#oh thats another problem. if i do watch a musical recording the whole way through i still might not be into the songs LOL
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bmpmp3 · 24 days ago
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by all technicalities i should be the perfect audience for musicals (insane suspension of disbelief, loves how play dialogue is written and acted, when i like a song i like it so much i need eat it, etc) but i still have trouble really getting into them outside of listening to the studio recording albums and picking out the songs i like..
part of it might be that im not a fan of most musical comedy songs and so many recommendations i get from like buddies at school are always comedies that just do nawt hit for me. PLUS i take myself and everything too seriously so im picky with comedies and i tend to prefer serious and melodramatic music and stories over lighter stories or fully humour (dark or light) focused things
another part of it is probably my music genre preferences: i like showtunes but i like them poppy and/or production/instrumental focused (which might be why i like animated musicals so much) and like i said before, melodramatic. and from what i can tell from my musicalhead classmates - musicalheads really Hate that kinda thing LOL
but im sure theres lots of stuff out there id like. somewhere. somewhere out there
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arthurflecksgirl · 4 years ago
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Comforting Arthur on Christmas eve
Headcanons:
Its christmas eve and you are alone. You just moved to Gotham city weeks ago and decide to go for a walk in the park. A lonely man sitting on a bench caughts your attention. No one should be this sad an lonely tonight, so you invite him to spent the evening with him at your place.
* Its was that time of the year again and for personal reasons you had to spent it alone. You moved to Gotham city just weeks ago, feeling beyong lonely, especially now during the holidays. The christmas lights hanging above peoples heads, the colorful treees....nothing could cover the grey and harsh atmopsphere of this town. Ever since you moved here you wanted to turn your back on this city again and now that you walked through one of the few parks, the home sickness was growing inside of you.
*Strangers passed you by without even looking at you. You didnt asked for much. Maybe someone to look you in the eyes or wishing you happy holidays. But it seemed like this was too much too ask for in a city like this. Maybe it was a bad desicion to go for a walk this evening. But you couldnt stand being inside these four walls which didnt felt like home at all. Everything was far away, no emotions attached. You felt disconnected to everything surrownding you. So going for a walk in the snow was something that might help to clear your head a bit. You took a deep breath in. The air was icy cold and hurt your nose.
*The trees looked heavy,bending under the weight of the snow. As heavy as your heart felt, watching a lovely man sitting on a bench at the end of the park. He was wearing a hoodie, so you couldnt see all of his face. His clothes looked like he was wearing them every day, no matter how warm or cold the weather was. Clean but worn out like a second skin. You stopped to watch him for a while. He was smoking one cig after another, not looking up for once. Oh how much you wished to see his face. There was something about him that made you curious. The way his brown curls were sneaking underneath his hoodie, the way his hands were hokding the cigarette. He was different. And he seemed to be the loneliest man you`ve ever seen.
*After a while you decited to hide behind a tree. Watching him for more than ten minutes seemed too obvious and you didnt want him to feel your eyes on him, making him feel even more uncomfortable as he already was. And then after the 5th cigarette he was looking up at the sky. The snow flakes melted on the tip of his well shaped nose as he closed his eyes. he exhaled the smoke like it was the last cig he would ever smoke in his whole life, which clearly wasnt the case.
*It was obvious that he was freezing like hell and you wondered about if you should just walk up to him and talk to him. Keep him some company. Nobody should be this alone on christmas and the man looked like he didnt had anyone to spent his time with. After he dumped the rest of his cig on the ground you walked towards him. He didnt noticed you until you stood right in front of the bench. That was how lost in his thoughts he seemed to be. You could tell that he was homesick for something too. Disconnected. Abandoned even. From Gotham, people or the world in general.
*"Hey" you said "Would you mind me sitting here?" The lonely man shook his head "Nahh". And then he looked at you. he was beyong beautiful. Now that you saw his face right in front of you, it was obvious that he wasnt a drifter. Just a very sad individual with the most beautiful, sad eyes you have ever seen. Green with a sparkly iris. Like he was hiding galaxies inside his mind. No wonder he got lost in it. There seemed to be so much to him. How could someone like him be this lonely today?
*"I`m Y/N by the way" you offered him your hand. "I`m Arthur" his voice was as soft as the snowflake falling upon his dark eyebrows as he took off the hoodie to run his other hand through his hair. It was longer than you expected and looked soft to the touch. Soon it was wet from snow and you got worried he might catch a cold.
*"I`m sorry I just came up. If you dont want me to talk to you just tell me okay? I dont wanna bother you. I just....well i saw you sitting there and....no one should be this alone on christmas eve...." His face lighted up immediately. Arthur was thankful for what you had said.  "Oh...thats so....nice of you. I`m not used to people being that nice....to me" he replied. There was a hint of a smile on his face but it seemed hard for him to smile.
*You told him about how you just moved to Gotham and about your problems finding any new friends. How alone you felt since you came here and how much he reminded you of yourself when you saw him from a distance. Arthur was listening closely. His eyes never drifting away . He was looking right through you. Even thogh he seemed shy. The look in his eyes was so intense you didnt knew what to do but to blush.
*Arthur told you how moved he was by a stanger coming uo to him, and just talk. he admitted how much he longed for someone to simply talk to him and listen. So you did. You listened to his story and Arthur had a lot to tell.
*You found out about how he was living with his sick mother, taking care of her until he was committed to the hospital. And how lost he felt. Not just now that it was chistmas time. But in general. Arthur didnt had any friends or family beside his mum and was working as a party clown. He told you about his great dream of becoming a famous stand up comedian and you tried to imagin the man in front of you dancing around in a clown costume, giggleing and being happy. It was almost impossible to imagin it but it made you feel warm inside to know that there must be this other side of him. A side that wanted to make people happy, even if he wasnt feeling the happiness himself.
*The more you found out about him, the more you wanted to know. You wanted him to tell you everything but you didnt wanted to push him or to overwhelm him with questions. So you asked him very carefully but it was getting more and more obvious how much he loved the attention. being asked things about his life made him feel like someone finally cared. And you did. Arthur was a stanger by now but it felt like you just met an old soul that was connected to yours ages ago. Everything he told you about himself effected you on a personal level. And you wanted to do something about it. You felt the need to be the person who made him smile for real. Yo wanted to be the reason for him to feel save and warm and needed. And there was one way to give that to him tonight.
*You asking Arthur if he wanted to stay the night with him made his green eyes sparkle in a way you never thought was possible. The fine wrinkles beneath his eyes deepened in the most adorable way as a beautiful, shy smile was crossing his face. He was thankful but a little helpless. Arthur just couldnt belive that you offered him to go home with you to be save and warm. You told him that your home wasnt as beautifully decorated as you wished it would be, because you left most of your things in your hometown and didnt had the money to buy new christmas stuff but you had some candles and lights. enough to make him comfortable.
*Arthur told you about how he never experienced christmas in his whole life. Not even some candles burning. You both gut up from the bench, while you promised him that this christmas will at least be cosy and save.
*Arthur taking your hand while walking to the subway station came as a surprise. Maybe he wasnt as shy as it seemed after all. His hand in yours felt as naturally as breathing. Like you were holding hands for the past thousands of years. It wasnt the hand of a stranger. It was Arthur. The gentleness of his fingers enterwined with yours was so familiar . His cold skin on yours magical to the touch.
*You tried to feel the shape of his fingers with all your senses. The softness of the palm of his hand, his knuckles, his fingertips,...you never held the hand of a starnher before. And yet he wasn`t one. You recognized him as someone who should have been there all your life.
*Coming home you felt a bit bad about the fact that you couldnt offer him the biggest christmas tree he had ever seen. But Arthur didnt mind. He watched you lightening some candles with a tender smile on his face. You asked him to take off his snow drenched clothes and offered him a cosy, warm christmas sweater with some comfy pj pants. First you felt a little strange to ask him to put on your clothes but Arthur was flattered by it. He felt a bit embrarassed to take of his own worn out cardigan and expose his fragile body. He was way skinnier than it seemed under all the clothes he was wearing outside. His ribs popped out in a very fragile but beautiful way. His tummy looked like he was sucking it in but he wasnt.
*Arthur put on your sweater telling you that this is perfect because dark red is his favourite color. he slipped out of his light blue pants and into your Pjs, which made him seem even more innocent than before. His hair was messy from changing his clothes and he ran his fingers through it while he lit himself a cig, asking you if its okay to smoke in here. You nodded as you walked to the cassette player "Do you want to listen to some christmas music?" you asked. Arthur told you how much he loved Frank Sinatra and his christmas record. You couldnt help but laugh because it was one of your fave holiday records,too. He smiled as Franks voice started to fill the room.
*Asking him if he wanted to try some of your self baked cookies made him a little bit uncomfortable. he admitted that he was on some meds which made it almost impossible for him to eat something without getting sick. You felt bad for him but it made you happy that he wanted to try two or three cookies because he has not eaten one of them in years.
*When you walked out of the kitchen you placed a plate of sweets on the table. Arthur picked teh one with the smiley face and glaced at you with his intense eyes. He enjoyed the way you took care of him so much, he even ate another one. And another one. Very slow but happy about not getting sick. Some minutes later he was surprised how many cookies he ate. Arthur looked at you with love in his eyes, telling you how tahnkful he was that you brought him here with you, gave him some warm clothes and made him eat something.
