, be they emotional, intellectual or even subconscious. We may not know why we are drawn to something but we feel an innate pull to be involved. The free will of humans leads to the most interesting combinations of birth and chosen cultures, which furthers the breadth of manifested identities in the world. Because of my own life experience, I decided to investigate other people of color who choose to be artists and identify as alternative, goth or punk.

During this project I had the privilege to meet, photograph and interview some stellar human beings. People who are unafraid and unapologetic about their artistic choices in this world. I am so inspired by each and every one of you. Thank you for being you and giving me a glimpse into your world.

Ashley - “I just do what I think is fun!”

I met Ashley Norman at school, I remember the day well. She had on a really bright outfit and her makeup was weird and fun. She had drawn wispy lines around her eyes in white eyeliner, like an abstract Picasso portrait – each eye different than the other. I thought it was so unique and I was impressed by her call to push her style in a different direction than her peers. When I met back up with Ashley recently, I asked her, what was her inspiration and the pull to identify as an alternative artist? She said only this: “I just do what I think is fun!” Ashley said she is also inspired by her diverse background. For her, being Black, Korean and Dominican gives her much to pull from historically and artistically.

Selena - “I think the hardest part was me finding my tribe, my kindred spirits. You can’t always spot someone who is alternative all the time, just by looking at them. Sometimes it’s highly internalized and you would never know.”

Selena is an illustrator, whose artwork is centered around themes of alchemy and the occult. She expressed that her drawings of demon girls with detached limbs, reflected her inner feelings of being disconnected from her identity sometimes. I asked her when she started to identify as alternative and for her it was in middle school when she realized that music was so important to her but that she felt little connection to Rap and Hip Hop. “It’s kinda like, when you’re Black, you kinda assume that you’re supposed to like these things, and you kinda do, but…it doesn’t feel like it clicks. Whereas for me rock and alternative music clicked for me, I was more able to relate to the subjects in the songs. I was 14, rap music was not helping me cope with what I’m going through. With Rock, we are talking about anger, feelings, things I could better connect with. From there on out I wore all black and listened to My Chemical Romance.”

Roxas - “It’s totally 100% possible to thrive and be yourself.”

Roxas Timmons was my classmate at LaGuardia in the photo program. I remember the first day I saw them and thinking how committed they were to their style. As I got to know Roxas over the past two years, I have learned of their interesting origin story growing up in the conservative Midwest. Roxas likes to be fluid in their identity and although they mostly identify as goth, they also enjoy dressing as a clown, a ghost, punk, alternative and anything in between. They talked a lot about how music and fashion influences their photography, which is primarily driven by self-portraits. They recounted how they started dressing alternative little by little in high school and after graduating, fully went for it. “I meet a lot of people who always say to me ‘I wish I could dress like that’. I want people to know that they can. They can have a successful career and make their way in the world dressing like this.”

Jacqs - “The art that I give to the world is my self expression. Serving looks.“

Much like many of the people I interviewed for this project, Jacqueline Chavois is a total stranger to me. Stumbling across her Instagram account, I was immediately struck by her incredible style and the collections in her house, where she regularly photographs herself. I asked her about her split tongue and why she would choose to make such a drastic choice of body modification. “I feel like it connects me to my African ancestry because the body modifications – these painful rites of passage, I feel that my African ancestors were doing that. It annoys me when it’s seen as only a White thing. Definitely has indigenous, African, tribal roots.”

Shola - “The aesthetic I want to give off is to live that best version of myself and let it be reflected in the work that I do.”

Shola Aurora is a first generation Nigerian singer-songwriter, born and raised in New York City. He performs an hybrid of rock, metal, and industrial goth music. He is heavily influenced by Japanese culture, having traveled to Japan several times. Anime, video games and Japanese fashion are all major inspirations and play out in his artistic choices. I interviewed him in Saint Marks Place, an area where he was able to truly express himself as a young man growing into his identity. Shola talked about how he came to his own style by being exposed to Visual K, a Japanese branch of glam metal. “Visual K showed me that performing is more than just getting up there and singing a song, you can create a world or an experience. It inspired me to live the best version of myself that I could. It left my mind open in terms of what I was interested in doing. As someone who grew up in Brooklyn in the hood, as a black male, the idea of doing feminine things or wearing makeup is unheard of. It took a lot of personal growth for me to break through to that side of myself.”

Xero - “Everyone needs a little bit of fantasy.”

Xero Gravity is a 24 year old biracial Black/Jewish cosplayer and digital content creator who centers herself around diversity and inclusion in the horror and sci-fi realms. I asked her to speak about why these genres are so important to her. “I feel horror is the best lens through which to look at society’s fears as a whole. What people are scared of at a certain time says a lot about what people are going through. When you look at the history of horror, it doesn’t really look good for Black and Brown people like us. We have a very complicated history with the horror genre. I always bring the discussion of horror and Blackness back to Birth of a Nation, the first feature film. It features a white woman in ‘peril’ being hunted by a white man in blackface. Woodrow Wilson screened this in the White House and endorsed it as factually correct. At the end the ‘black man” is hunted down and killed by the KKK, putting the KKK in a favorable light. No one talks about how this is the scariest film ever if you’re a Black person.”

Uny - “My art is fashion. My art is clothes, my art is expression. The way I dress is a total expression of the way I view my world through my lens.”

Unyquee Loretta Ortiz is a seamstress and cosplayer who identifies as Black and Latinx. Born and raised in the Bronx, she spoke about how her heritage plays into her stylistic choices.  “I often wear a lot of African prints because I want to be connected to Africa in the best way that I can do it. I was raised around my Latinx culture so I go out of my way to make my Black heritage more visual. A lot of people don’t look at me and see Latinx because my skin isn’t as fair or olive, but I feel very connected to that side of myself because I grew up around it. Sometimes I think people tend to push that aside and want it to not be there because of how I look.”

[madzilla84]

hi i went through your ace tag and it was rlly comforting in a way. can i ask when u knew or how to deal (if its not to invasive!) thx

Hi anon! I’m glad you liked the posts - I know I can be pretty iffy at tagging so I’ll make sure to keep everything there if I can :)

It’s not invasive at all! The answer’s very long though, lol, because it’s me, so I put it under the read more.

I talked a bit about this in my post last year with the clumsy metaphor for my II denim jacket as sexuality, so if you read that then I might be repeating myself a bit, apologies.

The very short answer is that on some level I’ve always known, and I handled it Extremely Badly lmao. Don’t do what I did. Which was mostly nothing. XD

The longer, proper answer - I knew I was in some way Different when I found myself completely bewildered by the crushes my friends developed when we became tweens/teenagers. Like a lot of queer people, I selected my Pretend Crush and dutifully put up his poster in my locker (Noah Wyle from ER; I thought he had pretty eyes). I thought everyone else was just doing it to be cool, as well, in the same sort of way everyone pretended to love [insert name of popular band here] to save face at school.

But like, we got older, and people started making out and hooking up with Real Boys at parties, and still - I felt nothing. You’re a late bloomer, many people told me. I thought maybe I could be gay, if I had no attraction to men - but then I wasn’t attracted to women, either, so couldn’t be that. So what, then, I wondered? You can’t be nothing.

OR CAN YOU??? XD

I got to university-ish age, and around that time I went online and heard the term ‘asexual’ for the first time, and stumbled across AVEN; read the definition and thought, yep, that sounds very familiar. But the problem is, finding something out about yourself doesn’t mean you accept it, or like it, or even really believe it. I wondered then if it was actually a real thing, and not something someone on the internet had made up to make themselves feel better, because there was actually something wrong with them, and thus, with me?

I came home for Christmas during my first (only. lol whoops) year of college and brought up the subject with a small group of acquaintances at a New Years party (I’d had quite a bit to drink), and the reaction was - depressingly predictable.

That’s not a thing.

I can’t imagine that.

That sounds awful.

God, no sex? I’d rather be dead.

Have you even tried it? You need to try it.

That can’t be natural.

Okay, I get it, I thought, not bringing that up again.

And, the thing was, because I wasn’t in a relationship, or dating, or looking to, it was sort of - a non-subject. I had no prying family members asking about my love life. My true friends were unfazed by whatever I did or didn’t do (and still are, they’re good eggs), so it was just - something I never had to think about. In my mind, it was just another thing about me that made me weird and an outsider and that I didn’t belong anywhere or with anyone. (All not true! But that was then.)

And unfortunately it took me about 15 years to start to properly deal with it. Yikes. Such a long time - it’s not even about missed opportunities for dating because I’m still not looking to do that, but more about - accepting that it’s a real part of me and is okay and *good* actually and not just a peculiarity to avoid thinking about at all costs. Acceptance seemed unattainable, let alone the idea of being *proud* of it? Ha! Unthinkable. The best thing to do was just to - pretend it didn’t exist. Why poke that bruise, I thought?

I was always in this weird kind of limbo with the LGBT community - like, I felt on some level like I should be there? But at the same time, I felt like an outsider. (For many of the same reasons people to this day will tell you aces/aros don’t belong. All wrong.) I got really into queer films etc as a teen, I went to gay bars with friends and joined the uni LGBT society … and felt uncomfortable almost all the time. (I know *now* that’s because I was *still* trying to be something I wasn’t and wasn’t being honest with myself or anyone else, on any level. And a lot of the club nights we went to were basically about hooking up, which is fine and all but absolutely Not what I was looking for, and made me feel even more out of place. Why don’t I want to do that? What’s wrong with me?)

But fortunately, the world is quite a different place now, and I don’t think it’s quite so bad now for younger folks because people are talking about it *so* much more; there’s so much more help and support. And I know everyone bitches about social media but it didn’t exist when I was a teenager and there are so many ace/aro people and resources to connect with now!! We’re still made fun of almost constantly *at best* and excluded a ton and erased etc etc, but it *is* getting better. Even for us older folks still figuring it out. :)

I don’t mind admitting that Dan’s video was a huge help. (Albeit a very painful one. Part of why that video was so tough for me to watch, and still is, is that some of it hit a bit too close to home, you know? I didn’t experience the bullying he did, nor the fame, but many things were deeply recognisable.) That sort of tore the scab off (bit gross, sorry), whether I liked it or not, and made me look at it properly for the first time … well, ever, really. The period of time directly after that was - very raw, for me.

The phandom really helped, too; it’s a very accepting and welcoming community and there are actually lots of ace people! Which is awesome! Maybe I *am* a real person! ;)

So many little things helped too. I met a friend for lunch in January and she got me a glass ace flag pendant as a gift; I couldn’t believe it. I’ve felt able to bring it up with a few people outside my closest friends - eg. a couple of colleagues - and was heartened by their responses. I know they didn’t 100% get it, and that’s okay, but they were interested and open to listening and that meant a lot. I went to Pride last year and had a great time, and the first person who spoke to me there asked me where I got my ace pin. :_) (I’d been once before, in 2015, and I hated it; I felt uncomfortable and disingenuous and like I didn’t belong there, and yet I knew deep down I wasn’t technically just there as an ‘ally’.) Even Dan’s little tiny offhand mention in his mermaids stream! I was like, yeah, we do exist! 

It’s all sort of had the fringe benefit of feeling happier and better about being open about it, like joining the LGBT network at work and - you know, just taking little steps. (anyone wanting to start with me that aces/aros don’t belong in LGBT spaces can catch my tiny hands) I saw an ace lanyard at Vidcon and thought ‘yay!’ rather than being uncomfortable to wear it, partly because I thought about how happy I would be to see someone else wearing one.

I don’t know what the rest of this ‘journey’s going to look like, I just know that over the last year I’ve gotten mostly to a place where I can say I *like* being ace, because it’s actually just what I am in the same way I have brown hair or am short, and not some weird deviance from Being Normal that I Must! Hide! At All Costs! That might sound simple but it was a hard place to get to. (thanks Mr Fire, I guess)

I hope this ramble made *some* sense and answered your question in some way! Feel free to send any more questions :)

[almarchive]

   hello, its nora n this is the ethereal but spoiled alma olive putnam. she goes by all 3 names cos she’s pretentious as fuck. raised in a farmhouse in vermont, never really had to work for anything in her life and doesn’t want to. studying class civ cos she thinks it makes her sound smart, but actually hates fuckin latin and just loves learning about feckless hedonism and the festivals of bacchus. was expelled from princeton in her first year so her parents basically paid her way into lockwood. loves the smell of libraries and listening to french music from a tinny record player in knee socks. bio is below the cut, like this post to be bombarded with plotting messages. i might forget tho so pls message me x

application template.

( elle fanning  / cis-female ) haven’t seen ALMA OLIVE PUTNAM around in a while. the ELLE FANNING lookalike has been known to be TENACIOUS & MAGNETIC, but SHE can also be FANCIFUL & DOUBLE-CROSSING. The 20 year old is a SOPHOMORE majoring in CLASSICS. I believe they’re living in FIDELIS but I popped by earlier and no one answered the door. ( nora. 23. gmt. she/her. )

aesthetics.

a red beret nestled on top of bright platimum locks, neck scarves tied around your throat the way they do it in french new wave films, running barefoot through the woods in feckless hedonism, china dolls with porcelain faces lined against the walls of your room, the mona lisa smile, knee-socks tugged over the hockey grazes on your knees, a forged botticelli drying on your easel, ophelia floating in the middle of a lake.

connection to tatiana & did they choose her name during the watershed?

alma saw her as academic competition and a threat to her de jure throne. in freshman year, tatiana got the role alma auditioned for in a university production. she’s disliked her ever since. alma abslutely chose tatiana’s name, and she’d do it again without hesitating. [that vine voice] I WON’T HESITATE, BITCH

the short form.

—  born in vermont in a big old farmhouse. her great-great-grandfather moved to america as an immigrant and worked on a plantation, made his way up cos he could speak a lot of languages and therefore win more people over. for the last two generations, putnam men have owned the farm and do little of the dirty work. big in the meat industry.

