#setting unrealistic standard for a journalist

[sfaira]

My design and headcanons for Asa are all over the place so I sat to some fun explorations of his hair. He's my first character that I actually envision changing his hairstyle throughout the years. My idea is that altough I adore the bangs look he gets rid of it somewhere after school when visiting and touring the US, and has plain simple long hair for most of his career. I wanted him to reach Stage 3 as an editor in chief, so As much as the volume change isn't fully logical here are the Trent Crimm adjacent explorations.

[immobiliter]

over the years as archon, furina has enforced on herself extremely high standards of both dress and her more general appearance when in public. she will never, ever be seen with a loose seam on her outfit or so much as a hair out of place ( and if she is caught like that, there will be absolute hell to pay for whoever is in her vicinity or whoever she deems responsible, rip ) — she is not just a god, but also a celebrity in fontaine ( we know she made the two concepts almost interchangeable from one other ) and there are countless journalists, paparazzi and ordinary people who take an interest in her day to day movements, meaning that she is under almost constant scrutiny. obviously maintaining such a flawless outward image of herself is unrealistic for anyone all the time and so the only people who tend to see furina looking a little more imperfect, who might catch her without makeup or dressed down from her usual very elaborate and intricate sense of style, are those who work at the palais mermonia

this is also why furina is a nightmare to work with, especially when it comes to the theatre: her own performance as archon is a matter of life and death for all of fontaine and, under such extreme pressure as she is, she will enforce those same standards onto anyone she is collaborating with. so far as she is concerned, those she is choosing to work with reflect on her and, in a way, become an extension of that need to seem beyond reproach in the eyes of her people. if they make her look bad on stage or otherwise undermine her, that is a potentially dangerous thing that can invite criticism and damage her reputation, and this is why stories abound of furina pulling out or cutting ties with a theatre troupe on the eve of a performance.

but for all this girl's many flaws, she has always been a huge patron for the arts in general. she knows that attaching her name to a theatre troupe or project can change the lives of ordinary fontainians and, if she sees merit in said project, she will bring a huge amount of passion and expertise in addition to exposure to those she is supporting. it was also very much her rule that everyone who worked on a play or opera or film, whether in front of the camera/on stage or behind the scenes, receive credit for their work ( which is why she's so annoyed when the theatre troupe throw it back at her during her story quest ). for all that fontaine is a very unequal society in many ways, furina tried very hard to ensure that the arts were accessible to everyone, no matter their background or financial status, and that anyone could start their own theatre troupe or find work within the industry if they had the natural affinity or talent for it. she also advocated for a system of bursaries and scholarships for those who displayed aptitude for music or acting or dance but did not have the mora to be able to fund lessons or tuition.

also if you scroll through the notices on the bulletin board outside the opera epiclese, there is mention of a melusine philharmonic orchestra and i like to think that this was very much a passion project of hers that she helped to set up centuries ago and still exists today.

[loveforlandonorris]

🎤 Lando at the post-race press conference in Austin:

Interviewer: Well, Lando, can we just start on that point? Talk us through the battle with Lewis?

Lando: I mean, I think it was quite an easy one for him, to be honest (smiles). (Lewis says something to Lando, I can't make it out, Lando replies 'I did, yeah'). Yeah, I mean, it's always good fun, you know? I felt like I was always in the vulnerable position, the one defending, and just clearly didn't have the pace at the end of, kind of, any of the stints today.

Tyre degradation was just not on par with these two guys. And I think they, you know, both Red Bull and Mercedes, always, not just this weekend have set the standard of tyre degradation and race pace. And that probably is our biggest weakness at this current point in time.

So it was good fun. Yeah, the battles, controlling the race at the beginning, my start was very good, you know? To get into the lead was, let's say, a podium maker. I think without that it would have made my race a lot, lot more tough. So a lot of things were great. The pit stops were amazing, again, by the team. So (smiles) a lot of things were great, and, yeah, it was a good day for us.

Interviewer: You say you didn't have the pace in any of the stints. Do you include the first stint when you were leading the race?

Lando: Yes, I just – I think it's much easier to lead. It's not often that I get to do it (smiles), but it's easier to, kind of, you know, just control the tyres and look after them and things like that. It comes with the challenge of dictating the pace a little bit and not over-pushing, not under-pushing.

But I think it was clear how much quicker Lewis was already, you know? As soon as he got past the guys behind, there was a couple of laps where he probably just got the battery back up and things like that and then as soon as he pushed on, he was quite a bit quicker.

So, I think, you know, all weekend, I think we get close in qualifying, we're good in qualifying. The new tyres mask a lot of our issues. But, you know, if you look at the overlays and the GPS of how much time we lose in slow-speed corners, it's... (smiles) I'm surprised to still be able to race them on a day like today, so I'm very happy. And... yeah (smiles), I know I wish for a little bit more when you lead so much of the race, but I don't think we could have done much more.

Interviewer: Okay. And McLaren have overtaken Aston Martin for 4th in the Constructors’ Championship today. Can we get your thoughts on that and the gap to Ferrari, which is 88 points?

Lando: I just wish it got bigger, so... (laughs) I don’t know what you want me to say with that. I don't think that's, you know, that's, I guess, where we're looking, it's our target. I feel like we're in- (an alarm goes off) cheers (smiles and laughs), wake up. Yeah, I think we're in a good rhythm.

It's been clear that Aston – I just, I don't know, they seem to have, I don't know, made the car slower and slower with every upgrade that they’ve brought… (the journalists react amused) (Smiling) What? They have! I mean, they were racing, Aston, at the beginning of the year and I don't know where they finished today.

But, you know, they were out in Q1 and then they've been struggling. So I don't know what their issues are, but, you know, they were very strong, they had a lot of points in the first half of the season, the second half they've been struggling, so... And for us, it’s vice versa.

So I think the main thing is, when you look at where we were (smiles), how bad Bahrain was for us, how many seconds off pole we were. You know, my 6 pit stops in the first race of the season, you know, I lost my PU straight away.

So there's things which just, sort off, put us on the back foot from the beginning. And when you look at where we are now, to be fighting against a Red Bull, who was an unrealistic target for almost anyone, and fighting against a Mercedes, as much as we are, I would say, disappointed that we couldn't go for a race win, when you put it in perspective of where we were and how much we've improved, I think it's still an amazing day for us.

Journalist Questions:

Question 1 (Niharika Ghorpade – SportsKeeda): COTA seems to be one of the bumpiest circuits on the calendar with a lot of patchy asphalt. How much did that factor into your performance today, and can anything be done for next year on where they can resurface the whole track instead of having these patches all around to make it harder with F1 cars in particular?

Lando: No, they’ve covered it [Max & Lewis' answers]. It would be helpful if they didn't put tarmac, you know, in a braking zone as well. They resurfaced some places and they start the tarmac at the 100-metre board into Turn 12, which is where we brake (smiles). So just little things they could do better. From what I heard, they're resurfacing the first sector or something next year, so we'll hope it's a little bit better (smiles).

Question 2 (Sahil Kapur – NBC): Lando, do any of the remaining tracks this year, or track characteristics or otherwise, give you optimism about scoring that first win and how does McLaren rise into P4 in the Constructors’ bode well or otherwise for your prospects next year?

Lando: I mean, do I think our best chances have gone? I would say yes. I think Qatar was our best chance of winning a race, (smiles wryly) and I missed out on that one. So I don't want to say no, I don't say, like, a 'never'. I think there's no super high speeds, you know, Suzuka-style circuits left, Qatar-style circuits left, which is where we're strong. And like I said, if you looked at the GPS and the overlays of how bad we are in the slow speed, I'm not looking forward to Brazil. I think we're gonna be pretty shocking there. So honestly-

Max: Abu Dhabi? You’re normally quite good there.

Lando: Abu Dhabi, we'd like to finish on a high.

Max: You're an Abu Dhabi specialist.

Lando: (Smiling) Am I? No comment. But-

Max: You’re always quick there. *You* are always quick there. I'm just saying *you*.

Lando: (Smiling) I? Me? Okay, not the car (laughs). Maybe Abu Dhabi, you never know. You know... we'll see. I don't think there are any good ones for us coming up. I think our best have, kind of, gone. I'm not... but yeah, I still want to be hopeful that we can do good results and I think we can still fight for podiums, but (smiles, pointing to Max and Lewis) these guys were too quick for me. They've been... I would say quicker all weekend on average.

We just about keep up in qualifying when we have that new rubber and the super low fuel and things like that. We can look decent, but I think realistically we're not at the level as a general package with these guys. So yeah, not great ones coming up but, you know, Vegas, Abu Dhabi are probably the better ones.

(I really hope Brazil is a good circuit for Lando. I know he said he isn't looking forward to it and thinks they'll be shocking there, but the Brazil practice and Quali are on my birthday this year, and I'm looking forward to watching him on my birthday. I really hope he has a good time there 🤞🏻🧡)

[homoqueerjewhobbit]

OK long bubbling rant/story time.

So there's a post that goes around Tumblr about fat acceptance and body positivity about taking the emphasis off sexual desirability. One of the lines in the post that always sticks out to me is, "what are you going to do, tell a 12 year old, 'don't worry, people will still want to fuck you?'"

This is all absolutely right, true, and valid. I support these statements.

But also, OK, story time, I promise it will circle back:

Back when I was growing up, in the nineteen hundred and nineties, there was a show in heavy rotation on afternoon syndication called Just Shoot Me. It's mostly faded into obscurity, and rightfully so. It was set at a Cosmo-esque fashion/women's magazine and featured an endless parade of mostly interchangeable extremely skinny women for the male characters to ogle and hit on. The main character was a TV plain (read still extremely thin and pretty but over the age of 25) "feminist" and "real journalist" stuck working there...

Anyway, one ep, real feminist girl starts dating this dude and really hitting it off, especially in their shared disdain for the skinny models and unrealistic body standards the magazine promotes. Things are going great, but on all their dates, he's constantly pushing her to eat more and more food. Finally, she figured out he's a Chubby Chaser and he needs her to get fat in order to find her attractive. (it was the 90s, Feeders and Gainers had not hit mainstream yet)

She tells him that he's just as shallow and objectifies women just as much as the model chasers at her office and dumps him. This is true and also a good message and surprisingly nuanced for Just Shoot Me.

But, here's the thing, my chubby 12-year-old ass did not know that chubby chasers were a real thing and thought that the entire joke was the idea that he would be attracted to fat people at all. It had never even occurred to me that people would be sexually attracted to me when I grew up.

So yes, also, as a young kid, I would have liked to hear that I could grow up to be fuckable.

[ellie-bygrave]

Realism in an Otherworldly Setting

[Minor spoilers for Spider-Man 2 (2023)]

To begin, we should discus the definition of realism. Academically there are many discussions on this topic and many different views. Putnam (1975) argues that realism can be explanation of scientific fact, whereas Morris (2003) discusses that realism is based on what we perceive to be true is realism. Realism can mean something different to everyone, but for the purpose of this discussion when talking about video games, I will be talking about realism in terms of being accurate portrayal of real life as most people perceive it.

As technology has become more advanced and gained new capabilities, many video game studios have made attempts to bring more realistic-looking games to audiences. Many have been successful, with developers sometimes using motion capture and face scans alongside their more traditional skill to create highly detailed characters capable of a wide range of human expressions. Additionally, using photoscans of objects and textures can push environments closer and closer towards realism.

However, realism doesn't have to end with just the visuals of a game, although this is often the first thing we think of when discussing realism in regards to video games. Realism can also be applied to the story, dialogue, characters, and gameplay.

Often, the story and plot of a video game will be unlikely to be something most audiences will have experienced themselves; one of the points to playing a video game is to escape from reality and experience something different. For example, games such as Bioware's Dragon Age series are set in a fantasy world with magic, dragons, and an Archdemon set on destroying the world. This is not something most of us can expect to have experienced and, therefore, we can say it is not very realistic.

Having said this, there are different levels of what we can deem realistic within a different world setting based on the rules this world establishes. Within the world of Dragon Age, is is perfectly normal to encounter a rogue dwarf on their way to defeat a host of Darkspawn. It would not, however, be realistic to pull out a smartphone in order to check which way to go at a fork in the path. This is because the rules and established lore of this world can define what is realistic and what isn't within the game.

Often people can have a problem with realism - or lack thereof - in video games. A recent release which has sparked some debate is Insomniac's Spider-Man 2. Most are familiar with the story of how Peter Parker (and now Miles Morales) was bitten by a radioactive spider and gained superpowers. Not very realistic by our real-world standards, but when we look at the universe in which this takes place in the comic books and on our screens it doesn't seem that far fetched.

An article from the well-known media journalism platform Polygon discussed the unrealistic way in which Mary Jane (MJ), a journalist, was implemented into these games. The writer of the article said they felt it was unrealistic to have MJ sneaking around and fighting the bad guys instead of staying out of the action, as journalists usually do (Rivera, 2023). Whilst in our world they would be correct, in the world of Spider-Man (specifically the Insomniac games) MJ frequently becomes involved in the action to help Peter with his world-saving duties. Therefore we can say that it is not that unbelievable that she would have the abilities we see in this game. After all, Peter Parker has worked as a photographer and lab assistant in these games, neither of which typically involve dealing out masked vigilante justice on the streets of New York.

All in all, the element of realism in video games in terms of storytelling very much depends on the world in which these stories take place. Realism doesn't just have to be constrained by what we have experienced in our own lives. Game developers can destroy the boundaries of what we determine as realistic to create their own to create fantastical and bizarre tales that we could never hope - or sometimes want - to experience.

References

Morris, P. (2003). Realism. Routledge. London. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ROSAAgAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false

Putnam, H. (1975). What Is “Realism”? Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 76, 177–194. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4544887

Rivera, J. (2023). Please, Spider-Man games, stop making me play Mary Jane stealth missions. Polygon. https://www.polygon.com/gaming/23930425/spider-man-2-mary-jane-stealth-missions-why

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The White House has a plan for Big Tech

This week, the White House released its long-anticipated plan for addressing monopoly in the tech sector. Fixing Big Tech is important, because a free, fair and open internet is a necessary precondition for organizing all our other fights about human rights, equity, labor, the climate, and racial and gender justice.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/09/08/readout-of-white-house-listening-session-on-tech-platform-accountability/

The White House plan is a mixed bag. They set out six action points, each of them amorphous enough that they could all be summarized as “the devil is in the details” — that is, depending on how these are handled, they could be great, or terrible.

But one point stands out as especially fraught, controversial and dangerous: a vague promise of “fundamental reforms to Section 230,” which is incorrectly characterized as “special legal protections for large tech platforms.”

I’m going to go through all six of the points below and describe how they could go right, or wrong, and in the end I’ll get into more detail on 230 — it’s one of the worst-understood areas of internet law, a favored punching bag of the right and the left, and getting this one wrong could deliver permanent dominance to Big Tech platforms.

1. “Promote competition in the technology sector”: This covers both meat-and-potatoes trustbusting (breakups, merger scrutiny) and modern, tech-specific tactics, like interoperability mandates and bans on self preferencing. This is generally great stuff, but there are three important pitfalls to avoid:

i. Interop mandates that expose users to risk through hasty action. The EU’s Digital Markets Act unwisely kicked off by mandating interop in messaging tools on an unrealistically short timeline. Maintaining the security of encrypted messengers is extremely important; failures in messaging encryption are a source of existential risk to human rights workers, journalists and marginalized people all around the world. Recall that Jamal Khashoggi was lured to his slaughter by the Saudi government after they broke into his peers’ encrypted messages using a cyberweapon produced by the NSO Group.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/04/eu-digital-markets-acts-interoperability-rule-addresses-important-need-raises

ii. Must-carry rules that force platforms to carry speech. Big online platforms have become our new public square, except that they aren’t public — they’re private. Their choices about which speech to block and which speech to carry are enormously consequential for our civics and politics. But rules that allow regulators to force providers to carry speech they disagree with set a dangerous precedent. Even if you think that the Biden admin’s compelled speech will be fine (say, a rule requiring warnings alongside vaccine disinformation), imagine how this power will be handled by President Marjorie Taylor Green’s administration.

The platforms’ moderation choices are a danger because the platforms dominate our discourse. Allowing the platforms to corner the market for online speech has profound First Amendment implications:

https://locusmag.com/2020/01/cory-doctorow-inaction-is-a-form-of-action/

But the answer isn’t to turn the platforms into an arm of the state — it’s to make their moderation choices less consequential for all of us, by devolving control over community norms to the communities themselves:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/07/right-or-left-you-should-be-worried-about-big-tech-censorship

iii. Self-preferencing bans are very hard to administer. If Apple puts its own weather app at the top of the app-store listings, or if Google shows you an infobox with its weather prediction at the top of a search, that might feel like self-preferencing. But maybe Apple really believes that it has the best weather app. There isn’t an objective standard for “best weather app.” Unless you’ve got a front-row seat for the wall of Plato’s Cave, distinguishing self-preferencing from good-faith curation is often impossible.

That’s not to say that we should tolerate self-preferencing, nor is it to say that we can’t ever detect and punish self-preferencing. Sometimes, tech companies actually document the fact that they’re self-preferencing, as Google did when its engineers emailed their bosses to complain about being forced to put Google’s inferior results ahead of rivals:

https://blog.yelp.com/news/yelp-testifying-in-google-antitrust-hearing/

But we can’t rely on Big Tech tripping over its own dick every time it does a bit of nefarious self-preferencing. The real remedy for self-preferencing is “structural separation”: banning platform operators from competing with platform users. Referees shouldn’t own one of the teams on the field, period.

https://locusmag.com/2022/03/cory-doctorow-vertically-challenged/

2. “Provide robust federal protections for Americans’ privacy.” A no-brainer. The US needs a federal privacy law, with a private right of action that allows individuals (and human rights groups) to sue firms that violate it, rather than waiting for a prosecutor to take up their cause. Do it.

I’m entirely unsympathetic to the argument that “targeted ads” are better than “untargetted ads” because they are “more relevant” to users. Users fucking hate targeted ads. Ad-blockers are the largest boycott in human history. When users are given the change to opt out of targeted ads, they do so in such overwhelming numbers that the holdouts are likely to be people who accidentally clicked the wrong button:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/96-of-us-users-opt-out-of-app-tracking-in-ios-14-5-analytics-find/

3. “Protect our kids by putting in place even stronger privacy and online protections for them, including prioritizing safety by design standards and practices for online platforms, products, and services.”

Sounds good. As a dad, I like the idea. But there’s so many ways it can go wrong. California’s version of this rule was so vaguely worded that it’s effectively impossible to comply with.

https://www.techdirt.com/2022/09/06/techdirt-podcast-episode-328-the-problems-with-the-california-kids-code/

It’s not just that this could result in kids being banned from using any online service — it’s also that all online services might institute invasive verification procedures (like requiring and storing — and, inevitably, leaking — government IDs to prove that none of their users are kids).

But the difficulties here don’t mean we have to be nihilists. We can demand that platforms that target kids — that market themselves as services for children — eschew advertising, minimize data collection, and take other steps to protect kids from commercial predation.

5. “Increase transparency about platform’s algorithms and content moderation decisions.” Opponents of this one will claim that telling people how you moderate is a gift to trolls and griefers. I’m unsympathetic to the idea that there is “security through obscurity”:

https://doctorow.medium.com/como-is-infosec-307f87004563

There’s a lot of room for debate about how the “civil justice” system of big platforms should operate. One thing is clear: automated judgments about user speech can’t be balanced by human review. The former happens at scale and near-instantaneously. The latter will either be deliberative and too slow to matter, or rapid and too quick to make sense of nuance.

One intriguing idea is to structure content moderation review as a “systemic” matter, which can address “immoderation” (the content that isn’t moderated) as well as moderation. Note that no one has tried this yet, so while it sounds great, it’s also a gamble:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/12/move-slow-and-fix-things/#second-wave

6. “Stop discriminatory algorithmic decision-making.” This one is also maddeningly vague. If they’re talking about ensuring that machine learning classifiers don’t discriminate on the basis of speech, it’s going to be very hard to make work. Remember, algorithmic moderation often operates on the context of speech as much as the content — if a bunch of seemingly coordinated users all post something that seems like harassment all at once, that speech might get labelled or suppressed or deleted. The exact same speech, posted by one person, once, might be left alone.

But there’s another kind of algorithmic discrimination, whose most obvious case is the algorithms that target predatory financial products to Black users, or exclude women and racial minorities from being shown good jobs on employment sites. This is illegal — and we don’t need new laws to prosecute it. But we do need new enforcement powers and resources for existing regulators to tackle it.

All right, that’s the five least controversial points in the White House plan. But I left out point IV: “Remove special legal protections for large tech platforms.”

Here, the White House is talking about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, AKA “The 26 Words That Made the Internet.”

https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501714412/the-twenty-six-words-that-created-the-internet/

CDA230 is a rule that says that if a user’s speech violates federal law, legal responsibility for that speech falls on the speaker, not the intermediary that brought you that speech. It’s a rule that makes hosting user speech possible, period. It’s how we get Facebook and Twitter, sure — but also how we get blog comments, Mastodon instances, and other independent platforms.

It’s also how we get the infrastructure that makes it possible for individuals, nonprofits, private groups and co-ops to create their own speech forums. CDA230 means that a hosting company doesn’t need to review all its customers’ users’ speech before hosting them (imagine if every web-page had to be vetted by your host before you could make it live — and then every change also had to go through legal review).

This is important in a competitive market, but it’s even more important in our current, monopolized world, where getting kicked off of a platform might doom a speech forum (and again, if you’re comfortable with this being used to nuke forums that the politicians you agree with get rid of, imagine which forums President DeSantis will target).

Any gun on the mantlepiece in Act I is sure to go off by Act III. If we hand any aggrieved party the right to remove speech without a trial, we can be sure that this facility will be abused by the worst people in the worst ways.

We know this because we’ve got decades of experience with the “notice-and-takedown” system for copyright enforcement, which allows anyone claiming to be a rightsholder to get almost anything taken down from almost anywhere, irrespective of whether a copyright infringement took place.

To see that in action, check out Eliminalia, which uses fraudulent copyright takedowns to launder the reputations of dictators, torturers, murderers and rapists, getting news articles and personal accounts of their victims and survivors removed from the internet:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#dark-ops

In Germany, Sony Music is attempting to force Quad9, a public DNS provider, to block the records of websites whose users have allegedly posted links to other websites where infringing copies of Sony’s copyrighted works can be found:

https://quad9.net/news/blog/an-update-to-the-quad9-and-sony-music-german-court-injunction-august-2022/

Sony is a serial abuser of its ability to moderate speech; the company routinely and wantonly deletes independent musicians’ performances of classical compositions by falsely claiming that they violate Sony’s copyrights — in other words, Sony is a music pirate on an unimaginable scale:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/22/crisis-for-thee-not-me/#filternet

Our evidence for what a post-CDA230 internet would look like isn’t limited to the copyright wars — for a more recent, more direct look at what happens when you make intermediaries responsible for their users’ speech, look at the aftermath of SESTA/FOSTA.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/03/how-congress-censored-internet

SESTA/FOSTA is a (nominal) anti-sex-trafficking rule that creates criminal liability for companies whose services are used in connection with the heinous crime of sex trafficking. The immediate impact of SESTA/FOSTA was the mass, internet-wide removal of sites that sex workers used to keep themselves safe.

SESTA/FOSTA pushed sex workers back onto the streets, deprived them of the forums where they shared information about dangerous clients, and created a renaissance in pimping, as sex workers were forced to turn to third parties for their protection.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/02/fosta-already-leading-censorship-we-are-seeking-reinstatement-our-lawsuit

Curbing CDA230 is especially dangerous in light of the calls for a “fairness doctrine” for online platforms. One of the activities that CDA230 protects is moderation, allowing online hosts to remove harassing, hateful, threatening or otherwise odious speech without worrying that this requires that they remove every such instance.

