#norwegian culture is being very sweet and nice

[sitp-recs]

Hey! Hope you're doing good!! :) I'm wondering if you know any Drarry fics that have mythological elements / stories as part of the plot. For example, a fic based on Greek myths like Hades/Persephone?

Hi anon! I’m doing great, what about you? :) oh that’s a really cool ask, I hope you enjoy these! I strongly recommend checking khalulu’s stuff as they always explore different mythologies and cultures across their works. I’d love to get more recs on this theme, too!

Nordic:

Veðr by @shealwaysreads (M, 3k)

Norsemen have ranged far enough inland to find Harry, alone and abandoned by his kith and kin. But they bring far more than danger with them, they bring adventure, they bring magic.

Swedish:

Sweden | A Midsummer Night’s Dream by @drarrelie (M, 5.5k)

With the war finally over, you’d think Harry would finally be granted that “normal life” he’s always dreamt about. Finally free from the Dursleys, from that nose-less megalomaniac, from Horcruxes, Hollows, Death Eaters, Dementors, Prophecies… you’d think that he, for the first time in his life, would be allowed to be just a normal teenager. You’d think he’d deserve that much, right?

Russian:

S’Mitten by khalulu (G, 6k)

Harry and Draco aren’t enemies any more, but it seems their history will always stand between them – so let’s try some other histories on for size! The fickle finger of fate is muffled in one of Mrs Weasley’s mittens. Did I mention kisses?

Norwegian:

East of the Sun and West of the Moon by khalulu (T, 6k)

One stormy Thursday evening, a big white bear named Draco turns up to carry Harry away from the dreadful Dursleys. They get along fairly happily together until one night Harry’s curiosity gets the better of him, and Draco is whisked away to his wicked aunt’s castle, East of the Sun and West of the Moon. It will take a strong wind to bring Harry that far…..

Albanian:

What Country, Friends, Is This? by khalulu (M, 8k)

When Harry and Draco are paired up for a nebulous “capstone project” in 8th year, Draco suggests they use it as an opportunity to take a free Grand Tour of Europe. Harry isn’t interested in being grand, and they soon veer off the beaten path. The journey to find what (and who) you really want can lead to unexpected places. (As well as Bertha Jorkins’ aunt, Illyrian Serpent cults, heroic baby Draco tales, and Slytherins singing Motown.)

Hindu:

Birds of Dreams / Remover of Obstacles / Guardian of Waters by khalulu (G, 12k)

Harry is exploring his Desi heritage, and Draco runs into him in colourful circumstances. Luna has a penchant for puns and the Patils watch Bollywood. Paper is folded, a flying carpet takes an Indian road trip, and a phoenix is found. Love blooms along the way, a flower that’s free.

Finnish:

Sparks from the Fox’s Tail by khalulu (T, 17k)

Draco is frustrated with his career as a travel writer, when a mini-tirade from Mrs Weasley and an encounter with the portrait of an intrepid great-great-great-aunt lead him to Finland to study wandless magic. Harry is – just being contrary and following his sweet-tooth, or taking the subtle route to saving the world?

Multiple:

The Hardest Hue To Hold by @cavendishbutterfly (M, 17k)

Harry needs to get the hell out of England. So he sets up a teaching assistantship in America, hops on a plane, and heads off to a fresh start. Except there’s a familiar face among the university faculty, and it’s really not the familiar face that Harry wanted. Or at least, it’s not who Harry wanted at first.

Irish:

Offer Up Our Hearts by @tackytigerfic (M, 23k)

Harry Potter has a very nice life, thank you very much. He's a top Curse-Breaker with a lucrative Ministry contract, and exciting prospects ahead. Sometimes he does wish that he had time to pursue something official with Draco Malfoy - they're half in love with each other, after all, and a great team (in and out of bed), though Draco is still one of the most infuriating people he knows.

Egyptian:

Memory Lost | You Found by @maraudersaffair (E, 30k)

After his Auror training, Harry's assigned to guard the Department of Mysteries - specifically the room where Malfoy is being held in comfortable captivity. Yet no one will tell him why, and what's more concerning? Malfoy doesn't remember Harry at all. To uncover the mystery, Harry must travel all the way to Egypt where he discovers a magical community living in the great pyramids and a long held secret that is dangerous to anyone who knows it.

Arthurian:

The Compact by astolat (E, 64k)

Hermione frowned. “The real question is why the magic of Britain would be failing now, in fact.” “That is not the real question!” Ron said loudly; he’d woken up fully by now, and Harry had too; it was starting to sink in that they’d found the problem. “The real question is, how do we fix it?”

Brazilian:

A Sense of Scale by @fantalfart and dragontamerdrarry (M, 70k)

In which Draco spends an obscene amount of time thinking of new nicknames for The Living Git, lying to himself and using his charms to seduce an extremely uncooperative sentient school.

Celtic:

The Stars Have Courage by @fantalfart (M, 85k)

Draco waited five long years to watch his husband wake up from a coma. He's not ready to meet a Harry with no memory of anything that happened after he died at The Battle of Hogwarts, twelve years ago.

Greek:

Close Behind by @oflights (M, 134k)

To rescue Draco from the Underworld, Harry has to look forward. Unfortunately, Draco has to look back.

Bonus: dark fae AU 🧚‍♂️

Mushrooms of Wiltshire by @shiftylinguini (T, 5k)

There's no point unpacking―Harry's not staying long, and besides, there's just bundled rags in his valise. The illusion of belongings, of a man heading to a new position at a prestigious manor―one beset with rumours of old magic and of impish forest dwellers causing chaos and mayhem amid the phosphorescent toadstool glow. Bugger the job. Harry's here for the rumours. He's been chasing them for years.

[cutejk123]

Blossom's Friends

So I have thinking about giving Blossom (my Luigi and Daisy's youngest daughter) some friends. I used this picrew for the designs of her friends as a prototype of what I would imagine they would look like and I have their aus and headcanons for them.

Here the links:

TOON ME! ⟪ A ⟫｜Picrew

TOON ME! ⟪ B ⟫｜Picrew

So here they are:

Himari

Age 12

Female

Straight, ''Cis''

She/her

Birthday: May 24th

Asian- Japanese

Dad- Hideki, Mum- Yumiko

Has a 6-year old little brother named Nobita

Has 1 pet: A Norwegian Forest cat (Female, colour: beige and white) named Bibi

Born in Osaka, Japan, but then moved to Brooklyn, New York State, USA at the age of 9 years old.

Speaks Japanese fluently, as this is her first language, English is her second. So she has a Japanese accent.

Himari first met Blossom at primary school, when she first came to Brooklyn from Japan. Himari was a bit shy as she didn't know much English, but soon, she made really good friends with Blossom and also learned English too.

Personality: friendly, spiritual, fun, helpful, hardworking, amazing, slightly strict.

Loves: Maths, comic books (especially shoujo manga), anime and tokusatsu like Doraemon, Tokyo Mew Mew, Super Sentai series, Showa-era anime and tokusatsu shows, drawing, hanging out with friends, ramen, computer games, her family, martial arts.

Dislikes: people making fun at her accent, dirty rooms, most modern new music.

Himari often teaches Blossom about Japanese culture, especially kawaii culture.

Clothing aesthetic style: Indie and Normcore.

Jada

Age 12

Female

Straight, ''Cis''

She/her

Birthday: November 9th

Black

Dad- Michael, Mum- Olivia

She is the only child

Has 2 pets: A Bird (Male, colour: white) named Mr Sparkles, and a hamster (Female, colour: ginger) named Robin

She wears glasses due to poor eyesight

An Animal lover and wants to help animals.

She is a Baptist Christian

She takes swimming lessons once every 2 weeks on Friday evenings.

Jada first met Blossom on the first day of secondary school, in Science class. Since Blossom is also an animal lover, she really connected to Jada and they started talking about different animals and breeds after class.

Bird enthusiast and often carries the book about birds in her school bag.

Personality: smart, intelligent, thoughtful, kind, sweet, helpful, brave, brainy.

Loves: animals, birds, science (especially biology), sports, family and friends, her pets, geography, the beach, swimming, gospel music, zoology.

Dislikes: Maths, sad songs, being late for important things, rude people, people hating on her love for birds.

Clothing aesthetic style: VSCO.

River

Birthname: Rachael

Age 12

Female

Nonbinary, Pansexual

They/them

Birthday: October 20th

White

Has ADHD and Anxiety.

Dad- Brandon, Mum- Abby

Has an older sister (sibling) named Sam, who is 17 years old and is genderfluid and uses she/he/they pronouns.

Has 1 pet: A Dog (Male, colour: brown and white) named Sparky

Gothic music lover

River first met Blossom during break time at school before River came out as nonbinary and pansexual. River commented on Blossom's clothing style, saying that Blossom was very adorable and fluffy, which made Blossom smile.

Personality: moody, cool, a little bossy, nice, sometimes calm, wild, loyal.

Loves: Gothic music, their dog, their best mate, anime such as My Hero Academia, Jujutsu Kaisen and Pokémon, art, drawing, chocolate cake, Hazbin Hotel, gory stuff like spiders, Halloween, Tim Burton films, videogames.

Dislikes: people using the wrong pronouns, their anxiety, pastel colours, cute things, Harry Potter, the colour pink. 

Clothing aesthetic style: Grunge.

Darcy

Age 12

Female

Straight, ''Cis''

She/her

Birthday: January 25th

White- Canadian

Has Dyslexia

Dad- Richard, Mum- Elizabeth

Has a younger 9 year old sister named Ann and a younger 5 year old sister named Lucy.

No pets

Food lover (sweets)

Born in Ottawa, Canada, but then moved to Brooklyn, when her dad got a new job at the age of 6 years old.

Speaks in a Canadian accent

A Great Singer

She is proud to be a little larger than her friends despite comments by other people.

Darcy first met Blossom at Reading help centre in their local area, when they were 10 years old. Blossom also struggled with reading despite not having dyslexia, so they started to play dollies together in the play area of the centre, and the friendship grew over time.

Personality: cheeky, funny, giggly, lovable, pouty, a little stubborn, greedy, bubbly, a little quiet.

Loves: cake, lots of fun, her little sisters, ball games like catch, biscuits, food, her Canadian culture, her friends, music, singing, sleeping.

Dislikes: getting sick, overeating, reading too much, being tired, annoyance, fat shaming, people making fun of her appearance.

Clothing aesthetic style: Art Hoe.

Fannie

Age 12

Female

Straight, ''Cis''

She/her

Birthday: June 30th

White- of Irish decent

Has Autism, Dyslexia, Anxiety.

She wears glasses.

Dad- Danial, Mum- Bertha

Has twin 7 year old younger brothers named Peter and Luca, and a baby 2 year old little sister named Penny. (all of them has Autism).

Refers to her parents as Mummy and Daddy.

Has 3 pets: 2 guinea pigs (both Female) named Pearl and Sweetie and a Lionhead rabbit (Female, colour- beige) named Creamy.

Always carries her yellow dog plushie named Caramel with her, just like Blossom does with her Bubbles the bunny plushie.

She is Blossom's best friend, she is always there to protect and help Blossom.

Fannie first met Blossom on the first day of primary school, when they were 4 years old. Blossom fell over and hurt herself and Fannie came over and patted Blossom's head gently.

Fannie's interests are similar to Blossom's.

Her hyper fixations are True and the Rainbow Kingdom, Sanrio and Play-Doh.

Personality: extremely shy, sensitive, cry-baby, kind, sweet, protective, quiet, prone to tears quickly, helpful, gentle, childlike, clumsy, humble.

Loves: colouring, watching cartoons, Play-Doh, drawing, art, her pets, family and friends, her plushies, making cute bracelets, painting, Blossom's Dad; Luigi (because he's the most sweetest, understanding and caring person with a very BIG heart), shows like True and the Rainbow Kingdom, MLP, Care Bears, playing card games, dress-up games, Sanrio, hugs and kisses, playing with Blossom, her Nintendo Switch.

Dislikes: messy rooms, untidy things, people making her uncomfortable, horrible people, others making fun for her childlike interests, anyone hurting poor Blossom, tall heights.

Clothing aesthetic style: Soft girl.

Camila

Age 12

Female

Demisexual (with male preference), ''Cis''

She/her

Birthday: April 2nd

Hispanic- Mexican

Dad- Miguel, Mum- Selena. Also her grandma Valentina lives with her family.

She was born in Brooklyn to parents who were from Mexico and moved to the USA.

She is the only child

No pets

She is the best baker in Blossom's year. Everyone LOVES her baking and her sweets.

She often bakes Mexican sweets like: Concha (sweet bread roll), churros, etc.

Usually bakes with her grandma, who taught her many Mexican baking skills and the cuisine.

If something goes wrong her baking, she becomes resilient and try it again.

She also speaks Spanish fluently.

She bakes special treats at the end for each term (Christmas, Spring, Summer).

Camila first met Blossom during Art class in secondary school and they sat next to each other. Camila positively commented on Blossom's OC drawings on her sketchbook, this made Blossom really happy.

Personality: resilient, strong, kind, creative, mature, loyal, reliable, trustworthy, patient, a little bit cheeky.

Loves: baking, cooking, friends and family, Mexican cuisine, family gatherings, cleaning, playing the guitar, helping her friends, volleyball, cakes, sweets, making people happy, learning new things and skills, watching Spanish movies.

Dislikes: getting things wrong, bullying, rainy days, rock climbing, trains.

Clothing aesthetic style: Cottagecore and Bakerycore.

Mars

Birthname: Martha

Age 12

Female

Trans guy, Bisexual, (also experimenting with pupgender).

He/him and They/them

Birthday: March 17th

White

Has Autism, ADHD, Anxiety, Gender Dysphoria.

Getting therapy for his GD and his severe anxiety to help him cope with the mental health issues. 

Dad- Eddie, Mum- Pauline

Has 1 older 15 year old brother named Roy, who is gay.

Has 1 pet, a British shorthair cat (Male, colour- greyish blue) named Bandit.

A huge rabid Bluey fan.

He has a (furry) pupsona called Bobo.

Has severe anxiety, which he is prone to temper tantrums and mental breakdowns.

Only socially transitioned.

He has Bluey merchandise everywhere, including social media pfps and such.

His hyper fixations are: Bluey, Paw Patrol, Blue's Clues, My Hero Academia, Y2K children's shows.

He is best mates with River.

Mars first met Blossom during Art class in secondary school just like Camila, before Mars came out as trans (he was only bisexual then). Blossom was amazed by the Bluey stuff on Mars' books and his bag. So they started talking about Bluey and their favourite characters.

Personality: sensitive, strong, kind, moody, sad, open, anger issues, obsessive, friendly, creative.

Loves: Bluey (obviously), art, drawing, his comfort characters, Paw Patrol, Y2K style, rock music like The Beatles, furry art, being accepted for his identity, LGBT+ memes, Tumblr, children's shows, dogs, friends and family, skateboarding, his plushies, Hazbin Hotel, cats, seeing Bluey memes, Jammidodger (a trans guy Youtuber; his parents wants him to stop watching that person because they believe that he could bring a bad influence on their child), videogames.

Dislikes: people misgendering him (it makes him flip into rage), used the wrong pronouns on him, his parents not accepting his trans and pup identity (but they are fine with the bisexual identity), Blossom's Dad; Luigi (unfortunately), his anxiety, being bullied, being misunderstood.

Clothing aesthetic style: Goth and Kidcore.

Well, that's all of Blossom's friends, I hope you'll like them. :)

Violet's (Blossom's older sister) friends are coming soon.

[edducard]

I wrote a lot of norwegian today.... Anyway introducing my lil hcverse Tori! Not mirrorverse Tori, very different. She's russian and cannot speak english (she only knows russian n norwegian) so Tord often has to translate for her whenever she visits.... she ends up w a crush on Laurel and Tord is forced to third wheel to translate until Laurel learsn enough norwegian to b able to talk to her new gf. Tord is of course her teacher and he is in immense suffering.

Tori also works animal control in russia so sayign she fights bears for a living is half true. She's big tall strong woman.... got them norwegian height genes....

