#I know Roger said it wasn’t claiming to be a documentary

[manyrandomfandoms]

it’s the five year anniversary of the BoRhap movie and I love that movie, I do, but also there’s sooo much wrong with it

like the attention to detail is so good and also so bad at the same time.

first off, the actors nailed it and I will die on this hill, I’m not talking about them

like how can we have gotten a direct quote from Freddie but y’all couldn’t give Rami brown contacts

The references to Freddie being a boxer and yet we’re recording Rock You in the EIGHTIES

WHY. Some of the big changes I can understand (like movie Freddie getting diagnosed before Live Aid) but fr some of them are just…why

[onegoldenglance]

Philip Calvert about Freddie’s sexuality

After witnessing yet another feud between fans on the internet regarding Freddie's sexuality, Philip Calvert, one of Freddie's longtime friends, always very reserved, has decided to intervene to calm the mood and clarify the matter once and for all. 

Many people acclaimed his precious testimony; obviously, some people have not received and continue not to acknowledge the truth, denying the evidence, but no one can change their brains...

These were his words:“To all those so concerned with Freddie's sexuality... I knew him personally (and yes, I can show picture proof), and I can tell you as a fact not speculation - not hearsay or fake biography books - but I can tell you as a fact because he said it openly to us, that he was indeed gay.

He rarely spoke about Mary to us, but we met her on a few occasions and when he did speak of her, it was clear he absolutely adored her. The only reason Freddie wasn't with her as he once was, is because he was gay and he finally accepted it.

Yes, he did tell us he was gay. Why? Because many of us were bisexual and still slept with women, and when we'd go out we would all try to help each other find partners. Freddie made it very clear to us that he was not interested in women at all. Men only.

Bisexuality does exist and some of us were bisexual while others were simply gay. Freddie identified as gay because once he broke up with Mary he showed no interest in women at all sexually.

 Apparently during his relationship with Mary he knew he was gay but his life with her before he became famous was not something he spoke about with us in great detail. He loved her very much and nobody can ever deny that. He would not have broken up with her if he'd still been romantically attracted to her.

Sexuality is not something that anybody else can identify for you. It's something you yourself have to find. Freddie was openly gay to those that knew him.

I'd known Freddie since the late 70s up until the end and stayed in touch with many friends (including Barbara) after he died. We all adored Barbara until Freddie passed away and she began lying about their relationship, claiming to have been with Freddie sexually when being interviewed by people that would not fact check her.

You'll notice she was in The Untold Story documentary that Brian, Roger and Freddie's family were a part of (which was obviously fact checked) and she herself never claimed there to have been with him sexually. She was introduced and listed there as a friend.

Yet, she claimed only in Lesley-Ann Jones' book (which has been deemed "full false information" by Jacky Smith of the fan club, Brian May and many roadies for the band if you need further proof) that they were sexual together. That's exactly why so many of us stopped talking to her after he passed away. We felt she was using his name for her own false benefit.

Keep in mind Barbara herself told us she and Freddie were never together physically. As did Freddie. Both Freddie and Barbara told us they did not have sex. That's not really an assumption on our part - it was a direct statement made from both of them.

Freddie wouldn't have had any reason to lie to us about Barbara. There was a point in time when we all liked her very much. But according to them themselves, they never did sex together.

Barbara changed her story a few times after he died and only to people who didn’t fact check. To those of us who knew her, it didn't shock us.

Freddie made it very clear to us that he has no interest in women, which was fine. Although some of us were bisexual, others were not.

So there you have it. He was gay. He was also generous and kind. And really funny. He was a great host and he was very talented. Not just musically. He had a great eye. He was very proud to show us around his new places and explain each decor piece, in Garden Lodge especially. He was many many things.

Don't get too hung up on one aspect of the man. Especially if you didn't know him yourself. Enjoy what he left behind. Indeed it is a shame that so many fans of his focus more on who he slept with and what he identified as vs what he left behind. I was amazed at how much fighting goes on between people who never knew him in regards to his private life.

I was disappointed to see that but I hope my few comments will help to bring that to an end. It's always a pleasure to speak to fans who appreciated the man for what he was and his contribution to music.” (Philip Calvert, Freddie’s close friend)

On ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’: “It did have a meaning. But I can honestly say that Freddie did tell us more than once that he did not want fans to know what it meant to him as it was meant for everyone to enjoy.

He said he didn't want people to analyse it. Because he felt so strongly about that, I'd rather not say more. Each piece of art should be admired and interpreted by he who looks upon it.” (Philip Calvert)

(x)

[midnightswithdearkatytspb]

You’ve Been Everything (Steve Rogers x OFC!)

Pairing: Steve Rogers x OFC!Orchid Black

Rating: PG-13 - Cursing & Angst

Word Count: 1,787

Side Characters: Natasha Romanoff and Frank Castle

Synopsis: They haven’t shared a bed in months, the snap has changed them both. There is no one to blame.

Info: Based off the song If This Is The End by Ryan McMullan. All mistakes are mine and the dividers are from @firefly-graphics ♥️ This was going to be a Drabble but it got away from me and also it was not my intention to use my face claim for Remedy for Orchid, but Ksenia Solo just fit.

Being a vigilante wasn’t easy when in a relationship, it especially wasn’t easy when you were with the one and only Steve Rogers, the former Captain America. Things had been hard for Steve way before the snap had even happened, it was straining their relationship, with him on the run, Orchid back in New York, working alongside the likes of Frank Castle, Matt Murdock, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and occasionally the Spiderkid who had help and forcing Steve to go into hiding. (Not that Orchid blamed Peter, she had no one to blame really but Tony and Steve. Why couldn’t they be like two normal grown men and work their problems out, hell even go to couples counseling?) When the snap happened Foggy, Karen, Jessica, and Luke disappeared, Hell’s Kitchen needed Frank, Matt and her more than ever, along with Queens when Spiderkid didn’t return, Orchid was running ragged. While Steve was silent and stoic, it unnerved her.

What used to be nights curled up on the couch watching documentaries together, playing board games, and cooking together, turned into Orchid staying out late, walking the streets late into the early mornings, oftentimes sleeping on the couch, taking meals from Frank’s fridge of leftovers. Steve had taken to sleeping over at the compound many times, avoiding going back to the apartment in Brooklyn, any chance to avoid having to speak to his girlfriend. He had let Orchid down one too many times and the longing stares she gave him were just a reminder of it.

It was spring going on 3 years after the snap, Frank noticed the dark circles under Orchid's eyes were getting darker and darker. Sighing he scratched his jaw before clearing his throat earning the dark haired girl's attention.

“If Karen was here I would ask her to have this conversation was here, fuck, even Jessica, but since their not, I’ll do it. I think you need to break up with Nomad or whatever Stephen is going by these days. You can’t keep losing sleep over this relationship because whatever you guys have now is not a relationship. I mean you share more meals with me than you do him, I’ve shared a bed more with you than you have with him just this past year.” Before Frank could continue, Orchid reached out silencing the big guy.

“First off it’s Steve, and secondly I know you're right, it’s just, part of me still loves him. I mean whoever thought me Orchid Black would date a man like Steve? He was just so great at the beginning and even just before the whole Tony debacle. Even while searching for Bucky he made time for us, I made time for him, then when he went on the lamb, he made sure to get letters to me, he was a dream. It’s just fallen apart Frank after he lost Sam and Bucky, and I get it, I really do. I just wish he would let me in, but maybe I have this wall up to and it’s over you know?” Orchid felt the tears building up but she wasn’t going to let them fall, no she was going to be strong. She hadn’t cried since that day when she was at a steak out with Karen and Jessica, for both an article Karen was writing, bad guy she and Jessica were trying to take down, when suddenly her friends turned to ash right before her eyes. When she got back to Frank’s place she found out about Foggy and Luke, she cried.

“Then you know what needs to be done.” Frank sighed, taking a gulp of his freshly poured coffee. Reaching into the pocket of her ripped skinny jeans she pulled her phone out reading the time behind the cracked screen. If she left now, she could beat Steve back to the compound upstate and actually have a talk with him.

“Yeah, yeah I do. Can I borrow your truck to go upstate, to the compound?” Orchid looked up to see the keys to the Chevrolet that she had helped him restore hanging from his pointer. With a promise to return it safely within the next 12 or so hours she turned on heel making her way to say her goodbye.

Friday had just let her drive write on through the gates even though it had been over a year since she had last stepped foot on the compound. Orchid pulled as close as she could get to the front doors so that way she could get away fast, it also looked like it could rain any minute. Keeping her head down as to not bring attention to herself she walked into the building making her way to the Avengers living quarters.

“Hello Miss. Black I have informed Miss. Romanoff of your arrival and she asks you to please join her in the main conference room, she has the sangria.” letting a silent Fuck out from under her breathe, getting off the elevator she cracked her neck and knuckles trying her best to relax. Natasha stood in the doorway down the hall leaning against the door jam, a tiny smirk on her face, her red hair was growing in, mixing in with the white blonde she had gone while on the run, it was doing a nice ombré effect.

“You don’t call, you don’t text back, you don’t write to me, what did you do?” Orchid hugged Natasha as she walked into the conference room, she owed her everything, from her life, to the fact she was even ever with Steve. Blushing Orchid took a seat beside Natasha and crossed her legs in an extravagant leather highback chair, immediately taking a sip of the fruity wine drink, avoiding Natasha’s question.

“Okay, seriously this is unlike you, usually when we get together you have so much to talk about, but lately you have been avoiding me. Come to think of it, both you and Rogers have been avoiding me, him I can understand somewhat, but when I ask him about you he just changes the subject. Talk to me Black.” It was Natasha’s turn to take a drink of her wine, while examining her friend, her ex-protégé of sorts that she and Clint once saved while on a mission. The circles under her eyes were much darker than they once had been, she was thinner than she had been before the snap, not that she had much to lose, she looked to be in a state of permanent melancholy, which wasn’t hard to be in the state earth was in.

“I’m breaking up with Steve.” Natasha stopped mid-sip and looked Orchid in the eyes, the trained assassin almost looked surprised but she was trained so well that if you didn't know her you wouldn't know. “It’s just that as much as I love him that we could have found our way back to each other after the snap.” Orchid placed her glass on the table and pushed her long locks of hair back with her other hand, a nervous tick of hers. Natasha sighed before slugging back the rest of her drink.

“You know you’d think as someone who runs group therapy he would be trying to make things work with you.” Scoffing Natasha leaned back crossing her arms clearly annoyed with her super soldier friend. Orchid just shrugged, and stared out the windows as the rain was starting to come down heavily.

“Well, just because you aren’t with Steve anymore doesn’t mean you can’t come see me or you can’t talk to me anymore. You were mine and Clint’s friend before you ever started dating him, Clint would be upset to see you like this.” the familiar feeling of tears building up came back, but she swore she wouldn’t cry and she won’t. Friday alerted them to Steve arriving back at the compound, Orchid got off the expensive chair so she could meet Steve at the elevator, in hopes of speaking with him in the living room. Natasha grabbed her hand giving it 3 squeezes, Orchid returning the sentiment.

Steve wanted to eat and catch up with Natasha and see if she found out anything new from anyone, then hopefully turn in for the night. Today’s group had been longer than usual, Mark who lost both his wife and daughter in snap, had finally gotten the courage to tell his story, and because he did, Luciell who lost her folks, wife, and son spoke for the first time as well. The meetings by the end of them always had him thinking of Sam, making him wonder what he would say, what he would do for the folks, was he making him proud?

Orchid, she stood right outside the elevator when he got off it. He had not seen her since he had gone home  to their shared apartment to get more clothes to bring back to the compound a couple weeks before. Orchid he noticed looked almost gaunt, not like the woman who had captured his attention years ago, the one he loved. Steve stood frozen staring at her, he didn’t notice the duffle at her feet till she slid it over to him.

“At one point in time I would have said you were the one for me and I’d like to think maybe you thought the same, but with all the pain we just didn’t cope all that well. It obviously tore us apart and we have been avoiding this for much too long trying to spare each other’s feelings, look where it’s gotten us.” Orchid’s voice cracked, so much for not crying. “We can’t even be in the same room as each other anymore and that’s not love Steve, so I’m doing you a favor and letting you go. You’ve been everything I could have ever asked for and so much more.” Getting on her tippy toes, Orchid leaned forward kissing Steve on the lips one last time. Not giving him a chance to talk or make a move, she sidestepped around him getting on the elevator letting the tears fall.

Perhaps part of her hoped that Steve would follow but the other part of her was just so relieved to have said goodbye. It was done and over. Upstairs Steve stood frozen eyes shut with a single tear slipping down the side of his face almost in shock. He knew it had been a long time coming but it still had hurt to see her go. An arm to his bicep pulled him from his gloom, a hope hit that it would be her coming back, but when he opened his eyes to Natasha’s green eyes.

“It’ll be okay.”

“Will it though?”

“Yeah.”

[marsalimackimmie]

Another Outlander Fic Idea

This is set in an AU where Jamie came through the stones to the 20th century soon after Claire returned, and they raised Brianna in the future together.

(I wrote this whole thing out at once and didn’t proof read it so please forgive any typos. It’s a mostly stream of consciousness outline.)

Bree always knew there was something different about her family-- in that they had none. All her friends had grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins… but the Fraser's were an orphaned family. Her Mama and Da had plenty of stories, but always said the people they discussed had died a long time ago. As a kid it made her sad in a detached sort of way, but as she grew older she began having more questions her parents couldn’t answer. 

Growing up, Bree had developed an interest in history with her father. He was always reading books, watching documentaries, and always seemed fascinated by everything he learned-- even the things everyone knew, and the things he supposedly lived through himself. It became something they bonded over, and it led Bree to her secret hobby of genealogy. 

Unbeknownst to her parents, Brianna one day organized a day trip with her friends up to Broch Morda, the place her parents always claimed Jamie was from. She searched their historical archives and church records, but could find no mention of Jenny, Brian, or Ellen Fraser born in the last few centuries. At one point a librarian said she HAD found people by those names, but perhaps it was a more distant ancestor(?) as they were all from the 18th century. 

With this being the only lead Bree had, she dug all in. Every detail that matched up with her parents’ stories (as few details as there were) made her confusion increase. Her first thought was “oh no, my parents are crazy”. Clearly, Jamie had become so lonely as an orphan that he constructed an entire backstory based on the lives of people who shared his last name 200 years ago, who he found through his weird fascination with history. Or was James Fraser even his real name? Oh god, is Fraser even HER real last name?

Freaked out, Bree decides to visit Broch Tuarach’s graveyard to make sure there weren’t just typos or mistakes in the records (it’s not like they’re very valuable or well preserved). The newest graves are full of Murray's, McTavishes, Mackenzies… wow a lot of M’s for a place built by the Fraser clan. She pushes through and finds many faded graves from the early 1800s… quite a few match the names from her supposed family history as well. Brianna is now certain her parents have been lying to her this whole time.

Roger, one of the friends Bree came to Broch Morda with, suggests that maybe they should try some archives in the larger Inverness instead, that maybe this whole Lallybroch business is just a weird coincidence, or a matter of family names repeating themselves. It’s not like Jenny and Ian are uncommon, after all, or James and Katherine for that matter. Brianna is skeptical but agrees. 

Back in Inverness, they dig through the library and find articles about Claire’s disappearance through the stones. Surprised, Brianna does the math and realizes her parents must have met when Claire ran away from this ‘Frank Randall’. The lies piling up, Brianna decides to call Frank and ask for any information he has. Frank is reluctant to speak to her when she ambushes him at his office, and she leaves.

Later she returns late at night hoping to break into his files (she’s really mad and not thinking straight, alright?) and instead finds Frank still there, drinking at his desk. In his drunken state, he tells her everything Claire had claimed about time travel, and stones, and that “bloody Scot bastard” who had taken everything from him. Bree is disturbed to find him so bitter and drunk, and honestly can’t fault her mother for leaving the guy-- he seemed awful. And how seriously could she take his story about magic stones when he’s three sheets to the wind?

Still, Bree can’t help but think. Her vacation is over and she goes back home to Claire and Jamie (they live in Edinburgh maybe, or a remote farming village away from modern hustle idk). Despite dropping many subtle hints, she can’t get her parents to crack. She does start writing down small details they mention about the family though-- for comparison to the historic family, out of curiosity, etc-- and trying to suss out whether her father is delusional or just lying. But he seems as sincere as ever, and never contradicts his stories like someone making it up might. 

Now Bree is starting to feel like the crazy one. Is there even anything here to uncover? So her parents are orphans; so her mom left a drunkard and married a Scot instead. Everything truly suspicious is just circumstantial, paranoid even. Why is she so fixated on it? In the end, Bree finally decides to drop it. 