This allows moderators to distinguish between a racist who calls another user by a slur, and a user who says, “Can you believe that racist called me :slur:?” Before 230 was enacted, courts took the position that once a service moderated any speech, it took on the duty to moderate all speech, creating the perverse incentive to ignore bad speech.

Some say that CDA230 protects Big Tech platforms only to the extent that it protects all online speech forums, including independent ones. But this is wrong. CDA230 protects small platforms more than it protects large ones — because large ones are better situated to hire the armies of lawyers and moderators to pore over and comma-fuck everything their users post.

That’s why Mark Zuckerberg supports eliminating CDA230. As he is fond of pointing out, Facebook’s budget for human moderators exceeds Twitter’s total revenue. He understands that if you need to be as big as Facebook to compete with Facebook that:

a) No company will ever compete with Facebook, and

b) No government will ever make Facebook any smaller.

It’s not just Zuck that hates 230 — it’s also Donald Trump. Trump understands that removing legal protections for intermediaries will make them less able to stand up to rich and powerful people who can hire vicious attack lawyers who pride themselves on suppressing speech:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/60-minutes-boss-hired-law-firm-over-metoo-story/

Trump loves the kinds of lawyers who kept #MeToo at bay for decades, not just by threatening the survivors of abuse, but by scaring anyone who might host their testimony into removing it.

The fact that Zuck and Trump think killing CDA230 is a great idea should at least give its progressive opponents a moment’s pause.

https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/09/biden_tech_reform_section230/

[Image ID: The logo for the White House, superimposed over a Matrix 'code waterfall' effect.]

[chipotle]

Twitter, failure modes, and your favorite bar

So I’ve been seeing arguments for why, no, you should really stay on Twitter, because of the problems with anything vying to replace it. Most circle around what tech people might dub failure modes in terms of both engineering and policy.

Make no mistake, many of these are solid arguments. Twitter has, as much as we like to pretend otherwise, gotten many things right. They’ve got fast onboarding. They provide a good experience on both mobile and desktop. (Please don’t @ me with your objections to ads and algorithms and whatever; I’m not saying the UX design on Twitter is perfect or free of dark patterns, I’m saying that it’s been developed by UX professionals over a 15-year period and it shows.) They understand the importance of making a service like theirs accessible. They understand the importance of well-designed terms of service that limit their legal liability without taking draconian stances toward users and their content. These are all failure modes that other, newer, smaller services have done little or nothing to address.

But for many people, the real issue isn’t what’s wrong with the other places. It’s that they love this place. Twitter, for all its faults, for all the love/hate relationship you have with it—it’s your favorite bar. This is what most indie creators are feeling, I think. None of the other services have the audience reach; it’s unrealistic to expect us to be on a half-dozen new sites when we could just stay put; and, hey, the likelihood of Twitter really exploding is pretty low. All of those are true, too.

The problem, though, is that just because Twitter’s failure mode isn’t likely to be “closing up shop” doesn’t mean it doesn’t have other failure modes. You might have noticed I didn’t mention harassment and toxic behavior as a failure mode—the things a Trust and Safety Team handles—but it is. As Nilay Patel observed, the product of a social network is content moderation.

To be clear, this is something all the Not-Twitters are going to have to come to grips with in ways they haven’t yet. Cohost, Hive, and OoobyBloobly (which I just made up, or did I, you’re not sure, are you) look good by comparison because they are a fraction of a fraction of Twitter’s scale. Your favorite Mastodon instance this week is even smaller. With Twitter’s two hundred million users, trying to regulate bad behavior is a 24/7 rearguard action.

Well, guess what? Twitter’s Trust and Safety Team is now gone. By deliberate design. It’s not coming back, at least not in any recognizable form, not any time soon.

You think I’m going to mention Musk restoring Trump’s Twitter account. I am. But the canary in the coal mine isn’t the who as much as it’s the how. Musk claimed in October that he’d set up a new “council” for moderation, and that “no major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before the council convenes.” That was a blatant lie. He polled his followers—hardly a statistically unbiased group—about restoring Trump’s account, and has restored others just on his own. Tech journalist Casey Newton:

At the risk of stating the obvious, this sort of ad hoc approach to content moderation and community standards is completely unsustainable. It does not scale beyond a handful of the most prominent accounts on the service. And, most worryingly, it is not based on any clear principles: Musk is leading trust and safety at Twitter the same way he is leading product and hiring—by whim.

And this is Twitter’s failure mode. All those tweets you’ve seen bitching about how a big problem with Mastodon is that you might choose an “instance” that ends up being run by an anti-woke edgelord tinpot dictator? That’s Twitter now.

Oh, you say the need for advertisers will help rein in their worst impulses, because no sensible advertiser wants to have their “promoted tweets” running in line with alt-right propaganda? Good luck with that: a Twitter that’s only ten or fifteen percent of its original size requires a lot less money to run, and Musk’s been clear he aims to reduce the company’s dependency on advertising income.

And those remaining thousand employees or so aren’t going to push back the way we saw happen in some tech companies a year or two ago. The shakeout isn’t just in progress, it’s almost over. The ones left either can’t afford to leave or subscribe to Musk’s worldview. Anyone who joins Twitter under his leadership will have done so knowing what that worldview is.

The “liberal bias of big tech” has always been a phantasm. Silicon Valley has always had a strong libertarian bent to it, from the right-of-center Hoover think tank at Stanford University to the military/aerospace roots that long predate the 1990s dotcom boom. While many SV libertarians are socially liberal, not all are, and a few of the most prominent conservatives came out of the “PayPal Mafia”: Musk, the openly anti-democratic Peter Thiel, and VC David Sacks, who co-wrote a book called The Diversity Myth with Thiel a couple of decades ago. Along with professional idiot Jason Calacanis, Sacks now advises Musk on how to run Twitter, and the circumstantial evidence suggests they’ve encouraged the performative cruelty Musk’s exhibited in how he’s run things so far.

So here’s the thing. What conservative culture warriors always say they want is the absence of political bias, but time and time again what they mean is bias that explicitly favors them. Everything else, you see, has an innate liberal bias—it’s them against the world, fighting the good fight. They want fairness and balance the way Fox News does. They don’t want an unbiased social media site; what they want is a site with Gab and Parler’s slant, but Twitter’s reach. Now they have it. The product of a social network is content moderation, and Twitter’s new content moderators will be hand-picked by Musk. It’s going to be full of people who won’t object to racism, homophobia, and transphobia as much as object to fighting it, because “free speech”.

If you do believe in the Fox News kind of balance, that I’m wrong about Silicon Valley’s political biases and especially wrong about Twitter’s, this isn’t a failure mode. It’s what you want, or at least what you think you want. It’s clearly what Elon Musk thinks he wants. But for Twitter as we knew it, this is a catastrophic failure. It’s a terminal condition, an unrecoverable crash.

New Twitter will be hostile to anyone queer, or non-white, or slightly to the left of Ronald Reagan. You may be a creator who wants to stay on Twitter to reach your audience, but the audience there will inevitably tilt toward the anti-woke, All Lives Matter, gender critical, Just Asking Questions crowd. If they’re your audience, congratulations, I guess. If they’re not, you have a problem.

I get that, right now, it’s still easy to rationalize staying on Twitter. The alternatives are too confusing, or have questionable terms of service, or don’t have a registered DMCA agent, or have a crappy official app, or have a crappy web interface, or just seem like they’re run out of a college dorm room. We can go down the list and acknowledge most or all of those are great points.

But your favorite bar is under new management, and whether you want to admit it or not, you know damn well what kind of bar they’re making it into. You need to think long and hard about whether you’re okay with that.

[scotianostra]

Peter May the multi award-winning author and screenwriter was born on December 20th 1951 in Glasgow.

From an early age he was intent on becoming a novelist, but took up a career as a journalist as a way to start earning a living by writing. He made his first serious attempt at writing a novel at the age of 19, which he sent to Collins where it was read by Philip Ziegler, who wrote him a very encouraging rejection letter. He went on to work with The Scotsman and the Glasgow Evening Times.

At 26 he published his first novel, The Reporter, which he was asked to adapt for TV, it became a 13 part series, The Standard, dealing with an ailing Scottish newspaper in 1978.

After The Standard he penned another series called Squadron about an RAF Rapid Deployment Squadron.

May worked on STV’s flagship soap (Take the) High Road, personally writing 200+ episodes and was story & script editor for over 12 years. He continued working for STV on Machair a Scottish Gaelic television soap opera which ran for over 6 years.

It’s astonishing to think that  ‘The Lewis Trilogy’ was turned down by all the major British publishers, The Blackhouse, the first book in , was published first in May’s adopted home of France in French translation at the end of 2009. It was immediately nominated for several literary awards in France.  The Lewis Trilogy has sold more than a million copies in the UK alone.

May’s books have sold more than two million copies in the UK and several million internationally.

April 2020 saw May publish  Lockdown, although it was written 15 years earlier. The story takes place in the city of London during a lockdown resulting from a global pandemic. May stated that the book was not published at the time because British editors thought the idea of London under siege from a virus “was unrealistic and could never happen”.

I’ve read five or six of May’s books now, and just about to start another, Runaway, which is set in Glasgow and London over a 50 year period. While I enjoy his books I really think he overuses long obscure words. Now I like to think of myself as quite learned, but for example words like  lugubrious have me scrambling to google to find out what it means, it’s looking or sounding sad and dismal, who knew, aye probably some of you, but me thinks he is just showing off.

Anyway he has been in the news a couple of times in the past month or so,  in November he said he was   left “horrified” by proposals to cut library services in East Renfrewshire. The council warned that funding could be withdrawn from school libraries, with public libraries also under threat. 

“Libraries – particularly school libraries – are the foundation of learning,” said the former Eastwood High pupil. “If you take away the school library, then the chances are children will not get into books.“Unless they are exposed to the joys of reading at school, it is a failure of the education system.” he also fears a lack of access to libraries would lead to a dumbing down of educational standards.

On a brighter note Stornoway’s new  Gaelic community centre  An Taigh Cèilidh opened it’s doors on Saturday, May donated £5,000 towards the project. The centre will have a book and gift shop, and it will serve refreshments. Most items will be sourced from Lewis and Harris, including a selection of local books not available elsewhere. The centre will also offer incentives to use Gaelic, such as 10% off your drinks if you order in Gaelic. So if you are ever on the Outer Hebrides and drop in just say “Cupan cofaidh mas e do thoil e” andd you’ll get your discount! 

As I said I do enjoy the books, if you fancy reading them keep an eye out on Amazon as they sometimes go down to as little as 99p. His latest novel,  A Winter Grave, set around  Kinlochleven is due out on January 19th.

[texastheband]

Sharleen: ‘Skinny celebrity mums make me sick’

Interview by Pony Vernon, Photography by Scarlet Page Taken from Grazia - August 8, 2005

At last - a star who didn't lose her baby weight in the time it takes to change a nappy. Texas singer Sharleen Spiteri tells Grazia why she thinks famous women are putting new mothers under unrealistic pressure to get slim fast. There you are, three months after giving birth, with a belly that still has people asking when you're due. But the last thing you can think of in between multiple feeds and nappy changes is how to get rid of it. Which makes it pretty galling when you then read about A-list mothers snapping back into shape the moment they've leapt off the delivery table. Texas frontwoman Sharleen Spiteri agrees. While stars like Anna Friel and Laura Bailey shrug off their baby weight in the same way the rest of us slip off a jacket, Sharleen, 38, lost hers exactly the way nature intends. Slowly. 'It took me about a year to lose my baby weight and it's only quite recently that I'm back to normal,' confides the singer, whose daughter, Misty, turns three in September. 'There are loads of famous women who have an elective Caesarean, rattle their baby out at eight months - before they're really developed - have a tummy tuck, liposuction, and then they come out going: "It was a fabulous diet!" And I think, "F*** off." It gives women unrealistic standards. And it's not fair.' Pressure or no pressure, Sharleen looks nothing short of amazing in the video for Getaway, the first single from Texas in two years. 'I am rocking my Anne Bancroft look,' she laughs. 'Tight pencil skirt, V-neck jumper, string of pearls. And I wore a lot of Celine too. All very sexy.' The first single from their new album, Red Book, is a perfect slice of sultry rock. 'I'm very happy with this record. It's like, you know when you feel really good in a pair of jeans? When you don't need to wear a long top to hide your waist, you just know you look hot? That's what this record feels like.'

We're sitting at the table of a hip new Mayfair diner, where Sharleen's dividing her attention between Grazia's questions, some low-GI, low-fat grilled chicken and two unapologetically high-fat, high-GI side orders of macaroni cheese and fries. She is chic, animated (so Scottish and brusque she's almost a cliché) and terrifically good fun. She tells us she definitely wants to continue her tradition of casting desirable men in her videos - actor James Purefoy stars in Getaway; Alan Rickman was in In Demand - with Chelsea manager José Mourinho. 'I think José's gorgeous. Really gorgeous. It's his eyes. You look in them and you know he's bad. 'We know exactly what she means! Banter aside, we're meeting on a weird day, as the suicide bombings took place in London just 24 hours earlier. Sharleen, like the rest of the city, has been hell-bent on carrying on with her schedule regardless, and did her own hair for our shoot when the stylist was unable to make it into London. It seems natural to discuss the terror attacks. 'I love London, I love Britain. But I'm so angry about this,' she says. 'And not just with the terrorists. I'm angry with Tony Blair and George Bush. Because you know what? There are going to be f***Ing enemies out there when you hold the weapons that we hold, and you basically treat other countries like s***.' It's the kind of forthright view we've come to expect from Sharleen, although her most vitriolic rants are usually aimed at the paparazzi. 'You can't scratch your arse in Primrose Hill [where she lives] without getting your picture taken,' she says.

However, although a household name, she has managed to lead a relatively private life with Misty and her boyfriend of 10 years, Ashley Heath, a journalist and style editor. That's no mean feat considering she's one of the most successful musicians of her generation: Texas have sold 20 million records worldwide and The Greatest Hits album went platinum five times over. Sharleen believes she's been able to preserve relative anonymity because she didn't fall for another celebrity. 'The idea of it makes me feel physically sick,' she says. She is, however, sympathetic to her celebrity friends who have fallen for another famous name. So what does she think about Kate Moss and her on-again, off-again affair with Pete Doherty? 'Don't pull it to pieces, because what it all bolls down to is, nobody knows what's going on except for them. What feelings, what love, what hate, whatever people have between them. No one knows. If they want to be happy, let them be happy. Because no matter how much you dissect it, you're never going to know,' she says. Although widely considered a member of the Primrose Hill set - whose glamorous, decadent lifestyle has spawned many a tabloid headline - Sharleen wants to debunk its existence. 'I think people wish it existed. Half the women who are supposed to be in it wish it existed! I mean, everybody knows each other. I know Kate, I know Sadie... but you know, we're not round each other's houses, hanging out. Most of the time we're working. I know I am, anyway. It's all been blown way out of proportion,' she says. But is her life still rock 'n' roll, even now she's got a child in tow? 'Yes, it is! To me, rock 'n' roll is living by your rules, which I do. I strap on a guitar and sing my heart out. That's rock 'n' roll. And I put my daughter to bed and snuggle up, or we have a bath and make foam beards - I love a foam beard, me. That's rock 'n' roll too.'

See the photoshoot: here Text originally posted on texasindemand.com

[comparatist]

Here goes my findings on Neerja Bhanot. ✌

Neerja Bhanot: The First Indian And The Youngest Woman To Receive Ashok Chakra

What does the modern articulation of a hero consist of, or for that matter the ancient terms of presenting a male protagonist? A towering figure, with unrealistic standards of physical beauty, a ‘masculine' rage and a penchant for bloodlust to be projected through his body language and last but not the least, the portrayal of basic forms of kindness through the glorification of the ‘saviour' mentality. When the normalisation starts to set on such standards, who’d have thought that a young woman in her 20s would break the monotony of such reflections through her indomitable courage, intelligency and dedication to establish the fact that not all hero wear capes? Neerja might not fit the traditional projection of heroes we see everywhere, but she’s the hero who refused to endure domestic abuse, saved the lives of 359 people by her quick wit and is an inspiration for all woman, who choose to speak even after being bloodied by the claws of patriarchy every now and then.

• Early Life: In September 7th, 1962, Neerja was born in the family of journalist Harish Bhanot and Rama Bhanot. Her father wrote in a letter, after death that he was ‘happy to hear' that he was blessed with a baby girl. Little Neerja was instantly everybody's centre of attention and often used to get addressed by Lado(the loved one). Neerja did her primary schooling till 6th standard in Chandigarh’s Sacred High School before her family shifted to Mumbai. She completed her schooling from Bombay Scottish School and eventually graduated from St Xavier’s College. Harish Bhanot wrote how Neerja was a no-nonsense girl from the very start. At the age of 18, she got approached by a photographer for a modelling assignment as ‘The Girl Next Door' for a magazine named Bombay. The ad gave her the opportunity to work with Paville, a popular retail store and eventually opened doors of getting featured in Binaca, Vaporex, Charmis, Krack Jack, Amul etc. for her.

However, by March 1985, her family got her married to a man they saw on the ad in Sharjah, UAE. Her became a living hell after that.

• Overcoming Obstacles: Within two months Neerja realised, life here won’t grant her the freedom as it did back in Mumbai. She faced emotional abuse from her in-laws in the form of “Even a very poor man gives his daughter something in marriage,” though they had decided not to take dowry during the marriage. She was even starved and denied money. She decided to end their marriage and pledge never to go back after she returned to Mumbai for a modelling assignment, and a letter from her husband stating the humiliating terms for her return followed her.

Determined to move past the trauma, she applied to Pan Am for the position of a flight attendant. Only 80 out of 10,000 applicants where chosen, Neerja being one of them. She was sent to Miami, for span of 6-8 weeks and within a year, based on peer review and her incredible performance in the field, was sent to London to be a Purser- the senior most cabin manager. Pursers worked as managers on flights. They handled passengers' complaints, made required arrangements and handled security.

It was this training which helped her later, to save the lives of people during the Pan Am flight 73 hijacking incident on September 5th, 1986.

• Neerja, The Braveheart: Several survivors of that hijacked flight, later revealed the importance of her role in the situation of crisis, how she outwitted the Libyan terrorists, alerted the crew to escape and prevent the flight from taking off. Doctor Kishore Murthy, a passenger on the flight recalled, “She was at the entrance of the aircraft when the terrorists boarded. She could have escaped like the pilots did, but she didn’t do it. That shows her guts and inner strength. She was truly a great leader.” After the crew left, she took the responsibility of the highest command in her hands, took charge of the situation as the terrorists asked for a different flight crew and tried to single out and take hostage of the American passengers in order to get their demands met. Under her supervision, the remaining staffs remained to maintain their duty of taking care of passengers along with successfully hiding their American passports from the terrorists as well.

Her anti hijacking training skills helped to keep the terrorist calm, thereby preventing any escalation during the negotiation efforts for 17 hours. Things took ugly turn when the lights went out due to the power shortage and the terrorists opened fire. Even then, she didn’t panic, held her ground strong and opened an exit to get all the passengers out before trying to leave herself. Her quick thinking angered the terrorists so much that they shot her point blank range in the head while she was doing her duty of guiding the passengers to safety.

• Legacy: Neerja's valour resides in the hearts of Indians even after 34 years of her demise. She was awarded Ashok Chakra posthumously for her bravery, which mother accepted in her place. Four years after, since 1990, a ‘Neerja Bhanot Award’ is given to women who are bold enough to overcome social injustice and help others to do the same every year by the Neerja Bhanot Pan Am Trust.

In 2004, the Indian Postal Service released a stamp in her honour. In 2016, Sonam Kapoor starred in the award winning masterpiece ‘Neerja', that honoured Bhanot's life. The same year, her brother Aneesh Bhanot authored a book named ‘The Neerja I Knew', having personal accounts of her friends, life, family and her co-workers along with her photos.

[odanurr87]

2019: My year in K-Dramas - Part 1

I’ve been getting into kdramas for a few years now, but I usually only watch one or two at a time. This year I watched a lot more (and that’s not counting The Bride of Habaek, which I dropped when it became clear it was a very bad adaptation of the manhwa; Crash Landing on You, which started airing a couple of weeks ago; nor Tomorrow With You, which I haven’t yet finished, what’s probably not a good sign), a few being rewatchs of old shows that I like. Seeing as it’s unlikely I’ll ever write up full reviews for each like I did for Goblin (you can read my review here), I decided to compile this list to tell you what I liked and didn’t like about each, what I feel worked and what didn’t. I’m also including a qualitative metric (Rewatch meter) that tries to gauge how likely it is that I’ll find myself returning to the show in the future (Low, Medium, High). Naturally, your very own meter may differ from mine.

For future reference, these are the shows I watched in 2019 and that I aim to cover in this series of posts:

While You Were Sleeping (2017)

W (2016)

My Strange Hero (2018)

The Secret Life of my Secretary (2019)

Angel’s Last Mission: Love (2019)

Strong Woman Do Bong-Soon (2017)

When the Camellia Blooms (2019)

Bring it on, Ghost (2016)

One More Time (2016)

My Girlfriend is a Gumiho (2010)

My Love From The Star (2014)

Descendants of the Sun (2016)

Regardless of which show did better, overall, I find myself drifting more and more towards Korean dramas than your run-of-the-mill American TV show, save for a few bright exceptions, such as The Expanse. Heck, they’re better than most Hollywood movies nowadays.

Since I’ll probably end up writing a lot, I’ve decided to split this review list into two parts. Let’s start with the last kdrama I watched and work my way backwards... if I can remember, that is.

WARNING! There will be spoilers so read at your own risk.

While You Were Sleeping (2017)

Bae Suzy as Nam Hong-Joo, and Lee Jong-Suk as Jung Jae-Chan.

Release Date: September 27 - November 16, 2017

Episodes: 16

Available on: Viki

Summary: Nam Hong-Joo is a young journalist who has had bad dreams about the future since she was a kid, but she has never been able to change the outcome. Jung Jae-Chan is a rookie prosecutor who moves in across the street with his younger brother. When Jae-Chan has a prophetic dream of his own about Hong-Joo being involved in a car accident, and the tragic events that follow, he makes an impulsive decision to interfere, changing Hong-Joo’s fate and that of police officer Han Woo-Tak in the process. When the three of them start having dreams of one another, they realize their lives are somehow entwined. Together, they decide to use their knowledge of the future for good, but changing someone’s fate is never straightforward, and the consequences for doing so may be more than they can handle.

What I liked:

The concept and writing. This is the second show I’ve watched, in chronological order, with Lee Jong-Suk as a lead where I’m really attracted by the concept. Imagine if you could take the precogs from Minority Report and give them (relatively) normal lives inside a kdrama. This is the result. Even better, having Hong-Joo and Woo-Tak have different and often contradicting dreams about the future makes for an interesting twist, as we see prosecutor Jae-Chan struggling to navigate these prophetic waters in search for the best outcome. Curiously, the show makes a point early on about how Jae-Chan’s the variable upon which their dreams diverge, but nothing really comes off it. Naturally, the concept of multiple diverging futures gives the show’s cinematography a chance to play around a bit, often comparing the same event in alternative timelines, or in the same timeline but at different moments in time. It may sound complicated, but it’s pretty to grasp once you start watching. Furthermore, the writing’s pretty tight all around, what’s not a mean feat when you’re juggling multiple realities, with some very emotional payoffs as the show draws to a close. Perhaps its weakest point is exactly how this prophetic dream ability is transferred from person to person (a theory is put forward which doesn’t entirely convince me), and the unnerving (and unexplored, fortunately) implications should someone less honourable were to have these dreams.

