#i wish more quirky and specific films could exist | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

flirting-with-psychology · 4 years ago

Text

[zombiebandido]

Can you recommend any Neil Gaiman to me, aside from Stardust or Good Omens? I cannot

What’s the best concert you’ve been to, if you’ve been? Idk, I think I’m just not huge on concerts

What’s the funniest screenname you’ve ever seen? i-run-with-scissors-to-feel-dangerous

Is there an animal you like that most people don’t? Don’t think so

Is there an animal that you think is overrated in terms of how it’s liked? Goats or cows, maybe

Is there a time period you think is underrated? Not really

What about music? Showtunes

Do you find yourself listening to music that’s a bit more esoteric? No

What are your three favorite books and why? Harry Potter because of the worldbuilding, Mistborn because of the worldbuilding and characters, A Confusion of Princes because it is a fun standalone book

What about authors? Idk, I mostly like specific books Do you have any likes you wouldn’t tell someone until you got to know them? Nah probably not

Do you have a favorite language? Not really

What about a place you’ve always wanted to visit? Ireland

What’s something someone does or says that just makes you laugh? Idk, it’s usually situational

Do goldfish crackers ever make you sick, or is that just me? No?

Do you have a favorite art style? Probably realistic

Do you have a favorite myth/fairy-tale? No, sorry I’m being boring with this quiz

Who is your favorite person aside from family? Probably my bff

Do any of your pets (if you have them) have weird quirks? My cat was just very emphatic

Do you listen to music from anywhere besides America? Not really

Have you ever “quit” a site and came back to it more than once? No

Do you have an “odd” fascination with anything? Dice

What is the thing you want most at this moment? An interesting job and a return to normal from the pandemic

What was the last book you read and what was it about? I’m currently reading The Martian about an astronaut stranded on mars

What was the worst book you’ve ever read & why? Walk Two Moons because the twist ending fucked me up

Do you have a favorite breed of dog or cat? Which? Golden retrievers

If you like any anime/manga, what are some titles you recommend? I don’t really like it

What do you think about school in general? I thought it was interesting and I wish I could go back

What’s the hardest thing you’ve been through, & what did you learn from it? Maybe the braces. Dk what I learned from it

What are three “unrealistic” things you want most? An interesting creative job with steady and high pay lol, the lottery, the good place experience from The Good Place

What are some of your favorite foods? Pasta, chocolate, cereal. I am a simple girl

Where do you like to buy your clothes? Kohl’s, Macy’s, and thrift shops

Do you take any daily vitamins? When I remember

Who are three of your favorite fictional characters of all time? Kelsier from Mistborn, Sirius Black from Harry Potter, Raydan Lykel from The Crown and the Flame

If you had to give the world a pre-existing mythological/fictional being, what would it be? Idfk

When buying Slurpees, if you do, do you get only one flavor or mix them? Mixing is fun

Do you have a favorite 7Eleven food? No

Do you have any desire to learn (a) foreign language(s)? Which? Not strongly

If you could have any career, “realistic”-ness aside, what would it be? Something in film maybe

What are three memorable movies from your childhood? The Little Mermaid, Harry Potter, Barbie as the Princess and the Pauper

Do you, personally, put a space after ellipses, or not? Let me check... do I? I guess I do

What do some of the things that inspire you have in common? Making things

Micky D’s sweet tea, y/n/other? No

What are three of your best (non-physical) qualities? Creativity, honesty, smarts

What are three of your worst (again; non-physical) qualities? Stubbornness, anxiety, lack of empathy

What is one of your firmest beliefs? I don’t really have firm beliefs

Do you ever question things until you’re unsure of even the silliest thing? Yes

Do you have anything that keeps you from doing something you’d truly enjoy? Anxiety and procrastination, and money

What are your three biggest pet peeves (personality-wise) in others? Holier-than-thou people, acting like you’re too cool for fun, being unsafe

Do you work to fix your faults? Or at least, admit to them? I admit to most of them but I’m not so great at working on them

What are three of your best physical qualities? (NOT EYES!) Why not eyes? Other than that, I guess hair color, boobs, singing voice (at least I’d like to think so)

What are some of your greatest aspirations? Do something fun, have a good social life, see what I would look like in my prime

How do you hope the world will change, if at all? Get done with the pandemic, stop having capitalism be so shitty

Who are three (fairly known) people you find very intriguing? Taylor Swift, Voldemort, F. Scott Fitzgerald

What are three things that make you the happiest? hanging out with friends, crafts, cuddling with my boyfriend

What is/are your view(s) on god, religion, spirituality, or relations to? I don’t believe in them

Are you arachnophobic or scared of spiders in the least? YES

Do you play WoW? What do you think of it either way? No, I am just not that into video games

What kind of computer do you have? Windows 7/Vista/XP/Other? Macbook Pro

What are you good at? Crafts and school

What career do you hope to have? Something creative

Are you taking any interesting classes in school/do you not attend? I’m finished with school but I wish I could go back

If you don’t attend, are you taking any “lessons” for anything? No

A book/piece that has had an exceptional impact on your life? Harry Potter

If you know of pandora.com, what is your favorite station? I haven’t listened to pandora in ages

Have you ever “lost” a friend in any way? How did you deal? Some just faded away but some actively ditched me and I tried to find out why

Any music recommendations? Showtunes

What are at least three of your biggest fears? Spiders, living a mundane life, covid right now

Most recently read book that you liked? A Confusion of Princes

Do you have a piece of jewelry you don’t like to take off? No, I have so many that I like to alternate them

Do you have a favorite quote? Why is it your favorite? Carpe Diem. Haven’t lived it much lately though Any odd pastimes you have? Making lists and charts

Are you quirky in any way? (Name them please). My fashion sense especially in high school, the nerdy things I do

Have any practices you aren’t opposed to but wouldn’t do yourself? Probably a lot, I’m generally of the live and let live mindset

Political standing?

Left

Do you have any piercings/what do you think about piercings? I just have my ears pierced

Do you have a favorite material? I’m a fan of soft materials like suede or velvet, also metals like copper and silver

What are three names you’d name a pet if you HAD to get a pet right now? It depends on the pet

Do you like to listen to dorky/amusing music? Idk

Coffee vs. Tea vs. Energy Drinks: Order from favorite to least favorite. Tea, energy drinks, coffee

Do you like more “fruity” sweets or “savory” sweets? Fruity unless it’s chocolate

What do you hate the most? Spiders

What genres of music are your favorite? Showtunes

Do you believe in true love? Idk

Do you believe in love at first sight? If yes, why? No

What are some of your favorite clothing accessories? Jewelry

If reincarnation exists, what sort of person would you want to be next?

One of those outgoing guys that always has adventures with his friends What are some things you believe strongly in? Idk

Where’s your favorite place you’ve been? London was pretty cool, also Italy

What sort of books and movies do you like? For books: sci-fi, fantasy, dystopia. For movies: rom-com, sci-fi, musical

What’s your favorite thing to do on a rainy Saturday? Idk, just stay in

Is there a book you’ve read that really touched you? The Great Gatsby just because I related to Gatsby a lot

Do you have a favorite artist? Taylor Swift

PC or MAC? Mac

What do you love doing? Crafts, shopping, board games

If you could create the perfect world for yourself, what would it be? Basically just the good place from The Good Place. Unlimited time and resources to learn and try things without pressure to make money off it

Do you think that fate plays a part in people’s lives? Not really

Are you religious, spiritual, atheist…? Atheist

What are your opinions on the media? The media is a very broad range of things

Do you think that people throw the words “love” and “hate” around too much? Idk

What is your favorite piece of technology that you own? My laptop

What’s a piece of technology you’d like to own? I have what I want at the moment.

Are you afraid of technology developing to where we’re too reliant on it? A little bit of getting to the point where a lot of jobs get replaced with AI, because instead of making lives easier like they could be, there will just be a huge unempolyment problem that our stupid capitalist society won’t solve

Does it bother you when people do things to fit in with a certain crowd? If it’s not what they want to do

Hot or cold? Cold Do you think that Bzoink should extent the character amount for questions? I don’t use Bzoink

Do you have a favorite combination of complimentary colors? Maybe green and pink

Do you know why all the young people who have nice cars always look grumpy? I don’t think I’ve noticed that

What’s your favorite odd ice cream flavor? Lemon Sorbet or Coffee Toffee Bar Crunch

Where do you like to get your ice cream? Haagen Dasz or Ben and Jerry’s

What’s your opinion on stereotypes/labels? Idk

Do you ever use random word generators for Bzoinkoids?

What?

Do you believe that history repeats itself? It sure seems like it is

Would you rather learn from your mistakes or just undo them? Learn from them

What was the most interesting class you had in school? My words and music class in college Do you write? If so, what? I used to write poetry, I sometimes come up with stories but I don’t really write them

Do you have a favorite website? Tumblr and Etsy

Do you think that the quality of TV shows is going down? No, there are usually good ones to discover

Do you have a favorite culture? Maybe Celtic. I just like the art patterns What was a story you heard as a child that really affected you? The Headless Horseman scared me a lot

Who was your favorite grade-school teacher and why? My third grade teacher and my 6th grade math teacher

Do you think that the world will end? How? Probably in a few billion years when the sun turns into a red giant

Do you believe in Global Warming? Have you researched it? Yes but I haven’t researched it

Do you prefer piercings or tattoos? Tattoos

Do you remember your dreams? Sometimes

#survey

3 notes · View notes

lumiereandcogsworth · 4 years ago

Note

UNO REVERSE. GO OFF, GIRL: deep ask time: tell me about your love for beauty and the beast. when did you get into it. what were your first impressions. when did you Know it was a big fave for you. how many times have you seen it. what’s your favorite thing about it!!! why the heck do you love it!!!!!

AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH OKAY🥺 this is gonna be long i’m just already warning you. I gotta do the under the cut thing cuz really I just can’t unwillingly subject people to such an essay. It’s good but like. anyway, here ya go:

when did you get into it? well [the stage goes dark, a spotlight centers on me, fog forms around my ankles] it all started on a calm spring evening, april 12th, 2017.... okay lmao i’m not gonna do that the whole time. but yeah so i loved the 1991 cartoon version a lot! it had always been one of my fave disney films as a kid, it was one of ones we had on vhs so it was a frequent flyer in on the big boxy dinosaur tv! but then, when me and my parents were touring my future university (i was a junior in high school at the time) we decided to catch a movie! i couldn’t tell you what else was playing that night, but live action batb was the only one that jumped out at me. it’s funny cuz it had been out for nearly a month, i really didn’t make any effort to go see it. i was like “ah, disney makes live actions all the time. who cares.” LITTLE DID I KNOW. but anyway, we went to see it and.... gosh i was enchanted. even that first night, it was like a switch turned on in me that i didn’t even know existed!

what were your first impressions? goodnesssss. it’s interesting because i hadn’t seen batb 1991 in YEARS, but as i watched the live action it was all coming back, i was comparing everything. which is funny too because, the comparison is what turned a lot of people AWAY from batb 2017. now, i could make a whole powerpoint comparing them, but i have no shade!!! if you like 1991 better, go off!!!! just don’t hate on one or the other :/ hate is lame! there’s a lot of love in the world and there’s, my goodness, CERTAINLY enough love for two film versions of a disney princess movie. goodness gracious. anyway, let me hop off my soap box!!!!!

i remember thinking it was DOPE that they made belle the inventor, and that they made maurice an artist. i remember loving the new songs, eSPECIALLY evermore. like wow. i was so happy they gave beast his own song. i remember being so entirely delighted by how extravagant be our guest gets. like lumiere!! you dramatic boy!!!!! it just kept going i was so dazzled and amazed and happy. i can remember how big the smile on my face was during that whole number. i remember how INCREDIBLY swept away i was when there was the whole “what do you say we run away?” scene and the enchanted book and going to paris!!!!!!! still to this day, every time i see the scene where it goes from belle’s hand on the book pages and pans up to the starry sky, i feel that joyful peter pan magic. and that’s what i thought the first time too. i LOVED all the added backstory for belle and beast. absolutely stunning. even at the beginning! they open it right away, really take you to the scene of the crime, in a sense. you see young, spoiled prince adam. his nasty, pompous behavior and all. it made him so much more real. i remember just overall being so thrilled with how much longer it was. it gave belle and beast so much more time to fall in love, it made the culminating end way more genuine. and of course i loved all the little jokes and their quirky little personalities shining through. and i also remember being so punched in the gut by the last petal falling and actually seeing everyone turn into inanimate objects. i was like *sobbing* HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO ME. but, even today, it makes the turn around of the curse lifting way more relieving and joy-filling. and don’t even get me started on The Kiss. the silent amazement between them. i can’t. surely, you get the point. i was in the car ride back to the hotel just utterly astounded, i couldn’t stop thinking about it. i’d never seen such beauty.

when did you Know it was a big fave for you? pretty soon!! i saw it a second time in theaters and i regret to this day not going a third time. but that’s life. i couldn’t pin point when it became my number one, but i’m sure it was that summer when it went on netflix and i had unlimited access and was deadass watching it most every night. that’s an exaggeration but is it though? anyway yeah it was love at first sight so it didn’t take long to reach my favorite movie spot at all.

how many times have you seen it? UHHHHHH okay so, that was something of an exaggeration, to a degree. i was counting how many times i was watching it but i stopped at ten. i honestly wish i had continued counting. do you know how cool it would be to do my 100th watch?? i’d have a whole party. my dad and i tried to do the vague guesstimate math once, and we figured something around 60 times. i don’t know how accurate that is but it sure feels like i’ve seen it 6,000 times. at this point i watch it every few months but... summer of 2017..... yikes lmao.

