#mine was released in (late) 2019 so I’m calling that 5 years

[thisdreamplace]

Hey! I just wanted to get this off my mind and ask for your advice. You said we could talk to you about things so here I am :)

For the past year, I’ve been struggling. I refused to admit that because I feel like I still have a lot of good things in my life, roof over my head, family that loves me, not a lot of money but enough for food and an occasional treat, friends that are willing to help me if I need them, etc. Yet, compared to where I was mentally & physically in 2019, the past year was kinda crappy. I’ve just not been feeling my best.

I started meditating after reading your answers for months, and it really brought up a stir of emotions these past three weeks. In the past year, I lost my maid of honour type best friend (ghosted me then I left her on read cause she replies to my texts with ‘haha’ or ‘yeah’ - no effort), my work is kinda there and kinda not (not stable), moving back home meant I lost my freedom to go out and just have fun or be alone, and frankly, I’ve lost my confidence and charm. Although I’ve never dated anyone, I knew I could have anyone I like and people find me pretty. I don’t anymore now and continue to put on weight. I started crushing on a person who’s kinda like a celebrity and started thinking how I’m not good enough, etc when the thought of manifesting them popped into my head. I’ve applied to a shit ton of jobs and when I’m not called back, I get sad, when I am, I feel nervous because I fucking hate the working style here (12 hours a day, 5-6 days a week is pretty normal). The pay is decent but I prefer freedom, even though I don’t know what exactly it is I want anymore. I’ve lost interest in my dreams. My family tells me it’s just how it is, all jobs are hard and I should just stuck it up especially since I’m young, but I want more out of life. I want to be paid generously while still having a life and loving my job. I want my ex best friend to apologise and reconnect with me. I want my precious housemates to start texting me back. I want a parter that’s amazing and to be loved and spoiled. I want my confidence back. I want to feel free and like myself again. I’ve been trying to work through things since last July, after switching from LOA to Neville and I know I’m not doing it right since results should have shown up already, in the 3D. I just feel like I’m in reverse. There were a list of things I wanted but now I just want things I had in 2019 (then the other things I wanted change too). I can have both, but I’ve really been out of it. I feel guilty for feeling this way, too, because I do have some things okay, but I would be lying if I said I haven’t been sick and tired and just timid and grumpy. Thank you for reading! ❤️ Hope you’re doing well and thank you for your blog 🖤

Hey!! You absolutely can always send messages like this. The law of assumption crowd tends to be tough, and for good reason. It’s true we fall back into the old story and the victim mentality and it shouldn’t be tolerated. But in my opinion, sometimes just being able to get it off your chest and out there works fucking wonders. If we are Gods having a human experience, maybe we shouldn’t have to feel so pressured to not feel a type of way. In that way, we give ourselves true unconditional love. So, always feel free to write to me like this.

Anyways, you are not alone in this. 💖 I would like you to understand that. You are not the only one struggling in this way, as you can see from my blog. And I am in the same boat some days. I know what it’s like, to have been at this for months and nothing drastic has happened. At some point, manifesting a text from someone and a free meal here or there just doesn’t cut it. And it can be frustrating because the pros simply respond like, “well you aren’t truly living in the end.” Clearly. lmao But sometimes it’s like you’ve hit a wall you cannot get through. Especially looking at the past, it can be so hurtful. When you found out about Neville, you felt like you had the world on a string. Finally, the puzzle pieces of life were coming together and you were ready to live the life of your dreams. Then months passed and you start looking at the past and begin to romanticize it. Because you have been at it for months and nothing it seeming to happen. But then you remember a time where you didn’t even know about the law and it was a better time in life.

Well here’s the truth. Neville even said himself physical labor, like working in a field all day from sun up to sun down, is easier than the mental labor of applying the law. He sure as hell didn’t lie. This is why we are on a journey. I especially feel it’s so true for people who come to my blog. Because there are plenty of law of attraction/law of assumption blogs that act like manifesting is simply affirming and getting what you want. But on my blog and blogs similiar to mine, I think many of us realize that this is one helluva journey. And it’s up to us to decide if it’s worth taking.

People say you can decide when your manifestation happens, people say all this type of stuff and you persist and your 3D appears so stagnant anyway. I can tell you that I have read quite a few success stories where people’s lives were stagnant for months. And then suddenly... everything started rolling in. Suddenly, their lives started to change in the most perfect way ever. And I would like to think this is true for you, and me, and everyone else reading this blog. That through some kind of persistance, despite the tears and days we just can’t take it anymore, that day will come where suddenly everything turns around. Suddenly, it all feels worth it. In that moment we will know why we could never give up on ourselves. Neville said everything has it’s appointed hour. As nice as it is to think we can have whatever we want as soon as we do XYZ, I think sometimes just believing it will come when it’s time is good enough. Knowing you can cause something to come slower/quicker can just cause so much anxiety sometimes. Maybe it’s not so bad to stop constantly feeling the need to be in control.

So all in all, feel what you need to feel. The good news is, you are God despite all of these uncomfortable feelings and thoughts you are dealing with. Somewhere deep in you, beneath the illusion lf all your fears and doubts, is the God within. The unconditional love that is always there for you to turn to. Even when it all feels so heavy it is there. Know that whatever it is you’re facing it is okay. Let it all come up, let yourself release it. Allow it to be, allow yourself to simply be. You do not always have to try or be doing something. You are simply enough right now, you are absolutely perfect for the things you want right now in this moment. Perhaps in meditation, allow yourself that space. Let those painful things surface, but under it all remind yourself this is all an illusion. You are complete and true love. The more you tap into that, the more the truth of pure love (your desires), will be revealed to you in the outer world. It’s just something simple you can do, that takes less effort in moments where it’s all so heavy. And it’s what I always try to do, so I recommend it.

I hope this was helpful. My life is like a lil rollercoaster lately, but in everyday something wonderful happens. And that is what I try to remember by each night. I am glad my blog has been so helpful to you. 💖

[hopetofantasy]

Culture, parallels & meta - S2 E1

Previous season Prologue

°

Maandag 20:25

The ambiguity of this clip, showing us Zoë’s POV as well as Robbe’s, was intentional. Unfortunately, wtFOCK decided to queer bait us at that time. Their banner on their website even portrayed Robbe as S2 main, before the release of the second clip. 

C is for culture: 

"I collected your favorite easter eggs" - During Easter, it’s a tradition for children to search for chocolate eggs hidden 'by the Easter Bunny’ or ‘the Roman Easter Clocks who flew over’ in the gardens of (grand)parents. This is usually followed by a brunch with the family. During the weeks before, friends/colleagues might gift others mini flavored chocolate eggs, with praliné, pistachio, marzipan, mokka, ... 

"I’m looking forward to it" - It’s back to school time in this episode. They just had two weeks of Easter break, which is situated somewhere in April - depending on the date of that religious day. They also have this Monday off, since it’s Easter Monday.

They just came out of the ‘Wasbar’ (= laundromat bar). Still a relatively new concept, but slowly gaining more and more popularity in the cities. These types of bars are perfect for students, tourists or locals, who love to eat or drink something, while waiting for their laundry. At some locations, they even organize concerts and events. 

Hello from the outside: Right before the release of this clip, a Belgian influencer filmed Jana and Zoë in 'De Wasbar', at ‘the same time as he was there’. He acted all excited and tagged the characters insta’s.

Where’s Wally: We kinda forgot about Robbe’s first girlfriend, Maud. Whoops!

Oop, there it is, the homophobia / heteronormativity: Robbe immediately stopping his girlfriend from going further than just making-out and deflecting the question about going to his house. 

Nod to the OG: Robbe saying "Hell and damnation" about his mother being angry. This is a subtle hint towards the religion obsession of Isak’s mom, a storyline wtFOCK never truly explored in S3.

Perfect parallels: Robbe’s "Can’t we go to your house?" with Maud’s "Or to yours?" in S2 and Sander saying "At my place or yours?" in S3.

Blink-and-y’ll-miss-it: Jana has the same phone case from S1 (the birdies!).

°

Dinsdag 08:25

C is for culture: 

"No, just porno" - More than half of Belgian teens don’t watch porn. Those who do, are mainly men, but a surprising 2 out of 5 female teens also like to explore. Though, this development has a huge impact on the average age to start sex: teens are waiting longer and longer to have their first time, due to insecurities formed by these types of images.

"Bedankt für die blumen" - A phrase the Pope uses every year during Easter in the ‘Urbi et orbi’ to thank the Dutch flower suppliers. This is used as a joke a lot by Dutch and Belgian people, because of the way the former Pope pronounced the phrase so weirdly. 

Blink-and-y’ll-miss-it: Robbe was wearing his oriental vibe t-shirt from S3. Yasmina pulls off her hijab at the entrance, due to the school’s policy.

°

Dinsdag 12:52

C is for culture: "Vijgen na Pasen" (= figs after Easter) - This expression for ‘a solution that's too late to have purpose’, comes from the former fasting ritual before Easter. Back then the only sweet thing people were allowed to eat were figs. But the import didn’t always run smoothly. So they sometimes arrived after Easter, which was too late, thus defeating the whole purpose. 

Perfect parallel: An annoyed Zoë asking Senne “What’s your plan?” in S2, a happy Sander asking Robbe the same in S3. 

Blink-and-y’ll-miss-it: Luca is throwing very annoyed glares towards the two lovebirds, Robbe and Maud. According to the FreeFest poll, ‘Beam Team’ is at nr. 1, ‘Blonde Ambition’ (Britt’s group) is at nr. 2 and their team - called ‘GRL PWR’ - is at three. 

°

Woensdag 18:21

Perfect parallel / Funny coincidence: Milan having sexual acts in the same room as Sobbe's reunion later on, both accompanied by a song of a LGBT+ singer. 

Blink-and-y’ll-miss-it: Each shelf has a name label and they’re all filled with products by 'Colruyt' (a discount store). Milan’s one is almost empty, due to his money issues and Lisa’s has a gluten-free product with a post-it ‘mine’ on it.

°

Woensdag 19:42

C is for culture: The girls and Jens are going to a concert of ‘blackwave.’ - an Antwerp hiphop duo, who’ve gotten more attention due to their hit single ‘Elusive’ ft. David Ngyah. Their style is rather funky with oldschool influences. 

Hello from the outside: The hiphop duo (mentioned above) actually did have a real concert on that exact Wednesday 24th of April 2019 in ‘De Roma’ Antwerp. The actors went to this, put videos on their characters’ insta and made some pictures with fans who spotted them in real life. 

Perfect parallel: Amber sending a topless pic to Senne and him screenshotting it in S1, the beat girl doing the same and Jana encouraging Jens to screenshot in S2. Also, Zoë stating they don’t have permission to see this, foreshadowing Viktor taking nude pics of her without permission. 

Blink-and-y’ll-miss-it: Look at these adorable pics with girlssquad and Robbe! 

°

Donderdag 12:53

Perfect parallel: Amber thanking the girls “You were there for me” in S1, her saying “All four of us are there for you” to Zoë in S2.

Nod to the OG:

°

Vrijdag 20:42

Perfect parallel: Jana saying to Amber that if someone spills a drink, her dress will be ruined in S2, Aaron actually spilling and ruining her dress in S3. 

Blink-and-y’ll-miss-it / Oopsie: The candle letters behind Zoë says ‘Hapyp Days’ instead of ‘Happy Days’.

[lovenliterature]

evermore thoughts

willow

I wasn’t sold on this on first listen but I really liked it on second listen with more attention to lyrics

video is also really lovely, big fan of that

really really like the difference in melody for the diff appearances of “life was a willow and it bent right to your wind”

favourite lyric: “I come back stronger than a 90s trend” - the look she does at the camera cemented this as my fave line even more

champagne problems

down as one of my faves from the start

love love love the narrative

proper late night with cider, melancholy vibe

kind of like a grown up/worse feeling august in terms of vibes?? as in like the experience described feels like a more intense heartbreaking august in a way

really like the conclusion too

favourite lyric: I really struggled to pick here but: “you booked the night train for a reason/so you could sit there in this hurt” for sheer visceral emotion, “dom perignon you brought it” for the way its sung, “How evergreen, our group of friends/Don't think we'll say that word again” and “she’ll patch up your tapestry that I shred” for lyricism

gold rush

again, one i wasn’t super sold on the first listen, music and the vibe didn’t really interest me

first notes made me think of epiphany

but then i listened to it watching the lyric video and holy shit

now v appreciative of the melody and bass and the pace of the lyrics

really really like her embracing talking about jealousy

love love love the ending and beginning being the same holy shit

favourite lyrics: “at dinner parties, I call you out on your contrarian shit” and the way she sings “with your hair falling into place like dominoes”

‘tis the damn season

again preferred on second listen, wasn’t on the list of early faves

the best xmas late night walks vibe, walking through frosty streets at home between houses, embracing the only time you get to think, losing yourself in music and nighttime with freezing hands and cloudy breath

would’ve fit my 2019 xmas vibe too

melancholy and nostalgia

favourite lyrics: “sleep in half the day/just for old time’s sake” and “and the heart I know I’m breakin’ is my own”

tolerate it

god girl you deserve better

kinda like a sad last great american dynasty in terms of searching for approval

naive innocence taken advantage of

drunk in my garden walking round to try and forget my life kinda vibe

favourite lyrics: “i know my love should be celebrated/but you tolerate it” and “now I’m begging for footnotes in the story of your life” 

no body no crime

holy shit did i sleep on this at first but oh my god its so good

start gives me show of hands vibes which is great

her husbands acting different and it smells like infidelity - just the way she sings this is so so fucking good

this is the easiest song to listen to and holy shit its just great

favourite lyric: “she said “that ain’t my merlot on his mouth/that ain’t my jewellery on our joint account”

happiness

“all the years I’ve given/is just shit we’re dividin’ up” - v v true, you have to rebuild your life after every relationship and taking it all apart is so much more sudden than building it up

like an alternative to the 1 which I LOVE

but also some parallels to this is me trying: “I hope she’ll be a beautiful fool..... sorry I didn’t mean that” vs “my words shoot to kill when I’m mad”

the whole bridge is iconic - “I can’t make it go away by making you a villain” - in the short term, anger at an ex can help, but eventually you have to move on, and its easier to accept that there was good in the relationship after a while, and it makes looking back on it better

“no one teaches you what to do/when a good man hurts you/and you know you hurt him too” - blame on both sides is much harder to take and grieve and its hard to know how to cope with that. it also makes advice more complicated because there isn’t much you can say to help

favourite lyric: “both of these things can be true” - always love duality and nuance in literature and its nice to hear it acknowledged in a climate of binary oppositions and no shades of grey

dorothea

nostalgia for the future

now prob my most listened, gets stuck in my head and one of the few i do listen to in isolation - like august

Reminds me so much of Ella - each other’s history, not each other’s whole future but in there somewhere

again sapphic vibes, real strong esp because of the ella vibes its the whole in between romantic and platonic affection

“hey dorothea, do you ever stop and think about me” - that’s the way I think of people I love esp ella and people from that era of my life, and anyone where its kinda open ended or just grown apart

favourite lyric: “and damn dorothea, they all wanna be ya”

coney island

instant fave - marked down from first listen and probably still one i actively look forward to 

much like with exile, the male vocals GOT me

“did I shatter you” that line broke my goddamn heart

favourite lyrics: both for the sheer feelings of the vocals and the lyricism “were you standing in the hallway/with a big cake, happy birthday/did I paint your skies the darkest grey” and “and when I got into the accident/the sight that flashed before me was your face”

ivy

the way she sings goddamn could be the whole fucking song its so beautiful

“my pain fits in the palm of your freezing hand/taking mine, but it’s promised to another” - the passive here is great

“he wants what’s only yours”

the trilogy of these lyrics “what would he do if he found us out?”, “he’s gonna burn this house to the ground”, “and drink my husband’s wine”, the recklessness, the drinking his wine like a secret defiance

“my house of stone/your ivy grows/and now i’m covered in you” - fucking hell this is the best imagery - even with the strongest walls and foundations, the love crept through and grew inside her til she was covered in it

favourite lyric: quite literally just the words “oh, goddamn”

cowboy like me

“dancin’ is a dangerous game” - hell yeah I get so many feelings from this, it just reminds me of the intimacy of dancing and the feeling of swaying in someone’s arms

“and the skeletons in both our closets/plotted hard to fuck this up” - both like active interference of exes or just simply trauma, unresolved issues

“forever is the sweetest con” - believing hurts and everything ends but its worth it for the time you have

favourite lyrics: “now you hang from my lips/like the gardens of Babylon”

long story short

first notes make me think of between the saltmarsh and the sea even though its SO different but also a bit like august idk why

“if the shoe fits walk in it/til your high heels break” - i just love the imagery of this line

“fell down the rabbit hole” - living for this line and the wonderland vibe

“but if someone comes at us, this time i’m ready” - the vibe of like not looking for a fight but defending what you love

favourite lyric: “past me/I wanna tell you not to get lost in these petty things” - YES BITCH also the energy I give to past me and future me gives to me now or “long story short I survived”

marjorie

another song I come back to on its own

this is the exact wistful vibe i look for in calm ish songs, can be sad, can be happy depending on a mood and this is perfect

the video is incredible and marjorie providing the backing vocals made me cry also it being in the same place on the record as epiphany was on folklore

“never be so polite/you forget your power/never wield such power/you forget to be polite” - love the use of wield, it also feels like the medium women try to find between being a “bad bitch” and being ladylike, but not a medium society will accept bc fuck that, the exact way THEY wanna do it instead

really the song i needed after the year of so much grief, and i know it’s gonna bring me comfort when grandma goes, especially the line “what died didn’t stay dead”

favourite lyric: “watched as you signed your name: marjorie” - the way this is sung will literally stay with me forever, its like a legacy in one line

closure

again, instant fave

the vibe of you don’t owe someone shit just bc they feel guilty is so good

“yes I got your letter/yes I’m doing better” “I know that it’s over” - I’ve moved on and I don’t need your permission for that or your well wishes thanks

Moving on doesn’t mean forgiveness

I just love the melody so much and its such a good song agh

favourite lyric: “I know I’m just a wrinkle in your new life/staying friends would iron it out so nice”

evermore

“grey november/I’ve been down since July” - most explicit pandemicy vibes i get, I was home and it was almost possible to just regard it as a normalish summer, looking after the dog and living at home and now its coming up to Christmas and I’m living away from home, our family is split across 5 homes in 4 cities and its fucking hard (not even sure if its that type of down but that’s how it made me feel)

“writing letters/addressed to the fire” - literally just picked up on this lyric and has kinda a dual meaning for me. 1 -feeling shit about things you create, putting in effort, just to throw it away. 2 - tactic for tackling anxiety, just getting rid of thoughts and releasing them from my brain

“Cannot think of all the cost/And the things that will be lost/Oh, can we just get a pause?” - again, v pandemicy and so relevant to the fam’s 2018-2019, we just needed a pause, we had to keep going and not process what we’d lost or we’d never carry on

such a good depression song

favourite lyric: “staring out an open window/catching my death”

[victroia21]

The Resilient Roadster: Why the Miata continues to reign for over 30 years.

