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misssophiachase · 4 years

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Happy Together

So, I’ve been writing a kind of 27 Dresses fusion but it deserves to be in multiple parts, hope you like it so far : ) Tagging all the lovelies who championed this Klaroline mix @sekretny13 @klarolineagainnaturally @realynn8 and so sorry for the delay.

Synopsis: She's a wedding planner and heiress, he's a journalist who thinks she's the perfect subject for his story. But both of them are hiding from the truth and each other in the process.

“How refreshing! A man who doesn't believe in marriage.”

“I'm just trying to point out the hypocrisy of the spectacle.”

“Oh! That's so noble of you. Do you also go around telling small children that Santa Claus doesn't exist? 'Cause someone needs to blow that shit wide open.”

“A-ha! So you admit that belief in marriage is kind of like believing in Santa Claus!”

“You are unbelievable.”

“Last time I checked you were the one who let it slip that Santa Claus doesn’t actually exist and I’m just wondering whether you truly are the Grinch in disguise.”

“Oh, puh-lease, I was clearly provoked and distracted by my current duties.”

Caroline was playing the dual role of bridesmaid and wedding planner at the Plaza Hotel for her former college roommate. Roles she knew extremely well and had too many times to count and had embraced over the past few years. Yes, she didn’t need the money, but it was something she truly loved to do.

Maybe because she'd been doing it since she could walk. Caroline would dress up the family cat as the groom and she'd walk down the makeshift aisle in her mother's best, lace tablecloth while humming the bridal theme at the top of her voice.

“And clearly while being provoked you also managed to multitask so well,” he joked, passing her the flowers that had found its way to him courtesy of multiple, jilted bridesmaids during the bouquet toss. “I don’t much care for lilies and, not going to lie, I’m disappointed you didn’t go in for the catch yourself. I really took you for the competitive type, Forbes.”

“You clearly have too many opinions for your own good,” she shot back, snatching it from his grasp but not missing how good his skin felt against hers in the process.

Bastard.

Those rogue dimples were also proving to be a burgeoning problem.

“If I’d known you were going to be such a smart ass, I would have uninvited you or at least insisted you be muzzled or tied to the table.”

“You gave me the chicken option, what did you expect?”

“There’s nothing wrong with the chicken.” He gave her a look which said there clearly was a problem with it. “The food budget wasn’t given the priority it deserved but I can only control so much. Okay, fine, it’s the least you deserved. You are so not the guy who writes those beautiful wedding announcements in the Post. Obviously you have a romantic ghostwriter hiding in the wings somewhere.”

“Why can’t you believe that I wrote those stories?”

“Well, for starters that sloppily tied bowtie at a formal event or the fact you don’t believe in love or marriage,” she snorted. “And this field trip to supposedly document my life experiences is just a public relations exercise, nothing else.”

“Public relations exercise? I do work in the media so those things go hand in hand. Anyway, last time I checked the Forbes heiress signed off on this project and was more than happy to be profiled and share her personal experiences.”

Caroline hated that misconceived title with a passion.

Heiress.

Sure, she was incredibly wealthy but she was also an ambitious, hard worker but nobody seemed to care about that part. It was something she felt devalued her existence and Caroline had done all that she could to distance herself from the gossip.

“Not exactly,” she shot back, knowing that much was true. She was going to kill Katherine for saddling her with Klaus Mikaelson in what was probably a weird and misguided matchmaking attempt knowing her evil tendencies. “But, even so, I thought the guy in question wouldn’t bitch and moan about poultry options.”

“Says the girl who entertains fairytales?”

“You don’t know anything about me,” Caroline replied bitterly. “But clearly I should have assigned you the vegan option in hindsight.”

“Tofu is my best friend, so you’re kind of stuck with me.” She looked at him dubiously, clearly not convinced. “And as much as I love the lilac tonight, I’m looking forward to your next ensemble.”

“How very male of you...”

“How very stereotypical of you,” he growled in response, his crimson lips twitching in annoyance. “That's not what I meant. You have no idea how many of our readers want to know the hottest bridesmaid colours for fall.”

“Spare me.”

“I’ll take that as a ‘no comment.’ Whether you like it or not, your publicist has given me all-access for the next month in the lead up to the Fell/Salvatore wedding in the Hamptons, so I’ll see you real soon, love.”

“I have a name,” she shot back, her anger no doubt leaving a trail in her wake as she stalked away.

“So, Caroline, do you think I’m going to find my true love for catching the bouquet?” Caroline knew he was smirking and she didn't like it one bit.

“I think you’ll struggle finding anyone to love you. Period.”

“So, I assume that’s a no to being your plus one?” Caroline didn’t bother to respond, just returned to her wedding duties without a backward glance.

The Fell/Salvatore Wedding Pre Rehearsal , Bridgehampton, two weeks later

“How could you do this to me?”

“You’re going to have to be more specific,” Katherine shared, swiping a piece of tasting cake and taking a bite. “Last time I checked given the devastatingly beautiful calligraphy on the invite Meredith Fell and Stefan Salvatore are soon to be joined in wedded bliss at this very site and I vote for the red velvet option.”

“How incestous,” she bit back, thinking about her ex-boyfriend being the groom-to-be and her the bridesmaid and wedding planner at his nuptials. Yes, she’d probably agreed to doing it so as to pretend that she didn’t really care he'd moved on and she was still just the same. “Who decided I needed a publicist anyway?"

"You did when Page Six was banging down your door three years ago about what you were wearing to the Met Gala and whether it was true that you drunkenly hooked up with John Mayer."

"It was once," she argued. "Although, just because you call yourself my publicist doesn’t mean that…”

“You agreed to the story, said it would help boost your social media following,” she argued but her subsequent and remorseful expression gave her away. “Fine, I might have overreached but given your already impressive reputation, it can’t hurt.”

“And you also never told me that the reporter in question was so…”

“Gorgeous?”

“Arrogant and presumptuous,” Caroline offered quickly. “He’s incredibly opinionated and nosy.”

“He’s a reporter, that’s what they do, Care.”

“Well, I don’t appreciate it,” she scoffed. “Any chance you can send him on his way? As far as I can tell he’s not the reporter he purports to be anyway.”

“He’s so endearingly persistent though…”

“That I am,” a familiar but annoying voice interrupted. “And our readers are so desperate to know about the bomboniere.”

“Wow, you actually know what that means?”

“I can talk about wedding details all day, love,” he chuckled. “Most people stupidly persevere with the sugarcoated almonds but more modern brides…”

“Just stop,” she interrupted, hand extended in protest. “I don’t need you to tell me how to plan a wedding, Mikaelson.”

“But it would be remiss not to mention that the readers want to know what the bridesmaids will be wearing. The hot tip is Vera Wang in Tiffany coloured blue. Oh, is that red velvet cake?"

“It's to die for," Katherine replied knowingly.

"Get rid of him,” she muttered, through gritted teeth and pleading with Katherine. “I can only take so much contrived sarcasm.”

“So, that’s a no on the Vera Wang then?”

“That’s a hell no to everything,” she hissed. “In fact, if I don’t see you again it will be too soon.”

“She’s jealous I caught the bouquet, right?” Caroline didn’t need to turn around to know that he was smirking. “It’s fine, we can catch up at the bridal table given we’ll be seated together.”

Caroline silently cursed her impending doom, wondering why he was persevering and she was doing the very same thing. Maybe they had more in common than she first thought, but Caroline would never admit that. She had far too many duties to fulfil and no arrogant reporter was going to ruin this next two weeks.

Or at least she thought.Or at least she thought.Part 1 on AO3 HERE

#happy together #27 dresses fusion #klaroline #klaroline fanfiction #misssophiachase #call me maybe

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tetrakys · 4 years

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Sweet Elite - chapter 10

I finally played the episode on both my active accounts, review below the cut.

The episode starts with Scholar reminiscing the Halloween party and finally openly admitting to themselves they have a crush on the person chosen in the previous episode. As you probably remember I’m currently on Tegan’s and Axel’s routes.

Tegan:

Axel:

I... am destined to suffer with this game.

After this realisation we decide that the most important thing is to focus on our studies to be sure we’ll be able to remain at the academy. After studying we go to the cafeteria to have dinner and we find there the person we are in love with, we have a lovely dinner together

Axel:

They talk about school for a bit

(Babe I forgive you only because you are cute, and also because you are teasing, your file says that math is one of your strengths, so cut the crap. )

Then he talks about him leaving school to go on tour.

(LMAO his face)

(!!!!!!! YES PLEASE!!!! but admit you’d do it because YOU want to see ME day and night 😏)

[...]

Ah! Someone who understands that scholarship students are brighter than the average Arligton student. It doesn’t take a genius to figure it out... I mean... someone would have to be veeeeery stupid and close minded to think the opposite... wouldn’t they... 🙄

Funny but... I’m sure we can come up with another form of punishment 😊😏

Tegan:

There’s not much to show about the dinner with Tegan, as I said multiple times until we literally jump on him we’re going to get nowhere with him.

SCHOLAR SHOULD I REMIND YOU THAT YOU’RE IN THE MATH DEPARTMENT TOO??

Then he makes his back crack and Scholar gets spooked and they talk about being weird and true to themselves.

I’m a bit sad that in all the cute moments with Tegan you can rarely tell if they are flirty or just friendly. I know they reflect his personality, but it’s disappointing.

At the end of the dinner we agree that we had fun and we should do this again after the exams.

And this is where the episode ends.

......

Okay, no, I’m jooooooooking

This is where most interactions with our crush end and Karol/Neha’s arc begins (still not sure if the arc is only about Karol or both, I’d say both).

Someone took a picture of scholar hugging Tadashi to console him during his arc and it got viral for some reason, so now Arlington’s sweetheart is again getting attention and the school board has decided to use the free publicity to raise the school’s profile in people’s eyes, so scholar is going to be one of Faxion’s judges. Scholar and Tadashi are called in Lady A’s office to talk about this, but they have to keep the secret until it’s publicly announced.

There is a very funny group chat scene where people try to get information out of Scholar and Tadashi, the picture comes out and we get no reaction from Tegan (he is the one who shares the link, so he might have at least brooded about it for a bit I hope), but we get a small cute scene with Axel

(Also, apparently he’s a dog person. Nice.)

Scholar, my child, could you try to use a bit of this sass with Tegan? You’re gonna die alone if you don’t.

After this, Faxion is announced and Scholar’s role too. You would guess that the smart thing to do is to treat well ALL the people who are going to to judge your work, right? Right? With respect, like any other human being deserves at the very least. But noooo of course not.

I’ve tried really hard to like you Karolina. I really did.

But you are a bitch.

Someone who defines people’s worth by how much money their parents own is even less than stupid.

She even tries to show she has some higher moral ground respect to another model who is just as an asshole as she is. I can’t see much of a difference between the two.

What’s the difference with Karolina? I see none.

Scholar tries to make peace with Karol and be an impartial judge. We meet the other judges, among them there is a Luis Vuitton knock-off who is apparently friend with lady A and knows things about both Scholar and Neha. They are really fishy. In fact they out Neha as a scholarship student in front of the whole school. This is where things go to shit. Up until this point Neha and Karol where a great team and way ahead of everyone else, but now Karol can barely stand Neha’s sight.

I see how Karol can be hurt that Neha has lied to her all this time, but it doesn’t justify the shitty way she treats her at this point. Also, try at least to be smart and civil until the competition is over instead of actively sabotaging everything because now that you know Neha is not rich her ideas are worth less in your eyes. But no, why be smart when you can be completely stupid.

In all this we also find out that Karol is anorexic, which we suspected since episode 2, and that Neha is in love with her, which we knew since episode 1. We talk to Raquel, Claire, Tegan and Neha about Karol’s eating disorder and the episode ends with the winners about to be announced (Karol and Neha of course) but Karol faints in front of the entire school.

A few comments:

- I appreciate when the writing is solid enough to make the reader see where the plot is going, instead of pulling things out of nowhere for pure shock value. Surprises are good only when they are well planned.

- I also liked that Scholar had an active role. I didn’t expect them being a judge and even if it’s a bit of a stretch I liked seeing that we are not a secondary character in our story. However I’m still turned off by the fact that scholar’s department makes no difference in the story. A scholar in the fashion department can’t be considered the “general population” vote. I know that the excuse for them not being in the competition is that they don’t have a ranking yet, but it makes no sense in my opinion. Even blaming it on the school board is a stretch. But this is not the only instance something like this has happened, a scholar in science needing someone to explain them the science lecture. A scholar in math teaming up with Tegan and Ellie to only end up shopping for computer parts online. I wish these things were better thought.

- I’m calling out whoever in the dev/art/writing team has a CLEAR preference for Neha. She is the only one we can raise the meter this episode. In my gameplays the only one we got a romantic interaction in one of the past episodes. The only one we have an extra solo illustration with. And I assume we have a 1-1 illustration with her here because this is her arc (same as what happened with Tadashi), so I’m expecting a 1-1 illustration with Karol next episode. However I feel the bias for Neha, same as what I felt the last episode with Axel, and no one can change my mind.

- This episode made me dislike Karolina a lot. I assume I should be nicer with her because she has an eating disorder, but her being a bitch has nothing to do with her anorexia. The two things may come from the same issue, her needing to be perfect for whatever reason, and I’m sure we will get a teary explanation at some point that will make me forgive her, but still... she deserves take accountability for her own actions. I hope she looses the award.

- Neha doesn’t deserve to loose, she is talented and works hard, she deserves to find another partner. Don’t worry Neha, there are lots of people who can walk in a straight line in the world, there’s no need to attend an elite school for this. However she is also quite spineless, but there’s still hope for her, I understand why she has been lying all this time if she was trying to build a business in such an elitist world. I hope this serves her as a lecture and she learns to stand up for herself and others when such things happen.

All in all I liked the episode. It’s not perfect but as a character arc episode is thousands times better than Tadashi’s was. I just hope we’ll be done with Karol quickly and move on to better things.

#sweet elite #se #se chapter 10

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fieldsofplay · 4 years

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Favorite Albums of 2020

25. Dehd – Flower of Devotion

Rather than look back on the shit year that was 2020, lets keep our eye on the hope of the horizon. Speaking of which, Dehd herald much of what’s to come on this here list. While as previously mentioned a shit year for most everything besides presidential politics, 2020 proved to be a great year for good old fashioned guitar music. Could I be accused of curling up with my version of musical comfort food? Perhaps. But starting off with Dehd, we have a type of band that used to be everywhere and now seems to be almost nowhere. Jangly lo-fi guitars, perky drums, and straightforward unadorned singing. About five years ago you couldn’t throw a rock in Brooklyn without hitting a band like this, but now that that fad is long gone. I’m glad that Chicago’s Dehd are still carrying the torch.

24. Perfume Genius – Set My Heart on Fire Immediately

I’ve always liked Perfume Genius, but for whatever reason Set My Heart on Fire Immediately is the album that took him out of the realm of casual background musical encounter to something I sought out. Chamber pop has never really been my thing (except for those couple summers where Grizzly Bear was totally my jam), but here the torch songs catch fire by the compressed force of Michael Hadreas’ longing. This record also pulls off the impressive feat of each song gradually morphing just a bit from what proceeds it, so that the whole record sounds similar and yet each song carves out its own little generic niche, the whole thing united by the quivering power of that pleading voice.

23. 2nd Grade – Hit to Hit

If you ever found yourself wondering what Guided by Voices would sound like if they wanted to be Big Star instead of punk rock Kinks, we now have the answer, and it’s Phily’s 2nd Grade. In the noble tradition of Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes, Hit to Hit’s 24 tracks breeze by in a mere 41 minutes and 8 seconds. An earworm sunny melody, a quick guitar hook, a second verse (maybe), and poof, each song is gone before you could ever miss it. You would think variation would be difficult working within such tight musical corners, but while each song clearly shares common DNA, there is actually a lot of variance here, from weepy country ditties (“Bye Bye Texas”) to overdriven stompers (“Baby’s First Word”) though they all tend to orbit the same (big) star.

