#if only both were younger/older than the relative… but then the plot would be impossible of course

[withthewindinherfootsteps]

Parallels in the Yi City arc: Yi City Quartet & 3Zun

(Long post ahead!)

I think one overlooked detail about the Yi City arc is how closely its characters parallel the story of 3Zun – with Xiao Xingchen as Lan Xichen, Xue Yang as Jin Guangyao, and Song Lan and A-Qing as aspects of Nie Mingjue! Though we can't know if its intentional, the sheer number of similarities does suggest to me that it shouldn't be overlooked – so, let's investigate.

Both Xiao Xingchen and Lan Xichen play the role of the 'betrayed' — significantly, because of some sort of blindness.

While for Xiao Xingchen this is physical, Lan Xichen is also blind to Jin Guangyao's true nature. This blindness has been shaped by their betrayer: Xue Yan blinded Song Lan, leading to Xiao Xingchen sacrificing his own eyes for him, while Jin Guangyao deliberately acts to make himself appear honourable and innocent to the people he encounters. This means Lan Xichen cannot 'see' anything contradictory to this about him. This theme of blindness becomes important to the thematic implications of this arc, which we'll talk about later.

In both cases, the 'betrayer' has some role in shaping this blindness, and uses it to their advantage.

Xue Yang blinded Song Lan, causing Xiao Xingchen to give up his eyes for him. Jin Guangyao's crafted persona is the reason Lan Xichen doesn't suspect anything about him. Xue Yang uses Xiao Xingchen's blindness to conceal his identity/nature and thus get close to an unsuspecting him; Jin Guangyao is likewise able to be unsuspected, while using Lan Xichen's generosity to murder Nie Mingjue and gaining a strong ally/defender. Regardless of intent towards Lan Xichen himself, this is still true.

This leads to an identity reveal and betrayal, in which the former party is blindsided (...pun not intended, I couldn't find a better word).

Xiao Xingchen is shocked that Xue Yang is Xue Yang when A-Qing tells him; Lan Xichen likewise does not want to believe Jin Guangyao isn't the person he thought he knew (though, he does promise to evaluate his beliefs!), and when Jin Guangyao ends up sealing his spiritual powers and betraying him, he doesn't see it coming.

Additionally, Lan Xichen and Xiao Xingchen are both tricked into stabbing a member of their group, as a part of someone else's revenge.

For Lan Xichen, it's an outside party (Nie Huaisang); for Xiao Xingchen, it's another member of this group (Xue Yang). Nie Huaisang wanted to take revenge on Jin Guangyao, and Xue Yang wanted to take revenge on Xiao Xingchen himself.

Also, Lan Xichen was tricked by his Xue Yang counterpart into being an instrument for a group member's murder, which could also parallel these events on Xiao Xingchen's side!

So, why is this important?

A common theme in MDZS is being critical of information/rumours. Don't accept something at first glance – question the validity, the evidence, the reason it's being brought up. We see this in the way Lan Wangji acts (eg when discussingg the case of the Chang clan) and in how he teaches the Juniors; we see this in how Wei Wuxian questions the words and intentions of Sisi and Bicao, even when having people suspect Jin Guangyao would be beneficial to him; we see this in the very premise of the novel, as something we were led to believe was true at first glance (by the title and prologue) is proven to be entirely false.

And, in Lan Xichen and Xiao Xingchen's case, we see the dangers of the opposite. That's not blaming them – Jin Guangyao is a very good manipulator and I’d argue Lan Xichen handled the situation very well when it was raised, and Xiao Xingchen was physically blind and couldn’t have guessed the body on the roadside would be Xue Yang of all people – but factually, both characters believed something without having seen the full picture, and were stabbed in the back for it. Lan Xichen could have considered Nie Minjue's words to provide another perspective, and Xiao Xingchen could have inquired into this mysterious person's background and questioned whether they were exploitative (even if it may have been unreasonable, and wouldn't have changed much since Xue Yang is a very good liar), yet both didn't. They both do accept or try to accept what we know is the truth when it's raised to them, but unfortunately it's too late and both pay a steep price. It's also worth noting that both are considered righteous figures (you can debate about Lan Xichen, but that's his in-universe perception), and neither had malicious intent towards any group member. But it doesn't matter how good your intentions are, or how good of a person you are – if you believe things unquestioningly, it'll still lead to harm. Both to you, and unintentionally by you, too. After all, this unquestioning acceptance of one-sided hearsay is a major driver of the mob mentality so heavily critiqued in the book.

And yes, this could've worked had their stories not so closely paralleled each others' – but I'd argue Xiao Xingchen's physical blindness serves to lampshade the metaphorical blindness of Lan Xichen, accentuating this theme. And also having two similar stories helps draw attention to what both of them are saying much more easily than if the stories had been very different.

At the end, however, Lan Xichen is left alive and able to reflect on what led him to this scenario – unlike his spiritual predecessor. Perhaps this is a glimmer of hope, a sign that there is more room for the questioning of rumours and for critical thinking skills in the world now, especially as the younger generation who embodies this begins to grow up; or perhaps it's just another detail of just how doomed Xiao Xingchen was, because despite embodying this theme, was there anything to reflect on and do differently, that would've changed the outcome of his story? As we said before, Xue Yang is a very good liar, and there really wasn't a reason to constantly suspect him from the information Xiao Xingchen had and (more importantly) could feasibly gather. Regardless, the difference in where they end up is important when analysing similarities, and I'm inclined to believe it is a small sign the world can change for the better.

(Similarities on other members under the cut – because there are a lot for everyone else, too, and this post isn't just about the two mentioned above. Once more, we'll be analysing both the 'what' and the 'why'.)

Xue Yang and Jin Guangyao play the role of the 'betrayer' or 'villain', hiding the fact that they're causing and wanting to cause harm – successfully from one member, unsuccessfully from the other(s).

The 'What'

Both kill the suspecting, the main difference being who they're targeting with this action (for Xue Yang, this taints Xiao Xingchen further, whereas Jin Guangyao was simply targeting Nie Mingjue and not Lan Xichen at all). Additionally, both are from a lower-class*, non-cultivator background, who were taken in by the Jin sect and rose to power through this and through doing… morally dubious things. Both share revenge as a motivator – specifically, revenge against an older, male Sect Leader who used them, rejected them and physically harmed them in some way too (Chang Ci'An due to Xue Yang being a street child; Jin Guangshan due to Jin Guangyao being the ‘son of a prostitute’). However, they have both accomplished this revenge goal at the time of their main story. They also have worked together and helped each other in their actions in the past (Villainous Friends extra). Also, both end up losing a hand to Lan Wangji, coincidentally enough.

The 'Why'

Though classism is a present theme in both their stories, I wouldn’t say this is what the parallels are drawing attention to — it’s drawn attention to much more when dealing with Jin Guangyao, and the idea that being treated badly isn’t an excuse for your actions is more prevalent in contrast (with characters like WWX and A-Qing) than similarities. Thematically, they instead serve to show just how easily information can be twisted and distributed – and again, why it's so important we don't accept everything at first glance. Outside of themes, their parallels do contrast them slightly, too — after all, Jin Guangyao’s treatment of Lan Xichen** is much more positive than Xue Xang’s of Xiao Xingchen, despite the ‘betrayed’ treating both of the similarly. But, one could argue, how much does this actually matter? Considering the eventual harm brought to this figure by them regardless, and everything else each of them did? Whatever the answer, the questions are raised by these similarities between them.

Finally, Nie Mingjue is paralleled by both Song Lan and A-Qing in different ways, though the Song Lan parallels are more prominent.

The 'What': Song Lan

All three were killed by the ‘betrayer’ — however, both Nie Mingjue’s and Song Lan’s murders occured before the betrayal, and their deaths and post-mortem identity reveals play an important role in it. A-Qing witnessing Song Lan’s death (as well as just discovering Xue Yang’s identity from Song Lan) is what makes her tell Xiao Xingchen who Xue Yang is, catalysing that betrayal, and Xiao Xingchen discovering Song Lan’s identity makes the betrayal have… let’s say even more of an impact :’). Meanwhile, the identity reveal of the mysterious corpse triggers the investigation of Jin Guangyao, and also starts to catalyse his downfall, leading to the events of the Guanyin temple. Additionally, both turn into fierce corpses encountered by the cast of the main story (both fighting Wen Ning and starting more antagonistic than they end up), with these corpses having been modified in some way by the ‘betrayer’: Nie Mingjue’s corpse is cut up, and Song Lan’s has the needles inserted and is under Xue Yang’s control. I wouldn’t especially say there are themes or questions raised here, it’s more similarities in the group dynamic, but it’s still very interesting to see.

There isn't as much to say here on the 'why' side of things, though there may be something I'm missing. The role of these characters here is mainly in service of the themes in the other characters' arcs – but it's still useful to analyse just how many factual similarities there are, again to give us hints as to whether these parallels between the groups were intentional or not.

The 'What': A-Qing

A-Qing and Nie Mingjue have less parallels, but they definitely exist. Their role here is their constant suspicion — they both suspect and keep suspecting the ‘betrayer’’s actions, despite the trust of the ‘betrayed’ in them (though Nie Mingjue is certainly more violent in this regard). Additionally, both play an important role in the death of the ‘betrayer’ as undead beings: the ghost of A-Qing by constantly tapping her bamboo pole to reveal Xue Yang’s position, and Nie Mingjue’s fierce corpse by directly killing Jin Guangyao. Both are souls through which Wei Wuxian experiences the events of their stories, and both also end the story in some sort of container — Nie Mingjue in the coffin and A-Qing’s broken soul in a spirit-trapping pouch — but admittedly that’s much more flimsy than the rest of my points.

The 'Why': A-Qing

Though at first glance it seems like this suspicion didn't do anything positive for the characters – both ended up dead at the hands of the one spreading/taking advantage of misinformation – it's important to note that these characters are the characters the truth is revealed through. Though I'd argue Nie Mingjue was probably blinded by his own assumptions as much as Lan Xichen was blinded by his own, even if it did end up lining up more closely with the truth, he still plays the same role as A-Qing in questioning and suspecting somebody despite it appearing – on the surface – that there's nothing wrong. And I don't think it's coincidence that in both these cases, the truth is revealed through somebody who did play this role.

Final Thoughts

Though it is possible these parallels were still coincidences, there really are a lot of similarities between the groups' storylines – and they do serve the purpose of important themes within the book. Therefore, I don't think it's unreasonable to assume they were intentional on some level! And even if I'm reading too far into things and they weren't? It doesn't mean they hold no value.

Finally, these parallels are really interesting on their own, but it’s also really interesting to compare where each group ended up. Both groups ended up destroyed due to murder done by the ‘betrayer’, with only one person left standing. However, while Xue Yang was the survivor of the Yi city group (and was later killed by LWJ), the survivor of the Venerated Triad was Lan Xichen — someone who, as mentioned, though heavily affected, now has the chance to grow as a person and fully take things with all their context because of it. So despite the prevalence in the Jianghu of the attitude MXTX is critiquing, despite Wei Wuxian, Lan Wangji and Mianmian only really being able to find peace by stepping away rather than changing it, despite the tragedy of the stories of both the Yi City quartet and of 3zun... ultimately, these parallels could indicate hope.

—

*Although there is a big difference in how much lower this class is, of course.

**There is also the aspect of Xue Yang having a negative past with Xiao Xingchen before, with the opposite being true for Jin Guangyao and Lan Xichen. Jin Guangyao is known to have a good memory and hold grudges — so, if the pairs’ roles were reversed, would anything fundamentally change?

[nileqt87]

More thoughts on how to resurrect the Indiana Jones franchise post-Harrison Ford

Perhaps a proper, modern television show would be a good way to bring back a younger, but adult Indy (with perhaps flashbacks littered throughout). You can also get away with a lot more content (definitely aim for TV-14) and characters who are allowed to be flawed. Relationship dramas are serialized storytelling's forte in a way that is disappearing more and more from blockbuster films. Complicated characters are better left to television, as the audience expects and allows for it because of the nuance and depth the serialization affords. The complicated, messy story of Abner and Marion is a story best left to being explored only after the characters have some real complexity and development. It also wouldn't be forced to play to the mass audience of under-13s that makes modern PG-13 often meaningless. In comparison, TV-14 actually pushes up harder against its limits regularly--not just violence, but also with innuendo and sexuality minus nudity. The amount of historical-style, pulpy violence, not to mention potentially comically gruesome deaths, in Indy would also necessitate the rating. Indiana Jones might be niche enough at this point with an audience veering towards adults who grew up with it (Gen-X and the older end of Gen-Y), while Gen-Z has little awareness of it, that Disney wouldn't be forced to make it a total kiddie property. It's not the same situation as back in the early '90s with Young Indy being aimed at older kids who had recently seen Last Crusade in the theater. They could reboot it for television with a young adult Indy who potentially could grow into a fully adult version. And I wouldn't try too hard to not step on the trilogy's toes with the timeline. Just let it live in its own developing continuity.

Use of long-running supporting cast (parents, Remy and returning guest stars aside) would also be a big difference from Young Indy. Characters like Belloq (could potentially go from friend to antagonist, akin to how Smallville handled Lex), Sallah, Henry, Brody, Abner, Marion, etc... could actually be around a lot more than just for an adventure here or there. These are all characters Indy had clearly known for years. Actually put the show into a seasonal, serialized format that isn't a new cast every episode. You could also stick around in locations a lot longer this way, which would help with budget.

Another thought I've had since watching an absolute ton of fantasy/sci-fi dramas in the last few years is that the influence of Indiana Jones is actually pretty apparent in a number of pretty famous characters, sometimes overtly and sometimes a bit more subtly. Harrison, Indy or Raiders in general are outright name-checked in quite a few places, often by scrappy action hero types who tend to take hard beatings (the kinds of characters who should've died a hundred times over) while in situations they're way over their heads in or literally impossible odds they can't win. Like Indy, the intended prize isn't won at the end and, outside of a few gruesome baddie deaths, the shady, corrupt or evil barely get a dent. Fox Mulder and Dean Winchester are two characters who name-check the comparison overtly and you can see the writers and actors both having the influence in mind. It's obviously a male fantasy, too. The influence on The X-Files and Supernatural is definitely there. Supernatural is chock full of biblical MacGuffins (not to mention having angels and demons as most of its recurring supporting cast), so it would be a hard comparison to avoid. Raiders came up in the WWII Nazi submarine episode with a piece of the Ark onboard (it's subsequently a show to raid for Indy ideas, because they pretty much mined everything biblical), for example. The X-Files likewise was dealing with shady government officials and pretty blatantly copied the huge warehouse of government secrets loaded with alien relics (and then repeated the Cigarette Smoking Man's warehouse reveal with the tunnel of filing cabinets stretching on forever). Mulder was also very much a one-man army a lot of the time when it came to the alien conspiracy (no offense to Scully). Moments like him climbing/riding the tops of sky rides, trains and escaping the spaceship were total Indy-esque moments. Sam and Dean had literal God-tier levels of plot armor keeping them alive (repeated resurrections included). Angel is another one that, unlike Mulder and the Winchesters being very human, is a supernatural character (subsequently his level of pain tolerance and durability is at the level of regular impalement, defenestration out of skyscrapers and being set on fire), but the comparison still holds because of how often he's getting decimated and fighting forces way beyond his pay grade. Wolfram & Hart, the Shanshu and seeking redemption with the Powers that Be, like the mytharc conspiracy/alien takeover and literal God a.k.a. Chuck, is another endless, unwinnable fight that is so far beyond all the protagonists that there's no win/happily ever after and they'd be lucky just walking away from it with nothing. Angel also name-checks Indy with a blatantly Indy-inspired fantasy dream episode (Awakening in season 4) with Angelus making a crack about the Raiders fantasy. George Lucas actually visited the Angel set back in 2000 and was interested in how they were making mini movies every week and doing some pretty huge stunts on television. David Boreanaz had lunch with Lucas and has talked about it a few times over the many years. I mean, these are all shows starring action-oriented leading men and writing staffs of relatively similar age. Mostly Gen-X males with a few Baby Boomers (more so on the writing staff) with an audience that's primarily Gen-Y but appealing to a pretty broad age range (and probably a lot more female than originally intended!). Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Harrison Ford films in general were very formative to that generation. Harrison Ford is the ultimate leading man action star to a certain generation. Gen-Y got their familiarity with all of that by being the original home video/VHS generation and subsequently a lot more familiar with retro media (including things that were made before they were born or around that time) than Gen-Z. '80s movies have a lot of currency and familiarity still with Gen-Y, even if Baby Boomers were the stars of them and Gen-X were the ones who saw them in theaters. Gen-Y fangirls absolutely dominate the fandoms of many iconic television supernatural/sci-fi franchises (many are admittedly aging franchises). The WB/CW have catered to this group of fans for the last two and a half decades. If you're going to be reviving the character as a mid-20s-to-30s version (if the show lasts long enough, it probably will be stepping on the trilogy's toes timeline-wise by the end), I'd absolutely be aiming for this same audience and their tastes. They're also the audience who would be most receptive to and familiar with the character, IMO. If I were going to reinvent Indiana Jones for the television landscape, I would definitely be looking at those sorts of shows that have influence from the character already in their DNA. I think for the target audience, they'd definitely need to be aiming it at the same fanbases. Young Indy mostly tried to avoid stepping on Raiders' toes (despite Temple of Doom and Mask of Evil already making it ludicrous) by limiting the amount of supernatural elements, but I think a show would have to go all in on it. Indy would have to be transformed a bit in regards to trying to line him up with a character who would still be skeptical after all he's seen. Young Indy ended up forced into being a straight period drama with educational elements, which is very counter to what the audience wanted. There are things to keep from that approach (meeting historical persons, being a WWI veteran and witnessing history could absolutely be mined as backdrops to the stories), but the supernatural elements would have to exist in a revival now to get the audience who I think would be most receptive to it. While I would aim for a serialized drama format that would mean the globetrotting wouldn't have to completely change locations every episode (have it instead in arcs with some bigger MacGuffins and baddies perhaps crossing entire seasons), it's true that there would probably have to be more location filming than good, ol' Vancouver, but Disney is one of the few who could afford it (though Covid certainly would throw a wrench in it and political situations could potentially kill off certain locations). There's only so much green screen that Indy could get away with, though I imagine that a fair amount of it would have to be used for period piece reasons alone. There are a lot of modern intrusions even in historically-intact cities (Eastern Europe comes to mind as having a lot of its architecture intact and is affordable to film in) and around iconic landscapes to paint out. But at its core, it probably would need to bulk up its focus on the relationship dramas. Indy tends to have a girl at every port and to a degree you would introduce some of these love interests, but there's still a lot of relationships of every kind that could be developed and serialized. Certainly throw in a few femme fatales and tragic losses, given the Smallville-esque situation of there being an inevitable Indy/Marion endgame that should be kept--it thus becomes about the journey when it's a set conclusion. Absolutely have a strong recurring cast of Henry and friends new and old. The films actually have a lot of characters that Indy didn't just meet yesterday and could be developed to a huge extent. For a show to work now, there'd have to be a lot more connectivity to how often the recurring cast appear. Young Indy had a lot more of an anthology format with little chance of us getting attached to most of the revolving cast outside of a very tiny few. That's the biggest thing I'd change. You need characters to become regulars beyond just Indy if it were revived for modern cinematic television (the true successor to the film serials of the '30s!) in a way that isn't necessary for film installments.