The Mazda MX-5, known in the States as the Miata, was first introduced in 1989. Since then, Mazda has blessed us with four generations of the MX-5. I remember the first time I ever began to appreciate this roadster. It was in the late 90’s as a kid playing the video game Gran Turismo. The Miata was one of the first cars you got to choose. It wasn’t flashy, but it was cool that it was in one of the most prestigious video games at the time. Fast forward over 20 years later and the Miata continues to be the best affordable sports car on the market.

I must admit, during my entire life I never thought about owning a Miata. It’s tiny, it’s not that fast and most of their owners are going through a mid life crisis. I found myself always desiring something practical yet fun to drive. The Miata is defined by the latter, however it is far from practical. I never had money to blow on a weekend driver; two seater sports car. So I always resorted to purchasing Sport Utility Vehicles, or four door sport sedans. After I sold my Acura TL type S, I was in desperate need of a vehicle. I visited an Alfa Romeo dealer with my heart set on purchasing a Giulia. I’ve always wanted an Alfa Romeo ever since I was a kid. My dad owned a late 80’s Alfa Romeo Milano and that was the family car throughout my childhood. When my dad drove by, I would brag to my friends that the Alfa would one day be mine. They would all laugh and clown on me because it was old and weird looking. But I loved it because it was Italian and different. I guess I felt like it represented me welI. I love having things that nobody knows about. Since I was a kid I always had to buy Nike’s that no one in school had. I mean it would seriously ruin my day if I saw someone else wearing my sneakers. I didn’t care if someone else liked what I had. I just preferred to stand out and I’ve carried that mentality into my adulthood. As far as the Alfa Romeo goes, I never got a chance to call it my own. My dad sold it to his mechanic a few years before I got my license. Bummer.

Back at the dealership, I couldn’t score a decent deal on a Giulia. Instead, I noticed an automatic Fiat 124 Spider Abarth. I remember when the 124 Abarth came out, it was only offered with a manual transmission. Rightfully so, a car like that should only be offered with a standard 6 speed. However, I didn’t want my daily driver to have a manual gearbox. At the time I lived in Los Angeles, and I’m sure you all heard about LA’s traffic. So a stick shift wasn’t going to cut it in bumper to bumper. So here I am in front of the next best thing, an Italian sports car with a scorpion for a badge. It checked all the right boxes. It was different, sporty, fun, and most importantly Italian. It could fill that void of always wanting to own a unique, Italian automobile. But there was a problem, it wasn’t practical. I’ve never owned a two seater sports car with enough cargo capacity to squeeze in my toiletry bag. So I passed on the Spider and ended up leasing a crossover; how original. Recently, I had the luxury of temporarily owning both the 124 Abarth and Mazda Miata. After driving both cars for a few weeks, I could definitively say the Miata is the better sports car. Although I’ve grown to be biased towards Italian manufacturing, I must admit the Japanese roadster is without question the better option.

The Miata featured in this article is a 2019 base model with 181 horsepower, an increase from 155 in the previous year. The 2.0 naturally aspirated inline 4 engine boasts 151 pound feet of torque with a curb weight less than 2400 pounds. It comes standard with a 6 speed manual gearbox and redlines at 7500 RPM’s. Combine this with the Miata’s fantastic handling and it’s enough to make you feel like you’re in a Formula 1 race car. The naturally aspirated engine makes the throttle feel extremely responsive. The gearbox shifts like butter and urges you to rev it all the way up to its redline. This Miata was by far the most fun I’ve ever had in a modern day roadster. It’s so light that you can just throw it into turns and still trust that it will remain in control. There is nothing in this world that is more fun than going through the gears in this car. The dual overhead cam engine is refined and appeals to many car enthusiasts for its simplistic design. The engine doesn’t have any plastic covers over it, rather it appears to look simple and easily accessible under the hood. This is something that is becoming more and more rare to find in the auto industry. Nowadays, engines come completely covered and require special tools to access. Automakers are discouraging people to work on their own cars. Not Mazda, just look at that engine, it looks like something straight from the past. As clichè as it may sound, Mazda knows if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Unlike Toyota with their Supra, Mazda will never offer their Miata without a standard transmission. They understand that the car is designed to operate with a manual. Going through the gears and hitting the perfect shift is what brings out the fun in a sports car. When BMW introduced the new Z4 last year, it did not offer a manual transmission. Same goes for Porsche with their latest 911. Dedicated fans were appalled when they found out a manual was not an option. BMW and Porsche listened to their supporters and released a manual transmission for both those models. These automakers paid attention to the feedback and understood that there is still a large enough market for manual transmission owners. Now automakers don’t want to make the same mistake. Look at Ford with their new Bronco, they offer a stick shift for the 4 cylinder model with a crawling gear! These stories are a true testament to the value us car enthusiasts bring to the table. Car companies are beginning to listen. Mazda however has been listening for decades and this latest Miata is the perfect example. A new and improved engine, handling that you can trust and of course the buttery smooth 6 speed transmission. Everything you want in a high revving sports car.

Yes it isn’t practical and maybe it shouldn’t be your daily driver. But the Mazda Miata is still around because Mazda continues to put love into manufacturing their beloved roadster. What do I mean by putting love into it? Well think about your mom or grandma’s cooking. You know when they make your favorite comfort food with love. You can tell when you get the same dish at a restaurant and it’s not made with love. Mazda does the same with their Miata. They are consistent and refrain from cutting corners to save money. And if they do find themselves not pleasing their hardcore followers, they make adjustments with the following model. The improvements Mazda continues to make on the Miata is a testament to the roadster’s longevity. It still continues to thrive in an automobile market that finds companies reinventing new crossover SUV’s. Mazda in particular wasn’t satisfied with their lineup of crossovers. The CX-7 was one of the early pioneers of the vehicle class. Now Mazda offers four options, including the new CX-30. Like the CX-3 wasn’t enough, they had to confuse us with a slightly larger CX-30? Mazda could easily shift all their attention towards their SUV lineup and stop focusing on their tiny sports car. The Miata has never been Mazda’s bread and butter or volume vehicle; but it will always define their brand. In a world full of crossovers, props to Mazda for not neglecting their pride and joy, their roadster, the Mazda MX-5.

[kookscrescent]

Aconite (pt.1)┊knj

❖ Pairing: Namjoon x f reader ❖ A bad summary: “Oh great! You will have to spend time with mister sour face over there during your down time as well.” ❖ Genre: angst, fluff, marriage!au ❖ Warnings: none in this chapter  ❖ Word count: 2.656 ❖ Parts: 2/??

⇥ Masterlist ⇥ Aconite Masterlist  NB! This is all fiction! Nothing mentioned/written are facts and/or real! So please just keep that in mind when reading and enjoy! Thank you ♡

⇦ PREVIOUS // NEXT ⇨

The silence in the room is almost unbearable. Roughly, thirty minutes have passed since you arrived, and during those Namjoon has managed not speak a single word to you, only greeting you with a short and curt bow when you got here, and you don’t even think he has looked at you for longer than a few seconds.

Seriously, what is up that man’s ass? None of this is your doing! You are both here, meaning that you have both agreed to this arrangement and the terms of the contract, so the least he could do is be somewhat polite and not act like a total asshole. You are minutes away from being fake engaged for god’s sake!  

You have been working your way through the stack of legal documents – or contracts, if you will – in front of you, the pen in your hand scribbling your signature on the underlined parts. You have already read every page of it twice before coming here, and you even sent it over to your lawyer for him to proofread everything beforehand.  

Moving the pen across the white paper for the last time, you close the contract neatly and place the pen on top. 

“All done.” You announce with a sigh of relief, your hand aching slightly from holding it so long.

Looking next to you, Namjoon has already finished and is now occupying himself with his phone, but he looks up briefly when you speak. You look away, you don’t want to waste your energy trying to be nice to him at the moment. There are still a lot of details that needs to be gone over, so if he wants to sulk then by all means he can go ahead, but you are not going to entertain his mood.

Haeun comes over, taking both you and Namjoon’s fully signed contracts before handing them over to Bang Si-Hyuk. He takes them gladly, not looking at them he passes them to one of the HR managers behind him.

“Okay,” Chinhae, the leading director of this whole affair, claps his hands to get everyone’s attention. Even Namjoon puts down his phone for once to pay attention. “You have now both read, understood and signed the contract, correct?” He asks you both.

“Yes,” you answer in unison.

“Perfect! But I would like to just go over the basics one more time so that everyone is clear and on the same page of what is going to happen in the months leading forward.”

The majority of the questions you had leading into to this have already been answered by reading the contract, but you like that everyone is very detailed orientated just like yourself. Not a corner is left untouched in this.  

“As of, well right now actually, you, ____ and you, Namjoon, are engaged,” a round of applause goes around the room and you look awkwardly at Namjoon, deciding to shoot him a polite smile, but he still has the same sour mine on as the last time you looked at him. You roll your eyes and focus back on Chinhae. So much for wanting to be civil. “so, let us start with just the basics. You are both clear on why this is happening, so we won’t touch too much on that anymore. As stated in the contract, the duration of the first part of the engagement is six months. During these months we will schedule a few quick meetings when it is possible. These meetings will be spent going over the progress.”

He turns the page of the notebook in front of him, carefully taking his time before he starts talking again. “During the six months we will either call for meetings if we feel like it is needed, but you can also call for a meeting if there is anything you feel like we should go over.” He makes a gesture towards Haeun and Namjoon’s manager Sejin. “Haeun and Sejin have been appointed as your direct managers for this because of your familiarity with them. So any minor problems or issues gets directed towards them like it would in any normal situation. Are you both following so far?”

“Yes,” You say.

And for the first time, Namjoon opens his mouth to say more than a three letter word, his tone sounding almost pleasant. “Yes, but I’m just more curious as to know what is going to happen when the meeting finishes.”

“Of course,” Chinhae says flipping another page. “As you already know from reading the contract, your living situation will change slightly from this day forward. You are both living separately right now, and of course Namjoon you are living with the rest of your members, they have of course already been informed of all this,” he pauses and Namjoon nods in confirmation. “We have already acquired an apartment for you both to stay at, and because you are both busy people, it has been decided that all the days where you are both in Seoul, you will stay together at the apartment. That way you have a chance to get to know each other a little better outside of the official outings and meetings.”

Oh great! You will have to spend time with mister sour face over there during your down time as well. “Are we going to have access to each other’s schedule then?” You ask because that was not mentioned in the contract.

Chinhae looks to Bang Si-hyuk and he nods. “We can make that happen.”

“Okay, because I think that will make it somewhat easier to navigate then.”

“Sure. Namjoon do you have any more questions?”

“One,” He says sitting up straighter in the chair. “I know that the contract stated that we will be in the public eye together, but it didn’t really go into detail. So, what exactly is expected of us regarding to that?”

You have to admit that you are a little amazed right now. In the last few minutes, Namjoon has spoken more than he has in the two weeks you have been acquaintances. And it feels like he is starting to warm up a little bit.

“Later today, at exactly four o’clock, we will release the press statement of your engagement,” someone behind him hands him two files and he hands them over to you and Namjoon. You have each gotten two files. On one its reads ‘Official Press Statement’ and on the other one does not have a title. “Here is a copy of the official statement that will be released. We have fabricated a timeframe of how long you would have been dating secretly had this all been real.”

Huh?

You flip open the statement file. “Kim Namjoon of BTS and ____ _______ are officially engaged. The couple, both being signed under Big Hit Entertainment, have been fond of each other since early February of 2019. They both agreed upon keeping their romance under wraps for the sake of their own privacy and getting to know each other on a deeper level, but they have now decided to take their relationship a step further and is set to marry late next year.”

Wow! This all makes it seems so legit and real, when in reality none of this is real or genuine. It is all a PR stunt, but had you been on the other side of this, reading this as a fan of either of you, you would have thought it was real. But that is also the whole point you guess.

“So we would have been dating for about 10 months.” You confirm.

“Yes,” Chinhae replies. “The other file is just a loose guide of what we need from you guys in the public eye.”

You flip to the other file, seeing Namjoon doing the same thing out of the corner of your eye. Quickly, you scan the first few lines. Public appearances, speaking fondly about the relationship/each other, hand holding, dates, kissing, social media posts.

You gulp as you read the word kissing. You really do not want to put your lips on someone so spiteful as Namjoon, but you already signed the contract and you guess a small chaste peck won’t do you any harm.

Or at least not a lot of harm.

Flipping a page again, a timetable comes into view. At the top is tomorrows date and next to it is a scheduled outing. Yours and Namjoon’s first appearance as an engaged couple in the public eye.

“I have a recording session at the studio tomorrow.” Namjoon comments upon seeing the timetable.

“They know,” you are surprised to hear Sejin speaking for the first time. His voice is much deeper than you would have thought, and he speaks in a very calm and collect way. “Your session is early in the morning at 10 am and your date isn’t scheduled until 4 or 5 pm.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” you cut in. “4 or 5 pm?”

“Yes, for now the time is put loosely depending on when Namjoon finishes tomorrow. Could be earlier than 4 but no later than 5.” Sejin explains. “Buy you will be meeting here before the date, and Namjoon, because of his scheduled session, will already be here, so there shouldn’t be too many delays.”

You really want to make a comment about how you don’t want to live your daily life around his schedule and how he should just show up on time, but you know how recording sessions work, how stressful they can be at times and how much work and how many hours that gets put into it. Also, you decide to be the bigger person in this case, smiling and nodding an understanding okay.

From the side, Haeun taps Chinhae and he leans towards her. She whispers something in his ear that no one else is able to hear, but you can see the smile she spots clear as day.  

“Oh right!” Chinhae exclaims immediately after. “I almost forgot!” He scoots away from the table, grabbing his briefcase from the floor and begins digging in it. He pulls out a small square box in black velvet and glides it across the table till it stops in front of you.

“Your engagement ring!” He says as if you need any clarification as to what is inside the small box.

Pulling it towards you, you silently open the lid.

Holy shit! You nearly curse out loud seeing the ring inside. You can feel Namjoon’s gaze on you, his eyes watching your reaction closely.

Inside the box sits the most beautiful silver ring you have probably ever seen in your entire life. No exaggeration! What immediately catches your attention is the big cushion cut diamond in the middle of the ring, being surrounded by a halo of smaller round cut diamonds, framing the bigger it in the most beautiful and vintage looking way. Cascading around the entire band of the ring is even more diamonds and when the light catches it in just the right way, it sparkles in the most breathtaking way.

You are overwhelmed with the amount of diamonds that are on this ring and you are almost afraid to take it out of the box and put it on. What if one of the diamonds falls out or gets lost? Now, you are not sure of the price of this thing or the general cost of an engagement ring, but you would bet your left arm on it not being on the cheap side of the scale.

Holy shit! Whoever picked out this ring is a winner at life!

“It’s… It’s beautiful! Wow…” You are speechless.

You didn’t grow up with a lot of money and having nice things – having expensive things – like this wasn’t ever something you thought of or wanted. And granted, the life you have been lucky enough to be blessed with now, could easily provide you with such things, it has just never been of that much importance. But wow!

“Put it on!” Haeun eagerly urges you from the other side of the table. Her eyes are twinkling like Christmas lights, focusing solely on the ring.

“I’m almost afraid to put it on. I’m afraid to break it.” You joke and gently pry it out of its place.

“It can be replaced if so.” Bang Si-hyuk says making you stop and look at him. He only nods towards your hand with a genuine smile urging you to continue.

Sliding the ring down your finger, you admire your hand. You never thought you would be wearing an engagement ring at the mere age of 23, but life works in strange and mysterious ways. The ring fits like a glove, hugging your finger perfectly almost like it was custom made just for you.  

It is perfect and your right hand now pales in comparison.

“It’s beautiful,” you repeat your previous words. You don’t feel like there are any words good enough to really describe just how beautiful it is.

Feeling Namjoon move beside you, you turn your eyes to him. To his hands to be specific. Both of them are bare.

You frown. “Doesn’t Namjoon get a ring?” Of course, you know that guys typically don’t wear a ring when they get engaged, but looking at the ring you have gotten, you suddenly feel bad and you don’t want him to feel left out… even if he is being an ass. “I mean, I get to wear this,” you flash the ring. “and… I mean, I just don’t think it would be fair…” Your words fade as you find it hard to explain what you mean.

“It’s okay,” Namjoon assures you, his gaze shifting from the ring to your eyes. “This is how it works in ‘normal’ situations,” he air quotes. “you should get to wear the beautiful ring and feel special... Even if it is fake behind the scenes.”

