#up board paper 2021

[shesnake]

Spider-Verse Artists Say Working on the Sequel Was ‘Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts’

Why don’t more animated movies look this good? According to people who worked on the sequel, Across the Spider-Verse, it’s because the working conditions required to produce such artistry are not sustainable.

Multiple Across the Spider-Verse crew members — ranging from artists to production executives who have worked anywhere from five to a dozen years in the animation business — describe the process of making the the $150 million Sony project as uniquely arduous, involving a relentless kind of revisionism that compelled approximately 100 artists to flee the movie before its completion.

While frequent major overhauls are standard operating procedure in animation (Pixar films can take between four and seven years to plot, animate, and render), those changes typically occur early on during development and storyboarding stages. But these Spider-Verse 2 crew members say they were asked to make alterations to already-approved animated sequences that created a backlog of work across multiple late-stage departments. Across the Spider-Verse was meant to debut in theaters in April of 2022, before it was postponed to October of that year and then June 2023 owing to what Entertainment Weekly reported as “pandemic-related delays.” However, the four crew members say animators who were hired in the spring of 2021 sat idle for anywhere from three to six months that year while Phil Lord tinkered with the movie in the layout stage, when the first 3-D representation of storyboards are created.

As a result, these individuals say, they were pushed to work more than 11 hours a day, seven days a week, for more than a year to make up for time lost and were forced back to the drawing board as many as five times to revise work during the final rendering stage.

"For animated movies, the majority of the trial-and-error process happens during writing and storyboarding. Not with fully completed animation. Phil’s mentality was, This change makes for a better movie, so why aren’t we doing it? It’s obviously been very expensive having to redo the same shot several times over and have every department touch it so many times. The changes in the writing would go through storyboarding. Then it gets to layout, then animation, then final layout, which is adjusting cameras and placements of things in the environment. Then there’s cloth and hair effects, which have to repeatedly be redone anytime there’s an animation change. The effects department also passes over the characters with ink lines and does all the crazy stuff like explosions, smoke, and water. And they work closely with lighting and compositing on all the color and visual treatments in this movie. Every pass is plugged into editing. Smaller changes tend to start with animation, and big story changes can involve more departments like visual development, modeling, rigging, and texture painting. These are a lot of artists affected by one change. Imagine an endless stream of them."

"Over 100 people left the project because they couldn’t take it anymore. But a lot stayed on just so they could make sure their work survived until the end — because if it gets changed, it’s no longer yours. I know people who were on the project for over a year who left, and now they have little to show for it because everything was changed. They went through the hell of the production and then got none of their work coming out the other side."

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Jesse Singal

Published: Jun 27, 2024

In April Hilary Cass, a British paediatrician, published her review of gender-identity services for children and young people, commissioned by NHS England. It cast doubt on the evidence base for youth gender medicine. This prompted the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the leading professional organisation for the doctors and practitioners who provide services to trans people, to release a blistering rejoinder. WPATH said that its own guidelines were sturdier, in part because they were “based on far more systematic reviews”.

Systematic reviews should evaluate the evidence for a given medical question in a careful, rigorous manner. Such efforts are particularly important at the moment, given the feverish state of the American debate on youth gender medicine, which is soon to culminate in a Supreme Court case challenging a ban in Tennessee. The case turns, in part, on questions of evidence and expert authority.

Court documents recently released as part of the discovery process in a case involving youth gender medicine in Alabama reveal that WPATH's claim was built on shaky foundations. The documents show that the organisation’s leaders interfered with the production of systematic reviews that it had commissioned from the Johns Hopkins University Evidence-Based Practice Centre (EPC) in 2018.

From early on in the contract negotiations, WPATH expressed a desire to control the results of the Hopkins team’s work. In December 2017, for example, Donna Kelly, an executive director at PATH, told Karen Robinson, the EPC's director, that the WPATH board felt the EPC researchers “cannot publish their findings independently”. A couple of weeks later, Ms Kelly emphasised that, “the [WPATH] board wants it to be clear that the data cannot be used without WPATH approval”.

Ms Robinson saw this as an attempt to exert undue influence over what was supposed to be an independent process. John Ioannidis of Stanford University, who co-authored guidelines for systematic reviews, says that if sponsors interfere or are allowed to veto results, this can lead to either biased summaries or suppression of unfavourable evidence. Ms Robinson sought to avoid such an outcome. “In general, my understanding is that the university will not sign off on a contract that allows a sponsor to stop an academic publication,” she wrote to Ms Kelly.

Months later, with the issue still apparently unresolved, Ms Robinson adopted a sterner tone. She noted in an email in March 2018 that, “Hopkins as an academic institution, and I as a faculty member therein, will not sign something that limits academic freedom in this manner,” nor “language that goes against current standards in systematic reviews and in guideline development”.

Not to reason XY

Eventually WPATH relented, and in May 2018 Ms Robinson signed a contract granting WPATH power to review and offer feedback on her team’s work, but not to meddle in any substantive way. After WPATH leaders saw two manuscripts submitted for review in July 2020, however, the parties’ disagreements flared up again. In August the WPATH executive committee wrote to Ms Robinson that WPATH had “many concerns” about these papers, and that it was implementing a new policy in which WPATH would have authority to influence the EPC team’s output—including the power to nip papers in the bud on the basis of their conclusions.

Ms Robinson protested that the new policy did not reflect the contract she had signed and violated basic principles of unfettered scientific inquiry she had emphasised repeatedly in her dealings with WPATH. The Hopkins team published only one paper after WPATH implemented its new policy: a 2021 meta-analysis on the effects of hormone therapy on transgender people. Among the recently released court documents is a WPATH checklist confirming that an individual from WPATH was involved “in the design, drafting of the article and final approval of [that] article”. (The article itself explicitly claims the opposite.) Now, more than six years after signing the agreement, the EPC team does not appear to have published anything else, despite having provided WPATH with the material for six systematic reviews, according to the documents.

No one at WPATH or Johns Hopkins has responded to multiple inquiries, so there are still gaps in this timeline. But an email in October 2020 from WPATH figures, including its incoming president at the time, Walter Bouman, to the working group on guidelines, made clear what sort of science WPATH did (and did not) want published. Research must be “thoroughly scrutinised and reviewed to ensure that publication does not negatively affect the provision of transgender health care in the broadest sense,” it stated. Mr Bouman and one other coauthor of that email have been named to a World Health Organisation advisory board tasked with developing best practices for transgender medicine.

Another document recently unsealed shows that Rachel Levine, a transwoman who is assistant secretary for health, succeeded in pressing WPATH to remove minimum ages for the treatment of children from its 2022 standards of care. Dr Levine’s office has not commented. Questions remain unanswered, but none of this helps WPATH’s claim to be an organisation that bases its recommendations on science. 

[ Via: https://archive.today/wJCI7 ]

--

==

So, there are 6 completed reviews sitting somewhere, that WPATH knows shows undesirable (to them) results. And they know it. And despite - or perhaps, because of - that, they wrote the insane SOC8 anyway. And then, at the behest of Rachel Levine, went back and took out the age limits, making it even more insane.

This isn't how science works, it's how a cult works.

When John Templeton Foundation commissioned a study on the efficacy of intercessory prayer, a study which unsurprisingly found that it's completely ineffective, it was forced to publish the negative results.

So, even the religious are more ethical than gender ideologues when it comes to science. This is outright scientific corruption.

[justheblueberry]

first bind!

i never posted it before, but it's good to have a marker of where i started 💜

paper was regular copy paper, sewn with embroidery thread, boards scavenged from an old sketchbook and endpapers excruciatingly cut with the sharp corner of a metal ruler and an ultra janky exacto knife, "mull" not shown because it was bright pink sparkly tulle. lol

the bookcloth is homemade from this strangely wrinkly and textured cotton fabric, and the endpapers are a rolled up and glued piece of paper. all held together with mod podge! hand-painted the title with golden acrylic.

i didn't think id ever post this one, but it's nice to look back and see how far ive come since november of 2021, even though im quite embarrassed by the state of it. still, it's the bind that has gotten the most use (and reuse); ive annotated it over and over again from each reread and now its full of tabs. still works as a book, so no matter how janky it is, it has lasted as a functional readable object!

[thatdiabolicalfeminist]

It's wild how successful the christofascists have been at shifting the Overton window to the point where soo many people who were so diligent about protecting people in 2021 or even early 2022 and were mocking the fascists for bitching about a paper mask are just like fully on board now with those attitudes or at least now think it's ok to walk around in crowded places with no mask

What other principles are you gonna give up?

[liaromancewriter]

I Thee Wed…

Premise: Ethan and Cassie are ready to say, ‘I do,’ but they forget one important step.

Book: Open Heart (post series) Pairing: Ethan Ramsey x F!MC (Cassie Valentine) Rating/Category: Teen. Fluff. Words: 1,560

A/N: So, I first did Ethan and Cassie's wedding in June 2021. In all that time, I've never written their wedding vows. Maxenna's vows were easier to write. Well, I finally cracked this nut! Yay, me 🎉

Submission for @choicesaugustchallenge prompt "summer wedding"

Cassie Valentine updated the patient chart and mentally crossed off another item from her seemingly endless to-do list. In just nine days, she would stand in the garden of her family home and marry her soulmate.

She couldn’t contain a small, excited scream, a dreamy smile spreading across her face as she imagined Ethan’s awestruck expression when she glided toward him at the floral-decked altar. But, she thought with a smirk, she couldn’t wait to knock him over on their wedding night with what she had on beneath the layers of tulle.

All in good time, Cassie reasoned, turning her attention back to work.

“Marlene?” she called to one of the regular nurses on her floor, handing over the tablet with the patient record. “Keep an eye on potassium levels for Mr. Dubois in 504. Page me if there’s any change in his condition.”

“Will do, Dr. Valentine,” Marlene nodded, scanning the chart quickly to confirm the orders.

She flashed Cassie a friendly smile. “Are you excited about the wedding? You and Dr. Ramsey make such a beautiful couple.”

“I’m counting the minutes,” Cassie grinned. “I have a final fitting for the dress next week, but otherwise, we’re all set.”

“Summer weddings are the best,” another nurse piped in. “Flowers are my favorite part.”

“I love hearing the couple’s vows,” Marlene said. “Are you and Dr. Ramsey writing your own?”

Cassie nodded in response, keeping her expression smooth even as alarm bells blared inside her head. Crap, crap, crap!

Between work, packing up her things at the apartment for the move to Ethan’s and coordinating with Sienna and her mom on the wedding, she had forgotten entirely about the vows.

She and Ethan had negotiated a hybrid ceremony, honoring her Episcopalian beliefs and his agnostic ones. He had agreed to have a priest officiate and receive a spiritual blessing in exchange for non-religious but personal vows, no Communion, hymns or readings.

Writing their own vows had sounded so simple before. A few words of promise, a declaration of their love, exchange rings and you-may-kiss-the-bride. End scene.

But now she realized it was anything but easy. Worse, she had no idea what she would say on the most important day of her life!

The pen dug into the paper, leaving dark, jagged lines on the legal pad as Ethan scratched out yet another sentence. His handwriting, usually neat and precise despite the doctor-like scrawl, had turned into a chaotic mess of crossed-out words and half-formed thoughts. Frustration simmered in his chest, his mind spinning as he tried to wrestle his emotions into something coherent.

He sighed, leaned back in his chair, and rubbed his temple. Sitting through a room full of demanding board members was a walk in the park compared to this. How was he supposed to find the words powerful enough to capture the depth of what he felt for Cassie?

Each attempt felt clumsy and inadequate, the words slipping away from him no matter how hard he tried. Irritated with himself, he muttered a curse under his breath, tearing the paper from the pad and crumpling it into a tight ball. It joined the other pieces of crumpled paper balls scattered around him.

Why had he insisted on their own vows? Should’ve just taken a template and been done with it.

He had been working on them all week and was no closer to the finish line. He had tried writing at home, in his office with the door closed and on a bench in the serenity garden at Edenbrook. Eventually, he retreated to Derry’s Coffee Shop in the hope that a place special to them both would inspire him.

The wedding was a week away, and he did not relish the idea of standing at the altar with nothing more to say than “I do” while Cassie no doubt recited something meaningful about him being her soulmate.