[puncheur]

Queer recommendations

a masterlist of queer content that I, a trans gay man, love and want to share with the world

Film/TV:

Alex Strangelove

-  american and cheesy, but nice gay coming-of-age story. very pleasant, the dumb tender content i crave

Brokeback Mountain

- sad as hell, a classic. i adore it, but find it hard to watch, obviously. beautiful and tender gay tragedy

Call Me By Your Name

- yes it’s controversial, but i loved both the book and the movie. it resonated with me and my experiences and the vibe of the film is just haunting

Druck (in German, but can be found with english subtitles)

- the german remake of SKAM. authentically depicts the lives of young people, each season focusing on a different character. the main character of season three is gay, and his love interest is a trans man (played by a trans man). absolutely beautiful 

The Gay and Wondrous Life of Caleb Gallo

- sitcom-ish web series, main character is gay, features a genderqueer character. this series is where the “sometimes things that are expensive are worse” meme comes from. it’s so clever and so so dumb

The Handmaiden (in Japanese and Korean, but has english subtitles)

- incredible and intense historical drama, the love story is between two women who are also the main characters

Love, Simon

- coming-out rom-com, same category as alex strangelove. how nice it is to see a dumb, sweet and gay movie plot

Please Like Me

- australian sitcom detailing the life of a young man coming to terms with being gay, his dating life, family, friends etc.. sounds basic but it’s different from anything i’ve ever seen, the characters feel real in a different way and watching it, it truly feels like a slice of life as it, plotwise, doesn’t follow a conventional outline

Queer Eye

- obvisouly most people know this already. five gays makeover people’s lives. interesting and funny and great i love it

SKAM (in Norwegian, but can be found with english subtitles)

- same authenticity as druck, as SKAM obviously is the original. season three is a beautiful, gay love story, but the love interest is not trans in this original version of the season

Music:

The 1975

- loving someone is the one that i’ll get gay about, but they make amazing music all the time and matthew healy is such an interesting person 

Benny

- i remember exactly where i was when i first heard little game back in ‘14, and it still resonates with me today

George Michael

- i don’t think i’ll ever tire of even his most over-played songs

Hozier

- take me to church is such an iconic song with such a powerful video that it brings gay tears to my eyes every time i see it. and hozier’s discography is so so tender in general

MIKA

- the dancing around in your living room, screaming along kind of music, amazing voice, lovely person

Panic! At The Disco

- i adore panic! and the power vibes are only intensified because brendon urie is pan. that’s how it works my friends

Queen

- of course, so much great music to even begin to mention it all. hits you right where it should

Sam Smith 

- just beautiful, HIM especially is haunting imo

St. Vincent

- intense, sharp, lovely edge, and clark herself is a wlw

Troye Sivan

- the blue neighbourhood trilogy of videos were amazing, but all of his music has that pure feeling imo, it’s soft but it hits you, i love him and his music

Books:

“Call Me By Your Name” by André Aciman

- as with the movie, i know some people find it uncomfortable or straight up unethical. i don’t, and the story absolutely catches me. i think it’s beautiful, and it’s beautifully written too. i full on understand why some people want to avoid it,  but i believe that depiction does not equal endorsement, and honestly think this is brilliant

“Crush” by Richard Siken

- a collection of poems dealing with themes of desperation and panic as siken explores being gay and falling in love. it’s beautifully written and my all time favourite book

“The Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde

- actually not explicitally gay but i’ll let it slide because it’s clearly there between the lines and wilde himself was gay. beautiful tale of narcissism, hedonism and self-ruin

Podcasts:

Alice Isn’t Dead

- fiction podcast made by the same people who make welcome to night vale. main character and voice of the show is a lesbian, surreal plot, can be pretty scary at times imo, in a good way

Vild Med Svans (in danish)

- two gay men talk about various elements of our culture form a gay pov, and goes into depth with the homo-scene in denmark as well. all in danish though

Welcome to Night Vale

- funny and surreal fiction podcast, where the main character and voice of the show is a gay man

Social media:

Andrean Sigurgeirsson (dancer)

insta

Brian Jordan Alvarez (youtuber, actor, filmmaker) 

youtube

Daniel Howell (youtuber)

youtube | insta

Eugene Lee Yang (youtuber, dancer)

youtube | insta

Jack Samrawi (dancer)

insta

Macdoesit (youtuber)

youtube

I’m aware that there’s a lot of queer content that didn’t make it on here, but I didn’t want to mention anything that I haven’t watched/listened to/read myself  :)

If anyone decides to do their own list of recommendations, I would love to be tagged in it though! 

Happy pride everyone <3

[lightsandlostbells]

Skam France 2.10 and 2.11 reaction

Skam France dropped two episodes last week, so I’m gonna put them together. 

this is another angry recap so heads up if you’re not into those

Episode 10

Clip 1 - Mickael and Lisa are very loud

Right off the bat - worst birthday ever. Making it Manon’s birthday was a good way to adapt these scenes into a holiday setting, though.

Are they play-acting so Manon can hear, or is this supposed to be a conversation between them and they’re careless enough to be too loud?

Actually I think this is a real conversation, not a performance for Manon. I think Lisa is sincere and she’s genuinely forgotten Manon’s birthday. Also that she really thinks for a second they’ve got to celebrate the pope’s birthday.

Lisa saying she misses Manon is sweet. Pretty sure they’re not going to delve into this family relationship or anything but it’s nice especially considering Lisa seems quite cantankerous. 

Lisa telling Mickael to open the door faster made me laugh for some reason. She doesn’t have time to prolong the drama.

This whole conversation is funny but poor Manon, she just wants to shut out the world.

Clip 2 - Mickael gets real

Manon’s actress continues to do a good job. She looks so tired and beaten down by everything.

Mickael and Lisa are both cute in their rendition of Happy Birthday! Lisa has so much more energy than Linn. 

“We’re sorry to steal from your cupboards all the time and ruin your life like leeches from hell.” lmao I love Mickael. 

I was apprehensive following the previous scene, because we got a funny conversation between Mickael and Lisa, but not the more serious and caring side of Mickael and the talk with Eskild that was in the original clip. I was worried because overall his character has felt less nurturing than Eskild and he hasn’t seemed to have as close of a bond with Manon - there were a few moments that were played more for humor than to indicate a strong relationship. It made me nervous that they were taking Mickael more in the direction of “gay comic relief” rather than showing his more substantial sides. So the fact they followed up the earlier conversation with Michael talking to Manon in a heavier way here was reassuring. We get to see his more caring side. He sympathizes with her and acknowledges how much he talks about his life but offers to listen as well. The actor is great and I hope they continue to give him the meatier material, especially in S3

I know he’s saying it because he’s worried, but telling a person with an eating disorder she has to eat entirety of her tray maybe isn’t the best advice? Though I doubt he knows about her ED.

Clip 3 - Charles shows up

I do think it makes it more random and less sense that she’d be like “go party with your friends, Charles” when it’s her own birthday. Or does he know that? He has to know that, didn’t he get her the cake? He’d probably see it on social media?

This is in my opinion the best Noorhelm scene of that relationship, and it almost was of Marles, too. Charles/William acts like a decent person, comes in semi-confrontational but gets his priorities straight when he sees that Manon/Noora is breaking down and panicking, and tries to calm her down and support her. The original scene of him lying down with Noora was genuinely touching and supportive.

They were on the right track and then they botched it. I have an anxiety disorder. I have had panic attacks. I know how scary they are. You don’t  “help” someone with a panic attack by physically picking them and making them leave despite them crying at you they don’t want to go out. What the hell. Why would they add that?

I mean I feel like there’s some weird gender shit going on here, with Charles being the alpha male type and then Manon being the fragile woman and it’s OK for Charles to ignore what she’s saying because Charles Knows Best. Not to mention this is the show’s idea of a swoon-worthy moment. We gotta get the guy carrying the girl around like a little doll. 

Lol, I even saw some weird justification of this moment along the lines of “Well, if she really didn’t want to go out, I’m sure he would have respected that.” She’s crying and telling him she doesn’t want to go out. What more does she have to do to get the message across? Does she have to physically fight him?

Clip 4 - Birthday cake

Well, the cake looks pretty, and at least they wrote in a new scene to acknowledge her birthday.

Also, don’t totally love that he took her phone away. I get it, he probably wants her to just chill, but in connection with everything else, it’s just another small way he’s jumping in and making decisions for her. I would not have been as annoyed if this wasn’t a pattern in their relationship or if this wasn’t immediately following a moment where Charles overrides Manon’s pleas on how to handle her own panic attack.

This scene of them on the rooftop felt like something out of a kdrama in terms of music and slow motion staring at each other. Or at least how I remember the kdramas I’ve seen.

I don’t get why he needed to take her to the rooftop other than the #aesthetic since he just carries her back to her room. I know it’s where their first date was, but she was freaking out and panicking when he tried to make her leave. I really can’t get over that! Whyyy did they need that moment?

Did Charles look at her phone? Sort of dilutes the impact of him not reading her Facebook messages. 

He muted the volume on her computer at least.

Episode 11

Clip 1 - Charles writing

I guess Charles was up writing this article for a while since it’s like 5 in the morning.

Confession time: I’ve never really liked that William (and now Charles) wrote the article for her. I know it’s considered to be one of the better things he did for her but even when I was watching S2 for the first time, I was like 😕 “Can’t they give me something to like about him that I don’t have reservations about?” I don’t think this was a terrible horrible thing he did, and admittedly I am bringing personal feelings into this situation, but it’s just something that I would not be OK with if someone did it for me without telling me first. I would be really panicked and upset if someone did this to me even if they meant it to be a kindness. He wrote the article and submitted it without her consent. Her name is on it. That means she’ll be held accountable for whatever the article says. Consider that Manon and Charles have been disagreeing on tons of topics so far - in fact Charles’ ability to make Manon rethink her opinions is a point that has been explicitly made about their relationship. So when it comes to the article, how can you expect that Manon and Charles would agree on the same points? Someone can be well-intentioned and still say stuff that’s a bit clueless, or make a mistake, and then it’s Manon who would be responsible. This only works if you assume Charles was a great writer with the right opinions - it excuses the action based on the outcome, without considering if the action itself is appropriate. (Which, to be frank, is true of many actions in this season.)

I would’ve preferred if he’d written it and then shown it to her to get her approval before sending. (“But that would have ruined the surprise/she wouldn’t have agreed to send it” - uh, too bad? She should get a voice in this. I get that she’s dealing with serious anxiety, I know what that feels like. But lol, imagine the resulting anxiety if Charles had sent out the article and it had a bunch of errors or some questionable opinions in it and Manon was criticized for it.)

The best case scenario is that he just took her notes and compiled them into something cohesive, which was somewhat implied, but she didn’t have enough notes to make a long enough article without him injecting his own thoughts.

Clips 2 and 3 - Manon and her girls

Did Charles make her tea? Now that’s a nice gesture.

Charles is watching her sleep, just to bring in those true Edward Cullen vibes. Manon was right about this being Twilight!

Lmao, explain to me why she had to wear that tiny dress? That looks like something I’d have worn to a middle school dance when I still had braces. It’s not Norwegian Constitution Day where the girls are going to be dressed up. It’s Manon’s birthday - she can dress however the hell she wants. She doesn’t have to dress up, she could wear her normal clothes. She could roll over to the party in sweats and a nacho cheese-stained T-shirt. 

The music and imagery in the last two clips has been getting super soap opera-ish.

And when Manon shows up, the other girls are wearing their normal clothes, jeans and comfy clothes. Again, why did Manon need the dress?

Heh, how much did they pay for the rights to sing Happy Birthday? Or is it only in the US that you have to cough up a pretty penny to use it on TV?

I looked it up and apparently the song was officially recognized to be in the public domain in 2016! Good to know.

The girls are very cute performing Happy Birthday, though. Love the placement of the birthday hats at jaunty angles.

I’m not really qualified to talk about this as a non-Norwegian but I’ve read a bit about the patriotic themes in S2, and how it’s fitting that Noora tells the girls on Constitution Day (how living in a free, democratic country means you have to believe the law will protect you from assholes like Niko) and that ties in to the overall motifs of the season, and so that’s obviously lost here. It’s a missed opportunity, especially with the article. I think if they tried harder they could have written, you know ... something that related more to this adaptation and French youth, instead of repeating a speech that specifically about Norwegian culture. That’s the bare minimum, my dudes.

Like when Daphne says they need to go to the police because they’re in France and the law will protect them ... I mean, sure, but it’s just one of those things that lacks the thematic relevance of the original as it’s not a national holiday at the time.

(They’re going to do 21:21 for S3 without any changes, aren’t they? Goddammit. I will believe them that they’re changing the storyline when I see it and not just hear it.)

A minor nitpick: I also feel like it’s kinda odd to read her article aloud? It made sense with Noora since it related to the holiday they were celebrating and could fit into their festivities but this is just a random article. In that case I’d find it weird if my friends just started reading something I’d written out loud. I mean it’s one thing to congratulate her for a job well done but IDK, felt out of place. 

But Emma only gets a few lines in, so thankfully we didn’t have to hear the whole thing awkwardly re-purposed for this remake.

Poor Manon with tears in her eyes. Her acting continues to be very good. Manon is more openly emotional and sad than Noora, who seems more like she freezes or shuts down or tries to close herself off.

Hug pile :(

Loved to see Daphne be at the forefront of taking Manon to the hospital and supporting her while they’re there.

Clip 4 - Justice

Nico is such a rat.

Also his ass is dumb.

But that’s no surprise.

Manon is more no nonsense and less playing with Nico than Noora was. 

Actually I preferred that they cut out the line about not dropping the soap and had her throw her drink in his face instead, good job, Manon! That was satisfying.

Clip 5 - The point of no return

So. This is the part when watching the original series where I knew I could never like William or Noorhelm. 

I’m going to go into a personal tangent, skip if you want. I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned how I got into Skam in one of these recaps so my apologies if I’m repeating the story. 

I discovered Skam completely randomly during S3, via a YouTube recommendation. Of all things, strangely it was because I had watched a preview for the show Eyewitness, which was an American remake of a Norwegian show about two boys who witness some murders while making out in the woods. I enjoy crime stories/mysteries and the premise sounded intriguing, so I watched the first 10 minutes of the pilot that the network had put on YouTube as a teaser, and then some interviews talking about the show. Eyewitness turned out to not to be my thing and I didn’t watch more than a few episodes, but because I’d watched it, YouTube started recommending me clips from other shows with gay couples, including Skam. One night I was bored and decided to finally click on one of the Skam clips. I was hooked right away, impressed by the writing, directing, acting, and chemistry.

This was still really early in Skam’s viral spread during the fall/winter of 2016. There wasn’t nearly the amount of information and organized how-to-watch-Skam guides available in English at this point. I learned about the social media concept and real-time distribution of the show from reading the YouTube comments. The first clip I got to watch in real time was the pool scene. If you were there at the time, you might remember the 10-day hiatus between episodes 5 and 6. That was when I decided to watch seasons 1 and 2. Before that point, I had not heard a single bad thing about Noorhelm, William, or S2. In fact, I only heard overwhelming praise from the YouTube comments - people commenting that they missed William, encouraging people to watch the previous seasons and singling out S2 as an amazing storyline (and a number of people saying S1 was boring but to stick it out to S2), telling people Noora and William’s relationship was fantastic. I mention this because for some reason, certain fans are under the impression that people decided to randomly hate S2/Noorhelm/William based on opinions they read on Tumblr and it’s only bandwagon hate. So this is just to say - I did not go into S2 with any negative expectations. I wouldn’t even say I was hyping it too much in my mind so that I was bound to be disappointed. I just expected it to be decent television.

I watched S1 in like a day and loved it. I especially admired how all of the characters had both good and bad sides, and how the characters who easily could have been demonized, like Ingrid and Iben, were made into human and sympathetic figures by the season’s end. Did not love William’s behavior at all, thought he was a creep, but hey, he apologized to Vilde at the end of the season! That must be the character development I saw people mention in the comments! And so I reasoned that S2 would redeem William and manage to sell me on Noora/William. It wasn’t my preferred storyline but I loved S1 and I loved what had been released of S3 so far, so they could probably make me enjoy it, right? And besides, S1 had been pretty good in a lot of ways about sexism and gender roles, I trusted the show to continue that into S2.

So I started S2. And I saw William text Noora even when she’d rejected him. Okay, I thought, not a great start, but it’s the beginning of the season. Surely this behavior will be addressed, and he has plenty of time to change his attitude. And I saw William use Vilde in order to finally get Noora on that date. Yikes, I thought, I thought he was supposed to get better? This is textbook male entitlement. I didn’t feel OK with his behavior.

But OK, we’re only on episode 2! So much time to turn it around! And then we learned that William apologized to Vilde in exchange for a date with Noora. Errrr, that makes his apology a lot less satisfying and much more self-serving, I thought. And then I watched William take Noora on a date, and Noora confront William with his shitty behavior toward her and Vilde, and to my great bafflement, I saw William not express regret for his actions, but instead justify his actions not once, but repeatedly, with reasons that were flimsy at best and appalling at worst. I saw Noora tell William he had manipulated her in order to get her on that date and William deny it and turn it back on Noora. The scene made me furious. At that moment I hated William even more than I’d disliked him in S1 - because S1 was supposed to show him at his worst and ended with a moment of him displaying some self-improvement. Why the fresh hell would we then get this scene that effectively erased that character growth in order to show how selfish his motivations really were? I hated that scene. Hated hated hated it.

We were still early in the season, though. And episode 3 had admittedly a nice scene of Noora and William hanging out together - it was a nice scene because Noora was so cute, though, not because of much to do with William, and marred by William saying some misogynistic crap and then not owning up to it when called on it. But all right. It was progress. 

Throughout the season, however, there was a pattern, where there would be a moment where William seemed decent for a fraction of a second, only to show his ass and do something I found obnoxious, entitled, or awful shortly afterwards. The midseason peak was him bashing a bottle over a dude’s head, justifying it, and belittling Noora for not understanding his Great and Important motivations for bashing a bottle over the guy’s head. This was followed by a scene I found horrific in which the show’s designated voice of reason told Noora that she needed to understand why her boyfriend bashed a bottle over a guy’s head, or else it was unreasonable and just like how war begins or some shit like that, in response to Noora’s objections to her boyfriend being violent. Viewing this scene was deeply surreal, as I was aware that this was the voice of the writer telling me why I should like William or why it was wrong for me to dislike William. The scene’s message made no sense in context.

At this point I had realized I probably wasn’t going to like William - in addition to his crappy behavior and attitude, he wasn’t written in a particularly compelling or 3D way, and the performance wasn’t charismatic enough to hold my interest (although I want to stress that it wasn’t the deal-breaker and I could tolerate mediocre acting for a well-written complex character). Yet I held out a little bit of hope that there would be an 11th hour revelation or redemption arc where we could see how much William had grown and the sexism and male entitlement that had been threaded throughout the season would be addressed properly. We got William calming down Noora from anxiety in what I thought was a genuinely lovely scene. I didn’t much care for him writing the article but it wasn’t something I hated him for. For a moment, things seemed like they might turn around.

And then, we came to this clip. The point of no return.

A scene in which William gets in Noora’s face, towers over her, doesn’t hear her out, shakes her off and leaves her crying in the middle of the schoolyard. 

That would be bad enough as it is, though I can maybe understand his reaction in the heat of the moment. Maybe. But it wasn’t until I read the text messages afterwards that I was well and truly done. Noora texts William like an hour after this scene happens. She explicitly says that if anything happened between her and Niko, it would have been assault, she blacked out, and she’s pressed charges against Niko. And William ignored her for days afterwards.

This is so unbelievably cruel that it killed any hope I had for this storyline, it killed any possibility that I could like his character or root for this relationship. He knows she might have been raped and he ignores her when she is pleading for him to talk to her. He doesn’t reach out to her on his own, either; it takes Noora tracking him down and demanding his attention. I don’t remember him ever specifically apologizing for this behavior (if he did and I forgot about it, feel free to remind me). He apologizes for Niko. Not for himself.

Imagine Noora, who still thinks she may have been assaulted, who is still dealing with the trauma, having to also deal with the boyfriend she loves abandoning her and shutting her out. Imagine how tender William was with her earlier in the episode as he saw she was breaking down, and how it feels when he withdraws that tenderness after he finds out the reason why she was breaking down in the first place.

