#i used to collect the magazines for gods sake this was such a huge part of my life

[youreacowgirllikeme]

Revelation

note: Chris Cuomo really is the only person who has the power to make me drop everything and write smut in the middle of the day just bc of one sentence he said on air (I’m obv talking about this) and I hate him a little bit for it (jk I don’t)

words: 1.4 k

warning: swearing (as usual), smut, daddy kink (obv)

Enjoy and sorry for typos and grammar, this came right out of my stupid brain

“I just don’t know what to do! “you whined, throwing up your hands in exasperation.

The decision about whether or not you should take this once-in-a-lifetime job offer had you racking your brain for the last two weeks. You loved the place you were working at right now, it was familiar and safe, the first job you took right out of college. But you were in a dead end now, and this new opportunity meant that you would be able to climb a gigantic step up the career letter, the better salary was also a huge plus.

But with that came a lot of added responsibility, the possibility of long hours and a whole new field of work you had little experience in. The new firm was expecting your decision the next day, and you were freaking out.

You had never been the type of person to just take a leap of faith, you were a careful planner and loved talking things through over and over again before making a decision.

So you talked to the person you trusted most, you boyfriend Chris. He was a couple of years older than you, meaning that he had considerably more career and overall life experience. When you addressed the topic, he went out of his way to help you. You made lists, had hour-long discussions about the pros, cons and how it would influence the life you had together. Chris was definitely in favor of you taking the new job.

“A change of career paths is a normal thing to do, this position would grant you so much more creative space and room to grow professionally. Your current firm is great, but there is nothing left for you to aim for there. You’re only 30, you’re too young to just settle for a job without persepective.” He said, voice already slightly annoyed. You have been talking about this for two weeks now, always going back and forth, and he was starting to get fed up with the topic.

“You’re right, but I’m just so afraid. It’s so much responsibility, and I’ve never worked for a magazine like that before. What if they find out I’m completely useless at writing about fashion, and then I’ll be fired?”

“Babe, they offered you the position. That means they’ve seen your work, and they like it. They want you. Trust me, those changes are necessary. It was such a big risk for me to abandon law and go into journalism instead but look where it got me. If I hadn’t taken that step, maybe I would sit in some law firm now, but I would definitely not be happy. And even as a journalist, I had to take several turns and make changes to get where I am now. It’s part of the journey.”

“I know.” You whined. You had heard all those arguments before, but you just couldn’t make up your mind. Turning to Chris, you pouted a bit and spoke. “I hate making decisions, why can’t you just decide for me.” Hearing that, Chris just shook his head, looking really frustrated now.

“For God’s sake, Y/N, don’t force making that decision on me. I can’t do that for you. I’m not your daddy.”

It was like your brain suddenly decided to completely shut down, the words Chris just said echoing in your head over and over again. You felt a spike of arousal between your legs, clenching them together as you tried to stifle a groan.

“Say that again.” You whispered in a breathy voice.

Chris was visibly confused.

“What, I said I’m not your daddy, why-“

The needy whimper that escaped your mouth at hearing that word again interrupted him, and he looked at you with the most perplexed expression before it dawned on him.

“Fuck, baby.” He murmured as he realized what you were up to. You could see his eyes darken as he was making his way over to you, grabbing you to pull you close. He leaned down to cup your jaw with his huge hand and tilted your head up so you were looking directly at him.

“What do you want to call me, baby?” he asked, voice a low growl now.

“Daddy.” You whimpered, leaning into the touch of his hand.

“Say it again.” He groaned, and you could feel the evidence of arousal starting to push against your stomach. You moaned at how stained his voice sounded, burying your head into his broad chest. “Daddy, please.”

“Do you want daddy to take care of you, baby?” He asked, and roughly squeezed your ass over the fabric of your yoga pants.

“Yes, please touch me, I need you.” You were a total mess just from the few words Chris had said, your panties already drenched as you grinded against the bulge in his sweats.

His huge hands gripped the hem of your pants and pulled them down together with your panties in one swift motion. Seconds later, his fingers were buried in you, pumping in and out of your pussy while you were clinging to him, your knees almost giving out under you.

“Good girl, you’re so wet for daddy.” Chris muttered, his thumb brushing over your clit before harshly pressing down. You could swear that you saw stars for a second as a powerful orgasm ripped through you, making you coat Chris fingers with your arousal.

You collapsed against him, and he picked you up, carrying you over to the couch. He carefully sat you down before quicky pulling down his own pants. His cock sprung free, he was already hard, clearly enjoying this as much as you did.

Chris sat down on the couch and beckoned you over with his finger.

“Come here, baby, you know what to do.” he said, and the deep, wanton tone of his voice would’ve make you do literally anything.

You crawled over to him, climbing on his lap before slowly lowering yourself onto his cock. You cried out at the feeling of being filled like this as you slowly took every inch of him until he was fully settled inside of you.

“Shit, Y/N, you feel so perfect around my cock.” Chris pressed out through clenched teeth, his hands gripping your tights so hard he was definetly leaving marks.

"Move for me, baby.” He groaned, delivering a sharp smack to your ass.

You started bouncing up and down on his cock, whimpering every time you sunk back down and felt him stretching you all over again. The friction was delicious, but you needed more.

"Daddy.” You whimpered. “Fuck me, please. I need more.” For a second, it surprised you how needy your voice was sounding, but you were beyond caring.

With a growl, Chris grabbed your tights and started pushing you up and down on his cock, snapping up his hips to deepen his thrusts. He was handling you like you weighted next to nothing and seeing him use his strength that way turned you on beyond measure. You threw your head back, totally lost in the pleasure he was giving you.

“You’re so perfect, baby.” He moaned, “such a good girl for me.”

Hearing those words was like a catalyst, and when Chris roughly pressed you down onto his cock, your climax hit you out of nowhere, making you tremble and shudder as you came. Seeing you falling apart like that pushed him over the edge as well, his iron like grip holding you down as he spent himself deep inside of you with a shout.

For a moment, no one was speaking as you slowly collected yourselves again.

“Wow, that was crazy.” You exclaimed after catching your breath.

“Yeah, I have no idea where that came from.” Chris admitted, pushing his sweat-slick hair out of his forehead before kissing you deeply. “But I really liked it.”

“Me too.” You replied. “Maybe it even convinced me to take that job offer. But I think we have to do it again before I can make a definite decision.”

You winked at him and he playfully smacked your ass in return.

“Everything for you, baby.”

[thekillerssluts]

DIY Magazine, October 2020.

Interview TALKING ‘BOUT MY GENERATION: WILL BUTLER

Talking to Will Butler is a bit like trying to have a conversation with a human magpie. Hugely enthusiastic and with a constant giggle on the go (“I have a nervous laugh, so I laugh at more things than I should…”), the 37-year-old has a tendency to veer off down strange tangents, taking your original point but then getting distracted or excited by some other new, shiny train of thought in a different direction.

You can tell he’s smart - not just booksmart, but the kind of smart where you can practically see the cogs turning at 100mph. “I love knowledge for its own sake,” he professes at one point. “I believe in it to a fault. I think it’s worth knowing all this shit, for no other reason than just knowing that it’s true.” And it’s this attitude that’s filled the three years since ‘Everything Now’ - he and his Arcade Fire bandmates’ society-skewering fifth LP.

In that time, amid world tours and festival headlines, Will has had two more children - twins - and went to Harvard to study a masters in public policy. He also found time to record ‘Generations’ - a second solo effort that takes the brilliantly all-over-the-place nature of 2015’s ‘Policy’ and hones it into something that’s more pointed, though still clearly fuelled by the same curious mind. Or as he puts it: “The first [album] it’s like, ‘I’m at the market! There’s some eggplants! Oh there’s a nice sausage guy! And OK cool I’ll get some of those and these!’ But then ‘Generations’ was much more like, ‘I’ve been storing these bones in my freezer for two years and now we’re gonna boil this down to make the pure essence of the beast’.”

Like most debuts from artists splintering off from their main projects, ‘Policy’ had been born from accumulating a collection of material that didn’t fit with his band. Unlike most, Will had just been nominated for an Oscar (for his soundtrack to Joaquin Phoenix film Her) before its release, “so that was a confidence boost,” he notes amiably. Conversely, the essence of ‘Generations’’ particular beast seems a far more targeted one - one intrinsically linked with the intense political conversations the musician had found himself wrangling with during his recent studies.

“I always want whatever I’m making to emerge out of what I’m living and for it to help me understand how I’m living better, so going to policy school was certainly part of that artistic project as well as the ‘what do we fucking do?’ project,” he explains. “I jokingly say that I was radicalised at Harvard, which is basically true. I was in a mid-career programme, so there were 25-year-old geniuses but also people in their middle age who’d worked in the UN in Pakistan or the government in Mexico. They had this whole perspective of how fucked everything is across the whole globe so it was��� educational.

As such, his second brims with a sense of palpable unease for a society that’s not only crumbling before our eyes right now, but has been doing so intermittently for decades and centuries. The twinkling, finger-clicking patter of ‘Close My Eyes’ belies the all-too-timely despair beneath it (“The photograph is new / But I seen that same headline, and I got to dance to keep from crying”), Randy Newman-esque closer ‘Fine’ digs right back to “George Washington and all his slaves,” while ‘Not Gonna Die’, he explains, was written in direct response to the November 2015 Bataclan shootings.“All these things hit different people in different ways, but that was so close to home,” he says. “It was Christmas after that and I was shopping in Manhattan; I walked into Sephora and it was super crowded and I thought, there’s a lot of people in here, where would I go [if something like that happened]? And I got so mad. It fucking worked. You made me scared. I’m not gonna die in Sephora on 5th Avenue but you made me think about it, you fucking pieces of shit.“Mike Pence was writing about it before he was running for Vice President, like, ‘We need to make sure we don’t have any immigrants come in because the immigrants can do this to us here’. And it’s like, I’m not gonna be killed by a woman fleeing violence in Guatemala!! The terrorists and the people saying ‘Be afraid!’: what you’re doing is working, and I AM afraid, and fuck you.”