*You watched his lips move as he was talking. The scar on his lip whispering to you how much it wanted to be kissed. Was it too soon yet? Arthur noticed and smiled.
*You put your face closer to his to let him know how much you wanted to feel his lips on yours. Arthur welcomed your half opened mouth with the tip of his tongue, whispering that he has never been kissed before. You couldnt belive that this beautiful man has never experienced a kiss, so you tried to give him the most wonderful memory of a first kiss possible.
*Arthur smirked as your lips parted again. An unkown happiness was spreading inside of him, making him feel light. He tasted like love and cigarettes. You wanted more but you wouldnt overwhelm him tonight.
* "You need some blankets, Arthur? We could...." you blushed.
"Cuddle?" he smirked.
"Yeah`?!"
"I would love that" he whispered back.
You reached for a huge, cosy blanket.
"Wanna watch some movies together?" you asked him. Your eyes focused on his hair reflecting the candle light.
"Sounds nice....I think Chaplin is on. Do you know his movies?"
You told him you havent seen Chaplin in ages and Arthur was very much excited about watching his fave movie with you.
*After the second movie Arthurs eyelids started to get heavy. He was getting sleepy in your arms, feeling save and sound. This was his first christmas someone allowed him to just relax and be himself. You softly kissed kiss forehead while he started to drift off into a peaceful sleep. You told him how much you wanted to give him a present but you didnt expected to not be alone tonight.
* Arthur put his lips close to your ears, mumbling: " You know what the best present  in the world is? Comfort. And with you I experienced comfort for the very first time in my entire life. Even if just for a day."
*And then you knew that this wasnt just a christmas present. Is was a gift that would last a lifetime.
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reelybadfnafocs · 4 years ago
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Here I go (oh boy, sorry for the terrible English, I’m actually Brazilian so this is hard) (i was about to be like holaaaaaaaa otro latino but then i remembred yall speak porch of geese fml. anyway hi. mod mangles on the case)
Name: Dolly the Dog
Species: Dog
Gender: Female
Job: The narrator of the shows/babysitter
Purpose: To help with the narration during the shows and to take care of the lost children in the establishment. Children are instructed to, if they ever lose sight of their parents, stay close to the stage and play with her; the parents are instructed to look there first. If the parents don’t come back to take their child, one of the employees has to discover where the child lives and take the poor kid home. If the kid is not comfortable with the employee, they can take their favorite animatronic to accompany them (this was only permitted after one incident, in which a girl made a scandal because she didn’t wanted to go with the day guard to her house). while i think the concept of a kid showing up to someone’s house with like a 6 ft furry robot is funny, i don’t see this really panning out in practice. as iffy as i am about it, i think the “babysitter/lost child center” thing can stay as is, but i think employees would defer to calling parents first (if the child is old enough to have memorized a phone number/have a phone), local authorities, or CPS.
Creator: Sarah Brown (another OC), the owner of the establishment and the creator of all the animatronics.
Location: The Showtime Funland, a restaurant for all the family (but specially for their children). It’s a vibrant, cheery and colorful place, where there are seven animatronics: Ollie the Owl, Billy the Bird, Fany the Fish, Charlie the Cat, Dolly the Dog, Happy and Lucky. Happy and Lucky are the only human-ish animatronics, and both of them are out of order during the game, and the others are the main actors of the stage, where they tell stories with musicals during the meals on the restaurant or just stay on the playground with the kids; the only one who can’t go to the playground during the day is Dolly, who’s programmed to stay and take care of the children waiting for their parents.
Where: On the stage; she sits on the front of the stage, on the right, and narrates the story that’s being performed.
Age: She’s the oldest animatronic: seven years of functioning. Her character is older than that, because of her old version, but since it was malfunctioning in a way which wasn’t even possible to take lightly, she was replaced by her new version. Her character is 14 years old. this is a little unclear to me…has she been in service for 14 years, or is the character supposed to be like a 14 year old child? i don’t think animatronics really need ages tbh but i dont see any issue with this either, so you can scrap this detail if you feel unsure about it.
Haunted/not: She is not haunted, but her program is malfunctioning; her AI is not recognizing the faces of the employees during the night for “unknown reasons”, and she attacks them as if they are “threats to the establishment”, in a way that she wasn’t programmed to do; she was supposed to call the police if any intruder came, but she becomes aggressive during the night because of someone meddling with her system.
During the game: The first thing the game shows is a cutscene, where the night guard is guided through the whole building by the day guard (called “Steve Hughes” by Annie, but it’s not known if this is the same day guard or not), and is introduced to the animatronics and told a bit of the story behind the establishment. It was created by Sarah Brown, a famous inventor, and was a well known establishment since its opening during the 80’s. During its history in business, there where countless robbers and stupid teenagers trying to get in and mess around with the things inside Funland, so the night guard was supposed to deal with these problems; but the animatronics, after a terrible incident in which the night guard was attacked by a robber, received a new AI capable of recognizing the faces of the employees and to give the night guard an alert if there was any intruder. The night guard is left alone to watch the cameras while listening to “Annie”’s recordings, since she was the last night guard, and discover about the malfunctioning of the AIs. In the third night, Annie quits, leaving the player with her guide about how to avoid the animatronics and with some recordings of how to flee if there’s something happening during the night (like a fire, for example) without getting caught. First, only Ollie and Fany are threats, but through night two and three Billy and Charlie too start to malfunction; in the end of night three, Dolly starts to do so as well. In the fifth night, Happy and Lucky also leave the deposit where they are hidden to attack the player. On the sixth bonus night, Annie left an odd recording of her and Sarah talking about the AIs of the animatronics, and Sarah implies that she knows of someone who would “do anything to make his business bigger than mine again, and wouldn’t hesitate to sabotage my creations”, as if she knows about the malfunctioning.
During the nights (3-5 (and bonus night)): She is the most predictable and organized of the animatronics, always making this specific path: first she leaves the stage, where she normally is, then goes through the playground (and stays there for a while), passes by the kitchen, through the deposit (where the audio doesn’t work, but the camera does), and then to the left corridor to the night guard’s office. She never changes her path, but as the game progresses she begins to become more and more fast and, since the other animatronics are more unpredictable, it’s harder to pay attention to her movements. Annie says, on her second recording, that she’s afraid of all the animatronics besides Dolly, since she is “the less threatening”; but, on her guide to escape on night four, she seems to have changed her mind (or it was a previous recording, before she labeled Dolly as “predictable and almost harmless”), it doesn’t chronologically make sense to have this be a previous recording, unless you intend to imply that annie went back and remade recordings for nights 1-3 right before she quit in addition to the night 4 guide. saying that “it would be best if you pay attention to her, since she’s fast and difficult to see without the flashlights”.
Skill: She tries to kill the player, first at the end of night three until night five (and the sixth bonus night). Dolly has a very advanced AI and is equipped with a recognition system, at least a hundred plays and stories on her memory, a voice system that helps her to change her voice when needed, the ability to sing, dance and interact with humans properly, and a system that can regulate her body heat. i was gonna say a hundred seems a bit much but idk how many stories the storyteller-esque animatronics are programmed to have tbh. if youre aiming to make the restaurant one of those cheaper places, id recommend scaling this number down.
Personality: During the day, Dolly is incredible cocky and arrogant when it comes to her role as the narrator, and she proclaims herself the “star of the show”, something her old version had but was even worse, coming to the extreme of pushing another animatronic off the stage and destroying it completely after getting annoyed by the poor robot. She’s kind with the children and the adults alike, but acts more politely with the elder and more sisterly with the younger audience; she says, during the game, that it’s horrible to never be able to go to the playground, but that she loves to take care of the lost children. During the night, she becomes a very aggressive but organized animatronic, something that her personality has during daytime as well; she is often annoyed by the others, since they sometimes go against the script for comic relief. Dolly is the most talkative of the animatronics during their attempts to kill the player, often bragging about her role as the narrator and star of the Showtime Funland and threatening to “end the show” of the night guard.
