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itsallyscorner · 2 years ago

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Maple syrup, coffee, pancakes for two | H.S

pairing: boyfriend!Harry Styles x reader

summary: you unintentionally help Harry with a song he’s been struggling to write

warnings: a lil on the cheesy side tbh, but she’s cute. Mentions the pandemic

a/n: this was one from the drafts, originally written when Harry’s House was released and I finally got around to finishing it :)

Sometime during 2020 and the pandemic

His soft murmurs and humming were the only sounds that can be heard in his makeshift studio. The occasionally creaking of the house or him clicking his pen would break the silence from time to time. His frame was hunched over on the burnt orange colored couch, with his knees almost pressed against his chest, the couch was far too small for his tall figure. However, he liked the couch and it was comfy to lay on when he took breaks from writing. The journal he used to jot down lyrics was balanced on his left knee while his right hand scribbled words on the paper sloppily.

He had just gotten off a zoom call with Kid, Mitch, and some other members who he’s been working with for his new album. While they were supposed to be working in the studio for today’s session, one of the writers had come down with a cold. While it wasn’t confirmed to be COVID, Harry and his team decided it would be safe if everyone just isolated themselves for a while until further notice. Harry actually enjoyed the thought of working on the album at his home. He considered this to be one of the most intimate albums he’s ever made. The artist in him believed that being in the place where he’s comfortable being vulnerable would allow him to write more personal songs. Being home also allowed him to be closer to his muse—you.

The small claw clip holding his fringe from his face began to feel a bit too tight and his eyes were straining against the warm toned light to look at the page on his journal. He had been stuck on a certain verse for a while now and couldn’t bring himself to just call it a day on writing. He had been on the grind when he first started it, but all of a sudden his verses were turning into single words waiting to be properly knitted into a song. So far, some words/phrases he had were:

Wine glass

Puff pass

Side boob ;)

Cocaine

Toothache

Yellow sunglasses

They were the most random and absurd words to be grouped together, yet he knew he was going somewhere with whatever he had. His train of thought came to a halt when your voice rang through the room.

“Hey, you”

His eyes shifted towards your voice and there you were leaning against the door frame. You wore one of his old sweatshirts, which came up to your knees, and some socks on your feet. You weren’t wearing much but your presence and the soft smile gracing your features screamed comfort to him.

The slight frown on Harry’s face turned into a smile that resembled yours. Pushing off of the door frame, you slowly approached Harry’s spot on the couch.

“Hi angel.” He greeted you, spreading his legs out to make space for you. You happily make your way in between his legs and settle on the floor. You crossed your legs and sat so you were looking up at him. Harry craned his neck to place a kiss on your temple, his lips continuing to move down your face to spread little kisses all over your face. When he got to your lips he placed a soft peck on them with a smile on his own pinkish lips.

“Hope you don’t mind me bothering you.” You tease, the sweet smile still on your face. Harry scoffs playfully, “Y’never a bother to me. I missed you today, what’ve y’been up to?”

He’s been in the “studio” since the morning, having a quick breakfast with you and immediately hopping on zoom to work with his team. It was now 6pm and you couldn’t recall seeing or hearing your boyfriend leave the room throughout the day for a break or a snack—which led to you checking in on him.

“Not much, finished up some things for work and caught up on some Love Island.” You shrugged, Harry rolling his eyes jokingly at the mention of the reality tv show. “How ‘bout you? Was today’s session successful?” You ask. Harry hums, reaching for his journal.

“S’half ‘n half. We finished that track we wrote last month��don’t know if y’remember it—but it turned out really great. I have a good feeling ‘bout it once it’s out.” He began while still flipping back to the page he last wrote on. “I started writing another, b’now I’m just stuck. M’brain feels like it can’t think of anything else, s’blank.” He ranted using his hands to express his emotions. You let out a chuckle as you avoid one of his large hands waving around from hitting your face.

“Maybe it’s time for you to take a break, H. You’ve been here all day, god knows how long you’ve been slouched on this couch.” For emphasis, you nudge said couch, Harry shooting you a look.

“S’not a bad couch, leave m’couch alone.” He pouts, silently agreeing that it was definitely time for a break. You duck out of his arms and get up, walking towards the door. Harry follows, moving to get up but halts his movements when a crack comes from his back. You swiftly turn around with your eyes wide and an amused look.

“Oi m’back!” Harry exclaimed in shock. He stood there for second before making eye contact with you. The two of you burst out laughing.

“I fucking told you!” You pointed at him, only to be gently pushed out the door by Harry who was muttering for you to “shuddup”.

Despite the two of you being home, Harry linked his fingers with yours while you both walked to the kitchen. His large hand engulfed yours, his rough thumb stroking the top of your hand.

“I’m actually hungry.” Harry thought aloud once the kitchen came to view. He was wondering what he should eat, deciding between leftovers, cooking, or ordering in. However, he let out a gasp when he saw food already on the table.

He turned around to you beaming, “Y’made my favorite!” On the dining table were pancakes, hash browns, eggs, and coffee. Even though he was eating healthier, Harry believed that one can never go wrong with breakfast for dinner. The main reason why he loved it was because of a memory you both shared during the early stages of your relationship.

The two of you had overslept at his house after movie night and skipped dinner. By the time you both woke up, everything was closed. So the two of you ended up rummaging through his kitchen only to find eggs, pancake mix, frozen hash browns, and coffee. Harry loved that night so much because it was the moment you two truly got to know each other more and connected. It was like finally breaking the barrier of whatever was holding you back from one another. Till this day he remembers the sleepy haze behind your eyes as you shared stories from your past. Your mascara smudged beneath your eyes and your hair was a mess, but none of that mattered because he thought you were beautiful either way. Ever since that night, the two of you would have breakfast for dinner as a staple in your household.

While Harry piled two plates with eggs, pancakes, and hash browns, you filled up two mugs with coffee. Harry liked his black, while you liked yours with a bit of cream and sugar. The two of you settled in the living room, ditching the dining table because it just wasn’t comfy enough. You smiled down at your plate—which had maple syrup dripping down a tower of pancakes—as Harry picked a record to put on. Call it old school, but it was one of the normal things keeping you sane during this lockdown. He had chosen one of his Elvis ones. The same one he played that first night you had breakfast for dinner.

You sat across each other on the couch, feet nuzzled together and your knees bumping alongside the other. The sound of your forks and knives scratching against the plate filled the room along with Elvis’s voice on the record player.

Harry had forgotten he had been writing the entire day. Instead, he remembered all the places you traveled to and the memories you made together on those trips. Being stuck at home for months made the both of you crave the outside world and the normality of it all. Though as much as you wanted to book a trip to Italy, it wasn’t safe to leave the country.

It felt like the world was ending, but to Harry it didn’t feel like it because he was with you. You brought light to the darkness—yes, it was cheesy—but it was the only way Harry knew how to describe being with you.

You guys spent the night eating and reminiscing on past memories you made together. As the hours passed, your plates were now empty and on the coffee counter, while you had found your way into your lover’s arms. His arms held you close to him as your body rested perfectly against his. Your head laid upon his chest, allowing you to feel him breathe and hear the beating of his heart. You were surrounded by his warmth and it was truly all you ever wanted.

Harry could feel you dozing off, your sentences had gotten shorter and your voice had a slight slur. With his nose against your temple he whispered, “Y’know I’ll always love you, right?”

You shifted your head to look into his dark emerald eyes, “Yeah.”

His eyes squinted at you playfully, “How so?” He tested you.

“Because I know I’ll always love you too.”

Then just like that, a spark set off in his head, and all of a sudden the words he has jotted down earlier that day made sense.

#Harry Styles #Harry Styles x reader #harry styles imagine #harry styles x fem!reader #harry styles drabble #Harry styles blurb #harry styles headcanon #harry styles fluff #Harry’s house #harry styles fanfiction #harry styles fanfic #harry edward styles

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covid-safer-hotties · 4 months ago

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School’s back and so is a COVID-19 surge: Protecting kids and precarious workers - Published Aug 30, 2024

While the chance of dying has decreased, we should be concerned about the serious long-term complications that can follow an infection.

The 2024 school year is beginning amid one of the biggest COVID-19 waves of the pandemic.

One U.S doctor states, “This is a very significant surge. The levels are very high. They’re the highest we’ve ever seen during a summer wave.” It might be hard to think about, but we’re still in a pandemic and experts are warning against COVID-19 complacency in schools.

Dying with COVID-19 in the acute phase may have decreased, but complications from an infection exist — more than 2 million Canadians have “long COVID” (LC). In this context, societies that see themselves as equitable, inclusive and just need to consider if they’re doing the best job protecting their more vulnerable members, like children and many precarious workers. Research shows governments are not doing the best protecting the rights of children in a crisis, and reports from workers indicate some feel abandoned and left to deal with scary health situations, largely on their own. For school staff, students, their families and communities, this all seems quite cruel. It does not need to be this way.

Organizations are working to make Ontario schools safer. Ontario school safety advocates for cleaner air in schools and research shows schools are safer when things like masking and vaccination are in place. However, these measures are generally not being followed.

Dr. Pantea Javidan writes, “the lack of health and safety in schools resulting from zero-mitigation policies continues to cause great physical and psycho-social harms to children and families.” One study found 14 per cent of adolescents who have gotten COVID-19 developed some LC symptoms. Another study found 45 per cent of infected children with at least one persisting LC symptom. For workers with LC, about 14 per cent have not returned to work within three months since their infection. Many people have been knocked off career paths because of LC. It is a public health crisis for workers and youth.

Allowing uncontrolled spread in communities and schools will likely see the crisis grow, so schools need to be made safe. Not making schools safe violates children’s rights because children’s rights to education include the right to an environment that is safe and not harmful to one’s health.

Kids are major spreaders of COVID-19 and with certain policies, the schools they attend can be safer. HEPA filters should be in every classroom and always on.

Businesses like the Apricot Tree Café in Mississauga are committed to clean air, use HEPA filters and are considered a leader in COVID-19 safe business practices. The owner reports not being sick in four years despite working in a high-risk industry. If a private restaurant can provide clean air, so can the public school system. Not doing so may violate certain human rights.

Dr. Javidan argues “policies threatening the life, health, and education of children are cause for alarm among defenders of human rights.” Importantly, human rights overlap into workers’ rights. In the U.S., workers have been disabled at an unexpectedly high rate since the pandemic began, and researchers are wondering if there’s a COVID-19 connection.

My research looks at precarious occasional teachers (OTs) in Ontario during COVID-19 and ways to make work safer for them, which makes schools safer for students. For example, hiring more secure contract teachers can reduce class sizes making them safer. Higher OT pay, basic income, and paid sick days could help by enabling sick people to stay home. OTs in B.C. make significantly more money per day than Ontario OTs, so higher wages are possible.

Ontario OTs have no paid sick days and can be exposed to multiple schools and hundreds if not thousands of students and staff, which puts them and others at risk. Higher wages and/or a universal basic income allows OTs to have a buffer due to lost income from days absent. A policy of paid sick days can stop sick workers going to work and helps a robust economy.

There are many educational and employment policy options available to reduce COVID-19 levels and protect students and workers during the 2024/25 school year. To uphold the rights of children and workers, these policies should be advocated for by community groups and unions, and adopted by governments and school boards.

#covid #mask up #pandemic #covid 19 #wear a mask #coronavirus #sars cov 2 #public health #still coviding #wear a respirator

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hemometer-goes-india · 1 year ago

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wtf ive seen posts on here like NobOdY wEArs mAsKs oN aIRplAnEs AnyMOre!! and i was like pshhh sensationalist nonsense

but wtf. now i am at the airport and for real, why is nobody wearing a mask? Also the AQI is abysmal right now. Visibly bad. And no one is masking??

Masks are such a good way to keep your lungs safe, and to keep your immune system safe in high risk settings.

If you don’t smoke bc you care about your lungs… why would you start inhaling huge amounts of smoke when the AQI is > 100? The cutoffs for “sensitive groups” are arbitrary. Higher # = more bad.

If you DO smoke, don’t you want to save that good good lung capacity for getting toasted? lol

Idk if my followers know, but I literally founded a mask company during the pandemic. Our device was recommended by top air quality experts and I helped write legislation to help workers pick the best masks during COVID. Our device is ASTM 3502 listed. I know what I’m talking about.

One common misconception about masks is that you need to replace them after every use. This is surprisingly false. As long as it doesnt get wet or dirty the meltblown fabric doesnt degrade significantly.

Here are my mask recs:

Best balance of comfort and performance: Air Pop

This was designed for pollution and illness protection in East Asia. These guys are legit.

Most cost effective + high performance: Fix The Mask

$15 up front cost + $0.30 for each replacement “filter” (you just use a surgical mask). Full disclosure, this is my company, but if you need a discount, email [email protected]. I will personally hook you up.

Most typically recommended: 3M Aura

this is what most serious masking people will recommend. It works well on most faces, but for me the rubber over the head straps mess up my hair too much.

