#save me professor lawrence save me

[cherryinterlude]

i sat through 3 hours of scientific jargon for this hunky beefy dreamboat in a packed theater full of noisy people and i would do it again

[fanfin-glutton]

A wild Hogwarts Legacy OC appears!

I present to you, Florence Inkwood.

Alright listen, I know there’s a lot oc character sheets out there and I know I’m pretty late to the HL wagon…. But I’ve spent way to long brewing up this character of mine in my head for way too long, so I must unleash her as well with the many stories I will create with her. Hope you will enjoy this ride with me 😌

Florence Inkwood is the youngest of four children, with her oldest sister (Victoria) and two brothers (Lawrence and Edward). Her mother (Elva) is a muggle, and her father (Ottis) is a wizard; Ottis owns an exotic plant and herb shop that caters to both muggles and wizards alike, while Elva stays at home to take care of the housework.

Her family lives in Massachusetts, and all her siblings have attended the Ilvermorny School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Ottis took a brief leave of absence from his shop for his wife's needs after she became ill unexpectedly while pregnant with Florence. Her father had saved her, and Florence's lives by using crushed snakewood leaves from a tree outside of Ilvermorny. The doctors thought this could be why Florence's hair was dark red-brown and the rest of her family was dark brown… as well as possibly cursing her.

Unfortunately for Florence, she was considered a squib for a while, as her magical abilities didn’t appear until she barely turned 15. This disappointed her father; because of the lateness of her power, he had put her in a muggle school so he wouldn’t face the external embarrassment of having a squib child.

Since then, she grew up always feeling inferior to her siblings and those around her; she thought they would see her as weak for her lack of magic. Because of this, she felt especially proud when she could physically dominate most of her male counterparts in school games while wearing a dress that limited her movements. She thought she had to prove herself academically, physically, and mentally to show that she was more than her non-existent magic. The only people who made her feel loved were her mother, sister, Uncle El (Eleazar Fig, aka Professor Fig), and Aunt Miriam (Miriam Fig).

You can read more about how exactly they meet in this post! (X)

Because of their connection and special bond, Florence was accepted into Hogwarts by a letter of recommendation from Professor Fig. Growing up, Eleazar and Miriam would tell her stories of their youth in Hogwarts. Since then, she had always dreamed of attending there, it was a new place she had never been to, of course, but it would also be a way for her to start a new life. And, oh boy, has it been an unexpected adventure for her.

Edit: oh my god thank you guys for the love and support 🥹🥹 means a lot to see people liking my bby🫶🏽🫶🏽💕

[siremasterlawrence]

Brother Boyfriend Redux Part 3

Fire Within

Cowboy Grayson is currently rolling in his bed lost to time as he smirks falling in to a void of nothingness.He free falls in to darkness in the abyss of it all he can see is four walls of glass coming to a head. He ricochets back and forth shattering one glass after another entering one dimension to the next. In the light of golden yellow protection hover over it descending on to him carrying him to the side.

Spinning through time Richard sees me in the middle of the space floating with such of control. I open his arms outward taking a turn he is wide open with excitement the shattered pieces rain over him.His body hit a hard surface upon impact he woke up sigh a large gasp of breath coming from his mouth.His face full of sut covering him in large dark patches he attempts to crawl to a chair but it’s burning hot.

He can hear the sound of a fire truck loudly emerge through the chaos of the city streets and he smirks. The plan is a go as Master Lawrence his ole God perfect in everywhere has depict to come to fruition.The fire truck stops parking in backyard the teams scream planning out the attack to get the fire to cool off. One of them Fire Fighter Brandon breaks in through the hard cold glass smashing the glass on to Brandon.

The man knelt down removing the building remains off of him kicking things inside he lifts him up in his arms facing the exit he is checking the entire area out for every way available. He races towards the window he leaps in to the air crashing through the window he felt scrapes over his body and he lands in h r backyards and puts him down to due a medical check.

He stops finally come to he stares into the surrounding completely in shock to see his crew completely disappear not even a trace of his team is left and all of it comes to ahead. Brandon’s body feels faint, his head began to spin spiraling, internal fiery super hot heat overtaking him, eyes rolling back up into his eye sockets then his body shuts down.

The hour flies by his eyes pop open in to a whole new world his existence became a non starter he cannot recognize anything in his sight he can feel a shadow overcast him. A man emerges from the back of the room a gigantic empty space fill to the broom with I’ll intention he can sense the pain shoot up from his legs upward to his body.

The man he saved from the eruption of the well to planned fire with television coverage and the sound of sirens causing the citizens to panic on to the streets screaming in a will of dismay and shock. The young man places both of his hands on both of his shoulders holding him down to the ground he struggles hoping he could fight and escape though it a failed effort at best.

The other man he calls Master Lawrence his God with gloved hands out stretching in to the air, he knelt down next to him placing his hand on his chin he swivels his face to look at him. Brandon face becomes on of utter disgust his expression of fear is quite sexy if I mist admit it for the world and I have it I mean have to have him I think pulling him in to a kiss.

“Sorry about all this! I set up a trap.”

“I figured that you bastard.”

“Oh! I like them feisty”

“Do you ? You won’t break me”

“Will see about that fucker”

“Fire Fighter pretty boi”

“Fuck you “

“Fine!”

“Gag him, tie him up and drug him”

“Yes Master”

“As you wish”

“No! Stop Please”

“Zip your pie hole”

“Master will displeased “

“Now open up that smart mouth”

“Mwahahahahaha “

“No! Wait”

“Mmmppphhhfff”

“Exquisite”

“You did well”

“Mmmmm”

“Tend to me now”

“Suck me off”

“Enjoy the show pretty show”

The end

Hello Teacher

Reaching the core of his being, receiving the absolute control mentally, emotionally, and physically ownership of the entire life of his being because now my slave Brandon is all mine.

His younger brother Clark who is a moonlighting professor who is also reporter to Major Company The Daily Planet News Paper a rag that I cannot stand to read happens to pass by hoping tocatch him.

He parks the car happily with a bright smile on his face sitting outside of his my home he settles in turning off the engine, he removes his keys placing them back in to the car as he unlocks the door, and steps out of the car slamming it shut.

He starts to walk up the stairs to the front of the door knocking on the front door it opens up greeting him at the mat is his brother Brandon they hug tight.

Whether he knew I am in the shadows he is aware of my presence as his brother leads him inside waving at me with a signal to get the plan going I race down the staircase to get things rolling.

He smirks with love his left hand crosses it’s fingers cementing his own implosion at the hand of his brother the two stand by the couch when Brandon wraps his hand on his neck.

The super muscular hand slicks into his way tight pants pocket digging in to find the prep needle he yanks off the cap pressing it up in the air and the spurts flew in to the air it is all ready.

He raises it up injecting him with it harshly upon impact the syringe goes in deep sinks very quickly the liquid formula soaks in very deep transforming him from the inside he is re-written.

Clark’s eyes roll back face palming in to the ground automatically he starts to fall in to a state of shock he begins to shake frantically speeding in to the wall he is knocked out cold yet again.

Brandon laughs so hard at his brothers own undoing I join them in the room taking his sly hand in mine with his arms wrapping on to me Brandon kisses me slowly our tongues push past each other.

I snap my finger in the air signaling a heavy change with eerie sea air washing over the room cooling everything follow by the dark window shades blocking the sun causing the room to spin.

The furniture start spring backwards freeing the space entirely for all of us to wonder about, the floor pulls apart beneath us an elevator shaft booms on under us descending through a cave below the base the house.

“Brandon carry him to the medical slab in the middle of the room and don’t ask any questions.”

“Yes Master Lawrence! “

“Sir Yes Sir”

“He is set up”

“Excellent! Perfect boi”

“Kneel in front of me”

“Waist on my hips”

“Grip me tight”

“Inhale my scent “

“Mmmmmm”

“Yes Master”

“Now sleep”

“Aaaahhhhh”

“Priceless”

“On to bigger and better things”

“Electrodes, strap and machine check, and check and check.”

“Initiate the transfer “

“Beginning in five…four…three…two…one”

The end

[lvllns]

book recommendations!

i got tagged by @rosebarsoap and @narrativefoiltrope!! thank u both!!

i'm gonna taaaaag @pensdragon @pinkfey @waspgrave @venusmages @queerbrujas @princesshoneytea and anyone else who wishes to do this!!

the last book i read: excluding manga, the red threads of fortune by neon yang!

a book i recommend: always always always the darkness outside us by eliot schrefer. do you like science fiction? would you like to experience the slow unraveling of a mystery aboard a spaceship as two young men gradually fall in love amidst the backdrop of Shit Being Weird? do i have the book for you! i still think about this book two years later. it had me staring at the wall for three days after i finished it contemplating life and what it means to be human.

a book that i couldn't put down: i will not bang on about the previous book so here's a different queer science fiction novel, winter's orbit by everina maxwell. science fiction, political nonsense, trying to solve a murder, slowly falling in love. it's just so good.

a book i've read twice or more: i've read tithe by holly black like. a dozen times by this point. i love the modern faerie tale books so much.

a book on my TBR: re-coil by j.t. nicholas! more science fiction! this time with the ability for people's consciousnesses to be backed-up and then downloaded into a new body!

a book i've put down: i've only ever put down two books. thr*ne of glass and ac*tar. it's a no from me.

a book on my wishlist: somewhere beyond the sea by tj klune! the sequel to the house in the cerulean sea! i'm greatly looking forward to meeting back up with arthur, linus, and the entire group of kids.

a favorite book from my childhood: i can't pick one so the immortals quartet by tamora pierce!

a book you would give to a friend: the city of brass by s.a chakraborty. doesn't matter if you like fantasy or not. you get this book. read it. read the whole trilogy.

a book of poetry you own: cracks knuckles i'm actually sad bc i can't remember if i saved all my poetry chapbooks from undergrad :( however! the year of blue water by yanyi was. amazing. incredible. i know i saved it because it just changed me so fucking much. salat by dujie tahat was also fucking incredible. they spoke to my poetry class and they were a DELIGHT!

a nonfiction book: broken by fred kay which is about the suspicious death of alydar, a famous thoroughbred stallion.

what are you currently reading: the horse god built by lawrence scanlan which is about triple crown winner secretariat, focusing heavily on his groom, eddie "sweet" sweat, and the influence eddie had on the stallion. also diving into looking at how grooms, black grooms specifically, are often overlooked when it comes to the entire package of a race horse.

what are you planning on reading next: oh man probably intimacies, received by taneum bambrick, who was my poetry writing professor (and many other classes professor lmao), and it's a poetry chapbook! and then following that, i will probably pick the tensorate series back up with the descent of monsters by neon yang!

[pandoramsbox]

Sci-Fi Saturday: The Man from Planet X

Week 27:

Film(s): The Man from Planet X (Dir. Edgar G. Ulmer, 1951, USA)

Viewing Format: Streaming Video (Amazon)

Date Watched: 2022-01-28

Rationale for Inclusion:

So far the 1950s has yielded films about a flying saucer that was not extraterrestrial in origin, an accidental trip to mars, and a trip to the moon. What we have not had yet is a tale of aliens visiting the Earth, at least until this week.

The Man from Planet X (Dir. Edgar G. Ulmer, 1951, USA) was selected for inclusion based upon the fact that it was the earliest film of its subgenre released during the 1950s. It beat out the more widely known The Thing from Another World (Dir. Christian Nyby, 1951, USA) into release by roughly a month. My being a fan of director Edgar G. Ulmer's pre-Code horror film The Black Cat (Dir. Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934, USA), which pitted Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi against one another for the first time, also was a factor in this film's selection.

Reactions:

The plot of The Man from Planet X boils down to a first contact situation that goes from problematic to outright messy because of a bad apple scientist wanting to exploit extraterrestrial technology. Overall, my partner and I regarded the film as stereotypical and fairly unremarkable, but it had a couple of interesting quirks. 

Instead of setting the action in the southwestern American desert, as many sci-fi films of the 1950s would, the action takes place in the atmospheric Scottish highlands, which gives Ulmer a chance to exploit skills and imagery picked up as a set designer in the German silent film industry. 

More noteworthy, the visitor from Planet X (Pat Goldin) communicates via musical tones. This method was unique at the time and would inspire a more spectacular interpretation in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Dir. Steven Spielberg, 1977, USA).

However, what stuck with me after the film ended was that the Earthlings may have murdered refugees from a dying planet. Late in the film, one of the men who first encountered the alien, American reporter John Lawrence (Robert Clarke), discovers that the alien is from the mysterious planet that is passing closely to the Earth on its way out of the solar system and mind controlling villagers in order to turn its crash landed ship into a wireless relay station to communicate with their comrades on that planet. Planet X is doomed, and the aliens are trying to escape to a healthy planet. The villagers not under alien influence decide the best path forward is to destroy the spacecraft turned comm station and prevent the invasion, which they do, along with the visitor from Planet X.

