#I’m not French Canadian but it’s still very funny to see one of my country’s largest cultural groups get treated this way | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

thetriggeredhappy · 5 years

Note

I absolutely love your writing! If you're taking requests, could you maybe do a speeding bullet soulmate au?

thanks a lot pal! and sure thing, i’ve actually had something half-finished in my drafts for soulmate!au for a while. in this AU, it’s the classic “your first words to your soulmate are written on your wrist”, with a minor twist–if your soulmate’s words are on your left hand, that means you will need to speak first. if it’s on the right, then your soulmate is the one who has to speak first before you say your words. this adds a little bit of clarity in-universe, since you can see your phrase is something simple like “how can i help you” and if you’re speaking second you can shoot them back with something buckwild. it can lead to people being more or less extroverted–knowing your line comes second means you can say whatever without being worried that it’ll be written on some poor sap’s skin, and knowing your line comes first means you don’t have that luxury. also limitations like “must be speaking exclusively to that one person” (unless polyamory), “can’t be through a phone or writing”, and “must be identifiable as the person” (do with that what you please). anyways, i like soulmate AUs and put a lot of thought into them.

actual fic is below the cut, and again, you’re very kind

”Are you doing alright, mate?”

To be honest, that wasn’t the worst line that Jeremy could’ve gotten, but fuckin’ seriously.

It wasn’t as bad as his brother Joey, he had “Your shoe’s untied” on the left, and Petey got the nightmare scenario and just got “Hey, how’s your day?” on the right, but the thing that really frustrated him was that it wasn’t even the reaction phrase. That was the opening phrase, meaning they had to say that to him first before he could respond with his own line, and if they were asking if he was doing alright that had to mean something bad was gonna happen and he’d probably look stupid in front of his soulmate and not have a good response or whatever because he’d just, like, fallen in the harbor or something.

Turned out, by the time Jeremy was twelve, he was starting to find out that bad things happening to him was gonna be a consistent issue. He had bad luck, worse than all his brothers combined, and over the course of all that time he got an awful lot of “Are you okay, dude?” and “Are you alright?” from a lot of people. But none of them ever got it exactly right,

missing the crucial few words, nobody ever saying “mate”. Nobody ever asking him that in a voice that felt dark orange.

“Y’know,” his Ma said to him one day when he was sulking, twenty-two and still soulmate-less and with a terrible time at job hunting to boot considering his most recent cast, luckily on his left arm so he could still glare at his mark. “It does have a hint at least.”

“That I’m gonna be a total klutz forever?” Jeremy sulked.

“That your soulmate isn’t gonna be an American, sweetheart,” his Ma corrected gently. “He’s probably gonna be British, or Irish, something like that. They’re the only ones who say “mate”, right?”

“Didn’t you also think my dad was gonna be a Canadian?” he asked suspiciously.

“Honey, I’m not magic, I don’t know everything. I thought it was unrealistic to think it would be someone actually from France,” she said, a little haughty.

She was one of the lucky people to get a really specific phrase, in a language that wasn’t her own no less. It was in French, and when he’d asked as a kid what it said, she’d laughed and said it meant “I promise I had a much more intelligent line to say, but I’m afraid I’ve forgotten it.”

She always said his dad had died, and worn the traditional covering to show that someone’s soulmate was dead, to hide where the words had gone black. But once or twice he’d glimpsed her wrist, and to be honest, the words looked more navy blue.

“Why the heck am I gonna talk to a British person?” Jeremy asked, sulking again.

“World works in mysterious ways, J-Bear,” his Ma shrugged.

She was right. Because a few months later, he was in a particularly terrible situation, and he received a phone call asking if he wanted a job.

”I’m seriously, actually, 100% going to murder you.”

It hadn’t shown up until he was four years old, which Mick’s parents had a bloody field day with, and once they were good and tired of dealing with that conundrum they moved right along to address the fact that in reply to whatever their son was going to say, he was going to promptly be threatened.

Great.

He ended up baking under the sun just like everyone else in his god-forsaken country, which only made the bright, cherry-red phrase stand out all the better. His mum tried to be supportive, honest she did, but even getting bullied at school every other day never led to him finding anyone, and she wasn’t all that surprised when at age nineteen he packed up the bare essentials and left home without a word.

He had an idea in his head. He’d heard before of people, terrible people, who used the idea of soulmate to do… bad things. To manipulate people, to make them stay in bad relationships because they thought this one person could and would solve all their problems. And if his soulmate’s first words to him were a threat…

He’d admit if he was asked that he was a lonely person. He didn’t ever seem to fit with anyone. Nobody ever seemed to understand what he meant once he started actually talking, being honest. And he didn’t know if he would have the strength to get out of a bad situation if he was promised up front that this person would understand him. He was pretty sure he would put up with a lot of bad things just for the sake of genuine connection.

So he decided he wouldn’t ever find his soulmate. He’d go off to do hunting and tracking in fuckall nowhere and nobody would ever bother him and he’d never need to deal with a soulmate. He didn’t need one. He’d be fine alone.

When he eventually turned to killing people for money, some part of him deep down wondered if he was just getting too lonely and giving in to what fate had in store for him. If becoming an assassin was the most pathetic, fucked-up bid for someone’s love that had ever happened in history. People did threaten to kill him a lot in that line of work. And more often, people actually tried.

Eventually he got a job offer out in America, more consistent pay and all for the same job, less moving around required, and he took it. He was getting up there in years, and he had a feeling that if he hadn’t found his soulmate by the time he hit thirty, he never would.

Jeremy got a new name: Scout. And his new coworkers—“teammates”, as the very pretty lady who unfortunately didn’t ask if he was doing alright had specified to him—were from all over the place. And he’d had high hopes for a minute as he realized one of his teammates was Scottish, but when he spoke face-to-face with the guy he’d instead greeted him with a cheerful “Pleasure to meet you, lad!” and his reply of “Yo, so you’re the Demoman?” had elicited exactly no response, so that was a bust.

He spoke to the Pyro, as briefly as possible since they freaked him out, but they’d similarly not seemed to react to what he first said to them, and neither had any of the rest of the team. Hell, the Heavy had outright brushed him off up front and the Sniper had given him exactly one up-and-down before he’d left entirely.

So cool. Great. New job with people who didn’t care. Nice.

And he found out more and more as time passed that they very much didn’t care. Most of the team could hardly tolerate him for more than ten minutes at a time, Spy he could barely put up with for two sentences, and even though he eventually got to be better friends with Pyro, and Engie eventually started putting up with him more, they still got annoyed with him pretty quickly. Pyro basically ignored him once they reached their limit, and Engie would essentially kick him out of his workshop.

And… to be honest, he didn’t feel totally comfortable talking to them about certain stuff. He felt a little bit like he’d get laughed at. And his once-every-two-weeks phone call home sometimes wasn’t enough to deal with various stresses and he usually was more interested in hearing their news than complaining anyways.

He didn’t know why he went out to the watchtower. Maybe because he was out for a run and it just happened to be in his line of sight. Maybe because it occurred to him that Sniper could keep a secret, wouldn’t tell the guys about whatever he ended up talking about. Maybe because he felt like he didn’t really have any other options.

Anyways, he ended up climbing the watchtower, asking Sniper if it would bug him if Scout sat around and hung out for a while. Sniper didn’t reply, just glancing at Scout over his shoulder briefly before returning to his scope. And then Scout made it exactly three minutes before he started in on talking. “I dunno I just think it’s funny that Spy thinks I’m rude when he’s always the one starting shit for no reason—“

And Sniper didn’t interrupt him, didn’t say anything, didn’t chase him off. He sat there, staring down his scope, occasionally pausing to take a drink of his coffee, for about two hours. Two hours of Scout just talking, thinking out loud.

It was nice. So nice that Scout cut himself off, eventually said goodbye and left the tower again, sure that Sniper would get tired of him and he’d never be allowed back up there again.

It became a weekly thing, every Monday Scout would go up there and talk to Sniper. Talk at Sniper, more like. And Sniper would listen.

One of the days, Scout said something, something he couldn’t even remember, because it was overshadowed by the thing that immediately followed it—Sniper laughing.

He’d never heard Sniper laugh before, he didn’t think. Not in the real way, anyhow. Sniper didn’t talk much. He’d occasionally mention something over the comms, and once or twice Scout heard him cheering along with the rest of the team when they won a match, but overall, he was a man of few words. So getting him to laugh…

He thought about it a lot.

Sniper didn’t entirely get why Scout started talking to him.

He tried so hard—so hard—to be left alone. He put on a scowl and wore the brim of his hat low and carried his knife off the clock and didn’t say hello or goodbye. He wanted to be left alone. He deserved to be left alone.

Scout, apparently, didn’t notice. And halfway through Sniper trying to figure out what to say to get the kid to leave, he started telling some story about his brothers back home, and…

He never got around to it. He never… got around to telling him to leave. And once Scout had that foothold, had that… constant nature, that consistency, once Sniper knew to expect him every Monday two hours after the team dinner or half an hour before sunset—whichever came first—he found himself…

God damn it. Enjoying Scout’s company. He liked some of the phrases Scout used. He talked in an interesting way. It was pleasant to listen to. And he was honest, uncomfortably honest at times. He told Sniper about all sorts of things that he figured it was safe to say nobody else knew about.

He talked about his family. His mum. His dad, who died, and then later he corrected himself to say his dad, who disappeared, who probably left, words in navy and not in black. He talked about growing up in the bad part of town, about never being allowed to walk home from school without at least one of his older brothers there until he was eight, when he started carrying a knife on him because sometimes none of his brothers showed up for him, until he was twelve, when he just started running there and back every day after baseball practice to save the trouble. About shoplifting, about getting a job delivering newspapers the second he was legally allowed to, about older brothers going in to work sick and Ma working two jobs to try and support them all when they got too sick for work, too sick for anything for a while. About what he did with his paycheck—he kept some pocket change for himself, to buy records sometimes, or posters, or snack foods for when dinner sucked, or fast food or drinks at the bar when he had time on the weekends. The rest of it—every goddamn penny—went back home. One day, maybe his Ma would never have to work again.

He wanted to tell Scout about his own sad life story. Climbing up the tree outside school and throwing rocks at the bullies who chased him, starting to skip classes and smoke towards the end of his schooling just to try and look a little more intimidating. About his dad scoffing at him when he tended to use a gun to chase off predators from their flock of sheep instead of fighting them hand-to-hand like a good Australian. About running away from all of his problems, and how killing animals, especially people, seemed to be the only thing he was ever any good at, and how sometimes that really did bother him, a lot.

But he didn’t. He couldn’t convince himself that Scout cared, somehow. Visits jumped up to twice a week, Monday and Thursday, same time. It was hot for a while, and he went into town one Sunday to pick up two cases of beer, hauled a cooler up into the watchtower, and left three beers next to where Scout sat and three next to himself about ten minutes before the kid showed up. When it started getting cold at night, he brought up his own quilt like he always did, but brought up the spare as well, left that on what he’d mentally started thinking of as Scout’s Crate. Scout drank the beers, and used the blanket, and would talk for his two hours and then say goodbye and not mention anything to Sniper when they went out to battle the next day.

It…

He didn’t like that he enjoyed it so much. He didn’t like looking forward to it, didn’t like perking up when he heard the ladder rattling, didn’t like hanging on to every word and the increasing frequency at which Scout was making him laugh. He didn’t like how much harder it got every time to bite his lip and hold back from chiming in.

He was a killer, he reminded himself. A hermit from absolutely nowhere Australia who didn’t deserve the company of other people. This was the best thing that could’ve happened to him, and he couldn’t push his luck. If he pushed his luck, then he’d drive Scout away and be left alone again. Scout only talked to him because he was quiet anyways, because he was a mystery. Remove the mystery, and the draw would be gone, and he’d be all alone again. Already this was selfish; he should just shut up and be grateful.

He stared down his scope and drank his coffee and was grateful.

A bad day at work, followed by a bad weekend, had Scout hesitating at the base of the watchtower.

Some part of him was rational, and knew he was being ridiculous. But another, stronger part of him couldn’t seem to make his feet move, was repeating a steady mantra to him.

Not wanted.

Sniper didn’t like him. Sniper didn’t want him around. Sniper was just too polite to turn him away, too nice, and was annoyed with his constant talking and wished he would go away but didn’t have the courage, didn’t want to be rude. He wasn’t wanted. Or maybe Sniper just pitied him, maybe Sniper just heard his assorted sob stories and thought, man, poor little idiot kid, might as well set out a blanket for him and let him talk. Maybe Sniper was collecting everything he said for blackmail.

The worst idea to run through his head: maybe Sniper had never been listening to him in the first place.

If Sniper wanted him around, he would’ve said something, right?

Scout didn’t go up into the watchtower that day, or the following Thursday. He didn’t bother looking for Sniper in battle, sure that Sniper would be ignoring him the same way he always did, pretending he didn’t exist the same way he always did.

When he went to the store that weekend, hoping to pick up some chips and soda, he found himself staring at a six-pack of beer. He didn’t even particularly like beer, usually, he preferred other drinks. But he was looking at this six-pack of beer, and he wound up buying it.

It wasn’t some cheap garbage, it was craft beer. It was more expensive.

He drank exactly three of the six and tried not to think about it.

Scout was gone. He never showed up. Sniper ended up getting so freaked out about it that he went to check the Medbay, sure that something bad had happened. Medic was there, working on something bloody, but not Scout. And Scout wasn’t in the workshop either, or the workout room, or the rec room. He got a lot of strange looks from his teammates as he asked around. For some, it was the most he’d spoken to them in months.

He was halfway to Scout’s room when he realized he was probably being strange, manic. Scout was allowed to not want to come visit him. He wasn’t offering anything. In all the time—six months, he realized, they’d been doing this for six months—that Scout had visited, all he really had to gain was Sniper occasionally humming or laughing, and exactly three beers on the hotter days and a tobacco-scented blanket in the winter. There was no reason for Sniper to expect him to show up on the little schedule that had been established. He started to feel silly.

Then he didn’t show up on Thursday either, and…

He felt worried, of course he felt worried, obviously he felt worried. One of the only good things to ever happen to him, and it just stopped showing up one day. And he wanted it back. God, he wanted it back. Two days and he already felt more lonely than he ever felt in his life. Maybe having felt even the smallest glimmer of companionship had made him soft, but damn it, he wanted to feel it again.

He made a decision.

Scout was lacing up his shoes before battle on Monday when a pair of boots stopped in front of him. This wasn’t strange. What was strange was that it wasn’t the calm amble of Engie, the sturdy stride of Heavy, the confident stomp of Soldier, or the crisp stride of Medic. No, it was an awkward shuffle. A rough clearing of a throat. He looked up, and it was Sniper.

He froze up. “Uh,” he said. “Hi.”

Sniper was looking at him. That was strange. In something like 95% of their interactions, Sniper was facing away from him down a scope, occasionally viewed in profile as he took a sip of beer or coffee, depending on the weather. And the other times were in battle itself, both of them otherwise preoccupied. But now Sniper was looking at him, thumbs shoved in his front pockets. After a second he moved to take off his sunglasses and immediately glanced off to one side, tapping them against his palm.

It looked like a nervous tick. This was strange. Sniper was never like this. Scout was confused.

Sniper glanced towards the rest of the team, all a short ways away, chatting amongst themselves at various volumes. When he spoke, his voice was rough and low and quiet. If Scout had to describe it, he would call it a dark orange.

“Are you doing alright, mate?” he asked, tone hesitant.

Scout remained frozen. Stared. Stared.

“It’s just,” Sniper continued, stumbling awkwardly with his words, unable to make further eye contact with Scout. “You haven’t come around in a while, and I suppose I just got… worried, that something happened—“

Scout got to his feet, whirled around, and angrily started digging through his locker, jaw clenched. He eventually pulled forth a pocket knife and angrily started ripping the grip tape from his right hand. He didn’t say a word.

“I’m sorry,” Sniper said quickly, holding up his hands, taking a step back. “I, I just thought it was odd is all, I didn’t know if—“

Scout silenced him by holding his now-bare wrist directly in Sniper’s line of sight, a few inches from his face, Sniper flinching back minutely at the motion. When he realized what he was looking at, his eyes widened. He looked at Scout. Scout looked at him.

“I’m seriously, actually, 100% going to murder you,” Scout said calmly, matter-of-factly, and Sniper had never thought about it before, but he would absolutely describe Scout’s voice as a bright red. Shaking hands moved to undo his watch, and he held his own wrist, the left, out for Scout to see.

Silence for a few seconds. “I—“ Sniper started to say, but was cut off by Scout.

“I cannot believe that you’ve never once since I’ve met you ever talked one-on-one with me. You’ve never said a fuckin’ word to me, Snipes,” Scout said, more than a little pissed off.

“I didn’t realize,” Sniper defended, a little weakly. “I thought… I thought I had.”

“Man, how many people can say they fuckin’ monologued to their soulmate for hours and hours before meeting them, huh?” Scout asked, hands on his hips now.

“I’m sorry,” was all Sniper could think to say.

“Here’s what we’re gonna do,” Scout declared, glaring at Sniper hard. “I’m gonna meet you after work like usual at the watchtower, and you’re takin’ me to go get pizza, and I’m gonna eat pizza while you talk about yourself. You’ve got about—“

He did some math in his head.

“Somethin’ like sixty hours or so of talkin’ to do to make it even,” he decided. “Got it?”

“Got it,” Sniper agreed weakly. Scout moved to sit down and start lacing his shoes up again, but before he could get to it, Sniper spoke again. “I’m… glad you’re okay.”

Scout looked back up at him. The sudden influx of nervous honesty on Sniper’s face made him feel surprisingly guilty. “Sorry. I just… got all up in my own head. I figured I was probably pissing you off, so I stopped going.” A pause. “I wasn’t pissing you off?”

“No,” Sniper replied. “Not at all. I… liked… having you around.”

Scout fought hard against the smile threatening to take hold. “Good to know,” he finally said.

“And I should’ve said something earlier,” Sniper continued, words flowing forth in a rush. “I should’ve told you, I should’ve—let you know. I really should’ve.”

“Well,” Scout shrugged, and finished tying his laces up, and stood to face Sniper head-on. “Now you told me.”

A pause between them, Sniper clearly working very hard to maintain eye contact.

“It doesn’t have to be pizza,” Scout amended, picking at his remaining hand’s worth of grip tape. “It can be anything. I just wanna hang out, like, away from base.”

“Like a date?” Sniper asked, slowly, hesitantly.

“Sure,” Scout shrugged.

A pause again. “Pizza’s fine,” Sniper seemed to decide.

“Alright,” Scout said, and smiled at him. “Alright. I’ll see you then.”

“Yeah,” Sniper agreed, and took his cue to walk away. He stood off to one side of the rest of the team, moving to take a drink of his coffee. His wrist caught his eye, and he looked over the words again, and for the first time in his life, they didn’t bring him dread. They brought him hope.

#tf2 #team fortress 2 #speeding bullet #sniperscout #my fanfiction #shut up me #everybody talks #sorry if parts of this are a little weird or hard to read I'm in a weird brainspace today #requests sometimes help keep me distracted at least

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dontbesoevil · 5 years

Text

So you want to improve your French and like to learn about things?

Good news for you, French Youtube has a very large number of really good channels of what we call “vulgarisation” (popularisation in English, but it isn’t used as much as the French word really).

I’ll divide them in broad categories and there are more.

Science:

So you like medicine, but also History? Well I have the perfect channel for you. Asclépios is a real life doctor who also likes to do videos about the history of medicine. You can start by this video on the Radium girls for example. Note that most, but not all of his videos have French subs.

There was a channel called “La statistique expliquée à mon chat”, but following disagreement (like big ones) between the illustrator/animator and the statistician doing them it stopped producing content. The statistician, one of the few Belgians on this list, started his own channel. Some of the old videos have been reuploaded and then he also produces other videos which obviously don’t look as good because he is no artist, but still interesting videos about statistics applied to every day situations and the world around us on Chat sceptique.

One of the big French Youtube channel is Dirty Biology. He does, as the title says, mainly biology-related stuff (he did study it and started and stopped a phD in it). His videos are really well-done and thought provoking and I cannot recommend them enough. The videos used to be 5 to 10 min, now it’s more 10 to 20 minutes. He did a recent video in Svalbard about climate change, but also a video about scientific publishing, or the fact that we all have royal blood. Seriously watch it. Most if not all videos have subs in French and Spanish. Some have subs in English, but it’s a hit and miss.

Asking any French person about their favourite science show as a kid and they will answer C’est pas socier. The US have Bill Nye, we have Fred et Jamy. Fred decided with a team a couple of years ago to start a website (with the associated YT channel) to do an updated version of C’est pas sorcier called l’Esprit Sorcier. You can show this to your kids, show this in class. It is well-made and interesting, and really made to be easy to understand. Each show lasts for 25 min and has a YT version and a website interactive version (with the videos shorter). I have linked their show on quantum computers for example. There are sadly no subs.

So I talk about it below, but my favourite channel ever is Arte and they produce a lot of very good cultural and documentary-style. But more recently, they have started a Youtube channel with French Youtubers to talk about interesting topics, called Le Vortex. They do it by season and in season 1, they have among other Dirty Biology (see above), Scilabus and Passé Sauvage (see below) and Pause Process. They talked on agriculture and its development from an archaeological, anthropological, and scientific point of view, but also internet from a more scientific point of view, and also transhumanism because why not, you know. I highly recommend checking all of their videos and apart from the live, they almost all have French subs. The second season has been filmed, but hasn’t been posted yet.

So as mentioned above, Scilabus is part of le Vortex, but she also has her own channel. She is French, but lives in Canada, in Québec where she is a researcher. She takes questions you might ask yourself like Why is there so much air in your crisps packet? or Why does cardboard have undulations? or Is marathon that hard? and just answers them. Some videos have subs, not all, but all are interesting.

