#like a lot of the early episodes have this message that people are incapable of truly changing

[my-thoughts-and-junk]

Thinking about . . . Adventure time

[tgammsideblog]

How likely do you think it is that June will be the next Chen to be redeemed? As an Autistic person myself, I'm worried that if she ends up as too much of an antagonist, it won't send a very good message. I also worry about the difficulty she'll have growing out of the mindset she's been raised with for years, and the possible overwhelming feelings of remorse.

I can see her starting to turn if she's told that a lot of ghosts are just misunderstood, we don't really know how misunderstood she is by people who aren't her family or the McGees, but it could be brought up in the same episode, and not all Autistic people are incapable of empathy, in fact, some of us are actually good at different kinds of empathy.

I just really want her to be redeemed and I can see the potential in pulling it off well, but I can't help but worry a little that they'll mess it up.

This is a bit more complex question from it ones i usually get. Mmm... First, i don't think it's out of place for you to be concerned for how June is going to be represented in the show. Keeping in mind how autistic people are often represented in media, it's reasonable to be worried. I can't tell you how to feel about that because that's more up to the person and autistic people are going to have different opinions just like any other group. June Chen hasn't had enough screen time for me to be able to fully judge her character and role. So, in my case, it's too early for me to jump to conclusions because there is still 2/3 of Season 2 to air. What i could tell you is the information we have given about her character and the hints the series has dropped so far. Here is what it has been confirmed: -We are going to have a ¨big episode¨ involving Darryl and June later in the season. The episode title or what the premise is about hasn't been revealed yet. - In the same Discord Stage AMA where this episode got mentioned, the creators were asked about which favourite member of the Chen family was. They talked about how they really like Ollie and June. If i recall correctly, they said that the members that we are going to see the most are Ollie and June. - June's voice actress, Sue Ann Pien (who is autistic), was allowed to add some ad-libed lines to June's dialogue. She was also asked to tell the writers if she found anything wrong with her character's potrayal and if something needed to be changed. -In another AMA, Bill confirmed that we are going to see more Ollie and June's interactions. Here is the hints the series has dropped so far: -From out of the episodes that Ollie has showed up, ¨The Unhaunting of Brighton Video¨ is the only one that Ollie doesn't mention June or that she doesn't have some cameo. The season has hinted that their sibling relationship is somewhat important. - In ¨The New Paranormal¨ June and Darryl's dynamic gets established. It has been confirmed that we are going to get an episode about them. -June is in charge of setting up ghost traps + coming up with gadgets. -In ¨Frightmares on Main Street¨ June's is given some extra moments were we see her have doubts over why the ghost catcher canister worked (something that she was sure it wouldn't work). (Image for reference)

Having all this in mind, this is my prediction: While Season 2 A was about making Ollie changing his mind, Season 2 B could be more about June reconsidering her position about ghosts. Since Ollie doesn't think that ghost are evil, it could be easier in some ways for June to get out of that mindset. Her scene in ¨Frightmares on Main Street¨ seems to be hinting at her having more importance in the season later on, as she is going to try to investigate why the ghost canister did work. As for how she could change her mind, it's possible that ¨the ghosts are just misunderstood¨ is something that could make her reconsider things since she probably knows what it does it feel like to be misjudged and misunderstood. That way she could relate to ghosts and no longer think of them as her enemy. It could be an interesting aspect to explore for her character too.

I do hope she gets at least 3-4 episode segments in Season 2 B, which is more or less what it took for Ollie to turn around and join Molly and Scratch. While Season 2 has had a lot going on, they managed to give Ollie a solid arc. I could see June getting one like that too.

Again, its reasonable to be worried about her potrayal. And there are things that are going to be a good and others not so good. I just hope this information i gave you could help you in some way and other people. Maybe to make predictions on your own and guess what is going to happen next. I'm not sure. For me, i believe that she is going to play an important role later in the season and i really hope that's the case.

[metvmorqhoses]

Hey there! I'd like to hear your thoughts about this. Jkr never put a lot of thought into voldemort as a character did she? The fact that his villainy is oversimplified to be "conceived under a love potion and hence can't love" although there are instances where he has loved. The narrative that is put forth is that every child who was conceived through unhealthy relationships, abandoning parents and difficult circumstances is destined to be incapable of love. (There are problems/issues because of these circumstances but it's not a doomed-to-be-unloved situation)

The abuse he faced or the trauma was never explained and neither was his nature which can be either perceived as arrogance or as self-preservation in his formative years..

I love your blog and analyses btw!🖤

i couldn’t agree more. i don’t know if you are familiar with what i usually write about voldemort as a villain and as an all-around character, but what you are talking about is not only something i always mention when i discuss him in a more complex, adult manner, but much more importantly is deeply linked to what i think about the hp series in general and to the one, major issue i have with it in particular. this is something i consider very important and, honestly, a topic that is never stressed enough: jkr wrote an overly black and white children book, where oversimplification is the fundamental fabric of everything and i find it all very problematic, to say the least.

i understand the series started as a children book and that characterizing so generically and so stereotypically serves as a great advantage to sell copies, since virtually everyone can draw their own conclusions about pretty much every single character of the series and therefore identify, but hp more often than not proudly poses as a moral compass, as a good-vs-evil lecture, aiming to accompany children into adulthood hand in hand (both the books and the movies literally grow in tone, length, targeted audience and themes with the children who are consuming them), so it’s not unfair of me to be concerned about what exactly these morals have been teaching children and then teens (myself included) for more than twenty years about reality, even as a fantasy series.

i often say the characterizations of its heroes is the thing that scares me the most about the hp series. the entirely of the “good guys” in these books lack basic normal human reactions. they all went through hell one way or another, harry constantly witnessing every last one of his family relations dying/growing up abused and hated/discovering he was raised literally to be slaughtered by the man he looked up to the most, ginny being possessed/forced to kill/almost murdered in tender age by the literal devil and whose trauma is never mentioned again, hermione having to erase the memories of her parents - you know, the list goes on and on. the one thing that all of them have in common tho, is their non-consequence to horror. and that’s wildly unhuman. aside from a little sadness, some stubborn dementors chasing bad memories and sporadic plot-serving nightmares, none of the heroes is really effected or damaged by what happens to them. when normal people would have spiritual crisis, ptsd, depression, manic episodes, you name it, jkr is feeding us the idea that really good, brave, strong, valuable people remain unaffected by trauma and that only the weak, wrong, damaged and therefore evil ones are. and i find it beyond disturbing.

paradoxically enough, voldemort is the only prominent example (probably along with snape and draco, but in a very different way) of “normal” human behavior when a child is exposed that much to trauma and abuse in tender age. jkr never really explains voldermort beyond her rhetorical “he’s wickedness personified” motto, yet the little characterization she gave him is entirely built around trauma - a trauma that she openly equates to evil. voldemort is a child born out of rape (there’s a metaphorical love potion and therefore he’s unable to love - leaving aside the idiocy of it, how sick is that? as if a child should carry the faults of his parents, as if all children born from rape were emotionally disabled or soon to be psychopaths! what exactly she wanted to prove with this point will forever be beyond me), a child abandoned to abuse and poverty in the middle of ww2, a child i’m sure shunned for his magical powers if not worse, a child without a single resource on the planet but himself, a child to whom no one, ever, not even later in the wizarding world, ever gave a helping hand or genuine affection (he was literally sent back to a world war because “no one can live in the school in the summer”, i mean!). of course he had to react to survive, of course all that left him scarred, because it didn’t leave him annihiliated! tom and harry share the condition of the orphan, but while harry was loved by his dead parents, glorified and rich and adored, voldemort was unwanted, discriminated against, bullied, poor and ignored. had dumbledore treated tom as he had treated harry (not that he treated harry that well if we really analyze it, but still), had his mother not abandoned him and died, jkr herself said lord voldemort would have probably never existed.

is this a correct way to stereotype human nature? is this a good message to give children? the only plausible human in there is the psychopathic super villain who is physically unable to love?

i like to think voldermort differently. i do think he could, of couse he could, actually love - as we all can if we allow ourselves to. he’s too complex, too intelligent, too whole as a character to lack anything, both for the good and for the bad. i like to think that maybe amortentia (aka the entirety of his early life experiences) left him dissociated and unable to *understand* his feelings in general and love in particular. maybe he didn’t dare to love anyone. maybe he dared once.

i like to think this way because the way jkr characterizes is nothing short of a disgrace.

the question people ask me the most is precisely this, if i think i’m giving voldemort much more depth than the author actually intended in the first place. my answer is always the same - yes, of course i do. voldemort is beautiful the way i imagine him, as a real plausible person, as a deeply flawed and multifaceted and scarred human being who turned to darkness in search for a home and a reason and that had ultimately found one, as terrible as it was. he certainly deserved more, from a literary point of view. yet i understand it was convenient and safe for jkr to only ever play with his godly, evil, black and white facade.

[the-lightning-strikes-again]

Yeah the Loki finale was meh/disappointing it doesn’t even feel like a Loki show anymore. I swear you could swap him with another character and the story would barely change.

Hi, anon! I'll put thoughts under a cut since idk who all has seen the Loki show yet.

Tbh, Loki is my favorite character from the MCU. I have waited for YEARS for this character to have an actual spotlight...

And I really wanted to like this show, I really did. Like, I legit wanted to just turn off my brain and enjoy everything?

But yeah, your message resonates with me. There were things I liked about the show, but once I got over the cool CGI and angst and female gaze, it just...feels like Loki got sidelined in his own story? The focus hadn't been about him specifically since episode 1. It instead shifted to Sylvie, who is different enough from Loki that she might as well have been Hawkeye still on his Endgame rampage for justice. And it was Sylvie's problems and Sylvie's motivations that drove the story. Which, you know, were interesting in their own way but not what I was expecting from a Loki show. A lot of scenes were just Sylvie running around and Loki somewhat helplessly following along in a daze that this is what his life has become. He was just ultimately a very passive character in someone else's story...because as the finale clearly showed, his core issues that needed to be worked out weren't in alignment with her own.

So it's sad to me that the show opened up by saying that Loki's destiny was always to function as a dead-end catalyst for other people's character development/journeys. And in the end, that's...exactly what Loki became for all the other characters in this show. ;A; And I'm not sure what they have going on for s2, but I fear he'll just play second-fiddle to Dr. Strange at this point.

I have other issues with the show as well....

___

I felt like they also massively declawed him? Ignoring the comics entirely (where he's even more badass) and looking just at the movies: He survived a Hulk smack-down, could toss humans like they were nothing, could travel between worlds through a variety of means, could already see into people's minds/memories and cast illusions and even change his form, and yet somehow all of this got retconned to make him a less powerful sorcerer compared to his Variants.

I remember this guy being actually dangerous and physically capable, which is why they locked him up. Loki used to have Avenger-level capabilities and strength. But now, he can't hardly fight off a human, and his defense skills are relegated to basic hand-to-hand combat and a dagger. The show even makes fun of his abilities and calls him a pussycat and turns him into a tie-wearing analyst...But I suppose that's in line with the general downgrade of his abilities in recent MCU movies...

___

And if being a sidekick in his own show and having his abilities retconned wasn't enough, I feel like the show failed to convince me that it really understood and is working to grow Loki's character.

The underlying issue that the show calls out as Loki's ultimate weakness is that he's "afraid of being alone," and that this feeds a narcissism complex. But this doesn't really make sense to me? Because he didn't grow up alone or unwanted. He had a mother (Frigga) who loved him deeply and taught him magic. He clearly made it into adulthood believing that Odin was his father, who certainly wasn't absent. He was always on adventures with his brother. He had clearly tried to build a reputation for himself that was differentiated from his brother's (the Silvertongue). This goes against how narcissists don't really have a personality of their own because they just absorb other people's mannerisms to fit in...So like, idk about parsing out the details of narcissism as a clinical diagnosis because I'm not a psychologist, but something feels a little odd here to me? Like, it's more than just...fear of being alone that drives Loki to be destructive? The loneliness is only a symptom??

The problem based off the early movies, providing that I'm not entirely an idiot in listening (which I suppose I could be), was that he was always in Thor's shadow and was never considered an equal, someone worthy of respect despite their differences. Even in the 2009 movie, his peers belittled his title as a Silvertongue and his love for magic. Discovering that he was actually an unwanted frost giant just twisted that knife in deeper and set him on a self-destruct path, once and for all. And it's really interesting to me that throughout this show, people are still constantly trying to establish themselves as alpha over Loki and make jabs about him as worthless and weak. And he's just desperate enough for validation to still try bonding with them the instant anyone tosses a bone of mild curiosity at him.

The fact that he's still positioned as less valuable and less respected than Sylvie, and that even Sylvie herself ultimately usurps equality in their relationship/partnership to enforce her will is just...depressing.

And for all this discussion about Loki changing/redeeming himself, at the end of the day, his perspective hasn't really changed? He still identifies himself as untrustworthy, even though he careens as a desperate lap dog for Mobius' approval and then Sylvie's once she gives him an ounce of attention. He has difficulty with accepting the value of a life, especially in regard to his own life. For example, he was still willing to consider upholding the death of future untold numbers via pruning despite being such a victim himself. And that's not a slam to his worry about a worse alternative, which is probably valid, but it's still weird that he does not believe he could contribute to a powerful resistance group capable of taking out multiple variations of one human man.

It's even weirder that he still seems to be caught in a tailspin regarding "necessary dictatorship," even though Loki is supposed to be a Silvertongue and could have won He Who Remains over as an ally against the other Variants of He Who Remains, thereby dismantling the TVA and freeing the multiverse. But unfortunately, he still can't see beyond two binary roads (mass chaos vs. subjugation). He has totally lost his confidence and identity as a Silvertongue. He can't see an alternative option despite supposedly being a Master Strategist, and that's echoed in how his initial thought to defeat Alioth was to kill it in a very Thor-ish, Asgardian way.

And because he has accepted the show's narrative that he is not capable or worthy of respect for his own unique talents, he openly just..accepts the concept that he's not meant to mean anything to anyone but himself ("I just want you to be okay") or do actually anything meaningful with his abilities. This probably underscores why he is so incapable of using his full powers for a Chaotic Good.

And for one final jab of hopelessness, the show immediately reverses the one (1) other mildly positive relationship he had just started to build via Mobius, solidifying that once again, Loki is not allowed to have friends. Loki is not allowed to have equals. Loki is not allowed to be respected. Which is probably why even when he's surrounded by other people, that's why he still feels alone.

I'm just sort of dead that for all the time the show spent on diagnosing Loki, it never got deep enough to ask why he feels alone.

Conclusion

So idk, the show just kinda depressed me tbh. I don't want to be this critical??? They have really great actors, interesting concepts, and clearly a strong CGI department. Again, not sure I could do better, so I recognize I'm playing armchair critic here. Maybe it'll get better in s2. I really want this show to prove me wrong and move Loki into a level of character development where he can like, actually have purpose in his own title show beyond serving as second-fiddle to other people in other people's self-discovery journeys.

Like please, just let him realize that he can have a positive, meaningful purpose. And that whatever his purpose is, that he is Enough just as he is, and that he can contribute meaningful things to others and be fully worthy of respect. And I think once that clicks with Loki, we'll see him really grow into something phenomenal. Something truly formidable, even if that character doesn't sit on a throne....

It's possible the show could go there? But I'm just a little leery that it's not really a show about Loki....

[parachutingkitten]

Season 5 Analysis

STANDARD DISCLAIMER: I am going to be applying the concept of criticism to a TV show you presumably love and adore as much as I do. If you do not want your idea that the show is immaculate to be challenged, I would not advise reading past this point.

Additional Disclaimer: This includes criticism of Nya’s arc, so if you’re the type of person to get catty about this subject, turn back now.

Mood for this season: It’s spoopy time.

You don’t need to, but if you are interested, and haven’t seen my analysis of past seasons, you can find those here:

Pilot - Season 1 - Season 2 - Season 3 - Season 4

You can also find all of these, and future installments, on my blog using the tag #analysis 

Hey everyone! I’m still doing these things! Let’s see, when was my last one? Over two years ago...? Yikes, I owe y’all an apology. I really didn’t mean to put these off that long. Anyway, get ready to hate me, cuz although (for the most part) this seems to be the fandom favorite season… I think it’s overhyped. I know, don’t kill me. I’ll explain myself. I don’t think it’s bad or anything, it’s very well structured, but I definitely wouldn’t rank it among my favorites. First, for a little context, I am making a one second of every ninjago episode video right now, so I’ve been binging the series and all it’s shorts back to back, so I think I’ll have a bit more to say about connective tissue between seasons, and hopefully you guys can look forward to more of these analyses between now and the new year when I’m releasing that video. I’m also officially a film major now so… sorry if I come of as extra pretentious or get too deep. Anyway, let’s jump into the thick of it, shall we? 

Plot

This is probably the area I have the fewest number of complaints about. This season has a breakneck pace and it keeps everyone busy. I think that’s why people like it. Everyone’s favorite has something to do. Which brings me to the question… which ninja’s season is this? Lloyd is on a lot of the promotional stuff, but he’s possessed and out of the picture for over half the season, so that can’t be right. Cole turns into a ghost, and the season is a ghost season, but that can’t be right cuz I don’t know that I’ve ever heard anyone claim it was his. Nya reaches her true potential, maybe it’s hers? Well, she does have a large b-plot, but she is consistently not a part of the a-plot. Kai has a whole thing with being protective of Lloyd, he has his fear of water, maybe it’s just another Kai season? Thing is, it’s no one’s. It is an ensemble season, and I think that’s a healthy thing for ninjago to keep doing. The more we label certain seasons for certain ninja, the more complaining we’ll get about who’s turn it is for screen time that we’ll miss out on telling a good story. Also, If the season is focused on a ninja you don’t like, you are less likely to like the season (see my next analysis for that can of worms). Again, this season tells it’s story really well. Morro directly ties into the ending of last season, and Nya’s getting water powers was foreshadowed the season before. That’s some cool connective tissue to start. The opening episode establishes the three different things the ninja will be looking for, and for once they’re actual tools instead of a series of weapons, blades, masks, whatever. I like that. Jay has some really good humor, Zane has his speech changes, Kai has his irrational fears and protective instincts, Cole has his ghost angst, Lloyd has to deal with his father’s passing, Nya is a new water ninja, Wu has a shop to run and a student to reconnect with, even Ronin has an arc about developing morals and gaining friends. There’s the mystery about how to deal with the ghosts, what the rules are, there’s the leader subplot, the ninja’s money situation, and lore of the different realms, they even worked in Skylor and Borg, there’s a lot of cool stuff going on. This is a tightly woven script that manages to include a lot of new concepts that you get pretty quick. I don’t feel like there’s even that much fat to cut. The opening is a little slow and strange, and the cloud kingdom episode feels a little unnecessary, but I do like the idea of visiting a different realm early in the season so the audience isn’t caught off guard in the climax. Again, the plot all works for me, it’s the other stuff I find myself pretty meh on.

Characters

Ronin

I’m pretty sure Ronin is the only new (non villain) character introduced. I like him a lot. Ninjago needed a true wildcard to shake things up and be unpredictable. I also think he’s pretty nicely woven into the action of the plot. I think his introduction is a bit strange. Like, the ninja already know him, but we’ve never seen him before? Just the way they talk about him sounds like they’re quickly recapping who this guy is for those who missed previous episodes. It’s fine if the ninja already know him but either 1) Introduce or foreshadow him a season earlier or 2) Introduce their dynamic to the audience before it becomes plot relevant. Maybe the ninja are grumbling about him being a nuisance while tea shenanigans are going on or something. Or maybe you have a scene of him stealing the scroll and making snarky remarks about the ninja while he does it. Idk. just something so his sudden plot relevance isn’t out of nowhere. Also, I don’t hate his and Nya’s dynamic, but I know a lot of people love it, and I’m just not totally here for it. Is he supposed to be a father figure for her? Mentor? Frienemy? Just plain friend? (love interest???) it’s not super clear and I could have used some clarification. I also like his use and tie to the next season, so overall, well integrated character.