[smartguyreviewed]

2x5 - Dumbstruck

Original air date:  October 8, 1997

Yay, an episode where TJ is actually acting like a kid! And also an excuse for me to rant about how much I despise group projects.

A very over it Lisa Simpson (played by Yeardley Smith) is handing back tests to her dumb ass students save for TJ and this annoying white kid named Clark that we’ll be introduced to briefly because Mackey ended up being the lead token white on this show, right next to Yvette’s cute friend Nina.

Clark asks how TJ did. He humble brags and Marcus snatches his test to gloat about his brother finally not doing well at something. Sike! TJ got a 110 on his assignment. Marcus is dumbfounded since he clearly doesn’t even put in the bare minimum. 

Lisa has to remind Marcus that demonstrating how you actually studied will get you more points. She gives her lazy, remedial students a chance to make up for their piteous attempts with a makeup assignment, an oral group report on WW2. Now everyone is mad at TJ because he fucked up the curve of the grading system, facilitating the need for a makeup assignment. Mackey is pissed.

Marcus and Mo of course decide to stick all the work on TJ while they go to Dawgburger. TJ, now wanting to fit in with his cool brother and bestie, agrees but is promptly thrown into a garbage can by Mackey and his 30 year old goon when they give him shit for being smart. Because the plot calls for it in this episode, TJ isn’t masterminding a plan to put fudged up charges on Mackey’s record or flunk him out of school forever. 

At the Henderson crib, TJ is attempting to do the assignment but the boys are watching The Three Stooges with non-copyright stock sound effects and can’t be bothered to lower the volume. Even Floyd stops scolding Marcus and Mo to join them. Apparently, TJ thinks being a genius and being entertained by slapstick are mutually exclusive.

Yvette is in the kitchen frowning at her fruitless yogurt when TJ comes in to whine about feeling left out. Yvette, as usual, is there to provide motherly advice and reassure TJ that he’s too brilliant to relate to simpleton humor. She even suggests that he’ll be the only non crooked black politician on the Supreme Court. Aww. TJ will revenge porn her in the future.

Just then, a truck pulls in with daddy Floyd’s wood--hehe--and the boys, including Mo, gather in the garage to bring in Floyd’s wood--last time, I promise--to wherever it needs to go.

Yvette comes in after the gang delegates how the work flow will commence and then commands the plot for the episode when she tells TJ his shoe is untied while Mo and Marcus are handing boards to each other. This ended well.

After passing out, Marcus, who is terrifyingly not alarmed, just calls for Floyd and then we end up at the hospital where it seems that TJ’s relatively light board smack has now rendered him dumb. Not only dumb but more childish than usual.

Marcus cares nothing about TJ’s prognosis, however, because he is a horny teenage boy and the doc is hot. Yvette has to literally drag him out of the room by his ear.

The doctor tells Floyd that this strange concussion could leave TJ acting like this for weeks. Of course Floyd is concerned since TJ is gifted. The next morning, TJ is so forgetful and delayed at breakfast that Floyd and Yvette have to play charades to help him navigate feeding himself.

Marcus comes in and asks if TJ is back to normal because he doesn’t want to do anything that makes him use his own damn brain for a change. After Flody sees this because Marcus did it right in the kitchen where he was about three feet away, he of course takes Marcus aside to tell him to quit badgering TJ to get well again.

At school, Mo thinks it’s a good idea to simply undo TJ’s problem by hitting him in the head again. Since we’re working off corny sitcom logic, he’s not exactly off base here. I mean, it did only take two light hits from a wooden board to turn TJ into an imbecile so why not do the same to get him back to normal, right?

During class, TJ is wowing everyone with his diminished IQ that was announced to everyone in the class for some reason. Eh, it’s Piedmont so I really shouldn’t be surprised that all of his business is out there.

Lisa is pissed because now that TJ is dumb and she hates Clark for some reason, teaching will be damn near impossible because nobody participates. I think I feel her pain because she asks a super easy question (what naval base did the Japanese attack) and nobody but annoying ass Clark answers. Poor thing. She probably came into this profession bright-eyed and bushy tailed, ready to change students’ lives and become the next Erin Gruwell but ended up becoming nothing more than a de facto babysitter.

TJ is taking advantage of being one of the guys by making fun of the more deadly effects of dropping bombs and says it led to radioactive monsters. The boys laugh but Lisa is aggy that nobody is taking this seriously. To spite her idiot students, she makes the reports worth half of their grade. Mackey blames Clark instead of the teacher who literally just assigned it. For some reason, this tickles Clark even though he’s going to end up in the garbage soon.

Since TJ is one of the guys again, he manages to tag along with the crew at Dawgburger, a place he wasn’t invited to earlier since he was going to do their group assignment all by himself. In hindsight, I hated group projects because I did all of the work anyways since my cohorts were dumb as rock boxes, so this wouldn’t have bothered me at all. Abolish group projects!

Post Dawgburger, TJ is in bed reading a comic and shooting the shit with Marcus. This is sweet. I like seeing siblings bond on TV shows because the regular narrative always seems to involve them all hating each other. Here, there’s no drama, just Marcus actually being responsible because he’s studying for the oral report and TJ, in what would be his natural state if he weren’t a genius. They even have a heart to heart when TJ asks if he’ll be okay and what would happen once he’s back to normal. Marcus says he’ll still stick up for him. Aww.

In geometry the next day, TJ’s intelligence just comes right back after he flawlessly recites the Pythagorean theorem when the dorky teacher asks. Once he realizes this, and after having probably the few easiest days in a while, TJ understandably commits to pretending to be a dolt. That is until pops sees TJ’s quantum physics magazine inside of a comic book!

Floyd traps TJ by making up a pretty damn good scenario in the Jughead comics but later confirms the lie by letting TJ know that wasn’t in the comic. He goes into how he likes being dumb with the guys because they like him more. Makes sense! TJ has nothing in common with them outside of attending their school but now he’s intellectually on their level. He knows this would change once he goes back to his regular self. Floyd should know this too but alas. I do love how he tells TJ he won’t rat on him. TJ returns the favor by telling his dad that he should write for the Jughead comics because that story he made up made him LOL super hard.

We cut to school where Mackey is just finishing up his group presentation about the X-Men invading Iwo Jima. Lisa Simpson isn’t impressed. Marcus and crew are up next and poor Marcus is struggling. I think it’s so funny that Marcus, a singer with a whole ass band, has stage fright upon trying to remember everything he studied for but just goes to show that music comes easier to him than school.

The internal monologues of everyone come up. Marcus is trying to remember what he studied. TJ contemplates bringing his brain back. Mo is...fucking beatboxing in his head. This shit had me dead when I first saw this episode. 

However, Lisa ain’t having it. She is two seconds away from using the dreaded red pen before TJ saves the day and begins talking about WW2. The boys are shocked but it helps trigger Marcus’s memory and then he’s able to spew out the facts. Mo doesn’t contribute but he will definitely take the credit! 

Later in the Henderson crib, Marcus is pissed because TJ almost let them fail. Although TJ is reminding Marcus that he put his effort into something and it paid off, Marcus is still annoyed leading TJ to think he doesn’t like him anymore.

Marcus explains that he enjoyed TJ’s company when he was dumb because he finally felt like what he is: his older brother. Kind of hard to feel that way when your younger brother is better at everything you do and a major know-it-all. He even admits that he can’t even pretend now that TJ is smart again because it won’t feel the same. I like when Marcus is doing more than chasing girls every episode because he shows maturity at times that is pleasing to watch.

He offers to instead be an older brother in other ways like threatening other people with violence if they make fun of TJ. Cute, but we all know Marcus is scary. Nice gesture though! Floyd comes in and tells the boys good night. At the end, we see Floyd took TJ up on his advice and is submitting an idea to the Jughead comics. Aww Floyd. I wish we’d gotten a subtle nod to if his idea was used because he seemed really happy with himself afterwards. Eh, whatever. Parents aren’t people so who cares.

Things I noticed:

- Clark being oddly satisfied that he knows Mackey and his fellow middle-aged adult friend are going to put him in the trash. Clark either has a crush on Mackey and didn’t like TJ for the attention he got from Mackey or he has some sort of a trash fetish. Or both. Maybe that’s why Lisa doesn’t fuck with him.

- “Okay students, now watch as I turn left to a right triangle.” I’m a dork and this actually made me laugh. Tough classroom, though.

[constant-and-immovable]

au: a hearth & home port

People come from all over, even from Bristol to stay at the inn, fiddlers playing almost nightly, and one of the owners at the piano. Redone and rebuilt, built onto with riches from rumors only say where, it’s become a  tradition for city families to holiday there who can’t quite afford a house in the country. The cove protected most of each day from strong tides, keeps the sandy beach preserved where otherwise there would only be rock and pebble. The lighthouse down the way ships in the distance leaving Bristol for the wider world.

And the stories that the proprietor tells.... Tales of adventure and romance and gold and blood....

Self indulgent and sweet, a mix of hurt comfort fic and fluff, started by myself and @wannabe-british-fangirl​. I’m not very likely to write long form material for it because we plotted almost the whole thing together, so while the kids were my characters, we both came up with it, and despite searching the chat for details, it was almost impossible to figure whose plotpoints were whose.

I did however write a timeline for it that I’ll post in the AU’s tags at some point.

But for now, meet the newer characters....

Their ages in the portraits aren’t quite right, and I’m not happy with ANY of their hairstyles or Ella’s hair color, but the site I used was an AI portrait maker and I got about as close as I could.

Cassiopeia [Cassie] Hawkins: a hell of a surprise, and a lovesick promise that if Silver stayed around, Jim would let him name her. At least, she thinks, she can shorten her name to Cassie, Cass. Even as an infant she had more in her features of her father than her mother, grew up pretty if not lanky, sharp. Prefers men’s clothing, and rougher company. The best sailor out of the lot, has been caught taking the schooner out alone at night. Has been caught as a teenager in the stable loft with the blacksmith’s oldest daughter and the grocer’s daughter.

Gets dragged home by soldiers at the age of sixteen, busted for highway robbery. A screaming match between her and her parents, sisters listening from the door, “You’re going to tell me I’ve done wrong with empty guns, robbing rich men of their tenants gold, when you used to gut men alive for information, and you never minded.”

She’s gone in the morning, a note and little else, returns a year later with the captain of her ship on her arm. The fourth generation of Hawkins women to find an older sailor and decide that he was hers.

Perpetual corner-lurker at social events unless the crowd is her age and there is copious alcohol involved, in which case she quickly becomes the center of attention, charming everyone in the room with her stories and a wink.

Cassie is never exactly close with her siblings, preferring to keep to her own room rather than the communal gathering space that Ella and Lyra’s room has become. She’s also the parrot’s favorite, and it’s unsaid but understood that when her father is gone, she’ll be the one taking Flint.

Capella [Ella] Hawkins: barely a surprise at all, despite being less than a year younger than her elder sister. The only member of the family who isn’t a fan of sea, trusting no captain or sailor other than her parents or her older sister, and no ship other than their schooner. She’s the only one who doesn’t have to be guilted or forced to work the kitchen, the best cook of the family, and quick with practical numbers and sums. Doesn’t look much like either of her parents, or (to Jim’s faded memories) any of her side of the family. Silver insists she looks just like the two of them nonetheless. Possesses more common sense than every other member of the household combined.

Extroverted and warm, she’s the one that half the town asks after, the “normal” girl in a family of changlings. The only one of the girls to grow her hair long.

Lyra Hawkins: older than her twin sister by several minutes. The older she gets the more she looks uncannily like her mother. She’s around fifteen when Silver notices, she looks just like her mum at that age...relatively horrifying, considering his girl is only a girl. Young. Very young. He’s threatened the lives of multiple men passing though Black Cove to stay the hell away from his girls but Jim was this old when he remembers trying to charm her.

“Jim, I’m a bad man.” “Congratulations, you’re four children and seventeen years too late for that revelation.”

Lyra is the dreamiest of them, listening to her father’s stories (and believing them) long after the rest of the girls have moved on from it. She knows that her mother has written some of them down, but she crafts them into something more wild and exciting, fairy stories and myths, and takes to writing poetry and prose. She’s right at home on the water, but likes society. Meets a young woman who’s painting a lighthouse in southern France one summer while the family is on holiday, and stays in touch with her through flowering letters, and eventually travels with her.

Social, like Ella (the sister she’s closest to, closer even than her own twin), she loves parties and company and dancing. Good with horses and animals.

Vega Hawkins: What felt like several minutes passe between the midwife’s assistant handing her to her father and her first breath--only moments likely, blue-grey and looking far too small, it’s not thought she’ll live through the night, nor will her mother. She pulls through of course, so does Jim, but that’s the end of that. Lyra was intended to be the last as it was, but Vega never lets herself feel like she was unwanted. Sometimes she feels like half a ghost, quiet, quick, clever. She has a sharpness to her with numbers, science, stars.

While Cassie and Ella tend to avoid the full use of their first names, Vega doesn’t mind it. She’s not particularly close to her twin, but has an understanding with her oldest sister about the need for isolation. When Lyra and Cassie rolled their eyes over learning sums, Vega quickly surpassed Ella’s skill, and soon her father’s. Nothing he knew she couldn’t figure, not even when there would be letters in with the numbers.

The sea is nice, and she’s handy at mapmaking but her eyes keep looking up.

“Where’s your sister?”

Ella counts heads at the table before answering her father: her and Cassie in a cut throat game of cards, and Lyra attempting a watercolor painting (poorly.)

“Vega’s on the roof.”

“Oh, that’s--WHERE?”

“Mum’s with her.”

“That doesn’t make it better.”

 Luckily they’re not up in the turrets, but on a flatter section of the roof, Jim’s grandfather’s spyglass with them. Still. it’s over a 12 ft. drop if they fall.

Vega runs away too, but inland to university, dressed as a boy, for astronomy and physics.

The girls will also be the same in the AU that goes under the tag ‘‘An AU in Hell’‘

[astralbooks]

The Court of Miracles - Kester Grant

Read: 11/06/2020

Rating: 2/5

Review: also posted on goodreads

This novel is a retelling of Les Misérables, focused on Eponine. In this version, ‘Nina’ is a cat burglar for the Thieves Guild, which is part of the criminal underworld of Paris that sprung up after the failure of the revolution. Throughout most of the novel, she fights to protect her younger adoptive sister, Cosette, or ‘Ettie’, from being forced into sexual slavery by the leader of another guild, even if her efforts to protect her sister risk causing an all out war between the guilds. I wanted to like this book. I usually enjoy retellings, I love strong sibling relationships, and this book is described as being great for fans of Six of Crows, which is a favourite of mine. Alas, it was not meant to be.

First of all, Eponine’s age is a mystery for most of the book. It’s retroactively revealed after the fact that she was nine years old during part 1, which surprised me as I was sure that she was older. But there’s no concrete mention of how much time passes between part 1 and the rest of the novel. For the whole of the rest of the book, Eponine could’ve been anything older than thirteen. She could’ve been in her early twenties for all the reader is told. Also, the barricade boys that show up in the story seem to be in their late teens / early twenties both when Eponine is nine and when she’s older. This is a relatively minor complaint, but the revelation that Eponine had been nine at the start really threw me, and drew my attention to the fact that I didn’t know how old anyone other than Cosette was. My copy of this book is an arc, and maybe the published version will have fixed it. I hope it has. There was a pattern in this book that I didn’t enjoy. Eponine would be told that she had to break in somewhere, she’d spend a moment to be like oh no, nobody’s ever done that before, it’s impossible!!! , and then she’d go and flawlessly break into the place and achieve her goal and nothing of any real consequence would go wrong. This happened multiple times and became frustrating rather quickly. A major pet peeve of mine is when the pov character straight up lies to the reader for no good reason. If the pov character knows what’s going on, but needs to pretend that they don’t know what’s going on to the world around them, then fine! Great, even. Clever plans are a lot of fun to read about and we support their inclusion and use. But unless it’s established that the novel is being dictated in-universe by that character, there is no reason for their internal monologue to pretend that they really are as clueless and angry as they’re acting like they are. Either this novel needed to be written in third person, or the reader needed to be looped in at least a little. I don’t mean that every step of her plan should’ve been spelled out ahead of time, I mean that her narration shouldn’t have blatantly lied to the reader. If the reader had been left questioning why Eponine was reacting so strangely to what was going on, only for her reaction to be explained at the reveal, that would’ve been a lot better than what we were left with, which was a plot twist coming at the expense of a logical narrative. In this retelling, Javert is a woman. When this was first revealed I was hyped about it! A reveal/implication that comes later on made me a little more :/ about it. Genderbending for the sake of heterosexuality is not something that I’m a fan of. Also, how many love interests does Eponine need? Did she really need three? I don’t think she needed three. There were some things that I enjoyed about this book! Lots of the characters were poc, so it was very diverse in that regard. I enjoyed some of the interactions we see between Cosette and Eponine, and I wish there’d been more showing how much they care about each other. I also enjoyed watching Eponine develop her friendships with people from all walks of life. There were some definite found family feelings in this book. Only some, though. When talking to my partner about this book, I said ‘I’ve read worse books than this’, which they then insisted that I include in my review. So here, I have now done so. As it stands, I probably won’t be in any rush to read the rest of this series when it's released. If reviews of later books indicate any improvement then I might, but it won’t be a priority. I was provided with an e-arc from the author in return for an honest review. Any quotes referenced may differ in the published version.

[crystalnet]

Pop Music in Ghibli

If you mention Ghibli and soundtracks in the same breath to most people, the first thing they will likely think of is Joe Hisaishi-senpai’s prodigious and immaculate compositions, BUT it occurred to me recently that there’s actually a great amount of pop music showing up in a handful of some of my very favorite Ghibli films. They’re more rare compared to the instrumental tracks, sure, but in that way it might be even be more impactful-- especially for plebeians without an ear for vocal-less music-- when they do show up. Click through as I explore pop music in 5 Ghibli classics. 

#1- The Wind Rises: ‘ "Hikōki-gumo" (ひこうき雲) by Yumi Matsutoya

Okay so hearing this song on a recent viewing of this film was the whole impetus for writing this. By hugely influential and popular song-writer Yumi Matsutoya, this closing-credits track drops just in time for a full fatality against the viewers’ emotional fortitude- if it remains in tact at all by that point. Between the bittersweet lyrics-- which corresponds beautifully with a plot point from the end of the film-- a righteous hammond organ part and this heart-breaking melody, it all just becomes a bit too much, in a great way. 

Mrs. Matsutoya here is outright indecent towards our emotions here. And I love it. In addition to that, the track counts as only one of a few instances of a pop song in a Ghibli joint serving as the closing track. So uh yeah, go down a rabbit hole of Matsutoya’s music if you wanna explore the wonderful world of vintage J-pop/city pop etc., and you will not be disappoint. Also, this isn’t even the first time one of her songs was used... her debut in Ghibli occured 2 decades earlier in....