3M Aura Particulate Respirator https://a.co/d/8mbNmml

I am super lazy, what is the minimum I can do? Any surgical mask with 90%+ filteation efficiency

A regular surgical mask will give you ~40% inward protection per studies in JAMA and other places (Clapp et. al) and others. It won’t give you 90% protection bc air gets around the sides, but it’s better than nothing.

How big a difference is 40% filtration? This is the best visual I’ve seen to illustrate the difference:

Don’t be a dick, and don’t be an idiot. Use a mask ffs.

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inevitablemoment · 2 years ago

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“it’s not as bad as it looks.”

Word Count: 1,026

Warnings: Stab wound, fainting, blood loss, brief mention of secondary infertility and miscarriages, brief mention of premature birth, brief mention of temporary deafness, brief mention of neonatal health issues, brief mention of the COVID-19 pandemic

Fandom: Spider-Man (Raimi films)

Pairings: Peter Parker x Mary Jane Watson

It seems to be a running trend of mine this month to write for new fandoms. So, over the past few weeks, I’ve just fallen down the rabbit hole of anything Spider-Man, and right now, the Raimi trilogy has quite a hold on me. A good percentage of this fic is me dumping my post-trilogy headcanons on you.

Enjoy!

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Mary Jane was no stranger to exhaustion. But the last however-many hours had been challenging her ability to keep herself going on minutes of sleep.

It was one of the two days of the week on which her alternate would perform, as well as a parent/teacher conference day for the kids’ school district. She and Peter decided to make it a family day before they would have to go to meet with their teachers.

Then, there was this flash of sparkling gold, a few seconds of darkness... and then another flash of gold.

They were still on Time’s Square, with their first stop planned to have been the Disney Store, but she couldn’t place just why it felt so different from a few seconds ago.

Peter had been the first of them to notice one of the newspaper stands, all of the papers blasted with headlines talking about how Spider-Man was a murderer and a criminal. Before she could roll her eyes, she realized that the man-- or, rather, boy-- on the image was not her husband.

Although Mary Jane and the three older children-- seventeen-year-old twins Maisie and Annie (soon to be eighteen), and thirteen-year-old Benji-- were silently thinking the same thing, three-year-old Susan had blurted out, “That’s not Daddy.”

The children, of course, knew of their father’s secret identity as the web slinging hero-- Mary Jane could only imagine how difficult it would have been for them to keep such a secret from their own children when they resided in the same house-- and had been taught from day one to keep it. Though it was tempting to brag about it to their friends.

“We’re still in New York, just not-- our New York,” Peter had tried to explain.

Even as he tried to explain the concept of a multiverse, most of the scientific jargon went over Mary Jane’s and the children’s heads-- at least, except for Maisie.

Peter immediately went to buy the newspaper bearing the likeness of his other... self? Honestly, Mary Jane didn’t know how else to describe it.

“Whoever the Peter Parker in this universe is, he needs my help,” Peter said. “I... I know he does. And not just about this. Something... something’s gonna happen.”

Mary Jane took his hand. “What do you need me to do?”

“Take the kids and find someplace safe,” he told her. “I’ll call you whenever I can, but if you have to move, tell me where you are--”

“I will,” Mary Jane promised.

“I’ll come with you!” Maisie offered.

“Me, too!” Annie offered. “We can help--!”

“No, you’ll be safer if you stay with your mom,” Peter told them. “Okay?”

Maisie was visibly grinding her teeth in frustration, but Annie-- ever gracious and accommodating, the only one of the twins who never had to be scolded twice for the same misdeed-- said, “I understand, Dad.”

Peter hugged the twins, kissing the tops of their auburn heads, before he addressed Benji.

At thirteen years old, Benji looked every bit his father’s son, but had a solemn and quiet disposition that reminded both of his parents of the man that he was named for.

Benji-- their miracle baby after two miscarriages.

Whom they almost lost during a high risk pregnancy, an emergency C-section in Mary Jane’s twenty-eighth week...

“Benji, I need you to listen to your mom while I’m gone,” Peter instructed. “Can you promise that?”

“Yes, Dad,” Benji promised.

Peter picked little Susan up from the stroller. Their little surprise, conceived and born in the midst of an unprecedented pandemic, but had been welcomed into the family with open arms.

“Daddy, you leaving?” Susan asked, her small voice breaking Peter’s heart.

“Just for a little bit,” he said. “I’m going to help someone, but I swear that I will be back as soon as I can. I need you to be good for Mommy and your sisters and brother, okay?”

“Okay,” Susan agreed.

Annie helpfully took Susan into her arms, allowing her parents to share an embrace

“Whatever’s going on, I promise that we’ll be home soon,” Peter swore to her. “I love you, M.J.”

“I love you, too,” Mary Jane said, kissing him. “Stay safe, Tiger.”

Over the next several hours, Peter kept sending her texts, telling her about what was going on. After Susan continued begging, he answered a video call, looking like he was in some sort of lab. She caught sight of two other men in the background-- the baby-faced boy that she had seen, and the other looking like he was ten years younger than her Peter, both of them wearing their own versions of her husband’s suit. The boy from the pictures looked significantly beat up, making her stomach sink as she wondered what in her Peter’s history had just happened for him.

Almost an hour after the video call, everyone else around them began talking about “Spider-Man livestreaming with the Daily Bugle.”

One man had been gracious enough to show Mary Jane the video. It wasn’t her Peter, though. But as she heard the Peter of this world speak, her heart breaking for him as she heard his voice.

“Mom, is Dad there?” Maisie asked, looking over her mother’s shoulder.

“I... I don’t see him, Mayday,” Mary Jane said.

She couldn’t even recall how much time passed before she saw that flash of gold again. But, in an instant, they were standing in the living room of their townhouse.

Peter-- her Peter-- was standing before her.

Without a second thought, she rushed into his arms. The kids almost turned the hug into a full tackle, but he didn’t seem to mind. Mary Jane’s hands began to run up and down his back before she felt something on her hands. She pulled her hand back, and her stomach dropped.

Blood.

“Peter, what happened?” she asked.

“MJ, it’s not as bad as it looks, I swear,” Peter tried to reassure her.

But, he failed as he began to keel over.

“I’ll call 911,” Annie was the first to jump to the occasion, while Mary Jane put her hand over where she had found the wound.

Please... please be okay...

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bipolarinboston · 8 months ago

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Mental Health Month posts from Facebook (because sharing multi year posts suck)

2023

So is it Mental Health Awareness Month? Or could it be Mental Health Acceptance Month? I guess it's a matter of education. But I was inspired by the fact that April is Autism Acceptance Month. I don't know if the sentiment is the same.

* I am out at work as much as I feel comfortable. I lead an internal DEI group and we introduce ourselves each meeting using roles outside of work. I'm a queer person who uses They/She pronouns and I'm a peer with lived mental health experience. My boss and a couple coworkers know I'm a presenter for In Our Own Voice because I invited them to present for June's DEI meeting. But I am NOT comfortable sharing my diagnosis to work (minus my friend) and I can't present myself sadly.

* About this time last year I volunteered to be a 'tech buddy' DBSA is STILL USING ZOOM. This is good for me because the commute home from Belmont after 9pm would be unbearable. Tech Buddies are the zoom host, and help take attendance and manage the speakers queue with raised hands. Going to DBSA let me know I'm not alone in a way I hadn't experienced before.

* My individual gave up her office early on in COVID and is permanently virtual. My group therapist retired in July and I had to say good bye on zoom. His replacement is private pay, but I'm using FSA funds to justify it. I started seeing my Psychiatrist in person only for him to retire 6 months after group did! I'm currently without a prescriber for the 3 time since 2016. Charlestown MGH is overloaded with patients and understaffed. The one difference this time is that I'm stable.

* I'm still running, but I started stressing about it in October, and I think my COVID bout (which was mild) is still impacting my performance. My photo a day streak is STRONG. I even called into a podcast who was doing an episode on "what works for me" because it really does help me get out the house. That and obsessing over step counts.

I enjoy making mental health content during May, but I feel like I'd just be repeating myself this month. Enough has changed from last year to write out this post. If you're still reading I bet you're very aware and I hope you're even accepting at this point.

2022

Mental Health Awareness Month is here again and I'll be posting for the third year.

In a perfect world I could be out on my public twitter. In a perfect world I could disclose online without any fear that come next job hunt, someone in HR will find that and take a pass on me. In a perfect world I could disclose at work even though I don't need any accommodations. It's not a uniform system but I've cobbled together fb, instagram, and my anonymous bipolar twitter account as safe spaces to share. I'm trying to feel less segmented but it's difficult when real world repercussions are a possibility.

Still zooming with NAMI's In Our Own Voice. They're starting to get in person presentations but it's just easier for me logistically to stay virtual. I've zoomed with plenty of places I'd never be able to get to in person.

This time last year I joined DBSA (Depression Bipolar Support Alliance) Boston, a peer led org that hosts support groups. I'm busy Wednesday nights zooming with the "Young" Adults group. A bunch of millennials and gen z folks using their lived experience as shorthand to bond. It's meant a lot to me and I'm walking with team DBSA for this year's NAMI Walk.

Covid still drags on. Last couple of Mays I wrote that I was glad I had Bipolar. And it's still true. My toolbox of coping skills is flush with things I knew, like taking baths with epsom salt, and things I've learned during the pandemic, like how I developed a running habit. My take a photo a day streak inspires me to get outside. And perhaps most importantly I can still see my prescriber, my individual and my group therapists remotely.

So happy Mental Health Awareness month. You're probably very aware at this point.

2021

I’m taking part in Mental Health Awareness Month again. I am still not out on Twitter*. I still cannot publicly disclose my bipolar, or even just 'mental illness' on an account with my full name for fear of personal and professional repercussions. In these kinds of spaces, it is much easier to navigate out as queer than out as bipolar. *This January I started an alternate anonymous twitter account so I can better engage with the neurodivergent, disabled and mental illness communities. (You'd be surprised at how much those overlap)

Before all of this began, I signed up NAMI's In Our Own Voice. You’ve probably heard about it whenever I mentioned the NAMI Walks I’m doing in a few weeks. We started zooming in August and I want to say it was one of the best decisions I made in terms of advocacy and stigma busting. I have presented to different groups, college nursing classes, one of the inpatient units at McLean Hospital, and several groups of Family to Family, the program mom took 15 years ago when I was initially diagnosed.

After over a year of Covid, I'm still GLAD I’m Bipolar. There's a collective mental health flare happening right now. But I have my diagnosis, meds, my therapy, and coping skills. I have a toolbox of things to try when I am stressed out or sliding backwards. And perhaps most importantly I have established relationships with my individual, group and my prescriber. I am so lucky that I've been able to see them remotely.

So happy Mental Health Awareness month. Now you're probably even more aware.

2020

Mental Health Month Post: I realized something: I am not out on Twitter. I can not publicly disclose my bipolar, or even just 'mental illness' for fear of personal and professional repercussions. I am more out in my queerness than in my mental health struggles. How ironic is that? I wish things were different.

When I signed up NAMI's In Our Own Voice, I was hoping to use it as a tool for greater advocacy but also to increase my "outness" as a bipolar person. Even though the training was Presidents Day Weekend, I never thought that a pandemic would put all presentations on hold.

Sure I participate in chronic illness (disability) twitter and will 'flirt' with outing myself. If you read behind the lines, check who I follow and talk to, you may be able to out me. But I talk about my crohns and humira, not lithium, and I leave therapy to my journal on patientslikeme.

But at a time like this I'm actually GLAD I am Bipolar. There's going to be a mental health flare when Covid starts to wind down. But I already have my diagnosis, meds, my therapy, and coping skills. I already have a toolbox of things to try when I am stressed out or sliding backwards. And perhaps most importantly I already have established relationships with my individual, group and my prescriber.

So happy Mental Health Awareness month. Now you're probably more aware.

#mental health month

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jcmarchi · 11 months ago

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Why Doesn’t My Model Work?

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/why-doesnt-my-model-work/

Why Doesn’t My Model Work?

Have you ever trained a model you thought was good, but then it failed miserably when applied to real world data? If so, you’re in good company. Machine learning processes are complex, and it’s very easy to do things that will cause overfitting without it being obvious. In the 20 years or so that I’ve been working in machine learning, I’ve seen many examples of this, prompting me to write “How to avoid machine learning pitfalls: a guide for academic researchers” in an attempt to prevent other people from falling into these traps.

But you don’t have to take my word for it. These issues are being increasingly reported in both the scientific and popular press. Examples include the observation that hundreds of models developed during the Covid pandemic simply don’t work, and that a water quality system deployed in Toronto regularly told people it was safe to bathe in dangerous water. Many of these are documented in the AIAAIC repository. It’s even been suggested that these machine learning missteps are causing a reproducibility crisis in science — and, given that many scientists use machine learning as a key tool these days, a lack of trust in published scientific results.

In this article, I’m going to talk about some of the issues that can cause a model to seem good when it isn’t. I’ll also talk about some of the ways in which these kinds of mistakes can be prevented, including the use of the recently-introduced REFORMS checklist for doing ML-based science.