Since the alien cannot communicate their intentions to anyone other than the exploitative and cruel Dr. Mears (William Schallert), I found myself wondering if the aliens were actually invading, planet annihilating locust types as later seen in Independence Day (Dir. Roland Emmerich, 1996, USA) or simply desperate refugees. The villagers assume malevolence on the alien's part in turning their neighbors into mind controlled worker drones, but given that the alien failed to be understood by the benevolent Professor Elliot (Raymond Bond), and the man who could understand them attempted to murder them, perhaps it was a desperate attempt to save their race.

My interpretation definitely comes from a lifetime of watching Star Trek and witnessing countries regularly refuse aid to refugees of war and political persecution. Despite the fact that the Holocaust was a relatively recent memory for the filmmakers, I do not think they crafted their narrative with that in mind. Ultimately, I have to tell myself, "The filmmakers probably didn't spend this much time thinking about the plot or its symbolism, you shouldn't either."

The Man from Planet X was built using interesting ideas, but does not make use of them as well as future filmmakers and storytellers would.

[thelensofyashunews]

Lupe Fiasco Shows Off His Unmatched Pen in "Cake" Single From Upcoming 'Samurai'

Assembling assonant syllables into sumptuous literary stanzas, Lupe Fiasco has built a his reputation off the strength of his pen game. Proving that few emcees can touch him even 20 years into his storied career, Lupe shares "Cake," his new single. Over a head-spinning instrumental from Soundtrakk, Lupe flexes like only he can, putting together intricate internal rhymes and off-kilter metaphors to assert an important message: nobody has bars like him. Locking in with Soundtrakk's swirling melodies and satisfyingly old school percussion, the Chicago rapper asserts that he's colder than a Siberian winter, with the pen game of Kurt Vonnegut and a vocabulary large enough to make a computer lose memory. He spits: "Ain't no domino in my dominance, when I'm droppin' this/Janis Jop-a-lin drop-a-lets, it sound like the apocalypse/Mixed with Christopher Wallace's topics, on top a obelisk/This a cobbleous novelist, inside of my esophagus/Rhyme as primin' as Optimus and this sh*t tastes like chocolate cake." The single arrives with a stylish, stripped-down music video directed by Chris and Blaq of IMPAKT STUDIO, which finds Lu flexing on a soundstage as he spits his verse amidst the commotion of production staff around him.

"Cake" is the second single from Samurai, Lupe's ninth studio album and one of the most personal of his career to date. The upcoming album is produced in full by Soundtrakk, making it their second full album collaboration following 2022's DRILL MUSIC IN ZION, and the first album that Lupe and Soundtrakk worked on with their longtime manager, and 1st & 15th co-CEO Charley "Chill" Patton, since 2007's The Cool. The 8-track album is smooth, yet cerebral, brimming with ideas, but always radiating Lupe’s pure love for the art of emceeing and committing himself as a servant of the rap game. Last week, Lupe introduced the album by sharing the single and music video for its title track, "Samurai," praised by Rolling Stone, Complex, Billboard, HYPEBEAST, Clash, The Needle Drop, and more. Now available to pre-save and pre-order on vinyl, Samurai arrives in both physical and digital formats on June 28th via 1st & 15th.

The upcoming Samurai is Lupe's first new album since 2022's DRILL MUSIC IN ZION, which earned critical acclaim from NPR, Complex, The FADER, and many others, including Vinyl Me Please, who wrote "At their best, Lupe’s bars are as visually and phonetically pleasing as popped bubble wrap." The product of a burst of thoughtful spontaneity, Lupe created DRILL MUSIC IN ZION over a short period, diving into a folder of beats sent by Soundtrakk and emerging with a fully-realized album in just three days. In 2023, Lupe kept busy by releasing tracks like "Wild Child (Remix)," a new version of his 2017 track created in collaboration with Chicago house luminary Vince Lawrence, and "Out There," an archival track from the 1st & 15th vault. The iconic Chicago native also settled into his position as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he teaches "Rap Theory and Practice." Beyond music, Lupe continues to focus on the community organizations he founded, including We Are M.U.R.A.L, The Neighborhood Start-Up Fund, Society of Spoken Art, and his cross-cultural content venture, Studio SV.

Stay tuned for more announcements about Lupe Fiasco and Samurai in the coming weeks.

[spinsterennui]

I was tagged by the lovely @archetypewriter ❤️❤️❤️ Thank you so much for thinking of me darling!!! Fair warning, though: you’ve asked *an English lit grad student* to answer questions in a written format. I hope you’ve learned your lesson lol. In my defense, I can’t help being verbose; it’s my nature!!! 😂😭

Tag 9 people you want to get to know better!!!

Last song: XTC “Respectable Street”

Last show: Burn Notice

Currently watching: I always have the tv on in the background bc it reduces anxiety for me, but I’m not necessarily watching; it’s like white noise. The shows I’m actually watching are: Burn Notice, trying to finally finish Lucifer (the second half of season 6), and I’m going to try to get to Lucky Hank either today or tomorrow, despite my having a severe issue with large beards due to traumatic childhood parent issues. I honestly can’t decide if it’s a good thing that Bob has such a terrible beard in this show or not 😭 Like the fact that he’s playing an English professor might have been too indulgent for me without the off-putting facial hair lol.

Currently reading: Unfortunately I don’t read much for pleasure at the moment. A lot of this has to do with being so behind in my dissertation, which causes me to feel like I shouldn’t/can’t read anything that isn’t research; consequently, I end up just not reading. That said, I have been reading bits of Bob’s book A Load of Hooey, which is hilarious and ridiculous but is also easy to pick up and put down because it has a lot of very short parts. Books closer to my research: Killer Apes, Naked Apes & Just Plain Nasty People: The Misuse and Abuse of Science in Political Discourse by professor emeritus of anthropology at St. Lawrence University Richard J. Perry (a history and critique of biological determinism that is written for a non-academic audience — I highly recommend it) and, a more theory-based text, The Age of Scientific Sexism: How Evolutionary Psychology Promotes Gender Profiling and Fans the Battle of the Sexes by feminist/queer theorist and Distinguished Professor of critical theory and gender/sexuality studies at University of Toronto Mari Ruti (also fantastic albeit a bit dated as it’s from 2015 — Ruti has a very interesting writing style, but this book can be challenging for someone unfamiliar with theory and/or reading heavily academic texts).

Current obsession: I mean all apologies for being interminably repetitious, but Burn Notice (as well as Jeffrey Donovan in Burn Notice because a) he’s an incredible actor and b) he is seriously fucking hot in this role). I’m actually rewatching (yes AGAIN), but mainly because I realized that I hadn’t really been paying attention to seasons 1-2 during the rewatch.

When Better Call Saul ended I wasn’t really ready to invest in a totally new show (except for a couple of shorter ones), because it left me a tad despondent I suppose. I’d watched it from day one, back in 2015, after we’d binged Breaking Bad. So I saw that Burn Notice was streaming and thought “low stakes rewatch” because even though I watched the whole series when it originally aired, it ended back in like 2013 I think, and I’d honestly forgotten how good it is. Despite its flaws, it is such an entertaining and satisfying show. It has an incredibly strong and unique female character, and the way Michael and Fiona’s relationship develops (or re-develops) is fun and frustrating and emotionally rewarding at once. They’re both deeply flawed, deeply traumatized characters who love each other more than they love themselves, and slowly they both grow to realize that they can bring out the good in each other while helping to mitigate the bad. They save other people, that’s the sort of formula of the show beyond the burned spy part, but they also save each other, in more ways than one.

I really love shows that, at their core, turn out to be about something more substantial than what appears on the surface, particularly if that something is love in some form. When a show surreptitiously sneaks in a message about love, that show tends to stick with me so much longer and affect me so much more deeply. Better Call Saul, The X-Files, The Americans (admittedly in a fucked up way), The Glory, Lucifer, Leverage (which reminds me that I still need to watch the new one), or even Bates Motel (or ​Buffy/Angel in some ways) all, to one extent or another, have an underlying narrative of love (not just romantic, although that’s a fave for me), as well as related themes of identity (and what it means — like both what you choose and what others assign to you and how that affects your ability to be a fulfilled human), trauma and the aftermath, and family (both blood and found). These themes are quite overt in some of the shows I mentioned and less so in others, but in my opinion the threads run through them all. However, in Burn Notice they each are incorporated into the story incredibly well, which is a big part of what makes the show so compelling for me.

Okay, essay over!!!!! All apologies 😫 Anyway here’s a photo of a special birdie friend on my mantle (the spots are blacked out for privacy bc they are photos of my nephews) ❤️

I’m not going to tag nine people but I am tagging @veyzus @yellowginghamdream @tahiri-veyla @darkskywishes (though I haven’t seen them in a while so I hope all is well) and @nissameta1782 (I always feel weird tagging unless I know someone pretty well, which is weird bc I love being tagged by people I’ve never talked to before lol . . . go figure). Please don’t feel pressured!!! Ignore if you want ❤️

[research-methods-review]

Name: Okonma Victor

Student number: 3162534

Timefulness: Thinking Like a Geologist with Professor Marcia Bjorneruccd

The discussion was about seeing geology far beyond the study of the earth, but rather as how thinking like a geologist can help save the world, by treating the planet better.

One of the salient questions she addressed was to enlighten listeners as to why earth is habitation, she mentioned that the planet's effort to lock away carbon in limestone and other mineral form, aided in this and made it less like venus. She stressed that humans should take better care of the planet, as the repeated carbon emissions were causing global warming, and we need to act fast to find a solution, in order to keep the planet habitable.

I picked the topic to learn more about the planet, and was curious about learning something new away from the fields I'm currently used to, and it opened my understanding about global warming, the planet, and seeing the earth differently.

ABOUT RESEARCHER

Marcia Bjornerud is a structural geologist whose research focuses on the physics of earthquakes and mountain building. Bjornerud is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America and has been a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the University of Oslo. Marcia is a Professor in Geology at Lawrence University 

KEY POINT

Climate Change and Long-term Thinking: Bjornerud stresses the importance of long-term thinking in addressing climate change, advocating for policies that reflect an understanding of geological processes and timelines.

Concept of Timelessness: Bjornerud introduces the idea of "timefulness," which encourages a deeper understanding of geological time and its implications for how we perceive our place in the universe.

Geological Perspective on Time: The discussion emphasizes how geologists view time on a vastly different scale compared to human lifetimes, helping listeners appreciate the immense history of the Earth.

REFERENCES

Lawrence.edu. (2019). Marcia Bjornerud | Lawrence University. [online] Available at: https://www.lawrence.edu/people/marcia-bjornerud-walter-schober-professor-of-environmental-studies-and-professor-of-geosciences [Accessed 1 Oct. 2024].

“Design for a Better World: Meaningful, Sustainable, Humanity Centered” with Professor Don Norman by Bridging the Gaps: A Portal for Curious Minds (soundcloud.com)

‌“Design for a Better World: Meaningful, Sustainable, Humanity Centered” with Professor Don Norman

The discussion opened with Professional Don allowing us to rethink what is real and what's artificial, and allowing us to look at the world differently. He gave examples about 

I picked the topic because the title was titled towards design, and I have a personal desire to learn things about design. As the discussion progressed I soon realized it wasn't what I had thought but about rethinking society, and how we perceive the world. Professor Don enlightened me about questioning what we are used to, and seeing things from different perspectives.

Some of the questions the discussion was asking were things like, why the society has conditioned us to think that women should wear cloth only once, this creates a dilemma and affects global climate sustainability as millions of cloth end up in bins each year, although they are some companies now that have created business models around borrowing clothes, to help tackle these challenges.

Professor Don touched different industries like automobile, economy, fashion, and pointed out how we can make our approaches in these industries more sustainable and human centered.

KEY POINT

Human-Centered Design: Norman emphasizes the importance of designing with a focus on human needs, experiences, and behaviors, ensuring that products and services are intuitive and beneficial.

Emotional Connection: The podcast highlights how meaningful design fosters emotional connections between users and products, enhancing user satisfaction and engagement.

ABOUT RESEARCHER 

Professor Don Norman is an american researcher, author, at university of california, his interests are in areas like cognitive science and psychology. He was Apple VP, founder of design lab. Much of Norman's work involves the advocacy of user-centered design.

REFERENCES

Robbins, Gary (October 24, 2014). "Don Norman has designs on your life". The San Diego Union-Tribune. Retrieved Sep 30, 2024

“Design for a Better World: Meaningful, Sustainable, Humanity Centered” with Professor Don Norman by Bridging the Gaps: A Portal for Curious Minds (soundcloud.com)

[dankusner]

From: Daniel Kusner Subject: Lawrence wright Date: September 7, 2015 at 1:29:18 PM CDT To: "Kusner, Daniel" Daniel.Kusner@dps.texas.gov

You could use this: "Austin is already at the center of the bicycling culture, with flatlands on one side and hills on the other, and great weather for cycling. All we need is more bikeways to make it the perfect place for bikes to rule."

