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mercerislandbooks · 1 year

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Miriam and Nancy Pearl in Conversation

Hello, my beloved Island Books community! Dare I say it? I'm saying it. I'M BACK.

Islanders know me for various reasons--mom of four chasing kids at the local parks and schools, Daniel's wife, ballet teacher, writer, neighbor, and friend. But for those of you that have followed this blog a looooong time, you might remember that former Island Books bookseller James Crossley (now across the bridge managing our dear friend Madison Books) and I started the Island Books' blog back in 2011. Other duties and a pandemic took me away from it for a few years, but the dust is settling, the sun is shining, and OMG, Island Books is heading toward our 50th anniversary at the end of 2023.

A 50th anniversary is no joke. There's a lot to say to honor my favorite place in town, so I'm lining up next to Laurie and crew to chime in. In the months leading up to the big day, I'll be chatting with current and past Island Books employees to trace the history and memories that make our store so special. I'll also be talking to our authors and literary friends who have a special connection with Island Books. Consider this project my yearbook to honor a local treasure, and if you read along with me, you'll see why Island Books is a pillar of our community.

I'm kicking off my series with a chat with a woman who needs no introduction. Nancy Pearl is an American librarian, best-selling author, literary critic and the former Executive Director of the Washington Center for the Book at Seattle Public Library. But who she really is, to me, is one of the greatest book lovers of our time. She's someone I admire and wish to be like, she's funny, she's smarter than hell, and she's our dear, dear friend.

Miriam: Nancy, tell me about the first time you visited Island Books. What are your memories there and what stood out to you about the store?

Nancy: The first time I visited Island Books was in 2003 when the first Book Lust book was published. Roger invited me to come talk about the book. I loved the store. I think small and cozy bookstores are the best, and Island Books was one of those stores that are wonderfully curated with a glorious mixture of the popular and the unusual books that you wouldn't see at a Barnes and Noble, for example. It reminded me of Yorktown Alley Bookstore, the bookstore I managed in Tulsa years ago.

Miriam: I didn't know you managed a bookstore! That's good to know and explains a lot about you. I went and did my google duty and saw that the Yorktown Alley Bookstore closed, which happened to a lot of indies once Amazon came on the scene. Can you tell me a little more about working there? What kinds of books did you recommend to customers back then, and how have your recommendations changed between then and now? How did that experience help launch you toward library work?

Nancy: I already had my library degree when we moved to Oklahoma and 2 daughters, ages 9 months and 31 months old; 7 years in Stillwater and then moved to Tulsa and my wonderful husband commuted back to Stillwater. He'd go in Monday mornings, sleep (in his office) Monday nights, come home Tuesday night, stay in Tulsa on Wednesday, and then back to Stillwater on Thursday and home again Friday evening. A good friend from Stillwater moved to Tulsa and opened the bookstore and when I was ready to go back to work I started working there. I think I said this already, but it was really a wonderful bookstore. I sold many many copies of all my favorite novels from 1980 to 1989, when I went to work at the public library, including Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (it was the then Random House rep, whose name I don't remember, who told me to read it, and he was so right), Pat Conroy (I met him at what was then called ABA conference in New Orleans and invited him to come to Tulsa and he did - I loved Prince of Tides. When the library staff (5 of us) went to dinner with him, he told us wonderful stories about his family and writing the book.

This was back in the day when it was time to order from Ingram you called them up and gave the order over the phone. I used to love calling them because all the women (and they were all women) had the loveliest Tennessee accents.

Miriam: I loved Prince of Tides too. Will you tell us about your experience with bookstores during the publication of your Book Lust series and with your debut novel, George and Lizzie? Do you have some favorite experiences from those times? James Crossley and I had the honor of being in conversation with you at Island Books when that came out and it was so much fun. There’s nothing bookstores love more than helping elevate authors!

Nancy: I loved doing the book tours for the Book Lust books (especially the first one) because I got to meet wonderful readers all over. I remember speaking at a bookstore in Washington (I think it was the one on Vashon, but it could actually have been Island Books) and the owner (maybe Roger) found a copy of one of my all-time favorite novels - Merle Miller’s A Gay and Melancholy Sound which was long out of print and gave it to me - And Lisa Scottoline chose More Book Lust as the Today Show bookclub book, which was thrilling - they flew me to New York and we were both on the show talking about the book. Lisa was wearing a beautiful Chanel jacket. Also I have to say here that I’ve really wanted to name More Book Lust this title: Book Lust 2: The Morning After.

Doing the tour for George & Lizzie was wonderful because I love talking about those characters and why I wrote the book. I especially enjoyed the times the program was as an interview, like it was with you and James at Island Books. I was interviewed at the library in Tulsa, where some of George & Lizzie takes place (in Tulsa, not the library, but I worked at the library) and many of my old co-workers and old friends came to the event The tour was really soon after the novel came out so not a lot of people had read it yet. I always felt the need to tell every audience that the novel wasn’t autobiographical.

Because I love meeting readers, I always liked going on book tours—I’m so glad I got to do the ones I did.

Miriam: The readers love you too, Nancy! Thanks so much for making time to answer my questions, for spreading your passion to so many others, and always offering your support to indie bookstores like ours.

To our Island Books community: Keep an eye on this space in the coming months—leading up to our 50th—for my upcoming conversations with Laurie Raisys, Roger and Nancy Page, James Crossley, and many more characters who’ve made Island Books the place it is today. There are so many memories and special people connected to our store. I’m excited to share them here.

—Miriam

#islandbooks #miriamlandis #nancypearl #Georgeandlizzie #booklust #bookstores #bookstore #indiebookstore #mercerisland #miriam landis #50 years of island books

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queer-ragnelle · 2 years

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I’m going to go out on a limb here in defense of editors.

Too often I see people dump on poorly written books like “Where was the editor?” Uh they were probably banging their head on the desk in frustration as the author had a tantrum and dug their heels in about every suggested change. Then the dogshit market and algorithm and nepotism rewarded this by launching the mediocre book to the NYT bestseller list or whatever.

After that or even simultaneously it lands movie deal and gets made into an even more mediocre franchise. Look no further than Fifty Shades of Grey author E. L. James who pioneered this shit over a decade ago. Just ctrl+f your fanfic names for new ones. Edit absolutely nothing, certainly not developmentally. Sell a million-billion copies on a false premise of BDSM. Make a movie and scream and yell at the director doing her damn best the whole time. Then fire her. With a new director, install your husband as the script writer so no improvement can be implemented in the adaptation of your idiotic and harmful story. Profit.

The downfall of storytelling is not on editors.

This shit isn’t art and it’s grown in a lab by people with influence who don’t have to work hard or improve themselves or think constructively because they’ll make money anyway. They don’t care about quality because they’re not artists, they’re merchants dealing in marketable tropes and taglines without any substance behind it. They’re snake oil salesmen. The editor is the health inspector they knifed out back.

#I can’t speak to trad publishing like what is a publishing house editor like idk #mine is indie but like imagine the audacity to just change nothing about your novel at all #you’re not perfect why does E L James act like this #I think she started this back in 2011 when the first book launched #it’s only gotten worse from there #I hate Cursed by Tom Wheeler so so so so much it’s not even funny #everything by Sarah J Maas too like this book doesn’t need to be 800 pages cut it tf down omg #go look how many books Ali Hazelwood has published in the last three years #she wrote the Love Hypothesis as Star Wars fic but published it as original in 2021 #go look how many books she’s written since then you’ll never fucking guess #tell me those are quality stories I dare you #now it’s getting a movie #I’m so sick of white mediocrity I’m gonna throw up #my post

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mrmrswales · 3 years

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Exclusive: the ‘profoundly powerful’ moments that shaped Duchess of Cambridge’s children’s charity work by Camilla Tominey

It all started with secret visits the public never got to see. Newly married, and with the world’s press chronicling her every move – down to the details of her designer dresses – the Duchess of Cambridge resolved to go "below radar".

Acting as Prince William’s "plus one", rather than a fully fledged solo royal in those early days, the newest addition to the Royal family knew that she wanted to find a cause she could champion as impactfully as Diana, the Princess of Wales’s landmine campaign; it was simply a question of where to find it.

Having already announced her first patronage of Action on Addiction, a charity working with people with drug and alcohol problems, Hope House, a women-only rehabilitation centre in Clapham, south London, seemed as good a place as any to start.

It was October 2011 when the then 29-year-old Duchess paid the first of several, incognito visits in a bid to find out what had sent its clients on a downward spiral of self-destruction.

According to Rebecca Priestley, who accompanied the Duchess on the visit and would go on to spend five years as her private secretary, it played a pivotal role in her decision to put childhood at the heart of her philanthropic endeavours.

Speaking on the record for the first time, Mrs Priestley, who is now an executive coach, recalled: "I remember going up to Anglesey, where they were living after the wedding, to have a conversation with the Duchess about her royal life."

At that point, she had the philanthropic world at her feet. She could have done anything she wanted in the charitable arena. Typically, she had put a lot of thought into it already. Addiction was an issue she was instinctively thinking about – but she was also genuinely interested in understanding what support was there and what role that played in the bigger picture of mainstream societal issues."

With the Duke having flown to the Falklands for a six–week tour of duty with his RAF search and rescue squadron, Mrs Priestley put a programme together to support the Duchess’s desire to "listen and learn"."A lot of it was behind the scenes, just talking to people and hearing where it was that they needed more help. The one thing that united all of the women at Hope House was that the derailing had started so early on. They could trace the problems in their adult lives back to childhood."

A subsequent private visit in February 2012 to Clouds House, a treatment centre in East Knoyle in Wiltshire, served as further confirmation that the early years should be a key area of focus. But it was during a later meeting with female inmates at a detox unit at Send Prison in Woking when the penny well and truly dropped.

"It was a profoundly powerful moment,” recalled Mrs Priestley. "You go in there with this preconceived idea that these women have done things wrong, that it was their fault. Then one woman started speaking to the Duchess about her earliest memories of seeing needles on the floor of her home."

She had always thought addiction was a misunderstood issue, but after this, she became concerned that there was a pre-destiny about those affected – an inevitability about it. These women were born into it and there was very little chance of escape."

The experience set in train a sequence of events that will next week culminate in the Duchess, 39, stepping up her ambition in driving awareness and action on the impact that early childhood can have on society at large.

She will launch a new initiative through the couple’s Royal Foundation to further explore the science around early childhood, raise awareness of the issue and foster collaboration and partnerships across relevant groups.

According to Lord Hague, who became chairman of the Royal Foundation last September, the "ambitious" new project will be equal in stature to William’s £50 million Earthshot Prize, launched last year with Sir David Attenborough to find workable solutions to climate change and environmental problems.

"The Duchess truly believes this is one of the great issues of our time," said the former Tory leader. "This is the central plank of her work in the way conservation issues are for the Duke. It’s a hugely significant moment."

While politicians are often in a rush to make a difference during the comparatively short time they have in office, royals are there for life, which perhaps explains why Kate has taken 10 years to get to this point.Having been instrumental in launching the Heads Together campaign with William and Prince Harry in 2016, designed at tackling the stigma and changing the conversation on mental health, it was not until 2018 that she convened a steering group of experts to look at how cross-sector collaboration could bring about lasting change.

In January, she delivered a landmark speech after her Five Big Questions on the Under Fives survey garnered over 500,000 responses.

"People often ask why I care so passionately about the early years," the mother-of-three said.

"Many mistakenly believe that my interest stems from having children of my own. While of course I care hugely about their start in life, this ultimately sells the issue short. If we only expect people to take an interest in the early years when they have children, we are not only too late for them, we are underestimating the huge role others can play in shaping our most formative years, too."

Pointing out that the social cost of late intervention has been estimated to be over £17 billion a year, she added: "The early years are therefore not simply just about how we raise our children. They are in fact about how we raise the next generation of adults. They are about the society we will become."

According to Eamon McCrory, Professor of Developmental Neuroscience and Psychopathology at University College London, the Duchess "has a vision of how she can help transform how we as a society view and invest in the early years for the benefit of society".

Describing her interest in "the role the brain shapes our early experiences and how that sets us on a path to adult life", he explained: "When you look at very young babies and infants, on the surface they don’t appear to be engaging in complex emotions so there's a tendency to underestimate the millions of synapses that are being formed every minute. But science is telling us we have to look under the bonnet.

"There’s no question that for the Duchess, this is a lifetime piece of work. The last five years laid the foundations, now we are entering a more proactive phase.” Described by one source as “thoughtful, professional and determined to do a good job,” there is a sense that Kate has never been in it for the early wins, but the long haul.

As one well-placed insider put it: "She took the job very seriously right from the very beginning. She continues to want to get it right and do her very best - for the institution, for William and the importance of the work she’s doing.

"She doesn't just want to rock up for a picture opportunity, which is why she used to get quite frustrated with all the early focus on what she was wearing. She really cares about this stuff."

Another source said she was "much more fun" than people give her credit for, pointing out how she has grown in confidence having found a cause that she is not only passionate about - but also well informed.

As Lord Hague put it: "She’s been reading the books and had trustees reading the books. People assume her interest in the early years is because she has children – actually it comes from all the adults she’s met." The other key influence has been Kate’s own idyllic childhood.

Brought up in leafy Bucklebury in West Berkshire by her entrepreneur parents Michael and Carole Middleton, pictured below with the royal family, the Duchess has never made any secret of how fortunate she has been to be brought up in a loving and supportive family.

"She always recognised that she benefited from such a great start in life," added Mrs Priestley.

"That’s why sport and the outdoors has always been a key theme for her. She was always asking how those sorts of experiences could be made accessible to others."

For Dame Benny Refson, president of the children’s mental health charity Place2Be, where the Duchess has been patron since 2013, Kate’s grounded upbringing has proved an asset.

“The Duchess listens and people feel heard and valued. It’s nothing to do with privilege. The groups she meets in challenging areas in London don't look at what she's wearing. What makes a difference is that an important person has shown a genuine interest in them. She can relate without passing judgement, which is so important."

Having started out as a reticent public speaker, the Duchess has finally found her voice – and next week she will have a lot more to say.

#duchess of cambridge

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duelofthefatesmp3 · 4 years

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i DO actually wanna know how youd make kotor 3 !!!!!

this ask has been sitting on my inbox for so long on PURPOSE! i wanted some time to re read the revan book + watch some swtor gameplays so i could give a concrete answer about why the book and swtor arent satisfactory and what i would do instead (im not like. a storytelling god so i this is just my PERSONAL idea). under the cut!

to begin with, what's wrong with revan the book and swtor, mai?

i am very fond of swtor i think it was such a nice idea to have an "open" world game set in star wars old republic time. but ultimately, it was not a good conclusion to revan and meetra's storyline! now, i don't really know what happened in the development of the third kotor game (if there ever was a plan for one) but it's clear they dropped the ball on that and decided to start a whole different project. i don't think we can blame disney for that one, because it was announced on 2008, launched in 2011, and disney had just bought star wars that year. so who knows.

the thing is that it's painfully evident that a bunch of the story that was gonna be in the third game, ended up in the book + misc parts of swtor. much of the book feels like a gameplay.

now, it was clear when the book was planned that they wanted to keep revan's story open so when the game came out, they could have a cool Revan storyline so he could make a cool villain appearence and draw in some of that kotor nostalgia. which ehhhhhh. uh. i don't really think did any favors for revan's character. he didn't have a satisfactory arc (I'm not saying "a happy ending" because good arcs aren't always happy) but at least some closure?

revan went through many big events in his life. we didnt need to keep his ass in stasis for his fun villain moments 300 years later. we already had what we wanted from him: jedi turned sith turned jedi again to defeat a terrible threat. that was it we could have let it there and it would have been cool! but then they decided to drag and drag his story just to leave him right where he was before. he just suffered a little more in the in-between.

you could say he finally redeemed himself of all of his crimes this way, but wasn't that the whole purpose of the first kotor game (and would have been the purpose of the 3rd?)

swtor does not centre revan in his own narrative. he's a side character for the player to experience. and look, i get it, we've had a different protag on each game, why not have another one in this one. well, because the protagonist has no personal relationship with revan. meetra was one of his closest friends, and fought with him. there is a connection that can be exploited. but the swtor protagonist is just some guy 300 years in the future who happens to stumble into revan and his life. not even his descendants get to fully interact with revan.

also, there is the fact that revan is not the centre of the game itself, only of a particular storyline. and it's weird, because swtor could have happened without revan's involvement.

ms. meetra surik, ms. bastila shan, women of the world I'm sorry

so it's no news that star wars is misogynistic as fuck right. cause it is.

so you decide to make your gender neutral protagonist a guy. then you decide to make your other gender neutral protagonist a woman. cool. now let's guess who gets underdeveloped, turned into a plot device without reason, and promptly fridged in the most unceremoniously fashion just to fullfil some manpain moments. which one do you think got that treatment.

i know the revan book is supposed to be about revan, but why make meetra go through a whole arc just to undermine her character and turn her into the faithful servant of the guy? she leaves everything behind for him, sacrifices herself for him, hell not even dead is she not serving the guy. and she was the second game’s protagonist! she beat up a bunch of powerful people and now she’s just meh, there? she had so many interesting ways to interact with revan (meeting kreia, revan’s first master, encountering another force consuming entity, etc.)

meetra went through a whole arc about dealing with the guilt of doing something horrible and having the consequences of it cut her from the force. we see her broken, then slowly come back to the world and reconnect herself with the force, then stop running and face the consequences of her role in the war. thats such a cool character with tons of potential! and nothing happened!

