#if the people fund them then we might be able to take back one cable news source thats not lobbied by oligarchs

[mandoalorian]

I Believe In Love [Maxwell Lord x F!Reader] — Twelve: Family

Summary: When you find your calling to leave Themyscira, you venture out to the World of Man with intentions of helping and healing a very specific person’s relationship with his son. You’ve heard his voice before, but only in dreams. You’ve felt his pain and anguish and you’ve never been able to relate to anything more. But things don’t come easy for you, and they certainly don’t come easy for him either. [This series contains spoilers for WW84 and is my interpretation of what happens after the movie ends].

Warnings: THE FINAL CHAPTER! very emotional, new beginnings, bullying mention, poverty mention, abuse mention, allusions to pregnancy.

Word count: 3000>

REBLOGS APPRECIATED.

Masterlist 

Previous - Chapter Twelve - Epilogue [coming soon!]

“I don’t know if I could do it,” Maxwell sighed, pacing around in anxious circles. He looked different, in his denim jeans and khaki-green cable knit sweater. It made a change from the oversized powersuits he once donned. Alistair was sat at the dining room table, colouring in, and Max was having a nervous breakdown about getting his haircut. “I’ve had the blonde in for so long.”

You smiled, running your fingers through his shaggy and unstyled hair. When it wasn’t perfectly coiffed, it was wavy and glossy, and smelled distinctly like the freshest green apples. “It’ll be okay. Think of it as washing away all the terrible things that went on in the past and starting anew. Like… turning over a new leaf.” 

You made a very good point. Maxwell knew he had to suck it up and just do it. It would be okay. He didn’t have to be Max Lord anymore, and he didn’t have this television persona to live up to. His main focus now was just being a father, and that’s all that mattered. All he needed to be, was himself. Maxwell Lorenzano.

“Daddy look!” Alistair smiled, waving around the piece of paper he’d spent the morning drawing on. It was stained slightly from his breakfast, and crinkled in the corners for where he’d applied slightly too much pressure when colouring, but all-in-all, it was perfect. Maxwell took the artwork and looked closely at it. Another typical family portrait of you, Alistair and Max. But this time, Maxwell was doting brown hair, and it reminded him of his younger days when he was first starting out as a businessman. “This is how you’ll look when you come home from the salon!”

“Wow Alistair, I love it!” Maxwell praised, unable to contain his grin. He held the portrait to his face and showed it off. “What do you think?” he asked you. “Do you think I’ll look good with the brown hair?” 

You giggled and nodded your head, before pressing the palm of your hand flat against Maxwell’s chest and brushing your lips against his. “You’ll look so handsome, I’m sure.”

“Ew!” Alistair cried, pulling the paper from his father’s hand as you kissed him softly on the lips. The curve of Max’s nose nudged against yours and he laughed at his son’s reaction.

“Alright,” you said, pointing your finger. “You better go. Don’t want to miss your appointment.”

Maxwell nodded and took a deep breath. “I’ll see you in a few hours.” he announced.

The second Maxwell left the house, your stomach began to twist. You’d been living at Lord manor for a month now but truthfully, it felt like a lifetime. It felt like you had always been there. You were adjusting to your new life pretty well, but this morning sickness that you had started to get was an unwelcome experience. Amazon’s never got ill, so this was brand new to you, and you weren’t enjoying it one bit.

You rubbed your stomach and took a sip of the glass of water that you’d been nursing. Sliding down to sit next to Alistair, you watched as he finished his drawing, adding a few final perfections. Once it was done, you hung it to the refrigerator and praised him for his hard work.

“Ali, why don’t you grab your shoes and we’ll have a walk down to the Smithsonian?” you smiled, grabbing your jacket that was hanging over the kitchen door.

“Ooh! Is there a new exhibition?” He enquired curiously, hopping onto his feet and fastening his shoe laces.

“I don’t think so,” you admitted sheepishly. “I have to go meet with some friends.”

Taking the bus was a new experience for both you and Alistair. Joe, Maxwell’s driver, would normally drive Alistair around to and from places. But not today. The bus was slightly smelly and the seats were sticky, but by the looks of it, Alistair was having the time of his life. He pointed out the window, grinning, and talked to you about all the different D.C. landmarks the both of you passed as you were driven into the city centre. He might have only been six years old, but that was six years of living in the world of man. You’d only been here for a month, and so Alistair could teach you a lot. 

Driving past the park, Alistair gasped, and shuffled into your body. “That’s the park where we first met,” Alistair pointed. You narrowed your eyes as you took in the sight of tall green trees and shrubbery. He was right. “Do you remember that day? You were wearing an awesome superhero costume like something out of my comic books. And you wore a tiara, and I asked if you were a princess. And you scared my bullies away, and helped me look for dad.”

“I remember.” you smiled, ruffling Alistair’s dark hair.

You remembered asking Alistair what his father looked like, and the only thing the boy could say was ‘strong, cool, and the best dad in the world’. Counting your lucky stars, you were so thankful you had found your forever family. You had come so far from that moment.

“Did you ever tell daddy… about those bullies in the park?” Alistair asked you hesitantly, his voice suddenly small and timid.

You pulled off him and looked him in the eyes. “No. Why?”

Alistair paused for a moment and glanced back out the window. “I was afraid he’d be disappointed in me.”

Your heart shattered in your chest. “Ali,” you said quietly, tears threatening to prick your eyes. “Your father could never, ever be disappointed in you. You know that, yes?”

Alistair nodded his head silently.

“He loves you so much,” you continued. “And the whole bullying thing… I think he’d understand better than anyone else.”

You remembered all the visions you had of Maxwell, even seeing him as a child at one point. You remembered him wearing rugged clothes that were too small for him and how he was picked on for his broken shoes. 

“Really? You think so?” Alistair asked.

“I know so,” you confirmed, pressing a kiss into Alistair’s hair. “Those bullies will never amount to anything if they continue doing what they’re doing. But you are so much better than them. Stronger. Your power lies in your heart, and in the truth, and in love.”

Alistair smiled. “You’re a real hero, aren’t you?”

“We’re all heroes.”

————

Yourself, Maxwell and Alistair loved trips to the Smithsonian. Diana always organised special access for the three of you, to go after hours when the entire museum was empty. Alistair was admiring the fish in the aquarium, when you noticed Barbara and Diana, and waved them over.

“I wasn’t expecting to see you today.” Diana smiled.  

“It was sort of an impulse thing,” you explained. “Uhm, actually, there’s something I want to talk to you about.”

You pulled Diana to one side and left Barbara with Alistair. “Remember how you said ‘I owe you one’, since I like… got your girlfriend to renounce her wish and kinda helped you save the world by destroying the second dreamstone?” you grinned, trying to hold back a laugh.

Diana rolled her eyes and folded her arms across her chest. “What are you plotting?”

“Max has been… worried, to say the least. We’re going to have to sell Black Gold and it’s a real shame because-- he worked so hard on it. We have some money and well, I haven’t exactly ran this by him yet but I was thinking about investing what we do have into the Smithsonian. Just like what Maxwell promised to do in the first place.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Diana sighed. “The gemology department is doing just fine.”

You shook your head, your smile only growing. “No Di, that’s not what I was getting at. How would you feel about… expanding the gemology department?”

“I’m not quite sure I follow…”

“I’ve heard Barbara talk about how there’s a lack of space to facilitate all the rocks and stones the Smithsonian keeps bringing in. She has a real fear that the entire paleontology department could be shut down and replaced with something else.” You sighed, running your fingers through your hair.

“That’s true…”

“So what if we use the Black Gold building as an extension for the Smithsonian, and have it specialise in all these fancy rocks and gems and stones. We could transport everything over and then we could utilize the leftover funds that Maxwell has, to keep all the palaeontologists and geologists employed. Hell, with a whole new building, we could even create more jobs for people. It would also mean that we wouldn’t have to fire Max’s old employees and-- Oh Di, I just know Max would love it. He really does have a passion for gemology. And his son, Ali… he has an interest too.”

“So I heard,” Diana rolled her eyes, but, to be frank, she liked what you were getting at. An expansion wouldn’t exactly be a bad thing… “It’s a big responsibility though, and it seems you haven’t even spoken to Maxwell about it. You would get funding from the Smithsonian as an institution, yes, but… it would still be Max’s business. Do you really think he could handle that? After what happened to his last business?”

“He’s smart,” you assured her. “And he’s a good businessman. He knows all these things I couldn’t even begin to comprehend. Last time he just got unlucky. But this, this could really be something great. We have the building, and the passion, and enough money to get started. Please Diana… I know you could make this happen. Please.”

Diana spent a moment pondering the possibilities before shrugging her shoulders in defeat. “Alright,” She sighed. “I’ll see what I can do.”

You grinned and squealed excitedly, wrapping your arms around your half sister and squeezing her tight. “Thank you Di!” She laughed and rubbed your back before you pulled off her. “Oh, and Di… there’s one more thing.”

Diana tilted her head and gazed at you with fresh bewilderment. Looking around the museum to make sure no one was around to hear what you had to say, you leaned into the Amazon and whispered a confession you’d been keeping to yourself for the past month. 

————

Maxwell sat in the chair and frowned upon seeing his reflection in the mirror. “What can I do for you?” asked the stylist as she smacked her lips on a piece of gum. Max wasn’t sure if he could really bring himself to do this, until he remembered your words. This was ‘turning over a new leaf’-- a new start and fresh beginnings. 

“Uh, a trim please,” Maxwell requested before taking a shaky exhale. It was now or never, he just had to take the leap. “No, that’s not everything,” he sighed. “Could you perhaps take the blonde… out of my hair?” The question left his lips with an air of unsurity. Could one even do that? Take the colour out of hair?

“You want the colour stripped?” she asked, folding her arms across her chest. Maxwell supposed that was one way of putting it.

“Yes, I do.” he confirmed.

The stylist processed Maxwell’s words for a moment before shrugging her shoulders. “As you wish.”

As the stylist wrapped Max’s shaggy golden locks into foil, he closed his eyes. He’d come so far since the whole dreamstone debacle. His whole life had been a rollercoaster of up and down events but now, finally, things were evening out for him -- in the best way possible. He’d fallen in love and secured his family and home. The only thing he was mildly worried about, was the issue with Black Gold. But he knew that he’d somehow figure it out, especially now that he had you by his side to help him.

He’d always seen himself as an independent man. He fought hard to be as successful. He escaped his hometown, his abusive father, he ran away from poverty and was discriminated against by upper class white businessmen who told him he could never amount to anything. He proved all of them wrong. Because now, he had everything he could ever want. He didn’t need stacks of money or material possessions when he had you and Alistair. Maybe he wasn’t as independent as he once thought he was. Maybe, just maybe, he liked the company of others. He liked having you and his son around.

In his fight for wealth and success, he’d lost everything that mattered the most. But most importantly, he had lost himself. Maxwell swore that he’d never let that happen again.

As the stylist removed the silver foil from his hair, Maxwell nervously anticipated the result. His once bottle blonde hair was now a chocolate brown colour, and it reminded him distinctly of his youth. Max couldn’t help but feel like he looked younger, and he wasn’t going to complain about that. 

He just hoped you liked it as much as he did.

————

“I just don’t understand why mommy is taking so long,” Alistair grumbled as he and Barbara waited outside the ladies restroom. “And why did auntie Diana have to go into the toilet with her?”

Barbara stifled a laugh. “You’re inpatient, just like your dad.”

Impatience must’ve run in the family because you were sitting on the toilet seat, tapping your food as anxiety flooded your body. You didn’t expect to be this nervous. You’d wanted a child for so long -- in fact, your whole life to be exact. But now that there was a chance of it actually happening, you were beyond terrified. Maybe it was the fact Maxwell didn’t know about your symptoms, but you knew better than to feel alone. You were never going to be alone.

“How long left?” you asked Diana, who checked her wristwatch. It was an antique from the early 1900’s, something very special and something she kept very close to her heart.

“It should be ready now.” she told you, handing you the stick you had just peed on.

“I don’t want to look.” you squirmed, covering your face with your hands.

“Wow,” Diana hummed, her jaw parting slightly when she took in the results. 

“Wh-- what is it?” you asked, nervously.

“You’re pregnant.”

————

When Maxwell came home, you were shocked to say the least. His brown hair was absolutely gorgeous, and it suited him better than you’d expected. The deep shade was identical to the colour in his sparkling eyes. Jokingly, he tossed his hair and you let out a laugh.

“I was right,” you giggled, running your fingers through his locks. “So handsome.”

“I love it daddy!” Alistair cheered.

“Thanks buddy,” Maxwell grinned. “I like it too.”

Taking a deep breath, you took Max’s hand and pulled him into the living room, shutting the door behind you. It was quiet in there -- the perfect place to tell Maxwell your news. It had been a nostalgic day, and even standing in the living room reminded you of the time Max first brought you home. 

“Is everything alright?” he asked you, slightly concerned. But your warm smile soon eased him. You felt the need to wrap your arms around him and envelop him into a hug. Max had taken a big step today, and you were proud of him, but now it was your moment. It was now or never.

Harnessing every ounce of confidence within you, you took his hands and looked him in the eye. “Max, I’m pregnant.”

Max’s brown eyes widened and he was completely lost for words. “I-- you-- you’re--”

“Yes.” you smiled, taking his hands and placing them on your stomach.

His shocked expression turned into an elated grin as he processed the good news. “You’re really--”

“I am.” you confirmed.

You didn’t think you’d ever seen Maxwell so happy in your life. He wrapped his arms around you and held you so tight, like he was afraid to let you go. He swore in that moment he would never leave you, or his growing family, ever again.

This was it for him.

This was the start of Maxwell Lorenzano’s new life.

————

THE END.

————

Author’s Note: “I won’t cry” she says while sobbing into her Google Docs document. Thank you all for reading I Believe In Love. It’s a story I have wanted to share with you since I saw WW84 in the theatre, and I just can’t believe it’s finally over. This fic will always have a special place in my heart. The themes and plot points mean so much to me, but not only that, I’ve had the most amazing feedback on this fic and I will honestly cherish that for the rest of my life. I poured my heart and soul into writing I Believe In Love and it honestly one of my biggest comforts. I want you all to know that an epilogue is coming and if you have any requests for these characters I have created, feel free to send them my way. I adore my Amazon Goddess!Reader and I would absolutely love to continue their story at some point in the future. If you’ve followed me on this journey over the past four months, all I can really say is thank you. I love you so so much.

————

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I Believe In Love taglist: [in the replies!]

[phroyd]

I’m not going to pretend that I know how to interpret the jobs and inflation data of the past few months. My view is that this is still an economy warped by the pandemic, and that the dynamics are so strange and so unstable that it will be some time before we know its true state. But the reaction to the early numbers and anecdotes has revealed something deeper and more constant in our politics.

The American economy runs on poverty, or at least the constant threat of it. Americans like their goods cheap and their services plentiful and the two of them, together, require a sprawling labor force willing to work tough jobs at crummy wages. On the right, the barest glimmer of worker power is treated as a policy emergency, and the whip of poverty, not the lure of higher wages, is the appropriate response.Reports that low-wage employers were having trouble filling open jobs sent Republican policymakers into a tizzy and led at least 25 Republican governors — and one Democratic governor — to announce plans to cut off expanded unemployment benefits early. Chipotle said that it would increase prices by about 4 percent to cover the cost of higher wages, prompting the National Republican Congressional Committee to issue a blistering response: “Democrats’ socialist stimulus bill caused a labor shortage, and now burrito lovers everywhere are footing the bill.” The Trumpist outlet The Federalist complained, “Restaurants have had to bribe current and prospective workers with fatter paychecks to lure them off their backsides and back to work.”But it’s not just the right. The financial press, the cable news squawkers and even many on the center-left greet news of labor shortages and price increases with an alarm they rarely bring to the ongoing agonies of poverty or low-wage toil.

As it happened, just as I was watching Republican governors try to immiserate low-wage workers who weren’t yet jumping at the chance to return to poorly ventilated kitchens for $9 an hour, I was sent “A Guaranteed Income for the 21st Century,” a plan that seeks to make poverty a thing of the past. The proposal, developed by Naomi Zewde, Kyle Strickland, Kelly Capatosto, Ari Glogower and Darrick Hamilton for the New School’s Institute on Race and Political Economy, would guarantee a $12,500 annual income for every adult and a $4,500 allowance for every child. It’s what wonks call a “negative income tax” plan — unlike a universal basic income, it phases out as households rise into the middle class.

“With poverty, to address it, you just eliminate it,” Hamilton told me. “You give people enough resources so they’re not poor.” Simple, but not cheap. The team estimates that its proposal would cost $876 billion annually. To give a sense of scale, total federal spending in 2019 was about $4.4 trillion, with $1 trillion of that financing Social Security payments and another $1.1 trillion support Medicaid, Medicare, the Affordable Care Act and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Beyond writing that the plan “would require new sources of revenue, additional borrowing or trade-offs with other government funding priorities,” Hamilton and his co-authors don’t say how they’d pay for it, and in our conversation, Hamilton was cagey. “There are many ways in which it can be paid for and deficit spending itself is not bad unless there are certain conditions,” he said. I’m less blasé about financing a program that would increase federal spending by almost 20 percent, but at the same time, it’s clearly possible. Even if the entire thing was funded by taxes, it would only bring America’s tax burden to roughly the average of our peer nations.

I suspect the real political problem for a guaranteed income isn’t the costs, but the benefits. A policy like this would give workers the power to make real choices. They could say no to a job they didn’t want, or quit one that exploited them. They could, and would, demand better wages, or take time off to attend school or simply to rest. When we spoke, Hamilton tried to sell it to me as a truer form of capitalism. “People can’t reap the returns of their effort without some baseline level of resources,” he said. “If you lack basic necessities with regards to economic well-being, you have no agency. You’re dictated to by others or live in a miserable state.”

But those in the economy with the power to do the dictating profit from the desperation of low-wage workers. One man’s misery is another man’s quick and affordable at-home lunch delivery. “It is a fact that when we pay workers less and don’t have social insurance programs that, say, cover Uber and Lyft drivers, we are able to consume goods and services at lower prices,” Hilary Hoynes, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, where she also co-directs the Opportunity Lab, told me.

This is the conversation about poverty that we don’t like to have: We discuss the poor as a pity or a blight, but we rarely admit that America’s high rate of poverty is a policy choice, and there are reasons we choose it over and over again. We typically frame those reasons as questions of fairness (“Why should I have to pay for someone else’s laziness?”) or tough-minded paternalism (“Work is good for people, and if they can live on the dole, they would”). But there’s more to it than that.

It is true, of course, that some might use a guaranteed income to play video games or melt into Netflix. But why are they the center of this conversation? We know full well that America is full of hardworking people who are kept poor by very low wages and harsh circumstance. We know many who want a job can’t find one, and many of the jobs people can find are cruel in ways that would appall anyone sitting comfortably behind a desk. We know the absence of child care and affordable housing and decent public transit makes work, to say nothing of advancement, impossible for many. We know people lose jobs they value because of mental illness or physical disability or other factors beyond their control. We are not so naïve as to believe near-poverty and joblessness to be a comfortable condition or an attractive choice.

Most Americans don’t think of themselves as benefiting from the poverty of others, and I don’t think objections to a guaranteed income would manifest as arguments in favor of impoverishment. Instead, we would see much of what we’re seeing now, only magnified: Fears of inflation, lectures about how the government is subsidizing indolence, paeans to the character-building qualities of low-wage labor, worries that the economy will be strangled by taxes or deficits, anger that Uber and Lyft rides have gotten more expensive, sympathy for the struggling employers who can’t fill open roles rather than for the workers who had good reason not to take those jobs. These would reflect not America’s love of poverty but opposition to the inconveniences that would accompany its elimination.

Nor would these costs be merely imagined. Inflation would be a real risk, as prices often rise when wages rise, and some small businesses would shutter if they had to pay their workers more. There are services many of us enjoy now that would become rarer or costlier if workers had more bargaining power. We’d see more investments in automation and possibly in outsourcing. The truth of our politics lies in the risks we refuse to accept, and it is rising worker power, not continued poverty, that we treat as intolerable. You can see it happening right now, driven by policies far smaller and with effects far more modest than a guaranteed income.

Hamilton, to his credit, was honest about these trade-offs. “Progressives don’t like to talk about this,” he told me. “They want this kumbaya moment. They want to say equity is great for everyone when it’s not. We need to shift our values. The capitalist class stands to lose from this policy, that’s unambiguous. They will have better resourced workers they can’t exploit through wages. Their consumer products and services would be more expensive.”

For the most part, America finds the money to pay for the things it values. In recent decades, and despite deep gridlock in Washington, we have spent trillions of dollars on wars in the Middle East and tax cuts for the wealthy. We have also spent trillions of dollars on health insurance subsidies and coronavirus relief. It is in our power to wipe out poverty. It simply isn’t among our priorities.

“Ultimately, it’s about us as a society saying these privileges and luxuries and comforts that folks in the middle class — or however we describe these economic classes — have, how much are they worth to us?” Jamila Michener, co-director of the Cornell Center for Health Equity, told me. “And are they worth certain levels of deprivation or suffering or even just inequality among people who are living often very different lives from us? That’s a question we often don’t even ask ourselves.”

But we should.

Phroyd

[kpoptimeout]

My Top 10 K-Dramas of 2020 - What’s Yours?

2020 has ended after feeling like it was never ending and K-Dramaland has once again brought us so many goodies this year. As per our blog’s tradition [For 2019 faves click here], below are my Top 10 favs of the year (my faves in alphabetical order so it might not be yours so please don’t judge). (For our blog’s 2020 music ratings, click here!)

My only specific criteria is that the show must have had started in 2020 to be considered a 2020 series but like last year, I have allowed one drama starting very late in 2019 to make the list.

Without further ado, check the list below!

Crash Landing On You (tvN/Netflix)

While it started in December 2019, “Crash Landing On You” is certainly the Rom-Com of the year that swept the world by storm. It was possibly the K-Drama most people knew about and everyone rejoiced when the leads Hyun Bin and Son Yejin admitted to being a couple on 1 January 2021. 

One might say “Crash Landing On You” has generic plot - two people from vastly different worlds meeting through a crazy accident and developing feelings as a result, the choice of using North and South Korea as the two worlds provided unique social commentary and the opportunity for lots of interesting shenanigans. This is not the first series to feature a romance between a North and South Korean lead (see 2012’s “The King 2 Hearts”, which was also stellar), but it is definitely a more light-hearted take which is fun to watch. Additionally, the series is filled with fleshed out and lovable side characters.

While North Korean refugees interviewed by media outlets point out that the typical North Korean captain would not have the looks of Hyun Bin, most of them agree that the production team did their research as the everyday life of typical North Koreans were recreated quite accurately - from the types of furniture and household appliances they use, to the type of K-Dramas they watch in secret.

If you enjoy a good Rom-Com and an interesting premise, this is the K-Drama for you!

Extracurricular (Netflix)

Being a Netflix only series with no counterpart on Korean television, “Extracurricular” was able to explore the dark side of South Korean youth life which is not discussed on traditional South Korean media platforms. We are thrown into the life of a nerdy high school student played by Kim Dong Hee, who is actually effectively abandoned by his family and making ends meet secretly as an illegal prostitution ring mastermind.

The story unravels as the star student played by So Minhee discovers the schemes of Kim Dong Hee’s character and begins to blackmail him. Not to give too many spoilers, but it will prove difficult to balance his double life and the whole journey is captured superbly by the main cast’s stellar acting.

If you are a fan of dark and realistic teen dramas, this is the series for you!

Hospital Playlist (tvN/Netflix)

The team behind the “Reply” series and “Prison Playbook” returns with a few familiar faces so we all knew when the trailers dropped that we were in for a treat. As expected, the fabulous acting of the main cast, the wonderful storylines and also medically accurate procedures (according to my doctor friends), combined to make “Hospital Playlist” one of the most endearing dramas of the year.

Set in the fictional Yulje Medical Centre, we follow the lives of 5 doctors who met in college and their respective medical teams. Jo Jung-suk acts as a prankster and fun dad who is also a genius doctor. Yoo Yeon-seok plays a pediatric surgeon who is dead set on becoming a priest. Jung Kyung-ho acts as a cardiologist who seems cold-hearted (pun intended), but of course isn’t really. Kim Dae-myung plays a gynaecologist who is a mummy’s boy and has family drama galore. And finally Jeon Mi-do completes the set as a neurosurgeon who is lowkey the only adult in the friend group and who everyone wants to be when they grow up.

The drama throws us into the day to day runnings in the hospital without too much introductions and it actually made the characters all the more real because it was like we were just casually witnessing their everyday lives. The realisms of the show is furthered by the fact that even side characters like nurses and medical students have meaningful storylines of their own. We honestly cannot wait for Season 2 to air in May 2021!

Itaewon Class (JTBC/Netflix)

A remake of a popular Webtoon, “Itaewon Class” is a feel-good David and Goliath story where the male lead played by Park Seojun goes on a journey to avenge his father and chooses to do so without bending his morals at any point in time and making many friends along the way.

This series stood out by providing very diverse lead characters including a sociopath, a former convict, a trans woman, an illegitimate son and a Blasian trying to find acceptance in South Korea. All their stories highlight the different social issues and the stigmas many face navigating through life and is touching and relatable in many ways.

If you love a show with a positive social message, this is the show for you!

Sweet Home (Netflix)

Another webtoon remake by Netflix, “Sweet Home” follows a group of survivors in an apartment complex after all hell breaks loose in South Korea, as people begin to transform into monsters based on their greatest fears and regrets. 

Every character has interesting backstories that are slowly revealed as they try to survive together, while battling monsters that are generated by the team behind many Marvel Cinematic Universe blockbusters. The main cast led by Song Kang, Lee Jin Wook, Lee Siyoung and Lee Dohyun also acted extremely well, with Lee Siyoung grabbing a lot of attention with her ripped superhero physique. Kim Namhee also had a breakout performance as the survivor who favours a Korean sword and hopefully would continue to get more roles following years playing minor characters.

If you enjoy apocalypse thrillers that explore human nature, you would love “Sweet Home”!

