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gremlingottoosilly · 8 months

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The Art of Hospitality (yan!Nanami x fem!Reader)

Nanami comes home to his favorite roommate. He is hurt and tired...but he knows who will instantly make him feel better. Tags and CW: Yandere, mild dub-con, non-consensual masturbation, Nanami is a panty stealer, light age difference, power imbalance, housewife kink, groping, praise kink AO3

You accidentally took his shirt from the laundry. Nanami thinks it’s an accident – he isn’t sure that you’re dumb enough to genuinely not realize that you were wearing a man’s clothes for a while already, but he doesn’t think you’re brave enough to flirt with him like this either. You’re stuck between being dumb and being too abrasive in your act – and honestly, Kento can deal with the dumb ones. Always a pleasure to spend some time with a person who knows when to shut up.

You look simply divine like this – tugging a shirt that is too big for you in your tiny shorts, carefully rolling the sleeves up so they won’t get splashed while you are doing the dishes. Nanami never asked you to pull up with so many domestic responsibilities – but it was expected. He already allows you to live here without paying rent, so…only natural you’d be his housewife in everything besides affection. He knows how careful he must be – you’re innocent, as some college dropout can be, and you don’t really think of him like that. At least, he thinks you aren’t – he is sure that were you a bit braver, you’d already sleep in his bed instead of a tiny guest bedroom. If you’d wear his shirt on any other day of the week, he would simply note this in his head and proceed with his day. Maybe stare a bit, imagining your curves hidden by the baggy fabric, catching glimpses of skin whenever you roll it up a bit too high. If it was on any other day, he’d just smile and proceed to go to his study.

But you had to pull his shirt out of the laundry on the exact day when he dragged his body home from a particularly nasty fight with a curse. The thing was defeated – something about fear of bug larvae, the sound it made while being dissected by his knife was something that Nanami wouldn’t forget for a long time, even with an ample amount of alcohol. You just had to be cute and adorable and domestic and wear his clothes on a day when he wanted it most. Where all of his desires of retirement amplified, pushing for a fantasy that was just out of reach.

Until he saw you cleaning the dishes with the tenacity of a proper housewife. Nanami knew he had to keep himself in check – knew how much he’d scare you with this. Still, at that moment, he wanted nothing more but to push you on that kitchen counter, roll his shirt even higher on your body, and use you like a proper domestic wifey you are.

— You did the laundry?

He slips right behind you, hands on your waist. It’s a gesture that cannot be mistaken for anything other than affection – and you get stiff immediately, not sure of what to do. He hopes you’d be a smart girl and won’t defy him. He doesn’t have patience for brats right now – no matter how adorable they might look. You take a deep breath and release it, relaxing in his hold. He squints, a ghost of a smile appears on his lips. What a boedient thing you are.

— I did the dark ones, yes. I wanted to do the whites as well, but there wasn’t enough, so… You trail off, your hands shaking just a little bit. Nanami notices and leans on you a bit, pressing you against his chest. Your breath hitches again, panic evident in your body. He wants you to relax – and so he slips one of his hands across your waist, pressing you even closer to him. You have to get used to the heat of his body eventually. Nanami isn’t known for charity work and you’d have to pay him back one way or another – and currently, you only have one way of achieving this.

Nanami pressed his hand more firmly against your waist, squishing you between his body and the counter. You are forced to relax into his touch – with no way of getting out, it’s only obvious why you’d be this scared. Poor, dumb girl. No idea what is coming to her. — You washed my things as well? You put the dishes on the drying stand, wiping your hands with the nearest towel. There is a certain clumsiness in your actions – like you were trying to remember how to act properly on the go. Like you tried your hardest to be a perfect housekeeper without looking too desperate. Although he likes that air of eagerness around you.

— I wanted to do something for you, sir. While I can’t get a proper job. The little snag didn’t go unnoticed. Every time you try to convince him that you finally got some part-time position, something minimal wage and extra working hours, he will always say that working like this would be useless – that you need a real job if you truly want to build up your experience. After some time, you stopped even looking for openings, instead marinading yourself in your meager savings and looking after the house. Sometimes you wondered if he just wanted to get a free house worker – but then again, he let you live in this big house without paying rent or even groceries. The only reason you’re still here is because he is generous…and you don’t want to think about the reasons behind it.

Spending time around so many people with loud personalities, Nanami craved someone simple. Easy. Nice and quiet – and a girl who is too helpless to survive on her own is just that. Some people are not meant to survive on their own, and there is a certain dignity in relying solely on help from others.

He caresses your hands – you don’t understand why is he suddenly so affectionate after spending months not even bothering to learn your last name, but then you notice the smell of blood. Scratches on his hands. Something that smelled like wet dirt and metal.

You turn away, bumping your nose into his chest. Kento looks…disheveled. With his tie lost, a few buttons were torn off from his perfectly ironed – you ironed it just a few days ago – shirt that was now covered in soil and blood. He looks like he just got into a fight – with no indications of who was on the winning side. You weren’t sure where he worked exactly – something corporate, you think, some cushy position that allowed him to escape overtime and get home at 6 PM sharp every day. Corporate people usually don’t return home looking like something tried to chew on them.

— N…nanami, what…what happened? He sighs, rubbing his forehead. It seems like your question somehow irritated him – you don’t want to be like this, don’t want him to hate you. Yet, it’s almost like your worry is making him insanely angry somehow. You bite your lips, face scrunched in a worried expression. You don’t want him to die – or even just get slightly more injured.

— Got into an accident. There is nothing to worry about.

You’re definitely not buying it. Kento likes seeing you gushing over him – but knowing how anxious his little roommate can be, you’re certainly not going to let it go so easily. And he has no intentions of showing you the secrets of the world of jujutsu right now. If ever.

— You got run over?! — No.

— A dog attacked you?! — No.

— Oh. You were robbed..? He sighs, thinking of how he still hasn’t come up with an excuse. He should have – but the fight was hard already, and the energy he spent working overtime on that curse didn’t make anything better. He loves your worry and your kindness, but he can’t deal with it right now. Somehow, he has to divert your attention. Somehow, he has to take this comfort he wanted from you and your body.

— You’re wearing my shirt.

Your eyes widened, heat spreading across your face. He sees that he has successfully distracted you – your hands are coming to cover yourself immediately, tugging on the wrist of the shirt as if trying to see if he is right. Seems like you really didn’t notice you were wearing something that belonged to him. God, what a dumb thing you are. What did he do to deserve such a blessing? You take a step to the side, trying to escape the trap of his hands – but Nanami is not having it. With a grunt, he is forcing you in front of him again, making sure you’re set here, nice and comfortable. Trapped close to him – like he’d ever let go of someone as precious as you. He might be a lot of things – a workaholic, an extremely tired individual with love for useless and dumb sunshine girls, but he is not stupid. Letting you go now will only increase the gap between the two of you – and not even in a sense of age.

— I’m…oh. I’m really sorry, sir, it must have been mixed in the laundry and… He snorts. The sound is weird, alien to someone like him – you look up, surprised he even bothered to listen to you. You really got him acting so weird…it’s almost an achievement. Somehow, you don’t feel like you won something.

— You didn’t even notice it was too big?

— I have some oversized clothes. — Something that your ex left you?

You find yourself wordless at the accusation. It doesn’t sound too weird at first – but the harshness in his voice is making you shiver. His hands are on your waist again, holding you in a gesture that can’t be platonic – and this is the first time he paid so much attention to you. You feel uncomfortable. You feel desired, somehow. Nanami smells of blood and you find yourself aroused at it. Are you really that weird of a person? Fighting the urge to press your nose in his shoulder and breathe in his musk, mixed with blood, sweat, and that wonderful perfume he is using? The scent of which was traveling with you the whole morning ever since you took the shirt out of the laundry. Did you truly not know it was his? Somehow, you aren’t so sure now.

— I…I guess I just wasn’t paying attention. I’m sorry, sir, I will…

You insist on calling him “sir” despite your age gap being not that terrible. He couldn’t be your father – yet he has this aura about him that makes you a bit afraid. Just a little nervous whenever he raises his voice or hums disarmingly. You don’t want to disappoint him, anxiety filling every bit of your existence when you think about this – he is doing so much, he has serious work and all you do is gush over housework and trying to play a role you were not made for. Never thinking how hard being a housewife might be.

— You’re going to just take off it now?

You freeze in place, not sure of how to answer. Nanami chuckles. You don’t want him so close to you, touching you like you’re in love – but he is hurt, stressed and covered in blood. He is lonely man, you can understand this – who else would invite a girl to live with him because he spends so much time working outside of the house, he’d disappear for days on end and someone had to take care of the house? if he had a partner then, surely, you wouldn’t be here. It must be hard, for someone like him – but he seems so nice, so hardworking, despite the initial strictness…why is he single?

You don’t feel comfortable with his chin resting on your shoulder, but you’re forcing yourself to relax. He had such a hard day, and he is still hurt. You might as well indulge him a little.

— I don’t think it would be polite.

— Why not?

His hands slowly unbutton the lowest part of the shirt, the one that is hanging way below your stomach. He is not revealing any skin – but the feeling of his calloused fingers even through the fabric is a bit much to handle.

— I’m a guest at this house. Wouldn’t want to embarrass the owner, right? His hand goes to grasp a few more buttons, making you stiffen. You don’t…don’t particularly want his hands in that area – almost under your chest, with a single brush of fingers enough to make you feel hot. Throbbing. Enough to make you question everything you know about him and…other things. You want to be a good guest, to not overstay your welcome – but it seems like the lines are getting more and more blurry each time. — I wouldn’t mind seeing you without it. — I’m really sorry I took it without asking you…

— You can get punished for it later. But…

Nanami presses his mouth on your neck, inhaling your scent. You smell like him – his cologne, his shower gel, the fabric softener he uses for his shirts, all the expensive things he knows you don’t have money for. You’re relying on his kindness and, well, he can be kind…if you’re willing to be good to him, of course. Good, obedient, and pretty girls deserve their rewards, after all. He has the perfect idea for just the one right now. You whimper when you feel his lips on your skin, when he nibbles on the sweet spot at the back of your neck. It can’t be mistaken for normal affection now – not with the way he keeps unbuttoning your shirt until there is barely enough to cover your breasts. His hand lays on your stomach, warmness spreading across the skin…there isn’t a lot you can do now. Your thoughts are mixed now, not sure of what to do to make him stop or to let him keep going. — Nana…no, Kento, I’m not really sure about… — Quiet, sweetheart. Just a few more minutes, okay?

You sigh, allowing him to just…touch you. Get sated with the feeling of your body in his arms – you don’t know how much time had passed, but he just rubs soothing circles into your stomach and breathes, occasionally peppering your neck with kisses.

You want him to go further.

You want him to stop. Maybe, it was just a few more minutes. Maybe, he took his time – you on;y woke up from that hazy, dream-like state when he suddenly yanked the rest of your shirt off, revealing your braless chest to the cold air of the house. You wanted to cover yourself – but your slow motions didn’t do you enough justice, as he easily grabbed your wrist in one of his hands.

He kisses you again, and you move your head to the side to meet his lips. You don’t know what you want – you want to help him, to make his worries go away, but he is still smelling of blood and rust and you’d like to draw him a bath first. Maybe take care of him there. Maybe grab your things and run even though it would mean you’d be homeless. You can feel his erection pressing to the curve of your ass and you move involuntarily, sliding up and down – maybe in an attempt to escape, maybe in an attempt to allure. You want for him to say something, to command you to do something – be more forceful, be more kind, make everything better, and then do it much, much worse. You sigh, trying to just…

The phone is ringing.

You manage to read the name. You wonder who the hell is Gojo Satoru. — I apologize for this. – Nanami whispers in your ear, getting away from you. Still keeping a hand on your waist, holding you down as firmly as possible. Not that you have any strength left in your legs to go anywhere. You’re waiting for Nanami to finish the call. Something is telling you that he just found a way to make you pay for staying with him for so long.

#nanami x you #jjk nanami #nanami smut #yandere nanami #nanami kento #nanami x reader #kento nanami #yandere jjk #jjk x reader #jjk smut #jjk #jujutsu kaisen #jujutsu nanami

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lilacstro · 2 months

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academia astro observations (pt 12 <3)

its college season, and diploma season and a season (i am hopeless about my college life fr)

well nvm you intelligent folks, you probably cannot relate, lets go:

1.Smartest people I have seen have Virgo and Gemini placements 9/10 times. Especially, in 3rd, 9th and 12th house

2. Ok so Aquarius is an underrated placement when it comes to being intelligent, I think I have said it before maybe? But aquarius mercuries, stelliums and 11th/3rd housers are most definately tech savy.

3. OH having Grand Trine in air element*bows down* such an active mind, and so super smart, almost effortlessly but don't get lazy y'all that is one another thing

4. I think just like its sister sign somewhat? Scorpio people, especially suns are really good with money and finances, creating money and infact managing money as well

5. Sagittarius and Libra placements are very likely to succeed in theoretical subjects, like business and arts and history and both of them, civics 100%

6. Your 9th house sign or lets say element can show your learning styles, 9H in Air signs? You might actually study by yourself really well, probably using books and lectures. 9H in Earth signs? The people who like going to labs, practical experiences. 9H in Water sign? Feeling an emotional connection and desire to study or they would overwhelm themselves and come falling down, 9H in Fire signs? Ah, you all definitely need some kind of pressure to ground and sit down and grind but once you do you guys have some real passion and drive, like pulling an all nighter before an exam and doing well somehow vibes.

