#using my tumblr blog as a confessional for a moment | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

dashboarddiaries · 10 months ago

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Dashboard Diaries is a production of Atypical Artists, hosted by Lauren Shippen (@thelaurenshippen) and Cher McAnelly (@overchers). Our theme was composed by Lauren Shippen and mixed by Brandon Grugle. Art by Shae McMullin. Transcription by Laudable.

For bonus clips, ad-free episodes, and more, become a patron at atypicalartists.co/support.

Lauren: Hello, Dashers! Lauren Shippen here with a quick little comment about this episode before we jump into it. My computer had a complete and total meltdown in the course of recording ... or attempting to record ... this episode. I eventually got things working again but there will be times in this episode where my audio sounds truly terrible. I’m really sorry about that. But it shouldn’t affect the wonderful experience of listening to Gretchen McCulloch talk about Tumblr linguistics. It’s a really, really fun episode. A great interview with Gretchen. So, I hope you guys enjoy ... and sorry for the technical difficulties.

[intro music]

Lauren: Hello, Enthusiasts! I’m Lauren Shippen, professional writer, who absolutely has brought Tumblr-speak into her real spoken life.

Cher: And I’m Cher McAnelly, Head of Entertainment at Tumblr. And student at Tumblr University.

Lauren: And this is Dashboard Diaries, a podcast for you – the folks who are in this internet bunker with us. We talk about what’s going on in our favorite hell site, get into what we like to call “tumbl-lore,” do fandom deep dives, and share the times when we’ve gone feral over a new ship.

And we have a really, really fun guest for you all later. But first, let’s do some Dashboard Confessionals.

[guitar riff]

Cher, what do you have from the archives for us this month?

Cher: So, I have two posts, both of which I feel very much tie in with the topic of the episode today. So, I couldn’t decide between the two. Both of which I re-blogged in July 2015. So, the first one is from user: officalcrow. It’s a text post that says “To my doctor after getting laser eye surgery: So, how do I shoot them?”

Lauren: (laughs) That’s very good.

Cher: The next one is very, very relevant I think to this episode. It is a screenshot of a YouTube video that says, “New computer terms:” and then it lists out “Avatar #trolling and meme.” And it’s from user: literallysame. Which I think, yeah, ties in really well with the focus of our episode today. What do you have for us today, Lauren?

Lauren: So, I have a post from, let’s see, 2014 from user: digitaltits. The post is a little bit like ... the one that I’m going to re-blog the post formatting is a little bit messed up because it’s such an old post and the original poster has since deleted the post I think. So, anyway ... but it says, “Mood. *white kid from ‘90s TV show on bed throwing baseball up in the air and catching it while staring at the ceiling*” And that’s just such a specific mood. And I know exactly what this user is talking about. And I totally feel that mood often.

Cher: As do I. It really captures the essence of the moment. (laughs)

Lauren: It really does. It’s amazing what language can do.

Cher: We love language!

[game show trill]

Lauren: So, this month we have a very, very special guest with us. We have Gretchen McColloch who is the host of the Lingthusiasm Podcast and Internet Linguist, and author of, “Because Internet.” Which I think has to be my favorite book about the internet that I’ve ever read. Thank you so much for joining us, Gretchen!

Gretchen: Thank you so much for having me!

Lauren: What is an internet linguist and how on earth did you get into that as a profession?

Gretchen: So, I spend a lot of time on the internet. (laughs) And also I think like many linguists I can’t really turn that linguist part of my brain off. So, if I am at a party or just talking to someone I’m always sort of analyzing bits about how they talk. And by the end of this podcast I’m going to have a whole report for you.

Lauren: Oh no!

(laughter)

Gretchen: Nothing but good things, I promise. So, spending a lot of time online also means that I wanted to know more about how people were using language online. I also think of myself as an internet linguist as in a linguist FOR internet people. Because I started my blog, which is called All Things Linguistic on Tumblr back in 2012, during the first era of when Tumblr was cool. And I started it when I was in grad school for linguistics and I was feeling myself sort of inching further and further out of that ivory tower and also feeling like I wanted to retain that sense of connection that I’d felt with linguistics when I was discovering it as a high school student and reading pop linguistic books and feeling like this really had this very direct applicability to my everyday life.

So, doing pop linguistics or linguistics communication or internet linguistics is also a way for me of retaining that connection and being a linguist FOR the people of the internet or OF the people of the internet in addition to doing it on the language that’s found online.

Lauren: I love that. So, you started this blog on Tumblr. Was that the first time you sort of got on Tumblr was to make that blog? Or did you have some familiarity with the platform previously?

Gretchen: (laughs) You know what? No one has ever asked me that question and it’s such a good question!

Lauren: Oh my gosh!

Gretchen: It was NOT my first time on Tumblr. (laughs)

Cher: Ooh! What brought you to Tumblr?

Gretchen: So, do you remember the era of ... there was the “what should we call me” Tumblr era where it was ... a lot of it was very student-y. You know? “When I’m late for class ...” and then there’d be a gif. And then there would be all these sort of extra single serving Tumblrs that I think of like single topic Tumblrs that would be about a specific thing. And then there were all these different versions of those. And there were all of these advice animal Tumblrs that would be like a specific domain.

So, the first Tumblr that I was involved with was some other linguistics undergraduate students and I collaborated ... Philosoraptor was probably the best known but there was like Philosophy this and History major that or whatever. And so we decided that the mascot for linguistics needed to be the Lingcod.

Lauren: Oh my god! I remember this blog!

Gretchen: Wait!? You saw the Linguistics Lingcod back in the day? That was us!

Lauren: That’s amazing.

Cher: Oh my god.

Lauren: Oh my COD.

Gretchen: Oh my cod! Exactly. So, we found this truly horrendous picture of a fish. This is not a pretty fish. It’s got these big teeth and it’s got this sort of open jaw. (laughs) We found this truly horrendous picture of a lingcod. And we made some captions for it and we made this single serving Tumblr. I bet Linguistics Lingcod is probably still there. Someone has probably forgotten the login. I don’t know if I actually ...

Cher: I can get you back in.

Gretchen: (laughter)

Cher: I have that power.

Gretchen: Oh my god! (laughs) There were other linguist advice animal memes that were more popular than us.

Lauren: Oh my god. Really?

Gretchen: Yeah, yeah, oh yeah. We were a bunch of Canadian undergrad students. And so Linguist Lioness was also around for a little bit. But the really popular was one Linguistics Llama.

Cher: Oh my gosh.

Lauren: I do remember Linguistics Llama, too, actually. YES.

Gretchen: Linguistics Llama. We’ve been in the same [inaudible 00:07:18] of the internet for a long time, Lauren. I just have that feeling.

Lauren: Obviously.

Cher: Oh my gosh.

Gretchen: And Linguistics Llama was not by me or my friends. And it had one of those backgrounds with the spiral colors and it had a scarf which was very classy of it. And I did ultimately ... I don’t know if IRL but I definitely exchanged Tumblr DM’s with the guy who ran the Linguistics Llama account who was an undergrad at NYU or somewhere like that. And so I had been aware of Tumblr for a couple of years before that from the meme perspective.

Lauren: That’s fantastic!

Cher: I love the concept of a single serving Tumblr. Or how each post is its own serving, snack, bite or whatever it is ... bite sized post.

Gretchen: And you still see these sort of themed Tumblrs, especially these days a lot of Tumblrs ... There’s the Tumblr that makes a calligraphy version of the post.

Lauren: Yes! Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know exactly what you’re talking about.

Gretchen: Or there’s the haiku bot Tumblr that re-blogs posts that have accidentally a haiku in them. These days a lot of those single serving Tumblrs are a bit more interactive. But you still see ones that are like, “I’m just posting things on one topic” and have this very narrowly constrained post type and they’ll pick a type of post. That was partly why I picked the name All Things Linguistic because I was like I want this to be very clear that this is a linguistics Tumblr. And that I’m going to post about not one specific area of linguistics, that’s what the word “all” means. (laughs)

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: (laughs) But that it’s sort of all around that. I didn’t really realize despite ... so, I knew about these single serving Tumblrs and the linguistic advice animals. But I didn’t really know that there were people who were hanging out in the linguistics tag on Tumblr until I got on there and I saw people re-blogging my post and them tagging it “linguistics” and seeing some of the other posts on there. So, then I was like, “Oh, there’s a whole community here that I could be a part of. It’s not just sort of randomly whatever is going on.” But yeah, I picked Tumblr because I knew how the interface worked from the back in the day Linguistics Lingcod.

Lauren: That’s amazing. I love that you’ve always been doing linguistics on Tumblr. That that’s sort of always been your relationship to it. And we like to think of Tumblr as this very niche unique place in terms of how we talk to each other and the memes that we have and sort of the internal language we have. In all of the online spaces that you’ve been in do you feel like Tumblr does have sort of a unique language unto itself?

Gretchen: I remember a couple of years ago on Twitter, maybe 2018, 2019, there were all of these Twitter memes that were coming up. And I was like, I saw these on Tumblr eight years ago! (laughter)

Cher: Yep.

Gretchen: There was that period where it was like, oh, okay, so the Twitter people have discovered Spiders George. That’s cool.

Cher: [crosstalk 00:10:17]

Gretchen: I was just about to make the same reference! “Do not cite the dark magic to me which I was there when it happened!”

(laughter)

Cher: Exactly.

Lauren: That shared language really is such a huge part of the Tumblr experience.

Gretchen: That’s the thing. You have this sort of shared vocabulary. A couple of things that I think are really interesting about Tumblr is that, one, is the half life of posts is so much incredibly longer.

Lauren: Yeah! Oh, interesting.

Gretchen: And the half life of a tweet – especially when I first joined Twitter which was actually also in 2012 but a little bit later in 2012. It was like six months later. Which felt like an eon because i was like, “I understand internet platforms now. I’m going to join all of them.” But the half life of tweets when I joined was maybe like an hour or two. And then Twitter started putting their thumb on the algorithm a little bit more and the half life of a tweet became more like six hours or twelve hours of if this tweet gets so legs it’s going to keep going and keep giving you notifications a day or two in. But the half life of a post on Tumblr. I mean, first of all, even a post that’s not very popular that’s only liked by a few of your friends or your mutual’s kind of thing is still like 12 hours. Because people catch up on their whole dash.

Cher: [crosstalk 00:11:28]

Gretchen: I was gonna say. Do you have stats on this?

Cher: I do! I have a fun metric. About 1/3 of engagement on Tumblr posts happens 30+ days after posting.

Gretchen: Yeah! Yeah!

Lauren: That’s wild.

Gretchen: I totally buy it. Especially if you just make a post that’s a little update for your mutual’s or something it’s probably not going to have a ton of engagement later but any sort of post that gets a re-blog or two – it just lasts so much longer. I’ve had posts that I made this post five years ago but it’s still going around.

Lauren: Absolutely.

Cher: It’s always funny to go by on your dashboard that you posted years ago.

Gretchen: Yeah!

Lauren: That happens to me sometimes on my ... I’ve got a public facing Tumblr and then my real Tumblr and every now and then on my real Tumblr dash I’ll see my own post from my public facing Tumblr from eight months ago kind of cross my dash. And that’s always such a strange moment. Especially since I think that Tumblr users are very good at digging up really old stuff somehow and then all of a sudden circulating a post a year after the fact. And I think that this can mean that certain things become sort of baffling popular. I kind of wanted to get your perspective on this, Gretchen – around why certain memes or ... I think the word “blorbo” especially is a great example of this ... why certain words catch on when others don’t. What makes something sort of become part of the permanent lexicon versus something that just gets passed around for a couple of months?

Gretchen: Yeah. I think there’s sort of two parts to that. One is this question of why do posts last so much longer? And the fact that posts last so much longer is a contributor to Tumblr having more of a culture because if you missed it the first time around you have so many more opportunities to see it. Whereas sometimes on a faster moving social network – I’m thinking of sort of the Twitter family of networks. So, Twitter, Blue Sky, Mastodon, all of those ones that are sort of very short text post based. You can show up after six hours and Bean Dad has happened and you’re like, “What!? I’ve missed all of this!?” Whereas on Tumblr things don’t show up on your dash quite as quickly. But [crosstalk 00:13:45] a lot longer.

I think that’s partly related to the queue feature. The queue feature is really a driver of that. Because people put posts in their queues and then they resurface a week later, a month later, three months later, six months later and partly that person still looks like they’re active and maybe some of the posts they’re making are live. But also they can resurface their post that they saw six months ago and it shows up on your dash now and maybe you decide to re-blog it or you decide to put it in your queue and this extends the half life yet again.

Lauren: That makes a lot of sense.

Gretchen: Other platforms really don’t have that ... on something like Word Press ... Which Word Press is fine. I use Word Press for my professional website. And I can schedule posts there. But what I can’t do is automatically put them in this sort of system that’s going to doll them out without me having to think about it. I have to say, “This post goes up next Tuesday at 2PM.” I can’t say, “Just put it up at some point in the future, whenever you run out of other stuff to put up.”

Lauren: Yeah. I love and use the queue feature. I haven’t really thought about it in that way before.

Cher: And I love how Tumblr users will often tag their queued posts. And they have all these fun little puns. “This one’s for queue,” or whatever it is and they post those ... there’s a whole queue tag ... I don’t know ... subgenre.

Gretchen: Or like, “You’re a queue-tie” or something like that. Yeah.

Cher: Exactly!

Gretchen: The queue is a big factor for that. But also the scheduling thing. Because some posts get tied to specific days and times. So, Julius Caesar Ides of March stuff going up around the Ides of March or like the September song, 21st of September, do you remember? This type of stuff. Stuff that gets tied to a specific day, people see it the day after and they go, oh, damn, I missed the window to put it up. I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to schedule this for this day next year.

Lauren: Yes!

Gretchen: Because I’ve done that!

Lauren: Me too!

Gretchen: I missed my window! Okay, I’ll just schedule it for next year with this idea that I’m still going to be here, people are still going to see it next year. Putting it into the future that way because it’s a way of participating in the culture. And also the idea of have I re-blogged this post a few years ago, yep, maybe sure, I don’t care, I’m re-blogging it again because I’m seeing it.

Cher: Yep. Neil banging out the tunes, April 13th.

Gretchen: Yes. Yeah.

Lauren: Right. All of these real holidays and all of these holidays that Tumblr has made up, or even days of the week memes! You know? Every fandom sort of has it. Whatever Wednesday. Yeah, that keeps a specific kind of culture alive.

Gretchen: That part keeps it sort of going. I think the tags on Tumblr also contribute sometimes to posts getting revived again after a longer period. Because when you’re browsing for tags ... let’s say you just got into a show for the first time and you’re like, “Oh, what have other people posted? I want to re-post some gifs.” So, you go into the tag for that show and you filter for gifs and you start re-blogging them. And some of those people may have put those gifs up years ago. Depending on when the show came out. But you’re re-blogging them now because you’re browsing via tags and looking for stuff to put on your blog. That’s a kind of behavior that you don’t see ... there are other platforms that have tags but Instagram has hash tags and people browse with them but they have a very impoverished post sharing ability. You can really only do it in your story and then it disappears after 24 hours and so you don’t get anything like a re-blog culture.

Twitter has a re-tweet culture and all the sort of Twitter family of networks. I’m on Blue Sky these days, baby. (laughs) And they have a re-tweet culture but they don’t have this “I’m gonna go find this and re-tweet all these tweets that are super old,” because they feature the timestamp very prominently on the tweet and so this idea of if you’re re-tweeting something that’s a week old it’s like, “Well, where were you?” Tumblr doesn’t feature timestamps very prominently anywhere on the posts. And so every post exists in this sort of eternal present.

Lauren: I hadn’t thought about the prominence of the timestamp being such a driving feature. But you’re totally right. I think that I’ll definitely get into a TV show from ten years ago and I’ll go and re-blog a bunch of gif sets from ten years ago because that’s when the fandom was most active. And I think that’s what Tumblr is for, right, is keeping those communities alive perpetually.

Gretchen: Tumblr is also unique as far as internet platforms go because in the early days of the internet this was a very normal thing to do – to try and meet people online based around a common interest. But this is much less common in the present day internet and really since the internet became mainstream. And sort of when only a few people were online you had to figure out a way to try to get to know people online. Because your friends and your neighbors and your family aren’t going to be online so you have to figure out how you’re going to meet people. And that was often very interest based, like Use Net is all based on interest groups.

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: But then when the internet became more mainstream you have things like Facebook which are all based on your contacts that you know IRL. Maybe you get to know people through a Facebook group or something but by and large Facebook is designed to connect you with people you already know. That’s this very sort of mainstream style of internet behavior. Twitter has sort of got this combination of things where in some cases people you already know but in many cases it’s people who are like part of maybe a professional community or an interest type of community – but in a very loose sense. Right? So, it will be people who are romance authors are a big group on Twitter or people in tech in various ways are a big group on Twitter. Or like Linguist Twitter was a corner of Twitter that’s somewhat decimated now, which had overlap with other academic areas and this type of thing.

So, you sort of had a nebulous interest group but it was hard to find them because people weren’t necessarily using a tag to organize that. You just had to sort of start with some people and then go through their follower list and following list. Tumblr also doesn’t surface who you follow or who follows you automatically. You can do it optionally. I’ve always turned it off. And you can’t see how many followers someone has. And so you can’t follow a social graph to find people to follow. You have to look at tags or who people are re-blogging. Those are sort of your only options to find other people on Tumblr.

Lauren: Yeah. I mean, in terms of how that drives language and shifts and how people are speaking online, I think in my head I’m imagining if I am on Facebook and I’m mostly interacting with the people from my real life or I’m on Twitter and I’m mostly interacting with podcasters or writers, then I am mostly engaging with people who are quite similar to me whereas on Tumblr I’m engaging with all kinds of people. And does that drive language faster or more differently if you are sort of engaging with a bunch of different types of people versus the people sort of more insularly in your circle?

Gretchen: I am so delighted you asked. There have been studies on this! (laughs)

Lauren: Ooh!

Gretchen: A lot of the work on this has happened through Twitter because Twitter has an API that’s really good for downloading this type of data. There have been a few masters thesises about Tumblr linguistics which are very cool. And their authors are people who just use Tumblr and collect some data. But if you want to study Tumblr you have to do a sort of participant ethnography. You can’t just download a fire hose of a whole bunch of posts because that capacity doesn’t exist on a technical level. You could use the API to download one person’s Tumblr blog but what would be the point of that?

Lauren: Right.

(laughter)

Gretchen: Whereas on Twitter, back before they killed this, but you could hook up to the whole fire hose and you could make a whole social network graph of who is following who and so you could get a sense of approximately who was seeing what. So, a lot of the internet language research has been done on Twitter not because everyone is on Twitter because very much everyone is not. But because it’s this very convenient sample that has this very convenient way of analyzing it.

So, this particular study that I’m thinking of finds that the way we adopt new words is this balance between strong ties and weak ties. Social theory – strong ties are people where you have a lot of acquaintances in common, friends and acquaintances in common. You know a lot of people in common very densely imbedded in your social network. And in many cases people spend more time with their strong ties because that’s how they get introduced to your other friends, right? So, a lot of people’s partner is a strong tie, or their best friend is a strong tie, because that person also knows a bunch of your friends because you probably introduce them to each other or you met as part of a friend group. And so you have all these friends in common.

And then your weak ties are people that you don’t have any or very many friends in common with. And so you’re maybe likely to see them less often but not necessarily. So, let’s say a barista at your favorite coffee shop who maybe you go there twice a week and you see them regularly, more often than some of your friends maybe, but you don’t actually have any friends in common with that barista.

So, weak ties are a really important source of new information to a social network. Studies have shown that you are more likely to get a job through a weak tie.

Lauren: Interesting!