22. Tame Impala – The Slow Rush

I’ll be the first to admit that The Slow Rush isn’t my favorite Tame Impala record, not by a long shot. Having said that, this album still feels like it got short shrift this year (not that anyone can really complain about that in these here times). If we never knew that Lonerism or Innerspeaker or Currents existed, I wonder how much people would be head over heels for this album. “One More Year” “Is It True” and “Posthumous Forgiveness” are all top notch Impala jams. Seems like this album is the soundtrack for the chilled out summer hangs that we never got to have, and thus it’s fitting that it seems condemned for the ash-heap of history rather than the late-night come downs we never got up to.

21. Against All Logic – 2017 – 2019

Ah, speaking of complicated musical relationships, I can never seem to chart a clear course with Nicolas Jaar. The music he puts out under his own name never seems to do much for me, but I dug his collaboration with Dave Harrington as Darkside, and I really love most everything he’s put out as Against All Logic. While admittedly not a great year for house music—normally a liberating genre of communal interconnectivity, now a cruel reminder that we all live in Footloose—a banger remains a banger, and 2017-2019 is full to the brim with them. While I honestly can’t remember the last time I went dancing, I’ll still crank up “Fantasy” and bop around my living room, literally dancing by myself (lets be honest, something I would have done pandemic or no).

20. Fiona Apple – Fetch the Bolt Cutters

Fetch the Bolt Cutters has had a lot of great things said about it this year, so I don’t really have to add that much. What I will say is this is perhaps the most interesting percussion I’ve ever heard on a record. There is percussion all over the place, but almost none of it in the form of full-kit drumming. Fiona always used the left hand on the piano as the rhythmic center of her songs, but here there is drilling, tapping, rapping, patting. The phrase DIY gets tossed around all the time (and almost never applied to big money, big label Fiona) but to me the most impressive thing about this record is how it always sounds like she is sitting at a rickety upright piano in the corner of a living room, while everyone congregating around keeps the beat by tapping on pots and pans, the walls, whatever is at hand. I’ve truly never heard anything like it.

19. Advertisement – American Advertisement

Godbless Seattle’s Advertisement. So long as there is cheap beer, old shitty cars driving with the windows down, and the U-SofA, there’ll be bands like Advertisement. Straight out of the vein of Cheap Trick and the more recent White Reaper, Advertisement play power pop with the emphasis on the power. Sometimes this type of music gets called sleazy, but honestly I don’t get it. I think its probably because you can imagine it playing while Wooderson drives around Austin looking for redheads. While we rightfully cancelled the song of summer this year, “Upstream Boogie” would have gotten my vote, perfect for backyard bbqs and cannonballing into creeks.

18. Nation of Language – Introduction, Presence

I didn’t set it up this way, but if Advertisement has a diametric opposite, its probably Nation of Language. Where Advertisement is all frayed edges and foam, Nation of Language is as buttoned up as those terrible sports jackets people wore in the early ‘90s. While its not as good as my beloved Black Marble, those bands share enough DNA to make me a big fan of this synth pop gem. It’s not as dark as the cold-wave Black Marble, but it does share that bands fondness for stark baselines and crisp arpeggios. If you’ve ever envisioned your life as a scene from a John Hughes movie, Nation of Language could easily be playing in the background.

17. The Soft Pink Truth – Shall we Go on Sinning so that Grace May Increase?

Indulge me in a moment of naval gazing. Every year as I put these things together I reach a point where I’m lack “damn, this album is this low on the list?” And the point at which that thought enters my head is usually indicative of how good a year for music it was. Now 2020 wasn’t a good year for anything, and I probably spent the least time of any year listening to music, new, old, whatever. For the most part I just listened to the Grateful Dead and ambient albums. However, for my idiosyncratic tastes, 2020 was actually a pretty fucking incredible year for new music, as evinced by the fact that this album is all the way down at 17.

Earlier on in 2020 as I was bombarding my poor local music text thread with yet more of my inane musings, I think I declared this a top 3 album of the year. And I wasn’t lying! “Pretty” is often a dirty word in aesthetic appreciation, but this is certainly the “prettiest” album of the year in the best sense of the word. From the Drew Daniel half of Matmos comes Shall we Go on Sinning so that Grace May Increase? A record that is somehow simultaneously deep house and feather light, so much so that it needs its own dumb internet music writing moniker—shallow house? wide house? vacation house? (actually kinda like that last one). With vocals from Jana Hunter, Angel Deradoorian, and Colin Self (with whom I wasn’t previously familiar) this thing will simultaneously make you want to tap your foot and drift off into the clouds. This is album is like the prayer Madonna sang about all those years ago.

16. Kurt Vile – Speed, Sound, Lonely KV

It’s not at all surprising that if Kurt Vile decided he wanted to go country western he’d be really fucking good at it. First of all, he’s an exceptional acoustic guitar picker. Secondly, his voice, while always befitting his hazed out urban rockers, has just enough twang to it that in retrospect it always sounded a little bit country. This record also gives me room to offer up an homage to the late great John Prine, for whom the EP is essentially a tribute. Vile covers two Prine songs, dueting with the man himself on “How Lucky.” Saying goodbye is never easy, but on Speed, Sound, Lonely (both the album, and the song more or less by that name) Vile manages a fitting tribute to a lost legend.

15. Lomelda – Hannah

The reviews of Hannah really did Lomelda a disservice. Sure, they were glowing, but they made it sound like this was some weepy milquetoast singer songwriter affair, when it’s actually a knotty album full off elliptical piano and fuzzed out electric guitar. Its 14 tracks hurtle by, largely due to the fact that almost all of them are under 3 and a ½ minutes. Things really get going with the second track, “Hannah Sun” with is squiggly synth effects and driving acoustic strums carrying on Hannah Read’s musings. It’s an album of relentless forward musical movement even if the vibe feels like it’s always looking back over its shoulder. Basically this album is what emo would sound like if it wasn’t made by the worst people in the universe.

14. Shabaka and the Ancestors – We are Sent here by History

Jazz! Another great year for jazz (Asher Gamedze’s Dialectic Soul and Keefe Jackson, Jim Baker, & Julian Kirshner’s So Glossy and So Thin are with a strong group that just missed the cut). In the midst of an excellent jazz renaissance (you gotta use super annoying words like “renaissance” when talking about jazz) Shebaka Hutchins remains my absolute fave of the bunch, and We are Sent here by History is probably my favorite thing he has put out so far.

13. Waxahatchee – Saint Cloud

While I really liked Waxahatchee’s low-fi emoish debut—American Weekend—I’ll readily admit I wasn’t much about the popier albums that followed, frequently jesting, honestly, that Allison was my preferred musical Crutchfield sister. All that changed for me with Saint Cloud. I’ve certainly drifted far off into country and Americana as I’ve aged, and it appears the same came be said for Katie Crutchfield. These songs have a giddyup to them but they never break out into a gallop, allowing the strength of the melodies to carry them along across the plains, with just the right hint of twilight. Saint Cloud is the sound of Patsy Cline if she played to roadside inns rather than the Grand Ol’ Opry.

12. Neil Young – Homegrown

This was the hardest album to place on the list this year. For starters, should it even count? Clearly I say yes. While some of these songs have been available for over 30 years, as an album, Homegrown was a “new” release here in 2020, even though it was originally slated to come out in ’75 between On the Beach (my personal fave Neil record) and Zuma. As a pure piece of music, is it better than most, if not all, of the records that follow? Of course yes. But what does a new Neil Young record mean in 2020? As a thought experiment its fascinating. Do we value this album within the musical context of 2020 or 1975? Fortunately, it’s an even more enjoyable listen than it is a thought experiment. From the first strums of “Separate Ways” you’re like “oh shit, this is the vintage stuff.” Gentle amber acoustic numbers (“Try”) share space with electric stompers (“Vacancy”). The best thing you can say about Homegrown is that if Neil had originally decided to release this instead of Tonight’s The Night, it would have fit right in amongst his unimpeachable run from Everybody Knows This is Nowhere up through Zuma. A classic is still a classic, no matter what year it finally sees the light of day.

11. Destroyer – Have we Met

Ah Dan Bejar, boy was I wrong about you. I kinda got into Destroyer’s Rubies, I loved his contributions to Swan Lake and The New Pornographers, but yet when Chinatown started really making waves, I just couldn’t do it. It was soft rock! I hate soft rock! I hate everything about it! This preconceived notion wasn’t helped by the fact that I saw him open for the War on Drugs in Pontiac once and he was so drunk he could barely stand up and had to read his own lyrics from a sheet. And yet, for some reason I never really gave up on it. I can’t tell you why exactly, but two summers ago Chinatown just slowly became my go-to for early morning / late afternoon strolls. I found comfort in giving myself over to its pillowy soft embrace / cheating on my own aesthetic judgments. Now that I’m card-carrying Bejarhead, I greeted Have we Met with open arms, and I was not disappointed. The synths glimmer, the guitars add just enough punch, and his lyrics remain sharp as ever. Its fitting that this was the last concert I saw before the iron curtain fell. The one thing I had always turned my back on ended up being the last memory of dionysian group enthrallment I had to carry with me out into the desert of social isolation. Come back soon Destroyer, come back soon, everyone.

10. Deeper – Auto-Pain

Ladies and gentlemen, get ready, because post punk is back! I always say my favorite genre is ‘sad songs you can dance to’ but post punk is a close second. When I was in college post punk underwent a bit of a renaissance in the form of Interpol (back when they were still good), Bloc Party (ditto), Franz Ferdinand, and a whole slew of British one hit wonders (Maximo Park, Futureheads, Art Brut, the Bravery). Fortunately, as is always the case, what’s old is new again, and stark melodic bass lines, angular guitars, and moody introspective speak-singing are back in full force. Of the three post punk bands gracing this here top ten (Deeper, Fontaines DC, and Crack Cloud) each has its own little slice of the generic pie. Fontaines have the deep gloom of Interpol/Joy Division, Crack Cloud ripple with the staccato energy of Gang of Four, and Deeper have the wiry dancieness of, well, Wire. So long as leather jackets and black and white photography remain cool, there’ll always be bands like this, and thank god for that. In a true sign o’ the times, I learned about this band from some random girl’s Tik Tok in my for-you feed. She repped five bands, two of which are in my top three, so I was like, sure I’ll give this band Deeper a go. God bless the internet. Finally, Deeper get bonus points for naming a song “This Heat,” who I’ve been spending a lot of time revisiting this year, and whose spikey guitars are all over this record.

9. The Flaming Lips – American Head

There are few things as satisfying in art as being genuinely surprised by a beloved artist you had given up as culturally dead. Since putting out their last masterpiece (2009’s Embryonic) the Lips have put out a string of good, if inconsequential, albums that befitting the ethos of the band could best be described as half baked (The Terror, Oczy Moldy, and a series of collaborative experiments). Basically, they had reached that dreaded nadir where I was no longer interested in listening to their new output (cough The National, cough cough Arcade Fire). So what made me give American Head a chance? That reader, is the point of art criticism! I can’t remember how the blurb on pitchfork read exactly, but I knew it referenced Tom Petty and a return to a preoccupation with more Earthly concerns—namely ‘70s heartland rock. Well, this sounded intriguing, and boy was I not disappointed. Sure, the Flaming Lips have already reached their sell-by date twice over (first in 1992, immediately followed by their MTV reinvention on 1993’s Transmissions from the Satellite Heart; and then again in the late ‘90s with the departure of guitarist Ronald Jones, followed by their creative pinnacle, ‘99’s symphonic masterpiece The Soft Bulletin), so it shouldn’t be all that surprising that this band could rise from the dead a third time. Only, for the most part, they didn’t. I guess I’m not surprised that American Head failed to reach a broader audience. Most people probably aren’t even aware that they are still a going concern, and after the failures of the last decade it makes sense that most weren’t interested in more tunes from the Oklahoma freaknicks. But for those willing to give the band another chance, American Head easily delivers their best album since Embryonic, if not all the way back to Yoshimi. Mixing ‘70s Americana with the star gazing of Soft Bulletin’s “Sleeping on the Roof,” the Lips deliver their best album in decades by foregoing the parlor tricks and returning to what they do best, taking trips to distant galaxies while keeping their feet firmly planted in the soil and songcraft of Oklahoma.

8. Cut Worms – Nobody Lives Here Anymore

This one is pretty easy. Do you like George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass? If yes, listen to Nobody Lives Here Anymore and revel in this double album’s upbeat acoustic rock mediations. If no, well there’s plenty of other good stuff out there. Not quite as metaphysical or orchestral as All Things Must Pass, Nobody Lives Here Anymore still manages to hit that rockabiliy-pop sweet spot that Harrison used to mine. I’m not quite sure what the definition of “troubadour” is, but it feels safe to call Cut Worms a troubadour, which is certainly better than his terrible stage name.

7. Cigarettes for Breakfast – Aphantasia

Similar to Cut Worms, Cigarettes for Breakfast also involves a simple influence equation. Do you pray at the altar of Loveless? If so, Aphantasia is just the record for you. Sure, it’s a bit of My Bloody Valentine paint by numbers (“Breathe” even features the same squally guitar noise [it’s really hard to try and describe My Bloody Valentine effects ha] as “Soft as Snow (But Warm Inside)”) but when you’re as into shoegaze as I am, that’s never really a bad thing. Plus, I’m being a bit unfair. Everyone with textured tremolo heavy wall-of-sound guitars and cooed vocals is going to inevitably be compared to MBV, and Cigarettes for Breakfast do enough to chart their own course. Perhaps most interesting is the musical journey this record charts. Its loudest moment is its opening, where pummeling guitars more reminiscent of Sonic Youth with a touch of Dinosaur Jr. rip across hardcore style drumming. From there each song becomes a little more ambient, until closer “If Someone Could Help Me, Please” more or less floats away on its shimmering sheets of beautiful noise clouds. In this sense, it bears a resemblance in structure, if not in sound, to Deerhunter’s Cryptograms, another album I spent a lot of time revisiting this year. A shutout here is owed to the fine folks at Radio K, who had me diving for my shazam as this thing ripped across their airwaves. So long as there is college radio, there’ll be a new crop of kids discovering via Kevin Shields that the electric guitar contains endless sonic possibilities.

6. Fontaines D.C. – A Hero’s Death

The second entry in our top-ten post punk trio is A Hero’s Death by Fontaines D.C. I’ll admit, on first blush it’s kind of a dumb band name (I just assumed they were some hardcore band from Washington DC chasing those Dischord Records glory days), but when you learn that the “DC” stands for Dublin City, it all clicks, as this band is sorta inescapably Irish in the way that James Joyce is. Now this fact at first was also off-putting—if I went the rest of my life without ever hearing the Dropkick Murphy’s again I’d be quite content—but eventually it becomes integral to their sound, and not just because of the brogue in Garin Chatten’s vocals. “Love is the Main Thing” is an incredible song in many ways, most notably because of the hypnotic quality of the drumming with its counterpoint between riding cymbal and staccato toms, but perhaps in the main (*wink*) for the way it manages to connote the weariness of a grey urban environment without ever being explicitly about it. Just as Turn on the Bright Lights managed to perfectly capture New York in 2001, A Hero’s Death to me is the aural equivalent of a dense urban center like Dublin, especially after nightfall.

5. Imaginary Softwoods – Annual Flowers in Color

It should come as no surprise that I listened to A LOT of ambient this year, and to me there was no better electronic record to chill the fuck out to during this insane year than Annual Flowers in Color. I absolutely loved Emeralds’ Does it Look Like I’m Here? and was devastated they never followed that gem (*wink*) up. In the immediate aftermath of the demise of Emeralds Mark McGuire’s solo albums got a lot of attention, but apparently the person I really loved in Emeralds was Imaginary Softwoods’ John Elliot. Annual Flowers in Color is like if Dead City’s, Red Seas, Lost Ghosts were waiting in the departure’s lounge of Eno’s airport. At the heart of the album lies the 10 plus minutes of “Another First/Sea Machine.” I could listen to this song forever, and on some particularly WTF 2020 lakewalks I more or less have. Chunky synths, arpeggios that drift off to infinity, ‘80s soundtrack nostalgia. I could live in these Softwoods for the rest of my sonic days.

