#this video is a venn diagram of my last two posts

[respectthepetty]

The algorithm got my ass after I posted about YinWar then defended mosquitos to @befuddledcinnamonroll by suggesting a video to me of War's mosquito bites.

Can't believe my browser did this to me. Leave this boy alone!

Going incognito mode. Can't trust nothing!

[tasty-littl-snack]

The hat making episode of Weird/or Wonderful World is the best watcher video ever.

No I am not exaggerating.

I think season three of this show is the best one yet, and this episode really shows why.

Let’s start with the fact that watching the trailer for season three, and even maybe seeing the title and tumbnail for this ep I thought “Oh hats? Okay I guess.” And by the time I finished watching this video my view changed entirely. This was the ep of the trailer I thought would be least interesting and I couldn't be more wrong.

This is peak watcher content to me and this post will attempt to explain why.

This episode has everything I love about this series. Going in-depth on something I had no idea about before, and showing the passion of the hat maker they are interviewing. I'm not saying the other episodes are bad, this third season is genuinely the best of this show, but I think this hat episode really shows what's best about this series. It's really two people exploring every last little bit of something wonderful.

Everything is there. You go in knowing nothing about hats and after 30 or so minutes you are entertained and gain appreciation for something that you didn’t think would take this much work.

The best thing about Weird or Wonderful is showing things you would not look twice at. I think the structure of this episode and this being not just a hatmaker but combining Ryan’s and Shane’s passion for movies really makes this episode a gem.

It’s been known before that obviously they don’t shoot this show in order of airing, but in this episode you can really see that they found their footing in what makes this third season unique.

Because if season 1 is them finding hidden gems in LA area, season 2 is more about the community/competition aspect, this one is about them trying out new things. Their enthusiasm is evident in this one, and I think also the topic of hat making which is not something everyday person knows about, only adds to the fun of this episode.

If I had to have one complaint about this season it’s that the episodes are too short (around 20 minutes) compared to other watcher shows but this episode is the longest one, and the craft and machinery used for it gains equal spotlight to Ryan’s and Shane’s enthusiasm. I think one refreshing thing about this episode in particular is that everyone is excited to be there and it shows. The haberdasher/milliner is knowledgeable about hats, and movies and as we know the guys also know a lot about them. (Although the humor in their taking time to guess the hats is also amusing). Perhaps (and that’s my only one complaint) sometimes Shane and Ryan are too much into their bits and cut off the man talking about hats, which I know is something they do often but with hat making being such uncommon thing I’d love to hear the man talk more about it.

But then again if you’re not slightly annoyed by Ryan and Shane's antics sometimes are you really watching their shows?

Another improvement in this episode in particular is the justification of making this show in LA. I think movies are something that is associated with that city, and the introduction to hat making by movies is something that includes the layman into the ep so we can feel parts of it. Most people don’t know anything about hats, but most people watched movies and so combining these two topics makes for this episode to be different than the others. I think that giving the hat maker time to talk about how a hat is made and showing that it’s indeed hard work makes me appreciate every hat I see in movies and real life, more than before.

“I like this episode because this is the venn diagram of our interests colliding” said Ryan in pod watcher some weeks ago, and until I watched this ep I wondered if it would live up to the hype. It does. I think part of it is seeing them genuinely excited about something together. Unlike other watcher shows - where Shane is a skeptic in Ghost Files, or Ryan is a bit annoyed with the Professor in Puppet History - so there’s a vibe of “Why am I putting up with him” that is good for those other shows, but I think here and in Weird/Wonderful in general you can see that they are really friends and excited about something.  Here they both can be amazed by what they are seeing and I think much more than in previous episodes  of this season. They are always trying their best but you can see that woodworking was more of Shane's thing while DJing and horses was something they are equally unknowledgeable about. So I think having the movies as an entry point for the hat making really engages both the hosts and the viewer into this episode and makes you appreciate the whole package.

This episode really shows the stellar editing and sound design. (My two favorite bits are Ryan getting electrified in the beginning and the exaggerated sound of shaking hands to show that the hat maker is strong). But also the intertwining of B-roll where the guys recreate movie scenes/posters really add to it. I will once again shout out Charlie because her editing really gives this show it’s own life, and  character that shows when she’s behind the edit. I really really love it, and I don’t think this show would be as wonderful without her editing.

I hope this is not the last we see of this show because the love everyone has for it really shows. And it made me appreciate the world around me a whole lot more.

TLDR I think this episode is the pinnacle of what this show and other watcher shows can be. I really love it. Best watcher video of the year so far to me.

[soraviie]

you're a writer.txt

━ type: bts x gn! reader ━ navigation

━ about: fluff   ━ pictures taken from Pinterest

━ previously posted on soraviii

NAMJOON: “Swiftly.”

“Eeeehhhhh.”

“Rapidly.”

“Eeeeeeeehhhh.”

“With increasing speed.”

“Now that one,” you laugh dryly. “Was the worst.”

He scoffs, glaring at you from the side of the couch, and proceeds to toss a newspaper onto the angular coffee table. 

“Well, if you’re going to be unpleasant,” he remarks, pretending to leave. Immediately you jump out of the seat, pencils scattering in all directions, and hang on his elbow, much to his chagrin, disappointment, and overall annoyance. 

“No, please, I promise I’ll behave,” you plead, swinging back and forth. “Just help a fellow struggling artist out. Oh, please, oh, Great Namjoon!”

For a second, the facade of unwillingness cracks, and his lips quirk in a fleeting smile but he’s quick to cement it. 

“A struggling artist, my foot,” he growls. “You’ve been sitting on your ass and watching Tik-Tok videos instead of revising.”

The said ass gets a pinch and you yelp but have no excuse for it. 

“I was,” softly, you agree. “I was simply enraptured by your thirst traps.”

Just for good measure, you fan your eyelashes but unfortunately, you’re at the point of your relationship, where Joon has smelt your bullshit for so long, he’s developed immunity towards it. 

“Enraptured?” he smirks. “Now you’re sounding like a writer.”

Derisively shoving him away, you stomp towards the desk, to glare at the jumbled mess of words that wear the thinnest veneer of a masquerading plot.

“Okay, see how you like when I dedicate my book to my editor, my friends, the dog our neighbour owns, anyone but you!...meanie.”

Not even a second passes when with a chuckle, Namjoon leans down to lay a soft kiss against your neck. 

“Okay, okay, struggling, starving artist, I’ll help you but just for an hour, okay? We have to sleep.”

Seeing your rainbow in the rain, you hum agreeably. 

“An hour will do.”

“So…Abruptly?”

“Nah.”

“Hastily?”

“No,” you take one of the pencils thrown haphazardly on the desk and tap the rubber end against your lips. “What about - swiftly?”

“That’s the first thing I said!”

YOONGI: Your apartment is haunted and yet unfortunately you’re not writing a horror story and hence discard this discovery for later use. All you see and hear right now is the rain in the Canadian plains and not the traffic outside. For you, the desk is a rock, the papers littered with notes, plot points, character names, and vapid "use-this-not-this" notes make the ground. 

You reach to your left, grasping around thin air, not daring to even look away. Writing was magic and often involved time travel - you looked away for one second, and the next thing you know it’s been three months and instead of half a book, you have three pages. 

To your great misery, no matter which corner of the desk you shove your greedy, clutching hand, it simply grasps no cup of coffee. Dejected, you can only sigh to yourself. The ghost must have taken it. 

And yet mere minutes pass and you can smell the wafting scent of a good cup of coffee. At this point, you could swear that it produces a cartoon-like effect, wisping around you enticing tendrils that flow up your nose, reducing your brain to mush. Blindly, you stretch your fingers, grasp the cup, and drink. For a two year old that sort of thing would be quite the achievement. Shame you’re not two…Physically at least. Yoongi always laughed that your mind was two years old. Starkly recalling the fact that there was such a thing as Min Yoongi and your boyfriend, both of whom created a circle in a Venn diagram, you at last drag your eyes away from the cursor and with a crick in the neck, find him standing in the doorway, sporting a tender, almost imperceptible smile. 

“Ow,” you groan, putting a palm to soothe the aching muscles. “You’re home early this evening. Been here long?”

“Give or take two days,” he laughs and does so even louder when your eyes bug out of your forehead. Blinking repeatedly you realize the day and that, just as a fact in passing, Yoongi’s vacation started two days ago. 

“No!” you gasp. “No, I went to sleep and all!”

“And didn’t notice me in the slightest,” he forces out in between lingering pauses of laughter. “You kept muttering about being haunted.”

“No!” you hide in the palm of your hands, mortified. “You were the ghost?”

“The fact that your first assumption is a literal undead specter and not your boyfriend taking care of you is highly upsetting,” he shook his head pitifully. You rise to your feet, throwing your arms around his neck. 

“I’m sorry, baby. I was…somewhere else.”

“No worries,” he pats your back, twirling a strand of your hair when you part. “I know what it’s like. You’re ready to join the world of human society or are you with the cursed villagers still?”

“I’m with my boyfriend. Promise,” you kiss his cheek, quickly darting to close the laptop, just not before making sure for the thousandth time that it was all properly saved.

“Good,” he hums. “As amusing as it is to watch you be so absorbed, I’d like to cash in my boyfriend privileges.”

“What unfair deal will you stick me with?” you bemoan and he snakes an arm around your waist. 

“Just a light massage. I’ve got some kinks to work out.”

“In all meanings of the word,” you mutter underneath your nose but he hears it and squeezes your waist tighter with a cocky smile.

JIN: “You don’t have to come. I’m alright coming home and celebrating with you. Privately," with a steady hand, you lay the final touches on your makeup and peer at him through the reflection of the mirror. Other than a form-fitting suit, Jin was wearing a deeply conflicted expression and to him, it didn't matter how many times you assured him of the opposite - he felt like a bad partner.

"You've always supported me," he muttered. "Came to greet me even when people were rude to you."

"You know, I don't care for most people," you shrugged, sliding a small bag onto the crook of your elbow. "So it doesn't much matter."

"Okay, psycho," he tries to humor, either you or himself who knows but either way, it falls flatter than wanted. As he's leaning against the wall, you press a kiss to his cheek, wiping the faint smudge of the gloss away from his skin.

"Whatever you decide, I won't take offense," you remarked in a low voice.

"But it's your night!"

"And my night never started or ended with strangers."

You shudder when the cold night seized your body, quickly rushing towards the car. Glimpsing at the clockface, you draw a huge sigh of relief. Unexpectedly, you were still on schedule. God knows why, but for some reason, you had the bizarre habit of being late to your own novel reveal.

"To the arts center, boss?" the driver inquires politely and you cast him a soft, welcoming smile.

"Exactly."

You give one last glimpse towards the apartment building before the car speeds away into the relative quiet of a Thursday evening.

For a writer, your speech was rather unimaginative, simple, and straight to the point. Thank you all for coming, enjoy the cocktails, enjoy the conversation and let the work speak for itself. At the end of the whole ordeal which was publishing a book, you were dry on words and preferred the ones that mattered, ones caught in the pages of two thick covers. You gift gracious smiles to all those who approach you, even the reporters who manage to irritate every single ounce of your nervous system. Good grief, how did Jin manage this day and night, you sighed, no wonder the man treated gatherings as a plague. As you stand to the side, successfully enjoying some peace of mind, a bouquet of plump flowers swims into your eyesight.

"Good evening, beautiful," Jin exhales smoothly, biting down on a cheeky grin. "You wouldn't mind if I kidnap you for a moment?"

Beaming, you cross your arms around his waist.

"I'm all yours," you purr. "After all that's what the story was about."

Jin's ears gain some notable blush despite the valiant efforts to remain unbothered.

"They killed their kidnapper," he objected demurely but that made your smile all the wider.

"They were a stronger person than I am."

HOSEOK: "You should publish," he belts out of the blue, forcing you to raise your gaze up from the paper and focus on the other side of the bed, where he sat, phone discarded in his lap and eyes boring into yours almost fearfully.

"What, why?" you laugh before picking up the sentence where you left it off.

"You write all the time. It's like you're addicted to it," he shrugs, presumably just so, baring no other intentions, though he was also using that "soft" voice, the one he wields whenever he wanted to change your mind. "You have entire books, completed, ready to go. Collecting dust."

"Writing is my hobby, similar to how some people knit, nothing more to it," brushing him off, you try to force your mind to retain two completely different trains of thought. One - why was Hobi using his "soft" voice and the second one - the amount of mud generated in a 19th-century backstreet alley. A completely normal thing to ponder about when in bed with an unfairly attractive man. Okay, maybe he wasn't too delusional about the addiction. With a sigh, you push the scribbled notebook away.

"I just enjoy writing. I'm afraid that if you want to publish anything that I compose, it would have to be posthumous," you scrunch your face in mocking sorrow. "You can be the grieving widow, shining a light on your partner's life's work."

His eyes glint unkindly in the muted bedroom light.

"That's not even remotely funny, ______________," he scolds. "But don't you want to...express yourself? Show your talent to the world?"

Tucking your feet under covers and pressing against the warmth of his chest, you give it a sweeping thought but remain just as indifferent.

