#it’s bringing me back to the Facebook days of poke wars

[l3visthighs]

I’m really about to be sitting here at work all day booping people. Tumblr what have you done zjedjsnsnekdjd

[ijustwannasleepyo]

Ok ngl the boop is bringing me back to my early Facebook days when poke wars were a thing

[leveloneblog]

Emily is Away <3: Review (Mac)

Title: Emily Is Away <3

Developer: Kyle Seeley

System: PC/Mac

Store: Steam

Genre: Simulation/Dating/Choose-your-own-adventure

# of players: Single Player

Release DateApril 16 2021

What if you could go back? Back to days of Mean Girls, skinny jeans, and iPods. What if you could go back to when a certain social media company wasn’t hellbent on world domination? Because that’s the bus ticket Emily is Away <3 is offering you. The third sequel in a series that originally provided players with an AIM simulator set in the early aughts, combined with a choose-your-own-adventure romantic storyline. With a knockout ending, it was met with massive success and response from fans dying to once again hear that familiar “ding”. 6 years later, developer Kyle Seeley has deviated from the Instant Messenger-style in favor of what? Facebook of course. AOL’s Instant Messenger is dead, all hail “Facenook” an experience likely to jettison some players into the past with nostalgia.

This time around you have a “Facenook” page. Blank and blue like the good old days. While aesthetically bare, it seems like an opportunity for players to fill in the blank spaces with their own memories. Like previous games, the story is driven mainly through dialogue trees. The player has the option of picking one of three responses when chatting in Facenooks messenger. The game is divided into chapters and your choices in these conversations affect outcomes later on. Customization to your own page is somewhat limited. You can’t change a profile picture nor set a status outside of story-prompted moments but there are dozens of easter eggs to remind you of the internet of yesteryear. You can chat with your friends as well as your crushes. Hell, start a poke war if you feel like it. Seeley definitely gets points for the way he’s able to recreate not just dialogue of the era but also accurate teen-speak of the time. It’s quite compelling.

The strongest element of the game without a doubt is the writing that lets you choose what kind of lovesick teenager you want to be. There are truly no limits to how high you can soar or how low you can sink when it comes to being someones’ partner on social media. You can be the angel that a mother only dreams of or the worst nightmare of shotgun-wielding fathers from afar. It was honestly shocking to see some of the things my character could say to a person he supposedly cared about only for me to think back to my own teenage years ago say “Yep, I remember doing that”. These moments did not happen in isolation and again, Seeley deserves praise for his attention to detail. Because there are hundreds of dating simulators out there and a good portion of them are set in some sort of high-school but Emily Is Away <3 strives to bring you one layer deeper.

Emily is Away <3 is another hit in a series of episodic time capsules. It’s sweet and tinted rosy red but it’s not without genuine emotion. Anyone who has fond memories of the internet’s halcyon days plus a love of choose-your-own adventure will find their nostalgia almost perfectly preserved.

[winterromanov]

College Bucky taking her home to meet the fam!!

pairing: bucky x reader (set in the same universe as this fic and this fic)

You’d never met Bucky’s parents and sister in the flesh before, but you might as well have done by this point. Ever since Bucky had told them he’d been dating someone they’d been dying to meet you--to the point where Bucky can’t Facetime home without his mother demanding to pull you into the frame and Becca Barnes regularly messages you on Facebook. 

So when Bucky finally invites you over to his family home for the weekend, you’re really not as nervous as you’d expect to be. Sure, there’s a vague sense of anxiety that stirs your stomach at the thought of how concrete and real this all is because, well. You’ve never had a proper boyfriend before. But Bucky’s mom has his smile and his dad has his eyes and Becca seems to be the best bits of all of them, so why shouldn’t this be anything but good?

“My mom is asking me if you like Mexican food,” Bucky says, phone in his right hand, sat cross legged on your bed. He’s supposed to be helping you pack. The most help he’s been was throwing one of his socks he’d found down the side of the bed right at your face. “I said yeah. We ate enchiladas once, right?”

“I’d use the term we loosely. I made the enchiladas and you ate them after you’d had practice.” You raise an eyebrow as he sheepishly looks up from his phone screen. “I don’t remember actually eating anything that night.”

“Well.” Bucky shrugs, smirking and deliberately looking away from you. “I had a great meal that night. Not just talking about the enchiladas, either.”

Okay, so now it’s your turn to throw a dirty sock at his features. You watch as he makes a show of spluttering and acting disgusted like you’ve just thrown a tonne of raw sewage all fucking over him. “You’re the worst.”

“I know you are,” he says, teasing, scrambling over to wrap the sock round your neck like a scarf. You squeal, giggling as you try and push him away--because his football socks are gross, come on--but he only laughs louder as you struggle, pulling you closer and closer. “But what am I?”

His face is just so damn kissable even when he’s being annoying beyond belief. You have clothes to pack away, dinner to assemble (well, he’s the one that’s supposed to be making the dinner) and Netflix to watch but you let your giggles subside, curl your fingers round his jaw, let your lips collide. 

“You’re still the worst,” you murmur against him. “But I seem to find that endearing, somehow.”

“Touche, sweetheart. Touche.”

-

It’s not exactly difficult to get to Bucky’s childhood home from university. He’s lived in Brooklyn his whole life so it’s just a matter of traveling there from Upper Manhattan on public transport. You have a feeling he’d not invited you sooner because he’d worried about whether you were ready--if things were going too fast, if you’d get intimidated standing in the front hall of the house he’d grown up in. But when he’d shyly suggested it walking through Central Park on the day of your fourth month anniversary, you’d squeezed his hand and let him know that yeah, you’re kind of okay with meeting the family he fucking adores.

The house itself lies in a fairly innocuous and relatively expensive looking neighbourhood, with tan brickwork and big windows and a bright red front door. A couple of cars sit in the driveway and flowers burst through borders trailing from the front yard into the back. You’d barely wheeled your suitcase up to the steps when the door flies open, two extremely excitable women rushing down to meet you.

“Oh, (Y/N)!” The older one--Bucky’s mom--gushes immediately, grabbing you into a hug before stepping back to take a proper look at you. “Oh, honey. You look just like all the pictures James has sent me. Becca, isn’t she just beautiful?”

“So beautiful!” Becca confirms, blue eyes glittering. She looks so much like Bucky it’s unreal. “Where did you get your boots from? I’ve been wanting a pair--”

“Hey!” Bucky jokingly breaks in between the three of you, running a hand across your waist. “Stop hassling my girl! I am here too, you know. You could show a little enthusiasm.”

Bucky’s mom slaps him on the arm in teasing and the two women fall under his arms, clutching his waist. His eyes close as he hugs them, squeezing them as tight as possible. Despite the closeness in distance it’s been a few weeks since they all last saw each other, and you can see it in the way he holds them. He’s home. 

“Miss me, then?” Bucky says, tongue poking out between his teeth. Becca responds by burrowing closer into his side, while his mom reaches out to clutch your hand.

“Of course we missed you. We miss you every day.” His mom looks at you with a gaze of gratification and what...what might be relief, so you smile and squeeze her hand back. “I am just glad that this one has clearly been looking after you.”

“He looks after me, too, Mrs Barnes.” Bucky’s expression is warm, loving, face slightly tilted to the side as he falls in love with you just a little more. 

“Please, call me Winifred.” She assures, before gesturing towards the open door. “Come on in. It’s freezing, and your dad can’t wait to embarrass you.”

Winifred lets go of your palm and trots up the stairs, Becca bounding excitedly behind her. Bucky rolls his eyes, picking up your suitcase, but it’s all done in jest. 

“They’re going to be like this all weekend, just so you know.” Bucky informs you, ushering you up the steps in front of him. “If it gets a bit much, just say. They’ll get it.”

“I’ll be fine. I’m more interested in all these photos you’ve been sending your mom of me.”

Bucky groans and you laugh, not so secretly pleased by it all. His heart is so full to bursting for you that he sends his mom photographs. It’s, as Sam would surely put it, absolutely sickening. 

-

Bucky’s dad is just as intrigued about you as his mom and sister are, but in a calmer, drier way shown through his bemused expressions and quietly funny comments round the dinner table. Where Winifred and Becca are thrumming with energy, he peacefully sits through the storm--exchanging measured conversation with his son and watching as you deal with Winifred and Becca’s near incessant questioning.

“(Y/N),” he says, quite suddenly, passing you a bowl of salad. “James says you’re the reason he passed Russian Literature last semester.”

You flush a little, not quite meeting his gaze as you pile lettuce onto your plate. “I wouldn’t go that far, Mr Barnes. Buck--I mean, James, is probably one of the smartest people I know.”

Becca snorts with laughter before masking it with a cough, and Bucky kicks her leg under the table, his mouth crammed full of enchilada. It’s funny, watching him interact with his younger sister. It’s like you’re getting a glimpse into the childhood they shared and you were never part of. The scuffed knees and pretend games and play fights that got out of hand.

“He works hard, and that’s all I ever ask of my children.” Bucky’s dad smiles warmly and proudly, eyes crinkling. There’s the blue, where it came from. Bucky’s dad has the same bright blue eyes, like the rough sea on the English coastline. Bucky’s cheeks burn pink and his hand finds your knee under the table, his fingers flexing over the fabric of his jeans. “And if he finds someone who works as hard as he does, well... I’m going to be a happy man.”

Bucky winks at you. “Good thing (Y/N) is the smartest gal I know, then.”

Winifred chooses that moment to bring out a pecan pie she’d made from scratch because Bucky said you’d like them and for half a moment you think you might burst into tears, because four months into loving their son and they’ve accepted you like you’re their own. There is no subtle (or unsubtle) judgement, no tripping up, no how can you possibly be good enough for our boy. 

He loves you, so they love you. It’s as simple as that.

-

Bucky’s childhood room only has a twin bed so you both curl into it like a tin of sardines, limbs entangled and breaths confused, cold feet pressed together under a red striped duvet. There are still teddy bears on top of wardrobes and piles of superhero figurines stacked in boxes, comic books and Star Wars memorabilia and posters of his favourite football stars. Photographs line his wall of him and Steve and Becca and old high school football teams, pinned up with flaking sellotape.

“I don’t think I have enough wall space,” he says, on the edge of sleep, face burrowed into your neck. You don’t turn but trail your hand up his arm until it meets the back of his head, fingers twisting round the hair that grows there.

“Enough wall space for what?”

“For you,” he hums gently, “You’d fill every centimeter of it like you fill every cell of my body.”

He falls asleep, like he often does after delirious muted declarations of love, but that’s okay. You don’t have to fill his wall. You’re happy existing merely in the thrumming, heady organ within his ribcage. It’s all you’ve ever wanted, and everything he’s always given.

