#trying to find words etc etc etc

[whisperedlouis]

I just want to say abuse is also complicated.

[transsexula]

Anyways when are we gonna stop pretending this isn't about "getting back at" an imagined trans guy. Good job! You both finally recognized trans men as men, AND ignored that they are punished for being men in one sentence. Really special work happening here.

The controversy is in only considering trans men as "men" in a way to hurt them. While also in a way misgendering:

"You're only a man because I know implying you act like a cis man in all the bad ways hurts you. In reality I see you all as hysterical bitches out to hurt the rest of the trans community" isn't progressive. It's just being nasty to be nasty.

Imagine hating trans people so much you joke about wishing they all died, then make posts like this, and assume that people will still think you actually care about the trans community.

[gothicrepetitions]

Feminist Perspectives on 9/11, J. Ann Tickner

[icewindandboringhorror]

indeed my exact process once every 8 months or so

[qqueenofhades]

Kind of want to write an academic AU. Do I know for what ship/fandom? Nope. Do I have any plot besides mundane suffering and/or disturbingly specific catharsis for me? I do not. Have I written fic in ages? I have not. And yet. Here we are.

[clumsypuppy]

my favorite thing abt tagging posts is pretending to be an alien watching earth through a telescope, writing tags to help me go back and find things for reference, and then turning back to the telescope

[janamensch]

Woah Ser Valerie… There’s rose petals in the air when she fights!

[yeliuxi]

In hindsight, it was very funny I was so baffled and surprised at reviews of Qi Ye saying that this romance novel protagonist didn't really seem to have any romantic feelings for his partner. I never noticed anything. I just thought he was being more normal about it. Anyway Jing Beiyuan is aromantic because he's just like me fr

[muzzlemouths]

Does anyone have a guide to know for sure what will and won't mess with screen readers? I mostly need to know if censoring words (like this -> ███████) completely fucks with it, or if it just reads out as "redacted" or something similar.

[icewindandboringhorror]

Recent life photos

[unionizedwizard]

i find it extremely funny that my (work!! laptop!!!) version of microsoft word just. arbitrarily decides to switch back to english in the middle of a documence sometimes. we are not so different you and i..........................

[unproduciblesmackdown]

oh i've been trying to find this interview again, which i remembered mainly for the parts about [interviewing the parents which is so Interviewing The Parents] but has many fun details

The first time Will Roland auditioned for “Be More Chill,” he didn’t get the part. “It’s the reality of our business,” says the actor, whose family moved from Manhattan to Locust Valley when he was 8. “On any given day . . . you may be the person who is going to get the job and you may not be.” But let’s not feel too bad for Roland, whose theatrical trajectory is the stuff most people only dream of. At the same time he was auditioning for “Chill,” the sci-fi musical that made it to Broadway after its cast album went viral (more on that later), he was also involved with a workshop for, as he puts it, “another little show called ‘Dear Evan Hansen’.” He got cast in that show, playing Evan’s friend, Jared, a character who brings comic relief to a work that has its devastating moments. Roland looks back on his four years with the show as “an absolutely incredible experience.” The writers worked “my sense of humor, and the sardonic way I observe things” into this classic theater role of the clown, “the one who comes out and observes the ridiculousness of the situation,” says Roland, sitting in the balcony of the Lyceum Theatre where he’s rehearsing his next big Broadway gig — the lead in “Be More Chill,” which opens March 10. Obviously, everything turned out just fine for Roland, and for “Be More Chill,” a pop-rock musical based on a 2004 young adult sci-fi novel by Ned Vizzini that appeared to be dead in the water until the cast album went viral on social media. After the show played at a small theater in Red Bank, New Jersey, in 2015, “I thought it was going to be the next big thing,” says Joe Iconis, the Garden City native who wrote the music and lyrics. “There was so much momentum.” But after a review in The New York Times that “was not particularly helpful,” interest dwindled and Iconis and his partners moved on. Happily, some things are meant to be. The Red Bank theater had enough faith in the musical to order a cast album, and suddenly the fan base exploded, videos were all over YouTube and fan art appeared on Tumblr. That led to an Off-Broadway production last summer that sold out before performances started, and eventually to the Broadway run, with Roland, who is part of Iconis’ extended theatrical family, very much back in the picture.

