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See comments above!

So I guess 'management' means 'come over for a chat with everyone, stroll around on the pitch and look incredibly hot in this years teamwear'.

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This is so beautiful...

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I do actually care marginally about the guy in that reddit screenshot who voted for Trump and is now worried that he might lose his medicaid funding because I did not fucking stutter when I said healthcare is a human right but the people losing their internships and job offers to the hiring freeze are straight up hilarious.

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I’m told to “shelter in place” today because the armed shooter is still at large in my city.

I’m told not to answer the door to a policeman unless there are two of them because the shooter is dressed like a cop.

I’m told not to show up at the No Kings protests in my city today because the shooter had political paraphernalia in his car, including signs that would be used in the protest.

He’s murdered two people in their home and shot two others in their home. In both cases, the victims were Democrat lawmakers and their spouses. The assassin is a Republican man. Again.

Minnesota State Speaker of the House Melissa Hortman and husband Mark: Dead Today.

Minnesota State Senator John Hoffman and wife Yvette shot several times, currently surviving.

Shooter Vance Luther Boetler: Still at large.

Multiple gunshot wounds in both cases. What makes a seemingly ordinary man hate his fellow humans so much—just because they’re from a different party?

Fox News says to “pump the breaks” on whether the murders were politically motivated. Fox “News”, who were forced to officially state that they are not a news source, but an “entertainment” channel.

I’m so done with the Fox propaganda machine churning out lies and promulgating the vicious bile that indeed incites this kind of violence, then absolving itself from any responsibility.

I’m so done with the political violence perpetrated exclusively by members of the gun-toting Republican Party on members of the Democratic Party.

Yes, I said it. Nobody is willing to say it! But it should be said!

All of the political assassinations/shootings in the United States in the last 8 years have been perpetrated by the so-called “conservatives” of the (former) Republican Party, all killing Democrats/liberals.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-politics-violence/

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/briefing/right-wing-mass-shootings.html

*Even the man who shot at Trump was a Republican.

Republicans, you have a responsibility to check your fellow party members. Stop pretending it’s about some rando mentally ill dudes, as if there is not an obvious common thread between all of the shootings. It’s the unchecked radical climate of your party today that permits and promotes this kind of violence. Yet, there is no acknowledgement.

Republican, you should be ashamed by what your party members are doing. You should stop the violent rhetoric. You need to take a step back and look at what your party has become. What has happened to your traditional, conservative values? Are you still the party that purportedly values life?

Fox News, you have a responsibility to stop spreading the lies and vitriol that causes—yes, causes—this kind of mindless violence. The wildly provoking, pejorative disinformation you spread on your channel against your fellow Americans inflames the gun-toting Trump base to conduct these heinous acts. You should be forced to change your name to “Fox Lies”.

Democrats and Independents, we have a responsibility to call Fox “News” and Republicans to task for the violence inherent in the climate they are permitting and/or promoting. Stop being so afraid to speak the truth because you don’t want the violence to escalate. It’s escalated. Too many good people have died.

These radicals are using fear to try and control us and shut us up. They are led to this extremism from the very top by their King Trump and his lies. For God’s sake, he pardoned the entire violent mob who attacked the Capitol. Decent Republicans are being manipulated by the Trump party (no longer genuinely the Republican Party) to think we are monsters.

Wake up, Americans. Wake the fuck up.

——————————————————-

A special note: Thank you to the police, FBI, and law enforcement in Minnesota who are working hard to catch this killer as we speak.

Special thanks to the individual law enforcement officer who had the good sense to check on other political leaders in the area and found the perpetrator at the scene of the second crime—who knows how many lives your actions have saved. You may not have captured the criminal, but you ended his agenda and put him on the run.

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A creeping sense of dread washed over Tom Hiddleston as he read the script for “The Life of Chuck.” He knew that its director, Mike Flanagan, wanted him to play Chuck Krantz, or, as the actor put it, “a harbinger of the apocalypse.”

But as he read on, there came excitement, a thrill. Chuck has a secret: He loves to dance.

Hiddleston, 44, loves to dance, too, a discovery he made when he was a teenager. “It was instinctive,” he said in a recent interview via video. “But it was only for me. I didn’t train, I wasn’t in dance classes.”