Nya

I’m adding in Nya here cuz she goes through a major character change, and how she’s handled is one of the things that rubs me the wrong way about the season. A lot of people will probably disagree and/or hate me for this section of the analysis so… here we go! The thing she has to get past to reach her true potential is fear of failure (supposedly) and the solution to that is to just… not care as much? First of all, I know this isn’t supper important, but the fun thing about the ninjago elements is that every elemental master matched up personality wise with their element. Jay is the energetic master of lightning, Kai is the hothead master of fire, Zane is the calm and calculating master of ice, Cole is the strong and dependable master of earth, Lloyd is the literal child master of energy. This especially goes for all the new season 4 masters. So what qualities are often associated with water personalities? Well, serenity, control, flexibility, elegance, patience… calm. You know, like a Zane type character (the element directly adjacent to hers). These are things that Nya isn’t - or at the very least don’t define her. (there’s also something to be said about water and its ties to more feminine qualities, which Nya has been actively shown to reject, but I won’t go into that rant here.) She was designed as the fire master’s sister, and when you try to fit a fire personality into a water shaped character mold… it doesn’t exactly mesh well. It doesn’t make sense. But, like I said, whatever. Maybe that’s the point? Like she has to change her personality to be more in tune with water? Sure. But let’s talk about this fear of failure thing. Because that’s the stated thing that dialogue tells us she needs to overcome. But when has Nya ever been afraid of failure? Fear of failure means avoiding doing something because of fear. Nya is ridiculously persistent, always has been (you know, fire personality). She tries training when no one tells her to, she makes her own alter ego to try and be a hero and save the people who would constantly tell her she wasn’t ready. Wu says she only wants things that come easy, but that’s never been her character before now, she has carried the team with her tech, research, and covert ops that no one forced her to do, all things which are not easy. Fear of failure is usually characterized by what if questions. If Nya is so afraid of failure, why don’t we hear her saying stuff like “but what if I’m not strong enough, what if I can’t save them in time, or worse, what if I lose control of my power and end up hurting people?” Cole shows much more of a fear of failure this season surrounding his insecurity about being a ghost. He wants to sit out from missions because he’s not sure he’ll be able to do it - he’s afraid of failure. But whatever, the writing isn’t clear at expressing her true setbacks, but she does display a real problem that a lot of people have and I think could have been well done if set up correctly. She shows an undying persistence that gets her too close, and makes her increasingly incapable. She lets her frustration hinder her progress (again, fire personality trait), and I think that’s interesting because I don’t think ninjago has done this character arc yet. The supposed solution to this problem is that she just needs to… care less? And yes, I kind of see where they were going with this, we sometimes cloud our natural potential by thinking about it too much, but saying “you need to stop caring” is the absolute wrong way to word it. Caring is not her problem, the problem is her control over the emotions that come from her caring. Caring is a good thing, and teaching kids that if you’re ambivalent about your problems, they’ll go away is not a good message. What she needs to do is take a step back. She needs to take a break, stop to think, and look at the big picture instead of hyper focusing on the roadblock directly in front of her. The usual and much better wording of the moral I think they were going for is “stop overthinking things”. Teaching kids to look at a problem from a different angle and give themselves time to cool down is a great thing. And just think of it, in the climax she could have this ah-ha moment where she steps back and looks at the bigger picture - the whole town, surrounded by the ocean - and gets the idea to sink the preeminent into the water, you could even easily tie that back into the bucket exercise, and that’s what triggers her true potential rather than the current… I’m honestly not sure what. Random flashbacks and the end of the season approaching quickly. Alternatively, you could tie it more directly into samurai x, and make her struggle with letting go of the past and allowing yourself to give up something good in your life to progress to something better. Anyway, I don’t think this was a bad decision long term, she needed to be solidified on the team as a full fledged ninja, I just think this season doesn’t handle the transition that well. Anyway, whatever, I’ll be waiting for your hate comments in the notes.

Romance

Um… there’s none this season? Like there’s a few Wusako moments that are still as weird as they were in season 2, but they’re really not prevalent. There’s also the Jay seeing the future thing which has some weird implications next season (again, some interesting connective tissue between seasons), but that’s about it. Maybe that’s part of why I don’t love this season? Like where’s the pixane? Lol, I’m kidding. But maybe that’s why a lot of people do like it. If you don’t like the canon ships… this is a nice little safe haven for you. Rare for a majority of the series.

Villains

So Morro is a good idea… in theory. I know he’s the fandom’s favorite edgy boy, but idk I think the brand of angsty teen they ended up with was more of an angsty 13 year old than 17 year old. His voice is really grating and I always want to yell at him to just… go get some cough drops. Stop throat screaming, use your diaphragm man! Also, everyone goes on about his last minute redemption, but as far as season 5 goes, he has like half a second of a change of heart. Literally, when Wu comes over and he’s drowning, he’s still being a persistent little idiot like “you never cared about me nooooo!” and it’s only at the last possible second that gives him the crystal, and even that he does it kind of saltily. The preeminent is pretty cool, I like her concept, her design, all that. All the other ghosts are fine I guess. Nothing super memorable out of them, although their aesthetic, especially when there’s a bunch of them swarming around is pretty cool. One last thing was I never understood how Morro “becoming the green ninja” worked and what exactly it was that… did for him? Like he didn’t actually get the power of energy, right? I don’t remember him using it. Did just him defeating Lloyd make him the green ninja? How does that transfer work? And why did he need it to take over the world or realms or whatever? Like I get that it’s supposed to give him more power and what not but idk, it wasn’t super clear. That’s a minor thing though.

Climax

Pretty cool. I like the ATMOSPHERE. Green light is a hard thing to use and justify correctly, but it works really well here, especially with the dark kinda gray blue sky complimenting it. When the preeminent starts walking into the ocean, it’s genuinely terrifying, but you understand exactly how it works and why she’s strong enough to do it. Nya’s true potential is again a little out of left field and could have had some better motivation put behind it. Like what is it Nya learned in that instant? To not be afraid to protect people? She’s… been doing that. Idk. I’ve hit on that enough for now. Overall, there was good variety. I like the green ninja fake out, I like the realm hopping, I even like the little Garmadon visit and Lloyd getting the robe. I feel like we didn’t need a part one and two, you could have had different titles. I mean come on. But hey, now we know, if Pix had only been there, the whole climax would have been wrapped up in like 10 minutes apparently. Pix for the win.

Humor

Really good. Like I’m surprised how much I laughed. Jay wasn’t annoying humor, it was good stuff, there were some good running gags, there’s a solid fourth wall joke about who the lead ninja is at the beginning of the season. Overall, I am pretty impressed. My favorite joke was perhaps the bit where Jay is sarcastically positive, the voice acting is just really solid. Then again, there’s also the whole Borg scene where he roasts half the ninja, that’s solid stuff right there. There’s just some really solid character interaction this season and the humor feels a lot more natural and less forced.

Drama

Okay, we’ve got a lot this season. Y’all know how I feel about Nya’s arc by now. It does not work for me. Ronin’s relationship with her is alright, but kind of comes out of nowhere. Ronin’s solo plot about kinda working for the ghosts works. Cole’s ghost angst works for the most part, although I wish he would have actually skipped a mission and then gone in to help save his friends once they can’t do it without him. That was probably the most solid drama of the season. The other main thing we have this season is Kai’s whole… fear/protective streak. This also doesn’t really work for me. Like, I get that Lloyd and Kai are friends and stuff, like his whole true potential was centered around Lloyd. But like, why does it have to be framed so weirdly? Sometimes in trying to make it seem like Kai is protective of him, it seems like the other ninja just like… don’t care about him? Not all the time, but there are some weird vibes. Also, it doesn’t really go anywhere. No one learns anything about themselves from this subplot, nothing comes of it, there isn’t really a payoff. Also, Kai has yet another irrational fear, this time of water, which really comes right the hell out of nowhere. They try to explain it away like “Oh, Kai feels powerless and so water can get to him” but like… what? That’s the exact situation he was in at the end of season 2 and he seemed perfectly content to literally swim across the ocean (which um… what do you mean the sworn protector of ninjago can’t swim?). Where is this coming from?! Again, it doesn’t really go anywhere, there’s not a point where he has to learn to confront it or he grows because of it. It’s just pointless stuff added cuz the writers like giving Kai vague trails to try and develop him. The cloud kingdom is kinda cool. That last minute twist about them working with Morro is… stupid and unnecessary though. 

Spotlight Episode

I really like the Spinjitzu master tomb episode. Some cool riddles, I like the first two rooms a lot. I do think the third room is a bit strange. Like, the clue was “don’t look ahead” and the solution was to look beneath them, which is the exact same solution as the previous room. Like, you already have magic ice that shows the future, why not play into that? Don’t look ahead could maybe mean don’t look to the future, the opposite of that being the past. Maybe they have to draw on their past adventures to solve it somehow? Learning from the past is a good lesson, right? But overall, I really like it. Some real solid humor this episode. This episode has the sarcastic Jay optimism, Kai totally stalling for time, Zane dealing a pretty sick burn on Cole, just a lot of fun stuff. I like it. It just has great energy and nothing feels like it’s drawn out for too long.

Misc

The aesthetic this season… can be inconsistent, but the main ghost vibe displayed in the opening theme is really solid and I really like it

Speaking of the opening, Ghost wip is great and the opening in on par with last season’s (which is my fav) for sure

Ice age references… okay.

Chima references…. OKAY...

Okay, but like Deepstone can… kill ghosts? Or not? Is it just something ghosts can touch? It’s supposed to be like water in weapon form, right? Like that’s how I understood it when they first introduced it. Wouldn’t the deepstone bars kill Ghoultar then? And then like, Cole’s bike is made of deepstone. He uses it as a weapon. Wouldn’t it kill him? It kills other ghosts when they touch it. How… how does it work?! I need answers!!!

The captain of the steam boat says they’re going as fast as possible, but later Ronin comes in and cranks it up like twice as fast… that always bothered me like, why would he lie about that? Who is this captain and why is he so chill about everyone’s lives?! And then later Wu cranks it up yet again, like the ship had slowed down to it’s previous speed. What the hell is happening with the controls of this ship???

So pissed that the nasty CGI nightmare cloud monster that chases the ninja is named Nimbus. Totally forgot about that. I have an OC with a cat named Nimbus… I promise, there is not going to be a stupid twist bout the cat being the monster thing in Mists of Fate. That would be very stupid.

I was all excited that season 13 gave us minecart chases, but I totally forgot season 5 gave us one first. I really like the return to the caves of despair btw, good reuse of a known location.

How many times this season did we do the: 

Kai: Oh, I don’t like water, I can’t do it uwu  Cole: ...You serious?

Thanks for reading! And if you got this far… I don’t know. I would love to hear your thoughts if you have any! These are just my opinions, so don’t think too much of it if you disagree.

-Kitten

[purplesurveys]

1266

Retaking this survey I took nearly exactly a year ago, which would be around the time of one of the lowest points in my life. A lot has changed and I’m *so much* happier these days, but it doesn’t hurt to revisit and acknowledge the emotions I went through then.

Are you afraid of lifts? 2020: I only feel afraid if I’m the only person riding the elevator. If I ever got locked inside I’d always feel a lot better if there’s at least one other person stuck with me. Otherwise I try not to be too bothered by lifts. 2021: Yeah, as much as possible I would still only get in if someone else was also planning to get in; elevators that are also visibly old and unmaintained tend to scare me away, too. But generally, riding the elevator isn’t a phobia of mine.

Who did you last talk to in person? Is that person attractive? 2020: That would be my mom and yes, I think she’s very attractive. Not in that way of course, but you know what I mean. She looks very young for her age and we always get mistaken as sisters. 2021: My dad. Sure, I think he looks okay.

Have you ever had a deep, personal conversation with a stranger? 2020: As much as possible I don’t like having deep conversations with someone I barely know, but sometimes I can’t escape the situation and I end up being a part of those talks. The nicest conversation I had was with a client during my first internship – he has his own company now, but over breakfast he told me about his struggles, his old unfulfilling 9-5 job, and gave me so much valuable life advice. He was so genuine and so nice and at that time I stopped minding the fact that he was a stranger and I’d most likely never encounter him again. 2021: Ooh I remember that. Yeah, he was lovely to talk to and I definitely have not encountered anyone with stories like his ever since. Anyway, I’ve grown to be a lot more extroverted over the past year so I certainly wouldn’t mind a conversation with a stranger, as long as they haven’t established themselves as a creep or pervert.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate your own appearance? Why? 2020: Probably an 8. I don’t have a problem with my physical features for the most part, but I don’t like my front teeth and that my body hair is thicker and grows more quickly than average. Those are the two things that mess with my self-esteem the most, and the two factors that took out the missing two points. 2021: 9. I still have the same points for self-esteem issues; but I’ve embraced them slightly more over the last year.

Who was the last person to send you a message on Facebook? When was the last time you saw that person? 2020: Rita. I probably saw her sometime in early March. Maybe during a board meeting for our org before the lockdown was implemented. 2021: Angela. Sometime mid-July, I think? when we went to the BTS pop-up store together with Reena and Hans. I might see her again next week for her birthday. I have to see her reaction when she opens up the present I plan to get her.

If you decided, at this moment in time, that you were going to make a sandwich, what would you put on it? 2020: Assuming my hypothetical pantry is full, I would go for a southern-style chicken sandwich with chicken breast and spicy mayo. My stomach just rumbled, what have you doneeeeee 2021: Holy shit that sounds so fucking good right now. Can I just steal my own answer? Spicy crunchy chicken sandwiches are the shit.

Are you good at controlling your emotions, or do you tend to let them get the better of you? 2020: It’s 50/50 at best. Sometimes I let self-control win since it’s usually the most responsible choice and it’s also to avoid drama, but there are days where I recognize that self-care is just as important and so I allow myself a healthy release whether the release is one of sadness or resentment or anything else. Repressing my emotions and letting them bubble up over time isn’t healthy, either. 2021: I’m a lot better at it now. I think I have done a lot of growing and maturing and processing over the last year, and I don’t get into dramatic outbursts nor repress my feelings too much anymore. Whenever I feel deeply I let the emotions stay, but I also know when I need to reach out and seek help.

At this moment in time, what do you want the most? 2020: Normalcy. 2021: At this moment in time, I wish I could go back to when I took this survey and reassure the me then that everything was going to turn out absolutely fine. But right now I wish I also had sushi.

How many times have you cried over the person you love/like? 2020: Too many. 2021: I don’t love anyone in that sense.

How exactly are you feeling right now? Why do you feel the way you do? 2020: I haven’t been feeling anything in particular these days. To be honest, I’ve just been doing a lot of…floating around, existing, trying to make it to the end of the day unscathed. I believe I’m feeling this way because there’ve been a lot of major life changes happening and I simply wasn’t prepared to deal with all of them simultaneously. 2021: Jesus Christ that was brutal to read. How the fuck did I...manage? Anyway, right nooooow I feel quite content because a new episode of Run BTS came out and I really enjoyed it!! I also feel cozy because it’s actually quite cold tonight, so it’s making me feel sleepy faster than I would like lol. What’s the relationship status of the last person that put their arms around you? 2020: She’s been married for the last 23 years to my dad. 2021: He’s been married for the last 24 years to my mom.

Has the last person you held hands with, ever told you that they love you? 2020: Yeah. 2021: ^ Gross. But yeah to answer this question in 2021 – yes she has, in a platonic, sisterly way. We say it all the time.

Is there someone you used to hang out with all the time, and now you don’t anymore? If so, do you ever miss that person? Why do you think your relationship changed?   2020: Sure, Sofie’s the first person I thought of because we used to be the best of friends. We simply grew apart when college started, since she studied in Manila and I was all the way in another city. It would’ve been too difficult to keep up the friendship with both of us also starting to have different goals and priorities, as well as new friends. I miss her sometimes, but I’m not desperate to see her anytime soon. I’m sad to see our relationship fizzle out the way it did, but we’re both pretty happy and have been doing well and that’s enough for me. 2021: I stopped hanging out with Aya because she is an abusive piece of shit, and I obviously value my friendship with Jo far more than tolerating an abuser and keeping them around in my life. As for missing her, no, not really. I’ve always found it easy to cut people off and wipe out the positive sentiments I would use to have about a person.

Who was the last person you talked to, whose name started with ‘H’? What color are that person’s eyes? 2020: I don’t know a lot of H people so it was probably Hannah even though I haven’t talked to her in a while. Her eyes are dark brown/black, like nearly every Filipino. 2021: Hans. Same, dark brown/black.

Who was the last person you talked to, whose name started with ‘M’? How did you meet that person? 2020: OMG this was so tough to think about. The only person I can think of is Angela but that’s only because her first name is actually Maria. We met on the first day of 1st grade, back in 2005. I accidentally stabbed her with a newly-sharpened pencil and made her palm bleed, and for some insane reason a lifelong friendship was established that day. 2021: Macky. He’s a coworker but is a couple of positions above me. At first I took issue with my workplace not using honorifics, but when I learned it was a tactic to get everyone comfortable with one another, I soon got used to it.

The person you love/like is offered a job in another country. Would you let them go, or try and convince them to stay? 2020: Let them, because that was what we agreed on. 2021: No matter my feelings towards the situation, I would never interfere and ask them to stay.

Is there anyone you dislike so much, that you actually can’t stand to be around them? 2020: Back in college I hated being anywhere near a frat guy. They all had the same vibe, had the same fashion sense, used the same slang, had the same shitty work ethic so I always knew whenever one was nearby. 2021: One of my uncles, who I believe has COVID literally right now because he refused to get a vaccine. Can’t say I feel awful.

When was the last time you wanted to cry, but didn’t, because you didn’t want to show that you were upset? Why? 2020: I’ve been hiding my emotions and my tears from my family the whole month because we’re not a showy family when it comes to our feelings. We deal with our emotions privately, in our own bedrooms. 2021: Like two weeks ago when my teacher in my Korean classes shared a song recommendation with us and it turned out to be this really emotional, introspective song about dealing with life anxieties. It was beautifully sung and I nearly cried, and the only reason I didn’t was because I was in a virtual class full of strangers and I wasn’t about to start bawling my eyes out in such a situation lol.

If you found out that someone had been talking about you behind your back, would you confront them? 2020: I probably only would if they’ve always been super nice to me to my face but talking shit about me if I’m not around. It would be something I’d want to get into the bottom of. 2021: Depends on who the person is and if I think they’re worth my energy or not.

Which do you think is worse - saying something and then wishing you hadn’t, or not saying something and wishing you had? 2020: I hate nothing more than being too afraid to say something and then never having the space to say it again. That’s the type of regret that stays with me and keeps me up at night. 2021: I still go with the latter.

Do you know anyone who seems almost incapable of showing their emotions? 2020: I wouldn’t say I know anyone exactly like this, but I know of people who have built a great big wall around themselves and are super defensive when it comes to their emotions in a way that you’ll never know if they’re going through something. The first person I thought of was JM. 2021: My dad is extremely unexpressive. I guess I can say I kinda get it - he has to keep up his image as the father of the house and all - but I hope he has his own, healthy ways of processing his emotions, even if they have to be done in private.

What are 3 things that are guaranteed to make you smile, or put you in a good mood? 2020: Good Mythical Morning, seeing my orgmates, and driving. Driving seems to put me in a really good mood these days, though that’s likely because I haven’t had to do it as often as I used to. 2021: BTS, my dogs, and talking to Angela and Reena.