4. Pottery – Welcome to Bobby’s Motel

In another moment of nostalgia for my college years, Pottery are a welcome return to weird ass experimental Canadian bands. They don’t sound anything like the Unicorns, but in spirit Pottery kind of remind me of them. I’ve spilled a lot of digital ink here and elsewhere bemoaning the fact that Pitchfork (or perhaps, me) isn’t cool anymore, and to me no band embodies this more than Pottery. They take a bunch of fun disparate elements—Talking Heads dance art rock, periodic weird pitch shifted vocal effects, hazy deep purple style guitars, and Queen style machismo disco—throw them into a witch’s cauldron, and come up with something off the wall that sounds like nothing else but is also instantly familiar. This is the type of thing Pitchfork would have been all over in 2007, but instead now they’re too busy chasing conde nast clout clicks. Oh well, nothing gold can last. But enough negativity, this here is a celebration of the joy of new music, and no new band embodies that unbridled joy like Pottery. Along with Fontaines DC, this is the band I wish I most could have bopped around to with a bunch of sweaty strangers in the 7th St. Entry or Turf Club. You can just imagine the call and response vocals and funky grooves getting the people moving. Oh well, hopefully we’ll soon all be rocking the vaccine, they can breeze through town, and I’ll be the first person on the dance floor embarrassingly pumping my fist a half beat behind the rhythm.

3. Pure X – Pure X

To paraphrase Same Elliott in the Big Lebowski, sometimes there’s a band, and well, sometimes there’s a band. For me this year, that band was Pure X. I absolutely loved their debut Pleasure way back in 2011, when lo-fi reverb heavy slow guitar music (ie, Galaxie 500) was all the rage. Their follow up Crawling up the Stairs was so bad I didn’t even bother listening to Angel, though perhaps that also owed a decent amount to just how terrible the art on that record is. (I’ve since remedied this mistake; turns out that record rules). Being that as it may, I can’t particularly tell you what drew me in to this year’s self-titled album, a full nine years after Pleasure first graced the stage. In one sense it’s probably because Pleasure is one those albums that just never went out of my rotation. Whenever the fahrenheit tips past 90 and the walk to the bodega is a few blocks longer than you’d like, that record always hits the spot. Maybe I just knew this was the record I needed this year. Either way, from the first bars of “Middle America” I was hooked. The guitars crash over you, but never in a threatening way. Rather, they envelop you like a weighted blanket, comforting you in their sonic embrace. Nowhere is this more true than on “Fantasy,” easily my favorite song of 2020 (especially since this was a year entirely devoid of dance floor bangers). If this album came out in 1999 rather than 2020 I would have hit the repeat button on my discman and listened to this song forever.

2. Crack Cloud – Pain Olympics

Pain Olympics is the answer to the question that no one asked: what if Arcade Fire’s (back when they were good) communal uplift was paired with Gang of Four’s stark anthem’s of industrialism’s collapse? While on first blush this might sound like your standard album of punkish fist pumping angst, from when the female vocals (sorry there are too many people in this band for me to be able to figure out whose who) come in on opener “Post Truth (Birth of a Nation)” Pain Olympics reveals itself to be a very strange animal (likely a unicorn of some sort), especially as little orchestral swirls creep into the mix, giving it an almost Judy Garland (in hell) quality. This subtle genre pastiche is given its best effect on stunner “The Next Fix.” That song starts out as an elastic spoken-word call and response addiction rumination, at the minute mark it starts to segue into a vocoded chill raver, then some horns crop up out of nowhere, then a spoken word passage, then at the two minute mark a chorus of voices come in, doing their best Broken Social Scene in the truest sense of the phrase. This is perhaps one of the strangest records I’ve ever heard, but what is strangest of all is just how beautiful it is. Crack Cloud are not for everyone, but if you really give it a chance, the returns are limitless.

1. SAULT – Untitled (Rise) / Untitled (Black Is)

You cannot tell the story of 2020 without SAULT, which is why this pair of records is here at the top, even if under the influence of sodium pentothal (lets be honest, veritaserum) I might lean more towards Pain Olympics. In June, the “anonymous” London project put out Untitled (Black Is), and then quickly followed that gem up with September’s Untitled (Rise). Perhaps more amazing still is that these two albums, released so close together, have unique personalities. Black Is is more pop/R&B whereas Rise has a dancy, electr(on)ic feel. I lean more towards the latter, but honestly, both albums are so overstuffed with amazing moments that it’s borderline unbelievable that one outfit could put out so much amazing music in such a short span. While these records would chart high even if sung in Hopelandic, there’s no escaping the social import of the lyrics. One need look no further than Black Is’s “Don’t Shoot Guns Down” for the 2020 dance party at the end of the world. As if that weren’t more than enough, it finds its analogue on Rise’s “Street Fighter,” and that’s SAULT in a nutshell: two albums in constant communication with one another, and more importantly, with the state of the world. Guns down. Don’t Shoot. Let’s dance.

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blarrghe · 4 years

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10 and 16, your choice 👀

Currently neglecting everything else I have going on for this Dorianders modern au. This is going to go somewhere...interesting.

16. I need a date for this wedding from the cliche prompts

Dorian asks a favour, he even has the foresight to ask using kittens. How can Anders say no?

Continues from the last one, for more of this tale you can read them in order on AO3

He had a wrap made with roasted vegetables, house made hummus, and smoked tofu, and it was surprisingly good. A little expensive still, but the menu said that a portion of all the proceeds went towards supporting the animal shelter, so really no part of him could find reason to complain. A skinny young tabby came and sat by them while they ate, and Anders stroked its stripes slowly, almost mesmerized, while Dorian told him the latest dramatic tale from some high-brow party he’d been to the night before. Anders was only half listening; they’d been friends for just over a month, though with all the little chunks of time they found to spend together, it seemed longer, and in that time Anders had learned that Dorian went to an unbelievable number of fancy parties. It seemed like there was a new one each night, fundraisers and awards ceremonies and shows of support for one cause or another. Pompous, stuffy affairs that he looked to Anders to laugh over, later. Anders didn’t mind, exactly, he could make fun of upper class excess any day of the week, and he actually appreciated being privy to some of the more political gossip, but there was a reason why Dorian seemed to always cap the nights off with an outing to some noisier, bouncier club. Most of what he did for work was painfully boring. And the stories that came after, about what happened at said bouncy clubs, were worse still.

He was going through it, Anders reminded himself, he didn’t really talk about it, but it was there. Grief and guilt and an unmistakable feeling of relief, which only led him to more guilt. There was a good deal of alcohol in the mix, too. He looked good, tall and handsome, workouts the next day to detox from the wild nights, but he was still a mess, underneath it all. Easy to forget, smooth as he talked, but Anders had an uncanny ability to see through veils, thanks to that ghost still shadowing his soul.

As his friend, Anders was more or less supportive; reminders about the uselessness of detoxes, a sounding board for work-related gripes, encouraging smiles when it looked like Dorian might say something a little closer to the truth. But as a man who had seen him, been struck down by the lightning bolt of his smile every time it graced his lips, he was mostly just jealous. But Dorian was busy treating his grief with sex and mindnumbing dance beats, and Anders would rather be a friend than a drunken encounter at a noisy club, so that was that. And he was very deliberately not waiting. He’d done all that before, the yearning and pining and endless aching for a one-sided love, and it was fucking terrible. Unhealthy. Friendship was good, friendship was healthy. Being used as some kind of distraction would not be, no matter how tempting.

Anders, meanwhile, had found his own distraction in the form of a coworker who was also decidedly going through something. Someone as different as could be from Dorian, and who had no undue attachment to Anders whatsoever. In fact, she had three or four men in rotation and was very obviously beginning to fall in a complicated way for one of the other ones. So distractions abounded, but at least between himself and Dorian there could just be a solid foundation, untroubled by jealousy and sex. Except for when he smiled.

“Anders?” Dorian’s voice cut through his thoughts, and the skinny tabby looked up, irritated that Anders had abruptly stopped petting it. “Alright, I get it, Tevinter politics, boring.” Dorian went on, “shall I leave you here with your new friend?” The cat hopped down from its perch on the seat next to Anders, and slunk away, indifferent.

“I — ah,” Anders shook his head, turning his focus back to Dorian, who always seemed to be smirking at him. “Sorry, I’m just tired.”

Dorian raised an eyebrow, then glancing away over Anders’ shoulder, he indicated something with a slight nod. “Would a kitten help?”

Anders turned to look, and whatever else was going on in his heart simply melted away, as two bright white kittens emerged stumbling from one of the carpeted cat tunnels set out under the windows of the cafe, wobbling and hopping over one another with fluffy little tails and bright blue eyes.

“Sweet maker,” he breathed, and he could hear Dorian laughing under his breath as he watched, “I’m going to go pet those kittens now.” Anders announced, leaving his head-shaking and amused friend behind.

He played with the kittens until they finished being curious about him and wandered off to sniff at someone else, and then he took a look around the place, appreciating the genius of it. Lots of fun shelves and carpeted tunnels and posts with fluffy balls on strings tied to their ends, cats lounging and wandering about; the skinny tabby, the two white kittens, an old black and brown giant with long hair and a grumpy expression, watching from a shelf on high, and several others, sleeping in happy piles on top of one another in various hiding spots or jumping from platform to platform overhead. There was a bulletin board on the wall with each cat’s picture posted up, along with an informative biography detailing their name, breed and personality. Paperwork for adoption could be requested from the servers, and the place had purportedly housed over a hundred lonely cats in the short time since its opening. There were some pictures of the lucky adoptees up on the board as well, and a flyer requesting volunteer help at the shelter. Anders ripped off one of the phone numbers hanging from it.

By the time Anders returned to their table, feeling altogether lighter and refreshed, Dorian had paid their bill. Anders watched as Dorian stood, pulling the strap of his gym bag back up over his shoulder and checking his watch with an apologetic grimace.

“You didn’t have to pay,”Anders frowned, reaching in his pocket for the bills to cover his share. Dorian shrugged.

“I may have ulterior motives, actually.” He replied, and Anders’ frown deepened. “I need to ask you a favour.”

He crossed his arms, feeling rather buttered up, what with the kittens and the lunch and the way Dorian was still slyly smiling at him.

“There’s an event next week, and I need someone to accompany me…”

“I’m no good at formal events,” Anders warned, “I’ll get you voted out of the Magisterium just by holding my fork wrong or something.”

“It’s not that kind of event, it’s a — it’s a family affair. A wedding.” Dorian admitted the context stiffly, a tenseness in his jaw already. It had been weeks since the funeral, which he’d never talked about at all, but the way he said wedding sounded about as much like one.

Anders’ heart stilled. “Can’t you find a date?” He quipped, or tried to quip, throat going dry again.

Dorian sighed. “I could take the one my mother’s found, or I could take a friend.” he replied, eyes pleading. Fuck that word and his desperate eyes. “Besides, the whole thing would be much more tolerable with someone to make snide remarks with on the sidelines. Free food, free wine, saving me from an evening of drudgery celebrating the union of some distant fourth-cousin and her fifth husband. Please?”

“I don’t much want to antagonize your mother.” Anders said, still frowning. He remembered her in the hospital, shouting bloody murder at his supervisors and snapping at the nurses. And it didn’t escape him either that for Dorian to bring another man to a family affair would set tongues wagging; that he probably wanted it to. Anders had a habit of flaunting Tevinter sensibilities where it came to things like gender presentation and respectable life choices. Some of it was accidental — there were so many rules to Tevinter codes of behaviour, it was too easy to break them — but some of it was deliberate. He missed Kirkwall, where none of it had really mattered, and some part of him didn’t want to let Tevinter rigidity take away his freedom. Halward Pavus, rest his temperamental soul, had seemed to pinpoint him for his otherness even while laying on his deathbed, and had let him know it with regular scorn. Scorn he’d no doubt directed at Dorian his whole life, given all the maladaptive coping mechanisms he was displaying in the wake of his death. And Anders was still trying not to become a maladaptive coping mechanism. Spirits on earth, he needed to call Merrill.

“Not even a little?” Dorian prodded, breaking through his brooding once again, “it can be great fun you know; it’s practically a hobby of mine.”

Anders sighed. “I wouldn’t know what to wear.” he said, a lame excuse that Dorian would happily rectify in a second, given how much he delighted in his own stylings. He could see it already, a smirk coming back to his lips out of that tense jaw, ready to make some suggestions as soon as Anders gave him permission.

“We can work on that. Come on, if you say no I’ll be forced to get exceedingly drunk, reject a probably perfectly tolerable woman, and generally make a scene.”

“As though inviting me isn’t going to do that,” Anders protested. No, Dorian didn’t talk about his family much, but Anders didn’t need him to in order to figure him out.

“You’re a friend, and a doctor. It’s plenty respectable.” Dorian leaned back, “and an excuse to leave early, if you get called away for some sort of...medical emergency.” he winked.

Anders sighed again. “Fine,” he said, shaking his head and wondering who exactly was deciding his responses at this point; clearly not the part of him that was sensible. “But I’m not buying new robes.”

“Of course not, you have terrible taste.” Dorian grinned, “I’ll find you something.”

Anders took the bus home, and fell asleep on his couch, an unsent text message still in the draft stages on his phone. Not to Merrill, she would be useless in this particular dilemma, but to a different old friend. Not that he trusted Isabella to know what to do, either, but at least her advice would be fun.

#anders #dorian #dorianders #friends to lovers #eventually #my writing #my fic #what if we were #anders being gnc in a way that pisses nobles off ;)#😎

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wishonastarx3 · 4 years

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I saw this coming... I’m so fucking tired of this.

I don’t care who reads this, if you actually know me in real life then you probably know that this is how I feel from my instagram story. I apologize in advance of the language in this post. These are my emotions and thoughts. (And yes I am aware that within the AAPI community there are it's issues, but that's not the point of this post)

I’m SO SICK AND TIRED of this shit. What happened on Tuesday WAS NOT OKAY. EIGHT PEOPLE ARE DEAD and SIX of them were ASIAN WOMEN. Click the hyperlink if you live under a rock or if you just don’t watch the news. I don’t know how you people live.

The Asian and Asian American community in this country has been saying for the PAST YEAR that we are NOT OKAY and that we NEED HELP. Donald FUCKING Trump REPEATEDLY kept saying pre pandemic, “CHINA! CHINA! THEY’RE STEALING OUR JOBS!!! CHINA IS EVIL!!!” and of course his base bought into that. BUT when the freaking pandemic started it was “THE KUNG FLU” or the “CHINA VIRUS”. So now, let’s make the target on our backs EVEN BIGGER NOW!!! (I still don’t understand HOW there were Asians who voted for him... but that’s beside this point of this)

This past year has had over 3800 reports of Asian American HATE CRIMES against us. These fucking cowards are going after our ELDERLY COMMUNITY like the BABY BITCHES that they are. WHY?! JUST FUCKING WHY?! What does this do for you? It makes me SO ANGRY to see these videos of the elderly community being ATTACKED and KILLED. I watched on video of a toisan lao (old Chinese Woman) in SF who was being attacked and she fought back against her attacker (AS SHE FUCKING SHOULD. HE ENDED UP IN A STRETCHER). But that really... that one really struck a cord with me as that’s the dialect my family speaks and it made me think “fuck. That could have been my grandmother. That could have been my grandfather.” Going after the community that doesn’t speak english, LITERALLY POWERLESS and that is old like a bunch of COWARDS. I, as a 5′9 Asian American woman from New York City has dealt with my far share of harassment... but the fucking elderly? Really?

This pandemic has just gave them an EXCUSE to attack us. As if we weren’t already being harassed and marginalized before!!! But of course, one will say “but how can that be? Asians are the model! You guys are the best minority group out there. Everyone loves you!” HAR HAR MOTHER FUCKER

So lets set up some points

The Model Minority Myth - the “idea” that Asians are the smarter minorities who end up becoming the doctors and lawyers who are good at math, science and end up going to Harvard. I’m sorry... what? This is pathetic. AND A FUCKING MYTH I’ve dealt with these AWFUL cliches and stereotypes. Are they good stereotypes? Sure...? BUT do you understand:

What that does to the individual? What about the Asians who do not want tot be doctors? What about the Asians who then have to deal with the mental illness that goddamn society created for us? (I’m not even going to go into the lack of Asians in entertainment business. That’s a whole separate headache.)