7. Virgo in 9H people can learn anything, ANYTHING. Maths, history. sociology, you name it. All they need is time and desire for that subject.

8. This also makes me feel Virgo in 9H people are definitely the types to elaborate everything they write especially in academic settings so they could in fact do very well writing academic papers

9. Part of Fortune in 3rd/9th again makes you a good learner and someone who can do well academically. but it doesn't quite mean you will excel without studying ahem it just means you have this extra gift to you.

10. Aquarius in 9H people are most likely to be the ones who ask the most questions in class, even if it feels it maybe totally unnecessary at times, but they are rarely afraid to speak to their instructors and ask curious questions even if they are non relevant.

11. Taurus placements, risings, or 9H, can actually be slow learners or late to bloom academically, but once they really learn something, boy its in their memory forever.

12. I have often seen people with Gemini placements have surficial knowledge in things, or they may rush with things at times, and not really go into deep details like Virgos or Aquarius people, just my observation

13. Uranus in 9H or 3H people can change majors a lot, and maybe just be uncertain overall with what they have to do.

14. Ruler of 9H in 8H can show there might be some kind of sudden nature involved in your college experience, maybe your suddenly dropout, maybe its a completely diffrent and transformative experience for you, maybe you get mental health issues in college etc.

15. College romance is likely for people who have Gemini Juno or Virgo Juno or Juno 9H/3H/11H (maybe through your friends, maybe college friends ahem) another one is ruler of 7H in 9H

16. Oh yes, people with Mercury as their chart ruler are again quick learners and also, really good at learning and very dedicated to studying things they are studying and would excel with talent or hardwork or both

17. Jupiter in 1st house people also actually come off as really smart and wise, but somewhat intimidating and know-it-alls when it specifically concerns to their academic abilities

18. Having pisces in 9H is actually one of the other indicators of being smart and actually, more of intuitive and intellectual smart, and these people actually may have some kind of emotional connection to their major and coursework not as in crying type of emotional but maybe their parents want them to succeed, maybe they want to do it because they feel like it. I also feel these people may like doodling while studying or using cute stationary or notes.

19. Mars aspecting Mercury, and you are very likely to get into full force with what you are studying, maybe go to the depths and get full drive and passion to be the best, have that competitive spirit inside you.

20. Speaking of which, it is yet again possible that people with Sun in 9H or Leo in 9H or ruler of 5H in 9H actually get competitive about studies. Infact if you have prominent leo and mercury placements both, this desire to be the best is even amplified (my mom has this, and even though her conditions did not support her completely to be as bright as she could, she still exceeded expectations imo and was always competitive about it even though she did not think of academics that seriously)

21. Jupiter aspecting Mercury people are more of wisdom smart or I may say curious smart kind of natives and there is rarely any sly and competitive kind of spirit to them, meaning someone who would want to share their knowledge most likely, talk about it to people and things like that, humble energy

22. Ego with what I know and can do is likely to come with people whose mercury aspects sun, they maybe can even make their scores their whole personality probably, there is a chance for this to happen though, so keep this in check maybe

23. Jupiter and Sun aspecting each other is another kind of placement that can give you some kind of pride and ego with what you know or you may actually get really defensive when someone questions your knowledge, however, another manifestation of this same placement is making your knowledge a beautiful part of your persona and sharing this light to most people, unafraid, these people can infact make great teachers.

24. Jupiter/Mercury in 12H people may really be good at deep research and probe, and these skills are again very important for researching and phds

25. Of course the Sag risings, we cannot miss them afterall. Even better if the Sun is in Scorpio or Mercurial signs the ability to pay attention to details and actually learn and teach things from scratch would be crazy.

26. Nadir in Virgo/Moon in Virgo/Moon in 9h or 6h/air or mercury ruled 3H natives may actually have some kind of mother who more so focused on the academic part in their life growing up or their childhood did have a lot of things around excelling academically

27. People with strong and positive mercury placements, or mercury in air houses may really be good at calculation and maths. Or even having an air sign/mercurial sign in air houses can count

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28. People who you have an academic rivalry with must have strong aspects to each others mars or pluto or both (there is some detail this point deserves but I am too exhausted I might add an edit here)

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29. This also makes me think of people with Pluto in 1st house, 10th house or Scorpio risings, they are 9.9/10 times always competitive, wanting to succeed and be the number 1, not in a toxic way but they really cannot easily see being left behind and if these people are academically inclined (they likely are since they are doing it), they would again want to do their best and be the person who is in some kind of rivalry with you lol

support me on ko-fi :)

paid readings are open xoxo

i have more but im tired af so i might make a part 2 someday, but its been a while since I have posted ngl but thanks for the support you all give me, ilysm

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lastoneout · 5 months

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Sorry I'm just so fucking sick of people online recognizing that ads and algorithms suck and it's best to find ways you can support creators directly, how every website is sanitizing the internet and fucking over anyone who wants to do anything different is awful and evil, and how if you get money from selling out(often against your will) to corporations said corperation might just randomly decide to nuke you and everything you've ever made off the face of the earth to save on taxes or w/e like what happened to Rooster Teeth and College Humor and The Escapist, but then throwing a fucking fit when the answer to that is "yeah well it costs money to make stuff because we don't live in a post scarcity utopia, so like maybe try, you know, financially supporting the creators you love if you want them to not get driven away by said enshittifcation of the internet or sold to and then deleted by rich corporations to make their shareholders more money".

I'm sorry, you can't have it both ways. Shit costs money, and your favorite creators asking you to support them so they don't have to stop making the stuff they AND we love(or sanitizing it and filling it with ads just to pay the bills, or begging for money from investors who will demand constant growth and retain insane control over what gets made and might decide to just delete everything to save a quick buck) doesn't make them monsters. Being broke sucks but like, christ. There's a difference between YouTube and Netflix price gouging and being greedy capitalists and your favorite indie creators asking for a little money so they can keep making stuff.

(And if you can understand why Dropout and Nebula are paid services and A03 has donation drives, then you can understand why Watcher is going the same route. We're trying to save the shows you love in the forms you love while challenging Google's damn near monopoly on online video sharing and continuing to not give corporations the power to delete massive chunks of media history.)

Just like fuck man, needing money to make things/keep your favorite websites up isn't inherently evil. Asking viewers for support is the GOOD ending for stuff like Watcher. I'd rather pay to watch than watch them sell out to W.B. or die off on YouTube.

#christ alive y'all are so fucking stupid #watcher #the watcher #watcher drama

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phantoms-world-and-more · 10 months

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Jumping on to the Danny the ghost king reincarnation vacations prompt. Danny is reborn in the PJO universe as Sally Jackson's Uncle.

-When Sally's parents die when she is young she goes to live with her eccentric Uncle Danny who actually cares and loves her. Because of this Sally didn't dropout of high school and went on to college.

-Sally still gets pregnant with Percy at 23, Danny is not happy about the father not being involved or Sally getting involved with the Gods but he supports Sally's decisions. Up until she decides she is going to marry Gabe for his monster repealing scent. Danny puts his foot down he will not have his niece marry such an abusive/ misogynistic asshole.

-Danny talks Sally out of marry Gabe and moves in with her to help raise Percy. Also while Danny might not have any of his powers, he still carries an aura/scent of someone powerful and that keeps monster away and masks Percy's powerful halfblood scent

-Percy grows up calling Danny Grandpa. Danny finds the incidents that keep happening to Percy that keeps getting expelled from school hilarious. Reminds him of his luck when he was alive the first time.

-When Grover meets Percy's Grandpa for the first time, he is scared out of his mind. He is not sure what he is smelling but it making all his instincts say run.

-Danny is in the car with Sally, Percy and Grover as they are racing to camp halfblood being chased by the minotaur. Danny dies protecting them from Zeus bolt of lightening. Everything progresses the same after that with Sally being captured/ transported to the underworld, Percy defeating the minotaur.

-Since Danny died technically his vacation is over, but he decides to stick around for a little bit longer to take care of unfinished business. While Percy is asleep in the halfblood infirmary, Danny decides to presents/disguise himself as a new teen halfblood camper.

-He make sure makes friends with Percy and supports him when the camp ignores him when they find out he godly parent is Poseidon. He barges his way onto the quest, ignoring Chiron's advice about 3 people being the best number for the quest. No way is he not supervising Percy's first quest especially after so little training and knowledge.

-When the four get to the underworld, Danny tells Percy to take Sally and leave. Percy is very reluctant to leave Danny, but does as Danny asks. Hades was against this but as Danny stares at Hades, he knows instinctively not to stop them. When the group leaves, Danny unleashes his aura as the Ghost King and goes off on Hades for kidnapping his niece. While Danny is not the technically Hades boss, he is more the more powerful deity.

-After Percy's quest is over and he is reunited with Sally, Danny meets up them and comes clean that he is Grandpa/Uncle Danny. He wanted to say some final goodbyes to both of them. That he would be watching over them and they were both welcome to join his realm when they died. That due to his status as Ghost King, he was limited in how he could interfere with the living realm, but would be keeping an eye on them.

-Also before Danny totally leaves, he makes sure to appear before the other Olympians. To give Zeus a piece of his mind in how he goes about blaming innocents with out looking at the facts. Also he gives Poseidon a belated shovel talk about Sally.

#fic prompt #daily prompt #PJO x DP #dp x pjo

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love-toxin · 7 months

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jump - cha hyun-su

a/n: sweet home is giving me serotonin for midterm season u know i had to do it <3

(cws: gn pronouns, minor sweet home s1 spoilers, suicidal reader + suicide attempts, puking, failed OD, trauma bonding, mild lewd mentions, omg they were neighbors, dark meet cute)

wc: 3.2k

August 1 - 2020

1410 - Cha Hyun-su.

Otherwise known as your unofficial, non blood-related, possibly-separated-at-birth-twin. Why? Because for a year and a half, you've been living as the official Green Home recluse. Now a second recluse has moved in right down the hall.

“Maybe we dedicate the fourteenth floor to up-and-coming college dropouts now.” You've heard that spoken under the breath of neighbours in the lobby, heard variations of it giggled between nosy ladies that have gotten too old to call it gossip. If they're resorting to gossip about two residents who have turned hikikomori, they're wasting their breath. Not much goes on in your apartment that anybody would want to gossip about.

As for Hyun-su? You're not sure. Sometimes you hear the tinny sounds of gunfire through his metal door. Other than that, nothing. So he games and eats ramyeon, and that's it? If it is, it's a little surprising. He doesn't look the type at first glance. In fact, he looks like he'd fit in with the popular guys you went to highschool with. The bulk box of instant noodles he ordered lies askew in the hallway, which you suppress the urge to kick as you walk by.

Your stomach rumbles. Wish I had the money to order ramen in bulk. Your life's savings jingles pathetically in your pocket: a few won scattered amongst pocket lint. The flickering of the lights overhead should be enough of a cue that you've fallen far in life. This apartment complex is a shithole, and aside from the odd cigarette or two you can snag from the convenience store there's really not much you get joy out of at this point. Food, sex, music, it's all the same. At least touching yourself is free. Not for much longer if I don't come up with rent next week. You absentmindedly kick a crumpled ball of paper down the hall. Unlucky as ever, your sandal goes flying with it, and tumbles right through the door and down the steps before you hear it hit the landing.

“Son a bitch,” You sigh under your breath, and with a moment of hesitation you hop along on one leg. No way are you gonna touch that filthy floor with your bare foot. Each step you take with help from the railing, and by the wall at the end of the landing lies your abandoned shoe–lying on its side like a piece of trash someone couldn't be bothered to throw away. You hop forward and wiggle your foot back into it, toes first. “Home sweet home.” You sigh sarcastically. Each step downstairs after that feels just as dooming as the last.

August 8 - 2020

I think I might have to die soon.

The blue-white glow of your phone screen is all the light you've seen for days. You missed the rent payment. Your application for an extended due date was denied. You're getting kicked out at the end of the month.

Am I in hell already?

A frustrated huff escapes you. Your phone clatters as it hits the wall, but if it's broken or not, you don't care enough to get up and check. What's the point in writing out your feelings if you aren't gonna survive long enough to reflect on them?

You pull the covers higher over your head. I'm doomed. The world is over. You stick your hand out from beneath the warm covers to reach the dial of your CD player, and turn it. Click. No power. They cut off your electricity already.

You fall asleep to the sounds of silence and your own breathing under the smothering covers.

August…something.

You kneel hunched over your toilet, expunging every ounce of fluid and bile from the hellish depths of your stomach. You've been puking for over an hour but there's still stuff coming out. With a loose, loud grunt you bury your knuckles into your stomach in a swift thud, forcing out one last expulsion of acid and chunks of food you probably ate ten years ago in the process. With a heave of laboured breath you sit back and slump against the cold tile wall of your bathroom.