She still had another visit to Inverness planned however, and Roger suggests they go to the Culloden heritage reenactment festival instead of getting stuck in dusty archives. Bree agrees, and Claire helps her assemble a period costume. Claire seems oddly knowledgeable and nostalgic about it, but Bree brushes it aside. In the end she has a costume that looks great, but isn’t totally accurate. It’s cheaper. It has zippers. She never said she was committed to accuracy ok? Still, making and wearing it seem to make her parents’ lips loosen a bit, and they all bond talking about Scotland and history and family the night before she leaves. As she’s going to sleep, she thinks she hears her parents discuss how they think “Jenny and Ian” are faring at Lallybroch, but that’s probably her imagination-- why would they speak in the present tense? And she knows for a fact Lallybroch is empty. 

Flash forward-- Bree and Roger have a great time at the festival. (To insert my own headcanon agenda, I should mention Roger and Bree are not romantic, just good friends. Roger knows Bree is secretly gay, and sometimes even tries to be her wingman. Bree is out to her parents after they caught her and Sally McGinnis making out when she was 17; that’s why they trust her to stay at Roger’s during trips without too much shovel talk.) When they get back to the manse, they run into Fiona (who had been dancing at the stones at sunrise and gone all day). She awkwardly lets them know she brought a man back with her, who seems like he just needs some help. Confused, they ask why he wasn’t brought to the hospital, and she says he doesn’t need it. Fiona claims this man was at the reenactment (to explain his clothes) but dodges most of their questions. Still, Roger is very hospitable as a Reverend’s son and lets him stay. 

The man, who introduces himself simply as Claudel, seems very friendly if a bit baffled. Still, Roger doesn’t love the idea of Bree staying in the building with a stranger and asks if she’d rather go home. Bree is resistant because she’s not some damsel who has to be protected, but Fiona pipes up and agrees with Roger. Especially since the trains aren’t running right now and the inn is full-- could she call Mr. & Mrs. Fraser to come pick you up, Bree? 

Outnumbered, Brianna angrily agrees. She then sulks in the living room until Claudel comes in and they talk for a while. Brianna complains that everyone treats her like she’s less capable, and the man commiserates, pointing out what she had missed earlier-- his missing hand. She asks what happened, and he vaguely says “the war”. (Fiona had briefed him on what happened to him, where/when he is now, and how he should be as vague as possible when he couldn’t give the truth or a good lie.) Brianna decides she doesn’t mind this guy, even though his presence is inadvertently forcing her to be picked up by her parents like a misbehaving child from a slumber party. 

About an hour or whatever later, there’s a knock at the door. Bree gets up, long suffering, and jokes with Claudel that it must be ‘her time’. They say goodbye amicably and he offers to walk her to the door like a gentleman. 

Bree answers the door to see Claire on the other side, looking equal parts ruffled and concerned, and almost doesn’t notice Claudel freeze behind her. She hears him ask, “Milady?” under his breath, and now her mother is freezing in place too. Do they recognize each other? she wonders.

Bree gets her answer almost instantly, when a smile stretches on her mother’s face and Claire goes to hug the man, saying “oh my god, Fergus. Oh my son.” Cue record scratch noise-- did Mama just call this man her son??? Bree has more questions than ever before.

[that-damn-girl]

His

(Oneshot)

Pairing: Stucky (Bucky Barnes x Steve Rogers) (MCU)

First part of  my collection of oneshots/drabbles for Stucky in the same universe in chronological order - His. Could be read as a STAND ALONE since ‘His’ is NOT a series.

Type: Fluff, mutual pinning, best friends to lovers trope.

Words: 3800+

Summary: Steve couldn’t grab his hand once and lost Bucky for 70 years. Now that he had an opportunity, he wasn’t about to let go.

Warning: Ignore anybody’s death in ‘Avengers: Endgame’.

A/N: This is my first story ever! It is also a submission. I am really thankful of @the-omni-princess for giving me the chance to take part in her 1K writing challenge.

The world was greatly different than from what it was a decade ago. Progression through seven decades was a whole another story. One that the two hundred year old super soldiers were greatly overwhelmed with.

Bucky had accidentally clicked a few extra buttons when he was trying to navigate through Netflix on Tony’s why-the-hell-is-a-TV-curved-and-ridiculously-large-and expensive  television screen. Instead of various Disney movies that were displayed earlier, he saw a live feed of Gerald, Tony’s alpaca, grazing in the backyard.

He didn’t know until then that one could use the TV as a monitor to view feeds from different surveillance cameras. A few decades later they’d make it a fucking portal to go through, he thought. In all honesty, although confused, Bucky was throughly amused with all the new advancements he had witnessed so far.

He tried clicking a few more buttons to revert back to Netflix, but all that he saw was different parts of the house through the cameras. He kept it up until the feed from the kitchen pulled up, revealing Steve and Morgan making homemade cheeseburgers. Because ofcourse, this was Tony Stark’s house, with never-ending supply for making cheeseburgers, and they were dealing with Tony Stark’s child, a never-ending blackhole for cheeseburgers.

From after the “Blip”, who the fuck calls the most strangest event in the history that, old relationships were being mended while new ones were formed. Things between Tony and Steve were still rocky until everyone was brought back; until their final mission. They weren’t perfect by any means, but surely they were starting to get better with time, effort and understanding from both the sides.

In order to reduce the emotional distance between his former family members and his new ones, Tony wanted them to spend some quality time together. He wanted Morgan to have good people to look up to, good people to learn from, good people to guide her. Moreover, he wanted her have a good big family and to feel the love and adoration he always wanted as a child. And, as per Tony, what was better than babysitting for this?

Pepper and Tony would enjoy date nights once or twice a month, while one or few of the team members would babysit Morgan at their cabin. This time, Steve volunteered. Bucky, who wanted nothing more than to make up for the lost time with Steve, volunteered to tag along.

At the cabin, as Tony and Pepper prepared to leave for the night, Morgan was a little anxious. She knew Steve, but she hardly knew this metal armed stranger who accompanied him. She had seen various documentaries on all the avengers and she knew of Bucky as Caption America’s childhood best friend who fell off a train but was saved by some fellow human beings. Tony had shielded her from the dark parts in everyone’s stories for now. Although she didn’t know Bucky personally, she trusted him because Steve trusted him.

Bucky watched their dinner being prepared by Morgan and Steve…his Steve…

How he wished he could say that.

The domesticity of the look fluffed up his heart; it mesmerised him. Steve mesmerised him.

Back in the day, every young gentleman had more or less the same goals. A beautiful girl to wake up cuddled with, a decent enough job to support their family, unforgettable fun times with  their girls in their arms, a lively brownstone with their kids laughing and running in the backyard, and never-ending happiness in their lives. Like all others, Bucky wanted it all too. Except, he wanted it all with Steve.

At the moment, however,  he wanted to go back to Netflix. Cursing for not thinking of it earlier, he asked Friday to do so just at the moment Steve and Morgan joined him.

“What, I made dinner for three and you couldn’t even choose a movie to watch?” Steve said with humor in his eyes as he set the food tray on the center table and sat on the couch. 

“Just wanted the little princess here to have her choice. Again.” Bucky flashed a toothy grin to Morgan. She giggled at that.

“A princess, yes,” she said flashing her own toothy grin with one incisor missing, “but hey, not little! I am almost six years old. Mom and dad say I am a growing girl. A growing girl, not a little girl.” She tried to make a face as serious as an ‘almost six’ year old could with her hands at her hips. Both old men laughed at that.

“I apologise for the incorrect words used, my lady. How about I rephrase it? What would our brave and beautiful growing princess like to watch tonight?“  Bucky sat on the other end of the couch.

“Frozen, please!” She squealed with excitement as she sat between them. And so, ‘Frozen’ it was.

The movie progressed and the cheeseburgers had met their fate. All three of its occupants were slumped down on the couch, enjoying the movie and munching on fries. Bucky straightened his posture a bit and extended his arm to rest behind him, bent at the elbows, on the head rest of the couch as his body curved a bit towards Morgan. Having not seen the movie before, he was so engrossed in it that he failed to notice that another arm had already claimed the spot. The back of his fingers touched those of Steve’s, palm facing each other, a little proturded behind the couch. 

Normally, he would would have retreated his hand like all the other times he had. This time though, he wanted to know what would happen if he didn’t. The need to explore the boundaries rose within him. The want to  rebell, to ignore the illogical age old stigmas, and act on what he wants, what he thought was right. He didn’t know if he was defying society’s unnecessary made up rules. He had wanted a chance to be with the love of his life since forever. He planned on taking the chance. The realisation made him nervous.

All of a sudden he became too aware of his surroundings. The movie was forgotten. His heart beat loudly in his chest. He panicked, didn’t know what to do further. Would it be fruitful, he thought. He was very unsure of his newest decision to have what he had wanted all his life. He wanted to shift his arm, but at the same time, he did not.

Acts like these were considered scandalous in his time when men did it with other men. He was conditioned from his childhood days to not seek comfort in a man's touch. However, the twenty first century was different from the twentieth. The beliefs and practices in this age were different than those in his.

Peter, the rookie, along with Shuri, the genius, tried to keep him updated with the changes that had happened in the world while the time his freedom had not been his. He was slowly coming around to using gadgets on his own.

As time passed, HYDRA advanced it’s technologies. The Winter Soldier was not taught about using them though. He was the deadliest soldier in the history of mankind, and their greatest asset. The possibility of him going rogue anyhow was too risky for any of his handlers to entertain.

His teenage friends had introduced him to internet and many spects of it. The nerd in him was overjoyed. He learnt about vines and memes. Caught up with the new movies and all time classics he had missed. Got to know about PRIDE.

He loved how people were expressive in this new era. Although not totally eradicated, social biasey regarding gender, racial and religious discrimination plagued a much smaller population than in his time. People were more logical and radical with their thoughts in this regard atleast.  One could be with whoever they wanted, live a life however they wanted. People were supportive and respective of other’s preferences and choices. Bucky loved it all. But he didn’t know how to talk about it with the man he loved with all his heart.

Although he suspected it, he didn’t know for sure if Steve felt the same way about him. Sure there were lingering touches here and there and hugs that lasted a bit too long for best friends, but it was hard to decipher the intentions behind them. He knew he had to talk to Steve about it at some point or the other. Then why not take a step towards it then? That’s why he decided he would take charge then.

Slowly and meekly, Bucky took a deep breath lightly and nestled his little finger in the crook of Steve’s little finger. He remained as still as possible as he sensed Steve stiffen. He cursed at himself loudly in his head. Surely Steve didn’t want him like that. Bucky was just Steve’s childhood bestfriend, who had been with him through thick and thin, literally. He was a reminder to Steve of what his earlier life was, not the desire to look forward to a future with better improvements.

His thoughts paused when he felt a movement against his ring finger. He realised Steve had nestled his own third finger against his. His heart rate picked up again. He felt little spurts of confidence break inside of him which led him to join their middle fingers. His heart did a happy lil jump when when Steve moved forward his own index finger, soon their fingers were interlaced.

Warmth seeped through Bucky’s arm. He felt full in his heart, in a way he couldn’t describe. Just holding hands like this, the simplest of gestures of affection, was a big deal for these two men when doing it with each other. The only times they’ve held hands is to when one needed to drag the other or needed help being pulled up during mission. Bucky finally felt how it was like not holding hands for necessity but just because his heart desired it.

He felt a sliver of hope. His mind though, felt full and empty at the same time. Maybe his suspicions were correct, maybe not. He couldn’t think straight with the weight of the Steve’s hand encompassing, encircling, enveloping his. He preferred not to think too much and just enjoy it while he could.

Little did he know that Steve considered him as his childhood bestfriend, his buddy, the driving force to want to be better both before and after the war, and so, so much more. Steve couldn’t grab his hand once and lost him for 70 years. He wasn’t letting go now.

~

They were in the same position throughout the movie. Too afraid of any change changing the other’s mind.

As the movie ended, Morgan was hungry again. She wanted to have a chocolate milkshake before she could go to bed. Both men were hesistant about it, but couldn’t say no to her puppy dog eyes. Again.

As the men prepared it in the kitchen, she busied herself with finding a stuff toy she forgot where she last kept it. 

After the movie, both men weren’t happy with not having any physical touch anymore. Since they had had a taste of it, they longed for more. But both were too unsure of themselves to initiate.

Bucky once again saw Steve tinkering with the ingredients in the kitchen as his hip leaned against the counter. The domesticity of the look fluffed up his heart once again. He wanted to hold his hand once again, forever and never let go.

Steve lined the inside of Morgan’s cup with chocolate sause just the way he had seen Wanda do it once. A bit of it dripped on the back of his palm just below his thumb on the hand he was holding the cup with. So focused on the task at hand, he didn’t notice it.

He had an ithy feeling at the junction between his moustache and slight beard. Placing the cup at the counter he went to scratch the itch with the same hand smeared and the chocolate sause at the corner of his mouth rather messily. He noticed it now. Bucky did too.

While Steve looked around for paper napkins, Bucky leaned off the counter, turned fully toward Steve and wiped the mess with his metal thumb in two slow strokes as his metal palm lay against his cheek.

Steve stiffened again. Bucky cursed at himself again.

He shouldn’t have done that. Holding hands was one thing. Cupping cheeks was another. Not removing your hand when the requirement for the said action was fulfilled, was a whole another level.

Again Bucky wanted to remove his hand, because he feared he was stepping over Steve’s boundaries, but he didn’t want to at the same time, because his heart just wanted to do so.

His eyes moved from Steve’s lips to his eyes, oceanic blue just like him. Someone said the truth about being able to look into one’s soul through their eyes. Because right at that moment, he saw himself in Steve.

Both were simple men before the war. Both wanted someone to love, to be with them through their highs and their lows, to be with them and support them at all times, to trust and confide in them, to share the silliest and most important things with them, to remember them and be remembered by them. Both wanted this 'someone’ to be each other. Both longed for each other.

As they affectionately looked at one another, Bucky glided his thumb over Steve’s lips once, then twice. Despite it being his cold metal-arm, all Steve felt was sweet warmth.

Bucky’s eyes moved back to his lips. He leaned forward after gulping. Steve followed right after him.

Earlier, the societal norms were against them, then time. Right then, both were in their favour. However, they forgot an almost six year old factor.

Right before their lips could touch, just a centimetre apart,  Morgan came back in the kitchen yelling, “I found it. Finally!”

Shocked to the core at sudden intrusion, both men jumped apart is they had touched lava. A slight tinge of pink could be seen on both their faces. Suddenly feeling slightly embarrassed and not wanting to make eye contact, both looked at Morgan.

She held a cute red and gold teddy shaped Ironman. Steve let out a sigh and a small laugh simultaneously, dipping his head low. Bucky smiled.

Steve went back to making her milkshake and handed her the finished product. The hungry child drank it one go. They then took her upstairs, made her take a bath and brush her teeth.

When they tucked her under the cover and proceeded to leave, she quietly asked them to tell her a bedtime story.

“Sure princess,” Steve sat on one side of her bed, leaning against the head rest, legs half down and one hand behind her pillow.

Bucky just stood there, unsure what to do. Morgan looked at him expectantly. Steve nodded at him and he went to sit on the other side of her bed, copying Steve.

“What kind of a story do you want to listen?” Steve asked combing through her hair.

“A love story!” She looked excited.

Steve wasn’t great with stories for kids. He looked at Bucky, intially for help, but then he looked into his eyes and immediately smiling down at Morgan said, “Once upon a time, there were these two people, two friends, Stephanie and James. Best friends actually.”

He looked up at his best friend. It took Bucky a moment before he caught onto Steve’s play. He could only stare at his friend, with eyes a little wide and surprise on his face. He understood why there was a female character alongside James and not a male. He was anxious to hear what Steve had to say next.

Steve continued, “They had been so for as long as one could remember. Always playing together, running together, being together, no matter what. They cared for each other, always had each other’s backs.

“They protected each other, even from the meanest bullies. They took hits for each other if it meant the other stayed out of harm’s way.

“If someone needed to find one of them, they could as well search for the other since they always stayed by each other’s side.

“Where one went, the other followed. A friendship like theirs was so rare. Luckiest were the people who had even a fraction of what they had.”

Steve took Bucky’s hand behind Morgan’s pillow in his and interwove their fingers. He looked at him with a fuzzy feeling inside his chest as he said, “Their love for each other unparalleled by any other.” He squeezed his fingers.

Bucky’s heart swelled. He squeezed right back. Something burst inside of him. He didn’t know what, but it made him feel giddy like never before.

“Stephanie idealiesed James for his bravery, his confidence-”

“And James idealised Stephanie for her goodness, innate goodness.” Bucky intervened with a smile brighter than the stars.

Lost is the beauty of Bucky, both inside and out, Steve took a while  before he continued, “There was a group of bad people who wanted brave men like James for their own cruel intentions. They kidnapped him and Stephanie couldn’t stop them.

Like any other close friend, she missed him dearly. She was angry at herself. She hated the day James was taken from her. She hated her inability to save him. She regretted not trying harder.”

Steve was looking at his lap. Bucky tightly squeezed his hand and said, “She didn’t know that there was nothing that she could have done to save him. It wasn’t her fault by any means.