-

In the morning Bucky shows you the sights of his home borough, Becca insisting on tagging along for the ride. You look over Brooklyn Bridge and eat hipster pizza and giggle amongst a crowd of serious tourists in Brooklyn Museum. Becca eventually meets a friend and disappears off into the city, so Bucky takes you to Prospect Park, beautiful and gloomy in the harsh January frost. It’s not long before you encounter the pop-up ice rink that appears for the winter season and, really, it would be a shame to skip the opportunity. It’s not half as busy as the rink at Rockefeller Center.

Weirdly, Bucky’s more erratic on the ice than you are. His long limbs stutter and stumble as he tries to regain his balance and you laugh, grabbing onto his gloved hands.

“This sure is a bonding experience,” Bucky’s voice wobbles as he almost takes out a small child with his right leg, “You trying to hold the weight of a six-foot tall football player while also on ice.”

“I’m stronger than I look,” you reply. You pull him violently so he, again, doesn’t knock a group of little schoolchildren like bowling pins. It gives him such a fright that both of you end up tumbling to the ground, frantically reaching out for each other’s hands to gain any semblance of balance.

It doesn’t work. You just end up lying on his chest, on view of the whole of fucking Brooklyn, and he has the nerve to fucking kiss you.

“What?” Bucky shrugs, not looking the least bit ashamed. “Wasn’t going to waste the opportunity.”

“It’s a good job you’re so cute.” You half-smile, trying to roll off him and onto the ice so you’re not holding up the rest of the skaters. He struggles to his feet, palms scraped but otherwise unhurt--but the pout on his lips says hot chocolate over another turn round the rink, and you’re not in a position to refuse.

-

On your last evening before reality resumes once again you and Bucky cook dinner. Well. You watch intently as Bucky throws the ingredients for a chilli in a pan, making sure he doesn’t accidentally do anything wacky (which he does an awful lot). He chases you round the kitchen with fresh chili on his fingers but Becca eventually teams up with you, whacking him with a spatula into submission. His laugh is so carefree it’s magical. You wish you could keep it forever, keep it like this.

(Your stomach swoops dramatically at the thoughts of what the future could hold if this--if this were to last forever.)

The food goes down well. Winifred gazes at you dreamily before gathering up the plates with Becca and Bucky, leaving you and his dad at the dinner table.

“I’ve...been worried about him,” Bucky’s dad admits in the quiet, the only noise faint giggling coming from the kitchen. “About James. About college. Because there have been times when he’s come home and there looks like there’s nothing left inside of him. But I look at him now, and...he’s not just living. He’s thriving. And I think that, at least in part, is because of you.”

You blink back at him, not sure what to say. There are not sufficient words in the English language to reply to that, the tenderness and gratefulness Mr Barnes shows in his expressive eyes and kind mouth. It clicks why Winifred looked at you with relief when you’d first met. They’d been so worried about him.

“You make him so happy, kid.” Bucky’s dad’s smile is crooked, just like Bucky’s own. “I’m just glad you found each other.”

You can only smile back. But sometimes expressions say all the words you need to, so. Bucky’s dad gets it.

-

You hold him a little tighter in the twin bed that night. Face to face rather than back to back. Watching Bucky Barnes breathe is a privilege, but loving him is a responsibility. He will never be empty or lonely while you can feel his skin beneath your fingertips. He will never be anything but him. 

my masterlist

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[lovemesomesurveys]

What is the closest book to you? Forgiving What You Can’t Forget by Lysa TerKeurst. 

Are you reading it or someone else? I'm reading it. It’s the book for the Bible study I’m currently doing.

What is the most expensive thing you own that plays music? My MacBook.

Do you have any siblings? If so, what are their names? I have two brothers. Ever wear colored contacts? No, I've never worn any kind of contacts.

What color is your hair? Naturally, it’s dark brown, but I’ve been dyeing it red the past 6 years.

What kind of shoes do you have on? I'm not wearing any shoes.

Do you like watermelons more or cherries? Watermelon. 

Do you like it when it rains? “I’m only happy when it rains, I’m only happy when it’s complicated.” Anyway, yes, I love when it rains. 

What was the last thing you bought? My brother’s birthday gift and something for me.

Do you get cold easily? No, I get hot easily.

Do you have a job? Nope.

Do you own a dictionary? No. I just use Google if I need to look up a word.

Do you like to mow the yard? I’ve never done it. I don’t have any interest in doing it. It would be hard for me to do as well.

Besides your mouth, where is your favorite spot to get kissed? Neck.

Who was the last person you ate with? My mom.

Did you take a nap at all today? No, it’s only 12:45AM. I took a nap yesterday, though.

Who was the last member of the opposite sex you laid in a bed with? No one.

What color is your father’s car? Green.

Where’s the last place you wore a hoodie to? To my doctor’s office.

Are your nails painted any special color? They’re not painted at all. I haven’t painted them in years.

Give us your plans for the next three hours? Right now I’m doing surveys and listening to ASMR. In about an hour or so I’ll probably make my usual nightly bowl of ramen and catch up on some YouTube videos while I eat. Then I’ll go back to surveys and ASMR.

Can you live a day without TV? Yeah, easily.

Have you ever had a best friend who was of the opposite sex? Yes, a few.

Do you prefer broccoli or asparagus? Broccoli all the way. I don’t like asparagus.

Do you have any complaints about your life? “Hey, wait, I got a new complaint.”  

Where was the last place you stayed over? A hotel last year.

Skim, 1%, 2%, or whole milk? None of those, I use vanilla almond or soy milk. Lately, I’ve been really into the Almond Breeze vanilla milk that has a hint of honey in it.

Are you reading any books right now? Yeah, I’m reading two: “Autumn’s Game” by Mary Stone and “Forgiving What You Can’t Forget” by Lysa TerKeurst. 

Now what are you listening to? I’m still listening to ASMR.

Do you have any bug bites? Nope.

Do you have any flowers in your room? No.

Do you know anyone that owns horses? No.

When was the last time you used one of those temporary public toilets? Are you referring to a porta potty? Never.

Do you live anywhere with any interesting landmarks? Not in my city particularly, but yeah my state has a lot.

When you were little, did you ever go to feed the ducks? Yes. When I got older I learned you shouldn’t do that, though.

When was the last time you visited the zoo? Did you get to feed any of the animals? About 5 years ago, I think. I got to feed a giraffe, which was awesome.

Would you ever want to own one of those little teacup pigs? No.

Do you like the taste of champagne, or do you think it’s a bit overrated? I didn’t care for it.

Given the chance, would you take a trip into outer space? Nooo. Just the idea of outer space creeps me out. I can’t even look at pictures. 

Have you seen any of the seven wonders of the world in person? No, sadly. 

Do people ever try and start poke wars with you on Facebook? That hasn’t been a thing in over a decade. 

What’s a restaurant that you won’t ever eat at again? This Mongolian BBQ place I used to love just because I can’t eat spicy food anymore. :( 

Did you have your morning coffee this morning? Or do you not like coffee? I haven’t gone to bed, yet, but I absolutely will have my coffee after I get up later. That’s a given.

Do you ever let scary movies get to you, and end up scaring yourself? Nah, not anymore. I love ‘em.

Is there someone you know that is absolutely repulsive? No.

Are you tired from last night? I’m always tired. 

Do you have over 400 songs on your iPod? Are all of your songs good? I definitely had more than 400 songs on my iPod. I couldn’t tell you the exact amount cause it’s been stored away and unused since like 2012, but yeah. Well yeah, they were all good to me hence why I had them on there.

Do you eat randomly, just whenever the hell you want? Yeah.

Did you have trouble getting up this morning? Like I said, I haven’t gone to bed yet. However, I always have a hard time getting up so I could just say yes to this question now. 

What’s a few things that automatically make you go, “Awwwe”? My doggo just existing, basically. haha. Do you have soft hands? Do you like holding hands? My hands could use some moisturizer. And yes, but I get self-conscious because my hands get clammy a lot.

Have you ever burnt a food, and make the whole house smell gross? Yeah. Why does burnt popcorn smell so awful? You wouldn’t think something like that would have such a strong, gross smell. I know I’ve had that happen with some other microwave food, too.

If so, what was the food you burnt while cooking? ^^^

Wouldn’t it be awesome if you had your own personal jet pack? This reminds me of a random dream a friend of mine had several years ago (that I still remember for some reason) where she said I had a jet pack and used that to get around instead of my wheelchair, lol. Suuuuper random, but apparently it stuck with me all this time.

What’s your opinion on perfumes that are REALLY expensive? Do you like them? I mean, there’s some really nice smelling expensive ones for sure, but I just couldn’t bring myself to spend a ton of money on something like a perfume. Everyone has their thing and that’s fine, but that wasn’t one of mine. Name a thing that melts in your mouth that you love: Walkers shortbread cookies do when I dip them in my coffee. They’re so good. Do you like roasting marshmallows? Can you toast one perfectly? I do, but I haven’t had much experience doing so. 

Have you ever burnt your tongue like REALLY bad? If so, what on? Yeah, with really hot coffee, really hot cheese on pizza, ramen that wasn’t cooled down enough, Pizza Rolls, Hot Pockets... 

Do you like having random power naps now and then? I wouldn’t say I like them, but sometimes sleep just wins and I give into them.  I just always feel groggy and more tired after a nap. 

Is your hair soft? Do you ever brush it at work or school? Yeah. I used to carry a travel brush in my bag when I was in school and used it sometimes if needed.

What do you think about lip gloss? Do you ever wear lip gloss? I like how it looks, especially a tinted one, but I didn’t wear it often. It’s been a long time since I’ve worn lip gloss.

Are you currently worried about your parents finding out about something? No.

Don’t you hate it when your drink is too hot to drink? I want my coffee to be really hot, but yeah I get impatient ha.

What’s the coolest thing you’ve ever made in a metal/wood work class? I made a simple doll house. It was super basic, but still.  

Do you like concerts? If so, do you like being in the mosh pit? Yesss. Concerts have such a cool energy and vibe. I love singing (shouting) along to the songs and just having a good time. It’s been over a decade since my last concert. :( And no, I never went in a mosh pit. That would not be my idea of a good time at all. I imagine getting claustrophobic, overheated, and hit and shoved. 

Do you like a lot of dairy products? What’s one of your favorites? I love cheese. I’m lactose intolerant, but thankfully cheese doesn’t seem to bother me. I’ve actually read a lot of people who are lactose intolerant can handle cheese. 

Have you ever “liked” two guy best friends at the same time? Yes.

Who can you trust more secrets with, a best guy friend or a best girl friend? It wouldn’t matter what gender they were.

