#time to call up those New Jersey relatives

[daddy-long-legssss]

@aeolianblues looks like they added another date for NY! 👀

[hellodropbear]

like she used to (III)

alexia putellas x sister

chapter I, II

edited this in 25 minutes and now I am going to bed... but alexia debut in here today :)

~~~~~~

I sat in the back of the car as Ingrid drove Mapi and me to Johan the next morning. The car was silent, my eyes focussed out the window, hyperaware of the glances that both defenders threw back at me every so often.

Mapi is worried about me. That much I can tell, but I don't know why Ingrid, who I've barely spoken to, seems to think the world is coming to an end. She was in the room this morning when Mapi told me that Mami had called to say that she would see me there. I don't think the tension in the room was hard for the Norwegian to identify. Or it could have been Mapi's wide eyes staring at me that made her think something was wrong. 

Alba is also coming to watch this game even though I told her I wouldn't be playing.

"you are part of the first team for the first time ever, hermanita! It is exciting just to watch you warm up."

I had rolled my eyes as she pulled me into a hug that day, but I appreciated it either way.

Ingrid led me to the changing rooms as Mapi made her way into the stands with some of the other injured players. My locker is beside Aitana's and she beams up at me when she spots me. I thank Ingrid quickly and make my over to Aitana and into her open arms.

"You ready?"

I nod, a smile on my face. For the first time in a long time, I do not think about my sister or what she would say, what her opinion would be. It is hard to grasp the idea that my dreams are maybe becoming a reality. 

E. Putellas 29

It is a dream that I have had for a long time, to have my name on a blaugrana shirt, to be in this very position. It is something I have wanted since I could kick a ball, since I watched my sister do the same thing all those years ago.

They had asked me what name I wanted on the back of my jersey. Because Alexia just had her first name, I could take the last name without the E but Mami said to keep the E. I think she wanted me to just use my first name as well but that is for Alexia. I am only new to this, I thought.

I will not play today, Jonatan told me, but he said he wants me to be a sub in a game with lower pressure after I've spent a few games on the bench and trained with the team for more than a week.

Despite this, Mami and Alba are sat in the audience, between a bunch of relatives and family friends.

A red flush creeps onto my cheeks as I hear them all cheering when I run out of the tunnel to start the warm up. Aitana's arm is around my shoulders and she gives me an extra tight squeeze before winking at me and releasing me from her hold.

I know I will be sitting on the bench for the whole game but just warming up with the team is exciting. The cheering from the audience during the warm up is ten times louder than any crowd I've played in front of, even in the most stressful part of a match.

I try to shrug off the goosebumps that creep over my arms as I take in my surroundings. It is surreal and I think I am in a state of disbelief when Patri approaches me.

"You ok, pequena?"

"I'm good." I look at her as she places a hand on my shoulder. "This is just big."

"I get it. You are very young. You should be very proud of yourself, Elena. You a right, this is a big thing. A huge thing. We are all very proud, remember that."

She squeezes my shoulder before letting go.

"Now get to warming up, stop drifting off with the fairies!"

~~~~~~

It only took Barcelona 5 minutes to establish their dominance through an early Salma goal and by half time they were already up by 4 to 0.

The second half started and by the end of the match we were up by 8 with a decent scoreline of 9-1. Patri pulled me off the bench to go on the rounds to all the opposition and the fans. I have seen this happen so many times that it still feels surreal to be experiencing it.

"Where is your sister?"

Patri's whisper is meant to be harmless but her words are like ice water down my back and my stomach flips inside out. She continues when I shrug my shoulders.

"I saw her earlier with Olga, she's probably sat with the other injured girls."

At the mention of the girlfriend I have not met, I resist the urge to throw up, saying goodbye to Patri and heading over to where my family was in the stands.

My whole family tells me how proud they are and I think Mami takes about a thousand pictures of me and Alba and gets Alba to take some of me and her as well. I am grateful that she ignores Alexia's absence but that does not mean any of us are happy about it.

Mami is frustrated, angry maybe and that is evident in the way she scans the stadium every few minutes and shakes her head or releases disappointed sighs every once in a while.

Alba is sad and it is obvious because she makes no effort to hide the tears that brim in her eyes behind her smile. She tells me it is proud but I know when she looks longingly over to where Alexia should be standing beside me that she is just as upset as I am.

I am offended but I do my best to hide my emotions. I try to be as happy as I can because I am somewhat exhilarated from the experience despite sitting on the bench for the full 90 minutes.

Keira and Ona were being rested for the whole match and it turns out that Keira is hilarious and Ona can provide the best commentary on any match. They are a good pairing and I enjoyed making fun of Keira as she struggled to keep up with our (very slow) Spanish.

I am definitely looking forward to playing at some point. The thought makes me so incredibly nervous but I don't think there will be a better feeling than finally stepping out onto that field with my name on my back and representing my childhood club.

Mami holds me in her arms after she's satisfied with the pictures and I feel a tear drop onto my head.

"I am so proud of you, nina, you have made me proud from the day you were born and you will continue forever. This is just the start of everything. Papi is looking down on us right now with pride too, he's telling all his friends that you are his baby bear and that he taught you everything you know."

I sniffle in her arms.

"Thank you for everything you have done for me Mami, I would be nothing if not for you."

"Oh, hija, I love you."

"I love you too."

Alba throws herself into the hug and proclaims it is now a group hug. Mami chuckles and extends one of her arms around her.

"Mi hermanita is all grown up!" Alba cheers quietly so only me and Mami can hear. "15 years old and in the first team, a record?"

"Only a record when I leave the bench, Alba." I whack the back of her head with my hand and she recoils from the hug in mock annoyance.

"I should go, Mami, I'll meet you out the front?"

She nods and I kiss her cheek before wandering back to the changing rooms.

I am surprised when they are empty but the sound of the showers tells me that I will not be alone for long.

It is supposed to be a happy feeling, but I can not help but feel alone in this room, full of the belongings of people who are older than me, more experienced, skilled. People who know my sister better than I do.

People who will always look up to La Reina. Who will always hang off her every word.

I wish that was me still because if it was, I would not be alone in this locker room right now, I would be celebrating with my sister.

But she is nowhere to be found.

She didn't even say hello to me, she didn't say congratulations, she didn't even acknowledge my existence. It hurts me more than I care to admit, but maybe that is what she meant when she said I was weak.

I wipe the tears out of my eyes before they spill and it is good timing because a whole group of girls walk into the locker room at the same time that Ingrid and Frido return from their showers.

"Our pequena!" Marta cheers when she sees me in my cubby and paces over to pick me up. "You are one of us now, welcome to Barca!"

Everyone cheers and a big smile takes over my face as I am thrown amongst the group of people, being hugged and patted on the back, loud yells in Spanish bouncing round the room.

Aitana holds me for longer than everyone else and whispers her congratulations in my ear.

"You need a lift home today?"

I shake my head and smile.

"Mami and Alba are taking me out to dinner."

Aitana nods and begins talking about how exciting it is that I have finally been introduced to the first team and how I have grown up and I zone out and scan the room.

The loud chatter is a far cry from the near silence that engulfed the room five minutes ago.

I spot Mapi in the corner of the room speaking animatedly to Ingrid.

Frido is also there, laughing with Caro and Marta

Jana is beside Bruna, a giddy smile on her face as they chat to Esmee.

That can only mean one thing, Alexia is somewhere in here but I do not want to speak to her. I do not want to see her and I do not want her to see me. I excuse myself from Aitana to quickly grab my change of clothes and I go over to the showers, spending the longest possible time rinsing myself and washing my hair and an even longer time drying myself and getting changed.

I spend a humiliating amount of time in the stall but I do not hear anyone else come into the bathroom so I don't really think anyone had noticed.

If I had known what was been waiting for me when I opened the door of my stall I probably wouldn't have opened it.

Because the bleached blonde hair was the first thing I clocked, but her confidence oozed out of her as she leant against the wall, her arms crossed, her head resting against the blue paint like she was bored.

I don't say anything when I see her, trying my luck by just walking straight past her but her hand reaches out and stops me from leaving.

"No, Elena, don't run away from me."

"What do you want from me, Alexia?"

She let out an exhale and her features softened slightly. I look down at her feet, willing myself to not make eye contact.

"Why did I find out you had joined my team through a post on Instagram?"

I roll my eyes and shrug my shoulders, making an unintelligible sound that tells her that I do not know and I do not care. I try to leave again but she just stops me again.

"Why do I not know anything about you anymore? Why did Mapi find you in the middle of the park near her house last night when you should have been in bed like Mami thought?"

At least Mapi didn't say anything. I was worried, she is terrible at keeping secrets.

I just scoff because I don't know how else to react to the irony.

"Where is your girlfriend?"

She sighs.

"Olga is in the changing room with the others. You can meet her if you would like."

"I do not want to meet her."

"Then why did you ask?"

"I just wanted to confirm it wasn't just another one of Alba's rumours. You never told me."

I am proud that my voice doesn't falter, that it doesn't break. It is calm, level, despite the emotions that are raging inside of me.

"And whose fault is that?"

I roll my eyes but I avoid saying anything. She hesitated before continuing.

"We were best friends Elena, what even happened? Why did you stop talking to me, why did you start skipping our thursday night dinners?"

I scoff as she tries to make eye contact.

"I am not having this conversation now, Alexia. This is supposed to be a happy day but you are ruining it. You don't remember, that is the problem."

"I should be part of this day with you. I am your captain now."

I hold back a laugh.

"yes, captain, anything you say captain." I salute her weakly and turn around to leave, pushing past her outstretched arm.

Mapi looks at me cautiously as I walk back into the changing rooms but she is chatting with Olga and I do not want to have any interaction with her. I wave goodbye to her and Ingrid and say goodbye to a few of the others.

"What did she say?" Aitana had walked out with me and had apparently seen Alexia enter the showers earlier as well.

"That she is my captain now." I don't think I will ever forget her coldness.

"She is also your sister, Lena, she must be proud?"

If she is she has not shown it.

"She is my captain before she is my sister." My voice is monotone and I stare straight ahead of me. "Football always comes before family. It always has for Alexia."

Aitana shakes her head.

"It should not, it is not healthy."

I can't help but agree with the midfielder beside me.

~~~~~~

Dinner with Mami and Alba is nice, although I shouldn't have expected the topic of my oldest sister to be completely neglected the whole evening. Thankfully, she waits until we are all in the car driving home to bring it up.

"Your sister should have been there today, Elena." She makes eye contact with me through the rear view mirror and I look away.

"There are many things she should have done but didn't." I mumble quietly so Mami can't hear me, but Alba does and she looks back at me weirdly.

"Alexia said she was going to talk to you, she told us how proud she was and I said that you would want to hear her say it to you."

"She's... proud of me?" My voice is soft and I can see my mother's eyebrows furrow in the mirror.

"Of course she is, you are her baby sister and you have just joined her team. She was upset that you didn't tell her and I don't think she really understood why but, Lena, she was practically crying. She is a very proud big sister. I told her to come with us tonight and she seemed keen, said she would meet you in the changerooms and come out with you."

"Why does she tell you all this but when she talks to me she is so cold?" My voice is barely a whisper yet both Mami and Alba hear me loud and clear.

"She went to meet you in the dressing room, she was excited for you to meet Olga and Olga was excited as well. What did she say to you?" Mami frowns, her eyes flickering over to Alba who also had creases in her forehead.

I shrug.

"She asked me why I didn't tell her that I had joined, why she doesn't know anything about my life anymore. She said she was my captain, she should be part of my life. I think she meant my football life, not my actual one."

"What makes you say that?" Alba is the one who speaks because Mami looks devastated.

I look around dramatically. "If she wanted to be part of my actual life she would be here right now, no?"

Alba runs her hands over her face in frustration but I don't think she is frustrated at me. Just the situation. I think it has upset Alba more than anyone else and I feel guilty.

"Sorry." 

"No, hermanita, this is not your fault, I just don't understand what is going through Alexia's head."

"It's ok, Alba, Mami. I don't mind. Really, I don't."

Mami just shakes her head. She is not happy and she clearly does mind.

"No, you and your sister need to sort this out, pequena, I simply cannot stand it any more. You will be home for dinner this Thursday and you will talk about it."

"But I have train-" I am interrupted.

"No you do not, you are not playing with the B team at the moment, don't be ridiculous. You will be there and we will discuss it then. We also need to discuss what we are going to do about your school."

I groan, although the change in topic is appreciated.

"Mami! I don't want to have to go back to school because I'd rather do this." She sighs and I roll my eyes.

"La Masia has made an arrangement that will allow you to continue your classes there but your days will be rearranged. You will go to training with the first team until 2, then you will go over to La Masia and do your school classes with your peers there. They will get you a tutor to study with you in the evenings when training usually is to make up for the school you missed in the morning."

Unfortunately, Mami has always been adamant that we get a good education despite mine and Alexia's obsessions with football.

I was quick to get out of the car when we arrived home, having dropped Alba off at her apartment on the way back. I went up to my room quickly, changing into my pajamas and heading to bed quite quickly.

Mami called out to tell me that she was going to see Alexia before bed, so I sat on my phone for a while, the doors locked and my lights switched off.

But my phone was plugged in and my eyes were closed when a soft fist hit my door twice. Thinking it was just mami, I called for her to enter.

But when I registered that bleach blonde hair for the second time that day, all I felt was regret.

"I am tired, Alexia. Please, just let me sleep."

"Elena, please." I hadn't noticed the tears that dripped down her face, the slump in her usual perfect posture. Her voice cracked when she said my name. "I miss you."

"Alexia. It has been a long day, I am tired, I want to sleep. Please, Alexia. Let me sleep." I am acting immature but I am tired, and I don't want to have this conversation now.

She let out a soft exhale, stepping towards me and placing a kiss on the side of my head that is exposed to the air.

I try to ignore the warm shivers it sends down my spine, it has been so long since she did that; since she did something she used to do every night.

She walks slowly back to the door, stopping as she reaches it and resting her hand on the door handle.

"Mami says you don't think I am proud of you. It is not true. I am so proud of you and I love you, pequena. But I don't think you need me anymore, I think you're fine without me. I am sorry, Elena. I am sorry for not being there for you when I should have been, but I will take a step back. I am so proud of you."

She pushed down the door handle and was gone just as quickly as she came and I resisted the urge to call out and tell her she had got it all wrong. I want her to take a step forward, she has already taken a step back. She has already taken 50 steps back.

I need her. More than anything.

But I can't rely on her. I can not be weak in front of her.

I am a Putellas. I can not be weak.

She has to be right. I am fine without her.