Do you look more like your mum or your dad? 2020: I’m a carbon copy of my mom, I’ve been told more times than I can count. 2021: Well yeah, that hasn’t changed.

When was the last time you saw your grandparents? 2020: I last saw my paternal grandparents in February; with my maternal grandma, two Thursdays ago. I have not seen my maternal grandpa since June or July 2015. 2021: Start of August for my maternal grandma; and I believe it was June when we most recently visited my dad’s parents. I visited my maternal grandpa at his columbarium slot during his birthday last year.

Have you ever felt really attracted to someone, but been deterred because you found out they didn’t have a very nice personality? 2020: No. If I get attracted to someone, that means I’ve already decided that they’re attractive on all fronts, including their attitudes and personality. 2021: ^ That is such a damn lie lmao. I remember getting attracted to this boy Lance from high school and thinking he was so cute and that I should probably try my chances with him...but I immediately got turned off when I noticed how he was slightly immature for his age and I stopped pursuing him immediately.

Have you ever hugged/kissed someone you’d only just met? 2020: Probably when I was out drinking, yes. 2021: ^ That’s true but that only goes for hugging.

Where is the person you would most like to see/be with? 2020: There is no such person. 2021: All my friends and best friends are at home. At least they should be at this hour, lmao.

When was the last time you bought a CD/DVD? Which one was it? 2020: The last CD I bought was Beyoncé’s self-titled album, but I can’t remember if I bought it in late 2013 or early 2014. 2021: ^ 2020-me had no idea :’) Anyway, the last DVD I placed an order for was Map of the Soul ON:E, though I’m not getting that until October. The last thing I was able to successfully receive was my Butter CD set.

Have you ever gone against someone’s advice and then regretted it? 2020: I don’t usually ask my friends for advice since I don’t want to possibly be the jerk that asks for advice but goes against them. I’ve always just gone with whatever I think is best for myself. 2021: I guess I’m still the same as I found myself agreeing to those two sentences.

Would you ever apologize for something that wasn’t your fault? 2020: Welcome to my life. 2021: Before, I used to. I won’t let shit like that pass now.

What’s been the best thing about your day so far? 2020: I’ve done a good share of self-care activities today…I actually got up in bed and have been taking surveys, I ate a lot for breakfast, I took a shower, and fixed myself a cup of coffee. The bar has been set very low since August obviously, but considering I’ve been skipping out on a great deal of activities that used to make me happy, I’m just glad I accomplished several today. It’s the little joys, guys. 2021: Getting good feedback from my boss on a deck I had to work on all day today. Also the new episode of Run BTS, aka my favorite thing about Tuesdays.

Has anyone ever cried in your arms before? 2020: I can only recall one person who’s done this. 2021: Sure.

Who was the last person you talked to, whose name started with ‘C’? Is that person older or younger than you? 2020: Tina, but her full name is Christina so she counts. I keep forgetting she’s a year older than me. 2021: Coco. Yeah, I believe so.

Do you keep a lot of things from your parents? 2020: Yes. They know my good side - my awards, achievements, job prospects, all the shiny stuff they can be proud of. They don’t need to know how mentally fucked their firstborn actually is, because it’s not like they’d know how to deal with all that weight. 2021: Yes.

Who was the last person you confided in? Do you regret it? 2020: Angela. Not at all. She’s been my rock for the last 15 years. 2021: Andi, and no. I trust them with my whole life and then some.

What was the last film you watched, that you hadn’t seen before? What kind of film was it? What did you think of it? 2020: I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a psychological thriller. It’s not for the faint of heart, especially those who’ve been feeling depressed and/or existential lately. It certainly didn’t make me feel good and I wish I could unwatch it, not because it was bad but because it was a bit too triggering. 2021: Be With You; it’s a Korean film that’s mostly romance but with a super super slight tinge of fantasy if you squint your eyes hard enough. I loved it a lot; both the leads are sooooooooo pretty to look at and the kid is a fantastic actor. I also cried a lot, but I do think the ending could’ve been executed better as it felt rushed.

Have you ever had an argument with the last person you hugged/kissed? 2020: Lots. 2021: Nothing more than extremely petty fights, the last of which we had approximately 12 years ago.

Using one word only, describe the day you’ve had so far. 2020: Lonely. 2021: Routine.

[goodbyenorthernlights]

This is an interesting conversation (if you can even call it that- early Mytho’s ability to converse is less than great) that Fakir has with Mytho in episode two, since Fakir is giving such a mixed message: The brief conversation boils down to Fakir telling Mytho that he sucks for being inconsiderate of other people’s feelings but at the end he affirms that Mytho still shouldn’t consider other people’s feelings. So it’s like what??? Make up your mind, Fakir????

It’s hard to know what to make of this during a first watch, when we’re still a ways off from learning who Fakir really is and what his background with Mytho is, but rewatching this scene once you’ve gotten all the information makes it easier to understand.

My personal take is that Fakir’s giving Mytho this contradictory reprimand as a way of processing his own mixed feelings about Mytho. Ultimately Fakir loves and I think admires Mytho as this heroic fairytale Prince who, even at this point, still has that instinct to protect and rescue even at the cost of his own well-being, but at this point a lot of that love has been overridden by Fakir’s frustration with Mytho.

Fakir, after all, has been serving as Mytho’s primary caretaker since Fakir was a literal child (Well, Fakir technically IS still a child, just an older one now) and not only is keeping Mytho out of harm’s way a difficult, full-time job that likely interferes with Fakir’s ability to have a normal school life, but Mytho can’t really reciprocate in any meaningful way. 

By “reciprocate” I don’t mean Mytho physically protecting Fakir, but on an emotional level Mytho doesn’t really respond to Fakir’s feelings and efforts at all. If Fakir is affectionate and plays with Mytho, Mytho won’t care. If Mytho gets hurt and Fakir cries and tends to Mytho’s wounds, Mytho won’t care. If Fakir is angry and hurls insults at Mytho and slaps him, Mytho won’t care. Fakir is investing all this time and emotion into somebody who only ever gives him indifference in return, because Mytho is simply incapable of giving anything else.

This isn’t Mytho’s fault, he’s certainly not deliberately trying to hurt Fakir, or Rue, or anyone, and insomuch as Mytho can have preferences I think he’d prefer not to- but it’s the effect Mytho’s heartlessness has regardless, that leads to Fakir’s frustration and resentment. There’s a part of Fakir that wants to yell at Mytho to think about other people’s feelings, to have more care for himself and the people around him.

...But the only way that can happen is if Mytho gains his heart back. And if that happens Fakir might lose his already limited control of Mytho, Mytho stops listening to and obeying Fakir, and doubles-down on the heroic thing now that he can also feel empathetic towards the people he rescues. And, of course, it also sets the story of the Prince and the Raven back on track... including the horrific and pathetic fate of the Knight that Fakir is reincarnated from.

So Fakir is left with this conundrum: Mytho as-is is a source of frustration and pain to him, but he’s terrified of things becoming even worse if Mytho begins changing. So he expresses his feelings by talking at Mytho, not caring if he’s being insulting or inconsistent, because it’s not like Mytho will care either.

[aion-rsa]

Why The Truth About Britney Spears Is So Elusive

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Britney Spears is one of the most-covered and least-known celebrities of the modern era. She is a millennial icon whose songs were the soundtrack of a generation. A choreographed contradiction from her earliest burst onto pop stardom, the singer became a blank canvass for anyone carrying a paint brush. The FX docuseries The New York Times Presents “Framing Britney Spears” is an attempt to find the artist’s place in the gallery. It is also searching for Britney’s whereabouts in general. Spears was placed into a conservatorship when she was 26 years old. That was 13 years ago this month, and she has been petitioning the court to have that changed.

Britney’s conservatorship, overseen by her father Jamie Spears, has been profitable. With a net worth of over $60 million, maybe too profitable to ever get resolved. It could be a form of life imprisonment and wannabe jailers appear to come out of the woodwork regularly in Britney’s career. Spears also currently has a restraining order against Sam Lutfi, one of her former managers.

According to “Framing Britney Spears,” court documents call the singer a “high-functioning conservatee.” Britney’s fans point out their favorite star released four albums, went on three world tours, performed a sold-out five-year residency in Las Vegas, was paid $15 million to be a judge on The X Factor, and put her name on a billion-dollar perfume line. Yet, she has been deemed incapable of taking care of her finances or life, and even when she can drive.The case is being proceeded over by Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Brenda Penny.

For a pop queen in exile, Spears hasn’t been invisible. She’s been spotted at Starbucks with her boyfriend, Sam Asghari. She’s posted clips of her dancing, working out, painting, and giving impromptu fashion shows on Instagram during the coronavirus lockdown. Her posts, of course, only fuel the fire of conspiracy theorists, regardless of their apparent mood or meaning. Spears’ song titles like “Work Bitch,” “I’m a Slave 4 U,” and “”Out from Under,” could also be read as messages concerning her career. 

Spears commands loyalty, and her fans love her. This is poignantly evident in Chris Crocker’s viral 2007 YouTube plea to “Leave Britney Alone.” The #FreeBritney movement rose up spontaneously after the conservatorship. The fan-produced podcast “Britney’s Gram” has dedicated itself to getting information to the public. Miley Cyrus shouted “Free Britney” during a performance. Paris Hilton and Rose McGowan have shown support. Britney’s mother Lynne Spears has been known to “like” comments with the #FreeBritney hashtag. 

Samantha Stark, the director of The New York Times Presents: Framing Britney Spears, freelanced as a choreographer while making the two-step into video journalism. Writing at The New York Times for the past 8 years, she also produced and directed episodes of The Weekly. Stark spoke with Den of Geek about the difficulties of reporting on Spears’ conservatorship, and the future of journalism in a changing media climate.

Den of Geek: What drew you to Britney, of all the cases?

Samantha Stark: We started filming this before a lot of these court filings about the conservatorship started happening. The original concept was to look back at media coverage of her through this 2020-then-lens, post-MeToo and post when things like talking about mental health are more mainstream. There’s not as much stigma. Looking back at the media coverage of her from the early 2000s feels so shocking now. That was the original concept. Then while we were filming, these court filings started pouring in.

Could you have picked two better names for this case than Wallet and Judge Penny?

Right? There are a lot of similar names that run throughout it. You have Jamie Spears and Lynn Spears and Jamie Lynn Spears. You have a lot of Kevins, just like a ton of Kevins running throughout. There are a lot of Sams also in Britney’s story. There are a lot of re-occurring names. But yeah, Andrew Wallet.

What’s the first misconception “Framing Britney Spears” will clarify for the casual Britney Spears fan?

A huge misperception of her, that I had going into the project, is a lot of people think that the creation of her image and the music that she does and the way her shows are and the outfits she wears are other people’s decisions. But what I learned over and over again was how much of a say in her early career, including “Baby One More Time” at the very beginning, she had in her image and the way she was presented. How involved she was creatively in every show she did and every music video she made, particularly at the beginning of her career. I think a lot of people think she’s this puppet that was sexualized as a teenager and didn’t know it. And I think, from talking to the people who worked with her then, that that was her. She had a really big say in that.

From my unscientific survey, asking everyone I came into contact with “what’s the first thing they think of when they think of Britney Spears”: A lot of people say, “Oh, that time she shaved her head,” or “the picture where she shaved her head.” One of the reasons it’s called “Framing Britney Spears” is there seems to be these very few still-image frames in our collective subconscious, that burned into us when we remember her.

We went into it wanting to figure out how we could learn what was behind the frame, outside of the frame. I think a lot of people don’t realize all the different factors that were leading up to that point. A lot of people don’t realize that she was going through a custody battle then and how important her role as a mother was to her, or is to her still. There’s a lot of pulling back the curtain we could do.

Danny Ramos, the photographer we interviewed, was one of the only people doing video during the big paparazzi explosion. We wanted to talk to him and use his video, so you could see what was happening outside of the frame. He describes the time with the umbrella, that’s another big photo that people remember, like the head shaving. What people don’t realize is how upset she was that day because she was trying to see her kids and wasn’t able to. And how much he pushed her buttons before that happened, some deep buttons. So that’s outside of the frame. 

Another one is the central mystery of our film. I think a lot of people don’t know that Britney Spears is still in a court-sanctioned conservatorship and that, for most of the 12 years, her father was the one in charge of her personal, medical, and economic decisions. He controls what happens with her money. The central mystery of our piece is something that Joe Coscarelli, one of our reporters, says in the film: “She’s living the life of a busy pop star, and yet we’re told she’s at risk constantly.” How is someone who can live the life of a busy pop star also be so at risk that she can’t make basic decisions for herself like medical-care decisions, where she lives, contracts, what to do with her money?

Britney’s lawyer, Adam Streisand, mentions a health report he wasn’t allowed to see, and was told by the judge it was justified withholding. I’ve seen a lot of reported diagnoses on the internet. Do you have any idea what that report said specifically?

Absolutely not. I think that’s important. Part of the difficulty with reporting on conservatorships, Britney’s and also any conservatorship, is that a lot of it has to do with medical records. Also, they do have court investigators that go out and interview the people involved. They have different kinds of people who submit reports about the person, and they’re protected under HIPAA and also allow the person some privacy.

Britney has signaled recently through her court filings that she doesn’t want her records to be sealed, that she wants people to be able to see them. But that’s particularly with her estate, which is different from the medical records. Who knows if she would want people to see that report also? But her conservators and lawyers in the past have decided it’s against her best interest. That’s something else interesting about conservatorships, is that other people decide what is in the person’s best interest. As Britney is performing in Vegas, other people are deciding for her what’s in her best interest all the time.

Since we don’t know anything about that report, we don’t know if Britney has a mental health diagnosis. She could not, there could be nothing actually in that realm. A lot of people like to speculate what kind of mental illness she might have, but we don’t know if she even has one. I think that’s important to remember.

Britney’s request for an outside independent party taking conservatorship seems like the most rational solution to the situation. Why is this so difficult?

That is the question. It seems as if Britney requests, “I don’t want my father in charge of being a conservator of the estate. I want this trust, Bessemer Trust, instead.” Yet her father is still in charge. That is legal. The judge made that decision. We don’t know why. A lot of questions about the conservatorship system, as a whole, have been brought up during this process. When someone is under a conservatorship, they are under a conservatorship because it’s considered that they cannot act in their own best interest. Conservatorships are mostly given to the elderly with Alzheimer’s, because a lot of people try to take advantage of people with Alzheimer’s and get them to sign over their money or their wills. And this was put in place to protect those people, which is really necessary.

It’s confusing because Britney is not. It’s a very unique situation, they always say, but we don’t know why.Jamie’s argument is that he has been doing a good job on this for the past 12 years. Her estate has grown, and that if he gets taken off and a whole new company takes over, it can harm her. Bessemer Trust does this professionally. They manage people with gigantic estates’ money all the time. So, the merits of that argument are questionable. But the judge decided that way. She’d left the door open. She didn’t decide he’s definitely staying on. She didn’t do an emergency suspension. That’s what they were asking for. They could still file to remove him.

These legal processes take a really long time, and as they’re happening, everybody’s getting paid. Britney’s estate pays the lawyers on both sides. She pays for her own lawyers, and then she pays for the lawyers arguing against her own lawyers, as well as the conservators’. That is oftentimes what happens with the conservatorship system. That’s also a place where people point to as something that could be a systemic issue in conservatorship systems: are these lawyers always acting in her best interest while also getting paid as long as the conservatorship is in place?

Is Britney a hostage, or is this a self-imposed exile?

I have no idea. We don’t know. Another really hard part of reporting this is there’s such a strong circle around Britney, seemingly controlling who she interacts with, because of the conservatorship, that we can’t talk to her. And she has not said anything publicly on her social media. Through her court documents, she said she appreciates the long “informed support” of her fans and that she “doesn’t want this battle hidden away like a family secret.”

Those were quotes from her court documents written by her lawyer, Sam Ingham, who legally is responsible for speaking for her since she’s not legally necessarily supposed to speak for herself. She could. So, that’s a mystery. Why isn’t she saying anything? Is it because there are people around her stopping her, or is it because she doesn’t want to say anything? Maybe Britney doesn’t want to talk to anyone about this. We have no idea. It makes it very frustrating to report on.

Just because you report on something doesn’t mean you agree with it. Do you think Spears speaks in code on her Instagram posts?

I don’t know. I have looked at every post since 2015 and some before that. It’s really fascinating to look at. Something about her Instagram that I love was this period of time where she was posting a lot of herself with her kids. It was just so beautiful to see her as a mom, because I know from talking to people close to her, that’s the number-one thing she’s ever wanted, to be a mom and to be seen as a mom. So those are really moving to me. Whether or not she’s speaking in code with other things, it’s so hard to tell because they’re always so surprising what she puts up there.

It seems she’s been doing it consistently, even in her songs throughout her career.

Yeah. It is interesting to listen to some of her songs now that we’ve seen all this come out in court. Even the song “Overprotected.” Listening to that now, wow. It has such a different meaning knowing that she does not want her father to be “protecting” her. A lot of her music videos and music has this bondage theme. Britney is often seen in chains or in cages. Also, a lot of themes of people taking from her, like “Gimme More.”

I think people haven’t taken that seriously, but when you look at it and you think of these as art and expression, even if she doesn’t have a song-writing credit on the songs a lot. Felicia [Culotta], her assistant and friend, who’s been with her for most of her career, said she would go into the studio and talk to the people who were writing the songs about what was happening in her life. And they would often write songs based off of what she was saying, which I guess is standard in the industry. I didn’t know. But we can draw our own conclusions to why there is such a big theme, yeah, of bondage and of people taking stuff from her.

Britney was a trendsetter musically. She explored dubstep, and she really is the face of the millennials. Do you think the #FreeBritney movement will also become a millennial icon?

Well, one of the things I find so compelling about the #FreeBritney movement is talking to Kim Kaiman, who was the marketing director at Jive Records. She was the person who met Britney when she first came in at 15, and decided how to market her, what her image was going to be. She very much expressed that she wanted it to be based off of who Britney actually was as a person. She describes her as “your friend that you kind of idolize a bit and look up to, but is the same as you, has the same hopes and dreams as you have.” And the 12, 13-year-old preteen age was who they were marketing her towards, I think she really connected with that.

Kim says she captured so well the dichotomy of what a teenage girl is. Teenage girls want to be grown women, but they’re also kids. It’s this wanting to be sexy and in control feeling that she captured that really spoke to these young people. Almost everyone in #FreeBritney who I talked to was in their late 20s or early 30s. So they were that age then. They were those kids that she was being sold to. I feel like the idea that she’s your friend really carried over, because they’re like, “This is my friend that they’re doing this to. I have to go stop it,” from what they said to me.

When they were that age, she was sold as this perfect, all-American girl. Kevin Wu, who’s one of the #FreeBritney organizers, says this in the film. He was saying finding out that she wasn’t perfect, that time where she was super vulnerable to people, and she was having public issues. I hate saying meltdown because I really don’t know what it was. But the vulnerability that she showed there really, really speaks to this group, and also, I would say, that age bracket in general.

I keep quoting people, but Felicia, it’s not in the film, said “Britney was judged and criticized for who she was. Even when she came out as a teenager, she was judged and criticized for being too sexy. A lot of people who are kind of these outsiders or people who were bullied or LGBTQ people, they were judged and criticized for who they were when they were younger, and so there’s this connection. They can relate to each other.” She said, “Britney relates to them as well.”

There’s kind of this counterculture fandom that the #FreeBritney people are like the people who were bullied when they were younger. And it is kind of millennial. We want to be more open talking about mental health. We don’t want bullying. We want diversity. I do think that it really speaks to that.