Where are the best cinnamon buns made? Do you love cinnamon buns? Cinnabon from my experience. Mmm, that sounds so good right now.

Have you ever had a REALLY bad rug burn? Did someone drag you? No. Those look and sound so painful, ow.

Do you think pasta and salad go good together? What’s your favorite in mind? Spaghetti and salad do. I love mixing them together. I eat my spaghetti with ranch anyway, so it doesn’t bother me.

Do you like going go-karting in the summer? Do you floor it when driving? I’ve never been.

Did you like eating Happy Meals at Mcdonald's as a kid? Yeah. I remember how exciting it was to be able to get McDonald’s, haha. And if you were the kid who got to have McDonald’s for lunch at school, you were so envied.

You can go to any restaurant; what restaurant, and what do you order? Wingstop. I’d order my usual, boneless garlic parm and lemon pepper wings, fries with extra parm seasoning, and a couple sides of ranch.

Have you ever sat on the computer for more than 4 hours? Uh, countless times. Even longer than that.

Do you ever go on youtube and browse and look for new songs? No, I don’t use YouTube for that.

Do you have a brother who is quite the video game fanatic? He’s not a video game fanatic, but he has some favorites.  Are you a video game lover? Whats your all time favorite video game? I wouldn’t say that, but there are those I like. Mario Bros anything, really. I was into this series called Life is Strange and Life is Strange 2 a few years ago. I’ve also been playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons on the Switch for the past year.

When your cat stares at you, do you stare back? I don’t have a cat, but I do that to my dog sometimes.

What grandparents are better, the ones on your mom's or dad's side? I was closer to my maternal grandparents, who sadly have both passed away, but I wouldn’t say either set of grandparents are better. I just had a different relationship with them. I have a good relationship with my paternal grandparents as well.

Do you like to have cake on your birthday? Which kind of cake in mind? Sometimes I’ll opt for cheesecake. 

What is your absolute ALL time favorite song at the moment? I don’t have a current particular favorite at the moment. I haven’t been listening to music lately.

Do you like drinking Mochas? (Hot Chocolate and Coffee together): I like white chocolate mochas. Peppermint white chocolate mochas, especially.

Do you ever get random headaches? If so, why do you think the reason is? Yeah. *shrug* It’s just one of those things that happen.

Have you ever seen your mom cry? Is it hard for you to see your mom cry? Yes, several times. Anytime I’ve seen her cry it just hurt my heart and made me really upset, too. 

Are you sick and tired, of being sick and tired? I really, really am.

What’s your favorite cereal? Did you ever eat the cereal Trix? All the sugary ones, basically. ha. And yes, I like Trix.  Are you allergic to anything REALLY weird? Do you know someone who is? I’m allergic to tangerines, which seems pretty random. Do you like Oreo cookies? Or are chocolate chip ones better…? I like both, but my favorite cookies are sugar and shortbread.

Are you a fan of spicy foods? What’s the spiciest food ever in your opinion? I used to be back when I could eat spicy foods. I was obSESSED. I can’t have it anymore, though. :(

[pastorcowboy]

We are the unhappy people

We are an unhappy people

I have been to many churches in 21 years. Rarely have I seen the happy people. There are the important guys with their hands in their pockets. Ohhh, they look important. The pastor that shakes your hand while looking for the next hand. The diverting eyes kills me. How many Christians are looking to save people but are not interested in friendship. It’s always business at church. Do this program and fill out that form. This guy has that title and that girl is in charge of this thing. What they don’t see is what the outsider sees: no smiles. There is little joy in running church like a business and sweat shop. Stop! Just stop it!

I do attend a happy church. They seem to be the happy people. Sunday appears to be fun day. They have other fun days too. I mention church directly because of happiness. If you can’t find happiness there then where can you find it? God is supposed to be about love, joy, and fulfillment. If they’re not happy, Houston we have a problem. Ok, lets turn towards the rest of us. The majority. They are not happy either. They claim they are free to do as they please. Do all the sex, drinking, and lying they desire. What I have found is that people in general are not happy. How do I know? Divorce is high. Crime is high. Protests are high. The government is trying to legislate freedom to get high. People are not happy.

Just find joy these days? Find content people. I have recently noticed some of the funny men and women have died. Where are the Carl Reimers, Mel Brooks, and Jack Benny’s of the world? Who are they? The funny people. Television used to be funny stuff. It used to be a place that we could go to get away from the “why so serious” world. Then on sports they take a knee. The news goes towards protests and fear. TV shows only talk about the plight of the maligned. Movies only focus on the cause and not the escape story. I have never watched Saturday night live yet; I see the skits being talked about. It’s bash this and bash that. Funny? Laughing? Happy people? nope, those days are long gone.

What does God have to say? In Matthew 24 we find Jesus talking about the end of days. It’s a bleak dark unhappy picture. One man will leave another. A spouse remains and another is gone. Jesus fears for mothers bearing children in winter. His picture is unhappy dark and cold. It looks and feels a lot like the Orwell’s book “1984.” It does not mention wars. It does not mention sickness. No, it focuses on sadness, loneliness, and division. Honestly, with all the technology pulling us together. Why are we pulling ourselves apart? God only knows and he does.

The answer seems so strange. How to stop this unhappy time? You see the more we fight for individual rights the more people back off. While we are trying to make us all inclusive, we are instead isolating the majority. Let’s give powerful rights to the few so that the many must behave. In the end the many just disappear. One by one people are shutting off. We can’t say what we think and feel. We can’t laugh at “poking fun” jokes. Although we we all deep inside think they are funny. There is no jostling and jabbing in good fun. We can’t poke fun at people. Some say that’s a good thing. Oh, is it? Then why are people shutting off. We were made to interact, laugh, poke fun, and jab. Kidding around used to be the human thing. So was laughing.

This is not funny anymore. In many ways the plight of 1984 was grey, dark, solemn, hiding, and fear based. Today we fear the politically correct. We fear disease. We fear offending. Tell me what we laugh at? Who do we laugh with without being cautious? We can’t, we just can’t, and it’s not a laughing matter. There is zero fun outside your head. Facebook has become a vacant parking lot full of cars. Yes, people are there watching and looking. Yet, nobody is talking, laughing, and jabbing fun. The world church of social media (created to bring people together) has become the place where unhappy people thrive. A place where division, hatred, and judgment rule the day. 1984 might need to be renamed 2024. We are becoming (or are) the unhappy people.

[rippedjeansandloudmusic]

Solangelo YouTuber AU

 you know how are there no solangelo YouTuber AU's but you know what I just wrote one so all you solangelo shippers who’ve been looking for one all three of you here’s my shitty attempt at writing one.

Nico di Angelo’s YouTube career was something he wasn’t sure was the best thing to boast about.

It had started about five years ago. He was short and scrawny, just like anyone at the age of seventeen, and had about as much experience with filming himself as he did with hitting on girls. Aka: nada. All he knew was that one button made the red light thing light up, and if you hit it a second time it would stop recording.

So, yeah. He knew close to nothing about the YouTube community.

His first video was a shit show, to say the least. He would constantly knock down the camera, couldn’t edit for his life, and had no idea what to do except introduce himself.

“Uh, hey? I guess, uh,”

Yeah, it was a trainwreck.

You could see he no longer had an ‘emo’ cut (thank god), and was trying out some sort of weird ass undercut. He was wearing a Fall Out Boy t-shirt and ripped jeans, something he would never quite grow out of, with ratty old Converse that his sister had gotten him for his birthday. His baby face was out and proud, no fucks were given, and you could see his bedroom at a really shitty My-Space 2006 angle.

His voice was down a bit, trying not to attract the unwarranted attention from his cousins Percy and Jason from the bedroom over, who’re visiting from their college in New York.

“I’m not gonna lie,” Nico told to the camera, raking a hand through his newly-cut hair and blowing out a sharp intake of air. “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. But, fuck it, why not try?”

And that was how his YouTube career started.

He wasn’t very popular at first since the bad camera angle with the bad editing and bad look didn’t really go together all that well. But, after puberty decided to maybe let him grow out of his five-foot-nothing and he could finally afford to buy a decent camera, he skyrocketed in the matter of about a year.

Have you heard about that new YouTuber, uh, I think it’s ‘Nico di Angelo’?

He’s kinda a stereotypical My-Space user if you think about it.

Honestly, that guy’s kinda all over the place with his videos.

First, he tried videogames.

Yeah… that didn’t go too well.

“What the fuck is Overwatch?” he asked open air, staring at the camera in front of him. He was live streaming, something he didn’t do often, just having nothing to do since his college courses were done for the day. Before much could be said about his remark some busted into the room, throwing the door open and staring daggers at the back of Nico’s head.

“What the fuck do you mean What is Overwatch?”

He was a tall guy, athletic build. His blonde hair fell in front of his face and his eyes were a vibrant blue, matching his tan skin but not his fucking furious expression. Nico blinked a few times, hand over heart, before hissing out a few not so family friendly words at his dormmate.

“Oh my God, Solace, you scared the shit out of me.”

“Well, you kinda deserved it. How, to the high heavens, do you not know what Overwatch is. Overwatch.”

Nico blinked a few more times, turning back to look at the comments underneath his stream. There were tons of comments flowing in, all about who’s the hottie di Angelo? and oh my god I ship it - s already coming in.

“Uh, I mean what is Overwatch? Possibly? I’ve never heard of it.”

The blonde’s eyes were blown open, and he put a hand to his chest as though he took personal offense to Nico’s inability to know what videogames are.

“My god, di Angelo, you’re less educated than my grandfather.”

Then he had run back into his room, and people in the stream could hear things flying. Nico raised a brow at the camera, mouthed a quick What the fuck is happening? before Will came flying back in, an X-Box controller in one hand and a CD case in the other. Nico just looked even more confused, not being able to resist when Will pushed him almost off the couch, taking his laptop and opening a new tab.

“I’m going to show you the best videogame of all time, di Angelo. And if you say no,” he stole a look at a flustered Nico from over his shoulder. “I’ll kill you.”

And that was when the infamous Solangelo tag started to spread like a virus throughout every single type of social media. Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram all became the manifesto for SOLANGELO: THE TRUE OTP.

Yeah, it was weird.

Solace started a channel for himself after that. Filled with random video games, some weird animations he made in his free time, and the occasional A Rare Nico di Angelo in his Natural Habitat: Episode XX

Anyone would be lying if they said it wasn’t amusing.

Throughout random videos or live streams, Nico would have, Will would be in the background, either seeing how much he could throw things at Nico before he would point it out, or just full on flipping off the back of Nico’s head.

