#and b) if it really is a Serious Problem that I’d be able to identify it tomorrow; that the symptoms would be really clear

[thatfriendlyanon]

prayer request, please <3 (in the tags)

[dycefic]

Hello, I recently read some of your work and I really really like your writing style! I’ve loved everything I’ve read so far and if it is not a burden to you and you are okay with doing so, I was hoping you could answer a few questions?

I was wondering if you had any formal writing education? Any advice for writing? Also wondered what kinds of books and authors you read, if you read?

I am sorry for all the questions, and if they’ve been asked before (I tried to find any answers you may have given to these or ones similar and I’m sorry if I missed them but direct me if need be).

I am also a writer and I’m always very curious about writers I look up to/ really like- most of them just happen to not be among the living so I do t really get to ask them any questions. Thank you for your time! It’s a pleasure to be able to read your writing!!

Thank you!

I am blushing extensively, thank you for all your kind words!

As for writing, I have had no formal education in it. I tried - and might not have dropped out of university if I'd succeeded - but creative writing required higher general scores than I got in school. I've read a lot of books on writing... like, a LOT... and always taken an interest in plot structure. I'm pretty sure I'm the only person who walked out of House Of Flying Daggers (I saw it in theatres, I'm that old) rhapsodizing about the way they visually represented traditional storytelling metaphors (ie 'a rain of spears').

I will note that while it seems that absolutely everyone recommends Stephen King's 'On Writing', I've never read it because a) I found the little bit I read wordy and self-indulgent, and b) the very mention of that man's name enrages me because my partner once got into a serious hyperfixation and we didn't have a single conversation in which King's name was not mentioned for OVER A YEAR. This is not King's fault, but the name still fills me with intense fury.

Books on writing I would recommend:

K. M. Weiland's 'Structuring Your Novel': I like her 'voice', and her chosen examples, and pacing longer stories is one of the things I have the most trouble with.

J. Michael Straczynski's 'Complete Book Of Scriptwriting': It's an old book now, but it's still one of the best I've ever read, and my long-standing favourite. There's a ton of fascinating history about the evolution of screenwriting, and a lot of very pithy advice that applies just as well to novels and short fiction as it does to movies and television.

Chris Baty's 'No Plot? No Problem!': I haven't reread this in quite a while, but I remember it as being really helpful as well as fun to read. I also recommend NaNoWriMo in general. I've been participating since 2002 - this year will be my twentieth anniversary of NaNo - and my writing has improved enormously in that time. Writing is like everything else, insofar as the more you practice, the better you get. I've hit 50K every year since the beginning, so even if I never got a novel I wanted to finish, polish, and put out there (and a couple of them are promising), that's still 950,000 words I've written.

Also? Fanfiction. Fanfiction is a GREAT way to practice the craft. Because the characters and universe are pre-built, you can focus on the writing itself, on things like examining nuances of character, identifying and using tropes, and building a compelling story. Between NaNo and fanfiction, over the last 24 years, I have written over 2,000,000 words, and you can't do ANYTHING two million times without getting better at it.

As for who I like to read, I can't recommend Diane Duane, Tamora Pierce, and Georgette Heyer too highly. Not only do they write good stories, they were/are very, very technically skilled. Reading their work is an education in itself. I also recommend consuming narratives from other cultures - I learned a lot about different narrative conventions from things like reading translated novels, myths, and fairy tales, reading manga, and watching Chinese and Korean movies and dramas. It really gives you a different perspective on the mechanics of storytelling, and shows you how many 'default' or 'obvious' plot tropes are actually really culturally specific. (I have consumed every re-telling, re-imagining, or re-translation of Journey To The West, including the old tv show AND the Hallmark movie. I really recommend this, as it is FASCINATING how many ways different people interpret the same story. The Korean 'Korean Odyssey' and Netflix's 'New Adventures Of Monkey' are my favourites)

Bonus reading: When Books Went To War, by Molly Guptil Manning. It's not about writing, but it's about why stories are important, the lifeline a novelist can throw to someone experiencing the darkest of times, and what I believe may have been publishing's finest hour. I cry every time I read it, and it makes me proud to count myself a writer. If you ever wonder why you're slogging away so hard at learning so fickle and difficult a craft, this book will remind you.

“The therapeutic effect of reading was not a new concept to the librarians running the VBC (Victory Book Campaign). In the editorial Warren published on the eve of commencing her tenure as director, she discussed how books could soothe pain, diminish boredom or loneliness, and take the mind on a vacation far from where the body was stationed. Whatever a man's need—a temporary escape, a comforting memory of home, balm for a broken spirit, or an infusion of courage—the librarians running the VBC were dedicated to ensuring that each man found a book to meet it.” ― Molly Guptill Manning, When Books Went to War: The Stories that Helped Us Win World War II

[sciencespies]

To Boost Black Men in Medicine, Advocates Turn to Sports

https://sciencespies.com/nature/to-boost-black-men-in-medicine-advocates-turn-to-sports/

To Boost Black Men in Medicine, Advocates Turn to Sports

Emily Laber-Warren, Undark

Aaron Bolds didn’t consider becoming a physician until he tore a ligament in his knee while playing in a basketball tournament when he was 15. His orthopedic surgeon was Black, and they hit it off. “He was asking me how my grades were, and I told him, ‘I’m a straight-A student,’ and he was, like, ‘Man, this is a great fallback plan if basketball doesn’t work out,’” recalls Bolds, who is African American.

“He looked like me,” Bolds says, “and that was even more encouraging.” 

If not for that chance encounter, Bolds, 34, a doctor at Mount Sinai Health System in New York, might never have gone into medicine, he says. When he was growing up, there were no physicians in his family or extended social network to model that career path. And at the schools he attended, he says, his aptitude for science didn’t trigger the kind of guidance young people often receive in more privileged contexts.

What Bolds did get attention for was his athletic ability. He got a full basketball scholarship to Lenoir-Rhyne University in North Carolina, where his team won a conference championship. But when he transferred to Bowie State University in Maryland, where he also played basketball, an academic adviser discouraged his pre-med ambitions, Bolds recalls, saying his grades were low and he lacked research experience.

Bolds is not alone in finding in athletics a fraught lever of educational opportunity. Whereas Black players comprise more than half the football and basketball teams at the 65 universities in the top five athletic conferences, and bring in millions of dollars for their schools year after year, the graduation rates for Black male college athletes are significantly lower — 55 percent as compared to 69 percent for college athletes overall — according to a 2018 report from the USC Race and Equity Center. Many Black college athletes end up without either a professional sports contract or a clear career path. 

Now some educators and advocates are looking to reverse this trend by connecting sports, an area in which African American men are overrepresented, and medicine, where the opposite is true. As of 2018, 13 percent of the U.S. population, but just 5 percent of doctors — according to the Association of American Medical Colleges — identified as Black or African American. (The AAMC data notes that an additional 1 percent of doctors identified as multiracial.) Decades of efforts to increase diversity at medical schools have made progress with other demographics, including Black women — but barely any with Black men. “No other demographic group is broken down with such a large split between men and women,” says Jo Wiederhorn, president and CEO of the Associated Medical Schools of New York. “And none of them have stayed stagnant, like that group has.”

According to data the AAMC provided to Undark, the proportion of Black men enrolling in medical school hasn’t changed much since 1978 — with only some headway being made in the past few years.

The absence of Black male medical professionals ripples across the health system, experts say, contributing to widespread health disparities. African Americans tend to be diagnosed later than White people with everything from cancer to kidney disease, leading to more advanced disease and earlier deaths. Meanwhile, a recent study suggests that Black men who see Black male doctors may be more likely to follow medical advice. Other research also suggests that racially concordant care, in which patients and doctors have a shared identity, is associated with better communication and a greater likelihood to use health services.

“We are in a crisis point, nationally,” says Reginald Miller, the dean for research operations and infrastructure at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest that the health of communities of color are directly proportional to the number of practitioners available to see,” he says. “It’s just that straightforward.”

Last year, the National Medical Association, a professional organization representing African American physicians, embarked with the AAMC on a joint effort to address the structural barriers to advancement for Black men. “We need to look at this with a unique lens,” says Norma Poll-Hunter, senior director of workforce diversity at the AAMC.

There is no single solution to such an entrenched and multifaceted problem, Poll-Hunter says. According to her, some medical schools have adopted a holistic admissions process that evaluates many personal factors rather than relying on standardized test scores, which can exclude promising Black candidates. In addition, she says, students of color need better access to high-quality K-12 science education, particularly in under-resourced public schools. “There are a lot of barriers that exist early on,” she notes, “and that then creates this narrowing of the pathway to medicine.”

But the novel strategy of wooing athletes is slowly gaining traction. Advocates point out that high-performing athletes possess many of the skills and attributes that doctors, psychologists, physical therapists, and other medical professionals need — things like focus, a commitment to excellence, time management, and problem-solving skills, as well as the ability to take constructive criticism and perform under pressure.

“When you say, ‘What’s your ideal medical student?’ it’s not just a kid who’s academically gifted. It’s a kid who’s got resilience, attention to detail, knows how to work on the team,” Miller says. “Because science and medicine are team sports.” And by virtue of being athletes, these young men are already attuned to nutrition, fitness, and other aspects of human biology.

Two former NFL players, Nate Hughes and Myron Rolle, recently became physicians. And there is evidence that competitive sports experience contributes to medical success. A 2012 study of doctors training to become ear, nose, and throat specialists at Washington University, for example, found that having excelled in a team sport was more predictive of how faculty rated their quality as a clinician than strong letters of recommendation or having attended a highly-ranked medical school. Likewise, a 2011 study found that having an elite skill, such as high-achieving athletics, was more predictive of completing a general surgery residency than medical school grades.

Advocates of the athletics-to-medicine pipeline point out its practicality. Thousands of Black men are already in college, or headed there, on athletic scholarships. It would only take a small percentage of them choosing medical careers to boost the percentage of Black male doctors to better reflect the proportion of African American men in the general population, they say.

No one thinks it will be easy. One obstacle, advocates say, is a lack of role models. Black sports celebrities are household names, but some young athletes may never encounter a Black medical professional. “People don’t believe they can become what they don’t see,” says Mark R. Brown, the athletic director at Pace University.

And for the best chance of success, many say, these young men need to form and pursue medical aspirations as young as possible, along with their athletic training. “Those kids who are able to do both, the rewards at the end are enormous,” Miller says. But the adults in their lives may not believe the dual path is possible. “The second that a kid says to a science teacher or someone else that he’s an athlete,” Miller says, “they go into a different category. ‘They’re not really serious about science and medicine, they’re just here, and so I don’t expect this kid to really achieve.’”

Rigid course and practice schedules also make it challenging for busy athletes to undertake demanding and time-intensive science majors, observers say. What’s needed is “a cultural change, and not just a cultural change with the athletes. It’s a cultural change with the whole structure,” Miller says. “Everybody’s excited about the idea” of the physician athlete, he adds, “because it makes sense. But when the rubber hits the road, it is challenging.”

Donovan Roy, the assistant dean for diversity and inclusiveness at the Western Michigan University Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine, was one of the first people to envision the potential of directing Black athletes toward medical careers.

Roy, 48, who is Black and a former college football player, grew up in the working class, primarily Black and Latino community of Inglewood, California. Attending an elite private high school on a football scholarship was eye-opening. He vividly remembers the first time he ever saw a walk-in pantry, at a friend’s home. “It was stocked like a convenience store,” he recalls. “Five different types of Hostess, Ding-Dongs, sodas, every type of snack that you ever wanted.” Equally startling was speaking with another friend’s mother, who was a lawyer. “I’d never seen a road map to success in my community,” he says.

Roy’s athletic talent continued to open doors — at 18 he got a scholarship to the University of Southern California — but poorly prepared by the under-resourced public schools he had attended through ninth grade, he struggled academically, and left both USC and later another university that he also attended on an athletic scholarship.

Eventually Roy found his footing, and when he did, he became a learning specialist. After working through his own academic struggles, he wanted to help others with theirs. Roy took a job as a learning skills counselor at UCLA’s medical school. There he helped the students who were struggling with classes like anatomy and genetics. In early 2015, he returned to USC as the director of academic support services at Keck School of Medicine.

Something Roy noticed at both these medical schools stuck with him, though it would take a few years for the observation to crystallize. A certain kind of student sought help despite, by ordinary standards, not needing it. These were the athletes, and many of them were Black or Latino. “They always talked about, ‘How can I excel? How can I get better?’” he recalls. They “were getting 90s and they wanted to be 100.”

Roy began a doctoral program in education in 2015, the same year the AAMC published a damning report about the lack of Black men entering medical school. This was a crisis Roy understood both personally and professionally. For his dissertation, he decided to interview 16 Black male students at Keck School of Medicine. What was it about them, he wanted to understand, that had gotten them there against all odds?

The answer, he discovered, was what academics call social capital. For medical students from privileged backgrounds, social capital might take the form of a family friend who arranges a summer internship at a biotechnology lab, or a well-funded high school that offers advanced placement science classes. The young men Roy interviewed did not, for the most part, have access to those sorts of resources.

“Growing up, I didn’t see a Black male with a college degree until I got to college,” medical student Jai Kemp said in a separate interview Roy conducted for a documentary he’s making on the topic. The social capital these young men leveraged to get to medical school took the form of parental support, science enrichment programs and clubs, peer social networks, faculty mentors — and the perks that come with athletics. “For me it was just sports that got me through,” Kemp said.

The pieces started to fit together. Roy knew from his own experience all the benefits athletes get, not just entrée to educational institutions, but travel, enrichment, and academic advantages like tutoring and early class registration. Athletes also tend to possess social cachet on campus and, with more exposure to different types of people, may feel comfortable in environments that seem foreign and forbidding to other young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. Roy also recalled the drive for academic excellence he had observed in the athletes who came to his tutoring programs. “I got this epiphany,” he says. “Why don’t we look at student athletes in order to increase Black males’ representation in medicine, because they have the most social capital and the most network on predominantly White campuses.”

Donovan Roy at the Western Michigan University Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine, where he is now the assistant dean for diversity and inclusiveness. While working on his doctoral degree, Roy interviewed Black men in medical school and discovered one key to their success: social capital.

Mark Bugnaski

But when Roy began talking to his medical school colleagues about recruiting athletes, who according to a report from the Center for American Progress — a liberal think tank — make up 16 percent of Black male college students receiving athletic aid in the Big 12 athletic conference, he says most weren’t receptive to the idea. The same thing happened when he got up the nerve to make the suggestion publicly at a 2018 conference in Orlando, Florida. The idea ran against type. “I think people tend to lump athletes into this box,” he says. “They just think that athletes are big meatheads.”

Roy knew this truth viscerally, because with his offensive lineman’s build of 6-feet-6-inches and 300-plus pounds, he sticks out in academic settings. “People stare,” he says. “They do not expect me to be in the role that I am in.”

What Roy didn’t know was that the idea was percolating elsewhere, including at the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Brian Hainline, the NCAA’s chief medical officer, says he and Poll-Hunter of the AAMC are in talks with several universities about launching a pilot program to support African American athletes interested in medical careers.

Meanwhile, in 2018 Miller founded the organization Scholar-Athletes with Academic Goals (a.k.a. SWAG, a name he hopes will resonate with young people). The initiative connects promising athletes with a range of available programs to help them pursue and succeed in science and medicine. Recently, Miller worked closely with leadership at Pace University to create a program, expected to launch next year, to support Black college athletes interested in attending medical school. Pace officials want the initiative to become a magnet for out-of-state athletes and a model for other schools. “My hope is that two years from now, colleges and universities will call” and ask, “Wow, how did you do this?” says athletic director Brown. “Once we have some success, and proof of concept, then I think it can really grow.”

Bolds graduated medical school in 2018 and is now doing his residency at Mount Sinai. His focus is rehabilitation medicine, and he plans to tend to injured athletes and serve as a team physician. He got a business degree while in medical school, and his long-term goal is to open his own interventional spine and sports medicine practice specializing in preventing and rehabilitating injuries in both athletes and non-athletes, as well as helping serious players enhance their performance.

But there were tough moments along the way, such as the encounter with that academic adviser, which Bolds says only served to motivate him. At the time, he thought, “Wow, this person doesn’t believe in me. So let me make them a believer,” he recalls. “That was, moving forward, really a turning point for me, honestly. Because I knew that people aren’t going to believe in you unless you give them a reason to.”

Bolds began to apply an athletic mindset to his pre-med classes. “That same grind of having to get up, 5 a.m., get to the gym, get shots up before anybody gets there, to put in that extra time — I was doing that with my studies,” he says. “I would get to the library before anybody.” Once Bolds turned his grades around, professors began to notice and help him, he says. Still, he says, his score on the MCAT, an entrance exam required by nearly all U.S. medical schools, was borderline. Instead of giving up, he attended multiple events at Howard University’s medical school, where he met people who advocated for him. It was the only medical school he got into.

Whereas Bolds had to bushwhack, he saw other Black students fall off the medical path — and his fellow Black teammates avoided it entirely. Many athletes find themselves enmeshed in a profit-making system that may not prioritize their education. The NCAA has been criticized in recent years for its long-standing policy which prohibits profit-sharing with college athletes — a policy that was only recently reversed under interim guidelines. Others have said that Black labor has been especially exploited.

In his residency, Bolds is focusing on rehabilitation medicine, and is pictured here working at Mount Sinai’s sports medicine clinic.

