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dallonwrites · 1 year

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[image description: a photograph of a wave crashing against the ocean. to the right, in a bold serif font, reads “2023 writing update” /end id]

dallon’s 2022 year in review + 2023 plans 🧍

Hehe so. I went back and forth on whether or not I’d make a “year in review” writing update because whilst I’m proud of what I achieved, this year SUCKED for my personal life and I had to sacrifice a lot of writing goals because of that (which also like, doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. But it still bummed me out lol). Writing did help me cope though. It’s funny because on paper this would be one of my more “successful” writing years, but really all my writing had to do this year was help keep me going lol, the rest feels like a bonus. I did want to honour what I did achieve though, because writing is one of the few positives of this year and I’m trying to be positive!

Learnt to prioritise my personal projects. Finding joy in WIPs that I write that nobody will see, or WIPs that I’ll never publish but find joy in sharing my journey with it, has really been the most valuable part of this year. Made dealing with submissions and rejections and self doubt much easier and reminded me why I write in the first place

Got my first publication! I had two short stories and one flash piece published. Getting to walk into a store and pick up a magazine that had my work in was so surreal and cool. I also got my first writing grant (love The White Pube x) and my first award nomination (the Pushcart??), two things I did not expect to happen in my first year of submitting lol! And, more importantly, I put myself out there in the first place, and let myself be rejected

I won NaNoWriMo, something I thought was totally inaccessible to me before. I’ll probably never write 50k in a month again, but it was a super fun experience and I learnt a lot from it!

I think 2020-21 was my “growing pains era” with writing and in 2022 I finally solidified what I want to write, figured out how to fix WIPs I was struggling with.

If you’re curious about the projects I’m working on in 2023, there’s a very long ramble about all of them under the cut!

[image description: a shot of two hands against a dull purple background, reaching for one another from either ends of the image. their index fingers are almost touching. in the top left corner, in a bold serif font, reads “revelations, revelations” /end id]

SHE’S BACKKKKKKK

Love of my life, bane of my existence for so long, I spent basically all of 2021 fighting with this project. In 2022 all I did was brainstorm and oh, oh I brainstormed.

The most important parts of saving this project was realising that 1) I will never publish any RR novel (That being said I did publish two short stories inspired by the RR verse LOL. But that’s all the world is getting unless I write a secret Beaulix or Dorothy/Jolie short story) and 2) This is not one novel, this is just a whole universe that lives in my head rent free and sometimes I feel less like the author and more like I am merely observing it like a medieval scribe. I call it the RR Verse because RR is still what started it all, but I’ve had so much fun writing stories beyond this novel. I have like, five novel ideas within this universe LOL! Help! This is intentional because, for now, I can’t imagine ever being done with this world

I really do think that RR and the RR verse is like My Special Project. It’s my baby even though it caused me so, so much trouble for so long lol. I just can’t let go of it and whilst I love all my projects, I have a special love for this one. Like it just enamours me in a certain way and the characters and world feel so real to me. Love having your own work be part of your special interest! I can hyperfixate on all my projects and feel that deep, probably-autism-fuelled loved for them, but I need have projects that purely exist to indulge in that, which for me is the RR Verse and Winter’s Slaughter. This is not a project I’m trying to finish any time quickly or get “perfect”. In fact, I’d happily start the novel over and over again, I love Felix and Dorothy LOL

I also think writing The Rabbit Knows How To Bury Itself, a short story about Felix and Dorothy, helped with RR because that short story is very much the darker pushed-to-their-limits imagining of both of them. Felix at his lowest, doing drugs in the bathtub, and Dorothy wanting to be the only one capable of hurting him but only hurting herself when she realises she can’t not love him. I almost feel like that short story is like, Dorothy’s worst nightmare scenario of what would happen to her brother so writing it was like a psychoanalysis project which I seriously recommend! I don’t think you have to push a character to their deepest, darkest limits for their arc to be compelling, but knowing how far you could push a character, how dark their story could get and what it could look like, imo informs how you write them in their actual story.

2023 plan for RR the novel is to just. Write it! See what I get out of it! I’m in my RR hyperfixation era so this is what I’ll start the year with, especially since my priority right now is writing short fiction to submit, so it’d be nice to have a fun little hyperfixation moment on the side. And I’ll definitely share a lot about it! It’s so fun now! Dorothy and Felix are more weird and off-putting than ever! Dorothy likes to break into rich people’s houses just to look around! Felix ruins her vibe by actually stealing shit! Normal sibling behaviour. NGL I still don’t know how to explain what this story is “about” plot wise, but this is part of a basic summary I wrote:

About trying to process and heal from trauma but being terrified of it because you don’t know who you are without your trauma and coping mechanisms. About realising that you can’t truly detach yourself from those things. About being terrified of the theoretical violence you perceive yourself to be capable of. About re-understanding what love can look like. Also about the moon, space travel, cold coffee, parties, blue hour, piano music, blurry film photos and birthday cake.

I love these two. Their love for each other endures everything, even the times they want to kill one another. Nobody is doing it like them. Also their birthday is on Jan 11th so happy early birthday <3

[image description: a cropped image of two arcade machines. in the top right corner, in a bold serif font, reads “lover boy” /end id]

AND WE ARE NOT DONE TALKING ABOUT THE RR VERSE! Lover Boy is technically Book #2 if you consider Revelations, Revelations Book #1. It’s set just under a year later and is technically the Beaulix Novel (who break up at the end of RR, surprise! But it’s because they both are like “I’ve realised I love you and that is terrifying me because I don’t think I’m in a place where I can love like this”), but sometimes it just feels like the Beau Novel! Beau is like a best friend to me and I love him so much, I had so much fun writing in his POV in Winter’s Slaughter that it just solidified my need to let him have His Moment. He’s sweet, funny, stubborn, emotional, confused, anxious, sleepy, he’s everything to me. I’m so obsessed with his narrative that I have barely figured out how he and Felix actually get back together LOL. We do get Felix’s POV too, but I won’t know exactly how that’ll look like until I’ve written more of RR. All I can say is he’s a bit more Normal in this one lol! He’s experienced growth <3 He finds himself <3

A big part of Beau’s narrative is reconciling with his need and yearning for romantic love. That yes, he doesn’t need romance, he can find love and fulfilment in other parts of his life, and he does! But that doesn’t take away from his yearning for this specific type of love. And it’s important to remember that Beau is a character who grew up gay in the 60s-80s. For him to yearn for, to reach out for romantic love in spite of everything is super important! He’s the type of person whose biggest dream as a kid was being prom king and his first heartbreak was realising that he couldn’t be prom king in the way he truly wants to be. Personally I think he deserves the world and more. He also has a little brother with a 15 year age gap, and their relationship warms my heart and tears it in two at the same time.

Revelations, Revelations feels like a night time novel and Lover Boy feels like a daytime novel. This novel feels like a hug, but like a hug after crying. Part of the summary:

1987-1988. Follows Beau and Felix when they decide to rekindle their friendship after time away, and the ways they’re too scared to rekindle the relationship part. Also follows Beau as he tries to navigate moving away from home, tries understand why sometimes colours are too loud and sounds are too bright, tries to get some sleep and get better at breathing techniques, tries to spend as much time with his little brother, and tries to maintain his Donkey Kong high score. Also Felix has a “mild” gender crisis. About healing but we jump right into the middle of it. About how it feels to reach out for romantic love when it’s almost always felt unreachable. Also about karaoke, arcade games, bowling alleys, home videos, golden hour, glitter, the ocean and blue raspberry slushies.

My 2023 plan for this one is that I am not waiting to finish Revelations, Revelations to start Lover Boy. I wanna work both on them at the same time depending on which one compels me the most in that moment. Will I finish either of them? No! Am I gonna have fun? Hell yeah

[image description: shot of a clear, starry night sky, with silhouettes of trees on either side. on the left hand side, in a bold serif font, reads “winter’s slaughter” /end id]

AND WE ARE NOT DONE TALKING ABOUT THE RR CHARACTERS, JUST IN A DIFFERENT UNIVERSE THIS TIME!

Not gonna lie I still haven’t read most of the 50k I wrote in November and I’m undecided on if I want to return to it via editing first or just pushing through with the draft. I’m conflicted! But I have lots of fun plot ideas and oh, this book is gonna be a giant and there’ll probably be a book #2 oops! The 2023 plan for this one is just “whenever the apocalypse hyperfixation hits”. Which I don’t know when that’ll happen, but it more than likely will! Once I actually look at the manuscript again I’ll do a proper update because oh there is plot to update on! Mainly using this section to highlight what is one of my favourite passages I wrote not just in Nano, but the whole year?

When Valentine found the collection of half-empty perfume bottles he had to take them. He likes to look at the empty space in the glass and wonder what stories could fill it up, maybe dinner dates or graduations or weddings or funerals or high-effort grocery store trips. What drew him to the train station were the ticket stubs scattered under the benches, on the ground of the decayed platform. He tried to explain this to Klaus, once, who looked at him, that glint of childhood wonder in his eye. Well, he’d said, nobody got rid of dinosaur bones just because there were no dinosaurs left to grieve them. And for Valentine, exploring the skeleton buildings that dot the world, specifically for what was left behind, is an act of deviance against the Devouring. This is how he remembers people, even if he never knew them. He once found the rib cage of a girl in the violet roller skates she left under her bed. Found the lungs of her mother in the attic, the box of forgotten goggles and swim meet trophies from 1986. So many people want to forget what the Devouring left behind; too many people want to forget the parts of themselves they let be devoured.

Also going to take the chance to soft launch one of my favourite characters I created this year: Cal, my emotionally volatile, traumatised, slutty transmasc king. He is everything to me to the point where I had planned for him to die and now I don’t know if I can bring myself to do it. He also has a ~messy emotionally intimate friends with benefits thing~ with Felix (this does not conflict Beaulix at all. We are not about that over here!), which is unsurprising considering their first meeting is literally them fighting in a Church but then it gets kinda homoerotic? And then kinda tender? Like look at this shit

“Felix.”

“Sorry about the cheek, Felix.” It doesn’t sound genuine. Cal says sorry like it’s a stalemate. But they also reach out, wipe the blood off with their thumb. And the scariest part is how gentle it feels, against all his sharpness.

[image description: a photo of ocean waves against a cliffside. in the bottom left corner, in a bold serif font, reads “ammonites for eyes” /end id]

OKAY WE ARE DONE TALKING ABOUT RR!

Ammonites For Eyes is a novel I introduced on here earlier in the year under the title I Am Made Of Indigo, about a trans man who moves back to his coastal hometown and has to reckon with his closeted identity when he becomes a new maternal figure for his younger sister. I actually started it in the summer and was super excited by it! But you see, this is where all we can do is laugh, because this novel is about the protagonists grief after the death of his mother, and guess what happened to me three months after starting this book! I had planned my whole second half of the year around writing this and had to immediately stop because, oh my god is this novel Apollo’s curse of prophecy?? I considered shelving it for a while which was a massive bummer because I am enamoured with the story, the world, the characters, and want this to be my debut. But I’ve gotten to a point where writing this feels like a necessity and I can’t see anything else being my debut. This is absolutely going to be the one project where I let myself claw out the deepest parts of grief and yeah, absolutely wish I wasn’t able to do that but I know that the final project that comes from it is gonna be something special. This will probably be my main project for most of the year, but also the one I talk least about because 1) planning to publish it and 2) those writing updates would not be fun to read lmaooooo. But super excited to write this! Definitely won’t be able to write it for long periods of time, but I hope to get a good chunk of it drafted, and if I end up doing my MA this year I’d like to work on this for it.

I don’t have a lot to say about the story itself, but my favourite little detail is that the protagonist works at a fossil shop that has a T-Rex skull displayed in the window who ends up becoming? A whole character? The protagonist talks to the skull and low key treats it like his therapist. So maybe this book IS about the horrors, but it’s also about the T-Rex skull. There’s a balance here

[image description: a close up image of the top of a persons back, with their hand holding their left shoulder. the image is tinted blue and green. in the left corner, in a bold serif font, reads “eulogy for the burnings” /end id]

What’s this!! I’ve only talked about this novel once, on my old blog, at the end of a writing update, but this is an idea that’s been slowly marinating in my brain for a while and in 2023 I’d like for it to marinate more, maybe even write some of it. This follows a man who tracks down his distant half-brother and becomes obsessed with him, whilst said brother is a pyromaniac who “hires” him to photograph the buildings and things he burns. Messy! Definitely one of my darker projects. It’s compelling me.

Other projects that I have less to say about but hope to work on in some way:

I have a novel reimagining of my short story How Does An Orca Pray, which I’m obsessed with conceptually but have no idea what to actually do with it as a narrative. I call it a reimagining because it’s conceptually the same but the details are different, like the characters are much older in the novel than they are in the short story. But fun fact! The novel is in the RR Verse! The religious commune in HDAOP is the same on in RR and in the RR Verse, the narrator and Josiah running away is a massive #scandal in Felix and Dorothy’s childhood. So I think it’d be fun to write that scandal from their POV and have it be like a little prequel. It’s fun! It has summer road trip vibes with dark undertones and the playlist is full of 70s bangers

I really would like my novel Life Cycle of Massive Stars to have a similar reboot to RR. I love that novel and it’s like a love letter to transness, autism, and my University city. Also a contender for what I write during my MA, so I’d like to start both this and Ammonites For Eyes and if I do my MA, I can present both of them and be like “help”

Also continuously going to be working on short stories. I’d like to grow my collection since I have a title that I love now, Swimming Pool Prayers, but also I don’t want to force myself to only write stories I think could fit into the collection. I struggle with collections because the minute I write a story I don’t think fits the collection or develops the collection, I’m like oh well that was a waste! So trying to unlearn that. Also want to write more flash fiction and more poetry. I don’t consider myself a great poet, but I’m attracted to the abstractness I find in it atm. Also I keep impulse submitting messy first drafts of poems to litmags OOPS!

#when i said my 2023 goal was self serving long update posts that i enjoy writing this is what i mean!#im gonna be honest besties i wrote this post mainly to ramble about my wips without making wip intros #writing update

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caballerotv · 8 months

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As with almost everything to do with this conflict, it depends on whom you ask.