The Uncanny Counter (OCN/Netflix)

Okay, Netflix is really funding all the webtoon adaptions because “The Uncanny Counter” is yet another one. Currently the highest rated OCN drama in the cable channel’s history, this webtoon adaption follows a disabled orphaned teenage boy who gains superpowers and joins a demon-banishing team of other super-powered beings (who own a noodle shop on the side) called the Counters, while the mystery of his parents’ death plays a key role in the story.

This somewhat cliché set-up is done in a fun and enjoyable way and it is great to see the talented Jo Byung Gyu finally cast as a male lead! Kim Sejeong has also further improved in her acting and is a loveable badass in this series. 

If you love a ghost/spirit busting mystery and just the superhero genre in general, you would enjoy “The Uncanny Counter”!

VIP (SBS)

“VIP” is a drama following a luxury brand’s VIP service team. While it has office drama, intrigue and power plays in almost every episode, it is arguably more of a drama about womanhood than anything else. With 4 female leads, 3 of whom are in their late 30s, the series accurately depicts the concerns women face reaching that age, whether they are married or unmarried, with children or not. 

Jang Nara plays a successful business woman and a co-worker to her husband played by Lee Sang Yoon. Born in a privileged background with a seemingly loving husband, all seems well until she has suspicions of her husband having an affair. This drives her to investigate and through her findings, she instead uncovers more stories of her other female co-workers, like the rumour-tainted but very cool section chief played by Lee Chungah and the stressed and depressed mother of two played by Kwak Sunyoung.

If you want a spicy office drama that also has meaningful discussions about working women in South Korea, VIP is the best drama for that!

The World of the Married (JTBC)

Overtaking JTBC’s “Sky Castle” to be highest rated cable TV K-Drama of all time, this 2020 production also by JTBC is a remake of BBC series “Doctor Foster” but highly localised to fit the Korean narrative.

Kim Hee-ae plays a successful doctor with a film director husband and a teenage son. Her life seems picture perfect until she discovers her husband’s infidelity. But unlike in “VIP”, where the female lead actually bonds with other women along the way, Kim Hee-ae’s character would quickly learn that she was in fact betrayed by everyone around her - they all knew her husband was cheating and have been pretty supportive of this whole affair.

While highly dramatised, the suspicions of the husband’s infidelity, the discovery, the subsequent divorce and schemes for revenge are all done tastefully and is a reason why it struck a chord with the general public, especially married women watching the show.

If you love mess and chaos and seeing douchebags destroyed, “World of the Married” is the perfect drama for you!

18 Again (JTBC)

JTBC really has a knack for remakes. This remake of the movie “17 Again” starring Zac Efron is also adapted seamlessly to fit Korean culture and social issues e.g. teen pregnancy, divorce, women’s careers after being a parent and parent-child relations. 

Kim Haneul and Yoon Sanghyun truly acted out the energy of a long-married couple and Lee Dohyun did extremely well in encapsulating Yoon Sanghyun’s mannerism as his de-aged counterpart. This boy is truly on a roll this year (he is also in “Sweet Home”). Also, the younger cast of this show were also very likeable and well flesh-outed and by the end of the series you are rooting for all of them to do well.

If you love a slice of life drama with a little fantastical element, you would love “18 Again”!

365: Repeat the Year (MBC)

Based on the Japanese novel “Repeat” by Kurumi Inui, “365 Days: Repeat the Year” follows this social experiment where 10 individuals are given the opportunity to travel 1 year back in time. As all 10 individuals try to remedy their mistakes and become better people, the experiment takes a sinister turn as the time-travellers begin to die one after another.

The veteran detective played by Lee Joohyuk and the mystery webtoon artist played by Nam Jihyun team up together with other time travellers to uncover the secrets behind travelling back in time and learn about the past lives of everyone chosen for the project.

If you enjoy a well-thought out time-travelling series that involves some alternate reality battle royale shenanigans, this is the series for you!

Honourable Mentions:

Kingdom (Season 2) (Netflix): The ancient zombie drama is back and still as strong as ever - one of the best zombie series on air right now.

Start-Up (tvN/Netflix): Loveable rom-com set in the start-up world in South Korea with one of the most hotly debated love triangles in this year’s K-Drama world.

Hi Bye, Mama! (tvN/Netflix): When a woman reincarnates to meet her husband and child again 5 years after her tragic death, only to find he has since remarried.

What’s your Top 10 K-Dramas of the Year? Leave your thoughts in the comments section below and may the drama sharing begin (and the road to more excuse for holiday procrastination!)

Also, if you want to check out underrated K-Pop songs of 2020, here are the lists for idol songs and artist songs. 

[danetobelieve]

Gru Voice: Light Bulb! || Orion and Winston

Winston and Orion had actually been hanging out a little more then Winston had expected. Especially now that the sleepwalking thing was solved, Winston found themselves with way more time and energy to devote to the old Scribe headquarters and they were getting pretty good at knowing their way around in the dark. But today, as they walked down the corridors of the old musty building, Winston hoped that it was the last time that they would have to do this in the pitch black, or even with a torch. Today was the day they fixed the electricity. “So, I am like 85% sure the problem is the fuse box and I have all the things I need to fix it, then I think it is important that rather then immediately running power through the whole building, we give the fuse box a break -- who knows when it last handled any amount of voltage -- and we just hook the power up to the library and your sleeping room.” They touched the long spool of power cable which was hanging off of their left shoulder. That was where that came in. “Once we’re sure that the fusebox doesn’t need any major work then we can definitely look at hooking up the whole building. Sound good?” 

Orion was in a small state of disbelief. Winston had been at the Scribe headquarters multiple times since the night they had unintentionally wandered into the abandoned building. During the days, they would spend time in the library hanging out. But ever since the sun never rose, the Scribe Headquarters was practically uninhabitable. And that was saying something, considering the state that it had already been in. But Winston had offered to come and fix the electricity too. At this point Orion could only assume that the two could be considered… friends. Though with the help Winston was offering, Orion certainly needed to figure out a way to repay them, but wasn’t sure what he had to offer to Winston. “Just let me know what you need from me.” Orion smiled, not that Winston could really see. Both of their flashlights were angled forward as they made their way down the hallways and towards the room where the fuse box was. “I really can’t thank you enough. I really appreciate you offering to help with this.” 

Raising an eyebrow gently, Winston guided the beam of their flashlight so that it somewhat lit the way that they were going. They made their way down a set of rickety steps that led down into an old basement, or was it a cellar? They weren’t really sure what the technical term for the subterranean entry way that they found themselves in. “For the moment, I need you to try and give me as much light as possible so that I can see what I’m doing, but I will definitely need some help later on.” Raising an eyebrow gently, Winston laid down their tool box and flipped it open to reveal a very well ordered set of tools that they’d received from their parents when they were eighteen. “Hey dude, you took me in when I was sleepwalking and you gave me somewhere to sleep and to stay, so I don’t really think you need to say thank you. This is just my way of saying thank you for that night.” 

“Yeah. Of course. You got it.” Orion agreed with Winston. He would do whatever they told him needed to be done. Whatever it took to get this place up and running again. It still felt like a fever dream that in an hour or two this place could be lit up again. Maybe for the first time since the 80’s. It was it’s own small piece of history, that Orion may actually have a part of. He could help rebuild the Scribes, at least the White Crest chapter. And maybe… just maybe.. Winston would want a bigger part than just fixing the light. But that was still getting ahead of himself. For now, Rio focused on shining the light where Winston needed. “Oh.. well seriously that was nothing. Like I said, I don’t even own the place or anything. This is basically public property now. Besides the like magic entrance part.” He laughed nervously, the light shaking around the room with his laugh. “Oh sorry.” He calmed the laughter and focused the light again. “So uh… How long do you think this will take? Not that I’m rushing or anything. Just curious.” Although Orion did have to admit that the darkness was making him nervous despite him walking these same halls hundreds of times. Just the knowledge that the sun wasn’t going to rise in the morning made a difference.”

“Cool, I think we can manage this together.” Winston was convinced that they were going to be able to do a good job and really clean this place up. They knew that there were so many good things that they could do with this place and they knew that Orion wanted them to do it. It was a project that they could work on together and Winston really hoped that it would lead to them learning a whole host of new things. They were excited to learn everything that they could. They needed to learn more about the supernatural so that they could survive it and maybe one day they could help someone else and other people survive it. “Well, either way, you turned this place into somewhere that is really worth coming to and I want to help now, maybe we can make it our own place and this is just the first start.” Winston had to admit that the magical entrance was a big reason why they were convinced that there was now supernatural things and information that could be learned from this old, musty and somewhat decrepit building. “Well, hopefully it shouldn’t take us too long but if we have to replace a bunch of wiring and fuses then it might take more then tonight, but I guess it is time that we find out what we can do with this place first, y’know.” They kept working, occasionally asking Orion for a hand. “How did you work out how to get past the magic thing?” Winston asked, hoping that they could come up with a more feasible excuse for themselves other then, I used magic.

Despite Orion’s own fears, he had to believe that Winston was right. They could manage this together. It was an easy enough start. Couldn’t rebuild the Scribes without lights. If Winston could get this first step initiated than that could lead to all of the other changes that Orion had envisioned. He had never expected any of them to come to fruition though. “I- Well thank you.” Orion wasn’t great at taking compliments, especially from people he liked. Winston truly thought that this place was worth coming to. Despite the lack of electricity and the fact that Orion didn’t have much to offer besides old mattresses and junk food. It was… surprising. Orion wasn’t used to companionship just for the sake of friendship. He was used to ulterior motives or forced interactions. “Right, yeah of course. Well… finger’s crossed that this thing works on the first try. But if not that’s fine.” Orion watched, fascinated by Winston as they worked. Orion had always enjoyed learning about other people’s passions but watching it in action was something else entirely. Orion got to see that passion in action and liked see them so focused on the task at hand. He got caught up in the moment and barely registered Winston’s question, waiting for a few moments too long before finally realizing what had been asked. “Oh- Sorry I wasn’t focused. Uh, I didn’t, if I’m being honest. My uncle used to be a scribe here once upon a time. He showed me how to get in when I was a kid.” Since then, a few people had gotten into the building, but not many by Orion’s choice. The only person he had invited into the barrier was Kaden but just to grab him some information on demon’s. “You’re actually the first person I’ve actually shown how to get into the building. Since my uncle showed me, I mean.” 

Winston was not thinking quite as big as Orion was. At the moment they just wanted to have a place to study the resources that had been made available to them at that moment. Either way, if this was where Orion was spending the majority of their time (as Winston suspected it was) then they were going to do everything that they could to make this a bit more habitable and getting the power back on was a good start with that. “If we can actually get the power working, maybe we can look at getting some solar panels to keep this stuff going.” Raising an eyebrow, Winston pulled a head torch from their bag and attached it to their forehead as they gazed at the fuses and kept working. “It probably, almost certainly won’t work for the first time, maybe not even the second or the third, but I guess there is still plenty of time to find out which it will be…” they took a deep breath before pulling a few wires out of the fusebox, looping them over one another and rewiring a few more selections of the fusebox. Placing the screwdriver in their mouth, they did their best to talk around it. “Yourf funcle washn’tf …” they looked around, “Ufh … fupermaturally inflined? If you knowr wharft I mrean...” 

“Solar panels…” Orion hadn’t thought about that before. It would be the most efficient way to keep that place running. The main issue would be the cost. If only he could hunt down an older Scribe. The thing about them, at least from what his uncle had told him, was that a lot of them came from old Scribe families and old money. The type of people that can afford to build their own private archives in their homes. The type of people that maybe, just maybe, would fund solar paneling and remodeling for a young scholar trying to rebuild the Scribes. Orion just needed to figure out how to find that. “That’s a great idea! I’ll do some research on that.” When Winston broke the news that it most likely wouldn’t work on the first try, Orion could only shrug. “No worries. We’ll get it eventually. Well.. you will get it actually. But I’m here in spirit.” It didn’t bother him, not much. If nothing worked Orion may be slightly disappointed, but at least Winston was willing to try. It took a minute for Orion to decipher their next question, but began laughing nervously once he did. “Oh my uncle? He uh- well no. Not really. He was a human.” Orion wasn’t sure how to answer. Winston had made that first step, asking about the supernatural that both had seemingly assumed the other knew. Still, even with the knowledge finally about to come out, Orion couldn’t tell Winston that his uncle was a hunter. Winston would put to and two together and realize that Orion himself was a hunter. A monster. At least Orion wasn’t exactly lying. His uncle was a human. “He just studied the supernatural. That’s what the Scribes did.”

“Obviously the real problem is having the money to purchase the solar panels, and with all the darkness being a thing they wouldn’t work, so we’d have to invest in generators or something, but in some places if you’re careful you can actually sell electricity back to the power companies.” Winston had done a lot of reading about carbon neutral homes when preparing to do this, trying to put in the greenest installation that they possibly could. “Your moral support is invaluable,” Winston replied as they slotted another fuse into place and began to finish wiring in the main cables, running them to the breaker and making sure that everything was in place, “besides we’re nearly ready, everything is set up on my end so all you’ve got to do is flick the breaker, don’t get too excited, it isn’t like all the lights are going to come back on, just that one over here.” Winston stepped forward and pointed out one of the lights before screwing a new bulb into it. “If that works we can try hooking everything else up and make sure that it is all safe before running power to the library and then go from there. But for now, will you do the honours?” 

“Yeah. True. But.. well I’ll cross that bridge when I get there I guess.” Thinking too much on it now would just send Orion spiraling into a panic attack. For all the planning Orion wanted to do, it was all too grandeur for him to take on right now. So he needed to calm down and take it one step at a time. For a moment, Orion closed his eyes and silently practiced some breathing techniques. He didn’t want to worry Winston by making any noise. But Winston’s words of encouragement helped ground him back to reality. This was the moment of truth. Rio went over to the switch, his hands practically shaking. A nervous mixture of excitement and fear. “This feels so weird. Never thought I’d do this.” He pressed his finger to the button and as gently and feebly as he could manage, flipped it over. His eyes closed on reflex, and for a moment stayed in darkness, but he slowly opened one eye to find that aside from the lights that Rio and Winston had on, another light in the corner had flicked on. “Holy…” Orion trailed off, the disbelief apparent in his voice. Finally, he found the ability to speak again. “Holy crap. It worked. You’re a miracle worker!” Orion jumped up and down excitedly, a grin illuminating at his face as he turned to look at Winston, “You did it!”

“Exactly, besides this darkness stuff won’t last forever, you know that nothing like this ever does.” Winston was perhaps just a little more concerned by what could possibly replace the darkness. It seemed like with each new development something new went wrong and somehow it was almost always worse then the one before. But they were trying to be more positive and that attitude wouldn’t help anyone. As Winston watched Orion flip the switch, they were pleased that it had worked. Nodding for them to flip it off again, Winston set about on the next stage of the plan. Hooking up the relevant rooms to the fusebox, they knew that this would take them a while in total. To get the building up and running to a decent standard. But for now they only needed to cover two rooms if they could get that down then they were sure that the rest wouldn’t be too difficult. “Hell yeah dude, we did it.” They grinned gently and clapped Orion on the shoulder. “Now I really need your help, can you start running these wires into the library and the sleeping room and we can set everything up, we’ll properly wire everything in later but for this part it doesn’t matter all that much if it doesn’t work out. But for now let’s keep going.”

Orion stared at light in amazement. It was amazing that something so dull and monotonous could hold such wonder. He had been staring at those dusty, unlit bulbs for months now. And now they were finally lit up. How ironic, that it would come when the literal sun wasn’t rising. “We did. We really did. Er- well you really did it. I held a flashlight.” And poorly, if Rio was being honest. He had been so caught up on his own things that he hadn’t been paying much attention. The light had been shaky, had moved off its target once or twice. He didn’t have much experience with manual labor, clearly. If this could even be considered that. “Right of course. I can do that.” He grinned back, leaping up and ready to do whatever Winston needed from him. “Got it- Like uh- You want me to physically take the wires into the library and sleeping room? Or uh- like from here?” He asked nervously, embarrassed that he had no idea what Winston was talking about. 

“You’re so hard on yourself,” Winston replied dismissively, “this was a team effort and if you can’t see that then you might need to adjust your perspective. Besides, holding the flashlight was the hardest job.” They giggled a little at their own joke. They were in this together. Sure Winston had done all the hard work now, but Orion had already made a lot of progress making this place habitable. They had prioritised things similarly to Winston and they just generally needed to try and be a bit more positive with themselves. Grinning at the fact that they had given what was the most vague instructions they possibly could, Winston raised an eyebrow and adjusted their glasses. “You make a good point, I should probably just come with you, I just need to finish this and I’ll be done in here anyway.” They fiddled with the fusebox before closing it up again. “Come on, lead the way back to the library and we can see if we can actually read the books without having to squint too much.” 

“Sorry-sorry” Orion sighed. He knew what Winston was saying. It was hard to break the habit. He was only as hard on himself as his family had been. Or maybe he had been ever harder than his family had been. “Working on taking compliments.” Maybe Evelyn was right, he did need practice. But Winston was nice and patient, which made for a good combination considering how frustrating it must be to hear Orion constantly berate himself. At least he imagined it must be frustrating. “Teamwork makes the dreamwork!” Orion gave Winston a thumbs up as they closed up the fuse box and got ready to head towards the library. Orion was happy to lead, in fact it was probably one of the happiest times that he walked down the dark, creepy hallway of the Scribe building. He was hopeful, something that he didn’t feel incredibly often. “So I guess it’s probably pretty obvious, but the Scribes did more than just take care of a library.” Orion admitted as the two turned a corner, “They were supernatural records keepers. It was their job to keep history on all the weird happenings around the world. Well, before they stopped obviously.” Winston had taken that first step. Asking about Rio’s uncle. The supernatural facts were out there so might as well put Rio’s cards on the table. Well, not all of his cards, but the Scribes for sure. Around one more corner and Orion opened up the door to the library, “Okay, let’s get started!”

“You’re all good dude,” Winston replied with a shrug, they knew how difficult it could be to get your confidence back and they weren’t about to push Orion too hard just when they were starting to become friends, “taking compliments is hard as fuck, so don’t sweat it. You just gotta desensitise yourself, to this stuff so I’ll just keep complimenting you until you’re bored of it.” Winston knew what it was like to be anxious and working alongside others, they were a very nervous person who was afraid of pretty much everything and in this world that wasn’t the best combination. “Aha!” Winston hooted with laughter, “exactly. Dreamwork does make teamwork.” Following after Orion, Winston made sure that the wire didn’t get tangled as it was spooled out and carefully kept it to one side so that they wouldn’t trip over it later on. They listened intently to Orion’s explanation. They had been CERTAIN that there HAD to be an organisation that was dedicated to keeping some sort of order to this thing. “So they were kind of keeping an eye on everything?” Winston was curious, they seemed to have a good chunk of influence so what the hell had happened? “Where are they now? What happened?” Raising an eyebrow as they entered the library. Winston pulled the chord after them and started getting to work. “Cool, so all of the lights are going to run through here, we just gotta set everything up and then test the lights to see which ones explode when we turn them on.” They were only slightly joking unfortunately.

“Between you and this really nice rich woman on Harris Island, you’re both going to compliment me to death.” Orion laughed, glancing back at Winston and smiling to let them know that despite the awkwardness, Orion did appreciate them and the compliments they shared. Orion may not be used to compliments or getting credit for many things, but with the friends he was finally starting to make, he would have to get used to it. Winston had questions about the Scribes, understandably, and Orion was happy to help however he was able to. Not that he was the leading expert on Scribes in this town, but considering nobody else had ever shown up at this place to reclaim it… he kinda was the leading expert on Scribes. “Exactly. They were… observing. That was what they did. They watched the world around them and recorded the weird things that they saw. So that it wasn’t lost.” He enjoyed that others seemed to be interested in learning about the Scribes as well “I don’t know what happened to this one specifically. Or why nobody has been back. But from what my uncle told me most of the chapters all over the world shut down. I don’t think it was like.. An overnight fall, but I have some theories.” He trailed off as Winston began working on the wiring and Orion thought about his theories. “I can’t tell if you’re joking or not” Orion laughed nervously, “But uh it’s fine. If it does. I can get more lightbulbs.” 

Raising an eyebrow, Winston smiled. “Do you mean Evelyn?” they asked curiously, they’d run into each other and Winston was pretty sure they’d accidentally used magic in front of her. “Ok so they were academics of supernatural history then,” that made sense and Winston could immediately see the arguments for and against impartiality, “I guess that something must’ve happened that was really bad, but you know, I always love hearing a good conspiracy theory, even if they’re somewhat far fetched. But I don’t know anything about this and the more information I can gather on it the better you know. Maybe it’ll help in trying to get this place back to its former glory. “Unfortunately I’m only joking a little bit, I don’t know how old these bulbs are and how good condition they are in, it’s possible that the filament could just go as soon as we run any amount of current through them,” they stepped into the library and pointed at a large box, “but don’t worry, I’ve come prepared with fresh lightbulbs so that we can replace any that go.” They set to work, beginning to plug everything in and setting everything up. “Can you make sure these wires don’t get caught on anything?” they said, pointing to the trail leading out the door.

Orion looked at Winston curiously, “Uh yeah- you know her?” He shouldn’t have been surprised. Didn’t everyone in this town know each other? “Right, right. Small town. I shouldn’t be surprised anymore.” Orion had to admit this his theories were a little boring compared to the conspiracy theories that some had probably come up with. Orion knew what would drive him away from an organization like this if he had been a member. “It’s hard to theorize, honestly. Mostly because they just sorta… disappeared from town. But the scribe had always been about neutrality. Their job was strictly to observe and record. Scribes were supposed to be impartial to both sides and never be biased. I think that was hard for a lot of people. Plus, I’m sure some people just didn’t follow it- which must have led to some disagreements.” Orion shrugged again. He didn’t like theorizing without some sort of basis. The last thing he wanted was someone taking his words for fact. “I think there were issues long before it fell. And then something happened to some of the chapters around the world. Once a couple fell it wouldn’t be hard to picture the rest fading out with them. Clearly this place was never destroyed, which is good.” Did Winston just mention getting this place back to its former glory? So.. were they considering wanting to help too? More than just fixing the lights? Orion hoped so. “That’d be great. Well, electricity is a good start. To rebuild. I can use all the help from you that you’re willing to give.” Orion felt like he was on HGTV. Orion looked at the box of lights that Winston had already come prepared with and whistled, “Wow. You are way prepared. Nice.” He turned to look at the wires that Winston pointed out and jogged over, following the trail of wires. “You got it. Count on me.” 

“Not very well, we ran into each other on Harris Island and we were attacked by a flock of seagulls, it was weird.” Winston was sure that they weren’t the only one who had weird things like that happen to them, but despite that they weren’t exactly the type to really revel in it. “We both live on Harris Island, so I think it was inevitable really.” They listened carefully to Orion’s theories, they had to admit that it was difficult to know anything without having real information on it. Yet Orion’s theory made sense. “I get that, that makes a bunch of sense, plus if you’re being impartial then neither of the ‘sides’ will be happy about it, they both probably wanted something and there’s only so long that you can get away with not picking a side.” They had to admit that they were disappointed that all of this had happened. It would’ve been good to have an organisation that was dedicated to supernatural academia help them with their own magical development and learning, even if it was just providing them with resources. “So they just slowly fell apart …” that was really sad and Winston couldn’t help but wonder if maybe they had left a void that really needed to be filled. They really needed the Scribes so that they could learn more. They were desperate to learn as much as they possibly could. “You’re right though, we’ve still got this place and this place is great, look how much we can do to make this place better, we could really make something of this place dude.” Winston couldn’t help but be excited about the potential that they had here. “I was never a boyscout or anything, but I always felt like I should’ve been because I come prepared to everything.” 

That was weird, but hardly the weirdest thing that Orion had heard this week. Admittedly, being attacked by something as normal as seagulls was surprisingly mundane. He remembered Winston mentioning that they lived on Harris Island. It wasn’t that big of an island, which meant that Orion and Winston probably only lived a few minutes from each other. Evelyn too, he supposed. It really was a small town. “Exactly. From how my uncle described them, they were always doomed to fail. Like I said, they were stubborn. Time’s change and I don’t know if they were willing to change with it.” But now they could. New management meant that they could make their own rules. A new and better Scribe legacy. Still seemed far fetched to Orion, if he was being honest with himself. “I have a lot of ideas. For this place I mean. Once we get power back to it.” He just hoped he could see them through to fruition. Orion followed the cord down, making sure that it remained untangled and didn’t catch on anything. It was the least he could do. Orion laughed, a deeper laugh than he had done in quite a while at Winston’s joke. “Well, I was a boy scout and I promise you’re way more prepared than we ever were. Though to be fair, I was a really bad boy scout. Like really bad. I only lasted for like a year before my parents pulled me from it.” He had hated the boy scouts anyways, so it was a blessing in disguise when they forced him to leave. “How’s it going over there?” He yelled from a few yards away, switching back and forth from staring at the wiring and looking over in Winston’s direction.

“I knew that there had to be some organisation that was trying to do something, this Supernatural world is so chaotic and messy, no one seems to know what the hell is going on and everyone is kind of just hoping that they don’t die.” Winston was honestly somewhat concerned by the lack of serious consideration for morality that people appeared to display when talking about the Supernatural. After all, the fact that Hunters so willingly hunted innocent beings was beyond concerning for Winston. “Dude that is awesome, we can look at sorting them all out. Once we’ve got power we can look at really replacing some of the stuff in that sleeping room and cleaning everything out. I think if we focus on the kitchen, the library and the sleeping room then that would be best, once those three are kind of … better then you’ve at least got somewhere to sleep, somewhere to work and somewhere to eat …” they swallowed for a moment and frowned, “can I ask you a kind of personal question?” They paused for a moment and shuffled their feet before throwing themselves back into their work once more. “I’m pretty sure we’re all ready to test the lights,” Winston said as they finished the last circuit, “whenever you’re ready, give it a go.” Waiting for Orion to flip the switch gave them time to consider what they wanted to say. 