Gretchen: Because your friends already know everything you know. Basically. Whereas your weak ties, especially a weak tie who is sometimes a friend of a friend – your friends may not have a job that they could give you but they might know someone who has a job they could give you or like your acquaintance may know someone. And you have a much larger circle of acquaintances than you do close friends just because that’s how time works. (laughs)

So, there’s a very interesting study that I cited because internet, I can’t remember the author but if anyone wants to go look up the citation you can do that, that did a sort of network model analysis of what if you had a social network that was all strong ties? So, this is your sort of classic sitcom style social network where everybody is friends with everybody else. Or you have a really tiny town and everybody in the town knows everybody. There’s 100 people on this island and they all have known each other for their entire lives.

And in this situation, the language situation rapidly becomes very stable. There isn’t a lot of change in the language situation because where is that change coming from? We’ve all been talking to each other our entire lives. Someone would have to invent a new form spontaneously which is less likely than someone just picking something up from somewhere else and transmitting it.

Conversely, a network that’s all weak ties ... so you can think of something like an airport where nobody really knows each other. You’re just chatting with the person next to you in line and you never really become friends after that. Nothing ever becomes predominant in a community because there’s no reinforcement mechanism for anything. Everyone is just talking differently from each other but there’s no way for really anything to really spread.

What they’ve found is that most social networks have a mix of strong and weak ties. And a weak tie is more likely to introduce a new linguistic form you haven’t encountered yet. Because they have a different social network to you. Largely. But you’re more likely to start using and picking up a form if someone who is one of your strong ties uses it.

Cher: Have you noticed any difference in kind of communication, like the linguistic use or slang use or whatever it might be, on Tumblr within different communities that you might be a part of on Tumblr?

Gretchen: One of the things that I think about from this is that like Facebook has sort of more strong ties than weak ties. And I feel like it is less linguistically innovative than Twitter is, or than Twitter used to be back in its heyday. Because Twitter had a lot more sources of new information, people you didn’t already know IRL. And so there were way more sources of new stuff.

For Tumblr, I’m trying to think about ... I feel like there’s less of an ability to get a gestalt of the entire site because your own personal network experience is so specific. Sometimes I see ... there was a past that went around a little while ago that was this, “I cannot stand these parodies of modern major [inaudible 00:26:42] original.” And this post was getting like 10K notes in its first 24 hours. Three different people who are on my dash who I’m pretty sure didn’t know each other had all re-blogged it separately from different people. And I then went and checked the timestamp and I was like, oh, this post is 24 hours old and it’s just spreading everywhere.

I think people don’t have necessarily the same hesitation around, “I’m going to re-share this even though it’s already been in my feed,” because then the person that I re-blogged it from will just treat that as a compliment and not treat it as, “well, that’s kind of boring.” On Twitter I tend to not re-tweet a tweet if it’s too popular because then I’m like, “Yeah, that’s boring, that’s yesterday’s news.” That’s been done, everyone has seen this already.

Whereas on Tumblr a post has 100K notes and I’m like, yeah, sure I’m still re-blogging it, this was quality.

Cher: And you can re-blog as many things, I mean, up to our post limit, as you want and still your followers would be excited to have you re-blogging or re-posting 250 things in a day. Versus being like, “Oh my gosh, that’s a lot.”

Gretchen: Yeah. So, there’s a couple interesting mechanisms around re-blogging. It’s very common to re-blog without commentary or re-blog with just a few bits in the tags on Tumblr. And then if your tags are witty enough or incisive enough someone else might promote them and you passed peer review.

Cher: Yes.

Lauren: Yep!

Gretchen: And so this is a mechanism of saying which things ... fewer posts get circulated more on Tumblr. They get circulated more and for longer. So, this is another side of the Tumblr has a more cohesive culture because you’re more likely to have seen the same post as other people because they circulate so much. And I remember when I first joined Twitter it was very rare to see a tweet that had more than 100 re-tweets. Now they’ve been putting their thumb on the algorithm more, you do see these very popular tweets. But at the time it was already very common to see Tumblr posts with five digits or six digits of notes. That’s always been a part of Tumblr culture I think.

Cher: Why do you think the Tumblr community gravitates towards captioning or talking in the tags versus in the caption section? It’s one of my favorite things about the platform and the way users engage but it’s always interested me how that sort of came about.

Gretchen: The commentary that I’ve seen and I sort of agree with this is that because ... Tumblr’s re-blog culture preserves the entire chain. So, if you say something in the tags then if somebody wants to re-blog the post from you they can just say their own things in the tags and they don’t have to preserve what you’ve said. If you say something in the comment field then if someone wants to re-blog the post from you they’ve got to preserve your comments. And sometimes I’ve seen a post that has three really interesting comments and then someone said something kind of boring and I will go back up that chain and re-blog the version without their boring addition, even if their boring addition was my friend.

Lauren: Same!

Cher: Yep.

Gretchen: So, if you’re worried that someone is going to be like, oh, I’ll have to go back up the re-blog chain and re-blog this post without your boring addition, you’re like, I’m just going to put this in the tags, that’s polite. That’s sort of discreet. And tags are also a way of talking primarily to your followers because if someone re-blogs that post from you they’re not going to see it. Their followers aren’t going to see it. So, it’s a way of having a sort of private, or not quite private, but like a more intimate level of conversation at the same time as you’re participating in this sort of almost site-wide culture of these bigger posts that have lots of stuff on them – you can sort of do that in the replies.

I also think that an underrated technological affordance of these tags is that Tumblr tags support spaces. Because Tumblr has a tags field and if you tag a post on Twitter or Instagram you have to write your hash tags without spaces. I’m saying hash tags on this platform but on Tumblr they’re tags. You have to write them without spaces. So, this puts a natural limit on how many tags and how long of tags you can write because no one wants to read this seven words all smooshed together with no spaces. That’s kind of obnoxious. Whereas with Tumblr tags you’ve got spaces in it so you can just read it like a normal thing. And also that tags on re-blogs aren’t searchable except for like if you’re indexing a post on your own blog. So, you can tag something that has your queue tag and then you can find your own queue tag. But otherwise they don’t become searchable and so the tags ... they’re sort of useless on a practical level which means you can write commentary in them because they’re not actually trying to do something practical.

And it’s kind of obnoxious SEO behavior to put too many tags in your post on Twitter or Instagram where they are readily searchable. Because you can’t actually search tags on Tumblr, at least not in a re-blog very well, it’s like, well yeah, this is a space for commentary instead. There’s also a fannish culture because Tumblr is very fannish of using tags for commentary on archive of our own on AO3.

Lauren: That’s such a good point!

Gretchen: AO3 tags have this mixture of commentary tag and functional tag that Tumblr tags also have. And so I would wager that most people on Tumblr know what archive of our own is. Whereas on sites like Twitter or Instagram some people do, depending on your subculture, but it’s less of a direct influence probably.

Lauren: Do you think that’s something that AO3 took from Tumblr, because a lot of those users overlap, that that’s why that happened on AO3?

Gretchen: I think a lot of them overlap but I think the directionality may be in the other direction.

Lauren: Interesting!

Gretchen: Because ... so, archive of our own was founded in I wanna say 2005.

Lauren: Yeah, yeah, I think you’re right. It definitely was sort of as fanfic.net was ... they sort of crossed paths a little bit.

Gretchen: Yeah, ‘cause an analogy that I really like making is that AO3 is actually very similar in size to the English Wikipedia ... in terms of like how long its existed and how many bytes of words are on both. They are very similar in size.

Lauren: That’s nuts! (laughs)

Gretchen: And in terms of this sort of skewed long tail ratio of how many people write on them versus how many people read on them, I think also quite similar.

Lauren: Yeah! Right, a small percentage of people are contributing of the people who are reading. Yeah.

Gretchen: I actually wrote an article for Wired a number of years ago when AO3 was winning the Hugo about how we should be ... because a lot of tech ink has been spilled about here’s how great Wikipedia is and here’s what we all could be learning about it. And not nearly as much has been spilled about here’s how great AO3 is and here’s what we could be learning about it. Even though they have very similar sorts of pedigrees. And I wrote a piece for wired that was like, “Here’s why AO3 is so neat,” and interviewed a couple of the tag wranglers to talk about AO3’s tagging system and how it works in the backend with a lot of volunteer labor to make it useable for users.

Yeah, I just think that AO3’s tagging system and it had this sort of tag wrangling open field you can do your commentary tags and you can also do your sorting tags in the same field. This was influenced by fannish practice on earlier social platforms. I wasn’t really on Live Journal but a lot of people were on Live Journal. If somebody knows more about Live Journal’s tagging practice I wouldn’t be surprised if there was an influence there. Also on other fan fic sites for sure.

Lauren: Yeah. The tagging on AO3 is so interesting too because you’ve got your functional tags like Tumblr has, too, where you’re putting it to the people find it in a particular search or to categorize your own profile or whatever. And then there’s the commentary tags and then AO3 has this weird in-between space that I don’t see on Tumblr as much which is fandom specific tags that sort of begin as commentary and then become actual sortable tags. Like “such and such character is an idiot,” or whatever. These things that sort of become fanon and therefore sort of get adopted sort of by the tag wranglers.

Gretchen: Like “dead dove do not eat” kind of thing.

Lauren: Right. Exactly! Yeah. Which is something I first encountered on Tumblr in the way it was used. Which is interesting ...

Gretchen: I think there’s some extent to which people do this on their personal Tumblrs. I’m thinking of all these sort of fun creative queue tags which may have started out as like, “Oh, I’m just doing this sort of joke,” and then sometimes they carry on. My tag for internet language on All Things Linguistic is still “Language on the interwebs,” because I tagged a post that in 2012 and then I was like, I guess this is what I’m using for this tag now. I have to go back and check because it’s like did I spell interwebs with an “s” or a zed? I have to check every time. Because I was just joking! But I’m still doing this!?

(laughter)

Lauren: That’s awesome.

Gretchen: There’s over 100 posts in that tag because there’s so many things.

Lauren: Is it an “s” or a “z?”

Gretchen: Look, I don’t know. I’d have to check! I think it’s an “s.” But I have actually tagged several ... some posts I’ve tagged with both because I couldn’t remember. So, if you click on one and you’re like, “there’s not any posts in here,” just click on the other one and see if you’ll get more.

Lauren: I totally have ... my playlist tag I always just tag “playlist” and “playlists,” because I can never remember which one it is that I used.

Cher: Sometimes I’ll be typing what I think is an original sentence as a tag and it will auto complete for me as ... someone has also typed out this similarly chaotic or unhinged sentence at some point.

Lauren: The great Tumblr hive mind.

Gretchen: I’ve always wanted to do a study of Tumblr tags. Cher, if there’s way you can hook us up with this data maybe this is a possibility, because it’s so hard to do data on anything in Tumblr. But also maybe Tumblr users would find this creepy so maybe we should just never do this. There was a meme that was going around ... I haven’t seen it in the last five years or so but there was this style of post that was going around for a while that would list five words and it would be “type these words into your tag field and fill in your tag that auto completes from them.”

Lauren: Yes!

Gretchen: So, it would be a list of colors or something ... when you tag something green what was that tag?

Lauren: Yes, I love those posts because it always brings up stuff that you completely forgot about, about your own blog. You know?

Gretchen: And I always thought that if there was a way of scraping all the tags from a post, a post like that would be a really interesting one to do this weird cross section of tags on Tumblr. It would be a biased sample but it would be biased in a very different way compared to using the tags that are searchable tags.

Cher: And we can absolutely hook you up with that data, Gretchen. So, just let me know what info you want, what data you want, and we can [crosstalk 00:37:38].

Gretchen: Where were you when I was writing!? Because [crosstalk 00:37:43]

Lauren: You need to make another book!

Cher: Yeah, I’m here for the sequel, Gretchen. I’ve got you. [crosstalk 00:37:53]

Gretchen: I was joking for a while that my next book would be called “Despite Internet,” which is how I wrote a book despite all the distractions online.

Cher: Oh my gosh. YES.

Lauren: I love that. What a great idea!

Gretchen: If I ever write a memoir ... (laughs)

Lauren: Yes, absolutely. I know that we are coming to the end of our time here. So, as a final fun question – do you have a favorite Tumblr linguistic quirk or meme or something that just has brought you a lot of joy on Tumblr as a linguist?

Gretchen: Oh man, how do I choose? They’re all my children! (laughs)

Cher: You can pick a few.

Lauren: Yes. Top three.

Gretchen: I’ve got this whole book that I wrote! (laughs) So, I’m going to pick a classic. I relaly like the style of what I have called stylized verbal incoherence mirroring emotional incoherence.

Lauren: Ooh!

Cher: Beatifully put.

Gretchen: (laughs)

Cher: Put very coherently.

Gretchen: And the point is that it’s stylized and so you are actually doing it on purpose, it’s not just sort of random key smash type things. But the Tumblr minimalist style, which as far as I can tell was initially most popular on Tumblr of lowercasing things, not using a lot of punctuation, using maybe line breaks only or periods as a way of breaking things up but not using a whole bunch of other punctuation. There’s this classic Tumblr post that’s like, “Tumblr, language is so smooth, it’s like a jungle river, with no periods, nothing stops here.” I’m not memorizing it that well and I haven’t seen it go around my dash that much in recent years. But there was a while when I was seeing it every week.

Lauren: I know exactly what post you’re talking about.

Cher: Yeah.

Gretchen: We can dig this up and re-blog it, right?

Lauren: For sure.

Gretchen: What I loved about it was the meta commentary on the reflection about a style that already existed that other people were doing that was also doing this self referentially and that people were spreading it. One of the reasons why Tumblr becomes this source of linguistic innovation is that Tumblr users love commenting about their own linguistic innovation. And then spreading those posts that comment on it. So, you see all these posts that will be like, “Oh yeah, I’m doing this.” And this swift like a jungle river post got posted, re-blogged so many times. And so even if you weren’t seeing that style initially, you would see the post that was commenting about it and go maybe this is something that I might want to do. This is something that other people seem to recognize and I think that the re-blog culture and the number of notes gives these observations a sense of sort of authenticity or gravitas or just this sense that they’ve passed peer review.

Other Tumblr users also think that this is the case because they’ve re-posted it. Because they re-blogged it. And if someone was making an observation about Tumblr culture or Tumblr language that wasn’t especially trenchant it just sort of sinks and vanishes without a trace. It’s these ones that get tens and hundreds of thousands of notes where people are like, yeah, I agree with this, I cosign this, I believe this. And I think that’s why stuff spreads because Tumblr users like that meta commentary and the ones that feel real keep getting passed around.

Lauren: Absolutely. I think that’s a perfect bow to put on the whole conversation. Gretchen, thank you so much for coming to talk to us about this. If people want to follow you online and learn more about this stuff – where can they find you?

Gretchen: Thank you so much for having me. I am at GretchenMcCulloch.com – my podcast is Lingthusiasm. It’s also @lingthusiasm on Tumblr. My Tumblr is @allthingslinguistic and my book about internet language is called “Because Internet.”

[gentle music]

Cher: What has you in your feels this week, Lauren?

Lauren: So, I have two quick in my feels things. The first is My Lady Jane on Amazon Prime, which is a new TV show. And without saying too much about it, because I sort of went in not really knowing anything and was really delighted, it just reminds me of the peak CW shows from the late 2000s when it was still the WB into sort of the mid 20-teens. Just everything about it feels like a CW show from 2013 and I really have been missing that on my television. So, that’s been bringing me lots of joy.

And then my daily podcast that I’ve been doing for the past year, Breaker Whiskey, is coming to a close tomorrow as of this recording, by the time this episode comes out it will have been ... the first year will have been over for a week. There’s been some really fun posts on Tumblr about it. About people getting excited for the finale. About people reacting to teh things that are happening. And it’s a very small group of people but it’s just always amazing when there is any Tumblr fandom at all for anything I make. And so that has been making me very, very happy this last week.

What about you, Cher? What’s got you in your feels?

Cher: I am having a lot of emotions, Lauren, about House of the Dragon. Do you watch?

Lauren: I don’t.

Cher: In my opinion, everyone especially the dragons should live forever. And that’s just what I’m going to say about it.

Lauren: Okay. Got you. [inaudible 00:43:12]

Cher: That is very much not the topic of the show. (laughs) The show is about how the dragons went extinct and they’re starting to show us and as it turns out I don’t want to know, Lauren!

Lauren: Oh no!

Cher: The dragons are all baby girls. They’re all poor little meow-meows. And they should be protected at all costs.

Lauren: And I’m Lauren Shippen, and you can find me at TheLaurenShippen.Tumblr.com.

Cher: And I’m Cher McAnelly and you can find me at OverChers.Tumblr.com.

Cher: This has been Dashboard Diaries. And ...

[outtro music]

Lauren: May your anons always be loving.

Cher: Your dash always refreshed.

Lauren: Your gifs always be loading.

Cher: And your ships always canon.

Lauren: May the fics you’re reading always be finished.

Cher: And the answers you seek always in the re-blogs.

Lauren: Thanks for scrolling with us!

Every Tumblr user knows that we Tumblrinas use language a little differently. We're not like other social media users. We're weird. We're weirdos. And this month, we have actual linguist Gretchen McCulloch (@allthingslinguistic) on to talk about it!! Plus: House of the Dragon dragon-related feelings and throwing a ball in the air as you lay on your bed like a 90s teen character.

Credits and transcript in our reblog. You can find transcripts for this, and every other episode, here.

Find the posts discussed in this episode in this tag!

#DD 40 #transcript

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jinx-on-mars-19xx · 2 years ago

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Since I was gone so long I thought I might do a little reintroduction 🧠

Hey people I love! 🫀

My name is Colson but you can call me Col or Jinx. I was on here originally as Jinx before my Tumblr disappeared but for about two years I've been back and mostly used Col. I'm great with either 🌹

I'm a trans man, he/they 🏳️‍⚧️

I'm mostly a Yungblud and Machine Gun Kelly fan page, I do fics, updates, and pic edits but I do a little bit of everything with a lot of my life sprinkled in, sometimes including my health problems (I'm open about all of it if you ever have questions) I actually love questions and asks as long as people are nice 🖤

Just thought I'd introduce myself in case any of my mutuals are new. This is somewhat of an 18+ blog, at least leaning that way but all I mean by that is sometimes subjects are a little mature. Thank you for stopping by and I hope you enjoy! Stay a while if you want just please be respectful. I don't tolerate any racism or hate against the LGBTQIA+ or mental or physical health hate. I'm sure I'm missing something but you get the idea I'm sure. I love you all and I'm here if you need me!