Duped by Data

Misleading data is a good place to start, or rather not a good place to start, since the whole machine learning process rests upon the data that’s used to train and test the model.

In the worst cases, misleading data can cause the phenomenon known as garbage in garbage out; that is, you can train a model, and potentially get very good performance on the test set, but the model has no real world utility. Examples of this can be found in the aforementioned review of Covid prediction models by Roberts et al. In the rush to develop tools for Covid prediction, a number of public datasets became available, but these were later found to contain misleading signals — such as overlapping records, mislabellings and hidden variables — all of which helped models to accurately predict the class labels without learning anything useful in the process.

Take hidden variables. These are features that are present in data, and which happen to be predictive of class labels within the data, but which are not directly related to them. If your model latches on to these during training, it will appear to work well, but may not work on new data. For example, in many Covid chest imaging datasets, the orientation of the body is a hidden variable: people who were sick were more likely to have been scanned lying down, whereas those who were standing tended to be healthy. Because they learnt this hidden variable, rather than the true features of the disease, many Covid machine learning models turned out to be good at predicting posture, but bad at predicting Covid. Despite their name, these hidden variables are often in plain sight, and there have been many examples of classifiers latching onto boundary markers, watermarks and timestamps embedded in images, which often serve to distinguish one class from another without having to look at the actual data.

A related issue is the presence of spurious correlations. Unlike hidden variables, these have no true relationship to anything else in the data; they’re just patterns that happen to correlate with the class labels. A classic example is the tank problem, where the US military allegedly tried to train a neural network to identify tanks, but it actually recognised the weather, since all the pictures of tanks were taken at the same time of day. Consider the images below: a machine learning model could recognise all the pictures of tanks in this dataset just by looking at the colour of pixels towards the top of an image, without having to consider the shape of any of the objects. The performance of the model would appear great, but it would be completely useless in practice.

(Source: by author)

Many (perhaps most) datasets contain spurious correlations, but they’re not usually as obvious as this one. Common computer vision benchmarks, for example, are known to have groups of background pixels that are spuriously correlated with class labels. This represents a particular challenge to deep learners, which have the capacity to model many patterns within the data; various studies have shown that they do tend to capture spuriously correlated patterns, and this reduces their generality. Sensitivity to adversarial attacks is one consequence of this: if a deep learning model bases its prediction on spurious correlations in the background pixels of an image, then making small changes to these pixels can flip the prediction of the model. Adversarial training, where a model is exposed to adversarial samples during training, can be used to address this, but it’s expensive. An easier approach is just to look at your model, and see what information it’s using to make its decisions. For instance, if a saliency map produced by an explainable AI technique suggests that your model is focusing on something in the background, then it’s probably not going to generalise well.

Sometimes it’s not the data itself that is problematic, but rather the labelling of the data. This is especially the case when data is labelled by humans, and the labels end up capturing biases, misassumptions or just plain old mistakes made by the labellers. Examples of this can be seen in datasets used as image classification benchmarks, such as MNIST and CIFAR, which typically have a mislabelling rate of a couple of percent — not a huge amount, but pretty significant where modellers are fighting over accuracies in the tenths of a percent. That is, if your model does slightly better than the competition, is it due to an actual improvement, or due to modelling noise in the labelling process? Things can be even more troublesome when working with data that has implicit subjectivity, such as sentiment classification, where there’s a danger of overfitting particular labellers.

Led by Leaks

Bad data isn’t the only problem. There’s plenty of scope for mistakes further down the machine learning pipeline. A common one is data leakage. This happens when the model training pipeline has access to information it shouldn’t have access to, particularly information that confers an advantage to the model. Most of the time, this manifests as information leaks from the test data — and whilst most people know that test data should be kept independent and not explicitly used during training, there are various subtle ways that information can leak out.

One example is performing a data-dependent preprocessing operation on an entire dataset, before splitting off the test data. That is, making changes to all the data using information that was learnt by looking at all the data. Such operations vary from the simple, such as centering and scaling numerical features, to the complex, such as feature selection, dimensionality reduction and data augmentation — but they all have in common the fact that they use knowledge of the whole dataset to guide their outcome. This means that knowledge of the test data is implicitly entering the model training pipeline, even if it is not explicitly used to train the model. As a consequence, any measure of performance derived from the test set is likely to be an overestimate of the model’s true performance.

Let’s consider the simplest example: centering and scaling. This involves looking at the range of each feature, and then using this information to rescale all the values, typically so that the mean is 0 and the standard deviation is 1. If this is done on the whole dataset before splitting off the test data, then the scaling of the training data will include information about the range and distribution of the feature values in the test set. This is particularly problematic if the range of the test set is broader than the training set, since the model could potentially infer this fact from the truncated range of values present in the training data, and do well on the test set just by predicting values higher or lower than those which were seen during training. For instance, if you’re working on stock price forecasting from time series data with a model that takes inputs in the range 0 to 1 but it only sees values in the range 0 to 0.5 during training, then it’s not too hard for it to infer that stock prices will go up in the future.

In fact, forecasting is an area of machine learning that is particularly susceptible to data leaks, due to something called look ahead bias. This occurs when information the model shouldn’t have access to leaks from the future and artificially improves its performance on the test set. This commonly happens when the training set contains samples that are further ahead in time than the test set. I’ll give an example later of when this can happen, but if you work in this area, I’d also strongly recommend taking a look at this excellent review of pitfalls and best practices in evaluating time series forecasting models.

An example of a more complex data-dependent preprocessing operation leading to overly-optimistic performance metrics can be found in this review of pre-term birth prediction models. Basically, a host of papers reported high accuracies at predicting whether a baby would be born early, but it turned out that all had applied data augmentation to the data set before splitting off the test data. This resulted in the test set containing augmented samples of training data, and the training set containing augmented samples of test data — which amounted to a pretty significant data leak. When the authors of the review corrected this, the predictive performance of the models dropped from being near perfect to not much better than random.

(Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.02497)

Oddly, one of the most common examples of data leakage doesn’t have an agreed name (the terms overhyping and sequential overfitting have been suggested) but is essentially a form of training to the test set. By way of example, imagine the scenario depicted above where you’ve trained a model and evaluated it on the test set. You then decided its performance was below where you wanted it to be. So, you tweaked the model, and then you reevaluated it. You still weren’t happy, so you kept on doing this until its performance on the test set was good enough. Sounds familiar? Well, this is a common thing to do, but if you’re developing a model iteratively and using the same test set to evaluate the model after each iteration, then you’re basically using that test set to guide the development of the model. The end result is that you’ll overfit the test set and probably get an over-optimistic measure of how well your model generalises.

Interestingly, the same process occurs when people use community benchmarks, such as MNIST, CIFAR and ImageNet. Almost everyone who works on image classification uses these data sets to benchmark their approaches; so, over time, it’s inevitable that some overfitting of these benchmarks will occur. To mitigate against this, it’s always advisable to use a diverse selection of benchmarks, and ideally try your technique on a data set which other people haven’t used.

Misinformed by Metrics

Once you’ve built your model robustly, you then have to evaluate it robustly. There’s plenty that can go wrong here too. Let’s start with an inappropriate choice of metrics. The classic example is using accuracy with an imbalanced dataset. Imagine that you’ve managed to train a model that always predicts the same label, regardless of its input. If half of the test samples have this label as their ground truth, then you’ll get an accuracy of 50% — which is fine, a bad accuracy for a bad classifier. If 90% of the test samples have this label, then you’ll get an accuracy of 90% — a good accuracy for a bad classifier. This level of imbalance is not uncommon in real world data sets, and when working with imbalanced training sets, it’s not uncommon to get classifiers that always predict the majority label. In this case, it would be much better to use a metric like F score or Matthews correlation coefficient, since these are less sensitive to class imbalances. However, all metrics have their weaknesses, so it’s always best to use a portfolio of metrics that give different perspectives on a model’s performance and failure modes.

Metrics for time series forecasting are particularly troublesome. There are a lot of them to choose from, and the most appropriate choice can depend on both the specific problem domain and the exact nature of the time series data. Unlike metrics used for classification, many of the regression metrics used in time series forecasting have no natural scale, meaning that raw numbers can be misleading. For instance, the interpretation of mean squared errors depends on the range of values present in the time series. For this reason, it’s important to use appropriate baselines in addition to appropriate metrics. As an example, this (already mentioned) review of time series forecasting pitfalls demonstrates how many of the deep learning models published at top AI venues are actually less good than naive baseline models. For instance, they show that an autoformer, a kind of complex transformer model designed for time series forecasting, can be beaten by a trivial model that predicts no change at the next time step — something that isn’t apparent from looking at metrics alone.

In general, there is a trend towards developing increasingly complex models to solve difficult problems. However, it’s important to bear in mind that some problems may not be solvable, regardless of how complex the model becomes. This is probably the case for many financial time series forecasting problems. It’s also the case when predicting certain natural phenomena, particularly those in which a chaotic component precludes prediction beyond a certain time horizon. For instance, many people think that earthquakes can not be predicted, yet there are a host of papers reporting good performance on this task. This review paper discusses how these correct predictions may be due to a raft of modelling pitfalls, including inappropriate choice of baselines and overfitting due to data sparsity, unnecessary complexity and data leaks.

Another problem is assuming that a single evaluation is sufficient to measure the performance of a model. Sometimes it is, but a lot of the time you’ll be working with models that are stochastic or unstable; so, each time you train them, you get different results. Or you may be working with a small data set where you might just get lucky with an easy test split. To address both situations, it is commonplace to use resampling methods like cross-validation, which train and test a model on different subsets of the data and then work out the average performance. However, resampling introduces its own risks. One of these is the increased risk of data leaks, particularly when assuming that data-dependent preprocessing operations (like centering and scaling and feature selection) only need to be done once. They don’t; they need to be done independently for each iteration of the resampling process, and to do otherwise can cause a data leak. Below is an example of this, showing how feature selection should be done independently on the two training sets (in blue) used in the first two iterations of cross-validation, and how this results in different features being selected each time.

(Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.02497)

As I mentioned earlier, the danger of data leaks is even greater when working with time series data. Using standard cross-validation, every iteration except one will involve using at least one training fold that is further ahead in time than the data in the test fold. For example, if you imagine that the data rows in the figure above represent time-ordered multivariate samples, then the test sets (in pink) used in both iterations occur earlier in the time series than all or part of the training data. This is an example of a look ahead bias. Alternative approaches, such as blocked cross-validation, can be used to prevent these.

Multiple evaluations aren’t an option for everyone. For example, training a foundation model is both time-consuming and expensive, so doing it repeatedly is not feasible. Depending on your resources, this may be the case for even relatively small deep learning models. If so, then also consider using other methods for measuring the robustness of models. This includes things like using explainability analysis, performing ablation studies, or augmenting test data. These can allow you to look beyond potentially-misleading metrics and gain some appreciation of how a model works and how it might fail, which in turn can help you decide whether to use it in practice.

Falling Deeper

So far, I’ve mostly talked about general machine learning processes, but the pitfalls can be even greater when using deep learning models. Consider the use of latent space models. These are often trained separately to the predictive models that use them. That is, it’s not unusual to train something like an autoencoder to do feature extraction, and then use the output of this model within the training of a downstream model. When doing this, it’s essential to ensure that the test set used in the downstream model does not intersect with the training data used in the autoencoder — something that can easily happen when using cross-validation or other resampling methods, e.g. when using different random splits or not selecting models trained on the same training folds.

However, as deep learning models get larger and more complex, it can be harder to ensure these kinds of data leaks do not occur. For instance, if you use a pre-trained foundation model, it may not be possible to tell whether the data used in your test set was used to train the foundation model — particularly if you’re using benchmark data from the internet to test your model. Things get even worse if you’re using composite models. For example, if you’re using a BERT-type foundation model to encode the inputs when fine-tuning a GPT-type foundation model, you have to take into account any intersection between the datasets used to train the two foundation models in addition to your own fine-tuning data. In practice, some of these data sets may be unknown, meaning that you can’t be confident whether your model is correctly generalising or merely reproducing data memorised during pre-training.

Avoiding the Pits

These pitfalls are all too common. So, what’s the best way to avoid them? Well, one thing you can do is use a checklist, which is basically a formal document that takes you through the key pain points in the machine learning pipeline, and helps you to identify potential issues. In domains with high-stakes decisions, such as medicine, there are already a number of well-established checklists, such as CLAIM, and adherence to these is typically enforced by journals that publish in these areas.

However, I’d like to briefly introduce a new kid on the block: REFORMS, a consensus-based checklist for doing machine learning-based science. This was put together by 19 researchers across computer science, data science, mathematics, social sciences, and the biomedical sciences — including myself — and came out of a recent workshop on the reproducibility crisis in ML‑based science. It is intended to address the common mistakes that occur in the machine learning pipeline, including many of those mentioned in this article, in a more domain-independent manner. It consists of two parts: the checklist itself, and also a paired guidance document, which explains why each of the checklist items are important. The checklist works through the main components of a machine learning-based study, in each case encouraging the user to verify that the machine learning process is designed in such a way that it supports the overall aims of the study, doesn’t stumble into any of the common pitfalls, and enables the results to be verified by an independent researcher. Whilst it’s focused on the application of machine learning within a scientific context, a lot of what it covers is more generally applicable, so I’d encourage you to take a look even if you don’t consider your work to be “science”.