Sent from my iPhone

On Sep 7, 2015, at 1:10 PM, Kusner, Daniel Daniel.Kusner@dps.texas.gov wrote:

Next Thursday, author Lawrence Wright ("Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief.") is coming to Dallas for a reading and signing to promote his newest, “God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State ” which Knopf releases on April 17.

In Chapter 7, “Big D,” Wright recalls having dinner with Robert Wilonsky. That same chapter, Wright says, “The Dallas Morning News, the most important paper in the state and one of the leading papers in the county."

PDF — 512 CYCOLOGY

PDF new yorker — 1988

Can God Save Texas? A Film God Like Richard Linklater Might Help

One of Texas film's greatest voices speaks on the "cruelty" of the criminal justice system in a new HBO docuseries.

Eva Raggio

Film director Richard Linklater takes a look at the inhumanity of Texas prisons. Mat Hayward/Getty Images for IMDbGod Save Texas, a trilogy of documentaries that debuted Feb. 27 on Max, examines some of the state’s deeply rooted issues. Based on the book God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State by Lawrence Wright, the limited series was made in three parts, each by a different Texas director.

The first, “Hometown Prison,” was directed by Richard Linklater; the second, “The Price of Oil,” by Alex Stapleton; and the third, “La Frontera,” by Ilana Sosa.

Linklater has produced a widely varied body of work, including the highly stylized intellectual favorite Waking Life, the coming-of-age comedy and stoner cult classic Dazed and Confused and indie hits such as School of Rock and Bernie.

Cinephiles are perhaps most sincerely attached to his naturalist masterpieces on time, such as Boyhood — which followed its characters through scenes that took place over 12 years and earned Patricia Arquette a Best Supporting Actress Oscar— and the Before trilogy, in which he surprised viewers with out-of-the-blue sequels, completing a love story through near-voyeuristic glimpses of a couple (played by Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke) across cities and decades.

We spoke to Linklater via Zoom from Paris, where he's working on a film that’ll keep him away from his adopted hometown of Austin’s SXSW festival — an event he’s hardly missed in two decades. It's nighttime in the City of Lights, and he has Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris and much more on his mind.

For the Austin-based director, dealing with real subjects (including his own mother, Diane Margaret Linklater, a former professor and advocate for inmates) in God Save Texas prompted a different form of investment into his film’s characters.

“I'm always close to my characters, even if I've kind of created them, written them,” Linklater says. “But there's a real actor there. There's a real person you're working with. So in this case, you're working with real people, you're getting their own personal stories. On one hand, it didn't feel that different. I want to have an affection and an understanding for people, but it's personal: It's their lives, it's my life, it's my mom. It couldn't help but be personal. And you're asking others to tell very personal, sometimes painful stories in their own lives. 

"So yeah, it's a big ask. But I think in a way, they trusted me because I was local and maybe they knew it was personal for me, but I feel close to every story. You're just trying to tell in the way you feel. So it felt right.”

Intercut with scenes from protests and stories of death row inmates, the film sees Linklater returning to Huntsville, a city 70 miles north of Houston that has the most active death row prison in the U.S. Viewers can practically smell the grease off the small-town diner menus as Linklater reflects with his subjects (many of them his old classmates), on how his hometown’s prison industry grew so wildly out of control — at least tenfold, from 10 prisons to 114 — in the past few decades, and uncovers the inhumanity of inmates' living conditions.

The auteur filmmaker is a proud Texan whose roots creep up in his work. And he maintains the love of home while decrying its systemic failures.

“You're catching me on the wrong night,” he says of his feelings for Texas. “We're executing an innocent guy tomorrow in Huntsville, Ivan Cantu, who's being put to death without … I mean, I can't believe it. I'm just stunned and really depressed, kind of a little desperate. We've been doing all we can. It's just like, gosh, the new normal. OK, we can kill innocent people. The next administration, maybe we can start … There's talk of camps. What's next? What can we put up with? 

"So on the one hand, I love Texas and I love the people, but I really do feel a disconnect with the cruelty. ‘Cause I know Texans aren't cruel by and large, but I think our government policies are extremely cruel, and this executing an innocent person is about the top of the list. So I don't know. It's times like this you feel pretty bad.”

Linklater says he didn’t stumble into any major production roadblocks, but taking on a project that required such a deeply personal investment was a matter of facing his past to expose a haunting present.

“Everyone was so giving and open and kind; I think it was just me getting over just wanting to go there myself,” he says. “This film concerns my mom. It's a lot of my own past. I was asking people to tell their stories. So it was just deciding to do it, I think. And I mean, these issues about criminal justice and the death penalty, these have swum around in my head all these years. 

“It was kind of cathartic and satisfying to find a home for some of these feelings. And my summation is fairly simple, really. I think after all of it, it's just like, yeah, the death penalty really does hurt a lot of … there's a lot of collateral damage to so many people and these state employees who have to be dragged through it. So to me, it's just kind of unnecessary trauma induced on innocent people.”

The film focuses on the trauma on both sides of the bars, from convicted inmates (many of whom proclaim their innocence) to state workers whose daily duties include strapping the bodies of death row prisoners onto and off the gurney. His opinions on the death penalty haven’t necessarily changed, but Linklater is more adamant than ever that the system predatorily exploits human error for profit, as we idly cede our rights to a state where punishment far too often exceeds the crime.

“My conclusion is don't do it,” he says. “I'm not a full-blown prison abolitionist, but I'm heading that way only in that — I don't mean let murderers out on the streets. I just think we could approach in a much more humane … the way we systematically create all this pain. We could systematically create more worthwhile treatment. I mean, face it, the prisons are full of people in on — it's mental health and drug addiction. If you treated those things, there goes 90% of the population right there.

“And then keep really the psychopaths, the murderers, serial sexual assaulters. I think we all have a vested interest in keeping certain people isolated from the general population, but people who made a bad mistake or something, I can't explain a tenfold increase. Crime is down everywhere. That's just the trend. Violent crime, everything's down. So why is our prison gone up 10 times in the last 40 years? I don't know. Things we have to ask ourselves. ... We should be investing in people, not just punishing them.”

For God Save Texas, he says, the trio of directors hardly compared pre-production notes beforehand. 

“We were sort of siloed in our own projects,” Linklater says. “We knew what everybody was doing, but I guess I went first and set a certain tone, maybe with the personal. When we started I don't think we really had a full plan. I was like, ‘Larry [Wright, who also executive-produced the series], so are we gonna go to Huntsville?’ And we just felt our way through it.”

Before and After the Before Trilogy

With his cinematic oeuvre falling into an array of styles and genres, Linklater doesn't give much thought to his overarching body of work, preferring to hyper-focus on each film. He says he hasn’t even pondered the uniting thread woven across his projects.

“I don't know. I'm always telling kind of character-based work,” he says. “The concept is never bigger than the characters. They're pretty far away from superhero or anything like that.”

While his films are often of the deeply felt variety that persist on viewers’ minds long after the credits roll, he also adds: “Or laugh. I've made comedies, a little bit of everything. I don't know, just always trying to express myself in my own relation to the particular story or subject.”

Least of all does he consider his legacy, or his writing living on through the ages.

“Boy, I can tell you, I never think I'll live on for generations,” he says with a laugh. “I'm really focused on what I'm doing like right now, making this movie. So that's really all you can do.”

He concedes that he's mildly aware the Before movies have prompted a niche form of tourism, made up of fans who visit the first film’s Vienna locations, for example. But he hasn’t been to Vienna in about 15 years and assumes the interest has dwindled. (It hasn’t; visit the record shop where Jesse and Celine share a charged exchange of awkward missed glances in a listening booth, and see for yourself.) He laughs at our joke suggesting the Austrian capital should’ve given him a key to the city.

Nonetheless, as he finds himself in Paris, Linklater has learned that the bookstore featured in the second installment, Before Sunset, is still a bit of a treasure for fans following the Before map.

In Huntsville, he’s known as “Rick,” a former football player for the state’s highest-ranking team. As a young adult, he self-taught filmmaking on a Super 8 camera. Before long, Rick went on to receive Academy Award nominations, be named one of Time’s most influential people in the world in 2015, and become an advocate for filmmaking, and particularly Texas filmmaking, as co-founder of the Austin Film Society.

He's a successful independent filmmaker whose movies have made a crater-sized mark on pop culture, so one would assume Linklater finds himself in a privileged spot coveted by any artist looking to make an impact without the fine print double-dealings. 

“Successful? I don't know. It doesn't feel that way all the time when you're working on a real low budget and you don't have enough time or money to make your movie,” he says. “But maybe that's it. I've just never cared about, I guess, the money or that result. I've really just focused on the next story I'm trying to tell and kind of avoided a certain kind of careerist trappings. Maybe staying in Texas probably was a good thing for my mental health.”

It hasn’t been hard, he says, to sustain that balance, keeping a sense of artistic autonomy while avoiding industry money grabs and other Hollywood pitfalls.

“You say no a lot," he says. "I think you define yourself a lot in this world — it sounds corny or maybe you heard it: It's like you kind of define yourself by what you don't do. Just because you have opportunities doesn't mean you have to do it. So the things I've turned down, the things I've not wanted to do that I could have, kind of defined you. It's like, yeah, no, I'm really focused over here. I know that's more money and that [I’ll] get to work with some big star, but I don't really want to do that. I want to tell [my stories]. So just follow your own muse.”

During the pandemic, his kids became an elite audience in a Linklater-selected, at-home film festival. He was glad they’d grown past the animated children’s movie days (“I could not wait to get out of kid movies. We did that pretty quick. I'm a filmmaker, I was showing them stuff, but yeah, I could not wait until they were starting to ask me more about movies”) and into more sophisticated cinematic territory.

“Say what you will, the pandemic was terrible, but we watched a movie every night,” he says. “These teenagers [would ask], ‘What movie are you going to watch now? Let's do the French New Wave, or let's watch films from Brazil.’ It was like my own little one-year curation, my own little film society in the family.”

For all the brilliant dialogue that mark his own films, the uniting thread he never thinks about, Linklater isn’t surprised that the most quoted line from his movies was famously ad-libbed by Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused.

“He wasn't even scheduled to work that night,” he says of his fellow Texan. “We worked up that scene and he just threw in that 'All right, all right, all right’ — he said that as he was driving in, and I thought it was really funny."

Linklater remembers that "within a day or two after that," the expression became a popular saying among the film crew.

"I noticed a key grip say, ‘OK, we're laying some dolly track over there. Let's go do that. And [he] goes, ‘All right, all right, all right, all right.' He was already repeating it," Linklater says. " And on one hand, I'm not surprised. I mean, of course you're surprised when you see a T-shirt with it or something like that, that's crazy.

“Matthew … he's earned it, I guess.” 

click to enlarge 

A new HBO docuseries finds Austin director Richard Linklater visiting his hometown to examine a universal issue: the ever-expanding prison industry. 

Max/Richard Linklater

newyorker.com

In “Hometown Prison,” Richard Linklater Looks at Life on Both Sides of the Wall

Richard Brody

8–11 minutes

With little fanfare, a complex and far-reaching personal documentary by Richard Linklater, “Hometown Prison,” dropped last week on the streaming service Max. It’s one of a trio of excellent films made under the rubric “God Save Texas,” based on the book by Lawrence Wright, of this publication—all of which consider the state’s history and politics in the light of the filmmakers’ own lives and families. The second film, “The Price of Oil,” directed by the seventh-generation Texan Alex Stapleton, traces the economic racism on which the state’s oil industry was built, as manifested in its disproportionate pollution of predominantly Black neighborhoods, including her family’s own. The third, “La Frontera,” by Iliana Sosa, who was born in El Paso to a family of Mexican descent, considers the historical unity of that city with its Mexican neighbor, Ciudad Juárez, and the enduring burdens imposed on Mexican Americans by white supremacy and the resulting militarized border. It takes nothing away from these latter films—exemplary blends of journalistic investigation, historical analysis, and intimate experience—to call particular attention to the power and the aesthetic range of Linklater’s documentary, which combines a narrow focus on a single institution with a conjoined exploration of the director’s life and his œuvre.

“Hometown Prison” is about Huntsville, Texas, where Linklater lived from 1970 (the year he turned ten) to 1981. He has previously explored his boyhood experiences there in such films as “Dazed and Confused,” “Everybody Wants Some!!,” and, of course, “Boyhood.” However, “Hometown Prison” concentrates on one oppressive peculiarity of the town: there’s a large prison in the middle of it, in plain view of much of daily life there, and a vast network of prisons spread throughout the town and its vicinity. The prison system is the town’s main employer. Texas, as Linklater relates, has the most incarcerated people of any state; it also executes more people than any other state, and those executions take place in Huntsville. Prisons, in other words, are a ubiquitous presence in Huntsville’s landscape, and yet, Linklater says, “At some point, you don’t really even see it.” In “Hometown Prison,” he attempts to see—and to give voice to silences on the subject, in his life and his work, that he has until now not managed to break.