-Col the Jinx 💕

🖤 Masterlist 🖤

Yes Daddy Verse/Saga of Smut

Dom x Colson

Yungblud x Machine Gun Kelly

I Think I'm Okay (prequel)

5 Times Col Came in His Pants and 1 Time He Finally Made Dom Do It

Drown Out The Demons

Romcom Bullshit

Much Better Workout

Sex and Candy

Claimed in Ink and Cum

Sweet as Sin

Yes Daddy

Spoiled Princess

What Daddy Likes

Like I Love You

Reverse Cowgirl Barbie

Sex on a Stick

Baby Boy

Pure No Longer

Sext Edits

Adventures in Toyland

Full on Sex Symbol

They Felt Eternal

Their Natural State

Ride or Die

Sin on Stilettos and a Cotton Candy Soul

Crimson Coated Candy

Piss Drenched Devil

Chocolate Kisses and Golden Showers

It's a Nice Day for a White Wedding

Sin in Snow White Taffeta and Latex

Freshly Fucked and Beautifully Filthy Manhandled Marionette of a Bride

Watercolor Wet Dream Come to Life

Drifting Deep in Hopefully Wet Dreamland

Flesh to Flesh

Five Times is a flashback series in the Yes Daddy Verse, it is set between the prequel and the first chapter- Yes Daddy. I placed it all in order 🖤

Adventures in Toyland is a follow up series to the Yes Daddy Verse, I'll still list them all in order and may add to any sections at any time. Let me know if you have ideas! 🖤

It's a Nice Day for a White Wedding is a follow up series to the Yes Daddy Verse happening after Adventures in Toyland, they're all listed in order and you guessed it, the boys finally get married! 🖤

-Omegaverse AU-

Gunpowder and Watermelon

Autocorrected Anxiety Attacks and Messy Sexts

Pachyderms and Pointed Teeth

Knocked Up Knockouts and Cheesy Puns

A Little Less Sparkle, A Little More Reality

The Overwhelming Significance of Surprisingly Small Jellybeans

The Folly of Fracturing Sharp China and Soft Hearts

Fear and Lusting in London Flats

The Inevitability of Egos Clashing and Vicious Tongue Lashings

Of Sugar and Spice and Virgin Tight Asses

A Rebel's Yell and a Gangster's Paradise

Candy Hearts and Paper Cut Families

Photogenic Admissions and Confessional Panic Attacks

Little Shop of (W)horrors in a Pastel Hell

The Inescapable Moment of Truth and the Consequences of Open Black Hearts

Milk Chocolate Cherry Kisses and Birthday Wishes

Working Out the Kinks Under Hot Lights and Wanting Stares

The Taming of a Wild Boy

The Dynamics of a Bright Future and How to Reach It

Pride and Phenomenal Passion

Stereotypes and Salt in the Wound

What to Expect from an Expecting Omega

Patched Up Cuts and Mixed Up Blood

Alpha, Omega, a Nuisance, a Rebel

Lost Boy in Toyland

Starry Eyed and Punch Drunk

Mirrored Reflections and Babes from Outer Space

Believing in Love Songs and Tall Tales

Go Down Just Like Holy Mary

Piss Kinks, Morning Drinks, and Brand New Nicknames

Animated Arguments and Matching Love Languages

Screaming and Dreaming for the Future

Son of Rage and Love

Son of a Bitch and Edgar Allan Poe

Couch Confessions and Heavy Petting

Early Spawning and Other Lessons (Family Don't End With Blood)

One Flew Over the Klepto's Nest

Old Magic and Animal Aptitude

Strawberries and Cinnamon Toast

Your Body is a Wonderland

Born With Horns

In the Midst of Mild Madness

What's in a Name?

Spare the Rod Spoil the Alpha

To Cut or Not to Cut

Our Blood Got Mixed Up So I Guess We Belong to Each Other

Feels Like the Very First Time

Headboards and Scratched Tats

Best Alarm Clock

The Beasts Inside Disguised as Beauty

Popsicles and Pink Cheeks

The omegaverse AU is separate from the Yes Daddy Verse. The boys are still themselves but in an ABO world. Alpha Col and Omega Dom

-The Viking and the Fae- (an AU)

Where the Sea and Land Kiss

A Chieftain's Vow

Under the Thrall

The Long Sword's Hilt

Taste Like the Sea

Inga Knows Best

Feast Fit for a King

How the Waves Dance

The Forest Meets the Sea

The Soulmate Stalemate

The Taste of Truth and Tall Tales

The Wave Cresting

The Wave That Drowns

The Red Sea and the Viking Who Conquered It

Seal With a Kiss

A Broken Past and a Sea of Tears

The Siren's Tease and the Secrets Spilled

War and Pieces of Each Other

The Storm that Rocks the Waves

The Hush Between

Viking/Selkie AU. Separate from other fics but still Dom and Colson

#introduction #life update #col rambles #jinx rambles #my fics #masterlist #com #yes daddy verse #yungblud and machine gun kelly #dom and colson #yungblud #machine gun kelly #5 times col came in his pants and the 1 time he made dom do it #adventures in toyland #its a nice day for a white wedding

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anhed-nia · 5 years ago

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BLOGTOBER PRE-GAME 9/30/2020: 30 MILES FROM NOWHERE/CONFESSIONAL (2019)

Spoiler alert. Or whatever. It’s not going to matter, you don’t care.

So, I've been away for a minute. Just about any reason to be away from Tumblr is probably a good reason, but I have an especially good one. I'm finally working on a "real" writing project, which demands, and deserves, all of my attention. My social media abstinence isn't just a matter of time management, though. Once I had a long term obligation on my plate, I became very aware of how the short term satisfaction I get from posting mindless rants was eating away at the fuel I have available for sustained efforts. When I wind myself up with a 500-1000 word blog post, it generates a lot of electricity, but I blow it all as soon as I experience the catharsis of posting it, and I'm further pacified by ego-stroking likes and reblogs. Not to sound like a sanctimonious luddite--I mean, I'm still here, after all!--but it turns out that the staying focused on the long haul has been surprisingly revivifying. In fact, I haven't been talking about my big fancy project for the same reason; I don't want to lose any of the juice I've been storing up by wasting it on the shallow pleasure of describing it. Also such things should probably be somewhat confidential until they're approaching the publishing stage, but I digress! There is an actual reason I'm saying all this, that has more to do with this blog.

(Don’t get all excited, I’m not doing EVIL ED right now, I just need a relatable image.)

As I got deeper into my experience of "real" film writing, I started to reflect on the meaning of my personal writing. Like, the point of it. I tend to write in a sweaty, compulsive, sadomasochistic haze, in which I'm sometimes hyperbolically generous, and sometimes--perhaps more often, unfortunately--as nasty as humanly possible. Sometimes the movies deserve it, when they're lazy, pretentious, or otherwise demonstrate an open contempt for the audience aka ME. Often, though, I'm just creating an opportunity to vent my generalized rage and frustration. That can be very entertaining for myself and (hopefully) my teensy-but-devoted readership, but lately I've asked myself whether there isn't some negative tradeoff for all this amusement. In this phase of my life, it's reasonable to assume I'll make more and more friends and acquaintances who create things I don't always care for, but I don't necessarily think they deserve to be abused for it. As much as I have a right to say whatever I want, technically, I'd be embarrassed if I were caught just jacking myself off by making fun of their work in public. And more to the point, I don't necessarily want to contribute to the growing atmosphere in which people feel more afraid to try and fail, because the public so commonly misidentifies sarcasm and mean-spiritedness as intelligence and superiority, and that form of petty darkness spreads across the internet a lot faster than a movie can reach a wider audience. After all, I'm in the process of potentially turning myself into one of those well-meaning failures right now. I could stand to be a little more deliberate about how I speak, and about what, in general.

My father is an art critic, and once in an extra petulant moment, teenage-me asked him in an accusative tone what he thought the point of his profession was. He replied calmly that he wouldn't publish any comment that he didn't think the artist could make use of somehow. I don't know if he always stuck to that policy, but the thought sure stuck with me.

So anyway, over the last few months I've been giving myself a bit of an attitude adjustment, through a combination of personal reflection, and hard work on something meaningful/not for the internet. I've been feeling all proud of myself and shit, but today reminded me that any path to enlightenment is always marked by setbacks, doubt, and temptation. For today, in complete innocence (or at least a melange of innocence and ignorance, as I very much invite this type of problem), I managed to watch TWO (2) movies about an academic film-cum-psychology project, focused on a gang of college buddies who inevitably reveal what bad people they are under the unique conditions of the project, and then the project turns out to be run NOT by its presumed-dead originator, but by the originator's even-crazier lover. It's amazing how particular something can be, and still be utterly obvious and cliche. In my defense, I really tried to turn the second movie off, because it was...just instantly terrible, but the seed of suspicion had taken root--is this randomly selected movie ACTUALLY EXACTLY THE SAME AS THE PREVIOUS MOVIE?--and I just had to find out if this could be true. I suffered, deliberately, for another hour and a half, to confirm my awful hunch. I don't know how I would have felt if I had turned out to be wrong (better? worse?), but I don't have to worry about that now. Now I just have to worry about my overpowering impulse to be as ugly as possible about what I have personally subjected myself to.

(The completely deceptive poster for our not at all witchy or eerie opening feature.)

In need of a passable time-waster this afternoon, I put on 30 MILES FROM NOWHERE. Released in March of 2019, Caitlin Koller's claustrophobic black comedy feels oddly like a product of 2020. A group of estranged, middle-aged college pals of the BIG CHILL ilk--which one of the characters calls out, out loud, just so ya know--come together for a fallen comrade's funeral, only to find themselves trapped in his widow's increasingly creepy cabin in the woods. Said comrade was driven to suicide by the failure of a psychological experiment he conducted that plunged its subject into madness, and if you don't realize right away that the obnoxious and unstable cast are the new subjects of their not-quite-dead friend's renewed project, then you're firing a lot slower than 24 frames per second. The dialog is often decent, aiding a handful of funny, natural performances...but it's hard to forget that you're just waiting for the conspicuously crazy widow to reveal that the "unexplained events" in and around the cabin are part of a controlled attempt to get the guests to devolve into their worst selves, which isn't such a difficult task considering the undesirable state they all arrive in.

It just made me ask myself, what was the point of this? Why do people make movies that are entirely predicated on the shock of the twist, knowing that if the twist isn't so shocking--or is baldly obvious from the start--then the whole experience just falls apart? Why not hedge your bets with a little more depth, or purpose, or style, or really anything more reliable than a smug attempt to prove that your script is smarter than your audience? Even if you do manage to pull off this dubious accomplishment, it reduces your movie to something like the experience of having somebody jump out of a closet and scream in your ear to "get" you. I've always felt concerned that if somebody ever tries to "get" me like that, I might just automatically punch them in the face. But anyway, whatever shred of good will this movie could have accrued with its plucky performances is blown away by the final insult, when the cops arrive to clean up the inevitable bloody mess. The responding officers are hilariously unimpressed and unsurprised by the byzantine scheme that has resulted in a shocking act of violence, because the cabin's "guest book", which our heroes all filled out, was actually the signatory page of a complicated waiver form granting full permission to the hosts to, like, do whatever the hell they want to everybody. Presumably this shit just goes on all the time, leading the local law to shrug off anything that happens to or because of the dumbassed lab rats who frequent the cabin? I dunno. I mean, what can I say? ACAB, I guess!

At the time, I managed to resist the urge to take to the internet and decry the crimes of this lame-o party joke. I really don't like the sensation that a movie is just trying to trick me into thinking something that isn't true. But, this isn't, like, an affront to cinema. People make annoying, below average movies all the time, and maybe you kinda have to, if you eventually want to make better movies. I imagine myself in the shoes of the people who actually put some elbow grease into this production, having to wade through the rantings of internet ghouls like myself while they're trying to see how their efforts are paying off. Making a movie is probably a lot harder than I think it is.

But that's part of the point I'm heading toward. I'm always amazed by people's willingness to pour huge amounts of energy and capital into something to which there is ultimately very little point. I mean, I have bad, unoriginal, boring ideas every single day of my life. But I almost never DO any of them. I have a hard enough time convincing myself to just get out of bed in the morning, let alone devote blood, sweat, and money to deliver unto the world material evidence of my personal mediocrity. I can't imagine thinking it would be worth it, for myself or the unfortunate people who are subjected to my project, to actually execute on my bad ideas. I'm being judgmental, but honestly, I don't even know if my attitude makes me better or worse than someone who accomplishes the task of completing and selling a movie that's mainly a waste of time. Movies are so complicated, and realizing them requires the consensus of so many people, that it's sort of incredible that there are people capable of making one that doesn't have a powerfully compelling motivation behind it. People who are able to do such a thing obviously have something that I don't, and it isn't just "consideration for the audience."

So, I could probably stand to be more forgiving--or just, less eager to absolutely flay someone alive on my dumb little blog because they so opened themselves up to my arsenal of elaborate insults. But like...not all the time. Sometimes, a movie really fucking asks for it, and in revealing itself to me, it has effectively signed a waiver giving me patent freedom to do whatever I want to it. CONFESSIONAL is the latest movie to give me such a gift. After the final credit rolled in 30 MILES FROM NOWHERE, I looked for a little palate cleanser. As little as I like movies that put their single egg in the motheaten basket of a "shocking twist", I also have a problem with what I identify as canned theater. Not that I think all movies have to be lavish productions, but I think they should try to do something that is natively cinematic. It's very rare that I'm impressed by anything that is literally all talk. So, I went in search of some more familiar form of trash to help me recallibrate, and trash is definitely what I got.

(Me crying over my own bad decisions.)

To be fair, I kind of should have known that I was in for a challenging experience. The 2019 found footage thriller CONFESSIONAL is more or less based on the "confessional" part of sleazy reality TV shows, isolating each cast member in a soundproof stall so they can spill the rotten contents of their guts. Unfortunately, I spotted a review suggesting that the movie succeeded, against all odds, at remaining visually dynamic despite the unchanging scenery, and I was intrigued. The reviewer was correct, impressively; the monotony of the coffin-like environment with its dark foam walls was the least of my concerns. Other problems superseded that threat, immediately. The plot concerns a group of college pals who come together to remember a recently deceased friend--a filmmaker who expired mysteriously while completing a psychology-tinged project in which she recorded all of her friends' most shameful personal secrets. Now, somebody else has taken over the project...someone who "has never been identified", according to an early title card in this movie-within-a-movie (EVEN THOUGH THIS PERSON WILL BE EXPLICITLY IDENTIFIED AT THE END OF THE MOVIE SO LIKE WHY), but who seems likely to be the decedent's ex-lover...who continues to expose their subjects' most shameful secrets on film. I mean, what the fuck? Did I somehow manage to pick a second movie with almost the exact same plot??? I couldn't believe it. I didn't know if I could take it. My prospects only got worse when the cast showed up and started talking. I tried to turn the movie off. I backed out and walked away from it, twice. But I couldn't leave it alone. I had to know if it was really the same movie.

CONFESSIONAL concerns characters who are contemporaneously in college, which actually goes a long way to making everything worse. Each of these walking cliches is connected in some way to Amelia, a film student whose mysterious death has created a campus scandal, leaving shattered hearts and lives in its wake. The living have each received a blackmail-flavored invitation to speak about the deceased in a tiny "confessional booth" somewhere on campus, where, predictably, they find themselves locked in until they confess whatever they know about Amelia, and their classmates. I don't know why practically every single movie about young people has to be so miserable, but this is one of those. I assume that it has something to do with the fact that youth is simultaneously so desired and so ignored. People in their teens and early 20s are so sexually coveted, yet so easily dismissed as individuals, that we wind up with all this media that panders to them relentlessly (or at least, panders to the legions of ticket-buying perverts who enjoy watching them prance around), without almost any consideration of how they actually think and act, and look. Movies like FAT GIRL and WELCOME TO THE DOLL HOUSE may be accused of their own form of pandering, a venal form of voyeuristic schadenfreude, but at least they reflect something of the awkwardness, isolation, and incompleteness of adolescence; something more than the dissociated, pornographic fantasies of adults who have long since forgotten what it was like to be powerless and ignored, or desired by people who don't even like you.

Not that CONFESSIONAL is supposed to be a work of grim realism, but it is most definitely rooted in a fantasy about college life that makes its contrived, message-y plot a lot harder to take. With almost the sole exception of "the nerdy one", every single character looks like a Bratz doll, oozing an exaggerated indecency that belies the movie's pretentious insistence on addressing the sex & gender Issues of the Day. What you get is a really good example of what happens when millennial characters are modeled, not on any actual millennials, but on other forms of marketing that are aimed at millennials, which are themselves just based on other preexisting youth-targeted commercials, et al ad nauseam. Even setting aside the deliriously slutty wardrobe choices, makeup appears to have been laid on with a trowel, coating each actor in a thick creamy layer of spackle that only makes any scars, pits, or other evidence of individuality look utterly bizarre. Accordingly, everybody preens, pouts, and generally behaves as if they're about to take off their clothes, which might be a huge relief given the profusion of chafing, cheapo mesh and straps they're laboring under.

So, ok, not every movie can have a great costume department, but the dialog here is a perfect match for the disastrous aesthetic decisions. Actually, this is the real reason I almost walked out on CONFESSIONAL. If I may ramble briefly, without substantiating any of my broad-ranging claims: Sometime in the late 90s/early 00s, horror cinema seemed to suffer a degenerative slide away from genuine thrills and chills, and into a version of the genre that is best characterized as the Slutty Halloween Costume approach. Any sense of existential dread, revulsion, or bodily vulnerability was widely replaced by a cutesy, Hot Topic-y preference for fast fashion and sex appeal, in which bloodshed more facilitated an informal wet teeshirt contest than any real fear induction. Horror's new mall goth look came with an equally shallow, boring verbal affectation: a sullen, sleazy, tooth-sucking sarcasm, that ushered in a new era in which, instead of making fun of the scummy coked-out dialog in porno movies, we now expect everybody to just talk like that, because it's hot. There's probably a line to be drawn between this unfortunate development, and the boneheaded real-world trend of identifying "sarcasm" as an important personal selling point on dating sites, but I won't try to prove that here. For now, I will just say that as soon as I heard the CONFESSIONAL characters start to speak, with their sneering, insinuating tones, with the vocal fry, with the head wagging, the jutting jaws, the smoldering gazes, the juvenile dragging-out of horny grownup words like de-bauch-er-y...I almost lost my nerve. Listening to these little creeps hissing and spitting for 84 minutes is a lot like being hit on by some barfly who continues to bludgeon you with his hot breath and corny lines without ever noticing that you've thrown up into your pint.

Uh, anyway. So what actually happens in the movie. Why would anyone ever allow someone to record video of them revealing the ugliest, most embarrassing parts of themselves? Especially a kid, for whom popularity and reputation are often a matter of life or death--literally and specifically, in the case of this story. The flimsy reason is that the late filmmaker, Amelia, was the most awesomest girl ever. Everybody loved her, because she was so sweet, and so smart, and so cool, and so nice, and so deep, and so original, and so talented, and so sexy, and just like, the bestest most perfectest girl in the whole wide world. N.B. "The greatest of all time" is, perhaps counter-intuitively, a really bad quality that makes for really shitty, boring characters. For better or worse, Amelia is rarely on screen (and when she is, she's no Laura Palmer, frankly), so it's up to the viewer to just sort of imagine a type of person who could make you act against your best interests on account of you just like them so much. After all, so many of the characters were obsessed with her in some way, that it's like they're here to help you clap your hands and believe in this seductive, compelling part of the movie, that just isn't actually there on the screen. The anonymous antihero behind the confessional booth scheme slowly extracts from each character the selfish, destructive behavior that in some way contributed to the tragic loss of the most amazing person of all time--and part of the result is, if not a very interesting excuse for Amelia's death, then a story so wacky that I really wish they had centered the movie on it, instead of on the tawdry soap opera we're locked into. Even if that imaginary movie had been really bad, and it probably would have been, at it would at least have been entertaining.

Part of what leads up to the death of Amelia is the existence of a secret school fight club, led by a stereotypically sleazy gender studies major, named Major, who is out to prove men's inherent superiority. The club is called CFB, or Cock Fights Back, which is somehow a garbled pun relating to cock fights, and Trump's famous line of "locker room talk": "grab'em by the pussy" > "pussy grabs back" > "cock fights back". CFB is different from your ordinary fight club in that the fights are always between girls and boys, and the boys are always blindfolded, in order to prove that a fully-abled female is no match for even a handicapped male. To complicate things, a new designer amphetamine is gaining popularity on campus, called "odds-on", meaning that it makes you the odds-on favorite in your CFB fight. As awkward as that is, it also seems that men are never the guaranteed winners of these fights, which makes you wonder why Major insists on continuing to host them. As much as I would have preferred to watch a stupid movie about this stupid idea, I'm stuck instead with a movie in which Major is such an aggressive MRA because he's secretly gay, and he thinks that hating women is a great way to hide that...as if that isn't what we all openly suspect about aggro MRAs. Secret gayness is a big part of this movie, involving multiple characters, although it amounts to very little other than the perpetuation of some stale, harmful cliches about how unfulfilled homosexual urges lead to suicide, sexual abuse, and murder. CONFESSIONAL is just as reliant on this grim vision of gay life, as it is on its weirdly obtuse discussion of drug addiction, for the suffocating sense of self-importance that it uses to try to elevate itself above its porn-y trappings. None of the movie's hot button issues are given any real thought, but are only dragged through the mud to create the illusion that there's a point to all this, thus relieving the film of any sense of innocence that could have made its condescending sleaziness forgivable.