what’s your favorite thing about it!!! the film itself? is that an option? the entire. gosh dang,,, thing? lol but idk i think what i love most is adam’s growth, probably. i mean. it is. you can’t write an 18k pre-canon fic highlighting adam’s troubled past and then go on to write who knows how many thousand words of fic of post-canon adam just being so gosh dang happy and happier than he’s ever been without his growth and arc being your favorite part. so :”) yeah. adam deserves the whole entire world and he’s got such a big heart, he just never knew how to use it, never thought he had it in there. he’s been kicked around and torn apart and Literally Turned Into A Monster, but he still grows and learns to love and learns that maybe life can be okay for him. but also i love belle so much too. her courage, her adventurous spirit, her no-thoughts-head-empty griffindor attitude about everything. like who just sees a giant castle and is like “cool, allow me.” it’s in the genes, cuz maurice does it too shdkdksk. anyway i just love belle so much, she’s so smart and clever and sweet and KIND and she has so much compassion in her heart. so much love when she’s literally been seen as a social outcast like probably her whole life. and yet? the kindest. but also so funny and sarcastic and GAH!!! i love my girl!!!!!! and the uniting of my two favorite characters in the whole world.... it just floors me every single time.

why the heck do you love it!!!!! oh my gosh literally how to answer this. i think at this point in the essay it’s pretty clear all my passionate opinions about it LMAO. the way i usually explain it to like, my dad, for example (i’ve brought him up twice now, he’s just always been a good ear for my fangirl interests. let’s me go off about anything haha.) anyway, the way i explain it is that it just checks off all the boxes. and i don’t even know what all the boxes are, but it’s everything. i think i’ve always loved beauty and the beast (even as a kid) because it flips the damsel in distress narrative. SHE has to save HIM. and of course, that’s been done countless times. but idk, for a disney princess, for my little kid mind, belle was special and this story was different. but more specifically to batb 2017, the aesthetic just slays me. the wardrobe is exquisite. the characters are so lovely and funny and wonderful. the songs, the NEW songs!!! the DANCE!!! THE CASTING. i love the cast so much. there’s so much gosh dang heat about emma watson as belle especially and it’s like i will fight all of you in the streets come to my house my address is— okay anyway. i think the casting was absolutely 15/10 phenomenal everyone from josh gad and luke evans to audra mcdonald and stanley tucci and literally everyone in between. DAN STEVENS HAD TO DO EVERYTHING TWICE. ONCE IN THE SUIT THE BIG CGI SUIT AND ONCE MORE WITH HIS FACE TO GET BEAST’S EXPRESSIONS JUST RIGHT. the dedication. i’ll fight everyone. he did a ballroom dance in a big suit on stilts. i just. okay so yeah i love the cast and i love THE LOVE STORY OBVIOUSLY. I REFRAINED TALKING ABOUT ADELLE UP UNTIL NOW BUT HELLO?????????? i guess that’s not true i talked about them a little bit. but obviously their love story drives it and boy do i love taking that drive every single time. it’s about the enemies to friends to lovers my guy. it’s about the saving each other. it’s about the seeing each other. i’m gonna lose my mind. i need to finish this oh my gosh i don’t know how to shut up about this film.

#I SERIOUSLY WROTE AN ESSAY #IM SORRY TO NOBODY BUT WOW #so anyway...... love that live action disney film........#batb 2017

7 notes · View notes

romchomp · 5 years ago

Text

That One Track from your favorite romance anime

So, I’m a whore for soundtracks. The amount of hours I’ve spent listening to various soundtracks is in the hundreds. Something I’ve noticed in discussions about good anime soundtracks is that romances are often left out, with the exception of Clannad and Your Lie in April. So here I am, ready to take the task nobody requested.

Before I start listing animes and their soundtracks I’d like to first say that the thing about scores in anime, movies, video games, and even tv shows is that they usually have one track that’s easy to identify (ie. a theme song, a track that plays during a progression/training scene or a track that plays during the climax, etc.). Depending on the tone and atmosphere of the series, this track could be sad, fun, a mesh of the two, or something beyond those lines. Regardless it should affect how you feel and be memorable. So in this post, I’m talking about different romance anime and what I think is** that one track** from them.

**Because I’ve had troubles embedding the tracks into this post I’ll just leave a link to a playlist I made with all the tracks used on soundcloud and youtube**

1. Toradora- Lost My Pieces

There are a lot of tracks from Toradora that I adore, including Yuugure No Yakusoku and Ameiro Rondo. What makes Lost My Pieces work out, however, is the fact that it plays at the climax of the series and stands for a mental shift in the main character as well as a tonal shift in the series. What else is interesting is that this is the only time the track is ever played in Toradora. It really shows how effective it was, considering the track's popularity. When most people think of Toradora’s soundtrack they’ll think of Lost My Pieces. This is certainly** that one track** that will make you...feel things.

2. Clannad- Roaring Tides

This one is probably more arguable considering how many tracks in Clannad are severe tear jerkers. Personally, Roaring Tides has always been that one track in Clannad that would without a doubt fuck me up. There’s just something about that piano...and the...everything. It’s a very dramatic piece and man is it good at heightening the drama in Clannad. Of course, Nagisa and SnowFeild are very close seconds and I can’t forget to mention Town, Flow of Time, People; or Existence; or the goddamn ending Dango Daikazoku (why does this show hate us).

3. Fruits Basket (2001)- Secret

Fruits Basket has a generally wacky soundtrack that covers a variety of tones. However, if there is one track that could be associated with the darker moments in the anime, one that always played when one of the characters talked in depth about the zodiac curse, it’s Secret. This track is a little different from the ones in Toradora and Clannad though. This one’s purpose isn’t to make the viewer cry. I think the track only has that effect from a nostalgic standpoint; listening to the track on its own after the fact adds quite a bit of feeling to this one. Secret is more or less, meant to set the atmosphere. That, put together with how often the track was used, makes it one of the more memorable ones. I can't wait to add the reboot to this list.

4. Nana- Akai Ren

Nana’s soundtrack doesn’t get talked about that often even among its fans. I’m not talking about the vocal pieces that were played by Black Stones or Trapnest, but the background osts. The reason for this probably has to do with 1) the songs sung by Black Stones and Trapnest are on a separate CD than the background tracks and 2) there are a whopping 43 tracks on the CD of background tracks. Regardless, there are a number of tracks that stuck with me even after finishing the show and the best example of this would be Akai Ren, which made me cry EVERY SINGLE TIME it played. That piano still haunts me. What also haunts is the second ending, Starless Night. That one’s a close second.

5. Anohana- Secret Base

I’ve been avoiding using the openings and endings on this list, but I’ll make an exception for Secret Base considering it plays like a track in the background for emotional scenes on several occasions. I was considering using Last Train Home instead, but that track just...doesn’t hit the same way and isn't utilized nearly as often as Anohana's ed. Secret Base also has the advantage of not being played in its entirety until the most climatic and emotional part in the series (as if just a few seconds of the song wasn’t already enough).

6. Your Lie in April- My Friend A Will Be My Accompanist

We all know the soundtrack for Your Lie in April is amazing. Whether it be the classical pieces performed by characters or the rest of the soundtrack that’s left for the background, but I think My Friend A is a particular track that’s memorable and easy to listen to on its own. It plays often throughout the show and because of that, I think it’s the most identifiable piece in the series. My Friend A is beautiful. It doesn’t even need the context of the show to make it an emotional listening experience. If anything this gives context to the show.

7. My Little Monster- Tetsukazu no Kanjou

Not as much of a tear jerker as it is just an adorable track that I often come back to. Maybe it’s a more of a track that elicits happy tears? My Little Monster’s soundtrack reminds me of Toradora’s in the sense that they both have fun scores that feature mostly quirky tracks with a few emotional ones sprinkled in. For this series, it’s emotional one is Tetsukazu no Kanjou, which the show utilizes quite well. It often plays when the audience discovers something new about a character or see an emotional shift in them.

8. Snow White with the Red Hair- Reconciliation: The Beginning of Two People

The best word to describe Shirayuki’s soundtrack would be magical; it's a true fantasy romance score. I was hesitant to mention this soundtrack at all because at first I felt that while Reconciliation is a gorgeous piece, it’s not overwhelmingly emotional, but I’m listening to it right now and have realized that uhhh it’s very emotional and I don’t know what I was thinking. And looking back, this track in specific added a lot to scenes and did, in fact, bring up several emotions. While (maybe) not tear-jerking, the track would definitely have you gushing at how sweet and precious the main couple is.

9. Bloom Into You- Earnest Wish

You know, you hear a lot of piano in romance series. A lot of violin. A lot of flute. But clarinet? That's not as common. This track really makes you wish there was more luckily, a lot of the other pieces on Bloom Into You's soundtrack also have clarinet in them. Anyways, any moment Earnest Wish started playing...I knew shit was about to go down. There was usually some dramatic wind (oftentimes blowing Touka’s hair) when it started playing. Something new would be revealed about the character's backstory or their insecurities. Good piece. Very good piece.

10. Kanon- Winter Fireworks

Kanon has the misfortune of forever being compared to Clannad and living in its shadow. Something I think, however, that doesn’t deserve to be compared to Clannad would be Kanon’s soundtrack. Its score is unique and successfully conveys a winter essence. Winter Fireworks is the best example, but there are so many other amazing tracks. I just [making aggressive hand gestures] really love it.

11. Your Name- Sparkle

Your Name is really good at using its score to accelerate emotional scenes and generally flow with the mood of the film. Its best example of this would be Sparkle, which plays at the climax and man does it work. The pace of the track has the perfect amount of energy to go along with a beautiful running sequence that was emotional as all hell.

So far I have only talked about tear-jerker tracks, but romances are also completely capable of having a track memorable by how warm and happy it is.

12. Toradora (again)- Startup

Startup is probably the easiest to remember/call out but I think Happy Monday is a really close second that no one talks about. Startup is used similarly to Lost My Pieces, though more often. Where Lost My Pieces plays at an emotional climax, representing a progression in the characters, Startup always plays when one of the main characters is making a stride to better themselves or their situation (hence, progressing the story). It’s a great track and does its job well.

13. Kaichou wa Maid Sama- Main Theme

Man, I could dance to this track. I remember always feeling giddy when this track started playing. You knew things were about to get exciting. It’s the perfect amount of fun and cheesy for a hilarious and sweet shoujo such as Maid Sama.

14. Princess Jellyfish- Umi to Tsuki no Yume

While it’s hard to stream the entirety of Princess Jellyfish’s soundtrack for free, there are a few tracks that are easily accessible on youtube. Umi to Tsuki no Yume is one of them and lucky for me, it’s one of my favorite tracks as well as one that seemed to stick out to others as well. It’s very befitting of the show’s flamboyant yet down to earth atmosphere.

15. His and Her Circumstances- Peace Reigns in the Land

I love every track from Kare Kano but this one especially left a mark on me. There’s plenty of lovely piano pieces that you could you point to as that one track but I personally find the tracks with trumpet solos and soft drums to be the charming point in its score. Peace Reigns in the Land normally plays sometime during the beginning of episodes and really leaves you feeling like everything is gonna be okay. As for accessibility to the soundtrack, there are a few tracks you can find on Youtube and I managed to find the entirety of the soundtrack here on Soundcloud uploaded only five days ago (so who knows how long it'll be up).

16. Nisekoi- Meirou

Nisekoi’s production value was always too good for its own good and its soundtrack is no exception. I was torn between a number of tracks from Nisekoi to mention. Should I go with the sweet and warm Lost of Words that reminds me of summer? Or the fun and goofy Meirou I can still remember playing at the end of each episode years after watching? Or what if I go with the more bleak Nikuhaku to represent that one track that stuck out in the series? Well. It’s Meirou. Hate to be anticlimactic, but Meirou captures the tone and atmosphere of the series better than any other track in the series. It's sweet but in a ridiculous kind of way.

17. Honey and Clover- Be Careful of Being Tricked!

I absolutely adore Honey and Clover’s soundtrack. It has an interesting range of instruments that gives it a unique charm. Be Careful of Being Tricked is no exception with its use of bongos, the organ, and acoustic guitar along with humming... It’s a good time. Bon Bon Bereppa was another track I thought of using for this list. Both tracks scream "How did I get myself in this situation?". It was really hard to pick one over the other, to be honest. It came down to the organ.

18. Lovely Complex- Orchestra Na Risa

Generally, the score of Lovely Complex is goofy and a riot to listen to on its own. Orchestra Na Risa is one of the slower pieces, and a touching one at that. Somehow it manages to feel sweet and whimsical while still fitting in with all the other ridiculous tracks and antics in the show itself.

Honorable mentions??

Doukyuusei (the whole thing tbh)

From Up on Poppy Hill- Kokurikozaka kara (theme song)

Air TV- Natsukage

Yosuga no Sora- Kioku

Now there are plenty of romance anime I have yet to watch and I hope many of them will make me think to myself "Wow, this would've made a great addition to that blog post I made about romance anime with good soundtracks". There are certain anime I’m even prepared for. But for now, I’m just writing about what I already know [it’s not a lot].

Here is a playlist of the all the tracks I listed in this blog post and here's a playlist I made of all my favorite romance anime tracks that you can check out if you feel inclined.

5 notes · View notes

wonderfulworldofmichaelford · 6 years ago

Text

Psycho Analysis: The Noid

In the annals of history, there are few villains as twisted, depraved, and evil as the Noid. The Noid is almost more than a simple villain when you really stop to think about it; the Noid is representative of the cruel, uncaring fate, crushing failure, disaster, and worst of all, the ruination of a perfectly good pizza. Could there be anything more terrifying?