For the first time, you hear him speak genuinely and it warms at your heart. Why could he not have been like this from the start? That would have made everything so much easier, and it sure as hell would have changed your first impression and opinion on him.

If only he continues to be like this everything will be fine and run smoothly. You just hope you haven’t spoken too soon.

“Alright perfect! Now that this is all in place, I think we can successfully wrap up the meeting, unless you have any last remarks sir?” Chinhae directs his last question towards Bang Si-Hyuk.

“I have no further remarks at the moment.” He says and stands from his chair.

Everyone else does the same, telling him goodbye as he leaves the room with the managers, leaving only you, Namjoon, Haeun, Sejin and Chinhae in the room.

You begin packing your stuff in your purse. Your copy of the contract, the statement and the ‘loose schedule’, and the black velvet box, but you halt with it in your hand, a thought suddenly occurs to you.

“Oh, should I wear this now?” You frown, referring to your ring.

“Uh…” Haeun hums, waiting for Chinhae to give you an answer.

“I mean, what if someone photographs me today wearing it?”

Chinhae checks his watch quickly. “No it’s okay, you can keep it on. It’s almost 4 o’clock anyways, so there should be no issues even if you are photographed wearing it.”

Silently, you nod, putting the velvet box in your purse carefully even though it is empty.

“I will see the both of you tomorrow between 4 and 5.” He chirps and leaves the room.

Now, only four people are left, but it seems that Namjoon is also in a hurry to leave, because as soon as Chinhae has disappeared though the door, he also makes a hasty retreat though it, Sejin right behind him.

So much for him starting to be nice and change his attitude…

“Happy engagement to me!” You jokingly scowl.

NEXT CHAPTER ⇨

This took me longer to get up than i initially wanted! But it’s here now, so i hope you enjoy! 

If you do, please remember to like and reblog!

[dannyd0levito]

September 26, 2020

I’m not sure why, but I find myself not being able to look directly outside through the window. It’s blue and grey, and quite gorgeous as the world wakes up. I’ve been awake since 5:12 a.m. myself. I’m reading a book I don’t remember the name of, but it inspires me to type out my feelings as I find my eyes blurring and my chest get tight. My throat has been dry and caught the entire time I read it.

           It’s a story of a 17-year-old girl who has had a bad run in with someone named Fucking Frank, coping with the loss of her friend, Ellis, who attempted suicide and didn’t die, but lost enough oxygen to her brain to essentially be a vegetable. She was homeless, her father and dog dead at some point and her mother physically abusive, and she was raped. She tries to escape everything by cutting so deeply with broken mason jar glass in an attempt to end the buzzing and pain but ends up in a hospital and is later transferred to an all-girl nut house. Now, she’s staying at a friend’s studio home, which is really a done-up garage, and struggles to find a sense of normal.

           I found myself relating to it a little too much all at once. It reminds me of my time at Heritage Oaks off Auburn Boulevard in Citrus Heights. I don’t remember exactly how old I was, but I think I was living in Orangevale in Sarah’s studio-home at the time. I think Charlie and I weren’t technically together at the time because I remember a guy in the loony bin taking an interest in me, which now that I think of it, might have been the first and only time in my life a person took interest in me first. I often forget about it, though, because everyone was crazy in that place. He gave me his number before I was discharged at the end of my two weeks and told me the day he was going to be released. I waited in the parking lot for him that day, but never saw him walk out. I haven’t heard from or seen him again.

           A couple months later, the crazy festered more and I tried to find him since he wasn’t answering calls or texts, no acknowledgment of the voicemail I had left. I found his name on the Internet associated with a pizza place in Chico. I remember calling them, the woman who answered sounding very skeptical and confused, but promising to pass on the message that Dani was calling for him. I don’t even remember his name. It’s stalkerish and creepy to do that, now that I look back on it. But I didn’t know this at the time and had no ill-intent. I just wanted to connect to someone who seemed to like me and see me, even when I was at my lowest point. I figured if someone could like me in there, then they could like me for who I really was.

           But I was wrong once again.

           I’m tearing up as I write this, but it’s not sadness. I don’t know what it is exactly. Something deeper, more like grief and depression and hopelessness. A loss of some kind. Innocence, maybe?

           Everything hurts in me right now and feels dark. The void is opening back up for some reason. I was getting so good at bottling my emotions – I envision a mason jar – and sucking it back into some hidden away part of me, but that fucking book opened it all back up.

           I’m relating to that 17-year-old girl somehow, but she was worse off than me. Sure, I attempted suicide that landed me in the nuthouse years ago. I don’t remember how old I was at the time. I think old enough to drink, maybe. Maybe it was 2015.

           I would’ve been 21 at the time, turning 22 July of that year, but I had been drinking and doing drugs long before then.

           I started smoking pot heavily after I started working at KFC when I was 16. I was vehemently against alcohol until I met Charlie. I was against it because of my mom.

           I don’t know why I clung to that relationship like I did. I don’t even remember who he was anymore. But that happens with all of my exes. At some point, I think I’m so enshrouded in a cloud of dissociation, I never really see them for who they are. They become an extension of myself that I project onto. And I don’t really know who’s fault that is. I’ve been told I’ve gaslit others and had it done to me in return by soon-to-be ex-husband. But I don’t really know if I believe the latter.

           I think I paint myself in a better light so someone will pity me at the very least. Making myself the victim and manipulating others to feel bad can be easy. But I really try not to. I’ve just heard that I do that. I don’t consciously do it, I just talk about how I’ve felt and what has happened to me in the past, and I talk about it casually because I know that despite how fucked up it sounds, I brought it all onto myself. Therefore: do not feel bad for me. Shit sucks wall-to-wall, but I know it was of my own curation and I’m at fault.

           I think about how alone my dad is. He has his friends and has always been very charismatic, but he has also been very manipulative emotionally. I never could get a full read on him. Sometimes, he seems quite jovial and polite and nice, like he’s really turning a corner and opening up. Then the more time I spent with him, the real him came out incrementally. If it happened all at once, he’d scare people away. But to normalize it slowly over time traps a person and they don’t realize it until years later what has been done. I think that’s why Marie left him without any warning and won’t go back.

           I’m like him in my own eyes. I don’t have an identity; if someone were to ask me who I am, I wouldn’t know how to answer. I’m a person, but I struggle with assigning even a gender to myself. I’m a biological woman, but I don’t feel like one. It’s not gender dysphoria because I don’t feel like a man, either. But something a little further down the road. I don’t feel like a woman because I don’t feel like a person at all. At best, I can describe my experience up to this point as watching the world through a lens, like a movie that I’m witnessing.

           I dissociate so often that I can’t remember most of my past and don’t even know when it’s happening. Others around me can’t pin-point when it occurs either. I’m really good at switching on auto-pilot. I’m existing at this point, not thriving or living. I’m usually okay with this.

           Occasionally, the cracks deepen and the emotions seep out a little. Like this morning. I think it’s been about a decade since I’ve written my emotions down like this. As a kid, I had tons of journals and treated them as the friend I never had: something to keep all my secrets.

           I still don’t have friends. The closest I have to this is Jerry. Everyone else is an acquaintance. But I don’t even view Jerry as a friend, or really a person. But I don’t say this out of spite or hatred, or anything malevolent. I think it’s just due to my morphing him as part of my weird way of viewing life through a gaussian blur filter. I know he’s a living, breathing individual and yet somehow, I see him as just another extension of myself. I’m still not sure how to explain it, but he’s not real to me anymore.

           Once upon a time, he was. Something happened to me between now and then, though. I fought hard for him from mid-2018 through about September of 2019. He really drew me to him, someone who could understand how bleak life really is for some of us and all the depth of pain a person can experience without being able to fully comprehend. Broken to broken, blind leading the blind.

           It was a mistake I now see. But not a regretful mistake. Just a natural one, like with everyone else in my past. Tom was a mistake. Charlie was a mistake. And every other man and boy before him depending on what age I was.

           It’s been a really long time since I’ve come apart like I am this morning. I guess I needed to at some point or I’d lash out again. It was cyclical for a couple years, my emotions. Despite how fucking terrible I felt every waking moment and wanted to end the pain, I could count on it. But I’ve been empty since maybe February of this year. Jerry screamed at me and something inside me snapped. It’s not his fault, I incite anger in others and goad them. But something in breaking him broke me, I think. I’ve been an empty vessel ever since. It’s pleasant not feeling most of the time, but when I do, it’s like I’m crying over the deceased and I don’t know why.

           I’ve been hurting a lot lately. I’m upset I can’t remember the good times from exes. Not for any reason in particular other than taking personal inventory of how my brain works. I remember some times from Tom, like us going to the San Francisco zoo for his birthday in 2016 so he could see the bears since they’re his favorite. I remember having a good day and I even have photos saved from that day, but I don’t remember emotionally. It doesn’t feel like that day even existed. I often daydream about being saved by someone and that memory holds the same sensation.

           Now he’s divorcing me. I don’t exactly remember where things went wrong, but I know it’s because of me. It was before 2018 when I started to get frustrated with us. He was calm and very nice, but also very cold. I know I got to see a part of him he didn’t allow anyone else to see, something reserved for significant others, and yet we couldn’t speak each other’s love language. His was touch, mine was thinking. He picked the wrong damaged person. My ability to love through touch has been skewed through rape, molestation, and sexual assault before him. Then, the same things happened while I was with him. Once from a man posing as a Lyft driver in 2018 when we had a fight at Pre-Flite on Kati’s birthday. Once in early 2019 when a “friend” from Bakersfield came all the way up to see me under the guise of missing me from high school and as an opportunity to catch up; he instead sodomized me in his hotel then left right after, but not before I offered to buy him dinner. He was antsy the whole time and during dinner, he took a pretend call saying his girls got hurt and he had to drive all the way back home. I tried to make it work logically in my mind, saying that this happens, it’s okay, he didn’t do what I think he just did. But I never heard from him again. Then Tom did it. I don’t think he meant to do it, but I can’t answer that honestly anymore. He had pent up sexual frustration and unfortunately, my experience with the men in my life included that in the form of rape. I know not all men are bad, and I know it’s my fault for picking people like this. But it still hurts. Right after I moved out, summer of 2019 when we separated, we got drunk at Burning Barrell. I was too much to drive, so he took me back to his place where I promptly blacked out. A few hours later I woke up undressed but not remembering how that happened. I was disoriented because I didn’t remember the drive home and it terrified me for a moment as I didn’t recognize his room already, though it was maybe only a month after I moved out. I panicked and put two-and-two together, feeling violated by my own husband and his sad confusion as he apologized. I know he didn’t mean it. I think. But I wailed and sobbed and felt robbed all the same.

           I’m the most stable I’ve ever been as of this year. I lost almost 50 pounds, cleared my skin, and stopped drinking and doing drugs, which were primarily weed and cocaine. And yet, I feel the emptiest I’ve ever felt. I think I’m technically in a relationship with Jerry and I say so because I think he believes that, but we’re not in my mind. I don’t know who he is and I’ve closed away most of who I am because he would scream at it. I hide behind dark humor and anger towards outside sources that don’t matter, like the anti-maskers and the Black Lives Matter protesters, and I live in a world where I’m white but I’m also not entirely, but I’m afraid to feel the way I do because to not support something that I can’t make the emotional space for makes me the evil one.

           I can’t help it. I don’t care about police brutality. I don’t care about the conservative agenda and how Trump is admitting to dictatorship if he loses the election. I don’t even care about myself, so how can one expect me to support things outside of what affects me directly?

           I have to go back to feeling nothing shortly. Today is Steph’s birthday. I have to collect my innards and mush them back into place and paint my face into something acceptable because to be anything else but cheerful would be selfish. This is not a day for me; that day comes once a year and passes as quickly as it arrives because I don’t emotionally celebrate it. Sometimes, people around me do, but I surely don’t. Every year I get closer to 30, I feel more and more disillusioned and like a failure.

           I told myself if I were alive by 30, I’m ending it. I think I still hold that promise to myself. Except I’ve attempted suicide several times now and it hasn’t worked out yet. I’m not afraid of eternal death and don’t believe in any sort of afterlife, but I’m afraid of the pain, then fucking it up, then ending up worse off than I was before – paralyzed, a brainless zombie with no consciousness like those who experience hypoxia, and being unable to finish the job.

[enchantingkittengaditor]

Deep Water | 00.0 Teaser: Magazine Profile

July 2020:

WATCH OUT WORLD THE OLYMPIANS ARE COMING FOR YOU

Today I got the amazing privilege to interview some of the worlds up and coming super-stars: The cast of the Disney+ series ‘Percy Jackson and The Olympians’

First I sat down with Caitlyn Watson, yes as in that Watson, the middle child of 5 kids is the younger sister of both Alice Watson, the super-star songstress, and Beatrice Watson, the oscar-nominated actress and future Black Widow.

She herself was very polite and shy, while she greeted me like an old friend in her favourite little coffee shop in Oxford, I could see that she was extremely nervous and didn’t entirely want to be there with me. When I brought this up she simply laughed and told me: “I was raised to always be polite to others and hide your emotion but lately that’s just become a lot harder with these interviews and my GP telling me she thinks I can stop my anxiety meds. So, I’m very sorry if it’s at all awkward, I’m just a very anxious person with a complicated past of hurting and tough emotions.”

But once we talked a little more she started to open up about herself and the madness that apparently rules the Watson house, even telling me that one day I should do a profile on her and her sisters and see where they grew up for the last few years. According to her, her castmates are some of the sweetest people I will ever meet except for Harrison who is quote “A total and complete twat with anger issues who is trying to clean up his act,” apparently with the help of her co-star Robert Downey Jr.

She was very humble and told me about her roots, having originally been born in the New Zealand city of Invercargill, she spent her first few years on her father’s family’s ‘Highland Station’ which at that point mainly functioned as a christmas tree farm and an animal sanctuary, though know it’s a natural park protected by the New Zealand government since her mother inherited the land, presumably when her father died though she didn’t really mention him much.

She then apparently moved to the outback when she was 3 for 6 months due to her father’s inability to keep a job in New Zealand. That was before moving to Cambridge for 3 months with her mother and sisters while her sister Dorathy was born, they then moved again to the Caribbean where she spent the rest of her childhood until high school while her older sisters moved to school with her cousins in the UK. Apparently, around 2011 - 2012 there was an incident involving her father but she didn’t mention him beyond this point.

After spending years in the Caribbean her mother relocated her family to Oxford, near her sister and her family, as 3 out of 5 of her kids were at high school, this is the point that Caitlyn met most of her current friends and co-stars.

The only reason I included any of this is that it is the most in-depth look into the Watson girls’ childhood.

When I asked her about the idea of being famous she said that it was never her dream, she actually used the very British phrase ‘cup of tea’, and that she was proud that her sisters had achieved their dreams but never imagined that she would join them in the crazy world of fame, instead she said she would have preferred to stay in the background cheering them on and becoming a lawyer or architect that becoming famous herself.

Overall my time with her led me to believe one quote I got from her co-star Jasmin was very true about her:

“Life. Life is cruel and unforgiving but not as unforgiving as the wrath of a teenage girl. Especially when said teenage girl has the fury of a thousand fires hidden beneath layers and layers of walls built up of years in the fray of the spotlight.

“That’s what Caitlyn Watson’s heart is like. It’s been like that since she was 11. Since her eldest sisters became famous, one as an actress and one as a singer. But no matter how famous they became she was always comforted by the fact they still had to share a room with her when they were at home.

“But Caitlyn will never let anyone know that unless they were one of her friends or her older sisters.”

Unlike Caitlyn, Jasmin happily lets people know what’s on her mind, often going on rants on twitter about something on her mind whether or not others care about the matter, though often several tweets long she often gets straight to the point.

My meet up with her was very different, instead of meeting in a hidden gem of a café we met and a roller rink where she still works. When I asked her about skating she stated, “It’s not my thing at all but my brother loves it and it paid well so it meant I could save for Uni and still go to school and get all of my homework done on time.” 

She also seemed very polite but instead of shy she came across as confident as Sharpey Evans from ‘High School Musical’ but a thousand times as nice.

From my day with Jasmin, I learnt a lot about how someone can be into both death and life in the form of flowers. She showed me around all of her favourite places in Oxford including a cemetery where she says she often comes to contemplate life and the quality of doing her homework.

I also got to see her go on one of her useless rants, this time about why we should all just give up and become moss after she found a headstone in the cemetery with her name on it. Though I reassured her it couldn’t have been her’s as the date was over 200 years ago.

Overall That day I learnt that she is overdramatic to the extreme but in the best possible way and will instantly welcome you into her family with open arms. But she is also like any other teenager as she is addicted to her phone and social media, though she does spend a lot of time on her phone trying to help people or keeping in touch with her fans. I even learnt that she has a rule: if any fan DMs her she has to reply within 72 hours or she has to sit with Harrison in every class they share for a week. But when I tried to ask her about this she just said “You’ll see. The whole world will see.”

So on that note, I will stop talking about her and start talking about her co-star Brenten, who voices Grover Underwood.

Now, I was warned that I might lose my hearing by both Caitlyn and Jasmin if I met up with him during his band practice so instead, I met up with him at his father’s music store where he excitedly showed me all of his favourite records, most of which were released well before he was born.

He was also asked, by his father, to show me some of the instruments he could play and give a demo of them, which is where I see why Caitlyn and Jasmin gave me the advice they did. Though I can see why people have been giving his rave reviews online for his music because he is a truly talented musician.

My day with him went as well as the other two but to me, it wasn’t as interesting as he himself wasn’t as interesting conversationalist. Though the one interesting fact I did learn from him was that he is the only cast member actually from American. But like everyone else didn’t grow up in America instead of spending most of his childhood in the Caribbean before moving to Oxford in summer 2019.

