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davecall93 · 5 years ago

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Alan (1)

“This is it,” said the man in charge of costumes, finding the pieces of the fat suit.“And these, I think, are the clothes that go with it.”

Alan lifted them up. He had been cast as a minor character in a local theater production, and his beanpole figure was not substantial enough for the character of Simon, whose primary characterization was that he dealt with his anxiety through food. He had been told he should figure out how to stuff himself with pillows but then the costume director remembered a fat suit had been purchased by an actor some years ago and left it when the play had closed.

“This is great,” said Alan, holding the pieces in his hand. “This is definitely better than pillows.”

“The clothes should work, too. Polo, dockers…tuck it in and get some glasses…you got a nervous, shy compulsive eater. Let’s give it a try.”

Alan stripped down to his boxers. His ribs showed lightly through his frame, and the minor effect of occasional working out saved his arms from a chicken leg effect. A slight bulge of a healthy endowment made for his one bulge. Shy in public, it was his need to adjust as he fit the suit and pants that took his attention. The costume director did not notice.

As he pulled on the polo shirt, the costume director suggested that it may be worth getting an ill-fitting dress shirt to make the character more uncomfortable looking. “But you should go see for yourself.” He gestured to the full body mirror in the room. Alan walked over and looked at himself.

The effect was instant, an instant only slightly less powerful than when he had first felt the full force of his sexuality in the fifth grade. Although his face remained absurdly thin, his stomach rounded out, his flanks and ass seemed to billow, and as he put his hands on his gut, his mind could not get off the space he took up, reveling in the inhabitual stretch of his reaching arms. The clothes gripped his expanded body, and he looked (and felt himself to be) as soft as a marshmallow. His groin danced and radiated a warm tingling that jetted up his limbs.

“It’s me,” he thought, in an instance of clarity that hit him like a train. He wanted to make the suit part of his body. No, not wanted, needed to.

“Not bad,” said the man.

“It looks great,” murmured Alan.

“Maybe makeup can round out your face,” said the man.

“Yeah, maybe they can,” Alan repeated, still speaking mostly to himself.

“How do you move in it?”

Alan turned around and tried walking in it. He made an awkward, artificial waddle, forgetting he should adjust to the costume and not to his imagination of what he would like if he were the costume’s size.

“I’d work on that.”

“Can I—Can I take it home? I’d like to get used to it.”

“Sure. It’s probably a good idea. I’ll help you get out of it.”

“No, no. I want to walk home in it. I think it’ll help out.”

“Method style. I like it.”

As Alan sat on the bus, it was all he could do to not imagine his ass expanding over the seat and into the next, elevating him higher up the seat. The bus was mostly empty, but he imagined people eying the seat and passing it, figuring there was not enough for two. The stop before his, he got out and walked into the grocery store, where he purchased a sheet cake, walking the next half mile home.

As he sat down at the table in the small apartment that he and his boyfriend shared, his actor’s mind formulated a little story about Alan, who was fat, who had a very big sweet tooth, and ate sheet cake directly out of the box because it pleased him to do so. He would say hippy dippy things about body positivity and he would be just a little bit clumsy and little bit destructive because he would know that he could knock things over at his size because he was shy about his size but not really.

He had eaten a good corner of the cake when he heard behind him, “Excuse me what are you—?”

Alan turned around. “It’s me, babe.” He appreciated the retreating look of shock on Richie’s face. Richie had a healthy body and while he did not feel that he needed to be shredded, his body clearly signaled that he was a regular gym goer.

“Holy shit, Alan. The fuck! Is that your costume? You’re huge.”

“They had a fat suit, apparently. I brought it home so I can get used to it.”

“You gonna wear that around the house?”

“I wore it home.”

“Actors…” his boyfriend sighed. Richie hated the theater. Or rather, he had no interest in it, and dating Alan had been its own comedy of manners in putting up with the art. “And you’re eating a sheet cake?”

“Want some?” Alan held up the fork.

“Ha! Why not?” Richie came over took a small bite. He wiped some frosting from Alan’s face. “You gonna eat that whole thing?”

“I’m trying,” said Alan.

“And what about dinner?”

“I thought you were making pasta.”

“I mean…how are you gonna eat dinner after all that?”

“I’ll make room.”

“Pasta it is. You gonna take that off before we eat?”

“Maybe.I think you’ll like what it does for my ass.”

“Oh you have one finally?”

Alan stood up and turned his butt towards his boyfriend—who had given up chasing bubble butts to be with the man he loved—and shook it.

Richie smiled as his eyes followed the two puffs swing side to side, appreciating not only the suggestion of his partner with a butt but also the reverse sexiness of someone just shaking a padded ass with no air of sexiness about it. “Yeah, I could work with that.” He slapped Alan in the back, but Alan was too cushioned to feel it. “I’m gonna shower and take a nap. Enjoy your cake.”

Richie would be a good boyfriend for fat Alan, thought Alan. Baffled but supportive. Which was exactly how Richie felt as he thought of his boyfriend downstairs eating sheet cake from the box in a fat suit, just before he closed his eyes to sleep.

#gainer stories #gainerfiction

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lifeonashelf · 4 years ago

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COLDPLAY

Let’s get this straight right off the bat: Coldplay is fucking terrible.

We all know this. Designating Coldplay as terrible isn’t a statement of personal opinion, it is an easily demonstrable fact. Just listen to them; Coldplay’s music proves the existence of Coldplay’s terribleness the same way that breathing proves the existence of oxygen. Surely, even the band’s staunchest supporters understand that their songs are pretentious, monotonous, and unimaginative—they’d kind of have to; I assume these people have listened to Coldplay, too. If you like music as superfluous as Coldplay’s, that’s totally fine. I’m not here to tell you that you shouldn’t, nor to convince you to stop listening to Coldplay (you can’t stop listening to them, anyway; no matter how hard you try to escape, wherever you go, Coldplay will find you). But they are unequivocally fucking awful, and I need to make that clear before we continue in case I end up saying anything courteous about them later. And, who knows? I may indeed find something positive to say about Coldplay—I mean, nothing comes to mind right now, but it’s going to take me a few hours to write this piece so it’s possible something will at some point.

Okay, so we’re all clear on Coldplay being fucking terrible, right? Great. But that isn’t the main reason I hate them. I appreciate plenty of terrible bands just as I appreciate plenty of terrible movies. Listening to a really shitty group is sort of like watching a cast of really shitty actors—though they clearly suck at what they do, there’s something oddly appealing about the charming naiveté they demonstrate by giving it the best go they can anyway.

For instance, since I was still filing most of my Warped Tour emo discs in my punk section when I began this venture, I never got around to writing about a band called Adair. If you’re not familiar with them, don’t worry about it; they only existed for a few years in the mid-aughts and their diminutive discography merely consists of a self-released EP and one full-length album, The Destruction Of Everything Is The Beginning Of Something New. Sonically, Adair were so amusingly prototypical of every baby t-shirt screamo band that was thriving at the time, they essentially sounded like they were parodying the style of music they played (although, to be fair, a lot of those squads did). But, Adair were absolutely serious, regardless of what stridently nasal heights the vocals reached, regardless of how faithfully their compositions adhered to their genre’s textbook page by page, and regardless of the sublimely ridiculous realms some of their allegorical angst lamentations ventured into (the line “lock me up in Guantanamo Bay and throw away the key” from the song “I Buried My Heart In Cosmo Park” may very well be the lyrical apex of their entire genus).

Adair’s music is so inane that it makes me laugh out loud when I sing along to it—but here’s the thing: I do sing along to it. I have probably played The Destruction Of Everything Is The Beginning Of Something New a hundred times from start to finish since my copy was sent to me to review for some website back in 2006, and I have cued up individual high(low?)points like “The Diamond Ring” and “Folding and Unfolding” even more times than that. As silly as they sound—and trust me, they sound very fucking silly—I still sincerely enjoy their tunes and have spent enough hours listening to TDOEITBOSN for it to possibly qualify as one of my favorite records ever. Shit, even writing about it right now makes me feel like hearing the disc, so I’ll probably end up blasting it in my truck tomorrow (ed. note: I actually did). If they ever decided to do a reunion tour, I would absolutely go see them, and if vocalist Rob Tweedie did that whole “hold the microphone out toward the crowd so they can finish the lyric” thing which every frontman in every band that sounds like Adair does at least a dozen times per show, I would totally be able to fill in each of those blanks and enthusiastically do so.

Sorry, we were talking about Coldplay. To recap, they’re fucking terrible.

Unlike a frivolous whimper-core ensemble like Adair, the most off-putting thing about Coldplay isn’t their music. They’ve actually managed to excrete a few tracks that I grudgingly enjoy over the years. However, sporadically releasing songs which don’t sound like they were specifically written for Gap commercials actually works against Coldplay in this instance. Sure, most of their output is noxious twaddle, but since they occasionally come across as a marginally decent band, their work isn’t awful enough to at least ironically appreciate it for being awful.

In fact, there’s absolutely nothing ironic about Coldplay—other than U2 and Radiohead (more on them in a minute), I can’t think of another band that seems to take itself as dreadfully seriously as Coldplay does. There isn’t a single lighthearted number in their entire catalog, and the demeanor of their music is so staid and cheerless that it’s hard to imagine the dudes ever cracking a smile while they’re making it. Their approach to songwriting is rigidly Pavlovian—when the music gets louder, ring ring ring, that signals the listener the *really* poignant part of the tune has arrived and cues them to emotionally salivate in kind—yet despite their calculated use of sonic dynamics to manufacture sentiment, the vapid and unspontaneous nature of the delivery saps their tunes of anything resembling genuine soul or passion. Even when thrusting through the more energetic tracks in their litany, the musicians in Coldplay always sound like they’re actively striving to not play their instruments too hard. The result is that they consistently deliver some of the safest and least edgy rock ever created, shaping their ethos around a formula so willfully tepid and cuddly that they barely qualify as a rock band at all. Coldplay aren’t quite the musical equivalent of plain yogurt (that would be Jack Johnson, an artist so comprehensively flavorless that even his name is fucking boring) but the granola in their mixture is always judiciously distributed so as not to agitate anyone’s tastebuds.

And at the center of this slow-motion kaleidoscope, you have Chris fucking Martin (I find it difficult to cite his name without including the “fucking” in there; he’s just one of those guys—like Jason fucking Mraz, Blake fucking Shelton, or fucking Bono). Coldplay’s music may be stagnant, but you’d never know it from beholding the practiced arsenal of slinky paroxysms their vocalist bursts into while that music is playing. In performance and in their videos, Martin’s appendages are incessantly in motion, his hands ever-swaying gently through the air like he’s waving a pair of invisible cigarette lighters or finger painting on the goddamn sky, ostensibly so deeply lost in his band’s reverie of sound that he simply can’t help himself from moving his body in a cadenced pantomime of the way their music is meant to superficially move your spirit.

For the three non-ballads the group has written in their career, Chris usually switches things up by crouching in an incongruous bobbing panther-stance like a battle rapper delivering a diss track about fucking his opponent’s mama in the mouth, until it’s time to freeze in the tried and true messiah-statue pose as the number’s final notes chime into the ether. But it is in the quiet moments when Martin truly shines—which makes perfect sense given that he’s the leader of a group so systematically anodyne they probably should have actually named themselves Quiet Moments. These are the obligatory interims where the frontman takes the stage on his own to sit down at the piano, resplendent in the spotlight, and perform an intimate solo rendition of one of his most tender hits to show everyone in the audience that Chris fucking Martin is a bonafide fucking musician who, if he really felt like it, could totally do the whole Coldplay thing without the other three dudes whose names no one knows. His soaring falsetto croon is custom-feigned for the arenas the band was destined to coldplay from the moment they dropped their breakthrough single “Yellow” and caused a nation of book-sensitive sociology majors eagerly anticipating the arrival of their generation’s U2 to cream their Dockers in unison. When Martin opens his pipes to summon those indelibly contrived choruses about birds and stars and other monosyllabic nouns, it hardly even matters what words he’s singing—the leitmotifs in most of the tunes are basically interchangeable anyway. What matters is that Chris sounds like he really, really, really means it when he says he will try to fix you.

That analysis probably makes it seem like I hate Chris fucking Martin as much as I hate his band. I actually don’t—he’s too benign a character to elicit such a fervid response; hating Chris Martin is like hating turtleneck sweaters, or actual turtles. In fact, I suspect he’s probably a really nice dude. At least, I’ve never heard any creepy stories about him showing his penis to under-aged fans on Skype or anything like that.

Regardless, while I don’t specifically despise either Martin, Dude Who Plays Guitar, or the other two anonymous members of Coldplay, I do gauge their collective as the fourth or fifth worst band of all time. And the reason I loathe them more than any of their neighbors on that list is because they aren’t the kind of prodigiously abysmal group you can just ignore until their moment in the spotlight inevitably passes—which is how I dealt with Five For Fighting from September 2001 through February 2002 and how I’ve been dealing with Twenty-One Pilots for the last four years (seriously, are you fuckers done yet?). Coldplay is a far cagier nuisance because they are massively popular and have been for a ludicrously long time. I’ve been patiently waiting for them to go away for two decades now, yet they continue to pop up every third summer or so to drop a new album and remind us that, yes, they’re still here assiduously mining the middle of the road for new ways to write more tunes about clouds being pretty.

Even worse, I can’t disregard their music because it’s everywhere. I hear “The Scientist” while I’m shopping for cereal at the grocery store, I hear “Talk” when I sit down to eat at any chain restaurant, and I imagine I’ll be viewing that idiotic video for “Adventure of a Lifetime” with the posse of animated dancing monkeys on an infinite Clockwork-Orange-eyes-gaping loop for the rest of eternity when my mortal essence exits this world and I am cast into the fiery pits of Hell. I can’t even watch football without encountering Coldplay, as I discovered with horror in 2016 when they took part in the most fatuous jumbled fucking mess of a Super Bowl halftime show the NFL had ever presented (a zenith of suckery which seemed impossible to eclipse until this past February, when Adam Levine showed up covered with prison tattoos and said, “hold my beer”).