“Tough case?”

Startled, Ethan looked up to find Cassie standing above him.

He had been so absorbed in his frustrated scribbling that he hadn’t even noticed her enter the coffee shop, place her order and walk over to him.

“You could say that,” he hedged, hoping she wouldn’t press for more.

“Maybe I can help,” she suggested, sliding into the seat across from him.

Before he could stop her, she reached for the pad, and he blurted out, “No!” even as she read the words out loud.

“Cassie, my love for you is like an unspecified virus that I couldn’t shake….”

Ethan saw the look of shock on Cassie’s face. Her eyes widened, and her mouth opened slightly. For a moment, they just stared at each other in stunned silence.

“Wait, are these your wedding vows? And did you just compare me to a virus?”

Ethan quickly tried to recover, realizing how the words sounded when said aloud. “I—I didn’t mean it like that. What I’m trying to say is that my love for you is something I never expected, something that took hold of me and changed everything.”

Cassie blinked, and then, to his relief, a smile tugged at the corners of her lips. “Babe, I appreciate the on-brand medical analogy, especially since I diagnosed Naveen’s bacteriophage, but maybe we can find a less…clinical way to describe it? This is our wedding, after all, not a keynote at the AMA annual symposium.”

“A keynote at the AMA would be easier than these damn vows,” Ethan muttered, running an exasperated hand through his hair.

He picked up his coffee and looked at her over the rim. “I suppose you’ve already written a masterpiece?”

To his surprise, Cassie blushed and looked away. “Not exactly. If you must know, I kind of forgot about them.”

She waved one hand dismissively. “Anyway, this isn’t about me. If you’re struggling, just focus on us, our relationship—what makes me the one for you? How you see our life together. Things like that.”

Ethan narrowed his eyes. “That’s some solid advice.” He reached for his phone, unlocking the screen. “In fact, it’s almost identical to the advice I got from another Valentine just a couple of hours ago. Ah, here it is.” He turned the screen to show her the text from Max.

Cassie’s eyes widened in disbelief. “That cheat!” She snatched the phone from Ethan’s hand, scrolling up to check the time stamp. It was from earlier in the day before she’d texted her brother. “He totally copy-pasted his response to me!”

Ethan chuckled, leaning back in his chair. “Looks like great minds think alike…or at least steal from each other. When did you speak to him?”

Cassie gave him a sheepish look. “Maybe half an hour ago. ”

“Isn’t it the middle of the night where he is?”

She rolled her eyes and made a face. “I know. Max wasn’t thrilled, which is probably why I ended up with recycled advice.”

She straightened in her chair, a hint of frustration in her voice. “I can’t seem to find the right words for our vows. At least you managed to compare me to a virus—I’ve got a completely blank page.”

Ethan chuckled softly, reaching across the table to squeeze her hand gently. “How about we work on them together? We always did our best work figuring out diagnostic differentials as a team. Why should wedding vows be any different?”

Cassie’s smile widened. “Just promise you won’t tell my mother this is how we wrote our vows, or I’ll have to call you a big, fat liar!”

“Deal.”

Nine days later…

Ethan faced Cassie, a deep contentment settling over him, unlike anything he’d ever felt before. As he held her hands in his, the words that once eluded him now flowed as naturally as breathing.

“Cassie, when I first met you, I had no idea we’d end up here, but from that moment on, you’ve captivated me in ways I never imagined. You’ve challenged me, frustrated me and inspired me to be a better person. And I've fallen in love with you again and again, even though I didn’t believe love or family were in the cards for me. You opened my heart to more. I promise to support and encourage you, embrace the unexpected with you, and always work on being the best version of myself for you. I vow to hold your hand and cherish your heart, loving you always and forever.”

Cassie flashed a mischievous grin, her eyes sparkling with amusement as she held Ethan’s gaze, recalling the day they wrote these vows. Her voice was light and playful as she began, making it clear she was savoring every moment.

“Ethan, from the moment you walked into my life—full of arrogance, calling me an amateur—everything changed in ways I never could have predicted. I told you then I was your biggest fan, but that barely scratched the surface of my feelings for you. I can’t imagine a single day without you, and I hope I never do. I promise to stand by your side, to love you fiercely—even when you’re driving me a little crazy—and to choose you every day, no matter what. You are my partner, my soulmate and my greatest adventure. I vow to cherish your heart with all that I am, always and forever.”

And then they lived happily ever after…

------------

All Fics & Edits: @bluebelle08 @coffeeheartaddict2 @crazy-loca-blog @jerzwriter @lady-calypso

@mainstreetreader @peonierose @potionsprefect @queencarb @quixoticdreamer16

@justyourusualash @tessa-liam @liaficreplies @trappedinfanfiction

Submissions: @choicesficwriterscreations @openheartfanfics

Ethan & Cassie only: @cariantha @custaroonie @youlookappropriate

[dear-ao3]

how i met my boyfriend - the designer axe story

as promised, since we have both now graduated the statute of limitations has expired on this story and i can now share it all with you.

some notes: ra is resident assistant and this story occurred in august of 2021. i wrote this all out the day after it happened almost 2 years ago. we did not actually start dating until october 2021 after we both realized we were in love with eachother. yes, we are still together as of may 2023.

without any further ados, the much anticipated designer axe story.

so part of RA training is that we have to make door decorations and bulletin boards for our halls and buildings. i had finished my door decks at 1 am sunday morning and the bulletin boards weren't due until 9 am monday morning. so i had all of sunday to work on it.

my building has no less than seven bulletin boards per floor and an additional 4 on the entrance floor. i dont know who the hell built this building but we need to have a serious talk about when too many bulletin boards is too many fucking bulletin boards.

so i was in charge of three on my floor. one about me, one covid policies and one sloth (his name is sam and i love him). and i am a chronic procrastinator. so i finished my about me and got through about 95% of my covid one by like 9pm and had to go back to the res life office to cut out a few more letters and get some scrapbook paper.

at this point its probably important to know that the only people on campus at this point were the RAs, some students getting mentoring training, and a few random first years here for an early arrival program. plus some staff.

now, i need you all to understand that there are 42 RAs. all of us have the same deadline. all of us had between 2 and 5 bulletin boards to complete. plus door decks. and room condition reports. so we were all moving at literally 600 frames per second, 120 miles per hour, or about as fast as a child does when they are told there's cake.

which is to say, we were all frazzled and stressed out of our minds.

so i open the door to the res life office at around 9 pm to cut out the word "but" in orange construction paper and grab 2 sheets of purple scrapbooking paper. in the office are the four RAs that were on duty that night, plus a good 7 other people are running around asking about glue sticks and construction paper and keys.

i knew that i only had my sloth board left to complete so i decided to take my sweet ass time, knowing that i was in need of a good break (and also im just a procrastinator) so i cut my letters and grabbed my paper and stood at the desk for no less than an hour talking to everyone about things like the fact that i fell out of a suitcase when i was 2 and that tamper proof lids exist because of the chicago poison pill murders and the flagship l.l. bean store in maine. it was very productive.

so i finally slink back to my dorm at around 10pm, very confident that i would finish by midnight and could watch some netflix or something before i went to bed. if only i knew what was in store for me.

i enter my dorm building and walk to the elevators. and then. one of the RAs from the third floor was like "oh saph. [another RA in the building] is looking for you."

and me, of course, didnt bring my phone to the res life office so i didnt know this.

i go up to the second floor and see one of the RAs from the second floor and another from one of the other buildings working on a bulletin board. they say "oh saph. [the same RA in the building] is looking for you."

i run up to my dorm and discover that somehow we missed the bulletin board by the downstairs elevator. seriously there's too fucking many bulletin boards. and they were asking me to do it. because they wanted to put covid policies on it.

and i know i said this story was about axe body spray. and it is. we are getting there.

so panic sets in because its 10pm and i still have two whole bulletin boards to make now. one of which i have nothing planned for. so i threw some soup in the microwave (because i had forgotten that dinner existed) and opened my laptop.

thankfully, i could reuse some of the same stuff from my own covid policies board in my common room. i just had to print it. which meant, yep you guessed it, another trip back to the res life office!!

at this point i think i had taken a grand total of at least 7 trips to the res life office that day alone. its a good 5 minute walk. not terrible, but just annoying enough that you hate yourself a little more every time that you have to do it. and now its 10:30pm. i am starving. i have two boards to complete. it was crunch time.

i make it to the office and this time i had no time to sit around and debate how popular l.l. bean is. i had policies to print and letters to cut.

as im struggling with the printer (because those fucking things can smell fear), someone else in the office starts loudly discussing timothee chalamet.

and now, this is where you want to actually pay attention because this man would be the reason i ended up only getting 4.5 hours of sleep.

said man in question is quite the character. he's in my grade and im pretty sure he's a polisci major (and maybe creative writing? there's some kind of writing) and he plays lacrosse. i dont really know how to describe him other than the fact that the first interaction i ever had with him was two years ago at freshman orientation when he complained to me in the dining hall that there was no milk for his protein powder.

that interaction is in my top 10 favorite interactions ive had in college.

but the one we are about to unpack definitely takes all of the cake.

so here i am, struggling with the printer and my tiny knock off dongle. the other RA on my floor starts discussing timothee chalamet's outfits with the protein powder RA.

and so apparently the protein powder RA worked in some major fashion designer brand corporate something or other thing over the pandemic. he told me which one but i was so shot and only thinking in construction paper and glue and staples that i didnt process any of it. but it was a fancy one. the store that is.

and so here's what happened:

me: "timothee chalamet? isn't he like, 17?"

protein powder RA and the other RA on my floor: "nah he's like 25. ive checked."

yet another RA: "yeah i just googled it."

me, a wimbo: "oh im thinking of finn wolfhard. but i dont think he's 17 either."

listen before you slam me, remember it is like 11pm and i have to still do 2 bulletin boards and we have training at 9am the next morning.

so protein powder RA pulls up some photo of timothee chalamet and starts telling me about all the brands he's wearing and i literally said "i understand all of the words that you're saying separately."

and he said "exactly!! he's just so great that when you put it all together you can't understand it!! he's just too perfect!!"

and the i made a detrimental decision.

there is life before this decision and life after.

i said "well. bring your fashion designer knowledge into the lounge and help me decide what color to cut my letters."

and he said okay.

so after severely debating the different color purples that we had and listening to the finer points of the fashion industry, i noticed something important.

he smelled like axe body spray.

see i bet you thought i forgot the point of the story. i did not.

let it be known that we are juniors in college (that's 20-21 years old if you dont know). axe is very common in middle and high school boys locker rooms. i have vivid memories of avoiding that hallway so i wouldn't be choked.

so im trying not to inhale too deeply because the smell has permeated my mask as i cut my "covid safety" letters in the color this man has dubbed "light lilac" and half listening to him talk about the fashion industry.

but i finish quickly, somehow escape the smell of axe, and grab my laptop and print outs before tagging along with the same protein powder RA and the other lax player RA back to the dorms. its now 11:15 pm. i still have 2 bulletin boards to complete. my soup is sitting in my microwave in my dorm, almost forgotten about.

halfway back from the office i realize that i forgot my dongle. i say so out loud and protein power RA says that he will go back and look because he's just that guy who likes to help. i say okay fine. and i sprint to my dorm building, drop the print outs and letters downstairs for later, and start the sloth board.

several minutes later, my soup has been inhaled, my papers glued, a sloth cut out, and im sitting in a mess of construction paper and staples in the hallway when i get a text from protein powder RA that quite simply said:

"its not there. do you need help with your boards?"

and me, being me, because i am exhausted and in need of company, say "yeah sure."

by the time he finally shows up, he's changed his outfit.

as a side note, every time ive seen this man during the last 5 days of training, he's been wearing a different outfit. oh and he works for lulu lemon. forgot to mention that.

but alas, here he came, holding my papers and reeking of axe as he walked down the hall to me, who is failing to staple a sloth to my bulletin board.

so for the next two hours i did my boards and he sat and talked. he wasn't physically helping me, but he was helping me stay awake, cause this man is a ball of fucking energy, and that was very important.

i only remember about half of what he said but essentially he was talking about how he was trying to be a better person than the one that he was freshman year. which is admirable. but he does still reek of axe.

