#I spent such a stupid amount of time on Brad's design

[cerealforkart]

Teen on Teen violence!

Choose your fighter under the cut!

[yigittezcan]

Patrick Bateman and His Possession of Artworks

Everybody knows American Psycho or at least hear the name of the movie. It’s a quite famous movie even though it contains challenging and gruesome imagery. Besides, its huge fanbase, Patrick Bateman is a cultural viral. His memes, quotes are still circulated through media. Bateman mostly stands out with his possessions. His iconic Oliver People glasses, Valentino suit, Rolex watch, Jena-Paul Guilttere suit bag (suspected), and his prestigious house that located American Gardens Building on W. 81st Street on the 11th floor. Undoubtedly, Patrick adores his house. It is a white-dominant minimally designed house. It resembles an art gallery. If we look carefully at his house we could find many things to discuss but in this blog, I want to talk about Patrick Bateman’s possession of artworks.

At the beginning of the movie Patrick Bateman introduces himself to the audience by narration. He also gives us a tour of his house. Passing the frames with black squares, Bateman goes for a pee. As he tries to empty his bladder we see his face from a reflective surface of a frame. This frame is a poster of Les Miserables musical in which Bateman only would be able to bear misery in an art context. Although it’s a weird choice for toilet framing, Les Miserables (1985) is one of the most successful and profitable musical adaptation ever. You could see reviews like “A musical that made history”. Bateman might watch this musical in the front seat and have fun, especially in the fifth act where the performers sing the I Dreamed a Dream (also featured in the original soundtrack). He should be touched by the following lines: “There was a time when men were kind When their voices were soft And their words inviting There was a time when love was blind And the world was a song And the song was exciting There was a time and it all went wrong”

Besides, Les Miserables there is a second artwork that Bateman probably spent on an immense amount of money just to buy and use as a decoration. Longo’s Men In Cities always finds a way to be seen in the frame. His two pairs of lithographs are centered in the Bateman’s living room.

While Longo creating the Men in Cities series he states that his inspiration came from the neo-noir (specifically American Soldier 1970) crime movies and punks’ dance moves.  To execute this series he gathered his friends on the roof of the house and took their photos just like he uses the camera as a gun and his friends try to dodge the bullets. I think it's also a stop motion practice on photos where he tries to capture small movements of the human body. It is a physical artwork. We see men and women in chic dresses and trying to stay on their feet. The men and women become a silhouette with huge negative space. As I read into Longo's art, I found that Longo commonly inserts violence in his art where he references the war era and the rise of capitalism afterward.

In an interview, Ellis discusses the original book of American Psycho (written by Brad Easton Ellis) where he states that his primal concern is to make fun of capitalism and what stupid meaningless values it brings to the people. Hence using Longo’s artwork matches with the film. However, as a huge fan of the movie I always found the capitalist subtext of the movie arguably weak as the audience is blinded by the killer charisma of the Bateman. Thus, the audience fails to understand Bateman's misery in abundance.

[phoebehalliwell]

i don't know if i'm the only one but i've often wondered exactly how hard it was to convince julian mcmahon to stick around for season five. they took his character, a feared powerful half demon and made him into the butt of the joke and the whole joke was basically ha ha look at this lovestruck fool obsessing and suicidal because he's got nothing to live with but can't die. ain't that funny? like how the fuck did the writers sell that to julian is my question

i find the entirety of season five just so goddamn insulting to cole's character. hell the fact that he got possessed by the source and this was treated as him turning evil instead of a shitty situation that got out of hand. like it wasn't bad enough he was villified for something that he wasn't even in control of half the time they couldn't even just vanquish the dude, they dragged it on and ridiculed him. i hate it here

lol. i mean. yeah. i really. like. it's like. like okay we all know cole was a fan favorite right and he & phoebe were really meant to like. be the sex appeal to the show no one else was really filling that role they were charmed's Sexy Couple tm. so like. in a sense i get the notion ab wanting to keep him around. because everyone loves him! he's bad boy! he adds this dangerous edge love balancing on a knife's point stuff like that. so like. that being said. u wanna keep him around. i just like Do Not Get how you opt to keep him around Like That. tbh. as w all things. i am blaming brad kern. i think it all really started to tank s4 (well, with mortal cole, but like) with source cole. that was bad, but i know it was part of the push to have like long form season drama character driven plots conflict between the sisters themselves it just like. sucked ass and balls imo. like i mean the fact they had to do the source as a possession just so they could get demon cole and lover cole,,, i mean it speaks to how stupid it was. the fact that u wanted cole to be a villain So Bad but the only way to do it was like. possession? sign that u should not do that like. like. like. i don't know how we're supposed to feel ab that.

