#oh to be a weird teen in 2014 instead of a weird kid

[vampirefucker-69]

I wasn’t on tumblr during what’s massively considered its ‘prime’ on account of the fact that I was actually like 6

There’s no joke here

I’m just mad I was a fetus during prime emo years

[starbuckie]

𝐢𝐭'𝐬 𝐛𝐞𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐨 𝐥𝐨𝐨𝐤 𝐚 𝐥𝐨𝐭 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐜𝐡𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐦𝐚𝐬

challenge: winter warmers writing challenge by @spaceodditybarnes

prompt: “it’s beginning to look a lot like christmas” by michael buble

pairing: bucky barnes x reader

words: 2k without lyrics, 2.1k with lyrics

warnings: i genuinely don’t think i can say anything besides FLUFF, oh wait theres some mentions of the shmexy sex (i promise im a functioning person)

summary: in which they take a little holiday stroll and talk about what they are.

a/n: THIS MADE ME VERY HAPPY THANK YOU FOR HOSTING THIS CHALLENGE JADE!!! i kinda veered off the idea of christmas with this one, but my mind created another idea and i kinda just went with the flow. anyways, i really enjoyed writing this one, and i hope you all had a lovely holiday season <3 LOTS OF LOVE Y’ALL

main masterlist || sebastian stan characters masterlist

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas

Everywhere you go

Take a look at the five and ten, it’s glistening once again

With candy cane and silver lanes that glow

Snow sprinkled to the buildings and sidewalks of Midtown Manhattan, making the traffic clog up to the oh so lovely sounds of taxis and cars honking. It was far from what people pictured it, really, New York was absolute hell during the holiday season. Sloshing boots and teens smoking pot outside the scantily decorated discount store that held very little, sad-looking Christmas lights.

It didn’t bother Bucky. No, he had never been a big fan of the holiday season. Even back in the forties, with his ma and little sisters, they had never been huge on celebrating Christmas, instead choosing to work those shifts during the holiday so they could make a buck or two more to hold them over. Now in the twenty-first century, the holiday just reminded him how truly lonely he was, everyone and everything he used to know long gone.

But then he found Y/N. Granted, it had not been a formal introduction. The poor girl had nearly damn run him over with her motorcycle for Christ’s sake, but nonetheless she crawled into his heart that cold December morning two years ago, and had not left ever since. 

Now she walked by his side at Rockefeller Center, her cold fingers intertwined with his warm ones, admiring the tree while he admired her. He already had every part of her memorized, from late night escapades in the sheets to studying the slope of her nose at team breakfasts. Even when he wasn’t with her, he was always looking at her, unable to pull his eyes away from Y/N’s radiance. 

This little… dalliance of theirs had only started a year back, and they had still yet to put a label on it. Sam had called it friends with benefits, Sharon called it being a couple without the name. Bucky had shut both of those ideas down, claiming that they were taking it slow and weren’t looking to call it anything yet they still had not really talked about it. Was it really worth ruining the bond he had with the girl he fell madly in love with? Whatever it was, they had never taken time out of their day to actually discuss what they meant to each other, but, God, he’d be a liar if he said he didn’t want to know.

“Bucky?” Her sweet voice brought him out of his thoughts, the glittering red and white lights of the Christmas tree reflecting in her eyes. “You seem kind of distracted right now, sweetheart, are you bored? We can head back to the compound if you like.”

He smiled at her worried tone, delicately kissing the tip of her nose. “‘M just thinking, doll, wanna stay as long as I can out here with you.”

The grin he received in return was breathtaking, her red-painted lips turned upwards and a little twinkle (literally and metaphorically) in her eyes. “Good.”

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas

Toys in every store

But the prettiest sight to see, is the holly that will be

On your own front door

“Oh, look at that helicopter, Buck! That’s so cool!” Y/N pointed at a little boy in the store controlling the airborne toy with a small remote. “They didn't have those when I was a kid, I just had my Tamagotchi.”

He scrunched his nose, staring at her with an emotion that could be described as nothing other than distaste. “What the hell is a Tamagotchi?”

“A Tamagotchi was like this little digital pet thing that you could take care of, mainly used for kids who were trying to prove to their parents that they could take care of a real pet. That’s why I had one at least, but I never did get a tabby cat like I wanted.” Y/N continued to ramble about her weird pet thing as they walked through the toy store, though Bucky didn’t really care. But he’d never stop her either. The way her eyes lit up in childlike wonder and her fascination with the toys on the shelves was too precious to destroy. This was the girl who he had seen slit throats and blow aliens’ brains out, and in the moment she was ogling an American Girl Doll like it was the last pancake at the breakfast table. 

Y/N finally convinced herself that she was done looking at the toys, claiming that she was too mature for such things (she really wasn’t), but he let her lead him out the door, before she halted right in the doorway. “What is it, honey?”

“Mistletoe.” He glanced up at the little sprig of green and red berries above their heads, hanging by a small strand of twine. A small group of kids with families stood around, watching them with both happy and annoyed faces. How could they not notice Y/N L/N and Bucky Barnes? Bucky’s vibranium arm may have been recognizable, but Y/N’s cheery, a little-louder-than-normal humming had caused a little group to watch them throughout the store. “I think they’re waiting for us to kiss, Buck.”

She leaned into him, placing her lips on his and placing her freezing hands on his cheekbones. Though Bucky had never been big on PDA, the rest of the world seemed to slip away when he was with her. He grinned into her lips, hugging her tightly around the waist so she squealed. When he forced herself away from her intoxicating mouth, she was sporting a bright smile and smudged lipstick that had rubbed off onto his. 

Giggling, she took her thumb and swiped off some of the red residue she had left. “You had a little something there, sweetheart.” 

A pair of hopalong boots and a pistol that shoots

Is the wish of Barney and Ben

Dolls that’ll talk and will go for a walk

Is the hope of Janice and Jen

Bucky watched Y/N point out all the different street cart vendors as they walked to Radio City Music Hall. She’d insisted that they go look at the window displays there as well, and who was he to argue? Strangely enough, they hadn’t talked much, other than the occasional “are you cold” from Bucky, to which Y/N assured him she was not. Her quiet voice sang the lyrics to Last Christmas when a little girl stopped in front of them, two auburn braids and green eyes boring straight into hers. 

The small child pulled on Y/N’s skirt, a silent plea to go down to her height. “Hi there, are you lost, sweetie?”

“I wanted to talk to you,” she looked back to an older woman, who gave her a thumbs up and a smile, “because you are my favorite superhero and I hope you have a very good Christmas.”

Y/N nearly melted at the toothless smile the girl, who she assumed was named Sadie by the necklace she wore. “Thank you so much, sweetheart. I hope you have a good Christmas too, and do you know this guy?” She dragged Bucky down next to her, the large, buff man hulking over the small girl. “This is my friend Bucky, do you know him?”

He eyed her warily, as if he were absolutely terrified of the tiny human. “You’re the Winter Soldier!”

Uh oh. The name was one that struck a chord of fear through everyone, still in shock of the events that had taken place in D.C. in 2014. While he and Sam had tried to label a new brand for the Avengers, people didn’t forget all the horrors of HYDRA and their prized assassin. Of course it hadn’t been him, even he knew that, but trying to convince people otherwise still made him feel guilty.

“You’re my second favorite Avenger, after Y/N, of course.” Sadie brought her hand to hover over Bucky’s vibranium one, her eyes wide with excitement. “Mr. Bucky, can I touch your metal arm?”

The man in question could barely utter out a word, muttering some sort of agreement before nodding with a timid smile. Giddily, she touched his arm, feeling all the cool ridges of gold-plated vibranium against the gun-grey metal. Sadie continued to pelt questions at him, about Sam and Redwing to his “adventures” with Y/N on the team.

Bucky, though shy at first, got more and more relaxed as they continued their conversation, his grin growing wider. Y/N loved her fans, she loved them so, so dearly, but seeing them interact with the man she loved was something different. Not a bad different, but a word that could only be described as pure joy. 

“Darling, I think we better leave Ms. L/N and Mr. Barnes alone. Say thank you and happy holidays.” The little girl looked sad, turning to look at her mom with a little pout, but she reluctantly obliged and soon the duo were off, into the crowded streets once again. 

“Y’know once upon a time I had dreamed about having kids,” Bucky commented. They walked along the sidewalks in a comfortable quiet after the encounter with Sadie, but Bucky’s mind had not stopped reeling from the happiness his conversation brought him. “Was gonna come home from the war, settle down with a gal, and live to be at least seventy years old.”

“Well, I can tell you you’re good on the last bit of that, Buck.” He snorted at her jab at his age, something that has become a norm for their little makeshift family of four. “What do you want now?”

He stopped in his tracks and looked over at her with a fond tilt of his lips. “Oh, just something real special.”

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas

Toys in every store

But the prettiest sight to see, is the holly that will be

On your own front door

“Y/N, what are we?” She glanced over at him from where they sat on the Met stairs, giving their feet a break from walking for hours. 

“What do you mean, Buck?”

He grabbed her hands and held them to his chest, trying to make her understand the amount of confusion and impatience he had with this one burdening question. “We’ve been sleeping together for a year, Y/N. We make each other breakfast, we go out together, I literally have half of my closet dedicated to your stuff, but even after all that we haven’t given us a name yet.”

Y/N sat in stunned silence, staring at the outburst from the man in front of her. To be completely honest she had never really thought about the question, choosing to enjoy each second she got to spend with the wonderful man with her. What she had noticed however, was how whenever they parted ways or were in the most intimate of moments, three little words nearly slipped off of her tongue. Every. Single. Time.

“Well, what do you want to be, Bucky?”

“I want to be the man you love. I want to be the man who loves you with his entire heart, though I like to think I already am. I want you to be my best gal more than anything in the world, and that I want to be the man who gets to hold and love you every night.” Slowly they drifted to each other, a magnetic pull bringing them to each other. “What do you think, doll?”

“I think,” her lips split into a grin, hovering over his own with the exact same expression, “that I want to be your best girl and the one who gets to make you pancakes in the morning and I want to be the one you get a cat with, who we’ll name Alpine because if I know you, names are the most important part of having a pet. I want to be held and loved by you every night, Bucky Barnes, and I am the girl who loves you more than anything in this entire damn world.”

Not another second to spare, Bucky pulled Y/N in close, letting himself get lost in one of her sweet, loving kisses, finally knowing that he was hers and she was his. At long last.

Sure, it’s Christmas once more

[koncreates]

Was having a conversation last night with some friends that really made me realize how we were all like... exposed to really not good shit when we were teens on this site?

Like remember when everybody loved "dorito face bad touch senpai-san and shota boy" comics? People thought those were hilarious and reblogged them without really considering the fact that "hey the punchline here is literally pedophilia". Remember the honestuck panty raid comic by the incest artist who made all that john/jade and made it as obviously weird as possible on purpose?? Like that one where Rose and Dave were doing the dirty and the comic punchline was that the song "We Are Family" came on??? Why were we allowed to see that as normal and an okay????

Like I remember when Free!! came out and so many kids (INCLUDING MYSELF) just took to calling the blonde one "shota boy" or "shota senpai" because we had been told "oh shota just means a boy who looks cute and young" instead of knowing it was a pedophilic fetish term. Hell I know some people out there who still have that misconception, but these days if you make the mistake of saying it you absolutely will be labeled a pedophile.

It feels like the environment of the internet went from absolutely not caring at all to being a little too gung-ho about labeling anything as pedo shit, and I think that's probably a case of direct causation skxhskc

Like, I don't wanna see other kids get groomed with black butler porn like I was. I don't want kids exposed to more incest art that was played off for laughs!

2014 was a weird fucking time and I am So Glad to be out of it alfbwlcj

[rpf-bat]

Underground, Getting Down

Pairing: Gerard Way x Reader

Genre: Fluff

Summary: Written for Gothtober 2020, Day 14. Prompt: “Symphony”. 

You’re a flutist, playing in the New York subway for tips. Gerard watches one of your performances, and decides that his next single, needs a mad flute solo. 

Beneath the streets of New York, the subway station bustled, filled with people. Some moved up the stairs, towards the streets, and others down the steps, towards the trains. Everyone in the crowd was rushing on to their next destination. At the base of the staircase, you stood, playing your flute. 

Your flute case sat propped open on the tiles in front of you. A few bills already lined the inside. A young woman dropped another fiver in, as you played Bach’s ‘Flute Sonata in A Minor’. 

You lifted your face from the instrument for a moment, to call out, “Thank you!” 

The woman had already turned away from you, rushing down the corridor to catch the E train. You shrugged, returning your lips to the flute’s embouchure hole. Even the best buskers, rarely made someone stop in their tracks. The song ended. 

I think I’ll mix it up, you decided, do something more pop for the next song. 

You picked the Bach sheet music up off your stand, placing it back in your bag. Then, you pulled out the sheet music for Jethro Tull’s ‘No Lullaby’.  This one was usually more impressive-sounding, when you had your friend, who played guitar, with you to do the intro. But, he was busy today, at his day job at Starbucks. You would just have to launch right into your solo. 

Your fingers danced over the keys, as the music echoed off the walls of the tunnel. You found your mind wandering, as you played. 

I really thought, when I graduated, that I was gonna play for the New York Philharmonic, you recalled wistfully. But, the auditions for first chair ended up being competitive as hell. Instead of playing high society symphonies, I just play out here, for the commuters and hobos. 

It wasn’t what you had dreamed of - but it was a living. 

As you continued your song, you felt a pair of eyes watching you. You glanced up from your songbook, and realized that a man was sitting, eerily still, on the steps. Hurried people were practically tripping over him, but he didn’t move, to get out of their way.  He stayed exactly where he was. He didn’t look homeless, you considered. His face was hidden by thick aviator sunglasses, but his clothes suggested wealth. He was staring at you, with rapt attention, as if your flute, was the only sound in the world. 

You found yourself blushing under his steady gaze, as the song concluded. You lowered your flute-holding arm to your side, and looked at the stranger again, curiously. 

“Bravo!” he cried, clapping, and jumping up. “You were amazing!” 

He walked over, and dropped a handful of bills, into your case. 

Wait, what? All of those are hundreds!, you realized, eyes widening. Who the hell is this guy?

He pulled the sunglasses off his face, shaking his long, dark hair out of his eyes as he did so. Your jaw dropped, when you realized you recognized him. 

“Hi,” he said casually, “my name’s Gerard Way.” 

“I….I know who you are,” you stammered, scarcely believing this was real. Your inner emo kid was screaming. “What are you doing in New York?” 

“Visiting family,” Gerard shrugged. “Well, technically, they live on the Jersey side of the river. But, I always have to stop by Forbidden Planet, when I’m in town.” 

“Oh, you mean the comic shop, on Broadway?” you nodded. “Yeah, they’re pretty cool. I….I’m Y/N, by the way.”

“Nice to meet you, Y/N,” Gerard grinned. “I really enjoyed that song, that you just did.” 

“I….uh, really enjoy your music, too,” you said awkwardly. You didn’t want to sound like a fangirl.

“I’m actually working on some new music right now,” Gerard revealed. 

“What?” you blinked. “Really? Wasn’t your last album in like…..2014?” 

“Yeah, Hesitant Alien was four years ago, already!” Gerard chuckled. “I think I’m definitely overdue for something new!” 

“Oh, wow,” your heart hammered excitedly. “I can’t wait to hear the new record, when it comes out!”