— both her parents had large personalities, so alma’s never really been shy around adults, even as a kid she’d speak to them in a forthright, confident manner, and because she was always surrounded by adults, she’s always seemed a bit wise beyond her years. — very much a consolidation of every character in the secret history. has a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs. obsessed with w.h. auden and the beat poets. — ”aestheticism is the only thing worth pursuing and even that is pointless” — is majoring in classical civilisation. can read ancient greek and latin. also speaks french. — studies hard and plays hard. she gets top marks but it’s because academia is literally her life, she loves the smell of libraries, the ancient smoke of learning, of feeling like old wine in a new bottle reincarnated from the bones of some old, dead witchy woman who invented a cure for cowpox or somethin. — isn’t a foward-planner, however. alma prefers to leave her options open, play the field, live in a spontaneous manner so her study style is mostly cramming a few days before a test, or staying up all night writing an essay on a massive adrenaline boost powered by red bull or probably adderall, scribbling (or typing) furiously into the night. — pretentious motherfucker. loves poetry, especially the romantics, loves morbid ones too, edgar allen poe, sylvia plath, allen ginsberg, she just loves them all. can’t get enough. her favourite films are like…. wanky artfilm independent european cinema. especially french new wave. “what do you think of goddard’s work??” while snorting a line off someone’s sink at 5am on a school night, but you can bet she’ll make it to that 9am class. — very intelligent and beautiful and knows both of those facts. plays devil’s advocate. humanitarian, vegan. — judgemental but takes great care not to appear so. petty and vindictive — just wants to be loved by all. a party girl ; doesn’t rlly enjoy it, jst feels she should enjoy it. — tries to be an enigma. wants to be mysterious and unreadable because that’s what books have taught her makes women desirable and interesting and cool. — obsessively devours mystery and thriller novels. she herself is a gillian flynn book waiting to happen. — act like the flower but be the serpent under it. is a user. manipulative. leads people on. will throw another student under the bus to demonstrate her own intelligence and integrity — heavily involved in the theatre society. loves attention. — has an addictive personality. seems unable to do anything in a small dose, she has to let it utterly consume her. with sports, she’s fiercely competitive, runs track, played lacrosse at school, now is a cheerleader probably. with alcohol, it’s never a shot, it’s a whole bottle – wine or whiskey – she’ll be table dancing before the night’s up and making out with someone she’ll regret in the morning. — her clothing style is like…. vintage thrift store but make it preppy. berets and cute hats, neck scarves, large fluffy cardigans or like those leathery jackets with big suede fringes on them, mini skirts (very 70s), and knee-high socks or boots. quite often she’ll be in sports kit, maybe a cute tennis skirt, n when she’s feeling casual she’ll wear like, a talking heads tshirt with a pair of mom jeans and converse, but otherwise, the library is her catwalk. — relates to ophelia from hamlet and sibyl vane in dorian gray. weirdly obsessed with women who commit suicide. loves jackson pollock paintings and abstract art. – likes old things. old books, old music, old houses, it reminds her of happier times like when she wasn’t alive. buys all her music on vinyl and has a gramophone because “the sound quality is better” kfdsjj.

plots.

here are some generic wanted plots but by all means message me so we can flesh them out more if any strike ur interest:

study buddies !! someone who is equally unprepared and so spends all night in the library with alma before a big deadline, maybe they even met in the library

if they’re from new england or vermont, then cousins . second cousins / extended family / family friends –  probably spat volavons on your character once as children, omg childhood friends !

people who live on the same floor and only know each other from brief interactions in the lift or the canteen

frinds !! unlikely friends !! toxic friends !! former best friends separated by sporting or academic rivalries !

hockey / cheer friends who are on other teams but who she absolutely loves playin against!!!

fellow academics who like meeting up to discuss latin and greek ! gimme a secret society bonding by their love of ancient learning

i reckon she’s in a lot of societies, definitely the film club, maybe works as a projectionist at the uni cinema if they have one so give me ppl affiliated with that, give me fellow wanky pretentious art-lovers and poets and historians who will go to museums and galleries with her and listen to the velvet underground on vinyl

people she gets mortally fucked off her tits with at parties

people who think she is throwing her academic potential away by caving to hedonistic impulse

people she has drunkenly made out with, hooked up with, or regularly sleeps with casually, maybe even a friend w benefits she is repressing feelings for, i love angst,

people she used to date or unrequitedly likes, but to them it’s just a physical thing, give me all the thirsty angst plots, and maybe some softness too, i need some religion in this girls life, she is a roman catholic after all

full biography.

alma olive putnam.

intro.

           the girl is a knife. razor-sharp, double-edged, the bright shine of a two-faced, lovely thing. silver like the secrets you magpie thief from other heads. you’re a scavenger of knowledge, of tidbits, of gossip to lock away for later use and late-night re-inspection. a mind is like a clock if you get to learn the pieces. bit by bit, you dismantle the inner workings of the brains that tick around you – how easy it is to change it’s path, how words and their meanings can make a person laugh or cry in an instant. to have the power to control that is to be a god. it’s the power trip you crave wielding pom-poms in your hands; a possessive need for control that a younger you, small and weak, never had as a child. small lips, smaller smile, a doll clutched in your too-hungry fingers, hard enough to shatter the bones of a real infant. you cut your hair with your mother’s kitchen scissors before the autumn falls, rendering you out of season, unfit for the cold weather that beats against the nape of your neck, where a stick-and-poke marks the star you were born under ; the bull. “mama, when will i be a queen?” as soon as they find a crown small enough not to slip from your head.

biography.

           if you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. hands red, stained by pomegranate seeds, the empty pulp of its shell splattered on your thighs you find yourself wondering – what would it be like to want? in the beginning, you never knew hunger. twins, born under the same star, you first, him second – a nuclear family. never a sister to compete with, you were always the cherry pie of your parents’ hearts. white-haired, blue-eyed, beautiful baby of mine. the townhouse in vermont and the summer house in lyon, you wanted for nought, showered with attention, saddled with gifts - hardly a wonder you came to rely on such affection as a confirmation of your own worth.

           at eight years old you first met death, blood on a gingham-print dress, a smear of it over your cheekbone and the pulp of a mangled animal at your feet murdered by the hands of a stable boy. “alma, my precious baby, you get away from that filth,” your mama would cry from the upstairs balcony – cigar in one hand and a bloody mary in the other – though whether the filth she referred to was the dead pig or the boy with a kernel of corn in his mouth, you never did find out.

           your family earned their keeps in farming, great-grandfather wolfgang hildegarde a german immigrant, great-grandmother maura lisbon a prairie girl. they fell hopelessly in love between troughs and pig-shit, working for three dollars a day at a farm their descendants would later own, trade deals with the indians, vacations to calcutta, your father todd putnam in the kind of sheepskin coat his father’s father could only dream of owning. he worked hard so that you’d never have to. your mama once asked – you heard it through the window, rounding cartwheels across the picket-fenced lawn – could he not find a respectable career rather than selling shrink-wrapped pork for a dime a dozen? that blood money had no business raising a child. you look far back enough, edie, your father had said in his low, strong voice that could bring a civil war to silence, and i think you’ll find that all money is blood money.

           language was never fickle on your tongue, french dinner time talk by the time you were out of your hush puppy shoes, your mama fixing the au pair a smile as she fixed herself another martini. you learned the clarinet at four and how to dance with the grace of a swansong at six, ethereal under a spotlight, an audience captive in the palm of your hand. by eight you knew that you’d always been destined to be loved. loved so hard they would want to taste you, bite into the soft plump of your cheek and eat you alive. that was how magnetic you wanted to feel. but mother hamsters eat their own young when penned in together too long, and soon you became too wild, too restless, another package on your father’s delivery invoice, box-shipped out to english boarding school.

           fitting in had never been something you had to concern yourself with. you were always the shiny new toy the other girls wanted to play with, bright like a dropped coin from a magpie’s beak. wherever you went, you seemed to leave a trail of awe, pig-tailed harriet’s adoring you, imitating you, teachers forgiving your class-time chatter for the sake of your wild heart and the restless spirit you possessed. tell us what it’s like in the states, alma. they’d coo, enamoured by your hollywood drawl. does your father own a gun? you hardly knew. barely even knew the colour of his hair, for the scarce amount of times he’d stoop to kiss your cheek, though you’d tell silver-tongued tales if it’d guaranteed you an audience. when you learned how to smile at the right times, and that flattery would get you everywhere, it soon became apparent that charm would pave the yellow brick road to success even when your lack of drive couldn’t.

           the road you followed – gum-snapping, roller-blading, friendship bands all up your arm – eventually led you to small-town fame. bright-eyed and gingham skirted, you’d always known you were more. there was a hunger in you to be something extraordinary, a want so adamant to be imagined and desired that it was almost savage. in leather-bound volumes and a circle of stones, you were helen of troy, the girl for whom they’d launch a thousand ships. but there’s so much rage within you, collecting like sawdust in cavernous parts. hockey helped. there was something grounding about the feeling of a stick clasped in your hands. sweat. stiff knuckles. feet pounding the earth. the smash of wood against flesh in the scram of a game, passed off as mere enthusiasm. “slipped, sorry.” hockey is the one thing you had that was yours alone – a feral instinct that motivates you to play; something primitive within you that sparks an energy like no other. on the pitch, you feel alive.

[sunnysynthsunshine]

Lolipops and Gumdrops (The Young Ones) (written October 2nd 2018)

The Young Ones was written by Ben Elton,Lise Mayer and Rik Mayall

The Young Ones was a sitcom that lasted from 1982-1984 

this fanfic is a exploration of the past,present and future for the characters

as in the ending of the show they were killed off because the writer’s had ran out of ideas.

The term "Lollipops and Gumdrops" is a made up term to describe feelings of wholesome mixed nostalgia

it's second meaning refers to the development of Vyvyan and Rick's relationship.

Chapter 1  (this explores the past of the characters prior to the events of The Young Ones)

 Before Scumbag

It was the early 1970s

In a fancy neighbourhood lived a family, and their son was sitting at the dinner table,

His parents were having an argument he had a vest and rolled up trousers with a few spots on his face.

His dad growled as he slammed his knife and fork on the table

“I SWEAR THIS NEIGHBOURHOOD HAS BEEN TAKEN OVER BY FILTHY HIPPIES!”

His mother nodded,

“Dominic I couldn’t agree more  useless layabouts all they want to do is do drugs and take up space on the roads with their protests”

Rick rattled his teeth as he nervously shook and timidly asked

“can I be excused?”

His dad shouted back

“Richard for the last time I said no talking when your mother is talking!”

His mum scoffed

“Yes, that’s incredibly rude  GO TO YOUR ROOM!”

Rick mumbled before he yelped, “I don’t have to do what you say fascists” as he attempted to flick a rude hand gesture

His dad glared

“HOW DARE YOU USE SUCH A OBSCENE GESTURE IN THIS HOUSEHOLD!”

Rick staggered up to his room when he shut the door

Rick’s room was his escape his shed of wonder, music and revolution

Philosophy and Marxism books on his nightstand, posters of Cliff Richard and The Who on his wall

And his prized possession...his record player   he looked through his records and put on his Ziggy Stardust ep as the opening chords of Starman were music to his ears

He stripped off his white shirt, replacing it with his black shirt while he sat on his bed reading a graphic novel and wrote a bit of poetry

He said

“I wish I could be like Ziggy or Cliff...be someone else for a change...not lonely pathetic Richard

Someone not like that, Someone who isn’t boring someone who doesn’t take rules from anyone...except Marx”

While he finished flicking through the pages he looked through his dressing table and took out...his makeup compact  he wouldn’t dare tell anyone at school about his androgyny

But he felt that he could be something unique…

He adjusted the brushes and applied the various eyeshadows, blush and lip gloss to his face canvas

He had a cigarette in hand and relaxed in his chair bobbing his head to bowie’s inviting eclectic voice.

Elsewhere down the street was another high class family the mother and father were a few generations older but they still moaned about “workers” and how the youth were a threat to society” in their back garden was their son Neil he normally had slicked back hair and fancy suits but when he’d go outside he’d show the hippie wallflower he’d later become

"Oh what a lovely day it is today Hello flowers, hello sun, hello clouds, hello plants"

anthropomorphic vegetables and plants grinned back at him "Hello Neil!"

he’d catch insects, wander the hedge mazes and grow vegetables..but amongst the pretty vines that decorated the patio he’d sometimes think about wrapping those wreaths around his neck until all he could see would be the beautiful sunlight...one of the days he did that his parents found out and he was diagnosed with clinical depression,his parents saw that as a disgrace he lost sleep and would stay up on some nights but as much as he was miserable he knew he wasn’t the only one so Peace Studies was what he decided to study once he finally got a place in uni.

In the city in a more dangerous side of town lived a barmaid Lindsay and her daughter Vivian

Lindsay would work at the pub the Kebab and Calculator leaving Vivian alone on some days

"Viv I'm just heading down to the pub alright"

"ok Mum"

Vivian waved and nodded frowning as she shut the door

"Vivian put on the cassette player and the sound of the Misfits was blasted, Vivian turned on the television to watch horror films and aggressively punch pillows.

Vivian had gotten used to bad luck,he had to buy her own birthday presents Lindsay would just give booze as presents while Viv liked the odd babycham it got old after he hit 17 when Vivian would be alone Vivian would either play video games,watch tv,get in street fights with fascists,study for her science exams or go to clubs to mosh to punk music Vivian at times felt lost...it didn’t help that at times socialising was hard for Vivian she’d retaliate with violence often

when Vivian was little she'd just listen to enter sandman on her walkman while blowing bubbles.

Vivian didn’t feel like a girl. she would dread looking in the mirror, Vivian eventually decided to transition, Vivian became...Vyvyan being a punk Vyvyan felt like he could show more of his self-expression through his appearance and attitude  he made his dyed orange hair spiky, got a few piercings and bought a ton of band merch and patches for his “battle jacket”

Vivian would bind but he'd only do it when he'd be alone when his mum did find out his mum couldn't tell the difference

There was also Mike a runway model influenced by classic Hollywood who would scam people for money usually the money was just so he and his papa wouldn’t end up on the streets again.

Chapter 2  (considering the original ending resulted in the characters getting killed off via a bus crash with no answer to what happened afterwards this chapter gives an alternate ending of what would happen if they did survive)

: Summer Holiday Part 2

The aftermath of the bus crash

It had been a few decades

Rick, Vyvyan, Neil and Mike were at Uni, Scumbag College specifically

Richard took up a different name "Rick", he took inspiration from ziggy's style and put plaits in his hair projecting an androgynous appearance he would've been able to show previously he openly wrote his poetry and got interested in political science and Anarchism self-proclaiming himself as "The Peoples Poet"....however, his tory side still could be seen in his pretentious, egotistical attitude.

Vyvyan didn't change anything, Vyvyan didn't give a toss what people thought of him sure his explosive violence and anger were repetitive at times but sometimes his compromises of destroying property were needed considering their lack of money and food stock.

Neil expressed the flower child that he truly was...but he was also a bit of a hypochondriac believing superstitions easily not the brightest crayon in the box but at least he had good cooking skills using the vegetables he had grown to make soups, lentils and other dishes

Mike just kept his "cool person" persona he couldn't get enough qualifications to get to mainstream colleges so he bribed the deen his course was business and advertising

It was kinda depressing...having to eat leftovers half the time, often having to deal with fights either from Vyv and Rick or from the people outside.

but they knew that they had nobody else, the country was in political hell so Rick's constant thatcher bashing was justified, Vyvyan's habit of destroying stuff was needed so they'd have money left, without Neil they'd not have much food and without Mike they wouldn't have someone to be the "voice of reason" in times of such chaos.

Thus the bank robbery ironically being at the same time as another bank robbery, in that bus, everything was nothing as they happily sung Cliff Richard's "Summer Holiday" only to drive off the cliff.

BOOM!

Neil and Mike got away quickly with minor burns...Vyvyan and Rick, on the other hand, we're stuck inside amongst the flames and debris

Neil shouted "Oh Mike this is very heavy, like more heavy than anything else we've ever experienced"

Mike nodded in response "I agree this is starting to be dangerously serious" as he flicked out his phone and called emergency services

"YOU BASTARDS YOU COMPLETE UTTER BASTARDS ARE YOU JUST GOING TO LEAVE US HERE TO ROT HELL?" Rick screamed in panic

"Oh damn I never thought it would end this way, I never got to have my first love, my first shag none of that I am going to wilt like the great leaders that came before me I guess the pigs have won I guess there is no future, no future for me," he started sobbing

Rick stopped sobbing when he noticed an uncomfortable silence outside of the roaring flames around him...the silence was coming from Vyvyan at the front of the bus

Rick out of his seat and crawled underneath the flames up to where Vyvyan was "Vyvyan?" he quietly asked as he shook the unconscious punk in front of him

he repeated himself "VYVYAN?" he yelled at the top of his voice

Rick knew this wasn't good "No! God no, please not him sure we had our rows, fights and disagreements but he never left, I enjoyed when we'd take the piss out of each other, I don't know how I'd continue life without him, I'm not letting the fascists win...Vyv he..., Rick gulped "he was my friend"

he grabbed Vyvyan's body and carried him over his back while kicking the doors and windows open

now on the ground away from the flaming inferno, Rick tried to process the situation and his background knowledge of CPR

he rested Vyvyan on the flat surface and begun to tilt Vyv's head back slightly putting pressure on his jaw

smirking in relief Rick noticed there was something else he had to do he looked sideways

he inhaled pinching Vyvyan's nose with his thumb and index finger as he placed his mouth over Vyvyan's and took some quick breaths

Vyvyan started to be coming back to him Rick released his nostrils he could sense Vyvyan breathing again

Vyvyan was confused as he attempted a punch only for Rick to block Vyv's fist and kiss it

eventually, emergency services arrived Vyvyan didn't give more punches as wires and patches were put onto him while he was placed onto a stretcher and being checked for injuries and burns"

Vyvyan coughed a bit and said

"What happened?"

Rick stood nearby smirking

"We crashed a bus over a cliff conveniently placed next to a billboard of Cliff"

Vyvyan gave a snarling type of expression

"No, you bastard to me, what happened to me?"

Rick kept his smile but spoke more solemn

"You...you almost died your oxygen was low and because you were at the front of the bus you took the most damage"

Vyvyan tried to process the information and raised his eyebrows

"and you saved me?"