and then. the vanquish. not sticking. i think like. i think they probably had the vague idea that cole having a mortal soul would not be able to be vanquished properly right? like. demons get destroyed into nothingness, but the human part of him lives, so i think they probably knew that was what they were going to do, that's what they sold to jmm and like. we sowed those seeds in the s4 finale w his ghost whispers and materialization. so i think like. they knew they wanted to Not Kill Him because he was such a fan favorite. maybe there was an intention to do a will they won't they variant of phole? and then. of course. there was the whole idea of paige cole, which, as the rumor goes, was meant to kick of in the s5 pilot, but both julian and rose shut it down. but i feel like. assuming that's true (which i 100% do assume that's true absolutely and i'm not endorsing it i don't think it would have been good or well written or whatever but like. 👀. you know?) but yeah. assuming that's true, i feel like that piece really speaks to what their designs for cole were: man meat. he was meant to be their male sex appeal and they weren't going to be picky about the narrative itself as long as he was still kicking.

but like honestly? i mean i shouldn't have to say this it's a given: it's not enough to just put your sexy man in front of a camera and call it a day like imo even a man who is not sexy can be made appealing through the power of the narrative. like, to level with you, i never really ever shipped phole nor found cole attractive at all like ever, but i can see like the fucking support beams you know i can see the infrastructure on which this whole thing can you know take on a life of its own in the earlier seasons because they very consciously put it there!! people shipped it for a reason n not just because they were two people standing next to each other on a tv screen i mean hello almost sinking a dagger in her heart but can't do it sends her away back to her sisters because he can't act out on his evil plan!! that's something!!!! that's so very something and they gave us Nothing they gave us nothing in the later seasons. and still expected it to fly. like. tbh julian was probably just like unwittingly duped like dragged along for the ride s5 which is likely why he was vanquished halfway through because i'd imagine roughly three episode in he went okay! um. what's this? guys? what's this? and then they said cole<3 you know he like knew he had to get the hell outta dodge.

anyways. if i were to resuscitate phole in s5. which like. to level w u. i wouldn’t. because they would need a lot of one-on-one screentime and we already spent so much of s4 splitting up the sisterhood in the name of phole i wouldn’t really want to continue with that per se But. if i were. this ask is getting long it’s under a cut 

something something demon of the week something something realms the point is cole is there when he very much shouldn’t be and like. he and phoebe get knocked into a different plane. so their bodies are fine and at the manor, but their minds are elsewhere and they need to solve whatever it is in order to get back. and we’ll say there’s a fuckin deadline because the girls need the power of three and right now they are sealed off from accessing it. and you know phoebe’s pretty fuckin pissed with cole because you know. he dragged her down to hell and she almost gave birth to the antichrist. actually source’s heir might be fun to keep around in this au idk. the point is phoebe’s pissed at cole and cole’s pissed at phoebe because phoebe’s pissed at him but he literally didn’t have control over himself in that era and he’s not getting the space he needs to justify himself because phoebe keeps stepping over him. but they gotta work together to get out of here. and were kinda doing enemies to lover 2.0 but like now they have History. of course we’ve gotta do a moment where cole has idk done something normal and phoebe’s so riled up that she does something rash and almost dies cole saves her like catches her bridal style or something faces inches apart breathing heavy and there’s a moment. like a we’re back in early s4 moment. which phoebe immediately breaks from and like walls going flying up but just for a moment there we see it it’s obvious: she’s still in love with cole. which then segues into an argument because like. cole wasn’t sure. right? he wasn’t sure if phoebe now just genuinely hated him. but now he knows right he knows better now so why are you acting like this? why are you taking every opportunity to shut me down to shut me out? why are you acting like you hate me when you know that’s not true right that whole thing to phoebe who gets the Classic because i do hate you. i hate you for what you did to me for what you did to my family and i hate you because i loved you so much and you destroyed me and i hate you because no matter how hard i try that love is still there and i know that for a second if i stop hating you i’m going to love you just like before and you can destroy me again and i hate myself because i’d let you because i love you. you know? big speech. big reveal. i have No Idea what piper and paige are up to right now. the point is. after this big confession we get the lull the cards are on the table what the fuck do we do now which is when cole Finally gets to opportunity to say he was actually possessed by the source and manipulated by the seer and the only thing that kept him holding on was his love for her and after she became queen of hell after he saw what the source had done to her he knew it had to end he doesn’t hold it against her for vanquishing him right this is where we exonerate all wrongs we’re just saying anything bad that has happened ever? scrub it. it’s the source’s fault. cole has no resentment against phoebe. he loves her a healthy, normal, non-possessive amount, so much so He Loves Her So Much he let her kill him and like honestly would probably do it again. idk and then they make out or something. and then they’re out of whatever plane they were in by the end of the episode. And Then we get a buddy cop episode with paige and cole where they bond and also sort through everything that happened there. slowly but surely. and then we do a real phole wedding a super small affair in the manor lowkey bc i hated their wedding episode it blowed we give them a good one. wallah <3

