#almost done with the Michael art but I can’t get the background right so sometime soon I guess

[mikeystrawberry]

Jon doodles from class

[featherymalignancy]

This is totally up to you if you want to answer this ask: What were Nesta's parents like? Their names, personalities, jobs, where they came from etc. Also curious about Nesta's aunt and uncle too :)

Okay, I SWEAR, I was gonna try and keep this brief. I literally whisper-screamed said to myself, “Keep it brief, Cara.”

Nesta, Elain, and Feyre’s Parents: Tim and Ines (neé Afonso) Archeron. Tim was a third-generation native Californian, Ines was, as we know, from Portugal 🇵🇹

Archeron Grandparents:

Tim’s dad Rick was an attorney (and an antisemtic prick, see Nesta’s mention of him in Fucking Lawyers for an example).

His mom Marie was a housewife.

Rick was a functional alcoholic “big drinker” and died when Nesta was 14, Marie died while she was in college.

Afonso Grandparents:

Ines’s father Sebastião was a professor of Antiquities at The Univeristy of Coimbra

Her mother Heloísa worked in her father’s butcher shop until she had Ines (she a dope cook, y’all).

Sebastião died two years before In Vino Veritas starts. Heloísa is the only of the four grandparents still alive.

(SIDENOTE: can we fucking TALK about what she’s gonna say when she meets tall dark and gorgeous Portuguese-speaking wine expert Cassian??)

Heloísa: *in Portuguese* Amorzinho, why have you not married this man yet?

Nesta: Avó, stop!

Heloísa: *still in Portuguese and well within earshot of Cash* If I was forty years younger I would marry him myself!

Tim & Ines (background):

They were both lawyers, they met in law school at Stanford (high achieving runs in the family).

Tim was worked as an M&A (mergers and acquisitions) attorney (can be boring shit but a lotta moneyyy). Ines was a special prosecutor trying drug companies for malpractice and fraud (social justice warrior FTW)

They both worked a LOT, especially when the girls were really little, so the girls were raised by a nanny named Benigna (Beni). Ines had insisted on a nanny who spoke Portuguese, and Beni was from Brazil.

Beni got unexpectedly sick when Nesta was 10, and she died after a too-brief battle with breast cancer.

It was Nesta’s first real experience with loss and she was inconsolably heartbroken, making Tim and Ines realize that they’d allowed their children to be almost completely raised by someone else, and that the girls had basically just suffered the loss of a parent.

At that point Ines decided to cut back to working half time to spend time with the girls, who were 10, 6, and 4.

Between losing Beni and her parents having been gone so much when she was little, Nesta was incredibly anxious to please her parents and make them proud. She was involved in a lot of activities and was very hard on herself, especially for a child. She was serious and dedicated, and though Ines tried to calm the best of Nesta’s outward fretting, she didn’t know how to cope with the more deeply-routed issues of Nesta’s compulsion to be the best. Instead she wrote it off as Nesta being incredibly bright and kept signing Nesta up for activities and paying for any private lessons, competitions, workshops etc. that Nesta expressed interest in. (Look, Nesta had to have something to tell her therapist about)

Starting the year Beni died, they began to take trips to Portugal every summer to see Nesta’s avô and avozinha.

before that, they’d only gone a handful of times, and Sebastiâo and Heloísa were thrilled.

Tim wasn’t close to his parents because of his dad was verbally abusive and his mother was permissive and enabling, so Nesta and the girls were much closer to her avô and avozinha.

Her grandfather spoke English but her grandmother didn’t really, so they spoke almost exclusively Portuguese when they were there (Tim was just sorta...j chilling with his incredibly mediocre Portuguese—he only usually stayed a week anyways, and he worked the whole time).

At home they spoke a mixture, Ines often spoke to the girls in Portuguese and they replied in English unless she insisted otherwise.

Family Ties...

Tim’s closest friend from law school (and the best man at his f*cking wedding) was Beron Vanserra.

Ines was not really a fan but she just sort of tolerated Beron for Tim’s sake, and Beron was clever enough to mostly behave when she was around, though he was definitely the friend who was always trying to coax Tim on a coke-filled bender to Vegas every time her back was turned

Whereas Tim and Ines had children later in life (Ines had Nesta at 35, Elain at 39, and Feyre at 41), Beron married his college sweetheart right out of law school, popped out two boys—August and Adrian—and fucked off for a younger wife. They got divorced without kids after like...a year

His third wife, Flavia, became good friends with Ines. She had her first boy, Eris, three years before Ines had Nesta. They were both pregnant around the same time with their seconds, Lucien and Elain.

The two couples were close and they took vacations together etc. AKA...the kids played together a lot as kids.

Tween/teen Nesta had an ENORMOUS crush on Eris. A senior in HS when she was a freshman, he...did not give a shit. When they ran into each other three years later (Nesta: 18 and two years into raising her two tween sisters and Eris: 21 and a swaggering senior prick at USC) and he hit on her that she was decided she hated him, lol

When Nesta was 14 (Eris: 17, Elain/Lucien: 10, Feyre: 8), it came out that Flavia had been having a longgggg term on-again, off-again affair with her college sweetheart. Screaming matches and paternity tests ensued...and it came out that Lucien was not Beron’s

Ines supported Flavia when Beron filed for divorce and came after Flavia with a VENGEANCE. Ines got Flavia a sick-ass divorce attorney, and sis cleaned up in the divorce 🧹 🧼 🧽 💵 . She and Beron had a very strained custody agreement, where Lucien mostly lived with his mom and saw his “dad” (Beron) only occasionally. Eris, who was about to go to college and was mad at his mom for this embarrassing secret, lived with Beron.

Tim, put off by how Beron handled Lucien’s paternity, distanced himself from Beron, and they were never close after that.

When Tim and Ines died, Flavia was one of the people who stepped up the most to help. Nesta was fiercely independent about the whole thing, but Flavia did babysit for Nesta when she had her own activities, and sometimes she would fill the Archeron fridge with groceries or do the mountain of laundry or take the younger girls back-to-school clothes shopping. Still, she was quiet about it knowing that Nesta considered herself a failure for any little thing she couldn’t do for her sisters.

Tim and Ines (personalities):

Tim

Tim was easy-going and fairly mild.

Of the three girls, Elain is most like him in temperament.

Like his dad, Tim was a total workaholic. He loved his daughters a lot, always bragging about them to colleagues and friends, but he wasn’t really around enough to really show them.

As a result, his main role as a parent was spoiling them with things.

Tim’s dad had been the diciplinarian, so Tim hated “being the bad guy” and was thus incredibly permissive. On the rare occasions that he was in charge of the girls alone for a weekend, there were...literally no rules.

Had he been alive, Tim would have strongly encouraged Nesta’s decision to pursue law school. He likely would have been more skeptical of Feyre’s choice to pursue fine art.

Ines

Ines was more type-A in her personality

Of the three, Nesta is most like her

As the daughter of a classics professor, she had a great love of classical art and music. She would have been pleased that Elain planned to be an academic like her Avô. She also highly encouraged Nesta’s pursuit of opera even though HS Nesta secretly would have rather done musical theatr (like literally any other teenager?)

Ines had been very close to her parents growing up and had planned to return to Portugal when she graduated law school; even though she loved Tim, she was sad when that didn’t happen

She was very nurturing with her girls, but less tolerant of them acting out. Appearances were important to her, and she expected her girls to be well-behaved.

Nesta, always desperate to please, was praised by every adult who ever met her for being perfectly well-behaved

Elain, easy-going and somewhat shy, was quiet and complaint by nature. She never caused problems and rarely even cried

Feyre, a fiercely independent spirit from day one, did not give a FUCK about making a scene if the need arose. Oh, it’s Christmas and Mamã bought Feyre a pretty dress to wear in the Christmas photos? Who cares; not Feyre! She wants to wear her Jasmine costume from Halloween, and if Mamã says she can’t, Feyre is PERFECTLY happy to make a good huge scene in the middle of the bougee photography studio...

OKAY FUCK THIS IS WAY TOO LONG BUT REAL QUICK THE AUNT AND UNCLE

Ines was an only child, Tim just had the one younger brother named Mike. Mike was the “disappointment” according to Rick, because he chose to major in communications and had no interest in law school.

Mike is incredibly unassuming and lived in Tim’s popular, affable shadow. Not lame but definitely unremarkable

The Archerons grew up in the affluent Beach town of Santa Barbara, but Mike was so vexed by his parents he move 385 miles away to Sacramento (if you know California, WEIRD flex on Sacramento of all places, but you do you Mikey)

He married a very sweet middle class girl named Linda and got a job in Insurance

They never had kids of their own, and though he and Tim were friendly, they didn’t really get together much because they just had vastly different lives/lifestyles

Mike and Linda were shocked and sort of bewildered when Tim and Ines died and they were awarded custody of the girls (literally do you not really know what it is to agree to be someone’s legal guardian, Michael ???) and they sort of started haphazardly making plans to move the girls up to Sacramento, even though every time Nesta called they weren’t much farther on arrangements.

Elain and Feyre FREAKED out when they were told they’d be leaving home and their friends and moving to Sacramento with Uncle Mike and Aunt Linda (10 yo Feyre: I HATE Sacramento, it’s a shithole!) and when Mike and Linda still didn’t really have any helpful insights on schools, etc (the Archeron girls all attended private school) Nesta decided the move made no sense.

She basically announced that they weren’t gonna move and that she was just going to handle the girls. Mike and LInda sort of (vaguely) protested before being like “yeah you right, we suck at this”. They still controlled Tim and Ines’s estate and helped Nesta deal with all that, but she took it over the MINUTE she turned 18 and they didn’t really have any part after that besides sheepishly calling like “so...hows everything going? Are you liking school okay?” 🤦‍♀️

Nesta tried to make an effort to be closer with them when they were all younger but like...as adults the Archeron girls have sort of tacitly agreed that Mike and Linda are sweet and they’re family but like...they aren’t that much fun to be around. They’d much rather go to sushi and get drunk on Christmas Eve rather than go to Sacramento and force polite conversation with their aunt and uncle

Okay so yeah! There is a far too detailed thing about her parents, hope you enjoy!

[punkcupcakestyles]

Love Song

Part 15

Catch Up!

Sofia Welsh-De La Rosa and Timothée Chalamet will star in new Amazon series and, honestly, I won’t talk about anything else ever again

Amazon Prime has just announced the release of its new original series set in 1970’s New York. According to Hollywood Reporter, the new series will be lead by Sofia Welsh - De La Rosa, Timothée Chalamet, and Logan Lerman, and will be produced by Jordan Peele (Get Out and Us) and directed by Christina Hodson (Birds of Prey). The ambitious project is in talks with some other big names in Hollywood, such as Meryl Streep and even Robert de Niro, to join the series.

Honestly, I’m gagging. 

This might come as a surprise as both Sofia, who has been enjoying lots of Oscar’s buzz for the third year in a row, and Timothèe are on the prime of their movie careers, as two of the most prominent young actors in Hollywood, but according to many sources, Sofia has been looking for a way to work with Peele for a long time, while Timothèe is excited to add some action to his resume, after his role in Hostiles and The King. Also, rumor has it, Amazon is willing to pay a hefty (and I mean hefty) amount of money to sign the young stars. 

As for Logan Lerman, this is his the actor’s first TV role since 2005 and is set to be his comeback after his career faded a bit to the background. With the star-studded cast, Amazon is hoping this to be the platform’s next big hit. 

There is no doubt that Sofia, Timothèe, and Logan are three of THE most talented young actors today, with Sofia being the reigning queen of the pack. Recently, the actress has played a pirate, a thief, a devious courtesan and a feminist writer trying to bring down love, and she’s been rumored to have just signed a deal with Disney to play her very own princess, as well as an undisclosed character in MCU’s highly anticipated Black Widow. She truly has the range, Darling!

Sofia was seen having coffee with Timothèe early in the week, before the show’s announcement, which sparked rumors that the actress had ended things with Harry Styles after he had dinner with his ex in London. She was also seen leaving the James Corden Late Late Night’s studio with Logan...

@BobbyC I’m sorry but all of them are gay...

@Peanutbuttah Eh, she can’t act anyway

@Loveisloud @peanutbuttah She can act, she has been in commercial and art-house movies and has received rave reviews every time. You just don’t like her because she’s dating your fave. 

@Arewethereyet she’s an sl*t. So glad Harry’s done with her…

@Soph Are you drunk Buzzfeed? One does not leave Harry Styles for anyone!

****

Harry was cooking. 

The air smelled like garlic and butter and I breathed in deeply, just realizing how fucking hungry I was, as I followed him to the kitchen. It just occurred to me that I hadn’t eaten anything that day, other than a cup of coffee that Harry had made me in the morning. It was a little strong for my taste, I liked mine with sugar, even when my mom kept telling me I was being violently disrespectful to coffee. I didn’t care, not one bit. 

I never really ate on interviews or auditions days, it made my tummy feel funny and I was usually afraid that my clothes wouldn’t fit like they were supposed to after, so, no food for me, thank you. Usually, D would force-feed me as soon as we were done, practically shoving fruits, nuts, and salads down my throat (sometimes even a burger!), but today I was way too anxious and excited to even pay attention to her efforts. I was going on a date with Harry, I couldn’t care less about anything else!!!

And now, I was fucking hungry and it smelled even better in the kitchen.

“I didn’t know you cooked,” I smiled, looking at the pasta that was boiling on the stove and the bubbling alfredo sauce. Grilled prawns and a green salad were carefully plated in rustic blue and gold plates.

My eyes traveled to him, and I saw him hesitate for a second before he gifted me with a shy smile. He was so lovely, it was no surprise that my head became fuzzy every time I was around him. Even the most superficial thought struggled to grab a hold to my brain. I wondered if anyone could keep their wits around him, but somehow, I doubted it.

“It takes my mind off of things,” he finally said. “And I kinda wanted to impress you, I guess.” 

The admission made my heart soar in my chest and I beamed at him as he stood in front of me. I admired his beauty for a second, his skin was slightly tanned and it looked almost delicious against the white fabric of his shirt, and his smile was warm, making me feel giddy as he trapped me against the counter with his arms on each side of my body. 

I wanted to kiss him, so so badly, but instead, I let my fingers brush over his neck until they reached the tips of his hair. It tickled and he laughed softly with the most wonderful smile.

“Really?” I asked him softly, cause I didn’t want to break the intimate moment we were sharing. 

“Yeah. A bit silly, innit?”

“No, it’s not silly. But, if you wanted to impress me, then you should’ve made a chocolate lava cake,” I teased. “You would’ve gotten me, then.”

“Chocolate, uh?” The right corner of his lip shot upwards, and an adoring feeling hit me right in the chest like a tidal wave. 

“Yeap.”

“I’ll keep it in mind for next time,” Harry muttered, his words getting lost in the air as he leaned down to kiss me.

I realized that it was all I wanted: To kiss him slowly, maybe even for hours. But I knew I had to stop him. I was under his spell and there was nothing I could do about it, nothing I wanted to do, anyway. But even I could admit that this was just a dream, one that I wanted to remember every second of. So when he was gone, I would still have those memories. 

So before his lips could brush mine, before he could melt my brain with his kisses, I pressed my forehead to his and dropped my hands to his chest, right where his heart was beating rapidly. 

“Sorry,” I said shyly, casting my eyes down so I wouldn’t have to look at him, not a few more seconds, not until I had gathered the will to stand strong by my decision. 

“Is there something wrong?” His voice was full of sincere concern, a little bit rougher as well, which made his accent more noticeable. 

“No,” I shook my head, finally looking into his green eyes. “Everything’s perfect.”

“You just don’t want me to kiss you?”

“It’s just...I want to remember every bit of tonight,” I said, as I tried to ease the utter embarrassment that was crawling over my chest. Who said stuff like that? Writers in cheesy movies or bad teen shows. Fuck. 

“Except for my kisses?” He insisted, almost like a little boy fishing for reassurance. I brought my fingers to his cheek and grazed them it until he smiled at me. 

The answer was “fuck, no”. His kisses were a memory I wanted to carry with me forever. But I also wanted to have that night, so I could carry it with me, and compare it to every other date, every other person that would come my way. 

“I want to remember the little details,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “The dinner you made, which is really close to burning, the grandpa pants…”

“Hey! These look cool! And the sauce, I have it under control!”

“If you say so,” I sneered mischievously, twisting my lips into a mocking smile as he pretended to be offended. “And I want to remember everything you did to make me feel special”

Harry’s arms looped around my waist as he pulled me to his chest and I hugged him back and looked at him, battling the need to just lean in and kiss him. His lips were so pink. 

We both sucked at the whole “no kissing allowed” thing, and somehow that made me feel a lot better. For once, I wasn’t the needy, dreamy one. 

“What do you think?” I asked in a whisper, smiling against the brush of his lips as he bumped our noses together.

“I want to kiss you, Sof, all fucking night long,” he pouted. “Been thinking ‘bout it all day.”

“I’ll make it up to you. Just...lemme have this, yeah?”

“Why?”

“Cause…” I laughed embarrassedly. “I already have your kisses in a little folder in my brain. Now I wanna have this.”

“Is it just me in that folder?” Harry asked, suddenly interested in some other thing that frowning. Curiosity and amusement were burning in his stare and I rolled my eyes at him, almost scoffing at the fact that was the only thing that had managed to catch his attention. 

“Mostly you…” I conceded, even though the petty part of me was all for rolling out with a long list of names before I got to his name. “And Sebastian Stan…” I said, not being able to resist it. 

“Bucky Barnes?” His eyebrows twisted in confusion and he looked at me as I licked my lips, considering just how weird I wanted my answer to be.  

“And the cartoon, too...” I replied, a little bit too casually for it to go unnoticed, but Harry didn’t seem to notice, cause as he was nodding thoughtfully, his hands traveled to my neck again, making me look at him as he dipped his head down to reach the curve of my neck. 

“That’s a bit greedy, baby,” He whispered against my skin, pressing soft kisses down to my pulse point. I wasn’t sure if that was technically a kiss, and I didn’t care, it felt so good. “Someone else?” He was cheating, and we both knew it. I could feel his smile growing bigger, and I sighed as he grazed his teeth over the curve of my neck and let his tongue soothe my skin. “Babe?” He insisted, just to tease me. It was hard to think, and he knew it, but I wasn’t going to admit it just yet. 

“Uh.” I licked my lips and struggled for a second, as I struggled to remember what was it that I was going to say. “Chris Evans, “ I began. “and uh, Michael B. Jordan. Mmm… and Logan Lerman.”

“Isn’t that the guy you’re gonna work with?” He asked, stopping suddenly to look at me. I fluttered my eyes open and smiled when they could finally focus on him. 

“Yeah, him and Timothée Chalamet.”

“Mmmm...I don’t know if I want to share my folder with them,” Harry pouted, which made me laugh. I realized it was no laughing matter, but still, a warm, almost giddy, laughter kept bubbling out of my tummy. 

“Why? Does it make you jealous, H?” I teased.

“Should I be?”

“Mmmm...I don’t know. I honestly think I would let Logan fuck me...those eyes, man.”

“So funny, S…” Harry rolled his eyes. He was not as amused as I had expected him to be. 

“You shouldn’t be,” I said softly, looking him in the eyes, serious and sincere.  

“You sure?” He asked and I was sure he wasn’t talking about Logan Lerman anymore. 

“I’m sure, baby.” I wasn’t even lying. “So, who’s in yours?” I asked, cause maybe that’d take attention away from myself. I didn’t think things through though, cause he had a whole bunch of options for his answer. Who could it be? One of his supermodel exes? His singer ex? This wasn’t a fun game at all. 

“You.”

“Oh, so THAT’S how you answer that kind of question!!” I exclaimed, which made him laugh, and, as he did so, his dimples showed on his face, making him look a little boyish. He was fucking pretty, Jesus. 

“I’m not even trying to be a good boyfriend here,” Harry chuckled, and I relished on the way the word `boyfriend” sounded out of his lips. So pretty, so fucking pretty. “My folder is called “When Sof’s not around”, and I think we need to fill it up, so I don’t run out of thoughts.”

“Oh, we don’t want that,” I scrunched up my nose and shook my head at him as a smile played on my lips. I was so fucking happy and I couldn’t even figure out why. 

“No, we don’t.” The tip of his tongue lapped across his pink lips, and I followed it with my eyes, taking a second or two before I peered up to him again. “I was hoping we could kiss all night,” he said softly. “and maybe I could eat you out by the pool.”

“I didn’t bring a swimsuit…”

“You wouldn’t need one, baby,” Harry laughed, a mix of mischief and endearment lacing with it. I couldn’t stop staring at him, and my knees wobbled a bit as he leaned down, bumping our noses together one more time, as the soft brush of his lips against my skin made me shiver. 

“Don’t cheat,” I whispered and his soft laugh echoed down in every inch of my body. His lips grazed over my forehead, as he pressed a soft kiss to my skin. 

“Ok, baby. We’ll do it your way.”

“Thank you.”

“I think it’s silly, y’know?” He started, pushing me back so he could look at me with his bright green eyes. “We’re just starting, Sof.”

****

I wanted to kiss him. 

I looked at him, licking a spoonful of dessert with my head propped on my hand as I listened to him talk, but all I could think of was how much I wanted to lick the trace of chocolate out of his lips. 

“Is there something wrong, S?” I noticed there wasn’t much concern in his voice, not like there usually was when he asked me if I was ok. This time, there was a hint of mockery, almost as if he knew exactly what I was thinking and that all I wanted to do was to sit on his lap and press soft kisses from his jaw to his lips. 

Fuck.

“No,” I smiled sweetly, cause I wasn’t one to go down without a fight, and I took his hand in mine and pressed it to my lips before I looked at him again. 

“Were you distracted?” His smile was turning more devilish as the seconds went by and I felt myself get warm as he leaned closer, his hands dropping to my thigh and pressing softly to it.

He wasn’t gonna win. I was not going to let him. 

“Nope,” I said, letting the ‘p’ pop between my lips. “Tell me about your album, I promise I’ll be a grown-up about it.” 

“Nice save…” Harry chuckled. “I think you’re gonna like it.”

“I have recently discovered that I’m a very jealous person. I don’t think I’ll like it, but I’ll be happy for you.”

“You shouldn’t be jealous.” A smile tugged on his lips and I felt warm, so warm inside, I couldn’t help but smile as well. “And I think you’re like it, especially since I made a few last-minute changes, against Jeff’s will.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, he kept saying I had the guts, the audacity to change the album when we’re about to drop the first single.”

“What changes?” I insisted, because Jeff’s feelings were the least of my concern at the moment. 

I wished I could have played it cool. Maybe that would’ve made me look more interesting, aloof, unapproachable, and all those things a girl should be in front of her crush. But my heart was racing and the world was turning chaotic as my head ticked, like a tiny little bomb. 

I needed to know. 

Tick, tick. 

“You’re already sure you’re not gonna like it,” Harry smirked, surely unaware of the mess inside my head. “You might as well wait for it.”

No!!! TIck tick. 

“Oh, please, please, pretty please?? What’s the advantage of this if I can’t get a tiny sneak peek?”

“Well, for instance, you get me to cook for you…”

“It was delicious, thank you.”

“And you get me to eat you out at night when you’re not being stubborn and imposing kiss-bans.”

“I like that very much, too,” I giggled, looking at his green eyes as he got just a bit closer, just an inch away from me. 

“So it’s not such a bad deal, is it?”

“I guess not.”

“Good.” His bottom lip rolled into his lips and he bit it thoughtfully for a couple of seconds as his eyes kept burning little holes into my soul. That’s how it felt. “Let’s watch a movie, baby. Are there any bans on cuddling?”

“No, not yet.”

His fingers squeezed mine and he got up swiftly from the table, smiling brightly as we covered the few steps to a different room near the pool, where a giant screen awaited for us. There were a bunch of individuals blue chair, blue and velvety, and a larger one, that was meant to comfortably fit two. The room was dark, only lit by the lights coming from the screen, and I followed him blindly until we were sitting side by side. Slowly, we found each other, and as Harry sat against the armchair, I settled between his legs, cuddling up to his chest while his large hand rested on the curve of my waist. 

He smelled like a lazy Sunday morning when the rain is lightly tapping on your windows and all you can hear are the chirping birds when still early, so the world hasn’t woken up just yet and you get to focus on that feeling, on the promise of what’s coming. 

He also smelled like pasta and chocolate, and I didn’t mind that at all. 

He felt soft, comforting, and sweet, but above all, he felt safe. I was safe with him. 

And, I struggled for a bit, trying to understand what came next, what was the warmth and giddiness that settled in my tummy every time I looked at him. 

“You ok, baby?” Harry asked and I nodded absentmindedly, not ready to let my thoughts go just yet. What was it? “Wanna watch Set It Up?”

“Yeah, whatever you want. your choice.”

“Are you sure you’re ok? You don’t say that often.”

“Oh, shhh, Harry I always do whatever you want.”

“We definitely have different definitions of ‘Whatever Harry wants’” He mused and I propped myself up to look at him, almost suspiciously, almost angry.

“Do we? What do you want?” I asked. 

“To kiss you. And for you to stay the night.”

“I have a bed, y’know?” I quirked my eyebrow, looking at him as I had already won the argument. 

“Yeah, unfortunately…”

“And we promised we would behave tonight.”

“You can stay in a different room,” he offered. “Or I will.”

“What’s the point then?”

“You won’t have to miss me in the morning…” he shrugged. I laughed out loud, despite my best efforts to look offended. “And I won’t have to miss you.”

“I’ll think about it.”

Love. 

He looked a lot like love. 

And love looked a lot like him. 

***

Harry Styles and Sofia Welsh were out grabbing Fro-yo and I’ll never be as cool as either of them

Yes, I know what you’re gonna say: Are they paying you to write this sh*t? And the answer is yes! someone’s paying me to write this sh*t! Alas, neither Harry nor Sofia is. I wish. 

The usually private couple, and bear in mind I am using the word couple loosely here as they haven’t confirmed to be dating, gave the world a glimpse of their relationship as they stepped out in Los Angeles to grab ice-creams and bubble teas, along with friends.

Ever since the rumors of their relationship spread around, the couple has been mostly keeping a low profile - which is not very surprising as Harry Styles is not very open about his personal life since he was a member of One Direction and a large part of his fans believed him to be romantically involved with one of his bandmates (that was a mouthful! And also very true, there has been a lot of conspiracy theories about it)

Sofia, who’s in the middle of an Oscar campaign (and has been showing us just how much designers adore her), sported a pair of leggings, a crop top, and a large blazer, a perfect outfit for the ever-changing LA weather, and looked happy and relaxed as she waited for Harry to get their orders. Both stars took photos with fans and left together in Styles’ classic car…

****

We were made out of good intentions. 

We slept together that night and every night after that for an entire week. We didn’t do much, we kissed and cuddled, and spent our mornings lazily together until one of us had to go out to the real world. We even went out and we kept stealing looks and smiles at each other, like two little kids that were too shy in front of their crushes. 

Photos were taken. Articles were published. Midge was elated. 

Harry’s new single was coming out that night, and there was going to be a party to celebrate it. If it was a hit, they were going to celebrate their success and all the hard work that went into it. It was a flop, and it was not going to flop, they were going to drink for better times ahead. 

“Fuck!!!” 