Bad idea. If you work up the courage to try this again, you're sure as shit never using pills for it after this. You swear you could feel each one as they came back up for vengeance, the burn in your throat harkening to the amount of dry-swallowing and gagging it took to get them in there. You'd rather just jump out the fucking window at this point. Sorry to whoever has to clean up the mess.

A pass over your face only smudges the tears drooling down it. This is seriously pathetic. Your sniffles echo off the grimy tile like the chimes of a bell, they sound far-off but they hurt your ears with the vibration. Everything hurts. Your chapped lips burn and your stomach aches with every clench around empty air.

Can I just die now? Am I allowed to die? Your knees hit your chest and you sob your questions out to nobody. Nobody's here and nobody cares. If you weren't a coward, you would've jumped already. You would've jumped two weeks ago when you knew you didn't have the money. You would've-

Ching ching. The doorbell. Ching ching. Right now? Seriously?

Ching ching. Ching ching. Ching ching.

“I'm coming,” You rub your tears dry with an aggressive touch and get one last sniffle out. A single splash of cold water on your face in the sink is all you have a chance to do. Fucking landlord, probably. Probably looking for one last chance to hassle you about the money. Nobody wants to move here, it's easier to keep a tenant than find a new one–or maybe he wants to kick you out early. If that's the case, it'd be the icing on the cake for this absolutely wretched excuse for a life you've ruined.

Ching ching. Ching ching. Without bothering to check the doorbell monitor on your way by, you head for the door and reach out to brush the handle. It's only by sheer coincidence that you pause, and in a moment of clarity, bow your head to peek through the peephole before you turn the handle.

“What the shit-” The rug trips you up as your steps hustle backward, a yelp escaping you as your back hits the floor and you scramble up to sit and stare back at the door in horror. Whatever that was, it…it wasn't…

You swallow dryly. Your hands feel numb. You flick your gaze from the door to the handle and back again, watching with intent fear as whatever it is that's outside keeps ringing the doorbell until it stops. That's the moment the world itself goes quiet.

“I…hear you…”

Your heart itself ceases its erratic beat in that moment. The grin curling up at the creature's dark lips is palpable in its voice. That head of exposed, honeycomb-like brains that you spied through the peephole comes alive in the squishy, spongy sounds that emanate from the other side of your front door.

Bang.

A bulb-like protrusion explodes out from the metal, leaving behind a deep indent that will forever mark the spot where the monster tried to get in. Bang. Bang. Two more in succession show up in the squealing steel of your door. It's trying to get in. It's not going to stop until it does.

“I hear you!!” It shrieks in tandem with your terrified screams. “I hear you! I hear you!!” The cackling of its cracked voice burns holes through your palms and into your eardrums, your hands not nearly enough to block out the horrendous screeching of metal on metal. In a bid of panic, you scramble to your feet and away from the bending frame of your door. Your toenails scrabble against the carpet and nearly catch on the loose threads as you close the distance to the window. You left it open to let the stuffy air out, but now it's an escape hatch. A way out. Your palms grip cool metal as you raise yourself up to the sill and crouch on it on the soles of your feet, perched like a bird pre-flight as you look out into the mid-morning sky and back to your battered front door.

This is it. This is the last chance you'll ever have to look out into the world you're leaving behind. The sky is clear today, oranges and light pinks streaking across the scattered clouds and dissipating more as the sun creeps into the air. The breeze tastes cool and crisp on your tongue, a stark contrast to the warmth that the glow casts over your trembling body. God, I don't wanna jump after all. I just want to look at this view for just a little longer.

Fresh tears chill themselves against your skin in the breeze, but your last, wishful peace is broken by a sudden clang. Like something brittle thudding against a solid surface. The sound draws your head sideways in an instant. The wind whips your hair away to frame your distraction in perfect view, hanging halfway out of his window two doors down.

He stares at you with brown eyes, once blank, now deep with urgency and fear. Hyun-su has a broken mop in hand that he's since stopped smacking against the wall once he's got your attention. He swallows and you watch his adam's apple bob in his throat.

Sorry, I've got to die right now. Those words that you feel brimming at your lips fall silent as Hyun-su motions to you. But you just stare with glossy eyes and a pained smile, because what can he do? There's a monster breaking down your front door, and the last hinge is barely holding on. You want to mouth the words “I'm sorry”, but he suddenly disappears.

It's only a moment before you hear the banging. Like a door swinging open and shut on its squeaky hinges, the shunk shunk shunk shunk resonates through the whole complex and just about vibrates you off the sill entirely. But you cling on this time because the thuds and squealing at your door are growing softer. Soon, the noises stop altogether as you hear a screech and the heavy pattering of the creature's footsteps leading away. In just as much time as it took to decide to throw yourself off the fourteenth floor, you've been left in peace again.

It takes about a half hour before you're ready to move from your perch, to step down on the freezing floor and brace your shaking legs by leaning against the wall. You keep checking all day to see if Hyun-su reappears. You don't see a thing, save for the sunset that marks the dusk of a day you didn't think you'd ever survive.

August ??? - 2020

If Hyun-su comes back, I'll sleep with him. On my life. Or I'll kill him. I haven't decided, honestly.

Your phone's battery is almost dead, and the screw that holds the hinge is so loose it's practically flopping all over the place. It's gone from a flip phone to a flop phone, realistically. Without the internet or cell service, all it's good for is a brick to hold your thoughts inside. Maybe it'll be all that's left of you once you're gone.

Is Hyun-su dead? That thought has been cycling round your head like it's circling a drain for about a day. The more you think about it, the more sure you are that he must've led the monster away to try and draw it from your door. The brain monster hasn't come back since, but neither has Hyun-su. You've tried everything from calling him to aiming a mirror out your window to get a glimpse into his apartment, but nothing. And if you knock on his door and he's not there, what will you do?

You've laid in bed awake all night, and with your stomach growling painfully you sit with your back against the mangled front door and wait. Your eyes shut at the tenth hour of the morning. Come back, Hyun-su. Please come back. Why'd you save me just to leave me alone again? You better not have died for me. The thoughts give you distraction for a while, as long as a while could feasibly last in these circumstances…

Shu-unk.

What the fucking hell was that?

Shunk. Shunk. Shunk.

You blink awake and stagger up to your feet in a rushed scramble. In the distance, just barely audible, is a soft voice echoing off the walls of the empty corridor.

“1412?” You're tempted to press your ear to the door to hear it closer, but the myriad of dents and fist-sized creases left protruding from it don't exactly leave a lot of space for you to listen. “1412?” The sound that had startled you awake, you now realize, is the sound of doors quietly being opened and closed. You're tempted to disbelieve, but the low coolness of that voice desperately makes you want to believe it's Hyun-su. And as terrified as you are of guessing wrong and paying your life's price for it, your fingers shakily clasp the door handle and it turns with a click. The squeals of metal make way for harsh scraping as the ill-fitting door fights the pressure of your body weight as you put everything you have into forcing it open.

It passes the threshold and swings open. You stagger into the corridor and catch yourself on the door frame, your fingers scraping dented steel from the pounding it took at the hands of that monster.

It is. It's him. That soft jawline and those big, brown eyes, the mane of fluffy hair and his unkempt clothes splattered with blood. He stands there lean and awkward in the hallway, lanky and ruffled and looking like he's been through a good bit of hell. His mop handle's got an upgrade but you don't care, really. You just feel a well of happiness surge up inside you that you figured had completely disappeared by now.

Hyun-su hurries up to you. When he gets close, he falters, however. His expression dims as he suddenly seems unsure of himself, and fidgets with the newly-crafted spear that suddenly seems too heavy in his hands.

“Are you okay?” He pants. “The monster-”

“You led it away.”

“Yeah.” He nods. “But you're okay, right?”

“Mh.” Your ears burn a little. This is my saviour, huh? So soft-spoken and meek? “Didn't get me at all. Thank you.”

He nods back, his scruffy locks forming a curtail around his neck as he does so. An awkward silence blankets the empty space. It's broken, however, by a deep gurgling in the pit of your stomach.

“Are you hungry?”

You lay a hand over your stomach as if your touch is going to make it stop rumbling. It's pretty humbling, to say the least–you hadn't realized how weak you'd become on two days without food. Hyun-su doesn't wait for an answer; he reaches into his pocket and pulls out something crinkly and wrapped in foil. It's still warm when he places it in your palm, yet his fingertips carry a chill as they graze your skin in the process.

“You should eat. We need to get going.”

“Where?” Hyun-su points down the corridor, and despite his urging you slip the candy bar into your pocket while you peek out where he's indicating. The door is busted-up and boasts a reinforced exterior from the many bumps and scrapes of a wheelchair coming in and out. You know it well. “1408? Where Mr. Han lives?”

He nods. “There's kids there, and some other people. I, um…I was going to come earlier, but they-”

“I get it.” For the first time in a long time, you crack a smile. “Had to go play hero again, huh?” If he was willing to drive away a monster from a stranger's door by using himself as bait, you can only imagine what he must have gone through to save some poor kids in peril.

“N-No, I-”

“You're a good guy.” You pat him on the chest. “I don't know why a good guy like you came to live in a place like Green Home, but I'm glad you're here.” Hyun-su looks down on you with a raised brow, but his surprise melts slowly into gratitude as he adjusts to your playful jabs. There's not many other ways for you to cope in an absolutely bizarre situation as this.

“...I'm glad, too.”

“Yeah?”

Hyun-su tilts his head down. He's a little hesitant on meeting your eyes, even though you owe him so much. “I'm…glad you didn't jump.”

“Me too.” The sentiment slips out of you so easily. When did that happen? Wanting to live? “I'd be a pretty shitty damsel if I threw away my life after you saved it.”

In the wake of another, now less-awkward silence, you stroll ahead of him towards Mr. Han's apartment. You only glance over your shoulder to make sure he's following, and to quietly reassure yourself that he hasn't disappeared again. When you do, that's when he hustles along to catch up, the smallest of smiles peaking his lips.

“If..”

You turn to look at him beside you. You can't help but pay him your full attention when he speaks–he does it so little, and he's so quiet, you fear you might miss what he says.

“If you feel like you want to jump again..” He extends his hand out to you. Despite the callouses on his long, lithe fingers, his palm looks soft and even…inviting, in some strangely enticing way. “..You can hold my hand. I'll keep you from falling.”

“Oh.” Your feet halt in their tracks. The air feels a bit heavier than it did before–but only in the space that separates you from Hyun-su. His hand lingers there, and beneath the cuff of his sweater's sleeve you spot for the first time those scars. Cuts, slashes, deep and intentional down the length of his tanned skin. Intersecting lines that point towards a past of hurt and harm.

So you and I are the same. Have you now, finally, come to that thought that Hyun-su had when he saw you ready to jump out your window?

“...Yeah.”

You place your palm delicately over his. Your fingers slide together like ivy on a window. They clasp into each other, squeezing like the grip of a latch on a closed door. And you feel at peace for real this time, because from this moment on you won't ever get near a ledge again–not to take a step off, at least. But maybe to see another sunset if you manage to survive that long. A smile perks at your mouth at the thought. God, I hope so.

“Let's hang in there together. Promise.” You squeeze his hand, and he squeezes yours back. The two of you make your way towards the apartment. And when this door opens, it'll close behind you for good.

#sweet home #cha hyun su #cha hyun su x reader #hyun su x reader #gn reader #ellie writes #3k

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moxidi-fanarts-and-sketches · 3 months

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NSBU TOMORROW SO ITS THEORY TIME: the movie characters represent the qualities that their real world versions wish they had. (pls keep in mind that so far we know NOTHING about these characters, so these are based on their appearance, body languages, classic tropes and general vibe)

Paula: bravery. she looks shy, awkward and all scrunched up. Jack, however?? that's a REAL action hero. no fear, just coolness.

Wendell: confidence. this one is simillar to paula's, he looks like a typical nerdy teenager/young adult with very little friends, and Vic seems really cool and confident.

Usha: novelty. Usha is an old lady who works on a store that sells tapes so old no one needs them anymore. but G13 is not only a young person, but also and advanced hacker with a ton of new technology that he understands perfectly.

Andy: intelligence/some sort of neat-ness. he appears to look very messy, and job at a video store is not a very prestige one, so maybe he's a college dropout (pun intended)?? but even if that isn't the case, he looks genuinely unsatisfied with his life. that's why he looks so contrasting to Greg Stocks (who is an allusion to james bond), the embodiment of elegance and grace among the action heroes.

Russel: likeableness. again, this is just my theory, but he looks like some sort of a criminal, or, at least, not a trustworthy person, which might lead to him being treated poorly by others. now, Jennifer... who doesn't love a cool, strong and attractive femme fatale?

I couldn't fit Liv and Kingskin in here, but for Liv it's respect. she's a young girl who looks bored, upset but fully harmless. she might feel like others look down to her and don't see her full potential. a person who DEMANDS respect?? Kingskin.

#not me overthinking a show that's not even out yet #not art #moxy talks #dimension 20 #d20 #never stop blowing up #nsbu #d20 nsbu

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tossawary · 9 months

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One of my favorite Discworld books is actually one of the more obscure ones, "Moving Pictures", which is about the invention of films and the movie business in this fantasy world that has dwarves and trolls and wizards and so on. It has its rough patches like every early Discworld book, but Ginger's speech about people who were born in the wrong time or wrong place for their dreams really gets to me in a good way, and I love all of the references to classic films and commentary on fame and creativity. It also has classic characters like Gaspode the Talking Dog and C.M.O.T. Dibbler, and it introduces Detritus's romance with another troll named Ruby.