at around 1 am i finished my last board and went upstairs to clean up. he came with me and sat on the floor and continued to talk while i cleaned up my disaster of paper and staples and glue among other things. at this point i was so relieved that i had finished that i was actually able to engage in the conversation, which was surprisingly deep and interesting.

and then. its about 1:45 am. i am about to wash my dishes so i can shower and go to bed. because remember that i need to be at training at 9 am the next morning.

and he says something about trying to be a better person again. and me, in all my sleep deprived glory, says:

drum roll

"and yet you still wear axe body spray."

and all hell broke loose.

i would like to preface by saying that he freaked out in a very joking matter and was not actually mad at me. but he was definitely disappointed and in shock. the next hour pretty much consisted of:

"are you kidding me? this is prada something something cologne and all these celebrities wear it!! how dare- it could not POSSIBLY SMELL LIKE AXE!!! well i guess its a little dry and axe is kind of dry smelling...bUT I SPENT SO MUCH ON THIS BOTTLE and the lady sold me on the larger one and it was like 150 bucks and UGH i cannot smell like axe! you know i got four compliments on how i smelled today??! and you're telling me i smell like fucking- *sniffs shirt* no! there's no way!! well i mean... no i cannot. i cannot smell like designer axe. damnit saph! im gonna have to sell this whole bottle now cause i can't use it! BUT ITS PRADA!!"

for an hour.

but it was very entertaining.

eventually i dragged him to the common room cause i needed to do my dishes and sleep and he continued ranting about it there, going as far as to call his best friend (who was asleep) and another RA and ask them if he smelled like axe. i meanwhile was laughing my ass off and 12 kinds of tired but couldn't find it in myself to care.

eventually he decided he needed yet another opinion. so he went to find the other RA on my floor, which, if you remember, is the same one who was thirsting over timothee chalamet with him in the res life office all of those fateful hours before. but that RA was nowhere to be found. so he ran down to the common room below us and scared the shit out of three freshmen.

and he asked these freshmen if he smelled like axe.

the answer was yes.

after that he left because it was 2:30 in the morning, and all the while he was yelling about how he was going to come to training tomorrow with different shirts with all his different colognes on them and have me sniff them because he couldn't smell like designer axe.

and i did the only logical thing. went upstairs to my my dorm and made him a door deck that looked like a bottle of axe that had a post it on the front that said "designer."

and so. now you all know not to buy cologne because its expensive because there's a good chance it will just end up smelling like axe.

and i didn't get to smell his other colognes because i almost passed out in training and left to take a nap. but maybe that was a blessing in disguise.

we’ve been dating for a year and seven months and just graduated college :) and in a fun twist of events, prada no longer makes that cologne anymore.

[gvenevera]

Kuroshitsuji Musical ~ 寄宿学校の秘密 (Secrets of the Boarding School) 2024 ~ VERA’S REVIEW!

Yes you read that right! I’ve had the most fateful chance to watch the very first performance of the newest Kuromyu in Hyogo last Saturday, so I figured I’ll eternalize some of my best memories here.

Before we begin: the LIVE STREAMING is available for the LAST PERFORMANCE, September 29th 2024, HERE! For only 3800 yen, you’ll get to watch it live at home, or watch it later for up to 1 week (October 6th)! Apparently you need a Japanese VPN though, if anyone knows how to navigate the site, please do share.

A few disclaimers from me:

*Anti-shippers DNI. This post barely has any shipping content at all but I don’t like people who harass others over fictional preferences. I’m a shipper, I can’t help being biased for my OTPs.

**Since photos were prohibited in the venue, I’ve included stage pictures featured in official news websites or accounts.

***This is by no means a critical review but merely a fangirl’s ramblings, and I often drew comparisons to the original stage play Kuroshitsuji Musical: Secrets of the Boarding School (2021). For reference, I suggest you watch it first! I intentionally avoided rewatching the 2021 version close to the airing date though, so my memories may not be accurate. Also my Japanese is mediocre so I apologize if there were important dialogues I didn’t catch.

Introduction

I know, sorry for the dilly-dally intro. But I’d like to first stress that ever since I started following Kuroshitsuji in my first year of university (like 9 years ago now lmao), I’ve ALWAYS dreamed to watch the stage musical live in person. When 2024’s performance was announced immediately after the last episode of the anime, I was overjoyed to see that our old cast was coming back.

And it was fate that gave me the opportunity - my scheduled work program this year was set to be in Kyoto AND during September! Needless to say, I had the Kuromyu ticket bought and reserved first, before my confirmation with the Kyoto office or my visa and plane ticket. Priorities, right?

Quick remark on the ticket process: I hit a snag right in the beginning because the ticket reservation website Eplus required a Japanese phone number to sign up. I contacted multiple people (middle school friend whose brother used to work in Japan, another who was quarter-Japanese, several dealer websites with high rate exchanges), until I settled on my roommate’s friend from high school who was currently working there. Many thanks to her and my roommate for the help!

She took care of registration for me - even so the advance sales was a LOTTERY ticket! We fortunately got the lucky draw - I saw many Japanese fans on X who were not so lucky, while others bought in bulk to sell later. Then, I used the online barcode to exchange for a paper ticket when I arrived in Japan on September 1st. That’s when I get to know my seat number - 3rd floor, 2nd row B. A very far position from the stage, but it’s alright because we’re here for the atmosphere anyway!

The performances for the first 2 days were set in Hyogo Performing Arts Center, KOBELCO grand hall. I’ve honestly never been to any kind of music performance (or even concerts) in my life, so I was blown away by the sheer size of the venue.

By 10 AM, the audience was trickling in. I was in awe of the fact that you can tell who was coming in to watch kuromyu - beautiful women dressed in black-and-white tones, many even sporting gothic lolita bows and dresses to keep up with the Victorian England theme. In fact, it felt like the whole of Ikebukuro were gathered here in this very building!

We were ushered into the hall entrance at 11 AM and let me tell you, the crowd was suffocating! In front of the theater, there was a goods section for Kuromyu merch. I’m so glad I took the time to queue up because it seems some of the merch were starting to sell out by the second day. The booth clerk looked perplex to see a non-Japanese customer here though. Here’s how the line looked like, and this was still early before most of the audiences got in:

(We’re not supposed to take any photos but I saw the warning signs too late…Here’s a view from where I was sitting on the third floor.)

I realized then as we were settling in that some ladies around me had binoculars!! Well how was I supposed to know you could bring those here, instead of trying to find those fancy opera glasses!?! Ah well, I was lucky that I’d recently had my prescription glasses updated and the seat to my left was vacant, so I could lean in to see the center better.

The Performance

While it is true that you can barely see the actors’ faces from the balcony seats, it was the grandness of the performance itself that blew me away. For the first time I could see the stage in all its entirety, all the actors dancing in synchronization, and the special effects…oh it had improved A LOT from 3 years prior!

The stage sets for Weston may look a tad “crowded” in the still photo, as compared to the original where they used white backgrounds but in reality, it blended in so prettily with the flashing stage lights. The middle section was a rotating floor and one of my memorable scenes was where Ciel and Sebastian were discussing their plans while crossing the rotating stage, to give the illusion of “strolling across the school grounds.” Sounds like a simple trick but if looked amazing from above.

On to the story itself - the execution actually barely changed from the 2021 rendition, which for me, was a relief! Now I know, some would argue a rerun should add in different elements, because who would want to see the same thing twice right? From past experiences with Kuromyu, the reruns tend to be hit or miss - different actors, different song remixes, voice changes, and so on. For this performance, I could barely tell that the cast (apart from Ciel, Sebastian and Undertaker) were all new members. Everyone got into character flawlessly!

The story of course followed the entirety of the Public School Arc. The script and choreography was almost identical to the 2021 stage musical version. If you would remember, this Kuroshitsuji arc was the first to be portrayed on stage before the anime adaptation - same as previously, they seemed to take inspiration from the manga only rather than the anime.

Some key moments from the play:

The opening sequence was again a recap of the previous arcs - Jack the Ripper (Lycoris that Blazed the Earth), Book of Circus (Noah’s Ark Circus), Book of the Atlantic (Tango on the Campania). I’ve always loved this part because you could tell they slipped in iconic themes from the past musicals.

Perfect Black: the main theme, and my favorite from this stage! I’m so happy to have heard it live! *swoons* Thank god they didn’t do anything weird to remix it. The whole cast dancing together was beautiful! However I thought 2021 did it better with the dramatic light focus on Sebastian during the chorus drop.

Ciel’s Earl of Phantomhive outfit was changed from the glittery blue suit to a blue-green checkered coat this year. (I’d have bought his Earl photoshoot set if I knew it beforehand) Yana-sensei later tweeted that she was the one to re-design it, to better match Eito. Then Eito Konishi himself replied, saying he was honored to play as Ciel Phantomhive, to which Yana-sensei praised his singing and called him “Eito-bocchan” …boy was he fanboying hard over that. He’s one of us!!

Arrival at Weston: I don’t have a comment on the P4 in particular, they were all straightforward from the manga. I think I like Redmond’s character the most here, he looked very pretty with the side-ponytail and while he was a show-off still, he wasn’t as annoying or arrogant as I somehow expected.

A notable interaction: Violet forcing Greenhill to pose for him at the swan gazebo. Greenhill’s actor really looked strained trying to keep an upside down bridge pose (Edward was supporting his back, but kept getting distracted). When he broke the pose and got up, Violet hit him over the head with his sketchbook so hard that the thump echoed through the hall.

As for the Prefect’s Fags: Edward and Cheslock were giving off some suspiciously gay rivals-to-lovers vibes over here. Which I kinda vibed with, I hope they kept the energy into the Blue Cult Arc!

One important thing: they kept the ALL the Fag lines! Which in Japanese accent also kinda sounded like them repeatedly calling each other “Fućk”. Oh how I wish the anime had kept those!

Soma Asman Kadar: now this guy deserves an ovation just for himself. Not only did he kill the role, he was also the funniest! Soma’s song was greatly improved and lengthened with catchier music and dancing - when his troupe “arrived” at Weston, he even dragged Ciel and Clayton to join in. I can’t do it justice, you have GOT to see those two English gentlemen crack the Indian dance moves! His pestering of Maurice Cole was hilarious and he kept exasperating Ciel out of his character, their chemistry was wonderful. I really didn’t expect to get hooked by Soma in this arc out of all people! Too bad Agni wasn’t here.

Maurice Cole’s miniarc - Flawless. Sometimes I wonder if he was an easy character to play just because his character trait is so extremely over-the-top lol.

The library kabedon scene and sebaciel burning Purple House scene didn’t exist. Another scene cut off from the last musical was where Clayton and the Blue House kids were congratulating Ciel on his fag duties and Sebastian took the chance to blend in with them. Sadly that was one of my favorite adlibs.

Ciel’s dream sequence: this was originally in the 2021 musical. After a talk with Macmillain made him revisit his past trauma, Ciel “dreamed” of the cultists, and Sebastian’s close call with Undertaker in BotA. I actually forgot about this part when I watched it in theater - the highlight was sebaciel reenacting the scene in BotA where they reached for each other, the enactment surprisingly gave me the impression of Ciel’s “worry” over Sebastian’s “vulnerability” here. Unlike the 2021 version though, Undertaker didn’t pull Ciel into a bridal carry or referenced the R!Ciel wake-up scene as clearly.

The second half after the break was the long-awaited Cricket Match. Like the previous version, there was no scene of Ciel jumping into Master Michaelis’ arms, but I think they just couldn’t fit that one into the sequence. The cricket songs were mostly the same as the original - with an improvement being them cutting out Red House’s random beauty pageant contest. It actually felt like the cricket match went by faster this time, which was a win in my book. I’ve heard people complain of Kuromyu 2021 being a “Prince of Cricket” musical, hence the bad reviews back then.

The laxative meat pie scene was hilarious. From Sebastian faking it as a student complete with Red House’s uniform, to the team’s diarrhea horrors. Redmond stole the show again, as he was going to help Harcourt in the middle of the field, but tragedy struck which made him deadpan: “Oh. Someone get Harcourt.” Then immediately left the stage lol. The Blue House kids lifted Harcourt out.