Admittedly, I can't really remember all the details of the film's tortured intrigue anymore, even though I basically just saw it. A lot of its meandering revelations just left me thinking, "Why did I need to know that? Why should I care?" I do know that about half way through this ordeal, I became really anxious about whether it would turn out that CONFESSIONAL did NOT have exactly the same plot as 30 MILES FROM NOWHERE after all, and I put myself through all this for nothing. But no, I was right to begin with. The wonderful Amelia's ethically dubious film project has been picked up by the unhinged lesbian character who loved her so much she wanted to become her, and killing Amelia and usurping her confessional project was apparently the best way of doing that. I guess exposing all the dark, violent secrets of all these tangentially involved characters was just an added bonus, or whatever. Ultimately, this ugly, ignorant PSA about something-or-other only deals itself further damage by relying so heavily on the potential of its clumsy twist to blow your mind, which it does not at all.

So that was it, that's how I burned a whole afternoon allowing my mind to implode-not-explode under the ponderous force of TWO (2) movies about exactly the same exhausted cliche that is still being peddled by certain pretentious assholes as fresh and exciting, and beyond the capacity of the audience to anticipate. There's probably a whole slew of other movies that employ this overly familiar "surprise", but I don't have it in me to dig them out of my long-suffering brain. Feel free to contribute in the comments. For now, I must prepare myself for the ordeal of Blogtober, during which I will *hopefully* choose my screening selections and words more thoughtfully than I have in previous years, when this blog was motivated by just as much abject misanthropy as these movies, which do nothing but willfully insult the audience's intelligence. Maybe today's detour into degradation will help me go forth toward more additive experiences, having purged several lungfuls of meaningless venom from my system, and this season will bring with it more interesting, provocative posts than the last. Or maybe not! In any case, I promise to keep trying my hardest to make it funny.

PS I actually love both FAT GIRL and WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE. I’m “just saying”.

#blogtober #2020 #confessional #2019 #30 miles from nowhere #horror #thriller #black comedy #found footage #brad t gottfred #jennifer wolfe #jennifer bosworth #caitlin koller

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frostsinth · 5 years ago

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1, 7 and 14? C:

I FORGOT I POSTED THIS! (and was confused why I got numbers in my ask box xD). But thank you so much for asking! -draws in a deep breath-

1. Tell us about your current project(s) – what’s it about, how’s progress, what do you love most about it?

Where do I start?? Royal Flush is my big thing right now. You guys should know all about my #obsession. It’s literally the only OC on my blog right now. I’m on the last chapter; I’ve written pretty much all of it, I’m just going back through and adding final details, editing out overused words. Making sure everything flows. The thing I love most about Royal Flush is that... it was literally just a whim. I think I was listening to ‘Dance, Magic, Dance’ and came up with the entire plot/story in my head. Grier is absolutely inspired/influenced by David Bowie in ‘the Labyrinth’. Nikostratus has become a personification of myself, mostly my anxiety. I love everything about these boys, and love how wonderfully their characters have just absolutely solidified into a reality. I wish I could write about them forever.

I’m also working on several other projects for tumblr, which should be familiar. Lost Time has taken a side burner, as I got kind of stuck in my inspiration. A Line in the Sand I have lots of plans for, but my attention is sucked dry by Royal Flush until I finish it (which will be soon!), then it’ll be my next priority. And I haven’t forgotten about Deals with Demons! I have more thoughts and plans for the next installment of that as well.

My big project, that I’ve kind of abandoned since I side tracked with Li’un Ma Shkio was my own full length novel that I was writing. I haven’t come up with a name for it yet, but the story opens when a pair of adventurers come to an ancient castle beyond the reach of civilization to look for a ‘cure’ for their cursed friend. Because, legend has it, the curse was started by a demon who once lived there. However when they arrive, they find instead a mysterious young woman. A human woman, for all they can tell. And when they find out the demon never actually left the castle and the woman lives there with him, they believe she’s being held there against her will. That is, until an assassination attempt on the demon sends her on a quest of her own to find the would-be assassin. So the question is, will they join her to save a demon of all things? And why is she just so absolutely strange?? (Sorry, I’m so bad at summaries. As I mention below)

That story was the start of all this. I created the world that all my stories happen in using the lore from that one. I’d love to finish it and publish some day... I got about 100 pages in, and I have it all planned out. Just need to sit and write it... Honestly, I have probably a dozen WIPs, I could talk about them all day. I’d love to show everyone how they are all tied together! (BECAUSE THEY ABSOLUTELY ARE)

7.What do you think are the characteristics of your personal writing style? Would others agree?

I think I write very descriptively and poetically? Perhaps like an old romance poet... I tend to babble on. Like who was that... Hawthorne? I have a lot of long sentences, a lot huge descriptive paragraphs. I tend to fall into the same types of scenes and tropes, but I mostly write for my own amusement, so it doesn’t bother me much.

I would also like to think I write soft moments very well. I definitely love me a confessional. I love the slow burns, and cuddles, and foreplay/aftercare. I tend to go off on tangents. I just have sooo much that needs to be all said at once!! I hope people agree, though honestly, I would love to hear from my readers what’s so distinctive about my writing style.

14. At what point in writing do you come up with a title?

I hate titles. I have the hardest time coming up with titles. Usually it’s one of the last things I figure out about a piece. But once I do come up with a title, it’s mine. And I love it. Now blurbs/descriptions of my works?? I just wrote 300 pages of a romance between a goblin king and a human prince. How tf am I supposed to summarize that in a single paragraph???

I tend to go on and on. But I love to talk about this stuff! So thank you thank you thank you!! Want to know more?? Here’s the list of asks! My inbox is always open.

#vixencatastrophe #frostsinth answers #frostsinth irl #Royal Flush #A Line in the Sand #Deals with Demons

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royal-loki · 7 years ago

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Thorki Playlist

Sometimes you just want to hang out on your own blog and listen to tunes that remind you of your OTP. I made a playlist that you all can listen to on my tumblr as you scroll through posts. I also wrote a narrative to describe the events in the movies as they fit with the songs I chose. Hope you all enjoy my Thorki mixtape! (Sometimes ads play before the music starts but they are in the order listed below; to skip the ads just go back and forth between the songs)

Thor (2011)

Bad Blood - Taylor Swift

Loki feels extreme jealousy and resentment during Thor’s coronation and plots to interrupt his brother’s big day. All those years of living in his golden brother’s shadow has created some bad blood between them, at least in Loki’s mind.

Somebody That I Used To Know - Gotye

Thor is stunned by Loki’s treacherous actions towards him and their father. After Sif and the Warriors Three arrived on Midgard and told Thor of Loki’s plans, he was heartbroken. He can’t comprehend why Loki would betray him. They were raised together, played together, fought together, and now Loki is just somebody that he used to know.

Wrecking Ball - Miley Cyrus

During Thor and Loki’s showdown on the Bifrost Bridge, Loki expresses his rage in the battle against his brother. He never meant to start a war, he only wanted Thor to let him in. But Loki can’t live a lie, and like a wrecking ball he breaks the memories of his old life that their deceitful father had created and lets himself fall into the abyss.

It’s My Life - No Doubt

Loki had survived his fall but now finds himself amongst the bitter outcasts of the Nine Realms. Hurt by those closest to him and finding an ally in Thanos, he constructs a plan to get revenge on his brother. “It’s my life,” sneers Loki, “I am no longer bound to the throne of Asgard thus I shall create a new kingdom on Midgard.”

The Avengers

Break The Ice - Britney Spears

It’s been a year since Thor last saw Loki, believing that he had perished in the abyss. In his fury, he pulled Loki out the mortal’s aircraft and brought them down to the cold ground below. Now seeing him under the moonlight, after all this time, has been like staring at a ghost. He’s alive, thinks Thor, thank the Norns. “I thought you dead,” Thor utters to Loki, attempting to break the ice. He doesn’t want to scare away his brother. He just wants him to come home. He wants to hold him close and never let him go ever again.

Circus - Britney Spears

Loki wrought down a nightmarish invasion of Chitauri soldiers and giant leviathans that are wreaking havoc on New York City. Watching the Avengers scramble around to stop the Armageddon has been amusing. Loki feels the adrenaline moving through his veins, he has never felt more alive. Thor surely will see him as an equal now. As Loki stands atop of Stark Tower, he thinks, “All the eyes on me in the center of the ring, just like a circus.”

Sorry - Justin Bieber

The battle is over, Loki has lost. Thor leads his brother to where they will depart from Midgard and return to Asgard where Loki will face judgement from the Allfather. The Avengers surround the two Gods as they grip the Tesseract on opposite sides. Loki’s mouth is covered with a guard to prevent him from bewitching anyone. His silver tongue can’t get him out of this situation. He knows that he may have severed the last bit of trust Thor had for him. “I know that I let you down,” Loki ruminates while looking up at his brother, “Is it too late to say I'm sorry now?”

Thor: The Dark World

The Kill - 30 Seconds To Mars

Loki stands before the Allfather in chains. He is still proud despite the dire situation he finds himself in. Coolly, he addresses his father yet Odin doesn’t seem to understand the pain he has caused his adopted son by lying to him. Just as Loki finds himself on the losing side of the argument, Odin goes in for the kill, “Your birthright was to die!” Come, break me down, Loki thinks, bury me, I am finished with you. He is led away to the dungeons, spared from death but crestfallen.

Numb - Linkin Park

Loki passes time in prison without a single visit from his brother. Weeks pass as he begins to shut down emotionally. Frigga is his only visitor and the only one that begged Odin to spare Loki’s life. The Queen tenderly attempts to comfort her youngest son, trying to reason with Loki to spare the fragile relations that struggle to keep hold the bonds between the Asgardian royal family. Loki reaches out to his mother, numb yet longing for her touch. His hand passes through her skillfully crafted illusion, the same seiðr that she taught him as a child. As he watches her disappear, he dejects to himself, every step that I take is another mistake to you.

Vindicated - Dashboard Confessional

Thor recruits Loki to fight the Dark Elves. Although Thor claims he doesn’t trust Loki, his younger brother knows that if that were the case he would have never come to him for help. The fate of Asgard depends on Loki’s cooperation. Thor’s faith in him is but a faint glow in the dark void that Loki feels in his heart, yet his brother’s love makes him feel vindicated. Loki finds the morale to fight alongside his brother once more, and to avenge his fallen mother.

How To Save A Life - The Fray

Loki lay in Thor’s arms. “I didn’t do it for him.” His younger brother whispers as sinks deeper into Thor’s grip. If only Thor had studied the healing arts like Loki did then maybe he would know how to save a life. Sitting there, helplessly, he cries out over his brother’s motionless body. He knows he has to keep going, to pull himself together to save the Nine Realms but at that moment he wonders what is there worth saving now?

Look What You Made Me Do - Taylor Swift

As Thor walks away, Loki lets the seiðr illusion of the Allfather slip. What other choice did he have? Go back to the dungeons for thousands of years until he wilts away or take his birthright and relieve the Mad King of his duties? Look what you made me do, thought Loki. A smile begins to creep up on his face.

Thor: Ragnarok

Feeling This - Blink 182

Thor comes back to Asgard after defeating Surtur and finds Loki on the throne instead of their father. Upon finding out that Loki is alive, he feels no anger. It has been years and all he wants to do his grab his brother and take him to his chambers. Thor begins feeling this strange mix of animalistic desire and heavenly relief. Yes, they will go look for their father where Loki had said he left him on Midgard but for now...

E.T. - Katy Perry

Loki looks on in horror as his brother rolls up in the Grandmaster’s harness chair. Happy that his older brother survived Hela’s assault but terrified of his reaction to Loki’s part in all that has taken place in the past few weeks (or days in Thor’s case). Loki suddenly feels like an E.T. in a room full of strange aliens. Without hesitation, Thor senses Loki’s presence and calls him over. Later, in their shared chambers, Loki tries to calm Thor from erupting in rage and sorrow yet he can’t stop the storm brewing inside his brother. Sparks of electricity surround Thor as he grabs hold of Loki. In this unfamiliar place, Thor only can think of one way to take his mind off of the despair that is clawing at him over the death of their father, being lied to his whole life and the fate of Asgard. He places a firm hand on Loki’s neck as he has done countless times before and kisses him.

Take Me On The Floor - The Veronicas

The elevator ride turned sour very quickly. Loki had expected his brother to beg him to stay yet he was indifferent. As Loki attempted one last trick on his brother, Thor caught him off guard and turned on the obedience disk. The God of Mischief falls to the ground. Impressed by Thor’s cunning and equally turned on, Loki looks up at him and quips, “Take me on floor.” Thor smiles sheepishly, and turns off the disk. He wants Loki to enjoy every minute of their last encounter.

Stellar - Incubus

“I’m here.” Loki says catching the glass top. Thor suddenly feels a rush of warmth flow through his whole body. In this stellar spaceship floating through the heavens, he starts to move towards his brother. They’ve lost nearly everything, their home, their parents, and most of their people. Thor embraces Loki in his giant arms in a tight hold. He can’t let him go, not again.

Avengers: Infinity War

The Ghost Of You - My Chemical Romance

Thor struggles to get to his brother’s body. His own body barely moving from the torture that Thanos inflicted on him. Only Thor’s anguish animates him. Hunching over Loki’s body, he lets out a hopeless cry, “I shall be with the ghost of you soon, brother!” Thor holds Loki close to him and resigns himself to die with the only family he has left.

All That I’ve Got - The Used

Thor wakes up among the Guardians of the Galaxy, a rag-tag group of heroes that are also seeking to get their revenge on Thanos. Thor tries to hide his sorrow by making light of the situation but he can’t stop thinking about Loki and everyone that he has lost. “All that I’ve got is the satisfaction from the vengeance I will inflict upon Thanos,” Thor whispers to himself. He scavenges the food supplies aboard the Guardian’s ship as the rabbit prepares their shuttle for their long journey to Nidavellir. All I want inside, I still am empty, Thor thinks to himself, so deep that it didn’t even bleed and catch me...

Titanium - David Guetta

Thor holds his new battle axe in his hands. The newly formed power of Stormbreaker is almost too much to bare. Mortals may only know of strong metals like titanium but a God knows otherwise. His weapon, forged in the heart of a dying star, will be his tool to avenge Loki. “Nothing to lose,” Thor mutters to himself as he sets off to Earth using the Bifrost.

#Thor Odinson #loki odinson #thor #loki #thorki #perfect #playlist

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fi-ona1-blog · 7 years ago

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Lagged a little

It is almost like coming to a confessional, writing a post about my past few weeks - “it has been 2 weeks since I last made a posting, I have much to talk about”...

Well, we wrapped up our induction, I think I remember writing a post about that. We have given presentations about what we intend to experiment and play with for the coming weeks. I will be working with the ‘immaterial’ myself - the scenographic tools that we do not hold in our hands i.e.: light, sound, atmosphere... Smoke, texture in emotion, balance...

I am starting to collect sounds and create sounds. I am researching the right softwares for me to then import my sounds and play with their pitch, tone, volume etc to make sound collage... Eventuating in a spectator experience in a room.

I am documenting everything in photo, and I will make field-logs, so that I can create dialogue between the sounds and their origins, and then go further into the relationship, to abstract, distort and/or clarify > all to experiment and understand atmosphere.

I am also deciding HOW to share all of this work - here? I think that might work out, but I need something that I can upload the right kinds of media, and I am not sure that Tumblr can do that for me. So I actually have created an Are.na profile (a lot of artists with great insight are featured there) and I have another blog but it is totally bare-bones at the moment: it’s on Blogger .com, and I am very new to it so I will see how it grows :) https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5983473479078902925&pli=1#allposts

Maybe I’l use that space to depict my work, and this to log my thoughts. I am concerned about fragmenting my processes though, so I am looking for the most seamless ways... Trial and error ensue.

Anything else... Eating well, resting properly, trying to get 4 45min workouts a week but I have to really get my discipline going. I want to get a really solid 6 months of work in, I have made a Task Manager that I am recording my weekly doings, and I will tally up my hours every month. I have some goals and tasks to keep on top of, hopefully there will be evidence of the results.

Sláinte!

F xx

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survivor-mesopotamia · 5 years ago

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Ep. #3 - "I'm just throwing stuff at things that I don't even know exists" (Isabelle)

I'm pretty nervous for this immunity challenge. Given that its a flash game roulette, I fully expect the other returnee tribe to get the highest score, so we have to strategize our point values for each game. I decided to play winterbells since no one else wanted to, but we need to put the lowest value there because I know there's no chance I will win it with people like Monty and Johnny who could end up playing it. If we strategize the points right, we could stay safe as well. I really don't want to vote anyone from our tribe off.

youtube

praying jj is the cheater

youtube

i was gonna make a real confessional, but ill save it for tomorrow. i'd just like to say i literally look like a CRAZY person scoring 2 billion in winterbells and not thinking it was enough when the other scores were 300k and 2 million. i gtg

YES We've won our third immunity challenge and it feels pretty good. I will say that right now I do feel kinda stagnant because you know we have yet to go to tribal council but yet at the same time I don't want to go. Honestly I've been loving the tribe Michael is truely the only one I question like their whole demanor becuase they felt almost like they where constantly trying to hand off their part of the challenge to literally anyone else but also with Collin mostly because he seems to be coming off kinda................forced is probably the best word for it. Well I don't know till next time ttyl

youtube

C7: https://youtu.be/fCmPRxLuFv8 C8: https://youtu.be/HH8tYuHGDFg

Going into tribal tonight SUCKS. I don't want any of us 6 going, but it has to be done. So far the discussion seems to be all about voting Chrissa out. My personal opinion on it is indifferent. Our conversations were pretty short and I was usually the one to initiate it. I feel more bonded with the other players on my tribe. I discussed it with Julian and it looks like that's the plan in execution at the moment. We have an alliance with JJ and I'm not sure if JJ knows yet because he hasn't said anything yet. As for Will, who I consider a really close ally, he had the same thoughts. Basically there's a lot of as long as it isn't me mindsets because it's a really difficult vote. Megan approached me about making a chat with us three together which is pretty interesting. It looks as though I'm in two chats now. One with JJ and Julian and another with Megan and Will. I'd like to think that's a good sign but the only good sign in a game is when the person who everyone said was going home goes home, so fingers crossed.

https://soundcloud.com/collin-vodicka-771937060/enlil-tribe-sucks

So once again, the Enki tribe has slayed the immunity challenges, however, I am one of the weaker people when playing comps. I am predicting a tribe swap next round though, but I'm also prepping for the possibility we have to go to tribal. I have made a really strong bond with Zach, and I am extremely close with Grace. I have started to get to know Adam, and I think Collin likes the "Team Grocery Store" thing we have going on since we are both baggers at grocery stores. I'm not that close with Michael or Cameron, so I wouldn't mind if one of them left if we had to vote someone out. But as of now, I am continuing to serve as a mentor to these new players and trying to give the full truth to them so that I have good relationships with them going forward. Also, last night I discovered a youtube link in the Idol System page of the Tumblr blog. It showed dancing crabs and the URL says "Step One." I did notice however that there were 140 views already when i found it the first time. So I assume someone already knows about the video on my tribe and has figured it out already. But it still does not hurt to try to get an idol. It at least gives me closure and gives me something to do while I let these newbies overplay the game like Zach is. Concerning the future of this game, if there is a tribe swap, I need to figure out how to get in good with these returnees. The newbie players are in a minority, however I am familiar with Megan Julian and JJ. I don't know anyone on the An tribe, but I guess thats the fun in getting to know people. I just have to be as nice as possible and try not to come off as a douche to them because they have played this game before. I haven't. The last thing I want is for people to think I am an entitled asshole. I want to stay civil and let people want to work with me instead of me forcing myself onto them. Finally I have a legit confessional LMFAO

https://youtu.be/ejn4YyJogo0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POLT6aOiJZs&feature=youtu.be

We won immunity! I was worried for a moment my score wouldn't be good enough cause I hurt my hand a couple days ago so I had to take lots of breaks to ice it. And i mean it was close...between first and second. Like damnnnn they got 0 points. That really has to be a hit to their tribe morale. But speaking of tribe morale, I really feel connected to my tribe. I've had a good time just talking to everyone. I think the person I've talked to the least is Abby but even then I really like her. I think there's a really good chance we swap after tonight's tribal, even though Johnny thinks it'll happen at 16. If we do swap, the person I want most on my tribe is Benji. Obviously since he's been gone from the community for ages, there's nothing linking us together so obviously like playing Malaysia with Isabelle, hosting Johnny in Flops, and hosting Lazio with Monty, not to mention the amount of seasons he hosted me in Pacific Islands (RIP). He's also very personable so I think he could gain us new allies. P.S. Prayer circle for Chrissa and Eric tonight, if I can swap with either one of them that would be a MIRACLE

me in my mesopotamia application: i dont want to end up in a ride-or-die pair. i always get fucked over and do worse than the person im aligned close with. benji: also if i didnt make it clear already you're my #1 in this game and the only way id write your name down is to win like im not going on call with the other tribemates and comparing notes i feel like im a lot more reserved around the others this was the first alliance i made and im sticking to it! me: you're my #1 too! no way i could write your name down either just in case that was not clear oifjeoijrf history repeats itself, baby! honestly its too early to tell if ill meet the same fate as i have in the past with my close 2s/3s (shoutout ash, sara, nick w + christine), but here we are. god as i sent that message i knew immediately it's gonna bite me in the butt later on. like i wasn't lying, i do really trust benji more than anyone else in this game BUT I NEED TO PLAY FOR ME this time! woof.

so i don't wanna talk to my host chat because drew is gonna not be proud of me and that's not okay I knew it from last night and today no one talking to me it's gonna be me no one ever wants me at merge so it's fine I could fight for it but JJ has given up so i guess that's it.