Perhaps most importantly to me is that this book introduces Ponder Stibbons, who is a wizard, and who goes on in later books to be one of the most important members of the Unseen University (he holds like twelve different positions), in that he's one of the few people who can competently manage a project and so ends up managing nearly everything. (Bear with me, it's been a while since I read any Discworld and my memory is a little rough.) In "Moving Pictures", Ponder is the classmate (roommate?) of a fellow named Victor Tugelbend, who is one of the main characters.

Victor begins the book as a career student, in that a wealthy relative left him a great deal of money exclusively for school; so as long as he STAYS in school, all of his living expenses are paid for. If Victor graduates, that's the end of the money. If Victor drops out, that's the end of the money. But if Victor manages to hit a specific mark range in the 80s every year, then he gets to stay on for another year and try again, and so Victor is perhaps the most dedicated and knowledgeable wizardry student in the university's history, because you have to know what the right answer is in order to intentionally get a certain number of the questions wrong, so that you can continue to coast along on your college fund.

Ponder's graduation is (accidentally) Victor's fault, because Victor runs away to get into the movie business. (I won't spoil what happens, but it's VERY funny.) Now, I like to imagine after the events of the book, after Ponder holds a faculty position in the university, Victor comes BACK to the university occasionally as a disgustingly well-paid external consultant, which drives Ponder UP THE FUCKING WALL. Like, people are so stingy all of the time but SOMEHOW the university budget has room to bring your offensively handsome dropout roommate back just to say, "Hmm, yes, that looks bad. Have you tried turning it off and on again?" I'd throw a fit, honestly. (As soon as Ponder has enough seniority, he probably puts his foot down to stop this if Victor isn't actually useful. Maybe he is, idk, but maybe not for THAT consulting fee.)

I also like to imagine that Victor Tugelbend and Theda "Ginger" Withel are still together, maybe even still acting (badly? mediocre-ly? decently?) together, in some dingy little theatre (Ginger is the director and runs their acting troupe like a tyrant) where the front seats are regularly filled with middle-aged folks who still sigh over the memories of moving pictures. (Moving pictures are now, presumably, VERY illegal in Ankh Morpork.) Victor and Ginger have only because even more attractive as they've gotten older, which is EVEN MORE OFFENSIVE to poor Ponder because his former movie star former roommate is married to another gorgeous former movie star?! I'd throw another fit.

Anyway, I think Ponder deserves to have an affair with a pair of aging former movie stars. I like to imagine this purely because I think it's funny. He seems kind of busy for marriage, so joining someone else's marriage part-time might be good for him. It probably makes most of the rest of the Unseen University faculty breathlessly envious and that really does it for him.

And I think that this affair would OF COURSE be covered by every newspaper and tabloid in the city, including The Times, and William de Worde and Sacharissa Cripslock don't fully understand why their entertainment reporter is so breathlessly excited about people who were famous over a decade ago? (Supermarket tabloids love to tell me about alleged affairs of people who were famous 20+ years ago.) The article on Victor Maraschino and Delores De Syn's failing marriage* is their bestselling newspaper in months and William puts his head down on his desk in despair. (He's fine. This happens on a weekly at least basis. He just needs a minute.)

*Victor and Ginger are very happy with this situation, actually. They're going to take Ponder to dinner to go on a double date with Ruby and Detritus soon. Victor and Ponder are going to get distracted arguing about some of the Inadvisably Applied Magic research projects, but that's fine, because Ginger wants to talk to Ruby about this one-troll-woman-show concept. (Detritus will proudly hand out tickets at the Watch station and accidentally intimidate all of his coworkers into accepting the invitation.)

#tossawary discworld #fic ideas #spoilers #long post

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cottonundiestf · 16 days

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Choose-Your-Own Bimbofication #6

(Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.)

You pick up your cell phone and scroll through, seeing familiar names of people you know and care about. Something in your gut makes you think you almost lost these connections forever, but those memories are secure now.

You look back at the table in front of you, realizing a document was missing. There might have been a diploma there, but it was gone. It couldn't have been yours, right? You feel a rush of lightheadedness that makes you stumble. Years of schooling you thought you had under your belt suddenly left behind a vacuum of intelligence.

Stripping through college? What a silly thought. You knew you were a high school dropout. You weren't smart enough to make it to college. Nowadays you were just spending your nights stripping and seducing rich men in your quest for a sugar daddy.

You reached for your Passport before it vanished, but something was wrong about it. It wasn't written in English, but the longer you stared, the more the words made sense. They were Cyrillic characters, which made sense. You came to America recently, but you were born and raised in Russia.

You actually came to the country a few years ago as a mail order bride. After that arrangement broke down, you realized there were still plenty of rich American men looking to take care of a sexy stripper who barely spoke English.

Your family back home shamed you for offering yourself to rich Americans like a sex object, but it was natural to gravitate toward a role suited for a dumb foreign hottie.

They could judge; you were happy with your life. You met a new man and he is eager to commit to his little sugar baby.

#cyo bimbofication #nationality change #dumbification

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morganwrites12672 · 2 months

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No More Lies

Sam Winchester x Reader

Summary: Sam runs into an old classmate while working a case (S2E2 "Everybody Loves a Clown")

Rating: PG-13

A/N: I had two comments requesting something with Sam, so, here it is! Don't forget, my request box is open!

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It had been over a year since Y/n had last seen an old friend of hers, Sam Winchester. He had left Stanford completely after Jessica had died in a fire. The entire situation had shocked all of their mutual friends. Nobody could believe that he had really just left. Yet, everyone did. Eventually, people stopped calling him.

Y/n might have stopped calling, but she didn't believe that Sam had left for no reason other than Jessica's death. The way his voice sounded whenever she did get him to pick up the phone. . . Something was off. Over the months, Sam picked up the phone less and less. She had almost given up hope. Hell, she practically had. If Sam wanted to talk to her, he would have called.

It was a fair weathered morning in Medford, Wisconsin. She had graduated from Stanford, and was finally free to do whatever she wanted. After how overwhelming college had been, she was taking a gap year. Spending it in her hometown seemed like the best option.

She was strolling through the Cooper Carnival whenever she saw him.

"What the hell?" She muttered to herself, waking through the crowd. It was Sam. He was wearing one of the red jackets of the other carnival employees. She couldn't hide the shock on her face. He left Stanford to join a carnival? Something definitely wasn't right.

"Sam!" She said as she approached him. She saw the shock on his face as he realized who she was.

"Y/n?" Sam said, his eyes wide. "What are you- oh shit. Your parents live here," He said, finally realizing why you were here. She saw him quickly glance around, almost like he was figuring out what to do.

"You joined a carnival?" She said, but it came out like a question. Nothing made sense to her right now.

Sam groaned, running a hand through his hair. She noticed he had grown it out more than usual. Y/n couldn't stop staring at him. What the hell was going on? It didn't make sense. Sam had wanted to be a lawyer. He was doing great at Stanford, pre-law. Why would he dropout and join a carnival, of all things?

"I. . . I don't know how the hell to explain this," He said with a sigh. Sam had wanted to tell Y/n the truth for a while. He had stopped answering her calls because he couldn't stand the guilt of lying to her. He had to now though. He knew she took smart to believe any bullshit excuse he could come up with.

"No more lies," She said firmly. It was obvious that Sam wasn't just on a trip with his brother. Last time she had heard from him, he was still enjoying the road trip. However, she had always heard the tension in his voice. She had always known something was wrong. She had never been what though.

"I can't tell you here."

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Her mouth hung open as she processed what Sam had just explained to her. He hadn't left Stanford because of the grief of Jess's death. No, he had left Stanford to find the demon that had killed her. She closed her mouth, but she was still unable to speak.

"I know that's a lot to take in. . ." Sam said gently, placing a hand on your shoulder. He had had no choice but to explain everything. Any excuse he could come up with, well he knew Y/n would have seen right through it. He had lied to her enough. She was the last person from Stanford he still had the option to be friends with anymore. He had burned too many bridges.

"Holy shit," She said under her breath, standing up. This was definitely a lot to take in. "And you're in my hometown, where my family lives, on a case?" She asked, now it wasn't shock so much as fear that she felt.

Sam nodded grimly, "Dean and I are trying to figure out what's behind the disapearences."

"I'm helping," She blurted out.

"No. Don't even think about it," Sam said more sternly. He knew once she set her mind to something that there was no stopping her. She had always been determined like that.

"My family could be in danger!" She exclaimed. "Either we do it together, or I'll be an idiot and do it solo," She threatened.

Sam mumbled a curse. Dean was going to be furious. But, he had no other choice. He didn't trust Y/n to behave herself. She would do something stupid, and then he would have to try and save her. Since the only lead this case had was the Carnival, he begrudgingly agreed to let her help. He would be able to keep her safe if she was with him. Plus, a local would be nice to have on their side.

Dean would be furious whenever he came back to the motel and found Sam and Y/n going through Sam's research. Sam had done the best he could on such short notice to explain the Supernatural. Y/n swore that after this case she would be done. She just wanted to make sure her family stayed safe.

That couldn't have been further from the truth.

Now that she knew what went bump in the night, she couldn't rest. Sam had been pissed whenever she outright refused to go back to normal. He tried endlessly to convince her otherwise. His words did nothing to change her mind. This was her life now. Helping the brothers gank monsters, even if it had taken a while for Sam to let her leave the motel room on hunts.

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A/N: Thank you so much for reading! Please comment and reblog if you enjoyed it! Also, my requests are currently open!

#supernatural drabble #supernatural fanfiction #supernatural fanfic #Spn #spn fanfic #spn x reader #spn x y/n #supernatural x reader #supernatural x you #Sam Winchester #sam winchester x reader #sam winchester fanfiction #sam winchester x you #sam winchester x y/n #S2E2 #Spn season 2

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lingthusiasm · 3 months

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Transcript Episode 93: How nonbinary and binary people talk - Interview with Jacq Jones

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode 'How nonbinary and binary people talk - Interview with Jacq Jones'. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about nonbinary speech with Dr. Jacq Jones. They’re a lecturer at Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa / Massey University in Auckland, New Zealand. But first, our most recent bonus episode was about various kinds of fun mishearings and missayings and misparsings that people make in songs, in phrases, in idioms – all sorts of, like, you know when you hear “an acorn,” and you think it might actually be “an egg-corn” because it’s like the egg of the tree? Well, we talk about what strange things that you mishear, or misparse, can tell us about how language works. Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to listen to this bonus episode, many more bonus episodes, and help us keep the show running.

[Music]

Gretchen: Hello Jacq!

Jacq: Hi Gretchen!

Gretchen: Thanks for coming on the podcast.

Jacq: Thanks for inviting me. It’s awesome.

Gretchen: Before we get into all of the cool research that you’ve done about how nonbinary people talk that you’re working on, let’s talk a little bit about your origin story. How did you get into linguistics?

Jacq: Okay, well, I mean, how far back do you wanna go, I guess? I was a high school dropout. I was in my teens. I was going around North America, in Canada and the United States, working and this and that. I decided I wanted to go back to school. I did get into an adult education programme and finished up my high school. It was in a really small town in rural Alberta. It had a community college, and they didn’t have that many classes. I went into geography.

Gretchen: That’s super related to linguistics.

Jacq: You’d be surprised.

Gretchen: Great.

Jacq: Yeah, because I had spent time in the southern United States and in Alberta and in Ontario and things, and so I liked seeing all the different places. I went into geography. For people who don’t know, geography has these two big branches. There’s physical geography and human geography. Physical geography is rocks and trees and mountains and weather, and human geography is how people affect the world and how the world affects people.

Gretchen: So, like cities and stuff.

Jacq: Yeah, right. So, I was sitting in a class, and we were talking about how goods move across borders and how a lot of human influences – including language and political borders – can affect the movement of goods and, alternatively, how languages can be stopped by things like mountains.

Gretchen: Oh! Okay.

Jacq: You’ll have dialects that won’t go over the top of a mountain because you have this physical barrier. I was like, “That’s amazing.” Somehow, something about this interaction between this natural world and something like language, which is very, sort of, in your heads – but of course, you’re not gonna walk up a mountain to go talk to the person on the other side.

Gretchen: I live in Montreal, which doesn’t even really have a mountain by proper mountain-people standards, and I don’t wanna walk up that mountain just to talk to someone at the top. I totally understand that prehistoric people also did not wanna do this.

Jacq: Exactly. People, you know, live along rivers, so you have languages and language change and language contact all along these natural systems. That was the bug.

Gretchen: That’s fascinating. That’s so cool.

Jacq: And then I went from this community college – this adult education programme – to university, took a linguistics class, and as they say, that was it. Fell in love with phonetics and acoustics and all the meaty bits inside of you that create language. And here we are.

Gretchen: You do sounds – phonetics, how people talk – and specifically, I first encountered your research when I was in New Zealand last year at the New Zealand Linguistic Society Annual Meeting in Dunedin. You were giving a talk about your dissertation on how nonbinary people talk. How did you get into that topic?