Rick nodded,

Vyvyan gulped speaking in a less rough raspy voice

"Thank you"

Rick kept smiling cheerfully at Vyvyan when he saw Neil and Mike running up

"There you lot are what were you waiting for? the end of the world? there's more to life than being a cloud you know" he scoffed.

Neil moaned

"Sorry Rick, but that was very heavy"

Mike folded his hands

"Neil's right that was horrible what you and Vyv were dealing with" "still it was smart of you to save him like that, I'm proud of you

Rick blushed at the compliment

Mike continued "I understand why you call yourself a peoples poet you're a poet for the people, you care for the people or the "workers" as you call them" he then patted Rick's head in a fatherly way"

Rick smirked "Yeah not all people some people are fascists but...some people..some people are alright"

Later they were in the hospital and it was no different than when they were at home instead of moaning about thatch Rick moaned about the NHS, Vyvyan would threaten to attack him with medical instruments and they'd chase each other, Neil would get leftovers from the vending machines and cafes nearby and Mike would flirt with the nurses.

Rick sat in his hospital bed, bored beyond belief, "I hate this, the stupid education system, the ruddy NHS, it's no different than prison"

Mike read his magazine "Well you're lucky we aren't in prison I'm never going back into the slammer you hear"

Neil moaned, "we get it but maybe if we got jobs, we could get the house back and avoid prison"

Rick scoffed smirking "WELL FOR ONCE NEIL HAS THE RIGHT IDEA!"

Mike said, " Rick I'm trying to read"

Rick answered back, "well then again we are innocent, we scrapped through our GSCE's, the bus I stole was already about to be destroyed anyway and the bank was already being robbed when we tried to rob it,we've all got social diseases but our opinions shall be justified by the riots going on in this country, and if the pigs do give us a visit we'll give this alibi

"Gee, Officer Krupke, we’re very upset; We never had the love that every Child oughta get We ain’t no delinquents We’re misunderstood Deep down inside us, there is good!"

Mike groaned, "Oh no he's singing Broadway songs"

Rick kept singing out of tune "We’re no good, we’re no good We’re no earthly good Like the best of us is no damn good!"

Vyvyan yawned and lept out of his bed grabbing a plastic knife and fork, aiming them at Neil and Mike

Rick said, "if it wasn't for me you'd be dead"

Vyvyan shrugged, "well it does feel more like hell than it does a hospital"

Neil asked, "Vyv why aren't you, your usual aggressive self?"

Vyvyan chuckled to himself "I'm taking a break from that, the doctors say my anger levels give me a risk of having high blood pressure, headaches and other problems

Mike emotionlessly turned his head "Oh"

Neil then walked  off to the cafe and vending machines to get food

Vyvyan fidgeted with the plastic fork as sat by Rick's hospital bed smirking at him

"Well this is it, new world, new people yet you're still stuck with us aren't you?"

Rick grinned, "Yeah, in a way we are kind of like a weird family, We're the children, Neil's the mum and Mike...."

Mike rolled his eyes "your the one thinking of weird ideas, Rick"

Rick snorted "well your the one to talk Dad"

Vyvyan fell on the floor laughing, while Mike blushed bright red "Oi! nobody who isn't a date of mine can call me that!"

Vyvyan got up "I think we've heard enough out of you've listened to too much Frankie goes Hollywood"

Mike tried to backpedal "T-They said that song was about motivation"

Vyvyan and Rick smirked at each other ".....Sure"

Rick then looked at Mike smiling innocently "it's ok Mike, we accept you for the gay dad that you are"

Mike said, "I'm not gay, I like men but I like ladies as well"

Rick cheered, "So your Bi, like Freddie Mercury wonderful"

Neil walked back carrying a wooden tray of sandwiches, chocolate bars, chips, toast and sausages, placing it on the nearby coffee table

"Hi Guys, I got us some supper, and it's not lentils"

Rick jumped for joy hugging Neil "Thank you, Neil, you shouldn't have  Now! let's have the last supper"

Neil smiled "Uh, your welcome Rick, but why are you suddenly being so nice?"

Rick grinned as he walked back to his bed "I, Nice? Neil the people's poet is always thankful for their people and goods, it's just part of my nature"

in between bites of food he got more honest speaking in a softer tone "I've learned a lot from you,Vyv and Mike, I was an internally homophobic twat back then,I would lash out at others when I was really angry with myself,I became sarcastic I was angry with the world but was still learning how to shake off my parent's conservative values for the revolutionary Marxism I was studying,I am grateful I know you, and how your able to put up with a bastard like me, I love you, my comrades, we are all Young Ones,and I've accepted who I am too,I'm Rick and I am brilliant"

Vyvyan sat on the side of Rick's bed smiling at him hiding tears "that is the soppiest thing I've ever heard but now you've made cry, hope your happy"

a few years after that they performed alongside Cliff himself for Comic Relief 1986 their cover got the song in the charts again and it felt like they would always be "ThE YoUNG ONES"

who weren't afraid...to live, love while their love is strong even when they wouldn't be Young Ones anymore.

Chapter 3  (this explains what the Young Ones were up to in the 1990s)

: Common People

It was the 90s Rick was into Britpop, Vyvyan was into glam punk and industrial music like KMFDM, Neil was grunge and Mike wore dad Hawaiian shirts

they weren't tv stars like before though, the most they got was from US Reruns on Comedy Central

they still lived in the same house they just changed it up a bit Vyvyan spent more time going to industrial mosh pits or appearing in advertisements Neil also appeared in advertisements,advertisements for petrol in Austrailia...yeah I don't get it either Mike got back to college but studied a different topic he studied film and Rick well out of his still active political life oh! you should've seen

Rick stood on a blue stage that had his name sparkle on a neon sign above him he was in his old outfit of a rolled up shirt, tie and jeans

She came from Greece she had a thirst for knowledge, She studied sculpture at Saint Martin's College, That's where I, Caught her eye. She told me that her Dad was loaded, I said "In that case, I'll have a rum and coca-cola." She said "Fine." And in thirty seconds time, she said, I want to live like common people, I want to do whatever common people do, I want to sleep with common people, I want to sleep with common people, Like you. Well what else could I do I said "I'll see what I can do." I took her to a supermarket, I don't know why, But I had to start it somewhere, So it started there. I said pretend you've got no money, She just laughed and said, "Oh you're so funny." I said "Yeah? Well I can't see anyone else smiling in here. Are you sure you want to live like common people, You want to see whatever common people see, You want to sleep with common people, You want to sleep with common people, Like me. But she didn't understand, She just smiled and held my hand. Rent a flat above a shop, Cut your hair and get a job. Smoke some fags and play some pool, Pretend you never went to school. But still you'll never get it right, 'Cause when you're laid in bed at night, Watching roaches climb the wall, If you called your Dad he could stop it all. You'll never live like common people, You'll never do whatever common people do, You'll never fail like common people, You'll never watch your life slide out of view, And dance and drink and screw, Because there's nothing else to do. Sing along with the common people, Sing along and it might just get you through. Laugh along with the common people, Laugh along even though they're laughing at you, And the stupid things that you do. Because you think that poor is cool. Like a dog lying in a corner, They will bite you and never warn you, Look out, they'll tear your insides out. 'Cause everybody hates a tourist, Especially one who thinks it's all such a laugh, Yeah and the chip stain's grease, Will come out in the bath. You will never understand How it feels to live your life With no meaning or control And with nowhere left to go. You are amazed that they exist And they burn so bright, Whilst you can only wonder why. Rent a flat above a shop Cut your hair and get a job Smoke some fags and play some pool Pretend you never went to school, But still you'll never get it right 'Cause when you're laid in bed at night And watching roaches climb the wall, If you called your dad he could stop it all Yeah You'll never live like common people You'll never do what common people do You'll never fail like common people You'll never watch your life slide out of view And then dance and drink and screw Because there's nothing else to do I want to live with common people like you.....

"I LOVE YOU JOHNNY MARR,DAMON ALBARN AND MORRISSEY!!!" Rick shouted into his microphone

Vyvyan snarled at Rick "Shut up Britpop bastard"

Vyvyan snatched the microphone and bulged his eyes out at the audience he had dark purple eyeliner and vampire esque contour on "Oh the beautiful people, the beautiful people

Neil then took the mic "Where the lights out, "ENTERTAIN US!", "HERE WE ARE NOW!"

Mike finger-gunned the audience "I'll be here" singing the spice girls I'll be there out of tune

Chapter 4 (and now the present and future,how the characters are interacting in the 21st century)

: The Young Ones: Years on into the vaporwave moonlight

The Young Ones in the 2010s note:this chapter is littered with Internet references

Rick was on a parade float holding a guitar filled with "angst" he had a military type outfit on and his pigtails were undone so his semi-long hair could be shown

"When I was a young child, my dad took me into the city, to see the marching band," "he said, Richard, you'll grow up would you be the poet saviour for the people, broken, beaten and the damned

Neil would play post-grunge songs with local bands for events like weddings, pub parties etc. , Mike was in a rockabilly revival subculture and Vyvyan was a fan of White Stripes and Gorillaz

But a new decade was just starting to show

Rick said,

"Vyvyan that's the wrong tape rewind it"'

Neil moaned as he worried about the camera

"Oh guys stop being so heavy it's just a polaroid"

Vyvyan then adjusted the camera correctly and handed it back to Neil who was wearing hipster attire with a star necklace around his neck and tarot cards in his other hand

.......SHUTTER...........rec:o beep 02:10:18

Rick rested on his bed posing in an "aesthetic" way decorated in an 80s anime styled sweater with his name written in Japanese characters, a pastel coloured cardigan and his plaits out like before wearing light orange shades singing the song lyric "I want blood, guts and chocolate cake"

Vyvyan ran over to his side placing a tray of crisps, ketchup and chocolate on the dressing table dipping the crisps in the ketchup eating them as he begun to fidget with a fake rainbow coloured butterfly knife before shoving Rick's face into the chocolate cake

"VYVYAN YOU RUINED MY AESTHETIC!"

Vyvyan screamed "I WAS BORED, IT'S NOT THAT HORRENDOUS TO OFFEND OSCAR WILDE IS IT"?

on a book cover, a ghost of Oscar Wilde is folding his hands sarcastically "no I suppose not peasant"

later that night Vyvyan was sitting in front of his laptop recording with a torch, microphone and horror figurines around his room "Hey mates it's Vyvyan's spooky storytime of True Crime" "so there was this girl in Liverpool and she knew some boys of the neighbourhood who would frequently mock and harass her so...she stabbed them and hid their corpses in the local pond"

"BE QUIET IM TRYING TO LISTEN TO JAPANESE 80S MUSIC WOULD YOU STOP BEING A HYBRISTOPHILLIAC!" Rick shouted from next door

Vyvyan shouted back, "CULTURAL APPROPRIATOR"

Rick overdramatically gasped "How dare you I am no weeaboo unlike you"

the next day they were at Mcdonalds when Neil noticed something about their meal

" I don't think we should eat this, it's not vegan you don't get it I'm literally eating death"

Vyvyan shrugged

"It's no different than the rest of the manufactured garbage you get in these places"

Mike nodded and Rick smirked, "Yeah Neil, if you hate the place so much eat somewhere else"

Neil moaned "but I don't go anywhere else without you"

they all groaned while Neil kept complaining

"You see all your doing is killing and torturing these animals"

Vyvyan rolled his eyes "Yeah animals that eat their offspring"

Neil wouldn't shut up so Rick stabbed him with a fork

when he noticed Mike was telling a waiter about what happened he hid in the bathroom "I can't believe it I killed Neil, it was all over one silly argument how could I?"

Vyvyan opened the door "you, miserable sod you can come back out now Neil's still alive nothing serious"

Rick breathed a sigh of relief "Thank goodness"

a few days later Mike wanted Vyvyan to stick his head out the window again.....for the vine

"ok Vyv just do what you did before on university challenge," Mike said as he manoeuvred his phone

"Do not stick your head out the window, mmm I wonder why" Vyvyan then slammed his head against the window as the video was done being recorded

Mike smirked to himself "this will get me lots of hits" Vyvyan had a few cuts on his face, he wasn't happy "You bastard my face is gonna need stitches now because of this!"

Mike ignored him only for Vyvyan to say "It's not stopping me from wanting to kick your face in" as he chased Mike and had a slapstick fight with him

while they were in the middle of that Billy Balowski was nearby rapping badly "Hey it's Lil Balowski and this is what I'm doing today I'm kneeing this two for not giving their pay"

It was night-time and Vyvyan and Rick were watching the sunset Rick said, feeling nostalgic "remember the good old days when we would attack each other with cricket bats and call out thatcher in our satirical performances"

Vyvyan finished his cigarette and said "Yeah, those were wild times of complete madness the chasing like Tom and Jerry and constant mentions of bottom"

Rick laughed it off "I recall you wanted to kiss my bottom" Vyvyan smirked "I did not, you wanted to kiss my bottom, anyways we were young ones then and we aren't young anymore"

Rick looked out into the now present moonlight "technically we will always be young ones, the floating timeline keeps us this way, it's like hell but it's our personal hell an anarchic fun open hell, not a fascist one"

Vyvyan nodded "hey, what was your life before this like anyway?" Rick inhaled and said "Well it certainly wasn't all lollipops and gumdrops" "I had some elements of self-expression and I did love some parts of my life but other parts are overshadowed by negative memories being told to believe on the right wing side of things. Where nothing but political lies were fed to you with Teresa and Trump the world seems to be repeating itself, but I never got a chance to fully spread my wings until meeting you. I was usually a quite timid, shy bloke, heh I do like the others but it was you who I felt the most connected to...you had an energy that I wanted but now I know I already had it now I have someone beautiful to share it with."