"Showmanship is your thing," you mutter, feeling the slight tickle of his fingers brushing against your hip. "I put everything on these pages. I repaint my own life, sometimes the life that I want, or think I wanted..." at this, you trail off, thinking of the multitudes of worlds, finished and unfinished, modern and ancient, everything from the horrifying deep of the unknown to the soft passing of loving Tuesdays.

"I don't feel comfortable sharing them just yet," you conclude with a sigh. "Maybe one day, just...not right now."

"You share them with me," Hoseok notes tenderly and you smile at his obliviousness.

"Well, obviously, I share them with you," you say and the space between his eyebrows wrinkles in confusion. You lay in silence, drumming your fingers against his chest, at times of lingering pauses feeling the steady beat of his heart.

"What are you thinking about?" he hums, tightening his embrace.

"19th-century mud."

He snorts.

JIMIN: At this point, you began to regret ever giving him the manuscript. It's 2 in the morning and your head thrums with lack of sleep but the side of Jimin's bed still remains brightly lit as his feet occasionally kick at the duvet. Glasses perched on the bridge of his nose, he nibbles at the skin of his fingers, eyes breezing through the pages. Any moment now he'll start sweating.

"Stop that," you admonish him gently, pushing the hand away from his mouth. Dazed, he stares at you.

"Is it morning already?" he asks, croaking almost.

"If it would be morning, I'd kill you," you groan, plucking the book from his hands.

"Hey, I was reading that!"

"And now you're not," you retort casually, flinging your proverbial baby in the nondescript corner of the room, wrapping yourself like a liana around Jimin's squirming figure.

"Just one more chapter," he pleads.

"No."

With a defeated sigh, he slumps in your arms, only stretching briefly to flick off the light in what could only be described as a petulantly displeased manner. Darkness envelopes you whole.

"You worked hard on this story," he grumbles. "Shouldn't you treat it with more care?"

You don't give in to his attempts on provoking you, on dragging the night longer, instead, you simply let your eyes fall shut.

"That story is in my head and currently that head is turning into granola from lack of sleep so if you want to be a good fanboy, let me sleep."

"Fine," he huffs before whispering, now far timider. "You will sign a copy for me, right? When it's officially out?"

If not for you holding him down, he'd be twirling his thumbs.

"Babe, when the time comes, I'll sign your ass," you promise only partly joking. "Just, please, shut up and go to sleep."

"This needs to be taken out, I don't like this, and what the hell is this plot point all about?"

Rolling your eyes, the drone of your editor becomes a vague chatter, a creek gurgling somewhere in the wild that puts you in a state of removed consciousness. All the more startling was the phone call buzzing against your thigh. Jumping out of the seat, you glance at the screen and exit the room despite the tantrum unfolding behind you.

Jimin didn't usually call mid-day, too ensnared in his own duties, and looking at the screen now, you find you don't like this new development as your mind jubilantly assumed the worst.

"Hi," you greet him anxiously. "Is everything okay?"

Only sobs could be heard from the other line. Immediately, your hands grow cold and your knees buck.

"Jimin! What happened?!"

At last, through a vicious array of snot and breathy pants, he cries out.

"I'm dating a murderer!"

For a second you stand bewildered, temporarily lagging behind. Nonetheless, when it all catches up to you, creating a large, sensible pattern, you curse, drawing a heavy sigh of relief. He must have finished reading the story.

"You've got to be fucking kidding me."

But he keeps crying further and even knowing it was far from being anything serious, your heart clenches at the sound of it.

"It's alright," you try to comfort him. "Put the manuscript down and go for a walk - wait!" you glance at the watch around your wrist. Jimin's present. "Shouldn't you be rehearsing?"

"I told them I'm not feeling good and took a day off to finish reading," he wails and you can feel the telltale sign of an oncoming headache. "Only for you to kill them in the end!" Through the endless weeping, you can only discern a few phrases of "favorite characters" and "cruelty".

"Change the ending!" he demands and for a second you remove the phone away from your ear, grimace at his antics before diving back into the conversation. Nonsense of a conversation.

"I'm not going to do that," numbly, you reply. "That's how the story goes. They die watching a sunrise."

"And you killed the dog too!"

"Yes," resigned completely, you nod along despite him not being able to see it. "I killed the dog too. You'll have to make peace with it."

For a lingering moment, there hangs only silence, before he sniffles, thoroughly dejected.

"Your heart knows no mercy," he accuses, then adds, begrudgingly sincere. "Love you."

"Love you more," you smile and then shake your head when he ends the call.

TAEHYUNG: It was barely any secret, Taehyung wanted attention. Hell, ask him and he'll say so but this was not attention per se. He was not watched out of loving thought but of clinical intent. Uncannily, he felt too much like a lab rat in the middle of his apartment, pouring milk into cereal. Warily lifting his gaze, he meets your deadset, cold eyes and flinches.

"Good morning?" he utters. You keep staring at him for a moment, before gathering your notebook and leaving the kitchen without so much as a word. Or a vowel even. Lifting a spoon of cereal to his mouth Taehyung wondered - had he done something wrong? You don't necessarily shy away from his touch or remain silent should he ask something, despite the answers being a tad absent-minded so he shrugs it away. Odd moon phases perhaps. But days pass and he feels a shudder rack his spine, freezing him mid-way with a bottle of water.

Leaning against the table, your eyes are set on him, observing his movements down to the most minuscule detail, wearing a face with zero expression. He puts down the bottle and awkwardly shuffles out of the room. When the evening settles he finds you slumbering unsightly on the sofa, hair in the face, mouth open, and notebook precariously perched upon your lap, with the pen rolled away. As any good boyfriend, he takes a picture to aggravate you with later and moves in to stir you awake, only for his gaze to catch sight of various names scribbled on the pages of the notebook. Delicately he wrenches it free and reads, recalling that for the past few weeks you seemed to be glued to this thing. To his bewilderment, he begins to piece together a string of plot, and listing back to the beginning he realizes this was your very own story.

When you wake, back a knotted mess, the sound of giggling could be faintly heard from the kitchen. Rubbing at your tired eyes, you find Taehyung sitting by the table, and with no small amount of horror you recognize your writing pad clutched between his grimy fingers.

"Give that back," you cry out, snatching it away from him in an instant, even hiding it behind your back, hoping that out of sight out of mind was real. Though he tries to remain serious, his lips flutter with unshed laughter.

"I know it's bad. You don't have to rub it in," you grumble and he rushes to capture your face between his palms, irritatingly still laughing.

"It's not bad!" he assures, gaze softening at the sight of your anguish. "I just think it's so cute you based your main character on me."

You blink.

"You and Kaz have nothing in common."

He cocks an eyebrow, drawling an arid:

"Really?"

"You don't! Two completely different people."

"Brown, floppy hair," he lifts up one of his curls. "Brown eyes, likes jazz music."

"Lots of people like jazz music," you mumble underneath your nose and he tucks you into a hug.

"Sure, baby," he laughs, graciously ignoring your bristling. "I can't wait to read more."

You slumped in his arms, cheek lifting in a small smile. He just couldn't resist.

"Of me, obviously."

JUNGKOOK: "How fast do you think a person bleeds out after being shot?"

The question is posed so unconcernedly that it takes a while for Jungkook to register its meaning. When he does, the hand caressing your bare leg, laying in his lap, freezes. Even your eyes were still glued to the movie and he ponders whether you realized the question was even spoken out loud and not locked behind the confines of your mind.

"I don't know," he shrugs. "Depends where on the body, I think."

You hum and the conversation stops there.

"How much would it hurt to have this jammed into the eye?" you question once again out loud, holding a metal straw over the breakfast he cooked for you. Just as before, your face gains some level of absence and Jungkook quickly grasps it means you were not really here.

"A lot," he responds, suspecting and increasingly concerned about the possibility of you having intrusive thoughts. Yet when he voices this, you brush it aside, laughing that it was just a passing idea. Wary, he believes you, afraid of otherwise.

But then you mumble a name in your sleep. And it's not his name. Steam rising to his face, he can feel his blood boiling as you keep moaning someone else's name. At last his patience breaks. Roughly shaking you awake, he tongues at his cheek.

"What?" groggily, you mutter, desperately trying to process the situation. "What happened?"

"You were muttering in your sleep," hearing it now, Jungkook understands that it might sound just a little silly but obstinately, he keeps at it. "A name. Not mine."

However, instead of cursing him out or being annoyed, your gaze drops to the duvet, flustered.

"_________, the truth," he orders sternly. "Please."

You bite on your lip but ultimately crumple under his piercing stare and head hung low from shame, paddle towards the desk. Confused, he watches you open up your laptop and show him a document.

"Misfortunately, Yours," it read. "Chapter One. Drastic Consequences to a Hurried Decision Making."

"Oh, thank God," he gasps, dropping back on the bed as relief floods his system. "Thank you, ancestors."

"I don't see how they're a part of this," you grouse but it remains unheard.

For some reason, Jungkook doesn't stop thinking of that night as he pours through the entire neighborhood, in vain hopes of trying to find you. Deep snow has descended upon the world, coating everything in mountains of white obstruction. Obstruction which at this moment Jungkook desperately wanted to get rid of. Perhaps had he cheered more for you, helped you edit better...perhaps the outcome would have been different. Maybe the blow wouldn't have hit you this hard.

With freezing fingers, you numbly re-read, the last passage of the book review column, printed in the national newspaper.

"Misfortunately Yours" is nothing but pulpy, self-inflated scribble of an inexperienced pen person, writing out their fantasies on a page when it should be contained to archives of the dark internet. Offering to us, readers, nothing but ambiance, it lacks everything from characterization to a solid backstory or really anything to grip the audience's interest. 1 of 5 stars."

Well, that's that then.

"_____________! ____________!" a desperate voice calls from the distance and apathetically you meet it's familiar owner. Jungkook's jacket is unbuttoned and one end of his scarf is dragging against the shoveled snow. "Oh, baby!"

At the sound of his coos, the sting of repressed tears gnaws at your eyes.

"You're freezing," he exclaims, wrapping a scarf around your neck whilst wrenching you away from the bench. You really were cold.

"It's going to be okay," Jungkook whispers against the shell of your ear, rubbing his palms against your shoulders - warming you up. "It's going to be okay. Just don't give up. No one can decide whether you're a writer or not. That's entirely up to you."

On the way home, you toss the newspaper into the trash, without looking back.

© soraviii/soraviie 2022-2023

[00towns]

2024: media in review

A Cook’s Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines, Anthony Bourdain 

A Venn diagram of my taste in television and my dad’s would look like two circles straining at the seams to get away from each other. The items that keep the two pinned firmly together are two programs: FX’s The Bear and Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown.

The last time I was home for Christmas, we sat on the couch in a post-dinner haze and watched as Bourdain explored the Lower East Side, finding and commenting on the best of what every street corner in the city has to offer. Neither my dad or I are particularly discerning eaters, but we were entranced: my dad in that funny way that New Yorkers get when they see their city represented on TV, belonging to themselves as much as it seems to belong to everyone else, and myself by the way that Bourdain seemed determined to fill out his life at every corner, expanding and contracting to fit the space he’s in, and consume enthusiastically in a way that I would describe as high-octane and not excessive, a fine, fine line to draw.

A Cook’s Tour is a detailed account of the behind-the-scenes of filming for Parts Unknown, where Bourdain sheds his television personality to take up a writing one which prides itself on being more candid, honest, and critical while maintaining the same dynamic, intensely focused way of experiencing the world. The book is sequenced in bits and pieces, following Bourdain’s original proposal for the show following the success of Kitchen Confidential to vignettes in Portugal, Russia, Japan, and more. While much of the novel follows the by-line of ‘extreme’ cuisines, the shiny parts of his story are when Bourdain looks at other facets of foreign foodways: concepts of luxury, moral approaches to meat-eating, and family. In Vietnam, he eats his way through a floating market and emphasizes the fresh ingredients and the foodways required to get them; in Portugal he kills a pig and notices the way that the life he takes feeds the entire community for several days and beyond. Along the way, he takes aim at fast food conglomerates, celebrity chefs who are more celebrity than chef, and the American empire that shaped the food politics of many of the locales he visits. Bourdain writes about food, certainly, but much of the beauty of his prose comes not from long-winded descriptors of flavors or textures, but the sense of place surrounding each meal he enjoys. In fact, much of his eating seems to do less evocation of taste and more of sensory experience, beyond the five senses to catalog humor, affect, generosity, place. He escapes his corporate overlords in this way – forcing the reader to pay attention to context, despite jumping around the world in vignettes. Every bite is in the direct shadow of the bite that came before it. Every open seat at a table inviting you to sit down is the result of generations and generations of community, an impossibly complex web of foodways, and importantly, chance. Not only is it one of the best ways to do food media, I’ll argue it’s the only way to write about it. Bourdain does a lot with words that much food communication struggles to do with pictures, videos, and audio. 

