#universal brand development

[troglodytemignon]

Love to work in an increasingly dysfunctional and paranoid workplace

[carbonateddelusion]

THAT REMINDS ME- I need to draw another entry for the explanation posts.. I think I'll give a rundown on the two (three? sane AU Eddie isn't really his own thing) versions of Edgar and how his relationship with The Main Antagonist Dude (Eli/Jack) impacts the narrative

I'll definitely need some input from Ben for Elijah's portion, though

[jcmarchi]

Meta Gets Into AI Video Generation

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/meta-gets-into-ai-video-generation/

Meta Gets Into AI Video Generation

Movie Gen promises to generate high fidelity videos with synchronized audio.

Created Using Ideogram

Next Week in The Sequence:

Edge 337: Our series about state space models(SSM) discussed BlackMamba, a model that combines MoEs and SSMs in a single architecture. We also review teh original BlackMamba paper and the amazing SWE-Agent for solving engineering tasks.

Edge 438: We dive into DataGEmma, Google DeepMind’s recent work to ground LLMs on factual knowledge.

You can subscribe to The Sequence below:

TheSequence is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

A small self-serving note before we start 😉:

For the past year, I’ve been working on several ideas in AI evaluation and benchmarking—an area that, as many of you know, presents a massive challenge in today’s AI landscape. After experimenting with various approaches, I decided to incubate LayerLens, a new AI company focused on streamlining the evaluation and benchmarking of foundation models. This marks my third venture-backed AI project in the last 18 months. We’ve assembled a phenomenal team, with experience at companies like Google, Microsoft, and Cisco, as well as top universities. We’ve also raised a sizable pre-seed round. More details about that in the next few weeks.

We are currently hiring across the board, particularly for roles in AI research and engineering with a focus on benchmarking and evaluation. If you’re interested in this space and looking for a new challenge, feel free to reach out to me at jr@layerlens.ai. I look forward to hearing from some of you!

Now, onto today’s editorial:

📝 Editorial: Meta Gets Into AI Video Generation

I rarely write back-to-back editorials about the same company, but Meta has left me no choice. After announcing an impressive number of AI releases last week, Meta AI has just unveiled its latest work in video and audio generation with Movie Gen. Open-source generative video has long been considered a challenging space due to the high cost of pretraining models.

At its core, Movie Gen is a new suite of generative AI models from Meta that focuses on creating and editing media, including images, video, and audio, using text prompts. It represents the culmination of Meta’s prior work in generative AI, combining and improving upon elements from projects like Make-A-Scene and LLaMA Image Foundation models. Unlike previous models that targeted specific modalities, Movie Gen allows for fine-grained control across all of them, representing a significant leap forward in generative AI for media.

One of Movie Gen’s key strengths is its ability to perform various tasks across different modalities. It can generate videos from scratch using text prompts, create personalized videos by integrating a user’s image with text descriptions, and precisely edit existing videos using text commands for modifications. Additionally, Movie Gen includes an audio generation model capable of producing realistic sound effects, background music, and ambient sounds synchronized with video content.

The Movie Gen research paper is fascinating, and we’ll be discussing more details in The Sequence Edge over the next few weeks.

💎 We recommend

“I’m blown away by the high quality and value of this event.” – Ricardo B.

“Great event – worth getting up at 4am in the morning for!” – Sandy A.

“What an amazing and insightful summit!” – Madhumita R.

“I loved the presentations and was truly captivated by the depth of experience and insight shared on these panels!” – Peter K.

“Great event! Looking forward to the next one.” – Rozita A.

“Spectacular and very insightful summit! Very well done!” – Chad B.

“This has been such an amazing event.” – Rob B.

Don’t miss GenAI Productionize 2.0 – the premier conference for GenAI application development featuring AI experts from leading brands, startups, and research labs!

🔎 ML Research

Movie Gen

Meta AI published a paper introducing Movie Gen, a new set of foundation models for video and audio generation. Movie Gen can generate 1080p HD videos with synchronized audio and includes capabilities such as video editing —> Read more.

MM1.5

Apple Research published a paper unveiling MM1.5, a new family of multimodal LLMs ranging from 1B to 30B. The new models built upon its MM1 predecessor which includes quite a few modalities during model training —> Read more.

ComfyGen

Researchers from NVIDIA and Tel Aviv University published a paper detailing ComfyGen, a technique for adapting workflows to each user prompt in text to image generation. The method combines two LLMs tasks to learn from user preference data and select the appropiate workflow respectively —> Read more.

LLM Reasoning Study

Researchers from Google DeepMind and Mila published a paper studying the reasoning capabilities of different LLMs with surprising results. The paper uses grade-school math problem solving tasks as the core benchmark and showcases major gaps in LLMs across different model sizes —> Read more.

Cross Capabilities in LLMs

Meta AI and researchers from the University of Illionois published a paper studying the different types of abilities of LLMs across different tasks. They called this term cross capabilities. The paper also introduces CROSSEVAL, a benchmark for evaluating the cross capabilities of LLMs —> Read more.

Embodied RAG

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University(CMU) published a paper introducing embodied-RAG, a memory method for both navigation and language generation in embodied agents. Embodied-RAG handles semantic resolutions across different environments —> Read more.

LLaVA-Critic

ByteDance Research published a paper introducing LLaVA-Critic, a multimodal LLM designed to evaluate mutimodal tasks. LLaVA-Critic is trained using a large instruction dataset for evaluation across different scenarios —> Read more.

🤖 AI Tech Releases

Liquid Foundation Models

Liquid AI released their first set of foundation models based on a non-transformer architecture —> Read more.

Black Forest Labs API

Black Forest Labs, the image generation lab powering xAI’s Grok’s image capabilities, unveiled a new API —> Read more.

Digital Twin Catalog

Meta AI released the Digital Twin Catalog, a new dataset for 3D object reconstruction —> Read more.

Data Formulator

Microsoft open sourced the next version of Data Formulator, a project for designing chart interfaces using language —> Read more.

Canvas

OpenAI announced Canvas, a new interface to interact with ChatGPT —> Read more.

🛠 Real World AI

AI at Amazon Pharmacy

Amazon details some of the AI methods used to process prescriptions for Amazon Pharmacy customers —> Read more.

📡AI Radar

OpenAI announced a monster $6.6B raise at a $157B valuation.

AI audio platform ElevanLabs is raising at a $3 billion valuation.

AI coding startup Poolside raised a massive $500 million round.

Popular open source builder Pydantic, raised a $12.5 million and launched a new AI observability platform.

RAG platform Voyage announced a $28 million fundraise.

Y Combinator invested in controversial AI startup PearAI.

Series Entertainment, a gen AI game studio, raised $28 million in new funding.

Durk Kingma, who was a part of the founding team at OpenAI, joined Anthropic.

One of the leaders behind OpenAI’s Sora model has left for Google.

Oura announced its next generation smart ring.

Subnet raised $55 million for building more environmental friendly AI datacenters.

Numa, a startup that uses AI in car dealerships, raised $32 million.

Avarra raised $8 million for its AI avatar sales training platform.

Artisan raised $11.5 million for building AI sales agents.

TheSequence is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

[maharghaideovate]

Personal Branding for SCDL Distance Learning Students

This image features a stunning, multi-colored flower, symbolizing the diversity and uniqueness of personal branding. The bright, vivid colors represent the various aspects of a student’s identity that can be developed through personal branding.

[annantgyan-blog]

Registration link:- (Limited Seats)

[reasonsforhope]

Story from the Washington Post here, non-paywall version here.

Washington Post stop blocking linksharing and shit challenge.

"The young woman was catatonic, stuck at the nurses’ station — unmoving, unblinking and unknowing of where or who she was.

Her name was April Burrell.

Before she became a patient, April had been an outgoing, straight-A student majoring in accounting at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore. But after a traumatic event when she was 21, April suddenly developed psychosis and became lost in a constant state of visual and auditory hallucinations. The former high school valedictorian could no longer communicate, bathe or take care of herself.

April was diagnosed with a severe form of schizophrenia, an often devastating mental illness that affects approximately 1 percent of the global population and can drastically impair how patients behave and perceive reality.

“She was the first person I ever saw as a patient,” said Sander Markx, director of precision psychiatry at Columbia University, who was still a medical student in 2000 when he first encountered April. “She is, to this day, the sickest patient I’ve ever seen.” ...

It would be nearly two decades before their paths crossed again. But in 2018, another chance encounter led to several medical discoveries...

Markx and his colleagues discovered that although April’s illness was clinically indistinguishable from schizophrenia, she also had lupus, an underlying and treatable autoimmune condition that was attacking her brain.

After months of targeted treatments [for lupus] — and more than two decades trapped in her mind — April woke up.

The awakening of April — and the successful treatment of other people with similar conditions — now stand to transform care for some of psychiatry’s sickest patients, many of whom are languishing in mental institutions.

Researchers working with the New York state mental health-care system have identified about 200 patients with autoimmune diseases, some institutionalized for years, who may be helped by the discovery.

And scientists around the world, including Germany and Britain, are conducting similar research, finding that underlying autoimmune and inflammatory processes may be more common in patients with a variety of psychiatric syndromes than previously believed.

Although the current research probably will help only a small subset of patients, the impact of the work is already beginning to reshape the practice of psychiatry and the way many cases of mental illness are diagnosed and treated.

“These are the forgotten souls,” said Markx. “We’re not just improving the lives of these people, but we’re bringing them back from a place that I didn’t think they could come back from.” ...

Waking up after two decades

The medical team set to work counteracting April’s rampaging immune system and started April on an intensive immunotherapy treatment for neuropsychiatric lupus...

The regimen is grueling, requiring a month-long break between each of the six rounds to allow the immune system to recover. But April started showing signs of improvement almost immediately...

A joyful reunion

“I’ve always wanted my sister to get back to who she was,” Guy Burrell said.