WHY ARE WE IGNORING THAT IT’S ONLY A SMALL GROUP OF ASIANS THAT END UP DOING THAT?! Are we going to IGNORE the Asians who don’t go to Ivy Leagues? Or the ones that are living below the poverty line?

This literally created the Racial Triangulation between the minorities! White people have put Asians on a pedestal in comparison to the other minorities and YES other minorities HATE us for that reason.By saying that we are the “Model Minority” it LITERALLY creates this thought that we better than the “other minorities” but yet we still ain’t white. So we aren’t a part of the majority therefore putting us in no mans land.

THE NEGATIVE stereotypes - OH and TRUST ME there are A LOT. These are just the ones at the top of my head.

The FETISHIZATION of Asian Women - this shit ain’t new. This is literally what the term “yellow fever” means when referring to MEN who only like Asian women. The fetishization of asian women LITERALLY GOES BACK TO 1890s when the short story “Madame Butterfly” was written when a WHITE MAN was in Japan and fell in love with an Asian girl (WHO WAS 15 BTW). There are literal journal entries of European and American men who were in Asian at the time who said LITERALLY SAY HOW EXOTIC Asian Women are, that apparently our vaginas just “feel different”. I’m sorry... WHAT?! I HATE nothing more than when I have dealt with men saying some bullshit about how “exotic” I am. Also lets not forget how American society has de-masculinate the Asian Man. Saying that have small dicks and that they are skinny and scrawny, therefore aren’t men. So you like only half of us?

Our Food - WE DO NOT EAT DOG. I grew up being told “YOU EAT DOG! YOU’RE CHINESE!”... fuck you. And now, Asian food is seen as “amazing” I’m happy you like our soup dumplings and bao. But you were the same fucking people who told me I ate dog. So you love our food but not the people? Okay. I see you. Oh and I didn’t forget about the people who have gagged at Asian food.

Mocking how we look and our language - Am I the only Asian American who had people pulling their eyes and saying CHING CHONG at them? Please, get hit by a bus. And isn’t ironic how now “fox eyes” are a make up trend? funny isn’t it?

People telling us to “GO BACK TO CHINA!” “GO BACK TO WHERE YOU CAME FROM”

I’m sorry. Who educated you? Asians have been in this country since the 1850S. WE BUILT THE DAMN RAILROADS. SOME OF US WERE KIDNAPPED HERE TO BUILD THAT SHIT. (Another note is how ASIAN AMERICAN HISTORY IS NOT TAUGHT IN SCHOOLS. This needs to be addressed and changed.)

Also for MYSELF - my GREAT GRANDFATHER BUILT THE DAMN RAILROAD and SERVED IN THE ARMY in WWI. My Great Uncles were in the Air force in WWII and my GRANDFATHER served in the KOREAN WAR where he was shot in the ear and received a Purple Heart. I FUCKING DARE YOU to tell me to go back to my country. MY FAMILY HAS DONE MORE FOR THIS COUNTRY THAN HALF OF THESE RACIST MOTHER FUCKERS.

Hate crimes in America have been happening since the 1880s. Yellow Peril goes back to the 1880s when Asian were literally depicted as these murderous group invading from Asia. And of course, they depict us with slanted eyes and with long braided pony tails. THIS SHIT AIN’T NEW. There has also literally been LAWS banning Chinese from coming to America. i.e THE CHINESE EXCLUSION ACT oh and lets not forget Japanese Interment during the 1930s. THIS SHIT AIN’T NEW. ALSO let’s not forget the Vincent Chin Murder in the 1980s when a Chinese American was BEAT TO DEATH because his attackers thought he was Japanese and they were blaming the Japanese for taking their jobs.

As I sit here, feeling not as angry as at the beginning, if history has taught me anything, fear and anger has been the drive for these crimes. In the 1880s we were thought to be evil and that we were going to take away all of the jobs (but low and behold, some of us were KIDNAPPED here). During WWII it was right after Pearl Harbor after Japan bombed it. Vincent Chin, his attackers were angry at the Japanese. Current day, Donald Fucking Trump decided to put the target on our communities back with both jobs being sent to China and with the Coronavirus being our fault.

What happened on Tuesday with the Atlanta police officer saying that the 21 year old was “having a bad day” WAS BULL SHIT. I didn’t know killing 8 people was a RATIONALE RESPONSE. Okay then. Call it what it is, A HATE CRIME. This man was saying he had a “sex addiction” and that he wanted to get rid of the temptation and he associated ASIAN WOMEN and the ASIAN SPA to be that temptation. AND WHY IS THAT?!?!?!? THE FETISHIZATION OF ASIAN WOMEN.

And before I get off of my soap box, THE MEDIA WAS PRETTY FUCKING LATE TO JOINING THIS, AND CALL IT WHAT IT IS, A HATE CRIME. SO MANY of the crimes against the Asian elderly go unreported or are not deemed hate crimes WHEN THEY ARE. SO MANY of them do not know English or enough English and can not report what was said to them. And what sucks too, my dad even said it, I think your grandparents would just take it because they would see this as “I immigrated here, I have to take this shit”. WELL THAT TRAIN STOPS HERE. WE WILL NOT BE SILENCED. WE WILL NOT SHY AWAY. WE ARE TAKING OUR SPACE THAT IS RIGHTFULLY OURS. I fucking PROMISE you that if you try to do so, you will have hell to deal with.

I’m not going to get into the subject of the people who are SILENT during this but were ALL OVER social media for their BLM support. I’m just going to leave it at we are asking for your help and to amplify this. Please.

To my non Asian friends who have reached out to me, I do appreciate it. I really do. But please rather than telling me you are here for me if I want to talk, I BEG of you, please read and learn about the history as well as the Asian/Asian American experience in America. It’s really not as rainbows and butterflies people have been thinking. Hate against Asian and Asian Americans started before 2020.

To my Asian brothers, sisters, aunties and uncles PLEASE stay safe.

#stopasianhate #stopaapihate

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paullicino · 4 years

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A Year like No Other

(Taken from, and funded by, my Patreon.)

A lot of people are now calling 2020 the lost year and it’s not difficult to see why. Most of us have never had a year remotely like this last one. For some of us, the calendar began to blur, weeks and even months merging into one another in a sickly, uneasy timelessness that had us double-checking what day it was. For others, there was stress after stress, as we worried about our health, our jobs, our governments, even our countries. And the two experiences certainly weren’t mutually exclusive.

This month, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on that, acknowledging both the struggles and the successes. It’s sometimes been a difficult twelve months for me, but it certainly hasn’t been without its inspirations and its wonderful moments. I wanted to share some of those, to talk about a few ideas and to spotlight the things that helped me through 2020. I hope it helps. I figure it’s as good a time as any for us to be sharing our blessings.

And I think that first involves celebrating you. I think that’s very important. This past month, a year on from the first COVID cases being widely-reported (and also the first reports of cases where I live), I’ve read a lot by people asking questions like “What difference does it all make?” or “What is the point?” when they look back. They ask these questions when they think about things like their life changes, their mask wearing, their activism or their voting. They see an ongoing pandemic, social unrest or political inaction and wonder why they should make an effort while others are lax or apathetic. It’s natural to wonder that. I think anyone can understand the fatigue, the cynicism and the disillusionment.

But I also, get this, have a Hot Take on this that says that the choices you made were vital. When you chose to wear a mask, to socially distance, to restrict when and where you went, you actively helped fight a deadly virus. You may well have saved lives, saved someone’s health, protected livelihoods by acting as you have. When you voted, shared a cause on social media, attended a protest or talked to even one person about helping others or making the world better, you contributed to improving your society.

In fact, I have capital-O Opinions about these things so strap in and hold on, 'cause here they come.

I’ve been very fortunate to share much of my work on the internet over the years, which is a very particular medium, and sometimes that work reaches a lot of people. My experience of this is that you never know who it truly reaches, or when, or even how, and most of the time you never find out. There’s certainly an immediacy to things where you can see, pretty quickly, what the instant reaction to something is, but that’s fleeting. It doesn’t last and, within moments, there’s already something newer demanding more responses.

In time, the true consequences of things shake out. People get back to you with their more considered opinions. Sometimes months, even years after you do something, you find out from someone what they thought about it, how it affected them or even how they were changed. It can take time for a person to realise how they were changed, too, and we rarely have perspective in the moment. Sometimes it takes us years to appreciate the choices and the actions of our friends, our family members, our teachers, our communities. People have contacted me about work I’ve done long, long after I first shared it, and many of those people have come from places that I never expected, have found my work in ways that I never expected. I think, now, that consequence never travels in straight lines. That cause and effect are strangers rather than siblings.

And so I hope it’s clear that the ramble you have so kindly indulged is meant to say that we don’t always notice the good things that we have done. We ask “What difference does it all make?” or “What is the point?” because we don’t get those answers immediately, or for a long time, or sometimes ever. But not knowing when we saved someone’s health, when we changed someone’s mind, even when we inspired someone’s actions doesn’t mean that we aren’t making a difference. There is a point to our life changes, our mask wearing, our activism and our voting.

I hope you can celebrate yourself and give yourself credit for the choices you made this last year. They have mattered.

I also want to thank you so, so much for supporting my Patreon. I know many of you have been with me since day one, for more than two years now, and I’m so grateful for both your capital-P Patronage and your presence, whether that’s in our Discord community or through your comments and your correspondence. That’s made a big difference to me this past year, helping me pay rent and put food on the table during a time when so much has been uncertain. 2020 was to be my first full year back in Canada after a complicated, circuitous absence and I had half-finished projects, freelance ideas and half a dozen tabs open in my browser with writing residencies to apply for, everywhere from nearby Richmond to the Yukon Territory. I hoped this would be a year that I’d both finally see more of Canada and be able to write about it, too. A lot of things didn’t quite work out, freelance budgets were slashed, work timelines lengthened and I became ill, but as I look back now I’m thankful for a great deal.

I still managed to fulfill some ambitions. At the start of 2020 I’d been finishing up some work on Zafir, which had been an absolute delight, and I was not far off starting spring work on Magical Kitties Save the Day. The close of the year saw me resuming work on a Feng Shui expansion and each of these projects has been really good for me. All of them gave me a chance to work with skillful, progressive people and to become a better designer.

As spring continued, I decided to make a one-off video about board gaming and mental health during a pandemic, partly to offer a practical and helpful introduction to playing board games online and looking after yourself, but also because I wanted people to feel that their actions during a pandemic mattered. Among the things I referenced and linked to, I’ve continued dipping into Headspace from time to time, and this helpful list of brief work-from-home tips has been further updated. I’ve also since further investigated the terrific work of Dr. Ali Mattu, a psychologist and therapist who has produced a lot of material over the last year focusing on how to handle the pandemic.

With the summer came widespread protests across the United States, which highlighted the oppressive and fatal consequences of systemic racism and the urgent need for police reform, both issues not exclusive to the that country (for me, the events echoed the protests that began on my Tottenham street in 2011 and the violent response to 2010’s student protests). I shared a list of resources that I thought were important at the time, but there also followed a wide call for white people to make more effort to both seek out, engage with and promote motion pictures made by Black Americans, or which reflected the Black experience. It wasn’t a big ask and, as well as watching films that had been recommended many times over (such as Us, Da 5 Bloods, The Last Black Man in San Francisco and the excellent BlacKkKlansman, which was the best film I saw last year), I also tried to diversify my social media feeds more. Instagram was host to a growing discussion about how the platform seems to (deliberately or accidentally) divide people by race, something which I think may still be the case, and several nature photographers I follow promoted Tsalani Lassiter and Rae Wynn-Grant. To my delight, among many of the things they speak about and share, both are experts on bears.

I thought it was important to look more closely at Canada, too, so I made more of an effort to follow Indigenous issues and have begun reading Indigenous news sources, including First Nations Drum, Windspeaker and the Nunatsiaq News. CBC runs its own Indigenous news section, much of which is written by Indigenous reporters.A lot of freelance and writing opportunities dried up as the pandemic contracted the world’s economies, but in 2020 I was able to start writing for VICE, working with my old colleague and friend Rob Zacny, and interview the world’s most famous board game designer. VICE has written a lot of relevant, helpful and informative material about current events over the last year and I was heartened by the words of a fellow VICE writer, Gita Jackson, who concluded her essay about living in The Cool Zone of historical possibility by reminding us how “In The Cool Zone, we can also rediscover hope.”

This year I was also inspired by Faith Fundal’s widely-shared CBC podcast They and Us, which was an excellent (and still rare) example of a mainstream media exploration of gender identity and trans rights, and really pleased for my friend Brendan, who launched his podcast project Hey, Lesson! in the autumn. Of course, I can’t mention podcasts without again reminding you of my love for the spooky, supernatural Death by Monsters, which I got to host last winter. It was my dear friend Paula, one of its presenters, who recommended that I start streaming regularly, something I now do here. She was absolutely right when she talked about how positive and social an experience it can be. It’s been a real joy, as well as added some important structure and schedule to my week.

And, of course, the arrival of my first full year as a Canadian resident meant that I got to celebrate my first anniversary as a Canadian resident. I paid my taxes! Let me tell you, it was a slightly confusing and esoteric experience, but it was also one of those mundane, humdrum things that confirms and validates you. Though I didn’t get to throw a party for that anniversary, I did get to enjoy my birthday celebrations before the pandemic really hit. My partner surprised me with a trip to the not-quite-remote-but-definitely-secluded Gibsons, on the quiet British Columbia coastline, which was the best birthday gift anyone’s ever given me and a chance to see more of the rocky, forested, mountainous fringes of a place I’ve fallen so in love with. Before Vancouver closed down, I was also able to collect more than a dozen people (representing five different nationalities!) together in a brewery and then a restaurant, something that now feels like an extremely alien concept. For some of us in our friend group, it’s the last memory we have of coming together and being in the same space. That gives it a pronounced poignancy, a bittersweet quality.

Finally, I’d like to share two more things with you. The first is particularly peculiar and personal: I found my wizard. After drafting this piece last summer, then sharing it in the autumn, a few suggestions led me not straight to my goal, but ultimately down the right path. The game that I was thinking of is called The Tomb of Drewan and I very much doubt that anyone, anywhere is likely to have heard of it. It’s thirty-nine years old this year and it was distributed by a publisher in Berkshire, not so far from where I grew up. It only took me three and a half decades to see what it looks like in colour.

Tracking down this game was a softly satisfying experience. It’s exactly as I remember. Everything makes sense. Reading through the manual reminds me of how difficult it was to try and understand this thing through a monochrome monitor, though I also think it was likely way too complex for the child I was. I don’t think I ever got anywhere. I don’t think I ever could have. But I at least know that my memory has served me well. That wizard was as real as could be.

The second thing is something about my own missing year, something that has also resurfaced in my memory as we’ve plodded through 2020. In the long, dark winter months, in the unstructured days and the collapsing weeks, I’ve been transported back to the early 2000s and to a time that now feels very familiar. Here's what that was like.

I’d been writing professionally for a few years, comfortably and competently, while still living in suburban Hampshire. As publishing moved from magazines to the internet, my work began to dry up, my options narrowed and, honestly, I didn’t respond to this shift by producing my best material. I also didn’t know what to do about all this change, becoming directionless and unsure. I didn’t yet have the confidence to take some of the larger steps that I eventually did and, instead, somewhere in all that I began to move backward. I struggled to find work. I slept the strangest hours. I was frustrated, but it also didn’t matter nearly enough to me because also, I was no longer motivated.

I have memories of waking up at all kinds of times of day and night. Of not knowing where to go. Of running out of things to take photographs of, after looking at the same local sights over and over. It was like living at the bottom of a well, with a tiny, distant view of the world and no handholds for climbing out. I wasted time because I had time to waste, something I deeply regret now, and I became crabby, unhealthy and inward-looking. I was far from my best.

