#like the show the Misfits refer to each other with their band names instead of their actual names

[im-just-a-dumb-gay]

Ramble about Jem Au

Drama! When Ecliese/Pizzazz finds out RoxCee/Reaper and Scthye are their half siblings and her mother stayed in the city. (Nothing like this happened in Jem btw. This is specifically for this au. Initially Roxcee and Pizzazz weren't related but the idea popped up so made this scenario)

(Gonna actually try to write a thing).

Ecliese ran out of the studio, hearing voices behind her but she wouldn't look back. She kept running until she found a storage area filled with nothing but boxes. Most of them being old papers and small office equipment. Ecliese closed the door and breathed loudly. Their mother, their mother was in the studio.

Ecliese gritted her teeth. Why, why now did she decide to show herself?! Never in the past (forgot age mother left whoops) years did she think to talk? To show her face? To be her mother!

In her rage, Ecliese broke the boxes surrounded her. Why?! Why!! Why did she leave?! Why did she stay?! Why now?! Sobs broke from Ecliese and they slowly slid down to the floor, apparently and cardboard surrounding them. The door then slowly creaked open.

Jake was shocked at the arrival of Rox and Cee's parents, let alone the reveal of their mother being the missing mother of their leader Pizzazz. When they ran off, Jake looked between where she left and RoxCee. Eventually, leaving the two to talk it out with their mother.

He walked through the halls, looking at every room until finding an old storage room. Slightly opening the door, his heart froze at what lay before him. Pizzazz, their strong and ruthless leader, broken down on the floor. He walked towards them, kneeling beside them before gently speaking. "Pizzazz..."

Ecliese had heard Stormer, his footsteps not difficult to decipher with the idiotic shoes he decided to wear today. They jingled at each step, tacky. Ecliese wanted to stop her tears, to instead scream and rant like she normally did. But now they were tired, and crying seemed to be the only thing they could do. Pathetic. Then a usually loud and grating voice whispered. "Can I come in?" A small nod was given. Ecliese too tired to try and hide.

Initially, Ruin didn't want to be part of this drama. The other members knew Pizzazz longer than they did. But he'd be lying if he said he didn't care about The Misfits. What was initially a money and fame grab had actually become something treasured...something she didn't want to let go. And so she followed Stormer. Ruin never really dealt with crying, this was something Stormer would be much better at. Quite honestly, they was surprised Pizzazz let them enter.

Jetta seemed to be awkward. In any other situation, Ecliese would've laughed. Instead, she quietly watched Jetta eventually sit on the opposite side of Stormer. Stormer had one hand on Ecliese's shoulder while Jetta sat firmly, looking back at the door. The two were quiet. It stayed like this for a while until Jetta sat up, and 2 sets of footsteps were heard.

Reaper and Scythe were not expecting their mother to actually show up. She always found an excuse to never stop by or even attend backstage to their concerts no matter how much they assured her they allowed it. What was a pleasant surprise, however, turned sour. Now they realized the root of all her excuses. She didn't want to face Pizzazz. The two didn't know much about Pizzazz's mother. All her paintings were thrown out and neither Pizzazz nor their father spoke about her. It was if she disappeared. Except she didn't. She was here the whole time, she was their mother. At first, the two didn't know how to react. It was then Reaper who spoke up.

"Why did you lie to us?" Prompted, Schythe continued "Why did you keep this hidden?". Their mother then explained. Explained her loveless marriage and how she had to leave her old life behind. How she did initially want to leave further away, until she met their father and stayed with him. She had wanted to see Pizzazz again, but that she was afraid. And that her guilt became too strong to ignore and finally, after all these years, meet Pizzazz.

Reaper and Scythe were stunned. It was, a lot. To know that the mother they loved and cherished all these years, was the same mother Pizzazz would angrily shut down at the mere mention of her. "We need to find Pizzazz. It might be best...you're not here when we find them." Their mother simply nodded in understanding, initially going for an embrace before stopping herself and going through the door. The two then went in the direction where Pizzazz and later Stormer and Jetta left. Eventually they found an open door and walked in.

Ecliese braced themself. Much like thenself, RoxCee were never great with their emotions. Ecliese knew she must have made their mother cry. Before all this, the two would speak praises of their mother. Surely, they sided with her. It seemed Jetta had the same thought, getting ready to yell back. What they didn't expect, however, was an embrace. It was sudden and in any other occasion, the two would have been shoved off and yelled at. Instead, Ecliese accepted it. She knew what it meant, they were there for her...Stormer and Jetta then joined as well, the four holding their band leader close. Ecliese was never much for hugs and all that mush, but...maybe this could be the one exception. She gently closed her eyes and fell further in the embrace.

[cybernaght]

Guardian rewatch: episode 4

While patrolling at night in civvies, Shen Wei gets caught by Zhao Yunlan and his merry band of misfits. You’d think that he would maybe quickly morph into his black-cloaked persona, because we know that the can just transform into Hei Pao Shi, magical girl style. Instead of summoning that disguise however, he dons his glasses (a very different kind of mask, but a mask nonetheless), and turns around, bracing himself for what’s to come. 

This is going to be fun. 

(Spoilers for the future episodes)

Let’s look at the situation from Zhao Yunlan’s perspective. What does he really know about Shen Wei? The man is polite, but strangely intense. He is undeniably intelligent, both learned and perceptive, but he is also way too knowledgable on the topic of alien-mutant-demihuman/supernatural for a civilian. He also, as far as Zhao Yunlan knows, walked away unscathed from at least three fights, two of which should have definitely been lethal. He could fall off the roof, and not even look disheveled afterwards. After being connected with two cases, he has now been lurking at a different crime scene entirely. And with all that, Shen Wei is also courageous, kind, compassionate, and understanding. He pushes back when Yunlan gets into his space. I don’t think there is a single moment, not even in this, very soft, episode, when Zhao Yunlan does not know that there is more to Shen Wei than meets the eye. He just doesn’t want professor Shen to be the big bad, and thinking he might be one is making chief Zhao worried and confused.��

Back at the SID interrogation room, Shen Wei is preparing to evade enough so that he does not have to lie too much. Thankfully, he is good at this sort of thing.

Part 1. Zhu Hong.

Zhu Hong is the first to interrogate Shen Wei, and her approach is by the book. She is impassive, but not unfriendly. She asks reasonable questions, such as “why were you so far away from your place of work and your abode in the middle of a night?” and “aren’t you a little bit too composed in face of death and spooky things for a professor?” Those are technically right things to ask. It’s exactly what should he asked in this scenario. Shen Wei, being much more of a sly bastard than he was letting on, turns it around completely and instead of answering anything plainly, talks about the Snake Tribe, implying that Zhu Hong must be a disappointment to her people. 

Zhu Hong storms off. Instead of being concerned, this time Zhao Yunlan is... endeared at the power move of cosmic proportions. It’s almost like he enjoys this man’s ability to use people’s weaknesses against them.

Part 2: Chu Shuzhi

Lao Chu approached the problem of Shen Wei by trying to scare him: he brings in his brother/puppet, and pretty much ignores the man. For Shen Wei this is an easy one, which is extremely unfair. He knows Chu Shuzhi and his past, which means does not need to find an opening; he just pounces right away, commenting on how Chu’s puppet seems alive, even trying to grab at it. His willingness to exploit his knowledge of his colleague’s dark past is kind of eerie.

“You confidence and composure remind me of someone I know”, comments Chu Shuzhi. And now, now Shen Wei purses his lips. He thinks, as do the viewers, that he must be speaking of Hei Pao Shi. But then Chu Shuzhi states that that other man is much more worthy than Shen Wei, we are to understand that he is talking is about Zhao Yunlan. Shen Wei stares at the chief through the mirrored glass, noting that whoever that person is, they must be truly righteous. 

Lao Chu very rarely speaks highly of his chief, so it’s nice to see some of that admiration here. If you squint, his comment could even be read as protective: he is neither deaf, nor stupid, and Zhao Yunlan must talk about Shen Wei a lot. 

Part 3: Zhao Yunlan

Zhao Yunlan does not try to intimidate, pressure, or follow any reasonable protocol. Instead, he just asks Shen Wei to be honest with him, and say whether there is a connection between him and the cases. Shen Wei startles at this, his eyes going big and vulnerable, and does, in fact, tell him the truth. Well. Sort of the truth. It’s closer to the truth than it is to a lie. It’s complicated. 

It’s hard to say for sure whether this perfect kicked puppy expression is an act. I, for one, choose to believe that he just sometimes cannot control his face when he’s in the vicinity of the man who will become his Kunlun. 