It wasn’t for lack of trying. Though Linklater credits Wright (one of the filmmaker’s longtime friends, who appears on camera, as he does in the other two films in the series) with the suggestion to make “Hometown Prison,” the work is anchored in two incomplete projects of Linklater’s. The first, a drama that he’d hoped to make in 2002, was about two high-school football players who, a year after graduation, end up on opposite sides of the prison walls. The second was to have been made from documentary footage that he shot in 2003, of protests outside those walls, when an inmate named Delma Banks, Jr., was about to be executed despite abundant evidence of his innocence. Linklater couldn’t find funding for the drama and never did anything with the footage—plentiful amounts of which appear in “Hometown Prison.”

Here, Linklater breaks silence in the most direct and literal way—by speaking. He delivers a copious and confessional voice-over, complete with reminiscences, observations distilled from research, and candid assertions (as when he declares capital punishment “barbaric”). He also appears on camera, in conversation with Huntsville residents whose lives intersect with his and with the town’s carceral economy. Linklater’s recollections of his late mother, Diane (included by way of a talk with one of her friends), involve her activism on behalf of incarcerated people released into town with no support. One of the most revealing exchanges is with Elroy Thomas, a manager at a Huntsville bus depot, who estimates that, in his thirty years on the job, he has sold one-way tickets out of town to hundreds of thousands of newly released prisoners—and adds that, in the process, he has become acutely sensitive to their frame of mind and the extent of the preparedness to return to private life. It’s shocking to see a line of former inmates walking casually away from prison with no clear destination down the closed-off vista of a leafy street. “They don’t offer no rehabilitation,” one of them comments. “If you’re trying to get right, you need to do it on your own.”

Among the ex-prisoners with whom Linklater speaks is Dale Enderlin, one of his former baseball teammates from Huntsville’s Sam Houston State University, where Linklater’s mother taught. (The team was later the subject of “Everybody Wants Some!!”) Enderlin spent thirty-nine months in prison for white-collar crimes, and his main observation from his time there is how routinely young, nonwhite people are railroaded into confessions for crimes that they didn’t commit. A civil-rights lawyer, Bill Habern, who arrived in town as a public defender in the nineteen-seventies, dated Linklater’s mother, and remained a family friend, says, “I came to Huntsville and I thought I’d landed in Mississippi twenty years before.” He shows Linklater bullet holes in his home, estimating that there are twelve to fifteen. Ed Owens, the first Black warden of a Huntsville prison, says that he experienced far more racism owing to his work inside the walls than to anything in ordinary town life; during protests involving one execution, the Ku Klux Klan demonstrated outside his house.

A prison in Huntsville, Texas.

The attitudes of many Sam Houston students interviewed in the documentary belie the centrality of prison to life in Huntsville. Despite being on a campus with clear views of uniformed prison guards, inmates being released, and demonstrations against capital punishment, they claim not to pay much attention to the facility’s proximity. “I’ve never given too much thought to it, until you hear the siren go off,” one student says. Another notes, “It seems that everyone’s aware of it, but no one wants to talk about it”; a third adds, “I’ve never heard no professor talk about it.” Linklater affirms that the “disconnect” is “kind of a Huntsville tradition.” One of his former high-school football teammates says that, even now, the prison “doesn’t even come to my consciousness.”

Of course, there are some in Huntsville for whom the prison system looms large. Linklater interviews many of them: the formerly incarcerated, and family members of the incarcerated; a local historian and activist who seeks to change the town’s civic life and is well aware of being despised for it; former corrections officials, whose firsthand experiences witnessing or even participating in executions has caused them to reject the practice; and a current one who finds the rigors of the carceral system hard to bear. Moreover, Linklater recalls one of his stepfathers, a prison guard (whom he dramatized in “Boyhood”) whom the stresses of the prison system psychologically warped and darkened.

Just a few minutes into “Hometown Prison,” there’s a shot of a restaurant across the road from a barbed-wire-fenced prison unit, which has a cheerful sign announcing “Sunday: Kids Eat Free.” I was reminded of another movie in current release, Jonathan Glazer’s historical drama “The Zone of Interest,” which is set outside the walls of Auschwitz, in a house where the camp’s commandant, Rudolf Höss; his wife, Hedwig; and their three young children live, apparently pretending, to the fullest of their capacities, that their lives are normal. Unlike Glazer, Linklater doesn’t merely observe Huntsville residents’ lives alongside prison but also hears from them. He displays deep and sincere curiosity about what people involved in a cruel system—or even merely living in view of one—say, think, and feel. He probes the psychology of their efforts to keep prison from their minds and also considers the ideologies behind the prevalence of incarceration and the death penalty in Texas—including racism, class-based inequity, an enduring myth of frontier justice, brazen demagogy, and a form of Christian fundamentalism that emphasizes strictness rather than mercy—as well as the practical policies that sustain the carceral system there, including the economic motives of contracts for businesses and employment for residents.

“Hometown Prison,” with its free and hybrid form, empathetically and indignantly brings suppressed agonies to light. It does more, too. Linklater looks deeply at the town’s self-gaslighting, at how it’s maintained and who maintains it, and to what ends. The film is a fervent and trenchant work of political psychology, living history, investigative journalism, and anguished confession.

With humor and the biting insight of a native, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Lawrence explores the history, culture, and politics of Texas, while holding the stereotypes up for rigorous scrutiny.

God Save Texas (Penguin, 2018) is a journey through the most controversial state in America. It is a red state in the heart of Trumpland that hasn’t elected a Democrat to a statewide office in more than twenty years; but it is also a state in which minorities already form a majority (including the largest number of Muslims). The cities are blue and among the most diverse in the nation. Oil is still king but Texas now leads California in technology exports. The Texas economic model of low taxes and minimal regulation has produced extraordinary growth but also striking income disparities. Texas looks a lot like the America that Donald Trump wants to create. And Wright’s profound portrait of the state not only reflects our country back as it is, but as it was and as it might be.

Lawrence Wright is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of nine previous books of nonfiction, including In the New World, Remembering Satan, The Looming Tower, Going Clear, Thirteen Days in September, and The Terror Years,and one novel, God’s Favorite. His books have received many prizes and honors, including a Pulitzer Prize for The Looming Tower. He is also a playwright and screenwriter. He is a longtime resident of Austin.

A light reception will precede the event beginning at 5:30 pm, with the lecture starting at 6:00 pm. Parking will be available on the SMU campus. FREE passes will be emailed to registered guests before the event.  Seating is limited, and not guaranteed.

Wright's publication of the same title will be available for purchase and signing after the event.  

TEACHERS ONLY -- Please sign in at the registration table to receive continuing education credit.

Co-sponsored with SMU's Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Center for Presidential History, the John Tower Center for Political Studies, the Clements Department of History, the Dedman College Interdisiplinary Institute, and Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences.

-- Southern Methodist University

[the-shiftshop]

Hey Diary - Part 4

PART 1, PART 2, PART 3 and SIDE STORY 1 of the Hey Diary Series

The day ended unexpectedly fun. Everyone was so confused why Keith and I had been laughing together, eating together and even sitting side by side in class today as if Keith never had bullied me. Some even tried to confront us, asking if Keith held me hostage. Keith had been dragging me all around with him. He even asked me to play ball with Peter and Tom, who seemed more closer than usual. I would make assumptions that my recent changes are still affecting them, but I already had deleted that log, and these two would, time by time, give hints that they’re nothing more than a friend, so I shrugged it off.

On my way home, I couldn’t get the fun out of my system. I finally felt so free to move. It’s like I can finally do whatever I want and be whatever I want to be.

Then I suddenly remembered what Keith had asked me this morning.

“Make me old enough to be a teacher for a day.”

It got me thinking about what he’s planning to do once more. It’s not that I don’t trust Keith. It’s just that I’m wondering what his goal is. It’s probably just because he wants to experience being old, or being a teacher. He looked so exhilarated when I told him all about the Diary App, so I’m pretty sure he just wants to give it a try.

At home, I didn’t waste anymore time to tinker with the app as I am very tired and I already want to fall asleep. I carefully wrote down on the app, thinking of the desired outcome I am aiming for.

Monday

Hey Diary,

Today was fun. It felt like I was friends with Keith, Peter and Tom ever since the first day we met. We all had fun together and it felt like all my problems are fixed. This morning, I talked to Keith about this Diary App. I have trusted Keith on this, and I do hope he wouldn’t take that for granted. He was super amazed with this app and the ability of it to change reality and he specifically gave me one request.

I wish that would come true, I wish Keith would turn into the person he want him to be just for a day, and that he would be aware of any changes that may occur.

With that properly typed out, I pressed save, then in just a few seconds, I lost consciousness on my bed.

---------

As soon as Felix fainted in his room, Keith was lying on his bed in the frat house, tossing and turning as he feel his body contort in uncomfortable ways. It wasn’t painful. It just felt like his body is growing far more foreign in every seconds that pass by. It’s like his body wanting to grow numb, but he can still feel pain if he try to pinch himself. With his fingers still pinching his cheeks, he noticed hair poking out to them. He proceeded to feel his face with both his hands, realizing that he’s growing a full beard. Finally recognizing what’s going on, he stopped moving around, and he instead just lied on his back and let it all happen.

He moved his hands down to his growing torso, feeling each muscles expand in his touch. He’s growing, that’s for sure, and it’s not just his body. His mind started to fog up a little, making him wince for a bit.

“I should be working on my lessons for tomorrow-” He blurted out unconsciously. He stopped himself midway, realizing what he had just said. That was the first time he said that. And not only that he meant he’ll study for a lesson, he knows he meant that he’s the one teaching them tomorrow.

He finally decided to stand up. His eyes widened when he saw that it had suddenly gone dark. Not only that, but his beddings changed. His shock soon changed into amusement when we quickly see the night change into day then back to night simultaneously, starting off slow, then it sped up. Even the weird feelings all over his body start to feel more prominent. Memories of years of teaching poured out into his brain. Names of all the student he should know popped out in his mind. Charles, that up-to-no-good student but gets straight As in his class; Marie, that campus nerd who kept asking him weird questions; Lawrence, that jock who needs to keep up with his quizzes. Keith already knew some of these students, but he started to see them in a different light. These are the students he teach, not his friends, not his classmates, not his football teammates.

Keith fell back on his knees as he started to feel tiredness.

It was exhausting feeling all of these happen in just a few minutes. It hurts his eyes to see the outside change between night and day as if like flashing images. His vision started to blur and in replace to his clear sight, a thick round glasses appear on his face.

He remember finishing college and finally started his first practice teaching. Now he’s a fully pledged professor. Everyone liked him. He can even remember students confessing their feelings for him, but of course, declining these for his job. He can remember going into classrooms, not to sit with the crowd, but to stand in front of them. He knows how to make a hard topic fun and he knows his students enjoy his class as much as how he loves to teach.

Tiredness was replaced with pleasure as he arched his back, placing both hands on his crotch, then giving a loud satisfying moan. Feeling his cock ballooned through his shorts. He slowly humped against his hands as he put more pressure on them.

He remember tons of hook ups from college up to recent. Remembering women bouncing on him, kissing him passionately, touching him with deep romantic and sexual connection. These thoughts of women is making him hard. His colleagues had been asking him why he haven’t been properly dating anyone yet, or even planning to marry anyone since he’s already nearing age of marriage, but he just enjoys having flings with a lot of people more than sticking to one, at least, for now. He knows when he will find that right person, and that person has not come yet.

He realized that both of his hands are already in his underpants, pawing that hard cock with one hand, while the other is teasing his tip. He finally had let both of his hands stroke his large shaft. He pulled his cock out of his shorts, then finally gave into pleasure.

“A-Ah! Yeah! Damn!” He cussed in his new deeper voice. Not only that he noticed his voice, he realized that his cursing got more softer, less of that slurs, but more of that expression used to show immense satisfaction. “Aww.. This feels so...”

He cut himself as he finally real his climax, cumming all of what seemed like a 14 year stock of cum all over the floor. The cum stain on the floor disappeared soon enough and his room straightened up more. Finally the quick changing of time came to a full stop.

It was morning and it’s time to take a shower and go to school.

---------

Wish was completed. Please take a picture and attach to the log to confirm change and to keep the new reality.

I stared at the pop-up message in my phone. Peter and Tom are laughing beside me while they eat their lunch. I haven’t seen Keith since morning. I’m kinda worried if I messed up with something. The suspense is killing me and I don’t like this. Tom waved a hand in front of me.

“Dude. You’re been staring in your phone since the time you got here. You fine?” He raised his eyebrows.

“Yeah. I’m fine. Just wondering where Keith has gone to.” I said.

“Keith? Who’s Keith?” Tom asked, before giving me a shocked face. “You don’t mean Professor Keith, right?” He chuckled, “Didn’t know he’s your type.” He joked.