When The Nightmares Started. This is the best track in the entire show and if it’s not the main theme, it damn well should be. It has moments of calm, a hint of romance and hope, and that awesome shit-is-about-to-get-real cue starting at 1:38 that never fails to make a scene tons more epic. Your dish-washing experience will be 100% more epic playing to this track, guaranteed!

The Justice League (and friends). This show could’ve probably gotten on my bad side real fast if it had created a villain with the same superpower as the heroes (depends on the execution to be honest) and, indeed, I thought that was the direction it would inevitably take, revealing at some point that (evil) defense attorney Lee Yoo-Beom also had prophetic dreams and had been using them for his benefit all along, muahahaha! Instead, the show gave us three average people, connected by their prophetic dreams, who decide to team up and use these visions for good. It’s not always easy to change the future, as it has many ramifications, and therein lies the show’s narrative potential that it manages to exploit, perchance to its fullest. Even in the very last episode there’s a hint that maybe the people they’ve helped throughout also have dreams of their own that they use to help others, sort of a pay-it-forward chain. It may be somewhat unrealistic, but it’s a good note to end the show on all the same.

Kim Won-Hae as Choi Dam-Dong. Easily the best supporting character in the show, delivering a stronger and more rewarding performance than in Strong Woman Do Bong Soon, where he played two characters (he was pretty funny as the over-the-top head of development planning at Ainsoft), veering towards the more serious/dramatic/emotional end of the spectrum, although with some comedic elements mixed in. I was surprised by how strong his arc turned out to be, and my respect for his character went up by several points when his arc comes to a close and we finally put all the pieces of the puzzle together. This man can do both comedy and drama, so kudos to him.

What I didn’t like:

Mr. Perfect (also known as Han Woo-Tak). It’s not that I dislike him, far from it. Woo-Tak is so good, smart, selfless, and even good-looking, that he kinda undermines the OTP just by existing. He’s really setting unreasonable standards for any man to compete against. I mean, he even plays Cupid for the OTP... while also being in love with Hong-Joo! On the plus side, the show doesn’t really try to push the romantic triangle angle, what usually has mixed results. The one thing I did mind is how the show hints at him potentially being a better attorney/prosecutor than the main lead since that’s kind of Jae-Chan’s thing. I mean, if you take everything that makes the lead special and give it to someone else, is he still the lead?

OTP: A stronger performance from Lee Jong-Suk than in W, complemented by a relatively (and I cannot stress this word enough) weaker performance by Suzy in some aspects (I think Han Hyo-Joon’s Oh Yeon-Joo in W does sad love better than Suzy as Nam Hong-Joo, but it’s a matter of preference), results in a better pairing with more chemistry. Suzy is great and lovable at being the quirky Nam Hong-Joo (watch the video below if you’re unconvinced) and Jung Jae-Chan is a lot more vulnerable than Kang Chul ever was, but I was left wondering at times whether this couple would’ve gotten as much traction were it not for the strength of their past connection (especially with Mr. Perfect around).

Verdict: What can I say? While You Were Sleeping was an excellent show from beginning to end. If I were to nitpick, I would’ve chosen the end wedding to be the one between Jae-Chan and Hong-Joo since that honestly makes more sense, and maybe I would’ve made Woo-Tak more of a bro than a somewhat-but-not-entirely romantic rival (think Seo Dae-Young in Descendants of the Sun).

Rewatch meter: High

W (2016)

Han Hyo-Joo as Oh Yeon-Joo, and Lee Jong-Suk as Kang Chul.

Release Date: July 20 - September 14, 2016

Episodes: 16

Available on: Viki

Summary: W is a bestselling webtoon by cartoonist Oh Seong-Moo that follows the adventures of Kang Chul, an Olympic gold medalist framed for the murder of his family, who’s eventually acquitted and becomes a multi-millionaire who fights crime (think Bruce Wayne but without the costume). Tired of his creation, Seong-Moo decides it’s time to kill the protagonist and put an end to the series (much like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle decided to kill Sherlock Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls). Oh Yeon-Joo is Seong-Moo’s daughter, a doctor and passionate fan of W, who is one day mysteriously transported to the world of the manhwa, where she sees a dying Kang Chul and saves his life. Intrigued by his mysterious saviour, Kang Chul decides to learn out more about her and Yeon-Joo finds herself constantly returning to the world of the manhwa. Will Kang Chul learn the truth about her and his world? And if so, what will be the consequences?

What I liked:

The concept. It’s not an altogether original concept, and I’m reminded of Schwarzenegger’s Last Action Hero (Who Framed Roger Rabbit before that), but it’s also not one that you see often on the screen, big or small. The idea of being able to enter the world you’re reading about and meeting the characters you know and love is extremely appealing and there is some fangirling from our protagonist initially. Naturally, since she knows everything about this world, it’s good fun to see her inadvertedly reveal something that she couldn’t possibly know and deal with the reactions/consequences. What’s better is how Yeon-Joo tries to figure out the laws of the manhwa world by applying the real-world concepts of cliffhangers and dramatic revelations, often to hilarious effect. Seeing how the manhwa continues to write itself to reflect events in W’s world, and the reactions by readers (and by Yeon-Joo) in the real world is really entertaining, especially those from the more passionate W fans.

The transition between animation and live-action. I love the blend between animation and live action, as in the example below. There are more subtle transitions, like when a character’s hand oscillates between the real world and the cartoon world. Perhaps it’s a very simple filter but it looks good. Also, what little we see of the manhwa is very well drawn.

Han Hyo-Joo as Oh Yeon-Joo. Despite the fact that Yeon-Joo’s character becomes less proactive in the second half of the series (as I will discuss below), she was the one who really carried the show for me, certainly on the emotional side of the spectrum, where Kang Chul felt a little flat throughout (to be fair, he’s more the analytical type and he’s a manhwa character). She was also able to convey humour quite well, especially in the earlier, funnier, episodes.

The execution (of the first half). The first episode doesn’t waste a second setting up the story and there is never a dull moment. Watching Yeon-Joo read the latest episode of the manhwa and witness her reaction as she sees herself in the comic was gripping and I was eager to see what the next episode would bring. The show was also fairly consistent with the rules of travelling back and forth and what one could and couldn’t do in the cartoon world. We were witnessing an epic struggle between the cartoonist who wanted to kill his creation with his stylus and the daughter who wanted to protect him so much that she had willed herself into his world (if that’s not a good setup for a love story, I don’t know what is). And all the while, Kang Chul was putting the pieces of the puzzle together in his universal and unrelenting search for truth. Every episode brought something new to the table and, much like the manhwa, ended with some revelation or cliffhanger that kept you on the edge of your seat asking for more. Unfortunately, I think that was also its downfall.

What I didn’t like:

The execution (of the second half) and the overall pacing. I think the (relative) downfall of this series was trying to do too much too early. It worked for the first half because the show had a lot of material it could burn through and, in a way, it was refreshing that it was willing to do so. Sadly, my thoughts eventually turned from, “What’s going to happen next?” to “What can even happen next?” The story was moving so fast that I began to wonder where exactly it was going, and that’s when some of the flaws started to seep through. Episode 9 focused on the aftermath of Yeon-Joo resetting events, thus making Kang Chul forget all about her. While I certainly felt for her when she met her amnesiac husband, this was largely thanks to Han Hyo-Joo’s performance (and good track selection), for Kang Chul had been her husband in name only. Had we previously seen more episodes of their life together, this scene would’ve been a lot more impactful, and her desperate crying outside the operating room more heartfelt. Then, the plot thickens as we move into the (overly) dramatic second half of the show, with the introduction of a villain who knows about the real world and starts manipulating events in the manhwa for his benefit... by possessing cartoonist Oh Seong-Moo! What? This was never established as even remotely possible! (not to mention it doesn’t make sense) As you can imagine, this is whereabouts the rules of this universe start to break down and anything goes. Furthermore, when this villain is defeated in Episode 13, the show suddenly remembered it already had an antagonist perfectly cast for the part and finally decided to put him to use, although too little too late for my taste. As if that weren’t enough, a character is killed because drama, since any other explanation would make no fucking sense. This death is entirely nonsensical and I was beginning to conclude the show should have ended a lot sooner.

The amount of flashbacks/dreams/recaps/plans. I don’t mind a good recap or a flashback every now and then, but there came a point where the show started abusing this narrative device a little too much. The show spent a lot of time either: going over things we already know; featuring lengthy dream sequences that are very transparent and serve no purpose (although, incidentally, would make for a better ending); or laying out how events are supposed to go only for them to go in a completely different direction. While they are sometimes necessary, most of the time they were just padding that actually detracted from the story.

How secondary the supporting characters in the manhwa truly are. I know Kang Chul is supposed to be the protagonist but his bodyguard and secretary aren’t given a whole lot to work with throughout the show. I wish they had been active participants in learning the truth of their world rather than passive bystanders.

How Yeon-Joo becomes less proactive in the second half. Maybe it’s just a feeling, but I think our female protagonist became more reactive and less proactive in the second half, with Kang Chul being the one who mostly directed the course of events. It didn’t help that she kept fainting every now and then, what meant she had to spend some time in bed, what was a shame since she was the more interesting character. To be honest, I think the whole father arc should’ve been over and done with in the first half, with Yeon-Joo stepping up to be the new cartoonist.

OTP: Undercooked, but Han Hyo-Joo manages to almost convince me.

Verdict: It’s hard not to say W is one of the most refreshing shows I’ve seen in a while, even despite its more prominent flaws in the second half. I don’t like how powerful the drawing tablet became, especially after it was established that the manhwa could, at times, overrule the will of the real world, as clearly depicted when Kang Chul refuses to commit suicide. I’d rather the manhwa characters had resolved things on their own, aided by Yeon-Joo, without having to resort to some ultra-powerful plot device. Furthermore, I think the show should’ve taken things a bit more slowly rather than try to surprise us every episode, and use that time to build the relationship between Yeon-Joo and Kang Chul. Another thing I feel the show didn’t exploit to its fullest was the fact that Yeon-Joo knows just about everything that’s transpired in W’s world, what maybe could’ve aided Kang Chul in his investigation (sadly, this is undermined by the fact that the murderer really has no identity, what I find odd). Last but not least, Kang Chul never remembering his “past life” was a missed opportunity.

Rewatch meter: Medium

My Strange Hero (2018)

From left to right: Jo Bo-Ah as Son Soo-Jung; Yoo Seung-Ho as Kang Bok-Soo; and Kwak Dong-Yeon as Oh Se-Ho.

Release Date: December 10, 2018 - February 4, 2019

Episodes: 32

Available on: Viki

Summary: When Kang Bok-Soo was a high school student, he was falsely accused of committing acts of violence and ended up expelled from school. Those who brought the accusations against him were his first love, Son Soo-Jung, and a fellow student, Oh Se-Ho. Nine years later, Bok-Soo saves Soo-Jung’s life and suddenly finds himself a mediatic sensation. In order to improve the school’s somewhat tarnished image, he’s invited back to finish his studies. Bok-Soo hesitates, but when he learns Soo-Jung is a teacher there and Se-Ho is the new director, a latent desire to get revenge surfaces. Will Bok-Soo finally get his revenge on the people who wronged him nine years ago? Or will he spend most of his time doing anything but? The latter.

What I liked:

Teacher Park. He’s the kind of teacher everyone would like to have in high school and an example of moral rectitude that Soo-Jung tries to follow. You can tell he really cares for all the students and always tries to be fair and just, no matter the personal cost.

Soo-Jung’s arc. Probably the character who experiences the most growth throughout the show, in no small part thanks to her starting point. She’s the only teacher who stands up for her students, is willing to expose the corruption in the school, and goes so far as to quit her job because she feels she didn’t earn her spot fair and square (despite Oh Se-Ho telling her she was hired because of her qualifications). It is worth noting that when Mr Park gives the other teachers the chance to own up and resign honourably nobody does.

What I didn’t like:

The series meanders a lot early on. Initially, I watched till Episode 14 and dropped it because nothing was really going on. Bok-Soo says he wants to get revenge but his heart really isn’t into it. He certainly doesn’t have a plan like, say, Edmond Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo, or Emily Thorne in Revenge. In fact, for those first 14 episodes, it only seemed he went there to suffer some more at the hands of the same people who wronged him all those years ago. What leads me to...

Son Soo-Jung isn’t a very likable protagonist initially. I don’t know if this is done on purpose to get us to side with Bok-Soo, but it doesn’t seem like a very smart strategy to have us dislike the lead’s main love interest for almost half the length of the series. I mean, that’s what the antagonist is for. It seems like at every opportunity she twists the knife on Bok-Soo’s back a little more, so much so that a hurt Bok-Soo outright demands, “Why don’t you just ask me what happened instead of constantly making assumptions?” (I’m paraphrasing) Her response, basically telling him to fuck off, didn’t win her any points in my book. That’s about when the writers probably realized their mistake and started filling us in on how Soo-Jung’s life was also miserable after Bok-Soo was expelled so please don’t hate her. They also pull a 180 when she stands up for Bok-Soo during a disciplinary hearing, what I thought was quite out of character for her at the time. The two seem to patch up their relationship awfully fast, what struck me as odd as they didn’t seem to have much chemistry. Having said that, Soo-Jung’s character certainly grows after Episode 14 and has a very satisfying arc, ultimately being the only teacher worth a damn in this school, other than Mr Park.

“Is Kang Bok-Soo’s revenge finally starting?” After I initially dropped this show at the Episode 14 mark, a video popped up in my YT feed with that title (only they used the actor’s name instead of the character’s). It was a scene where Bok-Soo went about exposing the many deeds of corruption within the school. Great, I thought, shit is finally hitting the fan... in Episode 26. I resumed watching from that mark until the end. The series had finally managed to get me invested, almost as it was over, and I decided to watch the episodes I’d missed.

OTP: There are some cute moments but I still didn’t feel the chemistry (what, ultimately, is my entirely subjective take).

Verdict: I don’t feel this is a true romance drama like others on this list, if ever it tried to be, what’s decidedly strange because there are many episodes dedicated to exploring the relationship between Bok-Soo and Soo-Jung with little else going on. Instead, I see it as more of a critique on the Korean education system and the immense pressures students are subjected to in order to meet unreasonable standards, with some romance elements sprinkled on it so that it’s not too depressing. That’s my take on it anyway. As such, it has some enjoyable aspects to it, like seeing Bok-Soo share nuggets of wisdom every now and then, or the students standing up for Bok-Soo and their school, or the revenge/investigation finally kicking into high gear. It’s just unfortunate it took so long to get there and didn’t really encourage me to do so.

Rewatch meter: Low

The Secret Life of my Secretary (2019)

From left to right: Koo Ja-Sung as Ki Dae-Joo; Kim Young-Kwang as Do Min-Ik; Jin Ki-Joo as Jung Gal-Hee; and Kim Jae-Kyung as Veronica Park/Park Ok-Sun.

Release Date: May 6 - June 25, 2019

Episodes: 32

Available on: Viki

Summary: The story follows Do Min-Ik, a prominent director at T&T Mobile Media, and his secretary, Jung Gal-Hee, as together they deal with the onset of an illness that prevents Do Min-Ik from seeing faces, the result of a possible attempt on Min-Ik’s life by some unknown party. On the corporate drama side, this undermines his shot to succeed his (jerk of an) uncle as Chairman of the company, and we see Min-Ik and Gal-Hee struggling to hide the truth of his illness and overcome the many obstacles set on their way to chairmanship. On the romance side, his inability to recognize faces causes him to mistake his secretary for Veronica Park, a rich heiress and leading figure in the film industry, whom he eventually falls in love with... what is kind of a problem since the real Veronica Park develops a crush on Min-Ik’s best friend, Ki Dae-Joo (also a director at T&T), while Gal-Hee falls in love with her boss. And, just in case we didn’t have enough corporate drama, we learn early on that someone may be embezzling from T&T and all the signs point to Dae-Joo. How will this all turn out?

What I liked:

Do Min-Ik and Jung Gal-Hee working together. Min-Ik is one sharp boss, and the moment he’s unable to recognize faces, he starts devising other strategies to recognize people, such as identifying them by their height. Gal-Hee pitches in with the different directors’ hairstyles, and eventually Min-Ik is even able to recognize them by their specific tics. Another example is the first stockholders’ meeting where they team up to prevent Min-Ik’s dismissal. Everything goes so smoothly that it prompts Veronica Park to ask Gal-Hee, and I’m paraphrasing here, “Did you write the script to this play?”

What I didn’t like:

The deceit lasting so long. Min-Ik doesn’t start as the best of bosses, we see that in the first episode, but that very same episode opens the door for him caring for Gal-Hee more than he’s willing to let on. The show does a good enough job of explaining his rather rude behaviour towards his secretaries and why he always fires them within a year, what makes the deceit all the more hurtful. However, the problem I have with Min-Ik not realizing Gal-Hee was pretending to be Veronica Park, is that this happens for 24 episodes! That means we only have 8 episodes left for him to feel betrayed about the whole thing yet also recover in time to start dating Gal-Hee. I don’t feel this was enough time to successfully explore their relationship.

How weak/bland every other story is. The attempt on Min-Ik’s life and the police’s investigation of it is handled abysmally, with the detectives only appearing from time to time to create what some writer thinks is drama. They’re so useless that the perpetrator actually has to turn himself in! I thought Dae-Joo was a bland character throughout, so I had zero interest in his relationship with Veronica Park. The same goes for Gal-Hee’s family. Even Min-Ik’s mother somehow pulls a 180 out of the blue. The only other plot thread that caught my eye was the possible embezzlement and that was wrapped up horribly, what leads me to...

No one facing the consequences of their actions. No matter how much the writers want to frame this secret organisation within T&T as Robin-Hood-like, the fact remains that they were stealing. Not only that, but they can be directly tied to the assault and attempted murder of Do Min-Ik, among other crimes. Sure, they’re all fired at some point, but they all get hired back thanks to Min-Ik. Nobody faces any jail time except for the guy directly responsible for Min-Ik’s accident who actually apologizes to him and turns himself in. The leader of this shadowy organisation comes out unscathed and has her machinations to see Dae-Joo become chairman of T&T rewarded when...

Dae-Joo becoming the chairman of T&T. What a payoff. The blandest and most uninterested character in the entire show becomes the chairman when the character we’ve been rooting for throughout, the only one who’s willing to put everything on the line to help the downtrodden secretaries, gets the short end of the stick. I guess it’s true when they say no good deed goes unpunished.

OTP: There is some chemistry there and I wish we had seen more of it, but sadly the (official) relationship between Gal-Hee and Min-Ik takes place a little too late.

Verdict: Usually, most of the kdramas I’ve watched and liked, to some extent, have some scenes that are imprinted on your mind (much like Gal-Hee’s face is imprinted on Min-Ik) and that you find yourself returning to from time to time. With this show, I honestly had to struggle to recall any such scenes, even with the aid of YouTube playlists. This is not helped by the fact that I can recall none of the music used, and that’s not a good sign. Memorable scenes and songs usually go together, as the next show in my list will prove. Ultimately, The Secret Life of my Secretary, while entertaining enough, didn’t live up to my expectations and, as such, it’s unlikely I’ll be rewatching it any time soon.

Rewatch meter: Low

Angel’s Last Mission: Love (2019)

Shin Hye-Sun as Lee Yeon-Seo, and Kim Myung-Soo (Infinite L) as Kim Dan.

Release Date: May 22 - July 11, 2019

Episodes: 32

Available on: Viki

Summary: Kim Dan, a troublemaking angel with a kind heart, is 24 hours away from Heaven when he meets the beautiful, talented, yet cynical and arrogant, prima ballerina Lee Yeon-Seo. Recently blinded by an accident during a performance, Yeon-Seo somehow manages to spot Kim Dan, who should be invisible to any human. His curiosity sparked, he follows Yeon-Seo around and eventually, in a fit of impulsiveness, saves her life in a car accident. However, for having interfered and saved a human’s life, Kim Dan is fated to turn to dust... unless he’s willing to undertake one final task. His mission? He must help Yeon-Seo find true love, but will he be able to keep from falling in love himself? Obviously not. And, naturally, Yeon-Seo has some evil relatives who are out to get her, because it wouldn’t be a kdrama otherwise.

What I liked:

The songs. I can’t vouch for the entire OST for I haven’t listened to it all yet (Correction: I’ve now since listened to all of it and it really has a lot of good tracks), but there are at least a handful of songs that will stick with you like glue. I can’t say if I like the songs more because of the scenes in which they play, or if I like the scenes more because of the songs that are used, but I can say the songs play an important role in engraving these scenes into my mind. Songs like ‘Sweeter’, by Jess Penner, that play when we’re playfully exploring the relationship between Yeon-Seo and Kim Dan; or ‘Pray’, by KLANG, when some important relevation or dramatic scene is about to transpire; or ‘Oh My Angel’, by Chai, that plays during the more romantic moments; these songs have made it into my Spotify list and are a must-listen on a daily basis for now.

The humor. Beyond the interactions between Kim Dan and Yeon-Seo, which sometimes make for very humorous situations, my hat’s off to the characters of Archangel Hoo, Dan’s senior (played by Kim In-Kwon) and Chung Yu-Mi, Yeon-Seo’s butler (played by Woo Hee-Jin). The former has dozens of opportunities for humor as he’s able to take the form of any human and keeps surprising Kim Dan by keeping tabs on him. The latter is probably the closest thing Yeon-Seo has to a mother (or maybe an older sister), and can be playfully mischievous when she starts noticing our leads may have feelings for each other. There are two scenes that perfectly embody the show’s humor that I would be remiss if I didn’t direct you to. Be aware they contain spoilers.

The leads and their chemistry. You cannot make a kdrama work if the leads don’t have some sort of chemistry (well, I suppose you could but it would be a bit of an uphill battle) and Shin Hye-Sun and Kim Myung-Soo have that in spades. This shows not only during the more romantic scenes, what’s expected, but also during their fights, what’s even better (if that makes any sense). This isn’t the first time I’ve seen L acting, in fact, he played the character of Yoo Tan in the short kdrama One More Time, with actress Yoon So-Hee playing his love interest, Moon Da-In. He sold me on that show then, as did Yoon So-Hee, but I feel his acting’s improved in this, or maybe the script and length of the show allows him to flesh out his character more, showing us more sides of his personality as the show draws to its end. And it’s really amazing to see how effortlessly Shin Hye-Sun can don the skin of the strong, cold, and harsh Yeon-Seo in one scene, and then swap it for the playful, romantic, and vulnerable Yeon-Seo that Kim Dan falls in love with in the next. Just watch more of those KBS World TV clips if you don’t believe me. These two steal every scene they’re in, but I feel Shin Hye-Sun is really the standout here. (At the time of this posting, Shin Hye-Sun has won the Top Excellence Award (Female) in KBS’s 2019 Drama Awards for her role in this show, so congratulations to her on an award well deserved!)

What I didn’t like:

How the show meanders towards the end. I laid out the plot in the most succinct way possible, but it’s hardly that straightforward. Dan’s mission should, in theory, be over when Yeon-Seo learns to love again, but then the show would then be over a lot sooner than Episode 32. The writers know that so they move the goalpost, at some point revealing that Dan also had to learn to love for the mission to be truly over. Not only that, but they both had to be willing to sacrifice everything for their loved one in order for God to believe their love was sincere or something, what leads one to think they need to commit suicide and the other to think they need to commit murder. I don’t know, by this point the show’s either stretching things out to reach the 32-episode mark or they’re milking each scene for every ounce of drama they can get, probably both. This problem gets compounded by the fact that...