Vyvyan was surprised that all of that was hidden in those whining tantrums Rick had back in the 1980s but he felt like his eyes had been opened he felt the same way, he held Rick's hand and smiled at him "I think so too, you, annoyingly revolting, amazing sod"

Rick blushed under his glasses

Vyvyan mumbled smirking, "P-Peoples Poet"

Rick then kissed Vyvyan he kissed back as they cuddled throughout the night

no cricket bats, no punches, no fighting

just love sickeningly revolting but wonderful...love

......Love is the answer ~ Rik Mayall (1958-2014)

[jimsturgessnews]

Actor Jim Sturgess, recently seen in BBC drama Hard Sun with Agyness Deyn, divides his time between Hollywood movies and songwriting. He talks to The Cork about constantly getting beaten up, the similarities between film and music, and swapping his skateboard T-shirts for a bespoke English Cut suit. As a fixture on the red carpet at Hollywood film premieres, Jim Sturgess has had to get used to being decked out by brands. “I remember the first time I got put in a suit,” the Wandsworth-born actor recalls. “I got on my bike the next day and delivered it back to them. They were like, ‘No, no, it’s yours, you can have it.’ I was like, ‘Are you joking?’” Even now, selecting from English Cut’s vast menu is a novel experience for someone accustomed to choosing from a rail of off-the-peg suits. “It’s like ordering a salad in America,” he says of the bespoke process, speaking like a man who spends extended periods of time in health-conscious Los Angeles for work. “You have a million options: do you want three buttons or two? I got quite into it. You start off thinking, ‘Oh, I don’t mind.’ Then you go, ‘Actually, let me see what pleated trousers look like … ’” After chewing it over, Sturgess settled on a rustic dark green. “I have a load of black and grey suits, so it was a chance to create something a bit different,” he explains. “It’s got a sort of tweed feel, a bit boxier than I’d typically go for … I’m sounding like a pro now, aren’t I?” His self-conscious laugh betrays that tailoring is not his, well, strong suit. “I live in Dickies trousers and a pair of white canvas shoes,” confesses the fresh-faced 39-year-old, who could comfortably pass for a twentysomething and still dresses, by his own admission, like a teenage skateboarder, even if he no longer actually skates in the park like he did when he was a teenager growing up in Surrey. “I sort of still think that I do, but I don’t,” he says. “Last year, I was messing around on my board, and I fell off and really hurt myself. Like, it hurt and hurt for a long time. You start to learn the hard way that your body’s not the same as it once was. Plus I have to go and throw myself around and get beaten up for work. You get injuries, and it makes life pretty difficult.” “You have a million options: do you want three buttons or two? I got quite into it. You start off thinking, ‘Oh, I don’t mind.’ Then you go, ‘Actually, let me see what pleated trousers look like’” Sturgess does seem to have a history of being on the receiving end of on-screen violence, from 2008 thriller Fifty Dead Men Walking, in which he played a British agent infiltrating the IRA, with Sir Ben Kingsley as his handler, to 2016 US TV series Feed the Beast, in which he played a Bronx chef with David Schwimmer as his fellow restaurateur. “I’ve got a punchable face,” Sturgess quips. “I suppose I’m attracted to stories that have an edge. Now I just assume that’s what acting is: getting beaten up.” Most recently, he was punched in the face by model-slash-actress Agyness Deyn – with a brass knuckle – for Hard Sun. (She learnt Israeli special forces fighting system Krav Maga for the role.) Written by Neil Cross, the scribe behind Idris Elba series Luther, the pre-apocalyptic BBC series stars Sturgess and Deyn as police detectives who inadvertently uncover a government-level conspiracy to conceal the inconvenient truth that the sun is going to destroy the Earth in five years. As knowledge of impending doom becomes more widespread, the fabric of society begins to unravel. At the time of writing, Sturgess has been selling Hard Sun to audiences in America. “They get bombarded with a lot of regal stuff, and they have a particular idea of what England looks like and sounds like,” he says. “It’s nice to show another side of London – a bit more contemporary.” Less like, say, 2008’s Tudor period drama The Other Boleyn Girl, where he played the brother of Natalie Portman’s Anne and Scarlett Johansson’s Mary, with Eric Bana as Henry VIII. Besides, Hard Sun is “very international”, even if it’s set in the UK: “If you live on this planet, you’re definitely involved.” Hard Sun also involved Sturgess wearing a suit every day, something he’d usually only do on special occasions. “It killed the joy,” he says. “I remember going to the Baftas, so I got out of one suit that I’d been wearing for months and put on another. Normally I’m pretty scruffy, so to put on a suit is quite a big change. It’s nice to put something on occasionally and feel a bit … You just feel different in a suit, don’t you?” Sturgess feels different whenever he gets into costume for a role. “It’s when the character comes alive, when you put on his clothes and the shoes that he wears,” he says. “It’s your identity. When you put on a different pair of shoes, you feel like a different version of yourself. So it’s really not until you put the costume on, clothes that you’ve specifically chosen to represent the character, that you understand, ‘OK, this is who he is.’” It’s surprising to hear that it all comes together at that late a stage, albeit after much planning and research. “Yeah, for sure,” insists Sturgess. “It’s always a very exciting moment, actually, when you go, ‘All right, there he is. That’s the way he’s going to look.’” One of Sturgess’s most sartorially memorable roles was the one furthest removed from any semblance of fashion: 2010’s The Way Back, inspired by the memoir of a Polish officer who claimed to have escaped from a Siberian gulag during WWII and trekked 4,000 miles across the Himalayas to British India. (A 2006 Radio 4 documentary questioned the veracity of the account, although there is evidence that someone did do the walk – just not the author.) “One of the great things that the survival expert told us was that you would never throw anything away,” remembers Sturgess. “So you wouldn’t get rid of your jacket, even in the desert – you’d cut it up and wear it as a headband.” Sturgess went straight from that to 2011’s One Day, the adaptation of the then-unavoidable David Nicholls novel with the instantly recognisable orange cover. Over the course of two decades of on-off romance with Anne Hathaway’s Emma, his character Dexter graduates from student to successful 90s TV personality. “Suddenly I’m in a tight pair of leather trousers and a giant jacket,” Sturgess laughs. “You couldn’t feel more different. And the clothes definitely navigate those feelings.” Those feelings were more combative in the case of London Fields, the adaptation of the Martin Amis novel also starring Billy Bob Thornton, Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, which has been trapped in legal limbo since 2015 after the director sued the producers for allegedly releasing their own cut (panned by the few critics who saw it). Sturgess played petty criminal and pub darts virtuoso Keith Talent, covered in tattoos and a grimy beard that made him feel “a bit tastier than I probably was”. This nearly proved disastrous when someone almost ran him over in a car: “I got really aggressive with him, and quickly realised that he was double my size.” Still, at least he’s used to being beaten up. Sturgess’ own sartorial identity was influenced by American skateboarding culture. “Certainly, when I was in my teenage years, I was very skateboard-heavy in my fashion,” he says. “And now most people look like skateboarders. It blows my mind that the standard footwear is a pair of Vans. Because when I was younger only someone who was into skateboarding would wear Vans.” He’s similarly bemused that lowly streetwear brands have ascended to the height of fashion, and that kids now queue round the block and overnight for the latest product drop at the Supreme store he used to wander into when it was just a skate shop. At the same time though, he totally gets it. “I remember my mum trying to put me into a pair of shoes that weren’t Converse All Stars,” he says. “They looked exactly the same, and they’d probably be way cooler now, but I was mortified. I was like, ‘No, they have to be Converse.’ My mum was like, ‘But they’re too expensive. These one look exactly the same – they’ve even got a star.’ And I was in tears: ‘Mum, you don’t understand. I can’t wear these to school: I’ll get crucified.’” The other major key to Sturgess’s wardrobe choices was music. He started a band when he was 15, singing and playing bongos in pubs despite being under-age. When school and the band finished, he went to the University of Salford to study media and performance, and be closer to the Manchester music scene. “There were a lot of jackets done up to the top and desert boots,” he says. “I miss that different kinds of music were so influential in the way people dressed. It was almost like a gang mentality: you’d have mods, you’d have rockers, you’d have two-tone … And now everyone looks roughly the same. But maybe that’s because I’m just hanging out with 40-year-old men. I don’t know.” Sturgess was as obsessed with films growing up as he was records. “Even at school, drama and music were the two things I was interested in,” he says. His uni course taught him scriptwriting, editing and theatre production as well as acting; he wrote and performed a one-man show called Buzzin’ that brought him to the attention of an agent, who encouraged him to move to London. Instead of kickstarting his acting career, he got into the Camden music scene and started a band called Saint Faith, taking bit parts in TV and ads to pay the rent. When they broke up, Sturgess was cast in 2007’s Across the Universe, a film musical based on Beatles songs and a perfect fit for his skill set. The common thread between music and acting is creativity and, perhaps not obviously in the latter’s case, self-expression. “It’s interesting because they’re very similar and totally opposite at the same time,” says Sturgess. “When you’re writing and playing music, it’s completely you, naked and bare; when you’re acting, you’re pretending to be somebody else. But you use your own emotions and life experiences to try and relate to the character. At the same time, people behind a microphone are playing some sort of a character. They might tell you that they’re not, but there is a level of performance that isn’t you while you’re just sitting with your mum and dad having a roast dinner.” Sturgess describes his diversion into acting as “circumstantial”; even now that he’s a star, music remains a big part of his life. “I’ve got a little studio at home, and then a lot of my friends are musicians,” he says. Over the years and the various bands, he’s amassed a vast quantity of unreleased material; he’s just now really putting his mind to doing something that might actually get out there. “I just want to finish a cohesive record that kind of has a beginning, a middle and an end,” he says. “Not just a load of scratchy demos that are all just lying around that could potentially grow into something great.” Songwriting inspiration can strike Sturgess in different ways. “Sometimes it’s just a thought,” he says. “Sometimes you’ll be messing around on the guitar and a little melody comes into your head, but you have no idea what the song’s about. Sometimes it’s lyrics: you build a song around the words first. Sometimes you can hear a drum loop, someone starts messing around with some melodies and then you just start singing on top.” Either way, it tends to be followed by a great deal more perspiration: “the grinding bit”. Sometimes Sturgess will know from the first page of a script how he’ll play a character – and sometimes not. “I’ve been offered things and I’m like, ‘I don’t know why you’re asking me to do this,’” he admits. “And that’s always quite exciting because it’s out of your comfort zone. You have to build a character, and change the way you speak and move.” For that, he accesses a database being constantly compiled. “Sometimes you’ve got a character in your head that you’d love to find a story for, and then you read something and go, ‘I could put that into this,’” he says. “Or you’ve noticed somebody on the Tube: ‘That’s interesting, the way he is.’ Then you read something and go, ‘I could use a bit of that.’” Getting noticed on the Tube is not something that Sturgess has to worry about – not even on buses with a picture of his face on the side. “Nobody’s that interested, really, so it’s very grounding,” he says. “In LA, people are very excited about movies, it’s an city built around the movie industry, and actors are kind of the commodity of that industry. So you feel a bit of treatment that you definitely don’t get when you come home.” London brings him back down to earth with a bump: “I’m very quickly getting knocked over on the Underground.” He tells an anecdote about a foreign tourist at King’s Cross who kept saying to him, “You’re a star, you’re a star.” Turned out she was looking for the Eurostar. That probably has more to do with Sturgess’s down-to-earthness than any lack of profile. Certainly, though, his flight path has brought him into the orbit of some massive stars. Like Tom Hanks, his co-star on 2012’s Cloud Atlas, who Sturgess describes as “the nicest guy you could possibly imagine” (exactly how you’d imagine him, then). “He took it on himself to organise a movie night every Sunday at his apartment in Berlin,” Sturgess says. “He’d order loads of food and put out the word to the cast and crew. And we’d all pile round there, hungover from Saturday night, to sit on his couch and watch movies.” Hanks would also talk with Sturgess about music: “He knew quite a lot about hip-hop.” Ed Harris, his co-star on The Way Back, is another. “He was one of the first actors that I worked with who I was so in awe of, and who became a friend, which was amazing,” says Sturgess. “He really took me under his wing, we bonded and we’ve stayed in touch ever since.” A surreal scene ensued in a hotel in New Orleans where the pair were working together for a second time, on 2017’s Geostorm. “We bumped into Billy Bob Thornton, who I’d just done a film with in London, in the foyer of the hotel,” says Sturgess. “We were in an elevator – a lift – and I introduced Ed Harris to Billy Bob Thornton. And I was just standing in the middle of two of the coolest dudes I know.” Sturgess doesn’t know what the future holds, beyond the release of two films that he shot after Hard Sun. The first, JT Leroy, is the strange but true story of a woman, played by Laura Dern, who writes a fictional memoir in the persona of a 15-year-old boy. When it becomes a literary sensation, she convinces the younger sister of her boyfriend, played by Kristen Stewart and Sturgess respectively, to masquerade as the non-existent male author – for six years. The second, Berlin, I Love You, is an anthology of 10 romantic stories set in the German capital and the latest in the series that began with 2006’s Paris Je T’’Aime; Dame Helen Mirren and Keira Knightley grace the ensemble cast. “It always surprises you,” Sturgess says of his fluid profession. “Which I quite like. What’s going to happen next? What sort of story am I going to be involved in telling?” Back in his normal “scruffy” clothes, he blends into the Chiltern Street foot traffic like a chameleon, just another anonymous extra in the movies of everyone else’s lives.  (credit)

[achillesmercury1996]

Mindless ramble I plan to read to my therapist about my ~life~ under the cut

Y’all, I just wish I knew what in the ever-loving FUCK I want to do with my life. Like, I wish there was something that I was genuinely GOOD at, but whenever I stop to think about it I just... *Radio Silence*. I went to primary school for 12 mother-fuckin’ years, yo, and during that time, I learned fuck all about myself and what I want to do with the remainder of my life. I dabbled in theater back in those days, but never stuck with it because I’m what my parents like to call ~a quitter~. (When, really, I just didn’t like rehearsals after school, and I especially didn’t like getting harassed by the male director with an ego bigger than Napoleon’s). 

Anyway, by some fucking MIRIACLE, ya girl graduated, and got accepted to UNIVERSITY. Which, for me, it was a huge fucking deal because I’ve never been considered ‘smart’ or ‘the college type’. Like, I graduated high school with a 2.9 GPA, whereas my sisters (who I’ve been endlessly compared to my entire life), graduated with a 3.8 and a 4.0, SO, and ended up going to one of the big 10 universities in America. Again...SO. 

Carrying on. I went to uni undecided because, again, I don’t know what the ever-loving FUCK I want to do with my life. So about halfway through my first semester, I was walking back to my dorm and was like, “FUCK IT, I write a lot, I’m gonna major in Journalism and Minor in Writing hahahahahaha because writing one semi-successful fanfic on fanfic dot net back in 2012 means I’m cut out for this legggoooo!!” 

Anyway, I declare my major and minor, and let me tell you...I took my first journalism courses at uni...and girl, journalism was NOT IT. Not for me, anyway. I always saw journalism as legit WRITING, and given the media boom, it is literally everything BUT writing. When I tell you my ass was hauling a FIFTY POUND VIDEO CAMERA AND BOOM MIC ACROSS CAMPUS FOR A PROJECT WORTH 50% OF MY GRADE...no, ma’am. I literally spent thousands of dollars on a course my 3rd year in my major where you were graded ONLY on doing these 2 film projects...and I DIDN’T DO EITHER OF THEM. I got a D- in the course just because my prof liked me, and would feel bad giving me an F. 

Side note, there was even a point during my 2nd year of uni where I decided to change my minor to EARTH SCIENCE because I was like, “yo, rocks are neat, and maybe I could write for Nat Geo one day hahahahahahaha”. Girl, WHAT!?

Okay, so needless to say, I literally fell into a pit, spiraled out of fucking control, drank so much cheap beer, and dropped tf out halfway through my 2nd semester my 3rd year. I had spent HOURS every single day, prior to my decision of dropping out, just looking at other majors offered at my uni (and I went to a liberal arts school, so we had a ton), and absolutely NONE OF THEM struck my interest. NONE.

So what did I do after I dropped out? You mean other than gain 50 pounds and work dead-end jobs? I WENT TO FUCKING BEAUTY SCHOOL. It’s like, someone looked at me, said my makeup looked nice once, and I RAN WITH IT, GIRL. I shit you not, even before I left the town my uni was in to move home, I was looking at beauty schools out there. It wasn’t until I realized that financial aid wouldn’t pay for housing at a beauty school did I realize I would have to move home. 

So I’m 22, and my dumb ass goes to Esthetics school. One of the WORST ESTHETICS SCHOOLS IN MICHIGAN, MIND YOU. BECAUSE I SOMEHOW GOT A SCHOLARSHIP. And, no, I didn’t get a scholarship because I’m ~so good at what I do~. I got a scholarship because I’m ~broke~, and the admissions officer felt bad for me, and said if I could write a decent essay about why I wanted to be an esthetician, then she could hook me the fuck up. And I said BET, because one thing that came out of me going to uni...I can write a BOMB essay, okay? I was the designated editor on my dorms floor my 1st year at uni. Not because I’m ~such a good editor~ but because I can bang out a 5 page essay in thirty minutes no problem. Ya girl knows how to write some bullshit down on paper and make it look like gold. Too bad I fucking HATE DOING IT. 

Anyway. I go to esthetics school, and immediately get licensed after graduating. It was one of the worst 6 month periods of my entire life, and I honestly hate reflecting back on it. It was also a waste of 8k, and now I’m 10k in student debt hahahaha thanks America! 

I genuinely tried to pursue esthetics afterward. I really did. I had a bitchin’ resume, and I went to a ton of interviews at salons, and applied to countless places as an esthetician and makeup artist. I even had a potential job lined up at a salon not far from my house...which ended up falling through because they wanted me to do ~free labor~ for three months full-time before hiring me. Which...no thanks. I needed money. So what did I do? I GET A JOB AT FUCKING KROGER. AS A PICK-UP ATTENDANT. Again, another dark point of my life that was followed by me quitting there after getting injured, going to work at HOBBY LOBBY only to have a mental breakdown before one of my shifts that leads to me quitting there. 

Holy fuck. So I had a small moment where I was unemployed for the summer. I went on a trip with my boyfriend, and was a bridesmaid and makeup artist for my sister’s wedding. So it was a good summer. Aside from having no direction in my life that wasn’t to the nearest bar or bottle of what-the-fuck-ever. But you know.

