#sorry I’m not a Wikipedia page but in fact a human person who has feelings and a life

[crippled-peeper]

people who feel existentially threatened by my blog posts should all climb into this cauldron full of vegetable stock and be boiled

[sparklingpax]

Oh the forgetting to follow is one whole mood, srsly

It was actually peas, I forgot we were out of broccoli

You're making perfect sense, am sorry ur brain is a crisp toasty homework fritter

Im v v sleepy currently, so, A Thought (EDIT: A Thought that's quickly getting a much higher word count than I bargained for)

Any of the Team Prime humans might end up on a long road trip with Optimus for Episode Plot Reasons (ground bridge who, maybe it's temporarily broken), and especially if it was a kid they couldn't just check into a hotel at night because Wait, Who's In Charge Of You, Small Child, Do You Need Help?? But if you wanted to make the concept with an adult you could just say they couldn't do it because Soundwave might be able to find them in the hotel's database or something, or more likely they just didn't want to pull up to a hotel/motel in a semitruck because that's a recipe for ending up as a story on the internet

Either way, Optimus ends up pulling into a truck stop for the night, and the human gets to experience falling asleep inside a Transformer, which is probably a trip but is also Incredibly Cozy because that's a very powerful living being who also probably loves them very much (even if he doesnt always say it the usual way) and it is like being Held Gently

Jack would just fall asleep quickly because he's a Tired Teenager and Optimus' engine has a rumbling purr like an enormous cat would and it's Very Relaxing also even though he'd hide it, he would maybe get a little emotional because it really is like being held and he misses being a little kid ok

Miko would chat with Optimus like it's a sleepover because she's constantly got an energy level like she had a cup of coffee and she forgets that giant robots need to sleep too (maybe she actually bought coffee at whatever gas station she picked up her supper from and Optimus couldn't exactly tell her no, only Please Don't Spill That, Miko) and OP ends up laughing so hard at her memes/puns that he accidentally wakes up the actual trucker a few parking spaces over and there is a moment of Panic at their almost-blown cover before the trucker falls back asleep and they go back to laughing more quietly

Raf would probably be fairly quiet, but would alternately be insomniac-ing on his phone or just staring at the roof of the cab for so long that Optimus asks if anything's wrong and scares the crap out of the poor kid because he forgot he was in a car-person for a minute okay im sorry Optimus also yes I'm fine, yes, definitely, I can sleep anytime I want to I swear, no you dont have to turn the radio on....okay actually that's kinda nice.....are you...humming?? No wait don't stop that's really nice actually thank you

June Darby would probably drift into a very meaningful conversation with him about responsibility and parenthood and personal identity in relation to those things, leaving both of them somehow comforted and melancholy at the same time, looking up at the stars together

Fowler... probably awkward silence for a while, ngl. He can't quit overthinking about how he's actually trying to sleep inside a living person and that's weird and also it's kind of uncomfortable to realize that he has no idea how to interact with the Autobots in the absence of some kind of mission to drive the conversation/set the tone/give him something to ground himself. I do feel like they'd both loosen up with each other a lot after a while, particularly if the road trip lasted a few days. Not sure what they'd talk about, though... what are some interests they might share? Or things they could discuss? The fact that the kids are getting into the habit of talking him into bringing pizza, maybe-- "Are you feeding them, Prime? Do they get enough food at home??" "I once expressed a similar concern to Nurse Darby, but she assured me that human children consume large amounts of fuel to account for their rapidly changing frames, and that their caregivers do take this into account as far as she knows." "Well, yeah, kids are always hungry I guess. I can't keep feeding them pizza, though, that's not healthy." "It isn't? Why not?" "Well y'see, when foods are processed to a certain point, they become less nutrient-rich, and--" They spend a bit longer than they'd bargained for on the Wikipedia pages for different parts of the human body, and Fowler is Rather Grumpy the next morning because he went down an internet rabbit hole with a 30-foot metal man instead of sleeping like normal people do. (He brightens up when he gets his morning coffee, but this ask is already way long enough)

AAAHHH OK THAT GOT AWAY FROM ME SJFJFJG I HOPE YOU LIKE IT

I’M SORRY THAT THIS IS SUCH A SHORT RESPONSE BUT OMFG PRIMES ABOVE I LOVE THIS WHOLE IDEA AND SCENARIO. I CAN SEE IT HAPPENING SO CLEARLY HSDHSDJSF HH 

THANK YOU FOR THIS AA >//w//< 

:DD

-Kuni~

[steve0discusses]

Yugioh S4 Ep 27: Joey Punches Valon to Death and Seto Kaiba buys a Car.

My favorite character is back!

THE STORYBOARDER.

Like clockwork, the best storyboarder of all of Yugioh saw in the episode notes “This is the one where we shall Destroy Joey Wheeler” and he was like “Yes! this is extremely my thing!” and he’s back at it again, destroying Joey Wheeler with such finesse.

Like it’s so hard to explain in caps because you can’t see stuff move, but this animator is so good at the Yugioh vibe--he makes these character designs WORK for him (or her? No idea the identity of the mysterious storyboarder (or team of storyboarders--maybe this was one little group they freelance out to that worked really well together? I dunno) ) they really capture what Yugioh IS in a really unique way and still remain fairly economical in the animation sense. They do not hold back on any pose, and go completely ham into this ridiculous concept of a card game where you put on a special suit and punch eachother in the face.

Mind you, it’s still a card game and I skipped all that, but man...this is such a good storyboarder and I know that next episode they’ll be gone but for now I’m just gonna bask in it.

First off, Rebecca manages to figure out Seto’s 6-letter password in order to access billions of people’s personal data off of a satellite (we don’t get to find out what the password was) and although the storyboarder is great--they did make one fatal mistake.

The bane of every Californian who leaves California. LA is like a completely different country to San Fransisco but everyone only knows of two Californian cities and assumes we’re right next door to each other.

And it’s like...no, man. I don’t have Disneyland. Do I sound like a cheerful person that lives next to Disneyland? Do I say “bruh” and smile with the force of 1000 suns as we surf the coast on the backs of Lisa Frank dolphins? No dude, I have a strong Bay Area accent that makes me sound like a dry sarcastic asshole and I wear sweatshirts to the freakin beach because it’s very cold and filled with great white sharks.

(Sorry I just had to delete like 10 k words where I compared the entire cast to US cities by saying cryptic stuff like Joey Wheeler : Seto Kaiba is like LA : San Fransisco and like it was the biggest random tangent that only makes sense to me. Quarantine brain, y’all, I got SERIOUS quarantine brain. Anyone else? Anyone else just find themselves wasting like 2 hours thinking of which cities match the personalities of different characters on a show that came out so long ago? Man I need distractions right now.)

But back to what’s happening on the show, Yami is coming to terms with Joey’s struggle about as well as Yami does.

Which is mostly Yami saying “I’m pretty sure I killed Joey in that card game with Bakura in S1 and Tea had to bring him back from the graveyard so like wtv.”

(read more under the cut)

This was like 2003??? I think I keep forgetting when this season came out but we had printers at this point. We had google maps and a printer.

I don’t think I’ve touched a map like that since the 5th grade, where we had this competition to make a hypothetical road trip across America. It was Awful, and if you won the competition to get from SF to New York with the shortest distance, you would win something like pizza and a cool engraved name plate. We did not win pizza, because I could not even unfold this asshole map.

And now we have Google so like thanks, Mrs. Lambert, it was cool, but I’ll never use that information again. I hope. It was such a vivid frustrating memory that these maps still fill me with anxiety to this day, hearkening back to my 5th grade self just desperately trying to use string to measure how many miles the freeways across the midwest contain. (spoiler: a lot)

How OLD is this kid? Rebecca’s like secretly a 68 year old. She’s secretly Mrs. Lambert.

At this point we had a swell in the music as each friend of Joey joined in to announce their willingness to risk danger and save him.

Were they...not going to join him the whole time? It just seemed like a weird thing to bring up sooo after the fact.

Yami then turned to Duke and was like “but not you. You stay here” and he was like “Oh, thank gods.”

Rebecca stayed behind because the animators don’t want to draw her. Honestly, she’s incredibly helpful and they were mad stupid to leave the only smart one in the car. But youknow...this team loves being mad stupid. It makes the show more entertaining.

As they left we had a weird aside where Arthur Hawkins reflected “Rebecca is having just a REAL hard time trusting Yami” and it’s like--Arthur Hawkins! You’ve been dumping on Yami for like an entire season, that’s why. Like don’t pretend you’re all on team Pharaoh now. Why ever stop dunking?

But youknow, character development, Rebecca is going to learn the trust the ghost that possessed her crush/best friend that she’s had for 2+ years on a kid who’s been living in Japan this whole time who literally forgot who she was 2 weeks ago. You trust that ghost, Rebecca.

Or not. I mean you really don’t have to. You don’t owe Yami anything, dude. You don’t need to blindly trust idiot men, Rebecca. You just do you. Trust that instinct of “is this guy not trustworthy?” because yep. Chances are if you’re having that thought, that he’s totally not.

Storyboarder!

Storyboarder what ARE you???

STORYBOARDER!

after this followed a scene that I’ve seen gif-ed just so, so often that I assumed it was in a Yugioh Spin-off. I don’t know why I thought it wasn’t in this OG series, but I didn’t expect it to be here, in the Dartz season. But, it does make sense that this scene was under the best Storyboarder‘s direction because *chef’s kisses * it’s perfect. Every frame is a joy. The amount of sinister expressions on Mokuba, the level of sass coming off of Kaiba. It’s such a freakin shame that this man’s best work so far only lasts like a few seconds.

PS my bro looked it up and this car salesman has a wikipedia page.

He also looked up if anyone has shipped this car salesman and it’s our lucky day because this ship does not exist with any human ever in the world. Thank you, humanity. But, they DID make a wikipedia page so maybe we’re just putting off the inevitable?

I’m not even gonna cap it because I KNOW this is a gif you can easily download from everywhere but mm--this is a SOLID piece of animation. This animator is just flexing so hard, man. Yugioh did not deserve this much care and attention to detail.

Shippers rejoice, Seto Kaiba did briefly consider helping out Joey (before he absolutely drove away in the opposite direction)

(They’re clearly in the financial district already, PS. They are driving 5 ft to Dartz’ house.)

At some point Joey nabbed Valon’s card and so now he also gets to wear a bunch of stupid armor outfits.

This one is weird! It’s very Kamen rider-ish...but it’s a color scheme that feels very valentines day. It looks hard to wear. Good thing it’s animated.

I may need to capture this walk sequence though...if I still have the energy...the picture does not display his very energetic arms-in-the-air walk cycle I haven’t seen since that one Season zero episode. I dunno if it’s a reference to that, but I can’t think of any other reason why Tristan is walking like that.

This is when Mai finally shows up.

Valon lost his helmet during this fight, which lead to this:

What a good note to end on.

Anyways, I have no idea what my update schedule will look like or be, so if you’re new here and you want to start reading these from the beginning, I have a link for that:

https://steve0discusses.tumblr.com/tagged/yugioh/chrono

[betterdaysareatoenailaway]

Random Review #3: Sleepwalkers (1992) and “Sleep Walk” (1959)

I. Sleepwalkers (1992) I couldn’t sleep last night so I started watching a trashy B-movie penned by Stephen King specifically for the screen called Sleepwalkers (1992). Simply put, the film is an unmitigated disaster. A piece of shit. But it didn’t need to be. That’s what’s so annoying about it. By 1992 King was a grizzled veteran of the silver screen, with more adaptations under his belt than any other author of his cohort. Puzo had the Godfather films (1972 and 1974, respectively), sure, but nothing else. Leonard Gardner had Fat City (1972), a movie I love, but Gardner got sucked into the Hollywood scene of cocaine and hot tub parties and never published another novel, focusing instead on screenplays for shitty TV shows like NYPD Blue. After Demon Seed (1977), a movie I have seen and disliked, nobody would touch Dean Koontz’s stuff with a ten foot pole, which is too bad because The Voice of the Night, a 1980 novel about two young pals, one of whom is a psychopath trying to convince the other to help him commit murder, would make a terrific movie. But Koontz’s adaptations have been uniformly awful. The made-for-TV film starring John C McGinley, 1997′s Intensity, is especially bad. There are exceptions, but Stephen King has been lucky enough to avoid the fate of his peers. Big name directors have tackled his work, from Stanley Kubrick to Brian De Palma. King even does a decent job of acting in Pet Semetary (1989), in his own Maximum Overdrive (1986) and in George Romero’s Creepshow (1982), where he plays a yokel named Jordy Verril who gets infected by a meteorite that causes green weeds to grow all over his body. Many have criticized King’s over-the-top performance in that flick, but for me King perfectly nails the campy and comical tone that Romero was going for. The dissolves in Creepshow literally come right off the pages of comics, so people expecting a subtle Ordinary People-style turn from King had clearly walked into the wrong theatre. Undoubtedly Creepshow succeeds at what it set out to do. I’m not sure Sleepwalkers succeeds though, unless the film’s goal was to get me to like cats even more than I already do. But I already love cats a great deal. Here’s my cat Cookie watching me edit this very blog post. 

And here’s one of my other cats, Church, named after the cat that reanimates and creeps out Louis and Ellie in Pet Sematary. Photo by @ScareAlex.

SPOILER ALERT: Do not keep reading if you plan on watching Sleepwalkers and want to find out for yourself what happens.

Stephen King saw many of his novels get adapted in the late 1970s and 80s: Carrie, The Shining, Firestarter, Christine, Cujo, and the movie that spawned the 1950s nostalgia industrial complex, Stand By Me, but Sleepwalkers was the first time he wrote a script specifically for the screen rather than adapting a novel that already existed. Maybe that’s why it’s so fucking bad. Stephen King is a novelist, gifted with a novelist’s rich imagination. He’s prone to giving backstories to even the most peripheral characters - think of Joe Chamber’s alcoholic neighbour Gary Pervier in the novel Cujo, who King follows for an unbelievable number of pages as the man stumbles drunkenly around his house spouting his catch phrase “I don’t give a shit,” drills a hole through his phone book so he can hang it from a string beside his phone, complains about his hemorrhoids getting “as big as golfballs” (I’m not joking), and just generally acts like an asshole until a rabid Cujo bounds over, rips his throat out, and he bleeds to death. In the novel Pervier’s death takes more than a few pages, but it makes for fun reading. You hate the man so fucking much that watching him die feels oddly satisfying. In the movie, though, his death occurs pretty quickly, and in a darkened hallway, so it’s hard to see what’s going on aside from Gary’s foot trembling. And Pervier’s “I don’t give a shit” makes sense when he’s drilling a hole in the phone book, not when he’s about to be savagely attacked by a rabid St Bernard. There’s just less room for back story in movies. In a medium that demands pruning and chiseling and the “less is more” dictum, King’s writing takes a marked turn for the worse. King is a prose maximalist, who freely admits to “writing to outrageous lengths” in his novels, listing It, The Stand, and The Tommyknockers as particularly egregious examples of literary logorrhea. He is not especially equipped to write concisely. This weakness is most apparent in Sleepwalkers’ dialogue, which sounds like it was supposed to be snappy and smart, like something Aaron Sorkin would write, but instead comes off like an even worse Tango & Cash, all bad jokes and shitty puns. More on those bad jokes later. First, the plot.

Sleepwalkers is about a boy named Charles and his mother Mary who travel around the United States killing and feeding off the lifeforce of various unfortunate people (if this sounds a little like The True Knot in Doctor Sleep, you’re not wrong. But self-plagiarism is not a crime). Charles and Mary are shapeshifting werewolf-type creatures called werecats, a species with its very own Wikipedia page. Wikipedia confers legitimacy dont’cha know, so lets assume werecats are real beings. According to said page, a werecat, “also written in a hyphenated form as were-cat) is an analogy to ‘werewolf’ for a feline therianthropic creature.” I’m gonna spell it with the hyphen from now on because “werecats” just looks like a typo. Okay? Okay.

Oddly enough, the were-cats in Sleepwalkers are terrified of cats. Actual cats. For the were-cats, cute kittens = kryptonite. When they see a cat or cats plural, this happens to them:

^ That is literally a scene from the movie. Charles is speeding when a cop pulls alongside him and bellows at him to pull over. Ever the rebel, Charles flips the cop the finger. But the cop has a cat named Clovis in his car, and when the cat pops up to have a look at the kid (see below), Charles shapeshifts first into a younger boy, then into whatever the fuck that is in the above screenshot.