Some (other) things don’t make a whole lot of sense. To start with, the theology and consistency on this show is all over the place. The same God that apparently ordered a couple of angels to shoot someone, gangsta style, because an angel broke the rules and fell in love with a human, is moved by our lead couple’s Romeo-and-Juliet love story and by Yeon-Seo’s ballet performance. Oh, and by the way, shooting someone is not how unruly angels are dealt with, God can simply pull a Thanos and have them vanish into mist, so why did he decide to use a gun that one time? Because drama! God also decides that the best time to send Dan to Heaven is when Yeon-Seo is lying commatose in the hospital (what a dick), to which Dan says, “Fuck it, I’m staying here,” and God lets him return as an angel so he can help Yeon-Seo wake up, interfering once again and thereby ceasing to exist... except he’s still an angel an episode later! What the f*** is going on here?! Archangel Hoo broke the rules once and he got the Thanos treatment, so how come Kim Dan gets so many second chances?

Some characters are either superfluous or their arcs are unclear. As an example of the latter, there’s the character of Ji Kang-Woo (played by Lee Dong-Gun), Yeon-Seo’s ballet instructor and Kim Dan’s rival for Yeon Seo’s affection. It’s revealed early on that he’s an angel-turned-human after breaking the rules and falling in love with a human himself... whom the gangster angels promptly killed. It’s never explained why she had to die while Yeon-Seo and Kim Dan are allowed to stay together, but apparently Kang-Woo is satisfied that his pain was necessary so he could help them trick God or something. I’ve no idea. But the award for the most superfluous character has to go to Ni-Na’s secret ballet instructor who only appears when the script dictates and is not developed at all. I can’t even remember if she had a name! What was her point even?

OTP: Probably one of the best pairings of the year (says the guy who’s watched maybe 4-5 2019 shows out of who knows how many).

Verdict: This is a case of the pros outweighing the cons. There’s simply too much that works for me, so many scenes and songs that stayed with me thanks to the strong performances of our leads and some of the supporting cast. I was never unaware of its more glaring flaws, what prevents this show from reaching Goblin levels of quality, but I could easily find myself rewatching it from time to time.

Rewatch meter: High

Strong Woman Do Bong-Soon (2017)

From left to right: Park Bo-Young as Do Bong-Soon; Ji Soo as In Guk-Doo; and Park Hyung-Sik as Ahn Min-Hyuk.

Release Date: February 24 - April 15, 2017

Episodes: 16

Available on: Viki, Netflix

Summary: Do Bong-Soon has a secret: she is insanely strong, a superhuman ability that has been passed down to the women in her family for generations. She also aspires to create a video game with herself as the main character. When Ahn Min-Hyuk, the CEO of gaming company Ainsoft, chances by her as she’s beating up half a dozen thugs, he’s instantly mesmerized by both her beauty and strength. The recent target of anonymous threats, Min-Hyuk decides to hire Bong-Soon as a bodyguard (she ends up being more of a secretary) and she accepts with the promise of joining the planning department of Ainsoft once the culprit is caught. Meanwhile, detective In Guk-Doo, Bong-Soon’s secret crush and childhood friend, investigates a series of strange kidnappings and murders in Bong-Soon’s neighbourhood. When the culprit targets Bong-Soon’s best friend, Bong-Soon and Min-Hyuk find themselves involved in the hunt for the criminal.

What I liked:

Gangster Bong-Soon. Okay, maybe saying she’s a gangster is a bit too much, but after beating a bunch of school bullies into submission, they soon look up to her as their new boss, taking orders from her and even looking out for her so that her secret isn’t exposed. It’s pretty funny then that Bong-Soon has to save her crew from being harassed by the new neighbourhood bullies, acting the part of a gangster for a short while.

The need for training. I appreciate the fact that Min-Hyuk foresaw the need to help Bong-Soon have full control of her strength, although he also created routines to bolster up her endurance, not to mention some of the moves she learned could have come in handy when she was depowered (sadly, she doesn’t use them). And all of this training does indeed pay off, as we see Bong-Soon fight smartly and using only as much strength as is needed to get the job done, as opposed to her Episode 1 self who used way too much strength with hilarious results. You can witness the results of Min-Hyuk’s training in the fight with the “new bullies” I mentioned previously, as well as the one at the beginning of Episode 9. Beyond fighting, her training also had positive results in her everyday life, like now being able to hug people without worrying about choking them.

The leads and their chemistry. The chemistry of these two is off the charts (it’s over 9000!!!). Everything about Park Bo-Young as Do Bong-Soon screams cute, from her short height to the way she talks, and even her glares of disapproval when Min-Hyuk does something he shouldn’t have. She’s also confident when she needs to, but not afraid to show vulnerability around the people she loves. I could shower similar praise on Park Hyung-Sik as Ahn Min-Hyuk, especially where the vulnerability department is concerned. Male leads tend to be more stoic (like In Guk-Doo), so it was quite refreshing to see how devastated Min-Hyuk was when he learned the identity of the one threatening him, or how crazy-in-love he is around Bong-Soon (she’s his kryptonite). Min-Hyuk is never afraid to wear his heart on his sleeve and it shows in every single scene. These two can just stare at each other in silence and convey more emotion than any spoken word.

The humor. I’m not talking about the dumb hospital scenes that feature humor more similar to what you’d find in a crappy Hollywood “comedy” (peeing jokes, really?), but things like Hyung-Sik’s ad-libbing throughout the show (he’s having a blast), or the more funny interactions between Min-Hyuk and Bong-Soon, even the ever-changing Romeo and Juliet scenes as Bong-Soon’s feelings for the different characters evolve.

What I didn’t like:

The sudden disappearance of Min-Hyuk’s family. Initially, the show has two distinct storylines: the string of kidnappings/murders, on the one hand; and the threats to Min-Hyuk, likely related to the question of who in his family will become the new Chairman of Ohsung Group. As expected, Min-Hyuk has several brothers who are a bit jealous of his success with Ainsoft and intuit their father will name him the Chairman, so it makes sense one of them is behind the threats. Once the storyline is resolved however, Min-Hyuk’s family is completely out of the picture, even during his marriage, what I find extremely odd.

The randomness of the depowering rule. Very early on the show explains that, while the women of the Bong-Soon family are blessed with superhuman strength from birth, they can easily lose this ability should they try to use it for less than honorable pursuits. It can be something as simple, and apparently harmless, as using this strength to become an Olympic weightlifting champion, as Bong-Soon’s mother soon found out, but it’s usually tied to using this ability to hurt innocent people. Naturally, once this rule was made known, it was only a matter of time before Bong-Soon would lose her powers as well, and this did indeed happen towards the end of the show. The problem I have with it is two-fold: its execution and its consistency. Bong-Soon doesn’t purposefully hurt an innocent man, she’s tricked into doing so by the villain. One could argue that whatever higher power granted this ability can’t tell the difference, except that argument falls apart entirely when you realize Bong-Soon has already purposefully used her power to hurt innocent people, like that one time she crushed Min-Hyuk’s foot to keep him silent (among multiple examples). That this event is played for laughs should have no bearing on the outcome. Furthermore, we later see Bong-Soon pleading for her strength to return so she can save Min-Hyuk, so it would appear that whatever higher power was listening is intelligent. At the end of the day, we all know this happened because the writers didn’t want to limit the fun possibilities of Bong-Soon abusing her power a little bit, saving it for the right moment to amp the drama. So, in reality, I was aware of it, and decided to roll with it.

OTP: Cuteness overload.

Verdict: This is one of the strongest shows in this list (no pun intended), more so given how much it’s able to pull off in 16 episodes as opposed to other shows’ 32, which is why I’m more lenient in terms of its writing. This is simply a good, fun, show, easily rewatchable thanks to the cute OTP. While its soundtrack may not be on par overall with the one from Angel’s Last Mission: Love, it still features some solid, memorable, songs (’Heartbeat’ by SURAN being the most obvious, but also ‘Double Trouble Couple’ by MAMAMOO, or ‘Super Power Girl’ by Every Single Day), not to mention a highly effective and comedic use of sound effects. Definitely one of my favourite shows.

Rewatch meter: High

And that brings us to the end of Part 1. I hope you had a good time reading through this post, maybe even found a show to your liking. What were some of your favourite shows in 2019? Stay tuned for Part 2!

[re-vised]

I think we should talk about Nancy Drew

Hey. So I don’t post much here anymore. Sorry about that. But as a person who is somewhat of a gaming journalist, and Nancy Drew Game fan I wanted to talk about Nancy Drew: Midnight in Salem, which is launching very soon (about 6 hours from now).

For those of you unaware I’ll try and get you up to speed as best as I can. All jokes aside (bc tbh Nancy Drew is a bit of punching bag), I do in fact love Nancy Drew games. I’m a mystery fan, and a puzzle fan so it stands to reason that I fell in love with the series when I was younger. Herinteractive did some insane work, pumping out 2 games a year, leading it to currently having over 30 games in the series. But there has been a bit of a stir regarding the most recent entry: Midnight in Salem.

Midnight in Salem was first revealed, as the games were at that time, with a post-credit’s teaser in the previous game, Sea of Darkness. This is where we got the basic premise, and people started getting excited for a new entry. But on the eve of its launch, there is a lot of animosity flying around. It all stems back to the desire by Herinteractive to innovate.

Nancy Drew in its prior form was a point-and-click game. It makes sense I suppose, it’s first entry, Secrets Can Kill. So it seems that going forward into the 2010s, where point-and-click isn’t on trend, Her interactive saw fit to innovate by changing the formula. Seemingly the developer, looking to grab new audiences, hopes the changes will bring in higher numbers. Maybe it will, but in my experience this fandom is rather... shall we say insulated. The fandom is passionate and tight knit, but there isn’t any kind of movement of people into the fandom. Nancy Drew Games are well known, but there is already some stigma that lingers around the franchise. It’s perceived as girly, and casual. Is it deserved? I mean sure a bit yeah, but a move to a new engine will not change that. Hell, Unity has cheap devs not paying to have the Unity Ident removed, causing the engine to be associated with bad-quality games in some narrow minded individuals. The shift to Unity, would allow players to fully explore the 3D environments of the ND universe, but this means a lot more work. Work that Her interactive vastly underestimated.

The first obvious problem is that Her interactive had some vastly, inaccurate predictions of the work needed. It seemed to many that, whilst there might be *some* delays, that Midnight in Salem wouldn’t fall too far from the standard biannual schedule. In this case, Salem was set to release the year after it’s predecessor, giving a difference between the two of 9-21 months. With the upcoming date, it is being released just short of 55 months later. Now of course, delays happen. We don’t like them but they happen. But to have a game being kicked 4 years down the road is pretty crazy. It’s crazier if that four and a half year development time is that big a discrepancy from your initial projections. That’s just underestimation, and oversight like that has left some cold on the release.

Many are of course looking through a crazy lens. This game basically replaced 9 possible releases. People are giving an unfair view of this. As such people are wondering if it is “worth the time” spent on it, which I mean it won’t be. A game can’t really be that good that it is going be worth 9 games that’s unrealistic.

But could it all be worth it? Well no I don’t think so. Nancy Drew as a brand is not something that people have been itching to jump on. There are no COD bros who secretly wanted to jump on board but didn’t want to bc it was point and click. I think for the most part, Midnight in Salem will not bring in new fans to buy stuff, but some fans seem to be feeling a bit dejected.

Whilst I can’t abide the fans jumping on #NotMyNancyDrew, protesting the crime of changing the format, let’s be real, it is a step back. See the games looked good in their previous style, but creating a fully immersive 3D environment is pumping totally different, unused muscles, and it shows. Textures are unimpressive. Character models leave a lot to be desired. Simply put, the resources are stretched thin, and there are some obvious faults in the screenshots we have been seeing.

All in all Midnight in Salem is rather disappointing. In trying to capture more audience, Her interactive is doing a disservice to itself. It’s done so much work polishing point and click to a mirror shine, and seems to have thrown it away to pursue something that seems poised to fail. The backlash, whilst a little overblown, is not unjustified. Unfortunately with the backdrop seemingly being Her Interactive flagging as a company, this will probably fail. And as much as I do not want it to be the truth, the company as a whole might not be far behind

[starlessskies94]

The Mark of a Soulmate (Negan/BlakeAU) Chapter Seven

It’s been a while since my last chapter so I hope this doesn’t disappoint. Thank you as always to the gorgeous @neganandblake​ for your support Lovely. You’re amazing! <3

Chapter Seven

Blake stood in front of her mirror blankly looking back the dressed up woman in front of her that she was struggling to recognize.

She hated looking like this...the makeup, the hair, the tight fitting dresses that sometimes restricted her breathing. It was all fake. Not one piece of the facade reflecting the real woman underneath. She’d have been perfectly happy with her comfy t-shirt and sweat pants.

But she was part of a brand. A face that represented perfection to the people that gazed upon it.

Laying on her bed; she desperately grasped at any excuse she could think of that would get her out of going to this launch party. None came to mind that would be acceptable for her management. She was already on thin ice for her employment after weeks of skipping work.

Forgotten meetings and scheduled photo shoots; runway shows she’d pretended to be sick for so, she didn’t have to attend.

It was becoming harder and harder to care about any of it. Her mood constantly spiraling into a cold depth of numbing aches and pains; heart breaking every time she looked to her wrist. 

Negan...

Where the hell was he?! And why hadn’t he found her yet. Was she not good enough, not worthy enough to finally find the love she’d been promised by that damn mark on her skin? 

It felt as though it was mocking her at times. A constant reminder that she was alone. That perhaps she would always be that way. That maybe the weeks of research she had been doing was all for nothing. What if he had already had someone else.

It had been known that sometimes people would fall for someone that wasn’t their soulmate, but it was a still a fierce long lasting love that many couples had cherished well into their old age. And other times it wouldn’t prove enough and the relationships would crumple. If that was the case for her soulmate and he did have someone he loved; of course Blake would be happy for him. But where would that leave her? 

She was so tired of obsessing over a man she didn’t even know. It was getting to the point wasn’t sleeping properly, eating an entire meal had become a challenge for her to ever finish; as her appetite was always waning. And the thought of keeping the search for her soulmate going, was beginning to feel like more trouble than it was worth. 

Reluctantly she pulled herself up from her bed, quickly smoothing the creases out of her dress. Adding a last touch here and there to her straightened hair; paired with her rehearsed smile she’d carry with her most of the night. And after one last flick of her golden locks she was ready to go. 

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

As Blake stepped into the center of the launch party; the only thing she wanted to do was to go home. 

The photographers; the journalists, designers, models and management teams...Blake didn’t care about any of it. It was a world she no longer wanted to be a part of.  

Looking around, it was like seeing it through a fresh pair of eyes for the first time in years. The privilege, the arrogance and conceit. The unrealistic levels of feigned perfection, it was toxic and Blake couldn’t understand how she’d let herself be taken in by all of it for so long without seeing the true ugliness hidden behind the camera. 

She didn’t even have Tara to ground her from the sea of chaos that surrounded her. She hadn’t been invited; another thing that angered her. Tara’s position as a makeup artist clearly not deemed important enough to include her on the guest list. When in fact her craft was just; if not more important as everyone else’s that worked on the sets or the runways. It wasn’t fair.

The flash of cameras was blinding along was loud thumping music as more guests pushed their way through the bustling crowds. Elbows bumping into Blake almost knocking her over. 

The clinking of champagne glasses echoed with idle chatter and laughter,all washed into white noise as the blonde imagined herself anywhere but where she was. 

Perhaps she could sneak out? Surely no one would notice. She’d attended as agreed, she’d fulfilled the agreement of her contract. Job done. But just as she moved to eye the exit, she was quickly grabbed by the wrist. 

“Ah Blake! Sweetheart finally you’ve arrived!” It was Damon, her boss. An older gentleman, dressing in a suit that practically screamed wealth; paired with a dark red silk tie and designer cuff links, sweeping back his receding grey hair the man had clearly dyed a mousy brown in an attempt to look younger than he was. 

Blake flashed him another well practiced fake smile, but from the frown on his brow; he clearly wasn’t buying it. Leaning in close she could almost feel his harsh breath as he whispered lowly in her ear.

“Get your ass up to my office now!” He hissed. Not giving her time reply as he then proceeded to brag her by the arm up the stairs towards the large wooden door by the landing. 

The blonde flinched as he slammed the door closed before releasing his grip on her, storming over towards his desk. His hands resting on the cold surface as he huffed a deep frustrated sigh from his flared nostrils.

Blake stayed by the door, the party downstairs now muffled by the closed door. Green watering orbs watching Damon’s every move as he poured himself a drink; turning from the window to address her. 

“Blake...” He started, leaning forward, arms resting on the back of his office chair; fingers impatiently tapping against the glass of scotch in his hand. 

“We’ve been through a lot you and I. Hell I’m the one that discovered you. Always thought you could make it in this business.” the man paused, another sigh leaving him. “But you’re just not hitting the mark anymore. You’re late, sloppy, giving excuse after excuse. And I’m getting to the point that I can’t keep lying for you anymore.”

“To be honest, I’m starting to wonder if your looks are fading because of it. You’re not taking care of yourself anymore. But I don’t have time to babysit my clients. You know that, I said as much when I hired you.”

Blake couldn’t believe what she was hearing, it was clear she was struggling and of all people she would’ve expect Damon to understand and give her time. Evidently she had expected wrong.

“We have a standard in this business kid, how else do you think these guys and girls sell the clothes they model or the products they endorse. It’s all about the brand and you have to look perfect while you’re doing it and I’m afraid you’re just not anymore.” Damon finished his drink with one final sip before putting the glass down and stepping out from behind his desk. Long tailored legs striding towards Blake as he placed a hand on her shoulder. 

His patronizing tone grinding on Blake’s nerves now the longer he looked at her.

“It was good while it lasted, but I’m afraid not everyone is cut out for this world sweetheart, I’m letting you. Your contact terminated immediately. I hope you can understand.” He patted her shoulder but quickly snatched it back when Blake slapped his hand away.

“Oh I understand!” She spat. “This obsession for perfection is ridiculous Damon. None of it is real! You pin and tuck everything to point I can’t fucking breath! You paint so many layers of makeup on my skin that it’s hard to tell it’s me, no woman looks like that! It’s not right and if that’s your idea of perfection then I’m glad you’re firing me!”

To Blake’s utter disgust, Damon simply scoffed in her face. An idle cocky smile widening across his face.

“They all get bitter when they realize they’re not as pretty as they used to be. Don’t worry sweetheart, I’m sure you can find employment somewhere else.” Damon joked sarcastically. “Perhaps somewhere that doesn’t require you to think too much, I know with this job ‘standing and looking pretty’ was already a stretch for you to remember all at once dear.”

“Fuck you Damon.”

“Enjoy the party Blake...might as well considering it’s your last.”

Blake trembled with anger at Damon’s cruel words, a chuckle echoing behind her as he stepped back out towards the party to greet his guests. 

Her bottom lip quivering as she refused to let herself cry. Her pride too stubborn to let anyone see she was upset. 

Turning on her heel she also rejoined the party, but surrounding people blurred and bled into the a mix of colours with no faces that seemed familiar. 

The blonde dropped herself on a lonely stool by the bar, raised fingers calling for the bartender as she order her drink. A bitter taste washing down her throat as she threw it back before ordering another. Her throat and chest warming and numbing all at the same time from the booze. 

Stray tears escaping down her cheeks as she wallowed in the depths of darkness she could feel herself falling into. But she didn’t care. She was tired. So tired of pretending. Pretending that she cared about the job she’d just lost, pretending that it didn’t hurt every time she thought about Negan living his life with someone else. Or trying to find the man that might not even want her. But most of all she was tired of pretending she was happy...

She honestly didn’t know who she was pretending for anymore. But she did know she was done with it. Maybe she really was destined to be alone, a lost soul wandering forever looking for a soulmate that didn’t want to be found. 

Message received universe. Thanks for nothing...She knew that now. 

She was finally realizing what it felt like to hit rock bottom and she was more than willing to give in to it. She’d noticed the side-glances and sneered looks from the guests the more she drank, her lip curling in disgust for their unwanted judgement. She didn’t need to sit there and take part in their pathetic game as they looked down their noses at her from their high horses. 

And so she chose to leave, but not before leaning across the bar to snatch hold of the bottle of scotch she’d been drinking. Her slender fingers wrapped around the neck of the glass bottle clutching it tightly as she stumbled towards the door. 

Her actions on everyone’s lips that saw her leaving, Blake giving on-lookers a bitter laced laugh as she passed. She was done with this life, these people and their corrupt world. 

And as she walked out the door, she didn’t regret a thing.

Tag List: @thetruebornwildchild @mychemicalimagines @fanficsharing @island-end

Let me know if you’d like to be tagged!

[iruludavare]

“Somehow that doesn’t relieve my mind one bit.” - Clemont

Meme || Accepting @kaloskiddos

     What escapes from her lips is a set of laughter, light and full a joy born from knowing, its roots in the way his words resonate with the heroine so. Perhaps, in this regard, herself and the younger trainer are similar-- that interviews are a source of nervousness, despite what comforts or reassuring statements are offered to them. That their world slows and quietens when the lens of a camera focuses in on them, each mechanical shift tightening the grip around their hearts. So much pressure sits upon their shoulders, heart beating hard enough to echo in the depths of their ears. Indeed, Serena can understand from that angle, how her words did nothing to offer Clemont relief.

          “I do not blame you. It doesn’t ease my mind much, either,”

     Beloved or not. Known for being on the quieter side or not. Expectations will be there-- that much, the champion is certain of. To be the kind and gentle Hero of Kalos in her case, and for Clemont, living up to the title of being an child prodigy radiating intelligence.

          “But... the Lumiose Press has never done me wrong so far. I trust they’d treat you with the same kindness and understanding.”

     Yes. Alexa, at the very least, and Viola if she must double as an extra set of helping hands when it is not her turn to be in the spotlight. And the rest of their team, too. Why, have they not taken care of the blonde ever since that parade? Acting as a safe group to retreat into when the stampede of journalists become too much, guards for when people get a little too close. A great aide in getting out her story, while also playing into unrealistic standard that the public already placed upon the young woman’s shoulders.

          “Even if interviews are... quite terrifying.”

[artificialqueens]

Love Shack, 1-5 (Trixya) - mallstars

Trixya college AU I’m currently writing after eleven years of not writing fanfiction at all. It’s a lesbian AU that is mostly fluffy, but definitely involves a lot of angst, pining, and smut!

Chapter 1: In Which Trixie Likes Cowboy Boots

“Sorry, I’m sorry!”, Trixie apologizes for what feels like the hundredth time today, struggling to roll her suitcase off the woman’s foot it’s currently crushing. She feels less sorry than she seems, however. After all it’s not her fault that woman has her legs sprawled out in front of her when Trixie with her two big suitcases obviously needs all the floor space she can get. She hopes that woman’s foot hurts and she learned not to be in everybody’s way. Trixie is exhausted. Exhausted from waking up in the middle of the night to get to Mitchell Airport in Milwaukee to catch a too-early flight to Boston. Exhausted from dragging around her suitcases. Exhausted from life. As excited as she is to start her new life (and she is beyond excited), it sucks that she has to start it feeling tired, annoyed, and stressed out because her family couldn’t even be bothered to see her off (and help her carry her luggage, thank you very much).