“I don’t know if I’m gonna do a whole second album,” Gerard confessed. “I think I’m just gonna put a couple singles out, and see how it goes.”

“I….I see,” you mumbled. This was crazy. Why was he telling all this, to a random busker, that he just met? 

“I wanted to thank you,  Y/N,” Gerard went on. “There’s this song I’ve been working on, for a couple months now. it’s just not sounding right to me, quite yet. You helped me realize what it’s missing.”

“And, what is that?” you wondered, still feeling bewildered. 

“A flute solo,” Gerard grinned. 

“Huh?” you gasped. “Who uses flute music, in a rock n roll song? I mean, besides Jethro Tull?” 

“I love Jethro Tull,” Gerard laughed. “But, for real, it’s not that weird. Billy Corgan had some flutes on ‘Drum + Fife’, on the album Monuments To An Elegy.”

“Oh, true,” you remembered. “Didn’t that drop in 2014, too?” 

“Yeah, I actually got to open for him, on that tour!” Gerard said excitedly. “That was when I decided that I wanted to bring a flute into one of my own songs, someday.” 

“Wow,” you realized, “You’re serious about this.” 

“I am,” Gerard said, looking you in the eyes. “But….can we talk about this somewhere else? I’m worried if I stay in one place much longer, somebody is gonna spot me, and start asking for pictures.” 

“Oh, uh, sure!” you nodded. 

“I think if we go up to the street level, there’s a coffee shop, like, right outside,” Gerard suggested. 

“You’re…..asking me to get a cup of coffee with you?” you grasped. Was this a date?

“Yeah,” Gerard said, turning red, as he awkwardly combed his fingers through his hair. “Is, uh, is that okay with you?”

“......Absolutely,” you smiled. “Just let me put my flute away!”

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

Gerard had insisted on carrying your flute case for you, despite the short walk. He was such a gentleman. You did not, however, allow him to buy your cup of coffee for you. He’d already given you that absurd tip, when he first strolled over to your busking spot. 

You stared at him across the table, as he sipped his latte. This still felt entirely unreal. 

“So, the song I’m working on,” Gerard explained, “It’s called ‘Getting Down The Germs.’”

“...Germs?” you repeated, confused. 

“The lyrics are still a work in progress,” Gerard admitted. He dug into the pocket of his green coat, and pulled out a small, tattered-looking notebook. He opened it to a page near the back, and pushed it towards you. “This is what I have so far.”

You took the book gingerly, feeling as if you’d been handed a holy text. The words on the page, were written in a surprisingly untidy scrawl:

It's never the same and the nights always glow

There's nothing to see and nowhere to go

It's easy to say you're happier when you're disturbed

The green lights in your head

Getting down the germs

I'm lazy and tame and the chimes always blow

A glimmering sound on the breeze when you go

It's never a shame and I've learned to live with the worms

Underground

Getting down the germs

“That sounds really good so far,” you complimented. “I’m guessing that’s supposed to be the chorus?” 

“Yeah,” Gerard nodded. “I usually write the choruses first. The verses, I’m still figuring out.” 

“Makes sense,” you replied, as you sipped your drink. “What about the melody?” 

“Oh, the melody’s pretty much completely done,” Gerard clarified. “But….I don’t know. There’s this bridge that comes before the second verse. I originally planned for that to be a guitar solo, but it just doesn’t sound right.”

“You think the solo would sound better, played on a flute?” you surmised. 

“Yeah, exactly!” Gerard said enthusiastically. You wondered if the caffeine was getting to him. 

“....Do you even know how to play the flute?” you asked, raising an eyebrow. 

“No,” Gerard shook his head. “But, you do.”

“....What are you saying?” you blinked. 

“That’s why I asked you to come up here with me,” Gerard explained. “Y/N…..would you be willing to go into the studio with me, and record a flute solo, for the track?” 

You choked on your drink. 

“Wh….What?” you wheezed, coughing from the coffee that had gone down the wrong way. “A-Are you serious?” 

“....Can you breathe?” Gerard asked, putting a concerned hand on your shoulder. 

“Yeah, I can breathe,” you managed, trying not to hyperventilate even more.  

“Good,” Gerard smiled, “because I am serious, Y/N. Your flute playing really impressed me. I won’t drag you all the way out to LA, of course. But, if I find a studio space, here in New York, will you work with me?”

“Yes!” you cried. “Oh my god, yes!” 

This wasn’t what you had dreamed of - it was more. 

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

A few days later, you found yourself in a recording studio, in Lower Manhattan. You’d never seen so much professional equipment like this before. You’d always just performed for live audiences.

Can I really do this?, you asked yourself, hit with a wave of uncertainty. 

“Y/N, thank you so much for coming out here, and joining us today,” Gerard greeted you. His smile, somehow instantly put you at ease. 

“This is Doug McKean,” he introduced, indicating a man in the corner. “He’s my producer.” 

“Nice to meet you, Doug,” you said politely, shaking hands. 

“And this is Ian Fowles,” Gerard said, indicating a second guy, with longer hair. “He was my touring guitarist, when I went on the road with Hesitant Alien.” 

“Oh, I remember seeing him, when you guys played Irving Plaza,” you recalled. 

“You were at that little gig we did, in Union Square?” Ian smiled. 

“Yeah, of course I bought a ticket!” you smiled back. “You guys were amazing!” 

“Aw, you really think so?” Gerard reddened, looking flattered. 

“I really do,” you replied. My Chemical Romance had been your favorite band, since your teens. When they had broken up, five years ago, you had been heartbroken. But, you’d found Gerard’s solo work, to be equally amazing - just in a different way. 

“Well, thank you, Y/N,” Ian said quietly. “Has Gerard explained to you, what we’re going to be doing today?” 

“Yeah, he said he wants me to do a flute solo for you guys,” you said, almost not believing your own words. 

“Let’s start from the beginning of the song,” Doug directed. “Ian, can you take us from the top, please? I know we got a great take of your part yesterday, but I feel like we can still do better.” 

“Definitely,” Ian agreed. He shrugged his guitar strap over his head, and stepped into the recording booth. You listened intently, as he played the opening notes. The tune was definitely different from anything MCR had done. But, it didn’t sound quite like Hesitant Alien, either. You were intrigued by the new musical direction that Gerard seemed to be heading in. 

“Alright, cut,” Doug called, pressing a button, to stop recording. “Ian, that was good. Gerard, it’s your turn to get in there. I want to hear that verse you were working on the other day.”

“Alright,” Gerard nodded. You watched him put his headphones over his ears, and timidly approach the microphone. A blush crept into his cheeks. Did it make him nervous, to have you, as an audience? 

“The answer’s always no,” Gerard sang, “to questions of a private nature…...the lights are always low, in settings of a conversation…..” 

He seemed to grow more confident, as the song continued. By the time he got to the chorus, he was belting it out. He sounded incredible. 

“....How was that?” he asked finally. 

“Amazing,” you breathed. 

Gerard’s cheeks reddened at your compliment. He stayed quiet, as he watched Doug take the vocal track, and mix it with Ian’s guitar playing. He played back the clip, of the two spliced together. The parts formed an even more impressive whole. 

“Alright, Y/N, it’s your turn,” Doug commanded. “Show us what you can do.” 

You gulped. You weren’t sure that you could do anything, that was on the same level, as what you just heard. 

“You can do it,” Gerard encouraged. “You played an amazing solo, in front of a whole station worth of people yesterday. Playing for three dudes like us, should be nothing.” 

That’s different, you thought to yourself. I don’t have a huge crush on everyone in the station.

“Here’s the sheet music,” Ian said, handing you a piece of paper. “I really like what Gerard’s composed here. But, I think he’s right. It’s going to sound better on your instrument, than mine.”

You took the sheet, and grabbed the flute case, out of your backpack. Taking a deep breath, you walked into the booth. Your fingers trembled on the middle joint of the flute. You glanced up at Gerard, who was sitting on the other side, of the pane of glass. 

He gave you a friendly smile, and a dorky-looking thumbs-up. You chuckled, your nerves dissipating. 

Alright, you told yourself. I got this. You brought your lips to the head joint, and began to play. 

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

“I don’t know,” you said, as you stepped back out of the booth. “Do you think that was okay?”

“That was incredible,” Gerard gushed, pulling you into an impulsive hug. His arms were so soft and warm. 

“Like, wow, what are you?” Ian gaped. “The secret lovechild of Ian Anderson, or something?” 

“Ha, I wish,” you laughed. “I’m just your average band kid.” 

“I wouldn’t call that average,” Gerard insisted, staring into your eyes, as he still held you close. “I was right….the flute just fits perfectly in with the song. And you’re the perfect person to play it.”

“Y/N, I can show you what the guitar and the flute will sound like together,” Doug offered, “If you could, uh, let go of her for a moment, Gee.”

“O-oh, right,” Gerard stammered, releasing you quickly. You blushed, and turned away. 

Doug began to play the edited-together track for you. You couldn’t believe it - your flute, Ian’s guitar, and Gerard’s vocals, blended together, into something incredibly beautiful. 

“I wasn’t sure if the flute was going to go well, with your style of music,” you confessed. “My background is the symphony orchestra. Most of the time, you only really see the flute, used in classical music, like that. I wasn’t sure if you could make it sound rock n’ roll. But...it works! Somehow.” 

“It does,” Gerard agreed. “Y/N…..I’m so, so glad that I met you.”

His eyes sparkled as he looked at you. It made your heart pound, for reasons you couldn’t articulate. 

“Y/N,” Doug said, bringing you back to reality, “that first take was great, but I’d like you to try it again for me, please.”

“Of course,” you acquiesced. “I’ll give it as many takes as it needs.” 

“I feel like we could all use some coffee first, though,” Ian decided. “Doug? You want to run down the street with  me, to get it?”

“Yeah, I guess it’s our turn, since Gerard ran and got the last round,” Doug agreed. “Y/N - what can we get you?”

“Oh, just a vanilla latte, I guess,” you decided. 

“Coming right up,” Ian smiled. “We’ll be right back.” 

The guitarist and producer got up and left. Your pulse quickened again, as you realized, that you were now alone in the room with Gerard. It felt different, than it had at the station, or the coffeeshop. Both of those times, there were plenty of other people around. But now…..?

“It’s just you and me,” Gerard said softly. He was still staring at you. 

“Y-Yeah,” you said nervously. “I guess we got quite a day ahead of us, huh?”

“Yup,” Gerard said awkwardly. “Doug’s not gonna let you leave, until you get your part just right.” 

“.....Gerard,” you asked, “why did you pick me for this job? You could have gotten anyone to play flute for you. I’m nobody.” 

“I told you, your performance got my attention,” Gerard reminded you. “I was just passing through the station, minding my own business. But, when I heard the sound of your flute…..I stopped still. I was like, oh my god, this is the sound that I’ve been looking for.” 

“Was it really that great?” you asked, feeling unsure of yourself. 

“Yes!” Gerard insisted. “Y/N, I swear to god, it was like I was hypnotized. By that incredible sound….and by the beauty, of the person making it……” 

“Beauty?” you repeated, your face going hot. Did he mean…..?

“I won’t lie to you,” Gerard said softly. “The moment I laid eyes on you, in that subway tunnel, I was so attracted to you.” 

“You think I’m attractive?” you realized, eyes going wide. 

“Yes,” Gerard whispered, looking you up and down, with evident desire. “I’m sorry…..you probably think I’m just a creepy, older dude….” 

“You’re not creepy!” you shook your head. “Gerard, I’ve always thought that you were extremely good-looking.” 

“You’re…..attracted to me, too?” Gerard put two and two together. 

You weren’t sure which of you took a step towards the other first, but, before you knew it, you were in his arms. He kissed you gently, but your body quickly responded to him, and the kiss rapidly turned more passionate.

He pressed you against the studio wall, his hands trailing down your body, as the kiss continued. 

“.....G-Gerard,” you gasped. “The others could walk back in, at any minute.” 

“If they interrupt us,” Gerard said, his voice husky, “we could always continue this, at my hotel, after the recording session is over.” 

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah,” Gerard panted, as your lips found his neck. “Oh, fuck, yeah…..I got a room at a five star hotel in Times Square, that I would love to show you.”

“When do you have to go back to LA?” you asked, gasping for breath, as he kissed you again. 

“I’m supposed to go home on Saturday,” Gerard confessed. “But, if you keep kissing me like that….I might just miss the flight.” 

[thiswasinevitableid]

#27 for the winter prompts strikes me as distinctly Sternclay NSFW

Here you go!

27 i run a hot chocolate/cider booth at the local ice rink and you always flirt with me but i didn’t think it meant anything because you seem to flirt with everyone

Barclay’s family has lots of traditions come winter, the same as most people he knows. But his personal one is manning the “Sip n Slip” at the Kepler skating rink. He started volunteering there when he was 16 and stuck driving Jake to and from hockey practice. It was something to do, and he liked cooking and making drinks, even if it was just powdered cocoa and simple cookies. 

Then he was coming back every winter when the stand opened to help out, and when he opted to stay in Kepler to work as a chef, he still made time to volunteer. He’s thirty now, the stand a little cramped for both him and the other volunteers, but the smell of warm sugar cookies and too-sweet cider takes him right back to his teens. 

The same can be said of the man currently at the front of the line; he looks like a rom-com hero, with his black hair slicked back and his stylish coat and scarf, and Barclay has not been this close to popping a no-reason boner in months.

“How can help you?” he leans on the counter, smiling. 

The man gives him a stealthy once-over before replying, “I’ll have a coffee, please. And a kid’s hot cocoa” he smiles at the young girl holding his hand, “anything else, Ellie?”

“No.” 

“I guess that’s all.”

“That’ll be two bucks.”

The man hands him a five, letting their fingers touch. He does the same thing when Barclay gives him his change. When Barclay sets the to paper cups in front of him he adds, “cream and sugar is over at that little table.”

“I’d say there’s plenty of sugar here.” It’s so smooth that Barclay is still blushing as the man and the little girl disappear into the rink. 

Maybe he should start making people give him their names with their orders. 

And their phone numbers. 

-------------------------------------------

“Hello again” 

Barclay bounds to the counter (as much as six foot three man can bound anywhere), “Hey! Coffee and cocoa again?”

“Just coffee, my niece isn’t with me.”

He does a mental fist pump; the kid isn’t his, so maybe that’s a sign he’s single. As he’s trying to work out a non-creepy way to get his name, someone calls from across the room.

“Joseph! There you are man” a stockier guy in a ranger jacket waves.

“First day of rec hockey” Joseph smiles, “wish me luck.”

“Good luck.”

Joe winks, and then he’s gone. Barclay starts a new batch of cookies, looks at the door to the rink every two minutes for the next hour and a half until the other man emerges, sweaty and laughing. He’s twice as handsome as before. When he spots Barclay staring at him, he waves. 

The cocoa packet in his hands turns two separate pieces, spilling powdered milk and sugar on the floor. 

---------------------------------------------------------

“Back again?” He forces himself not to sound too excited at the fact Joseph is once again ordering coffee from him. 

Blue eyes take on a glint, “With you here, how could I stay away?”

He’s this close to asking Joseph if he wants to get coffee somewhere nicer when the man waves another friend over, bumping shoulders and hands with him as they talk. 

Okay. Maybe he’s just demonstrative with everyone. That’s cool. 

Totally cool. 