“There was Fate which played it’s tricks. Nobody is stronger than the turn of events undertaken by it. Nobody could be above Destiny, no matter how much they wished. Their pair was just an unlucky lot, unfortunate enough to be under Fate’s wrath.”

Steve stared at Bucky, not believing what he said. To an extent, he knew he couldn’t have saved Bucky from falling off the train all those years ago, but the guilt of not just trying harder ate him alive everyday. He replayed every decision he made that morning, every action he did. The 'what if’s never ended…

Nevertheless, Steve said with eyes on Morgan, “After a very, very long time, Stephanie found a way to rescue James from those bad people. She didn’t believe there was finally a chance she could be with her long lost companion again. She was determined to take that chance and make it happen anyhow.

“She did succeed in rescuing him. She had never been as happy as that day before. He returned to her a little broken and damaged, but she didn’t mind it since he was stronger in his own right more than ever. When she had said she would be with him forever, she meant during both his highs and lows.

“Even time was not able to break their preciy bond. Her affection for him had never faltered. Instead, it had increased tenfold.

“The sudden detachment, the longing, the way she felt after their reunion, it all made her realise…” He stopped speaking and looked at Bucky again, lower lip shivering.

He took a deep intake of breath and said, “She realised  she had loved him all along. She loved him in every sense of the word, in every possible direction, in any possible way. Together, they fought their way through the bad men, making sure they’d never take him away from her again.”

“Did he love her back?” Morgan asked him. Steve looked down at her before raising his questioning eyes at Bucky, who just beamed down at Morgan and said, “Of course, princess. That’s why it is a love story.”

Smiling then, she asked again, “Did they live their lives happily after?” Now it was Bucky’s turn to look at Steve, who replied, “It took a little while, yes, but their happily after was the most beautiful one out there.”

Content with the story, she thanked them. “It was beautiful.” She had said. Indeed it was.

Exchanging their good-nights, they made their way downstairs. As Morgan slept peacefully, they were left alone with their racing hearts.

The big question arose then. What would they do now? They didn’t need to hide or be evasive from anyone. They were away from prying eyes and judgmental minds.

Neither Bucky nor Steve knew how to proceed, still overwhelmed.

Daring to initiate, Steve softly called out to the other man in the house as they stood near the stairs on the ground floor. Bucky turned around towards him. They stared intently at each other without saying anything. Nervousness clogged their nervous systems.

Bucky knew now was the time to come clean. Everything was out in the open already. Their feelings were mutual. There was hardly anything to be afraid of.

Repeating 'You can do it, you can do it’ in his head several times, Bucky took a step closer towards Steve. “About upstairs,”

“I meant every word I said, Buck.” Steve quickly ushered before he could say anything else. “I-”

Bucky took a step forward, cupped his cheeks and crashed his lips with Steve. He didn’t need to hear anything else.

It was the same man for whom he had pledged to be strong and brave, to help and to protect at all times. To stick with forever. Steve had left his newfound family of superheroes for him, defied over a hundred nations for him. If it wasn’t for what Bucky hoped it was, he didn’t know the workings of the world anymore.

Steve responded in kind. He grasped the back of his neck and laid a hand on the small of his back, pulling him closer. His heart thumped in his chest. They kissed and kissed and kissed, releasing years of pent up emotions.

When they parted, Bucky rested his head at the crook of Steve’s neck, breathing his scent, basking in it. Even cloud mattresses could not make him as comfortable as he had felt in that moment.

Softly but confidentaly, without any doubts, since  They were way past liking each other, Steve whispered in his ear, “I love you, jerk.”

Goosebumps rose on his skin. “I love you too, punk.” Grinning madly, he kissed him again.

Steve pulled back a little to look at his love of his life. He was smiling too. Finally, finally Bucky was his, and Bucky could call him his. However, Bucky’s insecurities were still ever prerent.

“Hey, you… you’re… you’ll be with me, right?” He looked at the floor.

Pecking his lips strongly, Steve said, “Never apart.” He knew Bucky needed more assurance. Who knew him better than Steve?

“Yes Bucky, it’ll always be you. You’ll be in my heart. From this day on, now and forever more.”

With amusement in his eyes, Bucky said, “Don’t do anything stupid”

