#j. alvarez

[samthetrekkie]

I have been watching oitnb for probably 10 years now which is the longest I have ever taken for a show (and I still have 1 season to go). and the weirdest thing is, it's not bc I dislike the show in any way, I actually really enjoy it, but it's somehow one of the most exhausting things to watch, mostly bc there is so much plot condensed into a time frame of like a few days to a few months at max. I personally am not a fan of this bc I like 1 season = 1 year, but me watching this show so slowly is mostly due to the fact that I have to be in a very specific mood to handle it. I don't quite know why, but it's similar for me with got (even though I'm clearly more often in the mood for that than oitnb).

anyway, very long prologue for wanting to say that season 6 was great, probably my favorite so far, next to season 2 I think. I only didn't enjoy the one with vee (was that season 3?) too much, but I generally liked all of them for different reasons. and season 7 is said to be one of the best overall tv show seasons, so I'm excited for that.

I particularly liked 6 bc the plot was very organized in the sense that we had a premise from about episode 2 onwards and there was a conclusion at the end (even though it was different than expected and I loved that it was for once an almost happy ending). I personally loved carol and barb, it was such wonderful dark humor, and the little 80s flashbacks were a treat. the other minor characters like the new (esp alvarez giving autistism rep) and the old guards (esp the mormon one) were great as well (not as in nice people neccessarily, but they made a great backdrop) and generally none of the new characters felt forced and I'm glad they will all return next season. and who thought caputo and fig would be the cutest couple of the season?? I also liked alex and piper, but I was so certain piper was gonna do something stupid again and mess up her early release. but yay she did it!

it's also worth mentioning that there were some really sad and dark things again that were really well done, like daya's abuse, the trial around taystee, and flores' deportation at the end. oitnb is just one of the few shows that ace dramedy so perfectly by balancing hilarious and devastating scenes.

[thebookishcrypt]

AUGUST MUSIC WRAP-UP

These is the new music I listened to in August! ARTIST: Emily Mei SONG: Mania ARTIST: Within Temptation SONG: Bleed Out ARTIST: Written by Wolves SONG: Altar ARTIST: Bludnymph SONG: Lights Out ARTIST: Bludnymph SONG: Watch Me (these are songs that are not new to me but I’ve been in the mood to play them often recently) ARTIST: Shadow Age SONG: Silaluk ARTIST: J. Alvarez SONG: Dos…

[malestarssockedfeet]

[rodrickonfire]

POV: You’re old and technology is hard

[calicobunnyrabbit]

JUDY AND V 5EVR !!! nomad + the star ending + running away with Judy is so sickly sweet i love them so much. V finding family again is everything

[deadbyjuly]

Random post

[jgroffdaily]

Excerpts:

For two seasons and a TV movie, creator Michael Lannan and director Andrew Haigh (who was just coming off his breakthrough film Weekend and was years away from the award-winning 45 Years and All of Us Strangers) led the show’s cast and crew in crafting a new kind of gay TV show—raw, relaxed, character-driven and intimate. It didn’t fully work—in the end, Looking was cancelled due to low ratings—but a decade away from the show’s premiere, it’s clear that the show’s legacy lives on.

Onscreen, the cast of Looking—including stars-to-be like Jonathan Groff and Murray Bartlett—played characters who were working to find themselves while creating a chosen family with each other. Offscreen, the actors were doing the same thing, reckoning with their own identities and finding family in each other.

For the lead role of Patrick, the production looked at Jonathan Groff, the Tony-nominated Broadway star of Spring Awakening, who’d recently made the jump to TV with a splashy role on Ryan Murphy’s hit musical series Glee.

Haigh: I actually quite liked Glee. I thought it was a good show, but I wasn't sure he was going to be right. Then he came in, and I'm like, “Yeah, you're great for this.”

Sarah Condon (executive producer): Jonathan just had all these qualities of vulnerability and also an amazing ability, which to me is very similar in some ways to Sarah Jessica Parker, of doing the comedy and drama together—not a lot of actors actually, can do both so well and flip back and forth between. He is one of those people.

Jonathan Groff (Patrick): I came out of the closet later—I came out publicly at 23, came out to my parents that same year too. I was out but I was, in a big way, not fully accepting myself. I came out of the closet because it felt more painful to be in than out at that point, but I didn't really feel myself own who I was until I had had the experience of Looking.