It wasn’t long before a full out war started.

All throughout their college years, it was fucking insane; seeing if they could knock over someone’s tripod, or maybe hack their account and upload some weird-ass video about why you shouldn’t do drugs. There are multiple videos on both people’s channels about why You shouldn’t be watching this dickwad! You should be watching my channel, which is 110% better.

When Nico and Will finished college, though, it didn’t stop.

They both moved to the outskirts of Los Angeles, Will’s reasoning to Try and stay hip with the kids, and Nico’s being because he wanted to stalk local celebrities.

But, they didn’t have an excuse as to why they were still living together.

Nico was having another Q+A. It wasn’t often that he did them, so when he did they were excruciatingly long. His longest one was almost three hours. Three hours.

Nico looked back at his phone, where he was scrolling through Tumblr looking for questions because of quote, Twitter’s the basic bitch’s place for looking for questions, and I’m no basic bitch. I’m a badass bitch, that’s who I am.

Out of nowhere, he started laughing at the top of his lungs. Getting di Angelo to laugh was a rare thing; smiling was even more so. You could call him stoic, though it wasn’t that rare. Though, to this extent? The bending over clutching his stomach and almost coughing up his lungs laughing?

Yeah, this was rare.

Will came racing down the halls of their small home, thinking maybe Nico was getting tortured, only to find his roommate rolling around on the floor, dying of laughter.

“Nico, what the hell is happening?”

Will looked to his camera, which was hooked up to his laptop. He raised a brow at Nico, who was too busy laughing to realize that Will had entered the room, before stepping over his shaking body to get closer. Immediately the chat began filling up once more with What question did someone ask? And the occasional Someone please tell me they’re getting a screenshot of this because I need it in my life. When Will came forward everyone was asking why he wasn’t helping, to which Will waved them off his a flick of his wrist.

“If he dies I’ll get all his stuff, so I’m fine with whatever happens.”

“Hey!” Nico shouted from the ground, struggling to sit back up straight. Will just rolled his eyes, walking over and planting a hand on Nico’s shoulder.

“What the hell was so funny?” He asked, to which Nico almost started laughing again. He simply held up his phone for Will to see. Will took the phone.

And almost immediately doubled over in laughter.

For the next about five minutes, Will and Nico were rolling on the floor in laughter. Once they’d finally picked themselves up and looked back to the laptop Nico winced.

“Holy shit,” He mumbled, placing his glasses onto his head and rubbing fresh tears from his eyes. Will smiled, also rubbing his eyes, before taking Nico’s phone from him.

“Please tell me you screenshotted that,”

“Fuck yeah.”

“Send it to me, I want that as my background.”

Nico promptly agreed, and Will almost died again before walking back down the hall, snickering to himself.

Nico looked back to the chat again, which was filled with questions about What the fuck was so funny? Nico just cracked a smirk before rubbing his forehead.

“You guys will find out soon enough.”

GHOSTKING’s live stream has ended.

It was months before Nico would bring up ‘The Question’ again.

There were plenty of theories circling around about what it said. None of which were true, but Nico was happy to talk about some in a new series he had adopted called What the FUck was the infamous question of July 3rd? Starring Will the dumbass Solace

They got some weird ones and some that almost hit the dead center, in which Will and Nico would just stare blankly at the camera with no facial expression before going on like nothing had happened.

It wasn’t until he got the question again in another Q+A that he finally broke.

“Okay, okay, what the fuck?” he asked, facepalming. Will poked his head from around the corner.

“What happened? Did someone else ask for advice on how to bury a body?”

Nico shook his head, throwing his phone back over his head for Will to catch. Will did so effortlessly, stealing a glance at the screen before smiling widely and throwing it back.

“I didn’t know your viewers were that dense.”

Nico scoffed, looking back at him. “Right? God, I didn’t think I’d have to do the cliche ‘Coming Out’ thing that so many others had done.”

At that, the entire chat box stopped loading. Nico raised another brow, tapping the reload button at the top of his internet browser a few times before calling back to his tech expert.

“The chat’s stopped loading,” Nico complained, looking up at Will from his spot on the chair. Will leaned over, opening another tab with the same chat. Immediately Will rolled his eyes, hitting the back of Nico’s chair.

“Nope. Just too much information for one browser to take in at once.”

OH MY GOD WHAT

WAIT HE’S GAY

HOLY SHIT

I DIDN’T KNOW THIS WHAT

I STILL DON’T GET WHAT’S SO FUNNY

Those were all examples of the new texts now coming in. Nico sighed, taking his glasses from his face and throwing them onto the table next to his laptop

“Yeah, I’m gay. Didn’t think that needed a formal announcement, but yeah. God, and here I was thinking I was being too gay.”

It wasn’t that long after that he had the ‘Newest Announcement in Nico di Angelo News’ was posted everywhere.

First of all, he had to let the first big Coming Out news die down.

People everywhere were freaking out. Tumblr fanart were going crazy, Twitter had a seizure, and even some news sites were dying. It was everywhere, New YouTuber GHOSTKING, aka: Nico di Angelo Comes Out As Being Gay.

He didn’t think it was that big of a deal, honestly. But, the internet had different ideas.

He’d been asked to do a collab with other big LGBT YouTubers, most of which he didn’t know, and it was a bit weird. He’d gotten multiple YouTubers wanting to do interviews and stuff, and he just didn’t understand why. Yeah, I’m gay. Not that big of a change. I’m still me.

After that, his views went through the ceiling. Especially with the nonchalance of how he announced it, out of the blue and with nothing different coming from his channel after it.

“Should I change my description to Major League Gay Guy? I mean, just incase people forget?”

Nico was leaning back on his couch, headphones wrapped around his ears and phone in his hand, scrolling though his social media.

Will shrugged, plopping down next to him.

“I honestly don’t understand the big deal. I mean, you’re gay, big deal.”

Nico nodded but changed his bio on Tumblr anyways.

It wasn’t until about a week after that conversation that everything changed.

“People are asking if I’m in a relationship again…” Nico sing-songed out into the hall. He heard a loud groan from across the hall, accompanied by a disheveled Will Solace stomping out of the clear blue. 

His hair had grown out since their first video together, so much so that he could now pull it back into a ponytail without much resistance. His face had matured as well. He was a bit more buff than before, accompanied by two or three tattoos on his upper bicep.

He sat beside Nico in a swivel chair, spinning around for a second. Nico scrunched his brows together, stealing a look at his camera like Can you believe him?, before just watching him for a moment.

Nico had changed as well. He was still wearing the mostly-black, but now he occasionally wore something that was a lighter gray. His hair was still cut short, though now in a much more fashionable style than back in his first solo video. He had also gotten new shoes, something Will had to physically force him to do, and started to branch out into society a bit more, not that he really had to. Will had also convinced him to dye a stripe of his hair, but only on the grounds that Will dyed some of his the same color. Now a stripe in front of both boy’s hairline was a bright blue, much to Nico’s disliking, though Will thought it was pretty, quote, Dope as fuck. To which Nico had punched him in the shoulder, saying You ever even think about saying that and I’ll shank you.

Will eventually stopped spinning around, feeling his stomach about to come up from doing it so much. Nico just rolled his eyes, stealing a look at the camera again.

“This dumbass,” he muttered, facepalming. Will winced for a second before smirking, taking Nico’s lack of vision as an advantage, diving forward and grabbing his wrists.

“But, you’re also in love with this dumbass, so…”

Nico rolled his eyes again, though couldn’t keep the small blush that rose up his face.

“Too much of my hatred, you are right.”

And then Nico took Will by the back of the neck, pulling him forward and kissing him.

Right during the live stream.

In the middle of answering a question, truly.

After a minute Will pulled back, getting up from his chair and spinning Nico in his swivel chair for a second.

“Yeah, I think I just answered that question for you, di Angelo.”

After Nico stopped spinning he glared at Will.

“Fuck off, Solace.”

Will winked at the camera before going back to his room, only to yell back a few minutes later about how he was ordering pizza.

Nico turned back to his chat, hoping that his computer hadn’t frozen up again, before sliding his glasses back up his nose.

“So, yeah. I guess I am kinda in a relationship.” He said, just barely enough for Will to hear him.

“More like ‘am’ in a relationship, di Angelo. Unless the last three years have just been a hallucination!”

Nico smiled again, just barely in frame.

“I guess so, Solace.”

Nico reached up, hitting the button on his camera to turn it off and end the stream.

“Guess so.”

[purplesurveys]

122

[kindaangelic]