In 2020, April was deemed mentally competent to discharge herself from the psychiatric hospital where she had lived for nearly two decades, and she moved to a rehabilitation center...

Because of visiting restrictions related to covid, the family’s face-to-face reunion with April was delayed until last year. April’s brother, sister-in-law and their kids were finally able to visit her at a rehabilitation center, and the occasion was tearful and joyous.

“When she came in there, you would’ve thought she was a brand-new person,” Guy Burrell said. “She knew all of us, remembered different stuff from back when she was a child.” ...

The family felt as if they’d witnessed a miracle.

“She was hugging me, she was holding my hand,” Guy Burrell said. “You might as well have thrown a parade because we were so happy, because we hadn’t seen her like that in, like, forever.”

“It was like she came home,” Markx said. “We never thought that was possible.”

...After April’s unexpected recovery, the medical team put out an alert to the hospital system to identify any patients with antibody markers for autoimmune disease. A few months later, Anca Askanase, a rheumatologist and director of the Columbia Lupus Center,who had been on April’s treatment team, approached Markx. “I think we found our girl,” she said.

Bringing back Devine

When Devine Cruz was 9, she began to hear voices. At first, the voices fought with one another. But as she grew older, the voices would talk about her, [and over the years, things got worse].

For more than a decade, the young woman moved in and out of hospitals for treatment. Her symptoms included visual and auditory hallucinations, as well as delusions that prevented her from living a normal life.

Devine was eventually diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, which can result in symptoms of both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. She also was diagnosed with intellectual disability.

She was on a laundry list of drugs — two antipsychotic medications, lithium, clonazepam, Ativan and benztropine — that came with a litany of side effects but didn’t resolve all her symptoms...

She also had lupus, which she had been diagnosed with when she was about 14, although doctors had never made a connection between the disease and her mental health...

Last August, the medical team prescribed monthly immunosuppressive infusions of corticosteroids and chemotherapy drugs, a regime similar to what April had been given a few years prior. By October, there were already dramatic signs of improvement.

“She was like ‘Yeah, I gotta go,’” Markx said. “‘Like, I’ve been missing out.’”

After several treatments, Devine began developing awareness that the voices in her head were different from real voices, a sign that she was reconnecting with reality. She finished her sixth and final round of infusions in January.

In March, she was well enough to meet with a reporter. “I feel like I’m already better,” Devine said during a conversation in Markx’s office at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, where she was treated. “I feel myself being a person that I was supposed to be my whole entire life.” ...

Her recovery is remarkable for several reasons, her doctors said. The voices and visions have stopped. And she no longer meets the diagnostic criteria for either schizoaffective disorder or intellectual disability, Markx said...

Today, Devine lives with her mother and is leading a more active and engaged life. She helps her mother cook, goes to the grocery store and navigates public transportation to keep her appointments. She is even babysitting her siblings’ young children — listening to music, taking them to the park or watching “Frozen 2” — responsibilities her family never would have entrusted her with before her recovery.

Expanding the search for more patients

While it is likely that only a subset of people diagnosed with schizophrenia and psychotic disorders have an underlying autoimmune condition, Markx and other doctors believe there are probably many more patients whose psychiatric conditions are caused or exacerbated by autoimmune issues...

The cases of April and Devine also helped inspire the development of the SNF Center for Precision Psychiatry and Mental Health at Columbia, which was named for the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, which awarded it a $75 million grant in April. The goal of the center is to develop new treatments based on specific genetic and autoimmune causes of psychiatric illness, said Joseph Gogos, co-director of the SNF Center.

Markx said he has begun care and treatment on about 40 patients since the SNF Center opened. The SNF Center is working with the New York State Office of Mental Health, which oversees one of the largest public mental health systems in America, to conduct whole genome sequencing and autoimmunity screening on inpatients at long-term facilities.

For “the most disabled, the sickest of the sick, even if we can help just a small fraction of them, by doing these detailed analyses, that’s worth something,” said Thomas Smith, chief medical officer for the New York State Office of Mental Health. “You’re helping save someone’s life, get them out of the hospital, have them live in the community, go home.”

Discussions are underway to extend the search to the 20,000 outpatients in the New York state system as well. Serious psychiatric disorders, like schizophrenia, are more likely to be undertreated in underprivileged groups. And autoimmune disorders like lupus disproportionately affect women and people of color with more severity.

Changing psychiatric care

How many people ultimately will be helped by the research remains a subject of debate in the scientific community. But the research has spurred excitement about the potential to better understand what is going on in the brain during serious mental illness...

Emerging research has implicated inflammation and immunological dysfunction as potential players in a variety of neuropsychiatric conditions, including schizophrenia, depression and autism.

“It opens new treatment possibilities to patients that used to be treated very differently,” said Ludger Tebartz van Elst, a professor of psychiatry and psychotherapy at University Medical Clinic Freiburg in Germany.

In one study, published last year in Molecular Psychiatry, Tebartz van Elst and his colleagues identified 91 psychiatric patients with suspected autoimmune diseases, and reported that immunotherapies benefited the majority of them.

Belinda Lennox, head of the psychiatry department at the University of Oxford, is enrolling patients in clinical trials to test the effectiveness of immunotherapy for autoimmune psychosis patients.

As a result of the research, screenings for immunological markers in psychotic patients are already routine in Germany, where psychiatrists regularly collect samples from cerebrospinal fluid.

Markx is also doing similar screening with his patients. He believes highly sensitive and inexpensive blood tests to detect different antibodies should become part of the standard screening protocol for psychosis.

Also on the horizon: more targeted immunotherapy rather than current “sledgehammer approaches” that suppress the immune system on a broad level, said George Yancopoulos, the co-founder and president of the pharmaceutical company Regeneron.

“I think we’re at the dawn of a new era. This is just the beginning,” said Yancopoulos."

-via The Washington Post, June 1, 2023

[shivasigma]

Right from monitoring an understudy's participation to creating stylish report cards with a solitary snap, school the board programming let schools play out countless undertakings with the force of computerization. Guardians can without much of a stretch monitor their ward's presentation and take care of their scholarly necessities. Also, school the board situation have properly supplanted the conventional strategy for information the executives with pen and register, accordingly decreasing the chance of blunders all the while. Moreover, a ton of use and time is saved, allowing the school to staff perform more work in a lesser measure of time and that too with higher exactness.

[gothhabiba]

The 2023 Barbie film is a commercial. I’m sure it will be fun, funny, delightful, and engaging. I will watch it, and I’ll probably even dress up to go to the theater. Barbie is also a film made by Mattel using their intellectual property to promote their brand. Not only is there no large public criticism of this reality, there seems to be no spoken awareness of it at all. I’m sure most people know that Barbie is a brand, and most people are smart enough to know this and enjoy the film without immediately driving to Target to buy a new Barbie doll. After all, advertising is everywhere, and in our media landscape of dubiously disclosed User Generated Content and advertorials, at least Barbie is transparently related to its creator. But to passively accept this reality is to celebrate not women or icons or auteurs, but corporations and the idea of advertising itself. Public discourse around Barbie does not re-contextualize the toy or the brand, but in fact serves the actual, higher purpose of Barbie™: to teach us to love branding, marketing, and being consumers.

[...] The casting of Gerwig’s Barbie film shows that anyone can be a Barbie regardless of size, race, age, sexuality. Barbie is framed as universal, as accessible; after all, a Barbie doll is an inexpensive purchase and Barbiehood is a mindset. Gerwig’s Barbie is a film for adults, not children (as evidenced by its PG-13 rating, Kubrick references, and soundtrack), and yet it manages to achieve the same goals as its source material: developing brand loyalty to Barbie™ and reinforcing consumerism-as-identity as a modern and necessarily empowering phenomenon. Take, for example, “Barbiecore,” an 80s-inspired trend whose aesthetic includes not only hot pink but the idea of shopping itself. This is not Marx’s theory on spending money for enjoyment, nor can it even be critically described as commodity fetishism, because the objects themselves bear less semiotic value compared to the act of consumption and the identity of “consumer.”

[...] Part of the brilliance of the Barbie brand is its emphasis on having fun; critiquing Barbie’s feminism is seen as a dated, 90s position and the critic as deserving of a dated, 90s epithet: feminist killjoy. It’s just a movie! It’s just a toy! Life is so exhausting, can’t we just have fun? I’ve written extensively about how “feeling good” is not an apolitical experience and how the most mundane pop culture deserves the most scrutiny, so I won’t reiterate it here. But it is genuinely concerning to see not only the celebration of objects and consumer goods, but the friendly embrace of corporations themselves and the concept of intellectual property, marketing, and advertising. Are we so culturally starved that insurance commercials are the things that satiate our artistic needs?

— Charlie Squire, “Mattel, Malibu Stacy, and the Dialectics of the Barbie Polemic.” evil female (Substack), 2023.

[lucysarah-c]

Hange introduced them. Y/N had been taken on as a PhD student under Hange's research team at the university. As an exchange student, she didn't know many people. Hange, ever the connector, quickly introduced them. The reason for the introduction eluded Y/N, but she didn’t give it much thought. Hange was an outgoing extrovert, and Y/N concluded that this was just part of their role as Levi’s extroverted friend.

It didn’t take long for Y/N and Levi to become more than just acquaintances who met at Hange's birthday party. Y/N didn’t make much fuss about it; Levi was a couple of years older than her, had graduated with honors, and was in a much better financial position than a PhD student. He also fucked like a beast, an important detail.

They didn’t talk much about their arrangement; it developed organically. Y/N would tell her friends that they were just two adults getting to know each other, enjoying the sweaty, steamy encounters in the meantime. While Y/N hadn’t been to many frat parties, she quickly concluded that if she and Levi ever parted ways from their purely physical arrangement, it would be hard to find someone who could do half of what he did.

It was obvious that Hange was aware of this, as they didn’t even try to hide it. Y/N sometimes wished Hange would be a bit less enthusiastic about knowing her personal life, or at least try to maintain a certain level of professionalism.

