#i think i got to like ep 500 something and then got busy

[thesinglesjukebox]

ADDISON RAE - "I GOT IT BAD"

Next up, Oliver brings us a star who rose to fame from the unlikely medium of (checks notes)... TikTok!

[5.28]

Brad Shoup: This is so Swedish it hurts. It sounds like a 2020s producer trying to make a 2000s hit using a 1980s suggestiveness. It's uncanny. I like it. [6]

Oliver Maier: Some obvious Britneyisms at play here: the punctuative orchestra hits, the B-chorus near the end and the siren at the very beginning, as if Rae is literally sounding the alarm about this dangerous boy. She's blowing bubblegum on the EP cover; the genre influence is not subtle. It works though, in part because Rae winks at the camera just the right amount. There's levity when she sings "He looks like the boy next door from my boyband poster," stacking two outdated pop culture tropes on top of each other and almost rendering the whole thing pointless, but she never prods hard enough it to collapse into pastiche. The horned-up glee of a line like "It's definitely something that could ruin my life" would have been subtext about 20 years ago, but now that's just a thing we invite people to do (incidentally, the track after this one on the EP is called "2 Die 4"). There's plenty else to enjoy in the lyrics besides all that, like the in media res opening line and the way she sings "He calls on me late at night, and he calls me baby," her voice dripping with pride at earning such an accolade. But the most impressive thing to me about "I Got It Bad" is that it obviously apes a vibe without being overtly, offputtingly cynical, because the the songcraft is fucking there: a glossy, 500-horsepower instrumental where you can barely discern an instrument and a big fat chorus. Delightful stuff. [9]

Frank Falisi: Nominally, the nostalgic urge is anathema to the writing of pop songs; how can something be the most monolithic feeling you've ever felt -- and the only song your head's ever managed -- if you're remembering something else? The pureness of plastic is how it can be melted down to cover old things and if it leaves a tacky taste in the mouth, it's only after the song ends, which is to say, after the pop. You could say that "I Got It Bad" references, however obliquely, a certain millennium-break sound-strand: the production is visible, busy but submissive, never invisible but an apparatus that produces the voice as much as the vocal cords. Even more so, 2002 haunts the way the personal pronoun dominates the territory of the song, from the verse's aspiration to ascension (love or lust, or somewhere on the way) to the divinity of a pre-chorus: "Take off every piece of me/until there's only skin on my body." Who's who? Addison Rae is different from Addison in the same way Britney Spears is different from Britney. The former are screens and their signifiers, the latter the heat bodies give off, intake, machinate. "I" signifies a space between the singer and the listener, a space that only happens in the duration between the start of the sound and its end. Will we ever be able to remember the start of this sound without saying the words "Britney Spears"? Or is that part of the song ending: once the feeling severs, we're left only with the ache. Restart the song or re-find the sound, it's all relative. I got it bad. [8]

Rose Stuart: This song violently throws you back to the 2000s, when every Disney star tried their hand at being a pop diva with lyrics sexy enough to remind you the singer is now a grown woman, but with vocals kept squeaky clean lest some emotion trick you into thinking the singer was actually into it. Everything -- from the beat to Rae's singing -- sounds both awkward and bored, sliding off your brain like an advertisement's first draft. [3]

Vikram Joseph: This is what you've all been hyping? This particular iteration of "You won't believe this but I have bad taste in men!" in a year where we had Olivia Rodrigo? I mean, this is so competently executed and so utterly devoid of personality, I really could not pick this out of a line-up. With a gun to my head to name an interesting thing about this song I'd go for the early Britney cosplay in the delivery of "ruin my li-i-uh-ife", or then again I might just gamble that it wasn't loaded. [3]

Will Rivitz: I've been only partly plugged into Extremely Online pop chatter the last few years, so forgive me if I'm not currently fluent enough in its current morphology to know whether or not this is a silly question: are we serious about Addison Rae? Like, yes, I get that there's been an unceasing stream of SHE ATEs since the EP dropped, and I also get that sometimes we support camp simply for camp's sake, and I also get that some of these people unironically go to bat for Sabrina Carpenter, so please be sympathetic to my inability to parse the semiotics of this past summer. Because the EP is indisputably mid as hell! Every song is a flimsy facsimile of a different recently relevant pop girl, the lyrics read like they were written by an AI trained on Netflix-reject teen romcom scripts, and somehow everything ends up sludging out into Disney's pop bargain bin. "I Got It Bad," naturally, is no different, a forgotten *NSYNC demo spruced up by Kim Petras's producers in which every verse has about five percent too many words and a syllable or two delivered as though Rae only realized two lines didn't rhyme halfway through the second. Rae doesn't have the juice to land tricky constructions like "take off every piece of me/until there's only SKIN on MY boDY" (is your skin not a piece of you? Are you wearing someone else's???) or the pacing to make "definitely something that could ruin my life" sound like she's delivering the words in her 20s. I love oodles of popstars who Do Not Have The Range, but Addison Rae so remarkably Does Not Have The Range that the Not Range is impossible to ignore. What gives! [3]

Will Adams: I have little interest in indulging the "um you guys Addison Rae's music actually kinda slays??" bit as much as it attempts to grab me (look! a Charli feature! an exhumed Gaga demo!). But it's hard to resist the charm of "I Got It Bad". The Max Martinisms are off the charts -- orchestra hits, alternate final chorus, the "it's gonna, gonna gonna" vocal stacking, absolute nonsense lyrics -- and Addison's blankness makes way for all of it to shine. [6]

Anna Katrina Lockwood: A terrific song performed so listlessly that I am absolutely unconvinced that Addison Rae does, indeed, have it bad. [7]

Katherine St Asaph: The arrangement is great: a little freestyle, a little 2010s-era Max Martin electro, a little 2000-era Max Martin staccato stabs and final counterpoint chorus. (It's produced by Rami Yacoub -- close enough.) Everything else is not: Addison Rae's vocal nonpresence, the incompetent lyrics (Addison is credited; I believe it), and a supposedly magnetic crush that makes Taylor Swift's undangerous lovers seem like goddamn incubi. [5]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: "I don't want something right down the middle," Addison Rae shrugs on this middling track. "I Got It Bad" isn't bad, just mediocre with its anonymous pop vision. [4]

Ian Mathers: "Generic" is not necessarily a synonym for "bad." [6]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: It's definitely something. [4]

Kayla Beardslee: First time listening, and I can see why this release made noise: it's a surprisingly good Pop Girl Song from an artist whose TikTok background wasn't guaranteed to translate well to pop music. Of course, once you get past the "oh, it's good" phase, it just sounds like a run-of-the-mill pop single -- nice chorus, but there are a thousand other songs that do the same thing. [6]

Michael Hong: "She's definitely improving," goes the top comment on YouTube and you can definitely see "I Got It Bad" as something in Addison Rae's transitional stage between "Friday" and whatever the hell Rebecca Black is doing right now. [5]

Taylor Alatorre: What does it say about the continued hegemony of the Long 1980s that, even in a song with those signature Max Martin orchestra stabs and a clumsy "boy band poster" line, there's still a perceived need to drench it in a blanket of heady synthwave fog? Like, if we're going to be doing anachronisms like that, can we at least skip to the point in the nostalgia cycle where we can start having gratuitous dubstep interludes in pop songs again? Because the 2:09 mark here would be the perfect place for one. [5]

Nortey Dowuona: The drums in this song sound like they were made by Adam Feeney for the 1986 electro pop pack. BTW, pls check that out, and if you find any drum packs or loops in it, use them better than just looping them at the bottom of the track and not doing anything with them. Who did produce this btw - one of them made "My My My" and another made "Stars"? rage quit blurbing, pls finish with joke about rami youssef is the one true Ramy - [2]

Claire Biddles: Not to sound exactly like a 36 year old who always has to check if the second "T" in "TikTok" has to be capitalised, but I had no idea of the vast lore behind Ms Rae's pop career. "I Got It Bad" has the whiff of a lost golden era of pop that could easily cause commotion in parts of the internet, but it's not specific or muscular enough to carry it past pastiche for me. Still, points for the pitched-up orchestra hits and points for the unexpected body horror of "Take off every piece of me/Until there's only skin on my body." [5]

Alex Ostroff: Your enjoyment of this will entirely boil down to how easy a mark you are for retro Max Martin 1.0 tricks that he's long since moved on from but which his old Cheiron Studios colleagues and his newer students nostalgically wheel out every so often. Addison herself is completely blank and uncompelling -- a delivery mechanism who does nothing to get in the way of the hooks but nothing to sell them either. Some of the lyrics are genuinely terrible in ways reminiscent of the Swedes' early work with Backstreet. "He gives it to me more than a little"? "He got me close, but now it's official"? But "He looks like the boy next door from my boyband poster" is a pop music snake eating its own tail that verges on charming. And then the bridge ends with those gradually stacking *NSYNC vocal harmonies ascending up to pop music heaven, then slides right into a Britney-style B-chorus! None of it is as impeccably constructed as its inspirations. For one thing, Max would have had the B-chorus repeat as a counterpoint harmony under the final reprise à la "...Baby One More Time," "(You Drive Me) Crazy," and "Oops!... I Did It Again". The last time he wrote an alternate chorus without immediately repeating it as a closing harmony was Robyn's "Show Me Love" (and he could have -- try singing it over the final chorus for yourself and you'll see that it marries up just as smoothly as Britney's!). In the hands of a real Pop Star and with a bit more work, this would be excellent. As it is, it's merely a very good pop song performed by someone utterly unable to convince us to make it as massive a hit as it would be in an alternate universe. Which should probably merit a [4] or a [5], but... Your enjoyment of this will entirely boil down to how easy a mark you are for retro Max Martin 1.0 tricks that he's long since moved on from... and unfortunately when it comes to classic era Max Martin pop music tricks, "I knew I should walk away, but I went closer". It's definitely something that could ruin my life... cause I... I got it bad. [8]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox ]

[gravitasmalfunction]

Now I’ve had my whinge and watched on another five episodes, I think I understand a bit better what the story is doing and while I still don’t like the it (‘it’ being the dominant cultural position on sex work) I can see where it fits in with the characterisation, at least. And I revised my expectations, as tumblr user khahahahahahah pointed out this is a romantic comedy cdrama built on romance drama cliches. I cannot hold it to any standards as a social commentary. So I have to accept it is what it is and look at it from another angle, which what it says about Qian Heng, because I want to study his stupid character like a bug. How is this absolute mess of a man successfully pulling off the role of a romantic male lead? Why can’t I hate this guy?

Although he surely knew what Cheng Yao really meant when she was running around the house after him trying to convince him to take up another career, he neither defended sex work nor particularly stood up for himself or tried to correct the misunderstanding. And although I initially feared that was to continue gathering as much ammunition against her as possible before she realised he’s her boss, it wasn’t the case at all. He genuinely didn’t give a shit what she thought about him, as long as she didn’t say anything slanderous. But he doesn’t have any particular respect for sex workers, as per his reaction the day after Wu Jun’s disastrous date with Cheng Xi. He thinks it’s hilarious that Wu Jun got blackout drunk and woke up to find cash on the hotel nightstand the next morning, and he was ready to tell everyone a night with Wu Jun was worth 500 yuan.

Here is the thing - Qian Heng appears to not care what anybody thinks about him as a person. He has a room full of trophies, complaints and threats all stored together and I think that is telling: they are all symbols of work he’s done. Sometimes you get a pennant and sometimes you get a death threat - either way your professional impact was recognised! He’s abstracted himself from humanity entirely; there is only the work. No wonder the sad bastard can’t sleep! The only friend he will accept care from is Wu Jun, and the only way Wu Jun can get him to accept care is by pointing out his health is necessary for his work.

But their friendship is genuine underneath the macho posturing, and that’s the crack in Qian Heng’s armour that shows us he is capable of joy and caring, but also hammers it home that he is actively choosing not to do that. Especially with people who love him and care for him, like his mother, who he is avoiding like the plague. Why refuse her care and accept Wu Jun’s? Because he can frame Wu Jun’s care as caring for his investment in an asset, their shared business. He can earn that care by working hard and being a great lawyer. But his mother’s love he didn’t have to earn at all and he apparently can’t handle being valued as a person at this time.

Of course this is a romance so it will be revealed that Qian Heng does care, that he is a human with human failings and human needs for connection and joy, and love will solve all his problems, but at this early stage (eps 1-6) the callous, brusque exterior is inadvertently revealing something to us the audience, which is that he doesn’t really like himself. Oh he values himself highly, but he believes he’s unlikeable.

One of his strategies for dealing with this belief is dismissing the need to be liked as unimportant (no interest in dating, for example, or spending time with his mum), and another is preempting people’s dislike for him by behaving appallingly (when he gets tricked into attending the group dating event and gives the most misogynistic possible answers to the getting to know you questions).

This dichotomy, that he sees his worth only in his work and not in himself as a person, is how he can go from apparent feminist one minute (while lecturing Cheng Yao about how she shouldn’t be making him or anyone else in the office coffee because she’s a lawyer, dammit, and her time should be spent on legal work) to apparent misogynist the next (concocting an elaborate ruse to manufacture a debt that means he can order her to keep house for him). But he’s not actually a misogynist. He’s a misanthrope. He dislikes everyone, including and perhaps especially his own self. But he holds a professional line in professional contexts, for example his lecture about keeping emotions out of family law practice and not falling into the trap of thinking one side is a victim and the other a villain - it was a really good lesson! He’s solid on the professional advice and professional values, he’s just a complete mess personally. A high achieving disaster. An eye-wateringly expensive shambles.

So maybe I will be catered to and there will come a critique of the patriarchy that has Qian Heng trapped in a vicious cycle of believing his only value is his professional output, and he will grow and evolve and become capable of receiving care and giving it. I would like to see that.

And meanwhile I cannot help but like Cheng Yao despite the early showcase of her less kind and empathic behaviours and beliefs. She is coping with this mess of a person as a manager and a human being and all his mercurial, contradictory directives with more kindness and grace than his behaviour warrants. I was so happy when she finally figured out how he was actually using her, and she immediately used it against him to make him go to sleep. Petty and spiteful towards a stranger in a job you don’t like - bad! Petty and spiteful toward your boss who is an insomniac jerk - yes please and thank you.

*pauses episode to deconstruct the themes of gender, professionalism and patriarchy and the implications of the FL's whorephobia*

I mean seen from another perspective, her obsession with the idea that he's a sex worker and her reaction to that belief seems to indicate an ego-protective mechanism at work, a cognitive dissonance that allows her to avoid confronting her feelings about how she was treated in her previous job, where she was ostensibly employed as a legal professional and then expected to entertain handsy clients after hours. And the irony that it was overhearing *his* conversation in that same restaurant with a client who wanted sexual favours from him, and how he flatly rejected those advances, that gave her the courage to walk out and resign on the spot - but even that inspiration was ultimately whorephobic because her takeaway from that scene was if he, a mere sex worker, can assert his right to walk away from a deal he doesn't want, then she, a highly educated lawyer, ought to have even less qualms about leaving an undesirable job. But then again her whorephobia is integral to this narrative tension that's being established, where she has fundamentally mistaken the power dynamic between herself and him, her accidental temporary roommate. She's being set up for a grand reversal when she realises he's not a sex worker, he's her new lawyer employer and named partner in the firm she's just taken a job with. But is the narrative going to punish her for assuming he was a loser/traitor under the patriarchy, a man who inverted the power dynamic by serving women's sexual needs, rather than the other way around? Or is it going to take her to task for the way she treats sex workers?

*browses tumblr, sees the ML actor's shirtless bathroom selfies*

Nice!

[argumentl]

The Freedom of Expression Ep 55 - Rage Room.

K: Hi, this is Dir en grey's Kaoru with this week's episode of The Freedom of Expression . Joe, Tasai, welcome.

J: Today we are wearing...

K: Yeh, you've been wearing these recently, havn't you? Its just the right season for them.

T, J: Yeah.

J: Its a bit warm out for a thick coat during the day now..

T: Yeah, this is really useful.

K: It is a bit warm now, isn't it?

J: Yeah, and when it gets too warm I can just take this off, and put it straight in my bag...

T: Yeah, its just right. It really is easy to use.

K: I see.

T: Its great. And when I wear it, the girls think Im cool.

J: Do they really say that to you?

T: Haha, is it just me?

J: That sounds like bragging! No one says anything to me!

K: Don't they? haha

J: No! Why do some people get called cool, and others don't..even though we are both wearing Dir en grey clothes?? Does this simply mean Joe Yokomizo is not cool? Is that it?

T: No, no. Your mood switch is impressive, haha.

J: Please stop it. You know I'm still trying to get married again. Don't get in my way!

T: Why are you so angry? haha.

J: Thats just me, haha.

K: You are angry, aren't you?　

J: Oh, I'm ok.

K: Speaking of getting angry...lets have today's topic.

T: Oh, good idea.

J: Ok, may I read out today's news? This news is about a 'Rage Room'.

T: Oh, very fitting.

J: Yes..In the suburbs of São Paulo, a 'Rage Room' has recently opened, where people can release their pent up stress and anxiety, and it has been proving popular. The room is set up in a warehouse, and peope can unleash their anger by smashing up old tvs and computers etc. According to Vanderlei Rodrigues (age 42), who started the business a month ago, there are quite a lot of people using the room who want to release their anger, especially with the spread of covid. Rodrigues claims this was the best time to open a Rage room, with so many people needing a release from the massive stress and aniexty which they are experiencing. Incidentally, the price to experience this is $4.64, which equates to about ¥490. Users need to wear protective clothing and a helmet, and can write words on the wall to aim their anger at, like 'ex-girlfriend', 'ex-husband', 'corruption', 'work' etc. A single-mother of two who used the room had this to say about it: 'Its good that I can work off my discontent in this rage room. My daughters, or anyone else, don't have to bear the brunt of my complaints, and its great being able to smash things'. A Rage Room! What do you think? First of all, would you go if there was one here?

T: I wanna try it out, yeh.

K: It sounds interesting.

J: Right? Smashing stuff up.

T: And its under ¥500.

J: Yes, it is.

T: Hm, that sounds pretty good.

J: Right?! It might be more expensive if it was in Japan, what with the land price being higher...if you compare it to São Paulo, Brazil. But if it was in the suburbs, like my home town Hachiouji or something, it might be cheaper, haha. It would be difficult to get there though. But if there was one here, I'd wanna try going. The question is though, if you went there, what would you aim your anger at?

T: Yeah.

J: Is there anything at Tokyo Sports you would pick?

T: There's a few things.

J: Right? Its like, what are you angry at? Like, 'My idiot boss!!!'?

T: Ah, I see.

K: Hiranabe?

J: Hiranabe! haha ???*1

T: Yeh, maybe I'll go with that. haha

J: Haha. Would you whack him in person?

T: No no, haha.

J: That would become a crime scene, haha. Kaoru, how about you?

K: Well, yeh...

J: What do you wanna unleash your rage at?

K: Hm, what do I? I don't really want to get direct anger AT anything. Stress happens as a result of lots of small things building up to make something bigger, right?

J: Of course.

K: I'd just wanna get the stress out in a way unrelated to all that stuff.

J: Ahh, I see. Well, yeh, stress has been building up bit by bit, even in just this last year.

K: Punchbags in gyms are apparently pretty popular too.

T, J: Ohh

J: People need somewhere to aim their rage. Ah, yeh there's that too. Some people go to the gym too. Lets go.

T: To a rage room?

J: Yeah. Well, I mean, I've got loads of things to  be angry at...loads that I can't say here, but...

T: Joe, are you that stressed out?

J: Yeah, its tough. My radio show is tough, everything is hard! Its been so tough, I wanna smash stuff.

T: But have you guys been really angry at anything recently? Like, so angry you wanted to punch someone?

K: Well, im not sure if its at that level, but I do get angry quite a lot...at people in the street wearing those noise cancelling earphones. They don't pay attention to anything around them, and just walk into you! There those people right?

T, J: Ahh, yeh yeh.

K???*2

T: You do get angry!

J: Well, yeah!

T: Well, I was out walking too, in Kichijōji, on a really narrow street near the station used by cars and pedestrians. And a drunk guy came riding his bike right down the middle of the street, and was about to crash right into me until I yelled at him. I was so angry with him!

J: Were you? Ahh.

T: Maybe my anger is aimed at people like that.

K: Mm, there are a lot of them.

J: This is why this kind of business works. Like you said earlier Kaoru, its not about being against a specific thing or person, its the daily stress that builds up and up, and this rage room helps to relieve that.

T: Its good, isn't it?

J: its just right. Should we do this? Let's open one.

K: Here?

J: Haha, we could smash loads here. Yeah, but a rage room. It sounds just right for these times....Kami is pretty quiet today..Are you there, Kami?

Kami: Im here, yes yes.

J: Were you asleep?

Kami: No no. Um, as for me...I wouldn't use this room.

J: Eh?! You wouldn't?

Kami: No.

J: Why? Don't you have any stress?

Kami: No, gods don't get angry.

J, T, K: Ehh?!

J: What do..

Kami: Its like, we are gods so we are not supposed to get angry.

J: Oh really?

T: I had the image that gods get angry quite a lot. 

Kami: No, not necessarily. You use a hammer to smash tvs and computers, right?

J, T: Yeah.

J: It would feel good, right?

Kami: I'd definitely hurt myself if I did that.

J: Haha.

Kami: Then I'd think 'Ahhh, it hurts' and regret doing it, which would make me get angry again. So I'd never do that. And charging ¥490 for it just adds insult to injury.

J: Haha

K: Well, there is that too.

T: Yeah.

J: Kami, have you never been angry in your life? 

Kami: I have loads of times.

J: You have? haha. You don't like the idea of a Rage Room though? You'd hurt yourself so you wouldn't use it?

Kami: I wouldn't.

J: Ahh, I see.

T: It would hurt your muscles a bit throwing a big, heavy hammer around.

J: Yeah, if you are not used to it.

T: Its scary.

K: Yeah, if its someone who doesn't usually use hammers.