---------------------------------------------------------

He officially cannot tell if Joseph is flirting. Yes, he stops by the stand every time he’s at the rink (usually twice, once when he gets there and once before he leaves), and when it’s slow he sits in a plastic white chair and chats with him, tossing in winks and smiles whenever he says something complimentary. He’s animated, charming, and Barclay is now the living, breathing definition of “hopelessly crushing” on him.  

But Barclay’s seen him talk the same way with his friends and teammates, and even with the other adults waiting to pick their kids up from the same class his niece attends. Barclay’s caught no fewer than four hockey moms and two hockey dads giving Joseph the eye. 

He doesn’t blame them; he spends the slow part of his shifts imagining what Joseph looks like under his nice coat. Or his work out clothes. Or the Bigfoot-themed holiday sweater he started wearing in mid-December. 

However, for the sake of his own sanity and not making a burgeoning friendship weird, he decides to treat all of their interactions as platonic unless Joseph explicitly says otherwise. So when Joseph asks if he’d like to go skating on Saturday, Barclay agrees immediately and then focuses on not getting his hopes up. 

Confusingly, Joseph tells him to be at Tenney Park at three in the afternoon, rather than at the rink. He arrives at five til one and discovers that the fully frozen pond is now a skating hot spot, complete with skate rentals. Barclay brought his own skates; his feet are large enough that getting a rental pair that fit is a crap-shoot.

Joseph is waiting for him on a bench, reading on his phone. He’s in his black coat, the one that makes him look like a secret agent on a ski vacation. The late December sun peeks through the clouds, and Barclay’s pretty sure a beam illuminates Joseph perfectly while a heavenly choir sings. 

No, wait, there are some carolers down the street. 

“I’m so glad you made it.” Joseph moves the pair of skates from the spot beside him and pats the cold stone. Barclay sits down, and they chat about the mystery series that Joseph got him hooked on. It takes twice as long as normal for him to lace up his skates, because whenever he glances to his right, Joseph is watching him with a smile and his fingers forget how to work. 

They wobble over to the ice and step on. The first few strides are fine, but then he hits a groove followed by a small dip and almost falls on his ass. On a normal rink, it’d be a fluke. But there are no Zambonies in the wild.

“This is, whoahfuck, harder on lake ice.” He flails a second time, sticks a hand out for balance only for it to be caught by Joseph’s own. 

“I like the challenge. But don’t worry big guy, I’ve got you.”

“Thanks, blue eyes.” 

The nickname is a complete accident, brought on by the fact that Barclay is staring into his eyes to avoid reading too much into the held hand. The hand that Joseph doesn’t let go off, even as they move onto a smoother patch of ice. 

All that rec hockey is paying off, because Joseph practically waltzes them around in circles, never bumping into anyone or losing his footing as they talk. They compare notes on holiday gifts and new years plans, and Joseph laughs when Barclay regales him with the story of the great babka debacle of 2014.

Barclay’s so caught up in their conversation that he misses an odd bump in the ice and goes sideways into the snow-covered grass to his left, taking Joseph with him accidentally. Joseph ends up on top of him, both cackling like kids at the chaos of the moment. Barclay shivers, snow sneaking under his coat. 

“Wanna, uh, get some coffee to warm up?”

“Sure” Joseph smiles. 

“Bet that stand uses the same mix mine does.”

“Oh, um, I was thinking we could go back to my place for it. I’m only a few blocks that way.”

 There’s no way he’s missing a chance to see Joseph’s house (he has a bet going with Dani that  it’s immaculate, while Dani insists Joseph could be a stealth slob), and so ten minutes later he’s pulling off his boots in the entryway of a one bedroom, first floor apartment. The walls sport several elegantly done cryptozoology posters, he spies a pile of cookbooks he recommended on the kitchen counter, and the whole place looks like it’s been tidied within the last day. He texts Dani a stealthy photo, then settles on the couch while Joseph moves about the kitchen. 

God, he wants to go in there and wrap his arms around him, kiss him against the counter until they both see stars.

Easy, Barclay, easy. He cannot ruin a good day with a friend. 

“I also have some wine, if you’d like that instead of, or with, coffee.”

He glances at the Kraken clock on the wall, “Sure, it’s late enough.”

Joseph walks in, now in just his sweater and pants, stopping to a light a candle before setting two wine glasses on the coffee table. He’s pouring as the sun sets, the change in light helping the room feeling warm and cozy.

“Careful, you keep up those romantic touches and I might think this is a date.” He teases. 

Joseph looks up, wine perilously close to the edge of the glass, “wait, this isn’t a date?”

“Uh, I, uh, I, I didn’t want to assume, I mean, do you want it to be a date?”

“Barclay” Joseph sets the bottle down, “I asked you out to something outside of the normal way of spending time together, without anyone else present, and kept holding your hand. And I kept flirting with you.”

“I know, but you kinda flirt with everyone.”

A self-deprecating laugh as Joseph joins him on the couch “Some work habits are hard to turn off; I have to be good at getting people at ease with me, to like me, because then they share information more readily. I guess that could make it hard for someone else to tell the difference.”

“So, uh” Barclay’s fingers cling to the knees of his jeans, “does that mean I could maybe, uh, kiss you?”

Joseph cups his cheek, guiding him in for a gentle kiss on his still chilly lips. Barclay whimpers, spends a moment embarrassed by the noise before Joseph lets out a little growl and shoves him backwards, climbing on top of him and kissing him demandingly. 

“‘Grrr’ to you too, babeAHhhhfuck” He rolls his hips as Joseph grinds down and sucks teasingly on his lower lip.

“Is, is that okay?” His black hair is coming loose from it’s gelled swoop, he’s blushing, and his eyes are wider than Barclay’s ever seen.

“Oh my god it’s so much more than okay.” Barclay groans, bringing his hands up to squeeze his ass and press them closer, “fuck, babe, do you have any idea how many times I wanted to drag you into the stand and, fuck, and cover your mouth so no one would know how hard I was making you cum.”

“Lordalmighty” Joseph jerks his hips, “why didn’t you?’

“Because I OH, oh yeah, bite there again, I wasn’t sure you liked me that way, and I really like you, and I didn’t wanna fuck things up.”

Joseph kisses his cheek, murmurs in his ear “Well, now that you know the truth, I want you to fuck me up, big guy. Think you can do that?”

Barclay growls for real this time, flipping them so they’re on their sides and Joseph’s back is pressed to the cushions of the couch. He grabs the dark haired man’s leg, hooking it over his own. 

“Yeah, blue eyes, I think I can.”

With that he slams their lips together, grinding his hips hard as the couch springs wobble under them and Joseph tangles his hands into his hair. His hands make up for lost time, slipping under Josephs shirt, dipping below his pants, mapping as much as him as they can find. 

“Barclay I AHlord, I have a bed you know?” 

“We can use that next time, burned through all my patience not jumping you at the rink.”

He feels Joseph smile, “Fine by me.”

“Fuck” he drags his mouth down, Joseph laughing when his beard scratches his neck, “fuck there’s so much I wanna do to you. Bet it’s so fucking fun to fuck you after practice, bet you’re all worn out and wanna be taken care of.”

“Holy shit.” Joseph matches his pace, working his hips as best he can in time with Barclay’s increasingly erratic thrusts. 

“Gonna keep you in bed all day, babe, suck you off so good you’ll beg me to come back tomorrow, gonna show you just how good I can treat you with this” he gives a sharper thrust for emphasis, “gonna, fuck, ohfuck, Joseph, fuckfuck” he cums hard, lifts his hand up to hold onto the top of the couch as the rides it out, Joseph moaning into his mouth and functionally pinned  between him and the cushions. 

“Fuck I, I didn’t mean to cum in my pants like it’s my first fucking time.”

“Don’t apologize, that’s the best thing anyone’s done with me in months. Now” he nips Barclay’s ear,  “show me how creative you are, big guy, and get me off.”

“Hell fucking yeah.” Between the two of them they contort enough to get Joseph's pants open and down, Barclay shifting back slightly to slide his hands into his boxer briefs, the front of which is completely soaked. 

“That’s so fucking hot, can’t believe you want me that bad”

“Nnnnnhuh” Is what Joseph manages in reply, his face pressed into the crook of Barclay’s neck, breath coming in short, warm bursts as he jacks him off. Barclay pays attention to which motions make him louder, which make him wiggle his hips with more force, and peppers the side of his face with kisses, wondering how the fuck he got so lucky. 

Joseph gets less eloquent the longer Barclay works him over, sinks his teeth into the neck of his shirt as he cums, whole body taut and picture perfect as he does. Barclay pulls his hand away, flopping it over Joseph's hip as they lay panting, the dark haired man nudging them so he can rest against Barclay’s chest while the larger man thanks the lucky stars floating somewhere just above the ceiling for all this. 

“Do you, um, want to stay for dinner? I have to do laundry anyway, so I can toss your clothes in so you don’t have to drive home like that” He ghosts a hand over the damp spot by Barclay’s fly. 

“That an excuse to have me wandering around your place naked?”

“Not entirely. Your shirt is fine, and I think I have some underwear that will fit you.”

“Fine, half-naked.” He kisses the top of his head. 

“When you put it like that, yes. This is both an excuse to have you half-naked in my house and to spend more time with you. Which might be my favorite thing in the world; seeing you at the rink was always the best part of my day.” 

Barclay cuddles him closer, wrapping him in his arms to keep away any lingering ice in the air. “Mine too.”

[hlupdate]

Here he comes, one of the planet’s most conspicuous young men, stepping out of the London drizzle and into a dusty suburban pub. If there was an old vinyl record player in the place it would scratch quiet. Instead, the two-dozen punters turn hushed and intent, as if a unicorn has just trotted in off the street, and nobody wants to scare it off. “That’s frickin’ Harry frickin’ Styles,” whispers a young man at the bar, “in this pub.” The pop star is asked what he wants to drink and in a voice already inclined to undertones, quietly orders a cup of tea.

A former teen star who is now 25, a happier and rockier solo artist since his boyband One Direction split a few years ago, Styles has hidden himself inside a large, swamp-green parka. He’s tall, around the 6ft mark, and carries himself with a slight stoop. If Styles could only do something about his appearance from the neck up (elfin brow, wide Joker smile, a face that’s recognisable across multiple continents) you sense he could drink in pubs like this anonymously enough. As it is, cover blown, he removes the parka. A woolly jumper beneath has a picture of the planet Saturn on it. Maybe they’ve heard of Styles there, too.

We take a seat in the corner. On nearby tables, conversations start to sputter as people try to keep their own talk ticking along on autopilot while straining to hear what Styles says. I ask him about the sheer strangeness of this and other aspects of fame. Full stadiums, swooning admirers, an excess of opportunity and cash. Why isn’t Styles an absolute ordeal of a human being by now? Keith Richards, at a comparable stage, imagined himself the pirate leader of a travelling nation-state, unbound by international law. Elton John was on vast amounts of cocaine. Meanwhile, here’s Harry, known in the music industry as a bit of a freak, medically, having maintained abnormally high levels of civility in his system. 

Styles tilts his head, flattered. There are others, he promises. “People who are successful, and still nice. It’s when you meet the people who are successful and aren’t nice, you think: What’s yer excuse? Cos I’ve met the other sort.”

Styles read Keith Richards’ autobiography a while back, and he recently finished Elton’s, too. (“Soooo much cocaine,” he marvels.) We talk for a bit about whether extreme dissolute behaviour and artistic greatness go hand in hand. Styles, who has just released his second solo album, Fine Line, the penultimate track of which is called Treat People With Kindness, has to hope not. “I just don’t think you need to be a dick to be a good artist. But, then, there are also a lot of good artists who are dicks. So. Hmm. Maybe I need to start scaring babies in supermarkets?” 

A couple of lads hustle over to offer drinks. A photo is requested; they say they’ll wait. I’m weirdly anxious about Styles’s phone, which is slung on the table in front of him. What must be the black-market value of that thing? If fans were to get hold of it, would they want to open Styles’s music app first, to listen to tracks from the new album, or rush to see his messages and calls, to find out who Styles has been flirting with late at night? The interest in his music has always run at a ratio of about 50/50 with the interest in who he is dating.

It’s a ratio Styles tries to adjust in favour of the music by being vague about his ex-partners, real and rumoured (Taylor Swift, Kendall Jenner, Parisian model Camille Rowe), diverting to discuss his songs about failed relationships. A year ago, when Styles was floating around near this pub in north London, where he lives, and California, where he tends to record, looking for inspiration for the new album, his close friend Tom Hull told him: “Just date amazing women, or men, or whatever, who are going to fuck you up… Let it affect you and write songs about it.” 

Styles, who writes in collaboration with Hull and producer Tyler Johnson, sounds as if he took the advice. The new album, Fine Line, is at its best when capturing late-hours moments, drunk calls, “wandering hands”, kitchen snogs. A golden-haired lover recurs. There are up tracks, down tracks, some with the trippy delirium of harpsichord-era Stones, others with the angsty Britpop swell of strings. While I listened, I couldn’t help scribbling down names, possible subjects. On the lyric “There’s a piece of you in how I dress” I wrote: maybe Kendall? In a song about a lover “way too bright for me”: surely Taylor.

Styles says he keeps to a general rule: write what comes and don’t think about it too much afterwards. The only time he worries about an individual lyric is if it risks putting an ex in a difficult position. “If a song’s about someone, is that fine? Or is that gonna get annoying for them, if people try to decipher it?” Has he ever got that judgment call wrong and taken a bollocking from an angry ex? Styles raises an eyebrow. “Maybe ask me in a month.” 

I quiz him on something I’ve often wondered about. Why are the very famous so inclined to hook up with the very famous? From the outside it looks twice the hassle, with twice the odds of ending badly. “Don’t we all do that, though?” Styles asks. “Go into things that feel relatively doomed from the start?” I ask him why he doesn’t date normals. He seems tickled: “Um. I mean, I do. I have a private life. You just don’t know about it.” 

Styles doesn’t particularly like being asked about his love life, but is amused all the same, as he is about most things. When I ask about the logistics of someone as well known as him dating someone anonymous (“Do you need to give them, like, some sort of primer?”), Styles snorts with laughter. 

“Uh-h-h. Like any conversation, I guess, it’s easier if you’re honest. But I try to let it come up when it comes up. Cos that’s a weird thing to talk about, y’know? If you’ve just started seeing someone, and you’re, like: [he adopts a throaty, mission-briefing voice] So! This is what’s gonna happen!” Styles holds out his hands: no, ta. “I don’t wanna have that conversation, man. It would be fucking weird.” 

And not very sexy, I say.

“Not sexy,” Styles says, “no.”

A quick aside about his accent, which is hard to capture in print. (“Nat sexy, no.”) After a workout in a hotel gym recently, Styles says he was taken aback (“taken abeck”) to be asked by a stranger whether he was speaking in a fake voice. He was appalled. But after so long crossing borders and time zones, living and working between England and the US, the accent has undergone a jazzy remix, and tends to get farthest from its Cheshire roots when he’s around strangers. Once Styles begins to get comfortable in the pub, the flatter, no-nonsense sounds of his youth return. Nowpe he says, for nope. Fook, for fuck.

“What the fook are they?” This was the response of his childhood pals, he remembers, back in the village of Holmes Chapel, when little Harry had the gumption to show up in the playground wearing Chelsea boots instead of the approved chunky trainers. Styles’s parents had separated when he was very young, but there is no origin-story trauma: he has always stayed close to both. His mother, Anne, would praise his singing voice in the car, and when Styles was 16 it was agreed he could audition for a singing contest on TV.