I remember auditioning for the show, and feeling heat on my skin during the audition. It was the scene with Patrick and Richie on the train, doing this flirtatious scene, and I remember my skin feeling hot, and it feeling scary and exciting at the same time. I felt raw and exposed in a way that I had never felt before. So there was a real vulnerability in that, that made me feel nervous and excited.

Carmen Cuba (casting director): Jonathan Groff was out, but he hadn't played a gay character before. And more than anyone, he was the most experienced on the show, even Andrew. So he definitely must have understood more than any of us, the fact that playing the role is one thing but he was then going to be in press talking about it. It's a different thing you're agreeing to, I assume.

Groff: I remember Murray, Frankie, and I showing up to San Francisco during pre-production in March of 2013—I mean, this is 10 years ago. I remember the month. I remember Murray making us dinner, and me and Frankie going over there, and smoking weed and smelling the jasmine in the backyard of Murray's sublet that he had gotten. I remember Frankie was freaking out, because he had graduated from Juilliard and is this brilliant actor, but had never done anything on screen before, and so we were talking about that. I mean, just immediately, we knew we had to have this believable friendship in order for the show to work. And so we just started hanging out and we never stopped.

Groff quickly developed chemistry with Castillo, one of his onscreen love interests. While Castillo’s Richie was initially meant to be a minor character, the team later made the decision to make him part of the main cast.

Castillo: I remember standing on the platform in between takes with Jonathan [for our first scene together]. I remember our chemistry was developing and we were hitting it off, and I didn't want to ruin that but I also wanted to open up to him and be honest with him. I decided to tell him the story about meeting my now-wife, who at the time was my girlfriend. When she and I had met, there was an undeniable chemistry between us, like the minute we laid eyes on each other, it was just like there was this attraction. We were the only two people in the room in a room full of people. I wanted to tell Jonathan that story because I was relating it to Patrick and Richie meeting.

I was revealing to him that I was straight and he didn't bat a lash. He took it in, he listened and yeah, it was funny, because it was almost like a coming out.

Groff: I knew that he was straight, because I had asked our director or costume designer. I had gotten the intel already. It wasn't a shock. “That guy's cute. Is he gay?” [Laughs]

Condon: I mean, it sounds silly, in a way, but they were brave decisions. I remember having to have that conversation with Jonathan. “Are you up for this?” There were a lot of those kind of conversations. And Jonathan was so game, as was the whole cast.

Groff: I remember the premiere was at The Castro, and I remember feeling like I was in a fairy tale. The Castro, the audience is lit as fuck, and it's a lot of gays. They are there to celebrate, which is just such a special, unique energy at a premiere of any sort.

Michael Lombardo and Richard Plepler were running HBO at that time. I remember being at that premiere and Michael was standing there, talking about, “This is the first exclusively gay show we've ever had on our network.” It felt like, “Oh my God— we're in this. We're a part of this moment in history.” It felt like more than a TV show. It felt like a big deal when he would say that.

Despite its mixed initial reception and its relative underperformance, the show made stars out of the main cast—especially Jonathan Groff.

Groff: Between the first and second season in New York, they had asked me to be the grand marshal of the Gay Pride Parade—because of the TV show, and because I'm a New Yorker and had done a lot of theater. I felt scared to do it. I said yes, because my head and my heart were telling me that I wanted to do it, but there was a huge part of me that felt incredibly fearful, incredibly insecure, and incredibly scared. I did it anyway, and that was also a ring of fire moment. Doing the Gay Pride parade, being on the front, waving at people, and being so visibly out—it was just a constant experience of being, in a great way, pushed outside of my comfort zone.

Alvarez: He was coming off of this breakup and he's meeting somebody new and he's encountering all these feelings of being out in public and what his image represents to other people. And so you're swirling with all these other things, and also you're like, just a man trying to love other men.

Groff: I remember, oh my God, talking about douching [in a scene on the show], and I had never really douched before, as myself. Frankie Alvarez came with me. What we did in the show, where we go to the Walgreens? We actually did [that] in the West Village in real life, where he walked with me to get a fucking anal douche, and also a dildo to experiment with. He was in the gay sex shop with me, doing that in real life.

Alvarez: It was a moment of vulnerability, where he wanted to go dildo shopping, but he didn't want to be alone. He could have called any number of his gay friends, but he called me. And it was a testament to our friendship that he trusted me, that even though I was straight, he understood that he had a supportive friend there through that time. I was Doris.

