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flipomatic · 3 years

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A New World Chapter 9: Study Session

Author Note: Yes, this is another Lisa chapter. I am aware of how many there have been. We’ll get to Yukina’s side when it’s time.

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The train to and from university was usually crowded. Lisa found herself traveling at the busiest times of the day, during morning and afternoon rush hour. She often stood in the crowd, with just a pole or overhead handle to hang on to.

Today she had been lucky enough to get a seat as she headed towards home, after another long day of university classes. Her school bag was heavy with textbooks, a different one for each course. She’d been busy reading them and filling them with sticky notes to mark important pages.

As her professors had reminded her, multiple times over the last week, midterms were soon. They didn’t start until next week, but that didn’t leave a lot of time to prepare.

Even though she’d been studying all semester, Lisa didn’t feel at all prepared for midterms. They were a significant portion of her grades too, so she couldn’t afford to fail them. If she wanted to pass, she needed to buckle down and study.

Lisa looked at her phone, clicking the calendar app. There were two Roselia practices between now and the start of midterms, both long rehearsals. Lisa clicked to her class schedule, with a sigh escaping from her lips.

If she wanted to get enough studying time in, she wasn’t going to be able to attend those practices. She wasn’t even going to have time to practice on her own, which was also quite frustrating.

Lisa had been working hard to step up her bass playing. The extra rehearsal with Yukina had been more productive than she expected, since they were able to focus on just the bass and vocals. Yukina had helped with her with tone, and providing more nuance to match each song. Lisa hoped that they would practice like that again someday.

Now though, she needed to put her music aside for a short while. Her college courses all required her undivided attention. It hurt to do so, especially since she had been putting so much effort into improving for the band.

Lisa clicked out of the calendar app and into her texts. She started typing in the Roselia group chat. “Hey, I’m not going to be able to make practice Thursday or Sunday. Sorry!!!” Lisa included a praying emoji at the end to express her sincerity.

Immediately, a bar popped up showing that Sayo was typing. “I wish you told us sooner.” Lisa could imagine her scolding tone. “That brings us to three for Thursday.” Right, Rinko had already been unable to make Thursday’s practice. Like Lisa’s, her schoolwork had been ramping up as the semester continued.

“Midterms snuck up on me, please forgive me Sayo!” Lisa knew that Sayo wouldn’t be able to stay mad at her if she phrased it like that. At least, she hoped that she wouldn’t.

“Hmm.” Sayo sent that short message, then spent about thirty seconds typing the next one. “Very well, but you owe the band extra practice time.” That was fair.

“Are we still gonna meet Thursday?” Ako chimed in, using a question mark face emoji.

“I will be missing that practice as well.” Yukina’s message popped up. Lisa could hear her voice in her ear, the way she would say those words. What she said was a bit of a surprise though.

Sayo typed quickly in response. “Minato-san, not you too…” She was likely shaking her head, wherever she was. Even if Yukina could go, it would’ve made sense to cancel the Thursday rehearsal. They almost never practice with just three members.

“It’s fine, we’ll still practice Sunday.” Yukina brushed off Sayo’s disappointment. They would have four members on Sunday, even with Lisa cancelling.

“I’ll contact the studio to cancel.” Lisa felt bad as she typed the words, since it was her fault they were cancelling. Though, maybe not. If Yukina wasn’t going to attend, they might’ve cancelled anyway. Lisa jotted down in her notes app to call Circle when she got home.

With that done, she shut off the screen on her phone and let her hands rest in her lap.

Lisa wondered why Yukina couldn’t go on Thursday. She usually had her schedule organized far in advance, including homework and individual practice time. Yukina planned ahead well, always prepared for what was ahead.

Maybe Lisa would ask next time she saw her. If she remembered, since that wouldn’t be until near the end of next week.

Lisa glanced up to check which stop they were at; she would get off in three.

Her phone buzzed against her leg, which was probably a continuation in the group text. Lisa picked it up and flipped it over, surprised to see that her assumption had been incorrect.

A message from Yukina had appeared across the screen, sent only to Lisa. “Do you want to study together?” Lisa squinted at it for a moment, not sure what to make of it.

She tapped the message to open it, slowly typing a response back. “What do you mean?” Yukina was acting so strange today.

The time it took Yukina to respond felt like forever. “On Thursday, I need to study too. Perhaps we could do it together.” She wanted to come study with Lisa? The sound of Lisa’s stop being called snapped her attention away from her phone, and she stood to get off the train.

She exited the station and started walking towards home, which was only a few blocks away. That message from Yukina was still there, waiting for a response.

Though they had just spent time practicing together, this felt like a completely different kind of request. It almost felt like, no, that couldn’t be. This couldn’t be an invitation for a date, could it? The last time they studied together, it was because they were taking the same classes. Now though, Yukina was studying vocal performance. She wasn’t learning about any of the same topics as Lisa.

No, Lisa shook her head, there was no way this was a date. Studying was something friends did together, not romantic at all. Regardless, the offer filled Lisa with warmth. She typed back. “Was getting off the train, I’d love to study with you!” A couple heart emojis followed.

“I’ll bring cookies.” It was a short reply, but it still sent a jolt through Lisa’s heart.

She stopped at the store on the way home to get some snacks, so she would have something to serve on Thursday.

Lisa hadn’t been excited about her midterms earlier, but now she was looking forward to studying.

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When Lisa got home from school on Thursday, right at 4:00 pm, she immediately started preparing for Yukina’s visit. She had made flashcards for her hardest class, science, which would be a good tool to study while Yukina was there. Lisa set them out on the table in her room, to make sure they were ready.

She also made sure to bring up all the snacks she had bought, just in case Yukina was hungry. Lisa hadn’t had time to bake her own snacks, so store bought would have to do. Whatever kinds of cookies Yukina brought could be added to the plate.

Lisa got some studying done after that, tackling her literature course. It was best to study that one alone, since it mostly involved reading. She was able to put Yukina out of her mind, at least for a while, and read a decent chunk of the assigned reading.

She stopped studying to join her family for dinner, before heading back to her room.

Then, Lisa had to wait. She knew Yukina had class late on Thursdays, with studio time at her school going past 5:00. She would eat dinner before coming over, which meant she likely wouldn’t arrive until at least 6:30, or not until 7:00. It was only 6:15.

The best thing Lisa could do while she waited was keep studying. Now though, it was a lot harder to focus than it had been earlier. Yukina could arrive at any minute, could come into Lisa’s room.

Lisa told herself that she was being silly, that Yukina had just been here last week to rehearse together, that Yukina used to come over and study all the time.

There was a tension in the air today, it felt different. Lisa knew it was probably her own overactive imagination causing it, but she couldn’t help it.

As the clock ticked slowly forward, she had trouble staying focused on her book. Lisa nibbled on one of the snacks, a small cracker, to ease her nerves. She went to the bathroom to reapply some light makeup, then returned to her studies.

At 6:40, the doorbell rang. Lisa called to her parents that she would get it, dropping her book and quickly heading down the stairs.

A familiar silhouette could be seen through the front door. Lisa pulled it open, beaming at her guest. “Thanks for coming!”

Yukina stepped through the open door, the small smile on her face equivalent to Lisa’s. She had her school bag, as well as a grocery bag. She nodded, then walked past Lisa into the house.

Yukina left her shoes by the door and the pair went upstairs to Lisa’s room. As Lisa shut her bedroom door, those nerves from earlier returned.

They didn’t make sense, but she couldn’t shake them. Even as she watched Yukina sit down on the ground next to the table, the same way she had a thousand times before, Lisa felt nervous. This wasn’t a date, she reminded herself. She was just studying with her best friend.

She joined Yukina at the table, opening the plastic bag that she’d placed on it. Inside was a small plasticware container, which was full of cookies.

“These look great.” Lisa commented as she popped open the lid. A wave of freshly baked scents spread through the room. Lisa placed a few onto the place with the other snacks, keeping one to eat right now. It was soft in the middle and firm around the edges, cooked for perhaps slightly too long. The flavor was good though, chocolate and peanut butter.

“What do you think?” Yukina asked, her expression far too serious for the question. Did she make these? That was so sweet of her; Lisa wanted to lean over and engulf her in a hug.

This was another strange behavior though. Lisa could count on her fingers the number of times Yukina had baked for her.

It only set Lisa’s nerves further on edge.

Lisa took another bite, swallowing before replying. “It’s delicious.” Yukina’s face relaxed at the assertion, and she reached for a cookie as well.

Yukina started eating it and seemed satisfied enough to continue.

“What do you need to study for?” Lisa asked as she finished hers, transitioning to the reason they were there.

Yukina flipped open her school bag, lifting out a large textbook. “Music theory.” She said simply, setting the book at an open space on the table. “You have your midterms soon, right?”

“Yeah~” Lisa reached for her stack of flashcards, which were still on the table from earlier. “Science is on Monday.” She had so many things to memorize, and very little time to get it done in.

The two settled into silence as they began studying, not as comfortable as Lisa was used to it being. She flipped through her flashcards, aware of the small sound they made as they were flipped over.

Yukina didn’t seem to notice. She had her eyes locked onto her textbook, and was reading through it. Lisa couldn’t help but glance at her once, then twice, couldn’t help wondering what she was thinking when she asked to do this.

As Lisa returned to her flashcards, she tried to stay focused on them. It was always tempting to flip the card over early, even if she really needed to take time to think about the answer. As she flipped more cards, she discovered that she didn’t know a lot of these terms.

“Would you like me to hold those for you?” Yukina’s voice interrupted Lisa mid card, drawing her gaze.

“That’s ok Yukina, I’ve got it!” Lisa gave her best cat smile.

Yukina didn’t seem impressed. “Can you remember the ones you’ve done so far?” Her hand moved to the small pile of completed cards, snatching them up before Lisa could protest.

“Ummm…” Lisa tried to think back on them, she really did. One had been about carbon, or something. Other than that she was drawing blanks.

Her silence answered the question. “Let me help.” Yukina reached forward with one open palm, the implication clear.

“Don’t you need to study too?” Lisa protested. It would be silly for Yukina to help her with a class she wasn’t taking.

Yukina’s hand didn’t budge. “My tests are a week after yours.”

Lisa sighed, Yukina was just too stubborn for her own good. It was one of the things Lisa admired about her, her persistence towards her goals.

Lisa reluctantly handed over the rest of the cards.

Yukina practically had a cat smile of her own as she mixed the old cards with the larger stack. Then she drew one off the top, showing one side to Lisa.

They continued this activity for a while, with Lisa giving the definitions and answers for each card. She didn’t want to admit it, but this was more productive than studying the cards alone.

Yukina seemed to be enjoying reading the back of the flashcards. She commented sometimes on their contents, about how this science class seemed interesting. Lisa felt more at ease as they worked, settling into the familiarity between her and Yukina.

They worked through the stack of cards, pausing for a break after about an hour.

Lisa went downstairs to make some tea, bringing it back up to her room. She prepared Yukina’s exactly how she liked it.

When she came back into the room, Yukina was flipping through the flashcards. She looked up as Lisa approached.

“Thank you.” Yukina took her teacup from Lisa, cradling it in her hands. Lisa sat back down next to her and sipped her drink.

For a moment, they drank their tea in silence.

Lisa broke it, as she often did. “How’ve your classes been going?” It felt like an appropriate topic, since they were there to study.

“Good, for the most part. I’ve learned a lot from my vocals professor.” Yukina said with a small nod.

“That’s great.” Lisa took another sip of her tea. A thought crossed her mind. Yukina hadn’t ever mentioned anything about her new peers. “Have you been making friends with your classmates?” Lisa thought she might as well ask, even if Yukina wasn’t offering up the information.

Yukina’s eyes narrowed slightly. “No, not at all.” That didn’t really surprise Lisa. “They’re not interested in Roselia.” That was a funny way to put it, like she had tried to tell them all about the band.

Another thought came, triggered by the word interested. This one was unwelcome. What if Yukina had met someone she liked? That seemed unlikely too, but the notion triggered a point of pain in Lisa’s stomach, where she carried stress and anxiety. All the emotions she felt earlier, all of her uncertainty, swept back in. “Did you, umm.” Lisa covered her nervousness with a giggle. “Meet anyone you’re interested in?”

Now Yukina raised an eyebrow. “Interested in?”

Lisa regretted asking, but it was too late to back down now. “Romantically interested.” She clarified, rushing through the words.

Yukina’s expression settled into a frown. “I’m not looking for a relationship there. My focus is on my voice and Roselia.” Her tone was low, carrying a hint of irritation at the question.

Of course, why would Lisa ever expect anything different. Just as today’s study session was definitely not a date, Yukina would not be interested in any of her classmates. She was focused on her music, not anyone else, and certainly not Lisa.

Yukina wasn’t interested in a relationship.

Lisa never should have gotten her hopes up. She knew better, after all this time.

She hadn’t said anything for Yukina to reject, and yet it felt like one.

“That’s very you.” Lisa replied, her smile now strained.

Yukina changed the subject, asking about Lisa’s classes. She happily transitioned to the topic, talking about what she was reading for her literature class.

They studied for a couple more hours, making their way through the rest of the flashcards and a dramatic reading of part of Yukina’s textbook.

When Yukina left, Lisa watched out her window until the light came on across the way.

Maybe it was time to give up on changing their relationship. Lisa was too afraid to try, too afraid to mess things up. Perhaps today was a sign that she should just leave it the same.

As long as things could stay like this, and the two of them could stay together, she would be fine. Yukina wasn’t interested in her, she was okay with it. That was what she told herself, looking out at that shining light in the distance.

She needed to be.

As long as she got to stay by Yukina’s side, Lisa could handle it. She always had.

Next Chapter

#bang dream fanfiction #bandori fanfiction #yukilisa #lisayuki #imai lisa #minato yukina #this ship is ramping up #flip writes

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lingthusiasm · 5 years

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Transcript Episode 40: Making machines learn language - Interview with Janelle Shane

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 40: Making machines learn language - Interview with Janelle Shane. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 40 show notes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about artificial intelligence – teaching computers language – with special guest Dr Janelle Shane, who runs the blog A.I.weirdness.com and is the author of You Look Like a Thing and I Love You, which is a fun new book about A.I. But first, we have some announcements.

Lauren: It’s a new year and we have new, big, exciting plans for the Lingthusiasm Patreon page. We are introducing a Discord, which is an online chat space, for patrons to share their lingthusiasm with their fellow lingthusiasts.

Gretchen: We’ve heard from a lot of you that you got into linguistics because of Lingthusiasm or it reawakened your memories of how much you like linguistics because you did some courses on it way back when and now you wish you could talk about linguistics more. We’re giving you a space where you can talk about linguistics, share your interesting linguistics links that you come across, and talk about them in a space with other lingthusiasm fans. We’re really excited to see what this community becomes. It’s a bit of an experiment, but we think it’ll be really fun to do. You can join the Patreon at the tier where you get bonus episodes as well, and you also have a space to talk about those bonus episodes and the regular Lingthusiasm episodes and any other linguistics things you wanna talk about.

Lauren: We want to see more Lingthusiasm not just online but also on all kinds of things, which is why we are also sending stickers over the next few months to patrons at the Ling-phabet tier. Patrons who are at that tier for three months or more will get stickers that say, “Lingthusiast” on them.

Gretchen: You can stick that to your laptop, your water bottle, your notebook, anything else in your life. Because the original trial run of stickers that we did with the special offer last year were really popular, we thought we’d provide a way for you to do that around the year. You can join that tier on Patreon as well.

Lauren: You can get other items at our lingthusiasm.com/merch page, but the stickers are an exclusive for our patrons.

Gretchen: Thanks to everybody who’s been a patron so far. We’re really excited to see you in the Discord. And we’re excited to get to try that out.

Lauren: Our last exciting announcement is that our patrons also helped us meet a new funding goal, which means that we now have some additional ling-ministration support.

Gretchen: Our fantastic producer Claire, who’s been with us since the very beginning, is also going to be taking on some more of the administration for the podcast, so you’ll see her around a bit on social media and on Patreon. You can listen to a bonus episode with Claire if you’d like to get to know her better as well.

Lauren: Our current bonus is on the future of English and what English might look like in a couple of centuries from now, inspired by Gretchen’s New York Times article.

Gretchen: You can get access to this episode and 34 other bonus episodes – that’s twice as much Lingthusiasm that you can listen to – at patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Gretchen: Hello, Janelle. Welcome to Lingthusiasm!

Janelle: Hi, it’s great to be here.

Lauren: Janelle, we are so excited to have you on the show today to talk about how we can make machines do language.

Gretchen: I think one of the things that we have in common, definitely one of the reasons I enjoy following your blog and Twitter feed and so on, is that both linguists and your approach to A.I. like poking at systems and seeing where they break.

Janelle: Yeah, for sure.

Gretchen: In case some people aren’t already following you on all of the internets, I wanna give people an idea of some of the stuff that you have tried to make break.

Lauren: Janelle, in your work, for people who haven’t seen it, you take large data sets of particular sets of terms or particular language genres, I guess, and then you feed them into an artificial intelligence, and we’ll talk about what that is later, and then it spits out these delightfully whimsical outputs. It takes inspiration from the data set that it’s given. I have a sustained history of laughing inappropriately loudly on public transport while reading your blog because the results are always so entertaining. Gretchen, do you have a favourite to share with us so I can chortle inappropriately?

Gretchen: Lauren, I think we should start with ice cream because I know you have a deep and abiding love of ice cream, and Janelle has come up with ice cream flavours.

Lauren: Yes! Yes, yes, yes. Janelle, where did the ice cream data come from? Did you have a list of ice cream flavours that someone gave you or…?

Janelle: Yeah. In this case, it was a group of middle-schoolers, actually. There’s a school in Austin, Texas, called Kealing Middle School where there is a group of students in the coding classes who decided that – they saw my blog. They wanted to do it too, and they wanted to generate ice cream flavours.

Lauren: Aww.

Gretchen: That’s so great!

Janelle: The thing is, I had looked at that, and I’m like, “Oh, this would be cool.” Then, I looked online and I say, “I need examples of existing ice cream flavours” because the A.I. has to have something to imitate. It doesn’t know about ice cream flavours unless I have some to tell it about. They’re scattered around. There wasn’t any big master list of them. So, I kinda said, “Oh, well. I guess that’s not gonna work.” Then, these middle-schoolers kicked my butt because they went and there was, I dunno, dozens of them – 50, 60 of them. Like, a lot of them. Each of them went and collected a few from this site or that site. Each one site would only have a few at a time. They had to manually copy and paste to this data set. They just, through the sheer numbers and having the time to do it, they put together this amazing data set of existing ice cream flavours. These middle-schoolers ended up getting about 1600 different ice cream flavours. Whereas, I only managed to get together 200. With the data set that much bigger, it made a huge difference. They started generating pretty amusing flavours.

Gretchen: I’ve got the blogpost up about the ice cream flavours from the middle school students, and some of them are really good. There are these whimsical flavours like “It’s Sunday” and “Cherry Poet” and “Brittle Cheesecake” and “Honey Vanilla Happy.” These seem like kind of reasonable ice cream flavours, right?

Lauren: I’d be open to ordering a “Vanilla Nettle.”

Gretchen: “Cherry Cherry Cherry.” If you like cherries, this is the flavour for you. There are also some weirder flavours from this data set like, “Chocolate Finger” and “Caramel Book” and –

Lauren: “Washing Chocolate.”

Gretchen: “Texas Charlie Covered Stunt.” Then, there’s this even weirder category, “Nuts with Mattery,” “Brown Crunch,” “Cookies and Green.”

Lauren: Aww, so close, and yet…

Gretchen: “Mango Cats.”

Lauren: They’re weird to us because of the semantics of them – just to be linguist-y and spoil the moment for a second – but they still are English words, or they look like something we’d recognise as English words, even though I don’t think “mattery” is a word that I know of. I think it’s worth saying artificial intelligence doesn’t know what ice cream is, right, it’s just using this list of flavours to figure out what kind of patterns could fit into that list.

Janelle: Exactly. It’s doing it at a very basic level. Like, what kinds of letters tend to come after other letters? What letters are we often finding in combination? Which letters are we never finding in combination? It’ll learn frequent words like “chocolate” or something. It’ll learn how to spell that after some false starts during training, but, yeah, without any concept of what chocolate is.

Gretchen: If it ends up with something like “Vervette’s Caramel Borfle,” it learned “caramel” but who “Vervette” and “borfle” are, I don’t know. That’s just randomly combining some letters in ways that are probable as English words.

Janelle: Yeah, it’s like a kid who learns how to write and immediately starts putting down letters on paper like, “Is this a word? Is this a word? How do you pronounce this?”

Lauren: Because obviously we train the neural nets that are children’s brains by talking to them a lot and giving them more input and taking them to school and doing those kind of things, but a neural net-type artificial intelligence that we’re doing this kind of training by giving it lots of data, how does it know if it is generating something that is more or less English? Is there a little thing in the computer saying, “Good work, Computer”?