Another way of avoiding pitfalls is to make better use of tools. Now, one of my pet gripes regarding the current state of machine learning is that commonly-used tools do little to prevent you from making mistakes. That is, they’ll happily let you abuse the machine learning process in all sorts of ways without telling you what you’re doing is wrong. Nevertheless, help is available in the form of experiment tracking frameworks, which automatically keep a record of the models you trained and how you trained them, and this can be useful for spotting things like data leaks and training to the test set. An open source option is MLFlow, but there are plenty of commercial offerings. MLOps tools take this even further, and help to manage all the moving parts in a machine learning workflow, including the people.

Final Thought

It is possible to train a good model that generalises well to unseen data, but I wouldn’t believe this until you’re satisfied that nothing which could have gone wrong has gone wrong. A healthy sense of suspicion is a good thing: do look at your trained model to make sure it’s doing something sensible, do analyse your metrics to understand where it’s making mistakes, do calibrate your results against appropriate baselines, and do consider using checklists to make sure you haven’t overlooked something important.

Author Bio

Michael is an Associate Professor at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. He’s spent the last 20 years or so doing research on machine learning and bio-inspired computing. For more info see his academic website. He also writes about computer science more generally in his Fetch Decode Execute substack.

Citation

For attribution in academic contexts or books, please cite this work as

Michael Lones, "Why Doesn’t My Model Work?", The Gradient, 2024.

BibTeX citation:

@article{lones2024why, author = Michael Lones, title = Why Doesn’t My Model Work?, journal = The Gradient, year = 2024, howpublished = urlhttps://thegradient.pub/why-doesnt-my-model-work,

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reasoningdaily · 2 years ago

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Nostradamus was born Michel de Notredame in 1503 in Saint-Remy-de-Provence, France. It's fair to say Nostradamus didn't have a boring life. He originally worked as an apothecary, then attended the University of Montpelier to pursue a medical degree. Along the way, he was expelled for practicing a "manual trade" (the use of herbal remedies), which was considered "too low" for a doctor (via Biography).

The jury is out as to whether he eventually went back to school and received a medical license, but Biography points out he did work as a physician during the plague outbreak in Italy and France. In fact, he became a bit of a "celebrity" plague doctor for his progressive methods (for the time) in treating the plague, which included herbal mixes, hygiene, and removing corpses from cities to slow down the spread of the disease.

He eventually focused on writing almanacs and became an astrologer. His work was so popular that powerful figures of the time hired him to "read the stars" for them. One example was the Italian noblewoman Catherine de' Medici, who wanted to have horoscopes written for her children. Eventually she made him Counselor and Physician-in-Ordinary to her husband, King Henri II of France

Above all, however, Nostradamus is best known for his 942 poetic quatrains (four-line poems), which are supposed to predict a number of future events — some of them well into the future, according to Biography.

Some of Nostradamus' prophecies have come true ... maybe

Fototeca Storica Nazionale./Getty Images

Because Nostradamus' prophecies are written in poem form, they can be very vague. In fact, you could use the same exact poem to "predict" several incidents throughout history, some of them centuries apart. There have been instances, however, where some of his predictions seem very specific. For example:

"The young lion will overcome the older one / On the field of combat in a single battle / He will pierce his eyes through a golden cage / Two wounds made one, then he dies a cruel death" has been interpreted as a prediction of the death of King Henry II of France, who died in a jousting tournament when a younger opponent hit his face and caused a massive wound. The king died after 11 days of extreme pain (per Insider).

Another famous prophecy that appeared to come true referred to the devastating London fire of 1666: "The blood of the just will be demanded of London / Burnt by fire in the year '66 / The ancient Lady will fall from her high place / And many of the same sect will be killed." However, the poem seems to indicate the fire was caused by lightning, when in reality it started inside a bakery (via Insider).

Some of his prophecies were definitely wrong, though. For example, he predicted that in "The year one thousand nine ninety-nine seven month / From the sky shall come a great King of terror." But nothing particularly terrible happened in September 1999 (per Biography).

The present year doesn't look good for humanity

Shutterstock

Nostradamus had a lot of terrible things to say about 2021. For this year alone, he predicted zombies, asteroids, and a plague, all with grim results. The predictions start pretty dark: "After great trouble for humanity, a greater one is prepared, / The Great Mover renews the ages: / Rain, blood, milk, famine, steel, and plague, / Is the heavens fire seen, a long spark running" (via 7News).

Experts believe the "great trouble" could refer to the COVID pandemic that started in 2020, with "a greater one" meaning the continuation of the virus into 2021. As for the "heaven's fire," turns out the massive Asteroid 2021 KT1 flew by Earth at 40,000 mph in early June, according to NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies (via USA Today). But since it missed and Earth is still intact, we can safely say at least this part of the prediction has failed so far.

For 2021, Nostradamus also warns us of "Few young people: half-dead to give a start," which seems to allude to some sort of zombie apocalypse (the half-dead) taking over the world. While we don't have (so far) any information of zombies taking over the planet, the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) is helping us get ready for it with their Zombie Preparedness Guide, just in case.

If we survive 2021, we'll be okay for a while

Shutterstock

Despite the grim predictions for 2021, Nostradamus' prophecies continue until the year 3797. So if we make it through potential asteroid crashes, famines, the plague, and a zombie apocalypse, humanity might survive an extra 1,500 years or so. Still, between 2021 and the end of times, Nostradamus predicted a lot of terrible things: wars, the coming of three Antichrists, and many plagues and pestilences, as related by The Sunday Post of Glasgow.

Many of these will leave the world in worse shape than it was before them, but not necessarily end it. At some point, Nostradamus predicted the third Antichrist will "rise over all the kings of the east" and trigger World War III. This won't be pretty and will last up to three decades, resulting in a lot of death and destruction. However, this won't be the end, either.

According to The Sun, the true end is what Nostradamus called the "final conflagration," a series of extinction level events that might include super volcanoes, "fire from the sky," and what some believe could refer to a massive solar flare. While he doesn't give a date for the end of the world, the fact that his predictions end at a specific time (the year 3797) could be a sign that he believes this is when the end will come.

#This Is How Nostradamus Predicted The End Of The World #nostradamus #end of times

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techassistanthub · 2 years ago

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"Navigating the Real Estate Market During a Pandemic"

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted nearly every industry, and real estate is no exception. With social distancing measures in place, many traditional real estate practices have had to adapt to the new normal. Online virtual assistants (OVAs) have become an invaluable resource for navigating the real estate market during this challenging time. In this article, we'll explore how OVAs can help you successfully buy or sell a property, even during a pandemic.

Conducting Virtual Property Tours

One of the biggest challenges facing the real estate industry during the pandemic has been how to conduct property tours while minimizing contact between people. OVAs can help by conducting virtual property tours on behalf of clients. Using video chat technology, OVAs can walk clients through properties in real-time, answering questions and providing a detailed look at the property's features.

Streamlining the Transaction Process

The pandemic has also made it more difficult to complete real estate transactions in person. OVAs can help by providing remote support for tasks such as contract review, e-signatures, and document management. This can help expedite the transaction process and reduce the need for face-to-face meetings.

Providing Market Research and Analysis

Managing Remote Property Listings

With more people working remotely, there has been a shift towards online property listings. OVAs can help manage these listings, ensuring that properties are accurately represented and marketed to potential buyers. This includes creating high-quality photos and videos, writing compelling property descriptions, and managing listings across multiple online platforms.

In conclusion, the COVID-19 pandemic has presented significant challenges for the real estate industry. However, with the help of OVAs, it is still possible to successfully navigate the market and achieve your real estate goals. By conducting virtual property tours, streamlining the transaction process, providing market research and analysis, and managing remote property listings, OVAs can help you buy or sell a property safely and efficiently.

If you're looking for an online virtual assistant to help you with your real estate needs, please contact us. Our team of experienced OVAs can provide the support you need to succeed in today's challenging real estate market.

#online virtual assistant

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digitalniran8 · 2 years ago

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How E-Prescribing Software Helps Optometrist?

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the usage of digital devices and continuous virtual meetings make a person develop eye irritation and other diseases. How E-Prescribing Software Helps Optometrist? Internet is a boon as it helps to make a transaction over the air and simultaneously, virtual meetings are scheduled at different time horizons. Work from home and online classes have added more reasons to use a digital screen for more than 6 to 7 hours a day additionally.

E-Prescribing Software is a web-based tool that helps medical practitioners to write prescription dispensing organizations. These files are stored and accessed electronically to make a clinical decision. To make any transaction in this software, an individual secure login is required. In case of a data breach, makes that person faces severe legal actions.

Optical Eyewear Prescription in COVID-19

Increased digital screen usage made people have the optical lens to avoid radiation emitted from those screens. An optical eyewear prescription is written by an eyewear prescriber with specific values supposed to give clear vision to a patient without any serious clinical issue.

Optometrists have created new practices for the patient during this pandemic to maintain eye condition. By following the guidance of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), doctors used E-Prescribing Software to ensure prescriptions to clinics and eyewear shops are sent directly.

Using contact lenses is safe and effective for people who practice good hygiene when handling lenses. A virus can be transmitted from contaminated surfaces and objects so American Optometric Association suggested using e-prescribing software and e-commerce service to place orders.

Ophthalmology Software Management

E-Prescribing Software supports Ophthalmology services to record all the data of patients electronically from appointment scheduling to billing. Reading from ophthalmology software is sent live to prescribing space and makes legible understanding.

Consolidated images and diagnosed reports of a patient are sent to the patient unique healthcare ID through Ophthalmic Image Management. Users can create customized forms to speed up the workflow. Options are given to trigger diagnostic and procedure codes automatically based on a patient database.

Benefits

For medical practitioners, E-Prescribing Software gives many benefits

The reports are transmitted instantaneously with no involvement of physical activities

An efficient practice to stop falsify readings and to reduce paper usage.

Workflow customization options with user-friendly tools that help doctors to access patients' previous eye records from EHR/EMR software.

Unified Cloud-Based System optimized to run on all types of web-browser and allows authorized access anytime, from any device.

Conclusion

Many eye care professionals are adopting towards E-Prescribing Software as it supports the transformation of treatment quality. The software helps to increase productivity and documentation speed. A lot of information regarding cataracts and general eye care tips are provided in the knowledge space.

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punyhoomans · 2 years ago

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Hola! I'm Allan and I need help defending myself in court! If you know me at all you may already be familiar with parts of this story;

At the start of the pandemic, my landlord glitched out and lied to the police to have me forcibly and illegally removed from my home (N.B. that I was the only tenant in the house and this was during the first covid-related lockdown/eviction moratorium)

Homeless in a pandemic and in a city embroiled in BLM protests, I was forced to spend thousands, obliterating my savings to find safe places to stay until I could sign a new lease. Sometimes I slept in my office. It was like camping, only with the threat of unemployment instead of bears.

Though it all my landlord was horrendously antagonistic, threatening me, my property, refusing to allow me to retrieve my stuff, and screaming at the police when I acquiesced to her demands for them to be present.

I was able to hire a lawyer and successfully obtained a protective order and an injunction to stop her from acting on her threats to destroy everything I owned, and forcing her to allow me access to move my things. (Some of which she maliciously damaged beyond repair)

I wish that were the end of it, but it turns out she is also attempting to defame me by levying false criminal charges against me.

Unfortunately, I have been unemployed for a while now and while I can't afford a lawyer, the court appointed attorney says there is essentially no case and no evidence against me, but I still have to appear in person or face arrest for failure to appear.

Tickets from FL to Boston are not cheap, as they have to be refundable due to the inconsistency and unpredictability of court dockets. I've already been rescheduled twice and I'm hoping the third time is the charm to finally end this mess.

This wasn't easy to write. I've asked for a lot of help and almost always got it, and I feel the worse for it every time.

I need to buy a refundable round trip plane ticket and secure lodging for 2-3 days in November and prices will only be going up.

Thank you for reading this. I know that the world is unrelenting in its misery, but your help makes it a little more bearable.

(if gfm doesn't work for you, my other payment methods are here:

https://www.paypal.me/allanc3001

Cash app: $pnyhmns

Ko-fi.com/punyhumans

#mutual aid #fundraiser #emergency

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something-tofightfor · 3 years ago

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Locked Down Part 1: The Room

Pairing: Dieter Bravo x Female Reader

Word Count: 4,982

Rating: None necessary? Mentions of the pandemic’s early days, quarantining, talk of COVID symptoms and after effects, etc.