I got a job that December (2019) as a receptionist at a local gymnasium. Honestly, it wasn’t that bad. I had nice coworkers, the customers were actually pretty chill, and the kids were...tolerable. It wasn’t bad, okay? I actually liked it, but we all know what followed the year 2019...

That’s right...2020. Covid-19. The bane of all of our existences as of right now. 

We had to close in March of 2020 with no clue as to when we’d be able to go back. Which, at first, was a nightmare. Because I had shit to pay for, and NO INCOME. At least until unemployment kicked in, we got our first round of stimmy checks, and ya girl actually started to thrive. 

I studied more into Buddhism, got into wicca and witchcraft which ended up being a huge light in my life, believe it or not (even if I’m no good at it rn), and I was able to just...be. For a while at least. The world seemed to stop, and I could actually BREATHE for once. It was nice. I lost weight. I stopped drinking ENTIRELY (and haven’t had a drink since summer 2020 THANK YOU VERY MUCH). I read a lot more and finally got to expand my book collection. I just...got to be. And it was so nice.

But now that America and society wants life to ~go back to normal~ and ~keep moving~ (thanks, boomers), that means that I need to do the same. Except I don’t know what it means to ‘go back to normal’ because I’ve never had a normal. And I don’t know how to keep moving because sometimes I really don’t want to. I just want to be. I want to be able to sit down at dinner every night and not feel crazy anxiety because my parents keep staring at me like they’re about to start grilling me about not doing anything with my life. Because, girl, if I had any sense of direction and what I wanted to do with my life, I WOULD BE DOING SOMETHING, OKAY? Like, this pandemic is fucking horrific, okay? But I’d be a liar if I were to say that those few weeks in March and some of April where we were all just vibing, baking bread, sewing masks and being NICE TO EACH OTHER were awful. They weren’t. I loved them. I will forever be chasing that high. 

Fuck. I don’t even know what the point is in writing all of this. Maybe I’ll save it and read it to my therapist on Friday so they can get a sense of what goes on in my mind, or how I’m thinking or whatever...but yeah. I just don’t know what to do. I have no direction. I have no passions. There are things I enjoy doing that make me feel good, but once I pursue them, or am forced to do them in a way that isn’t how I want to do it...I lose that passion. Ya dig? Like back in high school when I was an actress. I actually loved it. But once I had to go to rehearsal after school and get bitched at by a director who treated a high school production of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang like it was Broadway (like, sir, you went to uni for THIS?)...that passion dissolved. Same with writing. Same with makeup artistry. Same with LITERALLY EVERYTHING I’VE EVER DONE IN MY LIFE. And like I said earlier, according to my parents, that makes me ~a quitter~. 

I just...I have no passions, and the few things I enjoy doing...I don’t want to pursue them and end up hating them too. I don’t act anymore. I don’t write. I don’t do anyone else’s makeup but my own. I don’t even shop or go to the stores where I used to work (except for Kroger because a bitch has to eat). So when it comes down to it, whenever someone suggests I work in an area where it’s utilizing one of my few interests, or working somewhere that I like to go, that brings me joy or peace...why the fuck would I do that? Because, like everywhere else, I know in my gut that it’ll ruin that for me. I don’t want those things ruined for me. Even if I might be ~pleasantly surprised~, I don’t want to take that risk. Shit, I’m not that kind of risk taker. I’ll jump off of a 20ft high diving board, but I’ll be DAMNED if I apply and get a job at my favorite bookstore only to end up hating it, okay? No thank you. 

So, like I said in the beginning...I just wish there was something I was genuinely good at. Something I was passionate about that I could pursue it. Maybe even on my own so I could just...enjoy it without corporate hierarchy or whatever barking orders at me or reprimanding me for breathing the wrong fucking way. You know? Or even something that I was SO GOOD AT, that the company or whoever hired me couldn’t afford to lose me as an employee because there would be no one else out there who could do that job quite like me. Except the latter would never be the case, you know? I’m not that good or desirable at fucking ANYTHING. 

Anyway. Too bad there isn’t a course I could take on life. Too bad I couldn’t have directed my own life when it came to deciding to go to uni. Because, honestly, I only went because it was what I was told to do. But I digress about that. I just need...direction. I don’t have any, and I haven’t had any direction for a while. My parents would tell you different because they think that if they advise me on what ~they think is right~ I’ll just do it, and finally get my life together. But they don’t want to hear any of this. They just want me to get a job, make money, and get out of their house. They always say shit like, “you’re 24! You’ve been here longer than either of your sisters!” Again, comparing me to my older siblings. It just doesn’t help when you already don’t know what the fuck you’re doing, you know? 

Ah, fuck...anyways. Writing this helps. Getting these thoughts out helps. Sharing it with...someone (like I said, I’ll probably read this to my therapist) helps. It doesn’t give me any sense of direction or what the fuck I want to do with my life, but hey, maybe if I take these thoughts to someone who has their life more together, or who could help me get there, it could be a good thing. 

I just want to feel fulfilled. And right now I don’t. I never have. And everyone I know doesn’t do anything that fulfills them. It just pays the bills and puts bread on the table. Which is nice and all, but there has to be more to life than living to work and working to live. What about living to live? I need that. Even doing something that is somewhat enjoyable for the time being would be nice. But I’m tired of waking up everyday wanting to go back to bed because the job I have or whatever is so awful it makes me not even want to go through the day. What life is that? I don’t want that. I can’t have that.

But above all, that’s really what I want in life. I want to do something fulfilling. But how do I get there? 

Anyway, if you read this far...thanks? Maybe one of y’all out there feels the same way, and it’s comforting to know when other people feel the same way, I guess? You’re not alone, is what I’m saying. We’re all on our own journey in this fucked-up simulation we call life, but it’s nice to have support along the way. You’re not alone. I’m here, and if you ever need someone to talk to, an ear to listen, or a shoulder to cry on, just know that I’m here.

Okay, I’ll shut up now. Back to our regularly scheduled content and ~the gay shit~!

Love y’all.

[bughead-fic-request]

I would like to thank @leaalda for making these amazing banners.

This is an effort to spread the word about all fan fiction writers in our little fandom. If you would like to be featured or nominate a writer, please contact me. Please reblog this post if you can and check out some of @bughead-is-riverdale work!

1. First things first, if someone wanted to read your stories where can they find them.

I have a Masterlist of all my fics to date, all nicely ordered under headings/ship pairings. You can find it in my bio.

2. Tell us a little about yourself.

I'm 18 and I'm from the U.K. I've just accepted a place to study English Lit at Birmingham Uni in September, I'm so excited! I've always loved reading/writing - starting this blog is something I wish I had done sooner - and I also love theatre. I have a little brother with Down's Syndrome who is the centre of my world, I'm more like his second mum than his older sister because of our 8 year age gap. I'm the 'Mum Friend' of my friendship group, don't be alarmed if I call you 'my love' or 'sweetheart', it's ingrained in my soul.

I'm a hopeless romantic (probably why I'm so invested in Bughead) and I've been with my current boyfriend/best friend for just over 4 years.

3. What do you never leave home without?

My promise ring that my boyfriend bought me for our 4th anniversary. It's an aquamarine stone with tiny diamonds and I never take it off. As I said, I'm a hopeless romantic.

4. Are you an early bird or a night owl?

Definitely early bird, I'd rather not waste the day!

5. If you could live in any fictional world which one would you choose and why?

Cassandra Clare's world of Shadowhunters! I think I would be pretty badass. Besides I would find Julian Blackthorn and marry him.

6. Who is the most famous person you’ve ever met.

Sadly I haven't actually met anyone famous! Recently however I saw both David Tennant in 'Don Juan' and Andrew Scott in 'Hamlet', I was so close to them! Does that count?

7. What are some of your favorite movies/TV?

Aside from Riverdale... I'm a sucker for most period dramas (Colin Firth as Mr Darcy ahhh)! Brooklyn 99 is hilarious and Teen Wolf has always been one of my favourites. With films... Anything with Meryl Streep in it! I'm secretly a huge nerd so 'The Lord of the Rings' as well. Another one of my favourites is 'Dead Poet's Society' because it breaks my heart just to think about it.

8. What are some of your favorite bands/musicians?

Recently I've hated almost everything in the charts. Musicals are my safe haven so Hamilton, Les Mis, The Phantom of the Opera, Kinky Boots, and Rent I will listen to on repeat. I also love Tracy Chapman because of the meaning behind her lyrics and Queen is legendary.

9. Favorite Books?

Jane Austen is my favourite author and 'Pride and Prejudice' is my all time favourite, I read it annually. Please don't talk to me about 'Pride and Prejudice and Zombies', it's an abomination. I also love 'The Book Thief', 'Jane Eyre', and my favourite play is 'Hamlet'. Anything by Cassandra Clare is also fantastic, you're never too old to enjoy YA fiction no matter what people say.

10. Favorite Food?

My mum makes a delicious sausage and bacon pie, I ask for it on my birthday every year.

11. Biggest pet peeve?

Incorrect grammar.

12. What did you want to be when you were little? What do you want to be now?

When I was a kid I wanted to be a queen, and I still want to be a queen. However, I have a back up plan to become a journalist and/or author.

13. What are your biggest fears? Do you have any strange fears?

When I was a kid I watched an episode of Doctor Who that had a werewolf in it. It didn't help that my friends played a prank on me when I was in primary school where they locked me out in the garden on a full moon and grabbed my legs when I tried to crawl through the dog flap, scarred me for life. I still low-key panic in the dark.

14. When you are on your deathbed what would be the one you’d regret not doing?

Not having kids, I'm too family-oriented to not be a mum.

Okay… lets talk about your writing!

15. Which is your favorite of the fics you've written for the Bughead fandom?

I wrote a Soulmate AU called 'Odd One Out' - it's a Jughead x Reader fic but you can always imagine the reader is Betty as she doesn't feature as a character.

16. Which was the hardest to write, in terms of plot?

My 'Guilty?' mini-series, it was my first fic.

17. How do you come up with the ideas for you fic(s)? Do you people watch? Listen to music? Get inspired by TV/movies?

I have a notebook specifically for my blog where I brainstorm ideas. I also bounce ideas off my little sister. Anything particularly romantic I tend to pull inspiration from my own relationship.

18. Idea that you always wanted to write but could never make work?

I've had a Bughead AU 10+ chapter series plan in my head for a long time now but never put pen to paper. The idea of doing a long fic seems quite intimidating, I guess I'm worried that people won't like it and all my hopes/time will be crushed.

19. Least favorite plot point/chapter/moment you’ve written?

I wrote a fic called 'Double Date' by request and I felt that the plot was really weak. I didn't really have much to go at on the request and the person who requested it kept asking me when I would be done while I was in the middle of my A Level exams so it just really stressed me out, writing it felt like a chore.

20. Favorite plot point/chapter/moment you’ve written?

Probably Part 1 of 'Guilty?' because it was my first fic so I felt that I had to really prove myself to the fandom. I got a great response from it though so I was encouraged to keep writing.

21.Favorite character to write?

Jughead, without a doubt.

22. Favorite line or lines of dialogue that you've written?

"AT LEAST YOUR PARENTS WERE SOULMATES!" - 'Odd One Out' Part 1

23. Best comment/review you’ve ever received?

Recently someone told me that they translate some of my fics into Portuguese so their friends could read them and that my writing has helped them improve their English, they were from Brazil.

24. How do you handle bad reviews or comments?

I've never received any hate mail, I don't know how long that will last though. I guess if I did I would either just ignore it or shoot them down with sass, I write for free after all.

25. What is your favorite story you’ve ever written? Any fandom?

Like I said earlier, 'Odd One Out'.

26. What are you reading right now? Both fan fiction and general fiction?

I'm reading 'Lord of Shadows' by Cassandra Clare. Also a fic called 'Wicked Games' by @ariquitecontrary that I'm obsessed with.

27. Do you have an advice for writers that want to get into this fandom but might be scared?

Do not be afraid/self-conscious. I have never received any hate, we are a welcoming fandom. Make sure you tag your writing appropriately so people can find it and reach out to other writers, maybe they will promote your blog. My inbox is always open, I will never fail to reply to you.

[quillwritten]

I'd like to hear a short story from the word "reckless" if you don't mind :)

IT’S FINALLY HERE

I had an idea for this, connected to Silverstorm, but I’ve really struggled with it. The turning point was today at my uni Creative Writing Society when all of a sudden I had a eureka moment and finally, finally managed to tie it all together and I’m actually really happy with it. So, here you go. A short story prologue-type-thing for Silverstorm based on the word ‘Reckless’

On a lesser level, it was the first Thursday of the summer holidays after Avery’s first year at Sagedell Turris Academy. The pertinent aspect of the day, however, was that Avery was marching through London with her father, mother, brother, and at least a hundred other casters.

There were hundreds of people milling about in the square outside the Assembly Building. Avery was small for a twelve year old, and she kept one hand on her mother’s bag at all times to make sure they didn’t get separated in the bristling crowd. If she lost her family here, it would be a nightmare to try and find them again when she couldn’t see over most people’s shoulders, let alone their heads. Her other hand clutched a badge which she hadn’t yet had time to stop and attach to her top, or her hat, or wherever the most people would be able to see it. She was too small to carry one of the picket signs that were scattered around, but the badge had the same font emblazoned on it to match some of the boards: Casters want to cast their vote. Avery wasn’t particularly impressed by the phrase, but she agreed with the principal and that was why they were all here in the first place.

The march was loud and rowdy but eventually someone, or several someones, managed to establish at least some semblance of order and organisation. An already-tall man had found some sort of step or box to stand on so he could address the entirety of the crowd, and Avery could see him despite her small stature.

“We have bowed for too long under a government that doesn’t care! We have struggled for too long without voices! Did we casters invent democracy only to be conned by a sham of it, tricked and bound under an authoritarian Assembly?” His voice boomed across heads as the crowd quieted to listen, then roared in agreement. “What do we say to the Assembly?” The man hollered again.

Siva swore along with the rest of the throng, and it was testimony to the strangeness of the day that neither their mother or their father reprimanded him. Avery didn’t swear out loud. In her head, she ran through a few of her favourite words and thought them aggressively at the Assembly. She heard some of the curses echoed by people around her before the cries died down. Once they had, the group hovered, still and expectant, watching the man. Avery took the moment to tug her hat off and fix the badge to the band of red ribbon around the base of it.

Nearly before she could replace it on her head, chanting had started up again.

The protest remained peaceful for a good few hours, despite the seething horde of protesters, and Avery remembered one of Siva’s friends accusing him of enjoying battling bureaucratic injustice. She thought the wild flame in her stomach might feel similarly.

It wasn’t until after lunch that it got ugly.

They almost missed the first fire to start. Avery had been complaining about being cold, and she felt the warmth from the car at her back before she saw anything. She frowned and turned, grimacing at the car until she saw the flickering orange glow and her eyes went wide.

“Mum, there’s a fire in the car.”

Gracie Rao swivelled around, took in the fire at a glance, and spun back to her husband.

“Kish, we need to leave.”

Gracie snatched Avery’s hand but then someone grabbed Avery’s arm and yanked, and her parents disappeared into the crowd.

She gritted her teeth and snatched her arm back from whoever it was pulling her deeper into the crowd and was suddenly stranded on her own in the middle of the crowd. Someone screamed just above her ear. Avery elbowed them in the stomach.

The day got worse from there. Bluecoats appeared out of nowhere, the crowd whipped itself up into a frenzy, and the protest was a riot. At the back of her head, Avery thought she should have been scared, but she was angry now, too, and she had always been reckless.

More and more car fires were sparking up in the square and the surrounding roads and the air turned an evil orange as the heat started to build. Someone shoved Avery towards one of the flaming vehicles and she stumbled, just as the windows exploded from the heat and shattered glass flew out, lacerating Avery’s arms when she through them off to protect her face. One large shard of glass sliced her right forearm and she cried out, crumpling to the ground on top of the smaller pieces.