~~~~~~

She is still home when I walk downstairs in the morning, her eyes puffy and hair a mess as she sits on the kitchen table with a coffee. My sigh alerts her to my presence but I turn my back on her as soon as I enter the kitchen.

"Elena, please." I don't know how I changed my sister from a leader to a beggar, but today is not the day to ask when that happened.

I pour myself a bowl of cereal silently and head straight back upstairs, locking my bedroom door and eating my breakfast before sitting down on the piano stall, my fingers immediately jumping onto the keys, improvising and experimenting with new notes, chords and rhythms.

I don't know what Mami said to Alexia when she visited last night, but to be quite honest I don't want to know. I just need to keep being ok without my older sister, no matter how much I miss her. She said I should be fine without her, so I will be.

For some reason, I neglect to consider the other words she said.

"I miss you."

"I am so proud of you."

"I love you."

I think I ignore those statements because I can't seem to grasp their validity. If she missed me, she would have seen me; she would have come to my games. If she was proud of me I would already know, she would have told me like Mami had, like Alba had. Like everyone else who is proud of me has.

If she loved me... If she loved me she would be my older sister again.

I miss her, I am proud of her and I love her. It is true and I have never once doubted those emotions.

But it feels like she is just saying what she wants me to hear. What Mami said that she should say to me. I don't think she actually means it.

How could someone who loves me tell me that I am weak?

How could someone who is proud of me tell me that she doesn't want me to achieve my dreams, that she never wants to share a shirt because I am haven't had to work for it?

I don't understand how it could be true, both things at the same time.

I curse at the tear that spills out of my eye, rubbing it away aggressively and shaking my head at myself. No. I can not be weak. Not today, not ever.

My sisters words from today, from yesterday, from three years ago spin in my mind and my fingers become more and more aggressive on the keys of my piano, my song increasing in intensity; reflecting my emotions in the only way I know how. The keys are my home, the notes are my head and the song is my heart. 

Though sometimes the song sounds broken, like right now when there is so much going on. So many chords, rhythms. Increasing speed, increasing volume. My fingers moving at a million miles an hour, barely hitting one key before moving to the next. 

There is so much going on that it is overwhelming, so much going on that it could just explode. Into a million pieces. So many pieces that it would be futile to even try and put them back together.

It does that sometimes, and I have to fall back down to the softness and calmness of the easy rhythms, easily sailing away from the broken song like it never even existed. 

But it always existed, and it's remains will always be there at the bottom of the sea, haunting me, threatening to re-emerge. 

I realise I have been grieving my sister like she has died. I grieve the death of our relationship and how it has changed so quickly and so aggressively. I miss her more than anything, but the thought of what it used to be is overwhelming, it fills me with dread, with complete sadness. 

Those notes that exploded so long ago, still lying dormant somewhere, never gone, never forgotten. There are so many of them, I just wish she would help me pick them up.

My song has already exploded, so I resort to playing soft chords, tears now spilling from my eyes in a continuous stream. There are too many to wipe away and I know that my eyes will be red and my cheeks puffy when I eventually do. I have lost my sister in a way that is almost impossible to comprehend.

Because Alexia isn't dead, and somehow that makes her distance so much harder to understand, so much more hurtful.

She isn't dead, she has just decided she does not want to be a part of my life any more.

The song comes to a conclusion, and my fingers rest on the keys, my eyes staring ahead at the empty stand in front of me, trying their very best to not slip upwards towards the picture that I know hangs directly above it.

The picture of me and my family the day I was born, held in Alexia's arms as Alba tried her best to share me, both of them sitting beside Mami in bed as Papi watched on with a proud smile.

I would go back to that day in an instant if I was given the opportunity.

~~~~~~

I don't go back downstairs until I hear the front door close and Alexia's car drive away. I give it a few minutes before I actually leave the safe haven that my bedroom has become, ignoring Mami's watchful eyes as I slump onto the sofa, using the remote to switch on the tv.

I only watch it for five minutes before my mother switches it off, standing by the door and looking directly at me.

"She is confused, Elena. She doesn't know why this has all happened but she is angry with herself for not being there for you more."

I roll my eyes. Of course she doesn't remember.

"Maybe she should use her brain. Maybe she should just think."

Mami shakes her head at me, it could be in frustration, maybe disappointment. I still do not look at her.

"Maybe you could just talk to her! She doesn't know how to love you when you won't let her. She wanted you to meet Olga yesterday, but you left. She wanted to speak to you last night or this morning but you ignored her."

"But Mami, it is not my fault! It should not be up to me to fix what she has broken."

"She is trying, Elena, and at the moment that is what matters. This just can not go on, you are in the same family, the same football team! Mapi spoke to me yesterday, you know. She was practically crying, Elena, it's effecting even her."

"I never should have opened my mouth to her. Now she has involved herself in something that is not her business." My voice is poisonous and my words aggressive. I know Mapi would be heartbroken if she could hear this, she always has tried so hard to do what is best. Especially when it was about me.

I love Mapi, I always have. She never thought I did because I never gravitated towards her at training when I was little, but that was just because I thought she was another sister - she was like Alexia, always around.

When I was 11, maybe, I didn't realise how upset she got about me 'not liking her', and I had made a joke about never hanging around with Mapi. It was when she left the room that Alexia pulled me to the side harshly.

"Even if you don't like her, Elena, you have to pretend! She is my best friend and she loves you so much."

I remember looking at her with my mouth agape - I love Mapi, I always did. I was confused, it was a meaningless joke - a version of a joke I made all the time to Alexia.

Alexia didn't need to tell me to go talk to her, but I didn't know what to say when I walked out the door and found her sitting down with her back to the wall, tears pouring down her face. I explained everything and she apologised for being dramatic.

Since then, we have gotten along well and I have tried to spend time with her when I can.

It has been harder in the last couple years when I have fallen out with Alexia. They are best friends, I don't want to get in the way of that.

Mami's anger brings me right back to reality.

"That is enough, Elena! Maria only wants to help, but she can't, nobody can do anything except you and Alexia."

I resist rolling my eyes, instead releasing a huff of air.

"I'll think about it." 

My arms are folded and I turn back towards the blank screen, ignoring the way Mami sighs and walks away. 

It is only when I hear her door close that I let my angry facade crumble, my body shaking as I resist the tears. 

I need to stop crying. 

Alexia thinks I am strong enough to do everything by myself.

I need to prove to her that I can. 

Maybe then she will tell me she is proud of me. 

~~~~~~

this is pretty much all the prewritten stuff i have, will write more soon once my exams are done

let me know if there's anything you want to see in the next parts

part IV

[julymusings]

Dick Grayson x South Asian!Reader HCs

requested | reader is fem; like with Jason's hc post, I tried to keep it non-specific to any country, hope i achieved that😬

also it's barely mentioned but as a special treat: reader is trained in Indian classical dance😏😏😏

He loves watching Bollywood movies, but gets especially into the music…like really into it

This man becomes OBSESSED with Shreya Goshal; you come early one night to find him singing along to both parts of the duet Manwa Laage from Happy New Year while doing the dishes (which, if you don't know, is a very high-pitched song). He's so off-key but so into it you don't have the heart to tell him that your neighbors texted you to ask if a feral cat got loose in your apartment💀

Then it escalates— he tries to learn Hrithik Roshan’s dance from Dhoom Again (which has nothing to do with the fact that you told him Hrithik Roshan was your childhood crush)

(if ur not desi, it starts at timestamp 0:38 I highly recommend watching it for full context it's incredible— if you are then I know you already know what i'm talking about LMAOO)

And since you're a dancer you learn it with him but he’s genuinely upset that it’s so easy for you but so hard for him

"I should be getting this! Do you know how bendy my body is?!"

For some reason I feel like he would love the strong female lead-type movies (probably because he’s so eldest daughter coded) so movies like Queen, Dangal, Chak De India, that’s his jam, but he loves Kal Ho Naa Ho when he needs a good cry

If you’ve ever seen those tiktoks of families who dress up their dogs and cats in traditional wear…you’re doing that with Haley 100%

I think Dick is familiar with hair oiling because of his Romani background, but doesn’t start doing it until you guys are dating because you do it regularly so he just starts joining you

OR he does do it, but…badly. with one of those over-priced chemical-filled Sephora brands, and he doesn’t even apply it correctly. The first time you see him do it you’re legitimately offended. You spend the entire afternoon teaching him the right way, first taking him to the Indian market (they’re in new jersey so you know there’s plenty💀) and collecting all the ingredients and explaining the benefit of each one, then going back to his place and showing him how to properly toast the herbs and spices and then warm the oil with them, how to massage it all throughout his scalp and find all the pressure points.

He’s sooo attentive and genuinely interested, plus he just loves how passionate you are about this

He loves pani puri (obviously, he’s dick and they’re balls WHO SAID THAT)

But seriously, you make them and he’s just throwing them back non stop

He calls you rani (queen), meri jaan (my love), pyaari (cutie I think)

Dick learns how to drape your sari for you— he knows where all the pins go, where to make the folds and where to tuck in the fabric. He loves how happy it makes you and how you twirl in the mirror when he’s done. Once your relationship gets more serious, he loves to buy you new ones until you have all different styles for every occasion

He loves when you wear payals. You wear them once for an event, and he encourages you to wear them around the house because the sound they make when you walk is just so pretty

Another reason why he LOVES watching you dance. The ghungroos you wear make it all the more mesmerizing

Given how flexible he is from his acrobat training, he’s great at yoga. Much better than you, and you often require his help to get the positions right. He doesn’t mind, though, as long as it means he gets to have his hands on you as he guides your body into the correct stance

Of course he’s learning your language so he can communicate with your relatives. That doesn’t mean it’s easy, though

Most teaching sessions end with tears and/or yelling

“WHY ARE THERE SO MANY POSSESSIVE PRONOUNS??? WHY IS THERE ONLY ONE SPECIFIC SCENARIO FOR EACH ONE????”

“I DON’T KNOW DICK THERE JUST ARE”

In the least foot fetish-y way possible, he thinks the tradition of wearing toe rings is so attractive. When you tell him that only married women wear them, he considers proposing just for that reason (I mean he already has the ring, so what’s he waiting for?)

Speaking of marriage (😏), he’s so excited for you to get his name hidden somewhere in your mehendi/henna. When you’re getting it done, he keeps trying to peek into the room to see if he can spot it until the artist gets fed up and locks him out😭

On your wedding night the first thing he does when you get a moment alone is start searching for it

You told him about the tradition of stealing the groom's shoes beforehand. You did not, however, tell him about the bargaining portion of the tradition

So when he and his siblings are "looking" for them (come on now, they're world class detectives, but they don't want to ruin the fun) and ultimately "give up" like "okay! you got me! where are they!" and your family starts talking about a 5-figure ransom to see them again...