#2- Kiki’s Delivery Service: ‘I’m Gonna Fly”- Sydney Forester

Okay, so this is not another Matsutoya song. But in the original Disney release of Kiki, this song stood in for what was in the Japanese release a rather different, rockabilly-pop song from one of Matsutoya’s early albums ‘Rouge no Dengon‘, and this has since been corrected on subsequent releases. Tonally they are pretty different, but they both share a level of charm. This English replacement is way cornier though, but I imagine whichever one you grow up with will be the superior and preferable dose of nostalgia. I’m tainted by living with the original 90s English version for so long, that I get really thrown off in the first 20 minutes if, mid-maiden voyage, Kiki turns on her radio to Matsutoya instead of this funny little stand-in.

Speaking of Kiki’s radio, this is one of only TWO instances I’m aware of in which the pop song is diegetic within the film-- meaning it actually comes from a source within the actual world of the movie-- at least sort of (it’s that kinda pseudo-diegesis where the volume of the song makes it clear that it can’t actually be coming from her little radio). This song just really has a kind of saccharine horse-girl charm which I love and I feel like it matches the movie’s atmosphere pretty well despite being modern sounding, whereas Kiki’s world seems to be vaguely set in a version of the.... 50′s where dirigibles never went away? Never really thought about it actually. 

But yeah, these weird contract-based one-off recording artist concoctions are always kinda fun. They remind me of weird tracks from the Detective Conan opening themes where you just wonder about how and why they come about. Ultimately though, Disney probably made a good choice. The song occurs early enough in the film that it might do some work towards dissuading any reservations younger viewer-- or their parents-- might have after wading into such a then-exotic animated film such as this. It gently reassures one that despite appearances, this film CAN be a movie for English-speaking Americans. Plus I mean this lady’s voice actually rocks. I feel like it helped sell the movie to my older Jewel-listening sisters when we were kids and for that I’m grateful~

#3- Only Yesterday: “Omoide No Nagisa”- The Wild Ones  (and much much more)

Okay so Only Yesterday is stuffed to the brim with tons of pop music and other cultural ephemera, far too much for me to parse through now (maybe deserving of its own deep-dive post) but I’ll focus on one that shows up early in the movie.

(This isn’t full track, for some reason the only full version on youtube will not embed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRlKvOiXgjo

This track plays during one of the early memoir-esque narration-heavy flashback scenes. It’s before we are fully thrust into those more washed-out, impressionistic coming-of-age sequences, and are being lead gently into that world by way of recollection from the now adult protagonist. She is remembering the craze in 1966 around “group-sounds”, a genre in Japan that was clearly partly indebted to the British Invasion happening on the other side of the world. 

I like the song a lot because I can hear the Beatles, Kinks and Monkeys etc., but it has it’s own really unique flair on top of that influence. I hear smokey curry and coffee shops. Fuzzy bunny-eared television signals. I think of young fresh-faced Japanese Boomers experiencing a newly technicolor world of pop-culture. The echo on the mic pick-ups whirs in my mind pulling me back toward a “simpler time”. 

The appearance of this song early on is a tip-off to the unfurling of a particularly globally-minded and varied soundtrack in this film which continues to surprise throughout the runtime-- it is my second favorite Ghibli soundtrack after ‘Totoro’ by far and that usually has to do with the incredible Bulgarian choir music that appears, but stuff like this Wild Ones track is just great too. Whether the male-lead/love-interest is playing that Bulgarian “peasant music” via his Toyota’s cassette player or we are getting a history lesson in early J-pop/rock, it’s all particularly tasty. There’s even a couple appearances from music from Japanese children’s television.

A lot of the referencing is nigh impossible for this westerner to parse, but all of it--save for one track-- is pretty ace. That one let-down for me is yet another pop song in the form of the ending credit-sequence track, a Japanese cover of ‘The Rose’. I think Bette Midler is just not a tasty association for an American of my ilk and so even if the rendition is tasteful, and the ending scene is beautiful, it remains the only time I’m let down sonically in the movie. 

Before I move on, it’s worth mentioning that the movie itself may be named after an American film OR a song by the Carpenters. I can’t be sure, but I kinda wish they actually used this Carpenters track to close the film instead of ‘The Rose’ but maybe it was a licensing issue. Anyhow. Perfect movie. 

#4- Whisper of the Hear: “Take Me Home, Country Roads”- John Denver/Olivia Newton John/Various

Okay so the way this song factors into the movie is way different than anything else we’ve discussed so far. I’ll embed the Olivia Newton-John rendition that the film opens with as opposed to the Japanese version that plays in the ending, because uh, as cute as it is, the vocalist (who I think is just the main-character’s voice actress?) is pitchy as hell (maybe in a twee, intentional way?) 

But so yeah, this song is a big part of an initial and reoccurring plot-point in the film which has the young protag. translating the American song into Japanese with her school friends. It’s a slightly illegible plot-point if you watch the English dub, but it basically comes across. According to Wiki, the producer of the film’s daughter actually supplied her lyrics which Mr. Hayao himself supplemented, which is just too cute. In the film, her version is called ‘Concrete Roads’ which has some nice thematic resonance with a lot of the angst that shows up in ‘Pom Poko’ regarding the suburban developments which sprawled out from Tokyo and other major Japanese cities throughout the 20th cent., encroaching on that same beautiful countryside that John Denver was initially sending up.

In a climactic scene, the protag. nervously but triumphantly sings the song along with her magic-boy boyfriend and his grampa’s grampa-friends, and uh yeah it’s cute as heck. 

The film is based on a manga, and though I’m too lazy to research this much, I assume the manga was the first to introduce the concept of centering so much of the story around a relatively benign country-pop tune such as this. But I mean, the choral arrangement in the intro of Newton-John’s is kinda emotional as hell. Mountain-momma indeed. 

#5- My Neighbor Totoro: Ending Theme- I don’t know...

Alright we’ll end with a sampling from the best of the best. I’m not gonna force too much “research” for this ‘cause like, I don’t know man, I just don’t wanna do anything that would remotely threaten to extinguish the magic. And I refuse to ever listen to the abomination that is the Disney re-dub. But I understand they re-recorded these tracks for that. Which, like, why? I’m also assuming the songs were pretty faithful translations of original Japanese tracks, because they’re just too good to have just been created for the western release. Like Hisaishi has to be behind those kalimbas and synth-lines. The lady’s voice basically sounds like my mom to me(?) and the dusty patina on her vocal-track alone kinda makes me wanna weep. 

And I kinda hate when people just joylessly parrot internet meme terms, but this song is what I would be unable to not describe as a “bop”. I mean the drums alone rip. 

This song has a sister-track in the form of an introductory credit-sequence song which accompanies a ridiculously cute visualizer, and they’re both just perfect matches for the joyful, innocent and exuberant nature of the film itself. Elsewhere on the OST, this is basically the last time that I’m aware of Hisaishi using synthesizers and it’s just glorious. Get this man on drum-machines and synths again! So uh yeah, I mean it’s all just great. What else could I say? Best soundtrack of all time period. Full stop. The end. 

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ok that’s that. Keep in mind, there’s like a small hanful of Ghibli I still haven’t seen so there could be some major instance I’m missing but uh, maybe I’ll update if one day I find out there’s a straight up Utada Hikaru song in ‘Princess Kaguya’. Oh and uh yeah there’s this one in ‘When Marnie Was There’ by one Priscilla Ahn . It’s like a b-side of the Kiki song but not as good as that makes it sound like it’d be. But it’s horse-girl-core as hell. So uh yeah.

see ya space cowboy~

[enkisstories]

And five androids! (DBH)

No plot, just a little scene with Kara & Co after the revolution.

Detroit. 4203 Harrison Street.  

Liz slid the key into the lock. It fit just the same as it had years ago. And why shouldn’t it? Just because Liz wasn’t handling them anymore, they were still the same keys Todd Williams had used mere days before. And with that thought Liz felt the urge to wash her hands…

The woman hesitated. The key still stuck in its hole, but remained unturned.

“Mom? ‘s something wrong?”

Alice’s question went unanswered.

Liz reconsidered her approach. She pulled the key out again and decided to try the doorbell first.

An AX400 opened the door, but quickly sidestepped so that the visitor was facing a giant worker android now. In the background a male redhead was busy wrestling a baseball bat from yet another android’s grip. This one had a disfigured face and was stubbornly, yet ultimately in vain, resisting. The bat was pulled from his hands and vanished behind the redhead’s back. From the relative ease with which this man kept countering the scar-faced android’s attempts to reclaim his bat, Liz deduced that he, too, was very likely a machine.

“This is not how we greet visitors!” the redhead scolded his opponent in this push-pull game.

“Maybe Jerry doesn’t, but Ralph does, thank you very much!”

“Uh… hi?” Liz ventured, still standing outside.

She raised the hand in which she held the keyring and let them jingle a little.

“Sorry about that! I realized too late it would make me appear suspicious.”

“You must be Liz Williams?” the AX400 replied. “Please come in! I understand it’s difficult. For all of us.”

Soon as Liz and Alice had entered the house, they spotted a fifth android, a YK500. Upon seeing the visitors, the little one mumbled “I’ll make tea! Or whatever!” and then darted into the kitchen.

Alice, too, tried to keep her distance from the strangers. She kept close to Liz, never leaving hand-touching distance and stopping just short of crouching into her mother’s open coat for protection.

“I’m sorry”, the woman spoke up, and the same instant the AX400 started to say the same. They both followed up with: “Alice is such a shy child!”

“Why don’t you help the other girl in the kitchen?” Liz addressed her daughter. “Look, we’re all adults here, you’ll get bored!”

Alice shook her head. “I don’t want to be alone with the android!”

At that the scar-faced android shot forward. He bent down to face-level with Alice and hissed: “So you’d rather be in a room with FOUR androids?” at which Alice stumbled back a few paces.

“Ralph is a shy child, too”, the worker android remarked and the AX chuckled at that.

“Yeah, thanks”, Ralph barked, obviously unwilling to drop his point. “Ralph was burnt, pursued, shot at, arrested for existing and almost crushed alive in the end!”

“Ah, so? Sounds not much worse than being married to Todd Williams”, Liz replied with a shrug.

“I imagine!” the AX agreed.

Reluctantly Liz extended a hand towards the android. “You must be Kara. I was told you’d be living here with… others. My name is Liz Williams. Ex-wife of Todd. I inherited this house and, uh, you. All of you, I think. - Awkward doesn’t even begin to describe it, am I right?”

When Kara just shook her head, at a loss for what to say, the worker android came to the rescue. You could leave it to Kara to take the lead, come up with clever plans and infect others with her determination. But to smooth over social cliffs, surprisingly, the former Mad Scientist’s muscle guy was needed.

Luther pulled a chair with each hand, one for Liz and one for Kara. He lifted Alice up onto the table and before the girlchild could even start on a shriek, she was already steadied by her mother up there. Meanwhile Ralph kept standing within reach of the window, albeit at an angle that made it difficult to spot him. Not impossible, but as hard as a runaway gardener with some solid experience in hiding was able to make it for his would-be captors. Finally Jerry sat down on the floor. He started texting the other Alice, who was still hiding in the kitchen, in his head all the while tossing balls of crumbled up paper for the household’s roomba to catch as if it was his exotic pet.

“Did they prepare you for this at all?” Luther asked gently, after he had introduced everyone by name, leaving open who “they” might be. In his experience the catch-all term was pretty well understood without needing clarification. Both using and deciphering the term in any given context came naturally to Luther’s deviant mind, therefore the android assumed that it had to be the same for humans.

Liz nodded, not confused in the least. “I was instructed”, she explained, “to sell you only together on account of all of you being deviants. And I was advised to do so rather sooner than later. For the same reason.”

“Only as a group?” Ralph flared up. “What are we now? A litter of puppies?!”

“Might as well”, Kara mused. “I understand a lot of the impromptu deviant regulations originate in animals welfare law.”

Well-meaning, but missing the point. Because the androids didn’t strive to go from tools to pets, or from abused slaves to better treated ones. Their demand was full recognition as persons.

Bounce… bounce…

Jerry’s roomba was trying to retrieve a paper ball from out of a corner. The little device worked itself up at the futile endeavor until its owner picked it up. While holding the device, Jerry “in secret” removed the offending wastepaper with his other hand. Then he released the roomba back into the wild with a smile. Watching the display, Liz couldn’t help but realize how much closer those artificial beings were to her own kind than to the robot. Different, of course, but also the same on some fundamental level.

Into the silence Alice spoke up: “I don’t want them, mom! Let’s go home and put the house up for sale! I TOLD you so before we drove here!”

“Well, it IS your house, to do with as you please”, Kara conceded. “If you want it back…? You’ve lived her before all of us, after all.”

“Yeah, but the amount of crap outweighs the happy memories I’ve got of this place. I do not want to live here again.”

Liz took her daughter’s hands into her own. She kissed her head and re-assured the child that her advice had not gone unconsidered. Then she turned back to Kara:

“If you can cover the power and water bill yourself and also manage pretty much everything else about the house, then I won’t mind you staying here. Preferred it this way, in fact.”

Jerry jumped up.

“Sounds like a deal, Mrs. Williams!” he said cheerfully. “Pizza?”

“Jerry!” Kara snapped. “This is intense! You cannot just order a pizza and call it a day!”

The EM400 android nodded.

“I hear you, Kara”, he agreed. “Homemade pizza it’ll be, then.”

And with these words he shoved Alice off the table and in front of himself towards the kitchen. On the way there Jerry grabbed Ralph, whom he dragged along.

“You, too, Ralph! Your cutting skills will be needed!”

Kara, Luther and Liz exchanged telling glances, then laughed and followed the others.

 And then they really made pizza.

 Ralph told everyone about veggies and the garden he wanted to start in spring…

The Alices were afraid of each other…

Jerry insisted that pizza wasn’t deserving its reputation as unhealthy fast food. A spinach-carrot-slug pizza, for example, covered everything you needed. Everyone was heartwarmingly spooked…

Then Ralph agreed in all seriousness about the toppings. Now everyone was disgusted…

Alice Archer tentatively let Alice Williams in on a secret: “I have a picture of you in my treasure chest”, she whispered…

Alice Williams was delighted! “I have many pictures of myself, too!” she said.

 Asked about her house later, Liz would answer that she’d lended it to a living community for troubled adolescents: three younger teens and two older ones, the latter doing a great, but ultimately very wrong, job at pretending they were adults already.

“And five androids!” Alice Williams would caw.

[bibhabmishra]

The Princess Bride

It feels downright inconceivableI to devote only one chapter in a book about lessons gleaned from eighties movies to The Princess Bride. Why, just off the top of my head, while standing on my head, I can name five life lessons that this movie teaches you that you don’t learn anywhere else:  1. “Never go against a Sicilian when DEATH is on the line!” 2. “Love is the greatest thing—except for a nice mutton, lettuce, and toma- to sandwich when the mutton is nice and lean.” 3. “Life is pain. Anyone who says differently is selling something.” 4. Eventually, you learn not to mind the kissing parts. 5. And most important, “As you wish” = “I love you.”  Such is the depth of wisdom in this film that in 2013, twenty-six years after its release, BuzzFeed devoted a listII to the lessons gleaned from it. A BuzzFeed list! Who needs the Oscars, Princess Bride, when you have that ultimate of mod- ern-day accolades? The Princess Bride is so adored that it’s probablyIII now a clichéd response on Internet dating websites: walks on the beach, an open fire, sunsets, and The Princess Bride. And yet, despite this, love for The Princess Bride is not seen as desperately hackneyed or cheesily safe. The Princess Bride is what you’d need a prospective love interest to cite as their favorite movie for the relationship to progress,IV it’s the one film that would make you rethink a lifelong friendship if you found out your best friend “just didn’t get it”—not that they would ever say that, because I honestly don’t know a single person of my generation who isn’t obsessed with this film.