Levi was very reserved about his personal life, even though they usually met at his house. Overall, he was a calm, dedicated, and pleasant addition to her life. She brought him an expensive tea brand as a gift for all the times he had driven her home, even when it wasn’t necessary.

That day, Levi had come back from a business trip and had invited her over. They had a couple of glasses of wine that he brought from his trip. She was riding him over their clothes, the friction delicious as she gyrated her hips slowly. His hands gripped and raised her shirt slightly, kneading the skin under his fingers as he kissed her collarbones and descended to leave hickeys between her breasts.

The outline of his hardening cock on the side of his trousers was delicious against her covered folds, promising more but giving just the right amount of friction to drive her crazy. Her head was thrown back as one hand rested on his knee and the other on his shoulder for leverage. She softly gasped his name as he undid each little button before unclipping her bra from behind to finally raise it and suck and play with her nipples.

"Ah—Levi!" she moaned, and it was obvious by the way his hands gripped her ass that he had been needy, wishing to come back to her.

"Did that cute little pussy of yours miss my cock inside it?" he groaned with a smirk in his tone.

"Ah—" she was about to reply, but a playful snap on her ass made her jolt. Not painful enough to be uncomfortable but with enough strength. Then she froze in place, her whole body tensed.

Levi must have sensed the change in her attitude because his face, which was buried between her tits, parted and looked up at her. His lips still had a bit of saliva connected to her nipple. "You ok?"

She straightened up, feeling uncomfortable. "I—uh—I need to use the bathroom," she muttered before raising herself from his lap.

"Ah… sure, under the stairs, you know where it is," Levi replied, but she was already walking there and closing the door behind her. Her absence made him uneasy; he began to wonder if he had crossed a line unknowingly as he straightened his posture in his seat and locked eyes on the bathroom door.

"Shit—" she cursed under her breath as she realized what had happened. There was a clear red stain on her underwear. Her period had come early, at the worst possible time. They had been teasing each other about what they would do once he came back from his trip. She paced around the small guest bathroom, unsure. "I left him with his cock hard on the couch…"

There was no real reason for her to feel so ashamed or anxious. She should just tell him and promise to make it up to him later. They were both adults; he should understand.

Two subtle knocks at the door interrupted her thoughts. "Y/N, you ok in there?"

"Yes! I—uh," why was it so hard to say? Her cheeks burned with embarrassment. "Could you bring me my purse, please?"

She expected to hear Levi’s footsteps on the polished wood floor, but instead, he replied almost immediately, "If you need tampons or pads, there’s a basket with them on top of the toilet."

Turning around slowly, she saw the basket with a collection of different feminine hygiene products. Initially, she wondered why she had never noticed them. As she grabbed one, she couldn’t help but smile softly. It was a rather cute gesture. 'How many girls do you bring over that you have this?'

Quickly shaking off the thought, she reminded herself that they didn’t have that type of relationship, so he was free to do as he pleased, even if the idea spread inside her like boiling jealousy. 'He's a great catch… only you are the idiot thinking he doesn’t have others.'

She came out of the restroom, feeling how the mood had shifted to something uncomfortable—or maybe that was just her perception. Levi was casually putting away the snacks and glasses they had used, cleaning up. He looked at her from the corner of his eye as he continued washing the dishes. "You still need your purse?"

"No, thank you," she quickly replied, feeling like she was wasting oxygen. The moment made her reconsider if casual relationships were for her. She felt as if, by not delivering the sex they both agreed on, she was just annoying him with her presence. They could still have sex if he was into it, but she wasn’t feeling it. The cramps were starting to kick in too. "I’ll get going."

Levi, drying his hands, looked back at her slightly confused. "I was about to offer we order something to eat since I came back and still need to do the grocery shopping," he explained, surprising her deeply. "But if you want to go, I can drive you. It’s not too late; I could still go to the supermarket."

He seemed so unfazed, unbothered.

"I’ll take an Uber; it’s fine," she insisted. "I don’t want to be a bother."

Levi, who was unloading the dishwasher, paused. "I’m inviting you, moron. If you were a bother, I wouldn’t be offering for you to stay."

The plan seemed lovely: staying in his big cozy house outside the city because Levi insisted downtown and all its noise annoyed him, eating something tasty, having him spoil her rotten. It seemed too good to be true. The next words slipped out without intention, revealing her thoughts.

"We don’t have that type of relationship."

It dropped like a bomb. The silence was overwhelming, feeling like it lasted hours. Levi put the final dish away, his fingers lingering on the countertop door a bit longer. His lips pressed together, and from the outside, he appeared as stoic as ever.

"We could… if you want."

Adult relationships can be so complicated. Both looked at each other. "If you know what I mean," was implied by both their expressions. It felt so ridiculous, as if junior high relationships were easier than this. "Not to sound too needy, too desperate, set too many rules, be too insistent."

A smile crept onto her face, and she felt like a little girl with a crush. "I think I do."

He tried to wash off the enthusiasm. "Great, so… choose what you want to eat, and I’ll give you my card."

"You choose what to watch?" she asked as she took her phone out to select dinner.

"Yeah, sure."

Later, cuddling in bed and watching a cheesy Netflix show that made them wonder who funded such a production but continued watching because there was nothing better on, she had a question. Levi’s cat purred between his legs as she rested her head on his right shoulder.

"Why do you have all those pads in your bathroom?" she asked, genuinely curious.

Levi looked back at her momentarily before calmly saying, "Isabel, she's… like my little sister. I adopted her when she was little." He began to explain but realized it was hard to tell the complete story without some details. "Her friends and she, in middle school, would start to get their periods and be too ashamed to ask me for pads or tampons. So, I decided to set up a basket so they could grab what they needed. Over time, it became a routine."

"Wait," she sat up straight, "she lives here? What if she sees us?"

"Chill, she’s at college. She’s in her first year."

"Aww, well, it seems like you were a 'cool mom,'" she joked, making a Mean Girls reference.

Levi grimaced uneasily and then admitted, almost ashamed, "Not really… but I promised a friend that I would give her more freedom."

"Oh…"

(I don't know what this is, I just got an idea and decided to write it. That's all)

Link to my masterlist and my other works if you feel like checking them out. Tags!: @nube55 @justkon @notgoodforlife @nmlkys @humanitys-strongest-bamf @quillinhand @thoreeo @darkstarlight82 @angelofthor @aomi04 @levisbrat25 @l3visthighs @hum4n-wr3ckag3 @hannieslovebot @starrylevi @rithty @mariaace @ackrmntea @emilyyyy-08 @levisfavoriteteashop @katestrophes @levistealeaf @an-ever-angry-bi @youre-ackermine @fxnnyackerman @secretmoneybearvoid @trashblackrainbow @flxrartsstuff @katharinasdiaryy @kikarouflames @levisecretgfblog @searriously @blackdxggr @ackermanswifee @abiatackerman @braunsbabe @moonchild-12345 @levicansteponme Wanna join my tag list? Here!

[starleska]

i think ‘Big’ Jack Horner is Disney, and here’s why

many of us have had the pleasure of seeing the incredible Puss in Boots: The Last Wish by now, and were blown away by its clever writing, enchanting animation and emotional character arcs. yet there is one character who booted the trend of having a reason for his behaviour, and outright refused to experience any growth whatsoever.

let’s talk about ‘Big’ Jack Horner, and why i think he’s supposed to represent Disney:

‘Big’ Jack Horner isn’t just an antagonist in The Last Wish - he’s a villain. a self-obsessed, exploitative, murderous, petty, cruel bastard of a man whose awful behaviour isn’t just motivated by personal slights or childhood trauma: he sincerely enjoys hurting other people. whether it’s cheating his goons (’The Serpent Sisters’) out of a fair payment for their services or being excited about shooting a puppy in the face, there’s no denying that Jack delights in causing others pain and suffering. but what does he have to do with Disney?

let’s answer that question with another question: do you think that Jack, when placed next to the other antagonists - Goldi, The Three Bears, even Death - sticks out like a sore, plum-coloured thumb?

of course he does! but why? well, let’s look at Jack on a surface level. Jack is a monolith of a human being. not only is he physically huge and intimidating, he is the inheritor of an enormous pastry fortune and operates in the manner of a mob boss, with countless resources and a whole variety of powerful magical items at his disposal. indeed, Jack employs a crack team of bakers/assassins called ‘The Baker’s Dozen’ to carry out many of his tasks. although Jack does harm others himself, it is because of these resources - including the people who work for him - that he is able to bypass many of the obstacles faced by our protagonists in an honest and character-developing way (e.g., the Pocket Full O’Posies in The Dark Forest). Jack doesn’t need to have a character arc the way the other characters do, because he is so wealthy and owns so much.

but Jack’s reason for owning so much and being obsessed with magic and magical items isn’t through intellectual curiosity, or a traumatic backstory where he needed to learn how to wield magic. do you know what Jack’s covert motivation for owning all of the magic in the world is?

it’s money.

when we get the flashback of Jack’s childhood, dancing for the entertainment of an audience using his nursery rhyme, we see him becoming jealous of Pinocchio - and we see Gepetto in the back, absolutely raking in the cash. if we consider this flashback as that crucial moment within which Jack decided to become what he is today - and the presence of our off-brand Jiminy Cricket inclines us to think so - then we can understand that Jack decided that from that moment forward, he would own all of the magic. 

let’s go back to The Baker’s Dozen for a moment. this team of highly-competent, multidisciplinary artisans do everything for Jack, whether it’s baking the pies which make him rich, or laying down their lives at his service. we aren’t given an in-universe reason for why they do this. yes, Jack is feared, but he is still the subject of mockery due to his humble beginnings as a nursery rhyme character. it certainly isn’t due to being treated or paid well. however, if we view the Baker’s Dozen as a metaphor for overworked, exploited artists whose views are routinely dismissed by the money-hungry, powerful corporation who owns their craft...things start to add up, don’t they? considering historic allegations of worker abuse at the hands of Disney, having Jack Horner literally step on their spines and encourage them to flex takes on a whole different meaning. 