Not everything in A Cook’s Tour is perfect; I think the reason that his writing is considered edgy is for the same reasons I often found it grating. I cringe when he advocates for blindly running as far away from tourists as possible without a particular thought of what exactly one is running into. Much of the travel and eating advice sprinkled throughout his work is astonishingly male, including the suggestion to go into salaryman’s bars and just start drinking in order to experience Japanese culture. A particularly tense portion of his novel takes place in Cambodia, where he tramples over cultural and political custom to try to make his way to the heart of Khmer Rogue territory to film and eat, then cracks a joke about a ‘cowardly’ cab driver who his team forces to drive into dangerous terrain. This made my skin crawl; I know the feeling of wearing Americanness in Southeast Asia like armor and it’s disgusting, not empowering. It’s also unsurprising that Bourdain’s takes on much of Asia lack nuance and read as terribly outdated; in No Reservations he claims to have been bewitched by his travel in Asia, “even [falling in love with] not-so-pretty Taiwan and Korea”. Who are we kidding? No Reservations was written in 2007 – SNSD was already performing Into the New World. It takes a forgiving eye to read beyond Bourdain’s less-than-discerning writing for the middle American reader to his leftist takes on Kissenger in Cambodia, loser white dudes in Vietnam, and migrant workers in professional kitchens. Some of his descriptions of adventurous food feel just a hair on the wrong side of politically correct, but I’m not eager to take up the job of explaining exactly why they feel this way, given that I’ve never eaten half as adventurously as he has. 

Bourdain’s approach to living seems to be on an upwards trend right now, six years after his death. I feel like I understand deeply why, although I don’t agree entirely with everything he writes. Perhaps his words echo strongly with young people doing their best to live a life of slow richness (in the sense of food, not money), savoring every bite in a culture of excess, the type to order seconds but never takeout. Bourdain’s aspirations to connect deeply to where things come from and why feels like a valuable ethos for right now, but raise questions about how to do so when the fact of the gaze always remains. For Bourdain, his viewer has a name, which is a team of television producers and cameras that follow him and document his every interaction with his surroundings, making his gaze not just a handful of people in a room but hundreds of thousands across the English-speaking world. Can we all slow down? Can we all connect to new places and locales the way Bourdain does, or does that make those places tourist joints, too? 

I chewed through A Cook’s Life in a park in Seoul, at my desk in Yokkaichi, lying down in the forest in Naeba. He ate tete de veau in France while I chugged down vinegary cold noodles, he sipped at bird’s nest soup as I ordered the best vegan ice cream I’ve ever had twice in a row. Bourdain’s world is just as wide as mine, but traveling while reading travel writing feels like reading fantasy. Bourdain writes about his travels in a way that I find myself jealous of; not for the fact that he eats and drinks for a living, but the fact that he’s able to write so brazenly, without hesitation, full of conviction in what he says and feels, humility without fear. At time of writing, I’ve become slightly obsessed with Bourdain. I’m working on his other books, too, and the only thing stopping me from delving into his cookbooks is my disdain for French cooking. My dad and I watch Parts Unknown to unwind, but I would never wish a book like A Cook’s Tour on anyone looking to relax. Bourdain is the traveler’s travel writer for a reason. 

Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution, R.F. Kuang

I’ll start with what I enjoyed: I thought the function of the magical realist elements were delightful. In Babel, magic is woven into the real world of 1830s England through match-pairs, or pairings of words between English and other languages inscribed onto bricks of silver. The silver is able to capture what is ‘lost in translation’, which in turn creates magical outcomes based on the difference in nuance between the two words, like making ships go faster, food stay fresher, buildings last longer. The main character, Robin Swift, is a native Cantonese and Mandarin speaker who learns English from a young age through being partially raised by an English maid in Canton, making him a prime candidate for the fictional Babel School of Translation at the nonfictional Oxford University. The book came at a good time for me. At time of writing I’m about ten months into a twenty-four month period in Japan, and am hitting (what I perceive to be) a critical point in my language acquisition where things are actually starting to make a lot of sense while still being wildly confusing, so the themes of embodied language and the politics of fluency overlaid onto a magical setting struck close to home. The role of magic and the translation school in the larger setting of colonial Britain sets Kuang up for strong commentary on a number of different thematic elements of empire, including the invisible hand of academia, wasians, and the frenetic potential in being able to speak a second or third language so easily it comes like breathing. A few weeks ago, I met someone who is a native speaker of Mandarin, Japanese, and English, and I’ll tell you, it’s easy to imagine what she can do as magic. 

I spent a few days after finishing Babel wallowing in self pity that I would never be a native speaker of another language, despite my best efforts. The world constructed in the novel is just so textually rich and layered with the power of language and openings for meaning; truly, while reading I felt a deep melancholy that I would never have the depth of intimacy with another language that Kuang portrays as so powerful and out of the reach of many that it constitutes magic. I couldn’t even find it in me to blame my parents, who are equally the victims of language (in)access as I am, despite my mom’s ridiculous talent for five or so Chinese dialects. Robin’s half-brother Griffin at one point admits that he was a failed project of true bilingualism because his dreams – that ultimate, truth-telling space – weren’t in Chinese. Griffin yearns to be a truly native Chinese speaker, but his subconscious space remains just out of reach. I closed Babel with a sort of forlorn determination in my journey of language acquisition. 

Onto my critiques: Babel makes its goals clear. The long-winded title informs the reader of not only its overarching plot, but also the tortuously simple political messaging being swung at. Kuang insists on a similar level of hand-holding throughout, from the comically racist white British colonizers, the pages-long dialogues of spirited academic debates where Kuang is so painfully literal she could stand to cite her sources, to the core set of archetypal characters that make up the Oxford cohort the story follows. If you’ve read Yellowface, you’ll know all about Kuang, projecting, and absolutely rinsing white women, which is tee’d up so obviously for such an unforgivable smackdown in both pieces I almost want to ask for mercy. In Yellowface, the white woman narrator hates Chinese food while pretending to be Asian online, in Babel, the British professor fathers Robin with a Chinese woman while looking down on their intellect and civility; in both cases I think Kuang forgets that the most insidious white person is the one who genuinely believes that they love ethnic cultures while looking down on them. 

I want to be clear; I do not think that RF Kuang is a good writer, but I knew generally what to forgive given the limitations of the YA genre. The majority of my issues with Babel come at the last quarter of the book. Much potential for nuance is lost as the novel descends into a cartoonish parody of rebellion, complete with the barricading of a building at Oxford, betrayal from the white woman intelligentsia, and an embarrassingly brazen allyship with a group of working class white men. Babel is not for anyone looking for high level commentary or a truly built-out portrayal of revolution in a magical world. Ursula K Le Guin suggests (speaking on science fiction but applicable to this magical realist historical fiction) that a successful piece in the genre is not one that extrapolates from a logical extreme to inevitably end in massive destruction, but is rather one that uses extrapolation as one tool of many to reflect a present reality. “[...] let’s say this or that is such and so, and see what happens…  In a story so conceived, thought and intuition can move freely within bounds set only by the terms of the experiment, which may be very large indeed.” Taking this analytic, where Babel fails is in its overcommitment to “the necessity of violence” as a singular political message, so such exaggerated that the goal of the novel at some points seems to be impressing upon the reader that political message rather than actually portraying it in the text, the other commentary on community building and revolutionary sacrifice taking the form of stray bullets. Kuang spends the first four hundred pages of the book building out a colossal magical world with movement between the Global North and South, a cast of characters from across the world brought to Oxford under suspicious circumstances, and a colonial power capable of incredible cruelty in the real world, now armed with a magically enhanced abilities. The bounds of Kuang’s experiment are nonexistent, but its one-track minded focus on Oxford as an institution leads to a particularly cringeworthy climax where Robin literally climbs on a table in a library to soapbox to the workers. In this way, I felt as if the internal intuition of the world of Babel is forgone for an attempt to impress the relevance of its main commentary to the modern world. It draws a sharp contrast to other similarly YA-targeted novels about dystopian rebellion, such as The Hunger Games, where commentary about disenfranchisement and power is both genre-appropriate and nuanced. 

All things considered, I wouldn’t have made a particular note of Babel if I hadn’t been moved by the novel overall despite its many flaws. Perhaps my experience would be further enhanced if I delved deeper into this literary subgenre about books about/through/upon language and language acquisition. I welcome recommendations. 

Thank you, C, for this recommendation. Eat shit, Half Price Books! 

Big Ideas (2024), Remi Wolf 

Remi was scheduled to appear at Fuji Rock Festival, at which I was also scheduled to appear, but on the shinkansen to Tokyo I took a nap and woke up to the news of her cancellation. The night before, I had danced around my apartment packing, doing odds and ends of laundry, and folding things at random, blasting Big Ideas on repeat, giddy with excitement. I put my head down on the tray table, tried to ignore my friends cooing over me in pity, and let myself be super bummed for about ten minutes. Then I picked myself up, accepted a canned beer, and got ready to enjoy myself. 

Fuji Rock was a blast, although it did have a tender Remi-shaped hole. I’m still obsessed with this album in the way that I think a lot of people felt about The Rise and Fall of Midwest Princess. There’s not a single low point, each track showing off a different element of artistry from gritty vocals to funky instrumentals. My favorite song is Frog Rock, who’s instrumental chorus of ribbits is familiar to a few weeks in late spring when the tiny green Japanese tree frogs sing unceasingly in the rice paddies. I enjoy how slightly nauseating the lyrics are, poking at that weird line between the ick and an amphibian. A few weeks ago, a Japanese tree frog spent a summer sabbatical living on my monstera on my balcony, and he was christened (for a few precious days) Wolf. 

On the last day of Fuji Rock, I bought a Remi Wolf T-shirt despite not seeing her. It was a consolation prize. I didn’t see a single person wearing the same one until Summer Sonic, where I was reeling from PinkPantheress’s cancellation instead. Save our girls! 

AAA Tour in Tokyo, Hyukoh and Sunset Rollercoaster 

If you know me, you already know how annoying I’ve been about this show. I like Hyukoh but I love Sunset Rollercoaster, and I was eager to see them again after catching the Infinity Sunset tour at the Howard Theater in 2022. I also fell hard for Hyukoh’s guitarist after seeing his other project band Bongjeingan as rookie guests at Fuji Rock. 

Through the course of the two and a half hour show, both bands run through the hits from their own discographies, covering each other’s parts and ad-libbing where necessary. It was a riot knowing what beats to expect but not exactly where, or in what style. They also play the entirety of the six track collaboration EP, including the dreamscapey Aaaaaannnnteeeennnnaaaa, mixed live. I found the visuals and stage setting to carry a sense of humor, a lot like the EP itself, while still being serious about the music. They’re all wearing these stupid hats that aren’t mentioned or acknowledged once, including a crocheted beard for the bassist, a brain beanie for Hyunjae, and a hat from the merch stand with added devil horns made from fake hair on Hyuk. Throughout the show, no one talks to the audience except for a handful of sentences and one or two odd jokes, which often have to be cued through the teleprompter. Kuokuo asks us to buy merch so that he has more money to spend at Matsuya. (I was in Taiwan this summer – I’m like 95% sure they have Matsuya there). After the encore, Haoting Facetimes Inwoo, Hyukoh’s drummer who doesn’t tour abroad for health reasons. He yells into the phone in English over the crowd. Kuokuo picks up an acoustic and starts playing Wonderwall. 

The first night, two extremely drunk girls behind me catcall Haoting, the saxophonist, all night. A white lady standing next to me studying East Asian history at Sophia University (lol) tries to strike up a conversation with me – she cracks a weird joke about mainland China within the first five minutes of our interaction. The second night, a woman next to me covers her face with the AAA vinyl or her hand the entire time, blushes hard whenever any of the members approach us, then records Hyuk with shaking hands during the encore. The moment I leave the venue, it stinks like menthols. In addition, the calling from the crowd to the stage covers just about every language base that I can manage: the bands speak in English, the songs are in Mandarin and Korean, the crowd yells in a mix of all three plus Japanese. I feel bizarrely attached to each word that I can pick up. You dropped this! I want to yell. But I got it! 

As of October, this EP is easily my favorite music project of the year. Long live Taiwan! 

Look Back (2024), Fujimoto Tatsuki 

 I watched Look Back in decidedly strange circumstances. I don’t usually find narratives about writers writing about writing to be compelling, but I walked away from Look Back certain this is his best work. 

Look Back is short, sweet, and emotionally demanding. It asks a lot of its audience in its runtime of just under an hour, and commands attunement to everything packed into its narrow frame, from the middle Japan setting, the familiar yet foreign school life vignettes, and the boisterous insistence of adolescent pride. Blink, and you’ll miss a moment rich in text and subtext, all pulling desperately towards the final cut of Fujino at her desk, pen tapping away at her illustration tablet. Despite the tragedy of the story, she's not more renewed, focused, or desperate than she was, at least not in a way that we can see. What is there to do after a fundamental shift in the world but to continue on? 