You worked extensively with the #FreeBritney movement players. In the review, I wrote you treated them like stringers. How do you rate them as journalists?

I would not say that we treated them like stringers because we did all our own reporting ourselves. We have our own journalists. Liz Day, who’s featured in the piece. Everything that they were finding out and bringing up we independently investigated and verified, absolutely. But I will say, I think they became their own investigators for themselves. There weren’t people doing investigations into it when they first started in 2019. And so, they definitely became their own investigators trying to dig up court documents. But we definitely did that ourselves.

But part of the story is that they became these investigators, so we do feature that in the story. It’s fascinating. Some lawyers are involved with #FreeBritney, and they know how to find the publicly available court documents. They would take them and put them online and highlight them. And as soon as a new court document would come out, like if Sam Ingham, Britney’s court-appointed attorney, would file something new, they would know immediately and post it online and dissect it. But we did that ourselves too.

It’s so much easier for us to do it because we have a full infrastructure set up for it. These people were spending so much time. The reason they started doing the investigating is because there wasn’t any media covering it, and they really wanted that. They wanted people to look into this. And so, they started doing it themselves, and it got a lot of attention. Then the media did look into it.

We had an investigation into her conservatorship in 2016, so we were one of the only people to be looking at it in that way. It was by the reporter who’s in the film, Joe Coscarelli. They did this “Is Britney Spears Ready to Stand on Her Own” questioning: is she ready to not be in this conservatorship? A lot of people are interested in it because of what they started digging up.

I see it similar to the hijacking of right-wing hashtags by the K-pop stans or what’s happening right now with the GameStop stock. The community is bringing the attention and journalism is keeping up with it.

The fact also that the age of a lot of these people means they’re so adept at internet culture and social media culture. They are using social media in a sophisticated way to get people to pay attention to them, for sure.

Do you think Britney had any idea how creepy the Star Search Q&A with Ed McMahon was, or was she just blindsided by the stupidity of it?

I think you can look at her face and be the judge of that. She was 10, but she handled it very well. I think it boded for the future of men asking inappropriate things to her. She just kind of like, “It depends. Boys are mean. It depends.” She kind of shook it off quite well as a ten-year-old.

And you see her in our piece later, when there are men asking her inappropriate questions, she sidesteps it in a really good way, in a really way that’s interesting to watch.

The shocking one was her being told about a mother saying that she wanted to shoot her because she was a bad influence.

The wife of a governor, by the way. That’s the kind of thing that you look at and you wonder would it happen now? I think we’ve come some way of not trying to shame people for their sexuality, but who knows?

There’ve always been persistent dark rumors about Britney, along with other celebrities who reach a certain tier. Why do you think people are so eager to demonize them?

Well, I wonder if that is still true today. I feel like it was very true during this height of the tabloid era, like 2004 to 2009. We’re not as eager to enjoy celebrities’ crashing and burning. If they’re going to rise, they have to fall, that kind of narrative. I feel like our culture is not as into that now. I think we’re less mean-spirited. And I don’t know. That’s what I was trying to figure out this entire time making this piece. Like, why? Why Britney? Why are we, as a culture, consuming all of this?

The reason that there was paparazzi around her all the time is because it sold. We consume that. It sold the magazines better than any other light “storylines.” I don’t know why. I mean, just my opinion, maybe the idea of what could be beautiful in society and perfect in society was so narrow that people were resentful of that. The majority of the US Weekly readers were women, so the majority of people buying those photographs were women. Is it because this ideal was so narrow back then that people became jealous and resentful of her? Now, I think the standard of beauty has opened up much wider, but that’s just my guess.

One of the experts says she’s never seen anyone successfully terminate a conservatorship. If Britney does succeed, will that upset the guardianship designation in the future?

Only time will tell. Who knows? I mean, if there are issues within the system that need to come to light, I think it would help them come to light.

Just because we’re Den of Geek and you’re from The New York Times, I have to ask, are you at all related to Tony Stark?

You know, I get that question a lot, and the true answer is we don’t know.

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The New York Times Presents “Framing Britney Spears” debuts Feb. 5 on FX and FX on Hulu.

The post Why The Truth About Britney Spears Is So Elusive appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[mittensmorgul]

7.13, The Slice Girls.

Yes, yes, bucklemming and their creepy magical babies, but let's put that aside and talk about Sam and Dean and what this episode says about them, instead, for once. Instead of letting the focus on the creepy baby blind us all to what's actually happening in this episode, and what it says about s7 (and s6 too, and honestly a good chunk of Sera Gamble's approach to storytelling in general since she was the architect of these seasons even if she didn't pen this particular episode) overall.

Because whoa... it's kinda... not friendly to Sam...

My tag about how Sam and Dean are entirely different people, with different psychological composition, different mental and emotional processes, came about at the beginning of s11 (when the show was using a two-episode mirroring structure, thematically pairing episodes until the midseason 10, 11, 12 worked together as a triptych, and in a season where the final message the characters had to accept and learn was the understanding of Balance Of Opposites, these differences were on stark display) is "sam sympathizes and dean empathizes." It felt like a baseline difference in how each of them approach the world, and something necessary for US to understand their entire dynamic.

And that's on PERFECT display in this episode.

I've been talking throughout my s7 posts in this series about how Sam can't even see how compromised he is. Despite the fact he spends the entire season actively hallucinating Lucifer and openly admits he has difficulty telling those hallucinations apart from reality, he remains convinced that he's coping with it effectively (via the magic button of sanity he believes the scar on his hand to be), and all he has to do is press that button any time Hallucifer pops up, and everything will be fine again. This is Advanced Level Pretending The Bad Thing Doesn't Exist To Make It Go Away. And he can't understand AT ALL why Dean is intensely wary of him, and is unable to fully trust in Sam's perceptions or decision making abilities throughout most of s7.

(which... I mean turns out to be totally valid, but that's for another post... or at the very least, much later in this one... for now, let's try to stick to 7.13, Mittens, and avoid running off ahead of yourself for once... okay we have that settled, back to the point)

We don't see much of Sam actively Hallucifering in this episode, nor relying on the old Hand Squeeze maneuver, but it's impossible to watch this episode and draw the conclusion that Sam was an Objective Observer of Reality here. He's completely entrenched in his personal bias regarding Dean's actions, behavior, and mindset. And again, it's incredibly frustrating to watch.

Sam is so utterly convinced (because he HAS to be in order for it to continue working for him) of his own self-control, of his own stability, of his own soundness of mind, of his own perceptions of the world to be the One, True, Right, Correct Understanding. If that fails him, then as Dean told him in 7.02 when he first squeezed that wound on his hand to bring him back to reality, then "Stone One" of the foundation of his ability to cope with anything at all will just shatter, and his entire sense of self will slide away with it, and his unstable construct of sanity will collapse.

(which... happens two episodes later, but again, I'm getting ahead of myself... *slaps self and gets back to the point*)

Sam NEEDS to believe in his own "correctness" here. And sadly, part of that sham of belief involves the go-to mindset of s4-- that Dean is somehow "broken," that Dean is the one clearly not coping, or not engaging with reality as Sam interprets it, and that it's Dean's perceptions that are inherently suspect. Because Sam doesn't know a different way of relating to the world. He sympathizes.

I've written a lot about the difference between Sam as Sympathetic and Dean as Empathetic, but a super-quick and messy breakdown of this for the purposes of understanding my whole entire point here:

Sam understands others through an examination of them as filtered through his own personal past experiences and his own personal feelings and beliefs. He assumes that everyone else understands the world in this same way, and when someone's reactions or behavior deviates from his own personal experience, from how HE would behave or react in a given circumstance, he frequently disconnects or misinterprets, or attempts to re-file his observations or reclassify the other person in question into something he CAN relate to and understand.

In other words, Sympathy. (versus Dean’s empathy, where he is more able to set aside his own reactions and see people as they are, themselves. It’s what makes him so good at cold reading strangers, being able to put himself into their shoes rather than needing to imagine their shoes are identical to his own...)

We finally see a small subversion of this in Sam’s interactions with Jack in early s13, wherein he projects his own past experience onto Jack, applying the same things he experienced (or even wished he had actually experienced when he was younger) regarding his own psychic powers that he once believed may have made him "evil." Or at the very least made him "other." And Jack directly calls him out for his treatment in 13.03, which gives Sam pause, forces reflection, and drives him toward actually seeing Jack, rather than just seeing Jack as a projection of his own personal beliefs.

I really hope this makes sense... because 7.13 is demonstrating the root of this lack of understanding as the toxic and dangerous thing it can be, when pushed to this sort of deliberately self-deluding extreme. And of course Sam's ongoing ability to walk and talk and function at all completely relies on his ability to do this during s7 (which... ick is one of the reasons I think a lot of folks really have trouble with the entire narrative of the season, even if they haven't put their finger on why, because this is a super-icky, incredibly uncomfortable thing to watch).

Meanwhile, in addition to everything else going on, from the Leviathans being gooey and creepy and plotting world domination as their endgame goal while largely working to achieve it in plain sight, disguised as humans as they slowly infiltrate... everything and influence everything from politics to real estate to healthcare to the food supply to achieve their ends, to everything Dean relies on for his own personal comfort and stability and connection to the world being gradually stripped away from him (beginning with Cas and running right along through his own literal identity), this episode will steal yet another small physical comfort from him-- human sexual intimacy.

He's already lost Cas, his car (the singular constant in his entire life and the closest thing he's ever had to a home), his actual identity, his innermost thoughts (which went along with the identity when a leviathan took his form), comfort food (the TDK slammer slammed him good), Bobby, and even-- to an extent, due to his ongoing concern for his mental health-- Sam. Dean is... adrift... and now he can't even allow himself the simple pleasure of human touch and physical intimacy (even shrouded in the lie of a false identity... he can't even fake it for self-comforting purposes anymore). And yet, he still knows himself, far better than Sam does. And yet for Sam to maintain his self-control, he needs to believe that it's Dean who is deluding himself and succumbing to the depression Sam is not allowing himself to own.

Dean spends the majority of this episode actually doing his job, making connections, and coming to an understanding of the case through his own personal experience of it. While Sam puts the entirety of his reliance on coming to an understanding of the case on the Academic Validation of an "expert" in ancient Greek. Sam dismisses Dean's direct experience by rejecting it as inherently flawed-- because Sam doesn't necessarily trust his OWN ability to have made these observations himself, yet is 100% dependent on the conclusion that only his own observations are remotely reliable, lest his illusory grip on reality shatter entirely.

Dean, meanwhile, is not similarly compromised in a fundamental way, despite his increased drinking, which Sam uses as yet another excuse to dismiss Dean's assessment of reality. Dean's still insisting that he believes that Bobby's ghost may be haunting them, while Sam explains away each new incident rationally-- or so he believes, as the evidence mounts to a ridiculous extent. It gives Sam the false impression that Dean is emotionally compromised to the point his judgment has become irrational and based on his emotions, rather than his point of view and direct experience that Sam simply can't grok, and therefore needs to dismiss to maintain his belief in his own rationality.

These themes will become the "beating a dead horse dot gif" of s7, continuing even after Sam is healed by Cas in 7.17, proving they're inherent to Sam's fundamental makeup, rather than just a side effect of this "soul damage" he suffered with, or the demon blood he was addicted to in s4.

I'm still attempting to force myself to remain focused on just this episode, though, so I'll conclude with a few direct observations:

DEAN: I'm outside Lydia's. SAM (on phone):  Oh, come on, man. What, are you obsessed or something? DEAN (on phone):  No, I'm telling you. I have been eating at the buffet of strange all afternoon. SAM: Meaning what? DEAN: I'll tell you the second I know. But something ain't right. SAM: Or you're obsessed. DEAN: Shut up. I'm serious.

Despite Sam being told real facts by "experts" that the murdered men had all visited the same club Dean had the night before, he easily dismisses Dean's observations of something weird happening with the woman he'd hooked up with. Sam even tells him he's lucky he "dodged a bullet" since Dean hasn't been killed like the other men he's investigating, and is incapable of even making the connection between what killed those men and the "strange" things Dean's seeing with his own eyes regarding Lydia's rapidly growing daughter, Emma. Sam has to jump through increasingly flaming hoops with a straight face to maintain his belief that Dean is simply obsessed with this woman, that Dean is continuing to slack off, that Dean isn't objectively addressing The Facts™ as Sam understands them.

SAM: So what? I mean, so maybe she has another kid she didn't tell you about. DEAN: Nope, just the one. Emma. But that night, when I was with her, she didn't have any. And I was at her place, man. There was no playpens, no blankets, no rubber ducks. SAM: Right. Like you would have been focused on that kind of thing. DEAN: Hey, dude, that's the first thing you notice. Red flags. Then, all of a sudden, boom – baby. SAM: Yeah, the one you thought talked. DEAN: Oh, it talked. And not baby talk, either. SAM: Now you know so much about child development? DEAN: I know enough to know that they don't say, "Hey, Mom. Who's that guy?" So, cut to... Lydia's handing this kid who's calling her mommy over to these two women, right? But this is not a baby. No, no, this kid's got to be five. And same name – Emma. SAM: You know, George Foreman named all his sons George. DEAN: Are you deliberately messing with me? Dude, I know weird. Okay? There is no non-weird explanation for this. This morning, Emma was a baby. By sunset, she's Hannah Montana. Early years.

And yet Sam is still intent on the "expert" opinion of the professor they asked for help, over and above anything Dean might insist he's personally experiencing. Here, have a very short but complete meta encapsulation of this entire dynamic:

SAM’s phone rings. SAM: It's the Professor. DEAN: Oh. Good. The Professor. Yeah, I'm sure he'll crack this wide open. SAM: Shh!

Dean is sarcastic and dismissive of the professor, the supposed expert who deals in theoreticals and mythology, and not the reality Dean has directly experienced. Meanwhile Sam shushes Dean, dismissing not only his direct experience, but Dean's frustration at Sam’s repeated dismissals.

And here we have it again:

SAM: There's this whole crazy side to Amazon lore that Professor Morrison didn't even mention. DEAN: That's 'cause he doesn't believe in it, which is a real handicap when you're trying to deal with it.

THIS IS SAM'S WHOLE ENTIRE PROBLEM IN A SINGLE EXCHANGE. and then the moment Sam finds something In The Lore™, written down in a book where it's impossible to dismiss, he realizes that Dean hasn't been making shit up or somehow misinterpreting his own lived experience:

SAM: The lore says they reproduced quickly – as in, after mating, they gave birth within 36 hours. The babies grew incredibly fast, then the aging process became normal. Which is one way to make an army, I guess. The mating cycle is every two years. They send out all the women who have reached child-bearing age. DEAN: Which lines up, 'cause this happens every couple of years in different towns, right? SAM: Yeah. And we know for sure that at least some of the vics hooked up with strange women days before being killed Amazon style. DEAN: Hooked up in the same bar I met Lydia, right? SAM: Yeah. DEAN: And then suddenly she's got a little baby in like fruit-fly time. That baby turns into a little girl just as fast. SAM: Wow. So maybe you're – you’re, uh... DEAN: Don't say it.

But rather than questioning EVERYTHING ELSE Dean has been saying over the last few days (or longer, regarding his experiences related to Bobby's ghost), Sam holds on to the rest of his beliefs even more tightly. And he reframes this entire revelation into a different validation of his original thesis-- that Dean's still compromised, Dean's not being objective, Dean letting his emotional damage control him, and it's still A Problem. Because if that's still the case, then Sam is still Maintaining Control Of Himself, and not-compromised himself.

Sam latches on to this and refuses to let go, dismissing Bobby's ghost as a potential explanation for anything, dismissing Dean's evaluation of a document and again running off for a "professional opinion."

DEAN: Maybe it's useful. SAM: It's in a pile of "maybe it's useful." Besides, it's in Greek. Nobody reads Greek. DEAN: Yeah, except Greeks. Oh, and Bobby. SAM: And Professor Morrison. DEAN: Really? SAM: I'm going, Dean. You stay here, keep the door locked. Don't go anywhere. I mean it.

Meanwhile, this approach leaves Sam vulnerable. While at the professor's office, he's attacked by one of the Amazons. While left alone in their motel room, Dean's confronted by his Amazon daughter. He doesn't immediately kill her, though, despite drawing a gun on her before she can attack. And she is talking with him rather than outright attacking anyway, so he lets her talk. To me, this is the key exchange:

DEAN: You look exhausted. EMMA: And starving. It's been a tough sweet 16. So you believe me? EMMA: You'll help me? DEAN: If you really want help.

He is willing to help her escape her life IF SHE REALLY WANTS HELP. We know that when Sam does return, he literally sees a side of Emma that she never reveals to Dean-- the Amazon red eyes-- which convinces Sam that she's a monster incapable of not being monstrous.

A knife drops into EMMA’s hand from her sleeve. DEAN closes the refrigerator and points his gun at EMMA. DEAN: You were asking if I believed you.

I.e., no, Dean didn’t believe her, but he was still willing to hear her out, from an understandable “I’m still gonna point this gun at you while we chat” perspective. When Dean wavers, Emma uses that to question his ability to kill her at all... which is shockingly reminiscent of Dean's inability to kill Jack, even under direct orders from God, in 14.20:

EMMA: It's weirdly hard, isn't it? It is for me. DEAN: Knock it off. EMMA: How could it not be? You're my father. DEAN: Hey! We're not gonna do that. EMMA: But it's true.

So while Dean had wavered in just outright killing Emma, waiting to see if she would succumb to her monstrous nature and try to kill him first, Sam makes the choice to kill her immediately. And in his defense, he even invokes Dean's killing of Amy Pond back in 7.03 as proof that Dean is still compromised:

SAM: What did you say to me... when I was the one who choked? What did you say about Amy? "You kill the monster!" DEAN: I was going to! SAM: Oh, the hell you were! You think I'm an idiot? DEAN: What, you think I am? SAM: Dean, you were gonna let her walk! DEAN: No, I wasn't. That's ridiculous! SAM: Look, man, she was not yours. Not really. DEAN: Actually, she, uh, she was, really. She just also happened to be a crazy man-killing monster. But, uh, hey. SAM: You know what? Bobby was right. Your head's not in it, man. When Cas died, you were wobbly, but now... DEAN: Now what? Oh, what, you're dealing with it so perfect? Yeah, news flash, pal – you're just as screwed up as I am! You're just... bigger. SAM: What?! DEAN: I don't know. SAM: Look... Dean, the thing is, tonight... It almost got you killed. Now, I don't care how you deal. I really, really don't. But just don't – don't get killed.

Because that's what it boils down to, even underneath "stone one" and his Magical Scar Button, the foundation Sam laid that stone on was Dean's assurance, Dean literally guiding him through the mess of hallucination and reality that he'd been unable to separate out for himself, which Dean gets that Sam isn't actually dealing with outside of pushing the button every time Lucifer pops up for him. And without Dean, Sam knows his entire baseline for holding himself together would be gone. And isn't that just terrifying.

Because what Bobby was actually worried about wasn't Dean's head not being in it, but Dean's ability to carry the weight of all of this amid the relentless assault of the universe. From 7.09:

SAM: Yeah. Yeah, I kind of mean more like, uh... more like ever since my head broke... and we lost Cas. I mean, you ever feel like he's -- he's going through the same motions but he's not the same Dean, you know? BOBBY: How could he be? SAM: Right, yeah, but what if -- BOBBY: What if what, Sam? You know, you worry about him. All he does is worry about you. Who's left to live their own life here? The two of you -- aren't you full up just playing Snuffleupagus with the Devil all the live long? SAM: I don't know, Bobby. Seeing Lucifer's fine with me. BOBBY: Come again? SAM: Look, I'm not saying it's fun. I mean, to be honest with you, I-I kind of see it as the best-case scenario. I mean... at least all my crazy's under one umbrella, you know? I kind of know what I'm dealing with. A lot of people got it worse. BOBBY: You always were one deep little son of a bitch.