“How can’t I? We’re together till the end of the line, love.”

~~~

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[etherealwaifgoddess]

Adapting

Summary: Bucky tries adapting to the 21st century but finds the challenge too much for him. He loves Steve, but he can’t imagine ever fitting in to the modern world and it leads him to a drastic solution.

Content Warning: A very sad Bucky. Very brief mention of period-typical homophobia. Overall this one is a little angsty but it has a happy ending, promise. 

Word Count: 2.3k

Author’s Note: Hello lovelies, it’s been a while! I’ve been trying to get back into the groove of writing over the past few weeks and that posed more challenging than I’d expected. I managed to get this little fic where I wanted it though and figured I’d share it while I try to wrap up all the other stuff I’m working on. Hope you all enjoy :)  XOXO - Ash

Adapting

After a few months of living in the twenty-first century Bucky found he both loved and hated it in turns. When he’d been cleared as completely deprogrammed and sent home to the states he thought he couldn’t have been luckier. He was finally a free man, from both the government and the decades of brainwashing. Bucky was looking forward to living with Steve again in Brooklyn, the two of them on their own and free to do whatever it was super soldiers do in retirement when they’re not even thirty yet. The world was his oyster, he thought to himself as they signed the lease on a cute little condo right in the heart of their old neighborhood. 

The glamour of the twenty-first century faded quickly as Bucky tried to adjust to everyday life. Steve, who had been doing well on his own for four years, was eager to help Bucky acclimate to the new century. Unfortunately, Steve took to that as he did with all things; barreling in head first all at once. Bucky needed time to adapt, he couldn’t just throw himself at something and become good at it like Steve could. As much as he loved Steve, and god did he ever love that man, it was hard keeping up a brave face. Even harder, was that the love he’d felt for Steve back in the 30s hadn’t diminished one bit. 

When they were young being gay was a death sentence. Something so secretive that even back alley whispers could ruin a man’s life. Bucky had known he was gay since he knew what it was to want someone in that way. And like most things in Bucky’s life, it all came down to Steve freaking Rogers. The fine boned little blonde who never knew when to quit, his giant spirit housed in such a delicate frame. Bucky never acted on his feelings, never dared to, but some days he wished he’d had. It had been enough though, the time they’d had together in their tiny apartment over the Miller’s garage. He knew it wasn’t a crime to be gay anymore. He’d caught on to that pretty quickly, thank you HBO, but he still couldn’t bring himself to share that truth with Steve. Maybe someday. Bucky needed time to process and evaluate before proceeding, just like everything else in his life. 

One of the first things Bucky really minded was the food. Steve had warned him that everything tasted a little different nowadays but claimed he’d get used to it. Steve loved all the different types of takeout you could get in the city, willing to try anything and everything. Bucky found he couldn’t get past how fake everything tasted, like he could sense the lingering chemicals. Steve continued to insist they’d find something Bucky liked, even trying to ply him with bags of candy and boxes of mass produced cookies, trying to cater to his sweet tooth. Bucky gave up finally after a week where he’d spent ninety percent of the time hangry. He headed down to the farmers market and loaded up on all organic produce and heritage bred meats. He found an artisanal bakery that used simple organic ingredients too. Bucky took to making his own food from his farmers market shopping trips and was finally able to enjoy a meal. Steve, bless him, continued to try and find things Bucky would like but it never seemed to work out. Bucky felt guilty every time he’d have to pass something back to Steve with a “no thanks, pal” and the light of hope in Steve’s eyes dimmed. 

Steve was quite attached to his iPhone and thought for sure Bucky would love one too. He came home one afternoon with a sleek, shiny, little phone for Bucky, handing it to him like it was something priceless. “It does everything, Buck. You’re gonna love it.” he insisted. Bucky did not love it. The tiny black device only served to piss Bucky off more than anything. He could never quite get the hang of navigating it and his fingers always felt too big when he was trying to type. He’d loved technology when he was younger but the phone was just a bridge too far, and one he was not ready to learn how to cross. “I’m a hundred goddamned years old, Steve. No, I don’t wanna learn how to tweet. I’ll leave that to the fucking birds.” he grumbled, throwing the phone down on the coffee table after yet another one of Steve’s well intentioned attempts at teaching Bucky how to use some annoying app. Steve let up after that, leaving Bucky to poke around on the phone only when he was willing. Bucky knew Steve was upset that his gift wasn’t well received, but he was too frustrated with himself and the whole situation to apologize. 

Socializing was even becoming unenjoyable for Bucky. He used to go out every weekend to the dance halls and, when they were flush, the bars or clubs. Bucky was always the life of the party with a dame or two hanging off his arm, while Steve had shied away, content in the shadows. The times had certainly changed. Steve was now the one urging Bucky to hang out with the team and go out to the movies, but Bucky couldn’t have had less interest. He didn’t want to hold Steve back, and he felt horribly guilty when Steve would give him that damned sympathetic smile and say “It’s okay, Buck. We can just stay in.” when he very clearly wanted to go out. Bucky just couldn’t seem to fit in. He didn’t get the jokes or share the same interests with anyone and it was exhausting trying to make it seem like he did. So he preferred to stay at home in their condo, reading books or watching documentaries on their ridiculously large TV. He did occasionally enjoy when Natasha would drop in. It was seldom, but sometimes the tiny redhead would drop in unexpectedly with some old fashioned, homemade, Russian dish tucked under her arm for him. They would sit in silence watching a documentary, not having to say a word. She would give him a gruff hug and then be on her way. It was perfect and Bucky enjoyed her drop ins more than he’d admit. 

Everything came to a head after Steve’s birthday party. It was a week from hell as far as Bucky was concerned. He’d wanted to get Steve new paints and canvases, the expensive ones he’d seen the blonde fawning over a few weeks prior. Buying the supplies involved either going out in public alone, not ideal, or internet shopping, even worse. He tried to get them online but gave up after an hour, wanting to smash the damned laptop. Forcing himself to go out in public when he was already in a foul mood served to be just as disastrous, but he made it somehow. Then there was the party. Steve deserved the biggest, grandest party a guy could ask for, as far as Bucky was concerned. He wanted the best for Steve, he just didn’t want to be part of it. Steve looked at Bucky like he’d kicked his puppy when Bucky had told him he didn’t think he would be attending. So Bucky had put on his brave face and joined in on the loud, obnoxious party on July 4th to celebrate. Every drunken laugh and cheer grated on his nerves but he was coping and was quick to smile and nod every time Steve would look over. The last straw was the damn fireworks. Bucky hadn’t even stopped to consider how he would be with the fireworks but he quickly learned he was very not okay. Steve was staring up at night sky like it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, completely enraptured by the show. Bucky was digging his nails into his palms so hard blood trickled slowly down to his wrist, his whole body shaking uncontrollably. In between blasts, he miraculously managed to excuse himself for a bathroom break, and locked himself in the bathroom where he could fall apart for a few minutes. Maybe the shrink Steve had drug him to was right about the whole PTSD thing. Fuck. 

Bucky was certain when he woke up the morning after Steve’s party that he was ruining the other man’s life. There was no sugar coating it anymore, Bucky was bringing Steve down by being with him. Bucky didn’t think he’d ever adapt to this new world and he was so damned tired of trying. He wished they’d just left him on the ice in Wakanda until they needed him for a mission or something. It had worked out for the past seventy years, it would probably be better knowing it was the good guys pulling the strings now. Sure, Steve would miss him at first but Bucky was convinced it was for the best in the long run. Who needed a socially inept, only slightly stable roommate who couldn’t do anything on their own? And Steve, self sacrificing saint that he was, would never complain about it. Which honestly just made it worse. Even when Bucky had his low spells and would spend days on end curled up in bed, unable to even function, Steve was there to support him however he could. It was just too much to throw on the man, no matter how hard Bucky was trying or how much he loved him. 

“I think I need to go back on the ice.” Bucky said one night over dinner. He was only half way through his roasted chicken and potatoes but he couldn’t wait another minute.

Steve choked on his pad thai. “What?!” he yelped once his coughing fit had stopped.

“I need to go back on the ice.” Bucky was firm in his decision, “I’m not meant for this world, Steve. You know it as well as I do. So let’s save everyone the headache and put me back under. If the team ever needs me you can just bring me back out to help.”

“I’m gonna be sick.” Steve jumped up from his spot on the sofa and started pacing, running his hands roughly through his thick blonde hair. “If we did that to you we would be no better than Hydra. Do you get that?”

Bucky sighed heavily, he should have known Steve wouldn’t get it. “It’s nothing like Hydra. The Avengers are the good guys. I won’t be brainwashed or tortured or anything. I’ll just take a long, chilly nap and you guys can bring me out when you need me.” 

“I need you!” Steve cried, exasperated. 

“Stevie,” Bucky’s tone softened, pleading, “I’m ruining your life, pal. I can’t, I won’t, sit back and watch you give up this amazing life you could have if I wasn’t in it. I want you to be happy.” 

“That’s fucking rich.” Steve barked out a harsh laugh. His pacing stopped and he stood stock-still to stare a Bucky. He couldn’t hold it back anymore. “I just want you, Buck. How can you not see that? It’s only ever been you. Even when it was just you and me in that shitty little apartment in 1936, when we were so broke we couldn’t turn on the heat. I...” Steve’s voice broke with emotion and he shook his head. 

Bucky’s chest ached, terrified of what Steve was saying. It couldn’t be. “What are you tryin’ to say?”

Tears shone in Steve’s eyes. “I love you. I always have, and I guess I always will. I know you think you’re not adjusting to life now but you’ve only been here for six months. It took me a whole damn year to really get my bearings. I won’t give up on you. Not when I just got you back.” 

“How long?” Bucky cleared his rough voice, “How long have you felt that way?”

Steve shrugged, “Since forever, I guess. I’m sorry, I know you’re not-”

“I’m gay.” Bucky blurted out, cutting Steve off. “And I’ve loved you since the minute I could put a name to the feeling.” 

“Fuck.” Steve cursed, crossing the few feet to pull Bucky into his arms, “Fuck, we’re terrible at communicating.” He crashed his lips down on Bucky’s, frantic and desperate. 

It wasn’t a perfect first kiss but it was everything to Bucky. Steve’s warm palm rested on the back of Bucky’s neck, stabilizing him as he drowned in the other man. It was rough and heated and absolutely perfect. “I love you.” Bucky rasped out in between kisses, “I love so much.”

“Don’t leave. Please don’t leave me again.” Steve pleaded against Bucky’s lips, holding him closely, “We’ll figure it out, Buck. I promise. Please.” 

Bucky trembled, tears falling with giant sobs. He was so emotionally worn out and he clung to Steve like a lifeline. “Okay. We can try.” 

It took another six months and a few extra therapy sessions, but slowly Bucky began to adapt. It wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t quick, but that was okay. Change happened slow and gentle, like dawn rising up over the city rooftops bringing warmth and light to everything it touched. They found compromises and Steve did his best to be patient with Bucky, even though sometimes he practically vibrated out of his skin with the effort to slow down. They moved Bucky into Steve’s room and adopted a fluffy white cat they both doted on endlessly. Bucky eventually found common ground with Sam and they even made a weekend trip down to DC to visit him and do some sightseeing. After seventy years of being apart, and twenty years before that hiding their feelings, being able to be openly in love felt like the biggest blessing either man could have asked for. It wasn’t perfect by any means, but they were together and that was all that really mattered. 

[blapisblogs]

After that song ends and Corey Taylor gets a glimpse of something we’ll come back to later, we then cut to “young Corey Taylor” getting smacked and sassed by... Rob Scallon as the teacher? Yeah, Doug not only got Corey Taylor and his son Griff for this, he also brought in another musician. At least he got to contribute more to the music in this “review” than Corey Taylor did. Apparently he’s dating Tamara Chambers and that’s how he got involved with this (which makes the fact that Tamara’s here as one of his “students”... awkward at best), but judging by how desperately he’s tried to erase any mention of his involvement with this after the severe backlash it got, I’m guessing that he now regrets this. Anyway, hello, other Doug Walker regular Malcolm Ray. I have no clue who the other two “students” are, but I can only guess that they’re other regulars for Doug’s stuff. (Edit from the future: I think the other guy’s name is Walter? I know nothing about him except he works for Doug and I guess he likes Power Rangers.) All of them have high-pitched dubbed-in voices (I guess to make them sound younger in a “funny” way), and it’s really grating. Like... If you’ve read through my liveblogs about Sonic X, then you remember how I hated it whenever Bokkun said literally anything, right? Well it’s not quite as bad as him as far as the pitch goes, but it is just as annoying, if not even more so because there’s multiple people with high-pitched voices and the lyrics they get to sing in this part aren’t just annoying, they’re insulting.

Oh yeah, did I mention they sing for this next parody song?

If you know the album or the movie, you're probably already dreading this, and it's just as bad as you fear, maybe even worse. Yes, we’re at what’s probably the most popular song from The Wall: the BAFTA award-winning “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)”. If you don’t know, that song is preceded by “The Happiest Days of Our Lives”, which is so connected with it that most of the time it’s considered part of “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)” itself, as I’ve always heard it credited as part of that song on the radio. Doug does seem to know the difference though, as he notably does not parody the lyrics from “The Happiest Days of Our Lives”, which to me is a problem: that part is integral to knowing the story behind the song that follows it because it’s the part that talks about how the children in the school were abused by their teachers. Again, since Roger Waters based a lot of this off his own life and he grew up in a time where the teachers were legally allowed to physically and emotionally abuse their students, it’s pretty obvious that’s what the song’s about. Even without including “The Happiest Days of Our Lives”, Doug still parodied the scene where the teacher was humiliating young Pink in front of the entire class, reading his poems aloud and calling them “absolute rubbish” (though for this “review” it’s the teacher insulting Taylor’s musical taste in Pink Floyd, which is still shitty and psychologically damaging, and really upsets me as an autistic person who’s had their interests mocked multiple times). Despite all this, Doug claims Waters is just being a crybaby and exaggerating how bad his school life was when the abuse he suffered and the damage it caused him was real and very serious. You can say what you want about Waters’s ego, Doug, but making fun of someone for being abused, especially as a child, is a line that you should never cross.

It seems like Doug’s not satisfied enough with mocking what Roger Waters was talking about regarding his school life, though, because he goes as far as to mock all people who complain about school, dismissing detailed dissections of what’s wrong with today’s education system as “long-winded rants”. I’m convinced he didn’t actually read these “rants” he’s mocking, because there are serious problems with our education system. I could go into all the shitty things that I personally had to go through as an autistic kid, but you can find plenty of better, more detailed posts and articles talking about how fucked up America’s education system is today, to say nothing of what England’s school system was like in the 50′s (you know, the time period and experience Waters was clearly talking about with this), and this post is already long enough before I can even properly rip into this dreadful parody.

As the turd on top of this shit sundae, Doug Walker does a Dracula impression for part of the song because he’s saying that Roger Waters is calling all teachers “monsters” (yes, that’s literally the only reason). More specifically, it’s the Dracula played by Adam Sandler in the Hotel Transylvania franchise, where Sandler was already doing a weak impression of Bela Lugosi. Basically Doug’s doing an annoying, shitty impression of an already annoying, shitty impression.

Kill me.

[Lyrics (and snark) below the cut]

NC: We need more victimization (There are no good teachers! Not one! Not even by accident!) We need more stuff to rebel

[I know some people will complain about literally anything, but did you actually pay attention to what the album and film were saying? That teachers who abuse their students and try to quash their creativity and individuality is bad, something that Waters himself has clarified in interviews regarding the very song you’re parodying here? Do you not agree with that?]

(We don’t want to help you! We just want to eat your blood and suck your brains!) Though our education system’s broke (Wait, maybe it’s the other way around. I don’t know, I got a high school education! Muahahahaha!) This is pandering like hell

[You reviewed Norm of the North, Boss Baby, and the Emoji Movie despite none of those having ties to anything nostalgic (you even admitted as much in your review of the former), which was the entire point of the Nostalgia Critic. If that's not you pandering to your fanbase who just likes hearing you yell about bad movies, then I don’t know what is.]

(Remember that one teacher who seemed cool? He wasn’t! He was all part of the plan!) Hey! Who cares? All this bitching sells!

[Clearly it does considering your whole internet career is founded on that.]

(Remember that one teacher who seemed really kind and gave you candy?) Well oh well, we’ve got another hit in The Wall (That candy was really sugar-coated children's’ souls!) L-O-L, so school sucks. Grow a damn pair of balls.

[Okay, Boomer. You first. (Before anyone goes “well actually he’s not a Boomer”: I don’t care. This is such a Boomer message that a Boomer may as well be saying it.)]

(Children’s souls! We’re so evil! Muahahahaha!)

[I’m sorry for including all the evil laughing in this transcription, but it’s just as annoying to hear it, trust me.]

Bokkun “Child” chorus: Real cool visualizations (It’s all part of the plan so that you’re more likely to get a job when you’re older!) Milking your gloom and pity (Muahahahahaha! How terrible is that? Muahahahahaha! Muahahahaha!)

[Considering how schools in the way they operate now make students lose sleep, stresses them out over numbers that are assigned to tasks that have been forced upon them, and has been outdated for years since that’s not how most jobs work anymore... Yeah, it actually is terrible. You even said earlier that there are problems with our current education system, yet now you’re making fun of people who criticize it? Make up your mind.]

You hated school, who the hell didn’t? (It’s like those ‘90s commercials where the adults look like bad guys!) What’s next, hating DMVs? (Except they weren’t 90s commercials, they were really mini-documentaries! It’s all true! Muahahahaha!) Hey! Waters! Leave it on F-B!

[We get it already, Doug, you really hate Waters’s ego and the things he talks about in these songs. You’ve already talked about that in your previous parody, can you move onto something else about the movie that isn’t that? So far you’re making it sound like that’s the only thing worth talking about regarding this film.]

(We really don’t see what makes Cinnamon Toast Crunch so great!) All and all, complaining doesn’t mean much at all

[Well, at least you’re able to admit that your career means nothing.]

(Because we’re old! Muahahahaha!) But who cares, it’s still a damn cool song in The Wall (Bleh bleh bleh bleh, I’m a teacher, bleh bleh bleh bleh!)

[In case anyone was wondering why I said it was Adam Sandler’s shitty Bela Lugosi impression he was doing and not just a shitty Bela Lugosi impression, there you go. (For those who don’t get it: the “bleh bleh bleh” thing is a recurring “joke” in at least the first Hotel Transylvania. Yes, it’s as lame as it sounds.)]

We still need more persecutions (Muahahahahahaha! Ahehahahahahehe suck your blood, bleh!) (??) need to hear you (???) (Stabula!)

[I’m giving this my best shot, I really am, but... all I hear for that last set of question marks there is a really inappropriate c-word.]

What are you big boys to say school’s lame? Based on a long-winded rant?

[Hmm, posts and articles made by people who know what they’re talking about explaining how the American school system (since that’s what you’re basing this on rather than the one Waters wrote about) needs some serious retooling in order to cause less burnout, stress and trauma with literal children that can and will affect them in the short and long term when they grow up, or some internet jackass who gets paid for yelling at things and hasn’t been to a high school since at least the 90′s. Gee, I wonder whose opinion on that subject matters more in this situation. (That was sarcasm, by the way, for those who couldn’t tell.)]

Hey! Twitter! (???) bloody (???)!

[I’ve tried my best to figure out what they’re saying here, but this is one of the few times that I cannot actually tell no matter how hard I try, I’m sorry.

So anyway, the TL;DR version of what I think of what this parody song has to say about the original can be summed up in one Kermit gif:

...Why aren’t I watching The Great Muppet Caper instead?]

[thecomicsnexus]

The Case of The Chemical Syndicate

DETECTIVE COMICS #27 MAY 1939 BY BILL FINGER, BOB KANE, JERRY SIEGEL, JOE SHUSTER, JIM CHAMBER AND CHARLES BIRO

SYNOPSIS (FROM DC WIKIA)