Jacq: Sure. I think for most linguists, if you can press them, for most people in academia, what you’re into – there’s always something personal in it. There’s always something in what you’re doing. As a nonbinary person, navigating the 2010s – the late 2010s – trying to navigate what “gender” means, I kept catching myself really interrogating, really thinking about how I interact with people around me and what assumptions they’re going to put on me, what assumptions I’m putting on myself. You know, I’m getting on the bus, how low do I wanna talk to the bus driver? Just really silly stuff like that.

Gretchen: Like, are they gonna “sir” or “ma’am” me to show how they’re parsing my gender?

Jacq: Exactly. And do I want either of those options? Not really.

Gretchen: Which are both wrong.

Jacq: But if I can barely figure out what being nonbinary means to me as a nonbinary person, how can I expect the, you know, 60-year-old parent that I’m talking to, or a random person at the coffee shop I’m talking to, to understand all these backflips that I’m trying to do in presenting my gender? I mean, I’m into phonetics. I’m into acoustics. I’ve always been interested, linguistically, in this space between “This is how people talk because they are from Canada,” “This is how people talk because they’re a woman” – or because they’re a certain socio-economic class, or this – versus “This is how a jock or a burnout talks,” “This is how somebody asserts their identity.” When you’re looking at gender, that’s really this difference between a lot of stuff that we’re taught growing up and a lot of stuff that people might argue is inherent – a lot of stuff that is constrained by physiology, in some ways, by your existence in a meat suit – but you still always have control over it. That’s where this is. Part of it is being nonbinary and wanting that legitimacy of examining the numbers and proving that I exist, and nonbinary people exist, which are not represented historically. That’s changing now. And so, wanting that studying me and people like me to show “Hey, we exist. This is a thing that we can measure. This is a thing that we can look at,” and studying why, and yeah.

Gretchen: If you study all the other nonbinary speakers, then they’ll just tell how you need to talk now. So, that’ll be really handy.

Jacq: I mean, that’s part of it, too, right, is something that’s really exciting about studying nonbinary people during my dissertation – and I think that this is very much changing for the better, and I’m so happy that there are so many more options for young people in terms of gender and for old people in terms of gender and for anybody in terms of gender, but at the time, it really felt like all the templates that were out there were very binary – all the methodologies for studying speech, all of variation studies, everything, was, “This is how men talk,” “This is how women talk,” “This is how you’re supposed to talk if you’re a man or a woman,” or you want to present yourself – it was all binary.

Gretchen: I remember even when I was just being trained at grad school, everything was very binary. People weren’t even really questioning that. Even 10 years later, it seems like there’s been a lot more people thinking that through.

Jacq: Exactly. That is so amazing. From the point of view – putting on the researcher hat – studying it at the point where the speakers are making these first decisions without any templates – without a YouTube person to look at to model this kind of language on – felt really exciting.

Gretchen: And then somebody else who’s doing this study in another 10 years or 20 years or something when possibly nonbinary identity may have coalesced a bit more, then they have this to compare to as a baseline to see – it’s not often we get to watch a new gender evolve in real time. I mean, that’s not quite true because non-cis people have always existed, but the coherent, legible, nonbinary category, we get to watch it evolve in real time.

Jacq: Exactly. Traditionally, in these linguistic studies of dialect formation, that’s the 10-dollar word. You’re looking at something that’s very geographically bound. You have a group of people from one dialect that are moving to another place for another dialect. You have this contact, and you can study things coming out of that. But for nonbinary gender, even now, I can say, “Aw, there’s so many more nonbinary people out there.” I mean, realistically, if we think about our own networks, we do not have – I mean, I guess I can’t say this about everybody – but most of us don’t have a huge amount of nonbinary people in it compared to how many other LGBT people or how many other men or women – there just aren’t that many nonbinary people. We do tend to find each other, but we don’t have these big communities.

Gretchen: There’s a certain clustering, but it’s also not absolute, and there’s lots of other stuff. Do you feel like the internet has an influence on how nonbinary people talk?

Jacq: I think it does in the sense that the internet – and in particular, that kind of American sphere of the internet – influences everything that everybody does all of the time in some ways. But I also think that gender – sex and gender, in particular – these core identity things interact so strongly with where we are and our immediate context that it’s not quite as – in terms of speech, I don’t think it’s quite as strong. I did have one participant – if I can talk about my dissertation a little bit.

Gretchen: Oh, yeah, please, no, tell us about how the nonbinary people talk.

Jacq: One of my participants, Istus, is nonbinary and very femme. One of the things I talked about at that conference talk that you saw me – the slides are on my website, if you wanna take a look.

Gretchen: Excellent, we can link to those.

Jacq: Sweet. Istus is nonbinary and also very femme. This is something that really challenges the stereotypes that we have. Even me as a researcher coming into this had this idea of you have these men and women, and then you have these nonbinary people that are challenging these stereotypes, but “nonbinary” is not necessarily “non-femme.” So, Istus’s femininity was very nonbinary. When she talked about trying to construct her voice, this femininity that she wanted to get across, she would talk about putting on, basically, a Californian accent. She would say, “I can talk like this, and I sound very feminine, but I also sound like I’m smiling all the time, and I’m not that nice a person.”

Gretchen: Is Istus a New Zealander? Because you’re doing your PhD in New Zealand.

Jacq: All of my participants were from Christchurch (Ōtautahi), New Zealand. They were mostly between the ages of 18 and 22 – so this really specific first year of university cohort where you’re learning your identity and really stretching out from under your parents’ wings for the first time. I also had a couple of participants that were over 40. That’s interesting because it also challenges our stereotypes of gender as this static thing that you’re a man or a woman. When we look at how language can change over time, we don’t always think about how the people that are speaking can change over time.

Gretchen: A lot of the most visible nonbinary people are younger, but there’re also older people who are saying, “Oh, these young people have described a word for this thing that I’ve felt my whole life, and actually, I’m also this identity, and now there’s a word for it.”

Jacq: Absolutely. I mean, being a 45-year-old nonbinary person, you don’t necessarily want to speak like a 20-year-old nonbinary person, right.

Gretchen: Totally.

Jacq: If 20-year-old nonbinary people are trying to navigate what sex and gender is, if you’re 40, there’s that much more history of trying to figure all of this out.

Gretchen: Absolutely. Going back to Istus, who is the subject of the talk that you gave at the New Zealand Linguistic Society, one of the things that struck me about this talk when you were doing it is that you had participants take selfies of what they wearing at the same points as they were doing recordings. They did a bunch of recordings with different people in different environments, so you could see how they changed how they talked in relation to both what they’re wearing and also who they’re talking to.

Jacq: Absolutely. Because I think all of us have this experience of thinking about how we’re perceived by somebody else. That perception, for many of us, isn’t limited to just our voices. We don’t exist as a voice that wanders around in the ether.

Gretchen: We are not disembodied voices. We are meat suits wearing clothing suits.

Jacq: Yes. Which is super frustrating for many people, too. I call these recordings “in the wild” because I had this idea of David Attenborough following – “And here, he encounters the cis person.” But yeah, knowing that how we choose to present ourselves in that way is gonna change the way that we talk. This is pretty established. Also, the person that we’re talking to is gonna change the way that we talk. If you’re talking to your parent, you’re gonna talk to them differently than if you’re talking to your boss. We know this. But I was particularly interested in the way that these gendered relationships are navigated for nonbinary people.

Gretchen: Do you have an example of how some of your participants talked differently with different people?

Jacq: One example is Istus would play with makeup in really interesting ways. When I had the participants come, they would show me their selfies of these recordings, and I’d say, “Describe this outfit to me,” so I could see what they found really important because what you choose to wear has a lot more different – like, you know what is significant to what you’re wearing versus you don’t know if I’m wearing my lucky socks. That kind of thing.

Gretchen: Yeah, I dunno if your socks are lucky. I dunno if this is, like, the same shirt I’ve been wearing for three days which gives it a different valance to me compared to “Oh, yeah, this is my favourite shirt that I never wear, and I only wear on special occasions.”

Jacq: Istus didn’t have this in a picture, but she described her “stealth outfit,” which was every aspect of the outfit presented very masculine – sort of a suit jacket and loafers and this kind of thing. But every minute aspect of the clothing was actually feminine. The buttons were on – I can’t remember what side buttons are supposed to be on – but the buttons were on –

Gretchen: Neither can I.

Jacq: – the buttons were on –

Gretchen: The feminine side.

Jacq: Yeah, and the shoes were from the women’s section. There was this whole stealth coding that Istus was doing for herself – not for other people unless they’re cued in.

Gretchen: If she needs to go about as someone who doesn’t want her gender remarked on that particular day.

Jacq: Yeah, then she can choose where that gets presented. She would also wear different kinds of makeup. She would describe it as “enough eyeshadow so you can’t see the bags under my eyes” was one of her quotes.

Gretchen: Love it.

Jacq: The other quote was “makeup for the sake of wearing makeup” versus makeup that you would wear sort of a more natural face. You’ll forgive me if I get any of this wrong. I am not a makeup person. It was interesting because the – in her voice – the feminine cues that she used would change based on how overt her makeup was.

Gretchen: This is something that stood out to me about your talk, the makeup thing, because I’m very femme, I’m very cis. To me, I want all of my gender vectors or all of my gender points in the femme tally. But what Istus did in this thing was, if she was wearing makeup, she would do less femme gender vocal cues, like she’s counterbalancing the gender points, and as long as you have enough in the femme category and enough in the masc category, then it balanced in her head for whatever her personal definition of “balanced” is, which isn’t how I approach gender but is a really interesting thing that I learned from your talk.

Jacq: Aw, thank you. I’m glad that you found it interesting. Yes, Istus – and this is a theme throughout all of the participants. I should say that I also interviewed binary participants – men and women – and there were certain themes there, too. I don’t want to leave them all the way out.

Gretchen: Totally. You gotta have a control group.

Jacq: Yeah. But for the nonbinary participants, there was this – in my dissertation, I called it “incongruence” – but this idea that if you want to create some kind of mixed signal or if you wanna create something that isn’t quite in the two boxes that the people who are listening to you maybe have, then you can either take cues from both, or you can try to find some kind of middle ground. Those are two quite different things. Something very overtly feminine in your physical presentation combined with something a little bit less feminine or more masculine in maybe your vocal presentation, that can still get to something that isn’t binary in a way different than being very neutral-sort-of-middle-ground is.

Gretchen: The neutral-middle-ground is like, “I’m just gonna wear a hoodie and jeans because every gender can wear a hoodie and jeans, and then nobody will be able to perceive me as any gender at all,” whereas in a clothing way, doing something that has mixed signals would be like, “Okay, I’m gonna have a beard and also this super sparkly eyeshadow” or something like that.

Jacq: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And that wasn’t quite where any of my particular participants went. But the idea that if you only have these two options, and you need to create a third option, there isn’t only one way to do a third option. There isn’t only one way to be nonbinary. A lot of how you do that, I found in my dissertation, is based on your own personality, which is like, “Oh, surprise, people have agency in how they talk,” and some people don’t like wearing super sparkly eyeshadow.

Gretchen: Totally. But also, sometimes you need to do the academic version of establishing that baseline because you could say, “Well, based on my friends, a lot of them which are nonbinary, people seem to do these strategies,” but having written it down in this academically legible place and gone through and done it with some statistics or something lets you say, “Okay, here’s what we have in terms of what we know now and maybe this would change in another decade if there becomes a more socially legible category of nonbinary-ness.”

Jacq: And I think, also, part of including binary participants in this work is to bring nonbinary people into both an academic conversation that’s already happening, which is, again, that sort of talk of legitimacy and saying, “Here’s an established body of work,” and bringing a “new population” – I’m making finger quotes; they’re not actually new – but bringing a different population – an “understudied” population, let’s say – into the fold, at the same time, that allows you to interrogate what’s already there. We have this whole body of literature that ignores that nonbinary people exist –

Gretchen: But that also doesn’t ask cis people or people that we’re presuming are cis, “How did you know that you’re cis? How do you know your gender? What are you doing to signal your gender with your voice? And how much of that are you doing deliberately?”

Jacq: I think that that’s really valuable, too, the idea that – I mean, there’s nothing that says a cis person isn’t allowed to think about masculinity, or how they present masculinity, or how they present femininity, or what that means. I mean, personally, I think it would be really useful if more cis people did that. If more people just thought about gender in ways that weren’t binary, talking to the binary men and women in my study, I was a little bit surprised, but it was amazing to see – I mean, some people never thought about it. There’s questions about “How do you feel about being a woman?” or being a man, and people said, “I dunno. I never thought about it. It just felt right.” But not everybody. Some of the participants that I spoke to did deeply interrogate their gender at some point in their lives. One of my cis male participants talked about thinking that maybe they were trans for a while and then realising they weren’t. I think the fact that we, as people – and also, we as linguists doing these studies on language – can interrogate even binary gender from these perspectives is really valuable.

Gretchen: This was something that came up in a recent episode that we did about the vowel space and how gender affects the vowel space, which we can link to. One of things that I find neat about that research is that even kids who haven’t gone through puberty yet who still have all identical vowel spaces or vowel spaces with as much variation as they have in heights but nothing specifically affected by the physical changes of puberty are still doing social genders and actually have different vowels based on the genders in their heads even though their bodies aren’t affecting what sounds they can produce yet.