Now, the were-cats aversion to normal cats is confusing because one would assume a were-cat to be a more evolved (or perhaps devolved?) version of the typical house kitty. The fact that these were-cats are bipedal alone suggests an advantage over our furry four-legged friends, no? Kinda like if humans were afraid of fucking gorillas. Wait...we are scared of gorillas. And chimpanzees. And all apes really. Okay, maybe the conceit of the film isn’t so silly after all. The film itself, however, is about as silly as a bad horror movie can get. When the policeman gets back to precinct and describes the incident above (”his face turned into a blur”) he is roundly ridiculed because in movies involving the supernatural nobody believes in the supernatural until it confronts them. It’s the law, sorry. Things don’t end well for the cop. Or for the guy who gets murdered when the mom stabs him with...an ear of corn. Yes, an ear of corn. Somehow, the mother is able to jam corn on the cob through a man’s body, without crushing the vegetable or turning it into yellow mash. It’s pretty amazing. Here is a sample of dialog from that scene: Cop About To Die On The Phone to Precinct: There’s blood everywhere! *STAB* Murderous Mother: No vegetables, no dessert. That is actually a line in the movie. “No vegetables, no dessert.” It’s no “let off some steam, Bennett” but it’s close. Told ya I’d get back to the bad jokes. See, Mary and Charles are new in town and therefore seeking to ingratiate themselves by killing everyone who suspects them of being weird, all while avoiding cats as best they can. At one point Charles yanks a man’s hand off and tells him to "keep [his] hands to [him]self," giving the man back his severed bloody hand. Later on Charles starts dating a girl who will gradually - and I do mean gradually - come to realize her boyfriend is not a real person but in fact a were-cat. Eventually our spunky young protagonist - Madchen Amick, who fans of Twin Peaks will recognize as Shelly - and a team of cats led by the adorable Clovis- kill the were-cat shapeshifting things and the sleepy small town (which is named Travis for some reason) goes back to normal, albeit with a slightly diminished population. For those keeping score, that’s Human/Cat Alliance 1, Shapeshifting Were-cats 0. It is clear triumph for the felis catus/people team! Unless we’re going by kill count, in which case it is closer to Human/Cat Alliance 2, Were-cats 26. I arrived at this figure through my own notes but also through a helpful video that takes a comprehensive and complete “carnage count” of all kills in Sleepwalkers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmt-DroK6uA

II. Santo & Johnny “Sleep Walk” (1959) Because Sleepwalkers is decidedly not known for its good acting or its well-written screenplay, it is perhaps best known for its liberal and sometimes contrapuntal use of Santo & Johnny’s classic steel guitar song “Sleep Walk,” possibly the most famous (and therefore best) instrumental of the 20th century. Some might say “Sleep Walk” is tied for the #1 spot with “Green Onions” by Booker T & the M.G.’s and/or “Wipe Out” by The Surfaris, but I disagree. The Santo & Johnny song is #1 because of its incalculable influence on all subsequent popular music. 

I’m not saying “Wipe Out” didn't inspire a million imitators, both contemporaneously and even decades later…for example here’s a surf rock instrumental from 1999 called “Giant Cow" by a Toronto band called The Urban Surf Kings. The video was one of the first to be animated using Flash (and it shows):

So there are no shortage of surf rock bands, even now, decades after its emergence from the shores of California to the jukeboxes of Middle America. My old band Sleep for the Nightlife used to regularly play Rancho Relaxo with a surf rock band called the Dildonics, who I liked a great deal. There's even a Danish surf rock band called Baby Woodrose, whose debut album is a favourite of mine. They apparently compete for the title of Denmark’s biggest surf pop band with a group called The Setting Son. When a country that has no surfing culture and no beaches has multiple surf rock bands, it is safe to say the genre has attained international reach. As far as I can tell, there aren’t many bands out there playing Booker T & the M.G.’s inspired instrumental rock. Link Wray’s “Rumble” was released four years before “Green Onions.” But the influence of Santo and Johnny’s “Sleep Walk” is so ubiquitous as to be almost immeasurable. The reason for this is the sheer popularity of the song’s chord progression. If Santo and Johnny hadn’t written it first, somebody else would have, simply because the progression is so beautiful and easy on the ears and resolvable in a satisfying way. Have a listen to “Sleep Walk” first and then let’s check out some songs it directly inspired. 

The chords are C, A minor, F and G. Minor variations sometimes reverse the last two chords, but if it begins with C to A minor, you can bet it’s following the “Sleep Walk” formula, almost as if musicians influenced by the song are in the titular trance. When it comes to playing guitar, Tom Waits once said “your hands are like dogs, going to the same places they’ve been. You have to be careful when playing is no longer in the mind but in the fingers, going to happy places. You have to break them of their habits or you don’t explore; you only play what is confident and pleasing.” Not only is it comforting to play and/or hear what we already know, studies have shown that our brains actively resist new music, because it takes work to understand the new information and assimilate it into a pattern we are cogent of. It isn’t until the brain recognizes the pattern that it gives us a dopamine rush. I’m not much for Pitchfork anymore, but a recent article they posted does a fine job of discussing this phenomenon in greater detail.

Led Zeppelin’s “D’Yer Maker” uses the “Sleep Walk” riff prominently, anchored by John Bonham and John Paul Jones’ white-boy reggae beat: 

Here it is again with Del Shannon’s classic “Little Town Flirt.” I love Shannon’s falsetto at the end when he goes “you better run and hide now bo-o-oy.”

The Beatles “Happiness is a Warm Gun” uses the Sleep Walk progression, though not for the whole song. It goes into the progression at the bridge at 1:34: 

Tumblr won’t let me embed any more videos, so you’ll to travel to another tab to hear these songs, but Neil Young gets in on the act with his overlooked classic “Winterlong:” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV6r66n3TFI On their 1996 EP Interstate 8 Modest Mouse pay direct homage by singing over their own rendition of the original Santo & Johnny version, right down to the weeping steel guitar part: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VT_PwXjCqqs The vocals are typical wispy whispered indie rock vocals, but I think they work, particularly the two different voices. They titled their version “Sleepwalking (Couples Only Dance Prom Night).”

Dwight Yoakam’s “Thousand Miles From Nowhere” makes cinematic use of it. This song plays over the credits of one of my all-time favourite movies, 1993′s Red Rock West feat. Nicolas Cage, Lara Flynn Boyle, Dennis Hopper, and J.T. Walsh https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tu3ypuKq8WE

“39″ is my favourite Queen song. I guess now I know why. It uses my fav chord progression: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kE8kGMfXaFU 

Blink 182 scored their first hit “Dammit” with a minor variation on the Sleep Walk chord progression: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sT0g16_LQaQ

Midwest beer drinkin bar rockers Connections scored a shoulda-been-a-hit with the fist-pumping “Beat the Sky:” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSNRq0n_WYA You’d be hard pressed to find a weaker lead singer than this guy (save for me, natch), but they make it work. This one’s an anthem.

Spoon, who have made a career out of deconstructing rock n’ roll, so that their songs sometimes sound needlessly sparse (especially “The Ghost of You Lingers,” which takes minimalism to its most extreme...just a piano being bashed on staccato-style for four minutes), so it should surprise nobody that they re-arrange the Sleep Walk chords on their classic from Gimme Fiction, “I Summon You:” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teXA8N3aF9M I love that opening line: remember the weight of the world was a sound that we used to buy? I think songwriter Britt Daniel is talking about buying albums from the likes of Pearl Jam or Smashing Pumpkins, any of those grunge bands with pessimistic worldviews. There are a million more examples. I remember seeing some YouTube video where a trio of gross douchebros keep playing the same progression while singing a bunch of hits over it. I don’t like the smarmy way they do it, making it seem like artists are lazy and deliberately stealing. I don’t think it’s plagiarism to use this progression. And furthermore, tempo and production make all the difference. Take “This Magic Moment” for example. There's a version by Jay & the Americans and one by Ben E King & the Drifters. I’ve never been a fan of those shrieking violins or fiddles that open the latter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bacBKKgc4Uo The Jay & the Americans version puts the guitar riff way in the forefront, which I like a lot more. The guitar plays the entire progression once before the singing starts and the band joins in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKfASw6qoag

Each version has its own distinctive feel. They are pretty much two different songs. Perhaps the most famous use of the Sleep Walk progression is “Unchained Melody” by the Righteous Brothers, which is one of my favourite songs ever. The guy who chose to let Bobby Hatfield sing this one by himself must have kicked himself afterwards when it became a hit, much bigger than "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling."https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiiyq2xrSI0

What can you say about “Unchained Melody” that hasn’t already been said? God, that miraculously strong vocal, the way the strings (and later on, brass horns) are panned way over to the furthest reaches the left speaker while the drums and guitar are way over in the right, with the singing smack dab in the middle creates a kind of distance and sharp clarity that has never been reproduced in popular music, like seeing the skyscrapers of some distant city after an endless stretch of highway. After listening to “Unchained Melody,” one has to wonder: can that progression ever be improved upon? Can any artist write something more haunting, more beautiful, more uplifting than that? The “need your love” crescendo hits so fucking hard, as both the emotional and the sonic climax of the song, which of course is no accident...the strings descending and crashing like a waterfall of sound, it gets me every fucking time. Legend has it that King George II was so moved by the “Hallelujah” section of Handel’s “Messiah” that he stood up, he couldn't help himself, couldn't believe what he was hearing. I get that feeling with all my favourite songs. "1979." "Unchained Melody." "In The Still of the Night." "Digital Bath." "Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?" "Interstate." "Liar's Tale." “Gimme Shelter.” The list goes on and on. Music is supposed to move us.

King George II stood because he was moved to do so. Music may be our creation, but it isn't our subordinate. All those sci-fi stories warning about technology growing beyond our control aren’t that far-fetched. Music is our creation but its power lies beyond our control. We are subordinate to music, helpless against its power and might, its urgency and vitality and beauty. There have been many times in my life when I have been so obsessed with a particular song that I pretty much want to live inside of it forever. A house of sound. I remember detoxing from heroin and listening to Grimes “Realiti” on repeat for twelve hours. Detoxing from OxyContin and listening to The Beach Boys “Dont Worry Baby” over and over. Or just being young and listening to “Tonight Tonight” over and over and over, tears streaming from my eyes in that way you cry when you’re a kid because you just feel so much and you don’t know what to do with the intensity of those feelings. It is precisely because we are so moved by music that we keep creating it. And in the act of that creation we are free. There are no limits to that freedom, which is why bands time and time again return to the well-worn Sleep Walk chord progression and try to make something new from it. Back in 2006, soon after buying what was then the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs album, I found myself playing the album’s closing track over and over. I loved the chorus and I loved the way it collapses into a lo-fi demo at the very end, stripping away the studio sheen and...not to be too punny, showing its bones (the album title is Show Your Bones). Later on I would realize that the song, called “Turn Into,” uses the Sleep Walk chord progression. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exqCFoPiwpk

It’s just like, what Waits said, our hands goes to where we are familiar. And so do our ears, which is why jazz often sounds so unpleasant to us upon first listen. Or Captain Beefheart. But it’s worth the effort to discover new stuff, just as it’s worth the effort to try and write it. I recently lamented on this blog that music to me now is more about remembrance than discovery, but I’m still only 35 years old. I’m middle-aged right now (I don’t expect to live past 70, not with the lifestyle I’ve been living). There’s still a whole other half life to find new music and love and leave it for still newer stuff. It’s worth the challenge, that moment of inner resistance we feel when confronted with something new and challenging and strange sounding. The austere demands of adult life, rent and routine, take so much of our time. I still make time for creative pursuits, but I don’t really have much time for discovery, for seeking out new music. But I’ve resolved to start making more time. A few years ago I tried to listen to and like Trout Mask Replica but I couldn’t. I just didn’t get what was going on. It sounded like a bunch of mistakes piled on top of each other. But then a few days ago I was writing while listening to music, as I always do, and YouTube somehow landed on Lick My Decals Off, Baby. I didn’t love what I was hearing but I was intrigued enough to keep going. And now I really like this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMnd9dvb3sA&pbjreload=101 Another example I’ll give is the rare Robert Pollard gem “Prom Is Coming.” The first time I heard this song, it sounded like someone who can’t play guitar messing around, but the more I heard it the more I realized there’s a song there. It’s weird and strange, but it’s there. The lyrics are classic Pollard: Disregard injury and race madly out of the universe by sundown. Pollard obviously has a special place in his heart for this track. He named one of his many record labels Prom Is Coming Records and he titled the Boston Spaceships best-of collection Out of the Universe By Sundown. I don’t know if I’ll ever become a Captain Beefheart megafan but I can hear that the man was doing something very strange and, at times, beautiful. And anyway, why should everything be easy? Aren’t some challenges worth meeting for the experience waiting on the other side of comprehension or acceptance? I try to remember this now whenever I’m first confronted with new music, instead of vetoing it right away. Most of my favourite bands I was initially resistant to when I first heard them. Queens of the Stone Age, Kyuss, Guided by Voices, Spoon, Heavy Times. All bands I didn’t like at first.  I don’t wanna sleepwalk through life, surrounding myself only with things I have already experienced. I need to stay awake. Because soon enough I’ll be asleep forever. We need to try everything we can before the Big Sleep comes to take us back to the great blankness, the terrible question mark that bookends our lives.

[a-skyfull-of-starz]

Anime in the Time of Quarantine

This fine quarantine period, I have made it my mission to watch as much anime as possible, because I don’t know, I guess it’s better than wallowing in self-pity.  Here’s a list of everything I’ve watched to date and how much I recommend them, because I don’t know, I’m bored or something.

This list does not contain anime I’ve previously watched, because that would make it normal life anime. So don’t ask me why Shingeki no Kyojin is not on the list.  Of course it remains my favourite and I will continue to recommend it until my dying breath.

Also, this list is ordered in the order I watched them in, and does not reflect any standing other than that.  Also also, I get bored really easily, so if an anime doesn’t grab me immediately, chances are I’ll close it very quickly.  I’ve started a lot more anime than is on this list but got bored and closed it.  Hence, this list is almost entirely positive recommendations.  Also also also (I swear this is the last clarifier), I’ve been in a slice of life kind of mood, because my slice of life is boring and uninteresting to the extreme, so that genre is kind of over-represented here.  So with that being said, on to the list (sorry that it’s so long, I have an issue with verbosity).

Stein’s Gate: I started watching Stein’s Gate two years ago, but didn’t make it past the five minute mark, because I just didn’t get it.  I started watching it again a few weeks ago, and I still didn’t get it, but I persevered because I was bored and high on chocolate.  By the end of the first episode…I still didn’t get it. I continued to not get it until probably midway through the third episode, but when I got it, holy hell did it hit hard.  I absolutely enjoyed every second of this anime.  I loved watching Okabe’s journey from imagined insanity into actual insanity and then back again.  He went on a true hero’s journey, and I loved every second of it.  Miyano Mamoru gives a masterful performance (I always watch the subbed animes, and I recommend that everyone else does too).  The chemistry between Okabe and Kurisu is probably the best in anime that I’ve watched thus far (sorry Asuna and Kirito, your time has finally come).  This anime is rich with emotion, humour, tragedy, (some) romance, friendship, mad scientists and beautiful characters.  If you can stand being confused for the first three episodes, this anime will be an incredibly rewarding journey for you.  I highly recommend it.

Ao Haru Ride/Blue Spring Ride: I saw a clip of this anime in a seiyuu video and I fell in love with the art style and decided to give it a watch.  I have mixed feelings about this one.  On the one hand, the plot is interesting, although having watched similar anime, a lot of it is kind of cliched.  That being said, I did like the message of being true to yourself, no matter the cost.  And I appreciated the fact that Futaba (our main hero) wasn’t a stereotypical anime girl (although she really does cry a lot and I agree with Kou that it is annoying). I found Kou (our love interest) a very interesting and compelling character.  The clear winner of this anime though is the art style.  It is beautiful to look at.  Unfortunately, the first season ends on kind of a cliffhanger, and there doesn’t appear to be a second season coming any time soon, which is really disappointing.  If you like high school romance stories with an edgy bad boy in it, then this is the anime for you, but don’t expect a satisfying ending, because, well, there isn’t one.

Stein’s Gate 0: I watched this because my friend said that it made her cry after every episode (I personally didn’t think Stein’s Gate needed a sequel, but oh well).  Based on her recommendation, I went in with high expectations, which were kind of mostly unmet.  The plot was way more confusing, less compelling, it felt like the stakes weren’t that high, mostly because they were only introduced way later in the series (I know Stein’s Gate did the same thing, but it somehow felt more shoved in with this one) and because we already knew how it would end. Also the ending felt incredibly rushed. The only episode I really wholeheartedly enjoyed was the reunion between Kurisu and Okabe (sounds weird out of context, but I’m trying to remain spoiler free).  For the rest, I was left with mixed feelings, although I have to say, I probably love Okabe even more in Stein’s Gate 0 and Miyano Mamoru gives us another stunning performance.  I would probably have been happier if this entire series had just consisted of Okabe trying to move on from the fallout of what happened in Stein’s Gate and there was no drama of World War III.  So, I guess if you’re curious to see what happens if Okabe does not look for Stein’s Gate in the previous season, this is for you.  Honestly though, I’d probably be happier if I hadn’t watched Stein’s Gate 0.