The pervasive level of esteem Coldplay has reached dumbfounds me. This is a group that has sold millions and millions of albums worldwide, even though I have never once heard a single person utter the phrase, “man, that new Coldplay song kicks ass.” I’m sure their most dedicated fans have favorite hits, tracks that are significant to them in some way, etc. But their remarkable success is patently disproportionate to how patently unremarkable the work which garnered that success really is. Nobody ever describes the band’s music as “awesome”, just as nobody ever describes a glass of pinot gris as awesome—the term simply does not apply to their province; actually, in this case, describing the mouthfeel of Coldplay tunes and recommending cheeses they best pair with is probably more relevant than discussing how they sound. Coldplay is as universally popular as they are precisely because they aren’t awesome. They’re not beloved because they’re extraordinary; most people love them because they’re innocuous, functional, and suitable for almost any occasion—Coldplay is akin to a pair of cargo shorts, and no one thinks cargo shorts kick ass. Coldplay isn’t an alternative band (on the contrary, almost every good band is an alternative to Coldplay); they are a lowest common denominator band, undemanding and ubiquitous and safe to like because everyone else likes them. Their work is specifically geared toward people who think appreciating music demonstrates sophistication, but don’t ultimately give enough of a shit about the artform to put any effort into finding music that is actually sophisticated or appreciable. You may assume Coldplay is erudite because they’re British and they cite books you’ve never read when discussing the lyrical themes in their work, but they’re merely recycling the same emotional territory as every other pop act that writes tunes about finding love, losing love, missing love, and the 18th Century French peasantry.

The best thing about being a Coldplay fan is that it’s easy. You don’t have to buy their records, go see them live, or make any concerted effort at all to receive their music. If you listen to the radio for any extended period of time (or eat at an Applebee’s), you will eventually hear one of their songs; all you have to do is not hate it and, voila, you’re officially a Coldplay fan. There, don’t you just love the security of venerating a critically and commercially acclaimed band that will never challenge you or be unpopular?

Okay, I do strive to be fair—even in this arena where I can say whatever I want and no one can argue with me. I gave this a lot of thought, so here are four things about Coldplay that are not terrible:

1) “Clocks”: I resisted it for many years, but I finally had to concede that it’s kind of a pretty song. Notes of red currant and blackberries, and it goes superbly with a nice aged brie.

2) “God Put A Smile On Your Face”: It doesn’t put a smile on mine, but that’s why I enjoy it. Most Coldplay songs sound like they’re aiming to evoke what being hugged by a koala bear feels like, so I appreciate Chris fucking Martin delivering a darker number that seems intent on making me feel depressed instead. Well played, sir.

3) Viva La Vida, Or Death And All His Friends: I sincerely respect their effort to broaden their palate a bit by working with Brian Eno and making Dude Who Plays Guitar buy a distortion pedal to use on one song. This is still an archetypal shitty Coldplay record, but at least it sounds a little different than all of the other archetypal shitty Coldplay records.

4) Nah. They’re still fucking terrible; they were lucky to get three things.

There is one additional facet of the group’s career which has fascinated me over these past several years, even though it relates more to bands that are not Coldplay rather than the band that is Coldplay. Earlier I dubbed them the U2 of their generation, and recent events in particular have coalesced to underscore that comparison. See, when Coldplay came out, the tributes to their Irish brethren in choreographed affectation were far from subtle. Chris fucking Martin’s warbling was plainly modeled after fucking Bono’s, Dude Who Plays Guitar served up an endless cycle of repetitive but hooky high-register licks that were striking similar to the distinctive methodology of The Edge, and both bands’ workmanlike rhythm sections held things down with competent yet discreet backing tracks which militantly fulfilled each song’s basic requirements rather than showcasing the musicians’ dexterity. I don’t think anyone ever disputed the collective homage in Coldplay’s dogma, and no one was terribly bothered by it either; at the time there were a lot of people craving a band that sounded just like U2, because U2 didn’t sound like U2 anymore.

When Coldplay’s debut album Parachutes was released in July 2000, fucking Bono and company’s career was on a downward arc after they largely vacated their signature approach to instead craft a couple poorly-received discs dominated by insipid rave-lite tunes that not even the members of U2 listen to anymore. Though they would temporarily rebound later that year with “Beautiful Day”, the last honestly excellent song they would ever record, U2 had left a gap that needed filling. And the most obvious inheritors of their kingdom, Radiohead, had grown tired of anthemic guitar rock; they were hunkered down creating their demanding but exceptional opus Kid A, which sounded nothing like U2, nothing like Radiohead, and indeed nothing like any other music being made on planet Earth. Kid A still had some anthems, still had some guitar, and still had a little rock, but its oblique delivery clearly demonstrated that Radiohead was chasing a far different muse and had little interest in claiming the crown (of course, this would be abundantly clarified in hindsight when they subsequently slid further down their rabbit-hole, gradually abandoning the anthems and guitars and rock altogether, until finally settling upon their current songwriting formula, which seems to mostly involve Thom Yorke masturbating on his laptop, naming ten of his climaxes, and calling it an album).

So while U2 were busy trying to figure out why they weren’t relevant anymore and Radiohead were busy doing whatever the fuck they were doing, the lads in Coldplay stepped up and said, hey, why not us? They seized the ersatz-earnest arena rock mantle with A Rush Of Blood To The Head and never looked back. Now, 17 years and seven multi-platinum albums later, they can ruin the Super Bowl, collaborate with the Chainsmokers, and even make the same kind of lameass dance music that essentially buried U2’s career with impunity. Even more significant, they have come full circle. A group that started out playing second-rate U2 facsimiles under the moniker Pectoralz (this is absolutely true, by the way) is now one of the hugest pop institutions in the universe, beloved by millions of music and wine connoisseurs across the globe. And the student has eclipsed the teacher; U2’s desperate efforts to play catchup have made their modern work sound unmistakably like second-rate Coldplay facsimiles. Chris fucking Martin and those other three guys are no longer pretenders to the throne—they are Coldplay, and this is their empire now, bitches.

These days, U2 has to reprise their old records in their entirety on nostalgia tours to get anyone to come to their concerts, and Radiohead continues to release unlistenable albums which their fans claim to love while sheepishly casting them aside to listen to OK Computer for the thousandth time instead. But Coldplay has strategically situated themselves for an eternity as the undisputed emperors of rock mediocrity. I think they’ve got another two decades in them, too; I have no doubt that long after Twenty-One Pilots is (finally) relegated to the county fair circuit where they belong, Chris fucking Martin will still be promising sold-out crowds that lights will lead them home and having a series of polite, gently-articulated seizures while he sings “Speed Of Sound”.

It seems I respect Coldplay a little more than I suspected. You know what? I’m going to amend my original valuation right here and now. As of this moment, I am formally designating Coldplay the sixth worst band of all time.

Your move, Godsmack.

May 15, 2019

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shethirtysix · 5 years ago

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Quarantine Diary. Part 3 by Rebecca Kinsella

Welcome to the second wave....of my excellent blog posts! Berlin has started to open up again, resulting in droves of people taking to the streets like it ain’t no thang.It’s very much still a “thang”, but this is not the place for health advice or providing any kind of information that could be viewed as useful or intelligent. Been sweating a lot around the Berlin/ Brandenburg area over the past few weeks. Mostly to do with bike riding. As some of you may already know- I’m not a regular mom, I’m a cool mom. The Kita has started to screen my calls as a result of an “enthusiastic campaign” on my part to encourage them to take my lovely energetic daughter back,who has so many questions about everything! Questions all day long. Morning - questions. Still morning - more questions, and so on. Between questions and demands, I’ve been taking her out in the Anhänger a lot. There are many benefits to this; it’s difficult to hear her questions when I’m cycling and time spent outdoors with a kid is infinitely better than being trapped indoors with my beautiful “blessing “. She’s a great kid, don’t get me wrong but holy fuck 8 weeks without a Kita would have you attempting a “selbstgemacht” sterilisation in the kitchen as the 9,887th episode of ‘Paw patrol’ plays in the background. Anyway, less about my reproductive decisions and more about biking! I’ve been back to Gorinsee a number of times with the Anhänger, which is a really fun way to make a 40km cycle feel like a 300km uphill ride with flat tires. The cafe has reopened since Friday so I will return again and bring shame to my family by eating the famous ice cream sundaes until I’m quite ill and need to sit down.I also cycled to Liebnitzsee with aforementioned child and we took our first swim. I was so hot after the cycle there that I jumped straight in, the water was so cold I went into shock and felt like I was simultaneously having a heart attack and breathing malfunction. I waited for the sweet release of death in that cold water , but it wasn’t to be, and actually it was quite nice after a few minutes.

Gorinsee (Again) Myself and Tamara of She 36 fame made this route together on a Sunday afternoon recently. All was good until we arrived and the cold gripped us like a big cold bastard. I resorted to wearing my sweaty base layer as a crap looking hat, and Tamara resorted to two cups of imbiss coffee and swearing like a docker. The ride was redeemed beautifully on the way back though, we cycled through the forest and over some small bridges and it was wonderful. We even took some time out to critically review some of the art installations along the path on the way, ‘Utter rubbish’ and ‘total fucking bullshit hahaha’ were some of the eloquent and considered phrases that summed up our experience of these pieces. Tamara also took some time out to search for some massive sticks for her “asshole cat”. When she jumped off her bike to look for sicks the size of her leg I was ravaged by mosquitoes the size of a fist.

Müggelsee Maria and myself kicked off this ride this is good old fashioned shouting match with a dick head driving a car, he put across his invigorating and well considered argument.....actually no hang on it was so stupid he sounded like he grew up in a dog kennel and huffed the car fumes in his spare time.

Unmarred by such insolence we pushed on toward our luxurious destination, our ultimate goal was somewhere between enjoying a tranquil lake side moment and smoking loads of delicious cigarettes. We were not disappointed on both accounts. The road to paradise may be paved with pot holes, but enlightenment awaits for those who truly desire it.

Tegelersee While attempting to stave off ‘The boo-hoo’s’ (I believe the medical term for this is crippling depression), I have started to do some very early morning cycling. Does it work ? Sort of! Unless you consider getting out of sweet, warm ,cozy bed before the hour of 7am a crushing concept . Did a tasty 40km with a man (boo! Hiss!) friend of mine who kindly mapped the route out for us with accordance to my strict and precise requirements which were ; “ around the water “ and “ make it good, not shit”. With such masterful guidance ,there was no way he could fail. And fail he didn’t, we set off at 9:08am and we were home and showered by 12. Good way to start off the day, I didn’t feel too guilty about not leaving the house again for another 26 hours. Well earned.

#she36 #quarantine diaries #tegelersee #gorinsee #müggelsee #brandenburg #bikingtipps #notperfect #irishgirl #ridemitabstand

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gleefail · 5 years ago

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Glee Memories: 1x7 Throwdown

A long, long time ago, as Glee was approaching graduation in Season 3, I found myself nostalgic with some rare free time on my hands. So I decided to rewatch the series from the beginning and jot down some memories, discrepancies that have arisen since, fave quotes, tally solos - all that good stuff, strictly for shits and giggles.

8 years later (eek!) and once more I find myself with an unexpected abundance of free time. With so many revisiting or being newly introduced to the show between binge watching during Quarantine and all the tragedy that has surrounded the show since it went off the air, I figured I’d finish what I started. And by finish, I mean go through the end of S3. Cause I truly cannot acknowledge what happened after that. Except for 5B.

Kicking this off by reposting the first 15 episodes I already went through. Enjoy!

1x7 Throwdown okay, on the ‘what you missed on Glee’ they just said that Terri’s fake pregnancy was her sister’s idea. Um…nope. Not accurate at all.

“Look at me. Even in the heat of battle, I am so elegant. Regal.”

“Listen to us – we’re even fighting in our voice-overs” I remember that being the first time I really went “wow Glee. That’s reeeeeally not funny. At all.”

Rachel just told Mercedes “it’s Glee club, not krunk club” and Kurt snapped in Rachel’s face before his little secret shake thingy with Mercedes. Damn I love Kurtcedes. They’re the best.

“I’m about to vomit down your back”

oh Lord. Quinn’s not even showing yet and they’re giving her the sex of the baby? My friend just found out and I think she’s 6 months along.

Also, is it at all appropriate for a teacher to be driving two sophomores (15 years old) to a doctor’s appointment? What kinda school is this?

“The independent polling company in my Dockers has determined you’re the hottest girl in the school.” They really pushed some boundaries with some of the shit that comes out of Jacob’s mouth, lol.

Was it ever revealed who told Jacob about Quinn being pregnant?

Page 24 provision 14 second addendum: 12 members must perform for each team however not all members must perform every song. Thank God, otherwise there’d be no Troubletones competing now <3

“Santana. Wheels. Gay Kid. Asian. Other Asian. Aretha. Shaft.” Legendary. <3

Sue: “Bigotry is no laughing matter.” Santana: “And that’s how Sue…C’s it” Sue: “Outstanding” I still LOVE that moment.

“I mean, what are the chances of the baby getting Polio.”

“Bye Kendra!” “I HATE YOU, WILL!”

Yeah, he just said Quinn had a 10 week ultrasound. Can you really know the sex that early?

Ew. Rachel Berry panties.

Oh Hate On Me. Amber Riley is a goddess. I also think this was what made me honestly think (from this point through a big stretch of Season One) that Mercedes was popular. Honestly just cause she seemed super buddy buddy with Mike and Matt, who were the popular football players.

“Oh hey, buddy – I thought I smelled failure.”