Real people, real issues The young star was decidedly upbeat on Valentine’s Day, the afternoon following the first preview when he says those extremely vocal fans “brought some hard-core joy into this building.” Like everyone involved, he’s intrigued by the way the show took off, but really, he points out, it’s nothing more than word-of-mouth, which “just happens to be the internet right now.” On the other hand, he says, “I don’t know that word-of-mouth has ever put so much wind into the sails of a production.” When asked why the show resonates so strongly with fans, Roland says what they love about the show “is the same thing that I love about the show . . . that it is an honest depiction of real people dealing with real issues.” Roland plays Jeremy, a nerdy high schooler who never fits in until he swallows a SQUIP (a quantum computer in pill form) that has the power to turn him into one of the cool kids. There’s significant fantasy at play, says Roland, but “there is truth to every one of these characters . . . it doesn’t speak in broad, heart-rending poetry, it speaks in really human language.” Does he see himself in the character? “I think he sees himself in me a little bit,” jokes Roland, who talks about first getting involved with theater at Friends Academy in Locust Valley, which he attended from sixth grade through high school. “What they created for me, first and foremost, was a space where I found community and acceptance and belonging,” he says, which he notes, is why a lot of people start doing theater. Roland was serious about his goals “from the moment I met him,” says Tracey Foster, director of arts at Friends. “He knew what he wanted to do in life.” As the title character in “Oliver!” one of his first major roles at the school, Foster says that beyond his “big, booming, beautiful voice,” he was “touching, tender and scrappy.” (Roland’s recollection differs: “My voice was changing so it sounded really bad,” though he acknowledges that he’s “channeling a lot of those days in this performance.”) From the beginning, Foster says, Roland displayed “a wonderful combination of confidence and humility that . . . let him make mistakes and keep moving forward, pick himself up when he needed to.” Those qualities, she notes, suggest that “he’ll be able to survive the bumps in the industry.” Foster was in the audience for the first preview and naturally thought Roland was “spectacular.” But she also has raves for the production, which she first saw Off-Broadway. “They grew it up for Broadway,” she says, “in a way that was beautiful and fulfilling.”

Acting in his soul Roland’s family, of course, saw his raw talent early on. “Will sang before he spoke,” says his mom, Beth Roland, explaining that since she was a fan of “putting my child in front of a TV,” the first words out of his mouth were Big Bird’s alphabet song. Now, she says, “acting is just in him . . . it’s in his soul. I think he acts in his real life.” His dad, Bill Roland, who gets endearingly emotional when talking about watching his son onstage, has a simple response when asked about Will’s success. “Passion,” he says. For now, Roland, who turns 30 on Tuesday, is thinking less about the past than about opening night, managing the inevitable changes that Iconis and book writer Joe Tracz are throwing at the cast. He is getting married next year (check out Instagram for photos of his proposal at the ritzy but rustic Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Tarrytown). After that, who knows? “Be More Chill” could run for years, and there’s a movie in the works. No one’s called yet, but Roland says, “I would very much like to be involved.” Wisely, Roland is not thinking too far ahead. “I love doing TV and film, new plays, new movies,” he says, “really getting to put my stink into a character.” He looks forward to the day he can call his own shots and thinks at some point directing might be an option. “My dream role,” he says, admitting that he’s borrowing the thought from others, “hasn’t been written yet.”