“The craziest part about the whole X Factor thing,” says Styles, who auditioned for the ITV reality show in 2010, “is that it’s so instant. The day before, you’ve never been on telly. Then suddenly…” Suddenly you’re a piece of national property. “You don’t think at the time, ‘Oh, maybe I should keep some of my personal stuff back for myself.’ Partly because, if you’re a 16-year-old who does that, you look like a jumped-up little shit. Can you imagine? ‘Sorry, actually, I’d rather not comment…’ You don’t know what to be protective of.”

By the winter of 2010, Styles was a fan favourite, a key member of One Direction, a five-piece that enjoyed enormous national exposure and gathered millions of fans before any music had been released. Cameras filmed every part of their rise. There wasn’t any time in the dark to practise, test things out, mentally brace. “We didn’t get to dip in a toe,” Styles says. “But, listen, I was a kid, all I knew was: I didn’t have to go to school any more. I thought it was fucking great.” He remembers having a lot of fun, and being well taken care of. He jokes: “Maybe it’s something I’ll have to deal with a bit later. When I wake up in my 40s and think: Arrrggh.”

In February 2012, One Direction were feted at the Brit Awards, hours before they were due to fly to the US for the first time. On TV that night they looked young, silly, chuffed – on the precipice of something huge, and with no clue at all. Their subsequent wonder-run (five platinum albums, four world tours) had its foundations in their ridiculous popularity in the States. Right away, Styles remembers, “We were fuelling a machine. Keeping the fire going.” He remembers it as a stimulating time; maybe overstimulating. “Coming out of it, when the band stopped, I realised that the thing I’d been missing, because it was all so fast paced, was human connection.”

I first met Styles in 2014, around the time the lack of human connection was starting to bite. One Direction were promoting their penultimate album and I’d been commissioned to write about themthe Guardian. Management felt the boys were so exhausted that my minutes in their presence had to be strictly counted. Inside a circle of cripplingly hot lights, while someone ran the stopwatch, we interacted as humanly as we could.

I remember how jaded the best singer in the group, Zayn Malik, seemed. (Malik was weeks away from quitting.) I also remember how flattered and bewildered the others were to be asked a few grownup questions – and not what Louis Tomlinson would later describe to me as “who’s-your-favourite-superhero… all that shit”. Styles was watchful and quiet that day. By total chance, a week later, we were in the same London cafe and he tapped my shoulder. He was having lunch with friends. “Will ya join us?” 

t struck me as a quietly classy move. I was fascinated to see him interact with mates he’d chosen for himself. Styles was dry and funny, older than his years. After lunch we said the usual things about keeping in touch, and followed each other on Twitter. I kept an eye on his updates, about leaving One Direction, releasing an impressive, self-titled debut album in 2017, playing for 36,000 people in Madison Square Garden in New York, acting in Christopher Nolan’s Oscar-nominated war movie Dunkirk. Meanwhile, I did my best to manage the mess that had been made of my own account after Styles’s Twitter follow ignited a small explosion of teenage longing in my mentions. For at least a year I received weekly, sometimes daily, pleas from people who wanted messages conveyed to “H”. Still now, every few days, fans in America, Asia and Europe follow me to “see what H sees” in their timeline. 

He has around 50 million social media followers, and with that comes the ability to ripple the internet like somebody airing a bedsheet. I’ve noticed, though, how rarely Styles directs people to support specific causes, last doing so in 2018, when he encouraged people to join a march against gun violence. Why don’t you use your influence more, I ask? “Because of dilution. Because I’d prefer, when I say something, for people to think I mean it.” He runs his fingertips across the table. “To be honest, I’m still searching for that one thing, y’know. Something I can really stand up for, and get behind, and be like: This Is My Life Fight. There’s a power to doing the one thing. You want your whole weight behind it.”

It’s one of the things that sets Styles apart, the way he puts his whole weight behind the different aspects of this strange job. If you watch footage of him as a guest host on Saturday Night Live last month, Styles plunges in, fully inhabiting the silliness of every sketch. He has good songs in his repertoire (2017’s ballad Sign Of The Times stands out), and would probably admit to some middling songs that attest to his relative inexperience as a writer. But whichever of his songs Styles performs, he goes all-in, trusting that his zest and energy will hold an audience’s attention. He approaches this interview in roughly the same spirit, not enjoying every question, fidgeting, pleading for clemency once or twice, but giving everything due consideration.

I bring up something Styles joked about earlier: the possibility of waking up in his 40s with deferred mental health problems.

“Mm,” he says

Have you thought about therapy, I ask, to get ahead of that?

“I go,” he says. “Not every week. But whenever I feel I need it. For a really long time I didn’t try therapy, because I wanted to be the guy who could say: ‘I don’t need it.’ Now I realise I was only getting in my own way.” He shrugs. “It helps.”

Lately he’s been reading a lot (Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women stood out). He’s watched a lot of Netflix (crime thrillers and music docs). He recently cried through Slave Play on Broadway. I sense in Styles, at 25, a pent-up undergraduate hunger, maybe a desire to make up for lost time. “I’ve definitely been wanting to learn stuff, try stuff,” he says. “Things I didn’t grow up around. Things I’d always been a little bit sceptical about. Like therapy, like meditation. All I need to hear is someone saying, ‘Apparently, it’s amazing’, and I’ll try it. When I was in Los Angeles once, I heard about juice cleanses. I thought, yeah, I’ll do a juice cleanse.”

How messy were the results?

“You mean…?” Styles raises an eyebrow, recalling the poos. “They were all right. I was just hungry. And bored.”

One notable feature of Styles’s solo career has been his headlong embrace of unconventional clothing. A 2017-18 tour could have been sponsored by the Dulux colour wheel: mustard tones in Sydney, shocking pink in Dallas. In a more serious sense, some of Styles’s choices have fed into an important political discussion about gendered fashion. In May, as a co-host at the Met Gala in New York, he stepped out in a sheer blouse and a pearl earring. One evening’s work challenged a lot of stubborn preconceptions about who gets to wear what.

He says: “What women wear. What men wear. For me it’s not a question of that. If I see a nice shirt and get told, ‘But it’s for ladies.�� I think: ‘Okaaaay? Doesn’t make me want to wear it less though.’ I think the moment you feel more comfortable with yourself, it all becomes a lot easier.”

What do you mean, I ask?

Styles is leaning forward, hands folded around his cup of tea. “A part of it was having, like, a big moment of self-reflection. And self-acceptance.” He has a habit, when he’s made a definitive statement, of raising his chin and nodding a little, as if to decide whether he still agrees with himself. “I think it’s a very free, and freeing, time. I think people are asking, ‘Why not?’ a lot more. Which excites me. It’s not just clothes where lines have been blurred, it’s going across so many things. I think you can relate it to music, and how genres are blurring…”

Sexuality, too, I say.

“Yep,” says Styles. “Yep.”

There’s a popular perception, I say, that you don’t define as straight. The lyrics to your songs, the clothes you choose to wear, even the sleeve of your new record – all of these things get picked apart for clues that you’re bisexual. Has anyone ever asked you though?

“Um. I guess I haaaaave been asked? But, I dunno. Why?”

You mean, why ask the question?

“Yeah, I think I do mean that. It’s not like I’m sitting on an answer, and protecting it, and holding it back. It’s not a case of: I’m not telling you cos I don’t want to tell you. It’s not: ooh this is mine and it’s not yours.”

What is it then?

“It’s: who cares? Does that make sense? It’s just: who cares?”

I suppose my only question, then, is about the stuff that looks like clue dropping. Because if you don’t want people to care, why hint? Take the album sleeve for Fine Line. With its horizontal pink and blue stripes, a splash of magenta, the design seems to gesture at the trans and bisexual pride flags. Which is great – unless the person behind it happens to be a straight dude, sprinkling LGBTQ crumbs that lead nowhere. Does that make sense?

Styles nods. “Am I sprinkling in nuggets of sexual ambiguity to try and be more interesting? No.” As for the rest, he says, “in terms of how I wanna dress, and what the album sleeve’s gonna be, I tend to make decisions in terms of collaborators I want to work with. I want things to look a certain way. Not because it makes me look gay, or it makes me look straight, or it makes me look bisexual, but because I think it looks cool. And more than that, I dunno, I just think sexuality’s something that’s fun. Honestly? I can’t say I’ve given it any more thought than that.”

In our musty corner of the pub we’ve somehow passed a couple of hours in intense discussion. We’ll lighten up, before Styles heads home, with some chat about clever films (Marriage Story), stupider viral videos (the little boy who’s just learned the word “apparently”), that favourite-superhero stuff that, after all, has its place. He talks about the curious double time scheme of a pop star’s life – those crammed 18-hour days and then the sudden empty off-time when Styles might find himself walking miles across London to buy a book, afterwards congratulating himself: “Well, that’s an hour filled.”

Before we stand up I ask if he’s minded any of my questions.

He pushes out his lips, possibly recalling them one by one, then shakes his head. “What I would say, about the whole being-asked-about-my-sexuality thing – this is a job where you might get asked. And to complain about it, to say you hate it, and still do the job, that’s just silly. You respect that someone’s gonna ask. And you hope that they respect they might not get an answer.”

I tell him I do.

“Cool.”

Styles has to find those lads who wanted a photo. He scoops his phone off the table and flicks his thumb around the screen. Lately, he says, when he messes around on his phone in an idle moment, it’s mostly to look at videos – clips that his friends have sent him, in which their kids sing along to music he’s made. “Never gets old,” Styles says, beaming.

A few years ago, when he emerged from the boyband, blinking, shattered, he set himself three tasks: prioritise friends, learn how to be an adult, achieve a proper balance between the big and the small. Full stadiums, provocative outfits – Styles genuinely loves these things. “But I guess I’ve realised, as well,” he says, “that the coolest things are not always the cool things. Do you know what I mean?” He grabs his parka and his phone and, a little stooped, heads for home.

[northernreads]

looking back at the decade is weird. like i am so damn old. the last time i hit a decade i wasn’t really old enough to fully i don’t know... comprehend it? if i had to summarize the 2010s in one word than maybe: university? though there was more than that i suppose. this is probably going to be stupid long but i don’t caaaaare cause the 2010s went on forever too

i graduated high school in 2010. i went back for a victory lap solely to avoid university for a year. i did mediocre in high school in just about every way (grades, friends, experiences). i can’t say that i enjoyed it at all so finishing up with hs was a great way to start the ‘10s even if i petrified to start uni

in 2011 i started uni. i was terrified. i didn’t want to go in the first place, high school had sucked why would I want to do more school? but i felt like i had no other choice. the first year was rough, i worked my ass off though and while I was warned to expect my usual grades to drop the first year, they actually soared. when i was late enrolling for courses for second year the dean of my faculty emailed me to see if everything was okay and if I needed help. by second year i was actually really enjoying uni. i majored in history and minored in english and i loved it. i really like writing essays it turns out.

i graduated cum laude in 2016. my original plan to go to teachers college but after already extending my undergrad by a year and getting yanked around by my uni in so many dumb ways, when I found out that I would have to push back my graduation again to make teachers college work I decided to switch gears instead. i found something else to make my liberal arts degree work: librarianship

in 2015/2016 i realized I had to very quickly make things work if I was going to get accepted into a masters program. everything I had been doing to make teachers college work wasn’t enough for this masters program. namely that being a teacher meant volunteering with kids a lot while getting my masters meant developing relationships with profs. something I was incredibly uncomfortable with, and hadn’t even had much opportunity to do as my undergrad uni had a massive population and most class sizes were large even at fourth year level. I went way, way outside my comfort zone and made it work though. i got my letters of recommendation and got my act together and got accepted into both masters programs i applied to.

in 2016 i began my masters program at a new uni. the program was much smaller than what I was used to, and while I missed my english classes especially, I loved the program. I did well. I made friends. I even joined a club. mostly this two year program was me dealing with a long commute. (5-6 hours per day, four days a week). i was exhausted all of the time. i got a paper published. i loved this too.

in 2018 i graduated with my masters of information, with a concentration in library and information science

in the 2010s i graduated three times. graduations suck and yeah that’s some extreme first world complaining, but god i hate them so much

i got my first real job in 2012. i had no experience and had a hell of a time finding a job. finally one day someone gave me a chance and i started my first job at a gas station. i worked there for five years. i went through four managers, i trained a lot of employees, i made some work friends, i read a lot of books for uni there, it helped me come out of my shell a bit too

in 2017 i quit my job at the gas station. I was on my fourth manager and after weathering all that change this one finally broke me. every week he changed how he wanted things done and acted like I was clueless for doing it any other way. I also knew that I needed to develop some more work experience.

my next job was at a shoe store. less than two months into the job i was a senior employee because everyone kept quitting. it was my first time in retail and also the first time i was really working with other people. i hated it at times, but i also grew to like it too. i picked everything up quickly and was made a key holder before long. i was there for less than a year. the company wasn’t doing well and my hours were cut to almost nothing. cue next job

by this point it was 2018 and i had just graduated my masters program and was looking for a job in my field. in the meantime i needed money. i got a job at costco. they thought i was still in uni even though my resume said ‘graduated’. so I got hired on for the summer as a student. it was an okay job. bigger than anywhere i had ever worked certainly. by the end of the summer i was so ready to be done with it though, the management was poor at times and they were relentless in pushing us to promote membership upgrades. I despise upselling products to people who clearly don’t want to talk about it. overall it really wasn’t terrible. i did like a lot of the people.

i got two interviews for jobs at libraries over that summer. i was applying for hours every single day in 2018. zilch.

so by fall 2018 i needed a new job again. enter the coffee shop. i got hired to be a baker at tim hortons and was never a baker, in fact less than 2 months into the job they moved me permanently to their satellite location at a gas station (oh how circular life is) which had no proper kitchen. i liked the gas station location better in the end. there was a small group of ridiculous teens and barely adults on the afternoon shift and they were kind of the best. i was at tims for 8 months, was almost made supervisor but luckily dodged that bullet

in 2019 i got a better paying job. completely different than anything i’ve ever done before and not in my field. but i’m not complaining

i started the 2010s having never even kissed someone before. and i’m ending it having found someone that actually makes me believe soulmates are a thing.

in 2013 (i think) i had my first boyfriend. he was shit. i don’t think it even lasted 6 months but honestly i don’t remember much and i try not to

in 2014 (i think?) i had begun to question my sexuality a bit and landed on bisexual. i also had my first girlfriend. she was also shit. i guess it was maybe almost a year long. again i try not to remember. 

there were other almosts and not quite relationships but mostly it was just the two. and they were bad. they messed with me in their own ways. after the gf (2015) i just stopped dating. i needed a break from it at first. but the more time I took the more I began to struggle with realizing that i was ace. something i did not want whatsoever. i was also just busy with my masters. i had no time to date even if i wanted to between school, commuting and work.

in 2018 i met someone on here. he has been nothing but perfect ever since and i am madly in love with him. he also doubles as my bestest friend ever so that’s awesome

i traveled a little bit too. i did four major roadtrips with my family. twice to the west coast of canada and twice to the east coast. i also took a plane for the first time ever and went to england

i went to a few concerts: marianas trench (twice), lorde, hayley kiyoko, and imagine dragons

i got my drivers license and first car

i had roomates in uni in the dorms and now have my first apartment (+ a roommate)

i cut my long hair super short and kept it that way for a few years and then grew it all back again

i got back into reading again and it saved my life

i lost a lot of pets. i used to have my own personal zoo at the start of the decade. In particular i lost my dog Sam, who was the most important being in my life for most of the decade. now I visit my family’s cats and dogs once a week. and I miss them a lot.

we saw the world go through a lot of changes but i’m sure there are a million articles on that already. we saw too many memes too. but i’m guessing a zillion articles on that subject.