Jacq: That works the other direction, too. We often think of puberty as this thing where a bunch of stuff happens to you, and then you pop out the other end like, talking and looking like –

Gretchen: A gender, now.

Jacq: A gender. You are this. But that’s not – I mean, the variation that almost any given human can produce is so much wider than the constraints of physiology. I’m not the only person to look at this. I know that Viktoria Papp has done really excellent work with transmasc people. Lal Zimman also works with transmasc populations a lot, too. You can take testosterone, and it can thicken your vocal folds, and it can create a drop in pitch, but that’s not what it means to talk like a man if you’re transmasc. That’s not the end of it. At the risk of summing up someone else’s research in two sentences, what you tend to see, I think, in Vietze’s work is a drop, an initial drop, from testosterone, and then it kind of pops back up again with the idea that, as people become more comfortable in their bodies and in their lives and in their situations, there’s less pressure to perform some stereotypical masculinity and more to just be the person they are, the transmasc person they are, or the nonbinary person they are.

Gretchen: That sounds neat. We can link to that study so that if people want to hear more than the two-sentence summary version, they can follow up on that.

Jacq: And Lal Zimman’s work is amazing. Every single thing that Lal has written is fantastic, too.

Gretchen: Yes. Everyone’s in the Lal Zimman fan club. So, you have a corpus, which is delightfully called, I think, “The RAINBO Corpus.”

Jacq: Yeah, “Recorded Audio-visual Interviews with nonbinary and Binary Orators. It’s “RAINBO” without a W.

Gretchen: Oh, and it spells “RAINBO” – that’s so good!

Jacq: For the sake of the acronym.

Gretchen: That’s such a beautiful acronym. You have six nonbinary participants in there, and six binary participants, and they held this speech that you looked at the pitch of it, and you’ve looked at how they do their vowels and things. You also have a talk and a paper, I think, you’re working on that’s co-authored with one of those research participants who then de-anonymised themself from the previous anonymous corpus work that they were in.

Jacq: Yeah.

Gretchen: I find this really interesting because there’s this interesting balancing act in academic between, “Oh, I’ve got a research participant. They’ve got sensitive data. I’m going to preserve their anonymity,” and also, sometimes when people are telling us really interesting things about their lives or their language choices or their identities, giving them credit for that intellectual contribution to the work which names them – yeah, can you talk about this balancing act about participant and researcher collaboration?

Jacq: Absolutely. I would love to. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I don’t want to portray myself as an expert. There is a whole other body of work where your collaborators, your language consultants, work very closely with the researcher, but that’s not always the same methodology as the bigger picture, what we call “variationist,” studies where we’re trying to look at large groups of people and how they speak. Kaspar is the name of the person that I worked with. And I got their permission before this episode – I asked them how they wanted to be referred, and they said, “Okay.” We’ll call them Kaspar, which is great because that’s their name, so it’s super easy for me to remember.

Gretchen: But they also had a pseudonym in the study originally.

Jacq: Yeah. In the study, if you read my dissertation – which you don’t have to, but if you do – in the study, they were called “Alex.”

Gretchen: Dissertations are notably very long and, often, in the years after a dissertation comes out, people will write some shorter papers that summarise small bits of the dissertation. Keep an eye on Jacq and their website. Maybe there’ll be shorter versions. But if you really wanna read the whole dissertation or skim through it and pick out the bits that look interesting to you, we will link to it.

Jacq: I had set up, for my dissertation, you know, as a – I think there’s something else. Dissertations are a long work, and you’re learning as you go. That’s the point. When you’re planning these ethics and all of the things in planning this dissertation, you go through the process that has already been established. I did that. It’s fine. Kaspar came and was recorded. It ended up, as it happens, after I had done my data collection, Christchurch is not a huge place. Kaspar and I were in the same social circles, and we became friends after the data collection. Every once in a while, we would talk about the work that I was doing and stuff I was studying because they were super interested. They have a background in mathematics, and they’re familiar with linguistics, so it’s not like they knew nothing about linguistics.

Gretchen: So, when you were showing them some pretty graphs, they were like, “Oh, cool, graphs. I like those.”

Jacq: Yeah. And then I can’t remember if I asked them or they offered to do some proofreading before I had submitted it, and I sent them a draft. I got it back, and there were smiley faces and frowny faces on a lot of stuff. Then because we’re friends, we went and hung out and talked about it, and there’s something different. You’re participating in research. You’re getting recorded. And then research comes out. You know that you’re maybe nonbinary. You’re this population. And then you see yourself on a graph that plots your pitch somewhere, and you know what the stereotypes about feminine pitch and masculine pitch are. I mean, I did a bad thing in that sense. I hurt somebody, right, in not earth-shattering ways, I don’t think – or at least Kaspar didn’t tell me it was earth-shattering.

Gretchen: But in frowny face ways, yeah.

Jacq: And we share this perspective of the importance of examining new populations using established methodology and these traditional ways of doing things to grant – whatever you wanna call it – some kind of legitimacy from the academy – or however we wanna navigate this – but then this is still real people that are given little dots or little diamonds and plopped on a graph. I can say in 300 words how this isn’t meant to tell people how gendered they are; this is meant to examine nonbinary people and compare them on equal footing with binary populations, but of course, nonbinary people don’t come to the table with no baggage, with nothing behind them. You come, and you come with a gendered upbringing, a gendered – you exist in a world, right. You can’t just not.

Gretchen: Totally.

Jacq: That was really hard. We had a lot of conversations about that through the course of proofreading a dissertation and submitting it and trying to get to a point. And I didn’t have – because of the way that the ethics works – I couldn’t contact every other participant afterward and get the same insights and things. But it’s not all bad. Kaspar expressed to me how interesting it was and how amazing it was to see their plots there and the joy of seeing themself not in the ASAB cohort that they expected versus the sadness when they came a little bit too close or that kind of thing. We gave a talk about this and, hopefully, a paper that examines that a little bit more. The other benefit is that, now I have a collaborator and a co-author, it means that we can do a lot more really interesting stuff with data.

Gretchen: Well, and if they know all this math, you can do such cool math.

Jacq: And we can track them over time, and we can do new recordings and even stuff about how these interviews with people, or these recordings, are still a snapshot in time. Things aren’t static. People change, and people’s interpretations of themselves are reinvented constantly. I’m really excited. Watch for that paper.

Gretchen: That sounds really cool and really exciting. We will look forward to the Jacq-Kaspar collaboration, Kaspar-Jacq collaboration. You can keep swapping your names for who goes first if you do a whole bunch of different co-authorships like people do.

Jacq: It made me glad that I wasn’t recording myself.

Gretchen: Were you sometimes interviewing or the interlocutor?

Jacq: Yeah. We did these “in the wild” recordings, and then we had the traditional sociolinguistic interview with all of these questions. We recorded me at first thinking there might be accommodation stuff, but then it’s also just like, I can’t transcribe, like, 400 million hours of –

Gretchen: So, “linguistic accommodation” is the thing where, when you’re talking with someone, especially if you like them or you’re trying to get along with them, you talk more like the person you’re talking to, which happens to lots of people lots of the time. I certainly do it. And you were thinking, well, maybe if people are talking more like you when they’re talking with you, then that might shift things, but also, you end up with a lot of data.

Jacq: Yeah, that’s true. It ended up doing a little bit of spot checking. It didn’t seem quite there because of these outsider-insider relationships of I am Canadian sitting in New Zealand interviewing people. There was enough of a gulf that it didn’t seem –

Gretchen: They didn’t all start sounding Canadian when you were interviewing them. I’m shocked.

Jacq: They weren’t like, [stereotypical Canadian accent] “Oh, hey, thanks for interviewing me.”

Gretchen: Maybe this is a good segue actually because you’re a fellow Canadian, hello, “Welcome to the podcast, eh” – [laughter] – who’s been living in New Zealand for nine years now.

Jacq: Yeah, almost a decade.

Gretchen: Amazing. We’ve had a previous interview with Ake Nicholas talking about Cook Islands Māori if people want to hear someone with a more New Zealand accent.

Jacq: Actual New Zealand accent.

Gretchen: An actual New Zealand accent. But this is presumably a linguistic experience for you. Do you wanna say anything about what it’s been like? Do you talk differently to people other than me who don’t have a similar Canadian accent?

Jacq: It’s kind of hard to know. I think there’re a few things. I noticed about four or five years in that I was losing my Canadian raising. We had gone somewhere, and I said, “Aw, look at those three houses.” I was like, “Ah! What did I just do?” Instead of saying /haʊsəz/, I said /haʊzəz/. I was like, “Ugh.” Which is funny because when I lived in Canada, I never noticed Canadian raising. It was one of those things that was so –

Gretchen: So, Canadian raising, which we actually haven’t talked about on Lingthusiasm yet – so maybe someday in the future –

Jacq: What!

Gretchen: – is the thing that is responsible for the differences between how I say the vowel in “house” [noun] versus “house” [verb] or in “height” versus “high” – “height,” “high,” “house,” “house.” I will say, I don’t Canadian raise that much, so it’s a difference in terms of how you say the vowel between /t/ and /d/ or /s/ and /z/. There’re some people who say something like, “about,” more like /əboʊt/. There’s a stereotype that Canadians say /əbʊt/, and that’s not true. I want to correct that right now. People in lots of other English-speaking environments don’t do this Canadian raising, and you noticed that you were stopping doing it. Anecdotally, I also notice people that move to Canada do start doing more Canadian raising, so this seems to be one of the ones that’s flexible in people’s speech.

Jacq: Yeah, I think that’s true. It’s funny because it’s so stereotyped in Canada. I don’t think it’s as strong as the stereotype, but it’s definitely sticky in a weird way. I did lose it. But probably, in this interview, it’s back.

Gretchen: It clicks back in.

Jacq: Yeah.

Gretchen: Any other things that you’ve noticed?

Jacq: I remember when I first landed in New Zealand – so New Zealand is non-rhotic. There’s no R. Words that are spelt E-A-R, like “ear,” and words that are spelt A-I-R, like “air,” have merged, so they’re pronounced the same. I was sitting on the airplane waiting to disembark, and the announcer came on, and they said, “Could everyone exit via the /ɹiəɹ stiəɹz/?”

Gretchen: Oh. [Laughs]

Jacq: I had this moment of, like, cows stacked up at the back of a plane. Like, and it’s sat with me, and I think it’s because the context wasn’t quite enough for me to get – but I was like, “Rear steers? Rear steers. What?”

Gretchen: Well, it’s what you exit the “ear-plane” by, obviously.

Jacq: “When you exit the ear-plane by the rear steers, or alternatively, exit the airplane by the rare stairs,” which are the stairs that they don’t bring out that often.

Gretchen: We have to save the rare stairs and the fine china for guests.

Jacq: Exactly.

Gretchen: That’s exactly the kind of thing that, especially, when you’re hitting something out of context, and they seem to be more fond of using that, so if you weren’t used to that particular phrase, either, it would catch.

Jacq: Yeah, and I mean, you’re also in a new place and all of this, and you’re trying to pay attention because you have to do what the airplane people tell you because that’s the rules. I have one more anecdote that is very deeply only Canadian and New Zealand overlap.

Gretchen: Please, I wanna hear it.

Jacq: Maybe this is only western Canada. We’ll see. So, Gretchen, what do you call the front row of seats in the classroom?

Gretchen: Oh, that’s where the “keeners” sit.

Jacq: That’s where the “keeners” sit, right, that’s the “keener” seats, right?

Gretchen: I dunno if I have “keener seats” specifically as a phrase, but like, absolutely, totally understand you when you say this.

Jacq: So, if somebody’s a “keener,” that’s the person at the front of the class, yeah.

Gretchen: Absolutely, yeah. I have told people about this Canadianism myself.

Jacq: Amazing! I’m glad it’s a super salient Canadianism.

Gretchen: I’ve introduced Lauren to it, in fact.

Jacq: So, it’s not a thing in New Zealand. They don’t have keeners, but New Zealanders say “keen” all the time.

Gretchen: Oh, but for something different.

Jacq: You’ll say – and apologies to any New Zealanders if I get these pragmatically a little bit wrong – but you’ll say, “Ah, I’m going for coffee. Is anyone keen?” Or you might say, “Ah, the movie’s coming out next week,” and someone else might say, “Keen,” like they’re keen to go.

Gretchen: Oh, okay, yeah, I think I could say, “I’m keen to go,” but not “keen” by itself in a phrase like that.

Jacq: No, and I think that my impression – my 8-year-old, 9-year-old Canadian impression – is that you don’t really use “keen” – because it has a little bit of that odd, negative – I mean, it’s a “keener” thing, so unless you’re really claiming –

Gretchen: That you’re a big fan of Star Wars, and you’re a Star Wars keener, and you definitely have to go see the new one.

Jacq: If you’re keen to go to Star Wars, you wanna be in the front row.

Gretchen: Of course! Yeah, okay, yeah, I sort of get that. It’s not as neutral. It’s like you’re really actively excited. You’re not just like, “Oh, yeah, I’d be good to go” or like “I’d be down to go.” “I’d be keen to go” is like, “I’d be so keen to go! That would be great!” not just like, “It’d be fine.”