Appearance: A black and white dog (white on her mouth, chin, hands and belly), with big, glowing brown-yellowish eyes. Her ears are long and fall by the sides of her head, and she has paws instead of feet, but still has hands. She wears a magician hat with a blue bow on it, and sometimes during her show takes it off, just to reveal something inside of it that can help during the play (for example, a sword so that the protagonist can slay the dragon or a pie to the little protagonist give as a gift to a friend); she also wears a blue bowtie that matches her hat’s bow.
ok, final thoughts:
i was going to comment on how high-quality these animatronics seem to be, but given that you go out of your way to describe Sarah Brown as a very competent mechanic(? is that the right term idk), i think ill let it go. this seems like one of those higher end fancy-ish restaurants so most of this can slide, unlike if you were to make the location be some sort of cheap or dirty diner.
no notes on the story, i think it works well. the game seems to have kind of a steep difficulty spike towards the latter half with nights 3, 4, and 5, but thats not really an issue i think because you deal with more shit on fnaf 2 anyway. there were some iffy bits here and there, but nothing too bad that was worth pointing out or changing, so overall this is a solid character! good job :D
~mod mangle
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prorevenge · 6 years ago
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After months of putting up with my roommate from hell, I got the revenge of lifetime and screwed her over out of a fuckton of money and got her to pay rent and life has never been sweeter! (This is a long one)
This is a long one but very much worth the ride, so buckle up. (also, English isn't my native lang, sorry if there are any mistakes)
This story takes place a couple of years back. During college, I lived with several roommates, all of them were nice and we got along well, except for this one bitch, let's call her Karen. if Satan and Hitler had a child and that child had a child with Stalin and Cruella de Vil, that would be Karen for you, she is a loud-mouthed stupid, egocentric bitch who has the face that scare the shit out of a toilet. She would never clean up after herself, she would always leave her plates and things at the spot where she last used them. I have lost counts of how many times, I caught her stealing my clothes without asking and if you so much as touch her clothes she loses her shit on you, or her drinking our lactose-intolerant roommates almond milk and any time we confronted her for drinking it, she would shrug and say "I only had a sip, stop being so stingy." She plays her music loud at night, invites stranger without giving any heads up, a time or two she didnt pay rent even though her parents are FILTHY RICH and she is wearing gucci and prada shit, Karen also fucking lies about everything, even things that are not worth lying about. like if she woke up 7, and you ask her, she'll lie through her fucking teeth and say she rose with the sun rise because she is a natural. (ps, this is something i actually heard her say to her parents while she was skypeing them....so cringy, who the fuck says that? but i digress)
Months we have fucking put up with her, of course we tried to get other roommates but unfortunately when we all moved in everything, all documents and contracts were done in her name so kicking her out would require a lot of effort and most of us were busy with school and work and life happens. So we ignore it as much as we can and try to move on.
We are now all seniors and in our final semesters, meaning graduation was coming, AND Karen is planning a backpack trip across Europe with her friends as a graduation gift to herself, this is important so remember this.
One of our roommates and my closest friend, Sasha, has had a crush on a guy that lives down the hall. Any time the two of them are together, Sasha and the Guy keep giving each other googly eyes and blushing faces; it was sooo cute. Sasha is a verbal autistic person and has never dated anyone because she has a hard time with socializing and understanding social ques and subtlety, which lets face it, that is the core of dating, especially flirting but with a lot of encouragement from me and the final roommate, Lola we got her to ask him out. He said yes. She was so happy, you guys, she flew back into the apartment and did an hour of happy dance with her arms flailing about and a shit eatin grin on her face; needless to say we were all so happy. Karen caught wind of this and it just so happens at that time she was having relationship problems, I guess her bf finally realized he's dating human garbage. Not one to be outshined, Karen behind all of our backs went to the guy's place and spun lies about Sasha, saying she is a serial cheater and even made a fake account for Sasha's so called bf. the guy never called Sasha, and eventually weeks passed by he told us why but by then Sasha felt like the damage was done and lost interest in him.
I. WAS. FUCKING. FURIOUS.
This, this level of dickery and bloody pettiness is the straw that finally broke the camel's back and I vowed I wouldn't fucking leave until I served my slice of justice. Here's another character that you must know about, Prof C. His wife two years ago was in a horrible car accident and as a result is in a wheelchair, this is especially problematic because she was a stay home mom that took care of their two special needs kids and they have a toddler at home. Home life is a mess for him, he is running ragged between working and single-handedly is taking care of his family, the uni took pity and also feared the workload would see one of their best and most beloved teachers leave the school struck a deal with him to help him out. In all of his classes there will be quizzes and midterms, this doesnt change, but assignments you submit and he corrects at the end of the year, this is important cuz our uni has zero tolerance on proffs that dont constantly update the students course works so that students have the chance to improve their grades.
Karen, the lazy and stupid bitch she is, is somehow skating through his assignments, even though they require a shit tone of research and writing. I accidentally learned that one of her older friends told her that she only needs submit the paper on its due date and to only write the first 3 pages and use a paraphrase tool for the rest of the paper so the plagiarism software wont detect it and would think its original material and when the end of the year comes, submit a hard copy but with the first pages being her actual work and the rest being completely plagiarized, professional work. Prof C won't know cuz the likelihood a man as busy as him thoroughly checking the work of 120+ students is pretty low. I grinned. A plan was beginning to formulate in my head. Oh, sweet mother of Jesus, she is going down! All semester long I let her do this for all of the 7 papers, one of them which is a term paper that has 20% on it alone, all the while I spied and gathered all of her pass codes, social media, her student ID, everything.
The end of the year came and I compiled all of her assignments, both the original one with the paraphrasing tools she used to circumvent plagiarism and the one she finally handed them in, and I even made photos were there are side-to-side comparison of the assignments. This is a good start but not enough. So, One day chillin at the living room I open a conversation about relationships, Karen is two timing her new boyfriend and is sleeping with some other Person. so, I ask her questions like "don't you feel guilty for cheating?" and "You do realize this is wrong?" and I even paraphrase my words in a way that is vague but also clear, for example I would say "It's not fair, so many people work so hard everyday to be successful and you are here cheating and lying your way to success." Karen, narcissistic as fuck, would respond with snippets of I dont care and how she isnt cheating, she is only having fun and that everyone does it so why not her too. This is too good to be true, even her answers are vague, its like god put his hand on my shoulder, looked me right in the eyes and said, "burry this bitch". and Id be damned if I didnt. As you probably have guessed it by now, I was recording EVERYTHING. The recording plus the photos, and her assignments were more than enough evidence, I sent an anonymous email to the Professor, and i tell the girls so that they can prep for the shit storm thats coming. Three weeks later, results are out. she failed and LOST HER SHIT. She was screamin, crying, wailing, what a sight to see! you best believe, the girls and I were laughing. She tried to talk to the prof, but he was not having it. she cried and begged for a second chance but he said a hard no. So now she has two options: she goes ahead and doesn't graduate with us, and takes on a whole 'nother semester for one measly course or take summer course and cancel her trip to Europe, which mind you she spent a fuckton on, something like 13, 000$ and I know it could have been much cheaper but Princess Karen only wanted the best so yh. The next couple of weeks she spent sleepless nights because she was calling and cancelling all the reservations she made, tryin to get her money back BUT (again, GOD really was out for blood that day) because the cancellation was so close to some her trip most places refused to refund, or some charged her cancellation fees. She only managed to scrap 5.5 K back together, lossin 7.5 K. OUCH!
Its not over, having damning evidence I, with earned gusto, told her she was going to pay all of the bills till we move out, which was in two months, payback for all the times she was late on payment or defaulted and she would from now do her part of the house chores or else Im gonna send it all to the admin and faculty dean and she will fo sho be kicked out and all those uni years will have been for nothing. She hated it, she fucking threw tantrums and cussed me out but my god if she didnt do whats told. she cleaned her stuff, apologized to Sasha for what she did, I forced her to come clean to her BF (dont know the guy but the few times i met him he was super sweet to us and i felt bad for the guy), I watched her actually do the dishes for the first time in like years. IT was fucking amazing and I don't regret it one bit. In fact, anytime I feel sad now as an adult, i kick back my feet and reminiscine and a slow shit eatin grin draws itself upon my face.
tl;dr roommate was super mean, i found out she was cheating on her assignments and so i snitched on her and as a result she had to stay the summer and retake the class again or else she wouldn't graduate.
(source) story by (/u/let-the-write-one-in)
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alchemist-shizun · 6 years ago
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As expected, Dealing with intrusive thoughts is now one of my favorites
Here I come with almost all of my reactions on the episode, even though I tagged the spoiler warnings I put everything under the cut just in case. Enjoy the emotional rollercoaster while I'll probably go and rewatch it again.
Okay kinda expected one or two of the warnings but all of them together what is gonna happen???? (Though they make sense after reading the title)
HELLO FRESH BACK AGAIN
"I'm awesome and I can do this" there goes my boy. *said boy falls flat on the floor* ...come on
I felt that yawn bc I stayed up all night waiting for the video but it dropped at 8 am, I'm an idiot who should've gotten more sleep
"help me" why is he such a mood "everything is going wrong in my life" same but YOU SHOULDN'T SAY THAT LET ME HUG YOU
They're all sinking up so fast god I missed my bois. Also the general awkwardness of Virge and Pat, greeeeat something will go wrong
Virgil just ignoring everything and touching the railing, a mood
ALSO PLEASE LET ROMAN IN THE SITUATION
SECRET SECRETS ARE NO FUN TELL ME NOW OR ELSE WE'RE DONE
wait why does Ro want to be deeply troubled- man are you okay-
LOGAN'S HERE
"your most extreme reaction is an eyebrow raise" "FALSEHOOD" "I stand corrected" omfg
"what are you ta- what are you talking- what are you talking about?" I loved that whole take it made me feel complete
"Look I barely got any sleep" this can apply to a lot of us and I love just how we're all always like "TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF" but in the end this is where we all end up anyway
Okay I'm very curious about these troubling thoughts though
"so sushi" FUCCC I DIED RIGHT THERE
"Don't act like that was an accident" "everybody, Virgil. Let's give it up for the Purp Man" these speak for themselves. Also the purp man is my new fav nickname and I'm gonna use it.
