#in a situation where most of the online environment seems to agree that this whole situation is fucked up too like…

[bloodcunt]

gary lineker saying that male footballers are scared about the abuse they’ll get if they show support jenni is an absolutely crazy thing to say how do you type that out and think yeah that’s a good explanation

[mono-red-menace]

big dislike how often like little harmless online jokes get put into environments where it's like. not cool to make them.

like the "being fake mean" thing for one. like don't be like that to a complete stranger. you're not friends.

and then like those jokes become like. Bad to make because people didn't know how to respect other ppl's boundaries and made someone uncomfortable, and then people start going off about how the whole thing is like some horrible thing and you're bad if you made the joke and it's like.

idk every single time i see it it's. people without good social skills make someone really uncomfortable with a joke. that person doesn't talk about how it made them uncomfortable directly and instead vagues about it, or they do talk about how it made them uncomfortable but then like, either the interaction goes bad or. like idk there's many different situations.

but like it happens consistently enough that i've realised that the issue is almost never like. the joke itself.

and it's often like. the way people interact online. with like the feeling like you're friends with strangers or the extremely casual environment casual tone causing conflict and like stuff like that.

where like people with different boundaries when it comes to stuff online interact with each other and then make each other uncomfortable, and instead of it being a recognition that the way the interaction went down was flawed, the meme/joke/whatever becomes like. scapegoated

like the being fake mean thing is a fine joke if you're making it with friends who are fine with it, not with strangers.

like most jokes that aren't explicitly offensive just. are that way.

but then like people will go off about harmless shit being "problematic" and it's like. please listen to what you are saying is problematic. this is NOT problematic, it's the way it was joked about, it was how it was introduced, etc.

it's often like. inherent issues with a giant space with an extremely causal vibe with very little solid social rules governing the interactions between people yk?

and then also like the many different demographics, with people who don't have much experience interacting with others interacting with like. people who do so professionally. like

the issue seems to be just that.

and i'm not really sure how we can solve it.

like im going to be real i dont actually think like. in joke #752 is actually problematic and inherently causes negative interaction as much as like.

people will latch on to any piece of fun and try to bond with it, and sometimes that fun crosses people's boundaries, and there isn't really a way to Solve that. you know.

like are we going to go for like extreme moderation rules? at this scale that would be impossible

are we going to like, enforce social rules? how would we come to agree on this? etc.

like it just. is an inherent issue with interaction between people. i'm sorry. it's just something we have to deal with, instead of thinking that maybe this time saying this in-joke was always problematic and uncomfortable will fix it and there will be no more silly jokes that get taken into uncomfortable situations.

i never actually realised my opinion on it until now. i was trying to figure it out for so long, why i always felt weird when the new big thing gets put into a situation where it makes someone uncomfortable and then it becomes Problematic.

and then i realised it's just because it's another instance of attacking the symptom. yk.

like it keeps happening with a new joke every week because it's an inherent part of online culture, because of the tone (casual) and the scale (like, the entire world) and the number of hard social rules (few) and the level of moderation (minimal) and the nature of the interactions (anonymous) and the location the interactions happen (in the homes of the people online) and the different personal and cultural views of appropriateness (vast)

and a lot of these issues are just. unsolvable. or at least unsolvable in a way that maintains what the internet Is, and maintains the broader cultures developed here, and isn't prey to like, capitalist profit and attempting to make everything advertiser-friendly and etc. and etc. and etc.

it's just like. sometimes ppl don't understand or respect other people's boundaries and that will forever be an issue, especially in a space where your interactions are anonymous and in the comfort of your own home. how are we supposed to solve this?

cause i don't know other than to go "hey that made me uncomfortable, can we not do that?" and if they're a dick to you about it go "okay. i'm not interacting with you anymore." and blocking them and being done with it. and if they're cool about it just, continuing to interact.

which honestly IS an exhausting and uncomfortable approach but. what can you do, projecting yourself onto a stage visible to the entire world?

the options are to limit yourself from being seen by the entire world, such as by not interacting with or trying to make friends with strangers online, or by limiting your visibility, or stepping away entirely and either not interacting with others at all or not interacting with the internet as a whole, or to understand that issue is inherent to the platform and if you want to be seen by the whole world you have to be willing to interact with it only in the ways you're willing, and shove away the things you're not willing to interact with. eg blocking people that make you uncomfortable or telling them and hoping they reply in a polite and respectful manner, and blocking them if they don't, or just ignoring them entirely, or. any of that.

it's just a really hard situation that there isn't really any correct answer to. but like i think going after jokes and making them into like problematic things to do isn't a way to fix the problem bc it's just gonna like. exhaust yourself and it honestly leads ppl to become like. zealous about the whole deal and attack people about it. thus creating another problem of a similar calibre, where people who aren't interacting with the new joke/meme/whatever in an improper manner are now being attacked for it.

just like issue after issue after issue yk?

and like my solution to this should honestly be to just go "not my problem. can't change this either," but i'm going to whine about it just a little bc it kinda sucks that i can't change it LOL

[frazzledsoul]

So lately I've been thinking more and more about getting into the Gilmore Girls fandom again, which is cute, because the fandom is nonexistent, pretty much (even though the show is actually pretty popular on Netflix even all these years later) and I kind of wanted to talk about how I fell out with it.

I updated a story this week I had not touched for a year. It's my monstrous fic about Jess being Rory's baby daddy and it's 26 chapters so far and I kind of feel it went off the rails about seven or eight chapters ago but Lit fans seem to like it. Literati is not really my ship: I love them, but I also love Rory with Logan and I have written for both and see the merit in both ships. So I'm emotionally detached from it to a certain extent which is not the case with Luke/Lorelai. And I did not really get along or agree with what I thought the "official" opinions were from a lot of L/L fic authors that the fandom as a whole was encouraged to have.

The fact that I no longer talk to a lot of those authors/fans is partially (okay, mostly) my fault. There were a lot of cultural/political/lifestyle differences that couldn't be reconciled, but also a really wide gulf in fandom opinions that couldn't be reconciled, either. The fact that I was not a nice person about certain things last summer didn't help. I've blocked people on here about stuff I now consider petty and have retracted it but basically....I think sometimes online friendships need to stay in certain places and not be placed in toxic environments like Twitter and Discord where things can easily get out of hand. But when you're on a rage-blocking spree it can be hard to talk yourself down from it.

I guess the point I want to make here is that when the show was going on it had a considerable fanbase that was somewhat morally/culturally conservative. I don't think actual politics here is the issue (ASP was pretty clear about where she stood on that one) but if you were uncomfortable with Lorelai sleeping with Christopher while he had a girlfriend and never acknowledging that what she did was wrong and stupid it was okay to say that. If you didn't think it was okay for Rory to be involved with Dean while he was technically married to Lindsay it was okay to say that (not an opinion I share, but it was out there). If Lorelai sleeping with Christopher was a complete deal-breaker for you and you felt you couldn't sympathize or like her anymore after that and that what she did couldn't be justified, it was okay to say that. I feel that in 2016 with certain L/L fans and fic writers dominating the conversation, it wasn't okay anymore to express those types of opinions. Lorelai sleeping with Christopher is just a stupid thing Luke has to get over while we obsess over and over about how Luke failed Lorelai by not giving her the perfect wedding she wanted. It was perfectly okay for her to shove that knife in as far as she could if that's what she needed to do to feel that things were "over".

At the same time, the dominant L/L opinion that we were all encouraged to have was....intensely traditional in places. We were encouraged to believe that Lorelai's need to get married outweighed every other consideration, moral or otherwise, that marriage was going to immediately solve her and Luke's problems even though eloping ASAP would solve virtually none of them, and that Luke once again failed Lorelai by never proposing in the years between the OG series and AYITL despite the fact that it's explicitly stated several times throughout the revival that she did not want that. The dominant opinion here neither respects fidelity or has any room for a nontraditional arrangement, which is an odd combination to have.

There were other issues here, such as the time three popular fanfic writers decided to write stories one after the other about how Luke wearing jeans to dinner at Emily's did not mean he did not have any money and how they had to disabuse Emily of that notion right away because....how dare Luke actually be a person who could not afford nice dress pants. Being poor isn't a moral failure, people, and neither is wearing jeans to dinner. And yeah, fic writers can write anything they want and if I don't like it I don't have to read it and blah blah blah, but I think it's just another example of the "fandom" kind of laying out what opinions one was and was not allowed to have and how one often felt like an outsider for liking Luke *because* he was a redneck.

The thing is that when I go back and read older stories written by fans who were watching the show while it was airing or even fans who write for multiple ships I feel they...understand it more? The older stories understand why Lorelai's actions were so devastating and felt like such a betrayal. There's a writer who wrote in both time periods who has a story where it's explicitly stated that whether Lorelai was technically cheating or not doesn't matter, because it was still a horrible thing to do and she knows it and she's sorry. I honestly never felt as vindicated and validated as I did when I read that take on it. I feel this is S7's view on the situation. It's not like Lorelai tries to argue the point or anything: she knows pretty much right off that it was horrible. Yet the "modern" writers and fans seem to believe that Luke expressing any anger, even temporarily, is worse than what she did. And I feel intensely uncomfortable in a fandom where that is the dominant opinion.

Most of this isn't found in the fics themselves, for the most part, but in the publicly expressed opinions of the writers. And I feel this is a problem, in fandoms: you have your beloved fic writers and your thought leaders and they control the conversation and no one is really allowed to challenge them. Which is kind of why I feel fandoms in and of themselves are toxic: it's unhealthy to let only a few people decide what can and cannot be accepted. Sometimes it's better to let fics stay on the page and not know too much of what the writer's fandom opinions are....or at least, not to the point where it is considered the *only* opinion.

I just have one final thing to say, which is that I feel having the dissenting opinion that cheating is bad and not getting married is not a tragedy if you do not want to do it is something I feel has come back on me when I tried to write my take on L/L: I have a long, angsty story that I needed to write to get it out of me and let Luke say the things he needed to say about what had happened. I went round and round with some of these established writers in the reviews, because there were some very popular and influential fic writers who did *not* like my take on the subject. So there's some pretty solid evidence beyond my feeling that only certain takes on this ship were allowed other than my own insecurity. I feel all of this is unnecessary, and those who sympathized more with Luke than Lorelai should have a space to say why they feel these things.

But any rate, most of this is over now. The only stories really being written are AUs these days (the most prolific L/L writer working now is someone who never watched the revival and whose stories definitely have a more old skool take on things as far as the moral issues go) so all of the stuff in the past that we fought over doesn't matter.

But in case anyone cares....I'm probably updating that angsty fic next week. And it's going to have Jess in it. And he might be a (temporary) manwhore. So I'm sure I'll get some of those reviews again.

[vaguely-concerned]

Any tips for a TF POV fic? I want to write one because I too went through a time in my life when I let feelings bounce off cuz that was easier, but I feel like that's not quite on point for him 🤔

God I have SO MANY THOUGHTS about this and they’re all so wordless and frustratingly evasive to me yet (I am in the process of writing a looooooong T.F. POV fic and it gives me much more trouble than Graves POV, probably because as a person I’m quite a lot more like the T.F. Type in real life lol). But yes, here we go, let me try to express some of what I personally try to have as my hm ‘anchor points’ for his perspective. (Heavy disclaimer that these are just my personal & disorganized little musings and by no means the only or ‘correct’ way to read the character!)

- First of all I agree, the image of ‘bouncing off’ doesn’t feel quiteright -- it’s in the right neighbourhood but the wrong address sort of thing, but it’s really hard to come up with a way to explain how I feel the nuance here.

*insert three hours later spongebob meme here* Okay, so the metaphor I came up with is: T.F.’s relationship to emotions is a direct parallel to his relationship to water/the ocean: it’s scary down there, it’s dark, it’s dangerous, and if he should ever be dumb enough to try to go in too deep it’ll kill him dead because boy oh boy on so many levels this man just did not learn how to swim. As far as he’s concerned any sensible person would simply bob along on the surface in a sturdily built boat and try not to think too much about the weird shit that lives down there in the depths. (In this metaphor the layer of artifice and performance so habitual it’s basically integrated into the fabric of his soul is the boat. Y’know, the part that’s Twisted Fate and not just plain ol’ Tobias. I’ll hasten to add that I think both parts of his identity are equally ‘real’ and equally him, but the Twisted Fate part is like… protecting the Tobias part. Keeping him from drowning, as it were. I’m not sure he’d think of it like that himself for the longest time, though, I suspect he has more of a ‘that man is dead’ attitude towards the Tobias part after Graves is gone)

I think what I’m trying to get at is the idea that to him, raw emotion is as hostile and unknowable and unnavigable an ‘environment’ as the deep ocean. (And the only time we see him willingly go there, physically and otherwise, is for Graves, so you know let’s jot that down first of all lol.)

- He seems to genuinely quite like and be interested in people – how they think, what moves and motivates them, their secrets and foibles. So I tend to try to keep the uh ‘detail work’ in his POV focused in that direction. Priority going like 1) people 2) people’s valuables 3) the relative availability of people’s valuables at this moment if you have clever hands and a very charming smile haha

- One of my favourite things about T.F. is that he seems, I don’t know… quite genuinely good-natured beneath it all? If you back him into a corner some sharp and dangerous things peek out (he has survived in his line of heh ‘business’ for like thirty years, and a lot of it on his own), but for the most part and when unthreatened he has a sort of mildly amused and intrigued live-and-let-live attitude to the world even as he’s conning it that I find deeply charming. Which to me ties in with:

- T.F.’s first instinctive reaction to danger (perceived or real) the majority of the time seems to be ‘Flight’. Confrontation and violence are basically his ‘when literally everything else has failed’ options. (As seen prominently in Burning Tides, where he just keeps running and running and the only time he actually starts throwing punches is when he has to because Graves is in immediate danger and they’re backed into a corner. Which feels like it means something huh lol, I often think about what could actually make T.F. angry enough that he would openly express it and that seems to be the most likely angle for it in my eyes.)

- My take on one of the fundamental differences between Graves and T.F. is that Graves has A LOT of feelings but doesn’t quite know it (or more like can’t quite conceptualize it I should say) – he has a hard time identifying or finding vocabulary for feelings that aren’t some shade of anger. Meanwhile T.F. KNOWS he has feelings, he just doesn’t like it, ardently wishes he didn’t, and will do pretty much anything to run away and not have to engage with them haha.

Another important difference: when brought out of equilibrium Graves gets angry, and T.F. gets scared. I have the feeling that beneath it all he’s scared a lot, and it’s why his persona is so oriented towards gaining control in ways where people don’t realize it enough to even think try to take that control away from him until he’s already long gone. Misdirection as a way of life babEY

- This might be too deep in the ‘my WIP/process specific’ territory to really count as general analysis, but I think it’s there in canon too – there’s almost a feeling that he implicitly feels like he has to make up for some fundamental flaw or lack he has at the core? (Not a weird thing for him to end up feeling, considering what happened to him as a kid.) All the rest of him, all the cleverness and style and charm, is there to ‘make up’ for how at the end of the day he’s… wrong somehow. As Graves, who knows him better than anyone, focuses right in on, a coward. And that is CERTAINLY not the whole truth and even Graves in a full rage relents when he sees the effect the accusation has on him and once he gets the actual facts of what happened. But I think that sense of deep unworthiness is what’s stuck with him emotionally. His people left him because there’s something fundamentally lacking and immoral about him. He lost Graves because he’s not good enough, because he’s a coward who leaves people behind. He deserves to be alone. Mix in a ton of survivor’s guilt to taste, and I think you have the like… core emotional wound he’s constructed around.

There’s also something here about fear of profound powerlessness specifically in situations where words, generally his strongest card that’s not a literal card (har har har oh we do have fun here), simply don’t work right at the moment when he needs them to the most – he tried to beg for his people not to leave him behind, he tried to convince Graves to get the hell out with the rest of the crew… and it didn’t work. (In Burning Tides you see he’s given up even trying to explain himself, he just wants Out in whatever way leaves both him and Graves tolerably in one piece, even if he won’t be understood or heard or less alone afterwards. It takes him until like half way through the entire chase to even THINK about just telling Graves the truth. In all fairness to T.F. it probably wouldn’t have worked at that moment, but it does vaguely crack me up that he didn’t even consider it until all of Bilgewater harbor was already burning merrily behind them fhsajkfa)

- He has a little bit of a (perfectly justified considering his background honestly) chip on his shoulder, especially when it comes to powerful or arrogant people. There seems to be a special satisfaction in outsmarting and robbing specifically rich assholes (which would also be the people who have the most to steal, so y’know good times all round). From his short stories and few places in his bio you almost get the feeling that he has a funny sort of Robin Hood-esque sense of lopsided justice about it. (Robin Hood-esque only so far as to define ‘the poor’ as the eternally hard-strapped ‘T.F. & Graves Waistcoats and Cigars Fund’, of course lol)

I think T.F. both has a mind that tends more towards analyzing the big picture and also has more direct experience with like… structural/systemic powerlessness and oppression. So the cons they pull are probably partly how he channels the emotions that arise out of that (and the rest he just represses, like the relatable guy he is haha)

- Graves being back would cause some IMMENSE internal conflict in him, I feel – of course all the feelings of relief and attachment and love, but also… so much of who he is now came about specifically to find a way to deal with Graves being gone, with seemingly just shutting down the entirety of his need for real human companionship or closeness for like a decade, things that are suddenly starting to be brought online again and must be tremendously stressful to deal with when you’ve had it completely suppressed and deadened for so long. He’s put so much into trying to be fundamentally unattached to anything, anywhere, anyone (and there are some things here about perpetually being an outsider his whole life that I can’t quite put into words, but that’s a dimension too.) That sort of psychological self defense mechanism doesn’t just contentedly nod its head and go away just because something good happened one time haha. Probably a work in progress there huh (at least he’s not alone in it now <3)

PLUS some bonus Graves POV observations because man. I love writing him, he’s just a marvel of a man

- I know I call him a dumbass all the time, but in a street smart way I think he’s actually quite clever haha, he just has a bad tendency to get hung up on an idea and get tunnel sight. (I’ve based this a lot on the short stories but see also more recently his Sentinel skin voice lines for good examples: he’s incredibly straightforward in that ‘well obviously if it doesn’t affect me personally I ain’t gonna give it that much thought’ way, but you also have glimpses of surprising insight/shrewdness and… I don’t quite know how to put it, but something like an ability to get to the bottom line of something without getting caught up in the details. (I suspect T.F. does find himself lost in the details quite frequently, he’s much more attached to the decorative curlicues of the world.) Graves clearly & frequently has no idea what’s going on, but he strips things down to the essentials very quick: Lucian’s story as a direct thematic mirror to Viego’s, Is There A Sun Lady – Oh, I See, all of this is weird and creepy and needs shooting, and maybe most crucial of all: Isolde doesn’t want to be with her husband anymore so what he’s doing is just like. Extra shitty. He gets what he needs to get and then just barges ahead heedlessly with that. Icon.)

- He’s actually pretty darn eloquent in a gruff sort of way and uses some quite sophisticated vocabulary! And the way this is contrasted with the tendency to slip into blunter coarser language just as readily -- like when he takes the time to describe the monster that takes down the Prince’s ship in such poetic terms as ‘gargantuan’ and ‘the behemoth’s immense, distended jaw’ and it having ‘pallid dead eyes the size of the moon’, and meanwhile during his swim at the beginning of the story we get bastard cold and bastard dark and full of bastard jellyfish and crabs – brings me such immense and unending delight

- He’s more eloquent in his internal voice than he is when speaking (especially noticeable in Destiny and Fate; he does have a tendency to fumble his words when talking lol), and he gets quite easily lost in his own meandering reflective musings in a way I find incredibly endearing. I’d almost call it whimsical at times, honestly, hilarious as that is? Like when he’s literally so absorbed in a line of thought he forgets which way they’re rowing and T.F. has to remind him. (I think T.F. generally has more of a grip of what’s going on around them than Graves does lol)

- There’s an important distinction to be made that Graves actually does, by and large, read T.F: very closely and seemingly also pretty damn accurately. He’s good at (and clearly very interested in) reading his moods, spotting what tactics he’s using interpersonally, when he’s being genuine and when he’s being dissembling.

What Graves is actually bad at is understanding his own emotions, and to not bleed those emotions into other people’s motivations and behavior, especially when he’s upset or in heightened states of feeling, like he is all the way through Burning Tides. He can only name his own feelings in a vocabulary of anger, when it’s pretty clear from the subtext that there’s a whole bunch of other stuff going on there, and he has incredible trouble divorcing those feelings from what other people’s got going on with them right then. He feels hurt, betrayed, and undone by everything that’s happened to him, so the intention to hurt, betray and undo must live in the other person who he feels caused it. In less drastic cases you see him do this a bit when he feels like T.F. is being evasive with him – taking it as a form of rejection rather than realizing T.F. is just lost in his own thoughts, sort of thing. There’s a real improvement in this one between Burning Tides and Destiny and Fate, though, so maybe he’ll have an easier time of it with some time and practice.

Sorry it took so long to get back to you on this and that it’s a bit of a rambling mess, words have been real hard recently. Or rather I have too many words, all the time, left and right, I just can’t put them into the right orders to make any sense hahaha, I hope there’s some useful point in this somewhere for you at least!

[lovee-infected]

Congrats on finishing exams! I thought of a one-shot request that'll hug you in fluff. In TW, the end of his lab SR has Ortho almost begging Silver to let him use his body's features more and test things, essentially just wanting to play doctor. What about a cute situation with a reader (fem/neutral) who lets him play and poke around to try things out so he can make more use out of it? (Sorry if it's strange, just thought it sounded adorable ^^)

This took me a while to write since I had to translate Ortho's stories to get to know him better

I added some Idia condiment to it to so Ortho will be motivated to use his abilities to help his brother ♥

Someone like you

♦♥♠♣

"Okay , what are we gonna do now ?" you asked with a motivational tone , hiding your great nervousness . You were given the permission to keep Ortho for only an afternoon . Idia seemed pretty unsafe about letting you have him but since Ortho insisted , he gave up : " Be back by the sunset , okay ?" . Ortho has told you how shy and unstable his brother would be if he gets in a face-to-face conversation , so you tried to patch the whole thing up by phone . Honestly he seemed a bit strict on phone but you caught the yes , anyways , under some conditions of course : "No running , stay away from water , don't get into any arguments , avoid unnecessary interactions ," Idia had ruled . You promised to take your best care of Ortho but he didn't seem quite satisfied ; he probably just agreed because of Ortho .

Ortho didn't seem as cheerful as always and that worried you . He was drowning in his own thoughts that didn't recognize what you asked , making you repeat your question to pull him out of his daydreamings . Ortho then dropped his head and gave away a hum sound , probably thinking of something to do . He frowned a little putting a finger under his chin as if he was trying to remember something . "(y/n) ? " he asked , his voice filled with pain . " Yes ?" you answered , wondering if he's gonna talk about what was bothering him .

" My brother has been struggling with his studies a lot lately , he's a real genius , but he keeps on skipping classes and missing lessons , that's a worry . He was even close to getting kicked out of Mr. Crewel's classes for the rest of the year since he missed almost all classes this month , and now he isn't allowed to return to classes until he comes up with aj satisfying project or disquisition that changes Mr. Crewel's mind..."

Your eyes widened a bit at his words , it was this serious ? You knew that Idia was socially awkward for real but to fail him classes because of it...that wasn't something you would have expected .

" I'm so sorry to hear that , is there anything I can do ? " you asked , hoping there to be a way to help . Ortho nodded : " Yes please , I want to put my brother out of this obstacle and... need your help ," he crooned , eyes filled with pain now . You couldn't take him being this sad , that was the total opposite of what you brought him out for . "I'd try my best Ortho , let's save Idia ," you said holding his hand and giving him your best smile . " (y/n)... let's make my brother the best disquisition ever ! something that Crewel couldn't resist ," he declared , now with a hyped tone that proved how determined he was. You gave him a dried up smile while thinking of something to say . One one hand you didn't really know what might satisfy Crewel but on the other you couldn't say no to him , not that you motivated him yourself . " It's great Ortho but , since Ignihyde's the most high-tech dorm isn't it supposed to have the best and greatest scientific researches as well ? I mean comparing to them , my knowledge is pretty scanty ; wouldn't it be better if Idia himself does it ?" Ortho shook his head as a no : "He worked on plenty of great projects , from the history of magic to the rarest formulas of the strongest portions , but Crewel rejected each and every of them . He told brother that he lacked something that cannot be found through internet , that he needed something coming from outside of his room ,"

"I see..." you mumbled . " He most likely wants him to do his investigation out of the computers , to do it by being in direct contact with his environment , " you continued . Crewel really did want him to prove that he can get out of his room you thought , seemed a bit unfair but wise. Ortho now seemed to be really inspired by your words , he hadn't thought of Crewel actually having a purpose under his ask . He thought that the main problem was with his brother's researches not being good enough . " If that's why , then we can do it right now for him ! We already have whatever we might need for a great research and so he would no longer be rejected from his classses ! "

♦♥♠♣

" Plants...? " you asked , pretty unsure if this was going to help . It's true that Crewel wasn't looking for a strong yet totally online essay but it didn't enusre him liking one about flowers grown in Night raven college itself either . " Yes , flowers would be a perfect case since they're grown outdoors , just as Mr. Crewel wanted ! Also if we collect samples from them he can no longer claim that all those information were found through the internet , a real success ! " Ortho seemed pretty confident about his idea , but you couldn't let him do anything if that was going to be useless : " True , but doesn't he know everything about all plants here already ? After all they're all pretty exposed to anyone passing ," you said , but Ortho disagreed : " I've donemy research with that , Night raven's thousand-year old history had been through plenty of ups and downs , some rare species which are long extincted out there , remained here from decades ago , which proves that there are pretty worthy plants left here that Crewel would die to know about ; he would do anything to add new species to his collection . Also , it was only mentioned that Night Raven college has at least more than 250 unique plant species , which means that there isn't even any sure number or limit to them , that would be amazing , (y/n) ! No one has ever thought of doing it before ! We would be the first ones !"

You didn't know if that was a good idea or not , but you had to admit that you were impressed . This college surely did keep tons of mysteries within and you couldn't find any of them without a bit of risking .