I discovered so much about myself over the past decade. 2010 holly would not know who I am now and I am so grateful for that. she was kind of an idiot. I feel so much more like me than I ever have before. the 2010s were rough at times, and that’s putting it lightly. But i’m here. i made it. Things feel good. I have a lot more big things coming, and hopefully sooner than later. 

[kvndeathmusic]

my favorite records of the 2010s pt 1 (the less great stuff/honorable mentions)

Neither this post or its followup are going to be in any particular order, however all the records I talk about here are, in my opinion, not as good as the records i will talk about in my part 2. they’re all fantastic but these ones slightly a little less fantastic than the ones in my “top 10″. none of this is based on stuff like 'influence' or whatever other critics base their lists on, this is solely how much I enjoyed these records. And keep in mind, I'm only human, I havent listened to a good lot of records I've heard others describe as top 10 worthy, these are just records I found and that I resonate with. long post ahead. 

Vacation - Bomb the Music Industry (2011)

If you asked me what my favorite band is i will either say bomb the music industry or jeff rosenstock, but considering those are pretty much the same things it doesnt matter lol. While Vacation isnt a perfect record, it is one I love. It lacks some of the ska elements that I love about earlier BTMI records, but at the same time, it is the first record where Jeff’s “””solo””” career sound starts to form in tracks like Sick, Later, Hurricane Waves, Everybody That You Love, Everybody That Loves You, and Vocal Coach. And these tracks are all fantastic, especially the absolutely explosive opener Campaign For a Better Weekend. Where this album suffers in my mind is the fact that it exists as a weird hybrid middle ground between BTMI and modern Jeff Rosenstock, it isn’t really ska like old BTMI and it’s not quite to the same standard as the tracks on We Cool?. And some of the songs are just, not as good as the others, like Why, Oh Why, Oh Why (Oh Oh Oh Oh), which is washed out almost entirely in reverb, and tracks like Savers feeling barren and missing additional instrumentation. But fuck man I can not dislike this record or just call it “ok” because despite this I still listen to this record a lot, it’s so catchy and fun and Im a bit too chronically addicted to btmi. 

Reflektor - Arcade Fire (2013)

i dont really get the hate/mixed feelings others have with this record. there’s so many good tracks dude!!!! sure theres a bit of a slump in the middle and it doesnt reach the same emotional heights as their previous records you gotta be ignorant to overlook this records strengths. while i do like The Suburbs more than Reflektor, man i just vibe HARD with some of these tracks; the title track, We Exist, Here Comes The Night Time, Normal Person, Awful Sound (Oh Eurydice), Porno, and ESPECIALLY Afterlife. Plus the cover art is cool and I like it. However Flashbulb Eyes is one of the worst tracks Arcade Fire has ever put out and I hate it immensely. And while far less offensive, tracks like You Already Know, It’s Never Over (Hey Orpheus), and Joan of Arc are just kinda boring and/or uninteresting. Now granted, I'm extremely biased when it comes to Arcade fire in general unless were talking about the trainwreck that is Everything Now. I started listening to Arcade Fire just before Reflektor came out, and I have a kinda sentimental attachment to the record. ill explain the feeling more when i talk about The Suburbs. anticipation oooooo.

good kid m.A.A.d city - Kendrick Lamar (2012)

i might get crucified by some for not putting this in my top 10, but whatever come at me i guess. gkmc is a fantastic record, but i do think the ending is weak, which is why it’s here instead of in the top 10. i mean, let’s be real, Real is a mediocre track, and while Dying of Thirst is an important track to the whole narrative of the record, it feels way too long. almost everything else about this record is fantastic, from the beats, to kendrick’s nasally flows, to the overall structure of the record spinning a tale of a young man battling demons both inside and out, and his eventual redemption. even if i find this record at times to drop pace, it really is flawless otherwise. it felt like a disservice to put this in the 20-10s, bc it’s a good record, but i had to make some compromises and this was one of them. 

RTJ2 - Run The Jewels (2014)

el-p and killer mike are a perfect duo, and the tracks they make together are always total bangers. and for me, RTJ2 is the best overall, with RTJ3 in a close second. it’s hard to put this on the lower half of the list, some of the tracks just don’t work as well as the others, but despite that there’s not really any tracks i hate or dislike on this record, minus maybe crown. the pure aggression in the opening track Jeopardy sets the tone for an aggressive yet highly focused record. This is some of the best rap out there right now if you want some music to fuck shit up to. 

Pure Comedy - Father John Misty (2017)

This record is both hilarious and extremely bleak. Josh Tillman is a master of satire and sarcasm, and Pure Comedy is the peak of his songwriting skills. The title track is one of the best tracks of the decade, period. And he keeps up the momentum on the following few tracks. The main problem with this record is its weaker second half, but even then it’s criminal to suggest that those songs aren’t good regardless. And despite the bleakness, the one line that sticks in my head after all this time is the line this album fades out to: There’s nothing to fear.

Knife Man - AJJ (2011)

Continuing on the trend of folky, satirical, and bleak records, Knife Man is AJJ’s defining record (next to their debut LP). AJJ blends loud, punky anthems with quieter, folk tracks that touch on sensitive issues in a way only AJJ manages to get away with. And there’s some genuine heart mixed in as well, with the final track Big Bird always striking a chord with me. However, I do feel the record is, let’s just say, padded at times in my opinion. Still, I can’t deny how much i enjoy tracks like Gift of the Magi 2, Hate Rain on Me, The Distance, and Skate Park. Speaking of which when I saw AJJ live recently they played none of those songs and that kinda sucked but hey it was like $20 I can’t complain. And speaking of not getting what I wanted...

You Won’t Get What You Want - Daughters (2018)

It was hard choosing between this record and their 2010 self titled record, but in terms of the overall narrative and variety this record shines through. If there was a number 11 spot in this unorganized list this would probably take that spot. It’s noisey, it’s abrasive, and it’s like nothing you’ve heard before unless you’ve listened to Daughter’s previous records. Tracks like The Reason They Hate Me are catchy in the weirdest and most unwelcoming of ways, Less Sex sounds like a long lost Trent Reznor NIN track, and Guest House is a masochistic and gut wrenching finisher. Fantastic record aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.

We Cool? - Jeff Rosenstock (2015)

It’s obvious that I had to include this record somewhere on these list. It’s like a more refined version of the sounds that Jeff experimented with on Vacation. Definitely more punk than ska, but still some of those roots still shine through, especially in the track Nausea. Some of Jeff’s best songs are on this record, from the loud opening tracks Get Old Forever and You, In Weird Cities, to tracks dripping with bittersweet and moody lyrics like I’m Serious, I’m Sorry and Polar Bear or Africa. The main reason this record is on the back end of the top 20 is because the deeper cuts on the record do not match the energy and heights of the best tracks. Tracks like All Blissed Out, The Lows, Darkness Records and Beers Again Alone don’t feel like they belong and stick out a bit. They remind me more of the material Jeff put out on his 2012 EP I Look Like Shit. Mind you they aren’t bad tracks, but I’ll be honest I skip them often when listening to the record because i just wanna get back to the good good stuff. 

Sports - Modern Baseball (2012)

Sports is one of the best pop punk records ever, if you can even consider it as such. It’s like a blend of emo and folk punk, and it works so well. A good majority of this record is on my main shuffle playlist. Is it pushing boundaries? Not really, but tracks like Re-Do, Tears Over Beers, and See Ya, Sucker are undeniably catchy and memorable. I NEED MODERN BASEBALL BACK TOGETHER RN. There’s not really anything that wrong with the record, besides maybe lacking in variety, but at 30 minutes, it’s a record that feels nostalgic even on a first listen, and continues to feel that way even after numerous re-listens. Speaking of nostalgia...

The Suburbs - Arcade Fire (2010)

Some background, when I was 13 (circa 2013), I only really listened to whatever my parents put on for me. From my mom, I “inherited” a taste for classic pop and 80s new wave. From my dad, I got metal and hard rock. The first time I made the conscious decision to listen to a record fully, based on my own curiousity, was when I sat and listened to Sgt. Pepper in the summer of 2013, which broadened the scope of what I thought music could even be. And later that year, the first band I got into after The Beatles? Arcade Fire. When I think of my early teens, the memories are set to this record. I remember listening to Ready to Start in my brother’s old hot ass car while driving to the local fair with some friends on a chill fall night, eating tons of junk and staying up past midnight back when doing that was edgy and cool and not a symptom of my depression. 

If I was judging this record solely by its best tracks, it would easily be in the top 3. But I couldn’t place it in my top 10 because, frankly, some of the deeper cuts are lacking. I can’t say I like Deep Blue. I really don’t like Rococo. And Half Light I kills the pace of the record. But man, that title track, Ready to Start, Modern Man, Empty Room, Half Light II, Sprawl II... these songs defined my early teen years. I still tear up listening to the title track. Sure I have to skip a few songs when I re-listen, but I can’t place it any lower or my heart will break. It existing outside of the top 10 already hurts. And that’s all that’s left now. The top 10. 

But first, some random honorable mentions that didn’t make this list:

Sound & Color - Alabama Shakes

Black Star - David Bowie

Saturation II - BROCKHAMPTON

Melophobia - Cage the Elephant

Teens of Style - Car Seat Headrest

How to Leave Town - Car Seat Headrest

Daughters - Daughters

Sunbather - Deafheaven

Bottomless Pit - Death Grips

Year of the Snitch - Death Grips (should be on this list tbh)

Doris - Earl Sweatshirt

I Love You, Honeybear - Father John Misty

Helplessness Blues - Fleet Foxes

Plastic Beach - Gorillaz

Boarding House Reach - Jack White

POST- - Jeff Rosenstock

S/T - Joyce Manor

Firepower - Judas Priest

ye - Kanye West

KIDS SEE GHOSTS - KSG

You Were There - Kill Lincoln

Flying Microtonal Banana - King Gizzard

Infest The Rats’ Nest - King Gizzard

No New World - Mass of the Fermenting Dregs

Bury Me At Makeout Creek - Mitski

Puberty 2 - Mitski

Unsilent Death - Nails

Itekoma Hits - Otoboke Beaver

Morbid Stuff - PUP

A Moon Shaped Pool - Radiohead

RTJ3 - Run the Jewels

Angles - The Strokes

To Be Kind - Swans

Undertale OST - Toby Fox

Scum Fuck Flower Boy - Tyler, The Creator 

Igor - Tyler, The Creator

Weezer (White Album) - Weezer

nightlife - yuragi

[littlecatlost1]

Why can’t I be happy for Mark and Sean?

That title isn’t meant to be any kind of statement. I’m genuinely wondering. Why can’t I be happy?

I’ve been feeling pretty bad ever since the two of them announced Cloak Brand yesterday. I think it’s great that @markiplier and @therealjacksepticeye have made something they can be so proud of and so passionate about. And I hope that they’re successful and I wish them luck in this venture.

But, I don’t know, the whole thing just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

When the announcement came out yesterday, my emotions went on a downward slope which started with just some mild disappointment when it turned out that it wasn’t some kind of fun, entertainment related project like I was expecting. It comes out and it’s like, “Oh. It’s just some overpriced premium clothing brand.” I don’t really care about fashion, so, whatever.

I clicked the link to the Cloak Brand website and it’s there that my mood went down that sharp slope from being mildly disappointed to highly disappointed to even feeling angry and slightly insulted.

Okay, I’m going to step away from Mark and Sean for a second because this really doesn’t relate to them. I have never been a fan of these big name super expensive clothing brands. It just reeks of elitism. And status symbols. “Look at me! I’m better than you because I can wear [Insert brand name here]! Where’s your [Insert brand name here]? Aw, too poor? HA HA! Loser!”

Oh, my god! Who fucking cares!? It’s just clothes!!

I am not calling Mark and Sean elitists. Because they’re not. I know that that isn’t what they’re about and I know they only have good intentions. I just never expected them to do something like this. It feels so weird and out of character to me. I guess that’s part of why it’s bothering me.

I’m a little worried that this will create a similar mindset of “You’re not a real Markiplier/Jacksepticeye fan unless you wear Cloak Brand!” I’ve already seen little signs of it in the replies to their tweets. Someone brings up the high prices and someone else will reply with something along the lines of “You’re just mad because you can’t afford it.”

And this isn’t even about the prices, which I agree are kinda outrageous. Because I get it. I understand that these clothes are made of high quality materials and are custom cut, custom fit and that all of this costs a lot of time, effort, and most importantly, money, to produce. So, yeah, I get that they have to charge these kinds of prices. I get that it’s not the same as the other merch they usually do.

I think the problem for me is the marketing, the way they’re selling it. It really pisses me off. “This is YOUR brand!” is the big slogan at the top of the website. I go into the Our Story page and I watch the video and I read this message from Mark and Sean which contains phrases like:

Mark: “What’s best for you, specifically.”

Sean: “Because there has never really been a brand out there for people like us. People who game all day.”

Mark: “A real, honest clothing brand that gave you guys a voice.”

Sean: “We want to see you guys wear it. We want to represent you.”

The whole claim that this is “for our community.” Yeah, right! You mean the RICH SIDE of your community. These clothes are not for everyone, no matter how much they try to spin it otherwise. It sounds like they’re trying to say that these clothes were designed with the people in their community, their fans, in mind. It also sounds like they’re trying to sell it to gamers in general. “A brand for people like us.” But that’s the issue. Most of us are not like you. I’m pretty sure the majority of the people in your community don’t live as well as you, and can’t afford to simply throw down $80-$85 for one hoodie or $35 for one t-shirt.

Another sad thing is that a lot of people will do it anyway just because Mark and Sean’s names are attached to it. Many of which are probably kids and teens.

I don’t know. I can’t and won’t speak for everyone. ‘Cause maybe I’m wrong. I’m probably wrong. I’m stupid.

I’ve been watching both Mark and Sean since 2014. They’ve been a good distraction and a comfort as I suffer with severe depression and anxiety. I like that they’re both such humble and genuine people. It kinda feels like I’m sitting right there next to them, having fun like just another friend. I can at least pretend to know what that feels like when I watch them.

They’ve both been so great about interacting with their fans and making everyone feel included and that everyone matters. Generally just making the fans feel like they care. Sean, especially, who’s become such a wonderful advocate for mental health.

Which is why this whole idea that these clothes are for us or for the community rubs me the wrong way and makes me sick. Like all those great ideals they’ve built up over the years which came out the goodness in their hearts are almost being used as a sales pitch. I know they aren’t lying and I know there are zero ill intentions here. I believe in both of them. It just feels disingenuous, is all I’m saying.

I’ve seen people say some harsh things. Some people are saying that they’re treating their fans like gullible cash dispensers. I don’t agree with statements like that. I just don’t like this.

At least with the other merch it actually sorta meant something. Whether it was supporting a charity or supporting these awesome people. And right here, I have to give a highlight to Sean’s message of PMA. Ever since the start of 2018, Sean has done an absolutely beautiful thing with his Positive Mental Attitude movement. It’s so great. When I wear this, I feel like I’m promoting something that feels good instead of just wearing his brand. It felt like it was worth the slightly higher price tag.