4:17 Patton is adorable bye
"if you continue to push this we're going to end up in really dangerous territory" AND THAT'S WHERE THE TENSION STARTED TO BUILD UP
great flick
"am I delirious or is this the funniest video I've ever made" I felt that
YOU HIGH-JOCKED
okay but when Thomas starts disassociating I also feel really weird like as if there was something blocking my own hearing for real?? And not just the audio edited like that?? Maybe I'm just too tired
WHAT WHO WHHH first intrusive thought making its way what is gonna happen
OH MY GOD ROMAN WATCH OUT ALSO THAT'S DEFINITELY A NEW DARK SIDE OR SMTH LIKE THAT
W HO THE FUCKLKDSL IS THAT A MOUSTACHE IS THAT GLITTER WHAT IN THE WORLD IS HE WEARING WHAT IS HE DOING THERE PLEASE- okay but he looks crazy af I like that
"-evIL" "-SHOW UP"
First time I watched the scene where Ro gets knocked out I literally just screamed "ROMAN" in a high pitched sound I was shook wtf my bOY
Patton and Thomas's yells in unison plus "YOU KILLED HIM" I just I JUST
"Ah, he's the Duke" "....... boo" AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Okay but his voice is so on point with his character portrayal he's so weird it's awesome?
SONG SONG SONG and oh goodness the visuals I can't fathom how much editing work must have gone through this, they're all so talented.
"aunt patty naked" A G AI N??
"IM GONNA WHIP YOUR BUTT"
a snaKE IT'S DECEIT oh my these silouhettes are so great this is my favorite scene
this is gonna be stuck in my head all day
THE COOL MIRROR EDIT.
god i hate him so much already but i'm super intrigued he's so chaotic the whole team made a wonderful job i'll never stop saying this
"i'm really stupid right now" just how much out of context relatable content are we going to get on this fine day?
omg the dark version of creativity, which can be associated with intrusive thoughts, that's very clever
THE JUICY STUFF DANCE
"Repression can be very bad indeed" I mean he's right tbh it leads to never solving the problem at all
GO LOGAN GO HAVE YOUR TIME TO SHINE FINALLY i missed him
"i can't hear youuuuuu" much like "I don't understand what you're saying I don't know anything about words" THE DARK SIDES ARE ALL SASSY LITTLE BITCHES
pattonnnn did a real good job
THE BRAVE HANDSOME UNBEATABLE ROMAN and mashed potatoes
"scary" and Virgil just gives Thomas a look idk I live on the little details (Im ten minutes into the vid and look how long this post already is)
GEE Remus (already using his name bc it's shorter) looking so offended at the label and then pointing out it should be a Virgil problem whAT DOES THIS MEAN IM SHAKING
WHY WOULD HE BE DECEIT AGAIN IM DYING. "Idk if you guys can tell but I'm a little silly"
"then why are you lying" no everybody I don't need angst
THE BLACK AND THE WHITE THEORY I SAW GOING AROUND good job to whoever thought of that
JOAN
the forbidden dance
INTO A BUTTHOLE WHAT IS IT WITH HIM AND BUTTHOLES
there u go thomas said it too
haters gonna hate hate hate hate hate FHDSLAKLFD
irresponsible parenting, Logan completing the parental unit of the sides
"maybe there's hope for you after all!" me looking at all my wips
REMUS' LAUGH IS PERFECT. also "BITCH WHAT IS *YOUR* DEAL"
"you've never been one to soften the truth" OH BOI HERE WE GO
"do we have some case of brain swap???" I legitly said "maybe" in unison with Patton the first time
Vee pls stop putting Thommy boy down he's having a bad time
Logan trying to put some sense into the situation is my only spark of hope for this to turn back good
REMUS IS SO DRAMATIC
That lick was ....... let's pretend it never happened
"you know who can help us with that???" DECEIT'S SONG COMING UP that was great, imagine the chaos that the duo would create
"THATS WHAT REPRESSION IS?"
gasp Remus trying to make Virgil angry at Logan shall not stand DON'T PUT THEM AGAINST ONE ANOTHER HE'S JUST TRYING TO HELP
"you all are not listening to Thomas" this is the development I needed
"you're just para-" and he cuts himself. You all know what I'm talking about. Foreshadowing probably? This happened too back then when Roman was almost calling him the same. And then Virge looks so hurt I- "thank you for being on guard" that made me want to cry idk
the whole speech Logan gave? Pure gold. That was perfect.
HE SAID FIGURATIVELY *CLAP CLAP CLAP*
"UH RECORD SCRATCH?"
"does this make me cool?" djslagrkglhf also the teeth thing right after what the
... the deodorant eating ...
DUKEY
The first time I watched I thought his name was spelled Remis that's how dumb my Italian ass is
Still I love his name bc I'm a nerd for ancient culture, ESPECIALLY Roman (and ancient Greek but it isn't mentioned here) and I love the little thing they did with both Creativity names, super clever and very much liked on my part.
"I would never hide anything from you" and he looks at Virgil JUST ALL THIS FORESHADOWING
LOGAN SHOWING HIS TEETH BACK UP
"how about you shut up" Roman what the hecc man
THAT THING INTO LOGANS HEAD UNSETTLED ME A BIT
what are they doing to him today let him rest
double blow
"can we logic our way out of that?" everybody nodding was so pure
"shit"
THAT FUCKING JUMPSCARE I'M SORRY WHAT THE FU
"not all thoughts are meaningful"
He's go- no he's back again
THE CALLBACK MENTION AND PATTONS REACTION... probable foreshadowing to what Joan said about there being a part two of SvS?
"When are you actually gonna jump out of a moving car I've been bringing it up for years" so it's not just me..?
"it is okay if the thought happens to cross your mind"
"everything is okay" I'm going to cry I needed that
I love how Logan touches the topic that there is no problem in seeking help from therapists. There's a lot to say on this, but I was really glad that was pointed out since the are a lot of stereotypes on the matter
why did Virgil look like he was about to cry
Patton I love you
Thomas going to rest is what everyone wanted to see
Virgil confronting Remus I'm living you're doing amazing sweetie
"you tickle me emo"
"it was just like old times" then Pat and Lo's looks in this essay I will
ROMAAAAN
VIRGILS SMILE
"YOU'RE ALIVE"
"I LOVE YOU" ME TOO!! ME TOO ME TOO
"are you good?" "are you hurt at all?" I love when the sides look out for each other
"I'm sorry Logan" right through the heart. Another development.
I need y'all to look at Virgil in this exact second because. he.
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that's my point.
All those smiles while Logan's talking are making me alive
"No seriously, you're ... really ... cool" I started tearing up right here. Twice. And then Logan sinks down cause he's not at all used to this and he's feeling t h i n g s please keep on being appreciated you deserve it
Also Patton always learning from his mistakes and understanding them when he does something wrong or he thinks in the wrong direction, that's something I think a lot of people need to learn, including myself. Like, it's okay to be wrong and make mistakes, just do your best to make sure you're improving yourself afterwards, instead of dwelling on it too much
"I don't like him" makes two of us
"Soooo you have a brother?" oh boy
The m i r r o r it's making me cry
"He's gone now and he's never coming back!" "I don't think that's-" "BYEE" what was all that talk about repression for if you contiNUE TO DO THIS ROMAN please I beg of you let us hELP YOU he's making me die inside
Oh boi the big moment. I already expected a bomb to drop since Virgil was the last one remaining.
"You okay buddy?" "Huh?" op somehow was already found crying
"I'm a little disappointed in myself" istg all that foreshadowing mixed with me wanting to hug him
The music picking up tension, this is poetic cinema let me tell you
I noticed how he calls them "the others", all these tiny details is what I'm living for
"I should know better" I couldn't beLIEVE IT, also how he seemed to be so frustrated made something inside me break
the pause and then "Because I was one of them", the music stops for a second, a little second in which you can hear my distant screaming "GOSH HE SAID IT IT WAS TRUE"
Thomas is speechless and just stares at him while the music picks up again and then Virgil's sigh and expression sinking down like "there you have it. that's the truth. and you can't do anything about it" he looks so defeated I'm breaking down.
Did I already mention poetic cinema? I just love angst and this scene was perfect
First time watching I, too, barely understood anything I was listening to in the last parte because all of that was really a lot to take in.
"Those thoughts that you may have thought do not define you"
"[the thought] may simply be that we are really okay"
"Go to bed!" me
no im not in the mood for food because for some unfathomable reason I had anxiety before the video dropped yay me
WHY ARE U DRINKING RED WINE WITH THAT DISH
GAVIN BEST BOY EVER
and last but not least: are you fucking serious Remus
THERE'S A SNAKE IN MY BUTT FANDFKJL
I didn't expect this topic at all and I am so glad it was talked about, thankfully my intrusive thoughts do not bother me as much as I realized other people's do. And I never saw anyone talking about this before, which is why it makes this video so important. I saw a tweet recently about someone saying that it is okay if you think about weird things, the important is that you never act on them, that's what makes you a good person. But I think this video really explains it far better and I never realized how common something like this was? So yeah another time in which I've been educated and couldn't be happier about it. These people really are bringing light to the world gah I LOVE THEM.
oKAY guess I'm done this was a wild ride and yeah I tend to point out EVERYTHING, so here you have it, as I already mentioned if you feel the need to geek out too, I'm here for ANYBODY! (pls I have no friends)
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marvelgbt-posts · 6 years ago
Text
Projects
{Photographer! Peter Parker x Bigender! Artist! Reader}
Warnings: i dont know much bout the bigender community, and so i did my research. So you identify as two genders? I dont know what ‘genders’ exactly you’d want here, so i’ll put they/them pronouns if thats okay :)
Summary: ‘can i please get a bigender reader who goes to art school with peter, that has like, “god like abilities” and always compliments/draws/tells peter hes amazing. ((tag @give-you-the-sxn please?))