The final person I talked to was Harrison, who voices Percy himself. I was warned that he could be a bit temperamental so I went in prepared. Though he was very polite, I could see where they were coming from. He seemed to have some sort of underlying anger issue.

When I asked him about his co-stars he had some very interesting things to say. For example when I asked him about Brenten he stated:

“Brenten’s a great guy, he’s really focused on his music and I admire his passion and continued dedication to music. He’s really passionate and he’s really fun to hang out with. We do hang out outside of all of this we often try to comprehend our homework together, which just ends up with us playing one on one basketball or footy.

“But most of the time the girls are there so we get told off by Caitlyn for not focusing on our work which just makes us continue to goof off until she gives up.”

As for Jasmin, he said:

“Jasmin is just one of the guys she tried to join the guy rugby team at school and is thus far the only girl to be able to join a rugby team in the A-class in the whole league that the school is in. She hangs out with us whenever she can’t hang out with Caitlyn and the others. She’s also been helping me by giving me advice on how to handle my emotions and how to react to other people. She’s also helped me get in touch with people who can help me control my anger and get it out on the field instead of on others.

“She’s really is amazing she helps everyone she can and wants nothing more than to improve the world from where she found it. She is also very scary so don’t mess with her or you’d be completely insane. She can flip a switch from being the sweetest most innocent person alive to being a ripper out of the vampire diaries in less than a second if you mess with her friends or family. It’s honestly terrifying.”

Though when I asked him about Caitlyn he wouldn’t shut up, he truly seemed like a love-struck teenage boy, which I guess he could be. Some of the highlights include:

“She’s one of my best friends and she sees through my bullshit and calls me out on it, I don’t know what I would do without her,” he said slightly blushing at the mention of her, “She’s about 98% of my impulse control and without her I think I would have punched everyone in the city by now.”

“She’s my best friend. I don’t really believe in soulmates, but if I did and they did exist, I believe she would be mine. Maybe not romantically but platonically.”

“I would love to date one of my best friends I think that the bases of any good relationship.”

“She’s such a sweetheart, she may think that she’s a badass but really she’s a kitten in a human suit. I mean she also has a bunch of cats so that’s probably where that influence came from.”

“The weirdest experience on set was when Rick, Brie and Tessa decided that there was going to be an end credit scene in the final episode of the final season of the underwater kiss scene thing. So me and Caitlyn agreed and when we had to film it in front of the green screen I remember she was completely terrified, so I took her to the side while everyone was getting everything ready and I asked her why she was nervous. I remember she said ‘I’ve never kissed anyone before, and I don’t really want my first kiss to be on camera.’ So I decided in less than probably a second I was going to kiss her just so her first kiss wasn’t going to be on camera and I remember afterwards her sisters threw popcorn at us and laughed because they thought we were being complete idiots. It was a lot of fun to shoot that day.”

But enough about the possibly budding romance forming between theses two star crossed teenagers. It’s my personal belief that these four amazing teenagers are going to change the world whether or not that’s for the best they’re coming. So watch out world! The kids of ‘Percy Jackson and The Olympians’ are coming to get you.

Photo Sets From The Shoot:

Brenten (Caleb McLaughlin):

Jasmin (Amandla Stenberg):

Harrison (Jake T. Austin):

Caitlyn (Olivia Holt):

The Watson Sisters (Alice - Taylor Swift, Beatrice - Florence Pugh, Dorathy - Sophie Nelisse, Ellie - McKenna Grace):

The Entourage of Friends & Cousins (Kenzie - Kira Kosiran, Lola - Kelli Berglund, Arya - Selena Gomez, Sansa - Amber Heard, Melisandre - Danielle Campbell):

September 2020:

The Watson Sisters Have Landed Themselves In Deep Water!

Once again the pop princess Alice Watson has landed in deep water but this time she’s dragged her younger sisters Beatrice and Caitlyn into as well.

This morning it was announced that their father, long to be thought dead, Jason Franks would be put up for re-trail on the charges that landed him in jail.

In late 2012 he was tried and found guilty of murder, rape and parental abuse by English courts and sentenced to life imprisonment. While we don’t know many details as of yet we do know that all three of the eldest Watson sisters will have to testify in court as they apparently did before, though this time the trail is going to be public meaning they are going to be allowing press into the court.

While it is not known whether or not the girls have spoken to their father since he landed in jail, it was commonly thought that he was dead. Which is why these three have landed themselves in deep water, as they have been leading the media on for years playing along as though their father was dead.

It is as of now unknown when exactly this trial will take place but it is known that Alice has delayed the production of her next album, much to the disappointment of her fans, to allow for the trail in her hectic schedule. It is also rumoured that the production of Caitlyn’s new mysterious Marvel show will be delayed as will the production of Beatrice’s new movie.

While I will repeat that most facts are as of now unknown some of the things we do know are as follows:

The Watson Sisters will be testifying in court (as of now it is unknown whether or not it is against or for their father)

Their father will remain in prison until the trial

Their father has a record of criminal offences such as selling drugs in nightclubs when he was in the airforce stationed in Canada.

The court date is set around March 2021

For now, that is all we know but until the date is set and the record is cleared it’s likely that these three girls will remain in hot water.

September 2020 - March 2021 A News Title Timeline From Their World.

The Watson Sisters Announce a Book That Is Said To Set The Record Straight

Caitlyn Watson, ‘I never told anyone anything to do with my father except that there was an incident.’

Alice Watson, ‘I don’t want to comment on whether or not he abused me.’

Beatrice Watson, ‘Go the fuck away, leave us alone, we just want to buy school clothes and deal with this in peace.’

Beatrice Watson Swore At Journalist In Front Of 8-Year-Old Sister

Alice Watson’s Instagram Has Lost Over 20 Million Followers

Caitlyn Watson Said To Possibly Be Fired From Disney

The Rock, Obama, Robert Downey Jr. And More Come To The Watson Sisters’ Side.

Celebrities And Fans A Like Applaud The Watson Sisters’ Bravery To Come Foreward In New Book

‘Their Book Shows People It’s OK To Come Forward If This Happens To You,’ Says Brie Larson

‘What Life’s Like’ By The Watson Sisters Is A Must Read For Everyone

‘What Life’s Like,’ Is Now The New York Times Bestselling Book Of The Month

‘What Life’s Like’ Has Soldout Says Publishing House.

‘The Real Victim Here Is Us, The People,’ Claims Fox News

Thousands Of Fans Show Their Support Of The Watsons By Stopping Media From Getting Into Court House

The Heart-Breaking Testamony Of Caitlyn Watson On Her 17th Birthday

The Watson Sisters’ Father Has Been Sentenced To 3 Lifetime Sentences In Prison

‘We’re So Proud Of Each Other For Getting Through That’ Says Beatrice Watson

‘I’m Now Just Going To Go Back To Mum’s Have a Cup Of Tea And Hug My Cats,’ Says Alice Watson As She Leaves The Courthouse With Her Sisters

‘I’m Happy It’s All Over Now And My Girls Don’t Have To Worry Anymore,’ - Laura Watson

We interrupt your scrolling to bring you an... AD!

[grimelords]

My April playlist is finished! Please allow me to take you on a journey from the heaven of THP Orchestra to the hell of Inter Arma over three action packed hours. Specially sequenced for maximum enjoyment, there’ll be at least one thing in here you’ll love - I guarantee it. Listen here.

Good To Me - THP Orchestra: I've said it before and I'll say it again, the number one way to find good songs is to go through the whosampled page for Duck Sauce's 2013 album Quack because every single thing they put into that album is a bonafide classic.

I'm Your Boogie Man - KC & The Sunshine Band: I saw Jungle last week and they were absolutely amazing, and the venue started playing this song as soon as the house lights went up after the show which is an extremely good way to get people to not leave your venue and boogie instead. My favourite part of this is near the end of the second verse where he gets even lazier than normal with the lyrics and just says "I want to love you.. ah.. from sundown.. sunup".

Work It Out - A-Trak: I love this new A-Trak song that sounds like a secret lost bonus track from Discovery right down to that specific wah sound on the guitar.

Starlight - The Supermen Lovers: There was all this news last year that Music Sounds Better With You by Stardust was getting remastered and rereleased for its 20th anniversary and was going to finally be on streaming services that seems to have just.. not happened. It never materialized so now I'm stuck listening to the 2nd rate but still extremely good Music Sounds Better With You knockoff, Starlight by the worst named band ever The Supermen Lovers. The songs aren't even that similar particularly but that's just my personal feelings.

Girlsrock - Siriusmo: A friend of mine is a sort of expert on the whole Ed Banger mid-late 2000s electro scene and it's extremely good because he'll just send me songs like this every now and then that are totally sick and make it feel like there was somehow thousands of hours of this kind of music produced at that time and only the tip of the iceberg made it to public consumption.

11:17 - Danger: Somehow I didn't even notice that Danger had a new album in January but I'm finally listening now and it's a proper return to form and really, really good. This song sounds like if the haunted VHS tape from the The Ring was taped over an 80s workout video.

Ultrasonic Sound - Hive: I went to a 20th anniversary screening of The Matrix at The Astor and great news: that movie still kicks ass and rocks completely and has possibly gotten better in the two decades since its release. Someone had curated a really good mix that they were playing in the foyer after the movie and this song was in it. A heady mix of drum and bass and nu-metal guitar crunch that feels like a 1999 calendar picked up by a strong wind and slapping you in the face.

Homo Deus VII - Deantoni Parks: STILL loving and finding new things to love about this Deantoni Parks album for the third month in a row. I'm repeating myself but this music is just so good and feels so completely original to me. It's a great mix of complete technical mastery and the self imposed limitations of a restricted sample palette. Forcing himself to do absolutely everything he can with the sound and fairly well exhausting it over the course of 9 minutes.

Catacomb Kids - Aesop Rock: There's a good line to trace between this and Acid King by Malibu Ken where Aesop Rock's been thinking about Ricky Kasso for like ten years now which is interesting. There's lots of just very nice sounding lines in this like "Crispy the godsender who thunk over a quarter plunk to local Mortal Kom vendor". Just good weird word combos painting a very impressionistic picture of growing up. "deplanting cadavers" "zoo-keeper facelift". Very nice.

Mask Off - Future: I've never listened to Future much which is weird because he's very good but this is a song that just comes into my head pretty often. Metro Boomin's brain is huge and the vibe he created on this is just amazing. Wringing this sort of atmosphere out of the sample without sacrificing any of the trap beat at the center of it is such an achievement.

Old Town Road (Remix) - Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus: Everything that could ever be said about Old Town Road has probably already been written by now but my favourite part is finding out that the sample is from Ghosts by Nine Inch Nails which means it's also Trent Reznor's first writing credit on a #1 song. Absolutely praying for Trent and Atticus to join Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus on stage at the Grammys to perform this.

Claudia Lewis - M83: Every so often I remember just how good Hurry Up We're Dreaming is and listen to it on repeat for a while. It's absolutely amazing. Start to finish (except for Raconte-Moi Une Historie which SUCKS) it's just fantastic. I looked up why this song is called Claudia Lewis and it turns out that has an extremely good answer "I was surfing the web & found this website with space poems – Claudia Lewis had 3-4 space poems on this site. They were pretty bad space poems but I found it super moving, there was something very innocent about it. She’s probably super young like 12 or 14 but I don’t know her or how she looks or anything about her. I just know that she writes cheesy space poems."

OK Pal - M83: Every single musical element of this song is just perfect. I love the huge broad chords, the synth bends, the massive drums, the inverted Dead Flag Blues monologue. It's just beautiful.Little Secrets - Passion Pit: Passion Pit is currently on a 10th anniversary tour for Manners and I feel age 100 which is no good. But this song is good and it contains in my opinion one of the all time greatest drum fills after the first chorus. Huge, super air-drummable, and very functional: perfect.

Blood - City Calm Down: I think "I'm the one who wants your blood" is just such a great an evocative refrain and I wish he said it one million times more in this song.

Television - City Calm Down: Absolutely love the idea of writing a song about how bloody TV is the bloody opiate of the masses that sounds like a Clash cover in 2019 and sounding so deliberately out of the zeitgeist and doing it so well and with such conviction that it’s absolutely great.

I Am The Resurrection - The Stone Roses: We went to Andrew McLelland's Finishing School and he played this as his last song in honour of Easter Sunday and described it as the greatest piece of acoustic dance music he's ever heard which is honestly not a bad description - it's an absolute jam.

Daisy - Pond: It's very cool that there's like an evil, mirror version of Tame Impala that exists in Pond. I think every band should have that.

Crying Lighting - Arctic Monkeys: Basically the reason this song is on this list is because I got stuck in a loop of saying "your pastimes, consisted of the strange and twisted and deranged and I hate that little game you had called "crying lightning" in a Werner Herzog voice to myself and I thought it was funny.

Keeping Time - Angie McMahon: Angie McMahon is so damn good at songs and I cannot believe it! She's only got like 5 and they're all incredible. She’s gonna be huge!

The House That Heaven Built - Japandroids: Sterogum had a really good writeup the other day about Post-Nothing turning 10 years old that turned into a wrap up of why Japandroids are such a good band and why Celebration Rock is a perfect album and it really crystallized a lot of my feelings about them. They're number one on my list of Bands That Make You Want To Start A Band for a good reason and this article really nails the whole young men figuring it all out feeling of Japandroids' music. I really think both Japandroids albums should be called Youth And Young Manhood but Kings Of Leon already took that name. I remember when my friend first turned me on to Post-Nothing he said he didn't want to tell anyone else except me because it was so good and it was Best Friends Music and I really believe that. It’s best friends music through and through. When I saw them a couple of years ago it was as part of a sort of impromptu road trip with my best friend and I think that was the best context I could have given it. It's absolutely one of the best shows I've been to in my life and also Osher Gunsberg was in the crowd behind me but that's not part of the story. https://www.stereogum.com/2041439/japandroids-post-nothing-turns-10/franchises/the-anniversary/

Motor Runnin - Pist Idiots: The pub rock revival just keeps getting better and better. At the minute it's basically just Bad//Dreems, West Thebarton and these guys but I'm sure there's a million other bands bubbling under that are just about to break as well. I love this song, it's just straight up old fashioned pissed off rock and roll that somehow doesn't feel old fashioned at all.

Chains - As Cities Burn: As Cities Burn have reunited and have a new album coming out and I'm extremely wary of it because they're potentially ruining their previously discussed perfect streak. This is the first single and it's.. good I guess. It's kind of just normal and sort of outdated, a little bit of a step backward into safety for a band that was always changing and moving forward. I think I have a worm living in my brain though because I keep listening to it just because I really love the drum sound. They're very nicely mixed. Some very nice sounding drums.

Whacko Jacko Steals The Elephant Man's Bones - The Fall Of Troy: I was talking with some friends about young musicians because of Billie Eilish, and so we were talking about how Alanis Morrisette won a grammy when she was 21 and Taylor Swift won a grammy when she was 20 and Lorde made Royals when she was 17 and all that but what people don't realise is Thomas Erak wrote Doppelganger when he was 20 and it was his second album. He's 34 now and his music sucks badly. That's insane. What will happen to me when I'm 34? Chilling to think about. 

A New Uniform / Patagonia - Tera Melos: I think Patagonian Rats is still my favourite Tera Melos album. Toss up between that and Untitled actually. But I love this one for how cohesive it feels. For a band whose whole ethos is chaos it's amazing how well it all comes together as a complete work tied up with a bow by the Skin Surf reprise near the end. I love this song because it's two sketches of songs tied together into one little chaotic lump and the big Primary! Secondary! finale is just so satisfying.

Talking Heads - Black Midi: Black Midi finally have actually proper recorded songs on spotify! The way Black Midi is getting talked about at the moment really feels like the days of blog buzz are back, it's crazy. If you haven't seen it yet here's the KEXP session that's rightfully getting them so much attention https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMn1UuEIVvA I've watched it so many times and it's really something. The best part is the comments are full of music dudes just naming every band ever. "this sounds like if slint, polvo and hella did crack and had a gangbang" yuck "imagine them opening for Swans and/or Daughters" yuck "they're like if Minute Men and Frank Zappa had a baby and that baby dated the child of Talking Heads and Can but then got dumped for their best friend who was adopted and raised by their single parent Voivod but they were cool and stayed friends and listened to Tortoise and Thelonious Monk and got stoned and started a band and conquered the world." yuck "Slint meets Sonic youth meets Pere Ubu meets drive like jehu meets Beefheart...these guys took all that is deranged and twisted in rock and made one big soup of it!" yuck. Anyway the point is they rock completely and here's my addition to the band names: the way he sings sounds like Sting lol.

Walking On The Moon - The Police: This song makes you dumb I think. It's like the dumbest song in the world and listening to it makes your brain mushier, which makes you dumb and stupid. It's very good.

Rubber Bullies - Tropical Fuck Storm: I saw Tropical Fuck Storm opening for Kurt Vile the other day and it was absolutely incredible. My first time seeing them properly, not counting the live soundtrack they did for No Country For Old Men which was was a whole different kind of amazing. It feels like Gaz has finally put together a band that can keep up with is ferocious energy and the result is scary - they basically tore the place apart which makes them a funny opener for Kurt Vile who was as chilled out, relaxed and fun as you'd expect. They played this song near the end of their set and somehow I hadn't really noticed it when I listened to the album but now I can't stop listening to it. It's so good. I love the increasing paranoia of the backing vocals, especially in the last verse as it builds and builds.