As the series continued, the team looked to their cast for inspiration, sometimes borrowing elements of their personal lives and using them in storylines.

Groff: I remember sitting in a diner in San Francisco with Andrew and talking him through my most recent breakup as he was writing the big, final episode of season two and the fight between Kevin and Patrick—literally, me recounting and him writing down things that I said, that we said to each other, to get that in there. Everybody was offering up their own stories the whole time. It was incredible.

Weedman: The one thing I remember was, before we did the scene where I go see my dad's dead body, the three of us were sitting in this real funeral home and we're just talking about different times in our lives we'd seen a dead body and what that's like. I had just seen my friend Christopher's body and Jonathan had been through Cory Monteith’s [death]. We were telling all these stories that were just very intense.

And then I remember after we shot the scene, that Murray came to my trailer and just walked in, and we both just cried and cried and cried. And that's pretty rare, that actors aren't just on the phone, working out their next job, figuring out how they're going to renovate their house, how they're going to spend their money—they're not jerking off their ego in some way or some kind of “building their empire.” That wasn't going on—these were just sensitive boys.

In the aftermath of Looking, the cast and crew found themselves permanently changed. The experience of making the series affected everything, from their career decisions to their everyday lives.

Groff: It brought me out of my own skin in a way that I don’t know if I would’ve otherwise. And every set I walked onto after that, every rehearsal room I walked onto after that, I didn't feel insecure about my sexuality. Looking and the experience of being on that set with all those people was so liberating, and really, truly life-changing.

Condon: We've done about a yearly reunion.

Bartlett: Raul got married last year and a bunch of us were able to go—it was sort of a Looking reunion really. It was like, “Oh my God, this is our 10-year reunion.” And it was about Raul's wedding, but it was also a bunch of old friends getting back together and a lot of us from Looking days.

Castillo: Jonathan married [my wife and I] this summer so it's like a full circle.

Groff: That girl that he was talking about [while shooting the pilot] ended up being his wife.

Ten years later, many of the actors who starred in Looking have become bonafide stars. Jonathan Groff has appeared in generational projects on stage and screen, from Hamilton to Mindhunter to Frozen. Russell Tovey has appeared in shows like Quantico, American Horror Story: NYC and the upcoming Feud: Capote Vs. the Swans. O.T. Fagbenle, who had a minor role in season one as Agustin’s boyfriend, has gone on to do shows like The Handmaid’s Tale and appeared in the blockbuster Black Widow. And of course Murray Bartlett continues to be a staple of prestige TV, starring in The Last of Us and The White Lotus, which he won an Emmy for.

Groff: Even if the show didn't hit the way that we all wish it would have, it still affected people, including us, and it looks like that is the art that stays. I mean, I'm on Merrily We Roll Along right now. Forty-two years ago, it was a Broadway flop, and it's such an extraordinary show. People are finally, including me, getting to experience it for the brilliant thing that it is. And so that's encouraging, moving forward, that even though it might not be celebrated in the moment [it might have a moment later on].

Groff: I mean, ultimately, not enough people watched it, and we went off the air—that's just the story of what happened with the show. But the fact that it only lasted for two seasons and a movie, and 10 years later, we're still talking about it, there's something about the staying power of the show, and the people that continue, a decade later, to talk about the impact that it has had on them. It sort of helps heal those wounds of feeling rejected.

[anonymous-badger-238]

pick a best friend

You know that meme where they show you different outfits and you think of names of the people who would wear them and talk about their personalities?

I have no idea how true this is but pick a Rad Lab "boy"

(P.S. I love how I'm catering to one person like I have five followers but @un-ionizetheradlab is the only one who seems to care /lh)

[mythrite]

hey uh HU army

found these creatures i drew back in March

so yeah :D

[jonathangroffappreciation]

Various Instagram photos from Alexis Forte (Raul Castililo’s partner)

[haveyouseenthisseries-poll]

[transboypatrickmurray]

[poofesurex]

How accurate am I? (spoiler; I am very accurate) @diilyduzit @cringyedge

[xtruss]

The First Light of Trinity

— By Alex Wellerstein | July 16, 2015 | Annals of Technology

Seventy years ago, the flash of a nuclear bomb illuminated the skies over Alamogordo, New Mexico. Courtesy Los Alamos National Laboratory

The light of a nuclear explosion is unlike anything else on Earth. This is because the heat of a nuclear explosion is unlike anything else on Earth. Seventy years ago today, when the first atomic weapon was tested, they called its light cosmic. Where else, except in the interiors of stars, do the temperatures reach into the tens of millions of degrees? It is that blistering radiation, released in a reaction that takes about a millionth of a second to complete, that makes the light so unearthly, that gives it the strength to burn through photographic paper and wound human eyes. The heat is such that the air around it becomes luminous and incandescent and then opaque; for a moment, the brightness hides itself. Then the air expands outward, shedding its energy at the speed of sound—the blast wave that destroys houses, hospitals, schools, cities.