Zhao Yunlan counts his eyelashes, and lets him go. Just like that. No surveillance, no further questions. Shen Wei is just free to leave. 

The following day marks Guo Changcheng and Chu Shizhu being on the case together for the first time. 

It’s not remarkable, apart from being the first very tiny step from the least likely working duo to the most important people in each other’s lives. They would not get along for a while, however. It will take time for Guo Changcheng to find resilience through his weaknesses, and for Chu Shizhu to start admiring this young man’s ability to throw himself into danger he cannot possible handle. 

As this happens, we get to meet a righteous youth which is Lin Yusen. He lost the girl he likes to the face snatcher, and is prepared to do a lot of stupid things to avenge her. He’s noble, brave, extremely reckless, and a bit of an idiot, all of which are characteristics which should actually make him very suitable for the SID. I believe Zhao Yunlan when he agrees to take the boy on board after graduation. It’s a shame that he needed to die to create a plot device. 

Zhao Yunlan and Lin Yusen run into Shen Wei. Or rather, Shen Wei plants himself right next to SID, in order to calmly ask to tag along. He does not actually have a good reason to do so, I don’t think. It makes more sense to get involved as Hei Pao Shi than as Shen Wei, especially if he wants to keep pretending that he is a normal human. 

What Zhao Yunlan should so is keep the man he arrested the night before very far away from the case. What Zhao Yunlan does do is express vague concern for Shen Wei’s well-being, and then agree for him to join in, because, apparently, when Shen Wei is determined, there is no way to refuse him. Yunlan’s got it really really bad for this man, and it shows. He is rewarded with one of Shen Wei’s little secret smiles. 

Okay, now, can we talk about how they are literally touching as they walk by each other? 

I thought maybe this was a forced perspective thing, but no, they walk perfectly side by side, and so close their arms are rubbing together as they do so. It’s been a very long time since I have walked with anyone closely side by side (2021 feels), but I’m pretty certain you can’t achieve this accidentally. 

They find the victim who is not the victim, and Shen Wei is jumped by the perpetrator who is not the victim’s boyfriend, getting scratched hard enough to draw blood. Unfortunately, by the time Zhao Yunlan shows up, his skin has already repaired itself, leaving Shen Wei to pretend like the blood, crusting over what clearly used to be scratches, is not his. 

You’d think that while spending several decades pretending to be human you would learn to not accidentally heal yourself. 

The perfect “what the hell are you?” face. 

Instead of addressing it, Zhao Yunlan moves to shout his head off at Lin Yusen for getting involved, even though he was not the one who got attacked. I love the double standards at play. Shen Wei, in his mild, compassionate way, references the youth of his own name, reminding him to rely on other people for strength. I am sure this is a literary reference, incomprehensible to a foreign viewer; it sounds insightful and beautiful. 

As with many things, Shen Wei will learn a wrong lesson from this in the end, hyper focusing on his name, rather than remembering that going at it alone can get you killed. Shen Wei’s special power is learning, apart from when he is learning the wrong thing.*

As the two men proceed to interrogate the woman, and Zhao Yunlan figures out that the victim is not the victim via the misogyny: he does not think that a young woman could fend off an attack, or that she would be comfortable strolling around the day after. He makes his conclusions in front of slender Shen Wei, who has been attacked by things and people seemingly stronger than him and shook them off with ease. 

The thing is, Zhao Yunlan is not an idiot, he remembers that Shen Wei should have died on him at least twice, and is staring intently at where blood should definitely be soaking Shen Wei’s jumper. He is not really letting him off the hook for this. But he must see as plainly as we do that they work well together, and he makes a clear, deliberate decision to trust the man either way. He proceeds to discuss the case with Shen Wei, who also concludes that the victim is not the victim.

It’s lovely to see SID squad in action, staking out the perpetrators. Zhu Hong is set up as bait, with Da Qing and Chu Shuzhi having her back, and Lin Jing being their eye in the sky. There is a strange anti-yashou thing happening with the team however, which I find quite hard to understand. Lin Jing is giggling at her applying makeup, Da Qing saying that he is excited to see her pretending to be a lady. Come on now, guys, I know she is probably eating raw meet in her spare time, but she is also a beautiful, elegant young woman. I mean, look at her! 

While the team is staking out the Undergrounder perpetrator, their boss is having a lovely evening stroll through the park with Shen Wei, talking about merits of intimate friendship. We can assume that they spent the rest of the day together.

“Does Wei in your name have a deeper meaning?”

“It does. Someone very important gave me that name.”

I assume Zhao Yunlan hears the same thing in this as every sane person would: “my parents gave this name to me when I was born”, as opposed to “the love of my life who looks like you, sounds like you, acts like you, and has a thing for candy, gave me this name ten thousand years ago”. So, Yunlan starts talking about his family, makes a comment that his mom would have loved Shen Wei. The conversation is quiet and honest. There is some flirting, naturally, but there is no digging and no games; just the two men getting to know each other. 

Zhu Jiu ruins their stroll, and at the same time the face stealer and her boyfriend, Jia Hui, walk around the surveillance, capturing Zhu Hong. The team then does not call their Chief, presumably because they don’t want to disrupt his date. 

Shen Wei’s solution to throwing Zhao Yunlan off his scent is pretending to be hurt once more: this time drawing blood by prickling his finger on one of Lin Yusen’s trap. While it will not work in the long run, Shen Wei breathes a sigh of relief at Yunlan’s overreaction, and agrees to go to A&E with him to get a tetanus shot, as if it’s a thing people do every time they have a minor cut. 

We then meet Wang Xianyang pre-evil, and his pregnant wife pre-dead. Good times.

Guardian’s insistence on making Zhu Hong a damsel in distress is slightly grating. She should not need help to be rescued: she is not a human, and she shown to have a number of powers in this very episode. I almost wish her reliance one Zhao Yunlan could be read as an excuse to be close: I would prefer that to her being side-lined because she happens to be a woman.

If those recaps continue, I will start focusing more on fight sequences when they happen, because one of my jobs is in stage violence. This episode, we only get one fight, however, and it’s only four moves long. It’s more of a capture, really: Chu Shuzhi blocks a left hook and puts Jia Hui’s arm in a lock, then does the same thing on the other side. We are to understand that Jia Hui never stood a chance here. This lock would have looked better and more vicious if the elbow was more bent, putting the hand higher on the back. Also, continuity, what continuity? 

Shen Wei, who probably teleported out of the A&E, goes back to patrol the streets against Zhu Jiu, still in civvies, because being caught once was not enough for him. After a brief stand-off, he fails to capture the baby goth villain, who taunts Shen Wei with his only visible weakness: Zhao Yunlan.

Being distracted thus, Hei Pao Shi does not arrive in time to save Lin Yunsen, who runs in to save the SID team from the face stealer about to take them all out. On top of that, Hei Pao Shi also informs Zhao Yunlan that he’s taking the young man’s body away with the perpetrators, citing the peace treaty violation on his part. Needless to say, Yunlan is actually incredibly angry and upset at this turn of events, even though he probably could have summoned Hei Pao Shi if he wanted to; and must know that the Envoy is just doing his literal job. As he is storming off, Shen Wei stares at his back with naked longing. 

Zhao Yunlan does not know that Shen Wei took Lin Yunsen away to spare his feelings as the young man was forcefully turned into a mixed-energy bomb. This episode is when we discover that being mixing dark and light energies together leads to adverse effects for the carrier, resulting in a spectacular explosion. Shen Wei will use this knowledge in the future in ways I don’t care to remind myself of. That said, I do like is well-structured narratives, with a decent amount of foreshadowing, and elements are set-up in good time, so it’s satisfying - in an abstract, detached, sort of way -  to see that that particular plot device is already present in the story. 

At the end, we are treated to another sneak preview of the past: this time with the naming scene. Shen Wei vouches to keep his promise he once gave Kunlun to bravely march onwards, despite everything, and chooses to step aside. For now. 

(By which I mean while he will temporarily stop inviting himself along to solve cases with Zhao Yunlan, he will still get an apartment across the hall from the other man to better stalk him.)

I would also like to note with a hint of sadness that the first onslaught of dubbing glitches happens this episode. I thought those would not start until later in the show. 

Next up, Episode 5: The Butler Did Not Do It

*I don’t actually remember if his special power being learning is something explicitly stated in the show canon, or if I have just absorbed this through fandom osmosis. 

[junker-town]

The women of the Scottish Highland games

Masters competitor Katy Horgan throws the hammer on Day 1 of the Phoenix Scottish Games | Faron Images

Why women are flocking to one of the oldest, most “manly” sports in the world.