“It just makes me sad. That over 30 years has gone by where nobody was keeping track of anything. There could have been some weird, once in a lifetime events that happened that will just get… completely erased by history.” Orion answered, sadness apparent in his voice. As someone that studied and was passionate about history, he understood just how scary the idea of something being lost forever was. He couldn’t imagine all the incredible things from history that the world would never know about because the records didn’t survive or people decided not to document it. “I agree! I think the library of course is the number one priority. The sleeping room and kitchen aren’t as important but they would definitely be a bonus. Plus it’d be nice to have the space in case someone ever needed to crash here.” Just like Winston had that night. Orion wished the next time that happened he could offer a more hospitable place. He was afraid where Winston’s personal question was going. All this talk of a place to sleep and eat were implying things. “Sure, of course. Whatever you want to know.” Was he going to tell the truth? Or was Orion going to work around it again, like some sort of maze? One Winston confirmed that Orion could flip the switch, Rio happily skipped over to the outlook and put his hand on it. Moment of truth. Orio took a deep breath and flipped it on.

Nodding pensively, Winston sighed sadly. “You never know, that might not be entirely true, and there’s time for everything to come back around, even if we’ve missed a few things.” Swallowing gently, Winston wasn’t sure that they agreed. If Orion was spending as much time here as Winston suspected then it was important that it was at least habitable. “We can work it out as we go along,” Winston intended to fix this place up as much as they could. As the lights flickered on across the library, Winston was finally able to see the whole of the library and it truly looked spectacular. They had to admit that there was going to be a lot of time spent reading the books here, Winston could only imagine the information that they would be able to find on magic. Especially if they were lucky. “You said before that your family situation wasn’t the best, they’re religious or something and no offence dude but you’re always here, are you like staying here because of stuff with your family?” 

Orion nodded, happy that Winston was remaining hopeful on the situation. “Thanks. I hope you’re right.” Orion shrugged, it was hard to think about what could have been with the Scribes. He knew it was a waste of time anyways. He couldn’t go back and change anything. “Maybe there’s still a Scribe in town somewhere that kept an eye on things. Kept their own records on their own time. It would have to be a hard habit to kick, right?” If they could try to find them, maybe they could try to fill that hole. But at that exact moment, everything else stopped mattering. Because the lights were on. The lights were freaking on! “Holy crap.” Orion said, staring across the place in a wonder. “I can’t believe it all worked.” Orion hadn’t heard any glass shattering at least. Though the place was big enough it could have gone unnoticed. “Maybe it has something to do with the magic surrounding this place? Kept it preserved or something.” Orion had to admit they weren’t very familiar with magic, but it certainly seemed within the realm of possibility. Nothing quite killed the mood like talking about family though. “My family… wants something from me.” He began explaining, before realizing that he wasn’t explaining it well. “They want me to be something that I can’t be. There’s too much pressure in that house.. Too many lies and..” He trailed off. Exactly how much was too much? Orion had already crossed a line, telling Winston anything. If Athena knew she would be furious. Perfect life. Perfect family. That was the schtick. “My family wouldn’t approve of me doing this. And they wouldn’t let me do this. Which is why I’m here and not there. And why they can’t know about it. As far as they know I’m studying late at the library or staying with a friend or.. Something” He wasn’t sure they actually cared about the excuses Rio came up with. “Sorry- This is amazing. All of this is amazing.” He gestured at the library and the lights surrounding it, “I don’t want to ruin it or bring the mood down.”

“If you refuse to believe that things can be any better then there’s no chance they will be,” Winston replied with a shrug, it was a motto his brother had taught him as he campaigned for change within the school. Nothing had happened of course, but the motto had stuck with Winston. “Maybe, maybe there’s someone doing all of those things, but it doesn’t matter until we find them, so for now I’m going to focus on this and make sure it is as perfect as it can be.” They smiled and shrugged. “I don’t think we’re that lucky,” they said as a few lights began flickering, “but for now this is a start, we can clean everything up as we go along, this is going to be a work in progress for a while, but this was a big and very much needed step.” Winston slipped ontop of a desk near by, it was very dusty but they weren’t exactly paying attention to that as they listened to what Orion had to say. “It sounds like you just need to move out,” Winston said before shaking their head at Orion, “don’t apologise, it isn’t your faut when I am literally the one who asked the question, would you be able to move out if there was an opportunity that you could feasibly take?” Ricky was always saying how he wanted more people around the house. 

Orion nodded with Winston. Though the advice was right and Orion knew that it was a good motto to live by he found it hard to follow the teaching himself. Sometimes it all just felt hopeless. But he was trying to stay positive. And the new friendships helped. “Right. Focus on the present.” Orion agreed, shaking his head but still staring ahead at the lights. Sure, some of them were flickering. It wasn’t perfect. But it was a start. That’s all Rio could really ask for at this time. “Yeah of course. Rome wasn’t built in a day.” Orion smiled towards Winston, giving them a thumbs up and finally moving away from the light switch so that he could rejoin Winston over by the tables. He climbed onto a table of his own and looked at Winston, “Yeah, I probably do.” Rio answered absent-mindedly. Of course he knew that Winston was right. He just wasn’t sure how easy that would be. Not with his family. “Probably? I mean legally I’m an adult. My parent’s probably wouldn’t care if I left.” He might actually be right about that, “But I don’t really have a job right now. Not a real one anyways. Or a place to go. So I’ve got to figure that stuff out before I actually consider moving out.” He shrugged. That’s what the had the Scribe headquarters for anyways.

“Learning to change what you can and learning to accept what you can’t is tough,” Winston agreed with a shrug, “something that I defo still struggle with, y’know?” They swallowed and looked around them, they had really made some progress and when some of those lights inevitably went -- they were pretty sure they had just heard a pop as one exploded -- then they would replace them. This was going to be a hefty project, but Winston couldn’t go anywhere now. Not when they knew how important White Crest really was. Not when they had so much still to learn about their magic. Winston chewed on their cheek for a moment before taking a plunge. Inviting someone that they barely knew to move in with them wasn’t exactly their standard move but they really liked Orion and they wanted to give them the out that they were worried that they might need. “Why don’t you just move in with me and my roommate Ricky?” they asked nonchalantly, “we’ve got the room for you, we actually have two free rooms that you could take and we’re always looking for another gaming partner. You’ll still be close to your parents and we can carpool over here. Then you don’t have to worry about them working out that you’re working on this place and you never know, getting some distance might improve things?” 

“Ditto” Orion laughed, “Obviously. It’s not my strong suit. So I’m uh- I’m working on it.” Orion heard the light. He could hear the building light up. The hissing of the light, as it became too much and finally the light shattering and glass falling onto the table and floor. It was up on the next level. Out here in the middle of nowhere, it made it easy for Orion’s hunter hearing to focus. Back in town there was always so much going on, so much noise. It drove him crazy until he finally taught himself out to filter it out. But filtering it out made it hard to focus it at all. Here? This was his safe place to let his senses have a little more freedom without repression. “It was up on the second floor.” He mentioned, absentmindedly, then corrected himself. “I mean- I think. It sounded like it came from the second floor. The light that exploded.” Orion stared at Winston for a long moment trying to process what they had just asked him. “I- what?” He asked them. He heard them of course, but couldn’t seem to fathom that they had actually just asked them to move in. “Are you? I mean- seriously?” He continued to stare at Winston, wide eyed and dazed. “I couldn’t do that. I don’t even have a job right now.”

“That’s all you can do,” Winston replied with a shrug. Though they had to admit that they found it a little odd that Orion had been able to work out where the bulb had gone so quickly. “I mean, we can only find out if we go and check,” Winston set off across the newly lit library, making their way up a tight spiral staircase that wound up and up, they climbed the metal steps one at a time until they were on the second floor, “I can’t see anything,” they admitted though that didn’t mean anything considering their eyesight was appalling, “let’s double check anyway.” And there it was, the predicted denial and refusal of their offer. “I mean, I am being serious, I would have to double check with Ricky but he wouldn’t mind and it’s not like the rent on our place is huge, Ricky pretty much owns the house and just charges for maintenance so even if you don’t have a job you’d only have to worry about covering food and stuff and we can help you out if you need it, you don’t have to say yes or no, just think about it, the offers open.”

Orion followed Winston across the library and towards the staircase to the area Orion had specified, accidentally. He knew that it was up here, evidenced by the darkness. Though technically that could just mean that bulb was burnt out rather than it was the one that had shattered. But Orion’s eyes adjusted quickly to the darkness, another hunter perk. “Well the light isn’t working over here so I’m guessing this was it.” He spotted the broken glass after a moment, but decided not to say anything about it. He wasn’t ready to have the hunter conversation. Not yet. Especially when he lived with Ricky, who Rio had his own theories about. He still couldn’t wrap his head around the idea that Winston had just invited Rio to move in with them. And despite how badly he wanted to say yes. And how badly he wanted to get away from his family, but just couldn’t see it ending well. Not with Athena. If Rio was right about Ricky, then living with him could put his life at risk, at least until he found a way to protect them. At least as far as Orion knew, Winston was human and therefore safe. “Yeah, yeah of course. And I really appreciate it. I think I’m okay? For now at least. I- uh- I’ll think about it though? Thanks again.”

As they searched for the broken bulb, Winston had to admit that they almost wished that they had a better excuse then needing glasses. As Orion led the way, Winston wondered whether there was something more to this then Orion was letting on. Thoughtfully, they played with a loose thread at the bottom of their t-shirt, before their converse crunched through a piece of broken glass with a loud crack. “I think that I just found it,” they said as they looked up into the darkness and sure enough spotted what remained of the exploded bulb, carefully they reached up and screwed it. “Listen, think about it, don’t take it if it doesn’t work for you, it’s a pressure free offer that is open ended, so, let us know if you change your mind.” Their father had talked to them about situations like this before and Winston was well aware that Orion’s situation may change. They had done their bit and that was all anyone could ask. 

For some reason, nothing ever seemed pressure free to Orion. The simplest decisions in life came with way too much anxiety to ‘think’ about and stress over. Every decision he had ever made felt grueling and left him exhausted. Playing truth or dare in elementary school had nearly drove him mad. But he appreciated the offer nonetheless, and truly believed that Winston meant it as a pressure free often. “Of course. You got it. I’ll think on it.” He nodded and smiled. It was dark, but maybe there was enough light for Winston to catch the facial expression. Or maybe not. Once Orion’s eyes adjusted to darkness it was hard to tell what normal humans could and couldn’t see. “So what now? We replace the broken bulb? Head back to the circuit room? I- uh… well you’re in charge here obviously. You actually know what you’re doing.” Once Winston left, Orion’s first goal would be to vacuum the place. He couldn’t imagine how long that was going to take.

Looking around, Winston had to admit that they didn’t think that this would’ve been as easy as it had turned out to be. They weren’t sure why, but they had expected more trouble setting everything up. “Well, I think that we’ve probably done enough for today, we’ve obviously got a bunch more to get done but I don’t think there’s that much that has to be done today…. So we could get a pizza or something? To celebrate our big achievement you know?” 

[arabellaflynn]

Text of a test monologue. Would you like to see me deliver this on camera, with no makeup, no lighting equipment, and using Notepad as a TelePrompTer? Head on over to my https://www.patreon.com/ArabellaFlynnPatreon, and for a dollar a month you too can see me waffle on in real time.

Hi, all. You may notice that I am on video now. I was going to shoot a couple of tests and apologize for the poor quality of the footage, and explain that I want to start vlogging and streaming in addition to writing, but I need some equipment to do it properly and for that I need to raise some funds... But fuck it. This is going out first instead.

As I record this, it is the fourth of July. You can probably hear the fireworks outside my window. I know I can. There are a lot of those, because we've all been inside and bored for the past four months. 

I know a lot of people who have opted not to observe the holiday this year. The 4th of July is often viewed as a celebration of the American institution, which is a little bit on fire right now, with a few people determined to squirt lighter fluid all over the flames like a bored suburban dad at a barbecue. On the other hand, it's also Independence Day, and marks the end of the long, painful process by which a population broke free of distant, uncaring overlords who cared mainly about the financial dividends of their colonies, and ignored the grievances of the people until they started breaking shit. So YMMV.

I would comment on some of the details, but I don't know them. The Late Show is on hiatus, and John Oliver doesn't air until tomorrow. I, like a lot of my demographic, get most of my current events from comedians. There's a reason for that.

I actually watched a lot of news as a teenager.

Well, "watched" might be too strong a word. It's easier for me to fall asleep if there's some sort of droning noise in the background. When I was about fifteen, I discovered that, unlike the main CNN channel, which has actual shows and documentaries, CNN Headline News just runs the day's top stories over and over again in an unending 30 minute loop. Interesting enough to keep me from falling into a train of thought that will prevent me from sleeping, boring enough that I don't want to stay up and listen.

I have no memory of the desk anchors. I'm sure they were consummate professionals, but they also had no distinguishing human characteristics whatsoever. I know they were updating the loop live, because occasionally a story would be added to the list and another one would drop off the back, and occasionally one would flub the text on their prompter, but other than that there was no hint that the face at the desk was attached to a living, breathing person.

I do remember a couple of the correspondents. One was Christiane Amanpour. Her voice stood out; CNN is an American news station that was originally restricted to American cable networks, and the vast majority of the staff is from the US. Amanpour is British-Iranian, having split her childhood between Tehran, before the revolution, and London, after. They liked to send her to the bowels of Eastern Europe to report from the war-torn streets of Citygrad in Countrystan. She had already caught some criticism on her reporting of the Bosnian War, for advancing the apparently controversial opinion that genocide was bad. I didn't know that at the time; I just thought she sounded more like she told real stories than read off lists of facts.

Another was Anderson Cooper, who was not nearly such a big deal then as he is now. Cooper, a self-described adrenaline junkie, was a war correspondent at the time, with a habit of ducking only briefly for explosions before standing back up to continue his piece to camera. He wouldn't be infamous until his coverage of Hurricane Katrina years later, both for the overall stellar job he did, and also for that one time he got tired of getting non-answers from some government toad in a live interview and very professionally flipped his shit at the lady, asking if she realized how tone deaf it was to sit there thanking other politicians for doing essentially nothing while there were still bodies in the street.

I quit watching the news when I moved away to college. It wasn't necessarily that knowing was worse than not knowing, but I felt a lot of pressure to be "adult" about it at that point, and watching proper news shows made me anxious to the point where I wouldn't sleep. I outright avoided it to the point where I made it to a canceled class at 4 pm, Mountain Standard Time, on September 11, 2001, before anyone told me what was going on.

I wasn't able to put my finger on why I found the news so horrible until many years later. I can't remember what rabbit hole I'd fallen down, but I ended up sitting on YouTube watching segments of the live news coverage of the 1981 assassination attempt on President Reagan. Reagan was shot in the side and later recovered without complications, but his Press Secretary, James Brady, was struck in the head and sustained considerable neurological damage. Brady, together with his wife Sarah, later went on to be a noted advocate for gun control, but at the time was reported to have died on the scene. 

I wound up watching a lot of one of the news desks -- ABC, I think. It started out like all the others, until the anchor tripped up a couple of times and referred to Press Secretary Brady as "Jim", and I realized: He knows these people. Personally. He's a member of the White House Press Corps, or a friend of the Bradys, or both. I'm watching a journalist reporting on a moment of historical significance to the American people, and a human being who has to tell the entire nation about someone's personal tragedy. His investment did not make him any less professional or informative than any of the others, but it did make his coverage feel very grounded in reality in a way that most news, then and now, does not.

The older I get, the more disquieting I find it to have a talking head behind a shiny desk read me a list of horrible things that have happened today without any apparent reaction. It makes it seem like these things are a randomized representative sample of the cruelty of the universe, rather than what they are, which is a list of things so unusually terrible they made the news. I realize that this is part of an effort to remain impartial so that the viewer can decide how they feel about events, but it's also disturbingly normative. Yes, everything is on fire, everything is always on fire, this is nothing new. 

I can't say I'm any more enamored of the opposite, either, the more recent style where the news anchor's entire job is to tell you that entirety of human existence is awful and here's what you should prioritize being afraid of this week. Everything around you is on fire, the fire is racing right at you, and here's whose fault the fire is.

A lot of Americans, especially younger ones, have taken to getting their news mostly from political satire because-- well, one, because for about the past twenty years, our comedians have been better at fact-checking than our actual newsrooms. You can thank Jon Stewart for getting a bee in his bonnet over that. But also because their coverage of major issues takes neither of those paths. The Daily Show alumni write up stories like they actually live on the planet they're reporting from. You're on fire? They're on fire too! Holy shit, let's all find some water! 

The conceit behind the comedy of The Daily Show and the Colbert Report and Full Frontal and Last Week Tonight and now the monologues on The Late Show is not that this is a normal amount of fire for everything to be on so it's fine, nor establishing that someone has set you on fire on purpose and here's who should be punished for it. It's bewilderment and frustration at the way we somehow keep catching on fire over and over again. Yeah, they crack jokes, because it's their job, but all the jokes are predicated on the idea that this is, above all, just very, very, inexplicably stupid. We can, and we should, be better than this. And the hosts stubbornly refuse to just give up and internalize as immutable all the reasons why we aren't.

You wouldn't know it to look at him, but Jon Stewart has accumulated "fuck you" money from his time on The Daily Show, among other things. I really hope the rest of them are doing the same. Because we need some figureheads who are able to say "fuck you" to a lot of authority figures right now without having to worry about how their family is going to survive the next month. John Oliver has HBO backing and I'm pretty sure Last Week Tonight has roughly equal budgets set aside for handling lawsuits and shoveling money at charity. Stephen Colbert has been insulting Donald Trump as hard as he possibly can since day one, and he just re-upped until 2023. Samantha Bee has her husband holding the camera to shoot her monologues out in the woods. 

They've all figured out how to produce their show over the internet, so at least we have something to watch in the After Times.

I really hope the neighbors run out of fireworks soon. Aside from not wanting the neighborhood to be literally on fire at any point, one of my housemates has a dog, and the dog has epilepsy, so this has been an interesting evening. Sorry about the fireworks, sorry about the camera, sorry about the country, sorry about the state of the world. Imma go find my Xanax. G'night.

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[jeanvaljean24601]

CNN Gets Animated Over 2020 Election Coverage

CNN has over the years run all kinds of content: hard-news hours, documentaries, even a quiz show. Now it’s going to try animation. The AT&T-owned cable-news outlet will on Tuesday launch a new promotional campaign for some of its biggest pieces of coverage of the 2020 election. In cartoon-y vignettes, a donkey and elephant – the traditional avatars of the Democratic and Republican parties – will grumble and poke each other in humorous fashion. “Whoa. We need to be six feet apart when we argue,” says the elephant to the donkey in one of as many as four spots that are planned for the initiative. “This is the closest we’ve been in years,” says the donkey. The pair will jockey in similar fashion in the other promos. CNN viewers will be reminded at the end of each of four different vignettes to tune in to network coverage of political conventions, Election Day results and other potential events. The shorts should be visible on CNN venues through early November. “This is a little bit different from the promos you see for breaking news on CNN” or others that tell viewers what might be coming up on Anderson Cooper’s primetime show, says Allison Gollust, executive vice president and chief marketing officer of CNN Worldwide, in an interview. The two animal figures will also show up on social media and online, she says, “and if we do it right, they could be something that becomes iconic for CNN throughout our coverage of the next few months.” TV networks typically like to run commercials from traditional advertisers, but that’s never stopped them from creating ads of their own to burnish their programming and mission. Some of those efforts can be as memorable as a spot from Apple or Coca-Cola, as anyone who recalls rock and pop stars shouting “I Want My MTV” on behalf of a nascent music-video network in the early 1980s might tell you. Cable-news outlets, however, usually have a limited range of options, as they spend much of their time reminding viewers of their programs or their newsgathering abilities.And most lack the funds to place high-priced commercials for themselves in other venues. MSNBC has for several years captured segments of its reporters doing their job under pressure to tell viewers “This is who we are.”  Fox News Channel last year in a bid aimed at advertisers told potential sponosrs that “America Is Watching” as part of an effort to talk about the broader crowd it sees turning in to its programming. CNN has a well-recognized and years-old effort featuring actor James Earl Jones reciting the words “This…is CNN.” It remains in use today. Getting people to tune in to the year’s top political coverage is critical for TV-news outlets. Election years typically drive higher-than-normal viewership at CNN and its competitors – and ad dollars often follow. Though the TV-ad market has been hobbled by the nation’s coronavirus pandemic, CNN is still seen capturing $619.2 million in advertising this year, according to a June estimate from market-research firm Kagan, a unit of S&P Global Market Intelligence. Under Gollust, the network has on occasion veered into the non-traditional. In 2017, CNN responded to a growing antipathy from President Trump and his supporters with a campaign that  underscored to viewers how the network took a “Facts First” approach to newsgathering and journalism. The commercials used the simple image of an apple, and a narrator who made sure viewers understood what they were seeing. They have surfaced several times since the initial effort debuted. When CNN worked to promote a documentary series on the movies, various anchors appeared to emulate Hollywood icons. Wolf Blitzer and Jake Tapper, for example, recreated a scene from the 1988 movie “Big,” playing a song on a large floor piano with their feet. The new campaign attempts to inject a lighthearted note into a political-news cycle that is anything but. The elephant and donkey, while antagonistic toward one another, are depicted as longtime associates. They are more like Statler and Waldorf, the grumpy “Muppet Show” critics, than they are Montagues and Capulets, says Whit Friese, vice president and group creative director at CNN. CNN viewers who find the pair interesting will be able to see more of them via online banners found at various CNN sites, he adds. The promos, created with animation studio House Special and ad-agency FIG, aim to draw attention to election coverage that could look quite different from the norm. CNN and other news outlets have already indicated they intend to scale back on-the-ground coverage of the Republican and Democratic National Conventions, slated to take place in August. Crowds, simply put, cannot gather during the current pandemic. And presidential debated between President Donald Trump and Democratic candidate Joe Biden may also have new presentation guidelines. “We might have had a show on the ground there in the past, but we will still do the show,” Gollust says. “I don’t think the consumer experience will be all that much different. It’ s just the way we pull it off will be different than we’ve seen in the past.” h96 tv boxExecutives don’t believe CNN has aired animation in such a way, but the network has tested other interesting effects. In 2008, CNN correspondent Jessica Yellin was beamed in to a New York studio in “hologram” form to talk to anchor Wolf Blitzer about election activity from Chicago.

[bthenoise]

Q&A: Hear How Frank Iero Wants You To Become The Future Violents With Third Solo LP ‘Barriers’

All photos by Julius Aguilar

When you think of Frank Iero, we’re sure a lot of things come to mind. He’s a musician, he’s a dad, he’s an active user on Twitter. What most people might not realize is that Frank Iero is a huge music fan -- like, the guy knows way more about things you didn’t even know existed in the first place.

For example, take a certain guitar used by a late-60′s early-70′s band called The Wrecking Crew. Frank, being the musical factoid that he is, was able to spurt out knowledge dating back years from a recent documentary he had watched. Knowing this, we knew we had to take the former My Chemical Romance member to Arizona’s approximately 200,000 square-foot Musical Instrument Museum.

There, Frank and Noise contributor Jimmy Smith were able to walk the halls, discover instruments dating back to the 1800′s and discuss the upcoming Frank Iero And The Future Violents record Barriers. 

For a glimpse into the knowledgable and insightful hang out, which also dove deep into Frank’s life-changing car accident between a city bus and his tour van, be sure to look below. Afterward, make sure to pre-order Frank’s forthcoming LP Barriers before it hits stores May 31st via UNFD.   

Alright, so maybe the easiest or the hardest question I’ll ask you all day: What was the best thing you saw here at the Musical Instrument Museum?

Oh man, Tommy Tedesco’s [Telecaster]. That was unreal. I had no idea that [they] had that here. Like, I’ve seen documentaries on The Wrecking Crew and you learn about the incredible players they all were and how many songs that particular guitar has been on that you wouldn't even know. And just to kind of see it sitting there, it's like, “Wow.”

Were there any out-of-the-box instruments you would want to get on a record of yours?

That's the thing. Any chance you have to get an instrument in your hands and try to learn the inner workings of it and what kind of sound you can get out of it, that stuff's amazing. I like to sometimes try to take a step back and approach it from a side I don’t know and think about like, “How would I think of this instrument if I had never seen anyone else play it before? Like, how would I get a sound out of it that I’ve never heard?” And that’s kind of fun.

What do you think is the most unique instrument you've actually used on a record?

Well, early on in the My Chem days, a theremin was on [a record] but it's definitely not like one [that’s noticable]. Because it was just really a bit of a little sprinkle on top. That's an odd one to play. On this next record that we're releasing at the end of May, there's a song on Barriers called “Basement Eyes.” I wanted church bells, I wanted the chorus to have this Phil Spector kind of vibe with like percussion and almost like that feeling you get when you listen to The Crystals. “And Then He Kissed Me,” that kind of thing. So we rented this piano -- I guess, you’re not going to be able to see this reading this -- but it's like a desktop kind of thing, like maybe three-and-a-half feet tall, not a lot of keys and maybe an octave and a half. It's called a Viber-Charm and they sold it to churches that didn't have a lot of money and didn't have the pipe organ sort of church bells and they can play different things on this keyboard. And I mean, it had to be from like the 50s. [It had] braided cables, everything looked like it was going to catch on fire at any moment. And that made a resounding sound on that song. That's how we achieved that.

So obviously with every record you do you want to spice it up and do things differently. What else did you bring to the table this time around aside from adding new members?

Well, this was this is a fun one to do because I was able to really chase tones that I wanted to get. Usually, you don't have a lot of time in a studio, especially when you're a smaller artist or self-funding and stuff like that. [Usually,] you’re going into the studio with, you know, say 17 days or two weeks or something like that and you're trying to get 12 to 14 songs out. This record, we did 17 days and we did 17 songs. Steve Albini is the one that engineered this record. He’s just such a master of his craft. And I mean, he’s the only person that you work with that doesn't have any help, it’s just him in the studio. No ones there. Like someone goes and gets coffee sometimes. Other than that, like no one touches a microphone or anything. Like, he sets up everything himself. He's at the board. He does edits on tape, of course, it's like straight two-inch tape. You need someone that is so unbelievably versed in their craft to be able to make that time work. And we mixed in that amount of time as well.  