Some will begin with the Romans. Others will start with the late 19th-century Jewish migration to what was then the Ottoman Empire – to escape the pogroms and other persecutions in eastern Europe – and the rise of Zionism. Or the Balfour declaration by the British government in 1917 in support of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine and the ensuing conflicts with Arab communities there.

But the starting point for many people is the United Nations’ vote in 1947 to partition land in the British mandate of Palestine into two states – one Jewish, one Arab – following the destruction of much of European Jewry in the Holocaust.

What is Hamas, the militant group that rules Gaza?

Neither the Palestinians nor the neighbouring Arab countries accepted the founding of modern Israel. Fighting between Jewish armed groups, some of which the British regarded as terrorist organisations, and Palestinians escalated until the armies of Egypt, Iraq, Transjordan and Syria invaded after Israel declared independence in May 1948.

With Israel’s new army gaining ground, an armistice agreement in 1949 saw new de facto borders that gave the fledgling Jewish state considerably more territory than it was awarded under the UN partition plan.

What happened to the Palestinians who were living there?

About 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled – about 85% of the Arab population of the territory captured by Israel – and were never allowed to return.

Palestinians called the exodus and eradication of much of their society inside Israel the Nakba, or “catastrophe”, and it remains the traumatic event at the heart of their modern history.

Arabs who remained in Israel as citizens were subject to official discrimination. They were placed under military rule for nearly two decades, which deprived them of many basic civil rights. Much of their land was expropriated and Arab Israeli communities were deliberately kept poor and underfunded.

What is the Palestine Liberation Organisation?

In 1964, a coalition of Palestinian groups founded the Palestine Liberation Organisation under the leadership of Yasser Arafat to pursue armed struggle and establish an Arab state in place of Israel. The PLO drew international attention to its cause with high-profile attacks and hijackings.

How did the occupied Palestinian territories become occupied?

In 1967, Israel launched what it said was a pre-emptive defensive war against Jordan, Egypt and Syria, as they appeared to be preparing to invade. The attack caught Arab governments by surprise and saw Israel achieve rapid victories including seizing the Sinai peninsula and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria, and the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan. The six-day war was a spectacular military success for Israel. Its capture of all of Jerusalem and newly acquired control over the biblical lands called Judea and Samaria in Israel opened the way to the construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, which became central to the conflict.

Israel placed the Arab population of the West Bank under military rule, which is enforced to this day.

When did Hamas enter the picture?

The PLO was a generally secular organisation modelled on other leftwing guerrilla movements of the time, although most of its supporters were Muslim.

A Palestinian boy stands behind a picture of senior Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh during a rally marking the 28th anniversary of Hamas’s founding, in Gaza City on December 2015. Photograph: Mohammed Salem/Reuters

Islamist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood had previously avoided armed conflict and were largely dedicated to working for a more religious society. But that position shifted under the leadership of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a charismatic quadriplegic living in Gaza who helped found several Islamist organisations in Gaza including Mujama al-Islamiya, which won support by establishing a network of social services including schools, clinics and a library.

What caused the second intifada?

Peace negotiations sputtered along until the failure of Bill Clinton’s attempts to broker a final deal at Camp David in 2000, which contributed to the outbreak of the second intifada. The uprising was markedly different from the first intifada because of widespread suicide bombings against Israeli civilians launched by Hamas and other groups, and the scale of Israeli military retaliation.

By the time the uprising ended in 2005, more than 3,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis were dead.

The political ramifications of the intifada were significant. It led to a hardening of attitudes among ordinary Israelis and the construction of the West Bank barrier. But it also prompted then prime minister Ariel Sharon to say that Israel could not go on occupying the Palestinians’ territory – although he did not say that the alternative was an independent Palestinian state.

Is Gaza still occupied?

One consequence of the second intifada was Sharon’s decision to “disengage” from the Palestinians beginning in 2005 with the closing of Israeli settlements in Gaza and parts of the northern West Bank. It is not clear how much further Sharon would have gone with this policy as he had a stroke and went into a coma the following year.

The status of Gaza since the disengagement remains disputed. Israel says it is no longer occupied. The United Nations says otherwise because of Israel’s continued control of airspace and territorial waters, and also access into the territory, along with Egypt. Israeli has also blockaded the enclave since Hamas came to power in 2006.

In addition, many Palestinians in Gaza do not see themselves as a separate entity from the rest of their territories in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and so argue that as a whole they remain occupied.

Why does Hamas control Gaza?

Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections in part because of a backlash against the corruption and political stagnation of the ruling Fatah party. The Hamas leader Ismail Haniya was appointed prime minister. Israel began arresting Hamas members of the Palestinian parliament and imposed sanctions against Gaza.

Deteriorating relations between Hamas and Fatah resulted in violence. An agreement to form a national unity government fell apart and Hamas led an armed takeover of Gaza while Fatah continued to control the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. There have been no elections since.

Hamas has continued to attack Israel from Gaza, mostly using rockets until the latest ground incursion. Israel has maintained a tight blockade of the territory which has contributed to deteriorating living conditions and deepening poverty.

Where are we now?

Although western governments still pay lip service to a two-state solution, there has been no progress toward an agreement under Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has repeatedly said he will never accept a Palestinian state.

His present government includes far-right parties that openly advocate the annexation of all or part of the West Bank to Israel and the continued governance of the Palestinians without full rights or the vote. Israeli and foreign human rights groups say Israel has increasingly carved out a form of apartheid in the occupied territories.

Hamas’s killing of more than 1,200 Israelis now moves the conflict into uncharted territory.

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handeaux · 2 years

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Legendary Pugilist John L. Sullivan Won A Championship In A Cincinnati Bout

Off the top of your head, without consulting your phone, can you name any of today’s heavyweight boxing champions?

In 1890, everyone knew the name and fame of John L. Sullivan. He was a frequent visitor to Cincinnati and was easily the most famous celebrity of that era. “Jawn L.” was so famous, the people who shook his hand became celebrities themselves. "Let me shake the hand of the man who shook the hand of John L. Sullivan" became a Victorian catchphrase.

Sullivan is remembered as the first and the last. He was the first heavyweight champion of gloved boxing and is also recognized as the last heavyweight champion of bare-knuckle boxing. Sullivan was enormously successful, the first American athlete to earn more than $1 million in his lifetime. Depending on which boxing historian you consult, Sullivan may have earned the first heavyweight crown awarded under the Marquess of Queensberry Rules by winning a fight right here in Cincinnati.

That fight actually occurred just outside Cincinnati. Boxing, although enormously popular throughout the 1800s, was mostly illegal. When word got around that Sullivan was booked to take on Dominick McCaffrey at Chester Park out on Spring Grove Avenue, he was arrested on a warrant sworn by Cincinnati’s Law and Order League under an Ohio law prohibiting prizefighting. McCaffrey went into hiding at a roadhouse near the Zoological Gardens to escape a similar detention.

Sullivan was hauled into the courtroom of Judge Alex B. Huston and testified that he was indeed scheduled to fight McCaffrey, but only in a sparring demonstration. The dubious judge was eventually convinced on learning this “sparring” match would have both pugilists wearing gloves. Since almost all boxing up to then had been conducted under the bare-knuckles London Prize Ring Rules, Judge Huston agreed that the gloved bout did not constitute a real prizefight and could proceed.

Nearly 15,000 spectators packed the grounds and grandstand at Chester Park on 29 August 1885. Although it was later developed as an amusement resort, Chester Park at that time was basically a large horse-racing track. (“Chester” was the proprietor’s favorite horse.)

Sullivan and McCaffrey slogged through seven mostly indecisive rounds until the referee called the contest in Sullivan’s favor. Although many, including the Enquirer, objected to that decision, it was eventually agreed that Sullivan had fairly won on points, if not style. After pocketing $1,000 and a commemorative ring, McCaffrey conceded that Sullivan was the legitimate world champion – the first title achieved while wearing gloves.

Just four years later, Sullivan won the last title fight conducted without gloves, against Jake Kilrain in 1889. He finally lost his championship titles to “Gentleman” Jim Corbett in 1892. Throughout his career, Sullivan augmented his boxing earnings on the vaudeville circuit. Sullivan’s on-stage performances attracted quite a few feminine fans, including the “Jersey Lily,” Mrs. Lillie Langtry. As Al Thayer of the Cincinnati Enquirer related the incident in his 1894 book, “Ah There! Pickings from Lobby Chatter,” Mrs. Langtry and drama critic Mary H. Fiske, who wrote under the pen name “Giddy Gusher,” wangled their way into a private meeting with the champ through black-face comedian Lew Dockstader:

“Lew Dockstader told me a good story on John L. Sullivan, the other day, that has never been published. While the champion was in training for one of his matches, Mrs. Fiske, “The Giddy Gusher,” now deceased, told Lew she would like to go to his training quarters and take Mrs. Langtry with her, the latter being very desirous of seeing Sullivan. Lew and John were old friends and the latter said he would be glad to meet the ladies. On their arrival at the Sullivan quarters they were introduced, and, after shaking hands, the champion said: “Ladies, would you like to see me strip?” Of course he meant to show them his muscle, but the “Jersey Lily” was “not on” and she blushed to the roots of her hair. “The Gusher” winked at Lew and said: “We should be proud to.” And Sully stripped.”

For most of his career, Sullivan was a notorious drinker, and it was another stage performance that brought Sullivan and his appetite for demon rum to Cincinnati in 1891. The Cincinnati Enquirer (23 Apr 1891) tells the tale:

"John L. Sullivan made a spectacle of himself during the performance given by his company at the People's Theater last night that was not edifying. Among other things, he said he was drunk, and glad of it."

According to the newspaper, Sullivan was registered at the Gibson House but spent most of his time at Belle Curry's bordello on Broadway. Madam Curry might well have wished the big lug had confined himself to the Gibson, because Sullivan made a mess of her "resort." He kicked over a tray of glasses, beat up an employee named Fannie Frazier, demolished chairs and other furnishings.

Word of the champ's exploits reached Cincinnati Police Chief Philip Dietsch, who decided to take matters into his own hands. The Chief marched down to the People's Theater and confronted Sullivan.

"Sullivan," Chief Dietsch said, "you are a fine specimen of manhood. I wish I was as big and I would tackle you myself."

"You are a good sized little man yourself," said Sullivan, "but you will have to excuse me; I have been drinking."

The Chief agreed that Sullivan had been imbibing, a good deal.

"Well, I am not the worst fellow in the world," Sullivan said, "and I am not as bad as people say I am."

Chief Dietsch called it a draw and Sullivan continued to enjoy the freedom of the city. The Enquirer opined that Sullivan should appreciate the courtesy he was shown, but one imagines that Chief Dietsch was relieved not to engage in fisticuffs with the former heavyweight champion of the world.

#john l. sullivan #heavyweight boxing #chester park #lillie langtry #cincinnati sports

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papriakter240 · 5 months

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Basic medical institutions often do not have information department personnel

The author believes that this shows that ABC’s CEO has a high level of technology and rich experience.

“My family has a medical background, so I started my own business and established our company to help the medical industry.”

The author believes that this shows that the core team has a deep understanding and enthusiasm for the medical industry. It also explains the original intention of the company's establishment, hoping to improve the current situation of the medical industry through technological means.

"We are far more demanding on AI diagnosis than you think. Our GPT medical + large language model AI training will last for 6 months, and will eventually be launched. The most perfect one is far more convenient than all AI systems on the market. , accurate auxiliary diagnostic tools.”

The author believes that this shows HE Tuber that the founders and even the entire company attach great importance to the quality and accuracy of AI diagnosis and that ABC has invested a lot of time and energy in training their AI system and striving to achieve the best results.

Service capabilities

Basic medical institutions often do not have information department personnel. In addition to the ABC product itself, the ABC product itself must be designed to be simple and easy to use. The ABC service team will integrate needs by visiting customers and soliciting opinions to provide direction for iteratively updating the system.

In addition to providing software services, the ABC service team will provide customers with comprehensive business strategy assistance, such as Internet operation methodologies, event promotion poster materials, etc

Here the author shares an experience during research:

After the author reserved information on the official website of Kangbo Jiayun Clinic in the afternoon, I received 2 calls that day, and 1 call two days later (I did not answer either), and then there was no further information. What shocked the author was that the staff of Kangbo Jiayun Clinic did not continue to find ways to seize and confirm sales leads, including adding WeChat or sending text messages.

The difference is that when the author found the ABC technical after-sales reservation information on the ABC official account, he received a phone call soon after, and after adding WeChat to understand the basic situation, the ABC account manager in Guangzhou also applied to add WeChat friends. Serve potential customers who come to inquire.

Resources

Financing situation

In 2019, it completed an angel round of financing, amounting to tens of millions of yuan, led by Zhenge, followed by Matrix Partners China.

According to official information, Baidu Venture Capital and Zoo Capital are also shareholders of ABC, and the time and amount of investment were not disclosed.

Brand value

In the 2022 New Economy Industry Annual Peak List released by iiMedia Consulting, it won the 2022 China's Most Popular Health and Medical Product/Platform Award.

In 2020, in the [Seminar on Clinic Data Collection and Exchange Standards and Functional Specification Preparation] organized by the Sichuan Provincial Health Commission, it was confirmed that the ABC Clinic housekeeper is the deputy leader of the functional specification preparation team and is responsible for the main preparation tasks. (Data comes from ABC official public account)

Benchmark customers

In the early days when the product had not yet been launched on a large scale (before financing was obtained), ABC Clinic Manager established hundreds of pilot clinics. These early clinics used Internet services to optimize existing businesses while helping product optimization and improvement, and they complemented and co-evolved with ABC. . When it received financing (in 2019), ABC said: After nearly a year of use, primary medical customers have high usage viscosity, high product praise, and the customer churn rate is close to zero.

ABC provides services to primary medical institutions including Bingzhengtang, which has a large number of famous doctors, Tongrentang, a century-old store, and Yangpa Traditional Chinese Medicine Clinic, which has millions of fans on the Internet.

Value

By cooperating with these medical institutions that have certain influence and brand effect in the industry, ABC can not only improve its own visibility, authority, and influence, but also the successful cases of these more representative institutions can provide valuable information for other basic medical institutions. Successful cases serve as reference and imitation.