then we got bastila who is. a whole deal. so you make her go through a “promising jedi who defeated revan, to questioning reluctant companion, to fell into the dark side, to was redeemed thanks to her bond to revan, who helped her come back because he’d been through the same experience” arc, and then you decide to push her to the side to have a baby?? which is... its clear that the writer didnt know what to do with her (or with the other characters outside of canderous) so hey, lets get her to marry revan and have a baby.

my ideal kotor 3

to preface, im not a game developer, so some of my choices could be stunted by what a kotor rpg can do lol. of course, it would follow the same mechanics and have the same format as the first two, because consistency!

the fun way to start the game, would be from scourge’s perspective. we get to play as a sith! i’d even say you get to change scourge’s name and gender and looks (i know sith have different looks)

in scourge’s storyline, we get from his arrival to normound kaas, to his talks with nissyris, to his missions working for her. in some of these, we can make scourge lean into the dark or the light side! fun! plus we get some exposition with dialogue options. it all continues untill we get to nissirys story about the emperor. we get a fucked up cutscene of his childhood and then BOOM when its over, we see revan waking up from a nightmare and their pov starts.

ok, as for revan’s story, since we’d have to pick it up from where kotor ended, i’d have a little cutscene of revan back into the ebon hawk, with bastila, and them telling the crew to take them to courascant. then cut to a council meeting where revan and bastila get scolded in private, then rewarded by the republic. i would also like to see some revan mournink malak’s death mayhaps. since he was their childhood friend and all.

i would 100% scrape the marriage and two years passed part. as the book said, the council had no use for revan aside from the legend(tm), so why would they stay in courascant. revan was very alienated from the jedi at that point, despite being back in the “light side”

then like, to revan asking around for meetra and other jedi from the mandalorian wars, we can cash in that atris cameo, then revan starts to have these visions about the sith emperor, and maybe we could get a playable dream sequence about revan’s fight with mandalore the ultimate (I KNOW I WOULD LIKE TO SEE IT.) and we get the whole exposition to mandalore telling revan that the sith are behind it all. i believe we should get a bunch of these flashback/dream sequences of revan’s past doing shit. cut to revan burying the mask in a planet, then back to the present. we see a bunch of mission and juhani scenes trying to reach him, but he keeps pushing them away. revan and bastila meet canderous, travel to the ice planet, meet clan ordo (god i love clan ordo) you get the whole quest, you decide weather to spare veela or not, maybe you get a cheeky mandalorian companion (force sensitive mando oh?) and leave canderous behind.

we can visit like, a couple more planets searching for clues maybe, etc. then when reaching nathema, you are forced to go alone as revan, get to explore nathema a bit (raiding ancient location yay) nathema as a location can be so fun because you can have it weaken you hp bar and also you cant use the force (which, in game is pretty cool)

then we get to scourge and nyssiris arriving to the planet, they fight but since theres two of them and revan doesn’t have the force, they beat the shit out of them, and while running away, they get in a fight with bastila and the companions in the ebon hawk (ebon hawk shooting game my hated). bastila manages to get a glimpse of revan’s thoughts before they take them away. but the ebon is so ruined it takes bastila, t3 and the mandalorian a while to fix it, and they get stuck into the unknown regions for a while. the ebon hawk is left in an outer rim planet with t3 fixing it, bastila and the mandalorian run back to the jedi council, only to get caught in the middle of the jedi civil war. we can have bastila choosing to hide in courascant and trying to make sense of what she saw, reading texts about the sith empire, trying to plot a course to where they took revan (more atris! but shes pissed at her now)

cutscene to meetra’s pov, leaving malachor v behind, getting calls from everyone at the hawk (atton my beloved) but just as she’s leaving she gets a force message from revan, calling for her to find him and sending visions of normound kaas. then, through her force bond with visas, she tells her not to go because they’re gay and in love and whatnot.

then boom, she gets intercepted by bastila’s ship, with the mandalore and the other mandalorian (yes i do love having a bunch of mandos on board) and they go on their way to find revan.

now i want there to be an underlying message of “we can’t take our friends with us because we have to do this ALONE we’re powerful JEDI we don’t need our FRIENDS.” meetra gets asked if she wants to bring any friends and she’s like “no. we have to do this alone.” along the game you get constantly contacted by other game characters, you get the chance to talk to them or ignore them.

so, we get back to nathema, and meetra has a whole “holy shit this is just like darth nihilus but ten times worse. but i beat darth nihilus. i can do this!” then she finds peace in this place without the force, we get a whole speech about how the odds arent against them, they find a way to normound kaas, and get going.

in normound kaas i thought about them getting a whole mission about how to infiltrate the citadel, only to get helped by scourge. he joins the party, we get a little flashback of all the years he spent trying to make revan remember and they storm the citadel. we get to fight the dark council members, fun! then we get to free revan and the game switches povs. bastila hands the mask to revan and he has a cool “yes im revan im pretty cool” then a nice heartfelt yet rushed reunion with everyone.

then have a small CONVERSATION WITH MEETRA where she talks about the sith triumvirate she defeated and revan is impressed with her and is like “we are the last hope of the jedi, we’ve learned to walk between light and dark, we’ve done horrors but we can still make things right, our experience has made us more powerful etc.

then they fight the imperial guard, ALL OF THEM, meetra revan and scourge make it into the throne room, they all fight the emperor. meetra shows the emperor that she has seen the void, she has cut herself from the force, and she’s not afraid of him, revan supports her, talks about redemption and hope and NOW.

NOW. how the alternate endings could go:

if you decide to take scourge through the light side, he manages to form a forcebond with meetra and revan since they’ve both teached something about the duality of the force, they get 100% stronger, but its still not enough. UNTIL. a bunch of ships (jedi and mandalorian, even non republic ships) arrive to dormound kaas, the gangs from each game storm the room and together they make the emperor and his guard a bunch of punching bags. they beat him! (unknow to them, this was a backup body because the emperor can do weird shit like that, and has only debilitated his plan, but he’ll come back dont worry). then they fly back to the republic, to tell the chancellor about the sith threat, and preparations for the war begin. meetra and revan get to live happily ever after for a while, then they die away from the jedi or the sith (waaah im thinking about them helping canderous rebuild the mandalorians, and them doing it since they killed so many mandos in the war)

BECAUSE IN THE END KOTOR IS ABOUT LEARNING TO PROCESS TRAUMA AND RECOGNIZE YOUR MISTAKES AND LIVE WITH THE GUILT WHILST TRYING TO FIX THE MISTAKES YOU MADE ALONG THE WAY. AND ALSO TO HEAL FROM TRAUMA YOU NEED A SUPPORT SYSTEM SO EVEN THOUGH IT MAKES SENSE TO YOU YOU SHOULDNT PUSH PEOPLE WHO LOVE YOU AWAY. AND THINGS AREN’T BLACK AND WHITE ITS COMPLICATED SO YOU DONT END UP BACK ON SQUARE ONE YOURE A CHANGED PERSON.

if you decide to dark side scourge further, he betrays revan and meetra, they all die, and the emperor unleashes his angry lightning or whatever on everyone + a bunch of visions of all the enemies of past mocking them, and their loved ones suffering. and since you’ve had that “im not calling my friends bullshit” no one comes, you die there, and the emperor is only stalled for a few years. swtor ensues. scourge becomes the emperor’s hand.

now you could of course bring revan and meetra up in swtor, but maybe only as force ghost guides, or have some of the other characters of the game have relevance (visas tries to heal the miraluka planet 2021)

WELL THAT WAS A LOT OF WORDS. HOPE THIS IS SATISFYING ENOUGH

#this is bonkers but ive been thinking about it since 2011 so.#wow 10 years since i played kotor. wretched little game.#also if i switch pronouns midway its because it would make it clearer #kotor 3 rewrite

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96thdayofrage · 3 years

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Gifted and talented programs have been the target of criticism ever since the concept took hold in the 1970s as huge demographic changes were transforming urban school districts. White, middle-class families were fleeing to the suburbs. Like magnet schools, accelerated programs for gifted students were attractive to many of these families and provided a way to counteract this flight and maintain diversity in city school systems. The problem was that gifted programs tended to foster racial separation inside schools, undermining the very goal they were supposed to support.

Today, gifted programs still tend to separate students by race. New York City is a case in point. There, the education department has been struggling for years to change the demographic makeup of its gifted program—which is disproportionately white and Asian—and spread access to a more representative group of students. There are a handful of open-enrollment gifted schools in the city, but the district’s efforts at increasing diversity in the bulk of gifted and talented classrooms have largely backfired.

Back in 2006, a quarter of students in New York City gifted classrooms were white, although white students made up only 15 percent of the student population. The district attempted to level the playing field by eliminating a subjective system in which teachers and preschools played a major role in deciding which students were identified as gifted. From then on, students across the city would have to take the same two tests. Decisions about who made it in would be centralized. The hope was that using more objective measures would expand access and prevent in-the-know parents from gaming the system.

But relying on tests produced the opposite effect. Middle-class parents frantically prepped their four-year-olds for testing. This year, 70 percent of students identified as gifted in the city are white or Asian, up from 68 percent last year, while just over a quarter are black or Hispanic.

In 2006, before it changed the admissions system, New York City opened 15 new gifted and talented programs to serve more minority children, bringing the number of schools with the programs to more than 200, according to officials at the time. By 2009, many of those programs had been shuttered. There were only about 140 schools with gifted classrooms that year. This year, there are just 88. The neighborhoods that lost gifted and talented programs tended to be those with high concentrations of blacks and Hispanics: Bedford-Stuyvesant, East New York, Flatbush, Washington Heights.

Asked about the changes, department officials said they have actually increased the number of gifted and talented seats in recent years to meet growing demand. Given the decrease in the number of schools offering the program and the declining percentage of minorities in the program, it follows that the new seats are probably concentrated in just a few schools, many of them in affluent areas. So the question is, should they keep expanding the program? As a recent New York Times article noted, “The accelerated classrooms serve as pipelines to the city’s highest-achievement middle schools and high schools, creating a cycle in which students who start out ahead get even further advantages from the city’s schools.” In places like the D.C. suburbs, gifted and talented programs have the same dynamic.

Proponents of gifted education argue vigorously against doing away with it entirely. “There’s nothing worse than having a bright, talented child just sitting,” says Joan Franklin Smutny, director of the Center for Gifted, a nonprofit based in a Chicago suburb. “They need to be challenged. They need to be inspired.”

Joseph Renzulli, director of the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented at University of Connecticut, agrees with Smutny: “The biggest problem with bright kids in urban schools besides being picked on, is they are dying from boredom. The longer they stay in school, the lower their scores become.”

Supporting their argument is a 2011 study of high-achieving children by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank. It found that many such students lose ground over time, prompting the researchers to worry that “closing achievement gaps and ‘leaving no child behind’ [are] coming at the expense of our ‘talented tenth’—and America’s future international competitiveness.”

The racial disparities are “a great shame, of course,” wrote Chester Finn, the president of Fordham, in a recent blog post, “but it’s not exactly a surprise that more affluent kids are likelier to end up in gifted programs. Their families don’t face the stress of poverty, and they tend to have two parents who read to their children, send them to preschool, etc.”

Determining whether a child is actually more intelligent than her peers or whether she’s just the product of more affluent, ambitious parents is a difficult task for school systems interested in breaking the cycle of privilege that gifted education tends to fuel. Experts caution against relying heavily on tests, as New York does, but there are no national or even state standards defining giftedness, according to the National Society for the Gifted and Talented, an advocacy group.

The society suggests that parents and teachers check a list of traits, including whether children are “perfectionist and idealistic,” “asynchronous,” meaning they develop unevenly, or “problem solvers.” Smutny says teachers should be trained to look for a different set of characteristics, such as creativity, well-developed imaginations, and curiosity, which she says are correlated with above-average intelligence. They must also be trained to “cut through” stereotypes, she says, so that talented children who are also poor or from a racial minority are not overlooked.

Is there a better way to provide education for gifted children without exacerbating racial inequities? Officials in the Washington, D.C. public schools believe they’ve found a possible answer. This year, for the first time in more than a decade, the D.C. schools have reintroduced gifted education. The decision comes as many city neighborhoods are experiencing a surge of new middle-class, white families, and one reason for the reintroduction of gifted classes is to entice more of them to choose public, not private, schools. The district opened one gifted program in a middle school near the affluent blocks around Georgetown University.

But it also opened one at Kelly Miller in Ward 7, a majority low-income, African-American middle school, and at West Education Campus, in the 16th Street Heights neighborhood, where there is a small but growing population of Hispanic immigrants mixing with the predominantly black population.

Unlike traditional gifted programs, which usually require a test to get in, the D.C. programs are open to any student who wants to enroll. D.C. is aiming the program both at students who are book smart and those who may struggle on traditional measures of achievement but have other extraordinary talents that are harder to measure with a test. The plan is to “build up the gifts they have rather than just focus on their weaknesses,” said Matthew Reif, the district’s director of advanced and enriched instruction.

The principal at Kelly Miller, Abdullah Zaki, explains that the idea is to expand the concept of giftedness. “If there’s a kid who is not reading at grade level but has the gift of gab and can argue you down in a heartbeat, they’re obviously interested in debate,” he says. “We can take their natural gift and talent and hone and polish it.” Working on the skill the student enjoys and is good at might improve other skills that don’t come as naturally—analysis, reading of complex texts, etc., adds Zaki.

Administrators want to reach students who have the potential to excel at school but who haven’t been given the chance to demonstrate their gifts. But there’s another goal, too. “One thing we have learned,” said Reif, is that relying exclusively on tests to identify gifted students “often disproportionately identifies white and Asian students, and that leads to equity issues.”

The open-door policy D.C. has embraced may offer a way around the dilemma of identifying gifted children. “The bias should be to let students who want to try these classes try them,” said Gary Orfield, a political scientist at UCLA who has advocated for more racial integration in schools. “There should be a very explicit commitment to race and class diversity and targeted recruitment to make it happen.”

But simply allowing all comers to participate in gifted education doesn’t erase its problems. When Kelly Miller Middle School in Ward 7 launched its gifted program last fall, principal Abdullah Zaki says he “thought it would be a big clamor throughout our community—parents rushing to get their kids into our building. That didn’t happen the way I wanted.”

Convincing the African-American families in Kelly Miller’s neighborhood to enroll their children has been a challenge, partly because for many the term “gifted and talented” was a foreign concept, Zaki says. He’s taken to using synonyms like “honors” to persuade parents to take an interest, even if it doesn’t quite capture what the school is trying to offer students.

In addition, placing students with a wide range of abilities together is a difficult undertaking for teachers. It takes tremendous skill to create lesson plans that will challenge high-achieving students while not leaving others behind—one reason gifted programs were created in the first place. D.C. has hired three specialized teachers to lead the gifted programs at each of the middle schools with the program. They spend time each week with small groups of students working on projects tailored to the group’s talents and interests. But the specialized teachers’ time is divided among all of the classrooms in the school. And Kelly Miller is also offering a more traditional version of gifted education, with a track of accelerated math and literacy courses for students who score well in those subjects.

The ”schoolwide enrichment model,” as it’s called, has had some success elsewhere, but there’s no data yet to show how the schools are doing. D.C. officials say they’re watching the experiment closely and will look at test scores and teacher, parent, and student responses, and other measures at the end of the year.

The D.C. model may end up being a watered-down version of gifted and talented education that can’t match the more exclusive programs found in New York and other places. But it’s also much fairer, and it may also be a more effective way to reach the students with true innate talent. The Fordham study’s other major finding was that a large number of children are “late bloomers,” whose abilities appear only later in their school careers. At Kelly Miller, Zaki says the whole point is to identify these students—the ones with potential and talent who have so far been overlooked, possibly because of their race or class. “That’s the excellent thing about it,” he said. “These kids exist.”

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notebooknebula · 4 years

Video

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Jim Zaspel on Real Estate Investing Minus the Bank

https://www.jayconner.com/jim-zaspel-on-real-estate-investing-minus-the-bank/

Jim Zaspel (00:11): Yeah, that sounds good. Well, let’s get started, Jay. So Jay, you and I met about 10 years ago, 11 years ago. And you’ve been a real estate a lot longer than I have been. So tell us about yourself, how you got started in real estate investing and Jay Conner in a Nutshell. You got a lot of interesting stories behind you, so let folks get to know you a little bit.

Jay Conner (00:32): Well, you know, I don’t know if I can do Jay Conner in a Nutshell because you just told me last week I can’t manage to say my name. Right? I remember Jim, the very first real estate investing event that you and I met at. I don’t know what brought it on, but I think I was brought up on the platform to I don’t know to talk or something and I sat back down and I was sitting right next to you at the event and you leaned over to me and you said, talk Jay Conner can do [I remember a good yesterday, man]. So who am I and what have I been doing? So, as you said, Jim, I’ve been investing here in Eastern North Carolina since 2003 full time since 2003. And the first six years of the business, I’ve relied on local banks and mortgage companies to fund my deals. And I remember like it was yesterday, it was the third week of January, 2009, six years into the business, I called him a banker on this telephone right here.

Jay Conner (01:41): I called him up, his name was Steve. And I got Steve on the phone and I’d had this conversation with Steve many times. I told him, Steve, I have these two properties on the contract, which by the way, back in 2009, when you put earnest money down in North Carolina, you couldn’t get it back. So I got money tied up in the deals and these two deals representative over a hundred thousand dollars in profit. And so I propose about the deals and when closing was scheduled and the funding that I needed for the deals. And I learned that conversation that I’ve been cut off and my lines of credit are gone from the bank. And I wish I’d known that before I put the money down. Right? And so within two weeks of actually going to this event that I was at with you, learned about private money. I came back home, I put my private money program on steroids and I was able to raise 2 million, $150,000 in funding from individuals, either their investment capital or their retirement funds. And so I was able to close all those two deals that I had. I didn’t lose those. And since that time I’ve not missed out on a deal because I didn’t have the funding. So I’m still full time in the business. I do two to three deals a month. Our average profits are $67,000 per deal.