Ofc my beautiful valid child <3
A/N: i decided to change it up a bit and have the art class as a club after school instead. Also I hc that tom hollands peter parker is into photography. I hope you like it >///<
I listened to ‘youth’ by Shawn Mendes and Khalid while doing this.
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*not edited*
“Welcome class,” the teacher greeted you all brightly, “I’m glad you could make it after school today, what with all the rain and all I assumed only two or three of you would have shown up today. Anyways, you know what to do. Best get to it.” She clapped her hands, before turning her heel and moving to write on the board, writing ‘Integrated Arts Club’ in a cursive calligraphy font. That was her contribution to the club. Calligraphy.
You sighed. This was a way for you to escape the harsh reality of the outside world. Half the students in this club were members of the community, no scratch that, the majority of students were gay. There was maybe only one or two straight people apart of this club.
You took out your paints, paintbrushes, pencils, and then got your canvas from inside the supply closet where you had left it yesterday. It was your newest project, a painting of a woman in white, with bright red lips and a black dress that blended into the black background of your canvas. You were inspired by a woman you had seen one night on the streets of Queens.
Taking a seat by yourself- taking up the whole table with your paints and brushes spread everywhere- you began painting. Everything was already finished, you just needed the details. You heard the door open and close, only choosing to look up when you finished an eyelash stroke.
“Yeah, this is where I go after school. That over there is Mia- the one spray painting the poster paper- and the dude over there with the guitar is Jay. That over there is (y/n), their bigender so I’d just use androgynous pronouns for them. Over there is Ms. Burningham, our club sponsor, and the dude in the corner is Max, he’s a comic book artist. You’d fit right in, Peter.”
The voice belonged to MJ, a close friend of yours. She often helped give you inspiration, letting you paint some of her sketches to life. You heard her walk behind you, leaning down so her hair was in your peripheral vision. You looked up, “Yo, MJ.” You smiled at her, then up at the newbie.
He was short, about an inch or so shorter than you, with brown eyes and hair. He wore a sweater over another shirt, jeans, and ha a camera in his hands. He was trembling, probably nervous.
“Hey, ahh, who’s this?” You asked MJ, who looked at Peter. She leaned back against the table, her palms getting paint on them from the splatters that had fallen off your plate of paint.
“Parker- Peter. Peter Parker. Nice to meet you.”
He went to shake your hand, you lifted yours up to show him you had gotten black and red all over them, “Sorry, dont wanna mess up your hands. That camera looks expensive.”
Peter made a small ‘oh’ noise, looking down to his small Canon camera. “Yeah, it- its almost completely brand new. I sold some of my old stuff to get it. Useless stuff, shirts and books and stuff.”
“Cool, cool. Uh, MJ, could you tell Jay to keep it down over there? Can’t hear my own thoughts over his wanna-be indie music,” you said, completely disregarding the boy in front of you now. It wasn’t that you were rude, you just wanted to get this painting finished hole everything was still wet, otherwise it would make problems later on. MJ rolled her eyes, but nodded. You flashed Peter a smile, before turning to you painting.
After about a minute of silence, you heard a gasp behind you, “Holy shit- that’s really good!” You looked up, seeing Peter next to you with his camera turned on. He blushed, “Sorry! It’s just you looked so calm and pleasing, I snapped a quick photo while you weren’t looking- sorry.”
You half-smiled, standing upright, “Thanks, and it’s okay. This class is freedom of expression. Just not expression, ‘kay? As in, no swearing,” you laughed and pointed to the lady at the front of the class, her hands busy grading the Latin worksheets. Peter nodded, surprise clear across his face, “Oh- sorry.”
“Can I see?”
“What?”
“The pictures, can I see? I mean, they're of me, right?”
“Oh- yeah! Totally!”
Peter pushed a few buttons on his camera, and he scrolled through some of the photos until he found yours. “Here-”
“Wow, i look hot!”
You moved closer to Peter to get a better look, gawking at the aesthetic that was put into one simple photo. You did look good in this photo. “Mind sending me this? Not just this, other stuff, too. I’d love to make a piece from these- oh, if that’s okay?”
“Uhh- yeah! Sure!”
***
You flopped onto the bed, curling up next to a pillow. It was cold from loneliness, making you snuggle closer to it. You looked at your nails- paint ad managed to get wedged between the nail and the skin, and no matter how hard you tried it wouldn’t wash away.
You sighed, ready to turn off the light until your phone went off. You checked it to see there was a message from MJ, asking you if it was okay to give Peter your number. You texted back, ‘Yeah. Totally.’
Three minutes later, your phone went off again and it was Peter.
Unknown
Hey (y/n) its peter
Parker
Peter parker
Um
I just wanted to know if you wanted the photos to be on a hard drive or through gmail or something?
Hello?
-11:13-
You
Yeah
I’m here hi
A hard drive would be nice thanks
-11:15-
You took a moment to change Peter’s ID to his name. About five minutes later, Peter responded with more spam
Peter
Okay cool
Yeah okay
Yeah i can do that
Sure
Yeah
Okay
Cool
-11:32-
You
Lol
Imma sleep
Night peter
-11:35-
Peter
(…)
Night
-11:45-
***
The next day, you bumped into Peter in the hallway, “Oh, hi Pete. Can I call you that?”
“Hi, (y/n)! Yeah, totally cool!”
“Cool, got the hard drive?”
“Yeah, right here,” Peter patted his jean pockets for a bit before pulling out a black and red hard drive, “It has maybe 20 or 25 pictures here. Their mostly just random pictures of places around Queens, hope that’s okay?” You nod, “Thanks Pete.”
***
That night, you went home and changed Peter’s ID to ‘Pete’. After that, you plugged the hard drive into your laptop, opening the file titled ‘images’ and scrolling through the photos. Most of them were taken at impossible angles, and you wondered how Peter was able to capture photos like them. One was at the top of a building and looking down onto a busy interstate. Another was of the stars, a bit of the background trees getting in the frame. They were beautiful. Another was of MJ, her back towards the camera, a backpack strap in her hand, looking to the left at the sky with a sunset background. You saved that image as ‘Michelle_jERKFACE.jpeg’ on your computer. The photo Peter took of you earlier was amongst them as well.
You went to bed that night with a smile on your face and ideas fresh in your mind, ready for tomorrow's Club Meeting.
***
“Hey (y/n)! Like the pictures i sent?”
“Holy Shii-shhh! Peter! That sentence can go two ways!”
“OH! Sorry...”
“Its fine, and yes I did like them. They were really good! How come you never joined before?”
“Never thought i was good enough.”
“Not good enough?! Peter, those photos are professional level photos. They are wonderful and beautiful and deserve to be in a museum.”
“Oh, wow, thanks...” peter blushed, looking own with a small smile on his face.
***
You looked at the scenery before you, trees brown and crisp from the fall air. Peter sat next to you, his camera ready to snap a picture at any moment. MJ sat opposite Peter, sketchbook in hand and sketching the trees and people. Ned was posing by a fountain as Peter playfully took photos of him. You started sketching Peter into your own book, smiling when you finished and began shading.
MJ looked over at you, “Damn, you’re gay for Peter Parker.”
You looked at MJ with a shocked expression, before looking at the sketch and at Peter, who was now out of ear shot.
“Totally,” you smiled, before both of you went back to your drawings.
***
“Peter,” you looked at him seriously from your spot on his bed, “Ever think about kissing dudes before?”
Peter blushed, “I- ah, um...” His eyes widened, before looking down shamefully, “Y-Yeah… more than a few times...”
You smiled, “Cool, so what? You’re… bi?”
“More pan, I look for personality more than gender.”
“Cool, same. I’m (sexuality).”
“Oh, cool!”
***
“Peter, where are we going?”
“Behind the school. There’s something I need to show you.”
Peter had your hand tight in his grip, pulling you through the almost empty hallways. His voice didn’t stutter, which worried you.
Finally, you made it. Peter pulled out his camera, “Stand in front of that street art Mia did yesterday.” You did just that. Peter moved your arms to move in front of your sweater, telling you to tug at it a bit and look up at the sky. He moved some hair in front of your face to cover your eyes. He knelt down, snapping the photo.
“Cool, now stay there.”
“Do you always get like this for a photo?” You asked as Peter pressed record, moving next to you, “What do you mean?”
“Nothing, um. What are you doing?”
“Its for a project. I’m gonna screenshot part of the video later. Please, this is important.”
You watched Peter as he took control of the situation, taking your (smaller/bigger) hands in is own, intertwining them as he leant up.
“Kiss me.”
You coughed, moving back. Peter moved his arms around you again, “Please?”
“Why?”
“The project- please (y/n).”