Air pharmacies: Nanjing Tongrentang, Kangrentang, China Resources Sanjiu, Kangmei Pharmaceutical, Tianjiang Pharmaceutical, Shangyi Renjia, Zhenghetang, Wanhua Pharmacy, Yizhentang, Guangzhou Dashenlin, etc.

value:

ABC can cooperate with big-name manufacturers, which means that ABC has received unanimous recognition from them (including ABC's team, products, business model of aerial pharmacies, market size, etc.). And big-name manufacturers have rich experience and expertise to ensure that they can provide high-quality medicines and services.

B2B direct purchasing mall

The source manufacturer collects the goods, and the specific manufacturer is unknown.

value:

In addition to the above-mentioned values, ABC cooperates with source manufacturers to obtain more competitive prices and better purchasing conditions, thereby reducing purchase costs. And establishing long-term cooperation with them can ensure a stable supply of medicines,

#HETuber #Music #Gaming #Entertainment #Sports #Science And Technology

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spoadicdeviance · 3 years

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When “Anger Always Wins In The End”: The Story of X-Play vs Skyward Sword

Gather around the Barcalounger over by the fireplace friends, family, and those who only come to the Skyward Sword tag to bash the game in question. Old SporadicDeviance is going to tell you a tale that harkens back from the far distant past of 2011. It’s going to be a quite a long story, so you might want to get comfy.

The Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword was making its rounds across the mainstream game review circuit, largely earning 9′s and 10′s across the boards. The game also ended becoming one of the very few games to earn perfect scores from both EDGE magazine and Famitsu. Talks of potential Game of the Year awards were already underway.

Yes it seemed Skyward Sword would experience nothing but smooth sailing when it comes to the gaming media.

Enter X-Play; the TV show focused on game coverage airing on the network dedicated to gaming and technology (in the sense that MTV used to be dedicated to music) G4.

Starting in summer 1998, as GameSpot TV, and ultimately concluding its run by the start of 2013, this show was perhaps the most popular source of game reviews in its heyday. In fact, with the shows propensity to include heavy layers of snark and cynicism in their reviews, as well as having the tendency of preforming comedic skits based on the various games they covered, one could say that X-Play was one of the progenitors of various online independent game reviewers that started from around 2006 and continue to the present day.

“Why bring up the show’s history?” One may ask. Well its important to establish that the programs was very popular with a substantial viewership, even in its final years of broadcast.

Which brings us to the moment that X-Play and Skyward Sword crossed paths.

It all started with the shows review of the game and the program ultimately giving Skyward Sword an overall score of a 4 out of 5. This caused a bit of stir amongst X-Play’s audience.

Now, on the surface, a score like that wouldn’t appear to be anything to really harp on about. Sure, a 4 out of 5 score was on the lower end of the range of scores Skyward Sword was receiving at the time. Nevertheless, a 4 out of 5 was still overall a good score.

However, as said before, this is all surface level. To get a full understanding of why some gamers were questioning X-Play’s review, you have to look at both how X-Play defines its rating scale as well as the content of the review itself, beyond the final score.

First let’s talk about X-Play’s ratings scale. In 2011 the program updated the meaning behind each of the five different ratings. For a game to earn a 5 out of 5, the game would have to “realize all ambitions of its design” while a 4 out of 5 game would only accomplish most of its goals.

Well Skyward Sword’s goal was to be the proof of concept on what the Wii’s intent was as a console. The game’s ambition was to show the world that motion controls not only be practical as the primary means of control for a AAA game but also in some ways surpass traditional controls in terms of immersion and practicality. Does that mean by giving Skyward Sword a 4 out of 5, X-Play thinks Skyward Sword didn’t fully accomplish its ambition?

No. They didn’t think Skyward Sword failed in that regard. In fact, in their review of the game, X-Play stated that despite initial skepticism on Skyward Sword going all in on motion controls, hosts Adam Sessler and Morgan Webb were pleasantly shocked with how good the controls felt, saying that the Wii-Motion Plus controls were fluid, responsive, seamless, and never frustrating. They also stated that if all Wii games controlled just was well as Skyward Sword then a large majority of complaints lobbied against the system would never have materialized.

So what caused the show to give Skyward Sword a 4 out of 5? According to X-Play’s 2011 rating system and game needs to have “minor flaws” on order to get a 4 out of 5 score. So what did X-Play think were said flaws?

Well X-Play used the trite “revisit certain areas of the game” non-criticism that I’ve already touched on in a prior post. It’s weird since games like Metroid Prime also used backtracking and X-Play still gave those games perfect 5 out of 5 scores.

They also said that there wasn’t much to do in the Sky overworld, which is outright wrong considering all of the goddess treasures and various sky islands that have their own minigames/sub quests to do. Yes its mainly side content but almost every Zelda overworlds are mainly used for side content and linking the various areas in the map. I think I’ll go more in depth on the whole “The Sky is too empty.” criticism in another post.

Then they complained about how your shield can break and you would have to go back to Skyloft in order to purchase a new shield. Seriously? This is like when people complain that in Banjo Kazooie, when you die, you have to recollect all the music notes. That’s the point. The game is punishing you for messing up during the combat. Also the game doesn’t force you to purchase a new shield. You can play the game without a shield if you choose to do so.

I would say the shield bit is the worst criticism in the review if it wasn’t for the frankly dumb, and hilarious in hindsight, critique of Skyward Sword’s crafting system. Adam called the system “grindy” and said that crafting doesn’t fit in a Zelda game. Considering how Breath of the Wild not only has a crafting system, but also, by X-Play’s standards, made it more grindy than it was in Skyward Sword, I think even Skyward Sword’s biggest detractors can call this assessment of Skyward Sword crafting system half-baked at best.

And those were the flaws X-Play found in Skyward Sword. Even if those critiques were legitimate, and let’s face it they’re not, it doesn’t seem like these flaws are enough to justify docking Skyward Sword an entire point in a 5 point rating system, does it?

Well according to a lot of fans of the show, it wasn’t. Fans were speculating that X-Play wasn’t really sincere in their giving Skyward Sword a 4 out of 5. Some thinking that they set out to not give the game a perfect score and were grasping at straws trying to find any justification for their score, rather than have their final score come naturally as they played/reviewed the game.

By all accounts, Skyward Sword seemed to have been more deserving of a 5 out of 5 score rather than a 4 out of 5, according to a lot of X-Play’s viewership.

Viewer response to Skyward Sword’s 4 out of 5 score might have been the primary reason X-Play revamped their ratings scale the following year, using “half-stars” in its ratings (ultimately making the rating system a 10 point scale) as well as reworking the conditions for a 5 out of 5 score. Now for a game to achieve a 5 out of 5 a game doesn’t have to achieve all of its design ambitions and merely not have any “issues” which would result in a 4 out of 5.

My suspicion that the viewer response to the Skyward Sword review was the catalyst for the change is only strengthened by the fact that X-Play used Skyward Sword as their example of a 4 out of 5 game in their new ratings system.

But despite all that, the backlash to X-Play’s review was relatively minor, especially compared to the backlash a certain other professional reviewer got for giving Skyward Sword a lower score compared to X-Play, but that’s a tale for another time.

This isn’t the main part of the the story. X-Play’s review of Skyward Sword and the viewer response to said review were all the primer for the centerpiece of this tale.

It’s now time for the awards season. All the various gaming publications were nominating and awarding the best games of 2011. Skyward Sword managed to get itself plenty of nominations, including Overall Game of the Year from publications like EDGE.

But what about X-Play? What awards did they nominate Skyward Sword for?

Did X-Play nominate Skyward Sword for Game of the Year?

No.

Did X-Play nominate Skyward Sword for Best Action/Adventure Game?

Did X-Play nominate Skyward Sword for Most Innovative Game?

No. .

Did X-Play nominate Skyward Sword for Best Story?

No.

Did X-Play nominate Skyward Sword for Best Art Direction?

No.

All Skyward Sword was nominated for were Best Soundtrack and Best Motion Controls.

And you want to know the really messed up part; Skyward Sword only won for Best Soundtrack and lost the Best Motion Controls award to Dance Central 2. Let that sink for a beat. DDR Kinect 2 Dance Central 2 apparently had better motion controls than Skyward Sword according to X-Play. This despite of all the praise the show gave Skyward Sword’s controls in its review. This is like when the Queen bio-pic, Bohemian Rhapsody, won the Oscar for “Best Editing”. Are you kidding me?! But I digress.

Needless to say, if viewers were just a little peeved with X-Play’s review of Skyward Sword, they were outright mad with how the show basically snubbed Skyward Sword from its award show.

The vast majority of gamers felt that, even if the game would ultimately not win many awards, Skyward Sword should have at least had more than two (relatively minor) award nominations and should have been nominated for Game of the Year. X-Play was being called out, rightfully so, for not giving Skyward Sword its fair dues.

But all was not lost for Skyward Sword, for while X-Play would have full control on which games were nominated and which game would win the majority the awards, the fans would have their own say for one certain award.

G4 decided to do what they called a “Videogame Deathmatch”. This was basically a tournament consisting of 32 games released in 2011.

Each round would have multiple games paired off to face off against each other. The general public would go online and vote for one of the two games in each match to go on to the next round. The first round had people vote between 16 pairs of games. The next round would have 8. Etc. Etc. This would culminate in a final round where the two winners of each side of the bracket would face off and the people would vote between these last two games to decide which game would win the tournament and would receive the Viewer’s Choice Award at X-Play’s Best of 2011 Award Show.

Skyward Sword was one of the 32 games selected for the tournament, whether it was because G4 honestly thought the game deserved a chance to win or they were simply trying to placate fans of the game.

I would say the latter because the side of the bracket Skyward Sword was on was definitely the more competitive side of the two. How more competitive? Well while the side of the bracket Skyward Sword was on had games like Portal 2, Minecraft, Uncharted 3, Batman Arkham City and The Elder Scroll V: Skyrim, the game that would become the finalist for the other side of the bracket was Assassin’s Creed: Revelations. Does that answer your question?

So Skyward Sword faced some stiff competition. It really seemed like G4 and X-Play did not want Skyward Sword to win this tournament so they made sure it would go head to head against some of the most popular games of 2011. It was going to be a miracle if Skyward Sword made it to the final round.

Well let me tell you something; a miracle did occur that year.

In round 1, Skyward Sword went up against Uncharted 3, the flagship PS3 title of 2011, and the fans voted for Skyward Sword over Uncharted 3.

In round 2, Skyward sword went head to head against Fifa 12, the latest entry of the videogame series based off of the most popular sport in the world, and the majority chose Skyward Sword over Fifa 12.

In round 3, Skyward Sword faced off against Batman Arkham City, the game that is considered to be one of the greatest superhero games ever made (if not the greatest), and Skyward Sword got more votes than Batman Arkham City.

In the semi-finals, Skyward Sword went one on one against The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, one of the best selling games of all time, and the gamers chose The Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword over Skyrim.

Needless to say when Skyward Sword went up against Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, a game that even fans of the Assassin’s Creed franchise don’t hold in the highest regards (at least it’s not Unity?) in the final round, the vote went overwhelmingly in Skyward Sword’s favor.

The end result was that Skyward Sword won G4TV’s Videogame Deathmatch: Best of 2011 Tournament and was awarded the Viewer’s Choice Award for 2011.

Now when it came time to officially announce the winner of the winner of the Viewer’s Choice Award during the televised award ceremony, how do you think the hosts handled the situation?

Well take a look for yourself with this Youtube video archiving X-Play’s award show that year. (Timestamp 34:04-35:25)

They start out by saying how close the matchup between Skyward Sword and Assassin’s Creed: Revelations was, despite the fact that by accounts of those who participated in the voting process, Assassin’s Creed never got more than 40% of the votes in the final round, but that can be chalked up as theatrics for the audience.

When they reveal to the audience that Skyward Sword won the final round and in turn won the Viewer’s Choice Award, you can juts tell that Adam Sessler is not happy with the results. The way he’s moving his body. His tense face and pursed lips. The sarcastic tone in his voice as he calls Skyward Sword “Nintendo’s love letter to motion controls”.

Adam is not happy that the game he and the rest of the staff at X-Play snubbed from their award ceremony not only won the Viewer’s Choice Award but also beat two of their nominees for Game of the Year, including their choice for overall Game of the Year, in the process.

At this point, most people think it would be best for Adam to just accept the results for what they are, give Skyward Sword a proper congratulations, and move on with the next award of the night, in spite of Adam’s personal feelings towards the situation. Just be professional. That’s all Adam needed to do.

Most would think that, but Adam Sessler is not most people.

As the hosts were talking about Skyward Sword’s win, Blair Herter made a passing comment saying that the Nintendo fanbase being “enraged” over Skyward Sword not being nominated for Game of the Year helped Skyward Sword win the Viewer’s Choice Award.

Adam immediately jumped on that by adding with and I quote;

“Enraged? That’s a-th-th-that’s a nice term. It was close race, but ANGER always wins in the end.”

Wow. I mean wow. Not even the Red Sea is as salty as Adam Sessler was with that comment.

He couldn’t just take the L like an adult and move on. He felt like he had to get the final word on the matter.

It’s like Adam wants to say the Viewer’s Choice Award doesn’t really count because the vote didn’t go the way he wanted. This is, ironically, the kind of immature fanboy behavior Adam is trying to make fun of. It makes it seem like Adam thinks he’s above the “unwashed masses” that participated in the Videogame Deathmatch voting process.

Regardless on if you think Skyward Sword deserved to win the tournament, you must admit that this was bad look on Adam’s part.

Now I don’t want to end this post on a bittersweet note so I want you to think about what actually happened.

Skyward Sword is so beloved by the majority of gamers that when a review show as big as X-Play tried to downplay the game’s quality as well snub the game from its best of the year award show, the gamers respond by making sure Skyward Sword won the title of the Viewer’s Choice awards.

And this is one of several time where when major reviewer publications/programs reached out to their audience, the gamers, to get their take on what game they felt was the best game of 2011, and The Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword was chosen by said gamers as the the best game of that year.

It’s funny because whenever I bring up that point, the minority of Skyward Sword detractors try to make up some excuse to delegitimize Skyward Sword winning the viewer’s choice award.