And the final science channel is Zeste de Science, ZdS is a channel powered by the CNRS (Conseil National de Recherche Scientifique), basically the body that funds scientific research in France. It is quite neat and they have a couple of different series. The main one is videos of around 5 min where they present a topic like how to model crowds or how to make a little thing of plastic dance disco. It’s entirely based on research produced by CNRS researchers, but in an easy to understand format. They have recently started a series where they present current research projects as if they were action films and it’s very funny. The videos have subs, but not all of them.

History:

French Youtube has a lot of history channel, the biggest of which is Nota Bene. He does a lot of videos with a preference for stories on the WW, medieval kings and leaders around the world and their stupid or epic deaths, but also more recently partnerships with French regions to promote French heritage. He has a lot of videos and several series you can start by (like recently a series on the historical inspirations in Game of Thrones). Just go and have a look to what interests you, there is a lot. Some have subs in several languages, some only in French, it depends. He has also done a series with Arte (keur keur, i love them) on history and video games which I highly recommend. The series is also available in German and with English, Polish, and Spanish subs because Arte. His wife and him have organised a summer festival with Youtubers (both those doing history, and others doing completely different topics) to come and do presentations about historical topics. They are all filmed and posted on his bonus channel. Note that they don’t have subs and the quality differs with some being really good and some I stopped after a few minutes.

Do you like Goodnight stories for Rebel Girls? Well AudeGG a French comedian has a channel where she presents the life of famous women past and present in Virago. The videos are 2-3 minutes long generally and from all around the globe. You can start by the first one on famous French revolutionary Olympe de Gouges. (She has also recently done a partnership with the French tv archives on the history important laws for the rights of women that is also super interesting.) They all have French subs.

Another one of the big History channel is C’est une autre histoire. Manon started her videos when she was still a phD student, she is now Doctor in History (contemporary and ancient, she looked at the representation of Athena in the 19th century if I remember correctly, super interesting stuff). She has videos where she talks about a mythological character and how we represent them (les relookings mythologiques), where she takes a painting and explains what it represents in mythology (or the Bible for a few of them) so that when you see three ladies with an apple each, you know it’s the Three Graces (Tu vois le tableau), where she visits cities and presents nice less known places (Les villes aux détails most of them with Eng subs as well / inspired by Axolot, see below). She recently started short animated videos. Most of her videos have subs in French and in other languages. She also did a vlog during her last year of phD so if you’re thinking of doing a phD, that’s a good series to watch where she talks about the process and all.

We move to the other side of the Atlantic to visit our cousins, the Québecois with history lecturer, Laurent Turcot and his L’Histoire nous le dira. There are lot of videos about European medieval history as well as more modern Canadian and Quebec history. It’s really interesting. There are also a few videos about sex and gender throughout history (the most recent ones were on witches and vaginal art e.g.). He also has a series of videos on the French Revolution (with subs in Portuguese because why not. Sadly no French subs ). In terms of subs, it varies, some have them, some don’t.

To present the next one, I have to plug another one first. This is the Youtube channel for a tv show by the best tv broadcaster in the world (no I do not take criticisms), Arte. Arte is a French-German public broadcaster that has the best programmes and among those, a show that has made a lot of people including myself want to study politics and international relations, Le Dessous des Cartes. The show are only 12 min long and will present a country or an issue using a map. There are only two shows available on the channel at the moment, but type any geopolitical topic or country or area + Le dessous des cartes and you’ll find a show uploaded on Youtube (like “arctique + dessous des cartes” or “religion + dessous des cartes” or “chine + dessous des cartes”). This is a must see.

Anyway so inspired by this, the small channel, L’Histoire par les cartes was created and it does what it says. There are not a lot of videos, they don’t have subs, they are 5-10 min long, but if you’re like me and enjoy a good map, this is neat little channel.

See Le Vortex above, highly recommend, they have both history and science videos.

I mentioned Passé Sauvage above because she was part of Le Vortex, but she also has a channel where she talks about archaeology (her degrees are in it), anthropology, and history. Her videos are of differing quality technically, but the content is always really interesting. For example, that one on Is democracy the best system? She is developing a new project for 2020 called Odyssée sauvage which I’m really excited about and in which she will travel to Greece to compare archaeological vestiges to Greek mythology. Some vids have subs, the majority don’t sadly.

Social Sciences/Humanities:

Manon Bril (from C’est une autre histoire, see above) has a channel with her former university where she presents, one video per month, the conclusion of a peer-reviewed journal articles in social sciences and humanities in an easy to digest format. It’s more serious than some of the others, but really interesting. It’s on Mondes Sociaux.

Do you like linguistics? I love linguistics personally and this channel is the best. It’s called Linguisticae and Monté explains topics as diverse as what was the first language spoken on Earth, why do we say maman and papa in every language, or why the Académie Française is bad. The videos go from 5 min (the mum/dad one), to 20 min (the first language on earth), to 1h30 for the one l’Académie Française). He also did a really good 50 min documentary on the history and the language of Esperanto which I highly recommend (I linked the part 1 because the doc cut in parts as subs in several languages (except English), but there is also a 50 min version, but it’s only available with subs in Esperanto). Or two long videos on Tolkien’s elf languages and GoT’s languages. He has a lot of videos so I’d advise going through and see what interests you.

That one is about economics because we think we know, but we don’t. In Stupid Economics, they take topics that are in the news and explain how the economics behind it works. They recently did a video on the fine the EU gave to Google and even had a follow-up with someone from the Commission to answer people’s questions. They have videos on the economy of attention, Bitcoin, or CETA. The length varies from 3 to 15 min depending on the type of videos. They are all very well-explained and relevant to the world around us. They tend to have subs, but it depends. The older videos have subs, it depends.

Art/Music:

That first channel is more a “check those two videos” because that’s the only thing posted on this channel, but Louvre Ravioli has posted two interesting videos, each on one painting with detailed explanations on what is represented.

NART is channel on art (chocking I know) where she has several series of videos. The first one is called “3 coups de pinceaux” in which she presents a painter in around 4 min so that you know about their style, story and all and you can recognise them. At the end of each episode she does a quiz where you have to recognise which of the four paintings is by the painter of the day. The latest one was on Schiele for exemple. She has a lot of videos on Art + something. Like Art and Manga or is make-up art. She also has a few videos presenting art exhibitions. She studied contemporary art and started her channel by a 3-part series on contemporary art for those of us who need an explanation which I remember finding really interesting. Some vids have subs (even sometimes Eng subs, but not French), but not all.

There are a few music channels on French vulgarisateurs side. You can find them here on the Mediapason channel. The only one I follow is the very neat channel called Scherzando which talks about medieval music. But also how it still is relevant today. Like the Beatles and the Renaissance or how Georges Brassens was maybe a troubadour. The content of the channel is diverse and it’s all very interesting! Some videos have subs, but not all.

Other:

One of the most famous French Youtuber of that category (although he does other things) is Axolot. Patrick Baud loves the strange and the weird. He has series on people or stories that have a strange atmosphere surrounding them for 6-10 min. He has one of the best voices around. Seriously, you will want to listen to it for hours. He also has a series called “étranges escales” where he goes to a city and shows you a different side to it and other places to visit (15-20 min). He published recently a really interesting video on people who “hunt” for planets and how we discover(ed) exoplanets and it’s just so good, highly recommend (30 min).

That isn’t so much about explaining stuff, but I feel like I should still mention it. Le J-Terre is a monthly news live show and debate about climate issues. It is a group effort by the whole French-speaking European community (so French peeps, but also Swiss and Belgian) to really talk about climate change. There are no subs, but it is really interesting. If those topics interest you, everyone involved in this has their channel plugged so you can find them and their all really interesting (Partager, c’est sympa did a series of videos at the COP24 that I highly recommend with French and English subs).

One of the participants to the J-Terre is Professeur Feuillage, made by married couple Mathieu Duméry (a journalist) and Lénie Cherino (a comedian) where they play a professor and his assistant and present (with a lock of dick jokes, innuendoes, and dildos so careful who you share it with) issues related to climate change like Internet pollution, deforestation, or cute things that are actually destroying the environment. Lénie is actually going to take a bigger part in the channel and it will change a bit, but it’s the very beginning of that, so not sure what it’ll look like. The older videos have subs, not the newest ones sadly.

That one isn’t really popularisation per se, but I want to include it here. Vivre Avec is Margot’s channel where they talk about their life with Ehlers Danlos Syndrome. Recently it has turned a bit more to their plants and their rabbits, but the core of the channel is centred around disability. What is EDS?, what are certain things that people say that really they shouldn’t (the latest video is about people being like “Your life is horrible, it really puts things in perspective” :////). They are videos about symptoms, mobility aids, etc. as well as talking to medicine and nursing students about how to treat patients. All of their videos have French subs.

There are obviously more channels, but those are the ones I follow. If you check the “Channels” tab of most of them, they all have other great recommendations if that isn’t enough for you. Please feel free to add more if you want and come and talk to me about them because I love channels where I can learn stuff.

#langblr #french #français #i'm particularly searching for such channels in swedish and german #frenchblr #please come and talk to me #i have to work on my thesis and i have just spent more than 2h doing this #woops #i hope there aren't any typo because i can't be asked to proofread #you: write your thesis me: okay but what if i wrote nearly 3000 words on youtube channels instead

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lizzieraindrops · 5 years

Text

Your chance to make the sun rise thrice (Chapter 2)

a river that still runs (8803 words)

Beth Childs has come to Helsinki to meet her best friend Veera for the first time in the Herbs on the windowsill universe, an alternate timeline where the original Helsinki massacre was prevented and DYAD routed by Clone Club Alpha’s successful publicity stunt back in 2001. Veera Suominen and Niki Lintula survived and decided to live in a little apartment together as qpp’s. Numerous Leda clones worldwide are now in contact via a secure online network that Veera maintains.

Note: This chapter is a bit heavier than the rest of the AU. Beth is still struggling with a lot of the same challenges in this universe, even if the events causing them are somewhat different because of such early canon divergence. But the whole point of this story is that things can end up okay no matter how rough it's been. She's getting the help she needs and she's gonna be alright. That said, warning for soft discussion of past abuse, the effects of trauma, depression and anxiety, and some suicidal ideation. And of course, lots of love and learning how to heal, with support from her best friend.

Fun fact: Veera's username is 3mika, and she always sets her font to the precise warm turquoise of hex color #2299aa. She thinks she's hilarious, and she's right.

Also on AO3 | Playlist | Aesthetic sideblog

Part 1: Herbs on the windowsill

Part 2: Someday colors

Part 3: Your chance to make the sun rise thrice | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3

***

Beth wakes on a squashy couch that isn't hers. Morning-soft sunlight pours through the window above her, bouncing back off the walls to fill even the shady corners with a warm secondhand glow. Her limbs are soft, splayed under unfamiliar blankets and sinking into the cushions. She doesn't move yet.

The apartment. Helsinki. Beth's really here. She holds herself still, letting the truth sink into her. She half expects the usual anxious tension to clench her into a ball the instant she moves a muscle, but it isn't there. Neither is the invisible weight that so often pins her immobile. She still wakes frequently with both of them holding her body hostage, keeping her muscles unmoving but restless, even in sleep. Right now though, they're gone. She just lies there, soft beneath the window.

It's quiet but not silent. The occasional car on the little road outside chuckles as it passes. A soft rush of water echoes through pipes in the walls, running toward an early riser in another unit. These sounds fall strangely on Beth's Toronto-bred ears, isolated in the stillness of this of this little apartment on the outskirts of the city. Still, the early-morning atmosphere settles comfortably into her jet-lagged bones, murmuring a rhythm for her to sink into. The temporal upheaval of a transcontinental red-eye and a series of exhausted naps yesterday have left her a little unbalanced. And yet, here she is waking up with the day, and the ground under her feels so much more stable than she’s used to.

Beth breaks her stillness with a deep, deep breath that she can feel expanding all the way down to her feet. She stretches, too, but soon pulls the toes that get exposed back underneath the warm, scratchy blanket. The cushions of the old couch creak a little in complaint as she shifts, but her limbs remain supple. For a time, she just observes the sensations. Then, her awareness spreads beyond the couch and the window to the rest of the room.

All around her, an oddly blocky pattern covers the walls. It's one of the first things she noticed when she walked into the apartment yesterday afternoon. The pattern isn't wallpaper like it appears at first glance, but actually a multitude of small photographs. Most of them are unframed, but taped up in crisply aligned rows. In them, she sees the same face infused with a hundred different lives. Just above her, a sleeping, slack-jawed redhead with bulky headphones around her neck sprawls on the very same couch Beth's laying on now. A few rows down, a brunette and a blonde with their long hair in matching wild waves are leaning all over each other and grinning like devils. One of the few framed photos shows a girl with a hospital-short buzz cut and a delighted expression, sitting in front of what looks like a mouthwatering strawberry shortcake. Beth can see at least six others in the background behind strawberry girl. Among them are Mika with her unmistakable scars and Niki with her bright blonde hair, their arms around each other's shoulders.

Morning light glances off the glossy surfaces of the photos on the west wall. The particularly bright reflection off one of the framed photos draws Beth's eye. With a tiny jolt, Beth recognizes one of her own selfies beneath the glass. In it, she's wearing the same old turquoise blue sweatshirt that's spilling out of her suitcase next to the couch right now. Underneath it, she's wearing her track gear, so the photo is at least two years old. She'd had to quit cross-country so she could try to get the shitshow her life had become under control. She vaguely recalls sending it to Mika a long time ago. It's strange to think that her presence has been in this apartment for so long.

She's here. In Finland. Staying with Mika – Mika - and Niki. Far, far away from everything.

Sprawling on the couch she slept on with a sigh as if she hadn’t a care in the world, Beth can't believe she's really gone and done it. She's run so far away that there's an ocean between her and her problems. It’s so much better than she's dreamed, even if it's only for a little while. It’s worth it, even though she'll be going back far too soon. For the first time in years, it feels like she’s where she’s supposed to be right now.

It had all started out as foolish idea she'd floated one Saturday morning, months ago. She hadn't been serious at all. She'd woken up so relieved at not having to get up and go to work, until she remembered her weekly therapy appointment with a hopeless groan.

Putting off the genuinely daunting prospect of hauling herself out of bed, she reached out to snag her phone from on top of her dresser, checking to see if she'd heard from Mika overnight. After all, Helsinki was nine hours ahead, so Mika had already seen most of the day that was just beginning for Beth. They talked so often these days, since they'd first made contact over two years ago. Rarely a day passed without touching base. But there wasn’t anything since Beth had checked last night. She took it upon herself to send the first message of the day.

runwaterblue: god, i dont wanna get up and deal with any of thsi shit today

After her world fell apart, after finding out about Project Leda, after realizing that all her nightmares and more were real, after her father...

runwaterblue: wish i could come visit u and get away form everything for awhile

Mika replied almost immediately.

3mika: you can

It was evening in her time zone, but to be honest, Beth had no idea if she had anything resembling a regular sleep schedule. The girl was always online.

3mika: though you really should go to your appointment. you always feel better afterward

runwaterblue: howd you know i have therapy today

3mika: you always have an appointment saturday afternoons

runwaterblue: yes but how do you remember that? i cant evne remember my own appts lmao

3mika: you mentioned it months ago when you switched from sundays to saturdays

Beth shook her head with a smile. Mika was so good with details.

3mika: anyway. you’re welcome here, if you can get here

3mika: it would be great to see you

3mika: Niki wouldn't mind. we've had a bunch of Ledas visit us here, it's always fun

3mika: except that one time Dani and Ary got into a fight over football. some French-Italian team rivalry thing. that was not fun.

Beth laughed. It was funny how Mika was so good at making her do that, even on days like these. She leaned back against her pillow and held her phone over her head without sitting up, being careful not to drop it on her own face. She'd done that before. More times than she'd admit.

runwaterblue: i was kidding. id love to visit, but idk how id get there

runwaterblue: u should see the americans go off abt their football lmao. they're nerly as bad as the hockey freaks here

3mika: pls no

3mika: no more sports. it was a year ago and I’m still exhausted

3mika: sports are banned in this apartment.

Beth snorted. Mika wanted nothing to do with sports of any kind, and with Beth's athletic record, the topic had become a point of mutual teasing between them.

In so many ways, they were such different people, DNA be damned. Mika was reticent where Beth was outgoing. (Or at least, Beth had been. She was never quite sure how to think of herself these days.) Clone drama aside, Beth had been a pretty average Canadian high schooler. She got reasonable grades, played a few sports, and kept mostly out of trouble because there would be hell to pay if she didn’t. Mika was a brilliant homeschooled autistic orphan who had been raised in near isolation by her guardian after surviving the hospital fire that marked her skin for life. Beth mostly listened to pop music, and where no one else could hear, the occasional classical symphony. Mika held fast to Finland's weird obsession with death metal and dabbled in literally everything else.

And yet, Mika understands Beth like no one else does. And it's not just because they've both been through all this Project Leda bullshit. Though Beth doesn't know what she would have done without Mika to help her through that, too.

Beth won't ever be able to forget the moment that everything changed. Recognizing a her own face from the mirror on the evening news stopped her in her tracks, as something in her gut caved in with the hollow certainty that it wasn't her. Then face after face flickered before her, a flipbook barrage of déja vu. Blonde and smiling. Scarred and pensive. Braids and piercings and a rakish grin. Beth was rooted in place as people she had never been wearing things she had never worn said things she was never supposed to know.

That utter strangeness on the screen immediately seeped into her life like an oil slick into a river, tainting every thing she thought she knew with clinging uncertainty. Her father was inexplicably even more upset about it than Beth was, yet adamant that they shouldn't look into the matter. But it was already too late to stop herself from thinking. With slow horror, the truth of what exactly his behavior must mean dawned on her. And yet, even with the desperate growing certainty about who her Leda monitor must be, it was hard to believe that he could be anything other than her plain stern father.

He was always a bit strict and overprotective - probably well more than a bit, she realizes these days. But she’d thought that's just what it was like to be a cop's daughter. He'd never done anything really extreme, nothing beyond the firm discipline any kid could expect. He was just not a man to be trifled with, that was all. So until everything she thought she knew shifted that day and threatened to topple every assumption she’d built her life on, she had never truly dared to cross him.

Outright daring him to say to her face that he wasn't her monitor was probably considered a step beyond trifling. He did not take it kindly.

Two months later, Beth and her mother were living in an apartment on the opposite side of the city. It took two months for the two of them to lay plans to leave together, for good. For two months, her every move was watched. She spent two months knowing there would be hell to pay if she didn't give the performance of a lifetime pretending everything was fine, even while sirens blared inside her day and night. Two months was more than enough to teach her things she never wanted to know about the hidden marks fear leaves on the body.

Even after she finally escaped, her life was in tatters and nothing made sense. It wasn’t just the sudden jarring discovery of Project Leda, or the crisis it had forced her to confront. It was learning that, deep down, she had known that she’d never once felt free. She’d unconsciously kept herself from knowing to avoid exactly that conflict of wills that she’d known she would lose.

Trying to come to terms with what had happened and how it changed everything, Beth was continuously losing her balance. Questioning which parts of her life had been screwed over by her father and which by being part of some ridiculous supervillain science experiment was like trying to stand on two kickboards in a pool. She couldn't find her footing, and all she could do was try and stay afloat. She had to repeat her whole junior year of high school that she lost to this shitshow, while starting over at a new school, and only barely scraped her way into senior year. Now that she knew how honestly terrible she'd been at judging who in her life she could trust, it was as hard to talk to old friends as it was to make new ones.

Therapy helped her start sorting out what she was feeling, and how the environment she’d grown up in was really not the healthiest. She hadn’t realized how much she’d learned to doubt her own perceptions. That made constructing any kind of new understanding of her situation an uphill struggle. And of course, her therapist couldn’t help her confirm anything about a human experiment that was so illegal it had been an international secret. As she continued to stumble forward, Beth even started doubting her former certainty of the identity of her Leda monitor. She questioned herself and everything she knew until she wanted to scream with frustration or weep with confusion. The floor of the counselor’s office could have been mopped with her tears. It was, quite literally, driving her mad.

So, finally, Beth had taken up the invitation on the banner of every Leda news feature to "Contact the secure, clone-run Clone Youth Group Network (CYGNet) for answers by emailing [email protected]."

She wanted something concrete that would help convince her brain to stop reenacting these head games that warped her reality. It still insisted on playing through the patterns it had been taught, even in its teacher’s absence. She needed something that could brace her against the ideas that she was really just paranoid, overreacting, accusing, that this was all her fault for making a big deal out of nothing. Even with his other faults (cruelties, her mind whispered) aside, at least his involvement with Project Leda was unforgivable, and she wanted proof of it. Maybe if she had that, she could stop being mad at herself for not wanting to forgive. And if anyone had that proof, CYGNet would.

Maybe it was just because of the sheer blunt honesty about her motives, or the inescapable vulnerability of the message Beth sent, but Mika had replied to her within a day. And she'd been so gentle about it, too, enough to make Beth later question where the stereotype of autistic brashness came from. Then again, over email, Mika had all the time she needed to compose her thoughts and lay them out as softly as she wanted. She didn't have to spit them out as fast as she could to keep pace with a quick and painfully overwhelming world.

Hi Beth Childs,

I'm so sorry for what you had to go through. I still don't know how they got away with doing things like this for so long. I suppose people will always find ways to be cruel. But we've survived this long, and the whole point of CYGNet is to help us all heal. The experimental network has been dismantled, and we are assembling resources to help us. We've brought mental health professionals on to the project to develop custom programs for our needs. We can make them available to you, if you are interested.