Summary: After contracting COVID at the end of a work assignment overseas and doing your required quarantine, you’re finally ready to fly home. There’s only one problem:

The estate you were staying in has been locked down due to a major film production, and no one is supposed to leave - or, in the case of you needing a ride to the airport - come onto the property.

With a little help from your boss and a favor from the head of the studio making the movie, an unfortunate mistake turns into the work opportunity of a lifetime ... and may even have a few bonus perks, too.

Author’s note:

I don’t even know what this is, but here we are. I’m a sucker for a cocky man with fluffy hair and a gold hoop ... aren’t you? My take on Dieter is a little different from a lot of the ones others have, but I still hope you enjoy him.

This is eventually gonna get smutty, but we’ve gotta work for it, friends... quarantining is serious business and Dieter is very nervous about his health.

Thank you for reading; feedback is much appreciated on this one! Tag list to follow.

You were bored out of your mind, and had been for over a week.

It was to be expected - you’d been in a “two week” quarantine for nearly a month thanks to the fact that just before your first seclusion period ended after potential contact with an infected person, you’d tested positive for COVID, too.

The whole thing was a clusterfuck, but at least your boss had been able to make a deal with the hotel you’d been put up in before getting sick, working out your ability to ride out both isolation periods there instead of having to travel somewhere else to stay. It was a nice place, too - large, lush green grounds, an old, beautifully constructed residence that had been converted into a hotel in the middle of the English countryside - but you’d been there for two months straight, and you were ready to leave.

You knew that you were lucky, that actually being able to work safely during a pandemic was a luxury that few people were offered, and so you’d jumped at the opportunity to head overseas and film a segment on the property and surrounding area. It was relatively secluded, with low transmission numbers both on the property and in nearby villages, and you’d managed to get nearly all of your work done before coming into contact with whoever had gotten you sick - which you were thankful for.

Your case had been mild - loss of taste and smell, an insane level of fatigue along with some coughing spells - and so you’d used the time to edit and organize the footage you’d collected and begin writing your feature, but when you’d finished that, you’d turned to any other form of entertainment you could find to stave off the last few days of boredom.

Netflix was your constant companion, and the steady stream of books stacked in front of your door by a helpful bellhop helped, too, but the only in person conversations you’d had for weeks had been from your balcony to the people on the ground below, and you were halfway convinced that you’d be relegated to interactions like that for the rest of your life. Even though I know I won’t be. If you never heard another Zoom alert or got another request for a FaceTime call, it would be too soon, but as you paced around your room on the second to last night of your quarantine, you realized that even after going home, it would be more of the same.

Your boss had already told you they weren’t sending you out on another assignment right away, that they were going to give you some time to adjust to being back home. Even though you’d already gotten the virus, none of your immediate family had, which meant that once you were back in your apartment, you’d be by yourself - again. “Shit.” Stopping in your tracks, you covered your face with both hands, trying to calm your racing heart.

You liked being alone, liked having time to yourself - it was why your job was perfect for you, but even you had limits, and you were rapidly approaching them. Before you could continue to spiral, though, you heard your phone buzz with an email alert and quickly turned to check it.

Your first test was scheduled for 10 am the following morning, and if that one came back negative, you’d have one the following morning, too. From there, you’d be free to leave the hotel, catching a ride to the nearest city and airport and finally going home.

But you hadn’t booked a flight yet, and didn’t want to jinx yourself by doing it early. Instead, you confirmed the appointment, tossing your phone back onto the bed and then flopping down next to it, eyes on the high ceiling. I’ll figure it out. Head turning to the side, you sighed as you stared out the large French doors and at the night sky. I always do.

—

But there was no ‘figuring out’ the situation you found yourself in two days later as you stood at the concierge desk, the young blonde woman on the other side of it doing the bare minimum to keep you calm. “I’m sorry, we don’t have a record of you still being here, I closed out your file myself. I don’t know what -”

“Someone’s been bringing me meals for weeks. I’ve had six COVID tests done by the staff here, and someone’s been coming to bring me towels and toiletries every couple of days, so how can…” You trailed off, the heel of your hand digging against your forehead. “I never even paid the bill for my actual stay, so how did -” “I think I know the answer to that.” The blonde’s coworker stepped next to her, his lips pressed into a thin line. “Your initial stay was paid for by your company. The last two weeks have been a medical stay, so technically you’re not in the system, even though you’ve been here.” You sighed, closing your eyes. “And unfortunately, we’re on a building-wide lockdown as of right now because of the cast and crew arrival for a movie that’s going to film here, so -” “A what?” You dropped your hand against the top of the counter. “A lockdown? I’ve been locked down, I’m supposed to go to the city and then fl-” “That isn’t possible.” The blonde spoke again, her tone flat. “No one is leaving, not while the movie people are -” “You can’t keep me here.” You felt the panic rising in your chest, the elation of speaking to people face to face almost completely gone. “I’m not a prisoner, I -” “No, you aren’t, but we don’t have extra vehicles at the moment. The entirety of our fleet has been rented by the production team for the next few months, and they’ll be using them to transport the cast and crew between here and the soundstage.” “So I’ll call a cab or an Uber, or -” “We’re not allowed to have other vehicles on the property.” The blonde was eyeing you warily, and you couldn’t blame her - even you could hear how shrill your voice had become, the panic rising again. “It’s a production hazard, and they’re counting on us t -” “I want to go home!” You yelped the words, head whipping back and forth. “I’ve wanted to go home for three weeks, and now you’re telling me that because of some stupid movie that I -” “It’s a Cliff Beasts movie.” The blonde spoke again, her eyes sparkling. “You’ve heard of it? There are a ton of -” “I don’t care if it’s a Marvel movie and you promise that Chris Hemsworth is going to stay in my room with me for a month doing whatever I ask him to, that doesn’t mean -” “Chris Hemsworth’s kind of a dick.” You froze at the sound of a new voice, turning your head to the side and looking over your shoulder to see who was speaking. “You wouldn’t want to share a room with him. I had to sit next to him at the People’s Choice Awards once and it was fucking miserable.” Who the fuck is this? The man kept his distance as he spoke - white mask covering the entire lower half of his face and a pair of sunglasses tucked into the stretched out collar of his shirt.

“Mr. Bravo, sir.” The blonde spoke again, apparently addressing the man standing behind you, and you narrowed your eyes in confusion. Mr. Bravo? What kind of name is that? “Mr. Bravo, your assistant has already checked you in, I’ll just need you to come and get your keycard and give you the information about your isolation -”

“I think you need to figure out what’s going on with her, first.” The man gestured to you and you watched one of his brows rise, almost disappearing into the mop of wild curls that hung over his forehead. “No hurry here.”

“Thank you.” Giving him a smile - before you remembered that he couldn’t see it because of the mask you wore, you turned back to the desk and the blonde, whose eyes were still focused over your shoulder. “If I can’t get to the airport, and I’m not supposed to be here because it’s a closed set, then what are my options?” You looked between her and the male concierge, deciding that he was likely a better option to for an appeal. “There’s no way I can afford to stay here for the entire shoot. Can’t I just use one of the cars in the middle of the night or something, or… or maybe walk to the end of the driveway and catch a cab from -” “It’s raining right now.” The man - Mr. Bravo - spoke up after clearing his throat. “And the driveway was really goddamn long, so that’s not -” “How about this.” The second concierge spoke up again, nudging the woman out of the way and typing on the computer. “We will take the responsibility for this, and give you another night to figure something out. Call your boss, call the airline, call whoever you need to. We’ll have to move you off of your floor though, since that whole wing is reserved for the main cast, and we -” “Wouldn’t it make more sense to just let me go back into the same room?” You pinched the bridge of your nose, sighing. “Instead of cleaning a second one after I leave? It’s just one night, and -” “It’s a security concern.” The blonde’s eyes flicked between you and Bravo, her head shaking back and forth slowly. “The rooms are staggered, and if you go back, you’d be right next door to Mr. Br-”

“It’s not a big deal.” Your shoulders slumped, the sound of his voice a relief. “It’s only one night, and it isn’t like the virus can come through the walls.” A laugh that was nearly a sob escaped your lips and you met the young woman’s eyes again, finding them filled with frustration. But why? I didn’t do anything wrong. This isn’t my fault. “And we’ve all gotta quarantine by ourselves, right? I’ll just lock the door, I think I can -”

“We aren’t supposed to -” The blonde interrupted, but she was cut off by her partner, the man murmuring quietly into her ear. “Ok. Fine. You can go back to the same room for the night, and then let us know what you will be doing tomorrow. But please respect the film crew’s rules and do not interact with -” “Don’t worry.” You waved your hand in the air and then grabbed for the keycard you’d set down on the counter, sighing. “No one outside of my room is going to see or hear from me until tomorrow when all this shit is figured out and you’re watching me walk out that front door and straight to the airport.” Bravo snorted from behind you and you quickly looked back at him, noticing the deeply etched lines at the corners of his eyes - an indication that beneath the mask, he was smiling. “Just please don’t forget to bring me something to eat later, since I’m apparently still under room-arrest, and -”

“We will, miss.” The male concierge ducked his head and smiled at you. “When we bring the cast and crew their meals, we’ll knock. Breakfast, too.” At least there’s that. “I’m terribly sorry about this. It never should have happened, and you have our deepest apologies.” Maybe I have yours, you thought as you thanked him and then the woman, too, her eyes still on the man in the mask behind you. But she doesn’t give a shit.

Letting out a breath you reached for the handle of your suitcase and turned away from the counter, finally looking at Bravo head on. “Thank you. I meant it - you won’t even know I’m next door.” You paused, frowning. He looks familiar, but I don’t… “Unless you hear the TV. I got used to turning the volume up pretty loud, so if it bugs you, just bang on the wall.”

“Will do.” He reached up, scratching the side of his head. “Good luck with your boss.” Yeah. I’ll need it. Stepping past him and making your way toward the elevator, you closed your eyes after pressing the button.

—

Two hours later, you were stretched out on your bed with the pillow resting over your face. You’d gotten ahold of your boss, explaining the situation, and after she’d expressed relief that you were feeling better and could come home, she pressed you for more details about the production that you’d found yourself in the middle of.

You told her what you knew - the name of the movie franchise, that there was a man named Bravo in the cast, that they’d rented out the entire estate for the duration of the shoot, and you’d practically heard the wheels turning in her head, the woman telling you to hang tight and she’d get back to you. It hadn’t filled you with confidence, but Carmen hadn’t ever steered you wrong before, so you tried not to think about it too hard, hoping that when she called back, she’d have answers.

At the sound of a knock on the door, you pulled the pillow away from your face and sat straight up, eyes on the dark wood. Dinner. You were hungry despite still being unable to taste the things you ate, and you nearly sprinted for the door, pulling it open and bringing the tray in. It was the usual spread, and as you sat cross-legged on the bed with your plate in front of you, you kept your eyes on the TV, the volume turned lower than usual as you halfway paid attention to a movie on Netflix.

Halfway - until you saw a familiar mop of hair on the screen and paused with your fork halfway to your mouth. No way. “That was Dieter fucking Bravo?” You thought back to the man in the lobby, and the realization made the way that the blonde acted seem much more reasonable. No, not reasonable, but … it explains it. Food forgotten, you reached for your phone and typed the man’s name into Google, laughing quietly as you realized that it had been him, and that he’d actually been gracious and friendly toward you - which was very different than the impression many people had of him.

You considered yourself well-versed in pop culture, and had thought that you would have recognized one of the most popular actors in Hollywood if you’d run into him. But these damn masks, they make it … impossible. At the very least, it would be a really good story to tell your friends when you got home, but you had to admit that you were a little disappointed that you hadn’t outright realized it was him. Oh well. Tossing the phone down, you returned to your meal, trying to figure out if it was your imagination - or if you could actually taste the sauce on your pasta.

Ten minutes after you finished, your phone rang, Carmen’s name popping up on the screen, and you answered quickly, moving to the balcony doors and standing in front of them with one hand on your hip. “So when can I come home?” She didn’t answer right away and you felt your stomach drop, your eyes squeezing shut. “Carmen?”

“How would you feel about another job.” A job? What does that mean? “You’d have to stay there, but -” “Stay? Here? The woman at the front desk was practically trying to kick me out of my room today, how -” You’d moved out onto the balcony, resting your elbows on the railing and looking out into the dusky twilight. “It’s a closed set, Carmen. What would -” “I did some research, and it turns out that the studio head owes me a favor.” Hanging your head, you took a deep breath. “A couple of them, actually, for some publicity we did a couple years ago for one of her other movies, and because of these damn lockdowns, everyone’s trying to keep things small right now.”

“Yeah, which is why I was here on my own in the first place, I -”

“That actually works out well for you with this.” Carmen’s voice was calm, and you’d heard it before, when she was trying to explain the parameters of an assignment that she knew you weren’t 100% on board with. “I know you mostly do travel stuff - pieces on different cities and what they have to offer, but … what if I told you that I could get you hired onto the actual production as a documentarian?”

“What the fuck does that mean?” Frowning, you narrowed your eyes. “How would that benefit us at all?”