In Steele Indian School park in downtown Phoenix, palm trees sway behind white tents filled with meat pies and haggis for sale. In one of the largest, raucous Celtic bands (one named the Wicked Tinkers) rock out multiple times a day. Outside, bagpipes create an almost constant din. In the middle of the festivities, a metal fence surrounds the main event: Men and women in kilts and sneakers, many tattooed, forming loose groups around heavy objects in a makeshift “arena.”

On a warm, cloudless Saturday in March, the type you’d rarely see in any month in Scotland, the 56th annual Phoenix Scottish Games were held.

Highland games are a centuries-old Scottish tradition, but even in the U.S. they date back more than 180 years. Now, hundreds of these competitions take place around the world every year, although they have evolved considerably since the 11th century.

Notably, they are no longer a men-only contest.

Heather MacDonald, clad in a green tank top and dark red tartan kilt, puts chalk on her hands and takes her turn throwing the “braemar,”a 13-pound rock likely plucked from a patch of local wilderness. The games’ nine events also include the caber toss, which is effectively throwing a telephone pole end-over-end, and the sheaf, in which competitors stab a hay-filled burlap sack with a pitchfork and fling it over a bar. Both are major crowd-pleasers.

MacDonald competes in the women’s amateur A class, the highest class for amateurs. The Phoenix games do not have professional-class events for men or women, so everyone competes as amateurs.

However, in most Highland competitions with a professional class, women have to scrap for equal recognition. They don’t have an official pro circuit like the men. Women have to apply for “pro” status, and the paid travel and prize money that come with, for each competition they attend, and only if it’s available.

A women’s pro circuit would mean more opportunities to participate, and better prize money and potential sponsorships. For now, women like MacDonald compete for accolades and progress towards equality in a contest designed specifically for men nearly 1,000 years ago.

Michelle Crownhart, 62, has been competing in Highland games longer than almost any woman in the sport. The Phoenix resident sits in a camp chair under a tent, watching women throw a metal weight. She’s smoking a cigar and drinking a Kilt Lifter, a beer made by Four Peaks, one of the games’ sponsors.

Crownheart was formerly the athletic director of the Phoenix tournament. She started competing in 1994 because one of her daughter’s teachers was the athletic director then, and convinced her to show up. She learned how to do all of the events on the fly. Back then, organizers would pull people from the crowd, hand them a signup sheet and let them compete if they seemed inclined.

Only five women participated in 1994, Crowheart says. “Out of the five women, I finished fourth, so I was happy, but I fell in love with it.” This year, she wants to take first place at the World Masters Championship in Ireland.

Shaena Montanari

Heather MacDonald preparing to throw the Braemar stone.

Crownhart was also one of the first competitors in the Women’s World Championships, which used to be held in Phoenix but recently moved to Oklahoma. She says that only in the last year or so have women been given pro designations, despite their small, yet mighty, representation: “It’s taken that long.”

Women’s participation in the games grew quickly over the last decade. In 2009, 201 women participated in Highland events, according to a database of athletes and results on the North American Scottish Games Athletics (NASGA) website. In 2019, that number climbed to 702.

Competitors in Highland games can generally sort themselves into whatever class they feel they belong to: lightweight, masters or the A, B and C amateur. To participate as a professional, an athlete needs to be deemed worthy based on skill and reputation by the games’ organizers. Women can be invited in the same way as men if a competition offers a pro class for them. But men are the only athletes officially classified as pros on the NASGA database.

“There isn’t even a place on the website to enter a score as a pro if you are a woman,” MacDonald says. When someone asks her how to go pro as a woman, she says it isn’t really a “thing” like it is for men.

MacDonald, a former discus, shotput and hammer thrower at California State University Fullerton, got into Highland games 14 years ago during her last year of college. She believes the women’s classes have “exploded” with athletes in the last five years largely because of the community. In college, track meets sometimes felt overly competitive. That’s not the vibe among Highland games athletes. “We’re the Island of Misfit Toys because we all come from very different backgrounds,” MacDonald says.

Amaris Saldate, another athlete at the Phoenix games, is a chaplain who used to be a professional rodeo barrel racer. She describes herself as “not a sporty-type girl at all,” and jokingly refers to her body type as “the Michelin Man.”

She found the sport by accident. Two years ago, she walked into the Phoenix games after finishing an exhausting shift at the Phoenix Veterans Administration, which borders the park where the games are held.

“There’s this crazy, small little blonde lady running around in a kilt and throwing shit, and I was like, ‘What is she doing?’” Saldate laughs. The blonde lady was Rachel Smith, a Highland games athlete and co-organizer of the Phoenix games with her boyfriend Tim Timm, the athletic director. They invited Saldate to a weekend practice, and from then on she was part of the crew.

The earliest records of Scottish games first being held in the United States are from Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1836. The games have continued and spread across the country, even in places with thin connections to the Scottish diaspora.

The Phoenix games, like others, also put on a handful of Scottish and Irish cultural activities over the weekend — like pipe and drum performances, and dance competitions — and host representatives from more than 50 clans. Richard McBain, the acting chief of the McBain Clan was the “chieftain of the games” in Phoenix. Unexpectedly, he is also from Tucson.

While the games’ organizers strive to create a fun atmosphere, many of the athletes are competing to qualify for even bigger competitions.

MacDonald’s goal is to be invited back as a pro to the Scottish Highland Gathering and Games in Pleasanton, California, which are the largest in the country, drawing crowds of more than 30,000 people. Until recently, the prize money was much better for pro men than women.

“And that’s a huge, huge deal,” MacDonald says. “For a long time, we were like, ‘What the heck, why are we getting 50 bucks for fifth place and then the fifth place for the men gets like $600?’ That’s ridiculous.”

Fortunately, some athletic directors are now going out of their way to give women a better cut. The director of the Pleasanton games even raised the top prize for women to $2,500, which is the most MacDonald has ever seen.

At the Alaska Scottish Highland Games, only the pro men were paid, until Jeni McDaniel took charge. As athletic director, she got approval to have women pros compete instead of men at the 2018 games.

“At first, there was a little bit of resistance,” McDaniel says. “But I said, ‘I promise you these women are going to put on a show.’”

The event exceeded expectations.

“The majority of our vendors ran out of food and ran out of beer. It was pandemonium. We broke all-time records with attendance,” McDaniel says.

She credits the games’ success to the novelty of having women pros compete. In 2019, McDaniel obtained funding for six pro men and six pro women to participate.

“They are phenomenal to watch,” she says. “With any pro at any level, you are being paid to put on a show for the crowd and they deliver tenfold.”

Women participating in Highland games can dream big in a variety of ways. No one competition represents the pinnacle of the sport. There’s the World Masters Championship for athletes over 40 years old. There’s the International Highland Games Federation Chile tournament, where qualifying men and women amateurs get a paid trip to compete. Even the Arnold Sports Competition, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s famed multi-sport event, has an indoor Scottish Highland games, though only one of the four amateur classes is for women.

MediaNews Group via Getty Images

Heather MacDonald competing in the caber toss in Pleasanton, Calif.

But when the women aren’t focused on competition, they enjoy being part of the strong community that characterizes the sport above all. In Phoenix, Timm and Smith are ringleaders, organizing weekly practices for anyone in the area who wants to try heavy events for the first time. Timm calls the group “an incredible family.” At the games, he shows off a table of prizes for the winners, which includes handmade Viking axes.

This year, Timm created replicas of Scotland’s famous Dinnie Stones for the event. The real Dinnie Stones are two granite boulders with metal rings attached to them. The goal: to lift the two rocks, one weighing 414.5 pounds and the other 318.5, off the ground for as long as possible. The record is 41.00 seconds. The replicas, which Timm made by pouring mortar into a hole he dug into the ground, come in at 252 and 261 pounds each. Some of the competitors called them “Timmie Stones.”

Without passion like Timm’s, Saldate might never have discovered that she is a natural Highland games athlete, which she credits to her “ranch worker DNA.” She is competing in the open division at the Phoenix games, but she wants to qualify for the Arnold Sports Competition in Ohio, and eventually go to Scotland to see the sights and compete.

Though lifting heavy objects is a solo endeavour, competitors cheer each other on. Saldate bought plastic tiaras to hand out anyone who breaks a record. And elites, like MacDonald, often travel together to Highland or other strongman competitions throughout the year. She prefers road trips. “It’s part of the experience of being a little community, it’s part of the fun,” she says.

Being a Highland games athlete can feel like a lifestyle more than a hobby, filling the hours outside of day jobs. And sadly, because of the coronavirus pandemic, most of the fun for this year is likely over.