Taman Shud - The Drones: This might be the best Drones song. It's a list that's constantly being revised in my head but it's top 5 definitely. It's nice listening to Feeling Kinda Free now knowing what he was going to do with Tropical Fuck Storm because it's all here. Fighting against the constraints of his regular sound and regular songwriting and eventually finding the solution in forming a whole new band. I love this song for a million reasons but the escalation of the disregard is very good. “I don't care about Andrew Bolt or Ned Kelly or the southern cross or the union jack” and you're nodding and then he says ‘I don't really care if you're a pedophile’ and you're nodding but slower. I get what he means in terms of media hype and whatever but it's still a very funny line. Anyway "why'd I give a rats about your tribal tats? You came here on a boat you fucking cunt" is grade A.

Dawn Patrol - Megadeth: The best thing about Megadeth is the sort of half baked politics. Dave Mustaine is the best kind of moron, he engages with everything at a gut level but believes he's being very cerebral about it at the same time. This little intro song about a nuclear post-apocalypse is so good because it's a legitimate warning and a response to legitimate worries but it's also like.. wouldn't that be sick if we had to wear gas masks and carry assault rifles around because all the nukes exploded and everyone was dead. What if there was zombies.

Rust In Peace... Polaris - Megadeth: The story behind Holy Wars... The Punishment Due is so good. "Mustaine has said that at a show in Antrim, Northern Ireland, he discovered bootlegged Megadeth T-shirts were on sale. He was dissuaded from taking action to have them removed on the basis that they were part of fund raising activities for "The Cause", explained as something to bring equality to Catholics and Protestants in the region. Liking how "The Cause" sounded as was explained to him, Mustaine dedicated a performance of "Anarchy In The UK" to it, causing the audience to riot. The band were forced to travel in a bulletproof bus after the show" I just love him. I'd like to share a Dave Mustain quotes about this song also. "I was driving home from Lake Elsanon. I was tailgating somebody, racing down the freeway, and I saw this bumper sticker on their car and it said, you know, this tongue in cheek stuff like, ‘One nuclear bomb could ruin your whole day,’ and then I looked on the other side and it said, ‘May all your nuclear weapons rust in peace,’ and I’m going, ‘'Rust in Peace.’ Damn, that’s a good title.‘ And I’m thinking like, 'What do they mean, rust in peace?’ I could just see it now – all these warheads sitting there, stockpiled somewhere like seal beach, you know, all covered with rust and stuff with kids out there spray-painting the stuff, you know." Goes ahead and writes a kick ass song from the perspective of a nuclear warhead containing the line "rotten egg air of death wrestles your nostrils".

Planet B - King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard: King Gizz are Megadeth now and I love it! The cold war is global warming now and we desperately need new thrash metal about it to save us!

Primodial Wound - Inter Arma: If you can't tell by me including three of their songs on this playlist I'm still having an absolute time with Inter Arma. Something I really love about this band is their ability to sit in a vibe for so long and expand on it. They're not songs with narrative arcs and multiple contrasting sections, they're songs that just kind of dig deeper on themselves. This one starts deep and then by thinning out entirely at around 6 minutes in only gets darker.

Howling Lands - Inter Arma: This song made me dream of a Dark Souls game where Inter Arma does the soundtrack. It's a peabrained thought but it's one that really got me thinking. This is boss music of the highest order: a song seemingly about itself and the hellbound denizens cursed to perform it in the arena of hell.

Sulphur English - Inter Arma: It's extremely funny to listen to this song a bunch of times and be completely blown away by the total power and ethereal majesty of it and then look up the lyrics to find out that it's about Trump in that very good way of putting normal thoughts through a metal lyrics filter "The charlatan sets his eyes towards the throne / tongue adrip in revolting ecstasy" "Sever the corrupt tongue of the imperious fool / silence the gangrenous root of his abhorrent voice"

Peepin' Tom - Courtney Barnett: When I saw Kurt Vile he brought out Courtney Barnett to play Over Everything as an encore and it was so good to see just how much a hometown crowd loves her. Everyone lost their shit! We love our good friend Courtney! I think I've written about this before but Peeping Tom is one of my favourite Kurt Vile songs and I think Courtney's version is even better. Her voice is perfect for it and she really has to show off her range to do it which I love. The super deep 'peeping' to the high cascading 'tom' is a perfect musical moment to me.​

listen here

[annakie]

Notes on a Blog Cleanup, Part 5

...And now I’m at Page 611.  I’m in the end of 2016.  So, a little under 400 pages to get through another 18ish months.  Big change from the first 1000 pages being 18 months.

And this is when things go very, very wrong, for all of us, and then for me in a big way, in particular.

This is less about the blog and just more about reflecting on a time period.

And maybe my last post on this series.   We’ll see.

This got real personal at the end.  I’ll see if I keep it up tomorrow.

I really loved going through the last couple of years on the blog, but I was very, very much dreading getting to November, 2016.  We all know why.

The second half of 2015 was pretty great.  Went to NYCC a second time (though I never got around to doing recaps of that trip, which had its ups and downs but mostly ups), and then mom and I went on a Caribbean cruise, which I also didn’t do much recaps of.   Because on that trip, my grandmother had a big downturn on her health.  My mom nearly left the cruise early to fly back to Dallas (and the Princess Cruise people were so, so good to my mom when the front desk found out what was going on).  But in the end she stayed, but getting back home was like when everything really started going wrong, and why I say that the end of one of the best times of my life stopped after that cruise.

We got back, and a week later grandma had the stroke that signaled the end, and after a little over a month of hospice care that was very difficult to watch (and my mom and aunt and even dad were so brave about), she was gone.  Some good stuff happened in there, like The Force Awakens released, a fun Christmas party at work... but yeah.

I kept alluding to other bad things happening in 2016 and yet I honestly can’t remember now what was so bad, except that my oldest cat and my dog’s healths were both starting to fail.  I’m sure I had other reasons, but hey, from the standpoint of 2019, I’d just about to kill to go back to one ordinary weekday of January through very early November 2016 when we had a sane president and relatively sane political climate, I still had my job with the people I loved, and Jim and Cebu were still alive.   

Not that things are THAT TERRIBLE now, I just... really miss all those things.

I deleted a lot of political posts from the blog back then because, tbh, they just hurt to much to see.  I was like 90% sure Hillary would win, weren’t we all?  It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.

I got to one post the day the Cubs won the World Series and was like “That was the last day where things felt... hopeful and normal?”  Like wow this one really cool thing happened (at least to me it was awesome) and then like two days later... the world turned upside down.

I took the next day off work to stay in bed and just... cope.  When I went back to work the next day a friend of mine and I were talking and she told me that she knew how I felt but thought it wasn’t going to be that bad.  That maybe I was overreacting.   A year later she told me she was wrong to have told me that.

I’m counting the months until, hopefully, this is all over.  If we’re lucky, sixteen months.  If this impeachment thing actually yields results, much less.  If we’re very not lucky... much, much more than that.  I can’t even deal with the thought.

I’ve... decided to press pause on the blog cleanup, even though I have 600 pages (which is still THREE YEARS!) to go.  

I got to my first post where I admitted on the blog that I knew it would be Jim’s time to go pretty soon, and at the time, thought I still had around 6 months for Cebu.  

In the last few years, I have gone back and visited my posts about how my close to 17 year-old cat died on Christmas morning and then my 14+ year-old dog died three days later.  It was, so far, still considered to be the worst week of my life.  I had no family in town to turn to really, but they called, and friends who reached out online, and I made it through that time, but it’s three years later and it’s still hard to really think about when I’m not in the right headspace.  

The entirety of the end of 2016 until... honestly, like June of 2018 was like a freight train that hit and didn’t let go.  Things were actually okay when the grief cloud lifted around March of 2017 until the end of June, and then I found out my company was getting bought out, and then, well, this happened.  And it was worse than what I wrote in that post, to try and not mudsling as much as I could have.  

I am still finding posts I want to tag, entire gifsets I forgot to tag correctly here and there, or things that should have been tagged personal post or TAH or Mass Effect or whatever that weren’t.   As time goes on, I tag better and better though, and very little needs to be deleted other than “stuff is one sale right now!” or “This is no longer relevant” posts so... it’s relatively good now.

I’ve been feeling pretty shitty the last couple of weeks.  My dad’s oldest sister is dying, she’ll be gone in the next week or two.  I went to Palm Springs to visit her at the beginning of the month.  She was always so bright and vibrant and... classy.  I hadn’t seen her at all in like a decade though.  It’s weird how time gets away from you like that.  

The last time I’d seen her and my uncle, my entire family including my (mom’s sister) aunt, my (mom’s mom) grandma, my brother, (pregnant at the time!) SIL, and her parents were all supposed to go on a cruise, and Mom/dad/grandma/aunt and I were to stay with that (dad’s sister) aunt and uncle for a few days over thanksgiving before getting on the ship.  Grandma got sick, so I did Thanksgiving with (ds) aunt and uncle on my own.  And it was really fun.  I’d been so nervous at the time to be there without my parents and... nope it was a great weekend.  They took me to a Christmas fair, a NA Pow-wow (public was invited!), antiquing, bought me a sweatshirt and a copper bracelet... spoiled me rotten.  

Seeing her so diminished and what she and my uncle are going through now... very difficult.  My parents have been out there for over a month now, they’ll be there to the end.  

I thought I’d posted about this but I guess I hadn’t?  Over July 4th weekend I drove to visit my brother and sister in law and their (four!) kids.  My parents were there, too (they’re RVers, they can be wherever they want in a few days) My dad’s OTHER sister and his brother flew in for a day and a half, too.  I saw more family this year than I had than the past 10 years before this combined.  It’s really started to make me think about the value of family, if they’re good to you, which mine are, even if you don’t agree with them about everything.  

I thought I was getting sick all day, I came home from work at like 10:30 this morning, called into a meeting, slept through lunch, worked for an hour or two, had my afternoon meetings canceled by my boss then just laid in bed.  I was supposed to go play D&D4e tonight, and I didn’t go.  I could have.  I just... realized late this afternoon, I’m not sick, I’m just... blah.  I’m not sure if going through this blog was a symptom of that, or a cause.  

I think the impeachment stuff is getting to me, too.  It’s a part of how I feel.  I can’t stop looking for news of it.  I don’t want to get my hopes up.  I keep telling myself to let it go.  I can’t.  We are all so tired of what’s going on.  I’m exhausted.  We all are.

I can’t get the idea of moving to where my brother lives to be near him and the SIL and the kids out of my head.  I’ve been looking at real estate listings and can probably get a slightly nicer house there for what I could sell mine for here.  My job is... it’s fine.  But I could probably get a similar one there.  There’s one thing holding me here, my friends.  I keep wondering now if that’s enough.  I’ve lived in Dallas literally half my life.  Am I going to spend the rest of it here?  I’m not as happy as I used to be, that’s for sure.

Maybe.  It’s just a thought.  It’s a lot of work.  I don’t know.  I probably won’t go anywhere.

I think I need to go get some more sleep.

[mirkwoodshewolf]

New Year with the band; Queen x reader

Hello people of Tumblr and HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! I was hoping to have had this done last night but time got away from me so I finished it this morning and so for my first fic of 2019 I present to you another part of my Rock Angel series. This is a pre-Rock Angel fic right here so this is counted before “Set it all free” when you the reader are still the intern to Miami. And after seeing Bohemian Rhapsody for the 2nd time last night, I just had to do this fic and I may have another chapter up soon, hopefully. Anyways I hope 2019 is a great year for everyone and that everyone stayed safe after last night and are taking care of themselves post-New Year celebration.

Warnings: None except for INSANE FLUFFY FEELS.

Taglist *open*:

@phantom-fangirl-stuff

@onebigfangirlworld

@mr-badguymercury

@labessieisallama

@starswin

@naturalswifty89

@isabella-bby

_____________________________________________________

*December 31st, 1980*

This has been a crazy three months and here I am in Freddie Mercury’s house with a whole bunch of strangers plus the rest of the band and their wives to ring in the New Year.  Of course Adam didn’t want to come even though I tried to convince him to come, but he said that he was just too cool to be around a band like Queen.

It was 15 minutes till midnight and 1981 would soon be here.  I was at the food table trying to get a second plate of brownies and basically fill up on sugar to keep myself awake.  Most of the people were already hammered beyond anything else so I had to walk over some of their unconscious bodies till I finally reached the guys.

“Ahh there’s our best girl!” Freddie praised at he held his glass up almost as if he were giving a toast.

“Oh stop it Fred, I literally just saw you five seconds ago.”

“Five very long seconds.” He whined as I playfully shoved his shoulder.

“Isn’t that your second batch of sweets already?” asked Brian.

“Sugar keeps me up, otherwise I’d be asleep in the corner hours ago after all that I’ve been through this semester.” I said.

“But I thought you loved us? Guess we were nothing but a stress factor to you then huh?” Deacy snapped clearly teasing me as I noticed a glimmer of mischief in his eyes.

“No, no, no, no don’t you guilt me Deacy! You know I love you guys! This has literally been the best semester I’ve had, I just can’t believe in a couple more months I’ll be done and then I won’t see you guys till your next tour before Miami clears my internship credit.”

“I can’t believe you’ll be leaving us after our tour, I feel like you should stay here with us even after the tours done. I’d miss you too much darling.” Freddie said as he leaned over and hugged me close to him before kissing my cheek.

“In all seriousness love, maybe you should cut back on the sweets, you’ll crash faster if you keep eating sugar, take some of these,” he then handed me a couple of his celery sticks and baby carrots. I looked at him with a ‘seriously’ look as I said.

“Really? Veggies Bri?”

“Less you want cavities for the new year I suggest you eat those. Otherwise I’ll have Dr. Taylor here take a look at your mouth since he studied dentistry.”

“Wait for real?” I asked as I turned around and faced him.

“This whole time we’ve known each other and you never once bothered to listen to what I did in school. Really (y/n) what kind of friend are you?” Roger said in a mocked hurt tone.  I threw my baby carrot at him which made all of us laugh and we continued to chat till the midnight hour drew closer.

Time sure does go by when you’re having fun with friends because now as everyone gathered to watch the ball drop live from New York City. We were just 2 minutes away to ring in the New Year and as everyone began the countdown, the anticipation was growing as it got closer and closer.

10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1

“HAPPY NEW YEAR!!” Everyone cried out as horns were blown, confetti was thrown in the air and couples kissed each other to ring in the New Year.  Bri, Rog and Deacy kissed their wives to celebrate the new year, Freddie was off god knows where by now meanwhile I just sat there alone.

I sure wish Adam was here to ring in the New Year.  I mean he used to be romantic at first at the start of our relationship, always buying my flowers and leaving little poems every time he’d leave the flat, but now for some reason he thought the romantic gestures were too corny and lame for him all of a sudden, could threaten the new “Rock” image he’s been trying out.

So I secretly knew even if I did bring him, he wouldn’t go for a New Year’s kiss.  Which sucked because the believer of romance that I am, I always thought sharing a kiss with the person you loved, meant you’d have a full successful relationship in the years to come.

At least that’s what I always saw in my parents every New Years.

I sighed solemnly and decided to stop out of the craziness of the party and just have a moment to myself.  I sat along outside in the garden of Freddie’s house along the bench and just stared up into the sky.

“Happy New year mum and dad. I sure wish you could be here to see it.” I said to myself solemnly.

“Something wrong love?” I heard Deacy’s voice say. I turned around and saw the guys standing behind me all looking at me with concern.

“No, not really. At least anything serious.” I said.

“You sure?” They all came and sat around me. Deacy to my left, Brian to my right, Roger sitting in front of me and Freddie standing behind me with his hands on my shoulders every now and then squeezing them assuringly or massaging them.

“Yes, I promise guys nothing’s wrong just….missing my parents is all.”

“While we can see that’s true, there’s something else going on too. You got a little awkward once people started kissing each other, is this because of Arsehole?” Roger said.  I looked at him and said.

“His name’s Adam Rog,”

“Is there a difference?” he questioned. I scoffed at him shaking my head softly.

“I don’t know guys, I thought that maybe I could for the first time get a New Year’s kiss with the first boy whom I’ve ever allowed into my heart ever since my parents died. Oh if only you guys first knew him you’d know he was romantic like you lot are, but lately he’s just called off anything that could damage his ‘badass hard rock exterior’. I don’t know, maybe I’m just a sap.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being a romantic. Neither gender should feel shame for being or hoping for a little romantic gesture in their life. Take me for example, the best guitarist of the greatest band. Makes his wife breakfasts in bed even when it’s not Mother’s Day or her birthday. I do it because I love her.” Brian said.

“And me, silent bassist John Deacon. I wrote ‘You’re my best friend’ for Veronica. Because that’s who she is and will always be to me. Not just the love of my life, but also my greatest and most treasured friend.”

“And even though we’ve broken off the engagement, Mary will still always be the love of my life. No matter what, which is why I wrote Love of my life for her, because that is who she is and will always be to me. Even though we’re no longer romantically involved with each other.” Said Freddie.

“And even though I’ve gained the reputation for ‘bad drummer boy of Queen’, for Dominque I’m willing to do anything for her. Whether its treating her to a spa day or even a day off from the kids.”

“And that’s what makes your wives and Mary so lucky to have met guys like you. I….just wish I had that guy now.”

“You will love, one day.” Deacy said as he gently placed his hand on the top of my shoulder and gently stroked it with his thumb.

“Until then you still got us, in fact.” Freddie cupped my face and had me look up at him and he kissed both my cheeks and continued, “Consider that your New Year’s kiss from me to you, darling angel.” I smiled up at him as he released my face from his hands.  I then felt my head turn towards Deacy and he said.

“Happy New Year poppet, here’s my kiss from me to you.” He then kissed my temple before I felt him lean his face against mine giving me an additional butterfly kiss. He backed away as Brian said.

“Don’t forget about me,” I turned towards him and he cupped my face much like Freddie did. He first leaned in and gave me a soft Eskimo kiss as his forehead touched mine which always made me feel safe and loved. He then gingerly kissed the center of my forehead and it was then I turned to Roger.