When I mention Skyward Sword winning IGN’s viewer’s choice award, or when Skyward Sword was voted the number one, best game of 2011 by the fans of ScrewAttack, they say “Oh that’s because fans of Skyrim, Batman Arkham City, Portal 2, and so on were divided amongst themselves while Nintendo fans were united in their support for Skyward Sword. If the poll wasn’t a free for all, Skyward Sword wouldn’t win.”

Well here’s another instance of Skyward Sword winning a viewer’s choice award; Skyward Sword had to go one-on-one against multiple games in order to win the viewer’s choice award. Skyward Sword got more votes than some of the most popular, well reviewed, and highest selling games of that year. More gamers preferred Skyward Sword over Uncharted 3, Arkham City, and Skyrim.

I think all of that, along with how Skyward Sword was considered the best game of 2011 by ScrewAttack and IGN users, and how people are hyped for the HD rerelease, it’s safe to say that despite what some vocal people may try to say otherwise, The Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword is a game that is far more beloved by gamers than it is “divisive”.

#the legend of zelda #skyward sword #ocarina of time #breath of the wild #majora's mask #wind waker #twilight princess #a link to the past #a link between worlds #fi #link #groose #ghirahim #demise #impa #x-play

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1962dude420-blog · 3 years

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Today we remember the passing of Glen Campbell who Died: August 8, 2017 in Nashville, Tennessee

Glen Travis Campbell (April 22, 1936 – August 8, 2017) was an American guitarist, singer, songwriter, actor and television host. He was best known for a series of hit songs in the 1960s and 1970s, and for hosting The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour on CBS television from 1969 until 1972. He released 64 albums in a career that spanned five decades, selling over 45 million records worldwide, including twelve gold albums, four platinum albums, and one double-platinum album.

Born in Billstown, Arkansas, Campbell began his professional career as a studio musician in Los Angeles, spending several years playing with the group of instrumentalists later known as "The Wrecking Crew". After becoming a solo artist, he placed a total of 80 different songs on either the Billboard Country Chart, Billboard Hot 100, or Adult Contemporary Chart, of which 29 made the top 10 and of which nine reached number one on at least one of those charts. Among Campbell's hits are "Universal Soldier", his first hit from 1965, along with "Gentle on My Mind" (1967), "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" (1967), "Dreams of the Everyday Housewife" (1968), "Wichita Lineman" (1968), "Galveston" (1969), "Rhinestone Cowboy" (1975) and "Southern Nights" (1977).

In 1967, Campbell won four Grammys in the country and pop categories. For "Gentle on My Mind", he received two awards in country and western; "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" did the same in pop. Three of his early hits later won Grammy Hall of Fame Awards (2000, 2004, 2008), while Campbell himself won the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012. He owned trophies for Male Vocalist of the Year from both the Country Music Association (CMA) and the Academy of Country Music (ACM), and took the CMA's top award as 1968 Entertainer of the Year. Campbell played a supporting role in the film True Grit (1969), which earned him a Golden Globe nomination for Most Promising Newcomer. He also sang the title song, which was nominated for an Academy Award.

Glen was born on April 22, 1936, in Billstown, a tiny community near Delight in Pike County, Arkansas, to John Wesley (a sharecropper) and Carrie Dell (Stone) Campbell. Campbell was of Scottish descent and was the seventh son of 12 children. As a child he almost died from drowning. His family went to Church of Christ, and Campbell's brother Lindell became a Church of Christ minister. In 2011 he claimed his mother was Irish, although this was not true. The family lived on a farm, where they barely managed, by growing cotton, corn, watermelons, and potatoes. "We had no electricity," he said, and money was scarce. "A dollar in those days looked as big as a saddle blanket." To supplement income the family picked cotton for other farmers. "I picked cotton for $1.25 a hundred pounds," said Campbell. "If you worked your tail off, you could pick 80 or 90 pounds a day."

Campbell started playing guitar at age four after his father gave him a Sears-bought five-dollar guitar as a gift, with his uncle Boo teaching him the basics of how to play. Most of his family was musical, he said. "Back home, everybody plays and sings." By the time he was six he was performing on local radio stations.

Campbell continued playing guitar in his youth, with no formal training, and practiced when he was not working in the cotton fields. He developed his talent by listening to radio and records and considered Django Reinhardt among his most admired guitarists, later calling him "the most awesome player I ever heard." He dropped out of school at 14 to work in Houston alongside his brothers, installing insulation and later working at a gas station.

Not satisfied with that kind of unskilled work, Campbell started playing music at fairs and church picnics and singing gospel hymns in the church choir. He was able to find spots performing on local radio stations, and after his parents moved to Houston, he made some appearances at a local nightclub.

In 1954, at age 17, Campbell moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to join his uncle's band, known as Dick Bills and the Sandia Mountain Boys. He quit high school in 10th grade. He also appeared there on his uncle's radio show and on K Circle B Time, the local children's program on KOB television. It was there that he met his first wife, whom he married when he was 17 and she was 16.

In 1958, Campbell formed his own band, the Western Wranglers. "We worked hard," he said. "Six, sometimes seven nights a week. I didn't have my eye set on any specific goals or big dreams."

In 1960, Campbell moved to Los Angeles to become a session musician. That October, he joined the Champs. By January 1961, Campbell had found a daytime job at publishing company American Music, writing songs and recording demos. Because of these demos Campbell soon was in demand as a session musician and became part of a group of studio musicians later known as the Wrecking Crew.

Campbell played on recordings by the Beach Boys, Bobby Darin, Frank Sinatra, Ricky Nelson, Dean Martin, Nat King Cole, the Monkees, Nancy Sinatra, Merle Haggard, Jan and Dean, Bing Crosby, Phil Spector, Sammy Davis Jr., Doris Day, Bobby Vee, The Everly Brothers, Shelley Fabares, The Cascades, Paul Revere & the Raiders, Wayne Newton, The First Edition, The Kingston Trio, Roger Miller, Gene Clark, Lou Rawls, Claude King, Lorne Greene, Ronnie Dove and Elvis Presley. He befriended Presley when he helped record the soundtrack for Viva Las Vegas in 1964. He later said, "Elvis and I were brought up the same humble way – picking cotton and looking at the south end of a north-bound mule."

In May 1961, he left the Champs and was subsequently signed by Crest Records, a subsidiary of American Music. His first solo release, "Turn Around, Look at Me", a moderate success, peaked at number 62 on the Hot 100 in 1961 but reached number 7 on the Hot 100 in a 1968 Vogues cover. Campbell also formed the Gee Cees with former bandmembers from the Champs, performing at the Crossbow Inn in Van Nuys. The Gee Cees, too, released a single on Crest, the instrumental "Buzz Saw", which did not chart.

In 1962, Campbell signed with Capitol Records. After minor initial success with "Too Late to Worry, Too Blue to Cry", his first single for the label, and "Kentucky Means Paradise", released by the Green River Boys featuring Glen Campbell, a string of unsuccessful singles and albums followed. By 1963 his playing and singing were heard on 586 recorded songs. He never learned to read music, but besides guitar, he could play the banjo, mandolin and bass.

From 1964 on, Campbell began to appear on television as a regular on Star Route, a syndicated series hosted by Rod Cameron, ABC's Shindig! and Hollywood Jamboree.

From December 1964 to early March 1965, Campbell was a touring member of the Beach Boys, filling in for Brian Wilson, playing bass guitar and singing falsetto harmonies. He was then replaced on the Beach Boys' tours by new member Bruce Johnston.

In 1965, he had his biggest solo hit yet, reaching number 45 on the Hot 100 with a version of Buffy Sainte-Marie's "Universal Soldier". Asked about the pacifist message of the song, he said that "people who are advocating burning draft cards should be hung."

Campbell continued as a session musician, playing guitar on the Beach Boys' 1966 album Pet Sounds, among other recordings. In April of that year, he joined Rick Nelson on a tour through the Far East, again playing bass.

When follow-up singles did not do well, and Capitol was considering dropping Campbell from the label in 1966, he was teamed with producer Al De Lory. Together, they first collaborated on "Burning Bridges" which became a top 20 country hit in early 1967, and the album of the same name.

Campbell and De Lory collaborated again on 1967's "Gentle on My Mind", written by John Hartford, which was an overnight success. The song was followed by the bigger hit "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" later in 1967, and "I Wanna Live" and "Wichita Lineman" in 1968, remaining on Billboard's Top 100 charts for 15 weeks. He won four Grammy Awards for "Gentle on My Mind" and "By the Time I Get to Phoenix".

In 1967, Campbell was also the uncredited lead vocalist on "My World Fell Down" by Sagittarius, a studio group. The song reached number 70 on the Billboard Hot 100.

In 1968, Campbell released "Wichita Lineman", a song written by Jimmy Webb. It was recorded with backing from members of the Wrecking Crew and appeared on his 1968 album of the same name. It reached number 3 on the US pop chart, remaining in the Top 100 for 15 weeks. In addition, the song also topped the American country music chart for two weeks, and the adult contemporary chart for six weeks.

The 1969 song "True Grit" by composer Elmer Bernstein and lyricist Don Black, and sung by Campbell, who co-starred in the movie, received nominations for the Academy Award for Best Song and the Golden Globe for Best Original Song.

After he hosted a 1968 summer replacement for television's The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour variety show, Campbell was given his own weekly variety show, The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour, which ran from January 1969 through June 1972. The show's comedy writers included Steve Martin and Rob Reiner. At the height of his popularity, a 1970 biography by Freda Kramer, The Glen Campbell Story, was published.

With Campbell's session-work connections, he hosted major names in music on his show, including the Beatles (on film), David Gates, Bread, the Monkees, Neil Diamond, Linda Ronstadt, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Roger Miller, and Mel Tillis. Campbell helped launch the careers of Anne Murray and Jerry Reed, who were regulars on his Goodtime Hour program.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Campbell released a long series of singles and appeared in the movies True Grit (1969) with John Wayne and Kim Darby and Norwood (1970) with Kim Darby and Joe Namath.

After the cancellation of his CBS series in 1972, Campbell remained a regular on network television. He co-starred in a made-for-television movie, Strange Homecoming (1974), with Robert Culp and up-and-coming teen idol Leif Garrett. He hosted a number of television specials, including 1976's Down Home, Down Under with Olivia Newton-John. He co-hosted the American Music Awards from 1976 to 1978 and headlined the 1979 NBC special Glen Campbell: Back to Basics with guest-stars Seals and Crofts and Brenda Lee. He was a guest on many network talk and variety shows, including Donny & Marie and The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, where he performed "Rhinestone Cowboy". He also appeared on Cher, the Redd Foxx Comedy Hour, The Merv Griffin Show, The Midnight Special, DINAH!, Evening at Pops with Arthur Fiedler and The Mike Douglas Show.

In the mid-1970s, he had more hits with "Rhinestone Cowboy", "Southern Nights" (both U.S. number one hits), "Sunflower" (U.S. number 39) (written by Neil Diamond), and "Country Boy (You Got Your Feet in L.A.)" (U.S. number 11).

"Rhinestone Cowboy" was Campbell's largest-selling single and one of his best-known recordings, initially with over 2 million copies sold. Campbell had heard songwriter Larry Weiss' version while on tour of Australia in 1974. Both songs were in the October 4, 1975, Hot 100 top 10. "Rhinestone Cowboy" continues to be used in TV shows and films, including Desperate Housewives, Daddy Day Care, and High School High. It was the inspiration for the 1984 Dolly Parton/Sylvester Stallone movie Rhinestone. The main phrase of Campbell's recording was included in Dickie Goodman's Jaws movie parody song "Mr. Jaws". Campbell also made a techno/pop version of the song in 2002 with UK artists Rikki & Daz and went to the top 10 in the UK with the dance version and related music video.

"Southern Nights", by Allen Toussaint, his other number one pop-rock-country crossover hit, was generated with the help of Jimmy Webb, and Jerry Reed, who inspired the famous guitar lick introduction to the song, which was the most-played jukebox number of 1977.

In 2005, Campbell was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. It was announced in April 2008 that Campbell was returning to his signature label, Capitol, to release his new album, Meet Glen Campbell. The album was released on August 19. With this album, he branched off in a different musical direction, covering tracks from artists such as Travis, U2, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Jackson Browne, and Foo Fighters. It was Campbell's first release on Capitol in over 15 years. Musicians from Cheap Trick and Jellyfish contributed to the album as well. The first single, a cover of Green Day's "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)", was released to radio in July 2008.

In March 2010, a then-farewell album titled Ghost on the Canvas was announced which served as a companion to Meet Glen Campbell (2008).

Following his late 2010 Alzheimer's diagnosis, Campbell embarked on a final "Goodbye Tour", with three of his children joining him in his backup band. He was too ill to travel to Australia and New Zealand in the summer of 2012. His final show was on November 30, 2012, in Napa, California. After the end of the tour, Campbell entered the studio in Nashville to record what would be his final album, Adiós, which would not be revealed until five years later. According to his wife, Kim Campbell, he wanted to preserve "what magic was left", in what would be his final recordings. In January 2013, Campbell recorded his final song, "I'm Not Gonna Miss You", during what would be his last recording sessions. The song, which is featured in the 2014 documentary Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me, was released on September 30, 2014, with the documentary following on October 24. On January 15, 2015, Campbell and fellow songwriter Julian Raymond were nominated for Best Original Song at the 87th Academy Awards.

On August 30, 2016, during the 10th Annual ACM Honors, Keith Urban, Blake Shelton and others performed a medley of Glen Campbell's songs in tribute to him. His wife Kim Campbell accepted the Career Achievement Award on his behalf. Alice Cooper described him as being one of the five best guitar players in the music industry.

Campbell's final album Adiós, featuring twelve songs from his final 2012–13 sessions, was announced in April 2017. It was released on June 9, 2017. Adiós was named by the UK's Official Charts Company as the best-selling country/Americana album of 2017 in Britain.

Campbell died in Nashville, Tennessee, on August 8, 2017, at the age of 81. He was buried in the Campbell family cemetery in Billstown, Arkansas.