it doesn’t end there. do you recognise the items that Jack pulls out of his Mary Poppins bag when his Baker’s Dozen are being destroyed by the Pocket Full O’Posies - the items that he calls ‘the big guns’? it’s the broomstick from Fantasia, the spinning wheel from Sleeping Beauty, the size snacks from Alice in Wonderland, and a knock-off Jiminy Cricket from Pinocchio - all references to some of Disney’s earliest and most famous films.

still don’t believe me? well, let’s recap more of the items Jack has in his repertoire:

a hook-hand (referencing Captain Hook in Peter Pan)

a trident (referencing King Triton in The Little Mermaid)

poison apple bombs (referencing The Evil Queen in Snow White)

a glass slipper (again referencing Cinderella)

remember what happens when the knock-off Jiminy Cricket (interesting that there are so many Pinocchio references specifically, huh?) is horrified that Jack is losing so many men? Jack says he isn’t worried about losing the manpower, because he has a bottomless bag full of magical weapons. Jack literally gets his power off of the backs of his workers. sounds a lot like a big company justifying worker layoffs and exploitation because they have so many properties and are too big to fail, doesn’t it? 

hell, Jack doesn’t even know what half of these items do! when he’s using the unicorn horns as ammo, he is surprised that they cause people to explode in a shower of confetti. viewing Jack through this lens, it’s difficult not to think about enormous corporations gobbling up properties and churning out content with little to no regard for their artists (looking back at The Baker’s Dozen - some of whom do perish in the fight with the unicorn horns) or what the properties are about. we haven’t even touched on Jack coveting the Wishing Star, a recurring motif in countless Disney movies as representing magic, dreams, and boundless creativity. 

now, i hear you saying, ‘but Star! why would DreamWorks bother writing their bad guy as a metaphor for Disney?’ believe it or not, this isn’t the first time that DreamWorks have done this. in case you didn’t know, Lord Farquaad is a caricature of Michael Eisner, former chairman and CEO of The Walt Disney Company. the production of Shrek was actually quite troubled; animators who were perceived as having failed on other projects were ‘Shreked’, or sent to work on Shrek, instead of working on other (presumed to be more lucrative) films. of course, DreamWorks was co-founded by previous Disney CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, hence the animosity towards Disney and its works evident in the Shrek franchise. this is what formed the story of Shrek: an ugly, crude outsider character taking on the clean-cut moralising of a dictator hell-bent on a so-called ‘perfect’ world, all created against the creative backdrop of a painful separation from Disney and a great deal of pent-up rage. 

the irreverent, crass and sometimes adult humour of Shrek was a middle finger to Disney’s high-censorship control on animation. this is why Lord Farquaad (which you may have noticed sounds a bit like ‘Fuckwad’) is so obsessed with Duloc being ‘perfect’, and why he couldn’t stand the freedom of the fairy tale creatures who are the heroes of the first Shrek movie.

in fact, this kind of meta-commentary permeates the Shrek franchise: 

The Fairy Godmother from Shrek 2, despite being a fairy tale creature herself, is highly prejudiced against characters who break out of their perceived social norms: i.e., Shrek marrying Princess Fiona and getting his Happily Ever After. she is an expansion of the control left over by Lord Farquaad, and rich because of her monopolisation of fairy tale creatures and their stories. 

Prince Charming in Shrek the Third fails miserably to capitalise on these themes, but we’ll get back to him! 

Rumpelstiltskin from Shrek Forever After tackles the gluttony of franchise reboots, and how soulless and rooted in corporate greed attempts to reboot often are. whilst not necessarily Disney-specific, Shrek Forever After follows the box office bomb that was Shrek the Third: a movie which noticeably fails to write a compelling narrative approaching any of the themes of the previous two films. the writers learned from their mistakes and wrote a movie which satirised their own selling-out of the franchise, becoming hollow and unnecessary and ‘perfect’ - the very thing they were making fun of in the earlier Shrek films.

there is one more area i’d like to touch on: Jack Horner’s source material. we know that Little Jack Horner is quite obscure: an 18th-century English nursery rhyme involving a boy who pulls a plum out of a pie with his thumb, and congratulates himself for his fortitude. but did you know that from its earliest conception, Little Jack Horner was associated with foolishness and dishonesty?

it’s true: the simple yet inexplicable nature of the poem was lambasted for being infantile, and quickly became the subject of revision, moralisation, and even political satire. it is no mistake that to ‘be under one’s thumb’ (as many of the characters in The Last Wish are to Jack, both literally and figuratively) means to be under one’s decisive control. the choice of Jack Horner for the villain of The Last Wish is a clever one, because we could easily have ended up with a sympathetic Jack, whose ostracisation as ‘not even a fairy tale’ may have led to a justifiable motive, even for his specific brand of cruelty. but instead, the writers of The Last Wish have gone one step further; they’ve transformed a source affiliated with idiocy and deception into a metaphor for a global multimedia conglomerate...all while portraying him as simultaneously terrifying, powerful, and ridiculous. 

it has been over a decade since Shrek Forever After was released, and Disney has changed dramatically in that time. a global giant, Disney now owns more enormous money-making properties than ever thought possible, and consistently capitalises on nostalgia for its early properties to make more money and accumulate power. since breaking out of its exclusive licensing agreement with Disney in 2016, DreamWorks has had no official connection to Disney, making the ground for mockery and satirisation of the company which spawned the studio all the more fertile. ‘Big’ Jack Horner is not just a glamorous return to form for the dreadful, unapologetically evil villain which Disney has eschewed in modern times - he’s a hulking, egocentric monster whose avarice rivals that only of the corporation he’s inspired by. 

and those are my thoughts on ‘Big’ Jack Horner! of course this is by no means the definitive interpretation - we should all just have fun with the movie and come up with whatever theories we like 🥰💖 i’d love to hear your thoughts on him and The Last Wish in general - he’s definitely one of my favourite bad guys to be released in the past few years!

thanks so much for reading, and have yourselves a wonderful day 🥰

[mrs-stans]

Sebastian Stan Tells All: Becoming Donald Trump, Gaining 15 Pounds and Starring in 2024’s Most Controversial Movie

By Daniel D'Addario

Sebastian Stan Variety Cover Story

It started with the most famous voice on the planet, the one that just won’t shut up.

Sebastian Stan, in real life, sounds very little like Donald Trump, whom he’s playing in the new film “The Apprentice.” Sure, they share a tristate accent — Stan has lived in the city for years and attended Rutgers University before launching his career — but he speaks with none of Trump’s emphasis on his own greatness. Trump dwells, Stan skitters. Trump attempts to draw topics together over lengthy stem-winders (what he recently called “the weave”), while Stan has a certain unwillingness to be pinned down, a desire to keep moving. It takes some coaxing to bring Stan, a man with the upright bearing and square jaw of a matinee idol, to speak about his own process — how hard he worked to conjure a sense Trump, and how he sought to bring out new insights about America’s most scrutinized politician.

“I think he’s a lot smarter than people want to say about him,” Stan says, “because he repeats things consistently, and he’s given you a brand.” Stan would know: He watched videos of Trump on a loop while preparing for “The Apprentice.” In the film, out on Oct. 11, Stan plays Trump as he moves from insecure, aspiring real estate developer to still insecure but established member of the New York celebrity firmament.

We’re sitting over coffee in Manhattan. Stan is dressed down in a black chore coat and black tee, yet he’s anything but a casual conversation partner. He rarely breaks eye contact, doing so only on the occasions when he has something he wants to show me on his iPhone (cracked screen, no case). In this instance, it’s folders of photos and videos labeled “DT” and “DT PHYSICALITY.”

“I had 130 videos on his physicality on my phone,” Stan says. “And 562 videos that I had pulled with pictures from different time periods — from the ’70s all the way to today — so I could pull out his speech patterns and try to improvise like him.” Stan, deep in character, would ad-lib entire scenes at director Ali Abbasi’s urging, drawing on the details he’d learned from watching Trump and reading interviews to understand precisely how to react in each moment.

“Ali could come in on the second take and say, ‘Why don’t you talk a little bit about the taxes and how you don’t want to pay?’ So I had to know what charities they were going to in 1983. Every night I would go home and try not only to prepare for the day that was coming, but also to prepare for where Ali was going to take this.”

Looking at Stan’s phone, among the endless pictures of Trump, I glimpse thumbnails of Stan’s own face perched in a Trumpian pout and videos of the actor’s preparation just aching to be clicked — or to be stored in the Trump Presidential Library when this is all over in a few months, or in 2029, or beyond.

“I started to realize that I needed to start speaking with my lips in a different way,” Stan says. “A lot of that came from the consonants. If I’m talking, I’m moving forward.” On film, Stan shapes his mouth like he can’t wait to get the plosives out, puckering without quite tipping into parody. “The consonants naturally forced your lips forward.”

“If he did 10% more of what he did, it would become ‘Saturday Night Live,’” Abbasi says. “If he did 10% less, then he’s not conjuring that person. But here’s the thing about Sebastian: He’s very inspired by reality, by research. And that’s also the way I work; if you want to go to strange places, you need to get your baseline reality covered very well.”

A little later, Stan passes me the phone again to show me a selfie of him posing shirtless and revealing two sagging pecs and a bit of a gut. He’s pouting into a mirror. If his expression looks exaggerated, consider that he was in Marvel-movie shape before stepping into the role of the former president; the body transformation happened rapidly and jarringly. Trump’s size is a part of the film’s plot — as Trump’s sense of self inflates, so does he. In a rush to meet the shooting deadline for “The Apprentice,” Abbasi asked Stan, “How much weight can you gain?”

“You’d be surprised,” Stan tells me. “You can gain a lot of weight in two months.” (Fifteen pounds, to be exact.)