The Phoenix games took place the first weekend in March, at the precipice of the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S.. The Las Vegas Highland Games in April were soon canceled, as was the World Masters Championship.

“It’s been kind of a bummer,” Saldate says. She was planning a trip to the Las Vegas games with other Phoenix-area competitors.

Because of social distancing, athletes are now limited to practicing at home. MacDonald says she has heard about “backyard games” being held around the country so competitors can stay sharp and keep posting numbers to the NAGSA database. MacDonald is currently rehabbing an injury, and has her sights set on 2021. Of the eight competitions she had planned for the rest of the year, seven have officially been canceled.

She misses the sport and her fellow women throwers. And though they’ve set up Zoom dates, they only help so much.

“We didn’t form these connections with people out of nowhere, we all still share our common connections and want to be involved with the Highland games,” MacDonald says. “We can’t do that right now, but the connection that we created can still be preserved.”

[themadcapmathematician]

all i know abt transformers is the shia movie and the fact that darren criss plays one in the cartoons i think? should i get into transformers is what i'm asking

Oh god this is my favorite question. I’m not sure how to answer it but its my fave. Pull up a chair. I hope you’ve got some time on your hands.

The short answer: yes. You should at least give it a try. Transformers is a 30+ year old muti-media franchise that gets rebooted almost every 3 years so it basically has something interesting to offer almost any fan. If you end up not liking it that’s cool but there’s a lot to try before you decide.

The long answer is: yes you should and here’s why and here’s a rough idea of all the options you have to sample. I’m about to go on a long rant anon so you can check it out now or later or whatever but I’m just warning you ahead of time.

The basic Transformers plot (which I’m sure you know but I’m gonna go more in depth in a minute) is that a race of giant robot aliens who can turn into vehicles and other things have been engaged in a civil war that has lasted millions of years. This is the basic plot that all tf franchises spawn from although some explore slightly different subject matters. If that doesn’t appeal to you I mean there /might/ be a few other things you might find worth sticking around for because there’s just so fucking much of it, but you’re welcome to turn back now because that’s the basic things tf has to offer: giant robot aliens, cars and planes, fighting, some drama. Those are what tf is best at, with some variation.

It has a very active and long lived fan base and each section of the fan base is interested in different stuff with some crossover. There are people who literally only care about collecting the toys, people who wont try any other series except g1, people who only like the comics, etc. Etc. You’ll probably find people who like what you do pretty readily. If you like the toys there are toy forums and blogs. If you like the cartoons there are forums and blogs made for that too. If you like the comics, same. There’s a pretty active following of the comics and cartoon series on Tumblr alone; I would try searching the #maccadam tag since most tf activity has been moved there since the bay movies came out. Id also use the tf wiki liberally because it has pm all the information you’ll need to know about the fandom and the canon lore. There’s also plenty of fan fiction on Ao3 and ff.net if you’re into that and pm anyplace that hosts fan art has tf fan art.

Now there are several series, including comics, cartoons, the Michael bay films, the cartoon movie, spin off books, and video games. I’m gonna go over my personal favorites because I like and know them best but there are more than these if you’re interested in digging deeper.

(More under the cut)

G1: there are a lot of forms of what fans refer to as Generation 1 or G1 but if you live in the US its likely they’re talking about the very first cartoon series.

Summary: the autobots and the decepticons stripped their planet of resources and went looking for a new planet to continue surviving on. They both crashlanded on earth where they lay dormant for millions of years until conveniently awakened somewhere during the 1980s, where they continue their war all over again

Why you should try it: listen its cheesy as hell and full of nonsense plotlines and animation errors but not only is it good fun but at least watching an episode or two might give you a decent grasp on what spawned this enormous franchise in the first place.

G1 movie: this movie was a game changer. Its technically right in the middle of the g1 cartoon but it works as a standalone film too. while it has many trappings of the cartoon its better animated and has a more consistent and dramatic story.

Summary: Optimus Prime and Megatron fight, OP dies (yes he fucking DIES for the very first time. thousands of 10 year olds bawl their eyes out), Megatron gets mortally wounded, and the Matrix of Leadership (aka an autobot holy item/macguffin [this is the proto-cube btw]) has to choose a new leader.

Why you should try it: decent animation, classics lines, tons of 80s rock music, and it establishes a lot of tf conventions that would be carried over to all series that come after it.

Beast Wars: haha the 90s couldn’t be left out of the transformers fun, now could it? This was one of the first all-cg cartoon series in history and while its not much to look at nowadays, it was a big step in the 90s.

Summary: the series doesn’t center on Optimus Prime and Megatron but their decendants. The war is long over but some factions are starting to clash once again. Several members of these factions do the whole “crash land on earth while fighting” thing except they wake up during times before humans and instead of taking vehicle modes, they take animal forms, thus the name.

Why you should give it a try: it establishes the idea of Sparks for the first time, it has historical significance in the cgi realm, and it has a decent storyline with interesting characters. If you can muscle through the 90s-computer-animation look it might be the show for you!

Transformers: Animated: I dont think its a secret that this is one of my favorite tf series of all times. It was the first cartoon series I ever watched of tf and it also features my favorite toy line.

Summary: Optimus Prime is much less a war hero and more of a ..janitor really. He flunked out of the academy and spends his time repairing space bridges. One time during repairs though, they stumble across the Cube and just their luck, Megatron and some nearby cons are looking for it. They portal away to earth where they, you guessed it, crashland, until they’re awoken sometime in the future and go on adventures in futuristic Detroit.

Why you should give it a try: I like tfa’s art style and story and characterisation best tbh; Optimus is younger and more unsure of himself but also more earnest, with more visible baggage. The rest of his team feel like a ragtag band of misfits (which I have a weakness for no lie lmfao) who are still trying to find their place in this conflict and the future ahead of them. Sari is also one of the more beloved human companions and the show’s take on classics characters feels fresh and interesting, and the interpretation of the autobots and decepticons themselves is surprisingly nuanced.

Transformers: Prime: remember that 90s animation? Kiss that shit good bye my friend. This cgi is some beautiful shit. More than a few fans wish tfp is the art direction the movies had taken, storyline aside.

Summary: the autobots are already on earth, staking it out and fighting a more subdued sort of conflict with the cons. One day they get some human kids involved and stumble across some conspiracy shit and it all spirals out of control from there.

Why you should give it a try: great animation and atmosphere, gorgeous character designs, a solid interpretation go the characters, and it offers a more serious take on the story over all.

Rescue Bots: I’ve noticed this show doesn’t make the list a lot which is a shame? It has a much younger audience than any of then other series but its still quality and one of my fave tf series.

Summary: the ship of four non-combatants who were left in stasis before the war detect a transmission telling autobots to go to earth, so it…goes to earth. There they wake up on some island and are told they’ve gotta start building a repatoire with the native species…but they can’t reveal that they’re sentient aliens yet.

Why you should give it a try: ok ok, most of the series are made for 7-12 year olds with the teen and adult fans sort of in mind, this show…is a show made for pre-K kids, no joke. Its a lot less…murder-y, and this is especially saying something because it came out at the same time TFP did and in fact is supposed to take place in the same universe!

BUT, but it has a consistently well-written story and characterization, it addresses stuff I never thought it would, and its a nice break from the ridiculously high stakes of the other series. Honestly Rescue Bots is great and I wish more people talked about it because its a series totally worth watching, certainly as much as any of the others.

More Than Meets the Eye comics: there are a lot of comic series but so far this is my favorite one lol

Summary: the war is over, Optimus is done with everyone’s shit and splits the matrix in half, giving one to rodimus and they other to bumblebee. And what does roddy do with his newfound matrix half? Decide he’s going on a quest of course! And who better to go with than literally every unqualified misfit the autobot and neutral factions have to offer?

Why you should give it a try: ridiculous shenanigans, horror, drama, intrigue, strong characterisation, and a killer aesthetic. Damn it may not always give me what I want but its got a lot of exactly what I’m always looking for.

There are some video games (Fall of Cybertron, War For Cybertron, Transformers: Devastation), other comic series (Robots in Disguise, G1/UK comics), and the Robots in Disguise cartoon, however I don’t have a decent enough grasp on them to describe them super well I just know they’re pretty good and have had people recommend them to me. You’re welcome to try those as well of course.

Also if you’re into toy collecting or want to get into it there’s a lot of materials you can read and such but my personal advice is pretty simple:

1) go to walmart, target, a store that sells collectibles, a convention, or a garage sale

2) buy a cheap toy that you like. Don’t spend over like $20

3) decide if that was a fun experience or not and if you like having this toy or not

If you liked it enough to keep buying, then congrats, toy collecting might be right for you! Do your research, Don’t blow too much money too quickly, take it easy, have fun.