Things are... still good! We continue to do well enough in challenges that all strategic talk has been pretty much confined to agreeing to stay united and get everyone in the tribe as far as we can. It’s been surprisingly relaxed so far.

RIP Chrissa she didn't deserve this

from chrissa's boot ep https://youtu.be/02a8QiaQG8M

Chrissa voted out 5-1

#nomorethings

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survivor-kalymnos · 5 years ago

Text

Ep. 1 - “I am THE Survivor Chick And I Am Here To Win It All!!” - Susan

Franco

hehe

Maxyne

I AM FREAKING THE FUCK OUT!!!!! I don't know why I am, it's just another Survivor game but... I have be someone else kind of. So for this game I have to be "Maxyne" and I'm keeping my pronoun flexibility but I'm gonna be pushing the feminine side a bit more. Maxyne is actually my irl sister's middle name so it'll be easy for me to quickly become familiar with that name being used for me. I also know that Tim is gonna be in this game but idk who and I sure as hell don't wanna find out. Tim actually told me to apply cause they said that they were applying to but my dumbass did NOT know this was an alias game so now I'm fumbling around in the dark trying get into costume n shit not knowing what to do or what to expect. The only thing I have to cling onto my knowledge of Survivor ORGs and Jay's style of hosting. Which honestly don't do me well cause I haven't played Survivor in... months and I haven't been tuned into a Jay game in months too so I have no idea the ride I'm in for. One thing I did do is scroll through the rules, cause my experience always tells me that whenever there's a tumblr blog for an ORG, there's always something hidden somewhere there. Lo and behold, I was right so come 9 PM tonight I will be camping on the rules page updating and waiting for a clue, or someway to start my search. Cause every Survivor game i've played, the idol is found in less then 5 minutes and by the way I've formulated a thought about the idol, it's already long gone. So hopefully, I can pull a Merida and change my fate. Also there was a mention of One World rounds happening in this game??? UMMMM WTF??? PLEASE LET THAT BE A ONE TIME THING. Anyways, sorry for the word vomit, I usually have a lot of pre game jitters and thoughts so I figured I'd get a jump on my confessional count and start talking now. Let's hope I can pull through for this game and make it far. Or vote me out first, i'd rather not have responsibilities right now.

Rain

I’m looking forward to this. I’m looking forward to people not remembering who I am. I’ve been out of this a year now, I’m well and ready to get first boot, but I’m curious to see how a better, matured me will play. Probably badly, let’s be fuckin real. Anyway I’ll check back in toward the middle of this round. We’ll see how all my sockpuppet counterparts compare against my impossible standards.

Maxyne

5 minutes before the game starts and mama we. Are. SCARED.

Elle

This time around I am going to go for a peppy, happy-go-lucky girl. Not all of my tribe mates are online atm which majorly sucks! Plus, not everyone has me added. I am going to wait till people add me before I add them. I'll give it the night into the morning for that to happen. Otherwise, I'll slowly add them one-by-one. I want to do the slide puzzles because I know I am good at them. I'm going for a more hands-off approach when it comes to socializing so I need all the time I can get to set myself up in the tribe. If we can win the challenge then it'll be a great opportunity to really bond with my tribe mates.

Maxyne, Fae, and Erick seem to be the most active atm with Fae being the most social. I'll observe how far that socializing and activity goes on. It can either work to my benefit or I need to get rid of the ASAP.

Frank

Wanna start by saying that having a round button in this form is the smartest thing I’ve ever seen. Now onto my confessional: this tribe is alright, some people haven’t spoken yet I think and people seem nice and cooperative thus far. I’m so nosy so not knowing who everyone is is going to be a struggle for me. But I’m guessing Maynor is Gregg on the other tribe bc of the Sophie icon, but watch me be wrong. I’ll try to keep confessionals interesting, but then again I lie sometimes so womp.

Worm

So I am an hour into my first alias game and I’m already stressing the fuck out. I am so used to being able to go on call with people and get to know them. I wanna say one of my greatest strength is getting solid reads on people when I talk to them but that is only when I can go on call with them. This whole thing is gonna be a struggle

Fae

well we are an hour into this game and I have already fucked up my story. Guess I'm moving home now because I didn't think anything through. dear god. Why am I like this? guess moving my grandmother is going to turn into Me moving home lol. welp, lets see how this goes.

Maxyne

*googles How to stop oversharing*

Michele

Franco is a king we stan. Also I’m still laughing at worms name

Rain

Michele: Chosen one, will betray at f5

Susan: OTTN5

Worm: oh, worm?

Gregg: Dylan in disguise, watch me betray him again

Uhhh I’ll be back with the rest eventually first night is horrid

Idol hunt: OTTNNNNNNN10

Dusty

So far im feeling good on my tribe! I'm getting along really well with Erick! We have a lot in common and match each others energy. I'm also talking well with Fae, who says they think we've played a game together!! So I'm trying to figure out who it might be! I'm a little worried about the people who haven't spoken yet, but hopefully I'll be able to get to know them!

Elle

I think I'm connecting well with Maxyne. Since we are both doing the same assignment, it allows for me to grow closer with them. I think I might make them my ride-or-die, but I want to see how well our connection lasts in the days to come. Van and I are making great conversation in the tribe chat. I hope they will want to work with me. Other than that, I have not chatted with anyone else on the tribe. The people who have contacted me I talk to sporadically. I hope this is enough to get me by as I do not want to be seen as a social threat later down the line. Also, like, why did so many people get a disadvantage? I am so disappointed in all of them, but I know we can pull through!

lenny

off to an interesting start! so far, I am enjoying my tribe. definitely more chill than my last one but only time will tell. people's true motives will come out soon and this time, I am trying to really pay attention to who is a leader and who is a follower.

Franco

Nera tribe has such good positive energies? There hasn't been any friction, everyone is joking with each other, and overall everyone is having a great time!! Very honestly though I'm not sure what to make of everyone in a game and strategic sense. I've tried talking game with the majority of the tribe but most of it was still just like small talk and vague sentences. Im tryna play this fast and hard but I don't think anyone else is ): I vibe really well with Michele, Eliza, and Rain. Michele and Rain are so fun and probably down to get messy, so they'd be great allies. And eliza just seems like a genuinely good person that I think I would get along with really nicely!! I also REALLY want this reward challenge. Ive gotten three people at least who said that they would vote for me so!! Let's hope I win, at the very least itd be nice to prove to myself that I can have a good social game early on

Franco

On my very FIRST idol hunt of the SEASON I find?? A legacy advantage??? Im so??? Shook and excited. I just have a feeling that this is my game! Night 1 kinda sets the tone of the whole game and I had an AMAZING night 1. I also uhhh am dumb and told Michele that i found it. My goal was to gain her trust so we could work together but? She kinda just didn't respond and changed the topic. Idk if that's a good sign so yikes!!

Elle

Honestly, I should resign myself to the fate that we will not win the next challenge. So, it is imperative that we win this challenge so that we do not go to tribal two times in a row. I hope my score of 85 is enough because I could not get it any higher than that. I am honestly very frustrated with my tribe at the moment, but I guess we shall see how things develop. Maxyne and Erick getting the advantage is interesting only because it shows who has been the most social. I will either need to get in good with the both of them or take them out early. However, the most active and social people usually do not go home first. For now, I will just keep my eye on the two of them and see how they position themselves.

Elle

Erick giving the tribe the clue was definitely a strategic move. He wants to build trust and be transparent with everyone in order for them to like him. I see right through it. However, it is nice to get an edge on the hunt.

Fae

I FOUND THE IDOL!!!! Erick decided to share the clue and I FOUND IT!!!!

Eliza

dear m’fucking diary...

Hey gays, this is a crack fest. I’m doing this confession rn so that I don’t have to do that fever dream of a puzzle. I got a bat to the face when I did the idol hunt, funnnnn. So, let’s recap! I’ve been connecting with a lot of people so far and that’s great, I love my tribe rn and I’m happy that Franco won the reward considering that I voted for them, so now I can at least get on Franco’s good side an maybe get some info👀. Because this is alias I probably will be playing a tad bit differently but I’m still going to be the social playing badass that y’all know and love! The worst part of this so far is that I can’t fucking say y’all, who the hell says y o u g u y s. I’m changing how I speak just a bit so that I don’t immediately get clocked, so basically I can’t use y’all and lmao in every sentence. The people I feel closest to right now are Franco, Michelle, tristin, rain, and worm. In that order, don’t get me wrong, I love everyone in the tribe, those are just the people I’ve been able to connect with the most. I’d love to move forward with that group but if that doesn’t happen well then whatever, I mean I talk to literally everyone so I’ll survive. Pretending to be interested romantically in men (sorry James Zachary) is horrible, but I think people are at least believing that I’m 20. Jay told me that all I have to do to be an adult is be excited about stupid boring shit, so I’m just gonna pretend that I’m happy about buying a new couch. Well I’ll check back in soon to update y’all about people and probably give an analysis about everyone. That’s it, much loveeeee

Fae

I just want to say how ironic it is that I decided to do the idol hunt in the challenge and in reality actually found an idol

Gregg

Well. Im already overwhelmed and literally wanted out. (Jay knows why) But im doing counting challenge and i hope another f4 counting challenge doesnt affect my perfermance for this one. I really want to help the tribe win. Honestly im not gunna bother trying to figure out who is who. Im just gunna play and think the people are the people and play normally. Trying to guess ppl is what gunna mess me up. So wont bother with it but some phrase some ppl have said. I feel like i know who they r.

Franco

I WON FIRST REWARD AHHH. I'm such a social legend? Look at me? I'm literally winning this game. I kinda don't care about the clue because I already have a legacy advantage, AND half of a super idol (that I gotta give to somebody else, booooo), so I'm kinda??? Being chaotic and giving the clue to everyone who voted for me. It can give me an opportunity to gain more trust on the tribe

Tristin

https://youtu.be/Wyi5uWAulnE

Maxyne

I know this is late and it's long but i fell asleep last night while this was uploading, so sorry https://youtu.be/mXmbL49orVI

Elle

Now that I have gotten to talk to everyone I can finally assess my tribe. I feel like I can be great allies with Maxyne. They voted for me in the reward which means we have a mutual good vibe from each other. Hopefully I can make them my ride-or-die. Fae and Van are really nice and I can get down with them. I think if I could choose a strong alliance of three I would pick them while having Maxyne as my real ride-or-die. Sasha seems to be the least social with me which means that they could be an easy target. I don't trust Erick or Cran because they just give me bad vibes. I do not think anything of Frank. They are probably with Sasha as one of the least social in the tribe. At least Sasha is being active within the tribe chat. Finally, I think Dusty is a sweetheart and could possibly be another one of my allies. At the very least, I know I was strong in the challenge and have at least been moderately social. This means I will not be the first boot if we were to go to tribal.

Dusty

So now we've got an alliance in the works between me, Fae, Erick, and Elle. All in the name of working together to find the idol. I feel good about the group! Me and Erick are both each others closest ally. He won the reward challenge and in doing so he was able to will be half of a super idol! We don't know where the other half might be, but I'm really happy to see that Erick trusted me enough to will me a super idol!

van

So uh...I haven’t been super active because the world is burning around us. But I’m trying. So far I really enjoy the people I’m playing with!

Elle

Dusty asking me to work with Fae and Erick on finding the idol which works out well for me. This means I have already positioned myself into a sort of alliance which I hope will carry me in the future.

Elle

Fae confirmed with me the alliance that Dusty approached me with. However, there was no chat made. Also, Cranjes was added to the alliance by Erick and Fae which tells me that those those two are very social with him. These people are making their connections to obvious. Either way, with those people I have a 5-person majority. Hopefully these people will carry me through the pre-swap phase of the game, but I am getting pretty nervous in my seat. I do not trust Erick and Cranjes. I like Dusty and Fae, but I cannot get a read on the other two. Plus, if no chat has been made, how are we going to solidify the alliance? Hopefully my performance in the challenge will cover me for now, but I am getting pretty nervous at the moment.

Michele

elfranchele just started! it's an alliance chat with michele, franco, and eliza. excited to see where this goes!!

I can't tell if Susan is just super into her alias or if she really is old with her hubs

Cranjes

everyone seems nice. i guess. idk. i fell off a waterfall and fucked up my ankle for a fucking idol. but if anyone asks, it was sasha.

i have something against the name sasha bc peppermint should’ve won season 9 of drag race, not sasha velour

Fae

Soooo, there is now a chat for people to hell each other look for the idol. The idol I have...

Frank

YESSSSSSS!!! I’m not gonna be first boot. It’s a party even though I didn’t win my section. Eliza didn’t do their part on the other tribe and that’s a yikes (at least with a 2 hour time exactly that’s what I’m assuming). So like they’re probably going. I’m really happy I don’t have to worry about tribal tomorrow because my sister wants to drink and celebrate her birthday since plans went sour because of that quarantine life. But gamewise though, I want to talk to Erick tomorrow since they seem like someone I could work with, although based on reward I think multiple people think that. Gonna remember that. Gotta be social....but I’m me so it’ll be an uphill battle.

Rain

So, we lost immunity.

I could have seen that coming - but at least we weren’t totally destroyed. I’m already thinking Susan as a name but uhhh we’ll see where it goes. I’m pretty good with Franco, Michele and Eliza. I wouldn’t be shook if there was an alliance chat made at some point. I like Tristan too! And Gregg. And Lenny. ....okay I like everyone but Susan. Susan I’m sorry I respect your character choice but it ain’t it, chief.

Gregg

I feel like i might be good for this tribal. Only one name has been said which kinda worries me but im trying to stay positive. Susan is the target tonight and as long as it isnt me. Im okay with voting for whoever. Franco did share the clue with me. It was a simple clue so idk if itll be helpful or not. Im looking at a certain spot and doing all the 4 spots in the section. So hopefully i can find something.

erick

hi i have the eco fascist dream flu and i cannot move but cranjes is john and fae is birch confirmed, i fucked up the challenge but not to the extent that we lost so that’s nice. current alliance going with fae, elle, and dusty (dusty’s my fave). they elected to give me the idol clue and i got half of the super idol so i gave that to dusty as was required and then shared the clue with the group at large because i’m a communist

Worm

So we lost the first immunity challenge. It sucks but I'll get over it. The thing that worries me now is trying to get a read on everyone during the vote. Because I don't know who I'm playing with I'm struggling on getting a read on anyone. On the bright side though I think I'm doing pretty well socially. I've talked to Michele and Tristin and they seem to trust me so I'm happy about that. Also it seems like the tribe has come to a unanimous vote to getting rid of Susan. I feel bad about getting her out but she is firmly holding on to her character which I think is making it difficult for her to make connections with other people in the tribe. The only that has me worried about this whole thing is how easy this vote is going. My anxious head just wonders about how people behind the scenes could be plotting to get me out and I just don't know it. This also isn't helped by the reward challenge and Franco receiving 5 votes to get the clue. A couple votes wouldn't have made me suspicious but 5 just seems like a lot. Maybe I'm reading too much into it but all my anxiety is saying is that there is a majority alliance already formed in the first couple hours of the game and now I'm just playing from the bottom. Hopefully that isn't true but only time will tell.

Susan Burke

I Am SO SO Excited To Be Here!! I am THE Survivor Chick And I Am Here To Win It All!! Everyone So Far Has Been So Kind. I Love These Kids!! However, I Know My Age Will Make Me A Target. They Don't Believe This Ol' Hiney Can Keep Up With Them!! So, I Wanted To Make It Clear That I Am LOYAL To This Tribe And Its People!! When I Was Out Looking For The Idol, I Stumbled Upon The Other Tribe's Camp!! How AWKWARD!! I Decided To Tell Franco - He's Popular, And The First One To Really See SUSAN For SUSAN. Hopefully I Can Buy His Trust, Because He Can Keep This Nanna Safe!! It's Really Unfortunate We Lost...But It Was So Close!! We Won't Lose Again!! I Was Instantly Worried It Would Be Me, But Doing The Challenge With Tristin Bonded Us!! Together, We Decided That Gregg Would Be Our Target, And Now We Gotta Get Everyone ONBOARD!! #TeamSDB

Franco

Im very very sad we have to go to tribal. Like i genuinely enjoy everyone on the tribe!! But it's the way the game goes, every time someone leaves it gets me one place closer to winning hehe. I now have an official alliance with Michele and Eliza and??? We are going to SLAY this game. We all have our individual strengths and I think we could be a powerhouse. Unless Susan has an idol, shes going tonight. Its sad because shes so fun but im not surprised. Everyone else on the tribe seems to have some sort of personal stake or investment in the game besides her.

Elle

Having immunity means that I can safely bond with my tribemates without the game hovering over our heads. I'm really vibing with everyone in the tribe chat. However, I do not want to go into PMs unless they want to talk to me because it is such a Raffy thing to do to talk to people in PMs. I will try to be as social as possible in the tribe chat to still have those bonds, but I do not want to be seen as some sort of social butterfly.

Tristin

So we LOST the challenge and that sucks!! It appears that the majority of people want to vote out SUSAN and I hate it!! She’s super sweet and the older players always get voted out first! Maybe because she hasn’t been as social as everyone else! At least thats the explanation. I pretty much solidified working with Worm, Franco, and Eliza pretty much. Michele as well I think! But separately of course! I can’t wait for an alliance chat! Sorry to this Susan!!

Sasha

It's strange to be playing in a game where I know there's people playing that I already know but I have no idea who they are. I've talked a little bit to each but not a ton. I don't have too many guesses as to who is who, though. That's it.

0 notes

dashboarddiaries · 23 days ago

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For ad-free episodes and more, become a pal at atypicalartists.co/support.

[intro music]

Cher: Hello, Riverdalians. I’m Cher McAnelly, Producer, Professional Tumblr User, and Weird Weirdo Who Is Weird.

Lauren: And I’m Lauren Shippen, Professional Writer, who has never experienced the epic highs and lows of high school football.

Cher: (laughs) And this is Dashboard Diaries, a podcast for you – the folks who are in this internet bunker with us. And who are not in the stands at the football game ...

experiencing those epic highs and lows.

Lauren: So true.

Cher: We talk about what’s going on in our favorite hell site, get into what we like to call “tumbl-lore,” do fandom deep dives, and share the times when we’ve gone feral over a new ship.

So, to start out this week, Lauren, what do you have in your archives for us for our little Dashboard Confessional?

Lauren: Yeah.