Avery lay there for a moment to steady her breathing but grit her teeth and determined to fight on. She bound her arm roughly with fabric torn from the bottom of her cardigan and jumped straight back up again. The car next to her was still on fire and someone shouted duck. She couldn’t tell who it was but she ducked anyway because she’d already figured out that every word meant life or death here. Something whistled angrily over her head and smashed into the brick wall of the post office behind her. When she looked up, there was no sign of the thrower.

Avery snarled and snatched up a shard of glass the side of her hand from the shattered remains of the car window on the ground and grit her teeth against the heat of it. She couldn’t see her parents anywhere, so she launched at the first bluecoat she saw beating someone and slashed at the, with her makeshift weapon. He cried out and turned his attention on her but she was a wildcat, kicking, biting, punching, scratching and slashing. The woman on the ground staggered to her feet and goes to help but Avery screamed at her to go, get away, run. As soon as the woman was gone, Avery lashed out one last time and then she was off and running herself, towards anyone that looked even vaguely familiar.

The man who had been leading the protest earlier was stood in front of the government building, so she sprinted at him because there was no one else. He swore when he saw her.

“Why are there kids here?”

Avery swore back, tasted the word like metal in her mouth, and shouted that she was going to fight. The man said his name was Jasper, call me Jazz, and they slapped hands in a rushed handshake. Avery’s hand was small in his, and his eyes were still disbelieving, but Avery spun around and stabbed at another bluecoat and he shook his head.

“Alright Avery, but you’re only fighting here until we see your parents. After that I’ve got plans for you.”

Avery saluted like she’d seen in a film once, settled the vicious glow of rebellion somewhere behind her heart, and fought her first battle.

[emptymasks]

tagged by @ohpotter thank you :)

rules: you must answer these 85 statements and tag 20 people

tagging: sorry if some of you were already tagged @alyseofwonderland @clonetracers @lingering-snow @gemfyre @skip-mucky @ruinsrebuilt @gendryw4ters @alexpenkala @emono-omae @roecompany I know that’s not 20 but...

THE LAST

1. drink: water 2. phone call: my bank 3. text message: idk, I barely text any, I mainly just use messanger apps... probably my Dad 4. song you listened to: The Abduction - Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 5. time you cried: I don’t know, since my anxiety calmed down I haven’t cried as much 6. dated someone twice: nope, never even dated someone once 7. kissed someone and regretted it: still no 8. been cheated on: no 9. lost someone special: yes 10. been depressed: my mental health wasn’t the best when I was a teenager, definitely an anxiety disorder, and hating myself for a while, but I don’t know whether I got as far as depression, I don’t want to offend anyone who actually had depression... 11. gotten drunk and thrown up: no, I don’t drink

3 FAVOURITE COLOURS 12. blue 13. black 14. purple

IN THE LAST YEAR HAVE YOU 15. made new friends: yeah, started University this time last year, met some awesome people 16. fallen out of love: nope, never fallen in love 17. laughed until you cried: probably 18. found out someone was talking about you: I don’t think so. I mean my Mum talks crap about me all the time but 19. met someone who changed you: uh, yeah, I guess 20. found out who your friends are: not quite sure what that means 21. kissed someone on your facebook list: nope, never kissed anyone

GENERAL 22. how many of your facebook friends do you know in real life: all of them bar one, I only add people who I actually know, but there was one girl who I was friends with on deviantart back when I was about 13, but now I only add people that I know and talk too. I don’t even add people who I went to school with if I never talked to them. I don’t know, it just feels weird to do that on FB to me, 23. do you have any pets: our family has a chocolate labrador  24. do you want to change your name: um...no? It’s weird. I don’t really like my name, but not as in I don’t like it as a name, I just don’t like it for me. But I also couldn’t imagine having any other name. 25. what did you do for your last birthday: nothin 26. what time did you wake up: 8am-ish 27. what were you doing at midnight last night: sleeping 28. name something you can’t wait for: I don’t know... uh I’m being a vendor at the artist alley in Linc-Con (Lincoln, Comic Con) and it’s my first time being a vendor or doing anything like this and I’m nervous but excited but nervous. So I guess that. And Thor Ragnarok. 29. when was the last time you saw your mom: Like, an hour ago. I’m still staying at home for the summer, I move back to University next Monday. 31. what are you listening to right now: Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 (what a surprise) 32. have you ever talked to a person named tom: yes 33. something that is getting on your nerves: uh, a lot of stuff, I’m very anxious all the time. in terms of something that’s annoying me... not much.  34. most visited website: Probably tumblr or youtube. 35. hair colour: brown 36. long or short hair: Long-ish. I’d like it to be a bit longer, but it hasn’t grown in like years. Seriously, I’ve never had a proper hair-cut, I just trim slip ends off and it hasn’t grown in so long no one ever believes that I’ve never had my hair cut. 37. do you have a crush on someone: not really, there’s clebs I’m attracted too, but there not crushes  38. what do you like about yourself: uh... I hate saying stuff like this, I always worry that I’ll come across big-headed. If I have to say something... I’m creative? 39. want any piercings: nope 40. blood type: no idea, I really should know, but I’ve never known and I’m not sure how to find out 41. nickname: None. I’m the only person with my name I’ve known that likes to be called Rebecca over being called Becky. I hate being called Becky. I had a teacher that called my Becks and I didn’t mind that too much. I do like pet-name / terms of endearment though. 42. relationship status: single 43. zodiac: taurus 44. pronouns: she/her 45. favourite tv show: band of brothers, legion, house of cards, halt and catch fire, brooklyn nine nine, hannibal, flight of the conchords, peaky blinders, star trek, the tudors, torchwood, the thick of it 46. tattoos: no, I like tattoos, but don’t want any myself 47. right or left handed: right handed 48. surgery: nope 49. piercing: no, don’t want any 50. sport: I did swimming for a long time, I don’t do it often now, but still enjoy it. I also have a thing for learning K-Pop choreography and then doing K-Pop random dance plays. It’s a decent workout when you’re too shy to exercise with anyone around and you don’t have the money for the gym anyway. 51. vacation: Haven’t gone in years, can’t afford it. The last time I went out for the day was with our Uni’s Harry Potter society and we spent the day at the Harry Potter studios. There’s another Buckbeak now and you can bow to him and he bows back and honestly I just love him so much and didn’t want to leave him. 52. pair of trainers: I actually don’t have any anymore. The closest the trainers I have is probably my converse.

MORE GENERAL 53. eating: um, I may snacking on tic-tacs 54. drinking: water 55. i’m about to: after finishing typing this, I need to test out how the Transformers print I just finished will look once it’s printed out, and then it’s back to making charms 56. waiting for: nothing for today, but I am kidna getting nervous about moving back to Uni 57. want: I got a 2.1 last year and I’d really like to get a 1st this year at Uni. Also to keep my Etsy shop up and running and to do well at comic con. 58. get married: eh. I honestly couldn’t care less. I’d be very happy to be in a committed relationship without being married. 59. career: want to be a concept artist for film, but will probably still freelance on the side

WHICH IS BETTER 60. hugs or kisses: what about both?  at the same time?? 61. lips or eyes: as in what I’m more attracted too? idk 62. shorter or taller: I’d want a partner to be taller than me, which isn’t hard as I’m 5′4″ 63. older or younger: ...I’m not going to lie. I have a pretty big thing for older guys, but realistically it would be better and probably healthier to date someone around my own age. Although now I am starting to be attracted to some guys around my own age, and I’ve never had a preference for older or younger women. 64. nice arms or nice stomach: ... 65. hook up or relationship: relationship. I could never do a hook-up or casual sex or a casual relationship. 66. troublemaker or hesitant: I guess hesitant?

HAVE YOU EVER 67. kissed a stranger: still no 68. drank hard liquor: nope, don’t drink  69. lost glasses/contact lenses: I like the only person in my family that doesn’t need glasses 70. turned someone down: actually yes, once, but he said he’d liked me for the past 7 years and I hadn’t even had a conversation with him (saying hello to each other when he saw each around school doesn’t count) in the last 5 years and I hadn’t seen him at all in the last 2 years so it just felt kinds creepy to me. 71. sex on the first date: no, haven’t had sex, haven’t been on a date. I don’t think I’d ever feel comfortable doing that. Not unless it was a date with someone who was a super close friend so you already know and trust them, but even then probably would never want to do that. 72. broken someone’s heart: not as far as I’m aware off 73. had your heart broken: no 74. been arrested: no 75. cried when someone died: yes 76. fallen for a friend: nope

DO YOU BELIEVE IN 77. yourself: eh 78. miracles: no 79. love at first sight: no, it’s really impossible, you can feel attraction at first sight, but you can’t love someone you don’t know 80. santa claus: no 81. kiss on the first date: I mean, that kinda feels like the odd one out in this category. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. 82. angels: idk, I’m agnostic. I don’t really know if there’s any higher power of anything. Maybe there is, maybe there isn’t. Either way I’m not going to worry about it, I’m just going to make the most of my life either way and try to be a good person regardless cos that’s just the decent thing to do.

OTHER 83. current best friend’s name: idk if I really have  a ‘best friend’. I have friends, some of them I talk to more than others, but I don’t really rank friends. 84. eye colour: blue 85. favorite movie: ...this would be a really long list, are you sure you want that, I’ll try and put a few: Lord of the Rings, Baby Driver, Cap: Winter Soldier, Rise of the Guardians, The Princess Bride, The Breakfast Club, Inception, The Prince of Egypt, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Kingsman, The Martian, Mad Max Fury Road, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (I know it’s not a great film but I love the characters), Mission Impossible 4 (didn’t expect to like MI but there you go), Iron Man, The Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy 1 + 2, Deadpool, Interview with the Vampire (I love Lestat and Louis but you can probably guess my feelings about Anne Rice), Fight Club.. I should stop typing now.

[phantasyprone]

The Memeing of Life - A pretty extensive philosophical critique

Hey everyone, I’m just gonna take another break from writing my graduate thesis to briefly run through some of the points (???) made in Dan’s video. I’m pretty tired and stopped watching Supernatural to type this up so this is incredibly informal so yh, excuse the rambling nature of this. I’ll type what he said in the video then provide my thoughts.

 ‘‘Born too late to explore the earth, born too soon to explore the galaxy, born just in time to browse dank memes.’ Also a phrase that defines the purpose of our existence at this point in human history. Do you ever find yourself wishing for a different life, that your weren’t just a kid at school, or you weren’t just a young adult trying to work out what to do, or a person stuck in a job, but instead a person with a calling – a mission to go on adventure bigger than the life we know’ – OK, I have so many issues with this. 1. Only white males get to say that they wished they lived before this point. 2. ‘just’ a kid, and ‘just’ a young adult? Mate, Dan my man, no one is ‘just’ anything. Every single person is a complex, awesome human being capable of so much. No one is just anything and you say that like everyone out there thinks so little of themselves? Yeh of course, some people are on a journey to try and work out their life’s purpose but some people aren’t? For some people their purpose is to have close friends or family, or theyre on the career path they want, or some people are not in their mid twenties and just wanting to enjoy/get through the hell that is school. If I was 14 and watching a video where someone was telling me that ‘we’ all spend life trying to find our calling or mission I would have been like ‘fuck no. I just wanna pass my exams and get to uni mate, stfu.’ Or many teens, as actually was the same when I was young and super into philosophy, liked to think about this stuff on occasion, but in an informed manner not some chill youtube video they used to escape flinging an existential crisis at them.

  ‘our boring time’ – No, Dan. Our time isn’t boring. It’s exciting, amazing, there’s so much good in the world. Yo, have you even seen videos of baby pandas? Have you read the amazing things activists and progressive politicians, and inspiring children, and wonderful artists, and artists and non white cis straight amazing people are doing to make the world fucking awesome are doing? Nah mate. Not having it.

 (this shit got long so more under the cut)

‘well this is your life and its probs the only one youre gonna get’ – WHY DO YOU SAY THAT LIKE IT’S A BAD THING??? The fact that we only have this one life is such a beautiful thing to cling to and whilst sometimes things may seem shit, theres no need to go saying that phrase in that way like our lives are bad and we should just accept that? Yeh I could be Hermione Granger if I was in the Harry Potter books but would I want to be? NO. Yo, I wouldn’t give up my best mates for anything. And Hermione couldn’t play the guitar but I can. And Hermione didn’t laugh so hard she cried when my mate and me were out walking with huge rucksakes and my mate got stuck between two trees and couldn’t get out, then heaved herself through and fell flat on her face in the mud. NO, I saw that. – a wonderful moment. Yeh, this IS my life, and it’s the only one I’m gonna get SO GREAT. Things can be shit but yo, my mate got stuck in a tree so pffffft, this shit can be pretty awesome sometimes.

 ‘this reality could be a computer simulation talk’ – erghhhh, don’t throw stuff like that out so flippantly. That shit is actualy worrying to some people. I had a breakdown which took me 3 full months to get over that ONE thought, so cheers for saying that so casually. But it’s fine because if this is a computer simulation (which I highly doubt cause I did research, a lot of research) then this is what life is and it’s pretty great anyway so lets just not think about that and enjoy life if we can.

  ‘it’s a lot more difficult for us to find a quest that will give us the big answers’ – who are these people needing quests? Why do we need these big answers? You talk like there is some great, intrinsic meaning to everything and we should all be searching for it? Nah mate. Just enjoy what we have, don’t spend your life constantly searching for answers you’ll never find. Enjoy the now. What’s my big quest? To try and be kind to myself and kind to others. And to try to love myself and love others; there we go – big quest sorted. Don’t go giving people this existential crisis where they feel as though they wont be satisfied if they never find this ‘one true purpose’. You will have many different purposes and many different paths and missions and journeys and you will change and its OK to go in varying directions. There may not even be this idea that everyone has or needs ‘one big quest’ – just do what makes you happy and be kind, and if what makes you happy changes over the years then that’s cool. Don’t ever go thinking that you need to spend your whole life trying to find your purpose and you wont feel fulfilled unless you’ve found that purpose. Why only ‘one’ mission anyway? Do everything that makes you happy and live now instead of waiting and searching your whole life for something that you don’t find because you simply search for it.

 The whole discussion about contributing to science so that only a few people can go to mars – No dan, the amount of incredibly important advances in science, medicine, and technology that was discovered BECAUSE we funded space missions and people tried to find answers in the universe is staggering and I wish I could remember them all, but tust me – the amount of cool stuff in our lives that wouldn’t have been invented if it wasn’t for space exploration is seriously cool and y’all go try and be astronauts because you might change the world even if you don’t get to space.

 ‘reality is slow and painful’ – ergh, I mean, it’s cool if you sometimes think that, I do too! But you cant just say that without any context, or like ‘reality is slow and painful sometimes. But not all the time’. – like, of course we all feel this way sometimes but if you’re making a video you cant just announce that without also saying life is fast and amazing and wonderful. You have a certain responsibility here Dan. So no, reality can’t be defined by that wholly pessimistic and way too sweeping statement that it is ‘slow and painful’.

 then goes onto explain how cool, but not really cool books and film realities are. - yeh, but our lives are pretty cool. I mean, over half all movies and books are based on our reality... so i mean, it gotta be kinda interesting. Which it is...

Good bit being aware of this being a first world problem

 ‘you may say that there are many meaningful missions you could go on from perusing personal passions to politics, science or even changing the world to being a better place by doing charity work, and yep, that is all true but its not something that we can completely escape to, leaving what we know behind. I know, pretty disheartening right.’ – I mean, yay, finally some optimism but it was all ruined when you said that basically no matter what you do, you cant escape this reality. Eergh. No, Go do all those amazing amazing things and there is no way that any of these things are lessoned by the fact that they’re still within our reality. Escapism isn’t necessarily the best thing? Sometimes we gotta look at our reality and see how awesome it can be amongst the shit. And we should do all these amazing things to make it even better because if you could escape to a different world would you? If everyone who had something to give to society left then what state would humanity be in? A shit one. I for one am glad we can’t escape and I wouldn’t want to. Changing the world and making it a better place, whether that’s through charity work or by being a generally nice and lovely person, is awesome and the fact that we cant leave this reality isn’t disheartening.