Frankly it was only a matter of time before I covered the Noid. From his sickening modus operandi to his utterly nightmarish design to the fact his name sounds extremely similar to “void,” it’s only natural I would want to cover what is easily the most compelling and fascinating villain in all of fiction. Looking at the Noid will make you wonder: Did the Russo Bros. get inspiration for Thanos from him? Did Geroge Lucas try to write Vader’s backstory to mimic the Noid’s downfall? Is the Noid the inspiration for Lisa from The Room?

Perhaps these questions and more will be answered beneath the cut, but make sure you are eprepared, for the Noid is a villain unlike any other.

Actor: The Noid was given his distinctive voice and look from actor Pons Marr, who was the suit performer for Theodore Rex among many other interesting roles and puppeteering jobs in 80s films. There was truly no better man than the one who had to stand beside Whoopi Goldberg in a dinosaur suit to voice the manifestation of evil.

Motivation/Goals: As the physical embodiment of all the challenges in getting a pizza in thirty minutes or less, the Noid has one of the most heinous motivations of all time: to prevent your pizza from arriving hot and fresh. There really are few villains so vile and depraved as to try and deprive people of the joys of fresh food, so the Noid truly stands out among the serial killers, dictators, supervillains, and psychopaths I’ve previously analyzed as a truly despicable being. I mean, it’s one thing to commit numerous war crimes, raze entire countries, blow up planets, and commit genocide; it’s another thing entirely to ruin someone’s PIZZA!

Personality: Considering the above description, it should be obvious that his personality and goal are intertwined. The Noid exists solely to ruin your meal, and so his personality is cold, cruel, and grating to reflect that. He truly is the avatar of ruination, the embodiment of your worst fears for your takeout, the scion of doomed dinners. And everything he does, he does with a sinister cackle.

Final Fate: So this is actually the interesting part of the story, as there are numerous factors that played into the eventual demise of the Noid. The first factor is the decline of the “30 minutes or its free” guarantee, which was eventually changed to three dollars; many drivers would drive recklessly to avoid having to hand out free food, and so death and injury resulted on a few occasions. Lawsuits came in, and so the “30 minutes or its free” was soon discarded, and the Noid, as the physical embodiment of that honor, received his first major blow.

On January 30th, 1989, the second factor came into play: Kenneth Lamar Noid, a mentally ill man who thought the Noid ads were targeting and mocking him specifically. Noid held a domino’s hostage for five hours, demanding money, a getaway car, and a copy of The Widow’s Son, and even forcing the hostages to make him pizza and a salad; eventually he was captured with no one injured. Police Chief Reed Miller was quoted as saying “He’s paranoid” in regards to Noid, seizing on one of the greatest opportunities a man was ever given.

Noid was declared not guilty by reason of insanity in court, and spent time in institutions before finally killing himself in 1995. Though the company has denied this incident has anything to do with the Noid vanishing from advertising, this is blow number two in my book, because let’s be honest here, there’s no way they could easily live down that connection in the mind’s of the general public.

And as for blow three? Adam West killed him. Truly Mr. West was the greatest hero America ever saw if he could defeat such a monster with nothing but his bare hands.

While the Noid has had a few cameos in Domino ads in recent times, he is certainly not quite as prominent as he once was in their advertising.

Best Scene: Adam West killing him, obviously. Not only is such a menace finally being put down so satisfying to watch, but it’s classic Family Guy funny moments material (as anything related to Adam West on that show was, he was consistently good).

Of course, if you really want to go with the official Noid canon, you can really just pick and choose any of his commercials. All of them have very similar structures, and all feature ethe Noid’s cartoonish brand of mildly inconveniencing supervillainy. They’re all 30 seconds or less, so I’ll cheat and lump them all together.

Best Quote: After that one-two punch with Adam West winning the day, let’s give the quote to him: “Perhaps it was the Noid who should’ve avoided me.” Not only is it absolutely badass, especially coming from the mouth of a former Batman, it’s kinda a given I’d give it to someone who could talk seeing as the Noid is a babbling, voiceless weirdo. I mean, unless you really want me to say the best quote is “[incoherent Noid giggle].”

Final Thoughts & Score: I’m sure you’ve guessed by now that this is an April Fool’s joke; the Noid is a pizza mascot from the 80s, for crying out loud! What is there even to analyze here? Well, actually, you’d be surprised. While the Noid himself is a pretty stereotypical mascot character, he did have something of a cultural impact, not to mention there’s no denying that something animated by Will Vinton’s studio has to carry some sort of charm to it.

The most interesting aspect of the Noid is probably his downfall more than anything, especially since he took down the “30 minutes or it’s free” notion with him. That whole guarantee in the first place is easily one of the most disturbing and soul-crushing capitalist society guarantees imaginable, and considering it could only lead to rushed work on everyone’s part to accomplish and disappointment all around no matter the outcome, it’s shocking it stuck around for such a long time as it is. It’s really not all too shocking the Noid vanished after that went away. And while the company has said otherwise, it’s hard not to believe the whole incident with Mr. Noid actually did lead to the character being absent from advertising for decades.

But all controversy and downfalls aside, the Noid is a cute, weird, quirky mascot character through and through, and even with all the joking aside, a malevolent little gremlin who exists solely to ensure your pizza is ruined is kind of amusing as far as incredibly petty villains go. I have to say I have a soft spot for this weird little guy.

The Noid earns himself a nifty 6/10, which is three fourths of your average pizza, which is pretty cool. I really can’t justify any lower because his history is too fascinating and it’s not that he’s awful or anything, but I also can’t justify higher because, well… he’s an advertising mascot with very little personality to speak of.

While I think it is utterly bizarre that such a character was used to advertise pizza, his quirky design combined with the downright strange history to the character really help make him an interesting figure. His cartoonish antics in the commercials only help endear me a bit more to him; he has an old-school Looney Tunes vibe to him. I kinda wish Dominos would bring him back, especially in a day and age where mascots seem to be less important. I think the world would appreciate some more Noid zaniness.

#Psycho Analysis #The Noid #Dominos #Pizza #Mascot #April Fools #Pure evil #avatar of malevolence #nightmare fuel #True evil #Manifestation of sin

10 notes · View notes

baked-potatoes · 6 years ago

Text

Review - Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)

January 8, 2019

*spoilers included*

Directors: Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman

Starring: Shameik Moore, Jake Johnson, Hailee Steinfeld

Distributing Studio(s): Sony Pictures Releasing

Runtime: 117 minutes

Rating: PG

US Release Date: December 14, 2018

Synopsis: Bitten by a radioactive spider in the subway, Brooklyn teenager Miles Morales suddenly develops mysterious powers that transform him into the one and only Spider-Man. When he meets Peter Parker, he soon realizes that there are many others who share his special, high-flying talents. Miles must now use his newfound skills to battle the evil Kingpin, a hulking madman who can open portals to other universes and pull different versions of Spider-Man into our world.

I’m going on a Golden Globes film review tangent, AKA awards season buzzy movies! Expect some reviews of Best Film nominees from the Golden Globes and SAG nominations. I’m still on the fence to review Bohemian Rhapsody, partly since it’s been a while since its release and also since I have a particular bias towards it that would color my review. I did promise to review the winners of best picture (BR did win, surprisingly), so Green Book and Roma are definitely going on my list.

Enjoy my review of the movie that won “Best Animated Feature Film” at the 2019 Golden Globe Awards!

I have to say, this was, above all, a very refreshing take on the Spider-Man cinematic universe (that’s what I’m calling it). Most focus on the recognizable and relatable Peter Parker that we’ve grown to know and love from the Silver Age of the 60′s. But this movie really changed that expectation and gave audiences a funny and relatable take on the Marvel Multiverse.

Voice Acting and Screenplay

These characters had every opportunity to sound cheesy and contrived, or shallow and awkward characters, but the voice actors who took on each role shone through and made each character their own. Shameik Moore plays a biracial, not-dead-family Miles Morales, and it’s these two aspects that contribute to a rounded character. They don’t define his very existence (as some films use with heavy-handedness), but from his mother giving him kisses in the morning like many relatives do, to an emotional spiel from his dad about (a very complex) Aaron Davis’s death, these little details gently influence the plot and make a character you can’t help but root for. This ingenious young man who intentionally fails a test to get out of school is brilliantly portrayed and reminiscent of that Silver Age of comics, when superheroes became more human and more believably flawed. He undergoes a moving hero’s journey to fight amongst his inter-dimensional comrades and defeats the villain in splashes of color-- and this is where his character falls a bit flat with the screenplay during the final fight. It really was a fun and exciting fight, punctuated by those nostalgic comic book “booms” and text boxes, but although they give Kingpin a little sympathy, I feel like it’s not quite right. Well, it brings a huge amount of nostalgia to the movie, and it’s pretty badass.

However, I will give credit and say that Kingpin killed Morales-universe, charismatic, and new mentor Spider-Man (Chris Pine) within the first 15 minutes or so. Yes, there are multiverse Spider-Men so the gut punch isn’t as rough, but the ramifications for his death are real in his universe. Mary Jane (Zoë Kravitz) is devastated yet stoic as a mourning wife, and later on, she makes another powerful, somewhat bittersweet moment with another multi-faceted character in the multiverse.

And then, the other Spider-Man incarnations? Wonderful. We have Spider-Gwen, a seemingly typical Badass with a Past (I’m coining these expressions now) played very sympathetically by Hailee Steinfeld. We have John Mulaney playing Peter Porker (some of the best chaotic pig humor in the movie), Kimiko Glenn of Orange is the New Black playing Peni Parker (a bubbly, Sailor Moon-esque stereotypical anime girl who’s a wonderful crowdpleaser), Nicholas Cage playing a noir, near-emo sort of crime fighting Spider-Man (whose cape, as Miles notices, always blows dramatically in the wind).

And we come to the central multiverse Spider-Man, Peter B. Parker (as he notes tiredly), a depressed, middle-aged shadow of his former self. And once again, it could’ve been clichéd to another stereotype, yet uniqueness is what defines this movie. Jake Johnson plays this well. Peter B. Parker is wry and capable, but also exhausted and defeated. He narrates his life almost derisively, in that semi-humorous tone that defeated people feel when they’ve lost something in their life. When he comically stutters in front of Miles-universe MJ, he looks regretful yet reflective, wishing for something that he could’ve saved. It provides another soulful look into his character.

The story is a little bit by-the-numbers hero’s journey (expected in PG), but with this wealth of character development and clever fourth-wall jokes, it stands out in its story. Like I’ve said so many times, these characters could’ve been very obvious cliché buddy-cop stereotypes, but they’re well-rounded, mysterious characters that I could definitely explore in a sequel. Happily, Sony is making one!

Cinematography, Animation, Soundtrack

Some of the best sequences in this film reminded me a little of Black Panther, I’m not going to lie. I mean it as a huge compliment. This film’s cinematography was painstakingly created and brought to life by 140 animators, the biggest team Sony has had for a feature animated film. It shows so incredibly well. And the decision to animate backgrounds in smoother ones (one frame per action) and characters in twos (two frames per action) creates a quirky comic book feeling to the movie. The animation styles vary between Peter and Peni Parker, obviously, but that specific unconventional stop motion strategy (most movies use ones for characters and twos for backgrounds) feels like flipping a comic book all the way through, complete with hilarious yellow text boxes and bubble letter onomatopoeia.

And back to that Black Panther comment: why does Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse remind me of that? It’s the slow motion, brilliantly captured shots of Miles realizing what he can be and taking that leap of faith into the streets as the camera flips upside-down and “What’s Up Danger” plays. The result? As taken from the script, “he’s rising.”

What a film. What an atmosphere. The result is something I’ve never quite captured in any other superhero film. It’s not meant to be brutal or bloody or Superman-esque epic: it’s spellbinding and it knows what it is.

I could go on and on about this film and what a pleasure it is to watch, but I think I’ve said a lot. This is one of the most exciting animated films I’ve watched.

Summary and Rating

9.5/10 : Hot !

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider-Man:_Into_the_Spider-Verse

#bakedpotatoesreview #film #review #spiderman #spiderverse

3 notes · View notes

whereverthemusetakesme · 6 years ago

Note

1-10, 25

⊱asks for muns with a multimuse⊰

1. is there a muse that you wish gets more attention?

There are a few of them... but if I had to pick just one? Scout, for sure. I do get that she’s an obscure character even within her fandom, and no longer even relevant since the canon reboot - but that doesn’t stop me wanting to do things with her xD

2. if you HAD to choose, who’s your favorite muse?

Vanellope. Definitely Vanellope; she’s not only the cutest cutie, but also my favourite fictional character overall. Though I have to say that Lauren’s not far behind her... being as she’s 100% my own character, I’d not be a biased creator if I didn’t chose her xD

3. which muse is the trickiest to get into character for?

Recently? I’d say it’s been Mabel. I feel like the way I write her is hit-and-miss most of the time; but because there’s so much canon material for her I struggle to take all of it into account at all times, you know? I think I emphasise certain parts of her personality at the expense of others... and plus, I’m nowhere near as outgoing and bouncy as she is, which gives me trouble sometimes too xD

4. is there a muse that not a lot of people roleplay with?

I suppose that Cera, Lauren, Zoey, Babs and Vixey all fall under that category; each only have one or two people who interact with them at present. That’s the advantage of a multimuse blog, though; even when they don’t have that many interested partners, the blog as a whole still stays active - rather than collecting dust (and unanswered asks) the way Cera’s used to!