Janelle: What it’s trying to do, how it knows it’s making any progress at all, is its job is to try and predict the next letter or the next combination of letters. Then, it just checks its prediction against some example of real texts that it hasn’t seen before that it saved aside to check itself with and said, “Okay, did I guess close or am I still way off? Am I going to have to change my internal structure so that my guess would’ve been better and see if, going forward, that’s gonna be an improvement?” It’s like a trial and error, guess and check.

Gretchen: When you look at the different sorts of stages – because it goes through several different generations, right? It might start out with just “Here’s a bunch of Es because E is really common.” And then the check is like, “Yeah, but you could do better.”

Janelle: Yeah. It’s like guessing lots of Es is more correct than guessing lots of question marks or lots of Qs. Yeah, it has to say, “Oh, well, maybe I could work in an S from time to time. What do you know? That’s slightly more correct,” and proceeds from there.

Lauren: So, that’s how it learns “chocolate”? Because it might go in with CH and HC, and every time it goes, “Is HC right? Is HC right?” And the data set is like, “Naw, not really.” But when it’s got the CH for an ice cream list, it’s like, getting lots of positive feedback that that’s gonna appear in “chocolate” and “chip” and “cherry.”

Janelle: Yeah, exactly. The process, yeah, it is a lot different from the human child learning language because it’s taking place, really, in isolation with no other context. It’s as if you are setting somebody in a room with just a few dictionaries or a few encyclopaedias written in a language that they don’t understand. It’s even harder for the A.I. because it doesn’t have a concept of what language even is to start out with. It’s all just guessing what comes next in this sequence of arcane symbols.

Gretchen: It doesn’t have a sense of what’s probable in the world either, right?

Janelle: Yeah.

Gretchen: Because you have some of these flavours like “Peanut Butter Slime,” which those are all English words, it’s just it would make a terrible ice cream because slime and peanut butter and ice cream are not things that go together.

Janelle: Yeah, exactly. Or, if I’m getting it to generate Halloween costumes, it’ll come up with “zombie school bus.” It’s like, “Okay, zombie school bus. There’s magic school bus. Why is that more likely than zombie school bus?” We know. It doesn’t.

Gretchen: It doesn’t have any of that real-world knowledge that you can do – or like “Mango Cats.” What does it mean for a cat to be mango? I don’t know.

Lauren: If an artificial intelligence gained sentience, it’s likely it actually wouldn’t be a very good linguistics student because it doesn’t really understand the concept of sounds. It doesn’t seem to have a lot of understanding of the structure of a sentence. We talk in one episode about syntax essentially being this structure that we can hang other bits of sentences off. It has much more of a flat, just looking at the patterns on the surface kind of approach to language.

Janelle: Yeah. Keep in mind, too, the amount of computing power it has to work with is so much less than what it takes for sentience or anything near human level. If you’re looking at raw computing power, the neural nets we have today are somewhere around the level of an earthworm.

Gretchen: Maybe an earthworm would like peanut butter slime-flavoured ice cream.

Janelle: I’ll give all my Peanut Butter Slime to the earthworm.

Lauren: That’s very generous of you.

Gretchen: This was one of the analogies that I liked in your book, which I enjoyed very much. You Look Like a Thing and I Love You – the title of this book was named after another neural net, right?

Janelle: Mm-hmm. This was a phrase generated from a neutral net that was trying to do pick-up lines.

Gretchen: I guess that could be a pick-up line.

Lauren: We have things like ice cream names, and you’ve done death metal names, and Halloween costumes, and colours, and these are all three or four words at most. Pick-up lines is moving into more of the sentence/couple of sentences-type of thing. As the amount of words you’re trying to generate grows longer, how much more difficult does that make it for the artificial intelligence?

Janelle: It makes it a lot more difficult. When I was generating the ice cream flavours and things, I was deliberately going exclusively for these kinds of problems where it would just have to do a couple words at a time because when it tried to do longer sentences or phrases, it would not make sense. One of the things is that the A.I. I was working with at the time didn’t have very much memory at all. So, it would kind of lose track of things that happened a couple of words ago. It wasn’t really able to figure out then how to make a sentence work or make phrases work. It was a bit beyond it. The pick-up lines was definitely a case of, “This is too hard for the A.I.” It struggles, okay, not just the “How do you make a grammatical phrase?” but also “How do you do puns? How do you do innuendo?” These were all things that require a lot of background knowledge that this thing just did not have.

Gretchen: Another example that you use in the book is with recipes, right? It can figure out that you need to list some ingredients, you need to list some instructions, but then those instructions won’t contain the ingredients that were previously mentioned, necessarily, because it doesn’t remember that those are what it listed before.

Janelle: Yeah, we’ll see that. You’ll get something that on the surface at first glance looks like a recipe and then, when you actually read more closely, you’re like, “Wait a second. It has no idea what’s going on. It’s forgotten its ingredients. It’s telling me to chop the milk into cubes. Something’s going on here.”

Lauren: There’s something very confident about the way it fakes its ability.

Janelle: Yeah. Well, I mean, part of the reason it sounds so confident is that it’s copying what humans have written, and humans generally didn’t tend to write in the middle of a recipe, “Uhh, wait a second. I have no idea what’s going on.” It learns that is not a phrase that appears in a recipe, so it’s going to express any kind of confusion. It’s just going to plough ahead with its best guess at what a human would say.

Gretchen: This is where, I think, your famous giraffe question comes from.

Janelle: Ah, yes. I love this chatbot. It’s a chatbot called Visual Chatbot. It’s designed to answer questions about an image. You show it an image and then it comes up with a caption, and then you can have this back and forth conversation with the bot about what it sees in the image. You think that premise would be fairly straightforward, but there are weird quirks that arise just because this thing is trying to copy how humans ask and answer questions about images. The training data is important. In this case, the training data is a whole bunch of people hired through Amazon Mechanical Turk to take turns asking and answering questions about images. Then, the chatbot was trained on answers. So, given this kind of image, given what the question is, what would humans tend to answer in this situation? Some weird quirks emerge just from that premise. One of the things that they wanted to make sure to avoid was this thing called priming. People tend to ask questions to which the answer tends to be “yes.” They found in an early version of this chatbot that they could get 80% accuracy just by answering “yes” to every single yes-or-no question.

Gretchen: Uh-oh!

Janelle: They ended up having to hide the image from the person who was asking questions, so that helped a little bit. Now, it’s about 50/50 if you ask a given question whether it’s going to answer yes or no to that. One of the things that they weren’t able to correct was this interesting thing with the giraffes. What happens is, if you ask the question, “How many giraffes do you see?” the chatbot will almost always return a non-zero answer. It can be doing great about an image and, “Oh, yeah. This is a person on a snowboard. There’s snow,” up until the point where you ask, “And how many giraffes are there?” It will answer, “Three” or “Two” or “Too many to count.”

Lauren: I think it’s just worth clarifying, just to really make this clear, this is not a data set in which giraffes appear in every image.

Janelle: True. Yes. I would love to see that data set – snowboarding with giraffes.

Lauren: “Yeah, there are three giraffes.”

Gretchen: Giraffe snowboarders – this is possible. Because I know this is an ongoing joke that you have, I tested with an image of the cover of my book which, as I think as everyone knows, contains zero giraffes because it’s not about giraffes. Visual chatbot told me that it is a sign that says, “Unknown, unknown, unknown,” on the side of it which I guess is not the worst for a cover that has text in it. It just can’t read the text – sure. Then, I said, “How many giraffes?” and Visual Chatbot said, “Two.”

Janelle: It comes from this thing is copying how humans tend to answer this question. In its examples of humans hired through Amazon Mechanical Turk, the humans had not tended to ask the question, “How many giraffes are there?” when they didn’t know if there were any giraffes.

Gretchen: Right. You’d say something like, “Are there any giraffes?” The person says, “Yes,” and then you say, “How many giraffes?”

Janelle: Exactly. If you ask the chatbot, “Are there any giraffes?” it will answer, “No,” quite often. But then, if you follow up with the question, “And how many giraffes do you see?” it’ll say, “Five.”

Lauren: This approach reminds me of, as Gretchen said earlier, as soon as I get my hands on some kind of thing that’s doing this back and forth question asking or as soon as I’m let loose on a Google Translate, I think it’s a very linguist-brain thing to try and find these points at which the computer can’t handle language properly. It’s always great when you have an approach that understands how humans actually interact with this data that helps explain why you end up getting these really strange answers and why it’s good to have linguists help design artificial intelligence or chatbots and these things because the way humans choose to do language is very different to what we think of as the nice, straightforward application at the end.

Janelle: There’s so many start-ups that are trying to have some kind of bot that you can interact with in an open-ended manner. Then, they run into trouble. Facebook M is one of these services that was discontinued last year because they thought it was going to be like a digital assistant, lives in your browser, you can ask it to do things like look up show times and stuff. But what people ended up asking for was the weirdest, most complicated things. One guy documented, oh yeah, he asked it if it could arrange for a parrot to visit his office. I mean, you’re not gonna prepare for that when you’re training one of these chatbots. It turned out to be the chatbot kept needing humans to step in and rescue it. They realised it was going to be too expense because they were always gonna need these humans.

Lauren: This is a company that has no shortage of resources to throw at a problem like this.

Gretchen: I think if you tell people, “You can interact with this like a human,” they think they can do things like make a request for parrots because humans can understand a request for parrots. Even if I can’t personally deliver you a parrot, at least I understand this request. Whereas, a chatbot, if parrots aren’t in the training data, then parrots don’t exist.

Janelle: This is one of the things, too, that makes it hard to tell the difference between humans and computers when you’re chatting with them. If you’re in a customer service situation, they try to really narrow the context in which you can ask questions and not make it open-ended, especially if they’re going to invisibly use bots because they don’t want you asking for parrots out of the blue.

Gretchen: Right. It’s like when you call into a customer service line, it’s like, “Press 1 to talk to this,” “Press 2 to talk to that,” they really wanna keep your options constrained because then the computer can help you. It’s when it’s open-ended and people start behaving as if it can do anything that a human can do that you start running into problems.

Janelle: Yeah. What you’ll get is you’ll get these companies that’ll build chatbots where it’ll start out as an open-end conversation with something that is secretly a bot but it hasn’t said it is. But then if it gets confused, it’ll invisibly hand control over to a human. That can be problematic because then, if the customer by then is frustrated and thinks they’re dealing with a robot, the poor human employee may not have a very pleasant time with that conversation. What I would really love – what I would love linguists to design for me – is some kind of very polite, in-context way to ask a question or interact with one of these bots that would reveal whether it is a human or a computer, some kind of shibboleth that is never – not asking about his favourite Star Wars character, because that’s impolite if you’re talking to a human employee – but some phrasing or something that’s tricky.

Gretchen: That’s an interesting question because I think, a lot of times, asking for something that’s a little bit non-cooperative, like “How many giraffes?” out of the blue, is maybe gonna deliver that answer. But it’s also gonna be confusing and annoying to a human.

Janelle: Exactly. My default has always been, as soon as a human – because better be polite to a computer than rude to a human sort of thing – but it would be lovely to be able to tell the difference. Companies should just tell us or have a “Talk to a human” button or something, but yeah.

Gretchen: You’re looking for an inverse Turing Test. A Turing Test is this classic test in computer conversation where, if a computer can fool a human into thinking that they’re talking to another human, then they’ve passed the Turing Test. There are ways of passing the Turing Test if you constrain the context enough. Or if you tell people that they’re talking to a child or they’re talking to somebody who’s on some drugs or something like this – or a philosopher – then they’ll be more likely to believe – these are the three kinds of people that a robot can be. But if you try to do something that’s very practical or that is grounded very much in reality, then people aren’t as willing to be generous with the computer’s misinterpretations. Janelle, your blog post that you make the neural nets do funny things, they’re really funny. And yet, I have a feeling that it’s not only that the neural nets are funny, it’s also that you’re really good at spotting the funny bits and bringing them out to a blog post for us.

Janelle: Yeah, there’s a lot of human storytelling work that goes on. How is this going to be interesting? Where is the funny thing that it’s doing? Sometimes, the ratio is like 100 to 1 of things that aren’t very funny that it generates and the one thing that I’m like, “Oh, yeah. I’m posting that.”

Lauren: Because, I guess, the thing about it being a computer process is that you could just generate infinite numbers of nonsensical ice cream names, but a lot of those are too nonsensical to even be particularly amusing.

Janelle: Yeah. It also has a tendency to – especially if we’re dealing with something short-ish and simple-ish like ice cream, then it’ll generate something and it says, “Mint Chocolate Chip,” and I’m like, “Oh. It just copied that.” It learned that one.

Lauren: Learnt that one too well.

Janelle: Yeah. Because as far as these A.I.s are concerned, exactly copying my examples is a perfect solution to the question I’m asking of it. If it can predict every single word, word for word, in the text file that I gave it, then that is a perfect score. Sometimes, it’s almost like a battle for me to try to get it to be just bad enough at the task.

Gretchen: Not so bad that it’s incoherent, but bad enough that humans can resolve what it’s supposed to mean and it’s still funny.

Lauren: One application of this name-generation process you’ve been doing was when you created a list of craft beer names and a company actually took one of those names to create a beer. Was that a process that you embarked on because you thought this was a good place to experiment with creative naming or how did that come about?

Janelle: This was one of the things where I happened to know somebody who was friends with the owner of the brewery, and I thought, “Well, this would be fun to actually get one of these beers to exist in real life,” because people keep saying that the names A.I.s are generating are pretty good. In the case of craft beer names, there’ve actually been companies who have taken each other to court over having beer names that were too close to one another. There’s this need to maybe show there’re ways to still come up with new beer names and we hadn’t exhausted all the possibilities yet.

Lauren: It’s really a collaboration between you and the A.I. where you are curating all of the names that it gives you in order to find the ones that have that perfect balance of following the rules you’ve given it but with a bit of a lateral thinking approach.

Janelle: Yeah. Just the right amount of lateral thinking as well, too. Sometimes, it’s way off the mark and comes up with, I don’t know, “Farm Fight,” as a name for beer. I’m like, “Well…”

Gretchen: Here are some of the beer names that were on the list like “Dang River” and “Binglezard Flack” and “Toe Deal” and “Devil’s Chard.”

Lauren: Some of them I can almost imagine being a craft beer. In the end, it was “The Fine Stranger” that was bottled and labelled.

Gretchen: That’s good. I think the examples are very funny, but there’s also an important part of making a lot of funny examples, right? It’s not just to entertain people, even though it is very entertaining.

Janelle: There’s people using these practically as their business in coming up with brand names. I did this one beer. There’s a whole art to naming brands, and it’s not just coming up with the names, but it’s also this whole framing of “Because of the etymology of this and that” or “Because the computer mashed this together with that.” There’s definitely a storytelling element to it as well. When I was going through this process with the beer, I was definitely getting the sense of, “Oh, yeah. I’ve got all these great names.” Any – not any one of these – but many of them would make great beer names, and the beer would sell well, and the brewery would be happy with it. But, yeah, how do I put it on the marquee, put it on the silver platter and make them actually say, “Yes. The authority has spoken. This is the name.”

Gretchen: Beyond brand names, there’re also lots of other practical applications people are using artificial intelligence for now, whether that’s machine translation or self-driving cars or all of these sorts of very practical aspects to things. It’s hard to see the inside of a self-driving car, and what that looks like, and how it’s making problems for things. Whereas, it’s easier to see what happens when you make a bunch of weird ice cream flavours.

Janelle: Exactly. That’s why I like doing these tests. Some of the biggest applications for A.I. is in doing financial predictions or looking for fraudulent logins and things like that where it, maybe, is comprehensible to somebody who’s in that field, but the way that they’re making mistakes in that field is not very obvious, not very interesting, if you’re not right there in that field working with these kinds of numbers all the time. If it’s making a mistake on an ice cream flavour, that is much faster to see, “Oh, yeah, it’s doing pattern matching. Oh, yeah, it doesn’t understand what it’s doing.” A lot of these same mistakes really do translate over to commercial applications.

Lauren: We’ve talked a little bit about how you have to curate the output because it will just keep spitting out silly ice cream names forever. We’ve talked a little bit about some of the problems with the types of data that are put into these processes in terms of, you know, if you don’t set it up very well and you have people answering questions about giraffes in a way that the A.I. is going to implement weirdly. There are bigger and more serious implications for thinking about the kind of data that we are using to create artificial intelligence processes not just with language but particularly for this topic looking at the kinds of data that people use to build artificial intelligence. You talk about this a bit in your book. Where do you see some of the biggest challenges in creating good A.I.?

Janelle: One of the things is, remember these A.I.s have about the raw computing power of an earthworm and they don’t have the context, then, to realise that there are some things that the humans do that they probably shouldn’t be copying. Completely unknowingly, they will copy things like racial/gender discrimination and they won’t know that that’s what they’re doing. They won’t know that that’s a bad thing. They just really can’t comprehend it.

Gretchen: It’s kind of like the chatbot that figures, “Oh, if I just answer yes to everything, I’ll get 80% accuracy,” even though it’s not actually useful, communicatively, to just answer yes to everything.

Janelle: It’s like this is exactly what you have asked for but is not necessarily what you want. When we give it a bunch of human decisions on resume sorting, for example, and we tell it, “Copy these human decisions,” then these algorithms can look and say, “Well, this is a very difficult problem, but looks like all of the applicants who’ve gone to this one college tend not to be hired” and “Oh, that college is a women’s college” and it is implementing the gender discrimination that it’s seeing in its training data because it saw this signal, didn’t know what it was, only knew that it was helping it copy the humans a little better.

Gretchen: Right. If the humans are already having their sets of bias and if I can magnify that bias, like if you have a human that’s answering “yes” 80% and now the A.I.’s answering “yes” 100% of the time, it doesn’t know what it’s doing.

Janelle: Exactly. Yeah. They are so good about being sneaky about – you may think that if you set up a resume sorting algorithm saying, “Well, we’re just not gonna tell it what gender any of these applicants are” and it is very good at figuring this out not just through colleges but through if somebody has their extra-curriculars listed and “women’s soccer team” is on there, it will glom onto that. Or even subtleties with word choice and phrasing, it will start using those kinds of trends and use them to copy the humans better.

Gretchen: I’m thinking about a different resume study which showed that people – they had the same sorts of resumes – people with a white-sounding name versus with a black-sounding name were more likely to get called back for interviews. You can imagine in the A.I. that it actually just learns how to predict based on someone’s name. Like, “Oh, we’ve hired a lot of people named ‘Mike’ at this company.” We all know these companies that have a whole bunch of people named “Mike” and “Adam” and stuff. “Maybe we should just only interview the people named ‘Mike.’”

Janelle: It will absolutely do that sort of thing. You see there’s a lot of companies out there that are offering resume screening but knowing what I know about how commonly these A.I.s can pick up on this bias I would not want one of these programs screening resumes for my company, for example. Or I would, at the very least, demand to see the evidence that this thing is not making biased decisions.

Gretchen: Right. That’s a sort of way of saying, “Okay, well, if this A.I. still thinks ‘Slime’ is a good flavour for ice cream, then really how much can we trust it to make a good decision about resumes?”

Janelle: I think that’s almost the counter-intuitive danger about A.I. in a lot of ways. It’s not that it’s too smart and it’s going to take over the world and it’s not gonna obey humans – no. The problem is that it’s not smart enough to realise what we’re actually trying to ask it to do.

Lauren: It keeps obeying us too well in ways that we don’t want it to.

Janelle: Yeah, if it can. When it comes to language generation, language processing, human language is really, really difficult. So, that particular domain, more than a lot of others, you’ll see these A.I.s that are really struggling to get a handle on what the humans are saying.

Lauren: It’s good news that linguists will have jobs for a little bit longer.

Janelle: Yeah.

Gretchen: One of the questions that really came up in my mind when we were thinking about interviewing you was, can the A.I. take my job as the co-host of the podcast, Lingthusiasm? If Lauren and I want to go live on a beach somewhere, can we replace, as co-hosts, a bot-generated Gretchen and Lauren to run this podcast? Lauren, what do you think?

Lauren: We actually put this to Janelle a few years ago, back when we started releasing transcripts for our early episodes. About three years ago, in 2016/2017, we didn’t have many episodes, so we didn’t have a lot of data to work with, but also it seems like in these last few years, the ability to process larger text has gotten better. Is that the case, Janelle?

Janelle: Yeah, that’s definitely the case. The kinds of things I was doing in 2016 – generating words, short phrases, paint colour names, ice cream flavour names, those sorts of things – I wouldn’t think of tackling entire sentences or, let alone, sentences that follow one another that make sense. But now, just pretty much in the last year, there’s been some really big A.I.s that have been trained on millions of pages from the internet. They are much better at generating text. They can generate grammatical sentences most of the time now. Most of the words that they use are real words. They still don’t understand what they’re saying. I think, yeah, it has gotten better.

Gretchen: You can potentially take something that’s been trained on, let’s say, most of the English pages of the internet and then fine-tune it on a smaller data set to try to push it more in the direction of just, for a random example, Lingthusiasm episodes.

Janelle: Yes. If, hypothetically, I had many episodes worth of Lingthusiasm transcripts, I might be able to make a robo-Gretchen and a robo-Lauren.