I attached scans of some of your files that we recovered from DYAD. There are a few case reports with the signature of the person you asked about, spaced throughout your lifetime. There are also financial records with his name in the list of paid employees. He was without a doubt part of the Leda monitor program. I can provide all of the documentation that we have related to you, if you like, but I thought that would be too much all at once. I know these are hard to look at, but I hope they help let your mind rest. They are very real, and every awful thing we have experienced was also real, no matter how they tried to convince everyone that we were making it all up.

Please take your time with these, and stay in contact if you want to. You can join our mailing list, if you want to know when we have new information or new resources available. We're here for you.

And hey, if you just want to talk to someone who knows what it's like to deal with all of this, I'm here, too. You can reach my personal inbox or IM me at [email protected]. It'll be okay.

-Veera

Beth had started crying before she even finished reading the letter, much less opened the attachments. She cried so often these days. She only knew why half the time. But this time, it felt like the tears were extracting some of her pain as they left her, instead of just overflowing from the unending wellspring of her directionless distress. All of this was real, and someone else knew it.

Though she was grateful beyond measure for her mother’s untiring support, they were each other’s too-close, ever-present reminders of what they’d survived, trying to act like they weren’t, trying to convince each other and themselves that they were okay. Beth had needed something else, too, something until now unnamed.

This was a handhold, a backstop Beth didn't know she'd been desperate to find. It wasn't just the confirmation of what she’d concluded about her father. The ability speak plainly to someone she didn't feel the need to pretend around was an exhale of a breath held too long. At least one person in the world not only understood, but really and truly didn't want or expect her to act like any of this was normal or okay, or that she would ever be the same again.

Veera – or Mika, as she often went by online – made good on her offer of a sympathetic ear. Their correspondence started off with awkward, grammatically correct messages about the less painful details of their lives. Mika told her about the farmer’s market three blocks away where she went walking early in the morning before it got busy, and the plant stand there that her best friend and roommate Niki (also a Leda) had to ask her to stop buying so many succulents from.

At first, Beth tried to chatter like she used to, but there were no safe subjects. What had happened had touched all of her life. Normally, she’d talk about school, or sports, or her friends. But she was trying to start all over again at a new school with all the struggles that came with it. She didn’t have the time or energy for sports anymore, and talking about them hurt, now. Running used to make her heart sing. But no matter how she tried, there was no joy in the motion anymore. To top it all off, it was as hard to connect with old friends from her old life as it was to try and make new ones. She spent most interactions either doubting her own character judgement or dreading the moment people recognized her Leda face from the news.

She didn’t know how to talk about any of it to anyone. Maybe she could have if it had been just the clone thing or just the dad thing. But the two were inextricably entangled, and she still couldn’t even explain it to herself. It was all unbelievably horrifying, and any time she tried to be honest about it, people ended up disbelieving or horrified. Shocker.

Maybe, though, it wouldn’t be weird to talk about it with Mika. Mika already knew the worst. Beth didn’t have to hide that hurt from her to keep from shaking her world, or to keep her dismissal from hurting Beth. Maybe that’s what was hurting the most: the feeling that even after escaping, she still had to pretend to be okay. That compulsive stifling feeling choked her whenever it bubbled back up. On her bad days, a simple “how are you?” could reduce her to a blank face plastered over a raw tangle of emotions held motionless her own iron grip.

But Mika mentioned having bad days, too. Days came where she was too scared and nightmare-weary to do anything but make herself some tea and soak up some sunlight in the safety of home. Beth could casually say things like after those two months, i still twitch every time i hear a door open, and i wish my body would quit feeling like it doesn’t exist, my legs feel numb. It barely broke the surface of what it was like in her head, but was discomfiting enough for people that she held her tongue at school.

Sometimes, Beth got tired of constantly thinking about all this shit and tried to lighten things up. On one comically disastrous occasion of cultural exchange, she liveblogged Mika her attempt at eating the infamous Scandinavian lutefisk, along with an audio recording of the incoherent horrified noises she made after tasting it. In return, she received a recording of someone, presumably Mika, laughing harder than she’d ever heard anyone laugh before. It made Beth smile. Not many things did, back then.

Slowly, as the formality fell away from their transcontinental conversations, their heavier stories seething below the surface seeped in. Beth had been in therapy long enough now to know that she couldn't just recklessly unload on people the way she did in counseling sessions. But a counselor couldn't always provide the same kind of unspoken solidarity that someone in the same boat could.

Bit by bit, slipped into the chats that were becoming a daily occurrence, they talked about monitors, about what the experiment had really all been for, why that both was and wasn’t important, and how they'd discovered they were a part of Project Leda. Putting words to the pain hurt, a lot. But the ability to lay out long-unspoken truths in front of each other, knowing they were believed in the way that only people who have shared something can, was a healing kind of pain instead of the festering one Beth had been living with.

The two of them had more in common than they'd thought, growing up a world apart. Beth's experience raised under the subconscious wariness of her father's hovering thumb felt a lot like what Mika described growing up largely isolated with her former guardian. But sometimes, whenever they realized that something they'd both thought was normal was pretty not, they got a good laugh out of it despite the weight of their pasts. Mika seemed somewhat accustomed to her normal being considered pretty weird, so she usually took the revelations in stride better than Beth did. Beth wouldn't find out for at least a year after meeting her that it was because of her Asperger's, since it was a topic Mika seemed quite sensitive about.

Mika explained it once, in a conversation full of long pauses on her part and watching the typing icon disappear and reappear on Beth’s. The way she put it, it just meant that her brain worked a bit differently than most people's, processing sounds and sights and all the information it took in at different speeds and with different emphases. The difference could turn everyday things like the sound of a refrigerator running into a splitting headache, or something as simple as the soft texture of her favorite jacket into a kind of bliss. That alternative way of processing also extended to things like words and emotions as well. Sometimes, it took her longer than the world was willing to wait to process them into something that made sense. It often made communication tricky, trying to compensate for the gap in mutual understanding with most people. The world and the people in it could be so overwhelming sometimes, so fast and bright and full of noise and uncertainty and bewilderingly arbitrary social conventions. But the biggest challenge was other people expecting her to do everything the same way they did, ignorant of the fact there were any ways to exist other than their own, and completely oblivious to the fact that she was already putting in at least twice as much effort to communicate with them as they were with her.

And yet, even coming from such a different perspective, Mika gets it. Beth says sometimes i dream of drowning and its not a nightmare and i wake up not knowing how to feel, and Mika says I still dream of burning and wake up not knowing which fires are real, and they both say yeah. And they sit there across the world from each other knowing these things, knowing that it doesn't fix anything. And yet, it does change something. Nothing's any better, really. But somehow, the knowledge that someone else understands makes it a little easier to bear.

And that's just it. Somehow, without ever even having seen her face, Mika sees Beth clearer than anyone. All of her, all the ugly parts she hides so that they can't hurt anyone, and all the good parts that she also hides so that nobody can hurt them or take them away from her. Mika sees all of that and then just tells Beth another story about the Northern Lights she sees on the regular. Apparently, in Finnish, they’re called "fox fires." Beth hardly ever sees the aurora, living relatively far south in a bright city. But her stories about life in the metropolis by the lake intrigue Mika as much as the tales of the twisting green lights do her. And Beth can talk about something lighter again while not having to pretend that the heaviness isn’t there, too, even while she’s just once more trying and failing to explain poutine. For her, the weight never really goes away. But the effort of pretending she’s not carrying it takes more out of her than the weight itself. Mika understands that.

Maybe that’s why Beth had talked it over with Mika first, even before her mom, when she was considering taking a gap year after she hopefully managed to finish her senior year of high school. (God, it was so hard to think about English or math or whatever when just that morning she’d woken from a nightmare about being back in a not-home house that she never escaped.) Beth's mom had been so unbelievably supportive of Beth's recovery, even while she herself was adjusting to the wrenching change in both of their lives. It was both inspiring and a little intimidating. If her mom managed to run a household and raise a daughter all on her own, even while trying to heal from her own trauma, how could Beth not do her utmost, too? She was grateful to be able to talk to Mika about it, to get a reality check from someone who both understood her situation intimately and didn't make Beth feel that pressure of expectation. In the end, Beth did decide to take a year or two off before considering college, and her mom was again nothing if not supportive. Beth figured, after this entire mess, she deserved some time to herself to work on sorting her shit out, and her mom agreed.

After graduating with reasonable if not flying colors, Beth worked a series of part-time and odd jobs that didn't stress her out too much, letting herself focus on her own healing. In between her mom's support, seeing a counselor regularly, and the security of having a friend she could really trust, Beth felt like she was making progress. Slow progress, sure, but progress, nonetheless. Considering that she had seventeen years' worth of lies to unbelieve and emotional trauma to finally acknowledge, Beth figured that there was only so much she could do in the three years she'd had.

Her days were still hard. Getting sleep and waking up and eating and even just existing were still so fucking hard sometimes, and it was horrible. Some days, the thinnest sheet trapped her in bed like it was a car pinning her down. It felt so stupid for such simple things to be so hard. But then her therapist would remind her that that’s what mental illness and trauma was, that this was what the wounds in her mind and heart made her feel like. And once in awhile, sun broke through the shadows, and she had a day that reminded her what an okay day felt like – that okay days existed. That more might.

Now, she’s here, lying in a bright living room so far from home, with her dearest friend in the next room. She’s comfortable, except for the knot in her neck from sleeping oddly on the couch. The soreness pales in comparison to the usual tensions that are so strangely absent. Beth can’t remember the last time she felt this okay. She’s not steeling herself to go to work. She’s not dreading the next conversation with her mother that goes quiet as they both remember awful things they don’t mention. She’s not bracing herself for the next time her brain runs rampant worrying about whether she’ll run into the subject of her restraining order somewhere in the city and have to wonder if he'll honor it.

None of that reaches her here. There’s something about this quiet little pocket of space. It’s overrun with a proliferation of potted plants, from the sprawling lacy-leafed monster in the corner, to the fern peeping out of the kitchen, to the vine cuttings spilling out of an oddly familiar leaf-shaped glass bottle on the sill. Sunlight streaks through leaves and windowpanes and across the colorful patchwork of rugs on the floor. In the midst of it all, Beth is held by a palpable aura of gentleness. It holds her so softly that she doesn't need to hold herself in. It's like the layer of caution that she always keeps wrapped between herself and the rest of the world has simply dissolved away. In this moment suspended in morning light, she is okay.

She feels safe.

The realization undoes something in her. She feels the tears starting, and she expects the taut tension of involuntary stifling that always comes with them to return. But it doesn’t. She lies still and soft on the couch with the water creeping over her cheeks, breath occasionally catching but flowing freely. She savors it in the quiet.

The soft thunk of an ill-fitted door opening breaks into her odd reverie. Mika’s up. Beth sniffs and scrubs at her eyes halfheartedly, but she can’t hide them right now and she doesn’t want to. Mika notices immediately, and comes trotting over with quiet steps, leaning forward all concern.

"Beth," she says softly. She shifts from foot to foot like a nervous cat, watching Beth with enormous eyes. Beth has never met anyone else with such an intense stare. Or maybe it's just the fact that Beth knows beyond all doubt that she's being looked at by somebody who really sees her in her entirety. It's like she's staring right into Beth's soul. But Mika was able to do that long before they saw each others' faces. They've shared so many thousands of words over screens and seas, so many emotions that have gone otherwise unspoken, so many too-early mornings and too-late nights on the fringes of each other's dawns and dusks.

“What’s wrong?”

Finally, a flash of that sick tension runs through Beth’s body. It’s been okay when Mika has asked that before, when it was just silent letters on a screen. But out loud, the question falls on her ears like every well-meaning inquiry she’s ever had to scramble to find an acceptable answer for. The strain begins to cinch tight around her again like coarse ropes across barely-healed skin, ready to compel her to replace the truth with something safer. Her arms and legs tied, she begins to freeze, railing against herself for tainting the softness, the safety of this place.

"Beth." Mika says again, softer but more urgent.

In the gap between thoughts created by hearing her name, Beth seizes the chance to redirect them to the present. She clings to the welling in the corners of her eyes, the warmth of the sun caressing her back. The leaves of trees whisper outside the third-floor window in a mild breeze. The brightness spills over the sill and across Mika’s asymmetrical, half-craggy face and lights up tufts of her short hair as she steps closer. The couch dips as Mika sits down next to her, tilting Beth toward her.

Without meeting her eyes, Mika lifts a hesitant hand that hovers in the air between them, uncertain yet reaching. Her gentle palm falls onto Beth's forearm as softly as a floating leaf. The fingers curl around Beth’s arm just below the wrist, firm but not tight. Comforting.

The softness surrounding Beth seeps back into her, saturating her. As the memory fades like a ripple into water, the tension slackens. But it leaves her shaky, with traces of a familiar ache in her neck muscles, one that goes deeper than the simple stiffness from the couch. She sucks in a few unsteady breaths while Mika gives her arm a gentle squeeze.

“Sorry,” Beth says in a small, awkward voice.

Mika tilts her head. “Why?”

“Uh, I didn’t mean to bring all – this mess, in here.” Beth rubs the back of her neck with her free hand. “It’s so... soft, and okay, and – I don’t wanna ruin it,” she says, trailing off into a mumble.

“Hey.” Mika moves her hand from Beth’s arm to her shoulder. When Beth looks at her, she’s looking right back. Mika's eyes dart down to the floor for a moment, but then return to hold Beth’s with deliberate steadiness. “It’s alright. It’s like this here because we wanted it to be safe to be messy. You’re not ruining anything.”

“... Oh.” She’s steadied by Mika’s fingers curling around her shoulder, by the tendrils of sunlight spreading across her head and back and arms. Mika’s voice is small but steady, and somehow it comes from the same throat that makes that huge pealing laugh. It’s so strange how they sound nothing alike. Until yesterday, Beth hadn’t heard her voice since the lutefisk incident. They’d mostly kept to text and pictures. It had seemed easier, the way it gave them both plenty time to think before they spoke through their different uncertainties. Beth was already planning her trip before they realized that they’d never actually called each other. By that point, it sounded like more fun to meet in person the old-fashioned way.

"I'll make you some tea." Mika abruptly stands and lets go of her. Beth is sad to lose the contact. She flits across the room toward the kitchen in her soft cotton pajama pants, complemented by yet another black graphic tee for yet another Scandinavian metal band Beth's never heard of. Or at least, she'd never heard of them before Mika, who has something to say about all of them, and now Beth knows more than she'll ever need to.

Mika moves in and out of view behind the half-wall that separates the little living room from the kitchen. The fronds of the fern on the counter make a green rustling as she brushes by them. It sends soft feathered shadows waving across the wall opposite the window. Beth hears the rush of water boiling out of sight, and soon sees steam rising from the mug that's being handed to her.

"It's hot," Mika says unnecessarily. She sits down next to her again, this time leaning into Beth with her arm. Beth’s glad for it.

"Have you ditched the bags and gone loose leaf?" Beth says, eyeing the fragments of bright green leaf free floating in her mug.

"It didn't come in a bag. It came from the window."

"The window?"

"It's basil tea. For the fear and pain. Five large fresh leaves in two hundred and fifty milliliters water. We grew it here."

Beth takes a cautious sip. It's surprisingly sweet, and the savory smell of the steam rising from it curls into her sinuses. The aching in her head and neck begin to relax. It's unfamiliar, but it feels like home should, just like everything else here.

"Thanks," Beth says. On an impulse of craving closeness, she leans her head onto Mika's shoulder with a sigh. The sensation of contact deepens as Mika leans against her, too.

Beth holds the cup close, fingers wrapping around its warmth. She takes another sip and gets a bit of leaf stuck in her teeth. The way she scrunches up her face trying to dislodge it pulls a tiny laugh out of Mika.

“You don’t have to be okay here,” Mika whispers. “You can just be. That’s what we do.”

Beth finds her eyes wet again, but she smiles while she sets her mug down and wipes them away. “Kinda already wish I could stay here,” she says with a chuckle.

“... That’s probably not impossible.”

“Really?” Beth asks wryly. “Not even twenty-four hours, and you’d already be willing to put up with me?”

“Twenty-four hours and twenty-seven months.”

Beth melts a little even while waving the idea aside. “I wasn’t serious.”

“I know, but... weren’t you looking at the school here?”

“I mean, yeah, but... really, my mom just thought I deserved a break to get away for a little while. She’d saved up a bit, and I didn’t want to make it a big deal or anything, but she really wanted me to. She knew I wanted to come see you. Checking out the school was mostly an excuse. I know it’s a great place, but... I don’t really think it’ll help with what I wanna do.”

“What do you want to do?”

Beth sighs and leans back, looking at the ceiling. Mika follows her so that they’re still shoulder to shoulder, and pulls her feet up to tuck them in cross-legged.

She flounders for a moment, trying to find where to begin. She hasn’t told anyone this yet.

“This Leda crap has been kind of awful, right? It’s screwed so many of us up. But there’s only, what, a few hundred of us? And that’s not the only reason things get messed up.” She swallows. Her eyes trace irregularities in the ceiling: a knot in an exposed wooden beam here, a sealed and repainted crack there. “Kids like me are a dime a dozen. There’s so many people out there going through hell, just because they got stuck with people who are hurting so much that they hurt other people. And then they go on and hurt more people. It’s a cycle that’s really fucking hard to break.”

Breaths that have become harsh force her to pause and let them lengthen again. A touch on her knee draws her eyes down to a hand resting on it palm up, offering. Beth takes it. Mika squeezes her fingers in reassurance.

“When I was little, I wanted to be a cop like my dad, did you know that?” Mika, eyes wide, shakes her head. “Yeah. That was always my plan. I used to think he was so brave. Wanted to be just like him.” She shudders. Mika grips her hand, steady. “Even if I could do it better than he did, the system is still full of people like him. It’s broken. I couldn’t – I can’t end up like that. I can’t keep being a part of this shit. I want to actually help people.

“I never thought about it before I met you, but the people you brought in to do therapy programs and all for CYGNet? They’re amazing. The stuff I’ve gotten from them has helped me so much. And I don’t know what I’d do without my regular therapist. These people really help people like me. Like all of us. Those are the kind of people I wanna be like.”

Beth’s voice drops and becomes small and secretive, but firm. “I’ve been looking at the social work programs at home. There’s some really good ones at the uni near where mom and I live now. And that’s the city where I grew up. I know how things work there. I know it won’t be easy, but. I could really... do stuff.”

Silence stretches. Beth looks at Mika, only to be completely thrown off by an expression she can’t make heads or tails of. “What?”

Mika’s face is blank yet soft, only barely hinting at her thoughts in the faintest crinkling of her eyes. It’s funny, how quiet her face is most of the time. Beth never would have guessed, going off her online impressions of her. Mika’s so expressive and eloquent with her written words. In person, she is much more subtle. But even after only a day spent around her, Beth is already starting to see how her movements speak volumes in a language of their own. The flickering of her hands flares to life with excitement. The casual shake of her head tosses her hair out of her eyes even when it’s not in the way, like she’s clearing the slate of her mind. And much like Beth these days, she goes very still and tense when she’s getting uncomfortable or overwhelmed, the way she did after a particularly loud whistle at the train station. It shows in her shoulders. They’re soft now though, and she just watches Beth and squeezes her hand once more.

“You’re really amazing, you know,” Mika says.

“Wh- huh?”

“Well.” She looks away and turns their hands over, but doesn’t let go. “After the awful things you’ve been through – nnnh! Don’t pretend,” she says, looking back sharply as Beth begins to protest that she didn’t have it that bad. Mika knows her so well. Beth can’t help but laugh a little. “After all that, you just want to help people. All I ever want to do is get away from them, most of the time.”

Beth quirks a brow at her with a bemused grin. “Really? Because setting up and running an organization that provides mental health resources and extremely important information to a few hundred people is a really shit way to not help people.”

“I never talk to most of them! And CYGNet only has one hundred and thirteen members, not hundreds.”

Beth rolls her eyes with an exaggerated motion. “Yeah, so, you’ve somehow convinced, what, a whole freaking third of a huge group of scared strangers to trust you?”

“A lot of that was Niki and the press team, she’s way better at talking to people th–”

“And you’ve been careful enough and clever enough to keep them and all the information you got from DYAD safe and secure? I can’t even imagine the organization and, and cyber-security and whatever the hell else you put into all this. That you still put in. And look what you’ve done. You’re helping so many people. You found something only you could do, and do it really damn well.”

Mika looks down into her lap, half her face flushed. The raised ridges and swirls of the scarred side are pink, but not as dark. Her shoulders curl in a little, but she doesn’t pull her hand away from Beth’s. If anything, she holds on a little tighter.

“You don’t have to like talking to people to help them. You don’t have to be someone you’re not,” Beth says gently, then pauses as a new thought occurs to her. “Why did you talk to me?”

Mika gives a tiny shrug, eyes still downcast. “You reached out to me. Most people are scared, or suspicious, or hard to talk to, but you were just... honest. You told me exactly what you needed, even if that meant sharing your painful secrets with a stranger. I...” She trails off, looking toward the closed door of Niki’s bedroom. She blinks slowly.

“It reminded me of something Niki said a long time ago. When we first met. We didn’t trust each other at first. But when things got bad, we needed to, and she just... We’d only known each other for a day. She told me a true story that people had called her crazy for, and trusted me to believe her. And when I told her about... my Asperger’s, about being autistic, she just told me something about herself, too, another thing that a lot of people get cruel about when they know. This was back before she came out, too. She was hardly out to herself, then, really. But she told me anyway. ‘Secret for a secret,’ she said.”

“She’s really special to you.” It’s not a question. How could it be, with the sheer softness of love rounding out every syllable and making Mika melt into the couch and into Beth’s shoulder.

“She’s... yes. She’s my family.” Mika looks out the window, and the bright light dances over her nose. “I don’t remember ever having one.”