Jeenah Moon for Undark

As of 2014 reports, fewer than 2 percent of athletes in the NCAA will go on to play professionally. But for self-serving reasons, critics say, (Clemson University’s football team, for example, made $77 million in average annual revenue from 2015 through 2017) universities often direct athletes to “academic paths of least resistance.” Many schools practice “major clustering,” in which players are steered to the same relatively undemanding major, such as communications, so they can devote themselves almost entirely to their sport. Major clustering is more pronounced among athletes of color, according to a 2009 study of football teams at 11 universities. At six of those schools, the study found, over three-quarters of the non-White football players were enrolled in just two academic majors, although dozens of majors were offered.

Sheron Mark, an associate professor of science education at the University of Louisville, co-authored a 2019 case study of two young Black men who arrived at college on basketball scholarships, with the intent to pursue respective careers in computer science and engineering. But both found it difficult to balance academics with athletics because of pressure and blandishments from coaches and faculty advisers.

“For so long, they’ve been sold this message that you don’t have many choices, that banking on a professional sports career is one of very few options for you if you want to advance your station in life,” says Mark of many Black athletes. It’s important to have a plan B, she says, since “the odds just aren’t in their favor.” But coaches can discourage academically demanding majors because they may cut into practice time, and college athletes are not always capable of pushing back, she says, because their financial packages are tied to fulfillment of their team responsibilities.

Many Black college athletes are already strong candidates for medical school, advocates say, but others may need extra academic support to compensate for deficits acquired at under-resourced K-12 schools. They may also need post-graduation training to take science classes they did not have time for while working long hours as athletes — with some working 20-plus hours a week. “How are they being mentored and guided and protected in planning for their futures?” Mark asks. “They are high achieving in sports, they want to be high achieving in academics. Why don’t we support them?” When people wonder whether student-athletes can cut it in science and medicine, Mark’s response is: “It’s on us. It’s on us to help them do so. That’s how we can grow their representation.”

That’s what Pace University intends to do. The school already nurtures academic success in its athletes, who collectively had a B+ average last school year, but premedical studies have never been a great fit, in part because afternoon practices can conflict with long lab classes, says athletic director Brown. As part of the school’s new initiative, Pace science departments have pledged to offer flexibility in course section offerings in order to accommodate football commitments. Athletes of color from any sport will be welcome, but football was prioritized because it is the largest and one of the most diverse teams and has the most complicated schedule, Brown says.

The school also plans to adjust its advising, tutoring, and library services to ensure that pre-med athletes won’t falter when they struggle with personal issues or tough classes like organic chemistry. “Rather than saying, ‘Oh, chemistry, nobody likes chemistry, you’re right, you should just drop that,’ instead now it’s going to be, ‘Yeah, you’ve got to buckle down. And here’s how we’re going to do it,’” says Hillary Knepper, the university’s associate provost for student success.

Meanwhile, Brown will be directing his coaches to actively recruit Black and Latino high school athletes who are interested in medicine. In the past, Brown says, his coaches were less likely to select such students because of anticipated scheduling challenges. But now Pace is trying to establish a partnership through which a nearby medical school would give preferred consideration to pre-med athletes who have completed the Pace curriculum. “With our new approach, you’re not only going to have the ability to do it,” he says, “but you’re going to have a support system, to make sure that you follow the path.”

Some advocates for the athlete-to-doctor paradigm see this work as part of the larger movement for social justice. “Look what Jackie Robinson did, right? Look at Muhammad Ali, look at Colin Kaepernick,” Roy says. “Athletics has always been the vehicle for social change.”

Medical professionals can influence public policy, accumulate wealth, and help empower others in their orbit. “The impacts ramp up really quickly, from just that individual benefiting,” Mark says, to “your family, your neighborhood, your social network, and society — people you won’t even meet, and across generations.”

Studies suggest that African American doctors are more likely to choose to work in underserved communities. They also may be more attuned to, and motivated to combat, the disparities in health care. A study published last year, for example, suggests that Black newborns are half as likely to die when they are cared for by a Black physician.

Bolds is keenly aware of the health disparities for Black communities, and he jumps at opportunities to mentor other young Black men, to show them that they, too, can become doctors. “It seems like there’s so many steps that just are never-ending,” he says. But, he adds, to see someone “that you can connect with that’s at that finish line or has already passed that finish line — I think that’s very key to their success.”

One of the people Bolds has connected with is Darius Ervin, a talented Black basketball player from Crown Heights, Brooklyn, who is now a sophomore at Cornell University. The two met when Ervin attended a virtual event late last year, sponsored by SWAG, at which Bolds spoke. Afterwards, the two chatted, and Bolds now checks in periodically with Ervin, who says he appreciates the encouragement. “Those are people that have once laced up shoes and got on the court and played just like how I did, and now they’re in the hospital helping people,” he says. “Being able to speak to those people gives me the visual, allows me to see that it’s an opportunity and it’s definitely possible for me to do.”

UPDATE: A previous version of this article referred imprecisely to the institutional affiliation of Donovan Roy. He is at the Western Michigan University Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine, not the Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine at Western Michigan University.

Emily Laber-Warren directs the health and science reporting program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

Doctors

Health

Medicine

Race and Ethnicity

Sports

#Nature

[thedreadvampy]

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about disability and neurodivergence over the past couple of years (I’ve actually just now accepted a contract to freelance write a section of policy on disability and ableism for my old workplace. I have done this because I hate myself and starting a new job with 1.5x the hours as my old one JUST WASN’T ENOUGH STRESS)

and I have decided I REALLY take issue with the concept of "disabled”. like. at all. I think the construction of “disabled people” is at the root of SWATHES of what’s wrong with our society and how we treat people with specific access or wellbeing needs.

like I think it’s basically fact at this point to take a postmodern approach and accept the common framing of “people are as disabled as society makes them” ie disability is a social construct and who is disabled is purely a matter of who society isn’t willing to work around as default (the usual example is short-sightedness, which historically was a substantial disability but is barely noticeable in a society where using adaptive tech for it is normalised)

but I wanna push it further because either EVERYONE is disabled or NOBODY is disabled imo. “disabled” is a broad enough category to be fundamentally meaningless. it’s a useful umbrella term for like...people whose physical and psychological needs and personhood are often diminished, overlooked or ignored, but it’s also very arbitrary and contextual what qualifies as a disability.

which is kind of what I’m saying about person-centred parenting (which. pinch of salt I am not a parent). EVERYBODY has special needs because everybody’s needs are different. And my experience has been that positing Capital-D Disabled as a specific, blue-badge-holding, Very Serious category, and limiting your concerns about access and wellbeing needs to disabled people is: 

a) unhelpful to people who aren’t disabled per se but who benefit from specific accomodations (for a very trivial example, “having shit internet” isn’t a disability, but it’s still an access need that things like video transcripts, image descriptions and alternate communication routes will help meet) b) unhelpful to people who are “disabled-ish,” who don’t feel able to clearly identify as disabled, or who don’t know they’re disabled (which to be honest is so many of us because invisible disabilities, partial sensory or motor loss, and mental health problems make up the bulk of disabilities and those are often invisibilised or downplayed) c) unhelpful to “properly disabled” people, because it creates a huge othering effect. drawing a hard line between “normal” and “disabled,” or even imagining that that’s a line that exists, allows disabled people to be dehumanised or treated as the sum of their Tragic Suffering, as opposed to the Normal Abled People.

“Disabled” is, as I say, a useful generalisation/abstraction sometimes, but when we’re talking about actual material things (whether that’s material need or material change) it’s not a useful category. I honestly don’t think we can create a society which consistently confronts ableism while we’re trying to operate in a binary framework centred on “disabled” vs “not disabled” or “neurotypical” vs “neurodiverse”. We need to be willing to throw out the whole construction of “abled” and instead commit to handling needs without interrogating cause. 

This DOES NOT MEAN that doctors, therapists, individuals, communities etc shouldn’t try to diagnose, treat or understand conditions, or that we should throw out the idea of labelling condition groups. It just means that we need to flip how we look at it, and take a descriptive not prescriptive approach. We need to understand that these labels (whether something as broad as “disabled” or as specific as “Ehlers-Danlos type 2″) are useful as groupings, but that the function of them is to give a general idea of what issues might arise and what might help.

Every person with, say, EDS type 2 is using that to refer to the same symptom grouping, but a) they’ll all manifest, experience and describe symptoms their own way and b) they’re all individual people with other shit going on in their minds and bodies, and so what helps one of them may absolutely fuck another up. And somebody who doesn’t have EDS type 2, but who finds using a wheelchair helpful, potentially has more in common with EDS patient A (who uses a wheelchair) than Patient A has with EDS patient B (who has no mobility impairment but huge digestive problems).

And like. ok. I’m not hearing impaired but I do have audio processing issues, so subtitles are really, really useful to me. I’m not, technically, disabled in that way. it would be dodgy for me to claim I was. but it’s still super useful for me to feel able to request that. and then we have to ask - where’s the line? I’m disabled because my knees are fucked at 27. but if my knees were in this state at 80 I’d be in rude health. but if I was 80, it would still be an absolute pain in the ass to climb 5 flights of stairs, even though contextually I am healthier than expected. 

Or like...I was chatting to a pal about disability disclosure and all the little things you don’t notice affecting your life and therefore don’t report or ask for help with. I said “I have agoraphobia and there’s this like. physical resistance I have to push through to leave the house so I stand around going ‘oh no I have forgotten something’ because I’m procrastinating on having to go outside.” She said “oh I also do that but in my case it’s because I usually have forgotten something so I’m always paranoid.”

forgetfulness isn’t a disability (except when it is). and ultimately although the root is different the material impact is broadly the same. and the world is full of things we find hard that others find easy, but that may not be socially understood as disabilities. I just think we’d get a lot further if we took a solution-centred view on this. it does matter to me why I can’t leave the house, because how I handle it is affected by what the problem is. but it shouldn’t matter to eg my work why I need to give myself an extra 20 minutes to get out of the house (whether it’s agoraphobia, forgetfulness or something else) as long as we can, between us, figure out a workaround.

anyway that’s why I keep textdumping on that parenting post. because we shouldn’t have to ask “does my child have ADHD” or “is my child autistic” or “is my child trans” in order to justify finding ways for them to manage being restless, depressed, overwhelmed, manic, afraid, angry etc, or to let them wear what they feel right in and self-describe how they want to. It might be helpful to know if they’re ADHD/autistic/trans/whatever, because it can help you get ideas and resources for strategies, but it shouldn’t be necessary, and “because this thing is harmless and makes them safer/happier/calmer” is fundamentally a more important justification than “because they are autistic”

idk. treat people as people. try to do right by them. don’t build a hierarchy of Normal and Abnormal problems. just meet common needs and create space for people to express their needs without needing to disclose their whole medical history or litigate their disability status.

(TO BE CLEAR: in the current world legislation specifically related to defining disability as a protected characteristic and disabled people as at-risk/special interest groups are VERY NECESSARY. but in a world governed by an expectation of tailored accessibility and wellbeing approaches I think that necessity would at the very least be heavily reduced. and in communities trying to do more than the bare minimum to create an anti-ableist space I think the best single thing we can do is almost always to remove gatekeeping and disclosure barriers to asking for adaptations)

[formulatrash]

It’s so cool you can paint pictures of drivers on a human level!! Who is the coolest female driver you’ve met? And have you ever spent time with the queen that is Susie Wolff?

I know Susie quite well cus she’s a Formula E team boss (and has been for two seasons pretty much, now)

She’s really cool. Clever, sharp, able to ignore the sniping (and it is constant) that any failings in the team’s delivery are because of her gender. Not from other people in Formula E, but the media (not particularly English language media but that’s by no means universal) and the usual armchair commentators from Twitter to YouTube to the third circle of hell that is Facebook group comments of course spout sewage constantly.

Oh, she got the job because of her husband (she didn’t), she isn’t serious about motorsport, she had no proven record as a team boss previously.... I mean, neither did Allan McNish but that curiously doesn’t come up as to why he’s in charge of Audi, despite absolute shitting the bed in Season 4.

(I love Allan but: it would be disingenuous to call the start of S4 anything other than a clown show at Audi, albeit mostly related to finding their feet as a factory outfit - and it was fair not to put that on him; imagine if he’d been Alanis, though...)

Susie has led Venturi to the most success they’ve ever had as a team but still gets called mediocre by geniuses from the comfort of their couches. She wants more, of course - she’s an ambitious and fiercely driven person. She’s also super friendly and funny and I really like her; she has huge amounts of time for people and particularly young people and women starting out in their careers. I’ve done a few bits with her and D2BD and like, you don’t start a thing like that because you don't give a shit, you know?

Here’s something I don’t think I’ve ever published? It’s an interview I did with Susie in Riyadh back at a showcase before the start of Season 5. We were nervous. It was weird.

Diriyah, Riyadh, 2018 There are sometimes moments around interviews where technically your recorder is running but it’s not per se the start of formal questions yet. In a side room of a Riyadh conference centre, sitting down with Venturi Formula E team principal Susie Wolff, I had one of those this week.

It would be fair to describe the Riyadh Eprix as ‘controversial’ - putting a Formula E race in a country known for being the home of oil is one, admirably punk thing. But Saudi Arabia is - or has been - a very closed kingdom, with extremely strict rules and social systems that seem obviously out-of-joint with the western twenty-first century.

Beyond that, I have an international relations degree and used to work for human rights organisations. You can use google to pick out the contexts in which I was previously aware of Saudi Arabia. I am fearless to the point of total disregard for my personal safety but my heart fluttered as I went to Heathrow, as I boarded the plane, as we landed. Everything I knew said I shouldn’t do it.

But you know how it is when someone tells you that, even if it’s you.

I don’t know much about Saudi Arabia and I can’t pretend that 24 hours there has illuminated the country to me more than watching the chasing, blinking lights of Riyadh’s enormous, luminescent sprawl did while I was sitting at my hotel window typing notes.

Launch events are launch events. The fact I was wearing an abaya and hijab (although it’s not obligatory for non-Muslim women my hair is a bit avante-garde to risk it) didn’t really change the fact that they’re just awkward promotional chat, albeit with Arabic-to-English headset.

And then it was straight on to interviewing Saudi princes - who are just politicians, the sports ministry fairly far removed from anything that isn’t, uh, sports. But nonetheless “interviewing Saudi princes” rates quite highly on my *record scratch* *freeze frame* ‘Yep, you’re probably wondering how I got here?’ scale. How the hell did I get here?

Anyway, after that I spoke to Susie Wolff, the new head of Venturi Formula E team. It was a strange, semi-breathless moment; interviewing one of my heroes in motorsport, in the absolute least likely circumstances. A female ex-race driver being interviewed by a female journalist, in a country that women were banned from attending let alone participating in motorsport.

As she sat down, Susie looked me dead in the eye and said “Look, you of all people can’t have a go at me about this.”

I knew exactly what she meant. Should we be there? I don’t know, maybe not. If we weren’t, what dead-behind-the-eyes man would be and where would we be getting new jobs?

I didn’t notice it at the time but when I heard the audio back, we both sound nervous - breathy, almost on the verge of panic. I didn’t become a motorsport journalist to interview Saudi princes or worry about this shit - except maybe I did, really because Formula E has to be an obnoxious upstart, it has to be confrontational even and especially with the scariest potential opponents.

It was before last season, then and so the first thing I had to ask Susie was what she could expect from the season, coming in as Venturi team principle. It’s the most nervous we both sound on the whole recording.

“I absolutely don't underestimate the challenge ahead of me. I've been a great believer, my whole life, that you've got to push yourself out of your comfort zone.

“You've got to do things that do slightly scare you because that's when you develop as a person and when I took on this challenge I absolutely realised the work that lay ahead of me.”

It would be fair to say that, a few years ago when I decided to do this. I did not. I myself cannot claim to have any bold vision in the way I stumbled my way into Formula E and really hoped it was going to come up with something to save my life because I’d run out of my own options.

Susie clearly had a different approach, a full long-game more than a messy explosion of want/need/hope. But sitting there in this weird exhibition centre in a city I’d never been to before, she put it very well.

I had to ask her about the “women’s test” - the option for teams to run a second car at an in-season test in Riyadh, provided it was driven by a woman of sufficiently high driving standard:

“I started Dare To Be Different because everybody talks about the fact that there's not enough diversity in motorsport. But very few people do something about it and I think it's about being proactive - if you want to see change, be part of that change, don't sit and talk about it but actually try and help make it happen.

“And what I appreciate so much since joining Formula E - and I can very much say joining the Formula E family - is that they're very, very supportive, more than any other championship we approached. Because they realise that it's a problem. And it's something that they want to be proactive on.”

Everyone said it was a stunt. And yes, of course it was a stunt. So are rookie tests that get Mick Schumacher into a Ferrari, so is anything where there’s a constraint that conducts the order of the event. So is sport. But it wasn’t a badly-thought-through one and with my brain already trying to stop bending back on itself with the news I actually might quite like??? Saudi Arabia??? I didn’t quite notice how much.

Susie obviously had more detail on it -

“I think the concept that they came up with regarding the test day, within the first race weekend, is really good. I was quite vocal in how the concept should be transported and run properly because for me, rather than just creating an opportunity which creates a lot of attention but actually doesn't have any fundamental credibility or any long-lasting impact is not going to be positive change for the long run.

“So we had quite some discussions at our team principals meeting that actually teams will run a female driver if they find one that they want to run, that's of the right level. There will be no different sessions for different levels, there will be no women just put in the car out of completely out of the depth.