He's going insane trying to tell them that his father is the billionaire, not him, but your relatives could not care less. And the whole time he knows exactly where they are but he doesn't want to be that person and make all your relatives hate him😭

He manages to coax them down to 4-figures

He wanted 3, but after your youngest cousin read him to filth ("Oh the trust fund nepo-baby can't spare some change? Is this the kind of husband you are? Is this how you plan to support your wife?"), he had no choice

You KNOW he’s doing a dance number at the reception. Bonus points if it's the Dhoom Again dance

And of course he wants you two to do a number together. When he tells you as much, he thinks it'll be fun and silly and a way to spend time together— he's wrong.

Like a true Indian classical dance teacher, you are a DRILL SERGEANT. He gets transported back to his old Robin-training days, except Bruce is 8 inches shorter and wears 5 pounds of bells around his ankles. It's worth it for the end result, though.

You obviously eat him UP but he does a very good job

Which number? I'm SO glad you asked........

It's Kala Chashma

ok this really got away from me but i loved writing it. as for kala chashma i just thought it was funny😭but if you have any other songs you think would fit i would LOVE to hear

[melanieph321]

Ruben Dias x Reader - Not Ready Part 7/12

Emmy wears Ruben's jersey for good luck in this one.

So cute. 😭😭❤️❤️

Part 8 and Part 9 are out on my Patreon!

Readers sister dies in a tragic car accident, leaving reader and her boyfriend Ruben in the urgent custody of her niece and nephew. Readers' life is suddenly flipped upside-down since having children hadn't been the plan for her and Ruben's life together. At least not now, when his football career was reaching great new heights.

Enjoy! 💞

What kind of gift was worth losing your life over? 

Liza's package on your desk stared back at you throughout the working week. You left it there as a problem for someone else to deal with and not you, because your biggest fear would be opening the package and coming to find out that Liza's car swirled off the road in the middle of a storm in the pursuit for something worthless like shoes. Or that scarf you once told her that you fancied.

"Hey, you okay?" Laleh poked her head into your office before calling it a day herself. She caught you staring into the ether yet again, with your eyebrows furrowed in a matter of concentration.

"Huh?"

"You're doing that thing again with your face. Is everything alright?"

"Oh, I...." You shook out of your trans, heat flushing your cheeks. "I'm all good."

"Are you?" She stepped into your office. "Like I said, if you need someone to open up the package Liza's husband sent you, I'll happily volunteer."

You smiled, perhaps the first time that day. "I appreciate it L, but I'll bring myself to open it sooner or later. Besides, it wasn't Liza's husband who sent it to me..." You recalled that he wanted nothing to do with it. "It was actually the post office, sending the package to the closest relative of the original recipient."

"I see."

"Yeah." 

"Have you been getting a lot of those?"

"What?" 

Laleh shrugged her shoulders. "I dunno, memos and emails from Liza's former payouts?"

"No, not really. My parents were the ones to close her bank accounts and likewise. I suspect Liza's husband was the one getting notifications for her former subscriptions. It must have been really hard for him dealing with that."

"How is he holding up....in rehab?"

"Good." You nodded, but left out the fact that you often called him to give an update on the kids' life. Although he didn't say much during your brief talks, you knew that deep down those calls meant everything to him, a light in the dark tunnel that his soul had been shoved into following the death of his wife, your sister.

"Tell you what." Laleh shirped, having enough of the sad stuff just as she was clocking out from work. "How about I pull some strings and get us two seats for a pedicure this afternoon?"

"Can't make it. Football tryouts."

"Who's football tryouts?" 

"Emmy." You beamed. "I'm picking her and Vale up after school and taking them straight to Man City's training grounds."

"No way, is Ruben going to be there as well?"

"I hope so, but I'm not sure about his training schedule."

"Y/N, that's amazing, I'm so happy for Em."

"Yeah, so am I. Hopefully, she's not as nervous as I am."

"Nervous? What for? Wasn't Liza a football talent when she was young?"

You nodded, the memories of attending your sister's weekly fixtures flooding your heart. "Ruben says Emmy has got a good chance of making the team. All she's gotta do is show for it."

"Well then, I'll be rooting for her from the comfort of my salon chair. Don't forget to text me right after the tryouts."

"I will. I promise."

"Alright then, I'll see you."

"See you tomorrow."

You left work in a hurry to pick up the kids. However, on your way to pick up Vale you were approached by one of his primary teachers, Mrs Jones, who expressed her heartfelt concerns about Vale's "condition" as she carefully referred to it as.

"I assure you, Mrs Jones, Vale has not gone mute. All he needs is time, and he'll be back to speaking just like the other children."

Mrs Jones did not seem the slightest convinced and held you back an additional few minutes to inform you about an after-school program at the community center for children with traumatic upbringings.

"My ass." You mumbled and balled up the flier you had been given. Tossing it over your shoulder in the parking lot.

"Auntie Y/N, are we going to be late?" Emmy asked as you rushed her and Vale out of school towards your car. "Possibly. Most likely." You replied. Honesty was really important to you. You would never lie to your niece and nephew. Not when solemnly relied on you for guidance in life.

"I don't want us to be late." Emmy pouted. 

You popped your head through the passenger door, fumbling for Vale's seat belt and then Emmy's. "We won't be, I promise." You leaned forward, pressing a swift kiss to her cheek. "Now, did you remember to put on your lucky shirt?"

"Yes." She mumbled.

"Good." You smiled. "I'm sure it'll bring you luck today during tryouts."

"You think so?"

"I know so, baby." You gave her cheek one last squeeze before shutting the door to the backseat of your car. 

You had your way of hiding it, but just like Emmy, you were quite nervous about the afternoon. Nevertheless, you had to go through with it. For Liza. She would've been so proud to have Emmy follow her footsteps, despite it being for the Manchester City Academy.

Read full chapter and more on my Patreon

[pookielious]

Hiraeth

Hiraeth ; a homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home which maybe never was; the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for the lost places of your past

Chapter one — Philadelphia,PA

Summary: After returning from the war, Babe Heffron feels lost and empty, struggling with nightmares and survivor's guilt. He decides to take a spontaneous train trip with Bill to get away from Philadelphia and figure things out

Word count : 2,078 (11k+ charaters)

Notes: multichaptered (1/??) ! On AO3 !! No disrespect towards the men of the real easy company, this is based off of the hbo portrayals and strictly for funsies : ) no ships are included for those who don't enjoy ships !

Chapter below cut ↓

The year was 1946, a few months since the war had ended, since all of Easy had finally returned home to their respective states and family, it was a miserable year for Heffron; just about the most miserable you could get. Babe had returned to Philadelphia, back to his ma's on Front Street, and kept in close contact with Bill since they'd lived so close to one another, but after the war nothing felt complete anymore. It felt as if his life was missing something yet there was nothing to fill that void that layed both in his head and heart.

Being a veteran of such a horrible war had its downsides, of course, the nightmares plagued him, the survivors' guilt , all the 'normal' stuff that no one had warned him about followed the now 22 year old and all of the other veterans no matter when they came into the war.

He'd told Bill about it, both in person and over the frequent phone calls they'd had,Bill had even showed he felt the same kind of void ina way but didn't know how to go about fixing it. bill simply choiced to ignore it.

"We should do something about it yknow?" Babe said one day, out of nowhere in the middle of the coffee shop him and Bill regulared for a weekly coffee 'date', His index finger tracing the rim of the glass boredly.

",bout what?" Bill raised a eyebrow, sipping from his coffee mug, a pastry in hand

"I don't know, that feeling ? -- maybe we should.." he trailed off to think about it, eating the last bite he'd had of his breakfast sandwich , the coffee shop was relatively quiet.not many other people there besides the two and since they were regulars they knew the most active times and usually avoided it "–we should just go somewhere, maybe thats what we're missing yknow? "

"Where to?" Was bill's only question, babe was slightly suprised to hear that he wasn't even questioning his sanity, especially since it was bill he was talking to,going out somewhere out of nowhere without any sort of planning in advance surely wasn't a good idea

"Dunno, out of Philly definitely, I just need to be out of here-- to think or sumn'thin " the ginger shrugged, he didn't have a plan at all he wasn't even sure how long he wanted to be away from home, he just wanted to figure things out, find himself again

"Fine, just anywhere but Manhattan, or even worst" Bill pretended to shiver "-- jersey" he laughed

"God no" heffron cracked a smile "meet me at the train station on 30th tomorrow morning, one down on broad street yeah? I'll figure out where we're going before you get there"

"Yknow babe," Bill started "you might as well be as nuts as crazy joe " he said as he put cash on the table, standing up

~~

"Com'on it really can't be that hard !" Babe tried to reason with the man behind the counter

"We uhm-- we need a destination sir" the young man said, staring at the train destinations behind the counter "we have one at 10:30 for new york" he offered, still giving babe a look that screamed 'are you a mad man?'

"God no- anything but new york-- jesus" he sighed frustratedly "get me two tickets for- the furthest away from here-- whatever is available that's not goddamn jersey or new york , okay?"

The man stayed quiet for a moment, his eyes looking away from babe at their ticket selection with a small sigh he spoke again "Thatll be 47 dollars sir" babe handed him the money and received the tickets after a small fumbling battle with his wallet "thanks bud" heffron smiled and walked to the side, sitting down on a bench , he placed his bag between his feet as he waited for Bill, he'd came slightly earlier just as he said just so he could have everything ready before hand

Maybe now would've been a good time to rethink everything, maybe come back a different time and trade in these tickets for a new ride, somewhere planned with Bill or maybe even with one of his siblings or his ma, he knew Bill wouldn't judge him for it.. but he felt like it was a good time as ever, why not now

Sure he hadn't planned anything not even where he was going but that was the beauty of it all, he'd be going to a place long away from the busy city of Philadelphia , somewhere new. It almost reminded him of the deployment, the excitement of not knowing where he was going but knowing he'd be dropped somewhere, defending everyone he loved oversees, it was almost the same excitement but this time it he wasn't carrying guns and grenades, this time he was In civilian clothes, with a bag full of necessities and of course more clothes, without a helmet to protect him from gunfire , being sent to a tiny foxhole where he was to freeze his balls off. Thank God he wasn't in bastogne. He could shiver at the thought of being there again

"Babe-? babe?" Bill snapped his fingers infront of his friend's eyes " Earth to heffronnnn" He heard a voice , realizing he'd been lost in thought for God knows how long , Bill smiled as his eyes focused on him "there ya are, where's your head at right now"

"Thanking God I'm not in bastogne" babe stood up taking bills bag, he figured it'd make it Easier for him, with the whole blown off leg and all, despite the prosthetic and the crutch, Bill always had a funny sort of limp, one that at least made it look like it was difficult to walk with especially with a bag

"Who knows, maybe yous got us tickets back there" Bill joked starting to head his way to the terminal "God I hope not" babe sighed, following behind Bill "Jesus christ whatdya got in this bag? The goddamn empire state buildin'?"

-

The pair had gotten to their train just in time, their tickets had been punched and the two had been directed to their seats, the train was pretty full, the people from all over it seemed not just from Philly, the two made their way to the 3rd train cart as instructed

 it was a nice train, one of those trains with seats and a table infront of them and sleeping quarters similar to the one they had been in on their way to deployment though the two had some sort of understanding they would rather sleep in the seats then on some filthy beds that hadn't been clean in God knows how long

 "were soliders, We could sleep anywhere for christ sake" Bill retored, as he walked up to their assigned seats, noticing not one but two men in the seats across from them "ill be damned" Bill laughed hushedly , making the man in the isle seat, closest to bill look up from what seem like a attempt at a nap and the other, closest to the window look up from his book , babe hadn't been too har behind and finally came to a stop next to Bill, "small world ain't it babe?"

Babe smiled and laughed " well ain't it david Webster and ol' joe leibgott!" Babe handed Bill one of the bags to free his hand, long enough to give the two handshakes

"Ain't this a suprise!" Leibgott laughed, babe took note of how the two didn't look any different from when he last saw them, he'd had the twos phone numbers ,he had just about eveyones but they never talked all that much, at least not as much as him and Bill did as well as the others who had came from Pennsylvania before the war , who knew calling out of state could be so expensive

"good to see you both" Webster said putting his book on the table

"whatdya both doing on here?" Bill leaned his crutch on the table to put his bag into the overhead storage ,babe doing the same although much faster then Bill was

"Ain't learn to read yet?" liebgott teased

"I got a job for a journal in newyork, " webster started "they want me to go write a few articles about Mardi gras and some of that stuff in New Orleans so they payed for me to go there"

"You don't say huh?" Heffron said as he slid into the seat towards the window, opposite of web he took bill's crutch with him to lay down on the floor so it wouldn't be flying everywhere once the train started to move.