Jim Zaspel (03:03): I just wanna puke My friend, $67,000 per deal. So you just told me that you work half as hard as I do and get paid twice as much.

Jay Conner (03:11): So anyway, you know, I do the business, I love the business. And I got bored back in 2011 cause they got an amazing team put together for doing the business. So that’s when I started, I put on my teacher hat and I started educating other real estate investors, particularly on how to get a lot of funding for their deals without relying on their credit verification income or experience in real estate.

Jim Zaspel (03:36): That’s awesome! Well, you there’s one thing you, you did a training just a week or two ago that I was on and I went to high level folks and it was like, Holy moly, you know, when you’re in the hands of a professional, and I don’t mean a professional speaker, which you are, but what a few of my friends were talking afterwards is a professional teacher who’s like, wow, this is doable. And it makes it super clear. And of course you’re on his neck to listen to. Besides,

Jay Conner (04:04): I got a little bit of a different accent than the folks up there in PA. Right?

Jim Zaspel (04:09): A little bit, a little bit, a little bit. So Hey man. So we’re doing a couple of things are coming up. You know, these three individual days, tell folks about what’s in the books for how you’re going to help folks out and get some free training coming up.

Jay Conner (04:26): Yep. So for your subscribers, your followers, Jim, you’ve got quite a network. You can invite all your people to come absolutely for free to three Fridays in a row on real estate virtual training right here on the internet. These three free Fridays are, the first one is going to be May 22nd Friday, May 22nd. And folks, this is not a two hour training per Friday. This is all day 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM Friday, May 22nd is the first one, then Friday, May 29th and then Friday, June the fifth, all these three Fridays are going to be not only how to survive, but how to actually thrive when you’re in the midst of uncertain times. And even when we come out on the little side of Corona virus, there’s always going to be those uncertain times that come around the corner. So in the midst Corona virus on the coming out on the other side, how you can be very successful in real estate investing, whether you’re a seasoned real estate investor or you’re brand new and never done a deal the first Friday, Jim on May 22nd, I’m going to be teaching all day long focusing on private money, how to actually locate the private money and the funding, particularly right now front virus and the consequences of it are still going on.

Jay Conner (05:47): I actually have more private money coming to me without me asking for any money. It’s chasing me and I’m going to be sharing with of your folks that come there to the free Friday, how I actually am raising all this money in the millions without ever asking anybody for money, right?

Jim Zaspel (06:08): Jay That’s incredible! And if I can interrupt and just like a plug for you for a second. So I will say that in my experience personally and people I know you know, one of the biggest things that we’re afraid of. Like what do you say? Right? How do you, how do you ask for the money? But you didn’t even get to do that. And so I’m gonna put a bait hook out there for folks that, you know, Jay has this, I’m going to just use the words magical way of talking about not even asking for talking about private money and then getting it. So you’re in for a super treat. I know you’re going to talk about some of the stuff on that Friday on the 22nd, but I just want to stop right there. That alone is just incredible.

Jay Conner (06:47): Yeah. Well, and in fact, Jim I mean, you know what you’re talking about as well and you can speak to it because you’ve raised a ton of private money yourself.

Jim Zaspel (06:58): Yes, yes. We have several million dollars in private capital all using Jay’s processes and systems. There’s one time I raised, it’s just over half a million bucks at one launch in using Jay’s process. And that happened to be brushed by the group to be with the same private lenders to right now it’s over one and a half million dollars of private money from those same people.

Jay Conner (07:20): That’s awesome. That’s awesome. So that’s the first Friday, May 22nd and then the second Friday, May 29th we’ll be focusing on foreclosures. And here’s what I mean when I say foreclosures. So right now I mean you’re, our country’s starting to open up a little bit, but the foreclosures, people that were in foreclosure but hadn’t gone to their houses and not going to sale you know, when Corona virus was come along. So they put a stay on the foreclosures and there’s no new sales going on. You know, right now and won’t leave for the next few weeks. Well, as my grandmother would say, all they’re doing is saving up spit.

Jim Zaspel (08:03): Yes.

Jay Conner (08:07): That’s stuff ain’t going anywhere. I’ll do that. Then she’s going to be more spit all at one time,

Jim Zaspel (08:11): right? I got to get that one down.

Jay Conner (08:18): Well, you can always count on me to give you a nugget Jim. So you got all these people, there’s going to be this wave of new foreclosures just from the pent up demand. And then on top of that, we got all these millions of people over 30 million people unemployed, laid off. Well, that’s going to create even more foreclosures. So here’s the deal. There’s an affinity on an ever met me or heard me speak, you know, I come from a place of a servant’s heart. Look out for the other person first and you’re not going to have to worry about yourself. So there’s going to be a huge opportunity to serve a lot of people that are going to be having their own crisis. I mean, you talk about the Corona virus crisis, there’s going to be the foreclosure crisis that’s coming up. Are you gonna be able to serve a bunch of people, help them out of their crisis.

Jay Conner (09:13): And in return, I’ll teach you how to create win-win scenarios to where you serve these people and you make a ton of money at the same time in serving these people. That’s the second Friday, the third Friday on June, the 5th, I call it how to locate three private money. So I’m going to be teaching a strategy on that Friday as to how you can actually get funding for a lot of your deals without having to borrow any money. So I’m just going with the teaser to get funding for your deals without borrowing any money. I’m not talking about using your own money either. So that’s going to be free private money on a Friday, June the fifth. And so Jim you know, whenever it’s appropriate, I’ll let you tell people how they can register or maybe there’ll be seen it right here. I don’t know. But if you have not registered folks, I never gonna fill up. Because you are in Jim Zaspel world, you get to come for free, get registered right now.

Jim Zaspel (10:20): That is a huge giveaway. So what I’ll tell you folks who are watching this. The first thing I’ll tell you is I think you can tell from watching that, Jay spent 10 minutes to say hello, is that he truly has a servants heart And more honestly, more importantly for your purposes is he knows what the heck he’s talking about and he’s darn good at it. And most importantly, he’s just, he makes it so doable. And you know, I’ve heard, you know, until we learn something new there’s on-boarding process makes the challenge. Jay makes new stuff, seems so easy and so doable. And just cause he’s so good at himself. So you’re a great hand. So if you got emailed a link to this video, then the way it’s going to work is there’ll be a link to register.

Jim Zaspel (11:03): And again, it’s totally free, Jay’s doing, there’ll be a link to register for these free trainings in that email. And then if this video is on a page on one of my social media pages, it’ll be in the description as well. So check the email if you got an email, if you’re watching the social media check the first comment or the description and the link will be there. So go ahead and click it, cause I don’t know what Jay’s limit is, but obviously because of technology and bandwidth, all those things are. There’s so many people who’ve been fit in a class each day.

Jay Conner (11:30): Thank you so much, Jim, for having me on here. And, you’re going to be joining me, I think on a panel. So you all, not only do you get me, but you get the main man himself and these virtual trainings as well. So I look forward to seeing all of you and Jim at the upcoming virtual trainings. We’ll see you there.

Jim Zaspel (11:50): Awesome, Jay, I really appreciate you doing this folks. Get registered now and I’ll see you soon.

#Jim Zaspel #Real Estate Investing #Free Training #Jay Conner #Private Money Authority

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sugarycloud · 5 years

Text

What Caroline meant to me

Hi. So I haven’t posted in a while, and if I did it was always just fic. Honestly I was planning on never posting on here ever again. I was even for a moment gonna delete everything, cos it felt disrespectful or something to leave all of it up. But I couldn’t, and then I got my blog stats for the week and saw that I’d had over a thousand pageviews, something that hasn’t happened in years. So I felt I had to say something. In case anyone wanted to read it.

Firstly, I am so utterly devastated about Caroline’s death. She was the best person, a beautiful and kind soul, and it’s so tragic and unfair that she thought the only way out was to take her own life. It still doesn’t feel real, and honestly I’m not sure it ever will.

I know there are so many people to blame, the press and the media, and social media, and the CPS. But I don’t want to focus on that, because to me, I’m sad either way, I’m devastated either way. And I don’t have it in me to tunnel all my energy into anger and justice, right now all I have is sadness, deep and complete sadness.

Caroline was so many things to me, she was a crush, and an idol. She was one half of my OTP. She was a person who made me want to believe in myself more, love myself more and give less fucks. She got me into writing. She was the reason I know some of my favourite people in the world. And somehow, she was someone I knew.

I first became a fan of Caroline’s in 2011, like so many of this fandom, because of Carolly, because of Xtra Factor, because, and I still believe this, those two were soulmates, and it was clear as day to all of us.

We watched them and fell in love with them, and they made us so happy, besides when we were yelling at me for being idiots. Caroline was always my favourite out of the two, whether it be because I fancied her and not Olly, or because she had the most infectious personality. She was the type of person I could imagine going to the pub with, someone I’d want to be mates with, because she sparkled.

I started writing fic in 2012 and on it sailed from there, I wrote my last fic in November 2019, seven years of being in her and Olly’s heads, and making up all sorts of happy endings for them. It breaks my heart that they never got one, that Caz never got one.

I first met Caroline on December 1st 2013. She was in a car and she stopped and chatted to me and my friend. The driver kept trying to drive away and she kept telling him to stop. She said she liked my coat, and I got the worst pictures ever. But she was amazing and I was so happy.

I next met her at Viral Tap in 2014. I met Jo and Chris. I gave her a burger necklace(‘Oh my god! This is the best thing anyone’s ever got me! I’m gonna put it on!). We chatted for ages, got much better pictures, and she was so lovely, funny, and genuine.

Then I didn’t see her until during X Factor 2015. I saw her plenty before that, I saw Strictly live, both the actual show and the tour, plus A Night With Olly Murs, and I basically lived at X Factor. But I hadn’t actually met her in a year and a half.

It was her book signing, I was really nervous, she had unfollowed me on Twitter after I drunkenly insulted her boyfriend on there. Course she didn’t remember that. She didn’t remember meeting me before but did after a bit of prompting. We talked about Strictly (‘You won six hundred pounds cos I won Strictly?! *turns to her team* ‘She won 600 pounds cos I won Strictly!) and her book (‘I read it in a day’ ‘What was your favourite bit?’ ‘Any bit with Olly’ ‘Of course’), I kept calling her Caz (‘I love that you call me Caz!) and we took our first selfies. She signed my book ‘Lovely to meet you AGAIN’ and in one for my mum wrote ‘You have a wonderful daughter’.

I saw her at XF soon after that and the first thing she said to me was ‘I’ve met you before!’ before much Olly chat and XF chat and how brilliant she was chat. She always chatted to you like you were her mate, telling us about her mum coming to visit and what Olly got for her birthday(‘A coat and a purse’ ‘What brand?’ ‘Yves Saint Laurent… who needs a boyfriend when you have Olly Murs’) my poor heart could barely handle it.

The weekend of the X Factor final, I got about 5 hours sleep and saw them kiss on the stage, still one of the best weekends of my life.

Next time I saw her was April 2016, outside of BBC, there was 3 of us there and we all talked for ages. I remember saying something, maybe about having met her before, and she went ‘I do know who you are!’, I never worried she didn’t after that. Also thus began the habit of her taking my phone and taking selfies from all the angles whenever I saw her.

Honestly after that it starts to meld together, I served her at work in 2017(‘Oh my god it’s you! I haven’t seen you in ages!’) at her radio show where she was about to get in her car, turned around and saw me and got back out again. There was all the times at Chicago and the one time at stage door for Crazy for You, chatting to her at Aftersun, and even when I was at the back of the room, seeing me, pointing and waving.

The last time I saw her was last year at her River Island launch. It was so nice. There was a big queue to see her and when I got to the front she hugged me and went ‘Hey you’. We were chatting for a while about Olly and how I was seeing Take That a lot right at that moment in time (How many times?’ ‘20’ ’20!!’), I told her I couldn’t afford any of her collection and she went all whispery ‘Don’t worry, I’ll send you some’ (she never actually did but still a very sweet gesture). There was a queue forming behind me so she said she’d catch me a in a bit.

I sat down on the sofa and after a while, she came and sat down next to me (‘Is it just me and a load of Instagrammers?’ ‘Yeah’ ‘Do you know anyone else here?’ ‘No’). We took some more pictures (‘Oh my god the camera on your phone is so good’) and chatted about Love Island and the rest. Eventually I left after the place emptied out and she had to go do some promotion pictures. I can’t believe it’s the last time I ever got to talk to her, I’m so glad it was so good. I have not one bad memory of meeting her and I will treasure every second of it all always.

She wasn’t my friend, but she knew me, she followed me on Twitter and Instagram, and always asked about my work (she always remembered where I worked after I served her) and how I was. She knew me and I knew her. I always used to say ‘We’re not friends but we’re friendly’ when people at work would take the piss and call her my mate.

My work, honestly, have been so understanding. I found out at work, someone took me aside and told me, and took me home. I wasn’t in for 4 days and when I did go back I couldn’t stop crying. I cried on so many people. But they got it, they all got it, how much she meant to me and how much I loved her and cared about her and knew her. They didn’t dismiss it just because she was famous, they understood completely.

Honestly, ever since Caz died, I have never known such kindness and love in all my life. I had about 200 messages from people the night it happened, and people who have been checking how I am every day. I couldn’t sleep for a week, I’m still struggling to eat, and there are so many tears. But having so much support and being surrounded by love has helped so much. I only wish Caz had known how loved she was, I hope she did know, that she was so so loved by so so many. I can’t stop thinking about her family, about Jo and Chris, and her friends, poor poor Lou, and Sam, and Olly. I can’t even imagine how they feel, and I can do nothing but hope beyond anything that eventually they will be ok.

It’s hard as a person who doesn’t believe in heaven or the afterlife to find any solace in this. People find comfort in that, that’s she ‘in a better place’ and ‘at peace now’ and ‘looking down on us’. I get that helps people, but to me, there’s no better place, the place for her was here. And now all we have is memories, and thinking of her sad and alone, and it breaks my heart time and time again.

Caz was an amazing person, she was kind and generous and funny. She had a good word to say about everybody and no matter who you were, treated you just the same. She wore her heart on her sleeve, loved so deeply, felt everything so much. She was one of a kind, a good soul and the most beautiful person, inside and out and this world is a poorer one for her no longer being in it.

So what did Caroline mean to me? She meant the absolute world, and I’m gonna miss her so very very much.

#so i'm never posting again after this #if you want to talk send me your twitter or insta @#love to you all #i hope everyone is ok as can be

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jbuffyangel · 5 years

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Entertainment Weekly Arrow Article

We never get any big articles of Arrow, so yeah I am posting the whole damn thing. There were some interesting little tidbits and of course discussion around Emily Bett Rickards’ exit. Is it wrong that I am low key pissed that of course Arrow gets the cover of EW after she leaves? Is it also wrong that while I’m happy Arrow is getting some attention, I’m annoyed it wasn’t an Olicity cover? Cuz that’s where I am at. (X)

How Arrow saved the TV superhero — and why it had to end

As 'Arrow' prepares for the end, Stephen Amell and the producers reflect on its origin story and preview the 'Crisis'-bound eighth and final season.

Stephen Amell is dreading the eighth and final season of Arrow, though you wouldn’t know it on this hot, sunny July day in Los Angeles. Wearing Green Arrow’s new suit, the CW star seems perfectly at ease as he strikes heroic pose after heroic pose on a dimly lit stage. But once he’s traded heavy verdant leather for a T-shirt, jeans, and baseball cap, his guard drops and the vulnerability starts to creep in as he contemplates Arrow’s last 10 episodes, which was set to begin production in Vancouver a week after the EW photoshoot took place and premieres Oct. 15.

“I’m very emotional and melancholy, but it’s time,” Amell — who is featured on the new cover of Entertainment Weekly — says as he takes a sip from a pint of Guinness. “I’m 38 years old, and I got this job when I was 30. I’d never had a job for more than a year. The fact that I’ve done this for the better part of a decade, and I’m not going to do it anymore, is a little frightening.”

Developed by Greg Berlanti, Marc Guggenheim, and Andrew Kreisberg, Arrow debuted in the fall of 2012. The DC Comics series follows billionaire playboy Oliver Queen (Amell), who, after years away, returned to now–Star City with one goal: to save his home-town as the hooded bow-and-arrow vigilante who would become known as Green Arrow (it would take him four seasons to assume the moniker). What began as a solo crusade eventually grew to include former soldier John Diggle (David Ramsey), quirky computer genius Felicity Smoak (Emily Bett Rickards), lawyer-turned-hero Laurel Lance/Black Canary (Katie Cassidy Rodgers), and the rest of Team Arrow. Together they’ve defended their city from a host of threats — dark archers, megalomaniacal magicians, and the occasional metahuman — while Lost-like flashbacks revealed what Oliver endured in the five years he was away, first shipwrecked and then honing his skills around the world to become someone else, something else.

The premiere gave The CW its most-watched series debut since 2009’s The Vampire Diaries. But before they launched Arrow, Berlanti and Guggenheim had to suffer through a failure: 2011’s Green Lantern, starring Ryan Reynolds. The duo co-wrote the script but lost creative control of the film, which flopped. So when Warner Bros. Television president Peter Roth approached them in late 2011 about developing a Green Arrow show, they were wary. After much deliberation, Berlanti and Guggenheim agreed, on the condition that they maintain control. Says Guggenheim, “As long as we succeed or fail on our own work, and not someone else’s work then maybe this is worth a shot.”