He grinned up at me and said.

“You know the drill, get into these arms you little imp.” I grinned at him before getting off the bench and hugged Roger. His strong arms wrapped around me instantly giving me a big, warm bear hug as I liked to secretly call them.

I felt him repeatedly kiss the top of my head and felt him rub my back.  But then I felt him starting to poke and lightly pinch around my sides, oh shit not again!

“Rog no!”

“No you’ve ended last year with a frown, when you should’ve been smiling. So that’s my first New Year’s resolution, to get you to smile.” He said with a mischievous grin as he kept tickling me. I squirmed around trying to escape Roger’s grip but it was iron clamped.

“Rog….stohahahp!”

“Nah I don’t think so.” He said as he kept tickling me.

“You know Rog, I think you and I are sharing the exact same resolution.” Deacy say.

“No! Nohohoh Deacy don’t…..NOO!!” Soon I had both Roger and Deacy tickling me.

“For being total opposites, seems they’ve agreed on one thing.” I could hear Brian say.

“Indeed.” Stated Freddie.  

“But who says they get to have all the fun?” suggested Brian.  As I kept trying to escape from both Rog and Deacy, suddenly I felt four more pair of hands start to tickle me.

“Guhahahahys stohahahahhap you’re kihihihihlling me!!!”

“Will you start off the New Year with a smile little angel?” Freddie asked.

“YES!! YEHEHEHESS!! JUST PLEHEHEHEASE STOHAHAHP!!” And with that the tickling ceased.  I panted heavily trying to regain my breathing and I said, “You guys are devils I swear.”

“Well that was rather rude darling.” Freddie said.

“Does that require punishment lads?” Brian asked.

“I say it does.” Stated Roger.

“Agreed.” Said Deacy.  The four of them looked at me ready to start tickling me again when I shouted.

“No! No! No! No! No I’m sorry! I’m sorry! Okay I’m sorry I surrender!” They all smirked at me laughing softly.  I then looked at them and said, “Thanks for cheering me up though guys.”

“No problem love, we’re always here for you when you need us.” Brian said as he gently stroked my hair.

“Happy New Year, my four best boys.”

“Happy New Year, our little rock angel.” Freddie said. I smiled at them and I went up to them and the four of them brought me to the center once more but instead of a tickle attack, it was a Queen group hug.  

1980 was a roller coaster year for me, but the best thing that came out of it was the fact that a girl like me, an ordinary college intern music student got to call the biggest band in all of History, my family.

Hell I can’t even imagine what 1981 was going to bring that could make this year seem just like any ordinary year.

[usgunn]

September 8, 2019

CLICK HERE for the September 8, 2019 playlist

1.    The Walker Brothers - “My Ship Is Comin’ In” (1965)

It may be a music nerd cliché to love Scott Walker, but...I love Scott Walker.  I’m sure Scott will show up in other forms on later ARBTR playlists, but this week I felt like kicking things off with some quirky, string-laden late 60′s productions, and this early Walker Brothers song felt like a great way to start.  For a primer on Scott, check out the documentary Scott Walker: 30th Century Man, which is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.  A little extra trivia: this song was produced by Ivor Raymonde, father of Cocteau Twins bassist Simon Raymonde.

2.    The Left Banke - “Desiree” (1968)

The Left Banke are best known for their hit “Walk Away Renee,” from their first record in 1967.  That record was primarily written and arranged by keyboardist Michael Brown, who at the time was a mere 17 years old.  Brown parted ways with the band before their second record, The Left Banke Too, was released, but this track is one of the two songs on that album that he wrote and played on, and in my opinion a highlight of a small but dense catalog.  

3.    The Move - “Beautiful Daughter” (1970)

OK, so technically this song was released in February 1970, but...close enough to stick with our late 60′s time period.  A really wonderful string arrangement here, presumably done by singer and songwriter Roy Wood, who would later start ELO with Jeff Lynne.

4.    The Electric Prunes - “The Adoration” (1968)

This song comes from the fourth album credited to The Electric Prunes, Release of an Oath, but is an Electric Prunes record in name only.  The band that recorded “I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night” was gone, and all that was left was producer David Hassinger and composer/arranger extraordinaire David Axelrod, who would go on to compose and produce several amazing, hip, jazzy records under his own name.  I’m a big Axelrod fan and I’m sure he’ll show up on a future playlist, but this early example of his forays into the “rock” world seemed to fit with this week’s opening theme.

5.    The Soundcarriers - “Signal Blue” (2014)

Getting out of the 60′s, but this UK band has had both David Axelrod and Scott Walker referenced by critics as likely musical inspirations, among other hip 60′s and 70′s acts.  This comes from their album Entropicalia, released on the great Ghost Box record label run by Julian House, a graphic designer whose work has graced almost every Broadcast and Stereolab record sleeve, and who similarly does all the design for Ghost Box’s releases.

6.    SAULT - “Don’t Waste My Time” (2019)

Literally know nothing about this band.  Try and Google them -- as of when this playlist was released, you will find virtually nothing.  All I can tell is that the production was done by Inflo, a UK-based producer that appears to have some connection to super-producer Brian Burton, aka Danger Mouse.  Kind of a sassy, ESG feel; just heard this this week and loved it.

7.    Shape of Broad Minds (feat. MF Doom) - “Let’s Go (Space Boogie)” (2007)

Hip-hop project led by prolific producer (and, I think, part-time Atlanta resident?) Jneiro Jarel.  This comes from a record, Craft of the Lost Art, released on Warp Records hip-hop offshoot Lex Records.  And of course, this song features the vocal stylings of rap legend (and, I think, also part-time Atlanta resident?) MF Doom.  Jarel and Doom later did a full-album collaboration, Key to the Kuffs, under the name JJ Doom.  I love the propulsive feel of this song, with a riff that feels like it’s leading somewhere but keeps repeating itself.

8.    George Smallwood - “You Know I Love You” (1980?)

I discovered this song on a compilation put out by the enigmatic DC-based label Peoples Potential Unlimited called Peoples Potential Family Album, compiling tracks the label had reissued on 12-inches.  PPU mainly mines obscure boogie-funk from the DC/Virginia area, from which blind singer-songwriter George Smallwood hailed.  I love the backing vocals on this song, they totally make it for me, along with the demo-like sparseness of the production.

9.    Sandra Wright - “I Come Running Back” (1974)

I’ve already forgotten how I discovered this, but something I saw this week led me to listen to this track, from the album Wounded Woman, recorded in 1974 for Stax subsidiary Truth Records but unreleased until 1989.  I’m glad I did--I instantly fell in love with everything about this song.

10.   Tim Maia - “Brother, Father, Sister and Mother” (1976)

Note the correct song title above - Spotify seems to have mucked it up.  Maia was a funk/soul guy in the 70′s in Brazil who was the subject of Luaka Bop’s compilation World Psychedelic Classics 4: Nobody Can Live Forever - The Existential Soul of Tim Maia, where I discovered this song.

11.    Daphni - “Sizzling (Radio Edit)” (2019)

Daphni is the name under which Caribou mastermind Dan Snaith releases his more dance-oriented material.  This song, released this past summer, is a remix of an obscure 1981 funk track called “Sizzlin Hot” by Paradise.  It cooks.

12.    "Blue” Gene Tyranny - “David Kopay (Portrait)” (1978)

Note the correct song title above.  Tyranny was an avant-garde piano player and composer who dabbled the “rock idiom,” for lack of a better term.  He was briefly in the Stooges, apparently.  This song is adventurous from a compositional perspective but also remarkably funky.  Extra trivia: this song’s namesake, David Kopay, was an NFL running back and the first NFL player to publicly acknowledge he was gay.  In addition to the many things to love about this song, the extended synth drone outro provides a palette cleanser for the set of songs that close the playlist this week.

13.    Will Johnson - “Every Single Day of Late” (2017)

Will Johnson was the leader of the late-great Centro-matic from Denton, TX, one of my all-time favorite bands.  He released a couple of sparse solo records while Centro-matic was active, but since that band folded in 2014 his solo records have incorporated more varied sounds and approaches to songwriting.  This song, from his most recent record Hatteras Night, a Good Luck Charm (although a new one is due this year) opens with a somewhat menacing electric guitar sound and never quite feels settled, adding junkyard percussion and backing vocals with some interesting atonal guitar work in the middle.

14.   Rollerskate Skinny - “Lunasa” (1993)

Really, really weird and fearless 90′s rock band from Dublin, Ireland that featured Jimi Shields, younger brother of Kevin Shields from My Bloody Valentine, on drums and other instruments.  This song really gives you no idea of what the album this comes from (Shoulder Voices, their debut) sounds like--I’m not sure any individual song on the record does.  All over the place in the best way possible.  I felt like the backing-vocal heavy nature of this song went well with the previous song and the next song, even if they otherwise sound like they have nothing to do with each other.

15.    Kelley Polar - “Chrysanthemum” (2007)

Polar was (is?) a Julliard-educated violinist with an affinity for dance music who made two great string-drenched dance records in the early 2000′s and then, as far as I can tell, disappeared.  This song actually barely features strings, and I therefore hesitated to include it, but I love the starkness of this track and the rhythm “breaths” that drive it.

16.    Psychic TV - “The Orchids” (1983)

I’m not a Psychic TV fan, and I don’t get much of what they do.  The band, formed by former Throbbing Gristle members Genesis P-Orridge and Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson, often trafficks in drone and noise music that just doesn’t do anything for me.  But this song is different.  I first heard this song when Califone covered it on their Roots & Crowns album in 2006, and I still love that version.  But the original has a strange naiveté to it, with its lo-fi production and overlapping, cut-and-paste vocals.

[sailor-cresselia]

Zi-O 19 and 20: lol whoops waited a long time, might as well do them at once!

~We now bring you our Quiz Saga Liveblog.~

WhiteWoz’s Storytime Void is infuriating. Both because it’s so visually cluttered with all of the times displayed, and because the MULTITUDE of ticking sounds.

I love that the boys don’t have to stay still to transform. Seeing their transformation backdrops follow them like this, as their running, it’s great!

(I’m still pretty sure that Oma Zi-O’s bizarre chair is his transformation backdrop, by the way. At least, assuming that he’s not Another Zi-O.)

Is that a GOOGLY EYE on Another Quiz’s forehead?!

Sougo’s using the gun mode an awful lot lately.

“That monster is mine.” Yeah, it sure is, buddy. It SURE IS.

Hm, don’t think I noticed last time, but “The lessons of the past can’t be clouded by lies” is what’s playing over the shot of Rider Woz in the OP. Does that apply to the lessons of the future, as well?

Hey, Kamen Rider Quiz. You’re a little overpowered, there. We’ve already got ONE reality warper affecting our actions. We don’t need two, thank you very much.

I can FEEL the ‘We are not okay with this fight’ just RADIATING off of both Sougo and Geiz as this guy’s attacking them.

Geiz is still immediately here for the Woz’s nicknames, and Sougo’s getting a kick out of ticking off ‘his’ Woz. I love it.

The Another Rider and the Original Rider both existing at the same time… I haven’t seen the rest of the episode, of course, but I’d guess it’s a combination of “someone brought Actual Quiz back in time”, “Sequence Breaking”, and “The rules of time travel aren’t nearly as set in stone as they have been led to believe.”

(Yes, I’m sticking to that particular gun, come Helheim or high water.)

Sougo has a point – BlackWoz doesn’t come along for the fights, like, ever. He didn’t last time against Another Shinobi, not really. Not on his own; he was following Sougo to try and keep him away. So YES, Sougo’s calling you out on being out of character.

HI YES have I mentioned I really like when this season does ‘parallel version splitscreen’ shots? Like, during the Gaim arc with the two Sougos, and during “Fourze and Faiz” with Sougo and Geiz in the two respective time planes. It’s GREAT.

It’s a thing that the past few seasons have done, actually – these sort of split-views of characters. Ex-Aid used it a number of times for Emu and Parad’s conversations when they were fighting each other, particularly as Mighty Brothers XX L and R, where they went back and forth showing the suits in the ‘real world’ and the civilians in a mirrory, shadowy mindscape. Then, in Another Ending, there were several times during Genm vs Lazer that Kiriya and Kuroto were juxtaposed with their Rider forms. THAT was played a lot in the second half of Build – scenes alternating between having the armor and the civilian talking in the middle of a fight. To say nothing of the Takumi/Sento swaps, where they would sometimes change which actor was present when Takumi was talking. Sometimes. I really like that ‘form meets function’ aspect – remind the viewer who is under the mask, or who’s in the pilots seat, and it’s just really cool. The synchronized alt-selves talking is just another extension of that, be it a time-displaced Sougo or a Woz from a different timeline altogether.

… um.

Actually, whatever happened to “3 days from now” Sougo?

Suuuure, these are the only two options. Riiiight. “Take Quiz’s power (and totally kill your friend)” or “No More Mutants Riders.” Yeaaaah, we’ll get RIGHT on that, thanks Woz’s.

AHAHAHA NO. Uncle Tokiwa… ‘given how long it’s been stopped’ that watch is a Tragic Keepsake for Quiz, isn’t it? I mean, he’s from the future and all, so.

“Oh! Sougo, you have a lot of friends who like clocks! This one can stay for lunch too!”

“Um, uncle, no, this one has directly tried to kill me, actually, so maybe not-”

Ohhh. Right… Assuming the ‘riders lose their memories without their powers’ is true, which the characters all still believe is, even though i’m not so sure…

Taking Quiz’s powers while he’s… um, 2040 minus 2019 is…

Taking Quiz’s powers while he’s 21 years in the past is NOT a good thing.

“You will soon be forced to make some rather merciless decisions. Consider this practice.”

HEY WHITE WOZ. I’m not liking your expressions here. That’s waay more sketchy than someone who ‘supports’ their ‘savior’ has any business looking. Like, not even a creepy adoration sketchy, just. Plain creepy.

Oh no, that’s right, Another Quiz is Actual Quiz’s father. And now Mondo says that ‘he was talented, according to [his] mother.” Which means that in the proper timeline that he’s from… he never knew his father.

(Re-Ray plays quietly in the background)

Sougo has ZERO points. Poor Tsukuyomi only has three. Mondo quit it, you’re the GUEST here. Show some mercy on your poor, moronic host.

Geiz, what’re ya doing sneaking downstairs? (It could only be Geiz, because he’s wearing pants that fit.)

(gasp) GEIZ! You’re not wearing your harness! I was starting to think it was part of you!

(Congratulations! You didn’t do a violence!)

~skipping to the fight~

INSERT SONG: GEIZ TIME!

Okay, but really, when are they releasing these? And how many more are we going to get? Because so far I’m liking what I’m hearing, from this one and from Sougo’s in ep 16.

Not really sure what those sound effects are with your Ex-Aid armor today, though, Geiz.

Decade!OOO is Tajador. We want our bird.

BUT. Sougo’s movements are… eerily Eiji-like right now.

Hey, didn’t I say something about ‘when he stops being a knock-off, that’s when we need to worry?’ That would have been… right, last time was when I was watching the raw of episode 15. When Sougo was pulling off a pretty decent version of the Rabbit Tank Sparkling finisher. And then in 16, he was using Mighty Brothers XX pretty accurately, as well.

HM.

They go for the finisher, and the music stops dead when Hora freezes time. It’s disconcerting enough when that they do that with the background music. When it’s VOCALS that cut out, it’s terrifying.

Neither Geiz or Sougo are meant to take attacks from other Kamen Riders. It’s why Geiz was so poorly off after that curb-stomp Sougo gave him in the first part of “OOO and Genm.” It’s why Decade dealt so much more damage to both of them. And they just got hit with each other’s finishers.

WhiteWoz cares not for your puny ‘morals’ or ‘sense of right and wrong’ or ‘geiz’s growing realization that he’s not going to be able to go through with killing zi-o’.

WhiteWoz cares not for anyone.

Hey, Showy McSynth Pop? I don’t think it counts as winning if you hack the timeline to let yourself win.

So, Quiz’s backstory is breaking my heart. He just wants to see if his father actually loved his mother. That’s tragic. “Until she knows the truth, I don’t think my mother will be able to move on.”

About as equally tragic? Sougo’s line. “I think I understand.” said hesitantly, as he sits down, with restrained movements. Usually, when he’s Sougo (as opposed to Zi-O), the kids arms are almost constantly in some sort of motion. But he folded them and sat quietly down.

Sougo… what happened to your parents?

Geiz, baby, please tell me that the attack is at least partly a stunt? That you talked to Mondo before you guys came here?

Geiz??

(enter episode 20!)

We’re back to BlackWoz’s Storytime Vault! Hooray!

So: Sougo gets BlackWoz to help him and Mondo get out, via nifty Magic Scarf powers. Hora brings Another Quiz with her. And WhiteWoz is a total creeper calling them cowards.

The sunlight light overtaking Geiz and going into the 20 Rider Kicks logo is GREAT. Not only is it a great method for a transition, but it keeps us from seeing what Geiz is feeling – which it needs to, right now.

I’m pretty sure that was a sigh of relief from Geiz when Sougo and company left, after all.

The sequence breaking Another Riders seem to be a lot MORE painful to become than the Regular Another Riders… and those were already painful to watch. (Another Quiz’s eyes flashed red and blue briefly when he transformed, that’s nifty!)

Yup, I was right. The watch is a Tragic Keepsake. It was Mondo’s dads, and I think it broke today.

Sougo shows off his ‘Low INT, High WIS’ stats again. Did terribly at the quiz last episode, but can tell that Mondo’s not just here for his mothers sake. (Sougo, what happened to your parents?)

Geiz asks Tsukuyomi what Sougo would do. Well, he asks what “Zi-O” would do, and I eagerly await the day we get to see “Zi-O” become “Sougo” for him. Please let it happen. I’m still upset that nobody expect for Kasumi and Kazumin ever called Ryuuga by his name, this is almost as bad.