The last time I was in England I found myself going through old things from the early 2000s. I found many of the books I read, a great deal of writing I’d done and, in particular, a lot of my old RPG notes. A lot of old RPG notes, an absolute wealth of work that far exceeded anything I’d done outside of any work except that on Paranoia. I’ve written before about my roleplaying past and how I have fond memories of it, but I had completely forgotten exactly how much material I had collected together. I had so many biographies that I’d indexed them. I was starting to form an encyclopedia of everything I’d done, just so that I could find and reference the things I needed.

I had also read so much, which both prepared me for my degree and began to make me a better writer. I’d mostly stopped reading in my mid-teens and this was a new spurt of interest that led me toward many of the tastes and preferences I have today. I began to develop my fiction and non-fiction writing styles and I developed an interest in non-fiction that had paid me back a thousandfold.

I was building a new me.

I see now that I didn’t lose a year. I was certainly caught in a swamp of sorts, struggling to make progress, but the experiences I had during that time still mattered. They didn’t matter right away and they didn’t matter in any way that seemed at all obvious to me at the time, but they helped to shape me and to guide me, to show me both what I wanted and, certainly, what I didn’t want. If I had the chance to repeat it, I’d for sure live that missing year differently. I’d live it so much better, so much wiser and so much more fruitfully, but I can at least see it now as not the waste I long thought that it was.

And so I hope it’s clear that the ramble you have so kindly indulged is meant to say that, some time in the future, you may look back on 2020 and find your successes, your satisfaction, even your strength. I don’t mean to disregard anyone’s suffering or sadness, your feelings are valid and the pain, loss and difficulties you’ve encountered are very real. I don’t much like people who dismiss the feelings of others and I apologise if I’ve been too glib. I think a past version of myself needed to read something like this, a long time ago, and I only want to give them, you or anyone who might see this, hope for the future, a few reasons to be optimistic and, very importantly, a reminder to celebrate yourself.

Happy 2021. You made a difference. You always have.

#COVID-19 #2020 #Canada #writing #hope #you made a difference #Patreon #A CHAOS SPELL

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thedreideldiaries · 5 years

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Hey, friends! I thought I’d take this opportunity to expound in my political choices a bit - specifically to give some context for my choice of Sanders over Warren. Note for a few of my followers who know me elsewhere: this is copied over from other social media, so if it sounds familiar that is why.

First, I want to reiterate that I like Warren. So, if anyone reading this is torn between her and any of the other clowns who have thrown their sorry hats into the ring, then please: do me and the rest of the world a favor, stop reading this right now, and go ahead and give Warren your vote. I won’t be mad. Promise. If you’re on the fence between Warren and Sanders, though, then I implore you to read on.

Okay, is it just us in here? Cool.

For my friends torn between Warren and Sanders (like I was at the beginning of the primary), I’ve tried to distill my reasoning. As you know, a lot of the discourse surrounding Warren’s campaign constructs her as a younger, female version of Sanders. If I believed that, I’d be solidly in her corner, but a few differences between them make this simply not the case. Here are the ones I find most salient:

1. Let’s look at Bernie’s base. As much as we love to talk about representation in politics, a candidate’s demographic background tells us nothing about who they’re going to fight for. Their voting base, on the other hand, tells you who has placed their confidence in that candidate’s promises.

A good proportion of Warren’s supporters are white college graduates (young and old).

By contrast Bernie’s base is overwhelmingly working class, non-white, urban, and, perhaps most tellingly, young. You could attribute that to naivete, but I think something else is going on here: the demographic group with the most to win or lose from this election are people under 30. We’re the ones who will have to live with the most devastating effects of climate change, and we’re tired of the so-called adults in our lives not taking that rather pressing concern seriously. We don’t care if our candidate is old or young - we care if they listen. Which brings me to:

2. The Youth. Young people in America are disillusioned with democracy - not because we’ve decided it’s not a good idea, but because we’ve literally never seen it in action. We live in a corporate plutocracy where the financial barriers to running for office have rendered most politicians ridiculously out of touch. And Sanders, more than any other candidate in the primary, knows how to talk to young people.

And look - I’m planning to vote for whoever wins the primary. But if 2016 is anything to go by, if the youth demographic doesn’t get a candidate they can get behind, they won’t vote strategically for the lesser of two evils. They’ll stay home, and given what the Democratic party has done for them over the past 20 or so years, I can’t say I blame them.

3. The same goes for his endorsements. I’d be out of my lane if I spent too much time talking about what Sanders wants to do for people of color, but I think it’s telling that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar - three politicians showing real determination to shake things up in Washington - all chose Bernie over Warren. I think it’s telling that AOC cited his campaign, not Warren’s, as her inspiration for running for office (if anyone’s a female Sanders, it’s not Warren - it’s AOC).

4. Sanders is, quite simply, the genuine article. He’s fought for important causes (climate justice, healthcare, workers’ rights) since long before they were cool. He’s *not* perfect, but criticisms of him rarely touch his political history.

Warren’s record of activism is, by contrast, unimpressive. She used to be a Republican corporate lawyer, and while I absolutely respect that someone can change their mind about politics, and I applaud her for doing so, it worries me that what changed her mind wasn’t the Iran-Contra scandal, or the AIDS crisis, or the brutal crushing of the labor movement. It was the realization that Republicans were doing capitalism wrong. I can’t exactly argue with that (show me a Republican politician who truly supports a free market and I’ll eat my beret*), but it doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence.

*This is a joke. I do not have a beret.

5. Warren’s a capitalist; Sanders is a democratic socialist, and I think the difference is important. Warren supports a wealth tax, and she wants everyone to have healthcare, and I appreciate that she has the guts to talk about those things on national television, but at the end of the day, she’s a proud capitalist who believes the system needs to be corrected, not overhauled.

Sanders is a self-professed democratic socialist, and has built a popular movement around that label. And honestly, I’m not too worried about redbaiting. Yes, it’s a common Republican tactic, but the sentiment of “yes I would vote for Democrats but not for Socialist democrats” is a rare one, if it exists at all. And if it works against any of the primary candidates, it’ll work against all of them. They used anti-Commmunist rhetoric against Obama, for goodness’ sake. Look how much of an advocate for the working class he turned out to be.

Courting the centrist vote is a waste of time. Tiptoeing around conservatives alienates left-wingers and doesn’t actually sway Republicans. It’s a bad move strategically, in that it makes us look like cowards, and morally, because it means not getting very important things done.

Sanders doesn’t want to play the game better. He wants to start a whole new game. Warren’s economics platform seems to boil down to “50s but less racist,” and while that sounds nice, it’s just not possible. We can’t go back there - we have automation now, not to mention a global economy the likes of which we barely dreamed of in the 1950s, and it’s not realistic to try to make that happen again. We need something new.

6. People over party. In a lot of ways, Warren reminds me of the best parts of The West Wing. I like that show, but it was a comforting fantasy - a vision of what the Democratic Party could have been like with a little more gumption and a lot more luck. It never happened because the Democratic party and politics aren’t like that in real life. I have confidence in Sanders because his loyalty isn’t to the Democratic Party. It’s to the American people. He’s proved that over and over again over the course of his political career.

7. Bernie is an organizer. The “not me - us” slogan is very telling. Democracy is participatory. We don’t just need a candidate with a plan to fix everything. We need a candidate with a plan who acknowledges that the people hold the real power. We need a candidate who respects the will of the people and inspires them to get involved. We can’t win this election and stop thinking about politics. We never get to stop thinking about politics. We need someone who can inspire people to keep fighting.

The heart attack was a big deal, but the truth is, it’s never been about Bernie as an individual. His immediate reaction after getting out of the hospital was “I’m lucky to have healthcare; everyone should have healthcare; let’s get back to work.” That, more than anything, has given me the confidence that Bernie wants his policies to last long after he’s gone.

Also, people regularly have heart attacks and live another several decades. This is *literally* why we have vice presidents. If Sanders can get elected and pick a good VP and a cabinet (plus, you know, fill any Supreme Court vacancies that happen to arise over his tenure), his health won’t matter as much, because we don’t need a messiah right now. We need a resurgence of participatory democracy. We need more AOCs to take the stage. We need young people at the polls, not just in 2020, but beyond that.

8. I don’t like to talk about electability for a couple of reasons. One: centrists love to bring it up, usually in the service of talking about how policies they have zero stake in will never work. Two: Trump was supposed to be unelectable, and we all saw how that turned out.

That said: Warren’s currently polling third, which is not a great place to be. And while I don’t share some people’s cynicism about Warren, I have to agree that her response to Trump’s attacks has not impressed me. I’m confident that if Trump attacks Sanders, Bernie won’t take the bait, because he’s so on-message you can’t get him off-message. Like I said: he had a heart attack and immediately spun it back into the healthcare conversation.

And the polls are clear: head to head, Sanders beats Trump. Warren’s chances are far dicier.

9. And the most important issue, without which nothing else really matters: the climate crisis. I’d love it if we could wait for the country’s ideas to catch up to Sanders’ socialist rhetoric, but the truth is we are running out of time. I’m voting for Sanders because I have two nieces under 5 years old and a nephew who was just born, and I want them to grow up on a habitable planet, and they won’t get a chance to vote on that. I’m doing it because I want to have kids of my own someday, and while I absolutely respect the choice of anyone deciding to reproduce right now, I don’t have the emotional energy to raise a family during an apocalypse. And while I like Warren, and she’s expressed support for a Green New Deal, Sanders is the only candidate I trust to both beat Trump in the general and put his foot down to the DNC and their ilk.

10. Foreign policy!

First of all: guess who else hates American Imperialism? That’s right; it’s Bernie Sanders. Significantly, he has the guts to bring up America’s habit of meddling in Latin America’s democratically elected governments, which is something you pretty much never hear about from pretty much any other candidate.

https://www.vox.com/2019/6/25/18744458/bernie-sanders-endless-wars-foreign-affairs-op-ed

Foreign policy came up a lot during 2016 primary, with Clinton’s supporters trotting out the bizarre argument that a long history of hawkish policies is better than no policies at all. What with all that, I was surprised to learn that Sanders is actually quite well-traveled and has a long history of trying to mend fences between the U.S. and other world powers: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/02/bernie-sanders-foreign-policy/470019/

When it comes to climate change and foreign policy, Sanders acknowledges not only that it requires innovation (let’s not forget his early and vehement support for the Green New Deal), but also international cooperation. From the link below:

“To both Sanders and his supporters around the world, it is impossible to fight climate change without international cooperation. To that end, a group called the Progressive International was announced at a convention last year held by the Sanders Institute, a think tank founded by the presidential contender’s wife and son.

“The network of left-wing politicians and activists hopes to fight against "the global war being waged against workers, against our environment, against democracy, against decency,” according to its website.”

He’s also popular with left-wing leaders around the world, and it’s those kinds of politicians who we need to get us out of the climate crisis.

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/04/bernie-sanders-global-popularity-1254929

And finally, to stray briefly into comparison: again, I like Warren, but even so, I like her better domestically than internationally. The progressivism she touts at home comes up short abroad. I’m sure you’ve heard about it already, but I think it’s worth remembering that Warren voted for Trump’s military budget in 2017; Sanders didn’t. She talks a lot about peace, but her history on foreign issues looks pretty similar to that of other centrist democrats. This is a problem not only in terms of American Imperialism, but also because the U.S. military is one of the world’s leading causes of climate change. Her voting history and her cozy relationship with defense contractors have me pretty worried. This article goes into more detail about her history with various foreign powers as well as her general attitudes on American imperialism:

https://jacobinmag.com/2019/05/elizabeth-warren-foreign-policy

We all pretty much knew what we were getting with Clinton. Warren worries me not only because she seems to align with the rest of the party on our endless foreign wars, but because she keeps her support for the military-industrial complex behind a facade of progressive rhetoric that reminds me of the early Obama years. We can’t be let down like that again. Even if we ignore the devastating human cost, the planet doesn’t have time.

Further Reading - obviously I don’t agree with everything in every one of these pieces, but they offer a leftist critique that often goes missing from other, more superficial problems people bring up about Warren.

The polling bases of the primary candidates: https://www.people-press.org/2019/08/16/most-democrats-are-excited-by-several-2020-candidates-not-just-their-top-choice/pp_2019-08-16_2020-democratic-candidates_0-06/?fbclid=IwAR2G8np2q9N4P6DArdI-gPhA5Wp_SYDZPKQDpDhxVZ4YbwnAEmFd65swMOA

An interesting take on Warren’s policies vs Bernie’s movement: https://jacobinmag.com/2019/04/elizabeth-warren-policy-bernie-sanders-presidential-primary?fbclid=IwAR14wWjYDNuNMrXN7YjVFFFHXmoMWKpDVqBcbPBlQUUrA354iIyRAbKXG30

An opinion piece on the contrast between them:

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/08/bernie-sanders-elizabeth-warren-democratic-party-elite-2020-presidential-race?fbclid=IwAR3vA54QveM2cCTxQ2BbVXh_IICgTxweKVBLMRjhSFyyAdspnibJ50seDjY

Another one:

https://forward.com/opinion/432561/the-case-for-bernie-sanders-the-only-real-progressive-in-the-race-sorry/?fbclid=IwAR1vwONZ7azJQcoeo_KYNYiJ8ekzHhJsZ4Ms0UzDHI59j7Q6oio-5uJOGcI

Warren’s political history:

More about that from a different source:

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/10/why-criticize-warren?fbclid=IwAR0NTP0cRbSnr-a6HCuxE-4SCJZEqU2EAL1Gnx70FME-9UMBg-xYE5t7g7Y

A prequel to the former (beware - this one’s scathing as heck):

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/09/the-prospect-of-an-elizabeth-warren-nomination-should-be-very-worrying?fbclid=IwAR03d5I5j72s4kQC9wgRSrXnbmWsp_9HUvRWBZwzcfsT9RsZP-lSAX4aPz0

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queen-scribbles · 5 years

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By Any Other Name

Heyyyy, first Wayhaven Chronicles fic. /finger guns

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One definite advantage--and to be honest, Abigail’s favorite--of knowing the truth about Unit Bravo, her mother’s work, and the supernatural in general was how much less tense it made things. Amazingly, not keeping secrets made casual conversation so much easier.

Well, she amended with a small, private smile, glancing between the two members of said unit currently sharing her office space, in some cases more than others.

Felix grinned, having caught the expression, subtle as it was. “Smiling at the sight of me, Detective?” he teased, and Abigail couldn’t help but snort a small laugh. Before she could open her mouth to reply, however, he rolled right on, grin shifted somewhere closer to a smirk, “Or was it Natey that did it?”

Her coffee sloshed as she set the mug down a bit more hurriedly than intended, in tandem with Nate’s mildly exasperated sigh and straightened posture in the chair he’d claimed.

His quiet but reproving, “Felix...” only bought her a few seconds to scramble for her wits, but hopefully that was enough.

Abigail shook her head, tucking a curl that slid loose with the motion behind her ear. “Just thinkin’ how nice it is t’ be in the know, now. I hate feelin’ kept in th’ dark.”

Nate shifted in the chair, brow crinkling over those unfairly deep brown eyes of his. “I truly am sorry we weren’t free to tell you sooner, detective.”

She bit the inside of her cheek at the gooseflesh that prickled up her arms and instead flashed a warm smile. “I know. An’ I understand it bein’ to protect me, that’s always been Mum’s primary concern. All I meant is it’s nice t’ be able t’ just talk to you. A-All of you,” she corrected hastily, not even daring to look at Felix. If she so much as glimpsed a knowing grin from him, she would very likely burst into flames of embarrassment “I mean, the ones who deign to,” she joked, trying to change the subject at least a little.

“Ahhh, Adam’ll come around,” Felix said with an encouraging smile. “He’s just grumpy about about working with a human.” He winked. “Even one as special as you are. Might not ever be as fun as us, mind you, but he’ll play nicer once he sees you can keep up.”

“Which we know you can,” Nate added quickly(too quickly?) with a warm smile.

“I appreciate your votes of confidence,” Abigail said with a small laugh. “But good as that is t’ know, I wasn’t thinkin’ of Adam.”

“Eh, Mason hardly talks to anyone,” Felix said, gesturing dismissively with one hand. “I wouldn’t take that personally, detective.”

