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tabloidtoc · 4 years ago

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Globe, May 3

You can buy a brand new copy of this issue without the mailing label for your very own at my eBay store: https://www.ebay.com/str/bradentonbooks

Cover: Prince William and Prince Harry: Showdown at Prince Philip's Funeral

Page 2: Up Front & Personal -- Alec Baldwin, Kathy Ireland, Conan O'Brien grabs lunch in West Hollywood

Page 3: Meg Ryan, Heather Graham, Jon Voight steps out in Beverly Hills

Page 4: Kris Jenner says her role as momager of the Kardashian clan is like being a fireman because she has to put out so many heated squabbles -- satisfying daughters Kourtney Kardashian, Kim Kardashian, Khloe Kardashian, Kendall Jenner and Kylie Jenner takes skill and Kourtney is often so fed up she fires her three or four times a day, but Kris believes she's done a good job, saying she's totally dedicated to her brood and spends oodles of time and energy going the extra mile for them

* Jailed Ghislaine Maxwell is raising a stink over federal lawmen's claims she's a prison piggy, saying the institution's busted sewer pipes, not her toilet habits, are responsible for the overwhelming stench in her cell -- lawyers for sex perv Jeffrey Epstein's accused madam and sex trafficker leveled the charge to flush out prosecutors' claims the socialite's cage stinks like a hog's pen because she doesn't flush her toilet -- her lawyer Bobbi Sternheim insists there was a pervasive stench of sewage in Ms. Maxwell's unit, necessitating guards to flush pipes by pouring water down open drains in an effort to trap and disperse gaseous emissions and at times the stench in Ms. Maxwell's isolation cell has been overwhelming due to overflowing of toilets in the cell block above -- as for Ghislaine flushing, she does it often, at the guards' bidding even, though she doesn't use the commode in her cell due to lack of privacy

Page 5: Kelly Clarkson's tacky tales of pooping in trash cans and other crude antics are grossing out her alarmed pals, who fear divorce stress is pushing the talk queen over the edge and while Kelly has loved to shock people, her cringeworthy behavior has gotten worse since filing for divorce from music manager Brandon Blackstock, father of her daughter River and son Remington -- now Kelly has many fearing she's finally flipped after recently telling talk show guest Clint Black on-air she destroyed a poor trash can by pooping in it during a quick backstage concert break and she's constantly making potty jokes and seems to get a rise out of shocking people and even by Kelly's standards, this was a step too far and people are urging her to scale back on the belching, farting and gross anecdotes because they're a turnoff and make her look trashy and her grueling workload and prickly divorce has manifested in this gross behavior where she can't seem to hold her tongue and blurts out whatever she's thinking without consideration for other people -- other stars like Gwen Stefani and Blake Shelton are thinking twice before inviting her to social events and for talk show rivals like Ellen DeGeneres and Drew Barrymore, it's a dream seeing her push the boundaries of taste and Kelly doesn't have a filter and as long as she's got an audience she's just going to keep on doing it

Page 6: Macaulay Culkin is the daddy of a brand-new baby girl named Dakota, who is named after Macaulay's sister who died at 29 in a 2008 car crash, and she was delivered by Macaulay's lover actress Brenda Song

Page 7: Angelina Jolie has become a stressed-out single mom trying to care for her brood of six during the pandemic lockdown, and the strain is is showing on the 98-pound actress, but the 45-year-old, who shuns hiring a full-time nanny, still wants sole custody of her underage kids Pax, Zahara, Shiloh, Knox and Vivienne, and is fighting tooth and nail with ex-husband Brad Pitt to get it; their oldest Maddox Jolie-Pitt is now 19 and considered independent although the university student frequently lives with his mother -- caring for the gang puts a big drain on Angelina's bank account and her custody war with Brad is costing a pretty penny -- Jolie and her children spend most of their time bunkered in a massive 7,500-square-foot Los Feliz mansion that boasts a huge library lined with resource books but the kids need to be separated so they can concentrate on their individual Zoom classes and someone is always hungry or needing help and at the end of the school day, when they are bored, they end up looking for Mom to find them something to do while she is trying to work on her own projects, and like most siblings, the kids fight or argue, and that can test any parent's nerves and Angie is with the kids pretty much 24/7 and it's taking a toll -- there is a glimmer of hope as schools are close to reopening and once the five youngest are back in school for several hours a day it will give Angelina the breaks she needs and hopefully she can hang tight until then

Page 8: Cover Story -- Prince William and Prince Harry bury Prince Philip, but not the ax -- despite their public displays of grief, bitter brothers William and Harry erupted in a raging royal screaming match behind the scenes of their grandfather's Prince Philip's funeral and Princess Diana's sons lashed out, accusing each other of ugly betrayals and destroying the royal family and the princes blamed each other's wives for igniting the family feud and their showdown was explosive and they're refusing to forgive or make peace and any hope Philip's death will end this feud is pie in the sky -- Harry and William were forced to reunite to mark the Duke of Edinburgh's passing and comfort their grandmother Queen Elizabeth, but that doesn't mean they're kissing and making up; far from it because Harry and his wife Meghan Markle have caused so much damage with their TV interview, it will take a lifetime to heal this rift -- sparks began flying almost immediately after Harry landed back in his homeland. He went straight to his former marital home Frogmore Cottage in Windsor to quarantine under COVID rules while William and his wife Duchess Kate Middleton and their three children were holed up at their country home Anmer House in Norfolk, about 100 miles away, but that didn't stop the once-inseparable brothers exploding in fury at each other during a video call finalizing funeral arrangements -- William and Harry knew they'd have to walk together behind the cortege to honor their grandfather, but that was where their reunion ended and while their grieving grandmother and royal relatives mourned the loss of the family patriarch, William and Harry's pent-up anger and frustrations exploded as, on the same side of the Atlantic for the first time in over a year, William blasted Harry and Meghan for bad-mouthing his wife Kate and selfishly trying to destroy the monarchy and he reamed Harry for not visiting their grandfather in his final days and using the funeral as a publicity stunt while Harry retaliated by accusing his brother of throwing him and Meghan under the bus and vowed never to talk to him again -- instead of an expected joint public statement praising their beloved grandfather, they issued separate tributes, which underlined their split as in their statement, William and Kate reminisced about Philip taking their children for horse-drawn carriage rides and they vowed to support the queen in the years ahead and that was a dig at Harry and Meghan, who can't help the queen due to their self-imposed exile to California and it was also a shot because Harry's son Archie has spent no time with his royal relatives since his birth almost two years ago -- Philip's death has only intensified this horrific feud and this war is far from over, and may never be

Page 10: Prince Philip went to his grave regretting he couldn't stop Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle from ripping the royal family in a bombshell TV interview -- The Duke of Edinburgh called the explosive tell-all madness and he had some sympathy for Harry and Meghan's desire to do their own thing, but he thought they were wrong and he hated Harry and Meghan's preoccupation with their own problems and their willingness to talk about them in public; one of his rules was give interviews but don't talk about yourself -- Philip loved Harry and thought him a good man, but he did not believe they were doing the right thing for the country or themselves when they quit royal duties and Philip died worrying the explosive interview permanently damaged the monarchy and he deeply regretted he wasn't able to prevent the scandal

* Outraged Prince Philip shunned his son Prince Andrew's ex-wife Duchess Sarah Ferguson for the last 19 years of his life after she was caught cheating in raunchy photos that went public -- Philip considered Fergie beyond the pale and refused to have anything to do with her and when Sarah was staying at Balmoral Castle with her daughters, her ex-father-in-law would run from a room she'd entered and Fergie said it was ridiculous because as soon as she came through one door, he'd be falling over the corgis to get out of the other and she added it was very funny, except, of course, it wasn't -- the only time they appeared together in public was at Prince Harry's 2018 wedding, 26 years after Fergie was photographed lounging topless while her then lover John Bryan sucked on her toes on the French Riviera; she and Andrew were separated at the time

Page 11: Marie Osmond is getting the last laugh on rival Sharon Osbourne after the big-mouthed Brit, who chased off Marie from The Talk, was booted from the chat show in a racism scandal -- while Marie doesn't wish ill on anyone, she certainly isn't feeling any sympathy for Sharon's plight -- in public, Marie has never said a harsh word about Sharon, and never blamed her co-star with pushing her off The Talk, but behind the scenes, Sharon made mild-mannered Marie's life hell, which chased her away and Marie still cringes from the whole experience of working with the brash former reality diva, more than seven months after leaving the show and Marie doesn't want to stoke the fire, but it's kind of satisfying in a way that Sharon's finally being exposed for what she is: a snippy, smug phony

* Chaka Khan was the first celeb booted on Season 21 of Dancing with the Stars in 2015, and it's no wonder because she was a lousy partner, claims pro hoofer Keo Motsepe -- Keo slammed the singer for demanding they only rehearse around midnight, because that's when the night owl was used to going to the record studio and laying down tracks -- Keo accepted the challenge but now calls Chaka his worst partner ever

Page 12: Celebrity Buzz -- Jane Lynch eats lunch in West Hollywood (picture), Khloe Kardashian is getting called out for her attempt to erase a bathing suit snap that revealed some very real body dimples and famous for posting airbrushed and filtered photos depicting her as flawless she went berserk over the unedited pic summoning legal eagles to get the image scrubbed off the internet but she drew colossal backlash, Sutton Stracke of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills got promoted to series regular and impressed producers by making ousted castmate Teddi Mellencamp cry by branding her boring, fired New York Housewife Dorinda Medley has lost 14 pounds, Lil Nas X's limited-edition designer Satan Shoes which commanded $1,018 when they hit the market are now deader than a doornail after legal pressure from Nike

Page 13: Dean Cain sports a Superman-style logo on his hoodie as he bums around Malibu (picture), Annabella Sciorra shoots an episode of Blue Bloods in NYC (picture), co-anchor T.J. Holmes shows his tongue on the Good Morning America set (picture), Olympic champ Lindsey Vonn admits skiing was a slippery slope when she started mingling with the beautiful people of Hollywood

Page 14: Brooklyn Decker proves she going gray at just 34 and she's kinda digging it, Kathryn Dennis trying to prove she's comfortable in the natural skin she's in shared pics from her first-ever bikini photo shoot and actually points out imperfections

* Fashion Verdict -- Zoe Saldana 6/10, Kelsea Ballerini 3/10, Jessica Madsen 7/10, Joy Bauer 2/10

Page 17: Eddie Cibrian is incredibly proud of wife LeAnn Rimes for baring the truth about her battle with psoriasis in a naked photo -- Eddie applauds how LeAnn let it all hang out for a photo shoot to show solidarity with other people with the scaly skin disease who are ashamed and want to hide it -- LeAnn has described the horrors of hiding her painful, crusty rashes, saying onstage she'd wear two pairs of pantyhose or jeans, even in 95-degree heat and underneath her shirt, her whole stomach would be covered in thick scales that would hurt and bleed, and the pandemic worsened her condition because stress is a common trigger for psoriasis, and with so much uncertainty happening, her flare-ups came right back

Page 19: 10 Things You Don't Know About Catherine O'Hara

* Sylvester Stallone may have gone his final round as boxing great Rocky Balboa as his reps reveal the actor has thrown in the towel and won't reprise his iconic role in the upcoming Creed III -- in the Creed spinoffs, retired fighter Rocky trained Adonis "Donnie" Creed, the son of his onetime rival

* Dr. Dre hit back against the abuse claims of estranged wife Nicole Young, slamming her allegations as appalling in recently filed court documents in their ugly $1 billion divorce -- in the docs, Dre charges Nicole hurled the accusations only after realizing their prenup may prevent her from getting half his money, but Nicole insists the rapper forced her to ink the agreement, a charge he also denies

Page 23: Caitlyn Jenner is refining her image ahead of her run for governor in California by reducing her massive breasts to look more conservative -- she wants to downgrade her E cups to a more respectable C cup because she's been worried for a while they are way too big within the context of her body and draw unflattering stares and running for the California governor's office is serious and she wants people to listen and look at her face, not her boobs and the truth is, the implants have been weighing her down and giving her back pain too, so this makes sense in more ways than one -- Caitlyn will be slowly abandoning other cosmetic procedures and she would like to wean herself off filters and Botox too, but that'll be a gradual process that she'll do as time goes by and the big thing here is that she wants to look more natural and relatable for voters

* Nearly half of America is ready to vote Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson into the White House -- 46 percent of voters are ready to rock and roll with the 49-year-old former WWE wrestler as their prez -- in his new sitcom Young Rock, Dwayne plays himself as a future candidate for the Oval Office, but in real life he has admitted he is seriously considering a run for the top job

Page 24: New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, now facing two separate investigations into sexual harassment charges made by at least eight female staffers, is accused of cheating on longtime love Sandra Lee -- there's obviously a reason Sandra moved to California; she literally could not have moved farther away from Andrew; she's on the edge of the Pacific

Page 30: Grace Kelly died nearly flat broke -- the Hollywood starlet gave up millions to marry Prince Rainier of Monaco, and when she died at the age of 52, her only assets were a cottage in Ireland, owned by her grandfather, and $10,000 -- in 1956, she married into Monaco's royal family after coughing up a $2 million dowry, which is about $20 million today, and walking away from a glittering career -- according to a new documentary, her Hollywood earnings have disappeared as during her film career, Grace's total earnings could have reached $1.5 million, earnings that appear to be entirely missing from her will, but thanks to Grace, Monaco's royal family has cashed in big-time as her son Prince Albert II has an estimated net worth of $i billion and his wife Charlene Wittstock is rumored to be worth $150 million -- most people think of Grace Kelly's story as a fairy tale, going from Hollywood and suddenly being whisked off to a lot of wealth, but what is so poignant is that she had to pay to become a princess

* LeVar Burton may soon be helming a new enterprise: Jeopardy! -- nearly 200,000 people have signed an online petition supporting LeVar to replace the game show's late host Alex Trebek and LeVar supports the idea himself

Page 32: Kirstie Alley had two husbands and once claimed she was crazy about John Travolta, but for decades she secretly carried a torch for a married man: Patrick Swayze -- Kirstie described Patrick as the one that got away and truly believes they would have been together until his 2009 death at age 57 if things worked out differently and she says her love for Patrick began on the set of the 1985 miniseries North and South where she thought he was the most handsome, sexy, kind person she'd ever met, and each day on the set, she began to fall more and more in love but at the time they were married to other people: Patrick had his wife Lisa Niemi and Kirstie was married to Hardy Boys actor Parker Stevenson, her second husband -- Kirstie and Patrick shared a deep emotional affair and confessed their love, but never actually cheated on their spouses and Kirstie said they had an affair of the heart -- Patrick and Kirstie played lovers on the series and you can see the chemistry and at least once a year Kirstie watches the series and reminisces about the time she spent with him -- she says she cried for months after his death and she and his wife Lisa eventually became friends and even today, Kirstie wonders what would have happened if she and Patrick had not been married to other people

Page 36: Sally Struthers reveals she quit Save the Children charity after she was nearly murdered by a gang of bloodthirsty rebels during a trip to visit African orphans -- Sally was a roving ambassador for the charity for 35 years until a terrifying incident in Uganda where she was filming ads with a boy, who'd come from a remote village, when suddenly a roving band of guerrilla warfare guys came out of the bushes and asked the boy where he was from and he named his village, which was far away, and they decided they had kidnapped him, and they were going to shoot all of them and Sally was terrified and figured she was a goner, but a priest with her group told her to slowly walk off while never turning her back on the terrorists and as she walked, he convinced the gunmen to let them alone and at that point, Sally, who had a daughter Samantha from her six-year marriage to shrink William C. Radar thought she's been on so many little airplanes that could have crashed and in so many horrible situations and she's got a child, a real-life child of her own, and she can't do it anymore

* Usher is being accused of stiffing Las Vegas strippers by tipping them with fake money with his moniker and mug on the bills -- the flap exploded with a Twitter post slamming the singer for handing out Usherbucks in $100, $20 and $1 bills at the club Sapphire Las Vegas but club honcho George M. Wilson denies the charge, saying Usher, who stars at Caesars Palace stating in July, was a true gentleman and great guest and he and his crew converted thousands of real dollars to tip the girls dancing on the stage and left a generous tip for staff and apparently someone in his team left some Usher dollars on the floor to promote his Vegas residency and that is where it seems the confusion came in

Page 40: Val Kilmer is shooting for more than a career comeback after bouncing back from throat cancer; he is also looking for love -- Val admits he doesn't sound like he used to following a tracheotomy, but he insists he feels a lot better than he sounds but his voice is a raspy, grating sound, and he's forced to eat through a feeding tube, but he feels that shouldn't matter with the right woman -- the actor, who is slated to appear in the upcoming Top Gun: Maverick, is pumped up about working again, but it's dawned on him that he's missing one other thing, love, and the single star feels more energy now than ever before and there are things he'd like to do with a partner, like travel more -- Val regrets some of the things he did in the past and he was difficult and selfish, but his whole cancer ordeal has made him a better man and more open and giving but it's been a long, long time since he had a girlfriend, let alone even kissed a woman, but with the support and encouragement of his kids and friends, he's ready to put himself out there

* Fans are saying Christopher Meloni has one of the most remarkable rears on TV after a photo surfaced showcasing his awe-inspiring ass-ets -- a shot of the Law & Order: Organized Crime star in skintight jeans sparked a Twitter-storm where fans of his fanny let loose about his sculpted caboose

Page 44: Straight Talk -- Holly Madison is blabbing about her eight years as Hugh Hefner's No. 1 squeeze in the Playboy Mansion, and, if he were still alive, the king of skin mags would hate that he pretty much comes off as a dirty old lech

Page 45: Paula Abdul was a nervous wreck during her American Idol comeback, but she was not so jittery she couldn't brand her former co-judge Simon Cowell an STD -- special guest Randy Jackson and Simon previously teamed with Paula in the 2000s to make the talent show the biggest hit on TV, and Paula temporarily resumed her role after Luke Bryan tested positive for COVID-19, but when Randy told Paula seeing her on set seems like old times, she blurted "We're just missing the STD," and the remark caught host Ryan Seacrest off-guard as he held a computer device linking Paula and Randy, who was not physically present and Ryan exclaimed, "The what?!" and at that point Paula joked she meant it was an abbreviation for Super Talented, Debonair not sexually transmitted disease -- Paula also referred to Simon, who's only three years her senior, as a grandfather and while Paula seemed in the swing of things, joining the current Idol panel of Katy Perry and Lionel Richie, she was reportedly a bundle of nerves backstage before her comeback show and it was like she'd never done it before, and her pals couldn't believe it; they told her she had more experiencing judging than anyone out there

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amy-de-l-abc · 6 years ago

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Request Prompts Post

So I’ve had some people discover that you can’t see the prompts page on mobile (thanks, @spnimpalaimagines!), so here it is in post form :)

In one of the questions in my survey about request etiquette, I had a few authors respond saying that they prefer it if I send them multiple request prompts and let them choose which one to write. That being the case, I decided I might as well keep an ongoing list of my prompts, so I can give authors the link instead of sending them a gajillion different asks with requests. This, therefore, is the aforementioned list.