“I lost a very good friend of mine who should never have been in the situation that she was and I think when this happens it has to be done the right way and those inputs were all taken on board and I'm very confident that we have now created an opportunity that is going to a) have an very positive impact and b) show not just the Saudi community but the wider world what's possible. I think you can't underestimate the impact of seeing women on track, that's something visible that women can identify with and that's role models to which they can aspire.

“I will be announcing in November a full-time test driver within my team who is a female, I've taken her because of her abilities not just because she's a female [it was Simona de Silvestro, who tested for Venturi that December and is now part of Porsche] but I absolutely believe in in - and I think, you also because you're one of very few within what you do, you're a fantastic role model and that can inspire so many people - and that's why it's up to us to have a positive impact and have a positive change but it has to be done in a credible way.

“Because I'm not just flying a flag saying 'let's do something for the sake of it,' I very much think we have to do something but in the right way, in a credible way that's going to create long-lasting impact because I'm pretty sure you'd also love to see, in ten years, more young women doing what you do and to be able to turn around and say 'wow, I helped people to understand there was a possibility within this sport.' And the sport does have so many possibilities it's just that what people see is a male dominated world but there's no reason why it has to be. Not just focussing on the on-track activities, I very much believe that we have to look at the whole sport, from your industry in journalism to the engineering, the whole sport just needs to be more accessible to women and they have to come in at grass-roots level and be able to rise to the top of the pack.

“If they're of the right level. And I think that is one of the problems right now, internationally and I think that's where the Women in Motorsport commission was great that they did this assessment because people were able to see it. In one of our first meetings in New York when this idea had just come up many people were saying 'oh where will we get anyone from' and I was like 'well wait a second, in Audi there's Ashley Freiburg, at BMW there's Beitske Visser and obviously Jaguar there's Katherine Legge there are enough available, it's not ok to say you don't have the numbers when there are enough good women right now it's just a case of being open to that change. Certainly, it's one thing that I very much appreciate about Formula E - they're supporting us massively and we've got some exciting news coming out toward the end of October with regards to Dare to be Different and more events around Formula E and that's something that I'm very grateful for the opportunity to work on.”

(I apparently gave up properly writing the article at this point, I guess no one commissioned it - but hey, lil Tumblr exclusive)

[the2020romanceproject]

Review: The Wedding Date

(Or: Maybe I should only read the first half of romance novels from now on?)

Book two of my year of romance was Jasmine Guillory’s The Wedding Date! I was excited about this one, since I had actually heard of it before I started reading romance, and also it has fake dating which is always gold. And I did enjoy it...up to a point. More on that below. :)

First, a summary: Alexa is chief of staff to the mayor of Berkeley. Drew is a pediatric surgeon in L.A. They get stuck in an elevator together when Drew is in San Francisco for his ex-girlfriend’s wedding to his med school classmate. Drew was supposed to have a date for the wedding, but she cancelled, and on a whim he asks Alexa to go with him instead as his pretend new girlfriend. She says yes, and they have a great time at the wedding and fall in bed afterward and have great sex. Drew secretly changes his flight to leave later in the day on Sunday, and they spend the day together. They’re both hesitant because they know the other person isn’t looking for anything real here—Alexa in particular knows Drew doesn’t do relationships—but they keep reaching out to each other, and Alexa goes down to L.A. to stay with Drew the next weekend. There’s a brief blip where she texts him to ask if he’s sleeping with other people and he makes a joke instead of answering seriously and she cancels their next weekend together; then he runs into her (very conveniently) when he’s back in SF for a conference and they fall into bed again. Then there’s a more serious blip where she meets a bunch of his exes who let it slip that he broke up with each of them around the two-month mark when it seemed to be going really well. Alexa gets upset, refuses to let Drew say anything about his intentions because she doesn’t want to be hurt, and sneaks out of his apartment in the middle of the night to fly home early. Drew realizes how much she means to him and flies up to L.A. to support her at a hearing for the at-risk-youth arts initiative she’s pushing for, and the two of them happily reconcile (and the initiative passes). He shows her the job offer he got from his mentor at a San Francisco hospital, and she tells him yes, she wants him to move here. There’s an epilogue a year later where he takes her back to the elevator where they met and proposes.

I feel like I spent my last review talking entirely about why the book fell apart in the middle for me. This book also fell apart in the middle, but I’m going to start with some things I liked/noted about it, so as to not spend ALL my time complaining about shortcomings. :)

Things I really liked:

Chemistry. Alexa and Drew are both super charming. Their back-and-forth was really enjoyable to read. It was a big part of what got me into the book: I wanted to see these two charming people grow to like each other. All the thing where they’re at the rehearsal dinner and wedding and enjoy touching each other were really nice to read.

Tropes. This one had such good tropes! Stuck in an elevator together! Fake dating! Anything with plausible deniability, where they’re acting like they really like each other but each one thinks it might not denote real interest, is just the most fun. This one gave up the plausible deniability aspect way sooner than I would have expected, but still: great tropes.

Race. Alexa is black and Drew is white. I am also white, so my perspective here is not informed by personal experience, but I really liked how this was handled. Alexa does experience some microaggressions and outright racism—not from Drew—in ways that felt realistic to me. Drew doesn’t try to explain away any of the racism, which made him seem like a good potential partner to her. There was also a thing where he failed to understand a thing in her past that was impacted by race, and when she explained it he listened and accepted his ignorance. She was still concerned that he’d like her less for having made him aware of his privilege, which felt like a very sad and real fear. Overall, it felt like racial dynamics were allowed to come into the text in nuanced and organic ways that kept Alexa from being a token POC. (Jasmine Guillory is a POC herself, so I’m not surprised that this is handled well, and there are probably other things about it that I as a white person didn’t even pick up.)

Body type. Alexa is curvy! She’s embarrassed about it! But Drew loves it! As someone who fills out the top of a cocktail dress pretty well myself, I really appreciated both sides of this: the realistic body issues from someone raised in a society that valorizes thinness, and the way the text kept affirming Drew’s attraction to her. There’s a racial component to this as well—lots of skinny blond girls in this book—but it was something I was able to identify with even from my different societal context.

Things I noted/was surprised by:

How soon they had sex. At some point I’ll stop being surprised by this in romance novels. I’ve read a lot of fake dating stories, and written some, and I would have expected the charade to go on a lot longer before they had actual sex that couldn’t at all be explained away by the fake dating scenario. The purported fakeness of it is the fun part! They both think the other one isn’t interested for real, while their own feelings continue to grow! Why would you cut that part short?? As soon as they kissed and admitted to each other that they wanted it for real, the tension dropped from a ten to about a two. This book got a decent amount of mileage out of that lower level of tension—more on that below—but it’s so surprising to me that it didn’t keep the much more interesting and trope-y tension going longer.

Consent and power dynamics. This book was super good about consent: Drew made sure to check in about what Alexa wanted, and it was played for sexual intensity, where he clearly got a kick out of hearing her say it. But it was very, very one-sided. There was no implication that Alexa needed to check in with Drew on what he wanted. This wasn’t a surprise, exactly, but it did stand out to me, since I don’t read a lot of het (and honestly this is a big part of why—I don’t want to encounter gendered power dynamics in my leisure reading). Consent felt like a thing the woman had to give the man. I’m not saying this is a problem, necessarily; just something I noticed.

Sex scenes. The sex scenes almost faded to black but not quite. Maybe they faded to gray? I felt like I knew pretty much what sex act they were doing and when, but they weren’t described in any real detail. It was an interesting compromise, like the book was trying to give us a clear sense of their sexual relationship without any real titillation. I wonder if this is a genre thing—I’m not sure this book was published strictly as romance—or if it’s just Guillory’s style.

Romcom careers. They’re chief of staff to the mayor of Berkeley and a pediatric surgeon. Those have GOT to be two squares on the romcom career bingo card. I’m teasing a little, but I think this kind of character background serves an important role: we have to know that they’re accomplished, valuable people, so that when they feel rejected or insecure we can revel in it—look, they feel like I once felt! But it’s unjustified and they’ll end up happy!—instead of actually questioning the characters’ worth. Fanfiction usually gets over this hurdle by writing about characters the readers already know and respect and love, or, in the case of RPF, writing about people who are for-real successful and famous. Romance novels have to introduce us to brand-new characters, and one of the easiest ways to make us feel sure that these characters are worthy of our respect and of the other character’s love is to give them prestigious and intellectually or creatively rigorous careers. I’ll be interested to see how many other instances of this I run across.

Two points of view. It strikes again! Do all romance novels include both points of view? I don’t hate it, necessarily—but it does decrease the overall tension. You don’t get caught up in one character’s desires as strongly when you’re seeing both POVs.

Immediate attraction. Another thing I should probably stop being surprised by. Both Alexa and Drew are very physically into each other as soon as they meet; he has trouble not looking at her breasts, and there are so many narrative references to her wanting his touch, wanting to move closer to him, etc. To be fair, I think I’m pretty far toward the “not attracted to complete strangers” side of the spectrum, so I might not be the best judge of this, but it did feel a little over the top. I suspect this was an attempt to make us really want these two to be together. I think it was trying too hard—a more genuine reserve would have been more compelling to me, where they like each other but don’t immediately want to jump each other. Also, they’re going to a wedding together as fake dates! You don’t have to try that hard to make us interested!

Food as comfort. This was such a strong recurring thread in this novel. Alexa has a sweet tooth, and Drew is always getting her doughnuts; they get a lot of very satisfying takeout. It gelled for me with the thing where a lot of the satisfaction in the novel came from the comfort of “oh, this person is touching me; oh, they like me back.” Comfort instead of angst.

Subplots. One of my questions in approaching this genre was whether romance novels needed to be more novel-like than fic—i.e. whether they needed to engage with a plot beyond the romance. This does have a very slight B plot (Alexa’s youth initiative, which is connected to her difficult relationship with her sister) but it’s VERY slight. The book has an even less prominent subplot about one of Drew’s patients who develops cancer. Alexa’s subplot resolves, whereas Drew’s is only backdrop. Drew’s in particular is used the way I’d use a subplot in fic: it’s included to provide an excuse for scenes with or about Alexa, or to affect Drew’s mood in ways that reflect or influence the romance plot. It serves the romance instead of being an independent plot in its own right.

Okay, so those are my observations. Time to dig into the thing where this book lost me in the middle—much like the last book I reviewed, but for entirely different reasons.

I’ve already talked about the drastic drop-off in tension after they slept together. That actually was not what lost me this time. This novel managed to build enough of a rapport between the two characters that I was invested in their relationship becoming real. To be clear, I would have preferred that the fake dating trope go on longer and create opportunities for actual longing. But this novel wasn’t so much about longing; it was about that delightful feeling when you like someone and you reach out tentatively and they meet you in the middle. It was the very, very gentle tension of, “Maybe we could hang out today?” “Sure!” over and over, as a relationship builds. It was fluff-adjacent tension. Super enjoyable, the way a warm bath is enjoyable. I wasn’t dying to get to the end or anything, but it was nice.

I did wonder, about halfway through, how the heck this book could possibly keep going like that. And it turned out it couldn’t. That was when it introduced: the Misunderstanding Plot.

Don’t get me wrong. I love a good misunderstanding plot. But they are hard to do well. They work best when they feel unforced and genuine, and don’t make either of the characters carry the idiot ball. Like, say, if Drew and Alexa hadn’t had enthusiastic sex where they talked about how much they wanted each other, and they were still under the impression that it was a fake relationship, it would be very easy to have the other character accidentally confirm that and drive a wedge between the two of them. Or if one of them was starting to think it WAS real, and then they overheard the other person confessing to someone else that it was totally fake. (Don’t mind me; just thinking about ways I might write it.)

The problem with this one was that they were basically just dating at this point, so in order for drama to arise, the characters had to act badly in ways that felt forced and off-putting. They’d known each other for a week and a half; things had been happy and a little giddy and chill between them so far. Then Alexa texts in the middle of the workday to ask if Drew is sleeping with anyone else. (Because that is the perfect way to initiate an important relationship conversation, obviously.) He makes a joke, because he is clearly also very good at this, and they don’t speak to each other for a week and a half.

Guess which one of them this makes me like more? That’s right! Neither!!

Look. I like characters who are stupid about their own feelings and blind to other people’s. But I also like characters who, when they know about the other person’s feelings, are very, very considerate of them. Drew was not—and Alexa compounded the problem by being confrontational with the question and then abruptly pulling back as soon as she didn’t get the magical easy answer. In short, it made me think that they were bad for each other.

They recover from the texting thing when they just so happen to run into each other (I mean, I can’t throw stones, I’ll buy the coincidence) and are happy to see each other, and apologize, and everything’s fine. But by this point the novel had lost me. I had been enjoying the happy dance of “Does s/he like me? Ooh, s/he does!” but only so long as it lasted. They didn’t have a strong enough core after a week and a half to get through the badness of those texts. They were happy again, but I wasn’t invested. I was mostly reading so I could write this review.

Then, fascinatingly, the book won me back.

It was a very specific passage that did it. On page 190 of the paperback, Alexa talks in the narration about how she wouldn’t admit this to anyone other than herself, but ever since that first weekend with Drew, she’d imagined him in bed with her every night as she fell asleep. And I was sold. I mean, it was still very gentle tension. But! A thing the character wanted that she wasn’t getting! I could be into this again!

And then...well, this is already super long, so I won’t go into all the details of the misunderstanding that ended the book. It had a lot in common with the text message fiasco: Alexa felt insecure, got upset that Drew might not be into her, and refused to engage with him about whether that was true. (Okay, it was actually more egregious than the texts, in that she wouldn’t let him speak.) Her getting upset made sense, but her refusing to let him speak when he was clearly trying to felt SO forced.

The funny thing is, there was actually a seed of potential real conflict there: Drew hadn’t really admitted to himself that he wanted a long-term thing with her. He could have told her that. He could have done anything, really, to indicate that and create a real conflict. (Also tricky to handle without him coming off as not actually interested—but doable, I think.) As it was, he didn’t call her his girlfriend at a party—which, it had been like a month, and they hadn’t discussed it privately, so it’s totally appropriate not to throw the term around in public yet!—and...that’s it. Everything else was just her fears, and the very cowardly way she handled them. I guess that’s relatable? But it felt so engineered. It didn’t so much make me dislike her as make me annoyed with the text for twisting her response so that they couldn’t have the very short conversation that would have cleared everything up.

In fairness to Guillory, a friend who’s read the whole series tells me she does better with misunderstanding plots later. But I’m really, really excited to read a romance plot that doesn’t lose me halfway through.

Next up is Red, White, and Royal Blue. I’ve been told this was basically written for me, so I’m hopeful. Fingers crossed it sticks the landing!

[jenneferofjengaberg]

Since I’ve had a few days to process season 4 of Lucifer, I want to talk about Eve.

I’ll admit that when I heard spoilers for this season, my heart kind of sank. I immediately was like “oh god not another pointless love triangle”. I mean I’ve been through this before (I was a Bones fan). Many shows get almost to the point where they wanna get their romantic leads together, chicken out because they think getting the couple together will tank the ratings, and then suddenly introduce another character to be the romantic foil, even though the entire audience knows that this is just a plot device. The sole effect of this is usually irritating the audience, because there’s absolutely no reason to be invested in this new character at all. The audience knows they won’t be sticking around, knows that they’re not actually a serious competition to the main ship, and thus every scene that this new character is in feels like an annoying waste of time.

But the writers on Lucifer are better than this. While I don’t believe we are supposed to consider Eve at any point a viable alternative for Lucifer to Chloe (the cracks in the relationship are apparent early on), the relationship still felt realistic, and even necessary, given the state of Lucifer and Chloe’s relationship, and even more importantly, Eve’s state of mind as well. 

And that’s the other part of this that floored me (in a good way). Eve was never just a plot device. She was/is her own character, with her own motivations and her own journey, not just a pretty placeholder to make Chloe jealous. When she spoke bitterly of being created for Adam, being a “subset” of another person, and of spending that relationship trying to mold herself into what would please Adam, it was easy to empathize with her. What made it even more heartbreaking was that she immediately started doing the same thing with Lucifer, but seemed to be completely unaware of it, which felt so realistic. She’s theoretically aware that she has a problem, but it has developed into such a pervasive pattern in her life, that she’s unable to identify it when she stumbles into it again. Have we not all been there, in some shape or form? This relatable weakness made Eve interesting beyond her place in the Lucifer/Chloe saga. It made you root for her to get out of her relationship with Lucifer, not because you wanted her out of the way of the main ship, but because the audience could see the unhealthy and stifling trap that she was falling into again, even if she couldn’t. And she was endearing enough that you wanted something better for her for her own sake. This was some very smart writing from the Lucifer team.

My one quibble is that while I’m glad they let Eve finally realize her mistake, it was kind of sudden. I wish we’d gotten a bit more development going from point A, Eve completely blind to the fact that she’s once again sublimating her identity into that of her partner’s, to point C, where she’s like “Yeah, shit, I did it again, and I’m going to proactively fix it”. We needed them to show us point B, which would be her slowly coming to this realization, starting to question the relationship and her own decisions. But, I don’t hold it against them too much, because they only had 10 episodes, and they had to fit a hell of a lot of story in, for many characters besides Eve.