I gave him a confused look, then realizing what he meant, I quickly tried to reply back. “N-No! It’s not like that-”

“Tom, don’t tease him. Let him like whoever he likes.” Peter laughed.

“I mean, I should’ve been saying the same. But then, who wouldn’t fall head over heels for Professor Keith? He’s damn ripped. Unlike the other professors here who focus on growing their stomach and ego, more than growing their muscles.” Tom continued eating his food.

Keith’s a professor now, huh? I guess it worked.

After lunch, we proceeded to class. More than usual, everyone had been talking about Keith. I was sitting on my chair, still staring in my phone as it display the same message. I haven’t used this phone on anything else yet.

My attention switched to Alex who walked in front of me. I haven’t seen Alex in 2 days. He looks like he wants to ask me something. I looked at him and he opened his mouth. “Hey, Felix, uhm... Can we talk-”

“Okay, class back to your seats.”

A deep voice came booming through the room. Everyone sat back to their chairs, including Alex who looks disappointed.

I looked at the man by the whiteboard. He was wearing a denim dress shirt and a black jeans. His round glasses flare with the florescent light in the room. Everyone in the room is staring at him. Most girls are looking at him with hearts in their eyes.

The man dropped his things on the table, then started roaming his eyes around the room. “Before we start our lesson. Felix, a word.” He called onto me. I looked around to see everyone looking to my direction, most of them in shock. “Come now.” He said, walking out the room.

I hurried out to follow him somewhere. He didn’t bother looking back, and I just rushed to follow him. He finally stopped where there are barely no students around. He sat down by the window and stared at me. I just stared at him back, looking from his head to toe. He scuffed and gave me a short chuckle.

“Take a picture, it’ll last longer.” He grinned.

“I- Uhm. Sorry, prof. I don’t swing-”

“Nah! I’m messing with you, man!” He laughed. “It’s me! Keith! Well, it’s Professor Keith for you now.”

My eyes widened. This man is Keith. It worked. I mean why am I so surprised right now? I’m the one who knows about this Diary App.

“I’m enjoying this knowledge so much! I know about A LOT of stuff I never knew before. So this is how it feels to be a professor.” He flexed, touched his muscles, and basically showed off. He pulled out an apple and tossed it around. “A students gave this to me today. I never received any offer from anyone.”

“You like it?” I asked him.

“I like it? I LOVE IT! Though, I might not stay like this forever, at least I don’t want to.” He replied.

I raised my eyebrows. “Why?” I asked him.

“Well... For now I want to enjoy being this kind of adult.” He answered.

He stopped for a while, running his fingers against his chin. He then took a bite from the apple he was holding, chewing it thoroughly, then swallowing.

“The reason why I’m asking your help is... I want to experience being different people for the whole week.”

[softinkshadows]

㊙️Secret facts㊙️, or Things the JJK sorcerers would rather die than tell anyone (*ノ▽ノ)

Headcanons, crack edition, of our favourite sorcerers! (partly in homage to @snk-headcanons)

Some extensive contextual references to both the anime and manga ahead ~

----

Itadori Yuuji

Itadori has had a six pack since elementary school. He has also remained at the bottom of his cohort for academic grades since elementary school. Itadori isn’t actually good at cooking; meatballs are his only specialty. His wardrobe only contains hoodies. Itadori really ate his boogers as a kid. Itadori is so bad at reading cursed energy he still can’t tell the difference between a curse and a sorcerer. Nanami once asked him if he considered therapy. Itadori’s favourite mode of transport is Fushiguro’s demon dogs. On some days, Itadori thinks Fushiguro looks better than Jennifer Lawrence. 

Megumi Fushiguro

Fushiguro once tried to pick up smoking in middle school. He gave up because he was irritated at how popular it became amongst his schoolmates when he did. He has a drawer full of un-replied confession letters. Fushiguro can’t sleep without a bolster (he gets touchy in his sleep). Fushiguro cuts his own hair. His go-to drink is strawberry milk. Fushiguro is so unused to smiling he practices in front of his room mirror before giving up. In reality, when he’s genuinely happy his eyelashes grow by 3 centimeters. On some days, Fushiguro admits that Itadori is the person he will always count on to save him.  

Nobara Kugisaki

Nobara likes to dress up in her room and pretend to be a cover girl or fashion model. She once found Inumaki-senpai attractive. But this was probably because he was quiet. Nobara actually got lost in Harajuku station before meeting Itadori and Fushiguro for the first time. Nobara only processes emotions by yelling. Nobara does not feel pain. Ever since arriving in Tokyo, she has been scouted for several television shows. They were all makeover specials. Nobara has a personal grudge against the mirror in Shibuya’s UNIQLO store. She has a private photo folder in her phone dedicated to snaps of city lights, skyscrapers and Maki.  

Inumaki Toge

Inumaki likes to visit convenience stores to look for new onigiri flavours. He assigns expletives to a different flavour every week, and enjoys swearing at others without them realizing. His uniform collar serves a dual purpose of concealment when he sticks his tongue out at people he doesn’t like. Inumaki likes flirting. Inumaki secretly stocks up Yuta-senpai’s favourite snacks just before he returns from missions. Inumaki longs to be kissed (on his beautiful, cursed mouth). He keeps a written diary of things people say to him and and things he would like to say back to them. Inumaki’s favourite verb is “susumu” (keep going). 

Panda

Panda is intrigued by meat, particularly fried chicken, even if they cannot eat it. Panda does not like cooked vegetables. Panda gets PR packages from apparel and household brands with panda designs; they do monthly unboxing videos for over a million subscribers. Panda’s favourite tv shows are Oprah and Japanese crime dramas. Panda reads religious texts on Shintoism in their free time. Panda’s third core is a koala. 

Maki Zenin

Maki once lost her glasses at a party and almost burned down an entire restaurant to look for it. Maki does not like spicy food because it makes her blush. Maki giggles at memes. She has timed crying breaks in the bathroom. Maki secretly names her cursed tools after her favourite celebrities. Maki always buys herself two birthday cake slices. 

Aoi Todo 

Todo drinks protein shakes more often than he would like to admit. He has never won Maki in an arm wrestling match. Todo’s IQ fluctuates between 80 and 155. He has only been part of Takada-chan’s fan club for 6 months. 80% of Todo’s memory is fabricated fantasy. Todo’s teary face has made both children and grown men cry, out of fear. His dream is to open a pancake house. 

Ijichi Kiyotaka

Despite his looks, Ijichi is skilled in Jujitsu and Aikido. He pre-orders extra sets of Itadori’s uniform every month. He has at least 3 Fast and Furious movie posters in his bedroom. He likes to daydream about being part of an A-list sorcerer team with Nanami, with Gojo as his personal chauffeur. Ijichi keeps a treat money jar for every time he feels slighted or overly stressed at work. To date, he has used the jar to visit 3 Michelin-star restaurants. 

Geto Suguru 

Geto developed a sweet tooth after enrolling in Jujutsu High. His first kiss was stolen by Gojo in a supply closet when they were both sixteen (the latter did it for fun). Geto was once dared to shave off all his hair and had to stifle a sob at the thought. Geto’s non-sorcerer disinfectant spray is coincidentally a rose-scented line of luxury cologne called Infinite Love. On a bad day, Geto finds himself indulging in dessert. 

Gojo Satoru

Mostly shameless, Gojo feels the most self-conscious with his eyes uncovered. Gojo gets turned on by an exquisite pair of sunglasses. Gojo doesn’t like drinking alcohol. Gojo once injected sugar into his blood, partly in jest, partly because he was curious. Gojo reads critical theory. Gojo uses SK-II facial treatment essence. Gojo likes reading fanfiction written about him. He keeps a scrapbook for deliberately ugly doodles of Jujutsu society’s higher ups. He is the owner of tabloid news twitter account @jujutsushits. He is also the owner of twitter account @RealNanamiKento. When he has a bad day, Gojo scrolls through old, defunct chats between him and Geto.  

Nanami Kento

Nanami has never suffered from hair loss problems. He earned a university degree after leaving Jujutsu High, where he majored in economics and minored in comparative literature. Nanami freelanced as a poet-writer for 2 months. He is so respectable in jujutsu society that he once sold (more like auctioned) his pair of men’s leather shoes for 500,000 JPY. The buyers were all women. He has a drawer of XXL condoms. He did not buy them (Gojo did). He keeps a slogan t shirt that reads ‘Hot Stuff’. He did not buy it (Haibara did). Nanami is fluent in 5 languages. Nanami’s hobbies are ironing his blue dress shirt and getting into existential crises. Nanami has an excel sheet detailing his weekly expenses titled ‘letsgetthisbread.exe.’ When embarrassed, Nanami is prone to hiccups.

Ryomen Sukuna

Sukuna has a personal list of ‘Top 10 Sukuna Badass Moments’ playing on loop in his head. He sings when Itadori is in the shower to spite him, but mostly because he likes the sound of his own voice. Sukuna has a bad memory, having been alive for more than a thousand years. Sukuna hates contemporary fashion, but has a fascination for Crocs. He prefers jazz to imperial court music. Sukuna delivers lengthy, oftentimes ultraviolent monologues to Itadori when he is bored. He thinks he would make a good university professor. Sukuna is still terrified of motorised vehicles. 

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Notes: writing this was so fun, but some of it made me sad... 

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Taglist (っ˘ω˘ς ) : @encrytpta @wilddreamer98

[spacetime1969]

In your spies AU how did Ferb get involved with shield? What exactly does Candace do as a contractor? Are family meals with Phineas awkward since he has no idea about his family’s escapades? Do the shield spies sometimes do cross agency jobs with Perry? What is Doof up to?

Phineas and Ferb Spies AU

Nick Fury has a long memory, and the avengers getting saved by a handful of middle schoolers and a platypus is not exactly something you forget.

Fury being Fury, keeps an eye on Danville after the “incident.” After the agent assigned to Daville reports the Flynn-Fletchers stopping multiple alien invasions, zombie apocalypses, and sentient plant uprisings, Fury decides to recruit them. 

SHIELD actually tries to recruit both Phineas and Ferb, but Ferb is the only one who actually accepts. He starts out as just a low level agent, but becomes a department head within the month (because stinkelkrampen and positive probability ions). 

Because they were approached together, Phineas knows that Ferb works for SHIELD, but he thinks that his role in the agency is still low level agent, not a department head who regularly meets with Nick Fury. 

This means that during family dinners at the Flynn-Fletchers you have:

Linda: Who doesn't know anything other then that fact that Ferb works for the government.

Lawrence: Who is in the same boat as Linda

Phineas: Who knows that Ferb works for SHIELD but not how high up he is.

Isabella: Who doesn’t know about any of this.

Candace: Who works as a lawyer for SHIELD on cases that require a high security clearance, and is an occasional unofficial mission partner of Stacy and Vanessa when she’s bored. Knows that Ferb is a department head, but does not know that Phineas knows that Ferb works for SHIELD.

Jeremy: Who knows Candace works for SHIELD as a lawyer and that she occasionally joins Stacy and Vanessa on missions, but does not know about Ferb.

Vanessa and Stacy: Who know about Candace, Ferb and Perry, and that Jeremy knows, but not about Phineas. (They’re always invited to dinners because they’re Candace’s best friends and Ferb and Vanessa “dated” at one point for a mission)

Ferb: Who knows all of this except for the fact that Perry works for OWCA (at least officially). 

Perry: Who knows everything

Things get a lot less convoluted after Phineas gets kidnaped.

My personal headcanon for OWCA is that they deal specifically with LOVE MUFFIN and similar “evil” scientists. Villains that aren’t actually hurting people, but could cause serious damage if left unchecked. 

This could be a villain who is legitimately trying to take over the world but is incredibly incompetent, or someone like Doof who has the skills to be incredibly dangerous, but is mostly just working through his childhood through convoluted plots that go boom.

The two agencies don’t usually overlap. When they do it tends to be for a situation similar to what happened in Mission Marvel, where a SHIELD villain and an OWCA villain team up, or a situation where an OWCA villain suddenly becomes an active threat. 

For example, I think that the episode Phineas and Ferb Save Summer would have been a time that OWCA would have called in SHIELD. In that episode Rodney (trying but incompetent) uses one of Doof’s (competent but not actually trying) inators to hold the earth hostage under the threat of eternal winter. Unfortunately Major Monogram got fired and OWCA was in chaos. So Carl, being rapidly promoted from unpaid intern to Provisional Unpaid Major-in-Charge, didn’t think to call in SHIELD for help.

When something happens that leads to the two agencies working together it usually ends up being Perry, Vanessa, and Stacy who are put together for a mission. They usually go out for coffee afterwards too.

As for Doof, he’s off becoming Professor Time like we see in Milo Murphy’s Law.

Send me an ask with a question or idea for this AU!