Lauren: Do you know what else has happened in the last couple of years, Gretchen?

Gretchen: I think we’ve produced a lot more episodes of Lingthusiasm.

Lauren: Between the main episodes and the bonus episodes, we have 70 transcripts, which is over 800 pages of data. Janelle, would that be enough to have a go at creating a robo-Gretchen and a robo-Lauren?

Janelle: There’s one way to find out.

Gretchen: Oh, boy! Let’s do some live neural netting on the podcast.

Janelle: All right! What could possibly go wrong?

Gretchen: Okay. Can you walk us through what are you doing right now on your computer?

Lauren: Janelle’s gonna share her computer with us so that we can see what’s happening, but we might get some screen grabs as we go through.

Gretchen: We may put some links into the show notes if there’s stuff that’s visual that’s hard to see as well.

Janelle: What we’re looking at right now, this is actually just a browser window in Chrome. What I’m looking at is a thing that is an interface to an A.I. that’s being hosted on Google’s computers right now. Google is graciously allowing people to use their powerful computers that are pretty specialised for these kinds of calculations. Even though I am working on a fairly ordinary laptop, I’m able to connect to some fairly serious firepower here.

Lauren: It’s really interesting to get to see under the hood of making an A.I. run. I think we’ll give people a bit of a taste of that here, but if you want more details and more of an explanation of how we made “Robot Lingthusiasm,” we’ll make that into a bonus episode.

Janelle: So, here we are. I’ve connected to this A.I. I’ve downloaded a copy of it. Now, I’m going to upload lingthusiasm.txt. I’m going to upload this file of 2.4MB of you two talking. Let’s – okay. Okay. We’ve got our first sample out here right now. “It is already conversations.”

Lauren: Except it’s just conversation by someone called “Gina.”

Gretchen: Maybe this is the hybrid between the two of us – our merged alter-ego? Shall we read a few of these lines, Lauren? I think we should each start with “Gina” as we’re reading the lines.

Lauren: Okay.

Gretchen: First line. This is the first of Gina’s lines. “Gina: Yeah, that’s why I’m gonna be honest with you.”

Lauren: “Gina: We’re not always going to be like, ‘Oh, we don’t know why we did that.’ That’s why.”

Gretchen: “Gina: I know. The people who’ve come to me to ask me are gonna be like, “Yeah, I didn’t know who was getting up and down the stairs and going to a doctor’s appointment.”

Lauren: Okay. So, not very Lingthusiasm in content there, but I like where Gina’s going.

Gretchen: Yeah. I like that it’s getting a dialogue thing. We’re pleased to announce that, in fact, your Lingthusiasm hosts will be replaced by robots but only for one episode and it will be bonus and it will be very, very funny. You can go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to listen to the next bonus episode, which will be written by robots and performed by you and me, Lauren.

Lauren: To listen to that bonus episode, check out patreon.com/lingthusiasm. You can hear us reading some of our favourite examples. We will also give patrons access to some of those reams of examples so you can find ones that make you chortle as well. It’ll have some screenshots from the A.I.-building process for patrons as well. Thank you so much, Janelle, for taking us through the process of actually training a neural net artificial intelligence and showing us some of the pitfalls and some of the challenges and for talking to us today. If people want to read more about how artificial intelligence is making the world weirder and more wonderful, and some of the challenges and limitations, your book is You Look Like a Thing and I Love You. I loved reading it.

Gretchen: Yes, I can personally attest that I got my copy the night before my book came out when I was very distracted. It successfully distracted me for several hours while I was waiting for that countdown, midnight, to have that happen. It has lots of fun pictures of weird things that the A.I.s are doing as well. Thanks again for coming on the show.

Janelle: Oh, it was my pleasure. This was a lot of fun. I loved listening to your very strange generated conversations.

[Music]

Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, including extended versions of A.I.-generated Lingthusiasm transcripts, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, or wherever else you get your podcasts, and you can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, IPA ties, IPA socks, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet.

Lauren: I tweet and blog as Superlinguo. Janelle Shane is @JanelleCShane on Twitter, her blog is aiweirdness.com, and her book is You Look Like a Thing and I Love You. To listen to bonus episodes and help keep the show ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Recent bonus topics include future English, onomatopoeia, and linguistics fiction. If you can’t afford to pledge, that’s okay too. We really appreciate it if you could recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life.

Gretchen: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer to Claire Gawne, and our editorial producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Janelle: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

#language #linguistics #lingthusiasm #episode 40 #transcripts #Janelle Shane #artificial intelligence #Neural net #roboLingthusiasm #AI

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gallivantingheart · 5 years

Text

actions + consequences

who?: woozi/jihoon x reader

word count: 2159

genre/s: fluff, watery af angst

warnings: some mild language

synopsis: jihoon learned quick that you meant every threat that passed your lips, the consequences looming overhead always until one of you followed through. the bitter taste of your own medicine.

Your avengers nursery rhyme ringtone sings at 9:40, fairly early for him. He glances down to it, finding a few messages along with it. Three missed calls later, he picks up.

“Hey, what is it?” he's a bit curt, irritated his train of thought has been broken.

“Where are you?” you bite off, a snarl rumbling in the back of your throat.

“The studio, where else?”

You huff. “How about at our date at our favourite chicken place over an hour ago?”

His heart sinks. “Damn it. I'm sorry, I lost track of time. Our deadline for drafts are close and-”

“Ji, it always is.” you sound exasperated, another tense sigh puffing free. He hears the jingle of the door as you leave out onto the street. “But we made plans for this weeks in advance so you knew and had a chance to clear your schedule. Or at least time to change it. Because you've skipped out on too many before! Sure, I could have brought it to you, but the point was to get you away from work. An hour, half - dammit Jihoon, five minutes to pop in, pick it up and piss off!”

You were trying your best not to take it out on him. You'd kind of accepted that no matter how much he tried to refute it, music was his first love - always has been, always will be. You were just kind of hoping he would manage his time better between you and it.

He cringes as your voices rises momentarily, glad that it wasn't because of dance practice - taking this call alone was humiliating enough. Still, he purses his lips fondly as you take a moment to breathe to try and rein it in. His phone tucked against his shoulder, he starts packing up.

“How about I come down now? If only for a little bit? Would that fix some of this?”

He knows as soon as he's said it, it's wrong. Your breath hitches and he can feel the clench of your teeth through the phone.

“No, it wouldn't. Not when you put it like that. Like I'm an inconvenience. You're there, stay.” He tries to cut in but you talk over him. “I would have been fine with a proper sorry and a rain check but you know what? I'm suddenly very busy.”

He gets a hasty good night and that’s that. Slouching back into his chair, he sighs, rubbing at his face. He didn't like the tone of how you said that. It meant more than just something little. Jihoon groans and finishes up anyway.

You're right. Suddenly, his phone calls are missed, messages replied to just before your bedtime. Jeonghan and Jun are your new best friends, out with you multiple times that week. You call still, but conveniently when he can't pick up - during practice and just before your class. When he's too tired to roll over and pick up at three in the morning and you're hacking away at an assignment. He knows he's in trouble. Jeonghan even goes as far to say it.

“You're not happy. Neither is she.” Jeonghan says, plopping next to him.

The compact producer sighs. “I...I miss her. Really. I didn't mean to. Time just...gets away from you, you know?”

“Yeah, I get it. So, are you going to make this up to her?” he says during stretches, voice airy as usual.

“I - I don't know how.” Jihoon mumbles. “You've been with her a lot, what do you think?”

If you wanted advice, you went to Jeonghan. He was easy to talk to, always listened and offered up something straight to point, even through his jokes. Even secrets - there was something about his angel face that made you want to talk to him.

“Do something that fits with her schedule. Surprise her. God dammit, feed her, she eats like a horse! No, like Mingyu!”

Jihoon smiles fondly at Jeonghan’s complaint, ducking his head under his twisting arms. “I know she does.”

All through practice, his mind churns, ideas on backburner. Food, surprises. Something obviously enjoyable for you. But for him too or else you would feel selfish and pout all the way home. They're on their way back to the dorms, Seokmin asking for the long way, past the nearby uni campus - he doesn't ask for much, so he's easy to indulge. There are signs and banners for an anniversary fair. Jihoon’s eyes light up.

To: y/n 💕

Let me know when you're not busy. We should go out.

He's a little pensive over his message. When and how you would receive it. He wanted to do this on your terms, but it still had to happen.

It's organised on a saturday in a week’s time. He can feel the unspoken threat in her text confirming it - I'm making time, so should you. He clears out his schedule on the friday and the sunday, just in case. Better to be idle for a bit that bogged down with work.

Seeing as this would be a bit more showy on his part, he decides to dress the part, opting out of sweats for jeans and a dark tee under an equally dark hoodie. Sneakers, cap and glasses. He stares at a navy mock varsity jacket, considering it. Finally, he shrugs it on, jamming his phone and wallet in the pockets - you would get cold, you always do. Nondescript but still together. He agrees to picking you up, putting his licence to use.

You're waiting on your front step in frayed ankle jeans, heeled sandals and a tan oversized tee. You have a jumper slung over your forearm, hair whipping in the wind and your purse hanging at your side. He can't help but smile at the sight of you. He missed you, so much. The studio too quiet and empty, his nights monotonous and draining without that little reminder and support - radio silence was hard.

Jihoon hops out to greet you and open your door. You're smiling too, a lot shyer than he. He knows you've made more of an effort than usual from the way the edges of your eyes shimmer with eyeshadow, lashes long and fluttery and your nose doesn't shine so much.

He reaches out to peck a glance of a kiss, as restrained as he can. He would let you dictate boundaries, in case you're still annoyed. But for you, it's like withdrawal. The lack of his compact warmth and piercing laugh down the phone line. You missed his quiet company as you wrangled with your studies. You bridge the gap and hug him tight, burrowing into his thick hoodie and slipping your arms under his jacket, round his waist. He smells like coffee and fresh linen.

“Hi. Nice to see you.” You murmur.

If it weren't for the time apart, you would have cared a little more about his aversion to pda or affection at all. He returns the gesture, bringing you in tighter.

“Hey. You ready?” he says.

You nod, pulling back. Pulling a page from Joshua’s book, he opens the door for you to the little car. Making sure you're settled before doing it all himself again. You cruise off, your eyes watching him and the world outside.

“So, where are we going?” you ask.

“A surprise.” he says simply, trying to bury the smirk at your pout.

The way you lip juts out, bringing the edges of your brows down with it is adorable and always gets you your way. You turn the radio on, playing low while you talk for some background noise.

“Am I going to like it? Can I have a clue?”

Jihoon rolls his eyes. “Of course you'll like it! I wouldn't be taking you there otherwise! And no, you cannot have a clue. All I'll say is that we'll eat and come home with more than we arrived with and hopefully some good memories. Unless you throw up - you don't get motion sickness, do you?”

You laugh and shake your head, more confused than before, but still with a bubbling excitement. It simmers down a little when you look at the time - early evening.

“What time do you have to be back by? When's work?” you murmur.

“I'm sorry, but you're stuck with me till tomorrow night. My phone is on do not disturb and I have no schedules at all. Just in case.” he replies - from the way his eyes glitter and his nose points up in his profile, you know he's preening.

You squint, bitterness tinging the edges of your taste buds. “Really?”

He drops a hand from the steering wheel to squeeze your hand. He glances at you, eyes warm and a firm set to his brows.

“Yeah. Really.”

You pull up at a field, tents and lights flashing. Parking out on the grass, you're bouncing in excitement.

"A fair!"

He nods. "Saw it the other week. I thought it would be perfect." He looks at you. "This okay?"

You nod, hand slipping into his as you pull him along to the ticket booth at the gates. In your heels, you're a little bit taller than him, but he doesn't mind. It sort of makes it a bit easier to watch your face light up at the attractions and stalls. You direct him to the fairy floss stand, begging for a rainbow one in the shape of a flower. It's not hard to say yes to it, seeing the content gather in your eyes from the fluffy sugar rush. You pluck bits of fluff off, tickling them over his lips to entice Jihoon into consuming.

He convinces you to go on a few of the more daring rides, like The Tornado and The Kraken, your hand shaking in his as you stand in line on the wearing grass. He's never heard you swear so much from the fear and panic. After Electric Shock, you request a break, knees shaking as you walk down the metal stairs. Jihoon graciously gives you his arm for support.

He smiles as your heart still thunders in your ears. You plonk down on a bench, not too far from a photo booth and hall of mirrors. Your eyes are dazed and he tentatively moves his hand from yours to wrap around your shoulders.

"You okay?" He says softly, barely heard over the roaring crowds and music of the attractions.

You look at him and nod. "Yeah, I'm good. Just...need a minute. The rides are…"

Jihoon nods back. "I know they're a lot for you. I’m proud of you giving them a go. I wanted to - are we - I just - hey, are we good?" You look over at him, head tilted in question. Jihoon is a little too shy and guilty to look at you, instead hanging his head and looking at your knees. "I'm sorry about the other week. I've got no real excuse. You're just as important to me as my music and the guys, I should’ve appreciated you more. I have time for you, always. I swear I've learnt my lesson."

You beam and laugh a little, shuffling to press yourself against his side, resting your cheek against his neck. "Good. I'm glad. I really missed you."

The two of you take a minute to absorb each other’s presence and let your own heart slow down. When your hands have stopped their nervous shaking, you pull back and pop up to eye your boyfriend, pulling him standing.

“You know what we haven’t done yet?” You chirp.

He tilts his head. “What? The haunted house?”

You scowl. “Yes, but please no. You haven’t won me a soft toy yet.”

Jihoon’s impassive expression morphs into a laugh as he stoops over at your demand. Standing next to you, he slips an arm around your waist and leads you down sideshow alley, stall owners harassing the crowds with flashing lights and carnival music. The two of you are jostled by sugar-filled fair goers, the crowd’s ebb and flow turbulent.

“Now I want a big one. Biggest you can get, all cute and fluffy too. You’ve got all the other dads and boyfriends here as competition, so get your game face on.” You pep talk him through what you think is well-buried shiver.

With a knowing grin, he shrugs his jacket off in favour of putting it round your shoulders. “Since when have you been so competitive?”

“Since there’s a teddy in the mix. You know I’m a sucker for the cute stuff.” You smirk and poke his cheek. “Like you.”

He screws his nose up, but beams shy through a blush. “Shut up, that was gross.”

He stands at a stand of shooting ducks, bending forward to pay for a game and you wriggle closer. “Kiss for good luck?”

“You’re getting worse. Stop or I won’t play.”

(He wins first round.)

(You also get the biggest bear.)

#lee jihoon #jihoon #woozi #seventeen woozi #seventeen fluff #seventeen fic #seventeen imagine #seventeen scenarios #woozi imagine #woozi fic #written

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anne-lister-adventures · 4 years

Text

Sunday, 3 May 1840

8 25/’’

Very fine morning Reaumur 11 2/3º at 9 a.m. breakfast at 9 55/’’ to 10 35/’’ – Some Officer called at 9 55/’’ but not admitted – Sorry we were just sitting down to breakfast – The Officer who came before breakfast came again just as we had began prayers about 11 and staid and staid till Madame Besoc and Madame Vassilikofski (right spelt 2 or 3 pp.[pages] ago – Madame Mendt’s sister) had come and gone and Madame B-[Besoc] asked us to dinner tomorrow – Very civil –

The Officer of Belgian descent, Blaramberg, brother or cousin to a Colonel of the État Major from St. P-[Petersburg] of the suite of General du Hamel the Russian Ambassador in Persia now at Ispahan – He had just had letter from there in 24 days came on hearing of going to Persia to hope we should see his brother or cousin – Asked to bring his wife – A Greek, née Mavromichaly – Her uncle is Minister de la Guerre or something under K. Otho at Athens, and our Officer (degradé for 3 years for fighting a duel) if he does not get his father’s place at Kertch, head of the Musée of Antiquities there and settle comfortably there may probably go to and settle at Athens – The Emperor does not object to people leaving his service and settling in other countries but if they do this, does not permit them to return –

Mr. B-[Blaramberg] gone, we were just beginning prayers a 2d.[2nd] time when the Directeur of the Gymnase called and sat talking a longish while – An agreeable man – Mentioned General Prince Barataieff as très instruit in the antiquities of this country –

When he went recommenced prayers and had just finished when Mr. Roubetz called and sat perhaps 1/4 hour till 2 35/’’ – While the Directeur du Gymnase was here, a man brought 2 Billets d’Entrée invitation to the ball tonight – Much obliged – Sorry we could not go, I having nothing to go in but black which I could not appear in it being the fête day of the Empress of the Grand Duke Héritier and of one the Grand Duchesses –

Wrote the above of today till now 3 1/4 when A-[Ann] prepared dinner – Dinner at 3 1/2 to after 4 – Then reading Dubois vol.[volume] 3, and dozing till 5 40/’’ very fine sunny afternoon –

A-[Ann] and I out at 6 – But I found she could not get on – And turning back with her took 20 minutes – I took George and set off again at 6 20/’’ – Walked thro’ the low part of the Town, over the bridge to the hill on the other side the river – A great many people there – Fête for the 2 or 3 last Sundays – Today the last Sunday –

View of Tiflis, by Roskoschny (c. 1884).

Went into the curious little old Georgian church or Monastery walled round – A priest preaching – The little church full – Passed under clocher into the churchyard – Then pronaos, church, and part under the dome (chancel) up to the alter table where the priest stood – Church full of people – All the plateau of the mountain in the vicinity of the church covered with tombs, and 3 little ruined brick chapels near – Walked over the tops of the Sacles – Fine views of the river – There was music said George a little farther on – But saw the whole and returned at 7 and home at 7 35/’’ –

A[Ann] out of sorts but took no notice Tea – Had Domna at 8 40/’’ then sat reading till 10 – Have during the day spelt over the Etat Major map and read to p.[page] 155 vol.[volume] III. Dubois’s Caucasus – Very fine day –

Roubetz said the whole of the troops here in the province sixty to eighty thousand are dead in ten years an officer of the etat major takes on an expedition two horses for himself to ride and one for his sservant and two for baggage –

Told the Directeur du Gymnase I had wished before he mentioned it this morning to get some Armenian inscriptions copied – He said Mr. Brosset of the Academy of St. P-[Petersburg] had asked him to get all he could and he should set all the distant Maitres de Gymnase to work – He himself must learn Tatar, and will take lessons – Tatar is indispensable – Almost all the Georgians speak Tatar as well as their own language –