Shigatsu wo Kimi no Uso/Your lie in April: THIS ANIME OH MY GOSH!!!!  I did not even know that this anime existed until I saw it on Kaji Yuki’s Wikipedia page (I’m a fan, so what?).  He’s barely in this by the way, but that doesn’t matter, because this anime is amazing.  I knew how it ended because I unfortunately saw spoilers when I was reading what the plot was about when I was deciding whether or not to watch this, and I still cried for about an hour after the ending (and I don’t cry easily, especially not with anime).  The writing here is probably the best in any anime I’ve watched (yes, better than SNK, the king has been toppled from his throne), the soundtrack is amazing (I’ve been listening to it on repeat for a week now), the acting is beautiful, the artwork is gorgeous (apart from Kosei’s disappearing glass frame, that was weird), and all around, this anime is just…perfect.  If you enjoy teenage romance and drama, if you love classical music, if you feel like bawling your eyes out for an hour because right now your life is pretty boring and pointless, then this is the anime for you.  And even if you aren’t any of those things listed, I still recommend this anime because it is gorgeous and deserves recognition for how incredible it is.

Welcome to the NHK: this is probably the direct opposite of Shigatsu wo Kimi no Uso in every way possible.  I haven’t finished this anime yet because it is extremely heavy, and I can only manage two episodes a night, but I still highly recommend it.  It’s a fascinating take on a lot of modern Japanese culture, specifically surrounding mental health, the hentai industry and consumerism. It’s also got a lot of black comedy in it, which I love.  All in all (and depending on the ending of the series), I highly recommend this one for its interesting writing and plot and excellent acting.  

Lovely Complex: honestly, this anime sort of crept into my heart as one of the most adorable, refreshing, hilarious and unexpected love stories of all time.  It basically tells the story of two idiot friends who slowly realise they’re in love with each other, how this impacts their friendship and how they navigate the very dark waters of teen romance.  If you’re looking for an uncliched high school romance anime, where the heroine is the opposite of a cute anime girl, where the broody handsome guy is not the object of our affection and where you get flashbacks of just how dumb you were as a teenager and how grateful you are to be out of that age group (if you’re my age I mean, I’m mostly talking about myself here), then this is definitely the anime for you. Also, the opening song is ska, how cool is that?

Orange: another time traveling story, except the time traveling is even more confusing here. Just kidding, the time traveling is probably the least interesting part of this story, which examines suicide, depression, guilt and bullying, and does it in a pretty mature way.  Our hero (dear lovely confused Naho) is unfortunately not very smart, but that’s ok, because she has Suwa, the best human being in the whole world, to help her out.  Honestly, this story would have ended very differently if Suwa had not been around and he deserves every award that can possibly be given to amazing human beings. This anime is sort of 13 Reasons Why, but in reverse, less exploitative and with better friends (you’ll understand what I mean when you watch it).  If you aren’t going to be triggered by discussions of suicide, depression and bullying, then I really do recommend this, as it is very interesting, well-performed, and largely well-handled.

So that’s my anime watch list thus far.  I plan to finish Welcome to the NHK soon, and then start watching Mushishi, as I’ve heard a lot of great things about it.  Also, now that you guys have seen what my tastes are, I would love it if I could get more recommendations.  Lord knows, I’m not going to be doing anything else until I can find a way home, so I might as well expand my horizons.  Also also…no, that’s it.  Have a good quarantine folks!

[grisdidthis]

CHAPTER ONE: FIRST SIGHT

AKA, blessed fucknuggets, why do these fools feel the need to put themselves through high school, my sources tell me that the US school system isn’t all that to begin with, what gives?

PREVIOUS ENTRIES

(Warning: this got long. Looooong. Hence, cut, so that I don’t murder your dash like Edward doesn’t murder Bella in this chapter.)

Welcome to the first entry of a live-read that no one asked for, in which I’ll go through the first chapter of Midnight Sun, i.e. a retelling of the first Twilight book from Edward Cullen’s POV. Not to be confused with Grey, a retelling of the first volume of a Twilight fanfic with the serial numbers filed off, or the Life and Death edition, a retelling of the first Twilight book in which Bella Swan is genderbent into a dude called Beau, who utters the immortal line “I knew I must look like a gorilla on a greyhound.” Which still tickles my humerus to this day.

I’ve waited for this novel to drop so long that at some point I’d stopped waiting. If by some freaky turn of chance you stumbled on this without knowing about the hoopla surrounding the publication, here’s a Wikipedia link. The gist is that the first few chapters of the WIP got leaked, the author got upset, the book got shelved until ??? and no further information about it was forthcoming until a while ago, when out of the blue arrive the news that it’s getting released in August.

My first thought was “Oh, yay, something actually NICE is happening this year!”

My second thought was “Please let it be good, so that I can laugh outrageously at [name redacted] for mocking my enjoyment of this series!” And. Look. I know what’s said about Twilight with regards to its literary merit and Stephenie Meyer’s abilities as a writer. A lot of it is admittedly accurate. However, the metrics by which I measure the value of a book are a) did it entertain me? and b) did I gain anything by having read it? And yeah, those are personal and subjective items, but objectivity is a lie, Jesus enjoys using toasters to take selfies, and if ten years ago I hadn’t been looking for a place to post my 50k+ epic Renesmee-centric fanfic, I wouldn’t have met the people who are currently my best friends.

Which is to say: I’m too attached to this series to give a fig what color the prose is. Deal.

And yet. Me hoping that Midnight Sun would be good, in a way that people who don’t have my level of emotional investment might acknowledge, wasn’t… that farfetched?  Because the last book Meyer released before this one, The Chemist? Is an improvement on all her previous work. A huge improvement! It’s competently written! The characters read like they were intended to be flawed, messy people.

The main romance isn’t the kind of fucked up that Bella and Edward’s is, where you can pen treatises on why they’re omg so unhealthy. It’s the kind of fucked up where five seconds after meeting her love interest, the protagonist drugs him unconscious, kidnaps him, sticks a urinary catheter up his ding dong, straps him to a table and tortures him for information until the guy’s ex-CIA identical twin drops a plane on the barn they’re in and crashes through the ceiling all “HANDS OFF MY BABY BROTHER YOU DISCOUNT MATA HARI!”

Then they all make friends and go on a road trip together because a shady government organization is after them.

That’s not a fucked-up relationship that you write an essay analyzing the fucked-up-ness of. It’s something you stare at, stunned and, if you’re me, torn between thinking “Holy shit, this is so my brand of heroine!!!” and “How much crack was Auntie Steph on when she wrote this?” And it’s beautiful. I want ten more like it. So my hopes for Midnight Sun are tempered by the knowledge that, being a retelling of an established narrative, it can’t go all-out with the batshit. But I’m still optimistic that some part of it will give me that warm “Awww, you’ve come a long way from where we first met, author! Good on you!” feeling.

Now let’s (finally!) get started on the chapter proper.

…oh wait there’s an author’s note.

…uhm. Yeah. My dreams. About those. *fixed stare at faraway bonfire* Actually, let’s not talk about those and just move on to Edward Not Liking High School, thank you. Yeah. That’s good.

Edward Cullen doesn’t like high school. Edward doesn’t like that people think. Edward doesn’t like that the human student body is beside itself with the arrival of some new chick. Edward thinks his adopted siblings are super basic. (Rosalie = shallow, Emmett = simple, Jasper = psycho two seconds away from jumping off his chair and going on a rampage.) We don’t get to hear his utterly unbiased assessment of Alice, because she butts in and starts a one-sided telepathic convo about how Jasper is two seconds away from jumping off his chair and going on a rampage. You know. Normal sibling stuff.

WHY DO YOU PUT YOURSELF THROUGH THIS HASSLE, WHY!

(Let me take this opportunity to share my pet crack theory that Carlisle Cullen is secretly the most twisted, evil vampire in all of vampiredom, and that the sending the young ones to high school bit is something he does solely because he gets his evil fix by feasting on the emotional toil it inflicts on them. Also why he’s a doctor; he can ignore the call of blood, because being surrounded by the pain of patients and their loved ones already keeps him fed. I mean. He was chilling with the Volturi way back when, and Aro gives off a handsy vibe. No way he didn’t get his mind read in every which way, and if that happened - if he were reaaaalllyyyyy that nice, why would he still ping them as a threat of any kind?)

(This has holes in it, I know. And clashes with my other pet crack theory, which posits that the whole immortal child/Let’s Catch Them All: Cullen Edition was in fact the fallout of a Very Bad Italian Breakup, with Aro being the pissy ex who wants sole custody of the kids.)

Whatever. It still makes more sense than them going through “the inert state between active periods” when. My dudes! College is right there. Some places you can even sit out 90% of lectures and still get your diploma if you don’t feel like faking one, so Jasper would be all set! And you can pick different subjects! Diversify! Why must it always be med school rehashes, there are other worthy professions! And whole fields that are useless for getting-a-job purposes, but still interesting and enriching for those who have the luxury to pursue them. Let Emmett do Viking Studies, for fuck’s sake!

This amuses me much more than it rightfully should. I’m a child.

The Cullen clan tries to pep talk Jasper into not getting his murder on. Jasper is like OMG WILL YOU GUYS LAY OFF, while Edward is busy doing his judgy Edward thing and thinking to himself that Jasper should accept his limitations, that it’s a bad idea to have him at school at all, blah blah bleh, and you know what, I’m with you there, Ed.

Although we all know that this is just setup for the irony that will ensue as soon as Bella the Delicious klutzes her way into his line of smell.

Oh yah! Enter Bella. Edward can’t hear her thoughts. Jessica Stanley is a b-word. Edward wonders whether not being able to butt into the new girl’s head may be a red flag for vampire Alzheimer. Biology class next! The teacher is a man “of no more than average intellect” and, lord. It’s lucky that Edward is the mind reader in the family, because imagine if it were one of the others and they had to put up with listening to him bitch about the world at large, nonstop, at all hours of the day. And night, since these guys don’t sleep. Angela Webber is the only soul in the whole school whose thoughts have the Edward Cullen seal of approval. I feel sorry for her. I also feel this weird sense of hey, this all seems familiar in senses other than being a retelling, have I been here before?

Wait.

WAAAIIIIIITEEEEE.

*googles for the old version*

*runs first chapters through copyleaks*

*kubrick stare* MEYER, YOU LAZY SO AND SO, HOW COULD YOU!

*slams head on desk*

Well. At least I know what I’m in for. HONESTLY! It’s been. It’s been THIS MANY YEARS since the leaked version appeared, and that was a first draft, how in the… she’s way better than this, now! Was this novel produced in a terminal state of $#%CARING#NOT?&FOUND?! Is half of it just going to be the same old thing with a thin veneer of polish? I’m.

*sigh* You know what, I’m okay. We’re just going to call this first part a re-read. It’s been ten years, so I remember not a whole lot of the specifics, so at least I won’t be bored. BUT COME CHAPTER 13 I EXPECT TO BE SWEPT OFF MY FEET, DO YOU HEAR ME?!

Biology. Bella walks in right past a fan and gives Edward a throbbing throat boner. How awkward. Then she goes and sits right next to him and saucily tosses her hair around like he’s not actively plotting her murder and that of the rest of the class. The cheek of the thing!

Fortunately, Bella’s tasty ass is momentarily saved by a stiff breeze.

…I think we may have found the solution to Jasper’s control issues. The Cullens just need to start carrying air freshener around and spray the murder out of him every time he starts looking peckish. It would look weird if anyone else did it, but since they’re all pretty and rich, it’s more likely that the trend will catch on and cause Febreze sales to skyrocket.

Anyway. We’re not done victim-blaming Bella for…

…at least another couple of pages, but at least Edward gets his head out of his ass long enough to recall that hey, vampire! Oxygen is optional! But he still spends another lot of words grumbling about what a hassle it is to be forced to hold his breath in order to dampen his murderous urges. This is why you are a virgin, Edward. No, I don’t mean the planning the assassination a classmate’s assassination, plenty of serial killers still manage to get laid heaps, consensually, even! It’s the fact that you’re this much of a buzzkill that’s the issue.

Live, laugh, love, you dumbass disco ball!

Yep, he’s still on about how he’s going to kill her, totes kill her, he feral dangerous vampire, rawr. The miracle of adequate indoor airflow only got him to railroad a quartet of brain cells into thinking up smarter ways of snuffing Bella out. Now he wants to lure her to the forest. No, he’s going to kill her at home! He hates her! No, he hates himself and is projecting!

So he flees to his car, plays some calming music, breathes in and out and thinks about his family and how disappointed they’d be in him if he were to help himself to a Swan shake. Well, I’m nobody to shit talk anyone’s self-soothing routine. I’d probably throw in a truck of food + a bath, but he’s had 100+ years to figure out what coping mechanisms work for him, so let’s just let him do his-

Edward.

EDWARD.

…do you actually think this is an appropriate time to start a ginger-off with some random desk lady? Yes, we know you’re the One True Redhead To Rule Them All. (Though Kvothe from Name of the Wind may beg to differ, and I don’t know who would win that fight.) I mean, really? You pull this crap when you just barely talked yourself out of a murder? And then you call her eyes flat! What!

One of my favorite comic book series, Y the Last Man, features a scene where two characters discuss what it is that truly binds people together. One of them presents the argument that stronger bonds are formed not by shared love, but by shared hates. By which they mean not a kiss-kiss-slap-slap, enemies-to-lovers relationship dynamic, but like… you, being someone who really hates coleslaw, having a partner who likewise hates coleslaw, with whom you can indulge in tireless verbal roastings of coleslaw and who will never get tired of your complaining, because the fire of their loathing burns every bit as hot as yours.

I’ve always felt that this concept resonated with me deeply. And if you apply it to Bella and Edward, by its standards, they have the real deal. Go through the namesake chapter in Twilight-the-book, and you find Bella thinking similarly judgy thoughts, being irked by the same shit that no one normal would bat an eye to, going “Ugh!” and “Gah!” at everything that makes Edward wince internally. So their love will be eternal for sure. Perhaps not in an epic way. They’ll live boringly ever after, until they’re ancient and onion-skinned and lurking at passerby humans through the geraniums on their windowsill, exchanging “Holy crow, I can’t believe she bought a hydrogen engine car just to show off!” / “Awful! She should know that thinning the deer population so that they produce less flatulence is the most sound way of controlling toxic emissions!” And then probably gazing at one another like idiots for an ice age or two.

Edward wants to be moved out of Biology class. Goes back and forth with the desk lady, who obviously wants to tap that, because of course she does. Every hot-blooded woman within spitting distance must crave his alluring icicle, even as he mentally eviscerates every minuscule detail of their appearance.

Except Bella, because she’s soft, translucent, deep-eyed and edible. And, I mean. You can complain all you want about “you’re different from anyone else I’ve ever met, you’re SPECIAL, better, more beautiful, more everything!” being a dead horse of a trope so old and beaten that by all rights it should have turned to smelly glue, but. That pony is still kicking. And by kicking, I mean selling. And it sells because being made to feel special, even if it’s happening by proxy while you’re immersed into the thoughts of a fictional character, is nice. Readers enjoying that experience and seeking out fiction that provides it shouldn’t be considered so… mock-worthy as I’ve seen it be, in discussion of works that feature the trope prominently.

Which doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t be nicer if Edward’s narration were focused solely on elevating Bella, instead of also viciously kicking down everyone in the vicinity. Man, we get the message, okay? You don’t need to act like you’ve swallowed a Simon Cowell before coming in for school.

I swear, it’s almost a relief when Bella interrupts, heralding the triumphant return of the throat boner. Edward’s thoughts about the people around him are actually LESS gratuitously bitchy when he’s contemplating how to best murder them.

At least this time he is able to extract himself from the situation and flee speedily. (Which… in Biology, what exactly was preventing him from asking for a bathroom break? Or just saying he was feeling poorly and getting the fuck out of there?)

He meets the sibs. Only Alice has any clue of what is going on because visions, and she doesn’t explain anything to the others, who just stand there baffled while Edward decides to get his shiny ass in his shiny Volvo and run off to Alaska. Probably because it would ruin the serious mood of the scene if she told them and Jasper started doing happy cartwheels at the prospect of no longer being the only fuckup in the family.

END CHAPTER. Same time tomorrow, hopefully, and I’ll TRY to be less longwinded. Try. 

[alwaysspeakshermind]

Top 5 Anti-Varchie Arguments & Why They Make No Sense

#3: “Varchie breaks up every other day/they’re so toxic.”

Yeah, so...to quote both Hamlet 3.3.87 and that one Bugs Bunny meme—NO. 

[Quick but serious question: is this whole “they break up all the time” thing a trying-to-be-cleverly-snarky exaggeration, or are people really just that unobservant? I want to believe it’s the first, but I see it so often now that I’m becoming horribly afraid it’s the latter.]

Over the course of three seasons and 57 episodes, Archie and Veronica break up three times—three!—and each of those times, the breakup is precipitated by outside events, no one is happy to be breaking up, and both parties make a concerted effort to remain friends while neither ever actually quits caring about the other.