[hellothirteenhere]

Jujutsu Kaisen x Harry Potter

I feel as though every fandom has that obligatory multichapter Harry Potter!AU. Of course, that’s not to say that our amazing writers hadn’t been writing fic within this universe. (For example, check out seadawnn’s ‘Conquest of Hearts’ - Wholesome™ Itafushi that makes me smile every time I read it.) But I’m interested in seeing how a full-blown Jujutsu Kaisen universe would be like in an alternate Harry Potter-setting. So! I’ve been thinking long and hard about how it would play out and here are my headcanons for our very own Golden Trio! Couldn’t quite place them definitively in their Hogwarts Houses, so I would love to hear your opinions on where each of them should go, as well as your own personal headcanons.

Yuuji Itadori | Gryffindor/Hufflepuff (5th Year)

Ok, so here's the thing: typical shonen protagonist conventions tells me to put Yuuji Itadori in Gryffindor. And it makes complete sense! We see that he's brave - fucking demon possesses you and all you say is "What are you doing with my body?"?. But he's also willing to admit when he gets scared, like when he first faced a Special Grade. GryffindorJock!Itadori who is the captain of the Gryffindor Quidditch Team is a mental image I'm not willing to let go of anytime soon. However, Yuuji is also an incredibly kind individual who just wants to save other people. Hufflepuff!Yuuji is that guy who is popular with everyone at Hogwarts, he cooks meatballs in the kitchens at midnight as he talks to the house elves as though they were close friends, and he would definitely take a curse or two in order to save his friends if the situation calls for it.

Background

Yuuji grew up as a mostly normal kid. Sure, there had been strange (almost magical, somehow) instances here or there but he was an energetic enough child that it never really occurred to him to dwell on them for too long. 

As long as he could remember, it was just him and his grandfather. Supposedly, Yuuji had an older brother. But for some reasons that his grandfather refuse to tell him; he had to go away when Yuuji had been very young. He doesn’t even remember what his older brother looked like. But then again, Yuuji can’t even remember what their parents had been like - so he doesn’t really feel as though there was anything lacking in his upbringing. After all, how can you miss something you never had? 

On his eleventh birthday, his grandfather solemnly sits Yuuji down and tells him that he was a wizard.  He was a “Pureblood” - and potentially very powerful - wizard. His grandfather had been born a squib but he had known enough to explain to Yuuji the basics of the world that his parents had once belonged to. 

Imagine: “Yer a wizard, Yuuji.” “….Sweet.”   

His grandfather then hands him two things: 

First, a letter from some Hog-Wash-Hagwarts?? Warthog? School of Witchcraft and Wizardry that he was to attend. His parents had gone there as well to learn magic. 

Second, a long, sturdy piece of polished wood. When grandfather had taken it out of its box, Yuuji had looked at the wand skeptically - almost a hundred percent sure that the entire thing was one huge joke. But his grandfather was no prankster, after all, because as soon as his fingertips touched its surface, he felt a warm glow rush into his fingertips. 

According to his grandfather, the wand had been his mother’s, passed on to his grandfather for safekeeping after she had died all those years ago. 

When asked about the whereabouts of his father’s wand, his grandfather’s face turned dark. It was with Yuuji’s older brother, he said. His older brother who had also been attending the same school that he would be. 

Headcanons

Itadori is one of the best Defense Against the Dark Arts students of their year. He also gets great grades for Charms and, much to everyone’s surprise, Potions. A Chaotic Good™ through-and-through, Itadori tends to forget to follow the very strict instructions that Potions Master Kento Nanami wrote at the blackboard, and yet despite eyeballing the ingredients, his Potion turns out great every time. HOW? No one knows.

His dorm room is filled with Muggle posters - it just feels too weird to have a magical poster of a tall woman with a big ass greeting him every time he woke up or entered his dorm room. He learned the hard way that there is such a thing as too much of a good thing when Todo gifted him a moving poster of Jennifer Lawrence.

He tries his best to collect Chocolate Frog cards, bless his heart - but he always tend to lose them in the journey between Hogwarts and his home every summer. Little does he know that Kugisaki and Toge pilfer the ultra-rare ones that he somehow manages to pull in a semi-regular basis. 

Megumi Fushiguro | Hufflepuff/Ravenclaw (5th Year)

Primarily, I want Ravenclaw!Megumi Fushiguro as an aesthetic. We already know that he likes to read non-fiction books in his spare time (babes, i love you but that is nerd behavior), and he's shown that he's very sharp and intuitive when it comes to battles. He is also very knowledgeable about the Jujutsu World. Also, pretty boy looks damn good in blue. I can just imagine Megumi as the quiet, brooding Ravenclaw who is somehow friends with every insane person in Hogwarts. However, Hufflepuff!Megumi embodies who he is as a character. He's loyal to his friends and family, selfless when it comes to protecting the others, and he's willing to work hard behind the scenes even if he doesn't get recognition for it. We also saw how Megumi was willing to be the sacrifice bunt if it meant that Kugisaki had the chance to move forward during the baseball scene.

Background

Megumi came from an aristocratic Pureblood family, the Ancient and Most Noble House of Zenin. An extremely powerful wizarding family rumored to be distant relatives of Salazar Slytherin himself. Only - his father Toji had been born a Squib who married his mother just to spite his conservative family. Much to his surprise, however, Megumi was born not only an incredibly talented wizard but also the first parseltongue of the Zenin family in years.

Professor Gojo - back when he was still an Auror and not the DADA instructor at Hogwarts - came to the Fushiguro family household after he had apprehended Fushiguro Toji or, as the wizarding world commonly knows him as: the Sorcerer Killer. Much to his surprise, he doesn't find Toji's wife nor his stepdaughter - instead, he finds tiny Megumi talking to his pet garden snake, Orochi. He ended up taking Megumi under his wing, letting him live at the Gojo family’s home and later taking him to Diagon Alley a week before he started in Hogwarts. 

Gojo buying Megumi his pet owl, Nue. 

No, YOU’RE crying. 

Of course, the Zenin family kick up a fuss about custody. It's only Gojo's status as the strongest wizard alive - as well as his well-placed threat to make the knowledge that the notorious Sorcerer Killer had once been a Zenin known to the wizarding world - that keeps them quiet.

Headcanons

Megumi's best subject is Care of Magical Creatures - though he’s also great at Defense Against the Dark Arts and Transfiguration. Students are, by school regulations, only really allowed one (1) pet (an owl/cat/toad). And legally, Megumi has his horned owl, Nue. It is, however, an open secret within the Hogwarts community that Megumi Fushiguro walks around the castle with his pet snake Orochi wrapped around his wrist under his cloak. No one questions that Megumi arrives at Hogsmeade, conveniently trailed by the same black and white dogs every weekend. His roommates learn to turn their heads the other way when the bunnies under Megumi’s bed escape their cage.

He used the expansion charm in order to house his ever-growing collection of pets. Imagine Newt Scamander’s suitcase but, instead of a large sprawling space, it’s a cozy room filled with books and pets and pet paraphernalia.   

He’s not competitive enough to play Quidditch, but he attends every game to support his friends. He also attends their practices sometimes but just sits at the pitch to read his book, do homework, or take a nap. 

Half-Veela!Megumi make brain go brrrrr

Kugisaki Nobara| Slytherin/Gryffindor (5th Year)

Out of everyone, I had the hardest time placing the Kugisaki. I feel as though Slytherin!Kugisaki is the girl who dropped everything in order to go live in the city - the girl who was willing to do anything, even join a career with a high possibility of dying, just to follow her dreams. She is unapologetic about being herself, highly resourceful, and is one luxurious queen. But Kugisaki is also incredibly brave - unafraid to stand up for the girl who was being ostracized by everyone in their part of the countryside. I implore you to imagine Gryffindor!Kugisaki pulling the Sword of Gryffindor out of the Sorting Hat in order to save other people. 

Background

Kugisaki is a Muggleborn who used to live in the quiet countryside. She’s an incredibly talented witch who started showing signs of magic at an early age - something that had frightened her, especially because it was clear that it also frightened her parents. She tried to suppress her abilities, trying to fit into society for a while - that is, until a girl named Saori moved in from the city.

Saori had been a Pureblood witch who had grown up in the Wizarding World. She had been the first person told Kugisaki that her magic was a blessing instead of a freak of nature or something that she had to hide. Saori talked to Kugisaki about the wonders of their world that she would one day get to take part in. She told Kugisaki about Hogwarts, Hogsmeade, and all these wonderful places that she would get to go to. 

However, because they were a Pureblood family, Saori and her family did not know how to integrate within the Muggle community. Not too long after their arrival, horrible rumors about their family started spreading - that they were cultists, satan worshippers, etc. Eventually, they decided to move away from the country. Before leaving, Saori made Kugisaki promise to find each other one day and to never turn back on who she truly is.

When Kugisaki first received her letter from Professor Shoko Ieiri who mysteriously appeared in their doorstop the night of her eleventh birthday, the professor explained to her parents about magic and the wizarding - only, Kugisaki was only half listening. 

Unlike her parents, she wasn’t surprised one bit - it was only a matter of time, after all, and she was finally going to get to go to Hogwarts. Surely, Saori had already graduated by the time she entered but it was definitely one step closer to finding her childhood friend. 

Headcanons

Kugisaki has pretty good grades all around - but she is definitely known as the best in their year at Charms. She also has great grades at Defense Against the Dark Arts. She and Yuuji definitely almost failed History of Magic, though. They have too much energy to just sit quietly and take notes in class - especially one taught by a ghost. 

Every store owner in Hogsmeade knows Kugisaki by name - and by extention, they know Yuuji and Megumi too. She has long since mastered the art of dragging her friends all around the shops and still not paying a single Knut by the end of their Hogsmeade visit. At the end of every visit, Yuuji and Megumi swears that it would be the last time and yet, every visit, she still manages to wrangle both of them into coming with her 

In Potions, Kugisaki is a force to be reckoned with. Her cauldron always appeared to be on the verge of exploding and yet, somehow, a supernatural force (or by the sheer strength of her own willpower) seem to keep her from completely fucking up every time. 

BeaterNobaraBeaterNobaraBeaterNobaraBeaterNobara  

COMING UP

Slytherin!Sukuna Ryoumen

Ex-Auror-turned-DADA-Professor!Gojo 

Potions-Master-not-Professor!Nanami

Slytherin!Maki Zenin

Ravenclaw!Inumaki Toge

Hufflepuff!Panda 

[gotmilk5101520]

Trollhunters Book (2015) the weird book that would be the start of Tales of Arcadia

Trollhunters book. Read it and... what was all that?

Some spoilers below the cut.

So many things were different from the series we know and watch. It has a lot of horror and it was suppose to be a live action series adaptation of the book (Hey, Hollywood, if you want to do a live action remake of Trollhunters then just base it on the book. We already have the cartoon don’t want you ruining it like Rise of the Titans did) There were a lot of differences from the show i know, but it also had somethings that would be told differently from the book.

Instead of his mom, Jim lives with his dad James “Jim” Sturges Sr (And Jim’s last name isn’t Lake but Sturges which is actually important) who is a paranoid and traumatized man after losing his brother Jack Sturges in 1969 under a bridge and seeing some monster. Oh, and everyone lives in San Bernardino not Arcadia Oaks (So i guess it’s Trollhunters: Tales of San Bernardino?) And Barbara was the one that walked out (The book never gave Jim’s mom a name, but going with the series i chose to still call her Barbara) Oh, and Jim’s dad invented the Excalibur Calculator Pocket (Jim wielding Excalibur was foreshadowed as far as the book)

Jim is short. Like really short. Claire is taller than him (Okay am i the only bugged by that? Why didn’t the series let Claire be taller than Jim? Where are the aus where Claire is taller than Jim?) Tobias is called Tubby or Tub not Toby, and he’s Jewish, and he still lives with his grandma (The book doesn’t call her Nana) Claire is Scottish, apparently her birthday is May 2nd which is a day after Jim’s (Which is May 1st, but the series changed his birthday to October 10th) and her baby brother Enrique doesn’t exist in the book.

Steve is still Steve just more brutal and can get away with everything, his last name is Jorgensen-Warner, and is a Changeling (Though the show was going to make Steve a Changeling like in the book. But they changed their minds, as shown in episode 7 To Catch a Changeling, and his troll form was reworked into Draal. Now i have to wonder if Changeling Steve would’ve been better than what happened to him in the movie)

Blinky is an octopus like troll, with eight eyes (Four of them are blind) Aaarrrgghh is a female here with black fur. Gunmar the Black is red even though they call him the Black (I guess Gunmar the Red didn’t sound good) And the history of trolls is very different from the show. Also Killahead Bridge is called Killaheed Bridge.