You slowly gave in, letting Peter wrap his arms around your waist as you looked down into his eyes, your hands cupping his cheeks softly. He leant up to kiss you softly. Both of you stayed there, afraid and unsure of how to move.
“I’m sorry,” Peter said after a while, moving away. You were quick to react, taking the back of his head and slamming it back onto yours.
“Mph-!”
He was taken aback by the action, soon melting and whimpering into it.
Yep, you were so gay for Peter Parker.
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trendingnewsb · 8 years ago
Text
MIA: This is a white country, you dont have to spell it out to me
Maya Arulpragasam is bringing dancehall, hip-hop and grime to this years Meltdown. Is the outspoken British Sri Lankan the best argument for positive cultural appropriation?
The Guardian said that you couldnt shag to my record. As conversational openers go, MIAs beats the banal niceties of, say, Hello, how are you doing?. Its no surprise that she charges straight into a chat about why her last album was considered too confrontational for the bedroom by this paper. Its an icebreaker moulded to MIAs very own design: abrasive, compelling, underpinned by sex. Yeah, she finally concedes with a grin when I suggest we move past it, you cant have it all, can you?
Its a theme she warms up to when we talk about her edition of Meltdown at the Southbank Centre, which were ostensibly here to discuss. Usually, I wouldnt do something like this, she says, slouched under an oversized khaki coat dress. [But the organisers] were like: Hey, you can do whatever you want. Still, putting on the South Banks annual festival, curated in previous years by the likes of David Bowie, David Byrne and Patti Smith, has turned out to be a fairly arduous affair for MIA who says she doesnt do computers at the moment.
They didnt tell me it was nine days long. I thought it was a weekend. And then all my lists were, like, Well, this person wont be in London and that person is doing Glastonbury. Organising festivals is actually really complicated, she stresses. It wasnt just about dreaming something and then it appeared. Programming literally means, like, programming.
For all that Maya Arulpragasam didnt quite know what she was letting herself in for, one suspects the Southbank Centre didnt either; logistics aside, the mornings photoshoot has already been met with some flapping from the press officer made nervous by MIA climbing on the roof without safety clearance. Still, her lineup dancehall, Brooklyn hip-hop, depressive Swedish rap and Nigerian grime is perhaps the most underground the festival has seen in its 24 years. How much is she expecting to shake up its comfortable concert halls, cafe bars and conference-room spaces?
youtube
Click here to watch the video for last years Go Off.
When I was a teenager in London, I would just get a Travelcard and go somewhere, explore the city and go to weird places, she says. I would never judge the place, like, This is middle class and white. This is a white country, you dont have to spell it out to me, but there wasnt ever a limit on where I could go or what I could do.
A long, elliptical digression on London then and now follows, which takes in the optimistic multiculturalism of the 90s, Tamil house parties, empire and British identity. Its the bento box of an MIA interview: individually contained ideas that dont obviously bleed into one another and yet, overall, make a collective sense if youre prepared to go with it. Thats the key thing about MIA: you have to be willing to go with her to properly get her. Given that she still looks and sounds like a beautiful, bratty, art-school upstart and is prone to labyrinthine tangents, its easy to portray her as inarticulate or unhinged. But MIAs intelligence is instinctive rather than intellectual, and fuelled by the political.
The Mehrabian maxim that reckons that only 7% of communication is verbal is one that might best be proven by the transcript of a chat with MIA removed of all tone, attitude, context and body language. Take, for instance, her explanation of why only the future remains relevant:
As humans, we dont use our past and our history to work out the importance of what our role is in the present, she says. And if you cant use the past to define your present, then it should not be an element that holds back the future. Greece is a perfect example. More than Britain, they were brought to their knees, and not a single white country thought about saving them. And it was part of their heritage. Its where their mythology comes from or their concept of capitalism and democracy comes from. Nobody cared, everybody cared about the modern. Right?
Kim Kardashian is actually more powerful than Greece. She has more money than the whole of Greece, she continues. Therefore, thats where the power lies. If you then define it that way, then you kind of just have to live with that. And maybe whats happening in modern society: that if youre going to judge it by that, then other countries are gonna come in and define the future.
In print, its a statement that seems lacking in logic and coherence. In the moment, Im fairly sure Im able to follow her and we go on to consider how and where this future is being defined (for the record: You cant ignore the fact that China is going to be doing their thing in the next 50 years) and how Arulpragasam believes the immigration issue has become a red herring covering up a truth that can explain the American and British swing to conservative populism.
With Brexit, the idea was to get away from Europe and reinvent our identity, she says. And really, that identity was going to be American, but then they gave us Trump! So, everyone now is like, Oh shit, what is Britain? Are we going to rewind back to the 1800s? We cant. Its too late for that. So, going forward, we need a charismatic leader who then va va vooms the British identity. And we dont have that either.
People thinking that Im a bitch is totally unwarranted … MIA. Photograph: Stephanie Sian Smith/The Guide
The prime minister has called a snap election on the day we meet. Does MIA have any faith in our political system? Or in the left?
Everyone keeps going, Corbyn cant do this, but its, like, well, who else is there? she says. If people just left him alone to actually do the job and actually gave him some support, maybe hed be different. Treating him with so much contempt fighting that takes all his energy. How the fuck do you expect him to do interesting things? In any case insists the estranged daughter of a Tamil revolutionary, politicians are people who couldnt get jobs somewhere else.
MIAs politics, unwieldy and unslick though they may be, have often made her an easy target for tedious sneering in the press; the most insistent narrative is that, like Banksy, shes big on arch, subversive statement but lacks substance. Or that she is a hypocrite for making herself the poster girl for the worlds most marginalised people. And yet, shes one of the best pop stars Britain has ever produced. For all the ear-clanging experimentation of her five albums, MIA has always kept a sleeve full of pop bangers Bucky Done Gun, Paper Planes, Bad Girls, Finally that have sounded like little that came before or since her. Even if she didnt have the tunes, here is an art-school refugee Sri Lankan single mother with a visual aesthetic co-opted by everyone from Vetements to Versace who was born into political rebellion and revels in controversy. Gleefully gauche and carefree, MIA is the best argument for when cultural appropriation works. Bland singer-songstress beloved of Radio 2 playlists she isnt. So how much has the criticism bothered her?
People thinking that Im a bitch is totally unwarranted because Im not, she ays. I just had to fight for shit, and I still do. I just dont care any more. I dont know. She stops and starts. What I deal with as an artist, the media, the public persona, its a walk in the fucking park, compared to how confusing the universe really fucking is. Theres so much beauty in it and theres so much mystery, theres so much confusing shit in it. That is way more interesting to think about than why, like, Patricia hates me. You know what I mean? I laugh. Its like, Who the fuck is Patricia? and How can Patricia say this shit about me?. It just does not matter to me at all.As it is, she says shes most preoccupied with how to be a functioning grown up, an adult and a mother to an eight-year-old son (whose father Benjamin Bronfman is son to the billionaire heir of the Seagram fortune) born into immense privilege.
When the war came to an end in Sri Lanka in 2009, it actually did affect me, she explains. Everyone was, like, What the fuck does she know? Shes, like, a pop star, but that was my life. It was 50% of who I was, it was my identity. I didnt know what to do with myself. So I had a kid. Its the year the cause died, but the year my personal cause my son was born. And then, OK, I have to figure out what to do in very small parameters: I have a son, how is he going to see his grandma, am I going to make it there on Saturday? Can I make sure that I dont mess up his head by being depressed about certain things?
She struggles to reconcile her upbringing poor and living in Sri Lanka for her childhood to poor and living on a council estate in Mitcham, south London, in her adolescence with her sons. Im not very straightforward as an immigrant. That whole My kids would never see the pain that I saw; Im not like that. Im totally up for reintroducing him to the pain. I dont have any qualms about that. Her problems havent changed, she says, because of money or better circumstances. Whether Im in a mansion or a council flat, I would feel the same anxiety waking up going: I need to write this thing in a scrapbook, wheres my notepad? I would still have all those problems. I might still overcook the fish fingers. Those things are not going to magically transform because your house has changed. At the beginning I thought that money couldve saved my family. Very quickly I realised that money is not the thing.
Her conflict in wanting to being huge and commercial versus credible and ahead of the curve has been a persistent tension threaded through MIAs career. When I got into the music game, it was never an option to shut up and make lots of money. she says. To be a huge pop star, I would have to be, like, Yes, I think bombing Afghanistan was a great idea, I love our democracy and what it has achieved. I love the American flag and Im going to make a jumpsuit out of it. I just think it was important to have all of those Arab Springs, and its great and lets drink Coca-Cola. I had to do that, and do it all in a thong. Could I have done that if it meant that my mum had the nicest house in Chiswick by the river?
youtube
Click here to se the video for MIAs Bad Girls.
Does she worry about money now? If youre preaching living within your means, you have to, to some extent. But I also know that if youre someone in society that speaks out about injustice or political issues, one of the things that happens is that you get economically punished, 100%. I take that hit all the time.