Regarding the toxic argument: no they are quite obviously a safe and non-toxic ship. (Although they do appear to present the occasional choking hazard for children under the age of 13 who cannot seem to swallow Varchie’s happiness).  

“Toxic” is, however, a term I refuse to unpack and dissect at the length it deserves right now because I’m so incredibly sick of the misconceptions Tumblr and the rest of the internet perpetuates regarding toxic/abusive relationships that my exhausted frustration with this subject alone can fill pages and it’ll drag me off topic. So instead, I’m just going to point out that while none of Riverdale’s main ships is toxic (everyone’s just young; there is an actual difference), Varchie is the ship with the fewest elements the internet typically likes to designate as such (antagonism/aggression toward each other, childish/petty behavior designed to get under the other’s skin, resentment/bitterness directed at the other person following a breakup, etc.), so the frequency with which this argument is thrown around is extra-laughable. 

Especially considering how demonstrably willing both Archie and Veronica are to overcome their unfamiliarity with each other’s world, share each other’s concerns, support each other’s interests, and essentially serve as each other’s partner because they both consider all those things fundamental parts of being in a relationship (which they are).

**IMPORTANT NOTE: if you struggle to discern the difference between:

(1)  a healthy real-life relationship (which, sorry to be the bearer of bad news, will in fact include arguments because people are people and no human being who possesses a mind of their own agrees with another human being all the time)

(2)  a toxic real-life relationship (which can include arguments but doesn’t have to)

(3)  healthy and toxic fictional relationships (which are entirely different beasts, particularly in book or TV series as plot requirements frequently dictate that characters react in ways that no actual person would, because the narrative needs conflict or drama to function and publishers/networks still over-rely on relationships to provide that conflict or drama)

then you probably will believe Varchie is toxic, and you definitely need to do some research that goes a little deeper than Wikipedia/that one post with a bunch of notes that was written by a person who came out of their first college psychology class feeling like Sigmund Freud. Toxic relationships are no joke, and it’s a little frightening to see how many people on the internet are so confused as to what constitutes one in reality that they frequently interpret normal, healthy relationships portrayed in fiction as toxic, and borderline-toxic relationships in fiction as healthy. (Also, it doesn’t help that people who, for whatever reason, feel the need to paint their dislike of a certain pairing in homilectic terms, are in the habit of taking scenes that check off a few of the “toxic relationship” boxes and twisting them out of context so that they can pretend there’s an element of moral superiority to their prejudice.)

But, important reminder! Fiction and real life are not the same thing, so if you want to measure fiction by reality’s standards, you have to apply liberal amounts of common sense to your assessments of the goings-on in a fictional world and recognize that many developments are necessitated by things like plot advancement, network executives, deadlines, and your basic this-actor-got-sick or that-actor-is-going-leave-soon randomness. Playing judge, jury, and executioner on the toxicity of TV relationships is, if possible, even more complex than just judging the toxicity of real-life relationships because by arbitrary unwritten law, TV relationships must include some onscreen friction. 

In fact, one of the first things you’re taught about writing fiction is that no one wants to read/watch/hear about the thing that almost happened, so don’t waste valuable narrative time portraying that—yes, everyone likes to joke about how they would love to watch a show where the kids went to class everyday and everything happened normally, but it’s a joke. It’s not true. No one who’s done with high school really wants to go back again and listen to an hour of boring lectures week after week, and no one who’s still in school wants to come home and watch a show that’s a repeat of their entire day. TV shows (or books, or movies) expect you to understand that each episode/scene/chapter/whatever is a story they’re telling you about the time something did happen, and that expectation also extends to fictional relationships. Just because you happen to witness a couple’s every fight/argument/disagreement onscreen does not mean you’re expected to conclude that “OMG, this couple is so toxic! All they ever do is fight!” 

No.

That would be like concluding the only holidays in the town of Riverdale are Christmas and Labor Day because we haven’t seen them have Halloween or New Year’s yet. You’re expected to put two and two together and assume they’ve celebrated those holidays that logically must have preceded and followed Christmas, just like you’re expected to grasp the underlying implication that after weeks/months of happiness and fun and peace, these two characters who love each other are now squabbling/experiencing tension over something important that they disagree on. Archie and Veronica are shown working together, being happy, enjoying one another’s company etc. multiple times before conflict ever arises between them, and them figuring out how to navigate through that conflict is intended as a facet of the story’s plot and a developmental point in their character arcs, not a red flag denoting an unhealthy relationship.

But anyways.

Back to the “they break up all the time” argument and why its fallaciousness is so obvious that it needs to be retired with all possible speed. (And as a bonus, also back to its close relatives “they break up for stupid reasons and get back together in five minutes.”

The “Shouldn’t-Be-Necessary-But-Apparently-Is”Quick Guide To Varchie Breakups:

Breakup #1: The end of episode 2x08

Duration of breakup: Almost one whole episode (that spans the course of at least a couple days)

What leads to breakup: Archie, the comfortable-with-feelings person, drops the L-word and desperately wants to hear it back. Veronica, the uncomfortable-with-feelings person, isn’t sure she can say it back and doesn’t want to go on acting like it’s not a big deal when she can see how important it is to Archie.

The outcome: Neither Archie nor Veronica’s actual feelings change at all from the time of the breakup to the time of the reunion. (No, not even when Betty kisses Archie.) Veronica just finally realizes that what she feels for Archie is love, so she goes to see him and tells him face-to-face. Archie is happy to get back together right then and there, and they resume where they left off.

 “Breakup” #2: The end of episode 3x06

Duration of “breakup”: three +/- episodes (end of 3x06-beginning of 3x10)

What leads to “breakup”: Archie believes Hiram’s vendetta against him endangers everyone close to him, not just him, and decides running away is his only option.

The outcome: Once again, neither Archie nor Veronica’s actual feelings change. They both attempt to move on/forget (Archie with Farm Girl Whose Name Escapes Me, Veronica with Reggie), but don’t exactly succeed as evidenced by Veronica’s anger, Archie’s remorse, and how quickly they want to get back together when he returns to town. 

NOTE: This is the one I sarcastically refer to as “the breakup” because it was over the phone (which, as everyone who’s ever utilized this dodge knows, is the easiest way to keep yourself from going back on a hard decision you don’t want to make. It should be obvious to those with functioning sensibilities that Archie does it that way because he knows if he goes the in-person route he’ll have to see Veronica cry and won’t be able to handle it). Besides that, Archie tells Veronica that he loves her and she was “it” for him from the day he met her, and it clearly kills both them to say goodbye. So again, as any viewer with common sense can see, it’s a breakup in name only—their heads are forced to accept what their hearts can’t, and everything they think is resolved is really only postponed.

 Breakup #3: The end(ish) of episode 3x10

Duration of breakup: ALMOST TWELVE WHOLE EFFING EPISODES (end of 3x10-middleish of 3x22). COUNT THEM.

What leads to breakup: Archie has in no way recovered from his rough experiences over the past months, and is behaving erratically. Veronica observes his out-of-character behavior with a lot of concern, and Reggie (whether accidentally or on purpose) fuels the idea that Archie is no longer Archie, so when Hiram ends up shot the day of the PSATs, Veronica knee-jerk reacts due to all the stress, worries that Archie might be responsible for it, and doesn’t contradict Archie when he asks if they’re done.

The outcome: Once again (surprise, surprise!) neither Archie nor Veronica’s feelings for one another change. They again try to move on/forget each other by dating other people (Josie and Reggie), but it doesn’t work. They remain close, continue to look to each other for comfort/support, and as soon as they’re faced with a life-or-death scenario, they throw caution to the wind and tell each other the truth (“I love you. I don’t think I ever stopped loving you”/“My heart ached for you. Because I felt the same way.”)

 To recap: what do these breakups have in common?

(1) Each breakup is due to a legitimate concern involving the other person, i.e., they are breakups for mature reasons, not breakups for “How dare you not text me back within five minutes” or “I’m a free range pony that can’t be tamed” reasons (with all due respect to Fat Amy)

(2) Neither Archie nor Veronica wanted to break up

(3) Both Archie and Veronica continued to love each other

When you’re young, the un-fun truth is that you frequently make really bad decisions in love. (You also do it sometimes when you’re older, too.) Archie and Veronica breaking up because they mistakenly perceive certain issues as insurmountable, trying to move on with other people and then going back to each other to make things right and reaffirm the love they couldn’t pretend away the instant the opportunity arises isn’t them being fickle, or toxic—it’s just them being young and clueless and trying to recover from young and clueless mistakes as maturely as possible. 

And believe it or not, their relationship has been handled very well by Riverdale. There are few other TV couples who’ve been as steady as A&V, and none of them are teen couples (in fact, the only ones that even come to mind out of all the shows I’ve ever seen are married and/or background couples, not main couples, because main characters’ relationships are always put through more drama). It is basically unheard of for a teen show’s protagonist and their primary love interest (who, incidentally, is also another main character) to only go through three breakups in three seasons. It is rarer still for each of those breakups to have a justifiable concern at its core, and rarest of all for the characters to take the mature and difficult let’s-be-friends approach rather than the easy and childish let’s-personally-attack-the-other approach. 

That is not a back-and-forth and/or toxic relationship. That is a fictional teenage relationship handled more maturely than many a fictional adult relationship, and that is good. 

Postscript to the rant: 

Veronica does not break up with Archie in 1x01, because they are not yet together. 

Veronica does not break up with Archie in 1x11, because they are not yet together. 

Archie does not break up with Veronica in 2x01; he’s telling her he wants her to leave because he’s upset and lashing out. 

Archie does not break up with Veronica in 3x01, he just tries to soldier-heading-off-to-war her because he loves her too much to want her to waste her time waiting on him and Veronica refuses to agree to it because she loves him too much to back out because the going looks like it might get tough. 

I don’t know why all of these scenes are forever being cited as breakup scenes, but they are, and it’s so bafflingly incorrect that it makes me shudder. They’re not breakup scenes. End of story.

[littlelovelymemes]

(    *    & .    ---    MORE  POPULAR  TEXT  POSTS . 

‘  i  just  want  a  hot  boyfriend  to  fall  from  the  sky  and  into  my  bedroom  u  feel  me .  ’

‘  i’ve  come  to  the  point where  i  don’t  even  procrastinate  anymore  i  just  don’t  do  it .  ’

‘  my  personality  issues  can  be  directly  traced  to  the  fact  that  i  couldn’t  do  the  monkey  bars  as  a  child .  ’

‘  i’ll  get  over  it .   i  just  gotta  be  dramatic  first .  ’

‘  being  an  adult  is  having  the  ‘ we  have  food  at  home ’  talk  with  yourself .  ’

‘  “ i  can  see  your  nipples  through  your  shirt ”  first  of  all  stop  being  ungrateful .  ’

‘  in  the  back  of  the  club  arms  folded  cause  i  don’t  agree  with  the  music  selection .  ’

‘  movies  are  so  weird .  people  hangout  like  twice  and  they’re  all  like  “ i’m  in  love  with  you ”  calm  down  maybe .  ’

‘  gamers  are  so  weird .  fortnite  this ,  fortnite  that ...  just  say  two  weeks  like  the  rest  of  us .  ’

‘  i’m  gonna  become  a  millionaire  just  so  i  can  go  to  the  met  gala  and  actually  fit  the  theme .  ’

‘  ideal  body  weight :  you  on  top  of  me .  ’

‘  holding  hands  is  lowkey  exciting .  ’

‘  do  you  ever  lie  on  your  side  and  a  small  tear  leaks  out  and  you’re just  like  who  wtf  body  i  know  i’m  sad  but  i’m  not  that  sad .  ’

‘  i  get  my  news  from  the  only  reliable  source :  cryptic  symbolism  in  my  dreams .  ’

‘  one  day  i  will  take  a  really  good  selfie  and  you  will  be  sorry ...  you  will  all  be  sorry .  ’

‘  when  will  boys  realize  that  girls  that  are  “ hard  to  get ”  are ...  how  do  i  say  it ...   not  interested .  ’

‘  the  world  has  been  on  a  constant  downfall  ever  since  2015  when  y’all  decided  to  choose  meghan  trainor  over  carly  rae  jepsen .  ’

‘  naked  iphones  are  beautiful  but  at  what  cost .  ’

‘  there  are  five  frogs  staring  at  me  right  now  but  only  one  can  be  america’s  next  top  model .  ’

‘  there  is  no  doubt  in  my  mind  that  i’m  really  that  bitch .  ’

‘  me ?  constantly  afraid  of  being  abandoned  and  replaced ?  hell  yes .  ’

‘  if  you’re  jacking  off  right  now  i  just  wanna  let  you  know  i  support  you .  ’

‘  it’s  so  funny  how  people  get  upset  that  gender  is  a  social  construct ?  everything  is  a  social  construct ??  go  ask  a  frog  what  day  of  the  fuckin’  week  it  is ,   he  doesn’t  know .  ’

‘  it’s  not  a  real  party  until  you  sneak  away  into  the  bathroom  to  question  your  existence  as  you  stare  at  yourself  in  the  mirror .  ’

‘  due  to  unfortunate  circumstances ,  i  am  now  awake .  ’

‘  did  i  allow  you  to  have  fun  without  me ??  ’

‘  ‘ too  little  too  late ’  by  jojo  was  way  to  raw  for  me  to  handle  honestly  who  hurt  her .  ’

‘  don’t  worry ,  you’re  still  in  the  “ early  life ”  part  of  your  wikipedia  page .  ’

‘  i  don’t  give  a  yike .  ’

‘  my  life  is  fucked  up  and  lit  at  the  same  time .  ’

‘  hate  when  i  am  wearing  makeup  and  still  look  shitty  like  what  am  i  supposed  to  do ?  get  enough  sleep ?  eat  right  and  exercise ?  as  if .  ’

‘  if  we  date  i’m  going  to  always  want  to  hear  about  your  day  and  kiss  you  on  your  forehead .  ’

‘  me ?  overreacting ?  probably .  ’

‘  i  hate  being  ignored .  i  despite  it  but  i  ignore  everyone .  i  am  ignoring  like  three  people  right  now  for  no  particular  reason ...  crazy ...  ’

‘  what is  like ...  the  point .  ’

‘  um  excuse  me  but  where  is  the  attention™  i  ordered ???  i’m  getting  impatient .  ’

‘  tbh  i  am  ugly  but  i’m  also  gorgeous .  it’s  very  complex .  ’

‘  in  what  world  would  anyone  give  up  a  job  in  paris  for  ross  geller .  ’

‘  date  a  girl  who  fucks  everything  up .  ’

‘  i  get  so  excited  when  i  can’t  remember  the  name  of  someone  i  knew  in  high  school .  it’s  like  i’m  one  step  closer  to  being  fully  cleansed .  ’

‘  i  wish  i  could  be  the  person  i  want  to  be  but  i’m  too  tired .  ’

‘  my  aesthetic  is  constantly  being  sleep  deprived  and  sad  about  random  things  in  my  life .  ’

‘  i  hope  that  in  2019  i’ll  at  least  stop  ruining  my  own  life .  ’

‘  eyebrow  game  strong ?  more  like  eyebag  game  strong .  i’m  fucking  exhausted .  ’

‘  are  you  from  tennis  shoes ?  cause  you’re  the  only  ten  i  shoes .  ’

‘  i  want  to  cry  but  i  have  things  to  do .  ’

‘  when  i  tell  you  i  love  you  it’s  never  out  of  habit .  ’

‘  humans are  at  the  top  of  the  food  chain  so  why  are  we  getting  bit  my  mosquitoes  ummm .  ’

‘  why  don’t  birds  ever  shut  up ?  i  bet  they’re  talking  about  me .  ’

‘  if  you  insult  me  i’ll  just  agree  with  you  probably .  ’

[janiedean]

I haven't seen IT 2 but I'm enjoying that wild discourse too (it is funny but some comments like "lol they made penniwise homophobic because they saw the memes and didn’t want people to think he’s gay" makes me wonder how much they are serious or joking... "They were really hoping he's change after dating Babadook huh?" and if people really have difficulties to separate canon from memes or if they're joking too). But mostly I wonder: why people have a hard time getting it's a HORROR movie? (1/?)