Commissioner Gordon relaxes at home entertaining his young socialite friend Bruce Wayne. Wayne asks if anything exciting has happened lately, and Gordon explains that a fellow called the "Bat-Man" is puzzling him. Gordon receives a call that chemical manufacturer Lambert has been found murdered. They have Lambert's son in custody, whose fingerprints were found on the knife. Gordon invites Bruce Wayne to the Lambert mansion with him, and Bruce Wayne says he has nothing better to do.

When they arrive at the crime scene, young Lambert insists he is innocent. The lad explains that he arrived home early and saw his father lying on the floor. When he entered the library, he saw a figure escaping out the window. He pulled a knife out of his father's back, and his father's last word was "contract." Lambert's son recalls that his father had three associates, Alfred Stryker, Paul Rogers, and Steve Crane. Steve Crane calls Gordon on the phone. Lambert told Crane that he had received a death threat the previous day. Crane has received a similar death threat, and asks for police protection. Bruce Wayne decides to go home, and Gordon rushes over to the Crane residence.

Steven Crane is killed by a gunman who enters through the window. The thug and his partner steal a paper from Crane and climb onto the roof. They are confronted by a figure they recognize as the Bat-Man, standing in the moonlight. The Bat-Man punches the first thug out, then grabs the second one in a headlock and throws him off the second-story roof. He grabs the paper and escapes as Gordon is pulling up. The GCPD try to arrest the Bat-Man, but they are unable to catch him. Gordon learns that Crane has been murdered, and moves on to the next business partner. The Bat-Man smiles when he reads the paper he stole, and drives off in his automobile.

Paul Rogers visits the laboratory of Alfred Stryker, having learned of Lambert's death by news broadcast. Stryker's assistant Jennings clubs Rogers over the head and ties him up. Jennings explains that he will lower a gas chamber over Rogers and kill him the same way he puts animals to sleep. Jennings leaves to activate the gas. The Bat-Man leaps into the room through an open transom. The Bat-Man grabs a wrench and dives inside the gas chamber before it closes.

He plugs the gas jet with a handkerchief, and busts through the glass with his wrench. Jennings returns and tries to pull a gun on the Bat-Man, but the Bat-Man punches him in the face really hard. Alfred Stryker enters and demands to know what happened. When Rogers explains that Jennings tried to kill him, Stryker pulls out a knife to finish the job. The Bat-Man is hiding in the shadows, and he grabs Stryker from behind to stop him. The Bat-Man explains to Rogers that they were all partners in the Apex Chemical Corporation. Stryker had made secret contracts with all of them to pay them a sum of money each year until he owned the business. He grew tired of waiting and decided to kill them so he wouldn't have to pay. Stryker breaks out of the Bat-Man's grip and pulls a gun on him. The Bat-Man punches Stryker so hard in the face that Stryker breaks through a railing and falls into a tank of acid. The Bat-Man remarks that this is a fitting end for his kind, and leaves via transom. Rogers tries to thank the Bat-Man, but he is already gone.

Later at his house, Commissioner Gordon relates this story to Bruce Wayne. Bruce remarks that this is a lovely fairy tale, and leaves. Gordon thinks to himself that Bruce Wayne is a nice young chap, but he seems to lead a very boring life. Bruce returns home to Wayne Manor, where it's revealed that he is in fact the Bat-Man.

CONTEXT

There is a lot of bad blood behind this creation, so stay with me and we shall go through this...

So the legend says that Bob Kane created Batman when he was a minor and with the help of writer Bill Finger they did the story that was published in Detective Comics. And that is just a legend.

It’s hard to tell if Kane was a minor when he signed his contract to National. He was born in 1915, and that would make him 20 at the time National/Wheeler-Nicholson started the business. We know for sure he wasn’t the “creator” of Batman.

Comics historian Ron Goulart has referred to Batman as the "creation of artist Bob Kane and writer Bill Finger". Bill Finger said this about Bob Kane:

Kane had an idea for a character called 'Batman', and he'd like me to see the drawings. I went over to Kane's, and he had drawn a character who looked very much like Superman with kind of ... reddish tights, I believe, with boots ... no gloves, no gauntlets ... with a small Domino Mask, swinging on a rope. He had two stiff wings that were sticking out, looking like bat wings. And under it was a big sign ... BATMAN.

Finger offered such suggestions as giving the character a cowl instead of the domino mask, a cape instead of wings, adding gloves, and removing the red sections from the original costume. He later said his suggestions were influenced by Lee Falk's popular The Phantom, a syndicated newspaper comic strip character with which Kane was familiar as well, Finger named the character Bruce Wayne after Robert Bruce the Scottish Patriot.

Bob Kane said (and I quote): 

"Bill Finger was a contributing force on Batman right from the beginning... I made Batman a superhero-vigilante when I first created him. Bill turned him into a scientific detective."

Finger wrote both the initial script for Batman's debut in Detective Comics #27 (May 1939) and the character's second appearance, while Kane provided art. Artist Bob Kane negotiated a contract with National Comics, the future DC Comics, that signed away ownership of the character in exchange for, among other compensations, a mandatory byline on all Batman comics (and adaptations thereof). Finger's name, in contrast, does not appear as an official credit on Batman stories or films, even the comics he wrote in the 1940s and 1950s.

To make Bob Kane more of a controversial figure, when Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were looking for allies against the way National Comics was treating them, they went to Bob Kane, who betrayed them and at the same time re-negotiated his contract (as, like it was mentioned before, it wasn’t legal).

There is a documentary named “Batman & Bill”, that chronicles how Bill Finger created a legend and died penniless and forgotten, and how Finger's heirs, along with writer Marc Tyler Nobleman, finally righted this wrong. It also shines a light on the systemic injustices in Golden Age and Silver Age comics publishing, in which many other brilliant creators were shafted. 

The documentary’s most compelling when it focuses on the relationship between Kane and Finger, two men who couldn't have been more different. Kane, who died in 1998, was a brash, boastful figure, one who saw his creation—and its popularity—as an extension of himself. A classic showman, he greeted fans wearing sharp suits or Bat-cowls, sold original oil paintings of Bats (which the documentary claims were painted by other artists), and wrote a grandiose autobiography. Even when he wasn't around fans, he preened; the documentary makes much of archival footage and audio recordings of Kane extolling his own genius. Bill Finger, on the other hand, obsessively researched weird facts, and kept a giant notebook full of scraps and notes that he could use in the next Batman comic—information gleaned from riding the bus for hours on end, staring out at the city and recording what he saw. Batman's tragic backstory sprang from his own dark imagination, as did most of the hero’s other defining traits, and even feverish gimmicks like having Batman fight on giant typewriters or dodge giant pennies. But that creativity came with isolation: He made only one appearance at a 1965 convention, and did almost no interviews.

So yes, these days DC found a loophole (I suppose) and even though they still add the byline of “Created by Bob Kane”, they modified it to “Created by Bob Kane with Bill Finger”. I understand this was agreed by the Kane estate.

I think this Ty Templeton comic pretty much encapsulates the Batman created by Bob Kane...

REVIEW

A small synopsis for the other features I am following here. Crimson Avenger is dealing with a mysterious gambling-related murder. Bart Regan is trying to prevent the assassination of all the partners in a company (almost like the Batman story). And Slam Bradley is looking for his federal agent friend who went missing in Switzerland.

Of course the main attraction here is Batman, but I should put some emphasis on how the other features are changing and getting a bit more serious.

The Batman story has been remade several times, so this is not my favorite version of it. However, it is amazing that so many details of the Batman we know today are there already. And it feels too obvious for us, but the reveal at the end that Bruce Wayne is Batman may have been a mind-blower at the time.

I could go on and on about the many things in Batman’s style, but there are too many sources you can check about those.

Happy 80th anniversary, Batman!

I give the stories a score of 8

[fysebastianstan]

It has to be hard to get a handle on what someone like Jeff Gillooly is like when you’re working on a film that’s comprised almost completely from contradictory first-hand accounts from the people who really lived through these incidents. At times, you portray him sympathetically, and at times you have to show this dark, loathsome, irredeemable side of him. Is that hard to convey these constantly changing character directions as an actor?

Sebastian Stan: That’s one of the great things about the script. One minute I was laughing so hard at what was happening, and then the next scene I would become so aghast that I would get confused about what I was laughing at. It’s the kind of material that was always challenging my own system of values, and the idea that these are real people and that this really happened – not to mention what I thought I knew or didn’t know about it all going in – really sparked my curiosity. Regardless of what really is the truth, I had to follow the script. In the film, there are scenes where Jeff will say “I didn’t do this. I had nothing to do with it.” Then in the very next moment, we’ll cut to him acting completely opposite of what he was saying because that storytelling perspective has changed. Whether he was telling the truth or he was lying, I always had to follow the script to find the truth in each scene as an actor. Both Jeff and Tonya, from doing these interviews, basically contributed to the screenplay in their own words. Steve Rogers went to interview both of them. I never got a chance to hear Tonya’s interview, but I did get to check out his, and his point of view is definitely in the script, as is her’s. We have to honour both of them to some respect.

It’s also a story where there’s a great amount of abuse and violence that colour who these characters are. How were you all able to manage the film’s more outlandish and comedic elements with these incidents of real life violence?

Sebastian Stan: The hard part with Jeff is that there’s no excuse for that kind of behaviour. I don’t care where you’re coming from. There’s no excuse for it. Absolutely none. I think the issue is more than boiling down to calling Jeff and Tonya rednecks, and more about the nature of trauma. You’re talking about two individuals who are very damaged. You can see in both of their lives that their pasts aren’t the greatest, even before they met each other. The problem is that you’re growing up learning these cycles of abandonment, abuse, violence, and survival amid great uncertainty, and if these are present when you’re growing up as a child, the sad part is that these feelings often get equated with love if that’s all these people know. I thought about that a lot, and how people can seek that later in life. I think they both play this tug of war with each other where they try to let go, and they keep coming back together because they exemplify all they think they know about love. For her, she thinks that she can’t be happy, because if she starts feeling happy or comfortable, she thinks that something must be wrong. That’s relatable, and I think we all have these fears; this fear that if someone puts a gun to your head that you’re going to run a marathon faster than anyone has run a marathon before. It becomes a survival mechanism. People always try to say that there’s something in their background, but I think people always looked in the wrong places for answers. Neither of them was exactly keen on going to therapy. In many ways, this is a story about trauma.

You said you got a chance to go over the interview tapes, but did you meet Jeff in person, and did it change your opinion about him as a person?

Sebastian Stan: Yeah, I did. As for if it changed my opinion of him… (long pause) Even right now if you were to ask me that, I honestly wouldn’t know what to say. I’m further removed now, but at the time I had to take such an objective point of view, and to a point where I had to take my own opinions on the matter out of the equation to find a way in to who he was as a person and the situations he found himself in. The only way that this made any sense was to treat the film as an obsessive, compulsive love story. Here’s someone who attached his own identity so close to someone else’s identity and worth that without her he didn’t know what life was going to be like, and it terrified him. I worked from there and tried to figure out what kind of situation that would be like. All of that was in the script, and the accounts were already so contradictory that I would never go up to Steve Rogers and say, “Oh, we can’t say this like this because Jeff told me…” But there were definitely moments where Margot and I would be in a scene, and I would say to her beforehand, “I’m pretty sure this is where she knew what was happening.” And she would say, “No, because he wasn’t telling her anything.” And we would go back and forth and question ourselves and our characters about who knew what and at what point. I think Craig did such a great job with the film and how he allowed us – and how he allows the audience – to come away with their own take on what happened. No one here is very innocent, so getting the truth out of them all was something I knew would be almost impossible. We will never really know. Maybe that’s what’s so interesting about the story. Why do we keep coming back to this? Why do we keep examining what happened with O.J. or the Menendez Brothers? There was a bad thing that happened, and we can point to it and know that it’s bad, but knowing where it starts, where it ends, and who knew what is confounding. It’s like no one involved or observing from a far thinks that the actual truth could ever be good enough. Everyone thinks about what could have been and why, but I’m not sure if anyone wants to confront the truth or know it completely. Tonya claims she knew nothing about it, and Jeff says that it started out as this small thing that someone else ended up taking to another level that he wasn’t involved in. But regardless of who they are, when you play a real life person, there’s still a sense of responsibility there. You have someone’s life in your hands, so to speak. It’s a great challenge, for sure. With Tonya, you have someone who’s very animated and adamant that they had nothing to do with what happened, which if you study behaviour and how people react to certain situations, it makes people question them more. With Jeff, he just kind of shrugs and says he didn’t do it, which is fascinating in its own way because you’re always looking deep into their eyes for any sort of tell that they’re lying to you. It’s colder, but there aren’t as many distractions. It’s so fascinating to be able to play alongside Margot and show these two sides of this crazy story.

Did you ever follow the case closely when it was originally unfolding?

Sebastian Stan: I was about ten or eleven when it first happened, so I was actually in Europe at the time, and I wasn’t following it closely. I did see [the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary] Price of Gold, and I think that was that was the first real exposure I had to what happened, and that was great. From there I watched so many tapes about the ins and outs of the figure skating world, and it took my appreciation for the sport and the seriousness of what happened had more weight to it. Here are athletes who make the near impossible look effortless, and I think that was one of the things that endeared people to Nancy Kerrigan. Everything Kerrigan did looked so smooth, pristine, and almost regal. But this idea that it was also like a pageant sort of thing, which is weird when you consider how physically demanding it all is.

[biofunmy]

Would 1980s murder case be treated differently now?

CLOSE

Jennifer Levin (Photo: SundanceTV)

It’s not easy watching “The Preppy Murder: Death in Central Park” – a documentary about the 1986 slaying of Jennifer Levin in New York City and the trial of Robert Chambers, her assailant – more than 30 years later.

The five part series, airing over three consecutive nights, kicked off Wednesday and continues Thursday and Friday (9 p.m. EST,  AMC and Sundance TV). In looking at the crime, the Chambers team’s defense and the trial, it brings to light (or back to memory) the tactic of victim blaming and highlights controversial aspects of the trial – including the decision to disallow DNA evidence, as it wasn’t seen as credible. 

At the time of her death, Levin was 18 and Chambers was 19. They were friends and had a sexual relationship prior to her early-morning death on Aug. 26. Chambers told police Levin died accidentally when he threw her off of him while trying to defend himself from her sexual advances.

The documentary features interviews with friends of Levin, as well as her mother, Ellen; sister, Danielle; and an ex-girlfriend of Chambers, Alex Kapp. Prosecutor Linda Fairstein, Detective Mike Sheehan, who died in June, and a member of Chambers’ defense, attorney Roger Stavis, are also interviewed. Chambers did not agree to participate in the series, and his defense attorney Jack Litman died in 2010.  

Though Fairstein received backlash following her portrayal in May’s “When They See Us” about her prosecution of the five young men wrongfully accused of raping and assaulting a woman in Central Park, in “The Preppy Murder,” we see her devotion to bringing justice for the Levins.

An impassioned Jessica Doyle says she wanted to be a voice in the documentary to correct the narrative about Levin, her “best friend.” Thanks to Litman, tabloid newspapers seemed to question what role she played in her own demise. 

“Central Park suspect’s lawyer claims ‘Jenny killed in wild sex,'” one New York Post headline read. The headline “Girl’s slaying suspect: Sex play ‘got rough’ ” was splashed across the New York Daily News.

Robert Chambers, left, exits a New York court with his defense attorney Jack Litman on Oct. 21, 1987. (Photo: DAVID BOOKSTAVER/Associated Press)

Ricki Stern, who co-directed the series with and Annie Sundberg, says the post-#MeToo climate is one of the reasons she wanted to revisit the case, citing Litman’s attempt to vilify Levin because she wanted sex.

“A friend of Miss Levin testified the slain teen had said her previous encounters with Chambers had been ‘the best sex’ she ever had,” the Associated Press reported in 1988, about the closing arguments of the trial.  ″’That’s why she pursued him, and that’s why – unfortunately – this wound up the way it has,’ Litman said.”

“In that day, there wasn’t a public outcry that might happen today when the media – led by a defense attorney – looks at a young woman and says, ‘Oh, you asked for this. You wanted rough sex,’ or whatever the narrative was that they created and essentially pinned this woman’s death on her own actions,” Stern says. “And that’s important to reexamine in today’s day.”

But she is less certain whether the current climate would influence the case. 

“It’s an interesting thing to consider. I don’t honestly know,” she says. “I think there are so many cases of criminal injustice that continue on. You can look at the Steubenville case, you can look at the Stanford University case, where… the sympathy is still toward these boys. ‘Boys will be boys.’ ‘They were drunk.’ ‘They shouldn’t be asked to take full responsibility for their actions.’ ‘They’re actually good boys, but they just did one bad thing.'” 

Sundberg believes the power of social media would’ve fostered “more debate, and hopefully more support” from the start for Levin.

 “We’re seeing it now, in what’s been playing out with several of the survivors who filed charges against Epstein and Jeffrey Epstein’s estate, that there is an openness to explore what would’ve previously been a marginalized narrative,” she adds. “I would hope that women … would feel that they have more support in terms of coming forward against a media that might paint them in certain ways.”

Sundberg also brings up the DNA evidencefrom the crime scene, which State Supreme Court Justice Howard Bell ruled was not credible at a preliminary hearing, and prevented the prosecution from placing a denim jacket that Levin had worn that evening into evidence as a murder weapon. 

“”And I think if this were happening today, DNA would’ve made this less controversial; the method of murder would’ve been clearer to prove,” she says.

After more than a week offruitless jury deliberations, the prosecution and defense agreed to a deal – Chambers pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter and went on to serve 15 years, partly due to bad behavior in prison. 

Chambers was released in 2003 but re-arrested for selling drugs four years later, and sentenced to 19 years in prison. Today, he is serving his sentence at New York’s Sullivan Correctional Facility.

One way the case may play out differently today, is thanks to the rape shield bill – which Levin’s mom Ellen advocated for  – the sexual past of a crime victim (alive or dead) is no longer permissible in court.

‘Law & Order: SVU’ turns 21: Mariska Hargitay, Dick Wolf reflect on TV milestone 

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[script101]

The Doctor Falls/Credo in unum Librium: The Script (or "Think but this")

O.K., TV Show. You win. :-D

You gave me both emotional beats I wanted but didn’t think I’d get in a million years (spoilers after the jump), and you explicitly compared the abomination currently living in Madam President Hillary Clinton’s House to sewage.

In return, I officially forgive you for “Lie of the Land”.

We ARE clearly intended to remember that in that dreadful episode Bill was able to resist the lies. So I will remember ONLY that very basic premise and I’ll throw the specifics of that episode (which I found repulsive both on a personal level and on a dramatic level) in the garbage where they belong.

All is mended.

I had written a quick idea on a way to get to the emotional beats I wanted to see in the finale. I also had a lot of still-unanswered questions, but personally, I like Sci-Fi Joss Whedon style: if given the choice between a plot twist and a pile of answers or a single believable emotional moment, go with the believable emotional moment (loosely paraphrased from his comments in a documentary titled “Showrunners”). If the characters ring true, that’s more important to me then checking off every single question box.

1.I’d hoped that the first viewing would be about Bill. 2.I wanted the second viewing to be about a different character.

I needed Bill to survive and move on and AWAY from The Doctor. 2.If the above happened, I wanted the second viewing to allow me to focus on the tragedy of Missy.