J: Yeah, if it comes as a surprise, it'll be tough.

Kami: Um, wouldn't it be good to make something to prevent road rage? Something small.

J: Ah, yeah.

T: Yeah, road rage annoys me.

J: Road rage, yeh. Well, its dangerous.

Kami: If you told the government about a rage room that you can put in cars to prevent road rage, they would get it for you, right?

J: Ahh, well, like a small compartment?

Kami: Yes

J: A small rage compartment.

Kami: Yeah.

J: Before you get angry at person in front's driving, you could let it all out next to you ???*3

Kami: Ah, thats a good idea.

J: Haha

T: They could also make a room in the highway service areas or something?

Kami: Yeah.

T: To prevent road rage.

J: That might actually be good.

Kami: Yeah, road rage would disappear.

K: But if the wrong person comes in, they'll get punched.

J: Haha, your right. Everyone is there is stressed and annoyed, right?

K: Yeah.

J: If its not organised properly, they might start fighting.

K: They could have a martial arts contest in there.

J: Hahaha. Well, thats like putting your anger into a fight? Ahh.

T: I also wanna shout really loudly, to get rid of stress.

J: Ahh, we're not doing that recently, are we?

K: Ah, I see.

J: We can't yell at lives and stuff.

K: Well, Joe, you still talk a lot, but I've been talking less than usual.

T: Yeah.

J: Well, the number of conversations we have has decreased, right? Like, we don't go out drinking with friends..it builds stress.

K: Drinking makes your voice louder too, right? Joe, you get really loud when you drink! haha.

J: I do! Im so noisy

K: Well, yeah, its because of covid, people can't get their stress out.

J: Yeah. Well, lets think of some fun ways to get rid of stress.

T: Ok, lets think of something.

J: Firstly...

Kami: Something where you are not gonna get hurt and regret it.

J: Yes. But this is only dangerous because its tvs and computers, right, Kami? What if it were straw dolls or something?

Kami: Ah, in that case you'd hit your hand under the doll with the hammer.

J: Ah, you would. haha

Kami: There's no need for hammers and stuff.

J: Haha

T: He's peaceful.

J: Yeah

T: Very godlike.

K: But thats him messing up, right?

J: Oh, I see, its not that he's peaceful, its just about him messing up and hitting his own hand with the hammer. Does that make him a bit cute?

Kami: How about when you are opening a box and you pull it open with all your might, you cut your hand, right?

Kami: Cutting your hand on a box..

K: Oh, on a box, yeah. That happens a lot. I've been ordering online a lot recently. It cuts your fingers. ???*4

T: Yeh yeh, haha.

J: Also, when you get a package delivered and leave it in the hallway, and then bash your little toe off it when you walk past. Its only a small thing, but it hurst so much, right? Like, 'Uaaghh', you don't know what to do, right?

T: Yeah, thats annoying.

J: It really is. It would be better to just unpack it, but when you leave it there and bash your toe, its so bad!

Kami: Do you get annoyed?

T: What?

Kami: Do you get annoyed? As for me, if I bashed my little toe, I would think, 'Oh, not again!'. I would just be fed up.

K: Cute.

J: Haha, yeah. Whats happened to Kami today?

T: But yeh, it is those little things that often cause the big outbursts of anger. Just cutting your hand a tiny bit or something.

Kami: What would you call being fed up? Its not anger, but what is it?

J: What do you call that? Yeah.

T: Sulky?

K: Depression?

Kami: A sulking room would be good.

J: Ah, haha. Yeah, a sulking room.

Kami: It looks like there'd only be me in it.

T: Kami seems a bit sad today.

J: He does. Kami, did something bad happen to you?

Kami: Uh, yes, daily. All the time.

J: Oh, I see. Well, maybe not a rage room, but lets comfort each other in a sulking room.

T: Yeah, next time.

Kami: Yes please.

T: Lets get rid of the stress.

J: Yeah, haha.

K: Ok, lets finish here for this week.

J: Yes, im a little worried about Kami, but..

K: Thank you very much.

*1,2,3,4 - Couldn't catch/wasn't sure.

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[lilydalexf]

Old School X is a project interviewing X-Files fanfic authors who were posting fic during the original run of the show. New interviews are posted every Tuesday.

Interview with Sarah Ellen Parsons

Sarah Ellen Parsons has 18 X-Files stories at Gossamer and 19 at AO3. If you want high quality fic with interesting characters, go read her stories. Some of my favorites of her fics are The Crouching Thing and My Constant Touchstone Who Makes Me A Whole Person (which are two very different stories!). Big thanks to Sarah Ellen for doing this interview.

Does it surprise you that people are still interested in reading your X-Files fanfics and others that were posted during the original run of the show (1993-2002)?

With today's binge-watching culture, I'm not at all surprised. You can watch a bunch of eps and then seek out fic that is where you are in the series.

What do you think of when you think about your X-Files fandom experience? What did you take away from it?

I took away a writer's group Yes, Virginia, that is still together.  Mostly as friends, but whenever I write something, or someone else writes something, it's the first place we all run for machete beta. I have betad SO MANY novels.

We have a number of folks who are published writers since then and our time in X-Files fic brought us lifelong friendships IRL and made us all better at our craft. The majority of those folks were better writers than I am. And I make my living as a writer in my day-job.

Social media didn't really exist during the show's original run. How were you most involved with the X-Files online (atxc, message board, email mailing list, etc.)?

I belonged to a couple of the largest lists and posted there and bitched about the show on usenet with everyone else.  We had our own Yahoo group for beta.  We all had crappy GeoCities websites that we programmed the HTML for ourselves and hooked through various fandom link circles to get traffic to our stories.  But the main method of distribution was the lists.

Fun fact, I found a free page counter thing that I used at work one time through fandom. So fandom pays off in skillz.

Even without social media, we managed to get our stories in front of readers who would enjoy them. Where there's a will, there's always someone ready to step up and find a way.

What did you take away from your experience with X-Files fic or with the fandom in general?

Again, I have lifelong friends IRL that I got solely from fanfiction. That's the best takeaway.

Fandom disappointed me because it, like everything else, is ruined by people's egos, backstabbing, and petty people who get in positions of power and then use those positions to punch down or dictate. I was young when I was writing X-Files and I still had hope that people would rise to their better natures, so I got involved in various futile efforts to try to make people behave the way I wanted them to behave, I guess. I did a lot of public bitching that didn't serve me or my friends well. I now put that effort into politics, where it does actual good.

What was it that got you hooked on the X-Files as a show?

X-files was made for me. It combined science fiction, mystery, horror.  I love all of those genres. Plus there was Scully. No matter how sexist that writer's room was, Scully was awesome. But you kept seeing bad writing. Even in the heyday seasons, like Season 3, there were really terrible eps that made you want to fix things.

I'm a lifelong speculative fiction fan and a published feminist science fiction author. I actually was published before I fell down the fic hole. I got involved in fanfic due to getting my fantasy novel turned down from every major publisher for being "too dark". And I needed to get readers to see my stuff to prove to myself that I wasn't terrible at writing. I got a ton of feedback and it was like market research to see what people wanted to read.

My time in fanfiction made me 100% a better writer than I was.

What got you involved with X-Files fanfic?

I went to the X-Files Expo to see if I could make contact with someone from Harper Collins because the tie-in novels sucked so hard.  I got rejected with my pitch as I didn't have a literary agent.

Around that time, a pal who I watched X-Files with IRL was looking for a free X-files wallpaper for her work computer when she found the website where fans in Pennsylvania had fic archived. She read some and wrote to me - "you need to see this, and you can do better."  So I started reading and was.... I probably CAN do better. So I wrote The Batman Plot. And made two friends I'm still friends with with that one story.

What is your relationship like now to X-Files fandom?

Nonexistent.  I couldn't even watch the latest season and I saw only 2 of season one of whatever that was before I gave up. I have never watched the second movie.

X-files is my first fandom bad ex-husband. I loved it SO MUCH, but it betrayed me.

Were you involved with any fandoms after the X-Files? If so, what was it like compared to X-Files?

I was deep into Harry Potter for a while, but I didn't end up publishing anything in it. All my stories were novel-length and I was writing so much for work, I never completed anything. I called Snape/Lily when Prisoner of Azkaban was published and got Jossed by Rowling in one of my big ideas. (This is bad fandom ex-husband 2. JKR will never get a dime of money from me again because of her hateful stance on transfolk. I have RL friends who are trans and NO.)

I wrote fic in Supernatural. It was the obvious next thing after X-Files. However, the misogyny and bringing in all the Angel/Devil Christofascist stuff lost me. The ep where they declared all other religions other than Christianity as invalid and killed a Hindu god made me stop watching for good. I know enough Christofascists IRL that I can't tolerate it in my fiction. (Bad fandom ex-husband 3)

Who are some of your favorite fictional characters? Why?

This list is far too long to actually make.  But characters I spent time writing about include: Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Co. (I wrote three unpublished Star Trek novels before I found online fandom). King Arthur and Morgan Le Fay, Sherlock Holmes (I wrote a Sherlock Holmes play after seeing "Crucifer of Blood" and entered it in a national competition, where I got very nice comments back.), Mulder, Scully and Krycek, Rowling's Hermione and Snape (like him or not, its masterful characterization), Dean and Sam Winchester, John Winchester and Bobby Singer.  I wrote one comedy story starring Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  A couple of Roswell stories under a different name. Catwoman and Batman. I have some unpublished Avengers fanfic lying around as I'm an OG Marvel fan with a massive comic collection.

Do you ever still watch The X-Files or think about Mulder and Scully?

I was on a business trip a few years ago and FX had a marathon and I watched part of it when I was in my hotel room. Early seasons are comforting, but I don't go back there now.

Do you ever still read X-Files fic? Fic in another fandom?

I don't read X-Files fic anymore. I read a tiny bit of Star Wars after the second movie because Rian Johnson had it right. Now I don't care. I love Mandalorian, but am content to watch.

Do you have any favorite X-Files fanfic stories or authors?

Too many to count.  All of YV. Which reminds me, I need to go update our entry at Fanlore. I promised Punk I'd do it a while back.  I need to at least get everyone linked.  Right now it's only Punk and Sab.

But it was a ton of us.  Marasmus, Maria Nicole, Cofax, CazQ, M. Sebasky, Livia Balaban, Kelly Keil, Wen, Ropobop, Jess Mabe, JET, fialka, and a bunch of others that I can't remember their fic names any more, just their real names because I know them all IRL. I need to go back and look up their fic names and link them up there.

In addition to my little group of pals, I loved reading Mustang Sally and Rivka T, Rachel Anton - I keep trying to find her to encourage her to write romance if she's not doing it already, but no dice, Dasha K., Anjou, there were so many great ones, but their names have slipped my mind in the past 20 years.

What is your favorite of your own fics, X-Files and/or otherwise?

I'm most known for Prone, and I'm proud of that story for all kinds of reasons, but I think my very best is The Crouching Thing.

I mostly didn't publish anything I didn't think was good and hadn't been machete betaed within an inch of its life, but I'm not sure much of the angsty romance stuff holds up as well. I think it worked when the show was still ON and we were all in that emotional headspace, but probably not now.

Do you think you'll ever write another X-Files story? Or dust off and post an oldie that for whatever reason never made it online?

Funny you ask. I am currently reworking a plot idea I had for an X-Files fic into a contemporary M/M novel, which I will publish under a different pen-name. The plot is the idea I had for X-Files, the characters are very, very different other than one is uptight and the other more easy-going. But no more Mulder and Scully.

Do you still write fic now? Or other creative work?

I have been making my living as a writer for 25 years. I write the word count equivalent of 5 Tolkein novels a year, just for my day-job.  I am turning back to original fiction, which is where I was before X-Files.  I'm working on the M/M thing, a high fantasy thing, a low fantasy historical thing and a bunch of M/F Regency romances as I get time and energy.  I publish Fantasy and SF under my real name. Romance has pen names as you don't want that getting back to your workplace, either.

SEP is fic only and here she will stay.

Where do you get ideas for stories?

I have too many ideas to count.  I try to write them down when they come, so I won't forget. At least the outline of the idea. Often a scene. I've been like this my entire life. I started writing novels seriously at 15. I wrote a 500 plus page one about Morgan Le Fay during breaks in high school because "Mists of Avalon" pissed me off so bad as I'd read the original source material and that was a Wicca recruitment polemic.

What's the story behind your pen name?

Sarah Ellen was my great-grandma, Parsons was her grandma's last name.

Do your friends and family know about your fic and, if so, what have been their reactions?

Half my friends ARE fic friends. Most of my friends know as does my brother, who thinks writing for free is dumb. This is universally agreed on by non-fic friends who know. My mother still doesn't know about the fic. Just the "real" writing.  I write under a pen name to keep it away from my job and my published work.

Is there a place online (tumblr, twitter, AO3, etc.) where people can find you and/or your stories now?

My X-files stuff is up on Gossamer mostly. I'm trying to get the stories all moved to AO3 for all the genres. I'm working on this now.  SEP is really not a living thing anymore, but there was a time when she was more me than me.

If you want to find my "real" non-fic writing, write to me at se_parsons at yahoo dot com and I will point you at it.

And PLEASE someone, hunt down Rachel Anton and get her writing something we all can BUY.  Where are my old Krycek bitches at?  Do any of you know where she is? [Lilydale note: I’ve tried contacting Rachel Anton for this Old School X project but have not had luck. I would love to find her too!]

Is there anything else you'd like to share with fans of X-Files fic?

The community I loved has mostly moved on, but I think we left a legacy of solid work crafted out of our love for the show.  Find a living community you love for a show you love.  There are great people out there creating and get involved.  It will be worth it.

(Posted by Lilydale on December 15, 2020)

[jentlemahae]

hi! I am here to inquire about the plot of dream verse 💓

under the cut bcs i got carried away

EP 1: Dive Into You

It is no secret that 20-year-olf Park Jisung was born in luck. He was the full package – tall, handsome, smart, good-hearted, skilled at sports, and extremely rich. His family had found wealth 25 years before, when his grandfather (Park Haru) started the hot sauce business that would become the most successful hot sauce business in South Korea – DREAM FLAVOR. No one knew exactly how he had done it, as it seemed to have happened in the blink of an eye – people always asked him, but all he would do was wink and say, ‘I just had a spark of good luck’. But no one knew how true that was.

Jisung always looked up to his grandfather, and trusted every single word that came out of his mouth. His step-father (Jae-yi), however, had a much different opinion on the old man. He thought Haru was a total nut case, always nagging him obsessing over that damn candle. Truth be told, he did sort of have a point. Haru had a candle he was extremely secretive about, which he kept in a locked room beside his bedroom. You know, the “normal” place where people keep candles. As he was growing up, he always told Jisung that the candle was actually far more precious than it seemed, and that he should never let it blow out. A bunch of popicocks, as his father would say, but Jisung never forgot it.

He still didn’t forget it on that cold day of early May – that is, the day his grandfather died. Some people say death isn’t lonely, but that’s exactly how Jisung felt. Haru was not just his grandpa – he was his role model, his teacher, and most of all, his friend. On his will, he decidedto give Jisung a key to the candle’s room with a note that said, ‘I’m giving my spark of good luck to you and ONLY you. Use it well’. Jisung was torn because he wanted to trust that the last words his grandpa said to him were meaningful, but he couldn’t help but think, ‘What’s this old nut saying?’. Nonetheless, he took the key and went into the ominous room, with nothing but hope as his company. The candle was burning in the center of the dark windowless room, untouched and unsettling. It was just a normal candle you could find at a local market, yet something about the flame made it impossible to look away. Unsure of what to do, he decided to just leave and go home to try to forget about the whole thing. Yet, the trembling flame kept haunting his dreams for the entire night.

The next day, Jisung’s father decided it was time to move into Haru’s house and turn it upside down, with no care to the fact that the body of Haru was almost not even cold yet. He wanted to clean each room, but he couldn’t get into the candle room. Jisung was unsure of what to do – he did think his grandfather was bananas, but he also didn’t want to disrespect the only legacy he had left him. So, he refused to give up the key, and instead offered to clean the room himself. After dusting every inch of the area, he opened the door to let some air in. But as the wind was roaring outside, a sudden violent breeze came through the door and blew the candle out. Jisung rushed over and then ran to get a box of matches, to try to light it up as quickly as possible. However, no match seemed to work, as the fire appeared to refuse to burn again. With a wretched feeling in his gut, he immediately left and went back home to take a nap, trying to tell himself that it was nothing big. Boy, was he wrong…

When Jisung woke up from his nap, the sight that welcomed him was not what he expected – a young boy with blue hair and a green hoodie was sitting on the floor across from his bed. ‘Hi, I’m Mark’, he said – simple words that scared Jisung to his very bones. Raddled and very confused, Jisung decided to call his 5 friends – Renjun, Jeno, Haechan, Jaemin, and Chenle – and asked them to come over, hoping that together they would be able to make sense of the situation. But alas, they did not. As they watched Mark ravaging Jisung’s fridge as if he hadn’t eaten in a decade, they tried to come up with a game plan.

However, quick-tempered Haechan quickly lost his patience, and told Mark either he left on his own, or they were going to call the police. At which Mark looked at Jisung in disbelief and asked him if his grandfather hadn’t told him anything about him. Utterly confused, the boy shook his head, and so Mark told his story to the 6 googly-eyed friends…

Mark was 500-year-old spirit, born under the Joseon dynasty. Once he died, a witch bounded him to the candle – whenever someone lit it, Mark would bring good fortune and money to their family as long as the flame was burning. If it was blown out, the fortune would stop and Mark could wander the earth freely until someone new lighted it again.

The 6 friends exchanged a look and knew they were all thinking the same thing – they had to light that candle up once again.

(end of ep 1, now I’m gonna go more quickly omg this is so long I’m genuinely sorry)

EP 2: Rainbow

Mark overhears a convo between the others and becomes aware of the fact that they want to put him back inside the candle, but obviously he doesn’t want to. So he makes a pact with them to have 3 days of freedom, and he plans on stealing the candle in the meantime. He wants to go to the beach, so the 7 of them go on a road trip.

The 7 of them do some bonding and Mark tells them more of this story. He was born in a family of slaves and had grown up seeing all the injustices inflicted upon his people by the hands of the hierarchs. So, one day he decided to take matters into his own hands and began retaliating, by stealing from the royals to help his family. But his anger for revenge couldn’t stop at just stealing – he wanted the blood of those who had hurt his people. So, when he died, the witch put him there as a punishment for the murders.

They find out he’s a nice guy so they don’t want to put him back into the candle, as they realize he should have a chance to live too. So Mark tells them there is a way he can be out but still have access to his powers – they need the help of the witch who put him there. Obviously she’s dead by now but her power ran through her family, so she must have a descendant who is able to help them.

EP 3: Diggity

The witch who put him there was called Man Wol Lee and, as they find out, was an ancestor of Haechan. He doesn’t have magic but his twin sister – Hae-soo – does. So they go to her and try their best to convince her (Mark is the only one who manages to get through to her). In the meantime – Haru’s business (who is now in the hands of Jisung’s father) begins to go into trouble + Mark is staying as Jisung’s house (as he’s usually by himself anyway since his parents both work a lot) so the two have a lot of talks and stuff (e.g. Mark explains that when the candle is lit, he is stuck in a limbo called the Dreamverse – i.e. a place stuck between life and death where he has to face his own worst nightmares + tells him how he had met Haru). Anyways, they get Hae-soo to try something witchy so she channels Man Wol’s spirit with a spell book they found (and that Mark translated since he knew old Korean). They find out Mark and Man Wol used to be lovers (uh) in the old times, and she was the one who killed him and then forced him into the candle because she wanted to stop his lust for blood. She tells them the only way to free Mark is to bind someone else to the candle, to replace him.

EP 4: Irreplaceable

(+ Mark starts being mean to Hae-soo bcs he’s mad at Man Wol) They conclude the person they lock up should be a bad person + they don’t wanna kill them so they should find someone who justdied. So they go to the hospital but don’t find anyone (un)worthy enough (they know bcs Mark see what someone has been like while they were alive bcs of a spirit thingy).

*some shit happens*

They discover the candle got stolen. They search for a while, but then Mark disappears – someone must have lighted the candle again.

EP 5: Be There For You

Hae-soo does a locator spell so they’re able to find the candle, and discover that it’s now in possession of Vincenzo Cassano, one of the biggest mafia bosses in South Korea (he had heard of the candle’s powers and he wanted to use it). The 6 boys go to him to try to blow the candle out and free Mark, but they get caught and are taken hostage (they are taken to a storage area near Vincenzo’s house). Thankfully, Hae-soo followed them and blew the candle out, so Mark goes to free them but when he’s about to kill Vincenzo to protect Hae-soo, he can’t bcs spirits can’t kill the people who used to “own” them, so Jisung throws himself in the middle and gets shot instead. To stop him from dying, Hae-soo puts him in the candle.

EP 6: All Night Long

They realize Vincenzo has fled and has taken the candle. So there are two “realities” in the episode.

On one hand, there’s Jisung who is in the Dreamverse. There he sees a world exactly like his true reality BUT everything goes wrong – his grandfather is alive but tells him he’s a disappointment + his mother dies at Jisung’s hands + Jeno, Jaemin, Renjun, Chenle and Haechan force him to kill Hae-soo + they then try to kill him so he has to run away.

*BACKSTORY: Jisung’s father died before he was born + then his mother re-married but then she dies as well when he was 16 + Jisung never got along with Jae-yi and even less after the death of his mom

On the other hand, the others are trying to figure out how to bring Jisung back. Hae-soo and Mark contact Man Wol to ask her more information – she tells them they can enter Dreamverse (with her help ofc) and can help Jisung find an “exit”, which Mark couldn’t use since Man Wol made it impossible for him to access to ensure he would not escape. Jisung can use it bcs the prison world was not created for him. Jaemin, Jeno, Renjun, Haechan and Chenle go to Vincenzo’s house to try to find something to track him down (since the locator spell doesn’t work). But when they go there they find Vincenzo’s dead body and no trace of the candle.