He went out dancing with friends. The 1990s were his time. “My love for Daft Punk,” he said of the electronic music duo, “is enduring and real.”

While he is foremost an actor, Hiddleston has become something of a dance ambassador. Lean and elegant, he has the air of Fred Astaire. His limbs are long, but they don’t slow him down; his feet are fast and accurate. Known for his spontaneous eruptions of dance joy — on talk shows and the red carpet — Hiddleston is a natural with rhythmic acuity and, at times, riveting attack. His dancing, whether smooth or sharp, is instinctive and shaped by coordinated fluency.

Tom Hiddleston discovered he loved to dance as a teenager: “But it was only for me. I didn’t train, I wasn’t in dance classes.”Credit...Ariel Fisher for The New York Times

What’s apparent is the pleasure he gets from it: Certainly, there is Hiddleston the man, but also discernible is the boy within. There is innocence and fearlessness in his love of motion. An avid runner, Hiddleston said, “I’ve always thought of running as dancing forward.”

There’s no faking of abandon. “Tom dives into movement, and he’s not afraid,” the “Chuck” choreographer Mandy Moore said. “It’s like heart first, head second. He is a very smart mover, and he does think about where his body is in space. It comes across that he is not thinking about it — that it just comes from feeling.”

The dance in “Chuck” is long and complex — it lasts around six minutes — but Hiddleston performs it as though he’s making it up on the spot. As he read the script, he envisioned it as an explosion of emotion. “I just wanted it to fly, “ he said. “I wanted it to be the most vital and dynamic expression of joy and movement and freedom that it could be.”

In the film, Chuck is a mystery at first, appearing on billboards that read, “Thanks, Chuck!” accompanied by a photo and “39 GREAT YEARS.”

The story, mirroring the structure of the Stephen King novella on which it’s based, unfolds in three acts that travel backward in time. In the first, when the billboards appear, the planet is on the brink of extinction. Gradually it becomes clear that Chuck isn’t well.

Hiddleston with Annalise Basso in the dancing scene from “The Life of Chuck.”Credit...Neon

When the dance happens in the second act, Chuck, a businessman, is on a walk. He hears the beat of a drum played by a busker (Taylor Gordon). Instead of continuing on, he halts, dropping his briefcase. His hips give a soft, subtle sway. With two raised fingers, he wags them to the beat and takes a few steps back before stopping on a dime, switching direction and dashing off a quick pirouette.

It’s so unexpected that what follows is a beat of silence and stillness — a prelude to the dance, which, Hiddleston said, is “the last truly alive moment of Chuck’s life before his illness takes hold.”

“This is a moment of defying gravity,” he added.

And defying, for a few minutes, his fate. The number seems like a spontaneous release, but as we learn in Act 3, it dates to Chuck’s early years learning dances in the kitchen with his grandmother. As she cooked, she taught him jazz, swing, salsa, samba, Bossa nova, polka — styles that Hiddleston glides through in his dance.

He slips in a moonwalk, too. And there are signatures from his own dancing — things, Hiddleston said, his family would recognize, like a kind of shuffle. “My body just wants to do it, and I don’t know where it comes from,” he said. “My legs fly out from underneath me. And then I cross and they fly out and cross again.”

In the film, the dance draws a crowd, as all good street performances do. Janice (Annalise Basso), a young woman who happens upon the scene, is swept into the choreography as Chuck’s partner, and together, they fly. But during much of the duet’s creation, they weren’t even in the same room together.

Hiddleston was in London, and Moore and Basso were in Los Angeles. With the help of an associate, Moore started a training program with him, she said, “to work on the basics of jazz, some ballroom techniques, cha-cha, some salsa, a little bit of old school jazz just to see how his body moves.”

She choreographed by sending videotapes of movement phrases, but it wasn’t until they got in a studio together in London that the dance could be shaped and refined. “It was such a space of freedom and exploration,” he said. “Mandy believes so powerfully in the transformative power of dancing. And I felt so safe with her. She said, ‘You’re playing Chuck, but Chuck is you.’”