The test was given the evocative code name of Trinity, although no one seems to know precisely why. One theory is that J. Robert Oppenheimer, the head of the U.S. government’s laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and the director of science for the Manhattan Project, which designed and built the bomb, chose the name as an allusion to the poetry of John Donne. Oppenheimer’s former mistress, Jean Tatlock, a student at the University of California, Berkeley, when he was a professor there, had introduced him to Donne’s work before she committed suicide, in early 1944. But Oppenheimer later claimed not to recall where the name came from.

The operation was designated as top secret, which was a problem, since the whole point was to create an explosion that could be heard for a hundred miles around and seen for two hundred. How to keep such a spectacle under wraps? Oppenheimer and his colleagues considered several sites, including a patch of desert around two hundred miles east of Los Angeles, an island eighty miles southwest of Santa Monica, and a series of sand bars ten miles off the Texas coast. Eventually, they chose a place much closer to home, near Alamogordo, New Mexico, on an Army Air Forces bombing range in a valley called the Jornada del Muerto (“Journey of the Dead Man,” an indication of its unforgiving landscape). Freshwater had to be driven in, seven hundred gallons at a time, from a town forty miles away. To wire the site for a telephone connection required laying four miles of cable. The most expensive single line item in the budget was for the construction of bomb-proof shelters, which would protect some of the more than two hundred and fifty observers of the test.

The area immediately around the bombing range was sparsely populated but not by any means barren. It was within two hundred miles of Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and El Paso. The nearest town of more than fifty people was fewer than thirty miles away, and the nearest occupied ranch was only twelve miles away—long distances for a person, but not for light or a radioactive cloud. (One of Trinity’s more unusual financial appropriations, later on, was for the acquisition of several dozen head of cattle that had had their hair discolored by the explosion.) The Army made preparations to impose martial law after the test if necessary, keeping a military force of a hundred and sixty men on hand to manage any evacuations. Photographic film, sensitive to radioactivity, was stowed in nearby towns, to provide “medical legal” evidence of contamination in the future. Seismographs in Tucson, Denver, and Chihuahua, Mexico, would reveal how far away the explosion could be detected.

The Trinity test weapon. Courtesy Los Alamos National Laboratory

On July 16, 1945, the planned date of the test, the weather was poor. Thunderstorms were moving through the area, raising the twin hazards of electricity and rain. The test weapon, known euphemistically as the gadget, was mounted inside a shack atop a hundred-foot steel tower. It was a Frankenstein’s monster of wires, screws, switches, high explosives, radioactive materials, and diagnostic devices, and was crude enough that it could be tripped by a passing storm. (This had already happened once, with a model of the bomb’s electrical system.) Rain, or even too many clouds, could cause other problems—a spontaneous radioactive thunderstorm after detonation, unpredictable magnifications of the blast wave off a layer of warm air. It was later calculated that, even without the possibility of mechanical or electrical failure, there was still more than a one-in-ten chance of the gadget failing to perform optimally.

The scientists were prepared to cancel the test and wait for better weather when, at five in the morning, conditions began to improve. At five-ten, they announced that the test was going forward. At five-twenty-five, a rocket near the tower was shot into the sky—the five-minute warning. Another went up at five-twenty-nine. Forty-five seconds before zero hour, a switch was thrown in the control bunker, starting an automated timer. Just before five-thirty, an electrical pulse ran the five and a half miles across the desert from the bunker to the tower, up into the firing unit of the bomb. Within a hundred millionths of a second, a series of thirty-two charges went off around the device’s core, compressing the sphere of plutonium inside from about the size of an orange to that of a lime. Then the gadget exploded.