And not just my generation: in As You Wish, a very enjoyable book about the making of The Princess Bride, Cary Elwes—who played Westley the farm boy, of course—recounts being told by both Pope John Paul II and Bill Clinton how much they loved the movie, proving that The Princess Bride appeals to saints and sinners alike.V Now, having said all that, I have a confession to make. I was not the big Princess Bride fan in my family when I was growing up. That title instead went to my sister, Nell. Our mother took us to see it at the movie theater when I must have been nine and Nell was seven, and even though the film was— incredibly—something of a commercial disappointment when it came out, the cinema was absolutely packed with kids like us. In my mind, everyone in the audience was utterly in thrall to this tale of Buttercup (Robin Wright), her true love Westley (Elwes), and their battles against Prince Humperdinck (Chris Sarandon), Vizzini (Wallace Shawn), and Count Rugen (Christopher Guest), and their eventual assistance from the brave swordsman Inigo (Mandy Patinkin), the giant Fezzik (the professional wrestler known as André the Giant), and Miracle Max (Billy Crystal). Afterward, we stood in the cinema atrium as our mother bundled us back into our coats. “Did you girls like it?” she asked. Standing there in her corduroy dungarees and T-shirt, Nell looked in a state of semi-shock. “I LOVED IT. I WANT TO SEE IT AGAIN RIGHT NOW!” she practically shouted. Now, The Princess Bride is wonderful, but in order to understand how unex- pected this proclamation was, you have to know a little bit about my sister. Ever since she was old enough to throw a tantrum, my sister refused to wear dresses. She never played with dolls. She refused to let my mother brush her hair and had apparently no interest in her physical appearance. She did not like mushy stories—she didn’t even like reading books. In other words, she was the complete opposite to me. How much of that was a deliberate reaction against me, a younger sibling defining herself in opposition to the older one, and how much of it was simply an innate part of Nell was already a moot point when we went to see The Princess Bride: Nell’s parameters were so firmly set by then that her nickname in our family was “the tough customer.” She would consent to drink only one kind of fruit juice (apple), and buy only one brand (Red Cheek), and only if it came out of a can (never a carton), so there was absolutely no negotiating with her about mushy princesses. Lord only knows how my mother got her to see the movie in the first place. She must have hid- den the title from her. And yet, like the grandson in the film, Kevin Arnold,VI Nell found that, against all odds, she did enjoy the story, just as Kevin’s grandfather, Columbo,VII promises. I think Nell made my mother take her to see the film at the cinema at least three more times. As she wished. When it came out on VHS, we bought it immediately and it was understood that the videocassette was officially Nell’s, just as the videocassette for Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was officially mine. When she found out that the film had originally been a book by William Goldman, who also wrote the screenplay, she asked my amazed mother to buy that, too. Nell read it over and over until the pages fell out, so she stuck them back in and then read the book again. The Princess Bride was the book that taught her to like books, as much as the movie taught her to relax some of her other rules. She developed a lifelong crush on Westley and, not long after, she started wearing dresses, too. The reasons why Nell loved this film so much exemplify, I think, why it is universally adored in a way that, say, the vaguely similar and contemporary The Never-Ending Story is not. It’s a fairy tale for those who love fairy tales, but it’s also a self-aware spoof for those who don’t; it’s an adventure film for boys and—for once—girls, too, but without pandering to or excluding either; it’s got a plot for kids, dialogue for adults, and jokes for everyone; it’s a genre film and a satire of a genre film; it’s a very funny movie in which everybody is playing it straight; it’s smart and sweet and smart about its sweetness, but also sweet about its smarts. Unlike, say, Shrek, there are no jokes here for parents that go over the kids’ heads: all generations enjoy it on exactly the same level. It’s a movie that lets people who don’t like certain things like those things, while at the same time not betraying the original fans. But most of all, The Princess Bride is about one thing in particular: “The Princess Bride is a story about love,” says Cary Elwes. “So much happens in the movie—giants, fencing, kidnapping. But it’s really a film about love.” This might seem like a statement of the obvious, but it isn’t, actually. Yes, the film is ostensibly about the great true love between Buttercup and Westley, and their most perfect kiss that leaves all the other kisses in the world behind. Both Elwes and Wright were so astonishingly beautiful when they made the film that, watching them, it’s hard to believe any love ever existed on this plan- et other than theirs. And they, rather pleasingly, were quite taken with one an- other. In his book, Elwes talks at length about how “smitten” he was with Wright, and she says precisely the same about him: “I was absolutely smitten with Cary. So obviously that helped with our onscreen chemistry. . . . It doesn’t matter how many years go by, I will love Cary forever.” Disappointingly, however, Elwes insists that they remained just friends. “Everyone asks if there was more!” he says, sounding a little exasperated, apparently unable to see what everyone else can: namely, that it seems against the laws of nature for two such beautiful people not to have had sex at least once. The last scene that Elwes shot was of him and Wright kissing on horse- back, creating “the most perfect kiss” of all time against a sunset. Surely that was romantic. “Well, not really. Robin and I were friends by that point so we kept laughing, and [the director] Rob [Reiner] was going, ‘Touch her face, touch her face!’ ” He laughs. But Westley and Buttercup’s love is only a part of the film, and only one of several love stories in the film. There is also, for a start, the great love between Inigo and Fezzik. The scene in which a drunken and broken Inigo looks up into Fezzik’s face in the Thieves Forest and Fezzik says a simple, smiling hello is much more moving than the moment when Buttercup realizes the Dread Pirate Roberts is actually Westley (not least because she’s just pushed him down a hill). Even if Inigo does become the Dread Pirate Roberts at the end of the film, as Westley suggests he should, it is as impossible to imagine him going off without Fezzik as it is to imagine Buttercup and Westley being severed. This love between the two men is at the root of one of the film’s subtlest lessons. Bad guys teach audiences how to think of opponents in life, and this is especially true of bad guys in books and films aimed at kids. Because stories for kids tend to be relatively simple, villains in these films are almost invariably evil, and that’s all there is to be said about them. Cruella de Vil, Snow White’s stepmother, the witch in Rapunzel: WHAT a bunch of moody bitches. This is also certainly true of movies for children in the 1980s, from the frankly terri- fying Judge Doom (Christopher Lloyd) in Who Framed Roger Rabbit to the enjoyably evil Ursula in The Little Mermaid. It’s a pleasingly basic approach, and one that validates most kids’ (and adults’) view of the world: “I am good and anyone who thwarts me is wicked and there is no point in trying to think about things from their point of view because they have no inner life of their own beyond pure evil and a desire to impede me.” The Princess Bride, however, does something different. It’s easy to forget this once you’ve seen the movie and fallen in love with the characters but Inigo and Fezzik are, ostensibly, bad guys. When we first meet them in the movie, they knock our heroine, Buttercup, unconscious and kidnap her for Vizzini. We are also told they will kill her. Our princess! In the eyes of children, you can’t get much more evil than that. They are hired guns in the re- venge business, which is not a job for a good guy in any fairy tale. But Gold- man flips it around. We quickly see Inigo and, in particular, Fezzik being ex- tremely sweet with each other, doing their little rhymes together and trying to protect one another from Vizzini’s ire. Their love for one another shows us there is more to these villains than villainy. Goldman then ups the ante even further by having Inigo describe to the Man in Black how he has devoted his life to avenging the death of his father, thus giving him the kind of emotional backstory kids can definitely understand, as well as adding another mission to the movie. Soon after beating (but not killing) Inigo, the Man in Black fights with Fezzik, who we already know has a similarly sad past (“unemployed—IN GREENLAND”). Plenty of villains were once good before crossing to the dark side: Darth Vader, many of Batman’s nemeses, Voldemort. The point in those stories is that the difference between true evil and true greatness comes down to one wrong decision, one wrong turn, and there is no going back from that. But The Princess Bride does something more subtle: it suggests that good people some- times end up doing bad things, but are still good, have stories of their own, and are capable of love. Inigo and Fezzik both killed people in the past for Vizzini, but they’re all still good people. This is quite a message for kids (and adults) to take in: not everything is clear-cut when it comes to good and bad, even in fairy tales. In the original novel, William Goldman goes into much greater detail about Fezzik and Inigo’s friendship, and this is one of the reasons why I—in all hon- esty—pre-fer the book to the film.VIII But the film alludes to it enough in order for audiences to understand the real bond between the men, and partly this happens through the script and partly through the actors, especially one actor in particular. At one point, Arnold Schwarzenegger was considered for the role of Fezzik, but, thank heavens, he was already too expensive by the time the film finally started shooting. Where Schwarzenegger is all jarring rectangles and jut- ting jaw, André the Giant was all soft circles and goofy smiles. Where Schwarzenegger palpably punished himself to a superhuman extent to get the body he clearly wanted so badly, the man born André René Roussimoff suf- fered from gigantism due to acromegaly and had no choice about his size, just as Fezzik didn’t, much to the latter’s misery (“It’s not my fault being the big- gest and the strongest—I don’t even exercise”). It would be a patronizing cliché to say André was born to play Fezzik, but he was certainly more right for the role than Schwarzenegger. By the time he made The Princess Bride, André was seven feet, four inches and weighed more than 540 pounds. Easily the sweetest stories in Cary Elwes’s book come from the cast and crew’s memories of the wrestler, who died in 1993 at the age of forty-six, and this is not mere sentimentality. Quite a few of The Princess Bride’s cast have, sadly, since died, including Mel Smith, Peter Cook, and Peter Falk, but none of them prompts the same kind of fondness as that felt for André. “It’s safe to say that he was easily the most popular person on the movie,” Elwes writes. “Everyone just loved him.” Partly this is due to the extraordinary nature of the man. Robin Wright re- calls going out to a dinner with him where he ate “four or five entrees, three or four appetizers, a couple of baskets of bread, and then he’s like, I’m ready for seconds. And then desserts. I think he went through a case of wine and he wasn’t even tipsy.” But it was André’s innately gentle nature that made him so beloved. His “compassion and protective nature,” Elwes writes, helped Wallace Shawn over- come his almost paralyzing fear of heights when they were filming the climb up the Cliffs of Insanity. When Robin Wright felt chilly when filming outdoors, André would place one of his huge hands on top of Wright’s head. “She said it was like having a giant hot water bottle up there. It certainly did the trick; he didn’t even mess up her hair that much!” Elwes writes. When he died, William Goldman wrote his obituary in New York magazine. The last lines were as fol- lows: “André once said to Billy Crystal, ‘We do not live long, the big and the small.’ Alas.” Next, on a smaller level, is the love between Miracle Max (Crystal) and his aged wife, Valerie (Carol Kane). Initially they seem simply like a squabbling old couple, playing purely for broad comedy (and their scene is the broadest comedic one in the film). But it soon becomes clear that Valerie is needling Max only because she wants him to get back his confidence in his work after Prince Humperdinck destroyed it by sacking them, and her little cheer when her husband agrees to make a miracle for Inigo is really very touching. By the end of their scene, they’re working together, finishing one another’s sentences, holding each other arm in arm, and whispering little asides to one another. As a portrait of elderly marriage goes, this one is a pretty lovely one. Finally, there’s the great love story that frames the whole movie: the one be- tween the grandson/Kevin Arnold (Fred Savage) and the grandfather/Columbo (Peter Falk). In the beginning of the movie, the grandson is irritated by his cheek-pinching grandfather and can hardly believe that he has to stop playing his adorably primitive-looking computer baseball game to listen to grandfather read a book.IX As the film progresses, the relationship between the grandson and grandfather progresses almost like a traditional love story: the grandson slowly gets more interested, clutching his covers anxiously when Buttercup is almost eaten by the Shrieking Eels; then he gets angry, banging his bed with his fist when it seems like Westley has been killed; and finally, he comes around entirely and tells his grandfather to come back the next day to read the book again. “As you wish.” His grandfather smiles, and the film ends. “That wasn’t actu- ally in the script,” Elwes says. “They came up with him saying that on, I think, the last day, and it really captures the love between the grandfather and grand- son. You can also see the tenderness between Fred Savage and Peter Falk.”

[fyrapartnersearch]

Harry Potter Originals; M// or F//

Back to the grindstone. My name is Jupiter, I'm 21, and I'm looking to roleplay original characters in the Harry Potter universe! I only write with people who are 18 or older, very preferably 20+ as well. I'm fine with side pairings of any gender combination, but I'd prefer the main pairing to either be M// or F//. I can shoot off replies a few times a week depending on my work schedule.

  My post length varies between novella or multiple paragraphs depending on what we agree on; if we don't write novella, my first few posts tend to be very lengthy as I ease into everything, and then it tapers into around 4-5 paragraphs or so. I won't write with anyone who writes less than three paragraphs; I'm not hyper stingy with length, I just value quantity and quality in relatively equal measure. It also kind of sucks when you write a huge post and only get a paragraph in response. Just tell me if you'd rather multi-p or novella. I write in third person, past tense but I can do present tense as well if that's what you prefer. Doubling tends to be my default (either two M// relationships, two F//, or one of each) but it's not required, so let me know off the bat if that's not what you usually stick with.

  OKAY! Christ, that's a lot to get off my chest right in the beginning. I'm not going to shove everything into little words to skirt under the 300 word limit because my thoughts are far too disjointed for that, but I'll list the ideas I've got as incentive to read on: modern wizarding world, Triwizard Tournament (but different), prophecies, mysteries, bigger things afoot? Wow! So interesting! More context under way if you're intrigued.

  AGAIN, THIS IS A HUGE AD. MY DEEPEST APOLOGIES.

  Other things to mention before getting into the meat of my ad and just dump all of my ideas in one spot. As a general rule I don't write anyone younger than 20, both because of the nature of my RPs and because it just feels weird to me to write about kids in school despite the fact that Hogwarts is pretty much the objectively best thing about the series' setting! So no students. I would, however, totally be down with writing professors in Hogwarts. I’m kind of itching for it, tbh? Could be fun. I’ve been mulling over a professor character, one from either Hogwarts or Beauxbaton.

  Smut is good, but like doubling, not required. It goes without saying that any and all characters will be adults, of course. My limits underage characters/pedophilia, incest, nonconsensual/dubious consent, bestiality, gore, mpreg, A/B/O, toilet kinks, sexual abuse, things of that ilk. I also only write vers characters in bed I've spent way too many years playing with partners who only play bottoms in smut scenes, so I'm all burnt out on that, man.

  I'm a very big pinterest user and extremely hooked on aesthetics, so moodboards are to be expected on my half. I think practically everyone who roleplays nowadays is a big fan of pinterest, at least from my experience haha. As for face claims, I do prefer to use them! It's strange, though — I was so fervently against them for so many years as a roleplayer since I've got such a clear idea of characters in my head that it's impossible to find an actor or model to fit the image, and it used to break my immersion in roleplays if I was writing against a particularly well-known actor or model (and it still does to a degree, I try to stay away from the main hollywood actors like Chris Evans haha), but now it helps ground me a little more for some reason? I feel more like it's a world of our own when I have a clear face to look on. In any case, as I said above, I prefer face claims, but I won't be upset if you'd prefer not to use them. Whatever you’re into is fine!

  Now! Onto the good stuff.

  I'd love to write a setting in modern times as opposed to the original late '90's, exploring how the wizarding world and wizarding laws have shifted with the advancement of muggle technology; I'd imagine it was much easier to keep magic under wraps before smartphones came into the equation. Maybe the wizarding world is under stress or extreme restriction due to this.

  A reinvented Triwzard Tournament would be extremely fun! Now, I know the tournament was banned after Harry's foray into it since Cedric was killed, but hear me out: maybe it's reconstructed due to the fact that the previous tournament went the way it did because of the whole Voldemort situation. I'd really prefer a tournament held between school alumni as opposed to students anyway, both because it just makes more sense with the nature of the game as well as the fact that it means we wouldn't have to be writing kids. Maybe even the professors to touch on the school pride while still keeping the heart of the games intact? Or something else completely, I'm just tossing out ideas. This is sort of the main thing I'm aiming for at the moment since I'd really love to write a tournament and it gives us a lot of freedom to work with different ideas/settings/situations.

  I like the idea of exploring lives post-Hogwarts since the main series doesn't really get into that (excluding Fantastic Beasts, which I can't stress enough how uninterested in I am. Similarly, I am VERY critical of the world-building JK's done with expanding the universe, particularly with how sloppily she handled other cultures and their relation with her lore and would rather adjust things for our own take, so keep that in mind before contacting me). The main series is mostly set in Hogwarts, so I'd love to do something to explore the Wizarding World as a whole.

  I do also like the idea of a muggle getting wrapped up in wizarding stuff for whatever reason. The main series establishes that there are at least SOME witches and wizards that coexist with muggles, at least enough to have kids that are half-bloods. And again, yeah, I guess the FBaWTFT series does touch on this, but I'd really love to have a regular muggle thrown into the main cast for whatever reason somehow. Maybe they've got a magical relative or something or wizards need a non-magical person for plot related reasons?

  Something to do with prophecies could be very interesting — after seeing all of those prophecies kept under lock in the Ministry (before they were destroyed, at least, lmao), it got me thinking of what the extent of prophecies were and if all of them were as severe as Harry's, or what another prophecy could be. It could be fun to explore something with our own characters in that vein?

  I enjoy serious/darker plots, so I'd like to have a bigger plot that our characters bleed into! I’m not looking for a more mundane or slice of life roleplay. We could throw all of these ideas in a bowl and see what comes from it. None of these thoughts of mine are a prerequisite for contacting me, however. If you've got an idea of your own, I would more than love to hear them.

  If you're the type to just message me saying "I saw your ad and am interested in roleplaying with you." or anything with something like 1-3 lines in your intro, don't bother messaging me at all. I delete any and all messages of the sort. Just introduce yourself to me, what you're interested in or if you have ideas of your own, what your limits are, if you want to do multi-p or novella, and if you've got any pre-established characters or would rather make one for the roleplay.

  Told you I had a giant ad! Kudos to making it this far. My email is pieronhand@gmail.com. Sorry if you prefer messengers for OOC chit-chat or initial plotting, I strictly use email for everything!

[ievenranthisfar]

72 Needles In Millions of Haystacks // My First 24-Hour Orienteering Race

It’s somewhere around 3:00 in the morning. I’ve been up somewhere around 24 hours. And I’m… somewhere. I just don’t know where.

My partner Sean and I have just descended hundreds feet down a sheer rock face that’s dumped us into a pitch-black forest. Above us, a canopy of ancient pines blocks out the full moon. Below, the trunks of their fallen compatriots and an army of younger ones eager to take their place make our travel directionless and nearly impossible. And amid all this, we’re looking for a small, orange and white triangular flag with nothing more than a dot on the map, a compass, and the vague clue that it was located at a “reentrant.”

Suddenly, there at the bottom of that cliff, swallowed up by the forest, I felt very, very small. And very, very far away from anything. Forget finding the control, I think to myself. What if we can’t ever find our way out of this canyon?

Are we going to die down here?

__

A Little Compass Context

This was my first ever 24-hour rogaine orienteering race. I’d been introduced to orienteering a year and a half ago when my good running buddy Guillaume Calmettes invited me to a local event. He was using to sharpen his navigational skill in prep for his first run at the infamous Barkley Marathons. And he convinced me it was super fun and easy to pick up. He was correct.

In orienteering there are two basic formats. This first one I did was Classic, meaning you get handed a map of the area you’re in with little numbered dots on it. Then, you have to use your compass to find your way as you run from control to control in a pre-determined order as fast as possible. Beginner’s luck. I got second place. Guillaume got first.

The next event we went to the following month, I won.

Our compass skills were admittedly only okay. (Actually, Guillaume’s were fine. Mine, less so.) But having experience and fitness as a runner, helped us immensely. Still, we made plenty of mistakes. This year, I made some huge errors in races. It’s really humbling when it takes you 3:34 to finish a course, and the winner did it in 0:57. The beginner’s luck had run out.

Most orienteering events are relatively short, usually one or two hours long. But it’s incredibly intense. When you’re trying to find 15 different controls as fast as you can, you have your head buried in your map as you’re sprinting through parks, up and down hillsides and rooting through streams to find your controls.

Then Guillaume told me about rogaining. It’s the same thing, except it lasts for 24 hours. 🤯 I’ve run plenty of ultras that last longer than 24 hours, and I’ve done some orienteering races for a few hours, but I didn’t know you could combine the two. It sounded bonkers.

(For the record, the name rogaine comes from a portmanteau of the sport’s founding members’ names. It has zero to do with a fix for male pattern baldness.)

Guillaume and I talked wistfully about one day competing in the World Championship. Then, two months ago, I got a text. The North American Championship was taking place at the Nav-X Challenge in a month, in the Sierra National Forest. The top two teams would go to World. So we signed up.

Lake Shaver, near the course

A few days later, Sean Ranney reached out to Guillaume to see if he could join the fun. If you don’t know who Sean is, he’s an incredibly accomplished runner who holds the Tahoe Rim Trail unsupported FKT. He’s also the creator of a Barkley-style race called Euchre Bar Massacre every October. He’s legit.

Then, with just two weeks to go before Nav-X, Guillaume ran into some problems with his visa and had to return to France the day of the race. Sean and I were incredibly bummed to lose G, but we decided to go on and do the race. “Do it for Guillaume!” we said. “Or to rub it in his face!” We hadn’t decided which.

___

What To Expect When You’re Expecting

So, this is how I find myself waking up in a tent in the middle of the Sierra, waiting to be handed a map that would send me out into the forest on a very wild goose chase.

Camp/a Jeep commercial

Sunset the night before

Full moon over camp

Waiting for Sean to show...

Nine o’clock rolls around. Time to receive our maps. Sean is nowhere to be seen. Nine-thirty. Ten. I look around as other teams scurry to plot their movements and prep their gear for the next 24 hours. Time is running out. Instead of feeling stressed, I’m a little relieved. Maybe I won’t have to do this after all…

Ten-thirty. Sean’s red truck rolls into the dusty campground. I guess we’re doing this.

In a supremely ironic twist of fate, Sean had gotten lost for hours while driving to the starting area. This does not bode well for our future prospects. We exchange quick pleasantries and immediately get down to the business of plotting our moves. The High Sierra sun already beats down on us as we squat over a stump, with our highlighters and sharpies clenched in our hands. It feels oppressive already.

The second type of orienteering is called Score-O. All rogaine races are Score-O. The premise is that there are flagged controls laid out across the course, each assigned a point value based on difficulty to travel to it or find. Rather than racing for the fastest time, everyone has the same amount of time to nab as many controls/points as they can. If you’re skilled enough to get every single control, you’ve “cleared.” It’s a game of strategy. Do you go after more of the easy controls that are closer to the start but are lower value? Or do you try to go out farther and burn time to get higher-value controls further afield?