[topicprinter]

Hi r/startups! This is a 1,600 word blog post I wrote on my experience finding a technical co-founder, going full time on my startup, and pivoting. I've formatted it for Reddit below, but there's a much better reading experience available on Medium.On the hunt for a technical co-founderIt had been two months since our October launch and Dovetail had 200 users, of which 20% were active each week running real studies. This felt like good traction at the time but I still had 99 problems. I needed to restart the app every 6 hours due to a memory leak and the scheduling system was unreliable during restarts since it wasn’t idempotent.The MVP was built by a Polish agency, so I hired them once again before a holiday to the US. I couldn’t get the original developers and ended up with another developer who quit the agency one week into my project (unrelated to me!). The whole project dragged on as the client manager tried to find someone else to complete the work. Meanwhile, I was debugging a memory leak in code I could hardly read without the people who wrote it around to help. I spent parts of my holiday debugging and I eventually figured it out. The leak had a simple fix after a lot of investigation: the library that inlined CSS for emails was caching the entire application’s CSS. The fix was splitting the email CSS into a separate stylesheet.I got back to Sydney and decided this would be the last time I outsourced development. Outsourcing might work to build a simple MVP to validate your idea and the market demand, but to move forward I needed someone who could architect the code, do the bulk of the development, and stick around to help when things got hairy. I needed a technical co-founder, and I made that my main goal heading into the new year.By this point I had been pestering Brad for several months. Thankfully my refined pitch, the traction Dovetail had from launch, and the positive customer reception was enough to convince him to join as a co-founder. We had a lot of discussions about how we would work together. If I were to summarise the ‘ideal co-founder relationship’ in bullet points, I’d say:Complimentary skills. Development is just one aspect of a startup. Someone has to design the product, run marketing, customer support, keep track of expenses, apply for grants, talk with investors, do customer research, etc. Complimentary skills enable Brad and I to run fast.High trust and respect. One of us will be the ‘expert’ and the other person just has to trust the expert. I need to trust Brad with technical decisions, likewise, he has to trust me with design decisions. Of course we have sparring and discuss things in detail, but because we move quickly we don’t spend too long on trivial decisions. The relevant person makes the call and we move on.Similar experience levels. One person feeling like they are the ‘noob’ all the time isn’t healthy. Brad and I are the same age and we’ve been in the workforce for a similar amount of time. We’ve both got 8 years of Atlassian experience between us on a variety of teams.Compatible personalities. You will be spending an insane amount of time with each other, so you must get along. At the moment I spend more time with Brad than I do with Lucy.Going full timeBrad and I were still working full time and coding Dovetail in the evenings and on weekends. As I talked with more customers, I became more confident and excited about the opportunity for better software in the research space, but it was clear we needed to give Dovetail our fullest attention to have a chance at success.After four years of putting in 110%, I was burned out from Atlassian. At the end of (Australian) summer I took two months off work. I needed a break, but I also wanted to see whether I would go crazy working at home. I didn’t. In fact it was pretty awesome. At the end of this mini sabbatical it was clear my passion had shifted to Dovetail and the decision to leave Atlassian was tough. I was certain I wanted to try and ‘bootstrap’ instead of taking investment, so obviously a lot of considerations were financial.We did a lot of due diligence before making the final decision to leave our paying jobs. We see Dovetail as a financial investment but also an investment in ourselves. We’re both ready for different challenges and we’re in a stage of our lives where we can take risks. Brad and I looked at our expenses, talked about ‘salary’ expectations, and ran some exercises to check we were on the same page. In one exercise we each described Dovetail in three years and compared. For me, it was critical we both had the same expectations — the last thing you want is one founder imagining a ‘lifestyle business’ and the other dreaming of a billion-dollar IPO.A successful startup is the result of making informed decisions, not counting on luck. We had just launched pricing, so I forecasted how many customers we would need to break even. This information plus our growth rate gave me the numbers I needed to model our runway based off an initial investment Brad and I put in. I had worked on Dovetail myself for a few months before Brad joined, so I looked at how much time I had invested and multiplied that by the market rate for a senior designer in Sydney. Brad would invest the same ‘seed’ as me plus extra to make up for that time spent. We each own 50% of Dovetail.Once thing we’ve learned is that researchers do not run diary studies very frequently. Customers sign up to a paid plan for the duration of their study, then cancel once it finishes. Brad and I decided to go back to the drawing board and start working on features that encouraged repeat use. We needed to expand beyond the diary studies MVP I created with the outsourcing agency, and into a product that solves more common researcher problems.Reality checkI dislike the word pivot. It often has negative connotations (“oh, you didn’t get it right the first time around?”), and the reality is that startups are always pivoting anyway. You never get it right the first time. One huge benefit of a startup is that you are extremely agile and can pivot all the time if you haven’t found product-market fit. Also, its definition is unclear—you can ‘pivot’ the core feature set or marketing message dozens of times while continuing to target the same problem space. Is that a pivot?In saying all of this, I had gone down the diary studies rabbit hole and lost sight of our mission statement. Brad, with somewhat of a fresh perspective, convinced me we needed to evolve into something that researchers could use more than a few times a year. Ideally every day. We scheduled a bunch of customer interviews to help us figure out what that looks like, and for the past few weeks I’ve been sharing sketches and designs with our customers to see what they think.It’s possible we could double down on diary studies and eventually become profitable. I don’t think we would be very profitable, and that journey would be tough. So we’re pivoting the feature set while still going after the same general problem space of qualitative research.Moving to a new stackAs part of this new work, we’re taking the opportunity to incrementally rewrite the original outsourced code. Ruby on Rails was great at getting us where we are, but the new features we’re building demand a more modern stack, particularly on the frontend. Real time collaboration and a single page app with no page refreshes are two features people take for granted.The temptation to rewrite everything is strong, but stupid. We’d spend our whole runway rewriting code and not moving forward. We won’t move off Rails completely any time soon. Instead we’re slowly replacing components and services with React, Node, and GraphQL. It’s exciting, I’m personally learning a lot, and our frontend is much happier with the modularity and reusability that React brings to the table.We’re working to get a usable alpha of our new stuff out the door as quickly as possible, while making technical decisions that help us speed up development and build experiences people will love. We hope to launch our new version of Dovetail over the next couple of months. Stay tuned because I think you’re going to love it.Original post on Medium