Let’s not even get into the real-life context of this scene, and how rape victims are often treated like dirt by friends, family, and romantic partners after they come forward about their assault. Let’s just mention that rape victims fear their loved ones won’t believe them, will blame them, or reject them, to the point where it’s a huge factor in why they don’t come forward, and that what happens with Noora here when William leaves is the embodiment of that fear.

It’s not just that William has flaws. Everyone on this show has flaws. It’s the way his flaws are handled. There is too much baggage with his character in terms of real-life sexism and gender roles, too little remorse and empathy from the character himself, that it’s beyond what I can enjoy in a fictional love interest.

“We don’t know what Niko may have told him.” That’s true, and I did consider that at the time. But you know what? William knows Niko is a creep. If Niko made any kinds of threats toward Noora, if there was any way he misled William other than just saying Noora was a slut who threw herself at him or anything we could have predicted knowing what we’ve seen from Niko, we needed to hear about it once the situation had been cleared up. Julie needed to have William explain so we know he at least had an understandable, non-self-centered motivation for reacting the way he did.

“William was just hurt/didn’t know how to deal.” I cannot stress how much I don’t give a shit about how William was so hurt compared to how Noora must feel in this situation. Noora told him rape may have happened. Why in the world would I prioritize William’s feelings over the feelings of a sexual assault victim in relation to her own potential rape? 

Fuck William. Fuck Charles. Fuck this narrative that is constantly putting a guy’s boner feels and manpain above the female lead’s agency, rational concerns, and mental health. Fuck this narrative that is constantly encouraging us to empathize and understand an entitled dude’s emotions and actions, including sexism and violence, while the same entitled dude shows little empathy or understanding for a potential rape victim, a girl whose self-image was damaged by him telling her she wasn’t attractive enough, or a girl who rejects him romantically. Fuck the double standards of women having to understand and empathize with men when they are behaving like assholes but men not having to empathize or show compassion to women, including when they are victimized, by putting aside their own feelings for a goddamn minute.

Anyway, back to the Skam France clip.

Daphne got aroused from kissing Emma … hmmm

Once again, absolutely no comment from or about the supposedly bi girl sitting right there with them, which might change the context of the scene a bit.

This soap opera music starting as Charles comes thundering up to Manon.

DID THIS ASSHOLE MOVE IMANE OUT OF THE WAY WHEN SHE TOLD HIM TO WAIT

FUCK YOU DUDE

DID HE SHOVE MANON AGAINST THE WINDOW

“Answer yes or no” “I don’t know.” YOUR FIRST CLUE, JACKASS.

oh BOO FUCKING HOO Charles is crying, so glad this is about his hurt feelings and not his girlfriend potentially being raped.

Oh cool and he knocked her on the floor so she’s crying on the ground, great, she thinks she might have been raped and here’s what we have now. 

SHE TEXTS HIM AFTERWARDS. AND TELLS HIM. IT WOULD HAVE BEEN AGAINST HER WILL.

HOW DID THEY MAKE THIS SCENE WORSE

General Comments

I was willing to give Marles a chance in the hopes that they would rewrite the worst parts of this relationship, but instead it’s like they’ve double down on Charles’ domineering bullshit and it makes me so angry. That’s really all I have to say. 

I’m not French so if I misunderstood some context, feel free to correct me.

If you got this far, thank you for reading!

[polishgene]

My Bad Coffee Travel Guide

There’s something incredibly reliable about good coffee shops. My own dependability on decent barista coffee is similar to that of a heroin addict relying on their drug dealer. 

Yes, I say that, because not getting the right coffee can seriously ruin my day. And people who know what I mean, know what I mean.

So what’s so difficult about getting good coffee when you’re far from home? 

For me personally, there are three relatively annoying barriers to live with:

One:

I’m not into black coffee and I don’t drink milk that came from a cow’s tit (how did we only just realise this isn’t natural?!)

Two:

I can tell good coffee beans from the bad a mile off.

This means I need access to a skilled barista who knows how to source good coffee beans and process them correctly as well as appreciates that silly milk alternatives such as soy, coconut or pea (nice try Sproud, but you’re not quite there) are simply not acceptable. They change the taste of coffee. Unsweetened oat (yes, I’m looking at you, Oatly Barista) is a good alternative - it doesn’t get in the way of coffee. Simple.

Three:

I want to sit down to drink my coffee.

That one may need a bit of explaining. What can I say, I just like to sit down and feel it sink in and stir that God-sent buzz into my blood. I don’t care to run along with a herd of angry commuters, not before I had my fix. 

Yes, I’m that much hard work. And the sit down requirement stands in conflict to the previous two goals. The God Of Caffeinated People knows that if you manage to get a perfect oat latte, you’re most likely in a very busy cafe.

(decaffeinated growl)

Nevertheless, in 2019 all this fussiness can seem carefully marketed to. 

I mean, all over the globe coffee culture is being taken to absolute extremes hitting an all time high with recent nitro cold brew and what not. 

But let me tell ya. Having travelled a fair bit in the last two years whilst often working from cafes I feel I could write a book about bad coffee experiences.

The good ones? They’re good. You get your fix, lift your spirits and on with your day. It’s the bad ones you remember because for some reason they really f*** with you. 

So here’s my completely biased and selected at random Bad Coffee Travel Guide. Here I go. 

1. Surprisingly, there’s no bad coffee in Norway

This came much to my surprise but perhaps the best overall coffee experience I had was in Oslo and Bergen. Something about the seemingly cold, neat and annoyingly healthy Norwegians makes them perfect coffee addicts.

No matter how hard I tested the nordic coffee scene, I just could not get bad coffee in Bergen. And it’s not an insignificant detail that they have a way of pampering you with their waffles. It’s one thing to eat a delicious, warm norwegian waffle (whilst admiring the perfectly erect posture of your nordic barista). It’s quite another to be able to make one yourself, which I came across in a couple of cafes in Norway and wept with pleasure. 

Fussy decaffeinated customer experience: 10/10

2. Obviously, there’s no bad coffee in Italy

We all hate Italy. It’s basically a country which has everything and one does struggle to think of a single reason why they shouldn’t just drop everything and move to Tuscany, or Puglia, or Veneto, or… 

But if you are looking for reasons not to move to Italy (other than grown-up ones such as crime rates) quite possibly the hardest one will be coffee. They make espressos taste like mother’s milk and paint the gentle foam on top of each unmistakable cup with the finesse of Michaelangelo. 

I tried catching the Italians off guard by ordering coffee in petrol stations, at busy airports or very near the northern borders. But no luck. Their coffee is so good, I prefer it in an espresso or alongato so I can savour it. And if I want my afternoon cappuccino, I don’t even mind a bit cow milk. 

In Italy, I’m not even fussy anymore. They’re that good. It’s super annoying. 

Fussy decaffeinated customer experience: 11/10

3. There’s almost no bad coffee in New York 

To decrease your chances of getting a baddie in NYC, go Brooklyn. Brooklyn feels almost like the home of most of this world’s baristas so it’s no wonder I didn’t even have to ask. I just walked in and the person behind the coffee machine would just start making my coffee. They knew.

But even if you stay in Manhattan, you’re likely to be wowed: the Japanese themed, the minimalist, the artsy, the functional - whatever tickles your reusable mug. 

The only annoying aspect of coffee drinking in New York is the price. No, it’s not actually $6,30 because you have to add a 20% tip. And no, it’s not an option, they make sure you feel like a d*** if you just give them a smiley face. And I hope you’re not hungry as that microscopic cinnamon bun might drive the final tag up to $12. And given that Norway, one of the most expensive countries in the world (especially when it comes to food) opened the list, this should hurt even more. 

Get a day job, NYC. 

Love you though!

Fussy decaffeinated customer experience: 9/10

4. There’s some bad coffee etiquette in London

I love London, me and her have a very special relationship. And there are some amazing cafes and coffee companies that make it really hard to get bad coffee. This applies especially to East London and Soho, but really you can dictate a pretty high standard throughout zones 1 and 2. 

What I find difficult to live with sometimes is how tiny a lot of cafes are and how overcrowded they get. Somehow, if you go to a nice cafe anywhere else in the world you’ll be able to walk inside without shrugging your shoulders up against your body like a bobsledder. 

Not in London though! The general expectation is: slide in, try not to breathe too closely to anyone, get your coffee and get out. Forget sitting down. And that takes a lot of joy out of coffee drinking. 

But try Tap Coffee, Kaffeine, Italo or Story Coffee for an unmistakably sublime London finish and possibly even a seat.

Fussy decaffeinated customer experience level: 8/10

5. There’s some adorable coffee in Portugal

I know that some people would talk about France, and I do love dunking a croissant in my coffee, I’ll give them that. But for me Portugal does it better. Something about the size and choice of vessels (love having a small latte in a simple, thin glass!) as well as the pastry selection makes it extremely difficult to complain about. 

The price of coffee in Portugal is an additional bonus. It’s as if someone had recognised espresso machine coffee as a very basic, if life-enhancing, commodity that should not be restricted to busy bodies and hipsters. In Portugal, the time you spend sipping on your tiny yet satisfying cafe au leche is unlimited. 

The only “but”, which probably doesn’t even apply to that many people, is that the Portuguese don’t really care about pleasing the more refined taste buds. Unless you seek out an artisan cafe, you basically get what you get. It’s good coffee but on the whole it won’t knock your socks off like the Italian juice. 

Oh, and forget about vegan milk in a real Portugese caf. They don’t give a sh** about that nonsense.

Fussy decaffeinated customer experience level: 7/10

6. LA doesn’t care that much about coffee

There’s a lot to be said about why living in LA doesn’t require that much coffee. First of all, there’s so much sun and jogging and freshly squeezed juices and kombucha on tap that a primitive caffeine fix is just not that essential. The it girl that trots around East Village with a paper coffee cup will swap it for a beetroot-celery-apple-ginger juice whilst she’s longboarding in Venice Beach. 

And sure enough, I didn’t pay that much attention to coffee in LA. There was just so much else to do. Yet still, I don’t remember getting any noticeably bad coffee in LA.... well maybe apart from the one in Universal Studios canteen. But that only proves the point - if you’re shooting an exciting new series surrounded by industry top dogs (which - let me make it clear - I was not doing, I was taken around on a friendly tour), you don’t need perfect coffee. 

You’re on a pretty sweet natural high!

Fussy decaffeinated customer experience level: 6/10

7. I don’t care about coffee in Cape Town

Coffee culture has a way of mirroring gentrification. If you’re in an ungentrified area in a city and come across an outlet with a bit of scandinavian interior design, thick wooden tables or recycled furniture as well as a shiny new cadillac-of-an-espresso-machine, you feel safer. It’s strange to find that in a place such as Cape Town, as remote and “ethnically complicated” as they come and yet delivering the perfect vegan froth at the snap of your fingers. 

So yes, although they are scarce and make you feel a bit like you’re trying to stay in your european bubble, you can find nice and often worky cafes in Cape Town. But why the hell would you want to go there, when you’re also surrounded by so much beauty and adventure. 

Take a coffee detox in Cape Town and hike up and down Table Mountain instead. Or drive up and down the coast and watch one of the most spectacular sunsets on earth!

Fussy decaffeinated customer experience level: 5/10

8. There’s some amazing coffee in Warsaw

Warsaw, my beloved hometown, has a difficult relationship with coffee. On the one hand, like everything in Poland it’s saturated with mainstream brands and coffee corporations. The first Polish cafe chain Coffee Heaven was bought out by Costa Coffee (insert puke emoji) and the more sophisticated Green Coffee was turned into Nero. This of course killed of most of the character that these independent Polish brands managed to create in their heart-warming outlets. 

On the other hand, since approx 2015, smaller and more locally targeted cafes have been popping up all over the place. And most of them keep a fantastic standard of beans and make all sorts of coffee making techniques available to the general public. So I implore you to skip on Nero and try the likes of Cophi, Coffee Desk or Relaks.

Fussy decaffeinated customer experience level: 4/10

9. There is way too much bad coffee in Oxford

For a town hosting so much poignant brain power, Oxford has still a lot to learn when it comes to serving good coffee. It’s no secret that most English people are more into pubs than cafes and fair enough. But I seriously doubt that all those international scholars, prima sort professors and MBA high flyers run on builder’s tea alone. 

Oxford simply has much more potential for great coffee experience - a well run cofee joint will immediately find customers. That’s why it’s disappointing that there are only a couple of decent joints scattered around it’s Harry Potteresque streets. 

But you can prove me wrong - please send me your Oxford coffee list!  

Fussy decaffeinated customer experience level: 3/10

10. There’s plenty of really bad coffee in Switzerland

I love Switzerland. The efficiency, the timely trains, the impeccable landshafts. Your mind can truly be at rest as the Swiss are taking care of everything. And yet, I dare say it does not apply to coffee. 

Sure, you can find perfectly crafted cafes in Zurich, it is after all an extremely affluent Eauropean capital. But venture out anywhere and coffee turns into something resembling something a friend of mine compares to “milled mammoth bones brew”. 

Why oh why, Switzerland?!

Fussy decaffeinated customer experience level: 2/10 Now, there’s really no need to venture out anywhere that goes below 2/10, unless of course you’re having the adventure of a lifetime and coffee is beside the point. But if, like me, you need the taste of a perfectly crafted coffee to feel grounded and complete at your destination, there’s no need to go there.

[cookinguptales]

update: lmao I am so fucking doped up right now. sorry to the world that I got behind on shimamatsu translations, but have you ever tried to translate while on muscle relaxants? it’s a bad scene. god, I’m in a lot of pain rn.

gonna talk about some of the movies from the film festival below the cut. doped up af but I’ve seen like 14 movies so far, hella. tomorrow I probably have to skip bc I just took two cyclos and that is gonna fuck me the hell up.

movies I’d recommend:

thelma a norwegian film which is basically a coming-of-age story for a fundie christian girl who goes to college and realizes she’s a lesbian. oh, and that she has insane supernatural powers. (it’s kind of carrie-ish but with canon f/f, but imo a lot better than carrie.) the love story is really interesting, if incredibly dark. like if you’re in the mood for dark, kind of mindfuck-y f/f, this is your film. despite the very long upcoming list of potential triggers, it’s not as scary or brutal as it sounds. lmao. highly recommended, probably the film I’ve enjoyed most so far. (tw: violence, nudity, drug use, death, [spoilers] child abuse, possible mind control, child death)

custody a french film based on a short film that I saw a few years ago, and it’s fantastic and gut-wrenching. the short film was about a woman running away from her abusive husband with her children; this feature-length film is about what happens when a stupid judge ignores what both the wife and children have to say and gives him joint custody. (spoilers: it doesn’t end well.) interestingly, it has all the same cast as the original short film, though the kids are markedly older. idk if it’s meant to be a straight sequel or if one just inspired the other. really well done, tho, I was fuckin white-knuckling it in the theater. people were like. yelling. the climax of that film is INTENSE. probably the best quality film we’ve seen so far, though I think the plot could’ve been tightened up a little. (tw: very explicit depictions of physical and emotional abuse, very terrifying moments. [spoilers] but no child death.)

I, Tonya tonya harding biopic. I’m not really a big one for biopics, but this was a good one. it tried to explain how harding’s life led her to where she got, but didn’t necessarily paint her as some innocent victim. it was sympathetic where it needed to be, empathetic where it needed to be, but rarely let her get away with bullshit. lot of good performances here, but Margot Robbie (even though she looked way too old for the part) did a great job. (tw: explicit child/spousal abuse)

the villainess Korean lady-gets-revenge-on-shitty-men bloody action flick. not really my genre, admittedly, but I feel like anyone who likes this kind of movie would really enjoy this one. very Kill Bill-esque. it’s the story of this girl who basically gets passed around between illicit assassination organizations, in-fighting, revenge on all those who wronged her, etc. it is Very Bloody and many people die. the action scenes are HQ if you are into that kind of thing. I was mostly invested in the huge amounts of f/f potential. like at one point she joins an assassin organization where all the operatives are female and that whole part of the movie!! was very gay!! the actual canon relationships are het, but there is a strong potential for dark f/f murderwives here. (tw: haha oh boy if it’s a problem it’s probably here. implied CSA, child abuse, creepy relationships, violence, gore, nudity, child death, everyone else death, non-con facial surgery...like it’s bloody af okay...)

love means zero this is a documentary about nick bollettieri, who’s this super famous tennis coach. (apparently.) I knew next to nothing about the world of professional tennis going into this documentary, but I still enjoyed it bc wtf this guy is a piece of work. it’s basically all about how he fucked over a ton of people (especially kids) when he was trying to make tennis champions. and how he succeeded! by fucking over a ton of people! the interviews with him are honestly kind of wild bc he’s just such a crazy narcissist. this was especially weird for me to watch bc I grew up in the sarasota/bradenton area and never even knew all this shit was going on there. it was weird seeing my hometown on the screen like that, but also interesting. (tw: child abuse, just generally being a fuckboi)

MOVIES THAT WERE OKAY but like I had Issues

brimstone and glory I feel like I really recommend going out to see this one if you can see it on the big screen. it’s a documentary about a fireworks festival in Mexico and honestly the cinematography is stunning. it’s just so, so, so cool. but the actual documentary part is kind of boring sometimes, and you gotta have a strong stomach bc it also shows some of the injuries people get at this insane festival. like I don’t think showing that is a bad thing; I think it’s the only responsible way to make a documentary about this festival. like it’s amazing, it’s so cool, but also these people are like. going blind, losing hands, dying. and taking their kids!! like if you cannot handle watching kids in dangerous situations, don’t go!! dad was freaking out, lmao. (tw: graphic depiction of real-life injuries)

radiance a Japanese film about a woman who writes audio description for blind movie-goers. the same director made An (Sweet Bean Paste) a couple years ago, which was notable for its depiction of what Japan does to its citizens who have Hansen’s Disease. (leprosy.) it was weird to me when that movie came out that none of the reviewers really talked about that aspect of the movie; they were all like “UGH IT WAS SO POINTLESS AND CLOYING” and I’m like “did you miss the point of the movie?? which was critiquing the social ostracization of these people in Japanese society??? did that completely go over your heads????” anyway, I appreciated the depiction of PWD in Japan bc having lived there while disabled, I know that shit isn’t easy. that’s why I went to go see radiance. it was...okay? I think the most interesting part was when they let the blind characters talk. the movie was otherwise pretty pretentious and self-indulgent. lmao. like... it’s a rent, don’t buy situation.