And then there’s Scout, who has had a grand total of zero roleplay partners so far, so is kind of in a category all of her own? xD;;

5. if you HAD to choose, who’s your least favorite muse?

That’s not even a contest... Taffyta, for sure. I mean, I have a lot of fun writing her, but... is she a butt, or what? xD

6. which one of your muses have you been playing the longest?

On the whole? Angel. That was... back on Proboards, eight years ago, my first rping experience ever - it was a Disney-themed site, and she was my favourite character at the time, so she was the natural choice - and I guess she’s just stuck with me ever since.

7. which one of your muses has the most ships?

Ships I’ve been part of through rp here? That’s got to be Margo ( @bespectacledkitten ), as the only muse who’s actively participated in more than one ship at all. Even then, she’s only had Antonio and Vale as shipping partners, so... not loads.

Though if we’re talking more just for whom most ships exist, regardless of my participation in them... well, poor Angel does tend to be shipped with just about anything on four legs!

8. what is each of your muses otps? notps?

Hm.

Angel: OTP is with Patch of 101 Dalmatians II; and while there are a lot of ships of her I’ve seen that I disagree with, I’d say my main NOtp for her has to be with Dodger. As a sibling-type bond between them... oh yeah, I’d be all for that! But I just can’t ship them... he’s too similar to her, wouldn’t be able to give her what she needed in a relationship.

Mabel: I don’t really have any OTP for her. I’ve never rped a ship with her, and while some of her canon ones can be cute, none really make me think yes must ship it! NOtps are with either Dipper or Gideon... both for obvious reasons.

Cera: I’m intrigued by her and Littlefoot as a couple, though I’d need to actually get to play around with that before I could truly call it something I ship... and I’m not really sure of her other options. I haven’t seen any other pairings with her to have a preference on.

Taffyta: I’m not opposed to shipping her, but I don’t have any so far. NOtp is with Vanellope.

Zoey: OTP is with Rudolph, pretty much by default! No NOtps yet... I don’t even feel justified in calling her and Arrow a NOtp at this point, since we see so little actual relationship between them in canon. They’re just a noncommittal meh at this point.

Vanellope: None. I just don’t ship her... so I guess any ship with her is a NOtp for me?

Vixey: OTP is Tod. Don’t have any NOtps at present.

Scout: Undecided. I don’t think I ship her with Whie, but... I’d need more in-character interactions with her before I could commit to anything, either way.

Babs: OTP is with Featherweight, honestly! I dunno, there’s just something about the idea of those two being together that really appeals to me. Don’t have any NOtps so far.

Lauren: Haven’t really considered it. Lauren’s asexual, in my mind, so it just... hasn’t been relevant for her.

Danielle: I dunno I have a specific OTP. At different times I’ve shipped her with Berlioz (Aristocats), Rolly or Lucky (both 101 Dalmatians: The Series), but none that I can really commit to as a ‘one true’ pairing. Likewise, I don’t really have any NOtps for her, either... I’ll just play her and see what comes ^^

(and Annette as a bonus: OTP is with Pooka from Anastasia. He’s really the only person I’d consider shipping her with, so... NOtp is everyone else? xD)

9. why were you drawn to each one of your characters?

Angel: She’s just... long been a favourite of mine. Not ever since I first saw Scamp’s Adventure, when I didn’t pay her specifically much mind, but... it must have been a couple of months later, when I rewatched it for maybe the fourth time, I just... fell for her. The way she’s had such a tough life, her curious combination of selfish and selfless, both of which made her so interesting to explore further... and, I’m not gonna lie, her being the CUTEST little thing didn’t hurt at all either x3 By the time the first RP site I was part of came around, she was just the obvious choice to go for; and she’s stuck with me ever since.

Mabel: She’s just so quirky and energetic and optimistic and fun... how could anyone who’s seen Gravity Falls not be drawn to her? I liked her as soon as I started watching the show (some years after it ended, granted), and by the time I finished it I was really warring with myself over whether or not to pick her up. As you can tell, my willpower lost that battle xD

Cera: She’s such a hard-headed, stubborn BUTT WITH A HEART OF GOLD and I love it x3 I mean, I don’t usually go for characters like that, but something about the way Cera pulls it off is just... plus, the fact that she’s kind of too cute to take her jerkiness that seriously helps, too!

Taffyta: Mostly? I first picked her up because my girlfriend rped as pre-movie Vanellope and was hoping for some more of the Sugar Rush kids to pick on her... and I thought I could oblige there. I mean, I’m not really drawn to Taffyta, she’s awful... but she’s also a fun departure from all my other characters too xD

Zoey: I think... I was drawn to her potential more than her herself. In Rudolph, Zoey really is portrayed as your ‘generic love interest’ character, she’s cute and determined and doesn’t judge him for his nose... and that’s really all we’re given. And I just saw so much more untapped potential for that character, that I wanted to take her and make her into something more than just what the movie did.

Plus, the fact that my gf rps as Rudolph on her multi-muse was a key factor in that choice, too x3

Vanellope: She’s just so... got everything that makes me like a character. She’s utterly adorable; she’s so fun and sassy; she’s really brave; she has scenes in the movie that completely break my heart for her; she’s JUST... precious cutie, must be protected at all costs. I’ve had fun writing her on a couple of short-lived Proboards sites, so when I started up the multi-muse, it seemed a perfect time to add her to my muse roster.

Vixey: Like Angel, Vixey wasn’t a liked her as soon as I saw her. I’d watched Fox and the Hound many times before I even really considered her beyond her role in the film... in fact, fun story, I first picked her up on that Disney-themed Proboards site I mentioned above. My girlfriend had been playing Tod on there; and the site was a war environment, and she was planning to get him killed in one of the battles. Now there had been previous rpers who had played Vixey on that site, but all of them had since left or vanished... so I just thought, wouldn’t it be fun to pick her up so she can be UTTERLY TRAUMATISED by her mate’s death? Fox and the Hound has been a favourite of mine since I first started liking Disney movies, after all.

And it was just, as I was looking through her scenes to get the inspiration to write her, I realised how much there was to love about this character. She’s smart, kind, romantic, of course... but she also doesn’t let herself get pushed around. She was never afraid to stand up for herself when Tod snapped at her... and, I’ll be honest, I started to notice all the little hesitancies in her speech, too - the “Oh, um, gosh” and such like - and just found they made it such FUN to write her dialogue... and I’ve been attached to her ever since!

Scout: Oh my goodness, Scout... where do I even start with her? xD Like Vanellope, she’s adorable, she’s smart, she’s got herself a sharp mouth... and her life’s been such a struggle that, when I reread the novel, I just felt for her so much. The way Sean Stewart describes her, captures her personality, is just SO PERFECT, she’s so real to me, so believable... I wanted to do things with her, I wanted to do her the justice that the rest of the SW expanded universe, beyond that novel, never seems to give her. She deserved more spotlight than just that one novel, and a minor role in another, and I wanted to give that to her.

Also, I’d been low-key looking for a Star W.ars muse to take ever since I’d seen The Last J.edi, and Scout (who had just vaulted to the top of my favourite characters list for that fandom despite her lack of Force talent) was the perfect choice for that.

Babs: She’s just my favourite pony. I’m not sure what, exactly... I guess in some respects, the tough but also cute kind of characters appeal to me? After we saw her in One Bad Apple, I just found her a really interesting character. There was so much we were given about her that the episode didn’t have time to expand on, and I’m curious to see that built on and developed. Like Vanellope, I played her on a couple of short-lived Proboards sites and had fun with her... and when I was thinking of other characters to add to this blog, I just came again upon some of the gif icons I’d made of her for that, which just made me want to write for her all over again.

Lauren: What can I say..? She’s the main character of an original story I’ve been trying to write for years; I’m indulging myself by playing her here xD Though, fun fact? She was originally scheduled to simply be a minor antagonist in that story’s initial conception. Then, as I started delving into her backstory - to find the reason why she was how she was - she just became more and more interesting to me than the girl who had been originally created as the main character. Slowly Lauren just kind of... pushed her out to gain the top spot in my affections for herself.

Danielle: I’m not gonna deny it, Annette’s always been my favourite of the cocker sisters... but that said, they’re all adorable, and I think I started to warm up to them about the same time I did with Angel. The personality, all the little ways the animators showed their distinctness... Annette stood out to me the most, as the smart one of the bunch, and even before I started rping at all I’d developed a whole detailed personality for her. Dani was always second for me, while Collette kind of lagged, just because I couldn’t relate to her in the same way as I could the other two.

I don’t really have much to offer for the why they particularly drew me in. Just... they’re totally adorable, what other explanation can I give? xD

10. which muse is the most fun to write for?

Ooh... I think that’s gotta be Vanellope too, truthfully - though each of the newest additions to the blog aren’t far behind her. Babs and Dani and Scout are all really fun to play around with, too :D

25. which muse do people send the most asks for?

Mabel and Vanellope, so far on this blog! Though... I can’t say I’m really surprised. Their fandoms do both seem to be active for the long run, especially here on tumblr, so it does make sense that they’re the most popular ^^

#amanymcsnmore #ooc #ask #meme response #long post #This... got a lot longer than I expected it to!#but it was also fun; thanks so much for sending it :D

4 notes · View notes

hagiographically · 7 years ago

Note

Could you talk more about Stanford stereotypes regarding literally anything (idk majors?) bc they way how you explain them is literally so funny/good

lmao aw ily, you can always come to me if u want my opinion related to anything stanford (stereotypes about dorms, sports teams, greek life, a cappella ??) because i have A Lot Of It - i only wish i was more integrated with the school cuz most of my opinions are hearsay instead of personal experience

major stereotypes….hmm thats hard cuz there are So Many majors but i can just go with the most common ones and group some together, etc

engineering:

aero/astro - small department full of space nerds, most of them are in SSI, drones, i personally consider them very brainy and if i were better at engineering i would be aero/astro cuz i think it’s the next frontier. there should definitely be more women in it for sure

bioe - my ex was bioe, they’re a bunch of nerds but they have good enough hearts. they care about curing diseases and shit

CS - oh boy. ohhhhhh boy. here we fuckin go. honestly CS is barely even a sterotype at stanford cuz its such a dominant culture…..the people who decide what stereotypes even are, are probably CS. it’s gotten to the point where if i meet someone and they aren’t CS it’s worth noting. it’s gotten to the point where, in my psych/literature/communications/education classes, i expect the other people to be CS. i have so many Opinions on CS Boys because CS Boys are such!!!!a!!!type!!!! (and different from just, a boy who does CS). they worship the trinity of google, facebook, and microsoft. their junior summer internship is at least one of these. they buy into all silicon valley startup culture and they love elon musk and talk about venture capital when its really not welcome. they love talking about how much work they have and how little they sleep. all INTJs. probably virgos. there is also a subgenre of CS boy who didnt come into stanford wanting to do CS and ended up switching because its easier to be a CS Boy at stanford. they criticize the culture all the time. to this you can say, “it’s all right, craig, i know you just want to make money.”

CME - people major in this when they dont love themselves

design - i personally think this major is fuckin cool and considered it before i realized physics was a pre-req. the d school is thought to be d for douchey though because their whole shtick is so ~ideate~ ~prototype~ ~We Are Quirky and Put Post-Its On Walls~ but i dug it as a frosh. they can be kinda condescending, but theyre by far the most interdisciplinary dept in the engineering major (although its also full of white men who think theyre hot shit cuz they can use photoshop)

EE - again for people who lack self love, its supposed to be so fuckin hard

MS&E - white frat boys who glorify jordan belfort

ME - similar to design. live at the PRL. stay up till ungodly hours carving wood. somehow this is enjoyable. also white male heavy

who knows how the f to categorize this:

education - if i could do stanford over i would major in this. usually very diverse, woke, often come from underprivileged backgrounds so they want to make it better for other people and reach communities that arent currently benefited (unlike silicon valley or wall street :) ) i respect them because they do what they love and not to make $ although if educational engineering were a thing im certain people would jump ship. it’s also not in the humanities dept so i feel like theyre Above the stanford hegemony and i love that

earthsys - i considered a minor in this. usually sweet, earth-friendly people. white but woke. possibly queer. granola loving hippies and maybe some frathletes who want an “easy” major but not sure (im not shitting on easy majors. i have one. love ‘em)

generally i like girls in any of the engineering depts because they are dealing with sexism and doing it. the boys are oftentimes extremely self-congratulatory and will usually say something dumb about the humanities. even the girls will hit you with the “oh i wish i could study that!” about any non-engineering discipline, and it’s implied that what they’re really saying is “but i care about my future too much!”

humanities/sciences:

AAAS/chicanx studies/asian-american studies/CSRE - woke poc who use lots of buzzwords and say things like folx

art - the people who major in art are usually more quiet than you’d think. we have an Artsy Type at stanf that are kind of extra (theta chi/EBF types, also very woke QPOC) but i dont think theyre art majors for the most part. i barely know any actual art Majors. lots of engineers just do art on the side

bio - i love bio majors because they are sciency but also get shit on by engineers so we’re in solidarity. they are sweet and study all the time and just wanna make the world a better place. there’s also the pre-med kind of bio who i would hate if i were also pre med but since im not i just kind of admire and fear them

chem - i like chem people much more than i thought i would. again a very small major and they just live in lab and have varied non chem interests. this year i accidentally became friends with like 6 people from the chem fraternity and i was surprised how much i liked them

complit/english - i was this major! english in creative writing are usually chill, interesting people. complit and english in literature…….it’s a shakespeare circlejerk and they hit you with the Discourse. overly educated white people. avoid the boys specifically but the girls can also be incredibly self-satisfied. maybe 50/50. but if you take a creative writing class instead of a lit class, the CW kids are usually awesome

taps - our drama department. they’re nice, but extra and intimidating. (also stanford theater is…..okay….not really as good as they seem to think it is yikes that was mean but) however, like with english, take an introductory class and you’ll meet very cool non-taps majors.