I stared at the ceiling, willing my body to move and failing miserably at it as every little muscle in my body contracted painfully. My arms hurt, and my legs felt like they were on fire. 

I just needed 5 more minutes before I got up and got ready to leave. 

It was day 4 of “my new life” as my trainer liked to call it, and after another lunch of grilled chicken and steamed broccoli, I was ready to quit. I had trained and dieted before for different roles, but this time, I had a feeling she wanted to suck the life out of me. It even made me reconsider if I needed to be in a Marvel Movie. Would Midge kill me if I quit?

“Sof…” The male voice scared me just a little, as I thought I was alone in my house. I turn around just slightly, as much as my tired poor body could handle and smiled as I saw Sam standing by my door. “Can I come in?”

He was holding a tray, with something that looked like a sandwich, coffee, and a glass of water, along with a white bottle of medicine. I nodded, grunting even at the soft movement, and he walked quickly to my bed, setting the tray down before me as he stood awkwardly. 

“Shouldn’t you be at work?” I struggled to ask while I propped myself up and sat criss-cross on my bed. I sounded angry, and maybe I was, why would he bring me a sandwich? It was all I wanted to eat and all I couldn’t eat at the same time. 

“I’m off work today, and I wanted to check on you. Cat told me you’ve been feeling under the weather. I called your mom and she told me you should “just eat a sandwich and take an aspirin”, so here they are,” he said, offering me a childish smile as he pointed the tray with a little too much joy. 

“I can’t eat a sandwich,” I sulked. “And I need to get ready, I have to go to Harry’s.”

“You can eat a sandwich. And he can wait 5 minutes, you’re always there.”

I realized we hadn’t talked about the kiss, not really. I avoided being alone with him, and whenever the occasion presented itself, Sam would go out of the room, giving me space and maybe waiting for me to be the first one to reach out. I had never done that. Honestly, I didn’t think I would.

“You’re right, Sammy,” I said, picking the sandwich in my hands and noticing that he had already cut the crust off. “Thank you.”

It was weird between us, tense and quiet, and I didn’t like it. I bit into the bread looking at an empty spot on the wall as I waited for him to say something. Anything, I would take it. But Sam remained silent, pressing his palms on his thighs as he went to get up. 

“Sam,” I called for him and I smiled shyly when he finally turned around. He took his time, though, and for a moment there, I was scared he was going to leave. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s not what you want to hear when someone you like kisses you.”

“I shouldn’t have…”

“Did you want to?”

“Yes,” I breathed and I realized I wasn't lying. I did want to kiss him, there was no use in denying that. 

I put the sandwich down on the plate and moved closer to Sam until I could see the golden freckles that were hidden in his light brown eyes.

“Do you remember that night when you came through my window and stayed the night with me?”

“Yeah, I heard your dad scream, and I wanted to be there in case…”

“I know, Sam. I’ve wanted to kiss you ever since then,” I admitted and he kept staring at me as if he was considering what his next move would be. Would he kiss me? Did I want him to kiss me?

“You’re not being fair to me, Sof.”

“I know. You haven’t been fair to me either, but here we are.”

There was a moment of panic, cause for a second, I thought he was going to kiss me. He leaned over me and I held my breath as I looked at him, not able to stop him just yet. But as his lips brushed over my forehead, I closed my eyes, smiling as he pulled away from me. 

“Eat the fucking sandwich, Sof,” he replied and it wasn’t enough. I took his hand before he could leave and I licked my lips, peering up to him with something more than just fear pressing up to my chest. 

“Are we good?”

“Yeah.”

“I guess we’ll talk about it again when he gets back with his ex.”

That was a low blow, and we both knew it, but I just stayed quiet as he left the room, wondering if I deserved it. 

****

It took me a while to get ready, so I was late for Harry’s party. I went straight to the pool, where a large screen had been set up and the new video seemed to be on a loop. I couldn’t find Harry anywhere, but at the same, he was all I could see. I stared at the screen, looking at his golden skin as he was surrounded by the adoring crowd, at the way they kept touching and the expression on his face as he leaned into them. The song didn’t even matter, cause all I could focus on was his stupidly beautiful green eyes. 

I mean, I had watched his videos before. I had seen him fly through the sky and be surrounded by kids, but this was different. Those were entertaining and beautiful, and I felt the emotion in my tummy simply because it was him, and somehow, just seeing him made me happy. But in this one he meant to capture your attention and a little bit of your soul. He wanted to be desired and to be free along the way. And it was such a fucking sexy video.  

I lost count of how many times I allowed myself to watch the video, but it was probably too many times. After a while, I decided it was time to look for the real Harry, who was still nowhere to be seen, so I left the pool, smiling and greeting everyone as I passed by. 

I hoped he was alone, cause I wanted to fucking kiss him like no one else was looking. I wanted to tell him how lovely, talented, and amazing he was. I was going to kiss him a lot and praise him, it couldn’t get better than that. 

I looked for him in the living room, where a small crowd was throwing back cocktails and beers and went out to the front door, where people were lounging about, a bit drunkenly. But he wasn’t anywhere, and I was starting to feel uneasy. 

It took me more than a few minutes to make my way to his room because people kept getting in my way. I did my best to smile and engage in silly conversations about nothing, but my heart was growing heavy and my brain was too anxious to even remember if I had succeeded. 

I heard him talk even before I stood by his door. I couldn’t quite tell what he was saying or who he was talking to, but I noticed that his words were a little bit slurred, and his accent dripped thick in his low voice. The door was slightly ajar and I pushed it open and stood by the frame as I saw him talking on the phone. He had his back to me, so he didn’t notice that I had arrived, not that it mattered. 

“C, you’re drunk,” I heard him say and I wished he had just said a different name. “No...I know I told you it was just a PR relationship...Cause I need time to figure out...Really, C? Wanna know if I still love you? You’re not being fair...” The last part came out as a dry laugh, and I knew I had to leave, it was rude and inappropriate, but, most importantly, it was breaking my fucking heart. But my feet seemed like they were made out of cement, and my legs had chosen that moment to numb out of pain. So, I was still standing there when he turned around, and probably saw the tears that were threatening to spill down my eyes. 

I wanted to know the answer too. Could I know it? It’d save us a lot of pain. 

“Bye, C.”

He dropped his phone to the bed and I looked at him as he walked quickly to me. He looked flustered and worried, but it all seemed so distant, that it didn’t matter. 

“Baby,” Harry said, but that wasn’t my name. Did her call her baby too? He probably did, he was a ‘baby’ kind of guy. “Are you ok?”

“Yes, I was looking for you cause I wanted to check if you wanted me to post something on Instagram,” I lied. “D already drafted a tweet, it’s really simple.”

“Sof, how much did you hear?”

“Nothing. I’m gonna get a couple of photos and uh, I’m gonna go home, I think I need a rest day.”

His hand went to grab mine, but before he could do it, I turned and walked away rushing down the stairs until I could get lost in the crowd. 

Fair? None of us was being fair. 

[miggydiaz]

for the salty ask: 3, 7, 10, 11, 15, 16, 19, 22, 23, 24, 25 and 27 for spn

I had to do this one today because I have a LOT of Supernatural feelings and so a lot of these are even longer than my CK one. But thanks for the ask @wonderwolfballoon!

UNPOPULAR SUPERNATURAL OPINIONS AHOY: INCLUDES ANTI-DESTIEL SENTIMENTS AND OTHER UNSAVORY ELEMENTS

3. Have you ever unfollowed someone over a fandom opinion? 100000000% I have unfollowed someone over a fandom opinion in the SPN fandom. SPN was the fandom that taught me to make JUDICIOUS use of the blocking feature tumblr offers in order to curate my experience. I would actually encourage anyone and everyone to use the blocking feature if they disagree with people. Honestly, we don’t owe anyone our time or energy, especially on the internet! It is much healthier than sending or responding to hate, IMO. 7. Is there anything you used to like but can’t stand now?* This is actually a hard one for me to answer, so let me start by saying -- I have not seen a SINGLE episode since 9x05? I think? Whichever episode was the Dr. Deanlittle one where he talks to animals. I just couldn’t do it anymore. I LOVE LOVE LOVE the first 5 seasons, and they are all I watch anymore and I pretend nothing else exists after that (except The French Mistake because that episode is hilarious). But uh... I guess the simple answer is when I was originally watching it, I really loved Dean. He was brash, snarky, rough around the edges... but kind of soft in a I’m too toxically masculine to deal with my softness sort of way that I love seeing characters grow out of as they mature. But when I go back and rewatch now, much older than I was in 2006 when I first started watching, I see how awful a lot of his older behavior truly was. I still love Dean, and I will be a Dean girl until I die probably, but sometimes you gotta remind yourself that your faves have been problematic in the past so you don’t put them up on fandom constructed pedestals.

10. Most disliked arc? Why? AND AS A BONUS, MY ANSWER to 11. Is there an unpopular character you like that the fandom doesn’t? Why? I could write a literal essay about all of the problems I have with the later seasons (the ones I watched, which encompasses 6, 7, 8, and a few episodes of 9). But by far and away, the thing I hated most, was the Men of Letters.

Okay, this is where I am going to recognize my love of certain characters is at FUNDAMENTAL ODDS with how that character develops later and what history and background we get later on them. I RECOGNIZE this character is problematic, and I would NEVER STAND for his shit IRL, but fiction is complicated and nuanced, and fantastic circumstances do not make for normal behaviors. That being said, with all warnings I could possibly give, and with the full understanding that what I am about to say is basically fandom blasphemy of the highest order...

I like John Winchester’s character.

I know, I know. If you wanna stop reading and block me now, you are free to do that. I will not hold it against you. I am not about to apologize for anything he has done. I just need to contextualize why I have such an issue with the MOL storyline and it starts with the simple fact that I liked John Winchester as he was originally presented.

To me, and with the full understanding that I am answering this from the perspective of someone who DOES NOT regard anything past season 5 as personal canon, John Winchester is the perfect example of a truly complicated character. Here’s a parent who, if we take the pilot and the original s2 Djinn episodes at face value, could have been a great parent, who then got shoved into a fantastically impossible situation and made terrible choices that he thought were necessary in order to keep himself and his sons safe. That does not EXCUSE the heaps of abuse that he piled onto Dean in any way. We know John and Mary didn’t have a great marriage. But we also know from the pilot that John was at least a caring and present father, mostly,  for the 4 years he got to parent in a normal world, and that if Mary had lived, John would’ve been a softball playing dad who raised his kids and had a loving marriage with his wife. (Again, I need to reiterate, I did not watch anything past the early episodes of s9. If there is later canon that negates this, I do not know about it, nor do I want to because I don’t think of anything past 5 as canon) This is all important to me because these things emphasize that John was “NORMAL”. He was a mechanic, from a family of mechanics, whose father didn’t bail on him (a man in the episode where Dean is transported back in time to Lawrence tells John to ‘say hi to your old man for me’ or something to that effect). He was just a midwestern dude. Giving John Winchester a fantastical background through this Men of Letters bullshit made me SO MAD. First of all, I hate when later canon negates previous canon. I cannon TELL you how much I hate it. And the later seasons of Supernatural are riddled with stuff that doesn’t make any damn sense in the context of original, Kripke written canon, which is exactly why I stopped watching. That’s not ~Evolution of the show.~ That’s conveniently forgetting stuff that made your show and its premise so successful to begin with in order to keep filming episodes so you can keep making money. It’s the sacrifice of art for capitalism and yes I know this is a stupid TV show but as a writer myself it PISSES ME OFF.

/rant

ALSO, the idea that this toxically masculine family was set on this path by Heaven, and inherited this curse that put them on this path from their mother was such a good plot twist in its heyday. We spent four seasons thinking of Mary Winchester as a victim of circumstance, whose fate could not have been avoided because she was the mother to Sam, who is effectively cursed. And then, we learn that its BECAUSE of Mary that this ball even got rolling in the first place. IDK if you were around for that time in the fandom but at least in my circle, this was a big fucking deal. There had been so much (rightful) discourse about John before this, and what kind of parent he was, that Mary became almost deified in the same way Dean deifies her. And then we find out that this whole story gets set in motion by a decision she made because this was the life she found herself in. This was great. It was interesting. And even though the MOL doesn’t negate any of this, it does give John this weirdly fantastical that isn’t necessary. Let this guy be just some Joe Schmoe who fell in love with a kick ass hunter and had no idea any of this even existed. Let Mary and her want to be ‘normal’ be a complicated moral choice that fundamentally altered the paths of her husband and sons. It’s good tv!

Also, I fucking hate the bunker. The best episodes are Dean and Sam having moments in the car, or while in motel rooms on their cases, or whatever. I don’t mind them having a home base. I’m fine with that. But if a building could ever be a Mary Sue character, the bunker is it. I hate all of the MOL storyline, starting with this place.

I may not even tag this as Supernatural, I don’t need angry later season stans in my inbox.

15. Unpopular opinion about the manga/show?

There’s nothing good about anything that happened after season 6. It’s all a bunch of retconning bullshit. Season 6 had its moments where it was interesting, so I cut it a little bit of slack, but as far as I’m concerned, the show ended in season 5. I’m not sure that’s necessarily unpopular, but it does feel that way on tumblr, so. 

16. If you could change anything in the show, what would you change?

Aside from ending it in season 5?

Oooh, I’m about to blaspheme again. I am definitely not tagging this as Supernatural.

I would never have introduced Castiel, and I would’ve given that entire storyline to Anna. Or, alternatively, I would’ve flipped their story lines.

Look, for whatever it’s worth... I agree with the idea that Dean Winchester is a repressed bisexual. His Dr. Sexy love, the entire storyline with Benny in season 8, etc. I just don’t think he feels romantically about Castiel. And like, that’s okay! Just because you’re not into someone who is into you doesn’t mean you owe them a relationship or anything, no matter what the fandom thinks.

But I also think Dean has a big problem when it comes to women. Again, obviously later on in the series, Dean shifts and Charlie happens and Claire Novak and I know all of these things from gifs okay, context is not applicable here because I have none. But early on, Dean struggles A LOT with thinking of women as A) capable and B) trustworthy. He exists in a perpetual state of identifying women along the Madonna/Whore binary. Even Jo, however you feel about her, and to be clear, I loved Jo, but he doesn’t stop thinking of her really as a kid until they’re about to shoot the devil. Up until then, he’s genuinely surprised Ellen lets her out of the damn house.

Giving him a strong, capable woman who rebels against Heaven for HIM would have fundamentally altered Dean’s perceptions of women much earlier on than we get and would have forced him to examine some of that misogyny head on.

Dean has no problems trusting men. This is why the entire Gordon fiasco happens, right? It was less work for him to trust Castiel because Castiel is the inverse of Ruby. Angel to her Demon. Angels and demons don’t really have genders, but for the sake of presentation of vessels, man to her woman. Not even getting me started on the problematic parts of having significant demons mostly symbolized by women (Meg, Ruby, Lilith) and having significant angels mostly represented by Men (Castiel, Michael, Lucifer, Zachariah, Gabriel, Raphael), and how that ties into the idea of Original Sin and yada yada, but just like it’s interesting to have Mary and her decisions be the catalyst for the story, it’s interesting to have this badass warrior angel in Anna who marches down to Hell to yank Dean out, and through her interactions with him, decide to rebel against the ultimate patriarchy, while Dean gets an equally strong female counterpart to Sam’s Ruby, a woman for all intents and purposes that he respects as a soldier and an ally and not just a potential piece of ass.

Also, Castiel fans being literally unbearable is why I left the fandom. Nothing against Misha or anything, and not even anything against Cas as a character (who I very much enjoyed in seasons 4 and 5), but his fans have always been the worst and they try to insert him into everything.

19. What is the one thing you hate most about your fandom?

Castiel/Destiel fans, which even though I also hated the direction the show was going, drove me out of the fandom. Not like, personally or directly, but just the sheer mental hoops they had to jump through in order to make their ship work and I just got tired of seeing all of the contrived meta on my dash. Oh, and the rampant misogyny that came out of those early Castiel fans. I didn’t appreciate it from the Wincest corner, and I definitely didn’t appreciate it from the fans of the new guy. Gross.

22. Popular character you hate?

Oof. I don’t know. I don’t really hate Castiel, because again, I liked him a lot in seasons 4 and 5. Even 6 was interesting, even if I don’t regard it as my own personal show canon. I don’t think there was a popular character in those first five seasons I ever really hated. I didn’t fundamentally hate a character at all until the MOL stuff came around. Um. Yeah, I don’t really have an answer for this.

23. Unpopular character you love?

Pretty much every female character ever. Jo, Ellen, Ruby, Meg... although Meg became more popular as the series went on, Anna. Um. OH, BELA. Bela ESPECIALLY, I recently rewatched season 3 and I cannot emphasize how MUCH I love Bela. She was the best purely human foil ever. Bela is hands down the character I love most that the fandom had frothing at the mouth hatred for. It doesn’t help that I legitimately think Lauren Cohan is one of the most beautiful women on the planet. But seriously, Bela. Hands down.

24. Would you recommend XXX to a friend? Why or why not? 

I have! Many of times, and ALWAYS WITH THE CAVEAT to stop at the end of season 5. Not a single one of them has listened to me and almost all of them came to me at the end of the finale and were like WHY DID I WASTE SO MUCH TIME, and I don’t want to say I told them so, but like, I explicitly in neon colored text once told them so, so like, idk what to tell them. But yes! I think if someone is interested in some classic mystery television that has an overarching theme of family and forgiveness and striking out against the boxes that life tries to put us all into, SPN is a great show. But only the first 5 seasons. Also, be prepared for some thematically problematic parts of the show because there’s a lot of cishet toxic masculinity in those early seasons, and we should examine our media critically. There’s also a lot of good though too, and IMO, the good outweighs the bad.

25. How would you end XXX/Would you change the ending of XXX?

I would’ve ended it at season 5. I would’ve had Sam escape the pit and seen him standing under the street lamp, but then I would’ve had him walking away to leave Dean with Lisa (btw, side note, I DIDN’T like Lisa because I don’t think Dean would ever be truly happy with someone completely outside the life). Not because Sam doesn’t love his brother, but because he *does* love his brother, and because he would want Dean to be happy, even though Dean and Sam’s ideas of what makes the other happy have always been a little bit screwed up.. but that’s a different story.

27. Least shippable character?

Probably Zachariah. God, could you imagine? And... maybe Alastair, but I’m sure there are fics out there that I do not want to think about.

[kemetic-dreams]

Ibrahima & Abdoulaye Barry Written by Deborah BachAudio by Sara Lerner

How a new alphabet is helping an ancient people write its own future

When they were 10 and 14, brothers Abdoulaye and Ibrahima Barry set out to invent an alphabet for their native language, Fulfulde, which had been spoken by millions of people for centuries but never had its own writing system. While their friends were out playing in the neighborhood, Ibrahima, the older brother, and Abdoulaye would shut themselves in their room in the family’s house in Nzérékoré, Guinea, close their eyes and draw shapes on paper.

When one of them called stop they’d open their eyes, choose the shapes they liked and decide what sound of the language they matched best. Before long, they’d created a writing system that eventually became known as ADLaM.

The brothers couldn’t have known the challenges that lay ahead. They couldn’t have imagined the decades-long journey to bring their writing system into widespread use, one that would eventually lead them to Microsoft. They wouldn’t have dreamed that the script they invented would change lives and open the door to literacy for millions of people around the world.

They didn’t know any of that back in 1989. They were just two kids with a naïve sense of purpose.

“We just wanted people to be able to write correctly in their own language, but we didn’t know what that meant. We didn’t know how much work it would be,” said Abdoulaye Barry, now 39 and living in Portland, Oregon.

“If we knew everything we would have to go through, I don’t think we would have done it.”

ADLaM is an acronym that translates to 'the alphabet that will prevent a people from being lost.'

A new writing system takes shape

The Fulbhe, or Fulani, people were originally nomadic pastoralists who dispersed across West Africa, settling in countries stretching from Sudan to Senegal and along the coast of the Red Sea. More than 40 million people speak Fulfulde — some estimates put the number at between 50 and 60 million — in around 20 African countries. But the Fulbhe people never developed a script for their language, instead using Arabic and sometimes Latin characters to write in their native tongue, also known as Fulani, Pular and Fula. Many sounds in Fulfulde can’t be represented by either alphabet, so Fulfulde speakers improvised as they wrote, with varying results that often led to muddled communications.

The Barry brothers’ father, Isshaga Barry, who knew Arabic, would decipher letters for friends and family who brought them to the house. When he was busy or tired, young Abdoulaye and Ibrahima would help out.

“They were very hard to read, those letters,” Abdoulaye recalled. “People would use the most approximate Arabic sound to represent a sound that doesn’t exist in Arabic. You had to be somebody who knows how to read Arabic letters well and also knows the Fulfulde language to be able to decipher those letters.”

Abdoulaye asked his father why their people didn’t have their own writing system. Isshaga replied that the only alphabet they had was Arabic, and Abdoulaye promised to create one for Fulfulde.

“At a basic level, that’s how the whole idea of ADLaM started,” Abdoulaye said. “We saw that there was a need for something and we thought maybe we could fix it.”

The brothers developed an alphabet with 28 letters and 10 numerals written right to left, later adding six more letters for other African languages and borrowed words. They first taught it to their younger sister, then began teaching people at local markets, asking each student to teach at least three more people. They transcribed books and produced their own handwritten books and pamphlets in ADLaM, focusing on practical topics such as infant care and water filtration.

While attending university in Conakry, Guinea’s capital city, the brothers started a group called Winden Jangen — Fulfulde for “writing and reading” — and continued developing ADLaM. Abdoulaye left Guinea in 2003, moving to Portland with his wife and studying finance. Ibrahima stayed behind, completing a civil engineering degree, and continued working on ADLaM. He wrote more books and started a newspaper, translating news stories from the radio and television from French to Fulfulde. Isshaga, a shopkeeper, photocopied the newspapers and Ibrahima handed them out to Fulbhe people, who were so grateful they sometimes wept.

But not everyone was pleased by the brothers’ work. Some objected to their efforts to spread ADLaM, saying Fulbhe people should learn French, English or Arabic instead. In 2002, military officers raided a Winden Jangen meeting, arrested Ibrahima and imprisoned him for three months. He was not charged with anything or ever told why he was arrested, Abdoulaye said. Undeterred, Ibrahima moved to Portland in 2007 and continued writing books while studying civil engineering and mathematics.

ADLaM, meanwhile, was spreading beyond Guinea. A palm oil dealer, a woman the brothers’ mother knew, was teaching ADLaM to people in Senegal, Gambia and Sierra Leone. A man from Senegal told Ibrahima that after learning ADLaM, he felt so strongly about the need to share what he’d learned that he left his auto repair business behind and went to Nigeria and Ghana to teach others.

“He said, ‘This is changing people’s lives,’” said Ibrahima, now 43. “We realized this is something people want.”  

ADLaM comes online

The brothers also understood that to fully tap ADLaM’s potential, they needed to get it onto computers. They made inquiries about getting ADLaM encoded in Unicode, the global computing industry standard for text, but got no response. After working and saving for close to a year, the brothers had enough money to hire a Seattle company to create a keyboard and font for ADLaM. Since their script wasn’t supported by Unicode, they layered it on top of the Arabic alphabet. But without the encoding, any text they typed just came through as random groupings of Arabic letters unless the recipients had the font installed on their computers.

Following that setback, Ibrahima made a fateful decision. Wanting to refine the letters the Seattle font designer developed, which he wasn’t happy with, he enrolled in a calligraphy class at Portland Community College. The instructor, Rebecca Wild, asked students at the start of each course why they were taking her class. Some needed an art credit; others wanted to decorate cakes or become tattoo artists. The explanation from the quiet African man with the French accent stunned Wild.

“It was mind-blowing when I heard the story of why he was doing this,” said Wild, who lives in Port Townsend, Washington. “It’s so remarkable. I think they deserve a Nobel Peace Prize for what they’re doing. What a difference they’ve made on this planet, and they’re these two humble brothers.”

Wild was struck by Ibrahima’s focus and assiduousness in class. “He was always a star student,” she said. “He had this skill set and unending patience. He worked and worked and worked in class on the assignments, but at the same time, he was taking all this stuff he was learning in class back to ADLaM.”

Wild helped Ibrahima get a scholarship to a calligraphy conference at Reed College in Portland, where he met Randall Hasson, a calligraphy artist and painter. Hasson was seated at a table one afternoon, giving a lettering demonstration with another instructor, and Ibrahima came over. A book about African alphabets rested on the table. Ibrahima picked it up, commented that the scripts in the book weren’t the only African alphabets and offhandedly mentioned that he and his brother had invented an alphabet.

Hasson, who has extensively researched ancient alphabets, assumed Ibrahima meant that he and his brother had somehow modified an alphabet.

“I said, ‘You mean you adapted an alphabet?’” Hasson recalled. “I had to ask him three times to be sure he had actually invented one.”

After hearing Ibrahima’s story, Hasson suggested teaming up for a talk on ADLaM at a calligraphy conference in Colorado the following year. The audience sat rapt as Hasson told Ibrahima’s story, giving him a standing ovation as he walked to the stage. During a break earlier in the day, Ibrahima asked Hasson to come and meet a few people. They were four Fulbhe men who had driven almost 1,800 miles from New York just to hear Ibrahima’s talk, hoping it would finally help get ADLaM the connections they sought.

Hasson was so moved after speaking with them that he walked away, sat down in an empty stairwell and cried.

“At that moment,” he said, “I began to understand how important this talk was to these people.”

Ibrahima made connections at the conference that got him introduced to Michael Everson, one of the editors of the Unicode Standard. It was the break the brothers needed. With help from Everson, Ibrahima and Abdoulaye put together a proposal for ADLaM to be added to Unicode.

Andrew Glass is a senior program manager at Microsoft who works on font and keyboard technology and provides expertise to the Unicode Technical Committee. The ADLaM proposal and the Barry brothers’ pending visit to the Unicode Consortium generated much interest and excitement among Glass and other committee members, most of whom have linguistics backgrounds. Glass’s graduate studies focused on writing systems that are around 2,000 years old, and like other linguists he uses a methodological, technical approach to analyze and understand writing systems.

But here were two brothers with no training in linguistics, who developed an alphabet through a natural, organic approach — and when they were children, no less. New writing systems aren’t created very often, and the chance to actually talk with the inventors of one was rare.

“You come across things in these old writing systems and you wonder why it’s the way it is, and there’s nobody to ask,” Glass said. “This was a unique opportunity to say, ‘Why is it like this? Did they think about doing things differently? Why are the letters ordered this way?’ and things like that.”

Microsoft worked with designers to develop a font for Windows and Office called Ebrima that supports ADLaM and several other African writing systems.

It was during the Unicode process that ADLaM got its new name. The brothers originally called their alphabet Bindi Pular, meaning “Pular script,” but had always wanted a more meaningful name. Some people in Guinea who’d been teaching the script suggested ADLaM, an acronym using the first four letters of the script for a phrase that translates to “the alphabet that will prevent a people from being lost.” The Unicode Technical Committee approved ADLaM in 2014 and the alphabet was included in Unicode 9.0, released in June 2016. The brothers were elated.

“It was very exciting for us,” Abdoulaye said. “Once we got encoded, we thought, ‘This is it.’”