marlina the murderer in four acts this movie was not bad! it’s an indonesian film about a woman whose home is invaded and she kills all the invaders. it’s definitely a film that critiques misogyny in indonesian culture, but I feel like it undercut its own message by showing such incredibly graphic rapes. like honestly, I don’t really ever recommend movies that have very graphic rape scenes, but I guess she does end up killing her rapists during the rape scenes. I just. I feel like it could have been done in a way that won’t get people all sexually excited while watching a violent rape. : / y’know? other than that, though, I really liked the female characters in the movie and sympathized with marlina’s journey trying to get society to help her and realizing she had to just go it alone with her female friends. bc like. she’s attacked by men, but she’s also revictimized by shitty ordinary men all the time she’s trying to get to town, report the attack, etc. and so are the other female cahracters. so they just. have to be vigilantes. (tw: GRAPHIC rape, violence, mild gore, spousal abuse)

newton Indian film about a guy going out to the jungle to get votes in the main election. but like. none of the people out there even know who the candidates are, there’s a lot of anti-government violene, the villagers are caught between anarchists and the police, it’s just a mess. and I do think the movie was good at showing the futility of it all and showing how the people who really end up getting fucked over are the poor people in rural areas, but at the same time like. pacing was uneven, tone was ???, and I found the protagonist irritating. and there was what appeared to be some pasted on het which made no sense. (like honestly I cannot figure out why she ever wanted to talk to his dumb ass again.)

blade of the immortal it’s takashi miike making blade of the immortal. I mean. I feel like if you are familiar with those names, you already know if you want to see it or not. if you aren’t, idk how much you’d like it anyway. after already having watched miike’s ace attorney adaptation, I sense a pattern. the guy just looks at a HUGE corpus (like a VG with 5 cases, or a manga with 40 volumes) and is like “welll....then I guess we better make things fast.” so you have Big Bads being introduced in the same breath that they get killed, 30-second backstories, just a frenetic pace and a huge amount of information, and it’s confusing and overwhelming if you don’t already know it. and honestly, I haven’t read BotI so I can’t say how faithful this was. but if you already love the characters and just want miike’s trademark bloody action flick style, then I mean. fair enough. this here’s a bloodbath. I had a hard time getting emotionally invested as a fresh viewer, tho. highlight of the evening: an old man walking out grumbling about how he only likes classy martial arts movies, and apparently this did not qualify. having seen a lot of classics of the martial arts genre, still unsure what a “classy” martial arts film looks like. (tw: offscreen rape, death, blood, gore, just an unreasonable amount of killing honestly like it was funny by the end, attempted CSA)

gemini this is a “neo-noir” thriller. so essentially a murder mystery. unfortunately, the title of the movie basically gives away the entire story lmao. so while the build-up wasn’t bad, the entire last 15-20 minutes of the movie are a total letdown. it was nice to see canon f/f, I guess, but I feel like the movie never went in hard enough on that. like were they trying to make a point about how hard it is for celebrities to have same-sex relationships? I’m not sure!! I can think of a lot of things that would make this plot more interesting, but they just didn’t do them. acting was fine, I guess. John Cho was in it, even if his character was pointless. Zoe Kravitz is always fun. (tw: I mean it’s a murder mystery. so...murder.)

DID NOT ENJOY

scaffolding (israeli film, boring af)

the workshop (french film, kind of boring, makes questionable points about neo-nazis)

[wineanddinosaur]

We Asked 16 Brewers: What’s the ‘Weirdest’ Beer You Ever Tried to Brew?

No idea or ingredient is off limits in today’s brewing world. There are beers made with Maine lobsters and Mangalitsa pigs, candied ginger and gingerbread cookies, human urine, Norwegian money, and yeast harvested from beard hairs (no, seriously).

Craft brewers are a creative bunch, and that means sometimes things get weird (even out-of-this-world weird). Here, 16 brewers share the strangest beers they’ve ever made.

“Like all brewers who were previously homebrewers, I dabbled in a lot of weird sh*t. But I think the weirdest beer I brewed was an imperial stout with Atomic FireBalls candy. I was hoping for a nice cinnamon-roast-sweet thing, but it ended up tasting exactly like beef jerky. That was a dumper. Another weird beer was my second brew ever, which was a fruited ‘lambic.’ I brewed this one with my college roommates, and we pitched a tube of White Labs Brettanomyces yeast, and nothing else for primary fermentation, not knowing that their pitch rates for Brettanomyces at the time were one-tenth the size of a normal pitch. Then to top it off after the extremely slow fermentation, we threw a bunch of old freezer-burned berries into the plastic fermenter. That one tasted like an old, dirty rubber band and freezer-burned berries. Ew.” — Mitch Ermatinger, Co-Owner and Head of Fermentation, Speciation Artisan Ales

“My weirdest brew was a one-barrel batch of a kettle sour we did with Little Hug Fruit Barrels, those little sugary, fruity drinks we called ‘quarter waters’ as kids. We used no actual water, replacing it entirely with 800 containers of blue raspberry Little Hugs in the mash and sparge. The yeast struggled with the preservatives, fermenting very slowly and stopping a bit earlier than we had hoped. The final beer was bluish green, with a touch of sweetness, but tasted better than we feared. We also served it with lemonade as a shandy. People still ask us when we’re brewing the Little Hugs beer again.” — Ryan Diehl, Co-Founder and Brewer, Imprint Beer Co.

“The weirdest beer I made was a dry stout with mussels, about nine years ago when I had just discovered oyster stouts and I wanted to interpret it in a Neapolitan way. I still hadn’t opened the Birrificio Flegreo, but I dabbled in homebrewing and I decided to give it a try using mussels directly in the boiling process. The experiment turned out well and resulted in a slightly salted beer with a rich and persistent foam. I called it Stout & Co. because the Italian word for mussels is ‘cozze.’ I will absolutely retry the experiment!” – Chiara Bolognino, Co-Owner and Brewmaster, Birrificio Flegreo

“As homebrewers, there was a time we were experimenting a lot with the possibilities of gruit, changing hops for herbs. We tried all kinds of different herbs from our garden: alehoof, yarrow, mugwort… One of the most extreme versions was a test beer we made with gentian root, added both at the end of boil and on the cold side, together with bitter oranges. Because of our wild-yeast culture, the lactobacillus produced a lot of lactic acid. So it started pretty sour, but then gave way slowly to a long lingering bitter finish, as gentian root is one of the most bitter herbs. We took the beer to a festival in Amsterdam, Carnivale Brettanomyces, and it was definitely a love-it-or-hate-it beer. On a professional level, we made this beer again, but we decided to use aged hops in the beginning of the boil, just to temper the lactobacillus, and to use a bit less of the gentian root, to balance the beer more.” — Tom Jacobs, Co-Founder and Co-Brewer, Antidoot Wild Fermenten

“My supply rep stopped by the brewpub and happened to be carrying a small baggy of food-grade glitter. He asked me if I was interested — I know this sounds like a drug deal! — and I told him I wasn’t sure, so he left the glitter behind. A few weeks later I was blending a keg of What a Trip, a 10 percent ABV Belgian tripel with a prickly pear puree when out of the corner of my eye I noticed the small glitter baggy. It was just sitting there tempting me! I must have felt the magic in the brewery that day because I didn’t hesitate to sprinkle the glitter in the keg along with the puree. The result was quite magical. The beer tasted just how I expected with complex fruity esters, spice characteristics, and a melon-fig sweetness from the puree. While the glitter didn’t affect the taste of the beer, it was a feast for the eyes! When poured into a glass it danced around like stardust.” — Nacho Cervantes, Head Brewer, New Original Breweries

“The term ‘weirdest’ is way relative. For me, I’d have to say one of my ‘weirdest’ ideas was hatched on a trip to Italy when I visited a highly traditional acetaria, a place where they have been making real balsamic vinegar for generations. My first thought was: This stuff is awesome, how can I use it in a beer? Soon after I thought of a Flanders-style sour ale, as balsamic vinegar would not be out of character in that sort of flavor profile. So I brewed a base beer and aged it in red-wine barrels, as is how traditional balsamic starts off, with appropriate cultures and added balsamic in judicious amounts at points during a 20-month aging process. The result was our Philsamic (so named without my consent, which is another story), a balsamic vinegar-infused, wood-aged, Flanders-inspired sour ale we now brew at Area Two, our new wood-aging facility down the road from Two Roads. A beer fermented with balsamic vinegar? Maybe not so weird after all.” — Phil Markowski, Co-Owner and Brewmaster, Two Roads Brewing Company

“I think it has to be our Nightwood, which we released recently but brewed back in the fall of 2016. It was meant to be a black Berliner weisse of sorts, using our usual turbid mash, short boil, aged hopping, and coolshipping, but using some local midnight wheat and foreign de-bittered black malt for color. While the wort hitting the coolship was jet black, after spontaneous fermentation in barrels it yielded an admittedly disappointing deep brown hue that we empurpled a bit with some local aronia and elderberry. And while we typically use barrels as a neutral, porous vessel for microoxygenation, here we also opted to extend the age of the beer to maximize contact with character barrels: port, red wine, and bourbon. It took a couple years, but now we’ve got ourselves a nice weird beer that would never have come into being any other way.” — James Priest, Founder and Blender, The Referend Bier Blendery

“The weirdest beer I’ve made was an experimental imperial stout attempting to resemble coquito, a Puerto Rican holiday drink. I made a base imperial stout that was treated with nutmeg, cinnamon, vanilla, milk sugar, and lots of coconut flakes. I also soaked oak chips in rum to impart some of the rum flavor. Or, the most extreme beer I’ve made thus far is our latest bottle release, which is a full-bodied IPA with milk sugar, vanilla, and guava. The idea was to make a beer that could resemble a guava pastelito, a staple Latin pastry. We actually added guava pastelitos to the mash tun, as well as a shot of cafecito to energize the process.” — Erik Durr, Co-Founder and Head Brewer, Beat Culture Brewery

“Weirdest thing we ever brewed was probably one of our most recent collaborations. We made a smoked helles with Westbound and Down, Pizza Port, and Freigeist. It was a slightly drunken idea during last year’s GABF. Most collaborations start out like this. We got green malt (malted but not kilned) from Coors, and got a local barbecue guy from Owlbear Barbecue to smoke the malt we got. We smoked it over local applewood and oak. We basically made smoked crystal malt. It took 24 hours to dry and smoke. Then we had to actually rub the acrospires off the malt before we could brew with it, which took eight of us like an hour to do! It made for a light orange, softly smoky, malt-forward beer.” — Ashleigh Carter, Co-Owner and Head Brewer, Bierstadt Lagerhaus

“The weirdest beer I ever made I didn’t actually set out to brew. In my early days of all-grain homebrewing I attempted to make a classic: robust porter. But something went wrong in the process and the beer ended up tasting very thin and not the least bit robust. It was the right color, but the depth of flavor was just not there. A friend of mine described it as tasting like ‘burnt water.’ Never one to waste beer, I tried to salvage the beer by aging it on oak cubes. That didn’t solve the problem either; now it was just oaky, roasty, and watery. I had read about the German process for making ice beer and thought that might improve the beer. After all, the main problem seemed to be that the beer was watery, so why not freeze it and remove the ice crystals? I sanitized a plastic bucket, transferred the beer into it and stuck it in the freezer. While the results were a slight improvement, it still just wasn’t very good… Several months later I ran out of fresh home brew and decided to revisit the ‘porter.’ I poured a glass and immediately was struck by the aroma. It was earthy and sour smelling. I tasted it and to my surprise it was sour and it was really good! I wasn’t sure how the beer had gone sour until I remembered that the bucket I had frozen it in was the same one I had once used to make sauerkraut. It was a huge mistake on my part, but in the end it was the thing that ended up saving this beer. To this day it is probably the best sour beer I ever made!” — Tony Ammendolia, Owner and Brewer, Final Gravity Brewing Co.

“At the end of 2017, we brewed and released a nontraditional black IPA called Corpse Paint. It had all the flavors of our typical New England-style IPAs — super-soft mouthfeel, juicy flavor profile — but poured tar black. It really toyed with folks’ perception of what they were tasting, and was a bit of a mindf*ck. Some people loved it, but some people definitely had a hard time with the concept, since it looked so different than what their palate was tasting… Me and my production brewer Erika even staged a photo opp to promote the release (naturally).” — Armando DeDona, Brewer and Owner, Long Live Beerworks

“I never wanted to add anything to beer which was revolting. We have made beers that are somewhat unique. Garlic beer — this goes back over 20 years. We brewed a golden ale and put raw garlic cloves in the keg. It was quite good. The aroma was pungent; the flavor evident with some heat but not over the top.” — John Maier, Brewmaster, Rogue Ales

“I collaborated with an awesome local female coffee roaster at Vent Coffee in Baltimore on a beer I felt was going to be fairly rushed to meet a festival deadline. We met at the brewery and couldn’t really get inspired. Finally I met her at the coffee shop and, other than coffee, she had a bunch of both hot- and cold-steeped cascara. It was my first intro to cascara — the coffee cherry, formerly a coffee-bean-processing byproduct that was trash but is now pretty popular for teas — and I immediately knew I wanted to try it, along with coffee, in a Belgian beer. It turned out amazing and we were both very proud of it. Since then I have been obsessed with that ingredient. It throws so many weird different flavors at you, from leather to tobacco, ripe fruit, and smoke. So cool. I’ve now used it in a bourbon-barrel-aged beer that came out super cocktail-y and also most recently in a kettle sour.” — Hollie Stephenson, Head Brewer, Guinness

“Weird is such a subjective word — but often one used to describe Stillwater itself. That said, would a beer brewed in the Amazon, with cupuaçu fruit, conditioned à la méthode champenoise, be considered weird? What about a gose with chili peppers, orange peel, and MSG? Or perhaps Premium, with its celebrated use of corn syrup and wild yeast? But then, there is also the new ASMR series with ingredient lists designed to phonetically please, coming replete with textured labels for you to create your own autonomous sensory meridian response, or A.S.M.R., sound effects. This is a difficult question to answer, simply because ‘weird’ is not really the specific intent behind our concepts, but often the outcome. Like I said, weird is a subjective word.” — Brian Strumke, Founder and Brewer, Stillwater Artisanal

“The weirdest beer I’ve brewed so far was for an art project in collaboration with Galerie Wedding and the artist Emeka Ohboh. Beast of No Nation presented the result of a collection of notions of senses and experiences of sound, taste, and smell of the multicultural district of Berlin Wedding. The slightly sour character of the beer is based on the evaluation of locally commissioned research into the taste of Wedding. The beer was limited to 500 liters in 0.33-liter bottles and was only available at the performances of the artist. The beer was a blend of a 16° plato farmhouse ale with allspice pepper and juniper to symbolize the village the district was until 100 years ago, and 8° plato Berliner weisse, cold-hopped with dill and then bottle-fermented with Brettanomyces for at least three months.” — Ulrike Genz, Founder and Brewer, Schneeeule

“We actually have done a lot of ‘weird’ — and I think of that term in an extremely positive way — beers over our 23 years, especially looking at some of our collaborations. The one that really sticks out in my mind is Tsuyu Saison, which was a collaboration we did in Japan at Coedo Brewery and with Garage Project from New Zealand. Just the experience of being in Japan with Jos Ruffell and Pete Gillespie from Garage Project was weird and wonderful as we drank tiny beers on the train, tried beer ice cream, and ate some truly amazing food. These guys are so much fun to hang out with and are adventurous souls, which also leads to lots of laughs. And then to brew with Haru Asagiri and his crew at Coedo was really amazing. The attention to detail and condition of the brewery was top-notch. The beer itself was very unique: a saison brewed with Japanese ume plums and red perilla and then aged in fresh New Zealand Chardonnay barrels. We hopped the beer with American Jarrylo and New Zealand Motueka. It’s quite a fusion and it’s aged very well… Weird is definitely wonderful!” — Jeremy Moynier, Senior Manager of Brewing and Innovation, Stone Brewing

The article We Asked 16 Brewers: What’s the ‘Weirdest’ Beer You Ever Tried to Brew? appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/16-weirdest-craft-beers/

[floricimientto]

EUROPE

holy shit where do i start?

in a fucking gaming cafe right now in croatia (lol)

the keyboard is croatian so i keep on typing z instead of y. punish.

i dont even know how to structure this because i am up to week 6 and i havent slept in 2 days. i am also still covered in glitter from ultra. god help me.

FIRST WEEK.

Paris, France

Met the lovely Emma who let me stay in her apartment for 1-2 nights.

Got lunch in a lovely, little cafe where we drank French goblets of beer! 

Apartments in Paris are so tiny!!

1st night - Jet lagged so couldn’t sleep so went on tinder at Midnight.

Was slightly worried about meeting a stranger off tinder at midnight but what a night. Went to a bar where we drank whiskey shots followed by beer, went to a french nightclub where we got to party with Parisian locals. cute polaroids, drunk hotdogs and crazy french girl who wouldn’t let me on the podium.

wandered out at 4 or 5am when the sky was a bright royal blue as the light was beginning to break. the streets were quiet and beautiful. seeing Paris at that time was magical. We then got high and went to a french patisserie where i got to try one of each. we then went home and good lord, the french can fuck.

he then offered for me to stay another night. 

we went and saw the eiffel tower together and went for a fancy french lunch where we got a charcuterie board with assorted cheeses and meats, and french wine! amazing. That night I went and saw a show at the Moulin Rouge which was phenomenal. 

we then went to a bar near moulin rouge called Dirty Dick.cool bar, all about sustainability. they use recycled fruit scraps and turn them into liquors, cocktails. they left pineapple in a bucket to ferment and turned it into pineapple cider!! 

got very wasted that night. whoops.

next i went to Versailles

Versailles

,stayed in a fancy hotel to treat myself. Had a bubble bath whilst i listened to Nina simone. Jazz sounds better when you’re having a bubble bath in france... ummm and the continental breakfast, holy shit. there was a section just dedicated to cheese. you could just take huge chunks of brie. France, I love you.