Now he’s back in fighting form, but the character has stayed with him. After years of playing second-fiddle agents of chaos — goofball husbands to Margot Robbie’s and Lily James’ characters in “I, Tonya” and Hulu’s “Pam & Tommy,” surly frenemy to Chris Evans’ Captain America in the Marvel franchise — Stan plunged into the id of the man whose appetites have reshaped our world. He had to have a polished enough sense of Trump that he could improvise in character, and enough respect for him to play him as a human being, not a monster.

It’s one of two transformations this year for Stan — and one that might give a talented actor that most elusive thing: a brand of his own. He’s long been adjacent enough to star power that he could feel its glow, but he hasn’t been the marquee performer. While his co-stars have found themselves defined by the projects he’s been in — from “Captain America” and “I, Tonya” back to his start on “Gossip Girl” — he’s spent more than a decade in the public eye while evading being defined at all.

This fall promises to be the season that changes all that: Stan is pulling double duty with “The Apprentice” and “A Different Man” (in theaters Sept. 20), in which he plays a man afflicted with a disfiguring tumor disorder who — even when presented with a fantastical treatment that makes him look like, well, Sebastian Stan — can’t be cured of ailments of the soul. For “A Different Man,” Stan won the top acting prize at the Berlin Film Festival; for “The Apprentice,” the sky’s the limit, if it can manage to get seen. (More on that later.)

One reason Stan has largely evaded being defined is that he’s never the same twice, often willing to get loopy or go dark in pursuit of his characters’ truths. That’s all the more true this year: In “The Apprentice,” he’s under the carapace of Trumpiness; in “A Different Man,” his face is hidden behind extensive prosthetics.

“In my book, if you’re the good-looking, sensitive guy 20 movies in a row, that’s not a star for me,” says Abbasi, who compares Stan to Marlon Brando — an actor eager to play against his looks. “You’re just one of the many in the factory of the Ken dolls.”

This fall represents Stan’s chance to break out of the toy store once and for all. His Winter Soldier brought a jolt of evil into Captain America’s world, and his Jeff Gillooly was the devil sitting on Tonya Harding’s shoulder. Now Stan is at the center of the frame, playing one of the most divisive characters imaginable. So he’s showing us where he can go. The spotlight is his, and so is the risk that comes with it.

Why take such a risk?

The script for “The Apprentice,” which Stan first received in 2019, but which took years to come together, made him consider the American dream, the one that Trump achieved and is redefining.

Stan emigrated with his mother, a pianist, from communist Romania as a child. “I was raised always aware of the American dream: America being the land of opportunity, where dreams come true, where you can make something of yourself.” He pushes the wings of his hair back to frame his face, a gold signet ring glinting in the late-summer sunlight, and, briefly, I can hear a hint of Trump’s directness of approach. “You can become whoever you want, if you just have a good idea.” Stan’s good idea has been to play the lead in movies while dodging the formulaic identity of a leading man, and this year will prove just how far he can take it.

“The Apprentice” seemed like it would never come together before suddenly it did. This time last year, Stan was sure it was dead in the water, and he was OK with that. “If this movie is not happening, it’s because it’s not meant to happen,” he recalls thinking. “It will not be because I’m too scared and walk away.”

Called in on short notice and filming from November 2023 to January of this year (ahead of a May premiere in Cannes), Stan lent heft and attitude to a character arc that takes Trump from local real estate developer in the 1970s to national celebrity in the 1980s. He learns the rough-and-tumble game of power from the ruthless and hedonistic political fixer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), eventually cutting the closeted Cohn loose as he dies of AIDS and alienating his wife Ivana (Maria Bakalova) in the process. (In a shocking scene, Donald sexually assaults Ivana in their Trump Tower apartment.) For all its edginess, the film is about Trump’s personality — and the way it calcified into a persona — rather than his present-day politics. (Despite its title, it’s set well before the 2004 launch of the reality show that finally made Trump the superstar he longed to be.)

And despite the fact that Trump has kept America rapt since he announced his run for president in 2015, Hollywood has been terrified of “The Apprentice.” The film didn’t sell for months after Cannes, an unusual result for a major English-language competition film, partly because Trump’s legal team sent a cease-and-desist letter attempting to block the film’s release in the U.S. while the fest was still ongoing. When it finally sold, it was to Briarcliff Entertainment, a distributor so small that the production has launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise money so that it will be able to stay in theaters.

Yes, Hollywood may vote blue, but it’s not the same town that released “Fahrenheit 9/11” or even “W.,” let alone a film that depicts the once (and possibly future) president raping his wife. (The filmmakers stand behind that story. “The script is 100% backed by my own interviews and historical research,” says Gabriel Sherman, the screenwriter and a journalist who covers Trump and the American conservative movement. “And it’s important to note that it is not a documentary. It’s a work of fiction that’s inspired by history.”) Entertainment corporations from Netflix to Disney would be severely inconvenienced if the next president came into office with a grudge against them.

“I am quite shocked, to be honest,” Abbasi says. “This is not a political piece. It’s not a hit piece; it’s not a hatchet job; it’s not propaganda. The fact that it’s been so challenging is shocking.” Abbasi, born in Iran, was condemned by his government over his last film, “Holy Spider,” and cannot safely return. He sees a parallel in the response to “The Apprentice.” “OK, that’s Iran — that is unfortunately expected. But I wasn’t expecting this.”

“Everything with this film has been one day at a time,” Stan says. The actor chalks up the film’s divisiveness to a siloed online environment. “There are a lot of people who love reading the [film’s] Wikipedia page and throwing out their opinions,” he says, an edge entering his voice. “But they don’t actually know what they’re talking about. That’s a popular sport now online, apparently.”

Unprompted, Stan brings up the idea that Trump is so widely known that some might think a biographical film about him serves no purpose. “When someone says, ‘Why do we need this movie? We know all this,’ I’ll say, ‘Maybe you do, but you haven’t experienced it. The experience of those two hours is visceral. It’s something you can hopefully feel — if you still have feelings.’”

After graduating from Rutgers in 2005, Stan found his first substantial role on “Gossip Girl,” playing troubled rich kid Carter Baizen. Like teen soaps since time immemorial, “Gossip Girl” was a star-making machine. “It was the first time I was in serious love with somebody,” he says. (He dated the series’ star, Leighton Meester, from 2008 to 2010.) He feels nostalgic for that moment: “Walking around the city, seeing these same buildings and streets — life seemed simpler.”

Stan followed his “Gossip Girl” gig with roles on the 2009 NBC drama “Kings,” playing a devious gay prince in an alternate-reality modern world governed by a monarchy, and the 2012 USA miniseries “Political Animals,” playing a black-sheep prince (and once again a gay man) of a different sort — the son of a philandering former president and an ambitious former first lady.

When I ask him what lane he envisioned himself in as a young actor, he shrugs off the question. “I grew up with a single mom, and I didn’t have a lot of male role models. I was always trying to figure out what I wanted to be. And at some point, I was like, I could just be a bunch of things.”

Which might seem challenging when one is booked to play the same character, Bucky Barnes, in Marvel movie after Marvel movie. Bucky’s adventures have been wide-ranging — he’s been brainwashed and turned evil and then brought back to the home team again, all since his debut in 2011’s “Captain America: The First Avenger.” Next year, he’ll anchor the summer movie “Thunderbolts,” as the leader of a squad of quirky heroes played by, among others, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Florence Pugh. It’s easy to wonder if this has come to feel like a cage of sorts.

Not so, says Stan. His new Marvel film “was kind of like ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ — a guy coming into this group that was chaotic and degenerate, and somehow finding a way to unite them.”

Lately, knives have been out for Marvel movies as some have disappointed at the box office, and “Thunderbolts,” which endured strike delays and last-minute cast changes, has been under scrutiny.

“It’s become really convenient to pick on [Marvel films],” Stan says. “And that’s fine. Everyone’s got an opinion. But they’re a big part of what contributes to this business and allows us to have smaller movies as well. This is an artery traveling through the system of this entire machinery that’s Hollywood. It feeds in so many more ways than people acknowledge.” He adds, “Sometimes I get protective of it because the intention is really fucking good. It’s just fucking hard to make a good movie over and over again.”

Which may account for an eagerness to try something new. “In the last couple of years,” he says, “I’ve gotten much more aggressive about pursuing things that I want, and I’m constantly looking for different ways of challenging myself.”

The challenge continued throughout the shoot of “The Apprentice,” as Stan pushed the material. “One of the most creatively rewarding parts of the process was how open Sebastian was to giving notes on the script but also wanting to go beyond the script,” says Sherman, the screenwriter. “If he was interested in a certain aspect of a scene, he was like, Can you find me a quote?” he recalls.

Building a dynamic through improvised scenes, Stan and Strong stayed in character throughout the “Apprentice” shoot. “I was doing an Ibsen play on Broadway,” says Strong, who won a Tony in June for his performance in “An Enemy of the People,” “and he came backstage afterwards. And it was like — I’d never really met Sebastian, and I don’t think he’d ever met me. So it was nice to meet him.”

Before the pair began acting together, they didn’t rehearse much — “I’m not a fan of rehearsals,” Strong says. “I think actors are best left in their cocoon, doing their work, and then trusted to walk on set and be ready.” The two didn’t touch the script together until cameras went up — though they spent a preproduction day, Strong says, playing games in character as Donald and Roy.

After filming, both have kept memories of the hold their characters had on them. They shared a flight back from Telluride — a famously bumpy trip out of the mountains. “He’s a nervous flyer, and I’m a nervous flyer,” Stan says. Both marveled at the fact that they’d contained their nerves on the first day of shooting “The Apprentice,” when their characters traveled together via helicopter. “We both go, ‘Yeah — but there was a camera.’”