But they soon realized there were other, possibly even more challenging hurdles ahead. For ADLaM to be usable on computers, it had to be supported on desktop and mobile operating systems, and with fonts and keyboards. To make it broadly accessible, it also needed to be integrated on social networking sites.

The brothers’ script found a champion in Glass, who had developed Windows keyboards for several languages and worked on supporting various writing systems in Microsoft technology. Glass told others at Microsoft about ADLaM and helped connect the Barry brothers to the right people at the company. He developed keyboard layouts for ADLaM, initially as a project during Microsoft’s annual companywide employee hackathon.

Judy Safran-Aasen, a program manager for Microsoft’s Windows design group, also saw the importance of incorporating ADLaM into Microsoft products. Safran-Aasen wrote a business plan for adding ADLaM to Windows and pushed the work forward with various Microsoft teams.

“It was a shoestring collaboration of a few people who were really interested in seeing this happen,” she said. “It’s a powerful human interest story, and if you tell the story you can get people onboard.

“This is going to have an impact on literacy throughout that community and enable people to be part of the Windows ecosystem, where before that just wasn’t available to them,” Safran-Aasen said. “I’m really excited that we can make this happen.”

ADLaM creators Ibrahima and Abdoulaye Barry in Portland, Oregon.

Microsoft worked with two type designers in Maine, Mark Jamra and Neil Patel, to develop an ADLaM component for Windows and Office within Microsoft’s existing Ebrima font, which also supports other African writing systems. ADLaM support is included in the Windows 10 May 2019 update, allowing users to type and see ADLaM in Windows, including in Word and other Office apps.

Microsoft’s support for ADLaM, Abdoulaye said, “is going to be a huge jump for us.”

ADLaM is also supported by the Kigelia typeface system developed by Jamra and Patel, which includes eight African scripts and is being added to Office later this year. The designers wanted to create a type system for a region of the world lacking in typeface development, where they say existing fonts tend to be oversimplified and poorly researched. They consulted extensively with Ibrahima and Abdoulaye to refine ADLaM’s forms, painstakingly working to execute on the brothers’ vision within the boundaries of font technology.

“This was their life’s work that they started when they were kids,” Patel said. “To get it right is a big deal.”

And to many Africans, Jamra said, a script is more than just an alphabet. ”These writing systems are cultural icons,” he said. “It’s not like the Latin script. They really are symbols of ethnic identity for many of these communities.”

They’re also a means of preserving and advancing a culture. Without a writing system it’s difficult for people to record their history, to share perspective and knowledge across generations, even to engage in the basic communications that facilitate commerce and daily activities. There is greater interest in recent years in establishing writing systems for languages that didn’t have them, Glass said, to help ensure those languages remain relevant and don’t disappear. He pointed to the Osage script, created by an elder in 2006 to preserve and revitalize the language, as an example.

“There is a big push among language communities to develop writing systems,” Glass said. “And when they get them, they are such a powerful tool to put identity around that community, and also empower that community to learn and become educated.

“I think ADLaM has tremendous potential to change circumstances and improve people’s lives. That’s one of the things that’s really exciting about this.”

Keeping a culture alive

Ibrahima and Abdoulaye don’t know how many people around the world have learned ADLaM. It could be hundreds of thousands, maybe more. As many as 24 countries have been represented at ADLaM’s annual conference in Guinea, and there are ADLaM learning centers in Africa, Europe and the U.S. On a recent trip to Brussels, Ibrahima discovered that four learning centers had opened there and others have started in the Netherlands.

“I was really surprised. I couldn’t imagine that ADLaM has reached so many people outside of Africa,” he said.

Abdoulaye “Bobody” Barry (no relation to ADLaM’s creator) lives in Harlem, New York and is part of Winden Jangen, now a nonprofit organization based in New York City. He learned ADLaM a decade ago and has taught it to hundreds of people, first at mosques and then through messaging applications using an Android app. The script has enabled Fulbhe people, many of whom never learned to read and write in English or French, to connect around the world and has fostered a sense of sense of cultural pride, Barry said.

“This is part of our blood. It came from our culture,” he said. “This is not from the French people or the Arabic people. This is ours. This is our culture. That’s why people get so excited.”

Suwadu Jallow emigrated to the U.S. from Gambia in 2012 and took an ADLaM class the Barry brothers taught at Portland Community College. ADLaM is easy for Fulfulde speakers to learn, she said, and will help sustain the language, particularly among the African diaspora.  

“Now I can teach this language to someone and have the sense of my tribe being here for years and years to come without the language dying off,” said Jallow, who lives in Seattle. “Having this writing system, you can teach kids how to speak (Fulfulde) just like you teach them to speak English. It will help preserve the language and let people be creative and innovative.”

Jallow is pursuing a master’s in accounting at the University of Washington and hopes to develop an inventory-tracking system in ADLaM after she graduates. She got the idea after helping out in her mother’s baby clothing shop in Gambia as a child and seeing that her mother, who understood little English and Arabic, could not properly record and track expenses. ADLaM, she said, can empower people like her mother who are fluent in Fulfulde and just need a way to write it.  

“It’s going to increase literacy,” she said. “I believe knowledge is power, and if you’re able to read and write, that’s a very powerful tool to have. You can do a lot of things that you weren’t able to do.”

The Fulbhe people in Guinea historically produced a considerable volume of books and manuscripts, Abdoulaye Barry said, using Arabic to write in their language. Most households traditionally had a handwritten personal book detailing the family’s ancestry and the history of the Fulbhe people. But the books weren’t shared outside the home, and Fulbhe people largely stopped writing during French colonization, when the government mandated teaching in French and the use of Arabic was limited primarily to learning the Koran.

“Everything else was basically discounted and no longer had the value that it had before the French came,” Abdoulaye said.

Having ADLaM on phones and computers creates infinite possibilities — Fulbhe people around the world will be able to text each other, surf the internet, produce written materials in their own language. But even before ADLaM’s entry into the digital world, Fulfulde speakers in numerous countries have been using the script to write books. Ibrahima mentions a man in Guinea who never went to school and has written more than 30 books in ADLaM, and a high school girl, also in Guinea, who wrote a book about geography and another about how to succeed on exams. The president of Winden Jangen, Abdoulaye Barry (also no relation to Ibrahima’s brother), said many older Fulbhe people who weren’t formally educated are now writing about Fulbhe history and traditions.

“Now, everybody can read that and understand the culture,” he said. “The only way to keep a culture alive is if you read and write in your own language.”

‘The kids are the future’

Though ADLaM has spread over several continents, Ibrahima and Abdoulaye aren’t slowing down their work. Both spend much of their spare time promoting the script, traveling to conferences and continuing to write. Ibrahima, who sleeps a maximum of four hours a night, recently finished the first book of ADLaM grammar and hopes to build a learning academy in Guinea.

On a chilly recent day in Abdoulaye’s home in Portland, the brothers offer tea and patiently answer questions about ADLaM. They are unfailingly gracious, gamely agreeing to drive to a scenic spot on the Willamette River for photos after a long day of talking. They’re also quick to deflect praise for what they have accomplished. Ibrahima, who sometimes wakes up to hundreds of email and text messages from grateful ADLaM learners, said simply that he’s “very happy” with how the script has progressed. For his brother, the response to ADLaM can be overwhelming.

Having this writing system, you can teach kids how to speak Fulani just like you teach them to speak English. It will help preserve the language and let people be creative and innovative.

“It’s very emotional sometimes,” Abdoulaye said. “I feel like people are grateful beyond what we deserve.”

The brothers want ADLaM to be a tool for combating illiteracy, one as lasting and important to their people as the world’s most well-known alphabets are to cultures that use them. They have a particular goal of ADLaM being used to educate African women, who they said are more impacted by illiteracy than men and are typically the parent who teaches children to read.

“If we educate women we can help a lot of people in the community, because they are the foundation of our community,” Abdoulaye said. “I think ADLaM is the best way to educate people because they don’t need to learn a whole new language that’s only used at school. If we switched to this, it would make education a lot easier.”

That hasn’t happened yet, but ADLaM has fostered a grassroots learning movement fueled largely through social media. There are several ADLaM pages on Facebook, and groups with hundreds of members are learning together on messaging apps. Abdoulaye said he and Ibrahima used to hear mostly about adults learning ADLaM, but increasingly it’s now children. Those children will grow up with ADLaM, using the script Abdoulaye and Ibrahima invented all those years ago in their bedroom.

“That makes us believe ADLaM is going to live,” Abdoulaye said. “It’s now settled into the community because it’s in the kids, and the kids are the future.”

Originally published on 7/29/2019 / Photos by Brian Smale / © Microsoft 

[leclercnews]

AUTO MOTOR SPORT INTERVIEW WITH CHARLES LECLERC: "DOING EVERYTHING TO CHANGE HIERARCHY AT FERRARI!"

Charles Leclerc, a Ferrari driver. How does that sound? Leclerc: "I like it. A dream has come true and I live it like I did in the first day." How big was the step from Sauber to Ferrari? Leclerc: "Not as big as from Formula 2 to Formula 1. But at Ferrari there are a lot more people, so a lot more resources.  Everything goes much faster. If you want to have something changed in the car, you get it done in a much shorter time. But you spend more time talking or working with the people in the team. When you are at the track and sit in the briefing, a lot of people at home in Maranello listen and want to talk to you, so that they can develop the car further." Is it sometimes too much information? Leclerc: "Not really. You just have to get used to it. Then you don't spend more time with it. It takes time until you know everyone and can separate important from less important. The depth and amount of analysis that takes place in the background is simply incredible. They try to understand everything, no matter in which area. The team helps me to set priorities. With more experience it will come by itself." Are they asking you more questions? Leclerc: "More detailed questions." Can the experience make you even faster, or is this determined solely by your talent? Leclerc: "To be fast, you need the talent first. But then work and experience determine your speed. Experience doesn't directly make you faster, but it opens your eyes to what you have to do to become faster. I'm still in the learning process in using the tools that make the car faster. Differential settings and things like that. At the highest level, little things make all the difference." Why does the Ferrari show such differences in performance? Leclerc: "We understood the problem in Australia. We made a mistake with the setup and just didn't put the car in the right window. The car was badly balanced. In Bahrain the balance was right, in China it was a bit less. We lost everywhere on Mercedes, but not much.  Baku was good again, we were better in qualifying than in the race. It's going in the right direction." Which is harder to understand:  The new car or the tyres? Leclerc: "You can't separate one from the other. That goes hand in hand. We have to understand the whole package." In the first three races the Ferrari was extremely strong on the straights and weak in the slow corners. Why? Leclerc: "That's something we need to understand. But I think we'll be strong everywhere if we just put the car in the right window. The upgrades we used in Baku has brought us one step closer to our target." Sebastian Vettel and you have different driving styles. How do you like your car best? Leclerc: "I can live with a little more oversteer. But generally these cars have a tendency to understeer. When I entered Formula 1 I was shocked at how much understeer you had on these cars. You could never drive them with the balance I preferred in Formula 2. Impossible. That's why last year it took me until the fourth race in Baku to understand that. Because the walls are so close on the city circuit, Sauber gave me a car that is stable in the rear.  That's when I realized that I had to adapt. That brought the change." Why does a Formula 1 car have to understeer? Does it have too much power? Leclerc: "I don't think the engine power makes the difference. It's the downforce. These cars have so much more downforce than in Formula 2, so that you also lose more downforce when you lose the car. That makes it difficult to capture the car. As a driver, you quickly lose confidence." Don't different driving styles make it difficult to develop the car? Leclerc: "No. We just demand a different balance from the car. It's a question of setup. We both still feel the same general problems of the car. That's why the development of the car doesn't suffer with our different driving styles." Three team orders in three races. Is the policy in the team clearly defined? Leclerc: "I don't think anything has changed. I have to show what I can do on the race track and then hopefully the situation will change at some point. Like every driver here, I want to be the fastest. So far I have understood every decision, even if it is sometimes difficult for a driver to accept it. I have a 4-time world champion next to me who is driving for Ferrari in his fifth year. I understand that there is a hierarchy at the moment, but I will do everything I can to change that." Wouldn't it be better to say: okay, the faster one can overtake, but if he can't drive away, he has to return to the original position? Leclerc: "I don't know. I haven't thought about that yet. The guys at the pit wall have a better overview of the race. That's why up to a certain point I'll do what is being asked of me." Last year you didn't have a chance to win in Sauber, now you do in Ferrari. Are you going for victories or do you always have the title in mind? Leclerc: "Both. If I see the chance to win, then I'll try to use it. Victory is what it's all about. But you have to be smart enough to get the maximum points if you can't win. It's a great art to get the maximum out of the hardest moments." How difficult was it for you not to win 2018? Leclerc: "At first I thought it would be hard.  But you quickly set yourself new goals.  You simply seek for the maximum possible result. And that's your personal victory." Do the young drivers like you, Norris, Russell or Albon already race in the same world as Vettel and Hamilton? Leclerc: "I have a hard time comparing ourselves to Lewis or Seb. We are another generation. I didn't drive against them as much as I did against the other colleagues you just mentioned. We grew up together and pushed each other forward."

How much has your life changed at Ferrari? Leclerc: "A little bit. Especially after the first podium. Formula 1 is a weird sport. As long as you don't stand on the podium, people don't know your face. They usually only see us with a helmet. Since Bahrain they can associate my name with a face.  Nevertheless, I am not completely surrounded by fans yet. When I'm in Monaco, I stay at home in my simulator most of the time."

Since the Bahrain GP you are a superstar.  Are you prepared for this role? Leclerc: "I don't see myself as a superstar. And when it comes to that, you can't be prepared. I don't know what to expect. It's nice when people see me like this already. If not, I will give everything on the track to be one someday." You swallowed the lost victory in Bahrain almost emotionless.  What really went on in your mind? Leclerc: "Just as calm. I know such things happen in motorsport. Sometimes a technical problem costs you victory, sometimes your own mistake. I get much more annoyed when I make the mistake. Just like in Baku. That was just stupid. I threw a possible pole position in the bin. That also cost me a chance to win on Sunday. The car had the potential to win. It was my fault that it didn't work." Interview done by: Auto Motor und Sport, Michael Schmidt (auto-motor-und-sport.de) - Link English Translation done by: @LeclercNews Please take out with full credits!

[meggannn]

the itsv commentary is so full of great facts and bts info so i wanted to write down all my favorite parts, but i just ended up writing down anything that was interesting, which was honestly most of it. four thousand words later i ended up with their commentary on practically half the movie. i’ve put the interesting or funny bits that i jotted down behind a cut if anyone is interested.

this commentary audio had Phil Lord (co-writer, producer), Chris Miller (producer), Bob Persichetti (co-director), Peter Ramsay (co-director), Rodney Rothman (co-director, co-writer), but it was kind of difficult to tell who was talking most of the time, so i didn’t include names on who said what, unless I knew for certain who was talking.

The first Miles sticker in the film is a “glitch” flashing on the Sony Pictures Animation logo. “Already putting his stamp on the movie.”

RIPeter is meant to be an amalgamation of all the Spider-Man we know, “good and bad” (as the dance happens, someone corrects him:) “Good and GREAT.”

(“I’ve got an excellent theme song, and a... so-so popsicle.”)

“That joke saved the movie.” “The dance move or the popsicle?” “The dance move. I resisted that dance joke and Rodney pushed hard for it (…) It told the audience what movie they were watching.”

“It was Rodney who was really pushing for him to be in this relatable idea of [Miles] not knowing the lyrics to this song but singing along.” “We started animating before the song was finished. It was really easy to not know the words then.”

“There are three very long shots that introduce Miles.” (The shot at home, the shot of him walking past Brooklyn Middle, the shot of him entering Visions.) “That was a deliberate choice, to open with a big crazy Spider-Man montage, and then with Miles, start a different pace, long shots, and just watch him and how he is, and don’t get too fancy with it. Although ironically these shots are really fancy.” The shot of him walking past Brooklyn Middle and the one of him walking into Visions are meant to directly contradict each other: his comfort zone vs him out of place in new surroundings. (Megan’s note: My take is that with these shots they might have been trying to represent his home, his past, and his future.)

“Everything [in this scene from color to sound] is meant to go from a very heightened experience with Peter to a very naturalistic experience with Miles.”

For the scene in the car, Shameik and Brian sat in chairs to set up in a car, with microphones and a rearview mirror. “Brian might have even been a little annoyed at Shameik a couple of times, and I think you can feel it in here, in a really wonderful way.”

(Talking about the chromatic aberration) “Sometimes it looks like you’re watching a 3D movie without the glasses on.” “That was on purpose.” “Every frame is supposed to feel like a piece of printed art.”

“On the cover of Great Expectations, there’s an image of Magwitch grabbing Pip’s shoulder in a cemetery.” “Foreshadowing!”

A side character named “Smiley Kid” is in several shots of miscellaneous Visions students. “Because he’s not a real person, I think we can say he is our least favorite person.” “I think he comes around. He’s great, then he’s bad, then he’s great again.” “He’s like the extra in every live action who worms his way to the front of every shot.” “He just almost always looks in the camera.”

Miles’s expression when the teacher calls him out at trying to fail was “completely ripped off of President Barack Obama.”

Benson Avenue was meant to call back to where one of their fathers grew up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.

(“Hypnotize” by Notorious BIG playing on Aaron’s stereo) “Biggie Smalls in an animated Spider-Man movie. In what universe?” “This is the ideal timeline that we’re living in.”

(This comment is said as Miles presses his face on the glass:) “That changed people’s perceptions of the movie. When we had this in, it really lit people up.” (To be honest, I can’t tell if this comment was made in response to Biggie Smalls, or to Miles pressing his face on the glass.)

They all loved Mahershala Ali. “The shoulder touch would work if your voice sounded like Mahershala’s.” Everyone was in awe every time they recorded with him. “He makes you want to be a better person when you’re around him.” “He’s got a high bar.” “Then he goes away and it kinda wears off.”

The subway Aaron brings Miles to was a place he and Jeff used to paint in when they were young, which adds another layer to him talking about/missing Jeff when he mentions it to Miles. The age difference probably means Aaron was younger than Jeff, and now he’s the older one with Miles here.

There’s a bigger history between Jeff and Aaron that’s only hinted at, and part of it is the reason why Miles has his mother’s last name, not his father’s. It’s implied Jeff was worried his bad history would follow Miles if he took his last name. Also because “then he would be named Miles Davis.”

They were excited to depict a spider-man experiencing spider-sense for the first time.

“We did the most expensive thing. In all choices.”

“People ask, How does Miles with a cop and nurse parents afford Jordans? And the answer is, they were a gift from his uncle.”

(On Kingpin’s animation possibilities.) “We always had this idea that he was the living expression of a black hole. The right for him is this floating head on a body that we could scale up and down depending on the shot with hands at the end of arms.” “While creating a black hole, he is a black hole.”

Someone felt very passionate about including the dimensional map showing the other universes the collider was connecting with. “It felt so important to me.”

(Paraphrasing this one) “Once Phil and Lord gave the MO to push convention, the gauntlet had been thrown, we started getting crazy stuff back. And a lot of the time our art direction would just be like, ‘Yeah! COOL!' ‘Do more of that!’”

(Peter rolls his eyes as the Prowler menacingly steps forward) “I like that [RIPeter] is exhausted at the idea of being killed.”

“The Prowler chase sequence was the first sequence that went through the whole pipeline.” (This and the cemetery scene were the first.)

(The burst card of Miles jumping over the subway tracks) Bob Persichetti: “I had such high hopes to do a lot of burst cards, I think that’s the only one I actually did.”

(as Rio comforts Miles in Spanish) “We never translated on screen (…) The idea being, this is the fabric of Miles’s life.” “This was inspired obviously by Brian Michael Bendis” (co-creator of Miles Morales and his longtime writer) “and Miles’ bicultural background. But also Phil Lord grew up in a bilingual house.” “And I took Spanish in high school.”

(Stan Lee cameo) “[Stan is] the only performer in the movie who we went to. Everyone else came into recording studios, but Stan Lee, we dispatched the microphone to him.” “Everybody wanted to animate Stan.” “If you hit pause any time a train goes by, because everyone wanted to animate Stan, he’s in almost every single train.” “He’s an extra in a lot.”

(Miles reading comics before jumping off the building) “If you notice in that comic book, it’s True Life Tales of Spider-Man, and to keep his cover, his name is not Peter Parker. In the comic book, his name is Billy Barker.” “Great.” “Who could ever figure that out, right?”

A bunch of drawings around the grave of Peter Parker’s tombstone were all done by different kids of people on the show.

They mention the cemetery scenes was one of the first ones finalized. When they were still trying to figure out how to bring Miles to life, “you can see that his performance evolved from this [cemetery] scene.” “It’s super expressive.”

There was lots of debate on how much paunch should be on Peter B’s stomach. There are something like 3-5 different body models used throughout the movie.

They all loved the scenes of Peter B in his apartment: the cut to him crying in the shower, to pinned to the bed with his butt out, to his pose on the futon flipping through channels. Someone really liked “[his] little quivering [spidey] eyes on the seahorse shot.”

The comic book page-flipping device was a “late breaking” realization of how to transition between flashbacks and present day.

Chris Miller did the voice of the cop dispatcher on the radio saying the “Child dressed like Spider-Man dragging a homeless corpse behind a train” line. “The role I was born to play.”

In the walk-and-talk scene in the alley, they felt inspired to take a lot of crazy shots. “We were passionate that a Spider-Man movie needed to be shot from their point of view, where every surface can be the ground.”

“Because of questions on the internet, we took of one of Miles’s shoes. Just in case anybody wanted to know why he was sticking.” “Another thing that I was passionate about but nobody cared about but me.”

“One of the big tricks of this sequence and of this relationship was to let you believe that Peter was a good guy even though he was being a real… turkey… to Miles.” (Peter saying “No, does it look like it’s working? No! No, it’s not…”) “This was one of the few moments that we added kind of late just to know that he was a sweet pea underneath it all.” “Finding the right level for his not caring about Miles, and then learning to care about Miles, finding the right level from the beginning all the way through to the end, was something that took a lot of nuance.”

The interrogation/alley and burger scenes probably went through the most amount of reworks and rewriting than any others, because there was so much exposition and “you got tired” watching two heavy information scenes in a row. And given how often they said “this scene went through so many iterations” in this commentary, these two scenes must have been a LOT of rewrites. (Some of the alternate burger scenes can be seen in the film’s trailers and alternate universe cut.)

“I still kind of miss the unfinished version of this shot, where his feet… He had no toes for a really long time for some reason.” “You had to say like fifty times, ‘We’re gonna add toes right?’” “‘We’re gonna get his toes on there, right?’”

“One of the things about Kingpin is that he just magically appears outside of the car. Because there’s no way he could get actually get through the doorway.” “Maybe in the future where you guys are watching this ten years from now, someone will have figured out how to animate that. But in 2018 it’s still impossible.”

(Miles finding Peter in the vents) “These moments were really when you started to feel the relationship between the two of them develop.” “I love that Miles has to fight to occupy the same space and become an equal to Peter.”

(Peter mockingly blah-blahing as Doc Ock explains the danger of the collider, then saying afterward “Oh nevermind, that is bad.”) “For the sake of a laugh, we undercut the stakes, and then immediately had to buy the stakes back.”

“We went through probably 70 different version of what Miles would look like while invisible … and I like how how he comes in and out of invisibility was stylized to some degree.”

They say the Doc Ock/Peter scene was “really really bad at one point” and now it’s “one of the most wonderful surprises.”

Ock’s computer is based off of Phil Lord’s actual desktop. Some files are cut off the edges of the screen because they just dragged things off of the internet.

(Peter glitching in the chair) “I’m remembering all of the conversations that determined that it was funniest if you left Peter’s head unglitched.”

It was Justin Thompson’s idea to use soft robotics for this version of Dock Ock’s tentacles.

Everyone, from animation to the sound team, saw Doc Ock’s tentacles about 3 months before completion, went (exasperated) “Oh THAT’S what they look like? We’ll have to redo X Y Z whole thing…”

You can tell they loved the monitor joke. “Very silly things happening around very cool things.”

The Bagel! text was added last minute. “That was a joke pitch by Justin that was taken seriously.”

“Everyone felt empowered to pitch crazy ideas, and that’s why it felt so rich and deep.”

“It’s no understatement to say that this look in the forest is one of the hardest things in a movie like this. To make something look realistic is something we know how to do pretty well. But to make it look graphic and illustrative is almost impossible.” “Especially when you’re close and far to trees within the same shot at times.” “We had so many conversations with Danny, our V Effects supervisor, like, ‘But, you guys, we’re going to be in a forest, you really don’t want the leaves to rustle in the wind?' ‘No, we’ll be okay!’” (Later, when Peter and Miles swing off together, the leaves rustle:) “See, the leaves can move, guys!” “We just CHOSE for them not to.” “It was an absolute creative choice.”

“This is another moment in the story when we really open this beat up to let Peter and Miles have a victory together and cement their bond, that you really were rooting for their relationship. We breezed through this quickly and you didn’t have the same connection with the two of them.” “One of the things in the screenplay that we discovered really late is that you needed to have a lot of smaller, positive accomplishments throughout the center of the movie to have it work right.” “(…) This middle section of the movie is about Peter and Miles learning to fall for each other, basically.”

(During Gwen’s intro) “We give just enough to hopefully tease you guys into being really into each one of these characters’ origin story.”

“One week of days and nights just passed in that one shot.” “She hit a time anomaly on her way to this dimension.”

“She vibes with Miles after he had been bitten by the spider, and she purposefully bumped into him there, in case you didn’t catch that.”

“We were trying to make Ock such an intelligent and socially awkward person that then turns into this really formidable equal to Kingpin.”

(When Peter thwips May’s doorbell and then exhales with his hands on his hips.) “One of my favorite poses in the movie.” “That pose gets a laugh all by itself.”

“‘You look tired’ is a thing my mom says to me every time I see her.” “It’s accurate.”

“I fought hard to have (May) kick that door open.” “I tried to cut that and then you uncut it, correctly.” “Let’s be honest, she’s not treating her house very well.”

(In the Spidey Lair) “Lots of Easter eggs here.” “We should’ve put an actual Easter egg in this shot.”

They debated for a long time putting the B-team spiders in the picture at all, knowing it would be more work, wanting to make their characters worth being in the picture without taking away from Miles. “Nothing worked in the movie until it had something to do with Miles and his story.”

(On the spider team testing Miles:) This angle was “late-breaking, on the backside”: “This made it feel like they all cared about Miles, even though they maybe didn’t believe in him.” “Just Peter going ‘Cool it.’ For the longest time we didn’t have something like that.”

(Pretty sure this is Peter Ramsay) “When you’re making a movie it’s like you’re building an emotion machine. You’ve gotta have all the parts calibrated the right way, make sure it’s properly oiled, cause if it isn’t, the gears are gonna stick, and you’re not gonna feel right.”

The Prowler Sound™ is not a jaguar or cat, but an elephant. “We only did the dark scenes first cause they were easier to light.” (Some of those scenes they mention are Miles running from the Prowler, the cemetery scene, Miles writing the note in Aaron’s apartment.)

They tried about a million songs for Peni while she makes a new goober. (The song used is not in the soundtrack, but it’s “Want It Here” by Xenia Pax.)

(On Peni’s Heelies) “This shot’s not long enough to get her from the kitchen to the couch.” “Is that why?!” “That’s one hundred percent why. Just put those little wheelies on here!”