Tis now 10 20/’’ p.m. very fine day –

[symbols in the margin of the page:] ✓ ✓c ✓ ✓ +

[in the margin of the page:] Armenian inscriptions to be copied

Page References: SH:7/ML/E/24/0095

#anne lister code breaker #anne lister #ann walker #moscow to baku 1840

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awhilesince · 4 years

Text

Friday, 19 February 1830

Friday 19

8 3/4

1 5/60

Incurred a cross last night gently thinking of Pi (Mariana) Dressed in an hour a little motion getting up cutting open and reading Nysten’s dictionary de medicine jusqu’à 11 heures – Dejeuner en 25 minutes –

from 11 1/2 to 3 read over my letter to M– (Mariana) and wrote one end, and sent it to the post office about 1 to “Mrs Lawton 16 South Parade, Leamington, Warwickshire, Angleterre” – kind letter of chit chat – mentioned dining at the embassy on Friday and should have dined at the de N–s’ (Noés’) on Sunday and gone to the ball on Monday but prevented by sick headache – never fear more groundless than my becoming so wedded to the world as not to relish more rational and less exciting enjoyments – say I am no grumble against the world, it is not in my nature to be so ungrateful, but if I must make mental wreck it is not likely to be on shifting shoals of people but rather on dreary reefs of solitude – but will not enter on this subject now – will hear what Miss MacL– (MacLean) says – surely something will be hit upon by and by – no fault to find with Cameron – she is very well conducted and obliging – not more careless than probably others would be and anxious to do as well as she can, that I am desired of giving her chance – she would do well enough if M– (Mariana) was with me – but she is not in fact, a servant quite to suit me – she has all learn and “I, vous savez bien pourquoi, am the person to train up a lady’s maid in the way she should go” – If she cannot at last get to suit me, I shall, at all rates, not part with her till I have some reasonable hope of getting a better – mention Miss MacL–‘s (MacLean’s) so excellent account of M–‘s (Mariana’s) looks and spirits – and her having told Miss MacL– (MacLean) she meant to pay me a visit soon – asked what this might mean –

wrote 3 pages of a small sheet to Miss H– (Hobart) – thanks for the little cardcase – delighted to find I was not rubbed out of her remembrance – Surely she would understand that it was no complaint on my part to say, I would far rather have this little specimen of her handiwork than all the fine things that all the people ever made at Spa – said I instantly recollected her own – Charles shook hands with him and claimed our

left margin: acquaintance of almost 2 years standing, dating from Edinborough May 1828. Was not this wonderful for me whose memory gently serves me so ill in remembering people – mentioned dining at the Embassy on Friday myself and Lady S– (Stuart) de R– (Rothesay) the only ladies at dinner –

tho’ several came afterwards – had a little chit chat with Lady S– (Stuart) de R– (Rothesay) like her very much – she is naturally quick and clever – has 2 ideas when other people have one – Glad she was at Wimpole, because everybody delighted to have her and I know she always enjoys herself – thought, too, change of air would do both her and Lady Stuart good – knew not whether it was unreasonable or not de ma part, but began to think it long since I heard from Lady S– (Stuart) mention my letter this day week from Madame de Hagemann – concluded with saying my head would let me write no more than ever affectionately hers – Stupid sort of letter but my head ached biliously, and I could not write better –

then wrote full 1/2 sheet to Miss MacL– (MacLean) delighted with Mr Lindeley’s so good account of her – thought he seemed come here to see if he could turn his services to better account than at home – but what I had read on the subject was not likely to flatter his hopes much – he seemed unprepared for the necessary etiquette about being presented to the royal family here – made no other observation respecting him – no hint that I thought him vulgarish anything but highbred –

after 2 George brought in the card of “Mr Willoughby Crewe Hotel Aubin Rue Rivoli” with parcel containing the bond I gave M– (Mariana) at Lawton in 1826 for £200, and her marriage settlement bond, and the little dialogue she wrote (very well done) addressed to the lower class explanationary of her Friendly Society rules –

went out at 3 10/60 – my aunt with me – drove to the bois de B– (Boulogne) walked 1 3/4 hour my usual round by Boulogne and Auteil – back to the Porte Maillot – En passing left at the embassy my letter (sans envelope) to “Miss Hobart Honorable Lady Stuart’s Whitehall”, and my letter to “Miss Maclean 12 New Street, Dorset Sqare” – home at 5 3/4 – gave out 2 dozen servants wine – dressed dinner at 6 1/2 – read partly aloud, the whole of the paper –

came to my room at 8 1/2 – read my letter one full 1/2 sheet and 1 page another 1/2 sheet very kind letter from Lady Stuart dated Wimpole 15 February – but a so so account of herself – there is a place on her ankle Mr Freeman wishes her to be careful of –she feels as if she had no strength in her legs to support her – Alas! the infirmities of old age are creeping thickly on her – yet a little while and I shall have lost this good friend – speaking of Lord Graves and our sorry etc etc she adds “there is no doubt “higher powers had urged him to forget and forgive and that he could not stand it …… he must have quite lost himself as starvation attends his family as all he did dies with him – It seems Mr Charles Stuart is only come for a fortnight – then read my letter from Miss MacL– (MacLean) 4 pages and page and a few lines of crossing of 1/2 sheet envelope – unclosing 2 1/2 sheet notes from Lady Anderson (wife of Sir James A– (Anderson) lately ruined by failure of his steam carriage speculation) soliciting £1 to buy in a steam horse – it was said it might be bought in at this, tho’ it cost Sir James £80 – the intention was to exhibit this horse at one shilling each person on admission – what a resource! she finding herself in a family way, will not appear on the stage of a year – Miss MacL– (MacLean) wisely declined advancing the money herself, but did what she could to collect it among Lady A–‘s (Anderson’s) country women (the Irish) –

Miss MacL– (MacLean) gives a good account of herself about a page on the whole much less there usual on the high merits and success of Mr Long – “I am continuing as well as I think I ever shall be, and happy to feel myself as I am but I shall “say no more on my health but leave you to the faithful reporters at Whitehall who are at this moment at Wimpole” which I think rather an indecorous proceeding Henry having twice passed thro London without calling and they were promised him as their inducement to the visit but I mean never more to utter a word on the subject to Vere she has had all sorts of warning from me and may heaven direct her to what is best I wish with all my heart a vain wish that she had never accompanied you to Paris as the things of this passing world occupy her far more than formerly “There is a lady of comfortable independent fortune here Sarah Lawrence’s most intimate friend – who is wishing for a Travelling Companion for some years – she goes in spring to Paris” …… Miss MacL– (MacLean) mentioned me – anxious to hear all about me – “I do not know her much – she seems kindhearted – money in sufficiency, a harp in her room, looks musical – she seems healthy and good humoured – and speaks thro’ her nose smart in her dress – and I should think a few years older than you” – good enough! but I now feel that it is necessary to inquire well into Miss MacLs recommendations I know nothing of Mrs Lawrence were the lady a friend of Lady Ss or of Veres the case would be different as it is I doubt much besides my fancy runs on Miss MacKenzie Miss MacL– (MacLean) drolly enough concludes with (quite abruptly brought in) “Mrs Lawton is your best friend – no one loves so enthusiastically as she does” – this strikes – I know and believe it –

Coffee at 9 40/60 – came to my room at 10 1/4 – from then to 11 1/2 wrote the whole (but the 2 first lines) of the above of today – fine day – Fahrenheit 36° I think when I got up this morning, but 40° at 10 1/4 p.m. – a very little sun today, but not much –

Letter this morning 1 page from Miss Pickford Place de Noailles no. 49 Marseille Bouches du Rhône February 14 – “Fahrenheit 55° 1 p.m.” – to ask me to see and get Madame Marcet sent off if possible to Marseille as they stay there till the 24th instant – Reading a little anatomy Cloquet volume 2

(SH:7/ML/E/12/0167)

#annelistercodebreaker #annelister #paris #1830 #paris february 1830

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blackcoffeeandblankpagess · 6 years

Text

Little weekend snippets ✨

Friday

-had an interview in the afternoon for next year yeeee

-received birthday flowers from my lovely D @sweeterthanabumblebee, something wonky is going on with the mail this week literally three different people mailed me things express on monday to get here on wednesday (my birthday), got D’s thing friday, my mom’s thing TODAY, and still have yet to recieve the final package (who knows at this point)

-went with pals to see one of our friend’s band play at a local bar, they were really good and it was cool to see a new music venue, we had margs before hand and there is no doubt that they are my beverage of choice

Saturday

-woke up stressing that I had to complete a follow up questionnaire (basically a second application) for the position I interviewed for, I only had 48 hours to complete it from the time I recieved it and the questions were pretty thought provoking which I respected but was STRESS. FUL.

-^ completed said questionnaire

-jared coerced me into a brunch date after finishing that and it was a good mental refresh before diving into a major research project for the remainder of the weekend

-dove into the research project! It is my final project from my GIS in public health class and its a doozy

-went over to jared’s fo dinner and he made tikka masala again (so good) and we watched queer eye until his roommate returned

-spent the next two hours talking with his roomie about people’s pokemon evolutions (lol) consider this: you are the middle of evolution but there is someone who is the stage before you and someone who is the stage after you, we determined that Jared’s final form is peter parker, Nic is robin williams and I am clare gallagher (after explaining to them that shes an ultra runner environmentalist who once put her shit covered gel wrappers back into her pants after dropping them in her poop because she didn’t want to litter— my spirit animal)

Sunday

-woke up at 9:40 and nearly had a heart! attack! That is the latest I’ve slept in probably years...most likely needed it

-came home and accomplished research paper things for awhile

-went to the gym and learned how to do gym things @ jared

-accomplished more research paper things

Monday

-FINALLY got my mom’s package, she sent me pumpkin bread, corn bread, and a hat. I was very excited lol

-finished my paper! 18 pages and 4500 words later *wipes sweat from brow*

-found out I got a second round interview yeeeeeeee

-BIKED TO CAMPUS FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE SEPTEMBER CAN I GET A FUCK YEAH

-^ stress fracture still not feeling 100% but I felt ready to test this out now that I’ve biked in the gym a bit, so far so good, smiled so big

-got two new books in the mail! Also treated myself to a legit backpacking backpack from REI as a birthday present to myself, it was already 25% off and I had a coupon for another 25% so I got a super high quality backpack for a gooood price, when I was in asia a year ago I used my mom’s backpack from 30 years ago so I felt justified in investing in my own

Okay that’s all happy monday pals 🐢

#personalposts #myfood #me #ootd #books

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kootenaygoon · 5 years

Photo

So,

It didn’t take me long to find him on Facebook.

The neighbours had given me a name, so the first thing I did when I got back to the Star office was look him up. The guy killed in the trailer fire was named Ryan Tapp, and we had over 80 friends in common. He was a former Selkirk College music student, a Shambhala fixture deeply embedded in the local scene, and he worked at Reo’s Video with my friend Lauren Herraman. He was handsome, with a cleft chin like Gaston from Beauty and the Beast, and in one of his photos he was posing on a red carpet, at some film festival. Already people were starting to post on his wall, so I kept a window open to see the comments as they scrolled in.

As I begun to prepare the breaking story for the website, I chatted logistics with Greg on the phone. Were we okay to go ahead with publishing his name, since it was his trailer and only one person was killed? I told him people were already posting about it, and it would feel silly to have to wait until after his funeral to acknowledge he’d died, just because we were waiting for the coroner. We decided to go ahead with publishing his name, based on the fact he was already being openly mourned on Facebook.

“We’ll put this version up now, then we’ll want to add an interview with the fire chief before we go to press Wednesday,” Greg said.

“Apparently it was quite an operation. It would be good to get into the details of how they extinguished the blaze, because from what I understand there was a fair amount of coordination involved. They were some distance from a water source.”

That afternoon I didn’t touch my arts stories. Even after posting the fire story, I kept compulsively reading it over and over. I checked the Facebook comments, looked for Twitter engagements. I reached out to to some mutual friends to fish around, but mostly got conflicting and confusing information. One of my friends, the lead singer of a local band, posted a giant tribute on his wall that moved me to tears at my desk. My fingers shook as I tapped away, sobbing to myself alone in the office, as Hozier sung from my speaker. Every Sunday's getting more bleak, A fresh poison each week. The questions began to swirl: was this a suicide? A homicide? An accident? I felt like this story required a real reporter, and that wasn’t me. I was just some dude who got off on seeing his byline in print, a gossip queen from a sheltered suburb on the coast. I didn’t know if I could handle this.

I took a deep breath. I knew I had two choices: engage or don’t. I’d come to the Kootenays to learn how to be a reporter, and here was my fucking chance. Who else would do it, if not me? In big cities reporters were always fighting over scraps, but in small towns it wasn’t the same. There were two local radio stations that would read the provided press releases and a shitty website that might cobble together something semi-accurate, but really the Nelson Star was the only place higher-minded journalism was being done. I thought of that stupid Christian parable you see on church posters, the one about throwing starfish back into the ocean after they get stranded on the beach. The way I heard it, someone said to the thrower “there’s too many, you can’t make a difference.”

“It made a difference to that one,” he replied.

The next morning I connected with Nelson Fire Chief Len MacCharles, who had fought the blaze alongside departments from Beasley and Blewett. This was a guy who had been on the front-lines of the forest fire that took out Slave Lake in 2011, but it had still made a huge impression on him.

“There was a lot of destruction. There were butane canisters sitting outside, the size of hairspray bottles, stuffed into cardboard boxes,” he said.

“When the place got fully involved it started sending canisters shooting out like missiles, ranging from five to ten to over 100 feet.”

MacCharles was severe-looking and ultra-fit, with a sharp pointed nose and hair spiked with military precision. He told me one of the canisters rocketed past his ear, so close he could feel the singe. Had it been any closer, he figured, it would’ve easily decapitated him. His crews struggled to work around a downed power line as full-sized propane tanks exploded, sending shrapnel hurling into the night. Luckily no firefighters were harmed. He expressed relief at that, saying it could’ve easily gone another way.

MacCharles guessed approximately 40 to 50 canisters were fired into the surrounding area. Resident Ming Kwan mistook the sound for fireworks, and wasn’t alone in the observation.

“I heard sirens and shortly after a sound like fireworks going off,” Heather Salikin wrote on the Blewett Bulletin Board Facebook page. “When I looked out my window I could see explosions of fire. It was very surreal.”

MacCharles said though the fire had a tragic outcome, the extinguishing effort and collaboration between departments went well.

“I was really impressed with how everyone was able to work together.” The Kootenay Goon

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mtairyartgarage-blog · 4 years

Photo

International Women’s Day: Celebrating Women & The Arts

We’re celebrating International Women’s Day at the Mt. Airy Art Garage – and some amazing local and citywide women artists have stepped up to make this happen. Choirs, poets, spoken word artists, musicians, filmmakers, dancers, actors, painters, media gurus, and more. Join us in celebration and conversation!

So, feel free to read on, check out the artists’ bios, and spread the word about this event. Tell your friends, family, and even that passerby on the street! Everyone is welcome. Buy your tickets now or at the door. $10 donation per event or $25 for the entire weekend.

Outloud! A Celebration of Female Voices Friday, March 8th, 7-10 pm

An opening kick-off celebration that will focus on some of Philadelphia’s finest music and poetry.

Featured Performers: Anna Crusis Women’s Choir, TS Hawkins, Tamara Oakman, Victoria Peurifoy, Sister Cities Girlchoir, Yolanda Wisher, DJ Teriyaki, and Hannah Zaic!

Cocktail Reception Saturday, March 9th, 7-9 pm

Stop by, have a drink, chat, and see what we’re all about, here, at the Mt. Airy Art Garage.

Women In Media And The Arts—A Conversation Sunday, March 10th, 1-3 pm

An interactive conversation revolving around the past, present, and future of women in the arts. All are encouraged to attend, share, and question.

Featured Speakers: Michele Freeman, Sharon Katz, Nathea Lee, Janet Mason, Arleen Olshan, Nadine Patterson, and Jeanette Woods.

Learn more about our guest artists below!

Anna Crusis Women’s Choir

Anna Crusis Women’s Choir is committed to musical excellence and social change, singing to celebrate the diversity of women’s lives and culture. Anna Crusis is the country’s longest running feminist choir. In her thirty-seven year history, Anna has sought to act as an agent of social change by empowering, challenging and uplifting audiences with music that inspires and transforms. Anna has grown from a choir founded to promote women’s music, giving gay and straight women a strong community where they could find their voice and live their feminist principles, to a premier performing arts group and an important advocate for change in the greater Philadelphia region. Anna Crusis is committed to reaching diverse audiences and supports the work of fellow community organizations by singing at benefits and fundraisers.

Anna Crusis continues to promote these ideals with an emphasis on music by, for and about women and their lives. The choir values diversity and inclusion in its membership, its audiences and its repertoire. While honoring their common ground, choir members work to respect and learn from each other, from their differences in sexual orientation, racial and cultural heritage, age, class and spiritual expression.

Anna Crusis is a charter member of the international organization GALA Choruses (Gay and Lesbian Association of Choruses), which fosters the continued artistic and organizational growth of its member choruses through festivals, workshops and ongoing networking and administrative support services.

Anna is currently under the direction of Miriam Davidson, Artistic Director.

Michelle Freeman

With an ongoing love for her native Philadelphia region, Michelle has been working in marketing and events since she was in high school. Promoting concerts and handling flyer distribution projects as a teen, she eventually headed to Drexel University and received a degree in Corporate Communications while simultaneously working to establish and grow non-profit organization, Campus Philly. She worked in various positions at Campus Philly where she produced Campus Philly College Day and served as Senior Manager for Events and Media Programs. More recently, Michelle has been operating her own agency, Witty Gritty Marketing & Events. Amongst other things, she has implemented marketing programs and hosted events for the City Reps Office, City Food Tours, Campus Philly, and Philly Swap. She serves as publisher for the online magazine, Flying Kite. Michelle is also committed to volunteering and serves as a board member at Girls Rock Philly, and Spiral Q Puppet Theater. Occasionally you can see her around town DJing under the name DJ Teriyaki.

Sharon Katz

South African musician and humanitarian, Sharon Katz founded The Peace Train—a tour of 150 musicians by train across South Africa—in 1992 to help Nelson Mandela end Apartheid and has continued spreading a message of peace and reconciliation through performances and workshops in festivals, colleges and concert halls around the world.

Her recordings include “Imbizo” on Billboard’s Highly Recommended list and Grammy nomination list for Best World Music Album; “Crystal Journey” featuring the original 500 voice choir; “Lerato” with the legendary Afro-jazz diva Dolly Rathebe; “Live in NYC with Special Guest Pete Seeger;” “Double Take” with South African divas Abigail Kubeka and Dolly Rathebe; and “Carnival!” with Sting, Elton John, Tina Turner and Madonna. “When Voices Meet”, a full length documentary about The Peace Train, will be released in 2013. Sharon Katz & The Peace Train use proceeds from their appearances for their humanitarian work in under-developed areas of South Africa and around the world including music therapy with orphans and communities affected by HIV/AIDS; feeding programs in impoverished areas; conflict resolution work in violence-torn regions; and building schools and community arts centers. Sharon Katz & The Peace Train, the heartbeat of world music, www.SharonKatz.com

TS Hawkins

TS Hawkins is an actor, internationally recognized author, performance poet, wedding Officiant & producer/host for her radio station. Hawkins is fresh off her mini tour titled Silent No More in which she wrote the text “Cartons of Ultrasounds” and infused various directors, mask makers and puppeteers on each leg of the tour. She is soon to release her 7th publication, The Hotel Haikus, during the second installment of the Authors Under 30 Book Tour. More information on her, visit www.tspoetics.com

Nathea Lee

Mt. Airy-based photographer, Nathea Lee launched her freelance photography business in the summer of 2009. Although her business focus is live performances and special events, with a special emphasis on jazz, she delights in capturing images that reflect the heart of her subject, from performers, families and streetscapes to nature and architecture. In 2011, she was invited to be part of the multimedia team for the 3HO organization’s 10-day Winter Solstice Celebration (Kundalini Yoga retreat). 2012 was a breakout year for the enterprising and artful photographer. To honor Jazz Appreciation Month, in April, Nathea set out on a LiveJazz Journey. She is seeing and shooting a different jazz show each week for a year. In addition, her work has been published in a growing list of cultural media, including Black Renaissance Noire, thINKing dance, Philly 360°, and Acoustic Levitation; and has been featured in the exhibitions, A Day in West Orange, This Music We Call Jazz: Giant Steps, and the Philly Street Sounds Collective’s Philadelphia Open Studio Tour (POST) exhibit at The Arts Garage in North Philadelphia. She has also photographed for SmartCEO magazine, The Mann Center for the Performing Arts, and others. Nathea has been managing director of Kùlú Mèlé African Dance and Drum Ensemble since October 2009. Founded in 1969 by Robert Crowder, Kùlú Mèlé is one of Philadelphia’s oldest and most well-regarded dance companies. The company’s mission is to preserve, present and build upon the dance and music of Africa and the African Diaspora.

Janet Mason

Janet Mason is an award winning writer of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, whose literary commentary is regularly featured on “This Way Out,” an international LGBT radio syndicate based in Los Angeles and aired on more than 400 radio stations in the U.S. and abroad. Her chapbooks of poetry include When I Was Straight (Insight To Riot Press) and a woman alone (Cycladic Press). Her book, Tea Leaves: a memoir of mothers and daughters was published by Bella Books in 2012 was chosen by the American Library Association to be on its 2013 Over the Rainbow List of notable LGBT books. She is currently at work on a novel. You can visit her at www.amusejanetmason.com

Tamara Oakman

Tamara Oakman’s poetry and fiction has appeared online and in print in such magazines as Painted Bride Quarterly, Philadelphia Stories and Best of Anthology, Mad Poets Review, Fox Chase Review, Certain Circuits Magazine, Many Mountains Moving, et al., with upcoming fiction in The Feminist Wire. She has awards in poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and drama, recently winning the Philadelphia Writer’s Conference memoir contest (2012). She has an MA in English and is completing her MA in Humanities from Arcadia University. She studied poet Anne Sexton at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center in Boston, lived in the poet’s space, and interviewed friends and colleagues—including Maxine Kumin—culminating in a 40-page research article blended with an explicative analysis of Sexton’s poetry. She has lectured on Sexton’s work. She judged the Hidden River Arts fiction and drama contest; the Montgomery County Poet Laureate contest (2012), and is currently judging a fiction and poetry contest for Ursinis College’s Dolman Prize (2013). She is cofounder and executive editor of APIARY Magazine. Come see what the buZZZ is all about!! Find ALL 5 Apiary’s in FULL and MORE at www.apiarymagazine.com.

Arleen Olshan

Arleen Olshan, visual artist and handcrafter of custom leather goods, is Cofounder of the Mt. Airy Art Garage. Arleen looks forward to the celebration of International Women’s Day every year. “It means a great deal to me that on March 8, all over the world, women are being recognized for their accomplishments and the struggles they face to self actualize.”

For over 40 years, Arleen has been an activist in the LGBTQ and Feminist communities. She has held numerous positions such as Co-Coordinator of the first Gay & Lesbian Community Center of Philadelphia, Co-Owner of Giovanni’s Room, Officer on the Steering Committee of Philadelphia Focuses on Women in the Visual Arts, and Art Director at the YWCA of Germantown. She has worked in the HIV/AIDS community and with women in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction.

For the past three years Arleen has worked at building her dream of the Mt. Airy Art Garage through outreach to practicing artists in the Northwest, community residents, and organizations in the area. Now that 90% of the buildout is complete, Arleen is working in her studio on her leather goods and has returned to drawing and painting. You can find her work at www.arleenolshan.com.