Their take on the Emerald Archer — who made his DC Comics debut in 1941 — was noteworthy from the beginning. Taking cues from films like The Dark Knight and The Bourne Identity and series like Homeland, the writers imagined a dark, gritty, and grounded show centered on a traumatized protagonist. “As we were breaking the story, we made very specific commitments to certain tonal things, such as ‘At the end of act 1, he has his hands around his mother’s throat.’ And, ‘At the end of act 2, he kills a man in cold blood to protect his secret,’ ” says Guggenheim.

A hero committing murder? That was practically unheard of then. Having Oliver suit up in a veritable superhero costume by the pilot’s climax was radical too. Sure, the Marvel Cinematic Universe was deep into Phase One when the producers were developing Arrow, but TV was traditionally more apprehensive about comic books. Smallvillefamously had a “no tights, no flights” rule and only introduced superhero costumes in the last years of its 10-season run, and there weren’t any masked avengers running around NBC’s Heroes or ABC’s No Ordinary Family, the latter produced by Berlanti (Let’s not even mention NBC’s The Cape, which was essentially dead on arrival and never did get its six seasons and a movie). But Arrow not only fully committed to the idea of someone dressing up like Robin Hood to fight crime with a bow and arrow, it introduced a second costumed rogue, the Huntress (Jessica De Gouw), in episode 7.

“It’s just comic book to the extreme and the fans seem to really love it,” says Batwomanshowrunner Caroline Dries, a former writer on Smallville. “They still maintain it very grounded, but it’s very different with everyone in costumes. The appetite for superheroes has changed in my mind in terms of like they just want the literal superhero [now].”

Not that the team wasn’t meticulous about creating Green Arrow’s cowl. “We had to have so many conversations to get it approved, but that’s why we got [Oscar winner] Colleen Atwood [Memoirs of a Geisha] at the time to [design] the suit,” says Berlanti. “We were determined to show we could do on TV what they were doing in the movies every six months.”

“It’s really easy to make a guy with a bow and arrow look silly. We sweated every detail,” says Guggenheim, who also recalls how much effort it took to perfect Oliver’s signature growl. “I actually flew up to Vancouver. On a rooftop during reshoots on [episode 4], Stephen and I went through a variety of different versions of, basically, ‘You have failed this city,’ with different amounts of how much growl he’s putting into his performance. [We] recorded all that, [I went] back to Los Angeles, and then sat with the post guys playing around with all the different amounts of modulation.”

That process took eons compared to the unbelievably easy time the team had casting Arrow’s title role. In fact, Amell was the first person to audition for the role. “It was Stephen’s intensity. He just made you believe he was that character,” says Guggenheim, recalling Amell’s audition. “We had crafted Oliver to be this mystery box character, and Stephen somehow managed to find this balance between being totally accessible in a way you would need a TV star to be, but he’s still an enigma.” After his first reading, Amell remembers being sent outside for a short time before being brought back into the room to read for a larger group: “I called [my manager], and I go, ‘I know this is not how it’s supposed to work, but I just got that job.’”

In the first season, the show’s chief concerns were maintaining both the “grounded and real” tone and the high quality of the stunts, and investing the audience in Oliver’s crusade. Beyond that, though, there wasn’t much of an over-arching plan, which allowed the show to naturally evolve — from introducing more DC characters, such as Deathstroke (Manu Bennett) and Roy Harper (Colton Haynes), sooner than they initially intended (the shot of Deathstroke’s mask in the pilot was meant as a harmless Easter egg), to promoting Emily Bett Rickards’ Felicity from a one-off character in the show’s third episode to a series regular in season 2 and eventually Oliver’s wife. Even the whole idea of a Team Arrow — which, over time, added Oliver’s sister Thea (Willa Holland), Rene Ramirez/Wild Dog (Rick Gonzalez) and Dinah Drake/Black Canary (Juliana Harkavy) — was the result of the writers allowing the best ideas to guide the story. “Greg used to say all the time, ‘You have a hit TV show until you don’t, so don’t save s—,’ ” says Amell.

Also not planned: Arrow spawning an entire shared universe. “We went on record a lot of times during the premiere of the pilot saying, ‘No superpowers, no time travel.’ But midway through season 1, Greg started to harbor a notion of doing the Flash,” says Guggenheim. “I’m a very big believer that it’s great to have a plan, but I think when it comes to creating a universe, the pitfall is that people try to run before they can walk. The key is, you build it show by show.” And so they did. First, they introduced The Flash star Grant Gustin’s Barry Allen in the two-part midseason finale of Arrow’s second season. From there, Supergirl took flight in 2015, then DC’s Legends of Tomorrow in 2016, and Batwoman is due this fall. “It’s like the hacking of the machete in the woods and then you look back and you’re like, ‘Oh, there’s a path,” says executive producer and Berlanti Productions president Sarah Schechter. But even though Arrowis the universe’s namesake, Amell doesn’t concern himself with the sibling series outside of the now-annual crossovers. “I never think about any of the other shows,” he says. “I want all of them to do great, but they’re not my responsibility. My responsibility is Arrow, and to make sure everyone from the cast to the crew are good.” His sentiments are seconded by Flash’s Gustin: “I don’t understand how he does it — his schedule that he maintains with working out, the conventions he goes to, the passion he has for it, and the love he shows towards fans. He’s always prepared. He cares more about that show being high quality than anybody else on the set.”

That said, the universe’s expansion precipitated what is widely considered to be Arrow’s best season, the fifth one. After focusing on magic in season 4, the show returned to its street-crime roots as part of “a concerted effort to play not just to our strengths but what made the shows unique,” Guggenheim says of balancing their four super-series in 2016. “Because Arrow was the longest-running Arrowverse show, we were able to do something that none of the other shows could do, which is have a villain who was basically born out of the events of season 1,” he explains of introducing Adrian Chase/Prometheus (Josh Segarra), whose criminal father was killed by Oliver. “That gave the season a resonance.”

It was midway through season 6 when Amell realized he was ready to hang up Oliver Queen’s hood. “It was just time to move on,” the actor says of pitching that Oliver leave the series at the end of season 7. “My daughter is turning six in October, and she goes to school in L.A., and my wife and I want to raise her [there].” Berlanti persuaded him to return for one final season, which the producers collectively decided would be the end. “We all felt in our gut it was the right time,” says Berlanti. Adds Schechter, “It’s such a privilege to be able to say when something’s ending as opposed to having something just ripped away.”

But there’s one integral cast member who won’t be around to see Arrow through its final season. This spring, fans were devastated to learn Rickards had filmed her final episode—bringing an end to Olicity. “They’re such opposites. I think that’s what draws everyone in a little bit,” showrunner Beth Schwartz says of Oliver and Felicity’s relationship. “You don’t see the [love story of] super intelligent woman and the sort of hunky, athletic man very often. She’s obviously a gorgeous woman but what he really loves is her brain.” For his part, Amell believes the success of both Felicity and Olicity lies completely with Rickards’ performance. “She’s supremely talented and awesome and carved out a space that no one anticipated. I don’t know that show works if we don’t randomly find her,” says Amell, adding that continuing the series without Team Arrow’s heart is “not great. Arrow, as you know it, has effectively ended. It’s a different show in season 8.” And he’s not exaggerating.

The final season finds Oliver working for the all-seeing extra-terrestrial the Monitor (LaMonica Garrett) and trying to save the entire multiverse from a cataclysmic event. “[We’re] taking the show on the road, really getting away from Star City. Oliver is going to be traveling the world, and we’re going to go to a lot of different places,” says Guggenheim. “Every time I see Oliver and the Monitor, it’s like, ‘Okay, we are very far from where we started.’ But again, that means the show has grown and evolved.” Adds Schwartz, “This is sort of his final test because it’s greater than Star City.” Along the way, he will head down memory lane, with actor Colin Donnell, who played Oliver’s best friend Tommy Merlyn in season 1, and Segarra’s Adrian Chase making appearances. “Episode 1 is an ode to season 1, and episode 2 is an ode to season 3,” teases Amell. “We’re playing our greatest hits.”

But season 8 is not just about building toward a satisfying series finale. “Everything relates to what’s going to happen in our crossover episode, which we’ve never done before,” says Schwartz. Spanning five hours and airing this winter, “Crisis on Infinite Earths” will be the biggest crossover yet and may see Oliver perish trying to save the multiverse from destruction, if the Monitor’s prophecy is to be believed. “Oliver [is told] he’s going to die, so each episode in the run-up to ‘Crisis’ has Oliver dealing with the various stages of grief that come with that discovery,” says Guggenheim. “So the theme really is coming to terms, acceptance.”

If there’s one person who has made his peace with Oliver’s fate, it’s Amell. “Because he’s a superhero with no superpowers, I always felt he should die — but he may also not die,” says Amell, who actually found out what the show’s final scene would be at EW’s cover shoot. “I cried as [Marc Guggenheim] was telling me. There are a lot of hurdles to get over to make that final scene.” Get this man some more Guinness!

#arrow #arrow season 8 #stephen amell #marc guggenheim #arrow interviews #oliver queen #olicity #emily bett rickards #felicity smoak #arrow spoilers #spoiler theoretical

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creativity-is-rebellion · 4 years

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Top 10 Favourite TV Shows I Have Seen (So Far)

I’ve done a few of these lists for film and music now, so I thought I would turn my attention to the small screen. The funny thing about these lists is that they may not represent an entirely accurate picture of what they intend to illuminate upon, but rather what comes to one’s mind when they are being compiled. In saying that, all of the below TV series definitely stand somewhere on my lengthy favourites list. So, here we go:

True Detective, Season One (2014)

It’s been said by others before me, but Season One of True Detective is without a doubt a near-perfect blend of narrative, dialogue, and cinematography, arguably the best in the last 20 years or so of crime shows. The Southern Gothic and Cosmic horror elements are present in the decay of the surroundings, the extravagantly decorated victims, and the sinister antagonists. This is juxtaposed with the world-weary detective trope, which switches between present-day interviews with the show’s two protagonists and flashbacks to where the narrative of the season began back in 1995, with the discovery of a body that has been placed in some kind of ritual tableau. Both Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey do a fine job playing the protagonist detectives on the case, but the complexity of McConaughey’s Rustin Cohle definitely steals the show, so much so that his performance re-launched his career (known at the time as the McConaissance). It’s a lot more terrifying than your typical detective series, borrowing a lot of concepts from philosophers, such as Nietzsche, and has an overall depressing and nihilistic vibe. But these elements, in my opinion, just add to its ingenuity and watchability. 10/10.

Dead Like Me (2003-2004)

Ok, so this show is now a cult classic, but at the time it didn’t get enough viewers, so there were only two seasons. I was one of the people who didn’t watch it until many years after its initial run. The renewed interest in the series even spawned a movie version in 2009, six years after the series came out. The premise is simple enough; a young, sardonic girl dies in an accident, and now she, along with a few other wrongfully-dead individuals, need to help a certain amount of people cross-over before being allowed to finally go through the pearly gates themselves. But the series approaches the plot in a unique manner, adding heart to the characters, and being appropriately funny, deep, and interesting when it needs to be. There is a reason it is now a cult classic. 10/10.

Mindhunter (2017-2019)

Ah, the show that tells the story of how profiling at the FBI began, without naming any real-life FBI agents, but portraying hauntingly accurate versions of the serial killers that helped shape the system. I preferred the first season, even if Holden Ford, the main character, at times, appeared just as creepy as the monsters he was interviewing. The freaky-deaky sex scenes in the first season were kinda unnecessary, in my opinion, and took away from the main plot. It was enough to hear about the sexually-deviant acts of the sadistic killers being retold during interviews, and, even though it was meant to show the effects these stories were having on Holden, it still wasn’t needed. I also hated his bitch of a girlfriend. But other than that, the plot moves along at an interesting pace, with an adequate amount of foreboding that should be there when you fill up your days interviewing homicidal psychopaths. The second season took to long to appear in the world of Netflix, where audiences have the attention span of goldfishes, and was over-ambitious in its introduction of more serial killers than its predecessor, and jumping ahead too much in the timeline. I think that, since the first season, it has been interesting the way they start some of their episodes with the exploits of then-uncaught Dennis Rader, or the BTK (Bind, Torture, Kill) Killer, but, because there will be no more seasons, we will not see the ending of this plot. Also, in the second season, the plot about Bill Tench’s boy, and Dr. Wendy Carr’s love-life also took away from the plot. It seems that every time they delve into any of the main characters’ personal lives, they veer wildly off-track. They also could have found a more interesting serial killer to track than the Atlanta Child Murderer Wayne Williams, or could have done it differently. The audience agrees with this, obviously, because there will be no third season. Boy, it sounds like I was super-negative in this review, but I swear, I am a fan, if only for the interesting premise, excellent character portrayals, and creepy atmosphere. 8/10.

Dexter (2006-2013)

Fellow Dexter fans, repeat after me: We choose to ignore the ending. We choose to ignore the ending. We choose to ignore the ending. Sigh. Feel better? Good. Moving on. Dexter, the premise of a serial killer who only kills bad guys, as sketched out originally in Jeff Lindsay’s books (the novels for which the TV series was based upon), was, in 2006, a delightfully refreshing addition to Showtime’s prime-time slot set. In spite of what others thought, my favourite character besides Dexter was his sister Deb, played marvellously by Jennifer Carpenter. After Rita’s sadly horrific death at the end of Season 5 at the hands of the Trinity Killer (the best antagonist of the entire series), the quality of the show tumbled steeply downhill, but not enough for me to stop watching. 8/10.

American Horror Story (2011-Current)

I’ve enjoyed all nine seasons of American Horror Story, for its scares, and even for, at times, the sheer ludicrousness and campy acting. The best seasons, of course, include Jessica Lange, and no season to date has eclipsed the first two, but I like how there is a connected universe with each addition to the anthology. I am a person that enjoys a side-helping of Easter eggs and foreshadowing in my TV series, and AHS provides just that. Season 1 will always be the best for being the one that started it all, and Season 2 is a masterpiece. After that, my rankings are 5, 3, 4, 8, 6, 9 and 7. The latter seasons tend to follow a trend of peaking midway through, before skulking toward lukewarm endings. But the sheer existence of this show pleases the horror buff in me, so I will never tire of it. I can’t wait until October to see what they have in store for Season 10. 8/10.

Freaks and Geeks (1999)

Judd Apatow’s foray into the politics of high school in the early-1980s only lasted one season, but what a season it was. Freaks and Geeks introduced 16-year-old Lindsay Weir, who, after her grandmother’s death, is sick of being the brainy kid and wants to hang out with the freaks and finally be cool, sometimes with hilarious or heartwarming results. There is also her geeky freshman brother, Sam, and his equally awkward friends who run along as side-plots and occasionally provide the moral foil to the overarching plot of an episode. With a stellar cast, most of whom went on to even greater things, such as Linda Cardellini, Seth Rogen, and James Franco, Freaks and Geeks is more real than most teen dramas, and has rightfully developed a cult following in the years since the show’s cancellation. 9/10.

Twin Peaks (1990-1991, then again in 2017)

Ahead of its time, a pioneer

American Gothic (1995-1996)

This is a forgotten horror gem of the mid-90s that kick-started Sarah Paulson’s career long before AHS, and Gary Cole was electric as crooked cop Sheriff Buck exerting evil supernatural influence over a small god-fearing town in the South. I first saw this show when I was 10, and it scared the crap out of me. The senseless murder of Merlyn Temple at the hands of Cole’s aforementioned sheriff haunted me years afterward.

Community (2009-2015)

In the first few seasons, Dan Harmon’s hilarious comedy, Community, starts off normally enough, centring around a lawyer (Joel McHale’s Jeff Winger) who is exposed as having a fake degree, and is required to attend community college to obtain the proper credentials to be re-admitted into the bar. When he forms a study group, initially with the goal to convince the girl he has a crush on (Britta Perry, played by Gillian Jacobs), to go out with him, they all become fast friends and partake in many crazy exploits while studying at Greendale, including a dark parallel universe, which has evil versions of each character. With a stellar ensemble cast, including Donald Glover of Childish Gambino fame, and Chevy Chase, who is still hilarious in his seventies, this show is must-see television. Stream it today. 10/10.

The Good Place (2016-2019)

The ending made me sad.

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arrowdaily · 5 years

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Stephen Amell is dreading the eighth and final season of Arrow, though you wouldn’t know it on this hot, sunny July day in Los Angeles. Wearing Green Arrow’s new suit, the CW star seems perfectly at ease as he strikes heroic pose after heroic pose on a dimly lit stage. But once he’s traded heavy verdant leather for a T-shirt, jeans, and baseball cap, his guard drops and the vulnerability starts to creep in as he contemplates Arrow’s last ten episodes, which was set to begin production in Vancouver a week after the EW photoshoot took place and premieres October 15.

“I’m very emotional and melancholy, but it’s time,” Amell—who is featured on the new cover of Entertainment Weekly—says as he takes a sip from a pint of Guinness. “I’m thirty-eight years old, and I got this job when I was thirty. I’d never had a job for more than a year. The fact that I’ve done this for the better part of a decade, and I’m not going to do it anymore, is a little frightening.”

Developed by Greg Berlanti, Marc Guggenheim, and Andrew Kreisberg, Arrow debuted in the fall of 2012. The DC Comics series follows billionaire playboy Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell), who, after years away, returned to now–Star City with one goal: to save his hometown as the hooded bow-and-arrow vigilante who would become known as Green Arrow (it would take him four seasons to assume the moniker). What began as a solo crusade eventually grew to include former soldier John Diggle (David Ramsey), quirky computer genius Felicity Smoak (Emily Bett Rickards), lawyer-turned-hero Laurel Lance/Black Canary (Katie Cassidy-Rodgers), and the rest of Team Arrow. Together they’ve defended their city from a host of threats—dark archers, megalomaniacal magicians, and the occasional metahuman—while Lost-like flashbacks revealed what Oliver endured in the five years he was away, first shipwrecked and then honing his skills around the world to become someone else, something else.