Asterisks mean I really want this written, so if you are choosing between two or something and one of them has little stars, go for that one, please.

Anyone who finds this page is welcome to write any of these, but if you would give me credit for the idea and let me know so I can see what you’ve written, that would be great!

NOTE: Some of these, if not all of them, could be adapted/changed/inspiration for Reader x Sam or Reader x Dean or whoever. Feel free to do so, and if you do, I’d still love to see what you do with it, so shoot me an ask or a Fan Mail or whatever! If I request, I probably want Cas unless otherwise specified, but if you’re just looking for something to write, go for it!

CAS x READER

NEW! (8/30/2015) **Death’s Daughter** Inspired by a comment from hogwartsismyhometoo. Reader is the daughter of Death (nope, not gonna tell you how that works. Be creative! :) ). That’s really all I’ve got, except she ends up with Cas. I want to see something of the relationship between Reader and her dear old daddy (what kind of dad is Death, anyway?). Also, it’d be awesome to see Death’s reaction to his daughter and an angel–especially this angel.

**The Phantom of the Opera** Reader and Cas have unexpressed feelings for one another. Reader has joined a theater group and is playing Christine in “The Phantom of the Opera.” She keeps it from Team Free Will because she figures they (or at least Dean) will think musical theater is stupid. (How much or if they know about her singing abilities is up to you.) They find out and come to a performance. Cas, while impressed with how well she did, is jealous that Reader is kissing another guy up on stage. This somehow comes out. Cue lots of innocent fluff and admission of feelings!

Fics based on this prompt:

Cas x Reader by supernatural-imagine-oneshot

**Book Club** Sam and Reader (and Charlie, if you want, but you don’t have to include her) end up forming a book club between the two (or three) of them. One day, Cas hears the discussion getting a little heated and comes in, wanting to know what’s going on. Upon having things explained to him, he decides he wants to join. Things get interesting when, having been introduced to classics such as Harry Potter, Cas discovers fandom pick-up lines and thinks they’re an appropriate way to express his growing affection for Reader. The situation is not helped by Sam and/or Charlie, who is/are just encouraging him. Please keep the pick-up lines innocent (yes, innocent pick-up lines do exist :) ). This was partly inspired by the various fanfics in which people (mostly Dean) try to get Cas to use pick-up lines, and he fails epically. (NOTE: If you include Charlie, please don’t have her hitting on the reader at any point. Strictly friendship there, please.)

Doctor Who Gabriel shows up and zaps Reader into “Doctor Who” (9th or 10thDoctor era, please). TFW are left to watch as she participates in the show. They discover that Reader/her character/whatever has a bit of a romance going with the Doctor; Cas gets jealous. When Gabriel brings her back, Reader finds out about Cas’ feelings for her for the first time (he could admit it, or Sam, Dean, or Gabriel (or any combination of the three) could tell her; whatever you want). Innocent fluff ensues!

Fics based on this prompt:

The Strange Blue Box by theobsessivefanfic666

Changing Channels by imagine-teamfreewill

Babysitter Reader is not a hunter, but she knows about the life. Somehow Team Free Will have gotten saddled with an angel fledgling (or more than one if you want) and are at a loss as to what to do. They find her, a babysitter/nanny, and hire her to take care of the fledgling(s). The Winchesters leave Cas with her, for protection and because he can help if the kid(s) try to fly or whatever. Reader and Cas fall in love over the course of their babysitting adventure.

Fics based on this prompt:

Adventures in Babysitting by amazhangdestiel

The Babysitting Job by talesoftheimpala

Promise by hatgirl2017

Nightmare Inspired by this. Reader has a nightmare about Cas being hurt. She wakes up and freaks out. He appears to comfort her, and they end up admitting their feelings.

Fics based on this prompt:

A Light in the Dark by soulofawinchester

My Weakness by hatgirl2017

Worry One of the Winchesters nearly dies on a hunt. Cas heals him in time, and Reader breaks from all the worry and tension now that she knows her friend will be okay. Cas comforts her, and somehow this turns into a confession of feelings and fluff between the two. (If you want, they could still be in the room where whoever got hurt is—maybe he’s passed out or is asleep or something—and he wakes up to see them kissing or something… The long and the short of it is, you get bonus points if we get to see one or both Winchesters’ reaction(s).)

Did It Hurt When You Fell From Heaven? This may have has probably been done before, but I would love to see a Reader x Cas where she doesn’t know who he is and is being flirtatious, and she asks him if it hurt when he fell from heaven. Cas, being Cas, is all, “Yes, it did. How did you know?” or something like that. After that, it’s up to you.

Fics based on this prompt:

The Pick Up Line by theobsessivefanfic666

Falling From Heaven by saving-people-shipping-things

Protective Dean’s hitting on Reader—not with serious intentions or because he actually likes her or anything, just, y’know, being Dean—and Cas gets all protective and tells him to quit. Later (maybe when Reader asks him to explain or however you want), the angel admits his feelings (either verbally or with a kiss or something). Prefer slightly!clueless!Cas.

Fics based on this prompt:

Untitled by free-will-oneshots

Unavoidable by soulofawinchester

Let Me Call You Sweetheart Okay, so basically I just want Cas x Reader where he calls her “sweetheart.” I don’t even care. Bonus points if you include the song “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” by Bing Crosby or Henry Burr and the Peerless Quartet (the Bing Crosby version is shortened to just part of the lyrics; it seems to be the most well-known incarnation, but whichever one you want to use is fine with me. You can find the full lyrics on the Henry Burr page), but it’s not required. Also, if you want to have him use more pet names, “darling” is also a favorite.

Fics based on this prompt:

Untitled by free-will-oneshots

Allergies This one’s a bit complicated, as I apparently got the inspiration from this fic and wrote the request a few days later, when I couldn’t remember whether I had come up with the idea on my own or had gotten it from somewhere else. (I found which fic it must have come from weeks later, when I was rereading things from my favorites.) If you choose to use this prompt, please link to the fic I linked to above so that the author of the original will get credit for his/her idea.

Now that that’s out of the way, here’s the actual prompt: Cas has, at some point during his association with the Winchesters, learned about allergies (Dean or whoever probably explained them as symptoms that only happen when the person is exposed to something in particular, or something like that). When he begins to develop feelings for Reader, the clueless angel naturally decides he must be allergic to her. He goes to Sam and/or Dean for help (bonus points if it’s both of them), who laugh at/tease him good-naturedly and then try to get the two together. Whether this is done by plotting of some kind or just by encouraging Cas to declare himself is up to you. Bonus points if you include the song “You’re Not Sick (You’re Just In Love)“ (lyrics) from the Broadway show “Call Me Madam”.

Fics based on this prompt:

Allergic Reactions by maymorning

Selfless Meg It would be really interesting to see a piece in which Meg (who honestly cares about Cas, at least for the purposes of the fic; I’m not sure what the general opinion of the fandom is on this, but I think maybe she does), seeing that Reader and Cas are in love with each other but haven’t said anything, is surprisingly selfless and helps them get together. (Bonus if you can make her reasonably okay with this somehow; I hate it when anybody has to end sadly. It’s up to you if you want to give her somebody else to love instead, or if she cares about Cas but is not so much in love with him that it hurts too much, or whatever. Be creative, if you want.) If you can balance the focus of the story between the budding romance and Meg’s sacrifice, that’s great, since I love seeing lots of fluff, too!

Fics based on this prompt:

Resolutions of the Lonely by saving-people-shipping-things

Marian the Librarian I think it’d be awesome and super cute to see something where the reader works in a library and Cas comes in (for research or something, probably) and then keeps coming in because he wants to see her. I figure it’d be kinda like a coffee shop AU but without the AU and the coffee shop. If that makes any sense. Partly inspired by the “To Go” series by supernaturalfreewill (Part 1 | Part 2).

The Meta Prompt Reader is a fan of the Supernatural books who used to write imagines, until she met TFW and discovered they were real. (I know, I know, you can tell what’s coming from a mile off. Just bear with me for some details, please.) Naturally, she keeps this a deadly secret from the boys. One or both of the Winchesters discovers it, however. (Note: READER IS NOT NECESSARILY IN THE BOOKS HERSELF. It’s up to you, but my inclination is to leave her out, because most of these “fan-discovers-SPN-is-real stories do end up with the reader in the books, so, you know, just to be different, you could keep her out.) Now, Cas has, at some point, been introduced to the wonders of e-mail. Having either been told or just figured out about her feelings for Cas, said Winchester(s) begin to e-mail her fics involving Cas to the angel himself, one at a time. And here, we have the part you’ve all been waiting for since the beginning: the angel somehow discovers that the fanfics are written by Reader, etc., and we end with confession of feelings and happy fluff. Inspired in part by “Fan Fictions” (found here).

IMPORTANT SPECIFICATIONS:

1. No smut or anything very close, please. Kissing and cuddling are much appreciated, but keep it innocent. Preferably no smut implied, either, as that makes it less relatable for me, but I can deal with it if that’s what you wanna do.

2. As little cursing and “Oh, my God” as possible, please; preferably none at all from the reader. If you need alternatives, the usual suspects apply: “gosh,” “shoot,” “drat,” “darn,” “dang,” “heck,” etc. If you want other alternatives, or are not sure when/how to use them, feel free to message me through ask/fan mail/whatever and I’ll help you out.

SLIGHTLY-LESS-IMPORTANT SPECIFICATIONS/PREFERENCES:

1. FLUFF/SAP/SCHMOOP. LOTS OF IT. Like what would happen if you took marshmallow crème, clouds, and the stuffing from stuffed animals and dunked them in molasses and maple syrup. I will pretty much never be unhappy if you’re cliché with it, either. I love chick-flick moments probably at least three times more than Dean hates them, so feel free to use as much fluff as is humanly—or, you know, angelically—possible. I’m not kidding.

2. Unless otherwise specified, it’s a pretty safe bet that I will be happiest if the couple’s feelings are unexpressed until your fic. I just love seeing them admit to each other for the first time. (Honestly, the more ridiculously cliché their cluelessness, the better. *sheepish*)

3. I tend to prefer it if the guy makes the first move romantically, unless otherwise specified. (I think this is partly due to me being old-fashioned and partly to me being extremely shy when it comes to things like that.)

4. I’m not too fond of unfulfilled/unrequited love. Even if I don’t specify, I probably want you to have them actually admit how they feel (it doesn’t necessarily have to be in words; kissing’s good, too :) ), not just hint at it.

#request #Amy de l'ABC Request Survey #request prompts #prompts #cas x reader #reader x cas #castiel x reader #reader x castiel #cass x reader #reader x cass #idk guys cas x reader are all i have rn #i might be slightly hooked on those XD #if anyone has any more prompts feel free to ask me to add them and i'll give you credit

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britesparc · 4 years ago

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Weekend Top Ten #453

Top Ten Films That Make Me Happy

So every once in a while I do one of these things and the world ends up moving so fast that between me having an idea, writing the list, and it going up on Tumblr of a weekend, the plates have shifted and it doesn’t seem quite as relevant anymore. I remember listing ten films I wanted to see because cinemas were reopening; I think only two of them ever actually saw the inside of a Cineworld. And so we have this week; when I came up with the idea for the list, I thought either we’d all be in a celebratory mood, or else need commiserating. And at the time of writing, it’s looking – thankfully – that we’ll have enough reasons to be cheerful to be getting along with. But who knows? If you’re reading this on Saturday there may be a new president, or maybe the old one’s bombed China.

It’s a funny old world.

Anyway, like I said, my initial thought was that, in this time of darkness, we might need a little light; that everything is rather remorselessly grim and difficult, and we could do with a bit of cheering up. We’re all back in lockdown, the idiots are in charge, and Halo Infinite was delayed till next year. Lots of crap is going on. And, yes, fingers crossed, maybe we will be celebrating the Idiot in Chief getting booted out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue before too long, but life has taught me never to count chickens, and you can always do with a little restorative nip in your pocket, just in case. And what is a good curative for the blues? A fillum.

Yes, feel-good films. Cheerer-uppers. Movies that make ya happy. There are lots of them, of course; it’s practically a genre. But one man’s meat is another man’s poison, and one man’s (end of) It’s a Wonderful Life is another man’s (middle section of) It’s a Wonderful Life. Which is to say that what makes me happy might not make you happy. I found this when doing a bit of research for this list; as is common, I often have quite a few ideas when I’ve thought of a topic, but I like to Google it (or Bing it, as I get Microsoft Reward Points and I’m saving up for a few months of Game Pass), just in case there’s some obvious film that has escaped my mental grasp. In this case what I found was some of the films that people consider to be uplifting are downright weird – Forrest Gump? Really? And a lot of truly mediocre romcoms seem to float people’s happiness boats, from the wildly uneven Love Actually to the tepid You’ve Got Mail to the overlong and overly twee The Holiday (a film which I hated on first watch but which has grown on me, Stockholm-style, as I’ve seen it over and over again every year). And some people even list stuff like Lord of the Rings or Star Wars or Pirates of the Caribbean; good movies, true, but are they feel-good? I mean, loads of people die in all those films; in one of them an actual planet blows up. I know we like zombie monkeys and Harrison Ford in a waistcoat, but they’re not really the most relentlessly cheerful films, are they?

Or are they? I mean, when I got right down to it, there were quite a few blowy-uppy pictures that are genuine comfort blankets for me (Air Force One, which I watched so much at one point that I used to fall comfortably asleep to it when I was on my own, nearly made the cut). So, y’know, who am I to judge? I think what makes us feel comfortable, happy, and upbeat can be wildly diverse and erratic, even within our own taste window.

And really that’s what I was after here; comfort movies, films that uplift or inspire or just, well, make you smile. Not just because we’ve blown up the Death Star or because Tom Hanks has snogged Meg Ryan again. But there’s something about the film, from its story to its characters to its composition, that is continuously joyful.

So whether we’re lifting a glass in celebration or drowning our sorrows with an armful of Stella, here’s to the films that make us feel better. Chin up, folks. It might never happen!

Paddington 2 (2017): what is it about this film that evokes such joy? I’d say everything, from the script to the performances to the music to the shot choices. The bad guy is funny, the dire situations rarely threatening, almost everyone is nice, and it ends with a redemption and a musical number. Beyond all that, though, Paddington himself is such a supernova of absolute goodness that you can’t help but feel optimistic just by watching him. It’s perfect, really.