Beth slings an arm around Mika’s shoulders and smiles as she curls closer into Beth’s side. “Looks like you’re part of a pretty big one, now,” she says, waving a hand at the dozens of photos on the walls circling them.

“I guess so.”

“No need to guess. The evidence is right there. And I’m right here.”

Mika turns those huge eyes on her again. She’s done that multiple times now, even though Beth knows she rarely looks people in the eye. Eye contact is too much, most of the time. She describes it as too intense, too distracting, too intimate. Meeting those eyes – so like Beth’s own, but filled with such a different kind of light – Beth thinks she understands a glimmer of it. If every eye she met were as overwhelmingly expressive as Mika’s, Beth probably wouldn’t meet them all either. It keeps taking her by surprise, coming across their eloquence in an otherwise quiet face. Caught by that gaze, every emotion that lives in it touches Beth. Right now, it’s soft with adoration but shaded with a gradient of doubt. The width and depth of Mika’s eyes reveal a clear view of a vulnerable, aching, healing heart that spent eleven years starving for the love it needs and still hasn’t forgotten the famine.

It might be breaking Beth’s heart. No wonder Niki is always showering her with hugs and kind words and gentle hands on rounded shoulders. Maybe one of these days, Mika will have spent long enough finally getting to soak up all that affection that she won’t look at Beth like this when she says the simple truth.

“Hey. Here I am. Really.” Beth’s voice is a little choked up. She pulls Mika into a proper hug with both arms. Mika squeaks in surprise at being squeezed so emphatically, but returns it all the same. God, but she gives the best hugs of anyone Beth’s ever met. All contact and even, firm pressure and steadiness. “It’s so damn good to see you. I can’t believe you’re...” real, Beth thinks but doesn’t say. I can’t believe I didn’t imagine you. I can’t believe you’re just as kind as your words. I can’t believe how good it feels to be around you. “I can’t believe I’m really here.”

Mika doesn’t say anything. For a moment, one of her hands leaves Beth’s back to fiddle with something, then comes back to give her a little squeeze that Beth returns.

Beth’s phone buzzes a notification behind her on the little glass-top table next to the couch. The table’s wooden base is a round blob carved into the shape of a very fluffy and very ugly sheep with curly horns. Beth’s arms loosen from their embrace as she turns to look at it, bemused. No one but Mika really messages her except for her mom. But if it’s morning here, it’s about time for bed at home. She checks it, just to be sure she’s okay.

But it’s not from her mom.

Mika reaches out to gently grasp her forearm again as Beth shoots her a quizzical look and opens the message.

3mika: I'm glad you're here.

Beth's heart quails.

To think, that her darker days might have kept her from ever being in this moment. Beth might never have gotten to this point, hurt but healing and here. Here, she's seven time zones and an ocean away from the cycle of pain she grew up in, barely aware she needed to escape. She might well feel safer right here in this crossroads of time and place than she has at any other in her entire life. It's a realization that's as humbling as it is nourishing.

Already, the distance this journey has taken her has given her so much perspective. She wasn’t sure, before, whether the work she’s been considering was just a response to what she’s been through – or just a way for the cycle to keep her within its spiral. But she’s seen what Mika can do, what Beth could do one day, if she keeps on.

It won’t be easy. She’ll go back, and deep-seated memories will try to drag her back into small dark places. But being here, even for only a few hours, has already changed her. She can change, and she can grow, and she is already tapping into new strengths that her past has yet to reckon with. She is here, right now, in spite of all of it. And today is not a dark day.

“Me too, Mika. I’m glad to be here, too.” Beth’s tongue stumbles over the name, because she’s never said it out loud before, only read it on a screen.

Surprise sends Mika’s eyebrows up and her eyes wide again, like she’s never heard it before, either. Maybe she hasn’t. She tilts her head again like a question, touching her ear and looking at Beth.

Beth grins. “Mika.” A smile blooms on that curious face, lighting it up. She’s the one who pulls Beth into a hug this time, and it’s both fierce and soft. When she lets go, she leans into Beth’s side again and they stay like that, arms over shoulders and comfortably curled up together, soaking in the warmth of each other’s presence like leaves drink in light. The simple sweetness and companionship of it soothes Beth’s heart, seeking its way into the aching crevices. It’s an odd feeling, both seeping inward and flowing outward, trickling all the way through her until it warms her cold toes in a way that feels both new and strangely familiar.

A long, sleepy yawn announces that Niki’s awake now, too. Soon, she comes out of her room stretching her arms over her head. Mika reaches a hand out toward her to wave in greeting, though she leaves the other arm draped over Beth’s shoulders. Niki smiles at them. That kind smile, too, adds to the warmth washing through Beth. Her feet practically itch with it, and with a growing sensation of déja vu. She fidgets her toes against the floor as Niki walks over to brush Mika’s outstretched hand like a touchstone.

“How'd you sleep? Isn’t that couch the comfiest?” she says to Beth.

“Well, I’ve got a crick in my neck, but I still slept better than I have in years.”

Niki turns her sunny smile on Beth. “Good to hear it. Weird, though, I nap there all the time and my neck’s always fine. Huh. Anyway, I think I might make waffles. You two want some breakfast?”

Mika nods, but doesn’t let go of Beth yet. Beth is lost in thought, trying to remember what that light, floating feeling in her feet reminds her of.

“Sweet.” Niki ambles toward the kitchen and bends down with pursed lips to peer at the fern perched on the counter. “Hmm. You still look a little pale. Let’s get you some more sun.” She brings the plant over to the living room and is fussing over settling it on the sheep table when it clicks for Beth. A physical memory washes over her, for once welcome. She lets it fill her, refreshing like a deep breath of cold morning air her lungs are suddenly hungry for. She flexes her calves and ankles, her legs remembering the joy and freedom of stride and strike. Her bones are finally recalling how they once carried her with ease, even while they're adjusting to the new weight of who she's become. Fully alive again for at least this moment, her soles are practically prickling with the desire to eat up ground.

“How about you, Beth? Do you like waffles?” Niki asks, fluffing the fern’s crinkly green leaves. Mika squeezes her shoulder.

Beth grins and plants steady feet on the blue rug in front of the couch. “Save a few for me? I think I might actually go for a run first.”

#orphan black #clone club #veera suominen #beth childs #niki lintula #mk ob #mika ob #herbs on the windowsill au #lizzie taking up space #lizzie's adventures in writing #welcome back yall #long post #fic #ob fic #that a garden will grow

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borisbubbles · 5 years

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ESC2019 Preshow #18

18. ROMANIA Ester Peony - “On a sunday” SemiFinal 2, #06

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~Oi see da smøk rrrrrrrois freummmm deeeee eshhhhdrrrrreyyyyy ~

ENTRY ANALYSIS

You can forgive me for posting the NF version here, but “On a sunday” is one of those songs which comes alive ONLY during the live performance. I just love how she sllllllllrs her wrrrrrrds; See above. It’s funny to me that Ester, who is Canadian, has such questionable English diction but then I remember she’s from the FRENCH-speaking part of Canada 😍😂

Anyway, “On a sunday” is an interesting song to me for many reasons. A of all, it’s probably the closest thing we had to a genuine shock NF winner in this season, which is always exciting. B of all, um hello it’s a dark, vindictive gothic powerballad and I’m only gay, after all.

Personally I quite love the theme Romania are going for: I can definitely get ~Bride of Dracula~ vibes and you can FEEL the overwhelming anger and pain and thirst for revenge in Ester’s voice, which I think are very powerful attributes. Having said that though, the song itself is sorta weak lol. I mean, it has potential, which is already capitalizes with its Mrs. Havisham-themed styling, (there’s a reason it won Selectia Nationala and that’s because it GLEW UP), but “On a sunday” gives me less in terms of actual replay value and fun factor. It’s a curious entry and my interest is piqued but as if yet not fully retained.

NF CORNER

Time for the longest part of the write up because of all the shit I need to address here. 🙄

Well FIRST of all, I will NOT be addressing Laura Bretan because i don’t give a fuck about “Dear Father” and never have. Yes, she’s probably not gay-friendly, but I don’t give a care, honestly. I care about entertainment value and “Dear Father” was a BORING FUCKING SLOG to get throug. I’m happy it lost to something which i actually cared about. :-)

Who will I address? Let’s start with my faves. Nearly everyone favourited either Laura or Bella, but not I. I loved Trooper with their exquisite pirate rock:

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Lol this almost literally sounds like “Yo Ho A Pirate’s Life For Me!” but I Adorez It anyway <3 It’s so cheesy and gimmicky but I enjoyed it and YOU WOULD HAVE TOO, DON’T LIE. 🍺

And of course there’s also Bella Santiago, half-Philippina, half-Romanian biracial butterfly 🦋

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AN ARMY TO FIIIIIGHT FOR LOOOOOOOOVE!!!!!! Adding some lines in Tagalog <3 Everyone compares it to “Fuego” but this sounds way more like a mashup of “My Number One” and “The Balkan Girls” to me? I”Army of Love” is a fun-dispenser from start to finish. She should have won (literally. She was TVR’s chosen one.)

Sigh, I suppose this is where I also address the meltdowns after Ester won? Oh man, I don’t want to fucking address ... all of this, but the jist of it is this:

Laura Bretan was, as stated previously, boring and was rigged out because of it. Emmelie de Forest then ruined Bella with her TerribleDanishTaste™. The Laura Fans blamed, in increasing order of severity: TVR, Ester and “The Evil Wiwibloggs Gays” and even tried to get Ester DQ’d because the result wasn’t what *they*, fewer than 4000 people in a country of seven million, wanted. 🙄

(the funniest/saddest comment I ever read on the debacle and perhaps the entire internet period calls out William and Deban as -wait for it- ‘HOMOPHOBICPHOBICS’ lmfao how even. How dare those evil homos be phobic towards those poor homophobes!!!! #StopHomophobicphobiaNow #JeSuisBretan).

(and if anyone had any doubts Laura actually did make a public statement saying she still supports the message of the anti-lgbt marriage vid she appeared in 🙃)

Shit got SO BAD Ester refused to appear on public television for WEEKS, afraid of being badmouthed and attacked. Poor woman. Vile, toxic BULLYING by Wild Jokahs On A Gold Throne is NEVER the answer. Remind me to quote this when we get to Italy, a bit later in this ranking.

Qualification Odds: Borderline (+)

Obviously, after the entire ordeal she had to ensure I ABSOLUTELY WANT Ester in the finale even if she’s barely in my own top 10 for said SF. I don’t dislike Laura, but I do hate her fans and every instance which proves them wrong counts as a moral victory against cyberbullying to me :-)

I wish I could say with confidence that she qualifies though, but the reality of the matter is that Ester is Borderline at best. Romania’s best chance is if they go ALL OUT on the ~Gothic Vampire Queen~ idea they’re currently preparing and make it dramatic, powerful and visually enthralling (without taking themselves too seriously, obvi). If they manage that or similar, they should pull of qualification or at least come very close without embarrassing themselves.

Projected Placement: 6th-12th in the SemiFinal. If she qualifies, 12th-20th in the Grand Final.

Link to the masterpost

#Eurovision #Eurovision 2019 #ESC2019 #Eurovision Song Contest #Romania #Ester Peony #On A Sunday

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crispsevans · 6 years

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Films in 2019

filmpage - filmlist - suggest a film

CAN CONTAIN SPOILERS.

Ralph Breaks The Internet (2018)

seen in theatre production country: USA OV: english seen version: german Starring: John C. Reilly, Sarah Silverman, Gal Gadot Director: Phil Johnston, Rich Moore Plot summary: Six years after the events of "Wreck-It Ralph," Ralph (Reilly) and Vanellope (Silverman), now friends, discover a wi-fi router in their arcade, leading them into a new adventure.

Review: I freaking loved this movie. It’s funny and heartbreaking and the parallels to our lives nowadays regarding the internet are spot on. I was invited to watch this movie before it actually arrives in theatres over here in Germany, so I was very lucky to see it beforehand. It’s a good laugh, a good cry and contains a life lesson, like every disney movie has. Rating: 4,5/5

The Front Runner (2018)

seen in theatre production country: USA OV: english seen version: german Starring: Hugh Jackman, Vera Farmiga, J.K. Simmons Director: Jason Reitman Plot summary: American Senator Gary Hart's (Jackman) presidential campaign in 1988 is derailed when he's caught in a scandalous love affair.

Review: Opened last thursday and is almost cancelled in all of the theatres over here, because it’s running really bad apparently. I have to say, I am not surprised, because this is not a movie for everyone. You need to have a thing for political movies to enjoy this one. I did very much, even though there were a few parts that kind of made this movie unnecessarily long. What I also didn’t like about the movie was that it’s really superficial. It’s only scratching the surface of what could be a very interesting storyline. I know it’s based on real events, but I believe there’s more to tell to the story. The depth of the characters sadly lacked a ton. Jackman’s and also Farmiga’s performances, however, were strong and I enjoyed watching this film whatsoever. Rating: 3/5

Le Flic De Belleville (2018)

seen in theatre production country: France OV: french / english / spanish seen version: german / spanish Starring: Omar Sy, Luiz Guzmán, Biyouna Director: Rachid Bouchareb Plot summary: When a childhood friend from Miami gets killed after he comes to warn of encroaching drug gangs, Baaba (Sy) moves to Miami and teams up with a local officer to bring down the criminals.

Review: It was Sneak Monday you guys and what can I say - I was so confused when the production companies showed off their logos in the beginning, because I’ve never heard of one of them in my whole life before. I’m not really into french movies, don’t really know why to be honest. I still had no idea what this movie was about, not even when the title (ger. ‘Belleville Cop’) was revealed. But it was pretty much self-explanatory after a short time into the movie. It was very entertaining, but it reminded me on ‘CHIPS’ - another movie I’ve seen in a Sneak Preview a few years ago. Had some good laughs and I was pleasantly surprised, it’s nothing special though. No special screenplay or camera work, no special acting achievement or anything. Hence my rating. Rating: 2,5/5

Allied (2016)

streamed on Amazon Prime production country: USA / UK OV: french / english seen version: OV Starring: Brad Pitt, Marion Cotillard, Jared Harris Director: Robert Zemeckis Plot summary: In 1942, a Canadian intelligence officer (Pitt) in North Africa encounters a female French Resistance fighter (Cotillard) on a deadly mission behind enemy lines. When they reunite in London, their relationship is tested by the pressures of war.

Review: I’ve been wanting to see this since I first saw the trailer in the cinema years ago, but no one wanted to watch it with me or we had no time to watch it. So I had to wait a little more than two years to see this. Luckily, Amazon sent me an E-Mail with its 99ct - offers and ‘Allied’ was one of the movies I actually rented for 99ct on christmas eve. But I just watched it today, because I wasn’t in the mood before - I really had to watch it now, because otherwise I would’ve wasted 99ct for nothing and actually missed a really good movie. The trailer gave away very much about the storyline, still I pretty much enjoyed watching the movie. It does create suspense and it builds up to a very tragic ending. I cried a lot during the end, so if you know you’re a crying baby during movies and you want to avoid that, this is not for you. Very dramatic, but not the strongest performances by Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard. Saw both of them delivering stronger performances in other movies, but they did have great chemistry on screen. I also loved the costume design, no wonder this movie was nominated for several awards in this category. Rating: 4/5

#films2019 #reviews

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tmnt-veelicious · 6 years

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Across the Stars - Ch.2

URG, this chapter is small and yet it took me time to write it... I hate beginnings :’D Oh wellzzz, time to meet the others ! Heads up, next chapter might contain mentions of anxiety/panic attack. Also I’ve added links in this chapter regarding Vee’s tattoo and a reaction she has at some point (OF COURSE IT’S A VINE HAHAH) Have fun reading <3 First Chapter --> HERE Next Chapter --> HERE

She got green-lighted for a meeting three days later, meeting up with April right after work, following the reporter deep down the bowels of New York city's sewers. Vee couldn't deny being nervous, the exctasy of being shown things and beings that were so out of the ordinary fueling her with renewed energy. She still wondered if all of this was nothing more than a dream, but soon her thoughts shifted as they stumbled upon the infamous lair. The place was huge, the ceiling as high as the surroundings extending to many opened and closed rooms. It wasn't as much filled with water as Vee first thought, but it still had a slight 'sewer charm' that kept the woman grounded in this new world. ''Vee!'' She recognized Donatello's voice, turning to him with a wide smile. Although it did falter a little as she spotted three other turtles beside him, all impressive in size and look. April did warn her earlier, but she did not expect them to be so imposing. Donnie offered to take the woman's coat out of courtesy, revealing Vee to be wearing a black long-sleeved turtle neck shirt and jeans. She oddly felt smaller than she already was, her eyes still locked on the three other turtles. The one she noticed the most was wearing a red do-rag, his whole body being a mountain of muscles. He looked intimidating and severe, gazing down the human as if constantly judging her. Then she could see another one wearing a blue mask, this one looking more collected and slightly less muscled than the other. Vee couldn't help feeling a strong sense of leadership in him, mostly dued to his posture and general calmness. And finally she spotted the orange masked one, always showing a smile. He was smaller than the others, but still taller than Vee without any doubts. She already categorized him as an extrovert, a people-person, an explosive energy seeming to emanate from his sole being. ''So, that's Donnie's girlfriend?'' scoffed the red masked one. Vee froze. ''Wh-?'' ''If you mean by that a friend that happens to be a girl, yes she is,'' corrected Donatello with a frown as he was back by the woman's side. ''Aw come on D, the way you keep talking about her, we thought you guys were already a thing,'' chided in the small one with a mocking tone. If looks could kill...! Donnie was staring down at his brothers, trying to get them to stop. He did change the subject around, gesturing the other turtles to Vee, presenting them, from blue to red and finally orange. ''Forgive these buffoons.... Here's Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo.'' Vee smiled in response. ''Nice to meet you all! My name is Véronique.'' ''Veh-what now?'' cut the big one, confused. ''It's a French name, Raph. She's French Canadian,'' sighed Donnie, reajusting his glasses. ''Ooh, Canadian,'' said Michelangelo. ''The land of maple syrup and moose riding!'' ''And we also live in igloos,'' added Vee with a playful smirk. ''Sorry if my name is a mouthful of nonsense. You guys may call me Vee.'' The orange masked turtle nudged Raph. ''Look, she even says sorry, just like a true Canadian,'' he commented. ''Okay Mikey,'' cut the soft, yet authoritarian voice of Leonardo, finally speaking up. ''You've mocked our guest more than enough.'' His blue eyes went to April, catching the reporter's attention. ''April, can I have a word with you?'' As both of them moved to a quieter place, Donatello took the opportunity to show Vee around the place, shooing his two other brothers away as he knew they wouldn't stop pestering him. *** ''I don't know what to think about all of this,'' started Leo, crossing his arms before him, staring down with a quick sigh. ''… She looks nice but...'' ''But?'' pressed April with half of a smile. ''Can we trust her? Who knows if she'll go around telling people about us? It's already good enough that we have you, Vern and Casey around, but now a new human presence equals new possibilities or troubles.'' ''Woh, easy there.'' April tried her best to sound reassuring. ''I can already assure you that you can trust her. … You should give Donnie more credit; he wouldn't have met her if he knew she'd be trouble. You knew he was talking to her and yet you didn't stop him.'' ''Well, yeah, because he was trying to find information about her. I didn't want someone with a criminal record to go live with you, if she ever had one. Plus she moved from another country, that's a bit suspicious.'' April mimicked his position, showing a blank stare. ''That's called a new life experience, Leo. I don't see how that can be a bad thing.'' The turtle stayed silent, trying to think of a good comeback. His eyes trailed around the lair, soon spotting Donatello and Vee... ''Give her a chance, for Donnie's sake,'' added the woman gently. ''… They seem to get along pretty nice and I think it'd be good for you guys to see a new face around here.'' You should give people more credit, echoed chief Vincent's voice in Leo's head. He looked back to April, still serious. ''One mistake and she won't be allowed here anymore.'' *** Vee couldn't hide her grin as she spotted Donatello's workplace: two desks facing one another with plenty of screens showing various things. ''Oh wow!'' she let out in awe. ''I've never seen that many screens for one desk, let alone two!'' ''I do a lot of surveillance and multitasking so they come in handy!'' beamed up the tall mutant with a smile, as if proud he could impress the woman. The human continued to look around until she came near his lab part, a soft ''ooh'' escaping her lips. She always have had a fondness for science, her curiosity always pushing her to stay informed about its many subjects. She rolled up her sleeves to her elbows, out of habitude whenever she would get to touch things and be careful, and proceeded to check out a beaker and other tools. ''This is amazing,'' she added. ''All this super secret setup, this cool lair! You guys are truly like some sort of super heroes!'' Donnie was now showing a shy smile, but it quickly faded out as his eyes spotted something on Vee's left forearm. He came to her, carefully taking her wrist in his large hand, examining her skin which showed a tattoo, a sentence. He didn't remark Vee who was now looking up to him with large eyes, surprised by his behavior. Being this close again, she could now notice how tall he actually was, the top of her head hardly reaching his shoulders... ''I remember you saying you have tattoos, but I never really got to see them,'' he said, mesmerized by it, a finger slowly going over the letters. Vee was blushing hard, letting out a small laugh. ''Yeah, I have four of them and I plan to get more,'' she said. Donatello looked up to her, then realizing that he was probably a bit too close, his hands suddenly letting go of the woman's arm. He cleared his throat, standing straight. ''What does it mean? That's Latin, isn't?'' he asked. The human showed a comforting smile. ''Indeed! It means 'You are here for a reason'. … It's a lil' something I try to remember when things go bad.'' Their eyes met, Vee suddenly feeling her heartbeat increase. She couldn't help moving forward, next gently taking one of his hands, getting to sense his skin's texture. She noticed how slightly distressed he looked, most probably not used to people approaching him like this. ''… It's funny,'' calmly started the woman. ''I thought I knew you after all of those months of talking, but now everything feels new. … I'm still trying to figure out if any of this is real or not.'' His other hand came over hers, the ghost of a smile coloring his traits. ''It is very real, I can assure you,'' Donnie started. ''… I'm sorry about all the secrecy.'' ''Why did you finally accept to meet face to face?'' The turtle slightly sticked out his tongue a few times, thinking, Vee instantly knowing this was the cutest thing she would ever witness in her life. ''It just felt right,'' he finally said. ''I mean, it's easy talking with you. I don't need to rephrase everything I say, compared to whenever I speak to my brothers. We share many interests... Do I need to go on?'' Vee snorted a small laugh. ''See! We even have the same freakin' laugh. Unbelievable,'' he added, chuckling. Yeah, okay. This was no dream. The woman was finally starting to feel more at ease, her hands still inbetween his. She couldn't help noticing how warm he was, even though being a reptile.... ''Hi! Would you like a cup of tea?'' said a new voice. Vee looked towards the source, a surprised gag suddenly leaving her as her body twitched, now seeing a giant rat holding two small cups. Donatello realized he never mentionned this newcomer... ''Ah, uh, Vee, this is master Splinter. He's my dad.'' The woman looked surprised for a second, next taking her time to observe the rat. He was slightly smaller than her, his fur showing some grey and his black eyes were strangely expressive. She showed a smile, trying to be polite. ''W-why yes, tea sounds nice!'' she replied, next being handed a cup. The brew smelled nice, calming her nerves instantly. She did not hesitate to take a sip, green tea being one of her favorite kinds. ''Thank you for the cup, the taste is absolutely delightful,'' she added next. ''Polite. Just as expected from a Canadian,'' said the rat, amused. Okay he's the father, alright, thought Vee, trying not to spit her sip. She could hear Donnie grumble, probably cursing the entire world. ''Does everyone have to embarrass me today?'' he simply said. ''Do not fret over this, my son. I was simply approving your choice of guest. At least she didn't try to attack me like Casey did.'' ''Well, yeah, that's why I took her away from Mikey and Raph before she got any bad ideas,'' replied the turtle, now showing a smile. ''Even if I wanted to try,'' added Vee. ''I'm no ninjas like you all. The only thing I can manage to do is get bruises by simply looking at a wall.'' Both snorted, Vee's clumsiness having been brought a certain number of times in their previous discussions over the last few months. The woman's heart fluttered for a moment as her eyes met his, somehow glad she could finally share moments like this in flesh and not before a screen... ''Donatello did mention you are an artist, but I was curious as to what kind exactly?'' next asked master Splinter. Vee grinned with a small frown, still looking at Donnie. ''Well, it seems like I'm a popular choice of conversation around here.'' The turtle wished he could disappear. Vee turned back to the rat, her traits calm and soft. ''I am mostly well-versed in music and drawing, although I tend to touch writing in my free time. I try to be as versatile as possible so I can take on many offers and possibilities. … I tend to believe knowledge is the most powerful tool I can have.'' Splinter smirked at the mention of this, a small chuckle escaping him as he eyed the turtle. ''Well if that doesn't remind me of someone!'' Donatello sighed, visibly annoyed: ''Dad, please...'' ''Don't worry, the old rat that I am will stop pestering you,'' said the other, already turning to leave. He did nod at Vee, a smile still on his lips. ''It was nice to finally meet you and you are always welcome in this house!'' As soon as he was out of sight, Vee threw a new playful grin towards Donnie, cocking an eyebrow. ''A lot of your family members seems to hook us up already. Should I take this as a sign?'' The turtle blushed, soon hiding his face in his hands, grumbling before finally speaking: ''They revel themselves in my misery, please don't pay any attention to them.'' ''Well, disregarding that, they all seem fine so far,'' added the woman, taking a new sip of tea. Donatello looked down to her, somehow amused. ''… I don't understand. How can you be so calm about all of this?'' he asked. ''Your reaction is just so … different!'' Vee shrugged: ''If I'm willing to believe aliens could exist, why not mutants? My curiosity strangely overrides my fear right now and I can't help being in awe when facing all of this.'' ''Huh, I can already hear Raph's voice saying 'We're not a freakshow'.'' ''And I don't believe you are either.'' She was now before him, her free hand on one of his arms, her thumb slowly stroking his skin. Their eyes met, Vee's gaze tender, smiling softly. ''… Donnie, I value you first and foremost for who you are, not what you are. You're probably not used to hear this, but it's true. We spent many months talking and developping a friendship.... The fact that you're showing me all of this, who you truly are, only deepens the trust I have towards you.'' The mutant showed a same smile, his hand coming over hers, subconsciously craving for any contact. ''Thanks... that means a lot.'' For a moment, everything felt at peace, the world shutting down around them. Nothing else mattered as they had found eachother. Finally...