When she says that he’d try and prioritize Mondo’s feelings, he replies that “I guess we’ll have to fight. Make sure you tell him that.”

I don’t think that’s what you actually mean, Geiz. I think you’ve got a plan.

I hope you’ve got a plan. … one that you’ll be able to follow through on, because we know full well how that original plan is going.

And through these last two scenes – inside and outside of 9-to-5, the piano version of Over Quartzer is playing. It’s a thing of beauty.

Hm. “I guess we’ll have to fight”… Geiz, you were talking about you and Sougo, as opposed to you and Mondo, weren’t you? Because you went straight for Zi-O, not for Quiz. Clever boy.

Wait, when did you get Build?! I get that the watches are interchangeable, but you’ve been running Ex-Aid a lot lately, too.

(Now I kind of want to know if the Cross-Z and Genm watches are compatible with the Decade adapter…)

Sougo took a BEATING with that Build finisher, didn’t he…?

Nah, not as much as he could have… it looks like Geiz was pulling his punches, so to speak.

Sougo pulls the ‘which Woz are you?’ gag, and actually gets BlackWoz to refer to himself as such. Sougo gets a kick out of that, Tsukuyomi is dully surprised, and Woz is disgusted with himself.

Heehee… neither of them are telling their respective Woz’s what their own plans are. And neither of them are actually agreeing with their respective Woz’s goals.

Pity the respective Woz’s don’t acknowledge that last fact.

Sougo asks what Geiz would do… and when Tsukuyomi tells him that Geiz asked her the same respective question about him… that seems to tell Sougo everything he needs to know.

Low INT, High WIS. Sougo, you’re a deceptively devious little twig, aren’t you?

(WhiteWoz, knocking Hora down wasn’t necessary. Because I don’t believe for a SECOND that Geiz did THAT.)

Sougo, you deceptively observant little twig.

“So… Tsukuyomi said that Geiz asked her what I would do. I know I would let them interact. So, if he’s doing what I would do, then that’d be why he attacked me up there. So now I have to hold up his end of what he would do, and go straight to getting rid of the obstacle. So, I’ll take on RiderWoz, and let Geiz lead the father-son chat.”

So… The HeiGen Forever movie IS, in fact, canon, then? Because that’s the Double Ridewatch right there. And- pft – the Gaia Memory shoulder pads are temporarily little stick figures – pftHAHAHA! And they do the pre-transformation pose before attaching – this is absurd oh my god!

Of COURSE beating Another Quiz could work with Kamen Rider Quiz!

If a Riders power can only exist at one point in time; which still sounds fake, but I’ll allow it for now; the one that comes later seems to take priority. All the previous Another Riders were made after the Proper Rider already existed. That’s why the watches that our riders use had to be picked up in the present day – that way, they came into existence after the Another Rider did.

The exception to that is Shinobi, who didn’t exist at all yet, and was rendered impossible by being his own Another Rider.

In this case, Kamen Rider Quiz technically is the later iteration. He became a Rider in the future, and he’s here via time travel. So, chronologically speaking, Another Quiz came into existence in 2019, but Kamen Rider Quiz does not exist yet. So he can be considered the ‘replacement’.

SOUGO NO DO THE FINISHER IN THE LIGHT I WANT TO SEE IT PROPE-

wait it’s a Double finisher with CYCLONE JOKER? Maybe I don’t want to see it properly, Joker’s finishers are usually borderline body-horror…

Okay no, we’re good, it’s still iffy but it’s not nearly Joker Extreme levels of iffy, so we’re fine. I am A-OK with this finisher being a bootleg.

RiderWoz is OP. Sougo’s REALLY hurting after that.

Sougo and Geiz are. Not. Meant. To. Fight. Riders.

This scene with Mondo questioning his father is absolutely heartwrenching you guys. Made even more so by the piano version of Over Quartzer picking up where it left off earlier.

And then RiderWoz just has to come in and ruin everything. And use some TOTAL overkill on those attacks – oh GOD with actual lightning bolts and everything, and I had thought Quiz’s attacks were brutal when HE was doing them?

WhiteWoz cares not for your puny human morals or ethics.

Hey. HEY. What did those two watches just DO to Geiz? The bizarre vision thing is one problem as is, the electric shock is another, but something ELSE about that just effected him. Poorly.

WhiteWoz is in some serious trouble.

Hey. HEY. ProperWoz. What is that watch you just handed to Uncle Tokiwa? Why do you have Sougo’s upgrade?

I am glaring in the directions of BOTH Woz iterations. You’re BOTH super sketchy. But at least the first Woz is a more tolerable type of sketchy. At least he doesn’t seem to delight in other peoples pain.

SO I’m having fun with this again! Just have to hold out hope that they know what they’re doing with the previous riders, and keep going!

After all...

Mondo doesn’t seem to have lost his memories, now does he?

[cromulentbookreview]

The Oddmire, a Review in People Words

“As it turns out, intelligent beings are still fairly rubbish when left unsupervised.”

True story.

And by that, I mean: The Oddmire: Changeling by William Ritter!

The Oddmire: Changeling is the story of two brothers: Tinn and Cole Burton, who live with their mom, Annie Burton in the little town of Endsborough. Endsborough is surrounded by a forest called the Wild Wood because all sorts of weird magical things live there. However, thirteen years before this story begins, magic seems to be leaving the Wild Wood. To help keep the magic from fading away entirely, a goblin named Kull decides to perform an ancient ritual involving a changeling and a human baby. So Kull sneaks out of the woods with a newborn changeling to switch it out for Annie Burton’s newborn son. Only there was a slight problem. See, Kull got distracted by a cat (a problem to which I can definitely relate) and when he took his eyes off the baby and the changeling together in the crib for that split second...well, the changeling morphed to look exactly like the baby and Kull couldn’t tell which was the baby and which was the changeling.

Cats, man.

And, a side note: you ever work with documents and set the original next to the copy then you turn away for a minute then look back around and realize, shit, which one is the copy? The original absolutely must go to the Capitol, but....which one is it?! I’ve wasted hours of my life scanning pieces of paper looking for tell-tale signs of a photocopy. It’s no joke, man.

Back to the point:

Poor Kull, in a hurry and definitely not wanting to get caught, hesitates too long. Both babies start crying, and Annie is on her way in...Without much choice, Kull runs away, leaving the changeling and the baby behind.

Annie, upon seeing that she now has two babies when she definitely only gave birth to one, just goes “welp, guess I have two kids now.” Everyone in town is like “uh, one is definitely a goblin,” but Annie, because she is a fundamentally decent human is just: “well, I can’t tell which is which so they’re both mine, end of story.” Besides, there isn’t much difference between two young boys and goblins anyway. 

Annie’s husband, however, disagrees and vanishes just a few days after her one son became two. Annie is certain that he’s dead, but since this is the first in a series, you can bet the dad will show up eventually.

I imagine it will be exactly like that.

Time goes by and Tinn and Cole are now nearly thirteen. They go around making mischief in what can only be described as a very late-19th, early 20th century manner. The boys both know of the goblin story, but Tinn is all “I really hope I’m not the goblin, but one of us has to be and I’d rather it be me than Cole” and Cole is all “I really hope I’m not the goblin, but one of us has to be, and I’d rather it be me than Tinn.” Because Cole and Tinn are brothers, damn it, and they care about each other and they love their mom, and it’s super adorable and I love it. Anyway, one day, while playing in their climbing tree, Tinn and Cole find a note left for them by Kull: the changeling must return to the Wild Wood, or it, and all the magic in the Wild Wood will die.

There is no reason for the above gif, but whenever there’s magical woods, I have to feature this gif of Chris Pine ripping his shirt from Into the Woods. Because it’s just so...hypnotic...and pleasant to see...

Ahem.

Since they have no idea which one of them is the changeling, Tinn and Cole take off into the Wild Wood together, where they encounter witches, hinkypunks, and tart-stealing bears. They must also cross the treacherous Oddmire, a giant swamp in the middle of the woods. Meanwhile, there’s a Thing that lives deep in the heart of the woods. The Thing is evil, and it’s hungry. It hasn’t had anything good to eat for a long time...but then it senses a changeling in the woods...

(An accurate visual representation of The Thing in the Wild Wood. Seriously, the way Ritter describes it, it sounds like a ringwraith, minus the horse).

Yes, I know The Oddmire is a middle grade book. Yes, I know I’m technically an adult, but...eh, I’ll read whatever I want, and I loved The Oddmire. It’s written by William Ritter, a local author (woo, Portland writers!) who also wrote the fantastic Jackaby series - and, fun fact, if you’re a Jackaby fan, The Oddmire takes place in the same universe as Jackaby - in fact, when Annie Burton suddenly obtains a second child, the people of Endsborough ask for advice from an expert in New Fiddleham, and I swear to God that expert had better be Jackaby or else I will be pissed. I have my fingers and toes crossed for a crossover.

So, if you’re a Jackaby fan, you won’t be surprised to learn that the writing in The Oddmire is extremely clever and a ton of fun to read. Tinn and Cole are great protagonists - they’re mischievous, but they both genuinely love their mom and care a lot about one another that makes my poor, dead heart feel all warm and fuzzy. I loved the character of Annie Burton, too - she loves both boys equally and genuinely doesn’t give a shit if one of them is a goblin or not, they’re both her boys, end of story, and anyone who says otherwise gets a punch in the face. So many fantasy stories feature horrible parents - it’s nice to read one where the protagonists have such an awesome mom who cares about them so much.

As for their dad...well, he’s not really in this book, but it’s the first in a series so...who knows.

The only part of the story that could have used a bit more development was the Wild Wood and its various magical inhabitants. We don’t learn a whole ton about the creatures that live in the Wild Wood. I also wish we could’ve seen more of Kull and the Goblin Hoard, but, again, this is the first book in a series and the main focus is on Tinn and Cole.

What is it with me a serieses? It’s always hard to review the first book in a planned series because you have no idea where the subsequent books will go. I sometimes like to wait until all the books of a series are out before binge-reading them all because, well, waiting for sequels is difficult. I’m waiting for so many sequels right now, it’s the worst. Dear Brian McClellan, Scott Lynch, C.L. Polk, Amie Kaufman, Jay Kristoff, Maya Motayne, among many, many, many others: I’M WAITING. Ugh. I mean, I know writing is hard, I mean, it’s why I failed (and am still failing) at being a writer myself but waiting is just so hard.

Either way: The Oddmire is a great middle grade action/adventure/fantasy all about two identical twin brothers and their mom - all of whom absolutely love and care about one another, whether or not one of them is a goblin changeling. Again, this story made me feel all the feels right in my cold, dead, cynical Millennial heart. I’m a sucker for sibling stories because, well, I have siblings that I both love and, on occasion, despise. But still, they’re your family. I mean, it’s not like my siblings used to tell me that I was adopted or secretly a Russian sleeper agent or anything when I was a kid...I mean, I figured that was bullshit pretty quick because my siblings and I all look a lot like each other and we all look like our parents so...

RECOMMENDED FOR: Any fans of middle grade fantasy, fans of the Jackaby series, anyone who has ever grown up with a sibling, especially anyone who has a twin, identical or otherwise.

NOT RECOMMENDED FOR: Non middle grade fans, people who can’t stand it when family members in fiction actually like each other.

RATING: 4.5/5

RELEASE DATE: July 16, 2019

RINGWRAITH:

[brownsugarrilakkuma]

50 questions tag~

tagged by @neochamomiletea

1. what takes up too much of your time? Scrolling through Tumblr, playing Pocket Camp, and watching YouTube videos.

2. what makes your day better? Sushi and talking to my best friends. 

3. what’s the best thing that happened to you today? The Pizza Hut by my house finally got our order right. 

4. what fictional place would you like to go?  Right now? My camp in Animal Crossing Pocket Camp.

5. are you good at giving advice? I guess so because everyone always comes to me lmaoo.

6. do you have any mental illness? Not professionally diagnosed but I do have family history for a few.

7. have you ever experienced sleep paralysis? I don’t think so. 

8. what musician inspired you the most? This answer changes based on who I’m obsessed with at the moment typically. I’d say the most consistent would be Rihanna. Once I became Navy my loyalty has never swayed. I love her idgaf I’m here to have fun and get paid attitude. She’s also so ride or die for her friends and family and like same. However, I’d be lying if I didn’t mention I literally call my closet the ‘SHINee closet’ due to my posters of Jonghyun and Taemin hanging up in their. Eventually I plan to put more SHINee centric posters up as long as I have space. They’ve inspired me to continue to push through hard times when I’d much rather give up. 

9. have you ever fallen in love? Romantically? Not yet *Baekho voice* WHERE U AT??!!

10. what’s your dream date? I want to go somewhere with good food where we either get to either walk around and talk or be able to sit in the same place until the place is ready to close. 

11. what do others notice about you? My skin and hair. I’ve had so many random women either complement my skin (usually wearing makeup but I guess that means I do know how to apply foundation) or my hair (colored or when I was natural).

12. what is the annoying habit you have? I don’t ask for help.

13. do you still talk to you first love? Nope. 

14. how many ex’s do you have? None. 

15. how many songs are on your playlist? My Cheer Up playlist has 122 song but that’s in progress. 

16. what instruments can you play? None because I got impatient and gave up. 

17. who do you have the most pictures of? As of today I have 272 pictures and gifs and counting of Johnny on my phone and I’m not ashamed of it (cause that’s my mans). But uhhh I also have 100 pictures and videos of my cat Penelope saved on my phone too. It’s up to you to decide which is sadder lmao. 

18. where would you like to go before you die? Too many to list. Definitely Tokyo, Seoul, and Shanghai.  

19. what is your zodiac? Gemini sun, Aquarius moon.

20. do you relate to it? Too well. 

21. what is happiness to you? Being able to be yourself unapologetically around people you love.

22. are you going through anything right now? I should have a royal title by now for all the years I’ve been going through it. 

23. what’s the worst decision you’ve ever made? Anytime I decided against  listening to my gut knowing she’s right 99.999% of the time.

24. what’s your favourite store? At first I was thinking either Nordstrom Rack or TJ MAXX but TJ MAXX has a good mix of  skincare, makeup, bras, furniture, and food stuff like teas and cookies from brands you’ve never heard of along with interesting designer pieces. I like the hunt. 

25. what’s your opinion on abortion? I’m 100000000000% on board. As many as that person wants/needs to have. 

26. do you keep a bucket list? I have a mental list of shit I would like to get done if I was more disciplined. 

27. do you have a favourite album at the moment? Not really. I have some favorite songs I listen to off of some of my favorite albums released this year. I listen to playlist more than full length albums. Or all 1000+ songs on shuffle. 

28. what do you want for your birthday?  I like money gifts from family. My friends always get me perfect gifts. I think they get what my interest are better than my family members do.  

29. what are most peoples first impression of you? I don’t know I never ask.

30. what age do you seem according to most people? I always get aged down 4-5 years. Most recently a neighbor asked me what my plans were after I graduate high school this year. I’m 24.

31. where do you keep your phone while you’re sleeping? Next to the wall where my charger is. 

32. what word do you say the most? What, wow, and whack are my top three reactions to most things.

33. what’s the oldest age you would date?  Ideally I wouldn’t want to go older than 4 years. Like at least at some point we’d been in high school at the same time so we’d have some life experiences we’d have in common. But like if we click we click. 

34. what’s the youngest age you would date? Idk like 3 or 4 years? My response is about the same as the last one. I couldn’t image dating someone that much younger but life be like that sometimes. As long as they’re of age. 

35. what job/career do most people say would suit you? A writer or designer. 

36. what’s your favourite music genre? Deep house has become a recent fave of mine over the last like 4 years. I like having music I could vibe to or dance to at any moment. I’m here to have a good time.

37. if you could live in any country in the world, where would it be? I want to retire to the Tuscany region of Italy. Pretty much all of the countries I would want to live in are just as expensive as the US. 

38. what is your current favourite song? Puzzle Moon by GWSN

39. how long have you had this blog for? May of 2012 although I think I deleted some of my earlier posts. I’ve switched names and themes a lot.

40. what are you excited for? WayV!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And other new music in 2019. 

41. are you a better talker or listener? Listener. I have good ideas but sometime I struggle articulating them and once I get it, it’s too late. 

42. what is the last productive thing you did? i got some sewing done.

43. what do you want for christmas? I had a long list like every year. My mom did get me this Fashionary book I wanted. No Airpods yet. 

44. what class do you get the best grades in? English, History, and Art

45. on a scale from 1-10, how are you feeling right now? 10, I just had pizza

46. what can you see yourself doing in 10 years? Still being on my bullshit 

47. when did you get your first heartbreak? When Fall Out Boy went on hiatus in like 2008/2009

48. at what age do you want to get married? Uhh idk. I’m indifferent 

49. what career did you want to have as a child? i wanted to be in a girl group, an actress, and a fashion designer....so Beyonce, I wanted to be Beyonce 

50. what do you crave right now? ...more pizza. I’m hungry again. 