[guitar riff]

I’ve got a little fun sort of like ten year remembrance, 20 year remembrance kind of flashback. So, I pulled up a post from April of 2015. So, ten years ago was the last time I re-blogged this. And I’m not going to read the whole post because it’s incredibly long. But basically it’s an anonymous asker asking a Tumblr user a [preaky 00:01:12], “What’s your opinion on the 2005 P&P?”

“P&P” of course being an abbreviation for Pride & Prejudice 2005. Being of course the Joe Wright directed, Keira Knightley, Matthew Macfadyen film. And it is an exceptionally long post that begins with “Fuck this movie. I hate this movie. There’s so much whack shit in this film.” And then it just goes on to bullet point like all of the amazing stuff about 2005 Pride and Prejudice with obviously their initial evaluation of “fuck this movie. I hate this movie” being hyperbolic. They clearly love this movie deeply.

And I chose this post both because, yeah, it’s been ten years since I re-blogged it and I am still constantly thinking about Pride & Prejudice. But also it’s now been 20 years since the film came out.

Cher: Oh my gosh.

Lauren: There was this wonderful New York Times article that I’ll be sure to post on DashboardDiaries.Tumblr.com about specifically the hand flex moment.

DD 48 – Dashboard Diaries Transcript

(laughter)

You know exactly what I’m talking about.

Cher: Yes. I think it takes up a percentage of my brain. I had a conversation about the hand flex this weekend with someone.

Lauren: Incredible! So, there is an homage to the hand flex in the New York Times from last week.

Cher: The impact.

Lauren: Yeah, talking about the impact, talking about how there’s merch of the hand flex, how there’s like ... if you say “hand flex” to anybody who has seen this movie they know exactly what you’re talking about. And so yeah I just really wanted to celebrate 20 years of this quite literally perfect film that I have seen so, so many times and that I think is so iconic. And that I’m very curious to see ... yeah, I’m a 2005 Pride & Prejudice girly. Right?

I was 14 when it came out. I saw it in theaters. It changed my brain chemistry forever. And I sort of burned through all of Jane Austen’s novels in early high school. And eventually saw the BBC miniseries that was made in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s of Pride & Prejudice. It’s a couple of episodes, several hours long. And it’s really interesting because the people who are the BBC miniseries devotees kind of ... a lot of them turned up their noses at the 2005 Joe Wright film when it came out. Because it’s like, “This is not OUR Mr. Darcy. This is not OUR Pride & Prejudice.”

And I remember being so ... like, “Oh man, why can’t you just appreciate that this movie is so good!? Just appreciate it for what it is.” But now ... Netflix has announced that they’re doing a miniseries of Pride & Prejudice and I’m like, “This isn’t MY Pride & Prejudice! This isn’t Joe Wright! This isn’t Keira Knightley!” (laughter) And so I’m curious if Gen Z is going to embrace the Netflix miniseries in the same way that we embraced the 2005 movie and kind of rejected ... I’m just very curious to see what translates from one generation to the next and what kind of becomes the generational touchstone for all of these people.

What is your view on the Pride & Prejudice oeuvre?

Cher: Well, first off, incredibly perfect film. I love this post. I love this movie. I watch it, yeah, every few months or so. You’ve inspired me – it’s time for another re-watch, clearly. I also think ... one of my first thoughts when you were mentioning “this is not MY Darcy,” was the irony of each generation being prejudiced against the previous generation’s Darcy. (laughter)

Lauren: You’re SO RIGHT! The irony!

DD 48 – Dashboard Diaries Transcript

What do you have from the archives for this month?

Cher: So, I have a fun post from ... I think I re-blogged it in 2017. And it is a screenshot of a Wiki-How article. I re-blogged it from user:UGLY ... U-G-L-Y, you ain’t got no alibi. I’m very jealous of that username. Anyway ...

It’s a screenshot of a Wiki-How article captioned, “How to act like a mermaid at school.” And the screenshot is specifically of tip #5 which I think is key. And it says, “Act alert around water. If you happen to get a drop of water on you, run away to hide in the bathroom, or frantically dry it off. When the class is talking about the ocean, listen intently like you already know these things but you’re looking to point out a mistake. Or to be mysterious, clam up completely.”

Lauren: Clam up!?

Cher: Exactly. Really hoping that pun was intended.

Lauren: Absolutely. God, that’s good.

Cher: Somehow this post reminded me vaguely of the topic of our episode Riverdale because ... again, I didn’t finish Riverdale and we’ll get into that momentarily but for all we know someone could have become a mermaid in that show. I think it’s actually more likely than not.

Lauren: I agree with that, based off of everything that I know about Riverdale. [game show trill]

Cher: With that, should we dive into Riverdale?

Lauren: I’m scared. I’m excited. I can’t wait. Let’s go!

Cher: Let’s head on in. Yeah. Can’t wait to visit. Okay. So, can you give us a quick TL;DR of your kind of experience level with Riverdale and also just how you would describe the show in one sentence for our listeners who may have never heard of it before, and whose lives are about to change so much?

Lauren: Absolutely. I would love to. Well, first of all, I should say I’m curious what your history is with both Riverdale and with the comics. But I was a HUGE Archie comics reader, growing up. I read maybe a couple of Spider Man comics but I didn’t really get into the Marvel/DC comics until much later in life. But I was a devotee of the Archie comics. I would spend my allowance money on them. I LOVED them.

And I also was a CW WB devotee. And so there was definitely a time, I would say probably between 2009 and 2016 when I watched at least the first few episodes of everything that the CW put out. Right? I just had to give it a try. So, when they

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announced Riverdale I was like, “This is made for me. I cannot wait.” And what’s more, one of my real life personal friends, [Brita Lundeen 00:07:40], who is amazing and is an amazing TV writer and also has fantastic books, was a writer on the first [I think] two seasons of Riverdale. So, I wanted to support her as well.

It is an adaptation of the ... well, it is inspired by the Archie comics. Right? You’ve got Archie and Betty and Veronica and Jug Head and Reggie. And Cheryl. And kind of all the classic Archie comic people that you are familiar with. And they’re in high school and it’s kind of like a modern gritty Twin Peaks’ian take on the Archie comics. So, the first season opens up with a death of a student and then it kind of goes from there.

I watched I think the first three seasons. And then I kind of fell off and now have been consuming Riverdale through my Tumblr dash and there have been many times through the years when I saw a post and I was like, “Huh, that’s funny.” Then I was like, “Wait a second, is that something that actually happened on the real television show

Riverdale?” And the answer was always, “Yes, it did.”

What about you, Cher? What has your experience with Riverdale been throughout the years?

Cher: Uh ... so, yeah. I never really read the Archie comics but have always loved the kind of Archie-verse, the comic universe. I grew up ... one of my favorite films, which I mentioned probably dozens of times at this point in this podcast because again it does take up at least 1-2% of my brain is Josie and the Pussycats, the 2003 epic

Lauren: Also, a perfect film.

Cher: I’m also thinking, realizing now I’m saying it came out in 2003. Did it? I think it came out in 2001, actually, now that I’m saying it. So, the 2001 ... now I’m going to Google it to be sure.

Lauren: It’s very millennium-core.

Cher: It’s 2001. Yes. It’s very millennium-core.

Lauren: It’s really Y2K.

Cher: It’s so unbelievably Y2K. Perfectly so, yeah. Okay, the 2001 classic film Josie and the Pussycats. One of the best movies I would say of the early 2000s. And now it has become a cult classic. Underappreciated in its time. Incredible. I mean I could talk about that movie alone for so long. So, I am going to cut myself off here. But unless anyone has access to a vinyl copy of the soundtrack ... I have been trying to find one and I cannot. But otherwise, I will stop talking about Josie and the Pussycats now.

However, my name was almost Veronica.

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Lauren: Oh my god! Oh ... I cannot imagine you as a Veronica.

Cher: Right!? It’s so funny, it’s so different from my name. And my mom actually, at the end of the day ... she said she didn’t want her daughter named after a comic. Which is a very funny thing coming from Josephine AKA Josie ...

Lauren: Ah!

Cher: And also then naming me essentially Cher, Cheryl. So, same but different, we got there anyway. Exactly. So ... at the end of the day, everything is always Archie. We are all in the Archie-verse. We’re all a part of it. But yeah, I also watched the Josie and the Pussycats cartoon series after that and got really into all of the animated series, which are fantastic as well. And so yeah, same as you – anything the CW did from around 2004 until 2016 or 2017 honestly. Or even a little longer. I absolutely watched.

I think I watched Riverdale until season three or four. I can’t remember exactly the season when I stopped watching. I’ll have to Google when this episode was. I know the episode I stopped watching and it was a scene where they levitated a baby over a fire.

Lauren: YES! I do remember that very well.

Cher: Yes. I was like, you know what? I think this is the end of the road for me. I’ve seen enough for now. Clearly I hadn’t seen enough because I mean if I thought the show had gone wild from there ... that was just the beginning. But yeah, even though I stopped watching Riverdale I am very fond of it and I kind of love it’s chaos and its impact and also have really enjoyed being an outside observer via the people doing the good work of watching Riverdale and creating the post for us to view out of context.

Lauren: Mm hmm. What is the wildest thing that you have learned about Riverdale that you’re pretty sure is true through Tumblr?

Cher: Okay. The wildest thing ... honestly, it doesn’t even seem wild compared to everything that I’ve learned about Riverdale. But the fact that they’re all dead and characters in Jug Head’s stories?? He’s just writing these stories and they’re acting it out and they’re all like ... they’re dead and I don’t know if they’re in heaven ... or purgatory ... or [crosstalk 00:13:17].

Lauren: ... narrative.

Cher: Or they’re just in the narrative. Which is just so unbelievably ... I mean, it’s wild but also perfect as well. So yeah, I think that’s the thing that kind of I had to sit with for a moment. Also very Lost of them.

Lauren: So true.

Cher: Yeah. What about you?

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Lauren: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s so much. Yeah, I’m still trying to wrap my head around what exactly the show is and what happened in it.

Cher: YES.

Lauren: Because it goes from sort of being a high school drama that maybe is a little bit weird ... and I also kind of stopped watching around the floating baby. I know I watched through the

Cher: Right around the floating baby. (laughs)

Lauren: Yeah, right around the floating baby. I know I watched through the Heather’s Musical episode because they started doing musical episodes pretty consistently and I know I watched through that one, which I think was the second half of season three. So, I may have watched all of season three. But I think the wildest thing that I learned ages ago was I saw a post on Tumblr that was talking about how Archie died because he was sacrificed in the woods and they cut his heart out to do something. And I was like ... oh sure, this is a funny shit post about the things that could happen in Riverdale and then I went to the Riverdale Wikipedia page and read the episode summaries and I was like, “They legit cut Archie’s heart out in the woods.”

I need to find the original post because that was only one crazy thing about that particular post. I mean, just ... there’s a bunch of stuff that I want to re-blog to the Dashboard Diaries Tumblr.

Cher: Same. Lots of drafts in there. (laughs) Already. Also, I’m realizing as you’re saying that they cut Archie’s heart out. I do feel that I got to that episode. So, if that happened after the levitating baby I might have ... I think I watched maybe even near to the end of whatever that season was, because I do remember the sac- there was more than one sacrifice ... there was a bunker involved ... and some kind of thing in the woods ...

Anyway ... sorry. I cut you off. You said there were so many posts that you wanted to re blog.

Lauren: And there’s two that I just want to read because I think that they encapsulate this very well. The first is a screenshot of a decider article, sort of showing up in Google search results. And the headline is “Riverdale Ending Explained: Wait Were They Dead The Whole Time!?” And then the little preview of the article is “The short version is that thanks to the machinations of the evil sorcerer in season six the town of Riverdale was destroyed by a comet.”

Cher: Of course.

Lauren: The comment under the caption is “every single word of this feels like it was pulled out of a bingo machine.”

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(laughter)

Which I just think is really good. And then the other one is from a blogger called “utopians” it’s sort of like a three re-blog series of them re-blogging their post. And their first post is, “Sorry for posting about how much I enjoy Riverdale. I mean it with utter and absolute insincerity and it will happen again.” And then they re-blogged their own post and said, “I feel that the fundamental problem people encounter when watching Riverdale is that they are viewing it as a bad adaptation of Archie comics when it is in fact an almost perfect adaptation of Riverdale, a conceptual construct that I would describe as the platonic ideal of the phrase ‘television show.’”

(laughter)

And then they re-blogged that and say, “Riverdale existed within the collective unconscious before it ever moved to the body of [inaudible 00:16:52].” Which is like I think kind of the best way that I can describe my understanding of Riverdale. It’s not an adaptation of the Archie comics, it’s also not a TV show on the CW. It is like the idea of a TV show as hallucinated by a collective hive mind that spends a lot of time on Tumblr. And then somehow it was streamed through our televisions. (laughs)

Cher: It is the visualization of all the fan fiction that has just ever been written on this website.

Lauren: Yeah, and whatever combination of words in the English language you can dream up ... Riverdale put it in their script. (laughter) What about you? Were there any posts that jumped out to you as just sort of encapsulating the Riverdale Tumblr experience?

Cher: Yeah, there were a few. Well, actually dozens. But I’ll just read a couple and we’ll re-blog the rest. The first one is from user: Elainisms who said, “Literally, what other show is ever going to match Riverdale’s freak? What other show has serial killer dads and organ harvesting cults, and fake gay serial killer half brothers who are married to your real gay serial killer half brothers and gargoyle kings and jingle-jangle and over the top musical numbers and Jug Head and teenagers getting sent to prison by their girlfriends’ mobster fathers and speakeasies run by teenagers under the local diner and beautiful lesbian Cheryl blossom in serial killer jeans and the south side serpents and gay Kevin? No one will ever top this.”

And that’s one tenth of the details of this show. I was like, “Did they stop after season three?” There’s so much more!

Lauren: I know. I personally saw a lot of that content happen on television and I only watched three seasons. And there were, what, seven seasons??

Cher: Yeah, seven, I think, yeah.

Lauren: Oh my god.

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Cher: This other post which I had no idea about and I’m losing my mind over. And I think just kind of I don’t know answers so many of Riverdale’s unanswered questions ... is from a username I am not going to read because it contains a word that I personally can’t say but we can re-blog the post.

Lauren: Gotcha. (laughs) Yep.

Cher: And it’s a text post that says, “When I say Riverdale is genius I truly mean it because what other show’s creator would perpetuate a 20 year long revenge scheme over a cease and desist he received for writing a queer play which included serial killers, of course, about the main character of a decade old comic series he would later acquire

the intellectual property rights to that ultimately culminates in making every single character from said comic series no matter how minor coming out as queer in some capacity including having the two female leads fall in love in the shows final season. None of you understand true art and it shows.”

Lauren: Wait, is that true!?

Cher: YES! I have seen a few posts about this. I think I need to do some more research on the specifics of this but I am pretty positive that this the answer to the Riverdale ... the Riverdale origin story. Yeah!

Lauren: Oh my god. That’s incredible!

Cher: Right!? It’s perfect. I now need to take a class on Riverdale.

Lauren: Honestly. Oh my god. Yeah, I do love that the show was truly so unabashedly queer to the point of having all of the main characters end up in a polycule together at the end of it all. Which for me being my little bisexual shipper eleven year old reading Archie comics and didn’t know either of those things about myself that I loved romance and also was bisexual ... I had so many feelings about Betty and Veronica and Archie and Jug Head. And it’s just great that the show fixed the love triangle problem with being like, “They’re all in love. What’s your problem, you coward!?”

Cher: Yeah. Why just triangle!?

(laughter)

Lauren: Yeah, exactly! Why not make it a square. There is also a chart that I am going to re-blog that is just the Jug Head’s toxic little polycule ending explained. And it is truly ... it looks like the diagram for the interior of a nuclear fusion reactor. (laughs) That’s the only way I can describe it.

Cher: Fantastic. Perfect. This show contains multitudes.

Lauren: It really does.

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Cher: It is SO layered. I am kind of wishing I had finished it now.

Lauren: I know. Do we need to watch Riverdale?

Cher: I think so. I think we as a society actually all need to finish Riverdale. I saw a post from user: Crunchbuttsteak ... a very insightful post, thank you Crunchbuttsteak, that read, “The best way to experience Riverdale is through out of context text posts on one’s Tumblr dash that just raised more and more questions.” But that is not the post that I wanted to mention. The post that I wanted to mention is from user: DrCurdleJunior ... I wonder what they have a PhD in, perhaps Riverdale? Maybe they can teach the class. Who said, “Anybody notice how society fell apart after Riverdale stopped airing?”

Lauren: A-ha!

Cher: And so my question is, does all the universe’s chaos, was all the universe’s chaos going into Riverdale, or the Riverdale of the moment? The teen soap of the moment?

Lauren: Yeah, this is my grand theory of teen shows. I have a grand theory of teen shows which is that exactly what you’re saying which is that at all times there needs to be at least one television show aimed at young adults that it completely bat shit insane. And we’ve had this for the last 30 ish years I would say. 25-30 ish years.

Actually, I think we can go all the way back to Happy Days. Because Happy Days is where the term “jump the shark” originated from. And if you’re not familiar, listener, with the term “jump the shark,” which you probably are because we’ve spent a lot of time on Tumblr if you’re listening to this podcast you’ve probably seen people use the term “jump the shark.” If you had to define “jump the shark” for our audience, Cher, how would you do that?

Cher: Uh ... it’s when a show takes a complete 180 or makes a complete left turn into just ridiculous plots. It goes from being a show where you can kind of see where things are going to just completely bonkers.

Lauren: Yeah, and that came from the Fonz jumping over a shark in Happy Days while on I believe water skis. Was that it?

Cher: Yes.

Lauren: Yeah. And then we had ... I was never a One Tree Hill viewer. Were you?

Cher: I was not. I have seen a episode I think. It was Chad Michael Murray that was ... yeah. I had a poster on my wall from a magazine of Chad Michael Murray. But I did not watch One Tree Hill.

Lauren: Didn’t we all?

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Cher: Yeah, didn’t we all? Of course.

Lauren: Well, there’s that famous ... you’ve seen the scene, the opening sequence from one episode in a later season of the dog eating the heart transplant?

Cher: ...

Lauren: Have you not seen this?

Cher: I have not seen that. What I am realizing is ... it’s reminding me of Moody’s Point from the Amanda Show and the toe ...

Lauren: Oh, I don’t think I know that.

Cher: Oh my ... the Amanda Show, there’s one of the sketches that they have is a kind of knock off of the teen soaps of the time called Moody’s Point, clearly a knock off of Dawson’s Creek but also One Tree Hill. One of the dads loses his toe and then a dog eats it. And I am pretty sure a dog eats his toe. I think ... and then the dad gets lost in a hot air balloon ... without his toe. And that’s a big plot point in Moody’s Point.

Lauren: Sure.

Cher: So anyway ...

Lauren: That makes a lot of sense.

Cher: Yeah.

Lauren: Well, I need you to watch this right now. It’s 30 seconds. But it’s so good. [game show trill]

Cher: In front of the guy who was going to get the heart.

Lauren: In front of the guy who was going to get the heart. Yeah, I’ll post this on our Tumblr. It is delightful.

Cher: Incredible. That is, wow, that is perfect television.

Lauren: It really is. And so yeah, we went One Tree Hill to of course Glee. Glee was our generation’s I think truly bonkers show. And from episode one that show was bonkers.

Cher: Yeah. I like that it started at 100 and only escalated.

Lauren: In the very first episode a teacher frames a student for weed possession to get him into an a capella club. It’s crazy. But and then of course we had Riverdale, which I think perfected the art. But, Cher, do we have a bonkers, crazy, “jump the shark” teen show on right now?

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Cher: I have been thinking about it and I don’t think we do. There are so many shows that are good YA shows but I think what’s happening is we had one or two channels, the CW, [inaudible 00:27:00] that were showing these series and now there are so many streaming services and there’s so much content that it’s I guess harder for that show to hit and get renewed over and over again. Because a lot of these shows get cancelled really quickly before they get to their “jump the shark” territory.

I would have loved to see Deadboy Detectives get there.

Lauren: Yeah! Absolutely. They could have gotten there for sure.