“Because,” she continued patiently, giving you a moment. “You’d be documenting the process of making a movie during a pandemic for the franchise’s purposes and you’d be able to double dip, using your experience to write about it for us afterward. Pictures, too, in an exclusive to be released in conjunction with whatever marketing blitz they do when the movie gets released.” Standing up straighter, you considered her words.

It wasn’t too different from what you normally did - instead of exploring towns and cultural sites, you’d be focused on the single group of people - and the sets for the movie, along with the overall environment of filming during unprecedented times. I hate that fucking phrase. “So I’d have to stay here for the entire shoot? The girl at the desk said months, and I…” Trailing off, you realized that you had no real reason to go home, except that you wanted a change of scenery. But if I’m not confined to this room, maybe it won’t be … bad. “How would it work, Carmen? Who would I report to? How would I get paid?”

“The production would hire you and pay you throughout. If you agree to this, you’d meet with the person in charge in the next couple of days to sign contracts and paperwork and all that, find out what it all entails.” She took a breath. “And then when you write the story for us, we’d pay you your regular rate, just like usual.” So I’d get paid twice for the same job.

“I can’t afford to stay here on my own, Carmen. I -” “Hotel’s included in the contract, since it’s a closed set and you’d be in a bubble with everyone the whole time. That was something I did ask about. Your boss there will have more details, but … it’d be interesting, and you know it. Have you looked at the cast for this movie? It’s a ton of people, and it’ll drive our engagement way up. It’s a long job, but it … it could give you some new opportunities.”

“I like working for you.” You did - it was the truth, and you wanted the woman to know. “I like picking my own assignments and getting to travel, and I like the freedom of -” “I think you should do it.” She let out a breath and then cleared her throat. “Things are pretty shitty over here, to be honest. There are shortages everywhere, everything’s closed, we had to scale the budget way down for the next quarter, and everyone’s looking at everyone else like they’re carrying the plague if they so much as sniffle. At least if you’re there, you’ll get tested often and you’ll know that the people you’re around are safe, too.” You hadn’t thought about that, but she was right.

“And I’ve already had it, so it’s not like I can get sick again … that’s a relief.” Trailing your fingers over the smooth, flat stone of the railing, you eyed the expansive green lawn, the dim lights just turning on to illuminate it. “Dammit, Carmen.” Closing your eyes, you took a deep breath. “Tell them I’ll do it.” She laughed on the other end of the line, and you smiled too, humming quietly. “Why is this position open, anyway? Wouldn’t this be something that they’d want to have in place before the prep work starts? The actors are starting to get here, and -”

“They had someone, but they had to drop out last minute. Travel documents got fucked up, and she wouldn’t be able to get it sorted in time to fly in, quarantine and start with the shoot. You’ve already quarantined, so there’s no issue there.”

“Isn’t that perfect.” Inhaling, you could feel the cool night air moving through your lungs though you couldn’t smell it, and you swore under your breath. “This seems too good to be true. I haven’t seen any of these Cliff Beast movies, so hopefully that isn’t a problem. But -” “You’re not missing much.” She laughed - hard - and you did too, the woman continuing after only a few seconds. “This is going to be good for you. I’m actually pretty jealous. Dustin Mulray is in it, and he’s -” “No, shit!” Your eyes widened as she said the name. “Who else?” The woman listed off a few other names, and as she did, your apprehension about the situation began to fade, slowly being replaced with excitement.

“And of course Dieter Bravo’s in it, but you already know that since you met him.” I did. “I’m really surprised about that, since his last movie was such a different genre, but who knows what he’s trying to do with himself. Maybe he’s trying to get away from the serious stuff and back into the comedy, but -” “We’ll see.” You shivered, the air growing cooler by the second against your bare arms. “Thank you, Carmen, for doing this. Do you want me to keep you updated or send you drafts or -” “Nope.” What? “Don’t even worry about your piece for us until closer to the end of the shoot. As far as I’m concerned, you’ve got the next couple of months off. Just … have fun.” Fun? “I’ll call Paula back, and your paperwork should be in the production office tomorrow, or the day after at the latest. They’ll take care of everything.”

A few seconds later, you hung the phone up, slipping it into the back pocket of your jeans and returning your gaze to the landscape. It was quiet - the only sound the birds chirping off in the distance and the faint rustle of branches, but that didn’t last. “I haven’t seen any of the movies either.” Dieter was on his balcony, a low wall and about ten feet of space between you. “And I’m actually in this one.”

“Sorry if I was being too loud, Mr. Bravo. I -” “Call me Dieter.” He smiled at you, the sunglasses that had been on his shirt earlier perched on his nose, though the lenses were clear. “And you weren’t. I just figured I’d see what the outdoor area of my cell for the next two weeks was like.” Oh, I didn’t even think of that - he’s gotta stay inside too.

“It’s very small but it gets good sun for a couple hours a day.” Both eyebrows rose, the man cocking his head to one side. “I just finished a month confined to this room, so I definitely don’t envy you.”

“A month? Why?”

“Well I was here for work,” you replied, turning and leaning one hip against the railing. “And I came into contact with someone that tested positive while I was filming my piece on the town a couple miles away, so I had to isolate… and then toward the end of that, I somehow tested positive, even though I have no idea who it would have been from.” He winced. “Yeah, it was pretty shitty, but I didn’t have to go to the hospital, so it could have been much worse than just not being able to smell or taste anything.” Wetting your lips, you kept speaking. “So I had to stay here for another two weeks, which ended this morning, and I was supposed to fly home, but I guess they somehow forgot I was even here and locked everything down instead, so…”

“So now you’re stuck here with us.” He smirked, a large dimple appearing in one cheek. “But the only difference is that while we’re cooped up in our rooms, you won’t be.”

“How much did you hear?” Laughing, you rolled your eyes. “Nosy.”

“It’s not like I have anything else to do.” Standing up, the man ran a hand through his hair, the curls sticking out even more than they had been. “You ever been on a movie set before?”

“No, nothing like this. And I bet with it being so closed off, it’s going to be -” “None of us have ever done this shit before.” He rolled his eyes - though the action was playful - and you caught the glint of an earring in the light spilling out from his room and onto the balcony. Didn’t notice that before. “It’s new for me too.” That might have been true, but you knew that you were still on unequal footing, due to his having to constantly adapt to different situations and responsibilities on sets and having the experience where you didn’t. “You’ll be fine.”

“Mr. - Dieter.” You caught yourself, pressing your lips together and pausing. “I didn’t know who you were earlier, and I apologize for that. I wouldn’t have been such a -” “Don’t apologize. I know what it’s like to be fuckin’ stressed. Plus the mask didn’t help, right?” The grin that spread over his face made him seem almost boyish, and you couldn’t help smiling back. “And I know what people say about me. I know what people think about me, and it’s fine.” He shrugged. “I’m used to it. But…” He stepped marginally closer, though he kept most of the distance. “This is Hollywood. Not everything’s real. And maybe over the next couple of months you’ll get to know that.” What does that mean?

“Dieter, I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean, but …” You gestured at the open door to your room, choosing not to look away from him. “This is the last night that I’ll spend in this room. That blonde at the front desk can’t move me out of this side of the hotel fast enough, so I’m sure I’ll disappear to another wing of the building with the film crew, just to make sure I don’t bother the talent.”

His face fell slightly - which surprised you, but you understood that he likely wasn’t looking forward to spending the next fourteen days alone, much in the same way you’d spent so much time by yourself. “I wonder.” He mumbled the words, brow furrowed, but then his expression changed, the man’s face smoothing out. “The first five Cliff Beasts movies are on Netflix, did you know that?” I didn’t. “If you’re going to be working on the set for 6, you might want to watch at least one of them.” “Shouldn’t you take your own advice?” He laughed then, the sound carrying through the darkness. “We’ll see.” You didn’t know what else to say to him, and so instead of just standing there, you took a step to the side, closer to the doors. “I’m getting cold, so I’m going to go inside. If I don’t see you again until filming starts, I hope you have a good quarantine.” He frowned at you - pushing his lower lip out in an exaggerated pout, and you had to bite back a smile at the expression, keeping your face neutral. Oh, he’s trouble. The man muttered something in reply that you didn’t catch, crossing his arms over his broad chest. “Also? The groundskeepers make their rounds at about 11 am every day. So if you want to talk to a real person and not someone via video or over the phone, that’s your best bet.”

“You’re fucking joking.” Head shaking back and forth, you kept your eyes on him. “The only people you’ve talked to for the last month are the gardeners?” Agreeing and telling him that there’d been a couple days where you’d said hello to a delivery driver, too, you heard him swear, his fingers tightening against his biceps. “Fuck that. Now I get why you were so upset in the lobby.”

“Goodnight, Dieter.” Taking two steps, you paused and looked back, finding that he was still following your movement with his eyes, the man’s body angled so that he could watch you reenter your room. “The main groundskeeper's name is Colin, by the way. He likes fishing.”

You heard Dieter’s groan as you stepped over the threshold and back into the carpeted floor of your room, lips splitting into a wide smile while you pulled the doors mostly shut. That went well.

You’d never interacted with a legitimate movie star before, but if the job was everything that Carmen had explained, that would change over the course of the following few months. Dieter was only the beginning, you realized as you scrolled through the announced cast list, and while he was arguably the most talented, he wasn’t the most famous - and you had to wonder what the others would be like. Guess I’ll find out.

A half hour later, you were showered and in bed, the TV on and remote in hand. As you clicked through the Netflix menu, you replayed your conversation with Dieter in your mind, trying to make sense of it. He usually comes off as such a pretentious dick, but he wasn’t… that’s not what I saw.

Setting the alarm on your phone, you plugged it in to charge and then pressed play on the TV remote, snuggling down and into the blankets while the title screen of the first Cliff Beasts appeared on the screen. Might as well see what I’m getting myself into.

—-

#dieter bravo x reader #dieter bravo x female reader #the bubble #pedro pascal #pedrostories #locked down #pedro pascal masterlist #dieter bravo masterlist

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lululawrence · 2 years ago

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I usually only read larrie fics but I wouldn't mind trying some zouis fics, do you have any favorites? (I don't know if you even read zouis but you are the only "fic" person I follow that reads other ships so I thought it didn't hurt to ask!)

Oh nonnie yes!!! I LOVE zouis so much!! I’m on mobile, so this list isn’t going to be great, and my reasons for loving each aren’t going to be long because my toddler is a terror at the moment, but here’s a basic list for you to start with!

First, my own because self promo? Haha

Kiss Me Or Not - this was part of my birthday Drabbles series for Harry where I was offering to write Drabbles for anyone who donated to Harry’s birthday drive and I wrote some zouis! It’s short and sweet and was my first attempt hehe I love it though

Hope I Start Talking Crazy (before you understand me) - this one is technically zouiam, but there’s a lot of zouis in there as it’s all building up to the finally ot3 hehe it’s also a/b/o (alpha ZAYN and Liam who are already mated and omega louis), Louis moves in next door to ziam, and it’s just. It was so much fun honestly hehe it was for the zouis fest that ran last year!

Finally, You and I (Collide) - I wrote this as a gift for @so-why-let-your-voice-be-tamed who also loves zouis (and who has also written zouis and does a fab job!!) it’s a five times fic involving adventures in baking that Louis gets to be the taste tester for hehe

Okay and now for everyone else! Here are some of the zouis fics I’ve read most recently and loved:

You Only Fall In Love Twice by @beanno28 - okay so this fic is zourry, but since you usually only read larry fics I wanted to include this because sometimes having your usual pairing as part of it can help ease the way for you haha this was written for the Big Bang this year and is a famous/non famous fic and I loved it so much for so many reasons. It really focuses on all of their relationships and growing into the poly relationship together and it’s just. Wonderful. There’s also a focus on the poly aspect and adjusting to it and the difficulties they might face as they get used to it all that you don’t often see in poly fics, so I hugely loved having that in this one.

we’re still the kings of the Friday nights by @so-why-let-your-voice-be-tamed - this was written for zouis fest as well and ITS SO GOOD OMG!!! Friends to lovers, all the pining, that little hint of angst as they figure things out… it’s just. Everything good in a fic basically haha it’s a lot about self discovery as well and the way Mia writes about emotions is beautiful so of course that means this is impeccably done.

darling just dive right in by @so-why-let-your-voice-be-tamed - I told you she loved zouis, didn’t I? Haha I actually read this one as part of her birthday episode of @podfic-pals as a surprise for her, I love it that much. This is kind of… ex-friends with benefits to lovers? Haha I guess exes to lovers is more succinct and accurate to what they were but it’s so much pain. Soooo much pain. And then all the fluff when they realize their mistake. It’s just. So good. And royalty au!!!

New York Kiss by @quelsentiment - this fic. WHEW. Famous/non famous… kinda. Haha it takes place during Covid with quarantine and the uncertainty of the beginning of the pandemic especially playing a fairly large role in all of it and continuing as a strong undercurrent for their building relationship, so if that’s a trigger for you then stay safe, but I’m telling you this fic is art. The way every piece is put together and expounded upon, the way information is given, the emotions depicted, all of it just hits so perfectly and I love it so much.