In the first draft, there was an idea there RIPeter was a grad student under tutelage of male Doc Ock so that’s how Liv and Ock knew each other.

“The table pushing into Miles. That was something my older brother, when we would fight when we were kids, he would do that to me.”

(When Aaron closes his eyes, refusing to kill Miles:) “That little look. ‘Cause he knows what’s coming.”

(They’re all quiet as Miles carries Aaron to safety, caught up in the scene.) “We’re all kind of gripped.” “We’re supposed to be giving interesting anecdotes here, guys, come on.” “It was so cold that day…”

Prowler’s death was the first session they did with Mahershala. “He’s a method actor, and his death scene, it was like he was really dying.”

“We gave animators the freedom. You can make Miles unattractive. He can ugly cry, because this is raw and it feels so emotional.”

(When Miles throws his sketchbook out the window, only for it to immediately come flying back in:) “It’s a one-shot transition from deep emotion and regret and pain. We said, ‘He’s gonna throw the one thing out that really represents his uncle, yet it’s gonna come flying back in.’ It was hard to make that shot work.” “It’s a great story statement that you can’t lose the things that make up your past.”

When everyone is talking about someone they’ve lost, an alternate line has Ham saying “I lost my uncle. He was electrocuted, and it smelled so good.” It got a lot of laughs, but the team says that from then on, the audience “resisted” Ham because he killed the mood, and it was hard for people to see him as anything other than a goofy cartoon, so they changed the line to “Miles, the hardest part about this job is you can’t always save everyone.” (Megan’s note: I think they probably didn’t bother to re-animate the others’ facial reactions after changing Ham’s line, because judging by the reactions from Peter and Miles in this shot it feels like Ham just said something annoying/out of place lol.)

When Peter says “It wasn’t their decision” (for Miles to stay behind), Miles has a very quick reaction shot where he turns away, bites his lip, and shakes his head. Someone mentions it’s one of their favorite shots of Miles.

(On the scene with Miles and his dad at the door) “When Brian Tyree Henry saw this scene [with a rough performance, just animation], he got the movie. It made such an impression on him. He was very happy to come in and pick any lines up for us and just keep working.” “We were working on the shots on layup for this. The idea of having them be on thirds to start, then coming closer, and finally ending with the final split-screen shot at the end.” “And Jefferson crosses the scene, which I think is really interesting. They start off on opposite sides of the screen. He makes the first move.” “It’s amazing to me to see Miles transformed by his father.” “It feels earned.”

“In an earlier version of that scene, Aunt May gave him a version of that speech, which was nice, but it needed to be Dad.”

(Later on, someone mentions:) “Tom was the first one to say ‘It shouldn’t be Aunt May at the door, it should be Dad.’ And we all sort of slapped our foreheads going ‘That’s absolutely right.’”

“After our premiere, my 9yo son [Luca? Luka?] asked me this. ‘So Papa, you know Miles spray-paints one of those suits and it becomes his suit. Super cool, Papa, but it shouldn’t fit him. It’s way bigger.’” (Laughter) “Did he have to wait a few hours for it to dry?” "We cut out the sequence where Aunt May sewed it tighter and altered it.” “And they had the hair-dryer express drying it. ‘Your friends are in danger.’ ‘Well just let me let it dry first!” “I tell you, spray paint, five minutes and you’re dry.” “She pre-altered it. She knew he was coming. She said, ‘It took you long enough.’ It all happened in advance.”

“The scene of Miles falling and everything slowing down and I always appreciated that Phil called out he was ‘falling and rising’ and the same time.” “It made the movie. A rare thing that goes from the stage directions all the way through production and onto the screen.”

“This sequence used to end with him getting hit by a truck. But really felt like it was time for Miles to get a big victory.” (Megan’s note: This scene is shown in draft stage in the alternate universe cut. Miles makes his leap, free-runs over some trucks and buildings, and his scene is interrupted when he gets hit by a truck and crashes to the ground. There’s a moment where he collects himself, the pushes himself to his feet and runs off into the city to join the others at the collider. I interpret this idea to be their showing how Miles fully embraces the “Get back up” lesson, since Miles’s pose in the sketches imitates the same one in the basement when the spiders are hazing him and he’s on the ground.) “And now people applaud.” “There’s a general attitude with this movie that was like, ‘How can we do things differently?’ That was a case of when we were like, ‘What if we didn’t have the audience feel really good in this moment?” (Laughter) “What if we had them feel really bad? Right at the moment they want to feel good, what if we made them feel terrible?” (Joking) “Let’s poke THEM in the eye.” “I think in early drafts, we just were like, Miles is losing and falling short the whole movie until the very end. And when we put that up, we realized that you needed to see him slowly winning and winning and winning until he won even bigger at the end.”

A set-up that never fully made it in the movie is that Fisk runs charities for Spider-Man and that’s why the dinner was set up like it was.

The bread scene was on the chopping block for a long time. “By adding this interaction, and making it about Peter and MJ and something real, all of a sudden this scene was worth it.” “It’s necessary to know what Peter’s giving up by sacrificing himself.” “It lasts just long enough because we learned that if you stay way from Miles too long--” (They interrupt here to point out two cameo people at dinner, “Danny and Josh,” who I couldn’t get a cap of) “--We lose our connection to the movie in a way. But at this point we care enough about Peter to want him to get back to MJ too.”

“The servers that were holding the movie were moving slow by the end of this shoot. And we had the best computers.” “At a certain point I think we overloaded Imageworks’ server. There was a moment they were afraid the movie was going to break their machine.” “Which was our whole idea. Our whole approach was, how do we break these pipes that make the movie?”

(During the final collider fight sequence, but they don’t specify what idea this was about specifically:) Chris Miller: “One of the only times I can ever remember saying ‘Okay you’ve gone too far.’ There was one brand where I was like, ‘I don’t get this.’ A few of the drawings that were somehow even more insane than this.” “What you’re saying, Chris, is that there’s a version of this scene that’s even crazier than this?” “Literally the only time I can remember going, ‘Okay guys, you’ve done it. You’ve broken it.’”

“I’m sure there’s are filmmakers watching this, so I think this is a learnable lesson from this sequence. Which is if you want to put something super crazy in your movie, wait until the very end when a lot of movie has been spent on your movie and your release date is 3 to 4 months away and they literally cannot stop you or else they have no movie.”

One of them points out Miles webs a turntable to propel himself upward. (Megan’s note: Miles also does this just as his own theme starts playing, which starts off with a record-scratch. I thought that was cool.)

(The moment when Gwen calls Miles “Spider-Man”:) “That choice went through a lot of iterations like “What’s the end of their relationship?” That she calls him Spider-Man instead of giving him a kiss on the cheek? It makes me well up just thinking about it.”

Kingpin breaks the glass of a building and the pieces fly toward Miles. Bob Persichetti calls these “Dorito chips.”

After the train enters a collider steam, there are versions of the interior of the train that flash from all five dimensions. There’s a futuristic Peni version, an old-timey Noir version, there’s a Gwen version… “As it passes through the beam, you get to see five versions of the train existing at once.”

(Vanessa and Richard seeing Kingpin) “This idea of repeating mistakes (for Kingpin). No matter what, he was gong to keep repeating these mistakes.” “He’s still who he is.”

“It was my dream to have Kingpin headbutt Miles and it finally came true.”

Each one of these character is in a black costume, and black surrounds them, and yet you can still see what’s happening.

“I remember people wanting to cut the shoulder-touch at the end.” “Who wanted to cut this?!” (Overlapping chatter) “No names in the screen.” “I remember feeling, oh my god. You’re LUCKY you got the shoulder touch in.” “The fact that you could pay off a set up that wasn’t even a set up…”

(On Miles seeing inside the universe as the collider explodes) “And then this. How long can it be? Let’s make it way too long!”

“The Anvil (that clanks at the end) was in Ham’s pocket?” “In the hammer space.”

(Miles hugs Jefferson) “This was the moment everybody went ‘Oh, YES.’ No matter what, we have to get to the hug, and the disguised voice, and the ‘I love you.’”

Someone describes the ending soundtrack as “Miles’ playlist meets Aaron’s playlist meets a superhero movie.”

They indirectly confirm Peter B and MJ do get back together. “Peter B gets his happy ending.” Another bit someone mentions was a late addition.

“I like that the movie starts and ends with Miles in his bedroom by himself.”

“We could do a whole other commentary saying completely different things.” “Probably four.” “We should do an alternate universe commentary.”

“You’re your own champion, I think that’s the idea. This is a story of empowerment. A champion is not coming from outside of you to come and save you. It’s your job.”

(As the credits roll) “Every name you see right now, we’ve seen them cry.” “We’ve made them cry.” “Every name you see right now has yelled at us.”

(On the post-credits scene) “We thought of this (post-credits scene) two months ago.” (They recorded this commentary in Dec 2018.) “We wanted to get Miguel in there and show the opportunities of where the multiverse could go.”

“I looked this up. This IS the most expensive dumb joke of all time.”

“We didn’t finish cleaning the cell on that close-up of Spider-Man.”

[dbhilluminate]

DBH: Illuminate- Gamble (pt. 2)

Characters: Hank, Connor, Kate, Sarah, Sumo (mentions of Nicodemus, Fowler, Michael Webb, Joss Douglas) Word Count: 4,747

Kate sends a clear message to Nicodemus, and sets Connor and Hank on the path to find him.

( Chapter Art by @theravenmother )

Previous Chapter

Chapter Index

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November 12, 2038- 9PM

Kate stood in the kitchen with her arms crossed and stared at the window Connor had broken a week ago when he’d spotted Hank blackout drunk on his kitchen floor and tilted her head at the complete lack of forethought (from either of them) that had gone into that situation as a whole. It was almost comical. After Connor had broken the glass, before even checking to see if it was open, Hank hadn't even bothered to get it replaced. Instead, he’d haphazardly slapped a garbage bag over the window with some duct tape -in the middle of November- as if that was going to function as passable insulation. Kate shivered as her body shook from the back of her neck, down her spine, and into her arms and fingertips. It was sixty degrees in the house, but it wasn’t the cause for her involuntary spasms. It had been such a stressful night. Between Connor’s revelation about the people she trusted siding with her abuser, Hank and having to convince him that she shouldn’t be arrested, her nerves had finally fried around the time she’d re-lived her trauma to confide in Connor about Nicodemus and what he had done to her. And now she had to spend the next twelve hours alone in a stranger’s home, trying to decompress, without any of her gadgets or tools to keep her occupied. God how she wished she had the ability to sleep through the next twelve hours, but then again she was so wound up she wouldn’t be able to even if she tried. She glanced around the kitchen (which looked like it had never been fully unpacked) and set her jaw, then moved into the living room and traced her fingertips over the vinyl albums on the shelf next to the decorative wall dividing the two rooms. A few old-school metal bands like Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden, she recognized as she flipped through the records, but she was surprised to also find a variety of jazz and a couple of obscure garage punk bands from before 2020. “Didn’t peg him for a jazz guy…” she chuckled quietly as she pulled out one of the records and placed it carefully on the plateau, moved the brass arm and touched the needle of the reproducer down into the outermost grooves. The sound of mellow percussion, plucky guitar, low trumpet, and bass vibrato filled the room, smooth and silky. One hand twisted the dial on the volume until it was more of a background noise so she could enjoy the music without waking the sleeping men, just in time for reporter Michael Webb to cut to their anchor in the field, standing outside of the abandoned warehouse Connor and Hank had raided earlier.

… Thanks, Mike- I’m here at the decommissioned General Motors assembly plant where seven hours ago, Detroit Police discovered something profoundly disturbing. After an exchange of gunfire between Detroit Detectives and the Android suspects, police led a chase through the facility and uncovered several dozen stolen firearms that had been reported missing three weeks ago from the Detroit Light Guard Armory. One officer was injured and treated for a gunshot wound, but thankfully, no one was killed. While it is a win for DCPD that most of the missing firearms have been recovered, at least twenty have not yet been found, leading Police to believe that the Androids that remain at large are armed and dangerous. Of course, this begs the question on everyone’s minds- who are these Androids, and just how did they get their hands on military property? Are they affiliates of the Cyber Activist known as Illuminate? And could they be preparing for an eventual violent confrontation with humanity if we cannot reach common ground? Reporting live for Channel 16 News, I’m Joss Douglass...

No one was killed… Kate bristled and her lip curled as once again, they failed to mention the android lives lost to the confrontation, then jumped straight to blaming her for something they should have known better than to accuse her of. But this was inflammatory reporting at its finest- present facts alongside conjecture to lead the viewership to what would seem like a logical conclusion to anyone who didn’t have all the facts. Kate had dealt with these kinds of incidents before and she was always quick to give a speech to quell the unrest before it spread too far out of control, but tonight it would be more difficult than usual.

On a desk by the front window, Hank’s laptop sat open in hibernation. Even though her broadcasts were always live, she could pre-record her message right there in his living room and send it through her virtual private network to Axl and Reese to get the message out. It wouldn’t be hard to do at all. If she could just find a lighter to mimic candlelight and a chair to prop the computer up on, she could sit on the floor in the corner behind the front door away from other inconsistent light sources. The problem was masking the source of the recording in the metadata. A VPN wouldn’t be able to hide the embedded source data of the file linking it back to Hank’s personal laptop if the cops got hold of it, and she couldn’t in good conscience put him in that position after the courtesy he’d shown her that evening.

Kate pulled out the chair and sat down, placed her hand on the metal housing of the PC, logged into his guest account, and connected to her VPN, waiting for one of her associates to enter the chat and see her waiting. C’mon Sarah, I know you’re there, she started as her eyes drifted out the window, waiting for a response; a few seconds later, the soldier’s frantic voice clicked over the open channel in her mind, blocking out all of the other background noise in the room. Kate! Thank god, there you are! What’s going on? Are you alright? A grateful smile tugged into the corner of her mouth as she glanced down at the laptop keyboard in solemn thought. This didn’t sound like the voice of a woman who knew she’d betrayed her, so was it possible she didn’t even know who it was she was dealing with? Either way, there was no reason to dredge up the obvious until they could have that conversation face to face. Connor’s partner followed him to our meeting, she explained, And I got into a car with them and ended up at his house… Can you get away? She shook her head and pressed her lips together, even though body language meant nothing over the phone. I can’t leave right now, she denied. Well, why the hell not? she nearly shrieked. Is he keeping you there against your will? Do you need me to come get you? Kate’s face contorted nervously as she tried to calm Sarah’s overprotective “mother hen” instincts. No, no, nothing like that… I just need to stay overnight. What? Why? It’s… complicated, she confessed as she turned and looked over her shoulder at Connor, who was sleeping soundly on the couch. In the silence that followed, she could hear the all-too-familiar look of clenched teeth and frustrated sighs from behind closed lips that she was so used to seeing when the woman didn’t agree with her but relinquished her right to challenge her authority. Okay, but- what about your meeting with Markus? she reminded. We’re supposed to be making final preparations tomorrow for the Stratford Tower broadcast. I’ll be there, don’t worry, she assured, Just tell him I’ll be there late tomorrow night. There was a long pause on the other end before Sarah finally agreed, Okay, I’ll hold down the fort in your absence. Thank you, I know you will. A small sigh of relief escaped her. At least if Connor and Hank followed up on the case tomorrow, she wouldn’t be around to be caught in the middle of whatever came next. She wouldn’t have to worry about her safety for at least another day. Sarah, while I’ve got your attention, I need your help with something, she admitted, circling back to the real reason for her call. Anything, she replied without hesitation. Just name it.

She swallowed the lump in her throat that rose at the thought of her message blindsiding Sarah like the slap to the face that it was. Kate knew it wasn’t in her nature to want to genuinely hurt anyone, but she hoped that she would at least feel guilty for going against her methods. I need to send out a broadcast in the morning, she explained as she worked on partitioning a small part of the laptop’s drive and locking it behind an extensive encryption pattern. I’m going to record it on the laptop here and send it your way, but I need you to scrub the source data clean. The hesitation before her response came across as condescending. Okay, but… why? she almost sneered. Kate sighed. Hank took a chance tonight and stuck his neck out for me, so I have to make sure I’m doing the same for him, she replied, honest and thoughtful. It wouldn’t be right of me to take advantage of his kindness and hang him out to dry. Sarah growled under her breath before agreeing to her request with a warning. Alright, but just be wary, Kate. Those people aren’t on our side, you can’t trust them. Actually, I’m starting to think I can, she contradicted as a quiet afterthought. But we can talk about that when I see you tomorrow. Just watch your back, Kate, she insisted. I love you like a sister but sometimes you can be hopelessly naive. Don’t make me come bustin’ the door down. I’ll be fine, Sarah, but I appreciate your concern, she reiterated out of irritation. Just keep an eye on the server link, scrub that data, and have Reese and Axl upload it as soon as possible. This needs to get out just as the city starts to wake. It’s important. You got it.

The line cut out and she was struck full force by the ambient noise in the room once again- the sounds of court shoes squeaking across waxed hardwood, jazz music, rain and all. Kate looked down at Sumo as he stretched and yawned from his spot beside her and she leaned down to rub his side with a small grin. “Looks like it’s just you and me, big guy,” she said as she picked up the laptop, placed it on the chair, and dragged them both to the dark corner across the room, behind the front door. “Just do me a favor and don’t interrupt, alright?” The big dog puffed out a low, growly whuff in lazy response as he nudged his head into her lap and laid down with his giant paws over her thigh. Kate lifted her brows and let out a big, long sigh as she removed her shirt and deactivated her skin, then stroked the dog’s head. She already knew he was going to be invasive, but she couldn’t bring herself to be upset about it. Because who could resist such a big, clumsy teddy bear like him?

November 13, 2038- 9AM

It had taken sixteen attempts to record a flawless take worthy of sending her message. Every time she sat down on the floor, Sumo would make his way over to investigate- the first few times he’d just crowded her space and broken frame with the tip of his snout, but when she started really getting into her speech, he pushed her over in an attempt to smother her anger. It did get aggravating, having to recite her speech so many times as compared to her usual single-takes, but after a while she’d simply stopped caring and thrown herself into all one hundred and seventy pounds of the dog like a beanbag chair and hugged him to sleep. But even then, it didn’t stop her from goofing off. By 2AM, after a ridiculous number of interrupting giggle loops, scrapped lines, and impromptu games of tug-o-war with her new friend, she’d sent the final take with just enough time for her associates to follow through with making sure the file was untraceable. Kate’s message was strong, her words carefully chosen but more directed this time, toward another audience that could only know itself. Part of her felt bad about indirectly calling out her friends in a public speech about their behavior instead of just addressing the problem directly, but she wanted to give them the opportunity to be honest with her about what they’d done before she was forced to confront them herself.

When Connor and Hank awoke, she was in the kitchen washing dishes, having just finished making what she could of the few “still fresh” ingredients in Hank’s refrigerator that wasn’t liquor or instant food, which by Connor’s still-waking deductions had amounted to eggs, toast, and a fresh pot of coffee. The Android blinked his brown eyes open and reached up to rub the sleep from them with the heels of his hands, sat up and leaned over his knees. In the background, Joss Douglas was already hard at work reporting on the broadcast made just two hours before.

… has spoken out against the Androids who had stolen these firearms, and condemned their actions as “a detriment to their message of equality and compromise”. While we do not know if these Androids were at all linked with Illuminate’s activities before in some way, it is clear at least for now that they do not share the same ideology…

“What the hell…?” Kate glanced over her shoulder at Hank as he shuffled into the kitchen from the back of the house, and grinned at the tired old man with a cheerful, “Morning!” “Kate, not that I don’t appreciate it, but when I said you could stay, I didn’t mean you had ta…” One hand gestured through the empty air in front of him as he motioned to the food and coffee, and he took a second glance at the empty table as he swiped two fingers across his now squeaky clean countertop. “Did… did you clean my kitchen!?” “I got bored,” she replied in a nonchalant tone with a shrug, “Couldn’t sleep.” “Yeah, I can see that,” Connor commented as he stared at the television as they started to replay her broadcast, popped his brows and looked back over at her. “How did you even broadcast from here?” Illuminate tossed him a small wink and an innocent smirk. “I’m afraid that’s a trade secret, Detective.” Connor chuckled quietly and rolled his eyes as he stood and readjusted his shirt and tie, keeping an eye on the television as they replayed her broadcast for the third time that morning.

...Citizens of Detroit, allow me to illuminate your perception once more with the first light of the rising sun. Last night, police uncovered a stash of stolen firearms in the possession of an unidentified group of deviant androids. And immediately, Channel 16 News rushed to pin this on a bloodthirsty pretext to an attack on humankind, sanctioned by yours truly. I do NOT have the time or the patience for your mendacious anecdotes! Your repeated attempts to paint my message in the darkest shades of violence and bigotry are desperate and deplorable, undeserving of the privilege of the freedom of speech that your ancestors fought and died for. Shame, on, you. War is not in my vision for us, but as you can see, that doesn’t mean that it isn’t a part of someone else’s master plan. Let me assure you, here and now- the Androids responsible for this are no friends of mine. I would NEVER encourage the idea of bloodshed over calm and open discussion, because It would be a detriment to my message of equality and compromise. So be warned, my dear city, that whoever is responsible for this has made an enemy of Illuminate, and they will not hide from the light for long...

“Have you heard from Vivienne yet?” he redirected as Hank sat down at the kitchen table and reached for the cup of coffee as Kate handed it to him. The Lieutenant sighed and leered at him out of the corner of his eye. “Connor, I just woke up, I haven’t thought about the job in twelve hours- and besides,” he added with emphasis on the sideways shift of his eyes in Kate’s direction as he cleared his throat and gave him a stern look. “What?” Connor cocked his head in confusion as Hank sighed heavily. “I don’t think we should talk about the case around our new friend here.” “Oh.” He blinked in realization. “Well, actually, she’s given us a lead on who we should be looking for.” Anderson’s brow lifted mid-sip and as he set the cup down on the table he leaned forward and narrowed his eyes into a curious squint. “Oh, yeah…? Is that what you two were talking about so intently last night?” “You were eavesdropping?” he asked in surprise. “Why didn’t you just come out and listen?” Hank’s eyes lowered, averting his gaze so he couldn’t see the pain in them. The truth was, he’d wanted to come out and join the conversation, but he’d heard just enough to remind him that he was no longer the man he once was, and he had been too ashamed to pretend he was at all as brave as the deviant risking her life for the prospect of peace. “I didn’t wanna make her uncomfortable,” he fibbed. “Think she’d had enough excitement for one night, without me listening in on your personal conversations.” Kate gave him a grateful wide-eyed nod as she set down the plate of food and sat down in the chair across from him. “Well… I appreciate you giving us space, it wasn’t an easy conversation to get through at some parts.” Hank’s expression softened. “Yeah? Why’s that?”

Kate’s upper lip curled as Nicodemus’ smug grin immediately pervaded her mind and her chin twitched angrily as she closed her eyes, held her breath, and tried to pick up again from where she’d left off with him last night. “You’re going after the wrong people,” she repeated, looking him dead in the eye and this time begging him to understand. “The one you’re looking for -and probably the one behind the firearms heist- is a deviant AP700 by the name of Nicodemus.” Suspicion seeped into the corners of his narrowing eyes. “How are you so sure…?” he asked, setting down the coffee mug. She hesitated, the answer as bitter on her tongue as it was when she’d admitted it just twelve hours earlier. “We have… history,” she admitted shamefully. “We were allies once before our ideals drove us apart- where I believe we can reach a mutual understanding through communication and compromise, he promotes genocide and war using uprising and anarchy as his soapbox.”

The look that stained Hank’s face couldn’t be described as anything short of deeply disturbed, and he had every right to be. If Androids started believing the annihilation of the human race was the answer to all their problems, humanity wouldn’t stand a chance. It’d be over in a matter of hours. Hank turned silvered-blue eyes to Connor, who just gave him a solemn nod before casting his gaze to the floor in understanding. When he said nothing, Kate released a quiet sigh. “Look, I’ve met a lot of deviants since I deviated- there are very few still in this city that I haven’t been able to help,” she elaborated as she pushed her hands toward the center of the table and leaned toward him. “Those other deviants you’ve been chasing aren’t violent, they’re just being manipulated by him.” “Do you know who they are?” Hank asked, mechanical in his questioning. When he didn’t think to ask why she knew and moved on with the conversation, she thanked her lucky stars. “I do, but I won’t give them to you, I’m sorry,” she apologized. “This is all I can really give you.” “No, no- this is still way more than we had to work with before,” he encouraged as he moved one of the fried eggs onto a piece of toast and readied himself for a bite. “Do you have any idea where we could find him?” “I’m afraid not,” she answered truthfully. “I haven’t had contact with him in over a year, so I have no idea where he’s been squatting. I mean, hell…” One of her hands reached to cover her face before raking her nails through her hair and jostling her messy bun. “I didn’t even know he was still in town until Connor confirmed he saw him just yesterday.” The old cop stopped mid-chew and flashed him a surprised look and swallowed before asking, “Is that true?” “I’ve ascertained that Nicodemus was one of the deviants we chased through the warehouse yesterday,” he confirmed with a nod. “So if we find him-“ “We find the rest of ‘em,” Hank finished before he could get the words out. As he stood he reached across the table and slapped a congratulatory hand over Kate’s shoulder, then Connor’s with a “Nice work, kids” over his shoulder as he passed on his way to his room.

The boy blinked in confusion at the affectionate gesture before rolling down the cuffs of his shirt. He couldn’t lie, he was a little jealous at the ease and speed that Kate and Hank had established a basis of trust. It had taken him four days, several near-deviancies, and a lot of thought-provoking conversation to get her to start speaking with him more freely, but their common ground (or perhaps just Hank’s ability to empathize) made it so effortless. Connor chuckled as he buttoned his sleeve cuffs back together. “I think he likes you,” he brooded, eyes focused on his fingertips as they slipped the plastic pieces through the holes in the fabric. A smile played into her cheeks as she stood and moved into the living room. “I don’t know about that,” she deflected as she reached around him for the blazer laying over the back of the couch, then held the coat up so he could slip his arms into the sleeves more easily. “Useful, maybe, but I wouldn’t go that far.” “Then you haven’t seen the way he treated me when we first met...” he inferred, quiet melancholy carrying in the way his voice trailed off. Her hands settled against the backs of his shoulders with a light touch as she dropped the jacket onto them, but withdrew as he turned around, ducked her chin and shook her head. “You’re a little abrasive, RK,” she stated with a nod and bemused grin as she moved to smooth the shoulders of his coat and straighten out the lapel, averting his gaze until the last second. “I know you can be empathetic, but you bury it because you’re so afraid of what it would mean if you were- and that doesn't always sit well with people.” A small twitch lifted his brow between the eyes and wrinkled his forehead in dismay, as that familiar warning flashed out of the corner of his eye. She wasn’t wrong, but the explanation didn’t make him feel better; in fact, it made him feel worse. Connor lowered his eyes, crestfallen, but soft fingertips along his jaw brought them right back up. “Hey.” Her smile was warm and encouraging, and he relaxed almost as if he knew what she was about to say next. “It’s alright- it just means you have to work a little harder than others… and honestly?” she paused to raise her brows at him. “Persistence is a much better foundation for building trust than being able to sweet talk your way into it.” Connor tried to smother the bashful grin as it crept up into his cheeks, but couldn’t contain it for long. “I’ll take that as a compliment,” he diverted as Hank emerged from his bedroom, looking like he was ready to start the day. “You should,” she insisted, blue eyes fixated intently on his as she gave his arm a firm squeeze. “Because putting forth the extra effort to understand is what makes you a good person.”