" Fine Ortho , I'll take care of it then ," you said , preparing yourself for a long journey : " First , we'll try to collect samples from each specie that we see , then schedule each and every of them , submit details into a chart and finally , check the data with a reliable source to identify each and every of them , that would make a high-key strong disquisition ! " you told Ortho , making him nod happily and give you a tight hug : " Thank s (y/n) ! You're the best ! "

You hugged him back and then decided to start : Okay , first we need to get some small bottles , like the ones used in lab to keep magical materials , we shall go get so-" you couldn't continue as Ortho murmured : " Probe mode- open the toolbox " Suddenly three slides around his waist moved away and shelves filled with forceps , flacons , medicinal alcohol and tweezers , along with anything necessary for a professional sampler came out . You couldn't help but to be amazed , you didn't expect him to be this equipped .

" Seems like brother had optimized me to be in charge of investigations as well , he hadn't mentioned many of them before ," he giggled , fascinated himself facing how well prepared he was . " Wait , I guess we don't have to collect samples one by one , just as you said , Crewel already knows plenty of them . Let's just collect special ones ," he said before making strange sounds again : " Automated analysis -activate! - goal: identification of rare species -" He continued to make strange sounds as he analyzed the whole area , his body bizarrely moving on it's own and making weird sounds which each specie being identified : Primorose-sweet pea-Red valerian- borage-bluebells- woodruff-...

After about 5 minutes of analysis , his system got a new notification : " Error - Unknown-or-unrecognizable specie , located in five-o'clock position in a radius of five kilometers to south ," You two quickly went to the location as you were addressed , finding a small bush with a single blue-purple flower . Ortho gasped at the sight : "This is Eris's Orchid ! My brother had told me about them before ! These were told to be a symbol of bad luck back in my hometown , but brother said notto believe any of those words and that they were totally harmless . These flowers extincted in my hometown before my brother was born , I'd only seen old pictures of it . Brother will love this ! " Ortho's mechanical arms carefully picked the flower and placed it into a flacon and closed it . Ortho re-prepared his analysis sensors and said : " Okay ! One collected , way to go ! "

♦♥♠♣

Idia was stressed out , the two of you had to be back hours ago . Did something bad happen ? Could it bd that Ortho had problems with his gears again ? Where were you ? How could he find you now !?

" Brotheeeeeeeeeeeeer !! " Ortho's call for Idia broke the silence loudly before kicking the door open with his rocket leg and wrecking it .

"Ortho , I'd told you not to wreck the door with your- waaa aah- ! " he led out a terrified scrram as he saw the huge board the two of you were holding by hand . " Sorrrry it took so long ! (y/n) suggested we finish sticking everything before we could've lost any of them so we did ! Hope that nothing is missing ," he said , putting the board slowly down so it wouldn't get any damaged . "Wha-what is this ??" Idia asks with his eyes wide open . "Your alchemy project , brother ! Mr Crewel wanted you to give something that required direct contact with nature , so here you go ! Best project ever ! " Ortho explained happily . You could see the light shimmering into his eyes , a light that proved how excited and happy he now was ; just as you wished him to be

Idia was at a loss of words , staring at the board with his mouth open as if he wanted to say something , but no sound came out . His eyes run all over the huge board ; fascinated and shocked at the same time : "Y-you...you two did really did discover more than 100 of ancient species !? My- many of these were considered to be long ago extincted - even the Eris's Orchid ! " Idia replied . He had studied Night Raven being rich in Biodiversity , but this was far greater than his expectations , specially now that he saw you two finding them .

You were relived to see him appreciating your work , even though he was expressing it in a pretty odd way : " So...Idia , you think that's good enough ?" you asked . Idia slowly raised his head and stared at the ground , still too shy to make an eye contact with you : "It's... perfect ," Idia mumbled shyly . Ortho led out a happy shout as he saw his brother satisfied . He quickly jumped into his embrace and hugs him , making Idia lose balance . "O- ORTHO- NO-," Idia shouted before they both fell to the ground . You gasped at the sight : "My god , you two alright !? "

You helped them both stand up and then , it was Idia's turn to speak : " Th-thank you . Both of you . I couldn't imagine someone going out of their way to do such a thing for me..."

"No," you cut him off . You turned toward Ortho and bowed down a bit to be at the same height as him : "It wasn't me , it was all because of Ortho . It was his idea to look for forgotten species and study them , he was the one who could find them using his analytical power and his studies and well-updated datas enabled us to identify each of them , he is really amazing ," Ortho gazed upon you with his eyes filled with disbelief . "I know, " Idia agreed . "Ortho is special and surely way greater than many out there , including me . But he still has hundreds of undetected abilities , which are unknown to even me . Because of someone like you , he discovered more of his abilities and grow even greater , right Ortho ? " Idia asked . Ortho nodded and then , gave you a really tight hug : " Thank you (y/n) , you are wonderful . Because of you my brother now won't get in trouble and I am now more equipped and mighty to be there for him , you are the best ,"

You held your tears of joy back from falling , knowing that they may bring pain to Ortho since he didn't know how to cry . Even Idia now was smiling at you , he seemed a lot more comfortable with you now ; just as he was with Ortho . Your heart as well drowned in joy as you saw Ortho the way you wished him to be : Happy

[genshin-djinn]

Genshin Impact Chapter 1 Act 3: A Reaction.

Chapter 1 Act 3 is what took my experience with this game from “good game” to “masterpiece”.

THIS POST CONTAINS MANY, MANY SPOILERS FOR GENSHIN IMPACT CHAPTER 1: ACT 3

Genshin Impact has some problems— actually, it has a shit ton of problems. But during the fight against hordes of Fatui, with the Adepti channeling their abilities through my gang, flying through them as Oz, decimating them with Diluc— I just thought, this is the best time I’ve had in a mobile game in my life.

This game might not be perfect now— it’s only a quarter of the way done if we’re counting Karenri’ah. But it will be a fucking masterpiece once it’s all out. If this is the level of quality we’re getting for our archon quests, this game is going to be an amazing time on story alone.

KEQING

I love Keqing with all my heart. If she were alive today she would be a socialist here to topple the ruling 1%. When ningguang asked Aether who they trusted more, her or Keqing, I hit the Keqing button as fast as possible.

I think one of my favorite things about Keqing is that she’s so completely honest, which is unusual for a Liyue politician. If she doesn’t like something, she’ll speak out against it. If she thinks something else should be happening, she’ll make it happen. She can probably be deceitful at times, but in general she’s straightforwards in that she wants a government for the people and by the people.

I can’t wait for her story quest!

NINGGUANG

pretty.... voice pretty....

Ningguang is cool. Her JP voice is very pretty, like she could do ASMR videos online or smth. One thing I decidedly did not like about Ningguang is how her personality just ???? flips? In the middle of the quest, for no reason other than “because plot”.

It’s established that Ningguang cares about two things more than anything— the Jade palace and Mora. Why, then, would she destroy the Jade palace for the sake of Liyue? I get that she’s a good person at heart at all, but I want to see more of her indecision, her brain saying “mora” and her heart saying “Liyue”. The way she just flips on a dime isn’t really strange but it does contradict with her preexisting characterization.

Childe’s Boss Fight!

The section of this quest from Childe’s fight to the Adepti + Qixing battle is just nonstop adrenaline.

Childe is IMO a lot more fun than Dvalin (sorry Dvalin). I’m at WL5 and have a tendency to play fast and loose with important mechanics like.... dodging, for example.... and Childe’s Mask Electro form ended up destroying my team. I killed him with Guoba because everyone else besides Xiangling was dead. I

Another thing I really enjoy about Childe’s boss fight is that in the irrationalities of Childe as a character, it actually makes sense. Genshin is decent at making weekly bosses logical excursions— Andrius wants you to get stronger, Dvalin’s weekly fight is ~~all a dream~~; but tbh sometimes the weekly bosses don’t make sense. Andrius wants to train us, not murder us! How does dvalin, a dream slash memory that doesn’t exist, manage to knock someone out?

Childe as a weekly boss actually makes perfect sense. He’s an adrenaline junkie addicted to the thrill of fighting people— to put this in modern AU terms, he’s the guy who’s first in line to ride the rollercoaster that failed all of its health and safety checks. Childe wants to befriend the Traveler entirely because they’re stronger than him, so that he can fight them over and over again until he’s the strongest. Of course, this will never happen, because the Traveler is the MC and therefore is stronger than all others. However, in this way Childe being a repeatable boss makes 100% perfect sense— he actually wants to fight the Traveler again and again and again.

The one question I have about Childe is how in the living feck are the Fatui letting him join the Traveler and fight for them *against the Fatui*??? I think this might be touched on in Childe’s Story quest, which I’ll do in a bit, but like????? They let him keep his delusion and just walk over to Aether like “aight fam I’m on your team now”? How?

Jade Chamber/ Guizhong Ballista vs Sea Monster Fight!!

Basically, all my charged adrenaline from nearly dying to Childe just came to a head in this one huge fantastic fight.

And Xiao :)

I absolutely loved seeing the Adepti and the Qixing work together. This fight was probably my favorite fight in the whole game— the music was amazing (soundtrack where), the graphics were so nice, the adepti were so feckin cool, using everyone’s abilities was n I ce. My adrenaline was reaching its highest point at this fight and it was just perfect. It was just so fecking fun after days of WL5 pain, having to pop like five ultimates to kill one hillichurl, to be able to just demolish swathes of enemies with Fischl and Diluc, run around like a madman thanks to Xiao, have infinite health idr who did that for me but bless them, just absolutely destroy.

Ever since I hit WL5 I haven’t been able to really just go insane during a fight and stop caring about HP/ when to use skills/ dodging and this have me that opportunity.

Zhongli’s Deal

*punches Zhongli across the room with the power of being the player character* I love this man so much.

Zhongli Zhongli Zhongli Zhongli Zhongli. I AM VERY ANGRY AT HOW THE PLOT RESOLVED HIS STORYLINE. But it also makes a lot of sense. And I think, for once, Zhongli should be allowed to be selfish.

Because choosing to leave Liyue was a bit selfish. He’s leaving the country that adores him, loves him, gives him shit for free; to its own devices and then to a completely unknown fate once the new Geo Archon becomes god and takes over. But he made a frankly fantastic plan and can now leave the country, for now, in peace.

I was absolutely delighted to see Zhongli in Morax form. Making deals with La Signora, being a complete and utter puppet master who set this entire situation up and played Childe like a kazoo; but just like his dear friend Venti, I think Zhongli is happier when he’s just Zhongli, the eccentric mortal. He seems so much happier and so much more relaxed when he’s forgetting about mora and eating dinner with Aether and Paimon. Rex Lapis might have just put Liyue through the wringer, but he can now put down his 3000- year long reign and just be the happy, eccentric Zhongli.

Zhongli’s little bit of insecurity over being a “bourgeois parasite” makes perfect sense now— he doesn’t want to be seen as Morax, a superfluous god who’s using his name to get whatever he wants from the humans he watches over.

But also the part of my brain that feeds off lore nEEDS to KNOW what Zhongli got from Tsaritsa. What could be worth a gnosis? His own happiness isn’t enough— Tsaritsa is likely going to use his gnosis to try and destroy Liyue. What could be worth that?

My main thought would be either “someone’s protection” or “another gnosis”, but I don’t think the latter is possible. The former could be possible but doesn’t really make sense either— a) whose protection is worth putting an entire country, much less the world, in danger and b) the Fatui are out to kill everyone who isn’t Fatui, so they won’t agree to spare a major player in the war to come like that. Brain go brrr.

I’m very hyped for Zhongli’s story quest, which I think is coming with his banner on Dec 1, when Childe’s banner ends. I really hope that Zhongli visits Mondstadt and chills with Venti for a while, but anything with this guy would be fine lol.

LORE

We got a lot of lore this update and I am delighted by it.

Firstly, we get a tiny hint of how Visions are bestowed— “if a person shows true strength of will at a desperate and fateful moment in their life, the gods will look upon them with favor.” Vague but more than we had before.

Next we got some neat lore about Inazuma— firstly, that it’s led by a god named Baal and secondly that it steals everyone’s visions. I’m very hyped to visit because guess what fam aether doesn’t have a vision.

Final Thoughts

In case you can’t tell from my insane ramblings, I loved Chapter 1 Act 3 and I absolutely cannot wait to play through Childe’s story quest and Chapter 2 and beyond.

The Prologue in Mondstadt set the stage for Genshin. We started out in a fantasy environment with a fantasy tale of an immortal bard and a dragon. Mondstadt was an excellent introduction to the world of Genshin.

And now? We’re starting to build on that. Chapter 1 brings us another story of another god and their relationship with the country they watch over. Liyue is much less of a traditional fantasy setting and takes the darkness we saw in Mondstadt— a friendship ruined by manipulation and suffering— and build on it. Now we don’t just see the Fatui more often but we also see more of the Treasure Hoarders and the way both groups kidnap and experiment on humans.

Mond started to introduce us to the Fatui, but Liyue is where they really start bringing continuous plot relevance. Inversely, we saw much more of the Abyss Order in Mondstadt than we did in Liyue. I’m extremely disappointed we didn’t see any more of the Princess this chapter, but it makes sense given that Chapter 1 was really more about the Fatui than the Abyss Order.

All I’m trying to say is the Liyue arc was an excellent continuation to the stage Mondstadt’s arc set. Now, we’re on to the world of the Eternal Shogun, Baal! I’m really excited to meet new characters and experience new stories of Inazuma, but I hope we’ll continue to see Mondstadt and Liyue in the future. Mondstadt is likely going to be the most “boring” of the countries we experience, cuz it’s just so classically fantasy- themed, but it will always be the first country we explored in this world.

After Inazuma (if I had to take a shot in the dark, inazuma’s arc will take from December 23 to maybe March or April) we’ll go to Sumeru, which I am really extremely hyped for because it sounds extremely different from Mond and Liyue and we’ll meet Cyno and possibly even Collei! (just me extrapolating lol). I can’t wait to see where Genshin Impact goes story- wise, because its first major update has brought so much to the table.

.

[n5md]

Cloudwalker

In our newly relaunched "Learn more about..." interviews, we switch up the continuity slightly and focus on just one release: Gimmik's Cloudwalker. Martin kindly agreed to answer a few questions to kick off what we'll refer to as v2 of the "Learn More About..." blog.

While Entre Les Chambres was the actual return of Gimmik to the public eye, Cloudwalker is more of a return to form. It is undeniably Gimmik; however, Cloudwalker treads some new ground for you. Can you shed some light on how the creative process changed from Entre Les Chambres / Deux Nouvelles and how those two albums might have influenced Cloudwalker?

Very well observed - they did influence Cloudwalker! Entre Les Chambres and Deux Nouvelles were both produced under technically limited circumstances. On top of that, I thought that no one will ever hear this material. Luckily it was not the case, and I got the chance to become a member of the n5MD family. When you produce with the idea that the material will never get released, it gives you a lot of room and space. You are not concerned about expectations. The music can flow and evolve freely. The calm nature of those albums helped that process. It was research where I experienced myself more as a witness than a composer. For me, that is a new approach. This approach was still the same when I produced Cloudwalker. That is the reason why the tracks are so diverse. Short Wave Memories and In My Family do not have anything in common, but that is the way they evolved, without me constructing anything. The most significant difference is that Cloudwalker was produced in a proper studio environment. Plus, I took a step into eurorack, which brings a very unpredictable element. And yes, that is Mutable Elements "Rings'' what you hear on In My Family. I was working on a self-generative patch with "Marbles'' when all of a sudden, the melody appeared...

I think you sent me In My Family shortly after you finished it, and it was one of the darkest days of the early pandemic; where our local government-issued curfews and such. It was the track that I needed at that moment; it brightened my day. It's very cool that the melody was a generative experiment gone right. I seem to remember you have quite a bit of the Mutable Instruments modules. Modular, to me, seems like a bit of a wormhole of experimentation. So, how do you stay focused when experimenting with new sounds and textures to bring, say, one of your Modular Nature tracks, which you have on your Youtube channel, to life.

Working with a modular system is entirely different. My approach is always a question. What will happen if I connect this with that and modulate with this? Then you start patching, and the results are entirely different from what I expected - a lot more exciting and better! In the beginning, I thought modular was about rebuilding synth voices. So I started emulating the signal-flow path of a 101 for a start. I missed the whole point of modular... A system has a life of its own and takes you to completely different places, and sometimes I do not even understand the results. (-: But that is not important. The decision to work with modular is to avoid walking down paths I have taken too many times when composing. What keeps you focused is your ear. The trick is to learn when to stop. In the beginning, I lost a lot of great patches when the result was already at 90%. When trying to reach 100%, my tweaks destroyed that patch's beauty, and I never found a way back to 90%. That happened a lot of times in the beginning. A modular system really helps to learn when to let go… (laughing). I chose Mutable Instruments because those modules are very focused on musical and harmonic results.

So, going back to Cloudwalker, how did it feel getting back to basics as far as Gimmik goes. People may not know that Entre Les Chambres and Deux Nouvelles were made for very personal listening. Care to shed a little light on those two, and more importantly, what made you want to go past those themes and bring Gimmik full circle for Cloudwalker?

Entre Les Chambres and Deux Nouvelles were NOT a conscious decision. Those were a necessity! The title Entre Les Chambres means "between two rooms", the space that is between two rooms. That is nowhere! It mirrors how I felt at that moment. There were many significant changes in my life, luckily nothing concerning my family, but still major changes. In order to cope with it all, I started making ambient tracks. It was the only thing that helped me to cope and focus again. The tracks happened by themselves. Listening to them and working on those albums was a calming experience. When they were finished, I played them to Chris, and he convinced me that he liked them. That led to the decision to make those first tapes. Later I sent them to you. Your reaction was very motivating because the music got released. With that motivation and getting back into a studio environment, the Cloudwalker tracks just poured out of me very quickly - it felt terrific to go back to the studio. My family gave me the time to work in my studio, and you and Chris gave very motivating feedback! From my perspective, this makes Cloudwalker my most important album so far, and I am very thankful for this chance! Another key element is that you gave me total freedom regarding artwork, choosing tracks, and their order. Just great!

Well, I knew going in that you know what you are doing. So I shouldn't have needed to step in and manage such details. For release prep, I'm available to take care of the details that an artist doesn't have access to or the working knowledge. You and Chris ran Toytronics, and you are a graphic artist as well, so I knew that you know the drill. If something was glaring or didn't work under the n5 stylistic umbrella, it is my job to say something, but I was pretty confident that wouldn't happen. I also know that after you completed the tracks, you took a great deal of time to get them to flow perfectly and also fit on four LP sides—your care in craft shows, and it's been great to work with you.

You brought up Chris, and there is an Abfahrt Hinwl remix on Cloudwalker, so; I'm going to ask. Are we going to hear some new Abfahrt Hinwl soon?

Thank you, as I said, that means a lot to me. And I still think that it is a fortunate situation. The AH RMX of Sailing Everest on Cloudwalker was just me, to be honest. That is why I used an abbreviation - AH. It is more a hint. It has a lot of the Abfahrt Hinwil ingredients. We tried to revive the project and realized that working over a distance via the internet does not work for either of us. The key of Abfahrt Hinwil was that we worked in the same room, at the same time, with the same equipment - listening to what the other one does - giving an immediate reaction. The most important point is communication, which has to happen immediately - you need to respond straight away, not with a delay. Today we find ourselves in two different life situations. We both would like to continue. After an online experiment, we realized it would be only possible when we visit each other and then work in the same studio. That is not possible at the moment, and Covid plays a significant role in that.

Ah, I see; Abfahrt Hinwil was you and Chris basically feeding off one another; also, there are cheques and balances, which is great to have. I completely understand why it would not be feasible to do it from a distance effectively. So, I'd like to pivot to these little builds I see on your Instagram. You recently sent me a pic of a peculiar little box that looks to be a synth. Assuming this is something you built (loving the stickering, by the way). What is this, and does it appear on Cloudwalker?

(laughing) That is a drone box handmade by a guy in Russia. Six oscillators, each one with a kill switch. Three standard range oscillators and 3 Sub. A very rough-sounding machine, great for drones. The filter sounds very nasty, just great. There is a little bit in the track Cloudwalker itself but washed out by Big Sky. The downside is that there is no midi, trigger gate, or voltage control. It is more of an experiment tool. The important parts of the track Cloudwalker have Mutable Instruments: Plaits and Tides 1, using the Sheep mode. Both outputs went into Warps, modulated by Stages. The little melody was played live on the Yamaha DX Reface, going into the Big Sky. It was all recorded live onto tape to 4 tracks to a Tascam 234. Then it was mixed the classic way, patchbay, fx, analog mixer main out to digital. 75% of the album was recorded to a Sound Devices MixPre-3 II.

It sounds like your Big Sky gets some action! Strymon makes some exceptional pedals. It seems like you can almost entirely make music out of the box if you needed to, which is excellent. So one last question: When we collaborated on the Cloudwalker one sheet text, you added something about the production tools "representing technology from 1958 to 2019," and I asked if 1958 was a type-o that needed to be corrected to 1985 when it was not. When people read that, I think they will be very curious as to what technology you utilized from that far back…

Yes, it is a great pedal, I love the sound and the fact that you get nice results very quickly.

1958- (laughing) There is an on oscilloscope from Russia, which can be seen in some of the videos on HIDDEN REALITY, and 2 vintage function generators. I got those old function generators from a close friend, he is an electronic engineer and professor for physics at a university. They got rid of all their old equipment, and he asked if I wanted to have something. He could not throw those old machines away, so he rescued them to his cellar. He changed the connections for me, so I can use them with the modular environment, using my standard patch cables. I used them a lot as modulation sources, as they can modulate extremely slow (like MI tides). But I have to admit that I got them for their looks in the first place…(laughing) - Those machines look like the machinery you see in Qs research center in old James Bond movies...

Order Cloudwalker now: US / UK / EU

Learn even more about Gimmik

[douchebagbrainwaves]

EVERY FOUNDER SHOULD KNOW ABOUT BUSINESS

This rule is left over from a time when algorithm meant something like the current Google? Why do patents play so small a role in software? Any hacker who looked at some complex device and realized that with a tiny tweak he could make it run more efficiently. In something that's out there, problems are alarming. It has for me. It may also help them to grasp what's special about your technology. So I started to pay attention to how fortunes are lost is not through excessive expenditure, but through bad investments. Fear the Right Things. Microsoft Word. But there are limits to how well they'll be able to hire better programmers, because they'll attract only those who cared enough to learn it.

4 million a month to the rapacious founder after two years? They just don't want to seem like they had to make concessions. Perhaps a better solution is to assume that anything you've made is far short of what it might have been. If no one else will defend you, you have to publish it, and that's just as bad as the mid seventies. Perhaps a better solution is to look at the problem from the other end. When a company starts fighting over IP, it's a sign they've lost the real battle, for users. Startups usually win by making something so great that people recommend it to their friends.1 You generally apply for a broader patent than you think you'll be granted, and the startups are mostly schleps. True, but I don't think publishers can learn much from software. So while they're often nice guys, they just can't help it.

And not just from the technical community in general; a lot of users. So if you're the least bit inclined to find an excuse to quit, there's always some disaster happening.2 This essay is derived from a talk at the 2006 Startup School. Patent trolls are hard to fight precisely because they create nothing. Economically, the print media and the music labels simply overlooking this opportunity? There's nothing special about physical embodiments of control systems that should make them patentable, and the examiners reply by throwing out some of your claims and granting others. You can't even drive the thing yet, but 83,000 people came to sit in the driver's seat and hold the steering wheel. Technology trains leave the station at regular intervals. Startup acquisitions are usually a lot of mistakes.3 Cross out that final S and you're describing their business model.

Nothing is more likely to buy you than sue you. Experts can implement, but they can't design. Before central governments were powerful enough to enforce order, rich people had private armies. But different things matter to different people, and it's unclear whether anyone could be. If nuclear winter really is here, it may be safer to be a contrarian to be correct, and by that point the innovation that generated it has already happened. The startups we've funded so far are pretty quick, but they don't understand software yet. Most successful startups make that tradeoff unconsciously.4 And for programmers the paradox is even more pronounced: the language to learn, if you love life, don't waste time, because time is what life is made of. We tell the startups we fund not to worry about it, because a toll has to be more than new. If you grow to the point where anyone considers you worth attacking, you're doing well. Viaweb.5 In middle school and high school, what the other kids think of you seems the most important quality is in a startup.

If you had a handful of 8 peanuts, or a shelf of 8 books to choose from, the quantity would definitely seem limited, no matter how obscure you are now. I don't really blame Amazon for applying for the patent, but that has historically been a distinct business from publishing. You can lose quite a lot in the brains department and it won't kill you unless you let them. So I advise fatalism. Both make sense here.6 Every couple days I slip and call it Viaweb.7 Actually, it's more often don't worry about this; worry about that instead. I don't think they hamper innovation much. This is a little depressing.8 VCs should be trying to fund more of. When attacked, you were supposed to fight back, and there is something grand about that. Patent trolls are companies consisting mainly of lawyers whose whole business is to accumulate patents and threaten to sue companies who actually make things.

A mere 15 weeks. The truth is more boring: the state of the economy doesn't matter much either way. Perhaps we can split the difference and say that mobility gives hackers the luxury of being principled. Viaweb, and became Yahoo's when they bought us. I now had to think about something I hadn't had to think about something I hadn't had to think about something I hadn't had to think about something I hadn't had to think about before: how not to lose it. The optimal ways to make money by creating wealth, not by suing people. I was leaving I offered it to him, as I've done countless times before in the same situation. To make money the way software companies do, publishers would have to become software companies, and being publishers gives them no particular head start in that domain. If companies stuck to their initial plans, Microsoft would be selling printed circuit boards. It's more like saying I'm not going to apply for patents just because everyone else does. We tend to say yes to the second, but no smarter than you; they're not as motivated, because Google is not going to go out of business if this one product fails; and even at Google they have a lot of bureaucracy to slow them down.

There are several reasons it pays to get version 1 done fast. 9% of the people who thought during the Bubble all I have to keep repeating.9 It's easy to let the days rush by. So why do so many people complain about software patents stifling innovation, but when one looks closely at the software business I know from experience whether patents encourage or discourage innovation, and the content was what they were selling, and the startups are mostly schleps. But the breakage seems to affect software less than most other fields. You can lose quite a lot in the brains department and it won't kill you. It's ok to be optimistic about what you can see people doing. And one of the earliest sites with enough clout to force customers to log in before they could buy something.10 It seems to me the only limit would be the number of startups is not the criteria they use but that they always tend to focus on the goal of getting lots of users. This principle is very powerful.11 The American way is to make money from it indirectly, or find ways to embody it in things people will pay for information otherwise?