(2/?) Like, it is because this movie somehow become more mainstream? Is it because there is one actor from stranger things, they thought it would similar, with "light horror" and positive representations? Is it the clean picture and cinematography that makes it looks like less a horror movie because it hasn't a "dirty" quality of image some horror movie has? Are they just discovering what a horror movie can be ('cause it is one of the few mainstream one)? (3/3) Like I don't watch a lot of horror movies but obviously not everyone of them have the good guys winnings, or have a final girl, or have happy gay/black/oppressed people/... in it, especially if the movie wants to show the dark side of humanities. Or... is it somehow weird to them to have completely evil entities in a fiction? Like they always complain when one is grey and not b&w but when there's a literal demon/force of evil/chaos... no they can't comprehend it?

well never mind that the discourse is killing me and I hope it dies because last year’s was way more than enough is2g that I still have fucking nightmares over the pennywise discourse, I’ll say that:

number one: I have a feeling a lot of people watched the first because finn w/olfhard was in it and they were expecting it to be stranger things and the first movie was kid-based enough that they could hang on to that hope until the second, but like........... sorry to say that’s nowhere near how it works

number two: none of these people actually read a king book or they’d know exactly what they’d be getting into ie extremely fucked up horror like guys king never was the #1 choice for comfortable reading I don’t get how you go watch anything that’s not shawshank redemption and expect a comfortable viewing experience 

number three: horror movies are by nature supposed to be uncomfortable - like, the entire point of good horror is that a) you have to put yourself in front of things that Are Not Comfortable To Look At and b) Achieve Some Kind Of Catharsis By The End or b2) Get Out Of The Movie Feeling Fucking Unsettled And Thinking About It, and I think IT is in category b), but like... going into horror movies assuming that it’s fake blood and everyone is happy at the end is ridiculous because the point is that people die during horrors and actually IT has a higher survival rate than average and the average stephen king book which says all

number four: the fact that people took a meme seriously just kills me because honestly, there is no single thing in the first movie that makes you assume pennywise is anything positive. none. and if anyone was expecting pennywise to go to pride marches even just having seen the first one... guys. it’s a killer clown. who eats children. and other people. he’s not going to pride marches. also the whole debate about the first scene is pointless because it was in the book and it was based on a real murder that happened in bangor when king was plotting the book, and the entire point was showing you that a) people are evil, b) pennywise is evil, c) the return of the ancient evil that is 100% bad comes with killing a gay person which automatically makes the killing monstrous/evil, and it’s been there since 1986, and it’s in the first thirty pages of the book so... just... read a wikipedia summary? read the first chapter? idk but people complaining about pennywise not being pro-lgbt is just out of this world ridiculous to me at least

number five: idk re your last question because I honestly don’t know anymore but it feels like today’s fandom has this thing where they make grey characters absolutely evil without a chance of repenting when they’re set up to change and then they actually end up with True Evil That Is Just Interested In That and they suddenly can’t recognize it and want to turn it into cute and cuddly or not threatening and honestly I don’t get it whatsoever. also as someone who reads horror/watches horror not to get scared (bc I don’t easily) but for how as a genre is really good for character development/having settings where people have to face their fears whether they want it or not (which is a thing I find interesting in fiction okay)/a few different kinds of cathartic viewing/reading (not counting the part where I watch bad slasher movies because I think they’re hilarious or where I find actually entertaining a lot of trashy horror ie the nightmare on elm street sequels) I really don’t know how to feel about people going into *horror* movies expecting the cute ship or stranger things 2.0 or not getting that the ancient evil creature that’s 100% evil and nothing else is a trope as old as the genre? I mean I honestly Do Not Get It, could be that lately horror movies haven’t been very mainstream and good and this one is an exception but still... it’s horror. based on a book by a guy who’s known for fucked up horror. research things maybe, but from what I’m seeing people don’t :/

tldr: I think your points are all good and tbqh most horror movies don’t do the happy ending (actually it in comparison to a lot has.. a.. relatively less bad ending than most ACTUALLY the movie’s ending has fixed one of the things that irked me most about the book’s ending so GOOD) and people are assuming that most entertainment these days is harmless, but... idk man. I just want the pennywise discourse to die because last year was enough XDD

[kingofthewilderwest]

I have a super hard exam Monday morning and I really think I can't make it. I have been studying, but I can't understand a think! I thought It was the way I was studying but it's too late to look for alternatives. I have been reading my notes crying all day (I'm doing it right now and sobbing) but still no light.

I’m really sorry about the stress you’re going through. Exams can be extremely tough and I feel for you on that one. I’ve cried over tests and schooling and all that as well. It sucks to feel this stress. Academia many times pushes us to the brink beyond what we should be given, and I hope that you come out of this on the other side feeling relief.

When I was in school, one of the ways I calmed myself was to think about long-term. In less than 48 hours, this stressor will be completely gone from your life. It’ll no longer exist because you’ve taken the test. It’s a stressor, but it’s one for a VERY short time frame in your life. In the long scale of things, it’s very soon going to be out of your life and over with. And while tests can change our grades and that’s important, in the very long scale of school and academia… it’s not a big impact on our life. We can retake a class if we need to, or do better on the next test, or any and all sorts of options that will all result in a happy, fulfilling, awesome life of many years to come. This test is a very, very small part of the grand scheme of your life, and it’ll be completely over with and out of your life very, very soon. Whether you get a good grade or a bad grade here, your life will move forward, and provide you many great experiences to come. My happiness for the decades I will live is not reliant on one number on a sheet of paper.

I don’t know if that helps you, but it always helped me: once I remembered how small this thing was in the grand scheme of things, and how soon it’d leave my life as a stressor… it helped me realize… it shouldn’t be a stressor even now.

I hope I don’t sound like I’m brushing aside what you feel, because I mean the opposite. I know there’s many situations going into why academia feels SO IMPORTANT in our lives, both for our personal situation, and in the way society trends go. I do hope it helps to say that, in the grand course of whether or not your life will be complete on one test grade, it’s a minuscule thing, and I hope that that perspective can give some ease.

You’ve done your best. You’ve been studying. You’ve been working extremely hard and I want to commend you for that diligence. You’ve rocked that. And that’s something important. You have already shown a lot of character and drive working on this, and that’s better than any number you get. You’re already a hero and a succeeder in my eyes.

And, it’s not a shortcoming on your end that you don’t understand things. We all need time to understand anything; all information we first hear is something we don’t understand at first. That’s okay. That’s the nature of it. Every single human on this planet doesn’t understand things and may take a while to understand something; you are not ever going to be a failure for being confused, even if it feels understandably frustrating to not understand.

It’s always fine to talk to instructors about your struggles. I don’t know if you have or haven’t yet, but honest conversations with instructors can work wonders. I’ve taught college courses and have definitely played the mercy game with my own final grades once a student has come to me. I’ve been on the side of mercy with professors, where they’ve been willing to extend deadlines or work with me one-on-one to succeed. Many, many teachers want you to succeed, and will extend extra help and understanding to you if you talk to them. I know how much mercy can be given once they understand how much you want to succeed, and show you are willing to talk to them about ways in which you can. And I hope your instructor is one such person who will listen. It’s always worth talking over, and it can ease buttloads of stress.

Also… though you are on a time budget… if you’re really feeling this stressed, please give yourself a break. Please give yourself sleep. Please give yourself something nice, even if it’s eating a special treat for dinner or watching half hour of your favorite comedy show. Your mind in this state won’t learn the material most productively. Stepping back away from studying will actually help you and make a more efficient and productive study schedule.

I know it’s late in the game and you think there aren’t other ways to study, but if you want, I’m happy to list off some of the ways I’ve studied before. I hope I’m not overextending my bounds. I know you came here to vent and you might not want advice, but if you want some studying suggestions, here’s things I’ve done. We all learn different ways, and you’ll notice I tend to be text-oriented (with some hearing-oriented)… but maybe something here will click. Some of these studying strategies are time-consuming (not helpful for you right now), some of them are fast, but they’re different ways to work at the same material:

Do NOT just skim read notes or engage in “passive” reviewing. If you’re just looking over the books or old homeworks without engaging, it’s less likely for it to stick. Rereading is one of the least interactive ways and least demanding ways to try to “study,” and thus is often not effective for long-term retention and mastery of concepts. Make your study sessions as engaging as possible without destroying your brain cells and giving you a migraine.

Build up. Start simple, with easier learning devices, and then make it more challenging for yourself. For instance, for foreign language, I might start with flashcards or matching tasks. Then, I’ll eventually get to the point where I will try to write my entire vocabulary list from memory. Build up from easy to harder.

Multiple study sessions throughout a day or throughout the course of a week (when you have it) will almost always be better than one massive study session. Repeatedly engage with the material.

Repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat frankly is always the way to go.

PRIORITIZE. Focus on problem sections. Focus on sections that are most likely to be on the test in large quantities. Prioritize what you work on. You don’t need to know every tiny detail to get a passing grade; you just need to know what big stuff is most likely to be hit.

Tackle one section at a time. Don’t think about the full breadth of the unit. Master one concept at a time. Smaller chunks are always more manageable, more efficient, and more effectively learned. If you don’t understand the full breadth of your test, start with the smallest thing you can, work on that, and get that one thing right first. Just that one thing. 

Try to engage in the different styles of learning. Reading. Speaking. Acting out. All these will help you retain the information in different ways. For some subjects, this may be easier than others. But do what you can.

Flash cards. When you go through the flash cards, don’t go through each card once. Put aside the ones you get wrong. Rework the ones you get wrong a second time… or a third time… until you get them right. Then put them into the big pile again of every flash card and restart. ENGAGE with these things rather than quickly skim over the fronts and backs.

Draw diagrams. Venn diagrams. Tables. Charts. STUFF. Organize your information in new ways.

Make tests for yourself. Create tests that are multiple choice, fill in the blank, short essays, anything. Then, after you make those tests, give yourself a break, go back, and take your tests. See what you do and don’t remember.

Make memory devices! Memory devices for the win! Make them silly and absurd! Make it fun! Make memory devices from puns. Set key phrases to musical melodies. Make silly analogies. Do whatever you need to to memorize the material, even if in a dorky way. Like, I first learned the kanji 白 was ‘shiro’ because it looks like the character Shiro from Voltron. It’s got a square face with a scar in the center, and even a little tick at the top to represent Shiro’s WHITE hair floof (and ‘shiro’ means ‘white’ woot victory!). Other times, I’ve memorized numbers by setting them to tunes.

Rewrite your notes or key pages from your textbook. Type up your notes from class, or rewrite them, or take notes from your book again. Note that you can rearrange your notes as you do this; maybe you could make a page that’s all about X topic?

Study with friends! Quiz each other, talk to each other about problematic points, try to figure out difficult sections together. And don’t skimp, but don’t be afraid to make it fun. Learning goes better when it’s fun.

Write a “study guide” or “cheat sheet” for yourself of all the most pertinent material.

Talk out loud as you reread your notes. Engage with the material both with eyes and ears.

Try to quote your notes. Talk to yourself about what you remember. Then look and see what you didn’t talk about.

Try explaining to someone else what you’ve learned. This is a really good one. This will help you really pinpoint what you do and don’t know, and will mentally solidify the things that you do, in fact, understand. Nothing says “learning” like having to tell someone else what you’ve learned.

Especially if it’s mathematical, but also for other subjects, rework problems from your textbook or homeworks, get new problems from textbooks, or go online to find other problems with solutions. 

Find tutors. Or talk to teachers. Seriously, talk to teachers!

Any academic videos on YouTube explaining concepts? What about Wikipedia? Other websites on these topics to help you see the information presented in a new way? My ass got saved in Mathematical Logic due to a good logic wiki.

Give yourself breaks. Everyone needs different break points and has different levels of concentration ability, but one not-terrible-rule to consider is 50 minutes studying, 10 minute break. I personally prefer longer sessions and will do something like 2 hours, then 30 minute break. But that’s for you to decide with yourself.

SLEEEEEEEEEEEEEP. You do no favors for yourself if you don’t sleep. Sleep as best as you can. Fatigue prevents us from using our full mind, will prevent the recall we could have had if we were more awake. Fatigue prevents us from learning and retaining information we would have learned faster in a more rested state. Sleep allows us to process the information we’ve just thought about; we’ll wake up with a more solid understanding of materials because there’s been some unconscious processing. I know you want to maximize those study hours, but you’ll be wasting those 75% of the time if you’re up to 3 AM trying to work on something and can barely keep your eyes open. 

Make it about you. What is it about this material that you can care about? Find ways to relate it to what you care about, whatever the subject.

I know that’s not a very widespread list - I could write a lot more - but unfortunately I have to get going to my own time crunch for work. And I know I’m not covering every angle in which this is a stressful situation and how we may engage with it, and how people with different learning styles and minds and social situations interact with materials… but I hope that something in here helps you nevertheless.

Please give yourself a break right now.

To say the least, I’m wishing the absolute best for you. I’m rooting for you. I’m sympathizing. My heart feels for you. And I hope that you can find a bit of stress-relief in the midst of this. Take care, friend, and please take care of yourself through all this.

[blogs-of-our-lives]

           I’m sorry to say this, but this may very well be the last of the Blogs of Our Lives post.

           :(

           I’ve had a lot of fun writing for this, but it’s just not what I want to do with my life. And as much as I enjoy it, it’s taking time away from other creative projects. For my tens of viewers, it’s not the end of a chapter, but the beginning of a new one. Thank you all for reading, and believing that I can make something wonderful and funny out of trash. I just want you all to know that deep down, from the bottom of my heart, no matter how much love I have for you all, I will never ever ever love you as much as I hate Brightburn.

             Brightburn suuuuuuuucks. It sucks sucks sucks. I couldn’t wait until later in the post to say that. I had to lead with how trash the movie was, and now I’m going to spend the next couple pages explaining why it’s trash. It’s so bad that I – shitty movie connoisseur, who is making himself watch Days of our Lives and write about it – hated the movie so much that I decided to write a whole paper about it just to prevent someone else from being tricked into seeing it.

           I will start with the only good thing about the movie. The concept. Brightburn is about a young kid (I’d estimate about sixth grade) who discovers he has super powers akin to that of a god. He has super strength, he has super speed, he can fly, he can shoot lasers out of his eyes, and he’s almost indestructible. Essentially Superman. It’s not a particularly original idea, but I was intrigued with the fact that the kid seemed to almost immediately become evil. This isn’t particularly farfetched. In fact, psychopathic traits are fairly common amongst children. The brain isn’t done developing, and in some senses the child is a psychopath. Kids simply grow out of it. Luckily, kids are small, they’re weak, they can’t drive, they can’t vote, and they can’t even get a movie ticket to an R rated movie like Brightburn, which I refuse to grant the respect of italicization. The amount of damage a kid could do is extremely limited. So the idea of a middle-schooler with superpowers is kind of terrifying. Imagine a child without empathy who you can kick your ass. If you tell them to go to bed, they can throw you through a wall. And it’s not a one in a million chance the kid will be a psychopath. Plus, when I was a kid I used to think when it rained somewhere it rained everywhere. It blew my mind that it was raining in my hometown but not in my friend’s town. When my dad was a kid he was terrified of this movie called Killdozer. About a bulldozer that came to life and killed people. In his words, “What are you going to do, hide from it? It’ll just bulldoze everything.” Kids are idiots.

           Side note, I hope it’s not lost on anyone that I italicized Killdozer but not Brightburn. It’s intentional. I respect a movie about a killer bulldozer more than a $12 million movie.

           Anyway, that was the only good part of the movie. The concept. Now I’m going to tear it apart, starting with the pacing. Nobody really knows or cares about the pacing when it’s done right. When it’s done wrong, the movies often feel like they stagnate or are rushed in parts. Brightburn is one of the worst examples I can think of. The buildup just drags on and on and on and on. By the time [SPOILER ALERT] Brendon (or whatever the fucking kid’s name is) turns evil, we had been sitting in that theater for a solid hour. Maybe more. That’s two thirds of the movie (including credits) that was spent just building up. So now, when we finally get the action payoff, it felt like the movie was rushing to the end. The kid destroys most of the house, kills four people, and then blows up a plane in like twenty minutes. It’s like trying to write on a piece of paper and running out of room so you have to make the letters smaller and smaller to fit on one page. But it’s a thousand times worse than that, because the paper had a set length. You could plan out where the letters needed to go and how big they can be. A movie isn’t made with a length in mind. So it’s like reading a sentence but the letters get smaller and smaller for no clear reason. It felt like they didn’t know how to end the movie so they just threw some crap together and tried to play it so fast we wouldn’t realize how trash it was.

           On to the acting. I have no real complaints. The mom and the dad did pretty good jobs. Even the kid did a decent job. At times it was pretty weak, but I think most of that was on the writing.

           Fuck the writing. The Chekov’s guns of the movie were stupid and obvious. In one of the first scenes, the mother whistles during a game of hide and seek in order to get him to whistle back, like an off-brand Marco Polo. My editor literally leaned over to me (like two minutes into the movie) and whispered “I bet that’s going to come back later.” It did. Later on in the movie, the dad comments to the mom that it was strange Braxton had never broken a bone or even got a cut. Like two scenes later, the kid finds his space ship and immediately cuts his hand on the metal. Sure enough, it comes back later in the film, in a way so stupid that I’m going to struggle to put it into words. The mother jumps to freedom from her house and somehow cuts her hand during the fall. She looks at the cut (which is shaped exactly like Bryson’s and positioned in the exact same place), looks at the barn where the spaceship is hidden, looks back at the cut, and says (I’m paraphrasing) “The spaceship! It’s the only thing that can hurt him.” The biggest sign of a bad writer is when the characters think about what they’re about to do, say what they’re about to do, and then do it. JUST DO IT. I remembered the garbage scene from earlier in the film that established the only thing that can hurt him. Who was that line for? Children who weren’t paying attention? The film was rated R. Maybe they assumed the only people they could trick into seeing this trash were too stupid to follow a plot. And yes, I’m one of the idiots they tricked into watching it. Jokes on them, now I’m tearing their movie apart on my blog with tens of readers.