But yeah sorry this is really long but I do hope you consider giving transformers a try since I know I love it a lot and it really has a lot to offer. I hope this wasn’t like…a crazy response. That a crazy person might give. And that I didn’t scare you away or anything XS

the key is to try some stuff and have fun and if its not your thing that’s cool too! Have a chill night anon

[elaeomyxa]

*chants* tell me about your oc's! Tell me about your OC's! TELL ME ABOUT YOUR OC's!!!! (only if ya wanna) :3

OK SO

I've already ranted about Sasha here before, so basically I'm just gonna give you the gist of the whole story.

Sasha is a human who gets swept up in this mysterious company where their whole purpose is to stop nightmares. The deal with nightmares is that parasitic entities attach themselves onto various creatures and then feed off of their deepest fears, eventually growing a corporeal form based off of them. The company sorts its workers into groups, where each group's job is to go into the mindscapes of people to fight the nightmares before they can escape. The company is entirely run by sentient non-humans, because humans don't possess the ability to go into people's mindscapes, or see the corporeal forms of nightmares. (The whole workaround for Sasha is that she's not entirely human.) Due to that, humans are kind if discriminated against in the community. The whole reason that Sasha doesn't get found out immediately is that everyone has to hide their identity to work for the company. Anyways, she's found out after she gets hurt during their first assignment, and the others kind of shun her. She ends up striking a deal with an entity from her dreams in order to make herself stronger, but just ends up getting possessed and she disappears. So the rest of the group finds out and then they have to go on an adventure to get back to where they were back before they were staying at the company, because they need to get some sort of memory from their childhood in order to do a spell to release Sasha (they need memories, specifically, for... Plot Reasons). And that pretty much brings us to a place where we can talk about all their backgrounds.

So first is Nix, he's a fire elemental. He's fairly tall, sort of lean and muscular, and mixed black/east asian. He's got half shaved hair in long dreads that fade from red to yellow, and he's missing an arm and half of his face. He's the self proclaimed leader of the group, and is just overall peppy and cheerful. He's still quite smart and capable, though, so it wouldn't be a good idea to underestimate him. He helps others, even if it may be to his detriment, and he was actually the one who had introduced Sasha to the company when he found out that she could see nightmares. The way he hides his identity is with a welding mask. The deal with fire elementals is that they pretty much live with humans, blending in and that jazz. Nix used to live in a small village with his family, when there was a flood that wiped out all but him. He was only able to survive because of his parents sacrificing themselves, so now there's that whole thing with his guilt.

Next is Kai. She's genderfluid, so I use alternating he/she pronouns for him. She's sort of an anarchist, sort of pessimistic, sort of sarcastic, sort of chaotic, and sort of an ass. He's in a love/hate relationship with Nix, though that could change for her. He's a changeling, but ever since the family whose child the fae had used her to replace kicked him out, she's taken on more the appearance of a usual fairy. That is, short, winged, pointy eared, and pink. He's actually got red bug eyes, with two extra ones above each primary eye. She's got blue freckles, and a short pink side shave with a blue streak. The shaved parts actually appear to be a bunch of short, dense flowers. He hides her identity with a ski mask. So basically after he was abandoned, she was homeless.

Next is Apollo. He's an incubus, but kinda decided "fuck that," which has actually been taken pretty well within their society. He's taller than average and has a chubby build and curly ginger hair, always partially tied back. He has yellow eyes, and he's kinda freckled. He's also got horns and a tail, cause, y'know, demon. He's got real bad anxiety, though he's pretty much the only one in the group with any common sense. He really doesn't want to be working for the company, but once he joined he couldn't leave. So now he's pretty exasperated of his team's antics, but he's still nice to them. He hides his identity with a face mask and sunglasses. See, in this ~universe~ succ/incubuses aren't actually that bad. They don't feast off of souls, they just gain energy from getting it on. They can use their power of charm to convince people to do things, but they never actually use it to gain consent if the human wouldn't otherwise. Their whole deal is that they gain energy from sex, and it's not sex if the human doesn't consent. They're actually a lot stricter with that than some people are. They deal with people not wanting to get in the business of sexing people up pretty well, and they always do their best to find alternative ways to get then energy. Since Apollo's away from them, though, he's pretty much tired all of the time. He gets by on human food and such, but he's hardly ever able to do magic and such. He only really left their society as a sort of vacation, but then he got stuck working for the company.

Next is Ari. I'm love her. She's a species, that's for sure. By that i mean I haven't found a name for her species yet, so that sucks. As for appearance wise, her eyes are kind of hard to describe. Ice used the term "forth dimensional googly eye" before, but idk how well that works. Well, just imagine a snowglobe but instead of snow it's jam packed with bunch of eyes of various size, color, and species. Her skin is just a bunch of mottled colors. She's very cold, flat, and inexpressive. She doesn't interact with the others in the team much, but she's fiercely protective. She has a few misfit animals that she rescued from off the street, one of them being a legless calico. Honestly, with the way the cat acts she's not sure if she adopted it or the other way around. She hides her identity with just a huge cloak. She's got chronic pain and a limp, though she hasn't really done anything about this because of the way she was raised. Speaking of that, she's sort of the runaway royalty type. She was born of an affair between the queen and a servant, so she's kind of resented for that. The thing is, her society has a caste system based off of the amount of eyes and markings on skin. The "royalty" are supposed to have one eye and perfectly clear skin, and so Ari's had to learn from a very young age to use glamour to pretend to be that way. But yeah, she's been expected to be perfect for her entire childhood, so that kind of fucked her up.

Lastly, there's Iya. Xe's a bipedal speckled black fox, and has orange yellow eyes. Xe's pretty much the height that a normal fox would be on two legs, so, that is: not very tall. Xe hides their face with a veil on xyr hat. I have yet to add xyr pronouns to my phone's dictionary yet, so that's fun. Anyways, xe's very arrogant, and seems to act like they're royalty. Xe's also pretty repressed due to their childhood, but xe hasn't realized that xyr childhood was bad. Xe was expected to be a fierce warrior pretty much birth, so that means that xe feels llike xe isn't allowed to feel any vulnerability. Xe really cares for xyr teammates, but is afraid to show it.

Ari, Apollo, and Iya have banded together (some more reluctantly than others) to get Kai and Nix together because their constant almost-flirting was pissing them off, so I've started referring to them as the matchmaking crew.

I also am probably really bad at describing them visually, so I might sketch them all later.

[teleindiscreta]

My Abortion Wasn’t Like Ben Folds Said It Would Be

Wesley Allsbrook for BuzzFeed News

My best friend Daleen and I were born in the same hospital five days apart. When people ask how Daleen and I met, I like to say exactly this: “We were born in the same hospital five days apart.” It’s a standard party trick, something I’ve learned to deliver in increasingly pointed ways over the course of our 15-year friendship, a joke whose social-emotional function has never been lost on me. It’s something I wish were true, but isn’t. Something that isn’t, but maybe could be: the story styled and served sideways. Why not?

There are people out there who fumble the joke immediately. These people consider my response, make eye contact, and say, “Wait, no, but really.” These people are not my friends. Friends ask me how I first approached Daleen in the hospital nursery (did I crawl or did I scoot?) and how she responded (did she cry or did she drool?), and for a moment I feel relaxed knowing there are others who wish it were so simple, too.

Such were the frustrated circumstances of my life when I vomited in a Dunkin’ Donuts bathroom and discovered I was pregnant.

Having been born five days apart, it’s not uncommon for Daleen and me to structure our birthday season around each other. This is because I love the sturdy escapism that a prolonged birthday celebration provides, and also because we are both still traumatized by the year I forgot Daleen’s 19th birthday in 2007, referred to here in shorthand as T.Y.I.F. (“The Year I Forgot”). I don’t have enough emotional stamina to detail T.Y.I.F. now, but eventually it was nine years later and we had more or less moved on. Daleen and I were both seemingly grown, both with graduate degrees and gym memberships, both renting one-bedroom apartments in Hollywood — only Daleen’s was on the more respectable end. Mine was pushed up against the Metro red line and infested with roaches. Additionally, my apartment came with a sweet, adoring boyfriend I couldn’t convince myself to want to marry, no matter that for seven years he loved me the way he did, with a kind of cherubic grace you just don’t hear about in Hollywood, and no matter how badly I wanted my story to unfurl in clean, white lines on paper.