Nadine Patterson

Ms. Patterson is an award winning independent producer/director. Her training in theatre, immersion in documentary film, and intense study of world cinema enable her to create works grounded in historical contexts, with a unique visual palette. Over the past 20 years, she has taught video production at West Chester University, Temple University, Arcadia University, Drexel University, University of Western Sydney (Australia) and Scribe Video Center. She was the only filmmaker selected for The Biennial 2000 at the African American Museum in Philadelphia. Some of her films include: “I Used to Teach English,” Winner Gold Apple Award 1994 National Educational Film/Video Festival, Oakland, CA; “Anna Russell Jones: Praisesong for a Pioneering Spirit,” Best Documentary 1993 African American Women in the Arts Film/Video Competition, Chicago, IL; “Moving with the Dreaming,” Prized Pieces award from the National Black Programming Consortium in 1997; “Todo El Mundo Dance!” selected for the 2001-2002 Council on Foundations Film and Video Festival. Other notable works include: “Shizue,” screened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1991; and “Release” shown at the Constellation Change Dance Film Festival of London in 2006. She completed her second masters at the London Film School.

She received funding for her film work from The Philadelphia Foundation, The National Black Programming Consortium, The Bartol Foundation, and The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. In 2010 she received a visual arts fellowship from the Independence Foundation. In 2011 along with Ain Gordon and the Painted Bride Art Center she received a grant from the Pew Philadelphia Theater Initiative for the creation of a new work about forgotten historical places in Philadelphia. For the third year Ms. Patterson curated the Trenton International Film Festival in November 2012. She completed two milestones in 2011 by publishing her first book Always Emerging and by completing principal photography on Tango Macbeth, her first feature film as director. Tango Macbeth was featured in three film festivals in 2012 and will be on tour to New York, Chicago, Washington D.C. and Paris with the African Diaspora International Film Festival in 2013.

Victoria Huggins Peurifoy

Victoria Huggins Puerifoy is an author, Poet, Spoken word artist, Storyteller, writer, biographer, photographer, consultant, facilitator, voice talent, Narrator, and Public Speaker. She is a member of White Rock Baptist Church.

She is a self published author with seven books, three chapbooks, and two CDs to her credit. Her latest book Let the Axiom Speak and God’s Calling were recently released. She has a Liberal Arts Degree from Community College and has attended creative writing courses and workshops around the city. She is the facilitator for the Poetry and Discussion group at the Center in the Park Senior Citizen Center. Victoria also writes autobiographies for senior citizens. Her latest book is about a 92 year-old woman who commissioned her as a ghost writer. That book is called I have not lived in vain. She is currently working on an Anthology with the poets from this group. Victoria has gained popularity around Philadelphia, North and South Jersey, Baltimore, and in Delaware; for what she brings to the table provokes thought. Victoria has performed at the October Galley’s Poetry Night, The Art of Conversation, the Black Writer’s Museum’s Poetry Marathon and Story Telling Saturdays, The Ethical Society, Germantown Poetry Festival in Vernon Park, and Freedom Theatre – just to name a few. Her poetry and photography have been exhibited at the Thomas Jefferson University Hospital’s Kimmel Cancer Center. She is a regular at the First Presbyterian Church of Germantown’s – Bread and Cup Café, Poetify–Poetry to Edify, Coffee After Dark, and Panoramic Poetry – Uptown, which is hosted by October Gallery. Recently, she was featured in WHYY’s online newspaper and subsequently was Interviewed and Featured on ExposureNation.Com which is an Online radio show. “Mother’s In Charge” had Victoria to speak at a Writing Workshop for young women in crisis. The Baptist Congress for Christian Education commissioned her to conduct workshops for children who were competing for a poetry contest.

As mentioned earlier, photography is another one of her passions and she is frequently commissioned to provide photography services. As a biographer, she is commissioned to help senior citizens write their life story.

As a member of the White Rock Baptist Church she is an active member. She sings on the Church Chapel choir, is an Announcement Clerk, and a Member of the Good Shepherd Circle. Recently, she has taken on the role of secretary to The Malawi Missions, which is a new effort at her church, who is partnering with two other churches. She is a widow and has three adult children and three grandchildren with one on the way.

Sister Cities Girlchoir

Sister Cities Girlchoir is the choral training academy that invests in the unique potential of at-risk girls to transform Philadelphia and Camden. In their pilot year, the Girlchoir operates weekly during after-school hours to build resilience and connection through musical study. SCG is modeled after El Sistema, Venezuela’s monumental music and social change program. For more information on these amazing kids visit www.sistercitiesgirlchoir.org.

Yolanda Wisher

Yolanda Wisher, a poet and educator, serves as Director of Art Education for the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program. Wisher received a B.A. in English and Black Studies from Lafayette College and M.A. in Creative Writing/Poetry from Temple University. At the age of 23, she was named the first Montgomery County Poet Laureate. A former English teacher and radio host, Wisher is a Cave Canem Fellow and Leeway Foundation Art and Change Award recipient. Her poems have been published in Fence, Ploughshares, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and in the anthologies Gathering Ground, The Ringing Ear, and Lavanderia. From 2006-2010, Wisher was the chief architect of the Germantown Poetry Festival, a neighborhood event in Philadelphia which showcased the talents of youth and locally and nationally known poets.

Jeanette Woods

Jeanette Woods is the Community Media Editor for NewsWorks. She trains community groups and individuals in multimedia news gathering. She also develops partnerships with community-based content creators in order to feature their work on NewsWorks.org and NewsWorks Tonight. Woods joined the NewsWorks project in 2011.

Jeanette’s career has encompassed writing, reporting, field production, archival research, database design, online interface design and photo editing. Her production credits include WGBH-TV, Blackside, Inc. and National Geographic Channel. Here audio work has been featured on WAMU, Marketplace and WHYY.

Hannah Zaic

Hannah Zaic is a multi-talented, one of a kind pop artist based out of Philadelphia, PA. The daughter of a blues guitarist and poet, she was literally born to write and perform. Growing up in such an artistic atmosphere exposed her to many genres and artists which would later help her to develop the difficult-to-define style she is known for. At a young age her ambitions became apparent when she started an all female singing group at 10 and then fronted her first rock group at 15.

In 2009 Ms. Zaic left New Jersey seeking to join the thriving music scene in Philadelphia. It was there that she would form her backing band, The Damaged Goods. Within the year she was playing some of the area’s most prestigious stages and getting noticed by various media outlets in the tri-state area. But it wasn’t long before she would establish herself as a fixture on the singer-songwriter circuit throughout the Northeast. Her music, which can be described as pop with elements of the blues and rock, tells stories through carefully crafted lyrics and rich melody lines. On stage, she consistently delivers dynamic stage shows, drawing her audiences in and involving them in each performance. As a vocalist, Hannah manages to combine her soulful vocal skills, which have been likened to Sara Bareilles and angelic tone with a playful indie edge reminiscent of a young Aimee Mann.

Her debut album, [something clever] is due out in early 2013. For more information on Hannah Zaic and The Damaged Goods go to, www.HannahZaic.com, find her on Facebook through Hannah Zaic and the Damaged Goods or follow her on Twitter @ www.Twitter.com/HannahZaic.

#2013

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sundayeveningthoughts · 4 years

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Letters

Sunday Evening Thoughts

Letters

Dear Paul and Rachel,

I, Paul, write this greeting with my own hand. This is the mark in every letter of mine; it is the way I write. II Thessalonians 3:17

This is the next to last Sunday Evening Thoughts forever. S.E.T. began over 18-years-ago when Timmy first started college, and you, Paul were in your third year. The format started as a letter written to you about common, everyday occurrences: How to get along with your roommates? How to argue for a better grade that you thought you deserved? And how to love others in society?

But it’s time for them to end. It has been all mine — good or bad. I only have three areas of expertise: Bicycles, the Bible, and beer, with knowledge of the topics in that order. For you long time readers, you recognize “the mark of every letter of mine; it is the way I write.” If you had someone read you this Sunday Evening Thought, and didn't know who wrote it but were a regular reader, you would easily recognise who wrote it. So, it’s time for a change.

Still, to this day I like to get letters from friends. I heard from an old high school classmate last week, who was heading to hike the Camino de Santiago in Spain. He wanted to know if I had hiked it since I like to hike, especially the last few years. (I haven’t.) But I was genuinely excited to get his email.

For this next to last S.E.T. I had planned to write on Thomas Merton’s book Cold War Letters, which I recently finished. What a prophet he is! His insights on war and violence are as pertinent today as in 1962-3. It seems to me a true prophet's words are as valuable in 2020 as in 1963 or 700 BCE when he/she first spoke or wrote them. Ditto for Martin Luther King’s writings and speeches. Ditto for Dorothy Day. (Boy, Pope Francis is smarter than we realize recognizing all three of these folks.)

But I’m not going to write about Merton's Cold War Letters, though I encourage you to get “bitten” by Thomas Merton’s writings. Then I thought I’d make it very personal and examine letters from Clem (a great man!) that I still possess. But they were too sad, and not the best description of Clem, as he mentions several friends of ours in their late 20’s and early 30’s who were struggling because they had recently miscarried or aborted.

Then I gave a considerable amount of thought to write on Sue’s letters that I still possess from late high school. Sue (not her real name) is a friend I made when in high school who was serving 25-years-to-life in a Virginia’s prison for murdering her husband. She participated in a premeditated murder with her boyfriend to collect her husband’s life insurance. She too was complicit. It was a very gruesome murder where the boyfriend not only killed her husband, but decapitated and delimbed his body. The boyfriend was originally sentenced to death, but in 1973 the Supreme Court overturned all executions, and his sentence was commuted to life in prison without parole. He died there. Sue was sentenced as an accomplice to 25-years-to-life in Goochland Women’s Prison. She was paroled in 1989 after 20+ years for good behavior. I haven’t heard from Sue since 1973. But I did learn about the American justice system in a practical matter, especially the power of prison guards to make or break your day-to-day existence. Yet all 30-40 letters from Sue are not very exciting, except for revealing the mundane life in a women's prison.

No, I chose a letter from Roxanne (not her real name either) — my Eighth Grade girlfriend. Since we as a world are in a time of crisis with the coronavirus, perhaps this will make you laugh?

Here it goes…

Hi Tommy,

You better not give Kenny my phone number... Please don’t. I would feel dumb at that party with you. You will know almost everybody at Pat’s party. Now you name one person I would know at Sonny’s party besides you? I’d like to know how Cecil XXX knows me. You make it sound like he used to like me or something. (He didn’t. I would never like him.) I like you anyway so it does not matter… Why do you have to leave Pat’s party so you can go to Sonny’s? Pat’s is over at 11 o’clock. You said Sonny’s is over at 1 o’clock. Please stay as long as you can. Me and you already have a special seat. Me, you, Paul, Gail, Jimmy & Pat are on the sofa. The other people will have to sit around in a circle. It will be so much fun. (It will be the first time I am with somebody).

Luv,

Roxanne

P.S. Write back

P.S.S. Come to Pat’s party

P.S.S.S. Forget about Cecil XXX

P.S.S.S.S. It is 488-XXXX in case you forget

What a party! (… your mom laughed-out-loud when I read this letter.)

Have a good week…

Love,

Dad

P.S. If that didn’t make you smile, then this will — a live Phish version of “Alumni Blues/Letter to Jimmy Page.” “Letter to Jimmy Page” is the riff Trey Anastasio plays at the 2:53-4:03 mark. Since much of Phish’s music is organic, they usually include it with “Alumni Blues” which has a timely lyric, especially tonight, “Well, I’m alright… because I’ve got a degree!”

P.S.S. “Letter to Jimmy Page” is a very short song; originally written by Trey to Jimmy Page. Figuring he'd never read a letter if he wrote one, Trey opted to write a song instead. Apparently Jimmy was in a funk, depression state at that time (about 1985).

P.S.S.S. I’m amazed at how many Phish fans would know that about Trey and Jimmy. They know more about Phish than Orthodox Jews know about the Torah, religious Christians know about the Gospels, or devout Muslins know about the Koran.

P.S.S.S.S. Crank it up! (See my Eighth Grade writings skills are still intact!)

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pubcrawlbudapestfans · 5 years

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Pub Crawl Budapest Showers Praise On Dürer Kert Ruin Bar

Oktogon 1, Budapest based party planner Pub Crawl Budapest is reaching out to the wider community to share their admiration of the Dürer Kert Ruin Pub. Pub Crawl Budapest is a long running ruin bar tour that provides people a chance to visit the best ruin bars in Budapest.

The Dürer Kert Ruin Bar is situated in a building that originally began as a boarding school before serving as a Soviet College and then as part of a prestigious Hungarian university. Today, the building houses a leading club in Budapest that is positively brimming with personality. A guest of the Dürer Kert Ruin Bar will be able to experience the whole spectrum of music within one night as the bands rotate through a variety of genres, including indie, hip-hop and various electro trends. The stage at Dürer Kert is also open to all current productions, cult figures and fresh talents from both the Hungarian and the international music scene.

Pub Crawl Budapest says, “Ask anyone in Budapest and they know the Dürer Kert. It’s become an essential part of the Budapest nightlife. It has a cult following and it’s perfectly understandable why. In summertime, Dürer Kert’s ancient trees provide a shady place to rest after a long workday. You’ll find a number of hammocks, swing canopies and even an old, transformed Volán bus where you can hang out with your friends in the garden.”

They continue, “Of course, resting is not the only thing you can do in Dürer Kert. You’ll find concerts, open air grill parties, table tennis, and table football matches, all providing the fantastic carefree enjoyment you deserve. If you’ve been to Dürer Kert, you’ll also know that it is a great place for all-night conversations, the natural ambiance of the place just enhances everything.” More information about Dürer Kert can also be found at the following link: https://local.google.com/place?id=9892069758560073052&use=posts&lpsid=7725903771655276166.

Pub Crawl Budapest has established itself as a wellspring of information when it comes to Budapest’s colorful pub scene. Since the company started back in 2007, they have played host to over 30,000 guests. Pub Crawl Budapest also has the honor of being Hungary's first licensed Ruin Bar Tour.

The company provides a variety of services, including private pub crawls, stag pub crawls, beer pub crawls, wine pub crawls and more. With each crawl, guests are assured free welcome shots (one at each bar), visits to four cool ruin bars and one club and free VIP entry at every location. Pub Crawl Budapest also offers Power Hour Pub Crawls, which allows guests 40 minutes of unlimited premium drinks. The company says, “If you want to experience some next level nightlife, there’s no need to limit yourself to shots and beer—you can have a rum with some coke, or gin and tonic with our premium Power Hour Pub crawls.”

Pub Crawl Budapest’s knowledge of the Budapest bar scene and their entertaining pub crawls have earned them many fans. On Google, Pub Crawl Budapest has a near perfect rating of 4.8 stars out of 5, based on more than 250 reviews. In a recent 5-Star review, Leandro Oliveira says, “Pub Crawl Budapest is an amazing tour! I enjoyed it very much; the best night in Budapest together with our lovely guide Aleksandra! She is literally the gift of life! So nice, kind and welcoming! If you want to have the best Pub Crawl ever, ask for her.”

Pub Crawl Budapest is also very highly rated on Facebook, with a 4.9 star rating out of 5, based on nearly 500 reviews. In his review, Mert Ünal says, “Utku and Shairil were really helpful! They made the whole event pleasant, took care of everyone despite the fact that we were 50 people. I’d do it again with Utku since he is the best in town! Very genuine and sincere guy; he always gives his best attention to everyone regardless of their nationality, gender or race.”

https://www.youtube.com/embed/videoseries?list=PLzWLZZLpSeaThoTYFBzYC5Xncu0yGPha7

Those who want to learn more about Pub Crawl Budapest and the services offered by the company can find more information on their official website. Interested parties are also encouraged to get in touch with Pub Crawl Budapest via email or phone for further details. In addition to their website, Pub Crawl Budapest maintains a Facebook page where they frequently post photos and videos, share information on future crawls and communicate with their clients. More information about the company can also be found at the following link: https://www.pressadvantage.com/story/32350-pub-crawl-budapest-promotes-socially-responsible-partying-and-bar-hopping.

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cosmosogler · 7 years

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not sure what to do right now.

today was really bad... not because anything particularly bad happened (other than i got back my e&m test and it had... comments on it), but because i just really didn’t feel good emotionally. i just felt like doing nothing all day and didn’t get ANY work done at all.

like literally none.

we saw the ligo update during classical at least... and he moved the assignment back to wednesday. so i have one more day to dick around before i have to turn in whatever i have.

not going to have a lot of time tomorrow but we’ll see how that goes.

during my lunch break i went down to check out the lab but the students and professor seemed to be on lunch break. i arranged a meeting time over email after that instead. so i’ll be checking it out tomorrow after my office hour.

after quantum i holed up in suzanne’s office and got sick after trying to eat the pasta salad i made on sunday. i’d say that was a flop. it just didn’t have very good materials for being recooked i think. beans don’t handle being dehydrated and rehydrated as well as other stuff maybe. i’ll try a different brand next time.

during my office hour i really wanted to grade but then i just didn’t. i wanted to check something real quick, and then it was an hour later and my student showed up for the meeting with my supervisor.

i felt really, really bad telling the student i wasn’t really in much control over their situation or how much help they got. i had a nervous very fake smile plastered on my face and i just didn’t know what to say at all. i hated it. i wanted to solve everything but i didn’t have the answers. and it was also so, so hard to focus on the conversation. half the time i straight up didn’t understand what the words meant when the supervisor was talkin. i had trouble standing up the right way. i wanted to fall asleep.

so i felt stupid and slow the rest of the day after that. while i was back in suzanne’s office very specifically not doing any grading or homework i talked to harrison a little bit about how he was doing since i noticed his jokes were getting very dark. i don’t remember much else about that 40 minutes. we talked about something that i enjoyed... i was trying to tell a few stories from high school and i didn’t get through a single one. i kept getting interrupted and eventually i just bellowed something like “WELL AT LEAST YOU DIDN’T HAVE TO HEAR THAT PUN, BECAUSE WHEN I GET CONSTANTLY INTERRUPTED NONE OF MY JOKES CAN LAND. SO YOU GOT SPARED.” jennica yelled back and leaned way in and i told her to get out of my face but she took it good-naturedly.

e&m sucked. straight up. i got my test back. 9/30. nothing i do matters at all. i could do nothing but study physics for a year straight and still fail a basic quiz.

ok, well, studying with suzanne and john meant i got one more point on the test than last time.

i could get a perfect score on every quiz for the rest of the semester and the final and still only pass with a c+. i don’t know what to do. the grad advisor sent me an email about one of the professors who’s available for some tutoring. i sent her an email asking when she could meet.

while the class was going, instead of taking any notes, i stared at the floor, or blankly stared at the professor. i felt like i had never seen him before, and also never seen a blackboard before. i thought about what would happen if i dropped out. nothing good. i don’t want to do that. i don’t know what would happen to snoopy. or my savings. or really anything.

i felt like i had always been in that room for a million years but also like i had never existed in the first place. i felt like this is just what my life is like now. i move and get punched in the gut no matter which direction i step in. but i can’t just stand still. it doesn’t matter what tools i equip myself with. it always comes down to getting socked until my appendix explodes or something i don’t know where else to take that metaphor.

i hate this. i hate feeling stupid. retarded. you know. like mom said i am. after class i sat in my chair quietly while my classmates talked about where to get dinner before their class met for the second time today in preparation for the e&m midterm. i hate that i have a good week and then i spend the next three weeks being unable to think straight, or talk normal, or basically do anything school related. and then i get behind AND out of practice and i have to spend my good week playing catch up until i’m so exhausted that my depression gets bad again for three weeks. and also i get sick and i’m still sick and it’s been a month since this cold/flu thing started and i’m still coughing hard and sick and retching and i get sick every time i eat before 2 in the afternoon. and my nose is always stuffy and my face is scratchy and scabbed and healing too slow.

the cut doesn’t look as bad today and also isn’t as rough or raised from inflammation or whatever. so it’s healing. just... slowly. my surgical incisions still have that sort of raised bumpy quality that means they got more healing to do.

the surgeon said the incisions shouldn’t leave scars. but they’re still so... raw looking. not off-color in any way, just... sore. i get phantom habit pains whenever i jam something directly into my side where the largest incision is. it’s right near my elbow level so i just have things around that height at all times. trying to hold boxes, door knobs, stuff like that.