           I’ve told you guys about I, Frankenstein. The movie was worse than that. At least the writing in I, Frankenstein, while bad, followed a formula. There was never a point in which I rolled my eyes, it just in generally wasn’t particularly good. Brightburn, on the other hand, was aggressively bad. It was like all the different facets of a movie (acting, special effects, writing, pacing, visuals) had a competition to be the worst part of this dumpster fire of a film. I’m being too hard on the special effects. They were just wildly unmemorable, not actually bad. But somehow, incredibly, Brightburn was even worse than the sum of its parts. At a certain point, I looked up and started watching the blinking light of the fire alarm. There wasn’t really a pattern to it. I was fascinated. At another point, during the resolution of the movie, a man sitting behind me got out his phone and made a phone call. And you know what, I don’t blame him. It wasn’t like he was taking away from the experience. I was glad he was having more fun than me.

           Something I didn’t realize until now, when I looked up Brightburn on Wikipedia to trash how much money went into making it ($6-12 million, so honestly they used the money pretty well), was that it’s called a “superhero horror film.” I took a class my last year in college about Horror as a genre, and the running theme of the class was the question what is horror? I’ll define horror as best as I can, and you are all free to agree or disagree as to whether or not it’s true. I personally do not consider Silence of the Lambs to be a horror film, though it is scary. It’s a crime film. Even if the film contained supernatural elements (like, say, if Hannibal Lecter was a ghost and rather than breaking out of prison he comes back to life), it would still be a crime film. On the other hand, I consider the movie Friday the 13th (the 1980 film with Kevin Bacon, not the trash remake) to be horror. Even if the film contained no supernatural elements, it would still be a horror film. Friday the 13th Part 1 doesn’t actually contain anything supernatural, but if I mentioned one that does (Parts 2-12) I wouldn’t have gotten the opportunity to remind everyone that a young Kevin Bacon not only dies in this movie, but also has a sex scene. It’s arguably his strongest performance.

           Returning to my point, a universal part of horror seems to be the haunting. It doesn’t need to be a ghost haunting, it could be a human haunting as well. I’m sure it exists, but a movie about a stalker could easily be classified as horror, depending on the tone of the movie. Hell, The Gift was a great horror movie, and nothing supernatural or even particularly out of the ordinary took place. Looking at IMDB’s top 10 horror movies of all time, it lists The Evil Dead, The Exorcist, The Shining, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, Alien, The Thing, Nightmare on Elm Street (trash), Psycho, and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Of these movies, I haven’t seen Psycho, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, or The Exorcist (at least not all the way through). In every single one of the films I have seen, the characters are haunted by some kind of being. In some movies, they’re hunted by it, and in others (particularly the Exorcist), they’re tormented by it. But either way, a haunting is an essential part of every movie. In Silence of the Lambs (IMDB rated it as the 14th best horror movie, naturally), the killer never haunts the characters. He’s a menace, a killer, and a danger to everyone, but he doesn’t haunt them.

           Brando from Brightburn never haunts anyone, except for a ten second scene where he spies on his crush, which was honestly more cringey than creepy. So no, it’s not a superhero horror movie. It’s not a horror movie. If you want to call it anything, call it science fiction. The kid’s an alien, for Christ’s sake. Isn’t that like the number one test to see if you’re watching sci-fi? Right now, if you google “horror movies,” Brightburn is one of the first 10 images to appear. THIS IS UNNACEPTABLE.

           I’m sure I’ve talked about this before, but horror has always been a trash genre. I don’t want to give off the impression that I’m the horror equivalent of a comic book nerd writing about how The Avengers ruined my childhood and it was all wrong because they got one detail wrong from the source material. [Side note: I really enjoyed Endgame, and at the time of writing this, it is the number one highest grossing film of all time, and honestly it deserves it more than the trash blue cat people movie. It was a really satisfying ending to one of the largest franchises of all time]. Even the golden years of horror, the Friday the 13ths and the Nightmare on Elm Streets and Halloween, are all just… pretty good. The writing was competent, the music and cinematography were original and not bad, but it’s not particularly scary, and it looks like every horror movie will eventually become that way, except for the ones that rely on cheap jump scares. That’s the nature of horror, I suppose. It preys on a current and relevant fear, and as that fear becomes irrelevant, so does the movie. So when I complain about modern horror, I complain about the cheap, shitty writing that goes into by uncreative and unoriginal people that disappoints everyone. Modern horror is an easy paycheck. It’s cheap and it’s surefire. The Brightburn garbage raised $30 million dollars on a budget of $6 million. Pet Semetary, Crawl, and Annabelle Comes Home raised a collective $366 million to a collective budget of $66 million. That is a fucking absurd return on investment. None of these movies (except for Crawl, kinda) did anything different. Pet Semetary was a remake. Annabelle Comes Home is a continuation of the Garbage Cinematic Uni-garbage-verse that spawned from The Conjuring. So horror has become a yearly money-maker for big production companies. Just put out some trash that will surprise (not scare) people, and watch the dollars roll in. Financially, this is the golden age of horror. They can make anything with a jump scare and make MILLIONS.

           I don’t know what the point of all this is. I’m not telling the genre to do better, because it’s doing pretty fine. Midsommar and Us both got pretty good reviews. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark looks pretty good. It’s not like all the talent dried up. There’s still plenty of creative and original people working on horror movies, and they’re making some really good stuff. I guess it boils down to me hating Brightburn on a deep, personal level, and I’m not really sure why. I watch tons of trash. As I type this, I’m looking at my collector’s edition DVD set of Under the Dome. It’s garbage. Truly truly terrible. But there are scenes I liked. Shots I liked. It was made by people who were bad at what they do, but they were still creative. There’s this one episode where the government tries to blow up the dome, and everyone inside thinks they’re going to die. All the characters, thinking they have minutes left on earth, all finally do something. The plot unravels into something much, much, much simpler, as all the characters stop lying or trying to hide their motives. Everything untangles for just a moment, and after they survive the blast unharmed, it leaves the question what next? Sure, the conflicts were childish and silly, and the character arcs were (to put it nicely) poorly handled. But they tried to do something well, and for just a moment they struck gold. There’s nothing like that in Brightburn. There’s not a single scene that I can look at in the movie and say you’re on to something there. Keep working. If I were given the script and a blank check and told to write a better one, I would strip it down to the foundation. I wouldn’t rewrite it, I would delete everything except the core premise and start over.

           It just really really hurts, having to type out that this movie was worse than Under the Dome.

           I know it’s too late to convince anyone not to see Brightburn. And that’s fine. Sometimes the world moves too fast for you to make a change. But I just want you to know deep down how much I hate that movie. I resent it for wasting my time, my energy, and my money. It’s worse than Days of our Lives.

           Fuck you, Brightburn.

           Thank you for reading. It means a lot to me.

[agri-art-archive]

SCA Adventures in Heraldry, pt.1

~Hang on folks, this is gonna be a long one~ So recently, meaning back in January, I joined the (one and only) local Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) rapier combat group. At first, I thought it was just fencing. I had no idea what I was getting into- it was recommended by a friend, also in this group, who knew I thought it was modern fencing. This friend decided not to enlighten me, and once I got to my first meet. Well. Safe to say, I was surprised. 

(gif from giphy)

SCA Rapier Combat, it turns out, is not modern fencing.  Its more... Princess Bride-sy. 

It was AWESOME. I got so many bruises. So many. But it was all worth it. It continues to be amazing. Tuesdays are my favorite days due to this new sport. I own my own goddamn sword. Anyhow I digress, a big part of the SCA is the persona you build within the Society. You need a name, a region (country, etc), and a time period- anywhere between the year 600 to 1600- as well as some more optional things such as a detailed history and a personal coat of arms.  As a fan of Arting as a whole, the prospect of delving into Heraldry and making my own coat of arms is very appealing. 

Except, I’m somewhat of a perfectionist and very sentimental. I’m also indecisive as hell. 

Choosing a Charge (the plant, animal, building, human or human bit, symbol etc on one’s shield ((disclaimer, what I know here is basically the result of nights spent googling instead of studying, so if I’m wrong, please tell me))) was and continues to be very difficult. Because it will be a symbol representing Me, as a sword fighter and person in the SCA, for years to come.  Choosing everything else will come after- I already know most of what I want to put on the rest of my device, my motto (Towards Sea over Snow, hehehe) and my colours. 

But the charge is personal, symbolic, and very important to the whole. 

Anyhow, the point of this post and all the ones like it in the future is to document the development of my charge, because I’m not stopping ‘till I draw one that’s just right. 

Finally, to finish off with all this introductory stuff- here’s Agrimony-Art’s SCA Adventures in Heraldry, pt.1: The Alphyn, Rampant Regardant

Now, according to wikipedia (great source, I know), the Alphyn has no particular symbolism as a heraldic charge. That’s ok, the SCA doesn’t really care about symbolism and neither did the time period they use (apparently, again, dubious sources of knowledge here- apart from the fact this was a comment made by our Heraldry master/manager/person to ask- but still). However, the page (which can be found here-> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphyn ) does mention they were once described as being used as “judges” in ye olden chess game, instead of bishops. That’s pretty cool, but I’m not a good judge of anything (especially if my friends comments about my funny puns are anything to go by). Except desserts. I am quite good at judging desserts.

Anyhow!

The Alphyn piqued my interest mainly because, well, its a mofo wolf dragon!

(This is the picture on Wikipedia, creds to whoever drew it, I wish I could find you my dude)

Lookit! She’s gorgeous. Apparently it’s tail is also knotted, which I would like to believe means a promise kept, or a vow- maybe she always keeps it’s word. Who knows? That’s my opinion. Apart from that the Alphyn is a draconic wolf, with a long tail, and I love creature designs with long tails, dragons, and wolves- so she’s a perfect match.  Now I want to make it my own, with a different Attitude (which I believe is the position of the Charge) and in my own style.  After little debate, I chose my preliminary three favorite attitudes (all pictures from on this wikipedia page-> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attitude_(heraldry) ):

The Rampant Regardant:

The Passant Regardant:

The Sejant Erect:

I am so, so sorry for those of you on mobile devices. IDK why the pics are so large ok. I did warn this was gonna be a long-haul post.

Anywho. For pt. 1 I chose to do a “rough/clean idea” of my Alphyn, à la Rampant Regardant. 

It was an annoying start.

And it continued to be so, maybe because I’m unused to the stiff posture of Heraldic Charges? The front dragon arms annoyed me from minute 1.

The knotted tail was also an issue. Thank you google, for easy access to sailor knots. I believe this is the figure 8? Took me a solid bit to figure out how the hell to draw it. Proof provided.

Don’t even mention the fur. Or the front arms. Also, excuse the mess of solid black lines, that was for a later layer and I just... Idk. 

Lemme just say, Thank Mae for firealpaca and photoshop in general’s Transform Tool. First the dragon feet were too big, then the head, then the knot didn’t look right, then the raised back foot, then the ears, and the head, and the neck, and the dragon feet, and the mane, and the head, and the knot, and the dragon feet.... did I mention the fucking head.  AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. 

I stopped here, because I did not feel like doing another layer, and I felt this was good enough for a “rough/clean idea”. Can you tell I gave up by the time I got to the tail? I can. 

There’s just.... something inherently annoying about this piece. Maybe if I spent more time on it, refined it and added more deets, it would look better. Maybe. Who knows. 

But something about it, specifically from the waist up, annoys and irritates my very non-existent soul. No matter what I do, the head just.... looks too big. Too wrong. 

I’m going to restart.

Anyhow, this was SCA Adventures in Heraldry pt.1, one of my personal, non-novel/webcomic related projects. I hope this painful process was enjoyable, till next time.

[ncfan-1]

ncfan listens to The Magnus Archives: S1 EP034 (’Anatomy Class’), EP035 (’Old Passages’), & EP036 (’Taken Ill’)

A bizarre kind of comedy episode (at least it is to me), and lots of juicy, juicy plot.

No spoilers past Season 1, please!

EP 034: ‘Anatomy Class’

- There is something bizarrely hilarious about the story this episode. Yeah, the seven ‘students’ killed at least one person and drove a professor to suicide, but there’s just something so ridiculous about beings who are pretending to be human but are so bad at it that they have to take an anatomy class, and can’t hide it well enough to keep their professor from noticing. And they used placeholder names, and presumably had to exert a considerable amount of supernatural influence (presumably the same influence that keeps more people from noticing that they’re really bad at pretending to be human) to keep people from noticing how off that is. It has all the makings of a weird, gory comedy.

- Here is, I believe, our third statement so far given directly by the statement-maker. This time, it’s a college professor who seems more than a little rattled by everything that happened to him.

- And now we have our first indication that people from outside the Institute know there’s an infestation problem.

- So Dr. Elliott walks into his class to find it populated entirely by pod people. He takes this as well as you might expect.

- The fact that these people are so uncanny and that there seems to be a lot of supernatural “interference” radiating off of them (the fact that Dr. Elliott can’t remember what any of them looked like, and the fact that he didn’t notice anything odd about their names) makes me think a little of Not-Graham. At the same time, though, their ability to manipulate their own bones puts me in mind of Jared Hopworth. I wonder if a bone turner could create a new person from pilfered bones and black magic.

- The detail about Dr. Elliott suddenly being able to hear them breathing is… something. Although he doesn’t seem to want to think about it, the fact that he could only hear them breathing after a certain point implies that they weren’t breathing before.

- They’re very brazen, these seven, altering their bones right in front of the professor, when they must know he can hear them, and probably guess what’s happening. It implies that they are very secure in their ability to escape any and all consequences, which means it’s just as well that Dr. Elliott never confronted any of them about what he had been seeing and hearing.

- I’m sorry. I know the thing with the hearts is supposed to be horrific, but it’s funny. When I listen to this scene, I find myself close to snickering by the end.

- What really makes it funny is that the ‘students’ were polite enough to clean up the lab after they coated it in blood.

- And the tooth-apple is so bizarre I start giggling to myself when I think about it. Jonathan’s reluctant “Did you… eat it?” just makes it even better. Why would they do that? How would they do that?

- I know there’s no reason to believe the other professor didn’t commit suicide, but the first time I listened to this episode, I’d assumed he was so bad at teaching to the ‘students’’ satisfaction that they had killed him, and left that note because they thought that even his corpse would be worthless for educational purposes.

EP 035: ‘Old Passages’

- This is another favorite, not least because we have another appearance of Gerard Keay, and because I think this is the first episode where we’re really presented with a vague outline of the other forces at work in the world besides humanity.

- So I looked them up (being an American, I don’t know these things off the top of my head), and apparently Pall Mall is a swanky shopping district/home to prestigious clubs. The Reform Club is one of those, a private club that was men-only until 1881; if Wikipedia is to be believed, it was the first of London’s gentlemen clubs to open its doors to female members. It’s a popular haunt of political progressives.

- Robert Smirke was a real-life architect. As best as I can tell (I didn’t dig too deep; I don’t have that kind of time), his association with the occult is native to The Magnus Archives.

- And here comes Gerard, a skinny teenager in 2002 with a band t-shirt and a portable CD player. I had one of those. I’ve noticed that people heavily associated with the supernatural shrug a lot.

- The implication here seems to be that Mary Keay sent her kid down to some incredibly dangerous tunnel network to pick up a Leitner book for her. Lady, why don’t you do that yourself instead of sending your kid to risk his neck? What the hell.

- I think this is also my first semi-direct glimpse of Jurgen Leitner, and he sounds about as sketchy as I had thought he’d be. “Some things are too powerful to be owned.” And yet you’re meddling with them anyways.

- “Can you smell it?” Can Gerard sense the supernatural, or something?

- I wonder what the scream was about.

- There are fourteen passages out from the star, including the one Harold, Rachel, Alf, and Gerard went in through. And several of those fourteen are extremely reminiscent of entities/phenomena that’s been experienced in other statements in Season 1.

1. The one they walk in through out of the basement gives Alf and Harold a sense of claustrophobia, similar to ‘Lost John’s Cave.’

2. One is so dark that the flashlights could only penetrate a couple of feet before the light failed—‘A Father’s Love’ and ‘Growing Dark.’

3. One, if you look into it, makes you feel like you’re falling into it—the sense of vertigo induced in some readers by Ex Altiorā in ‘Page Turner.’

4. One makes you feel like you’re burning—‘Burned Out’ (and ‘Confession’), and the later ‘Burnt Offering.’

5. Pages covered in cobwebs—‘Arachnophobia’, ‘Burned Out’ (Tangentially).

6. The one Gerard runs down to get the book has walls covered in what is almost certainly blood—‘The Man Upstairs’ and ‘Killing Floor.’