“Y’know,” she began, running her finger around the rim of her mug with a smile, “if we’re goin’ to be working t’gether more closely”--a quickly raised brow to head off the comment he was about to make--”you don’t need t’ be so formal from here on out.”

“Really?” they said in unison, Felix with yet another grin and Nate with a brow raised in surprise. “That’s... very nice of you,” Nate added, holding her gaze.

Abigail shrugged and glanced down at her desk, picking at the edge of her memo pad. “Why not? It’ll help build a sense of camaraderie, yeah?”

“Not that some of us need any help there,” Felix muttered, amber eyes glinting with mischief.

She ignored him, or tried to. But her cheeks were still warm as she let her gaze drift to the computer screen. Shoot, is that the time? It really did pass faster when you enjoyed your company. “Alright, fun as this is, break’s over. We need t’ get back to work.”

Nate nodded, sitting forward in his chair. “Of course. What’s next?”

Felix, on the other hand, slouched even more comfortably, giving a playfully dramatic groan. “Aw, Abby, do we have to?”

Abigail just barely bit back the grimace, her jaw tightening a brief moment before she answered Nate’s question. “I want to see if Verda’s found anything new, and we should probably check in with Adam and Mason, see what they’ve learned.”

“I’ll come with you,” Nate said, pushing to his feet. “Felix can handle finding the others.”

“That eager to get rid of me, are you?” Felix chuckled, reluctantly peeling himself out of his chair as well.

“No, I just think you’ll enjoy getting out of the station for a while more than you would visiting the lab,” Nate replied smoothly.

“One being true doesn’t mean the other isn’t,” Felix said with a wink, but he headed out the door all the same. “You two behave yourselves, now.”

Abigail chuckled softly as she watched him exit the station.

Nate was holding the door for her when she looked back. “After you,” he smiled. “Abigail.”

She bit her lip to keep her answering sunny smile from spreading too uncontrollably as she stepped through. “Thank you. Nate.”

“I’m sorry if he jumped straight to being more casual than you intended,” Nate said as they headed for the stairs.

“Oh, no, nothin’ against nicknames,” she said, shoving her hands in her pockets. Of course he’d caught her reaction. “I’m just not fond of that particular one.”

Despite the brow he quirked in curiosity, Nate did not push for an explanation as to why she disliked the most common short form of her given name. The walk down the stairs wasn’t long, but when they reached the pathology lab door, it was closed with an ‘Out to Lunch’ note stuck on the glass.

“Does he always eat this late?” Nate asked, hands shoved deep in his pockets.

“Not often, but it has been known t’ happen,” Abigail said, pulling out her phone to double-check the time, even through she’d just seen it a few minutes prior.

“Is it worth waiting for him to return, or should we meet up with the others for now, and check back later?”

She nibbled her lower lip in thought. “I’m really curious if he found anything with the new parameters we suggested,” she finally admitted around a sigh. “Let’s give it a few minutes, yeah? If he’s not back in five t’ ten, we’ll regroup with th’ rest of Bravo and I’ll just talk to him tomorrow, I guess.”

He nodded. “Alright.”

The two leaned against the wall, hands in pockets, and Abigail tried to suppress a shiver as the chill from the painted cinder-blocks sank through her clothes. Neither of them spoke at first, allowing companionable silence to settle over them. There was something more to it, however; an edge of heat or tension that was not in the least unpleasant, even if it was distracting.

“Kids used t’ pick on me,” Abigail said abruptly. “Why I don’t like Abby,” she elaborated, then wrinkled her nose sheepishly when Nate cocked his head in confusion. “Sorry, I’m doin’ this wrong way ‘round, aren’t I?”

“It’s alright,” he smiled, half turning to face her. “But don’t feel like you have to explain-”

“I don’t,” she assured him. “I want to.” The loose curl slipped free from behind her ear, and she wound it around her finger as she started over. “I’ve got a fair dose of straight Irish in me thanks to my dad, an’ it decided t’ manifest in th’ most stereotypical way possible”--she paused to tug the rebellious red lock around her finger and gesture to the freckles that covered her face--”which makes me rather hard t’ miss.”

“Can’t argue with that,” Nate commented, but from the warmth of his smile, he wasn’t complaining, either.

Abigail’s face warmed, despite the chilly surroundings, and she looked down at her boots rather than risk losing herself in those eyes. “Anyways, kids bein’ kids, my schoolmates decided that if I looked an Irish stereotype, maybe I was other ones, too. Y’know, the temper, the stubbornness, th’ tendency t’ chatter. An’ well,” she hunched her shoulders, feeling a fresh chill from the cinder-blocks as she moved off the patch she’d warmed through contact. “Kids can be absolutely horrid when they want t’ be. If I talked too much I was ‘Gabby Abby’, otherwise it was ‘Abby the Red’ both for m’ hair and th’ color m’ face went tryin’ t’ weather their jibes without givin’ them the response they were hopin’ for.” A self-deprecating smile pulled at her lips as she scuffed one boot against the tiled floor. “Got real good at that. Maybe too good, considerin’ how long it took later teachers and friends t’ pull me out of my shell.” She finally looked back up to find Nate studying her with such intensity and concern it made her want to freeze and slide closer at the same time. “I know it’s more’n a decade ago, an’ a silly reason t’ dislike a nickname, especially one so common, and surely not meant the same way by anyone now, but...”

“Abigail,” he said quietly, stepping closer. “It’s not silly. Even if it was, it doesn’t matter. If it makes you uncomfortable, then that’s reason enough not to do it. I’ll talk to Felix.”

She shook her head, stuffing her hands in her pockets. “I’ll do it. It’s my name. B’sides, he might listen better hearin’ it from th’ source.”

Nate laughed. “An excellent point. He will ask for alternatives, mind you.”

“Mm, will he?” she replied with a laugh of her own. “Perhaps simply ‘Abigail’ is good enough for now.”

“I think so,” he said softly, smile tugging his lips as he gently tucked the hair back behind her ear. “And not just for now.”

She was suddenly very, very aware of her heartbeat, the cinder-block wall pressing her shoulder as she turned to face him, and just how alone they were down here. “Thank you, Nate,” she mumbled, fighting the urge to reach up and touch the hair he’d just smoothed back. “And also thank you for comin’ with me. Th’ creepy basement hallway doesn’t seem so bad with... with company.”

Nate’s smile bloomed even more fully, as if he guessed the extra word she’d almost dropped in that sentence, and he leaned a little closer. “You’re very welcome, Abigail. It’s no trouble, and we are supposed to be protecting you, after all.”

Abigail smiled and drifted closer to him. “Oh, I see. So protection’s the only reason you’re keepin’ me company, Agent Sewell?”

His smile stretched into a full-blown grin and he closed the distance still further, now close enough she had to tip her head back to meet his gaze. Which she very much wanted to do, especially if he was going to keep looking at her like that. “What do you think, Detective Jenings?”

God, her heart was either going to leap out of her chest or stop altogether. “I think-”

“Oh, detective, I’m sorry, have you been waiting long?”

Abigail’s eyes fluttered closed and she fought down the rapidly rising scream of frustration. She really was going to shoot the next thing that did that, human, vampire, or otherwise. No matter who it was. “Not long, Verda,” she said, shooting Nate a final lingering look as she spun to face the source of the latest horribly timed interruption with a smile on her face. “We’d just wanted to see if you had found anything new?”

Verda’s gaze flicked across the small gap between her and Nate as he nodded. “Actually, yes. I hadn’t quite finished writing up my report, but if you two would like to come in” --he moved past them to unlock and open the door--”I can have it done in just a minute.”

“Thanks, that would be great.” Abigail trailed him through the doorway, a faint smile pulling her lips when Nate had to duck as he followed suit, butterflies tickling in her chest when the movement brought him close enough their arms almost brushed in the moment before he straightened.

“I’ll just need a minute,” Verda reiterated, sliding onto his stool and tugging over the manila folder.

“Take your time,” she assured him, leaning against a counter. Nate mirrored the pose nearby, and when she glanced his direction, Abigail caught him studying her again. The two of them shared an only mildly-abashed smile before they settled in to wait for the report.

And if their hands happened to slip against the shiny metal counter and wind up closer to each other, well, that was obviously an accident. Nothing more.

True to his word, Verda finished the report swiftly and handed it over. Abigail thanked him, Nate held the door for her, and the two of them headed back up the stairs. Her phone chimed as they stepped back into her office, and she pulled it out to check the screen, fairly certain she knew what it was, considering Nate’s pocket buzzed practically in tandem.

Sure enough, “Felix says we need t’ meet up with them. Guess they found somethin’ important.” Abigail gave a wry chuckle and tucked the report in a drawer. “So that could’ve waited for t’morrow after all,” she commented, reaching for her jacket.

“At least now you’ll have it soon as you come in,” Nate pointed out.

“True.” They pulled on their jackets and he waited while she closed up her office. “Felix didn’t happened t’ tell you where they are, did he?” she asked, bemused, as they made their way out of the station. It was a rather important piece of information, and one he’d left off.

He shook his head and held the door for her, smile pulling at his lips. “He did not. We’ll just have to walk until we find them.”

The shiver that traipsed up her spine had nothing to do with the cool air, Abigail was fairly certain. She smiled. “Oh, what a shame.”

Nate chuckled and shoved his hands deeper in his pockets. “Is it? I can’t think of many better ways to spend such an afternoon than a good walk with good company.”

Her face flamed as she fell in step beside him, noting once again how he checked his stride so she could keep up. “Hard t’ argue with that. An’ at least it’s still light; keeps it from bein’ too chilly.”

“As well as allowing us to enjoy the view.” His expression was innocent and gaze on the picturesque streets spread before them, but there was just enough a hint of something in his voice to tell her there was deeper meaning to the words.

“That it does,” she agreed lightly, her own faux innocence even more easily seen through than his, she was sure. “No rush, then, I suppose?”

“Not so far as I’m concerned,” Nate said. “Adam might disagree.”

“Best not to mosey, then,” Abigail replied with a quiet chuckle.

Even if they didn’t mosey through the streets, they didn’t exactly hurry, either. It gave them plenty of time to enjoy the weather and company both, an arrangement that suited Abigail just fine. She planned to enjoy all the benefits of knowing the truth, but she’d have been lying to deny that these sorts of moments were right at the top of the list.

#queens fic #the wayhaven chronicles #abigail jenings #nate sewell #felix hauville #god this was so fun to write #felix is so My Favorite Type to write it's ridiculous #and don't even get me started on aj and nate's gd PINING #also: they'd've gone longer if i let 'em #but i have other things to do

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blackuigryphonvr · 5 years

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#PokemonGo #Niantic #Wayfarer #Abuse #CyberBullying I’m currently suspending ALL of my nominations for PokéStops in South Field, and my local area due to a pattern of very bad abusive behaviors collectively done towards me from a group of local individuals whom I’ve actually never ever done anything, but are trashing me behind my back.

I DO NOT APPRECIATE players ganging up on my nominations and ABUSING Niantic’s system to accuse me of being a Nazi and committing a crime! How dare u! It’s like I’m having my own version of the Warren/Sanders back-stab!

WHO in their right mind would ACTUALLY BELIEVE that I’m a Nazi?! WHO would ACTUALLY believe that I would ABUSE Niantic’s system to harm others in my community?

This has been a constant pattern of behaviors of a number of things dating back to June, and this confirms a lot of things I was already catching onto, and suspecting. This also strongly confirms my #1 suspect, and I already suspect up to 9 other persons as well as alt accounts.

Do u have any idea how much research I put into this spot since 2018? I didn’t just pull this out of my ass. It’s not only historical but prehistoric. There is NOTHING DIFFERENT about THIS SUBMISSION than all of my others that went through.

But I’ve noticed that whenever I publicly divulge where and when I’m submitting nominations and mention it publicly on social media, or the local Discord thread, those locations get rejected for reasons that make no sense at all.... but, the ones that did make it through were ones I never told anyone I was doing.

Before Wayfarer even went live, I had reservations about sharing my intel, which I’d been gathering since 2018 hoping to turn into a PokéStop eventually... but, I decided it was better to let go of it, so that others could do it. I gladly, And freely gave out my details, added info to Google & Yelp and even went to long lengths of so much research to share which maps to check, which historical archives to use.

I noticed that much of the ones I openly shared with others often got stupid reasons for rejections. So, we had to come up with better methods to submit nominations with less room for potential rejections like having cultural n historical information or good photography exposures. But, when they didn’t tell others they resubmitted, it got accepted.

Also, I was very vocal about my plans and wishes for which locations I’d been scouting out the best locations for Community Days, especially Public Parks! As a Mom I care about a safe place to play, free parking, and safe access.

I recall feeding my intel to others, publicly, and being told by a head person (whom I trust) that my info was being shared with someone whom wanted to do those locations. Specifically, South Field And Stella Tirrell Park.

I wanted those spots to become high quality places to play Community Day, but I HAD A STRONG INKLING that these places could become a PokéGym since there was an older PokéStop there. I told people this. Yet, no one bothered. Months blew by, and nothing...

Well, I finally hit Level 40 at the end of 2019 so I hustled to get my submissions done. It took days for me to plan out which ones I wanted, and which ones would be more likely than others to go through. But my Stella Tirrell submissions were screwed. I thought it was very strange.... but I still had 1 that go frozen in the cue. That one didn’t even go into voting until last week. And because no one was actively trying to screw me, it went through and now Stella Tirrell has a PokéGym.

But, also, I turned the Jet into a PokéGym in South Field. I did the work. And it paid off.

But I never told anyone that I was doing those.

Well, someone assumed it was another player. So I asked who they thought did it.... and THAT was the person at the top of my list as a suspect. This person also is very well liked and many people believe this person to be a nice person.... I know this because I also fell for the “nice guy” act until their behavior shifted by June. This person was also the very first local player I ever met at a Raid, and used to say hi to me driving around at night in places I was playing the game. This person has been so overtly passive aggressive towards me, and also tries to play it off at other times like it’s fine. But the cold shoulder treatment is so overt when they show up to Raids. Acting nonchalant but also actually repulsed by me, or that I don’t exist. Or: sure! I’ll help you.... sorry, I have to leave. Over and over!

Well, after mentioning a number of things recently ( if u scroll through my posts) u can see what I had to say about my recent successes getting 2 new PokeGyms myself that were MAJOR. Stella Tirrell and South Field. Any of these local players could’ve submitted any of those nominations but never bothered to BECAUSE the intel came from me.

So, when that nomination FINALLY wet into the VOTING on Thursday Night, by the morning it was screwed.

When I checked the email and saw the reasons why, I WAS FLOORED!

This was NOT just some instance of a lazy person reviewing and just picking any reason. It says “the Niantic Community of Players” decided this.

Think about that.

Multiple people went looking to find ANYTHING matching the locations where they knew I wanted PokéStops and meticulously went through ALL of the rejection reasons and SPECIFICALLY picked to accuse me of committing a crime!

Not claiming my photos were bad.

No. They accused me of abusing Niantic’s system to commit a crime to harm people in my community.

Well, I let others know in my community, and on social media.

I find it to be very strange than within a few hours a different PokéStop nomination went through in South Field. It’s just so strange!

Dude! Just play fair!

Even if I didn’t like someone, Or didn’t approve of them, I WOULD NEVER EVER ABUSE NIANTIC’S system to hurt Another player, or try to destroy their credibility to submit a PokéStop nomination. I would NEVER stoop so low as to lower my self worth enough to be THAT MALICIOUS! I have self respect. And a person that has self respect is respectful to others, and treats others with dignity.

I also wouldn’t go out of my way to try and kick people out of the game, or stop them from ever playing the game again, or stop having access to the Discord server.

There’s definitely been some very bad things done to me that qualify as bullying. I don’t like it. But, I don’t want to kick them out of the game permanently, or have them banned from the Discord server. I’m not evil like u are. I also know that some of these people are kids. But, it’s pretty messed up when it’s adult men. U literally shame yourselves.

Just because I’m getting old, don’t have my own car, am jobless & live in poverty, and I can’t memorize every name of every single Pokémon ever, or can’t memorize every single PVP Combo or Raid Couter doesn’t mean I’m stupid. I’m not a male player, and I can’t change my gender because I’m a woman -an aging woman! I’m not young. I’m not sexy. And u hate me for some unknown reason. But u really need to check YOURSELF !