“Those drinks are CRAP!” And then she just grabs a slushie out of a kids hands and throws it to the ground. Sue’s the shit.

um…all but 3 cheerleaders are academically ineligible…one of them is Britany? #oops

haha, a cheerleader answered all her Spanish questions with a picture of a sombrero. That’s awesome.

“Should they learn Spanish? Sure, if they wanna be dishwashers and gardeners” I kinda miss the political incorrectness and balls this show used to have

Figgins put the YouTube video up himself so Sue can’t blackmail him anymore. Maybe the first time a storyline fizzled out and if you blinked, you missed the resolution (if they even gave you any)…but certainly not the last

omg. Sue’s rampage. The music. Her screaming. Figgins’ “No! Not the children!” So. Effing. Funny.

Drizzle. I forgot about that #BlessFinnsHeart

It’s kinda funny that this show has now mentioned both John Stamos and Gweneth Paltrow, future guest stars.

“Give me my test back.” “I just don’t understand anything.” “That’s not my problem.” Was this the first moment we saw that Britany’s not all there?

This moment of unrecorded jamming in the choir room to Ride With Me is still one of the best moments of the glee club. It’s just real. And they’re having so much fun. It makes me sad that it’s coming to an end.

“Bye white people”

“Excuse me. What about us? You expect us to just sway back here like props?” Two seasons later. Still an issue. ETA: an entire episode dedicated to “yes, just like the props you are for Rachel Berry. And you should be okay with that.”

“I can’t do a song with 3 kids!” “Not with that attitude”

Keep Me Hangin’ On. Thus started me wondering “um…ok, but…was that necessary?” on this show. Mainly cause of the cutaway to the auditorium. Couldn’t they just do the routine as cheerleaders on the field and then cut to Quinn’s life and have that be enough? The auditorium stuff left me confused. And was kinda trashy. For no reason.

“Y’know, it’s sad enough that my Sue’s kids are living in squalor and probably on food stamps-“ “My dad’s a dentist” Hooray for continuity!

I remember being annoyed with Rachel when she offered to show everyone how to storm out…cause like…she was no part of that moment��and Tina and Mercedes were already storming out…

“Look, who’s to say that the way I do things is 100% on the ball…” “No one would say that”

“So it doesn’t matter that Rachel is Jewish, or that Finn is…” “unable to tell my rights from my lefts” #BlessFinnsHeart

I don’t agree with what Sue did, but it felt like the first time she showed vulnerability when she got upset finding out that Quinn was pregnant. Cause it was like she was hurt that Quinn didn’t trust her enough to tell her, but she told people in Glee.

Keep Holding On made me cry the first time I saw it. Also it’s one of the few songs that New Directions looks like a REAL showchoir.

Kurt is crying for Quinn in this song. And giving her comforting smiles when they partner together. Oh Kurt. He still has a little piece of my heart, fabulous little gay angel.

Listen, I like Diana Agron and all, but for some reason, her crying at the end of this ep (after Sue outs her pregnancy and at the end of Keep Holding On) feels terribly fake. What is that about? Diana’s so good at stuff like that! SOLOS: Mercedes (1), Rachel (2), Finn (2), Quinn (1)

#Glee Memories #Glee #lol Glee #Glee Throwdown

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totalconway · 5 years ago

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Drinks at the Pub, ends in short film opportunity...

So a little back story first, I started performing stand up comedy in 2012 and by 2013 I was lucky enough to win the state leg of Australia’s largest open mic competition Triple J RAW Comedy and headed to Melbourne to perform on the ABC.

Following that experience I was given a lot of opportunities to perform support spots purely based on that RAW comedy credit.

One case of this was performing at Rottnest Island for their Rottofest summer comedy which was held every Friday during the summer. Rottnest Island is a hot bed of local and international tourist, and the Island’s Gov’s Tavern where the gig is held would often sell out (120+ People) the crowd was always a mix of high profile people and obnoxious drunks (most of the time both)

On one particular Friday night, I was performing, and not to brag blowing the roof off the joint and in the crowd was none other then the President of my favorite sporting team the Fremantle Dockers Football Club.

At the time, the Fremantle Dockers board was facing backlash from the supporter base because they wanted to move the Dockers training ground from their spiritual home of Fremantle Oval to a state of the art, purpose built training facility in Cockburn (Yes Cock Burn) which is about a 30 minute drive up the road.

So after the gig on Rottnest Island, I get introduced to the president of the Dockers with the intro line “Hey Sean, tell him what you think of the Cockburn move” and you can see his look go from chilled and calm to “I seriously got to deal with this shit on my holiday”. I just told him “I’m pumped for it” and I was, its been a good move for the Dockers and I started reeling off the benefits for the move etc etc. We hung out had a few beers and the whole night I was spun out that I was hanging with the president of the Dockers.

I went back to work on Monday telling people I got to hang out with the President of the Dockers, with a bit of fake bravado swagger to jokingly let them know I only hang with A-Listers now! After a couple of days I didn’t think anything of it and went back to gigging and working.

A few months down the track I get an email from the booker of Rottofest Summer comedy asking if I’d be keen to Star in a short film for the Dockers. Its not paid but if the film is one of three winners of the competition I’d receive one of the tickets to the USA which was up for grabs. Honestly, they had me at “Star in Dockers short film”.

Apparently the opportunity was between myself and a Perth duo called Henry & Aaron. Henry & Aaron are film makers/comic actors who pretty much went viral on youtube with every film they made (Talking millions and millions of views) and they lost out to my RAW comedy set that had about 12 views purely because I had a few too many beers with the president of the Dockers.

When I got the call to go meet them about the project I was incredibly nervous. I had a whole pitch prepared about why I was the best candidate for the job “I fucking bleed purple” because I was still thinking I had to audition for the film but essentially I had already been cast in the film. Their only concern was whether or not I could fit in the costume because I’m a big fat dude they had to see if I would be able to squeeze into it. The whole time I was terrified of ripping it because it’s a $3-$4K costume.

Once the costume fit (just) it was straight to work. It was a great project to work on because they gave me a lot of creative control of my character, and I really wanted to portray a David Brent (The Office) like character, like a really fat black sheep in a white herd.

So we started filming in September of 2013, just after the Dockers had beaten Geelong in an away game in the first week of the finals. So the Dockers had a weeks break before they played Sydney in Fremantle’s first home preliminary final in two weeks time. This was a huge moment for the club because If we win this it will be the first Grand Final the Dockers have ever been in.

The first day of shooting was super intimidating, not because I was meeting some of my football idols but because the night before the first day of shooting I watched a documentary called Catching Hell about the Chicago Cubs fan Steve Bartman who was blamed for the Chicago Cubs not winning a game that would of sent them to the world series. Not the best film to watch when you’re about to work with you’re sporting idols on the eve of the biggest game in the clubs history. To say it made me super paranoid the whole shoot is an understatement, and it didn’t help that the first shot of the day was with the Dockers marquee player Matthew Pavlich. The scene was me jumping on his back, FUCK RIGHT OFF. I’m twice the size of Pavlich and you’re dreaming if you think I’m jumping on his back. If you watch the scene I take the “mark” and I’m nowhere near Pavlich.

It was a great shoot because everything was time sensitive, the players had their other appointments so we literally only had 10 minutes for each shot with the players so we flew through the script.

I got to meet a lot of the players I was fans of like Ryan Crowley, Nat fyfe, I didn’t get to meet Michael Walters but the scene he’s in, my fat is hanging out of my footy jersey and I did hear him say to David Mundy “That dude looks like a bag of oranges” which was funny, but Ideally I would of preferred he made the joke to me so I could of gained a fan when I busted his balls back, but unfortunately it wasn’t to be.

The last shot of the film was me gate crashing a press conference with Michael Barlow . Barlow did the interview and the CEO at the time did a big speech thanking the media for their support throughout the year and if they wouldn’t mind hanging around for 10 minutes so we could get our last shot. We smashed out the shot in 2 takes, boom we’re finished, I’m told not to tell anyone about the film until it airs the following week, easy enough right.

Wrong, the next day I’m back at work and people are looking at me like I’m the biggest piece of shit in the world, because one of the media outlets had filmed me gate crashing the Michael Barlow press conference, and passed it off like I was genuinely gate crashing the press conference.

I had to tell people it was for a film which didn’t help the situation because they thought because I do comedy it must have been some Jackass type movie I was doing. It also didn’t help the situation that Radio talk back shows were crucifying me saying how unfunny I was and how big of a dickhead I was for gate crashing the Barlow press conference, but I didn’t care too much because I knew the film was coming out the following week. It didn’t stop my Mum and my sister writing a long scathing letter to the radio station about how they should do their research before they try to shame their baby boy on the radio. Luckily I was able to stop them from sending it out.

The film came out the following week as well as the entries for the other films that we were competing against, the winners would be based on who had the most likes, shares and views. The first film we were up against was by the St Kilda Saints who managed to get Eric Bana to star in their film, it still makes me chuffed to think I starred in a film that went head to head with an Eric Bana film. The second film was by the Melbourne Demons which was a documentary about a child fan who was very sick, third place was us, and the rest of the films were Essendon Bombers which was fucking terrible and a few other teams who I can’t remember.

The film was released the night the Fremantle Dockers played Sydney Swans in a game which would determine who would be playing Hawthorn in the grand final the following week. Literally the clubs biggest game in their history at that point so the game was sold out and 50,000 people got to see me make an ass out of myself and it was humbling how much the Dockers supporters loved it. But more importantly the Dockers smashed the Swans and were headed for their first ever Grand Final.

Being the Dockers fan I am, there was no chance in hell we were missing out on seeing the Dockers play in their first Grand Final. I had cousin’s overseas who cut their holiday short to make it back in time for the Grand Final. It was such an amazing experience heading over for the grand final, and thanks to the film I was a bit of a star amongst Dockers supporters. I was flying over with my dad and at the same time One Direction were flying in and all these young preteen girls were waiting for them with signs and screaming for One Direction. I’m chilling with my dad waiting to board our flight and a family of Dockers fans came over and asked for a photo. All of these young preteen girls were looking at me with a confused look on their face wondering who I was and while they were distracted by me, One Direction walked past the crowd of fans with out any of them noticing.

The morning after we arrived in Melbourne we went straight to the Grand Final Parade which is one of the biggest events of the AFL Grand Final week. All the fans line the street to watch the two competing teams drive through the streets of Melbourne and ends with a big speech on the government steps and the captains of each club holding the trophy in front of their screaming fans. When the event finished all the Dockers fans turned to walk away and saw me in the street. Everyone stopped to shake my hand and to get photos, treating me like a full blown celebrity, even a girl who I had a crush on in High school asked me for a photo and I got to experience all this with my family watching. It was a very surreal and amazing experience to say the least.

The next day was the Grand Final, all the Dockers fans met at Federation Square before the game so we could march to the Melbourne Cricket Ground like soldiers marching to war. It was a sight that Melbourne people have never seen by an interstate club, which made me incredibly proud to be a Dockers fan. Being apart of the film, Dockers fans continued to stop and cheer me as we all marched to the MCG.

When we got to the MCG I was starting to get anxious for the game, my cousins could see me becoming more anxious, which is why they started screaming out "Look it’s the Unsung Docker” every 5 minutes. I had Dockers fans lining up to get a photo with me and then Hawthorn supporters and famous AFL commentators would walk past with a look on their face like “Who the fuck is this guy”

The Dockers ended up losing the Grand Final and we headed to the Dockers after party which felt more like a wake. After the Dockers lost the game I also found out that we also finished fourth in the film competition behind the Essendon Bombers who got the fucking Janoskians to pump out their film amongst their fans and got their views up with comments like “I’m only here because I like the Janoskians” (I’m still bitter about it). In one afternoon I managed to see my favourite team lose the ultimate prize and have my payment for the film pinched from me by some shit head kids, it was a rough way to end what was otherwise a truly amazing experience.

I wasn’t too disappointed though, the film helped me get an acting agent in Sydney which has lead to some amazing acting opportunities. I’ll share some more stories down the track. The Dockers unfortunately haven’t made it to another Grand Final since 2013, but hopefully one day I’m at the right bar at the right time to have a drink with the new president of the Dockers and we can get the wheels moving on The Unsung Docker 2

youtube

#afl #fremantle #fremantledockers #films #youtube #shortfilms #comedy #standupcomedy #careers #acting #lucky #drinking #rottnestisland #perth

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starlingsrps · 6 years ago

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rebecca price char. dev.

BASIC INFORMATION

FULL NAME: rebecca claire price

REASONING: nope

NICKNAME(S): becks or becca preferred, becky never.

PREFERRED NAME(S): rebecca

BIRTH DATE: july 20

AGE: twenty nine

ZODIAC: cancer

GENDER: cis female

PRONOUNS: she/her

ROMANTIC ORIENTATION: heteromantic

SEXUAL ORIENTATION: heterosexual

NATIONALITY: american

ETHNICITY: caucasian (german, english)

CURRENT LOCATION: austin, tx

LIVING CONDITIONS: p good and ruthlessly clean/organized. she lives with her fiance, kevin the actual living saint, and he gets enlisted to reorganize the furniture at least once a month and she is absolutely not allowed to go to flea markets unsupervised.

BACKGROUND

BIRTH PLACE: portland, or

HOMETOWN: mcminniville, or

SOCIAL CLASS: middle

EDUCATION LEVEL: bfa, ut-austin; education license

FATHER: hugo price, 70

MOTHER: evie price, 55

SIBLING(S): lucy quinn, 32; bella price, 25

BIRTH ORDER: middle

CHILDREN: jesus christ no

PET(S): ellis, cat

OTHER IMPORTANT RELATIVES: kevin saunders, 30, fiance

PREVIOUS RELATIONSHIPS: oh lord, dost thou have time? cause it was jake all through college and then a blur of dudes until kevin popped up like a knight in shining dockers.