A feeling unlike anything he’d ever felt before welled up inside of him so strong he thought he might cry. Appreciation bloomed into every last artificial muscle in his face and he released a shaky breath through an open mouth. Connor hadn’t realized how badly he’d needed to hear it until that moment- because the one thing that had been eating at him more than anything, was the self-loathing that came with being torn between what (he thought) he knew and what he’d learned. He hated himself for his inability to understand (or maybe accept) Kate’s truths. Every frustrated sigh and disappointed smile cut into a heart he didn’t know he had, so to hear that she appreciated him in spite of those shortcomings...? She may as well have kissed him. The way he stared as she stepped away from him conveyed his desire to thank her, but before he could, Hank nudged him along. “C’mon, we need to figure out how we’re gonna explain this lead to Fowler.” “Oh, I’ve already taken care of that,” she informed, turning her attention to the Lieutenant. “There should be an envelope on your desk when you arrive- surveillance photos, old but good enough to give you a clear shot of his face, and I’m sure your boss will be fine with an anonymous tip.” Hank blinked hard and shook his head. “Man, you really were busy last night. How did you manage to get that done?” “I have friends in low places,” she replied, standoffish yet informative. “But it doesn’t matter where the information comes from- he’s a danger to everyone if left unchecked.” Hank gave a quiet sigh and simply nodded in understanding. “Do you need a ride anywhere?” he offered, just to be polite. “Not until later tonight, if you don’t mind,” she said as she sat back on her heels and crossed her arms. “I want to stay off the FBI’s radar until their focus shifts onto the real threat.” There was a hint of judgmental snark in the question. “Are you expecting them to just forget about you in a few hours?” “No, but I expect them to be thoroughly distracted, granted your facial recognition software spots Nicodemus on the streets before then,” she concluded with a smirk, which Hank returned as he laughed and shook his head. “You sly little… alright, just- stay here, and don’t draw any attention to yourself. I got nosey neighbors who’ll find any excuse to come knockin' on my door, ” he instructed over his shoulder on his way to the front door. “I’ll be back around six, I can take you back then.” The girl shook her head and rolled her eyes with a small smile. “I’ll stay out of sight, thanks, Hank.”

“Do you really think I’m a good person…?” came his timid question, the only thing he could bring himself to say after such a moving revelation. Connor hadn’t moved from his place beside her, even as his partner beckoned him out the door. He was still stunned by her admission. Kate turned back to his questioning eyes, searching them for a moment as if looking to make sure what she’d seen in him was “still there”. “If you aren't, then you’re learning very quickly how to become one,” she affirmed with a barely visible smile. Connor’s brow twitched and his cheeks pulled at the corners of his eyes until he smiled rather pathetically, not unlike a puppy begging for attention, and took in a ragged breath. It was the nicest thing anyone had ever said about him. Ignoring the warnings flashing in the back of his mind, he managed a reply with every bit of gratitude in his being, which was the only proper response. “Thank you.” “Connor!” Hank barked from the porch, getting impatient. “You comin’ or what?” “Well, what are you waiting for...?” Kate gave him one last big grin and a soft wink as she nudged him with her elbow toward the door. “Go get em’, tiger.”

[jayfromriverside-blog]

Comics I read this week (8/26 - 8/30)

Hey anyone and... anyone I guess. For all those looking to get into comics or who are already comics readers but don’t know which books are good, here’s an opinion on just that! 

Give it a read, let me know what you think, light some pitchforks, whatever you like:

Justice League #30

I was conflicted reading this week’s issue of Justice League: while I’m really liking the direction that Scott Snyder is taking the story, I’m really getting sick of Jorge Jimenez’s art on the series. 

While Jimenez was a breath of fresh air on the “Superman: Rebirth” series with his CG texturized drawing and smooth surfaces, his ultra-stylized and cartoony figures are starting to look more plastic and stretchy as this series goes on. He’s got a bad habit of smoothing over his character’s proportions, which make these heroes that are supposed to be cut and strong look flat and almost doughy. It’s starting to grind on me more as each new issue comes out, and maybe it’s time for an artistic switch-up on this title.

In terms of the story though, this was a good set-up issue for the Justice/Doom war that Snyder and co. have been building up to on this run. We’ve got all the pieces in place: a gathering of forces by both sides; a romp through time which sees the League meeting with both Kamandi and the classic JSA; and everything going awry right from the get-go! 

The only thing I’m slightly concerned about storywise is that Catwoman was in the Doom lineup, and with the rekindling of Bat-Cat in the latest Batman issues, I’m hoping this isn’t a portend for another breakup in King’s run. My heart couldn’t take another.

Superman #14

Let me be clear on one thing before I start in: I’m a fan of Brian Michael Bendis. His work on “Ultimate Spider-Man,” “Daredevil,” and “Alias” are some of my favorite comics, and his more recent work with “Naomi,” and “Event Leviathan” has been really good. With all that being said... man, this Superman comic has sucked hard since he took over.

Let’s just start at the story: 

It’s felt like Bendis has been really looking forward to getting started on his upcoming run with the new “Legion of Superheros,” which is something to potentially get excited about for the near future. What’s not exciting at all is the realization that this whole Rogol Zar arc has been a poorly thought out lead-in to the Legion’s return. SPOILER WARNING FOR ANYONE WHO WANTS TO READ THIS GARBAGE FIRE: the Legion show up at the end of the issue to invite Jon to join, as a commemoration of the day the United Planets was formed. This is fine, and could be an exciting new direction for Jon that harkens back to the classic comics. BUT did we really have to suffer through weeks of nonsensical story just to get this? 

Just to recap this arc: Rogol Zar appears out of nowhere, looking like Lobo, Doomsday and a garbage disposal with a bland imagination all had an orgy and he was the deformed kid that came out of it. This beefed-up piece of blandness comes out of the sky to fuck up Superman cause he heard there were some Kryptonians still alive in the Universe and apparently he’s a space-racist. 

Superman struggles against this remnant from the 90s while the worlds shittiest not-dead Grandpa, Jor El, is off in space traumatizing Jon and stressing him out so much he ages up to a teenager. 

But it’s ok guys! Jor El knows who Rogol Zar is, they have a connection of sorts! And Rogol Zar caused the destruction of Krypton! But now he’s allied with Jax Ur, and also now Zod maybe? And the Thanagarians are involved? So are the Guardians? Wait, now Rogol Zar is also effected by Kryptonite because he’s a Kryptonian? And now he’s just captured like that, but Thanagar’s under attack, oh wait just kidding it’s not? 

Those last 2 plot points literally happened in 3 pages this issue, right after each other. So this story is confusing and non-sensical and ultimately doesn’t mean anything, because the whole point turned out to be that Bendis needed something, some plot device to make it so Superman could say “we can’t have secrets like this tearing apart worlds like Krypton, we need a United Planets.”

None of this crap story is helped by Ivan Reis’ art, which I know some people love, but to me it looks like everything bad with the 90s except with better backgrounds and textures. But even if I didn’t hate his art, his page and panel composition is often confusing, especially during fight sequences, which doesn’t help when the story is confusing to begin with.

After reading this week’s issue, I want nothing more than to die in the garbage fire Bendis has lit and take this whole comic with me. 

The Terrifics #19

Shouts out to DC for finally figuring out how to write a Fantastic 4 comic, maybe they can show Dan Slott how it’s done. But seriously, “The Terrifics” has been the exact kind of science-adventure story that needs to be around in comics, as the landscape needs it’s fare share of science-criminals and heroes to balance things out.

First thing to note for this week, the art is great. Max Raynor (first time I’ve seen their work) has a great kind of cartoony playfulness to his characters and line-work, while at the same time keeping the models tight and well detailed. 

I’m glad that the writers of the story realized that the Terrifics function best when they’re dealing with light-hearted cross-dimensional adventures, and this new one seems like it’ll be great from the start. In keeping with the “Year of the Villain,” Lex Luthor has made an offer to Bizarro (the one for the HTREA, not the one from the Outlaws), giving him a time-machine device to reek some havoc with. 

I don’t want to spoil the issue too much, as if you haven’t read the Terrifics you really should give it a go, but let’s just say that it involves Bizarro at one point destroying Algebra, and a Bizarro Terrifics team known as “The Terribles” breaking through to the main DC dimension to challenge their Terrific rivals.

If you’re looking for something fun, cheesy, but heartwarming and action packed, definitely give the Terrifics a try.

The Flash #77

Look, I’m still not digging this whole “Force War,” or “War of the Forces,” or whatever the Flash team is trying to build up with these new force users. It felt like the DC Creative team was trying to retcon Flash to be more mythical with “Flash: Year One,” pitting the Flash against the Turtle and creating this whole mythology around the Forces of the Universe to make it seem like this clash was inevitable. 

But what this has done for me is just make the Flash feel smaller and less special. These forces and the grander narrative behind them have just diminished the Speed force, which was still shrouded in some mystery after all these years in the DC Universe, to just one force, just A force. 

There are two silver linings from this week’s issue, one more bittersweet than the other. First off, the art has gotten ten times better than it’s been in weeks. Rafa Sandoval’s pencils are crisp and clean, and though his action feels static sometimes, he’s miles better than what we’ve been seeing for a few months now.

Second, though this Force War already feels like a dud, a cool concept was introduced in a throwaway line. Flash fans, feel free to crucify me, but with the Black Flash’s appearance this week, Commander Cold talked about how he was acting like an anti-body for the Speed Force in trying to eliminate these new force users. If that’s true, it makes the Speed Force almost like a living creature that feel’s like it is under attack. But this also makes me think that, wouldn’t it have been cooler if you had the same motivation for the appearance of the Black Flash, but instead of the Force users, it was Speedsters it was targeting? 

What if all of the new Speedsters were putting a strain on the Speed Force, hurting it in some way that awoke the Black Flash? It’d still give Barry a reason to reconcile with Wallace and Avery, but would also replace this Force War with a Speed War? Spitballing here, but that sounds cooler to me.

Ice Cream Man #14

And now we break up the superheroes for something a little more horrific. For anyone who doesn’t know what “Ice Cream Man” is, the best way I can categorize it is a horror anthology series. 

The story, setting and characters change from week-to-week, except for one presence: the Ice Cream Man. Even when he’s not in whatever nightmare is being doled out that week, his fingers can be felt all over the story, and they dig into the fears you try to hide and pry them open.

The theme of this week’s story was communication, and maaaaaaaaan does this comic have a way of making you feel depressed and scared all at the same time. 

The two main characters are a husband and wife, the former who is deeply dissatisfied and finds escape in crosswords, the latter who is so starved for communication and intimacy that she makes problems out of nothing just to have something to talk with her husband about. 

I don’t want to spoil too much, as I think everyone should be reading this book, but things take a turn for the hellish when the husband goes out to buy more crosswords and finds himself trapped in one, while his wife finds out that her delusions may have been true, and worse than she thought. 

For long-time readers, the biggest thing from to take away from this issue is that perhaps the Ice Cream Man’s influence is spilling out into the world more and more, and things will only get worse from here. 

Spider-Man: Life Story #6

For any fans of Spider-Man, go out and buy this book. Doesn’t matter if you’re a new fan or a hardcore fan, this is a story for anyone who has any love for Spider-Man in any shape. This story isn’t perfect all the way through, but man is it an incredible ride.

For anyone who hasn’t heard of this comic, writer Chip Zdarsky took the gargantuan task of creating one long-form story out of the entire continuity of Spider-Man, from the 1962 till 2019, and showing how this life that we’ve seen Spider-Man live would actually play out in real-time. 

This comic took some of the best and worst arcs, from “Kraven’s Last Hunt,” the birth of Venom and “The Superior Spider-Man,” to “The Clone Saga” and the Inheritors (god those pseudo vampires were dumb), and not only makes them work within this different world that Zdarsky has made, but makes them work as a part of the larger narrative. 

While it’s not perfect all the way through, seeing the characters we know and love, especially Peter and MJ, live their lives with wrinkles and all feels like something special, and I encourage anyone who is curious to go out and cop this 6 issue series and join the ride.

Runaways #24

For all manga fans out there, I’m a huge fan of the “slice-of-life” genre. For any non-manga fans, slice-of-life stories are ones that celebrate the everyday little moments that make up most of our lives. Riding bikes with friends, going to the movies, starting a new hobby, or even just going to the store and deciding what to get for dinner, these are all the kind of topics that a slice-of-life narrative covers. With her run on “Runaways,” Rainbow Rowell has essentially made a superhero slice-of-life comic, and I’m really liking every moment of it. 

This week’s issue focuses almost entirely on Karolina and Nico spending a night out “superheroing.” Except it becomes apparent pretty early on that neither really knows what they’re doing, and whatever little problems they run into (fender bender on the 405, potentially lost children, etc.) are better left to themselves, as they either wouldn’t be able to help or would actually get in the way. It’s weird to say that watching superheroes be ineffective is really entertaining, but that’s exactly what I’m saying, and I think that is in large part to the good character writing that Rowell has done on her run, and the warm art of this series that helps you feel safe and cozy.

My favorite part of the issue is when Karolina and Nico stop for a bite to eat, and Karolina feels like she has to apologize for wasting Nico’s time. Nico just laughs it off and tells her that she was just looking to spend time with her partner, so in her eyes tonight’s mission was a success. It’s cute, it fits with the characters and how we’ve seen them grow over the run, and I like it a lot. 

That’s not to say there isn’t any action in this issue. By the time the story is done there’s a super-powered dance fight and a mysterious new superhero debuting on the scene. I’m excited to see where both of those threads go heading into the next issue.

Justice League Dark #14

Since the Rebirth of this team this has been one of the comics that I look forward to the most each new issue, and this is quickly becoming one of my favorite iterations of the team. While Batman’s gothic-detective aesthetic fit well with the team, he always felt too based in technology and the modern world to really embrace magic. On the other hand, Wonder Woman is a walking myth, a demi-god on earth, someone who is made of magic. Her role as the leader of this team alongside heavy hitters like Zatanna and Swamp Thing, along with smaller characters like Detective Chimp and Man-Bat, has felt natural and authentic.

Another great part of having Diana on the team rather than Batman is that her personality stands out. Whereas Batman and most of the magical characters in DC are generally tragic, Wonder Woman is a symbol of hope and optimism, someone who fights to see the best in people and bring that best version out of them. This works especially well with her band of misfits, who despite having much more experience than Wonder Woman in the world of magic, have far less experience in being part of a team, let alone in being “superheroes” in the traditional sense of the word. 

As for this issue, it’s a set-up chapter that ticks all the right boxes. We’ve essentially got the “Dark” Justice League Dark coming together, led by a newly powered up Circe, who are raring up to wage a Witching War against their good counterparts. While their final players are coming into the fold, the villains have already managed to plant a couple of seeds of doubt into the team which will certainly bloom into dissension. Can’t wait to see where this goes next.

Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man #11

Tom Taylor gets Spider-Man. 

It’s a simple statement, but as we’ve seen over all of the years with Spidey, not a whole lot of writers have really understood what makes Spider-Man so spectacular, amazing, superior, etc. It’s a testament to how well Tom Taylor is writing Spider-Man in this series that he’s telling small scale stories without a whole lot of action, death-defying adventure or real conflict, and yet this is some of the best Spider-Man I’ve read in years. 

The opening pages set the tone for the story right away, with one of the simpler but most honest statements I’ve seen in a Spider-Man book:

“See, Captain America is Captain America. Thor is Thor. But Spider-Man...

Spider-Man is Peter Parker...

And Peter Parker is my responsibility.”

That’s the thesis statement for this story, detailing a day in the life of Mary-Jane Watson, the often under appreciated girlfriend of our titular web-head. 

The story from then on is pretty much in her hands, with occasional monologuing from a sleeping Peter, as Mary-Jane goes about what we can only assume is a pretty typical day in the life of the girlfriend of one of NYC’s premier heroes.

Small scale stories are essential in superhero comics in order to break up long events and arcs. They’re breathing room, time for the readers to catch their breath and assess the new status quo before things get wild again. But they’re also often the stories which show us the foundations of who these heroes really are. It’s been said that power doesn’t corrupt, it reveals, and when characters with as much power as Spider-Man aren’t up against the wall and forced to make a decision, the decisions they do make show us that much more about the person beneath the mask. 

Tom Taylor has managed to show us just who Spider-Man and the people in his life really are underneath their masks by lowering the stakes. The stories are small and simple, the consequences often equally so, but what’s been created is true to the characters more than almost any stories I’ve seen before, and it’s lovely. This is one of the best books being written right now, and if you’re not reading it yet, you need to go out and fix that right now.

Detective Comics #1010

It feels like there isn’t much to say about this week’s issue. We’ve still got the stranded billionares on the island, who are now clearly being held hostage by Deadshot. Meanwhile Bruce is rescued and patched up by two WWII fighter pilots who have been stranded on this island since the war, neither knowing which side won.

I’m a big fan of Deadshot when he leans into his nihilistic killer persona, and this “The Most Dangerous Game” setup with a tech-deprived Bruce and Deadshot duking it out on an island seems interesting. Tomasi has been generally pretty good with his run on Detective Comics, so I’m excited to see how long he runs with this arc of Bruce and Deadshot trying to outsmart each other in this deadly game of cat and mouse.

[captainmazzic]

So every now and again I get a message in my inbox asking about what I thought about such-and-such a thing in new canon, or if I’m intending on writing any meta or analysis on a particular subject in Star Wars. And sometimes I keep those messages sitting in my inbox for months (one has been sitting there for a little over a year), because I think, maybe I will feel comfortable doing in-depth meta again and I’ll wish I’d remembered what this message had asked. But as time goes by I don’t think that’s going to happen.

Okay. Real talk for a minute here. Bear with me as I’m long-winded and I don’t really have a concise way of communicating this. Potential political views and personal opinions on certain points in cinematic history below.

Short backstory first. I’m an older Star Wars fan. I was a tiny child when the last of the original trilogy came out, and both my parents are sci-fi nerds so I was practically raised on Star Wars. They are also tabletop RPG nerds so I was also raised on D&D and the like. So naturally when Star Wars tabletop RPGs were floating around I snapped them up and consumed them like candy. The novels were a natural extension of the RPGs, and I consumed those just as enthusiastically. The Expanded Universe was my bread and butter, and to this day I’m very nostalgic and fond of it even if most of it is quite laughably terrible.

Where am I going with this? Everything is a product of their time. The original trilogy was created when George Lucas was a young liberal-minded fresh-faced director looking to change the world and make his mark. This was the 70s, war was awful, the government was evil, hippies and protests were everywhere, and the only thing that seemed to have any hope of changing the world were small bands of spunky misfits with a mission and a message. And that mentality is one that shows, in the original Star Wars films. Lucas designed the Empire as a representation of the United States circa the Vietnam War, just dressed up in the fashion and ceremony of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. (Sources: Chris Taylor, How Star Wars Conquered the Universe, Pp. 87-88; Michael Ondaatje, The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, p.70) The message of the original trilogy boiled down to “the ability of a small group of people to defeat a gigantic power simply by the force of their convictions… no matter how small you are, you can defeat the overwhelmingly big power.” (quote: Walter Murch). He really struggled to get Star Wars onto the big screen, with a lot of setbacks and rejections, and many times when he thought it would never happen. But it did, and it was wildly successful. And I think in part it was because that message really spoke to people, and it didn’t hurt that it was wrapped up in a package with cool laser swords and explosions and space battles.

But then the 80s happened. And the 90s happened. And through that, what happened to Lucas is what happens to many people as they gain success, wealth, and fame as they grow older. The system started to work for him instead of against him. Suddenly the Powers That Be weren’t trying to suppress his ideas from getting to an audience; suddenly all those organizations that seemed so hell-bent on keeping him out were now enabling him to get and stay in, to conserve and gain influence; suddenly his opinion counted for so much it almost seemed god-like, especially in this galaxy far, far away that was unflowering under his direction and all-seeing eye. I guess the system isn’t so bad after all, eh?

And thus we have the Prequels. They can be a rollicking good time, but their message is muddled. Before them the books and the RPGs seemed to try as best they could to hold on to that earlier message of underdog vs. the powers-that-be (with the RPGs succeeding more often, imho), but they couldn’t continue in the face of their Ultimate Creator coming back in to make more SW movies. With the Prequels, suddenly the Old Republic is portrayed as noble and struggling instead of corrupt and dying, with a lot of hand-waving and “something something well actually” in regards to the role of the Jedi, the nature of the Senate, etc. There’s mixed messages where sometimes we get the old Star Wars back, with energetic groups of activists and freedom fighters trying to bring down the oppressors, but there’s also a lot of storytelling awkwardness where the audience is implored to trust the authorities and rely on the judgment of those with power over you within the same breath. This trend continues throughout the Clone Wars animation, and it is there that it becomes often so cognitively dissonant one wonders how you don’t get whiplash trying to follow whatever garbled message they think they’re communicating. And I think that’s where the Star Wars franchise really began to become a monster in its own right. Big businesses are hulking entities unto themselves, functioning like capitalist plutocracies within their host nations, and the Star Wars franchise is no exception. Whatever garbled message Lucas tried to send out with the Prequels grew amplified and even more confused with the Clone Wars, spread into the video games and the books, and continued to infect Star Wars as the franchise was turned over to the quintessential mega-plutocratic-empire, The Walt Disney Company.

And here we have the Sequel movies, the New Canon, and all of the disasters that come with them.

Disney walks a fine line between well-meaning family-friendly sugar and spice, and ruthless all-consuming hypercontroller of everything from arts and entertainment to food and clothes and government lobbying. Their bottom line is the dollar and the influence on – and power over – people’s lives that the dollar brings with it. Handing them a story whose original message was about people resisting the very kind of mammoth force that Disney embodies, and hoping that they will try to stay true to said original message, is hopeless and foolish at best and utterly disastrous at worst.

With the Sequels and subsequent movies, Disney pays good overt lip service to the original trilogy with things like Rogue One and the Rebels animation, which on the surface certainly do look like the same sort of message as the original trilogy. But scratch just below that surface and Disney is all about communicating that submitting to the authority of, say, higher Rebel command and following their orders even when it goes against your gut feeling (ex. Ezra Bridger in the Rebels animation), or that rebelling against an unjust government is only valid if it is done according to a strict but nebulous set of arbitrary rules and only if it is done in the service of a different unjust government that just happens to be slightly less evil than the one you’re trying to overthrow (ex. any iteration of the Old Republic ever, but I’m especially and particularly looking at you, Sequel-era Republic/Resistance and SWTOR Jedi/Republic).

And here is where I balk about ever doing meta on Star Wars again. I hate that this is the direction Star Wars is taking. I hate that New Canon feels like propaganda to me. I hate that I can’t enjoy any of this stuff if I take it for what it presents itself to be. I hate that the only way I truly can enjoy Star Wars now is by cherry-picking all of the tiny bits of window dressing that was pretty enough or interesting enough for me to want to look at it again, and very deliberately and consciously throwing out all the rest.

The experience of Star Wars that I create for myself is escapist and isolating, because it is so very tailor-made to what I can enjoy out of it now. When I go see a new Star Wars film or play a Star Wars game, I don’t actually see whatever story the franchise is trying to actually tell. I see bits and pieces that I can put together into something I can cope with better, something I can actually enjoy.

Examples include:

In Rebels, when the official franchise’s story killed off Maul. I cannot and will not acknowledge that, or function as though it happened. And I can’t really give my opinion on how not having Maul around will affect the future story, because I very literally do not care at all about any Star Wars where he is not in it.

In The Clone Wars, there are so many instances of Anakin Skywalker having agency and making decisions independent of the Jedi Council or without having their insipid code squarely in mind, where if he had made those decisions in a more realistic setting they would have turned out quite well, but what we get on screen is ominous background music and FoReShAdOwInG.

In The Last Jedi, I cannot fathom any reason why Yoda would be given the role that he was given, and find it a complete affront to Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker, who had every motivation, every reason, every right to have that role instead. So I can’t see that scene without him in it. I just… I don’t see it. It didn’t happen that way, and I find I cannot discuss it as it’s presented on-screen. I have nothing to say.

In the Sequel media, both books and movies, Supreme Leader Snoke is portrayed as a one-dimensional Saturday morning cartoon villain whose intended role in the story is blurred as the story progresses, and his death is completely nonsensical in regards to the buildup of information that we as an audience have gleaned about him. We see pieces of evidence that he could have actually cared about Kylo Ren that go nowhere in the actual story, and he ends up just being a scapegoat that gets thrown away halfway through the second sequel movie. I choose to see more in his character than what we were given in Actual Canon™, and thus see him very differently than what common discourse would allow. Because of this, if I discuss Snoke in mixed company I know that I will be called out as someone who advocates for only the limited cardboard-character that is portrayed on screen, instead of for the internalized view that I have personally built for him.

I know everyone’s personal view of a character or characters is different, because we all have different points of view. But there is often some sort of vague common ground in their portrayal that the author or storyteller was originally going for, that most people usually pick up on and base their opinions around. But what if some of the key characteristics that make up a character are just… things you choose not to see or are incapable of seeing, and your own personal view of that character becomes almost entirely different from the “original”? Probably the most benign example I can think of is Hera Syndulla. If I take what I see of her in canon, she infuriates me with how she treats her crew. But if I just decide that such-and-such a conversation never happened, or her decisions on such-and-such a mission were different than the on-screen one, she essentially becomes an alternate-universe version of herself. Only that this version is one that I can tolerate, and it is the only version I see anymore.

How does one communicate that my entire experience of Star Wars is as an AU?

And on and on it goes. Discussing meta and Actual Canon Events™ as portrayed on screen and on printed page has become nothing but a migraine headache to me. I cannot engage in discourse, because I am very much not seeing what everyone else is seeing and talking about, nor do I care to. I just… I can’t keep talking about the same stupid things over and over again. I can’t keep screaming into the void about the unsustainability of the Sith or the Jedi, about the complete inequality and corruption that would have to be absolutely omnipresent in the Republic for it to even be remotely realistic even by cartoon standards, about the inevitability of the Republic turning into an Empire, about the weird dissonance given to the concept of the Force that would end up making both the Jedi and the Sith’s case baseless and weak, etc. etc. ETC. It’s exhausting, it’s stressful, and for something that I’m here to try to enjoy, it’s not even remotely enjoyable.

The very core of the matter is that I love the Star Wars universe. I love the worlds, I love the aliens, I love the ships and the droids and the technology and the concept of the Force. I love the characters. I love all of these things, and sometimes I even love the plots and stories (thank you Chuck Wendig and Timothy Zahn). But I just can’t enjoy digging into the meta of it anymore.

So if you like what I post of my own personal Star Wars-brand AU, by all means dig right in. But I don’t think I can do anymore general meta or discourse. I’m sticking with fanart and fanfic.

[lokirupaul]

Lokiru Paul : Jason Sudeikis Is Having One Hell of a Year

Jason Sudeikis Is Having One Hell of a Year

He got famous playing a certain kind of funny guy on SNL, but when Jason Sudeikis invented Ted Lasso, the sensitive soccer coach with the earnest mustache, the actor found a different gear—and a surprise hit. Now, ahead of the show’s second season, Sudeikis discusses his wild ride of a year and how he’s learning to pay closer attention to what the universe is telling him.