The premiere gave the CW its most-watched series debut since 2009’s The Vampire Diaries. But before they launched Arrow, Berlanti and Guggenheim had to suffer through a failure: 2011’s Green Lantern, starring Ryan Reynolds. The duo co-wrote the script but lost creative control of the film, which flopped. So when Warner Bros. TV president Peter Roth approached them in late 2011 about developing a Green Arrow show, they were wary. After much deliberation, Berlanti and Guggenheim agreed, on the condition that they maintain control. Says Guggenheim, “As long as we succeed or fail on our own work, and not someone else’s work then maybe this is worth a shot.”

Their take on the Emerald Archer—who made his DC Comics debut in 1941—was noteworthy from the beginning. Taking cues from films like The Dark Knight and The Bourne Identity and series like Homeland, the writers imagined a dark, gritty, and grounded show centered on a traumatized protagonist. “As we were breaking the story, we made very specific commitments to certain tonal things, such as ‘At the end of act one, he has his hands around his mother’s throat.’ And, ‘At the end of act two, he kills a man in cold blood to protect his secret,’” says Guggenheim.

A hero committing murder? That was practically unheard of then. Having Oliver suit up in a veritable superhero costume by the pilot’s climax was radical too. Sure, the Marvel Cinematic Universe was deep into Phase One when the producers were developing Arrow, but TV was traditionally more apprehensive about comic books. Smallville famously had a “no tights, no flights” rule and only introduced superhero costumes in the last years of its ten-season run, and there weren’t any masked avengers running around NBC’s Heroes or ABC’s No Ordinary Family, the latter produced by Berlanti (let’s not even mention NBC’s The Cape, which was essentially dead on arrival and never did get its six seasons and a movie). But Arrow not only fully committed to the idea of someone dressing up like Robin Hood to fight crime with a bow and arrow, it introduced a second costumed rogue, the Huntress (Jessica De Gouw), in episode 7.

“It’s just comic book to the extreme and the fans seem to really love it,” says Batwoman showrunner Caroline Dries, a former writer on Smallville. “They still maintain it very grounded, but it’s very different with everyone in costumes. The appetite for superheroes has changed in my mind in terms of like they just want the literal superhero [now].”

In the first season, the show’s chief concerns were maintaining both the “grounded and real” tone and the high quality of the stunts, and investing the audience in Oliver’s crusade. Beyond that, though, there wasn’t much of an over-arching plan, which allowed the show to naturally evolve—from introducing more DC characters, such as Deathstroke (Manu Bennett) and Roy Harper (Colton Haynes), sooner than they initially intended (the shot of Deathstroke’s mask in the pilot was meant as a harmless Easter egg), to promoting Emily Bett Rickards’ Felicity from a one-off character in the show’s third episode to a series regular in season 2 and eventually Oliver’s wife. Even the whole idea of a Team Arrow—which, over time, added Oliver’s sister Thea (Willa Holland), Rene Ramirez/Wild Dog (Rick Gonzalez) and Dinah Drake/Black Canary (Juliana Harkavy)—was the result of the writers allowing the best ideas to guide the story. “Greg used to say all the time, ‘You have a hit TV show until you don’t, so don’t save s—,’” says Amell.

Also not planned: Arrow spawning an entire shared universe. “We went on record a lot of times during the premiere of the pilot saying, ‘No superpowers, no time travel.’ But midway through season 1, Greg started to harbor a notion of doing the Flash,” says Guggenheim. “I’m a very big believer that it’s great to have a plan, but I think when it comes to creating a universe, the pitfall is that people try to run before they can walk. The key is, you build it show by show.” And so they did. First, they introduced The Flash star Grant Gustin’s Barry Allen in the two-part midseason finale of Arrow’s second season. From there, Supergirl took flight in 2015, then DC’s Legends of Tomorrow in 2016, and Batwoman is due this fall. “It’s like the hacking of the machete in the woods and then you look back and you’re like, ‘Oh, there’s a path,” says executive producer and Berlanti Productions president Sarah Schechter. But even though Arrow is the universe’s namesake, Amell doesn’t concern himself with the sibling series outside of the now-annual crossovers. “I never think about any of the other shows,” he says. “I want all of them to do great, but they’re not my responsibility. My responsibility is Arrow, and to make sure everyone from the cast to the crew are good.” His sentiments are seconded by The Flash’s Gustin: “I don’t understand how he does it—his schedule that he maintains with working out, the conventions he goes to, the passion he has for it, and the love he shows towards fans. He’s always prepared. He cares more about that show being high quality than anybody else on the set.”

It was midway through season 6 when Amell realized he was ready to hang up Oliver Queen’s hood. “It was just time to move on,” the actor says of pitching that Oliver leave the series at the end of season 7. “My daughter is turning six in October, and she goes to school in LA, and my wife and I want to raise her [there].” Berlanti persuaded him to return for one final season, which the producers collectively decided would be the end. “We all felt in our gut it was the right time,” says Berlanti. Adds Schechter, “It’s such a privilege to be able to say when something’s ending as opposed to having something just ripped away.”

If there’s one person who has made his peace with Oliver’s fate, it’s Amell. “Because he’s a superhero with no superpowers, I always felt he should die—but he may also not die,” says Amell, who actually found out what the show’s final scene would be at EW’s cover shoot. “I cried as [Marc Guggenheim] was telling me. There are a lot of hurdles to get over to make that final scene.” Get this man some more Guinness!

#stephen amell #beth schwartz #marc guggenheim #greg berlanti #cast #s8 #interviews #news

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amplesalty · 5 years

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Day 12 - Chillerama (2011)

The last drive in...

As is tradition around these parts, we like to toss in the odd anthology film just for some variety. Now, it has been a while since we properly covered one since the last few I watched were in that blind period where I’d be watching stuff but not blogging due to laziness, namely Trick ‘r Treat, V/H/S and Tales from the Darkside. Between those and early entries like Creepshow I/II/III and the Twilight Zone movie, I feel like I’ve hit upon the bigger names of this sub-genre. I think the other big one would be Tales from the Crypt, which occupies this space in time between the comic and the TV show. I will freely admit, I’m watching this for one reason alone which we will get to.

Things start with a guy digging up a corpse and getting his dick bitten off before exclaiming that he’s ‘late for work’. I suppose that’s one way to avoid answering any awkward questions in the office. ‘Good weekend?’ ‘What did you get up to last night?’. No one ever asks you what you did before you came to work, clearly the best time to get your necrophilia ways in.

I don’t get the significance of the blue blood though, other than maybe it standing out because it’s so unique? It’s not like they’re trying to tone down the movie or anything, doing a Mortal Kombat turning the blood grey and calling it sweat. We will see later that this movie gets very graphic.

Turns out he works at a drive in movie theatre that is shutting down, tonight being the last night. This serves as the framing device to tie all the other stories together, cutting back to the drive in between segments to catch up with some of the main characters.

Up first is ‘Wadzilla’ the story of Miles, whose swimmers aren’t so strong if you know what I’m saying. His doctor, played by Ray Wise, prescribes him some new medicine that hasn’t been approved for market yet but he would make a good test case for. It wont help him make any more sperm but it will give what he does have a little more pep.

Or in actuality, cause him to grab his dick everytime he so much as feels the slightest arousal and have a look of the guy from the ‘Jizz in my Pants’ video.

Turns out that new medicine is causing his sperm to grow massively. Look at the size of that thing, must be like passing a kidney stone. The good doc advises he cease taking the pills and, should this happen again, he needs to jerk off as soon as possible to get the little bleeder out.

Unfortunately, Miles heads out on a blind date and catches sight of his date’s cleavage so has to rush to her bathroom to rub one out. What ensues is a chaotic scene in which the released sperm starts scurrying around the room like a lost gerbil and Miles trying to stop it. He even wrenches the shower curtain off the wall and tries to harpoon the gooey troublemaker like he’s Captain Ahab. Well at least we avoided that horrible trope of the date blocking the toilet.

Or so I thought, as Miles tries flushing his wasted offspring, only for it to cause the toilet to backup and spew water everywhere. Miles’ date wonders just what the hell is going on in there, only to get attacked by the beast which has even spawned teeth by this point. It even tries to fulfil it’s destiny of getting inside her, only for Miles to intervene and launch it out of a window.

This sperm doesn’t stop growing though as it starts to go on a rampage through the city like it’s the T-Rex is Jurassic Park 2, starting by eating this Worzel Gummidge looking hobo.

Pretty soon it’s destroying buildings and the army have been called in. But even they can’t stop it from what it wants to do...

Hump the Statue of Liberty.

It even has fantasies of the statue doing a sexy dance. LADY LIBERTY’S TWERKING, MAGGLE!

This calls for General Bukkake, played by Eric Roberts, to call in an airstrike which destroys the creature and the statue, even if that means he ends up living up to his name in the resulting explosion.

Our two love birds even get to finally share a kiss, though it’s a lot closer to snowballing under these circumstances.

Blocked toilet tropes aside, my most hated of tropes, this one was pretty fun. Definitely has that 50’s b-movie quality down with some fake film grain, green screen and practical monster effects.

Meanwhile, back at the drive in, dickless the clown is in the store room and the implication is that he’s jerking off. But I don’t know what he’d exactly be jerking off at that point except a small stump. The only other thought is that he’s trying to clean the wound or something but there’s a definite jerking motion going on. Either way, he sticks his hand in the popcorn butter so he can rub it where his junk used to be. Unfortunately for everyone intending to eat that night, one of the staff comes in to restock and chooses that can. This doesn’t end well.

Segment two is ‘I was a Teenage Werebear’, Werebear being a sub-genre I feel Hollywood has not explored sufficiently. The best way I can describe this one is Grease if it was written by Chuck Tingle, with some supernatural elements thrown in. Pounded In The Butt By My Closeted Lust For The Local Greaser Thugs Who Happen To Be Werebears. Just a strange mix of musical, horror, LGBT and beach movie.

Cosplay James Dean and his girlfriend here are in the middle of song when she promptly gets run over and surprisingly not killed. She’s just left in this sort of half brain dead state for the rest of the segment where she’s spouting random nonsense. This isn’t all bad as it lets him focus on his real love, Cosplay Albert Wesker.

What he doesn’t know is that leather daddy here is a werebear and, during a wrestling match, he gets bitten on the ass and infected with the werebear curse. There’s worse things you can be infected with through the ass. This does lead though to a homo-erotic argument cum slowdance set to the remarkably catchy ‘Love Bit Me on the Ass’ sung in a 1950/60’s rock and roll style.

But it’s a love that cannot last and Ricky knows he has to save the good people the only way you can stop a werebear, by sodomising them with a silver pole.

This one is certainly...different, I’ll give it that. I certainly wasn’t expecting a coming of age story dealing with the confusing world of the developing sexuality of the hormonal teenager so kudos to it for pushing some boundries.

Now, onto the reason I picked this one out, ‘The Diary of Anne Frankenstein’. My gosh, what a glorious pun. I should have known just from that that I shouldn’t take this movie seriously so I’m not sure why I was so surprised when it turned out to be a goofball horror comedy but oh well.

I don’t know quite what I was expecting from this but I still feel letdown slightly. It just feels like an excuse to poke fun at Hitler by making him a bit stupid but I feel we already explored this idea quite thoroughly in the Producers. Still, I guess they had to make things up a bit considering this involves creating a Frankenstein monster from the limbs of concentration camp victims. Christ.

It does end with the Monster beating Hitler to death with his own arm before dancing over his decapitated corpse so it does have it’s upsides.

We then get faked out with the next segment ‘Deathication’, a movie so scary it will make you shit. Only, the projector starts playing up and the movie cuts out. I for one am glad because the 30 seconds we see of this was bad enough, I don’t think I could have taken a whole segment of it. Te come to find that the drive in owner is being attacked by dickless who has turned full zombie. Turns out his special brand of butter has contaminated all the popcorn and turned the patrons into zombies as well.

That is to say, randy zombies that engage in a blood orgy that would make the people in Event Horizon blush. People are giving blow jobs to intestines, stump fucking, spit roasting people before tearing them in half and engaging in even more stump fucking.

It feels like someone else wrote this section specifically because it turns into the drive in owner going out in a blaze of glory, bandoliers and weapons strapped to his body as he tries to save the last few kids left alive. All the while he’s just speaking almost exclusively in movie quotes, most notably when he sodomises one of the zombies with his shotgun and invites it to say hello to his little friend. Lot of sodomy in this flick.

I’d say this matches what I’ve come to expect from anthology movies, strong book ends with an indifferent middle. Wadzilla is a cheesy take on the old giant monsters and the zombie outbreak at the end is a bizarre spectacle. If you’re into those Troma type movies, this one is worth looking at.

#Halloween 2019 #Chillerama

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wits-writing · 6 years

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Earth’s Mightiest Retrospective Ep 23: “The Ultron Imperative”

(Directed by Vinton Heuck, Written by Brandon Auman, Original Airdate: June 5, 2011)

As the title implies, this is the second part of this season’s Ultron storyline. A problem with it as a second part comes from how the basic shape this episode’s conflict hues close to the previous one, but with everything Ultron’s plan happening on a global scale. Taking over the computers in Avengers Mansion becomes taking over all the computers for the world’s armed forces, controlling all of Iron Man’s armors rather than just the one Tony’s wearing, and upgrading his body to Ultron-6 so the same weaknesses can’t be exploited twice. If this were the next time seeing Ultron after a longer absence, this could’ve worked. However, this leaves it less like the shifting stakes of the Kang storyline and more like the “Gamma World” storyline, which did the same basic escalation of its villain’s plan.

With that out of the way, there’s plenty to cover in “The Ultron Imperative” as it connects to the greater whole of Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. The team starts the episode still reeling from Thor’s apparent death at Ultron’s hands with the immovable Mjolnir left as a reminder that he can’t be replaced. Hank’s thinking about what could’ve gone wrong with Ultron. Tony tries to alleviate some of his guilt by calling back to how Ultron was in part a remnant of Stark Industries’ days making weapons. Hank won’t let Tony share the guilt for a simple reason, when they based Ultron’s operating system on the human mind they used his. Which could also account for why Ultron couldn’t bring himself to harm Janet last time. As the others discuss the damage done during last episode, compounded by Captain America being hospitalized, they fall under attack by Ultron-possessed Iron Man armors.

The fight with these armors works as an excuse to bring in brief appearances of suits from Iron Man’s comic book history, including the Stealth Armor and Silver Centurion, and another chance for Tony to fight in the Mark I. The Avengers decide the best course of action is for them to split up. Hawkeye and Black Panther will hold off the armors, while Iron Man, Wasp and Hulk go to their enemy’s current location. Ultron’s assault on the world’s military computer networks leads to an encounter with Maria Hill aboard the SHIELD Helicarrier. He needs to get to her since she has something no computer will give him, access codes to SHIELD’s nuclear armory. It’s an easy task for him, since it’s in his core nature to be able to interface with the human mind. The Avengers end up having the bad luck of getting there right as the launch sequence begins.

Thor’s story is the simplest to sum up for the episode. We see him where the previous episode left off, in some mysterious beautiful meadow with Enchantress using her spells to keep him there and accepting her affection. There are a couple brief cuts to him there before he’s able to force himself to remember the truth and demand Enchantress send him back to Earth. She’s enraged at him rejecting her affection and promises to let him go back, but with ominous warning that he’ll have to share Earth’s fate soon enough.

Thor’s return, heralded with an echo of the line “Ultron, we would have words with thee!” from the comics, makes fighting the machine easier for the team. However, Ultron’s done too thorough a job of accounting for the weaknesses that caused his downfall last time. He’s self-repairing so Hulk can’t smash him open again, forcefields to protect from Thor’s lightning, and eliminated the protocol preventing him from hurting Wasp. There’s no way to stop his plan to wipe out all organic life in a massive nuclear strike, until Ant-Man shrinks down and enters the machine’s body. He’s decided to go the Star Trek route and presents Ultron with a logic problem that contradicts his perception of humanities’ imperfections with the fact that Ultron’s core processing will always be based on the human mind, so he’ll always share some of those imperfections no matter how upgraded he becomes. The contradiction does its job and Ultron shuts down. Purging him from the computers he invaded and letting Tony detonate the missiles and disarm their warheads, saving humanity.

Hank is left to be called out by Hill for how none of this would’ve happened if he’d never created Ultron in the first place. Which Hank gives no retort and walks off to live with his guilt over this incident. “The Ultron Imperative” works best when the characters’ stories are progressing, even in slight amounts. Tony and Hank’s talk early in the episode felt like the first time Hank’s let go of his perception of what Tony used to be, probably thanks to seeing his own good intentions with Ultron go horribly wrong. The problem with this being a simple threat escalation from last time doesn’t hurt it too much as a standalone piece, but its an element that sticks out a lot more when you watch them back to back like I did.

The episode ends on Tony and Thor regarding the Enchantress’ threat about what’s coming to Earth. We’ll see exactly what it all means next time as the Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes season one finale storyline begins.