The Green vs Purple house battle was the same as last time. I always felt bad to see Cheslock being the only Purple kid doing his best because without any support member cast while Violet was sitting in the grass. But this time, he gave Cheslock a tree sculpture of his bust as a good-job reward! Good for them.

Lastly Green vs Blue. They incorporated the rotating stage again in the last batting when Greenhill accidentally hit Ciel. The end of the match cut straight to the Thames Boat Ride, then they did the Blue House cheering scene after. Sebastian finally got to do his signature bridal carry, awww.

Midnight tea party: the setting was even more beautiful than last time. Undertaker letting his hair fall from his hat was iconic as usual. I was impressed with Master Agares’ fight scenes because his actor looked quite older than his 2021 predecessor. I always liked how they did Derrick Arden’s death in the musical, it felt more anguished from the P4 POV while in the anime, it just felt like a gruesome horror scene.

Final musical number was Ciel-Sebastian-Undertaker chorus during their fight in the garden. Music and choreography seemed to be similar, EXCEPT they somehow changed the iconic “Your life is my priority” scene!!! 2021’s version had me hold my breath as Sebastian had his arm possessively hooked around Ciel and took off his glove with his teeth (seriously, you have to see it yourself). This time they had Sebastian and Ciel reenact the scene on the highest stage instead of front and center, and I didn’t feel as much suspense nor was there any glove-removal from what I could see. It was also a weird placement because they were so far away, and Undertaker should’ve been the one on the top as he did his goodbye pose holding the moon.

We end the story with Sebastian recapping the aftermath with Weston’s students, and finally sebaciel’s conversation back at the manor. Again, Ciel reiterates that Sebastian is the only one who could never lie nor betray his trust. Perfect Black came on as an outro, and I got chills when Sebastian ended the last verse on a raised note!

The curtain call was the experience I’d waited for. Somehow I only realized just then that the actors would do the full call during their finale performance, which was what we got to see in the recordings! That day, after the cast bowed twice, the exit announcement immediately came on but guess what? The audience, including myself, kept clapping all the way through the announcement, it went for so long that the cast actually came out to take another bow! As they returned on stage, most of us also stood up for a standing ovation - according to twitter this doesn’t seem to be a regular occurrence outside of the finale. It felt like a truly wholesome “welcome back” for the troupe and for Kuromyu, especially after the rather harsh criticisms from the previous stage (due to major cast and style changes, even I took a while to bring myself to watch it) and the long break due to the COVID years.

Overall summary

Kuroshitsuji Musical 2024 was a faithful rerun of its predecessor. They succeeded with the musical numbers, new cast, overall adaptation of the story. The settings, props and special effects were wonderfully upgraded. The original cast carried the show: Eito Konishi’s singing felt greatly improved and I thought he carried himself as more mature than his last performance as Ciel. Sebastian’s Toshiki Tateishi had a mesmerizing voice the more I listened to him, he never went out of breath even while dancing or fighting - truly vocals fit for the troupe leader. Kandai Ueda did well as his own Undertaker too, even with Undertaker’s peculiar accent.

My few complaints: I felt like the P4 cast (bar Redmond) could do to have more distinction in their tones and movements. It felt hard to distinguish who was talking at times. The performance seemed to have a faster pacing this time around, and you get less absorbed in certain conversations between the characters, so I wished they’d added in slow scenes here and there. And of course I miss the signature sebaciel moments that I’ve mentioned - granted, this manga arc had always been my least favored because of the lack of sebaciel interactions anyway! So I’d say they did the best with the source material.

While I enjoyed seeing my favorite production performed live with the music blasting through my eardrums, it was the atmosphere that truly made the experience for me. Sitting in the 4-storeys grand hall full of some 2000 Kuroshitsuji fans really pulled me back in time, especially during the standing ovation. I’m so happy to see my favorite series so loved after all these years. I’m sure Yana-sensei could feel it too.

I wish a successful performance for the cast going forward to Tokyo, and hopeful for many more musicals to come!

[ditadaydreams]

What I wish more people understood is that art is like cooking. Not everyone needs to be a great chef but everyone should cook to some extent. It is required to put fuel into our bodies, and we have to prepare that fuel. Same with exercise. A lot of people understand that regular exercise is part of a healthy life, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are athletes.

But it feels like most people don’t apply this perspective to art. Just because you are not an “artist” doesn’t mean that you should not be creating something that feeds your soul. It can be paper clip crafts, or doodles in your notebook, or knitting or LITERALLY WHATEVER THE HELL YOU WANT but please for the love of God do SOMETHING.

I think it starts with our art teachers exclaiming confidently that everyone is an artist. While I understand the intention behind it, I feel like it alienates people who don’t feel artistic, or aren’t particularly skilled and they end up frustrated. Not everyone is an artist in the sense that they have the mindset and technical skills to make meaningful pieces, but everyone should be a creator of some sort. It feeds that need in your soul, and just like food and exercise are part of a healthy body, so is art.

Human nature is to make crappy art and embroider crappy designs onto your clothes and finger paint and make a mess. All prehistoric cultures have instances of art dating as far back as tools and cooking, and it is just as vital to civilization as the things that keep us breathing. What’s the point of living without feeling alive.

Untitled Abstract by Me (acrylic on canvas board) 2021

[archivalofsins]

So, I've seen the new Amane gifs and-

Spoilers under the cut.

Big sister Shion, I think you misplaced your taser-

Again.

In all seriousness, I would like to discuss the second gif in this batch. Since at first glance, it looked like Amane arriving home to me. However, it could come off as an abduction. If she's leaving a public area or is in one. Something that's still a possibility given all the papers covering the door.

Unless, for some reason, Amane's family just hangs papers on the inside of their home door or own a business that does that. Either of these things could be the case. Since we see them working on a set in Magic, and they could put things up at home like this to remind them of certain things. That's not uncommon in familial residences, after all.

However, the papers and cards there looked to be put up for advertising purposes. Kind of like what one would see on a bulletin board just on the door. This is usually done on the front doors of businesses, which is why I said this makes it possible for this scene to be an abduction.

Now I do believe that Riyone, the one shown to use electricity on Amane in Magic, is more than likely her mother. However, I also believe her parents are more than likely divorced, and her mother was using the pilgrimage thing to kill two birds with one stone.

Q.09 Tell us your family structure.

Kazui: It’s only me now.

Amane: It was my father, my mother and me.

By explaining away her father's sudden absence and displaying to Amane that her father believes in this too. This would motivate Amane to take these teachings more seriously because, as we have been shown over and over again, Amane has great respect, admiration, and love for her father.

Q.02 Who do you look up to?

Kazui: You won’t know them even if I say, but I have a childhood friend I really respect. Sorry for just answering someone from my personal life.

Amane: My father. He’s been away on a trip for a while, but I think that’s very honourable of him.

So, if she was led to believe that her father followed these teachings as well she would try harder to be a good girl in order to,

A. Make her dad proud.

B. Be like her father.

C. Possibly see him if she's good enough.

Q.13 Who do you want to see right now?

Kazui: They won’t see me anymore.

Amane: My father. I want him to praise me for all my hard work.

Japan favors leaving the kid with the parent, which will cause the least change in the child's life. So, they tend to give custody to the parent the child is living with at the time. This is why it's become common for parents who are about to divorce their spouse to either kick the other out of the home or move without notice taking the kid(s) with them and then get a divorce.

"Parents secretly moving out and taking children with them isn’t unheard of-in fact, it’s often viewed in Japan as justified, in part because of instances where domestic violence is alleged. Such unilateral separations are legal in Japan, but if the other parent attempts to take the child back, that can be considered an illegal removal."

This would explain why Kazui and Amane were paired together as their stories may heavily involve highlighting the failings of the divorce system.

If Amane's mother did do this, then her father wouldn't have any legal right to see Amane, and her mom could just come up with any excuse for his absence she wanted. Something that divorced parents tend to do anyhow even when not given such beneficial circumstances to do it under.

"Each year, divorce affects roughly 200,000 Japanese children, double that of 50 years ago in a country where the total number of minors has plummeted. Of children with divorced parents, 1 in 3 said they eventually lost all contact with the noncustodial parent, a 2021 government survey showed. Given the system’s winner-take-all approach, spousal battles have only intensified, escalating the economic and emotional damage." X

Overall, given what we know, Amane's situation is rather complicated. However, I find it very telling that a lot of people are willing to endanger/torment a child for the safety and comfort of a bunch of adults.

Simply because this is always how child abuse and neglect has been treated by society. Especially when done by a parent. The concept itself is so abhorrent and senseless that many would rather look away from the issue entirely than confront it. Even if they must shift the blame to the victim to do so.

It's easier to go,

"Well, that kid must have done something to get that response from their parent."

Objectively true statement. Something was done to cause this. That's simply how cause and effect work. However, that something can range from things as simple as helping another person in a way they deem unacceptable

or breathing wrong.

The victim undergoing familial abuse doesn't get to pick the struggle it fucking picks them. It's Monday and their primary caretaker had a bad day at work? Guess who's getting beat again. This may be the rest of their evening or week now. Aw shit- did they get a low grade on a test?

Hope they're ready to go to the quiet room or sit at a table for seven hours to be taught this from the beginning. Because they're making their parent(s) look bad. If only they were smarter and not a complete embarrassment, then they could be having fun right now.

20/06/18

Amane: Thank you very much for teaching me. ……but, though I realise it’s strange me saying this after I asked you, I must admit it’s kind of unexpected. You give off the impression of someone who wouldn’t want to get involved in things like this.

Kotoko: ……well, you’re not wrong. I’m surrounded by people who could all be murderers, so I don’t plan on going out of my way to talk and make friends. I can’t let my guard down. But I like ambitious people like you. If you want to study more, then I’m happy to teach.

Amane: I see…… You look scary at first impression, but I quite like the way you treat everyone equally regardless of whether they’re older or younger than you. You don’t just treat me like a child or anything like that.

Kotoko: Treat you like a child? Hah, you’ve got to be kidding. Back when I was your age, I was already the person I am today. I don’t have any plans to let you get away with something just “because you’re a child.” ……remember that. There, I’ve finished marking. 83%. How do I put it… Even though you act like this, it’s not like you’re super brilliant at studying or anything, huh.

Ah, they managed to fix all those things; man, that's nice. Why do they always need something (clothes, food, water, etc)? Have they thought of their parent(s) needs lately? Recognized how hard their parent(s) are trying. They have it rather good, considering some kids are out there starving. How can they be so ungrateful?

Shifting the onus of blame onto the victim is quite literally a good way to make sure the bar is always moving, and success is unobtainable. This is literally the first thing abusive parents do. Make the abuse seem like the child's fault.

"Well, that was then - this is now. You don't have to keep behaving this way. You're in a safe environment."

An objectively true statement. However, that may not feel emotionally true due to how long the individual has been in an unsafe environment, the likelihood of them changing the behavior that they learned to cope with that immediately is pretty much nonexistent.

"If they were unhappy, they'd say something. It would show more they wouldn't be doing as good at school."

No, they wouldn't; depending on the severity and duration of the abuse.

Usually, the intention of child abusers, especially parents who abuse their children, is to not get caught. They will actively go out of their way to make it look like things are as good as possible. If the kid does or says something that contradicts that they'll just punish them. So, when well-meaning people go,

"Is something wrong?"

The first instinct for a child suffering under familial abuse may be to lie. Because if they don't, whoever they are talking to may discuss what they have told them with their caretaker leading to them getting in trouble again. Sometimes parents that partake in this type of behavior will even coach their kids when it comes to lying.

"How'd you get this?" - "Playing."

"Why did you miss so many days of school?" - "I caught a cold."

"Hey, do you like it at home?" - "Yep, my life is great. My parent(s) and I do (acceptable to mention hobby here) on these days. It's a lot of fun. Why do you ask?"

For children living under these sorts of conditions every waking moment is a fucking balancing act. They either say the right thing or get in trouble because at the end of the day they're going to have to go back home. So, children living under these sorts of conditions are well aware of what happens if they act a certain way in public by the time they reach school age.

"I mean, it could be that... but it's best not to pry."