EP 7: Rocket

Two “realities” again.

Mark and Hae-soo go in Dreamverseto rescue Jisung (they find him first and the two mend fences). They convince him they’re real (bcs he’s kinda going bananas and can’t distinguish the Dreamversefrom reality) + they take him to the exit which is a door located in the middle of Dreamverse – the door is the door to the ‘candle’s room’ at Haru’s house. They go there (struggling bcs the others try to stop them + it takes a lot of energy for Hae-soo to keep them inside so she’s weak) and manage to get out (yay!).

Jaemin, Jeno, Renjun, Haechan and Chenle look at the CCTV (Haechan hacks into it) but they can’t see who killed Vincenzo (bcs there’s no cameras in that room) BUT there’s one in the garage so they can see the car of the person who killed him à the car plate! They recognize it so they know who’s the owner. They go back to Hae-soo’s to find them all out + tell them who is the killer (and has the candle) – Jisung’s step-father, Jae-yi.

EP 8: Hot Sauce

Jisung is out BUT he’s not human – he’s a spirit, both alive and dead at the same time (so he can’t feel touch and stuff, that’s important for later). + Jisung has a talk with Hae-soo to thank him for saving her life and apologize for putting him in that situation. He replies that he’s the one who’s thankful bcs she saved his life. They kiss <3 but Jisung can’t feel anything so :(

So Jisung, Jaemin, Jeno, Renjun, Haechan and Chenle go to Jae-yi’s (which is actually Haru’s) house and try to find evidence of him being linked to Vincenzo – Jisung still doesn’t wanna believe it, but they find evidence. Mark and Hae-soo contact Man Wol and explain to her the situation and ask if they can put Jisung’s father in there without killing him. She tells them there’s a way to do with just a drop of his blood + explains the spell to Hae-soo + tells Mark she forgives him. So they go face Jisung’s step-father: there’s a fight and yadiyadiyada but they manage to put him inside so yay!!!

The “owner” of the candle is now Jisung. He decides to use the fortune to continue Haru’s hot sauce business – he puts it in a box (the one from the life is still going on mv). Mark is a human now so he can go anywhere but decides to stay in Seoul and experience life as a normal college student. Jisung and Hae-soo kiss again <3

EP 9: Life Is Still Going On (BONUS EPISODE)

It’s 7 years into the future. Everyone meets again at a dinner thrown by Jisung.

Jisung is the CEO of DREAM FLAVOR and the company has grown even more + he’s engaged to Hae-soo who is doing her medical residency to become a surgeon + Haechan and Chenle are now starting a tech company together (about keeping you safe from hackers etc) + Jaemin is a surgical resident as well + Jeno is now a soccer player in the national team + Mark is getting his second Bachelor’s

They eat and chat + Jisung tells Haechan and Chenle he’s giving them the candle bcs they need the luck more since they’re starting a new business. So he blows it out + the episode ends with Haechan lighting it again.

-FIN-

Thanks for reading omg this was fun :DDD

[greymattermaelstrom]

Ozlander Fan Gathering 2020  -   The Rik and Sophie Show

I attended Ozlander in Melbourne. What an incredible weekend so would like to share my Ozlander experience with you. Of course, it was during the very early days of covid-19 which I’ll address shortly. I’d never met any of the cast before, nor any group of like minded fans. Of course, you are usually lucky to know anyone who watch the TV show (not counting a partner) in your circle of friends let alone personally know a group of fans to chat with. It’s funny though, I’m not sure what I expected, but I thought people would have in depth discussions about OL characters/plots during coffee breaks or in line ups for autographs/photos. I didn’t experience that. I think it was a given that we were all deep into OL. Instead, I found we just chatted and got to know each other, ‘Where are you from?’ etc. As this was the first formal Outlander convention held in Australia, this was big news. I bought my ticket the day they were available (Nov 2019). It was a long way off but I knew the gathering would occur a short time after the first few episodes of Outlander S5 were broadcast, so when S5 started airing, my anticipation grew. Prices were steep admittedly, but a number of us felt it may be the first and last opportunity to meet a cast member, so we did what we could to get there (i.e. sell the healthiest child, blackmail the rich, etc).

Article from “The Scottish Banner” Feb 2020.

Unfortunately, 4 weeks out, Ed Speleers withdrew due to work commitments but local, David Berry, was announced as his replacement on the same day. Then 10 days out, Graham McTavish withdrew due to work commitments in Slovakia. No news of a replacement was announced (I learnt at the event that organising a visa etc with Covid-19 developing had made it nigh on impossible to organise a replacement in time). Ozlander organisers revisited the program and added extra value features to the various tiers. The gathering weekend was so close, yet seemed so far away in these uncertain times. Every day, I anticipated receiving an email stating it had been cancelled. I knew the organisers must have been pulling their hair out. Selfishly and as long as it was safe to do so, I was hoping it would still go ahead. The virus was not as advanced in Australia. Most of our relatively low number of cases were brought in by travellers (residents returning or tourists) from Europe/Asia before flying was cancelled. The Federal Government had restricted public gatherings to less than 500 at the time. Attendance was actually under 200.  FYI, below are the global covid-19 stats as of 19 April 2020, a month later. Australia’s population is 25 million.

A few days after the Ozlander event, only crowds of less than 100 were permitted by the govt. We were so, so lucky!! Of course, that reduced further as precautions were implemented over time. We have self-isolation and a lot of business closures, cancellation of sports/entertainment etc. It is dreadful, but not a total lock down in Australia. We could walk dogs and make necessary trips to the supermarket, pharmacy, doctor or special court appearances. Anyway, just wanted to address this concern. ~ Tickets sold well (premium tickets sold out). I saw fans on sm stating the date of the event clashed or it was a bit expensive so I know more wanted to come. Yes, the cost was relatively high. Return airfares for cast, accommodation, plus I assume their appearance fee was always going to be an expensive venture, especially as our AUD had been declining sharply against the USD for some time. Australia can miss out on some things because of distance and a relatively small population, but overall, I think we have done well over the years. ~ Rik (Richard) and Sophie posted IG photos from Melbourne a couple of days before the event. Yay!! They were in the country at least, enjoying the sunsets, cuddling koalas and hypnotising wallabies lol. Sophie posted a selfie from a public toilet (bathroom) - as you do. See Sam’s comment below. Toilet paper was becoming a precious commodity....🤔

So the odds looked good and finally, Ozlander arrived.🥳 Before we took our seats, a lone piper slowly walked into the throng playing Waltzing Matilda (iconic Australian bush ballad) which segued into Outlander's theme song. Goosebumps! Applause all 'round. The piper was a big fan too.

What a thrilling start to proceedings. We took our seats and Meagan Taylor (the one who dared dream the dream), welcomed everyone. The age range of fans was predominately 40-65. We were excited and expectant. Housekeeping announcements focused on coronavirus precautions of course. Wash hands, use hand sanitiser when you can't, no handshaking and no touching the cast. This last request was a little disappointing after seeing photos from other OL cons, but it was quite understandable. I think we were just over the moon Ozlander went ahead so we were more than happy to comply and consider the health and safety of others. Then Meagan had the unenviable task of informing us David Berry had unfortunately cancelled his appearance due to health reasons. Yikes! What a shame. (David released a press statement 15 March(?) outlining his difficult decision. Sydney is Australia's Covid-19 hot spot, so David being a Sydneysider, had to consider this I guess). There are IG photos of David, Rik and Sophie together in Australia, just not sure where. So of course, it surprised everyone that David wasn't attending. Refunds of his meet and great and the re-jigging of tiers was to be announced on the fly. Then there were two, Rik and Sophie (and no pressure whatsoever!)🤪. Meagan then advised that the five panels across the weekend would be all audience Q & A which got a loud cheer. On with the show! The Rik and Sophie show! 🎉 They came on stage ready for a good time. Rik opened with 'G'day'. Great start I thought and continued his half decent Australian accent. It's a hard accent to imitate as we know. Rik's was a bit exaggerated but that was part of the fun. 

‘G’day. ‘How are ya’?’

Sophie in an outfit she bought here. Same brand as Saturday’s dress that she brought with her.

Roger Mac is in da house.

I’ll admit, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I have seen Rik and Sophie in a lot of interviews, OL promos (talking to camera) and taking part on OL panels on YouTube. I can find their rapport a little strained and snarky at times. Luckily, I was very pleasantly surprised that their 2020 version was very endearing and entertaining. I think they’ve worked on this. I also think, that the spectre of Sam and Cait, through no fault of their own, does loom large at cast events. Therefore, it was great to see Rik and Sophie rise to the challenge of working the room in the absence of their cast mates. And I think they really relished this (albeit exhausting) opportunity and the small theatre made it a casual and intimate affair. They answered questions in an engaging manner and often expanded on it, citing on set examples, many I’ve never heard before, and I’ve seen a lot of OL interviews. Almost as soon as they came on stage, Rik was asked if he would play his guitar and sing for us. While flattered, I think it was too early in the piece and he said maybe he would do so during the weekend sometime. Alas, time wasn’t on our side so it didn’t eventuate. ~ Rik was asked if his hair ticks were under control (ep 501)😂. Combing his fingers through his hair, he replied in his strong Scottish brogue that most of them were gone now. Good sport. ~ He was told the OL bts photos he posts on sm (taken on set) were great and much appreciated and to keep them coming to which the audience applauded. I think he quietly enjoyed that moment. All creatives will take that, knowing their skills and hard work meant something to someone, much like our appreciation for OL and these sorts of events!

Then on to costumes, wigs and make up. It was thought that it must be nice to have your scalp/hair attended to in the makeup. ‘No, it’s not’ R&S said in unison.😂 Verra uncomfortable process apparently. The hair is flattened and held down with clips. The hairline edge of the wig is ‘glued’ to the top of your forehead and then alcohol is used to get the glue off after shooting, which dries the skin. Some hair falls out over time with this process also. We know this has happened to Sam to an extent.😬 Rik is hoping to grow his hair long enough so he doesn’t need a wig, which accounts for his current hirsute glory. ~ Sophie said they both share a make up trailer and added that Rik has a magic make up chair. Being early morning, he often goes to sleep in it and upon waking up, hey presto, it’s Roger Mac. At make up time, they do know if the other is a bit touchy, so they try not to annoy each other. Too much.😂 ~ At one stage, we were a bit shy in asking questions. Meagan said if this was in the US, there’d be a line up for the mic.😂

Ozlander Fan Gathering 2020 selfie. 

~ Sophie responded to a geeky question about wearing wireless mics secreted in their costumes or hair as well using the usual overhead boom mics you see on bts videos. She was asked about her experience with ADR which she’s not a great fan of it. The audience asked, ‘What’s ADR?’ There are a few accepted terms in the industry, Additional Dialogue Replacement is one. It’s when some dialogue needs to be re-recorded late in post production if the original dialogue audio recording at the time is less than optimal for a variety of reasons (thanks Google). Sophie gave an instance when in S4, Bree told Claire she had been raped. The stream in the background got into the dialogue mics too much in this particular outdoor location, so Sophie had to re-record her dialogue (like lip syncing) saying exactly what she said at the time, whilst watching the scene on a screen in a recording studio. It’s hard to get the context and emotion of the scene back into your voice and that’s why some actors hate doing it and plead to have the original dialogue kept as much as possible. But ADR happens more than you realise and for various reasons (see Google). It is impossible to tell when you watch the show, what scenes have had ADR done, it’s blended so well. They would record the stream/ ambient sounds separately at some point and then mix it in lower against the dialogue after ADR is done. 😅

 ~ Sophie talked about her audition process and was sat down in an exec’s office and was told OL fans are very passionate! (we are?🤔😁). They have an idea of how book Brianna should look and Sophie confirmed she wasn’t tall enough, eyes the wrong colour, etc and that yeah, as expected, she received some not so nice things on sm. But she tried not to read too much of it and pressed on with the role of Bree. Her tone wasn’t sarcastic or indignant at all, but humble. I was impressed. 

Queuing for photos with Rik or Sophie on this occasion. We weren’t allowed to touch but we all had a squirt of hand sanitiser (just to be super safe?).🤔            

There were a few photo opportunities over the weekend and a bonus or two thrown in make up for the cast that couldn’t make it. A refund was offered for people with meet and greet tickets for David. However, R & S kindly offered to do a meet and greet for David’s fans instead and they happily accepted. Legends! I don’t know where they found the energy to be constantly ’on’ with so many people over the weekend. Chocolate? Youth?  ~ As it was a small event, there weren’t any extra security staff that I could see. I think it was only the Museum staff and the security cameras which were hardly noticeable. ~ When getting my autographs, Rik and Sophie didn’t ask for my name, but when I read their personal messages, they had used my name (which they’d seen on my Ozlander lanyard. How cool is that? Very slick!). There were assorted costumes, the de rigueur wedding dress of Claire’s which added to the ambience. Of course, most of the audience were women but good to see a handful of men there, some even in kilts! Saw some Aussie Peakers in their MPC tees too. Cool. 

To settle a pronunciation question, Sophie asked the audience after lunch, ‘Is it scone (as in, phone) or scone (as in, shone)? 

An emphatic SCONE (shone) came back. Rik said “Oh, wow, a shouting(?) majority?’ 

Just to be sure, someone asked who lost, Rik pointed at Sophie. He didn’t gloat too much. Poor Sophie!

Of course, what would an OL event be without the cast having a drink or two to lubricate the tonsils (as we say).

Here are a few more tidbits. All the info I’m sharing has been gleaned from the panels and time spent with Rik and Sophie over the weekend as my tier allowed (which was a lot). ~ Yes, they had tried Vegemite (similar to marmite/promite), courtesy of David Berry. Sophie has some in Scotland. Onya Davo! (good on you David). Incidentally, Sam tried some when he was here in 2016 on Studio 10 (morning talk show - March 2016, his interview is on You Tube). It’s a thing. ~ Rik didn’t know if Sam’s whisky would be his cup of tea, but said it was ‘good actually’. ~ Rik was sometimes surprised by the particular take post production used for the show, but was more surprised by what was edited out of a scene (to add dynamics or guide the narrative a certain way which would apply to all productions everywhere). ~ The pyre scene with the Jesuit Priest at the Mohawk Village Ep 412 was hard to watch on TV. He said it was hard to watch them shoot that scene on set as it was so dangerous!😬 ~ Sophie very occasionally discussed the historical accuracy of things in a scene with directors ie. birthing stool or not in Ep 413 and 1960′s The Mashed Potato moves in S5 are different to how we know them now. She convinced the director’s on those 2 occasions. To me, it shows her passion for the show! ~ When asked about Bree meeting Jamie for the first time in S4, Sophie was asked about the eww factor but didn’t think about Jamie’s hand touching her face after he had relieved himself as he had only used a fruit juice bottle.🤣 ~ R & S were asked to respond to: ‘Aussie, Aussie, Aussie!’ And with relish they replied: ‘Oi, Oi, Oi!’. Someone did their homework. Cool. It’s a parochial call and response thing some aussies do at sporting events etc. ~ R & S often went for an early morning run. Before Sunday’s program began, Meagan asked us all to be very quiet. ‘That sound’, she said, ‘is Rik having his hair blown dry backstage.’ Laughter at Rik’s expense all round. Sophie came on with her’s still damp.

Graham McTavish ‘popped’ in from Slovakia to say hi and sorry I can’t be there. Rik and Graham had a good rapport. After some banter, the audience was now supposed to ask a question and GM rolled his eyes as he heard Rik’s voice again, this time asking him what he conditioned his beard with? ‘Well”, said GM, ‘well Richard, um, I, ahh (chuckle), I condition it with...., obviously a little bit of your love ..’. Much laughter in the theatre.

Then GM commented further, (which I missed, sadly), to even more laughter.

Who knows what would have happened had GM been at the event in person?! There is so much more I could share, but you get the idea. 

Sophie wasn’t feeling the best during the last panel just before the close of the event, but she pushed through like a trooper. Rik said she had eaten too much chocolate. A weakness of Sophie’s. I think fatigue was catching up with both of them. They did so much.

Meagan presented Rik and Sophie with an Akubra (pron. uh·koo·bruh) each (iconic Australian outback hat) as a memento of their time here at Ozlander. Rik had the Crocodile Dundee style whilst Sophie’s was more demure. In his best aussie lingo, Rik said: ‘I’m Richard Dundee and this is my partner, Skippy (Sophie).’ (Referencing Skippy the bush kangaroo ? - a much loved Australian TV show 1968-1970). 

The Scottish Banner article promised an intimate relaxed chance to get to know stars from the Outlander TV series and I’m happy to say that this is exactly what we got. Whilst it’s a shame we didn’t get to know Ed, Graham or David better, we certainly got to know Rik and Sophie better than we had ever anticipated. As a result, I see Rik and Sophie in a new light, esp in S5, where they have more scenes together. In a small way, I’ve gotten to know a little of the person that inevitably informs their TV persona (ie facial expressions, mannerisms, speaking cadence and inflections). What a memorable time I had (can you tell?). Thanks to Rik and Sophie, the gathering organisers (who got a special mention on stage at the close) and the other fans I met there. Thanks for reading this far on a rather lengthy post.😊 I know it’s my take on the weekend, but I’ve tried not to editorialise it, but present it, as accurately as I can, hence, it may be a bit dry to read.😅  I think Ozlander is a great name and I look forward to Ozlander Fan Gathering 2021.  

Ozlander graphics: Ozlander Fan Gathering (I tweaked the circle logo in the title)

Ozlander Fan Gathering 2020 selfie: Ozlander Fan Gathering

other photos: all permissions obtained    

Ozlander Fan Gathering article: The Scottish Banner February 2020

Sophie Skelton post: Instagram

global covid-19 cases stats: Wikipedia

[suchalilyofthevalley]

I’m going to be blunt with you - I don’t think you genuinely work for the media or PR as you say. You keep throwing around “facts” and then when you give us ideas (such as the 3-5 album ordeal) - you instantly back away and then change it around. If you’re supposedly a Shawn fan, you would see he is being mistreated. Even if artists have a say, you can see is mistreated by his clout team. ALL PR Stunts do not go past a whole year, so it is obvious they are setting up for a single release (1)

To build on “breakup” album. Even with the pandemic, the pattern is still there. If he isn’t breaking up with his team this year, I don’t see it going past the first few months of 2021. He is unhappy. You can tell he is a puppet. Don’t come at us for being worried and figuring out how soon it will end. There are many other sources out on the media saying this is a job/stunt and it will end soon. (2)

So first off, brave of you to hide behind an anon ask. Let’sset some facts and records straight here cause I’m not here for bullshit and I’mfar too old for fandom petty nonsense.

I’ve never said I was media. I’ve always said I worked inPR. If you check back into my gettingon my PR soapbox tag, I’ve been doing these posts since May 2011. Wellbefore my foray into the Shawn fandom. So, here’s almost a decade of receiptsprior to me stepping foot into this space talking about PR, touring, ticketing,the music industry, the PR industry.

Also, want some receipts that way with am I really a PRprofessional with oodles of experience? So, I’ve known @suzteel, @andiwontforgetyou (previously @facethefall-blog) & @whenidance for ages – helloIRL friends, all these girls have been with me through ups and downs of jobsand clients, both have been with me at events when I’m working or had access tobecause of work. We’ve gone on vacations together, been at each other’s houses,there in good times and in bad. I wouldn’t have gotten through losing my Mom alittle over two years ago without these ladies. Fun fact, D (@suzteel) & N (@andiwontforgetyou) aren’t even IN this damn fandom so there’s no point in them‘vouching’ for me for clout and L (@whenidance) is one of my best friends goingon almost a decade and knows more about me than anyone aside from my childhoodbestie. It’s my fault L is actually a Shawn fan and why we went on a massivelyinsane road trip for this kid last year. L also has been with me repeated timeswhen I’ve been with one of my former clients in a social setting.

Also, I’m not in this to become fandom famous or internetimportant. Believe me, I have like 450 followers on this blog, most of which aredead blogs from when I was around with Glee. Also, notice I never throw theseposts into main Shawn tags. If I wanted all this glory, don’t you think I’d bedoing that? It’s all based on interacting with folks who follow me or find mewho actually have an interest in this piece of the business. This is me wanting tohelp folks who have a genuine interest. I give no shits about being some bigperson in the fandom. No thank you.

I’ve also saidbefore I never went into PR for the fame of it, to be some clout chaser orto make a fuckton of cash. It’s always been about the client and their work.Always. Their goals are what’s most paramount, be it from smaller brands andtalent to some of the A-listers and Fortune 500 companies I’ve worked with.

I’ve always said I’m going to shed light on the facts of theindustry. That’s what I did here. I’ve never interjected my opinion into itbecause facts are facts and opinions are subjective. So, I’ll call out thedifferences in here below.

The album thing? I’ve got you some receipts. I’ve never waiveredthere. I’ve never been the one to say YES HIS DEAL IS FOUR and then back away. That’swhat y’all have gravitated to due to some other folks saying that was what theythought and that was their opinion. This is the firstask I got about deals from early March and here I’ll even pull it out foryou:

Yes, the number of albums is anold industry standard, that way the label actually holds you for a bit longer -however, there have been instances where it’s based off of years. 

Each label has its ownnuances and how they like to approach business. If an artist is more likely tocrank out singles or an EP before approaching a release for an LP and they’retesting the waters, a contract based off of year length may be theirgo-to. 

There also could beclauses that wrap both up, saying you’ll need to release X number of albums ina Y year span. 

Contracting is socomplicated and so individualized, it’s really and truly hard to say in ablanket way yes THIS is how it all shakes down.

There were posts where @thotmendes mentioned some of our conversationsand said in thispost here that I had said an industry sweet spot was 3-5, and then wentonto say that SHE thought his deal was 4. 