Bobby never actually said to Sam that Dean’s head wasn't in it. He gave Dean a bit of a talking-to after this, which is distressingly similar to what both Frank and Eliot Ness also tell Dean over the course of the next few episodes, but he never said this to Sam. This is SAM'S interpretation, based on SAM'S assessment of Dean, which informs Bobby's "buck up or else, you're a hunter not a person" speech to Dean from 7.09. Because this was what SAM needed to hear and believe to keep that "umbrella of crazy" firmly in place where he could manage it.

And as the universe continues tearing away at Dean's entire reality, that shield of "professionalism" is just about all he has left. And Sam unintentionally undermines even that at every turn.

What a horrific mess.

[abusedsapphics-archive]

(1) Hi! I'm the anon who sent the messages about feeling invalidated by my pdoc (psychiatrist, yes)😊. I just wanted to let you know that your response was incredibly helpful. Thank you so much. Your words literally made me cry. It was so relieving to have someone understand me. I waited for 2 years before telling her about C-PTSD because I was afraid something like this would happen... What you said about diagnoses is SO TRUE.

(2) It made me think of a past situation with another T. Before being diagnosed with an ED I was aware that I had one. When I told my T about it she said I didn't have one, and that I just had "disordered eating habits". Short after my Pdoc diagnosed me with bulimia. Why do you think that happens? It's like patients can't have their own opinions about what's going on with themselves (?) Also, why is it wrong that we read about psychology and try to understand what's going on with ourselves?

(3) Idk what to do with this situation. I feel like I need to prove to her that I was abused and beg her to belive me or something. I'm not gonna do that. I've been gaslit by my parents my whole life and some of the comments she makes feel so revictimizing (like when she minimizes the abuse). / I'm in Spain and there's very little information about C-PTSD here. Pete Walker's book is only in English too.. but you gave me some good ideas, thank you. ❤ do you mind if I keep you updated about this?

I’m super happy to know that my response could help you!

I think there’s a lot of reasons why mental health professionals tend to be at best hesitant, at worst neglectful and dismissive, when it comes to patients’ concerns and opinion. If I wanted to be charitable, I would say that it’s because an official diagnosis, especially if written down in a medical record, can be quite a big commitment, and so doctors and therapists, who don’t really know you or your experiences, want to go slowly - they’d rather spend more time making sure that they give you “the right one”, than risking it to be “wrong”, because giving you a treatment that’s going to harm you based on an incorrect diagnosis would be a professional risk for them, and bad for you.

That’s the charitable interpretation. The other interpretation is that doctors tend to think that they know better than their patients, because they’ve passed however many exams and we haven’t. Not only do they assume that all our knowledge comes from, like, pop culture and other not reputable sources, but also, if we demonstrate understanding of the current theories, they think it automatically disqualifies us, either because we’re ‘projecting’ or because we have malicious intent.

This is not rational, and, in my opinion, often not even necessarily conscious, but doctors do see themselves as the only people who have access to this sort of “forbidden magical knowledge”, and as soon as you demonstrate having accessed ~the sacred texts~ they get skeptical and defensive, which makes them more likely to want to defend their position of authority over you. It’s possible to bring them the checklists from the DSM and be like, “my experiences fit this diagnostic framework completely” and sort of like, force them to believe you, but they’ll probably still be reluctant and defensive.

I just gave up on suggesting diagnoses, mostly because to me they don’t matter all that much (it doesn’t matter what box I get put in, I will still need therapy), but also because I just don’t want to fucking deal with all their bruised egos. If I’m interacting with a psychiatrist it’s usually because I need meds, which means I’ll stick strictly to describing my symptoms, how they affect me in my best days and in my worst days, how the medication is affecting me, if I’m experiencing side effects, and that’s it. With therapists, I tend to open up more - I’ll mention early on that it’s important for me to not feel like I’m not listened to or taken seriously or assumed to be lying by authority figures (because it is, it’s a big trigger), and I’ll bring it up again if it’s relevant. If I think a diagnosis is relevant to a particular session, I’ll mention it casually, like ‘oh, I read about X disorder and it was interesting to me because I experience Y’ - but recently I’ve moved away from that, too, I just say ‘I experience Y’.

It is annoying to have to go in depth with descriptions of symptoms when it’s so much more effective to say, I don’t know, “depressive episode” or “anorexia” or “dumb bitch personality disorder” (my self diagnosis), but to me it’s less annoying than having to deal with the conflict of convincing a doctor that I’m not lying or exaggerating or incapable of reading psychology textbooks and drawing conclusions. At the end of the day though, we are the authority on our own experiences, and we only need them to believe us and take us seriously only so far as that makes them provide treatment - that’s it. They’re not the arbiters of our validity and our struggle.

Keep me posted, yes :) You can even do that off anon so I can respond privately, if you prefer.

[baddyxangel]

i feel like stiles isn’t appreciated enough throughout the show. like when he was trying to help scott with his first transition scott kept bowling him off and then would come back wanting his help, or when he had to be the one to give scott and allison’s messages and run across the school all day. especially with the beastiary where no one even lydia didn’t believe him that it was a real thing, or with matt where he thought it was him and no one gave him a second thought about his suspicions. in season 5 where if anyone gave him a chance on his suspicions on theo they wouldn’t have gone through a lot of that. also why did scott changes sides so fast when theo told him about donovan. scott is supposed to to be the best friend of stiles and he didn’t even try to talk to stiles before taking theos side.

I think in general it’s implied that Scott is just over trusting and that Stiles is under trusting. I think of the scene where Scott says “you don’t trust anyone!!!” and Stiles replies “yeah because you trust everyone!!”. Scott immediately accepts Theo into the pack, and Theo seems to know Stiles is too difficult to convince, so he instead works on getting everyone else to like him and kicking Stiles out of the pack instead of trying to get him to like him. Less work. i think you've got it. at this point, stiles is suspicious of anyting unusual and suspects everything is evil. He's usually right. Yeah, I never thought about that it just seems so clear now 😂

Stiles simply doesn’t trust anyone. And he has an excellent detector for bad guys (remember Matt?). He says he remembers Theo and ‘that’s not Theo’ which is a great plot thread they never followed up on. So it could be that it’s actually not Theo. Of that he’s so changed that he’s fundamentally changed. And no. I don’t care for Theo. He’s a classic narcissistic sociopath with a surface charm and not nearly as smart as he thinks. He is pretty though. Remember when Theo went home to his fake parents and threatened to break their fingers with a hammer if they didn't practice their fake signatures more? Boy, sure would have been nice if they ever properly explained that. Or even just showed us those two people ever again lol, what the fuck even happened to them? Theo probably killed them while practicing his villain 101 monologue.

I think Stiles has pretty good intuition, and can just tell if someone has evil intentions...like they give a vibe you don't feel good about, Matt being an example However because he's awkward and clumsy with words, he can't really put it into words why he has these feelings and his reasoning will thus sound ridiculous...Again Matt being an example

Stiles has great intuition and is usually right about those things. I can't remember exactly but I'm pretty sure he even suspected a teacher could be involved when the sacrifices were happening. Plus he realized he was being possessed by the nagitsune way before anyone else did, but no one listened. 

I would have like a scene towards the end of the series where Stiles says 'Man that guy looks sus' and the pack just attack the dude because Stiles is always right about those things.

Stiles is an excellent detective. He is able to detect which person is evil very easily, remember in Season 2 how he thought the Kanima's Master was Matt? Exactly. Stiles also says that he remembers Theo quite well, and that the Theo we know isn't the Theo he remembers. That plot line was, unfortunately, never expanded on so we don't really know if it was Theo or not. Scott seems to trust people right of the bat. Stiles doesn't. That is another reason. Theo was a mastermind villain and one of the smartest in the whole show. He was able to break Scott and Stiles' friendship whilst tricking everyone else within the Pack. He nearly took Sebastian's powers. He was a great villain, but a very bad character. He doesn't deserve the come back he had in Seaon 6a and B. He killed Scott for crying out loud.

There were also the early plot hints that Stiles was in some way 'magic' (which again were never followed up on). He certainly had spot-on assessments of the majority of the bad guys ( there's a lovely little moment after the birds invade the classroom in S3 where he leans over to pick a feather out of Ms Blake's hair and she actually flinches away). Also remember Stiles was always convinced that Lydia was not the Kanima (he joked about it but he knew it wasn't her). He also subconsciously knew he had been possessed before the Nogitsune even showed itself. It all just makes Scott's lack of trust in him all the more baffling, and it especially pisses me off when he calls Stiles on it in Season 5 (I've giving a lot of benefit to a lot of people) because actually Stiles was right every time. That scene broke my heart, especially bc Scott trusted Theo (who jumped out of nowhere) and not his lifetime best friend, like how?! but yeah I think Stiles was always right when It comes to trust people And Liam, who has been Scott's beta for like 5 minutes, totally trusted Stiles judgement (I love when they meet Theo in the woods in the same episode and Liam stands in front of Stiles to protect him).

stiles automatically didn’t trust him because of what he remembers of him before, he also doesn’t really trust a lot of people because scott trusts everyone and someone can’t just auto trust everyone too. stiles is there to like make sure that nothing really bad happens. stiles also looked at his dads handwriting and it was different and there is a clip of theo hitting his “dad’s” hand as punishment since it’s not the same.

Because Stiles is extremely perceptive and empathetic and understands a lot of unspoken things that are communicated through body language and motives (unlike Scott, who has no clue on what’s going on most of the time and is incapable of reading other people’s emotions, heartbeats, and chemosignals despite being a werewolf with supernatural senses.) Also, as Peter and Theo have pointed out, Stiles is “the clever one”, “smarter than everyone else” and “smart enough not to trust me [Theo]” I don’t think Scott fell for Theo’s bullshit so easily because he trusts everyone though. It’s more that Scott trusts others only when there’s something in it for him or if it’s convenient. He’s more worried about the possibility of Theo, or Liam (or another supernatural creature) stealing his true alpha status than about the fact that a stranger he knew next to nothing about could hurt his friends, and he only considered Theo an enemy after he tried to kill Scott and steal Stiles and his pack away from him. Never before. And that’s because, at that point, Theo becomes a direct threat to him. Stiles has warned Scott about Theo multiple times, but Scott brushed Stiles’ concerns off and chose to ignore every single proof of Theo’s shady behavior – Theo’s FAKE parents’ FAKE signature, Theo’s heartbeat/chemosignals, Theo creeping in his girlfriend’s bedroom to record her sleeping without her consent, etc. But Scott didn’t care, because up until that point Theo’s actions didn’t affect him directly. I kinda feel like In the end, Scott didn't care about any of the villains unless it was directly effecting him lol Also I think Scott was a bit naive, all the things he had done were successful bc he worked with the others otherwise I don't know how things would have turned out (just to mention when he bites Liam and had to kidnap him bc he panicked lol)

[theaurorfileshq]

R I V K A   W A L D R O N  /  A U R O R   C O R P O R A L

AGE:  Thirty-Three

BADGE NUMBER: R38N11

BLOODSTATUS: Pureblood

GENDER/PRONOUNS: Gendervoid, She/Her

IDENTIFYING FEATURES: blackwork sigil tattoos covering back, shoulders, arms, & feet ; usually wearing black (or red, on occasion) ; hair never longer than shoulder-length, rarely brushed ; constantly has sweets in pockets ; always looks like she’s slept six hours or less

STRENGTHS/WEAKNESSES:

(+): Dueling/Combat Magic, Occlumency, Wandless Magic

(-): Protective Magic (Cannot Conjure a Patronus), Touch Aversion, Maledictus - Raven Form (Beginning to Lose Control of Shifting Episodes)

BACKGROUND:

CW: implied domestic abuse, child abuse  

Rivka grew up deep enough in the Mississippi swamps that it would be difficult to pinpoint exactly where on a map. It was a place so drenched in old magic that it was palpable in the very air and water, and seemed to make the environment around them constantly shift. She and her mother - Delvene, father - Gil, and paternal grandfather - Lochar lived in an old manor house that had previously belonged to her mother’s proud Pureblood parents… Leaving them the place in their will was just about the best thing they ever did for their daughter, a squib, who otherwise would have inherited nothing. That they died only months after a short & sweet little wedding on the front porch wouldn’t arouse suspicions for many years.

Contrary to her mother, she displayed her magical abilities early, around age four. Young Riva left a trail of mayhem in her wake whenever she went tearing off into the swamps to play. And when she came back it was with all manner of critters and trinkets she shouldn’t have been capable of collecting herself while she was so small… She had a knack for making things move without touching them, going so far as to levitate some crawdads right out of the river. At age five, a particularly bad argument between her parents in the kitchen resulted in a lot of upturned chairs and broken dishes, as well as one dark-eyed toddler up a tree in the shape of a raven. They couldn’t manage to get her down again until she fell asleep and naturally shifted back in the middle of the night. But by then the damage had already been done… she had gained her father’s attention.

Her wild ways would only continue to intensify as time went on, especially after Gil decided in a fit of devilish inspiration he was prone to that he needed to harness the raw potential of her magic as soon as possible. He set Rivka to task running errands for him, usually to harvest potion ingredients, but sometimes to sit in certain places to listen and watch, sometimes to carry little packages or scrolls back and forth… He twisted what should have been a carefree and adventurous childhood into a rigorous training regimen. And the more she tried to resist his lessons, the crueler and more insistent Gil became. He demanded absolute obedience and deference and, brilliant little thing that she was, Rivka realized quickly enough that it was better to do as he said rather than risk the consequences. But, instead of controlling her, as he anticipated, his abuses only made her find every possible route of escape and every reason to buck authority. It made her elusive and feral, incapable of letting anyone in close enough to touch.

The one exception to this rule came in the form of Fidel Romero, a local auror in Mississippi who had been tasked with monitoring large-scale truancy & neglect cases of newly school age magical children in the area. Despite the many messages sent to the manor house in the swamp, the last officially known address for Rivka, now eleven, none of her Ilvermorny letters had been opened, nor had they received any indication she would be attending. When Fidel visited, he found that only Delvene remained, among a mountain of unopened envelopes, in a crumbled shell which had formerly been a stately Pureblood house of some repute. And all he could get out of her as she sat nearly catatonic on the porch in an old grey rocking chair was that a demon had crawled out of the swamp and swallowed her whole. With no other clues to go by, he ended up encountering Riva by chance… when he caught her stealing a handful of candies from a corner store in town. Once he plied her with a sundae the size of her head, Fidel got enough out of her to determine that her father clearly had no interest in her attending Ilvermorny. And so, he didn’t hesitate. He took her into protective custody that very evening.

Riva may have put something of a target on her back when she loudly declared in the entrance hall upon first entering Ilvermorny that she was not afraid of any bullies. That she did so while single-handedly dispatching of one such bully before ever laying hands on a wand did nothing to dissuade the particularly vicious or determined among them; but all the same, she took to Thunderbird house and to her studies like a lightning bolt to the tallest tree in the forest. Contrary to what her wild demeanor and odd social habits outwardly suggested, it was an environment that she thrived in. She was even capable of being attentive and quiet during class, although her reputation of wildness suggested otherwise. All it took was a good teacher to recognize her struggles and advise her to redirect her anger and frustrations elsewhere. After Riva became captain of the dueling club, there was a decided shift around her. The bullies that once targeted her were suddenly less eager to engage when she challenged them to a formal duel, in the proper arena.

In the summers between school, she would return to Fidel’s care briefly before vanishing again into the swamps she loved so dearly. He worried over her constantly, always concerned she was with her father. He had grown to distrust and despise the man over time, after gleaning what he could from Riva about his cruelties. Every time she left, he almost expected to never see her again, but miraculously, about two weeks before the end of summer, she would reliably arrive on Fidel’s doorstep again like clockwork, as if nothing had ever happened. He learned to be content with that for a while, until she came home one year with tattoos on her hands and back. Seeing red, he tore through the swamps looking for Gil for days and found nothing but a low, faraway sound like an echoing laugh taunting him. Despite his best efforts, Fidel couldn’t keep her away from him, as no lock or barrier would keep her. She flew through his fingers time and time again like a bird slipping through the bars of a cage. But he didn’t want to cage Riva… he only ever wanted to protect her.

She managed to hide any new tattoos or bruises she came home with after that, not out of fear of her father, but to protect Fidel and his big stupid heart as best as she could. She knew he wanted to tear Gil apart, that if he could he’d spend his whole life hunting through the ever-shifting landscape of the Mighty Mississippi bogs until he brought him to justice. But as much as she wanted to, Riva found herself unable to resist each time Gil summoned her to that old house constantly moving through the swamps. Somehow he held Dominion over her thoughts and actions, so much like that name she always overheard coming in hushed whispers from the darkest corners. The summer before her final year was when everything came to a head, when one night she returned unexpectedly early, in strange clothes, scratched and bruised and bloody, hands and feet and hair all torn from her flight… She would never fully explain to Fidel what happened, but what she saw that fateful night would come out in pieces, in nightmares, in long silent stares into the darkness. There had been fire, blood, and shadow, ancient tongues, and strangers in the woods. In the end, although she managed to claw herself out of her father’s grasp, she would never feel truly free of him.

The Mississippi River had always been her deepest & truest love, and the most comfortable home she had ever known. And so it only made sense that she’d follow it to its end. Living with Fidel and getting close to his family had helped guide her there, to the NOLA auror academy. Riva knew it was an opportunity, not only to improve her skills, but to further distance herself from the life with her father she had escaped. However, this time had its own share of challenges… It was in the academy that she finally had it explained to her exactly what being a Maledictus meant. To say that the diagnosis devastated her would be an understatement. In many ways, Riva felt that her world ended right there. In others, she knew she needed to do what she could for the people she loved in the time she had left. Becoming an auror was suddenly so much more important and urgent for that reason, and because she wanted to follow in Fidel’s footsteps while still walking her own path. But as it turned out, protecting him would also eventually mean deceiving him.

In her first year as an auror, Fidel got too close to finding Gil, close enough that she took it upon herself to throw him off the trail. Riva knew the swamps better than anyone, knew how to get to her father wherever he was, like her life depended on it. And so she also knew exactly how to keep Fidel away, this man that she had somehow grown to love more than her own blood. She followed him, carefully manipulating the clues as he came upon them, throwing her voice here or there, making just the right noise at the right time to get him to turn and miss something. She always kept just out of sight or out of reach in the dark, her heart pounding in her throat whenever he grew within arm’s length. It was one of the most difficult things she ever had to do, and not just because of the emotional toll it took on her, or the hurt she knew it would cause if he ever discovered the truth; but also because Fidel was damn good at what he did. It would be a few years before she saw him set the case aside, and even then she understood that it wouldn’t be forever.

Despite her adventurous nature, Riva was content to stay in Mississippi for a long while, perhaps because she found it difficult to miss out on even one moment with the ones she loved, knowing she would eventually run out of time with them. Instead of pushing to climb the ranks as quickly as possible, she focused on making herself like water, flowing easily along her path, trying not to rush too quickly towards or away from anything. She worked this way for ten years, collecting cases under her belt but largely avoiding anything that might draw too much attention to herself. But fate, as always, demonstrated that it had other plans for her… that it was not content to see her wasting away in one place, however comfortable she was to stay there. About a year ago, fate quite literally snatched her away in the middle of a case. Her superiors knew for certain that something was wrong when they didn’t hear from her for a week. But as soon as they mobilized a force to search for her, she turned up with a fuzzy memory in northern Minnesota, prompting investigation into the incident from MACUSA (since she had been transported over state lines such a significant distance). In the days following her recovery, she fervently worked on a list of codes that would not stop running through her head, insisting to anyone who would listen that they were significant to her abduction. Finally, about five days after turning up on the other side of the country, she saw the strange messages for what they were: a set of clues she had left for herself. Once she deciphered them, she was able to lead MACUSA to the northern branch of an Animagus trafficking ring operating along the Mississippi River, where they managed to take five or six smugglers into custody. This prompted her superiors to recommend her to MACUSA, after over a decade of solid work for them. And after meditating on it for a while, and receiving some vital encouragement from a certain gruff father figure, she agreed to apply.