~~~~~~~~

Just Plain Bill

The moment she woke up in the barn, I knew. I’ve been harping on “mirrors”, so I started crying within seconds. I knew that she’d be given a mirror shortly and likely would still not grasp what had happened. I did note that Twelve WAS kind kind when he was explaining to Bill what had happened, and when psychopath started mocking her in that accent I wanted to punch him in his stupid round face. But everyone did, amirite? (As an aside, given Twelve’s expressions and the limp in the scene in the barn, I was almost expecting him to start speaking with an American accent and pull a bottle of Vicodin out of that bag of jelly beans…).

I had had a nagging worry that Bill would turn out to be related to the Doctor or Missy/Master somehow. That would have answered a ton of questions but it would have felt cheap.

I also know Steven Moffat can’t win, and there will be attacks about “hand of God” because of the way Bill survived, but I don’t perceive the ending that way. The way the finale played out, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” DOES apply.

While describing what had happened to Bill, Missy said something that was entirely inconsistent with what she and the doctor had seen (there wasn’t a working heart to “scoop” out). We do not know what that gun did or did not do. We do not know what did or did not happen as part of being turned into a cyberman. We only know that the Doctor blindly believed he could fix it, only to later realize he could not.

As the extent of the injuries and harm Bill endured are unknowable (we cannot and should not believe the words of a psychopath who was getting off on inflicting as much suffering on those around him as possible), it is therefore plausible that an imaginary advanced technology (the sentient substance that was seen in “The Pilot”) was indeed able to cure Bill in a way that The Doctor could not.

And as far as I’m concerned, the conclusion of Bill’s storyline was FAR better than what I had suggested yesterday! Yesterday, in a post that intentionally had no hashtags, I mentioned something John Rogers’ had written: if you want to know what a show is about, rewatch the last scene of the pilot. I know that Bill’s rescue might feel unearned to some viewers, but I think it was perfectly foreshadowed in the last seen of “The Pilot”.

I also quite liked that when it came time to undo the horror that had happened to Bill, The Doctor was just set dressing. He didn’t help Bill. He didn’t save Bill. He was on the floor unconscious. His boasts and promises, no matter how sincere, were promises he has demonstrated over and over again that he could not keep.

I am no longer angry at Twelve (which is good since I bought most of seasons 8, 9, and 10!), but I do see his arrogance is unabated. It would have been disappointing to have had him control Bill (even if benignly!) all season, have her ripped from him by a psychopath who used and destroyed her simply to hurt the Doctor, only to have the Doctor claim credit for remedying the situation that only happened to Bill because of Bill’s proximity to the Doctor. I also am sad to admit that I still question how much he truly cared about Bill at all, as he consistently put her in too much danger and we were never told WHY he had chosen her out of his standing-room-only lectures.

To have Bill be rescued solely by Heather (young former-human who is making one helluva win out of a very bad situation!) after she learned how to control her new form of existence, all while the Doctor laid unconscious, was sadly perfect. He does not know that Bill survived. He cannot claim credit for Bill’s survival. With Heather, Bill now has complete agency over her future. I believe we can take Heather’s words as the truth: Bill can stay with Heather and be like her if she chooses, for as long as she chooses, or (“any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” applies!) Heather will make Bill fully human again if that is ever what Bill wants. It’s also significant that in “The Pilot” even though Bill sneaked into The Doctor’s lectures, she was only interested in the CLASS. He chose her for personal attention. Bill chose Heather and lost her. Heather chose Bill but could not control her new abilities. I was happy to see them fly away together. When the TARDIS doors closed behind them, that was the door slam heard around the…no where: there’s no sound in space…well yeah there’s sound inside the TARDIS…but if a TARDIS door slams closed in space and no one is conscious to hear it…OK YES it still produces sound waves inside said TARDIS, but…never mind.

I really am not angry at The Doctor anymore, but he had failed in every way possible, and Bill’s continued loyalty to him was less earned than the Full-Circle and explicitly foreshadowed possibility of seeing Heather again.