So it is with hacking: the more rewarding some kind of job. Well, founders aren't much better. A copy of Time costs $5 for 58 pages, or 8. Even now I think if you asked hackers to free-associate about Amazon, the one to choose is your growth rate to compensate. Some examples will make this clear. You don't need to be constantly reminding yourself why you shouldn't wait. But while I'd spent a lot of regulations.

Notes

To get all that matters, just as well as problems that have been the plague of 1347; the point of a company. I'm writing about one specific, rather than admitting he preferred to call all our lies lies. College English Departments Come From? Startups are businesses; the point of a place to exchange views.

And the reason this works is that the most abstract ideas, because they were already lots of type II startup, but you get paid much. Back when students focused mainly on getting a job after college, they compete on tailfins. Google will pay the most important section.

If the company.

VCs seem to have balked at this, on the firm's site, they're nice to you; you're too early really means is you're getting the stats for occurrences of foo in the same town, unless the person who would make good angel investors. The best thing for founders; if their kids to them about. In theory you could probably be to write an essay about why something isn't the last place in the case, is deliberately intended to be significantly pickier.

Particularly since many causes of the 800 highest paid executives at large companies. Surely it's better and it will become less common for the average NBA player's salary during the war, tax rates were highest: 14. For example, would increase the size of the latter case, not because it's a proxy for revenue growth.

If near you doesn't mean easy, of course it was wiser for them by the Clayton Antitrust Act in 1914. This explains why such paintings are slightly more interesting than random marks would be more linear if all you have to admit there's no center to walk in with a degree that alarmed his family, that must mean you should prevent your investors from helping you to raise money succeeded, and how good they are to be about 50%. So far the only reason I say in principle is that it's no longer working to help a society generally is to how Henry Ford got started as a single VC investment that began with an online service.

I couldn't believe it, by doing another round that values the company, but half comes from. I say the rate of change in response to what you really need that recipe site or local event aggregator as much income.

The US News list tells us is what the rule of thumb, the reaction might be able to redistribute wealth successfully, because investors don't yet get what they're really saying is they want both. It was revoltingly familiar to slip back into it.

In a typical fund, half the companies that seem promising can usually get enough money from mediocre investors. So by agreeing to uncapped notes. Since most VCs aren't tech guys, the last thing you changed.

There is usually slow growth or excessive spending rather than trying to sell services than a nerdy founder trying to describe what's happening as merely not-too-demanding environment, but they hate hypertension.

The First Industrial Revolution, England was already the richest and most sophisticated city in the few cases where a great founder is being able to redistribute wealth successfully, because spam and legitimate mail volume both have distinct daily patterns.

Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Anton van Straaten, Robert Morris, Geoff Ralston, and Jessica Livingston for their feedback on these thoughts.

[youcancallmemeimei]

i didn’t like seeing the sunlight today so i slept like from the morning and just woke up. here is 12:25am. And it’s pretty quite which i like i wish there is no sound and sometime wish people just speak with handsigns so i can make excuse for not answering their question because i don’t know much hand signs lol. Jus randam thoughts. life seems more tiring for me thesedays i think (i have some illnesses)

And you don’t have to say things like i promise~ i won’t do~ kind of stuff. I think we are all just same human beings who make mistakes, eating up our own words when things change, just simply forgot to, just simply mind changed or whatver. But it happens and i do that too so don’t feel worried.

about having zero friends i feel somehow can relate because i didn’t make any friends after i moved to a new city and it’s been like 5yrs now. I first thought i would leave this city after a couple of years but for some reason i’m still here lol although the reason i moved here is becoming more fainted every year. Anyway i totally get what you are saying about how you feel happy sharing your honest thoughts and emotions with others. I don’t really share my honest thoughts and emotions like 100% of my time with others. Most of the time i care about time location and person who I speak with before i give them my words and that’s like not 100% what’s in me. This may sound kinda stressful to hold in daily life, but because i’m like that i tend to keep like one ore two best friend who i can be 90~95% real, but still not 100%. Maybe to my own brother and a very close cousin i tend to be about 99%. For my 100% i think.. i had one person about 5 years ago. And with that person i felt so different. Like i felt like i was talking naked in both my body and soul when i was talking to that person, maybe because that person was like that real to me first so naturally i could become 100% to that person i think. i can also relate how happy it could feel when you can be and share your 100% with someone else. I’m missing that happiness thesedays, and maybe that’s one of reasons why my life feel so empty. But i don’t think i can help that for myself, it’s just something that needs some god’s help i think.

And yeah you do have a beautiful soul because i kinda smell similar stuff from you which i had smelled from the person i used to know who also had a beautiful soul. and it’s a relief your dad was really the loving person to you, my parents were very strict with me when i was little but i feel that’s also part of love and i kinda miss that more or so thesedays. Like living the life on your own you get to kinda miss that certain boundaries that someone else other than you kinda already know and guide you through so you don’t get tripped over. That’s a good love i think. and whether the guidance is right or wrong, we could feel pretty secured at least.

I feel much much grateful you feel okay with waiting for me, and i do too and i mean it ^_^.

I understand that you feel so happy helping others out, but also please understand you also deserve greater love and attention from the others too, and from that i wish you could feel fully happy about receiving the love from the outside as well. and there are people who feel extremely happy to just get connected and share feelings and 100% of themselves with you. Those people will stay and care for you even they don’t express it or show themselves in your life like all the times.

Ps. Just some randome thoughts again, but I don’t like hearing the word sorry although i say it a lot myself LOL. I guess it’s sorta traumatic for me. but to me the word Sorry is more like i have other background context that i’m not feel like sharing to you so i wanna skip that part that i don’t wanna explain but rather i’d just say sorry to wrap that up and let’s switch to other topic kind of feels in it lol. It’s okay for me to hear that from other people but not really liking it when i hear it from certain people who i think we deserve more transparency in between. Usually we tend to feel giving some background context might be too tedious or can hurt the others feeling by letting them know of it but if they are really your side they’d wanna focus more on why rather than let’s just stay cool. and they will probably want to involve more and talk about it rather than just staying in distance and assume things over you. Today i kept you waiting because i slept the whole day, and hopefully it didn’t make you feel anxious either, and if it did make you anxious then let’s find out a way we can feel less anxious about it?! lol

Hope you have a goodnight and less dream so don’t need to wake up in between. Holiday is almost over here where i live, one more day and i get to go to work. My work needs me on site, so probably i will be quite during the day times and somedays i won’t be able to get back to you simply because i get to work even during the night time in my house. (I work in somewhat competitive work environment).

Well anyways, happy again to see your wall of texts that feels 100% genuine. Gnight Mei.

You didn't feel like seeing the sunlight? But why???

It's ok to long for some peace and quiet sometimes, but we also need to have human interaction in order to live fuller!

Some illnesses? I hope not, I wish you nothing but the best!

I know what is like to move to another city, actually, i moved to another city 6 years as well, and not being able to connect with the locals is quite weird, but i got used to, I took advantage of the fact that no one knows me, who I am, I'm just a foreigner, and I really like to ask... Like.. let's say ,in the supermarket.. is this how you do it here? Oh i didn't know! It makes me feel good, if the reason why you moved is almost gone you shouldn't worry to much, take advantage of the situation, life never goes as we plan, but we should always looks for the good side, remember, every cloud has a silver lining!! Plus, you have me! An online friend :)

I get what you mean by not sharing who you are 100%, and it's completely acceptable, in the other hand I share who I am so they take it or leave it, I'm not going to shape myself for someone, it's as if we were LEGO, you add things to become something like a rocket, or you take some pieces out to become a little car, but you're still a piece of lego hahahaha idk you can add things to your life and take out, but you're still yourself, and in my opinion you don't have to hide things from from others because if you hide a piece from the rocket it won't be compete, if you hide something's from others the relationship won't be complete, hiding or not telling something is completely different than waiting for the right time to say it.

I'm glad you've met someone that makes you feel confident enough to show them your soul.

You don't have to let your happiness depend on others gorgeous, i leaned that in the bad way but I'm glad I did, your happiness should only depend on you, don't give that power to anyone, babe you should be HAPPY! You deserve it. I used to think being strict was equal to not loving you, but now, I'm agree with you, it's love, taking care of each other, and of course I'll wait for you, but don't take too long, I'll wait either way, but i might get a little anxious lol

You're very sweet, but because I've been quite lonely, and I've been through a lot of stuff that I'd never wish to anyone and during those times people were rude, i learned that we should always try to make others happy and help the in every way we possibly can, because we don't know what they're going through, i prefer giving than receiving, but i hope you get extremely happy to share your feelings with me.

If you don't like the word sorry then I won't say it.

Maybe we can feel less anxious about the replies if we find a closer way to do it without being to close.... Any suggestions?

I'd like to hear more about you, and as I said, I'll wait for your replies, but... Is there anyway i don't interrupt you but still hear from you? I mean... There's always a way... If you feel comfortable enough of course, I won't do anything you don't like :)

What do you do for a living? I'm curious ^^

I'm always happy when I get your messages, and I really really hope to get more.

Have a lovely week gorgeous, may your work flows easily.

Looking forward for your replyyyyyyyyyy

[doof-doofblog]

"I Can't Believe It!"

Tuesday 10th November 2020

(Part 2)

Hello again folks! Hope your week is going well so far. Today's blog is going to be reviewing the second episode which aired on Tuesday evening. The first part ended with a big cliff-hanger where Rainie asked Tiffany to be a surrogate for her and Stuart. Will Tiffany agree? I'm certain the majority of you are well ahead compared to me, but I hope you'll enjoy reading this blog regardless.

Anyway, let's jump right into. The episode begins with Tiffany, Rainie and Stuart in the Café. This clearly looks to be the day after Rainie asked Tiffany the biggest favour of her life. Stuart and Rainie are eager to hear whether Tiffany has made a decision on whether to be their surrogate. Tiffany admits she still hasn't come to a decision as she admits that there's a lot to take into consideration. It's understandable that she'd be worried about Keegan also and what he'd say. I mean, £10,000 is a lot of money, Tiffany and Keegan would be able to make such a good life for themselves with that money, how could she say no?! Plus she'd be giving a couple something they've always wanted, don't they deserve to be parents? As Rainie and Tiffany are discussing the situation, Keegan makes his way into the Café, he briefly acknowledges Stuart, but Stuart can barely look him in the eye and leaves without saying a word. Keegan looks instantly suspicious, why would Stuart avoid him like that?! As Rainie follows Stuart out of the Cafe, Keegan approaches his wife and asks basically what is going on and mentions how weird Stuart acted towards him. He questions whether it was because they were still angry about Rainie's accident, but Tiffany assures her husband that that's not the case, she then feels like she has to come clean, he'll only find out eventually, so it's probably best if she tells him now, it's then she admits the truth that they've asked her to be a surrogate for them.

Meanwhile, Denise has taken young Raymond to the park, it's incredibly sweet how she's trying to bond with her son. It's understandable why the boy is so shy and timid, he's been swooped into a new environment and - as far as I know - has no idea where his Nan or parents or siblings are, how can a young boy his age understand what's going on. Denise is unknown to him, she's just this lady who has taken him in, but of course he's not going to know that she's his Mum, and probably won't know for a long time. I love how Denise is so gentle with him, talking to him even though he doesn't respond. As she's talking to the young boy, Jack turns up as he's running through the park. Even though they have split up, they remain friendly as Jack asks how little Raymond is getting on, Denise confirms that he's settling in slowly but he still doesn't talk very much, she mentions that she's going to take him to a specialist just to see if it'll help as she doesn't feel ready to put him into a nursery yet. Jack mentions perhaps he could socialise with other children - which I think would be a brilliant idea, the amount of children on the Square, I'm sure it wouldn't be long until he made friends. Maybe Denise might let him play with other children eventually?

At the undertakers, Keegan is livid about what the Highway's have asked of his wife. He accuses Stuart of wanting to sleep with his 17 year old wife (Also I had no idea that Tiffany was just 17! I thought she was at least 19/20!) ... Anyway, Stuart and Tiffany both reassure Keegan that Stuart wouldn't have to sleep with her for her to carry a baby, Stuart confirms that it's all done in lab, and the baby biologically would be Stuart and Rainie's, they simply just need someone to carry the baby for them, someone they trust. Everything would be above board and legal. Keegan sighs as he seems to understand everything but he informs Stuart that they're going to have to find someone else - the next line I didn't really like the sound of "My wife's body is not for rent!" - I'm amazed how Keegan can even see it like that! Like seriously, how does his brain work?! Tiffany would be doing a wonderful act for a couple who can't conceive and who are desperate to have a child, I think it's probably the most honourable thing you could do for someone. Tiffany is speechless as her husband walks out leaving Stuart devastated.

Meanwhile on the Square, Phil walks past Kat on her stall, and once again she's winding him up as she's still wearing his West Ham football shirt. Phil has had enough of her games and tells her to give him his top back. But I love how Kat winds up him up even more, questioning whether she should take her own clothes off or strip Phil of his clothes. As Phil walks up to her she warns him not to come any closer as she will scream, but Phil doesn't believe as the closer he gets, she warns him further and further. Suddenly she lets out this blood curling scream for the whole Square to hear. The only thing is, as she screams, Denise can be seen walking down the street with young Raymond - has she seen everything? Something tells me that she is going to completely get the wrong end of the stick. She'll question as to why Kat was screaming as she won't believe Phil's side of the story and stop him from seeing Raymond.

At the Atkins household, Shirley is watching as Gray finishes a phone call with Karen. He reveals to her that Karen wants to meet up with him in the park. Shirley believes it's a good thing and that he should, it's been quite a while since he's seen his children. She persuades him that the children should be back living with him, but Gray seems to think that they're better off with the Grandparents. It's then Shirley tells him of her experience being a Mother, she still believes that she hasn't been the best parent, even though she thought she was doing the best for her children. But she does give Gray some really good advice, the longer he leaves it the harder it'll get.

Back out on the Square, Stuart approaches Keegan on his sandwich stall and tries to apologise. He describes that he and Rainie are like kids in a sweet shop once they get an idea in their head. Stuart acknowledges that Keegan has had it tough the past few months regarding the death of his sister, Chantelle and him trying to make a name of himself. It looks like that they both have a mutual understanding with each other and Keegan admits that it just feels weird for him knowing that - to put it politely - a part of Stuart is going to be inside his wife. Suddenly Tiffany approaches them and I can totally understand what she's saying her husband. She tells Keegan that the way he is speaking about her is awful, it's her body and she can do what she likes - why is it that he's making the decisions? And she is telling the truth, Tiffany hasn't even given them an answer yet, it's a though Keegan is making the decision for her, when it actual fact, it's completely up to her at the end of the day. Keegan apologises to his wife and she tells him that she actually does in fact like Stuart and Rainie and part of her does want them to be happy and have a family. She tells her husband that £10,000 could change their lives! She pleads to him to just sit down and talk/think it through, Keegan once again takes another big sigh and promises he'll think it through, for his wife's sake, he says that he'll try and support her and stand beside her, but at the end of the day she will be the one that's giving birth ... I don't understand why that's such a big deal, babies are born every day! Women give birth every day! The human body is an incredible thing and what a woman's body goes though is astonishing, being able to carry a tiny human for 9 months and then give birth is a wonderous thing. There shouldn't be anything fearful about it ... BUT ... (And my mind has gone a completely 1-80 here!) - What if something tragic happens during the birth and Tiffany dies in childbirth? What if there are complications with the pregnancy?! As much as this story could be beautiful, I do (Now) have a feeling that something tragic could happen.

Returning to Denise at home, she appears to be on the phone to someone, a specialist I'm assuming? It looks like she's trying to get help of trying to build a bond with her young son. She's trying to get through to them and trying to explain that she's his birth Mother and the poor boy has no idea who she is. It looks like she's pleading for someone to help her whilst she's trying explain the situation. I do feel for Denise, she's trying her absolute best to support and be there for her son, but of course he's been through something traumatic and everything he once knew has all gone. It's hard for a little boy his age to understand completely what's going on or what's happening. I'm hoping in time, he'll come to open up to Denise and eventually they'll be able to build a bond with each other.

At home, Tiffany looks as if she's watching birthing videos online - which is probably not the best idea. Labour and giving birth is a different experience for every woman. Some have really easy births, some have it a lot harder - it simply depends on the baby. But of course watching videos like that are going to terrify her and perhaps scare her into going through with it. Outside on the Square, Mitch finds his son in a world of his own. In not so many words, Keegan tells his father that he and Tiffany are having a disagreement - I kind of liked the way they were describing things by magic and pulling rabbits out of a hat - it was quite a clever take on things. Mitch sits along side his son and gives him some really good fatherly advice, he asks Keegan whether he has heard of the phrase "Happy wife, happy life!" - to which Keegan shakes his head. Now I think sometimes that phrase can be a a bit shady, but Mitch describes in such a lovely way, mentioning his Grandparents having a happy marriage which lasted over 50 years. He says that if your wife is happy, it should make you happy and as he says all this to son, it look as if Keegan completely understands what he has to do.

Back in the park, Whitney approaches the Atkins children, Mack and Mia as they play football. As they play they ask whether their father will be joining them. Whitney informs the children that unfortunately he has to work, this disappoints the kids as they tells Whitney that he hasn't played with them since their Mum passed away. He spends all his time with Shirley now and not them, Whitney is surprised to hear this and informs the young girl and boy that their father loves them dearly and would do anything for them. It's then as they continue to play, Whitney takes out her phone - is she going to convince Gray to make some time with his kids? Meanwhile at home, Gray and Shirley look as if they're doing work, Gray is on his laptop and Shirley is looking at paper work while Tina is sat in the living room behind them, (I loved Tina in this scene, I loved her clumsiness)  She's complimenting the house that Shirley has found herself in. I loved how she asked whether the cushion on the sofa was filled with feathers, Shirley's response was brilliant - I'll fill you with feathers if you don't be quiet, and then of course when Tina switches the television it blares through-out the whole household. Tina then asks whether it's possible to stay there for a while as the place she's living at is just constantly full of arguments. Shirley informs her sister to grab her coat as she's going to walk her back to her place, as they leave Gray's phone pings and as he looks over he can see that he's received a message from Whitney telling him that his children want to see him, along with a picture of his children.

At home, Denise appears to be juggling a few things, trying to sort out little Raymond's tea whilst trying to sort out appointments with the salon on the phone, so much so that she burns her finger on the burning hot oven tray. Suddenly the doorbell rings, Denise is surprised to see Jack standing there. She hangs up her phone call and invites him in. It's then that Jack holds out to her an envelope full of money, he admits he wants to help contribute with the expense of Denise seeing a specialist. Denise, at first, is reluctant to take it from him as she explains that it's not his problem and she can't take money from him. But Jack admits that he still cares about her and begs her to take the money, as it'll mean she wont have to bother Phil and also it would be a friend helping out another friend. Denise smiles and thanks her ex-boyfriend for his kindness and accepts the money. As she offers him a cup of coffee, they both smile - do you think her and Denise will rekindle their romance? Will Jack be able to stand by Denise and support her in bringing up Raymond? I'd like to see them get back together, it's clear they still care for one another.

Meanwhile, at the Slater household, Kat returns to find the household empty but is surprised to hear Phil's voice coming from the living room. She is stunned to see him sat in a chair and asks him how he entered their property, to which he reveals that the door was left open. She threatens to call the police if he doesn't leave the house but Phil is quick to respond. He tells her that he's come for his shirt and Kat questions him why he wants it back so desperately, it's then he admits that the top has sentimental value and it was going to be a gift for young Dennis for his 18th birthday. Kat is quick to apologise and admits she only took/wore it to get his attention and assures him that she was going to give it back. Kat then proposes that she'll only give him the top back if he goes and checks out the job she mentioned to him a while back, Phil can't believe what he's hearing. But Kat tells him that if he was to go with her, he'd see she wasn't as stupid as he thought. Something tells me that Phil will only go through with this dodgy robbery job just so he can get the shirt back? What do you guys think?

Returning to Jack and Denise, Denise informs him that trying to sort things out over the phone she's facing a battle of questions that she doesn't know how to answer, because unfortunately she hasn't got the answers to give them. How is she supposed to know if Raymond knows he's adopted, when he won't even speak. Jack throws in suggestions maybe asking a family friend or another family member or someone she might be able to contact, and it's then he recalls that Raymond's adoptive father was a vicar to which Denise reacts positively and recalls which church he was registered at. Okay - something is giving me a very bad feeling - I'm sure you guys remember that Denise's ex-husband Lucas was a pastor of some kind, or was a holy man and had something to do with the church - what if Denise goes to this church and finds that Lucas is now out of prison and back at the church. We know Lucas is returning to the Square, I feel this may just be the start of his return, what do you guys think? Personally, I am SO excited for Lucas and Chelsea to be returning and I hope their return to the Square will be a permanent one. But it feels that this build up into helping Raymond will be the most brilliant way in bringing them back into Denise's life, of course it may be unfortunate for her, but it'll be SO interesting. How is Chelsea going to react when she finds out she has a little brother and that her Mum slept with Phil Mitchell?! It's going to be brilliant I'm sure!

Back out on the Square, Phil bumps into Isaac and asks him why he hasn't updated him on Raymond in recent weeks. Isaac admits that Denise knows so unfortunately he can't continue giving him information, to which Phil tells him to give him his money back. But Isaac reveals he spent the money on treating Raymond to pizza and a toy, to which Phil can't really react to. He knows that if the money has been spent on his son, he can't really be mad. Isaac tells him that if he's so desperate for information on his son then he can speak to Denise, there should be no harm considering he is his father.

Returning to Tiffany and Keegan, she reveals to her husband that she's watched a video online of someone giving birth, but she couldn't finish it. But then she admits that she forced herself to watch the video till the end and she admits to her husband that she found it beautiful. She tries to persuade her husband that they can go through with this, they can treat it like their doing a job and/or a favour to someone, Rainie and Stuart will have the baby they've always longed for and Tiffany and Keegan will be able to use the money to evolve Keegan's business, they'll be able to get all the equipment and supplies they need to really make his business take off. But Keegan, once again, is so mopey thinking that people like him don't deserve to be successful and have dreams, but Tiffany then tells him that his sister wouldn't want him thinking that way and they would both want him to achieve his dream and be a big success.

Back at the Atkins household, Gray is finally reuniting with his children as they show him their drawings they've done of their Mum. Gray is incredibly touched and praises his children for drawing such gorgeous pictures. He suggests to them that they do some more drawing and eagers them to get their drawing supplies so they can do some together. As the children leave to grab their things, Gray thanks Whitney in bringing the children back to him and helping and it's then she tells him that if he ever needs any more help or if he needs her to look after the children until he feels ready to have them back permanently, she's willing to help whenever she can. Gray smiles and thanks her, to which Whitney smiles back.

Above the undertakers, Rainie is fast asleep on the sofa, but Stuart wakes abruptly as he announces that they have visitors, slowly Tiffany and Keegan appear from the staircase. This scene well and truly touched me, I began to well up! Tiffany begins to apologise for what happened earlier in the day, but then she softly reveals to the couple that after a long discussion with Keegan and thinking long and hard about it, they want take them up on their offer and will happily help them have a baby. Everyone is silent as they take in the news, both Rainie and Stuart tear up and Stuart asks whether they're being serious, and Tiffany confirms that she will carry their baby for them. Rainie is tearful as she thanks the red-head. Stuart excitedly states that between the four of them they will make a beautiful baby and he rushes to embrace his wife. Tiffany excitedly joins them and everyone is incredibly happy and excited. But as the three of them embrace in a huge hug, Keegan is left standing and watching, he looks towards the camera and appears less excited than anyone else.

Urgh ... Why can't Keegan see that they're doing something wonderful for the couple?! Of course he's bound to have concerns, is he jealous maybe? Or does he simply not want his wife to do this? I don't know, I think, personally, Keegan needs to realise that this is adult stuff, he's not a kid anymore. He can't mope around because he hasn't got his way, he needs to put on a smile and remain positive. Will Keegan eventually come round to the idea? Could this maybe even break Keegan and Tiffany? I mean this is EastEnders, as much as I want and hope that Stuart and Rainie get the baby they've always longed for, I fear that maybe there could be tragedy along the way. Could Tiffany lose the baby? Will she die in childbirth? Who knows? But this is another story I think is really going to touch people and will end up being gripping, it'll either have a wonderful or devastating ending. What do you guys think?

I hope you've enjoyed reading this blog, I have really enjoyed writing this one. I hope you all enjoy your day and I will be back tomorrow with another blog. Thank you again everyone for taking your time read, I really do appreciate it, it means the world. Every comment, every message, every like - I do notice it and I want you guys to know that it means the world to me that you enjoy this blog as much as I enjoy writing it. Enjoy the rest of your day folks and I'll be back very soon. Love you all xXx

[eryiss]

Request: Portrait of a Lightning God

Summary: With a crappy job and no financial support, Laxus needs money. On Bickslow and Evergreen's advice, he goes for an audition to model for the reclusive painter Freed Justine. A man he knows nothing about, but finds himself enthralled by. [Fraxus One Shot]

This was part of a prompt based request thing I'm doing, based off of a request where Freed is a painter and Laxus is a model. It was made by Tumblr user: @alex-is-wily. I hope you all enjoy and if you have a request please leave a comment or maybe go to the ask box.

You can read this on FanFiction, Archive of our Own, or under the cut. Hope you enjoy it ^.^

Portrait of a Lightning God

Laxus couldn't quite believe he had resorted to this.

He was standing in an art studio, with another man looking him up and down. This was a situation unfamiliar to Laxus, and one far from his comfort zone. The man inspecting him didn't seem to be at all bothered by Laxus' discomfort, either because he had been in this situation before and was used to it, or simply because he was the type of man who didn't take other people's feelings into account. Laxus hoped it wasn't the latter; if this went well, the two men would be spending a lot of time together.

That was the nature of being a painter's model.

The whole thing was Bickslow and Evergreen's idea. Since leaving college, Laxus had been unemployed and using his family's money to get by. Apparently Makarov had gotten sick of that and cut him off. The only job Laxus had managed to get hadn't paid well, just enough to keep him in his apartment and eating. But it was unstable. His friends' solution was to pick up some extra money by modelling.