Webster continued "And liebgott here, I ran into him in timeSquare, told me he'd been exploring the east coast and decided to join me"

"Exploring?"

"Yeah" liebgott shrugged crossing his arms "I felt kind of lost being back home in san fran,yknow? I just felt like I needed to be anywhere else but there"

Babe lit up "yeah! Yeah! Thats exactly how I felt " he looked over at bill "I told you I wasn't crazy he knows exactly what I was feeling"

Bill sat next to babe "Jeez now the both of you's are having mid life crisis , huh"

 liebgott raised a eyebrow "you feel the same? God that's a relief, webster over here was makin' me feel crazy for it too"

Babe laughed "I've been feeling that for a long time, trust me its torture"

~

the two Philadelphians had settled in as the train had moved out of the city, the train attendants had came through with breakfast and drinks for everyone, the chatter continued between David and Edward as the train started it more than a day long trip down to a little town close to New Orleans so they had plenty of time for that "So Louisiana hm?" Babe Said

"Did you actually not know where you were going before you got on here?" David questioned, being careful to not move around to much as he talked, because of liebgott; who had slumped over on him in his sleep

"Nah, we got completely random tickets , just so happens we got lucky and ended up with you both, ya'know?"

Webster simply nodded, taking a sip of his drink "maybe it's because I wasn't a big fan of being in Europe but I never felt that, how you and Joe feel i mean"

"Trust me I wasn't either, especially in bastogne-- I don't think I'll ever go back to Europe at least by will"

"I guess when I came back I was lost for a little but not as much as you guys feel now, i think i felt that way more when i joined back with the company, way back in haguenau."

"Because you weren't there through all of it" he shrugged, "you were still 'round people --normal people through the hospitals and stuff, but we were kind of isolated during the battle of the bulge or whatever they callin' it, y'know? it was just us for the most part sure we'd see other divisions and stuff, but it's a while different mindset, you know that"

After a while more of talking, the topic changed from homesickness and being lost. They'd both started talking about what they'd been up to in the past few months, since they were finally brought back to the states.

"Say, doesn't doc live out here? Doc Roe, right?" Web asked, changing the subject for what felt like the 5th time in the hour.

"Actually, yeah he don't live too far out of New Orleans from what I remember. Bayou chou- or- sumn' like that , Chene? Yeah that sounds right. Bayou Chene'

"Maybe we should keep a eye out for him, or go visit or somthing " Web suggested, stretching out his legs under the table.

"Yeah, that'd be nice-- if we could find out where he is"

"Your both pretty close, right? How don't you know where he lives?" Web questioned.

"We've sent each other a few letters and postcards, sure, but ion know the guys address by memory, I'm nughta stalka' or something", babe shrugged.

He wondered if they'd be able to find him out there, it would be nice to see the company together again, even if it wasn't all of them. Maybe he just needed to see his family again, that had to be the piece to the missing spot in his brain.

Author note ♧

Ty sm for reading!!! I've had this for a while now but I'm very much so committed to getting these chapters out soon enough!! I hope you enjoyed : )

Ps sorry if web and Lieb are slightly out of character! It's my first time writing for them

[tomorrowusa]

If this seems like a relatively subdued Pride Month, that's because the LGBTQ+ community is under more threat than usual this year.

For those in the LGBTQIA+ community, Pride month is a chance to be out, loud and proud.  But in the United States, there's been an uneasy quiet hanging over this June.  Big brands who once didn't think twice about cashing in on the pink dollar have scaled back support. The American offshoot of Target reduced the number of its stores carrying Pride-themed products this year after getting backlash in 2023. Nike, who became the subject of boycott calls last year over its marketing partnership with a transgender influencer, has also pulled back after offering Pride collections since 1999. [ ... ] The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) says it's currently monitoring 523 anti-LGBTQIA+ bills across the country. Over 300 of these bills were introduced in the first three weeks of 2024 alone, and 149 are still advancing or have been passed into law.

Just want to interject that the introduction of a bill in a state legislature does not mean it will pass. 2 homophobic bills were introduced in socialist/hippie Vermont, 6 in Illinois which was the first state to abolish sodomy laws, and 9 in liberal New Jersey. Don't count on them passing. But the 39 in deep red Missouri adds to its reputation as currently having the most homophobic state government in the US.

The majority of these bills relate to educational measures, through school sports bans, school facilities bans that prevent transgender students from using communal rest rooms, or curriculum censorship around in-school discussions of the queer community.  Increasing anti-LGBTQIA+ rhetoric has also seen bills introduced that would forcibly out teachers and staff.  [ ... ]

Trailing slightly behind is healthcare restrictions, where more than two-thirds of the bills (69 per cent) are aimed at limiting the accessibility of gender-affirming healthcare for transgender youth.  This is despite the American Medical Association resolving to "protect access to evidence-based care for transgender and gender-diverse youth" in June last year. 2023 also marked the first time the ACLU saw drag bans introduced across US states.

It's not just Republicans in state legislatures to blame for increased homophobia. There also billionaire extremists with social media empires.

Notably, Dr Ellis points to billionaire Elon Musk's October 2022 takeover of X — formerly Twitter — which saw the mention of grooming slurs against the LGBTQIA+ community jump by 119 per cent, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate.  The social media sphere also saw anti-LGBTQIA+ sentiment being taken up by foreign actors ahead of US election campaigns to sow division, according to Meta's head of Cybersecurity Policy, Nathaniel Gleicher.

Perhaps the most bizarre group in American politics is the Log Cabin Republicans.

Log Cabin Republicans president bizarrely defends Donald Trump's anti-LGBTQ+ record

Seriously, people in the LGBTQ+ community who support Republicans, Trump, and MAGA are in deep need of therapy. Imagine a hypothetical group like "Gazans for Netanyahu" to get some idea of how self-hating the Log Cabin Republicans are. Republicans are largely under the control of extremist Christian fundamentalists who would pass the most repressive homophobic laws they could get away with.

Back to the legislatures. It's a big mistake to neglect state government. Find out who represents you in your legislature. If they are Republicans, contact your state or county Democratic Party to learn how you can help defeat them.

Find Your Legislators Look your legislators up by address or use your current location.

[thecedarsights]

May I humbly request some NY hc’s?

**it’s fine if not dw**

idk if they'll be terribly interesting? but i'll try lol!

He has an affinity for all of the animals, plants, just nature related state symbols (e.g. beavers, eastern bluebird, nine-spotted ladybugs, sugar maples, etc. etc.), and probably loves learning about all of them.

He loves horses, and while he likes watching horse racing occasionally, he doesn't find the sport too terribly interesting. He probably talks about horse racing with someone like Kentucky though sometimes. He gets his mild interest in it from the horse racing in his own state (such as in places like the Saratoga Race Course as an example).

Is relatively decent at keeping plants alive, all things considered. The only person he really trusts to take care of them if he's not there is New Jersey. No one else gets to go near his plants. He likes to name them, too, sometimes.

Despite how much he makes fun of New Jersey's state nickname, he still trusts him the most when it comes to plants and gardening.

Not very original, but he has some pet pigeons.

He used to have a black cat named Void that would perch on his shoulder all the time.

Has snapped at multiple others to remind them New York state is not just the city. Sometimes though, he seems to forget this himself, much to his own dismay.

His answer on when 'upstate' starts seems to change semi-frequently, if someone asks for his personal opinions about it.

He gives Vermont Stewart's cards (gift cards you can only use in the store and those 'one free ____' ones) sometimes.

Adding on to that, he also sometimes will have a milkshake from them with him when he goes to the table. It got snatched once by Florida who then drank it and he still holds a grudge about it.

Occasionally swaps books with Washington, but will anxiously wait the entire time it is not in his possession.

There are times where he finds California extremely pathetic (can have different meanings, though. There are times where it's the 'soggy, sad kicked looking puppy' kind of pathetic or the 'you literally fucking suck, wtaf is wrong with you' kind of pathetic, among others).

Sometimes he'll make very spicy food and before he goes to eat it, walk up to others that don't like and/or can't tolerate spice and ask them to smell it, just to laugh at their reactions.

He likes playing sports. Ones he like are tennis, air hockey and volleyball, among (some very obvious) others.

He gets self conscious sometimes playing more active sports, or doing active things like running if he knows people are watching him.

He doesn't like swimming, be he does know how to.

He likes to go out into less populated parts of his state just so he can sit down and listen to nature.

He'll try to 'forage' in forests upstate sometimes, just so he find plants to take pictures and video of so he can show them to New Jersey to see if he likes them and ask what they are.

He used to skateboard because he knew it pissed other personifications off. He doesn't as much anymore, but he still has a decked out looking skateboard (it's black with things all over it. He decorated it himself and is very proud of it).

He knows multiple languages.

He finds the fact that it only snows for about a day or two in November and December in certain parts of his state now very depressing. He hates the fact sometimes it doesn't even snow until January. He doesn't like snow much, but he misses it when he doesn't see it as much as he used to.

His favorite drink is water. Cold, preferably.

He likes old/vintage stuff. He doesn't like calling them that though, because "It felt like this was the newest shit just last [speaks New York] week!".

[ourlittlevampire]

Imagine Early Sunsets Over Monroeville but it's Mikey getting turned into a zombie. There's no way Gerard would be able to bring himself to kill Mikey, even when he's in that state. He lets him live, trapping him in his basement room so he can't hurt him. For weeks he stays in their childhood home slowly running out of food. Gerard is also slowly losing his mind. He's used to being alone and not going outside, that's not the problem. The problem is that Mikey won't shut up. His little brother is constantly growling, moaning and banging around down there at all hours of the day. He can't sleep with that sound. He can't sleep because he's starving. He wishes Mikey would just shut up. He doesn't know why he's making that much noise. He wasn't like that a couple weeks ago, when he had first turned.

Starving, Gerard realised. Mikey is starving, just like him. He knew what those shambling things outside ate. Watched them attempt to do that with his beloved brother. It made him shudder just to think about. But what if Mikey didn't eat? He couldn't claim to know the first thing about. He didn't know if they could starve to death. What he did know was that the zombies he saw outside seemed to be less now. Maybe they had just moved on from New Jersey... or maybe they had eaten all the humans they could and starved to death.

Coming out of his thoughts, Gerard suddenly realised that the house was quiet. Quiet for the first time since his brother had first turned. He had an overwhelming feeling that something was wrong. Against his better judgment, he unbarricaded the door to the basement. It was so dark in there. All of his stuff was thrown around, his precious comic books torn to pieces. He would be furious, if he wasn't more focused on his little brother sprawled out on top of those shredded comics.

"Mikey?" He called out, concern rising in his voice. At the sound of his voice, the zombified man lifted his head. It looked like it took all of his strength to do so. He growled weakly, a hand barely twitching toward him.

This wasn't good. When he'd gotten Mikey into this room, he had had to beat him off with a broom. His little brother had been strong, almost stronger than him. Now he couldn't even get up. His little brother had always been skinny, but his body underneath the shreds of his t-shirt looked positively emaciated.

Mikey was starving to death. He knew that now. But what could he do? Feed himself to Mikey?

That thought played inside his mind for an uncomfortable amount of time. He was only pulled out of it when he heard screaming. Human screams. In the early days of the infection, it hadn't been uncommon to hear suffering. Now, though, it was something startling. He rushed upstairs and looked outside.

A woman, a relatively young one, was on the street outside of his house. She was covered in blood and holding a hand to her side. She was screaming for help as she limped down the lane. He didn't know what had happened to her, but she was probably bit. He already had one zombie to deal with, he didn't need another. Gerard moved from the window, content to be a bystander. Then, he rethought.

Gerard opened the front door. He cautiously peeked out. Surprisingly, no zombies around.

"Hey!" He called out. "Are you bit?" He asked.

The woman whorled around to look at him. Relief washed over her face. She started coming towards him.

"No!" She replied. "I cut myself climbing through a window." She moved her hand to show a giant gash in her tank top. He couldn't really see the wound, but all that blood did not look promising. "Do you have any medical supplies?" She asked.

"Yes.... They're down in the basement." He replied.

-

The screams had been horrible. It was worth it, though, to ensure his little brother would stay alive. He could hear him banging around down in his former room once more. He just hoped Mikey wouldn't get hungry again any time soon.