If there is a season 5, I really hope that Eve will return. I’d love to see her go on that journey of self-discovery that she told Maze she needed. I’d like to see her relationships develop, particularly with Maze, but also with others. Chloe could be a really interesting friendship to explore for her. Chloe was understandably upset at some of Eve’s decisions, but she also seemed able to recognize that Eve is essentially a good person, particularly through her actions in saving Trixie’s life. That’d be a natural foundation for them to build a rapport on. The writers created a great, relatable character, who has more stories to tell us.

[antagonistchanremade]

If I ever make a Minecraft texture resource pack (i’ve been into Minecraft since 2011 so I’m never gonna get used to the fact that they’re called resource packs now) I’m gonna fucking fix Minecraft’s shitty armor textures

To clarify the problem isn’t that the armor textures are too undetailed or anything

The problem is that they cover so fucking much of your skin

Skins are great! they make it easier to identify you among other players!!

And from what I understand in Bedrock Edition you need to actually pay real money for them because Bedrock sucks, and in that scenario it’s even worse that armor covers them up so much because you!! had to pay money for this!! if you had to pay money for it, this A) means that there’s an invisible downside that you might not consider when you’re buying the skin (the downside being “the better you’re doing at the game, the less people will even see the thing you bought”) and B) the skin is a bit of a status symbol, because if skins are free then it’s just a sign that you’re competent enough to figure out how to get a skin but if skins cost money then it’s a sign that you either care enough about the game to spend more money on it OR you’re so rich that this kind of money is practically nothing to you; either way, you probably want to communicate this to other players (if you’re rich, you show off because rich people are showoffs; if you care about the game, you show off because it gives you Cred as like, a serious player who invests a lot into the game)

So I’d make armor textures that are NOTICEABLE, but also, like, not very covering

So you can easily tell at a glance if someone’s wearing armor, but also still be able to see the majority of their skin

I’ve actually kinda done this already

About a month ago I frankensteined my own kinda-texture pack out of pre-existing packs, and I specifically chose the texture pack that was already the most revealing and erased significant chunks of the armor textures (strategically. i didn’t erase them willy-nilly. i made copies of the textures, then recolored bits of the original, opened the game, used those colors to identify what parts of the textures corresponded to what parts of the armor, closed the game, deleted the originals and replaced them with the copies (to get rid of that recoloring i did), and erased what i felt like was unnecessary, and i now had more revealing armor)

But because I didn’t actually make it myself, it’s private. The only people with access to it are me, @helpfool, and @comedydealer (and them because they’re the people I play Minecraft with; some other people I’m really close to could also get access to it (like if @aqours asked then I’d definitely let her have access) but only a select few and only privately). Because I don’t wanna steal the original packs’ creators’ art. My personal philosophy is that you can do whatever you want with someone else’s art privately, but only privately. If you wanna do it publicly, you need to follow the creator’s wishes. And I’m pretty sure some of the packs’ creators had specific rules about no redistributing.

[the-sky-fell-blossoms]

Not as Easy the Second Time Round [NESTR] (Part 2)

I found myself at work after that intrusion. It was a welcome distraction after baring myself in front of a stranger. There was only one person I'd ever consider thinking about doing something so unnecessary with, and he was proving to be exceptionally hard to get in touch with.

Jihuyn always made it a habit of probing me for anything on my mind. No matter how irrelevant it may be to me in my opinion. He’s always had accurate hunches in regards to how I was feeling, often before I even began to feel it myself. Now, when I've never been more confused, it was morbidly poetic he's nowhere to be seen. I constantly found myself in need of one of our talks. One without a tape recorder and false pleasantries. Jihuyn would tell me everything wrong with me. Give me vague and sentimental advice, I wouldn't know where to begin with following. He'd pat my shoulder and smile warmly. Although debatably useless, the comfort from the teal haired man made up for that in leaps and bounds.

I, in return, would let Jihyun know when he's being too emotional. Give a practical approach to the problems the soft-hearted Jihuyn put himself into. Tell him point-blank he's being stubborn or ridiculous. Ironically it was him who was the more close-minded out of the two of us. I would relent when proven wrong. Jihuyn often chose to hang on tighter to his own stance and dig himself into a worse situation than necessary.

I sighed, or maybe it was a groan. Even a glass of wine wasn't taking the edge off tonight.

Usually, on nights like these, I'd open the Chatroom. I'd open the app and there'd be a new update waiting for me. Luciel insisted that maintenance was his highest priority, he would never let work get in the way. Years ago he claimed not to be a liar nor fool when it came to things so serious as a possible threat. I would take every update as proof as such. Although annoying when I was planning on sharing an update of my own to Assistant Kang and inappropriate when something important needed to be discussed regarding the RFA. It was at least a testimony that Luciel did take his responsibility for the RFA seriously.

I didn't tonight however, I was spending less and less time online. I remained oblivious to this fact until I was graced with a call from MC. Claiming everyone was concerned by my disappearance. More so than Yoosung's.

That made sense. What right did I have to mourn more than someone who's lost both their best friend and their cousin in the same year? Luciel was someone I met who happened to share a common goal. Although, the RFA was a family and treated themselves as such. To Luciel they must have had such an estranged relationship. Second to none but the one the redhead shared with my own Assistant.

The connection Luciel had with Yoosung, it was palpable. You saw it in both of their eyes, although they held vastly different things. I often prided myself on being able to read those around me. It was obvious there was more there. The subtext in Yoosung's words. There was no way the older of the two missed that. I was certain even the newcomer MC felt it after only a day although she said nothing. It would have been a pleasant relationship. Luciel would have never smiled more than teasing Yoosung for kisses and hugs, Yoosung would have accepted whatever he felt without looking back and made him feel that he was needed at every turn.

I stared down at my drink in deep thought. Yoosung indeed had better justification in his mourning. I'll have to make a note to pay him a visit. Perhaps out to dinner. Yoosung would never refuse an invitation to free food. Maybe while out I'll take the opportunity to talk to him about working for me in the near future. Luciel would be pleased to know the blonde wasn't left to wallow on his own again. When Rika left us, Luciel was away with work, not returning until just before the funeral. His return mere days before and he didn’t even seem aware of the passing. He immediately asked for Yoosung. They drove together to the funeral later that week. Comforted him, or at least attempted to after he got into a screaming match with his mother at the reception. There was only one time that entire night he ever left the boy’s side. It was to speak with Jihyun and I.

Everything today went back to one of the two. Jihuyn… Luciel. My thoughts recently indulged in clear bias. It is hard not to think about them, however. When Rika passed and Jihuyn started his disappearance act, it was the same.

The only difference is I’m not as sure I should be mourning at all. At first, I did, blinded by loss and the news that Luciel had not been retrieved when Prime Minister Choi was brought into custody. All I could think was the worst. Everything was spinning and it was as if I was suffocating. Luciel was gone. The man I watched grow all those years. He was taken from us. I stood there trying not to let emotions, I didn't know were coming, take over. My breath through my nose short and hectic.

It had, indeed, been a hard time.

But after a week, I got a sudden call from Yoosung. Whatever spirited him to do such a thing was beyond me. What willed me to answer, even more so. "You… Understand. I saw it on your face. Seven always teased that reading you was easy if you get a feel for how you looked when you actually couldn't care less. And Venn diagrammed your faces. I didn't get it, but then… at that moment when they told us… I think I got it."

I said nothing. What Luciel joked about to Yoosung was none of my concern, nor why. How you would even go about following his inane instructions wasn't at all a can of worms I wanted to indulge in either. How I came up in conversation. There were no topics to touch on. I wanted no part in acting like a widow, reminiscing. I didn't want to remember.

"I really miss him…" I steadied my breathing, that week I had buried myself in my work and pathetically called Jihyun. Perhaps by the hour. "He always said he'd be gone, that- that he might not make it to see the end of the year." Yoosung was crying, I couldn't bring myself to end the conversation or change the subject. I sat there at my desk like a fool listening to the boy bare his heart to me in some desperate attempt for connection. "He always said not to worry, that we should keep going, be happy, and keep going even if… I just miss him so much."

"I do too." I do not know what possessed me to say that, but I kept going. "No one could have known this was going to happen. Not even Luciel." Had he known he wouldn't have been taken.

"No." He chuckled, even through a sob, "he just thought he was talking about leaving forever. I told him we'd help him, everyone in the RFA would. If anything happened. But we couldn't. We tried, everyone, even Saeran. So why…"

I paused at this. "He… was very adamant about protecting everyone no matter what. Were something to happen, he'd take any measure."

"Yeah…"

After that, I let him go on about anything that came to mind, classes, how everyone was keeping up, Saeran. I didn't say much at all, but he seemed not to notice. Or perhaps he didn't care. He didn't come to me when Rika had her time, and Jihuyn would have mentioned it if he had given him the same treatment I was receiving. He said i understood, that he saw. But even in retrospect, I have nothing to have any kind of understanding on.

It was troublesome to dwell on. But I'd be forever thankful for that call. It gave me some kind of hope. Luciel had training, means and years of resources. They had not found a body and Prime Minister Choi had admitted to nothing.

I reminded myself of this, though foolish to keep faith in such a small, minute, possibility. It was a possibility. Until the day I identify a body. It's a possibility.

It is a possibility I found myself resigned too. I am not personally one for betting, but Luciel proved himself to always be a safe one.

…………

He was there again, this time by himself. He stood in the door frame in a hoodie that seemed much too big for him. It did nothing to make him seem more comfortable or fool the CEO into thinking he wanted to be here. If anything he looked like he was barely holding in a sigh when the man opened the door. He was tired but tried hard not to slouch, his expression cold and unimpressed by the other. Which was not unwarranted, Jumin had just gotten home from work and was reasonably disheveled. Company had not been on his mind that night. Though from the other’s expression it probably wasn’t on his either. He stepped out of the way wordlessly and let the smaller male in, pulling at his tie with intentions of removal, preferably. He’ll regret his lack of manners later, after he had a drink. The silent gesture luckily didn’t go unnoticed, after a moment his guest stepped in and made a B-line for the couch. For the best.

Jumin stepped back in and went to the kitchen to fetch what seemed to be two minutes overdue. “Is there anything you would like? I remember you had opted out of a glass last time you were over.” He said pouring a glass for himself. Fortunately, his fatigue had not made him forget all manners.

“No.” He looked over through his wire glasses. His golden eyes just as piercing from here. They kept eye contact for a short while before Jumin pulled away and sat with him across the couch, bottle and glass in hand. He seemed to tense as the ravenette got closer. Watching as if there was a chance he’d pounce at any second, Jumin made no reaction to this, however, simply taking off his jacket and sitting down with practiced elegance. He still felt the other’s eyes on him but he simply sat quietly and put his drink to his lips.

They sat like that for a while, Jumin didn’t mind, however. It was perhaps what he was going to do anyway, he was thankful that he wasn’t being distracted from his alone time. Luciel seemed more than happy to sit there and stare until dismissed, and while he did not want it, the company was not despised. He was most likely in a good mood or maybe just in the mood to drink and be stared at.

By his third drink, however, Luciel seemed antsy. And while Jumin usually couldn’t care less normally. He was feeling talkative, and he was interested as to why the boy paid him a visit tonight. The wine doing its job of loosening him up.

“Why are you here?” Didn’t mean he was any less blunt, however. He still kept in the back of his mind that Luciel was a guest but all parts of his mind slipped into parts they didn’t belong. Constantly fixing the leaks before talking is a skill he is well versed in though.

He nodded his head as if thinking of how to answer, his curly bangs shifting lightly over his hooped glasses. He seemed pensive, as if he really didn’t want to say the wrong thing, somehow sitting up straighter, his hand gripping at the velvet of the couch. “V said I should see you. I don’t really know why.” He cut himself off prematurely. He obviously had more to say. Jumin was getting a better feel for the boy, or at least when he was uncomfortable, a constant state for the boy. But he seemed well adapt to silence. So Jumin just took another drink and decided it was best to continue.

“I spoke to V shortly on my way home. The conversation had no real subject, but he seemed interested in when I got in. I should have suspected something sooner... “ It was a short conversation, Jihyun hung up as soon as he got the estimate. There was really no time to question his behavior. “

“I believe he wants us to bond for some unforeseen cause.”

“Perhaps I’m secretly a clone gone wrong, or an illegitimate child.” The redhead mutters to himself, in all honesty, Jumin was surprised he answered at all. He finished his glass and hummed in thought at the statement.

“Well, there was this one time I decided to indulge in a commoner stylist. There is no telling what they did with the snippets… and there was the one time when I was five and had my first sip of wine… That night was rather blurry. How old are you again?”

“I’m 17…” Jumin looked him over. He looked much younger than that. He almost didn’t believe him. Luciel hardly seemed surprised at someone openly studying him. “My birthday is pretty soon.”

“Ah, sometime in the summer?”

“Yeah…” He seemed uncomfortable, whether it was about his age or his birthday, wasn’t certain, but Jumin took note. Leaning forward towards him Jumin squinted as if looking for something he found in the other’s eyes after a moment.

“So it’s possible.” He whispered as if telling him a secret.

Luciel blinked caught off guard for a moment. Jumin could tell the second the joke had registered in his head. The beginning of a smile ghosted over the smaller male’s lips before he turned away and muffled a laugh, which was also taken into note by the older man. After a pause, he turned back once again expressionless. “Very.” In one word he lost all the tension in his shoulders. Oddly enough, Jumin also felt himself lean back.

No, he didn’t mind the unexpected company at all. He’d sooner die than admit this to Jihyun, alcohol speaking or not.

[dellaliz19]

Black Panther movie review: spoilers!

So, I just went and saw Black Panther and yes, it deserves all the praise it’s getting. So, you know the drill, pros and (few) cons, here we go!

Pros:

1) The general look of Wakanda is stunning. It’s a perfect blend of “city of the future meets African heritage” and it’s just amazing to see it brought to life. The technology is visually so engaging, and it’s great that so much of the sets are really utilized. The fight in the mine with the train, for example is a really efficient way to not just have a fight in an empty field (or airport 😐) but to actually make use of the premise you’ve set up.

2) Shuri is perfect and that is final. But seriously, Shuri is such a great character. Her relationship with T’Challa feels so real. The scene with her remote driving the car while T’Challa is on top of it is some of the most amazing and imaginative team work I’ve ever seen on film, and it was great. And it’s fantastic that her intellect and technical skill are so celebrated, and that no one ever looks down on her for it. As a woman myself in a STEM field, I’m all for celebrating smart, capable women of science and Shuri is a great role model for little girls. Also, she’s the Queen of Memes, and I love her.

3) The Dora Miljae. The powerful women don’t stop with Shuri: the Dora Miljae are finally on full display, and I’m so on board with it! I love that the King’s personal guard are these strong, capable women, who kick some serious freaking ass. Point these ladies in the direction of Thanos and then just give everyone else the day off, they’ve got it handled.

4) Andy Serkis is clearly having the time of his life. His Ulysses Klaue is the fun, devil may care kind of villain the MCU could use some more of. He’s irreverent, in it for the money and just loving every second of being a bad guy. Thematically, I understand why he had to die, but damn, he was just so much fun to watch. I know Serkis is the undisputed motion capture king, but can we please let him act more with his real face?!

5) Speaking of villains the MCU could use more like, Eric Killmonger is the perfect villain for this story. His arc was personal and related to T’Challa: he was the dark mirror image of who T’Challa could be, and Michael B Jordan hit it out of the park. I can’t say I ever rooted for him, but I definitely identified with his belief that the powerful have a responsibility to protect the marginalized. I think it’s important that the movie made it clear that it wasn’t so much his ideology that was wrong, but his methods, and that that hatred had warped his ideals somewhat: that he had killed his own people and that he wanted to punish the world. And it was important to that it was clear that his beliefs impacted and helped change and shape T’Challa’s own actions. Killmonger was the “we make our own demons” villain finally done right, and his last line was so powerful and so in character.

6) Martin Freeman’s Everett Ross finally found his rhythm. He’s clearly the story’s comedic “straight man” but he was really well integrated into the narrative, and he never feels out of place or takes up too much screen time. His hero moment in the flight drone thing was a really fitting culmination to his character developed in this movie, and I’d enjoy seeing him in more MCU movies.

7) Danai Gurira’s Okoye is a definite stand out character. She gets great fight scenes, is compelling and wise and she’s a fabulously funny character as well. I would let her kick my ass any freaking day of the week.

8) Suprise Sterling K. Brown is always a treat. I loved his scenes in the spirit world with his son, and his flashbacks in the apartment were really powerful. In very short order we’re made to feel his entire arc, and how his living amongst oppressed people of his own race affected his ideology and his struggle to reconcile that with his loyalty to his country and his brother and that’s very much due to the strength of Brown’s performance.

8) Winston Duke’s M’Baku is definitely the other stand out character. He’s introduced in this very brutal, no nonsense way, and somehow he ends up being the funniest character by the end? His “I’m just kidding we’re vegetarians” line got an honestly to gosh snort out of me, and he was a great story beat in showing the traditional side of Wakanada vs the technological side, and how T’Challa will be a different king than his father.

9) It was nice to see Bucky, but to only have him be the post credits stinger. It’s clearly establishing why he’s awake and around for Infinity War, but I’m glad he wasn’t in the whole movie. Black Panther really let T’Challa and it’s characters be the star, and including Ross was a good way to tie it into the MCU without taking that focus away from where it needed to be.

10) Honestly, the whole cast does great work with their characters. Chadwick Boseman has really made T’Challa his own, and he’s a great character. Angela Basset is always good, and Lupita Nyong’o is also fantastic. I especially like that, for a Marvel romance, she and T’Challa don’t waste time on the will they/won’t they. They find a common goal, and then they’re united. I like it. Another.