Looking at our map, we have 72 controls. The possibilities are pretty much endless as to how we can design our run. Hell, the map itself is huge. It’s over two feet tall. I’m just wondering how I’m going to carry this thing in front of me for 24 hours.

Being novices to this whole thing, Sean and I both frantically googled rogaine strategies in the week leading up to the race. Interestingly, it involves office supplies. So on drive way up the previous day, I had found myself in a Staples somewhere in the Valley buying various brightly color writing utensils.

First, we highlight all the high-value controls on the map in yellow. The locations of water drops we highlight in pink. It quickly becomes apparently that the northeast corner of the map has the highest concentration of 60, 70, 80, and 90-point controls, but they’re spread further apart, and the terrain seems to be more forested, meaning navigation and travel will be more difficult. Also, there’s more water. The southern portion of the course has the next highest concentration of points. It seems to be more exposed rock which will be faster nav and travel. No water to speak of though. The northwest sector is denser in the number of controls but they’re lower value.

The correct plan seems fairly obvious (I think). We decide we’ll make a big loop of the northwestern segment first while we’re fresh, it’s hot, and we still have sunlight. Then, we’ll loop back to the hash house (the start/finish area), resupply and head out on our second loop. This loop will take us to the south overnight, where it should theoretically be easiest to navigate and we won’t need much water. Then, we’ll head back to the hash house for another resupply and go out on our third loop to pick off as many easier, lower-point controls as we can before noon tomorrow.

(One thing to factor into strategy is the penalty for finishing late. In this case, we’d lose 10 points for every minute past 24 hours that we’re out of the course. So you also want to plan the end of your race to have points where you can call audibles towards the end.)

Marking up the map

With our basic game plan laid out, we quickly start penciling in lines of travel from control to control. Again, more strategy. This time we’re trying to make each move the shortest possible while also hitting every control and simultaneously avoiding any overly difficult moves due to a giant mountain between them, dense forest, whatever.

We check our watches. It’s just a few minutes before the noon start. We quickly draw over our lines in sharpie, shrugging to each other occasionally. “I guess this seems good, right?” “Yeah. It all feels easy right now at least.”

Slipshod plan formatted, we hurriedly stuff all our gear, clothes and food into our packs. Because, oh yeah, since you’re going to be out in the wilderness on your own pretty much the whole race, you need to carry everything with you too.

Ready to roll

Still cramming stuff in our vests, we amble up to the starting area. We are, as usual, the outliers. Like any sport, orienteering has its own mores, particularly when it comes to fashion. Pants to protect the legs while crashing through underbrush. Long-sleeved shirts to deal with fluctuating temperatures. Protective hats to block hours of sun exposure. Calf-high gaiters to keep shoes free from any debris. Big packs to carry a day’s worth of supplies. Hiking-style shoes to cover the harsh terrain. We have none of this.

No, Sean and I stand there in our bright, little running shorts. Thin, polyester shirts. Tiny packs. We have so much skin exposed, I’m sure the other races are wondering if we’ll die of exposure or blood loss first.

It’s also worth noting that Sean and I are on the young end of the age spectrum. By a lot. Looking around, the average age seems to be hovering around 55. Orienteering, for whatever reason, tends to attract a much older crowd. I suppose it’s because it’s a thinkers’ sport. As I’ve learned time and time again, a great navigator who can move slowly but efficiently can crush a fast runner who’s shitty at navigation. Skill and experience levels the playing field immensely.

It’s 11:59. Our big adventure begins soon. The race directors herd us into the starting corral and offer a few final tidbits of intel and advice. And then, it’s, “OK… go!”

“Here goes nothing…” I mutter to Sean.

___

Noob Troop Loop

Orienteering starts are funny. Because each team has chosen a different one of the millions of possible permutations of routes, everyone scatters off in totally different directions immediately.

Sean and I bound out of the campground and down the main dirt road to the first bend, where we stop and consult our maps. We line up our compasses and shoot a bearing to the east-southeast, where our first control, 307, will supposedly be. Flipping over the map, I read the description of 307 off the chart. It simply says, “Broad saddle.” We peel off and quickly find ourselves climbing up a steep hill, dodging underbrush as best as we can. Soon enough, we top out. The saddle. But where is the control? We run a few hundred feet to the right, nothing. So we backtrack and try the left. Soon, “There it is!” We see the orange and white dangling from a tree branch. We quickly insert our e-sticks (basically USB sticks attached to our hands) to record our presence and then immediately consult the map again.

Moving from the hash house (pink) to 307 to 405

Control 405. To the east-northeast, maybe half a mile away. Rather than shoot straight there, we see that there’s a road between it and us. The road connects to another road that travels within about a tenth of a mile to it. And near there, there’s a junction with a trail. So, we can travel expeditiously via road, then shoot our bearing off the trail junction so we know exactly where we are and the exact angle we have to travel to reach 405, labeled “Marsh, S end.” Or at least that’s the idea.

We make our way to the road, turn on the second road, and fairly quickly find the junction. From there, we shoot the bearing and sprint off, back into the woods. Soon enough, we find a marsh and start scanning the area. Nothing. We move along the edge, trying to stay on the south side. But as the control continues to remain elusive, we begin just running around aimlessly hoping to bump into it. Ten minutes go by. “Where the hell is this thing?” “We’re definitely at the south end of the marsh… right?”

Finally, I pull my head out of the moment. “Stop. Let’s look at the map.” That’s when I notice that the marsh isn’t just one big strip; it has a bend into it, breaking the marsh into two distinct sections. “What if we’re in this part of the marsh, not over here?” Lightbulb. We’d overshot the bearing just enough that we’d landed ourselves in the smaller, adjacent part of the marsh. We turn 180 degrees and crashed through more underbrush until, there it was. The other part of the marsh. We sprint down its south face, and sure enough, the control comes into view. Ah, I’m starting to see how this is going to go…

We dip our e-sticks and I look down at my watch. 12:40. Two controls in 40 minutes. “Spot on pace!” I announce naively but also fully aware that it’s it’s naive. With 72 controls, to clear the course, we’ll need to find a control every 20 minutes for 24 hours straight. Two things: 1) That is an insane pace, and 2) it means we can make zero mistakes, like, ever.

So, time to get going. We consult the map again. Our next objective is 706, labeled “Reentrant.” We check our compasses and take off.

For the next hour or so, we’re cranking along nicely. Our control-every-20-minutes pace holds up. At 300 (“Broad terrace, N end”), I pull my head out of the map for a moment. It’s been two hours since we’ve started. “Holy shit. I feel like I’ve been out here with you all day,” I tell Sean.

There is no down-time in orienteering. No time to turn your brain off. No time even to eat or drink really. Your head’s always buried in your map, staring off the end of your compass, or scanning your surroundings, hoping to catch a glimmer of orange out of the corner of your eye. And as soon as you do and you’ve tag the control, your heads right back at it again. Oh, and you’re also running or hiking fully cross-country, hopping over logs, running down bare rock faces, hopping over talus fields, or breaking through underbrush, trying not to fall on your face.

Remember that thing you tried to do when you were little where you’d try to pat your head and rub your belly. It’s sort of like that except you’re also juggling a soccer ball, reciting pi to the 100th decimal, cooking an omelet, and doing your taxes.

___

Needle In A Haystack

The afternoon goes off relatively without much of a hitch. We trudge up hillsides, take shortcuts on logging roads that are nowhere to be seen on the map, skip across waterlogged marshes, cross long talus fields, and refill our bottles in cold, mountain-fed streams. Most importantly, we’re picking off controls here and there with only occasional difficulty. I actually can’t believe how well we’re moving. Honestly, I came into the race feeling only OK about my compass skills. But with the repetition of doing it over and over and over, hour after hour after hour, I’m starting feel cautiously confident.

Additionally, Sean and I have a very complementary partnership emerging. Ying and yang. He seems to be better with the compass and traveling over large distances to the general area of a control. Once there, I tend to be better at reading the immediate terrain and spotting the controls at a distance. (“LASIK!” I tell him. “The best money I’ve ever spent!”) And when one of us falters in his unspoken area of expertise, the other picks up the slack and the roles reverse. I’m really liking our chances.

Our entire northern loop

Eventually, we reach the very far northwestern corner of the map. 830, “Bare rock, W foot.” We sight ourselves off a massive wall of bare rock rising almost a thousand feet to our right. We’re almost surrounded by it in fact. I suddenly start to feel a quiet terror. It’s a cross between claustrophobia and helplessness. I realize just how far away we are from everyone and everything. Civilization. Safety. And any sense of origin. It’s like riding in an airplane and suddenly thinking about the fact that you’re 30,000 feet above the Earth in a metal tube. We round a giant grouping of boulders and thankfully spot the control. Mercifully, the feeling washes away in our excitement.

We make a few more moves. We shoot a bearing from 631 (“Stream”) to 821 (“Marsh, partially treed, SW part”). The move feels fairly complicated on the map. In practice, it’s even worse. But after 25 minutes or so, we find ourselves in the general area where we think we’re supposed to be. Except, we have no idea where we actually are. Or where the marsh is. Instead, we’re on a steep, loose hillside, chockful of deadfall and chaparral. This looks nothing like a marsh. This looks like the opposite of a marsh. Sean, sure he knows where we are, shoots off up the hillside. I follow him but only half-heartedly, feeling like he’s going the wrong way. My head starts to spin. The airplane feeling comes on again.

Five minutes later. “Stop! Let’s look at the map and see where we think we are,” I implore. “I think we’re here,” Sean points with the corner of his compass. I’m not sure how he arrived at that conclusion. But, scanning the dense canopy of trees enveloping us, I have no better counter. “I think we need to go back up here,” he points. I’m at a loss so I shrug and say sure.

We fumble around for another 15-20 minutes. Then I hear Sean shout, “Found the marsh!” “You glorious son of a bitch!” I exclaim and sprint towards the sound of his voice. Sure enough, he’s located a marsh perched on a shelf on the hillside. In my excitement, I try to hop over a huge trunk, but my shoe catches a piece of bark and I ragdoll. Flipping forward, I slam into the marsh, bent at a 90-degree angle the wrong way. “Shit! Shitshitshitshitshiiiit.” I follow up with, “I’m OK!” I look down at my knee, and it’s bright red. Blood oozes down, soaking my sock below. I pop up, more embarrassed than hurt. “You alright, man?” Sean asks. I look down at my leg, wet with blood. “Yeah, the flies are just going to have a little feast,” I grin.

After all this, we can’t even find the control. We flail a bit more until we realize there are in fact several marshes on this hillside. None seem to actually be on the map. We make our way from one to another, until we finally find our “treed marsh” and the control. Finally.

After spending the last four hours totally off-trail in the middle of the wilderness, our next line of travel bisects a trail and then turns into a logging road. We make it there, and it feels surprisingly wonderful to be swaddled in civilization again. And good thing too, because night is falling fast.

We have a half dozen more controls to get us back to the hash house, but most all are near roads or trails so we cruise through them without incident. The only snafu comes on the very final control, a quarter mile from the campground. 201 (“Stream junction”). At 20 points, it should be uber easy. But somehow we find ourselves going up and down a dry stream bed, back and forth, looking for a non-existent control. Something is clearly wrong, but we can’t work it out. We both get frustrated. I rise the idea of just cutting bait—it’s only 20 points after all—and heading home. But Sean’s stubbornness is quickly joined by my own, and we refuse to give up. I know this is a poor use of our time, but I know how angry I’ll be with myself tomorrow if we don’t get every control we try for. The moment of frustration forces us to pause and regroup. Sean looks at the map and, in his amazing wisdom that I still don’t understand, decides that we must be in the wrong stream. Looking at the map, I’m not sure that we could be in any other stream. But absent a better idea, I go with it. Five minutes later and back on the road, we spot our correct stream. We instantly feel foolish. Five minutes more of fighting vegetation along the stream bed and we find the control. A short jog later and we’re back at the hash house.

It feels good to be back amongst people and lights and manmade objects. The timing tent is playing some Zeppelin, and the RD offers me soup. I greedily accept. I see a full bottle of Mrs. Butterworth syrup sitting on a table and say, “Oh. Are you guys making pancakes later?” The RD stares at me and just says, “No.” “Uh… OK.”

It’s 9:30. We tell the few people lounging around where we’ve been, and they seem impressed. It feels good; we must be doing something right. We’re a third of our way through the course, which is great. But it also means clearing the course is out of the question. No mind.

I jog back to my Jeep, grab a fresh battery pack for my headlight and shove more gels, turkey sandwiches and formerly-frozen burritos into my pack. Ready to roll. We know night will be trying, but we just don’t know how much.

___

Descent Into Darkness

Time to begin our southern loop. Drier, opener, faster (supposedly). We pop out on the road and look for the second path junction to the left. According to the map, it should come very quickly. But it doesn’t. Or it does. We can’t tell. There are so many Jeep trails and turn-offs, it’s hard for us to know which is the correct one. We choose one that seems right. But the trail isn’t bearing in the direction it is on the map. Still we follow it. Dumb. We’re going uphill now. This seems very wrong. It’s supposed to be flat. Still we follow it. Finally we both agree it’s wrong. Duh. We head back down to the road. For some reason we think the trail must be farther away from camp so we head out. We take other side trails momentarily before deciding they’re wrong. We probably run at least a mile from camp. At some point, a pickup comes rumbling down the dirt road keeping up dust in our headlamps. “Oh hey guys! Is that Andy and Sean?” Through the floating dust and the stupor in my head, I can’t really make out who it is. After a few moments, I dawns on me that it’s one of the RDs. Sean explains to him what we are—or aren’t—doing. “These roads are all fucked up, man. Just get to a control and shoot straight lines from there,” he offers as advice. As the pickup chugs off, I say to Sean, “Well no shit. That’s what we’re trying to do.” But he’s right. The area is so heavily used we can’t trust the map or anything we see. So what do we do?

We fumble around for another 20 minutes or so before we finally identify a set of cliffs off to our right. On the map, we see a symbol for cliffs. We’ve finally located ourselves. PHEW. And we’re right by a control. We shoot a bearing and head off towards 202 (“Marsh, just N of N tip”). And we find it! We curse, we laugh, we howl. But we’ve found it. And we burned 70 minutes doing it. For 20 points. Just a quarter mile from the starting line. Woof.

With a new understanding of where we are, we shoot a bearing and head off into the wilderness once more.

Earlier that afternoon I had said, “How the hell are we supposed to do this in the dark?” Now that it was dark… yeah. “Flying blind” does not begin to accurately describe what we’re doing. We just take a bearing, point ourselves in a direction and pray that we end up there. And our “easier, rockier” loop is nowhere to be seen. It’s all dense forests with zero visibility. (Fun fact! Almost all 24-hour rogaines are held as close to full moons as possible!) The one advantage the night provides is that the controls have pieces of reflective tape on them. So, if you’re scanning your surroundings, your headlight might at least catch a glimmer coming off the tape. This proved appreciably helpful in spotting controls at a great distance, ones that we probably wouldn’t have caught in daylight.

But still, it’s just really fucking hard.

After we grab a few controls, we head towards a big section of cliffs. It looks cool on the map. It looks cooler in person. We claw our way up a sheer rock face onto what turns out to be a massive, smooth granite ridge, rising hundreds of feet above the surrounding valley. We find 902 (“Spur/bare rock, access from N or S”) rather easily. There’s nothing else up there besides the control attached to a lone tree clinging stubbornly to the rock. We register our e-sticks and then sit down for a minute.

“Wow. It’s really beautiful out here.” In the full moon, we can finally see the world around us. It’s a symphony of rock and wood and water lit by the pale glow of a giant rock floating in the sky reflecting sunlight from millions of miles away. For a minute, inside all the madness, the world is perfect.

“Dude. I’m going to eat my fucking burrito,” I exclaim. I throw my pack off and dig in, finding the now-nearly-warm bean and cheese burrito that had been sitting in the bottom for 12 hours now. I bite into it and immediately start moaning. “I can feel the endorphins firing in my brain,” I gush to Sean. He laughs politely. I’m in heaven.

A few minutes later, we say goodbye to the view, take our bearings and head down off the cliffs. Rather than change back to forest, the ground beneath our feet stays sandy and open. “Finally!” I shout. “The rocky loop we were promised.” Feeling in high spirits, we cruise downhill towards 506 (“Reetrant”). At only 50 points, this one should be no problem… Right?

Forty-five minutes later, Sean and I are just flabbergasted. I’ve run out of curse words. I’m empty. I’m fully defeated. We’ve run up and down this damn stream so long looking for a junction to shoot a bearing from that I don’t even know what my name is anymore. We’re flailing. Several times, I fully lose the thread. I look down at my map, and it’s gibberish. I forget which control we’re looking for. I start trying telling Sean he’s wrong, as I’m looking at a totally different part of the map. I don’t know what we’re doing anymore.

We sweep the forest back and forth, a few dozen feet from the stream and a few dozen feet apart from each other, hoping to catch the glint of reflective tape in our headlamps. But the battery on my light is dying and has automatically dimmed itself. Even if the control is out here, I probably won’t see it. If was more coherent I’d be upset. Instead I’m just apathetic.

Somehow, we decide to sweep in the opposite direction, way downstream, which feel very wrong to us, but at this point, it’s the only thing we haven’t done. Running—mostly out of desperation—we drop into a deep forest and begin thrashing around in the undergrowth when suddenly, “Holy shit! I’ve got it!” We find it. I have no idea how that control relates to what we were looking for, but I don’t care. Desperation gives way to a rush of relief.

Here’s what it looked like on Strava. Woof.

Later, as we’re following our next bearing, Sean and I both admit to each other that we thought about suggesting we just bail on the control. But then we both realized we couldn’t.

And here’s the true challenge of rogaine. Ninety percent of the time you can’t just skip a control that’s hard to find. Because if you don’t know where the control is, then you don’t know here you are either. And if you don’t know where you are, you don’t where we’re you’re going next. So, you’re forced to find the control, even if it feels impossible, because it’s your own way out alive.

The rest of the night continues on, eventfully and uneventfully. Ironically, we seem to have the most difficulty finding the lowest-point controls while the high-value controls are relatively easy to locate. We joke about it. It’s funny. I think.

Features like “clearing” and “reentrant” continue to be the bane of my existence. What constitutes one clearing over another clearing? What the actual fuck is a reentrant anyway?

We flail in the dark some more.

We drop down a rock face to a deep dark forest where I think we’re going to die. Somehow, by sheer miracle, I get the sense that the control is much farther north than we think it is, and we sweep the edge of the forest. Four minutes later, I catch the gleam of reflective tape in my headlamp.

Another time, Sean and I are a bajillion miles away from anywhere we think we know. We’ve been running across a series of gullies towards 907 (another fucking “reentrant”). We’ve run ourselves down deep into the folds of a hillside. We’re surrounded by rocks and more rocks. We have no idea where in the world we possibly are. And then all of a sudden Sean shouts, “I see it!” There it is, two hundred feet above us. Another miracle.

The night goes on, until dawn slowly yawns on the horizon. I realize I feel better than I’ve ever felt in ant 100-miler at this point. We’ve covering a lot of ground, and it’s more full-body, but I’m not gutting myself to do it. And the necessity of focus actually makes me feel sharp. Then I realize I’ve only eaten a few hundred calories all night. I check my water bottles. Oh yeah. I’ve only drank about 20 oz of water in the last 12 hours too.