CURRENT RELATIONSHIP: kevin saunders, corporate attorney and living saint.

ARRESTS?: a couple of close calls but mostly warnings

PRISON TIME?: nah

OCCUPATION & INCOME

PRIMARY SOURCE OF INCOME: kindergarten teacher

SECONDARY SOURCE OF INCOME: printmaker

CONTENT WITH THEIR JOB (OR LACK THERE OF)?: she wishes (a lot) that she had the fortitude to make printmaking her only job but she and kevin have the wedding to get through and want to move to the suburbs and start a family soon so it's best to just keep the etsy store open and have it be on the side for now.

PAST JOB(S): bartender, teaching assistant, printing press gofer

SPENDING HABITS: pretty reasonable, prone to very silly purchases like her cat shaped bud vases. they scare kevin, they delight her so they stay on the mantle.

MOST VALUABLE POSSESSION: the above vases. and her tools. and her engagement ring, which she is still prone to showing off six months later.

SKILLS & ABILITIES

PHYSICAL STRENGTH: ish? she's most stamina strong than physically strong but she can move a couch.

SPEED: yep

INTELLIGENCE: rebecca is a sturdy second in command on a pub trivia team.

ACCURACY: good

AGILITY: very good. she does teeny tiny detail work for her prints so she's very dexterous and agile.

STAMINA: good

TEAMWORK: not terrible.

TALENTS: generous, fun, creative

SHORTCOMINGS: flighty, nosy, and indecisive

LANGUAGE(S) SPOKEN: english, spanish

DRIVE?: sure just like a grandma

JUMP-STAR A CAR?: nope

CHANGE A FLAT TIRE?: not a clue

RIDE A BICYCLE?: yes

SWIM?: yes

PLAY AN INSTRUMENT?: nah

PLAY CHESS?: no

BRAID HAIR?: yes

TIE A TIE?: no

PICK A LOCK?: yes

PHYSICAL APPEARANCE & CHARACTERISTICS

FACE CLAIM: makenzie leigh

EYE COLOR: blue

HAIR COLOR: light brown

HAIR TYPE/STYLE: medium length, bangs that are her longest relationship

GLASSES/CONTACTS?: contacts but switches to her glasses when etching plates

DOMINANT HAND: right

HEIGHT: 5'5

BUILD: average

EXERCISE HABITS: run every morning

SKIN TONE: fair

TATTOOS: she always meant to get a really kickass piece but never got around to making up her mind. add in that kevin's not big on tattoos and she doesn't think it'll ever happen. but she likes them on other people.

PIERCINGS: ears

MARKS/SCARS: a few small nicks here and there from being alive, a scar from a slipped chisel on the palm on her left hand.

USUAL EXPRESSION: pleasant - she laughs and smiles easily.

CLOTHING STYLE: anything she can sit on the floor in for work, kind of tomboy-ish off the clock. cleans up real well.

JEWELRY: engagement ring

ALLERGIES: nah

DIET: garbage disposal

PHYSICAL AILMENTS: nope

PSYCHOLOGY

ENNEAGRAM TYPE: 7 - the enthusiast

MORAL ALIGNMENT: chaotic good

TEMPERAMENT: sanguine

ELEMENT: air

MBTI TYPE: ESFP - the entertainer

MENTAL CONDITIONS/DISORDERS: not...really? i'll come back to this.

SOCIABILITY: fantastic. she's the public face of the rebecca and kevin relationship and she will make friends with damn near everyone.

EMOTIONAL STABILITY: pretty good, prone to bad moods and stewing like anyone else.

OBSESSION(S): she won't let a plate go to print until she's 900% happy with it and that can take anywhere from an hour to forever.

COMPULSION(S): she will know if you've touched anything on her desk.

PHOBIA(S): spiders

ADDICTION(S): nah

DRUG USE: nothing that's not prescription

ALCOHOL USE: rebecca has a hard time turning down whiskey. it has, will, and always will get her into trouble.

PRONE TO VIOLENCE?: not at all

MANNERISMS

SPEECH STYLE: clear and bright

ACCENT: nah

QUIRKS: she gestures constantly

HOBBIES: print making, flea markets, the quest for the perfect velvet couch

NERVOUS TICKS: nah

DRIVES/MOTIVATIONS: happiness

POSITIVE TRAITS: bold, creative, outgoing, adventurous, charming

NEGATIVE TRAITS: sensitive, self-indulgent, impatient, risk-prone, defiant

SENSE OF HUMOR: goofy

DO THEY CURSE OFTEN?: not really? mostly because The Littles

CATCHPHRASE(S): nah

FAVORITES

ACTIVITY: going out with friends, etching, and hanging out with kevin

ANIMAL: otters

BEVERAGE: whiskey

BOOK: true crime scares the shit out of her but she'll read it all day if not attended to.

COLOR: red

DESIGNER: j.crew

FOOD: anything in some kind of pastry pocket

FLOWER: white roses

GEM: rose quartz to the point that it's the stone in her engagement ring

HOLIDAY: christmas eve

MODE OF TRANSPORTATION: drive

MOVIE: moulin rouge

SONG: "heroes" by david bowie

SCENERY: the ocean

SCENT: home, roses, freshly showered kevin

SPORT: not especially but she does get Hella into the olympics whenever it comes around.

TELEVISION SHOW: snapped

WEATHER: fall

VACATION DESTINATION: deeply fond of mexico but she'll kill you if you take her to a resort.

ATTITUDES

GREATEST DREAM: she wants to be shown in galleries again - etsy is fine, art fairs are fine, but damn she's forever chasing the high of her senior show.

GREATEST FEAR: anything happening to kevin while he's on one of his business trips

MOST AT EASE WHEN: working on a new plate

LEAST AT EASE WHEN: out of control, at one of kevin's very fancy corporate parties because she feels like she's too loud and too much for it.

WORST POSSIBLE THING THAT COULD HAPPEN: honestly, she just doesn't want to go back to who she was right after the breakup with jake. there were a lot of really bad attention seeking decisions made and a lot of not great guys and she's really grateful to kevin for kind of hauling her out of that.

BIGGEST ACHIEVEMENT: she's become someone she likes and that's enough.

BIGGEST REGRET: see above.

BIGGEST SECRET: never really did get over jake, didja becks?

TOP PRIORITIES: her life with kevin, personal satisfaction

#c: rebecca price

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ikeasimp · 4 years ago

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I love how I’ve made so many friends in Sweden and now half of them are begging me to move to their city ahahaha. I’m *considering* Linköping, because it is fairly close to Älmhult and Växjö and a train ride to Stockholm, and it is itself a fairly big city. If he’s able to help me get a job there, maybe I’ll end up in Linköping at first before I end up in Älmhult. But honestly the ideal situation would be me ending up in Älmhult to begin with. I’m considering starting several IKEA themed ML projects to add to my resume just to act as a simp for IKEA. Because if they see several projects directly linking to IKEA as a whole, they’re more likely to be impressed. My first idea is to create a categorizer for IKEA. You’d have initially a fake dataset for the sake of model building and training. The parameters would be: - Age [integer] - Gender [male, female, nonbinary, other] - Hobbies [vector] - Favorite Color [string] - A few “seemingly unrelated” parameters that might influence the outcome - A selection of IKEA rooms that the person likes [vector] - A selection of IKEA rooms that the person dislikes [vector] And similar params. I’d then survey a bunch of people to get real world data (extracting the “preferred” furniture pieces from the selection of rooms they like and dislike as its own vector, including furniture very similar to the pieces shown in the image) (~200pcs), then apply a GAN to the data to generate 20,000 pieces of data. Then I’d feed the GAN generated data into some sort of TensorFlow algorithm to see the relations between the items. I’m still trying to work out the exact way this would work in practice. On the front end, what sort of questions would IKEA ask, and what sort of data would they deliver? On the back end, what sort of data would need to be collected? What sort of data would interrelate to produce an answer from an ML model in that perspective to help deliver the data they want to show you, say, in the store at one of their kiosks? Then I’d host this sort of model on docker on Azure to show them that “hey, I know how to use these services too.” Because with all these on my resume I’d KICK *SERIOUS* ass with my resume. Still working out this project but hopefully it should be something good enough that I can bring it to Älmhult the moment I graduate and demand they give me a job because I simp so hard for IKEA, know my shit in IKEA, and know my shit in tech.

#sweden #sverige #machine learning #gan #generative adversarial networks #tensorflow #data science #big data

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dippedanddripped · 6 years ago

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Don’t call Maurizio Donadi a designer. “I’m very involved with product, but I’m not a designer,” the long-time fashion-industry stalwart says. “I have no intention of being a designer. I’ve always been in the middle—I had business sense and an eye without being obsessed. I’m a studier, an observer, and a manipulator, a hacker.” As a veteran of some of the biggest and most venerated global brands—helping bridge the business and creative arms of names like Armani, Ralph Lauren, Levi’s—he has more than 30 years of experience, studying the ways we interact with clothing.

These days, the primary beneficiary of Donadi’s observation and hacking is his company Atelier & Repairs, which takes deadstock, damaged, or otherwise unused garments and repairs and remakes them into one-of-a-kind pieces. Wearing voluminous patchworked army pants and a threadbare chore coat, Donadi has an unmistakably original look—a mix of Paris flea market and American army-surplus shop. This mix of vintage military and European workwear that makes up his own personal uniform has become Atelier & Repair’s baseline aesthetic.

While it’s definitely a look, it’s not just a look. In 2015, Donadi felt the need to use his talents to help combat what he saw as an obscene amount of waste in the industry. He could no longer just make more “stuff”—so he’s taken his talents to the shocking amount of overproduced garments in the world. His hand-touched, heirloom-like approach has caught the eyes of men like Bruce Pask of Bergdorf Goodman and rapper Playboi Carti.

I spoke with Donadi near his shop in West Hollywood—where a sign out front read: WASTE LESS, REIMAGINE MORE—about his career, Atelier & Repairs, and how he’s built a brand outside of the traditional fashion system that is successful for exactly that reason.

GQ: Were you particular about the way you dressed when you were younger?

Maurizio Donadi: My own style wasn’t a style. I had pants because I needed a pair of pants. I used to buy vintage because I didn’t have money, not because it was cool or trendy. Later on, I looked back to those years and thought, I had so much fun finding things that cost a dollar or two. I was looking more for things that spoke to me than, say, looking for a black T-shirt or a pair of jeans. There was one store called American Rags in my town, and it was the only vintage shop. I remember the smell very clearly.

Your job at Armani was essentially to shop and find cool things to show to the design team. How did you get that job? It sounds like a dream.

I was hired for a very specific job, for Emporio Armani in the U.S. I had already been based in the U.S. for 15 years, and I had knowledge of the market. What I think I had was something extremely important: data—knowing what the customer wants, opening shops, hiring people. So I was bringing all that, but the fact that I was Italian and also that I had a certain knowledge of a certain market that Mr. Armani was interested in. It was the beginning of a time when there was a more casual approach to clothing, moving from something that was very formal—still elegant, but more relaxed. So he said, Go around the world and bring research. I had a budget to buy things, and I pretty much had no meetings. It was a dream job.

Why did you walk away from these big, fancy jobs to start your own thing?

I thought that Levi’s was going to be the company that I’d end my professional life with, but it wasn’t. I loved being at Levi’s because it gave me the strength to do something new. But it was time for me to stop working for other companies and start consulting and doing other projects. Levi’s gave me the strength to move to a new place—Los Angeles—and work on small projects that I can give 100 percent of myself to. So instead of getting into the mechanism of a big company, it’s like being a killer—you go and you do the job. But a killer with an emotional spirit!

Why Los Angeles?

My wife and I were looking at London, going back to New York, maybe Hong Kong. The weather here is good and I was in Amsterdam for three years, which is basically three years in the rain. The lifestyle is healthier. We loved coming here over the years. And there’s a manufacturing base here. It’s easy to go places—it’s far away from everything but easy to go anywhere, if that makes sense.

How did Atelier & Repairs come to be?

Well, at first it was this one-of-a-kind and creative project, and then we started to realize it was something that feels good. Beyond being creative, the repurposing of clothing, the restoration of clothing, the upcycling of clothing, makes you think about how much excess there is. I said, Oh shit, there’s so much stuff here. We don’t need another brand. And since then, we have not produced anything. We have transformed — manipulated. We’ve been hacking someone else’s design, and enhancing, changing, reducing, amplifying, all depending on our creative mood.

So what was the first thing you made?

I basically transformed 200 pairs of cargo pants …

Where did you find them?

You can call around. Anything you want, you can find.

And you have the background to find it.

Oh, yeah. I sourced everything myself in the beginning. You ask around: Who’s selling military jackets? There are always a few people. Here or in Northern California or in Nevada, Florida … anywhere! There is stuff everywhere. America and beyond. There is amazing second-hand American clothing in France, in Japan, in Africa! There is so much stuff. The accumulation that our industry has generated is unreal. You can’t measure it. You cannot measure it. [Ed Note: But Donadi can, and does, measure it:] 150 billion pieces produced per year and we have a population of seven billion. That’s about 22 pieces per person per year, and I’d say one-third of the population can only afford one or two. Another secret is the yards of fabrics that are leftover. If you’re looking for half-a-million yards of denim? I could find that in a half-hour — not producing anything! \

I think of you as part of a new generation — along with Bode, Re/Done, Marine Serre — that are rebelling against the system and making clothing with an artisanal feel.

Deep down we wanted to show that you can be relevant, interesting, with an artistic approach, without falling into the calendar of the industry and not falling into this system that’s clearly broken. Like, I may not be able to give you a product in red that’s trendy right now — according to some person — but we can give you green. And with green you will still survive. There’s no such thing as “have to have it,” you know? That’s the power of marketing.