Two hours, a lot of queuing, and two overpriced smoothies later, Trixie is finally on her plane and watches Wisconsin get smaller and smaller in the distance. She sighs loudly and settles into her seat, pulling her blanket tightly around her shoulders. She finally did it. She’s finally leaving. She’s finally starting college. At the age of 23.

Five years ago, when she just finished high school, Trixie didn’t know what she wanted to do. It wasn’t that nothing excited her. It was that too many things excited her. She wanted to be a singer. She wanted to be a conductor. She wanted to work with small children and teach them how to read and write and make music, she wanted to be a hair dresser, a fashion designer, a makeup artist, an interior designer, any kind of designer, a journalist, a chef, and even, briefly, a botanist. She felt overwhelmed. She spent countless hours mulling over the possibilities while working her job as a receptionist at a hotel near her school, a job she had gotten as a junior in high school. The weeks had turned into months and she had found herself still working her receptionist’s job, thinking less and less about her future and getting more and more used to the idea of staying here. Helping customers, preparing the breakfast room, taking phone calls, reading magazines at her desk. It wasn’t that life in Wisconsin was bad. Well, it was, for a while when she was still a kid, but her mom had separated from her stepfather years ago and things had gradually gotten better. Towards the end of high school, things had been exciting, actually. She had been in love for the first time, and if she was honest with herself maybe that had a little to do with her hesitance to move away for college. But things hadn’t worked out with her and Shea, of course not, how could they when Trixie had struggled so much with her sexuality wanted to keep things between them secret long enough for Shea to run out of patience and eventually disappear out of Trixie’s life and Wisconsin.

But things are different now. Trixie is no longer a scared 17 – year – old, she loves girls and she loves that she loves girls, and everybody in Boston would just have to deal. She knows things will be different in a big city anyway, she will no longer be the only one that doesn’t fit into the cookie cutter standards her family have set for her, she will meet people like her, and she will meet people nothing like her, or her family, or anyone she knows.

There are so many things Trixie wants to do differently in her new life in Boston. This scares her, a little. For years the thought of moving away and flipping her whole life upside down had been a calming and reassuring (if at times unrealistic) thought. It didn’t matter that what Trixie was doing with her life wasn’t fulfilling when she knew she would really get things started soon enough. Dreaming about the future has always been a way to tolerate and justify the present. Now that she’s actually making the next step, she’s scared things are going to be just more of the same and her fantasies of a better future are going to be exposed as a lie. Trixie takes another deep breath and forces that thought out of her mind. No use in stressing out about this before she even landed. To calm herself, she puts her pink headphones on and listens to some music. She takes out her notebook and tries to come up with song lyrics, since that often helps to calm her down, but she can’t think of anything and instead just scribbles some flowers into the corner of a page. Writing music. Yet another thing Trixie wants to do with her life but almost never does.

Out of the many things Trixie wants to go to college for, she finally settled on early childhood education a couple of months ago. She got into Boston University, found a room in student housing, made all the decisions she hadn’t been making the last five years, and is about to start University in only three days. More things had moved in her life in the past three months than in the five years before that. The feeling of accomplishment she gets from this almost makes up for the awful morning she’s had. She scribbles a little sun on the middle of the mostly empty page in front of her and spends the rest of the flight in a state of nervous excitement. She is ready, bring it on.

♥♥♥

After what feels like an eternity, Trixie is finally standing in front of her apartment that she’ll be sharing with another girl. This is probably going to be awful, Trixie thinks, but there was no way she could afford a place on her own. She nervously pulls out her little mirror out of her bag to check her reflection one last time before meeting her new roommate. It’s an important moment, after all, and Trixie is nothing if not a little vain. Her pink lipstick has long since faded, and she didn’t really have the time to put on more than some mascara this morning. Her hair is flat and looks exactly like she spent her day on an airplane, and her blue dress is looking more like i-picked-this-because-I-wanted-to-be-as-comfy-as-possible-on-the-plane than pretty. Oh well. It is either this or changing and fixing her makeup in the dimly – lit hallway, and she is not that desperate. For all she knows her roommate spent all day in bed eating chips and wearing pyjamas.

She cautiously knocks on the door and only seconds later, a tall girl with pastel purple hair opens. She is dressed for whatever the opposite of a lazy day in bed is. “You look exhausted. I made soup if you want some? I’m Kim. Hi.”, she says, sounding nervous, and with a small lisp. She’s a sight to be seen. She’s wearing more makeup than Trixie has ever seen on anyone. Trixie loves makeup, loves it, but never wears a lot of it because she’s seen the way people at her home and at her old job look at her whenever she wears a little more, knows people think she’s being too much, and she can’t really handle that, as much as she’d like to. Kim, however, doesn’t seem to have any of these concerns. She’s wearing bright purple lipstick that matches her hair, a big white line under her eyes, at least three colours of sparkly eye shadow and a lot of fake eye lashes. Trixie stares at her for a second. She definitely was not in Wisconsin anymore.

♥♥♥

Half an hour later, Trixie and Kim sit in their room, eating Kim’s soup. It’s warm and tastes great. A roommate who can cook. That can only be helpful. This is what Trixie has learned in the last half hour: 1) Kim is great. 2) Trixie likes their room (which looks a lot like Kim, with pastel green walls, a lot of photos of high fashion makeup dos (and also cats. A lot of photos of cats. Maybe a little too many if Trixie is being honest), and very neat and organized. 3) To Trixie’s disbelief, Kim studies business administration.

“So what do you study? I never asked you, sorry.”, Kim says when Trixie is finishing her soup. Kim is sitting on her bed, facing Trixie, and applying silver nail polish to her toe nails. “I’m gonna do Early Childhood Education.” Trixie answers, smiling. She likes the sound of that. She’s finally going to do something she’s passionate about, how about that? “Oh, cool, I have a friend who does that. Shangela?”, Kim adds as a question, as if she is expecting Trixie to know this person. “She has a pretty cool job at a day care, she might be able to hook you up. Uh, if you need a job?”

Trixie smiles brightly. “Oh wow, that would be great! I’m definitely gonna need a job. I thought about waitressing or something, but that would be so much cooler.” Trixie thinks about the times she’s helped out at the hotel’s restaurant, about impatient customers and a lot of running back and forth. Yeah, she’d definitely appreciate not having to do that again, ever.

Kim stretches to reach her nightstand to get a little box, then pulls out some sticker nail art and starts applying sparkly silver stars on top of her silver nail polish. It’s a lot. Trixie loves it. “We’re gonna hang out tonight. Shangela and I. I’m at her place a lot, it’s the best.” Kim sounds genuinely excited and as much as Trixie already likes Kim, she’s a little relieved she’s going to have the place for herself for tonight, to breathe and settle in.

“How so?”

“So she lives in this house that’s big and awesome but also kind of a dump. And she lives with a bunch of people and they’re all so great. Mostly art students. Well no, only two art students. Hang on.” She narrows her eyes and thinks for a second. “Three art students. There’s Katya and Sasha, and no, that’s only two. Then there’s Adore, she’s a singer. I think she’s hypothetically taking classes here? But god knows what, I’ve never even seen her on campus.” Kim laughs, and then continues, going a hundred miles per hour: “Then there’s Jinkx, she just finished Uni and is looking for the next thing to do, she’s the best. Juju, she’s doing Philosophy but she’s really –

“Okay, wow, lots of people!”, Trixie interrupts her, pulling her knees to her chest where she sits on her new bed. Her head is hurting a little. It’s been a long day. She’ll have to put sheets on her bed and she doesn’t want to. “What’s with the names, do people in Boston just…not have normal names?”

Kim raises an eyebrow at her. “What’s a normal name?” she asks with a huff and a half smile.

“Uhh…Brenda, I guess? That’s a normal name. Wisconsin is full of Brendas.” It’s not actually that true, Trixie knows one, maybe two Brendas, but it’s a point she made so she’s gonna stand by it.

“Alright, Trixie.”, Kim snorts. “You’re literally called like my aunt’s dog, but sure, come for the names of my friends.” Kim is smiling, so Trixie knows she didn’t actually offend her. “Most of them picked a name they liked a while ago and made it stick.” She offers as an explanation. She tries to bend forward enough to blow her toe nails dry, but doesn’t quite succeed. She’s not the most flexible. Looks pretty awkward. “So if you’re fed up with your name, now is the time you wanna change it. New beginnings and all.”

Trixie laughs. “I actually like my name. I mean, not Beatrice, but Trixie. I like that a lot.” She admits and Kim raises an incredulous eyebrow at her. “What?” Trixie says, faking a pout. “It sounds like a doll’s name. I’m into that.”

♥♥♥

Trixie doesn’t know how, but somehow Kim has talked her into joining her when she leaves to go meet Shangela. She’s tired and in need of a shower, but also exhilarated and giddy, and genuinely curious about Kim’s friends. They sound intriguing. They sound like the kind of people Trixie has always wanted to know but who didn’t enter into her life much when she was living with her mum in a small town, working the desk at a hotel mostly frequented by people above the age of fifty. Half an hour ago, when they were getting ready, she pulled some clothes off the top of one of her suitcases and changed into them but changed her mind again after seeing what Kim had settled on wearing for the night:a purple dress with a big frilly skirt that matched her hair and makeup perfectly. That made Trixie empty out her suitcase in order to find her favourite pink dress. She barely ever wears this dress, because it’s just a little too much (or at least that’s what her mother had told her), but she loves the bright colour and how she could make the skirt twirl, and if Kim was going walk out in what she was wearing right now, Trixie could wear that pink dress. She made Kim wait for her while she put on some makeup – a little heavier than usual, because why not, and when she looked in the mirror, she felt prettier than she had in a long time. She hadn’t made an effort to look her best in a while, because she hadn’t seen a reason to, but tonight was special. Tonight was the first night of her new life – and also, if she was honest, she could already feel Kim’s over the top style helping her to be more daring. Next to Kim, it didn’t seem to matter what she wore.

Kim, waiting for her propped up on her desk chair and scrolling through her – pastel blue – phone, looked at Trixie’s final look and gave her thumbs up. “Do you need shoes for that? I have some really cool heels that would go great with that dress.”, she offered. Trixie thought about that for a second and decided that high heels might be a little much to go hang out with somebody at their house. She grins. “Nope. I got just the right shoes for that.”

Shangela’s house is a fifteen-minute walk from their apartment and the campus. Kim chatters away the whole time, lisp and all, tells Trixie about her Instagram account (“People love me on Instagram! It’s crazy!), and gives her more information on Shangela and her friends, that Trixie can’t really follow. She spends most of the walk feeling happy to have met Kim, and some of the walk anxious about meeting new people. Maybe she should have stopped at Kim today. Maybe that would have been enough. But she’s here, in her dress and her soft pink cowboy boots (that Kim made fun of for a solid two minutes earlier), and they’re walking up to the house, and Trixie can tell immediately why Kim likes spending so much time here. The house is big and old, with a small garden in front of it. In the garden there’s a big table with some candles, a fat white cat, and clutter on it, and a big tree that holds both fairy lights and two swings.

Before they’re even through the garden, the door swings open and a girl with big dark hair grins at them. She comes to hug Kim, seemingly unaware of the wet grass under her fuzzy, previously white socks. “Hi, you must be the new roomie? I’m Shangela.”, she says, and Trixie still thinks that’s the funniest name she’s ever heard. Shangela is tiny, barely reaches Trixie’s shoulders and looks about half the size of Kim. Before Trixie can answer her, Shangela points to her boots and laughs. “Oh my god, did Kim tell you to wear those? Kim, you bitch.”

“Actually, they were her idea. You can’t blame that on me.”

Usually, Trixie would regret her choice by now, but something about Kim’s frilly dress gives her confidence. “I’m country. Deal with it.” She says, deadpan, and at Shangela’s grin wavers and adds: “Oh, uhm, I’m Trixie, by the way. I hope it’s okay I tagged along? I don’t really know anybody here yet besides Kim and she said I could come?”

“Sure! Don’t worry about it, there’s always loads of people here at the Love Shack. After all, this is the best house in Boston!”

♥♥♥

And it is, probably. The house is big but so full of stuff that you barely notice. They are currently sitting in the kitchen with a checkers floor, three (!) big sofas and no table, and drinking tea.

“So, uh, the Love Shack?” Trixie asks after a while, remembering what Shangela said outside.

“Yes!”, Shangela grins, gesturing to the house around her.

“Nobody calls it that” Kim informs her. “I mean, Shangela does, but she’s tried to make it catch on for like two years now and no.”

At this, Shangela starts to sing pretty loudly: “The Love Shack is a pretty old place where we can get together – her – her”

“This isn’t even the lyrics” Kim says and rolls her eyes.

Shangela’s singing is pretty awful so Trixie interrupts her by asking how many people live here. She gets a vague answer. Something between six and nine, apparently, depending on she doesn’t know what exactly. Shangela changes the topic to her about her job at the day care and how her co-worker named Ginger (again with the names!) had just moved away and they were looking for somebody. Things seem to work out perfectly pretty much ever since Trixie landed in Boston and a part of her keeps waiting for something bad to happen. A cool job? Cool people? This is enough like Trixie’s secret fantasy life that she feels like it can’t be true. But Shangela is telling her about what she does with the kids – which involves a lot of dancing – and Kim has gotten up and started making pancakes as if she lives here, and her tea is warm, and the sofa is soft, and Trixie feels at peace.

Trixie’s peace lasts another eleven minutes. Then, somebody comes in the front door with a lot of noise, enters the kitchen in a rush and throws herself on the yellow sofa opposite of where Trixie and Shangela are sitting. “Hope you’re making enough pancakes, I’m the most hungry person in the world!” she exclaims in Kim’s direction before noticing the stranger in the room and flashing her a grin. “Hey, I’m Katya. I like your dress.”

Chapter 2: In Which Bob’s Hardwood Floors are Always Scratched

In the non-existent who-is-the-most-extraordinary-person-trixie-has-met-today contest, Katya gives Kim a run for her money. She is wearing a bright red lace bodysuit that covers every inch of her body except for her head, hands and feet, and a chunky necklace with a big black eye on it. Her blonde slightly curly hair is pulled back with a scrunchie, her lipstick is just as bright as her bodysuit and her heavy black eye makeup looks like she applied it in the dark.

“Did you wear that outside?”, Trixie blurts out before she can stop herself. Katya looks at her with her mouth open comically wide. Oh god. Trixie can already feel a blush creeping down her cheeks. Why couldn’t she just have said thanks for the compliment about her dress and left it at that. Always with the talking.

Shangela and Trixie laugh out loud. “New girl’s not a fan of you bullshit, Katya, how about that”, Shangela says, still giggling and reaches over to pat Trixie’s arm. “Get her, Jade. She needs that.” Trixie doesn’t know how to respond. The thing is, she is a fan of “Katya’s bullshit.” Very much so. Trixie wishes she had the guts to wear shit like that. Well, maybe not that colour. And maybe not the necklace. And also not the earrings with the tiny hands on it that she just noticed. What the fuck. But still.

“Katya’s an interpretive dancer.” Shangela says, as if that explains it all.

“Butoh.” Katya corrects her. Apparently, it’s obvious that Trixie doesn’t know what that means. “Butoh!” Katya says again, only louder, and lets herself glide off the couch until she’s lying on the floor with one leg still on the couch, dangling above her head. She rolls onto her back and starts laughing, heavily and without a sound, flailing her hands in the air above her. Trixie doesn’t know what’s so funny, but she laughs anyway. Katya doesn’t remind her of anybody she has ever met.

“That was her ‘dancing’” Kim comments helpfully. “That was one of her better moves, actually.” Kim walks over to them, settles a plate with pancakes on top of Katya’s stomach, and hands Shangela and Trixie full plates as well. “Anyone else home?” Kim asks Shangela. “Uh, Jinkx is home, and Adore too I think, but they just ate and you know they’re probably sleeping anyway.”

“More pancakes for me.”, comments Katya, who apparently decided she could eat without getting up, ripping off huge bits and letting them fall into her mouth from her extended arm.

They eat in silence for a minute, Trixie’s heart still beating a little faster from her thoughtless comment about Katya’s appearance before. Katya, thankfully, doesn’t seem offended by her comment. She’s fine. When Katya has finished her first pancake she turns to lie on her side, facing the others. “So”, she says with a grin (and if Trixie had teeth like that, she’d grin all day long, holy shit, they’re perfect)

“Who are you, besides uneducated in the art of dance?” When Trixie doesn’t answer because she doesn’t know how, Kim comes to her aid: “That’s my new roommate. Trixie. She likes that name. And those boots, she likes those also.” Katya looks at Trixie’s boots for a long while, chewing her second pancake thoughtfully. “I like them too” she finally says and – did she just wink at Trixie? Trixie must have imagined that.

“A woman not afraid to look stupid! A woman after my own heart.” Trixie’s heart beats faster at that, and she almost forgets to feel offended about being called uneducated. Almost.

The rest of the night is pretty great. They are chatting about anything and everything, with Shangela doing most of the talking and Trixie being happy to listen. Katya isn’t saying much either, she stays on the floor for most of the night but gets into weird stretch positions every once in a while – that girl can move her body. Katya seems to find their conversation endlessly amusing, breaking out into breathless giggling fits every couple of minutes. Most of the times, Trixie doesn’t even know what’s so funny, but Katya’s laugh makes her laugh anyway. Trixie feels drowsy, she’s been up and about for close to thirty hours now, and she settles deep into the couch and lets the conversation wash over her. Inadvertently, her eyes keep focusing on the girl on the floor in the tight red lace and matching lipstick. Trixie catches herself waiting for Shangela and Kim to say the next funny thing, so she can watch Katya laugh again. A couple of times she can feel a light fluttering in her stomach whenever she looks at Katya for too long. But she is tired and a little overwhelmed with everything and her stomach is probably all messed up from the plane ride and this means nothing, she decides. She is not going to crush on a person she met her first night here. Especially not one that wears an eye around her neck. They go home after Trixie has fallen asleep on the couch for the fourth time and back in her dorm room she goes straight to bed, without bothering to try and find her pyjamas or put on sheets. The last thing she thinks of before falling asleep is Katya’s laugh.

♥♥♥

The next morning, Trixie wakes up to pastel green walls, the faint smell of fruity perfume, and the thought of surprise that she was able to sleep that well in a new place. She must have slept a little too well, actually, because the sun coming though the half open blinders is bright and when she peeks at her phone she sees it’s past noon already. Kim is nowhere to be seen but even from her place in bed Trixie can see a post it note on the door: I’m at Shangela’s. Come over if you want to. Feel free to take my cereal if you don’t want to go buy something. – K. On the bottom of the page is a phone number that probably belongs to Kim.

Trixie stretches and remains in bed for a little while, feeling more at peace then she has in a long time. Her new roommate is better than she could have imagined, she has a job in sight, and she is still genuinely excited about starting classes on Monday. She looks around the room for a long while, deciding which of Kim’s cat pictures had to go to make room for Trixie’s stuff. She had packed a bunch of things to decorate her room, things that she loves and that are very personal, and she hadn’t been sure she would ever actually take them out. After all, she knew she was going to be sharing that room with somebody. But with Kim she knows she can fully be herself. And for now, being herself means getting out of bed to hang up pictures of her and her grandfather who had passed years ago, of her with her musical theatre group she had been in for most of high school, some pretty flowers, and some song lyrics she liked so much she had taken the time to write them down in her best attempt at calligraphy. She quietly sings to herself while putting on her favourite bedding (yellow with little daisies on it), arranges the few books she had taken with her on the empty shelf in her part of the room, and decides to go shopping for plants later. Currently the only plant in the room is an orchid on Kim’s night stand and it looks to be dead. Kim had painted the orchid’s brown leaves golden with what looks a lot like nail polish. A tragic plant.

It takes Trixie another hour to empty both of her suitcases. They have a big closet, but she shares it with Kim and while Kim has made her some space, it’s not quite enough (and not nearly half the closet). But Trixie doesn’t mind. Most of her clothing she doesn’t like anyway, it’s boring and she got it because she always had to look “nice” for her receptionist’s job. It’s all very uninspired, a lot of white, a lot of black. Then there’s a couple of things she really loves but never wears enough, some frilly dresses and skin-tight skirts, and she feels like she’ll actually get to wear these things around here. She spends a lot of time admiring Kim’s clothes and wonders if she’d mind sharing. Kim is taller than her and not exactly slim, but Trixie has some weight as well, big thighs and hips mostly, so Kim’s things might just fit her.

When her suitcase is empty, her side of the room looks like her and she’s happy. It’s only then that she begins to think about Kim’s offer to spend the day at Shangela’s. She wonders if Katya would be there. Katya. By the light of day, she is sure the fluttering in her stomach last night really didn’t have anything to do with her. Sure, Katya is beautiful and is obviously crazy in a great way, but Trixie doesn’t know her and it’s not like Katya would be interested in Trixie. As far as Trixie knows, she has met an underwhelming amount of three gay women and one bisexual woman in her life. One of the girls in her musical theatre group was gay, out proud and beautiful, but also never that interesting to Trixie. Then there was Shea, who Trixie very much didn’t want to think about. The third one was a woman who frequented the hotel Trixie worked at, and who always complained about the AC being too loud and generally got on Trixie’s nerves quite a bit. The bisexual woman was a girl named Courtney who Trixie met at a night club two years ago. They hooked up regularly over the course of nearly half a year but ultimately didn’t care enough about one another to make things work. So chances that Katya was going to be the fifth in this unimpressive line of women were slim. Then she remembers the way Katya winked at her last night it takes a second for her to catch her breath after that.

♥♥♥

After a long shower and some of Kim’s cereal, she decides she’s going to take Kim up on her offer and go to Shangela’s place. She thinks she can remember how to get there and puts Kim’s number into her phone in case.

Trixie finds her way to the house eventually, getting a little lost a few times on the way, but appreciating the chance to get to know the neighbourhood. On the way from her place to Shangela’s, there are a couple bars (including a 50s themed milk shake bar that Trixie will definitely be spending some time in), a supermarket, a nail studio, and even a little cinema that looks like it can’t have more than one room. It’s somewhere between summer and autumn, and the sun is still warm, so Trixie is wearing a soft yellow dress and her cowboy boots again – Katya said she liked them, didn’t she? And it’s not like Trixie needs a lot of encouragement to pull these boots out. When she reaches the house, there’s a group of people sitting at the table in the garden and Trixie makes out Kim by her purple hair immediately. Katya’s also there. She’s on one of the swings, swinging so high it looks like she might fall off any second. She waves at Trixie without letting go of the swing’s string. “Hi Trixie”, Kim says from where she sits at the table and then, “That’s my roommate I told you about. Trixie, this is, uh, a lot of people. This is Adore, Jinkx, Juju, Sasha, Chi Chi, and Bob. And you know Shangela and Katya. Kim points at each person individually and Trixie does her best to remember who everyone is.

The group at the table looks extraordinary for sure. Very much not like the friends Trixie had in high school and who slowly dropped out of her life one after one in the years after school. There’s at least three people at the table whose gender Trixie can’t make out. There’s Adore, with hair such a bright blue that she stands out even next to Kim. Adore is slouching in their chair, smoking something, wearing only an oversized shirt and hugging their hairy legs to their body. There’s Jinkx, short red hair and about zero features that indicated their gender. There’s Sasha, in men’s clothing and bald, but with an impressive amount of make up on. Juju is a small Asian girl who’s currently busy building a house out of playing cards; Chi Chi, who has a Nintendo in his hands, seems too involved in his game to look up, and Bob, tall and bald, a little older than the others, is the only one who stands up and shakes her hand.