What I said in last night’s post here for reference too:

Contract terms – you’ll see some intro deals based on years with options provided to extend based on years or albums, but we’ve got no real clue as to what the terms are with Island on this specifically. Folks keep assuming it’s 4. It could be 5, it could be 6. We don’t know what the original deal was. 3-5 is an industry sweet spot, but I’ve also seen some intro deals be 6. There could be year commitments tied into those as well aka 4 albums in 6 years, etc. Each label has its own formulaic equation as to how these things piece out and it changes per label, per artist, per genre - and how that all plays out into what the marketplace is consuming/streaming/spinning.

So please do me a favor and don’tcome at me saying I’m wavering on things without receipts. As you can see here, I haven’t.

Who said PR relationships ONLY last a year? They can be asshort or as long as people feel they need to leverage. PERSONAL OPINION ON THIS:I think PR relationships are stupid, pointless and beyond reproach. If you’re apublicist and that’s what you’re leaning on to do your job to get your clientscoverage and buzz. You aren’t worth your damn salt. Especially when you’ve gotA+ level talent you’re working with like he is. Even if you’ve got Q level talent, it’s still abullshit approach IMO. The same goes for calling/hiring out paps.

I’ve never once ‘came at fans’ for having concerns or beingconcerned. I’m concerned as well. Why I’m trying to give some color to theindustry piece of it. The only thing I said inthis post last night is that I was tired of the mistruths and conspiracytheories being spun as what’s really going on. Also – where are these “sources”out in the media saying it’s coming to an end? Blind items do not count. Ragsources are fine and dandy, but they’re also not legitimate sources. Come to mewhen you’ve got something from People, US Weekly, Billboard. Even then it’ll bewith a grain of salt until we hear it directly from their team(s) aka Dvora, theshared publicist.

MY PERSONAL OPINION: I am a Shawn fan. This kid’s music and hisshows have helped me get through some of the most difficult points in my life. Myass hiked to MEXICO CITY from NYC for his last three shows of SMTT thisDecember - the crazy road trip I referenced above with @whenidance. He gives me JOY. It’s why I care the way I do, it’s why I feel likescreaming and why I want to go legit work/help this kid out. It’s why I’mconcerned and trying to share some knowledge where I can, and what’sknowledge/facts about the industry versus what’s not true about the industry.Notice I said industry because I don’t know what this kid is wading throughright now and it’s not fair of me to say YES it’s this and assume like I haveany idea. CAUSE I DO NOT. I absolutely hate this nonsense we’re wading throughof whatever the teams have going for him/with him, I’m not a fan of this. Icame to be a fan of his, not of theirs. I don’t like what’s shaking out. Do Ifeel like this is PR? Damn right I do. Can we think this may have started outmore innocently and was positioned differently than what it’s evolved to? Yeah,for sure. BUT WE DON’T KNOW. All our thoughts are conjecture here. I don’t wantto see him unhappy, miserable, not feeling creative or supported. The wholepurpose of building a team around you that you trust is for that. I’m hoping thateven in this disasterpiece shit show, he can find that inner strength to dowhatever he needs to across the board to get back to a place where he’s feelinghimself, happy and being his own best version of the Shawn he wants to be.

Also – I’m leaving anon on for now, but if y’all can’t put on big boy/big girlpants and talk/behave like adults, it’ll go off and you’ll have to show yourface :)!

[loverlache]

Dracula 2020 BBC Netflix - can they retain the balancing act into Season 2?

So I finished watching the BBC Netflix adaptation of Dracula recently, having been too busy around New Year to watch it on its original timeframe. I’ve now watched the whole series twice, partly because I was so gripped by episode 1 & 2 and especially their incredible casting. Episode 3 did slip for me, but this is because I think the writers spent too much time trying to shoehorn Lucy W in rather than work with the main story foundations that were working so well in their adaptation. 

So why did episodes 1 & 2 mainly work so well? 

First of all, I think one of the main reasons that the first 2 eps felt familiar but also fresh was that they fully allowed Dracula to be a real character walking the perfect tightrope between horror and delight, while being absolutely fine about that. 

It’s really hard to make Dracula more relatable without undermining his horror. Most shows don’t bother. This one however tried, and tried spectacularly. They did this by making him delightful - not just by making him gorgeous, but by making him funny. Purists may not agree, but for someone who has for years wanted to actually see Dracula become a real boy, the particular balance between his dark humour and the horrid things he did moments later made him so much more compelling. This Dracula had a fabulous mixture of boyish, impish delight, incredible charisma, and hideous evil. You were never sure if he would just be funny/evil, hot/evil, funny/hot, or just evil, and in all cases, one aspect seemed to accentuate the other.

What’s more, you knew that Dracula was really okay with himself, as well. Sure, he’s looking for a bride. He’s lonely. He’s also got some fears and insecurities, but overall you know he’s at peace with his diabolical nature, while still being able to find delight in still existing in the world. After 500 years this is no mean feat. He asks for no apologies, and we offer none. This is no emo Dracula, which is refreshing when they could have gone the route of ‘misunderstood angel’.

Secondly, they created a second character that further emphasised all of these elements of the new Dracula, while also coming into her own. The wonderful central ‘dyad’ created between Dracula and Agatha made him even more delightful, hot and evil, while also making Van Helsing a better character overall.

Dracula, you get the impression, hasn’t met quite so many people as interesting and compelling as Agatha in his lifetime. He’s done his best to stay engaged, learning how to find, enjoy -  and then eat -  interesting people, but meeting Agatha gives him the biggest kick he’s had in some time. You could say he’s never been happier to be undead to meet someone who really wants to understand him. To know him. To challenge him - no, not to make him a better person - but to make him think. 

Meanwhile, Agatha is rather lost before she meets him, but when she does - he’s fascinating, clever, a mystery, a challenge - but she also reignites her purpose, which is to find meaning through God.  Van Helsing’s character has never seemed so vital. I’ve watched so many turgid versions of the bland good guy, fighting for the good of humanity. This Van Helsing literally comes alive in Dracula’s presence, not because she hates herself, but because through him she does see a dark compass to the light. 

Yes, there is a sexual undertone there that is fully realised in episode 3. But the chemistry they have for most of the show is not about turning Drac into a romantic hero - rather more telling the story of two people who sense true purpose in each other, two magnets finally finding their opposite that promises something beyond their own self-destruction. 

Yes, you’re never sure if Drac may at some point humanise, or whether she may darken - but this adds to it further. How long can their dance continue and how might it end?

So how could they make this work in season 2? Agatha is dead! Dracula is dead! And wasn’t he humanised? Didn’t they make out? And didn’t Dracula in modern times suck? 

First of all, let’s check out what this season seemed to establish or at least suggested to me. 

1. Dracula is now a fully freed character. He is not just a monster who can’t walk in the light, or touch garlic, or look at a cross. He can wreak havoc anywhere at any time. This sounds incredibly interesting to me and worth exploring further.

2. Dracula can adapt to any time. I know the 2020 setting didn’t work for everyone, but I think it wasn’t the time setting but rather the messy storyline that was the issue in episode 3. I would be happy to see him mainly living in 2020, but with his whole lifetime played out in various stories, with lots of amazing flashbacks to many points throughout time. 2020 does not need to tie Drac, it can free him. Crucially, if Agatha is in his blood, it might also free her...

3. Dracula can still be bloody scary in the modern world. Yes its harder when he’s not dressed in a cape and the Transylvanian sets certainly help. But the creepy child and listening into the sounds of the undead trying to claw their way out of their tombs were truly horrifying - and I would like to have seen more of that. It would require more thought about how Dracula’s brand of horror transfers to the modern-day, more use of super scary- contortionists, but the true horror of this Dracula was surely his full acceptance of his delight in being with, playing with, and then casually killing people. Let’s focus on that.

4. Dracula changed the game in his relationship with Agatha - but we cannot be sure that he was asking for redemption or showed real love for her. I think what we really saw was that Dracula realised finally he had found his real perfect bride in Agatha - which he had been trying to create for years - and reacted accordingly. I think we saw a flash of something new in his realisation he no longer wanted to be undead without her - but that is all, at least for now. 

5. We are not totally sure that Agatha is dead, or Dracula is either. Dracula can be brought back to life easily, it's his superpower. And as for Agatha - have we not just seen that she can now live through time? Why could then they not create something feasible enough that she can also effectively take over her ancestors - as well as her descendants?

Taking all of the above, there are the threads of some amazing stories that could be created in all kinds of times and also, with both Dracula and Agatha moving together through those times on a long, bloody fight to a final, mysterious end. 

I have a few caveats:

1. They would need to keep Dracula fully fanged. I do not want to see Drac's horror played out in a meta way, eg Drac is the new evil face of Facebook stealing our data. He is at heart a bloodthirsty monster and we need to always be reminded of it. 

2. Drac needs to not be in love with Agatha in a way we would recognise it. They still need to keep the will-they-won’t-they dyad between Agatha and Dracula but they need to take it into a new direction now that we think we know he would rather not be undead without her. He may think he is in love with her, he may stalk her, or he may want to get rid of his own need for her, all of which I would love to see Drac cope with while still being terribly evil, handsome, funny and charming.  

3. Agatha still needs to need the light and her God. With this in mind, she cannot be dark Agatha (for any long periods at least) or be realistically in love with Dracula. Again I would like to see moments of weakness, as she wishes and dreams of his redemption before God through her influence, but she needs to rarely if ever believe it will happen. 

That’s it! Really hoping season 2 happens though....

[prorevenge]

Racist mom tries to bribe son to dump me, I gain power over everything she cares about.

This is gonna be a LONG post lol, may have gotten exact timing sequences out of order.

Met a guy that we had mutual friends with and invited him to hang out with my friends and do fun stuff. Later learned he was not even allowed to hang out with my crowd cuz his mother was the very strict and hypocritical sort who thought everyone else was inferior to her precious kids. Guy was telling them he was doing work or something. Eventually he told them he wanted to date me and they flipped. The dad doesn’t have much say in the house and the mom (EM) was livid.

You know how Amish people don’t like rock and “sinful” music? Or females that wear shorts and tanks? Yuuup basically her. She went through my social medias and literally compiled and printed out giant lists of every country song I’d ever posted or concert I’d been to or clothing she thought was too provocative along and gave it to the pastors at both of our churches. EP called MY mom at 2am a couple times to rant and rave about “how could she let her daughter do such sinful things and flirt with boys yada yada yada”. She made racist remarks to Guy (I’m a super cute half Asian half messican, and all of his family is pale white golden haired angels) and even asked him if I’d molested him (I’m 5’ 2” and he’s literally a foot taller than me) and if that’s why he wanted to date and marry me. He was still at home and they went on a family trip to Colorado. Or as it turned out to be an exorcism style prayer meeting over Guy because EM just knows there must be a demon or something wrong with him. Oh and this was only within a span of a few months while he saved up to move the hell out.

Nope not over yet. EM then was harassing his work, his new church pastors (mine), his friends, got one of his business partners to leave him with lies that Guy is “bipolar” and “Schizophrenic”, thankfully most of the people had our back and we had some good laughs over what outrageous things they told us. Even driving an hour and a half to his apartment (I know dumb move to let them know where he moved to), in the middle of the night a couple times to harass and berate him and blubber about how everyone would judge her and how her reputation was going to suffer and church standing, she even dragged his two younger siblings into it all and told him they were heartbroken that he moved out and all the reasons he needed to move back home. Cue even more fun, one night he was just done so when they showed up to again try and bully him into moving back home or at least dumping me, he just up and left. Got in his mini and drove away. AND THEY FOLLOWED HIM. Unbelievable right? He used to race his mini so he lost them pretty quickly and booked it over to where I lived and spent the night there. I know, why not call the cops right? Well there was no physical damage or threats thereof. Yes she’s been verbally and borderline physically abusive to him growing up, think patriarchy super conservatives but it’s a matriarchy. At one point EM asked Guy what it would take for him to dump me, what amount of money could she pay him (Guys dad makes buttloads of moola, yeah those kind of people) to get me out of his life and for him to move back home. SHE TRIED TO BRIBE HIM TO LEAVE ME. She’d threatened to disown him and all the typical rich EP stuff before and knew he didn’t care. EM even called all his guy friends and asked if Guy has ever had any “homosexual” tendencies etc. Next month Guy proposed, and EM was SO MAD that she heard about it for the first time from a mutual friend congratulating her on the upcoming wedding! So of course she calls all the pastors and REEEEs about how we’ve been living in sin (kicker, we hadn’t even done the dirty dance but she didn’t bother asking) and telling everyone that they shouldn’t attend the wedding etc. Yea call us prudes :p EM also printed out all the reasons why I wasn’t good enough for her son and handed those out like candy to church leaders. Then when that had no effect she switched tactics and did the same thing with all her reasons why he was immature and shouldn’t get married and should move back home and be parented. Still no effect, except my dad at a huge meeting where she tried to distribute those, gathered them all back up and handed them to her and told her to stop slandering us and said how ungodly that was. And she stood there baffled and all the other people present agreed with my dad and told her to put those papers away. EMs exact words “but but I thought the very reason everyone is here is to show Guy why he needs to leave that girl and move back home!” I couldn’t help a giggle and a few other people couldn’t either. That meeting is a whole nother story, it was hilarious.

Where is the revenge you ask? Well all that was just the tip of the iceberg of course, but the revenge has been pretty simple. Spend a few obvious nights (SLEEPING ONLY) at his place, just to trigger her, but ofc our pastors and friends knew we’d committed to abstinence our entire lives up to the wedding (hella yea wedding night was killer) and other things like that to get under her skin but nothing that anyone else thought was bad. Very publicly plan and execute a HUGE wedding (over 500 people) and tell everyone about how our relationship is so beautiful and holy and how Gods destiny brought us together yada yada. She made a couple extra hoops for our pastors but we jumped through them with flying colors and everyone except her thought we were the cutest most Christian kosher thing. So basically to save face she had to fake smile and accept all the congratulations and be secretly embarrassed that we didn’t invite her to the wedding showers (she said she never wanted to see me and wouldn’t go to the wedding) and made excuses as to why she hadn’t gone, EM couldn’t tell her friends that we hadn’t invited her now could she? She went after the best man too and he almost decided against being the best man she was such a hassle and he was a pushover, but I told him the best passive way to deal with her is tell her that he wants to be there for his friend and how could she argue with that? She didn’t. But of course, what’s better than forcing her to attend the wedding but not allowing her to ruin it? Extremely petty I know, but I’m a drama llama and have enjoyed 98% of all this. I of course get ahold of EMs own mom and get to know her and she’s very sweet and loves me to death, along with Guys siblings and his dad, as many of EMs own friends and their families etc. So everyone loves me and when we invite them all to the wedding, they strong arm her into coming. I have my cop friends who have been having a heyday hearing about all this drama coming in for the wedding, one of them I make my MC so if she tried anything, not only would they take care of her swiftly, but she would also deeply embarrass herself because there was no denying that there were 500+ people there who loved Guy and I, including a lot of her friends. The ceremony was great, went off without a hitch, oh wait... I am not a bridezilla so if anything went wrong it was fine and the drama was cracking me up, I was a little disappointed she didn’t try anything drastic, but I could see on her face the entire time that EMs smile was sooo fake, and I got reports that she was seen crying outside later. Watching people congratulate her was priceless. When my own friends congratulated her a few of them later told me that she seemed surprised that I had any “respectable” friends (her literal words) who thought well of me. And no I’d arranged her to be only in one photo so she couldn’t ruin any others.

Oh and our wedding day was only the 3rd time she’d ever set eyes on me. She was against me from the start for almost a year without ever having spoken a word or ever seen me in person. Take that EM. To this day I have no idea what was her real beef with me. Happy ending: now that I provided the first grandkids, to my chagrin they’re like baby Targaryens they’re so white, and of course she’s too “young” to be a grandma so she’s called “nana”, but we laid down ground rules and she knows we will ostracize her at the drop of a hat, and she has kissed butt so hard and to her credit done her best to mend everything without ever really actually mentioning any of it. It’s great. We have holidays and fun visits in between and she showers us with super expensive gifts and will drop everything possible to help if we need anything. I think we��re friends now. One day I think she might bring it all up and try and play the victim, idk, but she’ll be hit with a carefully detailed account of everything that went down, in case her memory “fails” her. I can forgive but I’ll never forget, after all, I got my delicious revenge. Power over everything she holds dear and the evidence to expose whatever she hasn’t already done by her own dumb self and absolutely ruin her reputation and community and church standing. I feel really good right now

TLDR entitles mom wants to be petty about me dating her son so I take petty to another universe levels and crush her with epicc facts and logic and hold all the cards to ruin her life now

(source) story by (/u/cyborgurl)

[haich-slash-cee]

Being Human (UK)

This is a show that I recommend to people... but I add a lot of caveats.

The recommendation: A werewolf, vampire and ghost are flatmates. This show is hilarious! So much macabre and slice of life humor! And horror and whump!? Also, the show was run by a side-channel of BBC (BBC3) and I guess they had no production money, so the actors mostly look human and they just refer to each other as being a 500-year old vampire or ghost or whatever. Which makes it even better. The werewolf is Jewish, recites a Jewish prayer at least once, and hangs out watching “The Real Hustle” with the vampire. They work in a hospital as janitors. The ghost has a habit of making everyone tea to soothe herself and the flat is cluttered with tea mugs everywhere all the time. Also, people do get fang-y or wolf-y or do weird poltergeist stuff. And gore happens.

Longish post, more below the cut.

PS, this is the 2008-2013 UK version of Being Human, which I hear had a cult following. There’s certainly stuff on Tumblr. I found the BBC version through the US remake of Being Human, but I’m much more charmed by the BBC version. (The US version has the vampire and werewolf as hospital doctors? Why?) Also I watched the show maybe 4, 5 years ago, so impressions are from that.

And the caveats: There’s a lot of sexism which was hard to watch. It’s engrained in the premise and plot and occasional gross sexist jokes. And there’s other problematic stuff in the writing. It’s like having glass shards show up the meal you are enjoying, and it’s why I’m not sure I’ll rewatch the series (or not in it’s entirety, anyway). There’s also a limited spinoff web series called Becoming Human which also had some problems for me, including some gross sexism and fatphobia. (John Boyega from Star Wars does show up as a character in that series, for anyone interested.)

Back to Being Human and overall series recommendations. So the 1st season was good. I kind of forgot what happened in the 2nd and 3rd season (I think they got depressing and slow?). The 4th season picked up again, much to my surprise, and I remember liking the 4th and 5th season a lot. Even though [spoilers] there was a complete cast change by this time. But it worked, somehow. The show did go from at least having one woman of color to having an all-white cast at the end, which was not great. And there’s other racism too.

For people who like their happily-ever-after: uhhh so I vaguely recall that a lot of characters don’t really get a happy ending. Granted, half of them are walking around dead already, so...? Overall, the ending of the 5th season is... Is that a happy ever after? Happy for now? The Bonus on the DVD kind of makes it a happy-for-now with a continued possibility? It’s an acceptable HFN?

.....And now, the notes for all the hurt/comfort people and whumpers:

Holy crap people, there is SO much h/c and whump!?

OK first -- George the werewolf. George’s transformation sequence, SUPER whumpy.

Also, George ends up naked often, come to think. And he screams a lot during the show, for various reasons. The actor himself, in the bonus DVD interviews I think, cheerfully says something like, “People really like the way George screams, I do too.” (This is like when David Tennant cheerfully talked about how he enjoys playing a character who is unconscious and sick and gets fussed over by people.) And George is a very sympathetic, nerdy character who is easy to feel for. Who occasionally turns into a SNARLY SCARY WEREWOLF AGAINST HIS WILL. As mentioned, I think I liked season 1 George more than seasons 2 or 3.

Emotional hurt/comfort -- so Annie the Ghost provides a lot of the emotional centering, as I recall. Throughout all 5 seasons, all the characters lean on each other for support and there’s a lot of lovely warm fuzzies from that. Also, one of the later werewolf characters, Tom, is generally a sweet kid. I’m glad they didn’t do too much of the transformation horror with him, honestly. George/Russel Tovey could carry that, but I thought Tom’s strong point was looking puppy-eyed and folorn-eyebrow’d and trying to navigate the world with a mix of naivety and half-feral-ness.

Above: exhausted naps on the couch.

Below: Classic Being Human humor. A review of house rules and vampire stabbing etiquette, between Annie and Tom --

[Spoilers from here on] Okay, so as mentioned, the cast changed over between season 4-5. And to my surprise, I think I loved the new trio as much as, or more than, the original trio. I liked how loud Alex the ghost was. And I liked both Annie and Alex.

Also, I did not expect this either, but I got so interested in Hal! Yo! First of all, Hal is a centuries-old Vampire and speaks/looks like, idk, a Regency Character. And then 19-yr old Tom puts Hal to work at a fast food shop and bosses him around, and Hal’s indignation is hilarious. So already, this is excellent.

And somehow, Hal is very, very whumpy? So: the character of a “vampire who is trying to be good and suffers” is not new, and I’ve encountered versions where I haven’t been interested. (I was lukewarm about Mitchell, the original vampire in the show.) But for whatever reason, I really dug Hal. Maybe, for me, Hal was just the right mix of very serious and earnest but also ridiculous and tragic all at once. (I read some interviews with the actor Damien Molony, who mentioned how he’d done a lot of history and addiction research in to prep for the role. The new trio actors also had a lot of chemistry and fun on sets, it sounds like. So I might be picking up all that.)

Also, Hal is actually two characters -- the ridiculous indignant serious Good Hal who is desperately trying to keep the horrible, rude, murderous, Bad Hal from taking over. But, as one of the show producers, a woman, cheerfully commented in the DVD extras: “And then Bad Hal shows up, which is great, everyone likes a bit of Bad Hal”. 

Honestly, why do we even pretend to hide our fascination with the macabre and the whump, when showrunners and actors are cheerfully not hiding it all.

Here’s clips of Good Hal in Season 4:

Oh, I forgot about this part until I rewatched the last clip -- but at the end of season 4, Hal asks his flatmates to forcibly bind him to a chair, because he’s trying to fight off Bad Hal. Based on my perusing of the whump community, pretty sure that scenario is of interest to someone.