Look Back is titled in katakana, meaning that it doesn’t have a native Japanese title and takes English loanwords instead. I thought this was interesting to consider from a Japanese speaker’s perspective: while ‘look back’ in English conjures a distinct image of a person with their head turned to view what’s behind them, several scenes and themes of the film also reference ‘look back’ in a more linguistically roundabout way. In one of Kyomoto’s later four-panel mangas, she draws the scene in which Fujino, in superhero caricature, defeats the axe murderer at her college by crashing into him with a swift kick. The punchline arrives when she turns around, and the axe is sticking out of her back. We are again invited to ‘look (at her) back’, an interpretation allowed by the looser grammatical rules of Japanglish. It’s where the humor in tragedy is, twentytwenty in hindsight, what we can attain when we look back. In montage scenes of Fujino and Kyomoto running in the snow or parading around town, the former constantly looks back at the latter to symbolize their power dynamic and build to the eventual climatic argument, but again, a different interpretation of the title also invites us to put ourselves in Kyomoto’s shoes: she is look(ing) (at) Fujino’s back, always. Her ambition is not stunted by being a follower, it’s also provoked by being allowed to support someone whose work she admires. We again meet this emphasis on Kyomoto’s role as a lesser but not inferior match to Fujino’s artistry: she draws the backgrounds for every manga they publish, and goes to art school with the goal of improving her ability to do exactly that. Kyomoto only ever has the intention of supporting Fujino’s work: (a) look (at the) back(ground). 

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about look back (grammar rules ignored)  as a way of relating to others. The circular narrative laid out in Look Back seems to urge us to this conclusion despite its interruption, and asks us to hang our hopes on Fujino and Kyomoto reunited as more mature, fully realized adults in a partnership that may never be equal but will be mutual. For some, the rays of their partner are enough to eclipse personal ambition; the blessing of drifting in their orbit is a life well lived. This feels fundamentally incongruent to who I am as a person, but I have to ask if there is a world out there where I meet someone for whom it becomes possible for me to take a very, very happy passenger seat to their life. Am I looking for a partner who I can watch from the edges of the party? Or am I looking for someone who might join me there? 

(I swear I’m not intentionally trying to bring up Hadestown in a year-end review for the third year in a row, but it does fit nicely. Can we be assured that when we look back, what we are leading will still be there? Do I have the strength to be faithful that whatever I have turned away from will remain?) 

Even more, what do we do lieu of all these questions and uncertainties? I think we keep drawing. 

Honorable mentions (some media, some not, all very Textual to me) 

Taiwanese streetwear brand Goopi.co 

Working out twice in one day 

The salt melonpan from Pea Green Bakery 

The Acolyte Season 1  

Mugicha 

Meal consisting of canned corn, fried Spam, rice with furikake, and two sunny side up eggs 

Spiritfarer (2020) 

Costco membership

Mark - 200 

Password manager Chrome extension 

Conclusion

This year, I wrote about my 'best of' as they came to me throughout the year instead of waiting until writing this recap. I think this produced a list based much more on an emotional response to media than an assessment of their quality or artistic merit, which I may have (self-consciously) done in past years when selecting at time of writing. In this way, this year's recap feels a lot more genuine and a lot more vulnerable, despite containing some of my more unintentional or quick reads. I did consume a lot of excellent media this year which might be considered to have 'high' artistic value and I also had an emotional response to, but the thing about high art is that I'll always be scraping at the heels of someone smarter than myself. I feel like I can tell when an idea is present but escaping me. Perhaps that emotional response is my failure to put an idea into words, but to allow myself to process it in other ways.

Postscript: 2024 music recap

Festivals: 4

Concerts: 25

Best live set: AAA tour, never young beach 

Worst live set: Noname

2025 want to see: tofubeats, mass of the fermenting dregs, poison girlfriend, helsinki lambda club, pink pantheress, remi wolf, wave to earth, se so neon, deca joins, kendrick & sza, weyes blood, chappell roan, khruangbin

[firstdegreefangirl]

Katieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee Top ten productions in the last 5 years that you've seen?

KAT, STOP BEING MEAN TO ME. Honestly, I'm up to 60-odd productions, and narrowing this down was SO HARD. I peaked in 2018. Except that my NYC trip was in 2017, just a few months past five years ago, so Broadway Backwards and the OBC of Dear Evan Hansen don't count.

That said, here's where we landed. Organized chronologically, to avoid having to pick one single favorite among the standouts. Yes, I am open to follow up questions, and let the record show that "favorite shows I've seen" and "favorite shows" aren't necessarily the same, though that venn diagram is pretty close to a circle.

Under a cut because the list is LONG and DETAILED.

Sweeney Todd – 8 April 2018 This was a local production, with Tally Sessions and Chris McCarrell from New York to play leading roles, and this theatre just always does really really great work. My dad and I made a whole little day of it, and they did a Q&A after, and it was SO GOOD (you’ll see this same theatre come up again later).

If/Then – 29 April 2018 Another local production, but not where I live. I drove up to see it with one of my friends. Black box theater (where the stage and the audience are level, so everything is super close up and intimate) is my favorite kind of theatre, and it was INCREDIBLE to sit front row, half a foot away from the action It’s been like four years and I still haven’t stopped thinking about how much I loved the set too.

Newsies– 8 July 2018, 19 July 2018 Listen, I just really like local theatre, OK?! My area did two productions of Newsies the same summer, but this one was technically first. All local talent, and SO MUCH OF IT. The guy who played Jack Kelly honestly had NO RIGHT to go as hard as he did. I remember genuinely wondering if he was going to take down part of the scaffolding with how hard he was rattling it during Santa Fe. So good I had to go back and see it a second time.

Last Days of Summer – 14 September 2018 Remember that local theatre from Sweeney Todd? WELL THEY DID IT AGAIN. A world premiere baseball/WWII musical, starring Corey Cott (one of my personal favorite people). The show was FANTASTIC, and they let the audience stay for the cast party, so I actually got to meet/hug him. Also, I was freshly 21, so this was the first time I drank, accidentally. That’s a helluva story, but off topic for this post.

Dear Evan Hansen – 25 September 2018 Opening night of the first national tour stop in Denver. Need I say more? OK, I can say more. Uhhhh … check the tag ‘Katie and Rach: Destination Denver’ for the video I made about the roadtrip to see this show, and the highlights post from the show itself (from back in the days when Rachel and I liveblogged our friendship like hooligans).

The Play That Goes Wrong – 7 April 2019 I mean, you know how I feel about the entire Goes Wrong franchise, and this was what started it all. I saw it on a bad day, but then sat there and laughed for two and a half hours. It was SO fantastic, and I’ve been chasing it down again ever since. This summer, maybe …

Who’s Your Baghdaddy – 27 September 2019 I saw this one on a last-minute whim with my mom – of all people – because it was the end of September and the show I had tickets for got postponed (yeah, yeah, we’re all very proud of JerJor for being in Supergirl again, but the timing could have been better). It was the only thing I could find on my day off work, so we bought a couple of tickets as I swore up and down that I had no idea what the show was about, so if it was horribly offensive, it wasn’t my fault. And then instead it was hilarious and awesome and absurd in the best way.

Bandstand – 19 December 2019 A post-WWII musical about a group of vets starting a band to win a competition. The tour cast was INCREDIBLE, and the show never doesn’t give me chills and sobs. Bonus funny story: the community college that hosted the tour stop did a Q&A about the show and the history surrounding it before curtain call, and the professor running that totally spoiled the whole ending. At least I already knew how it went?

An Evening With Jeremy Jordan – 26 August 2021 OK, this is the one that was supposed to be September 2019. Three more delays (JerJor was in Little Shop of Horrors, COVID, COVID) and two venue changes (same local theatre, but it turns out they have more stages than I thought, and we ended up in a tiny event space upstairs from the upstairs. On the list for favorite venue, in terms of being beautiful and intimate and just perfect for the show they put on) later, it was my first indoor show post-pandemic, and it BLEW ME AWAY. Laughed, cried, lived, loved, all of it. A perfect, triumphant return.

Pretty Woman – 10 March 2022 Duh.

[hermette-historian]

i find what you're doing to be so fascinating and i wish you the best of luck in your journey, although i do have a question. what gave you the idea/want to get into the history of hermitcraft? i mightve just missed where/when you said this and if i have i apologize

I haven’t actually talked about this! (I don’t think, but I don’t feel like sifting through 250 posts to go check). And there’s a reason for that: in large part, I don’t remember. But I can tell you that the interest actually came after I started writing about it.

I know that sounds a little weird, but hear me out. I started watching Hermitcraft from the beginning in December of last year, a journey born from a finals-induced procrastination video binge that sent me down the rabbit hole of Mumbo’s earliest videos. As far as I can remember the only motivation I had to do so was that I thought it would be cool to try, not that I actually wanted to study it in depth in any way.

But that casual attempt was thwarted because at almost exactly the same time, I stumbled upon a fan community that I didn’t know existed for the first two and a half years that I had been watching the series. Social media begged me to liveblog as I went, and when it started getting a few notes here and there my interest in putting my thoughts out there grew.

Where that intersects with the type of content that I put out now is actually in my academic career, of all places. I’m a double stem major, and you can imagine how much writing that entails beyond the occasional lab report...it’s zero. the answer is zero. As much as I love what I do to an absolute fault, the commitment that it takes to study lab sciences leaves very little room to learn in depth or write about other things...unless, of course, I choose to overlap it with the things that I do in my free time.

So I started writing about Hermitcraft. It wasn’t a conscious choice, it more flowed from my constant subconscious desire to learn all of the things. It started with recaps, things that I thought were funny or that other people might not know. And then as I got back into the spring term and my free time diminished, I had to squish my interests together more and more until eventually...the Venn diagram between things that I wanted to learn and things that I was comfortable writing about became a circle. 

Now, it’s become a self-perpetuating cycle. With every new revelation, every new connection that I make, my interest in studying the Hermitcraft community grows. Every answer begets a new question; about the social structure, the delivery format, the interaction with the fanbase, and the layer added on top of that is how it all has changed (or hasn't changed) over so many years. 

I never intended for this journey to reach an audience, but I’m so glad that it has. It’s fed the creative energy that I’ve been lacking for years now, taught me how to go with my gut when it comes to delivering a message, and how different formats affect how that message is spread.

So in short it’s never been about the the history alone. Much like studying human history, looking back is simply a medium with which we can study the present community, why it works and what can change, and how it’s likely to move into the future. I think that’s pretty damn cool.

[randomestfandoms-ocs]

Can I just say, from the bottom of my heart, holy shit

When I started this chapter, I expected it to be another 2k that I had to force myself through, that would feel rushed and stilted and like it was really only there to get me closer to the chapters that I’m excited for.  I didn’t expect to write such a long chapter, or to write a chapter that I love and am beyond proud of.  As a writer, I honestly believe that this is one of the best chapters I’ve ever put together, even if it’s taken me since before quarantine even started to get it done.  

But it’s done!!!  And it puts Wayward Daughter above the 100k mark, and that’s insane – the last time I wrote a project that passed the 100k mark, it was a full novel at 150k and has since been lost forever due to technical difficulties.  This is such a big milestone for me that I just really want to do something to celebrate!  I have a few ideas for creations that I plan to make, but what I really want to do is to celebrate/thank everyone who has supported me and this fic so far!

Every kudos, every reblog, every vote, every favourite, every comment, all of it has led me to this point.  And I really want to show all of you wonderful readers how much this means to me, but I have no idea what to do!  

(shameless plug, if you haven’t read it before: AO3 | FFNET | WATTPAD)

So I’m throwing this out into the universe – 

What suggestions do you guys have?  Anyone who has hit a big fic milestone before, did you celebrate?  What did you do?  Any thoughts, opinions, feedback, or advice is more than welcome!

And while this chapter hasn’t been published yet (it’s currently two in the morning and I have to actually edit now rip), I do need to say a few thank yous!

@lorettastwilight​

God, I don’t even know where to start!  You have been my biggest cheerleader since day one!  You showed up less than a week after I posted the first chapter, and have read and commented on every single one, offering endless love and support and feedback.  You’re the reason that I started using this blog, that I became confident in sharing my characters, and the reason that Wayward even got a second chapter let alone all of this.  You have listened to me rant for hours on end about every single detail and have helped me plot out even the most complicated pieces of this puzzle.  You have always been there for me, whether it’s been with kind words or another hilarious comment, or with an edit to get me out of as slump, or even with four pages of venn diagrams on the various relationships in this universe (and the eternal judgement of everyone in that Denny’s lmao).  Thanks to that very first comment, you have become one of my closest friends in real life and on tumblr, and I am eternally grateful 💖💖 I truly hope that you enjoy reading this chapter as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it, and that when quarantine ends we might be able to get together and update that diagram!