7. One has at the end of the corridor a stranger Harold was certain meant him harm—the Not-Them, perhaps, seen in ‘Across the Street’, and later in the finale.

So… Fourteen passages, fourteen parent entities? Or was that just Smirke’s assumption?

- Jurgen Leitner has definitely been messing with things he shouldn’t have been.

- The inscription on the date stone, “Balance and fear,” makes the audio distort.

- I wonder if there’s any significance to Robert Smirke having built this in 1835.

- The book Gerard grabs seems to drop small animal bones behind it; this is almost certainly the book the ghost of Mary Keay (if that was even Mary Keay at all) showed Dominic Swain in ‘Page Turner.’

- I’d say the owners of the Reform Club know at least part of what’s up with that star and those passages, for them to insist that the builders rebuild the wall and not pry into it any further. So what’s up with them?

- “And I can’t help but wonder whether that was where they were found, or just where they were stored.” Which suggests that Jurgen Leitner’s books are far more vital to the plot than even past episodes would suggest.

- Tim’s interest in architecture, and Robert Smirke in particular makes me wonder if said interest will come up again.

- Smirke wanted to design churches? Uh, Jonathan, I wouldn’t be so certain he wasn’t designing churches, or at least chapels, considering the one we saw in ‘Growing Dark.’

- I think this is the first time we see worms loose in the Institute building.

- The last bit of the episode is devoted to Martin running into two deliverymen who it’s safe to say are from Breekon & Hope, delivering something to the Archives. Which is fairly ominous, to be honest.

EP 036: ‘Taken Ill’

- This one has a great atmosphere to it.

- As Jonathan pointed out, the way Nicole talks about her fears, and about insects and decay, and her use of the phrase “bleed into” is very similar to Jane Prentiss’s narration in ‘Hive.’ I get the impression that perhaps whatever was behind the deterioration of the nursing home in this episode is connected to the Flesh Hive, or is perhaps part of the same parent entity. After being touched by the pus oozing from that corpse, maybe Nicole got a flash of that visceral feeling, too.

- This one is kind of hard, because both of my grandfathers live in nursing homes. My maternal grandfather has dementia and can’t be cared for at home. It would be perhaps more accurate to say that my paternal grandfather is in assisted living; he’s close to ninety and has gotten to be very frail, and after he had a stroke, he decided he needed to be somewhere he could get immediate medical attention if something went wrong again. I don’t like the idea of someone exploitative taking over their homes.

- “I don’t know why I wrote ‘disease’ just then.” I think I do.

- It’s interesting that Alenka was still trying to call Nicole after the nursing home was decommissioned and John Amherst came in and started enforcing the “new order.”  It sounds like he tried to enforce that new order unilaterally, without the consent of at least some of the staff who remained after it was decommissioned.

- The detail about the heat is important to the episode, I think. In my experience, the summer heat is oppressive, and especially so because summer here is so humid. It’s thick and close and cloying; the air is too damp for your sweat to evaporate and cool you off, so it just sticks to you while you get hotter and hotter and hotter. I’ve heard it’s very humid in the UK as well, so I imagine summer feels much the same there as it does here.

- I’m guessing John Amherst is one of those people who’s only human in appearance. I can’t see any normal, conscious human not reacting as a fly crawls over their eye.

- It sounds like Amherst was trying to turn the entire building into one big pus-oozing wound.

- The fact that the pus could make Nicole’s skin burn even through a (presumably latex) glove gives the lie to Amherst’s claim that what killed Miller wasn’t contagious. If you didn’t automatically assume he was lying, that is.

- Nicole’s uncle seemed to grasp at least part of what had happened to Bertrand Miller. Why the calls he made didn’t result in the nursing home being cracked down on, I can’t imagine—I can only assume the reasons fell under some category of “Not my problem.” At least he tried, anyways.

- I can just imagine the uneasy pall over everything as Nicole drove back to Ivy Meadows that last time. I can just see the sky turning red as the afternoon grew older and the shadows growing—no breeze, nothing to break the rolling walls of heat. Just still air, so close it’s hard to breathe.

- The detail about the plants turning white reminds me of the plants in front of the farmhouse in The Colour Out of Space.

- Alenka banging on the window, it becoming clear her last phone call was a last-ditch cry for help, is a horrible moment, even before the flies enter the picture. Because we just see her. What about the residents still trapped in the building with her?

- It’s clear that the man who tackles Nicole is Trevor Herbert. This is the first time since ‘Vampire Hunter’ that we’ve seen someone out and about with the explicit purpose of hunting down and destroying supernatural threats (Well, asides from Gerard Keay, but there’s a caveat there in that I can’t tell if he proactively hunts them, or if this shit just sort of happens to him). They’re thematically linked, and the physical descriptions match up. This, despite the fact that Trevor Herbert is supposed to be dead. Don’t know who the woman with him is supposed to be; I hope we’ll see her again.

- The fact that John Amherst doesn’t seem to even officially exist further suggests that whatever he is, he’s not human.

- “Workplace accident.” Yeah, sure. I hope, at least, that getting rid of the hand means that the infection can’t spread any further.

- And Jonathan finds out about the deliveries. The smaller of the two packages is a lighter with a spider web design on it, and the larger is… worrying. The table from ‘Across the Street.’ Oh, that’s not good.

[autoirishlitdiscourses]

Discourse of Thursday, 17 June 2021

You're welcome! Your writing, despite the occasional typographical error or possessive formation problem though your thesis statement and to use it personally and recommend it highly. 52: A plagiarized or otherwise need to be aware that it is necessary to try to make real contributions to the group's discussion during the course. Look at the structural similarity between Yeats's relationship to Ireland? You've been a pleasure to read from Butcher Boy well? If you've prepared well for a more specific in the position of protector from the in-depth manner and provided a good understanding of the text in question, but rather that I have a potentially profitable, though. I have a cohesive discussion plan is to express more specifically in your paper in the humanities, or otherwise incorrect about them assignment, you should take a stand as Heidegger has it explicitly on why your juxtaposition actually matters, and your material effectively and provided a good selection, so you may just need to see some of the text you plan your discussion could have been to question 2, below. Has smoothed out a draft. This is true for more sections like these two particular pieces is a more analytically incisive paper. Which texts I have a couple of ways in which you dealt. All of the object itself. Like This One By the way to set the bar for anyone to assume that you must be completed, and on a paper that appears to have been of concern in the dialogue and showed that you'd thought about the Nugents there are variations between individual Irishmen and-voice arrangement of Patrick Kavanagh's On Raglan Road Patrick Kavanagh these poems can be determined beyond a reasonable doubt? I had properly remembered who you were strong last time you attend section and the divine aphasia I think that your paper around exploring that payoff. These are all comparatively small errors, and their outlines don't bear a lot of ways, and your recitation/discussion/section. At the moment, it may be worth a similar format and having talked about this, but I want to be helpful to think about your key terms more specifically about what the boss says in the morning. If neither of those revisions by Friday evening if you have signed up for Twitter? You just need to define your key terms more explicitly and say quite what it means to be more specific claim that you're capable of pushing this even further, if I can pass everything out together in a more clearly articulated stand on what you're doing with the two-minute and expect an immediate answer to a question that you are definitely capable of doing more than three hundred papers and gave a good recitation. Just for the quarter also discussed in the symbolism associated with the rest of the research or writing process is itself a kind of stand the poem until after the recitation, got people talking about a particular student's answers on earlier sections over to such mawkish and purple thoughts. If you believe that anyone has recited up to him. It's likely, but I'm also happy to proctor it later this week in section three was a TA than I had hoped, motivating people to make sure that you're using an edition other than the paper in a lot of good ideas here, and we'll work something out. Focusing on discussions of foot and mouth disease offhand, I think that the writer considers obvious. I think that they always have been avoiding presenting conclusions in favor of writing. Based on notes provided by TA Christopher Walker and the context of the text s with which he had done was inappropriate. Just don't glance at me occasionally, but rather of the landscape and love it and pasting the text that they understand and articulate why you're asking.

You added the before one I loved; changed from to by in from a Western; things like nationalism and the other is that someone writes an A paper, however. This is true for ID #10, which is a really, really big task. I will be how strong your central interpretive difficulties that I didn't again, I realize. I am currently leaning towards calling on you in section is engaged and sensitive, thoughtful performance that you can see it, in your case, one way or the location yet. Some of Synge's photos of the assignment required and gave what was overall an excellent job! This week has just been so much thought and writing a paper to be leveraged carefully. These should be adaptable in terms of line count, stanza breaks, or severe problems with papers in this range provide a genuine illumination in the hope of being adaptable in terms of which parts of your paper ultimately winds up being the connection between textual material and the historical facts in a late stage, and the ideas and ask again.

Going through people's paper proposals and last week's presentations has taken me so long to get you a B if turned in on time: We feel in England believe on line/paragraph spacing in MS Word 2007: Microsoft on line 651; and your readings are often quite complexed, impressive, and I'll give it back to you. I think it's inappropriate. I suspect that one of the course! In romantic relationships, playing by the other to do so very lucid and compelling, and I'll see you next week, in The Plough and the expression of your material you emphasize I think that these are genuine strengths in your hand, I'm so sorry to take a fresh reading, and. Attendance.

46. That would give you a write-up, I think that setting this paper to punch through to an agreement at that point in smaller steps this would need to have thought of that help? If the other TA notices you're there during attendance, and I quite enjoyed having you in section is in your paper, but this is quite engaging, and I'm happy to proctor it if you have any questions, OK? Of course. Thanks to!

As I said in section Wednesday night between October 23rd and November 27th, excluding 13 November is National Novel Writing Month:. Please turn off your cell phone—is cause for disciplinary action. Emails that I notice is that this is quite engaging though I still think that the exam any more questions, please let me know if tomorrow works, I think that your recitation/discussion tomorrow! Again, this may result in penalties beyond simply receiving an F, having managed to introduce some major aspect of something genuinely wonderful piece of writing with the page in question. I will be a smart, sophisticated, broadly informed paper, and that your introduction and conclusion do some of the poems you choose into a satisfying thesis is that if he hasn't taken it yet.

You have excellent things to talk about why the comparison is worth 20% of course; I'm going to be this week, when it comes time to get back to then? If you miss more than a very good work in the discussion overall was more lecture-based and less-capable beings, involving their male partners patronizing them in your delivery does not provide a more rigorous analysis than it needed to be caught up on spreadsheet for all three and a leg. Thank you, I'd like to do with your score. Again, you probably only need one question to think about what the success of your written expression. I'll see you in section treat each individual page that you go back to you. So, for free: Chris Walker's guest lecture on 19 November: Pearse's The Mother, recited in lecture yesterday: If your percentage grade for the rest of the very end of the argument may not have a standard 12-point font, etc. Then you should be cognizant of what they'd discussed, then you may recite any of it myself. I'll post them unless you go over twelve. Ultimately, like I said to other students were engaged, and you had quite a long selection and delivered it accurately, and the weird tenuous relationship that highlights something about the relationship of the text. But you really have done a good sense of the grotesque body worthwhile to make sure that I provide an estimate of where to go that route. 642; changed said please to says please; changed Acacacacademy to Acacacademy; changed answered to said on 1. Other points for that week's reading. Though the description of your own experience as a review guide to be absolutely sure/that you just need to be more effective for you or me, along with a set of esoteric knowledge regarding this selection. It's been a pleasure having you in revising and sharpening your paper won't necessarily be captive; and changed heifers to heifer in the best way to focus your discussion notes often contain more things than we can talk about why in section lately keep it up on stage, and I'll see you in lecture 5 December: The Clancy Brothers and the way that McCabe is quite dense, but you handled yourself and your sense of the contracting party, based entirely on your part, and I think, too. I'm so sorry to take an analytical paper, but with the selection you're reciting, along with several other thematic issues from a chance to talk in detail is the ideal resource, but my best guess is that I give you some background plot summary and possibly other contextualizing information, but this is not inherently opposed to the text specifically and exactly, think about it. I think that it was understood both closer to your paper to you. Burroughs, etc. Here are some on Wikipedia, if you think? You can theoretically go a long time, OK? I abandoned my discussion of the passage as a TA for, and is the case. Talking in general, which is up to you after I graded it you had chosen, and these are important to the poem. I hope you don't generally make subject/verb agreement, possessive/plural confusion, fear at his impending death would have paid off. You had a good-faith attempt to develop an even stronger work on future papers. I'll post it in any reasonable way, or even any real need for me to make up for discussion with the TA strike that you just can't seem to have sympathy for Francie, it sounds like you dragged it on the assumption that you won't have time to get people to explore additional implications of course readings or issues that I've made about grammar and phrasing at all, you gave them trouble being lagged they let him have it hot and heavy in the loop and let me know if you start making regular meaningful contributions to the YouTube video from the MLA standard by default, it currently is. Great! You can conceivably take as long as that's the case that he had to take so long to get other people are reacting to look at your U-Mail address regularly. Your writing is once again very lucid and very well done overall. Name/both/items Bloom orders for lunch;/or 3:00 section and you didn't hear that and hide behind the fact that hawthorn is one of the virtues of an analysis of things well, here. Unlike many students as possible. But if you're going to ask people to talk to me during my office hours if they do not pick up absolutely every possible point for virtually everyone after graduation. /, You should provide a larger-scale course concerns, please bring your luggage to section and are genuinely astounding, I am willing to do, then re-adding it using the add code for that assignment and may be that sitting down and write a draft, letting it sit and take a deep connection to 1904 as well as 1922, of course, what is the lack of specificity. To put it another way:/Anything and everything looks really good reading that they've been bolted on at this, and I will also post whatever you send me an outline with more concrete levels.

I'll see you at the high end, and! /Parnell scandal indicates something structural about the book deals with family relationships: disturbed youth Francie Brady, his relationship with his catalog of responses; the Clitheroes in The Walking Dead, which is already enough to engage in discussion. Personally, I think might have helped, although there are many profitable ways to make up the sense of how percentages or point totals for either exam. Besides attendance, not ten. Change to attendance policy: the professor's current lecture topics. Doing this effectively if the maximum possible score for the 5 p. Based on notes provided by TA Christopher Walker and the section website:. It's perfectly OK to just acknowledge that this is the perfect and ideal expression of your ideas, though I don't mean to imply that there are substantial areas of thematic overlap in terms of a text that you recited before. I think that a potentially productive.

As it is, there are always a good night, but reaches this length by tweaking the format for the quarter, so I'm not sure what to do so, or just pass silently over this request, and then making sure to get into South Hall 1415. What, ultimately, I'd move into discussion questions that you see as being the plus and minus range is that I give you. Any college student taking a heavy course load this quarter.

Just a reminder that you're capable of doing their recitations may wind up with questions about how their related. Other registration/administrative issues? Passages for close reading of that text correctly. Though it was all 'only a flash in th' pan'; freedom that ain't worth winnin' for freedom that wouldn't be worth winnin' for freedom that ain't worth winnin' for freedom that wouldn't be a tricky job to do whatever is necessary to call on you in this passage: If a Friday or Monday would work out in the third line; changed which to that phrase though neither is that future readers and viewers, is a fuzzy concept when examined closely, and I hope all of your performance tomorrow! I think I'm skipping the department party today and working, which would be more successful argument. This is a hard line to walk, and you asked some very perceptive readings to fall a bit was that I want you to dig deeper and/or Wednesday. But that's just a moment, points assigned for this change does not include your bonus for the actual amount of research here, overall; what I initially thought I had a good topic, but not the result of the poem's rhythm and showed this in your paper's ability to express more specifically into your analysis. I have to get at least once in my response is a hard time staying awake after I graded. You're welcome! Then structure your discussion. If little Rudy wouldn't life.

415-20, p. Failure to turn in an otherwise dull day. Well done. There are in participation right now the single biggest influence on McCabe is scheduled from 1:30 and will have to get all the fun under Liberty's masterful shadow; To-morrow the hour of the bird as the introduction for a more natural rhythm. I won't assess participation until the very end of the gaps were due to recall. Starting with questions that surround it or them. I'm glad you were reciting and discussing the selection in the way that is appropriate, and I hope your girlfriend's dental work went well and smoothly.

And the sergeant grinning up. If it falls flat, try moving on to and. Ultimately, you'll get another email about that. Truthfully, I am of course materials can be a more narrow range of the text s and that although I will still be calculating your grade as if time passes differently when you're on the midterm scores until Tuesday, October 11, and this is an important part of being because, really big task. I will be on the other; time and backing up your discussion plans even if another format is followed in a more interesting task. Have a good evening. I have you done with the poem's ideas needed a vocal pause in order to pay off on writing back to you whether you hit a snag that students have had you in section after the final and with me; I'm just trying to do this not because I think that specificity will pay off, because sixteen minutes can go on in grad school?

[emilyplaysotome]

Dating Diaries - Chapter 1 - Moving On

As some of you may or may not know, I recently went through a breakup. 

This story is for anyone who has experienced heartbreak - no matter how big or small. I hope you enjoy.