[callipraxia]

Well, folks, here it is. The ATOTS review. It...really could not have been done together with the NWHS review, that was a silly idea. Here is a link to a Google doc with the previous S2 reviews arranged in chronological order, if you want to catch up on those (not sure many people saw the second part of the NWHS review) and don't want to deal with wading through tags and reblogs of reblogs and such. That said...

A Tale of Two Stans

1) And now here we are. A Tale of Two Stans. Aka, the episode that proves you can break the “writing rules” if you’re good enough, since an info-dump like this would normally be a no-no, and yet…well, here we go:

2) Aww, tiny Ford. Why would there be a boarded up stash of mesoamerican gold in New Jersey? Did you also do that thing Dipper does where sometimes he doesn’t really know what a big word means? Possible reference to the whole mesoamerican salamander thing? 

3) Oh, Ford did kinda make it into the opening sequence, didn’t he? Last picture to fall on the stack before the title card of the Mystery Crew. Kinda fitting, given that despite being very important from here on out, he still holds himself a bit aloof from most of the cast for the majority of that time. 

4) I know why the writers had to include that awkward “brother!” line (so people catching up would remember, “oh, yeah, Stan said that this person was the Author of the Journals and his brother…and then the camera revealed he meant twin brother,” and so they could avoid calling Ford anything for a little while), but it was just…awkward. We see in flashbacks that Stan did sometimes call him “Stanford,” so I have to wonder if anyone would have noticed had Stan gotten halfway through the word and then gotten socked in the jaw. Or heck, even just called him “Ford” - though I’ve gathered that enough of the fandom had already guessed there were twins and one was called Stanley by this point that they might have actually said “wait, what?” upon Stan bringing forth “his” rarely-heard second syllable at the sight of his brother. 

5) …And then you see that however clubby they were in the flashback, something has clearly gone Very Wrong in the interim. Or would that be apparent to someone viewing this in isolation, I wonder? Stan’s repeatedly remarked that he’s been working on his project for thirty years, and Powers had previously implied that the machine did…something…thirty years ago in “Scaryoke.” Perhaps someone thought Mr. Mysterious Man With No Name was just very, very confused…and then got to the rest of the episode. 

…Though once you’ve seen the rest of the series and especially if you’ve spent far, far too much of your life dissecting Ford’s character on a molecular level, it is noteworthy in its way that all he did was punch Stan. Does he have a bit of a “do not shoot people who closely resemble relatives” policy? Considering the things we know about the multiverse, such a policy could probably have gotten him killed fifteen times over even assuming he didn’t stumble into a parallel Earth where the Shapeshifter had escaped, eaten Stan, and set up shop just to wait for the person it *really* wanted to kill to come back….

Hm. If the Shapeshifter stayed in one form for long enough, would it age the way that form would? I have no idea, my brain is wandering off on tangents again. Anyway, back to the episode. 

6) I am…unsure what to make of the fact Ford a) instantly recognized this individual as ‘his’ Stan, despite being aware of others existing, b) immediately figured out Stan is responsible for the portal restarting, without even checking to see if there are other people in the room, implying he isn’t altogether surprised that Stan would do this, and c) gets mad about it and launches into an argument as though picking right back up where he left off thirty years ago. And Stan goes straight from…all kind of emotions to sarcasm “some kind of…sci-fi sideburn dimension?”) with just as little hesitation. 

7) “Just because you’re family.” Dang, this makes Stan’s outburst at the end of the episode that much more painful to think about. 

8) “Stan, you didn’t tell me there were children down here.” That…would have been one of the upsides of giving the guy time to say…much of anything before you started yelling, Ford. Just saying.

9) Oh gosh, poor Dipper. Just…poor Dipper. 

10) “Also maybe the entire U.S. government.” “The WHAT?!” That…was some pretty impressive lede-burying, Stan. 

11) “Okay, it’s all right.” There’s Ford, never wanting to admit he’s completely lost control of the situation (I might not have noticed this, but happen to have reread the Ford essay of doom this morning)

12) Gotta compliment the animators on the scene where Ford (completely unaware he’s doing so) drops the bombshell that he’s not Stanley. The camera isn’t really focused on Stan in particular, but he has an utterly “oh [redacted] this is gonna go over like a lead balloon” expression on his face even before Mabel says his name is Stanford.

13) You know Stan was deliberately crafting his retelling of his childhood, focusing on the boat and how they were always a team and etc. Of course, we know from later sections that Stan isn’t necessarily telling the kids everything he remembers (he may not have narrated the scene with Crampelter to them, for instance) but his wording in the speaking bits are clearly trying to remind Ford of “good times.” 

14) If you look closely, when Stan jumps into the science fair picture, Ford momentarily looks…something. An expression of consternation is observable. Considering what he later says to Dipper about how being a twin’s a very claustrophobic experience, and the fact they both get called to the office when only one of them was wanted…yeah, I’m going with the theory that Ford wasn’t quite as happy as Stan might have liked to think for a while before the Incident proved the straw that broke the camel’s back. In the beach scene, Tiny Ford muses on whether there is a place where “freaks like me” fit in. I think this sums up a subtle but important difference in the characters: Ford wanted to find a place in society that would accept him, while Stan’s goal was just to get away from it and find a place where neither of them would need acceptance anymore. Which makes it interesting that Ford’s sometimes perceived as the ‘loner’ twin - Ford himself might want to think that, but truth is, he’s wanted to be amongst people since he was a small child, he just couldn’t figure out their social behaviors well enough to remotely compensate for having an unusual physical feature. On one hand, he can function much better when he’s truly on his own than Stan can, but on the other, one reason why Bill might have found Stan harder to manipulate is because of how very exclusive the list of people with opinions Stan actually cares about seems to be. He’s much more comfortable being an outsider…just so long as he has that little group of people on his side. Without them, however…not so much.

15) Why on Earth did the receptionist call “Pines twins” instead of just one of them? Was it just assumed Stan would show up whether called or not (if only out of confusion), or just a habit of everyone treating them as so much of a unit that even the school staff had to remind itself “oh, yeah, this isn’t actually some ‘person with two personalities’ deal, they’re separate people who are in fact capable of walking down hallways independently.”

16) Oh gosh, I just now noticed that the ears are drawn just as…blank things, and now I can’t unsee it. 

17) Hi, Principal Guy? I hate you. Just for the record. I think Caryn might agree with me; blink and you’ll miss it, but she clearly gives the guy some kind of Look when he gets to that “and his name’s Stanley” bit, and it could be interpreted as a glare.

(18) Seriously, this...the school sections just anger me for very specific reasons...not least of which is how, er, close to accurate it kinda is in some ways, regardless of how far off it is in others. I have relatives in the same age range as the Stans. One of them once had a teacher snidely remark that he’d pull the hood of his sweater up over his head, too, if he was as ugly as her; he then punished her for said rule infraction by making her walk home after school in the rain. The guy was eventually made to apologize to her very unimpressed and irate mother, but the fact remains – he felt perfectly comfortable saying that out loud to a student’s face in the seventies, just as Ford is the only person in the room here who seems to fully realize ‘wait, that was...not really so much a compliment to me as a setup for insulting Stan, and that’s kinda messed up from both directions.’ Now, I work in education, so I know the system is still seriously screwed up in lots of ways...but at least there would be a reasonable expectation of negative consequences for anyone who said something like that to a student or parent these days.)

19) Setting, briefly, aside how much I’d like to kick the principal character and then give him a lengthy lecture on why he sucks as an educator on every possible front...his remarks about Stan potentially not finishing high school are the reason why I’ve always favored the timeline which puts this in the second half of their junior year of high school instead of their senior year. If it was senior year, after all, then Stan could have continued to coast on Ford’s papers for the rest of the term, or – in the extremely unlikely event Ford just went straight to college without passing Go or collecting 200 diplomas or anything like that – just the school handwaving him through. It only makes sense if he had at least a solid, not-started semester left to fail spectacularly in, and a year left seems more reasonable.

20) This would, however, mean that Filbrick did not kick one of his kids out a couple of months before the kid was eighteen (which still would have been a deplorable thing to do), but a sixteen-year-old. So yeah, kicks and lectures to Filbrick, too.

21) Stan, you’re breaking my heart here. How. Many. Times. In this review set have I mentioned that you’d solve a lot more of your problems if you just told people what they were instead of being defensive and making attempts at jokes and just generally deflecting the situation. I mean, you probably weren’t going to get the outcome you wanted even if you had communicated, but you might have not, y’know, gotten disowned as a teenager, thrown out on the street, and left to fend for yourself and therefore almost inevitably slip into a life of crime.

22) If Stan didn’t intentionally smash the thing, he...probably shouldn’t have phrased the lead-up to the Science Fair Incident that way in his voice-over.

23) it’s kind of interesting to note how far back Stan’s tendency to talk to inanimate objects goes - one assumes he was projecting Ford onto the Journals when he would seemingly monologue to those, but who was he really talking to when he told the machine it was “all your fault!” Thinking back on what I said in my “Little Gift Shop of Horrors” reviews…his attempts to dissociate Ford’s academic giftedness from his base personality, his inability to communicate…it’s tempting to wonder if he’s kind of speaking to Ford when he’s ranting at the machine, too. He might not realize it consciously - would probably go to any lengths to avoid recognizing the fact, actually - but….

24) A lot of people have commented on how stupid the college admissions board bit is (how it’s extremely implausible that they wouldn’t at least look over the work he put into the thing, how they give their school a bad name being rude, etc.), but have an extra point from me: why was an asterfladjik perpetual motion machine being kept right out in the open with the other science fair projects, anyway? For all we know, Crampelter did the majority of the damage in the interim just for spite or something. Or Blendin, or...get the picture? The irresponsibility of whoever was in charge of the exhibits is probably at least as much to blame as anyone else for things going awry there.

25) Stan cost “our family” potential millions. Not “your brother.” “Our family.” The Pines tendency toward groupthink really isn’t just a Stan and Mabel thing, they all have it to some degree – unless, of course, one interprets things as uncharitably as possible, in which case Filbrick and Stan might both use “our family” and “this family” as a cover for “me,” to make a totally selfish objective look better….

Yeah, I know I say I have fun doing it, and I do – but too much character analysis can…kinda start to get to you after a while. Become involuntary. Prompt you to put forward these possibilities in public, as if you were still in English 400-something…Engage with caution, kids.

26) Pity Stan didn’t actually, y’know, go into sales. He managed to a) come up with a convincing-looking product as a teenager with no resources, b) presumably talk his way into an opportunity to pitch it to TV, and c) actually sell what looks like a decent number of fake clothes cleaners and shoddy pitchforks. And then just. Keep. doing it. Over and over again (the map showing glimpses of his travels indicates he got into horse racing at some point, doubtless losing his shirt as one generally eventually does when gambling, and…we probably don’t even want to know why he was being chased by guys with machetes outside the country, do we, but apparently he was also hawking lousy tennis rackets in his twenties along with the previously-viewed StanVac.). In a legit sales job, he might well have done all right for himself….

Except, of course, for it being…tricky to get a job outside of manual labor/something in a plant or mill without a diploma, and, perhaps even more importantly…Stan being Stan. His personality would render him utterly unsuited to joining a sewing plant or a cotton mill, at the very least, even if he’d been so inclined (I don’t know much about meat-packing plants or anything like that, but three generations of my family worked in the same sewing plant; decent living, but you had to have social skills more advanced than any of the Pineses demonstrated to flourish in such an environment, and of course you’d never get rich at it), and possibly for working closely with others/in a subordinate position at all. Despite his lack of self-esteem, Stan does not take orders especially well; we see when he tries and fails to call Ford for help (and then lies about it to the kids) that he’s proud as well as touchy and someone who just fundamentally…struggles to stay within the lines dictated by normal society, really. Perhaps it’s a mental illness or other mental issue (his shoplifting could well be indicative of a compulsive tendency as well as his depression and possible Issues post-homelessness, and when his behavior is looked at as a whole, I imagine it would be quite easy to make a case for him as someone with one of the major personality disorders, especially given his extreme emotional volatility. He could also reasonably be interpreted as having ADHD, with an emphasis on the poor-impulse-control aspect. Most likely, there’s more than one thing a psychiatrist could put a label on going on with him, really), but one gets the impression that Stan just…cannot help himself, or at least finds it extremely difficult to do so. Independent business probably really was his best option, all things considered - though under better circumstances, it might have consisted of something like “eventually taking over the business from the old man” or some joint venture with one of his brothers, not, er, endless con games and dodgy product sales. 

27) I do not wish to recall how much time I spent trying to google “universities that were viewed as always second-choice schools in the seventies” and similar terms, trying to pin down where Backupsmore might be/what it might be vaguely based on. 