“Hi everyone”, Trixie says, and awkwardly sits down in the empty spot next to Juju who looks up from her cards to tell her: “You’re joining us at exactly the right time, Bob is giving us an important lecture on how to treat his precious hardwood floors.” She rolls her eyes non-discreetly. Trixie must have looked a little lost because Sasha chimes in:

“It’s Bob’s house. He lets us stay here for next to no rent and certain people” – Sasha pointedly looks at Juju – “could be a little more grateful.” Juju doesn’t dignify this with an answer and instead adds a sixth floor to her card house, which promptly falls apart.

“So, uh, it’s your house?”, Trixie asks Bob, because she doesn’t know what else to say. In the corner of her eye she can see Katya has stopped swinging and is sitting still watching her. Watching them. Not her, of course.

“Yup.” Bob replies with a grin. Trixie likes him immediately. His septum reminds her of her unrealistic plans of getting one as well. “Used to be my dad’s house, is my house now, and I rent it out to these guys.”

“We’re his charity.”, says Chi Chi in a heavy southern drawl without looking up from his Nintendo. There’s no bitterness in his voice, Trixie notes.

“I’m not anyone’s charity”, Juju says, sticking her tongue out at Chi Chi, “Maybe your ass, but not mine.”

“Bob is a social worker and does a lot for LGBT youth”, Sasha says, apparently being the most helpful person at the table. “This house is basically open for those of us who need it.”

“Oh. So you’re all…” Trixie doesn’t finish that sentence, and regrets having started it.

“Fucking queer”, says Adore from next to Juju and almost all of them start laughing. Trixie feels a little lighter at that.

“Fucking queer”, echoes Katya, who has suddenly come up behind Jinkx and squeezes herself into the space between Trixie and Juju. She’s wearing a skin tight black dress covered in pictures of abstract faces, combat boots, and the little hands are dangling from her ears again. Her thighs press against Trixies and she smells like cigarettes and flowers. Maybe daisies, Trixie catches herself thinking, before frowning at herself. It’s not like she even knows what daisies smell like.

Katya is very close. And Katya is fucking queer, whatever that means. This close up and in the light of the sun, her dark makeup looks even messier. Her mascara is clumping a bunch of her lashes together in the corner of her right eye and her foundation doesn’t match her neck. Trixie wants to reach out and pick a stray lash off Katya’s cheek. The thought makes her blush. To her relief, nobody seems to pay her too much attention and after a while Trixie manages to get her mind off the girl next to her and focus on the rest of the group. Bob has resumed his lecture on how to treat the floor – apparently they were scratching it rearranging furniture all the time. Sasha and Jinkx listen earnestly, while the rest of them don’t seem too bothered. After a minute, Katya snatches away Chi Chi’s Nintendo mid-game and starts playing his Pokémon game while he quietly curses at her but makes no effort to get up and get it back. They spend another half hour half bickering with Bob, half doing their own thing (Juju is now busy gluing little crystals onto a mirror for god knows what purpose and Shangela is knitting what looks like a tent in the ugliest green Trixie has ever seen) when Kim turns the conversation to Trixie: “So Trixie, have you settled in already? Anything you need?”

Trixie remembers the plants she wants to get. “Uh, yeah, everything’s pretty great. But I want to get some plants. Can you tell me where to get them?”

“Plants! I need plants.”, Katya chimes in from next to her. “I’ll take you.” Trixie’s heart flutters at that. Again with the fluttering. Can she still get away with blaming that on the air plane? Probably. The thought of going plants shopping with Katya seems nerve wracking to her. She hopes somebody else will come too, maybe Kim, Kim could probably anchor her. “Anyone else wanna come? No? Good.” Katya says without really waiting for an answer, gets up, pretends to give Chi Chi back the Nintendo but then puts it on the ground out of his reach last second.

♥♥♥

The first thing Katya does when they’ve left the garden is take a cigarette and a lighter out of her bra. The second thing is ask Trixie this question: “So, who are you, and, more importantly, who do you want to be?” Trixie looks at her in disbelief for a second. What the fuck kind of question was that. Did she hear that in some kind of self – help group for people with awful fashion sense? Katya seems to expect an answer, so Trixie wrecks her brain for a second and comes up with:

“I’m the gal who’s not here for a long time, but is here for a good time. Trixie!” Katya almost drops her cigarette out of her mouth at that and laughs for way too long. That was pretty funny. Trixie mentally pats her own back.

“So Kim says you study art?” Trixie asks eventually, because she suddenly remembers that.

“Yes! Visual arts.” Katya says in a voice that leaves no doubt she lives for that. “With Sasha. The bald one? Sasha’s my favourite person!” Katya skips a little like that, grinning at Trixie. She seems just as overflowing with happy energy as last night and Trixie wonders if she’s always like that. Trixie isn’t, that’s for sure. She is right now though. Something about Katya makes her heart feel light. “So how do you like it here so far?” is Katya’s next question. With it, she spreads her arms and spins around in a circle twice, indicating the area around her. “I’ve never lived anywhere else, honestly, but I think it’s pretty cool, yeah?” she adds.

“Yes, oh wow, I mean it’s definitely better than Wisconsin. It just has to be.” She proceeds to tell Katya about her home town, about growing up in the middle of nowhere, about how much she had liked Wisconsin at times, and how much she had resented it at different times. She tells her about her neighbours’ farm and how she used to ride horses there until they moved away. She misses the horses.

Katya seems to listen intensely, looking way more at Trixie than at the street in front of her, and lighting another cigarette as soon as she’s finished the first one. Trixie likes being looked at, but feels weirdly self – conscious under Katya’s eyes. They reach a little flower shop after a couple of minutes. It’s painted in a faded yellow and Trixie likes that it matches her dress. It makes her feel beautiful.

♥♥♥

When they leave the shop a little later, Trixie is carrying a big carton box with an orchid (that is always going to look better than Kim’s and that is never going to get too close to nail polish), some succulents and a couple of plants whose name she doesn’t know but that she thinks are going to look very pretty in their room. The only thing Katya had gotten was a chunky (and ugly) metal sculpture of a crow that was meant to be a decoration for flower pots. “This will make a great necklace” she said when she first saw it, making Trixie snort.

“It’s way too heavy!”

“Pretty hurts.”

“I hate to tell you but this is like the opposite of pretty.”

Naturally, Katya bought the thing anyway, claiming she’ll be wearing it everytime they see each other.

“What about plants then?” “What?”

“Plants. You wanted to get plants? That’s why you came with me?”

“Oh yeah, no. I’m fine. Sasha has a cactus and that’s already a lot of responsibility, you see, I mean we share custody, but still.”

Whatever.

Her arms hurt from carrying the box, the wind is a little too chilly for her to be wearing just her dress, and she’s pretty hungry, but Trixie feels happy. Katya is great, she decides on their way back to Shangela’s – Bob’s? – as if she didn’t already decide that last night. Katya didn’t say much last night or in the garden today, but now that they are alone, she is talking pretty much constantly, skipping from one topic to another and back in a way that makes it hard for Trixie to follow but that’s also entertaining. Katya talks about her efforts to learn Russian and how she’s making sure her pronunciation is perfect, even if she doesn’t know that many words yet (“ворона, ворона“ she yells out, fiddling with her metal crow, as if Trixie knows what that means). She talks about the cat Trixie saw in the garden earlier and how she calls him Milk but everybody in the house has a different name for him, which doesn’t matter because it’s not like he listens anyway (“he’s not technically ours, and not technically allowed in the house, but I swear he spends most of his time in Juju’s and Shangela’s room, Juju lets him sleep in her bed). She talks about her dancing class and about a girl named Laganja that talked her into trying it out (“You have to meet her, she’s my favourite person!”) By the time they reach the house, Trixie is sure she wants to stay here and listen to Katya talk all day.

The garden is empty except for Kim, who’s petting Milk the cat, Shangela, who’s still knitting her tent-thing, and Jinkx, who seems to have fallen asleep in her chair. Trixie heaves the box with her plants onto the table and slumps down next to Kim. Katya, apparently filled with too much energy to sit down, stands behind Shangela and messes up her hair. “Stop that”, Shangela complains and then adds: “Go and call Violet. She sent Sasha like 10 texts today saying you should stop ignoring her.”

Katya sighs deeply and messes with Shangela’s hair even more rigorously, trying to knot it into a pretzel on top of her head. “Seriously Kat. What’s going on with you two?” Shangela asks, her voice suddenly soft. Katya opens her mouth as if to answer, but then doesn’t, and shrugs. Her giddy energy seems to slowly leave her body.

“Ugh” is the only thing Katya says before she turns and goes towards the house, presumably to call Violet.

“Who’s Violet?” asks Trixie, curious about the sudden shift in Katya’s mood.

“Oh, Violet. She lives here, technically, but she’s currently travelling around with a bunch of people making shows. She’s mostly doing aerial.” Kim explains. “You should see her, she’s amazing. She’s Katya’s girlfriend.”

Chapter 3: In Which Chi Chi Goes Hard And Goes Home

Katya’s girlfriend. Kim’s words are stuck in Trixie’s head even half an hour later when she’s back in her room, distracting herself with Netflix and a vegetarian Burrito she got on her way over here. Katya’s girlfriend. Of course Katya has a girlfriend. Katya is amazing. Trixie sniffs a little and hides her face in one of her pillows. When she comes up for air she catches sight in herself in Kim’s big mirror and suddenly has to giggle in slight exasperation with herself. The drama! So unnecessary. It’s not like she knows Katya, not really. Katya could be a serial killer for all she knows. With that jewellery of hers, she probably is. And at least Trixie found out about her girlfriend now, before she had time to indulge whatever feeling she gets when she looks at Katya for too long. It isn’t a crush yet anyway, not really. Everything is still pretty amazing, she decides, things are going just fine. And if she spends the rest of the day thinking about Katya’s laugh and the way her combat boots are just a little too chunky on her skinny legs, well, that’s okay. She’ll be distracted soon enough. She has things to do, people to meet, a life to live. Her life is going to be exciting.

As if to undermine that point, she spends the rest of the day in her room watching Netflix and mentally preparing for starting classes tomorrow. There’s not much to do. She already did most of her preparation reading weeks ago when she had still counted days until she would leave. So now her preparation consists mainly of pulling half of the clothes she just put into the closet this morning out of it to put them on and decide if they are the right clothes to wear on her first day. Trixie likes when her clothes mirror who she is. Or, maybe, who she wants to be. Either way, she wants people to have an idea of who she is before she even starts talking. But today none of her clothes say what she wants them to say about her, so she leaves everything lying around, deciding she’ll just have to wing it tomorrow morning. In order to do at least one productive thing today she brushes up on her resumé to give to Shangela when she next sees her.

In the early evening, Kim comes home from Shangela’s. She raises an eyebrow at Trixie’s clothes on the floor – and shit, Trixie realizes, Kim is so neat and she fucked up the room on only her second day here – but doesn’t comment. Instead, she throws herself on her bed and puts on Project Runway on her laptop while eating pickles straight out of a jar. Classy. Trixie, having gone back to her what-will-i-wear-tomorrow dilemma, is hardly paying attention to the show, but Kim keeps commenting on it, trying to involve her: “Can you believe Heidi talks trash about his look when she wears this? This?! She has some nerve.” Kim even turns her laptop so that Trixie can see Heidi’s outfit. At that, Trixie decides to give in and join Kim on her bed, and they watch the show together. It’s dumb and funny and gets Kim agitated in a way Trixie hasn’t seen her before, and this is nice, Trixie thinks, this is really nice.

♥♥♥

The next morning Trixie wakes up buzzing with excitement about starting her classes. She puts on an amount of makeup she never would have worn back in Wisconsin, slips into a light pink dress she settled on in the middle of the night, staring at the ceiling and not being able to sleep, and carefully curls her long blonde hair. Trixie’s hair is her whole pride, and she spends an embarrassing amount of time making sure it looks perfect at all times. And it does – as long as she doesn’t have to spend a day in an air plane. Kim blasts some Asian music Trixie has never heard before while changing outfits at least seven times and eating cereal at the same time. She lets Trixie leech off her cereal once more (Trixie is going to buy her own shit tonight, for sure) and then leaves for her classes in the opposite direction of where Trixie is going.

Like a true first semester student, Trixie is early to class. Twenty-eight minutes early to be exact. She wanted to make absolutely sure she’d have enough time to find her building and then found it much faster than expected, mostly due to a little plan Kim drew up for her. On her way here, the campus was mostly deserted,and in the small brick building she is right now she can’t see a single person. She double checks if she is at the right place. She triple checks. She goes into the bathroom to check her reflection in the mirror. She walks up and down the corridor reading the signs on every door. She goes into the bathroom again and washes her hands. Still twenty minutes. She wants to take a walk over campus because she hasn’t actually looked at anything yet, but is suddenly anxious she won’t find her classroom again, so she stays put. God, she’s nervous. What if in twenty minutes her professor will say something that tells Trixie that she shouldn’t be here, not in this room, maybe not even at this university, that maybe she can’t do this, and she should have stayed at the hotel.

This is stupid, Trixie decides, she needs to distract herself. In the last few minutes one other student has arrived, but he is lost in his phone and seems to be not at all interested in a conversation, so Trixie pulls out her phone as well. She hardly had time to look through her notifications this morning but now she sees she has a following request on Instagram from Kim and Shangela. She accepts and scrolls through Kim’s profile for a little while. That girl really is an artist, Trixie will definitely have to learn from her. It takes only a little scrolling before she finds Katya in one of Kim’s pictures and with it a link to Katya’s profile. She wonders for a moment if checking Katya’s profile is a good idea, but it seems a better option than freaking out about her studies before they even began, so she clicks on the profile. For whatever reason it’s called ‘momsgoldteeth’. Katya’s profile picture is of her with photoshopped demonic eyes in front of a background of fire. Her bio only says: Can you even fuck a pokeman? What the fuck. Katya’s profile is private, and Trixie hesitates before sending her a friend request, goes to check her own profile for potentially embarrassing pictures before she does. Trixie’s profile picture is her favourite picture of her that a classmate took on a field trip a couple of years ago. She’s standing on a meadow, wearing a flower crown she had just made, her arms raised in the air and the sun behind her making her hair look like it glows. Her bio says: Love your hair, hope you win with a bunch of heart emojis added in and oh, well, why not. She sends the friend request and while she’s at it, also sends one to everybody else she met yesterday. Making friends! It’s important.

She barely has time to look at their profiles before her professor arrives and opens their room. It’s still fifteen minutes early but apparently this professor is used to first semester students being anxious and early and she gives Trixie a smile that immediately makes her feel a little easier.

Trixie’s first lecture is probably boring – filled with: this is what we are going to do this semester, this is how to register for your classes, this is how everything works, and you need to pay attention, your exams aren’t going to be easy – but Trixie listens intensely and feeling much more relaxed than just half an hour before. She’s finally here and damn if she’s not going enjoy her time here. The two guys sitting next to her start playing hangman ten minutes in and a girl in front of her is eating dry cornflakes, but Trixie carefully writes down everything her professor says. She’s going to be good in this class. If these two idiots next to her – one just failed at guessing the word ‘compass’ – could be at university, then so could she.

♥♥♥

When Trixie comes home after her second and last lecture of the day, she’s still feeling good, but she’s also exhausted. Who knew sitting around for four hours could be so tiring? Kim seems to feel the same way because she’s lying in her bed, full face of makeup but changed into pyjamas, and plays on her phone. “Hey, how was it?” Kim asks with a smile. “Pretty cool!” Trixie answers. “I mean, we didn’t actually do much today, but the classes sound nice and apparently we’re allowed to eat during lectures so what more could you want?” She decides to do as Kim and changes into one of her night gowns before lying down in her bed and pulling out her phone. Katya and Adore have already accepted her request and she clicks on Katya’s profile. Her stomach is fluttering in excitement.

Katya’s profile is a lot. She barely has any pictures up, instead, there are a bunch of short videos. Trixie clicks on the latest one. In it, Katya is wearing the same red bodysuit she wore when they met and is doing a hand stand in a dance studio. A second video shows her zooming in and out of Bob while he is reading a paper, singing “You’re my favourite person” to him off key while he does his best to ignore her. Another video shows her smearing her red lipstick off with her hands before laughing hysterically and going out of the frame.

“Katya?” Kim asks, without looking up from her phone.

“Yeah. I’m uh, I’m just looking at her Instagram.”

“It’s a mess. Wanna see a good Instagram? Go to mine. Or Sasha’s, that’s amazing. But Katya? Hot mess.”

“Yeah.” Trixie agrees distractedly. Here’s a picture of Sasha kissing Katya’s cheek while she grins into the camera widely. “So, umm, Kim? Katya and Violet. They are…” she trails of, suddenly not knowing where she wants that sentence to go.

Kim frowns at her for a couple of seconds before saying: “They’re a couple. They are gay. A gay couple. Well, Katya’s bisexual and I’m actually not sure what Violet identifies as currently, but they’re a couple. You don’t have a problem with that, do you?” Kim sounds a little concerned at that.

Okay, okay. They’re a couple. Trixie knows this already and it’s bad enough without Kim repeating it a billion times over. Kim still looks at her with a scrutinizing look on her face and it takes Trixie a second to understand her behaviour. Oh. Kim thinks she’s a homophobe. “Oh no! God no. I’m gay. I’m pretty gay.” Kim looks relieved. “Pretty and gay. Gay and pretty” she adds to lighten the mood.

“Oh” Kim grins. “Oh, good. I’m not. Gay, I mean. Pretty, sometimes.”

“Yeah, umm” Trixie thinks for a second. Should she bring this conversation back to Katya? She really wants to. “So Violet is travelling a lot?”

Here’s what Trixie finds out: Katya had been interested in Violet since Violet first moved into Bob’s house a little over two years ago, but they had only started dating a year ago. Apparently, there had been quite a lot of pining on Katya’s side before that, and only when Sasha had played matchmaker had they finally started dating – damn Sasha, Trixie thinks. A couple months later, Violet had left to travel with her group. They are still together, talking on the phone all the time, and apparently arguing a lot lately.

Kim says she doesn’t know what these arguments are about, but it’s obvious she’s keeping something from Trixie. It’s also obvious that Kim cares a lot about both Katya and Violet. When Kim gets bored with the conversation a couple of minutes later, Trixie wraps her blanket around herself and tries to resist the temptation of checking out Violet’s Instagram.

Nothing good can come of this, she knows. She resists for all of four minutes, then takes her phone to find Violet’s profile. Thankfully, it’s not private. Trixie wouldn’t have brought it over herself to send her a follower’s request. As Trixie expected, Violet’s Instagram doesn’t help her feel better about the situation. Violet is hot. Of course she is. She is also tall, slim, has perfect dark 50s styled hair and makeup and looks nothing like Trixie. To make things worse, her body is barely covered in any of her pictures. Violet seems to have a preference for wearing a couple rhine stones and feathers, and nothing else.

Trixie has to scroll down quite a bit – trying hard not to admire the poses Violet gets into when doing aerial – before finding a picture of Violet and Katya together. It was taken in what looks like a night club. Violet is dressed in some glittery thing (she was probably performing that night, that can’t seriously be something she wears on a night out, Trixie thinks and feels more inadequate than ever) and Katya has her arms and one leg wrapped around her and laughs happily. She can clearly see the admiration in Katya’s eyes. The sight makes Trixie sad. She wants somebody to look at her the way Katya looks at Violet in the picture. (She wants Katya to look at her the way she looks at Violet in the picture, is a thought Trixie has, but refuses to indulge).

♥♥♥

It’s the first week of Uni, so there are a lot of parties happening on and off campus. Trixie loves parties but barely ever gets to go and it takes her a whole four days before she manages to talk Kim into going with her. Kim doesn’t seem to be too thrilled at the thought of spending the night at a club, but finally gives in at the prospect of getting to really dress up. She spends over an hour on her nails that end up so over the top she can’t use her phone. This is why she has Trixie text back and forth with Shangela, who wants to join them and bring some of the others along. Trixie wants to ask if Katya is coming, but doesn’t want Kim to tease her about it – and, also, she has managed to not talk (or think too much) about Katya for the last three days and she is not going to break that streak now.

When they’re finally in front of the club a couple of hours later, everybody from Bob’s house, except for Bob himself is there. (“Bob has a husband and a kid, he doesn’t wanna hang out with our asses too much” Juju explains when Trixie asks about him).

They are quite a sight to behold, Trixie thinks. Sasha is wearing a blue velvet jump suit and graphic blue makeup under the eyes, Shangela is in something that looks suspiciously like a cheerleader uniform, and Adore has replaced their blue hair with blond hair so big they are now taller than even Trixie. And then there’s Katya, in a bright purple dress covered in black hand prints and her hair in two messy buns on top of her head. The hands on her ears have long glittery fingernails today that Trixie is sure weren’t there last time. (Did she glue them on? Does she have more than one pair of creepy hand earrings? If yes, why?) Trixie hugs everybody hello and when she gets to Katya, Katya smells like daisies again. Well, daisies and cigarettes. Trixie tries to focus on the cigarettes. She wouldn’t want to date a smoker. But Katya is a lot shorter and skinnier than Trixie, and she feels so nice in her arms, and Trixie lets go of her with reluctance.

“Great dress.” Sasha tells Trixie, and Trixie looks down at herself, feeling a little self-conscious. She had borrowed one of Kim’s dresses, a tight black lacey one that shows her curves in a way that makes her more than a little nervous, but Kim had complimented her for a full twenty minutes, giving Trixie enough confidence to work this dress. (Also, if Kim gets away with that floor length golden dress covered in fans, cats, and fancy cutlery, Trixie should get away with this). She spins around twice to show herself off to the group, hoping for Katya to jump in on Sasha’s compliment, but Katya is busy looking for her lighter in her purse and doesn’t look up at her.

♥♥♥

The club they have picked is a queer club (because why step outside your bubble when you don’t have to) and Trixie is delighted with the energy there. It’s pretty small and a little bit dirty, the walls are plastered with posters of upcoming events and events long passed, either smoking is allowed inside or at least nobody cares, and some people are dressed weird enough that Trixie and her group don’t raise too much attention. It’s also the club where Adore has most of their gigs and where they – and apparently everyone they know – get to drink for free. Trixie orders a Gin and Tonic and leans against the bar, taking in the club around her. Being in a club and not being drunk has an unreal quality to it, and something about the heat and the loud music always makes Trixie feel a little drunk before she even starts drinking. Katya gets up on the bar stool right next to Trixie, back to the bar, and crosses her legs so that her shoe lightly touches Trixie’s thigh. She is wearing green jellies and Trixie wants to comment on them, but Katya is busy taking a video of Sasha, probably for her Instagram. The spotlights on the ceiling rapidly change from green to purple and back, reflecting prettily in the ice cubes in Trixie’s drink and Trixie can already feel a bit of sweat forming on the small of her back although she has yet to start dancing.

So far, there’s no dancing except for a group of guys awkwardly shuffling around in one of the corners. Trixie feels ready to dance, but not ready to be the only one dancing and having all eyes on her, especially not in the dress she is wearing. Chi Chi, however, doesn’t seem to have such qualms. He has barely taken a sip of his vodka tonic before he abandons the drink on the counter, walks to the middle of the dance floor and starts going hard. The song they are currently playing doesn’t have any lyrics, but that doesn’t stop Chi Chi from singing along loud enough for Trixie to hear him over the music. Chi Chi’s moves are enough to inspire a couple of people to start dancing as well, although nobody comes even close to his energy. After drowning not only her own drink but also Chi Chi’s, Juju drags Shangela on the dance floor, and Trixie trails behind them. She starts dancing rather carefully, her drink still half full in her hand, and her mind aware of Katya watching them with her phone in hand, texting someone. It’s probably Violet, Trixie thinks, and feels her stomach knot, and she probably should stop being hyper aware of Katya when Katya obviously isn’t paying her any attention. It takes her another minute to truly shift her attention and instead focus on Chi Chi and the others, on their silly dance moves and their laughs, and the light reflecting in their hair.