Perhaps most interestingly, however, ‘Generations’ doesn’t just point the finger outwards, it also poses questions of the singer’s own inherent part in it all. “A big chunk of this record is asking: What’s my place in American history? What’s my place in America’s present?” he explained in a previous statement about the album. “Both in general, but also extremely particularly: me as Will Butler, rich person, white person, Mormon, Yankee, parent, musician. What do I do? What can I do?”

“It’s basically like, ‘My God, how did we get here?’ - that Talking Heads line,” he continues now. “The record is at times literally a conversation with people arguing back and forth, and there’s a lot of questions raised and the answers aren’t answers - you just end the conversation in a different spot. There’s something to that process of discussing and coming to some sort of revelation only to find out what’s lacking there, and then you move onto the next conversation and find out what’s lacking there. I was pleased that the material felt cyclical and of a piece, and you feel like you’re in a different spot than you were at the beginning.”

Because yes, his latest might not provide all the answers - “This is a musical work and I don’t know what the end notes are,” he admits - but ‘Generations’ does emphasise the importance of asking the questions and having the conversations, both with the world and with yourself. And if you can have them over an album of musically explorative, rich and often perversely funny new offerings? All the better.

Next, he’ll return to the fold to begin work on Arcade Fire’s sixth opus. Writing for that had originally started in New Orleans before the pandemic hit, but the band “don’t have the file management down to really do it at a distance,” he chuckles. “Win and Régine are always demoing and working, and I’ve done a little. We always work on a record for about a year and a half and we’re not off that pace yet, we’re still weirdly on track…”

You can bet by the time that record lands, he’ll have chalked up a handful of other accomplishments to his name, too; lord only knows the political battleground of the coming weeks will give him enough food for thought. And in the inquisitive mind of Will Butler, thought and curiosity are clearly the most nourishing tools of all. “You can write a love song that’s super true, but can you write a history song that also is? And if it comes out right and there’s some value in it, then what does that mean?” he muses. “It’s about just trying different angles to express something true.”

‘Generations’ is out now via Merge.

Butler’s Bits

‘Generations’ is undoubtedly an album rooted in politics and society - this much we know. But it’s also a record that digs into the musician’s relationship with other parts of the human experience…

HUMOUR “It’s a coping mechanism and it’s also a worldview. There’s not exactly a cabaret scene in New York but the comedy here is quite musical and there’s a lot of comedians that interact with people in interesting ways. They’re a bit younger than me - I’m the oldest millennial - but there’s something in that spirit that feels relevant.”

RELIGION “I grew up Mormon and I’m still ethnically Mormon. It’s like The Smiths song, ‘Meet Me At The Cemetery Gates’ - ‘Keats and Yeats are on your side, and Wilde is on mine’, you lose, haha. I’m sure Yeats is such a fucking asshole but that’s my heritage. The classic lineage of the Western canon is how I grew up.”

ADULTHOOD “I have three kids now, and it doesn’t make me worry about the future so much as it’s made me learn so much about humanity watching them - watching how it all goes into the ‘this is what humans are’ mill. On ‘Policy’, the protagonists are a motley crew of rag-tag whatevers, whereas this is much more a coming of age novel - not like a teenager becoming an adult, but an adult becoming a worse adult…”

As featured in the October 2020 issue of DIY, out now.

[nicklloydnow]

“In the case of Afghanistan, America’s refusal to countenance the return of Zahir Shah may well have proved to be their greatest failure of imagination yet.

(…)

We were ushered into the garden room, there, on cane furniture, sat two old men. One, slightly-sunken of face but alert and with a smile waltzing over his lips, the other of a more military bearing. Dust eddied in the shafts of light as we passed, then settled as we did. We were visiting the 86 year old Zahir Shah, King of Afghanistan for 40 years between 1933 and 1973. With him was Lieutenant-General Sardar Abdul Wali Khan, who acted as an interpreter, it was entirely unnecessary as the King would answer in accurate though halting English.

We were there to discover if the old man was interested, or even able, to take up the reins again. His time as monarch (ended in a palace coup by his cousin, Mohamed Daud) had been one of unprecedented peace and prosperity for the mountain kingdom. In the late 1960s he introduced a new democratic constitution. Amongst other things, it guaranteed women’s rights and elections. He was also someone who was able to garner loyalty not just from his native Pashtun people, but from the Hazara, Tajik and Uzbeck minorities and the confidence of many of the regional powers.

The exiled king spoke of his visceral love for the country. That and his deep sadness. How, from his Roman exile he had seen his land first became a dictatorship after a palace coup, then a Soviet satellite state, ending in a Soviet inspired coup, the Soviet invasion of 1979 and the civil war that saw the death of 400,000 of its citizens between 1979 and the fall of the Taliban. Estimates suggest upwards of 10 per cent of the entire population were killed during that period, a salutary realisation that even 20 years ago Afghanistan had been a killing field for the previous 20 years.

(…)

These events had not dimmed the king’s desire to do what he could for the nation. He had told us he would do anything to secure peace. As he went on to do. Within a week of our meeting, he had made an informal agreement with the anti-Taliban Mujahedeen of the Northern Alliance.

(…)

At this point things were looking promising for a return of the king. But Pakistani Intelligence, the ISI, was uncomfortable with the prospect of a moderate in power in Afghanistan, and was even less happy by the combination of a Pashtun king, with the support of the Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara dominated Northern Alliance having political power.

Zahir at no time demanded the throne — indeed the Tajik, former President and leader of the Jamiat-e Islami rejected the idea out of hand — his offer was to convene a Loya Jorga, a gathering of all the tribal notables to create a new constitution. In November of that year the Bonn conference, which included all Afghan factions barring the Taliban, supported him as the interim leader.

And yet, by the time Zahir returned to Kabul with Hamed Karzi, the US had gone completely cold on the idea. Now their chosen man was Karzai, soon after American-led forces had driven the Taliban out of Kabul in 2002. It is clear that the US’s retreat from supporting the monarchical option was in part driven by their ties with the Pakistani ISI, for years they had starved the moderate Afghan nationalist Haq of support whilst feeding the Islamist factions of the Northern alliance.

(…)

The US, though it was aware of the possibilities of an Afghan solution to an Afghan problem, and a solution that could have utilised the residual loyalty of the Afghan peoples, decided against. The rest is dour, bloody history.”

“All empires die. The end is usually unpleasant. The American empire, humiliated in Afghanistan, as it was in Syria, Iraq, and Libya, as it was at the Bay of Pigs and in Vietnam, is blind to its own declining strength, ineptitude, and savagery. Its entire economy, a “military Keynesianism,” revolves around the war industry. Military spending and war are the engine behind the nation’s economic survival and identity. It does not matter that with each new debacle the United States turns larger and larger parts of the globe against it and all it claims to represent. It has no mechanism to stop itself, despite its numerous defeats, fiascos, blunders and diminishing power, from striking out irrationally like a wounded animal. The mandarins who oversee our collective suicide, despite repeated failure, doggedly insist we can reshape the world in our own image. This myopia creates the very conditions that accelerate the empire’s demise.

The Soviet Union collapsed, like all empires, because of its ossified, out-of-touch rulers, its imperial overreach, and its inability to critique and reform itself. We are not immune from these fatal diseases. We silence our most prescient critics of empire, such as Noam Chomsky, Angela Davis, Andrew Bacevich, Alfred McCoy, and Ralph Nader, and persecute those who expose the truths about empire, including Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Daniel Hale, and John Kiriakou. At the same time a bankrupt media, whether on MSNBC, CNN or FOX, lionizes and amplifies the voices of the inept and corrupt political, military and intelligence class including John Bolton, Leon Panetta, Karl Rove, H.R. McMaster and David Petraeus, which blindly drives the nation into the morass.

Chalmers Johnson in his trilogy on the fall of the American empire – “Blowback,” “The Sorrows of Empire” and “Nemesis” – reminds readers that the Greek goddess Nemesis is “the spirit of retribution, a corrective to the greed and stupidity that sometimes governs relations among people.” She stands for “righteous anger,” a deity who “punishes human transgression of the natural, right order of things and the arrogance that causes it.” He warns that if we continue to cling to our empire, as the Roman Republic did, “we will certainly lose our democracy and grimly await the eventual blowback that imperialism generates.”

“I believe that to maintain our empire abroad requires resources and commitments that will inevitably undercut our domestic democracy and, in the end, produce a military dictatorship or its civilian equivalent,” Johnson writes. “The founders of our nation understood this well and tried to create a form of government – a republic – that would prevent this from occurring. But the combination of huge standing armies, almost continuous wars, military Keynesianism, and ruinous military expenses have destroyed our republican structure in favor of an imperial presidency. We are on the cusp of losing our democracy for the sake of keeping our empire. Once a nation is started down that path, the dynamics that apply to all empires come into play – isolation, overstretch, the uniting of forces opposed to imperialism, and bankruptcy. Nemesis stalks our life as a free nation.”