Cons (these are pretty minor!)

1) Vibranium is starting to feel like “fairy dust.” Have a problem? Vibrainium will fix it. Shot in the spine? Stick a ball of that in there! (also, like T’Challa couldn’t take two seconds to throw a little of that Rhodey’s way?) Want to make super holograms? Use some of that. And so on. This one isn’t a massive point to me: clearly the in universe explaination is that the secret government white guys in the 40’s only had imaginations large enough to make a frisbee out of it, but it does almost reach the point of feeling like a writing crutch. Vibrainium does everything, so sure, it can do that thing! Again, not major for me, because the world Wakanda paints is so cool, but it did kind of bug me.

2) Forrest Whitaker’s wise man mentor Zuri is fine, but he’s probably the character most unchanged from his general stereotype. He’s a shaman, he’s wise, he dies. His character history is good though and very thematically relevant, and Whitaker does a good job with what he’s given.

3) Daniel Kaluuya’s W’Kabi could have used a little bit more background, especially in regards to his relationship with Okoye. He’s basically only given the motivation of wanting Klaue dead, and when Killmonger delivers him that he’s just suddenly on board with all this world conquering and murder in a way that seems out of proportion for the character we’ve seen. And he and Okoye really needed more introduction to their relationship, given that their falling on either sides of this civil war is a significant plot point. All we get is her calling him “my love” and he returning it: that meeting on the battlefield would have been a lot more powerful if we’d been able to see them be domestic and interact.

4) The bloodlessness. This isn’t the director or the movie’s fault really, it’s the MPAA but the fact that PG-13 movies can’t have too much blood is...kind of noticeable here. I think it might be because the Dora Miljae all use penatrative weapons and many other characters do as well, but if you have a giant fight with spears and no one is bleeding then it feels a little bit...empty. Like, Killmonger slits the throat of one of the Dora in front of Okoye there’s no blood. Again, I get why it’s happening, and I’m not blaming the movie, but it’s something that I definitely noticed, and although I’m not asking for gore I felt the total lack of blood detracted a little of the realness from the fights.

Obviously, Black Panther is a movie that has a very deliberate point to make about race. And, I say this as a white woman: I’m so glad it does. As a woman, watching Wonder Woman was an incredibly empowering and momentous thing for me. To be able to see a story about a strong, powerful good woman on screen - someone I could identify with, and picture myself as - made me feel like I could do anything, and I think everyone, no matter your race, colour, creed, gender, sexual orientation, should get to have that moment. And so no, Black Panther wasn’t going to be a movie that gave me that moment, but I’m so, so glad it’s clearly doing so for so many people. Black Panther is a movie that celebrates black excellence and also tells an engaging and powerful story, and I’m happy to be able to enjoy and celebrate that with everyone.

So, final verdict: 9/10 for me. In a universe that is getting increasingly crowded and teetering on the edge of fatigued, Black Panther is something new and different and wonderful that everyone can enjoy.

Bonus: best lines.

“WHAT ARE THOSE?!?”

“Are we in Wakanda?” “No, we’re in Kansas.”

“Don’t freeze.” “I never freeze.” Lands. Freezes. “Ngh...hi.”

“Bury me in the ocean with all my ancestors who jumped from the ships because they knew drowning was better than living in bondage.”

“No tears for me?” “Nah, everybody dies. That’s just how life is around here.”

“Are you recording this?” “For science.” T’Challa flies across the room. “Delete that clip!”

“What, do you have a mixtape coming out?” “I can send you a SoundCloud link if you want?” “Please don’t make me listen to your music.”

“Oh good, another broken white boy for us to fix!”

“If he touches you again, I am going to impale him to that desk.”

Also if Infinity War doesn’t include a scene where Tony Stark ends up in Shuri’s lab and she’s like, “aw, that’s so cute, your hologram reminds me of the stuff I was making when I was 5,” while Tony loudly just loses his geek mind, then what even is the point of it all?

[schraubd]

On the Latest Academic Hoax

A new academic hoax story has broken, and it's bigger than ever before. Three scholars wrote twenty papers, none of which contained the arguments the authors believed (and all of which contained arguments the authors considered to be ridiculous) and sent them off to journals in the "grievance studies" set. By the time they had to pull the plug on the hoax, seven had been accepted, six were either still under review or under some form of "revise and resubmit", and six were rejected outright. This project was an expansion on an earlier hoax where a gibberish paper called "The Conceptual Penis" was published in a pay-to-publish journal. The present effort distinguished itself both in the number of papers written and in the decision to submit to what the authors called highly-ranked journals in their disciplines. On that latter note, it's hard to assess -- once you start getting into the sub(-sub-sub)field weeds, what really counts as "highly-ranked" -- but at least a couple of the journals they scored with are recognizable names (Hypatia, in particular, was a good get). It's also true, as any observer of peer-reviewed scholarly literature can tell you, that a lot of peer-reviewed scholarly literature even in top journals is dreck. So the fact that the authors were able to get arguments that are (or they viewed as, anyway) dreck published is not itself surprising; though perhaps it gives insight into exactly what and how dreck gets through the process. Nonetheless, I think there are some important limitations on what one can draw from this "study", including significant ethical ramifications in how the "data" was presented. One might say I'm being overly credulous in even treating this project as one that seeks to earnestly improve the quality of academic publishing standards (hint: if that's your goal, sneeringly referring to your targeted disciplines as "grievance studies" is a bad way to start). But, in part we should be self-reflective about the quality of writing and reasoning in academia, I'll take it on its terms. First, the limits on the conclusion. The authors methodology was to take arguments that they figured would be appealing to the editorial staff of a given journal but which they, personally, found to be outlandish, and see if they could get them published. They say that proves a serious malfunction in the peer-review process. I say "haven't they just passed an ideological Turing test?" An ideological Turing test measures one's ability to mimic the beliefs of the "other side". You "pass" if you successfully convince members of that side that you really are one of them. So let's say I, a liberal, adopt a pseudonym and submit an article to Breitbart. I do my best to make it look, feel, and sound like a Breitbart-style conservative article. Now clearly, I wouldn't believe what I was writing about them. The key question is whether they'd recognize the sham: would they say "this sounds like what a liberal thinks a conservative sounds like" (which is, indeed, what it actually is) or would they believe that this is an actual conservative writing? If the latter, then I've passed the test. The thing is, nothing about passing the Turing test, on its own, demonstrates the falsity of the beliefs or arguments successfully mimicked. Someone on Twitter (I can't remember who) suggested the case of a young-Earth Creationist who submits an article to a biology journal that "mimics" tenets and presumptions of mainstream biological science. If his "hoax" succeeds, would we say "aha! The biological sciences are hopelessly corrupted, to be taken in by this prankster!" No -- we'd say that the author has, albeit disingenuously, written an actual good argument (that he happens not to believe). Likewise, if I successfully spoof Breitbart, I doubt they'd take that as decisive evidence that they've gone off the rails. The case for why these papers are different, then, can't simply turn on the fact that (a) the authors don't believe the arguments they made and (b) they were nonetheless accepted. There has to be something else in the argument that makes them objectively bad, such that it represents a failure (beyond the fact of the disingenuous motives of the author) for the journal to have accepted it. So what might these be? This is hard to assess, because the authors don't link to the full papers (the accepted versions have, unsurprisingly, now all been retracted) and because their summaries are by design written to make their claims sound as outlandish as possible. But at least in some cases this isn't facially self-evident. Take the paper they got into Hypatia. Its thesis is "That academic hoaxes or other forms of satirical or ironic critique of social justice scholarship are unethical, characterized by ignorance and rooted in a desire to preserve privilege." One certainly understands the extra-dose of gleeful "gotcha-ness" the hoaxers enjoyed in getting this paper into Hypatia. But it's hardly the sort of article whose "wrongness" transparently stands out such that reviewers should have obviously known, on face, that it was ridiculous. After all, one could absolutely believe that satirical critiques of this sort of scholarship are unethical and rooted in a desire to preserve privilege (the "characterized by ignorance" is, I concede, at least arguably performatively contradicted by the ability of the authors to sufficiently effectively mimic these arguments such that they got their papers published. But even then, that would just show that one prong of the element was, after the fact, demonstrated to be falsified). Ditto their Fat Studies paper on fat bodybuilding. Again, the article isn't accessible anymore, but if the basic thesis is that there could be various ways to present "fat" bodies as (in the authors' words "legitimately-built bodies") worthy of attention and praise, even now I won't say that isn't a transparently ridiculous assertion. Think of what the ESPN Body Issue has done on this score, for example -- quite a few of its models, at the very least, undermine the notion that "fat" and "athletic" (or even "muscular") are mutually exclusively categories (quoth one of the athletes, a Major League pitcher: "As a baseball player, if I'm pitching 35 times a season, seven innings a pop, 100 pitches a game, I need some fat. I need some extra meat on my body."). And to the extent the "obvious wrongness" is based on the thesis being "positively dangerous to health", I call foul both because it oversimplifies what the research actually shows regarding the linkage between health and what is deemed "fat" in contemporary American society, and because "mainstream" bodybuilding very obviously also doesn't represent the apogee of healthy living either. Again, I'm not saying that either of these claims are clearly right. But they're not, at least as presented, transparently wrong such that nobody (not just not-the-authors) could find them believable or worth engaging with. Another potential reason why we could say that reviewers "failed" in not recognizing the wrongness of the article is where there is outright falsification of data. This is something they (apparently) did in the "Portland dog park" paper (they claim to have "tactfully inspected the genitals of slightly fewer than 10,000 dogs whilst interrogating owners as to their sexuality"). Maybe a good reviewer should have recognized that this seemed suspicious. But here I'd say that peer review is actually quite bad at catching this sort of outright fabrication (political science had it's own scandal on this score not too long ago). Perhaps unsurprisingly, peer review works best on the presumption that the author is earnestly presenting genuine arguments obtained by honest means. Our peer-review system would be even more dysfunctional than it already is if the first question reviewers asked is "is this paper lying to me?" And that moves me to the ethical qualms I have in how the hoax authors have presented their findings -- most notably, in how they treat the peer reviewer comments. Each of the papers they submitted -- including those which were rejected -- comes with a selection of peer review comments, all of which are positive. The idea, presumably, is to demonstrate that even their worst papers that didn't get accepted nonetheless were not treated with the sneering dismissal they deserved. There are two problems with this presentation. First, I think it is actually capturing trends in peer-review to be more constructive, charitable, and supportive towards the papers under consideration -- all good things. One of the reviewers quoted (who had recommended rejecting the article) explained his more positive feedback as an attempt to "buy in" to the paper and provide constructive comments explaining why the article itself didn't work without discouraging the author from the field entirely. It is, I think, a good thing to read articles in their strongest possible light -- to try to think of the best interpretation of the claims the authors are trying to make rather than the most nefarious. This is a practice that hoaxes, in particular, exploit -- they gain their force precisely in the knowledge that their readers will commit the terrible sin of trying to take them seriously. The second problem with the way the reviewer comments were presented is simultaneously more and less serious. Simply put: if the hoaxer's goal really was to provide a pathway for identifying what is and isn't "working" in these academic disciplines (and I concede that may be far too optimistic), then there is no justification for not including the negative or critical reviewer comments that (presumably) explained why papers were not accepted. Partially, this is simply a matter of misrepresentation -- only giving the positive comments but not the negative ones oversells how receptive readers were to these pieces. But more importantly, the part of me that wanted to earnestly take this hoax seriously as a genuine effort to constructively critique certain academic disciplines was the most thirsty for learning the content of the negative reviews. What is it that gets a paper rejected in Sociology of Race and Ethnicity (or what have you)? Clearly, it isn't a wild west where anything goes so long as you mimic the right politics (the authors -- somewhat begrudgingly -- admit that their project conclusively falsified that hypothesis). Consequently, figuring out where the borders are, what raises flags and what doesn't, is actually incredibly important to the extent the project is actually meant to have any sort of constructive edge. That these weren't included is powerful evidence about what the ambitions of the hoaxers really were. So it's a more serious critique to the extent I take the hoaxers seriously as trying to have a constructive impact on academic publishing; and a less serious critique to the extent that ascribing such seriousness of purpose is absurd. In any event. I don't need persuading that academic publishing includes a lot of terrible work, and I don't need persuading that there are certain common markers as to what gets terrible work published. But this hoax overshoots the mark -- mostly because its goal isn't really to build a better scholarly mousetrap but rather to grind certain ideological axes. My recommendation, therefore, is revise and resubmit. via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/2Nl8iPv

[shsl-shipper-gamer-fangirl]

Other ahoges: Makoto | Komaru | Hajime | Matsuda | Munakata | Kaede

Saihara Loses His Ahoge and Everyone Loses Their Shit

Waking up to a mystery has never been a good morning for Saihara.

When he woke up on that particular day, it had been innocuous at first. He did his usual morning routine of getting ready. It's only when he sees himself in the mirror that he notices the difference. He patted the top of his head. Smooth. That's strange... While he wasn't particularly fond of the ahoge, he doesn't remember ever getting it cut. It's just supposed to be there. Always sticking out. No gel or wax could hold it down. Only his hat was able to tame it but he doesn't wear that anymore.

He's already let go of the hat. What's the harm in losing the ahoge too?

"Um... Who are you?"

Apparently more damaging than he originally thought.

Huh? Huuuuuhh???

"Who the hell brought this normie over here?" Iruma greeted him with an insult. Well, it was pretty tame coming from her. "Oh, I get it! You're one of my fanboys! Sorry to bust your nuts but you ain't touching these glorious tits of mine!"

Never mind. Iruma not recognizing him isn't a huge loss anyways.

"Oh, who is this? A new friend?" Gonta waved at him. "Hello there new friend! Do not be afraid, we are good people!"

Such a good friend he was indeed. What did the world do to deserve Gonta?

"Hold up. I wouldn't start getting cozy with the new guy just yet." Hoshi warned. "It's only ever been us sixteen here. Sorry for being paranoid but getting a new classmate out of nowhere is pretty suspicious. The kid's gotta introduce himself first."

Even though they're basically the same age, Saihara will admit any day that Hoshi holds some form of seniority over him.

"He's been quiet though. Hmm, could it be?" Amami stared at him with an unreadable expression. "You have troubles with memory too?"

No, not memory. He's just utterly speechless at how everyone is treating him all because he doesn't have one lock of hair sticking out.

"Perhaps our guest does not feel welcome enough." Tojo proceeds to correct this situation by pouring him a cup of tea. It's exactly his favorite. "I hope that this is up to your tastes. Please, make yourself comfortable. We only wish to know more about you."

He tries not to cry into his cup of tea. He just wishes to know how his friends see him. Just the ahoge? Guys, his eyes are down here.

"Be careful! He's still a menace!" Tenko was already in a fighting position. "I do not know who you are but I do know that you are a degenerate male! And Tenko will not let you and your impure intentions get to the girls! If you try anything, I will break you!"

He just wants his identity back, please don't break him. He breaks easily.

"Too loud..." Yumeno yawned and then slumped in her seat. "Hey, you being here is a pain so could you get out?"

It's not like he wanted this commotion either. He just went here to have breakfast and he honestly feels so attacked right now.

"No non! Don't go yet. Angie senses a divine aura from you!" Angie clasped her hands in prayer. "It's A-OKAY! If you're feeling lost, come to Atua and he will guide you."

He's not even surprised that he's already getting recruited upon supposedly their first meeting.

"And so adds another person to the number of people I will be observing." Shinguji chuckled lightly while covering is already masked mouth. "Ah, I wonder what kind of human you'd reveal yourself to be, kukuku..."

Okay? Sometimes he really wonders if Shinguji's okay.

"Oh, no. This is a problem." Shirogane settled her chin on her hand, contemplating. "We can't have two plain characters. That's just plain redundant."

Well he knows he doesn't have the most... unique face. But still, the way she says it makes it sound like an actual problem.

"I have checked my database of people whom I've previously met and you did not match with any of the IDs." Kiibo crossed his arms. "Please let us know who you are so I can update my records."

Not to sound robophobic but Saihara expected for at least Kiibo to recognize him. If even the robot's program couldn't identify him then this just confirms his fear that this was beyond his control.

"Hey, buddy you've been quiet. You okay?" Momota smiled reassuringly. "Don't freak out in front of us now. Relax, man. We're a loud bunch but I promise that we won't hurt you."

It's really hard not to freak out when you realize that your whole identity is centered around your ahoge.

"Answer if someone talks to you." Harukawa glared at him. "...Do you want to die?"

Whatever happened to that promise that they wouldn't hurt him?

"Guys, you're freaking the new guy out." Akamatsu "Still, it is kind of weird that you're only showing up now. Oh, it's not like I'm suspicious of you or anything! It's just... weird. Hmm, if only Saihara was here. He probably would have some theories."

But he's right here? Literally guys you don't have to look so hard.

"Has anyone seen him? He's never usually late for breakfast."

"Oh, pick me! Pick me! I toooootally saw him this morning!" Ouma "Hey! Look, it's Saihara-chan!"

Everyone turned their heads away from him and towards where he pointed at. Everyone except Saihara himself.

That's why Saihara saw. He saw Ouma take out Saihara's hat (he had been wondering where that went) and he saw... an ahoge on top of it. He saw Ouma wear it. He also saw Ouma smirk at him.

Ouuuuumaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!