The quiet part out loud. People don't want to be bothered by it. It's uncomfortable and usually considered to not be the business of outside parties unless it's child services. So, people look the other way and get uncomfortable when it's even alluded to near them. They'll look at the kid and go well, that's bumming me out. Best to think about things that can be solved at the end of the day. I mean, that's their legal guardian. I can't tell someone else how to raise their kids.

That's just how a majority of people view child abuse/neglect. Because children are either a nice thing to have around, or a problem that should be ignored or handled. Everyone in Milgram outside of Amane has been given a good deal of the benefit of the doubt. Despite them all being older and just as capable of understanding their behavior along with the hurt it has caused while rationalizing why they did it as she is.

Amane is the only character in the series who has been treated with the scrutiny of an adult despite everything she's been through. To me, that's very fucked up. It's gotten to the point that I don't believe people even recognize they're doing it. They don't recognize they're justifying continuing to let a kid remain in an abusive environment because it makes their lives easier. Because then they'll be more comfortable.

Directly mirroring the way child abuse is pushed to the side and swept under the rug in the real world.

Because at the end of the day people only care about children when it's convenient for them. When it's easy to care, when the person they're protecting the kid from is someone they already dislike. People have no trouble pointing out these issues then. Because it's easy to talk about the pain of children or someone being younger when it helps others support or deny something they already feel a certain way about.

It's easy for one to conclude that what Futa did was wrong, that Mu, Yuno, or Haruka made a mistake because of their ages and upbringing. Yet when shown the horrendous treatment Amane has endured and her age being put on full display from the beginning... Somehow there's still room to dance around the idea of whether she should be Innocent (Forgiven) or not.

Despite being given the option to not continue to torment the youngest, most vulnerable, and consistently neglected person here, many can suddenly find a good deal of justifications to continue her punishment.

All I did was say a bad thing was wrong, how was I to know that was gonna to happen; what about what you're doing?

"Futa isn't sorry, he just doesn't want to get punished." A lot of people wanted to discuss remorse earlier and how Futa displays it. Yet, showing remorse isn't indicative of change. Plus, remorse and shame look a lot alike.

The most important thing with Futa is he not only recognized that what he did was wrong regardless of how he displays that- He, also took the necessary steps to change his behavior moving forward. In order to prevent what had happened before from happening again. He's actively attempted to show more concern for those younger than himself since entering Milgram.

Even though he isn't particularly good at communicating, he goes out of his way to attempt to check in on others and asks about them. Despite saying he can't afford to do that he's still done so. Even going to inquire about Haruka.

He can do that but despite seeing the consequences of our judgements, a lot of people are too comfortable with doubling down on some of the most disenfranchised characters within Milgram. Simply because the idea of that sort of person existing to some is a personal offense.

That's fine Milgram let's you vote on that alone after all. However, I definitely wouldn't like my name being used to excuse the mistreatment of others. So, instead of saying it's for another prisoner's sake how about we cut out the middleman and get straight to the point.

Some people within the fandom would be more comfortable with Milgram if Amane were restrained. It would give certain individuals a sense of peace of mind.

No matter how easily broken that will be by whatever prisoner decides to act up next during the intermission in response to their verdict.

Despite everyone in Milgram showing little or no fear of Amane and Mahiru literally saying this,

Q.13 What do you think of Amane?

Shidou: Us adults need to do something for her. I can’t do anything while looking after the injured right now so I have to leave it to someone else, which is bothering me.

Mahiru: I would’ve loved to play a lot with her if she was doing better.

So, it'd be nice if people stopped using Mahiru as an excuse to hurt another prisoner that she has admitted to liking numerous times.

Q.10 Which of the other prisoners do you get along with?

Kazui: Shidou-kun, Mikoto and me all smoke together, so I think we get along well.

Amane: If I had to pick someone, then Yuno-san and Mahiru-san.

Plus, this is simply rich; looking back on all these people discussing the safety and care of children to compare it to how they're acting now. Justifying continuing the mental suffering of a child simply because it appears narratively convenient to them. You're going to meta vote the kid twice, really? Okay, go ahead.

That's the sort of place Milgram is after all. A place that says children only matter when they can fit into the framing most convenient to the one speaking. It doesn't matter if Amane is tortured blatantly on screen, it doesn't matter if she's having a rough time. Because a bunch of people have already decided that coddling adults who should damn well be able to protect themselves is more important than a child's safety.

Not surprising or disappointing, that's just the natural way of things in society.

I mean you might as well, I don't know-

Ignore the consistent signs of familial abuse happening around her, ostracize her because the idea makes you uncomfortable, avoid her like a plague. Put her in the corner because children are meant to speak only when spoken to.

Oh...hm that sounds familiar-

Lol, fuck kids though am I right? The only time people decided to care about Satoko, and her lived experiences, was when she was a teenager. Maybe if Amane was a few years older, then her lived experiences would matter. For now, though, nah-

Moving on! I'd also like to discuss two other gifs; the close-up of the baton with rope attached and the attempted flag twirling. Given what we've seen I believe that Purge March will be retreading what we are shown in Magic except subtracting Amane's idealized view of things.

It was implied that this was her ideal at the end of Magic through this image-

A scene that brings to question all of the presentation of Magic. That made me wonder if this is how things went or just Amane's more idealized retelling.

Star pointed out the absence of anyone in front of the stage in her post Sunday. However, there's another thing that's odd. The thing we see before the credits roll isn't everyone standing together as they are in the end but Amane by herself brandishing her wand-

However, unlike when she first brandished it her chibi form her wand moves from her left hand to her right back to her left again before the fake credits role at the end of Magic.

This also happens directly after everyone just mysteriously disappears like right before this she was dancing with just Yuri and Riyone-

Since we noticeably see Yuri isn't holding anyone else's hand and Riyone doesn't seem to be either. So, where did Gachata and Gozake go? Then when they are back in the credits it's like this-

Instead of Amane being in between Yuri and Riyone like she was before she's between Gozake and Riyone.

Since she did this when no one else seemed to be present this could mean a variety of things. One that she may have used the wand more than once, two she did a routine of some sort which she just finished, or even denote handedness meaning her left hand is more than likely her dominant one.

Considering how her routine begins with the wand in her left hand and ends with it in her left hand. However, I don't know enough about baton twirling to say. Plus, every video I've found on it has emphasized starting with one's right hand regardless of dominance. So, this is odd.

(Star here! Given the religious aspects of Amane's circumstances, it could also be something to do with the stigma left-handed people have/had. They might have forced her to use her right hand for things. A prime example of this is the gif of her attempting to spin the flagpole. This could indicate that Amane was forced to use her right hand, resulting in a loss of motor skills you wouldn't get when using your dominant hand. Further backing this is the fact that in the close-up gif of Amane twirling the baton, she starts with her left hand and then transfers it to her right)

Adding to that in baton twirling people are specifically trained to use both hands and it's widely accepted that one is meant to start with the right. Though the baton is usually meant to be the length of one's dominant hand.

X

X

Video on Baton Measuring: X, X

Outside of giving us a possible idea on her handedness- This also adds more depth to this answer given by Amane in her first written interrogation-

Q.14 Do you listen to music?

Kazui: I guess I do from time to time. It’s all super old music though, so I don’t think you’ll know it.

Amane: I don’t particularly listen to it for fun.

Because if Amane is majorette which has been all but stated, she would listen to music predominantly to practice her routines. This would give more depth to her pairing with Kazui as well. Since they've both been heavily related to the performing arts in some way.

Baton Twirling routines: X, X, X, X, X

What Amane appeared to be doing in the new gif using the baton with the string: X

(What Amane appears to have attempted with the flag toss: X)

Back to how Purge March may be the same events just less idealized.

If you look at these frames-

Notice that the way the flagpole lands on Amane's head and how the impact affects her mirrors this scene of Gachata flicking her forehead.

(This time, it's Star typing something! Gunsli was busy for a bit so I was headed to write this up o7

Taking this and the gif of her desperately trying to make her way through the water to grab the flag in front of her, it's likely they are going to use the switch from flagpole to baton as an allegory. Specifically, to better illustrate the timeline of events/order of circumstances.

Though, to expand on this, the flag may also represent the idea of everyone living happily together that Amane refers to in Magic. The baton, however, represents the ideologies surrounding the cult her family is involved in. If this is true, then it could also be visual shorthand for the idea of Amane changing her priorities.)

With that I think we're done here. There's a lot of interesting things about Purge March and I think it's going to follow up on Magic well. It's making me more and more excited for Double. Milgram has been very hush-hush about Amane and Mikoto. So, their songs might just end up speaking more than any of the others so far.

[eddie-redmayne-italian-blog]

The Untold History of Cabaret: Revived and Kicking

As Broadway welcomes the ever-evolving musical, its star, Eddie Redmayne—along with Liza Minnelli, Joel Grey, and Sam Mendes—assess its enduring power.

As director Rebecca Frecknall was rehearsing a new cast for her hit London revival of Cabaret, the actor playing Clifford Bradshaw, an American writer living in Berlin during the final days of the Weimar Republic, came onstage carrying that day’s newspaper as a prop. It happened to be Metro, the free London tabloid commuters read on their way to work. The date was February 25, 2022. When the actor said his line—“We’ve got to leave Berlin—as soon as possible. Tomorrow!”—Frecknall was caught short. She noticed the paper’s headline: “Russia Invades Ukraine.”

Cabaret, the groundbreaking 1966 Broadway musical that tackles fascism, antisemitism, abortion, World War II, and the events leading up to the Holocaust, had certainly captured the times once again.

Back in rehearsals four months later, Frecknall and the cast got word that the Supreme Court had overturned Roe v. Wade. Every time she checks up on Cabaret, “it feels like something else has happened in the world,” she told me over coffee in London in September.

A month later, as Frecknall was preparing her production of Cabaret for its Broadway premiere, something else did happen: On October 7, Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel, killing at least 1,200 people and taking more than 240 hostages.

The revival of Cabaret—starring Eddie Redmayne as the creepy yet seductive Emcee; Gayle Rankin as the gin-swilling nightclub singer Sally Bowles; and Bebe Neuwirth as Fraulein Schneider, a landlady struggling to scrape by—opens April 21 at Manhattan’s August Wilson Theatre. It will do so in the shadow of a pogrom not seen since the Einsatzgruppen slaughtered thousands of Jews in Eastern Europe and in the shadow of a war between Israel and Hamas that continues into its fifth month, with the killing of thousands of civilians in Gaza.

Nearly 60 years after its debut, Cabaret still stings. That is its brilliance. And its tragedy.

Redmayne has been haunted by Cabaret ever since he played the Emcee in prep school. “I was staggered by the character,” he says. “The lack of definition of it, the enigma of it.” He played the part again during his first year at Cambridge at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where nearly 3,500 shoestring productions jostle for attention each summer. Cabaret, performed in a tiny venue that “stank,” Redmayne recalls, did well enough that the producers added an extra show. He was leering at the Kit Kat Club girls from 8 p.m. till 10 p.m. and then from 11 p.m. till two in the morning. “You’d wake up at midday. You barely see sunshine. I just became this gaunt, skeletal figure.” His parents came to see him and said, “You need vitamin D!”

In 2021, Redmayne, by then an Oscar winner for The Theory of Everything and a Tony winner for Red, was playing the Emcee again, this time in Frecknall’s West End production. His dressing room on opening night was full of flowers. There was one bouquet with a card he did not have a chance to open until intermission. It was from Joel Grey, who originated the role on Broadway and won an Oscar for his performance alongside Liza Minnelli in the 1972 movie. He welcomed the young actor “to the family,” Redmayne says. “It was an extraordinary moment for me.”

Cabaret is based on Goodbye to Berlin, the British writer Christopher Isherwood’s collection of stories and character studies set in Weimar Germany as the Nazis are clawing their way to power. Isherwood, who went to Berlin for one reason—“boys,” he wrote in his memoir Christopher and His Kind—lived in a dingy boarding house amid an array of sleazy lodgers who inspired his characters. But aside from a fleeting mention of a host at a seedy nightclub, there is no emcee in his vignettes. Nor is there an emcee in I Am a Camera, John Van Druten’s hit 1951 Broadway play adapted from Isherwood’s story “Sally Bowles” from Goodbye to Berlin.