econ - oftentimes wonderful people! outside of class that is

femgen - same people as the AAAS/CSRE crowd except whiter. queer girls with undercuts. upperclassmen are intimidating to many. everyone shares their opinion even when its not warranted. my honors is in this

film studies - this was almost my minor and if i werent CW i might have doubled in film and comm! i dont know any film majors but if they arent a cole sprouse im sure theyre fine (they are probably a cole sprouse)

german/italian/french/spanish language or studies - spot the person who studied abroad!

history - like english, can be cool, more likely pretentious

humbio - the other premeds! actually humbio gets shit on alllll the time for being easy or having a fluff major, bio majors think they’re soft. thus, i like them. their course catalog is awesome and its a huge major but all the scary pre meds are straight up bio and humbios are softer but in a good way its a lot of sweet girls

intl relations - one of my favorite majors. usually very down to earth, the best of the IR/poli-sci/pub-po trinity. however, they can also be self-congratulatory for being So Woke and also they love to educate you when You Didn’t Ask

linguistics - weird, diverse people. very small major. similar to anthro, my old major. i love small majors they always have cute dinners together

MCS - a hard fuckin major. not as “Look How Smart I Am” as a bad CS. mostly quiet and stay in and study their ass off

math - love to wax poetic about the beauty of math. fun when drunk. not when sober

philosophy/MTL/classics - avoid. classics can be okay if it overlaps with archaeology because theyre just a bunch of nerds and they get really excited and its cute. phil majors would rather just educate you about how free will is fake and youre like tim can you please just get out of the way we’re in the dining hall and you’re blocking the cornbread

physics - Avoid. they think all other sciences are lesser. women and POC are ok

poli-sci - hit or miss. generally pretty friendly. very talkative. fun to talk to about Not Politics

psych - the best major hehe. generally liberal and woke and often queer. however, non-psych people in psych classes can be a nightmare (unlike english, taps, etc) and problematic as fuck. also sometimes psych majors are extra (exhibit a: me)

pub policy - probably in student government. im biased against it, but go in with hesitation. student government is by and large not as effective as they seem to think (however, a “woke” person in pub po might be cool because they will campaign for sexual assault awareness and economic diversity and good stuff)

STS - ohhhhh man. probably the major that gets most shit on at stanford. i think engineers think it’s fake. (humbio, design, and STS get shit on the most i’d say, because they are interdisciplinary STEM majors, so engineers think that they’re for people who arent smart enough to do hard majors. whereas with english or IR, engineers know they couldnt do it because they havent written an essay since 2009, so they offer grudging respect) a frathlete major. i personally like it because i dig interdisciplinary shit, but i don’t dig frat boys or athletes so i avoid. some of their courses are great but it does seem kind of scrapped together as a major and i dont know how people outside of stan see it

sociology - a small major, seems cool. stigmatized but not by stanford because stanford students dont know it exists. “dont you mean psychology?” no

urban studies - skaters? who knows. i respect them tho. i think they care about….like….architecture? and city development? its a very niche thing and i feel like it’s pretty hip n happening

#stanford #stanford university #majors #college #advice #stereotypes #stan

99 notes · View notes

hesitanthero · 8 years ago

Text

i guess ill post this then.....

1. Favourite colour: Green. But not like a shitty green. 2. Number of people you’ve slept with: 3.5 3. Cake or ice cream? cake 4. If you were a superhero what would your power be? Sarcasm. or something equally as useless. like being indecisive. 5. Ever been in a fist fight? with my brother. and this one time i accidentally hit this girl in the head with my elbow.. 6. Do you live in the country or the city? city. 7. Biggest kink? uhhhhhhhh 8. Favourite video-game? mario kart 64 9. Words you live by? “fuck bitchez; get money.” jk. “I am the architect of my own destruction” 10. Best book you’ve ever read? Ender’s Game or Speaker for the Dead 11. Favourite film? i… can’t.. choose just one…. Fox&Hound, Blade Runner, Fight Club and probably like 12 more 12. Horror or romance? Horror 13. Biggest fear? Clowns. Or Indoor Spiders. 14. Best memory? I have a bunch. But driving up to my cottage with my dad is always a good time. Listening to all the music he hates and me terribly singing it all to him. 15. Worst memory? Aside from the obvious shitty things.. probably when Angela friend broke up with my on my birthday. OR when Andy wouldn’t let me come over to his backyard to play when I was 5 and i just cried at our backyard border line while him and his brothers sang “No Girls Allowed” . fuckin. rude. 16. Where are you from? not here nor there. 17. Ever done anal? mhm 18. Would you prefer to be Mary Berry’s grandchild or Paul Hollywood’s bitch? …..Pardon? 19. Favourite outfit? Black on Black on Black on Black. 20. Snapchat or Instagram? Instagram 21. If you could freeze time what would you do? probably pants a lot of people. But freezing time seems like a pretty lonely power. 22. Best LUSH product in your opinion? probably some sort of soap. 23. Should people wear red shirts or brown pants in your presence? red shirts i guess? wtf is this. 24. Favourite television character? Robin Scherbatsky. Spinelli. Octavia Blake. 25. Do you have a nemesis? not really 26. Are you a hard-worker? depends what im doing i guess 27. What’s the best holiday you’ve ever been on? Paris was dope AF. 28. What’s your dream? probably something weird that doesn’t make sense like the rest of my dreams. ;) 29. Where do you see your life ending up? dead. 30. Describe your last sexual encounter. uhhh…. no sleep. pretty great. only 1 new bruise. she cute. 31. Cake by the ocean or sex on the beach? cake. 32. Ever done drugs? NEVER 33. Harry Potter or Lord Of The Rings? LOTR 34. Are you a jock or a nerd? probably somewhere in the middle. 35. On a scale of 8 to 34.7, how gay are you? 18.6498475. 36. Do you live for Tumblr discourse or hate it? meh. 37. Favourite trashy television show? most things i watch.. the 100, Wynnona Earp, The OC, Shot at Love with Tila Tequila… 38. Last time you watched porn? does scrolling through tumblr count because like.. an hour ago.. 39. Do you have a recurring sexual fantasy? not really 40. Weirdest dream you ever had? HA. They’re all weird. But this one time when i was really little I had a dream that my house was being attacked by acid monsters/ aliens and everything they touched melted. and one by one they melted all my family members until I was the only one left and i had a sword and then i woke up before i got melted. 41. Ever had mental health issues? plenty. 42. What’s the answer to the question you wish someone would ask you? 42 43. Do you wish people paid more attention to you? god no. 44. Do you have anyone who you’d happily slap right across their chops? yes. 45. Dog person or cat person? both 46. Sneakers or heels? Sneaks. 47. Favourite cocktail? Negroni 48. Day or night? night 49. Pokémon or Digimon? DONT MAKE ME CHOOSE!!!! 50. How big is your dick? like. 8/10 on rotten tomatoes. 51. Favourite musical? Rocky Horror 52. Favourite song? sunday candy atm. 53. Are you secretly a goblin/alien/android? android probably. 54. Why are you like this? because my mom ruined my life when i was a dramatic teen. 55. What’s your guilty pleasure? Shitty TV shows with terrible acting and scripts. 56. What would you say if I said ‘I love you’? i love you toooooooo 57. What’s the story behind your URL? i got bored of like 4 other ones. and i liked the alliteration. 58. Tell me something that worries you. Global Politics. and not being able to live comfortably because of the few opportunities for millennials with the rising costs of literally everything except my wage. 59. What have you been worrying about today? literally nothing. 60. I’m only sending you these questions because I have a crush on you and I’m too tragic to actually just say it. ;) 61. Hot dogs or burgers? burgers 62. Nintendo or the other trash-consoles? N64 specifically.. 63. Which fandom ruined a show that you used to like? Arrow. 64. What do you wish you could tell your best friend? u r a butt. 65. Tell us a deep dark secret. who is us? i dont have anymore deep dark secrets. 66. Are you curious about having a man in leather spank your botty ‘til it’s all red? no. no i am not. 67. Favourite Tumblr couple? what does this mean 68. Do you have any dietary quirks? probably. i don’t like dessert.. 69. Do you want to have someone pleasure your genitals orally while you do the same to theirs? k. 70. How old are you? 26 71. Which Buzzfeed listicle sums up your existence? “Sorry” 72. Do you have any pets? YES 73. What colour underwear are you wearing? maroon 74. Boxers or briefs? on who? briefs. 75. Fuck me, Ray Bradbury? no thank you? 76. Which television show do you want to last forever? Community. (its already over) 77. In a zombie apocalypse how long would you last? like 30 seconds. 78. Do you have good internet connection or do you want to punch your router every ten minutes? the latter. 79. Would you find it somewhat saucy if I sent bawdy nudes in your direction? wut 80. Which country has the best flag? Tamil Eelam 81. Do you consider yourself *iconic*? never 82. Most overrated food? Ketchup 83. Most overrated film? Titanic or the notebook 84. Most overrated television show? Friends 85. Most overrated type of cheese? Brie 86. Which brand would you never shop at? LV 87. Wisdom, courage, or power? Courage 88. Would you prefer to travel in time and stay in the same spot, or travel in space with time elapsing as normal? time elapsing. unless you’re stopping time again the other option is kind of impossible… 89. What’s the best birthday present you ever got? Art from friends. 90. What present do you wish someone would give you? the secret formula to krabby patties. 91. Do you have an ex? Why did you break up? yes. and yes. 91. Why does 91 appear on this list twice now? because someone dun fucked up. 92. Spare a thought for the humble creator of this list, it’s difficult to think of this many questions. no. 93. Do you prefer anons or non-anons? i don’t get either sooooo 94. Who do you wish you could have sex with more than any other? i don’t need to have sex with anyone THAT badly to have this answer ready. Krista. 95. What is your spirit animal? probably a fox. 96. Do you have one word that you really love the sound of? lederhosen. 97. Do you still have any of your stuffed toys from when you were a kid? yes 98. What makes you super nostalgic? 90s cartoons. 99. Give me an answer to a random one of these questions. (But don’t make it a shit answer like ‘yes’. Don’t be an asshole.) im not answering this. 100. What’s your favourite cocktail? you asked me this already 101. Sonic screwdriver or Ron’s shit broken wand from the second Potter book? sonic screwdriver. 102. Laptop or PC? laptop 103. What’s the sexiest accent in your opinion? Aussie. 104. Would you let Donald Trump tickle your nipples for an hour for £6,000,000? Only if he dies after. 105. You should check out a great little British website called Pretty52. no. 106. If you could dye your hair any colour, what colour would you change to? Hwhite. 107. What would you change about your body if you could? too many to list. 108. Do you prefer to be hot or cold? cold 109. What’s your favourite way to orgasm? slowly. 110. Are you a mermaid or a unicorn? neither. i am an android as discussed above. 111. What’s the name of your favourite pet when you were a kid? Nermal. 112. What was your favourite class at school? Art 113. Are you superstitious? not really. 114. What do you think happens when we die? people forget. 115. Pie or pi? neither.. but pie i guess. 116. Your followers a question. no. 117. Lick my genitalia. k. 118. What’s your favourite number? 13&18 119. Do you ever look up at the stars and feel small? frequently. 120. Do you have a good relationship with your parents? occasionally. mostly? 121. Tell me about a quirky personality trait. im the most normal what are you talking about. 122. What was your favourite story when you were younger? any Robert Munsch book probably. 123. Are you old before your time or young at heart? Y@H 124. Why do you do the things you do? Please. Tell me. I cant help it. 125. I hope you enjoyed these questions. 6/10 126. Which Tumblr blog would you recommend to all your fans? anything with cats.

3 notes · View notes

neptunecreek · 5 years ago

Text

EFF's 2019 Pioneer Awards Winner Remarks and Speeches

EFF’s annual Pioneer Awards ceremony celebrates individuals and groups who have made outstanding contributions to freedom and innovation on the electronic frontier. On Sept. 12, EFF welcomed keynote speaker Adam Savage, who spoke on the importance of storytelling, scientific exploration, and personal discovery. And each of our honorees had important messages to share with us: legendary science fiction author William Gibson reminded us how early science fiction shaped the world we live in now; the inspiring anti-surveillance group Oakland Privacy showed how we can stand together to make lasting differences in how technology is used in our communities today; and trailblazing tech scholar danah boyd challenged everyone in the tech world to shape a better future.

Opening the ceremony was EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn, who framed the evening by reminding us that we must articulate what that better future looks like and work to make it happen—because "honestly, we don’t have any other choice." Additionally, she underscored how important it is to recognize our past and move toward a better future. "Even now, especially now, we need hope," she said. "In the end, we cannot build a better world unless we envision it and talk about it."

Below are transcripts or prepared remarks of the keynote and award winners' speeches. Audio of the entire ceremony is available here, and individual audio recordings of each speech are below.

Opening Remarks by Cindy Cohn

Audio

Thank you so much, Aaron. I am just delighted to see everyone here tonight and to honor these amazing people. Tonight we take a moment to celebrate our community.

But as we begin I want to send a moment out for our friend Chelsea Manning, who is again incarcerated by a vindictive government. Our hearts go out to her and we wish she could be with us here tonight.

On to our awardees. Each of them will have an individual introduction, but I think tonight’s awardees represent a great cross-section of the work that is being done to make our digital world better.