"Where? I don't see him at all."

"Hey guys! It's me! Totally Saihara-chan" Ouma declared oh so innocently despite his smile being anything but. He didn't even bother changing his voice. Or anything else for that matter. He's just wearing a hat with an ahoge ridiculously glued on top.

He can't possibly think he could pull this off.

"Oh, hey Saihara! Where were you, man?" Momota warmly greeted him.

Okay... But to be fair, Momota isn't the... sharpest so...

"Geez, you had us worry for a bit there. What took you so long?" Akamatsu pouted at him.

Not Akamatsu too?? Shit. This was happening.

"There is something... different about you today, Saihara." Kiibo pondered. "Oh but you match perfectly with my identification scanner so it just might be a slight bug."

How can Ouma wearing a dumb hat with ahoge match Saihara's profile? Is he just an ahoge in his ID?!

"It must be the clothes. I mean it's plain to see that this is Saihara since his signature ahoge is there." Shirogane proudly presented.

So he's really just an ahoge in their eyes. That's... kinda sad okay.

"Nishishi!" Oh, come on! Ouma's even doing his trademark laugh and no one's going to point out that inconsistency? Seriously? No one? "I thought I'd try a new look today! Since I'm always wearing emo clothes, I thought I'd spice things up a bit!"

Okay full offense taken. His clothes are black not emo. It's just a coincidence that it's a common color for emos. Hey, black is a general color, okay? He is not emo.

"It looks suspiciously like Ouma's." Harukawa pointed out. "You have poor taste."

That's all she's going to take away from that? His fashion sense?

"Well I happen to think that Ouma has ridculously good tastes! Supreme leader tastes! Godlike even!"

Please, won't anyone at least point out that Saihara will never in his lifetime praise Ouma.

"Angie doesn't know about that last part. Atua says that Ouma's tastes are just so so." Angie commented.

Again, focusing on the wrong specifics here.

"Ah, but one can argue that since Ouma's talent is being a supreme leader then does it not mean that technically he does possess supreme leader tastes? I admit that it's a mere technicality but it fits logic." Shinguji argued.

Hey so, Saihara isn't the most egocentric person there and he doesn't even like attention but can they get back to him? It's bad enough that they think a barely disguised Ouma is him but to get set aside in conversation too? Just when Saihara thought things couldn't get any sadder, it does.

"Does it really matter? They're both menaces! Changing one's clothes does not change the evil within." Tenko sneered.

He's desperate. He will take any insult as long as it changes the topic.

"Whatever. Can we eat already?" Yumeno huffed in annoyance.

Not really contributing to the conversation but at least it's not about Ouma. His standards have hit an all time low.

"Yes, I will get the food served shortly." Tojo politely bowed. "However, it would seem that Ouma is the one missing now."

Aaaaand we're back to talking about Ouma. The same Ouma who's masquerading in a discount costume of Saihara. The one and only Ouma who's snickering right now.

"Who gives a shit about Cockichi?! If the cock sucker wants to miss out on good food then it's his loss!" Iruma ranted.

While she does make a good point, Saihara hoped that someone would have at least noticed that Ouma only disappeared as soon as "Saihara" appeared. But he knew better now than to hope.

"Oh, no! But what if he starves? Gonta don't want friend hungry." Gonta said with genuine concern.

If Ouma really was a friend then he wouldn't be making Saihara suffer like this.

"Eh, he'll live. If he gets hungry, he knows where the food is." Hoshi shrugged. "Just let him run around as much as he want so we can have some peace here for once."

Except the only flaw in that plan is that Ouma is HERE. He's literally right here. Seriously, is it a detective thing that only Saihara is noticing all these discrepancies?

"That's right. Ignore poor Ouma and let him die a dog's death! Nobody likes him anyways! He's the worst!"

Well he's not wrong... But how can he say that so easily about himself??

"Wait. Something's been bothering me." Amami, who Saihara only noticed to be quiet all this time, suddenly spoke up. He wore the most serious expression ever seen on his face. He walked up to Ouma and placed his hand on the hat. It stayed there, gripped ever so tightly.

Could it be...?

"There." Amami said after twisting the cap just a few degrees. He was back to smiling as if a weight off his chest had been lifted. "I apologize for the glaring. It was crooked and I was debating on letting it be but as you can see I just couldn't stop myself, ahaha."

"Awww, it's okay! Thank you, Amami-chan!" Ouma blew him a flying kiss.

At this point, Saihara would have gladly welcomed death.

"Oh, by the way. I almost forgot!" Ouma suddenly turned to Saihara. Oh no. He's wearing that smile. The smile that never leads up to anything good. That shit-eating grin. Ouma is wearing it at full blast.

Saihara should have run when he had the chance.

"I have a theory on the new guy! He's obviously the mastermind because I said so. Listen. I'm a detective so I know what I'm doing. So let's all gang up on him, okay? Let's go, team!"

...

Fuck.

It was at that moment that Saihara knew he was fucked up.

"Oi, is that true? You think we got ourselves the mastermind, bro?"

"Hmm, Saihara said it so it can't be a lie."

"Let's kill that asshole! I'll fucking cut his dick into pieces!"

"Tenko too will destroy this menace!"

"Please, guys we're more civilized than that."

"Ahaha, let's listen to our leader. Maybe there's still room for negotiations."

"Nyeh, sounds like more work. Can't we just finish him off?"

"...I can kill him quickly but it wouldn't be as satisfying."

"Don't kill him off just yet. We still need information from him."

"It is not a request I haven't heard of... I believe I may be of assistance."

"If you require rope then I would gladly volunteer in tying our culprit up. I have learned of methods where it brings more pain than it does pleasure."

"Oh Gonta does not want to hurt anyone. But Gonta does not like it if this person has hurt friends."

"Well Atua says that this calls for a divine retribution nyahaha!"

"What a plot twist! A mastermind reveal during a filler episode!"

FUCK!

He didn't have to be detective to know that he wasn't going to survive if he stayed there any longer. So he bolted and ran far enough to lock himself in his room. Just outside he could hear his classmates rioting. He knew they weren't allowed to break the door and it seemed that they remembered that rule. He just wishes that Ouma would conveniently forget that he could lockpick doors. Speaking of which, he could hear his distinct laughter bouncing just outside. Atua, if you're out there please spare him.

Saihara already lost his ahoge and consequentially, his identity. He wasn't ready to lose his life too.

[birdiethebibliophile]

{fic} That Old Sweet Feeling (part 21)

Fandom:  The Adventure Zone:  Commitment Rating:  M Chapter Warnings:  None Relationship:  Nadiya Jones/Mary Word Count:  2,033

Here on AO3. Read the rest: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Part 10 Part 11 Part 12 Part 13 Part 14 Part 15 Part 16 Part 17 Part 18 Part 19 Part 20

Tagging @someone-called-f1nch, @voidfishkid, @mellowstarscape, and @jumpboy-rembrandt!

Endgame has started. This chapter and the next are a LOT of plot, and this one’s a long boi, so brace yourselves, gird your loins, all that. 

Chapter Summary:   Grace formulates plans. Remy connects the dots. Jonesy speculates.

__________________

Nadiya was stirred from sleep by a soft knock on the door. She made a noise of discomfort and shoved her face back into the pillow. Through her half-awake haze, she could hear a lot of muffled voices, then, suddenly, the door burst open and she heard a loud, “Rise and shine, Reed Richards!”

Nadiya jolted fully awake and upright, nearly colliding with Mary Sage. “Wh- what’s wrong?” she said, danger senses immediately pinging.

“Nothin’, I just wanted ya to wake up,” Mary Sage said, half-collapsing against Nadiya. “Grace said we can’t have breakfast until everyone’s up and you’re the last one.”

“Oh. Geddoff.” Nadiya pushed half-heartedly at Mary Sage, who straightened up with a pout. She considered going right back to sleep, but she was pretty awake now. Right. They were at Grace’s penthouse-apartment-whatever it was in San Francisco. “Breakfast?”

“Yeah, she and Abbey’re makin’ French toast and Remy’s helping,” Mary Sage explained, sitting down on Nadiya’s bed with a slight bounce. “French toast an’ bacon an’ orange juice an’ shit. I think she has grapefruit, too, Jonesy really likes it?”

Nadiya’s stomach rumbled. “I have to shower first,” she said firmly. “I feel gross. And then I’ll be out.”

“Nad…” Mary Sage whined. “Please, we’re dyin’ of hunger –”

“Shower!” Nadiya insisted.

“Bathroom’s down the hall by Remy’s room,” Mary Sage, flopping backwards on the bed, managing to avoid Nadiya’s legs. “You suck.”

Nadiya stuck her tongue out at Mary Sage, grabbed her bag, and headed down the hallway.

She really had meant to take a quick in-and-out shower, but the minute she stepped under the hot water, she groaned and closed her eyes. It felt like the grime and dust of the past week was washing away down the drain. She wondered if Mary Sage had showered – judging by the state of her hair (not completely and totally knotted and greasy like it had been the previous night), probably.

Now that she was thinking about Mary, she couldn’t stop. Mary Sage had seemed more… herself  just now than she had in days. She’d been grinning widely, her eyes alert and not glazed over, with the spark of mischief that Nadiya recognized from their car chase back before they got to the cabin.

Nadiya wondered uncomfortably how long she’d been paying that much attention to Mary Sage.

Hurriedly, she washed her hair and made sure she got a thorough rinse before shutting the shower off and wrapping her hair in a towel, throwing her pajamas back on since she didn’t have any clean clothes.

She hesitated at the hallway exit, but before she could do anything else, Grace turned around from where she was standing at the counter and smiled. “Nadiya! Good morning! It’s real good to see you.”

“Um, good to see you too, Grace,” Nadiya muttered, sitting down at the table – two tables shoved together, if she wanted to be accurate – with Kardala, Jonesy, and a woman in her early twenties wearing retro aviator glasses who Nadiya identified as Pridmore. Grace winked and turned back to the griddle, where she was flipping what looked to be about fifty pieces of French toast. She had been the head of Humanities, Nadiya recalled; Irene’s boss, a tall, solidly-built nonbinary woman in her early fifties with long, greying brown hair pulled back into a ponytail. Whereas most of the rest of them – including Jonesy – were still wearing pajamas, Grace was wearing beige slacks, closed-toe brown lace-up shoes, and a pink flowered long-sleeved button-up shirt under a beige suit jacket, unbuttoned, that matched her slacks. Nadiya couldn’t remember ever wearing anything that nice except for her grad school interviews.

Grace, she decided, was either going to annoy the shit out of her, or was a genuine badass. Or both. Could definitely be both.

“Okay, we got French toast, bacon, grapefruit, orange juice, coffee…” Grace said, clapping her hands together. “Everybody grab a plate and have at it. Creamer’s in the fridge if you want it.”

For the next few minutes, the kitchen (or what was generally being called a kitchen) was complete chaos as everyone scrambled to get themselves their breakfast, but eventually, it settled down, and Nadiya was sitting a bit disbelievingly with seven other people, at an actual table, with actual food.

“There’s plenty, I grabbed groceries from the place next door this morning,” Grace said, stirring sugar into her coffee, “so feel free to have seconds or thirds or however much you want.”

“Thanks, Grace,” Remy said around a mouthful of bacon and a huge grin.

“I’ll help with the dishes after,” Jonesy added, kissing Grace’s cheek as she sat down.

Huh, Nadiya thought, looking from Grace to Jonesy. I guess they’re together. For some reason, she glanced at Mary Sage, who was eating French toast like her life depended on it, and who also winked at Nadiya when their eyes met. Nadiya quickly turned back to her own breakfast.

“So, you wanted to hear about our trip?” Remy said once he’d finished his first cup of coffee and gotten a refill.

“If you wouldn’t mind,” Jonesy said. “And then we have some stuff to fill you four in on.”

Remy launched into his version of the events, Kardala and Mary Sage occasionally chiming in with corrections. Pridmore was signing a translation to Abbey. Nadiya mostly let them take care of it, focusing on eating as much French toast and drinking as much coffee as she possibly could. It felt like it did when she’d spent days straight in her lab and she’d finally made a breakthrough. She would go home, sleep like the dead for twelve hours, and order from her favorite Thai restaurant whenever she woke up. Spend the day catching up on the news she hadn’t been paying attention to, watch an episode or two of whatever she’d been watching on Netflix recently, and let whoever’d been texting her she was still alive.

“Wow,” Grace said, shaking her head. “Y’all have been through a lot, huh?”

“You could say that,” Nadiya said, finally setting her mug down. “So, do you know what the fuck is going on? Because we may have some background now, but as far as we know, we’re still being hunted down by either the feds or Martine or both.”

“Well, first of all, you don’t have to worry about that here,” Grace said calmly. “I don’t know if Jamie, Addison, and Flanagan told you, but Jonesy and I – mostly Jonesy – had been working on some tech for blocking the bonds, and this whole place, as well as the surrounding block or so, is basically under a catch-all invisibility cloak. Well,” she corrected herself, “the cloak blocks artificial bonds – the kind Martine’s manufacturing with the stimplants and her modified oxytocin. Regular bonds still work fine. I don’t even know if there is a way to block those. We gave Jamie and Addison and Flanagan some prototypes we made – doesn’t block all artificial bonds, but it should block Martine, the hub.”

“Like a server in a computer network,” Remy said.

Jonesy shot him double finger guns. “Exactly,” she said. “Each team had artificial bonds with the other people on their team and with Martine – which is the main problem.”

“See, I don’t think there’s any way Martine’s given up,” Grace said, the friendly smile dropping off her face, replaced with a serious, business-like look that matched her outfit. “She’s a master manipulator, and I’d be shocked if she didn’t have a plan M, much less a plan B.”

“Here.” Jonesy pushed her chair out, going over to the counter and fiddling with a projector, opening a laptop and connecting them. “I made a PowerPoint.”

Irene leaned forwards eagerly, but Nadiya groaned. “How is it possible that literally every one of you is nerdier than I am?” she complained.

“I’m not,” Mary Sage said.

Nadiya considered that. “You have most of the Bible memorized.”

“That’s not nerdy, it’s sensible,” Mary Sage said, poking her fork in Nadiya’s direction.

“Focus, people,” Grace said. The room fell silent again as Jonesy’s projection appeared on the wall. “So, it’s clear Martine’s not working on her own. She’s been seen in the Capitol, for heaven’s sake. My best guess is that she sold her tech – the stimplants, mostly – to the government in return for complete amnesty.”

“What.” Nadiya knocked over her empty glass in standing up. “That’s – that’s my tech, she –”

“I’m just telling you what I suspect, Nadiya,” Grace said calmly. “I can see you’re upset, but I’m going to be real honest with you. You not getting a patent for your work is the least of our problems right now. Please sit down.”

Nadiya dropped back into her chair, a burning sensation behind her eyes. She wanted to yell at Grace that she didn’t understand, didn’t get how academia worked, that was her entire PhD, all her research, she couldn’t just start over and pick something else. Martine had all but destroyed her career.

“The biggest problem,” Grace said quietly, “is that the government is almost certainly underestimating Martine. They’ve given her too much leeway; they don’t get the extent of her plans. I think – yes, Remy?”

Remy was raising his hand, and now lowered it awkwardly. “I might be able to help with some of this,” he explained. “I… my mom used to work with Martine. She left me a message, a bunch of info on their work. What she knew about Martine, what she thought Martine’s plans were. That was a while ago, though, I don’t know how helpful it’ll be.”

“Anything is helpful at this point,” Grace said firmly. “Could you go get that for us?”

Remy nodded, jumping up from the table and darting from the room, returning in less than a minute with his laptop, which he opened. “She said something about Martine building an – an army of supersoldiers,” he said, pulling up the documents.

Grace’s mouth thinned, but she nodded. “That would fit with what I suspect,” she said. “Jonesy?”

Jonesy nodded and clicked to a slide showing a photo of Martine talking with two people in suits. “The man on the right there is the Secretary of Defense,” she said grimly. “And the one on the left is Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

“According to my intel – and my reasoning – Martine’s persuaded the Department of Defense that her stimplant tech –”

“My stimplant tech,” Nadiya put in, still fuming.

Grace sighed. “Nadiya’s stimplant tech, then. She’s persuaded them that it can be used as a weapon. Every news network I can find is working overtime to fix the PR disaster that was Richard’s broadcast, painting Martine in the best possible light. That’s got to be at the behest of the Department of Defense – honestly, I don’t know how deep this goes, she was at the White House, she may even have the president on her side. However, there’s no way she’s told them about the modifications she’s made. Which means…”

“Holy shit,” Mary Sage whispered. “It means she could have a literal, entire army with those connections. With the bonds.”

“All connected to her,” Grace said with a nod. “And I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s made a few more modifications since the disaster at the ‘Berg. To… make the recipients easier for her to control.”

Abbey, a middle-aged man with greying reddish hair, tapped on the table, then signed something, which Pridmore translated in her strong Scottish accent: “What was her original plan, then? Couldn’ta been this.”

“Again, this is partly speculation on our part,” Grace said, “but partly info we gathered when we were still working for the Fellowship. I don’t think she ever thought Richard’s plan would work. Hers wasn’t a backup, at least not to her; it was the only real plan. She was just using his as a way to execute hers. She wanted to recruit the best and brightest, bind them to her, and… well. Use them however she needed.”

“Well, that leaves me with a lot of questions, but I think there’s only one that comes to mind immediately,” Irene said in her quiet voice.

“What is it, Irene?”