WALL-E (2008): a film that starts with the end of the world but it gets better. It’s a cinematic joy, the virtually dialogue-free opening giving us dystopic vistas and a real sense of mood. But it’s WALL-E himself who brings the real feels, a mechanical wonder who does nothing but make other people happy and improve their lives almost by accident. he saves the human race and the planet simply by trying to be nice to one person at a time, and that’s a hell of an optimistic message.

When Harry Met Sally (1989): far sarkier than the other two films, and obviously a bit more, well, grown up (we all know what you must not do with Mister Zero), this is nonetheless a beautiful film. A slow-burning romance between two friendly, funny people, witticisms flying from every mouth, some absolute, genuine emotional stakes that you really, really care about, and the single most romantic ending a film has ever had.

Groundhog Day (1993): let’s face it, it’s the best film either Harold Ramis or Bill Murray has ever been involved in, and I bought every issue of Transformers/Ghostbusters. A tour-de-force of cynicism and sourness from Murray, but he gradually unravels (in more ways than one), becoming a happier and better person. It’s funny, it’s sweet, and the complexities of its chronally-displaced plot means there’s loads you can unpick. Masterfully written, directed, and edited, and that’s some of its joy, too.

The Hudsucker Proxy (1994): the Coens have, obviously, made a lot of very good films, and not all of them are darkly serious (No Country) or darkly hilarious (Fargo); they also have lighter fare, but none as floaty-light or so supremely joyous as Hudsucker. The script is pure screwball but also a precisely-honed, fast-spoken, Golden Age charm; the performances are all fantastic (we also get the best Lois Lane, Perry White, and Steve Lombard scene ever shot, and it’s not even in a Superman film). Look, it’s hilarious, it’s arch, it’s fantastically put-together, and it’s actually, genuinely hopeful and optimistic. It’s my favourite Coen Brothers movie.

Singin' in the Rain (1952): I’ve always got a lot of love for movies about Old Hollywood, but Singin’ isn’t really some kind of backstage satire; really, it’s a story about love, honesty, and creativity – movies are just the backdrop. But it’s the songs. Let’s face it, it’s the songs – and dances. These are some of the most joyous songs put to celluloid, and Gene Kelly absolutely attacks them from all sides. But I’ve gotta say, my favourite number is probably Donald O’Connor running up the walls in “Make ‘Em Laugh”.

Strictly Ballroom (1992): there’s a personal touch to this one, as my wife and I chose “Love is in the Air” for the first dance at our wedding. But there’s more to this film than memories of me being a shit dancer: it’s a supremely romantic film, possibly the most enjoyable straight-up romance from Luhrmann’s Red Curtain trilogy (spoiler alert: no one dies). A great underdog tale, two kids taking down a corrupt system, a story of the unlikely girl nabbing the hot guy; it’s timeless, it’s well-told, and its unusual setting (ballroom dancing competitions in Australia) gives it an extra kick.

My Neighbour Totoro (1988): Ghibli films often present us with a nicer, fairer world, where even the nasty monsters are there to teach us important lessons, or at the very least plucky kids can do the right thing and save the day. Totoro is different in that there isn’t an antagonist; there isn't much drama or, really, plot. It’s two very small girls dealing with a complex life situation, and also a giant bear-monster thing with a massive mouth who could be scary but is actually really nice and magical and saves the day because the girls deserve it, and also there’s a hollow cat that’s also a bus. It’s fantastic, but it’s also so nice, just a load of nice people and nice monsters being nice to each other, and if – let's say – the elements can be good, can't we be good too?

Die Hard (1988): yeah, okay, contradiction corner; a supremely violent and sweary action movie that makes me “feel good”. Is it the bit where he throws a bomb down a lift? Or shoots a dude from beneath a table? Or when Ellis dies? Honestly, yeah, there’s a little bit of that; the action stuff is so well-done. But it’s also a film with a ton of heart and soul and wit and life. John McClane is a masterpiece of character design, a gruff cop with a heart of gold, a capable action hero but also a working-class schmo who just wants to try to get back with his wife. He struggles and bleeds and doubts himself; he’s not a superman. The villains are incredible, with great lines and great designs and a great scheme; you care about these guys, they’re interesting. There's a part of you that wants Gruber to get away as much as you want John and Holly to get back together. It's a Christmas movie, all about family and forgiveness, and It's just plain fun, uncynical and sentimental and really, really funny. It's the best action movie ever made, I watch it every year, and it brings me great, great comfort and joy.

The American President (1995): oh no, too soon! But I couldn’t include The West Wing in a list of feel-good films, so this is the next best thing; smart public servants being smart, as well as moral and just, wearing their immense power with the right amount of humility. Sorkin really believes in the majesty of the office of President, and the founding myth of America and what that means, and he makes you believe in it too. His dialogue is, of course, exceptional, witty bon-mots and one-liners, but the love story is great too; two people finding each other later in life and trying to make it work despite everything. So it’s a great film, a funny film, a sweet film, a romantic film, but also kinda important; a film that makes you aspire to higher ideals, that gives you hope and confidence in the institutions of government. I suppose it is a fantasy – God knows, the last four years have shaken these institutions to their very core, over here as much as in the States – but The American President can make you believe again.

There you go. Ten films that just make me happy if I'm down, or cement that happiness if I'm already in the mood. All of these films, you’ll notice, are also very, very good; not some kind of “guilty pleasure” (if such a thing exists; don’t pleasure-shame!). Funnily enough, it’s the quality of the films that adds to their charm; I appreciate the craft as much as the plot or theme or performances. Like when I watch American President (or, more accurately, The West Wing) and I just enjoy seeing people good at their jobs be good at their jobs, then watching a well-made film makes me happy because I like seeing people good at their jobs be good at their jobs.

Anyway. Tear yourself away from Twitter, stop refreshing fivethirtyeight.com, pour yourself a drink, and – hopefully – make yourself happy this weekend. Unless you voted for Trump, then you can get in a bin.

#top ten #feel-good films #feel-good movies #movies #happy #optimism #biden #harris

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littlemissmeggie · 8 years ago

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92 truths

i was tagged by @1dfourinfinity, @galeaya067, and @jjfrommn (who tagged me over at my main blog but i’m going to do it here) like a week and a half ago. sorry it’s taken so long! thank you all for tagging me!

Rules: Write 92 truths about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged.

what was your…

last drink: a cup of tea in my cute harry fanart mug

last phone call: ugh. i spent like 45 minutes on the phone with my internet provider yesterday setting up a time for a tech guy to come replace my modem.

last text message: “hahaha! there’s someone in my building/neighbourhood that’s ‘the west wing.’” talking about people’s wifi names because i just renamed mine “gryffindor tower” after the internet guy set up my new modem.

last song you listened to: “screen” by twenty one pilots

last time you cried: sunday night. my mom and i were telling my brother a story about the night we hit a deer and an owl within two miles of each other because he was only a few months old at the time. it’s a super weird, funny story and we were all laughing so hard we were crying. (the deer was fine. we brought the owl home and called a local animal rehab place and they came to take the owl the next day and then sent us a picture in the mail of the owl being released back to the wild.)

have you ever…

dated someone twice: kind of? i dated this kid john for a while and then we broke up because he was joining the army and then we got back together for like a month when he came back from boot camp and then we broke up again.

been cheated on: yes. by my first boyfriend with this girl who was a total bitch to me. 😒

kissed someone and regretted it: nope

lost someone special: well, my grandmother passed away about seven and a half years ago and that was tough because we were very close. my great uncle eddie, who was like a second grandfather, passed away a little over three years ago and that was tough too. i’ve also lost some good friends because i’m terrible at keeping in touch with people when i no longer see them regularly. and there’s a whole long story about my cousin, who was my best friend since we were babies until about a year and a half ago when he got married.

been depressed: yeah. i’ve had bouts of depression since my teens. i’ve been doing all right lately though.

in the past year have you…

made a new friend: i’ve made some friends here on tumblr, which is really awesome. i guess i made a few new “work friends” when i started at the country club last summer too, so that’s kind of cool.

fallen out of love: not in the past year.

laughed until you cried: pretty much any time i’m with my mom and my sister or we are texting in our group chat.

met someone who changed you: well, i like to think that everyone you meet changes you, sort of in the butterfly effect kind of way, so yes. i’ve met a lot of new people in the past year.

found out who your true friends are: i don’t feel like i’ve really had anything happen in the past year that would have proved who my “true friends” are.

kissed anyone on your followers/following: no

how many people on your tumblr do you know irl: i knew one of my mutuals long before tumblr was even a thing. other than that, i’ve met @1dfourinfinity and @narryintheam when we went to see niall on the today show in october. and there’s my group chat and @kirrylovesnarry who i’ve never met in real life but who i talk to all of the time.

do you want to change your name: the name on my birth certificate is not meggie and no, i won’t tell you what it actually is, but i’ve never been called by the name on my birth certificate except in situations where they’re only calling me by my legal name. my cousin mentioned above didn’t know my real name until we were 8. so, to answer the question, i would love to legally change my name to meggie but i think it would really hurt my mom’s feelings because it’s a family name.

what time did you wake up today: 7:43am

what were you doing at midnight last night: i was actually going to bed, which never happens that early.

name something you can’t wait for: summer

what is the one thing you wish you could change about your life: i just wish i had a bit more money because finances get a little tight in the winter with heat bills and fewer work hours since the country club closes for the winter and i’m only working part-time at my other job.

what are you listening to right now: my boyfriend talking to his friend on the phone. or like in general? because i’ve been on a twenty one pilots kick lately.

whats getting on your nerves right now: one of my cats is in heat right now and she keeps making this really annoying crying meow.

about me…

nicknames: meg, megs, megaleg, megapalooza, miss meg/miss meggie (hence my url), mugzi/mugz, and megatron by my family; pookie, pumpkin, and punky by my boyfriend.

relationship: i’ve been with my boyfriend for almost six and a half years.

zodiac sign: libra/scorpio. i’m born on the day it changes so some things list me as the last day of libra and others have me as the first day of scorpio. i used a calculator thing where you put in the time you were born and everything once and it said i was scorpio. if i’d been born, like, three hours earlier, it would have been libra. but i definitely have both libra and scorpio traits.

pronouns: she/her

favourite TV shows: breaking bad, buffy the vampire slayer, 3rd rock from the sun, it’s always sunny in philadelphia, the sopranos, arrested development, and the original csi.

school: i graduated from the culinary institute of america in may 2010.

hair colour: brown with natural reddish-blond streaks. i’ve never dyed it.

long or short hair: i wore my hair short (like, super short) from the age of 7 to about 23 and then i grew it out really long. i cut it chin-length and donated it almost two years ago and realised i like it better long now. weird how life changes.

do I have a crush on someone: does my boyfriend count?

what do you like about yourself: i’m smart and funny, in an odd way. i’m talented, though most of them are wasted talents. i’m very good at my jobs and i’m a hard worker. i’m nice. i’m a strong person; i’ve been through a lot of shitty things in my life but i’m still here and i try to learn and grow from the shitty things as much as i can.

firsts…

first surgery ever: i had two hernias removed when i was, like, 3.

first piercing: i don’t have any piercings.

first sport you joined: my parents signed me up for kiddie soccer when i was maybe 4 because they wanted me to make new friends other than my cousin zak. i cried on the second day because i hated it so much.

first vacation: probably rehoboth beach, delaware. family tradition from when my mom was maybe 6 years old until my parents got divorced fifteen years ago.

first pair of trainers/sneakers: i’m 29. i don’t remember my first pair of sneakers. probably just white keds or something.

right now…

eating: nothing but my boyfriend’s making dinner right now.

drinking: water and tea now

listening to: my boyfriend making dinner

waiting for: dinner. i’m starving.

wanting kids: not really, unless my boyfriend really wants kids someday. i’m not a very maternal person.

career: i’m an assistant at cooking classes, though i’m going to apply for a position as an instructor. during the summer/early fall, i also work as the sous chef at the country club in my town.

romantic stuff…

lips or eyes: eyes probably.

hugs or kisses: um, kisses i guess. i don’t really like hugging people. i guess i hug my boyfriend in a romantic way though, if that makes sense? i just don’t really like hugging.

shorter or taller: taller. my boyfriend’s 6′. i dated a guy who was 6′3″ for a while, which was funny to see because i’m only 5′.

older or younger: i’ve almost always dated guys who were at least a year older than me. my boyfriend is twelve years older than me. my second longest relationship, though, was with a guy who was three years younger than me.

romantic or spontaneous: can’t you be both?

sensitive or loud: both? i’m not an overly sensitive person…

hookup or relationship: relationship

troublemaker or hesitant: i’m not sure how those are really opposites so i’m not sure how to answer. just someone who’s not boring but doesn’t get into trouble with the law, i guess?

have you ever…

kissed a stranger: no

drank hard liquor: i like whiskey and gin though i don’t drink often.

lost glasses or contacts: i don’t wear glasses or contacts, so no.

been arrested: no

turned someone down: yes

cried when someone died: obviously. i may not be overly sensitive but i still cry when people die.

fallen for a friend: yes. i was in love with my best friend for a while.

do you believe…

in yourself: usually. i’ll go through a period of, like, two days where i’m all down on myself and then i realise i’m actually pretty cool.

miracles: yes

love at first sight: infatuation, maybe. love, no.

santa claus: i did when i was a kid. i no longer do, though.

kiss on the first date: depends on the person and how the date goes.

i’m not tagging anyone because i just tagged a bunch of people in another thing, but do this if you’d like to and tag me so i can see it!

#meggie talks #about me #tag thingy

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cstesttaken · 8 years ago

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Cool It: You Don’t Have to Be on Every Social Media App

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

03.14.17

11:30 am

CHRISTOPH NIEMANN

Do I have to try every social media app?

You’ve Got Mail starred Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan and was an awful movie. I watched it in a hotel room recently and found myself thinking about you—thinking about all of us, really. To summarize: It is 1998. Hanks is the cocky, hard-charging scion of a massive Barnes & Noble-ish bookstore chain, about to open a new location on the Upper West Side. Ryan, meanwhile—vulnerable, sappy, like a human kitten—owns a tiny children’s bookstore nearby called the Shop Around the Corner. Ryan’s shop is everything that Hanks’ is not: quaint, neighborly, beloved. And, of course, it stands to be crushed by this encroaching tentacle of Hanks’ Machiavellian empire.

There’s a lot of anxiety in the air. Thematically, the film is concerned with what modernity (symbolized by Hanks and maybe also his high-octane girlfriend, who literally shouts, “Hurry, hurry, hurry!” at her espresso machine) might be doing to our souls (symbolized by Ryan and her boyfriend, who is referred to at a party as the “greatest living expert on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg”). This anxiety is everywhere. It’s a shame kids don’t know what handkerchiefs are, someone says. When office workers play solitaire on their computers, it’s lamented as “the end of Western civilization.”

It’s all so heavy-handed. But here’s the thing: As the bitter Hanks-Ryan bookstore rivalry escalates on the street, Hanks and Ryan are falling in love with each other via email, anonymously. They meet in some kind of chat room and begin emailing each other relentlessly, pouring out their feelings and the poignant whispers of their simpleton hearts. It’s dramatic irony, you see—they love each other in cyberspace, hate each other in meatspace—and the filmmakers milk it for all it’s worth. Scene after scene cuts back and forth between Hanks and Ryan, reading emails on their laughably briefcaselike laptops. Every time that cheery voice tells them “Welcome. You’ve got mail,” it’s a Pavlovian cue that flutters their stomachs and tingles their privates. It’s hard to think of two happier people in the history of film.

But you know what? Joke’s on them. Because what Hanks and Ryan do not know, and can’t possibly predict, is that the same series of tubes that’s serving as a conduit for their love will soon obliterate both their businesses! Soon they’ll both be irrelevant! They’re just too blissed out by each other’s electronic mail messages to recognize that this thing in front of them—this Internet—is also a merciless destroyer of worlds.

Reader, they are us; we are them. We’re blind to the transience of so many things we feel attached to, or else we are so attuned to their transience that we don’t allow ourselves to get attached. The truth is, even as I type this, laughing and smirking at You’ve Got Mail, I understand that someone in the near future will be similarly laughing and smirking at me. (“Typing?!” they’ll say.)

Are you obligated to try new social media apps? Not at all. Use what you enjoy. Try what you think you’d enjoy. Or don’t. You alone get to map out the borders of your online life. But you are, I think, obligated to stay open to exploring new social media apps—to keep yourself from becoming too jaded, too dismissive—and to always entertain the possibility that one of them might become meaningful and useful to you. I mean, I sunk a lot of time into Friendster back in the day, and I don’t regret it. I recognize that, like Hanks and Ryan, I was merely living contentedly in the present, without knowing that the magic of that moment would inevitably crumble—or even worrying about whether it might.