Situations Like These by @quelsentiment - okay so I’m not going to list all of this author’s zouis fics even though I want to, but they are honest to goodness one of my very favorite rare pair fic authors ever and they also give incredible aspec representation, so just. Check them out. But this fic was just. It means so much to me I love it very much a lot. The ace rep is FAB but also the way that Louis is just trying so hard to figure out what he’s feeling and what it means and not scare ZAYN off in the meantime and it’s just so very relatable to me! The way it’s all crafted is wonderful, so I defo rec this one along with the previous fic in this list lol

Sigh. I was going to leave you with just two of their fics but I can’t. I am listing three more cause I love them too much to leave off.

Favourite Boy - PAIN. FEELS. FWB (acquaintances with benefits?) to lovers!!!!

Dancing Barefoot - zouiam!!!! On a student field trip as parent supervisors!!!

driver’s license - enemies to lovers ft driving instructor ZAYN who distracts hopeful driver Louis enough that he keeps botching his driving test lmaooo

Unplanned Circumstances by @haztobegood - this one is technically not finished yet… or is it just a really open ending? Lmao it’s SO GOOD THOUGH so read it and shower praise on jinny and maybe she’ll finish it for us someday? Lol

Okay there’s. So many more I could include but I’m cutting myself off because it’s gotten long enough lol but here you go! I hope you enjoy!!! Be sure to leave kudos and nice comments for the authors in thanks hehe

#this got long sorry!#rare pairs #zouis #fic rec #my fic rec #long post #asks #anonymous

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writers-hq · 3 years ago

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Hello. We need to ask you something pretttyyy important.

So.

Right.

Ugh this sucks.

Right.

As you know the pandemic has proper knackered arts orgs and artists all over the shop and that, unfortunately, includes us. For the last 18 months, we’ve been unable to run our live events safely and, honestly? It’s left a huge hole in our beeswax. Add to the nightmare with the cowboy web developers and things at Writers' HQ are a little on the precarious side.

Recently the Arts Council decided we weren’t allowed to apply for the Culture Recovery Fund because we asked for both too much and too little (we don’t understand either)*. We have absolutely maxed out all available credit and aren’t eligible for any of the other covid support packages and eeesh it has left us in a very bum-clenchy situation.

Since the beginning of the pandemic we have run hundreds of free online workshops and courses for writers stuck in covid hell and worked our little butts off to make sure no one missed out on the community they needed during the weird-ass timeline we forked into in early 2020.

Last year, we awarded over 20 bursaries to systemically excluded writers, ran 312 webinars and workshops and saw our writers rack up over 200 publications and 50 longlistings, shortlistings and competition wins. One longlist had TEN Writers’ HQers on it, and one anthology featured SEVEN of you writerly maniacs.

But it’s not just about the publications. It’s about DOING THE WORK and hoo boy have our writers worked their arses off. We’ve seen 'em rack up those words, complete first drafts, fifth drafts, synopses, queries, collections, scripts, poems, a billion pieces of flash fiction, non-fiction, articles, journals, MA applications, podcasts, spoken word performances, self-published manuscripts, NaNoWriMo drafts and, most important of all, you’ve posted an endless stream of support and feedback on our forum, celebrating wins and rejections alike.

We love Writers’ HQ and we know it’s an important place for so many writers and we are determined that we won’t be scuppered at the final twist of the pandemic shitfight.

tl;dr: Writers’ HQ is really in the shits right now and if you have the resources to help us continue supporting writers across the world, we would very much appreciate it. We’re not a mega corp that can suck up the losses of the last 18 months. Writers’ HQ is a labour of love run by Sarah and Jo and Natalie (and Poppy and the rest of the amazing workshop team) from their living rooms because we believe the writing of stories should be accessible to everyone regardless of ability, class, neurodiversity or wealth, not just the rarified types normally allowed by the publishing gatekeepers.

So. If you can, there are three ways you can help us right now:

1. BECOME A MONTHLY MEMBER

Not only does your monthly sub give you access to like the best writing community and courses and workshops in the ENTIRE WORLD EVER PLUS ONE but it really is the best way to support us right now, and it helps us to continue offering plenty o’ free stuff for those who need the free stuff.

Get your membership here >>

2. DONATE TO THE WHQ BURSARY

Our bursary pot helps us to give systemically excluded writers access to all our writing resources.

Top up the pot here >>

3. SPREAD THE WORD!

Don’t keep us to yourselves! We’re too good to be a secret! Tell everyone you know about Writers’ HQ and let them see for themselves what awesome-sauceome writerly goodies we have to offer. If you have a website, please consider putting a link on it pointing to us, or just spam your friends demanding they check us out.

Thank you thank you we love you love you love you x

#writers' hq #writing organisation #creative writing courses #writing resources #writing tips #writing courses #free writing courses #writing prompts #writing ideas #writing inspiration #writing exercises #fiction #writer problems

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honest-moth-of-silver-grove · 2 years ago

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I posted 42 times in 2022

That's 4 more posts than 2021!

5 posts created (12%)

37 posts reblogged (88%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@elytrians

@muchymozzarella

@hamartia-grander

@demigoddessqueens

@thotty-bog-body

I tagged 42 of my posts in 2022

#not writing - 32 posts

#not mine - 10 posts

#art tag - 6 posts

#lol - 4 posts

#resident evil - 4 posts

#@hermione-grander - 2 posts

#my love! - 2 posts

#i dont think im capable of normal anymore - 1 post

#me w/ my villians - 1 post

#next tumblr april fools pls and thank u - 1 post

Longest Tag: 82 characters

#like i adore all of the adaptatiosn but am also sad that were loosing the og myths

My Top Posts in 2022:

hey... r u alive??

Am,,, I...?

(Lol, jk- yes I am. And I'm working on stuff I promise.)

((On A Totally Unrelated Note: Do NOT stop masking and get covid again because it can literally steal months of your life.))

0 notes - Posted October 11, 2022

not for nothing but i absolutely do see the trend of newcomer tumblr users only liking posts and not reblogging them

0 notes - Posted May 6, 2022

actually have a wip!!!

woo-hoo!!!

6 notes - Posted March 30, 2022

update. ask box still closed.

i survived the fall semester only to get covid.... ugh. omnicron is no joke.

stay safe out there y’all!

-Mothmom 💚

7 notes - Posted January 2, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

Nurse!Reader x Carlos Oliveira & Nikolai Zinoviev Headcanons

A/N: (Everyone’s a touch OOC as I doubt either one would willingly drag a civilian along, albeit for different reasons: Carlos because once you’ve been escorted to safety, you’re no longer his immediate concern; Nikolai because he was never all that interested in saving civilians, to begin with, but let’s say you’re just so darn cute/special that you alter canon circumstances, okay? Okay. Also, all of them survive RE3 in this, so yeah.)

☣ ☢ ☣ ☢

When shit starts hitting the fan, you don't panic immediately. After all, you work in a hospital, what better place to be during a pandemic, right?

Wrong! Oh so wrong.

You see the effects of the T-virus up close and personal, and it’s not pretty. Prior to this point, you thought such viruses only existed in science fiction or cheesy B-grade horror movies. But here it was in your workplace, quickly overcoming all quarantined forces, hospital staff, and security.

So you flee. You leave through a back exit and get the hell out of dodge, or at least, the center of dodge. You soon find, however, that it’s not just the hospital that’s overrun, but the city as well.

Maybe that’s how you meet them…

Carlos:

He swoops in and saves you from a hoard of zombies, looking like an A-list action star as he does it. (It’s the hair- it’s incredible.)

He tells you his platoon is rounding up survivors in the subway, that it’s a temporary shelter until they can get the trains up and running again. That he and his teammates were sent in to get everyone safely out of the city. You’re not sure if you believe this plan, but you follow him eagerly as he leads you to the subway.

On the way, you tell him who you are. When he finds out you’re medical personnel, he’s both impressed and relieved. He tells you his captain has been injured, and they haven’t come across a doctor or nurse that hasn't already been infected. You of course offer to help in any way your can. (Because you’re awesome like that.)

You’re not surprised when he tells you he’s working with Umbrella because you also work with Umbrella as a hospital employee. But to you, they’re a pharmaceutical company, why would they need military personnel? It doesn't sit right with you, but Carlos is an absolute sweetheart. (I mean the man is cracking jokes in the middle of the apocalypse.) So you trust the guy.

Carlos does his best to assure you you’re not a burden or some sort of unwanted weight when you first arrive at the subway car. Mainly, because he can tell by the way you keep offering to help get the trains running, even though you’d be no match for the horde, but also because of Nikolai’s snide comments about Carlos bringing in “yet another one” when the cars still weren’t working. “Hey, don’t worry about it,” he says. “It’s our job to protect you.”

Carlos takes you to his Captain- Captain Mikhail Victor in charge of Umbrella's Delta Platoon. You try and treat the Captain’s injury the best you can, using what little supplies from the first-aid kit that’s available. You apply a generous amount of first aid spray and wrap a makeshift bandage around the cut. You would have attempted sutures if the kit had any but unfortunately for the Captain, it didn’t. The wound isn’t deep but it’s in a compromising place. You know this man won’t make it out of here on foot.

Overall, you feel you’ve done an inadequate job because you know the Captain is still incredibly vulnerable, but both Carlos and Mikhail assure you, you’ve been more than helpful.

But you want to help more! When Carlos admits he and Tyrell won’t be catching the train and will instead stay behind to look for Bard, you offer to come with them, to help them navigate the hospital.

Of course, everyone thinks it’s a horrible idea. One: because Bard is supposedly at the police station, not the hospital, and Two: because you have no weapons training whatsoever. You’re a walking liability. Nikolai teases Carlos about “taking on the burdens of strays”. You flip him off behind his back.

After a ton of back and forth, you insist you go with Carlos and Tyrell, refusing to get on the train. At one point you take a seat on the ground of the platform and cross your arms stubbornly. (You’re not going and they can’t make you!)

Carlos is the first to accept the situation and roll with the punches. “Alright. But I have one rule.” He says. “No dying on me.”

You stand, smile, and shake his hand. “Deal.”

The three of you make it to the police station, where you hang back with Tyrell in the main lobby as Carlos looks around for Bard. Once it’s revealed that Bard is still at the hospital, you offer to escort Carlos there. After giving him your best “I told you so” smirk that is.

On the way you find Jill, clearly having been infected by something, even though you’re not certain what. But none of that matters as you and Carlos bring her to the practically abandoned hospital.

Once Jill is settled, you give Carlos some directions and a rudimentary drawing of where to locate the asshole Bard’s office. “You’ll need a voice key,” you tell him. “You’d have to look around these rooms for one of his cassettes.”

He thanks you before asking you to look after Jill for the time being. You promise to radio him if her condition worsens.

When Carlos comes back with the vaccine, you could practically kiss the man. You don’t, of course, it wouldn't be appropriate. (But the thought does cross your mind very briefly.) Carlos lets you administer the vaccine to Jill, you being the trained nurse and all. With all that's happened, being able to do some actual healing feels like nothing short of a miracle.

You begin to take notes on Jill’s condition, commenting that although it doesn’t seem to be a speedy cure, her fever’s going down and her skin doesn’t look as clammy.

The miraculous feeling doesn't last long, however, as Tyrell comes bursting through the room, clearly out of breath and pretty banged-up. He turns on the TV and to your horror, you find you have only hours to make it out of Racoon City unless you want to be vaporized. (Which, no, thank you! You certainly don’t!)

After catching up, Tyrell being high-key surprised you’re still alive, (which honestly, you’re like ‘same’ lol) you decide to go with Carlos underground, to locate the stockpiled vaccine as a last-ditch effort to save the city. You hope whatever they made, that there’s tons of it.

Before going underground though, Carlos gives you a gun from one of the killed security guards. It only has a few bullets but he feels safer knowing you’re not just going to walk completely weaponless into whatever danger Umbrella has waiting for you.

See the full post

187 notes - Posted April 4, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

#tumblr2022 #year in review #my 2022 tumblr year in review #your tumblr year in review #bruh this year kicked my ass fr

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sinceileftyoublog · 2 years ago

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of Montreal Interview: Making a Coherent Reality

Photo by Christina Schneider

BY JORDAN MAINZER

Like their most beloved albums, of Montreal’s 18th full-length Freewave Lucifer f<ck f^ck f>ck is a poppy, spritely record born out of a period of intense grief. Isolated, Kevin Barnes, the Athens, GA collective’s only consistent member throughout its history, decided to dive into free associational lyrics and washy and chopped sonic experiments as a way to process the death of both their mother and their dog, not to mention the collective trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Though 2020′s bright UR FUN was of Montreal’s most recent album for longtime label Polyvinyl, they self-released I Feel Safe With You, Trash in March 2021 on Bandcamp as part of the band’s Patreon. It’s the latter whose process and mindset became influential in the making of Freewave Lucifer f<ck f^ck f>ck. Barnes went into the studio and recorded a little bit each day, not trying to force any sort of aesthetic but making themselves work nonetheless. Naturally, some of the songs were inspired by what was going on in their life. “Marijuana’s a Working Woman”, referring to Barnes’ choice to switch out alcohol and welcome weed during the pandemic, sports psychedelic funk and piano obscured by effects, a sonic manifestation of their newfound drug of choice. “Ofrenda-Flanger-Ego-à Gogo”, on the contrary, juxtaposes sparkling synthesizers with lilting acoustic guitars, two cleaner sounds. From dance tunes to baroque pop to brooding 80′s synth anthems, Freewave Lucifer f<ck f^ck f>ck covers a lot of ground but never strays from Barnes’ ethos of catharsis.