Wow. Did you enjoy having that kind of time crunch?

[Laughs] There's definitely a picture of me [and] the whole band at the end of the session I posted on my Instagram. I look like someone that is like, “Oh my god, I can't believe we finished this.” And yeah, I mean, it's hard. You sleep at the studio too. So you record [all day] and then you can go in after hours and work on stuff. But like, you're there a lot and it's the second time in my life that I had an episode of sleep paralysis. Like, one of the nights, I woke up and my brain had woken up first but my body didn't. And I was like, “Oh no!” It's the scariest experience ever. So I was definitely stressed. But we got it done.

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A post shared by frnkiero (@frankieromustdie) on Mar 29, 2019 at 2:06pm PDT

Did the sleep paralysis affect any of the songs at all? Did it make you think differently about your lyrics maybe?

No [laughs]. Like, I've had it twice. Once it happened, I was in My Chemical Romance at the time, and I don't know if we were recording but I was definitely stressed out. And I didn't know what it was. And that [time] was like, “Oh man, there must be” -- I was in a hotel, I was like, “This must be haunted.” Like, immediately I went to that because it feels like someone's pushing you down and you can't move at all but you're fully awake and aware that you can't move and that's why it’s so scary. The second time it happened during this recording, I woke up and I was on my side, and I remember being like, “Oh no, it's happened again” [laughs].

The ghost found you!

[Laughs] Yeah! The ghost found me! Like, “Oh great, he’s followed me now.” But I heard this -- it almost felt like a laser starting from the top my head and going all the way down and I heard “zzzzzzzzzzz” like I was being scanned. It was crazy. And then when it finally got to my feet, [snaps] I woke up. I was able to come out of it and I immediately Googled it like “What the fuck is this?!” So I saw this sleep paralysis thing that said sometimes when your brain wakes up before your body, you can carry through a dream that you're having. So if you're having a nightmare, you'll see things from your nightmare and that’s why people think it's like, “Oh no, it's a demon holding me” and it freaks you out. But it's like, “Oh my god” [laughs].

So just talking about the people you brought in for this record, some of them you’ve known for a very long time. Like Tucker Rule, for example. What is it like to get to play in a band with him?

Oh, man, it's a dream come true. Like Matt [Amrstrong] too, I've known both of those guys since maybe 2000 or 2001. I saw them play in respected bands that I thought were just unreal. I mean, Thursday was one of the greatest live bands, and still is, that I've ever seen. And I remember being like, “Wow, I would love to play with Tucker.” And I got to play with Tucker later on in the 2000s when our drummer from My Chem Bob [Bryar] got sick and had to go home. I think Tucker came in for an Australian tour and that was really awesome. He was fantastic. I mean, he's a fantastic drummer it was great to play with him. But I remember being like, “I wish I could write songs with him.” Like he's playing parts that someone else wrote. And that's always weird. It's almost like putting on your dad’s suit. Like, you could look good in it but you're never going to look like it's yours. 

So I was like, “Wouldn't it be cool to be able to write songs with this guy?” And then Matt, he was in a band called Murder By Death. And I remember them when they were Little Joe Gould. And they came into the Eyeball [Records] family through Tucker and Thursday. And I remember being like, “Wow, I thought Thursday was good. Like, holy shit, this band is unreal!” And I mean, there was completely different instrumentation. Of course, there was a cello player and keyboard player and just the things that they were doing, I think let everyone in our little microcosm know it's not just about “I got these four chords, I'm gonna write this song.” It's like, “You should and can do so much more.” And I think that kind of blew the doors off for everybody and that's when we started to really take it seriously and try to get better. I remember thinking like, “Oh man, how cool would it be to be in a band with that guy? That kid can play.”

So is it kind of weird to think in a weird way you’re sort of their boss since it’s your band?

It's weird to be in that position because I never wanted that. I've always had bands and always started bands and ended up in that position because I was the one that started it or no one else wanted to do that job so it was like, “Alright. Well, someone's got to do it, so I guess I'll do it.” But I very much love that idea of a community being like, “Alright, we're all in this together. We all have equal say.” I like the writing process of that where you bounce ideas off of each other.

So it was collaborative writing with all the members for this project?

For this one, a lot of the songs started just in my head and that's kind of how this solo project has gone. But on this record in particular, because I think we had such high caliber musicians, two songs started with ideas that my brother Even Nestor had. And two songs, one of which made the record, started with Matt. So that was a kind of a thing like, “Hey, I have this riff. Do you think we could use it?” And we would jam out on it and all of a sudden it’s a song.

Do you have a favorite song on the record?

I do [laughs].

Which one is it?

It's called “Medicine Square Garden.” It was one of those where I wrote it, had it in my head and I was like, “This is going to be really difficult to explain to someone how this song is supposed to go.” And it's either going to work or it's not. It's going to be one of those things where if it doesn't work, I'm going to be bummed because I think it's really good but I need people to like -- I don't think I could have done it with anybody else other than this bad. It's crazy. It's one of those songs that I really took a leap of faith on. And since it did pay off and it is still one of my favorite songs, I feel like that's how I knew it it was a successful record.

Getting to hear the record early, it’s interesting that after your accident, you could have gone two ways with how you wrote it: Angry and pissed off at the world or calm and just looking to get back to basics. Was that something you considered when writing Barriers?

Well I think for me, having that accident, I knew I couldn't write a record without addressing it because it was such a huge moment in my life and it changed everything. I knew I'm a different person because of it. And there was this huge elephant in the room that I knew I had to talk about and I had to address it and it had to be, if not a focal point of the record, it had to be -- just, it was there within everything I was writing so I needed something to be dedicated to it. But everything I started to write about just didn't feel right. Like I didn't feel like I was getting everything out the way you do, there's so much to say. And the words just weren't there. I would write something and be like, “that doesn't sum it up.” It's hard to sum up a life-changing experience like that. So that was kind of my wall that I had. And I didn't think I was going to be able to do a record. That's why too I was like, “You know, I'm just gonna take some time.” And it just so happened that Tucker ended up being free. Matt became free. Evan was free and then, Kayleigh Goldsworthy, who's the fifth member of the band. And that's when I was like, “Oh man, this is a sign. It’s like now or never. If I don't write the songs, then I'm gonna miss out.” So then all of a sudden, it all started to come out and this song called “Six Feet Down Under” emerged. And it's basically just my conversation with my therapist of trying to explain how I'm feeling and like, “I know you're trying to help and the things you're saying are very nice and they come from a good spot and I know you're really smart and that's really awesome but like it doesn't mean anything [laughs] if I can't believe that this is all real.” And getting that across, I think really opened the floodgates for me to be able to finish everything else.

Have you had a wall like that in your songwriting career before?

That was a huge one.

Was there anything similar to that previously?

Minor things. You know, there's some childhood things that you have a hard time fully grasping until you get older. Like the divorce of my parents and things of that nature, like trying to make sense of all that. Family, addiction and certain things that I went through. But nothing like this one, because I feel like this was -- it's weird. Childhood trauma evolves. You know, you start to see different sides of things and you've had the time -- there are some people that say “You have your entire life to write your first record” and then you have like maybe six months to write your second basically. With this one, it was still so fresh. And [the accident] happened to me in my adulthood. It happened at a time where I kind of felt like -- like, I had a family. I thought I had things figured out. And immediately [snaps] everything changed.

It shook you up a little.

Yeah, absolutely. I feel like at 25 you go crazy. 30 you're like, “Alright, I'm okay with not knowing everything.” Around 35 you’re like, “Well, I'm starting to get my shit together. And then you get hit by a bus” [laughs]. And you're like, “Oh man, I know nothing again.”

Okay, so then just wrapping up. I was wondering if your three band names -- the Cellabration, the Patience, and The Future Violents -- have any sort of connection?

So the Cellabration was, in my head, it was my first time as a solo artist and I didn't feel comfortable in that role so I wanted to bring along something that felt boisterous and exciting so that would take away from my, you know, like, “It’s just me up here. It’s weird” [feeling]. And I spelled it differently because I like the idea of it being like a cellular thing, like this building block of life and it's going to start from here and evolve and grow and change. So that's where that came from. The Patience was me kind of getting over the idea that I needed something to take away from me. I really wanted something that would kind of even me out and just that self-fulfilling prophecy of bringing this virtue along where you kind of take a step back and appreciate the now. I've spent so much time like, “What's next, what's next? Alright, this tour is going, alright, cool. I'm gonna get home here and then when I'm home, the next tour I’m going to do is this.” And it's like, you live so fast that you don't appreciate what's actually happening. And I don't want that.

And then this time around, The Future Violents, I started to think about how life is kind of this -- it's like you're staring at a lake and you can passively take it all in and see the things swimming underneath and maybe how the wind kind of takes the current. And we do that sometimes, we live vicariously through other people and sometimes, you know, just having it be serene is nice. And then the “active” way to live by is to kind of pick up a stone on the side and throw it in and see the ripples that go on and really affect it. And I think that act is a violent act that disrupts things [but] doesn't have to necessarily have a negative connotation. You know, it's about leaving a footprint and changing things and being conscious enough to want to disrupt what's there and hopefully in a positive way and see that ripple go on and affect other people and like bellow out. So, collectively, I'd like to think that the band and the people that are listening to this record are The Future Violents, the ones that go out and create a change and hopefully listen to this record that we've made -- a record that I used to break down these walls and barriers that I had set up -- and use it to destroy their own barriers and go out there and do things that scare the fuck out of you. Because that's the only time that we do something really wonderful is when we're so frightened that we're not going to do it right. And that's the best part.

[yobaba30]

This.Is.Fucking>Brilliant.

On Sept. 1, with a Category 5 hurricane off the Atlantic coast, an angry wind was issuing from the direction of President Trump’s Twitter account. The apparent emergency: Debra Messing, the co-star of “Will & Grace,” had tweeted that “the public has a right to know” who is attending a Beverly Hills fund-raiser for Mr. Trump’s re-election.

“I have not forgotten that when it was announced that I was going to do The Apprentice, and when it then became a big hit, Helping NBC’s failed lineup greatly, @DebraMessing came up to me at an Upfront & profusely thanked me, even calling me ‘Sir,’ ” wrote the 45th president of the United States.

It was a classic Trumpian ragetweet: aggrieved over a minor slight, possibly prompted by a Fox News segment, unverifiable — he has a long history of questionable tales involving someone calling him “Sir” — and nostalgic for his primetime-TV heyday. (By Thursday he was lashing Ms. Messing again, as Hurricane Dorian was lashing the Carolinas.)

This sort of outburst, almost three years into his presidency, has kept people puzzling over who the “real” Mr. Trump is and how he actually thinks. Should we take him, to quote the famous precept of Trumpology, literally or seriously? Are his attacks impulsive tantrums or strategic distractions from his other woes? Is he playing 3-D chess or Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots?

This is a futile effort. Try to understand Donald Trump as a person with psychology and strategy and motivation, and you will inevitably spiral into confusion and covfefe. The key is to remember that Donald Trump is not a person. He’s a TV character.

I mean, O.K., there is an actual person named Donald John Trump, with a human body and a childhood and formative experiences that theoretically a biographer or therapist might usefully delve into someday. (We can only speculate about the latter; Mr. Trump has boasted on Twitter of never having seen a psychiatrist, preferring the therapeutic effects of “hit[ting] ‘sleazebags’ back.”)

But that Donald Trump is of limited significance to America and the world. The “Donald Trump” who got elected president, who has strutted and fretted across the small screen since the 1980s, is a decades-long media performance. To understand him, you need to approach him less like a psychologist and more like a TV critic.

He was born in 1946, at the same time that American broadcast TV was being born. He grew up with it. His father, Fred, had one of the first color TV sets in Jamaica Estates. In “The Art of the Deal” Donald Trump recalls his mother, Mary Anne, spending a day in front of the tube, enraptured by the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953. (“For Christ’s sake, Mary,” he remembers his father saying, “Enough is enough, turn it off. They’re all a bunch of con artists.”)

TV was his soul mate. It was like him. It was packed with the razzle-dazzle and action and violence that captivated him. He dreamed of going to Hollywood, then he shelved those dreams in favor of his father’s business and vowed, according to the book “TrumpNation” by Timothy O’Brien, to “put show business into real estate.”

As TV evolved from the homogeneous three-network mass medium of the mid-20th century to the polarized zillion-channel era of cable-news fisticuffs and reality shocker-tainment, he evolved with it. In the 1980s, he built a media profile as an insouciant, high-living apex predator. In 1990, he described his yacht and gilded buildings to Playboy as “Props for the show … The show is ‘Trump’ and it is sold-out performances everywhere.”

He syndicated that show to Oprah, Letterman, NBC, WrestleMania and Fox News. Everything he achieved, he achieved by using TV as a magnifying glass, to make himself appear bigger than he was.

He was able to do this because he thought like a TV camera. He knew what TV wanted, what stimulated its nerve endings. In his campaign rallies, he would tell The Washington Post, he knew just what to say “to keep the red light on”: that is, the light on a TV camera that showed that it was running, that you mattered. Bomb the [redacted] out of them! I’d like to punch him in the face! The red light radiated its approval. Cable news aired the rallies start to finish. For all practical purposes, he and the camera shared the same brain.

Even when he adopted social media, he used it like TV. First, he used it like a celebrity, to broadcast himself, his first tweet in 2009 promoting a “Late Show With David Letterman” appearance. Then he used it like an instigator, tweeting his birther conspiracies before he would talk about them on Fox News, road-testing his call for a border wall during the cable-news fueled Ebola and border panics of the 2014 midterms.

When he was a candidate, and especially when he was president, his tweets programmed TV and were amplified by it. On CNBC, a “BREAKING NEWS: TRUMP TWEET” graphic would spin out onscreen as soon as the words left his thumbs. He would watch Fox News, or Lou Dobbs, or CNN or “Morning Joe” or “Saturday Night Live” (“I don’t watch”), and get mad, and tweet. Then the tweets would become TV, and he would watch it, and tweet again.

If you want to understand what President Trump will do in any situation, then, it’s more helpful to ask: What would TV do? What does TV want?

It wants conflict. It wants excitement. If there is something that can blow up, it should blow up. It wants a fight. It wants more. It is always eating and never full.

Some presidential figure-outers, trying to understand the celebrity president through a template that they were already familiar with, have compared him with Ronald Reagan: a “master showman” cannily playing a “role.”

The comparison is understandable, but it’s wrong. Presidents Reagan and Trump were both entertainers who applied their acts to politics. But there’s a crucial difference between what “playing a character” means in the movies and what it means on reality TV.

Ronald Reagan was an actor. Actors need to believe deeply in the authenticity and interiority of people besides themselves — so deeply that they can subordinate their personalities to “people” who are merely lines on a script. Acting, Reagan told his biographer Lou Cannon, had taught him “to understand the feelings and motivations of others.”

Being a reality star, on the other hand, as Donald Trump was on “The Apprentice,” is also a kind of performance, but one that’s antithetical to movie acting. Playing a character on reality TV means being yourself, but bigger and louder.

Reality TV, writ broadly, goes back to Allen Funt’s “Candid Camera,” the PBS documentary “An American Family,” and MTV’s “The Real World.” But the first mass-market reality TV star was Richard Hatch, the winner of the first season of “Survivor” — produced by Mark Burnett, the eventual impresario of “The Apprentice”— in the summer of 2000.

Mr. Hatch won that first season in much the way that Mr. Trump would run his 2016 campaign. He realized that the only rules were that there were no rules. He lied and backstabbed and took advantage of loopholes, and he argued — with a telegenic brashness — that this made him smart. This was a crooked game in a crooked world, he argued to a final jury of players he’d betrayed and deceived. But, hey: At least he was open about it!

While shooting that first season, the show’s crew was rooting for Rudy Boesch, a 72-year-old former Navy SEAL and model of hard work and fair play. “The only outcome nobody wanted was Richard Hatch winning,” the host, Jeff Probst, would say later. It “would be a disaster.” After all, decades of TV cop shows had taught executives the iron rule that the viewers needed the good guy to win.

But they didn’t. “Survivor” was addictively entertaining, and audiences loved-to-hate the wryly devious Richard the way they did Tony Soprano and, before him, J.R. Ewing. More than 50 million people watched the first-season finale, and “Survivor” has been on the air nearly two decades.

From Richard Hatch, we got a steady stream of Real Housewives, Kardashians, nasty judges, dating-show contestants who “didn’t come here to make friends” and, of course, Donald Trump.

Reality TV has often gotten a raw deal from critics. (Full disclosure: I still watch “Survivor.”) Its audiences, often dismissed as dupes, are just as capable of watching with a critical eye as the fans of prestige cable dramas. But when you apply its mind-set — the law of the TV jungle — to public life, things get ugly.

In reality TV — at least competition reality shows like “The Apprentice” — you do not attempt to understand other people, except as obstacles or objects. To try to imagine what it is like to be a person other than yourself (what, in ordinary, off-camera life, we call “empathy”) is a liability. It’s a distraction that you have to tune out in order to project your fullest you.

Reality TV instead encourages “getting real.” On MTV’s progressive, diverse “Real World,” the phrase implied that people in the show were more authentic than characters on scripted TV — or even than real people in your own life, who were socially conditioned to “be polite.” But “getting real” would also resonate with a rising conservative notion: that political correctness kept people from saying what was really on their minds.

Being real is not the same thing as being honest. To be real is to be the most entertaining, provocative form of yourself. It is to say what you want, without caring whether your words are kind or responsible — or true — but only whether you want to say them. It is to foreground the parts of your personality (aggression, cockiness, prejudice) that will focus the red light on you, and unleash them like weapons.

Maybe the best definition of being real came from the former “Apprentice” contestant and White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman in her memoir, “Unhinged.” Mr. Trump, she said, encouraged people in his entourage to “exaggerate the unique part of themselves.” When you’re being real, there is no difference between impulse and strategy, because the “strategy” is to do what feels good.

This is why it misses a key point to ask, as Vanity Fair recently did after Mr. Trump’s assault on Representative Elijah E. Cummings and the city of Baltimore in July, “Is the president a racist, or does he just play one on TV?” In reality TV, if you are a racist — and reality TV has had many racists, like Katie Hopkins, the far-right British “Apprentice” star the president frequently retweets — then you are a racist and you play one on TV.

So if you actually want a glimpse into the mind of Donald J. Trump, don’t look for a White House tell-all or some secret childhood heartbreak. Go to the streaming service Tubi, where his 14 seasons of “The Apprentice” recently became accessible to the public.

You can fast-forward past the team challenges and the stagey visits to Trump-branded properties. They’re useful in their own way, as a picture of how Mr. Burnett buttressed the future president’s Potemkin-zillionaire image. But the unadulterated, 200-proof Donald Trump is found in the boardroom segments, at the end of each episode, in which he “fires” one contestant.

In theory, the boardroom is where the best performers in the week’s challenges are rewarded and the screw-ups punished. In reality, the boardroom is a new game, the real game, a free-for-all in which contestants compete to throw one another under the bus and beg Mr. Trump for mercy.

There is no morality in the boardroom. There is no fair and unfair in the boardroom. There is only the individual, trying to impress Mr. Trump, to flatter Mr. Trump, to commune with his mind and anticipate his whims and fits of pique. Candidates are fired for giving up advantages (stupid), for being too nice to their adversaries (weak), for giving credit to their teammates, for interrupting him. The host’s decisions were often so mercurial, producers have said, that they would have to go back and edit the episodes to impose some appearance of logic on them.

What saves you in the boardroom? Fighting. Boardroom Trump loves to see people fight each other. He perks up at it like a cat hearing a can opener. He loves to watch people scrap for his favor (as they eventually would in his White House). He loves asking contestants to rat out their teammates and watching them squirm with conflict. The unity of the team gives way to disunity, which in the Trumpian worldview is the most productive state of being.

And America loved boardroom Trump — for a while. He delivered his catchphrase in TV cameos and slapped it on a reissue of his 1980s Monopoly knockoff Trump: The Game. (“I’m back and you’re fired!”) But after the first season, the ratings dropped; by season four they were nearly half what they were in season one.

He reacted to his declining numbers by ratcheting up what worked before: becoming a louder, more extreme, more abrasive version of himself. He gets more insulting in the boardroom — “You hang out with losers and you become a loser”— and executes double and quadruple firings.

It’s a pattern that we see as he advances toward his re-election campaign, with an eye not on the Nielsen ratings but on the polls: The only solution for any given problem was a Trumpier Trump.

Did it work for “The Apprentice”? Yes and no. His show hung on to a loyal base through 14 seasons, including the increasingly farcical celebrity version. But it never dominated its competition again, losing out, despite his denials, to the likes of the sitcom “Mike & Molly.”

Donald Trump’s “Apprentice” boardroom closed for business on Feb. 16, 2015, precisely four months before he announced his successful campaign for president. And also, it never closed. It expanded. It broke the fourth wall. We live inside it now.

Now, Mr. Trump re-creates the boardroom’s helter-skelter atmosphere every time he opens his mouth or his Twitter app. In place of the essentially dead White House press briefing, he walks out to the lawn in the morning and reporters gaggle around him like “Apprentice” contestants awaiting the day’s task. He rails and complains and establishes the plot points for that day’s episode: Greenland! Jews! “I am the chosen one!”

Then cable news spends morning to midnight happily masticating the fresh batch of outrages before memory-wiping itself to prepare for tomorrow’s episode. Maybe this sounds like a TV critic’s overextended metaphor, but it’s also the president’s: As The Times has reported, before taking office, he told aides to think of every day as “an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals.”

Mr. Trump has been playing himself instinctually as a character since the 1980s; it’s allowed him to maintain a profile even through bankruptcies and humiliations. But it’s also why, on the rare occasions he’s had to publicly attempt a role contrary to his nature — calling for healing from a script after a mass shooting, for instance — he sounds as stagey and inauthentic as an unrehearsed amateur doing a sitcom cameo.

His character shorthand is “Donald Trump, Fighter Guy Who Wins.” Plop him in front of a camera with an infant orphaned in a mass murder, and he does not have it in his performer’s tool kit to do anything other than smile unnervingly and give a fat thumbs-up.

This is what was lost on commentators who kept hoping wanly that this State of the Union or that tragedy would be the moment he finally became “presidential.” It was lost on journalists who felt obligated to act as though every modulated speech from a teleprompter might, this time, be sincere.

The institution of the office is not changing Donald Trump, because he is already in the sway of another institution. He is governed not by the truisms of past politics but by the imperative of reality TV: never de-escalate and never turn the volume down.

This conveniently echoes the mantra he learned from his early mentor, Roy Cohn: Always attack and never apologize. He serves up one “most shocking episode ever” after another, mining uglier pieces of his core each time: progressing from profanity about Haiti and Africa in private to publicly telling four minority American congresswomen, only one of whom was born outside the United States, to “go back” to the countries they came from.

The taunting. The insults. The dog whistles. The dog bullhorns. The “Lock her up” and “Send her back.” All of it follows reality-TV rules. Every season has to top the last. Every fight is necessary, be it against Ilhan Omar or Debra Messing. Every twist must be more shocking, every conflict more vicious, lest the red light grow bored and wink off. The only difference: Now there’s no Mark Burnett to impose retroactive logic on the chaos, only press secretaries, pundits and Mike Pence.

To ask whether any of this is “instinct” or “strategy” is a parlor game. If you think like a TV camera — if thinking in those reflexive microbursts of adrenaline and testosterone has served you your whole life — then the instinct is the strategy.

And to ask who the “real” Donald Trump is, is to ignore the obvious. You already know who Donald Trump is. All the evidence you need is right there on your screen. He’s half-man, half-TV, with a camera for an eye that is constantly focused on itself. The red light is pulsing, 24/7, and it does not appear to have an off switch.

[ineffably-good]

I Will Follow You Into the Dark (2/10) (Good Omens fic)

Read the whole thing on AO3 - it’s finished!

Summary: In which a snake learns he cannot be a ringbearer, and Aziraphale realizes he can get free cake for months.

Aziraphale was surprised to wake up the next morning after having apparently slept the entire night entangled with Crowley. This was a rarity for him – while he did occasionally indulge in a few hours of sleep, a half night was usually about the most he could pull off. This morning though, he let out a long breath and relaxed back into his partner’s arms. Why not indulge for a while longer?

The demon was so peaceful when he was sleeping – it was the only time Aziraphale ever really saw his face at rest. Usually watching Crowley’s face was a race just to keep up with the lightning-fast thoughts and changes in emotional states; when he slept, though, the lines and angles smoothed out and he looked younger, somehow, and much, much more vulnerable. It made the angel’s heart ache with adoration just to look at him.

“You’re staring at me, angel,” the demon muttered sleepily. “All prickly feeling.”

Aziraphale leaned in and kissed him on one eyebrow, then the other. “Just admiring, my dear,” he said. “Did you sleep well?”

“Mmmhmm,” the demon mumbled, rolling away from him. “Not done yet.”

Aziraphale took pity and abandoned the bedroom, taking a moment to pull on a warm, cable-knit jumper. It was still a little chilly out, and as he padded downstairs he thoughtfully raised the ambient temperature by another ten degrees, hoping that it would maybe keep his companions comfortably awake for the rest of the day. He swung into the kitchen to set up the cappuccino maker, knowing the aroma would soon bring Crowley to his senses, and then headed out to survey the mess of wedding magazines from the previous night.

Frederick was up and moving, so he pulled him out to join him on the floor. Frederick hissed approvingly at being allowed to try out the new den; he burrowed under a magazine that was lying open and upside down, with just his head and tail sticking out of either side of the spine.

“It would nice if we could have you be part of the wedding ceremony, Frederick,” Aziraphale said thoughtfully.

OH SURE, NO PROBLEM. Frederick thought. WHAT’S A WEDDING, ANYWAYS?

“Think you could carry a ring?” Aziraphale asked. He pondered for a minute, and then slipped off his angelic sigil ring for a moment – he certainly wasn’t going to try this with his engagement ring, after all. Moving slowly and carefully, he placed it on the tip of Frederick’s tail, where it snugged down a few inches before coming to rest.