“tired” isn’t really the right word to be using. but it’s, like, the closest thing i got. weary. irritable. consumed. haggard.

i played a round of smash bros with keegan and harrison and we showed soham how to play. the controller i picked up was gunky and dusty and the a and b buttons were not responsive. there was something really disorienting about pressing buttons that are practically second nature and expecting something to happen and getting nothing and then running directly off the edge because my character didn’t stop to do the charge attack like i wanted.

hash tag relatable.

after that we went to relish for dinner. i biked over there. it didn’t take long at all. i got shunted off to a table by myself though because they were only set for four people and we had five. i had trouble hearing the conversation. the burger was good at least. but it was hard to participate, and then they all had to leave so quickly for their review session. i biked home and almost got hit by a car at a stop sign.

i guess i forgot that the stop sign is only there for one direction and not the other two.

i wanted to grade when i got home but instead of that, i goofed off and did nothing for three hours! then it was 9:00!! so i checked my comics!!!

one of them updated and it Fueled me. i wish i had someone to talk to about it. feels weird trying to describe it or recommend it to anyone though.

i’m kind of stuck in a bind there because on the one hand i hate sharing stuff that i find personally important. i hate sharing stuff that actually matters for real. but i also really like some stuff and think other people would like it too and i would like to like it together and be a little happier or maybe introduce someone to something that touches them. asher liked jojo way more than i thought he would and that was basically the best thing that’s ever happened to me.

it’s just risky is all. sharing stuff that doesn’t matter is... less dangerous. describing my day. stuff i did. how i feel. embarrassing times i got whacked in the face or whatever.

but stuff that matters? things that i hold close and think about every day? what i love?

i dunno. sharing that is scary. here i am only vaguely alluding to this comic that’s basically consumed my feelings and tears for like 6 months straight. i check it every day.

i know it’s not exactly my situation but it just... i dunno. reminds me of my childhood in a kind of way. i was alone though.

i think... maybe besides asher. or maybe even jim. really private thoughts. my favorite things ever. poetry. the last time i shared anything that really mattered was with craig.

well, we all know how that went.

at 9:20 after letting myself feel an emotion for once i got started grading. three hours after i wanted to start. i could have finished. but i didn’t do that! i didn’t even watch youtube videos or ANYTHING! i listened to one song a lot and i’ve learned it pretty well. i’d like to play it on the piano sometime if i could find any sheet music simplifying an extremely busy, textured piece haha.

at least i remembered to wear my reading glasses for a little while... my head doesn’t hurt as badly as it could have.

but instead of finishing my grading i got through like 6 pages. out of 180 that i need to have done by tomorrow. 540 by thursday.

i’m not going to have it done by tomorrow. or thursday. then my midterm is on friday and we’re all terrified. during our quantum review this morning the professor told us to focus on “math and physics” and then summarized everything we’ve learned in the class so far. Very Rude.

well. guess i need to at least finish this round of pages before bed. i want to keep writing... it’s not that i don’t express myself honestly around other people. i just don’t express myself. i guess. genuinely. fully. i don’t know.

oz is very open. i enjoy talking to him. we both just seem to have so little time or energy. and i am very afraid of, yet again, being Just Too Much.

right now i don’t want to do anything but cry.

last night when i laid in bed to sleep my back and hips started really hurting, like cramping up, like when i lay flat on my stomach playing my gameboy or reading a book for too long and try to sit up. i reached around to touch my back and maybe find what was hurting so bad and i realized that, just, my entire back hurts. every muscle from the sides all the way around the back. touching the muscles back there felt like jabbing my fingers directly into a bruise and i wanted to die because it didn’t stop hurting even after i stopped touching anything.

i’m too scared to think about getting a massage or anything like that. my scarring is so extensive on my right side... that and i just don’t like situations that are supposed to be relaxing. can’t stand hot tubs unless i’m just dicking around with my cousins. immediately suspicious of “relaxing voices.” except bob ross. that guy was legit. mostly because he was focused on painting and having a good time making his art. in group therapy back in spring we discussed asmr. makes me feel nauseous and grody. i only touch aromatherapy when i’m absolutely by myself and i basically dunk my pillows in lavender. doesn’t help me sleep though.

AND SLEEPING? GOD!!!!!!!!!! I CAN’T DO THAT AT ALL!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WHAT IF SOMEONE GRABS ME???????? IT’S HAPPENED MORE THAN ONCE.

i don’t like people touching me. can you imagine, laying on your stomach around someone you don’t know and you can’t see them directly while they get their hands all over you and make weird noises that other people find soothing but you just find to be false advertising?

but i don’t know what to do about my back. it hurts to lay down. my jaw hurts all the time. it is never not sore and tender. my shoulders are basically bricks.

i feel like i’m never going to get any better than this. i can’t change any more. i’m not good enough. i can’t keep doing this.

something good... i can’t think of anything.

i wasn’t even really that frustrated when i yelled about getting interrupted for the five thousandth time. it seemed like the funniest thing to do in that specific situation. standing up for myself is only easy when it’s funny! no wonder no one can take me seriously.

i gotta teach tomorrow. i guess that’s something. i really care about how my students are doing in their studies. at least, i hope i care. it’s hard to remember what it feels like sometimes, what to call that feeling. i try to be more “big sister” than “mom” but it seems like, in people’s minds, there might be a lot of overlap there. or it gets defaulted to mom and then it’s hard to pry yourself out of that box.

like i think of my students and i immediately think, “yeah i care about them!” but then i don’t actually feel anything? it’s just an instinctive thought without any ability to feel attached. that might come through in my grading. i’m not sure.

anyway it’s 11 and i haven’t made any more progress on my grading. might have to... put it away for the night and try to sleep. keeping myself physically healthy is going to help me more this week than finishing the grading. well, to think of it another way, getting sick right before my last (hardest? least predictable) midterm is a way worse idea than dealing with the consequences of not having the grading done and letting three labs stack up. gotta make a choice i guess. can’t do both today. just gotta... tell myself i’ll have more energy tomorrow, even if i don’t believe it.

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deadcactuswalking · 6 years

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WHERE THE LOVE GO? - THE TOP FIFTEEN BEST HIT SONGS OF 2018

The popular music in America of 2018 was somehow both chaotic and dreary and monotonous as hell at the same time. Constant album bombs and additional rule changes to the charts made the Hot 100 increasingly irrelevant – as if it wasn’t already, and to be honest, I didn’t hate as much of it as I thought I would – in fact, I have since learned to appreciate what little upbeat pop gems we had this year instead of observing it as just a dark, moody year full of mindless egotistical trap-rap... which it definitely was, for the record, I mean, there’s a reason I talk about the UK Top 40 more because the US’ charts seemed a tad painful to keep up with, just going off of exhausted recounts I’ve seen on YouTube and Twitter this whole year. Am I going to preface this with anything more interesting? No, because frankly I don’t think 2018 really deserves it. Let’s just talk about some ground rules.

-I am using the predicted year-end top 125 posted in the Pulse Music forum by MikesMusicReviews to determine what a “hit song of 2018” is. Songs that made it into the top 10 during the charting year (December 2017 to November 2018) count as well.

-This is the best list, and it’s what was posted second. The worst list is out right now if you want to read that, and the list that will count down my picks for the top 5 best and top 5 worst United Kingdom-exclusive hit songs will be out somewhere in the first quarter of the year, I imagine, but don’t expect it too soon.

-If this comes out on the day an episode was supposed to be released, REVIEWING THE CHARTS will be postponed, obviously.

-Finally, this is simply my opinion and I don’t consider myself highly as a music critic. This is just a silly little hobby of mine, and this list’ll probably actually be shorter and more reasonable than the worst list. Nevertheless, we’re counting down...

THE TOP 15 BEST HIT SONGS OF 2018

HONOURABLE MENTIONS

In a rough order of popularity, but no other particular order...

“Psycho” – Post Malone featuring Ty Dolla $ign and “Better Now” – Post Malone

Actual Year-End Hot 100 Placements: #6 and #13 – Peaks: #1 and #3

Yeah, what can I say? As much as I don’t really think Post can handle an album by himself at all, and I still stand by how beerbongs & bentleys sucked, these songs are pretty fantastic, if only for how catchy those hooks are. Seriously, him and Louis Bell can write a damn good chorus.

“Nice for What” – Drake – Year-End: #11 – Peak: #1

This soured on me quite a lot since I first talked about it, but I’m still impressed by how he got a song with a Fabo reference to hit #1 five separate times.

“MotorSport” – Migos, Cardi B and Nicki Minaj – Year-End: #34 – Peak: #6

Migos are too boring for this to really stand out as anything more than wasted potential.

“Back to You” – Selena Gomez – Year-End: #41 – Peak: #18

Nothing about this song remotely works and I love it.

“One Kiss” – Calvin Harris and Dua Lipa – Year-End: #68 – Peak: #26

This was the biggest song of the year in the UK, and while it really grew on me, it didn’t really survive too well to overplay, as I got into more house, I realised that this really wasn’t as unique as I thought it was. “Promises” with Sam Smith sucked though, so I’m glad “One Kiss” was the Calvin Harris single that actually succeeded.

“Happier” – Marshmello and Bastille – Year-End: #80 – Peak: #3

This song is awesome. Do I know why? Absolutely no clue.

“X” – Nicky Jam and J Balvin – Year-End: #90 – Peak: #41

Depending on how I feel, this song is either fantastic, or unlistenable, and sometimes both.

“Call Out My Name” – The Weeknd – Year-End: #78 – Peak: #4

Honestly, I think I just got sick of the Weeknd’s existence in the middle of this year, but this stop still holds up for the most part.

“JAPAN” – Famous Dex – Year-End: N/A – Peak: #28

Famous Dex’s ad-libs are heavenly, but they do make this track feel a tad too cluttered... and yeah, those are all the Honourable Mentions. There aren’t many but that’s because I’ve increased the number of songs on the best list to fifteen, and that’s how it’ll be for years to come, so, let’s just get straight into the list, starting with something that has definitely grown on me.

#15

In Summer of 2018, I said this on my “Best and Worst of 1994” list.

That’s why I hate “Perfect” by Ed Sheeran so much – it lacks what I want from any good pop song, a real hook that reels you in, not because it’s catchy and not because it’s unique, hell, I’m not talking about the musical hook here, just a moment in a song that forces you to pay attention and even if you don’t like it, you will understand why it’s so popular because it demands you to be attracted to it. – me, a few months ago

Yeah, well, um...

#15 – “Perfect” – Ed Sheeran

Produced by Ed Sheeran and Will Hicks – from the album Divide – Year-End: #2 – Peak: #1

It’s grown on me immensely, to say the least, and honestly I think that’s not only because of how there was so much less overplay and I heard it a couple fewer times per day in the latter half of the year, but how I realised this song doesn’t need that moment, and never needed that hook to begin with.

Well, I found a girl, so beautiful and sweet / I never knew you were the someone waiting for me

See, the fact that this song is generic and simplistic is the point, I guess, because it’s much like the artist himself – gingerly. It’s shy and cute in a way that only Ed Sheeran could pull off believably because he’s built his career off of being the everyman (who has since burst into fame, but in his album canon, that never really happened), and this is the climax of it. This is the everyman settling down and planning his life, and almost abandoning the events that are reminisced on in “Castle on the Hill” (which, yes, it’s still a better song than “Perfect”). The production isn’t anything special really either but it is clean and almost like a sweet sweep of cloudy nothingness with a slick acoustic guitar as all of Ed’s songs have, coated in some pretty elegant strings, it’s like the normal, somewhat rough-around-the-edges British dude has just been overwhelmed by the “orchestra” of this love he found with this woman. It’s cute and simple, and in that way it’s as effective as a song with an immense amount of hooks and catchy, interesting blips that can be pointed out and analysed.

#15 – “Wait” – Maroon 5

Produced by John Ryan – from the album Red Pill Blues – Year-End: #58 – Peak: #24

Yeah, this isn’t really a tie either, I just want to talk about as many songs in such little time – because this is a rushed list? Perhaps, but also because best lists are boring as hell, and I want some urgency... speaking of, “Wait!”. This song isn’t a chaotic emergency from the get-go, it’s just a polished and filtered guitar with some transcendent multi-tracked “Oh!” ad-libs, that later become part of the beat. Some may say Adam Levine sounds plastic and manufactured here, but I think he just sounds sick of it all and bored in the best way. He makes dirty looks from his wife’s mother seem like Vietnam flashbacks because he’s so unimpressed or unfazed by everything, it’s kind of hilarious. Oh, yeah, and then the beat drop, which happens way too quickly – and that’s the art of it. The beat drop happening 20 seconds into the song and never really having another effective drop throughout, especially with Levine’s rapid, nasal and sometimes almost triplet-flow falsetto over it, is just a demonstration of how panicked Levine is, and with the alerted trap skitter and the sheer lack of length or development to the track, you feel pain in overly polished material, and yeah, that’s why I still defend Maroon 5, because they still know how to express emotion, despite how their music is no longer close to the quality of stuff like “Sunday Morning”. That bridge where it all builds up into an insane synth that immediately disappears is like an anxious thought creeping up on Levine then just popping out of existence, and the abrupt end to the song is just a book end to this story we’ve been following, where Levine is like a desperate dog using puppy eyes.

Wait, can you turn around? Can you turn around? / Just wait, can we work this out? Can we work this out?

It shows Adam Levine at his purest core – a pathetic shell of a man... with a bunch of tattoos and a Twitter account that mutes the word “SpongeBob”.

#14

Oh, hey, speaking of the Super Bowl fiasco...

#14 – “STARGAZING” – Travis Scott

Produced by Sonny Digital, B Wheezy, Bkorn and 30 Roc – from the album ASTROWORLD – Year-End: N/A – Peak: #8

You know how good this song is? When you go on the Wikipedia page for ASTROWORLD, you can play a small snippet from this song. That means nothing but don’t let distract you because this song is fantastic. It starts with a really eerie synth and creepy guitar before the reverb-drowned snares hit in the intense bass drop. Travis Scott croons about how the psychedelics have “got [him] going crazy”, and I believe it, I mean, this song is trippy, with the spliced vocal samples and the drum fill (as well as the cut) in the beat that sounds kind of like a mistake, just furthering that off-kilter vibe. I love the post-hook as well where he goes into that brilliantly awful falsetto. I don’t think this is mumble-rap at all, but the fact that most of the post-hook is unintelligible makes this song perfect because he isn’t paying attention to you, he isn’t paying attention to the mic, he’s paying attention to the “stars”... and then he realises.

The beat cuts, losing its drums to a reverb echo and then the vocals, with only the eerie guitar and synth it started with, until an elephant-like siren pops up and one brief female vocal snippet, with a ghostly laughter popping up right before the rollercoaster sound effects and it crashes. This is the musical equivalent to Travis Scott getting his priorities straight and realising what his fans want after the bland trap of his last two records, and that beat switch is the best on the album, “SICKO MODE” included.

Oh, yeah, and this new beat? It’s so good, it just has this sweeping feel with Travis’ faster flow (including the echoes) making it feel so fun despite how it sounds like the beat has a splinter in it, if that makes sense. Travis’ bars are funny and almost anthemic, especially this one:

This right here is astronomical / I see you picked up all my ways, I feel responsible / They trying to say that all my problems is improbable / They keep itching at my spit, it’s diabolical, you feel me?

There is no better way to triumphantly start your album, which is already a greatly misleading, scattered and fun, all-over-the-place record, with a fitting ride through Travis’ mindset while producing it. Yeah, it’s astronomical. Next.

#13

I haven’t watched or read any best lists but I think everyone’s gone deep into this song so I’ll keep this brief (like I will for all best list entries if I go by my current formula of a bunch more songs with more urgency and more jokes, hyperbole and a generally fast-paced flow to the list, to make it not feel like a slog). This is “Finesse” by Bruno Mars, which is a great song in its own right, being improved by a pretty obscure female rap artist, I don’t know, you might have heard of her?

#13 – “Finesse” (Remix) – Bruno Mars featuring Cardi B

Produced by Shampoo Press & Curl and the Stereotypes – from the album 24K Magic – Year-End: #14 – Peak: #3

From those first few drum hits and vocal samples that start it off, you know what’s coming.

Drop-top Porsche, Rollie on my wrist / Diamonds up and down my chain (Haha!)

The ad-libs and backing vocals add so much to her verse because they add so much excitement and energy that feels like a crowd following on with Cardi and Bruno, who takes a smoother approach to the sugary slice of 90s throwback new jack swing, especially in the chorus where Bruno isn’t really audible, you just hear the guys behind him reciting his vocals, almost as if they’re hypnotised into this groove, which, honestly, I don’t blame them for. Every melody in this song is gorgeous, mostly because it’s a complete rip-off of 90s R&B but it’s such a good one, that still feels modern, even with the talkbox-like synths, there’s still that polished, clean percussion you hear from modern R&B and Cardi B to mix things up, including a Lil Jon reference. Yeah, even in 90s throwbacks, they want to flash straight to the next decade. Cardi makes me believe Lil Jon was as big in the early-to-mid 90s though, because her boisterous personality is just all over this song, especially the bridge, where she’s drowned out by the instrumental but her charisma drips through anyway, she’s that powerful of a presence. Yeah, Cardi saves this from being forgettable, but it’d still be here if it didn’t have her at all, Bruno brings a lot of that vocal ability we know him for, and it’s very reminiscent of “Treasure”, another of his songs I absolutely loved. Man, I hope this guy sticks to the 90s throwbacks for a while. He’s done several 70s and 80s songs, hell, a whole album of them, so I hope he doesn’t entirely skip this decade when working through the R&B of each era to add to his discography.

I drink ‘till I’m drunk, smoke ‘till I’m high / Castle in the hills, wake up in the sky / You can’t tell me I ain’t fly – Bruno Mars on Gucci Mane’s “Wake Up in the Sky” featuring Kodak Black

Oh, he’s just gone straight to 2010s trap featuring... Kodak Black? Alright, yeah, nevermind, just restart your career entirely, we’ve gone too far.

#12

“Woo”. It’s such a simple, primal exclamation of excitement. It’s so commonplace, especially in rap, because anyone can pull off a “woo”, and it can be in so many varieties. Just going to pull off one little “woo” that you can barely hear? Cool. You’re going to croon “Woo” in the background autotuned to hell and back while Drake’s talking about taking half a Xan? Sure, Travis. You’re going to repeat it ad nauseum to build up hype for a verse like in “Bad and Boujee”? Sure, Offset, you do that. Offset, how about you say “woo” all the time? Like Pusha T, he does that, he says “woo”, although nowadays he prefers “YEUGH”. God, I hope rap ad-libs continue to be a thing, they’re awesome.

#12 – “Ric Flair Drip” – Offset and Metro Boomin

Produced by Metro Boomin and Bijan Amir – from the album Without Warning - #38 – Peak: #13

I have no idea why I love this song so much. Do I like Offset? Yeah, he’s the best Migo. Do I like Metro Boomin? Yeah, I liked this album he released this year, he has iconic producer tags and is the most creative trap producer out there right now. It only makes sense, right, but this is both Offset and Boomin at their most clean, simple and “okay”... except the whole song’s about paying respect to wrestler Ric Flair for popularising the use of the word “woo”. Offset describes his lifestyle as he always does, but he then says, “Ric Flair drip”, so casually, because it should be something that rolls off the tongue, not anything that should be made a big deal.

Soon as we came in the game, all of these n****s, they imitate

Yes, you see, this is an apology from Offset to Ric Flair about jacking the “woo” ad-lib. Sure... I mean, all of that is headcanon, but that hook is insanely catchy, that beat has a classy piano melody that is way better than it has any right to be. Offset’s verses have enough flow switches and fast yet chilled, relaxed delivery to feel like a traditional Migos song... but there’s something about this one specifically. I think it’s how the focus of the song, despite relying on the typical subject matter otherwise, being “woo”, like, the use of the word “woo”, it’s so funny to me, and justifies Offset’s second verse, which is intense, dramatic and slides into the chorus like Offset’s jetski, perfectly, especially when it’s just him, the strings and the 808s. It’s melodramatic, for no reason, with Offset’s rapid flow emphasising the lyrics... which still roll around to being about how when Offset is dripping in jewellery, he thinks about Ric Flair and, paraphrasing, “goes woo on a bih”... I’m glad you and Cardi are back together, I guess, you delightful... homophobe... okay, maybe I don’t like Offset but this is a cool song.

#11

This next song is the most fun, enthusiastic and party-ready scream for help I’ve ever heard.

#11 – “Uproar” – Lil Wayne featuring Swizz Beatz

Produced by Swizz Beatz and Avenue – from the album Tha Carter V – Year-End: N/A – Peak: #7

Keep in mind that this is a beat Lil Wayne has said on record, he does not like, at all... and he kills it. You see, this is a reworking of the G. Dep song “Special Delivery” with Diddy, and Wayne has freestyled over it before on one of his mixtapes, before cutting his verse to say that he doesn’t like it, and passed J. Cole the beat, I believe... you wouldn’t believe me, though, because there’s crowd cheering implemented the beat and pretty much the first half a minute is dedicated to Swizz Beatz hyping everyone up, including another reference to an ad-lib (specifically, Lil Wayne’s lighter flick and bong hit).

If you ain’t got a lighter, what the f*** you smoking for? / We hot, ha!

Seriously, rap ad-libs got meta this year. Anyways, about this being a cry for help, despite how upbeat and fun the party-perfect beat is, the guitar line is actually somewhat menacing and the dark bass largely nullifies all presence of human emotion and excitement, and what do you think Lil Wayne raps about? Well, I’m not entirely sure.