Went to the palace of Versailles. Absolutely incredible. Its the chateu where all of the Louis and Marie Antoinette once lived. All of the room settings were still the way they were. Everything was covered in gold and all of the ceilings were ornately painted. all of the furniture was unreal and the gardens were the biggest and most beautiful gardens i have ever seen. 

wandered through the beautiful (and very fancy streets of Versailles), bought some jacket patches because i put my denim jacket on a candle in a bathroom in paris and it caught on fire haha. funny but v sad.

Next, I visited  Lyon(where emma is originally from) which i wasn’t overly phased by but met some super lovely people, especially these canadian boys! it was a very beautiful, modern city though. highlight of lyon was getting lunch where we got to cook our own meat on a hot stone and visitedamuseum where we saw all these amazing weapsons from ancient empire wars, like shields with renaissance paintings on them, swords that were ornately carved and covered in precious stones, armour and helmets. so cool.

Next, Grenoble and Lac Peladru! Camping was amazing.

and seeing the mountains of grenoble where the old village once was, was incredible and a park with the castle. where two weddings were taking place.

next, Marseilles - i loved marseilles. met some incredible people there too. cooked a hostel dinner with everyone. explored lake calanques with two lovely finnish girls and an american boy. long hike but sooo beautiful

it was so lovely being near the port, super magical city. men painting and playing violins and accordions near the water. 

Next, Cannes

very ritzy, stayed in a lovely airbnb right in the heart of it. lots of super yachts everywhere. got lunch with this hot half russian and half french girl.

hottest girl ever, hot blonde with tig ol bitties, kind of looked like tara reid.

caught up for drinks later that night with her and one of her friends but i got too wasted, ruined my chances and her friend had to put me into an uber (lol tragic)

fun night though, went for drinks at a bar where they gave you lolly bags and then went to a drag show.

then visited the absolute angel, Flavie, in Nice.

Such a lovely time with her and her friends. Yoga, singalongs, cookups, stories, breakdowns and cuddles, and some wisdom about energy!

then took a day trip to St Tropez - sooo fancy. really beautiful place to visit. everything was so expensive though. explored the streets then relaxed at the beach with a giant glass of Rose. Uber in St tropez even had a helicopter option. 

Next, caught a train or bus (??) to Italy. Stayed in Genoa for 2 nights with the lovely Michele and Juliano. two lovely, italian boys.

authentic dinner at trattoria, went to acquarium and african market. lots of africans in italian. genoa was very diverse. really liked it.

next, florence, too crowded and touristy but still beautiful architecture and a cool city to explore. didnt like the fuzzi museum. and only saw all landmarks from the outside because the lines were too long.

visited a pool bar with michael from LA (guy from my hostel)

and did a wine tour in Tuscany! best wine i have ever had. 

then met up with a boy i met in Florence in a seaside town called Livorno.

then Riccione/Rimini, another seaside town. then Padua! which was beautiful. 

Then from Padua to Ljubjiana.

beau

i fell absolutely in love with slovenia. stayed in Ljubjiana for 5 days. one of my favourite cities of the 6 week leg after france!!

 turquoise lakes with islands you could only get to by wooden boat. ancient castles at the top of mountains amongst beautiful, colourful buildings. quiet, cobble stoned streets. triple bridges with various rivers running all throughout the city. people leisurely riding bicycles through the streets. such a beautiful, quiet city. definitely needed after italy. 

delicious food (even though they eat horse - culture relativism though, am i right?)  

stayed in the most amazing hostel. the girls were so lovely and helpful. 

walked the streets, went to lake bled and went and saw the castle. 

met various people, such as a guy that was walking europe!! he had been walking since january. met 2 sweet aussie boys. explored this abandoned army base covered in graffiti and various art installations. super cool. it was called Metalkov

also had nightlife. we went out one night and ended up in a karaoke bar.

such a laugh when there are so many different nationalities. 

dutch girls singing bizarre dutch songs, tragic euros singing oasis, some norwegian girl singing death metal hahaha.

i then got wasted on cheap slovenian beer and did a duet of lets dance by bowie. followed by a solo rendition of say my name by beyonce (coupla slut drops)

NEXT STOP - caught an 8 hour bus to Split in Croatia where i started Yacht week. Stayed on the most beautiful, luxury yacht. Sailed around Croatia for a week. Explored Split, Makarsa, Hvar and Dubrovnik.

Highlights: floating around in the very salty Adriatic sea in my inflatable donut, visiting the set of Game of thrones, exploring all the beautiful old towns, eating the best pizza ever, ringing the bell, getting 3 course lunches every day, getting to visit Montenegro!! 

[travelguy4444]

The Atlas of Happiness: Discovering the World’s Secret to Happiness with Helen Russell

Posted: 4/4/2019 | April 4th, 2019

A few years ago, I read the book The Year of Living Danishly by Helen Russell. I think it originally came up as a suggested book on Amazon. I can’t fully remember. But, I stuck it in my queue, ordered it, and it sat on my bookshelf until it was time to read it. I couldn’t put it down. It was funny, well written, interesting, and an insightful look into Danish culture. It was one of my favorite books I read that year.

Last year, I somehow convinced Helen to speak at TravelCon and got to meet her in person. Now, she has a new book out called The Atlas of Happiness. It’s about why people in certain places are happier than others. It’s a phenomenal book (you should get it). Today, Helen shares some of what she learned in researching that book!

Here’s a funny thing: if you’ve been online today for more than a fraction of a second, you may have started to get the sense that the world is A Terrible Place. Even the committed traveler with an open mind could be forgiven for thinking that the outlook is pretty bleak.

And if you’ve seen the headlines today or been on social media and you’re feeling low as a result, you’re not alone.

It’s easy to get the idea that the world is becoming more miserable by the minute and that happiness is a luxury in these troubled times.

But over the past six years, I’ve learned that there are people all around the world finding ways to stay happy, every day. And that happiness is something we’re hardwired to seek out – wherever we are.

I started researching happiness in 2013 when I relocated from the UK to Denmark. I’d spent 12 years living and working in London as a journalist, and I had no intention of leaving, until out of the blue one wet Wednesday, my husband came home and told me he’d been offered his dream job…working for Lego in rural Jutland. I was skeptical to start with — I had a good career, a nice flat, great friends, close family — I had a life.

Okay, so my husband and I both worked long hours, we were tired all the time, and never seemed to be able to see each other very much. We regularly had to bribe ourselves to get through the day and we’d both been ill on and off for the past six months.

But that was normal, right?

We thought we were ‘living the dream.’ I was 33 years old and we’d also been trying for a baby for as long as either of us could remember, enduring years of fertility treatment, but we were always so stressed that it never quite happened.

So when my husband was offered a job in Denmark, this ‘other life’ possibility was dangled in front of us — the chance to swap everything we knew for the unknown. Denmark had just been voted the world’s happiest country in the UN’s annual report and I became fascinated by this. How had a tiny country of just 5.5m people managed to pull off the happiest nation on earth title? Was there something in the water? And if we couldn’t get happier in Denmark, where could we get happier?

During our first visit, we noticed that there was something a bit different about the Danes we met. They didn’t look like us, for starters — quite apart from the fact that they were all strapping Vikings towering over my 5’3” frame — they looked more relaxed and healthier. They walked more slowly. They took their time to stop and eat together, or talk, or just…breathe.

And we were impressed.

My Lego Man husband was sold on the idea and begged me to move, promising we’d relocate for my career next time. And I was so worn out by my hectic London life that I found myself agreeing. I quit my job to go freelance and decided I would give it a year, investigating the Danish happiness phenomenon first hand — looking at a different area of living each month to find out what Danes did differently.

From food to family life; work culture to working out; and design to the Danish welfare state — each month I would throw myself into living ‘Danishly’ to see if it made me any happier and if I could change the way I lived as a result. I decided I would interview as many Danes, expats, psychologists, scientists, economists, historians, sociologists, politicians, everyone, in fact, to try to uncover the secrets to living Danishly.

I documented my experiences for two UK newspapers before being asked to write a book: The Year of Living Danishly, Uncovering the Secrets of the World’s Happiest Country.

Since then, I’ve been humbled and moved to hear from readers from across the globe with wide-ranging life perspectives, but the one constant was a need to share the happiness secrets of their own cultures. Some of the themes that sprung out were universal — such as social interactions, exercising out of doors and finding a balance in life — while others were intriguingly unique.

So I set out to research into unique happiness concepts from around the world, interviewing people internationally until The Atlas of Happiness — my new book-baby — was born. It isn’t a compendium of the happiest countries; instead, it’s a look at what’s making people happier in different places. Because if we only look at the countries already coming top of the happiness polls, we miss out on ideas and knowledge from cultures we’re less familiar with.

Nowhere is perfect. Every country has faults. But I wanted to celebrate the best parts of a country’s culture as well as national characteristics at their finest – because that’s what we should all be aiming for.

Here are a few of my favorites:

Did you know, for example, that in Portuguese there’s something called saudade — a feeling of longing, melancholy, and nostalgia for a happiness that once was — or even a happiness you merely hoped for?

And while Brazil may be famous for its carnival spirit, the flipside of this, saudade, is so central to the Brazilian psyche that it’s even been given its own official ‘day’ on the 30th of January every year.

Most of us will have experienced a bittersweet pleasure in moments of melancholy — flicking through old photos, or caring about anyone enough to miss them when they’re gone.

And scientists have found that this temporary sadness — counter-intuitively — makes us happier: providing catharsis; improving our attention to detail; increasing perseverance and promoting generosity. So we should all spend time remembering those we’ve loved and lost — then practice being a little more grateful for the ones still around.

Finland ranked number one in this year’s UN World Happiness report thanks to a great quality of life, free healthcare, and education funded by high taxes.

But there’s also something else the Finns enjoy that’s infinitely more exportable: kalsarikännit — defined as ‘drinking at home in your underwear with no intention of going out’ — a pursuit so popular it even has its own emoji, commissioned by The Finnish Foreign Ministry.

In common with most Scandinavians, Finns aren’t shy about disrobing, and they all have such enviably well-insulated houses that stripping down to their pants is apparently completely okay even when it’s minus 35 degrees outside. What you drink and crucially how much of it you knock back is down to the individual, but it’s a uniquely Finnish form of happiness and mode of relaxation that we can all give a go.

In Greece, they have a concept called meraki that refers to an introspective, precise expression of care, usually applied to a cherished pastime — and it’s keeping Greeks happy despite turbulent times. This is because having a hobby improves our quality of life according to scientists, and challenging ourselves to do something different also creates new neural pathways in our brain. Having a passion that you take pride can be of extra benefit to those who can’t say the same for their primary occupation.

Because meraki can make life worthwhile if your 9-5 is more of a daily grind. Many tasks that need to be taken care of on a day-to-day basis aren’t particularly challenging or inspiring – from filing, to raising purchase orders or even — dare I say it — some of the more gruelling aspects of parenting.

But we can break up the never-ending cycle of mundane work with our own personal challenges — things that we’re passionate about that we can genuinely look forward to doing. Our meraki.

Dolce far niente — or the sweetness of doing nothing — is a much-treasured concept in Italy — often hashtagged on Instagram accompanying pictures of Italians in hammocks. Okay, so Italy hasn’t exactly topped any happiness rankings in recent years, but the cliché of the carefree Italian still exists – and with good reason.

Italians do ‘nothing’ like no other nation and perfecting the art takes style and skill – because there’s more to it than meets the eye. It’s watching the world go by over coffee and a cornetto. It’s laughing at tourists. Or politicians. And crucially it’s about savoring the moment and really enjoying the present. Many of us search for relaxation by traveling to exotic locations, drinking to oblivion, or trying to blot out the noise of modern life.

But Italians let the chaos wash over them. Instead of saving up our ‘fun quota’ for an annual escape, they spread it over the minutes, hours and days throughout the year and ‘enjoy life’ in all its messy reality.

One of the happiest countries in the world, the Norwegians must be doing something right. And quite aside from their enviable Scandi-lifestyles and the safety net of all that oil, Norwegians have a secret ace card up their sleeves: a concept called friluftsliv. This roughly translates as ‘free air life’ and it’s a code of conduct as well as a life goal for most Norwegians – who like to spend time outdoors and get high, as often as possible.

Anyone who’s ever visited the country will know that if you meet a Norwegian out in nature, their objective tends to be the highest mountain nearby – and there’s a saying in Norway that “You must make an effort before you can have pleasure’.

Most Norwegians believe you have to work for things, to earn them with physical endeavors, battling the elements. Only once you’ve climbed a mountain in the rain and cold, can you truly enjoy your dinner. It’s an old fashioned approach to the good life but numerous studies show that using our bodies and getting out into nature as often as possible boosts mental and physical wellbeing.

Which is all very well, on paper. But how to apply these principles and all the things I’d learned in real life? Well, I took it slowly — dolce far niente style. I had to learn not to be the archetypal Londoner, working all hours. Instead, I had to try relaxing once in a while.

Radical, I know.

Next, I got on the hobby train. I found my meraki in pottery, in cooking and trying out new recipes, often inspired by the countries I was researching. Some weeks, we ate well. Others, not so much (my husband still hasn’t forgiven me for ‘Russian month’). I’m not ashamed to say that I’ve done a fair amount of underwear-drinking, too.

The Finnish concept of kalsarikännit and I are now firm friends. And because I was working less and being more mindful of living well and looking after myself, it was relatively easy to adopt the Norwegian ethos of friluftsliv.

So now I try to ask myself: what did I do today? What did I climb? Where did I go? But the biggest mind shift was the realization that to be happy, we have to be comfortable being sad sometimes, too. That we’re at our healthiest and happiest when we can reconcile ourselves to all our emotions, good and bad.

The Portuguese saudade was a game changer for me — helping me to come to terms with the life I thought I’d have and find a way to move on, without resentment or bitterness. Because when you let go of these things, something pretty amazing can happen.

By learning from other cultures about happiness, wellbeing and how to stay healthy (and sane), I found a way to be less stressed than I was in my old life. I developed a better understanding of the challenges and subtleties of coming from another culture. My empathy levels went up. I learned to care, more.

Optimism isn’t frivolous: it’s necessary. You’re travelers. You get this. But we need to spread the word, now, more than ever. Because we only have one world, so it would be really great if we didn’t mess it up.

Hellen Russell is a British journalist, speaker, and the author of the international bestseller The Year of Living Danishly. Her most recent book, The Atlas of Happiness, examines the cultural habits and traditions of happiness around the globe. Formerly the editor of marieclaire.co.uk, she now writes for magazines and newspapers around the world, including Stylist, The Times, Grazia, Metro, and The i Newspaper.

Book Your Trip: Logistical Tips and Tricks

Book Your Flight Find a cheap flight by using Skyscanner or Momondo. They are my two favorite search engines because they search websites and airlines around the globe so you always know no stone is left unturned.

Book Your Accommodation You can book your hostel with Hostelworld as they have the largest inventory. If you want to stay somewhere other than a hostel, use Booking.com as they consistently return the cheapest rates for guesthouses and cheap hotels. I use them all the time.

Don’t Forget Travel Insurance Travel insurance will protect you against illness, injury, theft, and cancellations. It’s comprehensive protection in case anything goes wrong. I never go on a trip without it as I’ve had to use it many times in the past. I’ve been using World Nomads for ten years. My favorite companies that offer the best service and value are:

World Nomads (for everyone below 70)

Insure My Trip (for those over 70)

Looking for the best companies to save money with? Check out my resource page for the best companies to use when you travel! I list all the ones I use to save money when I travel – and that will save you time and money too!

The post The Atlas of Happiness: Discovering the World’s Secret to Happiness with Helen Russell appeared first on Nomadic Matt's Travel Site.

source https://www.nomadicmatt.com/travel-blogs/atlas-of-happiness/

[vidovicart]

The Atlas of Happiness: Discovering the World’s Secret to Happiness with Helen Russell

Posted: 4/4/2019 | April 4th, 2019

A few years ago, I read the book The Year of Living Danishly by Helen Russell. I think it originally came up as a suggested book on Amazon. I can’t fully remember. But, I stuck it in my queue, ordered it, and it sat on my bookshelf until it was time to read it. I couldn’t put it down. It was funny, well written, interesting, and an insightful look into Danish culture. It was one of my favorite books I read that year.

Last year, I somehow convinced Helen to speak at TravelCon and got to meet her in person. Now, she has a new book out called The Atlas of Happiness. It’s about why people in certain places are happier than others. It’s a phenomenal book (you should get it). Today, Helen shares some of what she learned in researching that book!

Here’s a funny thing: if you’ve been online today for more than a fraction of a second, you may have started to get the sense that the world is A Terrible Place. Even the committed traveler with an open mind could be forgiven for thinking that the outlook is pretty bleak.

And if you’ve seen the headlines today or been on social media and you’re feeling low as a result, you’re not alone.

It’s easy to get the idea that the world is becoming more miserable by the minute and that happiness is a luxury in these troubled times.

But over the past six years, I’ve learned that there are people all around the world finding ways to stay happy, every day. And that happiness is something we’re hardwired to seek out – wherever we are.

I started researching happiness in 2013 when I relocated from the UK to Denmark. I’d spent 12 years living and working in London as a journalist, and I had no intention of leaving, until out of the blue one wet Wednesday, my husband came home and told me he’d been offered his dream job…working for Lego in rural Jutland. I was skeptical to start with — I had a good career, a nice flat, great friends, close family — I had a life.

Okay, so my husband and I both worked long hours, we were tired all the time, and never seemed to be able to see each other very much. We regularly had to bribe ourselves to get through the day and we’d both been ill on and off for the past six months.

But that was normal, right?

We thought we were ‘living the dream.’ I was 33 years old and we’d also been trying for a baby for as long as either of us could remember, enduring years of fertility treatment, but we were always so stressed that it never quite happened.

So when my husband was offered a job in Denmark, this ‘other life’ possibility was dangled in front of us — the chance to swap everything we knew for the unknown. Denmark had just been voted the world’s happiest country in the UN’s annual report and I became fascinated by this. How had a tiny country of just 5.5m people managed to pull off the happiest nation on earth title? Was there something in the water? And if we couldn’t get happier in Denmark, where could we get happier?