If the empire was capable of introspection and forgiveness, it could free itself from its death spiral. If the empire disbanded, much as the British empire did, and retreated to focus on the ills that beset the United States it could free itself from its death spiral. But those who manipulate the levers of empire are unaccountable. They are hidden from public view and beyond public scrutiny. They are determined to keep playing the great game, rolling the dice with lives and national treasure. They will, I expect, preside gleefully over the deaths of even more Afghans, assuring themselves it is worth it, without realizing that the gallows they erect are for themselves.”

“We waged war in Afghanistan - twenty years of war, thousands of American lives lost, tens of thousands of Afghan lives lost, over 2 trillion dollars spent - but we did not wage peace. We went, we fought, we supported a corrupt Afghan government almost as abusive to the people there as the Taliban had been, we droned, we bombed, we tried to build an army of some of the historically best fighters in the world in the image of the American armed forces (so arrogant are we), we tried to build an Afghanistan in the image of our own country (so delusional are we) - and yeah, we did some good things too. In the end, we aren’t just the last in a long line of empires defeated in Afghanistan. Even worse, we’re the last in a long line of empires that raped and plundered it before we left.

God help us, if we don’t learn from this.”

[somebodysmother-blog]

Best Simple Wooden Sofa Sets – My Favorite Couches, Chairs, and Tables!

Decorating my living room is my favorite and least favorite thing to do. I love it because it is easy to come up with tons of ideas but it is hard to put them all together. If you want to be good at living room designing, you have to go through a lot of layouts and then try to figure out why they wouldn’t work. This gives you the best shot at finding something that you love and will work in your home.

One creative layout I have been working with is simple wooden sofa sets and classic style chairs and recliners. The combination works great if you know what you’re looking for and what to put around your new furniture. Today I am going to be going through some of my favorite tips and how I recently re-designed my entire living room using simple wooden furniture to get the look I have wanted for a long time.

Wooden Sofa Sets

There are two types of simple wooden sofa sets that you normally see in living rooms or family rooms. The first kind is the traditional set; this set uses lighter wood and is bulkier in size. We don’t see any high rising arms, extravagant lines or much outside the sense of pure simplicity. Another thing I have noticed is that you don’t see these types of sofa sets in homes that often. You might see one here and there, but people tend to stay away from them. This could be because they are harder to design around and when you do decide to choose one it can be a truly defining layout that you are now stuck with.

What I find people don’t see is how beautiful these types of sets can be in non-traditional ways. We usually think of a living room to be amazing if there are huge windows and sleek furniture with the latest TV and fireplace, but that doesn’t have to be the case. A lot of people love simpler layouts, especially in smaller homes and condos where you don’t want to super modern furniture.

Simple Traditional

Sofa Set #1

Looking at simple sofa set #1 you will see a lot of different things that pull the room together. It is even more amazing when you realize there isn’t a whole lot in the room. As we talked about above, the lighter colored wood is the key here because dark colors require more depth to their surroundings to look better than lighter and simpler tones.

The chairs, sofa, and tables all have simple wooden curves on the sides and a very straight structured composition to them. There is a teapot set on the table and small green plants on each table and to the side with a cute rug in front of the table. All these things add to the simplicity of the sofa set, and it is capped off with the cream-colored couches and seats, along with the white walls. Counting all the items outside of the sofa set, there are 4 things in total! The teapot collection, plants, and rug! But, when you look at the whole picture, it seems like a calming environment to be in. You don’t need a whole lot to make it all work, and this sofa set is a perfect example of using simple straight structure and minimizing the surrounding items to get the environment you want.

Sofa Set #2

In our second simple sofa set, you will see a completely different layout and theme. Here we see a much more traditional American style home layout. We have a few paintings on the wall with a very simple coffee table and round peg legs for the chairs. The arms are slightly curved and have wooden panels in between the arms and the lower portion of the chair, but that is advanced as it gets. What makes the traditional style look come alive is the pattern of the back and seat cushions. This truly touches on my main point that you can still have creative direction with simpler sofa sets. Imagine instead of those green striped cushions you had a light pin and instead of paintings on the walls that followed the green and white layout you had more abstract and contemporary paintings. That would change the game up!

What I love the most about this sofa set is the increased cushioning on the chairs. This is what traditional style sets were about, having comfortable seating that was simple but did the job right! We also see a larger plant creeping in from the left side of the photo, and this also adds to the classic style look. This would have been an absolute must look in the late 70s and early 80s, and it is something that you can still use today because you play around with the back padding and surrounding simplicity.

Simple Contemporary

Sofa Set #3

When I look for the best wooden design for modern living rooms, I want to see a few things. Number one, I want to see how the wood is carved and made out. I don’t want to have to deal with crazy shapes and structures if they only get in the way. Just because there are more curves or weird shapes to a sofa or chair doesn’t mean it is better! I can’t stress this enough!

For these reasons and more, I loved sofa set #3! The high rise arms don’t get in the way of anything since they are tucked into the chair. Long wooden cuts in the high rise panel give it that cool look otherwise the chairs would look bulky and ugly. The sofa itself is very simple and has a slight curve on the arms that is manageable. You don’t want unmanageable furniture, it becomes a nightmare! The side table has a completely flat surface with wooden legs that are designed to go outwards; this is a neat touch for the high rise arms. Last, the table is small and cute with two drawers to put your stuff in.

Sofa Set #4

Our last simple wooden sofa set has a lot in it, so we are going to have to unpack this part by part. It comes with 2 sofas, 2 chairs, and 4 tables. First off, this is a lot of furniture so if you don’t have the space it becomes an automatic no. Secondly, you need to actually have some purpose and design for this, and that is why I always imagine these types of wooden sets to be placed in larger homes with open layout concepts that don’t require you to have the same theme throughout the house.

What I love about this set is that it is simple but complex at the same time. The sofas look average in their appearance and nothing seems to be out of the norm which is the great simplicity behind it. But then the side has a pull out drawer that you put stuff in and that is just fabulous! You can store all your kid’s toys, your magazines and any other junk you might need to clean up before people come over. Moving onto the chairs, they are simple standard chairs with medium sized arms and thick cushion padding that looks incredibly comfortable.

Tables

When we look at the tables, we see a number of things that are both simple and complex. The giant table with the massive curve almost seems like it is unnecessary, why do you need a second main table to go with your sofa set? Especially considering its wooden and the general idea is to keep things simple. But again, it works with open layout houses that are bigger. What I don’t like is the drawers on the ends of the curved table, I feel that the table would be better if it curved out without the drawers, how many drawers do you really need?

The main coffee table in the middle is stunning! It is wide and long which I absolutely love and it doesn’t have anything sticking out (you guys can probably tell by now, that I am big on that).

All in all, it is a great simple wooden sofa set but I would remove the drawers on the curved table or get rid of it all together. I know that is there to add a little flare which is what the room is all about. I mean how could it not be about that? The elegant light, 3 piece panel painting, giant plant, and maroon rug all scream a modern setting.

Recliners

I’ve always found recliners to be the new replacement for normal chairs. If you really think about it, a recliner is just a much better version of a chair. For God sakes, it lets you lay down as if you are in a bed! How does it get any better than that? When pairing recliners with wooden sofa sets, I’ve found that contrast works best. Also, if you think about it, how comfortable could a wooden recliner be? When you look at the Recliner #1 picture, it doesn’t look like it would be the most comfortable chair to kick back in. Recliner #2, on the other hand, is much better but it is way too low to the ground for me, there aren’t any legs and that can ruin the experience.

That is why when I have wooden sofa sets or furniture I like to pair them with comfier color matched recliners. I’ve always felt that recliners should be plush and soft, that is how they were meant to be used. I found some great recliners that Laywayback reviewed, that go well when you are contrasting simple wooden sofa sets. I like to find a recliner that has that soft fabric feeling and then color match it with my sofa set. It is different but that is what this article is all about.

Simple Wooden Chairs

Finding traditional side piece chairs is a bit difficult because they almost always have a distinct look to them that is hard to pair with established sofa sets, especially if they are wooden. Lately, we have seen a bit of a change with this idea. If you look at the three single wooden chairs I have added, you can see that they are all sleek but are still very different. You can use chair #1 for a much more contemporary and modern living room and you could easily pair chair #2 with a simple layout. And chair #3 can work in both style rooms and that is why I included it. Even though these chairs aren’t the classic traditional chair, I would consider them to be better because they are more versatile.

That does it

After this long piece, I hope you guys have a better understanding of what some the best simple wooden sofa sets have in common and what makes each of them great individually. Wooden curves and crazy complex designs are fun to look at but they aren’t practical if you don’t have the space to make it work.

Honestly, this is the most I have written in God knows how long. I don’t think I’ve ever written this much since college but it is all for you guys (and my kids). Decorating is something you all know I am passionate about and it pushes my creativity. Thanks for reading guys, see you next time!