What the f*** though? (DAMN!) Where the love go? (OH) / Five, four, three, two, I let one go (LET’S GO)

He talks about killing someone, but goes into really oddly specific detail (like his other song on the list), but here he specifies the “love going”. So it’s like, he knows he’s betraying this person he clearly cares for but his gangsta rap mentality inspired by 2Pac has hardened him to the point where he doesn’t care. The flow is catchy here, and Wayne sounds hungry, which is fitting for the subject matter.

Money over b****es, and above hoes (THAT’S WAYNE) / That is still my favourite love quote (C5) / Put the gun inside, what the f*** for? (OH) / I sleep with the gun, and she don’t snore (AHHHHHHHHHH)

This is Lil Wayne’s middle-age existential crisis narrated by hilarious yelling from Swizz Beatz adding punch to everything he says, and it’s fitting for a retrospective album such as Tha Carter V.

This the jungle, so have the utmost, for the nutzos and we nuts, so—(IGH!)

I really love this line, because it portrays how much of a chaotic growing up Wayne has had as a jungle, which he went into detail about during his Billboard interview, but he’s just come to accept himself as “nuts”, and he knows that’s unhealthy, but he’s at a point in his life where he just has to come to that as the only solution.

Listenin’ to Bono, you listenin’ to Donald (GODDAMN HE SAY WHAT?!)

Yeah, hit those far-right weirdos with this diss about you being superior to them because you listen to... U2, I guess? Nah, I prefer when I thought he said this:

Listenin’ to Bono, you listen to Don O.

Like Donny Osbourne? Now that’s a diss track line true music nerds would come up with.

I see the shovel, but where did bruh go? (TALK TO ‘EM WEEZY) Hmm, to the unknown (OH!) / Only way he coming back is through his unborns

He calls him “bruh” because he’s so familiar and close to the person he’s murdering, to the point that he knows that he has unborn children? This is either me thinking way too much into these lyrics or genius and grim storytelling from Wayne, and I’d like to think it’s both, and it’s also a hilarious experience if this is an existential crisis, simply because of Swizz Beatz’ existence on the beat.

TALK TO ‘EM WEEZY

#10

So as I’m writing this, Harverd Dropout by Lil Pump, his debut album, has yet to come out, but I’m thinking it’s probably going to suck (Edit: It did) because Lil Pump has made himself bland and uninteresting, or at least the labels have sucked all the ignorant raw energy out of him, because they don’t know why he was so cool in the first place. He was pure energy in the most sarcastic, SoundCloud way possible, without making awful folk albums like X, being boring like his friend Smokepurpp or the Migos, or being a pedophile like 6ix9ine. He was the least problematic of the wave, but he had more charisma and personality than those guys combined, mostly because his one-line hooks were insanely catchy, his beats banged (especially the ones with distorted, crazy basslines), and he had the wit he needed to stand out, with particularly funny lines and running gags always included in his two minutes or less tracks. Now why do I say this? Because I feel bad for Pump, he’s been ripped of its unique characteristics and is now just nothing but a faceless (albeit face-tatted) body for Quavo and executives to paint lyrics onto so they can be regurgitated onto “catchy” trap beats... and this is why I miss songs like this so much.

#10 – “Gucci Gang” – Lil Pump

Produced by Bighead and Gnealz – from the album Lil Pump – Year-End: #44 – Peak: #3

This song isn’t really anything special on the surface, because it’s just Lil Pump spitting a hook and singular verse over a great beat from Bighead and Gnealz, with eerie piano countermelodies being immediately blasted with a hilariously heavy bassline, but that beat, regardless of how strong it is on its own, would be nothing without Pump, and he has no filter in this song, especially since he just calls out a popular brand of airlines by name, even though it was clearly his own fault when he was recklessly misbehaving on a plane because of drug influence... yeah, it doesn’t seem like I actually enjoy the song because of this ramble but that’s the best part of the song, his lyrics, especially when the beat cuts out for Pump to just spout his... “lyrical genius” onto pure silence, with an amount of dopey confidence that makes his family drug operations with his grandmother seem profound.

They kicked me out the plane off a Percocet / Now Lil Pump flyin’ private jet (yuh) / Everybody scream, “F*** WestJet!” (F*** ‘em!) / Lil Pump still sell that meth (yuh)

And he ends off the song with the words that started it all.

Gucci gang, Gucci gang, Gucci gang

...As the audience realise, Lil Pump has learned nothing and none of the last two minutes and four seconds were of any substance, and wasted your time. That is the genius of “Gucci Gang” – it catches your attention for only two minutes but it feels like more and it feels like something better, something special and most importantly, something mesmerising, for those 124 seconds, then crushes all of your expectations by ending with a cheap fade out. Esketit, indeed.

Other than #2, I feel like this is the hardest one to explain, but I’ll try and get through it. See, Taylor Swift is a very talented songwriter, but her best ever decision was to link up with Jack Antonoff, as the music she’s produced with him has been her most intriguing yet, and I think she could potentially make an amazing album if they really perfected their pop song formula. Swift did take a turn though, a darker one, that involved both a #1 hit and her worst year on the charts yet, as it’s hard to even think that Taylor Swift had a sleeper hit this year. She seems to be doing okay with the tour and all, but I do feel bad for how a lot of people turned on her when she really should be excluded from this narrative... and she would be if she stopped talking about it and making an entire album about her “tainted reputation” that wouldn’t really exist if she didn’t pipe up about it—

#9 – “Delicate” – Taylor Swift

Produced by Max Martin and Shellback – from the album reputation – Year-End: #24 – Peak: #12

This song wasn’t even written by Jack Antonoff, but a lot of reputation was, and even in the non-Antonoff songs you can tell that his influence rubbed off on Taylor, with the beautiful vocoder effect put onto Taylor’s vocals in the intro and the spacey 80s-influenced production, especially with the vibrant synths in the pre-chorus that work as an excellent build-up to a drop that never happens, because Taylor’s still curious about it being soon. I don’t know what the lyrics are about, and I don’t care, because they’re catchy and even kind of odd and janky, so you can tell Taylor wrote some of them. Yeah, the songwriting and storytelling is subtle but all over the place at the same time, I think it’s mostly nonsensical, none of the Genius explanations really make much sense to me – but that’s fine, because it doesn’t attempt to really be all that serious. When it sounds like it, it’s immediately contrasted with the fun, melodramatic 80s synths, the absolutely beautiful bridge and the pitch-shifted vocals. From what I can gather, it’s written like it’s her talking to a guy, but it’s actually her reputation? Eh, who cares? This song is a fun slice of traditional pop in a year that had literally none, and like I said, it’s hard to explain what works about this song, but I think it’s the imperfect songwriting, because that’s Taylor’s main appeal to me. Even in her poppier, more “sell-out” efforts, you can tell that it’s home grown and not entirely polished. The production and songwriting does feel “delicate” in that regard... Huh.

Oh, yeah, speaking of people being delicate... and Taylor Swift...

#8 – “Yikes” – Kanye West

Produced by Kanye West – from the album ye – Year-End: N/A – Peak: #8

Now this song is a joke. I thought it was a legitimate expression of his struggles with bipolar disorder, but he said that he doesn’t have it, and then he said he needs meds for it? I’m not entirely sure about his status but as a fan, as long as the music’s good and he’s mentally okay, that’s all I’m worried about. Now about this song being a joke, well, yeah, it’s a joke at Kanye’s expense.

S*** could get menacing, frightening, find help / Sometimes I scare myself, myself

When he’s off the medication, when he’s crazy, when he doesn’t know what he’s going to do next, he panics, understandably, but instead of making a dramatic fuss about it, he makes a fun trap-influenced banger with several jokes pulling fun at potentially “problematic” or sensitive topics, but it’s his best material in a while, running off with Juvenile’s “Ha” flow, in the first verse, talking about how he’s scared of getting #MeToo’d (surprisingly he’s avoided that), how he made TMZ watchable by turning it into “Smack DVD, hanh” and how he got resurrected by drugs after he thinks he’s run creatively dry, which is something he’s mentioned on Twitter afterwards.

Yeezy, Yeezy trollin’ OD, hanh

I like this line as it demonstrates how there’s a thin line between Kanye “trolling” and joking around, and legitimately being dependent on hard drugs or medication to the point where he could inevitably overdose, and covering that up with humour, which is what he’s been doing his whole career: playing the underdog whilst covering all his insecurities in bragging about, as he said himself, “money, hoes and rims again”.

The second verse is hilarious too, as he rambles about how he hates hospitals and would rather be in North Korea smoking with Wiz Khalifa (presumably in his cool pants), whilst cheating on his wife, Kim Kardashian.

Ask your homegirl right now, you had a shot at Ye? You drop everything!

I love these spoken word interludes as it’s just primal Kanye releasing pure thoughts, especially in the outro, where he brilliantly says that his bipolar disorder is just a “superpower” instead of just a mental illness, and whether this is unhealthy or a legitimate attempt at normalising mental health issues we don’t really know, you never do with Kanye, but one thing’s for sure: this song is a great example of honesty on record, and it really shines in those stand-up comedy moments throughout. Oh, and that melody is just like three seconds of a string sample from another piece of music pitched down, cut and time-stretched to sound like a vocal saying “hey”, DJ Mustard style. Now that’s genius.

I’m so. Freaking. Glad this. Song exists.

#7 – “Mine” – Bazzi

Produced by Bazzi and Rice ‘n’ Peas – from the album COSMIC – Year-End: #21 – Peak: #11

Don’t get me wrong, this song is pure aesthetic-pop, music that only exists for the “vibe” and has no substance or artistic merit, in the lyrics or the composition. This is Snapchat filter level R&B... hence why it was used as a Snapchat filter and became a meme because of it. Although that stodgy flute melody can’t be denied, and I like how the filter starts off filtered before becoming entirely honest and blunt, because this is just Bazzi expressing pure love for this girl, although his motives are disputed throughout.

Hit it from the back and drive you wild

Throughout the whole song, you know for a fact that this man just wants sex, despite how genuine he attempts to be, and that’s the appeal, it’s Instagram filter pop because he puts a filter on something that is really ugly, natural and primal: lust. That’s not only pretty funny to me but it makes all the bluntly delivered lines feel not only like lies but manipulation – like when he chuckles right after crooning “eyes”, like, yeah, you care about her eyes, sure, Bazzi, sure. And then there’s the twinkly drop, with quite literally a twinkle prior to the chorus, and a cute synth that plays throughout, as well as multi-tracked vocal harmonisations that immediately come to a stop for an 8-bit escalation sound... Yeah, I don’t know what the deal with that is either but it all adds to the song’s statement of sorts: This isn’t what I really think, and the synths in the background are emphasising the lie. It’s cutesy, but in the most scummy way.

Waste this night away with me, you’re mine

“Yeah, waste it, because that’s all it’ll be, a complete waste, because I don’t care, I just want to pamper you until you’re in bed with me.” The mini-rap verse in the second verse with those cheesy Rhodes pianos is hilarious, especially the last line about turning her into a bride. Now, that’s an innuendo I don’t want to explain.

I can’t look away, I just gotta say

Yeah, he can’t look away, but he can’t even bring himself to say that the girl is his, because she isn’t. He doesn’t want her to be either, he doesn’t care, he just wants sex and it’s evident throughout the whole experience, with all these cloudy synthesizer melodies covering a storm of lust and sex-fuelled deceit.

Eminem is a great technical rapper, and sometimes he is funny, sometimes he has a couple good flows and subject matter that makes a decent song. If this was the early 2000s, I wouldn’t need to specify technicality. I could have just said, “Eminem is a great rapper”, and I would need no other introduction to this entry on the list, but Eminem has fallen off, especially in recent years, with a couple awful records, including his biggest misstep, Revival, which, frankly, everyone hated. There’s no beating around the bush here, there is no critic who really enjoyed this album too much, so as a response, Em dropped a remix to his song “Chloraseptic” where he mocked them (and missed the point)... but that wasn’t enough.

#6 – “Lucky You” – Eminem featuring Joyner Lucas

Produced by Boi-1da, Illa da Producer, Eminem and Jahaan Sweet – Year-End: N/A – Peak: #6

See, it’s that one intense bell melody that makes this song so good, not the orchestral or piano riffs added onto it, not the brass, not the rapping, not the lyrics, but that bell loop, because that’s what makes this song so urgent and intense, and so furious. If the bell loop was any slower or pitched lower, this song wouldn’t bang nearly as much, but it’s not like Joyner and Em wouldn’t try. Like I said there’s a heavy bass and trap percussion here, and it’s great, but Joyner Lucas goes off, essentially yelling in his first chorus before the smooth transition to Joyner’s verse, where he essentially just lets everyone know he’s back on his BS, while proving all of the rappers that are charting from one hit that he’s been there for a decade and still isn’t quitting, and despite people wanting him tied down, he is the “underdog who never lost hope”, as he says himself, and is finally finding success. Not only do I love his verse’s content, other than the part where he says some homophobic slurs in Spanish for some reason, but his flow is awe-inspiring. It’s simple but charismatic, constantly switching and it’s still clear what he’s saying, even in the fast-rap section. It’s pretty cool, to say the least, especially the last line, which is just kind of hilarious:

Snakes in the grass trying to slither fast, I just bought a f***ing lawnmower (VROOM)

Then he passes the mic to Eminem, who repeats the chorus with a couple differences, notably how he doesn’t believe his Grammys were well-deserved or earned, until the bass drops and he somehow trumps Joyner so much that it’s not even funny. While I don’t necessarily agree with what he says about the new wave rap, Em doesn’t seem to, either? He says that he feels bad for all the lean these guys are doing (to the point where they have brain damage) and that he doesn’t hate trap, but no one in the game is like his old fueds with Ja Rule, Benzino and, uh, Mariah Carey, or even technically great enough to make him have the fire to snap and make great music again like his friends used to force him back in the day. He needs the desire to snap back at the criticism, but he doesn’t have it, and—wow, this is the most self-deprecating brag-rap song I’ve ever heard. Then they both finish off the song by repeating the first part of Joyner’s verse, and it’s all come full circle, but not a single moment was wasted. Oh, Eminem went quicker than “Rap God” on this one as well, that’s pretty impressive to say the least. Next.

Wow, we’re already in the top five – now, these are the five (or in this case, six) songs I have the most trouble explaining, because to be this high on the list, you have to have some form of connection with me, because it has to last the whole year and I have to still care about it enough to write about it passionately. I first heard this song in late 2017 and honestly, it’s still growing on me and could easily be my #1 by the end of this year, but that’s beside the point. How do I write about this song? How do I gather my thoughts on “Mo Bamba” by Sheck Wes without yelling profanities at the top of my lungs?

OH! F***! S***! B****! / YOUNG SHECK WES AND I’M GETTING REALLY RICH (CHING CHING)

Honestly, I have no idea, so just read me try and make sense of this song.

#5 – “Mo Bamba” – Sheck Wes

Produced by 16yrold and Take a Daytrip – from the album MUDBOY – Year-End: N/A – Peak: #6

“Mo Bamba” by Sheck Wes is raw, and makes you think Sheck Wes is an absolute beast with no remnants of human characteristics, because he can’t really be a human if you take only his music into account. He’s either a droning robot man or a confused, furious animal that’s been caged for too long and is trying to get out, but can only yell the word “bitch” at the cage so many times. That iconic piano line is given like two seconds to play out before being interrupted by producer tags and the bass-heavy beat, with Sheck Wes just moaning about people calling his phone in the most dreary way possible (no autotune either to add artificial vibrato), with only ad-libs to hype up the droning slog of a performance, and those ad-libs absolutely help, especially those ring-rings and the iconic ad-lib you know him for, but also the panting and the maniacal laughter. I couldn’t care less about what Sheck is saying, I’m pretty sure it’s violent, but I don’t care. Then he takes a long, odd pause, just to continue like nothing happened, as the chorus continues with a slight increase in energy. Then he mentions Drake.

Call me Drake how a n**** control—

Then the beat cuts out because Take a Daytrip’s ancient computer lags, what do you do? Well, scream like a madman, of course. What else to do? You’ve freestyled the whole song, you’re on a roll, don’t let that stop you, Sheck Wes... and he really doesn’t, because he goes insane and we just have to listen with our jaws dropped for that one verse, and I can barely describe in words how that feels, that one verse is just transcendent in a weird way. It’s a release of anger and frustration that you have with the song droning on, that Sheck Wes has with the hoeeeeeeeeees caaaaaallllling, and it feels so raw and energetic, like one man against the world and he tells them to stick it in the purest way possible, by yelling profanities, threatening violence and making ching-ching sounds in the background, and it’s reasonable, because you’ve gotten through one and a half minutes of just one constant routine and this is your one big break... until it just continues like normal, until it stops abruptly so Sheck Wes can have his own mini-verse about the DOOOOOOOPE and gettin’ rich with his BROOOOOOOOOS and taking YOUR girl and she don’t even let you KNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW

Now this one is an actual tie, not like #15, because this one has a genuine connection that isn’t subjective or only a loose relation, but I decided to tie these because they’re both excellent and brilliant songs produced by the one and only Pharrell Williams. Let’s just forget about Sweetener, and get mad ethnic right now.

#4 – “Lemon” – N.E.R.D. and Rihanna

Produced by Pharrell Williams and Kuk Harrell – from the album NO_ONE EVER REALLY DIES – Year-End: #83 – Peak: #36

The truth will set you free, but first it’ll piss you off.

N.E.R.D. made an amazing comeback in December of 2017 with the crazy good album NO_ONE EVER REALLY DIES, although it kind of got overshadowed by releases from BROCKHAMPTON and Eminem with more longevity, which is unfortunate because it’s one of the best albums I’ve heard from this decade. I own it on CD and at any chance I get to talk about it, I will. There are three versions of this song that all technically charted, but the one with Rihanna is the prime version. There’s a solo version and a Drake remix, but honestly why would you bother when this exists?

It starts with a manic bounce-influenced hyphy beat, reminding me of the Triggerman beat that bounce producers used to use back in the day and still do in Miami scenes, but unlike “Nice for What” by Drake, which just kind of lifted the sound and didn’t develop it or do anything interesting with it, Pharrell raps on the plucky synths and 808s like he was in an intense police car chase, fitting as the song is about authority and race politics which I’m not going to get into, because I don’t care, I just want to be bouncing around, bouncin’ to the sounds of hate supplements found right in their couches... what?

Yeah, that’s an actual lyric, but he doesn’t just spout nonsense over a bounce beat, no, he switches it with a stretched 808 section, using an Instagram video from a social media comedian and a blood-curdling shriek as a transition, then turns into a trap beat for Rihanna to brag on, and by God, I think I’m in love. This is the best performance, hands down, on the Year-End list, no question. Her flow, which switches throughout, is constantly slick and her delivery is powerful, carefree and fantastic.

Woo! This beat tastes like lunch

After a freaking Star Trek reference, it goes back to Pharrell talking about bath salt as his vocals are twisted in every possible way imaginable, as he raps about pulling up in a broken car not because he doesn’t have money, but because ��your eyes get acidic”. Oh, N.E.R.D., please don’t leave us for this long next time. Wait, wait a minute--

Also #4 – “Stir Fry” – Migos

Produced by Pharrell Williams – from the album Culture II – Year-End: #48 – Peak: #8

Oh, he also produced this, just to show his versatility and Goddamn, is this one a great flip of the classic Mohawks “The Champ” sample, making an almost difficult beat. Pharrell, the genius producer he is, just lifts pretty much everything possible from this song, from the off-kilter snares, bongos and cricket sound effects from the whistles in the original, for the Migos to flow over, and I love the coating of keys every few bars that harmonises with the refrain, now that is godly production, especially for a top 10 trap-rap song, which I can only barely describe it as, really. I love Quavo’s eerily droning melodies in the refrain, before the hook that leads perfectly into Offset’s amazing verse, which is really short but also has a rapid flow to it, like it’s so fun and energetic, really proving how despite competition from Quavo’s brilliant ear for melody and hooks, Takeoff’s chilled rap skills, he is the best Migo.

Oh, there’s this distortion coming in on like the third chorus which is just an ugly synth that disappears immediately when Takeoff comes in, for one of his shortest yet best verse, until he copies Quavo’s refrain in the funniest way, where Takeoff knows he can’t sing, so makes his shoddiest effort possible and it’s majestically awful, like it’s seriously such an interesting experience to have Takeoff essentially croon off-key moaning about how everyone’s watching him in your ear, it’s oddly soothing and by God, I think I’m in love again. Everything I said about “Lemon” applies here, it’s manic, insane, somehow not a cluster of random sounds despite being just that, and finishes way too quickly when it deserves and can easily take another minute or two doing its thing. Pharrell brings out the best in everyone, even two homophobic weirdos and Takeoff.

So this is the hottest take of the bunch, and I think I like this because it’s a catchy, fun pop song in a year that didn’t have many, but it’s also probably because I’m lame and like sincere songs about love as well as awfully misleading “I just want to get into her pants” songs that pretend they’re sincere songs about love, and this is just a song like that... except it’s both? And it’s not really about love at all?