28) It’s also interesting to contemplate…sure, a kid might want to go to CalTech, and, for whatever reason, might not manage. This does not mean said kid could not still get into a really excellent school which could just as easily be someone else’s first choice…which, frankly, it’s hinted Backupsmore…might have been, looked at from a more objective perspective than Ford’s? Perhaps it didn’t have the good publicity of some others, but Ford seems to have flourished there both academically and (by his standards) socially. That’s where he met Fiddleford, someone he considers even brighter than himself. They had a DDMD group, and this resulted in him noting in the Journal that he had ‘friends’, plural. He made rapid progress in his studies and wrote a nationally-ranked doctoral thesis in at least one of the hard sciences at an age when a lot of folks are still working on undergraduate (we’re never given an exact number, but based on a combination of him noting that he is “in his thirties” six years after arriving in Gravity Falls and a lot of googling about how long standard programs in various areas last, I’m…guessing that to be as far ahead as he says he was, he was probably around 23-24. At most.). This is where he also apparently, for reasons unknown, a) participated in a competition to invent mind control devices for a politician and b) even knew that was what the competition was for, which was…interesting (in a fic, I made this a plot point by saying the people who sponsored that program were from the same government agency as Powers and Trigger). It’s understandable why he might be bitter about having a golden opportunity to go to The Very Best snatched away almost as soon as it was presented to him, but it doesn’t seem like Backupsmore was really all that bad of a school. The dorms comment…I never lived in a dorm, but my understanding is that it’s quite common for them to have these sorts of problems, even at good schools. Just one of those “communal living” things, particularly when the residents are at one of those ages where a lot of them are not much invested in keeping their environments clean and tidy. 

29) Tea club represent! (I am…quite enthusiastic on the subject of hot tea, so I notice when characters have it. Especially when they are Americans, as this can imply that some thought was put into the decision to draw that instead of a coffee cup)

30) “Just…going to ignore that.” Oh, gosh, poor Dipper. It’s funny - if you just watched this episode, you’d walk away with the impression Mabel and Ford were going to get along fabulously while Ford thought “...what is wrong with that one?” about Dipper. But for Gompers, I guess….

31) Just saying…Fiddleford apparently had a pretty nice house. Unless, of course, the implication is that he, Emma-May, and Tate were literally living in the garage and that the house belonged to someone else, but this seems unlikely. He also seems to have had some business going on his own already, plus whatever Emma-May might have brought in (I’ve written her as a schoolteacher before, and there’s no reason, really, why she shouldn’t be in much any profession one might wish to place her in. It was 1980. Everybody was on the Pill and women were allowed to have private bank accounts even after marriage. Maybe she was the breadwinner, I’m just noting that Fiddleford hardly seems to have been a starving visionary, one way or another)

32) I love the implication that Ford didn’t bother with comments like “hello” or “this is Stanford,” but just sprang “multi-dimensional meta-vortex” on Fiddleford in the first sentence…and Fiddleford just instantly did the calculations in his head to determine it “mathematically feasible” without missing a beat. 

33) In the field of detail work - it could be interpreted differently at the time, but we see Fiddleford being a little sloppy with where he put his feet, and them both looking grim just before launching the dummy - all in keeping with the eventual reveals that they were both extremely sleep-deprived and had just had a nasty quarrel the night before. 

34) Hate to say it, Stan, but…frame of mind your brother was in at the time, I wouldn’t have entirely ruled out biting under the right circumstances. 

35) Stan is the quickest man on two feet with a snappy comeback. Not always to his benefit, but guess you gotta work with the skills you have.

36) Ford, on one hand, you’re quite right - Stan really does have no idea what you’re up against. He exists, at this point, 90% in the mundane world, where things are…usually not as dramatic as they are in yours. Out of context, it sounds like you’re just complaining that you have dangerous enemies; Stan’s response to the mailman a few days earlier was to grab a baseball bat on the assumption that anyone who knocked on his door would be an enemy, so that much, he gets completely. On the other hand, Stan is also right - you really do have no idea what he’s been through. Heck, you both robbed the United States government and he’s the only one who got caught for it; I highly doubt you’d been to any prison (at least at this point), much less a South American prison in the seventies, and things were going pretty well for you until…well, frankly, they hadn’t been going all that well for the past two years, but you didn’t realize it until much more recently. On yet another hand, though, Stan - you looked concerned a mere scene ago that Ford might be going off the deep end, and you were kinda right about that. Man answered the door rambling about people stealing his eyes, and he just handed you some tatty, ragged-looking handwritten book that he’d glued a silhouette of his own hand onto like some kind of grade school art project, all while rambling about how you had to take it to the ends of the Earth to prevent terrible destruction. If you know about Bill, of course, this is all perfectly logical…but without that knowledge, Ford doesn’t look like someone being insensitive here, he looks like someone suffering from severe paranoid delusions, possibly having some kind of psychotic episode. Either way, it’s quite obvious there’s something…Very Wrong. 

But then we get back to the theme, boys: communication. Do some of that sometime, won’t you? I mean, you’ve tried everything else, you might as well give this a shot, yeah?

(In real terms, though…this scene is one of the painfully realistic ones. Neither party is thinking straight; for various reasons, neither party may be capable of thinking straight for a sustained amount of time. As an adult who’s seen some Stuff, Stan realizes that there is something…wrong…here…but even leaving aside how frightening it would be to find a relative in that state, and how much you’d try to deny it was as bad as it was by analogizing it to Caryn on a caffeine overdose, this is just Not Something Stan Is Remotely Equipped To Deal With, and wouldn’t really be equipped to deal with even if he didn’t have so many issues of his own. We don’t know how long he’s been traveling, but traveling will wear you out quick enough, and we know the state Ford was in. Neither of them was in anything like any condition to control his temper well even if either had had a better track record than they do, and so, you’ve got two people with anger issues who are playing with incomplete decks here, and who have a lot of personal history…one starts talking over the other, they’re exchanging shots now instead of actually discussing the issue, then next thing you know…yeah. I’ve never actually had it come to blows, but I’ve had a lot of arguments with relatives which played out depressingly similarly, where you’re trying to make a point and the other person jumps in with something else and next thing you know, neither of you is talking about the original subject at all anymore, you’re yelling about something seemingly unrelated. Or possibly even two totally different subjects at once, even though both of you think you’re on the same topic. That’s always…fun….) 

37) I know I was defending Backupsmore a few items ago, but, uh…they didn’t have a single lab safety class in there, Ford? And/or they let you in the lab after you failed one in epic fashion? Cause everything about this screams “I never read the lab safety rules in my life!” 

38) I also have to wonder if…more than just errors that are attributable to Ford being bad at lab safety was at work here, though. Fiddleford put half a foot over the safety line and got sucked in; Stan ran over it and almost to the base of the thing without it affecting him even as Ford, in the same moments, a) could throw a book hard enough to overcome the gravity suspension but b) could not stop himself from going through the Portal. 

39) “That’ll be 99 cents.” Ways You Know This Was Set Before I Was Born….

40) Y’know, I never realized it, but…Lazy Susan changed the course of history. Stan presumably would have either left the store without buying anything or (it is Stan, after all) tried to punch Ma Duskerton in the face before running out the door with the loaf of bread in question if Susan hadn’t happened to mistake him for Ford…and then Toby and Blubbs started telling stories about the “mysterious science guy”’s reputation…and next thing you know, Stan has created the basic idea for the Mystery Shack out of pure desperation. If that hadn’t happened, then nothing else in canon could have proceeded to happen: Stan would probably be dead or permanently in prison by now, Ford would have mysteriously disappeared without a trace when the Northwest Realty people finally came to knock down the door to demand overdue mortgage payments, and Dipper and Mabel would never have come to town. Aside from issues of prophecy and destiny and all that, there’s also just how it’s implied this is the first time Dipper’s had friends…basically ever. They both do a lot of personal growth over that summer, especially him, which they wouldn’t have had otherwise. All because of Lazy Susan, of all people. 

41) 1982. Bread costs 99 cents per loaf. And they all just forked over fifteen dollars apiece. That was rather good money in those days, no wonder Stan’s eyes did that thing upon seeing it presented to him. 

41) Oh, Lazy Susan also inspired “Mr. Mystery”? Dang, Susan, you are surprisingly important! 

42) I’ve noted it before, but I’ll note it again: look at the surroundings of Stan’s mirror in the aging montage. At first, we see a bunch of papers about Stan himself. Next shot, still a lot of papers about Stan/his business, but he’s also taped a picture of himself and Ford as small children to the wall beside it - motivation, I suppose. Then in the final shot, he’s replaced his own “Employee of the ‘Month’ plaque with one declaring Soos the Employee of the Year, and where the picture of himself and Ford was, there’s now a framed photograph of Dipper and Mabel on the fishing trip. I’ll be the first to point out his occasionally questionable motives and ethics and multitude of character flaws, but credit where credit is due: man built a life for himself through genuine work (hey, making up tall tales is a valid job, what else do you call what authors do?)...and then was prepared to throw it all out the window, as he *had* to know that there were going to be…issues…with having killed off his original identity if he really did get Ford back/when Ford got back and saw the length of ‘his’ alleged rap sheet for the past thirty years. He had some personal motivations, of course (he felt guilty about what had happened; he wanted the relationship they’d had as children back; etc), but considering how much he had to lose by 2012, it’s hard not to give Stan some credit when deciding whether or not he genuinely thought he was doing the right thing. 

43) “The town. My family. Your parents. Even you kids.” Ah, this is why I assumed that Stan was just airbrushed out of the family’s collective memory after his disownment and that nobody knew he was really Stanley all those years - he lumps ‘your parents’ and ‘you kids’ together as distinct units, implying that ‘my family’ would mean his own parents and presumably the twins’ grandfather. Also, I find Ford’s expression very difficult to interpret here. 

44) And then there’s one of those moments when it’s hinted that Dipper and Stan are a lot more alike than either of them might be fully comfortable with - as soon as he’s heard the story, Dipper instantly apologizes for his…actually extremely reasonable doubts and anger in the first part of the episode. It’s not just that even Stan would have trouble believing a tale as tall as the truth of his life: it’s that Stan never told them a tale to begin with, which just left them to draw their own conclusions. I…really can’t think of a sensible interpretation Dipper could have reached other than “this guy is a murdering identity thief who isn’t related to me at all and…even if he doesn’t want to end the world, this is still probably not good, whatever he’s doing” with the evidence he had at the time, especially after the conversation in “Scaryoke” where Stan ‘fessed up to lying about the town and promised that was the end of it. It would, to some extent, be fair to be a bit upset with Stan about this even after learning the truth…but he isn’t. It really was for the family, then? Oh, ok, we’re good. 

45) I know the random utility of the totem pole is a bit contrived, but I’ll give ‘em their due: we did see in “Scaryoke” that Stan had security cameras showing the exterior of the property on monitors in the lab, so that’s actually a reasonably sensible place for some electronics to have been after all, I guess.

46) Ford admittedly did a decent enough improv job right up until he fumbled the technology, but it was a good thing Powers and Trigger were a bit dazed and confused - otherwise, they…might have noticed that his “very real report” was actually a picture of Mabel, outlined in flames and apparently laughing maniacally beneath a caption of ‘what hath science wrought?!’, considering it was in plain view of everyone for several shots there. 

47) I just realized that the timeline I established once means I almost certainly wrote three novels where Ford is stuck in his just-left-the-Portal outfit: aka, high-collared black rags that make him look a bit like a vampire that’s recently been in a knife fight. I’m…sure this did wonders for him all the times it would have helped him out to be perceived as a Respectable Sort Of Person We Should Listen To….

48) Anyone else really, really want to know what they were talking about for…at least a while, considering it was sunset (but still very much not dark at all) when Soos left the porch and full dark with stars out when it cut to the infamous mirror conversation? Especially since the fact that they were still talking fairly civilly - even joking - at that point meant that the previous conversation…probably was actually going reasonably well, or at least as well as could be expected, all things considered? 

Well, there. I did it. A Tale of Two Stans, a full reaction. It only took the entire day….

....Eh, worth it.

[randomvarious]

1994 London Playlist (YouTube)

New playlist, folks! This week I started to build a slate of songs from the year of 1994 that were made by people who, at the time, hailed from London, the most musically eclectic city in the entire world. Don't exactly know why London is the way that it is, but its broad and open embrace of acid house, club culture, and pirate radio in the late 80s and early 90s definitely set it up for massive electronic expansion on a mainstream level that seems to still go on to this very day. The US has never really had that same history of love for electronic music, and that's probably why massive metropolises like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago always feel like they're lagging behind in comparison to what London is able to spit out on a constant basis.