#chapter #writing #tmnt #tmnt 2014 #tmnt 2016 #tmnt donatello #fanfic #fancharacter #tmnt leonardo #tmnt raphael #tmnt michelangelo #oc #selfinsert #I JUST WANT TO WRITE FLUFF AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH

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mysticseasons · 7 years

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Charlie White's Olympic ice dance preview

What do you think dance is going to come down to?

Obviously, no one can predict. It’s so close. It feels like a coin flip, but instead of luck it’s going to be focus. Tessa [Virtue] and Scott [Moir, from Canada] in my opinion, have the stronger short dance. Gabby [Gabriella Papadakis] and Guillaume [Cizeron, from France] have the stronger free dance, and it’s whomever can play their strength greater without making a mistake. You cannot make a mistake. That to me was what kept me up at night. In ice dancing, it’s just like, if you make a mistake, it’s done.

Obviously, Tessa and Scott have experience on their side. I think that could make a big difference.

Let’s go back to Tessa and Scott. Is there more pressure now that they know their career is coming to an end?

I don’t know. I can’t see into their minds. I would have assumed they would have thought it was coming to an end at the last Olympics. I got that. But think they’re mentally in a very different place. I think they have an approach, an appreciation for, and maybe most importantly, a different perspective on the place of the sport of ice dancing in their lives and what it represents, what it means, and how they have the power to shape the storyline. So I think probably less pressure, I think they’re probably putting less pressure on themselves because they’re not trying to repeat, right? They’re just trying to be themselves. That’s my impression. And again, I haven’t asked them. But we’ll see.

Both the Canadian and French teams train in Montreal, but it’s Tessa and Scott splashed on cereal boxes and in commercials. Could that be part of a mental obstacle for the French?

Along with the experience difference between Tessa and Scott, you know, there might be a few sort of little things here and there that might work in their favor. It’s crazy the way, certainly, the subconscious can absorb your environment and take that with you wherever you go, especially in a sport like ice dancing. Again, your confidence is so important to your portrayal and your ability to skate cleanly. I think that it’s a tough environment for the French to have to deal with the Canadian love-fest for Scott and Tessa, but they’re not unfamiliar with it. I mean, they had to have seen it coming.

Also, I think if they can be tough enough to compartmentalize what that means, I think it actually works to their advantage in terms of being able to generally deal with difficult circumstances. That kind of mental toughness goes with you everywhere. You don’t want to be in a comfortable position. You want to be uncomfortable all the time, because when all is said and done, when you’re at the Olympics, that’s the maximum discomfort, right? And if you’re used to being intimidated, and you’re used to being afraid, and you can perform your best anyway in practice, then at the Olympics, it’s just going to be that much easier.

There seems to be a major love-fest on the internet for Tessa and Scott.

I love how much Canada loves figure skating. That’s great. And the athletes deserve it. Canadian athletes work very hard to be excellent and to represent their country well. But I think, sort of like with Michelle Kwan, right? Sustained excellence is just the number one thing that people fall in love with.

I think everyone sort of, in some way understands just how hard it is. And Scott and Tessa are already in the books as one of the greatest ice dance teams of all time. If they can win these Olympics, will have maybe given themselves an even better argument. And I’m not the one to decide who is the greatest ice dance team of all time. But it’s an interesting conversation to be able to watch live as your country mates are giving themselves that name is super exciting.

Between Scott and Tessa, they have sort of a good sort of balance of Canadian culture in their appearance and their attitude, the way that they approach work and interviews. They’re attractive people, they’re funny. There’s really no reason not to like them, and so it’s the perfect storm. Their career speaks for itself, and they’re the greatest chance in figure skating for the gold [for Canada] besides the team event. I think everyone’s still getting on board with the significance in a medal in the team event, that’s kind of coming around. And this year, Canada went all out in trying to win gold, but it still doesn’t quite stack up in terms of the individual.

- NBC Olympics (17th Feb 2018)

#People talking about Tessa and Scott

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vocalfriespod · 6 years

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Transcript for Episode 3: Southern Fried

CARRIE: Hi, welcome to the Vocal Fries Podcast, the podcast about linguistic discrimination. I'm Carrie Gillon.

MEGAN: I'm Megan Figueroa

CARRIE: Today we have our very first guest!

BETH: Hi!

CARRIE: Hi! Today we have Beth Troutman, a former congressional candidate and TV host, and a real live Southerner.

BETH: Yes, very real live Southerner.

CARRIE: Because today we're gonna be talking about Southern American English. Neither I, nor Megan, is a Southerner.

MEGAN: Nope

CARRIE: I'm Canadian.

MEGAN: And I've just lived in Arizona in my entire life, so: not helpful.

BETH: Well, I will try to help you guys out, although I've lived all over the country. I was born and raised in the south, and I currently live in the south, so my accent has gotten a lot deeper in the last two years since I've been back in North Carolina.

CARRIE: Awesome. One of the reasons why we wanted to talk about Southern English - first it was because my mother-in-law asked us to talk about it, who is also a Southerner.

BETH: Oh awesome, I love her.

CARRIE: But also because it's one of the forms of language that's denigrated. And that's our meat and potatoes. We are gonna fight against discrimination.

MEGAN: This is our first time we've talked about the way a geographic location speaks. We've done vocal fry, which could be anyone, and then we've done swearing, which could be anyone. Now we're concentrating on something that's a geographic way of speaking.

CARRIE: Yeah, regional.

MEGAN: Regional!

CARRIE: I guess this is the first time that this has really been something that's not universal - or closer to universal -because you know vocal fry - everybody does that or almost everybody.

MEGAN: This is why we're bringing in a guest host, because it is not universal. Also we don't want to fuck things up for Southern English in any way.

BETH: Well, fire away. I'll try to answer any questions possible and try to guide you through the Southern accent and I certainly can relate to the discrimination that that comes with someone hearing a Southern accent. Especially if you're a blonde female, which I am - there is a double whammy there.

MEGAN: Oh, the intersectional linguistic discrimination that being female being yeah, I get it.

CARRIE: Speaking of that, we just wanted to mention that we're really only talking about the white variety of Southern American English. There are other Southern dialects, and we will hopefully get to them, but we're setting those other dialects aside for now.

MEGAN: Because they're gonna be disparaged differently, right? There's going to be other intersectional things that play.

BETH: Absolutely.

MEGAN: Okay cool!

CARRIE: Let's talk about how you feel. So for example, you were in the television world, and I'm certain that there's some interesting stories you could tell us about having a Southern accent in that world.

BETH: It has been a strange experience. I was told when I first started in television - the first thing that I ever did was a morning show here in Charlotte, North Carolina, so having a Southern accent in a Southern city was not necessarily a bad thing, and in fact, most people were so used to hearing that non-regional dialect on television, that suddenly when I was a local girl on local television, people were super excited about it, because I sounded like everybody around here sounds. But shortly after that, as I was trying to move my career forward, the next position that I held was a morning show for the Lifetime network. That's a national show, so you're talking about a show that the entire country gets to see. People said to me that I needed to really work on my accent, that I needed to have that non-regional dialect. That's what they were telling me, at first. But I'm not very good at being someone who I'm not. I'm not good at being anyone but myself. So, trying to completely get rid of an accent was something completely foreign to me, and something I couldn't really do. Living in a different part of the country - I lived in Arizona, I've lived in Los Angeles, I've lived and worked in South Florida - I lose my accent a little bit. I think that's just because I hear people talking. I start mimicking other people's accents, so mine is much thicker again, now that I'm back in the south. But being told that you won't be successful in a particular field because of your accent, there's something really heartbreaking about that, in the beginning, because you're shutting out an entire section of the population. You're telling me that I'm not - I heard that I wasn't going to be successful, just because of that. It wasn't the tone of my voice, it wasn't my look, it wasn't my personality. It was literally that people - and I've heard this more times than I would like to admit, that people will underestimate you, if you have a Southern accent. That people will think you are kind and trustworthy, but they won't necessarily think that you are an intelligent person, and that is a big slap in the face.

MEGAN: There's actually a study on that. They looked not only at adults but kids, and they found that even nine to ten year old kids are already internalizing these negative stereotypes about the way that they speak. These Southern kids are saying that Northern speech is more respected, that people that speak non-Southern English are more in charge. They do have also the stereotype that Southerners are kinder. So when you hear a Southern accent, someone's kind, but they're not necessarily smart. And it's so sad to me! That's so sad!

BETH: I think that has a lot to do with the industry that I work in. Because, if you see people in charge, like news anchors on television, or you see people in films, whose characters are high-powered, or who are funny, or who are lead roles, you very rarely hear a Southern accent. You very rarely hear someone have that Southern drawl saying the “I”, and the “my”, the “light”, and the “night” - all the words that we tend to draw out. Our accent is kind of singsong-y. There's something melodic about it. There's something that is - well people have described it certainly to me: lazy. They say it's a lazy way of speaking. Maybe that's why people think that you're friendly, because you're just tired, I don't know. But if you think about it, since I was born in 1977, in my lifetime, we had Jimmy Carter as a president, we had Bill Clinton as a president, we had George W. Bush as a president. We had these people who were the leaders of the free world, who had Southern accents. They were men, which is in and of itself its own thing, but that tells you something about trustworthiness. I think that people thought that these guys you know could be trusted as leaders.

CARRIE: I absolutely agree with that, that's part of the reason why people wanted them. I just wanted to mention that the University of Chicago psychologist Katherine Kinsler and Jasmine DeJesus, who did that study.

BETH: I read that study. What was really remarkable, that the southern kids didn't have as much of a problem with the Southern accent, as the kids from Chicago, because they never hear a Southern accent, unless it's a rerun of Gomer pile or Andy Griffith or something.

CARRIE: Or Cletus, the slackjaw yokel.

SINGING: Some folk’ll never eat a skunk, but then again some folk’ll. Like Cletus, the slackjaw yokel.

BETH: Or Reese Witherspoon in Sweet Home Alabama. “You've got a baby! In a bar!”

MEGAN: Yes. That is an iconic line.

MELANIE LYNSKEY: You look fancy, like you just stepped out of a magazine!

REESE WITHERSPOON: Oh, well, thank you. Look at you! You have a baby! In a bar!

MELANIE LYNSKEY: Well, I’ve got three more at home! This one’s still on the tit, so I can cart him anywhere.

MEGAN: Those same kids were completely okay with the Northern accent, the Chicago accent, because they hear it on TV all the time, and it's in movies.

BETH: Hear it all the time.

MEGAN: I wonder about that, because you were talking about it, what we see portrayed in movies and by stand-up comedians is oftentimes all people like me, West Coast people, know about the south. I wonder what you think about that.

BETH: You mean the portrayal of the dumb Southerner?

MEGAN: I guess there's two things there. People on the West Coast, we have our preconceived notions about Southerners, and that's not fair. Especially since for most things, what we know about them are from movies or these kind of media. Also I see a lot of times that it is the dumb Southerner stereotype that is portrayed in movies.

BEHT: I think I probably speak for people, especially the people who like to pride themselves on being educated, even having advanced degrees - it is a tough thing to swallow. A few years ago - I guess it's been maybe ten years or so since you know Kellie Pickler was on American Idol, and she really played up the Southern accent and played up the sweet - everybody just wanted to hug her - but she also was on Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? and thought that Paris was the capital of Europe, the country. And didn't know that Turkey was a country.

KELLIE PICKLER: This might be a stupid question.

JEFF FOXWORTHY: I'm guessing it's probably gonna be.

KELLIE PICKLER: Ok. I thought Europe was a country. Budapest? I never even heard of that. Like, I know they French there. Don't they? Like I want to say, is France a country? I don't know what I'm doing.

BETH: There are those things that certainly the media has played up when it comes to Southerners, and that's a hard pill to swallow sometimes. Especially if you are trying really hard to be a successful person, or if you're in any kind of business where you are dealing with people all over the country, and having conversations with people all over the country. You don't want to be taken less seriously because of how you speak. However, there is one thing that I have noticed that's happened and in my professional life, oftentimes, off the camera, is that, because I have a Southern accent, the bar is set lower for me. And so it's not hard to impress, because people haven't expected me to be impressive. And I say that with a lot of humor. I say that that happens - it's happened more times than I would like to admit. That I wasn't expected to be particularly intelligent or articulate.

MEGAN: Do you think in your industry too, the bar’s set low, just being a female as well? Or is that is not as true in the TV industry.

BETH: I think the TV industry is more - it's hard to articulate this well - but the TV industry is so focused on physical appearance first, when it comes to women. There can be there are men who are in their 60s and 70s who are still sitting on an anchor desk, or who have been that old and sitting on an anchor desk, and you very rarely see women in those positions, who are of that age. And if they are, if they're heading to that age, there's tons of plastic surgery, and all kinds of makeup, and the lips get blown up. Then that whole, “women don't age as well as men” kind of thing. So there's kind of a double whammy when it comes to television, because you’re dealing with not only whatever regional accent that you have, but then you're also dealing with the physical aspects that go along with a visual medium, such as television, and the standards aren't the same for men and for women. I would imagine that that's probably true with an accent as well. However it might go the opposite way with a man with a Southern accent. A woman with a Southern accent might find success a little more easily with a Southern accent than possibly a man. Again, I think that's a level of discrimination and certainly can be considered sexism.

CARRIE: Yeah, I was gonna say, it sounds kind of like the Southern accent plus being a woman. It's like, well, those two things sort of go together. Where women aren't considered to be as smart as men, which is obviously false.

BETH: Or as powerful.

CARRIE: Right. And so it's okay. We want women to be kind and nice, so a Southern woman, that's okay, but a Southern man is going against that? Maybe that's why.

BETH: Yeah, it is, and it's an interesting thing to think about. Because the Southern accent has such a history. It's kind of a combination of British English and the language that - and what a terrible history we have here - but the language that that slaves brought over from their own African cultures. I think that that's where a lot of people say that this Southern drawl came from, was this mix of these two cultures colliding, for generations. And we do have a really, really dark past, here in the South. I think that that probably lends itself to - after the Civil War and during Reconstruction, when the South here, we were having so many financial problems, most people lived in rural areas and people were dealing with poverty. I think that that probably played into that initial stereotype that Southerners weren't quite as smart as other folks in the country. Again, it ties to a very dark, dark past that we have here.

CARRIE: There's another study - probably not as well done as the one from the University of Chicago - but there's another study done by Cupid.com, where people apparently considered the Southern American accent to be a sign of sexism.

BETH: To be a SIGN of sexism?

CARRIE: Yeah, which I know is dumb.

MEGAN: That doesn’t - that works not. That not work. I can't even speak. I mean, I don't have a -

CARRIE: You just can't even.

MEGAN: I can’t even, even though it's not my accent. That doesn't make any sense.

BETH: Yeah, what does that even mean? Having a Southern accent means that you're sexist?

CARRIE: I think what's going on is people think that Southerners are more sexist than Northerners, which again, probably not true.

BETH: Well, it could go to - I guess people thinking that we're generationally behind the times here. That we're not as progressive in the south. I live in a major city and it's the number three financial hub in the country. I live in a major metropolitan area. Raleigh, North Carolina, also, is incredibly progressive. So there are certainly really progressive parts of the south, that are more similar to - in thought - a New York or a Chicago or a Boston or a Los Angeles even a San Francisco. But I will say: I ran for Congress when I was 27 years old here. I was the first woman to ever run in my district, which was District 8. 2004! First woman to ever run. I was a single female. My degrees are in political science and Women's Studies, with a focus on feminist theory, which is quite progressive for this particular area. But when I got into rural North Carolina - my district was about ten counties, and I had part of Charlotte, which is the wealthiest city in our state, and then I had a part of Mecklenburg County, which is the wealthiest county in our state, and then I had all of Hoke County, which is one of the most rural counties in our state. Whenever I would campaign in the more rural areas, I - almost on a daily basis - got the question, “why are you running for Congress and not looking for a husband?” Or, “how are you going to, if you get elected, how are you gonna get anything done in Washington, if you don't have a man to run your ideas by?” I got that more than once and quite often, as a matter of fact, and the folks who asked me that weren't bad people. They just really still believed that it was more important for me, as a female, to be looking for a husband than anything else. That that was the thing that was going to provide me security, or that that was what success meant for a woman. I can understand, if that's what that Cupid study means. Because there is a level of that, but I don't know that that doesn't exist in other parts of the country. I haven't run for office in other parts of the country. I've only done it here in in North Carolina. But I do know that that was real, and that that existed. I'm still since then - no other woman has run in that district again, still. Which is a really interesting thing. You want to have more women in power, but they're not necessarily a lot of women stepping up, here in North Carolina. Although we did have a female governor, we had Beverly Perdue, let's see, we had a few years ago. When did she first get elected? I think 2004, was she running? I think that was that year, that same year.

MEGAN: So you've only had one female governor in North Carolina?

BETH: Yeah, so far. Our Secretary of State is a woman, Elaine Marshall. She is a female, and a pretty amazing speaker, and a very powerful, very smart, smart woman. But, it has traditionally been a very male - and that's true in a lot of parts of the country - it’s a very male-dominated field. Being a being a Southern single woman was an interesting thing, when running for office here.