Plus One - A Batman Fic

What if Terry McGinnis were always a part of the Wayne Family? Here's my take on how he would have met them the first time. ----------------------------- Amanda Waller watched, as she was bound to do. She watched Gotham. More specifically, she watched its protector, Batman, and his horde of BatBabies. She watched Batman rescue countless civilians, dispense justice to evildoers, and occaisionally stop his impulse to adopt every child he came across, before disappearing into the night. She watched Bruce Wayne flail spectacularly through life, somehow managing to run his business with great success, and his home with lesser success. Still, it was endearing to see that the Keeper of the Night could not manage to rein in his little ones. She watched Nightwing fly across Gotham and Blüdhaven, distracting his enemies with his tight fitting suit and defined butt before inevitably striking them down. She watched Dick Grayson work his day job, get home in time for dinner and to fight crime, and smother his siblings with endless, unnecessary, affection. She watched the Red Hood barrel through Gotham, pissing off every villain and leaving a trail of bodies behind him. When confronted with his vicious ways by his mentor, he would shrug and say something to the effect of "oops," and then turn around to make eyes at Nightwing, who eyed him right back. She watched Jason Todd rise from the dead and trample all over Bruce's life, bringing angst and his own particular brand of love, and a dry sense of humor. Of course, he still managed to make eyes at Dick Grayson, who eyed him right back. She watched Red Robin sail across Gotham, outsmarting criminals left and right, and doing more of the same with the Titans. She watched Tim Drake expertly handle Wayne Enterprises, high school, and his ridiculous family with admirable grace. She watched him nerd out over simple pleasures - Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Yuri on Ice, and saw the glimpse of youth that not even life as a vigilante had managed to take from him. She watched Black Bat let her actions do the talking in Gotham, pulverizing any and all ne'er do wells in her path, instilling fear in the hearts of the evildoers she left in he wake. She watched Cassandra Cain silently float through life, doted upon by her father and brothers, speaking once again through her actions to show how much she loved and appreciated he life now. She watched Robin tear his way across Gotham, protecting his city and those he considered his own viciously. She watched him trail his eldest brother with interest, learning and growing at his side. She watched Damian Wayne grump his way through his house, antagonizing everyone but his oldest brother and his sister. She watched him lavish care on his pets, and indeed every animal he came across. She watched Alfred Pennyworth despair of all of the above, and care for them through thick and thin, a slatwart presence in the family's otherwise tumultuous lives, his reward being everyone's presence at the dinner table in sound body and mind. Amanda Waller took a deep breath, and came to a decision. She looked down at the bassinet by her side, and tickled the warbling baby. Slowly, a smile worked its way onto her face. ------------- "Daddy, the doorbell is ringing." "Jason, don't call me daddy if you're going to be snarky about it," Bruce scolded. "Do it only if you mean it." "Oh yeah? You gonna punish me, daddy?" Jason breathed, inching forward sultrily. "Ew," Bruce said, leaving quickly, while his children - his immature, hellion, children - dissolved into laughter behind him. He pulled open the door and stared irately into thin air before a mewling sound at his feet caused him to look down, and felt a familiar feeling stirring in his gut. He knew it well - it was the urge to adopt. Bruce walked back into the kitchen armed with a wicker basket, and proceeded to hand it to Dick, who promptly dissolved into happy squeals. "Oh, Bruce, you got me a baby! I knew you loved me!" A small, baby boy looked up at Dick, startled, as the older man proceeded to smother it with butterfly kisses. "I found it on the doorstep," Bruce said. "I just need you to hold it. I need to go to the washroom," he said testily, excusing himself, waddling away with a suddenly tense bladder. The rest of the family immediately crowded around the baby to admire the new human, poking and cooing over him. Alfred stared dubiously after Bruce, wondering if he should place an order for a shipment of diapers. Amid the cooing, Damian rifled around the asset that the baby had come in, and pulled out a letter. He handed it to Dick, who read it out. "Dear Bruce," he read, "I made you a baby from some blood I got off of you. Love, Amanda Waller. PS - you're welcome." Everyone turned in shock as they heard a ragged rasping noise from the doorway, only to see Bruce fall to the ground, choking on his own spittle. Alfred rushed to his side while the kids took a closer look at the cheerfully thrashing baby. "Can I name him?" Damian asked, turning pleading eyes upon Dick, who promptly melted. "Of course, Dami!" "Then I hereby declare this brother of mine to be...Terrence." There was a silence after which Jason snorted. "That's a douche name. We should call him something like...Rambo." "No," Cassandra said definitively, silencing the dissenters. "Terrence is good." She promptly bent down and started blowing raspberries on Terrence's small tummy, causing little giggles to burst forth. "Who's my little baby boy? Who's my good little boy?" Dick cooed, bouncing Terrence. "No one," Bruce said rudely. "Apparently, he's my baby boy." Dick pouted massively, looking at Bruce with cow eyes. "Aw, don't worry. I'll be your baby, Dickie," Jason said salaciously, prompting a blush from the older man. "Ugh, incest," Tim muttered, taking Terrence away as Dick and Jason eyed each other hungrily. "Bruce, you've failed as a parent." Bruce strode forward purposefully and dragged Dick away to lock him in the highest room in Wayne Manor, and came back with Dick's startled screams echoing behind him. "There, that's one problem taken care of," he said, dusting his hands off. "Now, hand over Terrence." Tim danced out of Bruce's grasp, taking his brother with him. "I'm going to update our social media profile," he said. "We have to introduce little Terry to the world." "By that, he means that he's going to spend one minute uploading a picture of him and the baby to facebook, and the rest of the time showing him off to Connor on skype," Jason said helpfully. "Connor? Connor Kent? What's he got to do with this?" "Drake and the alien are dating, Father," Damian informed him. "I assume Drake is going to use Terrence to incite paternal feelings in his boyfriend's heart, causing him to fly over here from Smallville to play with the baby, which will then lead to "playing" with Drake as well." Bruce looked horrified, which Damian used to his advantage by snatching Terrence away and waddled off to instruct his new sibling on the proper use of a katana. Bruce tried to lock Tim away with Dick in the highest floor of Wayne Manor, when Alfred pointed out that unlike Jason, Connor could fly. Several minutes later, Bruce returned, looking smug after he had finished locking Tim in the basement, and then proceeded to kick Jason out. "Don't come back until you've banished your incestuous thoughts!" He yelled after Jason, as he tumbled down the stairs. Walking back into the house, he patted himself on the back. "I'm a good daddy."

[ashswritingplace]

Flanders Field

Here is my first attempt at flash fiction, a form of poetry or prose that has a word limit (I marked mine at 1,000), a fast-moving plot, a lot of action words, and not much time or space for description. I found this very difficult to write because I just wanted to write more and more. This one’s about my OC, Link, whose life changes dramatically on a dreary autumn day.

Flanders Field

11 November, 2012

The day started out as any other, a dreary anniversary of a dreary world war. Link had been reading that overused poem on his Facebook feed, something about Flanders and his field. He couldn’t remember who Flanders was, or why he and poppies symbolized the end of World War I. He did, however, remember reading about such a thing in his freshman year history class, and again in his junior English. To him, the image of poppies always reminded him of those bloody fields he’d only seen in textbooks.

His sister wasn’t home yet. Lilee was twenty-five now, five years his senior, but she had been more a mother to him than a sibling. His own mother had died in childbirth when he was a kid, bearing the dead bastard child that had caused his father to leave his family. Link’s mother had cheated on him, after all, and Link was only a reminder of that.

It was to be an uneventful day. Link was off from work at the theatre down the block, and Lilee was out running errands. Most likely, it would be a day spent with a couple video games and a few beers.

Lazily, Link leafed through the pages of “Interview with the Vampire” when he heard the creak of the front door. “Lil?” he called to his sister. “Took you long enough. I’m starving.”

His sister did not respond. This puzzled the man, who pulled himself from the couch and walked to the foyer. His sister was absent. Drops of scarlet littered the welcome mat beneath him. “Lilee?” he called again. “Are you alright?”

Still nothing. Link grew nervous. He started to look around their home, and finally found Lilee, on her knees, in the kitchen.

The woman he’d known his whole life was covered in blood. Her skin looked pale and pasty, and her brown hair was frazzled and matted. When she looked up at him, Link could see that her eyes were several shades too light, and filled with a hunger he could not understand. Her mouth was drenched in what he prayed to be lipstick, but he knew that blood ran thicker. Two long teeth poked out from her mouth on either side, her fangs now too long and too sharp.

Link looked near faint. “Lilee?” he said gently, though a fear clutched at his voice. “What… what happened?”

She smiled at him. “Linkon, my baby brother, I’m so thirsty. I think… I think I’ll visit your father now. I think he could satisfy me.”

“Lilee.” Link’s tone was stern, but he was quaking. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. Leave Dad alone, would you?”

Before Link could react, Lilee shot off. She reached inhuman speeds as she raced out of the house.

Link scrambled to his feet, tripping over the book he’d been reading earlier on his way out. As he regained balance, he noticed something hanging on the wall. It was a gift his sister had given him on his eighteenth birthday, and he hoped it would not become more than a decoration today.

He sloppily shoved his car keys into his car. Panic washed over him as he drove the ten minutes to his father’s house.

He couldn’t understand it. His sister hadn’t even looked human. She had looked… like a monster. This was the woman who regularly donated to the homeless, who took in every stray dog she found, who had raised him without complaint, despite still being a child herself.

Link hardly put his car in park before he was out of it, running up to the front door of his father’s family’s home. It was wide open, and one of its hinges was broken. He ran through the house, and there, in the great room, he saw it.

Flanders Fields.

Link was sure he would never be able to look at poppies the same way again. How could any sight compare to the mangled bodies of his entire family?

Before him was Lilee, now covered in a fresh coating of red. She was hunched over the body of Penny, Link’s three-year-old half-sister, and chunks of her flesh were falling from Lilee’s mouth. Henry, his father’s six-year-old, as well as both children’s mother, both lay dead beside Penny. Link’s father was screaming in the next room, probably to the police that would never believe him.

Tears sprung to Link’s eyes. His sister, his closest friend, had died the moment she had been bitten. This primal beast of her needed to be stopped.

Choking back a sob, Link wrapped his hands around Lilee’s gift. For two years it had hung from the wall in their living room, only taken down when Link felt like playing around. Now, things would change.

He could not even utter her name. He could not bring himself to look at her. Instead, the broken man could only mutter, “I am so sorry.”

In the next moment, his sword was through his sister’s heart. She looked up at him with hurt eyes that were not met. In the next few moments, she fell dead, fourth in this race of mortality.

Link didn’t know what had bitten his sister, but he vowed to kill them. He hadn’t known vampires existed before today. They were just fairytale monsters, mythical predators.

And yet.

Link was only twenty years old, a whole life ahead of him. Suddenly, he had found what he had not in high school: he’d found his purpose. He would never let anyone experience this pain.

[killedbycorona]

you really do not have to read my post or say anything -I need to say things. Maybe read the link. just stay inside please. and put up your protection before reading this if you can. This took 45 minutes to write and I don’t care if it means anything or not. I don’t have a blog. Be kind.

~

AHAH WOW THIS WORDS THIS REALLY EXACTLY MY EXPERIENCE WOW. I explained to my mom how when we went from zoom funeral to zoom shiva to zoom Passover to nothing, it didn’t feel complete or valid. She said, “of course not, you watched it over zoom.” Wow fuck I have not talked about this enough (two weeks of his passing today). I was in the funeral over zoom with others (I can’t remember the count). The day before, we had gone over writing his eulogy over Zoom. *I didn’t get to speak at my own father’s funeral because people wouldn’t be able to hear me over Zoom and they all had to be distanced and no one was going to bring a speaker.* I watched others bury my father and I did not get to. I took a screenshot that lives in the same camera roll as memes of a blurry video of his casket with his GD record on it, a trowel, our late cat’s paw print and other things that I couldn’t make out. The Zoom call ended and I was left in the dark away from my family. I tried FaceTiming everyone and started panicking. Luckily, my aunt had her phone and I called in. *I could not be alone with my father six feet under ground because I had to have someone hold the phone.* We hung up and everyone drove away and I can’t remember what I did after that.

My father, who survived 9/11 by taking the later train that morning to his job, two blocks away, died from this virus in three weeks. I’m grateful for our 19 extra years together.

I know many people are talking about the curve being flattened and going outside again. PLEASE DO NOT. Please, do not make the same mistakes we did. “What if he hadn’t gone to work that week like Harris suggested?””What if he wasn’t in a poorly insulated room and was moving more?””What if was in a different hospital?” We know nothing about this plague. We know no cure. We do not know who survived this round and gets it the next and won’t survive. Please, I don’t want any of you to experience this trauma that I am in and will be in for so so long. Maybe my frustration is misplaced. I feel incredibly angry and to see others risk themselves and others with no regard makes it so much worse. An US problem, not a ME problem. US. Take care of each other.