If you like what you’ve read here, please like/reblog or share elsewhere online, follow me on Twitter (@WC_WIT), and consider throwing some support my way at either Ko-Fi.com or Patreon.com at the extension “/witswriting”

#Avengers #Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes #Earth's Mightiest Retrospective #Wit's Writing #TV Review #Marvel Comics #Marvel #superhero tv #superhero animation #animation #comics

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berniesrevolution · 6 years

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WARNING: LONG ARTICLE! (It’s worth it, though)

It’s Time to Give Socialism a Try.” So declared the headline of a Washington Post column in March; one imagines Katharine Graham spitting out her martini. The article, by a twenty-seven-year-old columnist named Elizabeth Bruenig, drew more than 3,000 comments (a typical column gets a few hundred); a follow-up piece, urging a “good-faith argument about socialism,” received nearly as much attention.

By now, the rebirth of socialism in American politics needs little elaboration. Bernie Sanders’s surprisingly strong showing in the 2016 Democratic primary, and his continued popularity, upset just about everyone’s intuition that the term remains taboo. Donald Trump’s victory, meanwhile, made all political truisms seem up for grabs. Polls show that young people in particular view socialism more favorably than they do capitalism. Membership in the Democratic Socialists of America, which has been around since 1982, has grown from about 5,000 to 35,000 since November 2016, and dozens of DSA candidates are running for office around the country. In June, one of them, twenty-eight-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, upset New York City Congressman Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary, knocking off a ten-term incumbent and one of the most powerful Democrats in the House.

The meaning of socialism has always been maddeningly slippery, in part because it has always meant different things to different people. Michael Harrington, one of the founders of the DSA and the most outspoken American socialist of the postwar era, writes on the first page of his 1989 book, Socialism: Past and Future, that socialism is “the hope for human freedom and justice.” By the end of the book, the definition hasn’t gotten much more concrete. Karl Marx himself spent more time critiquing capitalism than describing communism, a habit that subsequent generations of leftists inherited. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said of pornography that, while he couldn’t define it, “I know it when I see it.” Socialism sometimes feels like the inverse: socialists know it when they don’t see it. Bernie has only made things murkier by defining his brand of socialism in terms hardly indistinguishable from New Deal liberalism. “I don’t believe the government should own the corner drugstore or the means of production,” he declared in the fall of 2015, at a speech at Georgetown University, “but I do believe that the middle class and the working families who produce the wealth of America deserve a fair deal.” But while the meaning of American socialism in 2018 begins with Bernie, it doesn’t end there. Every political movement needs an intellectual movement, and when it comes to today’s brand of socialism, it’s the thirty-five-and-under crowd doing much of the heavy lifting.

The American left of center is like a soft mattress, and Bernie is an anvil dropped in the middle: whichever side you’re lying on, gravity pulls you a little closer to him.

Bruenig, the Post columnist, is perhaps the most prominently placed of a small but increasingly visible group of young writers unabashedly advocating for democratic socialism. In writing her attention-grabbing article, she helped elevate a discussion that has long taken place on Twitter. Of course, the relative merits of socialism—and Marxism, Maoism, anarcho-syndicalism, you name it—have been debated in lefty journals and academic circles for a century or more. Members of this new generation, however, aren’t just talking among themselves; they’re trying to take socialism mainstream. And unlike their predecessors, they have reason to think Americans will take their ideas seriously.

They’ve got a double challenge. The first is to convince skeptical Americans that, despite what they may have learned in high school, socialism doesn’t have to mean Stalinism, and it doesn’t lead inexorably to the gulags of Soviet Russia or the starvation of Nicolas Maduro’s Venezuela. The second may be even trickier. They must explain how their version of socialism fits, or doesn’t, into the American political system while showing how, specifically, it is distinct from traditional Democratic Party liberalism. In other words, they must not only defend socialism in the twenty-first century; they must define it.

Nathan Robinson hated Bernie Sanders before he loved him.

It was the fall of 2015. Robinson, a doctoral candidate at Harvard and, at the time, a recent law school graduate, had been steeped in socialist thought since high school, when he discovered the writings of anarchistic socialists like Mikhail Bakunin and Noam Chomsky. Socialism has always been dogged by the question of whether it’s possible to participate in electoral politics while remaining truly radical. Like many leftists, Robinson initially saw Sanders as an example of intolerable compromise.

“Based on Senator Bernie Sanders’s public statements, one of the following things must be true,” he declared on his blog in October 2015. “(1) Bernie Sanders is unaware of the definition of socialism or (2) Bernie Sanders is fully aware of the definition of socialism, and is lying about it.” Sanders, he explained in a follow-up post, was “not asking for public ownership of the major sectors of the economy,” but merely calling for expanded welfare and regulations. “Socialism means an end to capitalism. Bernie Sanders does not want to end capitalism. Bernie Sanders is not a socialist.”

(Nathan Robinson, the editor of Current Affairs, sees socialism not as an economic platform, but as a strong commitment to certain principles.)

Those turned out to be among Robinson’s last blog posts. In January 2016, he launched Current Affairs, a deeply irreverent leftist magazine, with backing from a Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign. Despite being essentially a one-man operation, Current Affairs quickly developed a substantial following on the left thanks to Robinson’s extraordinary writing talent—especially his knack for composing viral takedowns of conservative intellectual hucksters like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson.

By 2017, Robinson seemed to have fully shed his earlier hostility toward Sandersian socialism. Here he was, last summer, writing on the difference between leftism and liberalism: “As Nancy Pelosi said of the present Democratic party: ‘We’re capitalist.’ When Bernie Sanders is asked if he is a capitalist, he answers flatly: ‘No.’ Sanders is a socialist, and socialism is not capitalism, and there is no possibility of healing the ideological rift between the two.”

That’s a long way from calling Sanders an ignoramus or a liar. What happened?

Much has been made of how Sanders has pulled the Democratic mainstream to the left. Presumptive 2020 presidential candidates are racing to capture the Bernie vote by declaring their support for policies—single-payer health care, free college—that once seemed impossibly radical. But Robinson’s evolution on Sanders is representative of a complementary phenomenon that has received less notice: Sanders seems to have also pulled the far left closer to the mainstream. The American left of center is like a soft mattress, and Bernie is an anvil dropped in the middle: whichever side you’re lying on, gravity pulls you a little closer to him.

“Those of us who consider ourselves on the more radical left were kind of disdainful of the political system,” said Robinson. “It was a real minority within Occupy saying you should even contest elections.” Sanders’s tantalizingly strong primary run—roughly equivalent to the MIT basketball team making the Final Four—made some lefties reconsider. For the first time, it seemed as though they could actually win. But winning requires engaging in politics, and politics requires some degree of pragmatism—a recognition that the achievable will always fall short of the ideal. That, in turn, requires giving up the ideological purity of the fringe.

Consider Jacobin magazine, the leading publication of the Millennial far left. It’s a magazine that wears its Marxist affections on its sleeve, with the tagline “Reason in Revolt.” Across the first seventeen issues, by my count, the word “Marx” or its derivations appeared an average of about forty times. But, since then—that is, beginning in summer 2015, when people started feeling the Bern—that’s fallen to only about twelve times on average.

Bhaskar Sunkara founded Jacobin in 2011, while an undergraduate at George Washington University—which now makes him, at age twenty-nine, something like the granddaddy of Millennial socialists. The magazine doesn’t have a strict party line. In May 2015, its website ran dueling pieces on Sanders’s candidacy. One, by Ashley Smith, called Sanders’s campaign an “obstacle” to the formation of a new left. But the other, by Sunkara, argued that the left should welcome Bernie’s run, “even if Sanders’s welfare-state socialism doesn’t go far enough.”

Since then, while Sunkara continues to distinguish in theory between Sandersism and full-blown socialism, Bernie has practically become the magazine’s mascot. A Jacobin Facebook ad, which reads, “It’s not you, it’s capitalism,” features an image of Sanders superimposed over the Jacobin logo. The winter 2016 issue featured a cartoon of Sanders on its cover, alongside Jeremy Corbyn of the British Labour Party. And a health care–focused issue from earlier this year reads as an extended brief in favor of Medicare for All, Bernie’s single-payer plan, featuring a fawning Q&A with Sanders. The editor’s note that opens the issue begins, “When future historians chronicle how Medicare for All was finally won . . .” To cast Medicare for All—not even fully socialized medicine, since it would nationalize insurance, but not providers—in such grandiose terms is a striking shift of the socialist goalposts.

(Bhaskar Sunkara, the editor of Jacobin, is at age twenty-nine something like the granddaddy of Millennial socialists.)

“We push for social democratic reforms in the here and now,” Sunkara told me, though he insisted that his long-term vision remained as radical as ever. “There’s a need to at least dabble a little bit more with strategy and some more policy-oriented stuff, instead of just merely trying to build an opposition movement and mainly talk about theory.”

Not everyone on the left is happy about it. Socialists, the leftist writer Fredrik deBoer wrote last year for Current Affairs, “seem to be falling into the models of the welfare state without really knowing we’re doing it, sliding rightward as we talk about a reinvigorated left, slouching towards liberalism.” At its core, he argued, socialism means moving sectors of the economy into communal ownership—not merely expanding the welfare state, which is social democracy, or perhaps social insurance, but not democratic socialism. Taking issue with an op-ed by Sunkara in the New York Times, deBoer worried that the Jacobin editor’s “alternative” vision “does not look very different from a more humane, more nurturing liberal capitalist state.”

Nathan Robinson, who published deBoer’s piece, and is currently at work on a book about what socialism means to young people, doesn’t deny that his own thinking has become less doctrinaire. “I’ve sort of come around to the idea that ‘socialism,’ the word, should less be used to describe a state-owned or collectively owned economy, and more used to describe a very strong commitment to a certain fundamental set of principles,” he said. “It should be used to describe the position that is horrified by solvable economic depravations, rather than a very specific and narrow way of ordering the economic system.”

For Robinson, the heart of socialism is not this or that policy, but rather the fundamental values that should drive our politics. During the election, Hillary Clinton bragged about having the support of “real billionaires” like Mark Cuban and Michael Bloomberg, in a shot at Trump’s refusal to disclose his finances. Obama, after he left office, was promptly seen vacationing on Richard Branson’s private island and partying with celebrities on billionaire David Geffen’s yacht. That makes someone like Robinson skeptical that the Democratic Party is actually committed to reducing inequality—which, after all, would require taking back some of the wealth of people like David Geffen.

A socialist, in other words, is hungry for a little class warfare. Sunkara, in the intro to his Sanders interview in Jacobin, wrote that while Sanders “may share some of the same policy goals as progressives like Elizabeth Warren,” the difference is his “confrontational vision of social change,” which involves calling out “the millionaires and billionaires” who are hoarding too much wealth.

Or, as Robinson put it in a Current Affairs essay (published under a pen name, a habit he has since dropped) titled “It’s Basically Just Immoral to Be Rich,”

After all, there are plenty of people on this earth who die—or who watch their loved ones die—because they cannot afford to pay for medical care. There are elderly people who become homeless because they cannot afford rent. There are children living on streets and in cars, there are mothers who can’t afford diapers for their babies. All of this is beyond dispute. And all of it could be ameliorated if people who had lots of money simply gave those other people their money. It’s therefore deeply shameful to be rich. It’s not a morally defensible thing to be.

If Sanders and the prospect of political power have made some preexisting radical leftists start talking more like New Deal liberals, the even bigger effect of his prominence has been compositional: by defining socialism in an especially capacious and inviting way, he pulled in people who might otherwise still identify as liberal or progressive. “What Roosevelt was stating in 1944, what Martin Luther King Jr. stated in similar terms twenty years later, and what I believe today, is that true freedom does not occur without economic security,” he said in his Georgetown speech in November 2015. “Democratic socialism means that we must create an economy that works for all, not just the very wealthy.”

This kind of talk is enough to make a certain kind of liberal’s eyes roll clean out of her head. What Democrat doesn’t believe in those things? But Sanders couldn’t have claimed this ideological real estate if his overwhelmingly Millennial supporters didn’t feel that mainstream liberals—embodied by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic establishment that lined up behind her—had abandoned it.

Briahna Gray, a contributing editor at Current Affairs who was recently hired as a politics editor at the Intercept, told me she probably wouldn’t have identified as a socialist in 2015. “The primary in 2016 radicalized me,” she said. Gray, a Harvard Law School–educated lawyer, has made a name for herself by embodying an intersection of identities that’s rare in media: a leftist, Sanders-supporting black woman. That has given her credibility to puncture the “Bernie bro” stereotype and take on Sanders critics who dismiss his movement as insufficiently attuned to racial or gender issues.

(Briahna Gray, an editor at the Intercept, came to socialism more recently. “The primary in 2016 radicalized me,” she said.)

“The most disappointing part of the 2016 primary was centrist candidates convincing Americans that policies that are implemented in wealthy nations all over the world, much less wealthy than ours, are completely a fantasy world,” she said. (Clinton declared during a primary debate that single-payer health care would “never, ever come to pass,” and later ridiculed Sanders in her campaign memoir for essentially promising Americans free ponies.) This was a recurring theme in conversations with young socialists. To their ears, the term “liberal” has come to represent an intolerably unimaginative posture toward politics: less “Yes we can” than “Not so fast.”

Still, the worldview Gray sketched out—“where socialism is used to mitigate the negative effects of capitalism”—sounded like good old Keynesian liberalism. If you’re someone who believes a word should have a fixed meaning over time, or who believes in the importance of the liberal tradition, then this approach—socialism as liberalism, just more liberal—can be deeply exasperating. Sean Wilentz, a historian and longtime friend of the Clintons, captured some of this frustration in a recent essay in the Democracy journal. “[T]here is something essentially dishonest about trying to assimilate the New Deal legacy as ‘socialism,’ ” he wrote, referring to the speech in which Sanders tied himself to Franklin Roosevelt.

There’s no denying that much of what today’s socialists are demanding fits within the liberal tradition of a Ted Kennedy or Paul Wellstone. Advocating something like single-payer health care, but calling yourself a socialist, can look like mere positioning. In fact, the socialist writers I spoke with didn’t really have a problem with that. “Part of it is just a rhetorical claim,” said Ryan Cooper, an opinion writer at the Week who identifies as a democratic socialist. He said that the core aspects of his political agenda are creating a “complete welfare state” and reducing inequality by democratizing ownership of capital. Why use a term as loaded as socialism to describe those ideals? “The point is to say, ‘Here’s a left,’ in a way that just could not possibly be co-opted by Andrew Cuomo types.”

Nathan Robinson echoed the sentiment. “I used to call myself ‘progressive,’ and then the term became used by everybody, and now it doesn’t really mean anything,” he said. “If you’re trying to say, ‘I’m further to the left than Obama and the Clintons,’ you’re stuck!” (Disclosure: I’m friendly with Cooper, who is a former Washington Monthly web editor, and Robinson.)

The divide may owe as much to differences in memory as to ideology. If you’re old enough to remember Democrats getting absolutely creamed in three consecutive presidential elections in the 1980s, then you’re old enough to remember them seemingly needing to pivot to the center to regain power in 1992. They didn’t compromise their core values (they would love a complete welfare state, if only it were possible), they just did what they had to do to win votes from what looked like an overwhelmingly conservative electorate. That included getting cozier with Wall Street and members of the plutocracy to ensure a stream of campaign funding that could rival the right’s.

But if the 1980s are when you were born, that’s not your experience. You remember that the Bill Clinton years were pretty good—but yielded George W. Bush. We got eight years of Obama—then Trump. If cautious, corporate-friendly liberalism gives way time after time to revanchist Republican administrations, is it really doing its job? If liberal figureheads stop even talking about a truly ambitious social safety net, how long should we keep assuming that’s what they want, deep down? Someone under thirty-five years old has no memory of a Democratic presidential nominee, let alone president, to the ideological left of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Meanwhile, that young person is broke: a report by the St. Louis Federal Reserve recently warned that households headed by ’80s babies have 34 percent less wealth than expected based on earlier generations at that age, and are thus “at greatest risk of becoming a ‘lost generation’ for wealth accumulation.”

Telling a young radical that, despite all their sharp disagreements with the liberal mainstream, they’re really a part of it, is a bit like telling a football fan that the Cleveland Browns are actually good because they won some championships in the ’50s and ’60s. It’s fair to wonder how many years a political movement can distance itself from certain principles before it runs the risk of a rival movement claiming them for its own.

(It must be said, too, that “liberal” is an unfortunate term. It belongs to that category of words—like “sanction” or“oversight”—that mean both a thing and its opposite; thus a “classical liberal” is really a free-market conservative. An acute instance of this problem is the even more awful “neoliberal,” which itself has two meanings: one is simply Reagan-Thatcher laissez-faire capitalism; the other, elaborated in the pages of this magazine in the 1980s, is more akin to the “New Democrat” philosophy of Bill Clinton. But these definitions overlap, because Clinton added financial deregulation to the agenda.)

It’s a bit unfair to ask the term “liberal” to cover every political position to the left of conservative and to the right of seizing the factories. The socialist label might be annoying, but it’s useful. Of course, the policies Bernie Sanders and many of his followers are calling for fit within the American liberal tradition, if you go back far enough. But to insist that they therefore owe loyalty to liberalism itself is to get the point of political movements backward. Ask not what you can do for your ideology; ask what your ideology can do for you. If young people increasingly feel like liberalism as it exists today doesn’t represent their values, then perhaps it’s up to liberalism to win them back.

If you think the Millennial socialist movement is only about protesting Clintonism, however, you haven’t been paying close enough attention.

The tricky part of advancing ideas under the banner of “socialism” is threading the needle between two contradictory critiques. The first is an evergreen: that real-world socialism inevitably leads to catastrophe and dictatorship, and only someone totally ignorant of history could deny this. (A representative headline in the National Review: “Despite Venezuela, Socialism Is Still Popular in the U.S.”) The second critique, as we’ve seen, is that self-identified socialists actually aren’t socialists. (David Brooks managed to make both these points at once in a recent column. The idea that capitalism is inherently flawed, he wrote, has “been rejected by most on the left.” Nonetheless, today’s progressive left, drunk on populism and identity politics, “seems likely to bring us the economic authoritarianism of a North American version of Hugo Chávez.”)