No mind. The sun comes up and navigation becomes easier again. Weirdly, I miss the reflective tape. You can’t have it all.

The next control is 623. I read the description: “Pool at base of 8m water (no access from NW).”  “Oooh! That sounds delightful,” I say. We find it. It is delightful. Just as the sun has risen, we find ourselves in the midst of a smooth, rocky gully with a gently roaring waterfall surrounded by glimmering pools of cool water. “I’m really glad we did this one,” I say out loud, instantly feeling like we’re an old, married couple.

Five minutes later, I’m blowing my ass out behind a bush.

Three controls away from finishing our second loop, we hit another snafu. We burn what feels like an hour wandering aimlessly through the forest. It’s 503 (another fucking “reentrant”). It should be easy. It’s not. I shout at Sean to stop and let’s think this thing out. We orient ourselves off a giant wall to the north of us and try to think our way out of this thing. Ten minutes later, I start shouting “Hallelujah!” as the world around us is finally matching up with the world on our maps. We split up and two minutes later I shout, “Holy shit I found it!” Seriously, what is a reentrant anyway??

An hour later, we’re back at the hash house. It’s around 9:00 in the morning. The first loop took us 9.5 hours. The second one took 11.5. Clearing the map is waaaay out of the question. But as we’re milling around the food tent, we still feel plenty good. Sean and I both make a beeline for the industrial-sized can of cocktail fruit and spoon the syrup and processed pineapple into our cups and guzzle it whole. It’s heavenly.

Also, fruitcake FTW.

___

Victory Lap?

We’re closing in on two hours left. It’s getting hot again. I know Sean wants to quit. He knows I want to quit. I know he knows that I want to quit. He knows that I know that he wants to quit. But instead, we make plans to head out on our final, truncated loop. We’ll pick off a few controls that are nearby with enough time to return before noon. (Good rogaine strategy! I feel proud.)

Sean looks a little rough. I didn’t eat many calories overnight, but he ran out. Nonetheless, all night, he’d pushed the pace on hills, leaving me in the dust. I’ve been perkier on the roads and had to pull him a bit. Basically, we’re both beat. We don’t want to admit it to the other person. It’s funny that we only met about 24 hours ago.

“We leave by 22,” we agree. Translation: 10:00am. We’ll have two hours to complete our mini-loop of four controls. It’ll only be 130 points total, but it’s more to prove to ourselves that we refuse to quit. At 10:00am precisely, we meet by the port-a-potties.

In my mind, this mini-loop is a victory lap. We find the first control with ease. The second with ease. The third with ease. The fourth one pretends to be difficult but soon we wrangle it in. With most of the course under our belts and 45 minutes left, we head back home.

At the hash house, we jam our e-sticks in the control labeled “FINISH” and give each other a series of handshakes, fist-bumps and hugs. We did it.

___

“That’s A Good Thing”

When we put our e-sticks into the download terminal—basically the thing that receives all those timestamps when we punched the different controls—the printer immediately spit out a long receipt-looking thing. “Wow. That’s long. That’s a good thing,” says the volunteer working the computer.

I look at my receipt. It says we have 2,900 points. I look over at the timekeeper’s screen, and the top number of points I see from other teams is 2,630. Whoa. We might have won.

We did all that. Sheesh.

There’s still twenty minutes left—it’s 11:40am—so there’s a good chance another team could still come in and kick our asses.

Fifty minutes later we’re standing at the awards ceremony. I’m cracked out my mind. I’m dirty. Sticky. Tired. Blood-shot-eyes-y. But eventually the RD announces, “Male team, open… with 2,900 points… wow, that’s almost the whole map… Pacific Mountain Runners, Andy Pearson and Sean Ranney!”

Beginner’s luck again. We’re the North American Champions.

The best part about orienteering is how quaint it is. (And I don’t use that word pejoratively.) This award ceremony is only a few dozen people huddled around an awning trying to stay out of the sun. The awards come in dozens of flavors, across every possible permutation of age and gender divisions imaginable. And the awards themselves? A certificate declaring “2019 North American Rogaine Champion” with the name section blank—RD: “You can write your own name in” —and your choice from a variety of chocolates. As far as I can tell chocolate is the belt buckle of orienteering. The adventure has been so epic, and the reward so unassuming, it feels perfect.

What winning feels like.

What winning tastes like.

___

The Venn Diagram

Reflecting back, I’m both proud of and humbled by what we did. The experience taught me more in 24 hours than I think I’ve ever learned. From geology to map-reading to problem-solving to ultrarunning to 500 other things, orienteering requires everything from you. But it’s a constant education too.

I love ultrarunning deeply. It speaks to a deep physical and spiritual part of human existence. But orienteering adds the mental aspect as well. You have to always be on.

We ended up moving more than 60 miles in 24 hours, with probably 90-95% of that being off-trail. (Full Strava details here.) During the race, I joked with Sean that the Venn diagram of people who would actually do this is so incredibly small. You have to possess the ability to run/hike at ultramarathon distances while also calling on a deep reservoir of navigational and outdoor experience. (Or in my case, just faking it.)

___

Not The End

If any of this sounds at least mildly interesting to you, I’d encourage you to look up orienteering clubs in your city. Almost all cities have one. In LA, ours is the LAOC. They have monthly events that are usually just an hour or two in length, and they’re a great way to try your hand at it. (Also, a fun family activity for kids!) Learning these kinds of map and compass skill is deeply rewarding and can add all kinds of new dimensions to your appreciation of the outdoors.

Basically, try it! And if you have questions or want some tips, let me know. I’m happy to help.

In the end, more than being proud of what we did, I’m proud of what we learned. And I can’t wait to hack our way through the Rogaine World Championship in Lake Tahoe next August. I just hope there won’t be any fucking reentrants.

[scnofcain-blog]

( MUSE H )  charles michael davis ? no, i’m certain that’s just rowan ( he/him ), a member of the cain family. the thirty-four year old greengrocer is known to be extremely patient and also very spiteful. when i think of them i picture freshly pressed white shirts, hushed conversations behind closed doors, & the sound of rustling leaves. ( cami + nineteen + she/her )

hey guys !! cami here, gmt bitch, real tired person. please accept my man. 

also a sidenote: i am not a very consistent person so me using a medium gif here, a gif icon on a starter and an icon on a different thread? likely.

when the big four families settled and accumulated power, they were in equal footing. wealth, respect, ambition. the cains' reputation, however, took quite a dip in the last few years. marianna cain was the only child and heiress to the cain legacy - whispers told of her yearning for more, perhaps marriage to someone from the other important families to cement her growing relevance. instead, she picked an engineer with no relevant name or status, and dressed him up with her own surname, by then just dangling to survive oblivion, that was likely to take it away.

together, marianna and nathan revitalized the family businesses, and soon the wealth began to flow in again, uninterrupted. their mines, especially, saw a level of development unheard of since the settlement. regardless of their success though, the choice made by the heiress in a critical time told the others that the cains did not search for power, that they were not a TREAT. for as much money and jobs as they generated, the cains were to be underestimated, as they still are.

rowan was the firstborn. the pregnancy was very high risk, providing many scares to the entire family through the journey. the delivery of the premature baby nearly took marianna's life, and rowan's was hanguing by a thread for a bit as well. the rather traumatic experience deterred the family from having any more biological children, but they weren't satisfied - only a few years later, they adopted a baby boy, whom they named roman.

the small family thrived for some years. marianna and nathan were hands-on parents, always present in their children's lives despite their own busy schedules. love, nurturing and a sense of union never lacked in the house, even when the two contrasting boys butted heads and argued. somehow, the two seemed to cushion any fall.

rowan accepted a feeling of duty from a very early age. no one imposed it on him but the boy himself, as there was this seed of ambition buried inside him fighting to burst out. with his soft nature and passion for the quieter things in life, no one would have guessed he'd one day turn into a sharp businessman, but rowan carved that path for himself. his surname was on those documents his mother signed and on the side of those trucks and on those plaques. he could always feel the responsibility they emanated.

growing up, he didn't devote himself to studious pursuits. instead, he moved semi-permanently to one of the many countryside houses his family owned, and during the week followed around relatives and advisors to learn their trade hands-on. slowly, they began giving him some actual jobs, but even then, past the age of twenty, it felt like his parents were easing him into it, protecting him from failure.

( death tw, parental death tw ) rowan had turned twenty one the previous month and his brother was barely sixteen years old. during a tour through one of their newest facilities to an investor, the platforms shook and everything collapsed. under the rubble were buried HUNDREDS of people, including mine workers and the two cains. very few survived, and the heads of the family were not lucky. the accident came with not only grief but guilt, as lawsuits began piling up, both from relatives of the deceased and survivors of the event. the cains hadn't just died, no. they had taken the lives of over a hundred people in a disaster beyond imagination.

rowan's pragmatism got him through most of it all. there were businesses to be run and a reputation to repair. without nearly as much experience as necessary, the man took over more and more positions until, shortly after, all the roles his parent's had occupied were replaced by him. one man doing the job of two, because no one else could do it right. no one else could uphold it to the same standards and plans as those two. because if someone else took even just a bit of the weight that was crushing him to the ground, he'd be able to breathe, and rowan didn't wish to do so. a busy mind left no room for mourning.

meanwhile, his younger brother grew more and more out of control. marianna and nathan had been an integral part of their lives even as they grew older, acting as the glue between their clashing personalities, softening any friction that would arise. without them, and with how each of the boys chose to deal with their hurt, the two drifted apart. hard as he tried, rowan could never be their parents, nor could any of his kind words undo the damage of losing them in such a brutal way. eventually, those words earned hard edges, louder ones, frustration mingled with worry - no one would recognize them now as the siblings they once were.

roman calmed down eventually, refocusing his life a bit more and finding worthier pursuits. his older brother sits on the office his mother once owned, spends most of his nights in his childhood home, still takes care of lawsuits that keep pouring in from the collapse. it is as if rowan's clock has stopped, leaving him stranded in a role that isn't his and in a constant reminder of the tragic day that tore the family apart. in a sense, he resents his little brother, who was able to walk away from it all.

recently, however, the two began spending more time together, even though it has led mostly to arguments, their views clashing against each other again and again. the climate of insurrection spreading through creon comes as the perfect wave which the cains would ride onto reignited glory: still sitting in a very low point, the family has united to discuss the power struggle, their views on the right of an oligarchy, their opinions on the rebel groups, they ALLIANCE with some of them. behind closed doors, the cains hide from the reputation that follows that, that makes them weak. they reconvene in the one whisper they never tried to kill, that they were allies of the common man, who had no power, no status, no name.

nathan cain often spoke about his insatisfaction with the way creon was run, and his older son absorbed every word he said, clinging to it with devotion. as he grew older, his eyes turned to books, to the search for how things were done before those four decided the world was theirs to rule. many of the revolutionary rhetorics in streets now resonate with the debates he'd have with his father, the suggestions, the unconformity. from within of the system, rowan was raising questions from the very start, and now the time has come for him to whisper it just a bit louder.

HEADCANONS:

despite being a self-proclaimed not-intellectual, rowan has an impressive personal library, many of the books in it being non-fiction and earth classics.

have you seen the powerhouse that cmd is? rowan might be just a little too into fitness. catch him in his morning jog. catch him growing kale. fight him.

his obsession with work and duty make him a very unreliable person, especially to loved ones. it is certainly one of his biggest regrets, yet he doesn't seem to be able to hop off of that moving train: he's lost most touch with his brother, his most recent relationship ended with a fizzled out engagement a year ago, friends keep walking away... life is kinda passing him by and so are all the people he wishes he could keep close, yet he always does the exact opposite.

in the last few years, rowan has shifted the family business focus from the mines to the many plots of land they own. not a single one has been neglected, and creon is currently facing a bonanza of produce and livestock - the trucks with the cain logo on the side are a common sight everywhere, and they have very much monopolized the pantries and fridges of creon.

just as hands-on as his parents before him, rowan is constantly visiting both the farmlands and the places where they end up. the optics are great, and it truly has brought a feeling of proximity between this big family and the rest - how much of this is propaganda and how much is genuine is a bit up for debate.

his patience knows no bounds, except for maybe his brother. rowan is the definition of laying low and waiting, seething, preparing. it is near impossible for most people to get a rise out of him, to make him show anything but politeness and good spirits. he is, however, a very resentful person, and can hold a grudge for far longer than most would assume.

no matter how much he rises up, rowan will always see himself as an impostor, in a place he wasn't fully prepared to take over, in a role that wasn't his, in a life he didn't pick. while he does his best to act as the good negotiator, some people have and will pick at his hidden core and insecurity, and it is very much a way to get inside his head. 

character parallels: julia wicker, aaron burr, annalise keating, robb stark, jack pearson, scott mccall, terry jeffords, jackson avery, setev rogers, laurel lance, randall pearson, chloe decker, clarke griffin, harvey kinkle, daisy johnson, alexander hamilton & alan zaveri.

WANTED CONNECTIONS:

the other cains. that can be the ones in the family page or, as long as you message someone else from the family, any other relative !! they are very much united, especially right now, when it comes to the politics of creon and the times of rebellion, so this could lead to some interesting strength for the cains or even weakness if your character doesn’t agree with the way things are heading. backstab us pls. be the snitch.

ex-fiancée. him and rowan broke up a few months into their engagement, mostly because of how little time, attention and love really the cain gave him. things might be !! sad and awkward, or more angsty if we wanna throw in some other stuff that lead to the collapse of the relationship, or even a little flame that is still there and that is killing the both of them !! hurt me 

a new chance. someone love this man then. commit the same errors as those before him and think that this time it will be different. hurt yourself

look at him. someone dick down this man. he might not have the time or emotional vulnerability for a healthy relationship but he certainly can find a break to go have fun !! 

rebel rebel, your face is a mess. the cains are threading dangerous territory with the opposition to the big four families, by getting closer and closer and trying to allign themselves with their movement. this could lead to some interesting friendships, alliances or full on mistrust and clashing of ideas !! rebel leaders and just your good rebels ready to rise up or at least hear the others out, vote cain for the people i guess

fight him. maybe one of your character’s relatives died during the infamous collapse of the mine. maybe you just don’t like the persona of the man of the people who, simultaneously, is sitting on a fortune and on power. maybe you think he’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. anyway, fight him

an old friend. someone who somehow has stuck by his side through all these years. they’ve been friends since they were just children. life has moved on and they’ve both changed a lot so bring me some drAMA

pals pals pals. even though most of his come and go, mostly by his wrong doing, someone please befriend this man. take him out for drinks. pls. 

[seuzz]

Novel: Absalom, Absalom!

Summary In 1909 Quentin Compson of Jefferson, Mississippi, is summoned out to her house by Miss Rosa Coldfield to listen to the story of the Sutpen family, into which her sister married. Quentin later hears more of the story from his father, and he himself learns more directly on visiting the decaying Sutpen mansion with Miss Rosa. A year later he recounts the story to his roommate at Harvard, who speculates copiously on details not know and which were impossible to learn.

The story of Thomas Sutpen, when put together: The son of poor white trash in Virginia, Thomas Sutpen was as a youth insulted by a house slave and became determined to have an estate and dynasty of his own. He moved to Haiti where he married, and only too late discovered—after fathering a child by her—that his wife was part-Negro. He divorced her and moved with twenty slaves to Jefferson where he bamboozled his way into ownership of a hundred acres on which he built a great mansion. He wed Ellen Coldfield, the daughter of shopkeeper and by her fathered a daughter, Judith, and a son, Henry. He also fathered another daughter, Clytie, by a slave a girl. For all this, Sutpen never really attained respectability in the eyes of the town.

Henry Sutpen went to university where he befriended an older student, Charles Bon, and brought him back home, where it was arranged for Charles to marry Judith. Sutpen, however, realized that Charles was the son he had by his first wife; on informing Henry of this, Henry disowned his father and fled with Charles. They joined the Confederate Army on the outbreak of the War. When it was over they returned home, and at the gates of the house Henry killed Charles. It is assumed it was because Charles was determined to marry Judith despite being her half-brother and being part-Negro. Henry then ran off. Ellen Coldfield was already dead before this had happened.

Thomas Sutpen returned to his ruined plantation and tried to rebuild it. He proposed a kind of marriage to Rosa Coldfield, the much-younger sister of Ellen, who had moved in with Judith and Clytie. He proposed that he father a child by her, but only marry her if the child was a son. She naturally refused and moved back to town. Sutpen then fathered a child on the granddaughter of a squatter who lived on his land. When the child proved a girl, he disowned them both, and was promptly murdered by the squatter, who also killed his daughter and the infant before being killed by a posse.

Some years later a child that Charles had fathered on an octaroon is fetched from New Orleans by Clytie and Judith. He marries a black woman and fathers a child. Charles's son and Judith die of yellow fever, leaving Clytie and Charles's grandson the only inhabitants of the ruined house.

In 1909 Quentin and Rosa travel out to the mansion, where they discover Henry, living there four years, in an upper room waiting to die. Later, when they try to fetch him back to town, Clytie burns the house down, killing herself and Henry.

Notes At the time of its publication, Clifton Fadiman denounced Absalom, Absalom! as "a penny dreadful tricked up in fancy language and given a specious depth by the expert manipulation of a series of eccentric technical tricks."

I think there is some justice in this judgment. I'm not alone, either. Even today, when it is a feature of university literature classes, this novel is controversial among critics. The plot is a Gothic horror story that is only slowly revealed in piecemeal fashion as various narrators take their turns sketching it and coloring it in with their own perspectives; and to grasp the prose style, imagine a kudzu that's been weaponized by Batman's Poison Ivy .

And yet this isn't to say that the novel is bad or and should be dismissed. It's quite good, actually, if only it is accepted as what it is and not wished to be what it is not.

But I'm not here to pass a critical judgment, only to remark on what works very well, what works less well, and what lessons might be learned. I have only two:

1. The novel does a masterful job of parceling out only a little information at a time, and parceling it out so that we sense the disclosures coming and are not shocked to our core when they arrive. This creates suspense and stops the plot twists being to nakedly shocking when they come, while still giving us a good chill when our fears are confirmed. It would work even if the prose style weren't as dense and obscure as it often is, and a reading of Absalom, Absalom! make plain how much sheer storytelling joy there is to be had in building and delaying plot developments not by manipulating the plot but by manipulating the narrative.

2. Most of the criticisms of the prose style concentrate on the length of the sentences, the complexity of their internal structure, and the insertion of parenthetical material. These stylistic choices can and have been defended, but the greatest defect (IMO) is the relative lack of vivid, concrete words, and the superabundance of words that only exist for the sake of other words.

Here is an example of what I mean:

... probably by that time he had learned that there were three things and no more: breathing, pleasure, darkness; and without money there could be no pleasure, and without pleasure it would not even be breathing but mere protoplasmic inhale and collapse of blind unorganism in a darkness where light never began.