[kostikivanov]

St. Vincent’s Cheeky, Sexy Rock

Annie Clark, the songwriter and multi-instrumentalist known as St. Vincent, has an apartment in the East Village. She’s rented it since 2009. But last winter and spring, while she was in town recording a new album, she didn’t stay there. If she wanted something, she sent someone to get it. “I need to not have to worry about the plumbing and the vermin,” she said. “Also, the trinkets and indicators of my actual life.” She was immersed instead in the filtration of that actual life into song. She was in a hermetic phase: celibate, solitary, sober. “My monastic fantastic,” she called it. A stomach bug in March left her unable to stand even the smell of alcohol, and, anyway, there were so many things she wanted to get done that she didn’t have the time to be hungover. She abstained from listening to music, except her own, in order to keep her ears clear.

She was staying at the Marlton Hotel, in Greenwich Village, a block away from Electric Lady Studios, one of the places where she was making the record. Most days, she got up at sunrise, took a Pilates class, and then headed to Electric Lady, to work past sundown. She had dinner in the studio, or else alone at a nearby restaurant, or in her room. A book or an episode of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” and then early to bed. Not exactly “Hammer of the Gods.”

It had been more than three years since the release of her last album, which she’d named “St. Vincent,” as though it were her first under that name, rather than her fourth—or fifth, if you include one she made with David Byrne, in 2012. All these were well regarded, and with each her reputation and following grew. The music was singular, dense, modern, yet catchy and at times soulful, in an odd kind of way.

Still, the self-titled album was widely considered to be a breakthrough, a consummation of sensibility and talent, a fulfillment of the St. Vincent conceit—this somewhat severe performer who was both her and not her. The act was a blend of rock-goddess bloodletting and arch performance art, self-expression and concealment. (She says that she got the name from a reference, in a Nick Cave song, to the Greenwich Village hospital where Dylan Thomas died.) The ensuing tour was called “Digital Witness,” named for a creepy/peppy song on the album about our culture of surveillance and oversharing. Her life was a whirlwind. There was a Grammy, some best-album acclaim and time on the charts, and a binge of attention from the music and fashion press, and, eventually, from the gossip industrial complex, too, when she began a relationship with the British actress and supermodel Cara Delevingne. The Daily Mail, struggling to take the measure of this American shape-shifting indie rocker, called Clark “the female Bowie.” (The paper’s stringers doorstepped Clark’s family.) When that romance came to an end, after more than a year, she began to be photographed with Kristen Stewart, another object of fan and media obsession, and so the St. Vincent project took on a new dimension: clickbait, gossip fodder. This bifurcation, as Clark called the split between her public life as an artist and the new one as a tabloid cartoon, was disorienting to her, and even sad. But there was a way to put it all to work: write more songs. Clark, quoting her friend and collaborator Annie-B Parson, the choreographer, told me one day, “The best performers are those who have a secret.”

For the new album—it comes out this fall, although Clark has not yet publicly revealed its name—she hooked up with the producer Jack Antonoff, who, in addition to performing his own music, under the name Bleachers, has co-written and produced records for Taylor Swift and Lorde. This has led people to suppose that Clark is plotting a grab for pop success. In June, she released a single called “New York,” and on the evidence the supposition seems fair. It is—by her standards, anyway—a fairly straight-ahead piano ballad, lamenting lost love, or absence of a kind. “You’re the only motherfucker in the city who can handle me,” she sings. Fans immediately began speculating that it was about Delevingne, or, if you thought about it differently, David Bowie, who died last year. “It’s a composite,” Clark told me, though of whom she wouldn’t say. She objects to the idea that songs should automatically be interpreted as diaristic, especially when the songwriter is a woman. “That’s just a sexist thing,” she said. “ ‘Women do emotions but are incapable of rational thought.’ ”

A few weeks before the release she told me, “It’s rare that you get to say ‘This song could be someone’s favorite.’ But this might be the one. Twenty years of writing songs, and I’ve never had that feeling.” It was May, at Electric Lady. She was in the studio with Antonoff. “We’re doing the flavor-crystally bits,” Clark said. This essentially meant adding or removing pieces of sound to or from the sonic stew they’d spent months concocting. “There’s a lot of information on this album,” she said.

Clark, who is thirty-four, was sitting cross-legged on a couch. She had on studded leather loafers, a suit jacket, and black leggings with bones printed on them, in the manner of a Halloween skeleton costume. Her hair was black and cut in a bob. (In the past, she has dyed it blond, lavender, or gray, and has been in and out of curls, its natural state.) She wasn’t wearing much makeup. When she performs, she puts on the war paint, and usually goes in for fanciful costumes and serious heels. For the “Digital Witness” tour, she wore a tight, perforated fake-leather jumpsuit with a plunging neckline, and smeared lipstick. Last year, she did a show while attired in a purple foam toilet. Parson, who is responsible for the rigid postmodern dance moves that Clark has embraced in recent years, referred to her aspect as “wintry,” which doesn’t quite encompass her tendency to throw herself around the stage or dive off it to surf the crowd.

Now she seemed slight, fine-boned, almost translucent—it was hard to imagine her surviving a sea of forearms, iPhones, and gropey hands. She has a sharp jawline, a few freckles, and great big green eyes, which can project a range of seasons. She thinks before she speaks, asks a lot of questions, and has a burly laugh.

On a coffee table in front of her were a Chanel purse and containers of goji berries, trail mix, and raw-almond macaroons. She stood occasionally, to play slashing, tinny lines on an unamplified electric guitar of her own design—a red Ernie Ball Music Man, from her signature line, that retails for upward of fifteen hundred dollars—which, on playback, sounded thick and throbby.

She shreds on electric guitar, but not in a wanky way. It often doesn’t sound like a guitar at all. Her widely cited forebears are Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew, of King Crimson. “I don’t love it when the guitar sounds like a guitar,” she said. “The problem is, people want to recognize that it’s a guitar. I have facility, and so I feel like I should use it more. I don’t have any other ‘should’ in my music.” (It can be funny, if dispiriting, to read, in the comments sections of her performances on YouTube, the arguments that guitar nerds get into about her chops.)

When she listens to a playback, she often buries her head in her arms, as though she can hardly bear to hear herself, but, really, it’s just her way of listening hard. Once, during a mixing session, while she was at the board and I was behind her on a couch, surreptitiously reading a text message, she picked up her head, turned around, and said, “Did I lose you there, Nick? I can feel when attention is wandering.” Her cheery use of the name of the person she is addressing can seem to contain a faint note of mockery. There’d be times, in the following months, when I’d walk away from a conversation with Clark feeling like a character in a kung-fu movie who emerges from a sword skirmish apparently unscathed yet a moment later starts gushing blood or dropping limbs.

Part of this is a function of Clark’s solicitousness, her courteous manner. “She’s created a vernacular of kindness in her public life,” her close friend the writer and indie musician Carrie Brownstein told me. “But the niceness comes through a glass case.” Clark has observed, of the music industry in this era, that good manners are good business.

Clark and Antonoff had met casually around New York but hardly knew each other until they somehow wound up having what he described as an emotionally intense dinner together at the Sunset Tower in Los Angeles. “She was very open about the things in her life,” Antonoff said. “That’s what I was interested in. Continuing to reveal more and more. I said, ‘Let’s go for the lyrics that people will tattoo on their arms.’ ”

Clark has eight siblings, some half, some step. She’s the youngest of her mother’s three girls. Clark’s parents divorced when she was three. This was in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her father, from a Catholic family with eleven kids, was a stockbroker and a prodigious reader who could recite passages from “Ulysses”; for a while, he had the girls convinced that he was a Joycean scholar. When Clark was ten, he gave her “Lucky Jim” for Christmas. At thirteen, she got “Vile Bodies.” She acquired a knack for punching up: in junior high, she toted around the Bertrand Russell pamphlet “Why I Am Not a Christian.”

By then, Clark’s mother, a social worker, had remarried and moved to the suburbs of Dallas. Clark was reared mostly by her mother and stepfather, and considers herself a Texan. Her father remarried and had four kids, with whom Clark is close. In 2010, he was convicted of defrauding investors in a penny-stock scheme, and was sentenced to twelve years in prison. She has never publicly talked about this, although she told me, “I wrote a whole album about it,” by which she meant “Strange Mercy” (2011), her third. When I asked her if she felt any shame about his crimes, she said, “Shame? Not at all. I didn’t do anything wrong. It’s not my shame.”

As a child, Clark was shy, quiet, studious. She played soccer. (There’s a charming video from a few years ago of her demonstrating the mechanics of the rainbow kick, while keeping her hands in the pockets of her overcoat.) Her nickname was M.I.A., because she was so often holed up in her bedroom, listening to music. She was a classic-rock kid—Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Jethro Tull—but the real gateway was Nirvana. “Nevermind” hit when she was nine, and she was precocious enough to notice. Like a lot of kids, she found a mentor behind the counter of the local record store, who turned her on to stuff like Stereolab, PJ Harvey, and Nick Cave. Also like a lot of kids, she started playing guitar when she was twelve. Her first live performance was at age fifteen, at a club in Dallas’s Deep Ellum neighborhood—she sat in with her guitar teacher on “The Wind Cries Mary.” She played bass in a heavy-metal band and guitar in a hardcore outfit called the Skull Fuckers: riot grrrl, queercore, Big Black.

Clark’s uncle—her mother’s brother—is Tuck Andress, a jazz-guitar virtuoso who, since 1978, has performed with his wife, the singer Patti Cathcart, as the duo Tuck & Patti. When Clark was a teen-ager, she spent summers as their roadie on tours of Asia and the United States. After graduating from high school, she worked as their tour manager in Europe. It was a lean outfit, so she handled pretty much everything, from settling with the clubs to fetching towels and water—an aspiring rock star’s mail room. The greatest lesson, though, may have been witnessing the power that music could have over strangers. “I’d watch Tuck & Patti bring people to tears,” she said.

“We knew she was serious about this music thing,” Cathcart told me.

“You couldn’t keep her from it,” Andress said. “But, until you hit the road, you have no idea. Of course, now she travels in a dramatically more luxurious way than we do.”

Clark went to Berklee College of Music, in Boston, but dropped out after two and a half years, itchy to write and record her own music rather than train to be a crack session hire, which is how she saw the program there. The best thing she got from it, she says, is a love of Stravinsky. She still can’t read music. She moved to New York, but after three months ran out of money and retreated to Texas, where a friend who played theremin with the Polyphonic Spree, a big choral-rock band out of Dallas, encouraged her to audition. She toured with them as a singer and a guitar player for a while.

Later, she hired on with Sufjan Stevens, the orchestral-folk artist. He first saw her at the Bowery Ballroom, where she was performing solo as the warmup act for a band she also played in, the Castanets. “She was up there with a guitar, standing on a piece of plywood for a kick drum, two microphones, one of them distorted, and two amps,” Stevens told me. “Obviously, she had talent.” Off she went with another giant band. “At that time, there were a dozen musicians touring in my band, and there was always a moment in the set where people could ‘take a solo,’ ” Stevens went on. “All the men usually just played a lot of notes really fast. But, when Annie’s turn came, she refused to do the obvious white-male masturbatory thing on the guitar. Instead, she played her effects pedals. She made such weird sounds. It was like the Loch Ness monster giving birth inside a silo.”

At the time, Clark had her first album, “Marry Me,” in the can, and sometimes she performed solo before her sets with Stevens. “I didn’t have that performance character she has,” he said. “I kind of wish I had. It’s both personal and protective. To get attention as a woman, in a heteronormative context where sex appeal sells, and to sell yourself instead by emphasizing your skill, ingenuity, and work ethic is an incredible feat.”

The first song on “Marry Me,” “Now, Now,” had her singing, “I’m not any, any, any, any, any, any, any, anything,” which, intentionally or not, sounds like “I’m not Annie, Annie. . . .” You might say that it was the opening salvo in St. Vincent’s still unfolding act of concealment and disclosure.

“This scaffolding that she has been so deliberate in constructing has allowed her to take more risks,” Brownstein said. “She presents this narrow strand of visibility. She can mess around with the whole thing of her being called doe-eyed or a gamine. There’s a classic kind of professionalism in the act, sort of like the old country stars—Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash. They let you know when you have access to their world. It’s a contrivance.”

The new album, by Clark’s own reckoning, is the gloomiest one she’s made: “It’s all about sex and drugs and sadness.” It ends with a song about suicide, which she sings in a husky voice that is downright frightening. (“Like any red-blooded American, I’ve considered suicide,” she told Marc Maron, on his “WTF” podcast.) She says that she wrote it on a tour bus en route from Lithuania to Latvia. Sure, sometimes the Baltics can bring you down, but, beyond that, there’s clearly some serious heartbreak and darkness underlying this new project.

Around the release of the “St. Vincent” album, Clark had been on tour more or less perpetually for ten years. “I was running hard. There were family things, illness,” she said. “I’m a little like a greyhound. Get me running in a direction, and I’ll run myself into the ground.” Among other things, her mother had a health crisis, which Clark doesn’t like to talk about.

“I was hurling myself into crowds, climbing the rafters,” she said. “I felt like, if I’m not bruised and bloody when I come offstage, I haven’t done it right.”

There’s a song on the new album called “Pills.” “Pills to grow, pills to shrink, pills, pills, pills and a good stiff drink / pills to fuck, pills to eat, pills, pills, pills down the kitchen sink.” (As it happens, those lines are sung by Delevingne, who will be credited, for the benefit of the British gossip press, as an underground sensation named Kid Monkey.) “I was trying to hold on,” Clark recalled. “I didn’t have coping mechanisms for tremendous anxiety and depression. I was trying to get through pharmaceutically.”

Clark may resent the assumption that everything she writes about is personal, that the protagonist is always her. “You couldn’t fact-check it,” she said. To questions about sexuality, she insists on fluidity. “I’m queer,” she said. But “the goal is to be free of heteronormativity. I’m queer, but queer more as an outlook.”

Yet there is just one narrator on this album. “The emotional tones are all true,” she said. “The songs are the most coherent expression of them. Songs are like prophecies. They can be stronger than you are.”

One day, during a mixing session at Electric Lady, Clark told me that her favorite lyric on the album was “Teen-age Christian virgins holding out their tongues / Paranoid secretions falling on basement rugs.” Later, she texted me to say that her favorite was actually “ ‘Remember one Christmas I gave you Jim Carroll / intended it as a cautionary tale / you said you saw yourself inside there / dog-eared it like a how-to manual.’ Cause Christmas—carol—Emanuel.” That’s from a song about a hard-luck old friend or lover named Johnny, who hits the singer up for money or support. “You saw me on movies and TV,” she sings. “Annie, how could you do this to me?” I asked her one day who Johnny was.

“Johnny’s just Johnny,” she said. “Doesn’t everyone know a Johnny?”

As Clark neared the end of recording, she turned some attention to the next phases—packaging, publicity, performance. She has observed that, when she makes the rounds to local media outlets or on cattle-call press junkets, she is repeatedly asked the same questions, many of them dumb ones. “You become a factory worker,” she said. “When you have to say something over and over, there’s a festering self-loathing. No better way to feel like a fraud.”

She’d made what she was calling an interview kit, a highly stylized short film, which consists of her answering typical questions. She sits in a chair with her legs crossed, in a short pink skirt and a semitransparent latex top before a Day-Glo green backdrop, with a camera and a sound crew of three female models in heels, dog collars, dominatrix hoods, and assless/chestless minidresses. A screen reads, “Insert light banter,” and then Clark reappears, saying, with a strained smile, “It’s good to see you again. Of course I remember you. Yah, good to see you. How’s—how’s your kid?”

There follows a series of questions and answers, with the former presented as text onscreen—generic placeholders:

Q. Insert question about the inspiration for this record.

A. I saw a woman alone in her car singing along to “Great Balls of Fire,” and I wanted to make a record that would prevent that from ever happening again.

Q. Insert question about how much of her work is autobiographical.

A. All of my work is autobiographical, both the factual elements of my life and the fictional ones.

Q. Insert question about being a woman in music.

A. What’s it like being a woman in music? . . . Very good question.

The camera cuts to her interlaced fingers. She wears paste-on fingernails, each with a letter. They spell out “F-U-C-K-O-F-F.”

There are more—What’s it like to play a show in heels? What are you reading? What album would you want on a desert island?—and her answers are mostly but not always sardonic. They were written by Brownstein. Clark shot another film, a kind of surreal press conference, with a similar deadpan gestalt and Day-Glo color scheme and trio of kinky models. In this version, in reply to the woman-in-music question, she performs a “Basic Instinct” uncrossing of her legs, as the camera zooms in on her crotch, accompanied by the echo of a drop of water in a cave.

These videos don’t quite serve the utilitarian function that Clark had put forth—that of saving her time and energy by furnishing her interrogators with workable answers—but they do convey a sensibility that suits the brand: cheeky, sexy, a little Dada. (They’re more on message, perhaps, than her recently announced role as a star of the new ad campaign for Tiffany.) She’d prefer to embody certain ideas than to have to verbalize them, when the context comprises dubious, inherited, unexamined assumptions about gender, sexuality, songwriting, and celebrity. She prefers gestures to words. She sent me a photo of herself from a video shoot and wrote, “Me performing gender.”

Meanwhile, she was having a costume made for her solo performance: a “skin suit” that would give her the appearance of being naked onstage. One morning, I met her in downtown Los Angeles, at the L.A. Theatre, an old movie palace. She arrived alone in a black BMW M-series coupe. The costume’s designer, Desmond Evan Smith, met her outside, to take advantage of the sun. He had swatches of latex, to compare with her skin. One was too pink, another too yellow.

“This is me with a slight tan,” Clark said. “I’m pretty pale.” She had on cutoff jean shorts, a Western-style shirt knotted above her navel, and the studded loafers. Smith led her to a gilded hallway on the second floor to size her up with a tape measure.

“What do you need me to do?” Clark asked.

“I just need you to stand there and look pretty,” Smith said.

“Done and done.”

He read out her neck, waist, and bust numbers.

“Hear that?” Clark said. “Perfect babe measurements.”

He peeled down her shorts to measure her hips. “Cheetahkini,” she said. “Is that a portmanteau?”

“Spread for me,” Smith said. “Your legs.”

“Comedy gold, Nick,” she said.

Later, when she’d started calling me Uncle Nick or Nicky boy, I’d find myself wondering if this skin-suit episode hadn’t been an elaborate setup, a provocation or even a trap laid by someone known to be in command of her presentation in the world. Or maybe it was just show biz, the same old meat market now refracted through self-aware layers of intention and irony.

“Should we get someone to volunteer to be my body?” Clark asked. “To add a little pizzazz? I could choose my own adventure here. I could get a custom crotch.” She began referring to this as her “perfect pussy.” “I’ll scroll through Pornhub and find one.”

After the skin-suit sizing, Clark drove across town, to a coffee shop off Melrose called Croft Alley, to have lunch with her creative director, Willo Perron. Perron, who is from Montreal, does visual and brand work for a variety of pop stars—Jay-Z, Kendrick Lamar, Rihanna. He helps them conceptualize music videos, album covers, and stage shows.