During our first visit, we noticed that there was something a bit different about the Danes we met. They didn’t look like us, for starters — quite apart from the fact that they were all strapping Vikings towering over my 5’3” frame — they looked more relaxed and healthier. They walked more slowly. They took their time to stop and eat together, or talk, or just…breathe.

And we were impressed.

My Lego Man husband was sold on the idea and begged me to move, promising we’d relocate for my career next time. And I was so worn out by my hectic London life that I found myself agreeing. I quit my job to go freelance and decided I would give it a year, investigating the Danish happiness phenomenon first hand — looking at a different area of living each month to find out what Danes did differently.

From food to family life; work culture to working out; and design to the Danish welfare state — each month I would throw myself into living ‘Danishly’ to see if it made me any happier and if I could change the way I lived as a result. I decided I would interview as many Danes, expats, psychologists, scientists, economists, historians, sociologists, politicians, everyone, in fact, to try to uncover the secrets to living Danishly.

I documented my experiences for two UK newspapers before being asked to write a book: The Year of Living Danishly, Uncovering the Secrets of the World’s Happiest Country.

Since then, I’ve been humbled and moved to hear from readers from across the globe with wide-ranging life perspectives, but the one constant was a need to share the happiness secrets of their own cultures. Some of the themes that sprung out were universal — such as social interactions, exercising out of doors and finding a balance in life — while others were intriguingly unique.

So I set out to research into unique happiness concepts from around the world, interviewing people internationally until The Atlas of Happiness — my new book-baby — was born. It isn’t a compendium of the happiest countries; instead, it’s a look at what’s making people happier in different places. Because if we only look at the countries already coming top of the happiness polls, we miss out on ideas and knowledge from cultures we’re less familiar with.

Nowhere is perfect. Every country has faults. But I wanted to celebrate the best parts of a country’s culture as well as national characteristics at their finest – because that’s what we should all be aiming for.

Here are a few of my favorites:

Did you know, for example, that in Portuguese there’s something called saudade — a feeling of longing, melancholy, and nostalgia for a happiness that once was — or even a happiness you merely hoped for?

And while Brazil may be famous for its carnival spirit, the flipside of this, saudade, is so central to the Brazilian psyche that it’s even been given its own official ‘day’ on the 30th of January every year.

Most of us will have experienced a bittersweet pleasure in moments of melancholy — flicking through old photos, or caring about anyone enough to miss them when they’re gone.

And scientists have found that this temporary sadness — counter-intuitively — makes us happier: providing catharsis; improving our attention to detail; increasing perseverance and promoting generosity. So we should all spend time remembering those we’ve loved and lost — then practice being a little more grateful for the ones still around.

Finland ranked number one in this year’s UN World Happiness report thanks to a great quality of life, free healthcare, and education funded by high taxes.

But there’s also something else the Finns enjoy that’s infinitely more exportable: kalsarikännit — defined as ‘drinking at home in your underwear with no intention of going out’ — a pursuit so popular it even has its own emoji, commissioned by The Finnish Foreign Ministry.

In common with most Scandinavians, Finns aren’t shy about disrobing, and they all have such enviably well-insulated houses that stripping down to their pants is apparently completely okay even when it’s minus 35 degrees outside. What you drink and crucially how much of it you knock back is down to the individual, but it’s a uniquely Finnish form of happiness and mode of relaxation that we can all give a go.

In Greece, they have a concept called meraki that refers to an introspective, precise expression of care, usually applied to a cherished pastime — and it’s keeping Greeks happy despite turbulent times. This is because having a hobby improves our quality of life according to scientists, and challenging ourselves to do something different also creates new neural pathways in our brain. Having a passion that you take pride can be of extra benefit to those who can’t say the same for their primary occupation.

Because meraki can make life worthwhile if your 9-5 is more of a daily grind. Many tasks that need to be taken care of on a day-to-day basis aren’t particularly challenging or inspiring – from filing, to raising purchase orders or even — dare I say it — some of the more gruelling aspects of parenting.

But we can break up the never-ending cycle of mundane work with our own personal challenges — things that we’re passionate about that we can genuinely look forward to doing. Our meraki.

Dolce far niente — or the sweetness of doing nothing — is a much-treasured concept in Italy — often hashtagged on Instagram accompanying pictures of Italians in hammocks. Okay, so Italy hasn’t exactly topped any happiness rankings in recent years, but the cliché of the carefree Italian still exists – and with good reason.

Italians do ‘nothing’ like no other nation and perfecting the art takes style and skill – because there’s more to it than meets the eye. It’s watching the world go by over coffee and a cornetto. It’s laughing at tourists. Or politicians. And crucially it’s about savoring the moment and really enjoying the present. Many of us search for relaxation by traveling to exotic locations, drinking to oblivion, or trying to blot out the noise of modern life.

But Italians let the chaos wash over them. Instead of saving up our ‘fun quota’ for an annual escape, they spread it over the minutes, hours and days throughout the year and ‘enjoy life’ in all its messy reality.

One of the happiest countries in the world, the Norwegians must be doing something right. And quite aside from their enviable Scandi-lifestyles and the safety net of all that oil, Norwegians have a secret ace card up their sleeves: a concept called friluftsliv. This roughly translates as ‘free air life’ and it’s a code of conduct as well as a life goal for most Norwegians – who like to spend time outdoors and get high, as often as possible.

Anyone who’s ever visited the country will know that if you meet a Norwegian out in nature, their objective tends to be the highest mountain nearby – and there’s a saying in Norway that “You must make an effort before you can have pleasure’.

Most Norwegians believe you have to work for things, to earn them with physical endeavors, battling the elements. Only once you’ve climbed a mountain in the rain and cold, can you truly enjoy your dinner. It’s an old fashioned approach to the good life but numerous studies show that using our bodies and getting out into nature as often as possible boosts mental and physical wellbeing.

Which is all very well, on paper. But how to apply these principles and all the things I’d learned in real life? Well, I took it slowly — dolce far niente style. I had to learn not to be the archetypal Londoner, working all hours. Instead, I had to try relaxing once in a while.

Radical, I know.

Next, I got on the hobby train. I found my meraki in pottery, in cooking and trying out new recipes, often inspired by the countries I was researching. Some weeks, we ate well. Others, not so much (my husband still hasn’t forgiven me for ‘Russian month’). I’m not ashamed to say that I’ve done a fair amount of underwear-drinking, too.

The Finnish concept of kalsarikännit and I are now firm friends. And because I was working less and being more mindful of living well and looking after myself, it was relatively easy to adopt the Norwegian ethos of friluftsliv.

So now I try to ask myself: what did I do today? What did I climb? Where did I go? But the biggest mind shift was the realization that to be happy, we have to be comfortable being sad sometimes, too. That we’re at our healthiest and happiest when we can reconcile ourselves to all our emotions, good and bad.

The Portuguese saudade was a game changer for me — helping me to come to terms with the life I thought I’d have and find a way to move on, without resentment or bitterness. Because when you let go of these things, something pretty amazing can happen.

By learning from other cultures about happiness, wellbeing and how to stay healthy (and sane), I found a way to be less stressed than I was in my old life. I developed a better understanding of the challenges and subtleties of coming from another culture. My empathy levels went up. I learned to care, more.

Optimism isn’t frivolous: it’s necessary. You’re travelers. You get this. But we need to spread the word, now, more than ever. Because we only have one world, so it would be really great if we didn’t mess it up.

Hellen Russell is a British journalist, speaker, and the author of the international bestseller The Year of Living Danishly. Her most recent book, The Atlas of Happiness, examines the cultural habits and traditions of happiness around the globe. Formerly the editor of marieclaire.co.uk, she now writes for magazines and newspapers around the world, including Stylist, The Times, Grazia, Metro, and The i Newspaper.

Book Your Trip: Logistical Tips and Tricks

Book Your Flight Find a cheap flight by using Skyscanner or Momondo. They are my two favorite search engines because they search websites and airlines around the globe so you always know no stone is left unturned.

Book Your Accommodation You can book your hostel with Hostelworld as they have the largest inventory. If you want to stay somewhere other than a hostel, use Booking.com as they consistently return the cheapest rates for guesthouses and cheap hotels. I use them all the time.

Don’t Forget Travel Insurance Travel insurance will protect you against illness, injury, theft, and cancellations. It’s comprehensive protection in case anything goes wrong. I never go on a trip without it as I’ve had to use it many times in the past. I’ve been using World Nomads for ten years. My favorite companies that offer the best service and value are:

World Nomads (for everyone below 70)

Insure My Trip (for those over 70)

Looking for the best companies to save money with? Check out my resource page for the best companies to use when you travel! I list all the ones I use to save money when I travel – and that will save you time and money too!

The post The Atlas of Happiness: Discovering the World’s Secret to Happiness with Helen Russell appeared first on Nomadic Matt's Travel Site.

[fuckyeahwintershock]

Author Spotlight: GingerLocks

Turn about is fair play, and this week’s Spotlight falls on last week’s recommender: GingerLocks aka @foreverdrunkatheart.

Recommended by @agentpeggiecarter, she says:

I’d like to mention the fantastic GingerLocks (on here she’s foreverdrunkatheart). She’s a smart, dedicated and hardworking artist/writer/human being. She honestly has it all. Her stories are engaging, fun and clever, my personal favorite being Operation: Plums and Entirely Too Early for this Much Glitter. Bucky and Darcy are always funny, honest and well rounded characters that carry you through her stories with ease, at the core of her writing are clever plots, smart twists and incredibly witty dialogue! I have all the emotions all the time when I read GingerLocks’ stories! And I think everyone should enjoy them a tonne more! Give her all the love pls!

The man smiled and started scooping, talking broken english to her, but from what she could piece together he thought she was Swedish because she ordered the black ice cream. Apparently salty liquorice was a popular choice among the Scandinavian tourists, and judging by the pale people here, there were a lot of them. “Here,” she handed the monstrosity of a cone over to Bucky, plopping down on the towel next to him. “Thank you.” They sat in silence, licking their ice creams, Darcy tried not to stare as some of the black ice cream melted over Bucky’s fingers and he stuck said fingers in his mouth to lick it off. Fuck that. He’s too hot to be legal. He met her eyes and raised an eyebrow, having caught her staring at his lips for a little too long. She cleared her throat, almost choking on her own spit, “any plans for tonight?” -Operation: Plums, Chapter 6

&

“So, basically, the extremeness of life and death has been taken away, and the kids all walk around to the other classrooms and the nursing homes instead of the catacombs. And they hand out the Lucia-buns to everyone there while they sing the Lucia-song and I voluntarily stress myself out with taking care of twenty kids who all carry burning candles.” “Ok…” “Hey, don’t be mister negative! When I first saw this thing, and I wasn’t in charge, it was beautiful! The buns and the candles and the boys wearing dresses and all the glitter!” He glanced at her quickly, he was driving in the middle of winter after all, and could see that little smile she had when she was feeling almost nostalgic. And there were not a lot of things she had to feel nostalgic about. The moment he saw that smile, he decided that Lucia was a very important day. No matter how silly it sounded, he would indulge her in every aspect of it, as long as she fell asleep at night with that smile on her lips. - Entirely too early for this much Glitter

&

“Oh golly, when these kids were first years, it took me twice as long to get them out the door. And I even had a tutor help me!”

“You say the cutest things when you have to censor your language.”

“Fudge you.” - Entirely too early for this much Glitter

Here’s what she had to say:

01. What about Wintershock as a pairing appeals to you?

I don’t know how it started. I think I fell in love with Darcy as a character, the way she was portrayed as the comic relief, BUT in a caring AND a nonsexual way. We’ve all seen the post abt how she’s one of the few sidekick characters to be portrayed with the respect that male sidekicks get and how awesome it was to see it in a female. Well that and my huge crush on Kat Dennings made me fall for this funny but loving and protective character. Then there was Bucky… Bucky, Bucky, Bucky. Where to start? I love him, from his ladies man younger years, to the amazing “till the end of the line” BFF and soldier, to the “broken-minded” assassin. I love him, I want to cuddle him up in blankets and give him chocolates and let him watch disney films, bc he deserves that! And I think Darcy will be the type of person to give it to him. She is also so incredibly ordinary compared to the superhumans and emotionally screwed heroes and I think they contrast nice (bubbly/silent and Loud/grumpy are my tropes!) and I think he will really give his whole self to his love and be completely “till the end of the line” with them, and I think they would both build each other up and accept each other as they are! <3

02. How did you first encounter the pairing?

Darcy and Bucky love seperately, then I fell for Shieldshock and Darcylanders were so open and inviting and I had just been in a really small and often attacked fandom and it was really toxic there so I jumped ship into your open arms! And then Shieldshock became Wintershieldshock and I was like “hang on, I really love the Darcy/Bucky thing going on, it’s more intense and kinda more varied? I guess. I think the Ot3 fics really made me think of the juxtapositions of the pairings and I fell hard and fast for both.

03. Do you have any specific Wintershock headcanons? Are there any particular fic tropes you like concerning the pairing?

I really like the “Darcy helps Bucky with pop culture” It’s sweet and I love when its portrayed in a way that has Darcy sharing her geekyness with the Nerd!Bucky. I also lovelovelove friendships and their relationships to others, I love how people have them work as a couple in a bigger setting. Just some boring domesticity for him (finally!) and a little more excitement in their day-to-day life for her. I got completely off track there…

I also love all the friends to lovers and FriendsWithBenefits turned more and a little bit of pining involves is also good, so all those overused tropes (c’mon guys, the reason it’s overused is bc it never fails to be amzaing!)

As for headcanons one of mine is, well, the same as MLChick said last week, the reading together. Just… being able to come together and be in the moment. Honestly, as a chatterbox myself I really appreciate the people I can both talk to and be silent with :)

Also, this:

http://foreverdrunkatheart.tumblr.com/post/128779875773/look-at-these-two-dorks-i-need-to-stop-based-on

04. Do you associate any particular songs with Wintershock? If so, which one?

Only, like, half my iTunes library… I mean it completely depends on what kind of fic I’m reading. For some reason I love a lot of Norwegian songs for them… I based a whole fic (Oh Please Honey (just tell me you want me)) on the Norwegian song “Aldri” by Razika, which is basically a more melancholy version of “Never getting back together” by TayTay Swifty, and concludes with ‘pick yourself up and find another boy’ and I had Bucky be the other boy and now I can never listen to the Aldri song without thinking about Wintershock.

05. What Wintershock fic by someone else would you recommend to others to read? What about this fic appeals to you?

*Link to last week’s author rec here ;) and then I also recced another author for later ;) ;)* But honestly though, MarvelLitChick’s series, and the Wintershock series by Lara @agentpeggiecarter and I also love the Run verse, but everybody knows the run verse so there is no point reccing that when probably everybody else has (if not then go read that at once!) and, well, currently I am reading a hilarious fic called “mission proposal: Date Darcy Lewis” by Amarantex. That and the Pizza verse by Pollydoodles never fail to light up my day.

06. What kind of Wintershock story would you love to read that hasn’t been written yet by you or others?

I have one… NAY 2, stories that are burning a hole in my mind. I have the main ideas written on a post it and hidden in a notebook, bc I am really torn, like on one hand, I want to write it myself… and on the other hand I wanna read it without writing the 20-50k needed to make it work and do it properly… Idk, I am still sitting on them, I don’t wanna let go just yet, but at the same time I am writing my bachelor this spring and I have 20-50k other things I have to do. Deadlines and projects riding my ass… Then again, apart from those two ideas (that may or may not be leaked in the future) I think the fandom is vastly creative and really cashes in on the crackship factor and all the possibilities that entails, giving us a wide variety of fics that covers most of the tropes I can dream of! Great on you!!

07. Out of the Wintershock stories you’ve written, which is your favourite, and why?

Oh, idk, I really love Operation: Plums, and Please Honey (tell me u want me), but honestly, I really love my oneshot “Therapy Cooking” a whole damn lot. It was the 3rd idea on that post it, and I just sat down and wrote it. I know next to nothing about psychology and mental health and PTSD so I spent a lot of time researching it and I was like “wait, is therapy cooking a thing?” bc I am still unsure, but it should be! Therapy where you are taught practical life skills and they make sure you get at least one decent meal and you get to focus on other things than just talking. Imagine how easy it would be for people in group therapy to connect and help each other if they were working together on a lasagna!

So I was entertaining the idea for a long time, on the post it, and I really wanted Darcy to be the “normal one” who had something deeper, and for Bucky to come out of his shell and find himself. I wanted them to heal apart AND THEN together. Independence for the characters is always important, and in this fic I got some Sam Wilson magic, and Supportive Steve, and a bubby Darcy who got the one armed Bucky to come out of his shell and reclaim the flirty aspects of 1940’s Bucky.  And the way he goes from “I don’t know who I am now” to having a personality is great :)

“Look at these lemons, James!” Darcy marveled at a crate of lemons, already stuffing handfuls into a bag. Bucky looked up from the plums he was perusing, remembering his last day in Bucharest and trying to shake the lingering paranoia.

“I’m buying the whole crate, and I’m going to bring some to class and the teacher is going to teach me how to make those amazing lemon tarts. You know, the tiny ones in the bakeries with the meringue on top.”  

Bucky smiles at her enthusiasm and shakes off his paranoia, reaching out for a bag and handing it over to Darcy’s waiting hand so she can hold it open as he loads it with plums.

“You just wanna use the the cooking torch,” he accuses.

“Well duh,” she rolls her eyes and elbows him in the ribs, “but lemon tarts are good without the meringue too…”

Bucky ends up carrying the crate of lemons on his hip, giving Darcy his wallet and trusting her to pick the best produce on his shopping list.

08. Quote a favourite extract from one of your stories. What is it that you like about it?

(oh, this was where I was supposed to use a quote. Oh well.)

She then reached over and grabbed his right hand, licking between his thumb and knuckle before she shook salt on it and gave it back, enjoying his bewildered look as she did it to her own hand.

“Now, lick the salt, drink the shot then bite the lime.” She smiled, and did just that. When she was done she shivered from the burn of the alcohol and raised her eyebrow at Bucky, who was still standing there with the lime wedge and shot in his hands.