Also, today anyone can get something from a luxury designer — that’s not special. To me, something that feels one-of-a-kind, like someone made it with their hands, that’s special.

That’s the most important element of Atelier & Repairs. Our job is not to be the biggest company or to dress everybody. It’s to offer an element with which you will feel comfortable. And making one-of-a-kind things, in production, is a nightmare. But the satisfaction of you going to the store and saying, I found this pair of pants and there’s only one made and it’s the one that speaks to me—that, I like. That enhances my personality.

There’s an artistic point-of-view, too — an artist rarely paints two of the exact same things. A sculptor doesn’t make two identical sculptures. And with a commitment like that you immediately reduce your commercial potential. I’ll never be a billion-dollar company, but I don’t care. I’d rather be a smaller company but more relevant.

You have many programs: custom pieces, ready-to-wear, collaborations with Gap and Dockers. Tell me about your approach to building a multi-tiered business.

We’re an ad hoc-racy, which is, in our case, an initiative, a project, a company, that changes according to the moment. So if I see that something isn’t working, I’m not obliged to follow it. Maybe it’s my disruptive nature, because I don’t want to belong. I don’t feel comfortable when I’m obliged to do certain things. I’m small enough to be able to change according to opportunities and emotions. That’s extremely relevant to me. I’m not a prisoner of the system. Many brands are very creative, very innovative but they’re part of that system — seasons, trends, fabrics and colors — but that’s not what I’m all about, for good and bad.

Having started in 2015, did you think that sustainability was going to be a big movement in the future?

We have abolished the word sustainability at Atelier & Repairs, in favor of responsibility. Let’s work responsibly. Sustainability entails that you’re doing many, many different things perfectly. Instead, we’re starting a process of looking at things responsibly. We think we can solve a lot of our problems that way.

What stops companies from doing the right thing is that their system is set. The supply chain alone — it would require change with their suppliers, the factories they work with, the way of purchasing things. Everything. That system was built over decades, and they would have to demolish that and start anew.

So what is your process of making a garment — since you don’t “make” anything?

We source about twenty items, things, like a white shirt or a Levi’s 501, military cargos, sweatshirts. We’ll get 15 to 20 items that we source. Some of them have cigarette holes. There’s inconsistency in fit, condition, color, and so on. Some are deadstock, they’ve never been worn before. So first you give them a sanitation wash. Then we grade them and sort them — some are so bad we can only use them as fabric while others are nearly perfect. When we have an idea about our inventory, then we start to create “stories.” Like, we have sweatshirts with bad graphics, so we’ll cover them. Or US army jackets, we’ll almost always use Japanese fabrics. Why? Because at one point the two countries were fighting each other. So now we want them to coexist. Each piece of military clothing we make, it’s not meant to be used in combat, [so] we’ll make the camouflage less aggressive, make it for weekends or gardening, not for fighting.

What I like about what you do is that it’s such an old tradition. This is what people did before the Industrial Revolution!

Repairing has been a natural part of any country’s history. This is an activity that has been minimized in favor of consumption. People ask, why spend three hours mending your socks when you can just buy a new pair? I remember when I was really young, my mother and grandmother repairing socks. That was a normal thing. Of course we live differently now, but I think there are ways to prolong the life of clothes. Don’t buy shit, buy less and maybe spend more. It’s OK to spend more if the item is going to last you 20 years. Instead of buying something that will make you happy right now, buy something that you know will make you happy for the next 10 years.

Do you remember when you first knew something had to change with the way you wanted to work in the fashion industry?

When I left Benetton in 1992, I thought we had sold everything we could sell and there’s no more growth, that we had reached saturation. And then I had this sense of nausea every time they’d talked about global domination. That was my first eureka moment.

What do you want Atelier & Repairs be in five years, or ten years?

I want to be in retail and I definitely want to be doing more than just clothing. Everything you can think of — paper, bicycles, houses, electronics. There is so much, so much. We could open, in theory, a department store: a cool, very unique proposition of a department store where you could come and look and purchase things with responsibility and creativity involved. Where you could buy a bicycle made from the parts of ten other bicycles. That’s not going backwards, it’s looking forward. I’m not saying for people to stop shopping, I’m saying to shop responsibly

#Maurizio Donadi #ateliers and repairs #fashion blog

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tak4hir0 · 6 years ago

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A year ago, I started working full-time at Bloomberg. That’s when I imagined writing this post. I imagined myself to be full of ideas that I could spit out on paper when the time comes. Just one month in, I realised it won’t be that easy: I was already forgetting things I learnt. They either became so internalized that my mind tricked me into believing I always knew them1, or they slipped my mind. That’s one of the reasons I started keeping a human log. Every day, whenever I came across an interesting situation, I logged it. All thanks to sitting next to a senior software engineer, I could closely observe what they were doing, and how it was different from what I would do. We pair-programmed a lot, which made doing this easier. Further, in my team culture it’s not frowned upon to “snoop behind” people writing code. Whenever I sensed something interesting going on, I’d roll around and watch what was happening. I always had the context, thanks to regular standups. I sat next to a senior software engineer for a year. Here’s what I learnt. Table of Contents Writing code How to name stuff One of the first things I worked on was a React UI. We had a main component housing every other component. I like a bit of humour in my code, and I wanted to name it GodComponent. Come code review time, and that’s when I understood why naming things is hard. There are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors. - Leon Bambrick Every code piece I baptize has an implicit meaning attached to it. GodComponent? That’s the component where all the crap I can’t be bothered to fit in the right place goes. It houses everything. Had I called it LayoutComponent, future-me would realise that all it does is assign the layout. It holds no state. Another great benefit that I found out was this: If it seems too big, like a LayoutComponent containing tonnes of business logic, I’ll know it’s time to refactor, because the business logic doesn’t belong there. With the name GodComponent, the business logic in there wouldn’t make a difference. Naming your clusters? Naming them after the service that runs on them is great, till the point you start running something else on them too. We ended up naming them with our team name. It’s the same idea with functions. doEverything() is a terrible name, and the ramifications are plenty. If this function does everything, it’s going to get bloody difficult to test the specific parts of the function. No matter how big this function gets, you’ll never think it’s too weird, since after all, the function is supposed to do everything. Change name. Refactor. Meaningful naming has a flip side to it, too. What if the name is too meaningful and hides some nuance? For example, closing sessions doesn’t close the underlying DB connection when you call session.close() in SQLAlchemy. (I should’ve RTFM and prevented that bug - more about that in Debugging) In this case, thinking of names as x, y, z instead of count(), close(), insertIntoDB() prevents assigning implicit meaning to them - and forces me to scrutinize what they are doing.2 I never imagined I’ll have more than one line to say about how to name stuff. Legacy code and the next developer Have you ever looked at some code and felt it’s weird? Why do they do it this way? This makes zero sense. I had the privilege of working with a legacy codebase. The kind with comments like “Uncomment code when situation figured out with Mohammad.” What do you do here? Who is Mohammad? I can do a role-reversal here - think about the next person coming to my code - will they find it weird or not. Peer reviews solve this somewhat. This led me to the idea of context: Be aware of the context my team is working in. If I forget about the code, and come back to it later, and I can’t recreate the context, I’ll go like: “Why the f did they do it this way? This makes zero sense… Oh wait, I did this.” And that’s where documentation and code comments come in. They help to preserve context, and share knowledge. As Li put it in How to Build Good Software, “The main value in software is not the code produced, but the knowledge accumulated by the people who produced it.” “The main value in software is not the code produced, but the knowledge accumulated by the people who produced it.” - Li We have this random client facing API endpoint that no one ever seems to use. Do we just delete it? After-all, it’s tech debt. What if I told you, once every year in a specific country, 10 journalists send their reports to that endpoint? How do you test this? If there’s no documentation (there wasn’t), we can’t. So, we didn’t. We deleted that endpoint. A few months down the line came that time of the year. Ten journalists were unable to send 10 important reports because the endpoint didn’t exist anymore. The people with the knowledge of the product had left the team. Sure enough, now there are comments in the code explaining what the endpoint is for. From what I’ve heard, documentation is something every team struggles with. Not just code documentation but processes around the code. We haven’t yet figured out a perfect solution for this. I enjoyed Antirez’s breakdown of different types of worthy code comments Atomic commits If you have to rollback (and you will. See Testing), does this commit make sense as one unit? Becoming confident about deleting shit code I was very uncomfortable deleting shit or obsolete code. I consider what was written eons ago sacred. My thinking goes “They must have something in mind when they wrote this.” It’s tradition and culture vs first principles thinking. It’s the same thing that happened with deleting the once-a-year-endpoint. I learnt too specific a lesson there.3 I’d try to work around the code, the seniors try to work through it. Delete all of it. An if statement that would never be reached? A function that shouldn’t be called? Yep, all gone. Me? I’d just write my function on top. I’ve not reduced tech debt. If anything, I’ve just increased the code complexity and misdirection. The next person would have an even tougher time piecing things together. The heuristic I now use is this: There’s code you don’t understand, and there’s code you know you’ll never reach. Delete code you’ll never reach, and be cautious with code you don’t understand. Code Reviews Code reviews are amazing for learning. It’s an external feedback loop on how you’d write code vs how they write it. What’s the diff? Is one way better than the other? I asked myself this question with every code review I did: “Why did they do it this way?”. Whenever I couldn’t find a suitable answer, I’d go talk to them. After the first month, I started catching mistakes in my teammates codes (just like they were doing for mine). This was insane. Peer reviews became a lot more fun for me - it was a game I looked forward to - a game to improve my code-sense. My heuristic: Don’t approve code till I understand how it works. My Github stats Testing I’ve come to love testing so much that I feel uncomfortable writing code in a codebase without tests. If your entire application does one thing (like all my school projects), then testing manually is still okay4. That’s what I used to do. But what happens when there are 100 different things the application does? I don’t want to spend half an hour testing everything, and sometimes forgetting what all I need to test. That’s a nightmare. Here come tests and test automation. I think of testing as documentation. It’s documentation for my assumptions about the code. Tests tell me how I (or the person before me) expect the code to work, and where all they expect things to go wrong. So, when I write tests now, I write with this in mind: Show how to use the class/function/system I’m testing. Show what all I think can go wrong. A corollary of the above is that in most cases, I’m testing the behaviour, not the implementation. (Here’s an example I picked up during bathroom breaks at Google) The things I miss in #2 is where the bugs come from. So, whenever I spot a bug, I make sure that the code-fix has a corresponding test (called regression testing) to document the information: This is another way things can go wrong.5 However, just writing these tests doesn’t improve my code quality, writing the code does. But the insights I gain from reading the tests help me write better code. That’s the big picture of testing. But, that’s not the only kind of testing to do. This is where deployment environments come in. You may have perfect unit tests, but if you don’t have system tests, something like this happens: The lock works(?) Source This holds true for well tested code too: If you don’t have the libraries you need on your machines, you’ll crash and burn. There’s the machines you develop on (source of all “It works on my machine!” memes). There’s the machines you test on (might be the same as the ones you develop on). Finally, there’s the machines you deploy on (please don’t let this be the same as the machines you develop on) If there’s an environment mismatch between test and deploy machines, you’ll be in trouble. And here’s where deployment environments come in. We have local development, which is in docker - on my machine. We have a dev environment, where machines have a set of libraries (and dev tools) installed and we install the code we write on these. All testing with other dependant systems can take place here. Then comes the beta / stage environment, which is exactly like the production environment. Finally, the prod or production environment, which are the machines on which the code runs and serves actual customers. The idea is to try and catch errors that unit and system testing wouldn’t. For example, an API mismatch between requesting and responding system. I guess things would be very different in a personal project or a small company. Not everyone has the resources to setup their own infrastructure. However, the idea still holds with cloud providers like AWS and Azure. You can have separate clusters set up for dev and prod. AWS ECS uses docker images to deploy, so things are relatively consistent across environments. The tricky bit is the integration between other AWS services. Are you calling the right endpoint from the right environment? You can even go a step further: Download alternate container images for the other AWS services and setup a local full-fledged environment using docker-compose. It accelerates feedback loops.6 I’ll probably have more experience here once I get my side project up and running. Derisking De-risking is the art of reducing risk with the code that you deploy. What all steps can you take to reduce the risk of disaster? If it’s a new breaking change, how can you ensure minimal disruption when things go wrong? “We don’t need to do a full-system deploy with all those new changes.” Oh, wait, really? How did I never think of this! Design Why am I putting design after writing code and testing? Well, design might come first, but if I haven’t coded and tested in the environment I’m in, I probably wouldn’t be great at designing a system that respects the quirks of the environment.7 There’s so much to think about when designing a system. What’s the usage numbers? How many users exist? and what’s the expected growth? (This will translate into how many db rows) What might be the future pitfalls? I need to convert this into a proper checklist titled “Gathering Requirements.” I haven’t had enough experience with it this year, which is something to solve in my next year at Bloomberg. This process goes a bit against Agile - how much can you design before getting to the implementation? It’s a balance - and you need to choose when to do what. When does diving in headfirst make sense, and when does taking a step back? Of course, just gathering requirements isn’t everything to think about. I think it pays off to include the development processes in design as well. Things like How will local development work? How will we package and deploy? How will we do end-to-end testing? How will we stress-test this new service? How will we manage secrets? CI/CD integration? We recently developed a new search system for BNEF. Working on this was wonderful. I got to design local development, learn about DPKGs (packaging and deployment), and wrestled with secret deployment. Who thought deploying secrets to production can get that tricky? You can’t put them in code, as then anyone can see them. Put them as an env variable, like the 12 factor app suggests? It’s a good idea. How do you put them there? (Accessing PROD machines to populate env variables everytime the machine starts is a pain) Deploy as a secrets file? Where does the file come from? How is it populated? We don’t want things to be manual. In the end, we went with a database with role access control (only our machines and us can talk to the database). Our code gets the secrets from this database on startup. This replicates very well across dev, beta and prod - with secrets in the respective databases. Again, this can be very different with a cloud provider like AWS. You don’t have to think much about secrets. Get your role account, input secrets in the UI, and your code shall find them when it needs them. It’s pretty cool how much it simplifies things - but I’m glad to have the experience to appreciate the simplicity. Designing with maintenance in mind Designing systems is exciting. Maintaining them? Not so much. My journey through maintenance led me to this question. Why and how do systems degrade? First part is not deprecating old stuff, always adding more. A bias towards addition instead of deletion. (Reminds you of someone?) The second part is designing with an end goal in mind. A system that evolves to do things it wasn’t supposed to do necessarily doesn’t work as well as a system designed from scratch to do the same thing. This is the taking-a-step-back approach instead of hacking away with agility. I now know of atleast three ways to reduce rate of degradation. Keep the business logic and the infrastructure separate: It’s usually the infrastructure that degrades - usage increases, frameworks become obsolete, zero-day vulnerabilities show up, etc. Building processes around maintenance. Apply the same updates to new bits and old bits. This prevents diff between new and old, and keeps the entire code “modern”. Ensure you keep pruning all your unwanted/old stuff. Deploying Would I rather bundle features together or deploy them one by one? Depending on the current processes in place, if the answer is to bundle features together, there’s a problem. The question to ask then is why do you want to bundle features together? Does the deployment take too much time? Do the code reviews not happen easily? Whatever is the reason, that’s the bottleneck to fix. I know atleast two issues with bundling. You’re self blocking one feature if bugs in the other. You’re going anti-derisking, or increasing risk of things going wrong. Then, whatever deployment process you choose, you always want your machines to be like cattle, not like pets. They aren’t precious. You know exactly what’s running on every machine, and how to recreate them in case of death. You’re not upset when one machine dies, you just spin up a new one. You herd them, not raise them. When things go wrong For when things go wrong, and they will, the golden rule is minimizing client impact. My natural tendency when things went wrong were to fix the problems. Turns out, it’s not the most optimal solution. Instead of fixing what went wrong, even if it’s a “one line change”, the first thing to do is rollback. Go back to the previous working state. This is the quickest way to get clients back on a working version. Only then should I look at what went wrong and fix those bugs. Same idea with a “borked” machine in your cluster - put it down, mark it unavailable, before trying to figure out what’s wrong with the machine. I found this weird, how my natural tendency and instincts diverge from the optimal solution. I think this instinct also leads me down the longer path to solving bugs. Sometimes, I figure it’s not working because there’s something wrong with what I wrote, and I’d get into the weeds going through every line of code I wrote. Something like depth-first search. When it turns out to be a config change, that is, I didn’t enable the feature in the first place, it pisses me off. I was so sub-optimal in the bug discovery process. Since then, my heuristic has been to do a breadth-first search before a depth-first search, to get rid of the top level nodes. What can I confirm using current resources? Is the machine up? Is the right code installed? Is the config in place? , like is the routing in the code correct? Is the schema version correct? Then, get into the code. We thought nginx didn’t install properly on the machine, but turns out, just the config was set to false. Of course, I don’t need to do this always. Sometimes, just the error message is enough to cut down the search space right to my code. When I can’t figure out the issue, I try and keep the changes-to-code-to-figure-out-what’s-wrong to a minimum. The less the number of changes, the faster I can hone in on the real issue. Keep the inferential jumps to a minimum. I also now keep a note of bugs that took me more than 1 hour to solve: What was I missing? It’s usually some dumb shit I forgot to check, like setting up routing, making sure the schema version and the service version match, etc. etc. This is another step of getting familiar with the tech stack I use, and one thing that only experience gives - intuition for figuring out exactly why things aren’t working. War Story It’s a dance between tweaking parameters, and playing with statistics vs fixing the underlying cause. How can this post ever be complete without a war story? I enjoy reading them, and I’ve got atleast one to share now. It’s the tale of search and SQLAlchemy. At BNEF, we have lots of analysts writing research reports. Whenever a report is published, we get a message. Whenever we get a message, we go into our database via SQLAlchemy, get all the stuff we need, transform it, and send it to our solr instance for indexing. Now, time for the weird AF bug. Every morning, connecting to the database would fail with the error “MYSQL server has gone away.” Sometimes, during the afternoon as well. The machines turn during the afternoon, so that’s the first thing I checked. Nope, errors never occurred when the machines were turning. We make thousands of requests throughout the day to the database, none of which fail. How come, then, this very low load trigger would fail? Oh, maybe we aren’t closing our sessions after the transaction? So if it’s the same session, and the next request comes after ages, we’ve missed the timeout, and the server has gone away. Quick look in the code, and sure enough, we are using a context manager for every read which calls session.close() on __exit__(). After one day of going through everything that might go wrong, getting nowhere, I come in to work next morning and have a chance encounter. The error occurred this morning as well. And one second after the error, three other index requests were successful. This had all the symptoms of an improper session close. You know how this story ends. Session.close() in the mysql dialect of SQLAlchemy doesn’t close the underlying DB connection, unless you’re using a NullPool. Yep, that was the fix. It’s funny how this bug occurred simply because we didn’t publish research reports at night and during lunch time. And therein lies another lesson - most stack overflow answers (of course I googled it!) for this bug were to tweak either the session timeout time, or the parameter controlling amount of data you can send per SQL statement. Neither made sense to me, because they were pretty much unrelated to the root issue. I checked that our query size was within the limits, and we were closing the sessions(lol) so timeout wouldn’t occur. We could have “fixed” this bug by increasing the session timeout value to 8 hours instead of 1 hour. It would’ve appeared to fix the problem, till the next time we have a holiday during the week - and the first research report next morning would fail. It’s a dance between tweaking parameters, and playing with statistics vs fixing the underlying cause. Monitoring This is something I never thought about doing before. To be fair, before coding full time I was never maintaining systems. I just built them, used them for a week and moved on. Working with two systems, one with great monitoring, and the other not so much, I’ve come to appreciate monitoring a lot. I can’t fix bugs if I don’t know they exist. One of the worst feelings is to find out from clients about bugs. “What am I doing?! I don’t even know things going wrong with a system I own?” I think three components make up monitoring - logging, metrics, and alarms. Logging in code, just like the human log, is an evolutionary process. You figure out things you might need to monitor, you log those, you run your system. Over time, you find a few bugs you don’t have enough information to solve. Those are good times to enhance logging - what’s your code missing? I think you intuitively figure out what things will be important to log. There was a lot of difference between the kind of things him (the senior SWE) and I were logging in our service. I figured just the request-response logs would suffice, while he had lots of metrics like query execution time, some specific internal calls made by the code, and also when to rotate logs, all sorted out. It’s virtually impossible to debug things without logs - if you don’t know the state the system was in, how do you even go about recreating it? Metrics can be derived from logs, or a separate standalone in the code. (Like sending events to AWS CloudWatch and Grafana). You decide your metrics and send the numbers in as the code runs. Alarms are the glue putting everything together in a great monitoring system. If one metric is the number of machines currently running in production, when this number falls to 50% is a great alarm to have - you know something went wrong. Failure count above a certain threshold? Yep, another alarm. I can sleep well at night, knowing if something goes wrong, I’ll be woken up. (Wait, what?) This hints at another habit to develop. When you fix bugs, you aren’t just focusing on how to fix the bug, but also, why didn’t you figure it out earlier? Was there alarming in place? How can you monitor better to prevent similar problems? I haven’t yet figured out how to monitor the UI. Testing the components are in place isn’t enough to know about things going wrong. This is usually where clients come in and tell us - things don’t look right. Conclusion Over the last year, I’ve learnt a lot. I’m glad I made the decision when I started working to write this post - I can appreciate much better how much I’ve grown when I have this document to look back to. And I hope there’s something you can takeaway from this, too! I’ve also been pretty lucky to get a great team - we code a lot, we laugh a lot, we get to design systems from scratch, and work with lots of other teams. This year, I’m sitting next to two senior devs. Let’s see how this goes! Thanks, team! Good engineers themselves design systems that are more robust and easier to understand by others. This has a multiplier effect, letting their colleagues build upon their work much more quickly and reliably - How to Build Good Software Things I’m not sure about I haven’t cracked the code of software engineering, yet. So, this section serves as a reminder for me: There’s so much left to learn! If I’m doing things right, this list should grow longer next year. Think in terms of abstractions or implementations? Should I have strong opinions about how to do things? Maybe as a result of being bitten before? Have I done the work required to have an opinion? Developing processes for workflows. If you need to change how you do things because of an emergency or an event - then is the process broken? Is it something to fix? Are utils (folder where you put random stuff you don’t know where to put otherwise) a code smell? How to deal with documentation for code and workflows? How to monitor UI to see when things don’t look alright? Spending time designing the perfect API / code contract vs hacking it out and iterating over and over again, to figure out what works best. Which one is better? The easy way vs the right way? I’m not convinced the right way is superior always. Doing things yourself vs showing those who don’t know how to do them. The former gets done fast, the latter means you seldom have to do it again yourself. When refactoring and preventing huge-ass PRs: “If I’d have changed all the tests first then I would have seen I had 52 files to change and that was obviously gonna be too big but I was messing with the code first and not the tests.” Is breaking it up worth it? Explore De-risking further. What all strategies exist to de-risk projects? Effective ways of gathering requirements? How to decrease rate of system degradation? Thanks to Hemanth Kumar Veeranki for reading drafts of this.