This just feels like business. And icky.

I like the slick, clean design of the logo. I’ll give them that much. But even if I could afford to burn $85 for a hoodie, I still wouldn’t pay it. Because it is NOT worth it!

I don’t know. Why is Cloak Brand even a thing? Did we really need this? I imagine the average gamer wears clothes that are a fraction of the cost and are just as comfortable.

I don’t know what to think. I feel let down. I feel like this belief I have of Mark and Sean being just regular people who just want to make people happy and don’t care about money has been stained, just a little bit. There’s a small disconnect there that wasn’t there before. I don’t know why I’m so bent out of shape. I’m a fucking idiot!

I still love these boys and I will continue to enjoy their content. I’ll say one more time that I wish Mark and Sean luck with their new clothing line, but I can’t support it.

I’m scared that I’m going to get burned for pouring out my thoughts. I just hope people will realize that’s all this is. Thoughts. I’m not a hater. This is not an attack against Mark and Sean. So, please, don’t attack me back.

[junker-town]

The most bonkers music in Olympic figure skating this year: Beyoncé, dad rock, and ‘Despacito’

Also Lorde and Ed Sheeran?

Once upon a time, figure skating was a demure, dignified sport in which, for music, you basically had to choose between a Broadway musical, a ballet, or like, one of the three operas anyone’s ever heard of. You’d do some jumps and spins to it, and that was that. Judges loved the music. Audiences expected it. Choreographers knew what to do with it. All was well.

That was, until, all was not so well in the world of figure skating. For the last decade or so, TV ratings have fallen. Kids aren’t signing up for lessons like they used to. Americans aren’t winning Olympic medals. The “six-point-oh” is gone and nobody understands the new scoring system.

So what’s a sport to do when nobody wants to watch another 7th-place American skate to an instrumental medley of Phantom of the Opera for the hundredth time?

ADD SOME DAD ROCK, BABY! [one million air horns]

After the 2014 Sochi Games, the International Skating Union officially allowed ladies, mens and pairs skaters to compete to music with lyrics. This means Pyeongchang will be the first Olympics in which, alongside the usual dosages of Swan Lake, you will also be treated to the music of British pop star Ed Sheeran and a truly bizarre big band cover of Oasis’s “Wonderwall.”

For anyone who retired from competition pre-2014, this is all extremely weird (and clearly a sort-of-embarrassing ploy for relevance). On the other hand, it will also be incredibly amusing to behold. Below, the most insane music that the world’s top figure skaters will perform on the Olympic ice, ranked in order of how excited you should be to watch them.

23. A suave Michael Buble medley

The country of Latvia is not particularly known for its figure skaters, but what it lacks in relevance, Deniss Vasiljevs’s freeskate makes up for in pairing modernized jazz standards with spandex blazers. Pro tip: Skip to 3:27 for some incredibly gifable dance moves.

22. “Chasing Cars” by Snow Patrol

Listen, I wouldn’t be surprised for competitors to skate to bands like, say, Coldplay. But show me a single 17-year-old who has even heard of the 2006 song “Chasing Cars” by Snow Patrol. This isn’t even like, the original version or anything. For whatever reason, however, the US’s Vincent Zhou is the sole exception to the teens-don’t-give-a-fuck-about-Snow-Patrol rule. I am shocked.

21. “With or Without You” by U2

To be fair, this is actually a pretty nice arrangement of this song, but still. Canadian pairs team Meagan Duhamel and Eric Radford could have picked a song that does not exclusively belong to Ross and Rachel.

20. Uh... Kansas? And not even the good one?

Watching Patrick Chan’s short program makes me incredibly annoyed that instead of skating to the far superior “Carry On Wayward Son,” he chose the far more boring “Dust in the Wind.” Whatever song he had picked will not make the experience of hearing Kansas at the Olympics any less strange.

19. Santana, and again, NOT EVEN THE GOOD ONE

It should be a felony to skate to a Santana medley that does not include either a) “Smooth” ft. Rob Thomas or b) “Maria” ft. Rihanna, which is technically called “Wild Thoughts” and is by DJ Khaled, but whatever. Anyway, Sara Hurtado and Kirill Khaliavin of Spain should be in jail now.

18. Ed Sheeran, and NOPE, NOT THE GOOD ONE

Ditto for Ed Sheeran. You have one choice: “Shape of You” or nothing.

17. “Candyman” by Christina Aguilera

This choice wouldn’t be quite so bonkers if it weren’t for the extremely literal costumes attached. Russian pairs team Evgenia Tarasova and Vladimir Morozov are out here looking like actual M&Ms while skating to a song called “Candyman.”

16. Game of Thrones

Once again, here’s a not-all-that-insane music choice, but this time it’s paired with a what appears to be a medieval knight costume from the Halloween aisle of a CVS.

15. That very loud Imagine Dragons song

The weirdest part about Moris Kvitelashvili’s freeskate is how at first, it starts out with very boring piano instrumentals, until you realize it sooorta sounds like “Radioactive.” And then, out of seemingly nowhere, we get the beat drop of “Believer” alongside some very bizarre arm-heavy dance moves. It’s a whole thing.

14. This incredible dad rock medley

Ice dancing, which is ballroom dancing except on ice, has actually always been allowed to use music with lyrics. It has not, though, been quite as inundated with classic rock as it is this year. This particular program by Canadian team Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir pairs a samba with “Sympathy for the Devil,” a rhumba with “Hotel California,” and a cha cha with “Oye Como Va.” Go tell your dad, he’ll be psyched.

13. “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” but sad

It’ll take you more than a few seconds into Brendan Kerry’s short program to realize that he is in, in fact, skating to the Tears for Fears song. But once you get to about ¾ of the way through (at around 2:00 in the video above), you’ll be like, why the fuck does this rendition sound as dramatic as O Fortuna? Who thought to make this?

12. An extremely goth “Paint It Black”

Speaking of sadder versions of classic rock, here is Ekaterina Alexandrovskaya and Harley Windsor of Australia, who have somehow turned the 1966 Rolling Stones song into what sounds like an Evanescence single from 2003.

11. “Hava Nagila”

Trust me, you will lose your shit when the main melody drops and Oleksii Bychenko of Israel starts his footwork sequence (around 2:53). This is his answer to Jason Brown’s “Riverdance” program, I swear.

10. That song that’s in every sad movie trailer

Its technical name is “How It Ends” by Devotchka, but I like to refer to it as “The Repressed Feelings Reawakener.” Skip to around 2:50 of his program and you’ll suddenly start missing your 6th grade boyfriend or weeping over a dying desk plant. It’s actually a great piece of music to skate to, but goddamn Dmitri Aliev for making me cry at work!

9. Celine fuckin’ Dion

Although one of her competitors will be skating to “The Prayer,” 30-year-old Italian Carolina Kostner knows that there is only one way to honor the queen of all music ever, and it is by choosing a song in which she belts in her native langue canadienne-française.

8. “Human” by Rag ‘N Bone Man

Show this video to your unmotivated emo child who “just isn’t into sports,” and afterwards, trust me, they will be. Czech skater Michal Březina’s freeskate involves both an incredible health goth ‘fit and slicked back Hitler hair, making him the official Olympic choice of angsty white teens everywhere.

7. AC/DC’s most hockey-friendly songs

Props to Ivett Toth of Hungary, who’s skating to the two songs most associated with that other sport that takes place on ice: AC/DC’s “Back in Black” followed by “Thunderstruck.” Additional props for the studded, sleeveless leather vest and the choice to wear pants rather than a dress or skirt. (Fun fact: prior to the year 2003, this would have been illegal.)

6. A big band cover of “Wonderwall”

What starts out with a snoozy instrumental jazz ends up being one of the most bizarre skating programs I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s the 1995 Oasis hit “Wonderwall,” but if a lounge singer was doing it. Now, in no universe do we need a big band cover of “Wonderwall,” but I respect Paul Fentz of Germany’s commitment to both ‘90s britpop and suspenders.

5. “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” but Lorde

Tears for Fears is having quite an Olympic year, which is maybe the strangest sentence anyone’s ever written. Canadian pairs team Julianne Seguin and Charlie Bilodeau are somehow the second to skate to a cover of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” but this time it’s by Lorde, which is one zillion times more exciting than that other one. Honestly though, if you’re going to skate to Lorde, would it have killed you to pick something off of Melodrama?

4. Ed Sheeran, but this time it’s the good one!

All I wanted out of this Olympics was for someone — anyone — to skate to “Shape of You.” And even though it’s ice dancing, and people care a whole lot less about ice dancing, and even though they finished it off with the Ed Sheeran song that is the most unlistenable of all (a.k.a. “Thinking Out Loud” a.k.a. the wedding one), I’ll fucking take it.

3. “Rapper’s Delight” by The Sugarhill Gang

Even judging by French skater Chafik Besseghier’s starting pose, you can tell this isn’t going to be Just Any Program. Not only does it kick off with one of the most iconic hip-hop songs in the world, it ends with C2C’s “Down the Road,” that French electronic song you’ve definitely heard before even if you think you haven’t. Basically, there’s a whole lot going on here, and that’s not even including his bizarre race car driving(?)-inspired getup which, if anything, serves to remind us all that skating is not just a sport. It’s an ~art~.

2. Des-pa-cito

It did not win at the Grammys, but this year, “Despacito” wins a far more important musical accomplishment: the most-played song in ice rinks at the Olympics. Not one, not two, but THREE ice dancing teams will perform the inescapable Latin crossover smash for their short dances, one team from Poland, one from South Korea (above), and one from China. Although this may seem like a highly improbable coincidence, it actually makes a lot of sense — in the short dance, teams are required to perform specific dances, and this year the requirement is a rhumba rhythm plus a Latin American or Caribbean-influenced rhythm. And what Latin- and Caribbean-influenced song was literally inescapable for the entirety of 2017? [Insert Spanish guitar opening riff]

1. BEYONCÉ!

Mark your calendar for February 20th at 8 p.m. EST, because that’s when Maé Bérénice Méité of France, dressed in a majestic black and gold unitard, will transform Pyeongchang into Beyongchang. Though it’s not until around 1:40 in the video above that you’ll hear Beyoncé herself singing (the first half of the program is a breathy cover of “Halo”), when the beat to “Run the World (Girls)” drops, every sports bar in the world will be screaming, or at least they should be. Though it hasn’t always been this way, from now on, this is what figure skating is about. I, for one, truly cannot wait.

[demitgibbs]

Anna Kendrick Talks Fluid Sexuality, Kissing Blake Lively

The pitch is perfectly crazy in Anna Kendrick’s walk on the dark side of filmmaker Paul Feig’s warped sense of humor, A Simple Favor. It’s martini-sipper mom versus martini-swigger mom. Target mom versus Met Gala mom. Aspirational versus extra.

It’s regular mom-meets-mom business, a modern mom-com – until Emily (Blake Lively) goes missing. Emily’s sudden disappearance prompts Stephanie (Kendrick) to mount an investigation by employing her keen Nancy Drew smarts and posting distressed clips of herself on her dorky craft vlog. (Friendship-bracelet tutorials are just gonna to have wait.)

A bit camp? Yep. A bit queer? Obviously. And naturally so, as Kendrick’s 15-year career is steeped in queerness: at age 17, she cut her acting teeth on Camp, the 2003 teen musical-comedy directed by out filmmaker Todd Graff; as Beca, she brought covert aca-gayness to the three-part Pitch Perfect franchise; and in 2014, the 33-year-old Oscar-nominated actress slipped into Cinderella’s glass slippers for Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods. And her long, impulsive kiss – “just another Tuesday,” Emily notes – with Lively in A Simple Favor, well, it’s not exactly straight, she says.

Here, the longtime ally talks about attempting to allow the lesbian love to bloom between queer-coded Pitch Perfect leads Beca and Chloe (Brittany Snow), what irks her about self-congratulatory reactions to celebs coming out and, when it comes to her own sexuality, being open like Emily.

A car sing-along, a little camp, some martinis and a mom makeout sesh: Anna, you sure know what the gay community wants at this point in your career, don’t you?

(Laughs) Oh my gosh! I wasn’t thinking of it in that way, but yeah, it is kind of camp. It takes itself a little seriously, but we’re always winking or having fun. It’s bright and colorful, and there’s an unabashed campiness to it – even though the stakes are very real in places.

You didn’t recognize a queer sensibility going in?

To be honest, when I was going in, there was just so much to play with. I remember having one of those conversations with Blake where we both felt like, “Are we high right now? Are we having a stoner conversation?” Because we were talking about how in a traditional comedy there’s a slider that you’re on from how subtle to how broad, and with this it felt like you weren’t just on this linear slider – you were in three dimensions, and you could go to all these places.

It was so much fun as actors to have that, and I know that sounds really stoner-y and existential and dumb. But the world Paul created had so much possibility, and so I wasn’t really thinking about one group. I was barely getting my brain around what the movie was in the first place! But I think Stephanie is very much an underdog and she’s finding her place in the world. I feel like that’s something that queer people can relate to at one point in their lives or another.

WATCH:

What was it like coming to set for the first time and seeing the giant painting of Blake-as-Emily’s vagina front and center in Emily’s front room?

OK, this is actually really interesting: So that painting – fun fact – was never once on set. That is all post effects. Sometimes it was green screen, and sometimes it was this other painting that was very nice but very Tumblr art. It was actually Blake’s idea to have it be a little bit more, um, obscene. Certainly it’s art, but a little more shocking for Stephanie to see. Not so polished, not so pretty, not so coy. I thought that was really brilliant.

Regarding Pitch Perfect: Are we ever gonna get the Beca and Chloe love story that they so deserve?

I know. I definitely wanted to have an ending that was a Bechloe ending, and we did shoot one version where Brittany and I tricked everybody into just shooting one that was just the two of us getting together. We knew it was a long shot. It meant so much to us that there was this following around their latent relationship and, yeah, I thought it would’ve been really cool if it would have ended up coming to fruition in the end. If we ever do a four, I will fight tooth and nail for it, but I’m not sure it’s gonna happen.

Because the studio doesn’t want to go there with their sexuality?

It wasn’t like Universal was like, “There can be no lesbians in Pitch Perfect!” Because obviously Cynthia Rose is an openly gay character. But I think they were just confused by it because they weren’t listening to all the online chatter about it, whereas I see it every day, and I’m like, “Are you kidding? This is what they want!”

Best lesbian Bechloe fanfiction you’ve read?

OK, I’ve actually only tried to ever read one. It was so sweet and puppy-lovey that I was like, “Aww, I wanted to read some sauciness!” I thought I was gonna get scandalized! Instead, I was like, “Aww! This is, like, so sweet! This reminds me of The Baby-Sitters Club books.” But I haven’t actually followed up on it.

You once met a guy at a Gelson’s market who told you he does your Camp character, Fritzi, in drag. First of all, how often do you run into drag queens at grocery stores who tell you that you’re their inspiration?

(Laughs) Not often enough! That was one of my favorite moments of being recognized, ever. And I’m sorry, what’s the second part of your question? I got too excited.

Which other characters of yours might make good drag material?

Stephanie has a real Sandy-in-Grease vibe, where she doesn’t become the bad girl, exactly, but she loosens up and shakes it off a little bit. But I do always still like Rizzo in Grease, who is more fun than Sandy, so I’m not sure that Stephanie is necessarily the one. She’d have to really just be letting her hair down.

You’ve said you downplayed Fritzi’s sexuality when you filmed Camp.