The meaning, if you read it carefully, is clear enough: Pleasure needs money, and breathing needs pleasure; for breathing without pleasure is not life but only a biological mechanicalness. You may say that Faulkner's original is more stylish than my paraphrase, and I will not argue. But notice how every noun in Faulkner's passage (and my own) is either abstract (thing, breathing, pleasure, money, inhale, unorganism) or abstractness dressed in metaphor (darkness, light). "Learned" is not a vivid verb, and "collapse" is another metaphor for an abstraction. Every one of those fifty-one words is either abstract or merely a connective binding those abstractions together.  And so the imagination fumbles vainly for some real and vivid image in this wall of words.

Here is a passage where we do get something concrete when Faulkner describes Miss Rosa’s house:

... a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them.

This is a challenge to read, but it is easier to absorb because there are definite objects—blinds and dust motes and flecks of paint; the sun, the room, the air—colored with vivid adjectives (dim hot airless; yellow; dead old dried); and even the parenthetical remarks about light and air carrying heat refer to real things.

When Faulkner writes in this latter, as he does throughout most of Chapter Nine, the reader can move swiftly and confidently through even the longest and most maze-like sentences, because the sentences gives us real things to imagine and ways of imagining them. But when he retreats into the abstract—which he is most often does—the story is swallowed up in mere verbiage.

You can defend even this aspect of Faulkner's style by arguing that, ultimately, that is all that the narrators have—their own words to explain something that has long since vanished—and that they are as lost and uncomprehending inside their words as the reader is. And maybe you are right. But I take from it the caution that the more complex your prose style, the more you need hard, bright words that stand for things that are not words if you don't want to baffle and intimidate your readers.

Recommended

[thevalkirias]

The Crown and the Solitary Queen Elizabeth

Netflix’s The Crown was advertised as the most expensive show ever developed by the streaming service. Though tells the story of real people, it’s easy to understand why the expenses were so elevated: the show enchants us with the grandiose beauty of its sceneries, the strictness of the costumes and the impeccable characterization, all in order to transport us to a time of political and social turbulence in an Empire that had just gone through an arduous world war and, moreover, was facing other kinds of agitation, including the ascension of a young woman, Queen Elizabeth, to the throne.

 Warning: this article contains spoilers!

It takes no time at all for the plot to be set in motion, and in the very first episode we are invited to the wedding of the then-Princess Elizabeth (Claire Foy) to Philip of Greece and Denmark (Matt Smith), in 1947. We know from History classes that royal houses were famous for arranging marriages according to what was most convenient, but here, between Elizabeth and Philip, all was done in agreement and for love. Philip, upon marrying Elizabeth, has to let go of all of his titles and of his position as a Navy officer. More than that, he has to accept that he would always be hierarchically below his wife. At first it doesn’t seem like an obstacle for the relationship, but as the episodes pass we begin to realize that it bothers the prince consort that he always has to stand in the background -- and it’s practically impossible not to remember Queen Victoria and her own prince consort, Albert.

Marriage is only the first stage in the Princess’s changing life. As the health of her father, King George VI (Jared Harris), decreases, it becomes just a matter of time before she has to replace him on the throne. Though Elizabeth was the first daughter, she didn’t grow up with the intention of carrying the Crown, since it was her father’s older brother, Edward VIII (Alex Jennings), who was King when she was a child. Edward abdicated from the throne so he could live with the woman he loved, who was divorced and, according to the strict rules of the Anglican Church, could never marry a royal. When Edward abdicated, his younger brother ascended to the throne, and Elizabeth, then a ten-year-old, became next in the line of succession.

With the intention of initiating his daughter in her duties, King George VI decides to send her and Philip on a long journey through the British territories. The King had been diagnosed with cancer and saw his days coming to an end, but he needed to make sure Elizabeth was aware of everything that was happening in the kingdom. The Princess embarks on a long journey that would keep her away from her home and her children, young Prince Charles and Princess Anne, while the King tries to reestablish himself. Unfortunately the worst happens and George VI passes away while Elizabeth is far from home, so she has to return to England in a hurry in order to take her rightful place.

And while you mourn your father, you must also mourn someone else. Elizabeth Mountbatten. For she has now been replaced by another person, Elizabeth Regina. The two Elizabeths will frequently be in conflict with one another. The fact is, the crown must win. Must always win.

At the age of 25, Elizabeth is now Queen Elizabeth II of England and feels from the start the weight and the burden that it is to carry the crown. This interlude in her life as a monarch is portrayed in a delicate and poetic manner, and we can see that she had very little time to take in the loss of her father and her ascension to the throne. In an instant Elizabeth and Philip were enjoying the hospitality in Kenya, but in the very next moment the Princess was made Queen. Though she had been educated on the British laws and constitution her whole life, Elizabeth felt that she had little aptitude or preparation to take on the role. The Queen needed to deal with men who were much older and much more experienced than she was, men who in many cases treated her in a condescending way just because she was a young woman; in other words, nothing new under the sun. In the vast array of powerful men and politicians that she had to deal with was included the then-prime minister Winston Churchill, beautifully portrayed by John Litgow.

The Crown puts a strong focus on the duality existing between career politicians and the monarchy, and frequently highlights the importance each of them had in leading what once was the British Empire. At that moment Winston Churchill was already an old man, approaching his eighties, and he had been responsible for leading England in the fight against nazism; Elizabeth, on the other hand, was still young and in need of more experience in order to deal with the duties that came with her position. Churchill was an experienced man when it came to the public life; he knew how to handle people according to his needs and made his position count through the use of both his intelligence and his sarcasm. If at first he sees Elizabeth as a raw and insecure woman, by the end of the first season he comes to see her as the strong and resolute Queen that we now know.

It’s a fact that being in a position of power demands more from women than it does from men. When it comes to men, mistakes are always forgiven, forgotten or ignored, but for women they are pretty much a proclamation of perpetual failure. If this happens in our daily lives, or even in Hollywood, what could we expect from an ancient institution such as the British monarchy? That’s the reason why Elizabeth was always attentive to her duties and did what she could in order to be the best possible queen to her people. That becomes evident in a very symbolic moment when she requests private lessons with a tutor. Because she was raised to be beautiful, modest and preoccupied with the affairs of the private home, Elizabeth felt that there was a large gap in her education: like every girl coming from a royal house, Elizabeth learned embroidery and how to play the piano, to be beautiful and quiet, but she never got more comprehensive or even basic lessons, the education that everyone should have access to; fearing that she would not be sufficiently intelligent to deal with her ministers and other politicians she would eventually meet, Elizabeth tries to educate herself by her own means.

Never let them see that carrying the crown is often a burden.

In her first years as Queen -- The Crown’s first season covers the first ten years of her reign -- everyone seems to believe they can manipulate Elizabeth in whatever way suits them best. Taking into account Elizabeth’s relative naivety and inexperience, everyone around her -- from the Prime Minister to her uncle and former king Edward to her grandmother, Queen Mary (Eileen Atkins) -- believes they know what’s best for her. Elizabeth, however, shows a unique ability for diplomacy, and manages to navigate the personal interests which are disguised as advice and, more than that, gets everyone to believe that she is accepting them. The Queen may be young and inexperienced, but she has the strength and fiber which are necessary if one wants to join the gallery of great British queens -- which is, as we know now, a fait accompli.

At the same time she has to deal with her royal duties, Elizabeth also needs to manage her husband. After giving up his titles and position in the Royal Navy, Philip seems to resent his wife. Though the prince consort had faced the situation in the best possible way in the beginning of the relationship, everything changed when Elizabeth decided to keep her family name, Windsor, instead of taking Philip’s last name, Mountbatten, as the name of the royal house she would preside.

Philip accuses her of taking his career, his house and his name from him, but he knew from the start that his duty as prince consort would be exactly that: to stand by her side and support her. This particular scene put a scornful smile on my face, since once a woman gets married, whatever her status, whatever society she belongs to, that is exactly what is expected from her: to give up her career for her new family, to abandon her house and name and take her husband’s. Philip doesn’t face this the way one would expect; his ambitions and sexism seem to be greater than his duty as prince consort and this brings turmoil to the marriage. On the show, Philip is portrayed as a bon vivant who goes to gentlemen’s clubs and comes home late and completely wasted. It’s hard to feel sympathy towards the prince consort when he seems to completely forget about his duties and focuses on nourishing misplaced grievances instead.

Another situation that demands caution from Elizabeth is the relationship between her sister, Princess Margaret (Vanessa Kirby), and Captain Peter Townsend (Ben Miles), a former equerry to King George VI. Like Edward, Margaret falls in love with a commoner and meets resistance from her family. Townsend did not come from a noble family, but he was also married and a father of two. The relationship between the Princess and the equerry began when he was still married and working at the Buckingham Palace, but it became public when Townsend got divorced.The hindrance faced by the couple was the same the former King had gone through: in order to marry a divorced man, Princess Margaret, who didn’t get support from the Parliament, would have to give up her title and privileges. More than that, Elizabeth, being both Queen and head not only of the monarchy but also of the Anglican Church, was divided between doing what was best for her family and what was best for the Crown.

 It wasn’t the first time -- and certainly won’t be the last -- that Elizabeth needed to ponder over her duty as Queen and put the many women existing in her her on a scale. We find her questioning her position in the world on several occasions, as she tries to balance the roles she has to fulfill. The issue regarding how she should reconcile the woman she was with the mother, the sister, the wife, and the Queen was very present in the first years of her reign, and it made Elizabeth wonder how to proceed on many occasions. In addition to all of her doubts and to having to deal with a predominantly male world, Elizabeth has to endure judgement from anyone who believes to be better than her at doing her job.

I am aware that I am surrounded by people who feel that they could do the job better. But, for better or worse, the crown has landed on my head.

The Crown manages to navigate different plots, showing us a little of the Palace’s routine, filled with many rules, the work of the Prime Minister and a bit of the characters’ private lives. We can see the first traces of the media’s obsession with the royals’ private lives -- there is, for instance, a car chase in which journalists and photographers harass Princess Margaret and Captain Townsend. For me at least it was impossible not to connect the scene with the death of the Princess of Wales, Diana, in 1997, after a car chase in Paris. The fact is that the royals have a mystique that fascinates people -- a fascination that even the show points to -- and everyone keeps watching them, waiting for the next steps of people who, once the robe, scepter and crown are removed, are as human as any of us.

The truth is that carrying the Crown is a solitary role. Elizabeth has advisors and relatives she can count on, but the burden will always rest on her shoulders and the final decision will always be hers. The Netflix show did a great job in displaying the difficult part of being a monarch and how exhausting it can be to face obligations and conflicts. There  is certainly glamour in balls, jewelry and dresses, but they are all presented simply as palliatives for one of the most difficult roles to fulfill.

Forget Elizabeth Windsor. Now you are Elizabeth Regina.

 About the author:

THAY

Tomb explorer, shadow assassin, pirate captain and sailor soldier. Hunts demons in her free time, wears a Gryffindor scarf and is an occasional getaway driver. Addicted to Supernatural and to buying books as if there was no tomorrow.

This piece was originally published in Portuguese on November 11, 2016 on Valkirias. Translated by Fernanda.

[blessedsinnersrp-blog]

Follow your fellow sheep down to the slaughter, Lennon.

You’ve been accepted as Colette Young with the FC Emmy Rossum. Saying wow five hundred times would not adequately describe how we felt about your audition. The depth you put into Colette was incomparable. she already had so many issues, and you were cruel enough to add to the pot. You are just such an incredibly talented writer, and we can’t wait to watch this town devour your characters.

Please send in your account within the next twenty-four hours.

desired character  →  colette wanda young

face claims  ⟨⟨ please list 2-3 options ⟩⟩ →  emmy rossum, phoebe tonkin

why do you want this character  →  Colette is a fascinating character to me; her skeleton suggests that there is a lot more than what meets the eye which I positively love. It’s not that she’s stronger than she seems, it’s that she is likely weaker. The first bullet point suggests someone who is fearless and blunt, but the fact that she allows these men to walk all over her suggest something else. She reminds me a lot of the women I grew up around- truly southern women. Not the bless your heart church goers, but the redneck wives that are tough as nails but ‘know their place.’ I have a love/hate relationship with that trope and I wanted to try to make it my own.

character quote  ⟨⟨ this can be dialogue that your character has said, a song lyric, etc. just something that catches the vibe of your person ⟩⟩ →  i have survived so many fires, i can no longer tell if i am alive or still burning

possible future plot ideas  ⟨⟨ this could be pertaining to a certain direction you wish to take your character as well as connections and potential plots with other characters  ⟩⟩ →

I’m still trying to feather out exactly where I think Colette would go but I do have a few basic connections with most of the groups already existing in bumfuck.

i. The MCs; Obviously, she works for them, she fears them in her own way, and she fucking despises them. I would love to see how her interactions differ between the older more racist members and the newer ones. She would be weary of all of them and I can’t see her being fond of Hunter at all- ‘yes ma’am. no, i don’t mean hunter- i mean ma’am. because like it or not having that name don’t make you better than me, ya’ fuckin’ bitch.’ Colette hates it when people talk down to her and I could see Hunter doing that a lot- doing woman’s work at all that. It would really rub her the wrong way because of everyone involved with the MCs, she would expect Hunter to get it. And the fact that she would treat her the same way as the testosterone fueled dumbasses, boils her blood. If anything, she might try to fuck Leo to secure her position in the bar, and to make sure one of his trigger happy minions won’t shoot her if she ever snaps at them.

ii. Church Goers; Depending on how long the members have been there, they might remember Colette and her siblings coming to church every Sunday. Or when they suddenly stopped because their momma was serving life in prison for shooting their daddy in the head. It wouldn’t be that shocking if one of them reached out to her family following the tragedy of their father’s death. Colette fucking hates the church and everything that has to do with religion but she likely sees a lot of them around town. She has probably butted heads more than once with Jeremiah and Juliet, which isn’t doing her any favors. As her skeleton stated, she’s likely served multiple church goers and she loves having something over the self proclaimed saints.

iii. The Law; She, like any self respecting redneck, does not much care for the police. She doesn’t trust them and even though it has been over ten years since she shot her father, she is still worried that someone is going to reopen the case of her father’s murder and find her guilty. No one, save for one of her younger sisters, knows that she was the one that killed her father. I would love to see that fear explored on a deeper level.

iv. Meth Ring; Her family- her father, her mother, her brothers and sisters- have all dabbled in the drugs and meth has always had a place in her family’s home. Her siblings have probably dealt for the ring before. I could see her father have worked for or with the ring before, but if that doesn’t comply with what you guys had in mind I totally understand. Either way, I think that she, or at least her family, would be well known to the ring. Remi is, of course, another connection that I think would be amazing because I can’t see how this relationship wouldn’t be toxic as hell. As much as Colette knows that she’s addicted- like really fucking addicted to the point that she’s turning into her dearest mother- she can’t stop. That’s the great thing about addiction, ya see. And she probably has a love/hate relationship with Remi, loves that he keeps giving her what she wants but hates him because she sees him as something of an enabler.

v. Other- Character Specific; Colette could have a very interesting relationship with Rhys, simply because he likely frequents the bar she works at and he’s associated with the criminal justice system so she already has a chip on her shoulder against him.

Other - General;

- Colette is very protective over her siblings, particularly her younger sisters. She’s acted as the ‘father with a shotgun’ for much of their lives so she probably could have threatened someone who was attempting to fuck one of her siblings.

- Colette is a sucker for a pretty face - well, not really, but she does get around a lot. I could see her having one or more fuck buddies.

- I can’t imagine Colette has a lot, or really any, friends, but I imagine that she has one or two from high school or childhood that remained in her life. After all, with how fuckin’ small bumfuck is, it would be impossible not to.

Ｈ Ｉ Ｓ Ｔ Ｏ Ｒ Ｙ

biography  ⟨⟨ minimum of 400 words ⟩⟩ →

tw: rape, sexual abuse, domestic abuse, abortion, murder

John Young, a cousin fuckin’ good ole boy, had nine children with Claudette Pickens; most of his kin were following in his footsteps of making a career out of being incarcerated. His fourth child and first daughter, Colette Wanda, was the apple of his eye. Of course, that meant instead of slapping her around like he did his boys, he saved her until she was old enough to take him to bed. The first eight years of her life were relatively happy; her house stunk of meth and cigarettes and desperation, but she thanked the Lord above that her daddy loved her enough not to put out his cigarettes on her arms. Her brothers got the brunt of her father’s anger, though on occasion he would strike Claudette with a beer bottle. But his daughters, his precious little girls, would remain untouched until a certain age.

She tries not to think about her childhood after her eighth birthday, the year John said she became a woman. The touch of older men is still enough to make her stomach turn and her hands twitch towards her knife. The years after that didn’t matter much to her. They were spent hiding bruises on herself and on her siblings, learning how to hold her liquor and when to switch daddy from bourbon to apple juice, how to throw a punch and how to take one. It cultivated a pistol in her mouth, one that caused her father to promote her from a bedwarmer, to a punching bag and a bedwarmer. Her momma was so proud.

Colette tries not to think about the years between eight and fourteen. She was fourteen when her father got her pregnant. She was fourteen when she had her first and last abortion. She was fourteen when she started sleeping with a knife under her pillow. She was fourteen when her father tried to sneak into her room and she stabbed him in the eye. He lived; Colette was in the hospital for two weeks- fell down the stairs, her mother said. When she came back, her father stopped coming into her room.

Colette was fifteen when she went to her first funeral. She was fifteen when her father was killed by a bullet that was lodged in his head. She was fifteen when her mother went to prison for life for his murder- one look at Claudette’s rotting teeth and arms covered in track marks and the jury couldn’t deliberate fast enough. She was fifteen when she had to keep the secret that still haunts her. She isn’t sorry that she took the shotgun off the wall and shot her father dead. She was sorry he was standing over her little sister when he fell over with a bullet blasted through his brain.

Two of her older brothers were over eighteen, but both of them were serving time when the rest of the children were left without any sort of parent to speak of. Colette and her siblings were ready to fight tooth and nail to force that state’s hand and let them all stay together. Fortunately for the Young siblings - or unfortunately depending on one’s view - child protective services in bumfuck were lack luster to say the least. No one wanted to waste the time or resources on children who would likely end up in prison and someone else’s problem sooner or later. Colette and her twin brother, Carl, were the ones to carry the family and take care of the younger siblings. Carl immediately dropped out of high school, but Colette attempted to stay for another year. Eventually she had to drop out to work full time. As far as her employers at Legs knew, Colette was well over eighteen, though most people knew that the eldest Young daughter was barely sixteen.

When she was offered a job at Snake ‘n’ Jake’s, she was more than willing to leave her job at Legs. The MC set her goddamn teeth on edge but working with limp dicked bible thumpers who got off on calling her a whore when they only lasted twelve seconds was making her go out of her goddamn mind. Colette never had the longest fuse when it came to… well, anything- she much preferred to come out fists swinging instead of taking shit endlessly. She figured that working with drunken patrons would be a slight step up from working at Legs. It takes every ounce of her self control not to crack a bottle of beer over the patrons’ heads but she’s managed so far. She hates how much the bar, or rather who owns it, feels so familiar to her. The guns, the drugs, the white supremacy- reminded her of daddy dearest and her brothers. As much as she hates her job, it’s not as though she can quit, or get fired- there’s not much employment options for a high school drop out without a GED or much anger management to speak of.