#August 8 #2017 #R.I.P.#Glen Campbell

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dherzogblog · 3 years

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The Birth of The Daily Show: 25 Years of Fake News and Moments of Zen

It was July of 1995 and I had left MTV to become President of Comedy Central. It was the basic cable equivalent of going from the NY Yankees to an expansion team. I was on the job just two weeks when I received a call from Brillstein Grey the high powered managers of Bill Maher, host of one of the networks few original programs, "Politically Incorrect". We were informed Bill and his show would leave the network when his contract expired in 12 months. It was a done deal. Bill wanted to take his show to the "big leagues" at ABC where he would follow Night Line. Comedy Central was left jilted. Terrible news for a network still trying to establish itself. We had a year to figure out how to replace him and the clock was ticking. So began the path to The Daily Show.

It was very much a fledgling Comedy Central I joined, available in barely 35 million homes, desperately seeking an identity and an audience. It was just over three years old, born into a shot gun wedding that joined two struggling and competing comedy networks, HBO’s Comedy Channel and Viacom’s HA!, Watching them both stumble out of the gate, the cable operators forced them to merge, telling them: "We only need one comedy channel, you guys figure it out”. After some contentious negotiations the new channel was born and the red headed step child of MTV and HBO set out to find the pop culture zeitgeist its parents had already expertly navigated. The network had yet to define itself. The programming consisted mainly of old stand up specials from the likes of Gallagher (never underestimate the appeal of a man smashing watermelons), a hodgepodge of licensed movies (“The God’s Must be Crazy and The Cheech and Chong trilogy were mainstays) and Benny Hill reruns. The networks biggest hit by far was the UK import “Absolutely Fabulous”, better know as “AbFab”. Comedy Central boasted a handful of original shows, including the wonderfully sublime "SquiggleVision" of “Dr. Katz”, the sketch comedy "Exit 57" (starring the then unknown Amy Sedaris and Stephen Colbert) and of course Maher’s "Politically Incorrect". In retrospect I don’t think Bill got enough credit for pioneering the idea of political comedy on mainstream TV. Back then he was the only one doing it.

Politically Incorrect performed just fine, but got more critical attention than ratings. It was a panel show, and I had something a bit different in mind to replace it. I knew we needed a flagship, a network home base, something akin to ESPN's Sports Center where viewers could go at the end of a the day for our comedic take on everything that happened in the last 24 hours….."a daily show". I had broad idea for it in my head. I would describe it as part "Weekend Update", part Howard Stern, with a dash of "The Today Show" on drugs complete with a bare boned format to keep costs low so we could actually afford to produce it. We could open with the headlines covering the day's events (our version of a monologue), followed by a guest segment (we wouldn't need to write jokes...only questions!), and finish with a taped piece. Simple, right? We just needed someone to help flesh out our vision.

Comedy Central was a a second tier cable channel then and considered a bit of a joke (no pun intended). It had minuscule ratings, no heat and even less money to spend. Producers were not lining up to work with there. Eileen Katz ran programming for the channel and the two of us began pitching this idea to every producer who would listen. One of the first people we approached was Madeleine Smithberg, an ex Letterman producer and had overseen "The Jon Stewart Show" for us at MTV. We thought she was perfect for the role. “You can’t do this, you can’t afford this, you don't have the stomach for this, it will never work ” Madeliene said when we met with her. We could not convince her to take the gig. Ok then....we moved on. The problem was we heard that same refrain from everybody. No one wanted the job. So after weeks being turned down by literally EVERYONE, I said to Eileen: “We have to go back to Madeleine and convince her to do this with us"!

Part our pitch to her was we would go directly to series. There would be no pilot. The show was guaranteed to go on air. We had decided this show was our to be our destiny and we had to figure it out come hell or high water. As a 24 hour comedy channel, if we couldn't figure out a way to be funny and fresh every day...what good were we? We told Madeliene we were committed to putting the show on the air and keeping it there till we got it right (for at least a year anyway). That, plus some gentle arm twisting got her to sign on. Shortly after that, Lizz Winstead did too.

Madleiene and Lizz very quickly landed on their inspired notion of developing the show and format as a news parody. It brought an immediate focus and a point of view to the process . All of the sudden things started to take shape and coming to life. Great ideas started flowing fast and furious while an amazing collection of funny and talented began to come on board. Madeliene and Lizz were off to the races. Now all we needed was a host.

The prime time version of ESPN's Sports Center was hosted by Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann back then and it was must see cable TV. But I had recently started to notice another guy hosting the show's late night edition. He was funny, with a snarky delivery reminiscent of Dennis Miller. His name was Craig Kilborn. On the phone with CAA agent Jeff Jacobs one day, I asked if he knew happened to know who repped him? “I do" he said. "We just signed him”. Within days he was in my office along with Madeleine, Lizz, and Eileen who were all a bit skeptical about the tall blond guy with the frat boy vibes sitting across from them. After opening the meeting with a few off color comments that would probably get him cancelled today (an early warning sign fo sure), Craig ultimately won them over and we had our host.

FUN FAC#1: Minutes after the news of Craig's hiring went public, Keith Olberman's agent called me directly to ask why we hadn't considered hiring him?

Ok, we had a host and producers...but what to call it? After sifting through dozens of ideas for a title, Madeleine called me one day and said, "I think we should just call it what we've been calling it all along...."The Daily Show". As we approached our launch date we taped practice shows and took them out to focus groups to get real life feedback. The groups hated it.... I mean with a red hot hate. They hated Craig, the format, the jokes, everything. We were crushed and dejectedly looked around at the room at one another. "Now what?" “Either they’re wrong, or we are". I said I think they are...but it doesn’t matter, we're doing this!" We never looked back.

The show took off quickly garnering some quick buzz and attention, we felt like we had crashed the party. Well, sort of. We had no shortage of fun, growing pains and drama along the way. The Daily Show version 1.0 was about to unravel. In a December 1997 magazine interview Craig made some truly offensive and inappropriate remarks about Lizz and female members of the staff. Whether it was poor attempt at humor or just plain misogynist (or both) is beyond the point. It was all wrong, very wrong. Craig was suspended for a week without pay. Lizz left the show. In the moment I chose to protect the show and its talent more so than Lizz. That was wrong too. It's more than cringe worthy looking back now, and I regret not making some better decisions then. My loyalty to our host was later "rewarded" when in the Spring of 1998 Kilborn's team, a la Bill Maher, unceremoniously informed us he had signed a deal to follow Letterman on CBS when his contract expired at the end of the year. No discussion, a done deal. Comedy Central jilted again. Like Maher, Kilborn wanted his shot at the network big leagues and we had a little over six months to figure out how to replace him. We all know how that chapter ended. That search would eventually reunite us with Jon Stewart who along with The Daily Show took Comedy Central and basic cable to the "the big leagues" on their own terms, redefining late night comedy in the process The rest, as they say, is "Fake News" history.

Fun Fact #2: before approaching Jon (who I did not originally think would be interested) I initially offered the job to a chunkier, largely unknown Jimmy Kimmel, fresh off his co hosting duties on "Win Ben Stein's Money" ...only to have him turn us down.

My fascination with late night began as a kid. I remember how exciting it was to stay up to sneak a peek at the Carson monologue and watch him do spit takes with his chummy Hollywood guests. Later on I also loved the heady adult conversation Dick Cavett would have with everyone from Sly Stone to Groucho Marx. But it was the comedic revolution of Saturday night Live in 1975, followed by Letterman's game changing show in 1981 that truly established late night as the coolest place on the television landscape. I could only dream of one day being part of it.

25 years on, I couldn’t be more proud of The Daily Show and its legacy. Those days helping build it alongside Madeleine, Lizz, Eileen and the team were among the most satisfying (and fun) experiences I have ever had. It was thrilling to take a shot at the late night landscape and try and make our mark, especially when no one thought we could.

I am prouder still of what Trevor Noah and his staff have achieved since they took the hand off from Jon, evolving and growing the show through a new voice and lens. I think my personal "Moment Of Zen" will last as long as Trevor remains behind the desk, allowing me to selfishly boast of having hired every host this award winning and culture defining franchise has ever had.

25 years later. it remains as relevant as ever, a bona fide late night institution, standing shoulder to shoulder with all the great shows that inspired us to start.

#the daily show #jon stewart #trevor noah #comedy central

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ms-demeanor · 4 years

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After reading your "ultra-long postivity post", now I have kind of a weird feeling because i relate a lot to pretty much everything you said, but i ended up approaching the "not everyone can x" from the opposite side, being the "gifted kid" teachers used to hold everyone to unrealistic standards (that i knew most couldnt achieve in the given timeframes), and now i get frustrated when i dont develop skills immediately, because i have done it before and feel like i should be able to and aaaaaaaaaa

Funny story: when I was a kid my parents had both my sister and I tested for learning and developmental disabilities. This testing included IQ testing.

It identified that we were both “gifted” kids* and that I’m dyslexic.

It totally missed my ADHD, though!

The problem with that is that my parents. Hm.

Okay my parents both grew up in very poor families. VERY poor. And they both wanted to go to college and knew the only way that they could was through scholarships. So they became debaters. They met at a tournament in high school.

Debaters are weird. You need an efficient working memory and strong recall and the ability to think quickly on your feet. Being witty and kind of an asshole are also good traits for debaters. Basically you’ve either gotta be really fuck-off smart to be a competitive debater or you’ve gotta at least *seem* really fuck-off smart.

And my parents were champion debaters at a national level. The Whittier College debate trophy has my mom’s name written directly under Richard goddamn Nixon. My dad was on the USC debate team and competed against Harvard and won. Not only that but he ended up coaching debate for USC and Cal Tech.

So as kids who grew up in extremely poor families and were able to go to college and get middle-class jobs and buy a house because of intellectual ability my parents placed A LOT of importance on intellectual ability.

So that IQ score became a large part of my life.

First we attacked the dyslexia. The approach was basically teaching me a bunch of sight words because sounding out phonics doesn’t work when the letters get screwed up. And because I was *gifted* we did a lot of really BIG sight words.

It took about six months to get me up to speed from “memorizing the pages of a story to match the pictures because I couldn’t read along in class” to “the first book I read on my own was The Hobbit.” I guess that counted as “cured” because that was the last time I got any kind of educational assistance.

At that time I was at a gifted school, a really tiny private school that was also an after-school daycare where we did full-day classes and then did gymnastics and swim from 3-6pm. I also was there over the summer because my parents worked.

So going from “tiny private school where the teacher has you stand up in class to read your failing grade in front of everyone so that she could shame you into performing better” to “fine public school in a suburb wealthy enough to have arts programs” was a major, major change. They did an aptitude test because I was transferring in from a different district and there was much discussion about whether or not to move me directly from the second to the sixth grade.

The district refused, thank fuck.

The public elementary school didn’t *have* a gifted program so it took very little time for me to become the Certified Weird Kid. My third grade teacher had me read aloud to our class for twenty minutes a day. I taught the class the multiplication table.

When it got to be time to go to the junior high school my mom went to a meeting for the school’s gifted kids program. APPARENTLY one of the kid’s dad’s basically said “I don’t understand why you’re wasting school funds on field trips for the stupid kids, the school should spend more of its resources on kids who have a chance of actually meaning something to the world” and my mom decided that while being gifted was important it was less important than making sure I wasn’t exposed to assholes of that caliber on a regular basis.

(thanks mom, I actually do really appreciate that reprieve)

Several teachers pushed me into advanced classes - my math teacher insisted that I take the advanced algebra classes in the seventh and eighth grade.

The GATE kids *WERE* assholes and were extra bonus special assholes to me because math was the only advanced class that I was in. (At my junior high school you had to pick your elective based on what level of classes you were in - to take the GATE classes you HAD to take a music elective; if you took art, drama, shop, or home ec you couldn’t take the smart kid classes. The algebra class was a new, separate addition to the program so *some* of the kids in the “electives for dropouts” program could take algebra. Schools are really fucked up, guys, in case you didn’t know schools are really fucked up and that was BEFORE No Child Left Behind).

I got a C in that algebra class and sat in my room for literally an hour screaming at myself for being such a selfish, distracted idiot that I let myself read my books instead of studying harder for the class. (clearly very healthy, normal twelve-year-old behavior)

When it was time to go to high school my teachers made a united plea to the district to transfer me into honors/IB/AP classes.

The kids in the honors/IB/AP classes continued to be kind of awful to me. I got extremely depressed and basically started doing the lazy-but-brilliant thing of completely ignoring homework or in-class work but performing spectacularly well on tests or essays in the classes that I wasn’t catastrophically failing

I was the only person at the school who got a perfect score on the vocab part of my SAT. I was the only honors kid who hadn’t been in SAT prep classes. There was only one other kid who graduated with the same number of units as I had, we’d outstripped the valedictorian and salutatorian but three classes each. I only applied to one college - I got accepted for painting but my interviewer urged me to move to the writing program and I got accepted for that too.

My financial aid didn’t come through and my dad wasn’t willing to cosign for loans on “an art program at a trade school.”

I got accepted to Pratt Institute on their Writing for Publication track which included an internship with the New York Times for third-year students in the program.

At that point I had a Columbia Scholastic Press award for my work on my high school yearbook.

Let me tell you, the community college that I went to and spent five years variously failing and succeeding at had a fucking *killer* newspaper and magazine when I was there. The local community newspaper that hired me when I was 21 was also much better designed and edited than it had any right to be for the three years I worked there (getting paid a whole eight dollars an hour and sometimes working 20 hours straight to get it in to the printer on time).

When I transferred to the state school I got perfect grades and worked full time and won every contest offered by the school’s English Honors society (which I couldn’t join because I was a transfer student and hadn’t done honors classes my freshman and sophomore years). I started a literary magazine with some friends when I graduated; we published four full issues online before it fell apart.

You know what’s also funny?

Even the food-service job I had to pay my way though the community college I felt terrible about attending was a skills test. I was a barista, so of course for a while I was a competitive barista.

I disappointed my parents a lot. I heard a lot of “we know you’re better than this.” I got told I was too smart to be screwing up this bad. I mentioned it a couple weeks ago but my results from that IQ test got compared to my sister’s and that was the justification for holding me to a higher standard. “You’re measurably brilliant, why aren’t you acting like it?”

Here lies the corpse of a gifted kid. Look on my works ye might and despair.

I am the perfect picture of a twice exceptional gifted kid and the reason I wrote all of this out is to tell you one thing:

“Gifted Kid” is a label that someone applied to you, it has nothing to do with who and what you ARE.