This was TOO FAR!

There was NOTHING wrong with my nomination. I looked up so much information about South Field Naval Airbase from multiple sources. I have read through so much archival data. I’m so much more informed about this area than anyone else. But anyone could do this if they just bothered to! Like, JUST READ! I’ve been working on this since 2018! It mattered to me. But also, other people were HAPPY and THANKFUL for the work I did. But I can’t write an encyclopedia as a nomination.

I did a Good thing.

Nobody likes BAD DEEDS nor those whom do them.

If u think that those of u whom all actively decided to attack me using Niantic’s system are people that u could trust, or whether they trust u, think again. They will ALWAYS remember that u all got together to attack my reputation, and it will always be in the back of their mind. Eventually, someone will always either screw u, or it will backfire in some way. Their is no honor among criminals, thieves, gangsters. If they can do it together with you against me, what makes u think at some point they might not do it to you the moment it suits them? Or, they will always assume u did these kinds of things.

Just don’t do it.

You know it’s wrong.

Just stop it, and move on.

You really need to think about what kind of person you really are, what your values are, and what kind of person you are vs what kind of person you SHOULD be.

If u have been putting up a front of who u want people to think u are, and I know you are, then u need to get to the root of why that is.

#niantic wayfarer #wayfarer #pokemon go #bullying #cyberbullying #abuse

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homestuckexamination · 6 years

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HSE - Patreon Essays

Been thinking about how I am going to be doing this, how to make it interesting, reaching beyond just the Homestuck Bubble... Sure, Patreon is mostly a tool to help support me while I keep writing, but I need to become more active and have a schedule to make it worth it to support me in the first place! So before I rush, anything, let me share the current ideas I had:

First of all, all of my writing will be out there for free, I’m not gonna put a paywall on that, not after I’ve been making these for free for over a year, duh! That being said, Patrons will have early access to the content as I write, as well as other perks, namely directing the kind of stuff I will be writing about next.

I also don’t want to stagnate in Homestuck- As much as I like the webcomic, and as much as there is to analyze about it, that’s not what I want this to be about. I’m more interested about the underlying message in Homestuck’s narrative, and what I have learned about storytelling and analysis in general through Homestuck- Analysis through its lenses, but not necessarily OF only Homestuck. Basically, how you can understand more about a work or about life through the use of another work, comparisons in models of hyperflexible mythology, Classpect Analysis of other characters, message and impact of other works, and the way Fandom and Society do stuff in general, as seen from this perspective. Also the way Homestuck has changed me and, in a more Meta way, the way writing those and analyzing stuff has changed my perception of things, maybe even some sort of guide or advice regarding analysis in general! It sounds kinda complex! But that’s fine.

To structure this chaos into something more palatable, I’ve decided to divide my writing in Tiers! Where a Tier 0 would be the stuff I’ll still answer on my blog- General trivia about the comic, quick thoughts on events, theories of one thing or another... Really, most of the content I answer from Asks.

Tier 1 essays wouldn’t be too long, but I cannot assure that because once I get going I can go for god damn hours. They’d be more focused on smaller analysis of character through their Classpect, potential of characters, theories and different ways of seeing certain events, talk about Fandom events and perhaps even the state of the world and the importance of certain things and themes in fiction. I’m thinking a majority of my content should be Tier 1 essays, more in-depth than the quick little thoughts I give on the blog, but no massive, sprawling stuff either that goes in-depth about every detail and minutia.

Tier 2 essays would be the big kickers I would begin pumping out more often if my Patreon works well. Think of my unfinished Masterpiece Analysis of Homestuck, but taking more time to redact my point and hopefully not making it a hundred-paragraph monstrosity that takes up your Tumblr feed. Analysis of other works through the lens of Homestuck, putting into words the depth I see in Homestuck’s systems, and more long-winded talks about the impact of the world on us and us on the world through fiction and fandom.

I’d be potentially making a Discord server for Patrons, too, allowing more direct communication and discussion on where to go and what stuff to cover next. If things go ideally, I should be able to keep a flow of Tier 0s, while making around 2-3 Tier 1 Essays and one Tier 2 Essay on a monthly basis,

So, ultimately, my idea for the Patron would be something like this:

-Free Content: Everything in my HSE blog will still keep getting posted and Tier 0 analysis will come as I get asks about stuff and answer them with my thoughts! All other Tiers of analysis will also eventually be released. Posted on Tumblr, making a Blog somewhere else, going to Medium, I may have to figure out a platform, but I’ll keep a repository of my analysis around.

-$1 Patrons: The basic support tier that’d grant access to the Discord when I get it up and running, as well as the ability to vote and influence the stuff I will be covering next, and gaining access to the finished essays before they’re posted publicly and freely.

-$2 Patrons: For those wanting to show more support, a friend invite to the Discord and access to the Drafts while I’m working on them.

-$5 Patrons: Anyone in this tier will be able to enter their name on a monthly roulette thingy, and the name chosen each month will get a sprite of an OC of their choosing in the traditional Homestuck style! Something like:

That’s what I’ve got for now, but other ideas for Tiers, rewards, Essay stuff and such would he heavily appreciated, specially given my ideas for the 2-dollar Patron Tier aren’t that great. It depends on what you guys want to see, and I want you all to be able to get in on the choices I make and the things I write! I also still need to at least prepare topics to choose from to start with and begin making essays before putting the Patreon up.

There’s a lot of work to be done, but this is more or less the base I’m working with internally, so please, give me your input and, again, stuff you would like to see me cover in the future! Also do take into account I’m not aware of every Fandom Phenomenon and every Work ever made, so if there’s a high interest in me covering a specific series, I will need time to actually go through the Series in the first place or need help learning enough about it to be able to write competently about it!

Yeah this is me kind of just throwing a whole bunch of stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. Regardless of what direction I take this in, thank you all for 3333 Followers and so much support!

#Homestuck #Patreon #Essays #Writing #Hiveswap #HSE

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gwenbrightly · 6 years

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Maybe

Cross posted from ffnet. Hello everyone! Welcome to the fic that was supposed to be my Valentines Day special… But… I'm not great with deadlines, so it's a few days late. "Maybe" is centered around Kai and Skylor, and takes place between s4 and s5. I've taken some liberties here with how Master Chen's Noodle House operates, and a few other things, but I really hope you enjoy my first attempt at writing Kailor! It was definitely interesting, trying to find the right balance between awkward dorkiness and adorable fluff, but I had a lot of fun writing this, as random as it turned out! Enjoy!

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Skylor stared balefully at her watch, silently willing the meeting she was currently in the middle of to reach its end before she got driven insane. The past month had been an exhausting, chaotic mess for her, and she was ready for it to be over. Following her father's banishment to the cursed realm, she had begun fighting to rebuild his noodle empire in a much less criminally inclined way. There had been little time to relax; she'd barely been able to appreciate the fact that she was living on her own terms for the first time in her life before being thrust into the process of orchestrating the many changes that needed to be made. Countless hours had been dedicated to debating and discussing, interviewing and observing, adjusting and questioning. All in the hopes of giving those associated with the many branches of the popular restaurant a chance at a new beginning. And it was nice, to have a purpose. But there were times where she debated whether or not she was actually making any headway.

"But if we reconfigure our employee rights policy as you have proposed, production may be negatively effected, which will most certainly lead to a significant decrease in profit..." A representative from one of the noodle factories pointed out, not at all pleased with the adjustments the redhead had just described. Sometimes she wondered if the individual in question wanted her to fail. She could've sworn she heard someone grunt in agreement. The bespectacled young women across the table from her glanced up from her Borg tablet in concern. Skylor shook her head. Best not to let this situation get out of hand.

"I am aware of that, Mr. Millers. I've already told you multiple times that I am more than prepared to deal with the consequences of any adjustments we make as long as it allows us to give Master Chen's Noodle House the positive reputation it deserves. So, really, I'm not sure why you've brought this up again." She said with a sigh. How much longer before she could retreat to the safety of her apartment? 10, 15 more minutes?

"Miss Chen has made great progress over the past few weeks. Just think of how popular the puffy potstickers have become since she decided to put them back on the menu." June, her recently hired assistant manager added quietly. Yes, she had made the right decision in selecting this girl to join her tightly knit team of employees, even if she was rather soft spoken.

"I am merely... concerned that these changes have not been thought out sufficiently. This business has existed for decades... It would be a shame if someone were to... Run it into the ground with unrealistic dreams..." The man replied in an oily tone, giving her a very fake smile. Skylor frowned. Such behavior was only going to make the meeting more tedious. It was official. He definitely wouldn't mind seeing her slip up.

"First of all, the lack of pay and deplorable working conditions seen in many of our more rural factories could be considered illegal, as I'm sure you know, and second of all, don't think I'm oblivious to what you are insinuating. I had hoped that your expertise and years of experience would be beneficial in reforming my father's business, but if you continue to undermine my judgement and fight me at every turn, I will be forced to ask you to leave." She informed Mr. Millers with a pointed stare. He deflated slightly but didn't seem overly thrilled to have been called out on his behavior.

"...As you wish, Ms. Chen..." For now.

"Good." Skylor declared forcefully, sharing an exasperated look with June, " I propose that we begin implementing adjustments as planned, then. To start with, all workers will now be entitled to a 15 minute break every three hours, and a half an hour break after five. Shifts will be no longer than nine hours, and we are increasing pay to minimum wage. All in favor?" She and June raised their hands immediately. The head delivery truck driver, quality control specialist, and several faculty members hailing from various locations, joined them, eventually, leaving a disgruntled Mr. Millers and one additional factory representative as the only opposers.

"That's eight for and two against. Sorry, Mr. Millers, but it looks like majority wins in this case." Skylor's assistant declared, hurriedly typing the results of the vote for posterity. She didn't appear even remotely apologetic about this turn of events.

"Thank you, everyone, for being so flexible. I know we've experienced a lot of changes lately, but I truly believe they will help make Master Chen's more successful in the long run. Now, is there anything else we need to discuss? I know many of you have families to get home to, so I'd prefer not to drag this meeting out any more than we have to, especially on a Saturday." Skylor commented with a relieved smile. Almost finished...

"I vote we call it quits. Today's supposed to be date night with the wife." Offered the truck driver. The others nodded their assent. Even those who were dissatisfied with the outcome of the meeting were ready to depart.

"Okay, then. Enjoy the rest of your weekend. I'll see all of you next week, alright?" The redhead called as conference room exploded into a flurry of chairs being pushed forward and paperwork being packed away.

"Phew. Glad that's over." June told her, watching everyone leave.

"Yep. We survived another run in with the infamous Mr. Millers."

"He sure is determined to throw you to the sharks... I don't know how you do it..."

"It isn't easy, but I'm sure he'll come around. Eventually. Or he'll just straight up quit. But it helps to have such a good team on my side." Skylor replied, elbowing her, "You've been a great help in getting everything organized. I really appreciate all your hard work. And June? Tell Chad I say hello... I can see his car in the parking lot." The assistant manager's cheeks flushed.

"Oh. O-of course. See you tomorrow... Please try to relax a little. I don't wanna end up having to run this place all by myself if you overwork yourself to death..."

"No promises, but I'll try. Now get yourself outta here – don't need keep that boyfriend of yours waiting, right? " The young woman told her friend, practically shoving her out the door.

"Okay, okay. I'm going. Bye!"

"Bye." At least one of them had something enjoyable to do with the remainder of the afternoon.

"Miss Chen? A-are you leaving? There's a customer who's been asking for you for the past half an hour…" The waitress who had suddenly appeared by her side informed her. Skylor cursed her luck. It looked like relaxation would have to wait.

"Where?" She asked, exhaling deeply.

"The corner booth over by the window. You can't miss him…" The waitress replied, pointing. Better get this over with, then, she thought, wandering towards the table she'd been directed to. The master of amber took her time, reluctant to engage in another potentially frustrating conversation.

"Hello? Someone said you wanted to see me… is there a problem?" She inquired, drawing closer.

"Oh, there's no problem," The person replied casually, turning so she could see their face, "I just wanted to talk to the prettiest restaurant owner in all of Ninjago City, that all." And then recognition dawned on her.

"Kai?" Skylor gasped in surprise.

"The one and only. Do you have time to talk for bit?" The spiky haired ninja smiled widely.

"Uh... Sure, definitely. It's been awhile... How have you been since the tournament?" She commented, eagerly slipping onto the bench opposite his.

"Oh, you know, the usual. Trying to keep Cole and Jay from killing each other. Making sure Lloyd actually sleeps at night and isn't living entirely off of peach rings. Solving minor problems for civilians. You hear about that bank robbery last week? Yeah, that was us." Kai told her with a shrug. The redhead's eyes widened.

"Wow, really? Sounds like you've been busy, then."

"Yeah. That's why I wasn't able to visit sooner – though I really wanted to... Especially since Master Wu's decided he wants to try his hand at tea making. He's got all of us helping him remodel Garmadon's old monastery so he can use it as a teashop." She wished he had been able to drop by before now, but she'd take what she could get.

"Oh. That's... That's an interesting decision. How is Lloyd taking it?" He looked a touch guilty, probably worried about his honorary brother. She'd gotten the impression that they were an extremely close-knit family. What would it be like to be part of something like that? Skylor wondered.

"It's hard to tell. He says he's just happy to have his team back together again... We're hoping he really is cool with it, but… getting him to talk about his feelings is like pulling teeth sometimes..."

"Yeesh. Sounds about right from what I've seen of him."

"Basically… But enough about me and my crazy family drama, even if I do admit to being a little worried about the kid. How has life been treating you these days?" Kai questioned (after all, he had come to see her, and she clearly needed to de-stress).

"It's been… hectic, to say the least. You wouldn't believe the number of sketchy business agreements my father made while he was still… around… I've been trying to undo most of them, but it takes time… and, well… there are people who are definitely not gung-ho about all the changes I'm making…" Skylor disclosed with a weary sigh. The master of fire reached across the table and clasped her hands.

"That sucks. I'm sure it'll get better soon, though. You have a that crazy way of winning people over with minimal effort. Few can resist your powers of persuasion." Was it just her, or was the room suddenly much hotter than it had been before?

"Thanks, but not everyone feels the way you do… I just hope it blows over soon. These weekend meetings – that's where I was when you got here – they're killing me… I've barely had time to sleep, let alone enjoy the city…"

"Sounds like you need to get away more… D-do you wanna… Go do something with me to get your mind off of everything?" Kai offered. Skylor froze for a second.

"A-are you asking me out? Like on a date?" She found herself saying, immediately cursing herself for being so forward. This… Dynamic between the two of them was difficult to define. They'd grown incredibly close while on her father's island, but then… she just wasn't quite sure where they stood now…

"Er… Maybe…? I-if you want it to be? I mean, we never did get to play tourist, so…? What I'm saying is… I enjoy you and I… I'd love to spend more time together…and… " The spiky haired young man rambled, smiling awkwardly. His cheeks were noticeably rosier than before. Oh. Yes, she would most certainly be interested in doing so.

"Okay, then… I'd love to go on a maybe date with you, Kai. Thanks for asking." She decided, smirking. His face brightened.

"Great! This is great! So… Uh, when are you free?"

"Say the word and I can be ready in five minutes?"

"Really?"

"Sure. Just lemme grab my purse. That should give you plenty of time to figure out what we're doing…" Skylor said, untangling her hands from Kai's and heading for her office. So, her weekend wouldn't be as tedious as she'd been expecting after all.

______________________________________________________________

"You know, it's gonna be a little hard for me to get out of your car with my eyes shut…" The redhead complained a bit later as she felt the vehicle come to a stop. She could hear the sound of Kai's laughter from the driver's seat.

"Don't worry. I'll make sure you don't face plant."

"That's such a comfort, Kai. Really, I feel much better knowing you're there to catch me..." Skylor replied, resisting the urge to peek. He ignored her sass in favor of exiting the car and slipping around to the passenger side.

"Here," The master of fire said, grabbing her hand and helping her step onto the asphalt outside.