Executive Director Cindy Cohn delivers the opening remarks

First, there’s Dr. danah boyd, who has spent her professional life trying to figure out and reflect back to us the ways in which people, especially young people, are interacting with technologies. That would be enough, but danah has now gone far beyond that to both support and inspire other researchers and build a community thinking about how Data and Society do and should interact.

Second, there’s Oakland Privacy, who represent what a supporting, inspiring, grassroots community can accomplish – putting the city of Oakland far ahead of the national conversation on these issues.

And finally William Gibson, whose imagination and storytelling have framed our digital world, with both its benefits and its perils. William pioneered the vision that we needed, and he did so before EFF and these awards even existed

We gather tonight in a time of reckoning and change for our community. It’s one where we desperately need to articulate and push for a better technical world because so many people have lost hope: unable to think of the future as anything but a dystopian hellscape, even as they feel trapped behind their phones or their keyboards.

Outside our world, the blush of tech-excitement has given way to a tech-lash that is needed. If not conducted thoughtfully, however, this moment threatens those who most need digital tools to keep themselves safe. It threatens those who have used and are using the Net to find community, support, and solidarity, and join together to find and implement solutions to many, many problems we see pressing against us all. Politicians of all stripes are angry at those big, brand name tech companies, powerful and unaccountable, but for very different and often sharply contradictory reasons. But as they shoot at Big Tech, we know that the public interest Internet, the marginal voices it has empowered and the innovators that could challenge and reform the current status quo, all sit nearby and stand a great risk of becoming collateral damage. We must not let that happen.

So far, we’ve seen that many of the efforts to combat the problems of big tech actually threaten to empower and ossify it. I shed no tears for the big companies, who join John Perry’s weary giants of Flesh and Steel as the unwelcome would-be governors of cyberspace. But if we want to move toward an Internet that works for us, where power is shifted to the users and builders and away from the Wall Street financiers and surveillance capitalists who would turn us into insecure, surveilled rats in a maze, we must step up now more than ever.

But there’s a reckoning inside our world too. Recent events have demonstrated the need to take a hard look the shift from technology being a niche issue led by quirky geeks and outcasts to one of big business, with the attendant money and power and corruption. We also need to look at the frankly horrible treatment that some in tech have wrought: from young girls to aspiring women scientists and technologists to contract and gig workers to people of color both in the U.S. and around the world. We must address our roles and own blind spots in letting this happen to so many. We must address the ways in which our embrace of the hero-narrative, and a hunger for the fruits of innovation, allowed a world in which being a genius made it OK to be an asshole, or much worse. Those days must be over now, and I say good riddance.

But this shift requires work by all of us who believe that technology can be a force for good in the world. It won’t happen automatically and the decisions along the way are not simple. We must do it together. We must stand with the survivors and ensure that, as we do so, we work to bring people of good will and good intentions along with us.

Barlow said, echoing Alan Kay, that the way to make a better future is to invent it. And it’s true. But as recent events have unfolded, I think that even he would likely have had to reconsider some of his own role in creating some parts of this world. But I also know that Barlow would have wanted the unvarnished truth, and was always hopeful we would find ways to discover it, and that ultimately that truth would help bring us to a better place.

Even now when the tools we built to help us see have given us the clarity to uncover the very worst. When we’ve built systems that let everyone speak, we must accept that those new channels will be filled with the voices of those who have long been silenced, who speak their truth and make us confront their pain. We also know that they are filled with those who want to keep them silenced.

Even now, especially now, we need hope. In the end, we cannot build a better world unless we envision it and talk about it. Being here with all of you tonight renews my faith that there are so many good, smart, thoughtful and kind people in this community. And we know that there are many more of us out there, outside our community, waiting to come in. We must revel in each other and not let the awful things we’ve heard and seen make us turn away from the truth, or each other.

So that’s my challenge to all of you tonight. Even as we’re unflinching in talking about and addressing the problems and harms that our current world has created or encouraged or even just rides alongside, we must also articulate what a better future looks like and work to make it happen. Honestly, we don’t have any other choice.

Now, on to the celebration part of the evening.

Keynote Speech by Adam Savage

Audio

I want to start by thanking EFF for asking me to be here and deliver this keynote. I've been a supporter and true believer in your mission since its inception. I was lucky enough to be at your 20th birthday party and party with John Perry Barlow, whose long-distance vision of the promise and perils of the Internet was prescient, to say the least.

I'm humbled to be in the room with tonight's award winners, each heroes in their own right. Specifically, Mr. Gibson, if you knew how much your books meant to my early days in San Francisco, they equate to me at 24 first coming here in 1990 and the city that I found when I moved here. And so I want to thank you personally for all the time I've spent and the realities that you have weaved.

I wanted to talk tonight about facts and stories. I've had a lot of different jobs and even careers in my life so far. Even in hosting MythBusters for 14 years on Discovery Channel, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what that job actually was.

Adam Savage delivers the keynote to the 2019 Pioneer Awards

In the first season, newly divorced and going through the particular insanity that befalls all of the recently divorced, three months into filming, I stopped dating entirely just to hunker down and figure out what this new endeavor of hosting a TV show was asking from me, what I had to contribute to it. And the answer would take me more than a decade. At first, I thought I was there to build stuff and talk about it. And then I realized maybe my job is to concoct entertaining scientific methodologies and execute them and talk about them. And then I thought it was to make something explode in every episode. That may have come from a note from the network. In 2006, I met Neil deGrasse Tyson for the first time and did his podcast, and I was sitting across from him, watching him go, and thinking, "Look at this guy. He is like an arrow pointed towards a goal of illuminating science for people." To use a phrase from Mr. Gibson, "He is vat-grown for this job." He is a science communicator. What a great mission. Wait a minute. I'm a science communicator. What a cool mission. Albeit, I'm a science communicator with only a high school diploma.

In 2008, we filmed an episode called Lead Balloon in which we made a 14-foot diameter balloon out of 28 pounds of rolled lead. No explosions. No fire. And when we talked to editorial about this episode, they expected that the cut for the lead balloon portion of the episode would maybe be 15 minutes. The first rough cut of Lead Balloon was 55 minutes long. The final cut was so thrilling and rated really well.

And I realized that one of the key things that made this episode great was Jamie's and my enthusiasm. If we were engaged, it turns out, so was the audience. And that's when I started wearing more costumes on the show, and it's when Jamie started asking questions that had no myth at all attached to them, like, "Well, if you could put square wheels on a car, how fast would you have to go to get a smooth ride?"

It took us two tries. The first try, all four of the brakes fell off the car at the same time, an injury I would have trouble doing if you asked me to do it on purpose. On the second try, the answer was 38 miles an hour.

It wasn't until season 11 that I realized the simplicity of my job. Storytelling. We were there to tell a story about the search for a hidden truth, to quote Raymond Chandler. Often, a hidden truth in something absurd. That, in fact, it turns out, was all I had ever done for a living.

When I spent several years as a graphic designer, and every designer will tell you this, the final design works not because it has the proper information, but because that information tells a story to the person who's looking at it. Your eye is guided to the right parts of the design at the right time. Instead of using time to tell a story like in a movie, a graphic designer uses space to parcel out the information so our brains can process it.

When I was working as a model maker in commercials and films, making spaceships, attaching little details to a ship, we called them greebles. Every single greeble has to have a story attached to it, and that story has to be known by the model maker gluing that greeble to that ship. Otherwise, it won't work aesthetically, because the surface details on the Millennium Falcon tell a very different story than the surface details on the Enterprise. The model maker is required to know that story. Otherwise, the story won't scan.

And on MythBusters, the story was one of scientific discovery but of also personal discovery. It was about watching Jamie and Kari, Tory, Grant, and I, and Jessi, and the entire team confront new ideas and new materials, and collaborating and learning what they can do, and seeing what we can learn from them.

Stories are what make us human. I think that we invented language in order to tell stories. I think the story is the first mover. We don't prioritize stories enough culturally, in my opinion. Every one of us has been annoyed by the self-proclaimed science geek who simply spits out facts they found on Reddit that day. It is an easy mistake to make, because we are trained in school to think like this. Fields like math and science and geography are most often taught in public schools as monolithic groups of facts to memorize by the test next Tuesday.

And when you make people memorize endless math tables or state capitals or the freezing point of elements, you lead them to believe a terrible thing, that facts equal knowledge. But they don't. Knowledge comes from taking facts and putting them in a context with each other. That context is narrative.

I have a great example. My high school freshman earth science teacher, Dan Frare, was telling us about glaciers, and he was trying to explain the features you saw in glaciers as they were moving. And he was trying to explain how slowly they moved. And he said to us, "The best way to picture a glacier is it's a river on Quaaludes." It was the '80s.

In fact, it was so long ago, I would go to Dan Frare's class at lunchtime, because I didn't have any friends. And I would pepper him with questions about science, and he would sit there and chain smoke in school while grading papers. This is a different time. Wait a second. Where was I? Quaaludes. Yes.

This is a beautiful way to talk about glaciers because it actually gave me a deep understanding of the physics of a glacier in one sentence. He took facts, and he put them in a story and gave my brain that story for the rest of my life.

Having told stories in the service of both art and science, I feel uniquely qualified—and you should know, I feel uniquely qualified for very few things—I feel uniquely qualified to tell you that I've come to understand that far from being at either end of a spectrum of human experience, people often say, "Oh, it's both an art and a science." And what we do when we say that is we place those things in opposition to each other and at a distance from each other.

And what I have come to understand is that science and art are simply both ways of telling stories, and for the same reason. We use these stories to figure out the shape of the universe around us. I'm telling you all of this to talk about what I see as the two important missions that the EFF has been fulfilling throughout its tenure. One is, of course, the legal and logistical aspect of their job. Fighting in court, writing amicus briefs, and tirelessly using the tools available to them to help all of us enjoy a safer Internet with proper privacy, autonomy, and genuine dignity.

But in addition, in order to wake up the public to the realities of the problem, it's not enough to recount just the facts, ma'am. We have to make compelling arguments for why we need privacy and safe spaces as well as free speech and openness. And in addition to the legal vanguard it occupies, EFF is also always working to help people understand what they are fighting for and how the issues affect them.

In order to understand the thing, we need to see our place in and adjacent to it. And this is arguably the most difficult part of their job. Tonight's award winners are here for the fight, and just as much, they are here for the stories, because it is a universal human truth that when we share and listen to each other's stories, the world moves forward in a positive way.

We are living through a difficult and critical time. I now truly understand the meaning of the famous curse, "May you live in interesting times." And I am genuinely not sure that we're going to make it out of this. It is the central fact of my current and probably all of our current existence.

But if we make it out, and I believe this with my whole heart, if we do make it out, it'll be because we have listened to each other's stories and connected with realities different than ours, than the ones we might occupy, and we have worked hard to let all of those stories be told. I hope we do. Thank you so much to EFF, and thank you for your time.

Acceptance Speech by danah boyd — "Facing the Great Reckoning Head-On"

Audio

I cannot begin to express how honored I am to receive this award. My awe of the Electronic Frontier Foundation dates back to my teenage years. EFF has always inspired me to think deeply about what values should shape the internet. And so I want to talk about values tonight, and what happens when those values are lost, or violated, as we have seen recently in our industry and institutions.

But before I begin, I would like to ask you to join me in a moment of silence out of respect to all of those who have been raped, trafficked, harassed, and abused. For those of you who have been there, take this moment to breathe. For those who haven’t, take a moment to reflect on how the work that you do has enabled the harm of others, even when you never meant to.

The story of how I got to be standing here is rife with pain and I need to expose part of my story in order to make visible why we need to have a Great Reckoning in the tech industry. This award may be about me, but it’s also not. It should be about all of the women and other minorities who have been excluded from tech by people who thought they were helping.

The first blog post I ever wrote was about my own sexual assault. It was 1997 and my audience was two people. I didn’t even know what I was doing would be called blogging. Years later, when many more people started reading my blog, I erased many of those early blog posts because I didn’t want strangers to have to respond to those vulnerable posts. I obfuscated my history to make others more comfortable.

I was at the MIT Media Lab from 1999–2002. At the incoming student orientation dinner, an older faculty member sat down next to me. He looked at me and asked if love existed. I raised my eyebrow as he talked about how love was a mirage, but that sex and pleasure were real. That was my introduction to Marvin Minsky and to my new institutional home.

My time at the Media Lab was full of contradictions. I have so many positive memories of people and conversations. I can close my eyes and flash back to laughter and late night conversations. But my time there was also excruciating. I couldn’t afford my rent and did some things that still bother me in order to make it all work. I grew numb to the worst parts of the Demo or Die culture. I witnessed so much harassment, so much bullying that it all started to feel normal. Senior leaders told me that “students need to learn their place” and that “we don’t pay you to read, we don’t pay you to think, we pay you to do.” The final straw for me was when I was pressured to work with the Department of Defense to track terrorists in 2002.

After leaving the Lab, I channeled my energy into V-Day, an organization best known for producing “The Vagina Monologues,” but whose daily work is focused on ending violence against women and girls. I found solace in helping build online networks of feminists who were trying to help combat sexual assault and a culture of abuse. To this day, I work on issues like trafficking and combating the distribution of images depicting the commercial sexual abuse of minors on social media.

By 2003, I was in San Francisco, where I started meeting tech luminaries, people I had admired so deeply from afar. One told me that I was “kinda smart for a chick.” Others propositioned me. But some were really kind and supportive. Joi Ito became a dear friend and mentor. He was that guy who made sure I got home OK. He was also that guy who took being called-in seriously, changing his behavior in profound ways when I challenged him to reflect on the cost of his actions. That made me deeply respect him.