My mom said that when war starts, the first round of soldiers die first and eventually the war ends. My dad was that first round. I am so scared for all the feelings that will arise as I watch the world cure from this. I guess I really derailed and went off topic since this was about zoom funerals. Don’t worry, I’m finding someone to talk to about this. I know no anger will bring him back and I know I’m mixing that with anger towards irresponsible fools. Please don’t be irresponsible.

I keep trying to not backtrack it to who gave it to him because what is the use. I don’t understand my process so much. This article really triggered me. I was in this daze today of “my new reality is people are extra nice to me because they are sad in quarantine.” Nah, it’s because I’m a kid without their father’s guiding light through this pandemic and the rest of their life. I get it, he’s always with me. But he isn’t. Not in the same way and that needs to be acknowledged first or too. I keep saying “stay inside, no one deserves to go through what I’m going through.” ***I do not deserve what I’m going through. But I’m here.*** And I’m really pissed at god and the whole damn universe right about now and the cliches are hurting me to the same degree they’re helping me. I wish I wasn’t in this pain. I wish my dad didn’t die. I wish anyone understood but I’m not about to reach out to this stranger in south jersey who is in their own grief process. Everyone saying they’re bored in quarantine. God what I wouldn’t do to be just bored in quarantine. Even if I was fighting with him, I would take that. I was bedridden with depression for 7 months in 2016. I know what this is like AND I get to experience all the shit of this pandemic, too. I’m not excused of the boredom or fear or panic or helplessness or anything. I get it all! Woohoo!! My head hurts too much to scream. I ache all the time and the panic is right under the surface just waited to be poked at to come out. I don’t care about Facebook etiquette. I don’t care to be seen as brave or vulnerable or strong or any of these really nice things. I don’t feel brave for losing my dad??? Or brave for how I share my grief on the internet. If anything, I have underlying shame about the mess I’m being publicly. I guess I care about Facebook etiquette.

My dad is gone and I am a lost child who doesn’t want to talk to anyone about it. *I don’t want zoom with a therapist in the same room I had the zoom funeral in in the same room I sleep in.* I want to leave my container and be held and I don’t get that. I hate being a victim but I fucking am a victim to this horrible disgusting killing machine. The statistics look like some mindless game but they’re real. I see them and know he’s gone, but not the last person I’ll lose to it. I already lost another person to it a week later! I don’t let it out and there’s no way to let it out when you’re snowed in in a basement apartment and can’t be in a therapist’s office. I can’t go home -it’s unsafe to travel, I can’t be in his home without him there, I don’t know if the virus would kill me, too. I really want a cat. I’m happy he and Hutch are together because they really were the sweetest and most loving beings around. Every story of either of them has been positive. I hope to continue that legacy and if I give any reason to give you an ill memory of us, I’m sorry. Please forgive me.

I am grieving completely sober. I’m feeling so much all at once and the one truth remains the same: I wish I could talk to him. He wouldn’t know what to say, but he’d be here and familiar and my parent and care in his most amazing special ever growing way. I don’t want to raise myself or do this without him. I don’t want to do this without him. I don’t want to do this.

Please stay safe. Please call or FaceTime whenever. I’ll most likely call back or be too anxious and tell you I need to get off the phone. Texting really doesn’t do much for me and I won’t reach out until I’m caught in a moment and even then I might not. Take initiative with me if you can. I wake up after 2pm and fall asleep between 4-6am. I have class some nights. Can’t do Wednesday’s between 5pm-9pm my time. Sorry my brain is rotting and frying and neurotic and stupid right now. Idk if anyone has the capacity to care to the degree of what I’m feeling. Community care - a different person to hold a little rock instead of one person to hold a mountain. I can pay someone to hold a boulder though.

Everything is wrong and you won’t fix that. But maybe you can walk by my side and not have to watch me carry this all on my shoulders. Maybe we can just find a moment to not be in this or be fully in this and have it not be this fucking awful or this lonely. Maybe we can go further than lightly touching the surface so delicately and vaguely and not bullshit it. I don’t know I need help some times and other times I’m fine until I’m poked. I was poked.

Ok this is long enough. I wish harry styles or frank ocean could distract me forever or take me to dinner so I can thank them and have a hello and goodbye with heroes the way I didn’t get to with dad. I wish I had a cat and my hair was white and eyes blue and I could waterbend and I could play records and drive a moped and travel the world and be in music videos and play music and perform and dance in a class and make art and get into floral design and celebrate mom’s big birthday which we’ve been talking about since October but is in June and do everything I never got to do with him here that he believed in me to able to do and wanting me to do. I wish I did it all then so he could see how fucking cool it was and I could show him pictures and have him judge whether to frame them or not. He was learning guitar. I wish I sang with him to him playing something sweet. I wish I took him to red rocks. I was going to take him to Harry Styles but for whatever reason, I bought no tickets for anything this year. Maybe I knew. He was going to see the Grateful Dead in August. There’s nothing fair about this and nothing I wouldn’t do to bring him back and life is cruel and doesn’t work like that. Life is really fucking cruel. I’ve done so much work and maybe it prepared me to be here but it really didn’t. What sort of punishment did I ask for. What did any of us do to have this bright man taken away. What if anything. Anyways, stay inside and have a good night. I’ll be understood one day I think. See you all on zoom.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/04/13/999348/covid-19-grief-zoom-funerals/

[nookishposts]

Avianotics

Recently returned to a more rural life, we are getting to know our neighbours. They come in all sorts.

I have taken most recently to having my morning coffee with the birds. We tempted them by hanging a couple of feeders from the clothesline attached to one corner of the deck. I do belief that the monthly budget line for bird seed has now equalled the mortgage payment. And the feathered folk have come to expect certain standards. We on the other hand are merely “staff”. Unpaid but for regular quality and dependable entertainment.

I know we live in an area of avid birders. Amongst whom I remain clueless when it comes to identification. Certainly I can tell a robin from a raven, but not a lot more than that. With a small set of binoculars and the handy little guide from the 50 lb bag of mixed seed I hauled into the dining room, I am getting schooled in bird wordery . Junco, nuthatch, grosbeak,finch and titmouse. From the beginning we’ve had chickadees, jays and wee wood peckers, but the cast of each morning’s dramedy is growing exponentially. We could mount our own production of A Chorusline, re-named A Clothesline. Or , given the occasional turf war, Nest Side Story: “I feel flitty, oh so flitty, I feel flitty and snitty and starved!”

The blue jays are HUGE. They squat like sumo-wrestlers readying for a match, and they can be downright thuggish if the lineup at the Seed-ateria  extends further than their patience. Woodpeckers amaze me with their grace; they hang in impossible ways from the spherical cage filled with black sunflower seeds, but prefer to perch atop the tightrope of the suet feeder, poking purposefully into their plunder. The high-fat and high-protein mix helps them weather the winter months. They are also the ones most likely to feed in a snowstorm, their little red caps reminding me of the red-touqued fortitude of Voyageurs crossing Canada by canoe. No sooner had I lamented the distinct absence of cardinals to a new Facebook friend when the first one appeared. They are quite shy apparently, and tend to be ground-feeders. Sure enough, the emboldened one made himself a feast of the mess beneath the feeders; all the stuff that the wee line dancers boot and scoot and boogie aside in their quest for the best bits. 

I sit, coffee in hand , feet up, fascinated. It’s a bit chilly to open the window enough to eavesdrop, so I am forced to imagine conversations around the breakfast buffet. Having the audacity to add a new tray feeder filled with peanuts this morning made for ripe commentary:

“WHAT have they done now?!”

“I dunno, it looks weird, but it smells good, doesn’t it?”

“Smells like the feed store.”

“Well, duh. Of course it does.The gardens are under a foot of snow and we know they don’t cook. Where did you think this stuff comes from, the seed fairies?”

“(GASP) There’s no such thing as Seed Fairies??!! Go on, ruin my childhood you big spoil-sport.!”

“Wanna go check it out?

“Race you!”

And just like that it’s become a riotous new 4-way swinging teeter-totter, complete with snacks.

I stuck some over-ripe grapes on the railing a few days ago, just before a big snow. Birds need water as well as food and I thought the sugary juice from the fruit might do. We have a string of soft white lights that run along the same railing and they glow under the snow, each bulb about the size of...a grape. That led to some confusion, and I think, a little cussing as a result. It occurred to me later that if left long enough the grapes might begin to ferment and we’d run the risk of encouraging the  jay-thugs to become inebriated. Oh goody. I can well imagine Mama-jays tugging Papa home by the ear :”I figured I’d find you back at the bar with your mates. Come home now, we have chicks to feed.” It may explain why they occasionally hit the window with a great thunk. Would it then become our responsibility to provide both rehab and relationship counselling? I don’t need to see a bluejay on a bender, a woozy woodpecker, or a tipsy titmouse. And nobody needs to break anything including the windows. Best re-think the fresh fruit and just put out a pan of water instead.

As I walk each day, I watch for hawks, ravens, herons and the occasional eagle. I see them hunting in the pastures both drifted and scrubbed by the wind; sparkling, ruggedly pristine, home to furtive field mice, ground squirrels and other flightless non-hibernators. As the prey birds swoop low, in my head I hear the deep sighs of a cello. As they rise again to cruising altitude, my inner soundtrack is filled with a bluesy muted trumpet. It’s an interesting space between my inner ears and the outer ones that take in birdsong and the actual flutter of wings in the air. Evenings, a pondering of owls and the call of coyotes through the darkness of the trees sets my imagination squirming. We live on a peaceful but never silent road, sounds carry and change with the wistful winds. The stillness of early morning brings the clearest birdsong, and reminds me that we too have lively and tender friends to feed.

[clusterassets]

New world news from Time: A Tale of Three Jihadists Puts the Fight Against Extremism Onstage

The sound of machine-gun fire explodes in a darkened room in Paris’ Montparnasse district on a May afternoon. The lights go black for a moment, and when they come back on again, a man lies dead.

The violence brings gasps from the 200 or so teenagers seated in the audience of Le Grand Point Virgule theater, who well remember the night in November 2015 when ISIS gunmen burst into the Bataclan theater just a few miles from here and shot dead 90 people. This time, however, the gunfire is not another deadly attack. It is the latest performance of Jihad, a four-year-old play that predates the devastating attacks in Paris, Brussels and Nice in 2015 and ’16.