The school actually has more teachers than the three in the show (Coach Lawrence still exists in the book) There is: Principal Cole, Miss Pinkton the math teacher, Miss Leach the drama teacher (Miss Leach probably later became Miss Janeth in the show) Senor Uhl doesn’t exist in the book. There are other characters like Professor Lempke (Someone i’m gonna talk more about later) Tubby’s dentist is named Dr. Papadapolous and not Dr. Muelas (Or as i like to call him. Guillermo Del Toro the Dentist) Sergeant Ben Gulager (Probably later became Officer Brennan)

There are different types of trolls like Nullhullers, who can vomit out all of their organs save their hearts to become faster. If i had to learn about this, you should suffer too. But i won’t say how Changelings replace their baby counterparts. It’s something you have to read yourself but it’s really really disturbing.

The Amulet of Daylight isn’t called that, and the Amulet is a Medallion that translates troll (So it doesn’t give you a suit of armor, or gives you a sword to fight trolls) The Trollhunters are different too. It’s the Amulet of Daylight that picks a troll to become the Trollhunter, with Jim being the first human Trollhunter. That is not the case here in the book. The Trollhunters were always humans and they fought the trolls that kept eating them. The Sturges are one of the family of Trollhunters, and towards the end of the book it’s revealed Claire is one too. And Merlin and Morgana have nothing to do with the book.

Jack Sturges was an interesting character to me and it makes me mad that he was one of the characters that wasn’t in the show. Hey i’m just saying, they could’ve made him be Barbara’s missing old brother if they didn’t want James in the series.

There were moments from characters that i always found strange and surprised the book didn’t confirm that.

Starting with Steve not Palchuk but instead Jorgensen-Warner. Now the book reveals he’s a Changeling cause Tub touched him with a horseshoe and Claire kills him. Some of Jim’s classmates would be among the kids that begins to disappear. And then later Claire gets taken as well. The book never confirms or denies it, but i believe Steve was the reason Claire and some of his classmates were taken. I say this cause when Claire tells Steve off (Which by the way was an awesome scene and i think she also Rule Number 3 him) and he walks away angry and then later she gets kidnapped. I found that weird and too convenient. And now that i’m thinking about it. Steve was bullying Jim and Tub before Claire tells him off. Thinking about it i think if Claire didn’t interfered then Steve would’ve picked Jim and/or Tub to get eaten by Gunmar. But that’s just my headcanon.

Another character i want to talk about is Professor Lempke, who i feel was split into two characters in the show, Strickler and Nomura. Lempke is an arrogant man who is also working to restore the Killaheed Bridge. Doesn’t that familiar? The book never confirms it, but it’s possible that Lempke was a Changeling too and was restoring Killaheed for Gunmar. Why else would he talk about how great the bridge is and went through all the trouble to get it to San Bernardino? And when Gunmar was freed and fighting, Lempke, as Jim said, was overjoyed at the battle and then after the battle Lempke disappeared. That last one honestly seemed like a sequel hook.

Given how somethings were i feel like, if Tales of Arcadia didn’t happen, then the book would’ve become a series. Trollhunters was from Jim’s point of view, and i feel like if we got the book series instead of the cartoon, then there could’ve been spin off books sequels and prequel. Maybe Trollhunters spin offs one from Tub’s point of view and one from Claire’s point of view, Trollhunters prequel on Jack when he was taken, Trollhunters sequels that may had them dealing with Lempke and possible other enemies and finding other Trollhunters. Who knows.

But all and all. The book was a good read and it really shows what would influence the show. Truth by told reading the book made me lose my appetite for a while.

[thekillerssluts]

We’ve Got A File On You: Win Butler

In a year when a lot of our plans have been on hold, Win Butler has been busy. In April, the Arcade Fire ringleader let us know that the band had been working on music shortly before lockdown, and then he let us hear some of it. Last week, on the night of the election, the band debuted a new song called “Generation A.” Apparently, Butler was one of the people who found quarantine more inspiring than suffocating. Just a couple weeks ago, he amended his previous hints with the update that he’s written “two or three” Arcade Fire albums thanks to having to stay still all year long.

It seems like there’ll be a whole lot of new Arcade Fire goings-on to parse sometime on the horizon, but that isn’t the reason Butler and I got on the phone one recent October afternoon. Butler’s not quite ready to talk about forthcoming music yet, aside from saying this era of writing gives him flashbacks to that which preceded The Suburbs and promising “The new shit is about some of the best shit we’ve ever done” as we say goodbye.

In the meantime, there have been some milestones this year: The Suburbs turned 10; Butler turned 40. There is, of course, a whole lot of rich Arcade Fire history between their early ’00s origins and now. There are too many high-profile collabs to dig through, too many pop culture crossovers to cover, in just one conversation. But before Arcade Fire’s next chapter begins, while we both had a moment of quiet at home in the year 2020, Butler and I took some time to dig back through highlights and surprises from across his career.

Appearing In Bill & Ted Face The Music (2020)

How did this happen?

WIN BUTLER: They were filming in New Orleans. I’m kind of the exact age where Bill & Ted really has a soft spot in my worldview. [Laughs] That was just like, yeah, of course I want to be in the Future Council. That’s the part I was born to play. No, it’s funny, it was just one of these random things that come through the email. Usually, it’s, “Nope, nope, nope, nope.” But this was, “Tell me when, tell me where, I’ll be there.” It was on soundstages. When we were filming it, Tommy Lee from Mötley Crüe was back there, and he sort of disappeared at some point. I got to bring my son, who’s six. He was hanging out and we were talking to Keanu about Canada and punk bands back in the day. It was a pretty sweet hang. It was a bright spot in 2020, let me put it that way.

You say you get these emails — is that random stuff they want Arcade Fire to do, or there’ve been other cameos you turned down?

BUTLER: Oh, no, it’s mostly random licensing or stuff that goes to the junk box. But every once in a while, it’s like, “Hey, that sounds like a nice way to spend the day.” I started out in film. I went to Sarah Lawrence College in New York around 2000. I had really wanted to go to film school, and I could never get in. [Laughs] Initially, the song “The Suburbs” was an idea I had for a film and it seemed easier to make a song than a film.

The Suburbs (2010)

That was a convenient segue. The Suburbs just turned 10. I was wondering if you have gone back and revisited it much amidst that anniversary.

BUTLER: The whole experience of Funeral was such a rollercoaster. We were on the road so long. We didn’t have much of a break going into the second record. For The Suburbs, Régine and I — I don’t think we saw anyone for a year straight before we even started demoing or anything for that record.

It was a time in my life… I don’t know, I was in my late twenties, and there were all these details of my childhood in Houston. You know, I moved to Canada when I was 19. [Houston] almost felt like this other life I had. I would close my eyes and imagine riding my bike through town and trying to find the edges of my memory. There was kind of all this emotion that came up through that, and I wanted to capture it. It’s funny, as a songwriter, most of the time I feel like my mind is living in the near future. You’re listening for these little signals in the air. This was almost inhabiting the emotional space of these memories but thinking about it as the future.

When you say it like that, I’m curious if the album feels different to you now that you’re a father yourself and another 10 years down the line. Like another layer to that refracted youth, sort of?

BUTLER: Totally. In a way, I feel like the last year has been a parallel to that year before The Suburbs. Then I was kind of a hermit by choice, and this has more been the world conspiring to make me a hermit, but it has been a really introspective. In a sense, the material that we’ve been working on feels the same way, this hybrid of your emotional landscape and the future.

It’s almost seasonal, like a trade wind that blows in once in a while. I remember we played with Neil Young when he was still doing the Bridge School Benefit and hearing him sing “Old Man” as an old man, almost like he wrote the song when he was 22 to sing when he was 80. I think there’s an element on that Suburbs record that’s like that as well.

Winning The Grammy For Album Of The Year (2011)

Obviously that was a huge turning point for Arcade Fire because you won the Grammy the following year. As a suburban indie fan at the time, I had no real grasp on how big certain bands were. From where I was, it was pretty trippy that you guys won that.

BUTLER: I mean, tell me about it. It was definitely pretty trippy.

There are very, very early moments of you guys getting linked up with some iconic artists. Arcade Fire got plenty of respect from the beginning. But at the same time, the Grammys is something different. That’s a moment of mainstream insurgency. Ten years on, you’re one of the big indie bands of your generation, but also one of the only rock bands to get to that level in recent times.

BUTLER: I don’t know it was the best record that year, but it was definitely the best record nominated that year. I mean, we were up against a Lady Gaga remix record and like, Katy Perry. We weren’t up against a great Eminem record, we were up against a not-that-great Eminem record. In a certain sense, I was like, “Well, I think we should win.” [Laughs] I think we had the best record.

I remember in high school Radiohead and Björk were the two [new artists I loved]. I bought The Bends the day it came out, I bought Homogenic the day it came out. And then everything else I listened to was artists that had broken up 20 years earlier. I remember watching the Grammys the year OK Computer was nominated and it didn’t win, and I was just like, “Oh, that thing must not mean anything then.” I remember Dylan won, and it’s a really great Dylan record, but objectively OK Computer was the best record. So if that didn’t win, then what the hell does that thing mean? After that, I didn’t think about the Grammys that much. It wasn’t on my list of my dreams of my career and what I could accomplish and what I wanted to do.

For me, I was looking more at a band like the Cure or New Order, these bands that were really just artistic entities but you would hear them at a pharmacy once in a while. Like, I’d hear “Bizarre Love Triangle” come on in the pharmacy in Houston and just be like, “Is this from outer space? What the fuck is this?” My dreams for our band was to do for other people what those bands did for me, which was just throw me a fucking lifeline. Because I was just like, “What is this world, and where are my people, and how can I feel OK existing?” My grandfather played in big bands and played with Louis Armstrong, and he bought me a guitar when I was 15. I held on to that thing — if I didn’t have that I don’t think I would’ve made it out of high school. It literally saved my life. I don’t think I could exist without that.

For me, the Grammy thing was strangely moving. Even up until the moment we won, I just felt like an interloper. Even when we won, people looked at us like aliens. Like, “Who? What?” You know, I’m a competitive person. It was really exciting. Cool, awesome, the universe makes sense for one second. It’s interesting, I didn’t expect it to mean anything until we won, and then it meant something.

David Bowie (2005, 2013, Throughout)

I alluded to this earlier but: The Grammys were like an industry stamp of approval. From the beginning, however, you guys were embraced by a lot of elder artists — particularly artists who were influences on the band. One I wanted to talk about was David Bowie. He was a very early supporter; you performed together in 2005, which turned into a live EP. Then he shows up on “Reflektor” in 2013. Somewhere around 2015, you talked about how you’d come to regard him as this professor-type character in your life. He came to your first New York show, right?

BUTLER: Our first headlining show, when we played at the Bowery, Bowie and David Byrne came to that show.

Wow, no pressure huh.

BUTLER: It sort of set the table. Like, “Well, I guess this is how it’s going to be right out of the gate.” [Laughs] It’s funny, I have a photo of David in my studio that I look at when I’m working sometimes. It’s just him in a dressing room with one of those kind of Hollywood mirrors behind him. He really… I don’t know, he felt some sort of spiritual connection with us. It wasn’t like he wanted anything from us. I just think he wanted to say, “Hey guys, you’re going on the right path, keep going.”

I was emailing him over all those years. I don’t know if you have anyone close to you that’s died and you go back and read those emails, it’s really these strange digital fragments of someone you care about. After he sang on “Reflektor,” Régine and I bought him a painting in Haiti as a thank you gift. We were supposed to mail it to him and we got busy and forgot about it, and in the interim he passed. I knew he wasn’t well, but I didn’t know he was dying. Maybe a couple months later I remembered the painting and I dug it out and it was a painting of a black star. A voodoo painting of a black star with rays coming out of it.

I didn’t know anything about his record being Blackstar or anything like that. Now it’s on the wall of my bedroom. Shit like that sometimes happens in my life. I take it for what it is. I don’t know exactly what that means and I just feel grateful… I don’t know man. Even just how inspiring, what he put into his art even in death. He’s someone I think about at least on a weekly basis.

Backing Up Mick Jagger On SNL (2012), Playing With The Rolling Stones (2013)

Obviously that was an ongoing relationship, and you’ve worked with David Byrne too, and you referenced playing with Neil Young. Still: Being onstage with the Rolling Stones seems particularly daunting.

BUTLER: We were Mick’s backing band on SNL. SNL is maybe one of my favorite American institutions. I don’t know if it’s the Canadian thing since Lorne [Michaels] is Canadian. The first time we did it, it was just like, “This dude is my friend.” I don’t know if Lorne’s kids like Arcade Fire or something. But I was in New York randomly and he was like, “Mick’s doing a thing,” and I said, “We do a pretty amazing cover of ‘The Last Time,’” and he said “Come on down, let’s do it.” Then we’re Mick’s backing band. I don’t know, pretty fucking cool.

What is Mick Jagger like to work with?

BUTLER: Mick is like: As soon as the light goes on, he’s a different person. When he turns it on, it’s like this muscle memory — like if you were with the greatest ballet dancer ever, and you say go and this energy comes out of him that is so practiced. It’s someone who’s an absolute master, after practicing something for decades and decades and decades. That was pretty amazing to see. You’re chatting with someone, we’re at the piano and we’re talking about an arrangement, “OK, let’s do a run,” and then, “Boom! Shit!” There he is.