Such were the frustrated circumstances of my life when I vomited in a Dunkin’ Donuts bathroom and discovered I was pregnant. It was the week before my 28th birthday. The Future! I thought, staring into the putrid, porcelain expanse of the toilet bowl. It wasn’t glamorous, but was it All Right?

I ordered a sausage-egg-and-cheese breakfast sandwich and thought about my one-bedroom apartment next to the subway — the roaches, the leaky gas stove, the anonymous grifter who kept smearing excrement on the sky blue Toyota Prius I inherited from my sister — and decided to schedule an appointment for an abortion as I soon as I could muster the words to tell my boyfriend, who was living temporarily back east for a job. By the time I did tell him, it was my actual birthday — number 28. And in response, he asked whether any part of me felt excited to know I could get pregnant, as if I hadn’t already carried the burden of that knowledge around with me — the messy red-brown muck of it — since I was 11 years old.

I didn’t feel excited. I felt desperate to be alone and terrified to be alone in alternating waves. I didn’t know which was the more honest feeling. I still don’t. But my body felt different in a way that was so apparent it surprised me. I felt hardened, nauseated, and ravenous for sugar all at once. More than anything I wanted to be rid of that feeling, to soften back into my old salty self, which is why I think Daleen and I went forth with our birthday festivities as planned, hosting a house party at a friend’s place a few nights after my abortion procedure. Daleen even made a flyer and two cakes. I wore a black velvet mini-dress and, because I was still bleeding, a giant menstrual pad, which I held securely in place with a pair of Spanx. That night I didn’t think much about my boyfriend, or even the baby that could have been. Instead I got drunk, because it was a party. I ordered a pizza. I entertained a group serenade of “Happy Birthday,” I licked frosting off my fingers, and I flirted with a crush because I was already falling out of love with the story I’d written about myself, or the one that had been written for me.

“Brick” By Ben Folds Five.

youtube.com

When my Northern California Catholic school needed a hip way to talk to freshmen about the consequences of abortion, they played us “Brick” by Ben Folds Five. It was 2002, and despite my unwavering understanding (even at 14) of my right to choose, I was young enough then for my pathologies to still be forming. For the next 15 or so years, Ben Folds’ account of emotional collapse following his high school girlfriend’s abortion at “6 a.m., day after Christmas” instilled in me a belief in the destructive quality of my own womb, which was then deep in the throes of female puberty. Perhaps as a result of this education, as a teen I sought control over the disorder I sensed in my body. I tweezed, flat-ironed, stuffed my chest into push-up bras, and eventually I went on the Pill, if only to protect myself from being drowned in watery emotion — a heavy, sunken brick at the bottom of the San Francisco Bay.

Following its release on their Whatever and Ever Amen album in 1997, “Brick” became the alternative rock band’s biggest hit and gained enough mainstream radio play that early fans accused Ben Folds Five of selling out. Despite its controversial subject matter, the reason behind the song’s widespread appeal can be understood in its lonesome lyrics and moody piano arpeggio, which suggest that — politics aside — abortion is sad for everyone. Especially Ben Folds.

Abortion does feel sad for some women, and that’s OK. But “Brick” isn’t about the experience of some women, or even one woman. Pay no attention to the piano gimmick and all that remains of “Brick” is a man imagining a woman drowning both herself and those around her with the weightiness of her #FemaleProblems. Ultimately, “Brick” is a song about how abortion made Ben Folds feel about Ben Folds, which, if for some reason you need to know, is “numb” and “alone,” despite his girlfriend being the one actually having the experience.

My adult self wonders how Ben’s girlfriend would have painted her story differently. Would she really think to include the detail of her boyfriend selling back his Christmas gifts on the same day as her abortion? Would she tell us what she ate afterward? (I ate a cheesesteak and I want to know.) Which TV shows would she recommend binge-watching to ignore all the bleeding? If she imagined herself a brick, would she instead be the kind thrown up against a windowpane?

I remember discussing the possibility of an unexpected pregnancy with another friend, Emma, after we both finished graduate school and faced the uncertain future of the rest of our lives as writers who also happen to be women.

“Would you have an abortion?” I asked her. “At this point?”

Emma, who was born in east London and raised in Essex — more accustomed to the grit of life than me — thought she wouldn’t, that somehow she’d learn to endure motherhood on a diet of rice and moldy vegetables, like her mother before her, and her mother’s mother before that. I said I’d opt for the abortion, but that I’d probably develop a drinking problem from the resulting pain and distress. In response, Emma laughed the sheepish way friends do when they agree with you but know they shouldn’t. We both wanted a third option, only we didn’t realize what that option could be yet.

John Everett Millais's painting “Ophelia” shows a scene from Shakespeare's Hamlet, in which Ophelia drowns herself in a stream after having been driven out of her mind when her father is murdered by her lover, Hamlet. Painting held at Tate Britain, London.

Print Collector / Getty Images

It seems important to note that while enrolled in the same Catholic school where I was encouraged to consider my uterus as one might, say, an albatross, I was also required to read Hamlet, in which the O.G. Damsel in Distress — the hapless and inconsolable Ophelia — drowns in a brook following the news of her father’s death. The scene was depicted by artist John Everett Millais in a now-iconic painting that hangs in Tate Britain. In the image Ophelia’s corpse is nearly submerged in murky blue water, as if her life has been extinguished by her own tears. Tied up in these narratives of women drowning is an implicit understanding of their physical and emotional conditions as less solid than their sturdier male counterparts. By comparison, women are soft, squishy, encased in liquid, or containing too much of it. “The female body is a leaky body,” writes my friend Emma in her essay “A History of Interiors.” Of course, the monthly fact of the female reproductive cycle adds yet another sodden layer. (Emma again: “The red mystery of woman: a feminine stigmata, foul and lubricious.”)

It’s not typical for me to swoon over conventionally attractive people. My type is more “90% attractive, but with something kind of ugly about them,” which is why I’ve dated a lot of extroverted cis men in the past. “Max” (which isn’t his real name) was a different kind of crush, though. Max was an LA kind of crush, which is to say he seemed imaginary, the kind of crush meant to distract from a dying relationship. Not only was our flirtation contained almost entirely to the digital sphere (Max liked all my Instagram selfies in the summer of 2016), but the easy naturalness of Max’s movie-star anatomy felt utterly impossible to me, by which I mean a woman from elsewhere, with no familial ties to Hollywood at all.

I had arrived in LA a misfit Bay Area exile, raised in some shapeless tech town hours and hours up I-5, while Max had a Movie Family. You could tell by the way he never mentioned his parents unless you asked him something direct, and even then Max never named names. That’s how you know who grew up with Hollywood and who didn’t. There’s a calculated casualness to the locals there, whereas I tried to tell anyone who would listen about that one time in college when child star Haley Joel Osment bought Daleen a pepperoni pizza and I happened to be there, too.

Close friends joke about my peculiar lack of chill, about the spastic way I carry my limbs and all my random bouts of nausea in public. I never see myself coming, which is why I felt surprised when, standing on the balcony the night of my birthday party, I swiveled around to flirt with Max and broke a fist-sized string light bulb with the sway of my right hip alone.

“Hips don’t lie,” Max said.

Indeed. I scraped shards of glass away with the side of my sneaker and excused myself to the bathroom. When I returned, I found Max sitting downstairs and flopped next to him on the couch. A beat passed while I crossed my legs, pursed my lips, and considered what to say next, only Max figured it out first:

“Is that blood?”

He directed his gaze toward the fleshy inside of my left knee, where a string of my uterine lining had decided to invite itself to the party. I looked down at myself then too, feeling the sudden, hot pressure of addressing the condition of my uterus for a person who did not, in fact, have one. Max himself seemed perplexed by the source of my blood, asking for a first and second time whether I’d been cut by the broken glass on the balcony, and for a moment I considered what it would feel like to tell Max the truth about my abortion and the possibility of bleeding without being wounded. Instead I said:

“It’s chocolate.”

In her video work “Untitled (Blood Sign #1)” (1974), the late Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta scoops handfuls of animal blood from a tray and onto a white wall. After tracing the outline of a doorway around herself, Mendieta scrawls a series of words in sharp, swift movements. “There is a devil inside me,” read the words inside the bloody doorway. The video then fades to black.

I find I am often more interested in the artist behind the work than in the work itself. In this case, Ana Mendieta is nearly as famous for her death as for her provocative “earth body” art of the 1970s and ’80s, which typically featured blood, dirt, hair, ritual, burial, and the artist’s nude form. In September 1985, Mendieta was a rising art star when, at the age of 36, she fell from the 34th floor of the Greenwich Village apartment building where she lived with her husband of just nine months, the minimalist sculptor Carl Andre. Andre was present at the time of his wife’s death, reporting to 911 dispatchers that the two had quarreled about Andre’s higher level of prominence in the art world, after which she “went out the window” and died.