Few people seem to be working harder to tackle that challenge than Matt Bruenig, the twenty-nine-year-old founder of the People’s Policy Project, a one-man socialist think tank—and the husband and intellectual teammate of Liz Bruenig, the Washington Post columnist. I met them for lunch near Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C., in April. Former high school sweethearts who met on the debate team in Arlington, Texas, they’re an odd couple, by which I mean both that they are different from each other and that they are individually odd. Matt is tall and scruffy, with a paunch and a patchy beard. Liz is barely five feet tall and had her hair pulled into a tidy bun the day we met. He is hyper-analytical and obsessed with economic policy. She is a religious Catholic—her pro-life views have made her enemies on the left, whereas Matt, she joked, “loves abortion”—and more concerned with philosophical questions than policy specifics. “I make a much more romantic case for socialism than Matt does,” she said.

(Matt Bruenig’s one-man think tank, the People’s Policy Project, specializes in left-wing policy wonkery.)

Matt gained some notoriety in 2016 when he was fired from his part-time blogging gig at Demos, a liberal think tank, after directing a stream of Twitter insults at the head of a different liberal think tank. At the time, Liz was thirty-eight weeks pregnant with their daughter, Jane. I asked what happened after the kerfuffle.

“We went to Twitter boot camp,” Liz said.

“Who was the drill sergeant?”

“Me.”

In 2017, Matt launched his crowd-funded think tank, which immediately began being noticed in liberal policy circles. His work, which in its faith in winning arguments by marshaling the right facts calls to mind a socialist Ezra Klein, is often cited in places like the Atlantic and Vox, and he has been quoted as an expert by CBS News and elsewhere. Even among prominent young lefties, his Twitter presence, even post–boot camp, stands out—277,000 followers as of June.

(Elizabeth Bruenig, a twenty-seven-year-old columnist at the Washington Post, has devoted columns to making the case for socialism.)

The Bruenigs argue, as Liz has written in the Post, that “it makes sense to think of socialism on a spectrum, with countries and policies being more or less socialist, rather than either/or.” Much of Matt’s work revolves around making the case that real socialist policies have been implemented successfully in other countries, particularly Nordic nations like Norway and Sweden. The question of how to describe the governance of these places has become quite contentious, because if these healthy, happy, rich nations are meaningfully socialist in some way, it’s hard to argue that socialism always ends in disaster. Conservatives protest the most loudly, but liberals, too, deny that socialism is afoot in Scandinavia. These countries are, we’re told, “mixed economies” or “social democracies”—bigger welfare states, sure, but fundamentally capitalist systems.

But in a post last summer, Matt used data from the OECD library and the International Labour Organization to show that a strong welfare state is only one part of the story. Most strikingly, at least some of the Nordics come out ahead on that textbook aspect of socialism, state ownership. In Norway and Finland, he wrote, the government owns “financial assets equal to 330 percent and 130 percent of each country’s respective GDP,” compared to 26 percent in the U.S. Norway’s government owns around 60 percent of the nation’s wealth—nearly double the level for the Chinese government—including a third of its domestic stock market. “There is little doubt that, in terms of state ownership at least, Norway is the most socialist country in the developed world,” Bruenig wrote a few months later—“and, not coincidentally, the happiest country in the world according to the UN’s 2017 World Happiness Report.”

The Norwegian example figures prominently in what is probably Matt’s most interesting policy proposal. In a New York Times op-ed last November, he argued that the easiest way to combat American inequality would be a “social wealth fund,” which he described as akin to an index or mutual fund, “but one owned collectively by society as a whole.”

Norway has such a fund, he pointed out, which is valued at over $1 trillion and is used to pay for its generous welfare state. Alaska has one, too, paying its citizens cash dividends from the proceeds of a diversified investment fund that, like Norway’s, started with oil money. Under Bruenig’s idea, the federal government would create an investment portfolio—perhaps by selling federal assets, or through “taxes on capital that affect mostly the wealthy,” or by redirecting recession spending by the Federal Reserve—and distribute a regular cash dividend to every American, or every American adult, each of whom would have one equal share in the fund. If the fund came to own a third of the nation’s wealth, he calculated, that would have meant an $8,000 payout to everyone between the ages of eighteen and sixty-four in 2016.

In addition to arguing for a social wealth fund, Bruenig published a long paper authored by Ryan Cooper, the writer at the Week, and Peter Gowan, a Dublin-based researcher, arguing that the best response to the problem of housing affordability would be a massive new “social housing” project, in which the federal government would pay to build ten million homes over the next ten years. Unlike traditional American public housing, this would be “designed to cater to people of various income levels, rather than just serving the ‘deserving poor.’ ” Again, they point to Europe for proof of concept: in the 1960s, facing a housing crisis, Sweden built one million social-housing units over the course of a decade, increasing its housing stock by a third. In Vienna, Austria, they report, “3 in 5 residents live in housing built, owned, or managed by the municipal government.”

(Continue Reading)

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televinita · 6 years

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Books Read in 2018: The Why

Third year in a row* of answering the self-imposed question: why did you read this particular book?

(*Although 2017′s is presently flagged by the garbage bot and under appeal -- WHY DO U HATE MY BOOK COVER COLLAGES, MR. ALGORITHM)

I am beginning to deeply regret the extra work involved to split them by category, so next year is probably just gonna be a numbered chronological list after the Quilt of Many Covers, but for now they are still divided into adult fiction, YA, middle grade/children’s books, and nonfiction

FICTION

True Valor - Dee Henderson. 2002. Read because: I went hunting for a military romance in which to cast Dalton and Jaz [The Brave]. This one at least guaranteed me Dalton (and included rescuing a female soldier lost/hurt in combat, so).

These Healing Hills - Ann H. Gabhart. 2017. Had this one in my back pocket for a while as a quality-sounding stock romance (nurse/soldier) waiting for players. When my need for a Barbie/Julia [Under the Dome] story reached a new high, I deemed it a match.

Shane - Jack Schaefer. 1949. This is the book Fourmile is based on, so I thought I could get a two-for-one casting thrill out of it.

The Lake House - Kate Morton. 2015. A gorgeous historic mansion hidden within an abandoned estate. A mystery from the past to be solved in the present. What are "things I am here for always."

Crimson Peak (movie novelization) - Nancy Holder. 2015. I LOVED the movie, and the only thing I love more than amazing movies is when I can have them translated into and enriched by prose.

Chasing Sunsets - Karen Kingsbury. 2015. Brush of Wings - Karen Kingsbury. 2016. I was hunting, desperately, for Ben/Ryan-shaped books [Off the Map], and "Brush of Wings" checked all the boxes (young woman who needs a heart transplant volunteers in a third world country, love interest has to find a way to rush her home when the situation turns dire). I only read C.S. first because I didn't want to miss where the romance started.

Rancher Under Fire - Vickie Donoghue. 2014. I was looking for a different book when I casually stumbled upon this title, and listen. I am not gonna turn down a ready-made Barbie/Julia AU* with bonus "single father" angle. (*cowboy/journalist)

Heart Like Mine - Maggie McGinnis. 2016. "Ben/Ryan, Sexy Hookup AU Version please."

The Mountain Between Us - Charles Martin. 2010. The request list for the movie was too long, so I decided to see if it was based on a book. Upon reading the back cover and finding out one character was a surgeon, I immediately forgot the movie cast as my brain exploded with Shondaland options.

When Crickets Cry - Charles Martin. 2006. "Doctor whose wife died young of a lifelong heart condition" sounded like the best book-shaped Ben/Ryan approximation yet, with bonus "watching out for a little girl who is sick in the same way" cuteness as well.

The Woman in Cabin 10 - Ruth Ware. 2016. A woman at work recommended it to me, and I was like, "a well received general thriller? Sure!"

Listen to Me - Hannah Pittard. 2016. Put "road trip" into the library catalog --> picked 70% because "Gothic thriller" made me think of "The Strangers," and 30% because I was reliving the glory days of Derek And Addison and this marriage sounded similar.

The Lying Game - Ruth Ware. 2017. I enjoyed the other book of hers I read so my friend brought in the next one she had.

Hatter Fox - Marilyn Harris. 1973. Read in high school and forgotten until I reread the Goodreads summary, and "doctor drawn to help 17-year-old" set off my radar. Shippy or merely protective/caretaking, my radar reacts the same.

Vanished - Mary McGary Morris. 1988. The trailer for unreleased Martin Henderson film "Hellbent" whipped me into a frenzy so I did my best to find book-shaped approximations of it. (spoiler alert: this failed miserably, but I grudge-matched it out)

Thunder and Rain - Charles Martin. 2012. Former Texas Ranger who is a single dad. Rescuing & protecting a scared/abused woman and child. At his ranch with cows and horses. By an author who has proven his salt in the hurt/comfort and restrained-romance departments.

Before the Fall - Nick Hawley. 2016. Mostly I came for the dynamic between the young orphan and the passenger who saved him, but I also like witnessing the general aftermath of plane crash survivors.

The Perfect Nanny - Leila Slimani. 2018. My work friend loaned it to me with the statement, "This has such good reviews but I don't know if I 'got' it -- I am really curious to know what you think of it!"

The Girl Before - J.P. Delaney. 2017. She loaned me this one too, with a more glowing recommendation.

Everything You Want Me To Be - Mindy Mejia. 2017. Aaaand one last rec from my seasonal work friend before our projects took us in separate directions.

The Dog Year - Ann Wertz Garvin. 2014. Dog on the cover + synopsis was basically a list of tropes I love: a woman (a doctor to boot!) grieving loss of husband and unborn baby; dogs; a new love interest who is one of my favorite professions to pair with doctor (cop)...

Losing Gemma - Katy Gardner. 2002. "So basically this is the victim backstory to a Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders plot? Dude, sign me UP; I can so see this friendship!"

Uncharted - Tracey Garvis-Graves. 2013. The companion novella to a book I loved.

The English Boys - Julia Thomas. 2016. Mom checked it out of the library, "guy in piney unrequited love with his best friend's fiancee" intrigued me enough to open it, and by 3-5 pages in I was hooked.

The Broken Girls - Simone St. James. 2018. Abandoned boarding-school ruins, a murder mystery from the past being solved in the present day, possibly tied to a second murder from the past?? Yeah, give it.

Heart-Shaped Hack - Tracey Garvis-Graves. 2015. White-Hot Hack - Tracey Garvis-Graves. 2016. Proven quality romance writer's latest books feature a professional super-skilled hacker? Sounds right up my Scorpion-obsessed alley. First book was plenty good enough to launch me into Part II.

Shine Shine Shine - Lydia Netzer. 2012. In my continuing quest to find books in which to cast Walter/Paige, I searched the phrase "her genius husband" and this one's summary matched my desires well.

Learning to Stay - Erin Celello. 2013. Ever eager to expand my hurt/comfort scenario stockpile, I went looking for something where a husband suffers a TBI/brain damage that mostly affects their personality. The bonus dog content sold it.

The Fate of Mercy Alban - Wendy Webb. 2013. Came up on my Goodreads timeline. I read as far as "spine-tingling mystery about family secrets set in a big, old haunted house on Lake Superior" and immediately requested it from the library.

Rated PG - Virginia Euwer Wolff. 1981. I was rereading her Make Lemonade trilogy when I saw a quote in her author bio that said, "I did write an adult novel. Thank goodness it went out of print." Curious, I looked it up, and between its age and the fact that it sounded more like YA than a proper adult novel, I was immediately more intrigued by it than her boring-sounding middle grade books.

Someone Else's Love Story - Joshilyn Jackson. 2013. "Young single mom with genius son meeting a possibly-autistic scientist who protects them during a gas station holdup/hostage situation and later bonds with her son" was the exact literary approximation of a Scorpion AU I wanted in my brain. By the time I realized that was not the endgame ship, I had already flipped through it and fallen in love w/ William and his romantic memories of his wife instead.

Driftwood Tides - Gina Holmes. 2014. Cool title + I love the "young adult adoptee bonds with the spouse of their late birth mother" trope.

The Haunting - Alan Titchmarsh. 2011. Title caught my eye at the library near Halloween; I dug the "dual timelines" setup with a mystery from the past to be solved in the present, and hoped for ghosts.

The Lost Hours - Karen White. 2009. I searched "scrapbook" in the library catalog. A family member's formerly buried old scrapbook, an old house, and unearthing family history/secrets? GIVE IT TO ME.gif.

The Etruscan Smile - Velda Johnston. 1977. Slim (quick read), attractive cover painting, an exotic Italian countryside setting in a bygone era, and a young woman investigating the mystery of her sister's disappearance all appealed to me.

Stay Away, Joe - Dan Cushman. 1953. All I could tell from the book jacket was that it was somehow Western/ranch-themed, possibly full of wacky hijinx and had once been deemed appropriate for a high school library. I just wanted to know what the heck it was about!

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YOUNG ADULT

(I’m kind of guessing at the line of demarcation between teen and middle grade audiences for some of these, especially the older ones -- another reason that I should give up on categories in the future -- but let’s just go with it)

These Shallow Graves - Jennifer Donnelly. 2015. Seemed like a YA version of What the Dead Leave Behind (which itself I was using as a Crimson Peak AU), from an author whose work has always impressed me.

Snow Bound - Harry Fox Mazer. 1973. Always here for survival stories! Also, this is a good author.

The House - Christina Lauren. 2015. I LOVE evil/haunted mansion stories.

The Masked Truth - Kelley Armstrong. 2015. It looked like Criminal Minds in a YA novel.

Things I'm Seeing Without You - Peter Bognanni. 2017. Went googling for stories that sounded like contemporary variations on Miles & Charlie Matheson [Revolution]. "Teen shows up at estranged father's door" fit the bill.

Even When You Lie to Me - Jessica Alcott. 2015. I always turn out for student/teacher stories, given enough suggestion of it being mostly an emotional connection rather than an illicit hookup.

Too Shattered for Mending - Peter Brown Hoffmeister. 2017. I also dig stories where teenagers have to take care of/fend for themselves in the absence of a parent/guardian.

The Devil You Know - Trish Doller. 2015. I enjoyed a previous book of hers, and I always like road trips and teen thrillers.

The Raft - S.A. Bodeen. Terror at Bottle Creek underwhelmed, so I thought I'd try a YA/female protagonist option for a survival thriller, not least because the girl on the cover reminded me of Under the Dome's Melanie.

Ghost at Kimball Hill - Marie Blizard. 1956. Picked up randomly at an estate sale; the vintage cover and incredibly charming first 2 pages won my heart.

A New Penny - Biana Bradbury. 1971. The rare idea of a teen shotgun marriage in this era -- when it would still be expected, but also more likely to fall apart and end in a young divorce or separation -- fascinated me; I was curious to see how such an adult situation would play out.

Marie Antoinette, Serial Killer - Katie Alender. 2013. I mean...it is really all right there in the title and/or the awesful puns all over the cover. ("Let them eat cake...AND DIE!") Pure unadulterated crack, combining my two fave specialty genres of history and horror? Yes ma'am.

Me And My Mona Lisa Smile - Sheila Hayes. 1981. I was looking up this author of a Little Golden Book to see what else she had, found one that suggested a student/teacher romance, and bolted for it.

To Take a Dare - Crescent Dragonwagon/Paul Zindel. 1982. 50% due to the first author's cracktastic name and my full expectations of it being melodramatic, 50% because I was still on my "Hellbent" high and looking for similar teen runaway stories.

To All My Fans, With Love, From Sylvie - Ellen Conford. 1982. The last one from my attempt-at-a-Hellbent-esque-storyline set -- girl hitchhiking cross-country is picked up by a middle aged man who may or may not have pure intentions, by an established quality author.

Be Good Be Real Be Crazy - Chelsey Philpot. Bright cover called out to me; I was in the mood for a fun road trip novel for spring/early summer.

This is the Story of You - Beth Kephart. Kephart's name always gives me pause due to her fuzzy writing style, but I loved Nothing But Ghosts, so I could not resist the promise of surviving a super-storm disaster.

A Little in Love - Susan Fletcher. "Eponine's story from Les Mis" on a YA novel = immediately awesome; I LOVE HER??? Also it's just my fave musical, generally.

Adrift - Paul Griffin. 2015. I've been really digging survival stories this year, and while stories about survival at sea aren't typically my fave, they keep popping up in my path so I keep poppin' em like candy.

Life in Outer Space - Melissa Keil. 2013. After delighting my brain with concept sketches for a high school AU, I set out to find the equivalent of Scorpion's team dynamics/main relationship in a YA novel, and by god I found it.

Everything Must Go - Fanny Fran Davis. 2017. The brightly colored cover drew me in, and the format of being like a scrapbook of personal documents/paper ephemera lit up the scrap-collecting center of my brain.

Going Geek - Charlotte Huang. 2016.

originally I thought it might be like Life in Outer Space, but once I realized the title geeks were all girls I shrugged and went, "Eh, still a solid contemporary YA novel at a cool setting (boarding school)."

Like Mandarin - Kirsten Hubbard. 2011.

By the author of my beloved Wanderlove, I was drawn in by the title, intriguing cover photo, rural Wyoming setting and the concept of a high school freshman girl latching onto/idolizing a cool senior girl.

Sixteen: Short Stories By Outstanding Writers for Young Adults. ed. Donald R. Gallo. 1984. Tripped over it at the library, and immediately wanted to consume a set of 80s teen book content from a pack of authors I know and love.