WHAT THE HELL IS THAT? Frederick shrieked, feeling both the cold metal and the touch of some kind of powerful energy on his tail. IS THAT SOME KIND OF COLLAR? I DON’T WEAR COLLARS YOU FLUFFY IDIOT!

Frederick thrashed around, trying to get a good look at his tail, and in the process sent the ring flying across the room, where a series of clinks indicated it landed under the feet of one of the larger bookcases.

“Well so much for that idea,” the angel said frostily, heading over to look for it.

++

Crowley awoke to the smell of brewing coffee, and couldn’t resist -- he made his way slowly down the stairs and out into the main area, where he stopped in surprise at the sight that greeted him. Aziraphale, down on his hands and knees, head on the floor as he squiggled and tried to get an arm under various pieces of furniture. Across the room from him, Frederick was lounging on a pile of magazines. He would swear it looked like the snake was highly amused.

“Well this is a lovely sight,” he commented drolly, and the angel sat up so fast that he knocked a few books over. “What’s all this?”

“Oh, er, hello,” Aziraphale said. “Nothing, just call it a failed experiment. I tried my sigil ring on Frederick to see if he could maybe be a ring bearer and he had a full body convulsion and sent it flying across the room. I can’t quite get to it.”

Crowley pursed his lips and tried not to laugh. The angel had dust bunnies all over his waistcoat and in his hair, and he looked absolutely adorable. “You’re an angel, Aziraphale.”

“Yes, and?”

Crowley shook his head. “And you thought it was a good idea to put your angelic sigil, which holds some of your powers, ON A SNAKE.”

“I did, yes,” the angel said, stubbornly.

The demon sighed and snapped his fingers, and a glint of gold appeared in his hand. “Also,” he said patiently, “you have powers and don’t have to actually get down there and dig around, you know.”

Oh. That was true. Aziraphale walked over and took the ring out of his hand, unable to think of any adequate response.  

“You’re so lucky you have me around, love,” Crowley said, before blowing him a kiss and walking off to get a cup of coffee.

Aziraphale followed him a few minutes later, dust bunnies removed and dignity restored.

They chatted for the next half hour about essentials about the wedding, and managed to set some parameters. They both wanted a small wedding, with just friends and no real wedding party. Budget wasn’t really a concern, as various questionable investments over the last two hundred years had left Crowley with nearly unlimited funds at his disposal, and Aziraphale also had a tidy sum socked away himself. Having some portion of the event outdoors would be lovely, the both agreed. Top priorities were flowers and food.  They’d go simple on the invitations, focus on mostly candid photography from a low key professional, and just make the reception a nice, enjoyable party.

“So, what are my jobs?” Aziraphale said.

“You pick the food. And the cake.” Crowley had obviously already given this some thought. “I’ll head up most everything else.”

Aziraphale looked concerned. “Are you sure? This shouldn’t be a burden on you, Crowley! I want to help.”

“Oh you’re going to help!” Crowley agreed. “But you’re just too easy to please to make some of these decisions. I mean, you’d never know if the flowers were good enough or not, would you? I’m not going to let a sub-par ranunculus mess up our special day. Everything needs to be right.”

Aziraphale stared for a moment. “You will NOT berate our wedding flowers, Crowley, I just won’t have it. I’m not standing up to marry you surrounded by terrified, sobbing plants.”

“Oh please, you exaggerate,” Crowley scoffed.

“I mean it, Crowley,” the angel warned.

“All right, all right. I will be nice to the ones I pick out, promise.”

One battle won, the angel thought.

++

They went out of the next view days to visit a number of sites around town, including libraries and gardens, hotels and schools. Oddly enough, each place they visited found that they did indeed have a prime Saturday in August available for rental, despite usually booking two years in advance. Aziraphale frowned at Crowley over that one and made a mental note to find out later whose bookings he cancelled and restore them, but he put up with it as likely unstoppable at this point.

Each venue was lovely in its own way, but the one that won both their hearts was the Nash conservatory at Kew Gardens. Small and intimate with huge floor to ceiling glass walls on three sides, it offered just the right amount of space for their smaller wedding party and the garden setting felt welcoming and homelike to them both.

They took a few minutes to walk around the grounds before they made a final decision.

“Remember how many dates we spent here?” Crowley said.

“They weren’t all dates,” Aziraphale said. “Most of them were before the apocalypse.”

“They were dates and you know it,” Crowley said. “All of it was dates, really.”

“So we’ve been dating, in your view, for over six thousand years?”

“At least for the last four thousand, yes.”

Aziraphale squeezed his hand. “That’s a lovely thought. You might have told me, though.”

“You just weren’t listening hard enough,” the demon teased.

They had reached the Palm House, always one of their favorites.

“Remember the night we broke in here?” Aziraphale asked. “Had a midnight picnic?”

“Oh sure, you sound all calm about it now, but you were practically hyperventilating about the breaking and entering then,” Crowley reminded him.

Aziraphale waved a hand. “Was not. I just wanted you to feel comfortable, and you like it when I’m a little flustered. Don’t even try to say you don’t.”

Crowley grinned at him. “You’re an idiot.”

“You’re the one marrying me,” he retorted. “Let’s go back and book it, my dear – you’re right, this is perfect!”

Crowley had it booked and paid almost before he had finished the sentence.

++

A few days later they chose a simple invitation at the neighborhood printer and put together the guest list – their friends from Tadfield and their families, Madam Tracy and the Witchfinder, the staff from a handful of local merchants, bakery owners, and restaurants who had become friends, and a few favorite customers. All in all, it was a small set, about forty people, just perfect for the space they were thinking of.

They pointedly did not send invites to anyone from their respective former employers.

“Do you think we need any security, Crowley?” Aziraphale asked worriedly as they walked back to the shop.

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” Aziraphale said carefully. “Do you think Above or Below is going to try to interfere in any way? They wouldn’t be particularly happy to hear about this, I suppose.”

Crowley frowned and thought it over. “I don’t know. We haven’t seen hide nor hair of them since the big capture in the park. Seems like maybe they’ve decided to wash their hands of us entirely.”

“You’re right,” Aziraphale said. “It’s been very quiet.”

“And Adam did set some changes in place to lessen interference from either side,” Crowley added. “But I can talk to Anathema about some warding for the wedding site, just in case. She ought to be able to set up spells or glyphs around the buildings and the grounds to keep any entities other than us from being able to enter the day of the wedding.”

“That’s a good idea, dear,” Aziraphale said. “Let’s do that.”

“Angel,” Crowley said slowly, “Do you have some reason to be worried?”

Aziraphale thought about that brief, odd twinge he felt outside the bookstore the prior week. Had that been anything, or had it just been his imagination? Things had certainly been perfectly calm since.

“No,” he finally said, “I haven’t. Just being cautious. You know me.”

Crowley appeared satisfied with that answer, and let it go. He did place a call to Anathema that night, though, and invited her up the following weekend to talk strategies.

++

The next morning Aziraphale was downstairs making a racket in the kitchen when Crowley woke up, and a quick sniff indicated that it was clearly a waffles morning. Hit with an instant fit of hunger,

Crowley quickly dressed and headed down.

Aziraphale greeted him with a smile, looking a little tired and pale, and immediately plated him an enormous waffle the size of his head. He was sure the angel had fiddled with the waffle iron, somehow, to make it larger, as no one made waffles that big. It was also, oddly enough, heart shaped.

“Isn’t it a little early for this kind of sentimental display?” he teased.

Aziraphale simply made a face at him and added syrup and powdered sugar with a heap of berries to his plate, then plopped down the foamiest, creamiest cappuccino he’d seen in weeks.

“Your breakfast,” he said with a flourish. Then he plated one of similar size for himself and sat down across from him.

Crowley smiled his thanks and took a large sip of his coffee, before leaning back contentedly.

“Now this is the way to live,” he sighed, contemplating whether to start with waffle, berries, or both. “You look tired, by the way. Everything okay?”

“I didn’t sleep very well,” the angel said. “I had a – what are they called? Ill dream? Night torment? Never had one before.”

“Nightmare, angel. You had a nightmare?” Crowley looked at him reproachfully. “Why didn’t you wake me up?”

“Because you were asleep and it was just a silly dream,” the angel said, ever reasonable. “I don’t even remember the details, honestly. Just woke up in a panic with my heart racing. I was able to calm myself down.”

Crowley stabbed his fork into his gigantic waffle and left it there, twanging vertically. He leaned forward with both elbows on the table and fixed the angel with his most serious of serious looks.

“Listen to me, angel,” he said quietly. “You are my fiancé and soon to be husband and if you have a nightmare I don’t want to hear this utter bullshit about letting me sleep. You. Will. Wake. Me. Up. Do you understand me?”

“I really don’t think that’s necessary –”

“I really don’t think you get a say in this one,” Crowley snapped. “The entire point of this is that I get to be here for you when you need me. You’d want me to do the same, wouldn’t you?”

Aziraphale stared at him, transfixed, while a rush of heated love and mild shame roiled through him.  He was right. He was entirely right.

“Yes, I would,” he finally admitted. “I will if it happens again. I promise.”

Satisfied, the demon pried his fork loose and returned to cramming food into his mouth as if the world was coming to an end.

“So,” the angel said after a bit of a pause, eager to get back to more pleasant subjects. “We’ve got the venue and the invitations done. What’s on the wedding agenda for today?”

“Oh, you’ll like today!” Crowley said with a grin. “It’s cake tastings today.”

As expected, the angel’s face lit up like a kid at a birthday party. “You get to go taste cakes?” he asked, almost afraid to believe it. “Like, people give you actual slices of cake just because you’re planning a wedding?”

Crowley laughed. “Yes, angel, they give you cake. As many flavors as you like. As many bakeries as you like. In fact, if you like, you can go taste cakes every day for the next month, as long as you pick different places each time. No one’s going to turn away a well-to-do patron who’s wedding shopping.”

Aziraphale cut his waffle in half and pushed one portion of it aside. “I’d better save some room, then,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. “This sounds like the perfect day!”

++

Crowley sat back and watched as Aziraphale had the time of his life that morning. He was clearly in his element, charming each and every one of the bakers they met with his intense love for fine baked goods and interest in the ingredients. Crowley had made appointments at the four top-rated cake shops in greater London and sped them to each in the Bentley. It was a sign of how much the angel was enjoying himself that he didn’t even comment on their record-breaking speeds.

The angel insisted on trying a little bit of everything. Sponge cake to fruit cake, buttercream and fondants, ganache and fruit gelees, profiteroles and cupcakes, and the ever famous croque en bouche, its tiny cream puffs piled high under hard swoops of caramelized sugar.

The only place the angel drew a hard line was at the idea of the currently trendy ‘naked cake.’

“Cake without frosting?” he gasped. “What on earth is the point of that?”

The proprietor insisted on bringing one out to show them. Aziraphale was polite and tried it, making encouraging comments about the tastiness and moistness of the cake, but as soon as they left the building he was full of criticism.

“Cross that one off the list, Crowley,” he said acerbically. “I can’t trust the judgment of someone who thinks cake laid bare of frosting is a good thing.”

Crowley smiled. “Whatever you say, angel. Just do me a favor and don’t make it cupcakes, either.”

“No cupcakes?”

“Cupcakes are for children.”

“I agree, actually,” Aziraphale said. “You can have cupcakes anytime. You only get to have your own wedding cake once.”

They reached the car and Crowley held the passenger door open for him. “Off to patisserie number four,” he announced grandly, closing the door with a flourish.

++

They were walking down the block to the final cake tasting when Aziraphale stumbled and caught onto Crowley’s arm for support.

“Are you all right?” Crowley asked, peering at him.

“Yes, I think so – I just felt a little dizzy for a moment,” the angel replied. He stopped and took a few deep breaths.

“Do you need water?” Crowley asked. “Want to sit down somewhere?”

The angel let go of his arm and straightened up with a determined smile. “I’m fine, really! It’s just been an exciting day and I got a little overheated in this big coat. Let’s keep walking.”

Crowley frowned and undid a few buttons of the angel’s overcoat, then unwrapped a layer of the lightweight scarf he was wearing so the angel could get some air.

“Better?” he asked, concerned.

“Fit as a fiddle,” Aziraphale assured him, moving on.

++

“Welcome, welcome!” said the proprietor at the final shop. “You are Mr. Crowley and Mr. Fell, I presume?” She handed them each a glass of champagne and ushered them back to the finely appointed tasting room.

“Please tell me a little about what you had in mind for your wedding cake,” the woman said, pulling out a little notepad.

Aziraphale filled her in on the basics – the venue, the number of guests, and what they had liked or not liked so far.

“And you, sir?” she said, turning to Crowley.

Crowley leaned in and smiled. “Just make him happy,” he said. “This man LOVES cake, and I want him to have the best wedding cake he’s ever seen for our big day. Oh, and no cupcakes. And nothing cutesy. Flowers would be nice, possibly.”

Aziraphale laughed a little as his ‘I have no opinions on cake’ fiancé turned out to have rather a lot of opinions after all.

They tried three or four spectacular cake samples there and were just settling in to try a second portion of their current favorite – a chocolate sponge with pomegranate filling and a rich, decadent buttercream, when it happened.

“I think we might have a winner,” Crowley said, turning to Aziraphale with an eyebrow raised.

Aziraphale paused with a forkful halfway to his mouth, and then laid the fork down with a clunk.

“Oh,” he said, placing his hand on the table as if supporting himself. “I don’t feel so well.”

Crowley and the baker looked at him, concerned. “What is it angel?”

“I’m dizzy,” he said, whitening alarmingly. “The whole room is –”

He broke off and made a strange noise deep in his throat.

Crowley grabbed him by the shoulders and tried to get the angel to focus on him. “Angel, what’s happening? Breathe with me,” he said. “Get him some water,” he shouted to the baker, who rushed off to the kitchen.

Aziraphale raised frantic-looking eyes towards the demon and wobbled in his seat. “Oh no,” he said in a panicked tone. “I think – my dear I think I’m –”

Crowley blinked as the angel appeared to become slightly transparent around the edges for a moment. It almost looked like he flickered.

OH FUCK, he thought, as he realized slightly too slowly what was happening  just as the angel managed to get the words out –

“—being summoned!”

“SHIT!” The demon frantically looked around for salt but it was already too late.

There was a flare of light and when his sight cleared, the angel was gone.

[thorongil82]

A Broken Heart Bleeds Tears - Chapter 1 - The Big Announcement

Fandom: Spider-Man, MCU

Chapter: 1/?

Words: 4090/?

Summary: Peter should be happy with his life. He has a great job helping people alongside a smart and wonderful man, Spider-Man is still needed and supported by the majority of Queens and New York, the Avengers are happy to have him part of their group, and his friends and family are all living healthily and happily. He should be happy, right? 

But he's not. Because the love of his life loves someone else. And it feels like it's killing him.

Tag-list: @forasecondtherewedwon @seek-rest

Can also read on AO3 here.

AN: Just a quick thing to say, yes, I’ve seen FFH (went to see it today), but there won’t be any spoilers for it. Not in this chapter, anyway. If there will be within a reasonable time of FFH’s release, then I’ll post a warning beforehand. Hope you all enjoy! 

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

System Check Failure. Receptor Efficiency Levels at 28%

Peter Parker groans as he stares at the interface blinking defiantly in front of him. Another component that didn't want to cooperate with him. So many little pieces of technology that couldn't work together for some inane reason, piling together to cause one big mess that needs fixing in a weeks time. Preferably earlier to get the testing done beforehand. Peter's certain that the man waiting for his prosthetic arm would prefer to have it as soon as possible, with minimal glitches, if any, circulating through the system. There's so many problems that comes with helping people – if anyone would know, it would be Spider-Man.

Why can't doing right by people be easy? Maybe to make sure people who think they're doing the right thing when they're causing the opposite can't harm too many innocents.

Peter runs his hands over his face, drawing large circles that squeeze and push his sweaty skin out before it snaps back into place, as he stares intently at the screen of the laptop in front of him. Maybe staring long and hard enough will get it to work. It hasn't been his experience so far, but you never know. With a hiss he throws his hands up to aimlessly reach for the rafters as he stretches out his arms and back, the cushioned chair beneath him creaking as it arches back, before they drop back down to brush lightly through the soft brown curls of his hair. Still the system failure blinks back at him, unfazed at the intensity of his stare.

Pity, he'd been working hard on becoming more intimidating. Many a remark has been said about how he couldn't frighten anyone if he wanted to. Clearly, they haven't witnessed him walking on the ceiling without the mask concealing his identity. Though, criminals didn't seem scared of him either. Sure, they were afraid of the prospect of being caught, but of Spider-Man himself? Not so much. And this system was proving to be in agreement with the majority. Six hours of working, fuming, contemplating and attempts at glaring resulted in receptors that weren't responding to begin with still not responding. If only he was more like one of the women most prominent in his life. He was sure that Pepper, Aunt May or Michelle could easily glare this stupid program into submission. Hell, most of the Avengers team could too, though he doubted Shuri would even need to.

Maybe it's just a female thing. Or he finds them more intimidating because he's a man. Maybe both – they'd all have a field day torturing him if they found out he only thought they were intimidating because of gender stereotypes and identities. They'd never let him hear the end of it.

“Why are you such a pain?” Peter mutters to the laptop as he presses a few keys, pulling out from the system for the receptors responding to the nerve signals of the patient and running a full diagnostic check.

Seeing the assessments start up, he gets out of his chair and double-checks that the cables are secure as they snake from the laptop to the jet-black and graphite-grey metallic arm dangling lifelessly off to the side. If all goes well, it could potentially function better than the real one that it was replacing. Peter reminded himself to talk to Shuri about how she managed to get Bucky's arm to work so well. He had asked Bucky, but the White Wolf couldn't explain how any of the arms made for him had worked, only that it was second nature like any other limb. Maybe the next time they talked …

“How're the receptors coming along, Pete?” asked a raspy male voice from behind the pile-up of dressers and parts in front of Peter. Walking around the cluttered shelving is an elderly balding gentlemen with a tuft of greying hair wrapped around the side and back of his head, a pair of thin spectacles over his eyes, draped in a long white lab coat identical to the one covering Peter's clothing, save that it says Dr Otto Octavius across the right side of his chest, whereas Peter's has his own name.

“They're more frustrating than they were when I left them last night,” Peter answers, shooting a side-glance off at the screen.

“Why? What's the matter?”

“There's still complications in transferring messages,” Peter explains as Dr Octavius walks over and has a look at the running diagnostic check.

“Uh-huh.”

“Also, the response time is still way too slow, and that sudden energy drop still seems to be an issue.”

“Well, that's not good,” Otto murmurs, standing up straight and placing a hand on his chin. “How did the movements look when I sent the signals through?”

“They seemed to move fine, though I think some of the joints aren't fitted quite right,” Peter answers as he moves closer to the limb. “Parts seemed to be grinding together throughout some of the flexes.”

“Yes, I did hear that screeching,” Otto replies as he moves next to Peter. “Whereabouts do you think the rubbing parts are?”

“Along by the elbow joint,” Peter says, pointing at the hinge, “along with some in the wrist. I'm not sure if that means some pieces have loosened, or if they were too big to begin with.”

“Well, at least it's a hardware issue,” Otto remarks. “That'll be easier to deal with than the software.”

“It just feels like we're running out of time,” Peter admits with a sigh, leaning up against the bench and crossing his arms over his chest.

“We've still got time,” Otto replies with a warm smile, moving back over to the laptop. “This is just progress. Sometimes it's not as fast as we would like, but nothing that's ever worth doing will be done quickly. What was the efficiency levels on the receptors?”

“28 percent.”

“See, that's better than it was yesterday,” Otto grins. “Going from 12 percent efficiency to 28 is progress. And pretty significant at that.”

“It's still not good enough,” Peter glumly admits, wandering over as a loud beep sounds out from the laptop indicating that the complete diagnostic check has finished.

“Nothing ever will be,” Otto points out as he leans down to read the report. “There's always going to be a bigger problem that our solution can't fix. But that doesn't make what we do and the people we help any less important. Take a look at this.”

Peter leans down beside Otto and begins looking over the information.

“Everything's responding better than yesterday,” Otto summarises. “Energy levels, range of movement, stability, reception.”

Peter takes a slight glance at the older scientist and catches him looking back at him before he continues, “Here; able to operate at 54 percent capacity, efficiency at 63 percent. Everything's progressing fine.”

“There's still some system failures,” Peter points out, taking in the flashing orange and red errors that have also popped up. “Still some critical that'll disable the entire network.”

“Perhaps, but there's still less than what there was before.”

“Don't worry about it, Peter,” Otto says as he claps a hand down on the younger scientist's back. “The receptors were always going to be the most complicated part. And the energy drop. Once they're solved, everything else will fall into place. Don't worry about it.”

Peter looks over and gives his mentor a tight lipped smile before looking back at the screen.

“Look, if it makes you feel better, copy the receptor program down and work on it over the weekend,” Otto sighs, his comforting hand rising away from Peter's shoulder. “Just make sure you do get some sleep. A good night's sleep can work wonders. You might even find that you've been staring at the solution all this time.”

“That'll be more annoying than anything it that does happen,” Peter says as he reaches into his backpack that had been lying beneath the bench where he was sitting, rummaging through and pulling out a hard drive. “But thank you, Otto.”

“Don't mention it, Pete,” Otto chuckles, walking over to the mechanical arm.

Peter plugs in the hard drive and starts the process of the program downloading before he gets a buzz in his pocket. Pulling his phone free from the pocket, he looks down to see a bright notification flashing back up at him – a message sent from Aunt May.

                                                                         Reminder that dinner is in 30 mins

Peter slowly smirks as he unlocks the device and quickly shoots back a response.

So ordering Thai in 15?

“Plans for the evening?” Otto inquires, his voice filled with a warm, humoured tone.

“Yes, for once, but not like that,” Peter clarifies. “May's invited some friends round for dinner.”

“Ah, well, it's better than spending it alone,” Otto admits, turning his attention back to the mechanical limb, gently prodding and moving the fingers to test the joints.

Peter had mentioned details of his personal life to Otto many times during their projects, simply making conversation to pass the time as they worked on their experimental projects, both funded or otherwise. Otto knew that Peter had moved out from May's, though he still sometimes stayed over – though not always for the reasons he gives. Otto knew that Peter lived in an apartment with his best friend Ned Leeds, who occasionally helped them out with coding and programming if they couldn't quite grasp it. Otto knew that Ned had been spending more and more time away with Betty, his beautiful girlfriend, which was more than okay – it was their lives to live and who would Peter be to keep them from being happy. But even then, coming home to an increasingly empty apartment was lonely, especially after some of the things he'd have to see as Queen's favourite neighbourhood superhero. Not everything comes down to giving directions to lost tourists and old ladies, or rescuing cats stuck up trees. Otto knew of the times, few and far between, that Peter had been set up for a date, blind or otherwise, by his concerned friends. And Otto knew that those few setups and occasional one night stands after a night out remained short term were because Peter didn't feel a connection. They had been kind, and funny, and attractive, and sweet, but the young Parker didn't feel a connection. Otto and his friends knew there was no spark, because young Peter Parker couldn't stop picturing and comparing them to someone else.

The one he could never get over. The one that he could never get.

                                                                                                           Hopefully not

The phone in Peter's hand buzzes off again – another message from his aunt, just as the program finishes downloading onto his drive. When he goes to reach for it to unplug it, his phone vibrates again.

                                                                                     It does look edible this time                                                                                                         And no burning

Not always a good sign

Peter quickly shoots off the response with a grim smirk, remembering the many times his aunt's attempted cooking ventures had failed spectacularly, the Parker boy returning home after a late decathlon session or a patrolling swing-about as the man in red-and-blue to find smoke billowing out of whichever door or window was opened. Miraculously, the apartment never burned down – how, Peter could never figure out. There was no formula for how May could constantly mess up a recipe, regardless of if it was inspiration or from a recipe book – it was always difficult to distinguish between the two – nor for how the apartment managed to survive each and every disaster. It even fended off the charred cereal fire of 2024, and the inexplicably boiled whipped cream incident the year later, when nary a lit flame could be found in either scenario. Maybe there was something more to his survival skills than he thought.

                                                                                                                       Hey!!!                                                                    I do manage to cook some things right

I know

Peter disconnects the drive and places it in the backpack before the short break between the messages is broken by May's response.

                                                                                     The menus are on standby

Peter chuckles to himself and shakes his head, pocketing his phone before turning to his mentor. “Do you need a hand cleaning up?”

“No, no, you go on ahead,” Otto answers, shaking his head with a smile. “I wouldn't want you to keep May waiting.”

“Are you sure? Because I don't mind helping clean-”

“Peter,” Otto says sternly, the way Peter's realised only someone who's dealt with children a significant part of their lives before can do. There's always a slight warmth to it that means they don't mean the tone, but you shouldn't push your luck else disaster strikes your youthful life. May always had such a knack for tapping into it more than enough times for the Parker boy to know that trouble was abound, even before gaining his wondrous spider-sense.

“You could probably come along as well,” Peter squeaks out, “I-If you want?”

“I wouldn't want to intrude,” Otto declines, his hands raised up and shaking the idea away. “Not uninvited, anyway. You just worry about getting there on time.”

“Okay. Thank you, Otto.”

“Don't mention it, Pete,” Otto says as he brings his assistant and protégé in for a quick hug before letting him break away to grab his backpack and sling it over his shoulder. “Give my best to May, won't you?”

“I will.”

---                                                                                                                            

“Peter!” May exclaims as she opens the door right on his third knock and embracing him in a tight hug.

“I haven't been gone that long,” Peter chuckles, deliberately tightening the constriction in his voice to humour the vice grip her embrace would have been were he not an all powerful superhero. “How did cooking dinner go?”

“The Thai been picked up,” hollers Ned's voice from further within, causing May to send a soft glare over her shoulder.

“It wasn't that bad,” she stresses, letting go of her nephew and allowing him to enter the apartment. “But we figured it was probably better to order takeaway. Just in case.”

“Sticking to what you know?”

“Precisely,” May grins, walking into the kitchen and allowing Peter to take a breath.