I also met John Perry Barlow around the same time. We became good friends and spent lots of time together. Here was another tech luminary who had my back when I needed him to. A few years later, he asked me to forgive a friend of his, a friend whose sexual predation I had witnessed first hand. He told me it was in the past and he wanted everyone to get along. I refused, unable to convey to him just how much his ask hurt me. Our relationship frayed and we only talked a few times in the last few years of his life.

So here we are… I’m receiving this award, named after Barlow less than a week after Joi resigned from an institution that nearly destroyed me after he socialized with and took money from a known pedophile. Let me be clear — this is deeply destabilizing for me. I am here today in-no-small-part because I benefited from the generosity of men who tolerated and, in effect, enabled unethical, immoral, and criminal men. And because of that privilege, I managed to keep moving forward even as the collateral damage of patriarchy stifled the voices of so many others around me. I am angry and sad, horrified and disturbed because I know all too well that this world is not meritocratic. I am also complicit in helping uphold these systems.

What’s happening at the Media Lab right now is emblematic of a broader set of issues plaguing the tech industry and society more generally. Tech prides itself in being better than other sectors. But often it’s not. As an employee of Google in 2004, I watched my male colleagues ogle women coming to the cafeteria in our building from the second floor, making lewd comments. When I first visited TheFacebook in Palo Alto, I was greeted by a hyper-sexualized mural and a knowing look from the admin, one of the only women around. So many small moments seared into my brain, building up to a story of normalized misogyny. Fast forward fifteen years and there are countless stories of executive misconduct and purposeful suppression of the voices of women and sooooo many others whose bodies and experiences exclude them from the powerful elite. These are the toxic logics that have infested the tech industry. And, as an industry obsessed with scale, these are the toxic logics that the tech industry has amplified and normalized. The human costs of these logics continue to grow. Why are we tolerating sexual predators and sexual harassers in our industry? That’s not what inclusion means.

I am here today because I learned how to survive and thrive in a man’s world, to use my tongue wisely, watch my back, and dodge bullets. I am being honored because I figured out how to remove a few bricks in those fortified walls so that others could look in. But this isn’t enough.

I am grateful to EFF for this honor, but there are so many underrepresented and under-acknowledged voices out there trying to be heard who have been silenced. And they need to be here tonight and they need to be at tech’s tables. Around the world, they are asking for those in Silicon Valley to take their moral responsibilities seriously. They are asking everyone in the tech sector to take stock of their own complicity in what is unfolding and actively invite others in.

And so, if my recognition means anything, I need it to be a call to arms. We need to all stand up together and challenge the status quo. The tech industry must start to face The Great Reckoning head-on. My experiences are all-too common for women and other marginalized peoples in tech. And it it also all too common for well-meaning guys to do shitty things that make it worse for those that they believe they’re trying to support.

If change is going to happen, values and ethics need to have a seat in the boardroom. Corporate governance goes beyond protecting the interests of capitalism. Change also means that the ideas and concerns of all people need to be a part of the design phase and the auditing of systems, even if this slows down the process. We need to bring back and reinvigorate the profession of quality assurance so that products are not launched without systematic consideration of the harms that might occur. Call it security or call it safety, but it requires focusing on inclusion. After all, whether we like it or not, the tech industry is now in the business of global governance.

“Move fast and break things” is an abomination if your goal is to create a healthy society. Taking short-cuts may be financially profitable in the short-term, but the cost to society is too great to be justified. In a healthy society, we accommodate differently-abled people through accessibility standards, not because it’s financially prudent but because it’s the right thing to do. In a healthy society, we make certain that the vulnerable amongst us are not harassed into silence because that is not the value behind free speech. In a healthy society, we strategically design to increase social cohesion because binaries are machine logic not human logic.

The Great Reckoning is in front of us. How we respond to the calls for justice will shape the future of technology and society. We must hold accountable all who perpetuate, amplify, and enable hate, harm, and cruelty. But accountability without transformation is simply spectacle. We owe it to ourselves and to all of those who have been hurt to focus on the root of the problem. We also owe it to them to actively seek to not build certain technologies because the human cost is too great.

My ask of you is to honor me and my story by stepping back and reckoning with your own contributions to the current state of affairs. No one in tech — not you, not me — is an innocent bystander. We have all enabled this current state of affairs in one way or another. Thus, it is our responsibility to take action. How can you personally amplify underrepresented voices? How can you intentionally take time to listen to those who have been injured and understand their perspective? How can you personally stand up to injustice so that structural inequities aren’t further calcified? The goal shouldn’t be to avoid being evil; it should be to actively do good. But it’s not enough to say that we’re going to do good; we need to collectively define — and hold each other to — shared values and standards.

People can change. Institutions can change. But doing so requires all who harmed — and all who benefited from harm — to come forward, admit their mistakes, and actively take steps to change the power dynamics. It requires everyone to hold each other accountable, but also to aim for reconciliation not simply retribution. So as we leave here tonight, let’s stop designing the technologies envisioned in dystopian novels. We need to heed the warnings of artists, not race head-on into their nightmares. Let’s focus on hearing the voices and experiences of those who have been harmed because of the technologies that made this industry so powerful. And let’s collaborate with and design alongside those communities to fix these wrongs, to build just and empowering technologies rather than those that reify the status quo.

Many of us are aghast to learn that a pedophile had this much influence in tech, science, and academia, but so many more people face the personal and professional harm of exclusion, the emotional burden of never-ending subtle misogyny, the exhaustion from dodging daggers, and the nagging feeling that you’re going crazy as you try to get through each day. Let’s change the norms. Please help me.

Thank you.

Acceptance Speech by Oakland Privacy

Audio

Mike Katz-Lacabe: So I first have to confess I'm not just a member of the EFF. I'm also a client. Thank you to Mitch Stoltz and your team for making sure that public records that I unearth remain available on the Internet for others to see.

So as Nash said, Oakland Privacy's strength comes not just from the citizens that volunteer as part of its group, but also from the coalitions that we build. And certainly every victory that is credited to us is the result of many, many other coalition members, whether in some cases it's the EFF or the ACLU or local neighborhood activists. It's really a coalition of people that makes us stronger and helps us get the things done that sometimes we not always deservedly get as much credit for. So I want to make sure to call out those other groups and to recognize that their work is important as well and critical for us.

EFF's nash presents a 2019 Barlow Award to members of Oakland Privacy

My work for Oakland Privacy comes from the belief that only from transparency can you have oversight, and from oversight derives accountability. So many examples of technology that have been acquired and used by law enforcement agencies in the Bay Area were never known about by the city councils that oversaw those police agencies.

In the city of Oakland, it was seven years after the city of Oakland acquired its stingray cell site simulator that the city of Oakland and the city council became aware of the use of that device by the police. In my city, I live in San Leandro, it was five years before the city council became aware of our city's use of license plate readers and a very notorious photo of me getting out of my car that was taken by a passing license plate reader got published on the Internet.

We do our best work when working together. That's been said. Let me give you ... speaking of stories, I'll take take off from Adam's talk here. For example, recently journalist Caroline Haskins obtained a bunch of documents pertaining to Ring, you may know the Ring doorbell, and its relationship with police departments. A post about a party that Ring held at the International Association of Chiefs of Police meeting with basketball player Shaquille O'Neal, where each attendee got five free Ring doorbells. That was highlighted by EFF Senior Investigative Researcher Dave Maass.

I, or we as Oakland Privacy, we then found a social media post by the police chief of Dunwoody, Georgia saying, "Hey, look at this great party with Ring, and there's Shaq." Dave then went and took that information, went back and looked at Dunwoody and found that subsequently, a few months later, Dunwoody was proud to announce the first law enforcement partnership with Ring in the state of Georgia. What a coincidence.

Oftentimes it's these coalitions working together that result in prying public records free and then establishing the context around them. The work we do involves very, very exciting things: Public records requests, lobbying of public officials and meeting with public officials, speaking at city council meetings and board of supervisors meetings. We're talking, this is, primo excitement here.

So, as was mentioned, our work with Oakland Privacy was helpful in getting the first privacy advisory commission, an actual city of Oakland commission going, within the city of Oakland. It's this organization, led by chair Brian Hofer, that passes policies regarding surveillance technologies, and not only passes policies but actually digs down and finds out what surveillance technologies the city of Oakland has. It has been a model for cities and counties, and we're proud that our work will continue there in addition to working on many other issues surrounding surveillance.

In fact, I would be very happy to tell you that we've had ... just recently the California assembly and the Senate passed a ban on the use of face surveillance on body-worn cameras. Again, our work with coalitions there makes the difference. And now, I would like to introduce another member of Oakland Privacy, Tracy Rosenberg. Tracy Rosenberg: Thank you, Mike, and hi, everyone, and thank you so much for this wonderful award. We are honored. We're splitting up the speaking here because Oakland Privacy is a coalition and is a collective, and that's important to us. We have no hierarchy after all these years, and I've been doing this for five years. All that I get to call myself is a member. That's all I am.

I want to highlight, there are people in the audience that are not coming up on stage. J.P. Massar, Don Fogg, Leah Young. There are people that are not here whose names I won't mention since they're not here, but it's always a coalition effort.

And this week I've been jumping up and down because the broader coalition that includes EFF and Consumer Reports and ACLU and a bunch of other people, we just stood down the Chamber of Commerce, the tech industry, and pretty much every business in California in order to keep the Consumer Privacy Act intact.

There were six people on a whole bunch of conference calls, you don't want to know how many, and somehow we actually did it. It's official as of today. There is power in coalition work.

I'm incredibly grateful to Oakland Privacy because I was incredibly upset about the encroaching surveillance state, and I didn't know what to do. And in the end, in 2013, Oakland Privacy showed me what I could do, and I will never be able to repay the group for that.

I was thinking back to our first surveillance transparency ordinance in Santa Clara. EFF actually came down, and they took a picture of me speaking at that meeting and put it on their blog, and I thought, I wish I could put into words what lay behind that picture, which was 11 stinking months of going down to Santa Clara and sitting in that room with the goddamn Finance and Governmental Operations Committee where they were trying to bury our ordinance because let's face it, the powers that be don't want transparency. And every month standing there and saying, "I'm not going to let you do that. I'm just not."

We succeeded. It became law, I think it was June 7th, 2016, which doesn't feel like that long ago. And now there are 12. Eight of them are here in the Bay Area, a couple in Massachusetts, Seattle, and somehow Nashville did it without us and more power to them.

So I think that's pretty much what I kind of want to say here. I mean, what Oakland Privacy does fundamentally is we watch. The logo is the eye of Sauron, and well, I'm not a Tolkien geek, but I deal with what I am a part of. Hey look—I went to a basement, it was all guys. It is what it is. It's a little more gender-balanced now, but not entirely. But the point is that eye kind of stands for something important because it's the eye of "we are watching," and in really mechanical terms, we try to track every single agenda of God knows how many city councils there are in the Bay Area. I think we're watching about 25 now, and if a couple more of you would volunteer, we might make that 35.

But the point is, and every time there's a little action going on locally that's just making the surveillance state that much worse, we try to intervene. And we show up and the sad truth is that at this point, they can kind of see us coming from a mile away, and they're like, "Oh, great. You guys came to see us." But the point is, that's our opportunity to start that conversation. Oakland is a laboratory, it's a place where we can ... And Oakland's not perfect. All that you need to do is take a look at OPD and you know that Oakland's not perfect. Right? But it's a place where we've been able to ask the questions and we're basically trying to export that as far as it possibly can, and we go there and we ask the questions.

And really, the most important part to me and the part that gives me hope is we get a lot of people that come to the basement to talk to us and basically share with us how dystopia is coming, which we know. It's here. There's no hope, right? But when those people find the way to lift up their voices and say no, that's what gives me hope. So thank you. Thank you and Brian Hofer is also going to make a final set of comments. Thank you.

Brian Hofer: So my name is Brian Hofer, I recently left Oakland Privacy. I founded Secure Justice with a handful of our coalition partners that are, some of who are in this room tonight. And we're going to continue carrying on the fight against surveillance, just like Oakland Privacy. I also had the privilege of chairing the city of Oakland's Commission, as you heard earlier, and it's an honor and a privilege to be recognized by EFF for the same reasons that my former colleagues have been saying, because you've been standing next to us in the trenches. You've seen us at the meetings, lobbying, joined in the long hours waiting at city council meetings late at night just for that two minute opportunity that Nash is now an expert at. You know how much labor goes into these efforts, and so I really want to thank you for standing next to us.

This path has been pretty unexpected for me. I quit a litigation job, was unemployed, and I read this East Bay Express article by Darwin BondGraham and Ali Winston based on public record requests that Oakland Privacy members had founded. And there's a little side bar in that journal that the very next day, just fate I guess, that this upstart group Oakland Privacy was meeting and that I could attend it. It's even more strange to me that I stayed. It was a two hour discussion about papier-mache street puppets and the people asking me if I was a cop when I walked in. Nobody wanted to sit next to me.

So when I finally spoke up and asked how many city council members they spoke to, the room got quiet. And so that became my job, because I was the one guy in the suit. At the honorable Linda Lye's going away party a couple months ago, I remarked that if we had lost the Domain Awareness Center vote, I would have never become an activist. I would have returned to my couch. I spent hundreds of hours on that project, and I would have been really disillusioned. But March 4th, 2014, which was the vote, is still the greatest day of my life. We generated international headlines by defeating the surveillance state in the true power to the people sense.