It’s this other level. I feel like people at that level, music’s not something they’re fucking around with. [Laughs] Music is a spirit. You hear something, and if it strikes a chord with you, it connects something at your deepest core. People like that, when you see them do their thing, it really is this other plane. It’s not this show thing. It’s more of a possession. You can hear it in the music.

I feel like I’ve listened to more music during COVID than any time since I was like, 18. I had this moment when I was listening to these amazing records from the 1950s. You can hear the room. It’s almost like audio VR — you can hear the drummer here and the bass player over here. There’s a sense of space, particularly to that older music. It’s a snapshot. If you hear “La Bamba,” right now, that is what it is. It’s a spirit captured on vinyl, on a piece of tape. It’s alive within that.

With people like Mick, they’re a little bit closer to the spirit of rock ’n’ roll — a literal spirit, not a figurative spirit. Bowie was the same. When he played with us in Central Park, the second he hit the stage he’s illuminated. You’re like, “Oh, shit, that’s what it is.” He’s a human when you’re talking to him and as soon as he’s in it, he’s touched by another thing.

SNL (2007-Present)

I’m glad you brought SNL up, because you’ve been on it a bunch of times, but you’re also one of the musical acts they’ve brought into skits. Like, they actually wrote a game show around you. How does that work? Did they write that sketch with you guys, or you walked in and they’re like, “Hey, by the way…”

BUTLER: I can’t remember, I think we’ve been six or seven times. We’ve been there for a couple different casts at this point. The Lonely Island dudes, those are so my dudes. In another life, I would’ve been in Lonely Island, that would’ve been my dream to just fuck around with my friends; when we were first writing music we were kinda joking around because you’re too insecure to try. A lot of times [at SNL], we’ve played for the staff when we’re there, because you get so fired up to play one or two songs and you’re playing live so your endorphins are running so we just sort of keep playing afterwards. I feel like they appreciate that, it kinda feels like you’re on the same team or something.

I was backstage at SNL once last year, and it is pretty crazy to see it all from the inside like that.

BUTLER: It’s so crazy. They write it all that fucking week, and then to see the differences between the dress rehearsal and the live show. They do a little meeting in Lorne’s office. They’ve done the dress rehearsal and it’s still this tiny office and every cameraman and every cast member is crammed in this little office and Lorne’s like, “Make it a blue light instead of a green light at minute 23, and change this word to this word, I don’t think that’s funny, change that, OK, go,” and everyone’s got pencils writing this down. It’s still fucking that. And you know, it hits and misses sometimes, but they’re doing it.

How long did you have to work on your De Niro impression for that skit?

BUTLER: It’s actually more of a Billy Baldwin impersonation, but it seemed to work for De Niro as well. [Laughs] My only real impression is I can look exactly like Billy Baldwin if I want to. If there’s any casting directors reading this and you need a Billy Baldwin impersonator, I’m your man.

LCD Soundsystem’s Goodbye Show (2011)

You’re the one who ended up serendipitously coining the title of the live album.

BUTLER: [Laughs] That is true. That was genuine. He was being a little talky.

I moved to New York before I moved to Montreal, and I would go to the city and go to shows and I didn’t see one fucking thing that was good in the whole year. I was like, “Wait, I thought New York was the shit, where is it?” All I saw was bad, very industry bands. I couldn’t find anything, I wasn’t cool enough to figure out what was going on. There’s very few bands that I really think of, like bands of my generation where I heard them and thought “These are my people.” For me it was the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, LCD, and Wolf Parade. When I heard those bands, I thought, “These are my fellow pilgrims.” It was art, DIY, no bullshit, just trying to make something great that communicates to people. It’s real and emotional.

James is really just one of us. He’s just such a great engineer and really into the way things sound and really passionate about details. It’s rare to meet people like that. James was working with us when Bowie came in, when we were in Electric Lady. James had never met Bowie before. The first 7” he ever bought was “Fame.” We’re in this studio, and the last time Bowie was there he had cut “Fame” with John Lennon, in the same studio. We were all like, “This is the right place to be.”

James is just a man after my own heart. We did a tour with them on Neon Bible. We were playing to a thousand people in Salt Like City and I was like, “Man, in a couple years a lot more people are going to wish they were at this show.” What a fucking great live band.

Scoring Her (2013)

What kind of headspace did you have to get into for this vs. making an album?

BUTLER: Spike [Jonze] came to a bunch of our early shows on Funeral. The second I met him he was just immediately one of my best friends. He thinks about the world the same way. Even though we work in different mediums he was someone I knew I’d be working with in some capacity. I was visiting LA and I was staying with Spike just randomly one time, in the early days of him working on the script for Her. I was reading the script and immediately thinking about how it could sound, and I was like, “Well, we should fucking do the score to this movie.”

When you’re working on a record, it’s so rigid, what works on a song and what doesn’t work on a song. It can be so limiting in a way. Within the band, there’s so many different talents and color palettes and things people bring to the table, so it was cool to do something where the boss is the picture. It doesn’t matter how anyone feels about a piece, if it’s working for Spike, if it’s working in harmony with the picture, that’s what the boss is — the emotionality of the picture. It’s not about you, it’s in service to this bigger thing. It was a cool opportunity for all of us to use different aspects of things we do, and to work with Owen [Pallett], who had done a lot of strings on our records. It uses a totally different part of your brain.

Do you want to do more of that kind of work, or was it this specific story from Spike that spoke to you?

BUTLER: I can say pretty confidently that I’ll work with Spike in the future. It definitely takes a lot of energy. It’s definitely something I’m interested in, but I feel like while I’ve got the juice it’s good to spend as much energy writing songs as we can. It’s pretty fucking hard to make a record, believe it or not.

Future’s “Might As Well” Sampling “Owl” From Her(2017)

Are you a big Future fan?

BUTLER: I love Future. There’s something in the rhythm of the thing he does that actually reminds me of some music from Haiti, in this really deep, subtle way I can’t put my finger on. There’s something almost mystical in the way he sounds, and I thought that was really cool that they sampled that soundtrack. His shit does sound like the future still. I think it’s pretty special.

The Reach Of ”Wake Up” (2004-Present)

This song has had this big pop-culture reach over the years. U2 used it as their walk-on music in the ‘00s. It was used in the trailer for another Spike movie, Where The Wild Things Are. Macy Gray and John Legend both covered it. Microsoft ripped it off for a commercial. It was used in a commercial for LA’s bid for the Olympics.

BUTLER: That Microsoft money went to Haiti, by the way. They did rip it off. [Laughs] Thank you Microsoft.

As far as I know that’s far from an exhaustive list, too. It’s just one of those songs that’s gone out and become a part of the atmosphere. Even a lot of big bands don’t necessarily have a song like that. What do you think it is about “Wake Up” that’s registered in so many different contexts?

BUTLER: From the time we wrote that song to now, the biggest difference in my life is I’ve traveled the world and I’ve been able to play music in all these different cultures and feel the ways different countries feel music. Not only listening to the music in other countries but seeing how they feel the music I play.

I remember around The Suburbs we played in rural Haiti. It was our first time playing in a place where nobody in the audience had any of the reference points of the music we played. We were playing in the mountains, there were people walking in barefoot to the concert. We were playing these songs we had been touring the world with, and the energy from the crowd was so different. The things they responded to, the things they felt, it actually fundamentally changed the way I heard my own music. It made me start to think about music not just from my own perspective but culturally how people hear it and feel it.

I think the one thing that kind of transcends everything across all cultures is melody. Régine was playing that melody on piano in our rehearsal room. I hear it like it was yesterday. It was like, “That’s the shit.” [Laughs] Being present and being in the room, hearing something and really giving yourself to it, just singing that shit like it really meant it and feeling the power of that melody and trying to push it until it breaks. That’s something I think about, just how great it is to have people to play music with. To say it like you mean it.

I remember singing that song in Montreal, in these lofts. Most of our early fans, the first time we played that song, they were like “Fuck this shit, I want the acoustic shit.” People were so negative. I remember a lot of early fans didn’t come to our shows after that because we were suddenly screaming at the top of our lungs and playing electric guitars. It was like, “Everyone here hates this, that means we must be going in the right direction.” [Laughs] But yeah, don’t be discouraged if people hate something. It doesn’t mean shit.

https://www.stereogum.com/2105395/win-butler-interview-spike-jonze-arcade-fire-snl-mick-jagger-david-bowie/interviews/weve-got-a-file-on-you/

[enchantedbyhiddles]

Over the last few years, Hollywood has finally caught up to the fact that half the population are women. It’s taken decades of being sidelined in favour of male-led stories for female characters to really start taking centre stage, in action films (Captain Marvel, Wonder Woman), comedies (Booksmart, The Favourite), horrors (A Quiet Place, Hereditary), dramas (Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Roma) and other genres, and the stats have really supported this move.

Just last week, a new study found that young women are going to the cinema more than men while other research has shown that the top-grossing movies, from 2014 to 2017, with female leads outperformed those with male leads.

Feminism sells, hooray! We knew it!

Now studios are wising up to this fact. However, in recent weeks we’ve seen a pattern emerge in big-budget movies that see them pandering to women by shoehorning in an insincere display of feminism.

Take X-Men: Dark Phoenix for example, which has a scene involving Jennifer Lawrence’s Mystique and James McAvoy’s Professor X arguing about the team’s increased number of risky missions to save humans to improve his political clout and popularity. After making her pretty reasonable point, she suddenly switches gear to make a dig about the name of their squad.

“By the way, the women are always saving the men around here,” she says. “You might want to think about changing the name to X-Women.” Next thing we know she’s been killed, or “fridged” as it’s called, in order to spur three male characters into action.

Then there’s Men in Black: International which has two similar moments. Tessa Thompson’s Agent M asks Emma Thompson’s Agent O why the secret organisation is still called “Men in Black.”

“I know!,” O exclaims. “I’ve asked the question… attachment issues!”

Later in the movie, and as seen in the trailer, Chris Hemsworth’s Agent H says, “We’re the Men in Black… the Men and Women in Black,” a line that drops like a lead balloon when you consider how many more men in black actually appear in the movie, have more screen time and altogether have bigger roles in the overarching narrative than, you know, women in black.

And who can forget when the superheroines of the MCU lined-up in that climactic battle scene in Avengers: Endgame? Though it's proven to be a source of inspiration for very young female viewers, we’ll give them that, to more discerning viewers it has served as an all-the-more condescending reminder that the franchise has spent the last decade putting its male heroes on a pedestal.

It’s really no wonder that the self-awareness of these moments have caused eyes to roll. You can just picture the male writers, who penned the scripts in all these cases, patting themselves on the back for thinking they’ve come up with truly feminist moments when in reality they only prove how little they understand of the concept or what women want.

Women don’t need to be reminded that these franchises, and movies in general, have historically championed male characters at the expense of female. We know, we’ve known for decades. What we want to see is the evening out of the playing field to allow for women to play as many leading roles as men in a way that makes sense to the character and story.

Captain Marvel, for example, has an abundance of feminist moments and dialogue that at first can be seen as overly trying to serve a feminist fist-pump. But actually, Carol Danvers has spent her whole life overcoming misogyny and sexism to prove she is just as capable as any man, in fields that have traditionally been overrun by men, so it makes sense that she’s confronted with these issues throughout the movie.

That’s one of the reasons female audience members have connected to her because they can also relate to the feeling of being overlooked, being asked to prove themselves at work because of their gender or even being asked to smile by a random man.

That’s why those moments feel like a more organic show of feminism, as do the scenes in Wonder Woman where Diana, who has never questioned her self-worth, strength or intelligence at home on Themyscira, expects to be listened to in a room full of men and treated with as much respect on the battlefield.

The feminism is woven into these scripts, written or co-written by women, in a way that makes sense for these characters rather than trying to correct misogynist missteps in their respective franchises. Other blockbusters have done this in an even more subtle way by just making their lead female and not looking at them through an objectifying male gaze.

The new Star Wars movies and the Transformers prequel Bumblebee do exactly that through Rey and Charlie, and even the latest Disney animations have moved on from the “Princess searching for love” trope by having the likes of Moana and Elsa searching for purpose instead.

They also prove that you don’t have to be a woman to write female characters in a nuanced and empowering way as male screenwriters like J.J. Abrams (Star Wars), and Jared Bush (Moana) can pen scripts that offer solid female narratives too.

History, however, has proven that male writers are also the worst culprits for delivering one-dimensional women and cringe-worthy feminist dialogue and the latest X-Men, Men In Black and Avengers movies are examples of this problem.

So if studios are really sincere about correcting the gender-balance of movies, and the film industry too, then its time they got more women writers like Jennifer Lee (Frozen) and Christine Hodson (Bumblebee) to pen its movies.

That way, we might be able to nip this faux feminism trend in the bud sooner rather than later.