Also notable is the episode “No Care, All Responsibility” (Series 5 ep 3). In one scene in particular, where Natasha has offered Hal a way to control his bloodlust and there’s this mix of vulnerability and power with Hal asking Natasha to put a stake against his heart, I remember thinking -- “I bet a woman wrote this ep and I bet she knew exactly what she wanted”. And I was right, that woman is Sarah Dollard, a queer woman who has also written a lot of other things (including Doctor Who). She also wrote Being Human goofy web extra eps with Alex, Hal and Tom called “Alex’s Unfinished Business” and they are so good ! (Interview). 

Also... the opening 3-minute backstory in “No Care...” made me cry. You get a glimpse of the show’s baddie showing real care and emotion in rescuing this little kid (an important character). When this kind of scene is done well, it just gets me. every. time.

Anyway here’s an appearance of Bad Hal (much later), being completely awful, murdering people and turning them into vampires and singing Broadway tunes during this.

Side note on Vampire narratives. Although Hal’s narrative arc of season 5 was interesting, and I’m aware this is show is urban fantasy, I still have qualms of the show enforcing IRL stigmas/ideas that addition is incurable and addicts are doomed. They’re not. (General overview on NIH page.) Addiction research is a growing field. From listening to NPR and reading articles, my impression is that addiction treatment will change quickly in the next few years. Related to the vampire blood addiction trope, Terry Pratchett covers vampires finding ways to be “dry” (one vampire, Maladict, swaps out blood addiction for coffee addiction) and you can find fanfics about the topic as well. (General link to Being Human Ao3 fanfics, why not.)

Side note on Hal’s dual characters -- recently, I did consider, “Is there overlap with Hal and portrayals of Dissociative Identity Disorder (MPD) folks?” IRL DID people have complained about movies with gross portrayals of people with DID. To me, Being Human’s Hal feels removed from that and closer to a fantasy.... but, I’m also not multi, so.

* Update: after having learned more about plural history, I’m even less sure now. (Note: my opinions are of someone who isn’t plural, as far as I know, so note that.) There’s a number of early problematic movies and books that hugely affected the popular narratives of plural people in the west, and still affect how therapists and non-plural people treat plural people even today. These include the movie “The Three Faces of Eve”, which has the narrative of “Good Eve, Bad Even, and later smushed together become ‘Fixed Eve’ or whatever”. There’s practically a whole lecture series on how the books/movies were made with sensationalism and formulas in mind and pretty gross things. Chris Costner Sizemore, the IRL Eve, had to fight the movie studios in court because the studios claimed they owned her life story. (There’s practically a whole lecture series on early plural history in the west, I might link more information later). Like, even today, multi people feel pressured to hide their plurality because they are afraid singlets or other people are gonna say “oh so which one of you is the ax murderer”, or that they are going to be fired from work. So.  

This post turned into a “Being Human seasons 4 + 5 Appreciation Post”. I guess Season 1 and 4, 5 were my favorite. I watched the show through library DVDs, but I think there’s eps of the show on YouTube. The DVD extras are probably on this YouTube playlist?

(Also, there is a pilot episode, with different actors except George/Russel Tovey. I don’t think one needs to watch the pilot to watch the main series; I kind of recall that the main series recycled some of the pilot. There is a funny scene in the pilot where George and Mitchell meet Annie.)

Being Human: a macabre, hilarious, horror-filled, flawed, sometimes dragging, emotional, whumpy, oddball show that I still think about sometimes.

[keepyourpantsongohan]

Ayesha Liveblogs Free! S3

I will never get tired of Makoto offering Haru a hand out of the water

OMG I guess some things do change Makoto’s been dunked and I kinda love it

“I’m never gonna be a normal person” wow who is this this Goth Diet Haru

I love the phrase “hot minute” actually thank u for ur teen slang Asahi

Offering people his lecture notes and texting back right away will anyone ever be as good as Makoto? Trick question no

“I’m still young and innocent” “That’s a weird thing to say” I love that Haru’s meeting a bunch of people who aren’t used to his antics

This flashback seems to indicate that Haru felt Some Kinda Way about Ikuya which is weird because they look almost the same

“Don’t worry too much about the family” LMAO Sosuke has received a blessing from his cousin to follow Rin to Australia 

“Just inferior copies of Ikuya” that’d be more meaningful if Ikuya had done anything other than stare broodingly

It’s telling that the Iwatobi team is dressed like the Wiggles in this outro

All this outro really told me is that they aren’t really that good at differentiating main character design

“We have to try not to spoil them too much” I approve of Ikuya’s brother and his co-parenting buddy

“I’m not going to move ever again,” said Asahi, with the full confidence of a twelve-year-old boy who knows absolutely nothing about anything

Okay but for real Ikuya and Haru straight up look like siblings this weird rivalry energy on top of that fact is a little bit Much

[Rose and Rosie voice] It’ll never work out their hair is the same colour  

“Is Haru the guy who was all dressed up and riding a camel in the recruiting video we saw?” UNBELIEVABLE their Arabian Nights outro from S1 was actually their recruitment video Iwatobi do u take constructive criticism

“I’ll even be good enough to compete against you” how many rivals does one young man really need my god

Hey Trenchcoat Man maybe introduce yourself before telling these teens how to live their lives

Dude you’re so controlling trying to prevent Ikuya from seeing his friends

Ahhhhh I love Haru being in touch with his emotions and apologizing to Ikuya tbh I give Makoto and Rin a lot of the credit for his ability to communicate lmao 

“I’d prefer you didn’t keep him too long” listen I get where you might be coming from since Haru hurt Ikuya’s feelings but also stop that

“Thought I’d give you a wake-up call” I really don’t like the vibe of Hiyori

“Japanese guy! Friend of yours, maybe?” An accurate representation of what it’s like to hang out with white people lmao

There’s a different vibe from a teenager who giggles about swimmers’ muscles to an adult swim coach who is coaching swimming at a university giggling about swimmers’ muscles put that away Mikhail

Hiyori gives me the straight up heebie jeebies every time he opens his mouth

I can’t read Japanese but I have to assume Rin was gonna call Haru and reminisce about their bed sharing night lmao

Natsuya is some kinda Swimming Capitalist Nomad I’m not mad about it

“How many of these dreams do you have?” that’s valid lmao Rin has #calledout for being a rival slut

“His face told me that what matters most to him is not here” I can’t tell if this is a reference to Ikuya or to Natsuya’s white-haired rival-friend-boyfriend-probably

You know what, in the context of this show: Boyfriend 

“Hey, calm down. Listen, Archerfish--” HARU PLS

I don’t know Misae but the fact she calls her boyfriend Archerfish has already won me over

Hiyori would you fucking stop interfering this isn’t fair to Ikuya

“Ikuya’s too busy to waste his time reminiscing on childish things” well that should be Ikuya’s decision shouldn’t it like not 2 get 2 real but this is all the markers of an abusive relationship if someone does this to you please tell someone

God this stubbly weird man and his ominous advice STILL without any introduction 

“I’m getting sick of hearing you speak for Ikuya like you’re his damn boss” ME TOO ASAHI

YOU CANNOT DECIDE WHO IKUYA’S FRIENDS ARE HIYORI YOU ABSOLUTE SHITPRETZEL 

HA Ikuya knows you’ve been giving the boys the runaround fuckweasel

“If I swim with Tono, maybe it’ll help me understand him” Makoto coming after jerks with his best weapon: empathy <3

“People you swim with all seem to end up suffering, don’t they” LISTEN YOU ASSBANANA IT’S NOT HARU’S FAULT THAT PEOPLE GET OBSESSED WITH HIM HE’S JUST A GOOD SWIMMER

Omg I enjoy the drama of Sosuke interacting with the one (1) person in Japan who has seen Rin lately 

“I have to admit, I’m a little disappointed there isn’t a single pudgy person here” like I know this is probably gonna be a running gag for their opposite body preferences but it’s also a self-burn for the creators of this show only drawing different scales of one body type

I really do love that Rei is swim team captain now my boy has come so far

Oh Romio is there anyone in this swim universe that doesn’t have some kind of Traumatizing Swim Experience 

“Think about what your reason for jumping in is” Sosuke’s advice sounds like beautiful nonsense I don’t know how that’s supposed to help him concentrate on start times

Lmao I love this Overbearing Friend Gesture of Shizuru and Nagisa putting seaweed on Romio and Rei’s plates without asking kjhfkghfghfk

“Actually, if you don’t mind, we have a proposition” $500 says that Nagisa and Rei are about to propose a relay race

Update from 8 minutes later: Someone owes me $500

“Can you tell how proud I am?” Natsuya is such a good big brother <3

 Hahahaha “a guy he wants to swim with again some day” Natsuya is also a good wingman for Rin lmao

Based on his inner monologue Sosuke should also be a swimming coach except in the vein of Cryptic Trench Coat Stubble Man who just offers random unsolicited advice to any teenage swimmer he passes by in the street 

“I’m so proud of you” jgjhgjhg Shizuru I love you and your tears for Romio

What kind of child welfare laws are there in Japan that Hiyori’s parents were allowed to just leave him alone in the park

“When I saw [Haru] again, the weakness I thought I left behind came flooding back to me” the moral of this story is that competitive swimming makes you gay

Ikuya used to be fun and sweet lmao what made you so broody my dude

Lmao @ Hiyori being mad that Ikuya thinks of Haru as his Prince Eric instead of him 

Wow I love Nao being a guiding force for this group of nerds

“I’m not hearting anything for you” Asahi understands Stranger Danger

It took Ryuji a solid six eps to even get a name u’d expect him to have a more important character connection than Rin’s Swim Coach’s Rival

“Then you should start swimming other stuff” I Love Misaki, Adopted Child of Haru and Makoto 

Well this wistful playground vibe has taken a strange turn

“It’s none of your damn business okay!!” TONO JUST GOT DUMPED HA

KJGHKJGH THE RAGE IN HARU’S VOICE ABOUT THE MACKEREL

Ryuji: He can just buy me dinner or something. I’m not picky. As long as it’s not mackerel

Haru [through gritted teeth]: I’m ready when you are

AH I LOVE KISUMI AND ASAHI BABYSITTING TSUKUSHI

“After all we’ve been through, why does it have to be like this?” U MADE IT LIKE THIS HIYORI

HAHAHAHAH Makoto and Ryuji had a standoff of wills and Ryuji lost

“Maybe it’s time for you to approach things more seriously” Nao has declared it’s time to stop sowing your wild oats and settle down Natsuya

Kazuma only shows up to remind Sosuke he is free to run away to swim whenever

“Hope you’re well” “Hey relax I’m not your dad” [Natsuya immediately begins acting like their dad]

YEAHHHHHHHHHHHH GO HARU LEADING HIS CATEGORY

“I don’t think he’s all that bad of a guy” that’s Stockholm Syndrome Ikuya

I’m glad Ikuya is finally fucking having a meaningful conversation with his friends

“In the water I’m alone. No one’s gonna save me” Get therapy Ikuya!!!

Wow Haru joining a race purely to have an Emotional Confrontation with Ikuya is some kinda growth I’m just not sure what exactly

“That guy’s the only one anyone ever talks about” to be fair if your sample size is Iwatobi swimmers they are all a little in love with him

“That’s our BOYYYYYYYYYY” Aw Asahi <3 

Ghjkghk I love Makoto teasing Haru for being Ikuya’s hero

“Oh, you’re wise now?” AWWWW Ikuya is fun again good for him

 I know that Ikuya reaching out in friendship to Hiyori is supposed to be a sign of emotional security but I haven’t forgiven him for the way he’s manipulated Ikuya!!! Ur a seawitch not a Prince Eric!!! >:((((

I’m super thrown about them going straight from the qualifiers to the next race what will the last four episodes of this season be about

“I’ve been giving myself pep talks in the mirror. ‘I am a genius. I am a genius.’” HAHAHAHA I LIKE FUN IKUYA

“Looks like you beat me” “Just in free” Haru has released Ikuya into the universe for Hiyori and I don’t like it (for Ikuya’s sake) but that’s how it be I guess

How many siblings are there in the Mikoshiba family lmao there’s a new one every season 

“But gender doesn’t mean anything in a competition” I like u Lady Mikoshiba

“You mean you were Russian this whole time??” this is a lot to digest

I LOVE RIN’S PUDGY CAT STEVE LOL IS IT THE SAME IN JAPANESE

“The water likes you. I can tell” ALBERT PLS, Haru is already FULL-UP on homoerotic swim relationships

It’s killing me that they keep cutting to Makoto like Haru’s cheating on him though

Not to undermine the subplot of these last three episodes but hasn’t Haru... lost races before hgkjhgk

“I thought something soft and cute would help balance out that scary face of yours” omg STOP this cuteness 

Gghkhgk these flashbacks and Rin crying over Sosuke’s surgery are SO cute I never thought I would feel so proud of Rin way back in S1 he’s grown so much!!

Makoto being surrounded by ladybugs and butterflies like a wholeass Disney Prince

WHY are ALL of these swimming weirdos SOMEONE’S UNCLE

“You’re still as weird as ever, Haru’s the exact same way” I should start tracking how long in a conversation it takes characters to bring up Haru

Gnjghkjhg Makoto gets through to Haru in 0.5 seconds after two weeks of him ignoring his own coach. The power of fish metaphors and Love™

Kinda seems like they are setting it up like Makoto will also get to travel the world for swimming and let me say... I’m not mad about it

Update from like 2 minutes later: I WAS RIGHT

“That’s the evil king who wanted the magic lamp” the Arabian Nights references kill me every time 

Djkhdkjhd Ryuji labelling Mikhail in his phone as “Muscle Freak” that’s tru friendship

“You should say, ‘I’m totes hip with the kids, yo’” Ryuji pls 

“You’re so cute, you must be Iwatobi’s famous Kou” KHGKHGKJHKJ 3/3 MIKOSHIBA KNOCKOUT KOU

Awwwww Rei is so nervous for nationals my sweet baby boy

I ADORE that Rin and Haru are literally running across the city right before their most important meet bc they want to see their friends swim 

Rrgjhgr the one and only backstory in this show is former childhood friends and it applies to every single character

OMG Rei get his own flashback but with his boy Nagisa I love it

“I think he’d make a good rival for you actually” Makoto Tachibana: Rival Matchmaker

GOOD JOB BOYS U DID GOOD (ALSO TEAM PHOTO I WEEP)

“Try not to cry when I beat you” SOSUKEEEEEEEEEE

Wow this final episode is already clutching at my heart right out of the gate baby Haru 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

Makoto letting four more boys pile into his one bedroom for the night bc he’s the Best Boy Alive

HJGHJKGH THIS EXCHANGE 

Mikhail: That’s what I call ‘totes hip with the kids’

Nearby youths: [Giggling]

Mikhail: [Soft indignant gasp] Ryuji!!

Natsuya and Ikuya have the cutest sibling relationship gjkghk THEY

The theme of this season is people hugging each other and crying over the lanes and I LOVE THAT 4 THEM

Rin and Haru and Makoto........... are good boys

“What is this, some kind of teen drama” that is exactly it, Rin

“He won’t stop talking about stupid crap like friendship and bonds” I love three (3) boys

Bonus: Out of Order Liveblog of Free! Take Your Marks + S3E0

Haru dropping his pants in Makoto’s apartment without the immediate context of them being near water was the most high stakes moment in this entire anime I had no idea where that was going

Haru leaving his apartment hunting until the day before he moves: Mood

Sidenote: Makoto and Haru going apartment hunting is domestic as HELL I love it

“The two of you are inseparable, huh?” “We’re friends, deal with it.” Let people be gay Kisumi 

Lmao @ Nagisa and Rei’s yoga pose video Iwatobi is the cutest swim team in the world 

“Then one day even those tears will dry out in the Tokyo desert” who hurt you, Ms. Amakata 

“Allow me to welcome you to Tokyo, the city where love and lust intertwine” Free! Love and Lust could really be a subtitle of this anime lmao

“I’m talking about the whole bunkbed situation, you know, top and bottom” lmao shout-out to Sloane for that one art

I love the wordless communication between Makoto and Haru (and for that matter, Sosuke and Rin) I’m so glad they worked things out

I’m also happy Rin and Kou are cool now they used to have quite a gap

“Rin wasn’t that honest with himself” rjghg Rin and Haru miss each other

“This is the one,” said Haru, next to Makoto, His Completely Platonic Best Friend Who Dreams About Them Sharing An Apartment and Dropping Trou

I LOVE STEVE THE FAT CAT. AN ICON. A BEAUTY. CHUNKY BABY

“The treasure is inside the red shark’s mouth” there is DEFINITELY a Rin joke to be made here and the writers knew it

I don’t know what I love about this more that Aii and Momo are TERRIBLE at scheming or that that they are throwing Rin and Sosuke together on White Day lmao

This team vacation... Sosuke giggling bc he was tickled... !!!!!!! THANKS

I’m loving all these teams getting presents for each other jkhgkjg

Oh am I finally going to understand this Momo and Capybara backstory

Lol @ Natsuya pouring his heart abt Nao to Sosuke wholly unsolicited

“What were you about to ask” “Oh, not anything important (I’ll wait for you Sosuke)”

OHHHHHHHHHH THE CHARM BACKSTORY SOSUKEEEEEEEEEE

Oh Christ alive am I about to watch the Arabian Nights recruitment film

Hhhgjgjhg I gather the only reason Haru got his license was to compete with Rin

“I’m the evil king who is after the lamp for his own selfish reasons” I hate this... but also... I love this???

“I am a mysterious peddler. I travel carrying mysterious bundles. While riding atop of my mysterious partner Chappy the Camel” HARU STOP

OH MAKOTO HONEY U POOR SOUL JHGKHFKJGH 

“Makoto. When I’m nervous I think about mackerel” I am going to expire

“I think the three of you should implement your own version of it” Fhjkhgk Haru is telling them to exploit their bodies for school recruitment but also that’s not really anything new so fair enough

Nagisa: Rei is Perfect Killer Muscles Handsome in my heart!!!!!!

“Maybe I’m never going to understand him” Omg @ The Jilted Middle School Exes of Haru Club

“How David had to give up his love.... And then Veronica, knowing they couldn’t see each other anymore” call me crazy but I think Rin is projecting his own issues onto A Rat’s Life LMAO

Tjehjkhkje Sosuke needing to call Rin bc he got lost on his way to the bathroom... Useless Husband Energy

HAHAH Rin is so upset thinking Momo and Kou are dating

At least Rin recognizes that he doesn’t get to decide who Kou dates he can only express his approval or disapproval

“Momotaru Mikoshiba is a man who lives by passion” gjhgjhg stop this

“Rin would never lose to a persimmon, ever!” MAKOTO R U OK

“You are not less than a persimmon!” THESE BOYS. U R SO DUMB BUT ALSO GET U A FRIEND LIKE THE IWATOBI SWIM CLUB

“It’s cool if you need to cry” “If you stay in the pool no one will ever notice your tears” I LOVE SOSUKE AND HARU TEAMING UP TO TEASE RIN

I also deeply appreciate that even though I’ve never heard their Japanese voices I know exactly who is saying what line in this outro just by dialogue and tone of voice

+

“I have a crippling fear of mascot costumes” “Then why did you take this job” kjhgkjhgkjh if that isn’t a work mood 

Wait... if Makoto is going to be the substitute wrestler... WILL HARU BE THE SUBSTITUTE MASCOT AHHHHHHHH

WAIT NO I HAVE GRAVELY AND HILARIOUSLY MISUNDERSTOOD MAKOTO IS GOING TO BE BOTH MASCOT AND WRESTLER

“Iwa means ‘boulder’ and ‘tobi’ means ‘black kite’ so it’s a boulder-headed bird!!” Well that’s more of an explanation for the appearance of the Iwatobi mascot than I ever expected, Nagisa

“You don’t have a crippling fear of mascot costumes, do you?” No but I have feeling Makoto is about to develop one

Oh it’s THIS FUCKPUDDLE who asked u to be here Hiyori

“I don’t exactly hate it” high praise Ikuya lmao

Thkjhtkjh I love Natsuya’s long distance relationship it’s sweet 

HAHAHA is the beak thing supposed to be a ploy so people see Makoto’s face

“I cannot let Haru see me like this” “Hi Makoto” HAHAHAHAH I LOVE THIS WHOLE INTERACTION AND ALSO HOW HARU JUST GOES ALONG WITH ALL OF IT

Also I don’t know how Makoto was planning to hide his identity after he was addressed as “Mr. Tachibana”

LMAO @ MAKOTO BEING RECOGNIZED BY HIS LEG MUSCLES I’M SCREAMING

“Hey Makoto, use a backstroke!!” HARU PLEASE

“Well done, you’ll be a great mascot someday” “Thanks? I think?” This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen and I loved it

Oh my goooood Haru bringing Makoto presents for his siblings.... they have ascended to the college relationship levels of Natsuya and Nao

Man Ikuya could not radiate stronger “leave me alone” vibes 

“Wow you boys make a dashing pair” you said it Suit Lady not me 

[mwelxn]