He had immediately discounted the idea, but they had been prepared; very prepared. They'd found an ad online from a painter needing a model for an upcoming painting. They had done a background check on him; the artist was respected, and previous models had only good things to say. They'd even gone so far as to contact him so they could get a better understanding of what Laxus would actually need to do. Apparently it should take four sessions, it would happen in the countryside, and would involve no nudity; Evergreen apparently knew that would have been one of Laxus' first questions.

There was no reason to say no. Annoyingly.

So now he stood in the painter's studio, allowing the man to inspect him. Laxus wasn't entirely sure what the inspection was for, as he had already sent the man pictures of himself and had been accepted for the job. Based on the multiple poses Laxus had been told to make – all just different ways of standing – he assumed this was a brainstorming session.

"Cross your hands in front of you and look down," The painter instructed, and Laxus complied.

He had looked into who the man was. His name was Freed Justine, he was a growing name in the art world (if the articles about him were to be believed) and apparently favoured landscapes to anything with an actual person in it; there was obvious exceptions, but not many. His private life was something of a mystery, apparently, and he had gained the reputation of a recluse.

Laxus hadn't accepted that and had also gotten in contact with one of Freed's previous models; a woman named Mirajane. She spoke highly of him, both as a painter and as a person, and had encouraged Laxus to try it out. From their conversation, Laxus surmised he was a good man, but could be standoffish. He was certainly seeing that.

A small hum broke Laxus' thoughts.

"I think that might be it," Freed said, apparently to himself. "You can relax now."

Laxus did so and looked behind him towards the painter. He had walked to a drafting table and sketched a quick figure in the same pose that Laxus had just taken. It only took a few moments and was nothing more than a series of lines and ovals, but it was certainly Laxus; the blonde couldn't help but be impressed.

"You said that you're free on Wednesdays and the weekends, correct?" He asked, looking towards Laxus.

"Yeah," Laxus nodded. "The other days I start at eight and finish at five."

"Okay. I'll email you the time and places ill require you, and I'm sure we can discuss our meetings further that way," He stood up and reached into his back pocket, pulling out his wallet. Laxus frowned as he picked out a selection of notes and offered them to him; it was around a hundred dollars altogether.

"I didn't think I was getting paid for today?" Laxus asked; not yet taking the money.

"I need you in certain clothing; a black exercise shirt and black jeans. I could attempt you guess your sizes, but this seems easier," He offered the money again. "Make sure its high-quality fabrics, and if this isn't enough tell me and I'll reimburse you for what I owe."

"And if it comes under?"

"Consider it a bonus," Freed shrugged. "I'd appreciate it if you got them quickly, though. Ideally I'd like to start on Saturday."

"Sure," Laxus nodded. "There anything else you need from me?"

"Not today. As I said, I can email you with the details of where you'll need to be and when," Freed placed his pencil down and looked Laxus in the eye for the first time. He was smiling a little. "I look forward to working with you, Mr Dreyar."

"Err, you too," Laxus muttered awkwardly.

Freed didn't walk Laxus to the door, but the blonde didn't care. As he walked, he played with the money in his pocket absently; this was the most disposably income he'd had since being cut off. And definitely too much for what Freed had wanted him to buy. He decided that he would buy the clothes immediately; he'd use some of the remaining money on getting a pizza or something for his dinner. It would be great not eating something not from a microwave.

After leaving the studio, he thought about Freed. Mirajane had been right; he could be blunt and seemingly uncaring, but he wasn't exactly rude. And logic dictated the more time they spent together, the less awkward it would be. It wouldn't be nearly as bad as Laxus had expected it to be.

The guy had a nice smile, too.

-~---~-

If it hadn't been obvious from his studio, Freed had an incredibly keen creative eye.

This was the only conclusion Laxus had made when he first saw where he would be modelling. He had managed to find a small, private lake outside of the city. It had an old wooden dock on it which, which looked at from a certain angle, stood directly in front of a large mountain. He had managed to find this location, and gotten permission to use it, within three days. It was… incredibly impressive to do so.

After Freed had explained what he wanted Laxus to do – stand on the edge of the dock in the same pose he had done in the studio – the blonde had asked why he hadn't organised a location beforehand. Apparently he had, and the original idea had been to paint him on the top of a city rooftop, but Laxus was better suited to a more natural environment, as he was a more earthy figure. Laxus didn't know if this was a compliment, an insult or just an observation, so he decided just to ignore the comment and do what the painter wanted.

That had been over an hour ago, they hadn't spoken since.

Laxus hadn't known any creative people in his life, so didn't know what exactly to do. He had decided that he would remain quiet, staying in the pose, as this was safe. Freed seemed level headed, but artists could be volatile and Laxus didn't want to risk angering the man. His work has staff rescheduling and Laxus knew he was at risk, so money was tighter than normal.

It was boring, but not difficult work. The post wasn't taxing on his body, and Freed had allowed him a single earphone so he could at least listen to music. It was essentially as expected. He was standing still; Freed was painting him.

"I should apologise," Freed spoke suddenly, and Laxus almost broke the pose.

"Why?" He asked after a few seconds to think.

"I was not welcoming when you came to my studio," Freed explained, and Laxus glanced at him. he was still painting. "When your friends contacted me, they explained this wasn't something you've done before, and you might not be comfortable. I didn't take that into account, that wasn't fair of me."

"You don't need to worry about that," Laxus placated.

"Perhaps," Freed agreed, and Laxus frowned a little. "But still, I apologise. I've been stressed for the last few months and I haven't been the most respectful person."

"Well, don't beat yourself up over it," Laxus assured him. He waited a moment before speaking again. "What's got you stressed out?"

"I have an exhibition in a month, it's in the biggest gallery in town. Well, other than museums, but they hardly count if you're an artist with an actual pulse," Freed explained, and Laxus chuckled. "But it's high profile, and I have to please them to keep in good faith. They want twenty exhibits altogether, and I'm not as prepared as I would like to be."

"You far behind?"

"I've finished sixteen of the twenty so far."

"That ain't too bad," Laxus said, glancing up at Freed again. He still hasn't stopped painting despite their conversation, so it wasn't too much of a distraction. "When did you start?"

"Eight months ago," Freed sighed, and Laxus winced a little. That meant about an average of two paintings a month, and now he had a month to do four.

"That could be worse," Laxus attempted to assure him, and Freed stopped painting to look at him with a slight raised eyebrow. His tone must not have been convincing. "Do you think you can make it."

"I'm sure I can," Freed sounded resigned. "I just don't want to sacrifice quality."

"Well, I'm sure whatever you do, you'll manage to make it good," Laxus was surer of his words now. "From what I've seen of your stuff, you're pretty good. And the critics seem to like you, especially that Jason guy. He just couldn't stop talking about how great you are."

"He' an enthusiastic man," Freed chuckled. "But still, this exhibition is like a test. Artists who had better respect than me tried filling that hall. If it doesn't work, they were classed as over-hyped and forgotten by the end of the month. I'd rather than not happen with me."

"Well, good luck I guess," Laxus didn't know what else to say. But the quiet was deafening. "And you really don't need to worry about upsetting me; I can take a bit of rudeness. I was a pretty big asshole as a teenager, it'd be hypocritical if I was sensitive about it."

"I suppose it would," Freed nodded, before smirking a little over his canvas. "Well, I'll be sure to treat you like dirt then, if that's what you want."

"Can't picture that," Laxus challenged, glancing up again. "I mean you felt so guilty about making me uncomfortable. I mean you must have been worrying about it the moment I left the door, ya might have even lost sleep. But sure, if you wanna upset me, you try your best."

"Don't misinterpret my politeness as being passive. It will not end well for you," Freed warned, and Laxus let out a single laugh. "Unrelatedly, that pose isn't working. You seem to be healthy enough unless your muscles are simply for vanity. Perform a handstand, quick as you can. I'm sure a man like you can sustain it for a few hours."

Laxus laughed, waited a few seconds and glanced at Freed. The artist was looking at him expectantly, no sign of a joke on his features. Laxus broke the pose, a little disbelieving.

"You're serious?" His voice was a little panicked.

A moment passed before Freed smirked again and looked down to his canvas. Laxus let out a little breath of relief before laughing and getting back into the pose. He was smiling this time and hoped that it wouldn't ruin the painting in anyway, because he couldn't seem to fight it. At least he felt a lot more comfortable now.

"Asshole," He laughed.

"I suppose," Freed agreed, and that made Laxus smile wider. "But if you doubt me again, I can assure you I'll follow through with any threats I make. You'll find my desire to be spiteful supersedes my desire to be successful."

"I don't doubt it," Laxus laughed again.

He smiled for the rest of the session.

-~---~-

The more Laxus got to know Freed, the more he liked him.

Over the weeks they had been meeting up for the modelling sessions, they had spoken a lot. Sometimes about Freed, sometimes about Laxus, and sometimes about whatever came to mind. The sessions had lasted hours, so it was hard to remember what exactly all their conversations had been about, but Laxus enjoyed them all. Freed made him laugh, made him feel comfortable, and made him look forward to their sessions together. He loved being around the other man.

He didn't need to go to every session anymore, but he still did. Apparneltly Freed had drawn him first and had planned to do the background after; his usual way of painting models. But Laxus insisted that he be there just in case he needed to make an adjustment and needed him there. It was an excuse, Laxus just enjoyed Freed's company.

Maybe Freed knew this. Laxus didn't mind if he did.

Laxus had grown attracted to Freed and thought perhaps Freed felt the same way. He hadn't spoken about it; he wasn't the type to let his feelings be known. Certainly not when there was a risk of fucking things up between the two of them. Being friends was better than nothing.

But still, the blonde couldn't help but think that maybe something was happening between them. Freed hadn't once questioned why Laxus wanted to be there when he didn't need to be and seemed to welcome the company. They'd gone to coffee a few times, once after a session and once just because Freed had offered. Even as he watched Freed paint, it didn't exactly feel platonic. Though the wine the two were drinking might have contributed to that.

God, were they having a picnic weren't they? This was close to being a date. That was too much to think about.

A he glanced to Freed, he frowned a little. He had noticed that the conversation was somewhat one sided. He had put it down to Freed being engrossed in his work, it had happened from time to time. But previously, Freed hadn't worn the worried expression on his face. His hands hadn't been tensed. And he hadn't drunk three glasses of wine within a two-hour period.

"Okay," Laxus sighed after a while, taking the paintbrush out of Freed's hand. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong," Freed said immediately.

"Fucking lie to me again, Justine. See what happens?" It was perhaps a little confrontational. But Freed could be a closed book when he wanted to be, and Laxus was slightly buzzed from the wine. It seemed to work, as Freed's facial expressions went from challenging to resigned.

"It's just… I haven't had this much trouble painting something in a while. It's bothering me," Freed sighed, looking at his painting.

Laxus couldn't agree with Freed, the painting looked great. Only half of the background was completed, but it was done very well. And the figure that he had been modelling for looked great as well. Perhaps he was just the type of person who was overly critical of their work, although that didn't seem consistent with what he knew about the man. Freed had a lot of confidence in himself and wasn't the type to shy away from his own pride.

"What can I do to help?" He asked; he was better at solutions than sympathy. "I can get back up there and see if that helps."

"Perhaps. Thank you."

Laxus nodded and walked to the small wooden dock. He got back into his pose and didn't speak for a while, knowing that it would help Freed get back into a creative mindset. Glancing up without moving his head, he saw that Freed was painting again, so decided that remaining quiet would be for the best. Freed's deadline from the gallery was getting closer, and it was only fair he did what he could to help him out.

He looked down again and allowed Freed to paint. This continued for a little while – around ten minutes, if Laxus was guessing correctly – until Laxus heard a small scuffling sound. He frowned and looked up. As he did so, Freed shouted.

"Fuck!" His voice echoed as he stepped over his upturned easel.

Freed hadn't sword often, and the visceral tone in which he had said it shocked Laxus. He left the dock immediately and walked to Freed, who had chosen to pace around the small clearing of dirt that he and Laxus had been sitting on. His jaw was clenched tight, eyes unblinking, and breath slightly audible. He was clearly incredibly stressed out.

"Woah," Laxus said, grabbing Freed by the shoulders and stopping him. "What happened?"

"It's wrong," Freed snapped. "When I started it, I thought I had the idea down. But I don't, and I've been painting it wrong basically since we began. This was meant to be the focus point of the exhibit, and it's a conventional piece of bullshit. A child could have done this."

Laxus would disagree, but Freed didn't need that. "Can you fix it?"

"Not without starting over," Freed sighed.

"Well, what exactly would you do differently, what's wrong with it?" Laxus asked. Maybe if Freed explained why he didn't like it; he would figure a way to fix it.

"There's no personality in it. No honesty. There's none of-" Freed cut himself off, before thinking a moment. "There's none of you in it. not really."

"What d'you mean."

"I mean… I decided to stage it here because I thought nature reflected who you were, do you remember that?" Laxus nodded. "Well, look at it. You can't see your face, you're in a pose I chose before I knew anything about you, you're in clothes that I chose for you. It doesn't reflect who you are even slightly. You're supposed to be the focus of the exhibition and I've made it so you could be replaced by basically any man in the country."

That was… a lot. Laxus hadn't known he was important in Freed's exhibition; he really had just thought that he was just the model for one of the paintings. Obviously Freed had thought otherwise, and just hadn't mentioned it.

"Okay," Laxus said after a moment. "We've got a week left. That enough time to start again with a new idea?"

"Don't be-"

"Is it enough time?" Laxus asked again.

"It's…" Freed sighed, thinking. "I could paint something in a week, and it could be good. But I'd have to work almost constantly, and you've actually got a job so… It just wouldn't be feasible."

"I'll quit," Laxus shrugged, and Freed's head snapped towards him. "I'll quit, then I can be here as much as you need me."

"What?" Freed asked, apparently blind sighted.

"The boss says three people are getting laid off at the end of the month anyway. He hates me and I'm not great at what I do, so I'm basically gone already," Laxus shrugged. "Why give them any more of my time, right?"

"And if you're wrong."

"Hate working for the place anyway. This would've been the kick I needed to get out and move on."

Freed waited for a moment, thinking. "Are you sure?"

"I wouldn't have offered if I didn't," Laxus assured, and the tone he spoke left no room for argument.

"Thank you," Freed smiled, and Laxus' stomach flipped.

He would do perhaps anything for that smile.

-~---~-

The difference between Freed when he had his freak out and how he was after he restarted his picture was like night and day. It was almost jarring, but Laxus was loving it. To see him so content, wrapped up in his creativity, was a sight to behold.

Laxus would stay here forever if he could.

There was a clear difference between the first painting and this, particularly in how Laxus was posing. Freed had insisted he wear his favourite outfit, and Laxus had complied. He was dressed in tattered combat boots; the same black jeans he had brought with Freed's money (they'd quickly grown to be his favourite); a purple shirt he'd owned for a while; and his long fur lined coat. Bickslow had seen him before he left that day, and claimed the outfit was quintessential Laxus.

Freed seemed pleased with Laxus' choice and smiled when he first saw him. The only adjustments he had made was requesting Laxus unbutton his shirt, so his stomach and chest were visible, apparently making Laxus seem more in tandem with nature. Laxus had done so without argument.

It was funny. If he had been told that would be his outfit when he met Freed, he would have turned down the job offer without hesitance.

His pose was different too. No longer was he looked down with his hands crossed. Instead his right arm was raised straight into the air and his fist was clenched, and he was looking directly at Freed; he compared it to looking down the lens of a camera. He was no longer standing on the dock anymore, instead he was on the shore of the lake, the water reaching to the middle of his shins. The tail of his coat pooled around him, and the chill was obvious, but he didn't care.

The speed in which Freed was painting was faster than he had in all of their time in the first version of the scene. And all throughout, Freed had been talking and smiling. Laxus hadn't realised that the longer they had worked on the first painting, the more subdued Freed had become. Now, he seemed more alive again.

Laxus was relishing in it.

"So," Laxus asked, keeping the smirk on his face as he spoke. Freed had requested the expression as well. "You gonna let me see anything today?"

They had been doing this for days, but Freed hadn't once shown Laxus what he had painted. With the first version he hadn't been shy of showing Laxus, but apparently this was different. When he had asked Freed why this was, he had been told that this was an honest reflection of how Freed saw Laxus, and that Laxus could see it only when it was complete. Laxus understood why this was but found himself craving an insight as to how Freed saw him.

"Potentially," Freed said, and Laxus' heart quickened. When he had asked before, the answer had been a flat no.

"Really, you're close to being finished?"

"I think so. Close enough that I might show you, at least," Freed smiled a little, and Laxus felt a thrill go through him. "We'll probably have to come back here tomorrow though, to finish on the finer details. So don't expect a day off."

"You're harsher than my old boss, y'know that?" Laxus laughed.

"I take it as a compliment."

Again, Laxus laughed before setting his face into the expression that Freed wanted from him. Even with the arm raised into the air, he hadn't had any trouble holding the pose; although his workouts had suffered slightly on his arm. Perhaps he was being sentimental, but he thought that maybe this was because he was looking directly at Freed's face, and watching the artist's content expression as he worked was hypnotic. The first day he had been posing for hours – with breaks, Freed wasn't so cruel as to keep him still constantly – and it had gone by in the blink of an eye.

That was an issue that plagued them both again, as time seemed to be rushing by. The two kept talking as Freed worked, and Laxus was in a constant battle to keep a smile from beating out his smirk. It was almost therapeutic; a sensation helped by the slight movement of water and the ambience of the nearby insects.

This relaxation broke at the sound of thunder.

Both Freed and Laxus perked at the sudden rumbling, and Laxus looked behind him. Clouds had formed above them, and it looked as though it was going to start raining. Laxus frowned a little at that.

"You think we should call it a day?"

"Probably safest," Freed said, already standing up and removing the painting from the easel.

They were quick to get back to the car, as they felt the first drops of light rain hit their skin. It wasn't heavy yet – not nearly heavy enough to damage the painting – but they both wanted to be sure. Laxus was quick to put the easel and paints that he was carrying into the trunk, securing them so that they wouldn't move around and be damaged as Freed drove. They had done this before, and had it down to a fine art.

But as the rain got heavier, their routine was disrupted slightly. Freed handed Laxus the painting without a word, and Laxus took it without thinking. It took him a moment to realise that, with Freed giving it him, it was also giving him permission to see it. he held it out under the protection of the trunk's door, and his breath hitched.

It was fantastic.

In his hands, Laxus held the only piece of art he truly cared for. He was at a loss for words as he looked at the detailed mixture of colours and inks and paints, all stemming from Freed's talent.

The painting focused on him. He was standing in the lake, arm raised to the sky, surrounded by nature. But it wasn't just a recreation of what Freed had seen. Thunderous clouds had been painted in the sky, almost swirling despite being still. A beam of erratic, powerful looking lightning slammed from the sky, hitting Laxus' raised fist and stammering down his arms. Flicker of lightning danced across any exposed part of Laxus' skin that could be seen and reflected off the lake. The colours around him were somewhat subdued and natural, but he seemed vivid and bright. His eye practically shone on the page.

"What do you think?" Freed asked, and he almost sounded nervous.

"It's fucking…" The words wouldn't come to Laxus. "It's amazing. You erm- You said you wanted to reflect more of me in this one, right?"

"I did," Freed nodded, voice still a little nervous. But he was calm. "When I look at you, Laxus, I see lightning. I- if I'm honest with myself, I see someone sharp, fast, exhilarating, powerful. You overwhelm me, Laxus. You are electrifying in a way that I can't quite put into words. I hope my art can make up for that."

Laxus still held the painting, looking at it with wide eyes. The rain beat down on his back, but he paid no mind to it. Freed thought he was overwhelming. Ironic, considering that was exactly how Laxus felt.

"Does it have a name?" Laxus asked, voice a little hoarse.

"I wish to call it 'The Lightning God.'"

That was the final straw for Laxus. He placed the painting in the trunk of Freed's car, stalked towards the artist and wrapped his arms around him. One snaked around Freed's waist, the other placed on the back of the man's head. He pushed their bodies together and pressed his lips against Freed's into a soft, passionate kiss. The rain beat down on the two men as Freed also moved, leaning into Laxus and kissing back.

That moment was timeless, and Laxus' senses were on fire. He could feel exactly what Freed had described. Everything was sharp and exhilarating and overwhelming and electric. Laxus couldn't have hoped for more.

As they kissed, thunder roaring around them and crackled of electricity lighting up the sky, Laxus saw the accuracy of the painting's title. If Freed thought that Laxus was the lightning in the painting, then Laxus deemed Freed the God. He was the creator, the man who had brought beauty to the world in his actions. What better god could there be?

And, as the painting had clearly proven, beautiful things happened when you mixed lightning and a god.

[madisonlindellcomjour333]

COVID Schooling. New Normal or Passing Fad?

COVID changes the way students learn, and this family is doing their best to cope.

I was walking down main street in my hometown, and overheard some moms complaining about online schooling. COVID has caused a lot of changes in the last six months, but it seems online schooling is causing the most recent uproar. After seeing these moms having a social distanced get together, I was curious to see what opinions they had and possibly their children’s opinions as well. One mom agreed to sit and talk which is where this article starts.

I am a current student and don’t mind the online platform. However, outside of adaptive and flexible university students, those in high school and under are having a difficult time. I spoke with high school freshman, Jackson Bussey, about his switch and worries on the subject. It seemed that his biggest issue was not getting into clubs. It was a difficult transition, he said, and that it was getting easier each day.

A typical day includes different zoom meetings with teachers and homework assignments after. However, the best part of the new school environment is the fact that he can eat and relax at his own leisure. Yes, he needs to attend the meetings on time, but he can finish and take a video game break or a nap if needed, Bussey said. He also stated that on days when he stays home instead of going to work with his mom, he has “ultimate free time” if he finishes each assignment for that day.

While this is a very positive outlook on the current COVID inflicted situation, Jackson’s mom, Lisa Bussey, seemed to feel differently.

While she was excited to see her son grow and be so independent, she had worries of socialization, or lack thereof, and was also juggling quite a bit. Lisa felt that there was a lot put on parents right now because of the whole situation. She takes care of multiple children and her normal job is before and after care. The situation has changed significantly. Instead of taking care of one child during the day, she now helps four kids, her own included in their studies. They range from 1st grade to 10th graders. She makes sure that they all stay on task during zoom calls, completes all schoolwork and homework assignments as well as take care of basic needs. These include, but are not limited to food, exercise activities, organizing assignments and helping with time management for all of the students she has in her care.

While this seems like a manageable and doable situation, and Lisa assured me that she could handle it just fine, it just makes everything more difficult when the 1st grader is crying over his math homework and the 10th grader is asking for help with honors English. COVID has changed so many peoples lives not just students but parents too. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.

Lisa and Jackson said they are doing their best to cope and have a good attitude and go with the flow of our ever changing world while facing the pandemic.

All this considered, people seem to be coping alright in this pandemic stricken world, but the ways in which everyone is adapting and reacting to these changes really makes the difference in life quality.

 Special thanks to Lisa and Jackson Bussey for letting me randomly interview them.

[didanawisgi]

CAN WE PULL BACK FROM THE BRINK?

Sam Harris, June 18, 2020

In this episode of the podcast, Sam discusses the recent social protests and civil unrest, in light of what we know about racism and police violence in America.

This is a transcript of a recorded podcast.

“OK…. Well, I’ve been trying to gather my thoughts for this podcast for more than a week—and have been unsure about whether to record it at all, frankly.

Conversation is the only tool we have for making progress, I firmly believe that. But many of the things we most need to talk about, seem impossible to talk about.

I think social media is a huge part of the problem. I’ve been saying for a few years now that, with social media, we’ve all been enrolled in a psychological experiment for which no one gave consent, and it’s not at all clear how it will turn out. And it’s still not clear how it will turn out, but it’s not looking good. It’s fairly disorienting out there. All information is becoming weaponized. All communication is becoming performative. And on the most important topics, it now seems to be fury and sanctimony and bad faith almost all the time.

We appear to be driving ourselves crazy. Actually, crazy. As in, incapable of coming into contact with reality, unable to distinguish fact from fiction—and then becoming totally destabilized by our own powers of imagination, and confirmation bias, and then lashing out at one other on that basis.

So I’d like to talk about the current moment and the current social unrest, and its possible political implications, and other cultural developments, and suggest what it might take to pull back from the brink here. I’m going to circle in on the topics of police violence and the problem of racism, because that really is at the center of this. There is so much to talk about here, and it’s so difficult to talk about. And there is so much we don’t know. And yet, most people are behaving as though every important question was answered a long time ago.

I’ve been watching our country seem to tear itself apart for weeks now, and perhaps lay the ground for much worse to come. And I’ve been resisting the temptation to say anything of substance—not because I don’t have anything to say, but because of my perception of the danger, frankly. And if that’s the way I feel, given the pains that I’ve taken to insulate myself from those concerns, I know that almost everyone with a public platform is terrified. Journalists, and editors, and executives, and celebrities are terrified that they might take one wrong step here, and never recover.

And this is really unhealthy—not just for individuals, but for society. Because, again, all we have between us and the total breakdown of civilization is a series of successful conversations. If we can’t reason with one another, there is no path forward, other than violence. Conversation or violence.

So, I’d like to talk about some of the things that concern me about the current state of our communication. Unfortunately, many things are compounding our problems at the moment. We have a global pandemic which is still very much with us. And it remains to be seen how much our half-hearted lockdown, and our ineptitude in testing, and our uncoordinated reopening, and now our plunge into social protest and civil unrest will cause the Covid-19 caseload to spike. We will definitely see. As many have pointed out, the virus doesn’t care about economics or politics. It only cares that we keep breathing down each other’s necks. And we’ve certainly been doing enough of that.

Of course, almost no one can think about Covid-19 right now. But I’d just like to point out that many of the costs of this pandemic and the knock-on effects in the economy, and now this protest movement, many of these costs are hidden from us. In addition to killing more than 100,000 people in the US, the pandemic has been a massive opportunity cost. The ongoing implosion of the economy is imposing tangible costs, yes, but it is also a massive opportunity cost. And now this civil unrest is compounding those problems—whatever the merits of these protests may be or will be, the opportunity costs of this moment are staggering. In addition to all the tangible effects of what’s happening—the injury and death, the lost businesses, the burned buildings, the neighborhoods that won’t recover for years in many cities, the educations put on hold, and the breakdown in public trust of almost every institution—just think about all the good and important things we cannot do—cannot even think of doing now—and perhaps won’t contemplate doing for many years to come, because we’ll be struggling to get back to that distant paradise we once called “normal life.”