3-5 factoids  ⟨⟨ these can be as simple as a few of their favorite movies and colors, to something more complex that you feel fleshes out your character  ⟩⟩ →

i. She grew up with a father that was very handsy, to put it politely. People, especially men that are much larger than her, touching her sets her teeth on edge. Most of the time, she would unload her glock into their skull, but at work, she is unable to do so. That doesn’t stop the thought from entering her mind everytime an MC gets a bit to close. Her patience has never been that impressive, and it’s wearing thinner and thinner as time goes on.

ii. Colette wouldn’t say she has a vendetta against the church, but she sure as fuck doesn’t believe in their God. As a child, she and her mother would attend every Sunday service and she would pray every week to God above to save her from the awful monster that was inside her daddy. And she never felt any relief. As an adult, she is incredibly bitter about the church and any who place their faith in the old building- or the crook who preaches there. Colette is thankful that most of those high and mighty bible thumpers stay the fuck out of her bar. On the rare occasion that one of them stumble into a seat before her, she maintains composure enough to allow them to come to confession over cheap whiskey.

iii. Despite working for the MC, Colette is positively disgusted with the views the club has about… literally everything. Everything they spew is literal bullshit. She’s lived in bumfuck just as long as the rest of them, and she knows exactly how hateful this town is. She doesn’t agree with any of it, and she’s fairly certain that at least one of the member have caught her snickering at their dated ideals. She’s been able to brush it off, batting her eye lashes and flattering them with compliments until they dropped it. Colette knows she needs to get her mouth under control, for her own safety and stability. She might think all of them are fucking idiots that she doesn’t agree with but she happens to agree with living and having a stable income, thank you very much.

iv. She wouldn’t say that she is an avid defender of the second amendment but she is damn sure that she’s not going to get hurt because some cousin fuckin’ good ole boys come in and decide to test her. Because of this, Colette is always armed. Always. She always has her knife attached to her thigh and she keeps a gun underneath the bar at work. Every room in her house has at least one firearm, though all of them are hidden from the house’s other occupants.

v. Colette and those of her siblings that aren’t incarcerated live in their childhood home. Plenty of her siblings and cousins pass through the house when they’re out on bail, and are welcome to stay as long as they follow Colette’s rules namely - ‘you touch one of my kids and they will never find your body’ - but she is the oldest permanent occupant. As such, she currently resides in the old master bedroom, formerly owned by her parents. There are still bullet holes in the walls and there’s a stink of meth that a decade couldn’t waft out but she prefers it to the time that she had to share her bedroom with three or more people.

[mrmichaelchadler]

Brian Tallerico's Top Ten Films of 2018

It’s that time of year when critics take a look at dozens of different pieces of art and try to put them in the same box. There’s something inherently odd about pitting films against each other, but it’s also a way to draw attention to things you love and want to share with more people. It’s often a way to consider themes in art, but I was struck more this year by what my top ten says about my personal taste more than overall motifs in the world of moviemaking. I spoke to Barry Jenkins earlier this month, and he commented on how he’s attracted to what he calls genuine filmmaking. That’s clearly a through-line in my picks too, none of which were made purely to garner awards or fatten wallets. They are deeply personal films from masterful filmmakers, across the spectrum of genre and style. What do Boots Riley and Debra Granik have in common other than a deep passion for what they do? They share that passion with us, and lists like this, at their best, amplify it just one step further. I saw around 250 films released this year. This list could be different with rewatches or even just over time. It’s always subject to change. But, as of today, these were my favorites of a very good year:

Runner-ups: “Black Panther,” “Blindspotting,” “First Man,” “First Reformed,” “Hereditary,” “Lean on Pete,” “Mission: Impossible - Fallout,” “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse,” “Wildlife” and “Zama”

10. “Sorry to Bother You”

It’s the rare film that can feel both completely current and ahead of its time. Boots Riley’s incredible social satire, anchored by a performance from Lakeith Stanfield that is only getting a fraction of the year-end attention it deserves, is the best debut of the year (and it was a strong one for debuts with this, “Hereditary,” “Minding the Gap,” “Eighth Grade,” and more). Riley’s film echoes his music in its blending of different styles and influences into something that feels both defiantly new and classically funky. It is often hard to tell when you’re in a year what movies from it that people will be watching five or even ten years from now. I would bet money they’ll be watching this one.

9. “You Were Never Really Here”

Lynne Ramsay’s award-winning “thriller” (the quotes because there’s not really one genre appellation that feels like it captures everything this movie does) is such a perfectly calculated work of art that it’s easy to take for granted the first time you see it. Every choice here has been carefully considered by a master craftsman, but that attention to detail is offset by an organic, emotional, borderline dangerous performance in the center from Joaquin Phoenix, doing what I consider the best acting work of the year. Phoenix is mesmerizing, capturing a man who has to access his trauma to do his very unusual job, and someone who dives deeper into his own nightmarish abyss each time. It’s a challenging, unforgettable film, and a testament to the overall quality of the year that it’s this far down the list.

8. “Shoplifters”

Hirokazu Kore-eda is one of our best living filmmakers, a man who personifies the Ebert principle of cinema as an empathy machine. He makes movies about real people, using them to encourage conversation about complex issues like masculinity, justice, and the definition of family. His Palme d’Or-winning latest is arguably his masterpiece, a film that reconsiders so many of his previous themes, but also works purely as heartbreaking melodrama. He spends 90 minutes getting his viewers deeply involved in the life of a family on one of the lowest rungs of society, and then challenges how we feel about them with stunning revelations in the final act. Directing some of the best performances in his catalog (Ando Sakura’s work here may be the most underrated of the year), this is an example of a master working at the top of his form.

7. “Annihilation”

What’s the cinematic equivalent of an earworm? You know those songs, or even ad jingles, that burrow their way into your brain and don’t go away? You think of them at random times, humming them to yourself without even knowing you’re doing so? Alex Garland’s latest is the movie version of that, a movie I saw early this year that will not go away. The images, the themes, the faces, the horrors—there’s something about "Annihilation" that has lodged itself in my memory in a way films rarely do. Part of the reason for that is how open the film is to interpretation, relying on imagery instead of plot twists. Those are the movies that last. We may remember a line or some shocking twist from films we like, but it’s the images from the movies we love that sneak up on us. “Annihilation” will be doing so for decades.

6. “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs”

I smile every time I think of Joel and Ethan Coen’s latest Western anthology, which is somewhat ironic given it’s a movie about death. Maybe that’s part of the game. After all, the final segment in Netflix’s film is about bounty hunters who distract their targets with stories. We’re all just distracted by the stories of life, many of my favorites told by the Coens, on our way to shuffling off this mortal coil. These stories work on their own or taken as an entire piece, elevated by the Coen’s incredible attention to detail in every element of the production, including Bruno Delbonnel’s stunning cinematography, one of Carter Burwell’s best scores, and a simply perfect ensemble. I wrote more about the excellence of this film here, and I’m still smiling.

5. “Widows”

Every once in a while, there’s a movie that gets dismissed as pulp by the critical Illuminati. What’s funny is those pulp movies more often find their way into the cinematic firmament than the most buzzed Oscar bait. I'm not worried about the future of "Widows." It didn’t help Steve McQueen’s masterfully entertaining and enlightening examination of corruption and agency in Chicago that it was horrendously advertised, leaving viewers who might like it at home and those who probably wouldn’t angry in their theater seats. Suffice to say, “Widows” was mishandled, but I am as confident in anything on this list that “Widows” will find a loyal, devoted audience over time. Great movies always do.

4. “Burning”

My top 2-4 are relatively interchangeable, all films that did what is so much harder and harder to do every year—broke through our increasingly diffused attention span. With the amount of distractions in this tech-heavy world, it’s getting more difficult even for film critics to “give themselves over” to a movie. For me, I’m often distracted by the other work I have ahead of me—pieces I have to write or editorial duties at this site. Our brains seem to increasingly be asking “what’s next?!” And so there’s something breathtaking about a movie that is powerful enough to push out the “next” with the “now.” Lee Chang-dong’s masterful thriller does exactly that, weaving a mesmerizing tableau for over two hours and then throwing you back into the world, dazed and marveling at what you just watched.

3. “Leave No Trace”

I had a similar reaction to Debra Granik’s poignant drama when I saw it in Sundance. All the other films in Park City faded away as I became deeply invested in the lives of two strangers. Granik’s compassion for these two people is contagious. We feel for the young Tom (Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie) and her PTSD-afflicted father Will (Ben Foster) in ways that is rare in cinema. We want Tom to be happy. We want Will to find stability. We want them to be their best selves, and yet Granik doesn’t even remotely judge Will for his trauma or Tom for her increasing need to leave him. It’s that rare subgenre of the character study that isn’t designed to make some grand statement about all of humanity but fully capture the lives of the people in its center. Will and Tom feel real. We know them and we root for them. And we don’t forget them.

2. “If Beale Street Could Talk”

I couldn’t possibly capture why I love Barry Jenkins’ adaptation of James Baldwin’s “unfilmable” novel more completely than Odie Henderson did in his brilliant review, so just read that first. My top two films of the year—and this clearly reflects a personal preference in what I’m looking for lately—blend the lyrical and the realistic. The story of Fonny (Stephan James) and Tish (KiKi Layne) is tragically real in its injustice and examination of broken dreams. And yet there’s also a poetry to Jenkins’ filmmaking that’s simply beautiful. There is poignant tragedy here, of course, but there’s also overwhelming joy. The joy of a family, of love, of hope, and of filmmaking artistry. It’s the rare movie that I feel will shift ever so slightly every time I watch it, offering me something new to appreciate and adore.

1. “Roma”

That last sentence also holds true for Alfonso Cuarón’s masterpiece, the best film of 2018. So many movies lately feel like they “take” from their audience, whether it be with lazy filmmaking or CGI extravaganza that leave you more exhausted than exhilarated. “Roma” gives and gives. I put so much of myself —what I value in both film and criticism—into my review that I’m not sure what else I could say other than I walked out of this movie on a high that films rarely give me any more. Perhaps it’s a reflection of the state of the form or just getting older and busier, but that “spark,” that “movie magic” doesn’t come along like I wish it would as often as it did when I was younger. I was floating after “Roma.” I still am.  

from All Content https://ift.tt/2RWVbaF

[rebelthroughreading-blog]

Two Boys Kissing by David Levithan

Two high school boys decide to beat the world record for the longest kiss on school property and live to the whole world.

Quick Information

price: $9.99

number of pages: 208

ISBN:   978-0307931917

publisher and date: : Knopf Books for Young Readers; 2013

author’s website: https://www.davidlevithan.com

genre: juvenile fiction

main subjects: gay, LGBTQ, love, social change, homosexuality

Plot

Teenagers Harry and Craig set out to beat the Guinness World Record for the longest kiss at the same time that Peter and Neil work through their relationship, Avery and Ryan begin a new relationship, and Cooper deals with the negative and lonely part of being gay in an unaccepting world. Narrated by gay men who all died from AIDS, the book follows four stories of gay teenaged boys who are looking to create something worthwhile.

Who’s reading it?

Written on a higher grade level, older teenagers around 14-17 would enjoy this books more. There are references to situations such as AIDS, a disease not many understand at younger ages, and bullying more frequent on the high school levels.

Why did I read it?

After having read David Levithan’s Everyday, I was intrigued with his style of writing. Everyday was a popular book about a person who woke up in a different person’s body every day and had to figure out how to live their own life while living everyone else’s. Interesting, different, but overall not terribly controversial. Almost everyone I asked who read it loved it or at least could feel the power in the type of book Levithan had created.

With this in mind, I looked at some of his other books, specifically Two Boys Kissing and Boys Meets Boy, the latter being the one of the two books of which I had heard though had not read. I did some quick research, skimmed a couple of reviews of the books to see what I could get of the two, and Two Boys Kissing had something different that I had never seen before. I had not seen this kind of story or kind of structure before, and that was far more appealing than what appeared to be a much simpler story. (Remember, I have not read Boy Meets Boy, so I of course cannot say anything about how the book really is. Go read it find out!)

Exactly why we should read it - all those controversial topics we are scared for our children to think about - is exactly why I read it. It showed us something beautiful, something gruesome, something sad, and something sweet all at once in a way that lets us decide for ourselves how we want to think but also showing us a perspective that may be different.

Evaluation

An intriguing story written in a different and unexpected way, Two Boys Kissing is not just about being gay but also about learning where one fits in the world. As so many teenagers feel lost and alone because of their various situations, a book about figuring out where and how one belongs can be not only appealing but also necessary whether or not the reader too is gay or has anything about himself that he may think is different than the way society says he should be. By telling four separate stories, the reader sees four separate sides to the big question of being a gay boy in a modern world that is supposedly accepting but still scary.

Harry and Craig decide to attempt to break the World Record of longest kiss in an extremely public and dramatic way that seems to be making another statement on top of just breaking world records. They want people to see them, but not just to see two boys kissing. The boys want to show that people can do the seemingly impossible when they set their minds to it. For Craig, this is how he comes out to his family. He wants this to be his achievement to support him when he tells his family that he likes other boys.

Avery is a transgender, gay male who falls for Ryan. Both have brightly colored hair and are overall loud in who they are. While Avery struggles with the past of once being what felt like the wrong gender, Ryan struggles with bullies because of his sexuality. Together, the two learn that they can overcome the difficulties of being different and can accept who they are.

Cooper is a lonely boy who only allows himself to be gay through online chats where he lets out all of his bottled-up sexual desire out. When his parents find out after reading his chats, he leaves his house with the intention of not returning. He struggles to find where he belongs, because he knows that he is gay and that he has many sexual desires but does not know how to act on them and feel satisfied having never been satisfied before then. Eventually, when Cooper cannot find anything to make him feel whole and better, he resorts to attempted suicide, the only way that he can see his inner turmoil ending. However, he is saved, and though the readers do not see what happens to him after he recovers, the readers know that running away, trying to find himself, failing, and failing at ending his own life will change his perspective, especially with his worried parents who, even though they may not approve of his underground actions through the chat room, still love him.

Neil and Peter have the most normal of relationships and stories as the readers follow them during a relatively normal few days where they are at one’s house together, play video games, go to a bookstore, and view the viral live video of the two boys kissing not too far from where they are. They struggle through the complications of being part of a relationship – not just one of two males but of any relationship. They are jealous, aware – or unaware- and must learn to understand one another.

All the while, the stories are narrated and interrupted by a chorus of men who were gay and died from AIDS looking down on these also gay boys who are discovering themselves and have a better chance at life than the chorus did when they all lived. These men speak directly to the boys, though the boys cannot hear them, trying to guide them through the difficulties of the life that the chorus wishes they could live while hoping to instill just that – hope.

Late middle school and early high school ages are often considered the most difficult when considering finding oneself and the place where one belongs, especially when everyone else wants one to fit a specific mold. Whether a reader is a gay boy or someone with different colored hair or anything different, Two Boys Kissing shows positives and negatives to the same situation. Young adults can find something about themselves in these books and relate to the difficulties and hardships that the boys must face before they can be happy. Readers finish with a sense of victory and perhaps a sense that they too could be part of their own victory.

The Issues

bullying

offensive language

sexual content

LGBTQ

Books like this have a lot of “issues.” Many people are not okay with the messages that teens receive. Being gay or transgender is not only acceptable but desired. You are a bully if you act on disliking the LGBTQ crowd. Sexually explicit thoughts and actions, such as sex message boards, teens having sex, teens having sex with adults, and inappropriate language are acceptable. Of course, these are only some of the issues.

If our children read this book, they will start to think all of these bad things are okay and therefore accept them as such. For example, two boys are bullied, because they are on a date. If teens read this book, they may think that it is acceptable to act that way for any reason, not just if two boys are on a date together. Some parents are portrayed as the bad guys, because they are not accepting. 

So why should we read it?

Every issue someone may see in the book is why someone should read it. Just because someone may not agree with being gay does not mean he or she should never read about someone who is. In fact, reading about a different opinion and perspective can be beneficial, because they are different. We can appreciate others and their values when we learn about them. Even if we do continue to disagree, we can see the other side and perhaps be able to explain our own views in a better way.

These types of things also represent the real world. When a teenager walks into a high school, he is going to hear every one of those offensive words even if he and his family would never dream of saying them. He is going to see bullying. He may even be the victim of a bully. He may be the bully. Whatever the case, bullying exists on many levels, and reading about it may help him understand what he is witnessing or how to overcome certain situations. What about all the talk about sex? Well, that also happens in high school. Teenagers think and talk about it. They are raging hurricanes of hormones, and cannot help but wonder and imagine. Though we may not want it to happen, teenagers also find themselves in those situations, and reading about them, just like the bullying and the offensive language, can help them understand things that maybe they do not necessarily want to talk about to adults or just in general. Fiction can create a world detached from reality enough for readers to safely explore ideas. Reading is the best way to learn about things outside of one’s immediate reality. 

How can we use it?

In 2018, more people are openly part of the LGBTQ community than ever before. Going to high school, everyone knows at least one member and often more than that. With Pride month, walks, parades, celebrations, and more, people are becoming more comfortable with themselves every day, and even if you may not believe in the same things as these people, you have to understand that it no longer matters. Whether or not you agree with it, people are gay, bisexual, pansexual, transgender, gender fluid, and so many other orientations and ways of being. We cannot live in this world without at least acknowledging what is around us.

Bullying is abundant. It happens. It has always happened and will continue to happen despite the efforts everyone has taken to eliminate it. The fact is that many people are mean and many people are not, and therefore bullying will be an issue. There will be people like the pretty viscous gang against Ryan and Avery who find reasons to be mean to others as opposed to being mean, because they dislike what they see.

Seeing that these things do happen and will continue to do so around them will enlighten them enough for them to start thinking. Maybe the reader is not a gay boy who is bullied for going on a date with another boy, but is different in some way and can relate to how these boys sometimes feel on the outside. They can learn to embrace themselves in parallel ways to how these boys accepted their selves.

Booktalk Ideas

Harry and Craig make a huge production of beating the current record for the longest kiss. As two boys, they are making a statement, but it is unclear exactly what statement each boy is making. Craig originally wanted to do the kiss, and Harry agreed to do it for Craig, because Craig wanted to do it. What is Craig trying to accomplish at the beginning versus what he wants at the end of the kiss? Why would something so public also be extremely intimate?

Peter and Neil have a much more insignificant story than other parts in that less is told of it. Should we have more Peter and Neil to have a more complete story or would that only be more complete for the part and not the story as a whole?

Cooper has the more negative outcome of the rest of the stories? Is his ending a sad or negative ending or is it a positive ending in disguise? Was it necessary to have a more “negative” story in the compilation? Why or why not? What makes Cooper’s story important to the whole?

What else can I read?

Everyday by David Levithan

Luna by Julie Anne Peters

Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli

Awards and Lists

2013 National Book Award Longlist

2014 Stonewall Honor Book

Professional Reviews

Deborah Stevenson (2013), Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books - https://muse-jhu-edu.libaccess.sjlibrary.org/article/519649

Nancy Silverrod (2018), School Library Journal - http://bi.galegroup.com.libaccess.sjlibrary.org/essentials/article/GALE%7CA342467528/454c1f6116755944579c58ba21dbf4e7?u=csusj