“Why us?”

[ayearofpike]

Master of Murder

Pocket Books, 1992 198 pages, 14 chapters + epilogue ISBN 0-671-69059-0 LOC: CPB Box no. 1081 vol. 14 OCLC: 26075926 Released July 28, 1992 (per B&N)

Everybody’s reading the thrilling Silver Lake series by Mack Slate. With the last book due out in a few months, fans are excited to finally find out who killed Ann McGaffer. Only problem is, Slate — that is to say, twelfth-grade nobody Marvin Summer, hiding behind a pen name  — has no idea himself, and hasn’t even started writing the book. It’s only as he works to close the distance between himself and his crush, Shelly Quade, that the grand finale starts to make itself clear to him, in ways that unexpectedly and gruesomely parallel his own life.

This might not be my favorite Pike book, but it has certainly had the most influence on me. I’ve always called myself a writer, since a fifth-grade teacher recognized my ability to craft a narrative and pointed out that somebody had to make books and I should think about it. In high school, it was my defining trait, and it wasn’t until I’d almost graduated from college that I realized it didn’t make me special. Everybody has a story, as Marvin finds out, and some of them are even better at telling it in an engaging way. It’s sad, in a way, that I identified with this book so much (like, I literally carried it in my backpack for my entire senior year) and it still took me so long to get that theme.

What I did get was an intense sense of connection with Marvin. Shy loner? Check. Separated parents who didn’t get along? Check. Younger sibling who wanted to be like me? Check. An English teacher hung up on prescriptive strictures of language who quietly cared about her students, and a language teacher who was more interested in building a classroom community than sticking to a scheduled curriculum? Check and double-check. Writing ability revered by peers? Check, even if my work rarely made it past my immediate circle of friends. Subconscious inclusion of issues I was going through in my work, to the point where it got me in trouble with the girl I liked? Well, not directly observable, but I mean, it’s hard to not come off creepy if you’re writing a love story to a girl instead of, like, actually TALKING to her.

I also really enjoyed the way Pike works with language in this book, and honestly, I still do. Modern YA gets a lot more respect, and deservingly so, but a lot of it is written in a direct, almost sparse way. It makes sense, considering how many contemporary authors write in the first person, and most people don’t actually think in metaphors and syllogisms and even (to some degree) descriptive adjectives. Master of Murder kind of goes hog-wild on this, kind of a leap from representational art to impressionist art. And I buy it. As Marvin is our POV character, it makes sense that as a writer he’d put some more florid prose into his observations and understandings of the world. Plus, this style kind of helps to establish him as an unreliable narrator, as we slowly learn how much he actually doesn’t know and, in fact, how much maybe he’s repressed.

That said, this story does have some holes. Let’s jump into the summary and I’ll get there.

We start out with Marvin in his English class, watching Shelly read his most recent book and thinking about their relationship. They’d gone out a handful of times a year before, but it stopped after the death of Harry Paster, another flame of Shelly’s who’d jumped off a cliff into the nearby lake. Marvin figures enough time has passed that he can ask her out again, but first he has to read the short story he’s dashed off for their creative writing assignment. Man, remember when creative writing was an actual COMPONENT of high school English class? And the only reason I got to do it was that I took a creative-writing-focused senior English course. I mean, I get it — public school English is about preparing you to pass the SAT or ACT, not teaching you how to reach and grab an audience. They save that for us, in post-secondary ed, by which time the interest in writing has already been drilled out of kids by making them do repetitive five-paragraph essays. Most of my students still don’t want to write, but I at least try to give them some room in the assignment structure to flex their creative muscles.

But anyway, “The Becoming of Seymour the Frog” is a legitimately good short-short story. It gives us a sense of Marvin’s author voice straight away, which is of course the same as the narrative, and it legitimizes how much Pike uses what modern writers would call excessive description. The teacher grades it right away (what? I give everything two reads, and this teacher is just going to LISTEN one time?) and tells Marvin he might be a writer someday if he learns to control himself. We both (the reader and Marvin, that is) know he’s already there, and Marvin completely discredits this advice. He writes best by giving up control and going into a state of flow, one where he can’t stop writing but also doesn’t necessarily feel that what’s going onto the page is coming from inside his own head. This is important later.

After class, he catches up to Shelly, but their talking is interrupted by the arrival of her current squeeze, Triad Tyler. Triad is a big dumb football jock who wants to buy Marvin’s motorcycle, which Marvin would never dream of selling. Before he can get around to asking her out, she ducks into the bathroom, and Triad complains that it seems like she’s always trying to escape. This is probably important later too. So already in the first 15 pages, Pike has nicely set up the major characters and their interplay with each other.

We jump to speech class, and I call BS. Like, we learn later that Marvin only has four classes as a senior. Why is one of them speech? My high school only required a half-day of seniors, sure, but our classes were English, math, world history, and economics. It turns out this class would be better called “communication skills,” which was required in ninth grade, but I’d still buy that more than speech. The teacher basically has them engage in conversational debate, and this day the topic they choose is Mack Slate’s Silver Lake series. It’s a good framework for sharing Marvin’s story, and showing the corner he’s painted himself into: Ann McGaffer’s body was found naked and tied up with barbed wire floating in Silver Lake, and five books on we’re no closer to figuring out who did it or why. The description grosses me out a iittle bit, but on the heels of the last two super-tropey thrillers, I’m going to choose to believe that Pike is poking fun at the intentional shock attempts of the genre.

After class, Marvin finally successfully asks Shelly out for that night, then goes to his PO box to pick up his fan mail. His little sister is already there, and once again we’re subjected to the jaw-droppingly beautiful small child. It was gross when it was fifteen-year-old Jennifer Wagner, but Ann Summer is ELEVEN and Marvin’s SISTER. Pike, isn’t it possible to describe a female one cares about without making it all about her looks? He does it with Marvin’s mom in a few pages too, when they get home. We get it — girls we care about are hot. Only problem is Marvin’s mom is an alcoholic who almost never leaves the house except to buy more booze. Dad is an alcoholic, too, but he’s not at home and his child support payments are erratic. Good thing there’s a best-selling author living in the house! But Ann’s the only one who knows, and it kills her to not be able to sing her brother’s praises and brag about how great he is.

They go upstairs to Marvin’s room to read his mail, and one of the last letters makes him pause. It has a local postmark, and the letter inside simply says “I KNOW WHO YOU ARE.” It starts to pull the book into more general thriller territory, but before we can think too much about it, the phone rings and it’s Marvin’s editor, asking about Silver Lake Book Six, which is four months overdue. I have some serious questions about the timeline of this series, but we’ll get there in a little bit. Marvin soothes her concerns, then goes to take a walk around the lake, trying to figure out where to start his book but not actually ready to start it before he picks up Shelly.

The date is successful, by most measures. They have dinner, go to a movie, and then stop on a bridge crossing a raging river because Shelly wants to look at the water. They sit down on the edge, Marvin landing on an old and weathered piece of rope, and watch the waters pound away down to their final destination — the lake. Then Shelly invites Marvin back to her house to sit in the hot tub, where they get naked and make out, but she suddenly gets sad and pulls away. I give Marvin props for being respectful and apologetic here rather than trying to force her to continue. Woke in 1992! But as he’s getting ready to leave, he learns the reason she’s sad: Shelly is thinking about Harry, which he expected, but he didn’t expect to learn that she thinks he was murdered. And she wants Marvin’s help to figure it out and clear Harry’s name.

There’s no basis for this belief, but Marvin figures he might as well listen and do some research, seeing as he can’t figure out his own murder mystery. He checks his PO box first, and finds another ominous letter that’s been mailed there directly rather than to his publishing house, so maybe somebody really does know him. He calls his agent (whose name is one letter away from a real literary rep, maybe even Pike’s) to ask about it. This insert, plus the editor whose name was close to the woman in charge of YA at Simon and Schuster at the time, made so many of us so sure that this was as close to autobiographical as Pike had ever gotten. I seriously chased leads from this book to try to figure out more about him, back before he started answering questions on Facebook and there was so much less mystery about it.

So then Marvin goes back over to Shelly’s house to talk about Harry. She has the police report and autopsy report, and Marvin looks them over, along with articles about Harry’s death from newspapers at the time. What it boils down to is Friday night a year before, a night when Marvin had taken Shelly out for her birthday, Harry and Triad were drinking beer together. Triad said that he dropped Harry off at home, and that was the last time anybody saw him until a fisherman found his body in the lake on Monday morning. Marvin starts to question the narrative that Harry jumped, because there are several physical symptoms that indicate maybe he was held captive. He talks to the fisherman and to Harry’s mom, and takes a look at the jacket Harry was wearing, and makes note of definite rope burn marks around the back and under the armpits. So Harry was tied up somewhere for a long time  — but where? And how?

Marvin goes home to rest and digest this info, and has a dream about his book series that shows Ann McGaffer hanging from a bridge by a rope around her waist. He’s startled awake by Ann, who says that their dad is breaking things downstairs. Marvin gets down there just in time to watch his dad shove a lamp into the TV, and the resultant cuts to Ann and his mom from the exploding picture tube send Marvin into a fit of rage. He starts to beat the shit out of his own father, and only stops when Ann tells him to, even though the dude is unconscious. Like, holy shit, buried violent tendencies that will make you like your father? So Marvin gets the hell out of the house to give himself some space.

He ends up back at his PO box, even though he knows there couldn’t have been another delivery, but there sure is a letter in it. He follows this back to Shelly’s house, where he finds her making out in the hot tub with Triad. Marvin overhears her say that she was using him to get him to do something, and Triad tells her not to go out with Marvin anymore, to which she readily agrees. So now Marvin is scared, he is heartbroken, and he has unlocked some deep-seated rage that will allow him to strike back. He ends up on the bridge, where he starts to figure out what must have happened a year ago. There’s a rope, there’s a giant oil stain on the bridge right behind it, and there’s a dead boy with rope burns on his jacket who was maybe hanging from it rather than being tied up. Marvin figures that Harry was jealous of his relationship with Shelly and decided to stage a little motorcycle accident, but accidentally slipped off the bridge and ended up hanging himself, slowly suffocating to death until the rope broke and he washed down to the lake.

And it occurs to Marvin that this would be a perfect way to get back at Triad.

After a misadventure with two girls in a bookstore who accuse him of trying to pick them up by pretending to be Mack Slate, Marvin buys a new car and a bunch of motorcycle-dropping gear at Sears, then takes the bike to Triad’s house to sell it to him. Marvin says that he left the helmet in a motel in the town across the river, and that the manager said he was going to throw it out if Triad didn’t pick it up tonight. Then he hikes to the car, which he’s had delivered around the block, and goes to stake out the bridge. While he’s waiting, he starts to think about the parallels between his own series and how Harry died. And we learn that the first Silver Lake book only came out after Harry’s death — in fact, that Marvin didn’t start writing it until then.

So this is my timing issue. Master of Murder does have some gaping inconsistencies, I’m not gonna lie. There’s the variable height of the bridge over the river: it’s 150 feet when Marvin and Shelly stop on their date, and maybe 60 when they have the final showdown two nights later. Also, later apparently Shelly knows details of a book that Marvin hasn’t even written yet? But this, in my mind, is the biggest problem. We’re supposed to believe that in a year, five books have come out about Ann McGaffer and her loves and hates. We’re also supposed to believe that he’s four months late with book six, and that it takes at least three months for the publisher to turn a story around and get it into bookstores. We also have the information that the fastest Marvin’s ever written a novel is eighteen days. So by that logic, there’s no way he could have finished and submitted Silver Lake Book One before mid-December. So five books have somehow appeared between probably March and let’s say November (they say the fifth one just came out) — five books in seven months — but they’re going to wait another three months to release the sixth? Also, how does an author, even an experienced and acclaimed one, sell a six-book series to his publisher without knowing the beats and especially the ending? There are too many inconsistencies and timeline impossibilities for me to buy it. If I didn’t know better, I’d say Pike was a new author writing publication fanfiction.

But anyway, Triad races across to the other town. Marvin is too far away to see him, but he recognizes the sound of his motorcycle. He grabs his rope, his knife, his can of oil, and his binoculars, and hustles the probably mile to the bridge to set up his death trap. But as the motorcycle is coming back, he gets his first good look — and sees Shelly on the back. So he drops the rope, but Triad is already braking, stops short of it, and shoves Marvin off the bridge.

So now it’s Marvin hanging from his armpits by a rope under the bridge above a raging river that leads to the lake in his town, and did I mention he’s wearing Harry’s jacket? Shelly’s more annoyed than angry — it turns out she’s expected this from Marvin the whole time. In fact, she DOES know who Mack Slate is, and she’s already read about this scheme in the Silver Lake books. But Marvin doesn’t even remember writing it. She wants to turn Marvin in to the police. But Triad wants to untie the rope and drop him into the river.

And suddenly Marvin knows what actually happened. Harry wasn’t alone on the bridge a year ago. Triad was with him, and shoved Harry just as he shoved Marvin. Shelly doesn’t believe it until Triad knocks her out for trying to stop him killing Marvin too. Marvin manages to get hold of the underside of the bridge just as Triad unties the rope, then he kicks Triad in the face when he leans over to look and see whether Marvin has actually fallen. The semi-conscious wedged body of the football jock gives Marvin a ladder to climb back up onto the bridge, and he stomps out Triad’s bad knee when the dude wakes up and threatens to go after him again. Only the knife falls out of his pocket as he does so, and Shelly picks that moment to come to, and it’s a simple matter for Triad to grab both her and the knife and threaten her death if Marvin doesn’t help him get away.

What’s in it for Marvin, though? The guy who tried to kill him is holding the girl who tried to frame him for a death the guy is responsible for. He gets on his bike, where Triad has courteously left the keys in the ignition, and drives away. I don’t like that he’s left a vulnerable girl at the almost-complete mercy (he can’t stand up) of a confirmed killer. What I like least is that he doesn’t even call the police. But then again, he’s abandoned his new car in the woods near the scene and surely doesn’t want to be implicated if somebody dies. So Marvin drives to a seaside town, rents a house and a computer, and writes an entire book in five days, only stopping to eat and sleep. Of course, within a few pages of the end he has to stop, because he doesn’t actually know how Ann’s best friend, left in the clutches of the boyfriend’s jealous best friend, is going to escape, or whether in fact she does.

Marvin calls his editor and tells her the story is done and he’ll express-overnight it to her. He also asks her to set up a reading from it at his high school that afternoon. More BS? Like, how are they going to allow an author to read from a book that the editor hasn’t even SEEN, let alone put through proofs and galleys? Marvin has to physically print and ship the manuscript — remember, this is 1992 and most people don’t have email yet (and when it would become widespread in a few years, it still had a hyphen). But she does it, and Marvin goes home first to find out that Dad’s in jail and Mom hasn’t touched a drop since. More good news! He takes Ann with him to school, where the entire student body is in stunned disbelief about the identity of Mack Slate, and finally gets some personal acknowledgement from his peers and teachers.

But Shelly doesn’t show up. Neither does Triad. The kids he does ask say neither has been in school all week. Marvin can’t dwell on this, because he has a major book series to finish, but it’s precisely this reason that he hasn’t made it all the way to the end yet. He knows that he needs someone else’s story to finish his own. So he goes back to the lake, and makes his way to the top of the cliff that everyone thought Harry jumped from. As he’s thinking, Shelly shows up with his knife. She tells Marvin that she suspected him of being Mack Slate back when they were dating, and he would tell her stories that had the same voice as Slate’s published work. So she sneaked into Marvin’s room one day and snooped in his computer for proof.

When the Silver Lake books started coming out, she saw the parallels immediately, and figured the only way Marvin could have known so much about how Harry died is if he had killed him. She got Triad, Harry’s best friend, to help her set up a situation where Marvin would implicate himself, not realizing that Triad had always wanted Shelly and been jealous of both of the other guys and didn’t care who hurt if it meant nobody else could have Shelly. That includes Shelly herself: if Triad couldn’t be with her, nobody else would. He didn’t tell Harry that Marvin and Shelly were out together that night, and when Harry realized Shelly was on the back of the motorcycle he did like Marvin and dropped the rope. So Triad pushed him.

Triad obviously has told Shelly all of this, and Marvin figures the only way he would have is if Shelly somehow overpowered him. It’s an interesting twist that she told Triad about using Marvin to get him to figure out Harry’s death and Triad never realized she might use him for the same purpose. (I feel like Shelly has more strength than even the story gives her credit for, seeing as Pike describes all her agency as coming at the hands of her feminine wiles.) Marvin suspects that here, the spot where it all began, is the spot where it has all ended as well, and that the soft soil where he’s sitting is Triad’s final resting place. Shelly doesn’t say as much, but elicits Marvin’s silence before throwing the knife into the lake. But of course Marvin still has a book to finish, and Shelly’s OK with that as she’s apparently the only one who’s figured out the parallels anyway. The book closes with them in Marvin’s car, Shelly driving to Portland so they can get the manuscript on a flight to New York while Marvin writes the last few pages longhand.

I have to admit it: I still really like Master of Murder. Obviously I’m not in high school anymore, so I don’t relate to Marvin the way I used to, but I do connect to his being trapped in his own story and having to listen for others. The book has a lot of holes and inconsistencies in general that either I didn’t notice when I was a teenager or I glossed over in the excitement of having a character I could relate to so well. In particular, the YA publishing description is not without issues, and the ways the industry has changed after the Internet and Columbine and social networks and Trayvon Martin and #MeToo don’t jibe with the already-shoddy impression of how it works that Pike puts on display. The story is consigned to be a relic of its time. But for those of us who were there, who were trying to make our stories heard the way Marvin wanted to, it carries some warm nostalgia. Maybe I only like it so much now because I liked it then, but I’m OK with that.