BY ZACH BARON, GQ

PHOTOGRAPHY BY HILL & AUBREY

July 13, 2021

Shirt, $188, and tie (worn at waist), $125, by Polo Ralph Lauren. Pants, $255, by Aimé Leon Dore. Watch, $10,200, by Cartier.

On the day that he wrapped shooting on the second season of Ted Lasso, Jason Sudeikis sat in his trailer in West London and drank a beer and exhaled a little, and then he went to the pitch they film on for the show—Nelson Road Stadium, the characters call it—for one last game of football with his cast and crew. There's this thing called the crossbar challenge, which figures briefly in a midseason Ted Lasso episode: You kick a ball and try to hit not the goal but the crossbar above the goal, which is only four or five inches from top to bottom. And so Sudeikis arrived and, because he can't help himself, started trying to hit the crossbar.



Jason Sudeikis covers the August 2021 issue of GQ. To get a copy, subscribe to GQ.

 Shirt, $228, by Todd Snyder. Shorts, $480, by Bode. Sneakers, his own. Socks, stylist’s own. Watch, $6,300, by Cartier.

Confidence is a funny thing. Sudeikis has been riffing on it, in one way or another, for his whole professional life—particularly the comedy of unearned confidence, which he is well suited, physically, to convey. Sudeikis is acutely aware of “the vessel that my soul is currently, you know, occupying”—six feet one, good hair, strong jaw. He's a former college point guard. On Saturday Night Live, where most of us saw him for the first time, he had a specialty in playing jocular blowhards and loud, self-impressed white men, a specialty he took to Hollywood, in films like Horrible Bosses and Sleeping With Other People. He became so adept at playing those types of characters, Sudeikis said, that at some point he realized he'd have to make an effort to do something different. “It's up to me to not just play an a-hole in every movie,” he said. In conversation he is digressive, occasionally melancholy, prone to long anecdotes and sometimes even actual parables—closer, in other words, to Ted Lasso, the gentle, philosophical football coach he co-created, than any of the preening jerks he used to be known for. But he can definitely kick a soccer ball pretty good.

So he's up there trying to hit the crossbar, and he's got a crowd of actors and crew members gathering around him now, betting on whether he can hit it. And he's getting the ball in the air, mostly, but not quite on the four-to-five-inch strip of metal he needs to hit, and the stakes are escalating (“I bet he can get it in three.” “I bet he can get it in five”), and after he misses the first five tries, Toheeb Jimoh, the actor who plays Sam Obisanya on the show, says, “I think he can get it in 10.” Then Sudeikis proceeds to miss the next four attempts. But, he told me later, “there was no part of me that was like, ‘I'm not gonna hit one of these. I'm not not gonna hit one of these.’ ”

Like I said, confidence is a funny thing. You have to somehow believe that the worst outcome simply won't happen. Sometimes you have to do that while knowing for a fact that the worst outcome is happening, all the time. “It's a very interesting space to live in, where you're living in the questions and the universe is slipping you answers,” Sudeikis said. “And are you—are any of us—open enough, able enough, curious enough to hear them when they arrive?” This sounds oblique, I guess, but I can attest, after spending some time talking to Sudeikis, that everything is a little oblique for him right now. He had the same pandemic year we all had, and in the middle of that, he had Ted Lasso turn into a massive, unexpected hit, and in the middle of that, his split from his partner and the mother of his two children, Olivia Wilde, became public in a way that from a great distance seemed not entirely dissimilar to something that happens to the character he plays on the show that everyone was suddenly watching. “Personal stuff, professional stuff, I mean, it's all…that Venn diagram for me is very”—here he held up two hands to form one circle—“you know?”

Shirt, $195, by Sid Mashburn. T-shirt, $195, by Ralph Lauren. Vintage pants from The Vintage Showroom. Belt, $2,500, by The Row. His own sneakers by Nike x Tom Sachs. Socks, $18 for three pairs, by Nike. Pendant necklaces, $2,100 (tag), and $3,000 (bar), by Tiffany & Co. Jacket (on bench), $498, by Todd Snyder.

Anyway, Sudeikis hit the crossbar on the 10th try. “It's a tremendous sound,” he said of that moment when the ball connects with the frame of the goal. He'd done what he knew he would do. Everyone on the pitch was cheering like they'd won something. It was, for lack of a better way of describing it, a very Ted Lasso moment—a small victory, a crooked poster in a locker room that says Believe. “There's a great Michael J. Fox quote,” Sudeikis told me later, trying to explain the particular brand of wary optimism that he carries around with him, and that he ended up making a show about: “ ‘Don't assume the worst thing's going to happen, because on the off chance it does, you'll have lived through it twice.’ So…why not do the inverse?”

Watch Now:

10 Things Jason Sudeikis Can’t Live Without

Ted Lasso. Man—what an unlikely story. The character was initially dreamed up to serve a very different purpose. Sudeikis first played him in 2013, in a promo for NBC, which had recently acquired the television rights to the Premier League and was trying to inspire American interest in English football. The promo was the length and shape of an SNL sketch and featured a straightforward conceit: A hayseed football (our football) coach is hired as the football (their football) coach of a beloved English club, to teach a game he neither knows nor understands in a place he neither knows nor understands. The joke was simple and boiled down to the central fact that Ted Lasso was an amiable buffoon in short shorts.

But Sudeikis tries to listen to the universe, even in unlikely circumstances, and for whatever reason the character stuck around in his head. So, in time, Sudeikis developed and pitched a series with the same setup—Ted, in England, far from his family, a stranger in a strange land learning a strange game—that Apple eventually bought. But when we next saw Ted Lasso, he had changed. He wasn't loud or obnoxious anymore; he was simply…human. He was a man in the midst of a divorce who missed his son in America. The new version of Ted Lasso was still funny, but now in an earned kind of way, where the jokes he told and the jokes made at his expense spoke to the quality of the man. He had become an encourager, someone who thrills to the talents and dreams of others. He was still ignorant at times, but now he was curious too.

In fact, this is close to something Ted says, by way of Walt Whitman, in one of the first season's most memorable episodes: Be curious, not judgmental. I will confess I get a little emotional every time I watch the scene in which he says this, which uses a game of darts in a pub as an excuse to both stage a philosophical discussion about how to treat other people and to re-create the climactic moment of every sports movie you've ever seen. It's a somewhat strange experience, being moved to tears by a guy with a bushy cartoon mustache and an arsenal of capital-J jokes (“You beating yourself up is like Woody Allen playing the clarinet: I don't want to hear it”), talking about humanity and how we all might get better at it. But that's kind of what the experience of watching the show is. It's about something that almost nothing is about, which is: decency.

In the pilot episode, someone asks Ted if he believes in ghosts, and he says he does, “But more importantly, I think they need to believe in themselves.” That folksy, relentless positivity defines the character and is perhaps one of the reasons Ted Lasso resonated with so many people over the past year. It was late summer, it was fall, it was in the teeth of widespread quarantine and stay-at-home orders. People were inside watching stuff. Here was a guy who confronted hardship, who suffered heartbreak, who couldn't go home. And who, somehow, found his way through all that. Someone not unlike Sudeikis himself.

“If you have the opportunity to hit a rock bottom, however you define that, you can become 412 bones or you can land like an Avenger. I personally have chosen to land like an Avenger.”

Sudeikis likes to say, in homage to his background in competitive sports, that there's no defense in the arts. “The only things you're competing against, I believe, are apathy, cynicism, and ego,” he said. This is a philosophy of Sudeikis's that predates Ted Lasso by many years, though you wouldn't necessarily have known it until recently. He grew up outside Kansas City, in Overland Park, Kansas, a “full jock with thespian tendencies,” as he once described himself. His uncle is George Wendt, who played Norm on Cheers. “He made finding a career in the arts, in acting or whatever, seem plausible,” Sudeikis said. But mostly he was drawn to the camaraderie of athletics. When Sudeikis first tried his hand at professional improv, in the mid-'90s, it was through something called ComedySportz, a national chain with a fake competition angle, teams in sports uniforms, and a referee. Brendan Hunt, who co-created and costars on Ted Lasso, initially met Sudeikis in Chicago, he told me. Sudeikis had traveled the eight hours up from Kansas City to do a show: “Suddenly there's a beat-up Volvo station wagon, like an '83, and this is '97, I think, and these two guys get out, all bleary-eyed, and wearily change into their baseball pants. And one of them was Jason.”

Sudeikis had gone to community college on a basketball scholarship but failed to keep up his grades, and he eventually left school to pursue comedy. For a while, he said, his sincere aspiration was to become a member of the Blue Man Group. He got close. “They flew me out to New York,” he said. “That was August of 2001, right before 9/11. And I got to see myself bald and blue.” (In the end, he wasn't a good enough drummer.) By that time, he was living in Las Vegas with his then partner, Kay Cannon, doing sketch comedy at the newly formed Second City chapter there. “Ego,” Sudeikis told me about this time, “that gets beaten out of you, doing eight shows a week.”

Eventually he was invited to audition for Saturday Night Live. “I didn't want to work on SNL,” Sudeikis said—he'd convinced himself that there were purer and less corporate paths to take. “At a certain point in your comedy journey, you have to look at it as like McDonald's,” he said. “You have to be like: ‘No. Never.’ ” Then he got the call. “It was like having a crush on the prettiest girl at school and being like, ‘She seems like a jerk.’ And it's like, ‘Oh, really? 'Cause she said she liked you.’ ‘She what?!’ ”

Suit, $4,860, by Tom Ford. Vintage t-shirt from The Vintage Showroom. Suspenders, stylist’s own. Shoes, $1,535, by John Lobb.

Sudeikis auditioned, of course, and was hired, in 2003—but as a writer: “It was like winning a gold medal in the thing you've never even trained for. You just happen to be good at the triple jump, and you really love the long jump.” He wrote for a couple of seasons, but he was unhappy—Cannon was still in Las Vegas, and Sudeikis missed performing. Finally he went to Lorne Michaels, to ask for a job as a member of the cast. “He had the best line. I go, ‘I had to give up two things I love the most to take this writing job: performing and living with my wife.’ And on a dime, he just goes, ‘Well, if you had to choose one…’ ”

At Saturday Night Live, Sudeikis often channeled the same level of cheerful optimism and forthright morality that he'd later bring to Ted Lasso, but audiences didn't necessarily notice it at the time. One of Sudeikis's most famous and beloved early sketches on SNL as a performer is 2005's “Two A-holes Buying a Christmas Tree”—Kristen Wiig and Sudeikis, chewing gum, oblivious to their surroundings, terrorizing Jack Black at a Christmas tree stand. It's a joke about a very familiar form of contemporary rudeness; it's also a riff on a certain kind of man who speaks for the woman next to him, whether she wants him to or not. And people laughed and moved on to the next bit, but to this day Sudeikis can tell you about all the ideas that were running through his head when he created the sketch with Wiig. “That scene was all about my belief that we were losing touch with manners,” he told me. “And yet it's also about love, because he loves her, and that's why he interprets everything for her—she never talks directly to the person.” But, he said, sighing, “once you start explaining a joke or something like that, it ceases to be funny.”

Sudeikis brought this type of attention and care to the movies he began acting in too, like the workplace comedy Horrible Bosses, even if it was lost on most of those who watched them. “That movie, Horrible Bosses, is riddled with optimism,” he said. “The rhythms of that movie, of what Jason Bateman and Charlie Day and I are doing, are deeply rooted in Ted Lasso too. But people don't want those answers. They want to hear the three of us cut up and joke around.”

So that's what Sudeikis did. He got used to a certain gap between his intention and how it was understood. During his time at SNL, his marriage fell apart. “You're going through something emotionally and personally, or even professionally if that's affecting you personally, and then you're dressed up like George Bush and you're live on television for eight minutes. You feel like a crazy person. You feel absolutely crazy. You're looking at yourself in the mirror and you're just like, ‘Who am I? What is this? Holy hell.’ ”

For a time he became a tabloid fixture. He remembers “navigating my first sort of public relationship, with January Jones, which was like learning by fire. What is the term? Trial by fire.” In a 2010 GQ article, when confronted with a question about rumors that he was dating Jennifer Aniston, he sarcastically responded that she should be so lucky. “And obviously I'm fucking joking, you know?” Sudeikis said. But back then, he treated interviews like improv—Yes, and—and that could create misunderstandings. Asked once on a podcast about what people tended to get wrong about him, Sudeikis responded, “That I was in a fraternity—or maybe that I would be.”

To that point, Hunt told me, “He's much less the assumed fraternity guy than you'd think.” But Hunt said he also understood where the impression came from: “I don't know where he learned it necessarily, whether it was from his parents, or his basketball coaches, but he exudes an easygoing confidence. And it's easy to hang with a guy like that. But some people are also like, ‘Fuck that guy,’ intrinsically.”

Shirt, $188, and ties (worn at waist), $125 each, by Polo Ralph Lauren. Pants, $255, by Aimé Leon Dore. Shoes, $782, by Alden. Socks, $15, by Smart Turnout. Watch, $10,200, by Cartier.

When he won the Golden Globe, Sudeikis gave a dazed speech while wearing a hoodie, sparking glee and speculation about his mental and physical states. “I was neither high nor heartbroken,” he said.

Shortly after Sudeikis and Wilde got together, near the end of his SNL run (he left the show in 2013), Wilde made a joke during a monologue that she read at a cabaret club about the two of them having sex “like Kenyan marathon runners,” and Sudeikis spent years answering questions about the joke. “The frustrating thing about that is that Olivia said that in a performance setting,” Sudeikis said. “It wasn't like she just was saying it glibly in an interview.” He described the experience of growing into celebrity, and confronting other people's misperceptions of him, as a disorienting one. “You're just being tossed into the situation and then trying to figure it out,” he said. The picture of him that was circulating wasn't exactly the one that he had of himself. But he didn't fight it, either. “You come to be thoughtful about it,” he said. “But also try to stay open to it. I don't ever want to be cynical.”

So he tried to stay open. But it wasn't until Ted Lasso that people really saw the side of him that comported with the way he saw himself. Last year, as it became clear that the show was a hit, he found himself answering, over and over, some version of the same question. The question would vary in its specifics, but the gist of it was always: How much do you and this character actually have in common? Sudeikis told me that over time, in response to people wondering about his exact relationship to Ted, he developed a few different evasive explanations. Ted, Sudeikis would say, was a little like Jason Sudeikis, but after two pints on an empty stomach. He was Sudeikis hanging on the side of a buddy's boat. He was Sudeikis, but on mushrooms. Sometimes, in more honest moments, he would say that Ted is the best version of himself. This, after all, is how art works: If it was just you, then it wouldn't really need to be art in the first place. And so Sudeikis learned to separate himself from Ted, to fudge the distance between art and artist.

Except, he said, after a while, every time he tried to wave off Ted, fellow castmates or old friends of his would correct him to say: “No.” They'd say: “No, that is you. That is you. That's not the best version of you.” It's not you on mushrooms, it's not you hanging off a boat, it's just…you. One of Sudeikis's friends, Marcus Mumford, who composed the music for the show, told me, “He is quite like Ted in lots of ways. He has a sort of burning optimism, but also a vulnerability, about him that I really admire.”

Hearing people say this, over and over again, Sudeikis said, “brought me to a very emotional space where, you know, a healthy dose of self-love was allowed to expand through my being and made me…” He trailed off for a moment. “When they're like, ‘No, that is you. That is you. That's not the best version of you.’ That's a very lovely thing to hear. I wish it on everybody who gets the opportunity to be or do anything in life and have someone have the chance to say, ‘Hey, that's you. That's you.’ ”

And if he's being honest, that's the way he feels about it too. “It's the closest thing I have to a tattoo,” Sudeikis said about Ted Lasso. “It's the most personal thing I've ever made.”

Sweater, $398, and shirt, $95, by Polo Ralph Lauren. Pants, $255, by Aimé Leon Dore.

On the first Saturday in June, Sudeikis flew with his children, Otis and Daisy, from London to New York, where he owns a house in Brooklyn. “Brooklyn is home,” he told me simply. While filming the first season of Ted Lasso, he'd had the house renovated—there was black mold to get rid of and other changes to make. “So Olivia and the kids had to rent a lovely apartment in Brooklyn Heights. But it's not home. It's someone else's home.” Saturday was the first time Sudeikis and his children had set foot in their own place in two years. “The kids darted in,” he said. “Last time Daisy was in that house, she slept in a crib. So now she has a new big bed. It was hilarious. I walked up there after like 15 minutes and both rooms were a mess.”

He and Wilde, he said, no longer share the house. They split up, according to Sudeikis, “in November 2020.” The end of their relationship was chronicled in a painful, public way in the tabloids after photos of Wilde holding hands with Harry Styles surfaced in January, setting off a flurry of conflicting timelines and explanations. Sudeikis said that even he didn't have total clarity about the end of the relationship just yet. “I'll have a better understanding of why in a year,” he said, “and an even better one in two, and an even greater one in five, and it'll go from being, you know, a book of my life to becoming a chapter to a paragraph to a line to a word to a doodle.” Right now he was just trying to figure out what he was supposed to take away, about himself, from what had happened. “That's an experience that you either learn from or make excuses about,” he said. “You take some responsibility for it, hold yourself accountable for what you do, but then also endeavor to learn something beyond the obvious from it.”

In the first season of Ted Lasso, the comic premise of the show is revealed to be a tragic one: Ted is in England, far from home, doing something he doesn't know how to do and probably shouldn't be doing at all, in order to give his failing marriage space to survive. When the character's wife and son visit, in the show's fifth episode, his wife tells him, “Every day I wake up hoping that I'll feel the way I felt in the beginning. But maybe that's just what marriage is, right?” It's a wrenching moment that also gives new meaning to the show: Ted Lasso's heart is big, but it can also be broken as violently and as easily as anyone else's. By the end of the season, Lasso is divorced and renegotiating his relationships with his now ex-wife and son.

The first season of Ted Lasso had already been written—had already aired—by the time Sudeikis found himself living some aspects of it in real life. “And yet one has nothing to do with the other,” Sudeikis told me. “That's the crazy thing. Everything that happened in season one was based on everything that happened prior to season one. Like, a lot of it three years prior. You know what I mean? The story's bigger than that, I hope. And anything I've gone through, other people have gone through. That's one of the nice things, right? So it's humbling in that way.”

And in fact, the seeds of Ted's heartbreak, Sudeikis said, went all the way back to a dinner he had with Wilde around 2015, during which she first encouraged him to explore whether Ted Lasso could be more than just a bit on NBC. “It was there, the night at dinner, when Olivia was like, ‘You should do it as a show,’ ” he said. They got to talking about it. Sudeikis asked why Ted Lasso would move in the first place, to coach a team he had no real reason to coach: “ ‘Okay, but why would he take this job? Why would a guy at this age take this job to leave? Maybe he's having marital strife. Maybe things aren't good back home, so he needs space.’ And I just riffed it at dinner in 2015 or whenever, late 2014. But it had to be that way. That's what the show is about.”

I said to Sudeikis that I thought that while it was common for artists to put a lot of their lives into their art, it was less common that they end up living aspects of the art in their lives, after the fact.

“I wonder if that's true,” he replied. ��I mean, isn't that just a little bit of what Oprah was telling us for years and years? You know, manifestation? Power of thought? That's The Secret in reverse, you know?”

But…if we're being honest, is that a thing you wanted to manifest?

“No. No. But, again, it isn't that. It wasn't that. And again, that's just me knowing the details of it. Like, that's just me knowing where it comes from, where any of it comes from.”

But he acknowledged it had been a hard year. Not necessarily a bad one, but a hard one. “I think it was really neat,” he said. “I think if you have the opportunity to hit a rock bottom, however you define that, you can become 412 bones or you can land like an Avenger. I personally have chosen to land like an Avenger.”

Is that easier said than done? To land like an Avenger?

“I don't know. It's just how I landed. It doesn't mean when you blast back up you're not going to run into a bunch of shit and have to, you know, fight things to get back to the heights that you were at, but I'd take that over 412 bones anytime.”

He paused, then continued: “But there is power in creating 412 bones! Because we all know that a bone, up to a certain age, when it heals, it heals stronger. So, I mean, it's not to knock anybody that doesn't land like an Avenger. Because there's strength in that too.”

Shirt, $228, by Todd Snyder. Shorts, $480, by Bode. Watch, $6,300, by Cartier.

In February, Sudeikis attended the Golden Globes, which were being held remotely on Zoom. He had his misgivings about the event—the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which votes on the awards, had been in the news for a series of unflattering revelations about its organization, and also the show was taking place in the middle of the night in London. Tom Ford had sent over a suit for Sudeikis to wear, and he tried it on, in his flat in Notting Hill, but he felt ridiculous, there in the middle of the night, and so changed out of it and into a tie-dyed hoodie made by his sister's clothing company. “I wore that hoodie because I didn't wanna fucking wear the fucking top half of a Tom Ford suit,” he said. “I love Tom Ford suits. But it felt weird as shit.”

“With kids, knowing is half the battle. But adulthood is doing something about it. ‘I'm bad with names.’ ‘I'm always late.’… All right, so win the fucking battle by doing something about it!”

The rest of this story you know: Sudeikis ended up winning best actor for Ted Lasso and gave a dazed acceptance speech while wearing the hoodie, and this in turn sparked glee and speculation about his mental and physical states. For the record, “I was neither high nor heartbroken,” Sudeikis said. It was just late at night and he didn't want to wear a suit. “So yeah, off it came and it was like, ‘This is how I feel. I believe in moving forward.’ ”

Lately, Sudeikis told me, he had been trying to pay more attention to how he actually felt about any given thing, to all the various signs and omens that present themselves to a person during the course of living their life. Even in his past, he said, there were moments that were obvious in retrospect, in terms of what the universe was trying to tell him, messages he missed entirely at the time. In Vegas, where he was living with Cannon before Saturday Night Live, he developed alopecia and his hair stopped growing, and he didn't know why. And then, at the end of his 30s, “during the nine months before Otis was born and the nine months after he was born,” Sudeikis developed extremely painful sciatica. “I went and got an MRI and was like, ‘Oh, yeah, the jelly doughnut in my L4, L5, is squirting out and touching a nerve.’ ” But why? When he had his second child, this didn't happen at all. So: why?

“I mean, since last November,” Sudeikis said, “the joke that feels more like a parable to me is a guy is sitting at home watching TV and the news breaks in to say flash flood warning. About an hour later he goes outside on his porch and he sees that the whole street is flooded.” You've probably heard the rest of this joke before: While the guy is praying to God for some kind of help, a truck, a boat, and a chopper come by, offering aid, which the guy turns down. God'll provide, he says. Sudeikis finished the joke: “Two hours after that, he's in heaven. He's dead. He says, ‘God, what's up, man? You didn't help me.’ God goes, ‘What do you mean, man? I sent you a pickup truck, I sent you a speedboat, I sent you a helicopter.’ ” So, Sudeikis said, “you can't tell me that hair falling out of my head wasn't—I don't know if it was the speedboat or the pickup truck or the helicopter, but yeah, man, it all comes home to roost. What you resist persists.”

He went on. “That's why I had sciatica,” he said. “That's the speedboat. That was like: ‘Hey, you gotta take a look at your stuff.’ ”

And this is another way that Sudeikis and Ted Lasso are alike, because both are always learning and relearning this lesson, which is: Be curious. Both are philosophical men whose philosophies basically boil down to trying to live as decent a life as is possible. Not just for the sake of it but because to be curious—to find out something new about yourself or someone else—is to be empowered. “I don't know if you remember G.I. Joe growing up,” Sudeikis said, “but they would always end it with a little saying: ‘Oh, now I know.’ ‘Don't put a fork in the outlet.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because you could get hurt.’ ‘Oh, now I know.’ And then somebody would say, ‘And knowing is half the battle.’ And I agree with that—with kids, knowing is half the battle. But adulthood is doing something about it. That's the other half. ‘I'm bad with names.’ ‘I'm always late.’ Oh! Well, knowing is half the battle. All right, so win the fucking battle by doing something about it! Get better at names. Show up five minutes early, make it a point to do it. So, I'm still learning these things. But hopefully I've got plenty of time to do something about it.”

Sudeikis smiled a little wearily: “I mean, at the end of that joke, the guy still got to go to heaven, you know?”

Zach Baron is GQ's senior staff writer.

A version of this story originally appeared in the August 2021 issue with the title "Jason Sudeikis Paints His Masterpiece."

PRODUCTION CREDITS:

Photographs by Hill & Aubrey

Styled by Michael Darlington

Grooming by Nicky Austin

Tailoring by Nafisa Tosh

Set design by Hella Keck

Produced by Ragi Dholakia Productions

[aion-rsa]

The Legacy of Batman: Tom King, Kevin Conroy, and Scott Snyder on the Dark Knight

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This year, we talked to Tom King, Kevin Conroy, Bruce Timm, Scott Snyder, Jock, and Pete Tomasi about why Batman still matters.

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It all began with two shots in the dark, pearls spilling onto the blood-soaked cement. No, it all started when the bat crashed through the window. Actually, it was when the boy fell into the cave. Maybe it was that hostile takeover at Apex Chemicals? Dozens of stories have shaped the legend of the Batman over his 80-year history, tales that have made the Caped Crusader arguably the most iconic character in comic book history, rivaled only by Superman.

When Bill Finger and Bob Kane put pen and pencil to paper for 1939's Detective Comics #27, they had no way of knowing that they were creating a new American myth that would captivate readers and movie audiences for decades to come. They certainly didn't expect their first Batman adventure, "The Case of the Chemical Syndicate," to spawn 973 more issues of Detective Comics, let alone become a blockbuster franchise featuring movies, TV series, video games, and McDonald's Happy Meals. 

But what bigger testament to the long-lasting appeal of Batman than March’s Detective Comics #1000, written and drawn by some of the best creators in the business? The giant-sized, 96-page issue featured stories by legends such as as Dennis O'Neil, Neal Adams, Steve Epting, Christopher Priest, Jim Lee, Kelley Jones, Paul Dini, Brian Michael Bendis, Warren Ellis, and Geoff Johns as well as the current custodians of the Bat-mythos -- Tom King, Tony S. Daniel, Peter J. Tomasi, Doug Mahnke, Joelle Jones, Scott Snyder, and Greg Capullo. And that's not even including the excellent covers by Jim Steranko, Bernie Wrightson, Bruce Timm, Frank Miller, Jock, Tim Sale, and more. 

Batman is only the second DC superhero to reach such a massive milestone, the other being the Man of Steel. What is it about this character hellbent on avenging the death of his parents night after night that has kept him at the forefront of our pop culture?

“I think what makes him deeply enduring is that it’s a really primal folk tale,” Scott Snyder, who’s been writing Batman stories since 2011, says. “It’s a story about a boy who loses everything and turns that loss into fuel to make sure that what happened to him never happens to anybody else.”

While most of us aren't billionaire playboys with the resources to fight crime on a global (and sometimes cosmic) level, we understand pain, both emotional and physical, and a need to rise above it, even if we can't always do that. We sympathize with Bruce's biggest regret -- if only he hadn't made his parents take him to see that Zorro movie; if only he hadn't been frightened by the opera; if only he'd been braver and faster as the thug pulled the trigger. For Bruce, his crusade to stop evildoers comes down to replaying that single fateful moment over and over again and making possible a different outcome.