@themildestofwriters​ @gottaenjoythelittlethingzz​

I’m putting the two of you together since so much of what I have to say to each of you ties into one another!  From the day that I first joined the JU discord, the two of you have been the biggest supporters of Amy and Wayward Daughter.  When I first joined, I was beyond hesitant to talk about this project because it wasn’t an original fiction piece, but you were both always there to encourage me to talk about my project and every other idea that I’ve had since.  Since moving into our no-longer-rp server I have gotten a chance to get to know all of your characters better than I ever could have hoped, and have fallen in love with all of them, and I truly hope you have both come to love Amy as well!  Your constant support has been more valuable than I could ever put into words, whether I’ve needed someone to bounce ideas off of, a beta, or even someone to just yell at me to stop hurting my poor girl.  With this chapter especially, having the two of you there to help me get past every hurdle and to help me celebrate every completed scene has meant the world to me, and I can say with absolute certainty that I could not have achieved this without you both, so from the bottom of my heart, thank you 💖

@papergirlverse​

TESSA MY LOVE MY DARLING!!!  I know that we’ve really only started talking in the past few months, but it feels like I’ve known you forever!  When we first started talking I was a little bit terrified of you, especially with how wonderful your writing is and how dedicated you are to actually updating your fics!  I definitely never expected you to be a bitch or anything, but I also definitely didn’t expect the day that you started yelling at me about how much you love Amy/Wayward!  Being able to talk to you about this project has truly been a gift, and your insights and feedback always mean the world to me!  You have been an amazing hype man throughout this chapter, and I really don’t have the words to express how much I appreciate that – so I hope you’ll accept a token of my gratitude in the form of that video that I can finally start working on lmao 💖💖

@ocfairygodmother​

Oh my god, where am I supposed to begin?  From the day that I joined the OC community, you have always been there to support everything that I’ve done, and without that support I can safely say that most of my ideas would never have seen the light of day.  You do so much for everyone all the time and it always inspires me to try to do more for the community as a whole.  I could talk for hours about how much your positivity has shaped my experience in this community, but I’ll save that for another day haha!  Today I just have to say thank you – every comment you have left on Wayward (and the rest of my fics, but today is Wayward day), every gift you have ever made for me, every encouraging ask and comment you have ever left, all of it has pushed me to become more confident in my abilities as a creator, and all of it has given me the confidence to share my work with this little corner of the world.  Your endless support has meant so much to me, and your enthusiasm about Amy has gotten me through more periods of self doubt than I ever want to count.  I may be a writer, but I’m not sure that I’ll ever be able to the right words to tell you how much it has all meant to me, so for now all I can say is thank you 💖

To the rest of my oc fam, who have all been there to support me as a creator every single day, thank you all 💖💖

[makistar2018]

The global icon penned an open letter in support of the Equality Act. After staying silent during the 2016 election, Swift has changed course in a big way.

Amy Zimmerman June 2, 2019

This Pride, Taylor Swift is coming out… as a vocal ally.A few years ago, it would have been impossible to imagine the famously brand-obsessed pop star urging her fans to write their senators. But late Friday, the woman behind girl-squad feminism and politely ignoring her neo-Nazi admirers finally took a stand. The fact that that stand was advocating on behalf of the Equality Act—which recently passed the House and must now be approved by the GOP-controlled Senate—and expounding on the importance of protections for LGBTQ Americans was not lost on some of Swift’s biggest fans.

But before we get to Kaylor (the portmanteau for Karlie Kloss and Taylor Swift’s hypothetical romantic relationship) and some of the more conspiratorial corners of Taylor Swift's fan base, let’s talk activist Taylor Alison.

Just a few album cycles ago, Swift was getting called out for her political silence. Her reticence to tell fans who she was voting for in 2016 stuck out as particularly craven. Given Swift’s background as a country-to-pop crossover artist, it’s easy to guess at her rationale. Considering a Venn diagram of country fans and Trump supporters, Swift may have understandably chosen to put her Hillary Clinton cape back in the closet so as not to piss off paying customers (when it comes to her brand and her career, Swift is a smart lady). But in the midst of an increasingly dystopian Trump era, her apoliticism has aged poorly. Either the singer sensed the woker Swifties turning against her, or she simply could not stomach doing nothing.

Whatever her motives, last year Swift shocked her followers by publicly endorsing two Democrats and strongly disavowing Republican Marsha Blackburn for Senate. “She voted against equal pay for women,” Swift informed her followers. “She voted against the Reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, which attempts to protect women from domestic violence, stalking, and date rape. She believes businesses have a right to refuse service to gay couples. She also believes they should not have the right to marry.” The singer declared, “These are not MY Tennessee values.”

Watching Taylor Swift weigh in on the midterms was about as disorienting as watching her walk away from paparazzi backwards. And just like her crab walk, Taylor’s activism has quickly become commonplace.

Her latest statements are in many ways a continuation of the priorities she expressed last year, when she declared that, “any form of discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender is WRONG.” But, in addition to being as well-intentioned and strongly-worded as her previous political forays, Swift’s latest statement has the added bonus of being gay as hell. Printed on the rainbow pastel color palette that the pop star’s been so fond of lately, Swift’s post intersperses sincere exhortations with rainbow emojis. Writing about the Equality Act, “Which would protect LGBTQ people from discrimination in their places of work, homes, schools, and other public accommodations,” Swift explains that, “I’ve decided to kick off Pride Month by writing a letter to one of my senators to explain how strongly I feel that the Equality Act should be passed.” (The Trump White House has voiced their opposition to the Equality Act, as it continues to roll back protections against LGBTQ citizens.)

Swift goes on to reveal that she has created a Change.org petitionfor Senate support of the Equality Act, which you can find in her recently updated Twitter bio (so far, nearly 80,000 people have signed it). In her post, Swift also included a copy of the letter she sent to her senator as a template for fans to pressure their own elected officials.

“Let’s show our pride by demanding that, on a national level, our laws truly treat all of our citizens equally,” Swift concluded.

Ruby Rose and Taylor Swift attend the 27th Annual GLAAD Media Awards at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on April 2, 2016, in Beverly Hills, California. 📷 Jason Kempin/Getty

The pop star’s thoughtful remarks have caused a vocal subsection of her fan base to lose their shit. Yes, Kaylor shippers do exist, as do diehard fans who have interpreted many of Swift’s recent actions as covert queer messages. For years now, sleuths have attempted to prove that Taylor Swift and Karlie Kloss were totally a thing (skeptics should listen to “Dress” and then get back to me). But as Swift teased her new music in April, #Gaylor conjecture reached an all-time high. At Vulture, Jill Gutowitz faithfully gathered Swift’s breadcrumbs, many of which fell on a spectrum from subtly to overtly Sapphic.

“Sometimes I think about men who sanctimoniously say their favorite movie is The Prestige and I’m like, you frauds could never handle a Taylor Swift pre-album clue trail,” Gutowitz wrote. In a piece titled “Why So Many of Us Believed Taylor Swift Was Coming Out,” BuzzFeed’s Shannon Keating summarized, Kissgate. All those rainbows! Swapped lyrics featuring female pronouns. Lyrics that just seem really gay. The cats. The donations to LGBT causes. That performance with Hayley Kiyoko. Today, April 26, the day of Taylor Swift’s long-awaited announcement, is literally Lesbian Visibility Day.”

Unfortunately for us believers, “Me” was just a music video—albeit, a very gay music video featuring “pansexual icon” Brendon Urie and a phalanx of ladies in pastel suits (is this camp?!). “The gayest not-gay thing we’ve ever seen,” indeed. Now that Taylor Swift’s totally rainbow Twitter profile reads “Support the Equality Act,” it’ll be near impossible to dissuade #Gaylor truthers—and it’s hard to imagine that Swift doesn’t know exactly what she’s doing.

“I really thought Taylor was coming out this time,” Shannon Keating concluded after the “Me” letdown. “I really did! Now, there’s a big part of me — the grouchy and cynical part — that feels like the rollout for Taylor’s new song and video was a calculated attempt to queerbait us all before she turned on her glittery heels and announced that ‘Me’ would be… the soundtrack to more of the NFL draft. But there’s another part of me that has to grudgingly respect how she whipped a bunch of full-grown gays who ‘don’t really care about Taylor Swift’ into such a frenzy.” 

As long as Swift is using her outsized influence to fight for LGBTQ causes, she can go ahead and keep us guessing. 

The Daily Beast

[bridgetinerabbit]

Venn Diagram

(Okay, this is my first piece I've ever written at all, so this is a bit nerve wracking, but here it is!)

Once again, Adrien and Marinette are spending  an afternoon in Marinette’s room. They just finished up their homework assignments and are debating whether to play video games or watch a movie with the time they had left for the day when Adrien notices that while everything seems normal, Marinette's smile seems a little forced and there's a tightness around her eyes.

"Okay, what's bothering you?"

"Ugh, it's really nothing."

"It's clearly not."

"Well it should be! God this is so stupid."

Adrien adjusts himself on the desk chair and waits for her to continue.

Marinette begins pacing and gesturing with her hands, "Okay, so, we've been doing this, knowing the identities thing and the being together thing for a couple of weeks now, and everything's great, and I know you think I'm wonderful as 'Marinette', and I totally know that it's true, but sometimes, when I let my brain wander a little too far, I start to worry that, well," she ducks her head and mumbles, "maybe you still like me as 'Ladybug' better." Lifting her head, she half shouts, "Even though, logically, I know that's completely stupid!"

Adrien's eyes shoot wide, then he looks down and frowns in thought, and then looks up at her, grins, and says with a chuckle, "You're right, that is stupid."

Marinette throws her hands up, "I know!" she shouts in exasperation and guilty relief at his words.

Adrien taps his chin and says, "Okay, so apparently this completely false idea isn't going to just leave you alone, so we need to put it to rest once and for all." He spins the chair to face the desk, grabs a discarded page from an earlier sketch, a pencil, and the nearest text book.  "So I am going to demonstrate to you," he swivels around, clasps Marinette's hand and heads for the chaise lounge, "that not only do I NOT like Ladybug more, but!-" He plops down, dragging her with him, arranging them so they are sitting side by side, her fingers are intertwined with his in his left hand, and the back side of the sketch is sitting on the textbook in his lap, "I actually like Marinette better." he finishes with a toothy grin.

Marinette blinks at him in utter confusion. "Okay, that makes no sense.  'Ladybug' is literally everything that 'Marinette' is, but with superpowers.  I'll buy that you like them... us? me... the same, but liking Marinette better than Ladybug makes no logical sense."

Adrien uses his free hand to squeeze her forearm, "That's where you're wrong, princess! And I'll prove it with a venn diagram."  Then he grabs the pencil and draws two large overlapping circles.

Marinette mutters, “Of course you would use something like a venn diagram.”

Ignoring her comment, Adrien starts, "So, over here in the right section are all of the attributes that are exclusive to Ladybug, in the middle, is the section for shared attributes, and on the left is everything that's just Marinette and not Ladybug." Adrien looks up at Marinette.  "Now, before we begin, you do understand, logically at least that when I look at you, I see Marinette all the time, right? I mean, at first it was a little bit weird to adjust, but since then, you're always either Marinette, or Marinette in polka dots with power ups."

Marinette quirks her mouth and replies, "Yes, logically I know that you see me as one person, even though there was an adjustment period, and it was much the same for me with you."

Adrien nods. "And so even though you originally fell for the charming boy next door, or... a couple of blocks away anyway, you don't see the mysterious hero as somehow lesser, because I know you also always see 'us' as me. Right?"

Marinette snorts and rolls her eyes, but can't quite hide her grin, "Of course, kitty.  It's all always you." She pokes him in the ribs. "The same inflated ego and everything. Though, somehow Chat Noir still has all the pet names.  Huh."

"Not all of them." Adrien mumbles to himself.

"What was that, Chaton?"

Adrien flashes his winningest smile, "Oh nothing, Hot Stuff."

Marinette shoves him while he cackles before burying her face in her hands. "Oh my God Alya! I'm gonna kill her!"

Adrien does his best to compose himself while a few giggles slip through. "Okay, we got off track." He grabs her hand again and gives it a quick kiss before wrapping her arm into his so he can use her clasped hand as a prop for his cheek, as he gestures to the center section of the diagram. "So basically, your whole personality belongs in this middle section, because, while you do act some differently, the essence of your personality doesn’t change when you don the suit.” Adrien jots ‘whole personality’ in the middle section while Marinette looks at him skeptically. He continues, “No really, when you’re Ladybug, your personality is the same, you’ve just always got your game face on.” He scribbles ‘perpetual game face’ in the rightmost section. “While Marinette, exclusive of Ladybug, has better access to your other faces, like sleepy relaxed face, which is among my favorites.” He adds it to the leftmost section. “But Ladybug does not have exclusive rights to the Marinette Dupain-Cheng game face, which is a sight to behold, whether directed at an akuma or Chloe, so it goes in the middle, as a non-perpetual option.”

Marinette looks thoughtfully at this odd parsing of her personality. “Okay, I guess I can see that. But then there’s also the superpowers.”

“Right you are!” Adrien exclaims while absentmindedly rubbing a circle on the back of her hand he’s still holding. “So here we go, on the Ladybug exclusive side,” He pens as he speaks, “Can lift a car.”  He taps the pen to his chin and considers, “Oh! There’s that crazy Cats Cradle-like thing you do between lamp posts and stuff when something needs catching.” He carefully writes ‘mad yoyo skillz’. “How are you at yoyos without the suit anyway?”

Marinette shoots him a puzzled look. “What? I don’t know.  The last time I picked up a regular yoyo was against Simon Says, and I was Ladybug at the time, so I don’t think that counts.”

“Doesn’t it though?”

“No, it doesn’t, I’m a klutz when I’m not Ladybug"

“Ooh, right. I forgot that one" Adrien jots in the Ladybug section ‘basic coordination’.  

Marinette slaps his arm with her free hand, “Oh shut up.”