THE MAN WHO QUIT GUNS N' ROSES When IZZY STRADLIN' left the The World's Most Dangerous Band, he quit the wrangling, quit the drugs, and quit LA. In Copenhagen recently to complete his first solo album, 'Ju Ju Hounds', Izzy spoke candidly and for the first time about his shock departure to PAUL ELLIOTT... By Paul Elliott Kerrang! Magazine - Sept. 1992 The boy crossing the street outside Copenhagen's Webers Hotel, a Guns N' Roses patch on the back of his jacket, would barely recognize Izzy Stradlin' today. Stradlin' sits on a low sofa in one of the hotel's simply furnished rooms. His hair, lighter and browner, is knotted into dreadlocks, his skin is lightly tanned. Stradlin' looks healthy, happy and relaxed; happy to be out of Guns N' Roses. So what was it that finally made Izzy quit the biggest rock 'n' roll band in the world? "I was sick of it," he sighs heavily, his voice lazy and dry, "just completely fed up with it. It didn't feel like it used to, something wasn't happening that used to happen for me. "I took some time off after the Wembley Stadium gig in August 1991. All through October and the first half of November I was riding motorcycles back in Indiana (Izzy grew up in Lafayette, and has since returned to live there). I ride trials bikes, where you go over rocks and logs, obstacles. I did that for almost two months straight. "In November I went back to LA, and there were some conditions and terms put to me which pretty much made the decision to quit the band real easy for me. I just thought, this is not acceptable - so that was it. "Since then, I've talked to Slash once, about a week ago in New York, and, uh, the last time I saw Axl there were a lotta harsh words - from him - so I kinda left it alone. I called him once after that, we talked for about a half hour, so I'm kinda waiting for him to call me back to discuss the things that we haven't really resolved. "There was so much going on, so much happening, and when you step out of something like that it still keeps moving, like a tornado. When I stepped back out of it I felt really relieved." Axl Rose's image suddenly appears on the TV screen that flickers silently in a corner of the room. Izzy rises, a wry smile on his face, and switches the TV off. "Wherever you go in the world, you're gonna see the band's videos or pictures," he shrugs, "so it's not like it's ever completely out of my mind. There was a point where I missed it for a while, so I just started writing again around December, putting this new thing together." - Izzy's new thing is a solo record titled 'Ju Ju Hounds', released in October, preceded by an EP, 'Pressure Drop', that's out in two weeks. He's also planning a European club tour with the band which cut most of the album and EP: guitarist Rick Richards (ex-Georgia Satellites), bassist Jimmy Ashhurst (ex-Broken Homes) and drummer Charlie Quintana. Izzy talks in depth about those records and his new band in next week's Kerrang!, but first there are questions to be answered about the old band. For example: do you feel you were pushed? "Yeah," he nods, "somewhat. I don't want to get into it too deep; a lot of it's personal stuff. I don't wanna say anything that's already been said about me, you know what I mean? There's been a little shit talked from their side, but I just gotta plow it off and say, 'That's how it is with them, it's nothing new'. "When I was told how the future was gonna be in the band, I thought about it for a long time that night, and when I woke up the next morning, I knew what I was gonna do that day. I decided to leave. "I never really thought about leaving the band till the last tour we did. I didn't feel it was fair to a lot of the people coming to the gigs to go onstage two or three hours late. That's just not right. That's the way Axl is and the way he works, but it's not right for me, and I don't think it was right for the fans either. Stuff like that kinda got to me after four months on tour. There's a lotta pressure, I suppose, but the bottom line is, if you gotta be somewhere and there's something you gotta do, you do it. That's how I see it. "When we were playing the gigs, a lotta times it was a case of, how long's it gonna be before Axl comes back onstage? It's a pretty big stage, and you're going, 'Anybody see which way he went?'. Then you see a bunch of roadies running... And the old filling-in with a blues jam and a drum solo shit get sold when it's on a nightly basis. It wasn't every night, but y'know... "I don't wanna talk down on these guys because a lot of the stuff that we did as a band was great, some great music, and God knows we had a lot of fucking crazy times, good times. I'm really proud of some of the stuff we did. Now it's 1992, and who knows where it goes from here. I just had to say, 'I'm stepping aside at this point'." - Before quitting the band, Stradlin' expressed dissatisfaction with Guns N' Roses' much-delayed 'Use Your Illusion' albums. He even admitted that he couldn't remember how to play Slash's song 'Coma' because it had too many chord changes! "It was crazy," the guitarist shakes his head. "The last record we did was too many songs for me to remember really. I had a hard time with 'Coma', it wasn't so much my style. Those albums I found very frustrating. I think there's some good songs on there, but the process was extremely, extremely slow. Again, that's the way Axl wants to do things. "I like to get the stuff done and carry on. If you start picking everything apart, analyzing, it's pointless, a downward spiral - and next thing you know, months have gone by, or a year. It took us a long time to get those records out, I don't even remember how long." The days began even before the recording of the 'Use Your Illusion' albums, when drummer Steven Adler was kicked out of the band. "I took it pretty hard when Stevie was out of the band," Izzy's face tenses. "It was pretty upsetting, cos I was watching Stevie trying to get himself together, and it was kinda hard seeing somebody trying when they're not really ready for it. Weeks and months were going by, we were in that old dilemma; it had been two or three years and we didn't have a fucking album out, we gotta move. "I actually spoke to Steve probably a month ago - against the advice of the legal system, the attorneys, all that fucking bullshit. That part of the business, that part of the band, is such a load of shit - it seems it fucks up so many good things. But I talked to Stevie; I'd heard he wasn't doing so well, and it was a trip talking to the guy, cos I hadn't talked to him for what must've been a year. - "He was a good-natured guy; I hope he can get it together. He was never malicious, he never tried to fuck people around, he was just happy playing his drums. In some ways he's a little naive, I guess. "I just tried to offer a little support, y'know? I just talked to him for a little bit. He was a good drummer. He wasn't a virtuoso, a Neil Peart from Rush or something, but he's a fucking damn good rock drummer, he's a good guy, and he's funnier than shit on the road. "I was always laughing when I was hanging out with Stevie. Some of the shit he'd pull, you'd just go, 'No fucking way'! One time we were in New York: I was rooming with Stevie and due to overbooking, we got a huge $500-a-night suite. We had this big room so we had a big party... and two days later we're still up! "Stevie's a hairy guy, he's naked, his fucking eyes are red and swollen like goggles, and he's walking around when the maid comes in. The look on this lady's face, man - it just freaked the shit out of her, this fucking red-eyed ape guy! "He was funny. I hope he gets it together. I told him to get a real job, clean himself up and start doing studio work or something. "He was saying that he just really missed playing. All these lawsuits," Izzy groans, "it's just so fucking ugly, y'know? I guess it's inevitable..." - Izzy can empathize with Adler, having struggled to kick drug habits of his own. "We left Hollywood as dirtbags," Izzy recalls, "the band that everyone was betting would crash 'n' burn the first week out. We were gone almost two years, and suddenly we were so popular in LA, everybody loved us, everybody had something they wanted to sell us. The drugs came easier, everything. Fuck, one day I was sitting in my apartment, fucked out of my head, and I go, 'Man, I gotta step back to some reality'. "I think going back to Indiana woke me up from my haze, point blank. I was still drinking a lot, still getting twisted, but it helped me get away from the drugs and that sorta bullshit lifestyle; every night the clubs and the parties and the drugs, just pointless stuff. That shit got old. "I managed to stop drinking and using drugs for a month or two, and you get all this anxiety, this energy, which you don't know what to do with. I put some of the energy into bikes, skateboarding..." - Izzy roots through a pile of magazines on the floor to pick up a stack of photographs of himself and his Swedish girlfriend Anneka on 'boards at a nearby skate ramp in Copenhagen, talking all the while as he leafs through the pictures. "From January, the only thing I've really been doing is playing guitar. I put the bikes away because I found myself getting into music probably more than I ever have. I go through phases of playing guitar and riding motorcycles, like I went through phases of just snorting and smoking. "The hardest thing about kicking coke is the fucking anxiety. It lasted for what seemed like an eternity. I remember two weeks when I didn't really sleep, and it takes months for your body to begin functioning naturally again. I had a harder time with coke than smack. I kicked smack but would keep starting up again, and the times I'd go cold turkey with no sort of medication; that's bad, but you can get through it. The coke I found to be more evil, a real fucker." He chuckles: "I'll be getting strip-searched at Heathrow if you print this! "Coke is more socially accepted than smack, but I haven't been around it for a long time. I haven't even been around any people using it, cos as soon as you stop using that stuff, you suddenly start looking differently at the people you hang out with. "For years, I never knew any other way to live. I suppose when you're a kid you do, but as you start fucking around with that stuff, it seems normal. I feel better not using it; it fucks me up. "There was a point in LA where I wouldn't go outside without a gun. I was carrying a pistol all the time, and eventually I think that works on you too. It's fucked, it's no way to live, and when I realized, I said, 'I gotta get out of here before it gets too fuckin' crazy'." - Guns N' Roses came close to breaking up in October of 1990. From the stage of the LA Coliseum, where the band were supporting the Rolling Stones, Axl announced that GN'R were finished, prefacing 'Mr. Brownstone' with the suggestion that "certain people in the Guns N' Roses organization should get their shit together and quit dancing with this man". 'Mr. Brownstone' was Axl's piece on heroin addiction. For Izzy, this was a time of mixed emotions. "I got a call from Axl on the morning of the first Stones show. He said, 'I'm sorry, these gigs aren't gonna go, I quit!'. But we managed to get through 'em. That was a weird time for me. Playing to 50,000 people with the Stones is as good as it gets, but the Monday after the last show I had to be up at 8am to meet my new probation officer. That was after I got arrested on a plane. "It's a federal offense if you fuck up on an airplane. I was outta my mind, there was a queue to the bathroom, and I was going, 'Well, I'm either gonna piss in my pants or piss on the fucking rug'! Everything was real quiet on the plane after that. "I was happy I'd pissed, I was completely numb, drunk, and of course when we landed, the police were there. I was also carrying a nine-millimeter pistol, but when my bag finally got to LA it was gone. "That probation officer was an okay guy, they're pretty fair people, but it made me realize that it doesn't matter how fucking big your band is, when it comes down to the legal system, you're just the same as anyone else." Izzy Stradlin' got pretty fucked up in Guns N' Roses, but he's doing fine now.

[harlanrwiley89]

Yes, the Open Office Is Terrible — But It Doesn’t Have to Be (Ep. 358 Rebroadcast)

Feeling stressed from working in a noisy open office? Tell your boss that working from home increases worker productivity by 13 percent! (Photo: MaxPixel)

It began as a post-war dream for a more collaborative and egalitarian workplace. It has evolved into a nightmare of noise and discomfort. Can the open office be saved, or should we all just be working from home?

Listen and subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

*     *     *

Hey, are you at work right now? And do you work in an office? Have you ever worked in an office? If you have, there’s a good chance it was an open office, at least to some degree. The open office design has been around for decades, in a variety of forms. If you’re a cynic, you might think an open office is all about cramming the maximum number of employees into the minimum amount of real estate. But you could also imagine that an open office produces better interaction and more collaboration. Wouldn’t it be nice to know if this were true? That’s what these people wanted to learn.

Ethan BERNSTEIN: I’m Ethan Bernstein, I’m an associate professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School.

Stephen TURBAN: My name is Stephen Turban. I am a recent graduate of Harvard College and I currently work for a global management consultancy.

Turban has since moved on from his consulting job. Anyway, he and Bernstein had just co-authored a paper called “The Impact of the Open Workspace on Human Collaboration.”

TURBAN: I don’t think I realized how much anger there was against open offices until the research was published and I was contacted by a number of friends and colleagues about their open offices and their deep, deep emotional scarring.

BERNSTEIN: There’s certainly a population of people out there who hate — I think that’s perhaps even not strong enough—

DUBNER: Not strong enough, agreed. But proceed please.

BERNSTEIN: People find it impossible to get work done. They find it demoralizing.

TURBAN: Also the lack of privacy, and the feeling that they’re being watched by others.

BERNSTEIN: Privacy tends to give us license to be more experimental, to potentially find opportunities for continuous improvement, to avoid distractions that might take us away from the focus we have on our work.

TURBAN: Ethan is really, I would say, the king of privacy.

BERNSTEIN: My research over time has been about the increasingly transparent workplace and its impact on human behavior and therefore performance. Over time, I’ve gotten asked the question, “What about the open office? How does it impact the way in which people work and collaborate?” I haven’t had an empirical answer.

In search of an empirical answer, Bernstein and Turban began a study of two Fortune 500 companies that were converting from cubicles to open offices. Sure, the downsides of an open office are obvious: the lack of privacy; having to overhear everything your coworkers say. But what if the downsides are offset by a grand flowering of collaboration and communication and idea-generation? What if the open office is in fact a brilliant concept that we’ve all been falsely maligning?

*     *     *

The office is such a quintessential emblem of modern society that it may seem it’s been around forever. But of course it hasn’t.

Nikil SAVAL: The economy of the United States was based on farming and it was based on manufacturing. The office was almost an afterthought.

That’s Nikil Saval, the author of a book called Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace.

SAVAL: People thought, “Well, offices are essentially paperwork factories. So we should just sort of array them in an assembly-line sort of formation.”

This meant a big room filled with long rows of desks and, scattered on the periphery, private offices for the managers. This factory model, which got its start in the late 19th century, came to be known as the American plan. And it was standard office form for decades, at least in the U.S. But then, in the middle of the twentieth century, in Germany:

SAVAL: There were two brothers, the Schnelle brothers, who began to wonder about the nature of the American plan. There was a sense that this was arbitrary, and there was no real reason to lay out an office in this way.

In 1958, Wolfgang and Eberhard Schnelle created the Quickborner consulting group with the idea of bringing some intentionality to modern office design.

SAVAL: And one of the ideas that came to them was that an office is not like a factory, it’s actually a different kind of workplace. And it requires its own sort of system. Maybe there isn’t a reason to have desks in rows. Maybe there isn’t a reason for people to have private offices at all, if essentially the office is not about producing things but it’s about producing ideas and about producing communication among different people. And so over time they pioneered a concept that they called the burolandschaft, or “office landscape.” And it was essentially the first truly open plan office.

The idea was to create an office that was more collaborative and more egalitarian.

SAVAL: It looks extremely chaotic. You’d just have desks in clusters and they just seem to be arranged in a pretty haphazard form. But, in fact, there was rigorous planning around it in a way that would facilitate communication and the flow of people and ideas. And it eventually made its way to England and the United States, and it was considered an incredible breakthrough.

A breakthrough perhaps — but the earliest open offices drew complaints similar to the ones we hear today. Lots of complaints.

SAVAL: By not instituting a barrier between people, by not having doors, by not having any way of controlling the way sound traveled in the office, it stopped facilitating the thing it was supposed to facilitate, which was communication, because it became harder to communicate in an office environment where phones were ringing off the hook, where you could hear typewriters across the room, and things like that. It wasn’t actually the utopian space that it promised to be. In fact, it was deeply debilitating in some ways for the kind of work that people wanted to do.

Meanwhile, there was an American named Robert Propst working for the Herman Miller furniture company, in Michigan.

SAVAL: He was not himself trained as a designer. He was sort of like a freelance thinker.

Propst was intrigued by the “office landscape” idea — its openness and egalitarian aspirations — but he also appreciated its practical shortcomings.

SAVAL: And he decided to turn to experts — to anthropologists, to social psychologists, to people of that nature.

After some research, Propst came to the conclusion that individuals are — well, they’re individuals. And they need more control over their workspace. He and the designer George Nelson came up with a new design in which each office worker would be surrounded by a suite of objects to help them work better. In 1964, Herman Miller debuted the “Action Office.”

SAVAL: There was a standing desk, a regular desk that you sat at, and a telephone booth.

Design critics loved the Action Office.

SAVAL: It looked incredible, but it was very expensive and very few managers wanted to spend this kind of money on their employees. So they went back to the drawing board and they tried to come up with something cheaper.

In 1968, Herman Miller released the Action Office 2.

SAVAL: And it was this three-walled space: these fabric-wrapped walls that were angled, and they were meant to enclose a suite of furniture. And it was meant to mitigate the kind of chaos that an open office plan might otherwise have.

You may know the Action Office 2 by its more generic name—

SAVAL: —which is the cubicle.

The cubicle promised a variety of advantages.

SAVAL: It’s meant to be very flexible, and it can form an impromptu conference room. And it was meant to divide up an open office plan in a way to mitigate the kind of chaos that an open office plan or an office landscape might otherwise have. And it was incredibly well-received. It was copied by a number of furniture companies. And soon it was spreading in offices everywhere.

But the cubicle could also be exploited.

SAVAL: It became a perfect tool for cramming more and more workers into less and less space very cheaply. The whole notion of what Propst was trying to do was to give a worker a space that they could control — was turned into the exact opposite. It was clear that his concept had become the most-loathed symbol of office life.

Indeed, the revolutionary, freedom-giving cubicle came to be seen as a sort of corporate version of solitary confinement. This left Robert Propst most unhappy.

SAVAL: And he blamed managers. He blamed people who were not enlightened, that created what he called barren, rat-hole-type environments.

Robert Propst, like the Schnelle brothers before him, had not quite succeeded in creating a vibrant and efficient open office. Their new environments introduced new problems: chaos in the first case, cubicles in the second. As with many problems that we humans try to correct — whether in office culture, or society at large — the correction turns out to be an overcorrection. Unintended consequences leap out, and humble us. And yet: in this case, the fact is that most offices today are still open offices. Why are we holding on to this concept if it makes so many people so unhappy?

TURBAN: If you’re looking purely at a cost per square foot, having an open office is cheaper.

BERNSTEIN: There are a lot of people, whether they’re managers or employees, who like the open office.

Bernstein admits that managers are primarily impressed by the cost savings of an open office. But some employees—

BERNSTEIN: Some employees like it because they have visions of it being more vibrant, more interactive. That fun, noisy, experiential place they’re hoping for once you take down the walls and make everyone able to see each other.

TURBAN: And there’s also been a big push around these collisions that have emerged in social sciences. How do you create these random interactions between people that spark creativity?

“Collision” is a term you hear a lot in office design and the design of public spaces generally. It’s the promise that unplanned encounters can lead to good things — between co-workers or neighbors, even strangers. Conversations that otherwise wouldn’t have happened; the exchange of ideas; unforeseen collaboration. Now, the office is plainly a different sort of space from the public square. The office is primarily concerned with productivity. We’d all like to be happy working in our offices, but is it maybe worth surrendering a bit of happiness — and privacy, and so on — for the sake of higher productivity? After all, that’s what we’re being paid for.

BERNSTEIN: If you want to have a certain kind of interaction that’s deep, productive in idea generation, or in something that requires us to have lots of “bandwidth” between each other, it’s nice to have that face-to-face interaction.

Ben WABER: Face-to-face conversations are so important.

That’s Ben Waber, he’s the C.E.O. of an organizational-analytics company called Humanyze.

WABER: What we do is use data about how people interact and collaborate at work. Think email, chat, meeting data, but now also sensor data about how people interact in the real world. And we use that to understand really what goes on inside companies.

Humanyze has developed sociometric I.D. badges, embedded with sensors, to capture these data.

WABER: We have by far the largest data set on workplace interaction in the world.

And what do the data say about face-to-face communication?

WABER: In all of our research, that has consistently been the most predictive factor of almost any organizational outcome you can think of: performance, job satisfaction, retention, you name it. People did evolve for millions of years to interact in a face-to-face way. We are very used to small changes in facial expression, small changes in tone of voice and that’s particularly important in work contexts where high levels of trust, especially as work gets more and more complex, and the things we build and make together are more and more complex. Really having that trust and being able to convey really rich information is critical.

Bernstein and Turban also believe in the value of face-to-face communication.

TURBAN: Nuanced communication around, “Here’s a proposal I have. Here is a thought I have about how this last meeting went.” That is a very rich and nuanced form of communication and most literature suggests that face-to-face communication is much better at that.

BERNSTEIN: Sociologists have suggested for a long time that propinquity breeds interaction — propinquity being co-location, being close to one another.

TURBAN: The closer two people are together, the more likely they are to interact, the more likely they are to get married, the more likely they are to work together.

BERNSTEIN: And interaction being, we will have a conversation, we will actually get some kind of collaboration done between the two of us.

TURBAN: You can look at slouching shoulders, you can see what is their facial expression, and that conveys a lot of information that is really hard to convey, no matter how good you are at emojis — and let me tell you, I am pretty good at emojis.

Okay, so face-to-face communication is important, at least for some purposes and on some dimensions. And an open office is designed to facilitate more face-to-face communication. So … does it work? That was the central question of Bernstein and Turban’s study.

DUBNER: In your study, there are two companies that were transitioning to open offices. First of all, can you reveal the identity of one or both of those companies?

BERNSTEIN: I can’t. In order to do this study, we had to agree to a level of confidentiality. I will say that we had a choice of sites to study and we chose the two that we thought would be most representative of the kind of work we were interested in, which is white-collar work in professional settings, Fortune 500 companies.

DUBNER: Can you give us some detail that helps us envision the kind of office and what the activities are?

BERNSTEIN: If you work in a global headquarters amongst a series of functions like H.R. or finance or legal or sales or marketing, this would describe your work setting.

DUBNER: And can you describe, for the two companies that you studied, they moved to open offices — what was their configuration beforehand?

BERNSTEIN: Everyone was in cubicles. And then they moved to an open space that basically mimicked that, but just without the cubicle walls.

TURBAN: Those barriers went down, so you could see if John was sitting next to Sally before, and there was a wall between them, that John could see Sally and Sally could see John, and that was the big difference between the original and the office afterwards.

DUBNER: So, tell us about the experiment. I want to know all kinds of things, like how many people were involved? Did they opt in or not? Was it randomized? How the data were gathered, and so on.

TURBAN: In the first study, we had 52 participants; in our second, we had 100 participants, and we wanted to measure communication before and after the move.

BERNSTEIN: We started with the most simple empirical puzzle we could start with, which was simply how much interaction takes place between the individuals before and after. We wanted to purely see if this hypothesis of a vibrant open office were true.

TURBAN: So before the move, we gave each of the participants sociometric badges.

These are the badges we mentioned earlier, from Humanyze.

BERNSTEIN: So they contain several sensors. One is a microphone. One is an I.R. sensor to show whether or not they’re facing another badge. They have an accelerometer to show movement and they have a Bluetooth sensor to show location.

TURBAN: So you can get a data point which looks like: “John spoke with Sally for 25 minutes at 2 p.m.” But you don’t know anything about what the content of the conversation is.

BERNSTEIN: A number of previous studies that have used the sociometric badges have shown that we are very aware of them for the first, say, few minutes that we have them on, and after that we sort of forget they’re there.

DUBNER: You write that the microphone is only registering that people talk and not recording or monitoring what they say. Do you think the employees who wore them believe that? I mean if I think there’s a one percent chance that my firm is monitoring or recording what I’m saying, I’m quite likely to say less, yes?