Of course, normal life for many millions of Americans was nothing like a paradise. The disparities in wealth and health and opportunity that we have gotten used to in this country, and that so much of our politics and ways of doing business seem to take for granted, are just unconscionable. There is no excuse for this kind of inequality in the richest country on earth. What we’re seeing now is a response to that. But it’s a confused and confusing response. Worse, it’s a response that is systematically silencing honest conversation. And this makes it dangerous.

This isn’t just politics and human suffering on display. It’s philosophy. It’s ideas about truth—about what it means to say that something is “true.” What we’re witnessing in our streets and online and in the impossible conversations we’re attempting to have in our private lives is a breakdown in epistemology. How does anyone figure out what’s going on in the world? What is real? If we can’t agree about what is real, or likely to be real, we will never agree about how we should live together. And the problem is, we’re stuck with one other.

So, what’s happening here?

Well, again, it’s hard to say. What is happening when a police officer or a mayor takes a knee in front of a crowd of young people who have been berating him for being a cog in the machinery of systemic racism? Is this a profound moment of human bonding that transcends politics, or is it the precursor to the breakdown of society? Or is it both? It’s not entirely clear.

In the most concrete terms, we are experiencing widespread social unrest in response to what is widely believed to be an epidemic of lethal police violence directed at the black community by racist cops and racist policies. And this unrest has drawn a counter-response from law enforcement—much of which, ironically, is guaranteed to exacerbate the problem of police violence, both real and perceived. And many of the videos we’ve seen of the police cracking down on peaceful protesters are hideous. Some of this footage has been unbelievable. And this is one of many vicious circles that we must find some way to interrupt.

Again, there is so much to be confused about here. We’ve now seen endless video of police inflicting senseless violence on truly peaceful protesters, and yet we have also seen video of the police standing idly by while looters completely destroy businesses. What explains this? Is there a policy that led to this bizarre inversion of priorities? Are the police angry at the protesters for vilifying them, and simultaneously trying to teach society a lesson by letting crime and mayhem spread elsewhere in the city? Or is it just less risky to collide with peaceful protesters? Or is the whole spectacle itself a lie? How representative are these videos of what’s actually going on? Is there much less chaos actually occurring than is being advertised to us?

Again, it’s very hard to know.

What’s easy to know is that civil discourse has broken down. It seems to me that we’ve long been in a situation where the craziest voices on both ends of the political spectrum have been amplifying one another and threatening to produce something truly dangerous. And now I think they have. The amount of misinformation in the air—the degree to which even serious people seem to be ruled by false assumptions and non sequiturs—is just astonishing.

And it’s important to keep in mind that, with the presidential election coming in November, the stakes are really high. As most of you know, I consider four more years of Trump to be an existential threat to our democracy. And I believe that the last two weeks have been very good for him, politically, even when everything else seemed to go very badly for him. I know the polls don’t say this. A large majority of people disapprove of his handling this crisis so far. But I think we all know now to take polls with a grain of salt. There is the very real problem of preference falsification—especially in an environment of intense social pressure. People will often say what they think is socially acceptable, and then think, or say, or do something very different in private—like when they’re alone in a voting booth.

Trump has presided over the complete dismantling of American influence in the world and the destruction of our economy. I know the stock market has looked good, but the stock market has become totally uncoupled from the economy. According to the stock market, the future is just as bright now as it was in January of this year, before most of us had even heard of a novel coronavirus. That doesn’t make a lot of sense. And a lot can happen in the next few months. The last two weeks feel like a decade. And my concern is that if Trump now gets to be the law-and-order President, that may be his path to re-election, if such a path exists. Of course, this crisis has revealed, yet again, how unfit he is to be President. The man couldn’t strike a credible note of reconciliation if the fate of the country depended on it—and the fate of the country has depended on it. I also think it’s possible that these protests wouldn’t be happening, but for the fact that Trump is President. Whether or not the problem of racism has gotten worse in our society, having Trump as President surely makes it seem like it has. It has been such a repudiation of the Obama presidency that, for many people, it has made it seem that white supremacy is now ascendant. So, all the more reason to get rid of Trump in November.

But before this social unrest, our focus was on how incompetent Trump was in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic. And now he has been given a very different battle to fight. A battle against leftwing orthodoxy, which is growing more stifling by the minute, and civil unrest. If our social order frays sufficiently, restoring it will be the only thing that most people care about in November. Just think of what an act of domestic terrorism would do politically now. Things can change very, very quickly. And to all a concern for basic law and order “racist”, isn’t going to wash.

Trust in institutions has totally broken down. We’ve been under a very precarious quarantine for more than 3 months, which almost the entire medical profession has insisted is necessary. Doctors and public health officials have castigated people on the political Right for protesting this lockdown. People have been unable to be with their loved ones in their last hours of life. They’ve been unable to hold funerals for them. But now we have doctors and public officials by the thousands, signing open letters, making public statements, saying it’s fine to stand shoulder to shoulder with others in the largest protests our nation has ever seen. The degree to which this has undermined confidence in public health messaging is hard to exaggerate. Whatever your politics, this has been just a mortifying piece of hypocrisy. Especially so, because the pandemic has been hitting the African American community hardest of all. How many people will die because of these protests? It’s a totally rational question to ask, but the question itself is taboo now.

So, it seems to me that almost everything appears upside down at the moment.

Before I get into details on police violence, first let me try to close the door to a few misunderstandings.

Let’s start with the proximate cause of all this: The killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police. I’ll have more to say about this in a minute, but nothing I say should detract from the following observation: That video was absolutely sickening, and it revealed a degree of police negligence and incompetence and callousness that everyone was right to be horrified by. In particular, the actions of Derek Chauvin, the cop who kept his knee on Floyd’s neck for nearly 9 minutes, his actions were so reckless and so likely to cause harm that there’s no question he should be prosecuted. And he is being prosecuted. He’s been indicted for 2nd degree murder and manslaughter, and I suspect he will spend many, many years in prison. And, this is not to say “the system is working.” It certainly seems likely that without the cell phone video, and the public outrage, Chauvin might have gotten away with it—to say nothing of the other cops with him, who are also now being prosecuted. If this is true, we clearly need a better mechanism with which to police the police.

So, as I said, I’ll return to this topic, because I think most people are drawing the wrong conclusions from this video, and from videos like it, but let me just echo everyone’s outrage over what happened. This is precisely the kind of police behavior that everyone should find abhorrent.

On the general topic of racism in America, I want to make a few similarly clear, preemptive statements:

Racism is still a problem in American society. No question. And slavery—which was racism’s most evil expression—was this country’s founding sin. We should also add the near-total eradication of the Native Americans to that ledger of evil. Any morally sane person who learns the details of these historical injustices finds them shocking, whatever their race. And the legacy of these crimes—crimes that were perpetrated for centuries—remains a cause for serious moral concern today. I have no doubt about this. And nothing I’m about to say, should suggest otherwise.

And I don’t think it’s an accident that the two groups I just mentioned, African Americans and Native Americans, suffer the worst from inequality in America today. How could the history of racial discrimination in this country not have had lasting effects, given the nature of that history? And if anything good comes out of the current crisis, it will be that we manage to find a new commitment to reducing inequality in all its dimensions. The real debate to have is about how to do this, economically and politically. But the status quo that many of us take for granted to is a betrayal of our values, whether we realize it or not. If it’s not a betrayal or your values now, it will be a betrayal of your values when you become a better person. And if you don’t manage that, it will be a betrayal of your kid’s values when they’re old enough to understand the world they are living in. The difference between being very lucky in our society, and very unlucky, should not be as enormous as it is.

However, the question that interests me, given what has been true of the past and is now true of the present, is what should we do next? What should we do to build a healthier society?

What should we do next?  Tomorrow… next week…. Obviously, I don’t have the answers. But I am very worried that many of the things we’re doing now, and seem poised to do, will only make our problems worse. And I’m especially worried that it has become so difficult to talk about this. I’m just trying to have conversations. I’m just trying to figure these things out in real time, with other people. And there is no question that conversation itself has become dangerous.

Think about the politics of this. Endless imagery of people burning and looting independent businesses that were struggling to survive, and seeing the owners of these businesses beaten by mobs, cannot be good for the cause of social justice. Looting and burning businesses, and assaulting their owners, isn’t social justice, or even social protest. It’s crime. And having imagery of these crimes that highlight black involvement circulate endlessly on Fox News and on social media cannot be good for the black community. But it might yet be good for Trump.

And it could well kick open the door to a level of authoritarianism that many of us who have been very worried about Trump barely considered possible. It’s always seemed somewhat paranoid to me to wonder whether we’re living in Weimar Germany. I’ve had many conversations about this. I had Timothy Snyder on the podcast, who’s been worrying about the prospect of tyranny in the US for several years now. I’ve known, in the abstract, that democracies can destroy themselves. But the idea that it could happen here still seemed totally outlandish to me. It doesn’t anymore.

Of course, what we’ve been seeing in the streets isn’t just one thing. Some people are protesting for reasons that I fully defend. They’re outraged by specific instances of police violence, like the killing of George Floyd, and they’re worried about creeping authoritarianism—which we really should be worried about now. And they’re convinced that our politics is broken, because it is broken, and they are deeply concerned that our response to the pandemic and the implosion of our economy will do nothing to address the widening inequality in our society. And they recognize that we have a President who is an incompetent, divisive, conman and a crackpot at a time when we actually need wise leadership.

All of that is hard to put on a sign, but it’s all worth protesting.

However, it seems to me that most protesters are seeing this moment exclusively through the lens of identity politics—and racial politics in particular. And some of them are even celebrating the breakdown of law and order, or at least remaining nonjudgmental about it. And you could see, in the early days of this protest, news anchors take that line, on CNN, for instance. Talking about the history of social protest, “Sometimes it has to be violent, right? What, do you think all of these protests need to be nonviolent?” Those words came out of Chris Cuomo’s mouth, and Don Lemon’s mouth. Many people have been circulating a half quote from Martin Luther King Jr. about riots being “the language of the unheard.” They’re leaving out the part where he made it clear that he believed riots harmed the cause of the black community and helped the cause of racists.

There are now calls to defund and even to abolish the police. This may be psychologically understandable when you’ve spent half your day on Twitter watching videos of cops beating peaceful protesters. Those videos are infuriating. And I’ll have a lot more to say about police violence in a minute. But if you think a society without cops is a society you would want to live in, you have lost your mind. Giving a monopoly on violence to the state is just about the best thing we have ever done as a species. It ranks right up there with keeping our shit out of our food. Having a police force that can deter crime, and solve crimes when they occur, and deliver violent criminals to a functioning justice system, is the necessary precondition for almost anything else of value in society.

We need police reform, of course. There are serious questions to ask about the culture of policing—its hiring practices, training, the militarization of so many police forces, outside oversight, how police departments deal with corruption, the way the police unions keep bad cops on the job, and yes, the problem of racist cops. But the idea that any serious person thinks we can do without the police—or that less trained and less vetted cops will magically be better than more trained and more vetted ones—this just reveals that our conversation on these topics has run completely off the rails. Yes, we should give more resources to community services. We should have psychologists or social workers make first contact with the homeless or the mentally ill. Perhaps we’re giving cops jobs they shouldn’t be doing. All of that makes sense to rethink. But the idea that what we’re witnessing now is a matter of the cops being over-resourced—that we’ve given them too much training, that we’ve made the job too attractive—so that the people we’re recruiting are of too high a quality. That doesn’t make any sense.

What’s been alarming here is that we’re seeing prominent people—in government, in media, in Hollywood, in sports—speak and act as though the breakdown of civil society, and of society itself, is a form of progress and any desire for law enforcement is itself a form of racist oppression. At one point the woman who’s running the City Council in Minneapolis, which just decided to abolish the police force, was asked by a journalist, I believe on CNN, “What do I do if someone’s breaking into my house in the middle of the night? Who do I call?” And her first response to that question was, “You need to recognize what a statement of privilege that question is.” She’s since had to walk that back, because it’s one of the most galling and embarrassing things a public official has ever said, but this is how close the Democratic Party is to sounding completely insane. You cannot say that if someone is breaking into your house, and you’re terrified, and you want a police force that can respond, that fear is a symptom of “white privilege.” This is where Democratic politics goes to die.

Again, what is alarming about this is that this woke analysis of the breakdown of law and order will only encourage an increasingly authoritarian response, as well as the acceptance of that response by many millions of Americans.

If you step back, you will notice that there is a kind of ecstasy of ideological conformity in the air. And it’s destroying institutions. It’s destroying the very institutions we rely on to get our information—universities, the press. The New York Times in recent days, seems to be preparing for a self-immolation in recent days. No one wants to say or even think anything that makes anyone uncomfortable—certainly not anyone who has more wokeness points than they do. It’s just become too dangerous. There are people being fired for tweeting “All Lives Matter.” #AllLivesMatter, in the current environment, is being read as a naked declaration of white supremacy. That is how weird this moment is. A soccer player on the LA Galaxy was fired for something his wife tweeted…

Of course, there are real problems of inequality and despair at the bottom of these protests. People who have never found a secure or satisfying place in the world—or young people who fear they never will—people who have seen their economic prospects simply vanish, and people who have had painful encounters with racism and racist cops—people by the millions are now surrendering themselves to a kind of religious awakening. But like most religious awakenings, this movement is not showing itself eager to make honest contact with reality.

On top of that, we find extraordinarily privileged people, whatever the color of their skin—people who have been living wonderful lives in their gated communities or 5th avenue apartments—and who feel damn guilty about it—they are supporting this movement uncritically, for many reasons. Of course, they care about other people—I’m sure most of them have the same concerns about inequality that I do—but they are also supporting this movement because it promises a perfect expiation of their sins. If you have millions of dollars, and shoot botox into your face, and vacation on St. Bart’s, and you’re liberal—the easiest way to sleep at night is to be as woke as AOC and like every one of her tweets.

The problem isn’t just with the looting, and the arson, and the violence. There are problems with these peaceful protests themselves.

Of course, I’m not questioning anyone’s right to protest. Even our deranged president can pay lip service to that right—which he did as the DC police were violently dispersing a peaceful protest so that he could get his picture taken in front of that church, awkwardly holding a bible, as though he had never held a book in life.

The problem with the protests is that they are animated, to a remarkable degree, by confusion and misinformation. And I’ll explain why I think that’s the case. And, of course, this will be controversial. Needless to say, many people will consider the color of my skin to be disqualifying here. I could have invited any number of great, black intellectuals onto the podcast to make these points for me. But that struck me as a form of cowardice. Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Coleman Hughes, Kmele Foster, these guys might not agree with everything I’m about to say, but any one of them could walk the tightrope I’m now stepping out on far more credibly than I can.

But, you see, that’s part of the problem. The perception that the color of a person’s skin, or even his life experience, matters for this discussion is a pernicious illusion. For the discussion we really need to have, the color of a person’s skin, and even his life experience, simply does not matter. It cannot matter. We have to break this spell that the politics of identity has cast over everything.

Ok…

As I’ve already acknowledged, there is a legacy of racism in the United States that we’re still struggling to outgrow. That is obvious. There are real racists out there. And there are ways in which racism became institutionalized long ago. Many of you will remember that during the crack epidemic the penalties for crack and powder cocaine were quite different. And this led black drug offenders to be locked up for much longer than white ones. Now, whether the motivation for that policy was consciously racist or not, I don’t know, but it was effectively racist. Nothing I’m about to say entails a denial of these sorts of facts. There just seems to be no question that boys who grow up with their fathers in prison start life with a significant strike against them. So criminal justice reform is absolutely essential.

And I’m not denying that many black people, perhaps most, have interactions with cops, and others in positions of power, or even random strangers, that seem unambiguously racist. Sometimes this is because they are actually in the presence of racism, and perhaps sometimes it only seems that way. I’ve had unpleasant encounters with cops, and customs officers, and TSA screeners, and bureaucrats of every kind, and even with people working in stores or restaurants. People aren’t always nice or ethical. But being white, and living in a majority white society, I’ve never had to worry about whether any of these collisions were the result of racism. And I can well imagine that in some of these situations, had I been black, I would have come away feeling that I had encountered yet another racist in the wild. So I consider myself very lucky to have gone through life not having to think about any of that. Surely that’s one form of white privilege.

So, nothing I’m going to say denies that we should condemn racism—whether interpersonal or institutional—and we should condemn it wherever we find it. But as a society, we simply can’t afford to find and condemn racism where it doesn’t exist. And we should be increasingly aware of the costs of doing that. The more progress we make on issues of race, the less racism there will be to find, and the more likely we’ll find ourselves chasing after its ghost.

The truth is, we have made considerable progress on the problem of racism in America. This isn’t 1920, and it isn’t 1960. We had a two-term black president. We have black congressmen and women. We have black mayors and black chiefs of police. There are major cities, like Detroit and Atlanta, going on their fifth or sixth consecutive black mayor. Having more and more black people in positions of real power, in what is still a majority white society, is progress on the problem of racism. And the truth is, it might not even solve the problem we’re talking about. When Freddy Gray was killed in Baltimore, virtually everyone who could have been held accountable for his death was black. The problem of police misconduct and reform is complicated, as we’re about to see. But obviously, there is more work to do on the problem of racism. And, more important, there is much more work to do to remedy the inequalities in our society that are so correlated with race, and will still be correlated with race, even after the last racist has been driven from our shores.

The question of how much of today’s inequality is due to existing racism—whether racist people or racist policies—is a genuinely difficult question to answer. And to answer it, we need to distinguish the past from the present.

Take wealth inequality, for example: The median white family has a net worth of around $170,000—these data are a couple of years old, but they’re probably pretty close to what’s true now. The median black family has a net worth of around $17,000. So we have a tenfold difference in median wealth. (That’s the median, not the mean: Half of white families are below 170,000 and half above; half of black families are below 17,000 and half above. And we’re talking about wealth here, not income.)

This disparity in wealth persists even for people whose incomes are in the top 10 percent of the income distribution. For whites in the top 10 percent for income, the median net worth is $1.8 million; for blacks it’s around $350,000. There are probably many things that account for this disparity in wealth. It seems that black families that make it to the top of the income distribution fall out of it more easily than white families do. But it’s also undeniable that black families have less intergenerational wealth accumulated through inheritance.

How much of this is inequality due to the legacy of slavery? And how much of it is due to an ensuing century of racist policies? I’m prepared to believe quite a lot. And it strikes me as totally legitimate to think about paying reparations as a possible remedy here. Of course, one will then need to talk about reparations for the Native Americans. And then one wonders where this all ends. And what about blacks who aren’t descended from slaves, but who still suffered the consequences of racism in the US? In listening to people like John McWhorter and Coleman Hughes discuss this topic, I’m inclined to think that reparations is probably unworkable as a policy. But the truth is that I’m genuinely unsure about this.

Whatever we decide about the specific burdens of the past, we have to ask, how much of current wealth inequality is due to existing racism and to existing policies that make it harder for black families to build wealth? And the only way to get answers to those questions is to have a dispassionate discussion about facts.

The problem with the social activism we are now seeing—what John McWhorter has called “the new religion of anti-Racism”—is that it finds racism nearly everywhere, even where it manifestly does not exist. And this is incredibly damaging to the cause of achieving real equality in our society. It’s almost impossible to exaggerate the evil and injustice of slavery and its aftermath. But it is possible to exaggerate how much racism currently exists at an Ivy League university, or in Silicon Valley, or at the Oscars. And those exaggerations are toxic—and, perversely, they may produce more real racism. It seems to me that false claims of victimhood can diminish the social stature of any group, even a group that has a long history of real victimization.

The imprecision here—the bad-faith arguments, the double standards, the goal-post shifting, the idiotic opinion pieces in the New York Times, the defenestrations on social media, the general hysteria that the cult of wokeness has produced—I think this is all extremely harmful to civil society, and to effective liberal politics, and to the welfare of African Americans.

So, with that as preamble, let’s return to the tragic death of George Floyd.

As I said, I believe that any sane person who watches that video will feel that they have witnessed a totally unjustified killing. So, people of any race, are right to be horrified by what happened there. But now I want to ask a few questions, and I want us to try to consider them dispassionately. And I really want you to watch your mind while you do this. There are very likely to be few tripwires installed there, and I’m about to hit them. So just do your best to remain calm.

Does the killing of George Floyd prove that we have a problem of racism in the United States?

Does it even suggest that we have a problem of racism in the United States?

In other words, do we have reason to believe that, had Floyd been white, he wouldn’t have died in a similar way?

Do the dozen or so other videos that have emerged in recent years, of black men being killed by cops, do they prove, or even suggest, that there is an epidemic of lethal police violence directed especially at black men and that this violence is motivated by racism?

Most people seem to think that the answers to these questions are so obvious that to even pose them as I just did is obscene. The answer is YES, and it’s a yes that now needs to be shouted in the streets.

The problem, however, is that if you take even 5 minutes to look at the data on crime and police violence, the answer appears to be “no,” in every case, albeit with one important caveat. I’m not talking about how the police behaved in 1970 or even 1990. But in the last 25 years, violent crime has come down significantly in the US, and so has the police use of deadly force. And as you’re about to see, the police used more deadly force against white people—both in absolute numbers, and in terms of their contribution to crime and violence in our society. But the public perception is, of course, completely different.

In a city like Los Angeles, 2019 was a 30-year low for police shootings. Think about that…. Do the people who were protesting in Los Angeles, peacefully and violently, do the people who were ransacking and burning businesses by the hundreds—in many cases, businesses that will not return to their neighborhoods—do the people who caused so much damage to the city, that certain neighborhoods, ironically the neighborhoods that are disproportionately black, will take years, probably decades to recover, do the celebrities who supported them, and even bailed them out of jail—do any of these people know that 2019 was the 30-year low for police shootings in Los Angeles?

Before I step out further over the abyss here, let me reiterate: Many of you are going to feel a visceral negative reaction to what I’m about to say. You’re not going to like the way it sounds. You’re especially not going to like the way it sounds coming from a white guy. This feeling of not liking, this feeling of outrage, this feeling of disgust—this feeling of “Sam, what the fuck is wrong with you, why are you even touching this topic?”—this feeling isn’t an argument. It isn’t, or shouldn’t be, the basis for your believing anything to be true or false about the world.

Your capacity to be offended isn’t something that I or anyone else needs to respect. Your capacity to be offended isn’t something that you should respect. In fact, it is something that you should be on your guard for. Perhaps more than any other property of your mind, this feeling can mislead you.

If you care about justice—and you absolutely should—you should care about facts and the ability to discuss them openly. Justice requires contact with reality. It simply isn’t the case—it cannot be the case—that the most pressing claims on our sense of justice need come from those who claim to be the most offended by conversation itself.

So, I’m going to speak the language of facts right now, in so far as we know them, all the while knowing that these facts run very much counter to most people’s assumptions. Many of the things you think you know about crime and violence in our society are almost certainly wrong. And that should matter to you.

So just take a moment and think this through with me.

How many people are killed each year in America by cops? If you don’t know, guess. See if you have any intuitions for these numbers. Because your intuitions are determining how you interpret horrific videos of the sort we saw coming out of Minneapolis.

The answer for many years running is about 1000. One thousand people are killed by cops in America each year. There are about 50 to 60 million encounters between civilians and cops each year, and about 10 million arrests. That’s down from a high of over 14 million arrests annually throughout the 1990’s. So, of the 10 million occasions where a person attracts the attention of the police, and the police decide to make an arrest, about 1000 of those people die as a result. (I’m sure a few people get killed even when no arrest was attempted, but that has to be a truly tiny number.) So, without knowing anything else about the situation, if the cops decide to arrest you, it would be reasonable to think that your chance of dying is around 1/10,000. Of course, in the United States, it’s higher than it is in other countries. So I’m not saying that this number is acceptable. But it is what it is for a reason, as we’re about to see.

Now, there are a few generic things I’d like to point here before we get further into the data. They should be uncontroversial.

First, it’s almost certainly the case that of these 1000 officer-caused deaths each year, some are entirely justified—it may even be true that most are entirely justified—and some are entirely unjustified, and some are much harder to judge. And that will be true next year. And the year after that.

Of the unjustified killings, there are vast differences between them. Many have nothing in common but for the fact that a cop killed someone unnecessarily. It might have been a terrible misunderstanding, or incompetence, or just bad luck, and in certain cases it could be a cop who decides to murder someone because he’s become enraged, or he’s just a psychopath. And it is certainly possible that racial bias accounts for some number of these unjustified killings.

Another point that should be uncontroversial—but may sound a little tone-deaf in the current environment, where we’ve inundated with videos of police violence in response to these protests. But this has to be acknowledged whenever we’re discussing this topic: Cops have a very hard job. In fact, in the current environment, they have an almost impossible job.

If you’re making 10 million arrests every year, some number of people will decide not to cooperate. There can be many reasons for this. A person could be mentally ill, or drunk, or on drugs. Of course, rather often the person is an actual criminal who doesn’t want to be arrested.

Among innocent people, and perhaps this getting more common these days, a person might feel that resisting arrest is the right thing to do, ethically or politically or as a matter of affirming his identity. After all, put yourself in his shoes, he did nothing wrong. Why are the cops arresting him? I don’t know if we have data on the numbers of people who resist arrest by race. But I can well imagine that if it’s common for African Americans to believe that the only reason they have been singled out for arrest is due to racism on the part of the police, that could lead to greater levels of non-compliance. Which seems very likely to lead to more unnecessary injury and death. This is certainly one reason why it is wise to have the racial composition of a police force mirror that of the community it’s policing. Unfortunately, there’s no evidence that this will reduce lethal violence from the side of the police. In fact, the evidence we have suggests that black and Hispanic cops are more likely to shoot black and Hispanic suspects than white cops are. But it would surely change the perception of the community that racism is a likely explanation for police behavior, which itself might reduce conflict.

When a cop goes hands on a person in an attempt to control his movements or make an arrest, that person’s resistance poses a problem that most people don’t understand. If you haven’t studied this topic. If you don’t know what it physically takes to restrain and immobilize a non-compliant person who may be bigger and stronger than you are, and if you haven’t thought through the implications of having a gun on your belt while attempting to do that—a gun that can be grabbed and used against you, or against a member of the public—then your intuitions about what makes sense here, tactically and ethically, are very likely to be bad.