 ‘But what do we have… is a world that might never do anything particularly amazing apart from destroying the world; memes’ – No, just no. People now are doing pretty fucking awesome things. Like, I don’t really need to say any more. Have you seen how far we’ve come? How much societal progression has occurred for minorities and women and the LGBTQIA+ community, and those who are disabled? Of course we have so so so far to go, but things are slowly progressing in general.

 meme discussions – they are relatable and show us how we all have relative experiences – but like no, memes are a cultural artefact which can be alike to Dadaist and surrealist work pointing out the absurdity of our time and how meaning can be warped and blah semantics, existentialism, satra, kafka, keikergaard, Joseph Heller, (I can’t be asked right now to go into a discussion of memes and existentialism and meaning because it’s interesting but long and tbh Dan should’ve covered that so I’m salty he missed this great and obvious discussion)

 ‘it’s what we do all day, and perhaps, that is us attempting to find meaning within ourselves in a time when the universe isn’t providing any easy answers’ – ergh, why do we always have to be searching for this true meaning you’re talking about? Maybe we just shouldn’t search for an intrinsic meaning? Look for love and kindness and humanity because who can argue with that, and let’s just not give your entire audience an existential crisis, or if you did want to discuss existentialism then please do so in a balanced, well researched and UPLIFTING WAY. This shit is serious and I’ve had so many breakdowns because of it but through YEARS AND YEARS of reading am I good and OK and not in that deluge or worry for meaning anymore. If you wanted to discuss such deep and truly worrying stuff as this, you needed to be more eloquent, less ‘ergh life is shit’ and just generally more optimistic (which I know you can be so, like, why was this so dreary and ergh)?

 so go reach for your dreams because what is important is that it’s your choice – erghhhhhh where did this argument go? We’ve missed so many steps in your discussion of finding one ‘true mission’ into you having a choice? Mate, I know how you could jump between these but you haven’t explained how you got here or how this all links up and whaaaaa? You need to back up WHY peoples choices make sense within the existentialist discussion youre basing all this on. You cant just say it and expect people to know?

 Sorry guys, that was my incredibly messy discussion of this video which was not at all eloquent because my brain is fried and I paused my rewatching of Supernatural to type this stuff up. 

[storyunrelated]

Colder, Harder Hugs #2_Oh Dear

Every sentence I write I'm worried that I'm making someone upset.

But, then, really what are the odds of that happening?

Turns out, it was something to worry about.

Well. Maybe ‘worry’ is too strong a word. It was something I should have been more concerned about, let’s say. Something I should have put a bit more thought into.

Turns out - oops, said that already.

It transpired (much better) that things were afoot I couldn’t possibly have been aware of. Unless I’d paid attention a little more. Apparently the vanishingly brief relationship me and Tillie had had constituted news for some people. The sort of people who cared about that thing, obviously. I’d have thought this wouldn’t be very many, uh, people. And I would’ve been right, too. What I could not have predicted was that this not very many people would also be quite vocal and quite active.

Society was a lot more fraught than I realised, it seemed. Who knew? Everyone except me, that’s who. There was considerably more friction between living-machines and flesh-and-blood folks than I had thought. Or at least those who said there was friction were very loud about it. Like I said. Vocal. The same sort of people who considered the first living-machine/flesh-and-blood person relationship to be a Very Bad Thing and weren’t shy about repeating this opinion. Oops.

Also, quick thing, how was it we were the first? I mean, I know there has to be a first for everything but honestly? Me? Someone else probably did it but kept it more discrete. Not that it matters now. I - and Tillie, so ‘we’ then - are in the eye of an unpleasant, skeevy media storm. It seemed. I wasn’t sure what it was supposed to be like, really. People lurked a lot more than usual. In and around hedges, on the other side of fences while I was walking, behind corners. It was weird.

Who reads magazines anyway? Most of these lurkers worked for magazines. Or so I was told. This was information fed to me via Tillie via her father, who had been on top of the emerging situation since just before it even became a situation. The guy was on top of everything from the sound of things. Still never met him, but nice to know he looks after his daughter. And me, by proxy. Though I doubt that was his intention.

Magazines though…weird ones with limited and agitated circulation. And since we live in the future the internet was a concern, too. Probably more of a concern, really. Who reads magazines nowadays? Like I say. Limited circulation. One person. And then that person says something about it online, then everyone knows about an eighth of the story but talks about it like they were the one who heard it first.

Oh, get me. Topical. Cutting! But yeah. Internet.

I thought that maybe finding one of these guys to talk to and set the record straight would be a good idea but I was, of course, completely wrong and was actually supposed to avoid them at all costs. This I learnt via Tillie’s father via Tillie - again - and kinda made sense once I thought about it. They probably didn’t want to be my friends. I did read the articles, though. Some of them.

The first article wasn’t that bad, actually. The publication was favourable (some people were actually on the pro-us side of this, I discovered - further surprises!). Some living-machine periodical I’d rather unsurprisingly never heard of. But then some anti-living-machine periodical I’d also never heard of got their claws into it. That was when things starting going a little south on my reading journey.

It made me uncomfortable the things they were saying. The word ‘unnatural’ came up more than once, and once was too much for me. They really didn’t seem happy about any of it. From the tone of the piece I got the impression they’d prefer I had found myself a nice flesh-and-blood girl to canoodle with, which seemed odd. I wasn’t sure who I wanted to hug was any of their business, really. At this point I started to feel uncomfortably like I was treading on the toes of people with legitimate problems in their life as a result of discrimination and I should probably just avoid reading any more about it in future. So I did. Ignoring bad things is tops!

Things did sort of spread from there though, which was less cool. Osmosis, yo. Or something like it. Somehow people in the real world started finding out. I mean, some people already knew - that guy who punched me in the face, for one, but he went to uni so he probably saw me so that I understand - but now it was more and more people. At least if the looks I were getting meant anything. I never did like it when people looked at me and now they did it more and more.

At least one person spat on me, which was new. My life had been pretty cushy and free from persecution up to that point so it was difficult to feel too hard done by but it was certainly a surprise. I moved away from them quickly and did my best not to think about it afterwards, but it was apparently enough for Tillie - on her being told - to tell her father, who acted on it. We now had bodyguards. Just like that. The very same day. Snap. There’s a man with connections.

They were nice fellows and no mistake, the bodyguards. Morley was the flesh-and-blood one, Malhas the living-machine. Serious about their work but pleasant to be around. I wondered if that was the same with all bodyguards? I’d never had one. The ones I’d seen before (in newspapers and such) always looked rather dour to me. Our two were positively jovial. Perhaps you paid extra for that. Or extra for the dour ones. What would people normally want from a bodyguard?

Both were also loaded for bear when it came to protection, which was a little alarming at first. Being an Englishman, I tend to recoil when seeing an armed person in an everyday context. It’s just how I’m wired. Not that I don’t nurture a baseline, adolescent fascination with weaponry. I do. In the way a twelve year old boy is interested in guns and tanks and such.

Hell, who am I to judge. I watch those Attrition films and I love it. Explosions hurrah!

Anyway. Both were very keen to show off their respective arsenals, and needed very little prodding to do so. Morley had this sort of slimline, powered-exoskeleton thing she wore beneath her suit that allowed her - as she demonstrated - to lift me bodily with one hand. If she wanted to do such a thing, of course. I’d heard of these things, but seeing one properly was new.

To be honest I was more impressed that she’d managed to get a well-fitting suit that could accommodate the thing and not look angular. I couldn’t put my wallet in the pocket of my jacket without looking like a sack of stuffed nonsense. She just looked smart. Suited and booted, as they say. There were other things her device was capable of she told me, though what they were exactly remained a mystery to me. All she’d do when I asked was tap her nose and smile, which did not make me feel especially comfortable. Safe with her outside. Just not comfortable.

Malhas, being a living-machine, was just built in such a way that made him a natural combatant. It was sort of hard to describe him, really. His head was his only really solid part and there were some bits and pieces I saw lurking in his torso every now and then but most of him was ribbon-like. And coiled. It’s hard to explain, like I say.

He is man-shaped most of the time but when he wants to he can uncoil and lengthen before retracting. Whip-crack fast, too. He demonstrated by putting a candle on wall (from a distance) and then slicing it in half (also at a distance) before I dropped a penny (which he had given me). According to Morley this constituted his ‘party trick’ and she had seen it more times than she could count at this point.

He could also lift me. Why they both insisted on doing this I did not know, but it was a compelling demonstration. He too had a suit that fitted perfectly and never caught or tugged or ripped or stretched no matter what he did. You’d have thought someone whose body opened up every time they bent would do some damage. I think the tailor was the real hero here.

In all honesty I wasn’t overwhelmed with them being there, however. Lovely chaps, as said, yes, but that they needed to be there at all made me feel bad. Like they were being put out of their way because of me. I knew they were being paid and this was their job, so, uh…

I just didn’t like being the centre of any attention, really, even if in this instance it was people being put into place to protect me from being the negative centre of attention. Maybe I was just reacting to an unusual situation. Tillie did not share my misgivings when I brought them up to her in the kitchen - the internationally accepted room for discussing matters of the day.

Or just the room I was in when she was passing. Take your pick.

“He says they’re for my protection as much as yours,” she said. I was about to question this when the logic of it hit me in the forebrain. It did make sense, and I felt a bit silly for not having worked that out without prompting. I was being harassed where I lived. Who did I live with? QED.

Wait, does that work there? Whatever. I got it, that was the point. I felt a bit selfish, now.

“That does make sense,” I said with a shrug, eyes down.

I couldn’t really look her in the face because it felt like something was trying to gnaw its way through my intestines, but that happened sometimes. Not anything actually gnawing its way through my intestines - that sort of thing only probably ever happened once in anyone’s life - just the feeling when I looked at her.

It felt vaguely similar to loss, which was ridiculous of course. I hadn’t lost her, I hadn’t lost anything. Our burgeoning relationship had simply come to a screeching, crunching halt and we didn’t cuddle anymore and I would die alone. That’s just life sometimes. Chin up, you know? Relentless positivity. As difficult as it may be. Even as hods and hods of little things pile up on top of your skull and weigh your thoughts down.

As it were. So to speak. You know what I mean.

For real though it’s fine. I have nothing to complain about.

“No-one’s been hassling you, have they?” I asked, eyes still down. This was something I’d asked her more than once lately and her answers had been consistent.

“No more than usual,” she said, same as usual. The gnawing in my gut became somewhat sharper. I disliked the idea of Tillie being hassled. Though ‘hassled’ makes it sound somewhat less unpleasant than I imagine it actually is. She has a rough time of it sometimes and bears it well, for the most part. People can be frightful, but this is hardly a shocking or profound insight. I knew this already.

Here and there Tillie had told me about some of the stuff that came her way, typically when a little thing finally caused her to overflow. I had provided hugs as there hadn’t been much else I had been able to do. Can’t make cups of tea for a living-machine, and those (along with hugs) are basically the extent of my comforting repertoire. I’d learnt that back-pats and ‘there there’ didn’t really cut the mustard in real life. She’d seemed appreciative at the time.

I hadn’t been called upon in such a capacity for a while now. I imagined her nice new group of friends was providing the kind of support I couldn’t, which was good. But still. People. Horrible. Whispered comments. Spoken comments. Shouted comments. Occasional thrown objects to accompany shouted comments. Who acts like that? People, that’s who. Pricks to a man, I tell you. We’re all of us terrible.

It made me sad that I couldn’t fix that. That I couldn’t affect some kind of change in society and humanity in a general way that would prevent Tillie from having nasty things yelled at her when she went outside. It felt like I wasn’t trying hard enough.

Or was it arrogant to assume that I had the ability to alter the world in such a way in the first place? I can never remember. I’d heard points made in both directions. Not about this specifically, but about supposed attempts at ‘martyring myself’. An overestimation of one’s impact on the world. Or something. I don’t know. I just want to help.

“Are you okay?” She asked, which snapped me back to the present. Evidently I’d been lost in thought. Tilting my face up from the floor at last I looked at a point maybe an inch above her head and hoped it looked like I was looking at her face while talking to her.

“A-okay,” I said. And I was. I knew I was. I had to be.

Tillie’s lights were the colour of concern, for whatever reason. It’s sort of blue-y. I think? You’re asking the wrong person, mate.

“What are you thinking about?”

‘Holding you’ would have been the actual answer. Or ‘fixing the world so that you’re happier’ would be another. Both impractical and both exactly the sort of thing you do not say to someone who asks you that question. That’s just common sense.

“Oh, you know, nothing. Explosions. World peace. It’s a bit contradictory up here,” I said, jabbing my skull with finger. I wished my thoughts were as refreshingly simple and comforting as explosions and world peace. It would have been an engaging mental exercises trying to mesh those two together.

I wish I knew what they were at all, really. My thought I mean. Beyond the above example answers that were actually true. There were further, deeper thoughts lurking beneath that were unknown to me. Those were the ones that worried me. I’m a close book to myself in all honesty. A lifetime of trying not to think too hard has made thinking at all - at least about the sort of thoughts Tillie probably wanted to know about - difficult. If not impossible. I could tell she didn’t believe me.

“Really?” She asked, head cocking to the side just ever so slightly. The head-tilt of disbelief. The lights changed to match it, tempering the blue (question mark?) of concern. I nodded a liar’s nod.

“Really.”

This rested in the air between us for a moment. Tillie sighed, head uncocking.

“You can still talk to me about things, you know. We are still friends. Right?”

“Of course!” I was wounded at the very suggestion! Just not wounded enough to act on it that much.

“I hope so. You’ve been kind of weird lately,” she said. This wounded me too, but I wasn’t going to tell her that.

“Sorry,” I said with a shrug and a grin. The best I could do.

Neither of us was sure what to follow this up with. We had a false start where we both tried to speak together and after a small politeness firefight (“After you” “No, you first” etc) Tillie was the one to speak:

“Should probably actually go and finish that work I was doing.”

“Learning, am I right? Me too,” I said. This was true. I should probably actually do more of that. Student, you know. Goes with the territory. There was another second or so of abject, agonising silence.

“Okay then…” Tillie said, turning and leaving. She cast one look back over her shoulder before disappearing into her room. I had been watching her go and when she turned flinched and looked away on reflex. Then she was gone.

Were I a wiser man I would likely make better use of Tillie. No, wait. Wrong words. I would appreciate her more than I do. That’s more like it. Not everyone is so lucky as to have a sympathetic ear so close to hand all the time. Most people would likely be more grateful, unlike me. Swine.

Life was just getting a little too confusing for me. This was not a situation I saw myself ending up in, you know? Who would? Colour me blindsided.

I don’t want to be well-known or notable have to worry about people taking my picture or anything like that. Don’t want to have to think about the possibility that, at any given moment, someone somewhere is calling me or my friend disgusting or unnatural or something else uncomplimentary. That’s the sort of thing that’s liable to make even an inert lump of flesh like me start to feel a mite anxious. And that’s no good at all.

Ideally things would be setup to just allow me to to sleep through my lectures, sit silently in my seminars, turn in uninspiring work and leave university without making a ripple so that when I die people can forget me more easily.

Wait, no, that’s not positive. Think positive, man! Relentless positivity, remember?

Uh. Hmm.

I’m not sure where to start. I’ll get back to it. Worry about it later. You have more pressing issues. You have a lot you actually need to sit down and think about. Things to stop avoiding, you know?

Wait. Wait!

Fireworks! That’s how explosions and world peace go together! Fireworks to celebrate! Just, you know, really beefy fireworks you need to shelter from.

Bloody obvious. God you’re such an idiot.