Tried for murder in the second degree, Andre was acquitted on all charges, ruling Mendieta’s death an accident or suicide by default.

The inverse of a suicidal woman is a homicidal woman.

After immigrating to the US as an orphan in exile from her native Cuba, Mendieta studied art at the University of Iowa, where she established herself as a fiercely ambitious, vital force who was as engaged as she was enraged with the male-dominated art world — “a devil inside her.” When painting and sculpting proved inadequate mediums to communicate her radicalism, Mendieta sought to imbue her work with a greater sense of power and magic and transitioned into experimental performance, which she documented through photography and video. In “Untitled (Facial Hair Transplants)” (1972), a male friend shaves hair off his face as Mendieta applies the hair to her own. In “Bird Transformation” (1972), Mendieta transforms the body of a woman into a fowl by covering it in white feathers and blood. In “Untitled (Self-Portrait with Blood)” (1973), she stares directly at the camera while blood dribbles from her forehead and down her nose, into her mouth. When asked by a district attorney whether she believed it possible that Mendieta could have killed herself, friend and fellow activist Lucy Lippard answered resolutely: “No.” She had too much life inside her.

The inverse of a suicidal woman is a homicidal woman: a monstrous woman, a woman of energy and intensity in excess, a powerful woman covered in thick, hot red blood. It’s clear to me now that Mendieta was born red regardless of the materials she used in her artwork. For her crime was one of multivalence, of contradiction. In her ambition and in her husband Mendieta was drawn to what she was most repelled by. She was herself, as changeable as she was in conversation with the world around her: a red woman — as much as Ophelia is a blue woman and the girlfriend from “Brick” is a blue woman, by which I mean solitary and tragic, without faculty enough to swim themselves to shore.

In Millais’s painting of Ophelia, her palms are held open and raised slightly above water at chest level, as if to suggest stigmata — only there is no blood. Ophelia’s hands have been wiped clean.

“What is the relationship between physical states, bodily wastes (even if metaphoric ones) and the horrific?” asks scholar Barbara Creed in The Monstrous-Feminine.

In drowning women we wash the red parts away.

For a long time after my abortion, my blood became a problem. For six months I didn’t bleed at all, my period mysteriously absented, just like the words I searched for to explain what had happened, how I was trying to understand it. Then, for a month straight, I bled in public. It didn’t matter how many layers I wore to protect myself against the seepage. My blood was angry, spiteful. I bled in Mexican restaurants and in the freezer aisle. I bled down the maddening, circular hallways at the university where I worked. I bled at the bottom of the Verdugo foothills, where I dripped onto the hardwood floor of my new home in Glendale, where there was no more boyfriend and no more roaches, only sometimes crickets in the kitchen sink in the morning. I bled through my jeans, once, when Emma made me laugh too hard. We were drinking wine on the sofa and Emma scrubbed the stain out of the couch cushion while I threw my jeans into the wash. I bled so much I thought I might be hemorrhaging and called my doctor, who told me the bleeding was rare but not abnormal. I started to feel light-headed, so Daleen dragged me out for steak at El Coyote, where my Diva Cup spilled out onto the floor of the women’s bathroom — red. When I stood from our table after dinner, the napkin I’d been sitting on was soaked red, too. Daleen threw all that red under the table and tipped when we left. It was all anyone could do. ●

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March of the Juggalos: Inside the Faygo-Soaked D.C. Protest

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March of the Juggalos: Inside the Faygo-Soaked D.C. Protest

Without Insane Clown Posse and their fan base, the Juggalos, Moon Brown would probably be dead. So a 16-hour bus ride from Detroit wasn’t going to stop Brown from seeing ICP for the first time at Saturday’s Juggalo March on Washington. Brown, 25, wearing a brown felt hat, black pants held up by a Grateful Dead belt and shirtless with a black leather vest, came to D.C. on Friday with a few bucks in his pocket, and he slept the night before the march behind the Lincoln Memorial. Carrying an aqua knapsack that he’s had since his days hitchhiking across America, he wanted to be only a few steps away from the stage for the event, excited about the prospect of seeing so many others who are like him.

Brown is skin and bones, with his black, white and red face paint that he had applied a day before beginning to wear off. With a wild brown beard, locks of long, wispy hair and a green half-crescent moon tattooed on the middle of his forehead, Brown, whose name is a pseudonym, has never been big on going to ICP shows or attending a Gathering of the Juggalos, the subculture’s annual music festival. But he credits the horrorcore rap duo of Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope, and Juggalos in general, for a support system that eluded him – and had him contemplating taking his own life a decade earlier.

“ICP built a family for those who didn’t have one,” Brown says. “Maybe they didn’t realize what they were doing, but they did something great, and I have the appreciation and love for that.” He adds: “If they’re going to call us out to be at the March, then I owe them.”

This feels different than your regular ICP show or Gathering. Sure, about 1,500 people are passing around liters of Faygo, smoking cigarettes like they’re going out of style, and yelling their fraternal call – “Whoop! Whoop!” – at anyone who passes by. Men walk around in Jason and lucha libre wrestling masks, women are in schoolgirl outfits and toddlers are in face-paint and ICP T-shirts. It attracts all ages, from the older man in the wheelchair to the little girl with curly brown hair holding a face-painted doll’s head on a stick. But Gatherings don’t happen at the National Mall, and they certainly don’t have the political feeling this one does. You see signs of the day: “Juggalo Lives Matter.” “Don’t Shoot/I’m Just a Music Fan With a Really Big Family.” “FBI: Foolish Bunch of Inbreds.” “The FBI Listens to Nickelback.”

Since 2011, the Juggalos have been branded by the FBI’s National Gang Threat Assessment as “a loosely-organized hybrid gang” in four states – Arizona, California, Pennsylvania and Utah. The report, which was collected from data submitted by state and local law enforcement agencies nationwide, recognized that subsets exhibited “gang-like behavior and engage in criminal activity and violence” in at least 21 states. In 2014, ICP, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, sued the FBI. Though the initial suit was dismissed for lacking “legal standing,” an appeals court reinstated the case in 2015, on the basis that the gang designation has brought significant harm to Juggalos. (Oral arguments on the appeal are set to begin October 11th.) “You might not give a fuck about ICP, but how are you not going to give a fuck about the situation that’s going on?” Shaggy says.

Whether you sip the Faygo or remember ridiculing the kid in high school who wanted to wear a Hatchetman shirt, one thing about this case has united people: The move to designate ICP’s fan base as a gang is unprecedented. Never before has the U.S. government targeted a fan base of an artist or music genre, and labeled anyone associated with it, as part of an organized gang. Though the Juggalos were not specifically named in the FBI’s 2013 or 2015 National Gang Reports, the gang label is the stain they can’t remove. That’s why they’re marching.

“You now have people examining the issue and understanding how wrong it was,” says Steve Miller, author of Juggalo: Insane Clown Posse and the World They Made, on the gang classification. “That was the problem before – you didn’t have people seriously taking a look at this as a true First Amendment legal issue.”

Antifa members join Juggalos in their march. Rosie Cohe

Off in the distance is the Mother of All Rallies, a relatively small demonstration in support of President Donald Trump. Despite the online clamoring for the face-painted Juggalos to confront and pummel the crowd, the gathering’s focus is civil, focused and disciplined. Antifa make their presence known in case there is a problem with the pro-Trumpers, but they remain off to the side, not impeding on the Juggalos or the event. Most Juggalos tell me that this day isn’t about the red hat-wearing assholes over there. It’s about them. It’s about their rights. It’s about the future of an American subculture that, in their eyes, has been unfairly labeled by the federal government and affected their lives for the worse.

One by one, Juggalos of all kinds – military veterans, registered nurses, fast-food cooks, government employees – step up to tell their stories to this family of misfits and outcasts. Despite never receiving a negative work review, Jessica Bonometti says she was fired from her job as a Virginia probation officer last year for showing appreciation on Facebook for ICP. Because she saw an ICP show, Crystal Guerrero says she lost a custody battle for her two children in New Mexico, now only seeing them six hours a week. Ashley Vasquez recalls instances in which she was almost kicked out of the military for her tattoos and wearing clothes supporting ICP’s music.

“That’s the biggest misconception about people outside looking in, thinking that Juggalos are just a piece of shit, inbred, uneducated fuckheads, you know what I’m saying?” Shaggy tells me. “It’s the furthest from the truth.”