[lit--bitch]

On ‘The Moth Apocalypse’, by Joseph Turrent (2020)

(Disclosure: I don’t personally know Joseph Turrent. I do know Haverthorn/HVTN Press, which is run by Andrew Wells and Iris Colomb (I’m familiar with Andrew). They both seem to have an interest in interdisciplinary practice, and they do some really interesting things with form and language, kind of messing with the dimensions of how we receive language on the page, how we receive language as performance. I think those values are synonymous in the work HVTN publishes. It’s not about work that can be classified, rather the unclassified. It’s been a really beautiful thing to watch Haverthorn grow. I was published in the first issue of Haverthorn Magazine, that must’ve been about 5 years ago, maybe longer (I was a completely different writer back then, I was 17). Back then it was just a tiny collective of poems and fictional pieces. Now they’re a press, they’ve got multiple different platforms including Haverthorn Magazine, they also run Interruptions and Correspondences. Their identity is much more streamlined. Thematically I would say that the publications are varied, but I think they’re all united by a common interest in intertextuality, or multidisciplinary influences. I think it’s rare to find publishers which are so openly into the “uncategorised” in the UK. I think the UK is still publishing a lot of writing which yanks itself into a genre, like the industry is still bound by a lot of traditional canonical stuff... I think it is changing a bit, but it is refreshing and comforting to know that Haverthorn have been thinking and publishing this sort of stuff for a while.) 

This debut collection from Joseph Turrent is like a fever dream. The relentless doom of oncoming death in a cyclonic-tidal-wave-storm where God is a 58-year-old man and Elon Musk is singing baby shark. How do we continue to forge and define our self-identity when the end of everything is so near? When our inevitable mortality is met by storms we can’t weather? How do we drive that message home without flying off the handle? 

What I’m most flummoxed by is this text’s use of layering, and the multiplicity of that “layering”, textually, structurally... (something I’ll unpack in a while). It plays on ambiguity in words, it cracks open these weird, beautiful dualisms mirrored between reality and irreality, sort of echoing Charlotte Geater’s poems for my fbi agent except the relationship here is not a coexistence between I and the agent. Rather this is a relationship with the world, felt all over the whole world. It’s our binding relationship with the very public disintegration of our existence in a world which never fails to learn from its mistakes, from a species whose errors seem to forever *glitch*. It’s a huge headache, but it’s also crystal clear in its admonition to us, and yet it articulates the world’s end in a beautiful, complicated, mesmerising way (certain lines make me think of Crispin Best). And in its prescience, Joseph really underlines how much of this is already happening before it has happened, in analogies both profound and absurd. 

So again, I thought because of some of the interesting pop-culture references and crossovers with poems for my fbi agent I decided to talk to my mother about the complexities that this collection poses, and jostle with its meaning. I think we both felt really weird reading this swirl of a text (it’s literally swirling down the page), I likened it to feeling ‘car sick’ at times, so I’m gonna start with the way the poetry is structured because I think it’s the first layer to this collection, which you need to pick at before you can bridge all this amazing, convoluted imagery. 

For the sake of keeping the poetry’s structure intact, I’m going to screenshot sections from the review copy HVTN generously sent me. This way I’m not spending ten years typing it out carefully (which I usually do cos I’m normally quoting from ze printed matter), and I want people to see how Joseph works with form and shape. It’s not obvious from the first poem in the collection, ‘Moths’, what the structure is because it’s a short opening piece, but begins to imply some sort of outline, or perhaps a disintegration, where line breaks leave words hanging. I begun thinking about what moths are in this scene, their presence, when do they come awake? Part of the collection’s thematics takes it focus from “darkness”, literal and figurative, the darkness of day, the “grimdarkness” (as Joseph puts it in ‘one rain drop falls out the sky’) of a summer in February and these gruesome, seasonal abnormalities which are set to interrogate us and make us feel uncomfortable. (Let’s face it, it’s uncomfortable when there’s daffodils in January). Beginning with ‘Ending Scene’:

All the way through, Joseph’s poems zigzag and swirl down the page like this ^. I enjoy Joseph’s, I’m assuming intentional irony here, in beginning the collection at the end. He’s intimating the symmetry of our present-day predicament: living in the beginning of our world’s end. That first line propels us to our future: ‘it’s 2030, the wind is so strong it’s a geometrical pattern’. Now take a look at this extract again, look at it as a whole image. Joseph is playing out that image of a geometrical pattern through line breaks and alignment. It’s so deliberate, so exact. It feels engineered. And it’s this powerful wind, winding its way down and down the pages, which embodies a resemblance to a natural form, like the way you think of clouds travelling across a digitised map of the world on a weather channel. Half of this collection situates itself amongst ramifications of climate change, the erratic change in weather, the sky’s putrid colour, threatening and sick. We’re seeing a storm unwind in words. But when you take a look at the other references Joseph wields in his writing, you can begin to see that this visual structure intimates more subtle connotations. 

Remember how I said that the collection is exploring the errors of our species which forever seem to glitch on themselves? We keep repeating the same history which evidences our end? I think this is implied by the way the text swirls, and eats on itself. Joseph says at one point, ‘this glitch is hilarious’ (one rain drop falls out of the sky), opening us up to this denial, like “the apocalypse is happening, this is surreal” laughter, but it’s also kind of like, we’re losing our minds, we’re laughing because we’re bridging the insanity of everything dissolving before us, endlessly replaying itself, over and over. I’m kind of reminded by that scene in ‘The Midnight Gospel’ from Episode 6, ‘Vulture With Honour’, when Clancy and Captain Bryce (the guy that comes to fix Clancy’s simulator), tells him his list of rules when navigating these dangerous different coloured wobbles to get to Sparkle (a cow-like creature who makes green oil which is used to preserve and keep the lantern part of a simulator healthy I guess, hard to explain if you’ve not watched the series). Anyway so they come across this little weird man creature with a hoopla head holding onto a rocket or bomb-like thing, stuck inside purple wobble, which Captain Bryce explains: that’s the kind of wobble that locks you in time. And this little man stuck inside the purple wobble is glitching like:

And then Captain Bryce says: “it’s too late for this guy, his mind is pickled” because he’s been stuck in the same second forever. And I got to thinking about how, the more acutely aware we become as a species of how we’re repeating the same mistakes, facing the same consequences, extinguishing the same forest fires, over and over, the more riddled the mind becomes, and anguished I guess. So the poetry here isn’t just like a cyclonic pattern depicting a natural form; the strange, violent weather tearing up the planet’s astro turf and rainforests. It’s also a visual representation of history’s rhythm. This glitch, this error that remains eternally stuck, jolting on itself. It really gives weight to the series of images in this writing, which repeatedly hit you in the face, but it also compounds the repetition in the writing. In ‘this is the sadness’, (and pretty much all of the poems), Joseph keeps coming back to lines like ‘I can’t stop thinking about’ and ‘I’m writing a’ pegged by a series of repetitive motifs, butterflies, 58 year old men as God, airplanes, butterflies, horror show, airplanes, horrow movie’... That repetition is attached to this glitch-affected way of writing. It’s clever and unusual, and when I started reading the structure as a message in its own right, I was amazed by how things suddenly started to make sense in terms of the writing. I could see all this incredible dualism which Joseph plays with and writes about. 

So I went back and refreshed the first poem in this collection, ‘Moths’. 

I’m thinking of terms like ‘cloudz’, and what clouds are, how they move, what they mean in this day and age. The obvious dualism here is the physical clouds we see and study in the sky, their changeability as they move across throughout the day, carrying rain or snow, whatever. And then there’s this more enigmatic weird concept of ‘The Cloud’ in computing, which is a homonym in and of itself. You have Sky’s WiFi ‘The Cloud’, where anyone can make an account and sign into their WiFi and they have hotspots called ‘The Cloud’ all over the UK. You’ve got ‘cloud computing’ which is this method of data storage, normally created by a single provider. They manage the data and how it’s processed/stored/encrypted and users can upload or save information there. Anyone with an Apple product automatically gets an ‘iCloud’ account where their data is automatically backed by Apple’s cloud software. This means you never have to sync up your devices with wires or buy extra USB sticks/external hard drives to back up your data. You can just set a timer on your phone, link it to your iCloud account and it’ll automatically back up whenever you want. People think of this accumulation of data in one place, (without having to personally manage it) as being an “amorphous cloud”. I’m seeing this as a poem which introduces this element of denial about our surroundings. We’re pretending its normal and trying to squish out the reminder of these seasonal abnormalities. Even if it’s stripped across the sky, ‘black with insane swirls you could drown in’ (alluding to the writing on the page itself), our denial tells us to talk us away from the indefinite scream that it’s not okay. ‘Our cloudz are dying because of u’—the way Joseph intersperses Internet vernacular/text-speech/shorthand here introduces the Internet’s presence, and our tensions between our physical reality and our artificial one. We transcribe events into our phones. We see something, we talk about it in on an online platform. The way we transfer reality from a physical realm to a virtual realm is an exchange which happens so regularly and with such rigour that it’s an indented feature to 21st century society. Every time Boris Johnson makes an announcement in real-time, journalists flock to Twitter to unpack it in an online arena which stays up for the rest of time. The fact that language is swamped by Internet culture and adopts terms once pertaining to more physical objects or tangible sensations sensations, renders language more faceted and multiplicitous than ever before. Such ambiguousness in what we mean and how we mean it, contributes to this acute confusion and fear, which compounds contemporary culture. 

Other homonyms: 

I’m thinking of dark as in ‘dark mode’ and ‘dark’ as in ‘disturbing’. ‘I regret not running through Wheat’ I think is a reference to that Theresa May interview where she said the naughtiest thing she ever did was run through fields of wheat with her friends, (as opposed to increased austerity and fucking up Brexit + various other shit). 

‘accidentally deleting the human race’ makes a mockery of the way the world is ending, which is by no means, “an accident”. I also wonder about the dualism in ‘A tornado touched my heart & I’m crying’, is it that we’re seeing the destruction a tornado unleashes as a perturbance? Sometimes Joseph writes like the way emojis sound, does anyone get that? Sort of like a staccato, plain-text way of articulating emotion. Did an emoji tornado touch his emoji heart? 