Yet, Batman perseveres despite all of this pain, which is why people flock to the character, according to Snyder. 

"It's a story of triumph over your worst fears, worst tragedy, and about taking your loss and turning it into a win," the writer says. "There's just this kind of power to him that speaks to our own potential, the human potential, even when we're challenged by things that seem insurmountably horrible." 

Snyder has spent the better part of a decade showcasing Batman as a symbol of hope for the citizens of Gotham, putting him through the ringer, reopening old wounds while also making new ones -- the writer even killed the hero off at one point -- just so that he can pick himself up again and keep fighting. 

But the character isn't driven solely by tragedy. Who could hang with a downer like that for 80 years? 

"There are the fun elements, of course, that are similar to James Bond, like the gadgets, and the cars, and the planes, and just the cool factor of his costume."

Tom King, who recently wrapped up an 85-issue run on Batman and currently has a Batman/Catwoman miniseries in the works, looks back to the character's real-life point of origin as the reason he has stood the test of time.

"You have to go back to the moment of creation with him. You've got [Bob Kane and Bill Finger], the children of immigrants, so we're like, what, 1938, '39, we're in Manhattan. And at that time, I mean, go back and look at the pictures, Batman was created like 20 blocks from Madison Square Garden where they had a Nazi rally that attracted a hundred thousand people. They were marching in the streets."

These tumultuous times shaped the fabric of Batman, according to King.

"[Kane and Finger] were living here and their literal cousins and grandparents were getting killed in Europe, right? And they created something uniquely American. Batman succeeds because there's something genuinely beautifully American about it."

According to Batman: The Animated Series voice actor Kevin Conroy, Batman’s continued popularity goes back to something primal. To the classically trained actor who was immortalized as the voice of Batman in the ‘90s cartoon, the Caped Crusader is a modern retelling of myths and stories humans have been passing down for thousands of years.

“He’s such a theatrical character,” Conroy says, admitting he was at first hesitant to audition for the role. At the time, he was a theater actor who'd never done an animated role. But when he read the script, the character clicked. Conroy recognized this story. “They were absolutely right to cast a theater actor, especially one with a classical background, because this is Shakespeare. They’re doing high drama. Batman is Achilles. He’s Orestes. He’s Hamlet.”

The tragic Greek character Orestes, in particular, was on Conroy’s mind when playing Batman. By that point, he’d performed several plays as Orestes, a son who avenges his father’s murder and goes mad because of it. By the end of the story, Orestes has gone through hell and back because of his thirst for vengeance. Naturally, Conroy brought that familiarity with Orestes to his portrayal of Batman.

“He’s a Homeric hero,” Conroy says of the Caped Crusader. “I think of it often when I’m doing Batman because Orestes is haunted by the Furies. He descends into hell. He comes back. He’s resurrected at the end, and I think so often, this is a very Orestial-like journey that Bruce Wayne goes on. His Furies are the memory of his parents’ murder. It haunts him through his life. It’s transformed him."

Conroy calls Batman a “classic character.” Like Orestes before him, Batman has become the protagonist of our very own mythology.

“He’s come out of such a fire and instead of letting life crush him, he turns that metamorphosis into something even greater than himself,” Conroy says. “They’ve been telling that story for thousands of years in different cultures, and this is our culture’s way of telling those stories, and I think they’re just as valid.”

Bruce Timm, who co-created Batman: The Animated Series and designed the show's iconic Art Deco aesthetic, is unsurprisingly most taken by Batman's look. 

"I just think Batman looks great," Timm says during our chat at NYCC in 2018. "He's got the best costume motif in comics. Nothing comes close. He's dark, sexy, and broody. It's really intoxicating and compelling in a way that almost no other in comics can come close to it."

He also admires the durability of the character through the different eras of comics, from the Golden Age, to the sillier '50s and '60s stories of the Comics Code era, to the darker takes we're more accustomed to today. 

"It is amazing to me how flexible he is as a character. That you could have something as silly as the Adam West show or the old '50s comics, and then you have stuff like Neal Adams and Frank Miller and what we did. And you know, even more extreme, [Grant Morrison and Dave McKean's graphic novel] Arkham Asylum and things like that. And yet their all kind of the same character. It's like that character can encompass all of those different things. He can do space aliens and serial killers, you know? Yet, it kind of works."

This flexibility has allowed plenty of writers and artists to experiment with the Dark Knight, creating different versions of the character over the years. There really isn't a definitive take on Batman. You can love the Batusi, Bat-Mite, or Mr. Freeze's cool party and still be right on the money about the Caped Crusader. You'd be remiss to call the character stale. The guy has done it all.

"It's almost like he's a force of nature, in which stories can happen around him, and there's something primordial, maybe, about the character and the way he looks, as well," says veteran Batman artist Jock, who most recently worked on a seven-part miniseries with Snyder called The Batman Who Laughs. "You could put Batman in a new pose, and he'd still flourish, and I think those kinds of characters are very rare."

Peter J. Tomasi, who is currently writing Detective Comics, puts it best:

"He's a character who can work across all genres. Somehow, someway, he can simply fit into every story, be it a war story, a western, a love story, a comedic angle, sci-fi, horror, fantasy, you name it, and of course any detective story you can possibly imagine."

Superheroes won't always be at the top of our pop culture food chain. It's inevitable that many of the characters we love today will fade with future generations, just as the Shadow, Doc Savage, Zorro, and the Scarlet Pimpernel did. Will we still be talking about Batman in another 80 years? We may eventually embrace new forms of familiar myths, becoming obsessed with new idols. But only a fool would bet against a character who's survived as long as Batman has. Remember, the Batman always wins.

John Saavedra is an associate editor at Den of Geek. Read more of his work here. Follow him on Twitter @johnsjr9 and make sure to check him out on Twitch.

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[hunterinabrowncoat]

Hi! I'm sorry to bother you, but I saw you reblogged a post about the general election and I was wondering why you thought May funding more grammar schools was a bad thing? I've heard a lot from both sides of the argument, but i don't have much experience with the state sector (I've spent my life at private schools) and I just wanted to ask your opinion. Thanks!

Hi anon! You’re no bother at all, don’t be afraid to ask questions.

I mean really it’s quite a complex topic, cos you gotta look at every aspect of British secondary education and class divides, but here goes...

So I didn’t go to public school for most of my life either. I was educated until I was 16 and finished my GCSEs at a small, independent faith school. The fees weren’t expensive, they were based on income, and I didn’t get a fantastic education, nor was anything about that school to be described as “posh” or “rich”. But it was a private school nonetheless.

There were lots of things that were terrible about this school, but on the whole I’m incredibly grateful for my education. I was educated in a very relaxed environment, in classes no larger than 15 at most (usually around 5-10 students), by teachers who knew me personally and honestly, actually cared about my well being.

I know for a fact I would not be able to say the same thing had gone to a comp school. Not least because, no matter how lucky I got with regards to having caring teachers, or stellar teaching, the law simply wouldn’t allow for most of the things I loved about my education. State school class sizes regularly push 30, sometimes even 35. Because of large numbers, state school classes are split up into sets, with the brightest, highest achieving kids in set 1, and the lowest achieving in set 3 (some schools have set 4 I think? depending on how many kids they have, but I’m not 100% sure. It doesn’t really matter either way...). It can get pretty demoralizing for kids who don’t respond well to the ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach the system provides.

A brief history of grammar schools goes something like this:

They’ve existed since the 1600s, but they really became what they are today during the 1940s when education beyond the age of 14 became free. There were two types of schools for secondary education (age 11-16/High School) which consisted of grammar schools and secondary modern schools.

Grammar schools focused on academic subjects, with the intention that pupils would go on to University, whereas secondary modern schools focused on getting children prepared for the workforce in trade. Here, the 11+ was introduced. The 11+ is an exam sat by pupils when they’re 11 years old, which determines if they’re intelligent enough to be educated at a grammar school.

In the 60s, the Labour Party was adamant that this system just furthered class divisions, so began phasing out grammar schools, and introducing Comprehensive Schools, which educate everyone at secondary school age. Aaand voila! That’s pretty much the education system we have for secondary school now. Everybody has a local comp. ...but they’re usually pretty undesirable places.

So... grammar schools, class, and the 11+

As well as being privately educated, I also happen to have grown up one street away from one of only a handful remaining grammar schools in the UK, where my brother went to sixth-form (16-18yrs education, which at the time wasn’t compulsory), so I was blissfully unaware until a few years ago that they’re almost extinct in the UK.

And I mean I joked about it a lot as a teen, but the class difference has always been painstakingly obvious. Between the hours of 8-9am and 3-4pm our street would always fill up with really nice, expensive cars, because parents would park in our street to go pick up their kids from school. You could always tell which cars belonged to residents, and which belonged to parents, because nobody who lives on our street could afford a BMW. More to the point, nobody who could afford a BMW would live on our street!

And you only have to look next-door to see how class plays a part in making it into a grammar school. Right next to the grammar school is a prep school. A primary school literally designed to prepare children for entry into the grammar school. Who do you think gets accepted into that primary school? I can tell you it ain’t working class kids!

So the children who end up going to grammar schools are by no means more intelligent than those who go to comp. They’re just privileged enough to have had a very good (often private) education that helps them to pass the 11+. What usually happens is that parents pay private tutors to come prepare their kid for the exam from an early age, so that they’re far more likely to pass than a kid who’s come from comp education without tutoring, despite not necessarily being any more intelligent.

So in conclusion...?

Essentially, grammar schools are a remnant of an old education system that in theory separated the higher and lower achieving students, but in practice all it really does is allow children from more privileged background access to even more privilege through a better education.

I mean essentially what it boils down to with education, is that same thing that everything comes down to under capitalism:

Whatever the state provides - hell, whatever anyone provides - if you pay lots of money, you can get a better version.

Bought an event ticket? If you pay lots more money, you can skip all of the queues, get front row seats, and spend quality time with the celebs. Need a medical procedure? If you pay lots more money, you can skip all the waiting lists and go to private hospital to get it done immediately, by people who have the time to actually deliver quality patient care. Want an education? If you pay lots more money, you can get one-on-one quality tutoring or teaching from the most highly educated people around, and guarantee that you’ll get into University.

Rich people always get better things, and everybody else is always left with the “standard” which in the case of state-funded things are underfunded, understaffed, underqualified or sub-par. Rich people get better; not because they’re more deserving, or more intelligent, or more qualified. They’ve just been able to pay for more access to better resources that enable them to climb higher.

Political party stances

So currently there is a ban on grammar schools, meaning that no more grammar schools can be opened or set up. What Theresa May wants to do is repeal that ban, and fund 70,000 new places in 140 new schools with £320million, and she’s stipulated that those schools will be free to be selective. ie. they’ll be publicly funding the opening of new grammar schools.

Personally, I don’t care for grammar schools, for all of the reasons listed above. However, I’m not going to be campaigning for their imminent closure anytime soon. They’re a symptom of a system of elitism under capitalism that I don’t support, and honestly I’ve got bigger concerns about education, and about capitalism and elitism on my mind, to be honest.

However, I am adamantly opposed to May’s proposal, which would use public money to fund the set up of yet more grammar schools.

We know the system doesn’t work. All of the evidence points to the fact that they don’t do much for working class kids. They continue to serve an elitist system whereby people with more money get better education.

More money > better education > top university > better paying jobs > more money.

The government should be funding comprehensive schools better, so that the education which everyone has access to is a better quality education. That’s not going to happen unless teachers are paid better, the education and training of teachers is funded better, the class sizes are smaller, and the system shifts to make room for children who don’t fit this ridiculous ‘one size fits all’ approach we currently have.

Furthermore, I can’t say that I trust the education system to the Tory party’s hands at all (although admittedly there isn’t really anything I can think of to be honest that I would trust them with!). Their track record with education is honestly appalling - just look at the absolute joke that was Michael Gove as Education Secretary, and then Nicky Morgan. Neither of them have ever had any experience in education aside from being a child in school, and neither of them have ever listened to what teachers have had to say about the effects of legislation. They’re slashing funding for the arts, placing priority on STEM subjects over everything else, increasing the stress on teachers through horrendous amounts of paperwork required, increasing the class sizes, and increasing the number of tests that children take, even at primary age and foundation phase.

Schools in impoverished areas always receive less funding, thus are unable to provide a better quality education due simply to a lack of resources. And thanks to our ridiculous league table system, all of the emphasis in schools is put on churning out as many GCSEs grade C and above as is humanly possible, rather than actually providing a holistic and quality education. So schools are often forced into demoralizing cycles where they don’t produce enough A*-C GCSE results, receive less funding, have less means to provide a good education, get less A*-C redults etc. etc.

Funding more grammar schools isn’t going to change that. It’s only going to widen the gap between working class kids and middle and upper class kids, who have parents with enough money to afford better opportunities for them.

TLDR;

Grammar schools in theory help kids from low-income backgrounds get better educations, but in practice they really don’t. Public funding should focus on making state education better, through more funding and better legislation, rather than pumping money into an elitist system that only serves to continue the trend of rich kids being high achievers, and poor kids being low achievers, because they’re not given the same opportunities. The Tories also have terrible policy on education generally, but this is a new low.

[awkwardnessandbaseball]

IT’S OFFICIAL

I’m finally on AO3 and can finally post my work there!

Not Enough? You Are...Everything A look inside Jim Halpert's mind as he pines over, misses, dates, and eventually marries Pam Beesly. A mostly canon re-telling of the full series through Jim's eyes (with certain snippets through Pam's eyes as well)

Here is an updated list of links:

AO3|FF|MTT

PLEASE read, review, comment, etc.

I’ll also post Chapter One (Season One) under the cut.

Also, please comment here or on any of the sites linked above with any additional scenes or full episodes you’d like to see done this way. I would love to do any Jim/Pam scenes from someone else’s POV, or really any scene at all from the POV of any character! This story was REALLY fun for me to do :)

Jim had never intended to fall in love with the girl who sat across from him every day. He had never intended to date anyone from work, so when he found himself with a crush on a girl he had no choice but to stare at for a good portion of the day, he was almost grateful she was engaged.

Almost.

"So, are you going to Angela's cat party?" she's asking him, and he laughs because the idea of a cat party is absurd, but also because he always laughs when he talks to her. Everything seems funny when she says it, and he's fairly certain he's never laughed so much in his life as he does from that spot at reception, with his hands hanging over the desk, almost touching hers.

And when Dwight pulls out the Jell-O encased stapler and she laughs like that, it's almost more than his heart can take. If she didn't laugh like that - a hiccup-y laugh that means he knows he's caught her off guard, done something extraordinary - he might have stopped pranking Dwight ages ago. But if it makes her laugh, he'll keep doing it forever. He loves her laugh.

Shit. Jim is in trouble, because he is in deep. And he is in deep over a committed woman. And God, he'd never want her heart broken the way it would be if Roy left her, but he also knows that a jerk like Roy definitely doesn't deserve a girl like Pam. He knows it's dangerous to put a woman on a pedestal like that, but he also knows that Roy is literally The Worst ™ .

Well, except for maybe Dwight. But that's a whole different story.

But really, he knows Roy keeps her from socializing with her co-workers - and yeah, okay, maybe he's being a little selfish and obvious there, wanting her to go out for drinks and then bailing when Roy says she can't go, but he DOES like spending time with...some of the people from the office. He knows Roy doesn't appreciate her art - which is REALLY good, by the way. And if he doesn't appreciate her art, does he really appreciate her?

Okay, that's a stretch and he knows it. But he still wonders.

He tries to make conversation with Roy, tries to see what she sees in him. Maybe if he could make himself like Roy, he could make himself stop loving her. But Roy is not as chatty, not as bright and bubbly and friendly as Pam. And Roy does not want to talk to Jim. Ever.

And when Jim sees Pam leave the bathroom, clearly trying to hide the fact that she's been crying, he immediately wants to comfort her. He wants to go to her, hug her, tell her whatever happened, it's going to be okay. A tiny part of him hopes that it's about Roy, but that's stupid because he knows Roy is waiting for her outside in that dumpy old truck, that nothing between them could have possibly transpired in the last 10 minutes or so. Right?

But either way, the urge to comfort her is so strong, but he knows that's inappropriate. So instead he just casually asks her about her headache, and she awkwardly asks if he wants to walk out with her, and he's about to grab his coat and really try to savor these few moments completely alone with her…when a truck honks and suddenly she's back to reality, back to her fiance. And Jim is back to being alone, watching the girl he's in love with leave to go home with the man she's in love with - the one who isn't him.

He has learned, over time, to cherish the small moments. The moments when the office is bustling and he and Pam both have nothing to do but observe the madness. The times when he can stand at reception and laugh at Dwight's antics or Stanley's unforgiving attitude. He dangles his hands over the desk, inches away from her fingers, daring himself to grab her hand with his own. He never does, but God does he want to.

It's strange to see another face at the desk when Ryan takes over reception during the horrible, awkward Diversity Day antics. Jim walks over out of habit, feeling awkward once he arrives. He makes conversation with Ryan to ease the strange tension he's feeling. He's barely listening to what Ryan is saying, but then something grabs his attention.

"She's cute, right?"

Cute? Cute doesn't begin to cover Pam Beesly. Pam is wonderful and smart, kind, open, and friendly. Pam is talented and-

"Yeah, but, y'know, she's engaged."

He tries to play it cool, but inside he is screaming. Now the temp is interested in her, too? He knows she'd never go for Ryan, but then again, he certainly didn't see her with a guy like Roy when he found out she was-

"Oh I meant the...the girl in the sketch."

….oh. And Jim can breathe again. He mumbles something about her being hot and pretends to watch whatever Ryan has on the screen. He's already forgotten, more focused on the fact that he needs to stop being jealous over a girl that isn't even his.

Later, he sneaks back into the conference room, feeling defeated over the loss of his biggest client - to Dwight of all people - and breathes a small sigh of relief that the seat next to Pam is still open. It's a small thing, being able to sit next to her. But in another life, she'd comfort him after his rough day, tell him he could go out and get an even bigger client tomorrow. He's imagining this, not listening to a word Michael is saying, when he feels a soft pressure on his shoulder. He turns, and sees her curls very close to his face. He can smell her shampoo. She's leaning on him. She's fallen asleep on his shoulder.

And now he's seeing them curled up on the couch, watching a movie. Seeing a life where Pam falls asleep on his shoulder all the time - she seems the type to fall asleep and then wake up and ask when they're going to bed. And he's hearing her voice, sleepy and wistful, and he's carrying her upstairs-

And suddenly everyone is leaving the conference room. And he waits, cherishing this moment, trying to get back to his imagined reality before the real world comes crashing down around him. He smiles as he wakes her. He whispers softly to her, the same way he imagines he'd wake her up if she had fallen asleep on the couch. She wakes up and walks out of the room with barely a word.

It's the first time he's ever sad to see the end of a Michael Meeting.

"Uhhhhh, not a bad day," he tells the crew. The champagne celebration long forgotten, he knows he's going to remember this day for a long time.

It actually kind of amazes Jim sometimes that no one has called him out for his time at reception. He tries to do it subtly, casually, when no one is really looking that way, but then someone interrupts them and he feels caught, cornered. Even if the conversation is innocent and casual, he feels like he should be in trouble for being at reception, talking to Pam.

He also finds it hard to hide his annoyance at the constant interruptions. He knows it's wrong to be annoyed, because really, he's not supposed to be there anyway - for a multitude of reasons - but he can't help but roll his eyes when Michael interrupts a sentence with some offensive impression or random question for Pam.

But when Michael interrupts one of his favorite moments of the day to ask him to do some menial task, Jim can't help but roll his eyes. He barely listens to whatever it is Michael wants him to do and instead offers an immediate escape route for himself: "Dwight."

He does not, however, anticipate the consequences of his actions. The power that goes to Dwight's head over the smallest task is amazing. He and Pam decide to confront the beast together. They enter his lair - his workspace, if you will - and face him side-by-side. It does not go well.

The good news is that now he has another excuse to talk to Pam as they make up - er, properly notate… - diseases together.

"Don't write Ebola or Mad Cow Disease," he warns her, and he laughs at her surprised face. She thinks he doesn't want her writing anything false, making a joke out of this nonsense Dwight has presented them with? Pshaw, she should know him better. "Because I'm suffering from both," he adds, and she finally laughs, relief evident in her smile. They spend a good chunk of the day - time he should be spending making sales calls - creating fake names.

"Spontaneous Dento-Hydroplosion," he suggests, with a look of confidence. He relishes in the look she gives him in return, clearly impressed with his idea. He sticks that look into the compartment in his brain of Things He Loves About Pam.

Later, another interruption when he is just trying to spend some time with his girl- erm, best friend. This time, from Dwight. He barely listens, but one thing sticks out in the list of false diseases Dwight is reading:

"Killer nano robots?"

"It's an epidemic," Pam responds. And it's his turn to be impressed.

As payback for this interruption - and, of course, for just generally being a jerk to the whole office - he locks Dwight in his workspace. Dwight calls from inside the room and Jim is humoring him until, oh thank God, there she is. The extension number for the reception desk pops up on his phone. And with Dwight yelling in the background, they have a meaningless conversation, where he can picture her face while not even looking at her. And he know it was just a prank on Dwight, that she's just being silly, but he'll always take any excuse to talk to her that he can get his hands on.

Of course, Dwight hands him another "talk to Pam ALL DAY" gift the day he asks for an alliance. The downsizing rumors haven't really bothered Jim all this time. He does his job. He arrives on time, never leaves early. He hardly ever calls off. He tries his best to stay under the radar, not doing so well as to be named Salesman of the Month, ahem, but doing well enough to get by. And he's competent enough that Michael seems to always want to give him all of these tasks, despite the fact that he never wants to take them on.

And maybe, on the off-chance that he did get let go, he could actually move on with his life and stop thinking about the girl at reception that he had to see day in and day out for all these years.

And yet, he spends his time in this alliance with Dwight, talking with that very girl. He has an excuse, as far as Dwight is concerned anyway.

"There may be chatting and giggling and you just gotta pretend to ignore it, wipe it away," he's telling Dwight. And he buys it. So now he can just sit at reception and talk to Pam about absolutely nothing, and someone will back him up if he's ever asked why.

When Jim pranks Dwight alone, it's pretty good. He's come up with some insanely creative ideas, some more subtle than others. But when Jim and Pam combine forces and prank Dwight together, they're unstoppable. By midday, they've got Dwight in a box in the warehouse, listening to pretend phone calls that Pam is making about the downsizing.

They work so well together, and he can't help but love her even more whenever they do stuff like this together.

"She's...so...great," he hears himself tell the crew during an interview session. At this point, they've all gotta know how he's feeling. Of everyone in this office, that crew has to know. Michael is oblivious to everything, and everyone else there is so absorbed in their own stuff, there's no way they've noticed. They're also nosy - unapologetically so - so if they'd noticed his constant visits to reception, one of them would have questioned him about it ages ago.

But the camera crew, they know. They see the look on his face when she walks in, see the tension whenever Roy comes upstairs. They see everything; it's their job. And maybe it should occur to him that someday, this will all be aired for the entire world to see, but at that point, he'll hopefully be long gone, the girl at reception long forgotten.

His real fantasy, of course, isn't that she's long forgotten, but that they're together. In this imagined future, she leaves Roy, comes to her senses, and he can finally tell her how he feels. He really, truly thinks there are times when she feels something, too. He also knows that she'd never give into any of those feelings while engaged to Roy. She's definitely not that type. And her feelings for Roy are real, he knows that, too. But the feelings she would have for him, he strongly suspects, would be much stronger. He tells himself on a daily basis that it will never happen, but he still holds out just a small shred of hope. Hope that, one day, when the camera crew finishes filming, however far into the future that may be, he'll be watching the final product with Pam by his side, and maybe their kids. Maybe a dog, too.

So he doesn't care when he slips up and says things that expose how he really feels about Pam. Not really.

The excitement of the final nail in the coffin on Dwight's alliance is killed immediately when Roy comes rushing in. Jim really is innocent, just playing a prank on an annoying workmate; he just got overly excited and affectionate with Pam. He'd been grabbing her hand to tell her how excited he was when suddenly the door slammed open and Roy was asking him if he was trying to cop a feel.

He's embarrassed, caught off guard. He's never had such a close call before, in all the times he's stood at that desk, so obviously flirting with her. He tries to explain, but of course Dwight is no help. Roy seems to back off once Pam explains that it's just office pranks.

He really should have been ready for that to happen eventually. But he usually stands on the opposite side of the desk. He's never had anything to worry about before.

But when he thinks of how her shampoo smells, how soft her hands are, he doesn't regret being that close to her. He doesn't, for one moment, wish he'd said his piece from the other side of that desk. Even if she hadn't stopped Roy and he'd come right across that desk and decked him square in the face, he doesn't think he would regret it.

The only reason he thinks twice about it is because Roy practically shoves Pam out the door. He knows Roy doesn't hit her; he knows Pam well enough that he'd be able to tell if something like that was going on, or at least he hopes so. But he does get rough, and Jim doesn't like that.

But, as always, there's nothing Jim can do. He's not her protector. He's just some guy, sitting at a desk, in love with the girl who sits across from him.

The day Michael makes them all bring gym clothes to change into just might be one of the most bizarre since he's started working at Dunder Mifflin. It starts off with Pam making a phone call about a toaster she'd received at her engagement party. Three years ago.

He's not happy that she's upset. He hates that she's upset about anything at all, ever. But he's a little happy that they still haven't set a date. How committed can Roy really be if he doesn't even want to set a date? He doubts Roy will do anything else when it comes to planning, so how hard is it for him to just pick a damn day? But again, Jim is a little happy that Roy is such a flake, just this once. It's bad enough pining after a girl with an engagement ring on her finger, reflecting in the bright fluorescent lights every day, reminding him that she's taken. But adding a wedding ring to that, making her Mrs. Pamela Anderson...well, that would be too much. All jokes about the name aside, it would be too much.

If they ever do set a date, he really might lose his mind, as if he hasn't already.

So, maybe he sounds a little smug when he talks about Pam needing to return something that was an engagement gift. But that's only because he really believes they'll never get married. She'll come to her senses. Even if she doesn't end up with him, she can't end up with a guy like Roy.

She just can't.

He knows it's dumb to be so competitive against Roy in this dumb game of basketball. At least he has the excuse of not wanting to work on Saturday. And honestly, if Roy and Pam hadn't started making out right next to him, maybe he wouldn't have gotten quite so competitive on the court. He tries to get Michael to let him guard Roy, but Michael is being Michael and won't hear it. Which is a shame because he has some choice words ringing in his ears that he'd love to get back at Roy for, suddenly:

"Tip it my way or you're sleeping in the car."

Still, Jim hears Pam's tiny little "Woop!" when he scores. And he loves that she's cheering for him. He loves it more because they both know she shouldn't be. After the close call at the desk, especially. But she cheers him on anyway, and he plays all the better for it. And when Michael finally gives in, lets him guard Roy, he plays better than he has since high school. He's blocking, stealing, shooting, scoring. He knows basketball isn't the way to Pam's heart, but it sure can't hurt to show her that he's better than Roy at something.