Talk to some Juggalos on this steamy September day at the nation’s capital and they’ll rattle off about every insult thrown at them for the last 20 years. Losers. Freaks. White trash. Rednecks. Meth addicts. Mistakes. Criminals. They’ve grown numb to the barbs, largely ignoring the constant ridicule that’s followed the marginalized fan-base. But one hurts more than any other: Gang member.

“What happened to us never happened to any band in the history of rock and roll that I know of,” J tells Rolling Stone. “Nothing like it.”

He adds: “You wanna call us something, call us a family, because a lot of us don’t have a family and all we’ve got is each other. This shit is real for us, man.”

ICP’s Shaggy 2 Dope and Violent J visited Rolling Stone to discuss the march.

Like almost every Juggalo I spoke to about their life growing up, Brown’s childhood was pretty shitty. Living in the Florida panhandle, his drug-abusive parents caused Brown to run away from group homes and bounce around the foster care system in Pensacola until he was around nine. On the steps at the base of the Lincoln Memorial, Brown refers back to the time he had to pull a needle out of his mom’s arm, and how his dad sold crack and forced him to smoke weed when he was four. Time and time again, foster parents would take him in, only to make it clear they really didn’t want him and that they only took him to not separate him from his sister. The last pair of parents, he says, constantly punished him, forcing him to run away again when he was 12.

It was around this time that he found an MP3 player on a school bus. When he popped in headphones and hit play, he listened to a few songs from ICP. He was hooked. But even with his newfound love couldn’t shield him from what was happening at home. He says that shortly after his foster family dropped him off with his biological parents, he was left to fend for himself. Between the ages of 14 and 18, Brown was homeless, living on the streets. “Homeless at 14 is not a good way to be in Pensacola,” he tells me. During that time, he says he was taken in by a few different families of Juggalos in the area for stretches. When he was 15, Brown was told by a friend what he already knew deep down: He was a Juggalo.

“Meeting the Juggalos and hanging out with them, I saw how people had each other’s backs, just this blunt, honest attitude,” Brown tells me. “It was real. That gave me something to lean toward.”

Brown remembers the first ass-kicking he got for being a Juggalo. When he heard the “Whoop! Whoop!” call at a party, he instinctively responded with one of his own. But these 20-somethings he was partying with were instead talking trash about Juggalo culture. Quick to fight, Brown, then 15 or 16, says he was repeatedly kicked in the stomach, with the anti-Juggalo group furiously stomping on his head. By the time they were done with him, Brown left with a bloody nose, a ripped shirt and a reminder of how people simply enjoy picking on Juggalos.

A juggalo getting their face paint done on site. Rosie Cohe

“People don’t get us,” he tells me.

Brown’s journey to Washington hasn’t been without its setbacks. When he was 17, he says he was given nine months in a low-risk juvenile program for improper display of a firearm at school when he unknowingly had a gun in his backpack. And trouble would find him again. Not long after the firearm incident, Brown and a buddy would walk up and down Michigan Avenue in Montclair, what Brown calls the ghetto of Pensacola, in hope of selling drugs to the area’s residential junkies. When he was apprehended for resisting arrest after tripping a cop around 2011, police found a custom knife he found in a gutter in his waistband.

The possession of a concealed weapon charge got him 14 months in jail. When he was getting booked, he says police saw his tattoos and asked him if he was a Juggalo. He says he confirmed he was, and saw the official at the jail mark down that he was a gang member. Brown says he didn’t care about the label at the time and that he hasn’t let it impact him since then, but one thought has stayed on his mind: What the fuck?

Sitting inside a studio at the Rolling Stone office days before the Juggalo March, J and Shaggy say they knew a while ago they had to do something.

Initially, they joked that the FBI’s gang classification of their fan base was yet another reason why they proudly own the title of “most hated band in the world.” But the group’s outlook would take a sharp turn from glee to despair. When they’d hit the road for meet-and-greets and in-store signings across the country, they found that the FBI’s gang label had real-life consequences for Juggalos: Longer terms in jail for offenders. Parents losing kids in custody battles. People getting fired from their jobs. Potential recruits not being able to get into the military. And on and on.

Even with the increased attention on their cause, the duo say that it’s hard to do those meetups with fans nowadays, as the stories they keep hearing from loyal Juggalos affected by the gang label are heartbreaking. Yes, there are probably a few fans who are gang members, but, they argue, why isn’t that same flimsy standard of blanketing an entire group applied to people in gangs who like other artists?

“There’s fucking Bonnie Raitt fans that are in gangs,” J says.

While they downplay the effect the gang label has had on them and keep the focus on their fans, it has impacted their ability to earn, specifically from the venues that are skeptical of booking them because of the Juggalo designation.

“The more that spreads, the harder this shit is getting, and fuck, man, where does it end?” J says.

When reached by Rolling Stone for comment, the FBI reiterated to that the 2011 report was “compromised of information shared with the National Gang Intelligence Center and the FBI from law enforcement agencies around the country.”

“The FBI’s mission is to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution. We investigate activity which may constitute a federal crime or pose a threat to national security,” an FBI spokesperson said in a statement. “The FBI cannot initiate an investigation based on an individual’s exercise of their First Amendment rights.”

The duo knows that getting the FBI to rescind the label, or at least acknowledge the matter, is a pipe dream. Shaggy says he knows already that’ll never happen. That’s why ICP became the latest in a decorated history of political demonstrations in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

“Whether [the FBI] want to admit it or not,” Shaggy says, “they fucked up.”

By 3 p.m., the chanting, laughter and clouds of cigarette smoke have made this a full-blown party. This might not be a Gathering of the Juggalos, but it’s a celebration of the culture and the people who make it possible. There’s Richard and Stephanie Miller, a couple from New Castle, Delaware, that’s helped organize a Juggalo carpool system, coordinating rides for people from as far as California and Washington State. There’s Amanda Donihoo, whose husband, Scott, otherwise known as Scottie D., president of Faygoluvers.net, gives an impassioned speech of his life for the Juggalos that mentions how him and his wife, an IT professional and a registered nurse in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, respectively, reflect how the group is pigeonholed and criminalized because of the actions of a few.

“We are some of the most straight-laced people ever,” says Amanda Donihoo, 35. “But since we don’t always wear the attire you expect or perceive a Juggalo would wear, people don’t understand.”

Juggalo marchers in face paint holding a sign saying “Juggalo’s are a family not a gang. Those who think otherwise [middle finger]”. Rosie Cohe

ICP has no plans to make this an annual event, so the Juggalos are making the most out of the day.

Hannah Baxter drove seven hours from New York state to be at the March. Baxter, 27, has been to roughly 50 ICP shows and two Gatherings, but it’s hard for the former group-home kid to describe what she’s feeling while looking at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

“This is the first time we’re actually banding together as a family to show everybody that we’re not as bad as they think we are,” she says. “Just ’cause we like people that rap about something a little crazy, we’re normal people, too.”

By the time ICP take the stage around 5 p.m., the Juggalos are hanging on their every word. While they speak on stage, two Juggalettes yell at a guy with a camera wearing a backwards “Make America Great Again” hat, telling him he’d get his ass beat by a family of a thousand clowns if he didn’t leave now. He says, “Fuck you, bitch,” and flees. Aside from that, this moment is festive and positive.

“This is our day! This is our year! Are you ready?” J asks the jubilant Juggalos. “The Juggalo family and the Wicked Clowns will never die. Let’s march, motherfuckers!”

ICP is at the beginning of the procession, looking almost overwhelmed by the love of the unlikeliest of families. It’s from this love that they push forward to lift the Juggalos’ gang label.

“It’s scary because this ain’t a movie,” J tells me. “This ain’t something anybody’s been through. And you don’t know how this is going to end.”

Brown’s March starts, and ends, with him walking through the crowd, carrying his third clear trash bag of the day. In an effort to help turn around the perception some may hold toward Juggalos, Brown, who works with prototype car parts for Chevy and Ford back in Michigan, packed some garbage bags and vowed to clean up the trash left behind on the Mall. It’s his way of giving back to a subculture that’s given him so much. At the back end of the March around the outside of the Washington Monument, there isn’t a piece of trash that Brown doesn’t pick up. He’s in D.C. for the next few days before heading back to Michigan, unsure of what’s next or where he’ll spend the night. For now, he’s bottling up the energy and the positive feelings of the day the Juggalos took Washington, a day he met more extended members of his family.

“That was epic,” he tells me, flashing his biggest smile of the day. He then darts to every piece of trash in his path, saying to anyone who will listen at the tail of the March: “Throw your garbage away! Give me your trash!”

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