[thesecondmate]

reading: wk50-52

3 weeks + 3 journal entries for how i was gonna start this post. in essence: goodbye 2020, my god has it been a rollercoaster, albeit one sloping gently downhill into familiar melancholy. i never thought i’d feel like this again, yet it’s like slipping into a warm ocean where i can float forever, safe in the salt and waves lapping at my face.

stay tuned a ‘best of 2020′ list and what i want to read next year that isn’t my damn textbooks. and maybe some personal updates depending on how much wine i drink this evening. happy new year, my loves.

week 50: penultimate week of o+g rotation: i would say the end is in sight but in fact i have lost all motivation, hate my degree (well, specifically, the course administration), had a breakdown outside my exam followed by the most embarrassing brain freeze ever during a panel discussion that i was speak on, took several days to reply to everyone about said exam breakdown, am convinced i will fail my 5th year exams, aaaand dealt with all of this by handpainting christmas cards all saturday. welcome 2 the fun house !

week 51: final week of placement: i struggled through the final week of my placement (literally popped into my placement for 2 hours to have a tutorial, get signed off, and collect my things), failed my mock osce, and went home. so unbelievably drained.

week 52: christmas & post-christmas liminality: feeling vaguely restored by the virtue of reading many books, watching many movies, curling up by the fire, eating many christmas cookies, and having barely any social interaction outside of my family and our cat and dog. still absolutely drained; still very terrified of my next placement and of failing this year. all i want is to move to a city where no one knows me and i can be something new, but alas. eighteen months until i graduate; forty-two until i finish my foundation programme and can truly set off into the big blue yonder of the world.

books

✩ The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo - Steig Larsson (finished) so i actually would have much preferred this to have kept its original swedish title, ‘män som hatar kvinnor’ (’men who hate women’) - it’d have been less manic pixie dream girl and more reflective of larsson’s point, even if larsson is v guilty of the former. it’s a good book - larsson’s grasp of plot is really excellent and i really enjoyed the twists and turns, even if the pacing of the big reveal was a little too rushed for my liking. however, i find his characters a little off - many of them are great, especially berger & henrik vanger, but i find blomkvist a little self-insert at times (he’s a financial journalist! but not like other financial journalists! and he has a sexy editor lady with whom he has an open relationship! and he sleeps with this cool hacker girl who immediately trusts him!), and lisbeth is...very ‘traumatised manic pixie cyberpunk girl’ if you ask me. which is a little uncomfortable. also not to mention the rape scene - which is vile. overall: good, intrigued to see if larsson will flesh lisbeth out to be less of a caricature in the sequels.

✩ The Orphan Master’s Son - Adam Johnson (finished) this book has lost none of its magic for me, absolutely none. if anything, re-reading it a few years later has made me appreciate so many things: the characters (even more than before! if that’s possible!!), the abject heartbreak of the second mate and his wife, the trip to texas (i got far more out of the political side this time), the relationships in the camps (the captain of the junma and li mongnan - hold me whilst my heart BREAKS), the way that johnson plays with narrative from the loudspeakers to the interrogator to the dreamlike quality of jun do’s own new life in pt 2. as a teenager, i was fascinated by the setting, the double-farce of the propaganda vs life, the passages about the second mate’s wife and her silken yellow dress - i thought that jun do was a bland narrator, which i now see couldn’t have been further from the truth. i have so, so much respect for johnson as an author and this book really is a formative part of who i am, in ways that i could not express.

✩ Dark Matter - Michelle Paver (finished) another re-read. michelle paver is the queen of ghost stories and things that go bump in the night (see: spirit walker in the chronicles of ancient darkness) - this book absolutely terrified me the first time that i read it, so i made a point of finishing it in the daytime this time. perhaps that’s why it didn’t hit as hard this time - it was less terrifying. however, really appreciating her choice to make the narrator gay, without ever making a deal out of it or naming it - it’s the lil things like working class arctic explorers being disgustingly in love with their charismatic expedition leaders, ya know? big fan. also huge fan of her descriptive prose - she is also the queen of arctic imagery. her prose, combined with the gorgeous black and white photos at the start of each chapter, have not helped my desire to sack it all off and go work as a doctor in the faroe islands or iceland.

✩ The Diet Myth - Spector (on hold) i left this book at uni bc i didn’t want to ruin my own christmas with his awful writing style, if you want an indication of how much i dislike this book.

✩ Smoke Gets In Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty (in progress) a christmas gift that i’m currently reading. i’m so morbid and am learning so much, although i feel like some of the chapters are burbling on with anecdotes but don’t hammer home many points (although maybe it’s bc as a medical student i’m less easily shocked than your average reader) - bit confused as to where we’re going but i’m along for the ride.

✩ Calling a Wolf a Wolf - Kaveh Akbar (in progress) beautiful. in progress - his imagery is quite beautiful but i struggle to sit and read poetry.

✩ The Secret History - Donna Tartt (in progress) re-read. i sink back into old books like familiar lovers, like hot baths. so much comfort.

films

✩ Dead Poets Society (1989) why were the deleted scenes deleted. WHY. rewatching it, i felt some of the character development and relationship development was a little rushed - yet the deleted scenes could have fixed that. WHY WERE WE ROBBED. as ever, emotionally devastated as someone who loves languages and books and words, but ultimately chose medicine and science. as ever, very very sad over neil perry and aching for todd anderson. newfound appreciation for meeks + dalton. that punch at the end? *chef’s kiss*

✩ Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) i am inducting my sisters into lotr and they are powerless to stop me.

✩ Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince (2009) my favourite of the hp movies.

✩ Atonement (2007) this film and i have a long history - i first saw the start of it many years ago, when i did not know what c*nt meant, so was understandably a little bit lost, but also keira knightley in that green dress was a true gay awakening moment. i love the cinematography - it’s so ridiculously dreamlike and gorgeous, and the set design for the house is just beautiful. as are keira knightley and james mcavoy. also, the soundtrack with the use of the typewriters and lighters as drumbeats - my GOD, so beautiful. the second half of the film felt very rushed to me - the reveal that some of it was briony’s fiction made sense, but it lacked the stunning quality of the first half, both plot-wise and camera-wise (although the dunkirk scene was brilliant; love a long, revolving camera pan). i particularly hated every scene with briony in it - v lacklustre - and also the scene with luc remembering cecilia, it just felt forced and gimmicky. the novel definitely wins out for me.

podcasts

i haven’t listened to any podcasts in a while, bar a few episodes of the magnus archives whilst cooking and running errands, BUT i did record one!! the episode will be up in the new year but we have a few back episodes on Right to Refuge, which covers refugee/asylum issues and is by the charity that i work for!

articles: medicine / nature

✩ Mass die-off of birds in south-western US 'caused by starvation' - Phoebe Weston, The Guardian

✩ Eradicating Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting: Human Rights-Based Approaches of Legislation, Education, and Community Empowerment - Williams-Breault (2018), Health Hum Rights i just finished my obstetrics & gynaecology rotation and was appalled by the prevalence of FGM/C in the UK and wanted to learn more. this article is truly excellent in terms of understanding cultural issues and barriers to ending FGM/C.

✩ Female Genital Mutilation: Health Consequences and Complications—A Short Literature Review - Klein et al. (2018), Obstet Gynecol Int. a short america-centric lit review that i read whilst writing up my reflective pieces - not as good as the above one but has more (horrifying) statistics: 200 million women affected worldwide; 6,000 girls cut each day; 85% will have some form of medical complication in their lives, from psychological/sexual to gynaecological to obstetric including death; estimated death rate of 1 in 500; 60.5% of affected women reported fear when their spouse wanted sex compared to 2.4% of unaffected women.

✩ Gender equality and human rights approaches to female genital mutilation: a review of international human rights norms and standards - Khosla et al. (2017), Reprod Health intersection of two things i spend a lot of time thinking about: human rights & medicine. interesting - to re-read again and consider and learn more about things like treatment-monitoring bodies, etc.

✩ The macho sperm myth - Robert D Martin, Aeon a wonderful friend sent me this! i am somewhat lost by the meandering course of the article but interesting points are raised. also the idea that some scientist was like ‘i absolutely KNOW that the heads of sperm contain tiny homunculi; i cannot see them but they are THERE’ is just hilarious.

articles: covid-19 nb: i am not linking every covid article i read bc that would be so depressing but rest assured i’m up to date on a surface level. i am not on a medical level bc i am emotionally exhausted.

✩ Covid vaccine: 'Disappearing' needles and other rumours debunked - Jack Goodman & Flora Carmichael, BBC pls don’t even. let me think about anti-vaxxers. i simply wish to know the current conspiracy theories so i can argue with people more effectively.

✩ Covid at Christmas: 'Chris Whitty is more popular than Britney Spears' - Emma Harrison, BBC please someone get me a chris witty prayer candle i am BEGGING

✩ Covid-19: Doctors call for rapid rollout of vaccines - Nick Triggle, BBC

articles: culture

✩ Art in 2021: The highlights to hope for - Will Gompertz, BBC yayoi kusama is coming to the tate modern!! which i can actually get to relatively easily on public transport from my uni city!! gonna take myself to see the infinity rooms omg i am so EXCITED

✩ History: Quileute Nation this is the official site of the quileute nation, whose history and mythology stephanie meyer butchered in the twilight saga.

✩ The Archers tackles the 'hidden' connection between disability and modern slavery - BBC something i’m ashamed to say that i knew nothing about until this article. the archers keeps on giving in terms of social issues.

✩ Gollancz gets Sims’ ‘horror for the Netflix generation’ - Tom Tivnan, The Bookseller jonny sims is writing a BOOK??! the EXCITEMENT i feel

[abigailslover]

1-65 😘

1. Do you ever doubt the existence of others than you?Literally all the time it drives me crazy like what if everything I care about isn't even real 2. On a scale of 1-5, how afraid of the dark are you?2, I'm not fussed about the dark unless I've just seen a horror or something's freaked me out 3. The person you would never want to meet?Donald Trump ew4. What is your favourite word?Ryan because it's the name of the person I love. Lmao soppy but I also can't really think of anything 5. If you were a type of tree, what would you be? One of those tall ones with the thin branches which kinda looks like its about to fall apart but somehow never does 6. When you looked in the mirror this morning what was the first thing you thought?Ah shit I didn't take my makeup off very well last night 7. What shirt are you wearing right now? A gryffindor pj top I got for Christmas. Kinda makes me feel like a traitor to my only true house hufflepuff 8. What do you label yourself as?Sexuality wise bisexual 9. Bright room or dark room?Bright room, then I can see everything and just yeah 10. What were you doing at midnight last night? Watching Friends 11. Favourite age you've been so far?Any age without responsibilities 12. Who told you they loved you last? Ryan before he went to sleep 13. Your worst enemy? Tarah because she's hurt me more than anyone 14. What is your current desktop picture? One of me and Ryan from Christmas a year ago, outdated but still so cute 15. Do you like someone?You'd hope so16. The last song you listened to?Stressed Out-twenty one pilots 17. You can press a button that will make one person explode. Who would you blow up?Donald Trump and hope that all his advisors are with him18. Who would you really like to just punch in the face?My brother but only if he's done what we aren't sure of 19. If anyone could be your slave for a day who would it be and what would you do?Taylor Swift but she wouldn't be my slave we'd just spend the day together and go shopping and just have the best time 20. What is your best physical attribute?My eyes 21. If you were the opposite sex for one day what would you look like and what would you do?I would look awful as a guy omg. I'd probably have weird brown hair and just look very average but not like I'm supposed to be like that. I'd masturbate because come on, have sex and just enjoy a ton of male privileges like getting paid more for the same job etc 22. Do you have a secret talent? If so, what is it?I can't think of any 23. What is one unique thing you're afraid of? Being alone. It's not unique but I'm genuinely afraid of being left all alone one day with no one with me24. You can only have one kind of sandwich. Each sandwich ingredient known to humankind is at your disposalSo I'd have a baguette with chicken and ham, melted mozzarella and sweetcorn with BBQ sauce 25. You just found $100! How will you spend it? Either use it as spending money on holiday next month in Spain with Ryan or save it for uni next year 26. You have a free plane ticket to anywhere in the world but you have to leave immediately. Where do you go? To see @awkward-is-a-life-choice of course ❤27. An angel appears out of Heaven and offers you a lifetime supply of the alcoholic beverage of your choice. "Be brand-specific" it says. Man! What are you gonna say about that? Even if you don't drink booze there's something you can figure out...so what's it gonna be?Defo jägermeister 28. You discover a beautiful island upon which you may build your own society. You make the rules. What is the first rule you put into place?Real equality for everyone29. What is your favourite expletive?Fuck, you can use it in so many ways 30. Your house is on fire, holy shit! You have just enough time to run in there and grab ONE inanimate object. Don't worry, your loved ones and pets have already made it out safely. So what's the one thing you're going to save from that blazing inferno? The bracelet my uncle got me for Christmas 4 months before he died 31. You can erase any horrible experience from your past. What will it be? The time when I was more depressed than ever 32. You got kicked out of the country for being a time-travelling heathen who sleeps with celebrities and has super powers...check out this cool shit...you can move anywhere else in the world!I'd go to America and be an outlaw with @awkward-is-a-life-choice it'd be ace 33. The Celestial Gates of Beyond have opened, much to your surprise because you didn't think such a thing existed. Death appears. As it turns out, Death is actually a pretty cool entity, and happens to be in a fantastic mood. Death offers to return the friend/family member/person/etc. of your choice to the living world. Who will you bring back?Who will I bring back from the dead? My uncle 34. What was your last dream about?Meeting Taylor Swift. It was so cool 35. Are you a good....[insert anything you'd like here]?Who knows 36. Have you ever been admitted to the hospital?Nope 37. Have you ever built a snowman?Of course 38. What is the colour of your socks?I'm not wearing any right now 39. What type of music do you like?Mostly pop 40. Do you prefer sunrises or sunsets?Sunrises are prettier but I'm never awake for them41. What is your favourite milkshake flavour?Caramel42. What football team do you support?Literally none I couldn't care less 43. Do you have any scars?A few. A couple of faint self harm scars, a scar on my thigh from work, one on my finger from an umbrella when I was 11, one on the back of my knee from falling on a broken garden lamp, some chicken pox scars and I think that's mostly it 44. What do you want to be when you graduate?I'd love to be a writer when I finish my degree but I know that isn't practical so I want to teach English and Creative writing to college and sixth form kids 45. If you could change one thing about yourself what would it be? I'd love to not have anxiety even though it's a part of me now 46. Are you reliable?When it matters, yes47. If you could ask your future self one question, what would it be?Are you happy?48. Do you hold grudges?It depends. If you've done something small I'll get over it pretty fast especially if I love you. But if you've really fucked me over then wooow you've messed up because I'll probably never let it go 49. If you could breed two animals together to defy the laws of nature, what new animal would you create?I'd mix an elephant and a snow leopard to make an snelephard or something like that and dhdhdhd it'd be so cute 50. What is the most unusual conversation you've ever had?Having to explain to a customer what gravy is when he's never had it or had anything like it and getting v stressed out51. Are you a good liar?Not in the slightest 52. How long could you go without talking?Longer than you'd think. If I didn't see anyone a while. If I saw Ryan I'd really struggle but probably just lay my head on his chest for a while and smile to myself 53. What has been your worst haircut/style?When I had a bob with a box fringe omg WHY. Never again it was such a bad look sjdjdj54. Have you ever baked your own cake?Of course did you even have a childhood if you didn't bake 55. Can you do accents other than your own? Lmao no 56. What do you like on your toast?Usually butter. Sometimes jam, or nutella. If I'm at my Nans honey, and once or twice marmalade 57. What is the last thing you drew a picture of?I doodled a flower whilst on the phone to the bank 58. What would be your dream car? One of the new minis. When I graduate and get a teaching job I'm 100% buying a mini 59. Do you sing in the shower? Or do anything unusual in the shower? Explain I always listen to music when I shower it makes me smile. Sometimes I sing but rarely. If I'm feeling really anxious and like everything's on top of me I'll just sit in there and feel the water running over me and remember that I'm alive 60. Do you believe in aliens?Not like we've shown them in films etc but I think that there has to be life out there somewhere. To have infinite universes and galaxies and everything and only have our planet have life on would be really sad 61. Do you often read your horoscope?All the time but I don't take it very seriously 62. What is your favourite letter of the alphabet?S. It just kinda flows and is doing its thing 63. What is cooler: dinosaurs or dragons?Dragons omg the purest coolest beings 64. What do you think about babies?They're so lucky to have their whole lives ahead of them. A blank slate. Also the cutest things I could honestly cry at babies and legit always cry at emotional giving birth scenes on TV. I want to be a mum so so much