BERNSTEIN: Well, it’s actually kind of a funny question, because in this case we really weren’t. But look, we phrased the consent form as strongly as we could to ensure that they understood this was for research purposes, and if they hadn’t believed it, they probably would have opted out.

DUBNER: What are we to make of the fact that the data represents the people who opted in only? Because I’m just running through my head, if I were an employee and I’m told that there’s some kind of experiment going on with these smart people from Harvard Business School and, however much you tell me or don’t, I intuit some or I figure out some or I guess some. And we’re moving to an open office and I think, “Oh, man, I hate the open office, and therefore I definitely want to participate in this experiment so that I can sabotage it by behaving exactly the opposite of how I think they want me to behave.” Is that too skeptical or cynical?

BERNSTEIN: Boy, you sound like one of my reviewers in the peer review process.

DUBNER: Sorry.

BERNSTEIN: It is a valid concern. Let me tell you what we’ve tried to do to alleviate it. The first thing is we’ve compared the individuals who opted in to wearing the badge and those who did not to a series of demographics we got from the H.R. systems. And we don’t see systematic differences there.

TURBAN: It is always possible when you’re doing social science research that someone makes a guess, whether it’s accurate or not, about what this study is trying to understand, and then takes a personal stand and says, “I’m going to stand for what’s right, and what’s right is cubicles!” In that case, they would have to have done that for every day for two months. So it would have been a remarkable feat of endurance. We don’t think that that’s what happened, but the open office factions are real, so, definitely important to keep in mind.

In addition to all these data from the employees’ badges, the researchers could also measure each employee’s electronic communications — their emails and instant messages. Again, they were only measuring this communication, not examining the content.

BERNSTEIN: And so what we were able to do is compare individuals’ face-to-face and electronic communication before and after the move from cubicles to open spaces in these two environments.

Okay, so the Bernstein-Turban study looked at two Fortune 500 companies where employees had moved from cubicles to open offices. And they measured every input they could about how the employees’ communication changed — face-to-face and electronic communication. What do you think happened?

*     *     *

DUBNER: So, you’ve done the study, two firms over a period of time with a number of people to measure how their behavior changes, generally. Tell us what you found.

TURBAN: So, the study had two main conclusions.

BERNSTEIN: We found that when these individuals moved from closed cubicles into the open office, interaction decreased.

TURBAN: Face-to-face communication decreased by about 70 percent in both of our two studies. Conversely, that communication wasn’t entirely lost. Instead, the second result that we found was that communication actually increased virtually, so people emailed more, I.M.’ed more.

DUBNER: How much of that decrease was compensated by electronic?

TURBAN: We saw an increase of 20–50 percent of electronic communication. That means more emails, more I.M.’s. And depending on how you think about what an email is worth, maybe you could say that they made up for it. Is an email worth five minutes of conversation, is it two minutes?

BERNSTEIN: It’s a little bit hard to say, because an email and an interaction may not be comparable in item.

TURBAN: Even if we saw an increase in the amount of virtual communication, which totally made up for the face-to-face communication, what you probably saw was a loss in richness of communication — the net information that’s being conveyed was actually less.

DUBNER: What can you tell us about how the open space affected productivity and satisfaction?

BERNSTEIN: I’ll come out clean and say, we don’t have perfect data on performance, and we don’t have any data on satisfaction. We purposefully stayed away from satisfaction; we just wanted to look at the interaction of individuals. In one of our two studies, we have anecdotally some information where the organization felt that actually performance had declined as a result of this move.

I will say that, boy, if we think about this, there are probably lots of contexts that we can think of where more face-to-face interaction would be useful and lots of contexts in which we think more face-to-face interaction would not be useful. And that’s where I’d actually prefer to take the conversation about productivity. That, at the very least, to date managers of property, managers of organizations have not thought about this being a trade off. They’ve assumed cost and revenue go together. That may be true in some subset of environments, but in others that’s not going to be true.

DUBNER: What did the companies in your study do after you’d presented them with your findings?

BERNSTEIN: One of them has actually taken a step back from the open office. The other has attempted to make the open office work by adding more closed spaces to it.

Okay, so an empirical study of open offices finds that the primary benefit they are meant to confer — more face-to-face communication and the good things such communication can lead to — that it actually moves in the opposite direction! At least in the aggregate. To be fair, an open office is bound to be much better for certain tasks than others. And, more important, better for some people than for others. We’re not all the same. And some of us, I’m told — not me, but some of us — thrive in a potentially chattier office. But on balance, it would appear that being put out in the open leads most people to close themselves off a bit. Why? You can probably answer that question for yourself. But Turban and Bernstein have some thoughts too. Here’s one: maybe you don’t want to disturb other people:

TURBAN: So, when you’re in an open office, your voice carries. And I think people decide very reasonably to say, “Well I could speak with Tammy, who’s three desks away. But if I talk to Tammy, I’m going to disrupt Larry and Katherine, and so I will send her a quick message instead.”

Or maybe you compensate for the openness of the open office with behavior that sends a do-not-disturb signal.

BERNSTEIN: If everyone can see you, you want to signal to everyone that you are a hard worker, so you look intensely at your screen. Maybe you put on headphones to block the noise. Guess what? When we signal that, we also tend to signal, “And please don’t interrupt me from my work.” Which may very well have been part of what happened in our studies here.

And then there’s what Ethan Bernstein calls “the transparency paradox.”

BERNSTEIN: Very simply, the transparency paradox is the idea that increasingly transparent, open, observable workplaces can create less transparent employees.

For instance: let’s say you’ve been really productive all morning; now you want to take a break. You want to check your fantasy-football lineup; you want to look up some recipes for dinner. But you don’t want everyone in the office, especially your boss, to see what you’re doing. So: you do it anyway but you’re constantly looking over your shoulder in case you need to shut down the fantasy-football or recipe tabs.

BERNSTEIN: That has implications for productivity, because we spend time on it. We spend energy on it. We spend effort on it. We tend to believe these days that we get our best work done when we can be our authentic selves. Very few of us get up on a stage in front of a large audience, which is somewhat of how some people encounter the open office, and feel we can be our authentic selves.

Nicholas BLOOM: So, if I have an idea—

That’s the Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom.

BLOOM: —if I go discuss with my colleague or my manager in an open office, I’m terrified that other people would hear. They may pass judgment or rumors can go around.

Bloom has studied this realm for years:

BLOOM: I work a lot on firms and productivity, so what makes some firms more productive, more successful. What makes other firms less successful.

DUBNER: So let me ask you this: a recent paper found that a couple of Fortune 500 companies who switched from cubicles to an open office plan with the hopes of increasing employee collaboration, that in fact the openness led to less collaboration. So, knowing what you know about offices and people, does that surprise you?

BLOOM: Not really. There’s a huge problem with open offices in terms of collaboration. You have no privacy. Whereas if it’s in a slightly more closed environment it’s easier to discuss ideas, to bounce things around.

Or consider the ultimate closed environment: your own home.

BLOOM: One piece of research I did that connected very much to the open office was the benefits of working from home. So working from home has a terrible reputation amongst many people. The nickname “shirking from home.” So I decided to do a scientific study. So we got a large online travel agency to ask a division who wanted to work from home. And we then had them randomize employees by even or odd birthdays into working at home versus working in the office.

DUBNER: Now, this was a travel agency in China, correct?

BLOOM: Yes, so it’s Ctrip, which is China’s largest travel agency. It’s very much like Expedia in the U.S. And stunningly what came out was, one of the biggest driving factors is, it’s just much quieter working from home. They complained so often about the amount of noise and disruption going on in the office. They’re all in an open office and they tell us about people having boyfriend problems, there’s a cake in the breakout room. The World Cup sweepstake. I mean, the most amazing was the woman that told us about her cubicle neighbor who’d have endless conversations with her mum about medical problems, including horrible things like ingrown toenails and some kind of wart issue. I mean what could be more distracting than that? Not surprisingly, in that case, the open office was devastating for her productivity.

DUBNER: So, you find that overall, working from home raises what exactly? Is it productivity? Is it happiness?

BLOOM: So we found working from home raises productivity by 13 percent. Which is massive. That’s almost an extra day a week. So a), much more productive, massively more productive, way more than anyone predicted. And b), they seemed a lot happier; their attrition rates, so how frequently they quit. Part of this was they didn’t have the commute and all the uncertainty. And they didn’t have to take sick days off. But the other big driver is it’s just so much quieter at home.

DUBNER: You also do write, though, that one of the downsides of working from home was promotion became less likely. Yes?

BLOOM: Yes. We don’t know why, but one argument is “out of sight, out of mind.” They just get forgotten about. And another story would be that actually they need to develop skills of human capital and relationship capital, therefore you need to be in the office to get that, to be promoted. And then the third reason I heard, we talked to people working at home and they’d say, “I don’t want to be promoted, because in order to be promoted, I need to come in the office more so.” I’m happy where I am. It’s not worth it.

DUBNER: “I just want them to leave me alone.”

BLOOM: I mean, the most surprising thing from the Ctrip working-from-home experiment was after the end of the nine months, Ctrip was so happy. They were saving about $2,000 per employee working from home because they are more productive and they saved in office space. So they said, “Okay, everyone can now work from home.” And we discovered of the people in the experiment, about 50 percent of them who had been at home decided to come back into the office. And that seemed like an amazing decision because they’re now choosing to commute for something like 40 minutes each way a day. And also since they are less productive in the office and about half their pay was bonus pay, they’re getting paid less. All in all we calculated, their time and pay was kind of falling by 10 to 15 percent. But they were still coming in. And the reason they told us is it was lonely at home.

So people always joke the three great enemies of working from home is the fridge, the bed, and the television. And some people can handle that and others can’t. And you don’t really know until you have tried it. So what happens is people try it and some people love it and are very productive. Great, they just stick with it, and others try and they loathe it and they come back into the office.

The more you learn about the productivity and happiness of office workers in different settings, the more obvious it is that one key ingredient is often overlooked: choice. Some employees really might be better off at home; others might prefer the cubicle; and some might thrive in an open office. You also have to acknowledge that no one environment will be ideal for every task.

Janet POGUE McLAURIN: So if you stop and think about: how do we spend our time? About half of our time is spent in focus mode, which means that we’re working alone; a little over a quarter of our time is working with others in person; and about 20 percent is working with others virtually.

That’s Janet Pogue McLaurin, from the global design-and-architecture firm Gensler.

POGUE McLAURIN: I’m one of our global workplace practice area leaders.

Given the diversity of tasks required of the modern office worker—

POGUE McLAURIN: —you need the best environment for the task at hand. So, if you’re getting ready to go onto a conference call, instead of taking it at your desk, you may go into a conference room. When you finish that, you may go back to your desk to catch up on email. You may socialize around the café area or even take a walking meeting outside. We need to have all these other work settings at our disposal to be able to create a wonderful work experience.

That doesn’t sound so hard, does it? So how do you create that? Let’s start with the basics. Pogue McLaurin acknowledges that many open offices don’t address their key shortcoming.

POGUE McLAURIN: The biggest complaint that we see in open offices that don’t work is the noise. And how do you mitigate noise interruptions and distractions? And that can be noise as well as visual. Being able to design a space that zones the floor in smaller neighborhoods, that tries to get buffers between noisy activities. There’s architectural interventions we can also do, with ceilings and materials and white noise, that may be added to the space. And it’s not about creating too quiet an environment — that can be just as ineffective as a noisy environment. You really want to have enough buzz and energy, but just not hear every word.

You also want to account for what economists call heterogeneous preferences, and what normal people call individual choice.

POGUE McLAURIN: Choice is one of the key drivers of effective workspace, and we have found that the most innovative firms actually offer twice as much choice and exercise on that choice than non-innovative firms do. And choice is really around autonomy, about when and where to work. It could be as simple as having a choice of being able to do focus work in the morning or being able to work at home a day, or in another work setting in the office.

To that end, no two employees are exactly alike — and, more important, no two companies are alike either.

POGUE McLAURIN: I think some common mistakes that organizations do is they try to copy someone else’s design. So if you think it’s a cool idea of something that you saw on the west coast, let’s say it’s a tech firm, and you’re not even a tech firm, and you’re sitting here on the east coast and you try to just copy it verbatim, it doesn’t work. It’s got to reflect how your organization works and the purpose and brand and community that you’re a part of.

So oftentimes, companies would start to adopt what other organizations are doing and say, “Yes, that will save us space, so let’s adopt it,” but they’re missing out by not providing all these other spaces to balance. So they want the efficiency without creating all the other work settings that people need in order to be truly productive.

It’s worth noting that Janet Pogue McLaurin, a principal with a design-and-architecture firm, is arguing that the key to a successful office is: design and architecture. But it’s also worth noting that her firm has done a great deal of research in all different kinds of offices, all different kinds of companies, all over the world.

POGUE McLAURIN: We’ve done several studies in the U.S. and the U.K. But we’ve also done Latin America, Asia, Middle East and we’re just completing a study in Germany.

So: what’s her prognosis for the long-maligned open office?

POGUE McLAURIN: The open office is not dead. Oftentimes people say,“Which is better: private office or open plan?” We measured all types of individual work environments, and what we’ve found is that if you solve for design, noise, and access to people and resources, they perform equally, and one is essentially not better than the other. And the best open plan can be as effective as a private one. And that was a surprise. I love data when it tells you something unexpected.

So do we, Janet Pogue McLaurin. So do we.

*     *     *

Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Rebecca Lee Douglas. Our staff also includes Alison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, Harry Huggins, Zack Lapinski, Matt Hickey, Corinne Wallace, and Daphne Chen. We had help this week from Nellie Osborne. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; all the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Ethan Bernstein, Edward W. Conard Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School.

Nicholas Bloom, economist at Stanford University.

Janet Pogue McLaurin, principal at Gensler.

Nikil Saval, author and journalist.

Stephen Turban, development & innovation at the Office of the President, Fulbright University Vietnam.

Ben Waber, president and C.E.O. of Humanyze.

RESOURCES

“Does Working from Home Work? Evidence from a Chinese Experiment,” Nicholas Bloom, James Liang, John Roberts, Zhichun Jenny Ying (2013).

“The Impact of the Open Workspace on Human Collaboration,” Ethan Bernstein, Stephen Turban (2018).

The Office: A Facility Based on Change by Robert Propst (Herman Miller 1968).

Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace by Nikil Saval (Anchor 2014).

EXTRA

“Are We in a Mattress-Store Bubble?” Freakonomics Radio (2016).

“Time to Take Back the Toilet,” Freakonomics Radio (2014).

The post Yes, the Open Office Is Terrible — But It Doesn’t Have to Be (Ep. 358 Rebroadcast) appeared first on Freakonomics.

from Dental Care Tips http://freakonomics.com/podcast/office-rebroadcast/

[daggerzine]

HOLIDAY FLYER: Quiet was the new loud- the band talk about their beginnings, the end and the forthcoming reissues of their first two records!

John and Katie, the early years.  

Holiday Flyer were truly something special in their 1990’s heyday. Hailing from Sacramento, but even in a scene that boasted bands like Tiger Trap and Rocketship, Holiday Flyer seemed to be off on their own island doin’ their own thing. Formed in the early 90’s by sibling John and Katie Conley (now Katie Haley), they released four LPs and several EPs and singles before calling it a day (and forming their next bands, California Orange for John and Sinking Ships for Katie,….now those bands are John’s Desario and Katie’s Soft Science).

 I still remember them driving a few hours from Sacramento to Santa Rosa, where I was living and booking shows (circa 1994-’95) and introducing themselves to me at a show I had put together (I think it was Codeine) and telling me about their band, which got me immediately interested. The music was soft, spare and pretty….not quite folk music but close (with decidedly non-flowery lyrics). As the band went on and they added band members the sound got a bit denser but no less personal and still very melodic.

 This year the Darla label is reissuing the first two albums, 1995’s Try Not To Worry and 1997’s The Rainbow Confection on limited edition vinyl (500 copies each).  It’s the first time on vinyl for both and the download for each one includes several extra unreleased tracks.

 So, here a few weeks before their 2/14/19 release date, I shot John and Katie some questions re: the origins of the band and what they’re doing now.

 Quiet was the new loud.

 Did you guys grow up in Sacramento or nearby?

 John: We grew up in Rocklin and Roseville. In my early 20s I moved to downtown Sacramento. I have lived in or around the area ever since. Currently, I live in West Sacramento. I’m still really close to the downtown/midtown area of Sacramento which I like. I still try to go to as many shows as I can here in town.

 Katie: So the Rocklin/ Roseville area is about 20 miles northeast of downtown Sacramento. It has grown a lot in the last several years with a major expansion of business and residential development. When we were young and growing up there the area still had a small town feel and some parts of the community were considered pretty rural – including our backyard ;-). I too eventually made it downtown and stayed for many years while I finished college. I still live in the Sacramento area.

 What did you get into first…punk rock? New wave? Something else? What was the progression like?

John: The first genre of music I got into was Metal. The first album I ever bought was Blizzard of Ozz - Ozzy Osbourne. I met Mike Yoas (Holiday Flyer, Desario) in 1985. He introduced me to Punk and New Wave. One of my favorite bands he turned me on to was Naked Raygun. They are still a favorite. Around 87 or 88 Katie and I started to listen to similar bands. We both loved The Smiths, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Echo and the Bunnymen etc. When she turned 15, our parents would let her go to shows with me, which was cool. Looking back now, she was pretty lucky. She got to see some killer show. A venue in Sacramento called the Cattle Club booked some amazing bands in the 90’s. We saw Ride, Lush, Slowdive and Nirvana there, just to name a few.

Katie: Yep, as little sister, John pretty much always had an influence on my musical taste. He's got great taste so why not follow! But I have to say I never really got into the punk rock. As a young child I really loved Olivia Newton-John, Pat Benatar, Fleetwood Mac, and Madonna (I must confess). Later The Bangles and the Go-Go’s were pretty big in my world. By my mid-teens is when John and I really started seeing eye to eye again regarding music. We watched a lot of 120 Minutes on MTV together. I remember that the first music posters on my bedroom wall in high school were Depeche Mode, The Cure, The Smiths and R.E.M. Those bands pretty much sum up the start for me. And yes, I was seriously lucky my big brother didn't mind taking his little sister with him to shows. The Ocean Blue and The Mighty Lemon Drops in San Francisco is one of the stand out shows John let me tag along on that comes immediately to mind.

 Was it pretty early on that you and Katie began making music together?

John: Katie was always singing, even when she little. I started playing guitar when I was 13. I had a band my last year of high school and Katie would occasionally sing with us. We didn't start playing together until after Katie graduated from High School. 

Please tell me about the early days of Holiday Flyer? Was it pretty easy to make music with your sister or did it take some coaxing? 

John: After High School, I had a couple of bands that didn't last very long. I kind of lost interest in playing music for about 6 or 8 months afterwards. I didn't stop listening though. I think one of the records that got me to pick the guitar back up was Today by Galaxie 500. There was something so different and special about that album for me. I started writing songs again and Katie would just come into my room and start sing with me. That was sort of the beginning of Holiday Flyer.

Katie: Yep, I pretty much forced my way in with harmonies that were not asked for.

John, still rocking it today. 

 What kind of stuff were you guys listening to at the time the band started?

John: I was really into a lot of shoegaze stuff. Ride, Lush, Slowdive. I think the band Moose had a huge influence on our writing. I had the early Moose EPs and remember buying an import copy of their first album. It was so different from the EPs, not shoegaze at all. It was really 70s folk influenced but still dreampop. At that time we were also really into some unfashionable 70s soft rock like Al Stewart, Bread, early Chicago, early Bee Gees ( Katie learned to play the snare/ride cymbal set-up playing along to Chicago and Carpenters records). 

Katie: Bands I recall listening to quite a bit during the early days of Holiday Flyer, include The Red House Painters and Belly. Looking at both of our lists, I think its clear that the bands we regularly listened to at the time were quite different that what we were. We never really set out to replicate a sound. If anything I think the influence or take away we always had from whatever we were listening to was melodies, lyrics, and song structure. This was put through our filters and out came HF songs. 

 Had either of you been in bands before or was Holiday Flyer your first band? At what point did Verna come into the picture? Who else was in the band other than the two  of you?

 John: I had a short lived punk band in High School. After that I had a band for a couple years called The Boon with Mike Yoas (Desario), and then another short-lived band called Ellie. There was a band called Light Iris that Katie and I were in with Jim Rivas ( Rocketship, Holiday Flyer, Desario). Katie and I both felt we were better able to achieve what we wanted to do musically as a duo so we left. Jim went on to play in Rocketship. That's how we met Verna. We played shows with Rocketship and Dustin Reske engineered all of the early Holiday Flyer recordings. Katie and I worked as duo for the first year. The early recordings are layered guitars and Katie and I singing. We didn't play live that often at first. In fact, we didn't play a show until after we started sending out demos. We got asked to play a showcase for Alias Records in LA, and I had to wrangle a show at a cafe just to make sure we could pull off the songs before we went to LA. We continued to played shows as a duo (electric guitar and vocals). Katie added the snare drum and cymbal after we released our first 7". When Rocketship broke up we asked Verna to play bass with us. This was the core band for most of Holiday Flyer. We had guests on most of the records. Our friend Toby Marshall played lead guitar on the Sweet and Sour EP. Ross Levine (Soft Science) played trombone on "The Rainbow Confection". Mike Yoas played bass and Matt Levine (Soft Science) played guitar on "You Make Us Go". For "I Hope", we expanded to a full band with Jim Rivas on drums, Mike Yoas on bass. 

Katie singing with Soft Science. 

When did it feel like a real band? When the first record came out or even before that?

John: It started feeling like a real band after we released "Try Not To Worry". We were getting good reviews for the album and doing fanzine interviews. We were also playing shows in San Francisco and LA and opening shows for Red House Painters, America Music Club, Low and Smog.

 Lyrically were there any specific themes you were exploring?