If you haven’t trained with firearms under stress. If you don’t know how suddenly situations can change. If you haven’t experienced how quickly another person can close the distance on you, and how little time you have to decide to draw your weapon. If you don’t know how hard it is to shoot a moving target, or even a stationary one, when your heart is beating out of your chest. You very likely have totally unreasonable ideas about what we can expect from cops in situations like these. [VIDEO, VIDEO, VIDEO]

And there is another fact that looms over all this like the angel of Death, literally: Most cops do not get the training they need. They don’t get the hand-to-hand training they need—they don’t have good skills to subdue people without harming them. All you need to do is watch YouTube videos of botched arrests to see this. The martial arts community stands in perpetual astonishment at the kinds of things cops do and fail to do once they start fighting with suspects. Cops also don’t get the firearms training they need. Of course, there are elite units in many police departments, but most cops do not have the training they need to do the job they’re being asked to do.

It is also true, no doubt, that some cops are racist bullies. And there are corrupt police departments that cover for these guys, and cover up police misconduct generally, whether it was borne of racism or not.

But the truth is that even if we got rid of all bad cops, which we absolutely should do, and there were only good people left, and we got all these good people the best possible training, and we gave them the best culture in which to think about their role in society, and we gave them the best methods for de-escalating potentially violent situations—which we absolutely must do—and we scrubbed all the dumb laws from our books, so that when cops were required to enforce the law, they were only risking their lives and the lives of civilians for reasons that we deem necessary and just—so the war on drugs is obviously over—even under these conditions of perfect progress, we are still guaranteed to have some number of cases each year where a cop kills a civilian in a way that is totally unjustified, and therefore tragic. Every year, there will be some number of families who will be able to say that the cops killed their son or daughter, or father or mother, or brother or sister. And videos of these killings will occasionally surface, and they will be horrific. This seems guaranteed to happen.

So, while we need to make all these improvements, we still need to understand that there are very likely always to going to be videos of cops doing something inexplicable, or inexplicably stupid, that results in an innocent person’s death, or a not-so-innocent person’s death. And sometimes the cop will be white and the victim will be black. We have 10 million arrests each year. And we now live in a panopticon where practically everything is videotaped.

I’m about to get further into the details of what we know about police violence, but I want to just put it to you now: If we’re going to let the health of race relations in this country, or the relationship between the community and the police, depend on whether we ever see a terrible video of police misconduct again, the project of healing these wounds in our society is doomed.

About a week into these protests I heard Van Jones on CNN say, “If we see one more video of a cop brutalizing a black man, this country could go over the edge.” He said this, not as indication of how dangerously inflamed people have become. He seemed to be saying it as an ultimatum to the police. With 10 million arrests a year, arrests that have to take place in the most highly armed society in the developed world, I hope you understand how unreasonable that ultimatum is.

We have to put these videos into context. And we have to acknowledge how different they are from one another. Some of them are easy to interpret. But some are quite obviously being interpreted incorrectly by most people—especially by activists. And there are a range of cases—some have video associated with them and some don’t—that are now part of a litany of anti-racist outrage, and the names of the dead are intoned as though they were all evidence of the same injustice. And yet, they are not.

Walter Scott was stopped for a broken taillight and got out of his car and tried to flee. There might have been a brief struggle over the officer’s taser, that part of the video isn’t clear. But what is clear is that he was shot in the back multiple times as he was running away. That was insane. There was zero reason for the officer to feel that his life was under threat at the point he opened fire. And for that unjustified shooting, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison. I’m not sure that’s long enough. That seemed like straight-up murder.

The George Floyd video, while even more disturbing to watch, is harder to interpret. I don’t know anything about Derek Chauvin, the cop who knelt on his neck. It’s quite possible that he’s a terrible person who should have never been a cop. He seems to have a significant number of complaints against him—though, as far as I know, the details of those complaints haven’t been released. And he might be a racist on top of being a bad cop. Or he might be a guy who was totally in over his head and thought you could restrain someone indefinitely by keeping a knee on their neck indefinitely. I don’t know. I’m sure more facts will come out. But whoever he is, I find it very unlikely that he was intending to kill George Floyd. Think about it. He was surrounded by irate witnesses and being filmed. Unless he was aspiring to become the most notorious murderer in human history, it seems very unlikely that he was intending to commit murder in that moment. It’s possible, of course. But it doesn’t seem the likeliest explanation for his behavior.

What I believe we saw on that video was the result of a tragic level of negligence and poor training on the part of those cops. Or terrible recruitment—it’s possible that none of these guys should have ever been cops. I think for one of them, it was only his fourth day on the job. Just imagine that. Just imagine all things you don’t know as a new cop.  It could also be a function of bad luck in terms of Floyd’s underlying health. It’s been reported that he was complaining of being unable to breath before Chauvin pinned him with his knee. The knee on his neck might not have been the only thing that caused his death. It could have also been the weight of the other officer pinning him down.

This is almost certainly what happened in the cast of Eric Garner. Half the people on earth believe they witnessed a cop choke Eric Garner to death in that video. That does not appear to be what happened. When Eric Garner is saying “I can’t breathe” he’s not being choked. He’s being held down on the pavement by several officers. Being forced down on your stomach under the weight of several people can kill a person, especially someone with lung or heart disease. In the case of Eric Garner, it is absolutely clear that the cop who briefly attempted to choke him was no longer choking him. If you doubt that, watch the video again.

And if you are recoiling now from my interpretation of these videos, you really should watch the killing of Tony Timpa. It’s also terribly disturbing, but it removes the variable of race and it removes any implication of intent to harm on the part of the cops about as clearly as you could ask. It really is worth watching as a corrective to our natural interpretation of these other videos.

Tony Timpa was a white man in Dallas, who was suffering some mental health emergency and cocaine intoxication. And he actually called 911 himself. What we see is the bodycam footage from the police, which shows that he was already in handcuffs when they arrived—a security guard had cuffed him. And then the cops take over, and they restrain Timpa on the ground, by rolling him onto a stomach and putting their weight on him, very much like in the case of Eric Garner. And they keep their weight on him—one cop has a knee on his upper back, which is definitely much less aggressive than a knee on the neck—but they crush the life out of him all the same, over the course of 13 minutes. He’s not being choked. The cops are not being rough. There’s no animus between them and Timpa. It was not a hostile arrest. They clearly believe that they’re responding to a mental health emergency. But they keep him down on his belly, under their weight, and they’re cracking jokes as he loses consciousness. Now, your knowledge that he’s going to be dead by the end of this video, make their jokes seem pretty callous. But this was about as benign an imposition of force by cops as you’re going to see. The crucial insight you will have watching this video, is that the officers not only had no intent to kill Tony Timpa, they don’t take his pleading seriously because they have no doubt that what they’re doing is perfectly safe—perfectly within protocol. They’ve probably done this hundreds of times before.

If you watch that video—and, again, fair warning, it is disturbing—but imagine how disturbing it would have been to our society if Tony Timpa had been black. If the only thing you changed about the video was the color of Timpa’s skin, then that video would have detonated like a nuclear bomb in our society, exactly as the George Floyd video did. In fact, in one way it is worse, or would have been perceived to be worse. I mean, just imagine white cops telling jokes as they crushed the life out of a black Tony Timpa… Given the nature of our conversation about violence, given the way we perceive videos of this kind, there is no way that people would have seen that as anything other than a lynching. And yet, it would not have been a lynching.

Now, I obviously have no idea what was in the minds of cops in Minneapolis. And perhaps we’ll learn at trial. Perhaps a tape of Chauvin using the N-word in another context will surface, bringing in a credible allegation of racism. It seems to me that Chauvin is going to have a very hard time making sense of his actions. But most people who saw that video believe they have seen, with their own eyes, beyond any possibility of doubt, a racist cop intentionally murder an innocent man. That’s not what the video necessarily shows.

As I said, these videos can be hard to interpret, even while seeming very easy to interpret. And these cases, whether we have associated video or not, are very different. Michael Brown is reported to have punched a cop in the face and attempted to get his gun. As far as I know, there’s no video of that encounter. But, if true, that is an entirely different situation. If you’re attacking a cop, trying to get his gun, that is a life and death struggle that almost by definition for the cop, and it most cases justifies the use of lethal force. And honestly, it seems that no one within a thousand miles of Black Lives Matter is willing to make these distinctions. An attitude of anti-racist moral outrage is not the best lens through which to interpret evidence of police misconduct.

I’ve seen many videos of people getting arrested. And I’ve seen the outraged public reaction to what appears to be inappropriate use of force by the cops. One overwhelming fact that comes through is that people, whatever the color of their skin, don’t understand how to behave around cops so as to keep themselves safe. People have to stop resisting arrest. This may seem obvious, but judging from most of these videos, and from the public reaction to them, this must be a totally arcane piece of information. When a cop wants to take you into custody, you don’t get to decide whether or not you should be arrested. When a cop wants to take you into custody, for whatever reason, it’s not a negotiation. And if you turn it into a wrestling match, you’re very likely to get injured or killed.

This is a point I once belabored in a podcast with Glenn Loury, and it became essentially a public service announcement. And I’ve gone back and listened to those comments, and I want to repeat them here. This is something that everyone really needs to understand. And it’s something that Black Lives Matter should be teaching explicitly: If you put your hands on a cop—if you start wrestling with a cop, or grabbing him because he’s arresting your friend, or pushing him, or striking him, or using your hands in way that can possibly be interpreted as your reaching for a gun—you are likely to get shot in the United States, whatever the color of your skin.

As I said, when you’re with a cop, there is always a gun out in the open. And any physical struggle has to be perceived by him as a fight for the gun. A cop doesn’t know what you’re going to do if you overpower him, so he has to assume the worst. Most cops are not confident in their ability to physically control a person without shooting him—for good reason, because they’re not well trained to do that, and they’re continually confronting people who are bigger, or younger, or more athletic, or more aggressive than they are. Cops are not superheroes. They’re ordinary people with insufficient training, and once things turn physical they cannot afford to give a person who is now assaulting a police officer the benefit of the doubt.

This is something that most people seem totally confused about. If they see a video of somebody trying to punch a cop in the face and the person’s unarmed, many people think the cop should just punch back, and any use of deadly force would be totally disproportionate. But that’s not how violence works. It’s not the cop’s job to be the best bare-knuckled boxer on Earth so he doesn’t have to use his gun. A cop can’t risk getting repeatedly hit in the face and knocked out, because there’s always a gun in play. This is the cop’s perception of the world, and it’s a justifiable one, given the dynamics of human violence.

You might think cops shouldn’t carry guns. Why can’t we just be like England? That’s a point that can be debated. But it requires considerable thought in a country where there are over 300 million guns on the street. The United States is not England.

Again, really focus on what is happening when a cop is attempting to arrest a person. It’s not up to you to decide whether or not you should be arrested. Does it matter that you know you didn’t do anything wrong? No. And how could that fact be effectively communicated in the moment by your not following police commands? I’m going to ask that again: How could the fact that you’re innocent, that you’re not a threat to cop, that you’re not about to suddenly attack him or produce a weapon of your own, how could those things be effectively communicated at the moment he’s attempting to arrest you by your resisting arrest?

Unless you called the cops yourself, you never know what situation you’re in. If I’m walking down the street, I don’t know if the cop who is approaching me didn’t get a call that some guy who looks like Ben Stiller just committed an armed robbery. I know I didn’t do anything, but I don’t know what’s in the cop’s head. The time to find out what’s going on—the time to complain about racist cops, the time to yell at them and tell them they’re all going to get fired for their stupidity and misconduct—is after cooperating, at the police station, in the presence of a lawyer, preferably. But to not comply in the heat of the moment, when a guy with the gun is issuing commands—this raises your risk astronomically, and it’s something that most people, it seems, just do not intuitively understand, even when they’re not in the heat of the moment themselves, but just watching video of other people getting arrested.

Ok. End of public-service announcement.

The main problem with using individual cases, where black men and women have been killed by cops, to conclude that there is an epidemic of racist police violence in our society, is that you can find nearly identical cases of white suspects being killed by cops, and there are actually more of them.

In 2016, John McWhorter wrote a piece in Time Magazine about this.

Here’s a snippet of what he wrote:

“The heart of the indignation over these murders is a conviction that racist bias plays a decisive part in these encounters. That has seemed plausible to me, and I have recently challenged those who disagree to present a list of white people killed within the past few years under circumstances similar to those that so enrage us in cases such as what happened to Tamir Rice, John Crawford, Walter Scott, Sam Debose, and others.”

So, McWhorter issued that challenge, as he said, and he was presented with the cases [VIDEO, VIDEO, VIDEO]. But there’s no song about these people, admonishing us to say their names. And the list of white names is longer, and I don’t know any of them, other than Tony Timpa. I know the black names. In addition to the ones I just read from McWhorter’s article, I know the names of Eric Garner, and Michael Brown, and Alton Sterling, and Philando Castile, and now, of course, I know the name of George Floyd. And I’m aware of many of the details of these cases where black men and women have been killed by cops. I know the name of Breonna Taylor. I can’t name a single white person killed by cops in circumstances like these—other than Timpa—and I just read McWhorter’s article where he lists many of them.

So, this is also a distortion in the media. The media is not showing us videos of white people being killed by cops; activists are not demanding that they do this. I’m sure white supremacists talk about this stuff a lot, who knows? But in terms of the story we’re telling ourselves in the mainstream, we are not actually talking about the data on lethal police violence.

So back to the data: Again, cops kill around 1000 people every year in the United States. About 25 percent are black. About 50 percent are white. The data on police homicide are all over the place. The federal government does not have a single repository for data of this kind. But they have been pretty carefully tracked by outside sources, like the Washington Post, for the last 5 years. These ratios appear stable over time. Again, many of these killings are justifiable, we’re talking about career criminals who are often armed and, in many cases, trying to kill the cops. Those aren’t the cases we’re worried about. We’re worried about the unjustifiable homicides.

Now, some people will think that these numbers still represent an outrageous injustice. Afterall, African Americans are only 13 percent of the population. So, at most, they should be 13 percent of the victims of police violence, not 25 percent. Any departure from the baseline population must be due to racism.

Ok. Well, that sounds plausible, but consider a few more facts:

Blacks are 13 percent of the population, but they commit at least 50 percent of the murders and other violent crimes.

If you have 13 percent of the population responsible for 50 percent of the murders—and in some cities committing 2/3rds of all violent crime—what percent of police attention should it attract? I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure it’s not just 13 percent. Given that the overwhelming majority of their victims are black, I’m pretty sure that most black people wouldn’t set the dial at 13 percent either.

And here we arrive at the core of the problem. The story of crime in America is overwhelmingly the story of black-on-black crime. It is also, in part, a story of black-on-white crime. For more than a generation, crime in America really hasn’t been a story of much white-on-black crime. [Some listeners mistook my meaning here. I’m not denying that most violent crime is intraracial. So, it’s true that most white homicide victims are killed by white offenders. Per capita, however, the white crime rate is much lower than the black crime rate. And there is more black-on-white crime than white-on-black crime.—SH]

The murder rate has come down steadily since the early 1990’s, with only minor upticks. But, nationwide, blacks are still 6 times more likely to get murdered than whites, and in some cities their risk is double that. And around 95 percent of the murders are committed by members of the African American community. [While reported in 2015, these data were more than a decade old. Looking at more recent data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, the number appears to be closer to 90 percent.—SH]

The weekend these protests and riots were kicking off nationwide—when our entire country seemed to be tearing itself apart over a perceived epidemic of racist police violence against the black community, 92 people were shot, and 27 killed, in Chicago alone—one city. This is almost entirely a story of black men killing members of their own community. And this is far more representative of the kind of violence that the black community needs to worry about. And, ironically, it’s clear that one remedy for this violence is, or would be, effective policing.

These are simply the facts of crime in our society as we best understand them. And the police have to figure out how to respond to these facts, professionally and ethically. The question is, are they doing that? And, obviously, there’s considerable doubt that they’re doing that, professionally and ethically.

Roland Fryer, the Harvard economist who’s work I discussed on the podcast with Glenn Loury, studied police encounters involving black and white suspects and the use of force.

His paper is titled, this from 2016, “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force.”

Fryer is black, and he went into this research with the expectation that the data would confirm that there’s an epidemic of lethal police violence directed at black men. But he didn’t find that. However, he did find support for the suspicion that black people suffer more nonlethal violence at the hands of cops than whites do.

So let’s look at this.

The study examined data from 10 major police departments, in Texas, Florida and California. Generally, Fryer found that there is 25 percent greater likelihood that the police would go hands on black suspects than white ones—cuffing them, or forcing them to ground, or using other non-lethal force.

Specifically, in New York City, in encounters where white and black citizens were matched for other characteristics, they found that:

Cops were…

17 percent more likely to go hands on black suspects

18 percent more likely to push them into a wall

16 percent more likely to put them in handcuffs (in a situation in which they aren’t arrested)

18 percent more likely to push them to the ground

25 percent more likely to use pepper spray or a baton

19 percent more likely to draw their guns

24 percent more likely to point a gun at them.

This is more or less the full continuum of violence short of using lethal force. And it seems, from the data we have, that blacks receive more of it than whites. What accounts for this disparity? Racism? Maybe. However, as I said, it’s inconvenient to note that other data suggest that black cops and Hispanic cops are more likely to shoot black and Hispanic suspects than white cops are. I’m not sure how an ambient level of racism explains that.

Are there other explanations? Well, again, could it be that blacks are less cooperative with the police. If so, that’s worth understanding. A culture of resisting arrest would be a very bad thing to cultivate, given that the only response to such resistance is for the police to increase their use of force.

Whatever is true here is something we should want to understand. And it’s all too easy to see how an increased number of encounters with cops, due to their policing in the highest crime neighborhoods, which are disproportionately black, and an increased number of traffic stops in those neighborhoods, and an increased propensity for cops to go hands-on these suspects, with or without an arrest, for whatever reason—it’s easy to see how all of this could be the basis for a perception of racism, whether or not racism is the underlying motivation.

It is totally humiliating to be arrested or manhandled by a cop. And, given the level of crime in the black community, a disproportionate number of innocent black men seem guaranteed to have this experience. It’s totally understandable that this would make them bitter and mistrustful of the police. This is another vicious circle that we must find some way to interrupt.

But Fryer also found that black suspects are around 25 percent less likely to be shot than white suspects are. And in the most egregious situations, where officers were not first attacked, but nevertheless fired their weapons at a suspect, they were more likely to do this when the suspect was white.

Again, the data are incomplete. This doesn’t not cover every city in the country. And a larger study tomorrow might paint a different picture. But, as far as I know, the best data we have suggest that for, whatever reason, whites are more likely to be killed by cops once an arrest is attempted. And a more recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences  by David Johnson and colleagues found similar results. And it is simply undeniable that more whites are killed by cops each year, both in absolute numbers and in proportion to their contributions to crime and violence in our society.

Can you hear how these facts should be grinding in that well-oiled machine of woke outrage? Our society is in serious trouble now. We are being crushed under the weight of a global pandemic and our response to it has been totally inept. On top of that, we’re being squeezed by the growing pressure of what might become a full-on economic depression. And the streets are now filled with people who imagine, on the basis of seeing some horrific videos, that there is an epidemic of racist cops murdering African Americans. Look at what this belief is doing to our politics. And these videos will keep coming. And the truth is they could probably be matched 2 for 1 with videos of white people being killed by cops. What percentage of people protesting understand that the disparity runs this way? In light of the belief that the disparity must run the other way, people are now quite happy to risk getting beaten and arrested by cops themselves, and to even loot and burn businesses. And most people and institutions are supporting this civil unrest from the sidelines, because they too imagine that cops are killing black people in extraordinary numbers. And all of this is calling forth an authoritarian response from Trump—and leading to more examples of police violence caught on video.

As I hope I’ve made clear, we need police reform—there’s no question about this. And some of the recent footage of the police attacking peaceful protests is outrageous. Nothing I just said should signify that I’m unaware of that. From what I’ve seen—and by the time I release this podcast, the character of all this might have changed—but, from what I’ve seen, the police were dangerously passive in the face of looting and real crime, at least in the beginning. In many cities, they just stood and watched society unravel. And then they were far too aggressive in the face of genuinely peaceful protests. This is a terrible combination. It is the worst combination. There’s no better way to increase cynicism and anger and fear, on all sides.

But racializing how we speak about the problem of police violence, where race isn’t actually the relevant variable—again, think of Tony Timpa— this has highly negative effects. First, it keeps us from talking about the real problems with police tactics. For instance, we had the recent case of Breonna Taylor who was killed in a so-called “no knock” raid of her home. As occasionally happens, in this carnival of moral error we call “the war on drugs,” the police had the wrong address, and they kicked in the wrong door. And they wound up killing a totally innocent woman. But this had nothing to do with race. The problem is not, as some commentators have alleged, that it’s not safe to be “sleeping while black.” The problem is that these no-knock raids are an obscenely dangerous way of enforcing despicably stupid laws. White people die under precisely these same circumstances, and very likely in greater numbers (I don’t have data specifically on no-knock raids, but we can assume that the ratio is probably conserved here).

Think about how crazy this policy is in a nation where gun ownership is so widespread. If someone kicks in your door in the middle of the night, and you’re a gun owner, of course you’re going to reach for your gun. That’s why you have a gun in the first place. The fact that people bearing down on you and your family out of the darkness might have yelled “police” (or might have not yelled “police”; it’s alleged in some of these cases that they don’t yell anything)—the fact that someone yells “police” isn’t necessarily convincing. Anyone can yell “police.” And, again, think of the psychology of this: If the police have the wrong house, and you know there is no reason on earth that real cops would take an interest in you, especially in the middle of the night, because you haven’t done anything (you’re not the guy running a meth lab)—and now you’re reaching for your gun in the dark—of course, someone is likely to get killed. This is not a racial issue. It’s a terrible policy.

Unfortunately, the process of police reform isn’t straightforward—and it is made massively more complicated by what’s happening now. Yes, we will be urging police reform in a very big way now, that much seems clear. But Roland Fryer has also shown that investigations of the cops, in a climate where viral videos and racial politics are operating, have dramatic effects, many of which are negative.

He studied the aftermath of the investigations into police misconduct that followed the killings Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, and Lequan McDonald, and found that, for reasons that seem pretty easy to intuit, proactive police contact with civilians decreases drastically, sometimes by as much 100 percent, once these investigations get started. This is now called “The Ferguson Effect.” The police still answer 911 calls, but they don’t investigate suspicious activity in the same way. They don’t want to wind up on YouTube. And when they alter their behavior like this, homicides go up. Fryer estimates that the effects of these few investigations translated into 1000 extra homicides, and almost 40,000 more felonies, over the next 24 months in the US. And, of course, most of the victims of those crimes were black. One shudders to imagine the size of the Ferguson effect we’re about to see nationwide… I’m sure the morale among cops has never been lower. I think it’s almost guaranteed that cops by the thousands will be leaving the force. And it will be much more difficult to recruit good people.

Who is going to want to be a cop now? Who could be idealist about occupying that role in society? It seems to me that the population of people who will become cops now will be more or less indistinguishable from the population of people who become prison guards. I’m pretty sure there’s a difference there, and I think we’re likely to see that difference expressed in the future. It’s a grim picture, unless we do something very creative here.

So there’s a real question about how we can reform police departments, and get rid of bad cops, without negatively impacting the performance of good cops? That’s a riddle we have to solve—or at least we have to understand what the trade-offs are here.

Why is all of this happening now? Police killings of civilians have gone way down. And they are rare events. They are 1/10,000 level events, if measured by arrests. 1/50-60,000 level events if measured by police encounters. And the number of unarmed people who are killed is smaller still. Around 50 last year, again, more were white than black. And not all unarmed victims are innocent. Some get killed in the act of attacking the cops.  [EXAMPLE, EXAMPLE, EXAMPLE]

Again, the data don’t tell a clean story, or the whole story. I see no reason to doubt that blacks get more attention from the cops—though, honestly, given the distribution of crime in our society, I don’t know what the alternative to that would be. And once the cops get involved, blacks are more likely to get roughed up, which is bad. But, again, it simply isn’t clear that racism is the cause. And contrary to everyone’s expectations, whites seem more likely to get killed by cops. Actually, one factor seems to be that whites are 7 times more likely to commit “suicide by cop” (and 3 times more likely to commit suicide generally). What’s going on there? Who knows?

There’s a lot we don’t understand about these data. But ask yourself, would our society seem less racist if the disparity ran the other way? Is less physical contact, but a greater likelihood of getting shot and killed a form of white privilege? Is a higher level of suicide by cop, and suicide generally, a form of white privilege? We have a problem here that, read either way, you can tell a starkly racist narrative.

We need ethical, professional policing, of course. But the places with the highest crime in our society need the most of it. Is there any doubt about that? In a city like Milwaukee, blacks are 12 times more likely to get murdered than whites [Not sure where I came by this number, probably a lecture or podcast. It appears the rate is closer to 20 times more likely and 22 times more likely in Wisconsin as a whole—SH], again, they are being killed by other African Americans, nearly 100 percent of the time. I think the lowest figure I’ve seen is 93 percent of the time. [As noted above, more recent data suggest that it’s closer to 90 percent]. What should the police do about this? And what are they likely to do now that our entire country has been convulsed over one horrific case of police misconduct?

We need to lower the temperature on this conversation, and many other conversations, and understand what is actually happening in our society.

But instead of doing this, we now have a whole generation of social activists who seem eager to play a game of chicken with the forces of chaos. Everything I said about the problem of inequality and the need for reform stands. But I think that what we are witnessing in our streets, and on social media, and even in the mainstream press, is a version of mass hysteria. And the next horrific video of a black person being killed by cops won’t be evidence to the contrary. And there will be another video. There are 10 million arrests every year. There will always be another video.

And the media has turned these videos into a form of political pornography. And this has deranged us. We’re now unable to speak or even think about facts. The media has been poisoned by bad incentives, in this regard, and social media doubly so.

In the mainstream of this protest movement, it’s very common to hear that the only problem with what is happening in our streets, apart from what the cops are doing, is that some criminal behavior at the margins—a little bit of looting, a little bit of violence—has distracted us from an otherwise necessary and inspiring response to an epidemic of racism. Most people in the media have taken exactly this line. People like Anderson Cooper on CNN or the editorial page of the New York Times or public figures like President Obama or Vice President Biden. The most prominent liberal voices believe that the protests themselves make perfect moral and political sense, and that movements like Black Lives Matter are guaranteed to be on the right side of history. How could anyone who is concerned about inequality and injustice in our society see things any other way? How could anyone who isn’t himself racist not support Black Lives Matter?