#Neil Kakkar

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gta-5-cheats · 7 years ago

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Fools and their crypto

New Post has been published on http://secondcovers.com/fools-and-their-crypto/

Fools and their crypto

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What should we do about token sales?

Two days ago a Lithuanian “company” called Prodeum looked like a promising if silly blockchain startup. Their stated goal? To track every piece of food on the internet. While I doubt many of us will care about the exact provenance of the orange we just ate, we could see, in some distant future, a need for this sort of tracking.

After all, the blockchain is the future. Fund it well and let it lead the way.

Prodeum checked all the boxes. They had a sharp team, a whitepaper written mostly in English and some excited fans:

In other words, Prodeum followed the token sale playbook from beginning to end. They created two tokens, one for funding the company and one for paying within the “network.” They created a credible whitepaper that, at the very least, tickled some of the neophilic nerves, and they had an active, if scammy, social media presence. That is literally all you need to run an ICO these days, and they did exactly as expected.

Then the whole thing imploded.

Latest Crunch Report

On the 28th the scam shut down, leaving a website containing a single word: penis. It is a tale for the ages, similar in scope to that one song about the One Tin Soldier.

In this case what did they find on the bloody morning after? Penis. That, friends, is the long and the short of the modern token ecosystem.

a shitcoin startup called Prodeum just exitscammed with millions of investor dollars and left them the following message on their site pic.twitter.com/q5R4QAxvwU

— ambidextrous layup guy (@thelateempire) January 28, 2018

This post on the 27th [WARNING: NSFW], purportedly by the scammer, explains things a bit more clearly:

Shop On SecondCovers

I hope you guys understand and I hope you’ll accept my apology. They were babyscams and I only made like $50,000 off of you guys in the last month. That’s a forgivable amount, right? I mean, there are millions on here. I just want to announce my resignation and that I won’t be making any more shitty scam sites anymore. It all started with tony dumper and satoshibox and I jumped for joy at my first $100 made from scamming. I sang to myself when I made my first $10,000 with bitflur..and Magnalis made me a lot. I put zero effort into prodeum though and that’s where I know to stop. I only made $3k on prodeum and I consider that a failure. Plus I shit the bed with the scam team too early.

“Remember that all ICOs are scams,” he writes in closing. The scam Ethereum wallet is currently empty and contained a maximum of $2,000. Not many were hurt in this particular scam but, as these things become more popular and things like this happen over and over again, I worry about the token sale space.

We are killing the very thing that will save startups in the next decade. And we’re sitting blithely by while idiots ruin it for the rest of us.

I believe that the token sale economy will drive the next startup revolution. Just as sites like TechCrunch, organizations like Y Combinator and the men in Dockers and fleece sweaters who populate Sand Hill Road defined (and still define) the last startup revolution, crypto will define the next one. But, as it stands, we cannot trust the participants, nor can we trust the products.

The token sale economy is half-baked. It needs another few wins under its belt to make it the investment vehicle of choice for the next generation of angels, and it needs fewer scams to prove to those angels that their money won’t go up in dick. It’s frustrating now, but I honestly think things are getting better.

So how do you, the startup fan, invest in these? Which ones work? Assume, for the sake of argument, that the token economy is a real thing and will lead, eventually, to a true utopia of token-based equity and utility coins. Because of the lack of oversight, no one in the space can be trusted — not even James Altucher.

Assume, for the time being, that all of these are scams and act accordingly. Do the due diligence. Ask questions. Imagine you’re investing in Apple in 1980. There is plenty of risk involved and you’re still not sure this Jobs kid has what it takes, but do you like the idea? The mission? The product? Apply the tried and true attitudes of the cautious investor and then add another soupçon of caution.

I’ve seen this sort of market before. It happened first in the dot-com boom when any IS or CS major could get a really nice job right out of college and in the run-up — and run-down — of the 2008 crash when startups were interesting simply because there was no other work. Startup investment was hot and scammers ran rampant. The same thing is happening now.

The current problem is simple: The ICO market exists within a social, legal and societal loophole that allows for bad actors to act badly. The opportunity is simple: It is the future of funding, whether Sequoia likes it or not. And the solution is simple: Create institutions that help the average founder crowdfund equity or create utility tokens while explaining, clearly and sanely, why the average investor should jump in. As it stands, that clarity and sanity do not exist. Enthusiast media has taken the field and that media is not allowed inside the big trading houses. Therefore, the entire ICO fad is happening in the shadows.