Now, schools and governments are increasingly using the play as a teaching tool for a generation of Muslim youth in Europe who have come of age in a time of terrorism, war and mass migration. Many young Muslims are taught to shun others, says the playwright, Ismael Saidi, 41, and to interpret the Quran in a strictly conservative way. “We Muslims have a problem,” he says. “We have to change the way we teach children. We are telling them that if they eat pork, they will go to hell. So how can my kids play with your kids, knowing your kids will burn in hell?”

Read more: How Islam became the fastest growing religion in Europe

The play, which tells the story of three young Muslims from Belgium who travel to Syria to fight alongside ISIS and groups affiliated with al-Qaeda, does not aim to preach. Rather, it is at times hilarious, poking fun at the very kinds of terrorists who have wreaked havoc in several cities in Europe, by depicting them as inept fools. One character wonders how he will know what an infidel looks like, given that in the video game Call of Duty, “the enemy, well, looks more like us.”

Jihad has now been translated into six languages, including Arabic and Japanese, and performed in five E.U. countries as well as in Morocco. In addition, Saidi has performed the play in schools across Belgium and France and in nearly 30 prisons. Production will begin on a French-language movie in September. Saidi has since written two more plays on similar themes, forming a trilogy that carries a serious message: that decades of bad government policies and neglect of Europe’s minorities has led to perilous drift and ever more dangerous radicalism. “There is a huge generation gap with the youth, between the system and their own system,” Saidi says.

The terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels have inspired other Muslims in Europe to grapple with the fallout from the events. The Moroccan-born French writer Rachid Benzine created Letters to Nour, an onstage fraught conversation between a father and daughter, who joined ISIS in Iraq.

For Saidi, the decision to write was personal. Born in Brussels to Muslim Moroccan immigrants, he was jolted into writing Jihad in 2014, after logging on to Facebook one day and spotting a photo of a former high school friend from Brussels posing with a Kalashnikov rifle in a jihadist training camp on the Syrian war front.

The friend was just one of around 5,000 Europeans recruited to fight in Syria and Iraq alongside ISIS and other jihadist groups from 2012 to ’15. Most hopped on the three-hour flight to Istanbul, then traveled over land to the front lines. Of those recruited into battle, about 1,700 came from France, while 470 came from tiny Belgium, the highest proportion of any Western country.

Saidi—a former cop who spent 16 years with the Brussels police force—was stunned to see his friend among them. “I assume he is now dead,” he says over espresso one May morning at a Paris café. “I asked myself, Why would he possibly decide to do such a thing?”

In his work, Saidi has tried to answer that question. Jihad depicts three young men drawn from his experience of growing up in Brussels’ predominantly Muslim neighborhood of Schaerbeek.

The oddball mix of losers head to Syria carrying deep frustrations about their lives. Ben, the instigator, admits to his friends that he turned religious after a rift with his conservative father, who berated him over his passion for Elvis Presley. “Maybe my dad will be proud of me,” he says wistfully as the friends approach the Syrian battlefront. He is soon killed by rocket fire.

His friend Reda tags along to Syria to escape a breakup with his girlfriend, whom his parents have forbidden him to see because she is not Muslim; he too is killed by rocket fire.

Ismael (the part Saidi himself frequently plays) has seen his dream of being an artist squashed by disapproving Islamic teachers. Depressed and adrift, he joins the expedition to the front lines and is the only one of the three to survive.

Back home, Ismael receives a visit from Reda’s ghost, who tells him he finally read the Quran in the afterlife. “I read it for both of us,” he says. “We were lied to. It speaks only of love, not of war, not of blood.”

The Only Weapon

Jihad is set at a time when E.U. governments made few attempts to stop the jihadist exodus through Turkey. That changed drastically after Europe’s battle-hardened fighters returned to wage terrorism back home. The attacks prompted tough crackdowns by E.U. governments, which have jailed hundreds of the former fighters who returned to Europe. In addition, in France alone, about 26,000 people have been placed on a watch list of those suspected of having radical views, who could pose a terrorist threat.

While heavy surveillance has helped tamp the threat, it is far from extinguished. Just one day after I met Saidi, a Chechen-born resident of Paris whose name was on France’s watch list ran through a street in the center of the city chanting “Allahu akbar” (God is great) and stabbing people with a knife, one of them fatally; the police shot him dead.

After each performance of Jihad, Saidi sits on a stool onstage, debating the play with the audience, which at a recent show in May comprised high school students from Paris’ immigrant neighborhoods. One girl asked Saidi what he thought of so-called communitarianism, a tendency among some ethnic minorities to adhere to strict, separate codes of conduct—a bitterly divisive issue in Europe. Saidi, a practicing Muslim, said he rejected it. “These physical ghettos become moral ghettos,” he told her.

For E.U. officials working to pre-empt more deadly attacks by homegrown extremists, Saidi’s plays have offered a rare opportunity for Muslims to discuss terrorism with fellow Muslims, without governments getting in the way.

But the governments clearly like what he’s doing. When Belgium and France unveiled a joint antiterrorism plan in February in the northern French city of Lille, they invited Saidi to be part of the proceedings.

The two governments have funded performances of Jihad in schools, as well as in prisons, which they believe are key breeding grounds for jihadist recruits. “This is not only a security issue, it is a social issue,” says Muriel Domenach, head of the French government’s task force on preventing radicalization. “We have to use each and every instrument.” Saidi says he believes performances inside prisons offer inmates a rare window into what is happening in the outside world. “The subject is jihad, but this is also culture,” he says. “I really feel culture is the only weapon we have right now to talk to each other.”

Saidi began writing the second part of the trilogy after a gunman claiming allegiance to ISIS besieged a kosher supermarket east of Paris in January 2015, killing five people. In the play—whose title, Géhenne, refers to a cursed place for sinners mentioned in the Old Testament, the Talmud and the Quran—a jihadist fighter is condemned to hell for killing Jews.

The playwright says many young people tell him after the play that their parents had taught them to hate Jews. Writing the play, he says, was a way of talking about anti-Semitism. “If you accept the disease, you can begin to heal,” he says.

Saidi says he was inspired to write a third play in 2016, after performing Jihad in Paris to an audience of survivors from the attack on the Bataclan theater the previous year. After the performance, several victims of the attack said they wanted to forgive ISIS; they included a man whose wife had been killed while shielding his body from the gunmen. “I was shocked,” Saidi says. “I thought, I cannot forgive them. So how can they?”

In response, Saidi wrote the play Eden, which opens in Brussels in October. In it, a dead jihadist travels to hell to retrieve his girlfriend and bring her to paradise, even though she too has committed acts of terrorism. “It was a way of bringing hope to myself,” Saidi says. “The other two plays had such sad endings.” Does the couple make it to paradise, I ask? “Right now, I cannot tell you,” he says.

June 14, 2018 at 08:24PM ClusterAssets Inc., https://ClusterAssets.wordpress.com

[randomconnections]

Bring Your Own Guitar

We’ve been looking for groups and outlets with which to get involved while here in Washington. I’ve been looking for musicians circles, drum circles, and other groups similar to those I’ve found in Greenville. No such luck. I haven’t even found a kayaking group. Then, I came across a listing for a Bring Your Own Guitar event on Facebook. The description sounded interesting, so I decided to check them out.

This event was part of the Bring Your Own Instrument organization. This seems to be an informal gathering with meetings for different instrument groups. There is a BYOU for Ukuleles and a percussion related one for “buckets and sticks.”

According to the Facebook event details…

BYOG – is for aspiring musicians who have the desire to play the guitar or haven’t played for a while. We learn chords, strumming patterns, songs, and play with other guitarists.

Sounded perfect for me. I’m an OK guitarist, but until I got my new guitar earlier this summer I hadn’t played much. I had been concentrating on banjo. I took classical guitar when I was at Furman because notes and picking came more naturally to me than strumming.

The time came and I headed to the venue, Empire Ale House in downtown Mount Vernon. When I walked in there were only a couple of patrons and no guitars in sight. I wasn’t sure that I was in the right place, so I asked the bartender, who pointed me to a set of closed doors. I poked my head in, saw several with guitars and a projector and screen setup, so I popped back to the car and came back with guitar in hand.

The group leader, Lisa, gave me her card and a cool pen with the group’s info. I was introduced to the other guitarists, and I got my guitar out. Three other guitarists arrived, bringing the group to seven.

Lisa was using an iPad app to project the lyrics and guitar chords. Tonight’s song would be “Take It Easy” by the Eagles. They practiced basic strum patterns and chords. Basically, it was a beginning guitar class.

Most of the time was spent on this one song. There were several levels of ability present. Jeremiah, seated across from me was one of the more accomplished guitarists, and would ad lib solos as we played.

My own skills fell somewhere in between. I could handle everything we played with no problem, and found myself improvising as we went along. There was no feeling of competition, and it was fun to just play along.

After the group felt comfortable with “Take It Easy” we played through it completely with all verses and introduction. After that we revisited some of the songs they had learned. We played Green Day’s “Good Riddance” and Old Crow Medicine Show’s “Wagon Wheel.” I had no problem with any of those.

One of the players commented that all of these songs used the same chords and patterns. I jokingly commented that there were only about two or three songs and variations thereof. Jeremiah retorted…

The first is “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” And the second is “War Pigs” by Black Sabbath.

As if it weren’t weird enough, we closed with the Weird Al Yankovic version of “American Pie.”

Oh my my, this here Anakin guy May be Vader someday later, now he’s just a small fry And he left his home and kissed his mommy goodbye Sayin’ “Soon I’m gonna be a Jedi, Soon I’m gonna be a Jedi”

Of course, the version they projected was the ukulele version, so I was a bit confused, but I coped.

The evening was relaxed, the company was pleasant and fun to be around, and it was a good experienced all around. One thing I liked was that there were no heavy religious tones like there are in the groups I play with back home – no hymns, no CCM, and no twangy country. It was refreshing.

The session was more enjoyable than the musicians circles at Perryville and the Pickens Flea Market, where I felt a bit out of my element, and certainly less stressful than the Appalachian group I played with at Claussen Bakery. It was the next best thing to jamming with my brother and nephew. The next BYOG is in two weeks, and think I’ll try to make it.

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[ramialkarmi]

Facebook is secretly trying to bring back one of its worst features

The INSIDER Summary:

Facebook's Poke feature was never all that cool or useful.

But on Friday, Facebook repackaged the Poke and rolled out a new "Hello" button for users in the UK.

Instead of just messaging your friend and starting a conversation, you can now take an extra step and force them to say hello to you, first.

Thanks, Zuckerberg.

Remember how much you used to love getting poked by your friends on Facebook?

Yeah, me neither.

In terms of cultural relevance, Facebook's Poke died years ago, and with it, the initially amusing but ultimately annoying phenomenon of being stuck in a meaningless back-and-forth poke war. The feature's novelty didn't last long: Why Poke someone when you could just, you know, message them?