Adrien grins at her. “What? I think it’s cute.  Oh, but that does bring up another thing.” Adrien writes, ‘creates random polka dotted items from thin air.’

Marinette frowns. “They’re not random.  It’s all part of the Ladybug thing. I get the lucky charm and then figure out how to use it to solve whatever problem I’m encountering.”

Adrien wears an amused smirk. “Are you saying that you don’t come up with scathingly brilliant plans that may or may not be ridiculously convoluted when you’re not being Ladybug?” Marinette eyes him warily, but is unsure how to respond.  He continues with the most smug grin he can muster, “What about, ‘Operation: Secret Garden?’”

Marinette shouts, “ALYA IS SO DEAD!" as she tackles a laughing Adrien to the floor, grabs a nearby pillow, and beats him with it as soundly as a detransformed superheroine can. Adrien blocks as well as he can while trying to catch a breath through his own laughter, between gasps he says, “And then… when I invited you for a ride… you said... NO!”  His face goes purple with the force of his laughter. Marinette yells, “Shut it, Buttercup!!” while beating him with renewed vigor. Between breaths Adrien responds, “Oh look, another pet name!” and give up speaking to his fit of giggles.

Marinette throws the pillow down, face plants onto it, and yells into the pillow, “You are the worst!!”

As Adrien is calming down from his giggle high, he breathes, “God I love you.”

Marinette lifts her face from the pillow and scowls at him. “I love you too, but I thought this exercise was supposed to be about making me feel better.”

Adrien clears his throat, and fails to wipe the stupid grin off his face. “You’re right. We got side tracked.” He gets up, walks over to Marinette and offers his hand, “My Lady?” She huffs as she takes the offered hand and he immediately re-twines their fingers and escorts her back to the chaise lounge where they resettle. “So, the only thing I see missing from the Ladybug side is admittedly pretty cool, and that is your magical reset button.”

Marinette snickers. “You mean ‘Miraculous Ladybug?’”

“Yeah, that. Now, moving on to my favorite section, the Marinette exclusive of Ladybug section.”

Marinette still seems unconvinced.  “Aside from ‘sleepy relaxed face’ what could possibly go there?”

Adrien looks her in the eye and raises an eyebrow before silently jotting down, ‘can hang out in public.’ “Marinette is a whole lot easier to date.”

“Okay, that’s actually a pretty good point.”

“Oh, and add to that,” he writes, ’is close friends with my close friends.’ “I mean, this whole having friends thing is still a pretty big deal for me, so having this relationship with you when Nino and Alya are already so close to both of us, it’s just… really nice.”

Marinette smiles. “Okay, yeah, I guess that’s pretty special.”

“And then” Adrien announces as he absentmindedly runs little circular patterns on her wrist, “There’s one final thing that Marinette has that ladybug does not.” He puts the diagram down and turns to face her directly, grabbing her hand in both of his in the process. “This thing that Ladybug sorely lacks is easily ten times better than all the magical powers combined and frankly puts every last polka dotted trinket and yoyo trick to shame. This is the thing that makes me certain that I like Marinette more than Ladybug, without any doubt whatsoever.”

Marinette giggles, “Alright! Out with it, what do I have that’s that’s so special that Ladybug doesn’t?”

Adrien lifts her hand up to his lips and breaths one word before lightly kissing her knuckles, “Skin.”

Marinette squeaks as her face turns the shade of her purse.

[deehollowaywrites]

Every now and then, a meme in the vein of “what was the first video game you played?” travels around social media. I have a reasonably cool answer for this: GoldenEye. That is also the last video game I played, because I sucked at it, wasn’t old enough to care about James Bond, and my mother thinks to this day that video games are trash.

I note this only to provide context for my brief obsession with Twine, a free online platform for creating text-based computer games and interactive stories. You can probably guess what sorts of games I wrote in a 24-hour fugue state of thinking about nothing but the fragile web of possibilities that comprises a horse race. Frankly, when I wrapped my little math-deficient noggin around what Twine actually is, my first thought was racing. It seemed like a match made at Lane’s End. Why would anyone write an adventure game on Twine that wasn’t about the two minutes of time between gate and post? The incredible volume of minutiae undergirding Thoroughbred sport is perfect for the sorts of games Twine enthusiasts create. Every last bedeviled detail of a day at the races is up to chance, a toss of the dice, a click of the mouse. A jock switch, or a gate scratch. A horse that looks super live, but is also named after your ex. Something as minor as a rider three pounds over, or as major as a horse breaking down in the stretch. This is what makes playing horses so fascinating, such a tease; what drives people to comb over the PPs and scrape for tips and place another bet, one more, so sure that this time they’ve outwitted fortune, that the wind is theirs to kiss. It’s all very butterfly effect.

There’s no glory in a simple, silly story game. It doesn’t make me a dime, and it isn’t high art. It is not, as the saying goes, actionable.

The only beneficial remnant of my Mormonism is the belief that every member is a missionary. It’s no longer necessary to answer questions about CTR rings or gracefully decline a Coke with scripture quotations, but the method itself gets ingrained. In progressive circles you hear a lot about making the space you’re in progressive. Influencing the biome of a sport seems like small potatoes in comparison to affecting civic change, but these are differences of scale, not type--and recently, in response to major upset and tidal change, certain voices are charging participants directly to carry the sport’s water. It’s not clear to me what exactly that entails--do I wear a button that says “I love horse racing! Ask me how”? do I add NYRA to my list of concerns when I call to nag Cuomo’s office?--but I also don’t mind either way. On the one hand, no one is paying me to be racing’s hype machine, or an officer of its apologia. On the other, it gives me joy to think, talk, and most of all write about racing, and to shove it into the long-suffering eyeballs of people who became my friend because once upon a time I talked about other things. In this mode, occasionally one of them will text me and say, Hey Diana! I got a pub trivia question right because you never shut the fuck up! You’re welcome.

Small potatoes! The tiniest and humblest potatoes. At a conservative estimate, 560,500 written words’ worth of diminutive spuds. One thing that can never be overestimated is joy. 

A book I adore, Station Eleven, uses as a motif the Star Trek Voyager line “survival is insufficient.” In cases of basic survival, the ends don’t justify the means: they’re the same thing. In times of famine, the body consumes muscle before burning fat. It’s tempting to look at racing’s probable future and scramble, reach for anything concrete, any proof of results, any actionable course at the expense of all else. Thoroughbreds are a marginal sport; I don’t think anyone is arguing that point (marginal is not the same as dying). Romance, one of my preferred literary vehicles, isn’t a marginal genre but neither is it overly respected. Trying to convince the average romance reader to pick up a racing title or the average horseplayer to pick up a romance is somewhere up there on the eternal hillside with Sisyphus. Pure, refined congrats-you-played-yourself bravado and pipe dreams. The Venn diagram of “nope” is a circle. But now and then, someone outside the sport does read a story. And they say something like, I don’t know anything about racing and this made me interested. 

Now, I’ve never done coke but I assume the rush is similar. 

The thing is, if some reader does trip further down the rabbit hole, they’re already forewarned--because those stories, they have warts. Sometimes I think people hear “racing” and “romance” and think, Well, she just wants to talk about pretty ponies and fancy hats and rich men. Would I be forgiven for this bent, if it existed, considering that the face of racing marketed to women consists of just that? Will I be forgiven for observing a wave of attractive, wholesome defense couched in lifestyle and passion and love? In our time of instant information, this type of promotion is useless, even if I understand the knee-jerk impulse behind it (beauty is the most immediate of compulsions; a thing is unlovable if it’s not above critique). But romance is political, as sport is. The public face of any field is a political choice. Whose stories are privileged and given weight, who is tasked with defending their own existence at one turn and an entire industry’s at another, it’s political.

Meanwhile, I like to think of the sport as a Google Trends display: the line on the graph marked “And Believe It Or Not, There Are Actually People Who Ride The Horses” moseying along, at a constant low ebb until 2016, where a sudden spike pops up and keeps climbing. I am here to love the things you hate. No one would have bet on me being here, and in reality the needle-shift is infinitesimal, certainly not actionable. But there’s something to be said for coming to racing not by family birthright, or particular raising, but through as solitary and collaborative a channel as research. I didn’t fall in love with a horse; I fell in love with a sport. 

Too bad love is not the question at hand.

Oddly, a majority of the stories populating #IAmHorseRacing are women’s, where “women” stand in for bloodlines, families, continuance. If you’ve been paying attention, this isn’t odd at all.

[whateveradjunct]

When I was heading to France last week, I considered taking my Nikon d750 with me, because I thought, not unreasonably, that France might be a photogenic country and that I might want to get some high quality photos of the place. I decided against it for a number of reasons, but one of the major reasons was that a couple of weeks ago I got myself a Pixel 3 phone, which reviewers have suggested may have the best camera on a phone out there. I’d previously had a Pixel 2, the former “best cell phone camera out there,” so I was curious as to how the Pixel 3 would improve on the camera.

So I left the Nikon at home and used only the Pixel 3 to take shots while I was in France. I ended up taking something around 500 pictures while I was in country (many of the best of which I have collected in this Flickr photo album), and can now tell you what I think about the experience. Here are my notes, in no particular order, with occasional art. Please remember that these thoughts are from someone who loves taking pictures but is not a professional photographer, so I’m not going to go into the weeds with technical issues and jargon. I’m mostly noting the experience of just trying to take pictures.

1. Overall I was very happy with the quality of the photos and the intelligence of the camera — the latter perhaps being a weird thing to say, but the fact is what separates the Pixel line of cell phones as cameras is not the hardware (which is mostly high-end but standard issue for a cell phone), but the processing Google applies to the photo data once the photo is taken. The camera makes choices, basically, about how it interprets the data you give it once you snap the photos.

And those choices are generally very good! There wasn’t a situation where I thought the Pixel 3 wasn’t capable of handling itself. As with nearly all cell phone cameras (and, honestly, nearly every camera, period), the Pixel 3 works best when it has a lot of good, bright, natural light, but it did very well inside and also very well in visually challenging environments with a lot of contrast between bright and dark (like, for example, the interior of the Notre Dame cathedral). Not every picture I took was perfect or even good, but the reason for that had as much to do (and perhaps even more so) with operator error as it did with the camera itself. Which is to say I can’t blame the bad pictures on the cell phone camera; a lot of it was me.

2. What do the photos look like coming out of the camera? Here are five, which I’ve not done any post-processing to (i.e., no tweaking with the various photo editors I have). These pictures were taken with the settings the Pixel 3 has right out of the box, including the HDR+ processing turned on, without zoom, and recording to jpg. Right-click on the pictures to get a larger versions of them (choose the “open image in new tab” option), and see the various details.

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Right out of the camera, the Pixel 3 a pretty good job of things. The colors are correct and not overly saturated, and the HDR+ mode does a good job of bringing out details in shadows without making them look overly processed. Note in particular the picture of the musicians in the conference room; the light’s behind them and their faces are shadowed, but the Pixel 3 does a pretty good job of balancing the data so you can see their faces clearly. In the rose picture there’s decent depth of field — not a lot, but the Pixel 3 knows what it’s looking at. There are limits, and you can see some of the choices the Pixel 3 has to make in the photo of the Notre Dame alcove, but those limits mostly show themselves in challenging situations where most any camera would show limitations of some sort.

I personally do a fair amount of photo-editing of my pictures, both to bring up details and for aesthetic effect, and the Pixel 3 gives me a fair amount to work with, even as it records the data into a lossy format like jpg (there is an option to have the camera record in RAW — the lossless format that gives photographers the most information to work with — but I didn’t turn that on and don’t really plan to except on very special occasions, because the files sizes are huge). It’s a fact that for a lot of photos, I don’t really have to do much editing at all — I merely straighten out sightlines or crop for better composition as much as I tweak colors or bring up shadows.

Out of the box, the Pixel 3 takes pictures that are better than “good enough,” and that’s a good thing. For people who like fiddling with photos like me, what comes out of the camera is even better than that.

3. One of the — perfectly reasonable — knocks on the Pixel 3 is that where other high-end cell phone cameras have an optical zoom function, the Pixel 3 doesn’t, Google instead opting to try to deal with zoom through processing (involving the minute unsteadiness of the human hand, or something, to help fill in interpolative gaps). I used the zoom function a lot while walking around and trying to get details that would otherwise be too far away. My verdict on the zoom is: well, it does something, but razor-sharp details isn’t it.

This is again probably best viewed, so here are four photos at or close to full zoom, three of statutes or architectural details at the Louvre, and one, of that tower they have there in Paris. Again, right-click on the picture for details (or in this case, lack thereof). Again, these pictures are straight out of the camera and otherwise unedited:

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My impression of these zoomed in pictures is that they don’t look like photos, they look like pastel drawings, or what happens when you use a very light “oil painting” photo filter from Photoshop or some other photo app. They don’t look bad? But at the same time, this is not what I want when I zoom in. I zoom in because I want a closer look at something, not an artful, detail-smoothed representation of that thing.