Perron, who is forty-three, wore white jeans and a light-gray T-shirt and black-and-white leopard-print skater shoes from Yves Saint Laurent. (“They may be a bit too rad dad,” he said.) He had a droll, weary air; his expertise was assured but lightly worn. He drives a Tesla. His girlfriend was the waitress at Croft Alley.

He wanted to discuss the album cover. There’d been a shoot in Los Angeles, on the same set they used to film the satirical interview kit. “Did you look at the photos?” he asked Clark. “Can we just do it? It’s good. It’s bold, too. It’s the one that stood out.” He was talking about a photograph I’d first seen on the home screen of Clark’s cell phone: an image of her research assistant, a photographer and model named Carlotta Kohl, with her head stuck through a pinkish-red scrim. Really, it was a picture of Kohl’s legs and rear end, in hot-pink tights and a leopard thong bodysuit. “This is not my ass,” Clark had said. “This is my friend Carlotta’s ass. Isn’t it a nice ass?”

Perron explained to me, “It all started, well— There hasn’t been a female lead who’s been able to be both absurdist and sexual. Sultriness but in a New Wave character. The energy of ‘Pee-wee’s Playhouse,’ ‘Beetlejuice,’ the Cramps, the B-52s, with some chips of Blondie. Think of Poison Ivy, from the Cramps: absurd but hot.”

“Manically happy to the point of being scary,” Clark said.

“We built these Day-Glo canvases and had people sticking limbs and heads through the canvases. Then we found that the most entertaining thing was the back of the canvas: Carlotta ostriched into the wall, just her ass.”

“Can we do it?” Clark said.

“It says everything that we want to say,” Perron said.

“But will people assume that it’s my ass? I’m doing all these body-double things.” She went on, “I was thinking a photo of my face that encapsulates the entire record—but maybe that’s a bit of a fool’s errand.” She mentioned an image from the shoot of herself with some stylists around her.

“It’s too ‘1989,’ ” Perron said.

“Too on the nose?” Clark said.

“It’s a single cover, not an album cover.”

Clark and Perron hooked up four years ago, when she was working on the “St. Vincent” album. “That thing was near-future cult leader,” he said. “We were talking about media and paranoia and blah, blah. Annie referenced ‘Black Mirror.’ It had only been on the BBC. And the films of Jodorowsky. We were working with a 1970 psychedelic aesthetic, plus postmodernist Italian, but in Memphis style.” The cover showed Clark sitting on a pink throne, with her gray hair in a kind of modified Bride of Frankenstein.

“One of the early conversations we had was about how indie rock always does the unintentional thing, so that it doesn’t have an opportunity to fail,” Perron said. By this, he meant, say, a band in T-shirts, looking tough, standing in the back of a warehouse—authenticity as a euphemism for the absence of an idea. “But we wanted pop-level intention.”

“The best ideas are the ones that might turn out to be terrible ideas,” Clark said.

They got into Perron’s Tesla and headed to his office, on the second floor of a house on a residential street nearby. A few assistants worked quietly at laptops. There was a rack of file boxes, with the names of clients: Drake, the xx, Bruno Mars, Coldplay, Marilyn Manson, Lady Gaga.

They watched a rough cut of the interview-kit press conference. “There are moments where you seem really pretentious,” Perron said. “But then, the brand should be ‘absurdist.’ ”

Clark said, “Yes, there are moments where people will be, like, ‘Is she just a pretentious dickhead?’ ”

They discussed possible music-video directors and brought examples of their work up onscreen. (One was a duo called We Are from L.A., who are from France.) Then they talked about the solo show, with the skin suit.

“Remember when I said the only ideas worth doing might be terrible ideas?” Clark said. “This might be one. Me solo with the guitar, and other characters who are shambolically me. It’s high-tech Tracy & the Plastics. I want Carrie to write the dialogue.”

“There’s dialogue?” Perron said, wearily.

“Yes, I’m putting aside postmodern choreography for this round. But I like for there to be some physical obstacle to overcome, to help me focus. It’s about manufacturing your strength. You’re wondering why I came to you. It’s because you worked with David Blaine.” Perron said nothing. “It should feel bananas, not pretentious,” Clark went on.

Then Perron said, “Do we want to make a decision on this cover art?”

“Let me look again,” Clark said. “Option one: Carlotta’s ass. Two, one of my selects. A head shot.”

“That gives me the last two or three records,” Perron said. “I want this one to be more aggressive. Let’s move away from that thing.”

“You mean that kooky thing?”

“That sedated thing.”

Clark said, “Let’s do Carlotta’s ass.”

“The label will give us some pushback,” Perron said. “But, honestly, I think it’s great.”

After a few moments, Clark said cheerily, “Fun fact: Carlotta has scoliosis.”

“It’s been a generative time, creatively, and I would like for it to set the stage for a broader vision,” Clark told me one day, with uncharacteristic career-oriented self-seriousness. Talk like this, out of rock-and-roll people, usually means projects, sidelines, interdisciplinary schemes. For example, Clark had an idea to take old Mussolini speeches and make Mad Libs out of them. She’d have her nieces and nephews fill in the missing words and phrases; then, in an art gallery in Italy, Isabella Rossellini would sit and recite the Mad Libs (the script delivered to her by Clark via an earpiece, to add a layer of awkwardness) to a soundtrack of chopped-up, sort-of-recognizable Verdi and a monitor playing clips of Mussolini himself.

Or motion pictures. Last year, Clark co-wrote and directed a short film called “The Birthday Party,” for “XX,” an anthology of horror films directed by women. In it, a suburban mother hides her dead husband’s body inside a large panda suit at her young daughter’s birthday, and it keels over into the cake, providing the film’s subtitle: “The Memory Lucy Suppressed from Her Seventh Birthday That Wasn’t Really Her Mom’s Fault (Even Though Her Therapist Says It’s Probably Why She Fears Intimacy).” At one point, Clark had a development deal to write and direct another film, called “Young Lover,” which is also the name of a song on the new album. A writer in her twenties has a sadomasochistic affair with an older married woman—“ ‘Swimming Pool’ meets ‘Bitter Moon’ meets ‘Blue Velvet’ ” is how Clark pitched it. Recently, Lionsgate, mining properties out of copyright, approached Clark with the idea of directing a film based on “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” with a female protagonist. The writer is David Birke, who wrote the screenplay for “Elle,” with Isabelle Huppert, which had become an obsession of Clark’s. (In the film, Huppert’s character’s father is in prison.) Birke, it turned out, had taken his daughter to see a show during the “Marry Me” tour, ten years ago. So, here was mutual admiration, a chance to play together in the sandbox of success.

The “Dorian Gray” treatment called for six historical settings. “It would be an expensive film to make,” Clark said. She reckoned twenty-five million dollars. “The likelihood of making this film is, like, two per cent. But I don’t care, because it’s fun. Worst-case scenario is I get seen as a hardworking person with ideas in a medium I’m interested in. I sort of subscribe to the idea of the busier you are, the busier you are.”

The day after her session with Perron, we drove up to Laurel Canyon, to Compound Fracture, which is what she calls the house that serves as her studio and working space. Technically, it is not a residence. There is a live room in the den (good for recording drums), a studio in the garage, and, just inside the front door, a white grand piano, with a book on the music rack of the complete Led Zeppelin (tablature for intermediate guitar), and, next to it, some lyrics scribbled on stationery from the Freehand hotel in Chicago: “Doing battle in the shadows / Baby you ain’t rambo (rimbaud).” She keeps a neat, sparse house. She’s a born de-clutterer. The art work is eclectic: a Russ Meyer nude, paintings made by people in extreme mental distress, and a photo mural of the high sage desert of West Texas. There’s a downstairs sitting room—“If musicians want to take a break,” Clark emphasized—with a stocked bar, William Scott busts of Janet Jackson and CeCe Winans, and some show-and-tellable mementos. She took one down: “I was on an ill-fated surfing trip to Barbados, in my 90 S.P.F., and I looked down and there was this cock and balls made of coral.” This had survived the purges. So had a brass heart sent by the surviving members of Nirvana. In 2014, when the band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Clark played Kurt Cobain’s part in a live performance of “Lithium.” There was a plaque in recognition of her inclusion, in 2014, on Vanity Fair’s international best-dressed list. “I’ve been wearing athleisure ever since,” she said.

For a while, her friend Jenny Lewis, the singer-songwriter, had slept on the couch down here. “She’s like a tree,” Clark said. “I would take shade in her. She made me eat food, because I forgot.”

Lewis told me, “I would go upstairs, make a quesadilla, cut it in half, and leave a half there. Maybe the little mouse would come. I’d come up later, see the half gone, and think, My work is done here.”

“As an adult, I haven’t cohabitated with another human,” Clark said. “Jenny and I have been on tour so long, we know the ways to not annoy people.”

When they first got to be friends, years ago, “we Freaky Fridayed,” Lewis said. Clark, eager to get away from New York, moved to Los Angeles, and Lewis, escaping some personal rubble in California, moved into Clark’s East Village apartment.

“We shared so much,” Lewis said. “The sacrifices you make for your music, not having a family. Some things unique to being a woman on the road, silly stuff like removing your makeup in filthy sinks around the world. Just being a woman out there trying to keep it together. Also, being a woman in charge, and the nuances of that.”

They also both had fathers who had been incarcerated. Lewis’s had been in prison for two years—“Everyone in my family goes to jail or prison,” she said—and then was diagnosed with colon cancer and died soon after.

Clark wanted to go for a hike in the midday heat. Every day, she tries to put herself in what she calls a stress position—some kind of physical difficulty, to force herself to persevere. We made the short drive from her house to a ridgeline with a view in the direction of Burbank, and began descending a trail through scrub and poison oak. She had on some flats that she called tennis shoes. The dryness made the steeper pitches slick, and she approached them with great care. At one point, a hum of bees caused her to shriek and run. I was reminded of her song “Rattlesnake,” which is about an encounter with a rattler while she was hiking naked in the Texas desert. “I’m afraid of everything,” she said. “I’m almost inured to it. Same with shame. I figured out years ago that, if everything is absurd, then there is nothing to be afraid or ashamed of.”

Despite her stress-position talk, Clark is a creature of habit, a curator of routine. Brownstein recalled insisting that they go on a different hike from this one, a couple of miles away. “She asked that I never drag her anywhere unfamiliar again,” Brownstein told me.

An hour later, we were back at the house. A mixing engineer named Catherine Marks arrived, to listen to some of the mixes on the new album. Clark wanted a fresh set of ears. (The principal mixer, back at Electric Lady, was Tom Elmhirst, an eminence who has worked with Adele, Lorde, Bowie, and Beck.) Marks, a tall Australian, was wearing a tank top that read “La La La.” Clark had showered and changed into a Pink Floyd “The Wall” T-shirt.

They talked about the low end on one of the songs. “I want to give it more balls,” Marks said, which had a good ring to it, in the Aussie accent. “Tom is a genius, obviously.”

“Best idea wins,” Clark said. They talked for a bit about how unprepared each of them had been for how hot Elmhirst is. They went out to the garage studio, which was full of wonderful toys—racks of guitars, various mikes, and an array of vintage synthesizers. Check it out, an E-mu Emulator II.

Marks sat down at the console. “Smells nice in here. It doesn’t smell like dudes.”

“It’s this Japanese incense.”

A Pro Tools session in the dying light of a Laurel Canyon afternoon. Marks got to work checking out the mixes. It was easy to imagine Clark in here alone for hours, days, weeks, thickening and pruning the sound as it scrolled by onscreen. Outside, you could hear a neighbor playing drums and the occasional honk of a lost Uber. Inside, Marks was listening to a track that Clark wanted to reimagine. “The vocoder’s not working for me,” Clark said. “I like the guitar better. If you need to sleaze it up, add Gary Glitter tuning. Just add glam guitar.”

“I can’t turn off what turns me on,” Clark’s voice was singing, while Clark herself stood behind Marks, checking her phone.

“Oh, my God,” she said, eyes suddenly wide. “This is so stupid. Oh, my God.” She typed a response, put her phone down on a preamp, and began pacing in anticipation of a reply. “It’s so convoluted.” She scooped up the phone and read a new text. Typing a reply, she was shaking her head. “What?” Marks asked.

“It’s a cuckold situation,” Clark said. “I can’t talk about it.” This was more than just hot goss. It was the most excited I’d ever seen her. Another exchange of texts, more pacing, head-shaking, the burly laugh. “It’s the first time I’ve felt glee all day.”

Last month, Clark went into a studio, in midtown Manhattan, with her friend the producer, composer, and pianist Thomas Bartlett, to record an alternative version of the new album: just her voice and his piano, a chance to hear, and to preserve, the songs stripped down to their bones. She had signed off on the final masters of the record the day before they started. “I took a whole night off,” she said. She was wearing a leopard-print bodysuit. “Now I’m done with my emotional anorexia, my monastic fantastic. It’s so good to just play music.”

It went like this: An engineer, Patrick Dillett, played a track from the record, then Bartlett spent a few minutes learning it and vamping on an electric piano, and then they went into the recording studio and laid down a few takes, him on a grand piano and her cross-legged on a couch, singing into a mike. After the first take, Dillett said, “It sounds pretty. Is it supposed to?”

“Will I be ashamed of myself?” she asked him.

“I hope so. Isn’t that the point?”

They recorded in sequence and got through several songs a day.

Later that week, she and Bartlett invited a dozen or so friends to hear her perform the album. Among them were David Byrne, Sufjan Stevens, and the singer Joan As Police Woman, who was celebrating her birthday at the studio afterward. They sat in folding chairs. Clark was on the couch, made up and dressed fashionably in a long jacket and pants.

“Now I can feel the feelings,” she said. She made a show of unbuttoning her pants in order to sing.

“The acceptance of beautiful melody is sometimes difficult for a downtown New York musician,” Byrne had told me earlier in the day. But here was Clark, without all the sonic tricks—the jagged guitar and the scavenged beats—accepting her melodies, feeling the feelings. She told me later, “I didn���t realize the depth of the sorrow on the album until I performed it that night.” The next day, she was shelled and had to cancel appointments. “It turns out that that was crucial to my being done with the experience of making it. Now I need to do what I need to do as a performer: I need to be able to disassociate.”

The final song on the album, the one about suicide, concludes with her repeating “It’s not the end,” in a voice that makes you want to bring her hot soup. On the night of the studio performance, she finished singing and sheepishly accepted the applause of her friends. Then she buttoned up her pants and said, “Party time, everyone.” ♦  http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/28/st-vincents-cheeky-sexy-rock

[ganymedesclock]

do you think it will ever be brought up that, even though the point of the crystal gems is individual choice, steven didn't really get a choice but to be one&be rose's replacement?

I mean, I think that you could extend that to Amethyst and Peridot as well!

I’m not going to say nothing good at all has come out of Peridot becoming a Crystal Gem or that she didn’t have any choice in the matter- which is why I think Message Received was effective- but you do have to consider she was kinda force-enlisted and sorting her as a Freedom Fighter Only And Always For Earth kind of misses the point that Peridot’s triumphant stand for Earth was for Homeworld’s benefit, which means if the Crystal Gems are anticipating Peridot to ditch Homeworld the way they did, her whole reason for standing up for Earth is going to evaporate.

This is a major issue that I think factors into her still-missing enhancers. Peridot has not been given the opportunity to self-determine even though that’s allegedly a core Crystal Gem virtue. Because when she does self-determine on that subject, her response is always, “Yes, I would like my enhancers back please.”

And here’s the thing. The fandom can argue this until they’re blue in the face but until there is even a single canonically stated scrap of evidence that tells us there is any negative drawback to Peridot’s enhancers, no one who wants to keep talking over her and keep her enhancers away from her has a leg to stand on.

They aren’t being forced on her, because Yellow Diamond didn’t care or comment when Peridot appeared without them. That also means they can’t be any kind of restraint or shackle or there would be limitations about when she can take them off.

Metal powers notwithstanding, it also is very clear that Peridot is incredibly limited without them. The episode that confirms she does have metal powers despite her own expectations also confirms she’s completely incapable of shapeshifting- she tried all day to do it when Steven was at least able to affect partial changes literally the first time he tried onscreen, back in season 1 when almost all of his powers were unreliable.

Moving on to Amethyst and Steven… their problem, rather concisely: how could they have ever made an informed choice regarding Earth and Homeworld if they never actually knew Homeworld? If, in Steven’s case in particular, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Amethyst also has some of this in her history- Garnet and Pearl have sanitized large parts of their history and have a pretty strong narrative bias to their version of events?

They literally didn’t even want to tell Steven Homeworld existed until Gems aligned with it came after them. Not that I have zero sympathy for Garnet and Pearl, but, we have to admit they don’t have a track record of being reliable or impartial narrators. Even when Garnet tries to be more honest about the horrors of the war, she’s adamant that the Crystal Gems were completely justified, that given over five thousand years Homeworld hasn’t changed and never will, that some Gems just can’t be reasoned with.

(And in case you’re uncertain that this is something that the show does not take her side on, consider the clearest she’s stated that was Message Received, the episode where the exact person she was talking about proceeded to tenaciously advocate for Earth to the highest authority she knew and then shut YD down when YD wouldn’t acknowledge it- and YD herself isn’t even supporting evidence for Garnet’s claim since it’s pretty dang clear the reason why YD is avoiding Earth is because she has a lot of tangled feelings about the war and she’s trying to avoid anything that reminds her of how she’s hurting.

Considering this is a show that is in a large part about being able to address and process powerful negative feelings like grief, that’s hardly an insurmountable hurdle)

With Amethyst in particular, like…

“The Crystal Gems is about being whoever you want to be regardless of what the establishment tells you you should be!”

“Great, I’d kinda like to not feel like garbage because I came from Earth’s Kindergarten, and also I like wrestling…”

“No, not like that.”

And that makes Garnet and Pearl sound like they’re maliciously doing it on purpose, which they aren’t, but, like… they really aren’t doing very good in letting Amethyst self-determine because astonishingly once you turn people loose with Freedom Of Choice they will, y’know, make choices that you don’t necessarily like, and you have to be prepared for that.

If Lapis really had freedom of choice in this particular situation and not a lot of extenuating circumstances keeping her on Earth she’d blow this popsicle stand faster than you could say “beach summer fun buddies”, and she has made that very, very clear.

And this is kinda what I meant in the last post I made of, I don’t think that Garnet and Pearl really prepared for, or considered, the idea that Steven might come to really disagree with them about certain things. I think they were already kind of blindsided by it early in Peridot’s arc because they totally failed to prepare for how willing and determined Steven was to go behind their back and keep trying to work with Peridot. 