General Thomas Farrell, the deputy commander of the Manhattan Project, was in the control bunker with Oppenheimer when the blast went off. “The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun,” he wrote immediately afterward. “It was golden, purple, violet, gray, and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse, and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined. It was that beauty the great poets dream about but describe most poorly and inadequately.” Twenty-seven miles away from the tower, the Berkeley physicist and Nobel Prize winner Ernest O. Lawrence was stepping out of a car. “Just as I put my foot on the ground I was enveloped with a warm brilliant yellow white light—from darkness to brilliant sunshine in an instant,” he wrote. James Conant, the president of Harvard University, was watching from the V.I.P. viewing spot, ten miles from the tower. “The enormity of the light and its length quite stunned me,” he wrote. “The whole sky suddenly full of white light like the end of the world.”

In its first milliseconds, the Trinity fireball burned through photographic film. Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration

Trinity was filmed exclusively in black and white and without audio. In the main footage of the explosion, the fireball rises out of the frame before the cameraman, dazed by the sight, pans upward to follow it. The written accounts of the test, of which there are many, grapple with how to describe an experience for which no terminology had yet been invented. Some eventually settle on what would become the standard lexicon. Luis Alvarez, a physicist and future participant in the Hiroshima bombing, viewed Trinity from the air. He likened the debris cloud, which rose to a height of some thirty thousand feet in ten minutes, to “a parachute which was being blown up by a large electric fan,” noting that it “had very much the appearance of a large mushroom.” Charles Thomas, the vice-president of Monsanto, a major Manhattan Project contractor, observed the same. “It looked like a giant mushroom; the stalk was the thousands of tons of sand being sucked up by the explosion; the top of the mushroom was a flowering ball of fire,” he wrote. “It resembled a giant brain the convolutions of which were constantly changing.”

In the months before the test, the Manhattan Project scientists had estimated that their bomb would yield the equivalent of between seven hundred and five thousand tons of TNT. As it turned out, the detonation force was equal to about twenty thousand tons of TNT—four times larger than the expected maximum. The light was visible as far away as Amarillo, Texas, more than two hundred and eighty miles to the east, on the other side of a mountain range. Windows were reported broken in Silver City, New Mexico, some hundred and eighty miles to the southwest. Here, again, the written accounts converge. Thomas: “It is safe to say that nothing as terrible has been made by man before.” Lawrence: “There was restrained applause, but more a hushed murmuring bordering on reverence.” Farrell: “The strong, sustained, awesome roar … warned of doomsday and made us feel that we puny things were blasphemous.” Nevertheless, the plainclothes military police who were stationed in nearby towns reported that those who saw the light seemed to accept the government’s explanation, which was that an ammunition dump had exploded.

Trinity was only the first nuclear detonation of the summer of 1945. Two more followed, in early August, over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing as many as a quarter of a million people. By October, Norris Bradbury, the new director of Los Alamos, had proposed that the United States conduct “subsequent Trinity’s.” There was more to learn about the bomb, he argued, in a memo to the new coördinating council for the lab, and without the immediate pressure of making a weapon for war, “another TR might even be FUN.” A year after the test at Alamogordo, new ones began, at Bikini Atoll, in the Marshall Islands. They were not given literary names. Able, Baker, and Charlie were slated for 1946; X-ray, Yoke, and Zebra were slated for 1948. These were letters in the military radio alphabet—a clarification of who was really the master of the bomb.

Irradiated Kodak X-ray film. Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration

By 1992, the U.S. government had conducted more than a thousand nuclear tests, and other nations—China, France, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union—had joined in the frenzy. The last aboveground detonation took place over Lop Nur, a dried-up salt lake in northwestern China, in 1980. We are some years away, in other words, from the day when no living person will have seen that unearthly light firsthand. But Trinity left secondhand signs behind. Because the gadget exploded so close to the ground, the fireball sucked up dirt and debris. Some of it melted and settled back down, cooling into a radioactive green glass that was dubbed Trinitite, and some of it floated away. A minute quantity of the dust ended up in a river about a thousand miles east of Alamogordo, where, in early August, 1945, it was taken up into a paper mill that manufactured strawboard for Eastman Kodak. The strawboard was used to pack some of the company’s industrial X-ray film, which, when it was developed, was mottled with dark blotches and pinpoint stars—the final exposure of the first light of the nuclear age.

[rodrickonfire]

Check your mailboxes…

[pureconguevo]

Mientras la brisa acaricia tu pelo yo te hare mi mujeeeer