CARRIE: I bet. One of the things that has come up a lot in this conversation is drawl, and I just wanted to talk about what that actually means, because I never really understood. I knew it sort of described the speech pattern, but I wasn't really sure what it meant. To simplify it a lot - what it really means is the way that the vowels are pronounced. So what would be a plain simple vowel in a Northern dialect becomes what is called a diphthong, or two vowels put together. Or even a triphthong, or three vowels put together. So for example, “meal” becomes “me-yal”. “ay-ye” instead of just “eh”. That's what it is: it's creating a longer vowel with multiple pieces in them, which I found kind of interesting and kind of fun. I hadn't really thought about it before.

BETH: I love it! I was helping a friend of mine as an actor in Los Angeles, and he got a part on American Crime Story, that show that was on ABC. His character was supposed to be from North Carolina, so he would send me all of his scripts, and I would read them into my voice memo on my phone and mail him the track, so that he could listen to a real Southern accent saying some of the words. Because a lot of people think that - and there are certain parts of here in North Carolina, especially the mountains, where they do draw out the syllables, that we all do the “I”, instead of “I”, we say “ah”. “I want a piece of pah” or “My ah’s itching” [eye], or those kinds of things. But we also oddly say “light” and “night” and “right” and “fight”. In the mountains of North Carolina, you hear more “raht” and “naht” and “faht” and “laht”. Even in this state, there's a regional accent. But I’s and A's and O's get changed up quite a bit. I don't even if I can say “phone” the way that those people say “phone”. We say “phone” or “home” instead of “home”. I don't know. “Home” is the way that I say it. I've had to, especially on television, try to correct some of those some of those vowels. But you get so used to it, and it does feel really good in your mouth. It almost feels like you're eating the words in a fun way. I had this book of poetry when I was in college called “The Language They Speak Is Things To Eat”, and I didn't understand that title until really recently, when I really started thinking about the way that you speak, the way that your accent comes out of your mouth. It almost feels delicious to say “I want a piece of pie”. It's almost onomatopoetic, that “pie” to me sounds like what “pie” is.

CARRIE: I was reading “The GRITS Guide To Life”/“The Girls Raised In The South Guide To Life”, and the way that they describe the drawl is 1) take your own sweet time, 2) bat your eyelashes slowly and speak at the same tempo, and 3) add syllables wherever possible.

BETH: That's about right. And you can as a female with a southern accent and a smile on your face, you can say some pretty nasty things to somebody and they won't realize that you've been mean to them until about ten minutes after you walk away.

CARRIE: “Oh bless your heart.”

BETH: “Oh bless your heart.” Yeah you could just look at somebody and say, “You're a goober!”, and have a big smile on your face and somebody will think that you just gave them the biggest compliment in the world. It's not a compliment.

CARRIE: There are other features that I thought it would be interesting to talk about. For example, double negatives. “I don't know nothing.”

BETH: “I don't know nothing.”

CARRIE: It's really bizarre that this is associated with Southern English, because it's just - well not everywhere - but a lot of people all over the place use double negatives.

BETH: Yeah, just poor grammar.

CARRIE: Well, it's not though. Here's the thing. Back in Old English, so England was kind of split into two dialect regions - I mean I'm simplifying, but - in the south, they used double negatives, and in the north they didn't. At the time, the southern dialect was actually the more “proper” dialect, and so it's funny that somehow that got flipped. Lots of languages have double negatives standardly, so for example: French. “Je ne sais pas”, the “ne” and the “pas” are both negative. So there's two negatives there. Or “personne n’a rein dis”. “Personne” is “no one” and the “n” part is “not” and “rien” is “nothing”. There's lots of extra negatives in sentences, and it's funny that in English we decided at some point - while “we” - some old white dude decided: “that's bad logic”. Because he decided that you were multiplying negatives and so if you multiply negatives, you should get a positive. But if you add two negatives, you get a negative. So equally logical. This is just a really dumb rule that we all follow because all of our English teachers told us not to do it.

MEGAN: Yeah, and it marginalizes other groups of people - so not only the Southerners, but people who speak Chicano English or African American English, all of these types of speaking do double negatives.

CARRIE: I think even just rural English and the other parts of the country in Canada too - so it's just everywhere.

BETH: Yeah, “I ain't got no iced tea”. We have a lot of double negatives. But now that I know the history of it, I'm gonna start using it more and more.

CARRIE: Good!

MEGAN: Yeah.

CARRIE: Oh yeah, “ain’t” is a good one, I love “ain’t”.

BETH: “Ain’t”. You remember when we were kids, when you would say “ain't ain't a word”, cuz “ain't” ain't in the dictionary. But now it is, so you can't say that anymore. It’s an official word, so you might as well use it, right?

CARRIE: Exactly! That is a silly argument - just because it's not in the dictionary, doesn't mean it won't be. Dictionaries are constantly updating.

BETH: Languages evolve.

CARRIE: Yes.

BETH: Or devolve.

CARRIE: They just change. They don’t actually get better, and they don't actually get worse: they just change. The other feature that's associated - or I think this is not even actually a real feature, it's just what we think - that Southerners speak more slowly. But apparently that's not even true. Some people do, but it's completely variable. What do you think?

BETH: I think that probably comes with the fact that we do draw some words out. It might take me longer to say certain syllables, but, as you can hear in this interview, I actually speak pretty quickly. But my dad, for example, my dad has a really thick Southern accent and he speaks so quickly that I sometimes can't understand him. He sounds like he's honking, he sounds like a goose or something - his nickname, ironically, is goose. I think that both of those things exist. There's the Southern person who speaks really, really quickly, and then there's the really sweet, slow accent. It takes them a while to say “hello” but once they do, you know you're gonna be in a conversation with them, and it's gonna be a really fun conversation, and it might take longer than it would, but you get used to it here. I'm guessing in other parts of the country as well, there are probably people who speak really slowly and also really quickly at the same time. But I think the fact that we draw so many of our words out a little longer makes the stereotype exist probably more prominently in the south, because some words do take us longer to say.

CARRIE: Yeah. My all-time favorite Southern feature is “fixing to”

BETH: “I'm fixing to go to work!” I got made fun for that. When I was young I sang a lot, and did some public speaking even when I was a young preteen, even nine and ten and into my early teens. I was in a rehearsal once, and I think I was in Salt Lake City, Utah, and the sound guy said something to me and I said, “well, I'm fixing to do my soundcheck. I'm fixing to do it”, and he was like, “what? You're fixin to?” I had never even thought about that word, cuz obviously everybody around me used it, and people still use it. I had to start really thinking about not using that one as much as I did at the time, and it’s one that I don't use as much as I used to. But I love it though, because you're like, “I'm fixing to do it”. What does that mean? I'm about ready to go and go to work. I'm about ready to go make dinner. I'm fixin to do it. Fixing myself, I'm getting myself ready.

CARRIE: That sort of leads into what I was reading about it, because I'm really fascinated with the semantics of it. Because it's similar to “I'm about to do something”, but it's not quite the same. According to Marvin Ching and Jay Myers, who separately worked on this, they say that you need some kind of delay. So if you're saying, “I'm fixin to make dinner”, there's got to be something in between you saying it and then you actually preparing it. They call it a preparatory activity, which is linguist-speak.

BETH: So basically I can't say “I'm fixin to make dinner” when I’m already making dinner. I think that makes perfect sense. That's exactly how we use it. So he's exactly right. It's funny that he studied that. I could have told him that and he wouldn’t even had to have done any work at all. I could have just told him that.

MEGAN: Oh my god, that is like the linguist problem. Every time I read something I'm like, we spend so much time looking at this, but we could have just asked someone who speaks it. Everyone else knows, but science needs a citation.

BETH: Yeah, that’s true. You can't really just cite the random Southern lady you talked to.

CARRIE: Usually you need a few more people.

MEGAN: Yes. This is why it's good to have someone who speaks Southern English on our Southern English episode.

BETH: I wish I had my dad on here now, so that you could hear a really thick southern Southern drawl.

CARRIE: That would be awesome. So there’s lots and lots of features, but it looks like we already done a lot of talking. I think we should just move on to the “why we judge it”. Part of it it, we've already talked about. Maybe the dark history, maybe the fact that many people were very poor for a long time - and we love to judge poor people.

BETH: I know.

CARRIE: And this reminds me also - I've been watching iZombie, which I mostly love. But they have this problem where they conflate Southernness with being working-class. Whenever they have somebody who's rough-and-tumble on an episode, they almost always have a Southern accent. It's very strange. It's supposed to take place in Seattle, so they shouldn't be surrounded by Southern accents.

BETH: At all.

CARRIE: It could be someone, or two, but you shouldn't expect going into a biker bar and having them all have Southern accents.

BETH: I think that's probably the stereotype that all of the south is rural, that you're gonna have just working-class, rough-and-tumble types of people and nothing else. Thatt probably has something to do with political stereotypes now, as well, because the South tends to go red and Republican. I think that there is a stereotype just because of that, as well.

CARRIE: Yeah, agreed.

MEGAN: For a long time, I also associated blue collar - just the term blue collar - with the South too, because anytime you hear about this stuff on the news or anything, they're talking about something like that. Those two things are always put together.

BETH: Yeah, because most the time when you hear stories about the South, you're hearing about manufacturing jobs that don't exist anymore, or about agriculture, which all of those things certainly are very true, but it's like any other place in in the world. Both sides exist, both things exist, but it is easier to, when you're in a visual medium like television, or you're in a medium where you're dealing with time constraints, it's easier to function based on stereotypes, than to try to explain the complexity of an issue in a 1 minute 30 story on something, or even in a 30 minute sitcom. You operate based on stereotypes, because it's easier than actually trying to write better.

CARRIE: Oh my god, lazy writing bugs me. Another example of this is Amy Schumer. She uses Southern accents to mock poor people. There's this episode where she's making meth, and she's so stupid, and she keeps blowing herself up. It's SO offensive.

SKEET: No, Becky Lee! No!

[explosion]

SKEET: Oh jeez. Beck, where are ya? Beck!

AMY SCHUMER: Skeet!

SKEET: Holy Moses!

AMY SCHUMER: I can’t seem to feel my legs, Skeet!

SKEET: That’s cuz you ain’t got none, Beck.

AMY: Oh, makes sense.

CARRIE: There's these messages constantly in the media, that we're supposed to judge the Southern accent. I think that's why most people do, because we’re told to. You have to interrogate your own biases.

MEGAN: Right. I think this is really problematic too, because just like talking about the study earlier out of University of Chicago, these children at nine years old are already internalizing these terrible messages, like that they may not be a smart, or that the people around them are racist, or whatever. I think this is why it's so shitty - one of the reasons why you shouldn’t judge accents, because what does this mean for their self-esteem and for their sense of self? I think that it's really sad. Discrimination based on accent is not illegal in the US. These internalized stereotypes are not inconsequential. It's not protected.

CARRIE: That's a really good point.

BETH: Yeah, and one that people probably don't consider and don't think about. I think it's one thing to consider too, for people who have Southern accents, who do who have jobs that end up in the spotlight. I ended up in television, or people like Jessica Simpson. When she had her reality show, and she has a Southern accent, and she had that whole moment where she couldn't decide if “chicken of the sea” was tuna or chicken.

JESSICA SIMPSON: Is this chicken that I have, or is this fish? I know it's tuna, but it says “chicken, by the sea”. So stupid.

BETH: I think that there is something that we as Southerners can do to counteract those stereotypes. If we end up in powerful positions, or positions that have influence, then we should buck the stereotype, and not play into it. I think we've seen too many people play into it, because it's more likeable, or they feel that it's more likeable, because it's less intimidating, or it doesn't challenge. So people feel more comfortable, because no one wants to be insulted. No one wants to have negative energy coming in at them at all times. The first thing that a lot of people do is they try to stay likeable, before they do anything else, because they just want to feel okay. I get it. I understand that. But at the same time, it doesn't help when there are people who have these positions of power, who have Southern accents, who utilize them to play into the stereotype more than anything else. I don't know if it's for self-protection, or if it's because they make more money that way, or what that is. That was one of my problems with that show that Jessica Simpson was on, and with Southern people who have ended up on shows like American Idol, playing into the stereotype, because it seemed likeable and funny, and it got votes for them, or got viewers, or whatever. I think that there's a responsibility, you have to you have to get out there and fight for yourself, but also fight for the people who might end up having might end up watching you, and saying, “wait a minute, if that person has a Southern accent, and they can end up being in these really great powerful roles, then I can”. I also think that's why we shouldn't have non-regional dialects on television and nothing else, and why we shouldn't just have Southern people playing the dumb blonde, or playing the rough-and-tumble guy, or the biker bar dude. We need to have a more complex representation of the human experience, no matter what the regional dialect is, or what the race is, or what the gender is. We've really done a bad job in media especially, across all of those areas, we stereotype everything from race to gender to religion to socioeconomic conditions. We stereotype across the board.

CARRIE: Yes. Everybody does but I think it does tend to be a little bit worse on TV.

BETH: Oh the media - oh it's terrible. That's the industry - it promotes such bad stereotypes across the board. Working in news, I certainly saw it more than I would ever like to admit. There's a real problem here in our country with systemic racism, and I don't think the news media helps in any way, because you know we're promoting certain kinds of imagery. It breaks my heart. I cried on air several times, actually.

CARRIE: Well, unless there's anything else that anyone wants to add to the conversation?

MEGAN: I don't know. Anything you think, Carrie?

CARRIE: I think we covered it all. I think.

MEGAN: The main point is not to be an asshole.

BETH: Yeah! Right? Just be nice! Just be nice to each other. Hug and talk and laugh.

MEGAN: And when you do talk, don't fucking judge the way the other person's talking.

BETH: Exactly!

CARRIE: Focus on what they're actually saying, not how they say it.

BETH: Exactly. Listen to the words, not how the words are being said. Listen to the actual words.

CARRIE: Thanks again, to Beth Troutman, for joining us today.

MEGAN: Yes, thank you so much.

BETH: Thank you guys, this was awesome.

MEGANL: This was a good first guest experience.

BETH: I'm glad to hear it.

MEGAN: Now we're spoiled.

CARRIE: Thanks everybody for listening, and don't be an asshole!

MEGAN: Do not be an asshole!

CARRIE: The Vocal Fries Podcast is produced by Chris Ayers for Halftone Audio. Theme music by Nick Granum. You can find us on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram @vocalfriespod. You can email us at [email protected].

#transcript #linguistic discrimination #Southern American English #Southern #English #linguistics #regional accents #regional dialects

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The Weekend Warrior Home and Drive-In Edition July 24, 2020: THE RENTAL, MOST WANTED, YES GOD YES, AMULET, RETALIATION and more

Are we all having fun yet? Does the fun ever truly begin when you’re in the middle of a pandemic, and no one can seem to figure out how to get out of it? While I love New York’s Governor Cuomo and the amazing job he did getting us through the worst of it, he just doesn’t seem to know how to get movie theaters reopened, nor does he seem to care. I mean, they’ve had four months now to figure this out and New York City is already in Phase 4 (which was supposed to be the last phase of the reopening). It’s a real shame, because this has been a ridiculously hot summer and with none of the “cooling centers” from past summers being possible, it is brutal out there. Fortunately, there are a few decent movies this week to watch at home and some in the drive-ins that are popping up all over the country.

I gotta say that I’m particularly bummed that my favorite local theater, the Metrograph, won’t be opening any time soon, but starting Friday, they’ll be starting “Metrograph Live Screenings,” which will consist of the type of amazing programming the theater has gained a reputation for since opening four years ago. They are offering new “digital memberships” at $5 a month or $50 annually (about half the price of a normal membership) so that you can watch any of the movies being offered at home. The program begins on Friday with Claire Denis’ 2004 film, L’Intrus, which Metrograph Pictures picked up for release. That’s followed on Monday with St. Claire Bourne’s doc, Paul Robeson: Here I Stand. You can see the full list of screening times and dates (many with filmmaker introductions) on the Official Site, and this will be a good time for those who can’t get downtown to the coolest area in New York City to check out the Metrograph programming until they reopen. (Apparently, they’re working on a drive-in to open sometime in August. Wish I had a car.)

If nothing else, it’s safe to say that IFC is killing it this summer. The indie distributor stepped right up to the pandemic and said, “Hey, we’ll play in those drive-in theaters that have mostly been ignored and didn’t play our films for decades!” It has led to at least two big hits in the past few months.

This week, IFC releases the horror/thriller THE RENTAL (IFC Films), the directorial debut by Dave Franco. In it, brothers Charlie (Dan Stevens) and Josh (Jeremy Allen White) decide to take a weekend away with their significant others, Charlie’s wife Michelle (Allison Brie) and Josh’s girlfriend Mina (Sheila Vand), who also happens to be Charlie’s creative work partner. They have found a remote house to rent, but they’re immediately suspicious of the caretaker (Toby Huss), who they think may be spying on them. He’s also racist towards Mina’s Arab lineage.

The premise seems fairly simple and actually quite high concept, and there have been quite a few thrillers that played with the premise of a creepy landlord/caretaker, including last year’s The Intruder, directed by Deon Taylor, and a lesser known thriller called The Resident, starring Hillary Swank and Jeffrey Dean Morgan. Part of what makes The Rental different is that Franco co-wrote it with Joe Swanberg, so you know it’s going to be more of a character-based thriller than some kind of gorefest. Sure enough, this deals with the competitive nature between the brothers and the jealousy that arises when you have such a close working relationship with your brother’s girlfriend. It’s what happens between these two couples over the course of this vacation that makes you even more interested in their behavior after things start happening to them, but there’s a pretty major twist that happens just when you think you know where things may be going.

That’s all I really should say about the plot to avoid spoilers. Although the third act veers into the darker horror tropes we may have seen before, that’s also when it starts to get quite insane. Franco clearly shows he has the eye for the type of suspense and timing necessary for an effective thriller, and his cast, including wife Alison Brie, really deliver on all aspects of his script to deliver shocking moments that will keep you invested.

In some ways, The Rental might be the most obviously accessible movie of the weekend, and since it will be playing in drive-ins (and maybe a few still-open theaters?), it probably is worth seeing that way i.e. with others, although it will also be available via digital download, of course.

Another “Featured Flick” this week -- and I’m guessing this is one you won’t be reading about anywhere else -- is Daniel Roby’s MOST WANTED (Saban FIlms), a real-life crime-thriller starring Josh Hartnett as Globe and Mail journalist, Victor Malarek, who discovered that a French-Canadian junkie named Daniel Léger (Antoine-Olivier Pilon) had been sentenced to 100 years in a Thailand prison for drug trafficking in 1989. As Daniel attempts to survive the violent conditions of the Thai jail, Victor tries to uncover the crooked practices by the Canadian federal police to get Daniel imprisoned for their own means.

This is one of two Saban Films releases that really surprised me, maybe because I’ve gotten so used to them releasing so much action and genre schlock meant mainly for VOD, usually starring fairly big-name action stars from the past, usually not doing their best work. Most Wanted is a far more serious crime-drama that tells an absolutely amazing story from North America’s famed war on drugs from the ‘80s. First, we meet Antoine-Olivier Pilon’s Daniel, a lowlife junkie who is trying to find a place to live and a job, something he finds when he gets into business with Jim Gaffigan’s Glenn Picker, a complete low-life in every sense of the word. It’s funny, because when Gaffigan’s character is introduced, you’re immediately reminded of the famous “Sister Christian” in PT Anderson’s Boogie Nights, and as we watch Picker completely humiliate and then betray Daniel, you realize that we might be seeing one of Gaffigan’s best performances to date.

What keeps Most Wanted interesting is that it tells the story on a number of concurrent storylines, ignoring the fact that one of the threads might be taking place years before the other. Through this method, we see how Daniel begins working with Glenn, while also seeing Victor’s investigation, as well as the sting operation being perpetrated by the Canadian feds, as represented by the always great Stephen McHattie. (McHattie’s appearance is also a telltale sign that this is indeed a Canadian production, as is the role played by author and filmmaker Don McKellar.) I’ve always feltHarnett was a really underrated actor especially as he got into his 30s and started doing more mature roles, and while his reporter character may not always be the central focus of the story, his attempt to get his editor to respect his work is something far too familiar to far too many writers. One also can’t sleep on the fantastic performance by Antoine-Olivier Pilon, who really holds the film together by starting out as a scumbag almost as bad as Picker but through his troubles to survive in Thai jail, we start to become really invested in his story. (The only character who doesn’t get nearly as fulfilling a story arc is Amanda Crew as Victor’s wife Anna who gives birth just as he gets involved in this major story.)

I wasn’t at all familiar with Daniel Roby’s previous work but the way he broke this story down in a way that keeps it interesting, regardless of which story you’re following, makes Most Wanted as good or better than similar films by far more experienced and respected filmmakers. (For some reason, it made me think of both The Departed and Black Mass, both movies about Whitey Bulger, although Daniel’s story is obviously very different.)

Okay, let’s get into a trio of religious-tinged offerings…

Natalia Dyer from Stranger Things stars in YES, GOD, YES (Vertical Entertainment), the semi-autobiographical directorial debut by Obvious Child co-writer Karen Maine (expanded from an earlier short), which will open via virtual cinemas this Friday as well as at a few drive-ins, and then it will be available via VOD and digital download on Tuesday, July 28. The coming-of-age comedy debuted at last year’s SXSW Film Festival and won a Special Jury Prize for its ensemble cast. Dyer plays sixteen-year-old Alice, a good Midwestern Catholic teenager, who has a sexual awakening after a racy AOL chat. Wracked by guilt, Alice attends a religious retreat camp where the cute football player (Wolfgang Novogratz) catches her eye, but she constantly feels pressure to quell her masturbatory urges.