I liked it. I know there will be people who don’t, but I was very happy with it. I actually think it was perfect.

~~~~~~~~

Oh Missy, you really are so fine!

Like I wrote in the unhashtagged post, Michelle Gomez is so likable that her character literally can get away with murder. The way her death played out was tragic, but it was the only way the audience could truly believe that she was sincere in her attempt to reform. When Twelve pled to both Missy and the Master to please stand with him and simply TRY to help, Missy understood what The Doctor could not: her previous incarnation was simply too much of a psychopath to ever be redeemed. She said she could REMEMBER what it was like to think and “burn” the way he currently DOES (present tense) and that she will miss it.

Note that she REMEMBERS it because she DOES NOT perceive people or the world in that way any more. You can only MISS something when it’s GONE.

Understanding the paradox of them both being on that ship at the same time, and WITH HER OWN MEMORIES of being that other person NOW COMING BACK in flashes exactly as the Master’s memories of dying on the ship began FADING, Missy realized that she HAD successfully CONNED and SCARED her former self (Missy: “which REMINDS ME… a VERY SCARY LADY threw me against a wall and told me…”). This was all a ruse. Missy NEVER wavered in her intent to redeem herself.

The performances were perfect. Missy knew Twelve’s plea to her former incarnation was not even falling on deaf ears, instead Twelve would be heard clearly, would be mocked, and his words would be mined for any sign of compassion that could be exploited as a weakness. Every moment Twelve wasted trying to convince the Master to do the right thing was another moment giving the bastard ideas on how to undermine him. This was a situation where a lecture would HURT his chances at success. Missy knows who and what she had been, and she knew that the former version of herself would stop at nothing to undermine the Doctor and inflict as much pain and suffering upon the innocent inhabitants of that ship as possible. She needed to to make Twelve stop talking immediately. She needed to remove her former incarnation from the equation as quickly as possible.

She knew the only way to redeem herself was to commit one final act of violence. She had to stop her previous incarnation. The only way to do that was to make him trust her by appearing, just for the moment, to betray The Doctor.

She remembered being that man. Because she remembered it so clearly, she knew there was no reasoning with him. Her former incarnation had been a completely unrepentant psychopath. He perceived his cruelty as a sign of strength. Missy also remembered the scary woman, and now realized that woman had been HER.

Missy thought she would be able to get to the lifts, inflict a slow fatal injury upon her former self, allow him to make it back to his TARDIS in time to make the necessary repairs, leave, and regenerate into her current incarnation. She knew that would happen because it already did happen. It would resolve the paradox. As soon as the elevator doors closed, she intended to return to The Doctor and help him.

She understood her former self so well, yet she had genuinely changed so much that she failed to realize just how strong his current urge to “stop at nothing” was. I think she felt pity, and I think that is what cost her her life.

Her paradox-scrambled mind remembered the scary woman. Her paradox-scrambled mind DID NOT REMEMBER that her former self had murdered the scary woman.

The moment she was hit with the fatal blast, she realized the irony of her miscalculation.

That’s why she was laughing.

The Doctor gets the glory, but it was Missy who truly died a virtuous death. “Without hope. Without witness. Without reward.”

She died alone, apparently without the ability to regenerate, knowing the Doctor would always believe she had truly betrayed him. She knew the deck would be abandoned and destroyed. She knew she would never be found shot in the back. We know from “Heaven Sent” that her species takes “forever” to die even if they cannot regenerate.

Since her last words to the Doctor were words of betrayal spoken only with the intention of being heard by her former self, her sacrifice will never be known or even suspected. The only legacy of her existence will be the sins of her past.

We might THINK she killed Danny. We might WANT to think that she killed Danny. It’s easier to accept INTENT rather than “sometimes good people are the victims of terrible accidents.” The truth is, we have, per the scripts, ABSOLUTELY NO EVIDENCE TO INDICATE MISSY HAD ANYTHING TO DO WITH DANNY’S DEATH.

But… We do know Missy murdered Dr. Chang, the young man who had worked for her and liked her, for no reason at all.

We know Missy murdered Osgood for no reason at all.

We know Missy murdered multiple UNIT officers, one of whom was the father of a newborn baby, for no reason at all.

Depending on when Steven Moffat decided on the storyline about “The Hybrid” being Clara and Twelve together, Missy might have let Twelve shoot the Dalek cage holding Clara Prime. Even if The Hybrid was planned when “The Witch’s Familiar” was filmed and Missy would NOT have let Twelve kill Clara, her motivation was still rotten.

Missy personally has done so many things that are just plan unforgivable.

Now, though, by deliberately having her die where none but the audience would ever know what truly happened, we have no choice but to accept that she had truly developed a conscience. She regretted her prior actions. Her tears were real. Her motives pure.

Psychopaths are devoid of empathy, but they can instantly recognize it and exploit it. I was correct that the expression on Missy’s face at the end of “World Enough and Time” was compassion. Missy WAS deeply upset when she realized the cyberman was Bill. We KNOW Missy felt compassion because the Master STATED DIRECTLY THAT HE SAW SHE WAS FEELING EMPATHY. It disgusted him.

As noted, Twelve is still arrogant. We will never know if this was just a short window when Missy would have wanted to do the right thing, or if she actually could have been a force for good in the universe who died before she knew how to handle crisis situations because Twelve rushed her into this idiotic test. We know Michelle Gomez will not be back next season. The Doctor is going to change appearance because of the events of this episode, Missy is just plain dead.

Had they cast ANY ACTRESS OTHER THAN MICHELLE GOMEZ as Missy, honestly, WOULD WE CARE?

I don’t think so.

But they did.

And I do.

Her story was tragic.

Bravo, Michelle Gomez!

And BRAVO to Steven Moffat and Rachel Talalay.

[bountyofbeads]

Roy Cohn Is How We Got Trump https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/20/opinion/roy-cohn-trump.html

To understand the anatomy of Donald Trump, you have to understand Roy Cohn and the prominence he played in the 50s and 60s in New York and Trump's early years.

Roy Cohn Is How We Got Trump

From McCarthyism to the mob to Trump, Cohn enabled evil. Why did elites embrace him?

By MICHELLE GOLDBERG, Opinion Columnist | Published Sept. 20, 2019 | New York Times | Posted September 20, 2019 8:50 AM ET |

Near the beginning of “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” the new documentary about the lawyer and power broker who mentored Donald Trump, an interviewee says, “Roy Cohn’s contempt for people, his contempt for the law, was so evident on his face that if you were in his presence, you knew you were in the presence of evil.” He wasn’t being hyperbolic.

The film, which opens in New York and Los Angeles on Friday, will likely be of wide interest because of how Cohn helps explain Trump. In the attorney’s life, you can see the strange ease with which a sybaritic con man fit in with crusading social reactionaries. You see the glee Cohn derived from being an exception to the rules he enforced on weaker people. From him, Trump learned how, when he was in trouble, to change the subject by acting outrageously, to never apologize and always stay on the offense. When the Justice Department claimed that apartment buildings owned by the Trump family were discriminating against black renters, it was Cohn’s idea to countersue the Justice Department for $100 million.

In the 1950s, as chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy, Cohn wasn’t just a key player in the anti-Communist witch hunts of the time. He also persecuted men in the State Department who were suspected of being gay, despite being a closeted gay man himself. Later, he became a consigliere to New York’s mafia families, some of whom also had ties to Trump, even as he ranted about law and order.

The film’s title comes from something Trump said when he was frustrated with then Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Cohn was Trump’s template for what a lawyer is supposed to be. (In Attorney General Bill Barr, he seems to have found someone who satisfies him.) “Roy was somebody that had no boundaries,” a lawyer in his firm says in the film. “And if you were on the right side of him, it was great. And if you were on the wrong side of him, it was terrible.”

But what I found most striking about “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” wasn’t its insights into the thuggish president, whose particularly brand of malevolence has been theorized to death. It was its reminders of just how decadent, in every sense, New York society used to be. Cohn was manifestly despicable, but he was embraced, rather than shunned, by New York elites. For a time, he had a sham engagement to Barbara Walters. He hung out with the famed artist Andy Warhol and was a regular at the oft-mythologized nightclub Studio 54.

Warhol is only briefly mentioned in the film, but his diaries mention Cohn’s parties repeatedly. “And when you go to these Roy Cohn things all everybody says is, ‘It’s so amusing, it’s so interesting, because you never know who you’ll find at these things,’” Warhol wrote in 1982. In 1985, he described Cohn’s birthday party at the New York nightclub The Palladium. TV monitors showed Cohn’s anti-Communist speeches from the 1950s. “And that was exciting, it was the best thing,” wrote Warhol.

To understand the milieu Cohn moved in is, I think, to understand at least some of the generation gap among elites over what’s sometimes called “cancel culture” or “call-out culture” or even just “political correctness.” If you are under 35 or 40, it’s probably hard to grasp just how much depravity used to be tolerated in fancy circles, and, further, how tolerating it was itself taken as a sign of sophistication

During Warhol’s heyday, the amoral celebration of fame was considered glamorous and edgy, and genuine outrage was deeply uncool. Similar values still predominated when I moved to New York almost 20 years ago, when figures like Harvey Weinstein seemed to rule the city.

It wasn’t until the intertwined ascents of social media and millennial progressives that the zeitgeist really turned, and jaded acceptance of the status quo fell from fashion. Younger people, scarred by the wreckage of the financial crisis, looked at the world they’d inherited and felt wide-ranging moral indignation. Unlike their elders, they hadn’t watched the radical promise of the late ’60s curdle into violence and farce, and so weren’t disillusioned with the left.

Today, wealth and power can still buy horrible people a degree of social acceptance. Sean Spicer lied to the American people for a living and is now on “Dancing With the Stars.” Ivanka Trump is still reportedly invited to celebrity weddings. But the left has far more cultural power than in the past, and some on the left have used that power to re-moralize the public square. Sometimes that means ostracizing people, or, as they say on the internet, canceling them. A more decent society would have done that to Cohn.

Still, it’s easy see why the way the left deploys its influence feels, to some, inquisitorial. The religious right, of course, hates the new cultural mores because it wanted to re-moralize America on its terms. But plenty of liberals are nostalgic for a less sanctimonious era, where, at least in certain cosmopolitan precincts, being amusing and interesting were more important than being upright. Sometimes I feel this nostalgia myself; if you came of age in a culture that celebrated transgression, norms that demand sensitivity can feel restrictive.

But to see the way Cohn was accepted among artists, socialites and the demimonde of New York night life is to be reminded how warped the city’s values used to be. That’s why, for so long, Trump was able to thrive here.

In the end, the social world in which Cohn could be at once a right-wing dirty trickster and a celebrity bon vivant did have rules, and he ran afoul of them. In 1986, after a lifetime of skirting consequences for his corruption, Cohn was disbarred for cheating his clients. (At one point Cohn allegedly dressed up like a male nurse to get a dying multimillionaire client to sign a document making him a trustee of his estate.)

Unable to practice law, his power evanesced. In “Where’s My Roy Cohn,” an old friend explains how, every year, Cohn held a private dinner for his intimates. After the disbarment, the friend arrived at one such dinner. “When I get there, this long table was set, and nobody came,” he said. At the same time, Cohn was dying of AIDS, though he refused to admit it. Trump, his protégé, cut him off. New York wasn’t more forgiving back then. It was just more forgiving of certain people.

Where’s My Roy Cohn?’ Review: A Fixer’s Progress

A documentary traces the life and times of a notorious lawyer whose career stretched from Joseph McCarthy to Donald J. Trump.

By A.O. Scott | Published Sept. 19, 2019 Updated Sept. 20, 2019, 12:00 a.m. ET | New York Times | Posted September 20, 2019 8:50 AM ET |

In a television interview near the end of his life, Roy Cohn predicted that his obituaries would lead with Senator Joseph McCarthy. He wasn’t wrong. Thanks partly to the televised Army-McCarthy hearings, Cohn’s role as the Wisconsin senator’s youthful counsel was imprinted on the public memory and seemed, when Cohn died of AIDS in 1986, to be the most significant episode in a contentious public career.

Lately, the emphasis has shifted, in part thanks to Cohn’s association, in the ’70s and ’80s, with the New York real estate developer who is now the president of the United States. Matt Tyrnauer’s  compact and informative new documentary, “Where’s My Roy Cohn?,” quotes President Trump in its title. The film’s answer to the question suggests that Cohn is among the threads that link the politics of the Red Scare with whatever it is we’re living through now. He’s still around.

As one of the principal characters in Tony Kushner’s great play “Angels in America” — an embodiment of hubris and shame, not without a tragic dimension — Cohn has been posthumously played by a handful of first-rate actors, including Al Pacino, Nathan Lane and F. Murray Abraham. The man himself, reanimated by Tyrnauer (a former writer for Vanity Fair) in newsreels and video clips, evidences a certain slippery charm, a relish for verbal combat, and what can only be called a passionate disdain for the truth.

Cohn’s personality and career are fleshed out by the testimony of accomplices and witnesses, lawyers and journalists (including Sam Roberts of The New York Times). The story they tell zigzags a bit on its way from an unhappy, privileged childhood through precocious success to disbarment and death. It’s the chronicle of a closeted gay man’s fate in a hostile environment and also, contrapuntally, of an unscrupulous fixer’s progress.

The people who reveal the worst about Cohn are the ones who knew him best — friends, family members, a former lover and a handful of colleagues. Some are well known, like Roger Stone, Cohn’s protégé in the dark arts of political manipulation. Others, like two of Cohn’s younger cousins, are private citizens who give an intimate account of their relative’s public corruption.

Nearly all of their reminiscences are tinged with the kind of astonishment that can start to sound like admiration. The chutzpah! The ambition! The nerve!

“Where’s my Roy Cohn?” offers a critical account of its subject’s ethically dubious behavior, early and late. As part of the team prosecuting Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage, he made ex parte phone calls to the judge urging that the couple be sentenced to death. Later, he defended organized crime bosses and cooked his own books.

Through it all, he was a fixture of New York society and a welcome guest in Washington power circles. He counted Ronald and Nancy Reagan among his friends, and friendship was a crucial tool in his arsenal. He was good at knowing when favors needed to be done and when they needed to be called in. He made a great show of loyalty, and received it in return.

Television interviewers, even when they made a show of asking Cohn tough questions, tended to fawn over his intelligence and connections. There is no doubt that he was a fascinating and important character, but “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” is most interesting for the questions it doesn’t explicitly ask.

Those have to do with not with Cohn’s blatant amorality, but with the moral compromises of the elite who tolerated his company and found uses for his talents. It’s not that any of the high-minded, good-doing, often professedly liberal people who invited him to parties and accepted his favors necessarily approved of him, any more than they approved of, say, Harvey Weinstein or Trump himself. But they kept him around, out of some combination of cynicism, self-interest and curiosity that remains an underexamined and toxic force in the history of our time.

[d2kvirus]

Dickheads of the Month: August 2019

As it seems that there are people who say or do things that are remarkably dickheaded yet somehow people try to make excuses for them or pretend it never happened, here is a collection of some of the dickheaded actions we saw in the month of August 2019 to make sure that they are never forgotten. 

When there was the possibility of the parliamentary sovereignty that Leavers harp on about, off sprinted proven liar Boris Johnson to Balmoral to beg the Queen to suspend parliament in order to force through a No Deal Britait - but of course, everyone but him are the “traitors” in this sordid affair, even after Ben Wallace apparently forgot that cameras and microphones exist when blabbing about how Johnson did this due to fearing that his working majority of one wouldn't survive a No Confidence vote

It was so nice of Michael Coudrey to post a blatantly faked screenshot of El Paso shooter Patrick Crusias’ MyLife profile page to try and claim that Crusas was a left-wing extremist rather than, oh I don’t know, a white supremacist who happened to parrot several of Trump’s soundbites about Hispanics, let alone consider that maybe mass shootings are something that shouldn’t happen with alarming frequency

Meanwhile it was equally predictable that Paul Joseph Watson was jumping up and down yelling “See!  See!  A leftist went on a killing spree!” which not only made it obvious he was trying to divert attention from the El Paso shooter, but also drew attention to the fact that while the alt right were tripping over one another to make excuses for Patrick Crusas as he’s some poor innocent victim of society, as soon as it emerged that Connor Betts isn’t one of them the excuses evaporated

So naturally, peak twattery followed when Dmitriy Andreychenko walked into his local Missouri branch of Walmart toting a tactical rifle and handgun while wearing body armor, and when he was arrested for being such a monumental fuckwit he bleated something about testing to see if Walmart respected his Second Amendment rights

Yet somehow the UK couldn’t laugh at Americans trying to blame video games for mass shootings thanks to Priti Patel trying to create a direct link between stabbings and fried chicken

Of course Jo Swinson has taken it upon herself to say she and only she can stop Britait, which was obvious by her rejecting Jeremy Corbyn’s proposal of an interim government out of hand without any reason in spite of the fact that, as Leader of the Opposition, of a vote of no confidence in Boris Johnson does get through the Commons it will be Corbyn who is asked to put together an interim government - but Jo Swinson instead suggested the first tow backbenchers she could think of because she cannot countenance the idea of Labour stopping Britait, as at that point what is she other than somebody who lies about her voting record?

This month it was Arron Banks who wanted to sound triggered to a sociopathic degree by Greta Thunberg with his lovely response to her yachting across the Atlantic by tweeting that freak yachting accidents tend to happen at this time of year, while Julia Halfwit Hartley-Brewer posted some lame tweet gloating about she and her family would be flying across the Atlantic instead, meanwhile Roger Helmer resorted to calling her a “Swedish pixie” during one of the rare occasions he remained awake when in public and Paul Joseph Watson talked about how an autistic girl was being “exploited” - but because Arron Banks has to be Arron Banks, he had to have the most cuntish last word and said it was just a joke...like saying women wearing burqas look like letterboxes

As if proven liar Boris Johnson hadn’t used the NHS as a platform for his outright lies enough in the past three years, he pledged an increase in funding...that was actually funding that NHS providers had been saving up for the past three years, but had been unable to spend in that time as the Tory government banned them from spending it...until it became convenient enough to allow them to spend their own money

If only somebody suggested to Lou Dobbs that, if you see a group of protesters sat in the road outside the ICE facility that employs you, driving your truck just inches from their faces is guaranteed to piss them off - and then using that as an excuse to plow through the pissed off crowd is guaranteed to cost you your job and piss off everyone bar the weirdos who believe it’s not vehicular assault if you run into people with differing opinions to you

It clearly did not occur to Steve King when trying to find a logical reason to say abortions should be banned that saying the human race may not exist if not for cases of rape and incest tens of thousands of years ago doesn’t in any way defend his position, instead make it sound uncannily like he’s on the side of those who raped and pillaged

It didn’t take long before Boris Johnson started reading from the Bannon playbook, stating that he would not take interviews with the press as they’re all biased against him - yes, even the BBC, the Murdoch Empire, the Daily Mail and Daily Express, all of whom have been churning out unthinkingly slanted headlines in his favour

It was so nice that James Cleverly repeatedly wanted to talk about how the Tory MP  William Wilberforce fought to end slavery...even after it was pointed out to him the first time he made that statement that Wilberforce stood as an independent and not a Tory, no matter how many times Cleverly tries to rewrite history

Let’s see if I’ve got this straight: the Lib Dems state that they will do everything in their power to stop Britait...yet Jo Swinson has ruled out going into coalition with either Labour or the SNP, in spite the fact they both have far more MPs than the Lib Dems and just so happen to also be opposing Britait

Similarly, the best idea Caroline Lucas had for solving Britait was for an all-woman cabinet that just so happened to include her, Jo Swinson, Heidi Allen, Justine Greening, Yvette Cooper and Anna Soubry among others - and seemed confused when it was mentioned that not only did her dream cabinet exclude all men but it didn’t include a single non-white MP either, and appears to have forgotten that a woman spent between 2016-19 fucking the process up at every turn

In the latest Priti Patel brainfart, she suggested that migrants earning less than £36,000 a year are no longer welcome in the UK...clearly failing to comprehend that arbitrary figure is higher than the basic salary of any member of NHS staff, any teacher or any police officer - you know, something a Home Secretary should be able to understand...

Walking proof that nominative determinism isn't really a thing James Cleverley could only try and claim that the leaked Operation Yellowhammer dossier was “out of date” and was no remotely relevant to any discussion about what would happen if the UK leaves the EU without a deal...even though the dossier was dated 1st August 2019

There was something deeply sinister about how the BBC described Owen Jones as a “Labour activist” after he was assaulted, as opposed to...oh I don’t know?  A journalist?

With the Leave hardcore now lionising chlorinated chicken of all things, it;s not surprise that Darren Grimes tried to say there’s no issue because we also have chlorinated water...somehow spectacularly missing the point

I have no idea how the Entertainment Software Association managed to bungle so badly that they managed to release the personal information of thousands of people who attended this year’s E3, including games journalists and Youtubers/Twitch streamers, but they managed it nonetheless

In a quite remarkable turn of events there was a controversy regarding Borderlands 3 that didn’t involve Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford, instead it was Take Two Interactive sending private investigators to the doorstep of Youtuber SupMatto to harass him into keeping quiet, and because he wasn’t keeping quiet they abused Youtube’s copyright system on an industrial scale with over 100 copyright strikes to force him off the platform because of reasons

For a documentarian Stacey Dooley makes an awful lot of factual blunders, the latest of which being a Panorama documentary where she described a Muslim prayer gesture as an “ISIS salute”, leading to the BBC removing the clip from the documentary...on the iPlayer, but leaving it in unchallenged for its initial broadcast

You would think that Microsoft wouldn’t be so dense as to release an update that cripples the computers of everyone using Windows 7 due to somebody typing a 2 instead of a 1 in one line of code, but that’s exactly what happened with the KB4512506 update that was coded by someone who assumed everyone has Windows 10

As it was time for Suzanne Moore to vomit another opinion piece into the pages of the Guardian, she took it upon herself to write a piece that managed to insinuate that Shilpa Shetty somehow deserved the racial abuse she received from Jade Goody, Jo O’Meara and Danielle Lloyd on Celebrity Big Brother back in 2007 because...hold on a minute...because Shetty had servants at home while the others didn’t which apparently makes it alright

The outraged howls from Manchester City fans and football pundits alike all because VAR rightly disallowed what would have been a last-minute winner for City was truly a sight to behold, because apparently VAR exists to make things easier for a small kabal of teams and everyone else can get fucked

...and demonstrated by Mike Dean using The Wenger Defence of “I didn’t see it guv” a week later to overrule VAR stating that Tottenham should have been awarded a penalty

...and yet the depths were truly plumbed when Ian Holloway blamed the EU for the fact he doesn’t understand the offside law, even though as a football pundit (and former manager) he’s literally paid to understand it

Ooblets developers Glumberland decided to double down on their dickheadishness which began with their smug and condescending blog post explaining why they decided to make their game an Epic Games Store exclusive, but they followed that up by acting like complete bellends on their Discord that culminated with them responding to somebody asking when they could buy the game with their own currency by telling them that nobody owed them the game

With both Bury and Bolton facing extinction, trust Sky Sports News to cover this by having a clock ticking down in the corner of the screen all day, as if the possibility (and, in Bury’s case, eventuality) of a club being kicked out of the league was the same thing as Deadline Day

Britain’s most triggered man Piers Moron Morgan was predictably irked by the Meghan Markle guest-editing Vogue because obviously somebody doing that is only after the publicity...a sentiment he neglected to express when Kate Middleton did the exact same thing a few years previously

The sensible thing that Bethesda should have done after the have done after the humiliation conga line that was Fallout 76 was try not to do anything that would irritate gamers further.  So instead they decided that, when releasing Doom - that’s the 1993 original, not the 2016 reboot - it would require players to use their Bethesda account to play the actual game 

I know it’s a cheapshot, but did UKIP really elect somebody named Dick Braine as their new leader?

How the hell did Apple develop a credit card that gets discoloured if it touches materials such as denim or leather, or to put it another way if it’s in somebody’s pocket or wallet?  What are they supposed to do?  Carry it around in their hand at maximum reach?

If you have a name like Michael Buerk it isn’t a good idea to make your name fair game, but that’s exactly what he did when he suggested that it’s potentially a good thing for obese people to die early as it would save the NHS money

And of course, it wouldn't be a month without Donald Trump being a colossal cockhead, and he certainly disappoint with his prioritising schmoozing with guests at Mar A Lago while people in Dayton and El Paso were experiencing the aftermath of their respective mass shootings, and when the Orange Overlord deigned to make a statement he not only demonstrated he couldn’t give a toss by talking about the mass shootings in Toledo and El Paso, but his response to it being plain for all to see that white nationalism was the catalyst for both was to blame video games for all of society’s ills

[dbwright]

COMING HOME

COMING HOME

We are sitting on the edge of my tree house ledge, staring into the night sky. She looks at a plane, tracking it with all of her eyes as it makes its way, blinking through the air.

“Why can’t we just take that home?”

“Because it is not built for that, it’s not made to take you home.”

But it’s flying.”

“It has a limit. It can’t get anywhere near space. We need a rocket ship for that.. an airplane just wouldn’t make it, I’m sorry”

Dharma blinked all her eyes at once, processing what I’d said.

“Oh, it’s just an air skimmer then. Useless.”

“Well it’s a little more important than that.. it goes 30,00+ feet in the air and takes us from place to place all over the world. Humans use them every day, all day. Without airplanes, our society would be much less connected.”

Dharma looks unimpressed. 

To “her” the feats of humankind were generally paltry and insignificant in real value the way a child would present a finger painting to an art dealer used to appraising Da Vincis and Monets.

The only thing she was impressed with was the ability of humans to be both loving and violent at once. Where she came from, most of her “people” carry the same temperament with very gentle and limited range.  Think the difference between Mr Rogers deciding between a blue sweater and a light blue sweater. That’s about as wild as they got with their individuality. So to Dharma, the TV pretty much blew her mind because she observed vapid reality stars, dramatic fantastical stories, and insightful documentaries all in one breath.

“She” looked as close to an eighth grade girl as an alien could, save for her light blue skin, webbed fingers, lack of ears, and the third eye which sat snuggly in between her main two. She had no ears but she could “hear” me through the vibrations of the airwaves my mouth made reflecting off her skull.

She blinked again, except only the middle eye this time. Usually, that meant her brain was whirring.

“Huh. Well, then we will have to find a rocket ship. With haste.”

I had met her crying in a dirt clearing about ten miles from my house. She had been abandoned accidentally by her parents (all 20 of them) who were here on a survey mission. She had snuck off ship and wandered into the woods while they were taking dirt samples and made friends with a baby bear. A young couple had arrived to the dirt clearing so the ship and Dharmas parents were gone without a trace by the time she had made her way back.

Dharma was lost and hopeless when I met her. She didn’t speak English but I understood immediately her situation somehow and took her home to hide with me. After all, what’s a super exclusive top-secret tree house for if not to stash illegal aliens in? 

I taught her the alphabet in one day and left her some kids books to practice with while I was at school and she was onto Dostoyevsky within a month.

My dad grumbled about the mystery of the missing library but said nothing else to me about it as long as the books reappeared on his shelf.