It was quite a contrast the following morning, on the Oakland Privacy list, when the naysayers thought the world had ended in calamity. Little did they know, that was the formation of the ad hoc privacy commission; we were about to change the conversation around surveillance and community control. EFF is directly responsible for helping us form that privacy commission in Oakland, and so it's my turn to congratulate you. Matt Cagle of the ACLU, Dia Kayyali, and myself were sitting around trying to figure out how to make it a permanent thing, and we noticed that another piece of technology was on the agenda. We didn't have any mandate or authority to write a privacy policy for it. But Dia signed a letter with me asking that we be given that task.

It worked, and that established the Privacy Commission as a policy writing instrument that remains today. As our colleagues were saying, that's been the launching pad for a lot of this legislative success around the greater Bay Area. It's the first of many dominoes to fall. I want to close with a challenge to EFF——and not your staff—like any non-profit, they're overworked and underpaid, because I'm sending them work and I don't pay for it. I was supposed to insert an Adam Schwartz joke there. I believe that we're in a fight for the very fabric of this nation. Trump, people think he's a buffoon. He's very effective at destroying our civic institutions. The silent majority is silent, secure in their privilege, or too afraid or unaware how to combat what's going on. So I'm going to tell you a dirty secret about Oakland Privacy: we're not smarter than anyone else. We have no independently wealthy people. We have no connections. We didn't get a seat at the table via nepotism or big donations. We have no funding for the tens of thousands of volunteer hours spent advocating for human rights. And yet as you heard from the previous speakers, the formula of watching agendas, which anyone with an Internet connection can do in their pajamas, submitting public record requests, which anyone can do in their pajamas, and showing up relentlessly, which in Berkeley and Oakland, you can do in your pajamas—that led to a coalition legislative streak that will never be duplicated. That four year run will never happen again. So I ask that you challenge your membership to do the same, pajamas optional. We need numbers. We need people to get off their couch, like me, for the first time. The Domain Awareness Center was literally the first time I ever walked inside the open city hall, and I apologize for the police lingo, but your membership is the force multiplier and it's critical that more folks get involved. If you don't already know, somehow next week turned onto facial recognition ban week. Berkeley, Portland, Emeryville, we have our Georgetown national convening where I know EFF will be. It's critical that new diverse faces start showing up instead of the same actors. As Tracy said, they can see us from a mile away. We need more people.

In October, we expect four more cities to jump on board. Only one is in California, demonstrating that this isn't just a Bay Area bubble. It's got legs. And like the Domain Awareness Center moment, we've got a chance to change the national conversation, and we better take advantage of it. Thank you for this honor and thank you for this award.

Acceptance Speech by William Gibson

Audio Thank you, Cory. And thank you, danah boyd. I will confess, I was actually ... I will confess I was actually a bit worried about coming down here and getting to this part of the evening and not having heard what she said or something very like it. And I found that a dismaying worry, and it's now been dismissed. So thank you.

This is the second time this year that I've received an award I wasn't expecting. The first one, Science Fiction Writers of America's Grand Master Award, I foolishly assumed I was too young for. With this one, though, I'd not thought it a possibility because I'm very probably, and I'm sure I could win a big bet with this, the least technically literate person in this room. I seem to be here, though, I seem to myself to be here, because in the early 80s, knowing nothing whatever about computers, I began to listen to those who did, drawn not by their understanding, but by their vernacular poetics. Because I'm an English major. I got my B.A. in it, my specialty is in comparative literary critical methodologies. And when that also comes in really handy for a novelist is when we get a really shitty review. But what I actually did to come up with that stuff was sit in the bar at '80s SF cons in Seattle and eavesdrop, really really intensely. And then I would deconstruct the poetics of the computer literate.

Author William Gibson accepts his 2019 Barlow

The first time, for instance, that I heard interface used as an active noun, I physically swooned. Likewise, virus as a term of digital technology. That was where I first heard that as well. Made my eyes bug out, visibly. And if you don't believe me, I'll refer you to a scene in Neuromancer where Case, my street-smart cyberspace cowboy, finding that the going's just gotten particularly rough, issues an urgent call for a modem. Because I had, I confess, no idea what a modem was. But I loved the sound of the word. However, there's another scene in Neuromancer, one in which Case overhears sort of in background, partly what seems to the reader to be an infomercial for children, and it's describing something it calls, "The Matrix," with a capital M, which seems in context to be the sum of all this cyberspace thing that Case is always running around in. But there's also in that little infomercial, there's a strong suggestion that the majority of that, of cyberspace, the majority of the content, is banal, everyday, absolutely quotidian. And by putting that in, I think I actually got that right. I somehow guessed that it all wouldn't be shit-hot cowboys versus a new order of giant corporations. So tonight, receiving this award from EFF, which by the way, I first heard of as a twinkle in John Perry Barlow's eye, though probably over the phone because he could do that. I'm very, very grateful that EFF exists, that it exists today to confront, among other things, the threat of the new order of giant corporations making it their business to gather magnitudes of utterly banal little bits of business about all of us. So thank you, EFF.

Special thanks to our sponsors: Airbnb; Dropbox; Matthew Prince; Medium; O'Reilly Media; Ridder, Costa & Johnstone LLP; and Ron Reed for supporting EFF and the 2019 Pioneer Award Ceremony. If you or your company are interested in learning more about sponsorship, please contact [email protected].

from Deeplinks https://ift.tt/2Q4mmUb

#Deeplinks

0 notes

gretagerwigarchive · 7 years ago

Text

‘Lola Versus’ Star Greta Gerwig On Working for Woody Allen, Dating Gay Men and What She and Parker Posey Have in Common

'Lola Versus' Star Greta Gerwig On Working for Woody Allen, Dating Gay Men and What She and Parker Posey Have in Common

Nigel M. Smith, Jun 6, 2012 11.

source: http://www.indiewire.com/2012/06/lola-versus-star-greta-gerwig-on-working-for-woody-allen-dating-gay-men-and-what-she-and-parker-posey-have-in-common-46942/

Indiewire sat down with Gerwig in Manhattan to discuss her recent slate of projects, and what it was like auditioning for Woody Allen.

This spring/summer alone you’re opening three of your highest profile films to date. Are you fearful of being overexposed?

No. I’m not in a position where I feel overexposed. It’s not like the combination of a Woody Allen Film, a Fox Searchlight film, and a Whit Stillman movie is the same thing as being in “Transformers” and something else crazy. Maybe to a certain audience I’ve become overexposed, but in general it doesn’t feel like that to me. But I suppose you never really know what’s going on. You just get the results.

Did you shoot all three back to back?

No, I had a big break between “Damsels” and “Lola.” But I did shoot “Lola” and Woody back to back.

About “Lola” — have you ever experienced heartbreak on that scale? You convey it so palpably.

Oh! I think the biggest heartbreak I ever experienced was when I was actually much younger, when I was coming out of high school going into college. That was this role, full-body, crazy heartbreak. I didn’t specifically relate it to that, but I was destroyed by it. The emotions you can feel at 18 are unlike emotions that you feel until something like this happens to you. I think they’re so all encompassing. I have not had something this traumatic happen, but I certainly can empathize with it.

I read in an interview that you were dumped by a lot of gay men?

I was! [Pauses.] I was going to launch into a story, but then I decided against it. But yeah, I have dated a lot of gay guys. I love them. They’re good boyfriends in lots of ways. And, I don’t know, if you like the chase there’s always something to chase there [laughs]. They really cannot be pinned down [laughs]. Not by me, that’s for sure.

So going from Violet in “Damsels” to playing Lola, it’s interesting to note that both experience severe heartbreak in each film. Their journeys both take off after hitting an all-time low in their lives. Did you see the similarities between the two women; were you wary of going down a similar path so soon after wrapping “Damsels”?

No, they’re so different. They kind of seemed like night and day to me — the way the characters felt and the way the characters dealt with things. I suppose there are some similarities but it just seemed they existed on different planets. So I didn’t have any fear that, oh this is already tread territory. I think a lot of movies you end up doing do have similar territory in some ways, and it’s up to you to find the thing about them that makes unique, different and special. You don’t always have control over what parts you play. But with these, they just seemed wildly different.

Now both Daryl and Zoe — their own journey kind of mimics your own, having begun by making a micro-budget feature and moving on to working with a company like Fox Searchlight. Did you feel an affinity with them and where they’ve come from? Is that what attracted you to their story?

Yeah. I definitely know the path that they’ve travelled. Their film was at SXSW, and I got my start at SXSW. I feel that they really seized upon a moment of making something of their own for very little money. I really admire that kind of chutzpah, going for it, and really doing it yourself. It wasn’t specifically what attracted me, but it is an affinity I feel for them.

Rumor has it you began work on your script during your time spent making “Lola.” Did they inspire you…

I can’t talk about that.

No?

No, yeah. I don’t talk about that [laughs].

Why so mum on it?

[Laughs nervously]. I just can’t talk about it. I’m being very good about this. I’m just not doing it.

OK…moving on. You’ve worked with some amazing directors over the course of your relatively short career.

I know.

Which one left the most indelible impressions on you as a writer, and as someone that wants to venture out and apply yourself in more areas?

I think one of the things that’s kind of amazing about being an actor is that you get to be on so many different film sets. Directors even when they’ve made lots of films, have still generally been on less film sets that you have. So in some sense you know a lot more about how films sets are run, and different ways to approach filmmaking. I think more than anything I’ve taken little pieces from each person I’ve worked with. It’s a personality thing. I think a lot of my favorite directors are very quiet. Woody Allen’s very quiet. He’s not a loud person. Neither is Whit. He’s very self possessed. There’s a measured, quiet, deliberate essence to who they are. That’s very useful in filming, because filmmaking is so chaotic. There’s so many things that can go wrong. And it takes so long that you need to have an enormous amount of patience, and ability to see things through even when things seem like they’re going to become a mess.

I think as far as writing, I love reading and I love writing. Words mean a great deal. With Whit, certainly words mean so much to him. That’s what I look for. I love it when you read a script and it feels perfect; it feels like a poem or something. Unlike a novel, they’re sparse. There aren’t that many words that end up in a script, so they have to be exactly right. I think taking that kind of care is something I really admire.

How did the whole Woody affair come about?

I auditioned for it. I met with his casting director and she had a feeling that maybe he’d respond to me in some way. I don’t think he totally knew who I was. This is what I’ve been told, so I’m not so sure on all of this, but apparently they showed him some clips and stuff, and I guess he liked my appearance on Letterman. I don’t know what it was.

Well if you can handle yourself on Letterman…

Yeah, I guess that’s what he figured. But then I know that Whit Stillman showed him footage of me, which seemed like good auspices because he had showed footage of Mira Sorvino to Woody, from “Barcelona” to go into “Mighty Aphrodite.”

I auditioned for him, then I came back. I read the script with him, then he directed me. I think a lot of people have these experiences with him where he walks in and looks at you, it’s two seconds, and then he says you’re hired or not. But I had a full on audition situation. I’m just happy I wasn’t fired [laughs]. I’m just really happy I didn’t get cut from the film. I had a really fun time making it. I would love to do one because it went by so fast.

So given the fact that you knew his hiring method going into the audition process, what was going through your mind as he kept the process going on longer than usual?

Well I just thought, this definitely means I didn’t get hired. It was two part thing. The first time I had a two second thing. And then the second time I came in for a longer audition. I did think a lot about what I was going to wear, because I thought if Woody Allen is going to look at your for two seconds, what do you wear? I think I ended up wearing a plaid shirt and penny loafers, which I think was totally weird, but I thought maybe I’d just try to be myself, and not second guess what it is I think he wants. How could you ever know that? And then I wore the same thing for the call back because I didn’t want to jinx it. Maybe he liked the outfit? I’m not sure.

But yeah making the movie was really exciting but very scary. It definitely felt like jumping into a frozen lake.

He works with a lot of actors for a second, third time. This film finds him working with a lot of newcomers to his world, folks like Jesse Eisenbeg and Ellen Page. Did you three bond together?

Yeah. I mean Alec Baldwin who I acted with in this, he’d been in a Woody Allen movie before. He’s Alec Baldwin, so he’s suave and awesome as always. But I think without putting words in their mouth, I think Ellen, Jesse and I were nervous. We all had a little trepidation working for Woody. On the first day we were just wildly nervous. He’d walk over and give us direction and we’d be like, that’s Woody Allen and he just told us to do it better. That was really exciting and fun. It was nice to be together for that, otherwise it could have been an isolating experience.

It was amazing for us. It was a really fun shoot, and it’s a really funny script. It feels like vintage Woody, and that’s exciting. But also shooting in Rome was beautiful. And the Italian schedule is very laid back. We would have very long lunches. The driver who drove me, Jesse and Ellen was named Spartacus, which was a completely exciting name. And Spartacus would go out to lunch with us all the time, so it was the three of us and Spartacus, and we’d go to these restaurants in the middle of the day. It was so laid back. It was this dream job. I’ve never had more fun on a movie ever. If it had lasted all year I would have been very happy. I wish it was a television show [laughs].

Speaking of great names, is Greta Gerwig your real name?

Yeah, Greta Gerwig is my real name. My mom likes alliteration and my dad’s name is Gordon Gerwig, so she wanted a G name for me and so I’m Greta Gerwig.

You lucked out.

I know I did.

It also screams indie film for some reason. Maybe it just sounds quirky, maybe I’m completely daft.

Me and Parker Posey. Alliteration — that’s what’s up. But Marilyn Monroe, alliteration, not indie film queen.

Maybe she could have been.

Yeah, you never know. I feel she really wanted to do crazy stuff.

#2012 #Interview #Greta Gerwig #Lola Versus #Woody Allen #Damsels in Distress

0 notes