I’m not sure I really knew what to expect from Ms. Maine’s feature film debut as a director. I certainly didn’t expect to enjoy this movie as much as I did, nor did I think I would relate to Dyer’s character as much as I did -- I’ve never been a teen girl, nor have I ever been Catholic, and by the early ‘00s, I was probably closer to the age that Maine is now versus being a teenager discovering her sexuality. In fact, I probably was expecting something closer to the Mandy Moore comedy Saved!, which was definitely more about religion than one character’s sexual journey.

Either way, I went into Yes, God, Yes already realizing what a huge fan I am of coming-of-age stories, and while there were certainly that seemed familiar to other films, such as Alice’s inadvertent AIM with an online pervert early in the film. Even so, Maine did enough with the character of Alice to keep it feeling original with the humor being subdued while definitely more on the R-rated side of things. On top of that, Dyer was quite brilliant in the role, just a real break-through in a similar way as Kaitlyn Dever in Book Smart last year. (Granted, I’m so behind on Stranger Things, I don’t think I’ve even gotten to Dyer’s season.) The only other familiar face is Timothy Simons from Veep as the super-judgmental (and kinda pervy) priest who Alice has to turn to when confessing her sins. (A big part of the story involves a rumor started about Alice and a sex act she committed on a fellow student that keeps coming up.)

Yes, God, Yes proves to be quite a striking dramedy that I hope more people will check out. I worry that because this may have been covered out of last year’s SXSW, it might not get the new and updated attention it deserves. Certainly, I was pleasantly surprised with what Maine and Dyer did with a genre that still has a lot to tell us about growing up and discovering oneself. (You can find out where you can rent the movie digitally over on the Official Site.)

Another horror movie that premiered at this year’s Sundance is AMULET (Magnet), the directorial debut by British actor Romola Garai, who also wrote the screenplay. It stars Romanian actor Alec Secareanu as Tomaz, a former soldier who is offered a place to stay in a dilapidated house in London with a young woman named Magda (Carla Juri from Blade Runner 2049) and her ill and dying mother. As Tomaz starts to fall for Magda, he discovers there are sinister forces afoot in the house with Magda’s mother upstairs being at their core.

I was kind of interested in this one, not just because it being Garai’s first feature as a filmmaker but also just because Sundance has such a strong pedigree for midnight movies, probably culminating in the premiere of Ari Aster’s Hereditary there a few years back. It feels like ever since then, there are many movies trying to follow in that movie’s footsteps, and while this was a very different movie from the recent Relic, it had its own set of issues.

The main issue with Amulet is that it deliberately sets itself up with a confusing narrative where we see Tomaz in the present day and in the past concurrently, so it’s very likely you won’t know what you’re watching for a good 20 minutes or so. Once Tomaz gets to the house, escorted there by a nun played by Imelda Staunton (Vera Drake), the movie settles down into a grueling pace as the main two characters get to know each other and Tomaz explores the incongruities of the decaying house.

Honestly, I’m already pretty burnt out on the religious horror movies between The Lodge and the still-unreleased Saint Maud, and the first inclination we get of any of the true horror to come is when Tomaz discovers some sort of mutated bat-like creature in the toilet, and things get even more disturbing from there. Although I won’t go into too many details about what happens, the movie suffers from some of the same issues as Relic where it’s often too dark to tell exactly what is happening. As it goes along, things just get weirder and weirder right up until a “what the fuck” moment that could have come from the mind of David Lynch.

I don’t want to completely disregard Garai’s fine work as a filmmaker since she’s made a mostly compelling and original horror movie – I have a feeling some might love this -- but the grueling pace and confusing narrative turns don’t really do justice to what might have been a chilling offering otherwise.

Going by the title and the fact it’s being released by Saban Films, I presumed that Ludwig and Paul Shammasian’s RETALIATION (Saban Films/Lionsgate) was gonna be a violent and gritty crime revenge thriller, but nothing could be further from the truth. Adapted by Geoff Thompson from his 2008 short film “Romans 12:20,” it stars Orlando Bloom as Malcolm, a troubled ex-con doing demolition work while fighting against his demons when he spots someone in the pub from his past that caused a severe childhood trauma.

This is another movie that I really didn’t know what to expect, even as it began and we followed Bloom’s character over the course of a day, clearly a very troubled man who has been dealing with many personal demons. Make no mistake that this is a tough movie, and it’s not necessarily a violent genre movie, as much as it deals with some heavy HEAVY emotions in a very raw way.

Honestly, I could see Geoff Thompson’s screenplay easily being performed on stage, but the way the Shammasian Brothers have allowed Malcolm’s story to slowly build as we learn more and more about his past makes the film so compelling, but they also let their actors really shine with some of the stunning monologues with which they’re blessed. While this is clearly a fantastic and possibly career-best performance by Bloom, there are also good performances by Janet Montgomery, as the woman who loves Malcolm but just can’t handle his mood changes. Also good is Charlie Creed-Miles, as the young priest who tries to help Malcolm.

I can easily see this film not being for everybody, because some of the things the film deals with, including pedophile priests and the effects their actions have on the poor, young souls who put their faith in them, they’re just not things people necessarily may want to deal with. Make no mistake that Retaliation is an intense character drama that has a few pacing issues but ultimately hits the viewer right in the gut.

A movie I had been looking forward to quite some time is the Marie Currie biopic, RADIOACTIVE (Amazon Prime), directed by Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis) and starring the wondrous Rosamund Pike as the famed scientist who helped discover radiation. Based on Lauren Redniss’ book, this is the type of Working Title biopic that would normally premiere in the Fall at the Toronto Film Festival, and sure enough, this one did. The fact it wasn’t released last year makes one think maybe this didn’t fare as well as potential awards fodder as the filmmakers hoped. It’s also the type of movie that works too hard to cater to the feminist resurgence from recent years, which ultimately ends up being its undoing.

The problem with telling Marie Currie’s story is that there’s so much to tell and Redniss’ book as adapted by Jack Thorne just tries to fit too much into every moment as years pass in mere minutes. There’s so much of Marie’s life that just isn’t very interesting, but trying to include all of it just takes away from the scenes that do anything significant. Maybe it’s no surprise that Thorne also wrote The Aeronauts, Amazon’s 2019 ballooning biopic that failed to soar despite having Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones as its leads.

I’m a similarly huge Rosamund Pike fan, so I was looking forward to her shining in this role, but she does very little to make Marie Currie someone you might want to follow, as she’s so headstrong and stubborn. This is the most apparent when she meets Pierre Currie, as played by Sam Riley, and maybe you don’t blame her for being cynical, having had much of her work either discredited or stolen by men in the past. Shockingly, Pike’s performance seems all over the place, sometimes quite moving but other times being overly emotive. Almost 90 minutes into the movie, Anya Taylor-Joy turns up as Curie’s grown daughter, and it’s one of the film’s biggest infraction, wasting such great talent in such a nothing role.

While Radioactive could have been a decent vehicle for Ms. Satrapi to flex her muscles as a filmmaker, the movie spends so much time having Currie fighting against the male-dominated science field that it loses sight of why she was such an important figure in the first place. Radioactive just comes across as a generally bland and unimaginative by-the-books biopic.

Also on Digital and On Demand this Friday is Chris Foggin’s FISHERMAN’S FRIENDS (Samuel Goldwyn Films), another quaint British comedy based on a true story, much like the recent Military Wives. Rather than being about a group of singing women, this one is about a group of singing men! What a twist!

Daniel Mays plays Danny, a music biz exec from London who travels to the seaside town of Port Isaac, Cornwall with some of his record company coworkers. Once there, they discover a local group of singing local fisherman, known as “Fisherman’s Friends,” who Danny wants to sign to a label. He also wants to get closer to Tuppence Middleton’s single mother Alwyn, who, no surprise, is also the only pleasant-looking younger woman in the town.

Fisherman’s Friends isn’t bad, but if you’ve seen a lot of British movies from the last few decades, then you’ve already seen this movie, particularly the “fish out of water” humor of a guy from the big city trying to relate to the down-to-earth ways of folk in a fishing village. It’s the type of really forced humor that is perfectly pleasant but not particularly groundbreaking in this day and age with so many filmmakers trying to do cutting-edge work.

Instead, this goes for a very typical and cutesie formula where everything works out with very little real conflict even when it throws in a needless subplot about the local pub falling on hard times and selling to a rich man who has little regard for the ways o the town. On top of that, and even if this wasn’t based on a true story, it’s very hard to believe anyone in the music industry or who buys records would be that interested in this group to make them worth signing a million-pound record deal. (Apparently, this really happened!)

I think it’s adorable that filmmakers are trying to turn character actor Daniel Mays (who you’ve seen in everything!) into a romantic lead, especially when you have James Purefoy right there! Instead, 56-year-old Purefoy is instead cast as Middleton’s father, while she’s put into a situation where she’s the love interest for a man that’s 23 years her elder. This kind of thing rarely bothers me as it does many younger female critics, but their romance is just ridiculous and unnecessary if not for the formula. As much as I enjoyed seeing Dave Johns from I, Daniel Blake as one of the singing fishermen, there really isn’t much for him to do in this.

If you like sea shanties and you are a woman over 60 (or have a mother that age) then Fisherman’s Friends is a cute butnever particularly hilarious British comedy that tries to be The Full Monty. But it never really tries to be anything more or less than the formula created by that movie 23 years ago, so it’s quickly forgotten after its saccharine finale.

Unfortunately, I just wasn’t able to get THE ROOM (Shudder/RLJE Films), the live action directing debut from Christin Volckman (Renaissance), but it’s now available on VOD, Digital HD, DVD AND Blu-Ray! It stars Olga Kurylenko and Kevin Janssens as a couple who leave the city to move into a an old house where they discover a secret hidden room that has the power to materialize anything they want, but this is a horror film, so what might seem like a fairy tale is likely to get dark. (I actually think I saw the trailer for this on Shudder, so I’ll probably check it out, and if it’s worth doing so, I’ll mention it in next week’s column.)

Yet another horror movie hitting On Demand this Friday is Pamela Moriarty’s A DEADLY LEGEND (Gravitas Ventures) that stars Corbin Bensen as a real estate developer who buys an old summer camp to build new homes unaware of the dark history of supernatural worship and human sacrifice. I’m gonna take the fifth on this one, which also stars Judd Hirsch and Lori Petty.

Available via Virtual Cinema through New York’s Film Forum and L.A.’s Laemmle is Gero von Boehm’s documentary, Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful (Kino Lorber), about the photographer who had a nearly five-decade career before dying in a car crash in 2006.

From Colombia to various Virtual Cinemas is Catalina Arroyave’s debut, Days of the Whale (Outsider Pictures) set in the city of Medellin, where it follows two young graffiti artists, Cristina and Simon, who tag places around where they live but coming from very different backgrounds, but they eventually bond while part of a revolutionary art collective.

Danny Pudi from Community and Emily C. Chang from The Vampire Diaries star in Sam Friedlander’s comedy Babysplitters (Gravitas Ventures) as one of two couples who have mixed emotions about having kids, so they decided to share one baby between them. Okay, then.

Netflix will also debut the rom-com sequel, The Kissing Booth 2, once again starring Joey King as Ellie, who is trying to juggle her long-distance romance with Jacob Erlodi’s Noah and her close friendship with Joel Courtney’s Lee. I haven’t seen the first movie. Probably won’t watch this one.

Next week, more movies in a variety of theatrical and non-theatrical release!

If you’ve read this week’s column and have bothered to read this far down, feel free to drop me some thoughts at Edward dot Douglas at Gmail dot Com, or tweet me on Twitter. I love hearing from my “readers,” whomever they may be.’

#Movies #Reviews #TheRental #Retaliation #Radioactive #YEsGodYes #VOD #Streaming #MostWanted #Amulet #TheWeekendWarrior

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m1kemedeiros · 7 years

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STRAYA EAST COAST'N - Feb 1st 2018 (Australia ) After travelling to 10 different countries and living in Australia for 2 whole years I've finally set off today on an east coast adventure. I will be travelling almost 2000 kilometres from Cairns to Byron Bay with my gal pal Lauren. Island hopping, boat accommodations, beach exploring, cities and the surf are just a few things we'll be getting into. We took a bus 4 hours from Cairns to Townsville to meet the Sea Link Ferry in order to make it to Magnetic Island. With only half an hour to spare we ran around Townsville trying to get a few things before jumping on the Ferry. Finally "Maggie" Island, outlined in golden sandy beaches and national park. Magnetic Island is home to a small residential neighbourhood of locals, wild koalas and many more critters. It's a great tourist destination and if you're looking for a good time X-Base is where we set up camp amongst many other backpackers looking for a cheap/ fun accommodation. After a relaxed night at Base meeting new people and sipping goon(cheap nasty wine) at a sunset cliff, the next day we explored the island. We hired a convertible 4 wheeler to do some off-roading. We drove across the island to the Fort Walk, I'd say it's more of a hike than a walk but nonetheless it was stunning. Once used for military to store ammunition and camouflage themselves from enemy invaders the Fort is now a popular trek to spot wild koalas and capturing some epic shots of Radical Bay, Arthur Bay and Florence Bay. Including a 360 degree panoramic view of the coast when reached to the tip-top of the Fort. Later we did some SERIOUS off-roading. Lauren drove up and down an extremely steep road with potholes that were 2 feet deep and 1-6 feet wide. There were moments that I thought the vehicle would tip over but we had a cry-laugh about it and explored the 3 bays and national park. If you don't understand "cry-laugh" go slap your funny bone against something hard. After a swim in the ocean we drove to West Point the opposite side of the island, had some ice cream before heading back to base. That evening was well spent with a great couple of American girls, hostel games and loads of dancing. The staff lads at base were such great fellas to party with I felt like I had also worked there for ages. Fun times! The following day after pulling our lives together we headed back to Townsville from the island but had a bit of an expensive hiccup cause Lauren forgot her purse, but it could happen to anyone...all good👌🏼. We now are back on route, down the coast headed straight for the oh so majestic Whitsunday islands. Finally we made it to the small town of Airlie Beach, home to the Great Barrier Reef and gateway to the famous Whitsunday islands. After checking into our accommodation at Nomads hostel we took a stroll around this quiet beach town. I came here to visit exactly two years ago so it was nice to see what changes had been made to this small sleepy oasis. After stocking up on goon we met our new tour group at the marina. We spent 2 days on the Tongarra catamaran soaking up the sun and the sea. Unfortunately for the weather being slightly bipolar, causing major swells, it took ages to get anywhere. We took shelter in Nara Bay an enclosed bay hidden from the rough choppy water. The following day we made it over to the second nicest beach in the world- Whitehaven Beach. Pure beaming white silica sandy beaches, fringed in palm trees and surrounded by swirling blue water, just a few traits Whitehaven is famous for. A $10,000.00 fine goes to anyone caught taking sand from this national park but I couldn't help that a pound of it got caught up in my underwear and swim shorts. Felt lucky to have travelled to this heaven on earth twice ❤️. Riding the catamaran back to Nara Bay we met a hawk that flew down to the boat and we threw raw kangaroo meat in the air to feed it. That night was filled with lots of games, drinks and dancing as loud as we can in this secluded bay somewhere in the Whitsunday Islands. Before heading back to Airlie Beach we all took turns struggling to stay on a banana boat that was dragged around the bay of Nara. After the Tongarra after party, a night filled of dancing with new friends, we spent the following day laying by the gorgeous lagoon before heading to our next destination. After a 14 hour overnight bus we eventually made it to Rainbow Beach. Known for its beautiful multi-coloured sandy beaches and being the gateway to Fraser Island, Rainbow Beach is a small tiny town. We spent only one day here hanging out on the beach and bodysurfing before our next adventure to Fraser Island. The following day we met our new group of roughly 30 people that we would be driving up and down the 120 km long Island with. We were split into groups of 8 and in 4 separate vehicles that we had to drive on the beach along the coast of Fraser. Being very tropical, untouched and the largest sandy island in the world made it difficult to drive around but we all managed. Our first stop on the island was the stunning Lake McKenzie, this fresh water lake was so pure and clean with bright blue water and silica sands too... Like Whitehaven. After some group bonding on the beach we went to our camp off of Cathedral beach to set up where we will be spending a total of 3 days, 2 nights. Before dinner that evening we climbed these amazingly picturesque and extremely steep sand dunes through dingo territory. We climbed to the top of a hill overlooking a part of Fraser Island. The next morning we drove along the shore line to a cove that's called the Champagne Pools. This was a highlight for myself. The Champagne Pools are a series of natural lagoons enclosed by rocks and clusters of shell fish. As the massive swell from the ocean smash up against the cliffside, water rushes in causing bubbles to form all around us like a "champagne bubbly" sensation. Some jelly fish came through too but none were harmful, I picked a few of them up to show the others just how harmless these little jellyfish were. After lunch 7 of us arranged a cheap 15 minute scenic flight over Fraser Island. This was a very small aircraft that would dip and take sharp turns like a rollercoaster over top of Butterfly Lake and other sand dunes. The flight allowed us to see both ends of the island. Later we met with the rest of that gang at Eli Creek- a natural fresh water lazy river that we tubed down in the afternoon to cool off after all the excitement. To end our day of excursions we checked out a beached shipwreck from the 1900s that was one of the quickest boats in its time. Circling the world 5 times in use of medicine and shipping patients this ship was eventually beached and used in the war, later on in life weddings and other events were also held on it until it became what it is today due to corrosion from the sea. That evening myself and a fellow French-Canadian, named Simon teamed up as the "Canadian Connection" and made a big pasta dinner for all 30 of us. The evening was filled with great food and drinking games. Following day we headed over to TeaTree Lake for a dip before heading back. Tea trees outline this freshwater lake and the natural oils from the trees make the lake water an orange colour. The smell of the air and water was so fresh I swam for ages out to the middle of the lake. It was great, quiet and calm and my hair and skin felt great after too. I was randomly greeted by a duck out there. Later we made it back to rainbow beach where some people went their own way but some of us that got along stayed up played a couple rounds of cards against humanity (UK version). Off to the next place! A 2 hour bus ride later, we made it to the gorgeous Noosa. This wasn't very planned so we kinda spent the first day hopping from accommodation to accommodation until we found something available in this tropical surfers paradise. It was kind of love at first sight between Noosa and myself. Noosa is a small separated suburban area surrounded by dense national park full of wildlife. It has incredibly beautiful coastal views, upscale shops, restaurants, stunning beaches and three separate islands. It has a laid back hippie feel but is still clean and upscale.. Like a much larger Port Douglas. Lauren and I spent Valentine's Day together down by main beach. We treated ourselves to a fancy mimosa filled brunch, went on a 3 hour coastal hike through national park and later had an Italian dinner and movie with a few gals we re-met from Fraser Island. We spent our last day hanging out on sunshine beach. She went bodyboarding and I surfed, well attempted to surf. The swell was very large so I got kind thrown around but I'm glad I gave it my all and tried it out. Later we took a long walk into town for dinner and walked back to say our final goodbyes to our short stay in Noosa. I'll be back! *terminator voice*. I'm currently on route from Noosa, through Brisbane to the Gold Coast, the city on the beach. This "Miami" of Australia has tons of attractions to choose from so we decided to stay in the heart of it all, in Surfers Paradise. We lucked out with Happy Travels sorting us out with a free private accommodation at Bunks hostel, best hostel I've ever stayed at in Australia. Our first night out we met a group of travellers who brought us out to a karaoke bar. The night ended with a fat lip I got from swinging the microphone around during a Grease Lightening duet with Lauren. Slapping myself in the mouth with the mic I essentially gave myself a natural self inflicted lip filler (haha). The following day we just laid by the pool, took a long evening stroll along the oceanside and had a fancy dinner at the Hard Rock, well not so fancy and over priced. Sunday we walked one hour to Pacific Fair mall to do some shopping and it was a fantastic shopping centre that felt like it never ended. We later caught the tram, headed back to surfers and shopped around some more before having a late night burger by the beach at bar Cavil. That night we also pre-purchased tickets for the following day for....DREAM WOLRD!!! Dream World is the largest amusement park in all of Australia and Lauren and I had the chance to experience all of it. We went on a Monday, a working day and I'd suggest going on a week day because we had the amusement park and water park to ourselves practically. We even managed on going on the most popular coaster, the tower of terror a total of 3 times. Almost lost my voice by the end of the day. Our tickets included an entry to the observation deck at the Sky View tower back in Surfers Paradise too. We polished off our day at this observation deck, towering 77 stories over the Gold Coast at dusk made for some really spectacular views and great photos. It was a beautiful day and a phenomenal way to end our visit to Goldie, can't wait to revisit one day. FINALLY Byron Bay, the original reason why I left Canada to visit Australia was for this small hippie oasis. This true surfers paradise tucked away in the hills along the most easterly point of Australia. We took a 3 hour bus ride to the famous Byron Bay, a very popular Aussie vacation destination, home to celebrities and very wealthy locals. Shortly after arriving we did a two hour hike to the Cape Byron Lighthouse, the last of the great 19th-century Victorian era lighthouses. This walk has truly spectacular coastal views that wrap around the most easterly part of Byron bay. This was a must-do I'd recommend it to everyone, we even saw a pod of dolphins playing in the waves. Two of my great friends set me up with a two day progressive surf lesson with a company called Stoked, which was how I spent my Wednesday. I've been surfing in 5 different countries and I'm still not very good. This Stoked surf school taught me a few things I've been doing wrong and I eventually managed to ride a number of waves right to the shore. That night we met up with an old pal named Cheeseburger Charles and he took us on a wild night out to a small club called Woodys. Thursday was a hangover day. We spent the day being lazy but later in the evening we met with Charles and went to a really fancy Italian restaurant called Trattoria Basiloco. We ordered almost everything off the menu, calamari, pizza, lasagna, calzone, bruschetta and gnocchi. Unfortunately most of the time spent in Byron was rainy but the next day big, naughty Charles picked up Lauren and I and took us on a road trip for the day. He drove us up to Lennox head, Ballina, through Tweed and into the Gold Coast where we had a late afternoon at an enormous shopping centre. Saturday...our last day was still a wet and rainy one. I did my last class of surfing at Lennox Beach and it was much easier the second time around. The class and I got to relax in the fresh red waters of TeaTree Lake just opposite Lennox Beach after our 4 hour surf lesson, a great way to wind down after battling waves. We spent our last night out at a nice dinner in town. Miraculously on our last day the sun came through the dark cloud barrier that hung over Byron for days. I woke up the KRAKEN(Lauren) at 7am with good news about the weather. We ran down to the main beach of Byron and soaked up 4 hours of sun, I body surfed waves until it was time to pack our things and head home. We now both sit at the Gold Coast airport waiting to head back to Cairns. The east coast of Australia was an absolute blast, naturally stunning and I just had the best time with my gal pal venturing through the many different parts of Straya(Australia). Happy to call this country my home for the foreseeable future.