The character, one of the most famous in Broadway history, was created by Harold Prince​​, who produced and directed the original Cabaret. “People write about Cabaret all the time,” says John Kander, who composed the show’s music and is, at 96, the last living member of that creative team. “They write about Liza. They write about Joel, and sometimes about us [Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb]. None of that really matters. It’s all Hal. Everything about this piece, even the variations that happen in different versions of it, is all because of Hal.”

In 1964, Prince produced his biggest hit: Fiddler on the Roof. In the final scene, Tevye and his family, having survived a pogrom, leave for America. There is sadness but also hope. And what of the Jews who did not leave? Cabaret would provide the tragic answer.

But Prince was after something else. Without hitting the audience over the head, he wanted to create a musical that echoed what was happening in America: young men being sent to their deaths in Vietnam; racists such as Alabama politician “Bull” Connor siccing attack dogs on civil rights marchers. In rehearsals, Prince put up Will Counts’s iconic photograph of a white student screaming at a Black student during the Little Rock crisis of 1957. “That’s our show,” he told the cast.

A bold idea he had early on was to juxtapose the lives of Isherwood’s lodgers with one of the tawdry nightclubs Isherwood had frequented. In 1951, while stationed as a soldier in Stuttgart, Germany, Prince himself had hung around such a place. Presiding over the third-rate acts was a master of ceremonies in white makeup and of indeterminate sexuality. He “unnerved me,” Prince once told me. “But I never forgot him.”

Kander had seen the same kind of character at the opening of a Marlene Dietrich concert in Europe. “An overpainted little man waddled out and said, ‘Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome,’ ” Kander recalls.

The first song Kander and Ebb wrote for the show was called “Willkommen.” They wrote 60 more songs. “Some of them were outrageous,” Kander says. “We wrote some antisemitic songs”—of which there were many in Weimar cabarets—“ ‘Good neighbor Cohen, loaned you a loan.’ We didn’t get very far with that one.”

They did write one song about antisemitism: “If You Could See Her (The Gorilla Song),” in which the Emcee dances with his lover, a gorilla in a pink tutu. At the end of the number, he turns to the audience and whispers: “If you could see her through my eyes, she wouldn’t look Jewishhh at all.” It was, they thought, the most powerful song in the score.

The working title of their musical was Welcome to Berlin. But then a woman who sold blocks of tickets to theater parties told Prince that her Jewish clients would not buy a show with “Berlin” in the title. Strolling along the beach one day, Joe Masteroff, who was writing the musical’s book, thought of two recent hits, Carnival and Camelot. Both started with a C and had three syllables. Why not call the show Cabaret?

To play the Emcee, Prince tapped his friend Joel Grey. A nightclub headliner, Grey could not break into Broadway. “The theater was very high-minded,” he once said. When Prince called him, he was playing a pirate in a third-rate musical in New York’s Jones Beach. “Hal knew I was dying,” Grey recounts over lunch in the West Village, where he lives. “I wanted to quit the business.”

At first, he struggled to create the Emcee, who did not interact with the other characters. He had numbers but “no words, no lines, no role,” Grey wrote in his memoir, Master of Ceremonies. A polished performer, he had no trouble with the songs, the dances, the antics. “But something was missing,” he says. Then he remembered a cheap comedian he’d once seen in St. Louis. The comic had told lecherous jokes, gay jokes, sexist jokes—anything to get a laugh. One day in rehearsal, Grey did everything the comedian had done “to get the audience crazy. I was all over the girls, squeezing their breasts, touching their bottoms. They were furious. I was horrible. When it was over I thought, This is the end of my career.” He disappeared backstage and cried. “And then from out of the darkness came Mr. Prince,” Grey says. “He put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Joely, that’s it.’ ”

Cabaret played its first performance at the Shubert Theatre in Boston in the fall of 1966. Grey stopped the show with the opening number, “Willkommen.” “The audience wouldn’t stop applauding,” Grey recalls. “I turned to the stage manager and said, ‘Should I get changed for the next scene?’ ”

The musical ran long—it was in three acts—but it got a prolonged standing ovation. As the curtain came down, Richard Seff, an agent who represented Kander and Ebb, ran into Ebb in the aisle. “It’s wonderful,” Seff said. “You’ll fix the obvious flaws.” In the middle of the night, Seff’s phone rang. It was Ebb. “You hated it!” the songwriter screamed. “You are of no help at all!”

Ebb was reeling because he’d learned Prince was going to cut the show down to two acts. Ebb collapsed in his hotel bed, Kander holding one hand, Grey the other. “You’re not dying, Fred,” Kander told him. “Hal has not wrecked our show.”

Cabaret came roaring into New York, fueled by tremendous word of mouth. But there was a problem. Some Jewish groups were furious about “If You Could See Her.” How could you equate a gorilla with a Jew? they wanted to know, missing the point entirely. They threatened to boycott the show. Prince, his eye on ticket sales, told Ebb to change the line “She wouldn’t look Jewish at all” to something less offensive: “She isn’t a meeskite at all,” using the Yiddish word for a homely person.

It is difficult to imagine the impact Cabaret had on audiences in 1966. World War II had ended only 21 years before. Many New York theatergoers had fled Europe or fought the Nazis. There were Holocaust survivors in the audience; there were people whose relatives had died in the gas chambers. Grey knew the show’s power. Some nights, dancing with the gorilla, he’d whisper “Jewish” instead of “meeskite.” The audience gasped.

Cabaret won eight Tony Awards in 1967, catapulted Grey to Broadway stardom, and ran for three years. Seff sold the movie rights for $1.5 million, a record at the time. Prince, about to begin rehearsals for Stephen Sondheim’s Company, was unavailable to direct the movie, scheduled for a 1972 release. So the producers hired the director and choreographer Bob Fosse, who needed the job because his previous movie, Sweet Charity, had been a bust.

Fosse, who saw Prince as a rival, stamped out much of what Prince had done, including Joel Grey. He wanted Ruth Gordon to play the Emcee. But Grey was a sensation, and the studio wanted him. “It’s either me or Joel,” Fosse said. When the studio opted for Grey, Fosse backed down. But he resented Grey, and relations between them were icy.

A 26-year-old Liza Minnelli, on the way to stardom herself, was cast as Sally Bowles. The handsome Michael York would play the Cliff character, whose name in the movie was changed to Brian Roberts. And supermodel Marisa Berenson (who at the time seemed to be on the cover of Vogue every other month) got the role of a Jewish department store heiress, a character Fosse took from Isherwood’s short story “The Landauers.”

Cabaret was shot on location in Munich and Berlin. “The atmosphere was extremely heavy,” Berenson recalls. “There was the whole Nazi period, and I felt very much the Berlin Wall, that darkness, that fear, all that repression.” She adored Fosse, but he kept her off balance (she was playing a young woman traumatized by what was happening around her) by whispering “obscene things in my ear. He was shaking me up.”

Minnelli, costumed by Halston for the film, found Fosse “brilliant” and “incredibly intense,” she tells Vanity Fair in a rare interview. “He used every part of me, including my scoliosis. One of my great lessons in working with Fosse was never to think that whatever he was asking couldn’t be done. If he said do it, you had to figure out how to do it. You didn’t think about how much it hurt. You just made it happen.”

Back in New York, Fosse arranged a private screening of Cabaret for Kander and Ebb. When it was over, they said nothing. “We really hated it,” Kander admits. Then they went to the opening at the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York. The audience loved it. “We realized it was a masterpiece,” Kander says, laughing. “It just wasn’t our show.”

“PAPA WAS EVEN MORE EXCITED ABOUT THE OSCAR THAN I WAS,” SAYS LIZA MINNELLI. “AND, BABY, I WAS—NO, I AM STILL—EXCITED.”

The success of the movie—with its eight Academy Awards—soon overshadowed the musical. When people thought of Cabaret, they thought of finger snaps and bowler hats. They thought of Fosse and, of course, Minnelli, who would adopt the lyric “Life is a cabaret” as her signature. Her best-actress Oscar became part of a dynasty: Her mother, Judy Garland, and father, director Vincente Minnelli, each had one of their own. “Papa was even more excited about the Oscar than I was,” she says. “And, baby, I was—no, I am still—excited.”

By 1987—in part to burnish Cabaret’s theatrical legacy—Prince decided to recreate his original production on Broadway, with Grey once again serving as the Emcee. But it had the odor of mothballs. The New York Times drama critic Frank Rich wrote that it was not, as Sally Bowles sings, “perfectly marvelous,” but “it does approach the perfectly mediocre.” Much of the show, he added, was “old-fashioned and plodding.”

In the early 1990s, Sam Mendes, then a young director running a pocket-size theater in London called the Donmar Warehouse, heard the novelist Martin Amis give a talk. Amis was writing Time’s Arrow, about a German doctor who works in a concentration camp. “I’ve already written about the Nazis and people say to me, ‘Why are you doing it again?’ ” Amis said. “And I say, what else is there?”

At the end of the day,” Mendes tells me, “the biggest question of the 20th century is, ‘How could this have happened?’ ” Mendes decided to stage Cabaret at the Donmar in 1993. Another horror was unfolding at the time: Serb paramilitaries were slaughtering Bosnian Muslims, “ethnic cleansing” on an unimaginable scale.

Mendes hit on a terrific concept for his production: He transformed his theater into a nightclub. The audience sat at little tables with red lamps. And the performers were truly seedy. He told the actors playing the Kit Kat Club girls not to shave their armpits or their legs. “Unshaved armpits—it sent shock waves around the theater,” he recalls. Since there was no room—or money—for an orchestra, the actors played the instruments. Some of them could hit the right notes.

To play the Emcee, Mendes cast Alan Cumming, a young Scottish actor whose comedy act Mendes had enjoyed. “Can you sing?” Mendes asked him. “Yeah,” Cumming said. Mendes threw ideas at him and “he was open to everything.” Just before the first preview, Mendes suggested he come out during the intermission and chat up the audience, maybe dance with a woman. Mendes, frantic before the preview, never got around to giving Cumming any more direction than that. No matter. Cumming sauntered onstage as people were settling back at their tables, picked a man out of the crowd, and started dancing with him. “Watch your hands,” he said. “I lead.”

Cumming’s Emcee was impish, fun, gleefully licentious. The audience loved him. “I have never had less to do with a great performance in one of my shows than I had to do with Alan,” Mendes says.

When Joe Masteroff came to see the show in London, Mendes was nervous. He’d taken plenty of liberties with the script. Cliff, the narrator, was now openly gay. (One night, when Cliff kissed a male lover, a man in the audience shouted, “Rubbish!”) And he made the Emcee a victim of the Nazis. In the final scene, Cumming, in a concentration camp uniform affixed with a yellow Star of David and a pink triangle, is jolted, as if he’s thrown himself onto the electrified fence at Birkenau.

“I should be really pissed with you,” Masteroff told Mendes after the show. “But it works.” Kander liked it too, though he was not happy that the actors didn’t play his score all that well. Ebb hated it. “He wanted more professionalism,” Mendes says. “And he was not wrong. There was a dangerous edge of amateurishness about it.”

The Roundabout Theatre Company brought Cabaret to New York in 1998. Rob Marshall, who would go on to direct the movie Chicago, helped Mendes give the show some Broadway gloss while retaining its grittiness. The two young directors were “challenging each other, pushing each other,” Marshall remembers, “to create something unique.”

Cumming reprised his role as the Emcee. He was on fire. Natasha Richardson, the daughter of Vanessa Redgrave and director Tony Richardson, played Sally Bowles. She was not on fire. She’d never been in a musical before, and when she sang, “There was absolutely no sound coming out,” Kander says.

“She beat herself up about her singing all the time,” Mendes adds. “There was a deep, self-critical aspect of Tash that was instilled by her dad, a brilliant man but extremely cutting.” He once said to her out of nowhere: “We’re going to have to do something about your chin, dear.” As Mendes saw it, she always felt that she could never measure up to her parents.

Kander went to work with her, and slowly a voice emerged. It was not a “polished sound,” Marshall says, but it was haunting, vulnerable. Still, Cumming was walking away with the show. At the first preview, when he took his bow, the audience roared. When Richardson took hers, they were polite. Mendes remembers going backstage and finding her “in tears.” But she persevered and through sheer force of will created a Sally Bowles that “will break your heart,” Masteroff told me the day before I saw that production in the spring of 1998. She did indeed. (Eleven years later, while learning how to ski on a bunny hill on Mont Tremblant, she fell down. She died of a head injury two days later.)