Behind the music and lyrics “When I wrote ‘Michael in the Bathroom,’ I was writing about myself,” says Joe Iconis, the Garden City native who wrote the music and lyrics for “Be More Chill.” If you don’t have a teenager in the house, note that the runaway hit from the show has all but broken the internet (it has its own Instagram account with, at last look, more than 12,000 posts). Iconis says when he wrote the song, about a guy who locks himself in a bathroom rather than face the other kids at a Halloween party run amok, he was writing about his adult self. But, he adds, “I hoped that young people would relate to it because it is a universal thing . . . someone else is going through this, not just the character in the show.” The success of the song and the show is part of a growing Iconis moment in New York theater right now. His musical “Broadway Bounty Hunter” will get its New York City debut this summer starring Annie Golden, and the cabaret group known as Joe Iconis & Family is set for a run in April and May at Feinstein’s / 54 Below. Sitting in a balcony lobby at the Lyceum Theatre, where “Be More Chill” is in previews, Iconis talks about getting the theater bug at 6, when his dad took him to see “Little Shop of Horrors” for his birthday. “I was immediately hooked,” he says, but as he grew older he realized performing was not for him. “I was terribly scared to be on stage.” With the support of his nontheatrical family (his dad is in information technology, his mom is superintendent of the Massapequa School District), the self-described “theater nerd” focused on music and says he knew by sixth grade that he wanted to be a Broadway composer. “I was definitely the only child who could say that. Ever.” As he works toward opening night on March 10, Iconis is focusing on fine-tuning the piece (“musical changes, script changes, things we want to tighten, numbers we want to reorder and rearrange”). It’s a huge enterprise, he says, but his faith in the show grows by the minute. He calls it “the little show that could.”

[hanzajesthanza]

i was looking up tips for formatting bilingual books (for example, a copy of idk the iliad with ancient greek on one side, english translation on the other), but i didn’t know the word describing this kind of format 🤔

so i was stringing together keywords like “book with two languages” and one of the results was a reddit post with someone trying to find a book that alternates between multiple languages, i.e., there are no translations, it’s it’s one text, but half of the story is in english, then the other half, or interwoven throughout, is in french or whatever

and it took strength to not suggest the hussite trilogy 🥴

[cacaitos]

okay, i guess i will add individual arguments to the mangas selected eventually (<- no lo va a hacer al final), but i would like some peer review for these stacks.

Stack 1:

Stack 2:

[sweetevoltrap]

I should be asleep but I'm thinking about Sylus' "you can talk"...

[pynkhues]

Anon from earlier about Sam's family. Thanks for letting me know that tribe was an offensive term for the Aboriginal people. I'm not Australian and didn't know. I apologize. And yes, people were using that term on twitter when talking about it. It's all in very bad faith.

(x)

You're very welcome, anon, and I appreciate the acknowledgement. I figured it was probably the terminology being used, and you just didn't know, but it's really kind of you to own it, apologise and be open to learning.

I'm kind of a bit lucky in this sense, because I have a few Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander friends from across different Nations, and I work with a lot of First Nations people in different capacities (actors, writers and artists at the theatre company, of course, but one of my areas of specialisation as a freelance writer is in people-related safety, so I have a - - mm, I don't want to say expertise, because I think this is a space you're always learning in, but perhaps an area of qualification (?) in writing about child safety, gender-based safety in the workplace, and racial and cultural safety, particularly with First Nations people, in which I usually work with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to develop documents on what helps them to feel safe in different contexts. I've written these sorts of things for schools, health services and arts venues, so I have a lot of conversations with people in different capacities too. I'm also on the theatre I work at's Reconciliation Action Working Group, so yes! Having a lot of robust conversations every day, haha).

But yeah. It's quite telling to me that someone would stress a level of 'care' over what happened to those First Nations people while using a term that many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples would consider a slur. To do that level of research into a family Sam could possibly be related to, and then to weaponise a community while calling that community something they'd find derogatory just makes it beyond obvious what the intentions behind it are. It would take two minutes to look up any of the many, many guides that exist about this, but those communities aren't who they actually care about. They're just grist for the mill.