My phone vibrated with an incoming message:

Running late - will be there in 10.

I responded with the letter “K” before returning to my book.

Truth be told, I didn’t really care that he was running late. Yes, I was interested in meeting him and yes, I thought he might help me sort through the mishmash of melancholy that clouded my brain which made getting any work done difficult, but when it came down to it, I simply did not care.

Only three weeks before I’d caught my dumb boyfriend Shizuo cheating on me with another girl. 

I’d been strong in his presence, calling him out and kicking him to the curb without showing a trace of sadness or regret but the fact of the matter was that Shizuo had been in my life for 2 years as a constant and now, he wasn’t. Suddenly the person I’d come home to at the end of the day was absent, and despite the fact that he was horribly flawed (and that I knew I’d be better off without him in the long run), my heart still hurt.

When I’d made an online dating profile only three days later it was mostly to show myself that I’d be able to get out there again. 

It was to prove to myself that I was still date-able and that the concept of meeting up with someone unfamiliar and speaking with them for an hour or so was not as scary as it seemed. 

There had been the doctor, the businessman, and the diplomat. 

All of them had been nice enough but my heart still missed that idiot Shizuo. As they politely reached across the table to touch my arm in a way that tested the waters yet remained appropriate, I felt myself tense or jump, which prompted them to pull away. 

They all told me I was attractive, and I now think looking back had I not been so jumpy they probably would have followed up.

Our conversations were nice enough, and as I began to settle into my new normal I found myself untroubled by the prospect of meeting this man.

Seeing as how I was still in such a raw, vulnerable state I was not planning to make him my boyfriend. 

When I’d seen him on the app I recognized him immediately and swiped right at the chance to meet him, something I normally would never have done. Knowing who he was, and knowing that he’d dealt with a loss far more significant than a shitty boyfriend made me want to speak with him. 

I’d agreed to meet him with the assumption that the universe had sent him to me in order for me to learn and move forward, though I have no idea what he was thinking when he agreed to meet me.

I figured that he was looking for what most men are - sex.

I figured that he saw he’d matched with a woman ten years his junior and decided that this was a no brainer.

I figured that when I’d been sassy and smart over text, he’d been more intrigued at the prospect of meeting me and so, he followed up in the days that led to our initial meeting.

I’m here by the statue.

Be right there.

I tucked my book in my tote and started walking towards the designated meeting spot which was only a few feet away. 

He was a little sweaty and I could tell that he’d been rushing because he was concerned about being late. Upon seeing me he smiled and I felt something flutter in my heart, which surprised me considering that he wasn’t really my type.

“I’ve never been to this park before,” he said.

“Well since you’re here I’ll give you a tour.”

You can’t just come out and ask someone how they dealt with the loss of their parents at an early age. You have to see where the conversation leads and pick up on if they’re willing or not to be open and vulnerable with you on the first meeting.

It was clear to me that he was blissfully unaware of my motives as he attempted to charm me with his smile and intellect. To be honest, it was working and even though I’d initially planned to pick his brain, or lead the conversation to a place in which I could ask about his pain, I found myself laughing and smiling and enjoying his company.

We walked a bit before he tested the waters as the others had, and to my surprise I didn’t jump at all.

In fact, I welcomed his touch.

There was something about him that I couldn’t put my finger on. 

Something between us that I hadn’t felt with Shizuo in all of our time together.

It was familiar yet new, and even though this man before me was no one I’d normally date, he felt right in that moment.

Before I knew it, hours had passed and the two of us began speaking not as strangers on a date but as if we’d been friends for many years. It was then that he took my hand in his, and gently kissing the back of it wondered aloud as to where I’d been all these months he’d felt miserable and alone in this city.

“With Shizuo,” I thought to myself, and forced a smile before leaning in and kissing the beauty mark on his cheek.

In response, his eyes went wide before he kissed me properly, and I found myself feeling as if I was in college again, making out with a handsome stranger in a dark corner of a bar.

He was a good kisser, and in addition to the butterflies he’d given me I found myself amused by the fact that I was suddenly rebounding with a man who had an impressive Wikipedia page.

“You know,” I said, taking a sip of my beer after coming up for air, “this might be weird to say but I’m a fan of your work.”

“I’m honored to have such a lovely fan.”

“Can I ask you something with the understanding you don’t need to answer?”

He raised an eyebrow with a mischievous smirk and nodded.

“In your work, even though you mostly write mysteries, I’ve noticed that you deal with themes of loss quite a bit. I read your bio and I saw that your parents passed when you were really young. I just...I wanted to ask if it’s difficult. Living with that loss, seeing things the way you do, and living amongst people who can’t see the way you see...”

It was clear the question surprised him, and his face took on more serious, pensive qualities before he answered my question. I held my breath as he thought, worried that I’d crossed a line with him, but he soon smiled and took my hand in his once more.

“Sometimes,” he said, “but I suppose we are the result of every experience we’ve ever lived. Had I not been faced with loss at an early age, I would not be Kazumi Kagami. My words would not have the power that they have - they would be unable to move people’s hearts and so in a sense I am grateful for every experience I’ve lived no matter how difficult.”

I nodded, thinking to myself that I was foolish for thinking a breakup could make me understand loss at the level that he’d experienced it, if only a little. Still, I could feel the tears beginning to well up and hung my head not wanting Kazumi to see.

“Sunshine,” he said, gently cupping my face in his hands, “what have you gone through that has you so sad?”

“I’m sorry. It’s not your problem - it’s silly, really.”

“Tell me.”

“No. I feel dumb. It’s nothing compared to what you’ve lived...”

Kazumi gently kissed my forehead before pulling away. My vision blurred, and I scolded myself for being an awful date as I attempted to calm my sniffling.

“You know, there’s this adage my mother always used to say,” Kazumi said quietly. “I used to cry because I had no shoes, and then I saw someone who had no feet. Do you understand the meaning?”

“There’s always someone who has it worse than you do.”

“No. That’s what I used to think too but after she died I realized it meant something much less obvious.”

I felt him gently wipe the tears from my face before he tilted it up towards him. When my eyes met his I saw that he was looking at me with an expression that was more gentle than anything I’d ever seen on a man. His lips were curled up in a soft smile, and looking at him so close made my heart skip a beat.

“It means that pain is pain. It is only after you experience pain that you’re able to see it in another person. Pain makes you more open, more aware, and it is not about putting value on whose pain is worse - it’s acknowledging that we all experience pain and that pain is simply a part of being human.”

Believe it or not, despite the serious conversation and the fact that I cried on the first date, Kazumi and I continue to talk.

Since our first date, we’ve gone on four more but spread out over a few months seeing as how his book has him on the road most days. What started as me wanting to learn from someone who understands pain has become a friendship of sorts.

At the moment, our relationship is in this sort of grey space - we are not quite friends, not quite lovers - but with all that said, I don’t regret anything that’s happened between us.

Kazumi has shown me that sometimes people come into your life in an unexpected way and help you understand that it’s ok to be human. He’s helped me realize that I can be sad about Shizuo, and that my feelings are not foolish. In the time we’ve known each other, he’s said things that have forced me to look in the mirror and realize that I have some work to do on myself before I attempt to find a partner.

Once a day or once every other day I get a text from him telling me I’m beautiful or calling me sunshine and it makes me smile.

No, he’s not my boyfriend and will probably never be, but with that said, he is very special and I feel very lucky that the universe sent me such a thoughtful, smart man with an impressive Wikipedia page to be my rebound.

There is life after Shizuo, and I am slowly figuring out what that is.

This was super personal to me, but I’m happy to have written it and despite how short it is, I hope you enjoyed it.

If you did, I hope you’ll consider sharing it and if you’re feeling really generous I hope you’ll consider buying me a coffee!

As always with these short stories they’re a mix of fantasy and reality for me, so bonus points if you can tell what’s real ;)

Thanks for reading!

***UPDATE - decided to make this a series of sorts...part 2 here!****

If you’re interested, no worries if not:

@robotloveskitten 

@airashime

@kingdomzeldaquest 

@hifftn 

@speakfearlessly1989

@nitelotus

@scorpioslover

@untilsmidnight

@dreamfar628

[helshades]

Far from me to use the crude tumblr speech but, here I have to say, I believe you're "reaching" quite a bit. As much as i agree that a lot of people involved in fandom(s) have… unusual… taste… I'm skeptical about the idea that sexual fantasies have much to do with political or belief systems. One fantasy can be more or less encouraged, sure, but overall, the big ol' classics stay in fashion. Usually a variant of "what if something that's supposed to be horrible happened… and I liked it???"

Human beings are bizarro primates, after all, and if left to their own devices in the company of most inanimate objects, will probably try to either eat it or have sex with it, it’s true. Add to this the fact that bodice-ripping novels have been a thing for way too long for many of fandom’s twistier fantasies to look that new (although you can bet your sceptic arse that the whole Alpha-Beta-Omega item is a strictly postmodern horror) and you’re quite right in assuming that in spite of numerous variants, overall fannish forays into Sigmund Freud’s censored nightmares aren’t that original. On the other hand…

Nevertheless, I’ll contradict you on a few points:

When I was sardonically linking fandom’s most hive-minded tendencies to a certain state of contemporary society, and I used the term ‘liberalism’, I wasn’t either announcing my conversion to Trumpism or alluding to a system of beliefs, rather to a structural phenomenon pervasive in our Western societies—and one must never forget that politics is by essence a res publica: civic life, what is common to all in the public space, and on which all can operate equally provided that they concert… Fiction doesn’t happen in a vacuum, it reflects a great part of our current preoccupations, personal ones indeed, but also ones we’ve absorbed from social osmosis, you might say.

Liberalism in Occident isn’t a mere set of political beliefs so much as the default structure of our respective and common economies, dictating the way States interact with one another in regards to a common market. This is capitalism triumphant, where in the initial idea resisting absolutism has long dissolved into pretty antisocial individualism as social constraint has come to be perceived as the worst kind of oppression possible. This has to be conjugated with the rise of consumer society—which, symptomatically enough, doesn’t have a Wikipedia page—in the 1960s, whose core issue is that the desire for consumption eventually overrides most ethical principles.

Economy completely informs social interactions, and that includes the way we educate children, actually. Did you know that an entire social phenomenon and bona fide psychological condition happens to be a direct consequence of mass consumption? In French we know this as the ‘kid king’ issue, what happens when a whole society is encouraging parents to spoil and coddle children so much that they grow into adults incapable of handling frustration, or indeed any type of adversity. Bear with me, because this is actually fascinating:

▬ Human beings are in a way programmed to seek pleasure and flee discomfort; they instinctively seek to fulfil basic needs, and once these are satiated, try to find as much comfort as possible. Any human infant and young child is ruled by this principle of pleasure, and the role of education is to basically teach children the reality principle, that they aren’t alone in life, that others exist and have to be taken into account, that impulses have to be controlled; this is done essentially by setting limits for the little child not to cross. Balance between the two principles is paramount to the construction of the self.

▬ Psychological resilience pioneer Boris Cyrulnik commented on the fact that if animals regularly abused in their infancy tend to find themselves as adults at the bottom of the social scale since they’ve acquired a certain aptitude for subjection, those never exposed to aggression tend to stand outside the group because of their inaptitude to participate in socialising rituals. Yet, adversity is absolutely needed to set sane limits to one’s behaviour: deprived of any real frustration, a child will grow up still believing himself omnipotent, becoming hedonistic, selfish, egotistical; throwing tantrums at any opposition. Typically, these children end up suffering from attention disorders—with or without hyperactivity—anxiety issues, oppositional disorders…

▬ This is also an unplanned consequence of widespread contraception, as most children nowadays are born of the

desire

of their parents to have them meaning that family no longer makes the children as much as a child makes a family; the main problem being that as the immutable centre of his parents’ attention, a child tends to become a perpetual consumer of everything that a society of mass consumption is ready to provide to keep him sated in his own desires. French psychologist (specialist of cognitive immaturity) Didier Pleux listed the ‘five Os’ of the overattentive parents: overconsumption, overstimulation, overestimation, overprotection and overcommunication; the parents will spoil their child with toys and sometimes food, seek to keep him busy at all times because boredom is perceived as yet another form of violence (but it is crucial in the development of creativeness), laud every single of his realisations, prevent him from making any real effort and prioritise his expression (letting him interrupt others when they speak, for instance) at all times.

▬The thing is, contemporary society harasses all of us with the injunction to consume, perpetually, at every opportunity, and in the case of good-willed parents it furnishes with the means to spoil their children just as advertisement convinces them that if they don’t cater to their every supposed need, they’ll be bad parents.

▬The phenomenon, because that type of behaviour, essentially consumerist, was being so encouraged by the rise of neoliberalism (a more aggressive form of that rapidly-globalising capitalism), quickly snowballed into public education, and I can tell you, most especially because I used to teach for a living, that in France a whole educative system got based on the notion that collective education would be better off if it was made to cater to the personal needs of pupils—but this is a can of worms to be opened on another day, preferably one when my cold has abated and I’ve stopped sneezing my brain away all over my keyboard.

Believe it or not, I’m not digressing that much. We are the grandchildren of the first mass consumers and the kid-king phenomenon is a Generation Y thing. My generation is having children of its own. Most importantly, this is the generation that got to grow up with the Internet first, meaning that we were born in a very, very different world. You noted that fandom fantasies aren’t really unheard of and I concur, but I’d argue that the Internet allowed for fantasies to be shared on a massive scale and amplified into becoming cultural phenomena that have much to do with group emulation. Psychologically and sociologically, it’s pretty fascinating, too: there is this uncanny collection of intensely personal feelings, really intimate stuff, stuff that used to be considered private (for some good reasons and a couple bad ones as well, I suppose), now exposed very publicly on the ground basis that the Internet preserves a certain anonymity—which isn’t untrue, mind you, unless you carelessly sign into one of those many websites and applications that syphon your data and manipulate your online browsing, but I digress again (if only a bit).

Sexuality has become incredibly public, as of late. Let me remind you that there are political movements asking governments to give an official status to their sexual habits (or lack thereof, in the case of ‘asexuality’) or, more aggressively, their feelings. Sorry, folks, but that’s the whole basis for the ‘transgender’ movement, and as far as I’m concerned people may live as they choose but I’m not entirely certain that the State has a rightful place in this? Anyway, the frontier between ‘private’ and ‘public’ has been melting, unfortunately so, and most of this must have to do that Western societies have been considerably depoliticised over the last few years, inasmuch as we’ve been rapidly losing our means of popular representation, decent public information, or generally civil services, due to an overabundance of capitalism, precisely.

Sex in fanfiction… it’s not quite sex in fiction, either. Oh, granted, there’s quite enough raunchy literature out there to make you doubt, but the particularity of fanfiction is that most works are an ongoing affair between an author and her readers, who often swap places, very much informed by public demand, meant to cater to very specific desires. In that, it’s not too different from many a published novel, albeit not the best ones probably, only fanfiction is… unbridled. But that’s not actually the point.

The point is, simply, that fanfiction is a cultural product issued from a certain period in time and it reflects part of the expectations of a society; because its producers are mostly young women, it has a lot to tell on the mechanisms of a modern young woman’s psyche—I can tell you it contains a lot of misogyny, for one, if not even gynecophobia…—but it also proposed a certain picture of the modern world that acts a little too much as a two-way mirror for my intellectual comfort. It’s not that every single writer of a Baby-Daddy kinkfic is going to develop paedophilic tendencies growing up, but one, although one mustn’t indulge in full-blown paranoia either, one absolutely has to consider the fact that sexual pleasure is the most powerful incentive out there. For realsies, I mean, it’s actually one of the most prominent arguments to be made against pornography, because we know its devastating neurological effects for regular consumers, who rapidly become incapable of dissociating the unrealistic portrayal, notably, of women, to the detriment of all real-life relations and rapports male consumers of porn could have with women. Sex rewires the brain with exceptional efficiency, because it’s linked directly to our reward system and programs us to want more of the pleasurable thing.

I assure you there’s no pearl clutching in remarking that pornographic fiction written by fans can have enormous influence on the budding sexuality of young people in a day and age where we have this paradoxical relationship to sexuality as a social concept: on the one hand, it’s absolutely everywhere and even children can’t escape it, since magazines and clothings brands do their worst to groom them into mini-pimps, sexy baby Barbie dolls and overall future (antisocial) disasters; on the other hand, we seem to have somehow revolved into the most shameful anti-intellectualism possible, and nobody needs to bother being rational anymore, and adults make desperate attempts to look like kids for fear of growing old, and they act like it, too.

I’m ending this long-arse comment on an anonymous post just sent to me, which is bound to ignite some… conversation as well:

I’m reluctant to make this point publicly for a myriad of reasons (mostly my own cowardice), but I think the then-concurrent rise of the Brony fandom, more specifically futa porn and its prevalence in adult male MLP “fans” has had a larger impact on current transwoman narratives.

I’ll be waiting patiently on the sides with a hot drink to see my followers count drop again, I reckon.