Earlier this summer, I spoke with Barnes over the phone from their home in Athens about Freewave Lucifer f<ck f^ck f>ck’s free associational process, making political art, and being inspired by sci fi. Read our conversation below, edited for length and clarity.

Since I Left You: So many of the lyrics on Freewave Lucifer f<ck f^ck f>ck are free association. Do you find it easy or useful to look back and glean meaning from what came out, to pinpoint where things were coming from? Or do you let the lyrics be?

Kevin Barnes: It’s a combination of both. I realize I try to need to be coherent. Reality is totally incoherent, but we make it feel coherent because we have to. I realized that the same thing applies to art. You don’t really need to try to make it linear or sensible because people will connect the dots anyways, and they’ll do it in a more interesting way than if you said something really straightforward. That’s the way my mind works anyways: bouncing all over the place. It feels more natural and organic to write in a style that feels more abstract or like it has no meaning. It’s impossible to not have meaning, if that makes sense. It’s impossible to abstract something so much you can’t take anything from it.

SILY: How did these songs come about? Did you come up with the lyrics first and then the instrumentation?

KB: Some of the words had been written or started. I always keep a journal with lyrical ideas or any phrase that pops into my mind that has a rhythm to it I could sing. All of the music was created around the same time last year. I had just finished this double album I self-released on Bandcamp that I gave to our Patreon people. That was in the middle of the pandemic. I knew we wouldn’t be able to go on tour and thought it would be a cool way to add value to the Patreon thing. I hadn’t released a record in my own in a long time, and I wanted to try it. Polyvinyl then asked, “Ok, can you give us a record now?” I worked on it shortly after. I was still in the spirit of the last record, in the approach of not knowing what was gonna happen and experimenting in the studio every day. Not worrying so much about what was going to be the single.

I just wanted to make music every day. I just wanted to make sounds. I didn’t want each day to feel like every other day. There’s something I read or heard recently that was like, “If you see a problem and work towards fixing a little bit every day...” and the problem for me was not having a record. So I had to work on it a bit every day. That’s why it feels musically composed, like maybe I’ve made this one-minute thing yesterday and today I don’t feel like taking a verse-chorus-verse approach to it. Each section has its own identity and personality, and the songs themselves contain a bunch of little sections I glued together.

SILY: The album still seems pretty cohesive, and the songs themselves have a lot of segues between them. How much of the final product resulted from you going back in and switching the order of the tracks or playing with how up front your vocals were in the mix?

KB: I think the whole process was just an experiment and playing around in the studio. Because I worked by myself and didn’t have any outside collaborators, I was able to completely become immersed in the project. I didn’t move parts around that much, but I would use what I did the day before as inspiration for the next day. I wasn’t trying to make something jarring where the songs would have extreme tempo or key changes. I didn’t have a vision necessarily, just more fucking around and being open to whatever sounds happen, while still trying to push myself to make more interesting creative decisions and try to create interesting sounds--more so than trying to create catchy or infectious things.

SILY: I wouldn’t say the aesthetic of the album is radically different from other albums you’ve made, but it definitely has a unique sound. Looking back, was there something you were influenced by that pushed you in an aesthetic direction?

KB: It has a sadness to it. My mom died last year. My dog also died, the dog I had for 15 years. COVID endlessly continuing. I was in a dark place. When I’m in that dark space, I try to escape through music, through a different realm and mind space that’s more positive or amputated from the sad reality. In a way, being able to make the record was a therapeutic experience for me. Sonically, my influences were really just everything I listened to in my life up until this point, and trying to imagine future sounds as well.

SILY: There are moments on the record, like on “Blab Sabbath Lathe of Maiden”, where it unexpectedly turns dancey. Did that process of change in the song mirror what you were feeling in terms of finding unexpected moments of happiness within grief?

KB: I had to generate it more because it wasn’t happening organically in my life. It’s something I’ve done a lot in the past, like on Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? There are songs that sound happy but are lyrically sad because of the pain I’m going through in my life that’s extreme. But instead of making minor key music that feels like a funeral, I decided to fight it by making something more positive, colorful, and uplifting.

SILY: On “Après Thee Dèclassè”, you sing, “Logic is the enemy.” Is that the thesis statement of the record?

KB: That’s a reference to Trumpism/QAnon as well: “Even love has cold hands when logic is the enemy.” Those people have an alternate reality that isn’t the reality that any of my friends, family, or myself see. It’s such a strange time period with Trump and the conservative movement. It’s the complete antithesis of everything I feel and care about, and to see the country splitting so completely down the middle, it can’t help but have an influence on our consciousness and art.

SILY: I wouldn’t really call of Montreal a political band. But you’ve been in a liberal city in a historically conservative state for so long. Does that contrast specifically have any effect on what you sing about?

KB: It absolutely has an impact on my worldview. I’m constantly getting spammed by conservative political signs. Even though Athens is pretty progressive, there’s still a ton of conservatives here. Going for a drive, you’re just bombarded by conservative shit. I’m actually probably gonna move out of Georgia next year. I just realized, “Why am I here? Why do I continue to live in this place that’s so outside of my views?” Just by living here, I’m giving it a tacit approval. There’s two sides to it. There’s [the other] side that’s, “Liberal people are most needed in these red places.” But I don’t want to fight that battle. It seems so endless and pointless. I’d rather move to New England where people are more like-minded than be here with these fucking cavemen.

SILY: As someone who has lived in Illinois for most of his life, I can’t really relate. I do have friends in similar situations, though, who live in “blueberries in a bowl of tomato soup.”

KB: [laughs]

SILY: On the final track, “Hmmm”, you sing, “Grief is an anvil to the skull.” What do you mean there?

KB: Knowing you’re not alone only makes it sadder. I didn’t really get any comfort out of sharing the grief [of my mother’s death] with my family. It just sucks, and there’s nothing that can be done about it. You just have to feel the pain. There’s no way around it.

SILY: What’s the inspiration behind the album title?

KB: I don’t really believe any of this shit, but if I were to explain it, Lucifer is definitely more of a friend to humanity than God. Jesus is fine, but Lucifer seems more helpful to humanity. Lucifer gets a bad rep because of superstition. The whole thing’s made up anyways, but if I were to pray to anything, I’d be more likely to pray to Lucifer than I would to some saint or whatever. The freewave concept is something I came up with. It’s basically, “To be liberated is to ride the freewave.” Everything has “wave” next to it, like “vaporwave.” “Freewave” is my own designation for what kind of music this is. “Fuck Fuck Fuck” is a reference to all of the horrible shit that was going on [in the world].

SILY: How did the art and design of the cover come to be?

KB: My brother David created it, and his vision for it was to feel like Times Square, Tokyo, or Seoul, an area that has a ton of signage. But instead of the signs being for a ramen restaurant or tattoo parlor, the signs are the song titles and lyrics.

SILY: What’s your approach going to be for playing these songs live?

KB: The benefit that we have nowadays is that we can put things in backing tracks if sounds are impossible to reproduce. We can always use sampler pads. There are four other musicians in the band, and I’ll assign them parts that make sense for their station. Jojo [Glidewell] has 3-4 different synthesizers and keyboards. So I’ll assign him main keyboard parts. [Nicolas Dobbratz] does most of the lead guitars. [Clayton Rychlik] is doing all the drums. [Davey Pierce] is doing all the bass lines. Then the rest is me trying to figure out what I can tackle. What’s leftover will either be left out or be in backing tracks.

SILY: Does adapting songs live prove to be as rewarding as making them to begin with?

KB: It’s a very different experience. At first, it’s not at all satisfying--we’re lucky we do have a practice space where we’re not gonna get the cops called on us, but it’s never going to sound as good. It always sounds flat when we’re in the room, but it’s gonna sound good in a club with a PA system. I have to look in the future and imagine what it’s gonna sound like. Practice is a laborious process; we just have to get our parts down and feel comfortable with what we’re gonna do. Once we hit the stage, we’re gonna feel better.

I like making stuff. I don’t really like reproducing stuff as much.

SILY: Especially for something as layered as this record. Is this album deeply intertwined with its context?

KB: I would think that usually, but a lot of stuff I think is very personal, once we go on tour, I realize they’re universal themes. Things I thought would only be relevant to me are relevant to everybody. People will point out a lyric I hadn’t thought about that much and say, “That lyric meant a lot to me.” So it takes on a different life when you play it live.

SILY: Are you working on anything new?

KB: I’ve started working on the next record. I have 3 songs, I think. I’m in an interesting place right now. Sometimes, it takes a bit of time to catch the spirit of what I want to do next. I can tread water and float around in the studio and make something usable for the next thing I put out. I have to work that way. It would be pretty easy to not make anything ever and stare at the wall. [laughs] That’s what I love about making records. When I physically hold the vinyl or CD, I can think, “2018 didn’t get sucked into some vacuum. I have proof I existed.” So I’m always trying to work on things and get into the headspace that will be inspiring and stay in touch with that side of my brain so it never goes to sleep.

SILY: Is there anything you’ve been listening to, watching, or reading that’s caught your attention?

KB: I’ve been reading this Clive Barker book Imajica. I knew he made Hellraiser, but I didn’t realize he was also an author. A friend gave me the book. It’s a pretty long book, so it’s not an easy read, but I’ve been super into it. I’ve been getting more into sci fi stuff, like Ursula Le Guin. Sci fi films as well. I don’t know why, but sci fi has been a safe refuge for me.

SILY: Probably the same reason it is for a lot of people: imagining a different world.

KB: Totally. I feel like sci fi doesn’t get treated like a serious art form. People think it’s goofy or nerdy. But it’s really prescient. So much that has been written in sci fi novels becomes reality in 10-15 years. I think we should all be mining sci fi literature for answers. A lot of the times, it’s pretty dystopian, but that’s probably pretty realistic.

SILY: Was Le Guin a big influence on this record?

KB: I wouldn’t say I was taking inspiration. There are some lines that connect to Alice Bailey and thinking about spiritualists in the early 20th century and A Treatise on White Magic. I guess sci fi and magical thinking are often one in the same. Religion is magical thinking--it doesn’t exist in the physical world right now. But if you can imagine it, it’s magical thinking. On some level, knowing that there are so many humans that existed and exist now that were really brilliant and turned on, I get a lot of inspiration from those people. If you watch Tucker Carlson, you’ll get negative and depressed all the time. I guess people are hungry for bad vibes. I don’t understand the appeal of that shit. It’s so negative and pointless. It’s like lying in shit. I love discovering new authors and filmmakers that pull us out of that negative way of thinking. Not in complete fantasy, but depicting realities that we can identify with and spark our imaginations.

Tour dates # w/ Locate S,1 $ w/ Le Pain 9/08: Athens, GA @ 40 Watt # 9/09: New Orleans, LA @ Howlin’ Wolf # 9/10: Austin, TX @ Mohawk # 9/12: Albuquerque, NM @ Sister # 9/13: Phoenix, AZ @ The Crescent Ballroom # 9/14: Los Angeles, CA @ Regent Theater #$ 9/15: Berkeley, CA @ UC Theatre # 9/16: Eugene, OR @ WOW Hall # 9/17: Portland, OR @ Wonder Ballroom # 9/18: Seattle, WA @ Neumos # 9/19: Missoula, MT@ The Wilma # 9/20: Salt Lake City, UT @ Metro # 9/21: Englewood, CO @ Gothic Theatre # 9/22: Lawrence, KS @ The Granada # 9/23: St. Louis, MO @ Red Flag # 9/24: Atlanta, GA @ Buckhead Theatre # 10/04: Carrboro, NC @ Cat’s Cradle # 10/05: Richmond, VA @ Broadberry # 10/06: Washington, DC @ 9:30 Club # 10/07: Brooklyn, NY @ Elsewhere # 10/08: Cambridge, MA @ Sinclair # 10/09: Philadelphia, PA @ Theatre of the Living Arts # 10/10: Cleveland, OH @ Beachland Ballroom # 10/11: Detroit, MI @ Magic Stick # 10/12: Milwaukee, WI @ Turner Hall # 10/13: Minneapolis, MN @ Fine Line # 10/14: Chicago, IL @ Lincoln Hall # 10/15: Cincinnati, OH @ Woodward Theater # 10/16: Asheville, NC @ The Grey Eagle #

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