Drag it into the light. Support projects with product. Stop getting your crypto news from Facebook and Reddit. Start holding founders accountable for their claims. If you don’t, we’ll all be left holding little more than an empty webpage emblazoned with a single word: penis. And we’ll deserve what we get.

0 notes

princebxte-blog · 8 years ago

Text

Understand that I specifically say timeline and not “ verse” for a good reason. I am going to be polishing this, and placing it in my backstory page towards the end for all to read. This is for those who do not have a historical era-ish -type muse. And for those who wish to rp in modern time! Only upon request and upon my request, though! but I would like to keep ‘for funsies’ as minimal as possible. Because I rp Adam in late 18/early19th for a reason.

Anyways.--- Without further adieu.

After the second curse was placed, and Belle had gone from his life. Adam was left to help tend his country as Dauphin. A Dauphin is someone who is named heir to the throne; aka, next-in-line.

The king was very ill, suffering a chronic condition that debilitated him-- to which shed most of his heavier, stressful responsibilities on to Adam.

Adam basically, was [king]-- doing everything His Majesty would, but without bearing the title. Which was probably best, considering the revolution and the numerous counts of kidnapping and executing of nobles.

At this time, Adam had reigned for about almost 10-ish?? years. Aging was slow, and to an extent. WHICH his aging eventually stopped due to his curse. [ details of curse will go into headcanon. Or another post about why this is] BUT Because his curse keeps him from dying, [wanting to keep him alive for as long as possible]. After a certain period, people began to question Adam’s youth [hello dorian gray ref. ;)] , and because the revolution was so conveniently placed-- he was able to make an escape. Joining the barricades, and the fight for those who deserve equal treatment.

After this, Adam picked up the pieces of his trading business, and disappeared. No one heard from him since

[[ during this gap of time -- I leave open because Adam may have gone and done multiple things all over the world. And included himself in many significant events--which, I will over time, list ]]

When Adam reappears in our modern world, of year 20XX, he is living a fairly busy life in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Work life;

Still in charge of his trading company from when he established in the Early 19th century. It has become a pillar in the modern world as one of the older most successful of companies. However with multiple shifts, and changes. It diverged a bit, with changes to government and technology. Because of regulations, and the government’s shift in laws as well as policies. Adam’s business would have to pay it’s share of taxes and leave the people who work for him [ thousands] without much to what the earned. To which Adam highly disagrees with. It is not right. He has been always doing this a certain way, and he does not believe in change-- or such a negative change. It would damage his company. It would also damage his company if FBI catches on to him. Which he has had a few knocks on his door. BUT-- because of these things with government and his company etc. he will place money in accounts all across the board between France, Switzerland, and the US to ensure people get their paychecks.This makes Adam a certified money launderer.

Having also acquired a large enough $$$$ living over the years ADAM HAS ALSO become a GREAT big investor, as well as a major day trader to which he has hired assistants to help. He has bought out PROPERTY in Vegas seeing the opportunity from back when, and owns about half the city. He keeps himself hidden by providing different names, or other people to stand in his place as a representative of own the land-- but behind the scenes he owns it.

Adam will get many emergency calls about his work which can be at any time of day. To which he might need to make a run to wire transfers and save his company from plummeting. His company is the only thing he has left from his past that he feels might be worth any merit, so he keeps a clean hold on it always. But because of his serious amounts of money. Adam leads a glamorous lifestyle as show.

And he works remotely, because he has assistants-- and mainly operates everything from his mobile device[s]

Social life; Adam has no real friends, besides his business partners who lean on him for his wit and skill in the market. Mainly Armenian, to which Adam has a hand in knowing some of the language. They like to drag him out to the exclusive clubs they all own, and party hard. A glamorous lifestyle. Some of which they bring Adam on purpose because they know that he covers their hefty bill, and that the dancers will gravitate towards them if a member of their party ain’t so bad on the eyes. And when this happens things get a little wild. Because Adam will drink to lose his anxiety, and drink to lose himself--- To which he goes a bit MANIC

Living;

Because Adam has been living so long-- he tries to ensure that his ‘secret’ for having lived this long does not get out. To which he has acquired multiple aliases. If one were to look into his wallet, they would find a multitude of IDs [kinda scary because people may put together that he is some serial murderer] he does his best to avoid anything that requires his name being put into the system. Such as police reports and medical records. He abstains-- by paying off the cops [they see his name, they let him move along-- ] and has his own sort of black market doctor who comes in when he needs help with a particular... task. [ will talk about this in a LATER as an ADD ON] forbes, rolling stones etc. etc. have tried getting him into interviews, for he raises so many questions and eyebrows-- but he makes sure to turn down and remain in the dark. Or breezing it off on a colleague who is actually born in this generation!!

Appearance; Adam still looks much the same, besides his strawberry blonde hair. Properly cut with a length that suits the time period better, groomed to make him appear professional.

So it has a little bit of length on the sides where there is a wave,

Other times it is a bit longer at the top.

--Sometimes longer, sometimes shorter. His facial hair varies. As for attire, he wears fairly semi-formal business suits. With a few twists. Having picked up styles across the years. Like! suspenders!

BUT will wears ties to impress a potential client, or business exec. who he might have to potentially pitch a partnership or production idea to. BUT just like cravats---

HE STILL HATES THEM

*RIPS OFF TIE MOMENT MEETING LETS OUT*

Otherwise he just likes to feel comfy and wearing suits or sweaters over dress shirts with nice pants and shoes are comfortable. He likes looking sharp, but also playing the part of his company. Being at the top of it-- It is lonely at the top. So he wears suits in the way that he likes.

Hobbies/Likes/Dislikes; *TRIGGER WARNING: HEAVY DRUG & ALCOHOL USE*

Unfortunately, this part about Adam gets a bit dark. Over the years Adam’s curse, and the loss of family, home, friends etc. His country, even! All things have disappeared and withers away, all bit himself. He feels alone, this world is a place he feels more unfit for than ever, and to make things worse, his curse does nothing but progress. His original method [will get to in a moment] is not enough to suppress the lows that he feels in this world. He makes enough to do drugs, and the current typical -- is the shooting up a heroin.

Highly addictive. It takes Adam to another world, to his old life where he feels like a human-- senses heighten. Worries wither-- he is without stress, or worry or knowledge of what or who or where he might be.

But just the feelings of his body in that exact moment. And because he cannot die [or die easily by typical means of a way a human would off themself] he does not mind his addiction. For there are no severe enough negative effects. Of course he gets sick from it-- he might suffer some other negative side effects-- and he becomes subject to paranoia, and happens to inherit other mental illnesses..... Otherwise this is his life. Especially when he feels most alone. He will go into withdrawal if it’s been longer than two days without the drug.

Another is his whiskey. It still provides a comfort, it is good for easing his anxiety, but it is the motions of drinking and tasting it that give Adam satisfaction. Pairing this with the H-- makes Adam feel alive, but also sick.

MORE Likes;

Adam loves to read the newspaper. Because he has been everywhere, he is up on worldly events. So he owns quite a few, and they kinda build up--he does not like throwing them away. Even though his assistants give him shit since he could just learn these things on the internet and bookmark them.

Piano -- Still loves to play. Occasionally he plays his violin, but not has kept up with it as much as his piano playing. There is just something about the comfort of pressing his fingers down on smooth, cool ivory.

Classic 1940s Jazz

Record player/phonograph!!

Dancing and classy Jazz lounges where he can just drink whiskey/scotch on the rocks and enjoy--despite... Himself.

The radio is the best thing! [hug music and podcast listener]

SLIDES ARE THE SHIT

Loves coffee, it overtook his affinity for tea.

MORE Dislikes;

Denim. Wearing it, that is. It looks good on other people, but for him he does not feel attractive or comfortable in it very much. Which he probably is gorgeous in jeans, with his nice butt-- but if he can, he would rather wear the dress pants. Dockers.

Television. [a well- up to date one], kinda gave up on technology when film came out. He will go to movie, but after the radio came out that is where he keeps himself up to date. And Newspaper, why need TV?

Computers-- he owns laptops [credit to his assistants], but does not use them. His phone is a gateway to the internet, but he never uses that option either. Unless he HAS to. Like GPS or anything relating to his stocks, and his company.

PERSONALITY;

Adam always tries to remain fairly upbeat. For himself. For his business. He has to be this way! He owns a lot and is a great influence! Hell!! Forbes attempts to contact him to be listed as a top successful, young exec. which is completely untrue. He is the oldest. He must act like he has little conscientious, little anxiety, high self-esteem, high individuality, competitiveness-- he MUST display himself as being the Dark Triad type--mostly altruistic [ unless you catch his eye], extraverted[which is EXHAUSTING because he is not] and practically MANIC. Adam basically exploits himself--and the curse helps in this.

And --There is a darkness about this TRUE personality, of course. As the curse--the alter the BEAST is a complete psychopath. Adam sometimes feels himself phasing into his Alter personality, making true his ‘business’ type of façade. Slowly day after day, he feels his real self drifting into this ugly person-- he might as well become a Beast AGAIN. Which is not surprising considering all the years he has gone on like this.

Having lived so long, with such loneliness, he has had such a sad life thus far. As an aristocrat prince; things were tough. He was haunted-- jilted... But not like this. For he feels a jilt within himself. Not belonging to the century like he should, and he knows it. He should have passed on like everyone else. And feels this somewhat purgatory--type feeling where there is no up or down.. No direction. Going forward means moving on, but he cannot simply move on. Seeing as he has tried for 200 years. But this part of Adam is usually kept to himself. When one is close enough, there is an obvious sense of Adam having been jaded. For so long-- he feels almost nothing anymore.

No sadness, no pain-- no happiness.. simply nothing. The glass if not half full, not half empty-- the glass is simply not even there! It is like being a shell, with a small essence of him there. So RPING with a modern Adam is probably going to be quite depressing for a person. Even if he is smooth, even if he is suave and has mature tastes-- in him there is a numbness that cannot really be removed. Not unless you have heroin, not unless you can make him feel something-- He might as well pretend to be James Bond, his fake personality does the job right-- though, deep down. Adam just wants to go home to his family. He misses his loved ones. Which makes this character; like I said-- unbelievably heart breaking.

Of course when he IS happy in this time-- he is genuine upbeat, genuinely suave-- and extremely generous with protectiveness of whomever is helping achieve these genuine feelings. Without the heroin.

CURSE;

Going off personality, it would be important to sort-of explain what is going on with Adam and his curse.

IN A NUTSHELL IF YOU HAVE NOT READ MY BACKSTORY [[WHICH I HIGHLY RECOMMEND FOR MAKING SENSE OF ANY OF THIS NEXT LITTLE BIT]]:;;; Having manifested IT AS a young child BEFORE he had become THE OFFICIAL Beast, THERE WAS ALWAYS this other personality, this possessive entity--BECAUSE OF WHAT ADAM WENT THROUGH AS A CHILD HE DEVELOPED THIS OTHER PERSONALITY AS A MEANS TO COPE AND FIND SOLACE AND CONSOLATION. AN IMAGINARY FRIEND BUT IT WAS MORE THEN THAT. IT WAS ANOTHER PERSONALITY A THING-- it HAD grown!! and completely gone out of control. Sipping off the agony and negative energies Adam gave off day after day, it became stronger, however it remain trapped. Unable to really control the prince-- As a beast FOR 10 YEARS it was able to INFLUENCE him, but the presence of Belle within Adam had overridden any of those negative feelings... After the spell from the enchantress broke and Adam’s death between that time and returning to his human form, it ALL activated this other personality MORE SO. Enabling it to become more of a split entity. Jealous of Belle’s control on him. And when he passed away again, but more officially without magic, the SECOND TIME-- he had made a deal with this personality, this demon/fallen angel that had clung to him as a child to return to him his life in return for a portion of himself. His soul-- so he could rescue someone he loves. BUT IT WOULD NOT BE SO PRETTY. And after doing so, lost everything including the very person he sold himself for. Over the years this thing has fed off Adam more and more-- his agony, his suffering-- it keeps him alive and well, it keeps his body from breaking down [aka aging to a point and then he stops]-- his metabolism and muscle content are in primal shape. He can become ill, it is rare-- but he can... He can have flesh wounds. But any mortally damaging situation will always transform [ INTO THE BEAST] the prince and return to him his health and life he was in process of losing. SO after the years of living this way, with this

ALTER/BEAST/DEMON/DARKNESS [Adam has many names for it] it has almost managed to phase into Adam’s original personality-- at times. Adam might lose control--sometimes black out, sometimes awake, and this thing will become a part of him as human, awake and a live and he cannot control it. As it plays him as a Beast-- Adam will chain himself to a wall, in a space he has created for this Alter’s episodes. But at times when he is most negative, most tired-- Adam cannot fight this thing wanting to come to life. It can take over. Does not matter how long. It is still much the same as before, only it has become more sophisticated. It displays the traits of a psychopath, a narcissist, ruled by machiavelliansim--altruistic, less agreeable, neurotic, and conscientious. All the types of Adam’s ‘fake façade’ he plays in front of his coworkers and partner exec.s Except with a little twist. It likes to go out at night, when Adam is most vulnerable-- it likes to take the blood AND THE FLESH of another and drink & EAT, for when this thing does it feels as close to a human as it can be. AND IT KNOWS that if ADAM KNOWS, Adam’s sel loathing will only make it’s power grow.

Sometimes this personality/demon will come into control within Adam for MONTHS at a time. That is what’s most frightening.

Adam will sometimes wake up having blood all over himself. Only finding that none of it is his own. Shaking. Vomiting-- disgusted with himself, with the smell and taste.

This is most damaging to the old prince-- for he leads such a glamorous lifestyle, and yet he has such a jekyll&Hyde living inside him. A beast, unchanging-- always wanting to get out.