Such an incredible line: ‘I love / thunderstorms because it sounds like God is choking on grapefruit’. I’m not even going to unpack that. I’m going to leave that one to simmer. But that’s not an example of an homonym here, in this section I was looking more at the part about ‘a million weird dead bugs’. There’s the bugs that come to eat us as we decompose. And then there’s “computer bugs”. Just a few examples where Joseph’s playing on words here. 

I think of these homonyms as alluding to our inability to discern between reality and virtuality. We’re unable to understand our reality as it is now, I mean if you discard the Internet and technology, we already struggle with deciphering between our own perception to another’s perception. What one perceives as being red, another might call pink, or orange, or green. The additional threat that Internet culture imposes is that, our language eventually becomes swamped by the technological vernacular of computers, of online-existence. And yet it’s inevitable, and it’s already happening. It’s interesting—Elon Musk said in 2016 about whether he thought humans were living inside a computer simulation— ‘The strongest argument for us probably being in a simulation I think is the following: 40 years ago we have Pong [the Ping Pong video game]—two rectangles and a dot. That’s where we were. Now 40 years later we have photorealistic, 3D simulations with millions of playing simulatenously and it’s getting better every year. And soon we’ll have virtual reality, we’ll have augmented reality. If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, just indistinguishable.’What Joseph’s showing here is the multiplicity and changeability of language, how technology burrows into its sinews, transforming terms we use to describe our tangible, physical realities into ones which you can hold in your hand and scroll down with your thumb. Language is the currency of culture which is being endowed to technology. But that’s not abnormal of language per se, I mean it’s symptomatic of how language and meaning evolve simultaneously, language’s multiplicity. Rather what Joseph is saying that it’s bridging a confusing gap, how can you tell between the tears streaming down your face and the ones streaming from your television? His poetry seems to breed flesh and wire together, forge them as inextricably bound entities of today. We can’t distinguish ourselves from our flesh to our wired online flesh. 

But although set it in the future, you can tell that this collection is entirely rooted in the now, even when it oscillates between different years in the near and distant future, from 2030, to 3042, to 2076. It reads like a series of tweets, but it appears like scan-lines coursing down the page, so Joseph’s really capturing a generational voice here, that “online” voice which is stripped and clipped, where it feels squeezed into 100-odd characters. The poetry is peppered with well-known, familiar references pertaining to our present-day. And I think year dates are an artifice in this collection. The world’s end is so resolutely close to us that we can taste it in images like Elon Musk singing baby shark, Lana del Rey as the saddest superhero, David Hasselhoff eating the white wine emoji... It’s laughable. It’s funny. It’s hard. I think part of the way I read into this mesh of pop-cultural references was down to its implied superficialism. Y’know, we sort of think of our extinction as being a distant probability, but we can’t think about it without losing our minds. We barely accept the inevitable truth of our own mortality, we just can’t come to terms with the reality that someday we will sip our last cup of coffee, hug a friend for the last time. And we won’t necessarily know it’s the last time, until it’s the last time. This fear is particularly prevalent in Western culture, so we’ve barricaded ourselves with our egos, and constructed this site which vows to distract us from that not-so-terrifying revelation, that we’re all going to die. Death is natural. But we think it’s so unnatural and upsetting, that we’ve invented celebrity culture, make-up tutorials, 100K followers, emoji reactions, opinion polls, status updates, likes, Facebook algorithms, botox and red shoes as part of a sequence to distract us from the eventuality of death, thinking that these things will sustain us. It’s all artificial, it’s all blue-light, it’s all moths ever gravitate towards. Joseph humours it, (I wonder if he’s jaded at times) with a sigh: 

‘There’s all sort of thunder & / lighting and it is Fantastic and important tv.’ Me and my mother both laughed when we read this, it’s more mockery of the kind of vapidity in contemporary culture. Just endlessly being like: ‘oh watch this, oh I’ll link you the video, this is so funny watch it, look at this, this is my fav clip’, it’s nauseating. And you get this nauseating feeling when you’re reading this collection as it continues, it begins to make less sense, it begins to glitch and unravel to the point where you don’t really understand what’s going on. It’s bombardment, and the struggle in making sense of what’s going on typifies the way the ‘I’ is struggling to hold onto sanity. And while the dystopia of The Moth Apocalypse makes for a terrifying read, it’s also met with such beauty, I don’t think I’ve ever read a more beautifying approach to apocalyptic writing. You can take deep pleasure in the way Joseph articulates natural disaster. From ‘one rain drop falls out of the sky’: ‘I went to see the cherry blossoms in the glowing forest / [...] / THE SKY IS PURPLE LET ME SLEEP / [...] it smells like strawberry / pop tarts outside’. This “glowing forest” alludes to a forest fire, the purple sky alludes to light pollution, making it hard to sleep. Strawberry pop tarts goes without saying really, probably one of the best examples of describing consumerist culture in a nutshell: pre-cooked, chugging in artificial colours and flavours. But when you read these sentences alone, you don’t get the impression that the world is dying awash in blood and fire, rather the violence is extinguished. It reads and feels more like a painting, this gradual description of shades and experiences. There’s something kind of Eva Figes-esque about his writing style, just the way he colours in scenes. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s glamorised, but rather, the apocalypse is beautified. 

I want to bring this review full circle and come back to the collection’s title: The Moth Apocalypse. By the end, I came to think of humanity, us as being the moths, here, roused by darkness and addicted to rectangular devices emanating blue-light. We frantically flap around its notification, its constant stream of information as the world around us is plunged into dark mode. The points where you’re thinking that the collection is relenting and giving up, are actually the most profound moments where it gets up. Joseph writes it best in ‘Everything Is Peachy’: ‘if you’re / looking for a sad and hopeful story / just sit / back and watch this rain.’ This collection begs us to be present, to consider and amend, and if nothing else, to laugh wildly as you don’t remedy it. It is an incredibly self-aware read, an invaluable perception of the “way things are heading”. The composition and structure of the poetry is masterful, art in its own right. The Moth Apocalypse is a promising and brave debut from Joseph Turrent.  

If this review’s piqued your interest, you can purchase The Moth Apocalypse from HVTN Press here but they have stopped postal orders for a while due to Covid-19, so you may have to hold on. In the mean time you can find more of Joseph here on Twitter. 

[evadne-leventhorpe-blog]

Challenge #1

Alternately Titled: Nut a Fairytale

“See you when I see you, your highness.” were the last words I spoke to the Prince before he made his decision on who he was going to eliminate. The prince was polite yet held that charismatic air I anticipated him to have, still I felt like there was something he was holding back while we spoke.

In the end, there were 12 girls that were asked to leave the palace, leaving 23 of us left in the running. I wondered what the other girls had done to make Dominic want to send them off away so quick. Surveying through the faces of the girls, a few were surprising departures, most especially Seraphine, a bitch squad member. What did they do wrong, and how do I avoid becoming like them? I searched for something in their faces to caution me, but there was nothing much they were giving away. I pushed those thoughts aside for another time to focus on enjoying surviving the first round of eliminations. However, there was not much time to think about that for the next few days.

Right after our first interviews with Dominic, we were thrown right into lion’s den when the welcome ball was announced. Aside from daily lessons about etiquette, diplomacy, and history, we were placed in a crash course dance class that lasted for an hour everyday in preparation of the welcome ball for all the Selected. If that wasn’t enough, we were expected to be ready for our first appearance on the Report as Prince Dominic’s Selected.

The Report went well on my part, having a mini reunion with Hyacinth Pierce. It was probably my third time on the Report with the host, and I definitely had enjoyed my time during the show. There was a certain easiness to Hyacinth that had placed me at ease. She was careful not to go too detailed into my family’s past, which I was thankful for.

Once the Report was out of my list of concerns, I only had the welcome ball to take into consideration. Since the ball was announced, I had been working closely with my maids in creating a dress for the occasion. My experience with huge parties, galas, and balls seemed to have benefited me quite well in choosing what I had wanted to wear. When I was much younger, I always had leaned towards the softer looking dresses: girlier, sweeter, what a teenager would wear. However, through the years, my style had developed into something more edgy. It took me going through a few online articles about a few designer collections, but when I saw a picture of a texture of a certain dress, I knew that was the piece I’d be proud to be in during the ball. I asked my maids to start getting to work on it right away.

When girls think about going to a ball, they seem to instantly think about appearing in a gorgeous floor length gown. Poofy, tulle, volume. Pastels. Something that elevates a girl into a fairytale, and it wasn’t in any of my interest to appear like that. What made me giddy with joy was seeing myself stand in front of my mirror in the dress I chose. I felt so sure of myself in the work of art my maids had created for me. It looked like a floor length halter dress, but my maids had outdone themselves with actually making the dress look like a net with tiny cut outs literally everywhere. It was mainly white, but there were strips of blue fabric the helped cover me up. It had a few large cut outs on the side too, but there was still an element of class even with all the skin I was showing.

The dress was pretty dramatic on its own, so I opted to wear my usual neutral make up. Nothing too dramatic, just something to highlight my features and make my skin glow, and topping it all off, I had my hair slicked back into a ponytail. Once I felt like I was ready for the ball, I immediately made my way out to the grand ballroom. Well, no.. Actually the first thing I actually did was take a selfie for my snapchat and instagram. I didn’t want to mess up my daily streak of posting about the Selection on any of my main social media accounts.