“Sometimes I wonder about my life. I lead a small life … And sometimes I wonder, do I do it because I like it or because I haven’t been brave?” Ryan typed that, sent it to Hanks. Now I’m putting the question to you.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

03.10.17

11:00 am

Christoph Niemann

I’m horrible at emoji—it’s like a foreign language for me. I always get “???” replies from friends. What should I do?

In 1918, a moderately but fleetingly famous Belgian man named Jean Pierre Pierard published an intriguing column in an American newspaper. Pierard was an actor, sometimes billed as “Le Colosse,” since he happened to weigh 342 pounds. (He was just a tremendous, tremendous fellow.) He was also the “Most Married Man in the World,” and this was the particular expertise with which he was writing. What does it mean to be the Most Married Man in the World? Well, at the time, Pierard was on his 23rd wife. Since 1886 he’d averaged one marriage every 1.4 years. But still, he felt strongly that “it is not good for man to be alone.”

This is the most important thing for you to know about Pierard—and I mean you specifically, my weird emoji-aphasic friend: Jean Pierre Pierard loved being married. He loved the institution of marriage—held it in the highest esteem—and felt a strong obligation to defend and venerate it against anyone who was starting to view it with the least bit of cynicism. “I believe in marriage,” he wrote. Deep down in the hallows of his giant being, the man was a romantic. And an optimist. And nothing about the clumsiness with which his optimism or romanticism kept colliding with reality was going to drain those feelings out of him. “It may surprise you to hear it,” Pierard wrote, “but it’s the truth, that every one of these 23 times I’ve taken out a marriage license I’ve done so with the same glow of hope and faith that I had the first time.” Being married brought him joy, so he kept getting married, even if he was lousy at it. Then he kept getting married some more.

I assume that you see where I’m going. It should be obvious, especially since I’ve written it all in not-fun alphabet letters. You’re correct that emoji are essentially a foreign language. So the only way to increase your fluency in them is with real-world practice—which is to say, by failing a lot, but paying enough attention to your failures to learn from them, and by asking more skillful speakers, people you feel totally supported and unjudged by, for help and safe opportunities to practice. But most important, don’t let anyone, with their snide ???s, spoil the pleasure those emoji bring to you. Don’t be ashamed!

OK? Just one more thing about Pierard: For a time, he attempted a career as a professional wrestler. It seems like the ideal job for Le Colosse—he could just fall on people and flatten them—and yet he was terrible at this too, maybe even more terrible than he was at marriage. Because he was ticklish—tremendously ticklish. He simply could not “permit of any contact with his ribs while wrestling,” The New York Times wrote, without being debilitated by his own giggling. All that his opponents had to do, no matter how small they were, was flutter their fingers around Le Colosse’s colossal midsection, topple him, and hold him down for the count. It was basically over before it began.

And, honestly, that’s how I’d love to picture you: joyously thumb-typing your syntactically jumbled, incomprehensible kissy faces, fires, whales, and eggplants without a care in the world, pinned on the mat but laughing and laughing and laughing. Do that and you’re .

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

03.09.17

11:00 am

CHRISTOPH NIEMANN

My girlfriend got me a Fitbit, but the data makes me feel lazy and ashamed. Do I have to keep using it?

I was in my kitchen the other night, slow dancing with my toddler before bedtime, when the Coldplay song “Fix You” came on—a song, I remembered reading, that Chris Martin wrote for then-girlfriend Gwyneth Paltrow after her father died—and I found myself feeling genuinely bummed, all over again, that Chris and Gwyneth had split up. I wondered what had torn them apart or whether—as these things often go—they hadn’t been torn apart but slowly undone by some dark, unspoken dissatisfaction or resentment that gradually multiplied until there was so much cumulative darkness between them that it blotted out whatever had been luminescent about their love. And that’s when I thought about you and your girlfriend and your Fitbit.

I also thought about Steve Etkin. Etkin is an engineer by training and by temperament who enjoys walking. And so a year ago, his daughter, Jordan, bought him a Fitbit. It seemed like the perfect gift. “I started receiving daily updates,” she told me, “about the number of steps he walked, the stairs he climbed. After a few weeks, I was like, ‘Hey, Dad, you’re really treating this like a job.’ ” (She was also like, hey, Dad, I don’t need all these updates.)

Anyway, it got her thinking. And, because she studies consumer behavior at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, she designed a study to test whether, as she put it to me, trackers like Fitbits have the capacity to “suck the enjoyment” out of previously pleasurable activities. Guess what. They do.

Etkin’s study was published in the Journal of Consumer Research. She ran a series of six experiments. In one, for example, she gave her subjects a 16-pack of Crayolas, then made a big show of tracking how many shapes one group colored in while letting others color freely, unencumbered by quantification. She did similar experiments with walking and reading, and in every one discovered the same basic result. “Measurement led participants to color more shapes, walk more steps, and read more pages. At the same time, however, it led people to enjoy coloring, walking, and reading less.” In short, people did more but felt worse doing it. Tracking redefined fun activities as work.

One problem here is that by focusing on quantifiable outcomes, trackers can diminish intrinsic motivation, which makes people stick with activities. Therefore, “measurement may sometimes actually undermine sustainable behavior change,” Etkin writes. Those insurance companies giving Fitbits to their policyholders might be shooting themselves in the (demotivated, stationary) foot.

But you know all this. It’s precisely the cycle of incentivizing and disincentivizing, of judgment and anxiety, afflicting you: that feeling that you can never take enough steps or unlock enough REM sleep. (“When you try your best but you don’t succeed … When you feel so tired but you can’t sleep.”) And, as it afflicts you, it widens the emotional space between you and your girlfriend—it feeds a smoldering grudge, because she handcuffed you with this thing. She tried to fix you, my friend. But her fixing made you feel more broken.

So you’ve got to talk to your girlfriend and take the Fitbit off, even though Etkin’s research suggests this is the worst thing you could do. (When people start tracking then suddenly stop, the fun is still ruined, but they also lose the benefit of increased output—a double whammy of underperformance and joylessness.) But who cares? It could be the only way for you and your partner to remain consciously coupled.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

03.08.17

7:00 am

Christoph Niemann

When my 5-year-old asks a question, is there a difference between looking it up in a book and just using my phone?

Recently, I watched David Kwong do some sleight of hand in a crowded theater lobby. Kwong is a magician who often consults on Hollywood films. (When a director needs, say, Jesse Eisenberg to learn a magic trick, they send him to Kwong.) Anyway, Kwong sauntered over to a guy with a deck of cards and asked him to pick one.

Honestly, I don’t know how to describe what happened next. For 30 minutes, Kwong made cards materialize in outrageous, stupefying ways, as though he were nonchalantly sliding them in and out of a parallel universe. Someone’s card flew out of the deck, spinning through the air. Another turned up in a guy’s back pocket—and not just in his back pocket, but buried deep, between his wallet and a bundle of crumpled receipts. Kwong asked someone to rip a card into four pieces, then hold them in his fist; when he opened his hand, the card was reassembled!

Maybe this doesn’t sound that impressive, written down. We all know card tricks are a thing. But the way Kwong kept relentlessly confronting us with the impossible—seeing this sorcery at close range—seemed to not just entertain people but to make them feel vulnerable and a little scared. People mewled and screamed, “No!” One poor man was reduced to crouching on the floor, laughing so euphorically he couldn’t catch his breath. (OK, that was me.) The guy with the ripped-up card in his fist refused to open it at first, shaking his head like a child terrified to look at his boo-boo, afraid of what he’d find. “He has total power over us,” one woman said quietly, gravely. She sounded creeped out. It was so much fun!

Now, I’m sure everyone in that crowd wondered how Kwong was doing it, but it’s a rare bird who goes home and actually labors to understand the mechanics of how such tricks are engineered. (Those rare birds become magicians—it’s how Kwong got his start.) Most of us perceive magic tricks to be unreplicable, to violate the reality we inhabit. They’re, you know, magic.

To a 5-year-old, phones are magic. The internet is magic. An older kid might be able to understand the technology and infrastructure involved, the nature of Wikipedia, and so on, but for a child so young, the answer just appears, miraculously, like a playing card yanked from a bystander’s back pocket. Leafing through a book together, by comparison, is a more collaborative, tactile, self-evident process. It’s a journey toward the answer, one that your child gets to go on.

What I’m talking about is the difference between learning and being told, between answering a specific question and getting a child excited about answering it on their own. It’s fun to amaze your 5-year-old, sure. But it’s more gratifying to set your kid up to one day amaze you.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

03.06.17

11:00 am

Christoph Niemann

Is flirting on LinkedIn less weird than on other social media? After all, it can vouch for you in a substantive way.

Whoa. Hang on. Let’s first poke at the premise of your question, because the implications here are huge. Notice how you casually presume your résumé offers a more substantive representation of your basic humanity than, say, all the tweets you’ve tweeted or all the digital artifacts amassed on your Facebook page. Think of the photos on Facebook alone: You in a rowboat with the gentle-looking man playing a banjo whom we understand to be your deceased (too young) father. You being silly—but not obnoxiously silly, just innocently, endearingly silly—in the Halloween aisle of a big-box store. You tagged in a photo of that kid you mentored that one summer, as he graduates from Berkeley. You climbing a goddamned mountain! Like, with pickaxes and stuff!

Do these not substantively communicate the substance of your life? Don’t they “vouch” for you to potential dates as a safe, noncreepy, sufficiently together human being, a sympathetic soul tumbling through the fundamental experience of being alive and looking for companionship? Or is that better captured with a line like this: “January 2013-November 2014, Senior Operations Associate, Mobitly Inc.”?

You seem to think it is. And I’ll admit—begrudgingly—that you may have a point. Because the lines have been blurred between our work lives and our emotional lives, our careers and our intrinsic selves. We subconsciously gauge a person’s character by their professional standing, and our experiences and attitude toward our work aren’t only sometimes relevant to our love lives. In fact, the two can feel crucially interwoven: The best startup founders are those who operate out of passion and devotion and with a kind of hyper-monogamous obsession. On the other hand, we all feel obligated to work on our relationships with the same myopic, idealistic intensity. And it can feel natural to apply the lessons we learn relating to people in one realm to our relationships in the other.

Take, for example, Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn’s CEO. I confess, I’m not a LinkedIn user, but I’ve been reading up on Weiner and, I have to say, he seems like a wonderful guy—a principled, thoughtful man who says very grounded, Jerry Maguire-type things like, “I’ve never been title-driven; for the most part, I’ve been purpose-driven.” He also reads books by the Dalai Lama, contemplates the difference between compassion and empathy, and practices mindfulness techniques like “being a spectator to my own thoughts,” which enhance his ability to relate to and motivate his employees. He calls his style “compassionate management.”

In an essay he wrote a few years ago, Weiner described leaving work one evening, feeling proud of the strides he’d made as a compassionate manager, only to be felled by the epiphany that he’d been very uncompassionately neglecting his wife. He was working so hard, he wrote, that at night, “when my wife would try to bring up her day, or talk about the things we need to get done, I would reflexively say something to the effect that it had been a long day, I was exhausted, and could we talk about it some other time?” In other words: “For as hard as I worked to manage compassionately at the office, I was not always actively applying the same approach with my family.” So Weiner applied the same compassionate management style to his marriage and made things right.

I worry that sounds off, like the emotionally tone-deaf insights of a stereotypical tech baron. But trust me, the way Weiner explained it, it sounded cool—real. (And know this too: Worried that I’d gush in this column about Weiner’s coolness and realness only to learn later that Weiner is actually not cool and not real and is, in truth, as imperious as Genghis Khan or a Grade A, misogynistic, steroidal jerk, I sat down and Googled “Jeff Weiner LinkedIn jerk” and was happy to find, as the first result, a post singling him out as a “counterweight” to the industry’s many other CEO-jerks. So that was reassuring—even if the post was published on LinkedIn. But even that can be interpreted as a testament to Weiner’s character, because it was Weiner, I learned, who had the vision to expand LinkedIn from a bland résumé farm into a successful publishing platform.)

I’ll go even further. I wouldn’t be surprised if a man as smart as Weiner already knows all this, knows that we live in an age where one of the prime, romantically reassuring things about another person—the thing that “vouches” for them best as a potential mate—is that they’re a trustworthy, hardworking, successful employee. And therefore, he also secretly knows that LinkedIn could be the ultimate dating site, though he wisely stops short of saying it. Instead, he just dog-whistles about that potential to attentive users and eagle-eyed investors, thus preserving the opportunity to pivot the company explicitly in that direction should the climate change and the need arise. Recently, for example, he told an interviewer, “Our core value proposition to members is to help them connect to opportunity,” and touted “the power of this as a platform to enable capital”—especially “human capital”—“to flow where it can best be leveraged.”

Isn’t he talking about dating, about setting people up? When Tevye and Golde’s daughters sang, “Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match,” weren’t they basically asking a kind of social networking platform to send their own human capital flowing toward whichever shtetl boy would give it the highest valuation and invest? Why shouldn’t you flirt on LinkedIn? Why shouldn’t love be one of the opportunities LinkedIn connects us with?

So, yes. You are right. And you’ve taught me a lot—you and Jeff Weiner both. I can see clearly now how we’ve all tied ourselves into a knot of careerism and affection and equity and sex, and maybe that’s just the way it has to be. I’m remembering now what happened when Jerry Maguire—the real Jerry Maguire—showed up in that living room, shivering, trying to win back his wife, who also happened to be his business partner at their new sports-agenting startup, how he told her, “You … you complete me.” But, more important, there was the line he slipped her right before that famous line. Suddenly, in the middle of his monologue, he was compelled to say, like a man giving a keynote at a conference, “We live in a cynical world, a cynical world, and we work in a business of tough competitors.”

Why? Why include that? What could Jerry Maguire possibly have meant? I think he meant: The internet is full of sinister strangers. It’s a hostile place in which to offer up your soul. But here I am. Look at me. View my profile. I’d like to connect with you on LinkedIn.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

03.03.17

11:00 am

Christoph Niemann

I work in a casual tech setting and I’m shocked by how much everyone swears. Should I say something?

Imagine what it was like to be a Puritan in 1642. You’ve come to America. The landscape is crude and endless; the soundtrack, all hissing insects and howling wolves. “Everything about the place seemed godforsaken,” writes the natural historian Tim Flannery in his book The Eternal Frontier. That lawless emptiness is why you’re here—it means freedom. But in all free and empty places, there’s also room for wickedness to grow. Everybody in your little settlement is aware of this, which is why they panic when, one day, someone happens upon a young man named Thomas Granger having sex with a horse.

It’s worse than you thought: When confronted, Granger rapidly admits he’s also had intercourse with three cows, two goats, five sheep, and a turkey. This behavior is so savage—and feels like such a threat to the ethical society you’re laboring to build there in the wild—that you respond with a campaign of ruthless cleansing. You round up each animal Granger has had sex with and force the young man to watch while you slaughter it. (Not the turkey, though; for some reason, Flannery notes, no one bothers with the turkey.) And since you can’t tell which of the village’s sheep were the particular sheep Granger penetrated—his descriptions are imprecise—you herd every sheep in front of him, like a police lineup, and force him to ID the five in question. Then you kill those five sheep too. Then you kill Granger. Then you throw all their bodies together in one big pit.

Now, fast-forward 373 years. Let’s talk about you.

It’s easy to imagine you, hunched in your tech company’s open floor plan, forced to sit on an inflatable ball or perhaps issued one of those iconoclastic standing desks without a chair at all. You are a wary pilgrim on the wild, godless edge of America’s economic frontier. And, as such, you understand that the foul language your colleagues are using isn’t just unpleasant but morally precarious; if it continues unchecked, it could lead you all—your entire industry, really—to much darker places. You know, just as the Puritans did, that this kind of impropriety needs to be nipped in the bud.

That’s how you feel, right? Well, you’re wrong.

You’re not the Puritans. You’re the kid shtupping the cows. Because the lesson of the Granger story—as I read it—isn’t that morality always wins. It’s that the mob always wins. The majority’s norms always beat back and outlast the minority’s. And the mob can be cruel: They’ll kill the thing you love right in front of you, then dump you in the ground.

I think you need to go along with the mob.

Does it matter if my kid’s handwriting is terrible?

Well, I happen to love handwriting. I think it’s curiously fun to look at and a considerable, if mostly esoteric, value-add to the written language—even in an era of tablets and smartwatches and speech-recognition software. But does it matter if your child writes illegibly? My answer is no, probably not. Handwriting is an old technology—about 5,000 years old. And as with newer old technologies (muskets or floppy disks or cars with human beings driving them), some people may inevitably feel a tinge of melancholy watching it sputter into oblivion. And yet the truth is that humanity has always replaced old tools with new ones, and often, once we’ve pushed through the emotionally charged transitional phase and come out the other end, everything feels fine again.