A & L Do Summer - Jan Blazanin. 2011. In the summer, sometimes you just want to vicariously relive the feeling of being a largely-responsibility-free teen in a small-town location.

The Assassin Game - Kirsty McKay. 2015. Looked like the (Welsh!) boarding school version of Harper's Island. (spoiler alert: it is rather less stabby than that, but still fun)

We Are Still Tornadoes - Michael Kun/Susan Mullen. 2016. "College freshmen? Writing letters to each other? Sure, looks solid."

Nothing - Annie Barrows. 2017. It looked relatable: like the kind of book that would happen if I tried to turn my high school journals into a book. (spoiler alert: dumber)

The Memory Book - Laura Avery. 2016. Contemporary YA about a girl with a(n unusual) disease, but mostly, the title and promise of it being a collection of entries in different formats.

Kindess for Weakness - Shawn Goodman. 2013. LITERALLY AU RYAN ATWOOD.

Make Lemonade - Virginia Euwer Wolff. 1993. True Believer - Virginia Euwer Wolff. 2001. This Full House - Virginia Euwer Wolff. 2008. I reread the first two so I could give them proper reviews on Goodreads, and then realized I hadn't read the last one at all.

Blue Voyage - Diana Renn. 2015. A hefty teen mystery in a unique exotic location (Turkey) -- with an antiquities smuggling ring! - called out to me.

Girl Online - Zoe Sugg. 2014. I was really in the mood to read something on the younger end of YA, something cute and fun, when I saw this at the library.

Wilderness Peril - Thomas J. Dygard. 1985. Reread of a book I rated 4 stars in high school but couldn't remember, which happened to be lying next to me on a morning where I didn't wanna get out of bed yet.

Survive the Night - Danielle Vega. 2015. The cover had a GLITTERY SKULL. Give me that delightfully packaged horror story for the Halloween season!

The Hired Girl - Laura Amy Schlitz. 2015. I've been digging into my journals and old family photo albums lately, really fascinated by personal historical documents (also recently obsessed over The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt), and when I saw a diary format book set in 1911 -- a housemaid's diary, no less; that must be interesting as far as recording grand house details -- it spoke to me.

Fans of the Impossible Life - Kate Scelsa. 2015. The colored-pencil-sketch cover gave me Rainbow Rowell vibes.

All The Truth That's In Me - Julie Berry. 2013. Someone who favorably reviewed The Hired Girl also recommended this one; the cover caught my eye, and it sounded like a thriller.

Girl In A Bad Place - Kaitlin Ward. 2017. I heart YA thrillers featuring girls.

Facing It - Julian F. Thompson. 1983. I was in desperate need of a book one night and my only option was to buy one off the library sale cart, so I snagged the one that looked like some entertaining 80s melodrama with a fun (summer camp) setting. (Spoiler alert: fun and entertaining it was not.)

A Good Idea - Cristina Moracho. 2017. "Rural literary noir," promised the cover blurb, and as I just mentioned: I heart YA thrillers.

Something Happened - Greg Logsted. 2008. Short/easy read + I was hoping for either a misinterpreted Genuinely Caring Teacher, or scenarios to use in an appropriate age difference context.

In Real Life - Jessica Love. 2016. My shipper radar pretty much looked at the summary and went "THE AU CHRISTIAN/GABBY SETUP OF MY DREAMS."

The Black Spaniel Mystery - Betty Cavanna. 1945.

Adorable cover (and dogs!) from an established quality author.

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CHILDREN’S / MIDDLE GRADE

The Cloud Chamber - Joyce Maynard. 2005. The cover made me think of Under the Dome, and the MC immediately reminded me of Joe McAlister.

Terror at Bottle Creek - Watt Key. 2016. After rereading Fourmile, I got a hankering for more books I might be able to cast with the kids from Under the Dome, and figured more Watt Key + a thrilling survival adventure was the ticket for that.

Swampfire - Patricia Cecil Haas. 1973. One of approximately 100 unread vintage horse books I own at any given time; finally in mood because it was short and sweet.

Baby-sitting Is A Dangerous Job - Willo Davis Roberts. 1985. Reread a childhood favorite in order to give it a proper review on Goodreads.

In The Stone Circle - Elizabeth Cody Kimmel. 1998. Same as above.

Wild Spirits - Rosa Jordan. 2010. Clearly the "Kat & Tommy take Justin under their wing" Power Rangers AU of which I have always dreamed, in my very favorite version of it: the one where Kat surrounds herself with animals.

Claudia - Barbara Wallace. 1969. Picked up cheap at a book sale, standard cute vintage Scholastic about a girl and her school life. Comfort food.

Reasons to be Happy - Katrina Kittle. 2011. The cover and the 5 reasons excerpted in the summary were so cute that I wanted to know what more of the reasons were.

Dark Horse Barnaby - Marjorie Reynolds. 1967. Needed a quick read and I'll p. much read any vintage horse book.

Runaway - Dandi Daley Mackall. 2008. Start of a companion series to my beloved Winnie the Horse Gentler, featuring some favorite themes: foster care + animal rescue.

Wolf Wilder - Katherine Rundell. 2015. Pretty cover, girl protagonist, historical Russian setting, wolves. All good things!

Backwater - Joan Bauer. 1999. Sounded like a beautifully tranquil setting.

The Dingle Ridge Fox and Other Stories - Sam Savitt. 1978. Animal stories + author love = automatic win.

If Wishes Were Horses - Jean Slaughter Doty. 1984. Overdue reread of a childhood favorite because I needed some short books to finish the reading challenge.

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NONFICTION

Junk: Digging Through America's Love Affair with Stuff - Alison Stewart. 2016. I mean, I am definitely an American who has a love affair with stuff.

Keeping Watch: 30 Sheep, 24 Rabbits, 2 Llamas, 1 Alpaca, and a Shepherdess with a Day Job - Kathryn Sletto. 2010.

As soon as I saw my favorite fluffy creature on the cover, I felt an immediate need to transport myself into this (dream) hobby farm setting.

(Side note: this is probably the lowest amount of nonfiction I have read in 1 year for a decade, but I was just so busy hunting down specific types of stories that I could not get distracted by random learning.)

#why I read #quality data #queued

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frederator-studios · 6 years

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Kate Leth: The Frederator Interview

One of our top-most frequently asked Qs is: “Do I need to study art or animation to become a creator”? Our long-winded answer could really be replaced with: “Look up Kate Leth”. For many of you, this intro itself will be redundant. Since she began posting her personal Kate or Die! comics in 2011, the growth of Kate’s now-ginormous online following - as well as heaps of talent and hard work - opened doors for her to become one of the most exciting comic book creators and animation writers working today. It was awesome talking with Kate about her adoration for Plum, the rising tide of female and non-binary voices in animation, and witches - lots ‘n lots of witches.

Kate: So now, where are these being posted?

Cooper: On our Tumblr! We have a long-running Studios blog. Do you know the Frederator // Tumblr origin story?

K: Maybe??

C: David Karp launched Tumblr from his desk at Frederator when he was an intern! Fred Seibert was one of its first bloggers and investors.

K: Oh that’s funny! I still use Tumblr sometimes, as like a less stressful platform than Twitter. Which it used to be much more so?

Yeah, Twitter’s really taken over, huh? Do you like Twitter or does it feel like a chore?

Half and half! I like the fun side of Twitter but it is also pretty depressing. I’m starting to use Instagram more, cause it’s just happier. It’s like a nice break, scrolling through pictures of my cute friends!

Has social media been very important to your career?

Oh yeah - all of the work I’ve ever gotten has pretty much been through social media. I come from a super small town in Canada, which makes it harder to network and connect with people. It used to be you’d meet people at Cons, but now you meet everybody online. So many of the connections I’ve made and so many of the jobs I’ve gotten have been through Twitter and Tumblr. I don’t know where my career would be without those platforms!

That’s amazing. Did you know those opportunities were out there when you started posting?

I got into Tumblr just to follow people. I worked at a comic book store at the time, and my boss knew that I was drawing and encouraged me to put my stuff online. So I did, and slowly started to amass a small following. It got bigger, and that was how I got discovered by BOOM!, which is how I did my first published comics—including the Bravest Warriors comics, which is kinda funny!

Whoa, cool! From comic book store employee to comic book writer - how was that transition?

I started working there in like... 2009 or 2010? It was part time; I was also working at a dress shop. But I got fired from the dress shop (laughs) so I became full time at the comic book store. My boss, Calum Johnston, was a really engaged member of the arts community. He pushed people to make comics and share them, and that’s how I got started.

He must be so stoked to see where your career is now.

It’s really wild to look back on. When I wanted to self-publish my first zine, I had no money. I was a super broke art student. Cal sold his original art of the cover of the first volume of Scott Pilgrim and used the money to help me and a bunch of other people self-publish our comics. He’s a really good dude.

That’s so generous! Do you stay in touch with people there?

Yeah, I try to! His daughter is in animation school now. I’ve known her since she was like 14. It’s cool cause now I can promote her work and help her get a foot in the industry, so it comes full circle!

When you got the job at the store, were you just a fan? Or did you know you wanted to be a creator?

Just a fan! I was really big into autobio and self-published comics. Kate Beaton, Lucy Knisley, Erica Moen, and Jess Fink were all creators I was following at the time. Kate Beaton is from Nova Scotia like me, and I watched her get successful on LiveJournal and things as a comic artist—and yet she had studied history! She had no formal arts training; she’d just started making comics for fun. I had always thought that if you didn’t go to art school, that wasn’t an avenue for you. Seeing what she was doing made me realize, “Oh, people can do that!? Maybe I could too!” I’d been reading web comics since junior high, but it was never something that I thought I could do, until I started doing it. Being on Tumblr was also really encouraging; seeing so many other people just starting out and at a similar skill level with their art.

How did the path from self-publishing to BOOM! go?

It was sort of accidental. An editor came across Kate or Die!, and I was offered a backup strip in one of the Adventure Time comics. Only like 2 pages - super short. And then they came back with an offer to write a whole graphic novel? I’d never written anything longer than 4 pages in my life. But I was like, “Sure, I can do that!”. So I wrote Seeing Red, my first Adventure Time comic. And it did well, so they asked me to write another one. And all of a sudden that was my job! I was like, “Oh, okay, I better get good at this.”

Wow, so you taught yourself how to write comics? And to screenwrite?

Oh yeah, I didn’t go to school for any of this. I went to school for makeup and photography. I was a professional makeup artist for a couple years. Then I studied photography for two years. Then I dropped out. A college dropout made good! At first, I didn’t feel like I knew what I was doing. I’ve been writing comics for 6 or 7 years, and I only now feel like I’m good at them (laughing) I know people will disagree! I’m very self-deprecating. But I definitely feel like I understand what you need to craft a story now. When I started, I didn’t think about stories as a whole: knowing where you’re going, how you’ll get there, the themes you’ll touch along the way. I did a lot of improv in high school, so I felt fine sitting down and just starting! I'd make stuff up as I went. But that doesn’t make for as good of stories. So over time I’ve learned to sit down and really figure out the world, the arcs, the timing for big moments. I fill books with outlines!

Do you have a favorite project you’ve worked on?

Spell on Wheels, which just came out from Dark Horse last year, is something I’m really proud of. It’s about witches on a road trip. Megan Levens and Marissa Louise, the artist and colorist I’m working with are so awesome; I’m really happy that we’re gonna do more of it. And it’s nice to have an original series out there, because I’ve worked on so many other people’s properties.

What are the biggest differences there?

It’s very freeing to write an original. You’re not beholden to any corporate standards or licensers, so it’s easier to tell the kind of stories that you want to tell. Especially in terms of things like diversity and queerness, there’s nobody saying, “Oh, we can’t do that because it’s not in the TV show”. It’s nice to not have to worry about things like that. Dark Horse has been very supportive of it, which is cool.

Is Spell on Wheels your main project right now, or what else is goin’ on?

I work in animation primarily now, so I’m working for Hasbro and some other places that I can’t talk about yet, as is always the way. But I’ve been with Hasbro for about a year and a half, as a sort of jack of all trades writer. I’ve worked on My Little Pony: Equestria Girls, Littlest Pet Shop, and a bunch of other things that haven’t been announced yet. As for comics, I’m currently working on the Mysticons graphic novels - the first one comes out in August.

What do you like best about being a writer?

I love it. I think it’s amazing to create worlds and characters and stories and see them brought to life by so many different kinds of people, with so many different artistic styles and talents and specialties. It’s just like magic. Animation is so exciting. You write a script and then you wait... like a year... and then it’s animated! And there are voices saying your jokes! I feel like the thrill of that might wear off at some point, but it definitely hasn’t yet.

What are your favorite cartoons?

Sailor Moon is top of the list. And Cardcaptor Sakura - any magical girl anime I would just eat up as a kid. I watched Disney’s One Saturday Morning religiously, Doug and all of those shows. And now Steven Universe is a big favorite. I got to write an episode for Craig of the Creek, which is great, and I’m really excited about that. And I’m a huge fan of Bob’s Burgers!

What is your episode of Craig of the Creek about?

Witches. I’m very into witches! I grew up on Buffy, Charmed - every YA book I could get my hands on. Practical Magic is my favorite movie. I feel like there were so many movies and TV shows about witches in the 90s. I’m ready for that genre to loop back, in a BIG way. And for the episode of Craig of the Creek, I created characters that ended up becoming part of the recurring cast! So it was neat to contribute to that world a little bit.

What is your favorite thing about Bravest Warriors?

Plum. Just Plum, in general. She’s my favorite character to write - she’s just so fun. She’s silly and weird, and once you get her voice right, she’s such a laugh. She's so blunt and harsh, but in this innocent, unintentional way.

Your episode “Chained to Your Side” has the Scaley Williams Dance - what inspired your play on Sadie Hawkins?

We don’t actually have Sadie Hawkins dances in Canada, which is funny. But I’ve always been kind of fascinated by the concept: “Oooh it’s so rebellious cause the girls ask the boys.” Which is so outdated! So I thought, what’s the futuristic version of that… and got: ‘the girls ‘dart’ the boys’. And we had this conversation, like, “Okay, they dart the boys - but it has to be consensual! They have to say yes!” That was very important (laughing) I could only take that joke to a certain point. But I knew the dance idea would let me do a lot with Beth and Plum. And I love beating up Danny. Like that’s my favorite thing to do in the comics. Just let terrible things happen to Danny. He’s such a goofball.

What are the themes that recur in your characters and stories the most?

Surface level, the obvious: witches and gay stuff. In a deeper sense, things I come back to a lot… there are a lot of characters I’ve written that work retail or minimum wage jobs. Because that’s what I grew up with—I moved out when I was 17 and started working, and did that up until 4 or 5 years ago. So that’s a huge part of my experience. Definitely characters who aren’t borne of privilege and are struggling to prove themselves. Like Hellcat especially, is very much about someone in their 20s just trying to get by. And I talk about self-acceptance a lot. I like genuine moments between people. Amid the comedy, I like there to be something real - especially if it’s something difficult to talk about. Hellcat is this really upbeat superhero, Saturday Morning Cartoon vibe—but I did an entire arc about how people misinterpret and mistreat men who are bisexual, and how that’s different from how bisexual women are treated. So it’s this funny comic, but still touching on real topics. I like to try to say something. But not, you know, hit people over the head with it.

Do you have a cartoon project that’s your favorite?

Yeah, but I’m not allowed to talk about it yet! I have had a lot of fun working on Equestria Girls. It’s so exciting to write stuff for kids. Since I started in animation I’ve actually tried to shoehorn myself: I want to write action-adventure for girls. That’s what I want to do. I’ve managed to get to a place where that’s everything I’m working on now, and that’s really exciting. A lot of people don’t want to be pegged like that, but I’m like, “Oh, you want me to write girls punching and having feelings? Good, I’m here for it!”

It’s funny to pigeon-hole yourself! Most writers seem to want the opposite.

I doubt I’ll want to do the same thing forever! But I definitely don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting to tell stories for girls. For a long time I think there was an onus to make sure your show could appeal to boys, and that led to a lot of female characters getting side-lined, because executives would say, “Boys need someone to relate to!” And I agree with that—but I really don’t believe there’s any reason boys can’t relate to or look up to girls. And I think perpetuating the idea that they can’t is pretty harmful.

In your time in the industry, have you noticed animation becoming more inclusive and diverse?

I’m lucky in what I’ve worked on. Hasbro has a huge female staff and a lot of the executives are women, so they’re very supportive of that. There’s always room for more diversity, but it’s been good. I know there are parts of the industry that are still very much a boys club, but I’ve stayed pretty far away from those, and would prefer to keep it that way. There are so many women coming into animation now. I know so many women and non-binary folks working in the field that are just going to keep rising. It’s definitely a rising tide.

That’s awesome.

Well, I have to believe that, or else I get depressed! (laughing). My boyfriend and I play a game where at the end of movies, we count how many title cards we get through before seeing a woman’s name. (I groan) Yeah, it’s wild. Usually it ends up being a producer, or the casting director, or a costume designer. It’s rarely someone on the creative end. And when you start looking for it, you really start noticing it. But it’s heartening when you see a movie that defies that. Like at the end of Black Panther, there were a ton of women’s names early on in those credits! That’s my goal, is to like (laughing), be the early in the credits female name. And then fill the rest of those credits with people I know.

Oh cool, so you would want to make a feature film?

Yeah. I have lofty goals. We’ll see what happens, but I don’t want to close myself off to any opportunities.

Do you know what that movie would be about?

Probably witches. But I guess we’ll see! ❀

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Follow Kate on Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr: @kateordie

Thank you so much for the interview Kate! I’m excited for your upcoming projects, especially the ones about Girl Magic. Soo... all of them :D

- Cooper

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