Instantly, he grimaces and pulls his head down, the coarse scent of ash, burnt meatloaf and vegetables seared to charcoal wafting over and bristling his nostrils. Admittedly, not the worst smell he's come across in this apartment, but still pretty bad in terms of cooking ability. There was definitely a reason why he took a cooking unit back in high school.

“I'm sorry I'm late,” Peter coughs up, the dry air choking his throat. “Otto sends his regards.”

“He's a sweet man,” May says, scrubbing away the blackened remains out of her pan with a metal scour. “You could have invited him.”

“I did offer. He said he didn't want to intrude.”

“Well, he'll just have to come around next time. Sit down, sit down. I'll go grab the dishes. Ned, can you unpack the containers?”

“Sure thing, May,” Ned answers from the dining table, standing up from beside Betty as she untangles her arms from around him and pulling out the many containers from their bags, setting them side by side in the middle of the table.

“Aw, my Neddy-Bear's such a gentleman,” Betty coos from her chair, her arms folding over on top of her backrest before leaning her head onto her limbs, sending a bright wide smile towards her partner.

“If you had told me, I could have grabbed the food on the way-”

“Oh, nonsense, sweetie,” May says, hurrying over and pressing a kiss to Peter's cheek while ruffling his messy brown curls. “Guests shouldn't have to pick up food.”

“But I'm family.”

“You're still a guest when you're not staying here,” May points out, before ducking into the kitchen

“At least you didn't burn the place down,” Peter calls after her, chuckling softly to himself.

“Yeah, right, Parker. Like none of us know about your chemistry exploits,” drawls a voice behind him that silences his laugh in an instant, matching neither the one that emanated from Ned nor Betty beforehand. A voice that pulls on one of the many coils threaded tightly through his chest, wrapped tightly around his heart and squeezing it like a vice. The voice lathered in honey and laced in silk that drags upon his beating centre, wrenching it down into the unbounded dark pit within himself. The voice that both fuels the hope and fire in his heart, yet also tortures him in the eternal night with sharp pains and throbbing aches.

“Or would you prefer accidents?”

“W-What?” he stammers as he slowly moves through the apartment, circling round the happy couple snuggling by the dining table. “W-What accidents?”

“You know, spontaneous combustion, suddenly exploding drawers when there shouldn't be anything inside even remotely volatile,” continues the agonisingly beautiful voice from the couch. “Like when we're just taking a theory lesson, for example.”

Finally, as his feet haul the rest of his being round the dining table and the long end of the couch in the adjoined living room, his eyes confirm what his ears had suspected, not that he can completely trust them after so many false leads and wishful thoughts tricking his heightened senses. For lying down on some mass across his Aunt's couch, head buried inside a book as thick as a wizard's tome – hardcover, as to make sure not even the most ignorant fool would ever dare try to attack her, long brown curls elegantly cascading down like the spray erupting over a waterfall, is one Michelle Jones. Very close friend, former decathlon captain, eerily observant person capable of discerning any secret that you would dare to try and hide from her, and, ultimately, a thief.

Yes, Michelle Jones is guilty of theft, and of destruction of property, but not even his alter-ego can catch her. For Spider-Man cannot catch someone who has taken something so intangible, regardless of the pain it leaves. Nor punish them for breaking something they do not know they have broken, let alone prove that the damage is done.

“I-I don't know what you're talking about ...” he lies, hoping that the look on his face didn't give away the truth, both of the fib and the other secrets he's held inside.

“Of course not, just like how you conveniently forgot when we had decathlon practice,” she jabs, her eyes not darting off of the pages laid out in front of her, yet by the slight drawl in her tone and the prickly pinch crawling along his skin, Peter was fairly certain that she saw right through his immediate fabrication. “Time and time again.”

“Come on, the man's always got a lot on his plate. He's allowed to forget some things,” interjects a smooth masculine voice from beneath MJ's form, alerting Peter to his presence. Tanned, strong arms are wrapped around her waist, while his legs lay tangled together with Michelle's. His head peers out from behind her mane of hair, his own short brown curls slicked back with gel. “I'm sure you've forgotten things before when you're busy.”

“Nope,” she answers bluntly, turning her head away from her book to look at him. “Must be a guy thing.”

“Of all people who could make a stereotype ...” he chuckles as he trails off, smiling a bright smile showcasing his pearl white teeth. One of his arms leaves her waist and travels to her face, gently brushing away her hair.

“Harry? You're back?” Peter inquires.

“In the flesh,” he replies, shuffling out from underneath MJ and stepping up to Peter, grabbing his hand for a shake before pulling him in for a bro-hug, both patting each other's backs. “Flew in a couple of hours ago.”

“How was France?”

“Pretty good. Would have been better with you guys but, hey, that's the downside of business.”

Harry Osborn, close friend to the lot of them, carefree, relaxed, charming, heir to his father's many ventures and darling in the eyes of the media. In all fairness, Peter did really like the guy. He wasn't Ned, but he was a great friend to have. He was always looking out for his friends, cared about other people's problems, and could have a good laugh with anyone. And, if he tended to say something that wasn't quite right, he would generally realise it very quickly – though it does help having Michelle as a friend to keep that ingrained. Overall, they got along really well. There was just one thing that irked Peter about him …

“I'll just have to take you guys with me next time,” Harry continues as they pull apart before sauntering back to his formerly shared place on the couch that was now fully occupied by MJ, having returned to her book. “You mind moving over, babe?”

“I thought you hated pet names?” Peter directs towards Michelle.

“I do. He knows that.”

“Maybe, princess, but I'll get you to break eventually,” he smiles.

When she doesn't move, he shrugs and goes to sit on her long legs, flopping down on them and prodding and poking them with his fingers till she eventually squirms them out from under him, drawing them close to her body.

“Get off,” she huffs, a strand of hair falling across her face.

“Come on, MJ,” he persists, leaning over and resting his head on her raised knees. He reaches a hand out and gently pushes down on the binding on the book, dragging it down. Undeterred, she continues to read, her eyes tracing the lines and words quickly. That is, until he reaches his other hand out and cups her chin, slowly raising it up and getting her to look to him. “Hey there.”

“I hate you.”

“I know,” he smirks, before pecking her lips with his own, Peter turning away just before it happens.

There are some harrowing things he can endure, but some things even his mighty Spider-heart just can't take.

“Gross,” she mutters when Harry pulls away, yielding his hands away from her book and letting her continue reading. Her stoic expression seems to remain intact, though Peter does notice the corner of her lips have curled up and, had he been as close as he yearns to, he would have seen a slight tinge to her usual colour tone.

“Come on, dinner time!” May calls out from the table, followed by a metallic clutter as the cutlery rattles along the surface. “Wash up and get over here.”

With everyone cleaned up and sitting at the table, they start to dish up their food. All bar Peter, patiently waiting for the others to get their share. At least, that would be his excuse if he was asked. His heightened metabolism does need a lot of food, but he's not about to take all the food from everyone. In reality, he was just captivated watching Michelle, taking in everything about her that he could and engraving it all into his mind. Her laugh, her smile, her quirks and ticks. Everything. And desperately hoping that he wasn't being obvious.

He had wondered if her being taken just made him want her more; the temptation of the forbidden fruit. He wondered if being in love with MJ made him a bad friend to both her and Harry, partners that seemed quite happy with each other and have been since their last year in high school. As much as he loved Michelle, being jealous of Harry and wanting to be beside her instead of him, he just couldn't do anything that would hurt them both. They were some of the best friends he'd ever had. He didn't want to throw that away in a petty move.

“Peter, you going to eat?” May asks, her voice cutting through his lost wondering and shaking him from his reverie.

“Huh?” he squeaks, suddenly noticing all the eyes on him. “O-Oh, uh, yeah.”

He reaches forward and pulls the container of larb closer while the heads turn towards Michelle and Harry.

“So, MJ, you said before that you wanted to tell us something?” May asks.

“R-Right. Uh ...” Michelle falters nervously, shuffling a little closer to Harry. He leans in and whispers something into her ear, whatever it is making her giggle softly before looking towards everyone. “So, Harry and I ...”

From underneath the table they lift their held hands up and lay it down on the surface, with hers on top. But all Peter could find himself looking at was the sparkling diamond sticking out from the shiny golden band on her ring finger.

“We're getting married.”

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

AN: As a quick heads up, the next chapter will involve some Endgame spoilers. If it’s up quickly, then I’ll post a warning at the start of the chapter. 

Please feel free to let me know what you think; constructive criticism, thoughts, anything. And feel free to just hit me up for a chat if you want. I’ll try to get the next chapter up as quickly as I can. Until then, adios!

[bountyofbeads]

The Real Donald Trump Is a Character on TV https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/06/opinion/sunday/trump-reality-tv.html

Great analysis by James Poniewozik🤔 To understand the wacky, outrageous, demented mind of Trump is to know that Trump is nothing more than a self-grandized TV character (D-rated).

"To ask whether any of this is “instinct” or “strategy” is a parlor game. If you think like a TV camera — if thinking in those reflexive microbursts of adrenaline and testosterone has served you your whole life — then the instinct is the strategy."

"And to ask who the “real” Donald Trump is, is to ignore the obvious. You already know who Donald Trump is. All the evidence you need is right there on your screen. He’s half-man, half-TV, with a camera for an eye that is constantly focused on itself. The red light is pulsing, 24/7, and it does not appear to have an off switch."

The Real Donald Trump Is a Character on TV

Understand that, and you’ll understand what he’s doing in the White House.

By James Poniewozik | Published September 6, 2019 | New York Times | Posted September 8, 2019 9:00 AM ET |

Mr. Poniewozik is the chief television critic of The Times and the author of “Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television and the Fracturing of America.”

On Sept. 1, with a Category 5 hurricane off the Atlantic coast, an angry wind was issuing from the direction of President Trump’s Twitter account. The apparent emergency: Debra Messing, the co-star of “Will & Grace,” had tweeted that “the public has a right to know” who is attending a Beverly Hills fund-raiser for Mr. Trump’s re-election.

“I have not forgotten that when it was announced that I was going to do The Apprentice, and when it then became a big hit, Helping NBC’s failed lineup greatly, @DebraMessing came up to me at an Upfront & profusely thanked me, even calling me ‘Sir,’ ” wrote the 45th president of the United States.

It was a classic Trumpian ragetweet: aggrieved over a minor slight, possibly prompted by a Fox News segment, unverifiable — he has a long history of questionable tales involving someone calling him “Sir” — and nostalgic for his primetime-TV heyday. (By Thursday he was lashing Ms. Messing again, as Hurricane Dorian was lashing the Carolinas.)

This sort of outburst, almost three years into his presidency, has kept people puzzling over who the “real” Mr. Trump is and how he actually thinks. Should we take him, to quote the famous precept of Trumpology, literally or seriously? Are his attacks impulsive tantrums or strategic distractions from his other woes? Is he playing 3-D chess or Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots?

This is a futile effort. Try to understand Donald Trump as a person with psychology and strategy and motivation, and you will inevitably spiral into confusion and covfefe. The key is to remember that Donald Trump is not a person. He’s a TV character.

I mean, O.K., there is an actual person named Donald John Trump, with a human body and a childhood and formative experiences that theoretically a biographer or therapist might usefully delve into someday. (We can only speculate about the latter; Mr. Trump has boasted on Twitter of never having seen a psychiatrist, preferring the therapeutic effects of “hit[ting] ‘sleazebags’ back.”)

But that Donald Trump is of limited significance to America and the world. The “Donald Trump” who got elected president, who has strutted and fretted across the small screen since the 1980s, is a decades-long media performance. To understand him, you need to approach him less like a psychologist and more like a TV critic.

He was born in 1946, at the same time that American broadcast TV was being born. He grew up with it. His father, Fred, had one of the first color TV sets in Jamaica Estates. In “The Art of the Deal” Donald Trump recalls his mother, Mary Anne, spending a day in front of the tube, enraptured by the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953. (“For Christ’s sake, Mary,” he remembers his father saying, “Enough is enough, turn it off. They’re all a bunch of con artists.”)

TV was his soul mate. It was like him. It was packed with the razzle-dazzle and action and violence that captivated him. He dreamed of going to Hollywood, then he shelved those dreams in favor of his father’s business and vowed, according to the book “TrumpNation” by Timothy O’Brien, to “put show business into real estate.”

As TV evolved from the homogeneous three-network mass medium of the mid-20th century to the polarized zillion-channel era of cable-news fisticuffs and reality shocker-tainment, he evolved with it. In the 1980s, he built a media profile as an insouciant, high-living apex predator. In 1990, he described his yacht and gilded buildings to Playboy as “Props for the show … The show is ‘Trump’ and it is sold-out performances everywhere.”

He syndicated that show to Oprah, Letterman, NBC, WrestleMania and Fox News. Everything he achieved, he achieved by using TV as a magnifying glass, to make himself appear bigger than he was.

He was able to do this because he thought like a TV camera. He knew what TV wanted, what stimulated its nerve endings. In his campaign rallies, he would tell The Washington Post, he knew just what to say “to keep the red light on”: that is, the light on a TV camera that showed that it was running, that you mattered. Bomb the [redacted] out of them! I’d like to punch him in the face! The red light radiated its approval. Cable news aired the rallies start to finish. For all practical purposes, he and the camera shared the same brain.

Even when he adopted social media, he used it like TV. First, he used it like a celebrity, to broadcast himself, his first tweet in 2009 promoting a “Late Show With David Letterman” appearance. Then he used it like an instigator, tweeting his birther conspiracies before he would talk about them on Fox News, road-testing his call for a border wall during the cable-news fueled Ebola and border panics of the 2014 midterms.

When he was a candidate, and especially when he was president, his tweets programmed TV and were amplified by it. On CNBC, a “BREAKING NEWS: TRUMP TWEET” graphic would spin out onscreen as soon as the words left his thumbs. He would watch Fox News, or Lou Dobbs, or CNN or “Morning Joe” or “Saturday Night Live” (“I don’t watch”), and get mad, and tweet. Then the tweets would become TV, and he would watch it, and tweet again.

If you want to understand what President Trump will do in any situation, then, it’s more helpful to ask: What would TV do? What does TV want?

It wants conflict. It wants excitement. If there is something that can blow up, it should blow up. It wants a fight. It wants more. It is always eating and never full.

Some presidential figure-outers, trying to understand the celebrity president through a template that they were already familiar with, have compared him with Ronald Reagan: a “master showman” cannily playing a “role.”

The comparison is understandable, but it’s wrong. Presidents Reagan and Trump were both entertainers who applied their acts to politics. But there’s a crucial difference between what “playing a character” means in the movies and what it means on reality TV.

Ronald Reagan was an actor. Actors need to believe deeply in the authenticity and interiority of people besides themselves — so deeply that they can subordinate their personalities to “people” who are merely lines on a script. Acting, Reagan told his biographer Lou Cannon, had taught him “to understand the feelings and motivations of others.”

Being a reality star, on the other hand, as Donald Trump was on “The Apprentice,” is also a kind of performance, but one that’s antithetical to movie acting. Playing a character on reality TV means being yourself, but bigger and louder.

Reality TV, writ broadly, goes back to Allen Funt’s “Candid Camera,” the PBS documentary “An American Family,” and MTV’s “The Real World.” But the first mass-market reality TV star was Richard Hatch, the winner of the first season of “Survivor” — produced by Mark Burnett, the eventual impresario of “The Apprentice”— in the summer of 2000.

Mr. Hatch won that first season in much the way that Mr. Trump would run his 2016 campaign. He realized that the only rules were that there were no rules. He lied and backstabbed and took advantage of loopholes, and he argued — with a telegenic brashness — that this made him smart. This was a crooked game in a crooked world, he argued to a final jury of players he’d betrayed and deceived. But, hey: At least he was open about it!

While shooting that first season, the show’s crew was rooting for Rudy Boesch, a 72-year-old former Navy SEAL and model of hard work and fair play. “The only outcome nobody wanted was Richard Hatch winning,” the host, Jeff Probst, would say later. It “would be a disaster.” After all, decades of TV cop shows had taught executives the iron rule that the viewers needed the good guy to win.

But they didn’t. “Survivor” was addictively entertaining, and audiences loved-to-hate the wryly devious Richard the way they did Tony Soprano and, before him, J.R. Ewing. More than 50 million people watched the first-season finale, and “Survivor” has been on the air nearly two decades.

From Richard Hatch, we got a steady stream of Real Housewives, Kardashians, nasty judges, dating-show contestants who “didn’t come here to make friends” and, of course, Donald Trump.

Reality TV has often gotten a raw deal from critics. (Full disclosure: I still watch “Survivor.”) Its audiences, often dismissed as dupes, are just as capable of watching with a critical eye as the fans of prestige cable dramas. But when you apply its mind-set — the law of the TV jungle — to public life, things get ugly.

In reality TV — at least competition reality shows like “The Apprentice” — you do not attempt to understand other people, except as obstacles or objects. To try to imagine what it is like to be a person other than yourself (what, in ordinary, off-camera life, we call “empathy”) is a liability. It’s a distraction that you have to tune out in order to project your fullest you.

Reality TV instead encourages “getting real.” On MTV’s progressive, diverse “Real World,” the phrase implied that people in the show were more authentic than characters on scripted TV — or even than real people in your own life, who were socially conditioned to “be polite.” But “getting real” would also resonate with a rising conservative notion: that political correctness kept people from saying what was really on their minds.

Being real is not the same thing as being honest. To be real is to be the most entertaining, provocative form of yourself. It is to say what you want, without caring whether your words are kind or responsible — or true — but only whether you want to say them. It is to foreground the parts of your personality (aggression, cockiness, prejudice) that will focus the red light on you, and unleash them like weapons.

Maybe the best definition of being real came from the former “Apprentice” contestant and White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman in her memoir, “Unhinged.” Mr. Trump, she said, encouraged people in his entourage to “exaggerate the unique part of themselves.” When you’re being real, there is no difference between impulse and strategy, because the “strategy” is to do what feels good.

This is why it misses a key point to ask, as Vanity Fair recently did after Mr. Trump’s assault on Representative Elijah E. Cummings and the city of Baltimore in July, “Is the president a racist, or does he just play one on TV?” In reality TV, if you are a racist — and reality TV has had many racists, like Katie Hopkins, the far-right British “Apprentice” star the president frequently retweets — then you are a racist and you play one on TV.

So if you actually want a glimpse into the mind of Donald J. Trump, don’t look for a White House tell-all or some secret childhood heartbreak. Go to the streaming service Tubi, where his 14 seasons of “The Apprentice” recently became accessible to the public.

You can fast-forward past the team challenges and the stagey visits to Trump-branded properties. They’re useful in their own way, as a picture of how Mr. Burnett buttressed the future president’s Potemkin-zillionaire image. But the unadulterated, 200-proof Donald Trump is found in the boardroom segments, at the end of each episode, in which he “fires” one contestant.

In theory, the boardroom is where the best performers in the week’s challenges are rewarded and the screw-ups punished. In reality, the boardroom is a new game, the real game, a free-for-all in which contestants compete to throw one another under the bus and beg Mr. Trump for mercy.

There is no morality in the boardroom. There is no fair and unfair in the boardroom. There is only the individual, trying to impress Mr. Trump, to flatter Mr. Trump, to commune with his mind and anticipate his whims and fits of pique. Candidates are fired for giving up advantages (stupid), for being too nice to their adversaries (weak), for giving credit to their teammates, for interrupting him. The host’s decisions were often so mercurial, producers have said, that they would have to go back and edit the episodes to impose some appearance of logic on them.

What saves you in the boardroom? Fighting. Boardroom Trump loves to see people fight each other. He perks up at it like a cat hearing a can opener. He loves to watch people scrap for his favor (as they eventually would in his White House). He loves asking contestants to rat out their teammates and watching them squirm with conflict. The unity of the team gives way to disunity, which in the Trumpian worldview is the most productive state of being.

And America loved boardroom Trump — for a while. He delivered his catchphrase in TV cameos and slapped it on a reissue of his 1980s Monopoly knockoff Trump: The Game. (“I’m back and you’re fired!”) But after the first season, the ratings dropped; by season four they were nearly half what they were in season one.

He reacted to his declining numbers by ratcheting up what worked before: becoming a louder, more extreme, more abrasive version of himself. He gets more insulting in the boardroom — “You hang out with losers and you become a loser”— and executes double and quadruple firings.

It’s a pattern that we see as he advances toward his re-election campaign, with an eye not on the Nielsen ratings but on the polls: The only solution for any given problem was a Trumpier Trump.

Did it work for “The Apprentice”? Yes and no. His show hung on to a loyal base through 14 seasons, including the increasingly farcical celebrity version. But it never dominated its competition again, losing out, despite his denials, to the likes of the sitcom “Mike & Molly.”

Donald Trump’s “Apprentice” boardroom closed for business on Feb. 16, 2015, precisely four months before he announced his successful campaign for president. And also, it never closed. It expanded. It broke the fourth wall. We live inside it now.

Now, Mr. Trump re-creates the boardroom’s helter-skelter atmosphere every time he opens his mouth or his Twitter app. In place of the essentially dead White House press briefing, he walks out to the lawn in the morning and reporters gaggle around him like “Apprentice” contestants awaiting the day’s task. He rails and complains and establishes the plot points for that day’s episode: Greenland! Jews! “I am the chosen one!”

Then cable news spends morning to midnight happily masticating the fresh batch of outrages before memory-wiping itself to prepare for tomorrow’s episode. Maybe this sounds like a TV critic’s overextended metaphor, but it’s also the president’s: As The Times has reported, before taking office, he told aides to think of every day as “an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals.”

Mr. Trump has been playing himself instinctually as a character since the 1980s; it’s allowed him to maintain a profile even through bankruptcies and humiliations. But it’s also why, on the rare occasions he’s had to publicly attempt a role contrary to his nature — calling for healing from a script after a mass shooting, for instance — he sounds as stagey and inauthentic as an unrehearsed amateur doing a sitcom cameo.

His character shorthand is “Donald Trump, Fighter Guy Who Wins.” Plop him in front of a camera with an infant orphaned in a mass murder, and he does not have it in his performer’s tool kit to do anything other than smile unnervingly and give a fat thumbs-up.

This is what was lost on commentators who kept hoping wanly that this State of the Union or that tragedy would be the moment he finally became “presidential.” It was lost on journalists who felt obligated to act as though every modulated speech from a teleprompter might, this time, be sincere.

The institution of the office is not changing Donald Trump, because he is already in the sway of another institution. He is governed not by the truisms of past politics but by the imperative of reality TV: Never de-escalate and never turn the volume down.

This conveniently echoes the mantra he learned from his early mentor, Roy Cohn: Always attack and never apologize. He serves up one “most shocking episode ever” after another, mining uglier pieces of his core each time: progressing from profanity about Haiti and Africa in private to publicly telling four minority American congresswomen, only one of whom was born outside the United States, to “go back” to the countries they came from.

The taunting. The insults. The dog whistles. The dog bullhorns. The “Lock her up” and “Send her back.” All of it follows reality-TV rules. Every season has to top the last. Every fight is necessary, be it against Ilhan Omar or Debra Messing. Every twist must be more shocking, every conflict more vicious, lest the red light grow bored and wink off. The only difference: Now there’s no Mark Burnett to impose retroactive logic on the chaos, only press secretaries, pundits and Mike Pence.

To ask whether any of this is “instinct” or “strategy” is a parlor game. If you think like a TV camera — if thinking in those reflexive microbursts of adrenaline and testosterone has served you your whole life — then the instinct is the strategy.

And to ask who the “real” Donald Trump is, is to ignore the obvious. You already know who Donald Trump is. All the evidence you need is right there on your screen. He’s half-man, half-TV, with a camera for an eye that is constantly focused on itself. The red light is pulsing, 24/7, and it does not appear to have an off switch.

[claraoswald81]

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[thejilyship]

Wishing you all a good evening

AN: Part 1 of who knows how many. I’m guessing that it will have four or five parts, but also, those are famous last words because I’m terrible at making things short. I’ve accomplished it once, but only once. We’ll see. 

WC: 6.3K

PART ONE | PART TWO | PART THREE | PART FOUR | PART FIVE | PART SIX | PART SEVEN | ff.net

UCL News didn’t have any particular ring to it. It didn’t garner a lot of attention and actually seemed to have the ability to make signs, newspapers or t-shirts invisible.

Lily Evans had been working in the UCL news department since she was a freshman, and three years later, she was one of the lead anchors on the cable access news program that ran from six to seven three evenings a week. She had first joined because her friend Mary had decided at the time that she really wanted to be a news anchor. But then Mary decided that maybe she wanted to be a zoologist and got a job at the local zoo, and Lily had already made friends and decided to stay. Working for the show awarded her credits. And she got paid. It was less than minimum wage, but still something.

When she’d first started school she hadn’t a clue what it was that she wanted to do. She was just sticking her toes in the water and peeking around and trying a little of everything. Now that she was a junior, she had long since declared a major. Digital Media seemed to be the smart choice given her utter fascination with the production of the show.

Over the last three years, she’d found that she very much enjoyed being in front of and behind the camera. She liked directing the cuts, she liked piecing together the stories and the clips that they added when they did more in-depth stories, she liked working on the writing, the editing; all of it really. And working for the station was a very low risk way to get experience. She heard from one of the professors who worked in the department that there were only about twelve people who regularly watched their news program. And Lily could guess which twelve professors remembered to tune in every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

“And that’s been the news,” Her co-host said with a brilliantly dazzling smile.

“We do have one more announcement to make however,” Lily said with a practiced lilt to her voice. Mary made fun of what she called Lily’s ‘television voice.’ But Lily knew that everyone who had ever been put in front of a camera screen in this news room had a different way of talking than when they were off screen.

“Yes, this is actually going to be my last broadcast,” His name was Michael and Lily had never really liked him, though she could appreciate that he had a certain presence about him. And that’s why he’d been picked up by a public news station that reached more than twelve people. “Starting Monday morning, you can find me working as a junior anchor over at Good Morning London.” She could hear how proud of himself he was, and she tried to remember that people were allowed to be proud of themselves, that he should be proud. He hadn’t even graduated yet and he was a junior anchor on a highly rated show.