She raised her other eyebrow in challenge and he narrowed his eyes at her, licking, shotting and biting.

“That wasn't so bad was it,” she beamed at him. He made a vague gesture of displeasure and she laughed. “No worries, Bucky-Buck, by the end of the night you’ll be doing body shots” she winked and handed him the Jaegermeister. He sent her a quizzical look and accepted the shot, taking the second one while she drank some water.

She looked over the dance floor next to them trying to find an example of exactly how to dance and turned back to point out the guy in a blue plaid that was doing this really cool dance with a girl who looked like she was in over her head with her sky high heels. She mentally thanked herself for her own sensible shoe choice as he spun his partner and she nearly lost her balance.

“That guy in-” she caught sight of Bucky’s phone screen before he tucked it away, she glanced up at his face and a slow smirk spread over her face. “Where you just googling body shots?”

Bucky didn’t answer, she was pretty sure he grunted, maybe even flushed a little, but the music was too loud for her to hear and the flashing lights were of no help what so ever.

She kept grinning at him until he leaned forwards, closer than last time, “you offering?”  with that stupid half smirk of his.

She blinked, but didn’t answer. Trying to determine whether he was flirting, just being Bucky, or genuinely wanted to experience this body-shot (and how A-Okay she was with that). In the end he rolled his eyes nodding towards the dance floor with his eyebrows raised.

From chapter 3 of Please Honey. I really enjoyed writing this. The two of them having fun, being together, (and this is the friends-to-lovers trope that I love so much) and I love adding humor to my plots, and as the rest of this story is big on feelings and slight angst and is also all about being ready for a commitment and doing all the stuff you gotta do to make it fair on your SO. So yeah. Bucky awkwardly googling body shots and him imagining lying Darcy out on the bar so he can do the thing is both hot and kinda dorky. ;)

We hope you’ll show her some love!

[sentrava]

What’s On in Copenhagen: July 2018

We’re deep into summer and there’s something to do in Copenhagen almost every day and night of the week. From great music festivals (including Copenhagen Jazz Festival!) to films to flea markets and so much more, your diary is about to get very full. Make sure you’re getting in as much summer fun as possible while the sun is still high in the sky until the wee hours.

Here’s the best of what’s happening in Copenhagen in July:

Saturday 30th June – Saturday 7th July

Roskilde Festival

Northern Europe’s biggest rock festival is back, including their excellent arts, non-profit, and sustainability projects. The line up this year includes Nine Inch Nails, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, St Vincent, Vince Staples, and more. Check out our playlist to get pumped!

    Sunday 1st – Tuesday 10th July

Before Sunrise at Cinemateket

Need summer romance inspiration? Richard Linklater’s class, quiet European backpacker romance, “Before Sunrise” spawned two sequels, but the original is the best. Just try not to fall in love with the sweet innocence of both Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke. The film plays every evening at Cinemateket for ten days.

    Sunday 1st July

Stefansgade Loppemarked

Go have a browse around this cool Nørrebro flea market from 8:00 am – 6:00 pm. You can pick up clothes, accessories, home goods, and hopefully enjoy the nice weather.

    Tour of Assistens Cementery

Ever wondered about the history of Assistens Kirkegård in Nørrebro? Take this tour to find out all about it, including how it was previously used and what the public usage is like today. Tickets cost 50 DKK and the tour starts at 2. There’s another tour being held on the 29th of July.

    Friday 6th – Sunday 15th July

Copenhagen Jazz Festival

Copenhagen has an excellent jazz scene, and it doesn’t get better than this time of year. Many of the larger concerts sell out quickly, so be sure to take a look at the smaller events too

    Friday 6th July

Carlsberg Friday

From 4 – 10 pm, enjoy beers, hotdogs, music, and laid-back atmosphere at Carlsberg’s monthly Friday bar. It’s free entry and there’s a free shuttle that takes you to Carlsberg Byen from Vesterbrogade 6 at 4 pm. Easy-peasy way to spend a summer’s night!

    Wednesday 11th July

Call Me By Your Name at Cinemateket

See why this incredible film, based on a book of the same name by André Aciman, has received worldwide acclaim for its beautiful writing and acting. The coming-of-age story tells the story of the complicated romantic relationship between a 17 year old and a 24 year old in northern Italy.

    Friday 13th – Saturday 14th July

Copenhagen International Choreography Competition & Gala

If you’re into dance, check out this competition starting at 7:30 at Dansekapellet. The organisation supports emerging modern choreographers; you’ll get to see the finalist performances.

    Friday 13th July

Scandinavia Standard App Launch Party

We’re so excited about the launch of our new travel app that we’re throwing a party, and everyone’s invited! Mark your calendars for Friday after-work drinks: more info to follow very soon.

  Friday Rock at Tivoli: Kim Larsen

Danish rock star Kim Larsen will be playing his hits at Tivoli’s Friday Rock. Usually you can see the concert for the price of admission, but this concert has an addition fee of 95 DKK.

Sunday 15th July

Rita Blå Loppemarked

From 12 – 5 pm, have a wander around this flea market at Kulturhuset. Entry is free and there will be lots of stands where you can buy clothes, home goods, and more. There will also be food stands, including pancakes and Moroccan food.

    Love Tour at Assistens Cemetery

This wonderful tour, which takes place at Assistens Kirkegård in Nørrebro, highlights the great romantic poets buried in the cemetery. The tour guide, storyteller Christian Kronman, will be reciting wonderful poetry and sharing the love stories of the poets. Tickets are 50 DKK and can be purchased in the information centre before the tour.

    Tuesday 17th July

Bas at Lille Vega

See the Parisian-born, New York City-raised rapper Bas in the intimate setting of Lille Vega. His strong lyrics and exploration of both his past and what it’s like to work in the hip hop music industry make for consistently powerful albums.

    Thursday 19th – Saturday 21st July

Musik i Lejet

This music festival takes places in Tisvildeleje, but it’s a real summer treat. Pack a beach bag and head up to the north coast of Zealand to see the likes of When Saints Go Machine, CHINAH, Marie Key, and Turboweekend.

    Wednesday 25th July

Ziggy Marley at Store Vega

Catch reggae and dub star Ziggy Marley performing at Store Vega. He always puts on a killer show and the beats will be excellent.

    Thursday 26th – Sunday 28th July

Summer in the City Festival

This free summer festival is held in the garden of Huset KBH. It begins at 3:00 pm daily and runs into the night. See acts like Rebecca Lou, Ida Kluo, PRUNES, and Silent Laika – this is a great chance to see fantastic performers for free in an ultra-cool setting.

    Friday 27th – Saturday 28th July

Carpark Festival

Located at Under Bispeengbuen in Nørrebro, this festival mostly features electronic music and emerging acts. It’s basically a big dance party for the weekend, and it’s all about good vibes and killer beats. The festival is free and open to everyone!

    Friday 27th July

Lunar Eclipse at Amager Strand

Enjoy a viewing of the gorgeous lunar eclipse on Amager Strand. The event is free and it will be fun for the whole family.

  Friday Rock at Tivoli: A-ha

The 80s are back! Or maybe they never went away! Norwegian superstars A-ha will play at Tivoli’s famous Friday Rock. Get ready to…take this on. Sorry, we had to.

    Monday 30th July

Open Air Cinema: E.T. at the King’s Garden

Watch the classic film E.T. in the beautiful setting of the King’s Garden. Bring blankets and gather a group for a fun evening. There will be food served from SULT restaurant, music from 4 pm; the film starts at 9:45 pm.

    Tuesday 31st July

Greenland in Tivoli

Take part in a celebration of Greelandic culture with this full day of events at Tivoli. There will be Greenlandic music, dance, theatre, food, and more. Simply buy regular admission to Tivoli and enjoy the festivities!

    Ongoing in July

“VERY: Ed Ruscha on Paper” Exhibit at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

See 54 paper works by living legend American artist Ed Ruscha, together for the first time thanks to the UBS Art Collection. Ruscha’s sly take on American culture, and particularly the LA landscape, is a real treat.

A selection of Ed Ruscha’s books, © Ed Ruscha. Courtesy of the artist & Gagosian as well as UBS Art Collection.

  High On Luxury: Lost Treasures of the Roman Empire Exhibit at Glyptoteket

Silver, gold, gems and luxury items created during the Roman Empire, celebrating artisan craftsmanship and decadence. If you’re in the mood to party, but in a super-cultured way, this is the exhibit for you.

  “Vogue Like a Painting” Exhibit at GL Strand

Explore the connections between fine arts and fashion photography with this lush, gorgeous exhibition in the lovely GL Strand space. There are over 60 works – all painterly in nature – by 28 fashion photographers. A real treat! On until the beginning of September.

  “MAJ 68 -The French Posters” Exhibit at Designmuseum Danmark

Celebrating 50 years since the student rebellions in Paris of 1968, this small selection of posters highlights what the protests were about as well as the artistry that can come of protest. The posters are to-the-point and attention-grabbing; it’s a study of both function and form. On until the end of September.

  If you’re a business or organisation that would like us to add your event to next month’s calendar, please contact us at hello [@] scandinaviastandard [dot] com. Thank you!

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  What’s On in Copenhagen: July 2018 published first on https://medium.com/@OCEANDREAMCHARTERS

[ralphmorgan-blog1]

5 things Americans celebrating Thanksgiving abroad want you to know.

Thanksgiving is a time for family, friends, and gathering together in gratitude. And that doesn't have to change if you're an American living overseas.

As the unofficial kickoff of the "holiday season," Thanksgiving is a celebration of all things American: food, family, football, and colonialism. And the pull of cozy traditions and comfort food can be mighty this time of year — even for those who've left the United States behind to live abroad.

I wanted to find out how U.S. expats celebrate the most American holiday of them all, so I connected with a few women who live overseas with their families. They told me about some of the more, well, surprising challenges they've faced — including a potato embargo! — along with new customs they couldn't wait to try.

Whether you're living abroad or you're missing someone who is, here are five ways Americans are throwing an expat Thanksgiving in 2017.

Photo by John Moore/Getty Images.

1. It's hard not to get a little sentimental about Thanksgiving foods and flavors — but experimenting with ingredients from a new place is half the fun.

Ashley Lunde moved from Madison, Wisconsin, to her husband's home country of Oslo, Norway, two and a half years ago. At first, she insisted on bringing the spices and foods she was familiar with to Oslo. But now, she blends the traditions and flavor profiles she's learned from her Norwegian family into the typical American Thanksgiving dishes.

"The turkey is baked with celery, carrots, and onions (was our tradition at home), but [I] have added grapes, apples, and pears as well to the mix. Food in Norway tends to be sweeter, (mixing meat and berries for example, is very common)," she writes in an interview over Facebook Messenger. "We also use lingonberry instead of cranberry, and rømme (a Norwegian version of sour cream) on 'grove rundstykker,' which is whole grain Norwegian bread made into dinner rolls."

Lingonberry sauce. Photo by Helena Jacoba/Flickr

Rachel Watson lives with her husband and daughter on a Marine Corps Base in Iwakuni, Japan. While the base has many comforts of home, there's an embargo on certain types of American produce including potatoes and apples.

"So, we will be using Satsuma sweet potatoes, which have  purple-ish skin and whiter flesh than an American sweet potato," Watson writes via email. "There are no Granny Smith apples here either, so for apple pies and other apple dishes, I'll be experimenting with some Japanese apple varieties."

Rachel Watson with husband Zach and daughter Maeve. Photo via Rachel Watson, used with permission.

2. This holiday is all about family — and no matter how you feel about social media in your day-to-day life, it makes it easy to stay in touch with loved ones.

Shelley Strelluf and her husband, Chris, decided to look for opportunities overseas following the presidential election. Her husband accepted a position in Coventry, England, and the couple and their two young children arrived earlier this year from Kansas City, Missouri. Staying connected with friends and family literally an ocean away is challenging but doable.

"We video call via Messenger with my mom about three times a week (same difference as Skype, the app was just slightly easier for her to use)," Strelluf writes via e-mail. "Sometimes we talk, sometimes she just likes to watch the kids play for a little while... So it's not the same as having her around, but it could be a lot worse. I'm grateful for the technology."

Shelley's husband Chris, with their two children, William and Emily. Photo via Shelley Strelluf, used with permission.

3. It's hard to make friends when you're in a strange country — so play an active role in building your new community.

Making friends as an adult doesn't come as naturally as it used to. But making friends as an adult in a new country, where there can be different social norms along with a language barrier, is flat out tough.

For Watson, she's made a concerted effort to seek out new friends — especially important, as her husband is currently deployed with the Navy. He won't be back in Iwakuni for Thanksgiving, so she's celebrating with her infant daughter, Maeve, and a new community on-base.

Lunde is part of a group in Oslo called the American Women's Club, that hosts a traditional Thanksgiving meal. The women were invited to discuss their experiences living abroad as well as some of the traditional foods from their part of the states. The U.S. Ambassador to Norway even addressed the group.

"It was really nice to spend the evening with other Americans, sharing a home cooked meal."

Photo by Phil Denton/Flickr.

4. But continuing to celebrate holidays like Thanksgiving is about more than being homesick or missing turkey. It's about honoring cultural identity and tradition.

Lunde and her husband welcomed a son, Espen, last year. Raising him to know and appreciate the many facets of his heritage is of the utmost importance.

"We really want to bring him up incorporating traditions from both our home countries, regardless of where we may be living at the time," she writes. "I think weaving a few Norwegian details into Thanksgiving is a creative way to do that. Hopefully celebrating in this way is something he'll grow to appreciate and enjoy."

Ashley Lunde, holding Espen beside her husband Paal and her in-laws. Her mother-in-law is wearing her traditional Norwegian "bunad." Photo via Ashley Lunde, used with permission.

5. No matter where you are in the world, or how much you've decided to embrace your new home, nothing beats pumpkin pie. But be prepared to accept substitutes.

In the states, pumpkin pies and canned pumpkin are sold everywhere from gas stations to department stores this time of year, but good luck finding one in other parts of the world.

Says Strelluf, "Something that is NOT a thing is pumpkin pie, so I guess if I want that, I'll have to figure out how to make it." Here's one blogger's idea for making that happen (with sweet potatoes — as long as they aren't embargoed, too).

Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images.

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[andranikolayi]

A CAT scan of the Contemporary Subconscious

for The Attic Magazine 

Potentially Everything

In recent years it seems that festivals have become the dominant musical events. While it would be rather pointless to add to the debate about the extraordinary surge in festivals, traveling to more and more events and seeing the similarities in tone and programming, one cannot help but wonder – what makes a festival special?

Rewire is a discreet but dense affair in the experimental/dance music hybrid in The Hague, not a very obvious choice when it comes to the Netherlands. The picture-perfect surroundings and walking-friendly size of the city made for a very pleasant festival destination.

While Rewire could be compared to the Unsound/CTM family, it is not an overtly music and contemporary arts festival, nor is part of the SHAPE network, carving a more distinct path. Despite not having an overall theme, subjects such as activism, feminism, nostalgia and emotion in music ran like a red thread through the programming. Adam Harper’s excellent essay The Music of the Body, published in the festival booklet was a very helpful starting point in this respect.

Rewire is certainly a place for discovery: featuring 45 min live sets and having the venues at about 5-10 minutes walking distance from one another with the schedule slightly overlapping, one could potentially experience a significant dose of every act.

This system worked pretty well between the Paard and Prins 27 venues across the street from each other, but going any further one felt the need for a bike, as AGF confessed to literally “running like a child” after her talk, in a failed attempt to catch Pharmakon’s set.

Regardless of those glitches, the three days were perhaps my most action-packed musical vacation.

Tulip Fields, Feminism and Improv

After spending a couple of days in Amsterdam, I took a rideshare to Den Haag, rushing through the flat fields populated with the occasional cattle and monochrome strips of tulips. Armed with my press bracelet, the city was starting to morph into the magical festival bubble as I ran into my friend Max and the rest of the Horse Lords on my way to the Korzo Theater.

Missing the Forest Swords talk right on the nose, I spent some time in the festival-dedicated-area of the lobby and putting together my plan for the evening.

 As the doors finally opened, I was really happy to see my long lost festival sister Amy, a happy coincidence creating a shift in my usual festival narratives, resulting in a more gynocentric experience. Together with her colleague Holly, our new female-journalist-power-group was born. It was the perfect setting for exchanging impressions and making those though choices between conflicting acts.

Our journey began in Paard II, the smaller room of the venue, with a dose of saccharine syncopated beats by Jessy Lanza. I fell in love with her childlike, pitch-perfect crooning when first hearing The Galleria, in collaboration with NYC producer Morgan Geist. Her solo work, while less club friendly, is infused by the same pop sensitivity coupled with heart-on-sleeve emotion and offbeat naïveté. On stage she was a pure sugar rush, enveloping the entire space in her sweetness. Struggling to get closer for some shots, I had a joyous run-in with activist and female:pressure ambassador AGF, adding another piece to the sisterly puzzle.

 Across the street in the dark, cozy stage of Prins 27, the New York trio Zs had just begun their set. A fluttering guitar intro was filling out the space, just as a slowed down tribal drumming started, juxtaposed with doomy saxophone howls and computer glitches by a special first-time guest performer, evolving into a delirious cacophony, seeping in and out of chaos.

Coming back later to the venue for Horse Lords, I arrived in the middle of an all-enveloping, hypnotic, sinuous saxophone solo,  emphasized by Max Eilbacher’s signature abstract electronics. Their second piece started off with quiet guitar finger picking, as the rest of the band was slowly joining in, soon turning into a full-on percussive explosion, with saxophonist Andrew Bernstein joining Sam Haberman on drums and Max picking up the bass. It was a nice change of pace to see them play with the dynamic and explore more meditative moments framing their more rhythmical passages.

 Trances

Back at the Paard, the main hall was packed, resonating with the shoegaze chords of the Slowdive reunion, which transported me straight back to high school.