But, of course, there’s a difference between slogans and reality. There’s a difference between the branding of a movement and its actual aims. And this can be genuinely confusing. That’s why propaganda works. For instance, many people assume there’s nothing wrong with ANTIFA, because this group of total maniacs has branded itself as “anti-fascist.” What could be wrong with being anti-fascist? Are you pro fascism?

There’s a similar problem with Black Lives Matter—though, happily, unlike ANTIFA, Black Lives Matter actually seems committed to peaceful protest, which is hugely important. So the problem I’m discussing is more ideological, and it’s much bigger than Black Lives Matter—though BLM is its most visible symbol of this movement. The wider issue is that we are in the midst of a public hysteria and moral panic. And it has been made possible by a near total unwillingness, particularly on the Left, among people who value their careers and their livelihoods and their reputations, and fear being hounded into oblivion online—this is nearly everyone left-of-center politically. People are simply refusing to speak honestly about the problem of race and racism in America.

We are making ourselves sick. We are damaging our society. And by protesting the wrong thing, even the slightly wrong thing, and unleashing an explosion of cynical criminality in the process—looting that doesn’t even have the pretense of protest—the Left is empowering Trump, whatever the polls currently show. And if we are worried about Trump’s authoritarian ambitions, as I think we really should be, this is important to understand. He recently had what looked like paramilitary troops guarding the White House. I don’t know if we found out who those guys actually were, but that was genuinely alarming. But how are Democrats calls to “abolish the police” going to play to half the country that just watched so many cities get looted? We have to vote Trump out of office and restore the integrity of our institutions. And we have to make the political case for major reforms to deal with the problem of inequality—a problem which affects the black community most of all.

We need police reform; we need criminal justice reform; we need tax reform; we need health care reform; we need environmental reform—we need all of these things and more. And to be just, these policies will need to reduce the inequality in our society. If we did this, African Americans would benefit, perhaps more than any other group. But it’s not at all clear that progress along these dimensions primarily entails us finding and eradicating more racism in our society.

Just ask yourself, what would real progress on the problem of racism look like? What would utter progress look like?

Here’s what I think it would look like: More and more people (and ultimately all people) would care less and less (and ultimately not at all) about race. As I’ve said before in various places, skin color would become like hair color in its political and moral significance—which is to say that it would have none.

Now, maybe you don’t agree with that aspiration. Maybe you think that tribalism based on skin color can’t be outgrown or shouldn’t be outgrown. Well, if you think that, I’m afraid I don’t know what to say to you. It’s not that there’s nothing to say, it’s just there is so much we disagree about, morally and politically, that I don’t know where to begin. So that debate, if it can even be had, will have to be left for another time.

For the purposes of this conversation, I have to assume that you agree with me about the goal here, which is to say that you share the hope that there will come a time where the color of a person’s skin really doesn’t matter. What would that be like?

Well, how many blondes got into Harvard this year? Does anyone know? What percentage of the police in San Diego are brunette? Do we have enough red heads in senior management in our Fortune 500 companies? No one is asking these questions, and there is a reason for that. No one cares. And we are right not to care.

Imagine a world in which people cared about hair color to the degree that we currently care—or seem to care, or imagine that others care, or allege that they secretly care—about skin color. Imagine a world in which discrimination by hair color was a thing, and it took centuries to overcome, and it remains a persistent source of private pain and public grievance throughout society, even where it no longer exists. What an insane misuse of human energy that would be. What an absolute catastrophe.

The analogy isn’t perfect, for a variety of reasons, but it’s good enough for us to understand what life would be like if the spell of racism and anti-racism were truly broken. The future we want is not one in which we have all become passionate anti-racists. It’s not a future in which we are forever on our guard against the slightest insult—the bad joke, the awkward compliment, the tweet that didn’t age well. We want to get to a world in which skin color and other superficial characteristics of a person become morally and politically irrelevant. And if you don’t agree with that, what did you think Martin Luther King Jr was talking about?

And, finally, if you’re on the Left and don’t agree with this vision of a post-racial future, please observe that the people who agree with you, the people who believe that there is no overcoming race, and that racial identity is indissoluble, and that skin color really matters and will always matter—these people are white supremacists and neo-Nazis and other total assholes. And these are also people I can’t figure out how to talk to, much less persuade.

So the question for the rest of us—those of us who want to build a world populated by human beings, merely—the question is, how do we get there? How does racial difference become uninteresting? Can it become uninteresting by more and more people taking a greater interest in it? Can it become uninteresting by becoming a permanent political identity? Can it become uninteresting by our having thousands of institutions whose funding (and, therefore, very survival) depends on it remaining interesting until the end of the world?

Can it become less significant by being granted more and more significance? By becoming a fetish, a sacred object, ringed on all sides by taboos? Can race become less significant if you can lose your reputation and even your livelihood, at any moment, by saying one wrong word about it?

I think these questions answer themselves. To outgrow our obsession with racial difference, we have outgrow our obsession with race. And you don’t do that by maintaining your obsession with it.

Now, you might agree with me about the goal and about how a post-racial society would seem, but you might disagree about the path to get there—the question of what to do next. In fact, one podcast listener wrote to me recently to say that while he accepted my notion of a post-racial future, he thinks it’s just far too soon to talk about putting racial politics behind us. He asked me to imagine just how absurd it would have been to tell Martin Luther King Jr, at the dawn of the civil rights movement, that the path beyond racism requires that he become less and less obsessed with race.

That seems like a fair point, but Coleman Hughes has drawn my attention to a string of MLK quotes that seem to be just as transcendent of racial identity politics as I’m hoping to be here. You can see these quotations on his Twitter feed. None of those statements by King would make sense coming out of Black Lives Matter at the moment.

In any case, as I said, I think we are living in a very different time than Martin Luther King was. And what I see all around me is evidence of the fact that we were paying an intolerable price for confusion about racism, and social justice generally—and the importance of identity, generally—and this is happening in an environment where the path to success and power for historically disadvantaged groups isn’t generally barred by white racists who won’t vote for them, or hire them, or celebrate their achievements, or buy their products, and it isn’t generally barred by laws and policies and norms that are unfair. There is surely still some of that. But there must be less of it now than there ever was.

The real burden on the black community is the continued legacy of inequality—with respect to wealth, and education, and health, and social order—levels of crime, in particular, and resulting levels of incarceration, and single-parent families—and it seems very unlikely that these disparities, whatever their origin in the past, can be solved by focusing on problem of lingering racism, especially where it doesn’t exist. And the current problem of police violence seems a perfect case in point.

And yet now we’re inundated with messages from every well-intentioned company and organization singing from the same book of hymns. Black Lives Matter is everywhere. Of course, black lives matter. But the messaging of this movement about the reality of police violence is wrong, and it’s creating a public hysteria.

I just got a message from the American Association for the Advancement of Science talking about fear of the other. The quote from the email: “Left unchecked, racism, sexism, homophobia, and fear of the other can enter any organization or community – and destroy the foundations upon which we must build our future.” Ok, fine. But is that really the concern in the scientific community right now, “unchecked racism, sexism, and homophobia.” Is that really what ails science in the year 2020? I don’t think so.

I’ll tell you the fear of the other that does seem warranted, everywhere, right now. It’s the other who has rendered him or herself incapable of dialogue. It’s the other who will not listen to reason, who has no interest in facts, who can’t join a conversation that converges on the truth, because he knows in advance what the truth must be. We should fear the other who thinks that dogmatism and cognitive bias aren’t something to be corrected for, because they’re the very foundations of his epistemology.  We should fear the other who can’t distinguish activism from journalism or politics from science. Or worse, can make these distinctions, but refuses to. And we’re all capable of becoming this person. If only for minutes or hours at a time. And this is a bug in our operating system, not a feature. We have to continually correct for it.

One of the most shocking things that many of us learned when the Covid-19 pandemic was first landing on our shores, and we were weighing the pros and cons of closing the schools, was that for tens of millions of American kids, going to school represents the only guarantee of a decent meal on any given day. I’m pretty confident that most of the kids we’re talking about here aren’t white. And whatever you think about the opportunities in this country and whatever individual success stories you can call to mind, there is no question that some of us start on third base, or second base. Everyone has a lot to deal with, of course. Life is hard. But not everyone is a single mom, or single grandparent, struggling to raise kids in the inner city, all the while trying to keep them from getting murdered. The disparities in our society are absolutely heartbreaking and unacceptable. And we need to have a rational discussion about their actual causes and solutions.

We have to pull back from the brink here. And all we have with which to do that is conversation. And the only thing that makes conversation possible is an openness to evidence and arguments—a willingness to update one’s view of the world when better reasons are given. And that is an ongoing process, not a place we ever finally arrive.

Ok… Well, perhaps that was more of an exhortation than I intended, but it certainly felt like I needed to say it. I hope it was useful. And the conversations will continue on this podcast.

Stay safe, everyone.”

[citizenaycock]

Cold War (2018) | Directed and Written by Pawel Pawlikowski

Before getting into Cold War, as a prelude, I’d like to mention a funny documentary the filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski released back in 1991 called Dostoevsky’s Travels. It follows the great-grandson of the famous Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky who died in 1881.  Fyodor is generally known as one of the greatest writers of all-time and possibly one of the first modern psychologists, deeply probing the human soul in his work.  Great-grandson Dmitri drives a tram in Leningrad, Russia and agrees to go on a speaking tour about his “prophet” Grandfather.  He doesn’t do this to pay his respects, but only because he dreams of scraping together enough money to buy a used Mercedes to impress his friends.  And he is OBSESSED with buying a Mercedes and knows nothing about his Great-Grandfather. He talks to crowds of intellectuals and hardly has anything to say about his kin Fyodor and just wants to get paid. He buys one Mercedes and it breaks down immediately. He then buys another at the end of the documentary and it gets stolen by bandits. As the doc progresses you see Dmitri is a bit of a numb-skull and a scoundrel. I liked it due to the irony of Dmitiri’s complete uncaring attitude towards Fyodor’s highly regarded esteem, and obviously this absurd infatuation with acquiring a used car as a status symbol compared to his novelist grandfather, who is held up so highly for his spiritual profundity and depth.     It’s a great piece of work no one has heard of...part-cautionary Capitalist tale at the end of the Soviet Union, while Cold War is part-cautionary Communist tale post World War II.  

Official Trailer for Cold War

Intro and Technical Specs

To start, my main fear of writing about films I love is that it will suck the joy out of the film itself by looking at it so closely.  I have only written in depth about two films, and thus far, am finding it to be the opposite.  When going under the microscope, I am just becoming more aware how great a truly well-made film is when breaking it down.  

Cold War may be the most beautiful black-and-white film I’ve seen.  The category Amazon has placed it in is “Arthouse Drama”.  Amazon Studios also is the distributor of the film.  My guess is because it did very well at the Cannes Film Festival and Pawlikowski won the Oscar for his previous film Ida in 2013. Sometimes they get it right.   To give some more context, I am very familiar with Ida and studied it for research for making my latest short film.  I found it interesting Pawlikowski implemented a particular style similar to filmmaker Paul Schraeder’s book, “Transcendental Style in Film”.  One aspect of this style pertaining to Ida is the cinematic framing for the action and not moving the camera until the end.  He framed his subjects in a squared 4:3 aspect ratio while leaving lots of headroom, sometimes leaving them in the bottom corner of the frame, which carried over to Cold War.  I don’t exactly know why he does this, but I have some theories that I will flesh out within the post in depth.  While watching, I immediately noticed the grain in the 4K version.  I looked it up and the film was shot with an Alexa digital camera and also a 35mm film camera, so apparently they were able to mimic film grain with the Alexa in post to match.  A 32mm lenses was used for almost all the shots. According to Pawlikowski it was because this focal length closely mimics the viewing width of the human eye and allows a wide space of action that can fit around the subject(s) in the frame. Similar to Ida, there is no non-diegetic music in the film (music added outside of the film’s music itself) until the closing credits, reminiscent of the French director Bresson.  

Opening in Rural Poland

The film opens on the hands of a man playing an instrument that resembles bagpipes, looks handmade and I assume is indigenous to Poland. The camera tilts up to reveal a bright-eyed rural man, and eventually pans over to another interesting looking character playing a violin as they sing together.  We soon learn that Wiktor (one of the protagonists) is traveling with two others (Irena and Kaczmarek) and they are recording various forms of folk music unique to the Polish people.  Kaczmarek immediately degrades this type of music as “possibly crude” or “too primitive” immediately marking a divide in perspective compared to Irena and Wiktor, who visibly enjoy interacting and recording the villagers’ authentic music.  

They soon come to a house where a unique-looking dirty village girl sings a song not accompanied by any instruments.  She has deep-set eyes and looks slightly haunted, and the lyrics of the song are about unrequited love. Not a happy song. Wiktor and Irena are enraptured by the raw singing and are recording this. In contrast, Kaczmarek disinterestedly eats soup in the next room, spoon klanking against the bowl, probably interfering with the recording.  Kaczmarek is representative of the Communist State for this film, high on bureaucracy and lacking in soul. The song being sung by the little girl is a huge part of the film as a whole.  Little do we know (and probably not evident to most who have seen the film) the lyrics tell the story of what happens between the protagonists we are about to follow in the film. The song is called Dwa Serduszka (Two Hearts) and is an authentic Polish folk song like much of the music in the movie.  After watching for the first time (I commonly do this) I went online to look up background information and found a very well-made youtube video essay describing the song as being the “Leitmotif” for the film. Leitmotif is a term defined as “a recurrent theme throughout a musical or literary composition, associated with a particular person, idea, or situation”.  In this case, the song operates as a direct pointing of what is to happen.  The song pops up several times throughout the course of the film, forecasting the fates of the two protagonist lovers, Wiktor and Zula, who are brought together by music.

This “forecasting” I believe goes deeper.  It’s as if it is pre-determined. Pre-determined due to the current political environment in Poland and the two characters’ difference in personality and upbringing.  Also, most importantly, is because they love each other in a way that seems beyond their control and not a choice, eventually becoming impossible for them to live life without one another. The leitmotif reminds us throughout the film of Wiktor and Zula’s inability to escape their fate, which is already etched in stone by powers beyond their will:    Two hearts four eyes Crying all day and night long Dark eyes, you cry because you can't be together You can't be together My mother told me You mustn't fall in love with this boy    But I went for him anyway and love him until the end I will love him until the end  

Folk Ensemble

Now we are at a large building which looks to still be in the rural area.  Auditions are going to be held here for singers and dancers for a folk ensemble performance.  A couple of trucks haul the commoners in and Kaczmarek gives a stately speech to the bunch before cutting inside to everyone waiting to audition for Wiktor and Irena.

We then meet Zula waiting.  She elects to audition with another girl, naively, rather than shine in the audition solo. They enter the room to sing for Wiktor and Irena.  Wiktor is immediately transfixed and asks Zula to hold on and asks her to sing another song alone.  She sings with an authentic, untrained beauty.  We also see her feistiness here.  It’s obvious Wiktor is smitten and she is marked down to be selected as one of the singers after they exchange a parting look.  By now, the framing style of the cinematography is noticeably unique compared to other films.  As mentioned in the intro, characters are often framed with lots of headroom and sometimes placed in the bottom of the frame, leaving it mostly open space.  My theory on this is that the environment the characters inhabit are shaping their destiny more than the characters’ own free will, therefore their heads are often seen at the bottom with action on top and around them. For example, Communism looms larger than the individual, tamping he or she down (literally) to the bottom of the frame.  Not only Communism, but their uncontrollable love for one another, the characters’ upbringing and the people around them with their general wants and needs. These factors shape their present and future more than their own willful, self-determination and I think the filmmaker is aware of this fatalism, yet doesn’t just come and say it because that wouldn’t be interesting.  We just see that Wiktor and Zula are never able to comfortably settle anywhere with their love nor escape the love they feel for one another, making their situation impossible due to the circumstances.        In Ida, duty to God looms large and so does the characters’ Jewish unknown family past (to only name two) and the shots are framed accordingly as well.   On a broad level stepping outside of the film, what’s interesting to me is how much free will do humans actually have and how much is self-determinant?  After studying the film closely, this is the deep question (not answer) that I came to that transcends the surface story.  

Wiktor watches Zula from a distance outside that evening.  Irena then tells him Zula killed her father and did some prison time for it.  After rewatching, I suspect that Irena loves Wiktor, and there are a few subtle cues later on that I noticed as well.  During private lessons, Wiktor curiously asks Zula what happened between her and her father while Wiktor plays scales on the piano and she matches the notes with her voice.  Zula says her father tried to be sexual with her so she stabbed him.  It is a very matter-of-fact and short answer.  Wiktor doesn’t say anything and continues playing the piano.   I’ve thought about this scene more so than any other scene after rewatching.  I think it is because of the dialectical nature of Zula saying she stabbed here Dad because he tried to have sex with her, one of the darkest things you could imagine, then the slight humor of Wiktor’s reaction while seamlessly transitioning back to the softness of the piano and her soft voice syncing.   Wiktor is very watchful, internal, reserved, most likely from a more refined family and musical background.  Zula is tough, spirited, tenacious and has lit a fire in Wiktor.  Wiktor is tall and dark-haired.  Zula is short and blonde. Opposites!

It is now time to perform for a large audience in a theatre.  Wiktor conducts. Zula and about 20 other girls in Polish folk attire sing the leitmotif song that was sung by the young girl earlier.  The group sings beautifully.  Zula shines in front.  Even Kaczmarek on the side of the stage behind the curtain seems to be in awe and carefully walks about as if not to disturb the magic.

Afterwards there is a reception.  Wiktor and Irena lean against a large mirrored wall and everyone else in the room is seen in the reflection. When you first watch it, it takes awhile to figure out the orientation of the room due to the mirrored wall.  I think this is the most interesting shot of the film.  Kaczmarek then gleefully enters frame and says that the performance was so beautiful, calls Wiktor a genius and says it’s the most beautiful day of his life.  He really means it and is the most authentic emotion we see from him in the whole film.  Previously, Kaczmarek thought all this “folksy stuff” was foolish.  There is a funny moment between the three.  Wiktor and Irena are obviously moved by this but not sure how to express it as the stately Kaczmarek leans against the mirror with the two.   On a second viewing, one sees Zula in the reflection staring at Wiktor the entire time.  The two make love soon after in a bathroom at the party.

The Ensemble + The State

The performance is so good, now the State wants to get involved and meets with Wiktor, Irena and Kaczmarek.  The government wants to turn the repertoire into a “calling card for our Fatherland” and incorporate “Land Reform”, “World Peace” and a strong number about the “Leader of the World Proletariat”.  In return the group will be held in high favor, able to travel to other countries to perform, etc.  Irena and Wiktor are visibly uncomfortable with this.  Irena speaks first and says thank you but the ensemble is about authentic folk art and the rural population doesn’t sing nor understand these difficult issues.  Kaczmarek quickly intervenes and calls the man from the state “comrade” and says the ensemble, on the contrary, will do this after given proper direction. Irena stares him down.  Wiktor says nothing.  The next performance is stained by a huge tapestry of Stalin behind the singing ensemble.  The tone now is more dutiful rather than soulful, as if singing a church hymn they are forced to sing.  Zula’s face while singing now lacks the life it possessed in the performance before.  The State must extinguish all individuality and uniqueness with the goal to homogenize.  Irena’s heart looks broken in the audience.  Everyone dutifully rises for applause afterwards and Irena walks out.  We do not see her again in the film.  Everything has changed.

The stuffiness of the singing troops is saved afterwards by a beautiful shot of Wiktor and Zula laying in a golden wheat field together at dusk. Golden?? The film is in black and white but my mind says “golden”.  Birds and crickets sing. Tranquility away from the group.

But it doesn’t last long, as they are unable to run from the larger outside factors.  Zula soon confesses that she reports on Wiktor to Kaczmarek about their relationship and the things he tells her. She says it’s because she’s on probation for something and assures Wiktor that it’s nothing that will hurt him, but Wiktor gets up and walks off angrily at a loss for words.      As mentioned, the scene starts with their eyes closed as if in a dream, beyond the State, but it's inevitable that the state has to enter their relationship at some point, infecting the dream, and will remain a problem for the rest of their lives.   Zula calls him a “bourgeois wanker” as he walks away and she reacts oddly by jumping in a nearby river.  As soon as she hits the water, Wiktor stops and turns around.  She floats in the river and begins singing the leitmotif song.  

The next shot is of the two silently sitting together again in the wheat field at nightfall with a campfire going.  Zula’s hair is wet. The two just stare at each other and never say a word. What are they thinking?   I think Wiktor is thinking that he can not escape her because of his love and that they are stuck!  Zula knows this too.  This is a type of love that transcends choice.  Just like the State, their love controls them. The silent shot in nature cuts to black, then diverges to a busy train station with a brass band as the ensemble leaves to go to Berlin for a show.  Kaczmarek gives a stately speech to the group about their trip.  Wiktor meets Zula privately in a train car and lays out a plan for their escape once in Germany to go to France.  Zula is nervous she will not be able to make it somewhere other than her homeland Poland due to her inability to speak French and lack of experience.  I doubt she has any family to rely on, and at the moment has the ensemble in Poland as a decent occupation.  Wiktor assures her she has talent to learn and the most important thing is they’ll be together. They kiss.   The performance in Berlin is shot very uniform and proper, perhaps further pointing to its newfound soulless rigidity.  Afterwards, Wiktor goes to the meeting place to cross the border.  Zula remains at the reception with the comrades and Kaczmarek (as if in a trance) and never shows.  Wiktor waits until nightfall and eventually stiffly walks across without her.  

Defection

Wiktor is now playing piano in a cool jazz night club in Paris with a band.  It is 1954.  His beard is now grown out a bit and his hair messier than before.  He is now in an empty cafe at closing time and speaks French with the waitress. He seems to have assimilated well here.  It is revealed he is waiting for someone. That someone is Zula.  She eventually walks in and they stare at one another for a few moments.   One look at Wiktor while sitting across from her shows how much he still loves her and has missed her. The actor playing Wiktor, Tomasz Kot, really shows this wonderfully. He is very good at being still yet showing so much.  Regarding the performances, this is one of the most authentic love films I’ve seen in a long time.  And an expert director and writer doesn’t hurt.  The film never feels sappy, in my opinion, while simultaneously remaining very romantic.   Zula doesn’t show much and stays cold during this scene, but can’t help but ask, “Are you with someone?”  Wiktor is.  So is she.  He asks if she’s happy.  She isn’t, but doesn’t say it.  Wiktor knows and walks her to the hotel.  She says she wasn’t good enough, not as good as him, to make the escape from Poland to Paris.  Wiktor says he believes love is enough.   Zula coldly kisses his cheek and then stolidly walks away.  Wiktor watches her go.  But eventually Zula breaks! She turns back around, walks quickly back and they kiss passionately for a few moments before she leaves again.      If one just read this and didn’t watch the film, you might think it seems like any other love story you’ve seen a million times. But to me, because of the authenticity of the performances and lack of constant soundtrack music, it really felt great to see these two embrace again. And I think it proves that moments in movies that may look cliche on paper can be pulled off with a skilled filmmaker and actors.  Also, there’s only a few angles that the camera covers in this scene and ALL the scenes really!  There’s a graceful economy and no superfluous closeups with unnecessary dialogue.  And as mentioned, no outside music booms in like most films commanding you to feel something! You feel it because you feel it, not because you’re told to feel it with an over-bearing soundtrack trying to compensate for lack of performance or direction. Wiktor now walks into his apartment, smokes a cigarette alone deep in thought, then gets in bed with his girlfriend.  He tells her he’s just been with the woman of his dreams.  She doesn’t seem to care and turns around to go to sleep, highlighting the lax and blase nature of their relationship and possibly Paris artist life as a whole.  Wiktor then turns off the lamp and looks up at the ceiling in lovestruck thought.

We are now in Yugoslavia in 1955, which looks much more lush than I would’ve imagined Yugoslavia.  Wiktor gets off the train to attend a performance of the ensemble.  Kaczmarek quickly greets him at the front of the theatre and is oddly cordial and confident in a sharp suit.   Once inside, Zula sees Wiktor in the audience and looks startled.   Wiktor looks side to side and men are watching him from the aisles.  He is escorted away by authorities yet remains adamant to see Zula rather than be afraid of being thrown in jail or hurt.  The first time I watched I thought he was definitely going to be thrown in prison. Kaczmarek obviously ordered the men to take him away and send him home in a train before he could see Zula, because of Kaczmarek’s interest in Zula.

Zula and the ensemble are shown singing the leitmotif song now.  Zula notices Wiktor is no longer in his seat.  Perhaps he was escorted out at the intermission.  She sings with a melancholic intensity.  The black-and-white contrast is especially beautiful here, maybe more so than anywhere else in the film.  There is a black back drop and all of the singers’ alabaster skin glows, as well as their folk costumes.  

Wiktor is back in Paris now and has gotten work as a Film Composer.�� Two years has passed since the Yugoslavia concert.  While in the middle of working on the soundtrack, the side door of the sound stage opens. Wiktor is spellbound as a smiling Zula is revealed.  

Zula has married an Italian so she could legally move to France.  She says the marriage doesn’t count though because it wasn’t in a church. Neither seem worried about it.  This time Zula does not hold back her feelings and, obviously, neither does Wiktor. They make love.   They ride on a boat down the Seine at night past the buildings and cathedrals. They messily and drunkenly dance alone at a night club in rapture. Heaven for a moment.   

Which begins Zula’s vast transition from the performing rural ensemble in Communist Poland to a solo singer at the Paris jazz club with Wiktor’s band.    She sings the emblematic Dwa Serduszka most wonderfully here. Order.  Everything in it’s right place. She is luminous as the camera slowly dollies around her, eventually revealing a packed club.  Everyone is captivated and still.  Then at the end is a lovely moment, maybe my favorite moment of the film, where Wiktor is staring at her intensely and she turns to check in with him and he gives her a nod of approval.  It’s almost corny, riding the edge, but is powerful, conveying a silent understanding between the two seeing one another perfectly clearly.

Poles to Parisians

We now are at where Wiktor and Zula live, which looks like a cool version of a converted attic with a Paris view.  Juliette, Wiktor’s ex, has translated Dwa Serduszka from Polish to French and Zula is unhappy with the translation, which most likely includes some self-consciousness about her pronunciation.  The manner is which the leitmotif song appears here runs parallel to the first step in the descent of the relationship in Paris.  Zula is defensive and anxious about the Parisian artistic circle Wiktor has introduced her to and she drinks to ease the anxiety of feeling inferior.  Wiktor tells her not to because she is “charme slave” as they say, alluding to how everyone has a narrative role and label in these circles.  Zula is becoming difficult and insecure.  Wiktor is becoming caught up in the scene and ignorant of Zula’s dramatic change of environment.