[row-a-blog]

IN THE NEXT ROOM REVIEW by Cameron King

Sarah Ruhl

Playwright Sarah Ruhl (known for her off-beat pieces such as Dead Man’s Cell Phone, Passion Play, and Melancholy Play) supplies us with an ironically out of date rendition of the discovery of womanhood.  Her 19th century vernacular juxtaposed with the shockingly modern subject matter creates a play that caters directly to Ann Arbor Civic Theater’s audience - which is not necessarily a compliment.

In the Next Room centers around the invention of the vibrator and it’s immediate effects on the Givings family and those around them.  I walked in knowing Ruhl’s reputation - a strong one here at Michigan.  I was excited to hear her words, assuming that they would be the only good or redeeming thing about this suburban attempt at art.  However, not even she lived up to my hopes.  

The play is trite and predictable in places you crave excitement - but wildly unpredictable in jarring ways.  I mean of COURSE there’s going to be unbreakable lesbian tension when a beautiful female nurse is fingering a horny house wife.  But the scenario is displayed as clearly unrequited - the housewife falls for the nurse and finds herself embarrassed and coy around her.  The nurse remains strictly professional and doesn’t - or pretends not to - take notice.  BUT THEN!  OUT OF NO WHERE!  The two kiss in the living room of the Givings’s home.  I found this to completely neglect the intense social construct of the time.  If these people don’t know about the female orgasm and chock genuine physical weakness and sensitivities up to “hysteria”, then how would they even begin to fathom the concept of two women falling in love and EXPRESSING that love with not a “hand on the cheek” or a moment of graceful confession, but with the modern make-out?  There were many moments where I believe she wrote something that any playwright would consider unrelated or strange - but kept them in because it fit the style of play that she is emulating (a dry, parlor drama with domestic cabin fever and absolutely nothing revolutionary.)  Perhaps she assumed the subject matter would pop and shock next to the vernacular of style she uses, but it just wasn’t enough.

Melissa Freilich - Director

Although I was impressed by the clean blocking and smooth casting of what I assumed would be a much clunkier show, I found that Melissa Freilich took on a project that she simply couldn't not do full justice.  She had the types, the costumes, the props to do this show, but when one chooses a show with as many strange plot holes as this one, it is up to the director to fill them for the audience.  Now, I realized that Freilich was VERY much catering to the people she knew would attend her show.  (That is - family members, friends, locals, all the regulars at a community theater performance) And she likely was watching rehearsals from the eyes of theatrical amateurs.  That is called lazy directing.  Perhaps now that she knows she’ll be reviewed, her directing style will become less passive.