The planner had warned us ahead of the media coverage this ball would have had but that didn’t stop my surprise with how great the media was in numbers. I found myself blinded by all the flashes of photography that ambushed me the moment I got close to the ballroom. There were photographers lined up on a small red carpet to take pictures of all the guests. My instincts had kicked in and I placed a hand on my hip and smiled at the people who were yelling my name. I smiled, I waved, I posed. Once I felt like I had worked those cameras long enough, I had finally joined the party.

When I entered the ballroom, I immediately felt the gazes of the people around me. I surveyed the room and saw a mixture of expressions. The most common one was shock, a reaction I had expected what with how revealing my dress probably looked at first glance. I placed a small smile on my face, just to add that little extra confidence I needed to wear with this dress. My eyes searched for the familiar faces of my fellow Selected, and I was ecstatic to see a few of my friends from the Bitch Squad enjoying themselves by a table. We had spent a few moments together, getting our pictures taken before we went our separate ways. I chose to remain seated, watching everything going by.

Joy. It was this bright joy that kept the mood light in this party. It looked like everyone was having an amazing time with the ball, it was probably most of their first times attending one. I wish I felt that too, but when you plan and attend enough balls, you’ve attended them all. Still, it kept me entertained to watch how everybody else was enjoying their night.

A part of my heart leaped when I saw Kat talking to Prince Evander. I had gotten pretty close with Kat for the past few days, and I had gotten to talk to her about the rumors that surrounded her and Evander and a first date before Kat even got to meet Prince Dominic. It was definitely not a surprise for me to see them talking to each other. There were these little signs that Kat displayed while she had talked to the Prince. The body language of how they both leaned towards each other, the way they looked like they weren’t playing some kind of character of themselves. I found myself getting more and more excited to see the future of Katvan (a collective name the Bitch Squad had coined to refer to Kat and Evander).

There were more little things I got to observe as I sat there too, the air of bitchiness Princess Lillian carried with her, the small glances that Prince Perseus had taken in the directions of both Charlotte and Aricia, and most especially all the girls that were coming up and talking to Dominic. I watched the girls coming and going as they spoke to the prince. Some of them seemed nervous speaking to him, a few with coy smiles and light touches, and a few seemed to have genuinely enjoyed just speaking to Dominic- no games, no mask, just talking.

I had to hand it to Dominic. With all the different approaches the girls had taken to him, he always seemed to have adapted well. I couldn’t hear any of the conversations from across the room, but I had eyes and body language was all I needed to tell how he was handling things. I could have told that he was flirting with a girl when his smile tilted more to the right. There were little things in his mannerisms I noticed, and the more I watched him interacting with everyone else, the more I wanted to get his attention.

But how does a girl get a prince’s attention during a Royal Ball? They don’t teach this stuff in boarding school. You couldn’t exactly turn to the fairy tales for any advice on that matter either. Cinderella got her prince’s attention when she had to leave the ball early. Sleeping Beauty had to fall asleep for a century before she got her prince. Snow White had to eat a poisoned fruit for God’s sake. It was all so impractical.

I grabbed a glass of champagne from a passing waiter’s tray and continued trying to figure out how I was going to get his attention. It was all so easy before. It was never me who had made the first move, it was the guy’s. All I had to do was smile at some guy’s direction and once he approached me, I knew that I had succeeded with finding that night’s fling. Come to think of it, it only really worked with having short term relationships. It was a mistake to always start off my relationships as physical. I liked the way they looked first, and that was probably why I never dated someone longer than for a month.

Now that I was in the Selection, I actually wanted to win this thing- but not without having any actual feelings. I wanted to spare myself from a loveless marriage like the one my parents had. I wanted something real, and if I didn’t approach the Prince- I’d never find out. Just do it. I found my chance to talk to the prince when I saw him standing on the edges of the ballroom.

Taking one very large sip of liquid courage, I stood from the table and walked towards the Prince.

“So Prince Dominic, seen anything that caught your attention?” I settled on standing beside him as I started off the conversation.

Dominic lifted his eyebrow, “You mean of the Selected?”

Of course he was thinking about the girls first, he was surrounded by two dozens girls vying for his attention. If he wanted to talk about us, well, it was no problem with me.

“Well, I was thinking of something along the lines of the ball right now, but sure, the Selected would work too.” I replied, taking a glance at the rest of the room.

“Don’t know yet,” he shrugged but his eyes met mine for a second before looking at something else. “There are a few standing out though.”

So there already were a few of us lingering in the Prince’s interests. Polls had been popping up between different magazines that covered the Selection. Some had predicted the favorites of the Selection, and Dominic’s possible favorites. I didn’t want to give myself some false hope, but I had read a few sources that said that I had been one of his favorites even before we arrived in the palace and have been for a while. Wanting to see if there was any merit to those sources, I tried asking if I was in his interests with my own (hopefully) funny joke.

“I guess I should have gone and stood outside then.” I laughed, finding my joke pretty funny and hoping that it would work. The prince shifted where he stood a little.

“Would you prefer to go outside?” Fuck, did he not get the joke?

“Maybe I could join you, there are some…” he paused, “more secluded areas we could go to.” 

His voice carried a little more persuasion in it, a little more honey. I raised an eyebrow and looked him straight in the eye to see if he was serious. He looked like he was and for a second I wanted to take him up on his offer right there. There was nothing more attractive than a man in power in a tuxedo, and boy, he looked so dapper with how that piece had clung to him- fuck he was hot. A chill shot straight through me just imagining what would have happened if I did say yes, but I remembered that I had learned my lesson. I was not going to start this off as a physical relationship.

“Ahhh, there’s that flirty side I’ve been hearing so much about. Smooth, Prince Dominic.” Most of the other Selected had described the Prince as flirtatious in the first Report, and it was a surprise to me since I hadn’t seen that side of him until now.

“As much as I’d love to go exploring more secluded areas with you,” It was true, a voice inside of me was yelling at me to just say yes. “I’d like to stay and enjoy the ball a little more.” I felt so bad on rejecting the offer, “It’s been a while since I’ve witnessed a scene like this.”

Disappointment flickered in Dominic’s expression, “That’s too bad,” I know, “These balls are all the same anyway, I’m sure you haven’t missed much.”

“I’ll take a rain check with your offer. You’re right with all these balls being the same though. It’s like they don’t have any other kind of music or it’s always the same people attending.”

“Exactly. You’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.” Glad that he had shared my sentiments. “So you don’t need really need to see more of this one, do you?” His face looked like he was going to win this mini-argument. He was persistent, and I felt tempted again to just say yes for the second time again.

“I’m not gonna lie, you make a convincing argument, your highness.” I chuckled trying to shake off the need I felt to get out of that ball with the prince. But I reminded myself that if I wanted to spare myself, I needed to have some control on my part. So I tried redirecting his attention back to himself. “I bet you’ve tried convincing some of the other girls too.”

“Tried? I’d say I’ve succeeded but I haven’t aimed my targets for today yet,” So there have been girls that he’s already fucked? Well they made fast work with him since we’ve been here for only a couple of days. My attention was brought back from my thoughts when he continued to speak.

“I’ve only been making plans for the future. So what about you? Would you say yes to, say tomorrow? Or some day soon after that?” He leaned a little more towards me, being more playful with his tone. I felt my heart beating a little faster as I tried to formulate an answer on my lips. My cheeks were heating up, and my throat suddenly felt so dry. Why did he have to be so attractive???

“You’ve succeeded with me,” I laughed trying to hide how flustered I felt. “How considerate of you, giving a girl some options.” I needed to direct this conversation. Two could play at this game. I leaned towards him a little more, placing my hand lightly on his arm.

“Hmmm, how about we go out of the palace soon? Go out on your motorcyle, have a nice dinner, have a few drinks.” I wanted to explore Angeles again, the city must have changed so much since I had left. Adding a little more playfulness on my part, I promised a little drinking. Who wouldn’t have fun drinking?

Dominic’s eyes lit up, “Sounds great.” he smirked.

Yes! I got a date with him! Ayyyy, got a a date with the Prince!! I hid my excitement, under a smile. I saw a waiter with a tray of food passing by, and I grabbed a dessert while talking.

“I look forward to it. The palace is amazing, but I’ve been wanting to see Angeles again.”

“Yeah, the city’s pretty great at night.”

I nodded as I bit into the dessert. “Yeah, I remember. So what else does a prince like you do in this city?” The planner in me began making up plans of where we could go together, there were a few of my favorite restaurants in the city like an outdoor one with an amazing view of the city underneath. But I also thought about Dominic having any favorites in the city too. He’s lived here longer than I have been.

“I mean, I don’t spend a lot of time outside of the palace… just when I can sneak away.”

“I understand that. I used to sneak out to the city before.”I coughed. What he said had resounded with me, I felt trapped by my parents back when I was so much younger.

He leaned back on the wall, “Yeah well… it sucks when there are too many… rules and things you’re supposed to follow.” I almost forgot that the boy I was talking to had so much weight on his shoulders, he was the next king of this country. He had to have all these rules.

“Tell me about it,” I felt my throat tightening up as I coughed again.

“Are you okay?” He shifts.

“Oh yeah, just a coughing fit.” I tried reassuring him. I’m getting a sickening feeling as I begin to cough more frequently.

“Are you sure?” he places a hand on my shoulder, and I feel like my chest was tightening.

“Uh, is there any nuts or chocolate in this?” I hold up the dessert I just bit into, suspicious that that was the cause of all this.