At the smaller stage, the crowd was anxiously trying to find a spot for the Forest Swords performance. The place was filled to the brim, with a line forming at the entrance. Luckily I had found a comfortable refuge by the staircase, with a great view of the performers in front of a large projection of a black and white photograph featuring a group of horsemen, bare-chested, riding into the sea. His majestic, dark yet danceable elegies and full-bodied beats were making the space almost claustrophobic, rending the room upstairs into a giant resonating box, with overwhelming bass, climaxing with the familiar refrain of Dagger Paths’ Miarches. After first seeing him in Paris back in 2014 and more recently on the big stage at Unsound, it was refreshing to experience this more intimate, focused performance.

 Popping back into Paard I, Blanck Mass, the solo project of Fuck Buttons’ founder Benjamin Jonathan Powers, took us on a journey to the glitchier side of trance with stroboscopic, organic visuals bordering the grotesque. It felt like being transported into a scene from Enter the Void.

This brief excursion was the perfect palate cleanser before GAIKA, although one might argue that nothing could really prepare you for his confrontational, full-on performance. Once he was on stage, the real party started – there were young girls in the front row weaving their hands in pseudo-oriental fashion, bodies swaying to the infectious beats. Behind the contorted figure of the performer, armed with the microphone, a large, Viking-looking metalhead was assuring the backing vocals, together with a DJ. It was a powerful, raw display of emotion coupled with an uncontrollable desire for dancing.

Norwegian duo N.M.O provided the healthy dose of analogue techno workout from the middle of the crowd, crystallizing in the collective catharsis we’ve all been waiting for, complete with sweaty drumming and a Jérôme Bel-esque performance moment when the guy in the Sudden Infant shirt doing 20 air pushups as the sample instructed.

Arca’s DJ set, coupled with Jesse Kanda’s visuals, was one of the most fascinating instances of crowd work I have ever witnessed. He had the roomful of people in the immense space of Paard II fully in his power, toying with our emotions from pumping techno to Destiny’s Child and even a traditional Urdu song, while baby owls, fish guts and African puppies were staring back from the screen. As if he wanted to make us dance, then make us feel guilty for dancing, in a highly nuanced realm between abandon and discomfort. I would have loved to experience the more performative, outlandish costumes side Arca is famed for, but the overall effect was still utterly poignant.

 Disturbance

Saturday started with a morning visit to the AGF/Kubra Khademi rehearsal; the meeting between the two artists happened a couple of years back online, after Antye read the story about the Afghan artist’s brave performance against female harassment in Kabul, which lead to her arrest and current exile. After meeting several times, over the years, the two artists developed ZANSUSPENSION, premiered at the festival.

The show was a highly moving interdisciplinary moment, featuring Kubra descending into the space in a body bag over AGF’s organic textures. Displaying strength and vulnerability, their collaboration seemed like the most natural thing in the world for both performers.

Skipping on the ensuing talk, I rushed to the Grote Kerk for Jayce Clayton aka dj/Rupture’s tribute to the late African American gay composer Julius Eastman. His minimalist piano pieces were resonating in the gorgeous space, the acoustics emphasizing the otherworldly nature of the score. It was a sublime, transportive moment. Jayce framed his tribute with a tongue-in-cheek self referential piece, a humorous and clever commentary on the role of the performer.

Sonic Sisterhood

Rushing back to Paard II, I was faced with a thick crowd blocking the entrance; I could hear Pharmakon’s world-shattering drones from the hallway. Entering the womb-like space covered in red light, I could finally hear her thanatic, visceral screams. Hers was a possessed, consuming performance, oscillating between electronics and her rolling on the floor with punk audacity, before surrendering to pure anarchy and descending into the confused but enthusiastic crowd. It was a good choice of programming to have Wolf Eyes play right before and set the tone.

 Later on, I spotted her at Prins 27, looking very un-demonic with her blonde tresses and biker jacket. We were all waiting for Moor Mother’s set. Antye and Kubra joined us in the front row.

Behind a computer screen and two microphones, Moor Mother started off with a series of texts about black identity on an ambient background, with interjects on a toy theremin. About ten minutes in, things went 180 and I witnessed the most punk rock performance of the festival – she put on a fat grime beat, grabbed a microphone and started pacing and staring down the crowd, while rapping about protests and slavery, before jumping into the crowd for “Deadbeat Protester”.

It was an intense marriage of politics and club culture that would have made DJ Sprinkles proud.

Although the much anticipated club night was about to start in Paard II, it was SØS Gunver Ryberg’s dark blend of masterful analogue techno back at Prins 27 that helped ease out the crowd from noise into club mode.

Booking a series of headlining DJs in the small space of Paard II after all the other performances ended was a miscalculation on the part of the organizers, especially when selling extra tickets especially for the night, leading in general chaos and a frustrating amount of queuing. 

Once again, it was the ladies who ruled this portion of the night as well, Aurora Halal’s live maze of kick drums and meandering beats leading the crowd into a beautifully orchestrated collective delirium.

The Swedes of SHXCXHCXSH went full darkness, but Helena Hauff’s gorgeous mix of Chicago, Detroit anthems and a hint of acid offered the perfect finale for this emotionally charged evening.

Although Croatian Armor, dressed in neon reflective active wear, delivered an eerie, subtle emo ambient set from behind a live palm tree and Swans had a kaleidoscopic, rich set, it was the ladies who shone through day two.

Sun Through Stained Glass    

 Sunday, as music festivals’ dynamics work, was the day of mustering all your strength to power through the rest of the event, moving in a dream-like state of bliss coupled with physical and emotional exhaustion.

I must have turned off three alarms before crawling out of my waterbed in a suburban villa framed by a large empty field with three wind mills and a goat farm (as bucolic as this may sound, it also meant I was staying real far), before making it back to the city.

Wandering between the various venues, I was too antsy to really settle on anything; however, back at the Lutheran Church, Dutch veteran collective The Chi Factory offered exactly what I’ve been looking for – a spot-on New Age ambient trip, complete with nature visuals and a floor full of beanbags. I took a seat among the rest of the audience dozing off while the last of the afternoon’s sunlight was creeping through the stained glass windows.

After his relaxing detour that made my inner hippie glow with joy, I stopped by The Grey Space to check out the Bertus Gerssen photo exhibition, after learning that many of the shots were taken in the infamous Villa K, a musician’s squat in the rich coastal Scheveningen district, which also happened to be my home for the evening. Instead, in front of the building, a crowd of about 40 people, carefully aligned, were standing still and looking straight ahead, wearing white scarves, while a text about guerilla warfare was blasting from the speaker, all to the confusion of both festival goers and passer-by. It was a performance orchestrated by the Das Ensemble Ohne Eigenschaften.

The highlight of the evening and personal festival discovery came from the British duo These Hidden Hands, whose deep, sleepy drones slowly built over more fleshed out beats, then burst into melody in a moment veering on the sublime.

Back in Paris, a friend of mine commented that now “Jeff Mills comes to Europe to do his artsy projects”; to be honest, I’m usually skeptical of these live electronics and classical instrument collaborations, even if it’s between Jeff Mills and Tony Allen – it usually can be amazing or notoriously bad. Despite the two musicians being true masters, technical virtuosos in each of their field, this second meeting of the minds on stage was everything I feared it would be – a major let down. With the exception of perhaps 5 minutes when Jeff’s beats were erring on the more melodic side, nicely filling out the space alongside Tony’s drumming. The rest of the set was rather tinny and flat.

This result could be pinned on the limited rehearsal time due to budget issues. Then again one must argue about the catch 22 of bringing the main headliner to a festival in order to sell tickets yet not facilitate said performer to be at their best and debate the relevance of booking such potentially problematic acts in the first place.

The North Sea

The next day, with my feet in the sand, I was pondering over the intense three days. Looking back at the program, it seemed like the festival managed to touch on some major issues in contemporary society, while addressing the audience’s fears and desires on a more subconscious level. There was talk about activism and political engagement, a lingering penchant for ‘90s’ nostalgia and a proclivity for the darker sounds of the electronic spectrum, those that seem to capture the looming global tragedy, as if they had compiled a collective CT-scan that revealed our late night thoughts.

Its diverse, seemingly erratic choice of artists was actually making sense; I was very pleased with the way they addressed the burning topic of 2016 – women in electronic music. Instead of making a point out of booking female performers, they were seamlessly integrated into the lineup, offering a glimpse into a much needed new reality in which female musicians and DJs are simply referred to as musicians and DJs. As Jo Kali argued in her essay from the festival booklet, “feminism demands a radical cognitive adjustment, not just balancing numbers.”[1]

Enveloped by the calming sound of the North Sea, I could not help but think back at all the exchanges and support I received from fellow feminists during the festival, be it sharing experiences of odd sleeping arrangements with male hosts on tour, or the casual inappropriate touching by random men from the industry or simply Antye and Amy buying my broke ass a drink. Being surrounded by all these wonderful ladies was certainly a privilege.

Although the festival took place the same time as the Rush Hour Weekender, which catered to my usual musical obsessions, I’m happy to have had this rather challenging festival experience.

I believe Rewire has found a tremendous formula for luring club people into the more underground realms of the electronic music spectrum. And, if nothing else, telling your friends you’re a 15 minute bike ride from the beach is always a good argument.

[1] Jo Kali, p.42 There is no “single” woman, Rewire 2017 booklet

Rewire festival took place March 29th-April 2nd 2017 in The Hague

analogue photos by the author @feralnoise

[lightsandlostbells]

Skam Italia episode 8 reaction

there was a Brand New Scene in this episode and it made some people very happy

Episode 8

Clip 1 - Don’t talk to me

The setting really is gorgeous and the music added some good notes of tension.

Tbh, I think Skam Italia’s visuals are usually quite impressive but I found the camera angles here more distracting and show-offy than aiding the content of the scene. I guess they were trying to make the scene askew to represent that everything was messed up and out of order, but instead I felt detached from the characters during what was a really emotional scene. I really wanted to see all the anguish on Eva’s face and the ambiguity on Martino’s but the camera kept cutting to angles that made it hard to see.

I still think Norwegian Eva is far and away the best actress of the Evas, and I’m gonna be honest, I’m not as sucked into Italian Eva’s acting on a realism/believability level (like this scene did feel like Acting, personally); however, I do still really like her and find her sweet and easy to root for, so I did not enjoy seeing her cry.

Also Martino felt noticeably muted/detached when previously he has felt more energized and easygoing in his scenes with Eva, which I’m sure was because of this crappy situation and his own guilt.

Clip 2 -  Caught in a bad romance

Awww, poor Eva has to be in class with Gio and wait until he leaves until she can get up. That’s gotta be the worst. 

This song choice kind of fascinates because listening as an English speaker, the lyrics seem more from the POV of the person who’s been wronged over and over by their partner and has reasons to leave, when Eva is currently the one who’s done wrong and is on the opposite side of the situation, and it kinda threw me. But this is not a scene in an English-language show (though plenty of Italians understand English, to be clear) so what seems most important is the melancholy and regretful tone that serves the emotional and visual content of the scene, rather than literal adherence to the lyrics. And obviously you could say that about any soundtrack, including ones where the languages line up. Anyway, not to be trite about this rambling observation, but the various Skams have made me think a lot about the different ways film/TV can use music to enhance a scene (and sometimes how music can be used poorly though I’m not referring to this scene here).

Eleonora coming through that crowd like a beautiful striped high-waisted angel.

That was a necessary hug girls, thanks. The gossip, not so much.

Clip 3 - Eva and her mom

Small thing, but I appreciate that they showed Eva having her period and changing her pad as a casual occurrence, considering that so much media treats periods as nonexistent. I don’t know if Italian media is more frank about this than American media, but I usually only hear periods mentioned if it’s a big plot point. The dramatic first period in a coming of age story, the missed period that signals a pregnancy, etc.

But also, she has to deal with all this and she has her period? To hell with that shit.

And the graffiti was there just to ruin even the most mundane, private moment. She can’t escape.

Speaking of music in the previous scene, I liked how quiet this scene was. Sometimes I prefer the absence of music to its presence.

Well, Eva is right, she was not the initial attacker and she didn’t fight back. She shouldn’t be getting blame for it because even if the cheating was motivation, Alice chose to smack her.

Hmmm, how distant is the mom according to Italian cultural norms? She brings her daughter cake in the morning and we’ve seen her invite Eva to do things with her (I think the movies and the market? Something like that). I get there’s some distance but it’s not like Eva doesn’t have a role in this, like I’ve seen Eva scrolling through the phone at the dinner table while the parents are there. Seems like everyone in this family is doing their part to shut each other out.

I’m glad the mom tries not to let Eva shut her out although I guess it didn’t work for very long. 

Clip 4 - Eva and Eleonora, Ed Edd and Eddy

Silvia nooooooo stop thinking about Edoardo all the time even if you’re trying to make him regret the way he treated you. That’s hardly better than thirsting over him.

Lol, Eva, it’ll help if you can go somewhere where Giovanni isn’t in your direct line of sight and you can brood in peace.

Eleonora is giving it all with her singing, like she is going to get Eva to smile no matter what. When Edoardo shows up she seems rather bashful.

We saw one of Eleonora’s manipulation techniques earlier this season when she rescued Eva from the overeager theater kids. 

Plot twist: Eleonora is a spy posing as a new student, hence her knowledge of manipulation. What is her mission? Infiltrating Eva’s heart.

Clip 5 - My fault

This is one of my favorite scenes in the original show from S1, so they had a high bar to meet. I think I didn’t respond to it as strongly in large part because I don’t care for Giovanni much, and I don’t root for him and Eva together at all, so my reaction is mostly feeling bad for Eva and feeling fine about the breakup if not the way it came about. But it was another nicely shot scene.

Giovanni definitely has a hand in creating this situation. Obviously he didn’t like, push Eva’s lips to Federico’s and make that happen, that’s on her. But when he talks about the irony of her thinking he was cheating when it was her who did … he DID make her paranoid by lying to her.

“If you had told me the truth this would have never happened” - I mean, she’s right? She needs to take responsibility for her actions (which she did) but he’s got to realize he fueled the situation that caused this. (Though I mean, you could say this of all the Jonases, not just these two.)

Giovanni’s whisper acting was getting on my nerves, I know he was supposed to be upset, but it came across as unsettling, which was likely not the intent at all.

“The problem is not that you kissed some guy …. the problem is who you kissed.” Ummmm well, it’s nice that Giovanni acknowledges that these guys are assholes who treat women like crap. That’s good.  I’m calling bullshit on the whole “I don’t care that you kissed a guy out of anger, I care that you kissed an asshole” thing. Lol, if Eva kissed Martino because she was mad at Gio, I’m sure Gio would have a problem with it.

But I don’t know what to think about this dialogue change. What does it mean for Eva’s character arc? Jonas pointed out an issue with Eva’s personality that, agree or disagree with him, was an issue with her. He didn’t understand her because he thought she was changing her personality and not thinking for herself, and yes, some of that is Jonas’ perception of her, but we did see her be insecure and rely other’s opinions, and her ultimate conclusion in the season was to find out who she was on her own. It’s also a devastating thing for him to say to her because it’s so personal. What Gio is saying seems more like his problem. She’s doing stuff he doesn’t like, going to parties for people he doesn’t like, he’s got insecurities about it. And he doesn’t know who she is anymore, but ... going to the parties of asshole dudes is not inherently a character flaw for her? She’s mostly doing it for her new friends, anyway, and you might say that’s the flaw, being a people-pleaser, but I don’t know if that’s the intent.  Not to mention that Gio himself has been an asshole, and some of the people he hangs out with are assholes, so ... shut up, Gio.

There’s some questioning of who she is toward the end of this scene but it feels like it’s being framed by which guy she wants to be with. I can think of a few ways they could redirect this arc - Eva saying fuck off Gio, don’t judge me for what I’m doing? Eva realizing she doesn’t like all these parties with the asshole Villa dudes? It just feels a lot less personal. I guess it’ll be easier to judge when the whole season is out, to see what point they’re ultimately going to make with her.

It also doesn’t help that we haven’t gotten the reveal scene of Eva’s past with Laura, which was in Skam prior to this scene, so we’re missing a crucial part of her characterization that explained why Jonas felt this way about Eva not having her own opinions.

Clip 6 - Edoardo (!) gives Eva (!!) a ride to school (!!!)

A totally new scene? With two characters who never interacted in the original? What madness?

Sooo let’s break this down.

this was a helpful act of random kindness from Edoardo

also nice that he made polite small talk with Eva about her test

then he drops the line about how he really saved her by offering her a ride and that’s either him responding generally or him making sure she knows that he’s doing her a massive favor and she probably owes him

which becomes evident when he asks for her friend’s name and number

which she realizes and asks whether he’ll kick her out of the car if she doesn’t give him Eleonora’s number

he doesn’t reply as if this is an absurd suggestion and he would never do that, but he also puts down his phone and doesn’t kick her out of the car

because he says he’ll find Eleonora on IG anyway

he gets her to school on time and she thanks him

I was not nearly as excited for this scene as like Eleonora/Edoardo shippers, but it was at least a change of pace, and I appreciate getting new material no matter what. Personally when I saw what this scene was going to be, I was way way way more intrigued by the prospect of seeing the William character interact one on one with anyone besides the Noora character, than the shipper material. Did we ever see him have a conversation with anyone from the girl squad except for when he’s telling Vilde she’s not worth it? Someone from the boy squad? Not even Penetrator Chris, for the most part. Oh, I guess there was the time he broke up the P-Chris/Jonas fight but he didn’t exactly talk to them except telling P-Chris he done fucked up. Every other time I can think of, it’s William in the company of Noora. And this is pretty vital because, while Edoardo is still an asshole, if you want to redeem the asshole, it’s necessary to show him being a non-asshole and doing nice stuff for people that he doesn’t want to fuck. Even if it’s still about who he wants to fuck.

So of course the question is, would he have bothered to pick up Eva if she did not have an attractive friend he wanted to pursue? They could have added little bit more non-Eleonora related small talk just to make him seem less manipulative, but I guess that was the point. He still needs to be shady at this stage. 

He and Eleonora will bond over studying the same manipulation techniques. 

I’m not going to say he’s a great guy based on this scene, because yeah, he had an ulterior motive in mind, but at least they gave me something to work with toward seeing how he interacts with other characters rather than other characters just telling me he’s a great guy, so another small point toward Skam Italia.

I don’t speak Italian so if I misunderstood some context, feel free to correct me.

If you got this far, thank you for reading!