In many ways, that’s the key to his effervescent performance: You see the person inside of the dancer. In Hiddleston’s case, it’s the clarity of his connection with Basso and Gordon — really, the number is a pas de trois — and his delight as he finds his flow. By the end of the shoot, which took place in the Alabama heat, holes had burned into the soles of his shoes.

“I’m only approximating what a professional dancer feels, which is like after four days of doing it, I thought there was a kind of economy to it,” he said. “It was like my body was accustomed to the routine, and so there was a sort of precision there that maybe wasn’t there at the beginning. I found it easier to make big extensions and bigger shapes and for it to feel a bit looser without sacrificing the form. As we were coming to the end, I was like, ‘I wish I could do this every day.’”

The dance has a weight to it, which is a shift from some of his most identifiable performances. In 2013, Hiddleston appeared on “Chatty Man,” Alan Carr’s talk show, with two other guests who started rapping. Carr asked Hiddleston if he would do a rap, too. Instead, he offered to dance. “They put some music on, and I just did a little dance, like completely spontaneously,” he said. “I remember my microphone pack fell off from the belt of my trousers.”

“As we were coming to the end” of shooting the scene, Hiddleston said, “I was like, I wish I could do this every day.”Credit...Ariel Fisher for The New York Times

He thought nothing of it, but years later, it went viral. In terms of coverage, there was, “an extraordinary energy around it,” he said.

“I actually became a bit self-conscious about it. As if it was something that people kind of wanted me to do.”

Eventually, he got over his discomfort. “Maybe I’ve lost that because I’m getting older,” he said.

And dance has continued to surface in his acting life. Recently he appeared in Jamie Lloyd’s London production of “Much Ado About Nothing” in which the cast dances: “We were doing eight shows a week to these ’90s bangers,” he said happily.

But he knows that the message of “Chuck” — and its dance — is serious: “Its message is, do whatever gives you that feeling of being alive,” he said. “Dance, do math, paint, write, run, play the piano, sing, skateboard, surf, climb mountains, whatever it is that gives you deep joy, that is a transformative force in life. Life is brief and precious, and it needs to be grabbed with both hands. It takes courage to follow the joy and to find it.”

He continued, “For Chuck, it’s dancing. And to some extent, for me, it’s dancing. So dance while you can.”

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TOM HIDDLESTON: The Puppy Interview for BuzzFeed Celeb

🥰🥹это слишком мило

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Yes he did.

LOKI + powers

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Excellent meta, @tigermind108 !

I would just add that the standard response from Thor (and the rest of Asgard) when Loki spoke was to tell him to shut up. We see it over and over again, from “Know your place, brother” and Odin’s threatening growl in Thor 1, to Thor shocking Loki with the torture device in Ragnarok before he can get a word out. Loki is also repeatedly physically gagged in the movies—which, interestingly, never happens to any other character (in my recollection), not even when they’re otherwise bound/captured/imprisoned.

What this effectively does is to prevent the movie audience from understanding, much less believing, Loki’s position on events. We frequently hear negative characterizations of Loki from other characters—mostly those in opposition to him. Without hearing from Loki himself, the audience is predisposed to think he is what others say of him. Hence, everyone “knows” Loki “killed 82 people in 3 days” and he spent his childhood trying to kill Thor, when the facts actually presented in the movies contradict this.

1. In Avengers, Coulson specifically says that everyone got out of the compound before the Tesseract blew the place up (and furthermore, Loki did not deliberately destroy the compound. That was a side-effect of his arrival, not a deliberate attempt to kill).

2. We know from Thor 1 that Loki was the victim, not the bully, in his relationship with Thor, going back to their childhood. This is seen in the scene with the two as children with Odin in the vault, and also evident in how Thor, his friends, and Odin treat Loki in the movie.

Throughout the MCU movies, Loki is never given an opportunity to explain his position, not even to defend himself when he was “on trial” and sentenced to life in prison by his own father in Thor 2. That is why we don’t actually know how much Loki was under the Mind Stone’s spell in Avengers1, or what happened to him in the void before he wound up in Thanos’ clutches, or a myriad other events that would have allowed other characters to understand him, instead of snap-judging.