The thing that made me uncomfortable about Fritzi was I was 16, but it wasn’t so much that she was gay – it was that unrequited gay love situation. I think if she’d been crushing it and getting girls, I would’ve been like, “Awesome, awesome, awesome!” It was just, at 16 you don’t want to be playing the girl that nobody likes, which I totally recognize as I get older is such a silly insecurity issue. But at the time I was definitely like, “Can’t somebody just have a crush on me in a movie – god!”

Would you have approached Fritzi differently in retrospect?

The truth is, I think I would have just enjoyed myself. Todd Graff is amazing, and I’m so lucky to have had him as my first film director. And he really got me to do everything that I think that I would’ve done as a more experienced actor, regardless, but I guess I regret that I didn’t enjoy myself more.

You recently won the Choice Twit award at this year’s Teen Choice Awards, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this was your crowning tweet: “Lot of people seem really proud of themselves for announcing they ‘already knew’ Barry Manilow was gay. Yeah……ur the true heroes today guys.”

When a public figure comes out, taking the attitude of like, “Duh, we knew,” is the weirdest thing to me. Even when celebrities announce that they’re pregnant, people aren’t like, “Duh, we could tell three months ago.” They’re like, “Aww, she’s finally ready to talk about the fact that she’s pregnant! That’s amazing!”

And you would think that your sexuality would just be really supported (because) they feel comfortable talking about it now. It’s a really weird topic to feel a sense of superiority that you figured it out first.

So much of what you do is just a bit gay. Was that the case for your role as Santa Claus’s daughter in the forthcoming Noelle?

Again, I would say Noelle has a touch of camp, so hopefully that will be enjoyable. It’s been so long and I haven’t even seen a cut of it, so I’m like, “What did we make?” Oh, but they did make a point to have same-sex couples wherever we went, whether we were at the North Pole or outside the North Pole.

Getting back to A Simple Favor: Where do you think Stephanie and Emily fall on the Kinsey Scale?

That’s a good question. I think Emily is a surprise for Stephanie, and she is completely in love with her in a way that she can’t totally understand. I do think that Stephanie probably would define herself as straight, except that there is this woman and she really is kind of in love with her and there is a part of her that is attracted to her.

That scene: I remember Blake and I both feeling like neither of us wanted to be the aggressor in the scene. Blake was worried that she would come off as taking advantage of me in that scene because I’m in a very vulnerable place, and I was worried that I would come off like I wanted so much more, and that Blake is just kind of playing and Emily is very comfortable with the fluid aspects of her sexuality, whereas Stephanie has more of an emotional component to it. So, I was worried it would be, like, really sad. We definitely struggled to find that perfect balance of, there’s just this moment and they both get caught up in it and it’s a little uncomfortable. Yeah, it was a fun day.

You’ve been open about your girl crushes over the years. Have you ever had a girl crush that was or could have been romantic?

Let me think about that. I definitely – there’s somebody I’m still friends with, and when we met we kissed. This was after high school, and it was the first time I had kissed a girl where it wasn’t just like, we’re at a party and boys are watching! That horrible performance silliness. But I think I haven’t had that emotional love for a lady, which isn’t saying it could never happen to me, but I think I’m more of an Emily than a Stephanie.

And your lip-lock with your longtime girl crush Blake Lively in this movie – thoughts?

(Laughs) I mean, all I’m ever thinking about in (kissing) scenes is, who has gum? Who has a mint? And I think Blake is probably the same because I’ve never experienced a guy, like, searching for a mint and searching for gum. So, we were the mintiest, freshest two people to have ever kissed in the history of America.

Congratulations!

Thank you. Call Guinness.

from Hotspots! Magazine https://hotspotsmagazine.com/2018/09/06/anna-kendrick-talks-fluid-sexuality-kissing-blake-lively/ from Hot Spots Magazine https://hotspotsmagazine.tumblr.com/post/177802820955

[cynthiajayusa]

Anna Kendrick Talks Fluid Sexuality, Kissing Blake Lively

The pitch is perfectly crazy in Anna Kendrick’s walk on the dark side of filmmaker Paul Feig’s warped sense of humor, A Simple Favor. It’s martini-sipper mom versus martini-swigger mom. Target mom versus Met Gala mom. Aspirational versus extra.

It’s regular mom-meets-mom business, a modern mom-com – until Emily (Blake Lively) goes missing. Emily’s sudden disappearance prompts Stephanie (Kendrick) to mount an investigation by employing her keen Nancy Drew smarts and posting distressed clips of herself on her dorky craft vlog. (Friendship-bracelet tutorials are just gonna to have wait.)

A bit camp? Yep. A bit queer? Obviously. And naturally so, as Kendrick’s 15-year career is steeped in queerness: at age 17, she cut her acting teeth on Camp, the 2003 teen musical-comedy directed by out filmmaker Todd Graff; as Beca, she brought covert aca-gayness to the three-part Pitch Perfect franchise; and in 2014, the 33-year-old Oscar-nominated actress slipped into Cinderella’s glass slippers for Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods. And her long, impulsive kiss – “just another Tuesday,” Emily notes – with Lively in A Simple Favor, well, it’s not exactly straight, she says.

Here, the longtime ally talks about attempting to allow the lesbian love to bloom between queer-coded Pitch Perfect leads Beca and Chloe (Brittany Snow), what irks her about self-congratulatory reactions to celebs coming out and, when it comes to her own sexuality, being open like Emily.

A car sing-along, a little camp, some martinis and a mom makeout sesh: Anna, you sure know what the gay community wants at this point in your career, don’t you? 

(Laughs) Oh my gosh! I wasn’t thinking of it in that way, but yeah, it is kind of camp. It takes itself a little seriously, but we’re always winking or having fun. It’s bright and colorful, and there’s an unabashed campiness to it – even though the stakes are very real in places.

You didn’t recognize a queer sensibility going in? 

To be honest, when I was going in, there was just so much to play with. I remember having one of those conversations with Blake where we both felt like, “Are we high right now? Are we having a stoner conversation?” Because we were talking about how in a traditional comedy there’s a slider that you’re on from how subtle to how broad, and with this it felt like you weren’t just on this linear slider – you were in three dimensions, and you could go to all these places.

It was so much fun as actors to have that, and I know that sounds really stoner-y and existential and dumb. But the world Paul created had so much possibility, and so I wasn’t really thinking about one group. I was barely getting my brain around what the movie was in the first place! But I think Stephanie is very much an underdog and she’s finding her place in the world. I feel like that’s something that queer people can relate to at one point in their lives or another.

WATCH:

What was it like coming to set for the first time and seeing the giant painting of Blake-as-Emily’s vagina front and center in Emily’s front room? 

OK, this is actually really interesting: So that painting – fun fact – was never once on set. That is all post effects. Sometimes it was green screen, and sometimes it was this other painting that was very nice but very Tumblr art. It was actually Blake’s idea to have it be a little bit more, um, obscene. Certainly it’s art, but a little more shocking for Stephanie to see. Not so polished, not so pretty, not so coy. I thought that was really brilliant.

Regarding Pitch Perfect: Are we ever gonna get the Beca and Chloe love story that they so deserve? 

I know. I definitely wanted to have an ending that was a Bechloe ending, and we did shoot one version where Brittany and I tricked everybody into just shooting one that was just the two of us getting together. We knew it was a long shot. It meant so much to us that there was this following around their latent relationship and, yeah, I thought it would’ve been really cool if it would have ended up coming to fruition in the end. If we ever do a four, I will fight tooth and nail for it, but I’m not sure it’s gonna happen.

Because the studio doesn’t want to go there with their sexuality? 

It wasn’t like Universal was like, “There can be no lesbians in Pitch Perfect!” Because obviously Cynthia Rose is an openly gay character. But I think they were just confused by it because they weren’t listening to all the online chatter about it, whereas I see it every day, and I’m like, “Are you kidding? This is what they want!”

Best lesbian Bechloe fanfiction you’ve read? 

OK, I’ve actually only tried to ever read one. It was so sweet and puppy-lovey that I was like, “Aww, I wanted to read some sauciness!” I thought I was gonna get scandalized! Instead, I was like, “Aww! This is, like, so sweet! This reminds me of The Baby-Sitters Club books.” But I haven’t actually followed up on it.

You once met a guy at a Gelson’s market who told you he does your Camp character, Fritzi, in drag. First of all, how often do you run into drag queens at grocery stores who tell you that you’re their inspiration?

(Laughs) Not often enough! That was one of my favorite moments of being recognized, ever. And I’m sorry, what’s the second part of your question? I got too excited.

Which other characters of yours might make good drag material? 

Stephanie has a real Sandy-in-Grease vibe, where she doesn’t become the bad girl, exactly, but she loosens up and shakes it off a little bit. But I do always still like Rizzo in Grease, who is more fun than Sandy, so I’m not sure that Stephanie is necessarily the one. She’d have to really just be letting her hair down.

You’ve said you downplayed Fritzi’s sexuality when you filmed Camp. 

The thing that made me uncomfortable about Fritzi was I was 16, but it wasn’t so much that she was gay – it was that unrequited gay love situation. I think if she’d been crushing it and getting girls, I would’ve been like, “Awesome, awesome, awesome!” It was just, at 16 you don’t want to be playing the girl that nobody likes, which I totally recognize as I get older is such a silly insecurity issue. But at the time I was definitely like, “Can’t somebody just have a crush on me in a movie – god!”

Would you have approached Fritzi differently in retrospect? 

The truth is, I think I would have just enjoyed myself. Todd Graff is amazing, and I’m so lucky to have had him as my first film director. And he really got me to do everything that I think that I would’ve done as a more experienced actor, regardless, but I guess I regret that I didn’t enjoy myself more.

You recently won the Choice Twit award at this year’s Teen Choice Awards, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this was your crowning tweet: “Lot of people seem really proud of themselves for announcing they ‘already knew’ Barry Manilow was gay. Yeah……ur the true heroes today guys.” 

When a public figure comes out, taking the attitude of like, “Duh, we knew,” is the weirdest thing to me. Even when celebrities announce that they’re pregnant, people aren’t like, “Duh, we could tell three months ago.” They’re like, “Aww, she’s finally ready to talk about the fact that she’s pregnant! That’s amazing!”

And you would think that your sexuality would just be really supported (because) they feel comfortable talking about it now. It’s a really weird topic to feel a sense of superiority that you figured it out first.

So much of what you do is just a bit gay. Was that the case for your role as Santa Claus’s daughter in the forthcoming Noelle? 

Again, I would say Noelle has a touch of camp, so hopefully that will be enjoyable. It’s been so long and I haven’t even seen a cut of it, so I’m like, “What did we make?” Oh, but they did make a point to have same-sex couples wherever we went, whether we were at the North Pole or outside the North Pole.

Getting back to A Simple Favor: Where do you think Stephanie and Emily fall on the Kinsey Scale? 

That’s a good question. I think Emily is a surprise for Stephanie, and she is completely in love with her in a way that she can’t totally understand. I do think that Stephanie probably would define herself as straight, except that there is this woman and she really is kind of in love with her and there is a part of her that is attracted to her.

That scene: I remember Blake and I both feeling like neither of us wanted to be the aggressor in the scene. Blake was worried that she would come off as taking advantage of me in that scene because I’m in a very vulnerable place, and I was worried that I would come off like I wanted so much more, and that Blake is just kind of playing and Emily is very comfortable with the fluid aspects of her sexuality, whereas Stephanie has more of an emotional component to it. So, I was worried it would be, like, really sad. We definitely struggled to find that perfect balance of, there’s just this moment and they both get caught up in it and it’s a little uncomfortable. Yeah, it was a fun day.

You’ve been open about your girl crushes over the years. Have you ever had a girl crush that was or could have been romantic? 

Let me think about that. I definitely – there’s somebody I’m still friends with, and when we met we kissed. This was after high school, and it was the first time I had kissed a girl where it wasn’t just like, we’re at a party and boys are watching! That horrible performance silliness. But I think I haven’t had that emotional love for a lady, which isn’t saying it could never happen to me, but I think I’m more of an Emily than a Stephanie.

And your lip-lock with your longtime girl crush Blake Lively in this movie – thoughts? 

(Laughs) I mean, all I’m ever thinking about in (kissing) scenes is, who has gum? Who has a mint? And I think Blake is probably the same because I’ve never experienced a guy, like, searching for a mint and searching for gum. So, we were the mintiest, freshest two people to have ever kissed in the history of America.

Congratulations! 

Thank you. Call Guinness.

source https://hotspotsmagazine.com/2018/09/06/anna-kendrick-talks-fluid-sexuality-kissing-blake-lively/ from Hot Spots Magazine https://hotspotsmagazin.blogspot.com/2018/09/anna-kendrick-talks-fluid-sexuality.html

[canaryatlaw]