Take, for example, a woman named Kristin Gulick in Bend, Oregon, who often has trouble reading messages scribbled by her chronically illegible office receptionist. “Yesterday I tried to dial a number that she’d written down, and I couldn’t read it,” Gulick told me recently. “I had to go back out and ask, ‘What does this say?’” And the receptionist was just like, ha ha ha, I know my handwriting’s terrible—you know, giggling the annoyance away. Was Gulick peeved? Yes. But was this a fireable offense or some irrevocable inconvenience? Not even close. In fact, Gulick really had no choice but to laugh the whole thing off too. “Thank God she’s good at other things!” she said, and life went on.

So there’s your answer. But who is Kristin Gulick, anyway? So glad you asked!

Handwriting may be one of those fundamentally human abilities—one that binds us to our own identities.

Gulick has been an occupational therapist for 28 years, specializing in arms and hands. She’s in private practice now, but shortly after 9/11 she found herself working at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC. A recent government report disclosed that more than 1,000 of the 50,000 soldiers who’ve been wounded in action in Iraq and Afghanistan—2.6 percent—have come back missing limbs, and Gulick was there to greet some of the first ones, helping them work around their loss and rejoin their life. Part of this work involved “transferring dominance” from one hand to the other; if a righty lost their right arm, say, they needed to learn to be a lefty now. And part of that was relearning handwriting—even just enough to fill out the deluge of hospital forms and sign their name.

Gulick found a total dearth of tools and curricula. Really, there was nothing. While she encouraged people to use first-grade handwriting primers early in her career, they were full of infantilizing penmanship exercises involving anthropomorphic animals. These books were not only unhelpful but degrading: Having lost a limb, many of these people were already feeling vulnerable and diminished. Now they were being treated—literally—like children. Gulick and an officer in the Army Medical Specialist Corps, Katie Yancosek, decided they could do better. “We’d give them exercises about balancing their checkbook and not about a little bunny or whatever,” Gulick said. The result was a six-week program, laid out in a workbook called Handwriting for Heroes. (The third edition was published this year.)

Look, I don’t mean to play some righteous, wounded-veteran card and make anyone feel bad. But I think we all see where this is going: It’s easy to write off handwriting only because most of us take it for granted. But I listened to Gulick talk about handwriting for a while, about what the ability to jot off a simple grocery list or be-right-back note for your spouse—functional but maybe also aesthetically pleasing or expressive, something you have created—does for a person’s sense of self-sufficiency and pride after working hard to regain that skill. How handwriting, really, may be one of those fundamentally human abilities—one that binds us, in a tiny way, to each other and to our own identities.

Your child won’t feel anything remotely like that sense of loss if they let their handwriting go to seed. Their lives will move forward in standardized fonts. If they absolutely have to write anything by hand, it may be disordered and illegible, but they can just laugh it off and explain (or text) what they meant. And that’s why I’ll stick with my first answer: It probably doesn’t matter. But I also think that, if we’re prepared to let handwriting go—to not care how ugly it gets—we should, at least, take a second to think about how beautiful it can be.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

03.01.17

11:00 am

Christoph Niemann

The same person keeps accidentally pocket-dialing me. Should I confront him?

Let's zoom out for a second: For more than 40 years, scientists have been debating whether we should be actively sending messages into outer space or just using projects like SETI to listen for messages sent to us—and not just whether we should broadcast anything, but what and how. Do we shoot out a bunch of math, to show aliens we understand math? Do we send pictures? Music? And if so, what math? What pictures? What music? There have been scientific workshops to hash this out in Toulouse, Paris, Zagreb, Houston, and Mountain View. There have been peer-reviewed journal articles with titles like “The Art and Science of Interstellar Message Composition.” It's a big, messy, excruciatingly meticulous back-and-forth.

And yet—all this time, while all those eggheads have been arguing—gobs and gobs of our satellite transmissions, television broadcasts, radio shows, and cell phone conversations have been quietly, sloppily spilling into outer space. It's all just oozing off our planet and into the cosmos like so much electromagnetic sewage—a phenomenon scientists call leakage. In other words, we're already beaming messages into the void—weak signals, but millions of them every day, without even realizing it or being careful about what we say. We are butt-dialing the universe!

Now say someone out there actually picks up that call. Wouldn't you like to know? Yes, it's embarrassing to realize we've made that sort of clumsy connection. But isn't it always just a little bit nice to know we've made a connection at all? So my advice is: Tell this person. Tell him he reached you. Tell him you were there.

CHRISTOPH NIEMANN

Is it unethical to crowdfund a project I don't totally believe in?

A month after the Boston Tea Party, in January 1774—with the idea of rebellion gaining momentum in Boston and patriots feeling more powerful than the remaining loyalists in town—a strange character who called himself Joyce Junior started stoking that new sense of boldness on the streets. Junior walked around elaborately costumed, like some anarchist harlequin, and posted flyers threatening any “vile ingrates” who were still loyal to the crown. Loyalists should be punished, he wrote. And he slyly suggested precisely how, signing his treatises: “Chairman of the Committee for Tarring and Feathering.”

Ten days later, a low-level British government customs official, John Malcom, got into an argument with a well-known patriot shoemaker on the street.

One thing led to another, and soon an angry mob had “swarmed around [Malcom's] house,” wrote Nathaniel Philbrick in his book Bunker Hill. Very quickly, all of Boston's frustration and resentment with England began to come down on this one middling bureaucrat. The rioters bum-rushed Malcom's home with ladders and axes. Once inside, they lashed him with sticks, then pushed him on a sled for hours through the snowy, unlit streets and bitter cold, collecting more irate Bostonians as they went. The mob mocked him. They threatened to cut off his ears. They beat him and beat him. Soon more than a thousand people had joined in. They ripped off Malcom's clothes. They coated his skin with steaming tar. They covered him with feathers.

The abuse went on for hours. When they finally dumped Malcom in front of his house, Philbrick wrote: “his frozen body had begun to thaw, his tarred flesh started to peel off in ‘steaks.’”

It was awful—all of it. And apparently, it was particularly distressing to Joyce Junior, the Wavy Gravy-esque performance artist who'd threatened British loyalists with tarring and feathering in the first place—the man who'd hammered that idea into the public consciousness, inspiring all that brutality. We know Junior felt culpable, because he immediately started doing damage control, scrambling to disown his idea. Junior issued another statement. It began: “This is to certify that the modern punishment lately inflicted on the ignoble John Malcom was not done by our order.”

Now, I don't think this project you want to crowdfund is likely to inadvertently encourage an angry mob to parboil an innocent man in his own flesh, then blanket him with feathers. But it's important to remember that ideas are volatile, powerful things. And so are crowds. They have a way of infecting each other and taking on a life of their own. So all I'm saying is, be honest—be real. If you only kind of think it's a good idea, it's OK to say so. The crowd will decide for itself if you're right. And it may surprise you.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

02.28.17

11:00 am

Christoph Niemann

My dad leaves incredibly embarrassing comments under every photo I post to Facebook and Instagram. What should I do?

Let’s face it: Dads are embarrassing. I remember, a couple of years ago, reading a newspaper story about a boy named Brooklyn who was so distressed by the prospect of his friends catching sight of his dweeby father that he insisted his dad drop him off around the corner from school and stay out of view. Why was this a newspaper story, you ask? Don’t millions of mortified children do this every day? Yes, and that’s my point. In this case, however, the dad in question was David Beckham.

See, dad-barrassment is universal—a condition of existence, like the weather. What matters is how well we endure it: whether we slough it off or allow it to seep inside us.

Consider another famous dad: Teddy Roosevelt. Yes, that guy—America’s first presidential man’s man. This is a guy who hunted bears and lions, who got into bar fights with cowboys, who resigned as assistant secretary of the Navy to actually fight a war rather than just plan one. Teddy Roosevelt loved war. War was his jam. As the historian Alexis Coe told me recently, “He treated everything like a battlefield.” In October 1912, Roosevelt was about to give a campaign speech in Milwaukee when a would-be assassin shot him in the chest. The bullet ripped through the copy of his speech in his pocket. There was a big bloody wound. Still, Roosevelt spoke for more than an hour, like a wounded infantryman still bayoneting people on the battlefield.

I’d called Coe after listening to the podcast , which she cohosts with former Daily Show head writer Elliott Kalan. Their Roosevelt episode suggested that Teddy’s warmongering machismo was bound up in his dad. During the Civil War, Roosevelt had watched his father, Theodore senior, pay for a surrogate to fight in his place. For Teddy, Coe says, “this was always a great source of shame. His celebration of masculinity and war, his romanticization of war as an experience to all men, is a reaction to his dad.” And if, to overcompensate for this excruciating embarrassment, Roosevelt felt compelled to speechify for over an hour while his torso hemorrhaged, then that’s his decision. But it also affected his own parenting.

Roosevelt had four sons, and he wanted his boys to be the valorous warriors his own father hadn’t been. When World War I broke out, the youngest, Quentin, memorized an eye chart to ensure he’d pass his exam and be able to serve. He was, in short order, shot down and killed by the Germans. Roosevelt was crestfallen. “To feel that one has inspired a boy to conduct that has resulted in his death has a pretty serious side for a father,” he wrote. He died himself six months later.

But the misery he wrought continued. One son, Archibald, had his knee ripped apart by a grenade. Another, Ted Jr., was wounded in France, then died of a heart attack while serving in World War II. Kermit, Roosevelt’s second son, served in both wars, then ultimately shot himself in the head on a base in Alaska.

You wrote because you didn’t like some comments on Instagram and Facebook. I’m talking about shame and war and death. It’s hardly fair, you’ll say, and you’re right. But this story shows, I think, that dad-barrassment is a powerful and unpredictable force; it warps the imagination, it pollutes the soul. The perpetrators are, inevitably, also victims.

By all means, ask your father—gently—if he wouldn’t mind toning down the comments. Tell him to text you privately instead, if you’d prefer. But ultimately the onus is not on your father to stop embarrassing you, but on you to reconcile the embarrassment you feel. I worry you’ve started seeing your father primarily as an engine of embarrassment, not as a complex human being entitled to express his wit, his playfulness, his love.

So, stomach it. Take the bullet, carry on.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

02.27.17

11:00 am

Christoph Niemann

I’m an omnivore, but are there animals that are just too intelligent to eat?

During high school, I went to visit a friend in Louisiana. Because I was a Northerner who’d never been to the South, I was given a lot of exotically Southern stuff to eat, like alligator and rattlesnake. Then came the big Louisianan feast: heaps of spicy crayfish, which we savagely twisted the heads off of then washed down with gallons and gallons of Dr Pepper.

When I got up to go pee, one of the men at the table told me to be sure to wash my hands first. He said it with a tinge of darkness, a whiff of trauma. He explained that it was unwise for a man to go from handling spicy crayfish to handling his penis. He’d been careless once and paid the price. So I washed my hands. But I still remember how worried I was, unzipping, and how hesitantly I moved my hand down, like a kid playing Operation, dreading that horrible bzzz. I’d absorbed the trauma vicariously, but my anxiety was real.

I thought of this when I read that researchers at the University of Bordeaux in France detected a similar kind of intelligently learned anxiety in crayfish. (After suffering a trauma, the crayfish were reluctant to venture into brightly lit, risky areas.) The scientists also found they could alleviate that anxiety by giving the crayfish a Valium-style drug. And while the scientists were careful not to embellish these findings with any anthropomorphic presumptions, I think we all sense the underlying epiphany here: Crayfish are a little more like us than we expected.

These days, it seems, everybody wants to know how smart their meat is. There are all kinds of startling farm-animal-cognition studies. We know that cows enjoy solving problems and have been known to jump into the air excitedly when they finally crack a tough one. Chickens are exceptionally good at delaying gratification, understand small numbers and basic physics, and can adroitly manage the thermostat of their coop. Sheep can remember and recognize as many as 50 human faces without making a mistake. Pigs excel at videogames played with special pig joysticks. And even opossums—yes, some people eat them—turn out to be excellent maze runners. One study ranked opossums’ “probability learning” skills second only to humans’ and higher than dogs’. Opossums! Those things that do very little and look dead most of the time!

The upshot, I’d argue, is that all animals are likely too intelligent to eat. Whether you go on eating them, with that knowledge, is up to you. You probably will. I do—proof that intelligence may be massively overrated.

Should I worry that my kid can’t spell? Does spelling matter anymore?

Did you hear about Thomas Hurley III? He was on Jeopardy! last year as an eighth grader—a likable kid from Connecticut with Peter Brady bangs and a blue dress shirt buttoned up to the jugular. He lost. And he lost, in part, because in Final Jeopardy, he wrote “Emanciptation Proclamation” instead of “Emancipation Proclamation.”

Does spelling matter anymore? Honestly, I don’t think so. I mean, initially, even schoolmarmy Alex Trebek read right over Hurley’s mistake. As a defiant Hurley told his local newspaper, “It was just a spelling error.”

Then again, spelling isn’t just about communicating. The culture still views it as a sign of intelligence, diligence, and sophistication. Bad, lackadaisical spellers are not looked at kindly. And neither was Hurley’s contention that he’d been “cheated.” (“Learn how to accept defeat, kid, or you will be disappointed for the rest of your life,” one Facebook comment read.) Clearly, autocorrect and other technologies have started a slow sea change, and maybe one day the persnickety spelling police among us will all have died out and we’ll be free to spel thingz howeEVA weeeeeeeeeee wonte. But, until that day, allowing your kids to blow off spelling may empower them to go against a societal norm without considering the day-to-day discomfort and judgment it could bring: the consequences for them but also for you, their parent.

“He was a little stunned by it,” Hurley’s mom said after the defeat. “He felt embarrassed. It was hard to watch.”

Should I give myself a weekend phone time-out? What if I miss important work?

What kind of job do you have? What kind of boss do you have? How tolerant? How demanding? One possibility is that you’re a senior adviser to the secretary of state, and your inability to be reached during a flare-up by a North African paramilitary group—because you’re lying in a park with a kale-and-bee-pollen smoothie and that copy of The Goldfinch you’ve been meaning to get to—leads to a severe diplomatic misstep and a weeks-long umbrage carnival on Fox News that can only be quelled by the semi-ritualistic firing and public shaming of the bureaucrat responsible: i.e., you. Another is that you’re a beverage distribution middleman, and your boss—who happens to be triple-checking stuff at the office on a Saturday night because he’s going through a divorce and doesn’t know what to do with himself��discovers a niggling glitch in your paperwork that may have sent an extra case of Fresca to Denver, but because your phone’s off he calls Greta, and after a couple minutes of digging she assures him that all the Frescas are, in fact, where they need to be.

See the difference? You’ve given me absolutely no information—just dashed off your question as quickly as possible without a second of reflection. And this suggests that you’re whizzing recklessly through life and, still accelerating, throttled by permanent urgency. You need a break. Your soul needs a break. I have no idea what the consequences might be—how could I?—but I think you should switch off that phone.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

02.24.17

11:00 am

Christoph Niemann

I read that mice injected with blood from younger mice improve on cognitive tests. Should I bank my blood?

So yeah, I went and read about this too. I read that for years scientists have been taking an old mouse and a young mouse, putting them next to each other, and stitching their circulatory systems together, just like jump-starting a car. Then they let the blood of one mouse circulate through the other—a process called parabiosis. And introducing the young mouse's blood—or even just introducing one particular protein found in the blood, called GDF11—to an old mouse does all sorts of wonderful stuff: It allows the old mouse to run longer on a treadmill. It changes the old mouse's brain in ways that suggests its memory has been improved. I read that it even rejuvenates a crusty old-mouse heart. Like, voilà! The heart isn't crusty anymore.

I also read that a Harvard scientist named Amy Wagers was “already working to commercialize” GDF11, which is found in human blood too. And this was the eye-opener for me: Even as scientists are always cautioning the media that it's way to soon to speculate about their studies' implications, one of these scientists—the one named Wagers, aptly—was already placing her bet.

Good for her, I say. I'm all for capitalism! But I'm also all for hematological self-determination. (Or, say, blood freedom.) I'd hate, one day, to have to pay some multinational corporation for a synthetic knockoff of my own younger self's blood—the very stuff that was pumping through my body for decades without costing me a damn cent. What a dystopia that would be! There'd be kids on the corner with clipboards, asking for donations so Americans for Hematological Self-Determination could sue these corporations. There'd be Blood Freedom teach-ins and Blood Freedom protest songs—which would be hard because “Blood Freedom” really doesn't rhyme with much.

So my answer is yes, absolutely. Stockpile your blood now, as much as can be squirreled away at the proper temperature. Just in case. Think of it as a tiny hedge against the Wagers of the future.

I get a lot of swag from startups—messenger bags, fleeces, hats, T-shirts—and my girlfriend makes fun of me for wearing it. Which is the douchiest to wear? Like, is a fleece cooler than a hat?