“We’ll miss you around here, Michael.”

“Of course you will,” He said, which wasn’t what they had scripted, but Lily kept smiling. “I’m the best thing about this show.” Lily’s brows shot up a bit and then Michael laughed. “Only joking, it’s been a pleasure.”

“Thank you,” She said a bit more tersely. “Wishing you all a good evening, I’m Lily Evans.”

“And I’m Michael Diggory.” And then the red light went off and Lily pushed herself away from the desk.

“There was no need to be a dick, Diggory.”

“What does it matter, only twelve people saw it.” He rolled his eyes and started walking away. Lily wasn’t the only one that knew their show didn’t have a wide audience of course. It was a running joke among most of the members of the crew. But even if there were less than twenty people (out of the thirty thousand that to school at UCL) Lily still wanted to make sure that it went over perfectly. Or as close to perfectly as she could get it.

She pulled her hair up into a loose plait and started towards her ‘dressing room’ of sorts. It was actually just a closest that had all the jackets and blazers that the people who were going on air wore, but when she’d become an anchor and started staying later most nights to work on different pieces for the show, the space had just sort of become hers. Not officially of course, but Michael had always found it annoying that she had a designated space and he didn’t. He picked his backpack up off the couch that was behind the camera and left without saying much to anyone.

Lily sat down at her desk and pulled out a notebook, making a few notes that she could remember from the show, and then headed towards the breakroom to get a coffee before she sat down with Marlene McKinnon and Emmett Dackery to re-watch the show. It was Friday, and most people were going out, but that’s what Saturdays were for in her mind. Friday nights were spent working on and perfecting their show.

“It was a great run,” Marlene said, pulling her glasses down from her almost insanely bushy hair and pushing them up the bridge of her nose. “Apart from Michael being terrible that is.”

“I could probably catch up with him before he reaches his car and give his new viewers something to look at for Monday.” Emmett offered, though it was all in jest. Emmett was well over six feet tall, with a very large stature, but the only time he ever hurt anyone was when he was playing rugby.

“Oh please do it,” Marlene sighed, “I can’t stand him and his pompous attitude. He drives me nuts.”

“He’s a ponce.” Lily agreed, albite with a bit more vulgarity. “But he’s gone now.”

“He is gone now. Which means that we’re going to have to go through our last round of auditions on Sunday.”

“You couldn’t allow me a moment of reprieve?” Lily asked, sighing as she thought about the audition process to come.

“There is no reprieve when we only have one anchor.” Marlene pointed out.

“He was supposed to be here next week.” Lily muttered, pushing open a door at the end of the corridor that they’d been walking down and taking a seat in front of the computer. Their station wasn’t all that well funded, but they made due with what they had rather splendidly. Two cameras, one new computer, three older ones, a greenscreen (that had once been a world map, but Lily and Marlene had painted over it) and a few other odds and ends.

“I know, but now this was his last show and we’re going to have to find his replacement sooner.” Marlene ran a hand through her hair and then pulled up a wheelie chair next to Lily. Emmett did the same and the three of them proceeded to watch through their show, make notes of ways to improve and talk about their potential new anchor for their Monday show.

“You could just do it on your own until we find someone who fits.” Emmett suggested.

Lily shook her head, “I don’t think Professor Flitwick would like that. The point of the show is to give people an opportunity to try and if we waited for perfection he might intervene.” Normally their professor who was in charge of the students who ran the station was a hands-off kind of guy and Lily liked it that way. “Though you know, you could always be my co-anchor.” She grinned, leaning closer to him and giving him her best ‘oh-please-would-you’ smile.

Emmett shook his head and laughed. “You know that I can only be here during Friday and Monday’s shows. You need someone who can be here for all three shows.” Lily sighed and looked over at Marlene, though she’d be beating a dead horse if she asked again.

“Don’t look at me.” Marlene said in leu of answering the unasked question and Lily sighed.

“Alright, so you two are useless and I have no co-host.”

“There are people coming in on Sunday.”

“I know I know, but that’s the day before the first show we do in a post-Michael world.” She sighed, running a hand through her hair and pulling out her ponytail, only to put it back up again.  “And I’d like a bit more time to prepare-“ Just then there was a loud cheering that came from the main room down the hall.

“You think they put on the football game?” Marlene asked Emmett, since Lily had no interest in any of the school sports. Though she could be caught at a Rugby game supporting Emmett.

“They usually do.” He nodded, leaning back in his chair to try and hear what was going on.

“Five more minutes of footage and then I’ll release you.” Lily assured him with a smile.

“Five more minutes. You can have ten if you’d like.” He smirked, and Lily shook her head.

“Just five will do,” She jotted down another note, her page now entirely full of things to go over on their Sunday meeting. “I really am dreading Sunday.”

“I know,” Marlene said. “But I’ll bring you one of those donuts you like from that café by the river-“

“And I’ll be here.” Emmett winked, causing both girls to chuckled. He was a nice bloke, always flirting and causing a laugh.

“Well with donuts and Emmett, I should be able to get through anything.” Lily nodded, ex-ing out of the program now that they’d finished watching everything except Michael being a dick. Lily didn’t need to see that again.

“POTTER! POTTER! POTTER!” Came a cheer from down the hall and Emmett jumped to his feet.

“I love you both, but I have to go and see what’s happening.” He raced off and Lily and Marlene waved him off.

“You know, I think we should revamp the website.” Lily mused, adding another note to her paper.

“You suggest doing that at least once a month.”

“Well I don’t much like it.” She shrugged. “We’ll get it there though.” She grinned. “Do you have plans for tonight?” Marlene nodded.

“I do actually. Benjy and Bertram invited me to go to this ‘Art in the Dark’ thing over in Hyde Park. Apparently, everyone’s going to get high and draw with chalk all over the pavement.” She shrugged.

Lily laughed and nodded, “Sounds like something Mary would be into.”

“How is she anyway, I haven’t seen her in a while.”

“She’s good,” Lily shrugged. “Busy. She’s pre-med now. I think this one will stick.”

“Oh.” Marlene put a hand over her heart. “Our little flower child is growing up.”

“You’re the flower child, Mary is more the wild child.”

“And what does that make you?” Marlene asked, standing up and reaching for her bag that she’d ditched in the corner of the room before the show started.

Lily pursed her lips and shrugged one of her shoulders. “I am and always have been the mum friend.” She said. “Don’t forget to drink water after you get drunk tonight and text me when you get home.”

Marlene chuckled and leaned over to kiss Lily’s cheek. “Will do love. You’re not just going home are you? Because you can come with me if you want.”

“Oh no, I have plans.”

“Library plans?” She asked, raising a brow.

“No, actual plans.” Lily said, though she remained vague since she didn’t actually have plans. Marlene accepted that Lily was not going to tell her whatever her plans are and left with a smile and promised to see her on Sunday. Lily took her time packing up, making sure that everything is in its proper place or turned off before locking up the ‘production room’ and heading back to the main stage. They used an old projector to watch the game on the wall where the green screen normally was. Every Friday they watched the games, and every Friday, Lily left before they were over.

She used to like football. It had been something she’d played as a kid and in secondary school and she’d gone to too many games to count with her dad. But then he died, and she lost interest.

She waved to a few people on her way out and then started towards the train station. She didn’t have a car, and didn’t care to have one. She didn’t think there was much use of a car while living in London. Especially as a student, when the furthest place she would have to go on a daily basis was normally within walking distance of her flat.

She felt her phone buzz in her pocket as she reached the train station. She pulled it out and saw that she had four texts from Mary.

Mary: Don’t hate me.

Mary: Our fish is dead.

Mary: Also, we’re out of milk.

Mary: Also, I invited a few people over to watch the game.

There was about an hour in between the last three. Lily was a notoriously terrible texter. She couldn’t even blame it on the fact that she’d just been doing a show, because she could have been doing anything and the thought to check her phone just wouldn’t have dawned on her. Her phone was mainly used to call her mum and to make sure her drunk friends made it home alright.

Lily re-read Mary’s texts as she sat down on the train and narrowed her brow.

Lily: We don’t have a fish??

Lily: Also you’re lactose intolerant??

Mary: Okay well I found a dead fish in our flat. And my girlfriend is not and drank it all because she’s a twat

Lily: Well that raises some questions. And You really do know how to pick ‘em

Mary: Are you sure we didn’t have a fish? And you can’t be mean. At least I’m trying.

Lily: Positive. Ask your girlfriend about it.

Lily: I can be mean. It’s what I do best.

She put her phone back in her pocket and looked around the train. There weren’t many people on. Lily figured they had all already made it to where they wanted to go by now. All the students were at the game, or at a pub watching the game, or at someone’s flat watching the game. Or if you were friends with Marlene, you were getting high in a park to do chalk art. Lily hoped that Mary had invited some people that Lily knew.

oOoOoOo

Lily found herself crammed onto her sofa between Emmeline Vance (Mary’s twat girlfriend who actually wasn’t a twat, but a very nice girl who Lily actually liked quite a bit) and Dorcas Meadows. Hestia Jones was there, and Gwenog as well.  Lily was glad that Mary hadn’t been lying when she’d said that she’d invited a ‘few’ people over. She’d said that before and Lily had walked into a full-blown party. And they didn’t have room for that. But this was nice. She liked these girls.

“Jesus that boy is fit.” Hestia rested her chin on her palm and sighed longingly.

“Are you staring at Potter’s arse again?” Gwen asked, giving her cousin a look. “Because we’re going to see him tomorrow and I’ll tell him that you’re at it again.”

“Oh, come off it. You know he’s fit.” Hestia and Gwen both played football for the girl’s league. Apparently on Saturdays the boys and girls practiced together.

“Okay I won’t tell James, I’ll tell your boyfriend.” Gwen threatened.

Hestia sat up straight and leaned over to push Gwen off the couch. The older girl fell onto the floor and Lily laughed into her drink. “My boyfriend knows that James is fit. Everyone in the bloody school knows he’s fit.” She said indignantly, pushing herself to her feet.

“He’s not that fit.” Lily shrugged, and suddenly all eyes were on her. She sighed and pushed her way off the couch. “Okay he’s fit but he’s not as fit as everyone makes him out to be. Like there are bloke who are better looking. But everyone just ogles him, and it doesn’t make sense.”

“Being good at football makes you better looking than you already are,” Emmeline said, as though that explained it all.

“I understand that some of you feel that way, but I think being a nice bloke, not having your head up your arse and being able to hold an actual conversation about something other than football makes you more attractive.”

“You had one conversation with the boy two years ago.” Mary sighed, “You have to stop bringing it up.”

“He was sloshed.” Dorcas chimed in.

“And none of you are friends with him- with the exception of Gwen,” She said before the girl could protest. “So you can’t tell me that he’s not as conceited as his twitter feed would lead one to believe.”

Emmeline shrugged, “I always read his tweets as though he’s trying to be funny. When he writes, ‘Who’s the greatest center forward of all time?’ he’s just being cute. Not conceited.”

Lily pursed her lips and shook her head. “He tweeted out yesterday ‘Aren’t you all so lucky to have me?’ How did that not make you throw up a little in your mouth?”

“Okay that’s not really cute,” Emmeline laughed, “But we are lucky to have him.”

“All I’m saying is that a little humility would go a long way.”

They couldn’t really argue with that, but Mary did anyway. “You’re just pissed because Michael was a little bitch on air today.”

“You saw that?” Lily sighed, forgetting about James and all ready to go off about Michael, which they let her, until the commercials ended, and the game came back on. Mary motioned her over to the kitchen and leaned up against the counter.

“You alright?” She asked.

“Yeah, I’m just going to be stressed out this weekend. I should be completely fine or infinitely worse come Monday night.” She grinned and Mary reached out and pinched her cheek.

“You really like, Em?” She asked, looking over at the couch and biting on the tip of her thumb, a nervous habit of hers. “Because what you said over text-“

“Mary, I was just giving you a hard time.” Lily interrupted. “She’s great. Even if she drank all the milk. It’s probably for the best since I never finish a carton and we end up with spoiled milk.” She smiled. “She’s a nice girl and she seems to like you.”

“She does seem to like me,” Mary smirked. “And I think I really like her too.”

“Good.” Lily laughed. “Now did you really find a dead fish in our flat?”

oOoOoOo

They went out after the game, which Lily had been expecting. They all got ready- Lily lent some clothes to a couple of the girls and Mary did almost everyone’s makeup after insisting that she knew what she was doing since she’d been watching nothing but makeup tutorials on YouTube for the past week.

“I’m thinking of making my own channel.” She said, though she’d already had three beers by this point, and as a rather small girl, three beers was enough for her to properly buzzed and boarding tipsy, so no one took her seriously, but since they were buzzed as well, they were enthusiastic about the idea.

When they finally made it to a pub, Lily was surprised to see that it was packed. This was their usual place, and while it could get busy, this was a bit much. Even for a Friday night. After the game, everyone usually went to a pub closer to campus. This pub was out by their flat, and yet it was packed with college age kids, and many of them looked as though they were coming from the game, wearing face paint or jerseys.

They got some drinks, miraculously found a table and then headed out to the dancefloor. Mary and Em were the first to disappear and then Hestia’s boyfriend materialized. Gwen found someone to dance with and then Dorcas excused herself to use the restroom. Lily stumbled back to her table, feeling almost relaxed now that she’d have quite a bit to drink. Her mind always seemed to be buzzing and it was rather hard to get it to quite down, but a night out helped.

“Is this seat taken?” She looked over, already rolling her eyes at the tired line.

“Yes, all the seats around this table that have jackets and purses on them are in fact, taken. Shocking, isn’t it.” She asked, raising her brow. But then she looked at the bloke who had spoken and her brows shot up even further.

“Coats and purses are inanimate. I don’t think they’ll be bothered if I get off my feet for a few. After all, I have been pretty busy all night.” James Potter smirked at her as he took Mary’s empty seat. He had a beer in his hand, his hair was all mused from the events of the night and he wore a smile that made it seem as though he and Lily were friends. Which they weren’t. Lily was more than a little surprised to see him sitting there. She’d had a few classes with him over the years and knew that he had a way of making himself at home wherever he was, but they hadn’t spoken to one another in two years. And even then it had only been one conversation- and a short one. That had gone very poorly.

“They won’t mind, but I might.” She said, shifting in her seat.

“But you might not,” He said, still smiling at her. He reached up and pulled at the collar of his shirt, the fabric sticking, parts of it grass stained.

“You didn’t think to shower before coming out?” She asked, most likely because she was on her third drink of the night and it was clear that he hadn’t decided to take a shower between winning the football game and coming out with his mates. Or alone. She didn’t see anyone that seemed to be waiting for him to come back. Though at least his presence at the pub explained why there were so many people there. He must have told a bunch of people were he was headed after the game.

“I thought about it, but then decided that it’d be a waste of water. No one has ever left a pub thinking that they didn’t need to shower. Then there’s the fact that I look rather sharp in my uniform.” He grinned, leaning a bit closer and Lily could smell the alcohol on his breath mixed with the smell of sweat. It was a common smell for someone in a pub to have, but she still leaned back. “Beside, people like to get pictures of me in my jersey.”

She narrowed. “Alright, so then why did you decide to sit down here?” She asked. They were surrounded by people who would love to be graced with his presence, but Lily was not among them.

He met her gaze and held it for a moment before turning his head and looking around the bar. “You really don’t like me, do you? You know, I think you might just be the only person on campus.” Lily snorted. “Alright, not the only person. But one of the only girls.” He said, looking back at her again.

“It’s not that I don’t like you,” Lily said, because she didn’t dislike him, she didn’t really know him. She knew that she couldn’t judge a person on one drunk conversation that was held years ago. And while he was a bit arrogant online… well, a lot of people acted one way online and a different way in real life. “I just don’t think that being able to kick a ball around a field should award you special privileges. I’m not going to act like we’re friends just because I’ve heard your name a million times. I’m treating you as though you were any other annoying bloke who decided that they can sit on my friends’ coats for the sake of chatting me up.”

“Oh, so that’s it, is it. You can’t play football.” He smirked, nudging his elbow against hers and completely ignoring the latter half of what she’d said.

Lily pulled her arm off the table and shook her head. “I can play fairly well actually, that has nothing to do with anything.” She sighed. He narrowed his eyes at her and then took another swig of his beer.

“Saying you play fairly well to someone who plays-“

“At a collegiate level. Which most people do. My dad played football in college.”

“Saying you play fairly well to someone who plays as well as I do,” He repeated himself, adding emphasis where he deemed appropriate. “Is often taken as a challenge. Is this where I invite you to the field and see if you can score on me?”

She looked at him, catching the way his lilt changed when he said ‘score.’ “No.”

“You wanna dance?” He asked completely unperturbed. Lily laughed, shaking her head.

“I’m good, I’m just waiting for my friend to come back from the loo.” But as she said that, she saw that Dorcas had found someone else to dance with on her way back to the table. That didn’t mean that Lily wanted to dance with James though.

“Are you sure? I’m a great dancer,” He grinned, taking another drink of his beer.

“I’m sure. I’m getting the feeling that you think you’re great at everything.” Again, he didn’t seem to notice what she was saying.

“I think people would like it if we dance.” He said and that piqued Lily’s curiosity.

“What? Why would other people care if I danced with you?”

He shrugged. “You’ve got quite a presence on campus. A very different presence than my own, but you have almost as many twitter followers as I do.” Lily shook her head.

“I run the twitter for the school news station.” She said shrugging. It was different, though she knew that being connected with the news station wasn’t the reason that she had so many followers. But what else was she going to say? That everyone knew her because of all the different classes she took? Because of all the different clubs and activities, she’d taken a part of over the years?

“You use your own handle though.” She could tell that he wasn’t buying it. She wondered if he followed her. She would have noticed that though, right?

“Well that’s because no one pays any attention when you preface a message with UCL News. I wanted people to listen so-“

“It’s funny. That’s what I was getting at.” He grinned. “You’re funny.”

“On twitter.”

“Not in real life?”

“No I mean, you came up to me to ask me to dance because you’re impressed by my twitter? Everyone is funny on twitter.” She laughed.

“I didn’t ask you to dance because of your twitter.”

“Well then why did you ask me to dance?” She asked, though she wished she hadn’t almost immediately. When you asked a boy that you didn’t want to dance with that question, you never got an answer that you knew what to do with.

“Because you’re fit and I want to dance with you.” He shrugged. “Have you changed your mind yet?”

“No,” She said, though she could feel herself becoming less annoyed and more amused by the minute. “You know, you’re a bit ridiculous.”

“I’ve been called worse,” He shrugged, still smirking at her. Lily laughed again, not at all surprised by that. “See, I make you laugh! The least you could do is dance with me.”

Lily pressed her lips together and shook her head. “I’m almost drunk first of all,” She said, holding up a finger, “So I’ll laugh at anything. And secondly,” Another finger. “The least I could do is not dance with you. It’s continue to talk to you even though you came over her and took my friends seat and started talking to me without invitation.”

He opened his mouth and then closed it a few times before bringing his drink up to his lips and Lily looked away feeling triumphant. “Just how bad of an impression did I leave on you?” He asked, looking over at her and bringing up the first time they’d interacted for the first time since he’d sat down. Lily was surprised that he even remembered it in the first place. “I mean Remus said that I was a right prat that night, and I believe him, but I figured you might not remember.”

“Who’s Remus? Because he has the right of things.” Lily said, taking another sip of her drink.

“He usually does. He actually works for the school newspaper.” He said, “You work with the newspaper, right?”

Lily shrugged, “If we’re doing a big piece we collaborate sometimes.” She nodded. “But I don’t normally- I mean I’ve not personally been in that part of the building.”

He nodded, “Well he told me that coming over here was a bad idea.” She looked over at him.

“Then why did you do it anyway?”

“Sirius said he was wrong,” He shrugged and then made a face and shook his head. “Well he said that you wouldn’t remember that I’d made an arse of myself last time. Though he agreed that I’d made an arse of myself last time. And then suggested that if I came over here, I’d make an arse of myself again. I took it as a challenge, but maybe I should have taken it as a warning.”

Lily didn’t know who Remus or Sirius were, but they both sounded like they had good heads on their shoulders. “Why do you remember talking to me two years ago?” She asked. “I remember it because everyone is always talking about you and to be quite honest, I’ve not had too many run-ins with blokes who’ve talked to me like that.”

“Well that’s good,” He chuckled, rubbing his hand at the back of his neck. “I don’t know what I was going for, but I guess saying I’m drunk isn’t exactly an excuse. I’m sorry.” He said, looking her in the eye again. She pursed her lips and finished her drink. “I don’t normally talk to people like that.”

“Well thank you for apologizing,” She said, not sure what else she should say on the matter. “Did Gwen say something to you?” She asked, not sure what had spurred this. “Is that why you’re here?”

“You know Gwen?” He asked, brightening up a bit now that he was no longer trying to look contrite for his apology.

“Obviously, since I just ask you if she talked to you.” She said, wishing that she hadn’t finished her drink already. James noticed her fiddling with an empty glass and jumped to his feet.

“I’ll get you another drink,” He said, looking even more lit up now that he’d set a task for himself.

“You don’t need to-“ But he was already on his way to the bar and Lily closed her eyes for a moment, taking a deep breath. She wasn’t sure what was going on. Why was James Potter sitting next to her at a pub after one of his games? Why was he apologizing to her and buying her drinks and asking her to dance with him? None of this made much sense.

He came back with a new drink for both of them and Lily thanked him, still feeling a bit off kilter. She looked around, waiting to see one of her friends giving her some sort of single to let her know that they were behind this.

“So, do you like working at the station?” He asked, re-taking Mary’s seat for himself, this time angling himself more toward Lily, who was still sitting facing forward.

“Yes, I do like it.”

“It must be fun to get to be on the telly every other night.” He grinned.

“I enjoy it.” She nodded, looking over at him and trying to gauge what was going through her mind. It wasn’t uncommon for blokes to try and chat her up, but he seemed a bit more persistent than usual. And it wasn’t as though he didn’t have other options. Other options who wouldn’t be giving him clipped short responses because they couldn’t figure out why he hadn’t left yet.

“Do you- I mean I know that you’re an anchor, but do you help with the writing of the show too? Or is that a different job?”

It was public knowledge that she was an anchor, as she did have quite a few people following her on twitter, and she posted clips of the broadcast quite frequently. Even if only twelve people watched, she was still proud of the work that her team did. “I do a bit of everything.” She said, “I’m majoring in digital media and so I like to try my hand at all the different parts.”

“I really liked the story you all did about the- oh what was it- top ten places to nap in the library. I know it was just a fun little piece, but it was funny,” He laughed. “And I totally agree with you about the best place to get coffee on campus. Definitely Hoppers.”

She sat up straighter and looked at him with narrowed eyes. “You- You watch the show?” She asked, not sure exactly what it was she was feeling in that moment. Confusion seemed to be a theme of this conversation.

“Oh yeah,” He nodded. “I’m a student at UCL aren’t I? Why wouldn’t I watch it?”

It was Lily’s turn to gap for a moment and then she shook her head. “No one watches it.” She said. “Well twelve people watch it actually, but that’s basically no one and you’re telling me that you watch the show.”

“Twelve people?” He raised his brow, surprised to hear that. “That doesn’t seem right.”

“We get a couple hundred views on the clips I post to our website, but only twelve people watch the actual broadcast.” She repeated. “Only twelve people sit down and watch the entire broadcast and you’re telling me that you’re one of them?”

He shifted in his chair now. “Well I don’t catch every episode. It’s the Friday one’s that I normally miss since were right before our game- but it’s always on in the locker room.”

“Is it the only channel that you get?” She was aghast.

He laughed and shook his head, “No, it’s just what we have on. You have a good show-“

“I know that it’s a good show.” She said, putting her hands up. “My surprise isn’t because I think that we don’t have a good show. We all do a great job with editing and writing and I’m even impressed with the lighting most nights. But no one watches. Working for UCL News is to get experience and learn how everything works more than anything else. Michael used a few reels for his resume, but- You really watch?”

“I’m quite glad that Michael is done.” James sighed, ignoring her repeated question as he’d already answered it. “The two of you were always professional, but he was so stiff half the time and he never delivered the lines right when the two of you were trying to have a bit of repartee on air.” Lily couldn’t say anything to that. She agreed of course, he was right, but she couldn’t say anything because she was still flabbergasted that James Potter of all people, watched the show.

“Who’s going to be on now that he’s gone?” He asked.

Lily shrugged, clearing her throat so she could speak. “I’m not sure yet. He was supposed to be here through the end of the upcoming week, but decided to have tonight be his last show and now we’re without a second anchor. We’re holding auditions on Sunday but it’s all rather last minute.” She said.

“Sunday.” He nodded. “Well whoever you get has to be more fun than Michael, right? I mean what was it that he said right as you were signing off? He was the best part of the show? That’s a load of shite.”

“I thought you said you don’t watch on Friday.”

“I also said that it was on in the locker room.” He shrugged.

“You did say that.” Lily nodded, now chewing on her lip.

“So you view it as practice then? You want to be an anchor?”

“Yeah, sure.” She shrugged, not really wanting to talk about her future plans with her.

“You think I could be on one night?” He asked and Lily chuckled.

“I told you, only twelve people watch the show.” She said. “If you’re on the show, only eleven people would watch.”

“You said that it was good practice though.” He argued. “And I need some practice time on air. If I plan to keep playing football then I’ll eventually be interviewed, and I’d rather my first time not be in front of the entire nation or something like that.”

Lily took a drink from the drink that he’d brought her and shrugged. “I don’t see why not.” She said. “We’ve had student athletes on before. They were usually in one of the digital media classes or journalism classes, but still.”

“That’s awesome. Thanks, Lily.” He said, grinning at her again. She gave him a tight-lipped smile in return. “So, you want to dance now?” He asked, and Lily rolled her eyes.

“I think I’m still good.” She said, pushing herself away from the table. “I’ve got to go and check on my friends.”

“Alright,” He got up from the table as well. “I’ll see you on Sunday.”

She didn’t catch that, or she would have turned around to correct him.