Stan’s aggressive approach to research came in handy on “A Different Man,” which shot before “The Apprentice.” His character’s disorder, neurofibromatosis, is caused by a genetic mutation and presents as benign tumors growing in the nervous system. After being healed, he feels a growing envy for a fellow sufferer who seems unbothered by his disability.

Stan’s co-star, Adam Pearson, was diagnosed with neurofibromatosis in early childhood. Stan found the experience challenging to render faithfully. “I said many times, I can do all the research in the world, but am I ever going to come close to this?” Stan says. “How am I going to ever do this justice?”

Plus, he had precious little time to prepare: “He was fully on board, and the film was being made weeks later,” director Aaron Schimberg says. “Zero to 60 in a matter of weeks.”

The actor grappled for something to hold on to, and Pearson sug gested he refer to his own experience of fame. “Adam said to me, ‘You know what it’s like to be public property,’” Stan says.

Pearson recalls describing the experience to Stan this way: “While you don’t understand the invasiveness and the staring and the pointing that I’ve grown up with, you do know what it’s like to have the world think you owe them something.”

That sense of alienation becomes universal through the film’s storytelling: “A Different Man” takes its premise as the jumping-off point for a deep and often mordant investigation of who we all are underneath the skin.

The film was shot in 22 days in a New York City heat wave, and there was, Schimberg says, “no room for error. I would get four or five takes, however many I could squeeze out, but there’s no coverage.”

Through it all, Stan’s performance is utterly poised — Schimberg and Stan discussed Buster Keaton as a reference for his ability to be “completely stone-faced” amid chaos, the director says. And the days were particularly long because Oscar-nominated prosthetics artist Michael Marino was only able to apply Stan’s makeup in the early morning, before going to his job on the set of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”

“Even though I wasn’t shooting until 11 a.m., I would go at like 5 in the morning to his studio, or his apartment,” Stan recalls. The hidden advantage was that Stan had hours to kill while made up like his character, the kind of person the world looks past. “I wanted to walk around the city and see what happened,” Stan says. “On Broadway, one of the busiest streets in New York, no one’s looking at me. It’s as if I’m not even there.” The other reaction was worse: “Somebody would immediately stop and very blatantly hit their friend, point, take a picture.”

It was a study in empathy that flowed into the character. Stan had spoken to Pearson’s mother, who watched her son develop neurofibromatosis before growing into a disability advocate and, eventually, an actor. “She said to me, ‘All I ever wanted was for someone to walk in his shoes for a day,’” Stan recalls. “And I guess that was the closest I had ever come.”

“The Apprentice” forced Stan, and forces the viewer, to do the same with a figure that some 50% of the electorate would sooner forget entirely. And that lends the film its controversy. Those on the right, presupposing that the movie is an anti-Trump document, have railed against it. In a statement provided to Variety, a Trump campaign spokesman said, “This ‘film’ is pure malicious defamation, should never see the light of day and doesn’t even deserve a place in the straight-to-DVD section of a bargain bin at a soon-to-be-closed discount movie store, it belongs in a dumpster fire.” The campaign threatened a lawsuit, though none has materialized.

Asked about the assault scene, Stan notes that Ivana had made the claim in a deposition, but later walked it back. “Is it closer to the truth, what she had said directly in the deposition or something that she retracted?” he asks. “They went with the first part.”

The movie depicts, too, Ivana’s carrying on with her marriage after the violation, which may be still more devastating. “How do you overcome something like this?” asks Bakalova. “Do you have to put on a mask that everything is fine? In the next scene, she’s going to play the game and pretend that we’re the glamorous, perfect couple.” The Trumps, in “The Apprentice,” live in a world of paper-thin images, one that grows so encompassing that Donald no longer feels anything for the people to whom he was once loyal. They’re props in his stage show.

“The Apprentice” will drop in the midst of the most chaotic presidential election of our lifetime. “The way it lands in this extremely polarized situation, for me as an artist, is exciting. I won’t lie to you,” says Abbasi.

When asked if he was concerned about blowback from a Trump 47 presidency, Stan says, “You can’t do this movie and not be thinking about all those things, but I really have no idea. I’m still in shock from going from an assassination attempt to the next weekend having a president step down [from a reelection bid].”

Stan’s job, as he sees it, was to synthesize everything he’d absorbed — all those videos on his phone — into a person who made sense. This Trump had to be part of a coherent story, not just the flurry of news updates to which we’ve become accustomed.

“You can take a Bach or a Beethoven, and everyone’s going to play that differently on the piano, right?” Stan says. (His pianist mother named him for Johann Sebastian Bach.) “So this is my take on what I’ve learned. I have to strip myself of expectations of being applauded for this, if people are going to like it or people are going to hate it. People are going to say whatever they want. Hopefully they should think at least before they say it.”

It’s a reality that Stan is now used to — the work is the work, and the way people interpret him is none of his business. Perhaps that’s why he has run away from ever being the same thing twice. “I could sit with you today and tell you passionately what my truth is, but it doesn’t matter,” he says. “Because people are more interested in a version of you that they want to see, rather than who you are.”

“The Apprentice” has been the subject of extreme difference of opinion by many who have yet to see it. It’s been read — and will continue to be after its release — as anti-Trump agitprop. The truth is chewier and more complicated, and, perhaps, unsuited for these times.

“Are we going to live in a world where anyone knows what the truth is anymore? Or is it just a world that everyone wants to create for themselves?” Stan asks.

His voice — the one that shares a slight accent with Trump but that is, finally, Stan’s own — is calm and clear. “People create their own truth right now,” he says. “That’s the only thing that I’ve made peace with; I don’t need to twist your arm if that’s what you want to believe. But the way to deal with something is to actually confront it.”

[headspace-hotel]

against the logic of the lawn

Imagine a box.

This box is sealed with tape or adhesive, which shows you that it has never been opened or re-used. It is in pristine condition. Apart from that, the box could hold anything. It could contain a Star Wars Funko Pop, a printer, a shirt ordered from some sketchy online vendor, a knockoff store-brand cereal, six individually wrapped protein bars.

As a Consumer ("the" Consumer) this is your fundamental right: To purchase a box that is, presumably, identical to every other box like it.

When you Buy Product, it arrives in a box, entire of itself and without context. It has not changed since its creation. If and when Product does change—whether it is broken, spoiled, used up, or eaten—you can Buy Product that is identical in every meaningful way to the original.

It's okay if this doesn't make sense yet. (You can stop imagining the box now.)

Imagine instead a suburban housing development, somewhere in the USA.

Imagine row on row of pristine, newly built houses, each constructed with small, meaningless variations in their aesthetic, all with beige or white vinyl siding and perhaps some decorative brick, all situated on identical rectangles of land covered with freshly unrolled sod. This is the Product that every consumer aspires to Buy.

I am not exactly—qualified, or entitled, to speak on the politics of land ownership in this country. My ancestors benefited directly from the genocide of Native Americans, which allowed Europeans to steal the land they lived on, which is where a lot of wealth comes from in the end, even today. However, I have eyes in my head to see that the act of colonizing a continent, and an economic system that formed as a supporting infrastructure to colonization, have embedded something almost irreparably dysfunctional into the dominant American culture's relationship to land.

This dysfunctional Thing, this Sickness, leads us to consider land to be a Product, and to consider a human upon the land to be a Consumer.

From this point of view, land is either locked into this relationship of control and "use" to varying extents, or it is free of human influence. People trying to reason about how to preserve Earth's biosphere, working within this framework without realizing, decide that we must "set aside" large areas of land for "nature."

This is a naive and, I would reckon, probably itself colonialist way of seeing things. It appears to be well-validated by evidence. Where human population is largest, there is less biodiversity.

But I find the broad conclusions to be strikingly unscientific. The plan of "setting aside part of Earth for nature" displays little curiosity about the mechanisms by which human presence impacts biodiversity. Otherwise intelligent people, perhaps caught up in the "bargaining" phase of climate grief, seem taken in by the idea that the human species gives off a magical anti-biodiversity force field, as if feeling guiltier will fix the problems.

(Never mind that lands managed by indigenous folk actually have MORE biodiversity...almost like our species' relationship to the planet isn't inherently exploitative, but rather, the capitalist and colonialist powers destroying everything.......)

Let's go back to the image of the new housing development. This image could be just about anywhere in the USA, because the American suburban home is made for universal interchangeability, where each little house and yard is static and replaceable with any other.

Others have written about the generic-ification of the interiors of homes, how houses are decorated with the most soul-killing, colorless furnishings to make them into Products more effectively. (I think @mcmansionhell wrote about it.)

This, likewise, is the Earth turned into a Product—razed down into something with no pre-existing context, history, or responsibility. Identical parcels of land, identical houses, where once there was a unique and diverse distribution of life. The American lawn, the American garden, the industry that promotes these aesthetics, is the environmental version of that ghastly, ugly "minimalism" infecting the interiors of homes.

The extremely neat, sparse, manicured look that is so totally inescapable in American yards originated from the estates of European aristocracy, which displayed the owner's wealth by flaunting an abundance of land that was both heavily managed and useless. People defend the lawn on the basis that grass tolerates being walked upon and is good for children to play, but to say this is *the* purpose of a lawn is bullshit—children are far more interested in trees, creeks, sticks, weeds, flowers, and mud than Grass Surface, many people with lawns do not have children, and most people spend more time mowing their lawn than they do doing literally anything else outside. How often do you see Americans outside in their yards doing anything except mowing?

What is there to do, anyway? Why would you want to go outside with nothing but the sun beating down on you and the noise of your neighbors' lawn mowers? American culture tries to make mowing "manly" and emphasizes that it is somehow fulfilling in of itself. Mowing the lawn is something Men enjoy doing—almost a sort of leisure activity.

I don't have something against wanting a usable outdoor area that is good for outdoor activities, I do, however, have something against the idea that a lawn is good for outdoor activities. Parents have been bitching for decades about how impossible it is to drag kids outdoors, and there have been a million PSAs about how children need to be outside playing instead of spending their lives on video games. Meanwhile, at the place I work, every kid is ECSTATIC and vibrating with enthusiasm to be in the woods surrounded by trees, sticks, leaves, and mud.