#3 – “I Like Me Better” – LAUV

Produced by LAUV – from the album I met you when I was 18. (the playlist) – Year-End: #35 – Peak: #27

This song is way too robotic to be about love, it’s way too stiff and way too sad. There’s not even a real flower on the single cover art, that is a plastic replica, I tell you. I think it’s about LAUV’s caffeine addiction. See, that’s why the guitar is scratchy and you can hear every single slap and string being hit with a twang, every single mistake, it’s organic, unlike the rest of the song. The guitar and his passion for music and songwriting is the only remnant of his personality before the first time when he got morning coffee, which caused him to stay for a long time and get addicted, eventually causing himself to believe that he has to rely on caffeine to live and he’s only productive when he’s—

Falling in love for the first time and being in a four-year relationship that taught me everything about myself, the world and how to love. – LAUV about the album this song originates from

Well, nevermind. Then why is it so stodgy? Is it because this love doesn’t exist, because if anything from the interview, it seems it does. The main drop melody is actually a vocal sample manipulated which I think represents the sheer emotion he’s feeling when he’s in love, how he can’t even find the words to describe this relationship that’s almost trapped himself into a cycle of fake finger-snaps and falsettos. Is its cutesy disguise and ugly drop supposed to be his facade disappearing and him finally realising love doesn’t mean anything and he’s been manipulating himself this whole time? Honestly, I don’t know, and I’m not going to over-think it anymore. This is a dude that’s just genuinely in love, or at least was, and is longing for her to stay with them, because LAUV thinks that when he’s around his true love, his soulmate, or at least who he thinks is his soulmate at the time, he’s a better person because of them, and he also said in that interview that the album is about him finding the ability to trust himself, so I think this is his first step, finding someone he can confide into. I like that, and I think this song’s head-in-the-clouds nature and atmosphere expresses that perfectly because he’s found himself in something he can’t safely get himself out of, but he doesn’t mind. It’s cool with him.

I like me better when I’m with you

It’s a pretty nice acoustic tune with some nice, dramatic synth work and a confusing yet perfect drop, and despite me having no clue what to think about it, really, I definitely know that I love how it sounds and I’m excited to hear more of LAUV in the future...

...Man, what did I just do? I put freaking LAUV on my best list, how humiliating is that? How am I ever going to be taken seriously when I put LAUV on my list of the best songs of 2018? Hopefully I can redeem myself with my choice for #2, Rae Sremm—What?

#2 – “Powerglide” – Rae Sremmurd (Swae Lee and Slim Jxmmi) featuring Juicy J

Produced by Mally Mall, Jean-Marie Hovart and Mike WiLL Made-It – from the album SR3MM (specifically disc 1, which is also titled SR3MM) – Year-End: #97 – Peak: #28

Yeah, the credits for this one are really THAT convoluted. Anyway, this one barely made the Year-End list and barely counted for this list, but even if it didn’t, this would be on the list, maybe lower for the sake of sticking to the rules though. Anyway, this is a Memphis rap song that just straight-up takes the beat from an old Three 6 Mafia song, bass-boosts it and has Rae Sremmurd rap on it about cars and strippers. So, what’s so special about it? Everything. It immediately puts you in that pump-up mood with Swae’s fun “yeah” ad-libs over intense strings and then the producer tags lead into the bass that knocks way too hard. The hook is way catchier than it has any right to be, and it’s just a simple flow but it’s so fun and swift, especially over this classic beat, with Swae dripping charisma from both his standard high-pitched singing vocals and his autotuned falsetto mumbling. In fact, the song as a whole is so positive. The lyrics may seem just like the standard rap fare because, really, they are, but they’re all so happy, upbeat and delightful, because this song is about respecting strippers for their work... in a car which is apparently just as good as an original generation Transformer. Cool, I guess?

R.I.P. Lil Peep, I gotta slow down on them Xans (HEY!)

Yeah, rest in peace to Lil Peep, and this line from Juicy J should be a message to rappers who are more careless about their hard drug use, it will mess you up and can kill you if you get an untrustworthy dose of fentanyl, be careful, guys. Wait, wasn’t this song about cars? Anyway, back to the song being positive, here’s a quote from Swae Lee that describes how cheery this song actually is, regarding the lyric, “she finer than a motherlover”.

I had to say it in the softest way. I want to say she’s beautiful, basically. She finer than a motherf***er—that’s kind of harsh. – Swae Lee on Genius’ Verified

That’s so pure. Just listen to the hook, which is already catchy and fun, and you can see how passive yet joyful this song is.

Kush all in my lap because these hoes don’t want to roll it

He’s not going to force them to smoke if they do not want to, he’s just going to put it in his lap. How nice of you. This whole song is about doing the usual rapper schtick, getting strippers to dance for you and smoke with you in a fast luxury car whilst wearing designer clothing, but they’re so respectful about it. Slim Jxmmi brings so much charisma to the track in his verse, and even shouts out the strippers directly, and says that sex workers and strippers shouldn’t be degraded just because of their line of work.

Might just leave with me tonight, but that don’t mean she a freak hoe / F*** with dancers and models, shout out them girls who get dollars

Jxmmi even specifies that if she wants, she can dance with her friends.

Shake that a** with your bestie

How nice of you, how respectful. Honestly I’m talking about the lyrics because there’s not much to say about the performers or the beat, it doesn’t change for the most part and each performer brings a unique delivery that keeps the turnt up vibe of the song. It’s an absolute banger and one of the best of 2018.

Much cooler than the cool kids, whoa

That’s cute, Swae. That’s cute. The song ends with Swae just chanting “hey” over and over and that’s a perfect way of finishing this banger, albeit abruptly. Uh, what else do I have to say about this? Uh, Slim Jxmmi is the best out of Rae Sremmurd and while I expected Swae Lee to have the bigger solo career, I am disappointed that it wasn’t Jxmmi, because he is such a legitimately fun and hype personality that I wish got more recognition. There’s a MuchDank video that replaces words in this song with “peanut butter” and it’s hilarious. Juicy J’s a legend. R.I.P. Lil Peep. Now it’s time for the big one.

After struggles with the label pulling him down and not letting him release music, and Birdman’s constant abuse and mismanagement, Lil Wayne managed to free himself in a court case and have a resurgence in the mainstream, mostly due to the release of his best album yet, Tha Carter V. Now I’ve already talked about “Uproar”, but now for the truly genius storytelling track on the record, and probably my favourite song that either artist has ever made, lasting longer than five minutes, that somehow nearly debuted at #1 on Billboard. Screw you, Maroon 5.

#1 – “Mona Lisa” – Lil Wayne featuring Kendrick Lamar

Produced by Infamous – from the album Tha Carter V – Year-End: N/A – Peak: #2

How in the mother of God does this song not have a Wikipedia page? This track is cinematic and presents itself beautifully, especially its story, which is about Wayne observing a deceptive woman who Wayne hires in order to rob a dude after the woman succeeds in seducing him for weeks and gaining his trust, before being betrayed. Kendrick then shifts the perspective to the “boyfriend” and talks about his feelings as he’s being deceived. That is the story in a nutshell, but the track makes it feel like a blockbuster movie.

We start with a light piano melody with Kendrick riffing a little refrain briefly before that lighter flick, which feels more tense than ever, as he sums up Wayne’s role as the mafia boss who essentially just sends women to hunt these men so Wayne can have the loot while not caring about himself or the dude they’re robbing. It’s awful and dreadful, and that’s why Kendrick’s verse is so good, because it gives a bigger picture to both perspectives and doesn’t just become a pointless, one-sided track from Wayne’s autotuned, braggadocios side of the story.

I see n****s in this b****, stuntin’, poppin’ bottles / Gettin’ drunk with these b****es, and when they leave they get followed / Fall asleep with that b**** and really don’t know much about her / Then she let us in, we take all of your s*** and when you wake up, she help you try to find it / I love it

Yeah, essentially, thanks, Wayne, for making my commentary and synopsis entirely unnecessary by explaining the whole thing in the first few bars. Wayne does later go into grim detail about the situation, with some really clever lines here and there.

Watch your mouth, Milli Vanilli (Ooh)

That b**** ain’t no angel, I treat her halo like a Frisbee

Lil Wayne’s intense second verse develops the story by detailing his experience with the girl named Liz who is one of the women he hired, as he hides in the bushes outside, turns music on to distract him and follows her into the house, then turning the music down and putting a gun to his frown, as he says in the song, just to get the pure satisfaction of seeing his terrified face as he is being robbed and killed by Wayne and his gang, as he finds out that Liz has been deceiving him. It’s fantastically evil, with the spacey beat only furthering this atmosphere. I love the comparison to Mona Lisa’s ambiguous smile as well. The song seems like it would end at about three and a half minutes in, but then...

Kendrick Lamar comes in with an ad-lib, he’s that good, and impresses over an orchestral instrumentation, beeping noises, distorted multi-tracked vocals of his own lyrics and police sirens... what? He then shifts his perspective to Liz’s “boyfriend” after he’s being robbed, panicking and sniffing around Liz, completely flabbergasted by this fake story that he’s been believing for weeks, maybe months, years, on end, and it all wasn’t worth it – and it’s all executed excellently, sometimes it’s really funny too, especially in that blip where Lil Wayne’s hit “Lollipop” comes up on Liz’s ringtone, it’s great. Both brought their A-game here, and when it comes to the end of Kendrick’s verse, well...

You scandalous as f*** and I hope you blow up / You know what? I give up, let me go get my gun / I got one in the chamber, I’m plannin’ on aimin’, Goddamn it, you know that the damage is done / B****, I’m in emotional ‘cause I’m in stress / I’m not supposed to go through this, I guess / So in conclusion, since you like rappers that’s killin’ that p****, I’m killing myself

Well? Do you expect me to say anything about that? It’s pretty self-explanatory, and with Kendrick Lamar’s rapid flow, it sounds insane. This song is one of the most perplexing hits of the year, but it’s one that actually requires you to think. It tells a story. Sure, it’s dreary like the worst of the year instead of joyful like its runner-up but it’s genius songwriting, all in a pop context, for five straight minutes, all elegantly orchestrated in a cinematic tone that makes it feel worth of a film adaptation. That’s what I like in pop music, when everyone has everything sorted out and it’s perfect, or imperfect, because every single little trait about the song has been ironed out and perfected to extend the song’s quality, personality, length, story and overall massive feeling. This is the peak of 2018 pop music, and I think that’s pretty safe to say, nobody expected this from Wayne in 2018, and with the amount of trouble Wayne had to go through to even get this released, with Birdman pulling its release for years to Martin Shkreli leaking a snippet and potentially meaning it never got out to the public ever, this feels triumphant, and an essential piece of music when examining the late 2010s, a time when the American public was that insanely depressed and downbeat that they let a song about hiring women to trick men into being robbed, leading to the man killing himself because he’s been living a lie, that lasts five minutes and doesn’t even have a hook, fight with a plastic, inoffensive Maroon 5 song for the #1 spot on the most prestigious music chart worldwide, and nearly bloody make it as well. And to think I nearly gave this to freaking Rae Sremmurd. Thank you, Lil Wayne, Kendrick Lamar and Infamous, thank you for “Mona Lisa”, the best hit song of 2018, by far – and thank you for reading, see you next time.

She say, “Ooh”, no emotion, Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa / Now he gets the picture, Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa, yeah...

deadcactuswalking

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thehopefulraincoat · 8 years

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Artist Problem #1

Keeping track of and managing time.

Okay, maybe that’s not the number 1 issue for every artist, but it’s certainly one that’s up there for me. And honestly, who doesn’t struggle with this in some way? But there’s no magic solution to it, so where do we start?

Let’s start here: you’ve got to find something that works for you. I’ve tried so many things that I quit after a short time because it just didn’t fit into my flow of work. Now, I don’t mean that if it doesn’t immediately click, then just give up. It’s said 30 days to form a habit. But I’ve also realized the importance of finding something that fits me.

For this topic, I’m going to go through the things I use and tell you what they are, how they work, and how I use them.

Scheduling:

Firstly, I use Google Calendar. Obviously, it’s a calendar and in this instance, I probably don’t need to explain how you use it, but a few reasons I like to use this calendar particularly is that it syncs between my phone and my computer (and sends reminder to both), and because it makes it easy to get the overarching view of the month as well as a close up look at the day.

Now, I use it to keep track of birthdays, things that fall outside of my normal schedule, and recurring stuff like my Bible study (or to keep track of when I don’t have it, more so, or when it’s not at the usual time). It’s not just for art, but by keep track of the other areas of my life, I can better keep track of my time doing art. For example, if I know I’m busy all weekend, I probably shouldn’t plan anything additional Monday-Friday because if I don’t have enough time to finish things, I know I certainly won’t over the weekend. Other things I do to make it work for me is coloring coding events. Church stuff is purple, art stuff is blue, birthdays are green, appointments are red, etc. Since I’m a visual thinker, my stuff has to be visually organized and colors allow me to look at things and at a glance know what’s what.

Trello is the other tool I use for scheduling. It’s designed to let you keep track of tasks for a variety of big/complicated projects. You can create “boards,” in each board you can create “cards” (essentially lists), and each item can be modified via comments you can leave on them, color labels you can add, and checklists.

I probably don’t use Trello quite the way it’s actually designed to be used. Mainly I use one board (though I have a second one where I dump notes about art ideas) where I have 1 card for each day, 1 card to serve as a misc to-do-list for things that just need to be done eventually, 1 card for things that have to happen this week but not necessarily on a particular day, and 1 card for overarching tasks (each item on this card has a checklist, so long term goals can be checked off one task at a time, completed over weeks or months as necessary).

Why I really love Trello is that I can color code, create sublists for items, and easily drag items from one list to another as needed. As I go through a day, I’ll complete, say, my daily art practice/sketching. I’ll have written it as “ART: Practice” and when I finish it, added a blue label, signaling that it’s done. Misc tasks are labeled pink when finished, orange is for chores when finished, and green for self-care, etc. This allows me to see at a glance how my day is getting used and by adding the color labels, I can see my items being “checked off.” The To Do list cards (as opposed to the Monday through Sunday ones) also allow me to sort things and keep a running list of stuff without having everything I ever need to get done on one big To Do list for the day.

Because I’m very visual, long chaotic lists can leave me overwhelmed, but if I don’t write everything down, I forget things. Having my lists broken up makes them seem more manageable, and checklists and color labels allow me to see that I’m getting things done.

(And yellow is reserved for “God time,” aka my personal Bible study, as opposed to my group Bible study, for those who might wonder.) If I’m having a particularly bad day, I can add in tasks to encourage me to feel like I’m getting things done (which helps me actually start getting things done). Like maybe I’m having a hard time focusings, but I did finally message that one friend back and I also finally got dressed. I’ll add those to my list and color label them. Feeling like you’re getting something done is really important when you’re overwhelmed or struggling with motivation. The trick is to move into actually getting things done.

Another trick, which I haven’t stuck to using, but might work for you, is rating your tasks. You can actually see it on the item “To promote my art.” You add plus signs to rate how important a task is (+ meaning unimportant & +++++ being VERY important) and you add divider symbols for how hard a task is (| is easy and ||||| is hard). This way you can

A good alternative to how I use Trello+Google Calendar is something called bullet journaling. You can look up how to do it with a simple Google search and all you need is a pen and a journal. I highly recommend it if something like what I do might work for you, but you’d rather have it all in one place and do it analog-style (though maybe an online equivalent exists?).

Goals:

Obviously, I use Trello a bit for goals, as I have that “Overarching Tasks” list where vaguer things like “Promote my art” are divided into more practical (but still too big to be considered a single step) sub-headings, like “complete my new website.”

This is where MS Word comes in (or really anything you can write out lists of goals on). I’m pretty sure you all know how Word works so I won’t explain, but I will give you a screenshot of some of my goals.

(Sorry, I’m too lazy to resize them)

This is just a sample of the whole list, but keeping track of big goals and then making do-able or “bite size” tasks for each goal is really important. It makes what is overwhelming seem possible and gives you a way to know what step to take next. If you know what you need to do next without having to try to remember what you’ve done and what you’ve yet to do, then you’re gonna save yourself a lot of time.

Time Tracking:

Everyone’s favorite section! Literal keeping track of time! (Or am I the only one excited here?) Anywho, Snaptimer is a simple free downloadable count-down timer. I use it for when I want to take breaks, which usually are on the computer. I’ll set it for however long I want and it goes off when I’m done. Plus it can be set to remain “on top” so you can see it counting down or it can be set to have a pop-up when it reaches zero, so it can alert you that your time is up both audibly and visually. Some nice little bonuses are that you can change the color, size, and font of the numbers and that you can customize the timer sound too (mine was a teapot whistle for a while).

RescueTime is a tracking timer. By that, I mean that it tracks how long I spend on what sites and in what programs (because I’ve downloaded it to my browser, phone, and to my desktop). Then if it can figure out what type of site it is (such as it knows that Facebook is social media and social media is distracting, generally), it categorizes it from Very Productive to Very Distracting (with Neutral in the middle for things it can’t categorize or that can’t be considered to be mostly productive or mostly unproductive). With this, I can get a snapshot of how productive my online time has been. It also lets you change the status of a site (like I’ve used Craigslist for job hunting in the past, but at first Rescuetime listed it as Distracting because it thought it was a shopping website and thus that I was shopping, so I changed it to Very Productive), it lets you delete time (for things like if you left Facebook open while you were away from your technology doing something productive), and finally it lets you set goals, like spending less than 4 hours a day on “Unproductive” things.

This is what the main part of the RescueTime dashboard looks like. I’ve only logged 2 hours and 23 minutes, but of that, only 40% has been productive (Note that the 40% ignores what is neutral - In this case, most of the neutral section is Youtube, which normally I use to listen to music, so it’s not a distraction but something that helps me work. Some days though, it’s just a distraction, like today.).

Lastly, for this section is possibly my favorite tool: Toggl. It’s a count-up timer that is just set up so nicely. You can use the online page, the desktop app, or the phone app and they all sync up to each other. Mostly, I use the desktop app, as I spend a lot of time on or near my computer. Toggl allows you to time a task, assign that task a project (which can be color coded - seeing a theme yet?), and add tags to the task. The tags and the projects allow you to go on the website and look at charts of how you’re time is divided up and they’ll email you weekly a breakdown of your time.

Here’s a glimpse at the Toggle Dashboard (Ugh, this last week has not been the best week for me, due to a few things that came up. This also doesn’t include the time I was at my job.). It’s really good for someone who needs visual aids and flexible structure. Here’s a quick breakdown of how I track things for art: admin work (this I use purple for and it includes tasks like working on making my website, designing and buying business cards, learning about HTML to do some edits to my site, etc.), practice work (This is a light blue and includes Sketch dailies, figure drawing, etc), misc small projects (these arecurrently a radder purple and can be anything that’s just a one-off image that will be more work than a sketch, but less than a multi-image or large project that takes a lot of planning; a task in this category might be labeled by what I think I’ll name the piece or simply a short description), and big projects (these will vary in label color depending on the project and can be anything like my Fairyland project which took months and was multiple images; a task in this group might be named by the title of the chapter I’m illustrating, for example).

Accountability:

Finally, the last thing I’m going to list is Discord.

Discord is a chat/messaging system designed largely to be used by gamers, but I use it, along with a group of friends, as the home to a critique group. Because Discord allows you to not only message people individually or in small groups, but also to set up servers that can permanently house large groups and then allows you to break those servers down into channels, it makes a nice set up for a crit group. We have a channel for us to post goals and make reminders, a channel for serious critique, a channel for sketches and things we may only want some light crit on or that we don’t care for crit at all, a channel for sharing art that inspires us, and a general channel for anything else. These people can pester me if I haven’t posted in a while and give me advice and encouragement to keep going.

Really, this can be done on numerous other platforms or with in-person meetings, but because many of my friends aren’t super close, transporting art can be a pain, and Discord has a nice multi-channel set up, I recommend it if you want to try something like I’ve discussed.

Don’t discount being held accountable by friends and family that aren’t artists too, though. Sometimes those people will be the best at holding you to things you need to get done!

Final Notes:

Find what works for you! Experiment. When something doesn’t to seem to pan out, take note of what worked and what didn’t. It’ll help you move towards something that works best for you.

Tough it out! You need to remember why you love art. You need to think about what you’re trying to achieve. Something I read once that helped me was, “The next time you feel like giving up on a project, do this instead: close your eyes, take a deep breath, and imagine how great you’ll feel when you finish the project. Because our subconscious minds are often unable to tell the difference between real and imagined, visualizing the final result can help us stay focused on completing it.”

Have accountability! Be that your best friend who loves your art, your mom who doesn’t get it, your art teacher you’re really close to, or your classmate in art college, there’s someone who can help you. Better yet, have that person find something you can hold them to so that it’s mutually beneficial.

ALL OF THESE PROGRAMS ARE FREE! (Well, except for Word, I suppose, but that or an equivalent comes with pretty much every computer) Some of them have paid premium options, but honestly, I think that they work fine without the premium stuff.

So good luck and I hope maybe something I’ve discussed will be of help to you~

#productivity #artist problems #time mangement #art help #sketchblog blogging #artist problem 1 #artist problem number 1 #the hopeful update

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