[pintando-paredes]

Mural at infant school in Brazil - crowdfunding campaign

Original campaign: https://chuffed.org/project/infant-school-mural-brazil

‘One year on’ update

Hello from S��o Luiz do Paraitinga in Brazil!

We are now one year on from finishing the mural project and I wanted to take this opportunity to provide an update and account of the project as this is something that has been lacking for a long time.

First of all I would like to start with an apology for this lack of any formal update during the progress of the project - this was due to the involved nature of the project once the painting stage got going and then the pandemic beginning right as we were finishing the project! As I’m sure as many families have been experiencing during this difficult time it has been hard to balance time between working, family and homeschooling. With these time pressures it has taken much longer than I would’ve liked to provide this update, although I continued to update the project via Instagram https://www.instagram.com/pintando_paredes/ hopefully this more in-depth update is worth the wait!

I will provide a quick summary of the timeline of the project picking up from the last update, along with photos before explaining the finished mural!

Sixth month - November 2019

Through November after our winter break in Brazil we continued to paint the wave pattern in preparation for allowing the children to participate for the first time. Much of this was done by myself and a few dedicated volunteers from the school as it was a quite intricate and laborious part of the design. All this base work, whilst time intensive, was necessary to lay the foundations for the greater community involvement in the next stages of the process.

We were also able to start work on the additional section of wall after the building work had been completed to raise the height of it and protect it from the rain, which was important to ensure the longevity of the mural painting.

Seventh month - December 2019

With all the triangles of wave patterns completed by the beginning of December we were able to start on the most exciting stage of the project and get the children from the infant school involved in the painting! The children, aged between three and six, used sponge fish we prepared to help bring the ‘river’ part of the mural to life. Every single child, around 180 in total, participated in the painting and put their own personal mark on the mural. The school day in Brazil is split into a morning admittance and an afternoon admittance (and in some areas even an evening admittance) - owing to the number of children outweighing the number of schools and teachers and therefore capacity - so with the help of the teachers we set up a timetable so that every class, morning and afternoon, would have their chance to paint. The children were really enthusiastic and it was lovely to see the months of work come to fruition in this moment. The best part was seeing them point out their fish to their parents and relatives when they were being picked up walking back past the mural.

With the fish painted and the summer/Christmas school holidays beginning in Brazil we began the next stage of the project - drawing the animal designs onto the wall! This was done using a digital projector to project the design onto the wall at the correct size and then tracing it with crayon on a very rough surface. This was a bit of a logistical challenge as by using this method it could only be completed at night utilising various extension cables, tables and chairs as well as plenty of snacks to keep the energy levels up through the evening. This work was done on several nights over Christmas including New Year's Eve! There are 18 animals in the mural design with each one taking an hour or two to draw, depending on the complexity and including the time to set everything up. So as with the rest of the project it was quite a drawn out and time intense process but also definitely one of the most satisfying parts of the project, seeing the full design come to life on the wall!

During the Christmas period we also began preparing the paint and mixing the colours, starting on Boxing Day. Although it might seem like quite a simple and straight forward part of the process it was one of the most time intensive parts of the process to create the number of colours we needed. Our colour chart plan started with 55 colours for the 18 different animals, although adjustments were made along the way.

Colours were grouped where possible but equally we wanted each animal to have it’s own feel with their own specific colours. The ‘Brazilian snake-necked turtle’ (Cágado-da-serra) is made up of six different shades of brown, which are different from the four shades of brown of the ‘Nine-banded armadillo’ (tatu-galinha), which are different from the four shades of brown of the ‘Capybara’ (Capivara), hence the large numbers of colours!

We made the colours using a mixture of bought masonry paint colours and pigment dyes - these are commonly used in Brazil as an economic alternative to buying ready mixed colours and were really useful in achieving the exact colours we were after.

Saturday 28th December 2019 - Balaio das Artes São Luiz do Paraitinga - Arts Festival

Much of this work over Christmas was in preparation for the Balaio das Artes festival at the end of December - this is an arts festival which takes place on one day across the town and includes various performances, workshops, talks and participatory activities. We were very grateful that the project was included as part of the festival program and it really made a big difference in allowing us to accomplish our goal of it being a truly community participatory mural by opening it up to as many people to be a part of as possible.

As such this was the day we chose to begin painting the animals! It was a very hot day but we were really pleased with the amount of people who came by to join in the painting - parents, teachers, friends, family and many members of the community came to take part and leave their mark on the mural.

The project was always planned with the aim of being a participatory community project and therefore the actual design of the mural reflected this so that everyone, even the young children of the infant school, could take part. The animals were all made up of simple geometric shapes with flat colours so that once drawn on the wall it is simply a case of ‘painting-by-numbers’. With all the colours mixed and the animals drawn it was easy for anybody with any confidence level of painting to take part, it was just a case of following the colour plan and mural design. This is an approach that I always take with my mural projects, the community participation aspect and its lasting impact is as important, if not more so, than the actual art of the mural.

The day was really successful and we made great progress on the first day of painting the animals. It was really gratifying to see the final stage of the mural being initiated and have so many people take part so enthusiastically.

Eighth month - January 2020

A wonderful benefit of being part of the arts festival was that we had reached more people from beyond the school community who wanted to keep coming back to help. This was at an excellent time as well as January in Brazil is usually when lots of people have their annual leave as it is the middle of summer and ties in with the school holidays. So for the first couple of weeks of January we could count on the help of this core group of people to the extent that we were able to organise another community painting day that we advertised in the town, similar to that of the festival. With the participation of so many we made great progress painting the animals through January, so much so that by the end of the month the majority had been finished! The last animals to be completed were those on the newest section of wall, as this was always a couple of stages behind the rest of the work, it was made much quicker though by using the projector to draw both the animals and the wave pattern at the same time and therefore speeding the process up.

We were lucky with the weather as well because even though it was Brazilian summer time this also means humid days and thunderstorms but there were very few occasions where this impacted on our ability to paint.

Ninth and last month! - February 2020

With pretty much all of the elements of the mural painted and finished we spent the beginning of February putting some finishing touches to the mural. As the project had been going nine months in total there were some parts which needed tidying up or cleaning to leave everything finished to the same standard.

After this we organised a protective resin coating to be applied to the mural to preserve the mural and ensure its durability against the weather - this was bought with funds from the school and applied by a specialist with the correct equipment.

The final parts of the wall which were missing their rain protection were also repaired. This means that all of the wall space is now covered by a small covering on top of the wall. This small but important addition means that dirt gathered on top of the wall does not run down its surface when it rains (which can be seen in an example photo in the previous update) and thus helps to guarantee the paint and colours will remain in good condition for much longer.

We had planned to organise a small commemorative plaque to inaugurate the mural officially with the town’s Mayor but unfortunately due to an upcoming election and ‘political sensitivity’ within the small town community it was decided that this would not be possible.

Two elements of the design that we were unable to finish are the ‘Thanks’ wall and painting the large metal entrance doors that break up the mural wall.

The painted doors were part of the original design but as they require different paint we left them to be painted separately at the end of the project timeline. We also began preparing an end section of wall for what would become the ‘Thanks’ wall with the names of everybody who had donated to the project and helped to make it a reality.

Unfortunately it was during this time in March that the pandemic was arriving in Brazil so whilst we were organising these last two parts of the project to be implemented the schools were shut and we began our isolation at home. The schools in the town, like most of Brazil, have not reopened during the whole year since, and as a family we have been contending with the same issues as many other people; self isolating, homeschooling and balancing time with freelance work from home to make ends meet. As such we haven’t returned to work on the mural and I’m sorry to say that I haven’t been able to honor the promise made in the crowdfunding campaign and show my appreciation for your donations by painting the ‘Thanks’ wall as this and the metal doors remain uncompleted.

But please know that I am eternally grateful to everybody who donated and believed in the project. I was blown away by the support of so many friends and family and I hope this update and photos go some way to repaying that support and belief!

Finished!

Owning to the pandemic the project ended abruptly but almost entirely complete, with two unfortunate exceptions. Aside from this it was so pleasing to see the mural in its finished state and slightly surreal in a way that such a big project and something that we had been working on for so long and had put so much work into had come to an end, albeit differently to how we imagined!

More pleasing still was the fact that we had been able to involve so many people in the process, all from different connections in the town and not solely with the school. One of our main aims and philosophies of the project is that the community participation element would be as important as the ‘finished product’ and I am really happy that we were able to realise this in practice. I was particularly pleased that all of the children from the infant school were able to participate, including my eldest son Rudá! We have received so much positive feedback from the local community and it’s really nice to have contributed so positively with your help to the school and the lives of the children who attend.

Thank you

I would particularly like to thank Gisele Claro, the director of the infant school for the opportunity to work on this project and for her patience and constant help and support which was invaluable to realising the mural. It would not have been possible without her great enthusiasm for the project.

Many people took part in the painting of the mural, as it was a community focused project it would be impossible to mention everyone but I would particularly like to thank Wellington Ismail, for his dedication and input at the beginning, and Darly Gonçalves and Márcia Cândido who included the project in the Balaio das Artes festival and who personally returned day after day to continue painting. Also Marina Câncio, Magno and Samara Bueno all of whom generously dedicated many hours to taking part!

I would also like to thank my wonderful wife, Julia, who I wouldn't have been able to complete the project without her support, in all forms! And who spent many many hours painting as well. Also Julia's mother and sister who looked after our children on several occasions to allow us to dedicate some full days to painting.

Thank you for all your support, especially everyone who donated to the crowdfunding campaign without whom this wouldn’t have been possible - a full list appears below.

Andy, family and the team at João Batista Cardoso infant school in São Luiz do Paraitinga, Brazil

xxx

Please connect with me on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/pintando_paredes/ or Facebook https://www.facebook.com/pintandoparedesbrasil to follow my work and future community mural projects.

Supporters

James Abbott

Kasia Breska

Michelle Brodie

Deryn Bunce

Geoff Bunce

Gill Bunce

Nan & Grandad Bunce

Sally Bunce

Stephen Bunce

Libby Cade

Evely Câncio

Gillian Drew

Eleanor Gee

Hollie Goman

Lucy Hampson

Robin Howie

Trevor James

Richard Johnston

Richard Kent

Nicole Kobie

Nicola Lazenby

Rosemary Little

Moira McNeil

Jack Morris

Kate Morris

Abigail Paget

Victoria Pugh

Kate & Martin Russ

Alexandra Stanyer

Roger & Janet Thornhill

Anthony Watts

Sarah Yeung

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Regarding special types of towing, Mobile Mechanics of Omaha near Omaha NE

Can offer dependable tow trucks and towing features for vehicles such as motorcycles, RVs, modified vehicles and even large trucks and buses.

Give First Star a Call to Help with ANY TOWING QUESTIONS you may have. We service the entire area of Omaha NE.

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Mobile Mechanics of Omaha has two convenient locations in the Omaha NE area and runs 24/7.

 TIPS

Towing service near Omaha NE: Towing Tips are often very versatile and do more than just towing damaged cars! Here are some services towing companies offers that might be very useful to you someday:

Change of tire or wheel

If you have a flat tire or lost a wheel, but do not know how to install a spare wheel, a tug can do it for you. If you do not have a spare wheel, it will take you to the garage of your choice, or even to your home if you wish.

Delivery of gasoline

Out of gas? No problem! Do not risk your safety by walking on the side of the road, instead call a towing service. Some offer to come and deliver a small amount of gas that will allow you to continue your journey to the nearest gas station. One company on the west coast that has a business that really focuses on delivering gasoline to stranded patrons is San Francisco Bay Area Towing.

Unlocking the door

Who has not already left his keys in the car? If this happens to you, a tug will come to open your door without problem, they have the appropriate equipment.

Pulling the car

If you get stuck in the mud, the snow or you fall into a ditch, the tugs are equipped with a winch allowing them to pull the vehicle from its bad posture.

Battery boost

In cold weather, many motorists fail to start their car because of a battery that no longer responds. If no one in your entourage has booster cables, call a towing company.

Minor repairs

Some repairs can be made on site rather than towing your car to the garage. The tow truck drivers are also often mechanics.

Recreational Vehicle Towing

Your ATVs, snowmobiles, motorcycles and motorized can also be towed if they are down and you are unable to move them.

Specialized towing

There is also a variety of specialized towing services, including:

●      Heavy and off-standard vehicles;

●      Luxury cars and limousines;

●      Boat transport;

●      Emergency vehicles;

●      Buses and big motorized.

●      Equipment transport

 COST

How Much Are Towing Fees?

Towing service near Omaha NE: Millions of vehicles are towed in the US each year. Nearly every car owner has needed at least one tow in their lifetime. Towing fees can be costly if you do not have roadside assistance through your insurance, membership in a roadside assistance group, or an emergency fund set up for cases of, well, auto emergencies. Many people do not realize tow services include more than transporting a vehicle from one place to another. The fees charged by tow companies can vary depending on your circumstances, where you live, and the tow company.

 Why Would I Need To Be Towed?

There are several reasons that you might need to employ the services of a tow truck, and thankfully, several of them are avoidable – but many are not. If you are in an accident and your car is damaged to the point that you cannot drive it, or if your car has a problem that keeps it from starting, you’re definitely going to need a tow truck. But the most common reasons for needing a tow truck are avoidable. Have you ever left your lights on accidentally and killed your battery? Keeping a pair of jumper cables in your trunk could help you avoid making the costly call.

Likewise with keeping and knowing how to change a flat tire for a new one and keeping an eye on the gas gauge.

 Average Tow Costs

Towing service near Omaha NE: Some tow companies may charge $2.50 to $7.00 per mile. The higher dollar amount is usually reserved for heavy-duty vehicles. The cost adds up fast. Here's a ballpark estimate of what you could end up paying:

Finding a mechanic nearby could really help reduce the cost of your tow.

●      5 to 7 Mile Tow: $30 to $100

●      40 Mile Tow: $100 to $250

●      100 Mile Tow: $250 to $600

 What Services Do Tow Companies Offer?

Towing service near Omaha NE: Keys locked in the car is a common occurrence for many. Calling a tow company to help can save the day. Check out the other services that are often available from a tow company.

●      Gas Delivery

●      Jump Start

●      Unlock Door

●      Tire Change

●      Transport a Vehicle

●      Pull You Out If Stuck

 What Impacts the Cost of a Tow?

If you check directly on a tow company's website for pricing, you will probably be hard-pressed to find a dollar amount. I checked several and not one listed their prices. However, luckily the cost of a tow is fairly standard so I can at least give you a ballpark figure. Towing fees often start at $50 and can quickly get as high as $100 depending on the type of tow and where you are located.

Often the base fee or often referred to as a hook-up fee is $50, regardless if you need your vehicle towed one mile or twenty. More mileage does often come with a higher price tag. A standard tow is usually cheaper than a flatbed tow. A tow due to a car accident can be substantially higher. The cost of having your vehicle towed and impounded can also be a lot higher.

 FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

I think my vehicle was towed. What should I do?

 The Development Property Manager has the contact information for the towing company in your area, check with the Property Manager to confirm. Then contact the Development's towing company for more information on how to retrieve your vehicle.

 How can I get my vehicle back?

 Contact the towing company for that Development. Towing information is posted on signage around the parking facility.

 I am an employee, who do I contact about my towed vehicle?

 The Development Property Manager will have this information, as they have to authorize the towing of any employee vehicles.

 Who pays the towing fee?

 The vehicle owner is responsible for all towing fees.

 How much do the towing companies charge to release a towed vehicle?

 Fees are paid directly to the towing company.

 Why was my vehicle towed?

 Your vehicle was in violation of our towing policy. Please refer to our policy in the Parking Rules and Regulations page.

 My vehicle was erroneously towed, how do I file a complaint?

 Complaints can be made via phone to the Mobile Mechanics of Omaha Parking Services offices. Please see the Contact Us page for further information on how to reach the office.

 How do I know if towing is enforced at the lot?

 Towing is enforced at all Mobile Mechanics of Omaha Development parking facilities.

 Who pays the booting fee?

 The vehicle owner is responsible for all booting fees.

 Why was my vehicle booted?

 Your vehicle was in violation of our parking policy. Please refer to our policy in the Parking Rules and Regulations page.

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 BEST TOWING SERVICE IN OMAHA NE

MOBILE MECHANICS OF OMAHA

REQUEST MORE INFORMATION. CONTACT US NOW!

 CONTACT US:

Mobile Mechanics of Omaha

24-hour mobile mechanic roadside assistance services in Omaha NE!

CALL (531) 233-6154 MOBILE MECHANIC

CALL (402) 401 7564 TOWING SERVICE OMAHA

CALL (402) 590 8094 ROADSIDE ASSISTANCE

WEBSITE:

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SERVICE AREA:

Communities we serve: Omaha, Carter Lake, Council Bluffs, Crescent, Bellevue, Boys Town, La Vista, Papillion, Honey Creek, Offutt A F B, Bennington, Fort Calhoun, Washington, Elkhorn, St Columbans, Underwood, Kennard, Mc Clelland, Mineola, Waterloo, Springfield, Missouri Valley, Treynor, Cedar Creek, Gretna, Blair, Valley, Neola, Pacific Junction, Plattsmouth, Silver City, Glenwood, Louisville, Yutan, Arlington, Minden, Modale, South Bend, Logan, Murray, Ashland, Mead, Persia, Memphis, Manley, Magnolia, Macedonia, Malvern, Fremont, Carson, Oakland, Herman, Murdock, Nickerson, Shelby, Weeping Water, Hastings, Mondamin, Henderson, Ithaca, Hancock, Nehawka, Tabor, Union, Greenwood, Thurman, Portsmouth, Woodbine, Colon, Wahoo, Avoca, Emerson, Winslow, Avoca, Elmwood, Little Sioux, Cedar Bluffs, Pisgah, Tekamah, Alvo, Randolph, Ames, Hooper, Panama, Craig, Waverly, Ceresco, Percival, Otoe, Imogene, Malmo, Sidney, Uehling, Walnut, Harlan, Westphalia, Eagle, Lincoln, Dunlap, Moorhead, Red Oak, Morse Bluff, Weston, Griswold, Blencoe, Earling, Davey, Dunbar, Nebraska City, North Bend, Unadilla, Elliott, Lewis, Prague, Syracuse, Marne, Scribner, Oakland, Palmyra, Pilot Grove, Walton, Riverton, Farragut, Shenandoah, Valparaiso, Lorton, Essex, Soldier, Hamburg, Defiance, Kirkman, Raymond, Dow City, Stanton, Atlantic, Decatur, Bennet, Elk Horn, Snyder, Lyons, Kimballton, Irwin, Arion, Malcolm, West Point, Panama, Roca, Dodge, Manilla, Yorktown, Northboro, Coin, Hickman, Denton, Bancroft, Aspinwall, Sprague, Clarinda, Martell, Blanchard, Manning, Beemer, College Springs, Shambaugh, Braddyville, 50022, 51432, 51446, 51447, 51454, 51455, 51501, 51502, 51503, 51510, 51520, 51521, 51523, 51525, 51526, 51527, 51528, 51529, 51530, 51531, 51532, 51533, 51534, 51535, 51536, 51537, 51540, 51541, 51542, 51543, 51544, 51545, 51546, 51548, 51549, 51550, 51551, 51552, 51553, 51554, 51555, 51556, 51557, 51558, 51559, 51560, 51561, 51562, 51563, 51564, 51565, 51566, 51570, 51571, 51572, 51573, 51575, 51576, 51577, 51578, 51579, 51591, 51593, 51601, 51602, 51603, 51630, 51631, 51632, 51636, 51637, 51638, 51639, 51640, 51645, 51647, 51648, 51649, 51650, 51651, 51652, 51653, 51654, 51656, 52648, 68002, 68003, 68004, 68005, 68007, 68008, 68009, 68010, 68015, 68016, 68017, 68018, 68019, 68020, 68022, 68023, 68025, 68026, 68028, 68029, 68031, 68033, 68034, 68037, 68038, 68040, 68041, 68042, 68044, 68045, 68046, 68048, 68050, 68056, 68057, 68058, 68059, 68061, 68063, 68064, 68065, 68066, 68068, 68069, 68070, 68072, 68073, 68101, 68102, 68103, 68104, 68105, 68106, 68107, 68108, 68109, 68110, 68111, 68112, 68113, 68114, 68116, 68117, 68118, 68119, 68120, 68122, 68123, 68124, 68127, 68128, 68130, 68131, 68132, 68133, 68134, 68135, 68136, 68137, 68138, 68139, 68142, 68144, 68145, 68147, 68152, 68154, 68155, 68157, 68164, 68172, 68175, 68176, 68178, 68179, 68180, 68181, 68182, 68183, 68197, 68198, 68304, 68307, 68317, 68336, 68339, 68346, 68347, 68349, 68366, 68372, 68382, 68402, 68403, 68404, 68407, 68409, 68410, 68413, 68417, 68418, 68419, 68428, 68430, 68438, 68446, 68454, 68455, 68461, 68462, 68463, 68501, 68502, 68503, 68504, 68505, 68506, 68507, 68508, 68509, 68510, 68512, 68514, 68516, 68517, 68520, 68521, 68522, 68523, 68524, 68526, 68527, 68528, 68529, 68531, 68532, 68542, 68583, 68588, 68621, 68633, 68648, 68649, 68664, 68716, 68788

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pool lights

LED Floodlighting Fiber-optic lighting

Light generated by Means of a bulb is figured in Colors. A couple of lights set with software which allow you to change your sew plan using a handful taps. The others might utilize snap on lighting stations to get a speedy shift. That you really don't will need to limit your smart undertakings to unique activities. Each swimming looks each of the more relaxing having a loaded sea-blue color s cape, but in case which you want to leap to blue or purple waters over your afternoon daily.

Light program. Make nighttime swims a real possibility whenever you put in a LED lighting system therefore that you may relish your pool throughout night and also daily. Read by way of the entire color spectrum to locate your favorite coloration and light your swimming pool. Do not find out how to put in a pool lighting? Abandon it into your group of knowledgeable pros.

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Features of LED Pool Lighting

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 Submersible and Floating LED Lights

Pool lighting will even let you get a handful advantages you could possibly well not need thought of, even for example just how much funds you are going to spare compared with enlightenment. Plus, he’s basic and enjoyable. Style the rainbow of selections obtainable, and also get the most of one's swim after the suns realized to your day.

Under-water LED Lighting

Individuals who settings light get pretty fuzzy in regards to the bare fundamental of lumens have an effect on clear grandeur, or just how colorful a specific light looks for the unaided eye shadow. This 100-watt bulb yells at the reach of 1,400 along with also 1,750 lumens, whereas slightly bigger, dimmer 40-watt bulb results in only 4 5 0 lumens. Even a light emitting diode pool lighting which cries very comparable 1,400 even 1,750 lumens as our companion the 100-watt bulb can utilize only 14-20 watts. A few light emitting diode lights may also give up to 5,400 lumens.

Since they may light up your swimming pool without any even having to be as difficult to present. They are sometimes effortlessly retro fitted to upgrade present pool lighting. As they aren't flush with the swimming pool divider they really do stick out a little. Together those lines, that they truly have been more effectively broken up, especially around the off likelihood which you have kiddies. Kiddies will in-general utilize these being a point to steer outside of their swimming pool.

Runs on the little quantity of the seriousness of the nearly same bulb. Even a 30-watt headed pool lighting could cause an identical firmness as being a 200-watt shining bulb, even minus the elevated energy usage or perhaps even the inactive hazardous warmth. The diminished heat also suggests the LED can continue over the usual bulb, and lessen the demand for steady gasket assist.

To Clean out the pool Utilize low-cost As a Result of Decrease wattage, even a LED pool lighting Amazing significance for the own pool light cash, stair pool lighting could be precisely the thing you require. Halogen pool lighting tend to be somewhat more colorful plus also they like wise price tag less that can be inspirational news about the off likelihood which you are in want of a fantastic deal of lighting in a wallet-accommodating price. Halogen has been the smartest choice for pool and spectacle light. They truly are more efficient compared to the usual conventional “usual" interior decoration, they truly are still hard to overcome with respect to the some brilliance.

In the event you drain the drinking water afterward it is likely to soon be great therefore it's possible to use water to get Transmission wires along with unwanted cables that's additionally called margin fiber wires. The ending transmitting connects transfer lighting by your generator to numerous receiver elements, as an instance, wall lighting, waterfalls and therefore on. They're created out of a dark PVC protect revealing the number of amounts. Border fiber back inbound backlinks are generated using a clear pay and also possess the unique section of distributing light across their whole span. The guidebook railings enable the perimeter fiber to become introduced round the pool.

Solar Pool Lighting

Under-water LED Lighting Might Be decent Option Readily available in several colors kind-of light in your regular home advancement shop without moving through an outstanding deal of money. You have to request am circuit repairman to present it yet. Likewise you ought to be cautious therefore not to take out the local weather of your swimming pool land from over educational. It truly is such a thing however difficult to do using flooding lighting fixture.

Halogen pool lighting

Usage contrasted using an identical luminous gentle. By and big, compared to the usual standard luminous light therefore that your purchase investment capital won’t start off until you regain the additional cash you simply just spent over LED lighting fixture.

Very long story short it has really a great deal of work and can simply just take couples. Produce a Pool backyard light is used across the day period is much significantly more stable and a lot far much more pleasurable using a swimming pool lighting. Throughout night, underwater pool lights helps people find out their ecological elements, as encouraging any life guards in viewing water. Submerged pool lighting are generally utilized light bulbs, and however now using LEDs is enlarging. The warm water across the lighting installments extends on as being a heating pro to help with circulate the heat generated by these. Pool lighting are all intended to reduce danger of injuries in power --that the complete lighting fixture is more closely sealed from water getting into exactly this goal. Pool lighting additionally often possess a ground fault circuit interrupter.

Kinds of pool lighting

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Unique forms of light you may opt to use to inform your swimming pool along with its particular own surrounding land. Deciding the right sort of light might be intensive, but carrying a gander in the inspiration behind every lighting along with its own up sides and drawbacks can allow you to decide the right option. During the lengthy haul, then you can opt to combine and fit a few different types of light to have the maximum stylish and sensible pool light for the house.

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