Leo Babcock - Set Designer

The set was simple and well done in the challenging space that is the Arthur Miller Theater.  The dressing was intricate and accurate, with the pieces implying an ornate 19th century home.  The final scene was done well; the walls opened up to reveal a stark “garden” (giant cardboard trees) and the audience was at last relieved of the dreadful sight lines that we were working to overcome for the previous two hours.

Costume Design - Molly Borneman, Abigail Zielke, James Zielke

Surprisingly alright!  The amount of dressing and undressing that takes place right over the audience’s faces made it impossible for these costumes to have any sense of fakery.  The women had detailed, ornate gowns, gloves, and corsets and changed to represent the passage of time.  The men had equally detailed and accurate costumes; however, I found it inconsistent and lazy when the light would come up on a new scene and the woman would be panting from her quick change while the man wears the same tie as the week before.  In the final scene, Dr. Givings is written to strip completely naked.  Seeing that this production was intended for a family-friendly audience, I understood that this step was not taken; however, the replacement for bare loins were nude briefs?  Which is like… no?  Like at least hit me with a man thong because I was looking at a strange alien butt that had no crack.  You can’t expect us to hoist our sails of disbelief in the final scene of the show - just because these Michiganders didn’t want to commit.

Lighting Design - Brad Pritts

Brad did pretty well.  His use of practicals was appropriate to the play and gave just enough to this quaint home.  I only wish I wasn’t able to see that weird butt thing.

Mrs. Givings - Liana Abela

Clearly a theater major at a SHIT college.  She decided that theater was her thing when a director gave her a nod and a wink after she nailed her 5th grade solo.  Liana has too many bad habits to be regarded realistically.  I felt no pity for her plight, nor did I root for her female take-over.  This young actress washed this complex role with a fake 19th-century vernacular and little to no stage presence.

Annie - Ellen Blanchard

This girl was sweet and well cast, but lacked the attention she deserved.  I think that the major lesbian plot hole could have been filled if the director had spent just a little time with this actress.  Perhaps if she didn’t completely flip from stark professionalism to tongue hockey in a beat, both Sara Ruhl and I would be happier.

Dr. Givings - Greg Kovas

Oh, Greg.  Greg is clearly a sweet little nerd who lost his virginity at 28.  I was impressed by his performance basics, but my expectations were unfortunately met when he didn’t surpass anything beyond foundation.  He, like his wife, used the character as an opportunity to practice playing a two sentence character description.  As he marched like a constipated constable from one end of the stage to the other, I could hear him repeat to himself, “He is cold.  He is sturdy.  He is smart.” - a mantra that barely got him off the ground and out of the script.

Leo - Joseph McDonald

Well, sir, congratulations on being the best community theater actor in Washtenaw County!  But I know you know that.  Although Joseph had a more nuanced and tortured performance than any of his cast mates, I couldn’t get over the fact that he knew that.  We’re all guilty of these performances - ones where we can’t help but say, “the moms are LOVING me right now!” as we flail and billow and butcher and overdo.

Elizabeth - Maegan Murphy

The first day Maegan got her script, she flipped through scanning for her lines.  At first, she was disappointed.  It’s been too long that she’s been cast as the lesser human, the maid, the nurse, the cook.  But then, like a mirage in the distance, Maegan reached her show-stopping monologue.  This would finally be her time, her show, her chance.  Rehearsals whizzed by and she would look forward to each chance she got to deliver her speech and work on it with Melissa.  But, Melissa didn’t pay much attention - was this a good sign or a bad sign?  Perhaps she was just that confident in her casting.  As the show approached, she pictured herself up on the Arthur Miller stage - all eyes on her, the unsuspecting, unassuming wet nurse.  She was about to make her big break.  What a time to be alive.

Yeah, Maegan was wrong.  She loved that stupid monologue, and it had me rolling my eyes in the third row.

Mrs. Daldry - Amanda Photenhauer

Bad.  Tried.  But bad.

Mr. Daldry - Rob Roy

I was impressed by the casting of Rob Roy, his presence was a majorly realistic catalyst for his wife to run to the other team.

The Audience -

Take your GODDAMN program off the stage.  Shut up.  Stop pretending you are a theatrical expert because you’ve seen your daughter in four other shows.  And for god’s sake, stop fucking calling the show from your seat to show off in front of your date?  What’s that???