It’s very, very unfair that the adults in your life used you that way. I have an exceptionally terrible memory of being singled out as the only one who passed the first test in my IB World History class; “Why is Alli the only one of all of you who is writing at grade level? You’re supposed to be the smartest kids in the school, why did you all fail?”

That’s awful for the kids around you, that’s awful for you. It doesn’t do anybody any favors if people around you are being informed that you’re setting the curve they’ll be judged against. And it really, really doesn’t do YOU any favors because it doesn’t take long *at all* for your brain to learn that that’s all you’re good for. If you aren’t the best at a thing then what’s the point, you HAVE to be best because they already SAID you were best and if you aren’t then all these other people hate you for setting a standard that even you can’t keep up with.

You end up competing with past versions of yourself and focusing on those things that make the grownups in your life praise you because the grownups in your life has praised you in such a way that it’s turned all the other kids against you.

You know who bullied the fuck out of me? The kids I taught the times tables to, the kids I read to for half an hour a day.

Those kids were MEAN to me but the teacher who told me to read Boxcar Kids to the class after lunch everyday was NICE and she told me not to worry, they were just jealous and I should be proud of my gifts.

“Anon did this in three minutes. What’s taking the rest of you so long?” - what a terrible weight to put on a child. You’re right. Not everyone can do everything.

Fucking hell.

Adults what the everloving shit is wrong with us? Please don’t treat kids like that.

Okay.

But here’s the other thing:

If there’s any time in your life that it’s easy to acquire skills with no apparent effort it’s when you’re a child surrounded by a support system that is engaged in making sure that you can acquire those skills.

It took three adults, two dictionaries, and several hours a day to teach me enough sight-words to throw me into “look at baby genius*” territory but from my perspective as a little kid I was just reading cool stories.

I spent four hours a day in the yearbook room and ditched and failed other classes so that I could work on the yearbook. I collected hundreds of magazines to get an eye for layout. But from my perspective as a teenager it was a fun activity that I did with the closest thing I had to friends.

I’m sure that there are some skills that you had a natural aptitude for, some things that came naturally. But I’m also sure that you didn’t learn those skills with no effort, it’s just that now as an adult with a life and other shit going on it takes more effort to learn to do things.

In all likelihood you weren’t a savant who did everything perfectly the first time you tried. It just seems that way because even really smart kids don’t know when they’re bad at things and are mostly being compared against other kids (with the few rare exceptions of music prodigies or math prodigies or those kids who end up in science grad programs at 12 and boy howdy do I think there’s a whole other can of worms when it comes to the way child prodigies* interact with the world).

You wanna know what probably saved my life in the last few years?

That “anti-capitalist love notes” tumblr post.

You are worth more than your productivity.

I was actually kind of offended the first time I saw that post on my dash. “No I’m not,” I thought. “You’re only worth what you can do, everyone knows that. People care about what you do for them.”

And why the hell would I think anything else? That’s what I’d learned for pretty much my whole life.

It took me a really long time to understand that I was wrong. I matter outside of what I can do for people or how well I perform. I matter more than being able to perfectly recite poetry from memory or do calculations on command or sit down at a piano and play a piece I’ve never played by sight-reading it.

And you matter outside of that too. You’re more than your performance, you’re better than being gifted. There are people who love you for the way you make them laugh and how you listen to their stories and for the simple joy of your presence.

It’s nice to be clever, it’s handy in a lot of situations even if it does come with a lot of baggage for some people.

But god damn, it’s important to be kind.

* Personally I have issues with the way that society constructs the concepts of giftedness, genius, and prodigies. There are a lot of “gifted” kids who were the kids who scored in the top 5% of their class in school but there are also gifted kids who were doing high-level math or reading novels as toddlers; there are prodigies who showed an aptitude for music young and who were then schooled in that instrument to the exclusion of all other activities (and I bet there are a fair number of kids who might be considered prodigies if they were trained to play flute for nine hours a day and didn’t have friends but thankfully we don’t *do* that to very many people - side note, ask me my opinion about olympic athletes some time). Words like “genius” and “gifted” are very nearly meaningless and almost *never* accurately reflect skills proficiency or long-term success or are reflected in income or respect. People think that geniuses are hypercompetent robots with their shit together but literally every adult I know with a genius-level IQ is some variety or other of total fucking tire fire.

#congratulations you have unlocked level two of my tragic backstory #long post

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reasonwarm77 · 3 years

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queen-of-the-trash-planet-tm · 5 years

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Ok here me out, Marinette Project runway winner

This is for @ozmav @mindfulmagics @maribat-archive @realrandomposts for inspiring me to do this even though I’m probably annoying you people.

She moved to Gotham after defeating Hawkmoth to study abroad

During this time she begins her time on Project runway

Even after having commissioned her work to celebrities such as Clara Nightingale and Jagged Stone she is out in the bottom 3 in 2 occasions

This causes her to work even harder to win

Marinette creates looks based off of Ladybug, the miraculous team, and the heroes of Gotham (Chat’s Miraculous was taken long ago, before defeating Hawkmoth)

Her Robin look was the one that made her the win (it was a simple, but elegant black blazer with a small robin embroidered on the right breast pocket, a white-based shirt with prints that resembled a bird making its nest, black slacks, and brown dress shoes).

The judges loved her craftsmanship, “You have magic in the tips of your fingers!”

“The embroidery is so detailed, how did you have time for that?”

“I love it! Marinette Dupain-Cheng you are Project Runway’s 20XX’s winner!”

*Cue Marinette being so happy she burst into tears*

After this, she begins working on building her brand. She began shipping her clothes internationally. Her work becomes huge in Asia and blows up, K-pop and C-pop idols love her. BTS was once caught using her clothes as airport fashion. Jackson Wang and BOYSTORY are always wearing her clothes.

Because of this Marinette’s celebrity clientele, just became a heck of a lot bigger.

Jagged now brags about her work at every red carpet event he goes to (if he didn’t already).

“Jagged, please. Jagged no. Jagged why?”

Clara does the same, but not to Jagged’s extreme.

Marinette is constantly embarrassed by this and try’s her best to give credit to the other contestants she met on the show. They all loved her and were as happy as they could be when she won.

All of this leads to Jagged introducing Marinette to Bruce Wayne.

“I hear you’ve been Jagged’s exclusive designer since you were fourteen? That’s impressive.”

Marinette waves it off, “I was just trying to help a friend.”

“I was wondering if I could commission you to create mine and my sons’ next charity gala suits. I’ve seen your work and it is very practical, most of the designers sacrifice functionality and practicality for aesthetic. But you seem to know that there is more to it then looking nice, your work seems to be able to be on the go as well.”

Of course, Marinette agrees, “Y-Yes! I would love to!”

This leads to a later fitting session at the Wayne Manor to get their measurements.

“Ah, Ms. Dupain-Cheng, you’re early,” Alfred points out while Marinette waits for entry.

Alfred allowed for her to get inside after a moment.

“On time is late and early is on time, Mr?”

“Pennyworth, but you may call me Alfred. That is exactly what I always say, Madame.”

“Well, in that case, you can just call me Marinette.” She smiles at the well-seasoned gentleman.

The well-mannered man shows Marinette to the living area to wait on Bruce and his sons.

What she wasn’t expecting was for two men to come barreling down the stairs, locked in combat over a trivial subject. “Take it back, Todd!”

“Not a chance, Demon Spawn!”

“I’ll break every bone in your body so badly, that not even the Lazarus pits could undo the damage caused!”

“When you say things like that, you just prove my point!!”

Marinette silently watched as the two continued their squabble. ‘What’s a Lazarus pit? I’ll have to ask Master Fu.’ (After defeating Hawkmoth, Master Fu retrieved Tiki. But that didn’t stop her guardian training.)

Eventually, the two boys got physical and Marinette decided it was time to intervene.

“Say it AGAIN!”

“You are JUST like your grandfather! You bra-”

“Umm, excuse me... Who are you two?”

The two stop to see a small, French woman physically keeping the two apart. The boys look completely gobsmacked.

“The better question is who are you?”

“I’m Marinette Dupain-Cheng, I’m here to get Bruce Wayne and his sons’ measurements for a piece he commissioned me to do. I’m a designer,” She said smiling, extending her hand.

Jason takes it before Damian, “I’m Jason Todd-Wayne, nice to meet you.”

Damian scowls, “How polite of you...” he murmured to himself.

Marinette looks to the boy who has yet to introduce himself, “And you are?”

Both Damian and Jason’s jaws dropped, she really didn't know who they were. She was in their house for Pete’s sake, “I’m Damian Wayne.” Damian took her hand and gave it a kiss for added effect.

“Show off,” could be heard from Jason’s direction.

Marinette didn’t care for what the peanut gallery had to say, she was bright red after Damian did that.

At this moment, Dick, Tim, and Bruce walked in at the same time.

“Ms. Dupain-Cheng, you’re early,” Bruce said walking to greet her.

“I didn’t want for you to wait for me, also you can just call me Marinette. It feels weird when someone older and with a much more esteemed reputation calls me Miss.”

Once she finished speaking, Tim basically ran to her at the speed of light. The Flash, who?

See all the boys enjoyed Jagged’s music, but Tim, Tim was the grade A fanboy that everybody at least knows of. He’s watched every interview, heard every song, bought every album, poster, t-shirt, and every bit of merch he could get his hands on.

Needless to say after all the praise, Jagged gives to his personal designer, Tim knows exactly who she is.

“It is an honor to meet you Ms. Dupain-Cheng, I am Tim Drake-Wayne. I’m a big fan of your work.”

“You like fashion, Timmy?”

“I’m interested, sure, but Ms. Dupain-Cheng has done work for Jagged Stone. Since. She. Was. Fourteen. Her work has won awards since she was fourteen!” Tim said, disgusted by his brothers’ not knowing who she is.

“Please, it was completely by chance I met Jagged. Plus, I wasn't the only designer he’s ever had.” Marinette tried to take the attention off of her achievements.

“You just the only one who has made Jagged look like something other than an eggplant. I love the guy’s music, but his outfits before you... they looked cheap.”

Dick moved to speak, “It’s true, looking back at his old ensembles, there was a dramatic shift in craftsmanship. I’m Richard Grayson-Wayne, but you can call me Dick.”

Marinette’s face rivaled her old Ladybug costume. “Please, it was nothing. I made a million mistakes when I was designing back then. Anyway, let’s talk about what’s happening today. Your measurements for your suits. I assume Mr. Wayne has more important things to do after this.”

This got the boys to get down to business (to defeat the Huns) and shapes up real quick at the sound of her “serious” voice. The same one she used to use when Chat Noir used to flirt in the middle of an attack.

She when in order of oldest to youngest. Bruce, Dick, Jason, and Tim, were all done. Damian had been waiting patiently for his turn, watching her work.

Marinette had this habit of sticking her tongue out whenever she was hyper-focused, Damian found this endearing. While she was getting his measurements, he was staring hard. This did not go unnoticed by the Batfam.

After she’s finished, it’s kinda late. Alfred invites her for dinner and Marinette graciously agrees. Marinette helps prepare the dessert, Alfred repeatedly told her she didn’t have to, but she insisted.

During dinner, the Batfam began to ask about her personal life, “So, are you seeing anyone?”

“Master Dick, that is not appropriate to ask a young lady!”

Marinette almost chokes at the question, “That’s... um... I just got out of a controlling relationship. I... um... really don’t feel like talking about it.”

Adrien had done a number on her mentally, once he discovered she was Ladybug he wanted her and him to get together immediately. She agreed after some time, but Adrien was always pushy. He always pressured her into doing something that she wasn’t comfortable doing. One day she had enough, she told him that she was done. Let’s just say that didn’t go over well. Marinette shifted in her seat as she recalls that night.

Damian seems to notice this and tells her that she doesn’t have to say anything if she doesn’t want to, Marinette appreciates this and thanks him.

Quickly Marinette switches the topic, “I really like that Gotham has heroes, that protect the city. They make me feel safe like I'm back in Paris.”

This gets all the boys’ attention, Bruce asks her why.

“In Paris, there were heroes to protect them from a magical terrorist, named Hawkmoth. He possessed people who were at their worst and turned them into these things called, Akumas. Ladybug and Chat Noir were the heroes. After he was defeated, Ladybug and Chat Noir retired.”

Damian was baffled by how the league did not know about this, “Why haven’t we heard about this?”

“Mayor Bourgeois kept everything quite to keep tourism flowing, but if you really want to know about it there’s a blog. Be careful though not everything on there is reliable.”

Tim makes a mental note to check it out later.

By the end of the meal and time to go home, all members of the Batfam+Alfred give and get Marinette’s personal contact info.

They gained a friend and a new designer.

Let me know if you want more because then and only then will I do more. This is my first time posting my writing, so please be nice. Thank you for taking the time to read it though! :)

Edit: here’s the ao3 link https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Farchiveofourown.org%2Fworks%2F20572886&t=MGFkNWY5ZDVjOTcwNmIyOTU3YjM0OGQwOTc1YTU5MWZkNDlkNzliYSwwZjg5ZTA1ODIyY2M5MGUyNWYxY2YyMzYyZTY3ZjY2NmNjNzIwMDg5

#maribat #marinette x damian #Damian Wayne #damientte #BatFam #tim drake #jason todd #dick grayson #bruce wayne #alfred pennyworth #adrien agreste #marinette dupain-cheng #miraculous ladybug #DC Universe

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cowboyshit · 4 years

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hangman’s monologue

I don’t know how to preface this but, for those of you who watched today’s bte (5/18/2020) and saw hangman’s monologue, I had to go in depth and break it down for everything I interpreted it alluding to. Overall it’s an insanely intelligent and amazing promo where on the surface level it can read as a reflection of what’s going on in the world, but when you pick it apart for the metaphors interwoven within you can see how much of a testament to his character and current story line it is and what he understands moving forward and what he’s come to the conclusion of doing. Basically this is just me going feral for thousands upon thousands of words because I clearly love a cowboy WAY too much.

You can read it under the cut, if you’d like!

Okay so I’m a little brain tired after a full day’s work but I’m still pretty feral about Hangman’s monologue and the metaphors it was filled to the brim with so *rubs hands together* I’m going to see what I can pick apart!