"So, you gonna tell me where we are?" She asked, ready to be permitted to open her eyes again.

"Nope. Not yet. I want it to be a surprise." Her companion informed her. Kai gently gripped her elbow to keep her from losing her way. He was certainly taking this seriously given how spur of the moment it had been. It was kind of adorable.

"It's just a little further." Together, they wandered towards the unknown destination.

"I'm trusting you that when I finally get to open my eyes , I won't be standing in the middle of a sewage system or something." Joked Skylor as the master of fire's pace slowed.

"Geez, I'm not that mean… and I'll have you know that Ninjago City's sewers are actually a very interesting place to explore." He started defensively, "Though, on second thought, we'd probably both rather not run into any Serpentine right now, so. Guess I can't really judge too much…"

"I was kidding, dork. But yeah, maybe save that for another time?"

"Well, uh… We're here, so, you can look now." Kai stated awkwardly.

"Whoah. S' bright out here…" The girl blinked furiously. He slung an arm around her shoulders.

"Well, you see, that's what you get for spending all day inside that restaurant of yours dealing with prickly business men. No time to enjoy the sun." She seriously contemplated whipping him in the face with her ponytail, but ultimately chose not to. Looking around, she caught sight of the rather large sign just in front of them.

"I'm sure it has nothing to do with the fact that I've been pretty much blind since we left the restaurant… The Ninjago City Zoo, huh?"

"I-is this okay? It was the first thing I thought of, and-" The master of fire inquired nervously.

"It's totally fine. I've been meaning to come here, anyway. It'll be way more fun when I've got someone to enjoy it with." She assured him with a smile. Kai returned the smile in relief.

"Shall we?" They linked arms and pressed forward, joining the surprisingly short line of people waiting to get in.

Entrance fee paid, the two soon found themselves standing near a large map with arrows pointing to the various attractions and areas within the park.

"So. There's a peacock on the loose. Should I be concerned?" Skylor observed, attention temporarily drawn away from their discussion of which route to take. Kai glanced where she was looking. A very self satisfied bird was currently strutting about, fanning its brilliant feathers for all to see. Several children followed it in fascination. He snapped a picture on his phone to show the others later.

"Nah, it's pretty common for one to be wandering around like that. They're super tame. You're not, like, allergic or anything, right?" She shook her head.

"Nope. It's just… My father tried to keep one as a pet when I was little, and I guess I've never really…"

"Tried?" Her eyes lit up at the question.

"Well, we only had it for a few weeks. It absolutely hated Clouse – I don't know what he did to anger it – but it was always chasing him down the hallways screeching and stuff? Let me tell you, those things may be beautiful to look at, but they make the worst noises imaginable. It was hilarious to watch, though. He'd just be minding his own business, and that stupid bird would come flying at him like he'd murdered its young." The redhead explained, giggling as she remembered the man's plight.

"Seriously? That's priceless?" Kai declared, laughing with her.

"Yeah, and you should've seen how many times he complained about it, too. He was always like, Master, your pet just tried to make me into a pincushion again. Why do you insist on putting up with such a ridiculous creature? Don't you have a button to make it go away? And my father would just go on and on about how glorious its feathers were and how it was worth more than all of Clouse's hair dye collection."

"Wait-Clouse dyed his hair?" Kai wheezed.

"Ooh, now I'm giving away all my dark family secrets. Better watch out, or I'll start spilling the secret recipe for puffy pot stickers or something…" She teased.

"So, what happened to it?"

"Darn thing ended up being released into the wild. Father couldn't bring himself to get rid of it completely, you know, just in case he ended up needing a way to mess with Clouse again… I think it's still on the island somewhere. Used to see it every once in awhile when I went hiking and stuff."

"That has to be one of the coolest stories I've heard in a long time." The master of fire asserted.

"It's… something, alright." Skylor admitted, "Where to first?"

"Have you ever seen a camel?"

As it turned out, while Master Chen's island had contained a variety of exotic creatures, Skylor had in fact, never been near a camel before. So, of course, the spiky haired ninja was more than happy to change that.

"C'mon Skylor, I have a great idea." He informed her, dragging her down the pathway, at breakneck speed, dodging other people as they went.

"Could we maybe slow down a bit?" She panted.

"Sorry, no can do. We don't wanna be late for feeding time. You'll be missing out on a pretty cool opportunity if we do."

"Wait… What?"

They arrived at the exhibit just as the zookeeper began explaining procedures for meal time interaction.

"If you just hold out your hand like this," The zookeeper demonstrated, pressing some treats into their hands. Apparently Skylor was going to be getting up close and personal with the large mammal.

"Nice and steady, Brenda, here, probably won't spit on you."

"Probably." The redhead commented, bemused.

"Yeah, these are her favorite treats."

"What am I even doing right now?" She pondered, turning to Kai.

"Having fun. Duh."

"You won't be saying that if the camel spits on you." Skylor pointed out.

"The chances of that happening are like, super slim. In all the times I've been here before, it's never even come close to being a problem. And besides, I'll still look awesome, even if I do end up with spit in my hair." He insisted cockily.

"Whatever you say, fire boy." She said, finally following the zookeeper's instructions. Hand held out, she watched as the camel approached her. Luckily, Brenda was only interested in daintily consuming the offering of food that was being presented to her, and refrained from salivating on anyone. She nudged the redhead's shoulder playfully when she was finished, looking for more food.

"Sorry," Skylor told the creature, "That's all I got. Go bug Kai. He still has some."

"See? She's just a big softie…" The master of fire stated, letting the camel nibble on the treats he held.

"Yeah, kinda like someone else I know." She replied with an innocent smirk. He raised an eyebrow.

"No clue who that could be..."

"Course' not. Thank you for letting us participate in this. It was surprisingly fun." The girl commented to the zookeeper as they made their departure.

"Okay, you get to choose where we're going this time." Kai stated, linking arms with her.

"You sure you wanna trust me with that? I might make you visit your brethren the porcupines."

" First it was hedgehogs, and now this? Why does everyone always want to compare me to prickly animals?" He groaned in mock irritation, continuing to wander down the trail.

"Well, I mean, you could always restyle your hair?" She suggested.

"Never! I like it the way it is."

"Who am I to stand in your way, then? C'mon, the lions should be just up ahead." They walked in companionable silence, enjoying the nice weather and the distraction from their chaotic lives. Several hours were spent exploring the zoo. Kai showed her all the best places to stand in order to get the perfect view of the animals. Skylor's phone quickly filled with pictures. Good natured teasing was shot back any forth. The sun had begun to set by the time they'd seen everything there was to see. An afternoon well spent, for both of them.

________________________________________________________________"Hey Sky?" Kai called softly, shaking the sleeping redheads shoulder, "Skylor? We're here."

"Wuh?" She asked blearily, running at her eyes. The day's events had clearly wiped her out.

"We're just outside your apartment. You fell asleep pretty much as soon as I pulled out of the parking lot."

"Oh." She was home already?

"Yeah. But that's okay… I mean, we did do an awful lot of walking, and I know you were already tired before we even left Master Chen's, so…" He assured her.

"Hey, Kai?"

"Yeah?"

"Thanks. For today, I mean. It was… It was nice to get away for awhile. With you."

"It was" He agreed, wishing the moment could last longer.

"Let's try not to wait so long between visits next time, okay? I-I missed you…" The girl admitted. Next time?

"I missed you, too… I'll do my best to drop by more often." Promised the master of fire. Skylor shot him a weary grin.

"Well. Good. I, uh… I'll text you?"

"Sounds like a plan."

"Goodbye," She said, giving him a side hug. It only lasted for a second, but it was full of warmth.

"Bye. I… I hope things with your restaurant calm down soon…" Kai stated.

"Me too. Good luck with the tea business. Maybe I'll drop by sometime."

"I'd like that." Reluctantly climbing from the vehicle, Skylor gave one last wave before heading inside. Although it would end up being awhile before either of them were ready (or able) to commit to anything official, this day would always be locked in their memories as one of the best moments in the beginnings of their relationship. Their lives would be busy, and filled with danger, but, eventually, they would find their way. Almost as soon as the redhead had left, the master of fire's phone began to vibrate. How on earth did his sister have such perfect timing?

_______________________________________________________________

Nya: So, how was ur DATE with Skylor?!

Kai: #1, it wasn't even anything official. #2, how on earth did u know what I was up to? Stalker.

Nya: It wasn't even that hard to figure out. Ur so hopelessly in love that I couldn't help but notice.

Kai: What? U know that doesn't answer my question – right?

Nya: Fine. Green bean and I checked the tracking device on ur phone.

Nya: We got bored. And there's only ONE reason u'd visit the noodle place. It doesn't take a genius.

Kai: Invasion of privacy, much?

Nya: I call sibling rights.

Kai: Whatever, dorks.

Kai: And for the record, it went great.

Nya: ASDJDHFHSJA! Details?

Kai: Patience, sis. Tell u when I get back.

Nya: Better drive fast then. I'm waiting.

Kai: Kay. I'll make sure to completely ignore every speed limit posting I see.

Nya: Fine. Fair point. Don't get urself arrested. I'm not bailing u out.

Kai: Sure thing. Imma be home soon.

Nya: Love u.

Kai: love u 2.

#ninjago #ninjago fanfiction #fanfiction #myfics #skylor #kai #kailor #heartwarming fluff #and awkwardness #and i'm sorry about the shark line (you know who you are)

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gingerandwry · 6 years

Text

Memphis, Tennessee

My first night in Memphis I settled into my AirBnB-- a large ground floor of a duplex decked out in music-related imagery, furniture and knick-knacks-- then drove downtown for a late dinner at Belle Tavern, a newish upscale Southern restaurant and bar. The restaurant was closed (which saved me some money) so I ate off the bar menu and chatted with the friendly staff. That night I enjoyed the biggest, longest thunderstorm I’ve ever witnessed-- from the comfort of my bed.

On my last visit to Memphis I did most of the interesting things here so I decided to use this time to catch up on this blog, The Economist, my Portuguese lessons, travel planning and exercise. On my first day I finally left at 1pm and headed to Gus’s for their world-famous friend chicken. It does not disappoint. Then I headed to the National Civil Rights Museum which I had been sad to miss last time.

It’s housed in the former Lorraine Motel, where Dr. King was shot. When it opened in 1991 it was the country’s first civil rights museum (and it’s affiliated with the Smithsonian, which is how it became “National”). The museums I had just seen in Birmingham and Jackson are considerably newer and are in states that witnessed a lot more action in the struggle. (Tennessee was also a Jim Crow state but its racists were apparently less murderous.) The experience is heavy from the start. As you approach the highly recognizable motel, you see a wreath hanging on the balcony where Dr. King was felled. A plaque then directs your eyes to a run-down brick building across the street and the window in the former boarding house from which James Earl Ray fired the bullet (allegedly-- more on that later). After a deep breath, I entered the building.

This museum stands out from the others I visited in two main ways. First its focus is national, not on a specific state. Second, it’s arranged not chronologically but episodically. So after introductory sections on slavery, Plessy and Jim Crow, each room tells the story of a notable episode during the struggle: Brown, Rosa Parks, Freedom Rides, Bombingham, lunch counter sit-ins, March on Washington, etc. At first I didn’t like this, as I thought, one, it would glamorize certain people and events while ignoring the “foot soldiers; and two, the historical timeline would become confused thus lessening the impact. The first concern was unfounded as the display were extremely detailed and thorough. And the non-sequential approach ends up also having merits; visitors can fully immerse themselves in the parts without getting lost trying to piece them together. The only problem is the crowds (which a sign in the lobby warned about). I ended up sandwiched between a tour group and a high school group and so scurried through some areas I would have liked to explore more. In part the museum design is to blame-- it’s confined to the original small structure of the Lorraine-- and in part it’s because addresses a popular, important subject, so the crowds are a good thing.

The museum also ends the story in a novel way. The passage of the Voting Rights Act is the first ending, but there are several codas. First, visitors enter the recreated rooms of the hotel where Dr. King was staying, and a window reveals the balcony as well as a view of the assassin’s building across the street. It’s very powerful. Following coverage of the immediate aftermath of his death, the displays then turn to the Black Power and Afro-centrism movements of the lates 1960s and early 70s, followed by the enduring legacy of the Civil Rights Movement. I think it’s inspired to point out that even tho the concept of Black Power doesn’t sit as comfortably with many whites as Dr. King’s non-violent resistance, it’s an equally important part of the same struggle. This museum also highlights throughout the many inequalities that blacks still face, such as the way most cities and schools are still segregated and the black political representation is still short of its potential.

And then things get really interesting... Across the street, in the boarding house where the assassin’s bullet came from, a newish wing examines the manhunt and trial that put Ray in jail (and displays the purported rifle). It then details the controversy that has surrounded the assassination ever since: the idea that Ray didn’t do it, that he didn’t do it alone and/or that he acted at someone else’s behest. Three separate commissions looked at the evidence, including the Justice Department and FBI in 1999 and 2000, and these displays very carefully and thoroughly present their findings. These investigations debunked some theories, but they raise A LOT of questions, and visitors are left to draw their own conclusions. Ultimately the more recent commissions decided Ray probably acted alone (tho they deemed a lot of witnesses, police and prosecutors unreliable) but he probably expected payment. From whom is unknown; the suspect list is quite long. It’s rare that a museum (especially a National one) would treat “conspiracy” theories so thoroughly and with such gravitas-- and not really try to dispel the conspiracy. Imagine the Kennedy Presidential Library doing that. I believe this reflexes the belief of some of the King family that Ray did not act alone and their attempt to uncover the truth.

All that mystery made me hungry again so I ate at nearby Central BBQ which was obviously delicious. Then it was home for more catch up. For dinner I was craving something non-Southern so I went to Los Comelos. I thought it was a nice-ish Mexican restaurant, but it turns out to be a local family chain. Food was tasty enough tho. Then it was over to the Pumping Station for some drinks and conversation before bed.

On Thursday I woke up and headed to nearby Cooper-Young for breakfast. The neighborhood was not as happening as I thought it would be so I drove north up Cooper Street (Midtown’s main drag) to a good ol’ diner called Barksdale. After a cheap, basic, tasty breakfast, I continued north to the Overton Park neighborhood which was much more bustling than Cooper-Young. I drove in and around the park to peep some of the shmanciest homes in the city.

I then drove to Stax Museum of American Soul, the legendary studio that produced some of the biggest, best soul acts of the late 60s and early 70s. The 20 minute film that starts the tour really tells you everything you need to know, but the following displays go into much greater detail. I appreciated how they taught musical history, describing the sources of various influences like gospel, country and blues and how these all converged in Memphis. The museum also seeks to tell a broader story of black music, so it also features contemporaries and followers like Motown, Mussel Shoals, funk and disco and fairly give credit (and blame) where it’s due. The artifacts are numerous but not all that impressive-- mainly records and covers along with some clothes. (One big exception is Isaac Hayes’ gold trimmed, fur lined Cadillac with TV and fridge accompanied by a video of him describing how awesome it was.) The best part of course is the music and videos. The Stax story, like so many in the music industry, ends sadly and in bankruptcy. In fact it’s only in the fine print at the end that we learn the original building was torn down in the 80s and the current one is a recreation. That feels like kind of a gyp, but overall it’s a good experience and a good lesson in music history.

The rain returned that night so I just walked to the closet bar/restaurant, Young Avenue Deli. Seemed like a fun place (with a stage!). As I was leaving, trivia night was beginning. The first question was “What two countries share land borders with Sweden?” Is that what passes for trivia in Memphis?! On the way home I stopped for beer at the very friendly Hammer & Ale bar/store.

The next morning I set out for Nashville. I had planned to take the Natchez Trace Parkway most of the way since it’s a lovely, historic road. But it was raining across the entire state so I opted for the I-40 straight shot. Driving for three hours in rain was hellish, and the road was surprisingly crowded and torn up and the drivers pretty incompetent and/or inconsiderate (especially the truckers). But the scenery was pretty, especially the second half. I must have passed at least 20 state parks full of fall-colored forests, as well as some lovely water ways and charming farm houses. It almost made of for the misery of the drive.

#memphis #tennessee #travel #gaytravel #intentionaltravel

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