#backpackerlife #backpacking #aussielife #travelaustralia #australia #wanderlust #traveller #islands #beaches #surf #surflife #islandwildlife #nature hikes #getlost #world travel

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lorainelaneyblog · 4 years

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This is Loraine Laney writing for God, and this is what it is with the new, whiter, building across from my apartment. I’ve heard the property values have dropped by $200,000. My apartment could not possibly get any worse, but it just did, the light reflecting is blinding, causing eye pain, and a headache around the eyes. The heat is insufferable. It looks silly as well, because it looks like it belongs in a tropical area. Further, it’s ugly now, and further still, it’s causing little kids to suffer in their own yards and homes. The adults are angry, and my eyes hurt, though the heat and light abate about nine PM in this suite, allowing me to open the curtains, earlier on cool days, it’s going to be impossible to see comfortably. As I sit at my computer, I can no longer see trees, as I’ve got the curtain open, after sitting in the dark all day, a sliver, and still, there is discomfort.

Further, this is what it is, I have spoken, on the ether, with a contractor, who assures me that this corner will be the first to blow off in a storm. Just grab your coat, and walk out, he says.

‘You won’t need it in summer!’ he says.

‘Funny.’

‘Further,’ he says, the engineer, that is, ‘the building will crumble within two years, Loraine. And you’ll go with it, Loraine, it will crumble to the ground, Loraine, and you’ll go with it, Loraine, so this is what I would do, Loraine, I would not stop until I got out of there, seriously, with my life in my hands, Loraine, I’m not even joking, Loraine.’

‘Oh.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘If I survive the lead and the chemical torture, and the frozen windows, in the event of a fire, I’m planning--’

‘Oh, funny, Loraine, the windows are freezing shut?’

‘Mm yes.’

‘Oh. God. So this is what I would do, Loraine, I would NOT STOP until you find another place, Loraine, or, in winter, you’ll find yourself homeless, or dead, Loraine, let yourself get evicted, oh, your rent is paid? Get homeless now, not in winter, it sucks in winter, Loraine. So complain to the landlord until he evicts you, Loraine, do SOMEthing, Loraine, do SOMEthing, Loraine. And, as for that white building, I was called in on that too, and I told them to tear it down, Loraine, and they, the women, insisted on doing a makeover, because they thought it looked drab, Loraine, forgetting the plethora of problems there, the plethora of problems, Loraine, the rooms are too small, the gaps, they’re called, are all wrong, and I know that you know what that is like, from that apartment whose walls you constantly bash into, without drinking, I know that, and you almost, you used to scratch yourself on that pony wall, oh, and he sharpened the cupboards, so your clients see you have scratches on your stomach, isn’t that nice? So get out, before you die, and that’s all I have to say, Loraine. Further, on that high rise, I asked them to do me a solid, a solid, I said, and this is what they did, Loraine, this is what they did, Loraine, this is what they did, Loraine, this is what they did, Loraine, the proof is in the pudding, Loraine. Do you know what it costs to dispose of that facing, Loraine, it doesn’t just go in the waste pile like--’

‘It doesn’t, Loraine,’ says [ ] [ ].

‘Oh, it’s so hot in here. And even there, it comes in all white.’

‘Not that golden glow,’ says the engineer. ‘Suffice to say,’ he says, ‘it will be hell all summer unless you move now, seriously, brutal, and I told them they would drop the property values, and they didn’t even care, Loraine, Ottawa, more money than sense, Loraine, your, precious, crack money, Loraine. Do you think that is lost on those residents who are sweating right now? Who are blinded by their own building, Loraine?’

‘Oh, God.’

‘Right, Loraine. Let’s leave it at that.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You’re welcome, Loraine.

(continuing)

‘It costs a fucking, fuck, fortune to dispose of that material, Loraine,’ says the engineer. 'You have to melt it, you have to strip off the back, and, melt it, it’s called, but, really, you have to break it up, break. it. up. Lo-raine. It is from Hawaii, as you said, and, further, it costs labour, man hours, they are called, Lo-raine, from hell, Lo-raine, man-hours, from hell, Loraine. They are laughing, all the way to the BANK, Loraine. Seriously. We, our stupid, little, women, in government, at pretty, city hall, who have, as your neighbour said--been tasked with the little project of upgrading Carling-fuck-ton--“They’re letting women do building now?” are, in. point. of. fact. the laughingstock of Ha.wa.ii.

‘They went looking for it,’ the engineer continues. ‘They wanted, they said, something “pretty, and fresh,” and someone said, “I have something for you, but it’s really, really, hard to dispose of, when there is a breakdown of materials, or a breakdown in society, or a breakdown in a neighbourhood, because,” they said, “we had a shit ton of it, but, when the volcano struck,” they say, “it was such a disaster, of such incredible magnitude, that we decided not to make anything pretty anymore, and we’ve been selling it off. But, to tell you the truth,” they continued--”’

‘“What?” they said.

‘”It is very, very, shiny," they said, to them, Lo-raine. Who replied, ‘We don’t mind, it’s a cold climate, and it’s dark a lot.” And they said, back, “Well, everywhere, including Canada, is sunny, in summer, and it will be too hot, we found.”’

She said, 'Well, it’s cold, too.'

‘Huh,’ they sighed.

‘Well, this is what I think,’ she said.

‘What’s that?’ they said, two construction developers, very, high--

‘They are, Loraine,’ says [ ] [ ].

‘So, this is what it is, Loraine, they laughed at them, in their face, on Skype, and said, “This is what it is, ladies,” and one woman said, “We don’t go by ‘ladies’ here, we go by women, or something else, nicer.”

‘Like what?’ they laughed, laughing again.

She said, “No, not laughing, women,” she said.

They laughed again. ‘Okay, women,’ they said. ‘Women,’ one said. ‘Women,’ he said again.

And they, the one, said, ‘Stop. being. rude.’

‘And they sobered, men, tough guys, big, tough, ex--’

‘They are, Loraine,’ says [ ] [ ].

‘--construction workers, Loraine, they are half aboriginal, and really, fucking, tough, guys, Loraine, really, fucking, tough, and the little girlies, on the phone, were making them giggle a little, they were, Loraine, and this is what they said next, they said. “We’re sorry,” and laughed. So, then, they said, “We’re sorry,” more soberly, and then they reiterated the problems with the building material, Loraine, re.i.ter.ated the problems. with. the. building materials, Lo-raine. And they said it three times, Loraine, and they did, in fact, dare to suggest a consultation with someone in development or construction, and this is what they were told, Loraine. “We. are. in point of fact, the experts, here. We understand,” said one of the women, “that in your country, and especially in your state and even culture, women are not treated equally--” To which was said, “You realize it’s the States?” “Of course,” said the woman. “But,” she said, “it’s Hawaii, not Washington.” And they laughed, for an hour. And, when they completed laughing, they said, “Do you think you’re a racist?” asked one man. “Because we think you’re observing the colour of our skin, and thinking of our culture as aboriginal.” To which came the reply, “Never. We are not racist against the French in Canada, and we are never racist at all, against anyone, but, we do recognize that there are cultural differences.”‘

‘”That’s racism,”’ came the reply. "Wrong," said one woman, the other woman, in fact. To which came the reply, “Oh, I see, not racism,” said one of the men, and she said, “Right, simply cultural awareness. And you wouldn’t believe this,” she said, “But we have a blogger in town who wrote this herself, to be aware of these things when it comes to relationships.” And they almost pissed their pants. When the heard the word “relationship,” they almost pissed their pants. So, subsequently, she says, “What’s so funny?” angrily, in fact, and they laughed more, Loraine, and more, Loraine,” until they couldn’t stop laughing.

‘“We heard about Canadians, and their ways, from some people, and, actually, we think you have something there.” said one man, the other man, this time. The engineer continued, “So this is is what it is, Loraine, says says, “Our ways? Our ways are not your ways?” And he was shocked, because she just said there were differences to be observed. So, immediately, they assumed she was dumb, and so, after that, there was nothing to be said, so they just said, “So what about the materials?” thinking they would, not might, but would, demure, over the materials, but, that’s not what happened, this is what happened, Lo-raine, the two women, almost at once, said, “Look, we don’t need any shit from you, “ and they, the men, were shocked again, and they, the one, the first one, who is the main talker, usually, at negotiations, said, “look, we don’t need any shit from either,” and she was not shocked on Skype, which is what everyone government uses, and it’s not free, for government, only private individuals, and "did you know that, Loraine?”’

‘No, I didn’t,’ says Loraine Laney.

‘Right, so now we’re talking one to one, and you’re giggling, about construction men, we call them, in the States, and women there like them too, Lo-raine, so I say again, “We don’t,” kidding, Loraine, she says, and I quote, “Fuck off.” So I say, “Oh, this is serious now,” shocked, and I say, “Serious business in Canada with women,” and I sneer “women,” and she says, “Are you sneering?” she asks. “Are you telling me to fuck off?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says. “I’m tired of your laughing, and your sneering, and I want to discuss the business at hand now.”

“This is what I’ve been trying to do,” I say.

And she says, ‘Okay, then,’ which riles me a little, so I say, “Okay, then?’

And she gets her back up, not realize I realize why, and says, ‘Fuck off,’ again, so I say, ‘So what about those materials?’ and my partner laughs a little.

So she says, ‘Fuck off,’ again.

So I say, ‘So what about those materials? They’re tough, you know?’

‘You said that, and we know best.’

‘Ohh, God,’ I said. And she goes, 'What?’ And I go, ‘Well, we warned you, and you haven’t checked with anyone in the business. Are you contractors?’ thinking the worst.

‘No, we’re buyers,’ she said.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Well, it’s your decision.’

‘Yes, it is,’ she said, the first woman, to which I replied, ‘Okay. So, this is it, you will hate it, period,’ I said. To which she replied, “Well that’s neither here nor there, but I’m in charge, not you.’ And the other woman said, ‘Right.’

And I said, ‘I’m just warning, as a courtesy, that’s all,’ and I was laughing a bit, privately, to myself, so she says, ‘Okay?’ And I was irritated again, so I said, ‘Well, yes, it’s okay that you’re the buyer, and sure of what you want. If you like it, after you do a building or two, we’ll sell you the bunch.’

‘We’ll buy it now,’ she said.

‘Oh,’ I said.

‘All of it. We like it. We want it. We have many buildings to redo right now, in social services,’ and I thought, Oh, God, so I said, ‘Ho-oly shit.’

‘What? she said, angrily.

‘You, they, will not be happy with it at all, because they can’t move if they don’t like it, and further--’

And she goes, ‘Yes?’ so gently, and so uncharacteristically, that I realized that she. was. screwing. me. So I thought, Let’s dance. So I said, --further, Iwouldliketosay,’ and she goes, ‘Yes?’ And I thought, fuck you. I thought, fuck you. I thought, fuck you. I thought, fuck you. So my partner says, ‘Okay, well, we’re gonna go,’ thinking of Skype prices, and she says, ‘We’re available 24/7,’ she said, ‘if you need to talk.’

And I said, giggling to myself, ‘Okay,’ and my partner tried to stifle a laugh, but couldn’t, so I said, ‘Don’t laugh,’ because it was obvious, too obvious, because she said, 'Fuck you,' again, and then lo and behold, a constant refrain for us, which was, 'Are you single?’

‘Are you?’ I said.

And she said, ‘No, I’m married. And my friend is too.’

‘N’kay,’ I said.

‘We’re just asking.’ And I thought, I wonder if she’s speaking for her too.

So, she pipes up, ‘Yes, common question.’

‘Not in business,’ I said. ‘Well,’ the second one said, ‘we’re not businesswomen, we’re government,’ snottily.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m single. He’s not.’

So she goes, ‘Are you dating?’ very formally. And I said, ‘Sure.’ And she goes, ‘Do you fuck married women? Because I’m allowed.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Well, we’re a long way away.’

‘We have to come to buy it.’

‘Okay. We’ll ship it. No cost. If you still want it, after all I’ve said.’

‘I do. We do. She wants you too. We both do. And him too, if he’s allowed.’

‘That’s good of you to be concerned, but I do what I want.’

‘We don’t like those kind of men. Self entitled.’

‘Well, that’s a no then, for my part.’ And I could tell he wanted to get off the phone right away, so I said, ‘We’ll talk then?’ And she said, ’Okay,’ sweetly. And I said, ‘Great.’

And she said, ‘What about my friend? Who’s she going to sleep with? Now?’

‘He’s so sensitive. Mar-ried, said the other woman, repeating, then, ‘mar-ried.’

So I sigh, and they say, ‘Okay, we’ll go.’ No, that’s not what they said, they, she, said, ‘Fuck off,’ again, this time, and I thought, now it’s my dick, so I said, ‘Okay, man, we’re paying for this call, and we gotta go.’

‘So, yeah,’ says my partner. ‘See ya,’ he goes.

She goes, ‘Oh, go fuck yourself,’ and I thought, who are we going to report these women to? And, I thought, and I’m funny, No.bo.dy. But then I felt bad, so I said, ‘Look, get some help with this,’ and she thought I meant my dick, so she says, ‘I don’t need help, you do. And I say, ‘K, we gotta go,’ cause I’m panicking a little, cause my partner is hurting, I can see this, his poor dick, over, as you might agree, a theoretical point.

‘Yeah,’ says Loraine Laney. ‘Everyone’s doing it--’

‘And he’s punished,’ he says.

‘Right,’ Loraine Laney says.

So I go, ‘Gotta run.’ And she goes, ‘Fuck you,’ really darkly, so I said, ‘Nope, we don’t like this conversation anymore, so we’re going now.’ And she says, ‘Fuck you, and the horse you rode in on.’

[ ] [ ] was pissing his pants, Loraine,’ says [ ] [ ].

Loraine Laney is laughing.

God says, You won’t believe it, Loraine. She says, ‘Loraine Laney is stupid. We’re the real women, not her.’

And I say, ‘I’m sorry?’

‘Loraine Laney,’ she says.

‘I’m not familiar,’ I said. ‘Of whom do you speak?’ And suddenly, the penny dropped. This is the write again, from “relationships,” So I said, ‘The blogger,’ I thought I better say, ‘that you mentioned?’

‘Wise,’ says Loraine Laney.

‘Thank you,’ says the developer. Continuing, I say, ‘Earlier?’ Scared.

And she goes, ‘Right, right, right, right,’ and I thought, whew, until she says, ‘She’s a bitch, and a whore, and I’m the real woman. Everybody hates her, including me, and so should you.’

And I said, ‘Well, I don’t know her.’ I’m thinking of my dime again. Until she goes, ‘She’s a rabidly diseased woman,’ she said, quietly, ‘who fucks anything that moves, and is hateful to all concerned for her.’ And I thought, I wonder who is concerned for her. And I said, ‘That’s horrible,’ not knowing what was horrible. [ ] was killing himself, Loraine. So I say, ‘Well, that’s it.’ And she goes, and my partner was scared, and laughing, so I go, ‘We’re in a hurry now, and she goes, ‘Fuck you.’ And I said, ‘N’kay,’ trying to be bright. And she goes, ‘Fuck you too.’

And I wanted to hang up, but I’m polite, so I say, ‘Well, I don’t know what to say.’

And she says, ‘Say you hate her.’

‘Okay. No. Who the fuck is she?’ I say.

And she goes, annoyed now, ‘[ ] [ ]’s [ ].’

And I go, ‘Oh, shit. Well, I won’t say anything of the kind. I like [ ] [ ] very much, everyone does.’

‘Oh, shoot,’ she said. ‘I thought he was an asshole too, because [ ] [ ], and, though the penny dropped, I decided not to enter in on a discussion as to whether [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]. So I say, ‘Okay, well, this is very unprofessional, and, I must, now, go.’

‘Oh,’ she goes. ‘Fuck it. I thought you would fuck me, like a man, like [ ] wouldn’t cause he’s an asshole.’ He was laughing then too.

‘I was, Loraine,’ says [ ] [ ].

So, I say, ‘Look, we’re colleagues. He’s great. I gotta run,’ and she goes, ‘Fuck you,’ again. So I said, ‘Listen,’ and I thought no, I thought, no, so I shut up. And she said, ‘What?’ And I said, ‘Nothing. And she goes, ‘What?’ So I was scared, so I say, ‘Nothing at all. I must go.’ And she says ‘Fuck you,’ again. So my partner thinks he’ll rescue me. So he goes, ‘Look. I gotta go. My wife needs me. And she goes, ‘That’s nice for a change.’

‘She sounds like the devil,’ says Loraine Laney.

So I go, ‘Yeah. K. Let’s go,’ and he says, ‘The kids need me now,’ and this is code, in aboriginal culture, for something very, very, specific, Loraine. It’s I need to get laid, Loraine. And it’s a joke among men, and women too. So she says, ‘This is refreshing,’ And I say, ‘Yeah.’ And she goes, ‘Okay, so let’s hang up, okay?’ And she says it so sweetly that I believe I’m free, so I say, I don’t say it sweetly, I say, ‘Okay,’ scared, because I can’t talk to her anymore, my partner is unhappy, my dick is soft, I’m bored, I’m sad, for [ ] [ ], as you know him, and I am sad for Canada, in general, as well as, specifically, and I assume you are one, I’m assuming you are one, already, all this is in my mind, Loraine the poor, Loraine, when suddenly, my partner goes, ‘Let’s go,’ as a reminder. So I say, ‘Bye, then,’ and, Loraine, she goes, ‘Fuck you.’ And this time, I hung up, no, I didn’t. I said, ‘What’s wrong?’

I thought we were in a relationship by now, Loraine.

So she says, ‘Fuck you, and your fucken buddy. I know what you’re doing with me and my friend.’

I thought she thought we were playing hard to get or something, But she rejected me, my friend was thinking, he told me.

‘Exactly,’ I said, later.

So, she says, ‘Fuck off,’ really defensively, so I said, ‘Please tell me what’s wrong. And she says, you won’t believe this, ‘You think I”m a slut, and she’s a whore, and my friend is a slut, and she’s a good whore, and all whores are good, and all women are bad,’ and I go, ‘You mean all sluts are bad?’ And she goes ‘Yeah,’ softly, very, very, softly, so I felt sad again, until she says ‘So fuck off. We think whores are sluts, and whores,’ softly, ‘and further, that they’re diseased, and, further, that we’re not, but they are,’ she said, twice.

So I sigh again, and I say, ‘Why do you pit one against the other?’

‘I’m sorry, because they’re disgusting, and I, myself, am never disgusting. I don’t use condoms,’ and I thought, Well there’s a vote of confidence, and my partner started laughing, and he said, ‘Well, we do.’

And she said, ‘Wull,’ and she said, ‘Wull,’ and she said, ‘Wull,’ and I go, “Yeah,’ to let her off the hook, but she says, “That Loraine Laney has a lie in herself, which is that she has no diseases, but she does, all whores do,’ softly again, ‘But, I will admit this, her medical records bear that out.’

And, suddenly, I was impressed with you. So I said, “Really?” knowing she had no way of knowing this, and thinking I would rather have sex with you, by this point, my partner says, and he’s an angry type, not because of his wife, but because of other kinds of idiots, just like this one, ‘I like her better than you.’

And she says, ‘Well, because of condoms?’

And he goes, ‘Yeah.’

And she goes, ‘Well, I’ll use one.’

‘And he goes, ‘Okay.’ And he wants to go, so he says, ‘We’ll talk to ya later,’ and she says, ‘Fuck you,’ again.

So he goes to me, ‘Listen, [ ], I’m hanging up now, and I’d advise you to do the same. And she starts screaming, no, just screaming, no words, just screams, loud ones. So my partner looks at my on Skype, and just rolls his eyes, so I go, 'Hey! Hey!’ And she starts crying, uncontrollably, saying, ‘You’re a misogynist! You’re a fucking misogynist!’

No, Loraine, that’s what I thought too, it was actually an hour and a half by now. She was not embarrassed. She’s her spokesperson, I thought, she gets her laid, until she says, ‘You’ve been rude to my friend, telling her what’s what, cutting her off, calling her down, laughing,’ and finally, Loraine, ‘being anti-feminist.’

So I said, ‘That wasn’t my intention.’

And she goes, ‘Fuck your intentions.’

And I said, ‘Well, my behaviour then,’ sighing to myself. And she said, fine, no, she didn’t, she said, ‘Fuck you.’ And the other woman, the first woman, now drying up, ‘Yeah, fuck off.’ And I said, ‘K,’ again, thinking of the almighty dollar, and how these two whores, I thought, I thought, just cost me two hundred dollars in phone bills. Seriously. And I got mad. Finally. Saying, I said, ‘I got to go,’ And--

(continued with a new title, The Engineer.)

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