[comfortablynumbonthepuzzle]

Mike/Will Season 2, Episode 2: A Shot-By-Shot Analysis

Hi everyone! I know it’s a little late, but here’s the second installment of my Shot-by-shot analysis of Will & Mike’s friendship in season 2, to celebrate ST’s renewal for season 3! 

If you haven’t, check out my post about Will Byers’ sexual identity, which you can read here. It’s by no means a comprehensive analysis, but it’s a relevant precursor to this series. Note that it was written before I’d heard about the stranger things bible clip, which basically confirms it, which you can read here.

If you’re just now discovering this, read part one of the series here. Give it a reblog if you’re so inclined, distribution keeps the work alive :)

Please no negativity or homophobia. I welcome commentary but keep it respectful. 

And so, we begin with episode 2. This one was pretty fun to do. Let’s begin!

1. Will’s room, morning

In this scene, Joyce finds Will’s drawings, and worries he’s had another episode. Will lies when pressed, saying the sketches are meant to accompany a story he’s writing.

This scene is important for a number of reasons, though primarily because we know Will doesn’t normally lie. The basic premise of that first exchange between Joyce and Hopper in season one is that Will does not lie, cheat, or otherwise deceive, so Joyce is able to register the sinister implications of his disappearance even when others don’t. We also see in that episode that Will is unable to lie to Mike about losing in Dungeons and Dragons. That scene between Will and Mike is one of the few scenes we’re given of Will independent of his supernatural trauma and the only one that’s not a flashback, indicating that honesty, or at least integrity, is meant to be a core part of Will’s personality. (It’s worth noting that Will is also repeatedly identified as ‘good at hiding’, which I think is an interesting contrast to his being honest, as well as a metaphor for his sexual identity and possibly a subtextual hint, but that’s another post).

That Will lies to Joyce is an indicator of the extent to which he wants to avoid what we know are the consequences of disclosing his ‘episodes’. For example, he’s pulled out of school and socially ostracized. He’s alienated from his classmates and friends. He’s observed and tested on by doctors who in large part fail to recognize his humanity. He’s robbed of his privacy and allowed no real sense of autonomy or independence. He’s offered no substantial hope of recovery, as doctors are seemingly unable to diagnose or treat him meaningfully. And his episodes are framed, and treated, as a pathology, which likely affects his self-image profoundly.

And beyond the personal and social ramifications of disclosing his episodes, there’s the very real matter of the episodes themselves. Will, whether he recognizes it at this point in the series or not, is facing a very serious, very dangerous threat, and I imagine there’s a part of him that is desperate to believe his episodes are psychosomatic. (We see this play out later on when Will takes Bob’s misguided advice and tries to excise the shadow monster verbally).

And so Will lies.

This demonstrates to us the extent to which his time in the upside down has changed him and his relationships, just as it has changed Mike. I wrote in my last post that Mike’s fundamental character traits change after the events of season 1, and though we see less of this in Will, I think the same is true for him. I also wrote that Mike seems to be his best, true self only with Will. Given that Will tells Mike (and only Mike) the truth about the shadow monster in the “crazy together” scene, it would appear that Will is his best/true self with Mike.

2. Bike/School scene(s)

In this scene, Mike, Dustin and Lucas ride up to the school in their ghostbuster costumes, and are shortly joined by Will. Mike and Lucas begin an argument almost immediately, because both have dressed as Peter Venkman (Bill Murray’s lead character).

The Mike/Lucas relationship is really interesting. It’s worth noting they’re both competing to represent Venkman, who is essentially the leader of the group. I think it’s a fitting argument for describing their relationship, and echoes the conflicts they had in season 1.

While we see less of it in season two, Mike and Lucas clash frequently, and it makes sense. They’re two sides of the same coin: both are leaders and feel very passionately about their friends and relationships, as well as the right course of action in dealing with problems that arise. Both are powerful/fiery personalities, a bit stubborn, a bit sarcastic, and a bit self-righteous. Both are mellowed somewhat by the other boys in the group. Will is a quiet complement to the rambunctiousness of the rest of the party, while Dustin is genuinely good-natured, sweet, and functions as a kind of dopey comic relief. They even out the sometimes fiery temperaments of Lucas and Mike, both occasionally playing mediator between the two. Dustin does so in season one by orchestrating an elaborate apology between them, while Will, to an admittedly lesser extent, tries to pacify them in this scene by suggesting there can be “two Venkmans.”

I think this is relevant firstly because it (to me) makes sense that two fiery personalities might naturally lead to divisions where each passionate person is paired with someone less intense (ie: Lucas/Dustin and Mike/Will) and also because the parallels between Mike and Lucas (including their skepticism of the others’ love interests) could (MAYBE) hint at a possible love triangle with Mike, Will, Eleven, considering that Dustin and Lucas are in one with Max. (But again I'm really not too sold on the idea of a love triangle.) 

What’s interesting about this Ghostbusters-specific conflict is that it highlights how the personalities of Venkman, Stanz, and Egon (or, parts of them) complement those of Mike, Lucas, Dustin and Will. The selection of who is which Ghostbuster is absolutely a conscious decision by the Duffers, but we also learn that the boys themselves selected which character they wanted to represent. It’s interesting to imagine the boys watching this movie and identifying with certain characters, etc.

Stanz, like Dustin, is the goofy comic relief. Lucas and Mike are both Venkman, because they’re both passionate leaders and (kind of) anti-heroes. Will, like Spengler, is an incredibly smart scientist, who expresses no interest in women, even when they express interest in him. I think this part is very important. Ghostbusters is full of overt sexually charged moments: Venkman has a heterosexual romantic storyline, and there’s a prolonged scene where Stanz has a weird sexual dream involving a female ghost (honestly, what?). Spengler, on the other hand, not only does not have a female love interest, but dismisses, several times, a woman who’s clearly interested in him. Spengler’s apparent lack of interest in women is a conscious contrast to Venkman and Stanz (though more Venkman), who are preoccupied wholly with sex. It’s meant to be a part of his personality.

Will, unlike Mike, Dustin and Lucas, expresses no interest in women either. It makes complete sense to me that a) the Duffers would liken him to Spengler at least partially for this reason, and b) that in a movie that frequently depicts straight sexuality, Will would feel drawn to his character. 

Also, this may seem like reading too much into it, but the boys’ costumes are obviously conscious choices. Lucas and Dustin’s are identical, they look store bought, while Mike’s and Will’s are not. We know that Joyce made Will’s, because we saw her doing it. Not sure what this means about anything, but it’s interesting to look at, considering that costume design is a VERY VERY conscious effort. Read an article about it here.

This visual was first evident to me because Mike and Will walk next to each other, and Dustin and Lucas walk next to each other. Also worth noting that dustin and Lucas have lockers next to each other, and it seems like Mike and Will have theirs elsewhere.  

3. Trick or treating

When they come out of the house in loch Nora, Will and mike are walking together while Dustin and Lucas walk with Max.

Will is filming Mike using Bob’s camera. Mike’s clearly mad because Max has come along, even more so that she’s come along without his approval. He asks Will if he agreed to her being invited, and when Will responds that he didn’t think Mike would mind, Mike tells Will he “should’ve checked with [him] first” and that “[Max] is ruining the best night of the year.” He then walks away, leaving Will alone, visibly upset at having angered Mike.

This scene again reinforces, pretty boldly, that Mike and Will are a pair. That not only do they consult each other before doing things, they expect that the other person affirms and approves a decision before it’s made. They’re a unit.

4. Shadow Monster

When Will is again suddenly transplanted to the Upside Down, he calls for Mike, and only Mike, repeatedly. 

Now, this analysis operates under the basic assumption that everything is intentional. This scene in particular reminds me of the one between Will and Jonathan in the first episode, where Will criticizes his friends and family for babying him, and implicates Joyce, Dustin and Lucas but avoids Mike. Of course, we can assume that the exclusion of Mike was accidental, but I think it’s far more likely that the line was intended to communicate something in particular and executed very subtly. I think it’s the same here. The Duffers could’ve easily had Will call for Dustin or Lucas, but he doesn’t. He calls only for Mike, three or four times. Even if it means nothing, it was still a creative choice and that in and of itself warrants notice.

I think Will has come to rely on Mike for some sort of guidance or protection, from both supernatural and human troubles. It’s Mike that comes after Will, saying “I couldn’t find you.” Mike is probably the one who noticed Will was missing (again). He insists on taking Will home, alone, indicating perhaps that Mike doesn’t want to relinquish his caretaker role to anyone in the group. I wrote in my last post that Will and Mike have a sort of symbiosis, where Will needs Mike, and Mike needs Will to need him, and this relationship helps them cope with the traumatic events of season 1. I think this is where we see this dynamic start to play out more perceptibly, and it all culminates in the next scene.

5. “Crazy together”

Tumblr for some reason won't let me add more gifs, so I’m going to do a separate post with a full analysis. Coming soon, I promise! Sorry guys :( 

But anyway... that’s it for episode 2! I hope you liked it and as always let me know if there’s anything I missed! 

[felicia-cat-hardy]

These 2 Best Friends Met On Twitter During The Pandemic

Friends may come and go, but best friends are forever. In Elite Daily's Bestie Check series, we're celebrating the stories that make best friendship so special. Whether they grew up together or recently met through an app, this series explores the unique ways BFFs first bonded and how they maintain their strong friendships to this day. Did they hit it off instantly? What was their biggest fight about? Who's better at keeping secrets? If you thought passing the vibe check was hard, only the very best can pass the bestie check.

When Beatriz "Bea" Atienza tweeted about her love of a particular romantic pairing — Malex, for fans of the show — from The CW's series Roswell, New Mexico in April 2020, she had no idea she'd meet her future BFF on Twitter as a result. Yet that's exactly what happened after Alba B. J. responded to Bea's tweet "desperate to find someone" to talk to about the same on-screen couple — even if it meant talking to a stranger.

The self-identifying feminists — who live half a country apart, in two different regions of Spain — were both in lockdown amid the coronavirus pandemic when they first slid into each other's DMs. While distance could potentially hurt a lot of friendships, it's all Bea and Alba have ever known throughout the course of their year-long relationship — and they love it. They even became pen pals in recent weeks, hand-writing letters to each other whenever they get a chance. In Bea's own words about their letter exchange: "If we weren’t in the Bridgerton mood enough, we are now."

All it took was one tweet about a TV show ship to kickstart their fangirl friendship. Their shared love of books, graphic novels, and other series is how they continued to bond. Though they've yet to meet in real life (which they hope to be able to do this summer), how they view everything outside of fandoms — like love, politics, and family — is why they consider each other besties.

Here's their story:

Alba B. J.

About Me: Intense fangirl, food and music lover, devoted feminist, and human rights defender.

Age: 20

Current Location: I was born, raised, and currently live in Spain — 30 minutes outside Barcelona.

Zodiac Sign: Gemini

Beatriz "Bea" Atienza

About Me: Aspiring teacher, chocolate lover, and your local feminist fangirl.

Age: 20

Current Location: I live in a town called Aranjuez — about 45 minutes away from Madrid, Spain.

Zodiac Sign: Hardcore Libra

How did you two meet?

Bea Atienza: I had posted a tweet in Spanish regarding my favorite ship from The CW's Roswell, New Mexico, Malex — aka Michael and Alex, played by Michael Vlamis and Tyler Blackburn, respectively — and Alba replied because, like me, she had never met anyone in the fandom who spoke Spanish before.

Alba B. J.: I was desperate to find someone to talk to about Roswell, New Mexico, and that's how I (thankfully) found Bea. We started talking about the show and other fandoms, and the rest is history.

What was your first impression of each other?

ABJ: That she was another version of me I needed to meet. Where has she been all this time? What an amazing girl!

BA: I thought she was very outgoing and super nice for replying without even knowing me. I hadn’t been a part of fandom Twitter that long and I didn’t realize how people who had never met could connect just like that. It was a nice surprise to see her reply and how nice and passionate about being a fan she was, because it reminded me of myself.

How long have you known each other?

ABJ: Over a year now. April 27, 2021 marked one year since we started talking.

How long have you considered yourselves best friends?

BA: I don’t think there’s a specific moment where we said, “Oh, we’re very close now.” It just kind of flowed.

ABJ: I really can’t say when exactly, but we bonded more over the last few months. Thanks for that, Bridgerton!

What initially sparked your friendship?

BA: I think it was the fact that we were both equally passionate about being fans. There are people who can watch a show or a movie or read a book and not become hardcore invested in it, but we do — it’s an important part of our lives. Bonding over pop culture pieces that you love can join two people as much as any other element or hobby. I didn’t have anyone around who lived the fandom life like that and who I had as many fandoms in common with, so finding Alba was special.

ABJ: Nothing brings two fangirls together like fangirling over the same things.

Do you know if you're astrologically compatible? Do you care?

BA: We’ve never really checked. I love to see Libra-related memes and stuff like that, but I’m not really into serious astrology.

ABJ: I really don’t know, but honestly, I don’t care. I know that we are compatible no matter what our astrology signs suggest.

What did you study in school?

ABJ: I studied cinematic production at school, and I am waiting to finalize it with an internship. While waiting to do so, I am working in a factory where my dad works.

BA: I’m almost finished with my third year in college. I’m studying to be a preschool and primary school teacher.

Have you ever lived together?

ABJ: Unfortunately, we haven’t met in person — but I think living with Bea would be marvelous since we’re so alike. I feel we would be on the same page about how the housekeeping would work and everything. I’d love to be roommates for some time with her, honestly.

How often do you text/call/FaceTime each other?

ABJ: We talk practically every day and we try to FaceTime, but sometimes it’s difficult to combine agendas. But we’re messaging, sending each other memes and fandom-related stuff all the time.

BA: We text and send audios to each other daily. FaceTiming is harder because we’re both quite busy during the week, and during the weekends either she’s out or I’m out. We’ve seen some movies together, though.

What was the last thing you texted about?

BA: My dilemma regarding my WhatsApp background. I currently have this beautiful shot of Jonathan Bailey (Anthony in Bridgerton) with a bunch of flowers, but I found a really cute pic of Shadow and Bone's Kaz and Inej that I also love, and I know Alba's the one who can help me.

ABJ: About Kate and Anthony, the main couple of the second season of Bridgerton, and the book I'm currently reading: Here the Whole Time by Vitor Martins.

What’s one TV show you both agree on?

BA: I can’t really choose one, because we generally think the same: Teen Wolf, Roswell, New Mexico, Bridgerton, and Shadow and Bone.

What's your favorite underrated thing about each other?

BA: Her style! I’ve seen many pictures of her outfits and I love her fashion — it’s casual, but cute and modern, and I envy that in a good way.

ABJ: The way we understand each other perfectly. Even from the beginning of our friendship, we have always understood each other, no matter the subject, the situation, or the "problem."

What is your favorite memory together?

BA: Either the time we watched Pride and Prejudice (2005) together — because Alba had never seen it and I’m a super fan — or when I sent her a Red, White & Royal Blue book pin and we started our letter exchange. (We’re pen pals, too!)

ABJ: It’s not one, per se — it’s the way I can always count on Bea. No matter the issue, fan stuff, important stuff, happy/sad stuff, she’s always there for me.

What’s one random memory you have of each other?

BA: It’s not really a memory we had together, but it has always stuck with me that Alba told me that when she watched Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, she started crying in the first five minutes and didn’t stop until the end of the movie.

ABJ: Maybe the way our friendship started, because I would have never thought that sending Bea that DM would have created this one-of-a-kind bond.

Which one of you is better at keeping secrets?

ABJ: I’d have to say it's a tie, because we’re both really good at keeping secrets.

BA: I’d say we’re both quite good at it. I’d never betray anyone’s trust, and I know she wouldn’t, either.

What was your biggest fight about?

BA: We've never really had a fight, hehe.

ABJ: We have never fought. Yay, friendship!

Was there ever a time when you considered not being friends?

BA: Nope.

ABJ: Honestly, no — more like the opposite. I want to be more friends, if that makes any sense. She’s such an amazing person, and we connect and understand each other so well, I still feel we could be closer.

What’s one word you’d use to describe your friendship?

BA: Serendipitous — finding something that makes you happy by chance.

ABJ: I’d go with fascinating. Every day with Bea is so beautiful and exciting.

Why do you think your friendship works?

BA: I don’t think we have a relationship like one you can have with someone you’re with every day, so of course the deeper bonds of physical contact have not arisen yet, but I think we work because we’re so similar in many aspects of life. It’s not just that we like the same TV shows, but also that we see love, family relationships, politics, etc. in very similar ways as well. We deal with certain situations in the same way and that makes me feel connected to her.

ABJ: We really understand each other and we are always there. We’re almost the same person. We feel and like things the same way. The same way we are there to fangirl over everything, we're there when more serious and mature events happen, too.

What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned from each other?

ABJ: That it's always OK to be yourself. No matter how intense or "too much" you are, there will always be someone who will understand you and share that intensity with you.

BA: I don’t think I would’ve let myself get immersed in fandom Twitter and met some other incredible people if it wasn’t for Alba. Getting to connect with other people who love what I love is a huge part of my life — if I hadn’t met her, I may have never found the community I have found.

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