[datingadviceonreddit]

My recent experience dating during shelter-in-place:If you're single, odds are that you've been asked, "What's it like dating during the coronavirus?" Welllll my friend, it's like dating during regular times (read: terrible), but 10x worse because the odds of meeting someone just went from 1% to 0% since few of us have single, male roommates. This isn't an episode of New Girl, after all.Things got weird initially. All sort of dating disasters from my past popped up. Seattle Sheriff started Snapchatting me, a NYE makeout from 2016 started responding to all my IG pictures with compliments, a guy who hit on me 7 years ago and now has a live-in girlfriend started DMing me about his "decades long odyssey to spend time with you," Big Suge DM'd me to ask for running advice....clearly, no one was exempt. But then things started to settle down by end of April.Shelter-in-place has separated us into these defined cliques: The Singles, The Couples, The Couples with Kids, The Unemployed, The At-Risk, etc. And while I do feel connected by the fact that we're all in this situation together, it's affecting us all so differently that I feel incapable of understanding what this experience is like for folks in other groups. Each have their own unique challenge. For example. I have never been more grateful to not have kids than right now, and I also realize that some folks might be feeling alone despite living with partners or family during this time. However, since this is a story about my experience, I will tell you that I (cue the dramatics) feel discriminated against as A Single during shelter-in-place! What do you mean I have to stay home by myself for months on end, with no end in sight? How am I supposed to meet someone? Will the government give tax benefits to us bachelors/bachelorettes who have been forced into this solitude? I'd even take an arranged marriage situation right now: take a Buzzfeed quiz and get matched with a suitor. Higher odds than my current situation of masturbating.I've rarely felt alone as a single woman in a vibrant city but shelter-in-place stripped me of my usual 'distractions', like friends, happy hours, workout classes, office culture and parties. My neck was locked up for a few days and I couldn't turn my head to the left and at one point I thought it was moving down my back and I would soon be unable to move, and I had that dark, single person moment of, I'm going to die alone in my apartment and no one could know for days. I've had to look, really look, at the somber, make-up free face in the mirror with the newly appeared dark spots and think about makes her happy when stripped of those things. It's been uncomfortable but it forced me to spend time imaging what the future looks like for a happy Wendy, single or married.I had stopped swiping in February as I wrapped things up with The Cole Valley Bartender, Tatted Writer, and started things with The Mayor, and then shelter-in-place started and I decided there was just no point in starting things up with someone new virtually. I did go on one virtual date that first week with yes, another bartender. We met back when happy hour was still a thing, on Valentine's Day of all days. He was tall with blonde curls and a big smile. Soooo cute. I left him my number on the receipt since it had worked so well last time, and believe it or not, I heard from later that night!Hey Wendy (curly one), thanks for the number and being my favorite today. Don't tell the other people they get jealous. Definitely into your vibe but seeing someone currently. Was I 2-for-2 or 1-for-2? No matter, it was the nicest rejection message that I've ever received. To my surprise, I heard from him a month later!Hey Wendy, weird text to send but things didn't really work out with the person who I was seeing when we met. If you ever want to grab a drink let me know.I was thrilled! The universe was rewarding me for putting myself out there. We made plans for the following week but then shelter-in-place hit and we turned it into a FaceTime date. He taught me how to make my favorite cocktail, made one for himself, and then we continued chatting while walking around our respective neighborhoods. The activity transformed what could have been a dry interview into a fun activity. The texting petered out as SIP continued and he finally told me, "Sorry been out of touch just not really feeling the whole long distance vibe right now." If you couldn't guess before, yes he's a surfing bro. Funny how SIP made us "long distance" but I understood.My optimistic side crumpled when SIP got extended to May and I cried. It felt like my life was on hold but I realized that was because of how I was living it, and this situation wouldn't change for many more months. What was I going to do about it? I started swiping. One of my first matches was with "Jack Ryan." Jack attended a military school (my second one in the Bay Area, how??), rode bikes, skis, and attended the same business school as my roommate. Lots of commonalities made the FaceTime first date easy. He had first suggested a social distance bike ride but I didn't feel comfortable doing that, not with roommates. Six feet is the quarantine version of a condom. "I don't know where you've been, Jack!"Our first date lasted 90 minutes. I remember thinking he looked a little disheveled because his hair was long, but cute. The conversation flowed easily, we had a lot in common and he asked questions. By the end I was grinning and I had the odd desire to touch him. Oddly didn't have that with Surfing Bartender, who I thought was objectively more attractive.Our next date ended being up that social distance bike ride. Meeting up during quarantine means having a weird version of the "let's be exclusive" chat super early."I've only seen my two friends from 6ft away.""I've only seen my roommates."I was stumped on what to wear. Didn't need padded bike shorts for a 10 mile spin but also couldn't get away with jeans given my thighs and propensity to sweat. Plus, a helmet makes me look like a dude so I wanted to wear my hair down to compensate, but the helmet limits your options. I ended up going with dark jeans to hide sweat spots, hair half up and down, big hoop earrings to really hammer home that I was a woman in case anyone thought it was a man bun, and mascara.The first thing I noticed in person was his size. From 6ft away he looked to be my height, 5'8", and not the 5'10" as advertised on his profile. Swallowing my disappointment, I mounted my bike and we pedaled to Ocean Beach and did a lap around Golden Gate Park and then stopped at the Conservatory of Flowers for a picnic. I had brought a beer for myself and he had brought beers for both of us, plus a snack. It passed in a blur and I couldn't tell you what we talked about except that he was a great conversationalist with the same sarcastic sense of humor. He biked me part of the way home before we waved awkwardly and promised to do something again.Our third date was a proper bike ride. When he proposed it, I started to wonder if he was looking for a cycling buddy instead of a romantic partner, but the athlete in me couldn't say no. He wanted to ride to Stinson but I hadn't been riding much this year so I only made it as far as Pantoll station. He pulled out chocolate chip cookies out of his jersey for a mid-ride snack. That he baked.I rode home with a full belly and a big ass grin on my face.Our next date thankfully didn't involve bikes or my nemesis the helmet. Instead we had drinks and takeout burritos in Lafayette park. It started as a warm, sunny day but SF being SF, the fog started rolling in as soon as we plopped down our blanket and by 8pm our teeth were chattering too much to even talk. I was hoping he'd kiss me, I was living alone at this point and no longer had to be concerned with spreading to anyone else, but instead we waved from maybe 3 ft away. We met a week a later in Duboce park and I brought to-go margaritas and all these stories that I wanted to share with him. I had brainstormed with Tinker Bell prior to the date about how to broach the topic of touching but thanks to those margaritas, he needed a bathroom and I conveniently had an empty apartment a few blocks away. Once he was inside it was, Game. On.He kissed me in the kitchen, we dry humped on the couch (Sorry, roomies) and he ended up spending the night. The Covid wall was successfully broken, hopefully my vagina walls were next.Dating during the coronavirus has felt like if "Love is blind" and "Too hot to handle" had a Netflix love child. I obviously knew what Jack Ryan looked like from his Bumble profile but quarantine forced us to take it slower and we spent an entire month just talking without any physical touch. I truthfully don't know if I would have continued seeing Jack Ryan had we met in regular life. I am, ashamed to type this out, shallow in regards to height, and was initially put off by his stature. I think there's a chance I would have noticed that upon walking into the bar, decided there was no attraction, and not given him a second date, but maybe I would have thanks to our great first conversation, I really don't know. Fortunately I couldn't see his height via FaceTime or on a bike which allowed us time to build an emotional connection. I was concerned that first month that there was no chemistry but when he finally kissed me, I didn't want it stop. I still don't.I'm still working through this—the cynic in me says I'm maybe latched on to him because of shelter-in-place and I'm lonely and my vagina is purring because I hadn't been touched in months, but I'm trying my best to ignore that because he's great and it's okay to just be excited, no disclaimer necessary. Time will show if it's the man or corona. And here's why I like him: he's a great listener, he's thoughtful, he's intentional, he's smart, he communicates, he's equally invested in my pleasure, he gives me the spotlight to be weird, he's active and he's handsome. In the words of Issa Rae, "Hold up, he dicks you down, makes you laugh, and he don't work at the airport? What's the problem? Cause I don't hear it." Me either Issa, me either. via /r/dating_advice

[newagesispage]

                                                            MAY                      2020

PAGE  RIB

Check out the We are One Global film fest on youtube from May 29-June 7. We will be able to experience movies from Cannes, Sundance, Tribeca and Venice for free!! Yahoo!!

*****

May 10 will bring us The Feeding America comedy Fest. So far the stars on board are Eddie Murphy, Adam Sandler, Tiffany Haddish, Chris Rock, Louie Anderson, JB Smoove, Brad Garrett, Jon Lovitz, Tim Meadows, Keegan-Michael Key, George Lopez and Sarah Silverman, just to mention a few.

*****

Jim Carrey will release his Memoirs and Misinformation on May 5.

*****

If you need honest medical info, take a look at Quackwatch: A guide to quackery, health fraud and intelligent decisions.

*****

Current times are a magnification of a problem that has been brewing for quite some time. The kiss ass, the indifferent, the greedy who don’t miss a trick are todays fortunate sons.** If half of this country didn’t want the other half to have a fighting chance we wouldn’t be in this situation right now. The Federal government should have all of our best interests at heart.  I will never understand why so many of the’ have not’ voters love supporting the’ haves ‘that love to fuck over the little guy.

*****

SAVE THE USPS!!

*****

I guess we know how this country would be prepared to react to bioterrorism.

*****

SNL is working from home like so many but with Tom Hanks, Brad Pitt, Fred Armisen, Paul Rudd, Miley and Sandler.

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George Gray, announcer for the Price is Right is recovering after a week of 3 heart attacks.

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Marijuana use is at an all -time high. Alcohol use is up 40%.

*****

What is up with Georgia Governor Brian Kemp who seemed so surprised at the virus months after everybody else seemed to know the facts? This is what happens if we only listen to Trump and Fox news.** He is so ready to open up the state early. ** A Georgia citizen said it best: Kemp mandates restaurants open, whether I reopen dining rooms or not. I file for business interruption insurance, it does not go through since I am “allowed” to operate full capacity. My landlord can demand all their money since I am allowed to fully operate. Furloughed staff that is collecting unemployment insurance have to come back to work or I have to let them go. Their unemployment insurance then goes on my tab. If things blow up again they are still on my tab, not on the state since they are no longer employed. This is about screwing the working class.** A dog has now been diagnosed with the virus as well as some cats.

*****

UFO footage has been declassified by the pentagon. Wow, anything to distract! ** This whole Scary Clown 45 mess often seems like a big government experiment. Just how much will we put up with? How stupid or complacent are we??

*****

The President’s council on reopening America has a message for our country: Die you fucking slaves. Die Die Die. We’re rich and you’re not and we’ll be even richer after the mass burials are over. Sucks to be you.

*****

The Federal government does not have absolute power. Why do “big government” haters suddenly want the Feds to run their lives??** Some checks were delayed because Trump wanted his name on them?** The Huffington Post has reported that $180,000 a year of Trump campaign money is given to his son’s significant others.

*****

The Carter’s have asked donors to the Carter Center to instead give those donations to local organizations in need.** A great charity is RIP medical debt which puts $100 to every dollar you donate to wipe out medical debt.

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Need some nature sounds in your life? Visit NPS.gov/sounds

*****

It looks like Macgruber may become an 8 episode series according to Will Forte.

*****

It is sort of reassuring to see that the late night hosts who mostly hover around my age, are no better at technology than I am.** BTW, Billy Eichner is such a great guest from home.. more please!** I see that one of the 8G band on Late Night has a big pic of Mick’s face behind him at home. I also see that same pic everyday above my desk. A kindred spirit.

*****

Linda McMahon, wife of WWE chair, announced the18.5 million Trump super PAC in Florida. Governor DeSantis now calls WWE essential. Many of the wrestlers were fired so the bottom line looks good.

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Being willfully stupid is not part of the Christian tradition.- John Meecham

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Some fast food workers went on strike. This is a good time to do it. Risking your lives for minimum wage is hardly worth it.

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Threadgill’s, the Austin bar that helped launch Janis Joplin is closing down.

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Is this true? 150 members of the Saudi royal family tested positive for covid-19.** Did Trump play down the virus because he owes millions to China’s state owned banks or was it to try to get dirt on Biden?

*****

I am not sure what has happened to the American workplace. So many strides were made in the mid 20th century but a lot of that seems to have fallen away. I see so many employers leaving it to employees to provide supplies before they even get the job. Teachers sometimes buy things for the classrooms. Some employees must buy their own cell phones for video conferences or even punching in and out. Some nursing home employees bring in their own cough drops or snacks for residents. How much $ do the people at the top need?? No sick pay? Work or starve!

*****

Everyone staying at home proves how badly we need a better high speed internet system in the U.S.

*****

Porn hub has been giving free porn.** The My Pillow guy is praising Trump as he donates 50,000 masks.

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All these Trump worshipping MAGA shills, they’re willing to die for the dumbest, flounciest fancy lad in history. –Patton Oswalt.

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So we don’t want to give Government help to immigrants who pay taxes, we do want to help cruise lines who avoid taxes by registering as foreign companies. Got it! ???

*****

The Neo confederate hate group, ‘league of the south’ is moving ahead with its annual conference in June.** Trump is getting ready to open the country with a coalition of his republican Governors and companies (some of whom seemed surprised). ** How did we get here? If our Pres is incapable of reading simple memos, he is incompetent. ** Scary Clown is trying to speed up the Wall as we are dropping like flies.

*****

This can’t be true. Federal agents are confiscating masks and supplies in hospitals, presumably for ICE agents??** Was Scary Clown 45 trying to force congress out of session so that he could skate some recess appointments by?** Rules have been weakened as to the release of mercury and various toxins from oil and coal power plants.** Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil do not seem to concerned about the virus.** Trump circled back around to the heat and light thing as a cure because he could not get over the shit he got for telling us that spring’s warm weather would take care of everything, right?

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Chicago businessman Gene Staples has purchased Indiana Beach amusement park and will open in July if he is able.

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Nascar will be back this month with new races but without the live audience.

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Catch Ashes to Ash: The disappearance of Robert Bee on Youtube.

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As everyone is sick with respiratory problems and the pollution has ebbed a bit, scary clown 45 has to roll back some of our rules that protect clean air. Auto emissions are rolled back to 1.5%.  He has to be loving the fact that we can’t all gather and protest. Hmmm?? Perhaps it is a conspiracy.. but his.** Oh but the disbelievers did gather in Michigan with dolls in nooses and confederate flags. Why do they think that the medical experts are telling them this for partisan reasons or just for their own kicks? They have our safety in mind. Use your fucking heads. How can this country get stupider as time goes on? ** Why can’t they just cover Covid treatment? Medical debt is gonna skyrocket.** I don’t like big government either but in times of crises and health care, we need it to work properly. ** But when the powers that be tell us that animals can’t get it and then a tiger gets it or that masks don’t protect you and then they suddenly do, it makes us all skeptical. Way to confuse us fuckers!!  Even with the ignorant and the panicked, just tell us the truth and the average person will be with ya!!** It was snowing in April? Where was this warmer weather that was going to kill the virus?

*****

You just knew that Trump and his cronies had money on the line when it came to hydroxychloroquine. ** Scary Clown 45 has removed the very man who was set to oversee the $ 2 trillion stimulus. The good ol boys can’t wait to get their hands on that money while people are dying. ** Trump delayed checks that are not direct deposit because he wants his name on them.** People had trouble getting thru when applying for unemployment. Canada gave out the benefits and then checked the details.** States and companies are very confused. Jared claims he is in charge, Pence is supposed to be in charge and FEMA claims they are the final word.  Trump seems to thrive on chaos. The states bidding, stocks up and down and Doctors disagreeing are right up his alley. He probably does hate being stuck at the WH.

*****

People will forgive you for not being the leader you should be, they will never forgive you for not being the leader you claim to be.

*****

Why should it be surprising that poor communities are being hit so hard? The poor, the minorities do so much of the cleaning, the cooking and delivering that still has to be done. When people are not sheltering in place because they are needed or they need that paycheck, of course they are getting infected since they are still out there. Add to that, little or no health care and poor diets from food deserts etc. and there you go.

*****

White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham is out after 9 months.  Kayleigh Mcenany is in.** Vaccine chief Rick Bright is reassigned. He recently wanted to put hydroxychloroquine to some rigorous tests. He has been vocal about the administration.

*****

Lights Out is leaving Comedy Central and looking for another place to air.

*****

Can’t wait to see Mrs. America about the women who shaped our past.

*****

I rarely pay attention to advertising but I love that Chantix turkey. I hate the fact that he had a smoking problem, though.

*****

Every prisoner in every prison, especially the non -violent and the elderly should be reviewed. There needs to be more room made for white collar crimes that hurt so many more of us.

*****

Word is that Kim Jung un is brain dead.

*****

Rumble media has released Planet of the Humans from Jeff Gibbs on Youtube . The film will run free for 30 days and sort of explodes the myth of our ‘green’ heroes.

*****

Common, Woody Harrelson and Shinola watch co. have created a cannabis leak motif watch and the proceeds will go to criminal justice reform.

*****

Navy Captain Crozier was fired for telling the truth and looking after his crew. ** The U.S.S. Comfort isn’t taking Covid patients??

*****

Good bye Schitt’s Creek. We sure will miss ya!!

*****

Franklin Graham was asking volunteers for his field hospital in NY to sign a ‘statement of faith.’  It stated that they, “believe in God’s plan for human sexuality within the context of marriage between a man and a woman and that those that stray from those beliefs face eternal damnation and eternal judgement in Hell.”**

*****

Jon Cryer has a new book out: So that happened.

We can see now what would happen if all the humans were dead. The mountain goats have come down the hill and taken over a town in Wales. The Pandas are finally mating in Hong Kong now that they have some privacy.

*****

Bernie is out after 4 long conversations with Obama and tells us that he will concentrate on the pandemic. Looks like we are stuck with Biden.  At least Biden is talking about lowering Medicare to 60. It’s not enough but at least it’s a start.** Who will the female VP pick be, Klobuchar, Witmer, Abrams??

*****

Netflix along with Steve Carell and Greg Daniel will bring us Space Force on May 29 with Lisa Kudrow and John Malkovich.

*****

In Sweden, all land is for public use. Imagine!!

*****

ICP cancelled their Juggalo fest.

*****

Perhaps home schooling will become more popular. Perhaps with the pollution dropping, humans will get the message that we have really fucked ourselves in this world. Less cars people!!** The Twitter CEO donated a billion. That made the other top $ people look like schmucks.

*****

Kleenex Cottonelle is donating a million rolls and a million bucks. Share A Square!!

*****

Fight Island??

*****

Tiger King.. who cares.. Crip Camp is the one to watch.  A Secret Love is also great. This is the world that we should build from the ashes of Covid-19.** Stop trying to get me to watch Tiger King. –Bill Maher

*****

We are in a recession.** I don’t understand when I see so many “devout”  people show no respect for religions other than their own.

*****

Tom Pelphrey on Ozark this season just blew me away!! He has to be the one to watch at the Emmy’s.

*****

On a personal note: Hey Aunt Ritski, I will never forget that you saved a couple of people from drowning when you were a lifeguard. I will never forget one of your favorite tales, that you wanted to be Miss Kitty when you were 5 years old and got a little drunk trying. I will never forget the times that you drove thru the ditches, your Cooter Brown stories or the way that you often left all the change on the bar when we were out.  How could anyone forget the weddings, the bullet you had to live with the rest of your life and the love you had for your siblings. We will miss you forever because all of the lives you touched would have been a whole lot different without you in it. What the fuck would we have talked about if not for the saga of you? I can think of nobody who would disagree with that. Your family loves you baby. Go in Peace and serenity.

 R.I.P. Adam Schlesinger, Ellis Marsalis Jr., Mort Drucker, Lorena Boreja, Janet Alexander,  Patricia Bosworth, Bucky Pizzarelli, Logan Wiliams, Maeve Williams, Wallace Roney, Joe Diffie, Andrew Jack, Alan Merrill, John Prine, Thomas L. Miller, tornado victims, Charlotte Figi, David Driscoll, Hal Willner, Patricia Bosworth, Ann Sullivan, Brooke Taylor, the Canadian shooting victims, Matt Seligman, Barney Ales, Bootsy Barnes, Bruce Meyers,Roger Beatty, the tornado victims, Tim Brooke- Taylor, Jorge Camara, Andrew J. Fenady, Brian Dennehy, Don Reed Herring, Henry Graff, Allen Daviou, Tom Lester,  Bill Withers and Rita Hale.