Cher: But there’s that whole other conversation about the show and those implications, though the show was fantastic.

Lauren: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Cher: Anyway, I digress. But yeah, I was thinking Heartstopper is lovely. It’s beautiful. But it definitely is not bonkers. It’s just really ...

Lauren: No. It’s just really good.

Cher: Yeah. There’s Yellowjackets which feels a little more ... I don’t know ... adult? I know a lot of ... it has YA content and I do think a lot of teenagers will watch it. I definitely would have watched it if it was airing when I was a teenager.

Lauren: Totally.

Cher: And it is starting to get pretty bonkers. But I also don’t think ... nothing that quite fits that bill. I think Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, which was another Archie-verse show was going in that direction was cancelled. So, yeah, I do think there’s a void and the chaos is escaping from that void.

Lauren: It’s escaping! I think Yellowjackets is such a great example. The other show that I was like, that I actually did watch almost every season of, I fell off the last two seasons but then I watched the finale and still cried through the finale. So, it was still hitting – Vampire Diaries. I highly recommend watching ... if you’re interested in the nature of television storytelling and sort of scripting and all of that kind of stuff, I highly

recommend as a student of television, watching at least the pilot of the vampire diaries, if not the first season – because when that show came out ... I remember watching the first couple of episodes and being like ... this was at a time when I was deep into my own sort of self guided television education. Right? I was watching Twin Peaks and X-Files ... Battlestar Galactica and all of this stuff to kind of get a grand scope of genre television.

And it’s like we all know how TV shows go usually. And so the first couple of episodes I was like, okay, I see where this season is going storytelling-wise. This character is going

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to probably die or get turned into a vampire. This character is going to reveal that they’re a vampire to this person, this person is going to fall in love with that person, and break up and actually go with that person. You can kind of see ... you should be able to see kind of what’s going to come, right?

And then they do all of that in the next three episodes and it’s like episode five and I’m like, there’s 22 episodes in the season, where the fuck is this going?? But I think crucially Vampire Diaries was always like that. Right? It was always break neck speed. It was always just crazy bonkers stuff happening. Super dramatic, super soapy. But it always stayed within the bounds of its own universe and its own kind of rules that it

established. Verses I think One Tree Hill, Glee, Riverdale – Degrassi is a great one, too – the teen soaps where it’s just like you literally can just do whatever you want at any time. There’s no internal rules.

And I think Yellowjackets fits more into the Vampire Diaries mold where it’s like, the stuff that’s happening on the show is crazy but it all kind of makes sense within the crazy universe that we’re existing in. And I think you’re right. I think the chaos is escaping. I think that we need ... the CW is dead. It’s no longer a network that’s making television shows for people under the age of 65. We need somebody to make

something absurd!

Cher: I could not agree more. I think humanity depends on it. Clearly. I can’t think of a time when there hasn’t been at least multiple shows, at least a couple that kind of fit this bill. Usually one main one and then a couple kind of off shoots. But there’s Outer Banks which I don’t know what’s happening in Outer Banks ... I feel like it’s still airing. And vibe-wise I only watched the first couple of episodes of it but I know how hugely popular it is on Tumblr. It’s one of those shows that I vaguely know what’s going on because of Tumblr. I think they find treasure. A group of friends who find treasure.

Lauren: That sounds right.

Cher: Definitely more ... yeah. That show could have the potential but I don’t think it has the viewership ... a lot of these shows had that ... everyone ... even Riverdale, for a moment there, it felt like everyone was watching Riverdale. Gossip Girl ... iconic. Which again, I think that stays more within the staying within its own universe kind of side of things.

Vampire Diaries ... in the end, I mean it is wild because it went bonkers but still compared to Riverdale, nowhere near ...

Lauren: Nowhere near.

Cher: Yeah. Which is wild, because it’s still ... I’m thinking because Vampire Diaries is a show I finished and it is like ... someone’s a witch, someone... there’s another dimension, Stefan gets caught in a lake safe for three months.

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Lauren: Yeah, that’s right!

Cher: It’s absolutely wild. And that is so norm core in comparison. Not saying Vampire Diaries ... no shade on Vampire Diaries. Huge fan. Great soundtrack.

Lauren: Oh yeah. Mad respect.

Cher: Mad respect, but yeah, it is so ... where is the chaos going? Who is going to take on the burden of the chaos?

Lauren: What would be your perfect ... so yeah, when it comes to teen soaps, the setting has to be high school, right? All of these shows, they’re in high school. And then there’s sort of a different hook, right? It’s like One Tree Hill was just sort of slice of life, kind of like romance and friendships and that kind of soap. Glee is like, okay, it’s sort of these misfits in this very specific niche club. Of course, Riverdale, being kind of like a murder mystery noir, that kind of being the hook initially.

What would YOU like to see in the next chaotic teen show in terms of a hook? Or the thing that sort of sets it apart?

Cher: Ooh, that is such a good question, Lauren. Space. I think it should take place in space. Lauren: Space! Yes! Okay! I love that.

Cher: Like a futuristic ... kind of vibe.

Lauren: Yes. I love that. Well, ‘cause the 100 ... it was not in space for more than the first episode, but the 100 also got kind of crazy but within the rules of its own universe. But I could totally see a version where it gets crazy in a really chaotic way. And I think that’s sort of futuristic show, that’s really fun. I love that idea.

Cher: What about you?

Lauren: I mean, I am sort of curious to see what the like sports team, like Friday Night Lights, what would Friday Night Lights be if it was just not at all focused on realism and naturalism? I think that could be kind of fun to do like a high school basketball team or something and then but it’s not really about basketball. (laughs)

Cher: Friday Night Lights meets like Teen Wolf. Oh, Teen Wolf! I forgot about Teen Wolf! That was a whole other thing.

Lauren: Yeah, Teen Wolf got pretty whacky, too.

Cher: Yeah, that got pretty wild. That also stayed within the confines of its own universe. Lauren: Yes.

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Cher: I do like the sports angle, ‘cause I think there’s a lot that can be done there. It can get ... there’s a lot of room to get bonkers, both in a Supernatural, un-real kind of ... yeah, non realism kind of way. And in a staying within the own universe but I don’t know this football team becomes world champions for some reason at the end of the day kind of way.

Lauren: Yeah. I think ... this is a half baked theory that I’m sort of forming on the fly. So, I’m really curious to hear your thoughts. It’s something I’ve been mulling over a lot over the last couple of years, sort of like YouTube Easter egg, like video reaction-ification of television. Right? Sort of the fact that now when a TV show comes out everybody kind of has the inclination to pick it apart and find the plot holes and find the Easter eggs and all this ... kind of what the MCU sort of ... what it hath wrought on media at large.

Part of me wonders if there’s less of an appetite for the Riverdale approach to

storytelling. Because I don’t know, I feel like I occasionally see a post on Tumblr that is somebody reacting to something whacky in a story. And not even that whacky ,but just something sort of out of character, out of left field, not fully jumping the shark but just

something a little bit off. And sort of the rejection that occurs. The natural knee-jerk rejection that occurs to that because they want everything to make sense. And it’s like ... it doesn’t ... to take a Riverdale example ... Veronica just like owns a speakeasy in the basement of the diner in town. Right? And she is 16. She just runs this speakeasy. And it’s like that makes no sense. Even if Riverdale were otherwise a normal show, that would make no sense. Because how is she getting liquor, how is she owning this business? But that doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter at all. But I wonder if younger people now like need things to make sense.

This is just a vague instinct I have. I don’t know if I’m totally off base here.

Cher: No, I think that you’re definitely going in the right direction. I think that makes a lot of sense. And the more you’re saying it the more it was kind of clicking. Yeah, there is so something to be said for the importance of shows that exist within a universe that kind of ... it’s a TV universe and that universe has rules that can kind of just be made up on the fly. And can go ... the sitcom logic or soap opera logic, it’s your long lost triplet who is in a coma ... I love the space that these shows get to go that wild and it’s so much fun. But I think now as you said with so much discussion happening, it really kind of cuts off the nonsensical nature at the knees because so much of the engagement around the show is the discussion.

There were a few things in the season of Yellowjackets but ... some jump the sharky things that happened. I definitely am reading all the reactions online and a lot of them were, “This absolutely makes no sense!” I started seeing posts being like, “This show is starting to make no sense. I wouldn’t be mad if they cancelled it after season three.” That level of “it makes no sense, so just stop.”

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Whereas a lot of other comments are like, “The writer knows where this is going. Trust them to know where this is going.” And some other ones saying, “Just come along for the ride!” Which I very much like. I think you’re right. There’s less people just along for the ride and much more like, “How is this ...” The comfort of being able to vaguely predict where the show is going to end up. With Yellowjackets, again, I think it’s a good example – we’ve known since season one the writers have always said that it is going to be a five season. And they pitched five seasons arc and planned a five season arc. So, all of the discussions around the series have been saying, “Oh, okay, well, we think in this season we’re probably going to get the rescue.” Because that’s how it would time out with the amount of time they spent in the wilderness and then I think it’s going to end in “this way,” because that is how they’re breadcrumbing it.

Imagine trying to do that with Riverdale?

Lauren: Impossible!

Cher: Imagine episode one ... showing someone season one, episode one of Riverdale and saying, “How do you think this show ends?” And then telling that person, showing that person the final episode. Which also maybe we should do that!

Lauren: Maybe we should!

Cher: Go watch the first and last episode of Riverdale. (laughs)

Lauren: That’s actually a great idea. (laughs)

Cher: I love it. Then we could, yes, next episode we could do a little segment about it. Lauren: Yeah. Okay.

Cher: Listeners, also, if you want to join us in watching the first and last episodes of Riverdale and sending us your thoughts, we would love to read them.

Lauren: Please do. Yes. Please!

Cher: Oh! One other note ... Did you see that there was apparently a Supernatural and Riverdale crossover planned? There was a script.

Lauren: No, I did NOT know that!?

Cher: I just saw a post which I did save and we will re-blog to the Dashboard Diaries, that was essentially like, “I have a vendetta against the person who did not green light the Riverdale/Supernatural crossover script.”

Lauren: Can you imagine!? (laughs)

Cher: Release the script!

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Lauren: Supernatural exists in a really funny little in-between space where it’s like it also goes completely bonkers and has the episode where Sam and Dean end up in an alternate universe where they’re actually Jared and Jensen filming Supernatural. There’s all this meta commentary on it and stuff. But at the same time it is still doing the Vampire Diaries thing of somehow still existing within its own universe at all times. It’s like Schrödinger’s chaos. Both extremely chaotic at all times, but never fully jumping the shark.

Cher: Schrödinger’s chaos is an incredible phrase. I love that so much. I want that on a shirt. Lauren: Yes. (laughter)

There’s one final post that I want to share.

Cher: Yes?

Lauren: Which is from @porcelaindollcheryl – just because I think that this Tumblr user really has pictured a beautiful feature for us as humanity. Which they write, “The world should be ready for midnight Riverdale screenings. It needs to enter the cult mainstream. We as a society should do everything in our power to run Riverdale marathons at your local falling apart movie theater hosted by drag queen Cheryl Blossom with theme skits and commentary from various drag performers, themed blue drinks, maple flavored whatever. It should be an event. Step aside The Room, Rocky Horror, whatever else – you haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen the eight hour Riverdale season three super cut with commentary from drag king Archie, drag king Cheryl, and straight Kevin, drunk on maple rum and then they bring out the gargoyle king puppet.

(laughter)

Cher: Take all my money.

Lauren: YES! That’s what we need. We need Riverdale cult screenings at local movie theaters and drive-ins. That needs to happen so badly.

Cher: Perhaps that could fill this chaos void that has been created, if people are supporting their local Riverdale.

Lauren: Yes!

Cher: Creating lots of local Riverdales.

Lauren: I think this is what we need.

Cher: Yeah. I could not agree more.

And with that, Lauren, what has you in your feels at the moment?

DD 48 – Dashboard Diaries Transcript

Lauren: I mean, so much. I’m going to run through two things very quickly. Which is, just because they’re both incredibly spoilery and so I don’t want to talk about them in detail. But The Last of Us ... it’s currently Monday as we record this. The episode two of The Last of Us season two aired last night. And even though I play the video game and I knew it was coming, I am overwhelmed.

And then last week 911 aired ... and a bonkers thing happened on 911! That I’m sure we will talk about at some point. But I don’t want to talk about it because it is very fresh and extremely spoilery but I also did cry through that episode.

In the trifecta of things that I’ve cried to ... The Pitt finished two weeks ago. We’ve now experienced a season of The Pitt. And [stammers] it’s I think one of the best television shows I’ve ever seen in my life. I mean that so sincerely. And I’ve seen a lot of TV! (laughs) I really think that it was an extraordinary 15 hours of television. I am already hungry for the next season, which is going to be coming out in January. Because these are people who know how to make TV. So, they’ve already started working on the second season because they know what they are doing.

As everybody who listens to the show knows, as you know, I’ve been watching The Pitt since week one. And have been running a campaign to get every single person in my life to watch The Pitt. I’m happy to say that I have completed that campaign and every single person I know is watching The Pitt. With the exception of my doctor friend who won’t for good reason. Not because it is inaccurate but because it’s too accurate. But then also it’s just been really wonderful to see my Tumblr dash slowly get consumed by The Pitt.

I don’t know the last time that I was an early adopter to something that then Tumblr wholeheartedly embraced. I don’t know that it has trended on Tumblr yet. So, there’s still a ways to go. But ...

Cher: It has actually.

Lauren: It has!? [gasps] Oh my god!

Cher: It made it into fandom the last week of March.

Lauren: Incredible. Well, and I know, Cher, you are also a Pitt watcher. So, what has you in your feels right now?

Cher: The Pitt. 100%. I am already planning my re-watch after I finish my re-watch of ER. Lauren: Hell yeah.

Cher: I’m on season five.

Lauren: I’m also on season five!

DD 48 – Dashboard Diaries Transcript

Cher: Oh my gosh!

Lauren: But for my FIRST time.

Cher: Perfect. I didn’t realize that this was a re-watch because I have very poor memory and I think I watched it during COVID in a very short amount of time. So, I keep thinking, “Does this person have a baby soon?” And they’re like, “Okay, I’m pregnant.” And I’m like, okay, yeah, I know this. So, it also feels like I have no idea what is going to happen.

Also, wait, actually ... a couple of times you have mentioned when watching The Pitt that you’re kind of glad that The Pitt is not a follow-up of ER because you don’t know if you could handle what happened to Benton.

Lauren: Yeah.

Cher: Okay. I don’t think I’m there yet – clearly. Are you there yet? Because do you know what happens to Benton? Or are you just there yet? Because you’re on season five ...

Lauren: Yes, no, sorry. I meant ... okay, so you’ve seen all of The Pitt now, right? Cher: Yes.

Lauren: Okay.

Cher: Ohhh! Oh!

Lauren: I meant that I was happy that it wasn’t a follow-up because then canonically Dr. Robbie’s mentor who died would have been Peter Benton.

Cher: Would have been Peter Benton. Okay.

Lauren: Yes.

Cher: I have been watching ...

Lauren: As far as I know, nothing happens to Peter in the actual show. (laughs)

Cher: I have been watching ER, waiting for the other shoe to drop – terrified for Benton’s life – for the ... when ... how far in is Lauren!?!? Is it going to happen soon!?! What happens to Benton!?! Oh my god, he has a baby now!?! What happens to Benton‼‼

Lauren: Oh no! I’m so sorry that I explained that so poorly initially.

Cher: Oh my gosh. Every time he gets to the car I’m like, “Benton, drive safely.” (laughs) Never mind. That makes so much sense. No, because in my mind I was like, well, if it was a follow-up from ER they would not have that happen to him because they would never do that to Benton. So ... ... right?

DD 48 – Dashboard Diaries Transcript

Lauren: Right. I mean, just the fact that, yeah, if it had been an ER follow-up then, yes. I think that the mentor who died in COVID would have been Peter canonically. Right?

Cher: You are so right.

Lauren: I would not have been able to take that. Because Peter is one of my favorite characters from a TV show in a long time. All the characters in ER are great, but Peter is just so complex. That actor is so great. I don’t know why. I’ve never really seen him in anything else since, or before. But I have to imagine that he just did 900 seasons on ER and was like, “I’m good!”

Cher: Happy for him. Yeah.

Lauren: Yeah. But he’s so good. And oh my god, no, I’m sorry that I scared you like that. As far as I know, nothing happens to Peter! And nothing ever will! (laughter)

Cher: He’s actually safe forever in the narrative.

Lauren: He’s safe forever. Yes. Exactly.

Cher: He has plot armor. He’s good.

Lauren: Exactly.

Cher: In my head canon of The Pitt as an ER spinoff they just wouldn’t have done that as a plot line.

Lauren: Yes. Love that.

Cher: It didn’t even ... I couldn’t even fathom the possibility of them doing that. So, yeah, I was just like, oh yeah, no, for sure, what happens to him. I was like – that makes so much sense. Wow, I am going to watch ER with a smile on my face even though I do know ... I joined the sub Reddit and that was a mistake because I’ve been spoiled for so many things that happen way later in the show. It does jump the shark around season ... 11 starts to go really well, but season 13 apparently is where things really get extra bonkers, which I’m kind of excited for.

But yeah, I keep going and searching the name of a character to see what people say about them without realizing this character has multiple seasons, you’re going to find out things. But anyway ... yeah.

Well, what has me in my feels is I’m so glad that Benton is safe and happy and just living a beautiful life in the narrative.

Lauren: I mean, I have to assume. I have ten more seasons of ER to go, but I have to assume he’s fine.

DD 48 – Dashboard Diaries Transcript

Cher: Listeners, I really hope listeners who know right now aren’t scared for us. Lauren: Yes, like, “Oh my god, these poor people.”

Cher: Yeah. If they only knew. No, no, no. No. No. He’s fine.

Lauren: He’s fine.

Cher: He’s fine.

Lauren: He’s fine.

Cher: He’ll be ... HE’S FINE.

Also, Dr. Odyssey kind of has me in my feels. And I think falls in the same bucket of the shows that we’ve been talking about where it just started bonkers. I do fear for its future. I don’t know ... I said seven thoughts in a half sentence. What are your thoughts on the Dr. Odyssey not-finale, penultimate episode (?) ... where are we at the moment? Do you know how far in we are in the season?

Lauren: I am one episode behind. Because it’s Monday now, it came out on Thursday night. I watched 911 Friday and then I had family visiting over the weekend. And so I haven’t had a chance to watch anything else. But I’ll probably put it on this afternoon as I do emails and stuff. It has not been renewed yet, right?

Cher: Yeah. It has not.

Lauren: Yeah, I’m scared. Because the vibes between the three of them continue to be impeccable. And I just need them all to just commit to the bit. I need them to commit to each other in a little throuple. And then if the show doesn’t get renewed, I will be fine.

Cher: Yeah, as long as they can end on that note. A throuple, sailing the world. The love boat. Lauren: The love boat. Then we’ll be thankful for the season of Dr. Odyssey that we had.

Cher: And thankful for the fic that hopefully will be written, that could tell us what could have been.

Lauren: Exactly. This doesn’t really have me in my feels but actually just in terms of bonkers things that happened last week on television ... do you watch Mythic Quest? Have you watched Mythic Quest? Will you watch Mythic Quest?

Cher: I have, yes. I watched the first couple of episodes of season four, but I’m not fully caught up on the most recent season. But I’ve seen most of the show.

Lauren: Okay. I don’t want to spoil anything for you for the end of season four. But I will say ... because if you do watch it actually you should know this going into it because Apple

DD 48 – Dashboard Diaries Transcript

pulled a truly crazy thing. Okay, so the show finished airing its fourth season maybe like a month ago. It was like the end of March, I think. Then two weeks ago it was

announced that the show as not going to be renewed. So, season four is the last. It had already ended, one of those situations where you don’t realize that the season finale you just watched was actually the series finale.

Cher: Yeah.