After an intense half hour of some of the most ambitious dancing Trixie has ever seen in a club, Chi Chi kisses Shangela goodbye, messes up Juju’s hair and gives a wave to Trixie and the rest of the group at the bar, before saying: “That’s it, I’m out” and leaving the club. Trixie is slightly puzzled. The night was only just getting started. “He always does that”, Katya, coming up behind her, says loudly into Trixie’s ear. She places both of her hands on Trixie’s shoulder and gets on her toes to talk to her. “He goes hard for thirty minutes tops and then just goes home to sleep. And then he makes fun of everyone else for being hungover in the morning” Katya is so close Trixie can see where her red lipstick is slightly overdrawn. A strand of her hair is sticking to the side of her neck. She let’s go of Trixie before Trixie can reply and starts dancing, suggestively grinding against Juju until Shangela squeezes in between them and all but sushes Katya away.

♥♥♥

Two hours later, Trixie is a little drunk and a lot happy. Everyone but Kim has joined them on the dance floor and they take turns taking breaks and sitting with Kim – which mostly involves making fun of the rest of them dancing. Trixie tries again and again to get Kim on the dance floor, but every time Kim points to her nine-inch heels and tells her there is just no way. After another two gin and tonics, Trixie feels free enough to bust out her favourite dance moves, which resemble tap dancing and which she learned taking a class four years ago. She’s a little rusty and she can barely remember how to properly do the steps, but she’s making everybody laugh in the best way, and that’s all she can hope for. Shangela and Juju are making out heavily against the wall behind her, without a care in the world for their surroundings. Sasha is talking animatedly to a stranger in a bowler hat, Jinkx has her arms around Kim’s shoulders from behind and seems to be taking a nap on her, and Adore is dancing with Katya and Trixie, every now and then mirroring one of Trixie’s moves in a half-mocking way. The music at the club is mostly 80s pop in questionable remixes and they shout along with the lyrics (and pretend to shout along where they don’t know the lyrics), and when What a Feeling comes on, Katya starts cartwheeling in the too small space and manages to kick pretty much all of them at least once.

It’s 5 am when they make their way back home, Trixie and Kim to Campus, the others to the house. Trixie’s hearing feels muffled, her feet and her back hurt, her voice is hoarse from screaming to the music, and the cold air bites into her skin where it’s sweaty from the club, and she decides they are going to this club at least once a week from now on. Kim, however, swears she’s not going to go out again for at least half a year.

When they stumble into their hallway, Trixie impulsively wraps her arms around Kim’s shoulders and hugs her as they continue walking. “Thank you” she says. “No, thank you.” Kim replies dryly. With you in the group, I’m not the worst dancer anymore.”

Trixie’s already half asleep in her bed when her phone buzzes with a message from Katya.

Katya

You looked like a goth Barbie doll tonight and I love it.

♥♥♥

Trixie spends the rest of her first weekend in Boston in their apartment, where Kim teaches her how to glue on fake lashes and overdraw her lips. Trixie is pretty much in awe of Kim’s skills, especially since she found out that Kim makes most of her clothes herself. Trixie itches with the desire to go out and buy some more clothes she likes, but she has to save her money for rent. At least one good thing came out of her hesitating to go to college: she has some savings and can make rent without too much of a problem, but still, better not splurge before she has a new job. Kim says she can just wear whatever she wants from her part of the closet, so it’s fine. Trixie spends quite a bit of time trying on Kim’s clothes, finding out which dresses fit her, and which don’t, and which lip stick looks best with which dress.

She doesn’t see Katya this weekend, and in fact hasn’t even replied to her 5 am text yet, a text that had kept her up for another half hour. Katya likes her. Or, at least likes her style, and her style reflects on her, doesn’t it? Honestly, the main reason why Trixie hasn’t replied is because in her happy buzzed state she had felt like replying with several heart emojis, but knew this wasn’t an appropriate answer.

At some point during their lazy Sunday Trixie realizes that Katya doesn’t even know Trixie is gay. But it doesn’t matter, she decides. It’s not like Katya’s available anyway.

Chapter 4: In Which the Rain is Metaphorical

The second week of Uni is a lot more stressful for Trixie than the first one. She has a hard time focusing in her lectures and seminars, not because they are boring – ok, some of them are, but not all of them – but because she doesn’t like sitting and listening without talking herself for too long. The lights in the lecture hall are always a little too bright, her professor’s voices always a little too dull, and the other students always a little too loud. She finds herself drifting off a lot, and spends more time with anxious thoughts about upcoming exams than actually listening. She can’t fail at this, she thinks, she just can’t.

On Thursday in her second week, she has an interview at the day care Shangela works at. It’s called Miles of Smiles Childcare, it’s painted a bright blue and the windows are full of children’s art. There’s a jungle scene painted all over the big front window, with barely distinguishable animals obviously drawn by enthusiastic toddlers. Trixie likes it there right away.

Her interview is with a large woman with a deep booming voice. She’s called Latrice and is in charge of the day care, but looks like she might as well be in charge of the country. Trixie follows her through the hallway into her office, bumping into kids who cross her path in unexpected way not only once, but several times. There is a stray tomato lying next to a single shoe right in front of Latrice’s door, which Latrice picks up with a sigh and places on the desk in her office. Once they are sitting on opposite sides of Latrice’s desk, Latrice offers her tea and cherry gummy bears that are already set up on the table. Trixie takes two of the cherries and notices with relief that she feels rather relaxed. There’s something about the ugly yellow of Latrice’s office walls and Latrice’s calm smile that has a soothing effect on her.

The interview goes over rather well. Latrice is unimpressed with Trixie’s work experience in the field (which basically comes down to her baby sitting her neighbour’s kids every time their dad had to take out their mom to make up for the stunts he kept pulling), but Shangela must have talked Trixie up quite a bit, because Latrice wants her back the next day to see what she can do. Trixie is nervous about that, nervous about an opportunity to fuck up yet another thing, but when she walks through the corridors of the day care, all bright and colourful and loud, she knows she really wants this.

She’s on her way back home when her phone buzzes.

Katya

Heard you have your interview today. You’ll be fine! I mean, they took Shangie, and she’s Shangie, so their standards aren’t too high. This time, Trixie texts back immediately.

Trixie

You’re late, interview’s over. Went well!

Katya

Good! Sasha ditched me for a date with weird-hat-guy, so I’m lonely do you maybe want to get drinks? I should get a hat like that, don’t you think

Drinks? With Katya? Trixie’s heart starts beating way too fast and she sits down on a nearby bench for a second, weighing her options. She’s not sure going out with Katya is the best idea for her. After all, she is still only semi-successful in not developing a crush on that girl. At the same time though there is no way she could say no to that offer. She hasn’t had time to talk to Katya alone since they went to get plants and maybe, just maybe, hanging out with her would help her in demystifying Katya and moving on. So maybe hanging out with Katya is the best thing she can do.

Trixie

I hope it’s milkshakes

Katya

At that milkshake bar? Yeah, sure I’ll be there in twenty?

Trixie is at the 50s milkshake bar fifteen minutes later, her stomach fluttering a little. So far, she’s barely spent time with Katya, and she’s not even sure she can hold a conversation with her. The last thing she wants Katya to think is that she’s boring. Trixie isn’t boring, she knows that, but she also knows that she’s too good at hiding that fact sometimes.

When Katya arrives it’s on a bike with a deflated wheel that seems to take her all her strength to ride. She probably would have been faster on foot. “It’s Juju’s” she says, as if that was an explanation, and then “Hi”. She hugs Trixie and she’s a little sweaty from her ride here and Trixie can smell her shampoo in her hair for a second. She doesn’t know what it smells like, it reminds her faintly of…yellow? Trixie isn’t good with scents. Today’s outfit includes a dress with a pattern of coffee beans and a necklace of the crow they had gotten together. Katya had already broken her promise to wear that thing every time they see each other, but apparently, she hasn’t thrown it out yet either. She’s also wearing big brown glasses. Trixie didn’t know Katya had glasses. She catches herself thinking that the glasses make Katya look even more beautiful, and internally rolls her eyes at herself. That’s just too much.

Half an hour later, while sipping the rest of her strawberry milkshake, Trixie is assured she doesn’t bore Katya. Quite the contrary, she’s rather successful at making Katya laugh; a laugh that makes her flail her arms in front of her almost every time. She tells Katya a little about the guests at the hotel, and brings out every funny exchange she can remember, sometimes shamelessly exaggerating, just so she can get that laugh out of Katya. It works every time. Trixie is pleased with herself.

After Trixie admits she doesn’t know what Butoh dance is (she had wanted to look it up but her refusal to indulge in her Katya madness had stopped her), Katya pulls out her phone and shows her a video on her friend Laganja’s Instagram. Katya and three other people, all of them in bodysuits, are…moving around to synthetic music in a dance studio. There’s a lot of dramatically exaggerated facial expressions, falling to the floor, and twisting your body in ways Trixie could never do. It’s mesmerizing, artistic, impressive, and also hilarious. At one point, when Katya lies on her stomach, grabbing her feet with her hands and letting a silent scream into the camera, Trixie chokes on her drink. She goes into a little laughing fit, can’t help herself, and Katya, turning off the video grabs her shoulder and says: “This is art, bitch. Get with it.”

“The art of what exactly” Trixie retorts, still laughing and a little relieved that Katya doesn’t look to be too insulted. “The art of moving your body in a way nobody ever wants to see?”

“Exactly. Yes!” Katya yells out, hitting the table twice as punctuation, making a man a few tables over shoot them a curious look. “That’s exactly it! I mean, it isn’t of course, but that’s exactly it!”

“Look at me, getting art.”

“Get it or it gets you!” Katya puts away her phone and flips through the short menu again. “You should come to one of our shows sometime. You’d fit right in with Shangie and Juju, last time they almost got kicked out of the theatre because they couldn’t pull themselves together.” Katya grins at that memory.

“Is there a show this weekend? I have, like, nothing on.”

Katya shakes her head no. “I’m actually not here this weekend and maybe all of next week. We’ll see, I’m visiting someone.” There’s beat of silence before that last word and Trixie wonders whether she should maybe not ask further questions, but her curiosity wins over.

“Who?”

“Violet.”

“Oh. Your girlfriend, right?” Trixie says as casually as possible, not looking at Katya and instead focussing on the ice cubes in her glass. There’s one that’s shaped like a foot. Trixie crushes it into pieces with her pink straw.

“Yeah.” Is Katya’s only answer. She closes the menu and leans back in her seat, looking at Trixie expectantly.

“So are you guys, like, long distance? Kim says she’s travelling?” Trixie asks after a few long seconds of silence in which she contemplated changing the subject back to the hotel, to Laganja, to her classes, anything else.

“Yeah. Uh, she’s travelling with a show as an Aerial performer, she’s pretty incredible.” Katya’s eyes light up at that. “We met at the house, she lives here too.”

Trixie knows all this.

“Do you manage to see her a lot?”

“Nope.” Katya says, playing with a crumb on the table. She pushes it back and forth with her straw, leaving a small trail of bubbly milkshake foam on the plastic table. “But it’s fine, you know, or it will be. I’m done with Uni next summer and who knows, maybe I can travel with her. I have some talents as well, as you know!” At that, she grins before she immediately gets serious again. “She’s in New York sometimes and that’s when I get to see her most.” Katya takes off her glasses and rubs them on the bottom of her dress. The dress, which is a little too short anyway, rides up, but Katya is mostly covered by the table. Trixie forces her eyes away and looks out of the window they’re seated next to. It’s getting dark outside and her reflection stares back at her out of the window. She’s pale in the light of the bar and a strand of hair has gotten out of the bow at the back of her neck. She hopes her hair wasn’t messed up like this at her interview earlier. It’s drizzling outside, a big puddle is forming right in front of her on the sidewalk and the thought of Katya maybe being gone all week makes her feel forlorn somehow.

“So you’re going to be in New York all week?”

“Oh, I’m going tomorrow and then we’ll see. It’s not easy to plan this stuff and her schedule changes around all the time and I also never know how long I’ll want to stay. Sometimes she has time off and we get to do stuff, but then other times no. But this time should be fine, I’ pretty sure we have a room just the two of us this time. There’s this girl travelling with her who’s a little, uh. Valentina. She’s cool, I like her, but she’s also awful, and, ugh, I’m not even sure what bothers me so much about her, but it’s something. It’s something!”

“Maybe you just want some alone time?” Trixie tries to sound casual, fixing her hair distractedly.

“Yes. Yes, alone time would help.” Katya says and sighs quietly. Then her mood suddenly changes and she’s grinning again. “Alone time would help” she repeats, and winks at Trixie obnoxiously. Trixie forces herself to grin and then focusses back on the puddle on the sidewalk. It’s growing and growing, and the rain is leaking in a trickle out of its corners down the empty street.

♥♥♥

Working at Smiles for Miles is a challenge, that’s for sure. Trixie arrives after her morning lecture and barely has any time to settle in before she has to comfort a little boy who’s crying because his mom is coming to pick him up half an hour later than usual. She awkwardly sits on the floor with him trying to come up with things to distract him, and when she gets up ten minutes later her legs have fallen asleep and she almost stumbles into a little bookshelf. Just when the boy stops crying, Trixie has to break off a fight between two girls. She’s not sure she gets what the fight is about. Apparently one girl uses the purple pen too much so that another one can’t use it, but when Trixie points to at least seven other purple pens right in front of them on the table it doesn’t seem to solve anything.

She barely gets to her actual task: to change the decorations on the window from paper bunnies to paper leaves the kids made this morning. Shangela is in the room with her, keeping an eye on her per Latrice’s orders. She’s sitting in a corner of the room with a couple of kids and builds a space station out of Legos. She looks to be a lot more relaxed than Trixie is and doesn’t come to Trixie’s aid once.

The kids are curious about Trixie and, not being able to distinguish between things that are important (changing the decorations) and things that are not (everything else), keep coming up to Trixie with things like this

“I’m sleeping over at Tom’s tonight. His mum is making chicken fingers.”

“Do you know where I live?”

“You have pretty hair.”

“My uncle is a fire fighter and his car is bigger than your car.”

“Can you count to 100?”

“Will you come to my birthday party?”

“Can I touch your hair?”

“Maisie is sleeping at my place tonight. We are making chicken fingers.”

“Annie says she’s a fairy princess but she’s not. She doesn’t even have the wings. But I have the wings. But they are at home. But I can get them, can I go?”

“I can count to six billion trillion. One, two, three, four, five…”

Trixie is stressed out at first, but slowly settles into the ridiculousness of it all, deciding that putting up the decorations can’t really be what Latrice wants to see from her. Instead, she engages with the kids. Turns out, a lot of them want to touch her hair. Turns out, Trixie likes having her hair touched (Well, except by Sebastian, whose fingers are stickier than is acceptable). When Latrice comes to check on her two hours later, Trixie is sitting in a rocking chair with two kids on her lap and a couple more at her feet, reading the Rainbow Fish. It’s a good thing she knows that book pretty much by heart, because the kids on the floor insist on looking at the pictures the whole time, making it almost impossible for Trixie to get a look at the words. She has to read quite loudly to be heard over the space battle fight Shangela and her kids have going on in the corner. Trixie feels her voice getting hoarse already. The space battle ends as soon as Latrice walks in and looks over the room. Latrice gives Trixie a nod and a satisfied smile.

♥♥♥

The next day is a Saturday. It’s sunny outside and Trixie almost takes a walk before breakfast to enjoy the sun after the last days of constant rain. Almost. Kim is away visiting her mum, and Trixie, who had been looking forward to having the room for herself for a while, feels a little lost without her. With Kim and Katya gone, she doesn’t really know what to do with her weekend and spends most of her Saturday on her homework. It’s a good thing she has time to catch up, honestly. She tends to underestimate the work she needs to do for her classes, always counting on her smarts to get her through, but she had to learn pretty fast that she is one of the least experienced people in her seminars and that catching up with the others is not going to be easy. Trixie lies on the floor in between her and Kim’s bed and reads pages after pages of highly theoretical texts. The way they read, their primary intention seems to be to never be understood by anyone, ever. Trixie spends a lot of time marking key phrases in different colours and developing an organization scheme for her course work, and little time getting her reading done. She is taking a break changing her nail colour from plum to light blue – to match her highlighter – when her phone buzzes with a text from Shangela.

Shangela

Talked to Latrice. You’re in & the kids won’t shut up about your Barbie hair. :) Text me the times you’re free and we’ll work out our schedule :) halleloo!! :) :)

“Yessssssss!” Trixie shouts out, jumping up from the floor doing a silly dance in front of Kim’s mirror. She has a job! She’s going to be paid! When she picks her phone off the floor to text back Shangela, she sees she has an Instagram notification – which, given the fact that she barely ever posts anything on there is pretty rare. She clicks it and sees Katya has liked one of her pictures. Her stomach twists a little at the sight of Katya’s name. The picture she liked is one of Trixie’s notebook with some song lyrics she had been proud of at the time – the time being five years ago. The notebook lies next to her guitar on her bed, pink sheets, a pink pillow. She remembers having taken quite a lot of time to arrange things for this photo only to gather a whopping amount of two likes on it. Now there’s a third one. She’s instantly mortified and reads over her lyrics again, trying to pin point just out how embarrassing this was. Well. Pretty embarrassing.

She had written the lyrics after her break up with Shea and they basically screamed: I’m heartbroken and I don’t know how to express myself but I really need to do it anyway, please metaphorically hold my hand by giving me likes on this picture, thank you.

Hang on.

How had Katya even found that picture? Granted, it doesn’t take that long to scroll though Trixie’s Instagram, but this is one of her earliest posts and there’s about two hundred pictures between this one and her latest one. Had Katya really scrolled through all of them? And if yes, why? Trixie sits back down on the floor where she spent most of today and scrolls through her own profile, looking for any more embarrassing shit Katya could have seen. There’s some pictures of her in a lot of ugly makeup doing the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Given Katya’s own ventures with makeup, Trixie thinks these aren’t so bad. There’s a lot of pictures of Trixie with her guitar, some taken by friends from school, some awkwardly taken by herself. Those are fine, except for the occasional bad hair style. Most of the pictures show landscapes and farm animals and more or less dumb and or thoughtful captions Trixie had come up with. There was one picture of Trixie’s favourite cow that she had captioned with: You’re not fucked up. It’s your behaviour. There was another one of that cow and Trixie in matching flower crowns. Then there were a bunch of pictures showing her and Shea, that didn’t give any indication that they were anything other than friends and that made Trixie’s heart ache a little. But all in all, not much to see. It is then that she gets a text.

Katya

How you doing, Beatrice?

Trixie snorts at the sight of her own name. How does Katya even know this? Is Katya short for something? She doesn’t know.

Trixie

Got the job at the Smilemile. Am thinking all I’ll have to do is sit still and be a Barbie doll and then collect my check.

Katya

That’s the dream. Well, a dream Not my dream. Sounds pretty bad. badddd Liking the check part

Trixie

Also finished all my coursework Workin it!

Katya

But it’s Saturday Don’t you know homework is for Monday morning When u already felt bad abt it all weekend and u have a couple of minutes before classes and you’re freaking out That’s the sweet spot, mamma

It’s 6pm on a Saturday, Katya is with her girlfriend in New York, and she is texting Trixie. She wonders where they are right now, what they are doing. Maybe they aren’t together yet? Maybe Katya is still on her way, bored at some train station. Maybe she has already gone through the news, and twitter, and everybody else’s Instagram and Trixie’s the last bit of entertainment she has. Or, maybe, she’s at Violet’s show, waiting for it to start. Unlikely. She doesn’t know exactly what kind of show they’re doing but it definitely looks like a night time thing. Like, late at night. Maybe she should look at Violet’s Instagram some more. Violet is so pretty, and skinny, and perfect.

Unknown Number

Hi, Katya says you’re alone and standing in the rain outside being sad. If you want you can always come over. There’s not much going on, but we are playing video games and Jinkx is showing Adore how to fry an egg. Sasha.

Trixie

Katya! It’s not even raining!

Katya

The rain is a metaphor Metaphorical rain! Get with it

Trixie

What’s your damage

Katya

You don’t know what to do with yourself because I’m gone And Kim But me also The rain is the absence of meaning And me Can’t spell meaning without me HAA Did u know that, I didn’t MEaning I love that

Trixie

I hate that.

Trixie

Hey Sasha, thanks for inviting me, I’ll be there in 20

Trixie spends another two minutes lying on the floor but neither Katya nor Sasha respond to her again, so she finally gets up, relieved that she has something to do now, somewhere to go. She gets dressed quickly, in one of Kim’s earlier dresses, that didn’t come out too well but that’s very warm and comfortable. When she checks herself in the mirror, she notices that she doesn’t care much about what she looks like today, because Katya isn’t going to be there to see her. That realization makes her huff. This is stupid. Since when does she dress for Katya? Dressing for Katya is pointless for at least two reasons: 1) Dressing for anyone is stupid. 2) Katya, specifically, dresses like if a scarecrow had a baby with some kind of alien life form.

This is why Trixie takes off the comfy dress and exchanges it for an uncomfortably tight pink pencil skirt and a fluffy pink sweater. Then she puts on a full face of makeup, just for herself, and likes it so much she even takes a selfie (or twenty-five) to upload to instagram later. Well, maybe this isn’t just for herself. Who cares. This is complicated. Trixie spends her first Saturday night without Kim in the Love Shack’s living room playing Mario Kart with Chi Chi and Adore. She curses herself a little for wearing a tight skirt just to sit on a couch and envies Adore who isn’t even wearing pants, but she is having a great night - even though she keeps checking her phone for more messages from Katya. But Katya is with Violet, and it’s not like Trixie’s last message invited a response anyway. Her phone stays silent.

♥♥♥

Trixie’s first week of balancing Uni and her new job is a struggle to say the least. It takes most of her Sunday to try and rearrange her schedule, so she can work at the day care three times a week. She even drops a class because of that, but that’s okay, she had taken on more classes that she needed, expecting for something like this to happen.

On her first real day of work Trixie finds out fast that working here is not going to involve a lot of sitting around like a Barbie, and instead involves a lot of quick tough decisions. At lunch time Aaron spits his tea into Evan’s face, which sends Evan into a fit of rage. Trixie knows what to do, sort of, but not really, and keeps her arms locked tight around Evan, who struggles to get free and screams at Aaron. Trixie is doing her best to calm him down, keeping her voice as soothing as possible and making sure not to hurt him with her grip. It’s scary to see how angry a child can get, he’s shaking with rage and she’s not sure she knows what he’d do if she let him go. Thankfully, Shangela and another co-worker, Betty, are in the room as well and look calm, so she must be doing an okay job. Ten minutes later, when Aaron is peacefully playing with a train on the carpet, Trixie is still a little shaken. Her neighbours’ kids never got this angry.

Katya remains gone all week and doesn’t text Trixie once. She updates her Instagram daily, however. Most of her videos are random things she filmed in the streets in New York, things that caught Katya’s attention for some reason. Some of her videos contain Violet, leaning over a bridge, eating a waffle, and doing nothing much but making Trixie feel bad. Katya’s latest video is of a plate of ravioli that Katya keeps zooming in and out of, laughing hysterically.

When Trixie gets home from Uni and work every day, she’s exhausted, but always looking forward to evenings of Netflix, makeup and watching Kim make clothes. This is how her first month of her new life passes. Not every second is exciting, not even every day is, but every day something small has Trixie feel grateful that she came here.