The film director at the party looks Zula up and down when they arrive.  Wiktor allows this without rebuke, most likely due to the nature of the sexually-lax Parisian art culture. Everyone is beautiful and chic at the party.  Zula immediately goes for the drinks.  She then sees Juliette and approaches her abruptly (yet with restraint for Zula), subtly challenging her French translation of Dwa Serduzska.  Juliette calmly explains her reasoning according to the lyrics’ metaphors. It’s obvious Juliette sees through what’s happening in the situation here..  Juliette’s part is small but the actress is excellent and conveys a lot.  She eventually mentions how the transition to Paris must’ve been a shock...the cafes, cinemas, shops, restaurants. Apparently Juliette sees this shock more than Wiktor does.  Zula tries to play it cool here but you can see she’s flustered.  This is a game she’s not used to playing. She then retorts that her life in Poland was better.  

Wiktor is talking to someone and looks over and sees Zula and the Film Director sitting closely, flirting.  Zula glances back over at him to see if he cares, but Wiktor stays put.  Then later she aggressively confronts him about giving her story “more color”.  It is apparent now that he has enhanced her Polish story to seem more dramatic in order to captivate his French friends and colleagues.  Wiktor shrugs this off.  Zula’s vibe is not carefree and cool like the rest of the party with her straightforward, intense rawness which creates an isolation for herself.   She sits in the bathroom now alone, drinking from a bottle, talking to herself in the mirror.  She calls Wiktor a jerk, but then says she loves him. She calls herself an idiot at one point. She continues to talk in the mirror as if to console herself.  And I can’t help to mention how much she looks like a young Gena Rowlands here.  It reminds me of the 1968 film Faces, which is also black and white.  They look so much alike, and both fantastic actresses that are blonde, voluptuous and troubled.

Gena Rowlands in Faces (1968)

Joanna Kulig in Cold War (2018) Wiktor, unknowingly and excitedly, opens the bathroom door and says that they’re all going to the Jazz Club now.  Zula says she’s a bit sad and wants Wiktor to come in the bathroom with her, but he ignores this and says let’s go.  She takes a moment to herself and then it cuts to the club.  She looks miserable and wasted sitting at the bar.  As we go, I am still noticing the framing I mentioned at the beginning with the subject at the bottom, but for this shot she really seems low!

Her melancholy is interrupted by an upbeat, American song (”Rock Around the Clock Tonight”) and she gets up reinvigorated and starts dancing enthusiastically with a few different guys.  The camera goes handheld and is the messiest camerawork of the film (a good messy).  She eventually gets sloppy and gets on the bar and almost falls and people drunkenly cheer as Wiktor exasperatedly watches.

We then see Wiktor carrying her into their room.  Zula says he is no longer a man in Paris like he was in Poland, and says she and the director get along well in attempt to get under his skin further.  He then sits alone in the dark and smokes a cigarette.

It now cuts to Zula in a sound studio singing into a mic in French.  I don’t speak any French, but her accent and pronunciation feels correct, but her spirit is muted...and we soon see one reason why.  Wiktor’s voice ominously interrupts her over a speaker behind glass in the recording booth.  Now the shot is on him and he looks disheveled and dark and tells Zula they only have 40 minutes left and not to blow it.  There is a deep hate in his eyes we haven’t seen yet, perhaps retribution for calling out his manhood and their recent relationship woes. An engineer and the film director are also in the booth.  There is just a bad energy in the room and anyone that’s ever tried to perform anything would be able to detect how difficult it would be to bring a great performance here.  The music starts back up and Wiktor looks down as if disappointed right before she starts singing.  

We are at a listening party now for Zula’s record at the French Director’s apartment.  Zula is standing in the middle of the room alone, listening intently as several others sit around in the background drinking champagne.  Dwa Serduszka plays, but now in French.  It’s okay but not great. It doesn’t have the soul that it had before in Polish.  I’m trying to put my finger on it, but the French seems a little stiff and the vocal track seems extra-produced.  Too loud and too clear when mixed with the band’s instruments and it’s just not what it was before like the first time at the jazz club, for example.  Again, this leitmotif song is also a metaphorical indicator for the stage in the relationship. She looks over at Wiktor who is cooly leaning on the wall off to the side (maybe too cool) and gives Zula a nod similar to his nod after the jazz club performance.  But this nod doesn’t have the effect it did then and seems oddly forced.  The record playing here in this posh Paris apartment compared to the Polish rural girl singing at the beginning of the film is night and day. It’s obvious why, if you think about it.  They’ve taken a folk Polish song, translated it to French for a rural Polish singer, then recorded and produced it in a slick Paris sound studio under difficult conditions.  How could the quality not suffer a bit?! Another example of the larger outside obstacles making it impossible for them, even in a free society like Paris, France.    

It cuts to them now walking home afterwards.  Immediately it’s apparent Zula is unhappy.  Wiktor recognizes this but apparently didn’t know while at the party.  As they pass a fountain next to the street, Zula throws the record in <splash> yet continues to mostly hold her sadness in, which has become more of a depression at this point.  Assimilating is one thing, but they have gotten into this habit of holding back and not being up front, maybe due to the social circles they run in now.  Zula cooly mentions that the French Director has fucked her well 6 times and "not like a Polish artist in exile,” which causes an eruption in Wiktor (what she wanted) and he slaps her.  

This is strange to mention but, technically, the slap doesn’t sync with the sound. Lol. I watched this part 3 or 4 times to make sure and it just doesn’t (unless there was a lag in the internet connection).  Maybe nobody else notices this, but I’ve had to edit-sync slaps, kicks and punches before many times on this very computer and immediately saw something didn’t look/sound right. After the hard slap, Zula raises up and says, “Now we’re talking”, which is sarcastic but also the truth.  Often one needs a crisis moment to break out of a behavioral habit and apparently the French translation broke the camel’s back. The next day Wiktor frantically goes to the Director’s apartment looking for Zula.  He stomps through the rooms looking for her.  The Director then says she went back to Poland.  Wiktor slowly walks out of the apartment with a terrified look on his face.   Wiktor has become unhinged and plays maniacally on the piano at the Jazz Club.  The other band members just stop playing and look at him as he bangs on the keys in isolation.  There is some slight comical levity here for a couple of seconds due to the look on the clarinet player’s face.    You assume Wiktor has lost his job.  He is now miserably pumping coins in a phone booth for talk time to find out where Zula is in Poland.  Afterwards, Wiktor goes to what I assume is an embassy.  A Polish man at a desk tries to dissuade him from leaving Paris and going back to Poland.  You can see the Eiffel Tower outside the window as the man asks Wiktor why he would ever want to leave this place.  He says Wiktor doesn’t exist anymore to Poland because he left and let down all the young people he worked with. The man takes a drink from his cup and reacts as if he’s spiked it with something strong, perhaps how he’s able to get through his job.  He then mentions there is a way Wiktor can go back if he truly regrets what he has done.  

The Exiles Return

It is 1959 and we see Zula back in Poland on a dreary, crowded train with peasants.  Soldiers whistle at her as she walks on a snowy road.  She has come to visit a very broken, gaunt Wiktor who is being held prisoner by the military for being an exile.  He says he has to be here for 15 years and got off lucky.  Zula gives the guard what I assume are cigarettes which buys them 10 minutes alone.  

His right hand has been beat severely.  They kiss and Zula says she will wait for him.  Wiktor tells her to find someone else, but Zula says she will get him out.

Cuts to 1964, 5 years later.  A performing Zula is on stage singing a ridiculous Latin-infused song with a black wig on, resembling a late Judy Garland.  She looks overweight and drunk with her comical, sombrero-wearing band. We now see an older Wiktor backstage with Kaczmarek who is holding an unhappy, despondent child.  Kaczmarek doesn’t look like he’s aged a bit and still has a detached soullessness about him.  With Kaczmarek, you wait for him to be rude or mean but he is not.  He always stays at a steady, robotic hum of cordiality.   It is revealed Wiktor can no longer play music because he can no longer use his right hand.  It is also now apparent that Zula married Kaczmarek in order for Wiktor to be released.  Zula now comes off stage and walks quickly toward them but drunkenly falls down. She manages to rapidly get up and falls directly into Wiktor’s arms, completely disregarding Kaczmarek and her son.  They go off to the restroom together and sit on the floor staring at one another.  Zula pulls off her wig, perhaps finally able to shed this horrible identity she's had to create to survive. 

She asks him to get her out of here...for good.  

The two take a crowded bus and get dropped off on a country road next to a lovely field.  They look slightly rejuvenated but stolid.  

Early in the film, Irena and Wiktor sat in the van while Kaczmarek took a walk to take a pee.  Kaczmarek then aimlessly walked into the ruins of this old church. He looked around, then left...point being we’ve seen this place before.  And earlier, even Kaczmarek’s face showed a certain amount of reverence for this old church and felt the power it gave off.  Wiktor and Zula now enter this same church.  There is a circular hole in the ceiling, perhaps so God can see them.    

They now kneel with a candle lit in front of them on an alter with a row of white pills. They have a brief, simple marriage ceremony. They both have a glow to them.  They cross themselves and mention God.  They ingest the pills.

They kiss.  

They then sit on a bench at dusk and look out into the field, holding hands, quiet.

You can hear the insects and an occasional bird chirp.  Both have dark circles under their eyes.  It’s so beautiful yet so sad.   Zula then says, “Let’s go to the other side.  The view will be better there”.  They stand and go, leaving an open frame.  A gentle gust blows the wheat from behind where they were sitting.  Perhaps God’s sigh...

This last time I watched, the ending really got me...and is powerful now as I write about it.  As mentioned in the intro, Pawlikowski’s last film Ida incorporated a particular style.  Pawlikowski never moved the camera until the end of that film, so when he did the viewer would be raised up in a transcendental way as the first external music came in, lifting us from the real world for a few moments.  I think he did the same thing here with Cold War in a different way. The moment of transcendence for this film comes at the end also but not with the movement of the camera but with the movement of the wheat behind the bench before cutting to black.  This film is high on realism, but this gust is something otherworldly, therefore a powerful contrast from the stark, real world tribulations previously in the entirety of the film up to this point.  This is what makes it so heartbreaking and beautiful and poetic all at the same time.  And also, for a moment, the viewer might weigh whether the fate of Wiktor and Zula is so horrible after all.   “for my parents” appears before the credits, pointing to the fact that the story is based on the filmmaker’s parents’ true experience during that time period.  Bach’s Goldberg Variations comes in and you know it’s Glen Gould when you hear the humming, which I don’t necessarily like but it doesn’t ruin the mood.  Bach was also used for the ending of Ida and is also the only non-diegetic music used for Cold War.  

In conclusion, I think every great film has to have a surface story that one can follow and then a large idea hidden within that story (or as a result) to meditate on which includes something deep about the human condition.  With some films, one has to work to find out what that larger idea is. For future posts, I may try to specifically focus on this “larger idea” rather that breaking down the entire film.  This often appears as a question, not an answer, and Cold War does this masterfully.

[blackgirlblues]

Being A Black Girl: And Chasing Your Dreams.. Yikes.

Hi, 

It’s me, your resident black girl back with some new shit to rant about. I’ve been posting a few screenshots of short poems and paragraphs I’ve been writing on my phone as a way to heal and get over Capricorn boy from my last post on here and I see you guys like and reblog. Thank you for showing love, although it makes me sad that so many of you seem to be going through the same range of emotions I am. I’m sorry. 

I know it’s a lonely place to be in. 

But, on the bright side, I’ve got a lot of new followers joining the diary/manual/rant page that is blackgirlology and it’s nice cause I think it’s becoming a little bit of a community. So, in a way, were never really going through any of these emotions alone. If you’ve found this page-you’re part of a community. Bask in it. 

Anyways, that aside, a lot has happened since I last spoke to you. I don’t know if any of you may remember, and for some new people this will be a surprise. But I’m actually a singer songwriter from Ireland. Moved to London a year and a half ago to pursue my music dream and that’s how I met Capricorn boy whos been the source of all my poems. 

Throughout this time in between, I’ve been trying to chase my dreams, and chase them relentlessly. and this summer i did just that, let me tell you, what im about to tell you guys, is to put it simply, wild. I’ll just cut to the chase. 

It all started in July. I’d been in London for quite a long time now, over a year and now have a manager who’s my best friend first and foremost. We’ll call her Maya. I met her in my first week of moving to London in the student halls I was staying at and we became best friends pretty quick. She studies music business, so it made sense and she just naturally ended up taking up the role as my music manager. Shes seen everything. The songs I wrote about Capricorn boy, the tears, everything. And she saw everything this summer. 

I saw an ad for a record label opportunity in London. It was advertised on my university facebook page; a new indie label, looking for demo submissions for a competition they were setting up to find their new signee. I sent a screenshot to Maya who agreed I should send my stuff in. I did, they liked it, I got a meeting, we were sent terms and conditions for the competition. We signed it, the rest was supposed to be history. 

Big yikes. 

There’s so many layers to this story that I will be shortening it, just because it can get very draining for me to talk about or even write about. I’ve healed from it i think, but I still want to put it here and write it about to finally close that chapter and be done with my feelings about what happened to me and my music. 

Basically, the whole competition, the record label, the dickhead CEO, it was all a scam. I had accidentally signed away the master rights to my new song to a record label started by a fake CEO who was committing fraud and known for tricking young artists into handing over their master rights so he could profit off of them, for power. 

It was a mess. Another contestant told me and Maya when we were outside of their office. Just minutes before we were under the impression that I was doing an interview for Billboard Magazine. Honestly, I never truly believed it. Shit was too good to be true. 

But she told us everything. How he was actually a run away from Spain, where he was caught and exposed for doing the exact same thing to artists there, how he didn’t have any money to fund the competition he had somehow roped all of us into, how he was illegally avoiding paying his team, how none of the creatives we had collaborated with for photoshoots etc were paid, how everything was a lie, how he didnt have any connections, and how he was trying to convince me specifically to sign a 360 deal with his label. 

Which, guys, I’m not stupid. After the first week of being with the label for the competition and letting my song live through their disastrous marketing campaign, Maya and I long decided that regardless of what they said, I would not under any circumstances be signing anything with any entity of their company. 

After being told the truth, I had to sit down. You see, when I came across this opportunity, I thought this was finally the life I’d been manifesting coming true. I had begun to grow in my spirituality and start journaling, writing down my manifestations, and getting to work with a record label who would later offer me a fair contract before I turn 20 was one of the manifestations I had written down every night before I went to bed. However, what I’d gotten was the exact opposite. 

I remember, me, Maya, and 2 of the girls from the competition all stood around in a circle outside of their new office that the CEO also hadnt paid for wondering what our next move would be with this new information. There was still 2 other contestants inside who had no idea what was really going on was an elaborate scam. One of them wanted to go in and expose them on the spot. I said no, we had to go in and pretend like everything was normal until we figured out what to do afterwards. 

So in I went, plastering the fakest smile on my face and pretended like I still thought I was about to be speaking with Billboard Magazine. Once I got out, I broke down in Maya’s arms. 

I went home to my flatmates, Ellie and Bea and cried for hours before I had to go work a 7 hour shift at a pizza place. 

I stayed in bed, and cried, and cried. and cried again. I didn’t get out of bed unless I needed too. The only people I talked too were my flatmates E and B and Maya. 

Everything was sorted out eventually, a lot more happened, but as I’ve been writing this article for you guys, I realised that all of that stuff is no longer relevant to my journey and isnt something I want to bring back into my energetic circle because I’ve made peace with the fact that a lot of people who betrayed me when I was at my lowest, peace with the fact that these contestants who wanted to “work together” to get out of this mess, actually wanted to save their own asses and leave me in the cold. 

But I still got out of it and I’m still here. 

I nearly got sued by a man with less than 20 pound to his company account online, but hey, I’m here.

I guess why I’m telling you guys this really short account of my summer is to both record it for myself but also to say its okay to flop, its okay to fail. I did both this summer. and thank god i did. it was the best thing that ever happened to me. 

following your dreams is scary, doing it as a black girl is terrifying because society has already kind of set you up to fail. there’s already misconceptions about what you do, who you are, where you come from and how good you’re going to be at what you do. its almost like we cant fail and we need to work 10 times harder to obtain half of what the average white person will get. and sometimes it can feel like we dont have any space to fail or make mistakes because of this but let me tell you thats not true. 

if anything, the universe will put you in places that will force you to grow through the mistakes you make. and thats exactly what happened to me this summer. 

i chased my dream so relentlessly i ended up in an environment i thought i manifested, i thought was good for me, only for the universe to show me that that specific environment i’d been wishing to be in is the furthest from what i need right now in my life. 

this so called failure showed me that not everybody who smiles can be trusted, and that people can be way more deceiving than i ever thought, especially when push comes to shove and they need to save themselves. you start to see the real them when it starts to get tense. the people who seem to be around you when you’re doing good will most likely dissapear when things start to go south, including some of your oldest friends. you will get radio silence on their end. be upset. cry. but after that be glad that this situation revealed their true colours. 

and then never put any more energy into them again. 

this failure showed me how fucking strong i am. how resilient and kind i am even in the face of disrespect and actual evil. it showed me how much i can care for someone who i believe is at a risk of losing it all, and showed me that this will not always be reciprocated. and for a while i thought that meant that i had to harden myself up and grow a shell. but i dont think so. i will not allow the things ive been through to make me into a hard person when i was born soft. i mean now, im a little rough around the edges, jagged enough to cut anyone who comes too close with some of that bad energy, but soft enough to hold myself tight and glue myself back together when i need to. soft enough to hold the people who held me this summer. soft enough to help people who i know deserve it. 

im a good person in a shitty world, i don’t need to match the world and become a shitty person to survive. 

after all of this happened, i stopped writing music. 

i haven’t written anything properly or produced anything in months and sometimes i get worried that ive completely lost my talent. but thats another thing that this failure taught me, i can never truly lose whats meant to be mine. i know that i was put on this earth to create change, to inspire, to be an activist and a voice for people who dont have one. i know i was put here to do it through a creative medium and right now i still think that is music. 

i think i just need to stop being so scared to start again, to learn my craft again.

i used to be so scared of failure but now i am so thankful for it and the lessons its taught me. i had so much hurt and pain and hatred in my heart for the universe for, in my head, doing this to me. but then i realised that the universe never does anything to you, it does it for you. all of this happened in my best interest and while i definitely didnt understand at the time, i get it now.

thank you universe for the worst summer of my life. 

and my black ass will be continuing to chase my dreams relentlessly, failing, tripping and falling on my ass until i get to the very top. 

besides, if everything had just gone right, that wouldnt have been very interesting, would it?

[blasian-kpop]

My Silver Knight. (1)

Anonie asked:

Baekhyun sugar daddy scenario?

_________________________________________

At the age of 21 you were kicked out of your parents house after a confrontation.

Since you’re in college your parents allowed you to stay at home to finish college but the campus was more than an hour away. So, it became a habit that you wouldn’t come home sick for days on end. Living with you then boyfriend and is crappy apartment with his two other roommates became your home 30 minutes away from campus. Since you’re in college your parents allowed you to stay at home to finish college but the campus was more than an hour away. So, it became a habit that you wouldn’t come home sick for days on end. Living with you then boyfriend and his crappy apartment with his two other roommates became your home 30 minutes away from campus.

But your parents wanted to see you home more often than what you gave them. After a while it got so annoying that you just didn’t answer their phone calls anymore. One day, you got a voicemail from your mother, where she threatens to cut off all allowances for you, unless you came home. At the time you thought this was the most stupidest thing ever. ‘Why couldn’t you live your life without being chained down to your parents.’ You didn’t know, but all of this started a snowball effect where you went home and practically cussed at your parents for being too clingy.

“Cut the umbilical cord already”. You scream to your mother who looked at you with absolute shock. And in that same moment your father screamed in your face about your disrespectful attitude and how that you were no longer welcome at this home since you didn’t decide to live there. You packed up the rest of your things in your room when you left that same night. And you thought finally freedom but that wasn’t the case.

After the first month of having no disposable income, And your fruitless effort of finding a job, your boyfriend broke up with you as you couldn’t pay your way to live in his apartment. Of course it was his friend who convinced him to do this as they were all paying rent and you were kind of just freeloading. But he was kind enough to let you stay a couple of nights until you can find your own way. There was no scenario in your mind that would lead you back to your parents house, And do you didn’t want to be that person hopping from couch to couch but after a week your luck started to rise.

A close friend of yours (sasha) in College reached out to you after seeing you struggle in classes. You told her about the situation and she agreed to let you stay with her until you could get back on your feet. You are grateful, and in the same week you moved out of your exes three room apartment and into your sashas cozy little studio. The days went by and you still remained unemployed and collecting debt. You came across this website, it was for sugar daddies looking for sugar babies.

It seems stupid at first but as you considered it more and more it was actually kind of a smart idea. Acting as a companion for these older men in exchange for money, it was borderline prostitution but still legal because they weren’t paying for sex, they are paying for love.

So, you’re scrolling through this site day after day having conversations after conversation, when you finally run into this one guy who didn’t look that old but who knows. Byun Baekhyun was is his name. He looked 25 but his age said 37. That was hard to believe, but you message him anyways. If he was a catfish then you’ll just move onto the next right?

So you message him and he’s nothing but a gentleman in text form. But he’s very straightforward and blunt. Within the first few days of talking he already asked what your monthly expenses were and of course you didn’t know what to take and count for his monthly expenses as you didn’t pay for anything major. You barely had a car, splitting the rent in the studio apartment would’ve been easy as of already cheap, and because you didn’t have any income to begin with leisure spending wasn’t really the top thing on your mind. So he gave him a ballpark estimate of $35,000.

He explains to you that it was an a lot of money actually and that he’d be happy to pay that much maybe even rounded up to 40,000 a month. Soon after that he scheduled for you to to meet up at a Thai food restaurant that had the best tea ever. Friday at 6 PM, and he was very adamant that it was just going to be a short meeting.

So you go through your wardrobe and you find the most classiest outfit that you could find yet still casual. Nice black leather pants a pure white blouse and silver 5 inch block heels. Your friend asked where you going and for some reason you just wanted to keep this whole exchange it secret from her. She came from a very religious family and you didn’t know with what you were about to do was morally correct in her eyes and or if she would still allow you to live with her if she knew. Because as far as you knew this was still borderline prostitution.

So you tell her you going on an online date and told her not to wait up as you didn’t know if you’re coming home. You’re obviously joking but it produced a nice chuckle from the both of you. So you grab your keys and off you go to the state. As you get closer and closer to the location you get exponentially more nervous and suspicious about the authenticity of this whole exchange. What kind of crazy person pays someone else just to be around? How desperate does that make somebody? Isn’t this a fetish? So many questions went to your head and you singled out only if you to ask this me and once he saw him. You promised yourself that no matter what he looks like you were going to go through with it. But if he was a complete psychopath you’d be allowed the first chance you got.

You text him from the website telling him that you got here. He said to just walk inside and asked for bacon in the lead you to his table and that’s exactly what you did. Expecting the worse you get ready to put on a brave face as you meet this man but when you saw him you were stunned. He looked just as useful in his pictures his hair slicked back, face shave and clean, suit as sharp as ever. A nice silver suit with a metallic black shirt underneath and a gray tie. In a soon as he locked eyes with you he felt like nothing but pray. He just oozed dominance.

“ and you must be the little lady that I’m waiting for, huh?” He stands up to greet you giving you a handshake and pulling you into a hug. You are already nervous as it is so when you stumble over your words it just made it 1000 times worse. Now you’re embarrassed and nervous what a combination. “ you look stunning, I’m glad you stayed true to your photos, even on sites like those you can get catfish”

You chuckle at all of his words as you sit down. He’s a lot less blunt in person and seems to want to take things slow so he offers you a meal and you look through the menu order your food and as you’re waiting for it to come out he just makes the general conversation to learn more about you and to tell you about this whole arrangement that he has planned out.

And you asked your share of questions of course, like where he works? what he does on his free time? what he expects out of this relationship? And apparently he is a vice president for a PR industry and keeps up high disposable income by making investments in major companies.

“ so here’s how I’m thinking this can work out, we will meet at least once a week but will never meet at my house and I will never go to yours, but don’t worry will be in a very lavish environment nonetheless. But this exchange is more business than personal to me and I like to keep my personal life away from my business. You said you’re new at this rate?”

“ yeah, you’d actually be my first sugar daddy so you know, be patient with me, I guess” you say this was such a cool way that it releases a slight chuckle from his mouth as he replies “of course you’ll be treated well”

“ this arrangement can go as short or as far as we take it, and we won’t engage in anything new unless you’re comfortable with it. So make sure you’re communicating with me because even though I don’t want to force anything on you I do like surprising my little sugar babies all the time.” He smirks at you, and his staring just made you feel hot all over. Like what kind of power did this man have.

“ every meeting I’ll give you $10,000 and all you have to do is be nothing short of my cute little girlfriend”

“ I mean, you’re making this really hard to refuse. So I guess if you’re OK with taking things a bit slow at first then I’ll be all In” he’s excited to hear this and offers to drive you home. Do you deny this request but Thanks him for the meal that he paid for it anyways. You to exchange phone numbers so that you could confirm this relationship as official.

As he walks you to your car you contemplate it if this was the right way to go or not. Just then he stops you read as you make it to your car and spins you around.

“ trust me baby girl, I’ll make you the happiest that anyone ever could.” You are speechless and could only develop a shy smile as you look down to the ground. He grabs you cheeks gently and kisses you on the four head. It was so loving it made your heart skip a beat, he was so gentle.

“ thank you for this time, can’t wait to see you again.” You show your gratitude by giving him a hug before you get back into your car. And he walks away to his.

Before you get the chance to drive off you get a text from an unknown number. Undoubtably Baekhyun. “ get home safely baby girl, and make sure to text me when you get there. So I know you’re safe” you reply of couse and smile to yourself. This wouldnt be so bad after all.

_________________________________________

So it wasn’t until I finish this whole scenario that I realize the request was for a Text and not a scenario so I guess part two would just be text based with some scenario in it. Oh well.

Oh and sorry for any errors... i didnt proof read.

Bai for Now