The revival of Cabaret won four Tony Awards, including one for Richardson as best actress in a musical. It ran nearly 2,400 performances at the Roundabout’s Studio 54 and was revived again in 2014. And the money, money, money, as the song goes, poured in. Once Masteroff, having already filed his taxes at the end of a lucrative Cabaret year, went to the mailbox and opened a royalty check for $60,000. “What the hell am I supposed to do with this?” he snapped.

Rebecca Frecknall grew up on Mendes’s Donmar Warehouse production of Cabaret. The BBC filmed it, and when it aired, her father videotaped it. She watched it “religiously.” But when she came to direct her production, she had to put Mendes’s version out of her mind.

Mendes turned his little theater into a nightclub. Frecknall, working with the brilliant set and costume designer Tom Scutt, has upped the game. They have transformed the entire theater into a Weimar cabaret. You stand in line at the stage door, waiting, you hope, to be let in. Once inside, you’re served drinks while the Kit Kat Club girls dance and flirt with you. The show’s logo is a geometric eye. Scutt sprinkles the motif throughout his sets and costumes. “It’s all part of the voyeurism,” Scutt explains. “The sense of always being watched, always watching—responsibility, culpability, implication, blame.”

REDMAYNE’S EMCEE IS STILL SEXY AND SEDUCTIVE, BUT AS THE SHOW GOES ON HE BECOMES A PUPPET MASTER MANIPULATING THE OTHER CHARACTERS, SOMETIMES TO THEIR DOOM.

Mendes’s Cabaret, like Fosse’s, had a black-and-white aesthetic—black fishnet stockings, black leather coats, a white face for the Emcee. Frecknall and Scutt begin their show with bright colors, which slowly fade to gray as the walls close in on the characters. “Color and individuality—to grayness and homogeneity,” Frecknall says.

As the first woman to direct a major production of Cabaret, Frecknall has focused attention on the Kit Kat Club girls—Rosie, Fritzie, Frenchie, Lulu, and Texas. “Often what I’ve seen in other productions is this homogenized group of pretty, white, skinny girls in their underwear,” she insists. Her Kit Kat Club girls are multiethnic. Some are transgender. Through performances and costumes, they are no longer appendages of the Emcee but vivid characters in their own right.

Her boldest stroke has been to reinvent the Emcee. She and Redmayne have turned him into a force of malevolence. He is still sexy and seductive, but as the show goes on, he becomes a skeletal puppet master manipulating the other characters to, in many cases, their doom. If Cumming’s Emcee was, in the end, a Holocaust victim, Redmayne’s is, in Frecknall’s words, “a perpetrator.”

Unwrapping a grilled cheese sandwich in his enormous Upper West Side townhouse, Kander says that his husband had recently asked him a pointed question: “Did it ever occur to you that all of you guys who created Cabaret were Jewish?”

“Not really,” Kander replied. “We were just trying to put on a show.” Or, as Masteroff once said: “It was a job.”

It’s a “job” that has endured. The producers of the Broadway revival certainly have faith in the show’s staying power. They’ve spent $25 million on the production, a big chunk of it going to reconfigure the August Wilson Theatre into the Kit Kat Club. Audience members will enter through an alleyway, be given a glass of schnapps, and can then enjoy a preshow drink at a variety of lounges designed by Scutt: The Pineapple Room, Red Bar, Green Bar, and Vault Bar. The show will be performed in the round, tables and chairs ringing the stage. And they’ll be able to enjoy a bottle (or two) of top-flight Champagne throughout the performance.

This revival is certainly the most lavish Cabaret in a long time. But there have been hundreds of other, less heralded productions over the years, with more on the way. A few months before Russia invaded Ukraine, Cabaret was running in Moscow. Last December, Concord Theatricals, which licenses the show, authorized a production at the Molodyy Theatre in Kyiv. And a request is in for a production in Israel, the first since the show was produced in Tel Aviv in 2014.

“The interesting thing about the piece is that it seems to change with the times,” Kander says. “Nothing about it seems to be written in stone except its narrative and its implications.”

And whenever someone tells him the show is more relevant than ever, Kander shakes his head and says, “I know. And isn’t that awful?”′

You can also listen the entire article here !!

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/cabaret-revival

I know it's a very long article , but very interesting!!

[oracle-cassandra]

What are Radblr's thoughts about this? I'm on my way to take a test when this article popped up on my screen, and I wanted to post this before I leave, especially given that this is published by Scientific America. However, Im personally skeptically that "social contagion" doesn't play a factor at all; I wouldn't doubt it plays into this even a little bit. I'm sure everyone knows about articles posted in favor of this fad from, like, two years ago from even big names like Mermaids, who have either been proved wrong or backtracked.

I have pasted the article below. There are links in the original article.

----------------

Health Care

Evidence Undermines ‘Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria’ Claims

Fears of “social contagion,” used to support anti-transgender legislation, are not supported by science

By Timmy Broderick on August 24, 2023

A recent study claiming to describe more than 1,600 possible cases of a “socially contagious syndrome” was retracted in June for failing to obtain ethics approval from an institutional review board. The survey examined “rapid-onset gender dysphoria,” a proposed condition that attributes adolescent gender distress to exposure to transgender people through friends or social media. The existence of such a syndrome has been the subject of intense debate for the past several years and has fueled arguments against transgender rights reforms, despite being widely criticized by medical experts.

The American Psychological Association and 61 other health care providers’ organizations signed a letter in 2021 denouncing the validity of rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) as a clinical diagnosis. And a steadily growing body of scientific evidence demonstrates that it does not reflect transgender adolescents’ experiences and that “social contagion” is not causing more young people to seek gender-affirming care. Still, the concept continues to be used to justify anti-trans legislation across the U.S.

“To even say it’s a hypothesis at this point, based on the paucity of research on this, I think is a real stretch,” says Eli Coleman, former president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. Coleman helped create the organization’s most recent standards of care for trans people, which endorse and explain the evidence for forms of gender-affirming care.

Many transgender people experience gender dysphoria, meaning that the gender that was assigned to them at birth and their gender identity don’t align, causing distress. ROGD was proposed as a gender dysphoria subtype in a 2018 paper by physician and researcher Lisa Littman, then at Brown University.* Littman’s survey asked parents of transgender adolescents—recruited predominantly from anti-transgender websites and forums—to describe their child’s “sudden or rapid onset of gender dysphoria” and to state if it coincided with increased social media usage or the child’s friends coming out as transgender.

Littman later issued a correction that updated the methodology, including a brief description of the websites and forums, and noted that ROGD is not a formal diagnosis. But the concept had already been taken upin books and podcasts—and by politicians—to promulgate the idea that peer pressure and social media are making kids transgender or that being transgender is a form of mental illness. As legislation targeting trans people has reached an all-time high in the U.S., ROGD’s alleged social contagion has been invoked by lawmakers in states such as Missouri, Utah and Arkansas to justify banning or restricting gender-affirming care for young people.

“This is just a fear-based concept that is not supported by studies,” says Marci Bowers, president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. The term ROGD is being used to “scare people or to scare legislators into voting for some of these restrictive policies that take away options for young people. It’s cruel, cruel legislation.”

Like the 2018 study that coined the term rapid-onset gender dysphoria, the recently retracted paper, which was published this March in Archives of Sexual Behavior, surveyed parents of transgender children about their children’s experiences. The study was co-authored by Michael Bailey, a psychologist at Northwestern University, and Suzanna Diaz, a pseudonym used by a mother of a child with gender dysphoria. Diaz is not affiliated with an institution and had already collected the survey data before collaborating with Bailey on the paper. The study was retracted because Diaz and Bailey did not get consent from the survey’s respondents to have their responses published, although Bailey disputes this. (Bailey declined to answer questions about the retraction from Scientific American.)

The participants in both the 2018 and the retracted 2023 studies were recruited from online communities that were explicitly critical about many aspects of gender-affirming care for transgender kids. Littman’s research was inspired in part by parents’ posts on these skeptical websites.

In response to criticisms that recruiting parents from anti-transgender websites may have biased the results, Littman says, “I reject the premise that parents who believe transition will harm their children are more likely to discredit their kids’ experiences than parents who believe that transition will help their children.”

Most experts cite the survey of parents rather than transgender children themselves as another major flaw in the methodology of both studies.

Diane Ehrensaft, director of mental health at the University of California, San Francisco, Child and Adolescent Gender Center, concurs. “To talk about what children are thinking, feeling and doing, particularly as they get old enough to have their own minds and narratives, you need to interview them,” she says.

Parents can often be the last to know about their child’s gender identity, Ehrensaft says. Coming out can be terrifying for many transgender kids. Family members often respond with violence or distrust or may even kick the child out of the house. Almost 40 percent of transgender youth experience homelessness or housing instability, according to a 2022 report from the Trevor Project, a nonprofit that provides crisis support for young LGBTQ+ people. Many kids who wait to discuss their gender identity with their parents before appearing to “suddenly” come out are simply keeping themselves safe, Ehrensaft says.

“It is not rapid-onset gender dysphoria,” she says. “It’s rapid-onset parental discovery.”

Many experts have also questioned what length of time qualifies as a “sudden” experience of gender dysphoria. Both the 2018 and 2023 studies left the definition up for parental interpretation. Complicating this, there isn’t one pathway or time line for being transgender, says Tey Meadow, a Columbia University sociologist who studies sexuality and gender. “For some people, it can evolve slowly. For others, it can evolve quickly,” she says.

For most transgender youth seeking gender-affirming care, considerable time elapses between when they realize they may be transgender and when they receive such care. A recent analysis of 10 Canadian medical centers in the Journal of Pediatrics found that 98.3 percent of young people seeking gender-affirming care had realized more than a year prior that they may have been transgender. “If ROGD were a real thing, we would expect to see two discernible streams of patients coming in [to receive care],” says Greta Bauer, a co-author of the study and director of the Eli Coleman Institute for Sexual and Gender Health at the University of Minnesota Medical School. There would be a distinct group of adolescents with more recent knowledge about their gender identity going to clinics and another group that had had such knowledge for years. “But we didn’t see that,” she says.

Thomas Steensma, a psychologist at Amsterdam University Medical Centers who provides gender-affirming therapy, says he has not seen evidence of the “social contagion” component of ROGD, and he cautions against even using these terms. “Rapid means out of control, and contagion signals a warning, and that warning induces fear,” he says. “There’s no evidence that certain developmental pathways are more problematic or less beneficial or helpful than others” for a child’s gender identity.

Steensma reports that he sees two “peaks” of referrals in his clinic: young adolescents and 15-year-olds. In a 2020 study Steensma and his colleagues looked at adolescent referrals from 2000 to 2016 and found no measurable difference in the psychological functioning or the intensity of the gender dysphoria between more recent referrals and those who came to the clinic starting in 2000. If adolescents are presenting with a different form of gender dysphoria, Steensma has not seen it.

The researchers did observe a change in their referral population in recent years, however. More kids assigned female at birth have been transitioning in recent years than those assigned male at birth. Many studies have captured this difference—including the 2018 survey proposing ROGD—but experts are unsure of its cause. Littman suggests that female-assigned kids are more susceptible to the “social contagion” of gender dysphoria because they feel social pressure more acutely than male-assigned kids. But Ehrensaft says nothing in the clinical literature corroborates this assertion. Instead she attributes this discrepancy to shifting cultural factors that influence how children express themselves and explore their identity. In our culture, Ehrensaft says, “there’s a lot more gender stress for the boy in the tutu than the girl in the football uniform.”

Other forms of gender incongruence, such as identifying as nonbinary or gender nonconforming, further challenge the idea that children should be forced to abide by traditional gender categories. And the best way to understand what kids are experiencing is to ask them questions and listen to their answers, Ehrensaft says.

“In some ways, [kids] are far more advanced than I am, as somebody in my 70s, about how they live and understand gender,” Ehrensaft adds. “So if we want to really understand gender, turn to the experts—and that would be the youth themselves.”

*Editor’s Note (8/24/23): This sentence was edited after posting to correct Lisa Littman’s occupation and her affiliation at the time of her 2018 paper.