I read in a review of the Pixel 3 where a reviewer notes that the zoom works as intended up to about a 1.5x zoom, and after that things start getting overly interpretive. My experience has been that this estimation is largely correct. I have some pictures that are moderately zoomed in that are perfectly good. But too much zoom means you’re getting the AI version of impressionism. My thought on this is that this iteration of AI zoom is only the first, and that Google will probably get better at it as it goes along, because that’s what Google generally does. So two Pixel generations from now, this will likely be a solved issue (or alternately, Google will throw up its hands and just put an optical zoom on future Pixels). Here with the Pixel 3 and today, however, be aware that the zoom works up to a point (1.5x or so), and then it gets kind of wacky.

4. The only other real issue with the Pixel 3 that I’ve noticed is that it feels a bit slower than the Pixel 2; sometimes there seems to be a lag between when I press the button to take the picture and the camera registers the picture being taken. It’s a relatively small issue but it’s been noticeable to me, and I wonder if other people have been experiencing it as well. I’ve not missed any photos because of it, fortunately. But be aware of the possibility of a bit of shutter lag.

5. On the selfie front, the Pixel 3 features a “wide angle selfie” mode — an optical zoom out, if you will, thanks to two cameras on the front of the phone. This actually is very useful for when you’re trying to get a lot of people into frame while taking selfies:

Do be aware the the wide-angle selfie mode has some distortion. But then, selfie cameras have distortion anyway (it’s why your nose always looks big in a selfie), so I guess you pick your poison with selfie distortion. What I do know is that I’ve used the wide-angle selfie function several times already, so this was a smart add-on on Google’s part.

6. This is not meant to be an exhaustive review of the Pixel 3 camera, but one that touches on how I’ve been using it. I’m not covering a lot of the functionality of the thing — I haven’t used the video mode, or the panorama mode or tried the “HDR+ enhanced” mode, or sideloaded the apparently super-cool but not-officially-released “night mode” into the phone to try it out (the night mode apparently makes it possible to take super clear pictures in very low light, and the key as far as I can tell is a long exposure time, which, well, yes, it would be, wouldn’t it). I’m not covering any of those things because, as noted, this is not how I’ve been using the camera. I’ve been using the camera in a pretty straightforward fashion, as I suspect most people will.

And as a “daily driver” camera, the Pixel 3 really works. It takes great pictures and in all sorts of circumstances, and with the exception of the zoom above a certain point, steps up when you need it to (also, as an aside, the fact that the Pixel 3 comes with unlimited storage in Google Photos is a point well in its favor, since you can store your photos there and keep your phone’s memory relatively uncluttered). We’re now well past the point where the average person has to wonder whether they’re missing out on really excellent photos if they only have their cell phone with them. With the Pixel 3, the answer to that is definitively “you’re not missing out.” This phone will get that great shot for you, most of the time.

7. Does this mean I’m ready to ditch my dSLR for the Pixel 3 full time? No; the dSLR still has a better sensor, better lenses, and does specific things much better than the Pixel 3 does or will (like, sorry, Google, zoom). But this isn’t an either/or situation; this is a “this, and” situation. I no longer have one excellent camera and one camera that I just happen to carry around; I have two excellent cameras whose use cases overlap but are not a perfect circle on the Venn diagram. I don’t suspect I’ll ever stop using a dedicated camera for particular things where a high-end, single-use piece of machinery makes sense. But, as noted above, when I have my Pixel 3 with me, I don’t worry that I don’t generally have enough camera with me.

8. Does it make sense for people to upgrade to a Pixel 3? I’m very happy I did, but I also acknowledge I’m a tech geek with a particular interest in photography, and I have enough money to indulge in this sort of thing (my other phone stopped working, which prompted me to get the Pixel 3, but let’s not pretend there wasn’t a good chance I would have gotten one anyway).

If you already have a Pixel 2 (or the first generation Pixel), some of the new capabilities of the Pixel 3 camera are going to be available to you with software upgrades. So unless you’re already at the part of your upgrade cycle where you’re getting a new phone anyway, you can probably sit tight and be fine. If you have the latest generation of “flagship” phone from Apple, Samsung or any other high-end phone manufacturer, you’re also probably just fine. Cameras are the new hotness on phones and every manufacturer will tell you why their iteration of cellphone camera tech is the best. It’s getting a little silly (some upcoming phones will have up to five cameras on the back of a phone, which seems much of a muchness), but on the other hand if you’ve got a high end, recent phone, you probably have a very good cell phone camera no matter what. Finally, if you just don’t care about photos, either from your cell phone or in general, the Pixel 3’s camera capabilities won’t matter regardless.

But if you are looking to upgrade, do like taking pictures and want to have the possibility of taking genuinely good photos with your phone, are fine with Google knowing everything about your digital life, and (not trivially) have between $800 and $1,000 to splash out on a phone (or have Verizon, which will let you slide it into your existing plan for a monthly fee), then I can really very highly recommend the Pixel 3. Aside from (yes) taking some of the best photos possible on a cell phone, it is also otherwise a very solid high-end phone, with some features (call screening, I’m looking at you) that are amazing differentiators, and an operating system upgrade cycle that means you always have the best, most recent version of Android first.

For me, in any event, it’s been well worth the upgrade, and not just for the photos, although the photos probably would have been enough. I really like this camera, and I really like this phone.

Taking Pictures With the Pixel 3: Some Thoughts When I was heading to France last week, I considered taking my Nikon d750 with me, because I thought, not unreasonably, that France might be a photogenic country and that I might want to get some high quality photos of the place.

[periru3]

End of Year Vidding Meme 2021

I’ve starred co-vids with @tafadhali!

I Feel Like This Isn’t About Me (Utena)*

Lost on You (She-Ra)

Eat Them (Multi-Horror)*

Lookin’ Up (Parks & Rec)

Maneater (Multi-Horror)*

All I Want Is to Be Your Girl (Person of Interest)

Rose Garden (Utena)*

Vexercise - Turtle (Over the Garden Wall)

Rose Bride My World (Utena)*

Welcome to Hell (Multi-Horror)*

Operation: Ketchup (Spy Kids)

Dammit Janet (The Good Place)

Ironic (Twilight Zone)*

I Feel the Earth Move (Multi-Disaster)*

Favorite vid of the year: “Rose Bride My World” was such a labor of love and I am SO happy with how it turned out. It is maybe the second-best thing Taf and I have ever created together, after our Buffy limericks, and honestly I don’t think there’s a second of it I would change, which is rare in a two minute vid, let alone a ten minute one. 

Least favorite: Well it’d be really easy to say “Turtle” but since that was a vexercise I don’t think it counts lol. I’m honestly very happy with my vids this year, but the one I rushed the most and feel could be a little tighter in the editing would probably be “Dammit Janet,” but even that one I love.

Vid most underappreciated by the universe: The population of the center of a four-circle venn diagram including Utena-fans, RHPS-fans, Vid-fans, and people with the attention span for 10-minute videos is probably fairly small, and we knew that when we made “Rose Bride My World,” but, as Taf said in her post, I do with we could somehow beam our magnum opus to all those people. I also wish more people appreciated “Lost on You,” but admittedly some of that is competitiveness with the other vids to the same song for the same ship I noticed on YouTube after completing mine... they are... very popular. 

Most fun vid: God, I feel like I made a lot of fun vids this year. “Operation: Ketchup” and “Welcome to Hell” are strong contenders, but I might have to go with “Dammit Janet” on this. It’s just so goofy and was so fun to make. EDIT: scratch all of that, I just rewatched “Lookin’ Up” and that’s the winner.

Vid with the single sexiest moment: Uuuuh I think there’s like eight moments in “All I Want Is to Be Your Girl” that vie for the top space, so I’ll just give it to that whole vid. Honorable mentions to “Maneater” for obvious reasons and to “Operation: Ketchup” for Carla Gugino’s (and Antonio Baneras’ and Alan Cumming’s) existence. 

Most successful: Weirdly this seems to go to “I Feel Like this Isn’t About Me” - on YouTube at least. Not what I expected, but I’ll take it!

Biggest vid fail: Bailing instantly on Vexercises, and also how crappy so much of my video quality is. I’m getting a new converter. 

Hardest vid to make: “Rose Garden” took a LONG time to make. I think it’s that we had so much we wanted to cram into such little space, trying to cover basically every character’s arc and how it relates to Anthy with only a few lines to give to each. We had to be very economical and it took a long time to get it how we wanted it. Funnily enough, “Rose Bride My World” only came about because of a joking conversation after we finished “Rose Garden” and it took maybe 1/4 the time to make even though its three times as long. 

Most unintentionally telling vid: Let’s just say “Lost on You” hit very close to home while I was making it and might for a while yet...

Last year’s goals: N/A

Goals for next year:

Use a new, better video converter and make higher quality vids

Get experimental with premiere! Download new effects and transitions and play with the stuff already in there I’ve never used

Finish some of the vids I’m going into the year already in the middle of instead of endlessly starting new stuff

Make at least 2 of my BNL-Sitcom vids

[thekillerssluts]

CAN WILL BUTLER'S 'DISCO TOWN HALLS' SAVE AMERICA?

The Arcade Fire star is using the tour to re-invigorate local politics, one town at a time.

A select group of Arcade Fire fans got two sets one chilly Sunday night in October in the Twin Cities. The first was a major arena show. The second was at least 10 times smaller, and decidedly more political, as Will Butler, a rock star, visited the Turf Club to talk politics.

Arcade Fire's "Infinite Content" tour, linked to the release of their latest album, Everything Now, features a stunning show with live and recorded video choreographed in time to a spectacular array of synchronized lights and the band's typical virtuosity on dozens of instruments. The tour is staged in the round, with the band rotating through positions on a mock wrestling ring of pure white. Following two-and-a-half hours of near-constant music, the band's last song segued into a rolling bass line, over which the lead singer Win Butler absently sang a few lines of "Stand by Me."

Rock-star after-shows are supposed to be frivolous, louche, pleasure-seeking affairs. Win's brother Will, though, held his after-party about 45 minutes later at the Turf Club, one of the Twin Cities' oldest and greatest music venues, with a sense of seriousness. He had replaced his branded stage attire with a white button-down shirt. He's a stunning performer on multiple instruments with a wildly antic stage presence, and was nominated for an Academy Award for the score to Spike Jonze's Her, but, at the Turf Club, he kept it simple. He grabbed an acoustic guitar and demanded everyone sing along to "Stand by Me" from start to finish. Then he got to work.

Butler addressed the crowd of maybe a few dozen local activists and spoke passionately about the need to focus on local politics and to vote in off-year elections, then called Erin and Alyse Maye Quade to the stage. Alyse is the political and organizing director for the Democratic Farmer Labor Party (the Minnesota version of the Democratic Party). Erin, her wife, was the only DFLer to flip a GOP house district in the 2016 election, and now represents a suburban Minnesota district. After each woman spoke, Arcade Fire's violinist Sarah Neufeld played a set.

The night at the Turf Club was Butler's ninth "Disco Town Hall," a series of post-concert gatherings intended to link local politicians and organizers to music fans. Arcade Fire has always been an activist band, donating $1 of every ticket to Partners in Health. This, though, seemed new. Pacific Standard spoke with Butler over the phone to ask why a rock star would rush out of the arena to host small community events like this.

How did you decide to go local with your organizing? What's changed for you that this seems like the necessary approach?

For a little over 10 years now, we've done a dollar per ticket for Partners in Health. And then, after working with them for years, I went to school, the Harvard Kennedy School Mid-Career Master's in Public Administration. I feel like I've been a good advocate for them [Partners in Health], but I felt I could be a better advocate.

They are both macro and micro oriented. They showed that you could treat tuberculosis in rural settings and AIDS in rural settings, and were pioneers in that movement. Their approach to development is tied into the community, what community needs, and to try and empower the community. But they also realize if you can change six lines of U.S. code you can save a hundred thousand lives. If you get three congressmen to agree to something, things can change.

So you went to Harvard to learn how to be a better advocate? To learn how systems really work?

I took a class with Paul Farmer, focused on history and how society works, and with Robert Putnam, who is all about social capital, and how communities work, and how society functions or not.

So I was taking this history and sociology, just thinking about my role in the world and America in a shitshow of a year, in a university setting. And I realized I was going [on tour] to every major American city and would have 4,000 to 15,000 locals in the room. I wanted to experiment with the Venn diagram of people who come to the show and have a powerful emotional-aesthetic experience, then come to the after-show and talk politics, then listen to Sarah Neufeld play and have another powerful emotional experience.

What have you found so far?

I'm trying to preach to the choir and radicalize them a little bit, not push them farther left, but make them a little harder. Part of it is a community-building exercise. You came to the show, and now you're here, and now we're talking about something important. I try to introduce a little bit of flour, a little bit of thickening, to the music-goers in that city. I will never be more influential than having just gotten off a stage with a show that people liked.

How do you organize these local events? Do you just call up and say: "Hi! I'm a famous rock star and want to put something together!"

Some of it is cold-calling! I live in New York. I wanted to do the the afterparty for the campaign to close Rikers Island jail. I like to have activists and politicians together. I literally just cold-emailed my city councillor: "Dear Mr. Lander. I am a constituent. I play in a band called Arcade Fire. We're playing Madison Square Garden. Would you like to talk at the show after?"