Look, I don't care what you wear, but I do think that a startup fleece is definitely not cooler than a startup hat, because a startup fleece puts the name and logo of the startup in closer proximity to your heart than a startup hat would. My instinct is, keep this stuff away from your heart. Far away. The closer to your heart, the douchier.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

02.23.17

11:00 am

Christoph Niemann

My best friend dropped our Snapchat streak, and I’m hurt. What should I do?

Oof. I know how it feels. Streaks are magic; streaks are wild. There you are, you and your bestie, slinging those pictures and videos back and forth, getting that sacred pendulum of digital adorableness and hilarity moving between you, and you start to feel momentum, don’t you? A rhythmic bond—a fellowship, a closeness—taking hold. You’re in it together! And, better still, that little flaming number keeps ticking up, higher and higher. You’re watching your progress, reciprocally microdosing the endorphins. Then suddenly, all that excitement stops. You send a snap, and no snap comes back. It’s a gut punch. It’s over. You’re dropped.

Like I said: Oof. I empathize. And yet I can’t claim to understand the hurt of being dropped nearly as well as Maica Folch, who has been literally dropped and literally hurt from the dropping.

Folch is an aerialist in San Francisco who spent much of her adult life working as a trapeze artist. She started when she was just a teenager. Has Folch ever been dropped? Yes. Yes, she has. And, somewhere beneath the acute pain of impact, did she also feel something akin to the abandonment and resentment you’re dealing with? No, she did not.

It’s 1987, Barcelona. Dress rehearsal, the day before a big aerial dance performance. Folch has been hoisted 80 feet off the ground in a meticulously engineered elastic harness. And yet not so meticulously, because there’s been a miscalculation with the rigging and, before Folch can comprehend what’s happening, she sees the floor racing toward her.

She is falling, most likely to her death. And it’s just like everyone says: “I saw the movie of my life,” she tells me. She hears her gasping colleagues calling out as she speeds down at them. What happens next is unexpected, and yet it happens so naturally. “I was so peaceful,” Folch says. “And I fell down like a feather.”

She hits the ground. She bounces. Bounces! Remember, she’s basically tied to an enormous rubber band, and this serene feather of a woman bounces so high that she’s able to grab a rope up there and steady herself. “If I had freaked out and come down with an intense energy,” Folch says—if she’d stiffened and steeled herself—her body would have shattered. Instead she was bruised, like a fallen apple, but “didn’t break a bone.”

And here’s the most helpful part of the story: It never occurred to Folch, after being dropped, to feel jilted or angry. “When something goes wrong,” she says, “there is no one to blame.” It’s a kind of aerialist credo, really—put loyalty and trust first. You say to each other, “I love what I do, I love doing it with you, and if I start doing it with you, it’s because I trust you,” she explains.

“We don’t live in a perfect world,” Folch says. Carabiners fail. People fail. Friends don’t always return your snap. And it’s probably not because they don’t love you but likely just because none of us, zipping around on our phones and in real life simultaneously, swinging like trapeze artists between these two platforms of frenetic distraction, can be expected to do it all perfectly or to recognize the many distant and private emotional burdens our little snaps might bear. We will let each other down. It’s just a fact. But we all deserve some slack, some good faith—especially from our best friends.

The secret to a thriving trapeze partnership, Folch says, is not necessarily forgiveness but refusing to think of the inevitable disappointments of life as requiring forgiveness in the first place. “You create unconditional relationships. There is pain. There is guilt. But you don’t disappear from the picture.”

And so my answer is: Move on. You’re fine. Learn to love more. Learn from Folch, who knew, deep down, how to handle being dropped and how to bounce back too.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

10.28.16

7:00 am

Christoph Niemann

I pictured this Nest Cam looming over you—pictured its one dark eye, unblinking—and I immediately thought of that nasty old Cyclops who terrorizes Odysseus and his men in The Odyssey. What was his name? What was the story, exactly? I figured I better reread that bit.

In a nutshell, Odysseus and his men are returning from a long, atrocious war. Landing for a stopover on the island of the Cyclopes, Odysseus confesses he’s at a loss to understand this mountaintop-dwelling race of one-eyed savages: They don’t fear the gods! They have no laws! They are just too alien to be intelligible; Odysseus sees them only as “brutes,” beneath his regard. So he leads his men into a cave—the home of one particular Cyclops who isn’t home—and ransacks it. They build a fire and help themselves to all his many cheeses.

Well, the Cyclops—his name is Polyphemus—is pretty ticked off when he returns (the original “Who moved my cheese?”). And Odysseus suddenly turns diffident and cloying: “We’re at your knees in hopes of a warm welcome,” he tells the Cyclops. But does he apologize for what essentially amounts to home invasion? No, he does not. Instead, he demands a gift! That’s right, Odysseus asks the giant for a “guest-gift,” the giving of which, he explains, is a mandatory and sacred custom between guests and their hosts, as dictated by his Greek gods.

Let’s pause the narrative right there. I was sure the story had something instructive to say about what happens when the expectations of a guest and the expectations of his host don’t match up. Because your problem seems to be that you expect privacy, while your hosts expect to continue protecting their home with the latest Wi-Fi–enabled surveillance tools. They’d like to keep their minds at ease; you’d like to keep their eyes off your privates. And I felt obligated to defend their interests—privilege them—and conclude that the host-guest power dynamic is tilted toward the host and that, like it or not (and in your case I certainly wouldn’t like it either), being a guest means accepting a degree of powerlessness. Keeping the camera running is disrespectful to you, and creepy, but maybe that’s just how it’s got to be.

But then, back in The Odyssey, things escalated. Polyphemus bashes two of the men on the ground of his cave until “their brains gushed out all over,” then rips off their limbs and eats them. So Odysseus sharpens a stake, heats it in a fire, and stabs it through the Cyclops’ single peeper. It’s an ugly story, in other words. And its ugliness snapped me back to reality. Because you are not some pea-sized Odysseus trapped in a terrible colossus’s cave. You are a human being staying in another human being’s house, and part of what makes us human is our willingness to engage in empathic back-and-forths to reconcile conflicting expectations. We compromise. We try to act decently toward each other.

And suddenly I pictured you, alone in another person’s cavernous house, with that ominous, unyielding eyeball trained on you 24/7, and I imagined how vulnerable and exposed you must feel—how stripped of self-respect—and also how resentful. Because why else would the first solution that occurred to you be, essentially, to blind the camera? No, you don’t have a right to do so. But couldn’t you take a more obvious, less defiant tack? Couldn’t you just respectfully ask your host to deactivate the camera? Or to program it around your daily schedule, so it only flicks on when you leave?

I really don’t think it will be a hard conversation to have; part of me assumes it never occurred to the homeowners how uncomfortable leaving that camera on would make you feel. But I get it: Sometimes we stew for so long that we get lost overthinking these things. Maybe what we learn from Homer, ultimately, is that not every problem is epic.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

09.25.16

6:40 am

christoph Niemann

My cat will only drink from a running tap—not even a cat fountain. But I live in a drought-stricken state. Help?

You’re familiar with the Misfits, I assume. They are iconic, the so-called horror-punk band that played hard and demonically fast while singer Glenn Danzig—a huge, dark creature from New Jersey with a forbidding curtain of long black hair—screamed. Danzig’s songs had titles like “Skulls” and “Die, Die My Darling” and, of course, “Mommy, Can I Go Out and Kill Tonight?” That last one could, arguably, be read as a bloodthirsty anthem written in solidarity with America’s imprisoned house cats because, as the world would eventually discover, Danzig is a cat fancier.

A few years ago, pockets of the Internet had a good laugh at Danzig’s expense when a photograph surfaced of him walking out of a grocery store carrying a tub of Fresh Step kitty litter. (If you don’t understand why this was funny, one incredibly left-brained commenter on the site Metalsucks.net provided this analysis: “It is funny because it is something of an ironic satire to see someone who has widely been written about as an offbeat satanist buying kitty litter.”) Danzig himself had another take: “Why do people even care?” he shot back. “Why are they wasting their lives on this?” He had a point. People laughed at him for not being punk enough; he outpunked them all by not caring.

“Glenn Danzig is my spirit animal,” Daniel Quagliozzi told me recently. Quagliozzi is the proprietor of Go, Cat, Go!, a feline behavioral consultancy in San Francisco; he comes to your house and troubleshoots your cat problems. DQ, as he’s known, also grew up in New Jersey and spent his formative years deep in the punk scene, whipping his then-mohawked head around to the Misfits. “They don’t want to be told what to do. They don’t want your hands on them or their lifestyle,” DQ explains—and this, he adds, is precisely what he appreciates about cats as well.

“I relate to them. I relate to their F U attitude toward society. They make you wonder, ‘Why the hell did I invite them in the house in the first place?’” In fact, DQ has regularly seen owners of defiant felines reduced to “wearing shrouds of cardboard to protect themselves from their swatting cats, or carrying water pistols or air horns to blast their cats away.” One guy resigned himself to keeping the litter box on his couch, because that’s where the cat insisted on pissing and crapping. All too often, DQ says, people are “just not ready for the hostile takeover.”

When I asked DQ about your problem, he let out a long sigh and said, “The running water thing is so … God.” There are countless reasons why a cat would demand a running faucet. “Maybe the water in the bowl is stale or not the right temperature, or the bowl might be too small and it’s creating whisker stress.” (Yes, whisker stress: Google it.) Maybe the cat feels more secure on the counter. “Or it could be boredom.” Maybe your cat leads such a dreary life that trickling water qualifies as fun.

My advice? Hire DQ. Fly him in if you have to; frankly, the guy’s aptitude with cats blew me away. Otherwise, he suggested trying to “mimic what’s happening in the same location.” Start by putting a recirculating fountain next to the sink; often, DQ says, we overlook the importance of location when assessing cat problems. (Maybe, for example, your cat just wants its water separate from its food, or up off the ground.)

But most of all: Steel yourself for confrontation—for a kind of protracted, brutal brinkmanship. Your cat isn’t likely to go on strike and die of thirst, DQ says, but any change you make will likely leave the animal “anxious and unsettled.” And that is “definitely going to be harder on the guardian than it is on the cat.” That is, the cat will try to own you—belittle you. Find your inner Danzig and flip the script.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

05.24.16

9:00 am

I think someone is hate-retweeting me. She has 25K followers! Should I call her out?

Easy. Couldn’t be easier. Hate-favoriting and hate-retweeting is childish behavior. So if you want to be bold, by all means call her out. And if you want to be less bold but perhaps more effective, just block her: Game over.

And yet, can I be honest? This may be the most subtly perplexing question I’ve ever had to pretend to be a know-it-all about. Because if I push just a bit on your premise, it all goes soft. I can see ancillary dilemmas, qualifications, and niggling unknowns pile up until the kind of clear, objective truth I’m required to find gets hopelessly boxed in. There’s a lot here to pick apart. Let’s start with the corrosive, discombobulating nature of spite.

Ever heard of the Spite Fence? Go back to 1876. San Francisco’s Big Four—the four main bazillionaire railroad barons—all decided to build mansions on a scenic, empty hilltop: Nob Hill. At least, it was mostly empty. Bounded within the large property purchased by one of these magnates, Charles Crocker, was a little house on a small, separate parcel owned by an undertaker named Nicholas Yung. Crocker wanted Yung gone; Yung wouldn’t sell. Crocker, bewildered that his money hadn’t made this inconvenience go away, kept making offers. Yung kept declining. So Crocker—overcome with spite—started a flame war. Or a wall war.

Crocker built his mansion. Then he built a 30-foot-high wall on his land that effectively surrounded Yung’s property. It shut out the light. It shut Yung in. It was ridiculous looking, and people came from all over to gawk at it. There was a kind of class war brewing in the city at the time, and one activist pamphlet singled out Crocker’s fence as a “very obnoxious” symbol of “the domineering spirit” of the wealthy. The San Francisco Chronicle called the Spite Fence an “inartistic monument of resentment” and a “memorial of malignity and malevolence.” Yet Yung—the simple undertaker, just wanting to live his life, in his house—didn’t sell. The undertaker was himself essentially buried, though still aboveground. But he just took it, took the high road, and let that towering manifestation of Crocker’s out-of-control id speak for itself. Yung never even retaliated, though he thought about it. His wife said, “There are some things to which people like ourselves do not care to stoop.”

You must feel like Nicholas Yung: tweeting through your life in a pure, happy-go-lucky way, only to see a wall of spite building up in this other person’s timeline, one hateful retweet at a time, to rebuke you. And like I said at the outset: How nasty that is; how immature. But why do you think these likes and retweets are hate-likes and hate-retweets, as opposed to supportive likes and supportive retweets? What would lead you to this conclusion? I can’t help but wonder if there’s something you’re not telling me—if you yourself worry there’s an arrogant, airheaded, obnoxious, or self-congratulatory tone to what you’re tweeting, the sort of attitude that typically elicits that kind of resentment online. Are you, for example, relentlessly issuing tidbits like “So lucky my baby sleeps for 12 hours each night!!!!!! Almost enough time for tantric sex with my amazing partner!” or “Just had lunch with Bon Jovi! #blessed”?

I’m not saying you are. I’m just wondering. Honestly. I don’t want to blame the victim. My point is, the victim of one kind of obnoxiousness can be a perpetrator of another. You ought to give that a hard think and figure out which side of this Spite Fence you’re actually standing on, before you poke your head over and start shouting.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

04.07.16

11:00 am

Christoph Niemann

Two stories. Try to hold them together in your mind.

The first involves a man named Muki Bácsi, at a Hungarian wedding in 1879. Muki was a drunk, apparently, but a beloved and awe-inspiring one. He was the region’s “champion drinkist,” according to the London Telegraph. And so, arriving at the wedding banquet, Muki found a tremendous 3-pint glass at his place and was told that, as the party proceeded through toast after toast, he was expected, each time, to suck this hulking receptacle dry, then fill it up again.

Muki sighed. “Lads, I am about to die,” he began. He was certain he was on the verge of a stroke, and the last thing he wanted was to flood his ailing innards with wine. And yet, Muki also knew he was at a gosh darn wedding and that weddings are specially charged, sacred days that temporarily reorganize the universe entirely around love and joyousness and mirth. Muki considered this, considered his glass, and pushed a great gust of air out of his weathered lungs. His lips formed that air into words: “So be it! A man can die but once!” And then Muki started to drink and drink. He drank until 2 in the morning. Then Muki asked to be carried to a bed, groaned once, and died. He was, the paper reported, “the merriest wedding guest of them all.”

The second story is shorter: In 1912, Elizabeth Lang shot a woman dead in Indiana. The case was open-and-shut, according to The New York Times. Elizabeth offered a clear confession. “She said I was ugly. She said I was old. I killed her for that, and I am not a bit sorry for it,” she told police. If it sounds extreme, it is—I’m not going to excuse it. And yet, monitor the slight shift in your own understanding and feelings when I reveal that this incident occurred at Elizabeth’s wedding.

It’s possible these stories aren’t entirely true—that they are, instead, the truth extruded through the melodramatic, yellowish journalistic conventions of their time. But even as fables, they offer some relevant lessons.

From Muki, we learn that the ideal wedding guest is submissive. Making the day a success requires that, to some degree, everyone subsume their needs and join with a larger collective spirit of conviviality. We guests arrive when we’re told to. We wear what we’re told to. If Abba comes on, we dance to Abba—even subpar Abba, like “Fernando.” We do these things because we care; it’s the Muki in us.

And from Elizabeth, we learn never to piss off the bride and groom. Even as all of us guests work to put our individual feelings aside for the day, we must understand that the bride and groom’s desires can become grotesquely elephantine and should be allowed to carry extra weight.

These are extreme examples, of course. But you are not being asked to festively drink yourself to death. You are being asked to use a hashtag on Instagram. And if you didn’t use the hashtag, and the bride murdered you for it, that would be nuts. So no, I can’t claim you are “required” to use the hashtag. But whatever your objections, using it seems like such a trivial sacrifice. The couple is merely asking for help gathering your photos into a larger virtual collection, easily viewed by them, their guests, and their would-have-been guests (excluded by head count costs, travel expenses, family feuds, and so on).

Hashtags can be dumb. I get it, I do. But this hashtag genuinely feels like a force for good. Like the wedding itself, it’s a mechanism for bringing people together. Why stand in its way?

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

02.10.16

4:35 pm

Christoph Niemann

I’ve declared evenings and weekends a digital holiday. Should I set up an email autoreply to let people know?