“Yeah that thing is almost, entirely chocolate.” FUCK. I haven’t anything that had chocolate since I was a kid for many good reasons why. The best reason was because I suffered a severe allergic reaction that lead to anaphylactic shock.

“Okay, “ I cough, “Fuck, I can’t breathe- Oh shit, I’m not supposed to swear around you!” I feel so mortified swearing around the prince, holy fucking shit, that was the first thing they told us not to do! But my head starts to feel more light, and the room’s closing in around me.

Dominic places an arm on my back, steadying me. “I don’t think that’s your biggest problem right now. Do you need to go to the hospital wing?”

“Right yeah. Priorities,” I cough again. “I’m gonna need an epipen.” I try to take a deep breath, but it’s getting harder and harder to do so. “Shit, I can’t breathe.”

“What do you need me to do?” He looks panicked, unsure of what to do with what was happening with me.

“Help me get to the hospital wing? Don’t know where it is…” I’m finding it harder to even say a sentence, and I know that I needed to get some medication before I got worse, thinking about the first time I had eaten chocolate and how badly my throat had swollen up when I was three.

“Right. Yeah, follow me.” He’s still placing a hand on my back to keep me steady as we both start winding through the huge crowd of people attending the ball.

“Thanks,” I breathe out. Holy hell, how did I miss that dessert being chocolate? I feel so stupid having to leave the ball so early because of this. Everyone must be seeing how the prince and I were leaving together, well shit. Hope they a good luck at us while they’re at it. I’m trying to keep up with Prince Dominic through the halls, but it’s so difficult to get any air in me.

I try to take in short breaths as we’re rushing through. I’m thanking God that I didn’t chose to wear the platform heels I had originally considered. I look at Dominic and he has this expression of worry on his face. At least he’s decent enough to actually worry about me, and I’m at least thankful that I got to spend a few adrenaline fueled moments with him. A voice inside my head snorts thinking about how I had resembled snow white eating a poisoned apple. Well, I guess I had taken the Snow White approach on this prince.

We finally make it to what seems to be the hospital wing and we burst through the doors. “Hello! Lady Evadne needs help!” he yells through the wing with such a sense of urgency. I’m holding onto Dominic, the only thing keeping me standing. As soon as we arrive, nurses ran towards the two of us, one nurse bringing a wheelchair.

I immediately got on it, my legs feeling so tired of holding me up and running. “Someone just get me one of those damn pens you stab people with!” I yell between pants. I could barely breathe, and the whole room was spinning around me. A nurse wheels me towards one of the beds, and I close my eyes just for a second to prevent myself from passing out. I feel a sharp pain on my left shoulder, and I can tell that they’ve injected me with something.

“So… do you need any more help here?” I open my eyes to see Dominic standing beside me. “I’m not actually supposed to leave the ball…”

“No, I shouldn’t be keeping you away from everyone right now.” I take another breath. I wanted him to stay, I didn’t want to be left alone, I actually wanted to get to know him a little better after all of this. But it wasn’t right either, to ask him to stay. Who was I to demand him to stay?

“Maybe I will next time, we’ll see,” I chuckle, joking about out his earlier suggestion.

“Ok… I hope you feel better…” he says as I watch him walk out of the hospital wing. There will be other times, I tell myself. Now’s just not the right one.

“Thanks, Prince Dominic.” I call out as I get helped onto a bed. A nurse helps take off my heels, and one encourages me to lay back as she puts an oxygen mask around my face. A person in scrubs approaches me then.

“Good evening Lady Evadne, I’m Dr. Gauge. Your file says that you have a severe chocolate allergy, is this what caused this reaction?” he asks, looking at me.

I nod in reply.

“Okay then, since you’ve already been administered with epinephrine, we’re also going to be administering some anti-allergen medication through an IV. Would that be okay with you?”

“Yes, but are you keeping me here?” I ask, as I see a nurse bringing an IV needle.

“It’s likely we will. We need to see if your system wouldn’t have any other reactions that would endanger your life.”

“Alright, then please call one of my maids to bring me some comfortable clothes.” I say as a nurse warns me about placing the IV through my skin. There’s a sharp pain that makes me cringe with having that needle under my skin. A nurse injects an anti-allergen into my IV, and all I do after that is lay back and think about what happened. She told me that drowsiness was a common side effect of the medication.

Some night it turned out to be. It actually was pretty enjoyable, getting to hang out with a lot of the girls and having the chance to make dinner plans with the prince, running through the palace halls as I had a bad allergic reaction. I guess I could call it a day.

After a few minutes of just laying back on that bed, I hear the voice of my head maid, Veronica, asking if I was okay. She helps me change into one of my pajamas, and hands me a make up wipe to clean my face. After changing into more comfortable clothes, I reach out for my phone and check my social media account one last time, and taking one last update for my story on snapchat before succumbing to the effects of the medication.

A/N: Thank you so much for @domschreave for RP-ing with me and special shout out to @ladykatdempsey and @isabellafaulkner for giving me some of the things Vad mentioned in this chapter. Sorry that it seems a little shorter than my usual length, I’ve been a little busy with school and stuff. 

[recentanimenews]

My Week in Manga: February 13-February 19, 2017

My News and Reviews

Hooray! I managed to write and post another in-depth review at Experiments in Manga. Even if I’m not writing as much as I once was, it still feels pretty good to get back into the (slow) swing of things. Anyway, last week I took a look at Jen Lee Quick’s dark fantasy Western Gatesmith, Volume 1. The comic is off to an intriguing start though it can also be a little frustrating. The series is currently on break, but I hope that there will be more soon.

As many people are probably aware, the prolific and versatile mangaka Jiro Taniguchi passed away earlier this month. Despite not being particularly well known in English, a fair number of his manga have been released in translation. Kate Dacey of The Manga Critic has a nice guide to Taniguchi’s work for those interested in what is currently available. At The Comics Journal, Taniguchi was the subject of a recent article by Joe McCulloch and an obituary written by Zack Davisson. Other comic sites like The Beat have recently honored Taniguchi as well. I’ve read most but not quite all of Taniguchi’s work in English, my personal favorites being A Distant Neighborhood and his collaboration with Baku Yumemakura The Summit of the Gods. Way back when there was a Manga Moveable Feast devoted to Taniguchi, too. Some of the links are no longer work, but many of the features can still be tracked down.

In happier news, SuBLime announced three new licenses last week: Akane Abe’s Am I In Love or Just Hungry? (digital-only), Scarlet Beriko’s Jackass!, and Tsuta Suzuki’s A Strange and Mystifying Story. (I’m very curious about Jackass! and I’m very happy about A Strange and Mystifying Story which is actually a license rescue. The first three of seven volumes were originally published in English by Digital Manga; I remember quite liking them.) The Toronto Comic Arts Festival has started announcing its featured guests for the year which will include Gengoroh Tagame among other fantastic creators. The OASG talked to Kodansha Comics about the licensing of Chihayafuru. While still probably unlikely, a print edition of the series isn’t completely off the table. As for Kickstarter campaigns for queer comics that have recently caught my attention, Megan Lavey-Heaton has launched a project to print the third volume of Namesake.

Quick Takes

The Box Man by Imiri Sakabashira. The North American manga industry is primarily focused on publishing more popular, mainstream works, but occasionally an alternative or independent work is released as well. The Box Man was originally serialized in Ax, an alternative manga magazine in Japan which was the basis for the Ax: Alternative Manga English-language anthology. Examples of Sakabashira’s work can be found in that anthology and in the earlier collection Sake Jock, but The Box Man is his first long-form work to be translated. Granted, there’s very little dialogue that actually needs to be translated–for the most part the manga is an entirely visual experience. Even the story is fairly limited in scope. The narrative follows a kappa-like cat accompanying a man on a scooter who is transporting a box which turns out to contain something rather peculiar. The strangeness of The Box Man doesn’t end there, but the point of the manga seems to be less about telling a story and more about creating a visual spectacle. The artwork incorporates popular culture references (some of which I’m sure I completely missed) and at times can be rather bizarre, violent, or erotically-charged.

Blood Blockade Battlefront, Volumes 1-7 by Yasuhiro Nightow. I wasn’t initially planning on reading Blood Blockade Battlefront–I wasn’t a huge fan Nightow’s Trigun–but I kept hearing great things about the anime adaptation and then I came across a “complete” set of the manga on super sale, so I picked it up. The series is actually ten volumes long; supposedly Dark Horse has plans to release the final three at some point. In general the manga tends to be fairly episodic, so even if the rest of the series isn’t translated at least readers aren’t left with an unresolved story. It wasn’t until partway through the second volume of Blood Blockade Battlefront that the series started to click with me, but once it did I found myself really enjoying the manga. Its mix of goofy everyday life and action-heavy sequences actually reminded me a bit of Cowboy Bebop. The manga is essentially about a semi-secret group of monster hunters working in what used to be New York before it was destroyed by the sudden appearance of an interdimensional portal. The character designs of the main cast are sadly simple and plain compared to the series’ fantastic setting and creatures, but their distinctive personalities mostly make up for that.