The literal, straightforward historical answer to the lawn is that the American lawn exists to get Americans to spend money on chemicals. The modern lawn ideal was invented to sell a surplus of fertilizer created after WW2 chemical plants that had been used to make explosives were repurposed to produce fertilizer. Now you know! The more analytical, sociological answer is that the purpose of the lawn is to distance you from the lower class. A less strictly maintained space lowers property values, it looks shabby and unkempt, it reflects badly on the neighborhood, it makes you look like a "redneck." And so on. The largest, most lavish McMansions in my area all have the emptiest, most desolate yards, and the lush gardens all belong to tiny, run-down houses.

But the answer that really cuts to the core of it, I think, is that lawns are a technology for making land into a Product for consumers. (This coexists with the above answers.) Turfgrass is a perfectly generic blank slate onto which anything can be projected. It is emptiness. It is stasis.

I worry about the flattening of our imaginations. Illustrations in books generally cover the ground outdoors in a uniform layer of green, sometimes with strokes suggesting individual blades of grass if they want to get fancy. Video games do this. Animated shows and movies do this.

Short, carpet-like turfgrass as the Universal Outdoor Surface is so ubiquitous and intuitive that any alternative is bizarre, socially unacceptable, and for many, completely unimaginable. When I am a passenger in a car, what horrifies me the most to see out the window is not only the turfgrass lawns of individuals, but rather, the turfgrass Surface that the entire inhabited landscape has been rendered into—vacant stretches of land surrounding businesses and churches, separating parking lots, bordering Wal-Marts, apartment complexes, and roadsides.

These spaces are not used, they are almost never walked upon. They do nothing. They are maintained, ceaselessly, by gas-powered machines that are far, far more carbon-emitting than cars per hour of use, emitting in one hour the same amount of pollution as a 500-mile drive. It is an endless effort to keep the land in the same state, never mind that it's a shitty, useless state.

Nature is dynamic. Biodiversity is dynamic. From a business point of view, the lawn care industry has found a brilliant scheme to milk limitless money from people, since trying to put a stop to the dynamism and constant change of nature is a Sisyphean situation, and nature responds with increasingly aggressive and rapid change as disturbance gets more intense.

On r/lawncare, a man posted despairingly that he had spent over $1500 tearing out every inch of sod in his yard, only for the exact same weeds to return. That subreddit strikes horror in my heart that I cannot describe, and the more I learn about ecology, the more terrible it gets. It was common practice for people in r/lawncare to advise others to soak their entire yard in Roundup to kill all plant life and start over from a "blank slate."

Before giving up, I tried to explain over and over that it was 100% impossible to get a "blank slate." Weeds typically spread by wind and their seeds can persist for DECADES in the soil seed bank, waiting for a disastrous event to trigger them to sprout. They will always come back. It's their job.

It was impossible for those guys to understand that they were inherently not just constructing a lawn from scratch, and were contending with another power or entity (Nature) with its own interests.

The logic of the lawn also extends into our gardens. We are encouraged to see the dynamism of nature as something that acts against our interests (and thus requires Buy Product) so much, that we think any unexpected change in our yard is bad. People are sometimes baffled when I see a random plant popping up among my flowers as potentially a good thing.

"That's a weed!" Maybe! Nonetheless, it has a purpose. I don't know who this stranger is, so I would be a fool to kill it!

A good caretaker knows that the place they care for will change on its own, and that this is GOOD and brings blessings or at least messages. I didn't have to buy goldenrod plants—they came by themselves! Several of our trees arrived on their own. The logic that sees all "weeds" as an enemy to be destroyed without even identifying ignores the wisdom of nature's processes.

The other day at work, the ecologist took me to see pink lady's slipper orchids. The forest there was razed and logged about a hundred years ago, and it got into my head to ask how the orchids returned. He only shrugged. "Who knows?"

Garden centers put plants out for sale when they are blooming. People buy trees from Fast Growing Trees dot com. The quick, final results that are standard with Buy Product, which are so completely opposite the constant slow chaos of nature, have become so standard in the gardening world that the hideous black mulch sold at garden centers is severed from the very purpose of mulch, and instead serves to visually emphasize small, lonely plants against its dark background. (For the record, once your plants mature, you should not be able to SEE the mulch.)

Landscapers regularly place shrubs, bushes, trees and flowers in places where they have no room to reach maturity. It's standard—landscapers seem to plan with the expectation that everything will be ripped out within 5-10 years. The average person has no clue how big trees and bushes get because their entire surroundings, which are made of living things (which do in fact feel and communicate) are treated as disposable.

Because in ten years, this building won't be an orthodontists' office, in ten years, this old lady will be dead, in ten years, the kids will have grown, and capitalism is incapable of preparing for a future, only for the next buyer.

The logic of the lawn is that gardens and ecosystems that take time to build are not to be valued, because a lush, biodiverse garden is not easily sold, easily bought, easily maintained, easily owned, or easily treated with indifference. An ecosystem requires wisdom from the caretaker. That runs contrary to the Consumer identity.

And it's this disposable-ness, this indifference, that I am ultimately so strongly against, not grass, or low turf that you can step on.

What if we saw buying land as implying a responsibility to be its caretaker? To respect the inhabitants, whether or not we are personally pleased by them or think they look pretty? What creature could deserve to be killed just because it didn't make a person happy?

But the Consumer identity gives you something else...a sense of entitlement. "This is MY yard, and that possum doesn't get to live there." "This is MY yard, and I don't want bugs in it." "This is MY yard, and I can kill the spiders if I want to."

Meanwhile there is no responsibility to build the soil up for the next gardener. No responsibility to plant oaks that will grow mighty and life-giving. No responsibility to plant fruit-producing trees, brambles, and bushes. None of these things, any of which could have fulfilled a responsibility to the future. Rather, just to do whatever you damn well please, and leave those that come after with depleted, compacted soil and the aftermath of years of constant damage. It took my Meadow ten years to recover from being the garden patch of the guy that lived here before us. Who knows what he did to it.

The loss of topsoil in all our farmland is a bigger example, and explains how this is directly connected to colonialism. The Dust Bowl, the unsustainable farming practices that followed, the disappearance of the lush fertile prairie topsoil because of greed and colonizer mindset, and simple refusal to learn from what could be observed in nature. The colonizing peoples envisioned the continent as an "Empty" place, a Blank Slate that could be used and exploited however.

THAT is what's killing the planet, this idea that the planet is to be used and abused and bought and sold, that the power given by wealth gives you entitlement to do whatever you want. That "Land" is just another Product, and our strategies for taking care of Earth should be whatever causes the most Buy Product.

It's like I always write..."You are not a consumer! You are a caretaker!"

[push-tet]

what I've done

The town of Veronaville is one built on little love and one big feud. For years, the Capp and Monty clans have been at each other’s throats; yet this hatred cannot stop the younger generation from crossing borders and falling for one another. Will their actions bring both feuding families to ruin, or spark reconciliation? Can their love truly heal such deep wounds?

Wouldn't you like see Veronaville in entirely different light? K-he.

WHAT’S NEW:

Added a massive storyline! The familiar Сapp, Monty and Summerdream families will be seen in a whole new light🌟

Added three brand new families with their own stories and secrets! 🌟

Added some new and special townies. At the end of the town album there will be a list of townspeople who have biographies and memories, so no need to add/resurrect literally everybody on your lot. 🌟

Added 20 new community lots + remade the old ones as well 🌟

DISCLAMER AND TRIGGER WARNINGS!!!

This hood is not a retelling of Shakespeare's plays, nor is it a mere makeover of the Maxis’ Veronaville. Think of this neighborhood as an alternate universe.

The Neighborhood contains themes of: fantasy, s*icide and self-harm, body horror, OC X CANON (?)

I may have (unintentionally) spoiled some of your favorite simmies… 

ISSUES THAT I AM AWARE OF:

Some townies’ memories could disappear. It happens even with the mod that forbids the townies from losing their memories. I don't know what the reason is so I recommend checking them before you play the game, namely, by going into the family and teleporting the townies to the resident lot. If the memories are already gone, then please re-download the hood.

Hoodchecker might show some minor errors connected to the wrong memory subjects. This was intentional so don't be alarmed! It doesn't affect your game in any negative way.

Don't try to resurrect Julien Cooke. Just forget about him.

Oberon originally had an overlay with a mechanical prosthetic. But for some reason in some testers’ games the overlay was affecting Oberon's complexion, turning his skintone white… So I removed the overlay entirely. You can add it back if you wish!

RECOMMENDED MODS AND PROGRAMS:

Cyber Parts by @themeasureofasim (optional, Oberon’s prosthetics)

Restore Default Names for Sims in Subhoods (if you intent to play a subhood version of it)

🐸DOWNLOAD MF - SFS

THE CONTENTS:

VD01 ENG is a main hood; contains some of my CCs.

VVBS CC is an archive with some custom content from me for the hood (consists of: some cosmetics, contacts (in the masks section) and one female haircut).

VVBS SUBHOOD is a subhood with two major differences from the main hood: it does not contain pictures from Storytelling folder (so the nhood is less heavy) + you can pick and choose whether you want it with or without my custom content.

EXTRA CONTENT folder is not necessary to download; it contains some extra stuff from my project. This file is locked, but you can gather the password in main hood itself through the storytelling pictures and a little game in the community lots (you can find the rules of this game in the description of 2 Pentameter Parkway lot). Think of it as a reward for your attentiveness!

If you find any errors or bugs, just let me know! THANK YOU!

idk what to put in here so that dads' ranking

P.S. Destroy this town with your crazy ideas. :))

Well, the English version of this interactive fanfic is finally OUT!