Universally, every assistant in a progressive politician's office knows our band. That's our constituency.

Who did you call to set up this Minnesota show? How did you end up at the Turf Club with this young power couple?

In school last year, one of my classmates is the minority leader in the Minnesota house, Melissa Hortman. I said, "Hey Melissa, what's going on in Minnesota?", and she connected with me Keith Ellison's chief of staff, and he said, "these people [Erin and Alyse Maye Quade] are really rad."

What's one particularly powerful story from the afterparties?

We did one in Tampa on the campaign to change the state Constitution about felon disenfranchisement [i.e. allowing people formerly convicted of felonies to vote]. There's a decent chance that a change to the Constitution will at least get on the ballot in 2018, and there's been a big organizational push. Two of the organizers had been convicted of felonies and told their stories.

One of them said: "I'm a middle-aged black man, I've got kids, I just want to be a full citizen. I want to come home and tell my kids I voted." That's heavy but really powerful, and it's one in the morning.

It's a pretty interesting self-selected group that comes out and stays up late to go to this kind of meeting.

My dream is that a bit of an Italian '50s Communist Party scene. It's late night, there's something about it.

Does Sarah always play?

Yes.

Did you approach her and say "Hey, I know we're going to pour our hearts out on the big stage, but then let's do another show!"

First, I wanted to keep it in the family. And there's going to be so much talking. Talk talk talk. But then I thought, she's such a beautiful player and her music is so elemental. The world is mysterious and has nothing to do with words, so let's get a little more universal.

[aion-rsa]

Star Wars: The Internet Reacts to Gina Carano’s Mandalorian Firing

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Welp, it’s been in the wind for a while but Gina Carano finally posted enough nonsense online for Lucasfilm to categorically state that it has no plans to work with her in the future and that her views are “abhorrent and unacceptable,” so it looks like we’ve seen the last of former Rebel shock trooper Cara Dune in Disney+’s hugely popular Star Wars series, The Mandalorian.

“Gina Carano is not currently employed by Lucasfilm and there are no plans for her to be in the future,” said Lucasfilm in a statement. “Nevertheless, her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.”

A source told THR that Lucasfilm had “been looking for a reason to fire [Carano] for two months, and today was the final straw.” This was swiftly followed by confirmation from her talent agency UTA that they’d dropped her as a client.

We need to recap the situation a little for those who just have absolutely no clue what led to Carano’s dismissal. The short version: the actress has posted COVID conspiracy theories, mocked the idea of adding pronouns to her Twitter bio, declined to show support for the Black Lives Matter movement, and has suggested that there was voter fraud in the 2020 US election on social media. Inevitably, she then joined Parler – a social network populated largely by conservatives, conspiracy theorists, and right-wing extremists – following the subsequent online backlash.

It’s been a bit of a PR nightmare for Lucasfilm and UTA that showed no signs of abating, and it culminated this week when Carano posted some thoughts to her Instagram that likened having right-wing political views to being Jewish in the Holocaust, featuring a picture of the 1941 Lviv pogroms.

Carano was on her way to record an interview with The Babylon Bee – a kind of evangelical version of The Onion – before the news broke of her firing, and has yet to respond to the situation at the time of writing.

As official information regarding Carano being let go from The Mandalorian started circulating, news also arrived that her co-star Pedro Pascal had been cast as the lead in HBO’s highly anticipated The Last of Us TV series. Earlier in the week, Pascal had been online showing public support for his sister Lux, who had announced that she identifies as a transgender woman in Chilean magazine, Ya.

The move to fire Carano has created quite the conversation online, as you’d expect, with many noting that the Haywire actress was getting to taste some sparkling consequences.

Fuck Around and Find Out, Mandalorian Edition. https://t.co/8aJWDaUsoO

— Steven DeKnight (@stevendeknight) February 11, 2021

Pretty easy to write Gina Carano off The Mandalorian pic.twitter.com/J7ucbsQZnR

— Khail (@KhailAnonymous) February 11, 2021

GINA CARANO: bEiNg a cOnSerVaTivE iN aMeRicA tOdaY iS LiKe BeiNg a jEw iN nAzi GeRmaNy! ME: It's definitely like being *something* in Nazi Germany.

— Illjwamh (@illjwamh) February 11, 2021

Hey Gina Carano… If you wanna know what it was like to be a Jew in the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, I can give you my 95-year-old grandmother's phone number. The Nazis killed both her parents, all 6 siblings & all extended family. She'd be happy to tell you to f*ck off 🖕

— Jake Lobin (@JakeLobin) February 11, 2021

So, Gina Carano lost the biggest job of her career at Disney AND she was dropped by her agency? LMAOOOO pic.twitter.com/ojgTUC5s6D

— ᴇᴅɢᴀʀ (@edckbar875) February 11, 2021

all the Star Wars dudebros complaining that Gina Carano has a right to be a bigot but when John Boyega talked about Star Wars and Hollywood being racist suddenly it’s “actors should stick to acting”

— nadia! ☾ (@avqlons) February 11, 2021

Disney to Gina Carano: pic.twitter.com/ciqsycJTVi

— Mitchell Northam (@primetimeMitch) February 11, 2021

nah because i feel so much relief knowing i’ll be able to enjoy the 3rd season of my favorite show without anticipating a gina carano jump-scare

— abby (@razorcr3st) February 11, 2021

…do you know how hard you have to work to make me *glad* your badass female character won’t be coming back to Star Wars?

— Amy Dallen (@enthusiamy) February 11, 2021

Pedro Pascal: HBO, Disney, WB, Netflix Gina: Carano

— meez (@lonny_aster) February 11, 2021

damn they fired Gina Carano so hard that her coworker got another job https://t.co/8jjuhLsZ4t

— Keifer (@DannyVegito) February 11, 2021

How it started: How it's going: pic.twitter.com/hRj7WbCdsL

— HeyIt'sVadim (@vadimnewquist) February 11, 2021

Fun game for tomorrow: find a video of a male YouTuber screaming about Disney “cancelling their best female Star Wars character”, scroll back about a year in their videos and check out what they had to say about the Cara Dune character when she debuted in season one. pic.twitter.com/48CNFGS6ZD

— Renfamous⭐️ (@renfamous) February 11, 2021

Venn diagram of guys complaining about Gina Carano being “cancelled” and guys originally objecting to having a strong female character in a Star War pic.twitter.com/EWk02KoQtN

— James Moran (@jamesmoran) February 11, 2021

lol girl bye

— Rahul Kohli (@RahulKohli13) February 11, 2021

Carano’s supporters/conservatives were rather more outraged by her firing than those who had expected it to happen quite some time ago, and many of them went on to tweet their disappointment under the hashtag #CancelDisneyPlus.

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[benito-cereno]

Three more holiday playlists

Last year, I shared three holiday playlists that I made. At the time, I kind of thought, “Hey, these are *the* holiday playlists I have made, good job. Now I have these.” But almost as soon as I finished them, I knew I would have to make more this year, and that this work would never be done.

And so, here are three new playlists on the same theme. Thanks as ever to @harkpodcast for calling my attention to some of these. I told myself I wouldn’t lean too hard on them this year for song ideas but a) they feature such delectable trash on their show and b) I had some of these songs planned since last Christmas and they covered them after I already had them lined up, so there. They are definitely responsible for me knowing about “Landy in my Egg Nog” though. (Thanks, RJ and Ian.)

Anyway: please listen responsibly.

1) garbage christmas 2017

The 25 worst Christmas songs I could think of this year. This is designed to be a very terrible, communal listening experience. Last year’s playlist also featured a drinking game that would also apply to this one. These songs go way deeper than just “I hate when I hear this song at the mall.” These are actively terrible, several of them are NSFW, some are actually real for real racist, so be ready for that. The play order kind of weaves motifs together like a Venn Diagram of awfulness, with themes ranging from “racist accents” to “annoying voices” to “British shit I do not understand AT ALL” and then some overlap.

2) best christmas 2017

As with last year’s list, the title is a playful hyperbole. This is just a playlist of good Christmas songs such as you might like to play at a party. It is a mix of underrated classics and songs you’ve never heard; it’s up to your own personal experience to determine which is which. There are two (2) songs on it that are explicitly about Jesus. I hope that is not too much for you. Also, the first video starts with a (very funny imo) skit/sketch, but I promise there’s a song there. Just skip to like the three minute mark if you need jams immediately.

3) 8 crazy tracks

Last year’s Hanukkah playlist featured 16 tracks, two for each night. My friend @jewishcaptainlorca told me I should make the next one 18 tracks, because 18 is a lucky number in Jewish numerology. I said, “No problem,” which turns out was an act of hubris that did not find favor in the eyes of the Lord. There’s just not enough Hanukkah music for me to do an 18-track playlist every year without strip-mining the same albums year after year, just making lists of children’s songs (a little of this happened anyway), or, worst of all, adding Hanukkah-themed pop music parodies (no). Anyhoo, here’s eight songs to eat jelly donuts to.

Please feel free to share, and let me know if you find something you like!

There is a chance I will be creating another playlist or two in the next week or so if I have time. I’ll reblog this post with the new links if that happens.

Happy Holidays! Season’s greetings! Merry Christmas! Chag sameach! Prettige Sinterklaas!

[hyperfixation-hideout]

LMAO I was already gonna reblog and say that I agree but then I saw you’d tagged me and my video essays IN the post! But uh, I agree! XD It’s complicated, it’s confusing, it’s yet to be clarified. If after ALL this buildup surrounding the merge there’s just some way to stop it or it’s so slow that it takes until the end of the series to complete (by which point they’d have “won” and people say they want the souls to separate - which I really don’t think is possible at this point), it’d be anticlimactic. Oscar’s story isn’t about losing himself and magically getting himself back so he can be his own person - it’s about being and becoming himself both in spite of, and along with, the merging of his soul with another’s. 

It’s not a clean transfer, either, but a combination. We’ve already seen how their similarities are more and more prominent (not new, just spotlighted and developing). It’s about Oscar’s soul being his own even if the one he’s merging with once wasn’t, and so far, every step of the way, Oscar has been growing and developing, coming into his own -- not losing himself. They’re becoming each other, but like I mention in those “long boi videos,” who they become is essentially up to them. Souls in Remnant are what you make of them and how you identify yourself. Everyone gets to choose for themselves whom they’ll become. Oscar has asserted this time and again to the people around him, but seems to believe he’s the exception, that all he can choose is whom to be right now. It’ll be great to see him continue to take up the mantle he’s had thrust upon him as the newest iteration of Ozma. The Oz soul isn’t gone; it’s “never alone,” after all. It joins someone new and carries on with them throughout history as one. If Oscar were to die, his voice would be in the next guy’s head. 

Not a rg shipper, but I adore gngrbrd (their friendship) and agree that Ruby’s dynamic with Oscar vs her dynamic with Ozpin is very different and makes it a lot easier to tell how the merge is going. If only they got more screentime together lately to analyze, but it looks like another volume of separation for the two.

Also, @ those people who say they want the end of the series to separate the souls so Oz can rest without Oscar dying - the god of light said “until your task is complete, you will reincarnate.” So Oscar wouldn’t die, he’d just be the last incarnation, so when he dies, the cycle ends. The souls are already nearly-merged. I don’t think ripping them apart is possible anymore if it ever even was, because the line of who’s who is already blurred. Once a venn diagram becomes a circle, how do you make it into two again? It’s all just a really cool concept and I’m thrilled to see where it goes. Great post, OP! :D

Alright I'm about give one my unpopular opinions here!!! U Have Been Warned!!!

I want Oscar & Ozpin to fully merge. I've been thinking about a lot over volume 8 & I think it would be best for the show if the merge fully happen.

They've made it very confusing & the Fandom can't seem to agree on what happens once the merge is complete. The only way to put this augment to rest is by completing the merge & the fall out after.

When the merge happens I'm gonna cry. Cause it will be a tragic moment no matter what. Oscar scared of losing himself to the merge & not knowing what kind of person he'll be. And considering that we learn that useing magic makes the merge happen faster I think that's how it well complete.

Something bad happens & Oscar has to use all of his power for a long time. By long time I mean long enough for the merge to complete. And he stops/fixes whatever happens but everyone realize that the merge is complete & its just a sad moment.

This will probably happen in vacco. Because little prince.

Now here's my main reason why I want the merge to happen. @hyperfixation-hideout made 2 great long boi videos about the merge. Y'all should watch. In them Its argued that Oscar is inheriting Ozpin memorys, magic, & most importantly his soul. Ozpin soul isn't taking over Oscar's. Oscar soul is inheriting Ozpin. Oz is becoming a part of Oscar. Not be erased by him. I wanna Oscar realize that just because he's become Oz doesn't mean he still isn't little cute boy Oscar Pine.

I also wanna see how everyone would interact with a fully merge Oscar. It will tell us exactly how everyone sees him now. I mostly wanna see how Ruby would treat him. Because I'm a Rosegarden shipper!! But how Ruby treat Ozpin & Oscar is very different. She has a very different dynamic with each of them & whatever dynamic they have after the merge will set their relationship in stone. Or maybe they're have a whole new dynamic & my shipping heart won't know what to do with itself.