But Facebook seems determined to give users another roundabout way to say hello to their friends. On Friday, people in the UK began to see a "Hello" button on their friends' Timelines, as first reported by Matt Navarra of The Next Web.

Facebook Hello - The most pointless gimmicky new social media feature in 2017? http://pic.twitter.com/E1oF02HJeD

— Matt Navarra ⭐️ (@MattNavarra) June 2, 2017

The "Hello" button works exactly like a Poke. Once a friend says hello to you, you get a notification with a waving hand and a burst of confetti, asking you to say hello back.

"Saying hello is one of the most universal things people do, so we're testing a feature that makes it easier to say hi on Facebook," a Facebook representative told Mashable.

However, the Poke never technically died — it still exists, hidden in a drop-down menu labeled "..." at the top of everyone's Timeline — so the addition of a  "Hello" button seems redundant at best. I'll be surprised if the "Hello" feature survives any longer than the Poke did once its novelty wears off and people stop using it ironically.

But if you long for the days when the Poke reigned supreme, you may soon be able to bug your friends in a kind-of-but-not-really new way.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: This is what Bernie Madoff's life is like in prison

[writingsblog]

On Hot Russian Composers and A Questionable Self Identity

I’m not proud to make this declaration by any means; I’m actually quite devastated that this has become a facet of my being, but holy fuck do I detest reading. I’m not talking about the day-to-day casual Reddit browsing, Facebook lurking stuff, or the kind that is fundamental. I’m talking like the big-ass textbooks, fucking “War and Peace” type of reading expected of me from a bunch of classes I’ve taken. Every Facebook meme ever created that pokes fun at not doing the reading can have my name found tagged somewhere in the comments section. And before you say anything, yes, I see the irony in me writing this for people to read while simultaneously dispelling my unfavorable feelings toward the practice. The title says it all, but bear with me.

I have this inclination to test the patience of authority; I love erring on the side of mischief. I’m honestly a little shit, and this display of little shittiness can best be shown through my inability to tell you about the plot of a single novel the average high schooler should have read in any of their English classes. I mean, I didn’t even check out the last book I was required to read for my AP Lit class senior year, like I was that done with reading by then. Jay Gatsby? I don’t know her. Hamlet? Couldn’t say that I am familiar with that queen. Mrs. Dalloway? Which school did she teach at? Because I can’t say I’ve ever met her. I’m not even telling you all of this to, like, brag, either — like, it’s actually something real embarrassing and shameful to admit, but this primer on my propensity toward not reading becomes relevant soon, I swear.

Reading is hard. Reading is really fucking hard and I relished in the glory of my simple acts of disobedience by just … not doing it. My attention span is essentially the Planck-length equivalent of time, which could perhaps explain my habit of becoming engrossed in the lives and times of the authors of books I should’ve been reading instead of reading the actual books themselves. I mean, I told you it’s not that I hate literature or anything. It most likely was because I couldn’t be bothered to read anything expected of me out of both laziness and adolescent mischief. This habit would manifest itself throughout various classes, in different forms, but nonetheless with the same result. Physics lessons on Einstein’s theories of relativity led me to instead learn about his hobbies as an amateur violinist while calculus lectures on Newton’s creation of an entirely new branch of mathematics led me to follow this tangent about his religious fervor and penchant for being weird as hell.

Toward the end of middle school, I had to learn this Tchaikovsky piece for a symphony audition. It was his “Serenade for Strings,” the 48th opus, which was this orchestral masterpiece written in the absolute most horrific time signature ever. The technical demands of the piece alongside the massive Romantic-era middle finger that was the time signature drove me to, of course, not read through the piece at all. I want to make a brief mention that my habit of disregarding readings did not simply end at the written text; rather, it indiscriminately dismantled any drive I would have to begin reading anything that was required of me, and that included this daunting six-page shitstorm of a serenade. During the free periods I should have spent rehearsing the serenade’s dreaded triple piano “pianississimo” measures, I instead, surprisingly, read this book about the composer himself. It was in “The Life and Letters of Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky” that I read this quote from him that would resonate with me well into the current day. Tchaikovsky described himself as “Russian in the fullest sense of the word,” to which I thought: “How incredible. Not just a veritable sense, but the fullest sense. How affirming it must be to be able to fully identify with a culture.” I think the reason as to why his words connected with me to such an extent is because they made me aware of this hollow cavity inside me that housed my cultural identity. It led to the realization that I couldn’t truly say that I fully identify as anything.

I was born on the first of November in Cần Thơ, a large port village that skims the Mekong Delta along the southern fringes of Vietnam. I couldn’t really tell you anything about what life was like there besides the fact that it’s just really fucking hot. I was really young when I left Vietnam with my parents to pursue the prospect of a better life here in the States. The first four years of my life I recall entirely in Vietnamese. My clearest memory from this time in my life was a very specific moment where my mother was sitting at the kitchen table eating. I asked her why she made so much noise while she ate, to which she laughed and asked me if I would like to eat with her. I sat there with her and we just had this casual and carefree conversation in the kitchen. I don’t know why this one specific memory is so clearly branded frame for frame in my mind, but it, like other memories of my early childhood, was narrated back to me entirely in my mother tongue. I think the closest I’ve ever felt to Tchaikovsky’s cultural “fullness” was at this point in my life.

I started school at 4 years old. I never realized that the children in my class had the privilege of growing up in homes where English was regularly spoken. I remember crying so hard on the first day of preschool that I fucking puked a storm on my teacher. It was such a mess; there were all of these people around me mouthing these weird sounds and reacting with confusion when I couldn’t understand them and then the puke being everywhere — like it really was just not cute. I didn’t pick up English as quickly as my teachers would have liked during early elementary school. I swear to God I was about a hair away from repeating the first grade because of my inability to properly speak the language or make any progress in those little English workbooks where you fill in a letter to make words and phrases. In the end, I couldn’t tell you what made it all click, but I would eventually pick up English incredibly fast. Like, scary fast; scary like the reading teachers had to constantly tell me to slow down with my reading, essentially putting a harness on my reading skills so that the other kids could “catch up.” This was pretty much how the rest of my schooling went with regard to English. I honestly did pretty well in my English classes. Like I’m not even trying to gas myself up here or anything, but my essays were usually pretty fucking lit despite my never doing the required readings for any of those classes. I don’t even know, like I went from this scared and confused child who couldn’t understand what anyone around him was saying to someone who would be asked to proofread college and scholarship essays for friends. English was no longer a burden on me. I learned to use it well enough that I began to identify as somebody who had a pretty lit command of the language, but this achievement came at a cost. What I hadn’t noticed was that during the years I spent developing my English, my ability to speak Vietnamese suffered. I began to realize that I couldn’t speak Vietnamese like I used to. I would stutter, mumble and replace various words with their English equivalent. As much as I tried to communicate with my parents, the words just couldn’t come out with the clarity and eloquence I was so familiar with when speaking English. I knew that I knew these words. Spoken to me, I’d understand almost every Vietnamese word my parents would speak, but as I sorted through the linguistic rolodex in my brain to try to hunt for the right string of words or phrases to respond back to them, nothing came out. I don’t really know how to describe it. It’s like getting into a really fucked up accident and having to learn how to walk again. Like you knew that at some point in the past you could do it, and that you did it pretty well, but here you are, trying to pick up these pieces of your past so that you can put together at least a semblance of who you once were. With language having had such a profound impact on me, I couldn’t come to terms with the fact that I more or less lost my ability to proudly communicate in my mother tongue. I was even having trouble calling it that. Like aren’t you supposed to know your mother tongue better than anything else? By technicality English is my second language, so I just felt so distraught realizing that my ability to speak it had so greatly surpassed the language I was basically born speaking. In a way it felt like language, something I had learned to confide in for so long and something that helped me form my identity, betrayed me in some type of way? I can’t really think of another word for it. Honestly, I was just about 50 shades of shook over the whole situation if you really want to know the truth.

This whole story brings me back to what I was talking about earlier, the whole discussion on “fullness.” I guess a kind of end goal for me in terms of culture and identity would be to connect to something remotely similar to Tchaikovsky’s cultural “fullness,” and I don’t mean end goal like it’s something I want to do before I die or anything. I just mean it in the sense like, “Damn, wouldn’t it be really fucking incredible to feel the way Tchaikovsky felt about his own identity?” I think why this whole ordeal hit me so hard is because I feel like language is one of the most important facets of a culture. Like, beyond anything else, language connects you with others in such a personal way, so I kept asking myself, like, if I can’t speak the language of a particular culture, can I even fully identify with it? I’m just very preoccupied with the word “fully,” but how, like, many things can I even fully identify as? It just brings up a shit ton of questions, like, “Can I fully identify as a given ethnicity if I wasn’t born in a certain place?” or “Can I fully be an ethnicity if I don’t necessarily look like a person who belongs to it?” Perhaps such an inability to fully identify as anything nowadays is something symptomatic of the modern age. Like, it could just be something that accompanies the common practice of compartmentalizing every aspect of our being into these new and labeled divisions. Maybe in some ways this Tchaikovskic fullness isn’t realistic. Like, I could just one day come to the realization that I will never be able to, in any manner, replicate even the modicum of the fullness Tchaikovsky wrote about, but even if that were the case, I don’t think there are any real detriments toward the pursuit of such a feeling. Some might call it myopic, like somehow having this focus on a singular aspect of culture in the hopes of attaining some abstract fulfillment isn’t sensible. I mean, I can definitely see how people would believe that, seeing it as being vapid and shallow, but I think we have to keep in mind that we all currently live in this era where we ourselves have the ability, now more than ever, to form our own identities. We can choose to append or remove certain facets and aspects of ourselves to grow closer to our ideal self, and I think that’s a very freeing aspect of it all, despite claims that it can be seen as being inauthentic or full of shit. I guess the hyper-idealized millennial sense of self is the result of a fluid amalgamation of various different things. Maybe this fluidity is a completely different sense of self than Tchaikovsky’s original interpretation of fullness, or perhaps the result of this amalgamation is exactly how he may have felt. I mean, as much as I’d like to, I can’t really slide into his DMs to ask him how he personally defines fullness, so I guess a lot of it is up in the air. The fact of the matter is, I’m still trying to figure out my own sense of self and how it relates in the context of the world around me. And maybe I won’t ever be able to say that I am Vietnamese in the fullest sense of the word and feel the satisfaction Tchaikovsky felt. I guess I can be fine with that and just do my best to work toward a sense of fullness and fulfillment that reflects what it means to be fully myself, whatever the hell that may even mean.