And you're just simply not gonna find another playlist of great London-made tunes from 1994 that are quite like this one either, because I've got some real underground electronic heaters for you all to chew on here. At some point, I plan to expand this beyond just electronic music, but for now, you get some downtempo/trip hop, some IDM, some deep house, some breakbeat hardcore, and a handful of jungle tracks too; a great smorgasbord that almost no other city could produce so readily.

But first, there are two absolute classics on here: one is from a breakbeat hardcore group called 2 Bad Mice, who dropped a brand new remix of their '92 track, "Bombscare," in 1994 that ended up catching on like total wildfire. It's a very infectious, floor-filling, breakneck raver that cycles through all these abruptly twisting-and-turning combinations of anthemic vocal samples and drum breaks that ends up yielding absolute bedlam. And there's a lot of uploads of it on YouTube too, and the one with the most views has over 370K. A mid-90s dance classic that still has the capacity to make one lose their shit.

The other is from the one and only Ashley Beedle's disco and jazzy house group, Black Science Orchestra. In '94, they dropped a 12-inch EP on the Junior Boy's Own label called Altered States, and the track that kicks off its AA-side, "New Jersey Deep," makes for some jazz-funky, outer-space-coasting, deep house grooviness. It, too, has a lot of different uploads on YouTube, and its most popular one has over 378K plays.

But other than those all-time bangers, the rest of these songs are a lot more relatively obscure. The Rapino Brothers, who are best known for making the most famous remix of Italo-dance act Corona's global 1993 smash hit, "The Rhythm of the Night," kick us off with some relaxingly chill and stringy, bleep-blooping trip hop in "Go Ahead London," a tune that has a little over 10K plays across its couple uploads; then IDM trio The Black Dog grace us with their fantastically dreamy remix of German duo Alter Ego's "Tanks Ahead," which has a little over 15.2K plays across its various uploads; and then the great Dave Angel supplies us with a piece of aquatic techno called "Artech," which I once proved lines up perfectly as the opening music for the jetskiing Nintendo game Wave Race 64. That one has somewhere around 60K total plays on YouTube.

The rest of the playlist, then, is comprised of a small handful of deep and heady jungle beasts as well as a downtempo remix of a song by a group called A Friend From Rio, who are based out of London, but make music that sounds Brazilian. The Lumen Soundsmiths remix of their song, "Para Lennon and McCartney," is an excellently lush slice of bliss that sounds like it could've fit right in on a chillout compilation that was released a decade afterwards; impressive.

This playlist is ordered as chronologically as possible and links are provided below to songs that have been posted about previously in order to give them more context:

The Rapino Brothers - "Go Ahead London" Alter Ego - "Tanks Ahead (Black Dog Mix)" 2 Bad Mice - "Bombscare '94" Black Science Orchestra - "New Jersey Deep" Zero B - "Lock Up (Counterforce Remix By DJ Crystl)" Dave Angel - "Artech" A Friend From Rio - "Para Lennon & Mccartney (Lumen Soundsmiths Remix)" Lemon D - "Deep Space (I See Sunshine) (Original Drum & Space Mix)" DJ Tamsin & The Monk - "A Better Place (Bay B Kane Remix)" DJ Crystl - "Warpdrive (Remix)"

Playlist is also on YouTube Music.

So, we've got 10 tracks that end up totaling a little over an hour. And I've got some more playlists for other London years too, if you're interested!

London: 1997 London: 1998 London: 1999

Enjoy!

More to come, eventually. Stay tuned!

Like what you hear? Follow me on Spotify and YouTube for more cool playlists and uploads!  

[deepautumncolors]

Book Review

Laura Le Quesne is a 29-year-old journalist who works for a magazine called Love Life in Great Britain. In need of some new material, she travels to the island of Jersey between England and France - where her parents met and fell in love - to do some research so she can write an article about their love story. Her father died when she was very young and her mother has also passed away, so all she has left of them are happy memories and a few sentimental items that were passed on to her. She is obsessed with the idea of meeting her soulmate and having a relationship as romantic as theirs someday.

When she arrives at her hotel room and opens her suitcase, she realizes she has accidentally taken the wrong one from the airport. Its contents belong to a man who seems like he would be the perfect match for her, so she tries to track him down. With the help of a cab driver named Ted, she eventually finds out his name is Jasper and meets up with him so they can switch their luggage. You would expect Jasper to be a total jerk because it's a romantic comedy, but it turns out he's very likable. The problem is, so is Ted. As he drives Laura around the island and acts as her tour guide over the next several days, they form a friendship that could possibly develop into something more if it were the right time, since he is just getting out of a marriage. Laura finds herself thinking about Ted whenever she's with Jasper. She has more in common with Jasper but more of a spark with Ted, although he's unavailable emotionally.

When she visits some of the places her parents had been to and meets with several of her elderly relatives, she learns that her parents' relationship and family history is not quite the same as what she had believed it to be for all these years - maybe it wasn't so romantic after all. Laura must come to terms with these new discoveries and figure out what (and who) she is truly looking for when it comes to love.

This story was so much fun to read! I really liked it. It was one of those books where I wanted to find out what happened, but I also didn't want it to end. There's an added bonus of an island map at the beginning, so you can see where Laura is throughout the book. I think one more bonus would have been to include the article she ended up writing at the end, but we don't get to read it. However, I loved the excerpts from the self-help book she was reading during her trip at the beginning of each chapter. Just like the last book I read by this author, it has some deeper themes below the surface of the love triangle.

Sophie Cousens has one other book that I haven't read yet and a new one coming out in November. I plan on reading both of them next year!

[xltribe]

XL's Featured Tribe Men Of The Week Anthony What are some of your biggest fashion obstacle? I can say not seeing the style of clothing I envisioned in my head to wear to an event or just a regular day-to-day. And then there are times I do find something in my size and the fabric always appears and feel different from the display that for me frustrates me a lot, sometimes it makes me not want to buy clothing. Luckily for me, I sometimes find similar style jeans or shirt and take them to my tailor Ingrid and she makes what I felt impossible possible. There are also times when I cannot find what I am looking for a period and I reach out to my friend Tyre Lajuan to make my idea in my head wearable. It may cost me more having things altered or made, but I know its custom to me and I will be comfortable. He is also coming out with a big and tall line be on the lookout for it. Photo By D Goodwin Where are you from and how do you describe your style? I am from a small town in New Jersey called Rahway. Rahway isn't a town where you have a heavy fashion influence. The normal footwear there was timberlands and those boots would be worn with everything through all four seasons...ha! ha! ha! As a result, I had to watch music videos on BET, MTV to keep up with trends.  What also really helped me was adventuring out to neighboring towns and NYC. Also having friends that had relatives and other friends in the entertainment industry and seeing some of them get ready with their custom suits and shirts, jackets captivated my mind and has made an appearance in some of my looks now. Being around so many diverse people and cities I picked up a lot of my style influences from them.  I would have to say my style is casual and urban. However, On a regular day, I really can be found wearing a sweat suit with Jordan's or Nike sneakers. Tell us about your biggest fashion nightmare and if it came true do explain. (attach a picture if you can) My biggest fashion nightmare is to squeeze into something that I know I shouldn't be trying to get all this Body..ody..ody..into and wear it to an event and it rips on me in front of people. That would be a nightmare for me. 1. Knowing that I know better. 2. Being that folks won't forget that and neither will social media... ha! ha! ha! Photo By Lord NC What are some things you want to see more of from your favorite brands? I would love to see brands take some ideas from my XL and up brothers and make clothing our size and stop making our clothes with the cheaper material. I feel we deserve to look good in designer labels as well and not just wear a sneaker or a shoe from them. Where do you see yourself in five years and how do you see yourself accomplishing it? I see myself graduating from grad school, married and opening my own business. I am currently working on a lot of things at the moment seeds have been planted, my focus and determination are there. How long have you been on the journey of being a Big & Tall man? What's the biggest misconception you hear about Big & Tall Guys? I have been on this journey for all of my life. My weight fluctuates all the time. My heaviest weight was 389, But where I am now is the smallest I have been in a long time. The biggest misconception I hear that we all are out of shape and are a risk for diabetes and an array of unhealthy diseases. I can stand here and say I can keep up with the best of them. And there are others that I know that can attest to this as well. If you could swap styles with one celebrity who would it be and why? I would have to say, Pharrell Williams. Pharrell Williams has always been really clean with all his looks for me and daring, I am really intrigued on how he mixes and matches pattern and colors. When I think of making a statement in urban and trendy he is the first person that comes to mind. Instagram: Epichem Below is the guy who makes my clothes WWW.TYRELAJUN.COM IG:BornBillionaire

[happynapper69-writes]

Ship: Shigaraki x Bakugou

Setting: No quirk au, Shigaraki is a third year Bakugou is a first year, short hair female bakugou. (not a fully formed plot)

Shigaraki is a bit of an otaku. He loves playing his games and he’s a little shy around others. He prefers small groups and being able to speak freely about his favorite games. The only place that he likes to go that is crowded is the arcade. He and Spinner tend to spend a lot of time there, they like to play fighting games and rhythm games.

The only thing is that he’s been bothered by is the fact that someone has been beating his records in the games at the arcade. A so called “Lord Murder”. Knocking down his scores in the rankings. But he could never catch the culprit until one day he encounters Baku banging away at the taiko drum game, getting perfects on the expert level song that he had been struggling with lately. His jaw drops as he and Spinner witness the absolute annihilation of one of the hardest songs in the game and a crowd forms around Baku. Shigaraki doesn’t get a clear look at Baku but he can see the sports jersey and the explosive blond hair. 

Baku leaves before Shigaraki is able to make it through the crowd towards her, because Shigaraki desperatly wants to talk with her. Both he and Spinner talk excitedly about the skill of the unknown first year “boy” and decide to look for her at school the next day. The two had only had a good look at Baku from behind and with the short hair, they kind of just assumed that Baku was a boy. Shigaraki desperately wants to make friends with “him”. 

Shigaraki spends most of the next days scanning the lunch room and the crowd of kids leaving school at the end of the day, hoping to catch a glimpse of the signature blond spiky hair. It doesn’t go so well because Baku had spent those days in the library instead of the lunch room preparing for a test and was staying back after school to teach her idiot friends.

They spend a couple of weeks just missing each other when Shigaraki is close to losing his mind. Spinner drags Shigaraki over to the Todoroki house to cheer up (Dabi has the biggest house). Baku had also gone to the Todoroki house to hang out with Fuyumi in the kitchen, having walked back-reluctantly-with Shouto. Shigaraki is playing Mario Kart on the tv in the living room with the rest of the gang when Baku and Fuyumi bring out the snacks. But they are all so concentrated on the screen that they don’t look back. 

Luckily, Spinner looks over at Fuyumi to thank her when screams and points at Baku, “That’s him!” They all whip around and Shigaraki drops his controller. He’s shaking terribly as he instantly recognizes Baku and he so desperately wants to greet her but now he’s contronted by the fact that his new potential friend/video game rival is a girl. The only girls that he talks to is Toga and his relatives. He can barely talk to Fuyumi. 

And so begins Shigaraki’s challenge of trying to befriend a gorgerous younger girl so that they can play games together. He falls in love with Baku when she wins a figure for him out of one of the crane games for him that he desperately wanted. (he’s bad at crane games)

[jcmarchi]

NASA-Supported Team Discovers Aurora-Like Radio Bursts Above Sunspot - Technology Org

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/nasa-supported-team-discovers-aurora-like-radio-bursts-above-sunspot-technology-org/

NASA-Supported Team Discovers Aurora-Like Radio Bursts Above Sunspot - Technology Org

A NASA-funded team of scientists has discovered long-lasting radio signals emanating from the Sun that are similar to those associated with auroras—the northern and southern lights—on Earth.

Scientists have discovered radio bursts above a sunspot resembling radio emissions from Earth’s auroras. The pink-purple streaks in this illustration represent the radio emissions, with higher-frequency radio signals in pink, closer to the sunspot, and lower frequencies in purple. The thin lines represent magnetic field lines above the sunspot. The sunspot is the dark region on the Sun at the bottom. Image credit: Sijie Yu, New Jersey Institute of Technology

Detected about 25,000 miles (40,000 km) above a sunspot – a relatively cool, dark, and magnetically active region on the Sun – such radio bursts had previously been observed only on planets and other stars.

“This sunspot radio emission represents the first detection of its kind,” said Sijie Yu of the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, who is the lead author of a paper reporting the discovery in the January 2024 issue of Nature Astronomy. The research was first published online in November 2023.

The discovery could help us better understand our own star as well as the behavior of distant stars that produce similar radio emissions.