For the most part we understand the bald eagle he talks about seeing is something that makes him want to go home. Home is not his physical house, but All Elite Wrestling. That’s the home he’s been avoiding. I was almost thinking the bald eagle represented Matt Hardy in some way, which makes the line: “…when I hear what sounded like a miniature tornado spin right past my ear” seem to me like it relates to Vanguard 1 being a drone that’d sound like that – because, as far as I’m concerned, every time I’ve been at a demonstration with a bald eagle flying they’ve not sounded like a miniature tornado, but maybe he was being a little hyperbolic or maybe it was coming in fast haha. Plus, if we tie the bald eagle to Matt Hardy that could be the change Hangman has seen that’s making him think maybe it’s time to come home. He’s watching Kenny with Matt and maybe feeling guilty for not being there with his tag partner. Hearing the constant commentary of “one half of the tag team champions” is perhaps getting to his guilt? Because even if Hangman doesn’t want to be tag team champions with Kenny and even if he doesn’t actually care about having that tag team gold (which – small interjection, for all he says he doesn’t care about it, he did make a point to pack it with his ‘essentials’ when he left to go live in the woods) he does shoulder guilt of not being good enough, in not doing what he’s supposed to do. His partner is there, so Hangman feels guilty that he’s not. A tag team is supposed to stick together. So maybe, just maybe, the bald eagle has something to do with Matt Hardy, as that’s been the only change to AEW recently (with him tagging with Kenny) that’d be enough to put some sort of guilt on Hangman’s shoulders that I can think of.

Oh also – real quick – I do think it’s interesting he’s talking about this happening as he comes up on his last bottle of whiskey, but he talks more about that later so I’ll get into that a little more later on. I think this has to do with his acceptance that he’s using the alcohol as a crutch, but I digress. Moving on!

“Maybe I should go home? I don’t know. The thought itself bloomed inside my brain like a malignant tumor; uninvited, unwelcome, but growing just the same. I mean, it would be ridiculous to go home right now. Because out here I can’t get infected. I can’t infect anyone else.”

These lines are more evidence that Hangman is fighting within himself, with his own mind about returning “home” to AEW. It’s an unwanted thought, but it’s an important and heavy and prevalent one. In the woods and away from AEW he can’t feel day-to-day like a dog chasing it’s tail, reminded that he’s not quite achieved what he wanted (remember that he promised at the press conference that he would be AEW world champion before 2019 was over, which he failed to do and he has never had another chance at that title yet). Or, even worse, when he’s there he’s constantly shown his loneliness to his face where it’s inescapable, even if some of it is his own doing (not seeking new friendships after breaking off with the Elite and even going so far as to horribly damage his new friendship with Private Party over a measly $12. It’s not about the money at this point, I think Hangman is afraid to let anyone get close to him again because he thinks if he has no one close to him he won’t have to fight those thoughts of being shoved back into the shadows).

Which brings me to this little part: “Because out here I can’t get infected. I can’t infect anyone else.” When he’s away from AEW he can’t be infected by his worries of splitting with the Elite and he can’t allow those feelings and what he does because of them – drinking, acting out – to hurt anyone else. Because Hangman loves the Elite as much as he probably wishes he didn’t. He has too good of a heart not to love them, even if he is angry at them and even if he doesn’t want to be a part of them anymore. We saw this when he went from angrily yelling at Matt and Cody to asking with concern after Nick’s well-being once he found out he’d been “hurt” by Hangman during their last match.

The next few lines that follow I do believe may be more about his commentary regarding the coronavirus and what it means to be traveling to the show, etc. but once we get through those lines we hit this part: “I mean even now I would never know if I overreacted coming out here to live, but I would forever live with the pain of knowing I didn’t do enough. And to be honest, I’ve been kind of enjoying living out here. I’ve got good company, and I know you can’t see them right now, but they’re everywhere. It’s not just people either. Two days ago I swear a raven winked at me.”

There’s a lot in those lines that follow the same theme of what’s been discussed. If he never returns home to AEW, he won’t know if he’s been overreacting about everything. Things are getting muddled in his head where it’s reality vs anxiety. Maybe running away and hiding from everyone was an overreaction. Maybe avoidance, instead of ripping off the band-aid and letting the wound air and heal wasn’t the right move. If he never goes back, he’ll never know. He’s beginning to understand that the only way forward is to return, but there’s that fear and anxiety inside him that keeps screaming to slam the breaks and reverse, to go deeper into the woods as it were instead of coming out from the shadows.

And of course he’s enjoyed living away from “home” despite this moment of reflection he’s having. Out here in the woods he doesn’t have to fear disappointing anyone. He doesn’t have to run across the Elite’s path and worry there’ll be another fight because they just won’t listen to him. He doesn’t want to fight with his friends. He just wants to shake hands and go his own way, but they’ve got their claws in him and it’s made him desperate and feral to get away from them and as such he acts out and in turn hurts (infects) other people AND himself.

But, like I said, Hangman says: “But I would forever live with the pain of knowing I didn’t do enough.”

Even if it isn’t his fault that Matt, Nick, and Kenny (I’m leaving Cody out only because he really hasn’t had a solid presence in the Elite story lines since this has begun) won’t let go, he’s recognizing that if this is something HE wants – if he really wants to be separated and that’s what’s going to make him happy - it’s going to have to be something he does. And if he doesn’t go back to AEW, if he just continues to hide and get drunk in the woods, that failure will sit on HIS shoulders and no one else’s. There will be no one to blame but himself.

Also! I do believe the line about the raven is a reference to Marty which is why I included it, but that’s really all I gotta say about it haha I was just excited to think he was referencing his old villain buddy.

Okay so the next bit is a little long, but I need to include his whole dialogue to break it down: “Why did I think that in the first place? Honestly? I mean, it feels selfish, but there is a large part of me that wants to march right back up the front steps and slip off my boots and let them dry, stumble right through the front door with a sheepish grin, hoping nobody noticed I had left in the first place. And as nice as it is out here, truthfully the past few months has left me feeling pretty damn worthless. Like, I used to know more, but living in a house is kind of all I understand now. And maybe most selfishly, I feel like I want to go back home because I was on the run of my life in that house. I was learning to eat as much toast as I wanted fresh from our Russel Hobbs toaster. I nearly won the prestigious “Man of the House” award in May. I teamed up with our broom to clean the house better than ever swept it before. And I feel like I might have been starting to patch up the holes of the house.; the walls that made the house what it was in the first place. Everyone was loving it - what I was doing in the house - and it made me feel more validated than I ever felt in my life. And I felt like maybe I was on my way back to winning the “Man of the House” award. The thing I had promised to win on day one. But I - I’ll never get that momentum back… I mean, does momentum even exist in a house that’s empty?”

This part is FULL of so much and I’m going to try my best to talk as cohesively about it as possible without just. Screaming.

So again, he’s talking about how he thought about returning to the “house” and what all of that entails. Of course Hangman wants to return without notice – he doesn’t want to have to answer on where he’s been or what he’s been doing. He doesn’t want prying eyes to poke and prod inside when even he’s still tangled about what his journey is and what would actually make him happy. It’s only going to set off his anxiety if everyone starts pointing out how long he was gone because a part of it, despite himself, is tied to that guilt for how long he’s been gone in the first place. He does feel guilty for being away. The last thing you want when you’re guilty for something is for it to seem like everyone’s going to put it under a microscope. And maybe he knows he isn’t strong enough yet to not fall back on harmful behaviors in order to cope with that sort of scrutiny.

Also, him feeling worthless being away from AEW. Hangman, at his core, is a representation of struggling with self-identity. Who is he? At the end of the day who is Hangman Adam Page? I don’t think that’s a question he has enough self-confidence to look in a mirror and answer. He’s caught searching right now, lashing out, numbing himself, stumbling, trying, doing, failing, succeeding… and he’s still just a little bit lost. He hasn’t quite caught his stride. His eyes are so focused on the AEW World Championship (which I believe is the Man of the House award he’s talking about) because he thinks that’s what’s finally going to prove to everyone – but more importantly himself – that he’s good enough.

The funny thing though, I think this reflects the children’s story he wrote about his character too – is that I feel like there’s a chance even holding that title isn’t going to prove anything to himself. Like when it talks about the “golden horseshoe” in his children’s book and the fact that “Adam” didn’t need it to do an amazing job. But… I digress.

And I think that’s where the last line ties in, where he talks about not being able to find that momentum. He doesn’t think he can get back what he had when he was going after the championship in the beginning. Everyone’s moved on, he thinks. The eyes of the belt now fall to others - Mox, Brodie Lee - where’s room for him in that? With how tangled up he is right now it’s no wonder he can’t see himself pushing for the momentum again of having everyone rally behind the idea that he’d hold the championship or be capable of taking it away from the names who have it now. He feels like that part of the house has emptied out and with all his other battles he can’t see how he’d get through those to get any piece of importance back on that spot.

I want to reiterate and focus on another section in that long quote because I think it’s incredibly important: “And maybe most selfishly, I feel like I want to go back home because I was on the run of my life in that house. I was learning to eat as much toast as I wanted fresh from our Russel Hobbs toaster. […] I teamed up with our broom to clean the house better than it’d ever been swept before. And I feel like I might have been starting to… patch up the holes of the house… the walls that made the house what it was in the first place. Everyone was loving it, what I was doing in the house and it made me feel more validated than I ever felt in my life.”

If you’ve been watching AEW from the start and hadn’t seen much of Hangman before, you’ll have caught on to the trajectory of his popularity and how he is at the highest point in his career that he’s ever been in. The cheers these days are for HIM. I remember my excited surprise when, during a promo with the Bucks and Kenny, Hangman interrupted them and the entire arena cheered for HIM. For his interruption. Think about that in terms of how his career used to be – how no one really cared that much if Hangman was coming out to the BC theme because they’d rather see the more popular Bullet Club members, The Young Bucks or Kenny Omega. But now he has a catchphrase people are chanting. People pop FOR him. He’s learning how to eat that “toast” the crowd is giving him. He’s learning how to accept this outpouring of love and support us fans are showing up in troves with for him.

The line about the broom is clearly a nod at Kenny. They cleaned the house better than before – that match at Revolution was… astonishing. I feel like he and Kenny were finally hitting their stride and coming to a better understanding in working in tandem in the ring and that’s what this is a nod to.

And now those last two lines. Patching up the holes of the house – that’s his relationship with the Elite. Before all this went down, we saw a BTE episode where Matt and Hangman sat down at a bar and started to get serious before the camera cut and didn’t let us see what the conversation was, but we understand it was about the contention between the two of them (as Matt’s the one lashing out the loudest and angriest out of the bunch and making Hangman explode the worst). So, right before all this happened Hangman was maybe finally feeling like he was getting somewhere with the holes torn in his relationship with his friends. His brothers. His family. (Which – real quick – we know found family is a huge thing for Hangman, given the earlier episode of BTE where Jimmy Valiant talked to him and Hangman lamented over the loss of how Jimmy helped him and all the trainees feel like they were a family).

And that last line about feeling validated. He finally is getting the recognition he’s (quite frankly) deserved all along. He’s come into himself and now the crowd is rallying behind him. At each show he was just getting more and more over. Everyone has been loving what he’s been doing at AEW. They care more about him than KENNY OMEGA (which we also see Kenny rant about in this same episode earlier on when he’s on the zoom call with Colt). Imagine how insane that must feel to him after he’s always put these guys on such a high pedestal for their achievements!!!! Look at his career record when paired to Kenny’s or the Bucks. But finally, FINALLY after all this time he was emerging as the favorite and of course that’s where he’s finding validation. That’s helping take down those worries and those anxieties when it comes to feeling like he’s not enough or that no one cares about him. How can he feel that way when he goes to the ring and thousands of people are screaming HIS catchphrase or popping for HIM? And maybe there’s a part of him that’s stayed away because not having that audience cheering for him robs him of the validation he was just beginning to accept and brings his fears back that are always waiting in the wings.

Okay, moving on.

“I mean it seems unfair that I get to live out this Snow White woodland fantasy while Cynthia from Food Lion has to go back to her apartment every morning. I mean am I the bad guy here? I mean, either way I look at it, I’m the bad guy in my own drunken monologue here in the woods. I mean, maybe that just the way the world has conditioned me to think when the choice was never mine to begin with.”

I think the “Cynthia from Food Lion” bit is talking about us. The audience. Hangman feels guilty for running away and leaving us behind while we still have to face our day-to-days and we don’t get the luxury of running off and getting drunk in the woods when things go bad. We have to keep facing our day no matter what we’re going through. We have to keep “going home” in a way, regardless of what our struggles are. It’s valid to feel guilt for it, but he’s also right about the way the world has conditioned him to think when the choice was never his to begin with. It’s, to me, that reflection of what us millennials face. We are constantly told we are in the wrong, that we’re killing business after business despite the issues being out of our control to fix or have a hand in. We’ve been conditioned to constantly feel this guilt that we’re not doing enough – for the most part our parents and grandparents had degrees or jobs or houses by the time they were in their twenties whereas most of us can’t afford that. We’re constantly told that we’re not doing enough. That it’s our fault even when we don’t have a choice.

“I don’t know. All I know is that I can’t shake the feeling that the world is about to fuck me dry one more time. And for the first time ever, I have the chance to put on lipstick first. I mean… I need… I know I need to go back home. Home is still there.”

This is a little vulgar of an expression, but I think that’s the point. It’s shock value to really pull your attention toward it. It needs that hard light shone directly on it. In the beginning I talked about how sometimes we know we have to walk into something that’s going to be awful just to get through to the other side and I think that’s what this refers to. Hangman knows he can’t keep running from his problems and, given his history, he can’t help but feel like it’s going to explode in his face even if he comes with good intentions. If we look at the trajectory of every time he tried to tell the Elite he wanted to separate from them we see how it got uglier and uglier each and every time. So even though he doesn’t think it’s going to go perfectly fine or the way he wants it to go (where he’s allowed to walk away, figure out who he is on his own, and then maybe go for the AEW World Championship if that’s even still something he can achieve) he knows he has to go back. He’s had a chance to “put lipstick on first” which means he’s had the chance to get ready for it. To steel himself. For the first time in his career he’s had a chance to step away from the storm, stare it right in the eyes and see exactly what he has to do in order to get through it, even if he comes out battered on the other side. He has to go home. He has to go back to AEW. He has to face everything he’s been running from lately.