Compassion. Sensitivity. Openness. Tolerance. I’d like to think that these are the core values of the Mr. Know-It-All column—the imperturbable foundations on which, every month, I try to build this tiny chapel of words. I’m not going to lie: This job is intimidating! Your questions come ricocheting into my inbox from WIRED HQ, sweeping toward me like a flurry of screeching bats from the mouth of a dark cave. And it’s up to me—only me—to lasso one of those unruly mammal-birds and tame it, transmute it into something more approachable, a gentle, sweetly singing canary whose song is Truth. Admittedly, sometimes it goes better than others. (Like that weird bat-and-canary bit—that one kind of got away from me.) But my feeling is, if I approach your questions with an open heart—if I try to locate, within that cryptic line or two you’ve submitted, some glint of shared humanity and try to understand you—then I cannot fail.

But I don’t understand you. I just don’t. I read your question on Friday evening, after a hectic week. I typically like to get an early jump on knowing-it-all, but I figured—just this once—I could mull over your question all weekend and bang out a thoughtful answer just before it was due. Then I thought to myself: “Why wouldn’t you set up an email autoreply?” I assumed I was missing something.

I fell asleep wondering what it might be—wondering about you. I slept very well. On Saturday I woke up to discover my car was dead in the driveway. I jump-started it. Then my sister-in-law visited. I made some soup. Sunday: took my kids on a hike, learned to use a chain saw, caught a few minutes of The Bourne Ultimatum, cooked a so-so chicken dish.

Now it’s Monday morning. The sun is rising; the column is due. I still don’t understand you. Do you have a justifiable reason to not set up an autoreply? I can’t imagine one. (How much of an inconvenience can it be? It’s automated!) I also wondered if, in a society where we all seem slavishly and often necessarily tied to our devices—where so many of us feel perpetually on call—you worry that your obstinate rejection of email every weekend will come off, to the rest of us, as a preposterous, selfish luxury. Does an automated email responder rub your privilege in our faces?

Yes, maybe a little. But guess what else it does: IT TELLS US YOU’RE NOT THERE. Imagine if I’d reached out to you for clarification on your question on Friday. Now imagine me waiting for a reply, consulting my phone as I continued to turn your question over in my mind. Imagine how that would have colored my weekend—impinged, just a bit, on my enjoyment of my family, my soup, my chainsawing, my Jason Bourne, my chicken. And, as you depleted my various joys with your unresponsiveness all weekend long, imagine how I might have come to resent you for it.

But I don’t resent you. Because, although you say you’ve declared your weekends a digital holiday, you’ve so far only declared it to me. And thanks for that. It saved me some hassle. Me and you are totally cool.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

02.09.16

4:40 pm

Christoph Niemann

How long should you wait before shutting down someone’s Facebook account after they die?

“This is for all you lovers out there.” That’s how it begins—one of the most existentially horrifying moments in American cinema.

I’m talking about the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance in Back to the Future, in which we see a temporally displaced Marty McFly onstage, sitting in with the band on “Earth Angel” with a guitar, while his teenage parents, George and Lorraine, move toward their first kiss.

This is it: the precise, excruciatingly brief moment in which the cosmos will offer up the possibility for them to fall in love—a doorway they can step through or not step through. But if they do, it’s a straight shot from here through the sinews of the spacetime continuum to marriage, and to Marty’s birth, and to all the circumstances of life that Marty had always mistaken for the one and only, inviolable reality. But he’s wising up now. While traveling through time, he’s learning that his life, like all of our lives, is only an exquisite and provisional fluke—a haphazard product of so many collisions and coincidences that were never guaranteed. Up on the stage, he’s about to be confronted with this truth in a deep and terrible way.

You know the scene, right? It turns on an obnoxious redhead who tells George to “scram,” then cuts in between him and Lorraine and sweeps her away. Slowly, a warped and nightmarish score rises over “Earth Angel.” Marty becomes disoriented, diminished. His strength—his selfhood—is draining out of him as, out on the dance floor, that insufferable ginger cackles and whips Lorraine around like a rag doll. He is dragging Lorraine farther and farther from George—and dragging our universe (or maybe all of this is proof of a multiverse?) farther from its capacity to produce Marty’s life, diverting the sacred headwaters of his personal history.

Marty’s compromised hands batter his guitar, making a discordant mess of “Earth Angel.” He raises one hand and watches it turn … translucent! His face is stupefied, powerless. Somehow Michael J. Fox—that cocky scion of 1980s precociousness—pulls it off: this look of violated innocence and panic, of a carefree boy suddenly thrown down and dying on the battlefield of time.

What is happening to Marty? Doc Brown has already explained the process: Marty is being “erased from existence.” Stop and think about those words for a second. They are horrifying. (A thrash metal band from Belfast called Scimitar even wrote an abrasive, ear-pummeling song called “Erased from Existence,” inspired by this scene. It’s very hard to listen to.) But the worst part isn’t even that Marty himself is being erased. The true, piercing horror comes when he looks at the photograph slipped through the strings of his guitar: the one of his brother and sister and him standing against a low rock wall. Earlier in the film we’ve seen the images of his two siblings vanish from that photo, and now Marty’s image is fading too. This is what it means to be erased from existence. And this is what frightens me most: not just that Marty is vanishing but that all evidence of his life will vanish. No one will know who he was, because—here’s the thing—he wasn’t.

You ask how long you should wait before shutting down the Facebook page of a loved one who’s died. I ask why you’d ever want to delete it. Consider the ripple effects—the many ways their absence would be felt across that platform, on so many other people’s pages and their community’s collective, digital memory. Everything the deceased had said, not just on their own page but on others, would be gone. And so would everything people had said to them. They’d be instantaneously untagged from hundreds or even thousands of other people’s photos, exiled into some anonymous interloper status: a nameless human void.

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Source

https://www.wired.com/2017/03/kia-social-media-apps/

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woods2006gal · 8 years ago

Text

Party On, Garth

“All right, well, call us if he wakes up or, you know, anything. Yeah, fine. Thanks for your help, Meg,” Dean says, then hangs up his newly acquired cell phone and shoves it in his pocket. He pulls out his flask and takes a quick swig. “What a bitch.”

Sam shakes his head as he leans forward. It was one of the few times where he rode in the backseat as Addison was driving. “So, Cas is the same, then,” he asks.

“Down to the drool.”

“Huh.”

“By the way, how is your custard?”

“It’s all right. It’s getting better. Just wish it wasn’t like the damn tape from The Ring. I mean, I feel like I’m okay cause I passed on the crazy.”

“No, you didn’t. You heard what Cas said.”

“Let’s — let’s not. You know what?”

Music starts playing and Dean stares at Addison in disbelief as she pulls out her iPhone. “You’re fucking kidding me, right?”

Addison smirks. “Thank you for calling as my ringtone annoys my friend.”

“Because it’s fucking annoying, Addison,” Dean tells her.

“Hey, Addison. It’s Garth,” the familiar voice greets.

“Oh, we worked on that demon thing, didn’t we?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, we definitely owe you one. So, how can we help?”

“I’m ready to cash in that chip. There’s something brewing in Junction City, Kansas.”

“Just text me the details and we’ll meet you there.”

“We’re going to help some random dude,” Dean asks, after she hangs up.

“It’s Garth,” Addison answers. Seeing the blank look on his face, she smiles. “He helped us while Sam was being drugged by his number one fan. We owe him one.”

Dean shakes his head. “Fine.” A silence settles over the car until familiar music starts playing. He glares at Addison. “Turn it off.”

“No.”

“Turn it off, Addison.”

“I believe the rule is driver picks the music, shotgun shuts their cake hole. And since I’m driving, this is what I want to listen to.”

“This is not music. This is…It’s not music, Addison.”

Dean turns to his younger brother. Sam holds up his hands. “Dude, it’s your rule. And you never let either of us pick the music when you’re driving.”

“My own brother,” Dean coldly mutters. Sam shakes his head in amusement.

Addison smirks and turns up the volume. “Tell me why, I never wanna hear you say, I want it that way,” she sings and grins when Dean glares at her.

“I hate you.” ~*~ “Well, this is it,” the coroner says, leading the trio into the morgue. They stare when they see Garth next to the table with a white sheet covering the body. It wasn’t seeing their fellow hunter that caught them a little off guard, it was seeing Garth was dressed in military fatigues. “Agents, this is Corporal Brown.”

“Corporal James Brown," Garth greets, with a sad smile. “I’m shipping off to the AF mañana. I’m here to pay respects to my cousin as I will not be able to attend the funeral.”

“That must be terrible for your family. Losing two brothers so fast.”

The trio exchanges a look at the revelation, before looking at Garth who was surprised at the news. “Yeah. Yeah. My aunt…she’s, uh, she’s real broke up about it.”

“Hey, Doc, can we see both files, please,” Sam asks.

The coroner nods and grabs a file of a table before it handing it to Sam. A phone rings and the coroner pulls out his cell phone. “My wife. I’ll, uh, be in my office.”

“Great,” Dean lets out as the coroner walks out of the morgue.

“Garth, you didn’t say that they were brothers,” Addison says.

“Dude, I just found out about the other corpse, and…started moving quick. I’m sucking up info as I go,” Garth defends.

“What? Are you allergic to a suit,” Dean questions.

“No. I just look good in a uniform.”

“Yep. Same cause of death,” Sam tells them, moving over to a computer in the corner.

“Right, uh, gutted at night in the woods, where legend says that the ghost of Jenny Greentree roams,” Garth reiterates. He frowns as Dean pulls out his EMF meter. “Oh, uh, I already scanned for EMF…” He trails off as the meter goes the charts. “Oh. Um, I guess mine must be broken again.”

“All right. I’m reading your mail. Uh, ghost of Jenny whatever,” Dean mumbles.

“Greentree. That’s just it. I torched her bones.”

“Seems like she’s still got something keeping her around,” Addison says, lifting the sheet off of the body. She raises an eyebrow upon seeing what appeared to be a large bite mark in the center of the victim’s chest.

“Highly doubtful. Chick was homeless. Plus, is it me or is this less evil spirit, more monster chow?”

“A werewolf,” Dean asks, glancing at Addison and she shrugs.

“Except, uh, the witness said that whatever was chasing the victim numero uno was invisible.”

Dean chuckles. “Uh, so invisible ghost werewolf?”

“Why’d you think I called for backup?”

“Hey,” Sam calls and they turn to him. “Any of you ever heard of a Thighslapper Ale?”

“Is that a stripper or a beverage?”

“Beverage for douchebags,” Dean clarifies.

“It’s actually a pretty good beer,” Addison comments and Dean stares at her. “What? It is.”

“Uh, number one microbrew in the Pacific Northwest,” Sam tells them.

“But we’re in Kansas,” Garth argues.

“Yeah, I rest my case. What’s your point,” Dean asks.

“The owner is the dad to the dead brothers,” Sam explains.

“Right. I’ll can the uniform, go Fed. See you at the brewery in forty,” Garth says, then quickly leaves the morgue.

“He grows on you,” Dean states. ~*~ Addison shrugs on her black blazer after she climbing out of the junk car. The trio, along with Garth, had made their way to the Midwestern Brewing Company. Dean places a hand on her lower back as they make their way towards the building. “Agents,” a brunette woman greets, opening the doors from the inside of the building. “I’m Marie. I’m a manager.”

“Thanks for coming in on a Sunday,” Dean tells her.

“We want to help. Anything we can do.”

The hunters follow Marie into the building. “Oh. So all this is your dad’s, huh?”

“And his friend - Randy Baxter. They own the place together now.”

Sam frowns. “Uh, ‘now?’”

“Well, since Dale died.” The group stops when they hear people arguing. Two men were standing in an office along with a young man, who appeared to be a janitor’s uniform. “The, uh, charming Randy Baxter,” Marie explains, motioning to the man who was yelling.

“Tell you what,” Randy begins, glaring at the young man. “Congratulations. You’re headed for the graveyard shift. Be one second late and you’re fired.”

“Yes, sir,” the young says, then quickly walks out of the office.

“He’s actually a really nice guy,” Marie quickly tells them. “It’s just not easy being the axman.

“So true,” Dean adds.

Garth clears his throat. “My comrades got you covered, so if you’ll excuse me.”

“Uh, yeah, I’ll go with you,” Sam says, then walks into the office with Garth.

Marie sighs. “He blamed himself when Dale died, and now this,” she tells them while they walk towards the brewery.

“If you don’t mind me asking, but why would your father blame himself,” Addison questions.

“Well, Dale was sensitive. But what do you do — watch them twenty-four seven? You can’t blame Dale’s friends.”

“But your dad still feels bad,” Dean states.

“And it doesn’t help Dale’s wife is suing us.”

“Really? Why?”

“She’s angry and grieving and this is America?” ~*~ “There’s a million things with claws that go bump in the night,” Dean says. He was sitting on the couch with Addison. Her with her iPad and him with John’s journal. Sam was sitting at a table with his laptop while Garth was at the bar, fiddling with his EMF reader. After leaving the brewery, they had headed to Garth’s motel room. “Once you throw in ‘invisible,’ the number goes down.” He closes the journal and sets it on the night stand. He rolls his eyes, seeing the hotel brochure. “‘Afternoon delights?’ Really, Garth? Don’t you think this place is a little, uh…”

“Uh, you want a nice hot tub after a day at the office,” Garth tells them. “It’s the little things. I feel sad for those brewery dudes. Spending your life beautifying the world through beer. First a partner offs himself. Now two kids get ganked by unknown freak-a-deek.”

“According to this, Dale wasn’t just a partner. He was also the brewmaster,” Sam says. He doesn’t say anything as Dean pulls out Bobby’s flask and takes a swig.

“‘Brewmaster?’”

“He was widely considered a genius.”

“All right. That’s it,” Dean replies, standing up. He walks over to where Garth was sitting at the bar and places the flask on the counter top. He doesn’t hear Garth’s EMF meter light up. “No microbrew is worth, what was it, eight Food Magazine awards?” He grabs a few beers out of the fridge and hands them out before twisting the cap off his own bottle. “Beer’s not food. It’s…whatever water is.” Addison places her beer on the coffee table before turning her attention back to her iPad. “Hmm. Thighslapper.” He takes a swig. “Wow, that’s actually awesome. Damn it, I’m not even mad anymore.”

“Told you,” Addison mutters. She smiles at the annoyed look at the Dean shoots her.

A gulping noise gets their attention and they watch as Garth quickly drinks his bottle of beer. “Wow. Party on, Garth.”

“I don’t even usually drink beer. It messes with my depth perception,” Garth tells them after, dropping his empty bottle on the counter. Addison raises an eyebrow when he hiccups. “Especially when I skinny dip. Hey, you guys want to hear a joke?”

“Listen to this. This is something interesting,” Sam begins and Garth bursts out laughing. “Garth, are you drunk?”

“Dude, I just…drank a whole beer. Of course I’m drunk,” Garth replies, then lets out a loud burp.

“So, you found something interesting,” Addison asks, turning to Sam.

Sam nods. “Right. Uh…”

“Hey, can I have some more Thighslapper,” Garth asks.

“No,” Sam and Addison say at the same time.

“No. Coffee for you, Tara Reid,” Dean tells him.

“Coffee with kalhua in it,” Garth hopefully questions.

“So, it says that Dale actually left the company two weeks before he died. Or maybe he got pushed out cause he didn’t want to sell. I mean, Baxter said the deals been in the works for months,” Sam explains.

“That explains why Dale’s widow would be suing,” Addison says.

“Maybe Dale had a bone to pick and he’s still picking it,” Dean suggests.

“Right. So, maybe he’s a spiritu malo,” Garth adds.

The police scanner on the bar lets out a noise. “Unit to McAnn residence. 698 Washburn.”

“‘McAnn residence,’” as in Jim McAnn,” Sam asks.

“As in, let’s hope for their sake our spiritu ain’t made it out of the woods. All right. Let’s go check,” Garth says, standing up.

“Uh, you two go. Ads and I are gonna visit the widow,” Sam says. Dean looks at them and receives two amused smiles in response. ~*~ “Your husband did a lot of traveling, huh,” Sam asks, as he and Addison sit across from the widow. She was an older blonde woman, who was obviously exhausted by the events that had been going on the past few days.

“He went to all kinds of exotic places for the best ingredients,” the widow tells them.

“Right. We’ve tried his work. It’s - it’s great.”

“We hear that you’re not on the best terms with Dale’s old partners,” Addison says.

“Well, they sold his company right out from under him. It’s not about money. It’s about…it was his baby, you know,” the widow explains.

“You sound pretty upset about it,” Sam comments.

“I’m furious. I hate them. But then I think how Dale was.”

Addison frowns. “What do you mean?”

“His friends left him behind, but you know what he said? ‘I’m gonna send them a gift that shows I forgive them.’”

“Do you have any idea what sent them,” Sam questions.

“Bottle of sake. From one his trips. In a gorgeous box with writing. He was so careful with it. Wouldn’t let me touch it.” ~*~ After stopping to change and to give Dean a call, while also learning what he and Garth had found out, Sam and Addison are waiting outside the brewery, waiting for Dean and Garth. “Just spit it out,” Addison says, breaking the silence that had settled over them since leaving the widow’s house.