Jacq: Yeah, but if you’re keen, you’re like, “Yeah, I could” – if you wanted to be extra, you could double up the New Zealandisms and you could be “keen as.”

Gretchen: Oh, yeah, I’ve heard the “as.”

Jacq: You could be “keen as,” but I don’t know – that’s where my knowledge of New Zealand lexical items stops is at “as.”

Gretchen: I love “keener” as a Canadianism because my prof friends will be like, “Oh, one of my keeners came to my office hours today,” and they’ll mean that student who’s always asking really good questions and is really excited to be there and stuff like that. It’s very positive when my prof friends who were all themselves keeners back in the day use it. Maybe some people use it negatively, but I sure don’t know any of them.

Jacq: If you are a keener, then “keener” is quite positive, but maybe less so if you're not.

Gretchen: Maybe less so. So, you finished your PhD, and you’re teaching now. I have been told that you make students stab themselves with toothpicks for science. Can you tell us about that?

Jacq: I would love to tell you about that, with a caveat: I tell students to very carefully try not to stab themselves with toothpicks, but it doesn’t quite translate. I teach phonetics, which involves learning about all of the sounds and how we make them. If you’re a speaker of English, you might be familiar with this little sound called “R.”

Gretchen: R is a sound, yes, that I’m familiar with.

Jacq: The alveolar approximate, the /ɹ/ noise. The R sound, the /ɹ/, can be made about 16 million different ways. There’s something like eight or nine different things that you can do with your mouth that will get you close enough to /ɹ/ for people to understand you.

Gretchen: Oh, wow. When I was learning phonetics, they told us there were two different ways, and there’s actually six or eight of them.

Jacq: There’s two different tongue positions, and that’s where the toothpick comes in. But you can also do – there’s different stuff with the back of your mouth. Some people have lip rounding, and some people don’t. Some people raise this and that – yeah, there’s different ways to do it. But you were right when you were learning phonetics.

Gretchen: But because it all produces approximately the same sound, kids just hear adults making the sound, and they experiment with their mouths to produce The Sound, and because the meat suit part of our throats is kind of squishy, you can manipulate it in different ways and end up with the same thing that comes out.

Jacq: You get close enough. In English, we don’t have a lot of other stuff in that area, too. When you think about it, if you’re a kid, if you think about something like a /p/, if you’re a baby looking at a caregiver going /p/, you can really see that, right, but a /ɹ/, you get a face, and you don’t really know what’s going on.

Gretchen: You just get a blank face. You can’t see what they’re doing. With something like a /k/, you can’t necessarily see what they’re doing, but the sound is very distinct that they’re making. /ɹ/ is this approximate sound, which is why it’s called an “approximant” in the International Phonetic Alphabet because it’s just sort of like, “Eh, I dunno.”

Jacq: Close enough, yeah. What you get is you have this sound where there’s a bunch of different ways to make it, and also a bunch of speakers that don’t really know how they make it. When you say something like a /k/, you make that sound, and you’re like, “Oh, my tongue goes here.” But when you’re making a /ɹ/, it changes – depending on where it is in the word – all this stuff. As you learned in your phonetic class, there are two ways that your tongue can be shaped when you’re making a /ɹ/ sound. This may blow some people’s minds because they never thought about it before and didn’t realise that the other way is possible. The two big ways are – they have a million different names because of course they do – but one is called the “bunched R,” usually.

Gretchen: This is when your R, like the back part of your tongue sort of crunches up or gloms up into a bit of a shape at the back that doesn’t actually touch the roof of your mouth.

Jacq: The back of your tongue is all crunched up, and the front of it is down at the bottom of your mouth. The other way to do it is often called the “retroflex R,” or the “curly R,” so you have bunch-y R and curly R. The curly R – the retroflex R – the front of your tongue is curled up and back a little bit.

Gretchen: It’s almost like the tip of the bottom of your tongue is touching, or almost touching, the roof of your mouth.

Jacq: Yes. Which one do you make? It’s hard to –

Gretchen: I know which one I make!

Jacq: Awesome! One of the important points of science is confirmatory analysis. You should replicate this finding and see if it still holds true. If you wanna know which R you make, there’s a way that you can do this with just a toothpick. It’s really easy. All you do is you take a toothpick, a clean one – and make sure you wash your hands – and then you take your toothpick, and you make an R sound – /ɹ/ – or you can pretend you’re a dog and go [imitates dog growl], something like that, just make your /ɹ/ noise. Then you take your toothpick, and you rest it on your bottom teeth or however you wanna – kind of have it centrally into your mouth – and as you go /ɹ/, slowly and carefully, and not stab-ily, put the toothpick into your mouth, and then go, “bleh,” stick your tongue out. The toothpick will either be touching the top of your tongue or the bottom of your tongue.

Gretchen: Whoa! And this tells you which R you have?

Jacq: Yes. And if it’s touching the bottom of your tongue, you’re making a retroflex – you’re making a curly R. And if it’s touching the top of your tongue, you’re making a bunched R.

Gretchen: So, you’re either a curler or a buncher, and you can tell this based on which side you are. I actually went looking for toothpicks so that I could try this and ended up finding a cotton swab, like a Q-Tip, before I saw my toothpicks, and so I tried this with a cotton swab and did not stab myself. This is the safety conscious version you can do if you like because it also works.

Jacq: As long as it’s clean and your hands are clean, that’s a good, safe way to do it.

Gretchen: I’m a buncher, which I thought I was, and I have just confirmed that.

Jacq: Anecdotally, in Canada, it was usually about 50/50 when we go through classes, or we try it. This is in Alberta.

Gretchen: And in New Zealand is it also 50/50, or is it different?

Jacq: In New Zealand, there are a lot more bunchers. I think this might have to do with New Zealand being non-rhotic. I don’t have a paper on this. I don’t know anything. But there’s also a lot less lip rounding. In Canada, lip rounding is almost universal, like it’s on Rs a lot.

Gretchen: Yeah, I lip round.

Jacq: But in New Zealand, that’s not the case. Most people don’t round their lips.

Gretchen: Jacq, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. As we ask at the end of every interview, “If you could leave people knowing one thing about linguistics, what would it be?”

Jacq: It would be that you’re the boss of your language. How you communicate with people – it’s all on you. People can tell you how they think you should talk. Even linguists can say, “Well, this is how people talk.” But if you’re not feeling it, do something different. You can change it. You can do whatever you want, communicate however you wanna communicate. Don’t let anyone tell you what to do.

[Music]

Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on all of the podcast platforms or at lingthusiasm.com. You can get transcripts of every episode on lingthusiasm.com/transcripts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on all the social media sites. You can get scarves with lots of linguistics patterns on them including the IPA, branching tree diagrams, bouba and kiki, and our favourite esoteric Unicode symbols, plus other Lingthusiasm merch – like our “Etymology isn’t Destiny” t-shirts and aesthetic IPA posters – at lingthusiasm.com/merch. You can find our co-host, Lauren Gawne, on social media, and her blog is Superlinguo. Links to my social media can be found at gretchenmcculloch.com. My blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com. My book about internet language is called Because Internet. You can find our guest, Jacq Jones, on their website at jacq.land – that’s J-A-C-Q-dot-L-A-N-D. Lingthusiasm is able to keep existing thanks to the support of our patrons. If you wanna get an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month, our entire archive of bonus episodes to listen to right now, or if you just wanna help keep the show running ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Recent bonus episodes include spoonerisms, mondegreens, and eggcorns; secret codes and the joys of cryptic word puzzles; and inner voice, mental pictures, and other shapes for our thoughts. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who’s curious about language. Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, our Production Assistant is Martha Tsutsui-Billins, and our Editorial Assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Jacq: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

#linguistics #lingthusiasm #language #podcast #episodes #transcripts #podcasts #Jacq Jones #phonetics #phonology #gender and speech #nonbinary speech #binary speech #linguistic research #research ethics #interview #geology #geology as a gateway to linguistics

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jacksgreysays · 5 months

Text

Extremely late, completely unnecessary opinion of the Watcher situation, (2024-04-24)

So this is a relatively belated post — several days after the initial “Goodbye Youtube” and one day after the “An Update” videos — and surely by this point there are more interesting/insightful op-eds (both in written form and video form, especially penguinz0’s fairly objective POV as, essentially, a YouTube expert) but there is something about the Watcher situation that made my brain itch. Thus, I wanted to write about it in order to make sense of it all as well as get into a philosophy that seems to be haunting me in recent years and which I think applies greatly here.

This may seem completely out of left field considering 1) definitely not fanfiction and 2) about Watcher Entertainment, a YouTube channel which—as far as this tumblr is concerned—I’ve not engaged with whatsoever, but I don’t know where else I would put this, and weirdly enough I think the general tumblr response to this whole predicament is maybe the… if not objective… then at least, most thoughtful?—or, perhaps, least immediately reactive?—amongst the various social media platforms, that I think some people might appreciate this anyway.

In terms of my relevant background: I majored in Management Science (which is just a fancy way of saying Economics + Business + Accounting because they are, weirdly enough, separate things) and minored in Film Studies in school, I am currently working in the stage tech industry (which, I know, is obviously different from film/video industry), and I like to think I am a fan/consumer of a wide variety of independent creators, some of whom I am lucky enough to be able to afford being a patron/subscriber. I won’t go into all of them—because it is a lot—but there are four in particular whose business models I want to analyze in comparison to Watcher’s admitted blunder:

A) RocketJump (known for Video Game High School and Anime Crimes Division; the core group which turned into the podcast Story Break, then became Dungeons and Daddies) B) Dropout (formerly College Humor, we’ll get into their discography later) C) Drawfee (previously an offshoot of College Humor, now fully independent) D) Corridor Digital (used to be mostly behind the scenes of how VFX studios work, have since become a mostly original content creator)

I will say, right off the bat, I am a patron of Drawfee as well as Dungeons and Daddies, and I am a subscriber to Dropout. I am not subscribed to Corridor Digital’s streamer, which I will get into why later. I understand that being able to sustain those two patronages and one subscription is a luxury that not everyone can afford and so my point of view is already skewed by being such a person who could theoretically afford another streaming service if I so chose. I also acknowledge that many fans of Watcher are not in similarly financially secure places as I am and that regardless of the business model, any monetization that comes from fans would have been a rough ask. However, I wanted to go into this essay in a way that accepts Watcher’s statement—that they needed more funding—in relatively good faith rather than assuming the worst (although that is another point I’ll get into later, largely related to the philosophy I brought up earlier.)

All four of the above listed content creators started or, at least, hit their stride on YouTube:

RocketJump and College Humor were, if not household names, then the digital equivalent of it in the “early days of YouTube.” They were part of the wave of content creators that made YouTube seem less like a bunch of eccentrics with cameras making videos on the side and more like a viable way to support yourself/your team with the art you create.

RocketJump’s Video Game High School went from short (less than 10 minutes) minimal location episodes in season one, to 30 minute plus episodes with full on fight scenes and car explosions by season three thanks to a Monster Energy brand deal. They also had two seasons of Anime Crimes Division, a literal TV quality show, thanks to a Crunchy Roll sponsorship. Unfortunately, RocketJump shut down not long after (their videos are still up on YouTube but they obviously don’t add anything new) but the core creative team behind that have been involved in several projects outside of YouTube (Dimension 404 on Hulu being one of the biggest ones so far) including the podcast Story Break (part of the Maximum Fun network) and now the independent podcast Dungeons and Daddies, the episodes of the main campaigns which are free with ads or, for patrons, ad-less along with additional mini-campaigns and other benefits.

I will say, during RocketJump’s decline, they did try their best to keep going. The partnerships with Monster Energy and Crunchy Roll were the big swings to get the funding to make those TV quality shows they wanted. I believe they lucked out with those brands in particular, or, at least, those brands didn’t seem to inhibit the creative process or ask too much of them that it felt like “selling out” but I also don’t have insight into why they didn’t pursue this model of, essentially, very weird but interesting season long commercials. Maybe they just couldn't find the right brands or maybe they did feel like it was too stifling. Regardless, before they shut down completely, they did also downsize—moving out of the actual city of Los Angeles over to Buena Park. Which is in Los Angeles county, and basically counts as LA still, but is way cheaper than literal Hollywood real estate. (I should have added to my relevant background that I’m born and raised LA county, and have relatives and friends in the film/movie industry, so trust me when I say literal Hollywood/city of Los Angeles is so overrated and unnecessarily expensive. There is a reason why LA traffic is the worst and it’s because everyone is commuting INTO the city. Respectfully and with affection, no one should live there. No one’s start up should be located there.) Obviously the downsizing didn’t necessarily work for RocketJump, but they also didn’t have multiple successful revenue streams the way that Watcher currently does.