So now the final bit which is my favorite metaphor simply because it has to do with horses so, you know the horse girl in me SCREECHED.

“But honestly, what I want to do is climb back on my horse and ride off into the sunset and just say the hell with it. Maybe this little rant is all I have left. I’m just throwing my leg over a saddle with a broken tree. Kicking a horse i know has long been dead, and the horse just collapses, and I’m sitting back here in the same spot wondering “Why did I want to go home in the first place?” Maybe it was the eagle coming back home to her nest that made me think it or maybe it’s because I’m out of whiskey.”

For those of you that don’t know, the tree in a saddle is the saddle’s frame on a western saddle. It’s basically the structure the saddle is based on and how you tell how to properly fit your saddle to the horse so you don’t cause further problems for your horse while riding. When the saddle tree breaks, the saddle can shift where it’s positioned on the horse’s spine and cause a LOT of problems for your horse. It’ll add pressure where pressure shouldn’t be added and distribute the weight off, effectively fucking up the horse’s spine. It’s easy to ride a saddle with a broken tree because for the most part unless you are paying close attention you won’t feel that the tree is broken, but your horse absolutely will. So what he’s saying is that while he wants to get in the saddle and ride off into the sunset to effectively never be bothered again, he won’t be able to do that.

The next few lines are simply more reflections of Hangman trying to work through his personal anxieties. Maybe he’s telling himself this last little bit as a way to try and “get out” of going. Maybe he’s trying to tell himself he’s crazy for thinking it’s time to go back. It’s also a reflection of what he’s worried about – that all of this is going to be for naught. That it’s hopeless. That he’s had time away to reflect and think, but maybe that’s just it. Maybe when he goes back he’ll just be “beating a dead horse” and be caught up in the same shitstorm he was before. That he’ll go through all this trouble to go back only to find himself planted right back on his ass in the spot he’s at now. Aimless and tangled up inside his head.

Those last couple lines, again – he’s wondering what’s made him think this way. Is it because he’s out of alcohol and he finally has to face sobriety and think? Or is it because the “bald eagle” came back to her nest and made him feel like he needed to go back too?

Like I said before, overall this is an amazingly thoughtful piece. The way it was delivered like a rambled monologue but actually had so many in-depth layers was phenomenal. It comes across like someone working through their anxiety, talking out their problems, being pulled back into those thoughts of doubt and trying to convince himself out of them. Just... fucking phenomenal, really.

#hangman page #for anyone curious its apparently 4080 words long :D #i dont even know what to tag this as #meta: hangman adam page #?????#I DONT KNOW #i just love a cowboy man

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swiftiemcdibbles · 4 years

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Here we are AGAIN, swifties I'm talking to you...

➡️I am not 100% sure of the validity of this statement, I have absolutely no reason to doubt the person that told me this..just wanted to put this "disclaimer" here just in case⬅️

I used to work with a girl whose cousin apparently attended the same High School as @taylorswift . One day we were talking and everyone I ever work with, or heck ANYONE I know, knows my immense love for Taylor. So she told me that @taylorswift didn't get to walk at her Graduation due to the "spectacle" it would become. Basically the School knew her being there would take all the attention away from the other people Graduating. The girl that told me this also said there were rumors that this came to be because of jealousy and parents of jealous kids went to the school and demanded something to be done. Idk if that's how or why it happened, but it is very possible.

This could have been in junction with what @taylorswift said, she was in a car with her Mom doing radio tours and simply couldn't attend. Logistically wise. So, it could have been a combination of things, Taylor has always been very open about her High School experience and that it wasn't good. So I totally believe people didn't want the girl they made fun of for having such a "far fetched" dream, and keep in mind at the time of Graduation she had already had a development deal with RCA and was songwriting with them, then signed to...that label no one cares about anymore...had also released her debut album, "Taylor Swift", and was getting ready to release "Fearless"((Love Story, the lead single, was released in September 2008, her graduation year)). She had done one of her most famous acceptance speeches where she says "this is definitely the highlight of my Senior Year"((when she won the Horizon Award)). My point is, she was ridiculed for having a dream, and before they Graduated, Taylor was already starting to achieve those dreams, and I think it made a lot of people jealous.

So I do think her speech to the class of 2020 about not attending Graduation was GREAT. Here is the biggest celebrity of our generation, and one of the best of all time, telling them that look, I didn't get to go to my Graduation and I still went on to do great things and so will you. And that she also can relate to looking forward to that day for years only for it to be taken away from you, it sucks.

So, I write this because once again im seeing SWIFTIES attack her! This is unacceptable, and it makes me wonder how many of those who all have been attacking her lately, were ever really REAL fans to begin with. But it doesn't matter I guess. So I say to ya'll, be gone. Taylor has plenty of true fans that your exit won't even be noticed.

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charliejrogers · 3 years

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Miracle on 34th Street (1947) - Review & Analysis

What a weird, wonderful movie. Miracle on 34th Street is quite possibly the oddest Christmas movie I’ve ever seen. In part this is due to the fact that some stuff just doesn’t age well. How many old, strange men are you willing to let your seven-year-old daughter hang out alone with, Ms. Doris Walker?! But also it’s weird because because despite its typical Christmas-movie themes of faith/belief, true love, family, etc… it’s a wholly unique film that doubles as a legal drama!

This was my first viewing of the perennial classic, a film which started as a story by Valentine Davies and was adapted for the screen and then subsequently directed by George Seaton. Though baptized a Roman Catholic, Seaton himself grew up in a Jewish neighborhood of Detroit. He even had a bar mitzvah. I wonder how much of Seaton’s upbringing affected the final product we see. The central theme of holding faith in something that doesn’t make sense to those around you probably resonated strongly for the director who as a kid who became interested in a religion that was foreign to both of his Swedish immigrant parents.

From a direction standpoint, it’s fairly by the books and of its time, with a few notable exceptions, one being the opening credits sequence which shows a lone man walking slowly about the NYC streets from behind. He’s dressed in all black and we have no idea who he could be. He could literally be anyone in the world. Then all of a sudden, like magic, his face is revealed: the man we’re following is Santa Claus! Or, at least it looks a whole lot like him. What is Santa Claus doing in New York? Is this even Santa Claus?

These are questions that end up being central to the movie and just straight up never get answered. I loved that writing choice. The writing is the first of the film’s three big stars. This film won the Oscar for both best story and best adapted screenplay and it deserves every ounce of those awards. The story is so sublimely clever. Put shortly, the movie is about a man who claims to be Santa Claus and due to his uncanny resemblance to the jolly holiday figure, his natural aptitude for talking to children, and his almost savant-like knowledge of toy stores in Manhattan, he gets hired to be the mall Santa for Macy’s flagship Manhattan store. However, not everyone is as convinced that he is the real Kris Kringle. Certainly the Macy’s company psychologist does not. An uptight and unpleasant man, he (like others) thinks Kringle is utterly delusional but (unlike others) he also thinks these delusions presage future violence whenever inevitably others may challenge Kringle on this delusion. The psychologist thus schemes to get Mr. Kringle committed to *cue thunderclaps* Bellevue!

What ensues is a legal battle. I can’t imagine any other Christmas movie whose climax ends in a courtroom but it’s an incredibly satisfying thing to watch. We have the idealistic lawyer, Mr. Fred Gailey, who believes that Kringle, while clearly delusional, poses no actual threat to the community and actually does the community a great service in spreading kindness. Nevertheless, has to prove that Mr. Kringle is legally THE Mr. Kringle lest Kringle spend the rest of his life in the looney bin. Note… I have a very healthy and “modern” view of mental health, and would never use the term “looney bin” to describe today’s mental health hospital… but I use the term here because the images we get in the film of Bellevue’s inpatient psych ward are of sedated men in all-white clothing… in other words the movie certainly thinks of being in a psych ward as a looney bin, which adds a bit of dramatic tension to the story.

There’s certainly some not-so-subtle condemnation of psychology going on this movie (at least of the kind practiced by the Macy’s psychologist, Mr. Sawyer (a snivelling Porter Hall)). This was coming at a time when increasingly science was taking the place of religion, so it makes sense that psychology would be an enemy in a movie about faith and clinging to things that don’t make sense. The trial over the existence of Santa Claus almost serves as an inverse Scopes Monkey trial; Kringle even ironically compares his lawyer to Clarence Darrow, the lawyer on behalf of science.

What this movie nails so absolutely perfectly is that honestly… I don’t know if Kringle really isn’t Santa Claus. I’m not claiming that Santa exists in the real world, but in the world of this film, it’s really not obvious whether the film leans one way or another. That’s an ambiguity that tends to make art shine when it’s present. We see through Gailey’ legal maneuvering that the legal defense for Santa Claus’ existence is tenuous at best. At one point he calls the prosecutor’s child to the witness stand to argue that Santa Claus must be real since that is what his Dad (the prosecutor) has always told him. Therefore it seems like the film’s psychological explanations are probably the most likely. Yet at the same time… when a little Dutch girl comes to see Santa at Macy’s because she can “just tell” he’s the real Santa… why else would Kringle know Dutch songs about Santa off the top of his head? Why does an old man who lives in an old folk’s home on Long Island know so much about Manhattan’s toy stores?

And then there’s the more practical questions about Santa lore. Why is Santa in New York? He says he was born in the North Pole… so why did he leave? If he’s real, then why does he need to direct parents on where to buy the best toys? Is it merely that the world has outgrown him?

There’s also a whole economic piece of the script that I won’t even fully touch on. But basically Kringle in attempt to do right by parents, doesn’t merely recommend toys from the Macy’s toy department, but lets them know about better deals on toys that are located in stores elsewhere in Manhattan, including those that are rivals of Macy’s! This policy is such a hit with customers, it ushers in a revolution in department store policy, with department stores across the nation vying to extend more goodwill to customers. As I said, there’s something in there about the power of the free market and how capitalism doesn’t have to be evil... but I’ll leave it there and return to the central questions of the film. Like... does Santa Claus exist?

I don’t know! But the film raises really interesting questions and just leaves them there for us to sit with. Everything that the film tells us points us to the common sense conclusion that this man is NOT the genuine Jolly fellow… yet we want to believe there’s something more and that’s what makes this film so special. We literally as the audience go through the same mental charades as the characters in the film.

Thus far, I’ve attributed this brilliance to the plot, but there’s another absolutely vital element: the performance by Edmund Gwenn as Kris Kringle. This guy deserves every ounce of his Oscar for his performance. There’s not a second that he’s on screen that he doesn’t ooze charisma and charm. This whole movie would fall apart were it not for him, good plotting be damned, since we need to believe, even for mere fits and flitters, that this man is Santa Claus.

Never is he more convincing than when he interacts with children. There’s the absolutely magical scene with the little Dutch girl I mentioned above, but it’s when Kringle chats with little Susan Walker (played to heart-melting perfection by nine-year-old actor Natalie Wood whose got a stink face that never ceased to make me chuckle) that this movie achieves greatness. Though the trial scenes put the theme of faith vs. psychology at the forefront, the real heart of this movie is the conflict of faith vs. practicality. Little Susan is raised by her mother (and her Black nanny/house-caretaker who gets depressingly little credit… or screentime), and her mother Doris Walker (Maureen O’Hara) is a thoroughly practical women. She’s a high-up exec at Macy’s, and seemingly one of the only women to be in such a position. As such, she’s a unique character for her time. Rigidly pragmatic, she eschews any and all attempts at fun and imagination for her daughter (as well as for herself). We get the sense that a different film, a different story, might dive deep into Walker’s struggles as a single mother in the 1940’s trying to be taken seriously in the business world. In a sense, she’s a forerunner to Faye Dunaway’s character in Network. She was clearly hurt by romance in the past (she and her husband divorced, which I imagine was rather scandalous at the time), and this fear of getting hurt by romance is what compels her to teach her daughter to avoid the stuff completely.

Clearly, there’s some cool gendered stuff going on here. Imagination, romance, faith: these are all things that are stereotypically more female-coded, while business, pragmatism are more male-coded. You inherit your father’s name but your mother’s religion as the old tradition went. And in our society at least, the latter (pragmatism/business) is supposed to make you successful and get you places… the former (faith/romance) does not. Yet in this movie, we have idealism and romance of our male lawyer Fred Gailey (John Payne) and the pragmatism of our female businesswoman Doris Walker. It’s a fun play on typical gender norms, but more interesting is to see how this duality plays out in the development of little Susan under the dual influences of her mother and the combination of Misters Gailey & Kringle.

Natalie Wood goes down in the pantheon of all-time great child actors, up there with the kid from Kramer vs. Kramer. She’s precocious but not in a way that’s off-putting. The way she evaluates the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade in such a matter-of-fact way is hilarious, and as I mentioned the stink eye she gives Kringle when he tries to tell her that he’s Santa is nothing short of perfect. Over the course of the film, we see her more harsh nature melt away and she becomes a kid. It’s a beautiful reminder of that childhood only comes once in a lifetime. If this movie shows us nothing, it’s how hard it is to maintain a sense of levity once one becomes an adult. We have to start worrying about what our bosses might think, what the press/public might think, what voters(!) might think. Never again will it be fully OK to have your heads in the clouds and believe in nonsense, so why take that away from children.

As much as this is a perfect film, I could have done without the romance plot. Mostly because it seems unnecessary. Doris seems to change in her attitudes towards Kringle and towards raising her daughter that constitute enough character growth thata having her all of a sudden fall head over heels for Gailey just seems forced. For that matter… Gailey’s a weird dude. This movie romanticizes a weird, creepy type of romance where Gailey spends time with a small girl just to get time with that girl’s mother. Walker and Gailey are such opposites and share no on-screen chemistry, that I just didn’t buy the plot.

But that’s OK. It’s a small blemish on an otherwise wonderful film. It hits different emotions than, say, It’s A Wonderful Life, but it’s magical all that same, and one that I can actually imagine children wanting to watch. It’s unceasingly clever plot, matched by a once-in-a-lifetime performance by Edmund Gween as Kris Kringle and a great child actor performance from Wood make this a must-see movie for any holiday movie fan.

***/ (Three and a half out of four stars)

#miracle on 34th street #edmund gwenn #maureen o'hara #john payne #natalie wood #george seaton #christmas movies

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