Katie: Looking back at the lyrics, some of them I really love, and a few of them I think oh no...can't listen. They are lyrics only 19 year old me could have written. But overall, I think the HF lyrics are really just kids trying to make sense of it all in a somewhat sweet naive way. I think that might be part of the appeal? They are very honest.

John: I agree with Katie, I think most of the lyrics, especially on the early recording and first couple of records were us just writing what we knew. Some of it is difficult to listen to now, for numerous reasons. Ha Ha! That being said, I'm really proud of what we did in Holiday Flyer.  

Katie: Me too. 

 When and why did the band break up?

Katie: Oh boy, why do you have to bring up old shite? Ha, Ha. 

John: Well, it was my decision to end Holiday Flyer. It was just a good place to stop. We had made our most polished album, I Hope and I wanted to do something different. Verna and I had already released the first California Oranges album with our friend Ross Levine on drums. After a couple of show as a trio, we added Ross's twin brother Matt on lead guitar and started working on our 2nd album "Oranges and Pineapples". During that time Katie and Verna started recording a record with Ross and Matt which ended up being The Sinking Ships. About a year later we decided to merge the two bands and Katie joined California Oranges.

  Soft Science blowin’ minds.  

Sacramento is kind of a low-key city but has always had a great indie rock/pop scene throughout the years with all of your bands plus Rocketship, Tiger Trap, etc. Why do you think that is? Something in the water?

Katie: Perhaps the area somehow cultivates shut-ins? Ha, Ha.  

John: Not really sure it's big enough to call it a scene (ha ha). I think there might be a one degree of separation for most of the indie bands from Sacramento.

Please tell me about the reissues that Darla Records is doing?

John: James Agren at Darla has been wanting to reissue Try Not to Worry and The Rainbow Confection for a long time. Both albums were originally released on Silver Girl Records and have been out of print/unavailable for many years. With these reissues the entire HF catalog will now be available through Darla Records. About a year ago James was finally able to get me to start the process. I felt it was a good time to reissue them. It took us awhile to gather all the miscellaneous tracks which will be included with the digital downloads of each record. I'm looking forward to them being available on vinyl for the first time. Both albums have been remastered by Mike Yoas along with all the bonus material including demos and songs we recorded for compilations. I'm really happy with how it turned out. The LPs sound really good. I think people who like the records will be happy with them. I designed new sleeves for both records too, which was fun. They also have liner notes written by Jack Rabid and Dave Heaton, which is super cool.

The new covers for the reissues. 

Katie: Yes, we really appreciate everyone who helped make the reissues happen! Even our friend Scott Cymbala from Fingepaint Records (the label that released the first HF 7”- also Beck’s first 10”) dug through boxes at his house to find original copies of old songs that were remastered and are included with the bonus material.

Will the band be (or have you been?) playing any gigs for the reissues?

Katie: I love singing with John it is a special experience that I really appreciate now that I have more perspective on what we did. But, we will have to see. We are both pretty busy with our other projects right now.  

John: Katie and I played a few show over the last few years. One was opening for Mark Eitzel which was cool. We played a show with Mike Yoas on bass and Jim Rivas on drums for a local Summer concert series last year. Our current bands come first at this point, but if the right opportunity came up I'm sure we'd make it work.

What are you two doing musically these days?

John: I've been in Desario now for going on 15 years, which seems crazy. It's not as easy to find time for music like when we were younger, but I'm glad to still be playing. Desario are going to start recording a new album in January and hopefully play some shows out of the Sacramento area next year. 

Katie: I am in Soft Science. Our 3rd album Maps came out in June of 2018. It was released through Test Pattern Records which Ross and Matt Levine run, and I help here and there on occasion. John does most of the graphic design for the Test Pattern releases as well. We are all very fortunate for that! This last year was a pretty amazing year for Soft Science. A couple highlights include playing Paris Popfest and traveling to Michigan to play at the Kalamashoegazer fest. I enjoyed seeing you there Tim! I also enjoyed seeing my old pen pal from the HF days, the wonderful Janice Headley, who created the Copacetic zine in the early 1990s. I had not gotten to see her in many moons so that was fantastic. She was there playing in Tears Run Rings so that was an extra treat! For 2019 Soft Science will just be doing whatever we can with the current momentum we have. All in consideration of our normal lives of course ;-). But we all love it so, new songs, and more live shows are in the works! 

  Desario bring the noise. 

 What are some current Sacramento bands that we might not know about but need to?

Katie: Soft Science played with Rosemother this year and I thought they were quite good!

John: Arts & Leisure are working on a new record, which I'm excited about. Two other Sacramento bands I really like are Ghostplay and The Surrounded. Ghostplay has and EP out now, and The Surrounded are working on an LP or EP. 

Any final thoughts?  Closing comments? Anything you wanted to mention that I didn’t ask?

John: Thanks Tim for all the support and interest over the years for our music. I'm also thankful to still be playing and look forward recording and playing live in 2019.

Katie: Just thanks for asking us to do the interview! We are thrilled there is interest in the reissues of our old HF albums. There is an overwhelming amount of music out there so when anyone listens and likes you it is best to be grateful. That we are!

Please visit the links below both for the reissues as well as what John and Katie are doing today. 

https://darla.com/products/holiday-flyer-the-rainbow-confection

https://darla.com/products/holiday-flyer-try-not-to-worry

www.testpatternrecords.com 

https://www.facebook.com/desarioband

https://www.facebook.com/softsciencemusic

 More more more Desario.

[onestowatch]

Aidan Alexander Walks Us Through His Birth Chart, Favorite Vines, & Friendship With Billie Eilish [Q&A]

Aidan Alexander’s impressive talents extend far beyond any singular medium. From acting, amassing an avid following on every social media platform that’s worth using, to now, music, the 20-year-old is the reason why the term crossover success was invented in the first place. However, upon hearing Alexander’s music for the first time, it is difficult to see him as anything but a genuine musical talent. With only three singles to his name to date, “I Don’t Love You,” “Yours,” and “melancholia,” Alexander poignantly touches on themes surrounding love with delicately painted brushstrokes of lush atmospheric pop. 

Currently working towards his highly-anticipated debut EP, we had the chance to sit down with Alexander to discuss his transition to music, but it was in our moments of spirited digression that I came to discover a new side of the rising talent. It is a side defined by a delightfully sarcastic demeanor, love for his Aquarian nature, an abnormally-started friendship with Billie Eilish, a desire to use his social media platform the greater good, and so much more.

OTW: It’s been a few years since you moved, but how has the transition been from Idaho to Los Angeles?

Aidan: It was a culture shock. My mom used to live in New York for a long time. So, growing up, I used to spend a lot of time in New York as well. Luckily, I got to experience more prior to going to LA. You know? I had a little bit of a cushioning. But I loved it. I loved the commotion. I love the chaos. There’s a lot of inspiration all around me. There’s a lot in Idaho, as well, but it’s a different kind.

OTW: So what made you choose LA over New York?

Aidan: I came to LA for acting. LA, I think is a little bit better for acting than New York. Also, I need space and I don’t know if I could do a 500 square foot apartment for like $4500. Maybe one day. I was telling my friends I would love to spend a year in New York. And then I have dual citizenship in Europe so then maybe after that I would just jet away. Out of here. Always just going east.

OTW: In a past interview, you said you were either too busy or too scared to pursue music. What is it about now that made you finally pursue it?

Aidan: I don’t think I was ever too busy. I think I was just being a little bitch about it. I think I’m just a perfectionist. You know, it’s my nature. I’m just very, very meticulous with details. So I really wanted it to be perfect. And that’s probably why I would say it took a little bit. But now that I kind of ripped the band-aid off, I’m like, “Let’s get it.” You know?

OTW: What was the immediate feeling like after releasing “I Don’t Love You?”

Aidan: I was just very happy. It’s cool to have people finally hear what I've been listening for months. It's cool to have them finally get it. You know? There’s more to reference. I can finally be, like, “This was really cool when I was in the studio working on this.” It’s another thing to talk about.

OTW: So speaking on being meticulous, does that have to do with your Aquarius nature?  Aidan: I don’t know if being meticulous about detail is an Aquarius thing. I just know that “I Don’t Love You” is an Aquarius thing. The first single. That’s very much my Aquarian nature. Yeah, I don’t know if that’s my zodiac sign coming into play or not. It might be. It probably is. Either that or just my flat personality. One of the two.

OTW: On the topic of stars, do you know your whole chart? 

Aidan: I know that my sun is a Gemini, which is really spooky. I’m a crazy person. I think my mars is a Leo. That’s all I know.

OTW: You don’t know your moon?

Aidan: I don’t know my moon. Let me check. I have it on my phone. It’s gonna bother me really bad. Let me pull up my chart.

OTW: Yeah, I’m a Gemini moon, so…

Aidan: Gemini moon, huh? What is moon? Is moon your emotion?

OTW: Believe moon is your emotion, which I hear it isn’t too great to be a Gemini.

Aidan: My sun is how I’m perceived which is a Gemini. I’m like, that sucks [still looking for his moon sign]. Sorry, just give me one second. It’s gonna bother me so bad. Ooh! There we go! I found her! I got her. Oh, hold on. I spoke too soon. Oh actually, I might have just gotten it. Okay. That’s pretty lit.

OTW: Whoomp, there it is.

Aidan: Okay, so, my Moon is in Leo. My Mercury is in Pisces. My Venus is Capricorn. My Mars is in Aries. Jupiter and Saturn are in Taurus. Uranus and Neptune are in Aquarius. Pluto and Lilith...I don’t even know, these just sound made up now...are Sagittarius. Sun is Gemini. So yeah, we didn’t learn too much.

OTW: We got your full birth chart though. That’s what really matters.

Aidan: I can’t wait to be picked apart by everyone who now has my natal chart.

OTW: So, both “Yours” and “I Don’t Love You” tackle love in very different ways. So is love a major part of your songwriting process right now? Or does it just happen to be present in the first few singles?

Aidan: No, love is just a major part of my life. I love love. Not even so much, like, romantic love. Whether it’s platonic love or self-love or kind of just like emanating love outward, you know? I’m a big believer in love. I think it’s romantic and it’s pretty. So, there’s a lot of things you can write that pertain to love and they can be totally different. But, you know. It’s all like one wheelhouse. Having said that, my love life is a joke [laughs]. So, I write about that a lot. Just because it’s something that matters to me. So it’s something I write about. I also write a lot about stuff that doesn’t necessarily pertain to love. A lot of it is going to be on the new EP. But no, I think that love is a big part of everything.

OTW: Is there anything you can tell us about the forthcoming EP?

Aidan: The single “Melancholia,” which is a poem I wrote when I was younger. I just thought it was really pretty and I wrote it. I kind of transplanted it into musical form. That is going to be on the EP as well as what’s already out and a few new records which I think are really cool. There’s a lot of different sounds, you know. I try to pull inspiration from a lot of different kinds of music that I liked. I’m not a big fan of when every track on a record is the exact same or sounds similar. I kind of like having a wide array. So that was something I wanted to focus on. OTW: So speaking on your vast influences that range the gamut of Robyn, Fleetwood Mac, and Billie Holiday, was that something you grew up with in your household or something that you sought out later on?

Aidan: Yeah, I remember my mom used to always sing “Blue Moon” around the house and “Good Morning Heartache” by Billie Holiday. And I used to love jazz growing up. I thought it was really pretty, so I would always sing “All of Me” by Frank Sinatra. I performed at a cafe once when I was really young. I loved the lyricism to it. I loved how poetic it was. Just cause back then you had to stand out more to be popular. There weren’t all the gimmicks that we have now. A big part of my creative process is making sure there’s a lot of focus on the lyrics. When I say that my inspirations were, like, Fleetwood Mac, people would say, “Okay, well you’re not singing folk music on a guitar.” But it’s very much like...you can draw inspiration apart from just the sound, you know? There’s the thematic content.

OTW: Has your social media popularity affected how you document your day to day life?

Aidan: You know, when I first started doing social media, I was the textbook definition of that little child running around a mall with his Snapchat out. Just cause that’s what I saw online. That’s everything that was out there. Everyone has that phase when you’re young, when you're just the absolute worst to yourself. I might still be in that phase. I’m not really sure [laughs]. I really just stray away from all that now. It’s so not me. And I’ve already done it, so I know that it isn't me. It’s really only affected me in the sense that I will post a song I’m listening to and be like “Oh, actually, maybe someone will listen to this.” If I had 200 followers, I would probably never post a screenshot of music I was listening to. I know that’s a weird example but that’s something that I think about a lot.

I think I use Instagram like a normal college student, which is not good. I should probably be more professional on my Instagram. It definitely gives me a level of responsibility, you know? Cause you have a platform. You have a voice. And you have certain responsibilities. Apart from that, I think that if anything, it just gives me more people to talk to.

OTW: On the subject of using your platform, you recently did a PSA tackling the “arming teachers” argument.  

Aidan: Oh! Yes, I did! Oh, I haven’t even talked about that yet. It was a really really cool PSA. My manager sent me the script, and I felt really passionate about it. I’m from Idaho where guns are very easily accessible. And I hate guns. I think guns are so scary. I’m very squeamish around guns. It was so comical, the whole “arming the teachers” thing. It was like, we’re doing everything except actually tackling the problem. I just thought it was so ridiculous. I saw the short as just a way to bring more attention to it in a way that wasn't too dark but still was very serious.

OTW: As an artist with a platform, is being politically and socially outspoken personally important to you?

Aidan: Personally, yeah. I just think I owe it to the greater good. Maybe that’s my Aquarian nature. I just think it's kind of a waste if you have people listening. I feel like you should be saying something that’s worthy to be listened to. I think it's like in Spiderman, “With great power comes great responsibility.” You have such a chance to shed light on things that the average person doesn’t necessarily have the platform to speak on. So I think that it’s a bit of a waste of an opportunity if you don’t. 

OTW: You mentioned posting songs that you listen to. I heard that the recent Billie Eilish song made you cry.

Aidan: Whew! Yeah. I Snapchatted her last night. I was like videoing on Snapchat and it keeps going and it was like literally recording for like 10 minutes. And it was me. It was like a 45-minute long video of me just sobbing to “when the party’s over.” I sent it to her and I got a notification this morning that she screen recorded the entire thing. Yeah, so I don’t even know if that was the answer to your question.

OTW: No, that was great. So how did you two first become acquainted? 

Aidan: It’s funny because I think that she DM’d me something like, “Let’s be friends!” or something and I was like, “Oh my god you’re kidding. Of course!” And this was when “bellyache” was pretty much all she had out. I remember I sent her a photo of someone covered in beans. I don’t know why. It was super weird. And then I went to one of her concerts and then we just started hanging out. I can’t remember all the specifics. But I know that it was a very odd beginning

OTW: Just something involving beans.

Aidan: I know! I think she sent me the beans photo. So I sent it back, I think is what happened, if I recall correctly.

OTW: You’ve done acting, you’re killing the social media game, and are now venturing into music. Are there any other artistic ventures you hope to pursue in the future?

Aidan: You know, I love writing. I write screenplays and songs, so writing is very present in my acting and my music. I write essays a lot. Not essays that are argumentative school essays or something. Sometimes I feel like I’m not poetic enough to say what I’m really trying to say in a stanza of six lines. I just feel like I'm not good enough. So essays give me a big platform to spew and by the end, I think you’d somewhat know what I’m trying to say. I’d love to do an essay book or something. I already have a ton. I also wrote an entire poetry book and I was hesitant about releasing it, but maybe one day I’ll put that out. Who knows? And I love to direct as well. I’m a terrible dancer but at my gym, there are dance classes and me and my friends do that every Monday. So maybe in the near future, I will also be a talented dancer.

OTW: Who are your Ones To Watch? 

Aidan: Ooh, okay. I just found a girl on Spotify today, GIRLI. She’s so So badass. I like her song “Young” and “Day Month Second.” I also love bülow right now. She has a really good song called “You and Jennifer.” Obviously, I’m always watching Lorde. Always. Always. I think that’s it. Those are the ones I’m watching right now. Oh and also La Femme. It’s like a little French electro band.

OTW: Before you leave, describe yourself with one Vine.

Aidan: Oh, mother of God. Let me think. I have to make this good. I'm going back and forth between two. Because I act tough but I’m really a baby, I think it would be the one where the girl goes “It’s the fourth of July. Imma pop these firecrackers don’t pop em on me. Where the police at?” and the mom goes “There’s a police right there” and she gasps. That’s my favorite one. 

Or the one where he looks at a crayon or something and the sister goes “Is that a weed?” and then she calls 911. That’s funny. Ooh, or the one of the guy dancing to uh...you remember in American Horror Story where he’s like “You’re all I want! You’re all I need!” and he’s like screaming? 

There’s a video where a boy is dancing and he dubs that over to him dancing so it’s him dancing to screams and it’s pretty good. That’s probably me too. That’s my internal struggle. Just link all of those.

[neocatharsis]

171224 BIGBANG LAST DANCE FINAL in Japan - Kyocera Dome Osaka

To read more about her fanaccount click: Here

Daesung: I'm feeling excited when I wonder when we'll be able to hold a tour like this again. So... really, I'm full of gratitude. Our activities until this year are our first chapter. I'm so happy that the end of this chapter turns into such a beautiful memory with all of you.It makes me look forward even more to the beginning of our next chapter. I really want to convey my gratitude to you, thank all of you so much until now! This year was very busy, with solo tours for several of us. For me personally it was a very meaningful year.

Thanks to all of you I was able to be active in Japan the whole year. It wasn't planned at first that I'd be having this many activities, but thanks to your support my opportunities increased and I was able to be active without incidents from March all the way until today. Thank you truly for supporting me so so much. My album that was sold on 12/20 wasn't planned to be released as mini album either. It was supposed to be a digital EP, but thanks to your support... if I think of it, even that I am standing here right now seems like a mystery.

To be loved by so many fans for over ten years, really... I wonder how many people on this planet receive this much love. I'm living a life full of happiness. It can't be helped that we'll enter a blank period next year, but to make sure that you won't feel lonely even in this blank period, I'm preparing many things for you, so... please look forward to the plans for the blank period.Today is the final concert here but... in January, I'm sorry I know it's far... I'm holding my solo final in Hawaii on Jan 6-7. So if you could, without over-taxing yourself, I'd be happy to spend the final with you. Please keep supporting me. Thank you so much until now!

Taeyang: It was a busy year for me as well with my solo world tour and solo album.  To be honest, preparing for BIGBANG's tour right after my solo tour had ended was very tough, but I was looking forward to meeting you, our fans so much that I could work hard to prepare our tour. I want to let you know again that meeting all of you on stage is the biggest happiness for me. Thank you. As you already know, after this tour ends our chances to meet will become less, and that makes me very sad.  I always thought that my heart was ready, but meeting all of you on stage now makes me feel like this time would go on forever. TOP-san who couldn't be with us for this tour misses you all a lot as well. Please wait for us until the 5 of us will come back to you.

YB: Can you wait for us? VIP: We'll wait!!! YB: Will you wait? VIP: We'll wait!! YB: (wide smile) The time that I spent with you and the songs that we sang together will remain in my heart always, until forever. Thank you so, so much.

The reason why we BIGBANG could become artists who hold dome tours and are known worldwide - ir's true that us members one by one have worked hard, but without your love and support, BIGBANG would not be who we are now. Thank you so, so much. I love you!

G-Dragon: I felt lonely. I don't know why. The members were busy and we couldn't meet, and I couldn't see you, my fans. I wanted to see you but I can't just do so on my own will, so I held back and... (seems shy of his MC script but continues) it was tough. I missed you. ...not because of that (of feeling lonely) but I always do. That's why I really, really am happy about this tour together with the members and all of you fans. It's so much fun. I missed this.

This time it's only 4 of us. Rather than sad, it feels insufficient. If only it could have been all 5 of us. But when winter ends, spring comes and just like that, I'm sure warm days are about to come. 

Until that time, please spend your days well/happily and don't be sad. Because we will meet very soon. We, the five members of BIGBANG always want you to be happy. That is the source if our strength. So surely, if we spend our time looking forward to the day of our reunion, that day will come very soon. Just like you have loved us until now, our love for you does not change. Let's dance our last dance together with a smile. Really, thank you so much.

Seungri: BIGBANG debuted in Japan 9 years ago. Our Japan debut was a sudden decision, and it was quite tough in Japan's entertainment system that is completely different from the Korean one. A lot of things happened and we hit many walls (laugh) Really, it was tough! But the more I was active in Japan, the more I got to love this country and the more my love for you, our Japanese fans, grew. My live for singing and dancing increased as well. We BIGBANG started in a small hall with 500 people. Now we are holding concerts in domes.

Since 2012, in the span of five years we have held 83 dome concerts. I still can't believe it. As a foreign artist, even for Japanese artists this is something difficult to achieve, and that we did is all and completely thanks to VIP JAPAN, I truly believe so in my heart.I want to convey my gratitude to you once more. Thank you so much! (all four members bow and thank the audience) SR: When I woke up today, I wondered when BIGBANG will again be able to hold a concert in Japanese domes after today ends. I feel weird somehow.

Before the concert started today, backstage many staff members had teary eyes and some were crying. Everyone, of course the members have worked hard for our success too, but the reason why BIGBANG could do so many things in Japan is our hard-working staff backstage. Without our hard-working staff behind us, BIGBANG would not be who we are today. Please give the many staff members who support BIGBANG a big applause!

So please, take this words that come from my heart. Really... I loved Japan. I hope to be able to do many things in my beloved Japan in the future as well. VIP JAPAN, thank you truly for supporting a plain guy like me so much! I'm grateful that you love BIGBANG so much!

SR: Please keep supporting BIGBANG! Really though, I don't have that many love experiences........ DS: (laugh) I bet you were just thinking "I'm in trouble" when you said "love experience" SR: I'm a guy who doesn't easily find a woman he loves, but... VIP JAPAN, I love you!

We spent a really happy time being supported by so many fans in Japan. Today we BIGBANG are only four, but when we come back to you it will be as five! That's a promise! (Watch Video: Here)

Credit: mshinju