“No idea what you’re talking about,” Sam replies, shooting her a reassuring smile.

Addison stares at him, then shakes her head. A car pulls up and they watch as Dean climbs out. Sam quickly picks the lock on the brewery door and they make their way up to the offices. “Found it,” Addison says, gingerly picking up the wooden box. She sets it on the desk and slowly opens it. Japanese writing covered the inside of the box. A bottle of sake was sitting inside.

Sam picks up the bottle. “Oh,” he says, upon noticing the broken seal on the bottle. “Wait a second. Someone’s been sampling the goods.”

“Oh, you don’t say,” Dean replies. He motions to the security camera hanging in the corner. “Hey, check it out. God, I love paranoid people. See if you can get on.”

Sam sits down behind the computer. It easily boots up. “Okay. Uh…” He trails off as he opens the security feed. “Huh.” Addison shakes her head as the boys wave at the camera. “All right, so, first death was, what, uh four months ago? Yeah?”

“Yeah. Trevor McAnn,” Addison tells him.

“So, what did he let out of that bottle.” They watch as three men appear on the screen. “Nothing there.”

“That we can see,” Dean adds, watching as Trevor grabs a few liquor bottles from the office. Addison watches as Dean grabs a bottle of whiskey and a couple of glasses. He sets the glasses on the table before taking a swig from the bottle.

“Seriously,” Addison questions.

“Tick tock,” Dean replies. Addison sighs and grabs the bottle from him. She fills the two glasses before setting the bottle of the desk.

“I mean, can you even get drunk anymore,” Sam asks, glancing at Dean. “It’s kind of like, uh, drinking a vitamin for you, right?”

“Shut up,” Dean mutters, walking back over the cabinet. He grabs a bottle filled with a clear liquor. Addison turns her attention back to the computer, taking a sip of her whiskey in the process. He opens the bottle and takes a sniff, before shrugging and taking a swig from it. “Holy shit.” He grabs an empty glass and fills it, walking back over to Sam and Addison. The three of them clink their glasses, then easily throw them back. They throw back more shots, until their each sufficiently buzzed “All right. Party time.”

“Okay.”

“Rewind and go,” Dean says, pulling a chair over to the desk. They settle in watching the security feed and drinking the liquor. He threads his fingers through the belt loop on Addison’s jeans and tugs her down onto his lap. She fills her glass up with the clear liquor and does the same to his empty glass. She leans back against his chest.

Sam plays the video and they watch as Trevor opens the wooden box. A woman, wearing a dirty white dress and jet black hair appears behind him. “It’s the creepy girl from The Ring,” Addison mutters.

“So, he - he let that thing out of the box and it must have just followed him to the place with all thing thingies,” Sam replies, taking another swig of his whiskey.

“Yes. Yes. That’s smart. I’m actually kind of drunk,” Dean tells them.

Addison leans her head back on his shoulder. “Me too.”

“That’s cause you’ve always been a lightweight.” Dean raises his empty glass. “What is this?”

Addison grabs the bottle of the desk and takes a swig. “Something really good.”

Dean chuckles as he grabs the bottle out of her hand and pours some in his glass. “Me likey.” He turns to his younger brother. “I miss these talks.”

The moment Dean takes a sip of the liquor the office door opens and Randy Baxter enters the office. Dean spits the liquor back into the glass as Addison sits up. “What the hell,” Baxter demands.

“Oh man.”

“Crap,” Addison murmurs, standing up. She sways and grabs onto the desk.

“Uh…” Sam trails off, looking between Dean and Addison.

“Turn it off. Turn it off,” Dean tells him.

“FBI, huh? You know what,” Baxter begins, pulling out his cell phone. “You can save it for the cops.”

“Whoa, whoa,” Sam says, jumping up from his seat. “Mr. Baxter, listen. If - if you just let us explain, you might not—”

Baxter suddenly falls to the floor and they stare in disbelief. Garth was standing behind the man, taser in his hand. “We - we should probably go,” Addison says, looking between the boys. ~*~ “It says, ‘what you took will be taken from you,’” the Japanese man tells the trio, while examining the wooden box they had taken from Baxter’s office. It hadn’t been hard to find a someone who was able to translate the box for them after leaving the brewery. “Like eye for an eye. You with me?”

“Yeah,” Addison replies, then takes a gulp of her coffee.

The chef finishes translating the box and looks at them. “Where’d you guys get this anyway?”

“Why,” Sam asks, shifting. “Is - is there, uh, something the matter?”

“Well, you’re not superstitious, are you,” the chef asks, handing the box back to Sam.

“Not at all,” Dean answers.

“Because…this says the bottle inside contains a Shojo.”

“What’s a…shojo?”

“An alcohol spirit. Look, it’s just an old myth. I wouldn’t worry about it. But they are not known for being friendly.”

Someone from inside the restaurant shouts. “I got to go,” the chef tells them.

“Oh. Uh, hey, uh.” Dean fishes out a wad of cash and hands it to the chef. “There you go. Thank you.”

“Thank you,” the chef replies, then heads back into the restaurant.

The trio make their way back to the motel room, where Garth had taken Baxter back to. “Garth,” Sam begins as they enter the room and find Garth practicing martial arts. They younger Winchester frowns as he looks around. “Where’s Baxter?”

Garth motions to the heart shaped hot tub in the corner. “Dude’s a lot heaver than he looks, FYI. But here.” He pulls out Dean’s EMF meter and sets it on the bar. “Thought you might want this back.”

“You have the CEO of the douchiest microbrew in the US gagged in your hot tub,” Dean states, staring in disbelief at the scene in front of him. “You really think that’s gonna end well?”

“I’m not feeling the love.”

Addison grabs her iPad off the coffee table. “Let’s see what we can find out about a Shojo,” she mutters, sitting down on the couch.

“What’s a shojo?”

“Japanese booze monster,” Dean answers, moving towards the bar.

“I guess that would explain why you got to be drunk to see it. Very poetic.” Sam sits down at the table and opens his laptop. Garth looks over his shoulder as Sam researches. “Ooh. Creepy.”

“Okay. So, a shojo is said to roam where there’s lots of alcohol,” Sam reads. “There’s lore saying that, back in the old day, if you were plastered enough, you could see one skulking around the breweries in Japan.”

“Yeah, but why is this one shredding brewers’ kids,” Dean asks, pouring whiskey into his flask.

“Because you can harness the will of a shojo with the right spell box,” Addison explains, standing up. “Basically, you can create an attack dog to do whatever revenge you want them to do.”

“So Dale nabs one to punish his pals.”

“Send the bottle, sooner or later it’s popped open. Then you a have shojo that will do whatever Dale compelled it do right here on the box,” Sam finishes.

“Wait. Except it’s not killing the people that screwed him over,” Garth reminds.

“Dale’s widow said that company was his baby,” Addison says.

Sam nods. “So, if he really wanted his friends to feel what he felt…”

“He would take theirs,” Dean reasons. “Well, their kids. Jim’s anyways.”

“And Baxter was the godfather.”

“All right, skip to how do we gank it.”

“Good news. It is killable.”

“But…”

“But only with a samurai sword consecrated with a Shinto blessing.”

“Well…that’s not a silver lining. All right, the shojo already cleaned house, right? I mean, Marie’s the last target standing so…I’ll hit the pawn shops and, uh, look for the sword and you guys babysit Marie.”

The EMF meter Garth had set on the bar is knocked off and the hunter quickly catches it. “Yikes. Sorry.”

Dean grabs the EMF meter out of Garth’s hand. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Unless I’ve got nothing to be sorry for.”

“Garth,” Dean warns.

Addison exchanges a look with Sam. “Dean, what’s he talking about,” she asks.

“I’m concerned that Bobby might be haunting you,” Garth explains. “I - I brought it up to Dean and he shot me down.”

“Garth,” Dean snaps. “Leave it alone.”

“It’s okay,” Sam replies, standing up.

“No, it’s far from okay.”

“I’ve already tried contacting Bobby,” Sam tells them. Dean stares at his younger brother with a shocked look. “When that beer disappeared, I pulled out a talking board.”

“Without me?”

“You know, I figured, why drag you in…when it’s something I could just put to bed myself.”

“And?”

“And if he was there, I’d have told you.”

Baxter groans. “Talk about this later,” Dean tells them. “You and Ads follow Marie.” He turns to Garth. “Let me borrow your keys.” ~*~ “What if my dad is haunting us,” Addison asks, after throwing back the tequila shot. Keeping an eye on Marie had led her and Sam to a bar near the brewery. They were sitting at the bar, watching Marie through the mirror hanging behind the counter. “I mean, that would explain some things that have been happening.”

Sam shoots her a sad smile as he motions for the bartender to refill their drinks. “I tried that too, Ads. Patrick’s not haunting us either.”

“Oh.” Addison picks up her glass of red wine and quickly empties it.

“I’m sorry that I wasn’t there.”

“It’s fine.” She shoots him a smile. “Seriously. Don’t worry about it.”

Sam’s phone rings and he fishes it out of his jacket pocket. “Yeah,” he greets after spotting Dean’s name on the screen.

“Hey, either of you good to drive,” Dean asks.

“Uh…” Sam trials off, looking between his glass of whiskey and the tequila shot that had just been placed in front of Addison.

“Well, get a ride. It’s at the brewery.”

“What?”

“There’s another kid. Don’t think - move.”

Dean hangs up and Sam shoves his phone in the pocket before standing up. Addison sets a fistful of bill on the counter and slowly stands up. “Uh, I’m way drunker than I thought I was,” Addison tells him as they make their way out of the bar.

“Wait! Wait, wait, wait! Taxi,” Sam shouts as he and Addison rush over to where a couple was climbing into a taxi. “Hey, hey, hey! Stop! Hold on, hold on. National security! Please!” They flash their fake badges at the couple as the couple steps back. “Thank you, ma’am. Sorry.”

“Yeah, uh, thanks,” Addison tells the couple, then slides into the backseat of the cab. “Hey, we need to go to—”

“The brewery,” Sam interrupts. “Step on it!”

“What,” the taxi driver asks, looking between them.

“The brewery! Hurry! Hurry, hurry.” The driver slowly drives down the road and Addison groans. “Please?”

“Yeah, but I like to drive safe, you know,” the driver reminds.

Addison leans in close. “Why are we going to the brewery,” she whispers.

“Dean says there’s another kid.”

“Oh. Gotcha.”

Within a few minutes, they’re pulling up to the brewery. Sam shoves a wad of bills into the driver’s hand, then he’s pulling Addison out of the cab and they’re making their way into the brewery. As they move further into the brewery, a young man, wearing a janitor’s uniform nearly runs into them. “Whoa,” Sam says, grabbing the young by the shoulders. “Easy!”

“We got to get out of here, man,” the young man tells them. “It’s here!”

“Where’s Garth,” Addison asks, looking around.

“Who?”

“Garth,” Sam repeats.

“I - I - there was a guy - he got knocked out!”

“Course he did,” Addison mutters, starting to walk off.

“Ads,” Sam says, grabbing her arm and pulling her back. Her gaze widens seeing the shojo moving towards them. “Stay behind me. Stay behind me.”

“Okay, okay,” the young man replies, staring at the ghost. “What? You can - you can see it?”

“Oh yeah,” Addison answers. “We are so wasted.”

“Fire exit,” Sam says, motioning to the opened door on his right side. “On three.”

“Okay.”

“All right.” The door suddenly slams shut. “Okay. So much for that.”

The shojo appears right in front of them. Addison pushes the young man back as Sam is tossed against the wall. The shojo continues towards them. Addison is thrown across the room and she hits a wall before falling to the ground with a thud. The young man backs up as the shojo advances on him. A hand grabs his shoulder and he jumps seeing Dean with a sword in one hand.

“Get back,” Dean orders, shoving the young man behind him. He slashes at the air in front of him. The shojo punches Dean, the force knocking him to the ground and causing the sword to slide across the room. He looks around the room. At the other end Sam was lying on the ground, unconscious. While a few feet away Addison was also unconscious. He spots the sword a few feet away from. The sword slides across the floor towards him and Dean scoops it up before standing. Sam groans as he slowly wakes up. “Where is it?”

“Uh, swing right,” Sam replies, staring at the shojo. Dean swings to his left, completely missing the spirit. “My right.” Dean swings and Sam watches as the shojo quickly moves out of the way. “Three o’clock, Dean!” He misses the shojo once more. “Six o’clock!” The young man falls to the ground as Dean swings the sword behind him. Hearing an unearthly scream, he shoves the sword backwards, then the releases the sword.

The shojo appears in front of Dean. The spirit lets out a scream and vanishes, leaving the sword to fall to the floor. Dean picks up the sword. “You okay,” he asks the young man.

“I’m alive. Yeah,” the young man answers.

“Sam?”

Sam shoots him a thumbs up. “Yeah.”

“Ads?”

Sam slowly makes his way over to Addison. “She’s still out.”

Dean runs a hand over his face, pushing down the worry. “Where’s Garth,” he questions.

“Well, he’s - he’s over this way,” the young man tells him, motioning down one of the aisles.

“Would you go get him?” The young man scampers off. Dean looks at the sword in his hand and the spot at where it had landed. He looks down at the sword in his hand. He knew it had moved from where it had landed a few feet away from him. “This moved. Bobby? Are you here? Come on, do something.” He’s unaware of Sam and a now awake Addison listening to him. ~*~ “You sure you guys don’t want to hang out,” Garth asks, as he and the trio walk out of his motel room with his bag in his hand. They stop by his car and he tosses the duffel bag into the trunk. “Grab some brunch, maybe some brews?”

Dean chuckles. “Tempting, but, uh, we better roll.”

“All right, well.” Dean’s caught off when Garth embraces him. Addison smiles as Garth hugs her. “Call me anytime.”

“All right,” Dean tells him.

Garth turns to Sam. “And you, Sam.” He holds out a hand and Sam chuckles as he grasps it and shakes. “Aw, come here.” Garth hugs the younger Winchester.

Sam awkwardly pats Garth’s back. “Uh, yeah. Thanks, Garth.”

“Sayonara, kemosabes,” Garth tells him, climbing into his car. He nods over to where the trio’s latest car is parked. “Nice ride.”

“You’re right,” Sam says, watching Garth drive off. “He has grown on me.”

“That he does,” Addison replies, smiling.

Sam clears his throat. “All right, um, so let’s talk about it.”

“About what,” Dean asks, looking between them. Sam shoots him a knowing look. “Oh. The, uh, talking board? That’s fine. I get it, I guess.”

“No, not that. Look, we heard you.”

“Heard me what?”

“Dean, what exactly happened in the brewery,” Addison softly questions.

“Nothing. It was, uh, it was just my imagination.”

Dean turns and walks back into the motel room. “Dean, we know that something happened,” Addison tells him. “Just be honest with us.”

“The blade was across the room and then it was in my hand,” Dean begins. “And then my beer drank itself. Oh, and then that page magically appeared on the bed. And - and then Bobby’s book fell down and out popped the number of the guy who found Cas. Nothing, I’m sure.”

“Clearly,” Sam replies.

“Well then what, Sam? Is Bobby here or not?”

“You know what I think, Dean? I think that regular people, they see ones they lost everywhere too.”

“Yeah, fucking ghosts!”

“Or they just miss ‘em a lot. I mean, they see a face in the crowd, we see a book falling off the table. Same thing, Dean. I did the talking board, I ran plenty of EMF. When that beer went poof - I went a little nuts.”

“Yeah, why didn’t you tell me?”

“Like I said, little nuts at the time.”

“All right, well, if it wasn’t Bobby, then what Jedi’d that sword into my hand?”

“Well, the shojo did slam the door from across the room,” Addison reminds. “Maybe it was trying to grab the sword.”

Dean nods, unconvinced. “Right. Right, I mean if it was Bobby, he would let us know. I mean, who knows more about being a ghost than Bobby? Instant Swayze, right?”

Sam nods. “Exactly.”

“Okay. Okay, you — so your theory is that - that we’re practically regular people about something for once. All right.” The trio each grabs their bags and walks out of the room. “Well, you guys want to grab some brunch and some brews.”

Sam groans. “Ugh, no. I’m so hung over. Let’s just hit the road.”

Dean turns to Addison and she shakes her head. “The fact that I’ve haven’t puked everything up is a damn miracle,” she tells him.

“All right,” Dean replies, tossing his stuff in the trunk. They climb into the car and Dean starts the engine. “Hang on.” Sam shoots Addison a confused look as Dean walk back into the motel room. A moment later, Dean climbs back into the driver’s seat, Bobby’s flask in his hand.

#supernatural #fanfiction #series rewrite #dean winchester #sam winchester #ofc #deanxofc

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