The most recent, obvious example was MIA being forced to quit her headline slot at Afropunk last year, following a contentious quote in which she asked in an interview why Beyonc and Kendrick Lamar might not discuss why Muslim lives matter or Syrian lives matter. I dont regret [raising the issue], she says, with triumphant chutzpah. You saw how bad it was. And the Muslim ban didnt happen just with Trump, it was already happening under Obama. But you couldnt say that about him, you couldnt say that he introduced the Muslim ban, or banned seven different countries, or was already monitoring people, or dropped more bombs than Trump has. In truth, Obamas administration did identify the seven countries on Trumps list for additional screening measures, but it didnt bar their nationals. Shes already skipped ahead. The quantity of damage cant be quantified right now, she insists. Well have to wait the four years. After eight years of Obama, we kind of knew [his failings], but we just werent allowed to say them because he was so great. He was better than any person in Hollywood that I wouldve watched. He was really likable and just had loads of swag. That doesnt mean that you have to deny the truth, though.
This (and much more) comes moments after she tells me she has no time for opinions these days. She claims she doesnt read the news any more and that her primary sources for information are customers at the local kebab shop, taxi drivers and then sort of figuring it out. What about the state of the world? MIAs moment as an agitprop pop activist has never seemed more potent. Politics? I have no time for these things because Im so stuck in the zone. Ive become a hermit. [Meltdown] is actually giving me the chance to actually go out and meet people again. Ive gone for weeks without talking to a person, I do that happily. I tell her I dont believe her, as I suspect it would be a recipe for her to go fully barmy.
Im actually quite an extreme person, so I dont see that as madness. I see that as, like, solitude, doing a phase of solitude is not that bad. After declaring her fifth album AIM to be her final one, shes also trying to find new ways to channel her creativity. Im trying to write a film. I havent stepped into it yet because I want it to be good. Once you hit the start button you cant really stop it. She has, she tells me, the added complication of ADD to contend with. When was that diagnosed? I just have it. Dont even need diagnosis, its a waste of time, its a waste of the NHS. In truly blithe MIA style, she adds: Its just when you have too many ideas and not enough ways to get them out.
MIAs Meltdown is at the Southbank Centre, SE1, 9-18 June
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viralhottopics · 8 years ago
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Net nostalgia: the online museums preserving dolphin gifs and spinning Comic Sans
Archivist Jason Scott has made it his mission to record digital culture for future generations. But why are we so keen to relive the days of Geocities websites and 56k modems?
Jason Scott is a guerilla internet archivist. Someones got to be. If youve got some content embedded in a site thats about to disappear, then he and his team of coders and data engineers go in there and Oceans Eleven the joint. In the name of digital archaeology, they migrate as much data as they can to a safe harbour even as the main site goes down. We swoop in and, to the best of our ability, take a snapshot, he says.
Scott is interested in conserving the stuff we have forgotten has value. Increasingly, our culture plays itself out on the internet, yet even now we have a tendency to view what we do on there as trivial. Or we make the mistake of assuming that digital means for ever. The problem is, the internets systems have been designed as though everything goes on indefinitely, he says. There are no agreed-upon shutdown procedures. When users die, what do you do? Because their accounts live on, and suddenly Facebook is telling you your dead friend also likes Snickers bars. Often, you dont even know whos running a site. Its as if you didnt know who was in charge of your water supply; then one day, it just stopped …
As one of the earliest adopters in the pre-world wide web 1980s, Scott took thousands of screenshots of bulletin-board systems early internet message-boards. In 1996, he decided to share his ASCII joy by building a website to host them all: textfiles.com. Its still online today, a piece of retro-within-retro. The site made Scott famous in net-nostalgia circles, and its legacy has made him one of the key movers in how we interact with and conserve an online kingdom, parts of which feel as faded as any Mayan temple.
Scott now works for archive.org. This is the new, broader umbrella for what used to be called the Wayback Machine, the online library that can show you what a given website looked like on any given day, now encompassing more than 279bn pages. Its $18m (14.5m)-a-year running costs are funded chiefly through donations, averaging $25 a time. Alongside Jimmy Waless Wikipedia, the Wayback Machine feels like a relic of a kinder, gentler era in the life of the net before Facebook algorithms were squeezing every penny out of your newsfeed. It was, we were told, a soft-libertarian wonderworld, full of dreamers who believed that private donations plus low information costs would breed a web where we were all equal, all beautiful.
It hasnt quite turned out like that. Which could be one reason we now look back so mistily at the web of olden times. Even in 2001, there were back-to-the-landers recreating the revolving Roman columns, dolphin gifs and mismatched spinning comic sans of the Geocities age. By 1999, Geocities was the third-most visited website in the world, enticing a vast quilt of hobbyists to make their own pages about whatever interested them. When it finally shut its doors in 2009, the Wayback Machine made a complete copy of it. But nostalgia for what it represented means that theres also Neocities an attempt to reboot its elemental qualities. Not to mention the Geocitiesizer which recreates the rest of the web in the same garish colours, autoplaying Midi-songs and intrusive tiled windows. Internet artist Olia Lialina has created One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age which serves up an unending spool of Geocities page screengrabs in the form of a Tumblr blog.
Go back another generation in internet nostalgia and you hit Tilde.club a website-building engine with a lengthy waiting list, where learning a few coding skills will allow you publish some authentically rough, poorly spaced web pages from the mid-90s. In addition to these retro sites, there are emulators to recreate the blocky tedium of waiting for 56k modem to serve a page. Then graphics patches to simulate the graininess of old cathode ray screens. These are often sinkholes of processing power. Making something look slightly grainy and a bit off is, it turns out, unbelievably energy-consuming.
An old webpage as seen on the One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age blog. Photograph: oneterabyteofkilobyteage.tumblr.com/
This nostalgic impulse is also playing out in the real world. Last year, AMCs much-admired but little-watched Halt and Catch Fire took the early internet era and dramatised it, one IRC chat log at a time. In music, the now-fading vaporwave movement imbued the silvery cyber-joy of the early internet with lashings of melancholia, as a generation that had come of age alongside the net began to look back and wonder where their dreams had gone.
Perhaps were experiencing this boom in nostalgia because theres suddenly so much more retro to go around, and easier access to it. Or perhaps its because the innovation curve seems to have plateaued; todays web giants are between 10 and 20 years old, and much of the past five years has been about tweaks, consolidation and monetisation of previous business plans. Theres also a sense that weve come through a lot of collective mental evolution in the past few years from an age where each new social network filled us with naive joy at the possibilities for connection, to an era of subtweets, dogpiling and virtue signalling.
Scott isnt convinced. In the final analysis, people will hook their own nostalgia on to their own brains very effectively, regardless of when the technological platform started. Oh, remember when we were all on Netflix? Remember when Twitter was just this little club? In the life of any platform, theres always an early-adopter phase, where the people who were there first get annoyed by the people who have arrived later.
Its also wrong to assume that your cherished experience is everyones nostalgia rapidly becomes obscure hieroglyphs if youre outside its target market.
One day on archive.org, I put up a whole lot of under construction gifs that Id taken from Geocities, says Scott. And Id watch as people linked to them. Some of them said: Hey, remember these? But others said: Ive never seen this before. Why did people do this? Then an art museum got in touch and said: We want to make a wall of them as an art exhibition. People didnt have any connection to them theyd go wow or what is this?, but it had become about as meaningful as someone making a dress from an old phonebook. It had fallen down into this general mulch of human culture.
The mulch is vast and every layer obscures another. Were all eating and excreting so much culture now that it has become very hard to keep tabs on it. The archive team are presently recording all US TV, 24/7. One team member recently phoned the White House switchboard to record every different voicemail message on there just to have a database of what it sounded like in 2016.
But while the team try not to make too many editorial decisions, they have to accept that not everything can be preserved. Even if it is just chucking out the washing powder ads on all that TV coverage and just keeping one version, compression must come, and that means stuff will inevitably get lost along the way. Scott shrugs. Life, he admits, is a lossy format.
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trendingnewsb · 8 years ago
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MIA: This is a white country, you dont have to spell it out to me
Maya Arulpragasam is bringing dancehall, hip-hop and grime to this years Meltdown. Is the outspoken British Sri Lankan the best argument for positive cultural appropriation?
The Guardian said that you couldnt shag to my record. As conversational openers go, MIAs beats the banal niceties of, say, Hello, how are you doing?. Its no surprise that she charges straight into a chat about why her last album was considered too confrontational for the bedroom by this paper. Its an icebreaker moulded to MIAs very own design: abrasive, compelling, underpinned by sex. Yeah, she finally concedes with a grin when I suggest we move past it, you cant have it all, can you?
Its a theme she warms up to when we talk about her edition of Meltdown at the Southbank Centre, which were ostensibly here to discuss. Usually, I wouldnt do something like this, she says, slouched under an oversized khaki coat dress. [But the organisers] were like: Hey, you can do whatever you want. Still, putting on the South Banks annual festival, curated in previous years by the likes of David Bowie, David Byrne and Patti Smith, has turned out to be a fairly arduous affair for MIA who says she doesnt do computers at the moment.
They didnt tell me it was nine days long. I thought it was a weekend. And then all my lists were, like, Well, this person wont be in London and that person is doing Glastonbury. Organising festivals is actually really complicated, she stresses. It wasnt just about dreaming something and then it appeared. Programming literally means, like, programming.