Lauren: A big thing happened in the last 30 seconds of the season finale. And it was something that very much clearly was like, okay, this is what we’re going to be ... this is the cliffhanger into season five. Didn’t get renewed. Cher, when you finish the season, you will not see that cliffhanger. So, Apple released, last week, an updated version of the season finale. Me, I had a big reaction to what happened at the end of the season in a very positive way. I enjoyed the choices that they made. And so I’m like, “Oh, I wonder if it’s an extended scene. I wonder if it’s going to give us a little hint of where things kind of would have gone from here.” Sort of not giving us a full bridge from the cliffhanger but maybe pulling us back up from it. Right?

No. They just removed the last 45 seconds of the episode and threw in a new one that they clearly shot at the same time just in case they weren’t going to pull the rip cord on it. And you can still see the original ending on YouTube, but it’s so crazy to me that now that anybody who watches the show for the first time, just like burns through the four seasons, will have no idea that this huge thing happened. It’s crazy! I’ve never heard of a show doing this before. (laughs)

Cher: That is wild.

Lauren: It’s nuts.

Cher: I have also never ... that is such an age of streaming solution.

Lauren: YES!

Cher: ... to a show being cancelled. Just being like, “Oh yeah, we’ll just change the ending and no one will ...”

Lauren: Just change the last 45 seconds. And it will be fine.

Cher: Yeah. Wow. And that also is just going to create such an interesting ... yeah, dichotomy between the people who have been watching the show and watch the finale with it. And didn’t ... and when people discuss it ... some people will be very confused. That is wild!

Lauren: Isn’t that crazy!? It’s like creating a Berenstain/Berenstein Bear problem. Right? Cher: Yes!

DD 48 – Dashboard Diaries Transcript

Lauren: Absolutely wild shit. And so, if you do finish season four, I want to hear about it. Because I was there when ... I saw the original ending. And I have so many feelings about it and nobody to talk to about it. And so ... I also just want to know your ... yeah. If you still finish it.

Cher: I want to find the- I’m sorry I cut you off.

Lauren: No, if you finish, I want to talk to you about it.

Cher: I am definitely going to finish it. And then I am going to try and find the alternative ending. It’s got to be somewhere.

Lauren: I has to be somewhere. And if push comes to shove, somebody did gif it on Tumblr. A couple of people gif’d it. So, it exists in gif form on Tumblr. But I mean, just a testament to how important fandom culture is, right?

Cher: Yeah.

Lauren: Literally lost media. Archivists at this point. Because as far as I know, it’s not available as a bonus clip or an alternative ending or anything on Apple as far as I can tell. Which also for a show about video games, they should have just made a little interactive thing around choosing your own ending.

Cher: Exactly!

Lauren: I digress.

Cher: There are so many better ways to approach that kind of sudden cancellation and change. I so agree. The choose your own adventure kind of ending or ...

Lauren: Could have been so fun.

Cher: Yeah. And I mean, yeah, it does make me think about and something that I am often concerned about is the library of Alexandria level of content that is on websites like Tumblr and AO3 and Watt Pad and just kind of all over ... and of course all the streaming as well, but there’s just so much content that if it gets wiped from a server or there’s a ... you own things on a streaming service that can be changed, you don’t have the physical copy anymore. What’s going to happen if someone just decides, oh, this album is gone. Which happens all the time. There will be a song on Spotify or something that you get really into, and then the artist is like, “I’m going to remove that song.” So, the song is just gone!

Lauren: Yeah!

Cher: It really brings up a larger conversation, yeah, a larger ... there’s a word I’m looking for but I can’t find it ... the larger word I’m looking for-

DD 48 – Dashboard Diaries Transcript

Lauren: Larger concern?

Cher: Thank you. I really gotta pull out those SAT vocab flash cards again. Anyway ... It operates within a larger framework of the internet of the world wide web that ... Lauren: I mean, it does. It really does.

Cher: It makes me think, “How much can I download onto my hard drive!?”

Lauren: Right. And all I could think sort of watching the updated finale last week was like, Apple is lucky that they pulled this for a show that didn’t have amazing viewership numbers and also had a sort of viewership that was not a rabid fan base necessarily. Because if they had pulled this shit for something ... I could see so many other fandoms where this could call a full meltdown. Wild shit.

Cher: Yeah. It is so ... I mean, imagine ... Well, Game of Thrones, the ending ... maybe they should have. Game of Thrones is one of those where people said, “Hey, just shoot another ending, we’ll pretend it didn’t happen. We’ll look the other way. Just do it.” That is one show where I’m actually like ... I was going to say, oh imagine if they did that with Game of Thrones. I’m almost interested to see if this sets a precedent with other series that get cancelled. We have heard about changes happening in streaming, like oh, this scene was taken out of the show or switched. It happens quite a bit I would say. But I think it’s also something that people don’t really talk about. And it is a brand new thing.

Lauren: And this cliffhanger was quite divisive. A lot of people really didn’t like it. So, I wonder how much that also played into it as well. Not just sort of giving a non cliffhanger ending but also like, “Oh never mind, that thing that we did that you didn’t like we didn’t do it.” So, to your Game of Thrones point ... if the fandom reaction is really bad, yeah. I think probably ... again, it’s like 30 seconds, right? It was very easy for them to film multiple endings on set that day or whatever. But yeah, I am kind of ... I’m grateful anytime any show is on the bubble and it knows it and it’s able to sort of film something that would give it a nice little bow, just in case.

But maybe then wait or I don’t know ... to show one version and then ... anyway. I didn’t mean to go on a whole thing about it. But it was interesting. And I’m very curious to hear your thoughts once you’ve watched it.

Cher: As you said, they did it so quickly.

Lauren: Yeah, so quickly.

Cher: Afterwards. Yeah. I think there was definitely a better way to approach that. Especially for the fans. If it’s a smaller fan base I think they would appreciate ... there would be less

DD 48 – Dashboard Diaries Transcript

backlash if you gave them more versus just taking it away. I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m trying to say here. (laughs) Anyway ... I was going to ask you if I can guess how it ends.

Lauren: I mean, yeah. Do you want me to confirm or deny? Or just stay stone faced? Cher: You can confirm or deny. I like a spoiler.

Lauren: Okay.

Cher: Does it end with ... and I’m horrible with character’s names, these characters I’ve watched four seasons of ... the two main programmers getting fired and going off to start their own thing?

Lauren: Ian and Poppy?

Cher: Yes.

Lauren: No.

Cher: Huh. Okay. Does it end with them getting together?

Lauren: Well ...

Cher: Yes?

Lauren: I mean, do you want spoilers?

Cher: Ah, noooo, I’ll watch it. Okay.

(laughter)

Lauren: Also, in terms of the version that exists versus the version that maybe is archived ...

Cher: Oh my g- Well, I mean, if it’s a shipping thing that was changed ... I mean, I think that just throws a whole other wrench in the gear, anchor in the water, whatever the ... yeah.

Lauren: This is what I’m saying. If it had happened in another fandom, a bigger fandom, I think that shit would be wild‼ (laughs)

Cher: Like, if it had happened in, say, Supernatural, with a key scene? Lauren: Exactly. God, can you imagine!?

Cher: Oh my gosh.

Lauren: Oh my god.

DD 48 – Dashboard Diaries Transcript

Cher: I think that would have actually broken some websites.

Lauren: Absolutely. There are people on the internet convinced that they filmed that scene for Supernatural and it just didn’t air. And it’s like, no, I don’t think that happened. It’s nice to imagine, but no.

Cher: Yeah. It’s somewhere like on a VHS, hidden in a box, on a lot somewhere. Lauren: Exactly.

Cher: Oh my gosh. Honestly, the Supernatural hidden alternative scenes would be just ... release the tapes!

Lauren: Release the tapes!

Cher: Release the tapes. It’s time. The world needs to know.

And with that ...

I’m Cher McAnelly and you can find me at OverChers.Tumblr.com.

Lauren: And I’m Lauren Shippen, and you can find me at TheLaurenShippen.Tumblr.com. Cher: This has been Dashboard Diaries. And ...

[outtro music]

Lauren: May your anons always be loving.

Cher: Your dash always refreshed.

Lauren: Your gifs always be loading.

Cher: And your ships always canon.

Lauren: May the fics you’re reading always be finished.

Cher: And the answers you seek always in the re-blogs.

Lauren: Thanks for scrolling with us!

This month, we dive into one of the weirdest--and most fun--TV shows to watch through Tumblr gifsets: Riverdale. In the course of our chat, we come upon a terrifying discovery: was Riverdale containing all the chaos of the universe? Will putting it back on the air save the world?

Credits and transcript in our reblog. You can find transcripts for this, and every other episode, here.

Find the posts discussed in this episode in this tag!

#DD 48 #dashboard diaries #riverdale #transcript

12 notes · View notes

survivorkvaloya · 8 years ago

Text

Episode #5: “I Didn't Come Back To Be A Stupid @$$” - Andreas

Not quite sure what to make of this tribe of 5 but I find in this one theirs no where to hide because I can almost guarantee Jackson is going to be a middle man between Danielle and I, and everyone knows that in this tribe I would be the one they send home. But luckily for me, I have Gage and Christine's students on my tribe so If I send them home it weakens them come merge, but following the murder of 3 returnees early on I can NOT have a repeat of Easter Island, so I need to get over my phobia of returnees.

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MKAY COOL I COULDN"T HAVE ASKED FOR A BETTER SCENARIO IT'S LITERALLY 4 V 1 IS THIS HOW SANDRA AND VARNER FELT

~*~Tales From Reflection Island~*~ Hi. I'm pissed. I was so excited to finally win my first tribal immunity and FINALLY not have to worry about being voted out, but that was short lived. Brett, my flop ass mentor, was voted out on the other tribe almost unanimously. What the HECK. So my gay ass is shipped off to reflection island where I have to "reflect on what went wrong" or whatever. But it ain't my fault Brett is a flop! He was the mentor. He was supposed to know not to get voted out. AND THEN we have a tribe swap.... While I'm on reflection. You know what happened to the last person on reflection island during a tribe swap? They were voted out unanimously the same round they returned (rip Connor). So when I come back I'm gonna have some serious work to do. Going onto a tribe of 5 is scary in itself, not being there when the tribe is formed is even worse. the ONLY saving grace in this whole situation is the reflection ritual or whatever the heck its call. Bc I'm always doing #that and I PICKED AN URN WITH AN IDOL PIECE IN IT WOOOO. Now I have 2/3 pieces! This makes it so much easier to get that last piece and make an idol. And that could save my ass in this tricky situation. My plan once I come back is to victimize myself, talk to everyone, be so devastated by the loss of my mentor, act paranoid, and find that last piece. Wish me luck!

Im actually really frustrated right now, we could have easily won immunity but Lauren messed up very basic instructions and just completely fucked us over. Now we have to go to tribal. Lol 4th tribal out of 5 ugh. So anyways this tribal should be easy however we know how this game goes, the easy vote never happens. But none the less this allows me a valid reason to take Christine's student out which would have completely destroyed all her numbers which means shes 1 which isnt a huge threat. Im just worried about idols ,and tribal on my 200th day is ANNOYING. Anyways i need to go calm down phew. Old Andreas is coming out lmao

So jackson and I had a plan to throw the torch pass challenge and use lauren to get out andreas. funniest part: we didn't even have to throw because lauren posted at the wrong time and fucked it all up! I'm trying to make everyone hate her now so she feels like she has to vote with us. jackson was hesitant at first about voting andreas but he's warmed up to it. I hope he stays with the decision. I really think him and I can fight our way through this game.

i got my 2nd idol piece from fucking hell of looking through numbers! van who??

So I think I already did a confessional but oh well. This tribe swap isn't looking good for me. I ended up not getting the idol piece because Chelsea already got it so that was super annoying. BUUUUT. I got reward this time and Ryan ended up getting his 2nd idol piece from it. I'm happy bc that means we have 2/3 in our posession and I think that he's 100% loyal to me. He's said over and over that this is our idol and I truly believe that. We've been friends for so long that I doubt that he would be using an idol that we both found against me in any way. I'm trying to talk to everyone every day but it's hard when it's one world. I hate it so much fuck fkjdsn. Andreas is kinda annoying and very pushy when it comes to this game. He created an alliance with Jackson and I, which I don't think I'll stick too, to try and talk about the vote. From what I can tell at this point, the vote is going to be Andreas anyway. Although Lauren fucked up in the challenge, people are wanting to keep her around for a throwaway vote if we lost next time (which we are going to if we're going to be keeping the weak players anyway). I'm starting to get annoyed with not being in power. Chelsea is running around only talking game yet telling me that other people will inform me with the plan... I- There is no way that I'm gonna be able to get her out and if god forbid we went to tribal again, it would be Lauren. I'm thinking of teaming up with Lauren to vote out Chelsea if it came down to it, I don't know if that would be the right move but right now, I feel like she's running the game and I want to be the one that takes her off of the high horse that she's sitting on.

Hi I'm Jackson and this is my third confessional, just in time for the third generation of tribes. Ever since the swap, I've kind of had a heavy feeling in the pit of my stomach. Not because I was put on a tribe with people I can't work with - in fact, I've had good interactions with everyone on my new tribe in the past, and best of all, I'm reunited with my closest ally Chelsea. Instead, the feelings of dread come from the fact that a lot of power was given to the two of us to start making moves of our own, and it's scary to no longer be floating in the background, hiding behind our mentors. Still, Chelsea and I both feel like we can't shy away from the opportunity we've been given. So, we planned to throw the immunity challenge. I had two objectives in mind for this. The first was to allow Colin to join our tribe after his return from exile, as he's someone I really trust and I couldn't guarantee his safety if he went to another tribe. The second was to vote out Andreas, who I see as one of the smartest and most well connected players in the game. We were going to have Chelsea pretend her internet went out, which I'm honestly not 100% sure would've worked without attracting suspicion. But then Lauren decided to do what I think she does best: go inactive without explanation. Since she queued her post for the wrong time, our torch lighting was out of order from the get go, and we had no chance of winning unless Lauren came online at just the right time (which she didn't). So yeah, we lost, and I guess me and Chelsea got our way. Right off the bat Lauren was scrambling. She came to me and Chelsea for help, asking us to stay united as original Ersfjorden members, which normally I'd roll my eyes at because she's suspicious af to me but was happy to hear in this specific moment. With me, Chelsea, and Lauren, we have three, and can vote out Andreas like we planned (or, at least, like Chelsea pushed really hard to and I agreed only after talking to my mentor because I'm a weenie). Andreas was acting pretty jumpy too. I think he really doesn't want to get voted out on his 200th day of tumblr survivor, and yeah, I get that and I'm gonna feel real bad casting my vote. He really helped me get my footing on Ersfjorden 2, and we could've had a nice working relationship even though he probably would beat me at the end. Anyway, he came to me pushing hard to get Lauren voted out to keep the tribe strong, and I told him I was definitely on board. His worry was not that Danielle would flip on us (more on that later) but that Lauren would somehow make an idol with Chelsea, who I can tell he doesn't totally trust. Joke's on him - Colin has the idol piece that everyone thinks Lauren has, but I'm not gonna tell anyone. I tried to reassure him that Chelsea's on our side too, and I'm hoping his guard is down. Danielle is the wild card. Even though we could vote out Andreas without her (assuming Lauren isn't the fucking mastermind of the millennium), I wanted her to be in on this vote because I think she will stick with me postmerge. Ryan likes her, and I don't want to go against him (yet). So I told Danielle that Lauren was pushing for Andreas, and she seemed tentatively supportive of the idea to vote him out now with Lauren being the next to go if we lose again. She also sent me her reward, which was a clue to an idol piece hidden somewhere on the blog. Long story short, the URL involves a five digit code starting with a 7 and including no repeating digits. It's basically impossible to determine the URL from that (unless i've already gotten it right but someone got their first and the page was deleted?) without more info, and I don't think the hosts would give such a difficult riddle. So yeah I think she didn't send me the entire clue (she withheld some of the digit hints), which kind of annoys me because she's trying to gain my loyalty by supplying intel but she doesn't trust me enough to let me have a chance at finding it myself. Also I shared literally all the details about JD and Liam's shitty alliance on Ersfjorden2 that locked out her and her student, so I feel like I'm giving out more than I'm getting back. But anyway, though she says she's on board for the Andreas vote (making it 4-1 against him), I worry that she's concerned about my relationship with Chelsea. I also worry that she's closer to Andreas than she claimed (and than Ryan thought), and that she might have ratted me out to him. While it doesn't seem like there's a lot he could do if he did know we were targeting him, there's a slim chance he could try to pull Lauren over. In that case, it'd be either me or Chelsea going, and considering how many more limbs I've gone out on than usual this week, I'm not feeling super safe. So yeah, that's about it, so unless something changes in the hours before the vote tomorrow, this is it. I'll be voting for Andreas and hoping I didn't get duped.

Looks like everything is still good to go with the Andreas vote. Sorry bud! The ship has sailed ~

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Whelp, operation save Brett was a flop and I'm sad. But on the bright side I'm in love with this swap! It's nice to be reunited with Ryan and I'm glad QuilLynn is still with me. JD also seems really nice and then I haven't really talked to Nicholas yet. I'm glad we were able to win immunity but I'm kinda worried for Lauren. I feel like Jackson and Chelsea will help her but we'll see.

Going into tribal its been really quiet and that's been scaring me. No one is really talking to me besides Jackson but I could just be acting like a crazy person but who freaking knows. Hopefully this tribe votes out Lauren but maybe tonight, as my 200th night in TS will be my final. I hope not though, I don't wanna be a pre-merge flop.

Omg so the whole point of last vote was to get rid of Brett bc he is a bigger threat then jack and he would be more likely to be able to convince Lauren and Christine to flip. And of course we don't tell jack about the vote bc he really wanted Chelsea, but then of course he fucking ends up on my swapped tribe. I'm really happy I'm with Gage again bc he's definitely someone I trust and he's really nice, I'm also kinda glad to see lily And I'm hoping we can continue to work together. Jack ahhh I didn't tell him about the last vote so I don't think he trusts me anymore but he's nice. So that leaves Liam as the only person I hadn't met yet, I exchanged like 2 words with him and then he tells Ryan that he's talked to me the most? Like how is 2 lines a lot of conversation?? I mean I feel bad for him being super busy with 2 jobs and everything but he doesn't talk to me a lot and when we actually do talk it's always at 3 in the morning. So anyway last night Liam goes up to me and says hey I have an idea for if we ever have to go to tribal council, and he was talking about how me him and jack should work together and I agreed to it of course bc you should never really say no to alliances bc that's sketchy. I also found out that it was Liam and JD who created the majority alliance, like this boy seems kinda power hungry tbh. Anyway Kalfjorden looses immunity which is fine but I just hope it's not Chelsea, Andreas or Danielle. And then apparently Lauren has been super inactive and messed up on the challenge so it would make sense to vote her out and everyone seemed on board or whatever. But then in the all girls alliance, that I like the idea of but don't really feel comfortable with half the people in it, lily talks about how we gotta save Lauren. And at first I'm like wtf Lauren is cute and all but she's not the most active and I don't care about her that much. And Lily says that all the newbies are on board to vote together to vote out FUCKING ANDREAS. Like wtf I love Andreas?? And he's trying at this game unlike Lauren. And also lily goes oh yeah it'll be nice to vote out Andreas so that we can keep up student numbers like??? I'm a mentor??? I'm of course willing to work with students but not when they say they would like to vote out all the mentors lmao. I would tell Andreas but I won't bc I need to keep up my trust with lily especially since we're on a 5 person tribe where there's no room to hide. Anyway I could see if I could possibly talk to Jackson who I don't know well if he'd be willing to vote Lauren, ahh idk what I'm gonna do I hate this.

Im actually very concerned I may be going home tonight and part of me is thinking that perhaps i should throw my vote at Chelsea incase an idol is played. I don't see Christine letting Lauren go without a fight and I would be a great person in her eyes to take out pre-merge. Heading into this vote im super concerned, probably more then i've been in a while which is super scary. I didn't come back to be a stupid ass but its so freaking quiet, and I don't see Lauren going without a fight.

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