It wasn’t until his cigarettes started disappearing that he began to complain and give me a hard stare. Unfortunately, Dharma had discovered an affinity for tobacco (it made her high like catnip) and I had to find an alternative which surprisingly turned out to be soap. She would eat bars of soap like hot pockets. According to her, the high wasn’t as good but at least her breath smelled better.

In any case, my dad's cigs stopped disappearing and he stopped staring at me but my mom started asking me what kind of boys I was playing with and where I was playing to go through soap so quickly. I even had to roll around in dirt before going home each night to keep the story up.

The things you do for love.

Yes, it’s true.. I fell in love with an alien. 

What can I say, it was a weird time for me and like most love -you never know where it might spring forth from but when it does you have to take it for all it’s worth. 

And luckily for me, she fell in love with me too, or at least the equivalent of her species. Mostly it meant she would pat me on the head once or twice to show her affection through physical contact. 

One week we binged romantic comedies and she thought she understood love better and started making up silly implausible scenarios to start an argument with me and had me concoct long-winded makeup speeches declaring my love for her and how she was the only “girl” for me in response. After which she would swoon, forgive me, and give me a kiss. Then she went to sleep.

Yea I know what you’re thinking.. aliens sleep? 

She sure did, and they even cuddle too! Which was pretty cool for only a few hours. That first night, I woke up stuck to her. In her sleep, she had wrapped her side gills around me and for lack of a better word, ejaculated all over me.

See, in her world, the “females” lay hundreds of millions of tiny sticky sperm that form a sheet, or net of wriggling sperm that the “males” would open their pores to accept. The sperm would wriggle their way through their bodies until they found a womb, multiple of which were located up and down their core. After two weeks, tiny babies would shoot out their ass and mouth and be collected in large bowls where half were eaten as a delicacy like caviar and the other half sent to an incubation hive.

Anyway, I learned all that later.. that first night when she sprayed me I almost suffocated silently, thousands of tiny sperm crawling in my nose and ear holes, but luckily she woke up in time and ate most the sperm away. She ate her own jizz to save my life. 

After that, we switched; I was big spoon from then on and she would come all over a throw pillow instead. 

And the pillow smelled like skittles.

I know, really weird.

But what love isn’t, to the uninitiated? And I’d never been in love before so I really had no baseline for normal.

Things went well for about six months. There wasn’t much sex, or any at all, despite her having a vagina but what high schooler is really getting it like that anyway? And I didn’t look like Brad Pitt after all. More like Ellen Page. Or a teenage Ellen Degeneres. Kids called me the baby-faced lesbian for a reason.

I was skinny, scrawny, pimpled up, and awkward. And against all odds, I had found love, and love had found me.

It was a strange but glorious time.

The only problem is she aged much faster than me. By the time I was sixteen and a half she was already 20 and by the time I was seventeen she was 35. See, the Kkreeebbppobbbb age differently from us. They have an exponentially accelerating aging process that takes them from 0 to roughly 500 Kkreeebbppobbbb years that fits within a 17-18 human year timeframe.

This meant that she would be leaving me very soon. And she was determined to find a way home so her body could decompose in the giant compost heap in the sky.

Literally, there is a floating compost heap island in the air where all the bodies went into after they passed. The bodies would go in and their remains would exhaust into the atmosphere and fall through the clouds with the rain as a very fine mist that the living would gather in their drains and gutters, bottle, and drink at home.

Apparently, it also made their sperm more potent, or so they claimed.

“Look man, I don’t make up the news I just report it. There were a lot of things about her species that repulsed me or made no sense, but in the end, while she was from another planet, she loved me like she’d been born a human and that’s all that mattered.”

I loved her so much my chest hurt when I was away from her.

However, things got real about a month after my seventeenth birthday. I came in the tree house to find her weak and unable to get out of bed. She stared at me with slowly blinking eyes the way a horse does on its last days. See, like humans, as the Kkreeebbppobbbb get older, they get weaker and frailer. 

She called me over

“I think my time is coming, Freddie. My time has come. I'm afraid.. I.. I won’t make it home.”

My eyes started welling up immediately and my throat went numb. I didn’t want to admit it but I knew she was right. There was no rocket ship I could take her on and frankly I wouldn’t have even been able to make make it ten yards in public without her ending up in a government facility being dissected for examination.

Oh, I could have dressed her up and snuck her around a little bit for sure.. but see the sun made her fart and the longer she was out in it, the worse the smell got, until the air was so thick and toxic flowers literally wilted. The government would have weaponized that shit immediately. But I digress.

She lay there feeble and silent, and I knelt over her, my tears starting to fall.

“But.. but I don’t want you to go.” I said to her

“..time is a circle ..but life is a straight line ..my love.. we aren’t meant to live forever..” she replied back “It is better to have loved and lost rather to have never loved at all, Freddie.. you taught me what love is and made me happy. I’ll never forget that”  she added with an increasingly faint whisper. I stared with far away eyes at the pile of Romantic Comedy DVDs behind her head. I thought about Billy Crystal seeing Meg Ryan at the bookstore, and Julia Roberts standing in front of Hugh Grant saying “I’m just a girl in front of a boy” and old Ryan Gosling holding onto old Rachel McAdams hand as they died at the same time, souls floating to heaven together. And I knew at that moment this could never be us.

I really let it go then. My shoulders shook as my chest heaved and I lost my breath and hoped to die.

“Please.. please don’t go.” I begged her

She motioned with her hand to me to come closer.

I lowered my head next to her alien lips.

“Freddie.. Freddie.. promise me.. please promise me.. one thing.. before I go”

“Anything! What can I do for you, my love”

“...before I die.. eat me.” 

I paused.

“Excuse me?”

“Before.. I.. die.. eat me.”

“What? I can’t do that! -You mean.. like with a fork and knife? I couldn’t. No -I couldn’t! That would tear me apart.. What do you mean eat you, are you crazy? 

I mean, how would I even prepare you anyway? And you’re a lot denser than you look, it would take me a month -and by then without a deep freezer you’d decompose and I’d throw up trying to eat your remains and then have to eat my throw up too it’d be a vicious cycle of puking and eating and puking and eating and honestly I’m already too skinny to become bulimic.”

She waved her hand at me, annoyed.

“No, I mean eat me.” And she pointed at her alien vagina.

“I want to go out on an orgasm, Freddie. On a high note. Lick my fucking pussy one more time like you mean it, Freddie.”

I stared at her. 

First of all, that dirty bitch.

I realized she had been lying to me. See, I had been eating her out every night for a fucking year. She had told me I was helping her with a specialized biological detox her species needed, that it was totally normal.. a totally non-sexual act and that’s why she never blew me in return because her species doesn’t actually engage in oral cunnilingus for sexual purposes, it was against their religion.  And the orgasms were a by-product only.

“But.. you..” my eyes narrowed

“I know, I lied.. I’m sorry. It’s just that your dick is so weird looking to me I just couldn’t do it.”

“You selfish bitch” I cried out. “Your cunt smells like fucking week old mayonnaise, you think I would have done that every fucking night if I thought it was optional and not life or death as you said??” 

“Freddie.. I’m sorry.. you’re right I was a selfish bitch.. but I’m dying now. That is real.”

I softened immediately my eyes got wet again.

“Shit, you’re right.” I mean I wasn't happy about the new revelation that I had been eating my girlfriend out every night sometimes 2-3 times a night all for a lie, but in the end I still loved her and if I’m being honest with myself, I probably would have still done it at least every other night if she’d asked bc I’m such a pushover that's always eager to please.

“Okay.” I said.

She smiled and touched my cheek gently.

“I love you Freddie.”

“I love you too”

She closed her eyes (all three of them) and I stared at her with loving eyes myself, tracing her contours with my eyes, trying to memorize every line of her face for after she was gone. I loved her like I’d never loved anyone and would never love anyone like her again.

After a pause, she opened her middle eye and blinked quickly. Which apparently meant (now that I know more) that she was horny. 

“Well? What are you waiting for, I don’t have all day.” 

She nodded down at her pussy.

“Start munching, motherfucker.”

I grumbled and took a deep breath

I started kissing her stomach and nibbling her thighs.

“What the fuck, if I wanted foreplay, I would have diddled myself before you got here. Eat me now, if I can’t come home.. I want to go out cumming.”

“Jesus, okay okay I was just trying to make our last moments together a bit more romantic.”

“If you want to make it more romantic stop talking and start licking.”

She was a sassy old bitch by now, but I guess I understand. She had no time left to beat around the bush, no pun intended.

So I used my fingers to spread her sheath and her pussy pushed out like a turtle head out a shell.

A nasty odor hit me in the face like a spray from an aerosol can.

“Fuck me, your pussy stank, mama! You got that old rank alien pussy now don’t you?”

“But my clit still works” she retorted and grabbed the back of my head and pushed me back down.

“Fuck.” I grumbled but after taking another deep breath to the side, I started licking furiously. I knew how she like it, in an even up and down motion with some swirls and figure Ss throwing in. By now I was a master of the alien clit.”

“Ohhhh. Yea.” She whispered 

I kept licking

“oohhhhh, Freddie.. yea you lick it so good Freddie” she moaned 

 “don’t stop don’t stop!” She cried and pushed my face even deeper until my mouth completely covered her turtle head and my tongue was licking it like the inside of a soda bottle.”

“Yes yes yes!! I’m coming I’m coming I’m coming!” She screamed and her body went taut and her thighs started shaking. Normally she would push me away immediately. This time not. After the shakes were gone, she went completely limp and didn’t move. She was gone. I gave her a few tentative licks in case she was just sleeping, but in my heart, I knew she was gone. 

She was the love of my life. I thought of all the times we shared, the movies, books, conversations.. I started to tear up again, and before I knew it I was bawling, dripping wet tears onto her wet pussy head and started licking her kissing her begging her to come back.

“What in the holy fuck?!”

I looked up, and to my complete horror, my mom was staring at me. She had a plate of cookies in her hand and they dropped all the way to the ground in slow motion...

“And that is how my mom caught me crying and eating a dead elderly alien’s pussy on a Friday night and why I was grounded for almost a year until college started. Later on her parents actually came back and collected her remains so she could finally be in the great compost pile in the sky.”

I finished my story, looking around anxiously.

The room was so quiet a pin could drop and it would echo.

The group was silent, everyone staring at me or each other wide-eyed.

“What? You asked us to share our most embarrassing moment in high school.” I cried out defensively.

“Uh not that embarrassing, dude.” One guy said with everyone giggling

“And not that weird!” A girl said

“Hey, you know where I could find some alien pussy, bro? I’ll lick that mayonnaise bro.” Another asked, making everyone laugh.

Another kid raised his hand “Why do aliens lay eggs through gills and AND have vaginas with clits at the same time? What’s the point of that?”

“Because even aliens need to get off too, ask your girlfriend Ricky!” everyone was howling and pounding their tables 

“Fuck you! I get my girl off plenty with this d-dick, don’t I baby?” Ricky hollered, looking expectantly at his girlfriend, who rolled her eyes and pretended to get an important text message suddenly. A few girls around Ricky snickered.

An overweight girl raised her arm, frowning at me while giving side-eye to the professor. “I find it problematic that you would describe her “sperm” as smelling like skittles and her vaginal ejaculate like old mayo. This is sexist because it promotes the heterosexual stereotypes of a male-dominated society and it's reductive and aggressive and it makes me really uncomfortable. Also the fact it really should have been described as a non-gender conforming being in your story but you insisted on referring to her as a “she.” I feel attacked right now. Triggered. Extremely triggered.”

A few girls nod in agreement and a bunch of boys groan. The professor cringes quietly.

My face flushes and turns beet red and I close my eyes and slowly put my forehead on the table wishing I was dead myself.

and it was at that moment I realized college was gonna be really, really hard for me.

I missed Dharma a lot.. 

Sigh.

At least she got to come before going home.

[phooll123]

Academy Awards Unfold Amid Changing Movie Business – Variety

Guillermo del Toro won a best director statue at the 90th Annual Academy Awards on Sunday for his work overseeing the fantasy romance “The Shape of Water.” “I am an immigrant,” he noted, in a politically charged speech, “The greatest thing our art does and our industry does is to erase the lines in the sand. We should continue doing that when the world tells us to make them deeper.” Del Toro is the fourth Mexican director to win a best filmmaking Oscar in the last five years, joining his friends, Alfonso Cuaron (“Gravity”) and Alejandro G. Iñárritu (“Birdman,” “The Revenant”). Gary Oldman won the lead actor award for his chameleonic work as Winston Churchill in “Darkest Hour.” “The movies, such is their power, captivated a young man from South London and gave him a dream,” said Oldman. “Darkest Hour” also earned a makeup award, honoring the team that turned the slender Oldman into the portly prime minister. Sam Rockwell and Allison Janney picked up supporting actor and actress honors. Rockwell was recognized for his performance as a bigoted police officer in “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” while Janney was rewarded for her turn as a caustic parent in “I,Tonya.”

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Honored for his first nomination, Rockwell thanked his parents for instilling a love of movies in him and dedicated his award to Philip Seymour Hoffman, the Oscar-winning actor who died of a drug overdose in 2014. Both actors gave shout-outs to their fellow nominees, with Janney saying her competitors “represent everything that is good and right and human about this profession.” Jordan Peele, a Comedy Central star, nabbed a best original screenplay honor for “Get Out,” a horror film that examines race relations. “I knew if someone let me make this movie that people would hear it and people would see it,” said Peele. It was an evening of politics, one that overflowed with denunciations of Trumpism, and pledges of support for immigrants and minorities. There were also moments that seemed tailored to pluck the heartstrings of both red and blue states, including a montage dedicated to military films. “Phantom Thread” and “Darkest Hour” got on the board early, picking up costume design and makeup awards, respectively. “Dunkirk” picked up editing, sound editing, and sound mixing honors. “A Fantastic Woman,” a Chilean drama about a trans woman, nabbed a best foreign language film statue. And “Icarus,” a look at Russia’s doping program, earned a best documentary statue, picking up a statue for Netflix, a streaming service that’s viewed warily by more traditional movie studios. “At least we know Putin didn’t rig this competition,” host Jimmy Kimmel joked in one of many Trump administration jabs. Best Animated Feature winner “Coco” also injected politics into the evening. Accepting the award, Darla K. Anderson, the film’s producer, said, “‘Coco’ is proof that art can change and connect the world and this can only be done when we have a place for everyone and anyone who feels like an ‘other’ to be heard.” There were records during a yawning broadcast. At 89, James Ivory became the oldest competitive Oscar winner, picking up a best adapted screenplay Oscar for “Call Me By Your Name.” Sometimes waiting plays off. Roger A. Deakins, finally won an Oscar for lensing “Blade Runner 2049” after 14 previous cinematography Oscars. The science-fiction epic also nabbed a visual effects Oscar. “Blade Runner 2049” may have scored with Oscar voters, but it failed to excite crowds, collapsing at the box office and resulting in an estimated $80 million in losses. Backstage, Deakins said that he wasn’t sure if wanted his name to be called. “I mean, a big part of me was saying, ‘Please no,'” Deakins said. “I find it very hard,” he said of having to get an acceptance speech on the Oscars stage. “I’ve worked with a lot of the same people for years. I think it’s recognition for their work.” Despite unfolding from a stage encrusted with sparkling Swarovski crystals and flanked by glittering Roman columns, there is a shadow over this year’s broadcast. The Oscars unfold at a time of dramatic social and economic change in the movie business. The fall of Harvey Weinstein — arguably the person responsible for inventing modern awards season campaigning of marathon glad-handing and lavish receptions for voters — has triggered an industry-wide conversation about sexual harassment and discrimination. In October, Weinstein was accused by dozens of women of sexual misconduct and assault. He denied all allegations of nonconsensual acts, but in the ensuing scandal he was drummed out of Hollywood, and fired from his perch at the Weinstein Company, which is now being sold after teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. The fallout didn’t stop with Weinstein. Other major media figures, including Dustin Hoffman, Brett Ratner, Louis C.K., James Franco, and Kevin Spacey have been engulfed in their own scandals related to allegations of sexual misdeeds. In the days before the Oscars, Ryan Seacrest, whose genial soft-ball questions are a staple of awards show red carpets, was accused by his former stylist, Suzie Hardy, of harassment and assault. Seacrest has hit back hard, claiming that Hardy extorted him and noting that an independent investigation commissioned by his employer E! could not find “sufficient evidence” that he behaved inappropriately. Seacrest took  his spot on red carpet despite the fact that some publicists privately said they would steer their clients clear of the E! host. He did manage to corral some stars, with the likes of Allison Janney, Christopher Plummer, and Taraji P. Henson stopping to talk to Seacrest, and also avoided any embarrassing on-air confrontations. Kimmel managed to find a way to make light of the litany of alleged abusers, quipping in his opening monologue that the golden Oscar statue is an ideal Hollywood man. “He keeps his hands where you can see them,” said Kimmel. “Never says a rude word. And most importantly no penis at all. He is literally a statue of limitations.” There were many more somber moments. Ashley Judd, Salma Hayek, and Annabella Sciorra, three of Weinstein’s accusers, took the stage to introduce a series of interviews about the Time’s Up movement and the push for more diversity on screen. “This year many spoke their truth and the journey ahead is long, but slowly a new path has emerged,” said Sciorra. That was the hopeful part. But Sciorra, once one of the industry’s rising stars with films like “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” also noted the professional consequences for women who turned down powerful predators. “It’s nice to see you all again,” she said, a seeming reference to a career derailed by men like Weinstein. “It’s been awhile.” Despite the theme of the evening, a celebration of women’s empowerment, Kobe Bryant, the former NBA star who was accused of sexual assault in 2003, won an Oscar for best animated short film for his work co-creating “Dear Basketball.” The charges against Bryant were dropped and the case was settled out of court. It wash’t all politics and advocacy. There was still old school glamor. As the Oscars inches towards its centenary, the show was in a nostalgic mood, inviting back past winners from its nine-decade history such as Eva Marie Saint and Rita Moreno. In addition to an industry-wide reckoning about systemic abuse, there are also corporate concerns that are roiling Hollywood. The business is undergoing a period of intense consolidation. AT&T is trying to get government approval for its purchase of Time Warner, Disney is snapping up the bulk of Fox’s film and television assets, and Viacom is flirting with joining forces with CBS. Fox and Fox Searchlight has a leading 27 nominations, but it’s unclear if the company will continue making awards-bait fare after it is folded into Disney, which prefers to be in the tentpole business. All these mega-mergers are taking place while the kinds of films that the Oscars tend to celebrate, smaller, more human-scale dramas are being eclipsed by comic book movies and special effects-driven fantasies. The gap between popular tastes and those of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, the group that hands out the Oscars, seems to be widening. This year’s crop of best picture nominees are the lowest-grossing since 2011, with only two films, “Get Out” and “Dunkirk,” topping $100 million at the domestic box office. At the same time, fewer people are tuning in for awards show. Last year’s edition was the third-least-watched of the 21st century. Despite the sagging ratings, ABC has brought back Kimmel as host. This year’s broadcast will try to avoid recreating an eleventh hour snafu that made Kimmel’s first stint as emcee so memorable — an envelop mixup that saw presenters Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway mistakenly proclaim “La La Land” the best picture victor. The real winner, “Moonlight,” was later announced in a moment of sheer pandemonium that will join Cher’s Bob Mackie dress and David Niven’s streaker in Oscars infamy. Kimmel made light of the mistake seen round the world in his opening monologue. “This year when you hear your name called don’t get up right away,” he quipped. “Just give us a minute.” More to come…

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[thedeadshotnetwork]

Watch This Doc on Alien Gangsters and the 'Biggest Story Never Told' This article is part of the Motherboard Guide to Cinema , a semi-regular column exploring foreign and obscure speculative films. In 1992, a now infamous study claimed that as many as 3.7 million Americans may suffer from “UFO abduction syndrome,” or the belief that they had an encounter with extraterrestrial visitors. This study has been criticized on both methodological and logical grounds , but there is no doubt that people who claim to have been abducted by aliens exist in significant numbers. Many researchers in the past two decades have tried to account for the prevalence of UFO encounters by likening it to a religious impulse or the manifestation of a psychopathology . In the absence of hard evidence of an alien encounter, seeking alternative explanations for reports of ET abductions makes sense. But what if material evidence of these encounters does exist? This is the conceit of Patient Seventeen , a new documentary released last month by Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell. Patient Seventeen chronicles the final surgery of Roger Leir, a foot surgeon and prominent ufologist who claimed to remove extraterrestrial nanotechnology that had been embedded in his patients. The documentary is a poignant eulogy for Leir, who passed away during filming. He had spent a large part of his career striving to make the study of UFOs and alien abductions a scientific endeavor. Leir and his associates examine images of the object after it is analyzed with an electron microscope. For those who claimed to have been abducted by extraterrestrials, Leir’s surgeries provided a bridge—however shaky—between their visceral personal experiences with non-human intelligences and the hard evidence needed to prove the reality of extraterrestrial encounters. Mainstream scientists continue to be skeptical of Leir’s work, however. They dismiss his alleged “offworld implants” as terrestrial objects, which has made his work the subject of some controversy. When he set out to make Patient Seventeen , Corbell told me he was skeptical about alien implant technology, but he had “no doubt” that UFOs are real and piloted by extraterrestrial intelligences. "I just figured I would get to the bottom of this whole thing within a matter of weeks…fuck I was wrong.” “I was working on documenting the fields of nanotechnology and advanced propulsion, and how they relate to the UFO phenomenon,” Corbell told me. “I really didn’t want to make a movie about alien implant technology and I didn’t know what to think at the time. I just figured I would get to the bottom of this whole thing within a matter of weeks…fuck I was wrong.” In an effort to shed light on the mystery of supposed “offworld implant technologies,” Corbell tagged along with Leir and the anonymous Patient Seventeen—who Corbell described as “just your average guy”—as they prepared for the surgical removal and analysis of a small piece of mysterious metal that was found to be embedded in Patient Seventeen’s shin. When he showed up for the surgery, he found Leir trying to locate the piece of metal in his patient’s leg with a stud finder, a tool usually reserved for locating pieces support wood behind the walls of a building. “I told Dr. Leir that I would film his surgery, but if he was lying, bending the truth or trying to deceive the public in any way by altering his results, that I was going to out him,” Corbell said. “I asked him if he was sure that he wanted me to film his work, and he said, ‘Yes, Jeremy. I've been doing this for more than two decades, and there’s something to this!’” Read More: I Went to the International UFO Congress to Learn the Truth About the Phoenix Lights Patient Seventeen was also skeptical about the possibility that the piece of metal in his body was extraterrestrial in origin, although in the documentary he claimed to have had a number of extraterrestrial encounters as a child. He also openly acknowledged his hostility toward his extraterrestrial abductors in the film—he referred to them as “alien gangsters” and expressed a wish to “take them out.” It was these hostile encounters with extraterrestrials in his childhood that led Patient Seventeen to seek out Leir to surgically remove what could be invasive alien technology. Leir claimed to have surgically removed embedded extraterrestrial nanotechnologies from seventeen different patients, although he never seemed interested in sharing his data or these objects with other researchers. Leir passed away shortly after removing the small piece of metal from Patient Seventeen’s leg in early 2014. Although he didn’t get to see the results of his final surgery, two of his close research associates carried out the analysis of the strange object after his death and the second half of Patient Seventeen is devoted to their efforts. The surgical removal of the object from Patient Seventeen's leg. Leir’s working theory was that the devices embedded in his patients were sophisticated nanotechnologies created by extraterrestrials. According to Leir, instead of radio signals these devices emit so-called ‘scalar waves,’ a type of electromagnetic radiation that has never been proven to exist and as such can’t be detected by human radio instruments. The last serious physicist to entertain the possibility that scalar waves exist was Nikola Tesla, who had no shortage of strange and scientifically dubious ideas . Anyway , the device found in Patient Seventeen’s leg is more than a little odd in terms of its composition. Leir’s associates—a materials scientist named Steve Colbern and an alleged military-affiliated nanoscientist who simply goes by ���Nano Man” (himself the subject of a short documentary by Corbell)—continued the physician's legacy by sending the sample to two labs for composition analysis using scanning electron microscopy and broad spectrum elemental analysis. These tests can reveal an object's structure on the molecular scale and the number of atoms per element present in a sample, respectively. Read More: This Neuroscientist Wants To Know Why People Who See UFOs Feel So Good Ufology has its roots in the work of Josef Allen Hynek, a noted astronomer and military physicist who authored a number of government intelligence documents on UFOs . Even though it has captured the attention of a number of serious scientists, including Harvard psychiatry professor John Mack, the field has struggled since the 1950s to gain acceptance as a legitimate science. This is because most evidence of extraterrestrial encounters is limited to eyewitness testimony as photos and videos collected by these witnesses. Still, it lacks many of the hallmarks of hard sciences like physics or biology, such as the ability to conduct experiments to prove theories wrong. Examining the object from Patient Seventeen's leg. In this sense, Leir was a true pioneer of trying to bring at least some semblance of scientific rigor to ufology. He regarded these alleged “offworld implants” as the hard evidence that could either prove or disprove extraterrestrial visitations to Earth. Yet as skeptics like Joe Nickell have pointed out, Leir’s reluctance to share his results or the supposed alien implants he has removed with other researchers for further analysis is anti-scientific and makes his claims seem all the more dubious. Corbell, however, argued that Leir wasn’t trying to hide his results. “Dr. Leir was absolutely not reluctant to share his work,” Corbell said in an email. “People just weren’t listening— including me.” Without spoiling the film, let it suffice to say the results from Leir’s science experiments in Patient Seventeen are definitely strange. The object in Patient Seventeen’s leg had a number of hallmarks of an extraterrestrial object as far as its elemental composition is concerned, but this is far from conclusive evidence. As events became stranger following Leir’s death, Corbell was left with more unresolved questions than he started with. Roger Leir plays an organ shortly before his death. In an effort to make sense of the lab analyses of the object from Patient Seventeen’s leg, Corbell reached out to two outside experts—including UCLA meteorite expert Alan Rubin—who he said were unwilling to go on camera to talk about possible alien technology. When Corbell presented them with the results from the labs, he said they were puzzled, but ultimately concluded that more tests would have to be done to determine whether the object was extraterrestrial in origin. According to Corbell, shortly after he finished shooting, Colbern—who took possession of the object from Patient Seventeen’s leg after Leir’s death—stopped responding to Corbell or Patient Seventeen’s calls and emails. Colbern had effectively disappeared and taken the only hope of solving this mystery with him. Corbell said he didn’t hear from Colbern for two years, but shortly before the release of Patient Seventeen, the two re-established contact and now Corbell is in possession of the object from Patient Seventeen’s leg. Corbell said he plans to repeat the initial tests run on the object to ensure they weren’t false positives before exploring other tests that will ultimately determine whether the small metallic thing is from Earth. In the meantime, Corbell said he’s refraining from any sort of judgment on whether the little piece of metal is actually extraterrestrial nanotechnology. “I don’t think belief should play a role here at all,” Corbell said. “I might be sitting on the most astounding physical evidence of an off-world, non-terrestrial nanotechnological device from an advanced Alien intelligence...or not. But you can be sure that I’m going to find out. I owe that to Patient Seventeen and I owe that to Dr. Leir.” November 27, 2017 at 01:26PM