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

Cosmic count exceeds expectation: Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer on ISS reveals surplus of cosmic rays

Cosmic rays confound scientists once again. The latest analysis of data collected by the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) on board the International Space Station has revealed a surprising surplus of cosmic rays made of deuterons—atomic nuclei made up of a proton and a neutron.

The finding, described in a paper published in Physical Review Letters, adds to the growing list of unexpected results from the space-based detector, which was assembled at CERN and has detected more than 238 billion cosmic rays of particles of various kinds since it started taking data in 2011.

Cosmic-ray particles fall into two main classes: primary and secondary. Primary cosmic rays are formed in cosmic sources such as supernova explosions, whereas secondary cosmic rays are produced in interactions between primary cosmic rays and the interstellar medium.

In its latest study, the AMS collaboration investigated data from 21 million cosmic deuterons detected by AMS from May 2011 to April 2021. Examining how the number, or "flux," of deuterons varies with rigidity, that is, particle momentum over electrical charge, the AMS team found surprising features.

Deuterons are thought to form in the same way as helium-3 nuclei, in collisions between primary helium-4 nuclei and other nuclei in the interstellar medium. If that is indeed the case, the deuteron-to-helium-4 flux ratio should be similar to the helium-3-to-helium-4 flux ratio.

But this is not what AMS sees. By contrast, the AMS data shows that these ratios are notably different above a rigidity of 4.5 gigavolts (GV), with the deuteron-to-helium-4 ratio falling less steeply with rigidity than the helium-3-to-helium-4 ratio. In addition, and again defying expectations, above a rigidity of 13 GV the data shows that the deuteron flux is nearly identical to that of protons, which are primary cosmic rays.

To put it simply, AMS has found more deuterons than expected from collisions between primary helium-4 nuclei and the interstellar medium.

"Measurement of deuterons is quite difficult because of the large cosmic proton background," says AMS spokesperson Samuel Ting. "Our unexpected results continue to show how little we know about cosmic rays. With the coming upgrade of AMS to increase its acceptance by 300%, AMS will be able to measure all the charged cosmic rays to one percent accuracy and provide an experimental basis for the development of an accurate cosmic-ray theory."

IMAGE: The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (center left) on the International Space Station. Credit: NASA

[sage-lights]

smoshblr tag game 💗💫🫂

tagged by: @babychosen

rules: copy and paste the questions below into a text post and write in your answers, then tag as many people as you want!

1. how long have you been watching smosh? about 9 years, but i did take a 2 year break from 2021 to 2023 where i didn't watch smosh at all (just wasn't interested in that era)

2. favourite smosh cast member(s)? i have what i call my "core six," which is amanda, angela, shayne, courtney, chanse, and arasha 🫶

3. favourite pairing? amanda + angela (*gasp!*) (what a shocker!)

4. favourite recurring character? ooooo, i've got a couple! aunt carolyn and the chosen are so damn good. but my all time fav will always be my boyfriend, dominic!

5. favourite smosh video? right now, it's got to be the last video in the baf legacy series with criss darren, brenda "final girl" poppy, mr grub, the chosen, and regina o'brien 🤗

6. first video that got you into smosh? don't remember which one really got me hooked, but i know the first one i ever watched was the boogie-boarding video from the first ever smosh summer games

7. favourite picture of the cast? forever in love with this shoot. have i mentioned that i wrote an entire paper on the costuming alone? (yes, and i won't shut up about it)

8. favourite picture of your fav? her face card is lethal 😭 and this photoshoot is so elite, she looks INCREDIBLE here!!! (i've posted these pics here sooooo many times i'm obsessed with them)

9. what smosh series do you want to see more of? praying for the return of "let's do this" fr 😔

10. dream guest on smosh mouth? oh my god, i don't know! i mean, angela. that was already a dream and that happened A LOT and now i don't want her on. now it's too much. (jk my real answer is matpat. they HAVE TO make it happen!)

i'm tagging: @unknownteapot, @mynephewmarriedajaguar, @smoshimonsters, @vangoghschair, and @poppyfamily 💌

[poem-today]

A poem by Brian Brodeur

THE CARPENTER'S TALE

There's going to be an accounting. And it'll be the weird stats that come out of somewhere. And this is one of the stranger ones.

—Kerry Breen, This American Life, 8/13/2021

Most of us laughed at being called "essential" in those first weeks of New York's quarantine. We'd grease a hinge or patch a rotten sill,

replacing sunk beams under a snack machine, painting classrooms. Though it felt like cheating, I'd never seen the schools look so pristine.

Then, in April, at our team meeting, our boss clears his throat and his voice softens. Putting down the cruller he's been eating,

he says, "Next week, we start building coffins." One of us laughs. Another spills his coffee. I tell my boss, "Get out of here. Build coffins."

He looks up from his clipboard and glares at me, then gives us all the plans his boss gave him: "We'll be building coffins for the city."

On Monday, I show up at this school gym outfitted as a shop. On cinderblocks, beside the bleachers with the lights turned dim,

our prototype: a six-foot plywood box standing on its end where the feet would be. Above the prototype and scoreboard clocks,

a championship banner's "Victory" had begun to sag where flags of UN nations cling to the ceiling. Under Germany,

we set up cutting and assembly stations, a place where we can urethane the boards. Electricians rig fans for ventilation

and 10 of us plug in extension cords. We stack up drafts of plywood on the floor— a draft is 50 sheets. Our only words

concern the lack of Mets and Yankees scores, how hot the gym gets, who brought Gatorade. We run through 2x4s and they bring more—

wash, rinse, repeat. I mean, we're getting paid, but after so long it occurs to me: My god, they really need this many made?

No one gives us an end. We build 150, stacking them from one side of the gym to the other, five coffins high—no one can see

above the shrink-wrapped freight pallets of them. I back the forklift into the elevator and drive down Concourse near the stadium

and down another street to a tractor trailer. The forklift's so slow people honk at me. Honk at a guy carrying coffins—or

scream at me to move. This goes on three weeks. I find it—I don't know—bizarre, I guess, not one person ever stops to ask me

what I'm doing, everyone obsessed with toilet paper. Then, passing on foot, a guy who speaks Spanish stops to zip his vest 

and says, "Morte," finger-slicing his throat. "Sí," I say, and he just shakes his head and walks away. I slam the trailer shut.

Our team built 450 in the end, and there were other teams in other districts across the whole Department of Ed.

No one I tell has ever heard of this. Why would they? Not exactly good PR— Guess what we used schools for. You'll never guess. …

But now that things are waning, more and more I feel alright, like I can let it out. It wasn't war—if it had been a war

we'd know what happened, what it was about, how much we'd lost, what people did out there. I'm sure someone will make a final count,

and we'll deal with each last expenditure, but that's years off, and this is not a war.

Brian Brodeur

More poems by Brian Brodeur are available through his website.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

David Smith at The Guardian:

“Look at me, look at me,” said Martha-Ann Alito. “I’m German, from Germany. My heritage is German. You come after me, I’m gonna give it back to you.” It was a bizarre outburst from the wife of a justice on America’s highest court. Secretly recorded by a liberal activist, Martha-Ann Alito complained about a neighbour’s gay pride flag and expressed a desire to fly a Sacred Heart of Jesus flag in protest. This, along with audio clips of Justice Samuel Alito himself and a stream of ethics violations, have deepened public concerns that the supreme court is playing by its own rules. The Democratic representative Jamie Raskin has described a “national clamour over this crisis of legitimacy” at the court.

A poll last month for the progressive advocacy organisation Stand Up America suggests that the supreme court will now play a crucial role in voters’ choices in the 2024 election. Nearly three in four voters said the selection and confirmation of justices will be an important consideration for them in voting for both president and senator in November. Reed Galen, a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, a pro-democracy group, said: “The idea that these guys act as if they are kings ruling from above, to me, should absolutely be an issue. It was always Republicans who said we hate unelected judges legislating from the bench and we hate judicial activism. That’s all this stuff is.” Public trust in the court is at an all-time low amid concerns over bias and corruption. Alito has rejected demands that he recuse himself from a case considering presidential immunity after flags similar to those carried by 6 January 2021 rioters flew over his homes in Virginia and New Jersey. Justice Clarence Thomas has ignored calls to step aside because of the role his wife, Ginni, played in supporting efforts to overturn Donald Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in 2020.

Ethical standards have been under scrutiny following revelations that some justices failed to report luxury trips, including on private jets, and property deals. Last week Thomas, who has come under criticism for failing to disclose gifts from the businessman and Republican donor Harlan Crow, revised his 2019 form to acknowledge he accepted “food and lodging” at a Bali hotel and at a California club. These controversies have been compounded by historic and hugely divisive decisions. The fall of Roe v Wade, ending the nationwide right to abortion after half a century, was seen by many Democrats as a gamechanger in terms of people making a connection between the court and their everyday lives.

There are further signs of the debate moving beyond the Washington bubble. Last week, the editorial board of the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper argued that, since the court’s own ethics code proved toothless, Congress should enact legislation that holds supreme court justices to higher ethical standards. The paper called for the local senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, who is chair of the Senate judiciary committee, to hold a hearing on the issue.

[...] Congressional Democrats have introduced various bills including one to create an independent ethics office and internal investigations counsel within the supreme court. Broader progressive ideas include expanding the number of seats on the court or limiting the justices to 18-year terms rather than lifetime appointments. But such efforts have been repeatedly thwarted by Republicans, who over decades impressed on their base the importance of the court, ultimately leading to a 6-3 conservative majority including three Trump appointees. This week Senate Republicans blocked the ​​Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act, legislation that would require the court to adopt a binding code of conduct for all justices, establish procedures to investigate complaints of judicial misconduct and adopt rules to disclose gifts, travel and income received by them that are at least as rigorous as congressional disclosure rules.

Democrats should be aggressive about confronting a runaway radical right-wing majority on SCOTUS and make it a major issue. #SCOTUSisCompromised

See Also:

Vox: What can Democrats actually do about Thomas’s and Alito’s corruption?

[ohmightydevviepuu]

fanbinding: a second version of our little life (rounded with a sleep), plus some thoughts on fandom and Fanfiction Writers Appreciation Day

the story: i found in my tumblr drafts an ask about this story, a hard-boiled detective noir AU retelling of the first season of OUAT.

a lot of the first half of the story came to me very quickly and very easily, especially during the rewrite draft, because i had already done some work with @thisonesatellite to brainstorm about what might be expanded and i already had about 18k to work with.  

i got stuck about halfway through, caught up in my own writer bullshit, but @wistfulcynic kindly stepped up and freed me from that with a couple of simple, pointed plot questions while the group in the CSRT discord helped me unlock a few ideas about the specifics of the dreams.

as for the ending...was directly influenced by a project that @distant-rose and @justanotherwannabeclassic were working on that they kindly shared with me. 

the binding: sewn boards covered in Duo Oatmeal bookcloth. lineco bookcloth spine piece, hand embroidered for decoration. painted by me in a buttercup motif. paste-painted endpapers from Madeleine's Paste Papers on etsy. art by @camii-artt.

i mentioned in the earlier post about how joining the @captainswanbigbang CSRT in august of 2019, to work on finishing the fic of my heart, was a fateful decision for me. boy howdy was it. i had no idea what i was getting into--the people, the community--they were just names i'd seen on so many amazing fics. i had no idea what events were like or what the group chat would be like but i jumped in with both feet. it was the timing, you see. august is (for Reasons) a very difficult month for me and the idea of grasping on to this Thing was a joyful and a hopeful one.

so we embarked, as a group, on this writing project together. comments, questions, discussions about show canon turned into pet photos and vacation photos and late nights. we entered lockdowns together. watched one, two, three babies come into the world. new jobs. new houses. election night(s) 2020. insurrection day 2021. new year's eve parties, cocktail hours, bake-off, video game lobbies. in-person meetings. vacations. and so many nights spent writing together.

all because we wanted the same two fictional characters to kiss.

holding this fic in my hand is a wonderous thing because it literally would not exist without these people.

happy FFWAD to my CSRT/IAS fam. you're everything.

@wistfulcynic @thisonesatellite @optomisticgirl @spartanguard @shireness-says @idoltina @initiala @phiralovesloki @thejollyroger-writer