Chapter 5: In Which Katya Doesn’t See The Sunrise

“I don’t know. This is too much. Is this too much? It might be too much” Trixie says, frowning at herself in their mirror.

“No, it is perfect” Kim reassures her.

“But – “

“Perfect”

It’s a Friday night and they are invited to Juju’s birthday party later. It’s 80s themed. Kim went all out with their 80s looks, claiming that motto- and costume parties are the only parties that matter. This is why Trixie is currently in a pink velvet body suit, complete with a fanny pack, yellow cuffs, and pink headphones on. Roller girl fantasy Kim calls this creation. It is too much. But she is also not changing out of it, not now that she has spent almost an hour on the perfect hair and make up for it. She can’t stop looking at herself in the mirror.

Trixie has been looking forward to this party ever since she got the invite two weeks ago. Her social life hasn’t exactly been thrilling lately, between homework and her job, she’s barely hung out with anyone but Kim. She also hasn’t seen Katya in a while. The few times she went over to Katya’s, Katya usually wasn’t home. One night, Trixie was playing video games with Chi Chi and Adore when Katya walked in, sat down on the couch next to Adore, and watched them play, falling asleep on a bag of chips after a while. One other time Trixie was baking cookies with Kim and Shangela at the house and Katya joined them, making a mess of the kitchen. Other than that, they barely saw each other. The good news is, Trixie has used this time to ban Katya out of her thoughts. She has been mostly successful at that; she’s not thinking about Katya before going to sleep, she not looking at Katya’s Instagram, and she’s definitely not looking at Violet’s. The bad news is, she can’t wait to see Katya tonight and she hopes to get another compliment for her outfit from her. The ‘goth Barbie doll’ is still echoing through her mind. But that’s okay. Baby steps.

They get to Juju’s late, because getting ready always takes longer than you think. Also, if Trixie is honest, she got ready extra slow on purpose, because there’s nothing more awkward than arriving at a party early, when everybody just sits around and waits for the party feeling to kick in. No thank you.

Luckily, when they get there, the party is in full swing, with people spilling out of the house into the garden and music so loud Trixie feels like this can only end in a neighbour’s complaint. Somebody has set up a wading pool in the garden, full of ice cubes and beers. Classy.

Trixie and Kim go inside, looking for Juju or anybody else they know. The kitchen is stuffed with people, most of them wearing clothes that might have been fashionable some time between the 60s and the 90s – nobody seems to take the 80s motto too seriously - , there’s ABBA blasting from the stereo and a lot of smoking inside. Bob definitely wouldn’t approve. The first familiar person they find is Jinkx. They are sitting on the kitchen counter, sipping tea, looking calmly around the room, not interacting with anyone. Their 80s outfit isn’t really 80s at all. Like the dress Trixie wore to the club the other night it is out of black lace, but this one is a lot less tight and goes past Jinkx’ feet. Jinkx must just have stepped out of the shower, because their hair is still wet. They look like a witch, Trixie thinks.

“You look like a swamp witch”, Kim greets Jinkx and hugs them were they are propped up on the counter.

“Thank you”

They stay with Jinkx for a while, Trixie hopping up on the kitchen counter next to them. It’s a nice view from here and for now she’s comfortable socializing with just Kim and Jinkx. Jinkx, as turns out, studied four semesters of Early Childhood Education before switching majors and goes out of their way to let Trixie know all there is to know about her professors and courses and even offers Trixie their old materials, including text books. The evening has already paid off just for this. Trixie is in the middle of complaining about one professor’s messy presentations in his lectures when Katya comes up behind Kim and yells “hi!” into Kim’s ear so loud that Trixie flinches. The stereo is loud, but not that loud. That was unnecessary. Katya is wearing a simple colour blocked dress that’s much too big on her, and her open hair is teased into more volume than she normally has. Trixie awkwardly leans forward to hug her without getting up from her prime spot on the counter – she’s decided that’s her party spot for tonight. From her position, Katya feels even smaller than usual. As always between them, Katya lets go of the hug first, takes a step back and beams at her, making a motion that indicates Trixie from top to bottom: “This. Is. Amazing” she says, validating all of Kim’s and Trixie’s efforts in three simple words. Trixie feels herself blush a little but hopes it’s not visible in the dim light of the kitchen. Only when Kim elbows her slightly does Katya make sure to compliment Kim as well.

“What are we drinking?” Katya asks, taking Kim’s cup and smelling the drink. “Tea? Really Jinkx?”

As if on cue, Shangela pops up behind Katya, a bottle of wine and some plastic cups in hand. “Kim, Trixie! Finally, we thought we would have to do this without you” she shouts as a way of greeting, handing all of them cups and pouring in a generous amount of wine before leaving as quickly as she came. Trixie notes she didn’t offer Katya a cup. Does Katya not drink? She opens her mouth to ask Katya just that when Katya seems to spot somebody at the other side of the room. “Hang on” she says, sounding excited. “Be back in a second, I want you to meet someone, Trix” When she comes back, she is accompanied by a very tall, very intimidating looking girl, in a purple dress that’s a little too tight to be convincingly 80s but that looks amazing nonetheless. Violet. Of course. Of course Violet would be here for Juju’s birthday. Trixie doesn’t know why that thought hadn’t occurred to her before. She could have used some time to prepare for this. She takes a big sip of wine and sits up straight, crossing her legs and draping her hair over her shoulder.

Violet kisses Kim on the cheek and gives Trixie a small smile.

“Trixie, this is Violet. Violet, Trixie. Kim’s new roommate.”

“Hi” Violet says, giving Trixie a once over. She looks a little bored. There’s nothing boring about Trixie, so that look pisses her off a little. She tries to mirror the look and holds Violet’s eyes for a couple of seconds.

“Violet managed to get the weekend off just to come to Juju’s birthday!” Katya says, her smile big and her eyes glistening.

Violet snorts slightly at that. “Well, mostly for you, babe. You know Juju can’t stand me.”

“Even better” Katya says, grinning, and takes Violet’s hand.

This is bad. This is pretty bad. Of course Trixie knew that Katya is in a relationship, but knowing about it in an abstract way, and seeing it play out right in front of her are two very different things. Trixie withdraws from the conversation completely, trying to listen and not focus on where Violet and Katya stand so close their sides are touching. The group are talking about Violet’s show and her experiences on the road, with Violet, Jinkx and Kim doing most of the talking. There’s an aura of arrogance and disinterest surrounding Violet. She speaks in a mostly monotonous voice, sounding bored about experiences that to Trixie seem to be the opposite of boring. Apparently, she has spent the last couple of months on a tour bus with fire-eaters and acrobats, touring most of the US. She seems over it. With a stab of pain, however, Trixie notices that Violet’s eyes turn soft whenever she looks at Katya. At one point during the conversation, she puts her arm around the much smaller girl, hugs her closer to her side, and kisses the top of her head. This is when Trixie decides she needs to leave the kitchen. Her party spot be damned.

Once she is out of the kitchen, she leans against the wall in the hallway for a second. Deep breaths. None of this is news. None of this matters. She waits until her heart has stopped racing, grabs a bottle of wine that’s just sitting there on the ground waiting for her, and decides to see who else is there. She is going to have a good time tonight. Wearing what she’s wearing she just has to.

♥♥♥

Trixie finds Juju, Shangela, and a bunch of people she doesn’t know sitting in folding chairs around the wading pool. Juju has her naked feet in the pool, in the ice cubes, in the middle of October. “Trixieeeeeeee!” she shouts when she sees her, “come here, tell me happy birthday!”

“Happy birthday” Trixie grins, sitting down in one of the folding chairs next to her. It’s covered in one of the ugliest floral prints Trixie has ever seen.

“I’m drunk, are you drunk?”, Juju asks her, waving a bottle of vodka around and almost hitting Shangela’s head.

“Working on it.” Trixie indicates her bottle of wine.

Juju looks at her expectantly.

“What?” Trixie asks.

“So we’ve been talking” Juju waggles her eyebrows at Trixie, trying to prompt her to ask her to go on.

Shangela puts her hand on Juju’s thigh and shakes her head lightly. “Come on, Jujubee, just don’t.”

“What?” Trixie asks again. She puts up her feet at the edge of the wading pool, trying to not put too much weight on it so the water doesn’t spill out. Some spills out anyway, immediately seeping into her shoes and making her toes freeze.

“Do you like the ladies?” Juju asks gleefully, swatting Shangela’s hand away.

“Huh?”

“The Ladies. You know, I like them. Or I like Shangie, but that’s the same thing. It’s the same thing!” She stops and blows Shangela an overdramatic kiss, who rolls her eyes at her with a little smile. This apparently prompts Juju to get up and sit in Shangela’s lap, who is trying her best to remain her balance in the cheap chair. “Ladies are lovely. If you like them, there’s somebody you should meet. Somebody likes you! Ahh!”

“Oh. Umm. Yes, I, uh ‘like the ladies’” Trixie doesn’t quite know what to make of this conversation. If Juju keeps bouncing up and down like that, the chair will break and maybe they’ll land in the pool. That would be funny. She hopes the chair will break.

Juju screeches at Trixie’s answer and slaps Shangela’s shoulder excitedly. “See! I told you”

“You told me, darling” Shangela nods patiently.

Juju seems to suddenly realize something. “But do you have a girlfriend? Please don’t have a girlfriend.” Her voice is whiny. She is too involved in this, Trixie thinks.

“I don’t have a girlfriend.” Trixie says, trying not to sound too bitter. She takes another big sip of wine. Was this bottle full when she got it? She isn’t sure. She tries to get excited about somebody asking about her but can’t quite manage to do that.

“Do you want one? I can introduce you” Juju wiggles her eyebrows at her so vigorously that one of her fake lashes detaches from her lid and dangles left of her eye.

Trixie thinks about it. She should do this, she should. What’s the worst thing that can happen? Even if she doesn’t care about this person, getting to kiss somebody is always nice. She sips on her wine some more, leans back in her chair, and unwittingly her mind drifts off to kissing Katya. Leaning in, slightly down, and putting her pink lips on Katya’s red ones, feeling their softness, smudging their lipsticks. She thinks about putting one hand on Katya’s neck, pulling her closer to her, and one hand on Katya’s back, travelling down, slowly down.

An ice cube hitting her shoulder puts her out of her fantasies. “Trixie! You wanna meet her or what” Juju whines impatiently, already fishing for more ice cubes to throw, but they keep slipping through her clumsy fingers.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

♥♥♥

The party goes on for hours and everybody seems to have a good time. Trixie does her best to have a good time as well, but it’s hard when she runs into Violet and Katya at least another ten times. Violet and Katya dancing on the patio. Violet and Katya talking to people in the hallway, their arms wrapped around each other. Violet and Katya cheering for Chi Chi in his beer pong game. After a little while, Trixie ends up lying on the sofa in the living room, doing nothing but watching Adore blow smoke circles out of the open window, and half listening to the conversations they’re having with people outside. The music is loud, the people are loud, and she feels heavy with alcohol, but she is peaceful just lying here. Part of her is angry for not having a better time and using her chance to dance to some of her favourite songs, but she’s learned in her life that a good time can’t be forced.

She must have fallen asleep after a while because when she wakes up, the sky is starting to turn pink with the sunrise, and the room around her is empty save for some people passed out on the floor and quiet hushed conversations. She thinks about just sleeping here, but her outfit is uncomfortable, and she needs to get all this makeup off, so she gets up to leave through the garden. She feels slightly buzzed, but she stopped drinking a couple of hours ago, so she should be fine.

There is a small group of people still at the wading pool and they are stumbling up to make their way home just as Trixie passes them. One of them can’t find his shoe, which Trixie spots floating in the pool. She doesn’t say anything.

Trixie is about to leave the garden when she hears a soft familiar voice behind her. “Hey, Trixie”

Katya is sitting leaned against the big tree, her knees pulled to her face, smoking. She’s alone.

“Hi” Trixie says, wondering for a second if she should continue walking or not. She takes another two steps, then decides to turn around and walks up to Katya. She looks lost.

“What are you doing here?” Trixie asks.

“Me? Oh, err, watching the sunrise. I like watching the sunrise.”

Trixie frowns at that. The sun is rising, is slowly turning the part of the sky behind the house a soft pink colour; and Katya, with her back to the house, can’t see this at all. Trixie does not point that out.

“Where’s Violet?”

“She’s sleeping” Katya puts out her cigarette against the cold ground and lights another one. She looks at Trixie for a long second, chewing her lip, then asks “Do you maybe want to stay for a couple of minutes? I can’t go to sleep yet.”

Trixie has never seen Katya like this. She looks sad and drained of energy, very unlike her usual self. Trixie pulls of one of the ugly lawn chair cushions and sits down on it opposite of Katya. The ground is cold beneath her even through the cushion. She doesn’t quite know what to do and starts digging little holes into the ground with her fake pink nails that she spent too much time decorating. There’s little hearts on every second finger, or there used to be. Most of them must have come off at some point during the night, and they took the underlying nail polish with them. Now there are heart-shaped holes in Trixie’s nails. Trixie wants to say something, fill the silence, but one look at Katya tells her Katya is trying to get up the nerve to say something herself, so Trixie waits.

This is what comes out of Katya after what feels like an hour, but was probably only a minute:

“I’m screwing this up”

Trixie tries to catch Katya’s eyes at that, but Katya puts her head against the tree and faces the sky, her eyes closed.

“Screwing what up?”

“With her. With this! My life? Everything. Take a pick.

“Did anything happen between Violet and you?” Trixie asks, hating herself for the small glimmer of hope she feels inside her stomach at that. This is not a nice thing to feel. Her right index finger hits a stone under the dirt in the garden and the nail comes off almost entirely. Trixie pulls it off and buries it in the dirt next to a patch of dandelions.

“No. I don’t know. I don’t know. Did you know it took me months to convince her to even go out with me? Months. She just wasn’t interested. She rejected me again and again and I can still remember that. And we’re together now, but I can still remember that. I didn’t change, you know? I’m still the person she rejected” Katya shakes her head. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be telling you this, you were on your way home. Sorry.”

“But, I don’t know, she kept getting to know you better and finding out new things about you, so that’s probably why she changed her mind. People change their minds, you know.” Trixie says softly, trying to be as helpful as she can. God, she’s not used to conversations like this. The only person she ever talked to about relationships was Shea, and she had failed at most of these conversations, obviously. At school, she always had friends, of course, but she was never anyone’s best friend, and people just didn’t come to her with their problems. Now she is Kim’s best friend, or at least Kim is hers, but Kim never seems to want to talk about romantic relationships. So Trixie is pretty new to this.

“But if people change their mind, they can change their mind again.”

“Yes, I guess. But – “

“Do you know the kind of people Violet is on the road with? They are all artists, they are all interesting, they are all creative. I’m not better than them. I’m not. This is a truth!”

“Are you scared Violet is going to cheat on you?”

Katya sighs at that and opens her eyes, finally looks at Trixie. She takes the time to light another cigarette before answering. How many cigarettes does she go through in one day? This can’t be healthy. “It’s not like that, Violet and I. We’re open, you know. She can fuck all of them, that’s fine.”

Oh. This is news. An open relationship. It had taken Trixie quite a while to wrap her mind around that concept when Courtney had first suggested it to her, ages before. She likes the thought, she thinks, but only in an abstract this-is-for-other-people kind of way. The thought of being in an open relationship herself makes her uncomfortable and a little sad. It just doesn’t line up with her idea of romance, outlandish as that idea may be. Suddenly something occurs to her and her heart beats twice as fast as before. If Katya is in an open relationship, then –

“So you can, uh, do whatever you want then?”

Katya huffs out a breath of smoke. A small smile forms on her lips but it’s gone as fast as it came. “Of course not. But if you’re talking about hooking up with people, yeah. Yeah, it’s just… I don’t know. I hook up with people sometimes, sure, but do you want to know what I think about when I’m with them?”

Trixie doesn’t.

“Violet?” she asks, her sudden rush of excitement over the news of Katya being allowed to be with other people already mostly gone.

“Violet. All the time. It all comes down to her, every time. I hook up with a guy with an ugly tattoo, I end up trying to memorize it, so I can tell Violet about it. I hook up with a girl who has the nicest hand writing I’ve ever seen and I want to take a picture of it and send to Violet. And it’s not like Violet cares. Not that much. Or maybe she does. I can’t tell anymore. God, this sounds so bad. She’s amazing, she really is, please know that I know that”

Trixie doesn’t know what to say to this. She looks at Katya’s face for a long time. Katya has her eyes closed again and the sun behind her lights up her curls. Trixie wants to lean in closer and hug her, do something to get the sad look off her face, but she feels frozen in place. She’s cold, sitting there without a jacket in the early morning, and if she’s cold in her velvet jumpsuit, Katya must be freezing. She wants to suggest going inside, but feels like she can’t interrupt this moment, so she tries to clean the dirt of her hands on the seat cushion and thinks of something to say. There’s a worm making its way over one of her shoes. She gets him off her with a folded leaf and watches as it buries into the cold ground again.

“It was different when she was still here.” Katya goes on after a while. “We were open then too, but it was more fun. I could go out, hook up with a guy, and come home and hook up with her. That was brilliant. Brilliant! And it should work now too, but it just doesn’t. I miss her so much. I don’t wanna fuck anybody just because I can’t fuck her. Do you want to be fucked by someone just because the person this someone really wants is unavailable? Do you?”

This is an awful thought, Trixie thinks, but damn if she doesn’t love the way Katya says fuck. There’s so much force behind it. “No, I don’t.”

“See? This is why it doesn’t work. So I stopped sleeping with other people and I don’t think Violet even understands why. And she hasn’t stopped. And she shouldn’t have to. She’s not doing anything wrong at all. I mean, those were my terms, my fucking terms. I wanted to be open. And now I can’t handle it. And I just miss her too much.”

This is Katya’s breaking point, apparently, because she puts her hands on her face and begins to sob. Shit. Trixie still doesn’t know what to do, but has to do something, so she gets up and sits down next to Katya, without her cushion, on the dirty ground. Kim will be so pissed about the dirt on her butt. Trixie snakes an arm around the smaller girl, who immediately leans into her side.

Katya is cold against her side and the smell of the cigarette she is holding where her hands are wrapped around her knees bites into Trixie’s nose. She cries for what feels like a small eternity, and Trixie’s head is spinning. Where is a bottle of wine when you need one? She wrecks her brain for helpful things to say, comes up empty, but after a while at least remembers she has tissues with her. She pulls one out of her fanny pack and hands it to Katya, who blows her nose loudly.

Katya’s sobs slowly subside after that and she rubs her face dry with the back of her hand. When her breathing has calmed down, a small grin forms on her face.

“I can’t believe you’re wearing a fanny pack, by the way. Like, you did that.”

“I did that.”

[uk-news-talking-politics]

AirPods outcry: It's time to grow up

By Eliot Wilson

Scandals over MPs’ expenses are like Tube trains. Depending on where you stand, they may be frequent or less common, but you know that one will come along soon enough, before you get bored. The latest offender (or victim, depending on your perspective) is the deputy leader of the Labour Party, Angela Rayner, once the great hope of the Corbynite Left, now somewhat marooned without a portfolio to exploit.

It was The Sun which paraded its civic thriftiness by highlighting that Rayner had spent £249 of public money on a pair of “personalised” AirPod wireless earphones in April 2020. These were but one purchase among many, as she had spent over £2,000 on office equipment and technology, including an iPad Pro, a smart keyboard and a “velvet” chair. The earphones, however, were deemed to be particularly egregious, and The Sun noted sniffily that “other Bluetooth headphones are available on Amazon for £8”.

There will be some people who think this is prima facie appalling largesse, elected representatives making free with taxpayers’ money to avail themselves of luxuries they should properly pay for themselves. A spokesman for the increasingly splenetic Taxpayers’ Alliance noted that this “will no doubt be… ‘within the rules’”, but added that “MPs should be asking themselves if it was necessary when millions of Brits may face unemployment”.

At this point it might help to recall some facts. The basic salary of a backbench member of parliament is £81,932. This is set by the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA). In addition, MPs may reclaim expenses related to their parliamentary duties, particularly office costs, in a scheme administered by IPSA. Last year, in response to the new working practices imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic, IPSA authorised MPs to claim an additional sum of up to £10,000.

We can conclude various things from this. Firstly, Rayner was within - well within - the additional spending limit when she purchased an array of computer equipment to help her work remotely. This may well reflect that she already owned much of the kit necessary: most MPs work from iPads already, especially those who sit on select committees, the paperwork for which is distributed electronically.

Secondly, there is no suggestion that this spending was in any way improper: it was claimed in accordance with an IPSA-authorised scheme and the reimbursement was approved by IPSA. Again, it is worth saying that IPSA is, as its name suggests, an independent organisation. It is a statutory body led by an independent chair, chief executive and board, and is not part of the House of Commons.

Why did the spending generate headlines, then? Journalists know that, nearly 15 years after the expenses scandal which was uncovered by The Daily Telegraph, the simple phrase “MPs’ expenses” is enough to attract attention and either clicks or purchases of a physical newspaper. Sleaze sells. So does the suggestion of sleaze. Rayner is also a relatively high-profile scalp to claim, as Labour deputy leader, and she had been unwise enough to criticise the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, for his use of an expensive Ember 2 travel mug (RRP £180), a gift from his wife, from which to drink his coffee. Clearly, Nemesis, the dark-faced goddess, was watching Rayner’s embrace of hubris, and struck.

I worked in the House of Commons for more than ten years, and the expenses scandal is burned into my memory. It was a reckoning for greedy and careless MPs, and the Commons’ authorities, from Speaker Martin down, handled it badly. Responses to the media were defensive, reluctant and occasionally drenched in victimhood. In the end, however, the result was the right one: salaries and expenses were removed from the control of the house, and policed instead by an independent body.

Yet here we are, arguing about a £249 pair of earphones. There seems to me only one valid argument against what Rayner did, which is that some items of technology should be paid for by MPs themselves from their reasonable salary of £80,000. I say “reasonable” deliberately: it is more than a nurse, a firefighter or all but a senior police officer earns; but then it is less than a senior GP or headteacher. In major private sector professions, it would unremarkable.

If an MP should pay for some of his or her office equipment from salary, how much? Remember that MPs are effectively 650 small businesses, with staff employed across (usually) two offices. It would seem unreasonable to expect them to foot the bill for every office expense, as £80,000 would disappear rather quickly, so there should, surely, be some public money involved. How much? Where is the line drawn?

The critical issue exposed here, though, is that we are unrealistic and adolescent in our approach to what we pay our legislators. £80,000 is a comfortable salary, but we expect MPs to govern the country, or else hold those who do to account. That is an important job, and just as it has grave consequences so it should attract an appropriate salary. Senators and representatives in the US, who have fewer functions and sit far less than MPs, earn $174,000 (roughly £126,000) and have much larger staffs. German, Italian and Austrian legislators all command higher salaries.

Parliament should attract the best and brightest. We want accomplished, talented, learned, experienced and empathetic representatives. As things stand, anyone successful in a private sector career would likely take a considerable reduction in salary to become an MP, as would some senior public sector workers. Is that what we want? Or should we, perhaps, be grown-up, apply a sense of proportion and realise that, on a national scale, the remuneration of MPs is a very small amount of money, but one which, if increased slightly, might attract better Members?

We want the best, but we want the cheapest. We begrudge spending of a few hundred pounds, yet we criticise the people we elect when they are, as many are, patently out of their depth. We want the best of all possible worlds, and that’s something we usually leave behind in childhood. Let’s grow up, raise our focus from the minutiae, and pay good people well.