This is probably another reason why Adam goes manic, and gets himself involved in heroin. For if he drugs himself hard enough, he might wake up drooling-- and looking like a fool, but he will wake up with just drool. And that is all. Everyone besides himself remains SAFE.

[this will probably be polished and edited-- and added on to later]

Car; Aventador [AKA Lamborghini]

Classic rally in black, scissor doors-- probably the most noticeable thing on the strip. Adam would not try to make a getaway in this-- even though he could, it is too easy to spot. We will just use UBER for chases.

Living;

Adam lives in a condo/penthouse in a 27 floor dark gray building, highly secure. Adam holds the top two floors, a penthouse that has high ceilings and a spiral staircase. With large windows. The style is this sort of 18th century contemporary--

THE WEST ROOM [see what i did there?? West wing]-- no one is allowed to go in here, because it looks like it might be a s copy to Christian Grey-- only instead of a play room, it is a chain, and heroin room, full of scratches and blood stains--All the horrible things.

Furnished to the NINES with antique 18th century furniture.

Almost a tad gaudy-- and his decorator will give him shit too [yes he has a decorator!] Of course this keeps getting more depressing--

having a his and hers his/his her/her any/any?? THE POINT he has a double bathroom to NOT share with anyone. B’(((((( my child suffers

And you get the main idea! Adam holds on to some furniture, some books, some original paintings-- etc.

HEALTH;

Because of Adam’s heroin addiction. Here are some things that go with his behavior.

| | ----| | PHYSICAL THINGS FROM THE H | |---- | |

Shortness of breath, Dry mouth, Constricted (small) pupils

Needle track marks visible on arms

Cycles of hyper alertness followed by suddenly nodding off, Droopy appearance, as if extremities are heavy

Substantial increases in time spent sleeping, Increase in slurred, garbled or incoherent speech

Wearing long pants or long sleeves to hide needle marks, even in very warm weather

Disorientation

Depressed respiration (shallow breathing)

Clouded mental functioning, Decreased pain from either physical conditions or emotional challenges

Chronic pneumonia for Adam he has this is on and off

Seizures

Adam does not share his needles with anyone. He does not get disease or much infections because of his curse. But he has seizures time to time, especially if he has been in withdrawal for too long-- which will probably more than likely cause him to transform into the Beast anyway.

| | ----| | BEHAVIORAL THINGS FROM THE H | |---- | |

Lying or other deceptive behavior

Avoiding eye contact, or distant field of vision,

Withdrawal from friends and family, instead spending time with new friends with no natural tie, Lack of interest in hobbies and favorite activities,

Hostile behaviors toward loved ones, including blaming them for withdrawal or broken commitments

Uncontrollable feelings of itching that result in compulsive scratching or picking at skin (itchy blood)

Regular comments indicating a decline in self esteem or worsening body image

Some of these are well hidden. Adam DOES keep some interest in certain activities, but they are not as grand as they could be if he were not addicted.

MENTAL HEALTH

Adam exhibits swings in his moods at times , mostly effected by the drugs he uses. However, on the outside- he might appear to have subclinical dissociative personality disorder.

He suffers anxiety

PTSD

a lot of coping for depression

SPEECH; [[coming]]

LOVE LIFE; AHAHAHAHAHHAAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAHA!!!!!!

MILITIA; [[coming]]

[[anything else I must add that I may have forgotten for this-- i will place on the page!]]

ALL in all Adam is a giant ass gary stu who hates himself.

The end!

0 notes

totalconway · 5 years ago

Text

The Right Kinda Fat Shit

A bit of water went under the bridge between acting in ‘The Unsung Docker’ and my next acting job. In that time I got to open for some big name comedians including Steve-O from Jackass, Doug Stanhope, and Donell Rawlings from Chapelle show.

In that same time I was awarded the ‘Fuck off to Melbourne Award’ at the annual Doustie Awards (The Perth Comedy Scene Awards) but I had already set my sights on a move to Sydney to pursue my comedy dream a little less then 2 years into starting stand up.

So after I packed my things and left my job I headed for the big city lights of Sydney. I had only been to Sydney a handful of times prior to moving there, once to see Danny Green vs Anthony Mundine, the second was to see Jay and Silent Bob Live after their Perth show sold out and the third time was to perform at the Sydney Comedy Store to perform at their Christmas show. It was a huge honour for me so early in my comedy career to be invited to perform at the Sydney Comedy Store as it is arguably the best comedy club in Australia. It felt like I was being presented with a black belt for an art form I was still wrapping my head around. My decision to move to Sydney was made easier by the fact that one of my best mates was heading over as well and we agreed to rent together in the inner west suburb of Petersham.

After working for 10 years on the Docks, manual labor jobs was something I was trying to avoid at all costs so I applied for some weird jobs. Some jobs I didn’t even realise were a thing including a job making sales commission on selling Paralympic Pins. After sitting in the interview and listening to the lady explain in a thousand different ways but never actually saying “You will sell Pins for a commission” I politely declined and hauled my unemployed ass back to Petersham.

After the success of ‘The Unsung Docker’ I was keen to dip my toe in the acting pool again, if only to fill in my days of unemployment creatively. I went searching through the website ‘StarNow’, which is essentially the Craiglists of media work and applied for numerous gigs. Along with the short films and University projects I applied for I also applied to be represented by an acting agent so they could make the job search easier for me. After a few days I received a call about my application and they were super keen to have me on their books which was weird because the only film credit I had was ‘The Unsung Docker’. I’ve always been skeptical of people who are too excited to offer me something because 99.9% of the time its something you don’t want.

I reluctantly agreed to sign with them, I figured if this was a scam they wouldn’t be able to get any money out of me because I’m fucking broke but sure enough a week later true to their word they sent me out for my first audition. The gig was paying $2000 for a days work playing a delivery man for a Tatts Lotto commercial. Being $2000 for a days work I wasn’t exactly confident because I felt you needed to have some serious acting chops to make $2000 a day. In my mind that’s like ‘Home and Away’ money. But sure enough, I went to the audition and for the first of many times in my acting career I was the right kinda fat shit.

I don’t remember much of the commercial, it never made it to air. All I remember was pushing an empty refrigerator box and pretending it was full. My experience in manual labour had given me the skills to be able to look like I work harder than I do so I was able to nail the performance. The only other thing I remember from the shoot was that the little girl in the scene was a spoilt little rich kid and was as annoying as fuck for the whole day. She kinda reminded me of Veruca from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory only she didn’t die chasing golden duck eggs.

When the shoot was done I had to wait a few weeks to get paid and after union fees and my agents cut I ended up only making about $1100 which is less Home and Away money and more regular Delivery Man money.

In between acting jobs I was still hitting up ‘StarNow’ to find independent projects to cut my teeth on. Only two stood out, one was playing a a security guard ( I think my character died in it but I don’t remember) the other was me in a suit watching a chick dance in front of me with a red light filling the room. The scene felt like a cross between a David Lynch film and a soft core porno. I have yet to see either of these films but I’m sure I nailed the fat guy character they were looking for.

During this time, I finally buckled on avoiding manual labour work and got a job at the Airport working for REX Airline which is a small regional airline. One of the most brain numbing jobs I ever experienced, so much so I started regretting not taking that sweet sweet Paralympic Pin money. The REX job was to purely help me pay the bills and it barely did that. My excitement for living in the big city lights of Sydney was starting to dimmer.

During one particular shift I got a call from my agent saying that I had been offered another gig. I didn’t even have to audition I just had to meet the director and see if we “vibed”. I asked my agent why I didn’t have to audition for this film and she blew so much smoke up my ass I felt like I was sitting on top of a volcano. She said “I was the best actor on their books”, “how incredibly talented I was”, and “how I have a big future in acting”. Pretty much saying I was the next Heath Ledger and for a millisecond I actually believed it until I read the character description “Fat, Balding, pale, poor skin etc etc”. The gig was for an anti obesity health campaign and I was like, Fuck that! two seconds ago you were describing me as the next Heath Ledger and now you want me to do a role that is me just being a fatty fat boombardy FUCK THAT. Then she said it was paying $5000 so I agreed to do it.

We didn’t really need an excuse to party in Petersham so being offered $5000 for an acting job is as good as any. We also had friends over from Perth and what better way to celebrate my thriving acting career than getting drunk with the Perth crew. Partying was not the best decision because I ended sleeping in and had to race to the meet and greet with the director stinking of piss (alcohol and my own) looking super haggard and feeling paranoid I may have flushed $5000 down the toilet. I managed to get to the meeting in time by spending my last few bucks on an Uber, walked into the meeting looking disgusting and smelling like an alley way. I walked in to meet the Director gingerly and feeling a bit embarrassed about the state I was in. Too my surprise though, my night on the piss had helped me become the living embodiment of their ‘Fat piece of shit character’ they wanted for the commercial. So I left the meeting on a high but with no more money, I ended up spending the next 3 hours getting home for round 2 of Partying Perth style.

It actually paid about $10,000 because every year it aired I would get paid another $5000 in roll over cost.

The shoot ended up being 3 days and it was pretty chilled, I literally had one scene with no dialogue. I pretty much just had to sit there and be fat and sad which was surprisingly hard considering the guy directing the commercial was mostly known for working on comedies so we had a lot of banter in those 3 days. The third day of the shoot was my time to shine, I had to sit there and be told how my fat is killing me etc etc. It was the most important shot of the commercial because this is where they drive home the point that Fat is Bad.

There was some tension on this day because the big honchos of NSW Health who were paying for the commercial wanted to sit in and watch and make sure the scene was delivering their Fat is Bad message. So my first thought was what better way to show off my comedy skills in front of the director than to crack a joke during this pivotal scene. When the Doctor said to me “All that toxic fat can lead to blah blah... its not looking good” I turned to my wife in the scene and said in the saddest voice I could “I better lay off the meat pies then”, This popped the tension in the room and got the whole crew laughing. Its not the best joke but it was good enough to send the crew into a giggle fit after a hard couple of days. Everyone was laughing except the producer who came marching down yelling and screaming about having a bit of respect for NSW Health who were there and are taking this very seriously (Fuck off cunt). NSW Health have been paying to fat shame me for 3 fucking days, they can go fuck themselves if they can’t handle one Meat Pie joke. Getting told off made the crew laugh even harder. They struggled like school children being told off at an assembly but once everyone got their composure back we shot the scene and it was a wrap.

youtube

After the fat commercial I felt I was done with acting. Don’t get me wrong acting is a lot of fun but it kinda loses its magic when you’re whole role is sitting their looking fat.

One of the ways I tried reigniting the spark to do acting was when I came across a ‘Kickstarter’ campaign for Troma’s new film Return to Nuke em High Vol 2. Troma was a big part of my childhood with the toy line Toxic Crusaders which was inspired by the animated series and not the incredibly gory live action movies. With ‘Kickstarter’ campaigns they have rewards depending on the amount of money you donate and for $3500 you could have the legendary Lloyd Kauffman direct a 5 minute short film that I would write. I jumped at the opportunity to buy this reward not only would I be following in the same steps as actors like Kevin Costner, Samuel L Jackson, James Gunn who got their start doing Troma films, but it was a great excuse to head over to New York.

I purchased this reward which was $3500USD, it was not only all the money I made working on the fat commercial but it was also all of my pay from REX Airline for that fortnight after.( I didn’t take into consideration the exchange rate). I made my investment in 2015 and I finally received the DVD copy and posters at the end of 2019. It was a slow process but definitely looking forward to heading over once this COVID-19 shit is over and done with. I don’t think I’ll use the original script I wrote in 2015 called Love/Life about a guy who develops a relationship with the girl who catfished him, she also happens to be a Banshee.

A few months later I got sent for another audition this time it was a paid short film called The Spa. What was the role? Well Fat delivery man of course! but this one was different, it was an amazing script and I actually had dialogue which is always great.

I ended up scoring the role of Moose and part of the job requirement was having to do table reads with the other cast members. Still being naive I thought this was a bit of over kill for a short film but if I’m getting paid and it gets me out of a days work so I’m happy to do all the table reads you want. I’m glad they did the table reads because when I went in for the rehearsal I was star struck by the cast.

After the Fat Commercial I had bitch and moaned to the universe to give me a role that would show I could hold my own against the best of the best and not just a guy whose there for being the right kinda fat. In return the universe slapped me into check when I walked in for the first table read and saw the cast that included Chris Haywood, Jay Laga'aia who have pretty much starred in every great piece of Australian cinema and Peter Moalaeua who I had seen on a bunch of TV commercials. They say be careful what you wish for and I was definitely worried I had bitten off more than I could chew. It was a dream come true to work with the likes of these actors and also a huge motivator to make sure I could hold my own against these acting beast.

The shoot for The Spa was absolutely amazing, working with some of the most talented actors and crew in the country. Watching Chris Haywood and Jay Laga’aia on set was one of the greatest experiences. Observing them walk around just nailing every take and then joking and laughing with the rest of the crew and doing so with absolutely zero ego.

This reminds me, after the shoot Jay Laga’aia drove me as close as he could to my flat in Petersham and then gave me his $50 Taxi gift voucher to help me get the rest of the way home. It was a crazy experience driving home with Jay because we’re talking about comedy and what not and I’m sitting there like Jay Laga’aia is giving me a lift home, this dude was in fucking Star Wars.

Working on The Spa was an amazing experience and it is incredibly humbling to sit back and watch the success it has had. Being showcased at film festivals all around the world and picking up numerous awards.

Acting is a weird industry. I’ve loved all the opportunities I’ve gotten, even the shit ones because sometimes you have to work through the Fat Shit Roles to get the skills to be the Fat Shit you’ve always dreamed of. The right kinda fat shit.

vimeo

#acting #perth #fat #fatshaming #movies #commercial #tv #comedy #performing #blog

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