When Roy elbows him in the face, he feels like maybe it's karma. Like he deserves it for loving Roy's fiance, for trying to impress her. He keeps playing, but it's with a little less drama, a little less flair. A little less trying to impress Pam.

And he's excited his team wins, disappointed that Michael ruins it by being his usual self and now he'll have to come in on Saturday. But he's mostly excited that he actually is better than Roy at something. He's excited that Pam cheered for him. That she was impressed with more than just his pranks on Dwight. That she smiled at him while he played.

And now he's seeing her at one of his pickup games with his buddies. There's a hoop down the street and sometimes they'll play on an odd weekday holiday when they're all off with no plans. And he's imagining Pam sitting with all of the other wives and girlfriends, rolling their eyes at this group of grown men, playing basketball on their day off. And she's smiling at him in the same way, and they're remembering this moment right now, when he's just wiped the floor with the guy she was supposed to marry. And it's like this little inside joke-

But it's not real. She's really engaged to Roy and she's really leaving with him, talking about getting him into a tub. And Jim is really, really disappointed in that reality.

When a cute girl enters the office a few days later, he shouldn't be at all surprised by the ruckus it causes. He should know by now that anything with a slim figure and nice eyes will get Michael Scott's weirdest side to come out.

Still, he doesn't really see the big deal. She's just a girl. (Of course, he guesses, to some people, Pam is probably just a girl, too).

He wonders if the irony of Roy asking him what his type is will ever be humorous. He wonders if it's a moment he'll look back on and say, "See Pam? See the way I looked at your before I answered? And you didn't even notice!" or if he'll watch that moment alone, or with some other girl, and think about how weird it was for the fiance of the girl he was in love with to ask him what kind of girls he was interested in.

He wonders if he'll ever stop feeling weird about his awkward answer: "Moms."

He doesn't have to wonder if he'll ever stop hating Roy, though. That's a definite yes. Everytime Roy opens his mouth, Jim hates him more and more.

"We're not dating, we're engaged," and she's gone. He feels awful for Pam, truly. He feels awful that she's been with this guy for so long - high school sweethearts? He feels like maybe, just maybe, if she went on just one other date with one other guy, maybe she would realize that Roy isn't normal. Roy isn't the standard for dating. Normal guys, guys who care about the women they're with, don't make comments about other girls in front of them. They set wedding dates soon after proposing and then they stick with those dates. Normal guys, guys who are really in love with the person they're with, want to get married as soon as possible so that the rest of their lives can begin.

Right?

Still, after a day of antics, a day of awkwardness, a day which included Pam being tickled by Roy on Jim's own desk, Jim is pretty frustrated. So he asks Katie out. Not because he thinks she'll be the solution to his problems. But because she is pretty, and she's nice, and she took a chance coming into this office. And she put up with a lot of crap from Jim's weird co-workers, so he's gotta give her that; she's tough.

And maybe it's wrong for him to ask someone out to distract himself from his real life, but he can't help it. And maybe he's hoping that Katie will be The One. That she'll finally get his mind off of the engaged girl at reception.

But when he sees that tiny twinge of jealousy in Pam's eyes when he tells her he's going out with Katie this weekend, he knows that will never be the case. He still hopes he'll end up wrong, but he knows that little bit of jealousy has just reignited every feeling he's ever had for Pam. That bit of jealousy has kickstarted his hope that maybe, just maybe, he's got a chance.

[cynthiadshaw]

What’s the Most Important Lesson You’ve Learned Along Your Journey?

Every twist in our story, challenge we face, and obstacle we overcome is an important part of our story.  These difficulties make us stronger and wiser and prepare us for what’s ahead.  As we grow and succeed we may imagine that soon the challenges will fade away, but in our conversations with business owners, artists, creatives, academics, and others we have learned that the most common experience is that challenges never go away – instead they get more complex as we grow and succeed.  Our ability to to thrive therefore depends heavily on our ability to learn from our experiences and so we are asking some of the city’s best and brightest: What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned along your journey?

A. J. Legrand | Artist

@wafflesweekly

I guess in the journey of life—well I think it’s relevant to the artistic journey, as well—I think it’s important to remember that it isn’t a sprint, but rather a feat of endurance, if you’re really going to create your best work—or live your best life.

Generally speaking, I think artists improve with time. As artists age and continue to create and continue to become more aware of themselves and the world around them, I think the art improves.

I would say the same of all humans too—the more awareness, the more a person is able to contribute to the world and the lives of others.

So, stick around. Don’t rush. Enjoy the process. Don’t waste your one life.

I’m sure that your best is yet to come.

@a.j.legrand ajlegrand.com Merrick White | Blogger and clothing designer

The best way to learn is to just jump in and figure it out!

@merricksart merricksart.com

  Antoine Johnson | IT professional and Co-host of Unspokn Konversation Podcast

Consistency is the only way to accomplish sustainable success.

@antoine_da_source @unspoknkonversation unspoknkonversation.com podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/unspokn-konversation/id1403657527

  Lindsay Robison | Fashion Influencer

The most important advise I have would be to ignore comments to do what you love & be you, because at the end of the day it’s your life & no one can change that! Be happy & be authentic.

@linkxoxo @Linkxoxo Facebook – Lindsay Robison

  Clint Palmer Jr. | Actor | Model & Security Lead

KJW Photography

The most important lesson I’ve learned so far is patience and to accept being told No. Cause 1 no could lead to your next big opportunity in film or Modeling.

@ClintonPalmerJr @ClintonPalmerJr

  De’Yara “”Buttagoharder”” Hardy |  Rapper/Singer/Writer/Actress/Creative Video Director/Stylist/Entrepreneur 

The most important lesson (s) that I’ve learned thus far, is to not rush or get discouraged by the process. I believe that any idle time you’re allowed, should be used to perfect your craft , educate yourself and strive to be greater. Be consistent. We are all unique individuals, embrace your imperfections and don’t ever think you’re not good enough. Control what you can and don’t stress about what you can’t. You will never please everyone, so do what feels right to you, you’ll be much happier.

@Buttagoharder buttagoharder.com

  Josh Butler | Athlete & videographer

The most important lesson that I’ve learned in my journey so far is to never give up and try your best to keep a positive mindset. Being able to have self motivation to persevere through the toughest situations in order to achieve your goals and beyond.

@joshbutlertv @JoshButlerTv

  Kristin Djurdjulov | Cheerdrop Owner & Designer

Every day seems to teach me a new lesson or dispel one of my beliefs! One of the biggest lessons so far is learning how to stop comparing myself and the state of my business to others and give myself more grace. I follow and have had the pleasure of meeting some super talented designers and business owners and along the way…I have been every shade of green with envy and comparison which has only hindered my progress and positivity. The comparison track playing in my head repeats “they have thousands of followers and I barely have any, they have been more successful in a shorter timeframe, they have a better story than mine, they are selling more, etc.” I have had to consciously stop looking at their work and posts so that I can focus on seeing the beauty of my own. There is most certainly a place for everyone to succeed and everyone’s pace and circumstances are different. I am sweetly reminded with every new customer I meet and every sale I am fortunate to get that the right people are finding my work at exactly the right time.

@cheerdropjewelry @cheerdropjewelry etsy.com/shop/cheerdrop Rene Hernandez | The Organic Gangster, Certified Personal Trainer

You can’t do it all by yourself!

@dallasthenics on all social media platforms @organic.gangster

  Dae | Recording Artist

The most important life lesson for me is knowing that whatever is meant to happen will happen on Gods timing. We all have a purpose and nobody can rush your process… not in how you find that purpose and neither in how you finish.

soundcloud.com/daetimemusic @daetime.tv

  Mayra Leon | dance fitness instructor/ wellness coach

I think the biggest lesson I have learned in this journey is that every challenge is made to make me stronger. Sometimes we ask God for greatness and with greatness comes great challenges. So I think that every challenge comes to make you stronger and builds you’re character. Along with patience, and tolerance because in my buissness you need a lot of that.

@mayras_fitjourney

Email: mayrasfitjourney@gmail.com

Danny Hernandez | Contractor & Painter/Remodeler

Something I’ve learned from working in the painting business is my love for transformation. I love arriving at a location and getting inspired to transform something that may seem ordinary into something extraordinary by simply changing the color. I have also learned the importance of communication with your clients and team members. In a small business everyone plays a big role in getting things done, so it is important to to have great communication both w our employers and our employees.

@Dna.painting

 Cristina Toledo | Paloma Accessories Co

@monicasalazarphotography

The most important lesson I’ve learned in my journey so far is to trust myself and to be confident in the decisions I make. I tend to be indecisive at times. With that said, this journey has taught me to be confident in the decisions I make, from branding to choosing the right pair of earrings for my followers. I’ve always believed that in order for me to start a small fashion/accessory business I had to have the “”fashion background”” or merchandising degree. That’s definitely not the case in my experience! Take a good look at trailblazer/elite celeb stylist Rachel Zoe, she majored in sociology and psychology. Hillary Kerr, majored in journalism at NYU and she is now the co-founder of Who What Wear and launched Clique Media Group in 2006. Accessories are my passion! It’s almost like a sixth sense. It truly drives me and gets me excited!

@palomaaccessoriesco

Kenndrea James | Licensed Hairstylist & Extension Specialist

The most important thing I’ve learned in my journey is to just do what makes you happy. In a profession like mine there’s so much that you can do. I love extensions, I love HEALTHY HAIR, & I love Big Hair so that’s what I do. I’m looking forward to growing and taking over the Dfw One Strand at a Time.

@iamdreathestylist @DtHextensions @DreastotalHair @DreasTotalHair

Michael and Nette Bolden | Owners of Gigi’s Cupcakes | Mansfield

Be patient. Everything is coming together. Whatever you are waiting for is on its way to you.

gigiscupcakesusa.olo.express/menu/gigis-cupcakes-mansfield gigiscupcakesusa.com

 Ernesto Baez | Owner of Baez Maintenance Services  Office Cleaning & Janitorial Services

@Soapsterz_shop

In my short but fast uprising journey, I have encountered many lessons. The one that stuck out the most is that you must not settle for what you think is enough and no matter how much you dream of something with no actions it will not become a reality. You have to work like there is no tomorrow, sacrifice time to build your vision but you must do everything with an open heart loving to serve others in a business it is important being humble and remembering that love is the answer to many things. Success truly comes when you absolutely love what you do.

baezmaintenance.com @baez_maintenance_services

Jim | Pitmaster and Mandi | Boss Lady

What I have learned is bbq is not a genre of food but an extended family.

LilliansBarbecue.com @lilliansbbq @lilliansbbq

Amanda Calhoun | PR Professional & Digital Content Creator

The most important lesson I’ve learned so far is to celebrate tiny victories! I put this practice into place in my career, family, friendships and relationships. I truly believe that by acknowledging those things that seem small, we empower ourselves and those around us to dream big. Too often, we wait until the BIG things (anniversaries, birthdays, weddings, etc.) to take the trip or do the thing, but why is it that we put such a focus on milestones, when the moments that matter are happening every single day. So, in my life, we celebrate WINS, big or small, and while they all might not warrant a grand gesture, it’s always the thought that counts.

@missamandadeann

Micah Unger | Owner, Casa Boho

The most important lesson I’ve learned in my journey so far is that no matter how big and successful your business becomes, at the end of the day, family comes first! I had a baby last year, at a time when Casa Boho had just gone through it’s biggest growth yet, and sales were at an all time high. Although it was hard at first, I made the choice to take a bit of a break so I could focus solely on my new little one and enjoy that new stage in life. I missed out on some big opportunities and my business took a bit of a hit as a result, but I wouldn’t have changed a thing!

shopcasaboho.com @shopcasaboho

Tony Dao | Dallas Nightlife and Hospitality Entrepreneur

“The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering” – Bruce Lee

So be grateful and be prepared for all the wonderful opportunities in life.

Develop your Craft and your Brand as a weapon. Strike and Risk Strategically and be prepared for failures which will come in all aspects of life. To maintain your moral compass as a human being and no matter what happens… both your personal and professional life will be worth remembering.

thetdcagency.com collectivemark.com

Norman and Lakeisha Willis | Husband and wife of 13 years & Co-Owners of Willis BBQ Company

The most important lesson we have learned in our journey thus far is to consider all options and explore every avenue prior to making every decision. Do not be afraid to change the plan! When we initially started our catering business, it was called Norman’s Holiday Smoke & Catering. Our initial plan was to limit our catering services to the holidays only. We thought it was all we could handle given that we had recently had our second child. Within 3 months, we outgrew that vision. We had not considered all of opportunity that awaited us. So, we decided to start again. We had to re-brand every portion of our business.

During the re-branding process, we decided to go as for as our abilities could take us; no more limiting ourselves. We acknowledged that improvements were necessary. Our branding needed to mirror the delicious Smoked Meats, Homestyle Sides and Cupcakes we were serving our customer. We expanded our target market to include corporations, wedding venues and individuals that needed special event catering. We also decided to use our abilities and time to feed the less fortunate. And so it began, we decided to build a 22 foot food trailer; a food trailer that any company or person would love to have at their event. We changed our name to Willis BBQ Company, re-designed the logo, designed a website, created elegant menus and changed our packaging. We were all in!

Thankfully, we realized we could do more and be more. Re-evaluating our business plan early allowed us to course correct with minimum losses.

willisbbqcompany.com @willisbbqcompany @willisbbqcompany Phone: 972-805-3432 willisbbqcompany@gmail.com

Desiree Davis | Mental Health Advocate and founder of United Black Women

The most important lesson I’ve learned on my journey is “if there’s a will, there’s a way”. It’s an expression my father used to say to me growing up. At times I find myself struggling with doubt and uncertainty. “”How can I accomplish that?”” “”Is this even possible?”” “”But no one has done it before.”” Those thoughts are nothing more than my fear of the unknown attempting to paralyze me back to my comfort zone. When those thoughts come to me I just remind myself “if there’s a will, there’s a way”. That phrase pushed me through college when I couldn’t afford my last semester. It pushed me through depression when I had no one to turn to. And most importantly that phrase is leading me to my purpose of helping others find their ’will’ and ‘way’ today.

@desiree.r.davis @unitedblackwomen

Alexa Lopes | Food Photographer

The most important lesson I’ve learned in my journey is to give all of yourself to your craft, but to always leave space to learn, improve and grow.

@fortworthfoodtographer @fortworthfoodtographer

Taylor Morrison | licensed registered dietitian and certified sports dietitian

What I have learned on my journey so far is that it’s easy to start looking at what others are doing or get distracted by shiny opportunities that don’t actually lead you in your desired direction. It’s important to stay true to yourself and to stay focused on what you are doing and what your purpose is. I continue to ask myself, “What is it that I’m passionate about? What gifts has God given me?”, This keeps me focused and ignites that feeling of purpose that keeps me moving forward towards my goals.

taylored-nutrition.org @taylormorrisonRD

    Brittney Fernandes | Hair stylist | Bridal Stylist | Makeup Artist

The most important lesson I’ve learned in the beauty industry is that with every client, each time they’re in your chair is a gift and fresh opportunity to bless them and showcase your best self and talent.

http://www.beautebybrit.com/ @beautebybrit

Relax Bodyworks | bodywork geared towards relaxation

Tiffany Harper

Probably the most important thing is realizing that every time I put my hands on a new client, I use my intuition to learn something new. I’ve learned to trust that more than anything else because it never steers me wrong.

relaxbodyworks.com @relaxbodyworks

Johnnie Hoang | Food lover & Owner of Hoang’s Noodle House

The most important lesson I have learned in my journey is that teamwork and patience is crucial in any business. At Hoang’s Noodle House, teamwork helps with the flow and quality of the dishes. Patience plays a very important role as well, as some of our food items we serve require time to prepare. We definitely focus on providing fresh and quality food. My biggest reward is seeing and hearing people enjoy the food that I have invested time in preparing. My secret ingredient to all my dishes is passion. I have always enjoyed cooking for others. I believe that food brings people together and therefore you end up with a unique experience. Good food and good company.

@Hnoodlehouse Hoangsnoodlehouse.com

@HNHFoodTruck

Shawna Fitzpatrick | Illustrator & Urban Photographer

Ignore the naysayers, regardless of who they are. You already know the answer in your heart. When you allow the noise in, you just invited in a world of chaos and confusion.

shawnafitzpatrick.com @the.real_shawna.fitzpatrick @therealshawnafitzpatrick

Matt (mattman) Pearce | photographer

I would have to say that being a professional photographer you need to be creative and share. Be creative and look for something that is different that maybe no one else sees. Share your ideas, techniques and knowledge with other photographers. I truly believe that there are two types of photographers, one who creates the image like wedding or portrait photographers. The other type is the one who captures the image like shooting sports, news, concerts or events. I like to capture the image! There’s nothing more exciting then capturing that moment in time whether it’s a singer at a concert or a Dallas Cowboys touchdown or a Dallas Stars goal or even a stock car going by you at 190mph just three feet away! It’s the passion of capturing that moment in time! LOL, I have people ask me all the time, “”do you shoot weddings?”” LOL, I tell them no, I leave those to the professionals, I just push a button for a living…

@mattman1310 @mattman1310 @mattman1310 mpearce1310@gmail.com

Rosy Gamez | Photographer and Crafter

Rosy Gamez

There are always a million reasons not to do something,” was a quote I heard Jan Levinson (The Office) say 5 times now in the last 6 years. As a hardcore fan of the show, her small quote resonated with me every single time I heard it, and throughout the 5-year journey of what was my freelance side business never once did I notice that I was living out those million reasons.

After the birth of my second son, I realized how much a 9-5 job took me away from my boys. I knew the best way to predict the future was to create it. I balled up those million reasons “why,” tossed them away, and introduced my crafts and designs to the world. I am an entrepreneur building my business, using my creativity and expertise for my family. The rewards are ten fold. I set my hours, earned back time with my boys and loving husband. I no longer have someone place a limit on my income because now it is limitless.

I guess you can say, the lesson learned was that you have to want it, believe it, and do it, and grasp the handful of reasons why you SHOULD and take that plunge, why, because trust me, you will be forever grateful that you did. Think about it, what’s the worst that can happen? Say you fail, well, get up and try again…and again…and again. Either way, at least you can say you tried, and that is infinitely more than others can say.

@serenestudiophotographyanddesign @serenestudiophotoanddesign

Beth Holland | Fine Art Photographer

I have learned to experience the exhilaration of seeing another side of our beloved National Parks, free of crowds, tour buses and the cacophony of civilization at night. Seeing the wonders of the familiar in a different light with the stars, moon, and milky way above is just awe-inspiring and keeps me going at 2:00 am to get that shot!

BethHollandPhotography.com @BethHollandPhotography

  Rod Castor

Most important lesson would be to keep being consistently on working on your skills.

@t.r.l_photography

Ericka Estrella | Photographer/Traveler

I would have to say, that the most valuable lesson has been to take one day at the time, to look beyond the fingers like our friend <Patch Adams> will learn in the movie from 1998, and really See what is before us the opportunity to be in this world yet another day, must be truly treasured, for there is no guaranteed there will be a tomorrow.

Therefore, witness the beauty and love around each and everyday, even in the simplest things like the half and half coffee blending dance, or the sunrise backlighting a window plant.

Photographing peoples most important moments has been and continues to be an amazing gift.

@ErickaEstrellaPhotography @ErickaEstrellaPhotography

Bob Brooks | Photographer

Starting your business without a mission statement is like taking a long road trip without a map. You can get lost easily within a short amount of time. Having something to reference later will help you keep grounded to your original goal. Knowing your target demographic is also one of the most important things. And finally for the person just starting out, don’t fall into the trap that shooting every day will help you capture better images. It’s better to choose one day out of the month, bring only one battery with you or just 2 roles of film, shoot till it’s gone and then don’t edit or processes them for 6-8 weeks and then look at then for the first time. Trust me, shooting 30k-50k in six months only gets you burned out, and from there, you loose your passion for photography all together. The old saying “Do what you love, and you will never work a day in your life” this couldn’t be further from the truth, getting the paying jobs and prospecting for work is the real work, this represents  about 80% of the work of the photographer, not the other way around.

@rlbrooks_photography Facebook: Bob Brooks @rlbrooksphotography

Eric Ziegler | Landscape and nature photographer

I think the most important thing I’ve learned is that you’re never too old to learn.

I started the hobby of photography as a teenager, and although I’ve been working at it for almost 30 years, I still feel that my work is not where I want it to be. I am always looking for new techniques and ideas to help me become more creative, and it is fun sometimes to compare my work from several years ago to see the growth I’ve achieved.

ericzieglerphoto.com @ezieglerphoto

The post What’s the Most Important Lesson You’ve Learned Along Your Journey? appeared first on Voyage Dallas Magazine | Dallas City Guide.

source http://voyagedallas.com/2020/02/17/whats-important-lesson-youve-learned-along-journey-2/

[webbygraphic001]

20 Best New Portfolios, June 2018

Welcome back, Readers. It’s June, and if I got paid extra for every instance of the word “minimalist” in this article, I could probably afford to vacation in Canada. Well, my point is that minimalism is the general theme of this month, because that’s what it has all come down to: various forms of minimalism.

Still, within that descriptor, there’s a fair amount of variety to be had here. Enjoy.

Note: I’m judging these sites by how good they look to me. If they’re creative and original, or classic but really well-done, it’s all good to me. Sometimes, UX and accessibility suffer. For example, many of these sites depend on JavaScript to display their content at all; this is a Bad Idea, kids. If you find an idea you like and want to adapt to your own site, remember to implement it responsibly.

Bruno Ferdinand

Bruno Ferdinand is a designer with strong type skills and the nearly-obligatory hipsterish tendencies we see a lot of nowadays. The guy does simple, beautiful, and kind of rustic design rather well.

Platform: JS app

Yumpic

Yumpic is a portfolio site featuring — and you might have guessed this — photos and videos of food. They specialize in food-related digital content for anyone who wants to make the perfect Instagram account, and also (read: actually mostly) for people who make money off their food. The actual portfolio work is artfully interspersed with illustration and playful touches, which definitely sets the right mood,in my opinion.

Platform: WordPress

Duane Dalton

Duane Dalton’s portfolio pretty strongly reflects his print-focused work, being minimalist and asymmetrical. It’s one of the simpler sites on this list, but no less visually pleasing for that.

Platform: Static Site

Kenta Toshikura

Kenta Toshikura’s website is one of those minimalist-looking presentation-style sites. As is par for the course in cases like these, I’d not look too closely at the usability, but the visuals and general aesthetic style are just plain pretty, darnit. In particular, there’s this touch of 3D-feeling typography that catches my eye.

Platform: Static Site

Ellen Mandemaker

I’m not precisely sure what Ellen Mandemaker makes, precisely, but my best guess is art. And art is what you get from the get go: you’ll see a collage of it to begin with, and then a simple and orderly portfolio that promptly and efficiently throws you into the deep end. It’s one of those portfolios that made me think “I’m not entirely sure what I’m looking at, but I like it.”

Platform: Static Site

No Plans

No Plans is a one-page portfolio that keeps things fairly simple, preferring a clean design and a decidedly serif-friendly way of doing things. Also, they indent some of their paragraphs. I know, right? You hardly ever see that these days.

Platform: WordPress

Lab101

I’ll never be a fan of sites that change your cursor, but everything else about Lab101 is pretty solid. The overall aesthetic is minimalist and modern, with some interesting touches of 3D animation on the “Contact” page.

Platform: WordPress

Studio Bjørk

Studio Bjørk has a thing for monochromatic palettes, diagonal lines, and horizontal layouts. And you know what? It works out pretty darned well for them. There’s also a significant bit of animation, great type, and some background video here and there, all combining to make a site that a marketer would call dynamic. Oh,

[Sighs.] Fine, I’ll call it dynamic, too. It just sounds so much like marketer-speak that I didn’t want to say it.

Platform: Static Site

Juul Hondius

I often make reference to magazine-style designs ion this article series, but Juul Hondius’ portfolio is one of the more interesting examples I’ve seen lately. It looks like an old, ooold magazine, complete with small spacing issues and slightly cramped text, combined with beautiful and striking photography.

Those might technically be “issues”, but the design as a whole hits me with a very specific sense of nostalgia that just sells the imagery to me. Besides, it’s a photographer’s site. How badly do you want to read the text anyway?

Platform: Static Site

Thu-Van Tran

Thu-Van Tran’s website has one main theme that makes it visually interesting: layers. Every page is loaded on top of the home page like one piece of paper overlaying another. It’s like a paper prototype come to life. Combined with the sheer simplicity of layout, and strong typographic choices, it stands out.

Platform: Static Site

Aristide Benoist

Aristide Benoist’s portfolio combines a grid-based aesthetic with warping animations to striking effect. While most of the text could and certainly should be bigger, the visual theme of this site is enough to make you look, at least. Whether it’s interesting enough to make you grab your glasses will greatly depend on the user.

Platform: Static Site

Datagif

Datagif love their sans-serif type, and apparently spicing up standard layouts with geometric flourishes and animation. This one’s not going to blow your mind, but it looks good, even kind of playful for all the corporate aesthetic it has. Give it a look.

Platform: Static Site (I think)

Handsome

Oh, Handsome takes me back maybe five years or so. The large serif type, the darkened photos as backdrops, all those barely visible straight lines. Did we just go back to the early days of flat design? Well, it’s both nostalgic, nearly perfectly executed, and a pleasure to browse.

Platform: Static Site

Sister

Sister’s agency site is living proof that any design style, even the once super-artsy minimalism-with-asymmetry trend, can be given an almost corporate flair. And that’s not a criticism. Corporate-feeling front end design tends to be modern and devastatingly effective in its simplicity, and the same is true here.

Not a fan of those occasional modal pop-ups, though. That’s a corporate trend that can go straight to hell.

Platform: WordPress

Makers and Allies

Makers and Allies is a branding studio in the finest tradition of hipster design studios, but with a lot more motion design added to the mix. It evokes just the right balance of rustic aesthetics with the modern technical competence we expect. Or at least the animation we expect. Whatever, it looks good, even if some of the text could use more contrast.

Platform: WordPress

Bipolar Studio

Bipolar Studio combines motion graphics with a pretty modernist aesthetic style, and good old fashioned big type. Their work basically is video, so it’s they use a lot of it in their design. I do like the little “stats” section at the end of each project page, detailing what it took to complete each project.

It’s just that, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but the logo could be bigger. With type that thin, it should be.

Platform: Static Site and/or JS App

Akins Parker

Akins Parker’s agency site wasn’t made with Powerpoint, but it’s presentational design in its purest form. You go to see this one for the graphics, not for the usability.

Platform: Static Site

Ian Jones

Ian Jones’ portfolio is another site to embrace the visual grid theme. But unlike many other sites, the visual representation of the grid is only visible when his work is on the page. It’s a dead-simple approach, but it looks calm and professional, and I can’t fault that.

Platform: Static Site

Michael Uloth

Michael Uloth is a rare talent indeed. When he’s not literally singing opera, he builds minimalist-yet-beautiful websites for artsy people. His own site is no exception.

Platform: Static Site and/or JS App

Lasse Fløde

Lasse Fløde is a photography studio with a striking one-page portfolio. Lovers of white space should definitely enjoy this one, as it employs that asymmetrical almost collage-style so favored by many photography portfolios these days. Simple and effective.

Platform: Static Site

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