OKAY. so. it’s late and I gotta wake up in 4 hours and 15 minutes and get on a plane and this was probably bad planning on my part but today was overall pretty good! I had my alarm set for 11:35 to get to my haircut appointment at 1 (25 minutes to get ready and eat breakfast, hour to get downtown), but I woke up at 10:40 and I was like I bet if I check my phone right now I’ll have a message from Jess about getting breakfast since that’s kinda our thing now so I checked my phone and I did, so we said we’d meet there in 15, at which point I got out of bed, brushed my teeth (and evidently neglected to take my pills, oops), get dressed and get out the door. I’ve been trying to diversify my meal choices because I’m generally super boring and order the same thing whenever I go to a certain place, so I’ve been trying to get some variety lol. So far I’ve had their french toast, their banana bread french toast, their french bread pudding, their caramel apple pancakes, and today I got the smores pancakes. I got the closest I’ve been to actually finishing my meal today since it was a “short stack” (meaning 2) of pancakes instead of the full order of 3. But it was quite good as always and breakfast company is always enjoyable. It was about an hour later when we finished up, so I started walking to the train from there. This is the red line, which I took every day to get to school but since I haven’t had many needs to go downtown recently I haven’t been taking it as much. so I make it on the train, everything is good, then I get off at the stop nearest to the ulta I go to for haircuts, but then my gps decided to be very weird and not terribly helpful in getting me the last like, 0.2 of a mile there, so that was kind of a pain in the ass but eventually I figured it out and made my way there. Haircut was good, I always like seeing my haircut lady because she’s super fun and I always like catching up with her, I hadn’t been in a solid 3 1/2 months since I’d been spending all of my time studying for the bar (so of course my hair was SO overgrown) and I was like oh man, she’s gonna think I left for new york without telling her because we last left off with me not sure whether I would stay here or go to NY, so I was happy to tell her I’m staying. Hair wise, I did basically the same thing as last time, short in the back and longer bangs in the front, how I like it. So that was a good interaction, we always discuss media and how it affects things, so I always give her updates about the legal position Adnan Syed and Brendan Dassey are in (and end up having to explain the tiered court system to do so, but we managed) and we talked a bit about the second season of 13 reasons why because we had previously discussed the first season so she wanted to know what I thought about that, so of course I said I feel like they went way overboard and it honestly hurts the real kids in high school going through terrible bullying or being terrible bullies by making them think “well things aren’t /that/ bad like it is in the show, so this isn’t really a big deal” which of course leads to a whole other load of issues. And of course we talked about the two scenes in the finale (you know which ones I’m talking about) that were IMO totally inappropriate and unnecessary, sheerly for dramatic effect and with no regard for how it would effect the vulnerable teenagers this show is marketed towards, and I’m basically at the point where I’m jumping off this bandwagon and won’t be watching the third season, because they’ve shown their hand as far as what their priorities are, and it’s making a dramatic show that will get them money and fame, not to actually discuss the awful things that go on in high schools that lead kids to die by suicide like Hannah Baker, which is a fucking shame because there. are. so. many. Hannah Baker’s out there who are one mean comment away from taking their own lives, and to be approaching a media project about those issues and completely disregarding how it would actually effect the real teens and young adults struggling with these issues is really just indefensible to me. okay, I’ll stop my mini rant there. But yeah, haircut was good, got back on the train and then made a stop at Target to grab a prescription and a few odds and ends (like, mouthwash, shaving cream, a birthday card, and a box for mailing purposes), then got an uber pool home partially because I’m lazy but also partially because I can’t get my public transit app to open and I’m worried I’m gonna run out of cash on it, so I’ll have to figure that out at some point. But I got home and started on all I needed to get done, starting with putting in a load of laundry. I then sat down to write out the birthday card, it’s for one of the little kids whose parents were on the staff for tour back in 2014 and he’s turning 9, and his mom posted that he really likes getting stuff in the mail and has already excitedly been checking it so she would love to get a bunch of cards sent to him, so I bought a funny one with a squirrel taking a selfie on the front, then on the inside says “hope you’re having yourselfie a great birthday” or something like that because that sounds like 9 year old boy humor, to my best estimate anyway. so I wrote all that out and then tried to make it look fun and I tried to draw a balloon on the envelope but I can’t draw so instead I have a badly drawn balloon with an arrow pointing to it saying “badly drawn balloon” because kids. Okay, enough about that. Other than doing laundry most of the rest of my day was focusing on finally getting stuff hung up in my room, started with the mockingjay posters I had in the frames. I ended up having to move things around a good amount to fit them in places because they are BIG (like 27″ by 40″) and then had to mount them on a nail on everything and was very intense lol but I managed. Then I just spent most of the time relocating the stuff I had taken off the walls to fit the posters and then hanging some of the photo ops and posters I hadn’t gotten the chance to hang yet, so now my walls are very crowded but I’ll have to figure out a few other places to hang things 😂 so basically I did that for a few hours, then when my laundry was done I sorted it and then used it to pack my bag for North Carolina tomorrow. I’m going to be there for a full week so I wanted to make sure I got everything, and I’m super annoyed at my insurance company’s mail in order program because they promised me a package for over a week now that was supposed to come today but didn’t, and now I’m gonna be low on meds for the next week add have to hassle my doctors office again about getting me an emergency supply for the third fucking time in the past work which idk if they’ll even do, so that’s another fun thing I’ll have to deal with. I just typed everything from “I’m super annoyed” on to now with my eyes totally closed and I only missed one key stroke, in case you were wondering lol. but yeah, I’m super tired. The other thing I did was put in the overtone deep treatment which has added a nice richer red color to my hair, and it’s not quite as bright as Mera’s hair but it’ll do for now being that anything else would probably involve bleaching my hair and I ain’t about that. So I packed and took care of shit then wasted time doing stupid shit and in case you couldn’t tell by the fact that I typed all of that with my eyes closed, I’m very tired right now so I should definitely sign off now. I downloaded the heathers musical bootleg onto my computer so I can watch it on the plane tomorrow just for kicks 😂 so that should be fine. alright, that’s it. Goodnight kiddos. See you on the other side.

[bookpeopleteenpresscorps-blog]

Teen Press Corps Member Maddy Interviews Author Andrew Shvarts

BY MADISON CLARK, BOOKPEOPLE TEEN PRESS CORPS

Madison Clark: What colors make you happy? Andrew Shvarts: I am actually Colorblind, so that is an interesting question. Most people assume it would be grey but I recently got the glasses that allow me to see color and realized just how much more vivid the world was. Especially reds. I stared at a tomato for an hour in awe of the redness. The experience of putting on those glasses was like, I’ve seen red, I know what it is but it was so much more vivid than I could have ever imagined. I was driving and I saw a coke truck go by and I almost got into an accident because I had never seen anything as beautiful.  Although what’s funny, is I can’t see purple at all; I see it as blue. And the sequel to Royal Bastards, City of Bastards, is purple. I didn’t know it was purple, and when we did the color review I was gushing about how lovely of a blue it was.

MC: If you were an ice cream flavor what would you be? AS: Coffee. That’s my favorite flavor to eat and I drink like 90 cups of coffee a day. I’m also super animated, so I’ll go with coffee.

MC:How would you define true love? AS: This is going to be a very married answer, but I feel like true love is when you can be absolutely be every part of yourself around a person. So much of life is putting some mask on or acting a certain way and to me true love is when you hit that point where you are just 100 percent yourself, warts and all, with no judgment.

MC: Do you have any children? AS: I have one. He is three; his name is Alec. Royal Bastards is actually dedicated to him, because I actually started writing it, like, the week he was born, so him and the book are very close in my head.

MC: If you could freeze time for a week, what would you do with that time? AS: I feel like since I have a full-time job, write, and have a kid, the lack of time seems like the thing I hate most about life. I want to read more, go more places, although I’d want to specifically unfreeze moments. I’d essentially want a time turner.

MC: What would your main character get a tattoo of? AS: I think Tilla would get a tattoo, later in life, that reminded of her of her past, like a western flower as a memento of the life she left behind.

MC: What superpower would you want to have? AS: Honestly just not having to sleep. That’s a super lame superpower but if I could have those eight extra hours a day, that would be pretty good. Or maybe a save game system. To be able to save my life, do something, see how it played out and be able to reset it if I want with no consequence.

MC: What superpower do you think you WOULD have based on your personality? AS: So I have a theory that everyone actually does have a very low-grade superpower but they are so low-grade you don’t even notice it. Like I have a friend  whose credit cards are always demagnetized. So I think he must be emitting a low-grade electrical charge that’s so subtle it only does that. I think mine is that I incept nicknames really well.  I’ll call a coworker something and it will stick for like 15 years. I must have like a light mind control because they aren’t even always good nicknames.

MC: How has your job affected your writing? AS: A lot. I work for Pixel Berry now. And we do mobile games with stories, like choices, and I wouldn’t be in YA if it weren’t for this job. When I graduated college and wanted to write horror, I thought I was going to be the next Stephen King…and it would be easy, but it wasn’t at all. Nothing was working and then I just managed to get this job writing for this video game company, where I had to write games for high-schoolers. I had before that only written adult horror, and had no idea how to do it, so I had to unlearn everything I knew about storytelling and relearn something totally different: and I loved it. I love being funny and writing about teens. Also, because at my job everything gets revised constantly, as a result I’m very easy with editors. I will change anything, I don’t care. It’s made me very adaptable to feedback.

MC: How did your experiences in high school shape your life? AS: I went to essentially Nerd High. It was a private high school and it was where all the tech people sent their kids. I think having that environment with smart and supportive teachers and a very nurturing environment cultivated my creativity, and left me open to that sort of thing.

MC: In your book you deal a lot with perceptional bias. So how have your beliefs changed as you have went through life? AS: I was always raised to be very skeptical, and very individualistic. I think that informs Royal Bastards, with the idea of questioning your family and questioning your beliefs. One of the weird things I think that has happened in the world is that things have gotten less nuanced, by circumstance of what’s happening in the world. When I wrote Royal Bastards in 2014, politics were so different that I was like, this will be a book without a clear good guy or bad guy because politics are hard and ambiguous. Now I’m like oh yeah, there’s bad guys…they march with torches. Things have become less ambiguous but more passionate as well.

MC: What is your favorite word? AS:I think most of my favorite words are actually in Russian. Russian words just sound great. The russian word for hippo, for example, is begemot. It such a better word than hippo, which is so “who cares”.

MC: What advice would you have given to your younger self? AS: The advice I’d give to myself is the same advice I’d give to all writers. Read and write a wide variety of things. Read from perspectives that totally aren’t yours, and write and read genres that aren’t the ones you usually would. It’s very easy for authors to get stuck in one specific genre and become so deeply immersed in those tropes that you rely on them as a crutch. The best thing that ever happened to me was being forced to do middle-grade comedy instead of horror.

[thepermanentrainpress]

TRACK BY TRACK FEATURE: SAM TUDOR - “QUOTIDIAN DREAM”

Nearly three years following the release of his last record, Sam Tudor is back with Quotidian Dream.

Tudor was born and raised in Williams Lake, BC; his move to Vancouver in the latter teen years greatly influenced the sounds and synergy behind 2014′s The Modern New Year—contemporary campfire melodies with flickers of trumpet, banjo, and keys. On Quotidian Dream, Tudor struggles less with growing into a new city and more with the immediate space around him.

Experimental folk is layered with elements of new wave (“Quotidian Boy”) to jazz (“Chlorine”). Tudor’s vocals bring a soft-spoken intensity to “Truthful,” with the thumping backbeat and whirring of strings coming to a beautiful, unsettling head at its close. “Joseph in the Bathroom” is a remorseful take on his high school days, while “Holiday” presents a warm, folk rock hook. A little grit and power would carry the tune into Mumford & Sons’ Babel territory—but it is his tender nature and jaded lyricism (“Oh it’s the cost of a frozen place, paying for the colour when it’s all gone grey”) which make the closet anthem. Tudor often sings of disconnect with his surroundings—a vacancy marred by routine and expectation and TV screens. But his compositions reflect the opposite; a discerning self-awareness held by the notion that, even as the flames run out of him, he is able to find them again.

Tudor was kind enough to write us a track-by-track on the release, which you can delve into below.

Words below by Sam Tudor:

1. “New Apartment”

I’ve heard people talk about their apartments as safe sanctuaries and I’ve also heard people talk about them as lonely, even threatening spaces. In my experience, a Vancouver apartment can be both of those things simultaneously. When I first moved to Vancouver I would go home with a combination of urgency and anxiety. It’s a bit cliché, but in the last couple of years I’ve been noticing physical space a lot. Most of the photography and paintings that I like these days document empty spaces – human creations that seem alien. Anyway, that’s what I was thinking about for this song. I think when I wrote it I had a specific moment in my head, that moment when you first move in somewhere and you are alone, and you haven’t unpacked your things yet.

Quotidian Dream by Sam Tudor

2. “Quotidian Boy”

Writing and performing songs is cool, but it’s also a pretty weird thing. There’s a lot that I find funny about it. I used to write a lot of incredibly broad metaphors that could mean anything and I look back on that and find it funny. The construction of the ‘suffering artist’ image is pretty funny too and I am definitely guilty of it. My good friend Brodie told me that it’s important to always ‘balance the sacred and profane’ in your life. I’m trying to embrace that as much as I can these days, and I think this song says some things that are important to me while laughing at it all as well. The chorus “I’ve got unlimited strikes but I don’t want to play” sums up how I often feel – lots of opportunity, still feeling the urge to bail.

Quotidian Dream by Sam Tudor

3. “Truthful”

At some point in the last couple years I became very frustrated with myself. I was in university, and it seemed like I had become more articulate then ever, but wasn’t sure if I was actually saying or understanding anything important. You can congratulate yourself for being complicated and having lots of layers and nuance, but sometimes all that starts to feel like a weight you don’t need. I tend to overthink things a lot, and I often get stuck in these feedback loops. I got in a pretty bad one at that time, sort of like a ferris wheel you can’t get off. This song is a grasp towards something outside that loop. The chorus originally had much more words but I thought that would miss the point, so I just made it the simplest thing ever. I spend a lot of time on lyrics but this time the vibe was way more important than the words. I wanted to just cut through the bullshit and feel real and that was mostly it.

4. “Brain Stealers”

I think this song is mostly just about feeling creatively empty. When I felt as though I couldn’t write any good songs, I wrote this song instead as a sort of ‘exasperated throwing up of the hands’ type thing. It’s funny that it ended up on the album. It features the return of my trusty organ auto-drum: an old, no-name brand organ with a beat setting that I’ve come to really love. It can’t keep tempo anymore and it currently sits in my childhood home at Gavin Lake Camp. My parents keep trying to throw it away, and every time I visit home I fear it will have disappeared forever. Hang in there, organ. A little longer.

Quotidian Dream by Sam Tudor

5. “Joseph In The Bathroom”

This song is the one that is most important to me. My hometown and my experience growing up there take up a significant amount of space in my mind. Strange as it is to admit, I was ‘popular’ in highschool in the sense that I had friends and managed to navigate all the high-school cliques (I think being friends with everyone can sometimes mean you are friends with no-one, but that’s a different write-up). I was a survivalist though; and I avoided those people I might otherwise have been friends with if they weren’t generally deemed unpopular. I regret that I acted that way and I regret that highschool channels people in ways like that. Weirdly, the older I get the more I remember and think about those kids in the corners – the ones who weren’t as lucky as me and weren’t able to navigate highschool in such a way. I still feel guilty and angry about it all today. I think the song is about more than just that, but in a sense it’s an apology song.

Quotidian Dream by Sam Tudor

6. “Blue Flower”

This is an unlucky song! This song is cursed! I know a girl who was listening to this song and when the line “as the camper van floats off the road” was sung she literally drove off the road and crashed her car! This is a true story! She’s fine, but I have since become very wary of this song. Drive safely, everyone.

Quotidian Dream by Sam Tudor

7. “Chlorine”

Do you know that feeling you get when you stay up really late on social media and your eyes start to feel weird and you are tired but also the computer screen has inhibited all your melatonin so you have insomnia and are also a bit stressed and it’s an uncomfortable dream-like state? For me, that’s part of what Quotidian Dream is. I kind of wanted the album to sound like what that felt like. I think this might be the song that taps into the feeling the best. A big part of this song’s tone is created by the use of the trusty fish guitar. Shaped like a fish, and not a very good guitar, but it has a unique, slightly out of tune tone that I love. So I played that a lot in this song, and we had saxophones and strings and recorded it late at night.

Quotidian Dream by Sam Tudor

8. “Clinical Names”

We made so many different versions of this song. I’m not really sure why this is the one that ended up on the record. It could genuinely have been an accident.

Quotidian Dream by Sam Tudor

9. “Holiday”

I like pop music and big anthemic choruses, but I also tend to write about sad things. So I always end up with weird songs like this one. My brother Harry played the drumbeat first and we wrote the song around it.

Quotidian Dream by Sam Tudor

10. “Silver Lining Skies”

I realize after listening to this record as one entity that a lot of it references being in my room, or being in a room, or being in a house, or something like that. This makes sense, considering how much time I do spend in my room. Most of the album was recorded entirely in my room. At the end of this particular song there is an audio file of me walking up the stairs and opening the door to my room. Or… am I exiting my room? Is this me going out in the world happily or retreating further into my own head? Who knows!? Wow, I am such an artist. I am so deep. Holy fuck. Ho-ly Smokes. In all seriousness, I just thought it was an important way to end the album considering how much I’ve been thinking about insides and outsides.

Quotidian Dream by Sam Tudor

If you’re still here, thanks for reading this! I hope you enjoy the album.

_______________________________________________________

Much thanks to Sam for giving us further insight into his new album! Quotidian Dream is available for purchase on Bandcamp. He will be playing a free set as part of the Vancouver Fringe Festival on Saturday, Sept. 16 at the Big Rock Brewery Fringe Bar (1531 Johnston St), alongside Rae Spoon. For more on Sam Tudor:

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Posted by: Natalie Hoy