For all that Maya Arulpragasam didnt quite know what she was letting herself in for, one suspects the Southbank Centre didnt either; logistics aside, the mornings photoshoot has already been met with some flapping from the press officer made nervous by MIA climbing on the roof without safety clearance. Still, her lineup dancehall, Brooklyn hip-hop, depressive Swedish rap and Nigerian grime is perhaps the most underground the festival has seen in its 24 years. How much is she expecting to shake up its comfortable concert halls, cafe bars and conference-room spaces?
youtube
Click here to watch the video for last years Go Off.
When I was a teenager in London, I would just get a Travelcard and go somewhere, explore the city and go to weird places, she says. I would never judge the place, like, This is middle class and white. This is a white country, you dont have to spell it out to me, but there wasnt ever a limit on where I could go or what I could do.
A long, elliptical digression on London then and now follows, which takes in the optimistic multiculturalism of the 90s, Tamil house parties, empire and British identity. Its the bento box of an MIA interview: individually contained ideas that dont obviously bleed into one another and yet, overall, make a collective sense if youre prepared to go with it. Thats the key thing about MIA: you have to be willing to go with her to properly get her. Given that she still looks and sounds like a beautiful, bratty, art-school upstart and is prone to labyrinthine tangents, its easy to portray her as inarticulate or unhinged. But MIAs intelligence is instinctive rather than intellectual, and fuelled by the political.
The Mehrabian maxim that reckons that only 7% of communication is verbal is one that might best be proven by the transcript of a chat with MIA removed of all tone, attitude, context and body language. Take, for instance, her explanation of why only the future remains relevant:
As humans, we dont use our past and our history to work out the importance of what our role is in the present, she says. And if you cant use the past to define your present, then it should not be an element that holds back the future. Greece is a perfect example. More than Britain, they were brought to their knees, and not a single white country thought about saving them. And it was part of their heritage. Its where their mythology comes from or their concept of capitalism and democracy comes from. Nobody cared, everybody cared about the modern. Right?
Kim Kardashian is actually more powerful than Greece. She has more money than the whole of Greece, she continues. Therefore, thats where the power lies. If you then define it that way, then you kind of just have to live with that. And maybe whats happening in modern society: that if youre going to judge it by that, then other countries are gonna come in and define the future.
In print, its a statement that seems lacking in logic and coherence. In the moment, Im fairly sure Im able to follow her and we go on to consider how and where this future is being defined (for the record: You cant ignore the fact that China is going to be doing their thing in the next 50 years) and how Arulpragasam believes the immigration issue has become a red herring covering up a truth that can explain the American and British swing to conservative populism.
With Brexit, the idea was to get away from Europe and reinvent our identity, she says. And really, that identity was going to be American, but then they gave us Trump! So, everyone now is like, Oh shit, what is Britain? Are we going to rewind back to the 1800s? We cant. Its too late for that. So, going forward, we need a charismatic leader who then va va vooms the British identity. And we dont have that either.
People thinking that Im a bitch is totally unwarranted … MIA. Photograph: Stephanie Sian Smith/The Guide
The prime minister has called a snap election on the day we meet. Does MIA have any faith in our political system? Or in the left?
Everyone keeps going, Corbyn cant do this, but its, like, well, who else is there? she says. If people just left him alone to actually do the job and actually gave him some support, maybe hed be different. Treating him with so much contempt fighting that takes all his energy. How the fuck do you expect him to do interesting things? In any case insists the estranged daughter of a Tamil revolutionary, politicians are people who couldnt get jobs somewhere else.
MIAs politics, unwieldy and unslick though they may be, have often made her an easy target for tedious sneering in the press; the most insistent narrative is that, like Banksy, shes big on arch, subversive statement but lacks substance. Or that she is a hypocrite for making herself the poster girl for the worlds most marginalised people. And yet, shes one of the best pop stars Britain has ever produced. For all the ear-clanging experimentation of her five albums, MIA has always kept a sleeve full of pop bangers Bucky Done Gun, Paper Planes, Bad Girls, Finally that have sounded like little that came before or since her. Even if she didnt have the tunes, here is an art-school refugee Sri Lankan single mother with a visual aesthetic co-opted by everyone from Vetements to Versace who was born into political rebellion and revels in controversy. Gleefully gauche and carefree, MIA is the best argument for when cultural appropriation works. Bland singer-songstress beloved of Radio 2 playlists she isnt. So how much has the criticism bothered her?
People thinking that Im a bitch is totally unwarranted because Im not, she ays. I just had to fight for shit, and I still do. I just dont care any more. I dont know. She stops and starts. What I deal with as an artist, the media, the public persona, its a walk in the fucking park, compared to how confusing the universe really fucking is. Theres so much beauty in it and theres so much mystery, theres so much confusing shit in it. That is way more interesting to think about than why, like, Patricia hates me. You know what I mean? I laugh. Its like, Who the fuck is Patricia? and How can Patricia say this shit about me?. It just does not matter to me at all.As it is, she says shes most preoccupied with how to be a functioning grown up, an adult and a mother to an eight-year-old son (whose father Benjamin Bronfman is son to the billionaire heir of the Seagram fortune) born into immense privilege.
When the war came to an end in Sri Lanka in 2009, it actually did affect me, she explains. Everyone was, like, What the fuck does she know? Shes, like, a pop star, but that was my life. It was 50% of who I was, it was my identity. I didnt know what to do with myself. So I had a kid. Its the year the cause died, but the year my personal cause my son was born. And then, OK, I have to figure out what to do in very small parameters: I have a son, how is he going to see his grandma, am I going to make it there on Saturday? Can I make sure that I dont mess up his head by being depressed about certain things?
She struggles to reconcile her upbringing poor and living in Sri Lanka for her childhood to poor and living on a council estate in Mitcham, south London, in her adolescence with her sons. Im not very straightforward as an immigrant. That whole My kids would never see the pain that I saw; Im not like that. Im totally up for reintroducing him to the pain. I dont have any qualms about that. Her problems havent changed, she says, because of money or better circumstances. Whether Im in a mansion or a council flat, I would feel the same anxiety waking up going: I need to write this thing in a scrapbook, wheres my notepad? I would still have all those problems. I might still overcook the fish fingers. Those things are not going to magically transform because your house has changed. At the beginning I thought that money couldve saved my family. Very quickly I realised that money is not the thing.
Her conflict in wanting to being huge and commercial versus credible and ahead of the curve has been a persistent tension threaded through MIAs career. When I got into the music game, it was never an option to shut up and make lots of money. she says. To be a huge pop star, I would have to be, like, Yes, I think bombing Afghanistan was a great idea, I love our democracy and what it has achieved. I love the American flag and Im going to make a jumpsuit out of it. I just think it was important to have all of those Arab Springs, and its great and lets drink Coca-Cola. I had to do that, and do it all in a thong. Could I have done that if it meant that my mum had the nicest house in Chiswick by the river?
youtube
Click here to se the video for MIAs Bad Girls.
Does she worry about money now? If youre preaching living within your means, you have to, to some extent. But I also know that if youre someone in society that speaks out about injustice or political issues, one of the things that happens is that you get economically punished, 100%. I take that hit all the time.
The most recent, obvious example was MIA being forced to quit her headline slot at Afropunk last year, following a contentious quote in which she asked in an interview why Beyonc and Kendrick Lamar might not discuss why Muslim lives matter or Syrian lives matter. I dont regret [raising the issue], she says, with triumphant chutzpah. You saw how bad it was. And the Muslim ban didnt happen just with Trump, it was already happening under Obama. But you couldnt say that about him, you couldnt say that he introduced the Muslim ban, or banned seven different countries, or was already monitoring people, or dropped more bombs than Trump has. In truth, Obamas administration did identify the seven countries on Trumps list for additional screening measures, but it didnt bar their nationals. Shes already skipped ahead. The quantity of damage cant be quantified right now, she insists. Well have to wait the four years. After eight years of Obama, we kind of knew [his failings], but we just werent allowed to say them because he was so great. He was better than any person in Hollywood that I wouldve watched. He was really likable and just had loads of swag. That doesnt mean that you have to deny the truth, though.
This (and much more) comes moments after she tells me she has no time for opinions these days. She claims she doesnt read the news any more and that her primary sources for information are customers at the local kebab shop, taxi drivers and then sort of figuring it out. What about the state of the world? MIAs moment as an agitprop pop activist has never seemed more potent. Politics? I have no time for these things because Im so stuck in the zone. Ive become a hermit. [Meltdown] is actually giving me the chance to actually go out and meet people again. Ive gone for weeks without talking to a person, I do that happily. I tell her I dont believe her, as I suspect it would be a recipe for her to go fully barmy.
Im actually quite an extreme person, so I dont see that as madness. I see that as, like, solitude, doing a phase of solitude is not that bad. After declaring her fifth album AIM to be her final one, shes also trying to find new ways to channel her creativity. Im trying to write a film. I havent stepped into it yet because I want it to be good. Once you hit the start button you cant really stop it. She has, she tells me, the added complication of ADD to contend with. When was that diagnosed? I just have it. Dont even need diagnosis, its a waste of time, its a waste of the NHS. In truly blithe MIA style, she adds: Its just when you have too many ideas and not enough ways to get them out.
MIAs Meltdown is at the Southbank Centre, SE1, 9-18 June
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