Thor makes an assumption in Avengers1 that Loki is attacking Earth only because this planet is special to him (Thor). Thor never even gives Loki an opportunity to explain why he has come to Earth—he just assumes the worst, and assumes it’s all about him. (If Thor had shut up for once, perhaps it could have been different. Perhaps Loki could have confided in Thor that he was being manipulated by Thanos. But that would have made a boring movie.)

What we consistently see is that Loki’s perspective is deliberately silenced by the other characters as well as the filmmakers, in order to move the plot and other characters forward. That was his purpose as a villain. It is only by consciously looking at the events in the films, and at the character, that we can see beyond what is said about him.

Despite these significant handicaps, Tom Hiddleston is able to portray Loki with such empathy that most MCU fans have come to love him anyway. Even silenced, with half his face covered, we can see the complex range of emotions Loki is going through in his eyes. We’re not supposed to sympathize with Loki, but we do, if we can see past the mischaracterizations about him.

But specifically in regard to the gag in Avengers 1, there is a moment in Endgame when we see Thor placing the gag on Loki (when Tony has gone back in time). Thor does it specifically to shut Loki up when he is talking, and he does it with obvious satisfaction. It’s portrayed for the audience’s amusement.

So, it may not have had anything to do with Loki’s magic at all. It may simply be that Thor gagged Loki simply to shut up his annoying little brother, whom everyone had always deemed not worth listening to.

With muzzle or without muzzle?

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Okay, it’s interesting that Tom says “there were a few other chairs,” because that means he was told he was in the movie before other MCU stars were told. What does that indicate?

Possibly that his role is larger/more central to the story than most others?

Example: Marvel told CH he was Thor before telling Tom he was Loki.

Jimmy Kimmel: The cast of Thunderbolts* was here, and they were too scared to say they were going to be in the movie, even though Marvel had already publicly confirmed that they were in the movie. Do you still have to have these conversations with them, or do they just kind of trust that you're going to keep quiet?

TOM HIDDLESTON on JIMMY KIMMEL LIVE

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Marvel: I’m going to kill you!

Loki: let me ask (y/n)…

Marvel: that’s not how this-

Loki: (y/n) said no.

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“Get Help.”

I feel kind of upset about this scene in the film, because even when Loki says he doesn’t like the strategy proposed by his brother and that he feels humiliated by it, Thor ignores Loki’s feelings by saying that he loves it and that this is the only way to bring down the grandmaster’s guards.

Also, I feel confused because Loki does it anyway and makes me think that he just did it because he wanted to please Thor… but Loki wouldn’t do that, would he? 

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Parkour cat!

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Loki - Outcast - Tumblr Series 4, Part 2

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Loki - Outcast - Tumblr Series 4, Part 1

851 A.D.

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It always makes me sad when people use fanfic as an insult, not only because I personally write it quite a lot, but because I've read works on ao3 that are pure art. That makes these worlds, characters and relationships really feel real, no matter how crazy the scenario is.

There are works that have made me laugh, cry and even heal a little. Works with gorgeous prose, brilliant character arcs, hilarious jokes and heart wrenching scenes; all being put down because they're 'just fanfiction.' As if fanfiction doesn't come from a place of love, inspiration, creativity and passion.

Yes, there are cringe works out there, but let's not act like the publishing industry has a leg to stand on with that either. Fifty Shades, anyone? Twilight? All those old racist, sexist and homophobic books that we call 'classics?'

Part of the beauty of fanfiction is the freedom and experimentation that comes from it. That it's just a community of people writing what comes into their head and seeing how it turns out. And a lot of times it turns out to be amazing.

So, yeah. It makes me sad when I see people putting fanfic down. Because so many authors have impacted me through their writing, haven't gotten a penny for doing what they do and are getting sneered at by both fans and so-called 'real' writers on top of that.

Anyway, please share and comment some of your favourite fics/authors below or in reblogs. I'm adding my collection full of works and authors I love from a mix of different fandoms.

https://archiveofourown.org/collections/CarefullyCuratedWorksOfArt

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Loki - Outcast - Tumblr Series 3

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Something so profoundly fucked up between the inverse ratio of shrinking middle class and ever increasing aggression of advertisement