In contrast, College Humor was acquired by InterActiveCorp and was turned into CH Media which was three pronged: College Humor, Drawfee, and Dorkly. In 2018 they made Dropout, which had exclusive content separate from their YouTube videos which involved all three prongs. Then some financial shenanigans happened early 2020—IAC withdrew their funding—and there were a bunch of layoffs right before the pandemic which extremely sucked. It has been stated by multiple people involved that it was basically a miracle that Dropout survived through all of that, but there were definitely some sacrifices along the way to make that happen. Currently, Dropout seems to be thriving with mostly exclusive content with the occasional “first episode of a season” posted to YouTube, OR if Dimension 20 is doing a “sequel season” in an already established campaign they will put the entirety of the previous season on YouTube.

IAC withdrawing their funding did put CH Media in a bind. They had to layoff a lot of people right before pandemic and, understandably, a lot of trauma was had. There were also weird issues with who controlled certain IPs/brands/digital assets (I mostly come at this from a Drawfee POV, it took several years for them to own the Drawga series and be allowed to host all of the episodes on their YouTube, and there was also something about the sound file for their opening animation?) but mainly the difference is what kind of content they generate. Originally Dropout had multiple scripted shows with high budgets and pretty cool effects/animations/stunts (Troopers, Kingpin Katie, Gods of Food, Ultramechatron Team Go!, Cartoon Hell, and WTF 101) whereas now almost all of their shows are variations of improv comedians being put into different scenarios or given different prompts. I’m not just talking about Game Changer and Make Some Noise, because Dimension 20 and Um, Actually also technically fall under that description as well. Which is not to say that these shows are worse than the scripted shows—I subscribe to Dropout, so clearly I’m a fan of their current shows—and the budgets for them have since increased to resemble, if not match, those early shows, but it is a noticeable shift in their content creation strategy as a response to the lack of IAC funding. And I will say: Dropout releases at least three videos a week if not more and at least two of those are long form at 30 minutes plus (Dimension 20 being the longest, of course.)

So, these first two business models are not really the most applicable to Watcher Entertainment considering their origin was to get away from Buzzfeed—they’re probably not keen to be partnered with or purchased by a larger company—but there are some aspects to both that I believe are valuable in at least showing the strategy in how these former YouTube creators could successfully extract themselves from YouTube or how they still utilize YouTube even if it is not their main hosting platform or revenue stream.

Then there is Drawfee and Corridor Digital, both of whom are currently—if not primarily—on YouTube, whose situations are more comparable to what I believe are Watcher’s goals.

Drawfee had to rebuild themselves like a phoenix from the ashes of the CH Media layoff during the beginning/worst of the pandemic. Side note: I’m happy that Nathan (one of the four main artists of the current Drawfee team) at least has forgiven(? or let bygones be bygones) Dropout enough to be on an episode of Game Changer (although I will say that this happened after Drawga was “returned” to Drawfee, and after Dropout officially split from College Humor as a brand.) All that being said, Drawfee was a team of four artists plus their editor who wanted to stick together but basically had all of their support system taken away from them. They took a bit of a break to assess their goals and options, announced a patreon with several tiers with great perks, and stuck to their upload schedule. In addition to two videos a week, they also stream on Twitch weekly, have a patron only stream once a month, and a draw class (for one of the higher tiers) once month. After asking their patrons on the relevant tiers if they were okay with it, they began releasing the patron only stream and the draw class to the general public for free after a month. The patreon perks also include things like merch discount codes, high quality PNGs of the final rendered art, access to the draw class with live interaction/critique, and a commission from the artist of your choice. The only “ads” they run are for their own patreon and merch store and, even then, they’re usually at the end of the videos with a credit scroll of the patron names during their exit banter.

Admittedly, they only have MAYBE eight employees—that’s including their video editor(s?) and their discord mod(s?)—with the main four artists doubling/tripling up duties as additional video editors, CFO, and marketing/merch leads. It’s a very streamlined crew and their production costs are not very high since it’s mostly screen recording of their drawings with their audio recording overlayed onto that footage. Although the video editors do sometimes have clever cuts to relevant images depending on their vamping. Sometimes they will have a guest artist but, again, since it’s screen and audio recordings, there’s no travel/housing costs. So, very minimal expenses due to low production costs and small crew but, again, their only revenue source is the patreon/merch, they don’t do outside ads and they very rarely do live shows.

Corridor Digital is, I think, the most applicable to what Watcher would ideally do, which I suppose is somewhat ironic for this essay in particular considering they’re the only one of the four that I don’t financially support. They have two YouTube channels: their main one being where they show the “final product” videos, but I believe their Corridor Crew channel which started primarily as behind the scenes type of videos is where most of their views come from. Especially their React series (VFX artists, Stuntmen, and Animators React etc.) On Corridor Crew they usually upload two videos a week — one which is a React and the other which goes into fun projects/challenges (involving VFX or not) or using VFX to explain scientific concepts — as well as the first episodes of their exclusive content on their streamer. Also behind that paywall are longer and ad-less versions of the videos on YouTube. They also have merch. All of them have merch, I don’t know why I’m stating that. They don’t have a patreon as far as I know, but I also don’t know if their subscription to their website comes with similar perks like discounted merch or something similar.

Anyway, their studio seems to be about 15 to 20 people — not all of them are VFX artists, of course. I believe they have higher equipment costs than Watcher since, understandably, Corridor has to be on the cutting edge of video editing technology. They do occasionally travel for shoots, but it doesn’t require big teams, and that’s only when the local locations available to them don’t match the requirements for the “final product” videos. Otherwise most of their videos are set in the studio or in the alleyway outside their studio in Los Angeles (the city itself, not just the greater county, though they are in a rougher and thus probably cheaper part of Los Angeles). I personally don’t subscribe to their website primarily because their exclusive shows don’t appeal to me—either they’re too technical or a little too dry; to be fair, most of them are VFX artists first before they are performers—and I don’t particularly feel the need to see the extended cuts of the videos uploaded on YouTube. Also I sometimes get a little bummed out by their lack of diversity.

All of this to say, from these four different business models, a bespoke Frankenstein business model for Watcher could be cobbled together. But also, even with that bespoke Frankenstein, there are some changes that Watcher would have to make: primarily their upload schedule. As of right now, I think they do MAYBE one video a week if not, perhaps, one video every TWO weeks. If they want a monthly subscription model, their rate of content generation would ideally be higher to double/quadruple their current upload rate. Obviously they want to create videos with higher production value, but at that rate of generation, something’s got to give: supplement their TV quality shows with either a behind the scenes type series or an increase of “we get four episodes out of Shane and Ryan get increasingly drunk in someone’s backyard” or something similar. Leaning into shows like Worth A Shot (the first season in which Ricky Wang makes cocktails based on a random ingredient, the second season threw in some competitive aspects which I didn’t really find necessary) or the Beatdown which has relatively low production costs (no travel, one location, maybe two cameras at most therefore smaller crew requirements) but a higher polished look. Otherwise, for a separate streaming subscription service, 2-4 videos a month is not going to cut it.

As of right now they probably can’t back out of the separate streaming subscription service because those set ups usually require some level of contract/paying for servers for the website and whatever is hosting their videos for a set amount of time. However, what really strikes me is that I literally didn’t know they had a patreon until I scrolled through the comments of the first Goodbye Youtube video. Maybe it’s been linked "tactfully" in the descriptions of videos, but considering they claim to be lacking in funds, the fact that they weren’t plugging their patreon at the end of every video is not just strange, but also irresponsible considering they do have 25 employees that they don’t want to layoff.

Additionally, I understand artists needing to be in a space that promotes creativity, but there are cheaper places that must be comparable that aren’t in literal Hollywood. It’s an unnecessary expense. On top of that, other people have already brought up that it was fairly crass to introduce this paywall, attributing it to the increased production costs, when the next planned “new series” is a reboot of an old Buzzfeed series in which people travel and eat expensive food. I’m not even talking about the personal expenses of Steven, Shane, and Ryan; what kind of car they drive or the cost of their wedding venue doesn’t matter on a business model basis.

But getting back to the patreon: again, I literally didn’t know they had one. I’m looking over their tiers— they have $5, $10, $25, and $100 — and for the most part they seem okay, although I think they have more to offer that wouldn’t necessarily cost them more. Ie, something that has baffled me for a while: the fact they don’t sell the mp3s of the Puppet History songs; they already exist and it doesn’t cost them anything additional because they don’t need to put it on physical media. Or maybe they do and they’re not marketing it similarly to how they weren’t overtly marketing their patreon?

And, okay, maybe they didn’t want to seem desperate — in the early days of Dropout and independent Drawfee, they both were very blatant in getting people to subscribe/join their patreon. As they should be. Desperation maybe doesn’t look cool and sexy, but it is earnest in a way that conveys equal effort that fans who can afford it would want to see. The fact that we weren’t getting rotating ten second clips of Steven, Shane, and Ryan asking people to join the patreon at the end of every video — even if its the same clip every three videos — is wild. And yes, the $25 tier includes a shoutout every 3 months on Watcher Weekly+ (which I don't quite understand what that is,) but the fact that they weren’t doing a quick post movie credits scroll of all the patreon names is, again, wild. Once you have that initial list, it’s not too difficult to add any new names that join and put that title overlay on top of, again, those nonexistent ten second clips of the three.

As others have already stated, it seems like an extreme mismanagement of their existing successful revenue streams, if they are actually struggling to pay all of their employees. Which goes into the philosophy part of this essay: don’t assume malice when it might just be incompetence. It’s something that I have to remind myself of often because I do get paranoid about people’s intentions sometimes and I have to check myself. Am I being overly suspicious of what might be just an honest mistake? Am I assigning ill will to an action just because it inconvenienced me?

Yes, of course, a lot of this situation could be misconstrued as straight up greed. But, also, Watcher is a relatively young company, helmed by three people who certainly don’t have experience running their own company:

They like to travel. They like to bring a full crew around with them. They’re renting out a shiny office in the heart of Hollywood where everyone knows is where real show biz happens. They’re adding more employees to the team because surely more people means better. And they want better productions values because the prettier the videos the more people will like them right?

It’s naive. It’s a level of inexperience combined with giving responsibility to officers whose main priority is to entertain. And if that means entertaining themselves and their staff, then they might not know the difference. It’s the kind of mistake that first time managers make—trying to prioritize fun over getting the job done. Prioritizing making friends with their employees rather than making sure the work the employees put in is equal to (or greater than) what you spend on them whether that is in paycheck or bringing them to cool locations for fun shoots. It’s a mistake anyone can make, it's just unfortunate that they made this mistake in front of millions of people. It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s solely a greed induced cash grab.

But then comes the catch-22 of the philosophy—is it worse to assume incompetence than it is to assume malice? Or, in this case, greed. Especially for the heads of a company that holds the livelihoods of 25 employees in their hands. At what point does it not matter if it’s incompetence or greed if the end result is the same?

Is it better to think that Watcher knew about the various other business models of independent creators and just ignored the efforts put into achieving those successes or is it better to think that they didn’t know and just stumbled into one of the worst moves they could have done. Again, other people have mentioned that Great Mythical Morning—which Watcher has had multiple collaborations with—has managed to make the YouTube subscription/tier system work to the point that they can sustain themselves as well as spinoff channels. Is it incompetence or greed that led to Watcher thinking they could bypass that completely in less time and with less content?

I’ve been at this mess of an essay for several hours when I should have been asleep. Ultimately I want to say, regardless of incompetence or greed… yes, Steven is CEO and yes he is ultimately the one who makes the final call but it is disheartening to see the pointed vitriol at Steven specifically and the infantilizing of Shane and Ryan in comparison. Either they’re all silly uwu boys who are messing around not knowing how to run a company, or they’re all complicit in a crass cash grab in an extremely busted economy.

I think what’s most frustrating to me in all this is that there were so many other channels and creators who have literally walked this path before them and, again, whether through incompetence or greed or arrogance, for them to just ignore it… It’s not betrayal because I don’t know them and so there’s no relationship to betray, it’s just so inefficient and convoluted that I don’t understand. Or, no, even if it was greed, it’s an incompetent greed because at least pure greed would have been pushing that patreon every second they could. Their ratio of YouTube subscribers to patreon members is less than 1% and I bet that’s because a lot of their audience, like me, literally didn’t know they had a patreon. I probably would have become a patreon member of theirs had I known earlier, ESPECIALLY if it included access to those Puppet History songs. Drawfee has half as many YouTube subscribers and nearly double the patreon members as Watcher. I’m just baffled, is all, and maybe by this point sleep deprived.

Anyway. That’s my extremely late, completely unnecessary opinion of this situation.

Edit (several hours later after some sleep): I forgot to mention, because they did walk this back almost immediately, even before their "An Update" video, but I believe the original plan was to put EVERYTHING behind that paywall and pull their content from YouTube entirely. Which is, again, extremely baffling, because if ALL of their content is behind a paywall, how would they possibly gain new fans? Even if all of their current fans were able and willing to pay for their separate subscription streaming service, how would a brand new person even stumble on their content enough to want to subscribe if there wasn't a significant amount of "proof of value" free content on YouTube? Again, extremely baffling, and a level of incompetence that overshadows a "cunning" greed. But, like I said earlier, they did walk this decision back almost immediately. If I've misunderstood this and that was never their plan, please let me know, I don't want to be spreading misinformation in a situation that is already so convoluted.

#jacksgreyson #writing #nonfiction #essay #watcher #op-ed #youtube #drawfee #corridor digital #dropout #rocketjump #dungeons and daddies

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