Giganto Maxia by Kentaro Miura. Though it certainly has its problems, Miura’s Berserk is one of my favorite series. I have been significantly less enamored with the other manga by Miura that have been released in English–specifically his collaborations with Buronson Japan and King of Wolves–but I was still very curious about Giganto Maxia. Whether it’s intentional or not, the dark fantasy manga shares some similarities with Attack on Titan and Terra Formars and also appears to be heavily influenced by professional wrestling. Miura’s artwork in Giganto Maxia is tremendous but the story, while it isn’t awful, struggles to match the caliber of the illustrations. I almost wonder if Giganto Maxia was originally intended to be longer than a single volume since so much about the manga’s world and characters are left unexplained in the end. Giganto Maxia does more or less tell a complete story, but it feels like a single episode taken from the middle of a larger narrative. At one time a slave forced to battle to the death in a gladiatorial arena, Delos is now fighting against the empire itself. Joining forces with Prome, a powerful spirit who takes the form of a young girl (and who is constantly trying to get him to drink her “nectar” ), Delos can transform into the mythic titan Gohra in order to do battle.

Lake Jehovah by Jillian Fleck. Lake Jehovah, Fleck’s debut graphic novel, first came to my attention due to the fact that Jay, the comic’s protagonist, is genderqueer. While themes of identity, gender, and sexuality are integral to the comic’s story they aren’t the primary focus of Lake Jehovah. Instead, the comic is about the end of the world, both literally and figuratively. Human civilization has already succumbed to multiple apocalypses but Jay unexpectedly becomes the prophet for the next impending disaster while dealing with even more personal and existential crises. Jay struggles with intense depression and anxiety which slowly destroys xis relationship with xis fiance. Eventually she leaves, no longer able to cope with Jay’s instability, and Jay is left recover and come to terms with everything alone. Lake Jehovah actually handles the topic of mental illness better than many other comics I’ve read. It’s an emotionally tumultuous work, tempering despair with humor as the characters search for meaning in their lives even while everything is falling apart around them. Some turn to sex or drugs while others find comfort in poetry or art. Lake Jehovah is a somewhat strange but undeniably compelling comic.

By: Ash Brown

[jamiekturner]

How I, a designer, learned to code and released an app in 4 months

Okay, I’ll be honest with you right away. The title is a little misleading.

I started learning Swift 4 months before and I knew some coding before that.

But I have never created a native app for any platform. Thinking about it now, I had no idea what I was up against…

For you to understand the how I did it, first I must tell you the why.

Traveling back in time

I always loved computers. My father bought our first machine when I was around 8 years old, and I became hooked in a second. It had a blurry CRT screen and it was running DOS, but it did what you wanted it to do.

That thing was pure magic for God’s sake!

Of course I mostly played games on it but I fell in love with the whole environment. I learned about how a PC worked, turned all the knobs and switches in the programs and became the guy others came to for tech-advice.

Fast forward to 1999. It was the time of 56k dial up modems and ADSL lines. I was still into computers as the Internet started gaining popularity in Hungary. I spent most of my afternoons in the school’s IT room visiting Geocities pages.

It was the beautiful era of <frame> based websites with the dancing baby animgif and I wanted a part of it.

I started learning HTML and created my first website. And since it was ’99 I appropriately named it Zolee Site Millenium. It ran on our school server and was only accessible via a Frankensteinian URL, something like www.kkt.piar.school.gov.hu/~hosszu2 (notice the nice tilde character in there). But I was online, I conquered a little bit of the new promise land called the World Wide Web. It felt amazing.

My love for gaming stuck with me in the following years: I was playing a lot of Counter-Strike. As it became the most popular game, I always had a chance to create a website for my current team.

I loved designing and building pages, but after a while started focusing my efforts on the visuals and usability. The latest trends of web development passed right by me as I learned more and more about pixels and user-experience.

Today I work as a full-time UI designer at a Hungarian agency. I have no experience with the current top frameworks like Node, Angular or Bootstrap. And I’m okay with that.

But I’ve been keeping an eye on HTML, CSS and JavaScript goodies, because I always work on personal projects on the side.

The idea for GAget

In 2011 my website got a huge facelift. The layout got featured on DeviantArt and I felt excited about new users checking it out every day. But I also was really frustrated.

Not because of the number visitors, but because there was no quick way for me to check them. There were two options. I either had to keep fiddling with Google Analytics, or I needed to find a simple app to do the trick for me. That’s what OS X Dashboard widgets are for, I thought, so I started looking around.

But the solutions out there were either too nerdy and ugly or just didn’t give me enough data. So being a designer, I drew up a mockup of what the best solution for me could be and posted the design on Dribbble.

A couple of dozen likes made me dig into the topic a bit more. I found out that widgets were essentially HTML + JavaScript apps, so I started taking it a little more seriously. I mean, these were the two languages I was most familiar with.

The working prototype was running on my Dashboard in a couple of days. I named it GAget [pronounced the same way as gadget] as an acronym for Google Analytics widget. A silly name, but it stuck.

The widget was released about 2 weeks later, in August of 2011.

I stopped updating the bookmarks featuring GAget after a while…

The amount of feedback was stunning: MacStories, SwissMiss and tons of smaller blogs featured GAget. I even had my name printed in the Hungarian version of PC World magazine.

I knew I had to keep working on it.

What to do next?

Today the widget has over 84 thousand downloads and it is being used by thousands weekly. With a friend of mine we even created an iPhone version. So when Apple released Yosemite and discontinued the development of Dashcode, GAget’s future started looking pretty grim.

But as one hand took something away, the other gave something back: Apple opened up the Notification Center for developers to display widgets there. Hope! Maybe the success story of my small widget could continue!

My Instagram post about the new design.

I started reading Apple’s documentation on Today extensions (this is what they call widgets). But it was all native Objective-C code. Ugh! Dealing with a compiler, memory leaks and multi-threaded processes was not what I wanted to do. It sounds scary if you’ve never done it before. But I made up my mind, GAget needed to become a native widget!

My biggest problem was that I had no idea where to start.

The Objective-Struggle

I purchased a book about iPhone development in Objective-C, but gave up after a couple of sections. To be honest, for someone familiar with front-end languages and a bit of PHP, Objective-C looked way too complex. Look at this code:

@​i​n​t​e​r​f​a​c​e​ ​​R​e​m​i​n​d​e​r​V​i​e​w​C​o​n​t​r​o​l​l​e​r​(​)​

@​p​r​o​p​e​r​t​y​ ​(​n​o​n​a​t​o​m​i​c​,​ ​w​e​a​k​)​ ​I​B​O​u​t​l​e​t​ ​U​I​D​a​t​e​P​i​c​k​e​r​ ​*​d​a​t​e​P​i​c​k​e​r​;​

@​e​n​d​

What could an interface, a property be, what does nonatomic or weak mean and what the hell are @ and * doing in there? I understood end though!

https://fat.gfycat.com/DifferentGivingFunnelweaverspider.mp4

The swifter way to code

The tutorials in the book were leading nowhere. After a few weeks of struggle, I didn’t get any closer to a native widget.

Then I remembered that Apple introduced a new programming language called Swift alongside Yosemite. It was new to everyone, so a lot of gurus started writing about it, discussing why it sucked and how you should learn Objective-C before even thinking about touching Swift. All this buzz made me take a look: I downloaded and started reading its documentation.

It felt like a breeze. The code started looking familiar, something like a little complex JavaScript! I fired up Xcode and started copying what people were doing in tutorials.

My main goal was an OS X widget, but most tutorials were focused on Swift itself or iPhone apps so I had to keep searching. I still had a lot of unanswered questions, like:

How can a widget and a containing app communicate? (Core data and app groups)

Can I use hover interaction? (No)

How do I open only one row of the widget while closing the others? (Auto layout and some manual height hacking)

Apple’s one page long documentation on widgets forced me to dig up source codes on GitHub and Stack Overflow and it took me countless hours to figure out the answers.

I collected and published the links I found useful along the way. They might be relevant for you too, in case you’re starting out with iOS or OS X programming.

I managed to find everything I needed and started moving faster than I expected: GAget for Yosemite started to take shape.

MVC, multi-threaded processes, app targets, view controllers and core data meant nothing 4 months ago. But thanks to the tutorials, Stack Overflow and a lot of sleepless nights I managed to learn the bases of Swift and OS X development.

Thanks to 800 people the beta testing was a blast. GAget is now available in the App Store as a designer’s first native application.

What I learned — besides a new programming language

I knew that working on a personal project is awesome long before Swift came along. You get to do whatever you want and you don’t answer to a boss or a client. You can add and remove features any way you like and you work in your own pace.

Deadlines

However, I found that giving yourself a deadline can be extremely motivating. Every New Year’s Eve my wife and I sit down and make a list about the things what we want to achieve in the following year. This time I listed that I want to release the new version of GAget by the end of January: this was my deadline.

Even though I ended up missing it by a month (thanks to Apple’s review process and a few other projects), I was working the hardest in January to check this thing off my list. Having it written down on a piece of paper is a powerful motivator.

The circle of learning

I also discovered that while learning something new there are three phases you cycle through: excitement, struggle and solution.

Excitement phase:you alway start here. You have a new idea and start learning things, everything looks promising and you wonder what you can do next. You feel motivated and you’re experimenting with the stuff you know. But you eventually reach a barrier in your knowledge.

Struggle phase:as you encounter the first real problem your excitement and motivation levels start to plummet. You have no idea what could help you or what to search for. You are desperate: even checking out the 3rd results page in Google for an answer.

Solution phase:Finally! You find the solution to that nasty problem. You move faster than before, and start to feel excited and motivated again. You go back to phase 1.

So next time you start out, remember: the struggle phase might be long and frustrating but the solution is out there. Finding it is part of the fun.

And don’t forget to check out GAget ☺

  The post How I, a designer, learned to code and released an app in 4 months appeared first on Design your way.

from Web Development & Designing http://www.designyourway.net/blog/user-interface-design/designer-learned-code-released-app-4-months/