The Sun often emits short radio bursts that last for minutes or hours. But the radio bursts Yu’s team detected, using the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico, persisted for over a week.

These sunspot radio bursts also have other characteristics – such as their spectra (or intensity at different wavelengths) and their polarization (the angle or direction of the radio waves) – that are much more like radio emissions produced in the polar regions of Earth and other planets with auroras.

On Earth (and other planets such as Jupiter and Saturn), auroras shimmer in the night sky when solar particles are caught up in the planet’s magnetic field and pulled toward the poles, where magnetic field lines converge. As they accelerate poleward, the particles generate intense radio emissions at frequencies around a few hundred kilohertz and then smash into atoms in the atmosphere, causing them to emit light as auroras.

The analysis by Yu’s team suggests the radio bursts above the sunspot are likely produced in a comparable way – when energetic electrons get trapped and accelerated by converging magnetic fields above a sunspot. Unlike Earth’s auroras, though, the radio bursts from sunspots occur at much higher frequencies – hundreds of thousands of kilohertz to roughly 1 million kilohertz. “That’s a direct result of the sunspot’s magnetic field being thousands of times stronger than Earth’s,” Yu said.

Scientists detected aurora-like radio bursts above the large, dark sunspot seen in the upper left in this image of the Sun taken on April 11, 2016, by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. Image credit: NASA/Solar Dynamics Observatory

Similar radio emissions have previously been observed from some types of low-mass stars as well. This discovery introduces the possibility that aurora-like radio emissions may originate from large spots on those stars (called “starspots”) in addition to the previously proposed auroras in their polar regions.

“The discovery excites us as it challenges existing notions of solar radio phenomena and opens new avenues for exploring magnetic activities both in our Sun and in distant stellar systems,” Yu said.

“NASA’s growing heliophysics fleet is well suited to continue to investigate the source regions of these radio bursts,” said Natchimuthuk Gopalswamy, a heliophysicist and solar radio researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “For example, the Solar Dynamics Observatory continually monitors the Sun’s active regions, which likely give rise to this phenomenon.”

In the meantime, Yu’s team plans to reexamine other solar radio bursts to see whether any appear similar to the aurora-like ones they found. “We aim to determine if some of the previously recorded solar bursts could be instances of this newly identified emission,” Yu said.

[thenomadinside]

2020 Soundtrack of Life: End of Year

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“Together Again” by Janet Jackson

It’s been ages since I last listened to or even heard a Janet Jackson song being played but this is one of those classic songs that you get hyped up when it randomly pops up. This song reappeared during lockdown when I was at my parent’s home in New Jersey when one of my friends had the initiative to get all of our friends from all over the world to participate in a full fledged lip dub. It was fun to be a part of this project that captured us all in our habitat during an unusual time, while promoting an optimistic message that we will eventually be together again post-COVID.

“Grind and Hustle” by DROELOE

Prior to jumping on my flight to Taiwan, I was contemplating on taking language courses in Taiwan and had been doing research by watching a bunch of Youtube videos on peoples experiences at the various programs offered. I came across a Youtuber that documented his experience taking a gap year after graduating from college. From his videos, it seemed a large portion of that year was spent in Taiwan where he took Mandarin classes at Shida for several months. He used this song in one of his vlogs and really enjoyed it as it was a very upbeat, motivational song.

“刻在我心底的名字” by Crowd Lu Upon completing my 15-day hotel quarantine, I reacquainting myself with things that I haven’t been able to partake in during shelter in place. At the time, I remembered feeling oddly naughty doing something as mundane as watching a movie at a theatre, knowing full well that my friends back in the States were stuck in their homes. This song blew up last year after being the feature song of a popular movie called, “Your Name Engraved Herein” that got five Golden Horse Award nominations. This song definitely helped round out the entire mood and feeling of the movie which was sentimental, romantic, and emotionally frustrating at the same time.

I generally don’t choose Taiwanese films to watch by choice as from the movies I’ve watched before, the acting usually leaves much to be desired but I was pleasantly impressed with this film. They had casted two relatively fresh leads that had great on camera chemistry and the acting felt natural and authentic to me. It was funny because after this movie and song blew up, I would constantly hear this song being played in retail stores, cafes and performances by outdoor street performers where it got almost borderline annoying.

“怪天氣” by YELLOW, 9m88 One of the things that I missed during lockdown was taking my biweekly dance classes at Alvin Ailey in New York City. When I got to Taiwan, I was looking into dance studios in my neighborhood and came across one called “Jimmy Dance Studio” through Youtube. I was sold after watching this dance video from one of their hip hip instructors that used this song in their choreography. I am a huge fan of this sort of style which is more smooth, groovy, and jazzy. In the States, I have found it really difficult to find instructors who have this style so I was pleasantly surprised to come across this on their channel. This led me to taking a few one-off classes before purchasing a class package.

“Butter” by HowZ Upon arrival, it didn’t take long before my Spotify playlist inevitably began populating with Taiwanese songs. Discovered through the radio feature on Spotify, ”Butter” by HowZ was one of the first few songs that I saved from a more local artist. I can’t say that the lyrics are particularly well written but the song is smooth and just oozing with… dare I say, butter? When I attended my first live music concert in Yuanshan, HowZ coincidentally happened to be one of the guest performers and that’s when I was able to officially put a face to the name.

“Joy” by FKJ I love all of FKJ songs because they expertly integrate jazz, groove and hip hop into their songs and it especially sounds amazing in a concert setting. I remember after taking the workshop of one of my hip hop instructors from Jimmy Dance Studio, he extended a public invitation to his students to come attend a performance in Yuanshan that he would be DJ’ing at. I was probably the only one who attended from that group he extended an invitation to but I thoroughly enjoyed it as it had a very “underground” vibe to it. This was the first concert I attended by myself and “Joy” was one of the first few songs that was played to pre-hype the crowd before the performers came on stage.

“I think too much” by Christian French At Ultra (a music festival that happened in Taiwan last year), I met these two English teachers and for one reason or another happened to be discussing a lack of authentic Mexican food in Taiwan. They recommended a decent place called ‘Twinkeyz Tacos’ that was one of the best that they’ve found in Taiwan. I ended up going the next day and happened to take a few live photos of both the food and interior design. Later in the day, I was reviewing photos and because the photos were live photos I caught of snippet of this song being played in the background. I spent an embarrassingly long time with the help of my awesome roommate from New York dissecting the lyrics to this song. I related to this song because in certain aspects of my life, I know that I can be a huge over-thinker which is a trait that I believe I’ve acquired from my mom. Over the years, I have conditioned myself to think less in the greater aspect of things because they don’t actually matter, but I related to this song because there was a lot going on in my mind at the time that provided a lot of unnecessary stress in my life.

“Never change” by enjoihu I first heard of this 18-year old independent musician when first attending one of my favorites bars in Taipei called “Draftland.” That time we went there was some sort of ongoing collaboration featuring both a local graphic artist and musician (in this case, enjoihu). I am a huge advocate of these sort of community-oriented events as they are engaging and adds a level of change to a given space which promotes retention. I remember specifically taking note of enjoihu’s playlist in the second room on the first floor and thought his mix completed the concept of that space very well and gave a rather nice ambient mood. I have since followed him on Soundcloud and I’d say his music is such a mood to me as his work is inspired by the lofi genre, and is my favorite combination of lofi, classical notes, rap and old school hip hop. In my mind, he is considered to be the Tennyson of Taiwan.

“睡不著” by 壞特 ?te This artist was one that also gained a lot of recognition from a local perspective last year and I would commonly hear her songs more often being played at local coffee shops as her style is more mellow, artistic and more suited for those sorts of chillax environments. I applaud her for being able to create such a distinct brand for herself as she never shows her face as its oftentimes hidden by an oversized sunhat. My friend once went to a dinner and told me that some relatively well known female artist with a big hat that covered her entire face was performing and I immediately knew it was her. Initially I thought it was really just her aesthetic but I eventually found out that her day time occupation is a doctor the reason why she dresses like that is because she has to conceal her identity.

“別問很可怕” by J.Sheon

This is one of my favorite songs and proud to say that I can read almost 90% of the lyrics in Chinese for this song even though I still butcher it a bit during KTV. I don’t know too much about his background but I believe J.Sheon is a ABC and has since moved to Taiwan. This was also one of the first few local songs that popped up in my music playlist and I really enjoyed it as it was melodic, easy to ingest and was very smooth. Fun fact, I heard he owns or is an investor at the bar Vine Bar in 東區

[lindsaywesker]

Good morning! I hope you slept well and feel rested? Currently sitting at my desk, in my study, attired only in my blue towelling robe, enjoying my first cuppa of the day.

Welcome to Too Much Information Tuesday.

‘Sushi’ means sour rice.

The ‘prat’ in ‘pratfall’ means ‘buttocks’.

Confidence is silent. Insecurities are loud.

69 has been sexual slang since at least 1790.

Optimists are, on average, cleverer than cynics.

Farmers get the most sex out of any profession.

The Roman Catholic Church is richer than Croatia.

People with bigger brains take more daytime naps.

Earth has lost 50% of its wildlife in the past 40 years.

In the 1870s, New York had a school for aspiring criminals.

Houses in Britain numbered 13 cost £9000 less than average.

Your immune system has the ability to kill you in 15 minutes.

Entomologist John Midgely has just discovered a fly that can’t fly.

A gender-neutral equivalent of ‘sugar daddy’ is ‘glucose guardian’.

Athletes appear larger if they wear a bigger number on their jersey.

'Playing chess with the pope' is an Icelandic euphemism for having a poo.

One in four currently charting pop songs in the UK samples an older song.

In 1805, British manufacturers made a chamber pot containing Napoleon’s head.

45% of men in the UK would be uncomfortable saying “I love you!” to a male relative.

If everyone in the world washed their hands properly, we could save one million lives a year.

Students who complete a ‘Science Of Happiness’ course are happier than those who don’t.

In 2014, a pine tree planted in memory of George Harrison died after an infestation of beetles.

When a group of people are laughing, people tend to look at the person they trust/like the most.

In 1907, French waiters went on strike for better pay, more time off and the right to have moustaches.

According to new research, Vlad The Impaler, the inspiration for Dracula, may have been vegetarian.

In 2010, McDonalds mistakenly packed and distributed 5000 Happy Meals with a condom instead of a toy.

When a drone bee mates with the queen, he releases his sperm with such force that it can cause an audible pop.

Due to their many customisation options, there are 383 billion different ways to order a latte at Starbucks.

The average woman absorbs up to five pounds of damaging chemicals a year thanks to beauty products.

Caffeine is made of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen, the same as cocaine, thalidomide, nylon, TNT and heroin.

When a woman no longer gets frustrated and upset with you, you can almost guarantee that she doesn't care anymore.

When German economist Edgar Jaffé died, D.H. Lawrence sent a letter to his widow saying he was glad Edgar was dead.

Fish from the Phallicthys genus (literally ‘penis fish’) can have phalluses as big as half their total body length. (Crikey!)

John Cena, WWE superstar, has granted more than 400 Make-A-Wish requests, more than anyone in the charity's history.

Scientists say the brain purposely forgets certain memories in order to avoid information overload and emotional hangovers.

Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, has towns called Intercourse and Paradise. It takes six minutes to get from one to the other.

Stephen Hawking once held a party for time travellers. However, nobody came because he sent out the invitation after the party.

50,000 fake PhDs are estimated to be purchased every year in the United States, while only 40,000 PhDs are earned legitimately.

Studies show that by eating a big breakfast, you won’t feel as hungry the rest of the day, which can lead to more nutritional food choices.

According to a new paper in Nature Human Behavior, opposites do not attract. Over 80% of traits in couples were rated as similar and only 3% of their traits were substantially different.

Male palm cockatoos make drumsticks out of tree branches and rhythmically tap them to attract females. When they are done drumming, they tend to throw away their drumsticks.

In 2018, robbers in Belgium were told by a shop owner that he might have more cash for them to steal if they came back at 6:30. When they returned three hours later, they were promptly arrested by police who’d been tipped off.

Some football matches are now filmed with AI-powered cameras designed to track the ball during play. Much to the annoyance of viewers, during a 2020 Inverness Caledonian Thistle vs. Ayr United match, one camera kept confusing the ball with a bald-headed linesman.

Actor Jack Nicholson grew up believing his biological mother was his sister. When his mother got pregnant at a young age, his grandmother (who he thought was his biological mother) raised him as her son. Nicholson didn't find out this information until 1974, when he was already in his thirties.

Okay, that’s enough information for one day. Have a tremendous and tumultuous Tuesday! I love you all.