I have Pahleen (translation) and @f1shart (English editing) to thank for that! And I also want to thank the many wonderful testers and people who supported my project!🌹🌹

I will continue to post materials about this neighborhood on this blog, but I also have plans to expand this universe, so for that I created a blog @vv-bs so you can follow the development of the project!

[kifkay]

I love when magic has an effect on the body & soul of its caster. like!! you don’t get to be a reality-bending demi-god and walk away with no strings attached. there’s always a price.

Bloom’s dragon fire consumes her from the inside, leaving lightning-like tissues of scars along her limbs - be careful, rumbles the Great Dragon from within, don’t let your emotions consume you. Bloom wails from the pain and clutches whoever is in the vicinity - but cannot fully stop it. just prevent it or treat the aftermath.

Musa gets migraines. Stella becomes ill when she doesn’t get her daily dose of sunshine. Aisha’s senses get muddy sometimes, almost as if she’s submerged underwater. Nabu experiences uncontrollable tremors in his arms, when he creates too many of his phantoms. all of those are - yes, horrible to experience but manageable enough for the school (and the Magic community at large) to tell them to just suck it up and weather through.

once you get your enchantix though, you start developing… unique abilities. almost like, in achieving the final fairy form, you became one with your brand of magic.

Bloom starts producing smoke. Like - she snorts at something funny Riven or Sky say, and literal puffs of smoke emerge from her nose. It’s jarring at first (“Bloom Peters, when did you start smoking? do you know that it kills??”) but quickly becomes endearing once they realise it’s not life-threatening in any way (after speed-running through like fifteen Magix apothecaries). Among her other ‘oddities’: too hot to cuddle with (only Stella can stand the high temperature, since she has a resistance to heat), becomes strangely overprotective and a little possessive, her eyes sometimes become a startling orange hue as if she’s embodied by the great dragon himself (it’s just a party trick).

Stella becomes more ethereal. In certain lights, her skin looks translucent - like a mirage weaved with moonlight. Her hair glints in the sun, almost too bright to like at; her touch feels phantom-like. She becomes even more beautiful, but less - human, earth-bound, Stella-esque. A curse and a blessing, that one.

Musa’s hearing gets really fucking good. She has a steadily growing dossier of blackmail on every student in Alfea - simply because shut doors or longer distances are no longer obstacles for her. It’s annoying too, because she can’t exactly turn it off - and now she gets to hear all the things people say about her, behind her. but here’s a consolation - she can influence other creature’s emotions through the melodies she hums! like how in canon, she pacified the bird Roc and brought mirth to the arguing fairies.

Flora gets much sturdier. Her skin harder than bark; her body able to withstand thirst and hunger for much longer than the rest. It’s honestly so intimidating. Here’s this sweet young woman — known to cry for trampled flowers and cut weeds!! — absolutely bodying a sharp ass ice shard that Icy attacked her with. It just — crumbles upon colliding with Flora’s body. insane and frankly so so hot for others to see.

As per the negatives… I like the idea of Flora being able to connect to the memories of nature around her and literally absorb the pain/fear/anguish of whatever she witnessed.

Aisha and Bloom are similar, in a sense that both of them are vessels to primordial divinities of their universe — Bloom is the holder of the Dragon Flame, and Aisha is the child of the Infinite Ocean. therefore, both experience a more extreme transformation than their girl friends. like, Aisha’s dreams are infiltrated by visions of past and future; memories of those who were lost to the Ocean. she dreams of Politea, of Tritanus, of her mer cousins and ancestors, and even those who were not yet born. if Aisha was not so mentally wilful, she might’ve folded under the weight of those prophesies.

Aisha can also breathe under water and her body gets the musculature it needs to be on par with her mer cousins while swimming, because why the fuck not?

Tecna - I frankly have no ideas for and would love to hear suggestions!

[maharghaideovate]

Personal Branding for Distance Learning Students: How to Win at Symbiosis University

As a student, especially in marketing, a personal brand has to be built. Building a personal brand, if there are large numbers of workers in a certain job market, would help you stand out if you study via a distance education model at Symbiosis University Distance Learning. A complete personal brand promotes visibility and opens up other opportunities. The following are some helpful tips and…

[armageddon-generation]

Empire of Death was bad and cemented several fundemental flaws in this season.

I watched this in the theatre, and the contrast between everyone's excitement before Empire, and their universal disappointment leaving the theatre was super disheartening. I'm gonna try to articulate my problems with episode, and how they're linked to fundenental structural issues of this season.

SPOILERS BELOW:

Sutekh

The moment the UNIT characters died the story was robbed of any stakes. (Also? Kate and Ibrahim?? During Pride month?? Disgusting)

Sutekh was pointless, big CGI spectacle who was barely there. Saying he's been latched onto the TARDIS since Pyramids of Mars was such an asspull. Why couldn't he have latched on during Wild Blue Yonder? wouldn't that make much more sense??

You're telling me the guy who holds all life in contempt is invested enough in learning the identity of Ruby's mum he willingly reveals himself??

And then they defeat him by dragging him through the Vortex just like before, which it's been explicitly stated *didn't work* last time? He just *lets* Ruby leash him??

The 'death of death is life' bit, and the idea of the Doctor representing life as a Ying to Sutekh's Yang, is a cool concept just jammed in there with no real buildup or depth.

The issue is bringing Sutekh back takes so much effort- a literal, clunky clipshow of Pyramids of Mars, a whole episode spent building up to the reveal of a silly anagram entirely unrekated to Sutekh's previous appearance. And it just... amounts to nothing. What a silly way to cap off a season meant to be jumping-on point for brand-new viewers.

Mel was just takingup space. Pointless.

Ruby's Mother

I don't have a problem with the *concept* of Ruby's mum being normal. I really like the idea thematically. The execution was terrible.

First of all it leaves so many unanswered questions (why the snow? Why was time changing? Why was she shadowed? Literally just for the sake of the mystery-box?) and represents the worst thing about this new era- RTD using fantasy logic to handwave any logic at all, and just do whatever he wants without properly justifying it.

Second, I *hate* how easy and simple and neat the reunion is. Ruby seems incapable of getting angry with anyone. She has never once argued with 15, or Carla, or anyone besides that one moment in 73 Yards. She has never expressed any kind of negative feeling towards her mother for abandoning her. And it's fine for her to reach that conclusion! It's just bizzare we never see Ruby struggle with her feelings beyond the shallow goal of wanting to find her.

(Also Carla? Has nothing to say?? Just welcomes that woman in with basically no comment? Carla is a 2D cutout of a person, used as a plot device and otherwise relegated to the single character trait of I Love My Daughter. The children yearn for the ilk of Jackie Tyler, Sylvia Noble, even Francine Jones.)

15 & Ruby

The emotion behind 15 & Ruby's split felt entirely unearned because we've never seen their bond develop. They never argue, never disagree, Ruby hasn't learned anything about herself or grown or changed. The closest we got to that is 73 Yards, which was undone. She was already brave and kind and musical and sure she loved her adoptive family when we met her in Church on Ruby Road.

Similarly, 15 tells us Ruby encouraged him to talk about family in a way he never has, but that was in what, two moments across the season? And they seemed random, unrelated to Ruby being with him. New viewers will assume 15 is just that open anyway- he was discussing fatherhood with a dead man's hologram- and old viewers assumed trauma-dumping was just a new trait of 15's personality, not Ruby-specific.

The problem is we're told Ruby & 15 are best friends but it isn't earned. I liked 15 crying initially but both he and Ruby do it so much (15 cries about 5 times in this one episode) it loses its impact and I'm becoming numb to it. There is no contrast, no downtime.

Season Structural Issues

I think the biggest problem is Season 1's storytelling priorities. It's much more interested in selling *the show* (look at our big budget! And guest stars! And how flexible our format is! Musical episode! The Beatles as props! Bottle episode! Indie folk-horror! Black Mirror! Gay Bridgerton!) it forgot to put effort into developing and investing us in its characters. I liked a lot of the individual stories this year but in retrospect a lot of them feel like they're wasting space that needed to go to essential character and theme setup.

These skewed priorities, combined with the cut down episode count, really impact the pacing of the season. Ruby and 15 were barely together! Even in Rogue they were seperated for most of the story!! We only loop back to a flashback of 15 meeting Carla in Rogue!

This is made worse by the baffling insistence on a 45-minute runtime. We know key sequences were cut from almost every episode, with highlights including:

The Gobin King invading Ruby's flat and her banishing him with scratchcards in The Church on Ruby Road: Her missing 'companion saves the day' moment!

Refrence to the Toymaker in The Church on Ruby Road, which was itself referenced in The Devil's Chord. 'I told you about the Toymaker when we first met' sir, objectively you did not.

The TARDIS jukebox playing the Sugarbabes' Push The Button in the opening scene of Space Babies, hastily cut around in the final edit. This is the setup of a running joke still in the episode, and part of the story's climax. The first encounter with the Bogeyman was also longer, with 15 taking particular interest in its skin

Extended scenes in Abbey Road from The Devil's Chord, including an apparently significant speaking role for Cilla Black, according to her annoyed actress.

Cut dialogue from The Devil's Chord explaining the musoical number was caused by Maestro's power lingering, and that banishing them undid everything they'd done. Fans inferred thos based on the rules established in The Giggle, but again, new fans haven't seen The Giggle and were left clueless.

An opening sequence for The Legend of Ruby Sunday where 15 & Ruby meet Susan as a nanny in 1947 America, a blue-skinned waitress, and an astronaut meeting a colony of giant, sentient ants. At the end of this we actually see 15 decide to go to UNIT for help. In the broadcast version he just sorta shows up.

Really what Empire of Death exposed to me is how emotionally hollow the season was. I enjoy the exoperimentalism, but not at the cost of character. And then in the finale Russell reverts to almost a parody of his RTD1 finales, with the nonsense logic and lack of consequences. All the worst bits of Last of the Time Lords and The Giggle put in a blender.