I’m gonna tag: @agust-ds, @thejoong, @itslovingjungkookoclock, @yerim-5hinee, and @aqsun (idk if you’ve done this one but I know you’ve done some other tags so I didn’t tag you in those and you don’t have to do this either but I do like you so I want to include you in things like this too but I’m shy so sorry for the long explanation lmao) 

[kbrown78]

Yearly Wrap Up: 2018

Sorry this post is so late, it took awhile to get all the information I needed and I kept going back and forth on the format I wanted to do for this post, but I finally have an end result I am happy with. In this post I will be going over all the books I read in 2018, all the stats, completion of 2018 reading goals as well as 2019 reading goals. Also fair warning, this is going to be a long post. So to begin with I'll talk about my 2018 reading goals and of I was able to accomplish them. This year was the first year that I did the Goodreads Challenge, I thought it would be good to see how many books I could read in a year. My initial goal was 50 books and I ended up reading 80 books, so I was definitely able to tackle my Goodreads goal. Unfortunately that was the only reading challenge I was able to finish. One of my reading resolutions for 2018 was to finish a reading challenge and I did that with the Goodreads one, but I also did the PopSugar 2018 Reading Challenge. That one provided a large number of reading prompts that I hoped would help expand the genre of the books I was reading (which was another reading resolution of mine) and of the 50 prompts I was only able to complete 34, which is not bad, it's more than half, but I still wanted to complete all of them. As I mentioned I wanted to expand the genre of books that I read, since I mostly read YA fantasy, and I do think I achieved that goal by trying to read more adult fantasy, science fiction, different fantasy sub genre's, and a few books in other genres, but I will go more into that when I do a break down of all the books I read this year. I also wanted to go to more book events and that did not really happen. I only went to 1 this year and the rest I was unable to go to for various reasons, so I need to get better with planning in order to go to more events this year. I did want to be more active in the book community and I definitely think I achieved that, with providing regular posts and book reviews. I was originally going to do a channel on YouTube but I suck with editing software and I honestly prefer writing. Finally my #1 resolution for 2018 was to tackle all the books in my physical TBR, with books from 2017 and 2018, I was able to narrow down my overflowing basket to just 5 books. Since I now have a rule where I have to read 10 books before I buy a new one (holiday's are an exception) I'll probably have the rest of those books read by the end of 2019, so that all new books in my TBR pile will all be from 2019. Now that I've summarized my status on all my reading goals for 2018, I'm now going to start going into the actual books. I'll begin by listing all the books I've read and putting them in different groups based on their star ratings. Then I'm going to go into the statistics of all the books, like genre, authors, status, and other things.

Ratings:

5 Star Books: These are without a doubt my favorite books of the year, the cream of the crop, and some of them are possibly my new favorite books or series of all time. 

A Natural History of Dragons (Memoirs of Lady Trent #1) by Marie Brennan, The Tropic of Serpents (Memoirs of Lady Trent) by Marie Brennan, The Tethered Mage (Swords and Fire #1) by Melisa Caruso, The Defiant Heir (Swords and Fire #2) by Melisa Caruso, East by Edith Pattou, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu, Every Heart a Doorway (Wayward Children #1) by Seanan McGuire, Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children #3) by Seanan McGuire, The Star Touched Queen (Star Touched Queen #1) by Roshani Chokshi, Crown of Wishes (Star Touched Queen #2) by Roshani Chokshi, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (Wayfarers #1) by Becky Chambers     

4.5 Star Books: These are the books that I did really love and couldn't find much fault with but I couldn't fully connect to the story (would still recommend all).

A Closed and Common Orbit (Wayfarers #2) by Becky Chambers, Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach, The Shadow Queen (Ravenspire #1) by C.J. Redwine, The Voyage of the Basilisk (Memoirs of Lady Trent #3) by Marie Brennan, Rosemary and Rue (October Daye #1) by Seanan McGuire, The Call by Peadar O'Guilin, Robots vs Fairies

4 Star Books: This one is a bit split because some are books that are solidly 4 stars and lean more toward the 4.5 star rating, and other were saved by a fantastic ending from a 3.5 star rating. There are things that could have been improved on within the story but overall I enjoyed reading all of them.

Beauty Queens by Libba Bray, Down Among the Sticks and Bones (Wayward Children #2) by Seanan McGuire, Ignite Me by Tahereh Mafi, Vivian Apple at the End of the World (Vivian Apple #1) by Katie Coyle, A Great and Terrible Beauty (Gemma Doyle #1), Ice Like Fire (Snow Like Ashes #2) by Sara Raasch, Frost Like Night (Snow Like Ashes #3) by Sara Raasch, Uppity Women Speak Their Minds by Vicki Leon, Invisible Planets translated by Ken Liu, In the Labyrinth of Drakes (Memoirs of Lady Trent #4) by Marie Brennan, Record of a Spaceborn Few (Wayfarers #3) by Becky Chambers, Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone (Harry Potter #1) by J.K Rowling, Tales of the Peculiar by Ransom Riggs, Code Name Verity (Code Name Verity #1) by Elizabeth Wein, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan

3.5 Star Books: This is a bit of an unusual rating because it usually means that I was expecting to be disappoint by these books, and while there were still issues that I couldn't ignore, I surprisingly enjoyed.

The Registry (The Registry #1) by Shannon Stoker, Caliban's War (The Expanse #2) by James S.A. Corey, Snow Like Ashes (Snow Like Ashes #1) by Sara Raasch, You Are a Badass by Jen Sincero, The Language of Thorns by Leigh Bardugo

3 Star Books: These were books that I thought were decent, but they had flaws in them that I was unable to over look.

A Court of Wings and Ruin (A Court of Thorns and Roses #1) by Sarah J. Maas, Walk on Earth a Stranger (Gold Seer #1) by Rae Carson, Like a River Glorious (Gold Seer #2) by Rae Carson, Children of Blood and Bone (Legacy of Orisha) by Tomi Adeyemi, An Unkindness of Magicians by Kat Howard, After: 19 Stories of Dystopian and Apocalypse, Illuminae (The Illuminae Files) by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff, The Wrath and the Dawn (The Wrath and the Dawn #1) by Renee Ahdieh, Uprooted by Naomi Novik, Red Sister  (Book of the Ancestor #1) by Mark Lawerence, Sabriel (The Abhorsen #1) by Garth Nix, Monstress Volume 3: The Blood by Marjorie Liu, The Red Tent by Anita Diamant, Nightfall by Jake Halpern and Peter Kujawinski

2.5 Star Books: These are books that I had a lot of issues with but were redeemable enough that I would still give them a try.

The Collection (The Registry #2) by Shannon Stoker, Three Dark Crowns (Three Dark Crowns #1) by Kendare Blake, Dreams of Gods and Monsters (Daughter of Smoke and Bone #3) by Laini Taylor, The Bone Witch (The Bone Witch #1) by Rin Chupeco

2 Star Books: These are books that I had lot of issues with but it didn't upset me enough to make me want to quit it. These books and downward I personally wouldn't recommend reading, but that's just my opinion.

Princesses Behaving Badly by Linda Rodrigez McRobbie, Days of Blood and Starlight (Daughter of Smoke and Bone #2) by Laini Taylor, Vivian Apple Needs a Miracle (Vivian Apple #2) by Katie Coyle, The Knife of Never Letting Go (Chaos Walking Trilogy #1) by Patrick Ness, Leviathan Wakes (The Expanse #1) by James S.A. Corey, Bitterblue (Graceling #3) by Kristin Cashore, Sandry's Book (Circle of Magic #1) by Tamora Pierce, Lirael (Abhorsen #2) by Garth Nix, Torn (The Unraveled Kingdom #1) by Rowena Miller, Into the Bright Unknown (Gold Seer #3) by Rae Carson, Front Lines by Michael Grant, American God's by Neil Gaiman, The Falconer (The Falconer #1) by Elizabeth May  

1 Star Books: These, sadly, are the bottom of the barrel. I had a hard time finding good qualities with these books and some of them I got so frustrated by I ended up quiting them.

The Wicked and the Divine Volume 1: The Faust Act, Our Dark Duet (Monsters of Verity #2) by Victoria Schwab, Truthwitch (The Witchlands #1) by Susan Dennard, Rebel Angels (Gemma Doyle #2) (DNF) by Libba Bray, The Virgin Suicides by Jeffery Eugenides, Under the Never Sky (Under the Never Sky #1) by Veroncia Rossi, The Library at Mount Char (DNF) by Scott Hawkins, Daughters of the Storm (Blood and Gold #1) (DNF) by Kim Wilkins, The Legend of Holly Claus by Brittney Ryan, Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch #1)(DNF) by Ann Leckie (I didn't hate this book, it was just too weird and confusing to carry on)

Statistics:

This is the part where I'll break down authors (gender and ethnicity), status (finished or not finished, companion, stanalone, special cases), and genre of the books.

AUTHORS: (Not counting anthologies with multiple authors, also series counts as one)  

Male: 16

Female: 42

White: 48

POC: 10

STATUS:  

Finished (If the book was part of a series that ended than had a companion series follow it, I'm still counting that as a finished series, also I'm counting anything 2 or more books as a series): 8 (A Court of Thorns and Roses, Gold Seer, Monsters of Verity, Daughter of Smoke and Bone, Vivian Apple, Snow Like Ashes, Ignite Me)

Unfinished and Completed (Unfinished means that I haven't finished reading the series, uncompleted means that all the books in the series haven't been released yet): 12 (Gemma Doyle (won't be completing), The Knife of Never Letting Go (won't be completing), The Wrath and the Dawn (won't be completing), The Facloner (won't be completing), Under the Never Sky (won't be completing), Abhorsen, Memoirs of Lady Trent, Imperial Radch (won't be completing), Harry Potter, Front Lines (won't be completing), The Registry, Circle of Magic (won't be completing))

Unfinished and Uncompleted: 10 (Legacy of Orisha, The Witchlands (won't be completing), The Bone Witch (won't be completing), The Expanse, Swords and Fire, Book of the Ancestor (won't be completing), The Unraveled Kingdoms, Three Dark Crowns (won't be completing), October Daye, Blood and Gold (won't be completing))

Companion series: 8 (Wayfarers, Wayward Children, Star Touched Queen, The Illuminae Files, Code Name Verity, Graceling, Nightfall, Ravenspire)

Stand Alone (includes non fiction): 13 (Princesses Behaving Badly, Beauty Queens, An Unkindness of Magicians, Uprooted, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Uppity Women Speak Their Minds, The Virgin Suicides, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, You Are A Badass, The Library at Mount Char, American Gods, The Red Tent, The Legend of Holly Claus)

Anthologies/ Short Story Collections: 6 (After: 19 Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, Robots Vs Fairies, Invisible Planets, Tales of the Peculiar, The Language of Thorns)

Comics/ Graphic Novels: 2 (Monstress Vol 3: The Blood and the Wicked and the Divine Vol 1: The Faust Act)

Special cases (Special cases are for books that I'm leaving as a self contained standalone even though they have a sequel): 2 (East by Edith Pattou, The Call by Peadar O'Guilin)

GENRE: I'm going based off of where these books are shelved in stores, even if I don't agree with some of them.

YA: 44

Adult: 33

Fantasy: 42 (A Court of Wings and Ruin (Epic fantasy/ Romance)(YA), Every Heart a Doorway (Portal fantasy/ Contemporary fantasy/ Mystery)(A), Down Among the Sticks and Bones (Gothic fantasy/ Mythic fantasy)(A), Beneath the Sugar Sky (Portal fantasy)(A), Walk on Earth a Stranger (Historical fantasy)(YA), Like a River Glorious (Historical fantasy/ Romance)(YA), Into the Bright Unknown (Historical fantasy/ Romance)(YA), A Crown of Wishes (Epic fantasy)(YA), Day's of Blood and Starlight (Epic fantasy/ Portal fantasy)(YA), Dreams of God's and Monsters (Portal fantasy/ Epic fantasy)(YA), Children of Blood and Bone (Epic fantasy)(YA), Truthwitch (Epic fantasy/ Romance), A Great and Terrible Beauty (Historical fantasy/ Portal fantasy)(YA), Rebel Angels (Historical fantasy/ Portal fantasy/ Romance)(YA), The Bone Witch (Epic fantasy/ Romance) (YA), The Wrath and the Dawn (Retelling/ Romance/ Historical fantasy)(YA), East (Retelling/ Historical fantasy/ Romance)(YA), The Falconer (Historical fantasy, Steampunk, Romance)(YA), Uprooted (Epic fantasy/ Retelling)(A), Tales of the Peculiar (Fairy tales/ Short stories)(YA), The Tethered Mage (Epic fantasy/ Mystery)(A), The Defiant Heir (Epic fantasy)(A), The Library at Mount Char (Urban fantasy), Circle of Magic: Sandry's Book (Children's fantasy)(YA), Sabriel (Epic fantasy/ Gothic fantasy)(YA), Lirael (Epic fantasy/ Gothic fantasy)(YA), The Star Touched Queen (Retelling/ Romance/ Epic fantasy)(YA), Nightfall (Thriller/ Low fantasy)(YA), Monstress (Epic fantasy/ Horror/ Comic)(A), The Wicked and the Divine (Urban fantasy/ Mythology/ Comic)(YA), Torn (Romance/ Epic fantasy)(A), Three Dark Crowns (Epic fantasy/ Gothic fantasy/ Romance)(YA), Rosemary and Rue (Urban fantasy/ Mystery)(A), A Natural History of Dragons (Fantasy of Manners)(A), The Tropic of Serpents (Fantasy of Manners)(A), The Voyage of the Basilisk (Fantasy of Manners)(A), In the Labyrinth of Drakes (Romance/ Fantasy of Manners)(A), American Gods (Urban fantasy)(A), Daughters of the Storm (Epic fantasy)(A), The Shadow Queen (Retelling)(YA), The Legend of Holly Claus (Juevnile fantasy)(YA), The Language of Thorns (Retelling/ Short Stories)(YA)  

Science Fiction: 10 (The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (Soft SF)(A), A Closed and Common Orbit (Soft SF/ Biopunk)(A), Record of a Spaceborn Few (Soft SF/ Generation Ships)(A), Leviathan Wakes (Space Opera/ Crime Noir/ Alien Invasion)(A), Caliban's War (Space Opera/ Alien Invasion)(A), Invisible Planets (Anthologies/ Translated/ Soft SF/ Hard SF)(A), Ancillary Justice (Hard SF/ Space Opera)(A), Under the Never Sky (Survival/ Romance)(YA), The Knife of Never Letting Go (Survival/ Alien)(YA), Illuminae (Survival/ Soft SF/ Cyberpunk)(YA)  

Science Fantasy: 3 (contains magic and technology): 3 (The Paper Menagerie (Short stories)(A), Robots vs Fairies (Anthologies)(A), Red Sister (Grim dark fantasy/ Epic fantasy)(A))  

Dystopian/ Post Apocalypse: 8 (survival's the name of the game): Our Dark Duet (urban fantasy/ post apocalyptic)(YA), Vivian Apple at the End of the World (Contemporary/ apocalyptic)(YA), Vivian Apple Needs a Miracle (Contemporary/ apocalyptic)(YA), After (Anthology/ dystopian/ apocalyptic), The Registry (Dystopia/ Action)(YA), The Collection (Dystopia)(YA), Ignite Me (Dystopian/ Science fiction/ Romance)(YA), The Call (Contemporary fantasy/ Portal fantasy/ Horror/ Apocalyptic)(YA))

Literary Fiction (lacks magic or new technology): 6 (Beauty Queens (Contemporary/ Satire)(YA), Code Name Verity (Historical fiction)(YA), Jonathan Livingston Seagull (Philosophical fiction)(A), The Virgin Suicides (Contemporary)(A), Front Lines (Alternate history/ historical)(YA), The Red Tent (Historical/ Biblical fiction)(A), The Giving Tree (Poetry)(YA))  

Non Fiction: 4 (Princesses Behaving Badly, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, Uppity Women Speak Their Minds, You Are a Badass)

2019 Goals:

I did a T5W outlining my 2019 reading goals, and I promised I would talk about them more in this post. So I'm going to conclude my Yearly Wrap Up post by discussing what I hope to accomplish in my 2019 reading year. For starters I have a goal that I'm carrying over from 2018 and that is to read a wider genre of books. I wanted to accomplish this last year, but going into 2019 I have a better idea of what specific genre's I would like to try more of. This year I really started to transition from YA fantasy to Adult fantasy, but I haven't given up on YA yet. I want to try some YA contemporary and magical realism, but as of right now I only have specific picks in mind for this. I want to read more historical fiction and historical fantasy, like the Golem and the Jinni. I enjoy reading about settings from different time periods, especially if they have magical elements, I just need to be careful about finding books that don't get heavy handed with a crappy romance. I want to read more science fiction, specifically Adult Science fiction, since I haven't come across a YA science fiction that intrigues me. I'm sill trying to learn what exactly I like in science fiction, but I know I like character driven stories, like Becky Chamber's series. I knew I would like to attempt the New Weird and Hard science fiction genre's but at the same time I'm a little intimidated by them. I also want to get back into literary fiction, including adult dystopian's and classics. I used to have no problem reading classics and would read 1 or 2 a month, then I just got burned out by it, but I want to pick up that genre again. In terms of fantasy, I still expect that to be the genre that I read the most of put there are still some things I would like out of 2019. I've already said that I'm leaning more toward Adult fantasy and wanting to read more historical fantasy, but I would also like to read more fantasy standalone's. That's something I wanted to do in 2018 but sadly did not find any new ones that I really loved. I also want to read more anthologies or short story collections, in any genre really, because that was something that I discovered that I really liked in 2018 and want more of. The next reading goal I want to accomplish in 2019 is to complete is to finish at least 5 series. For this I'm counting anything that is 3 books or more as a series. I finished 7 series in 2018 but 2 of those were duologies, and I feel like those are super easy to finish. There are several series that I started I won't be completing or the series isn't completed yet. Fortunately most of the series that aren't completed yet I already know I'm not going to continue, and the rest are either being completed this year or have a large number of books that I need to get through for me to catch up with the series. With that being said there are at least 3 series that I will definitely be finishing this year: the Memoirs of Lady Trent, The Registry, and the Swords and Fire series, and I have also already completed one series, so this is goal I can definitely tackle by the end of the year, maybe even half way through the year.  Something else I want to accomplish this year was to go to at least two book events, but that's going to be difficult to do. Most of the bigger book events or conventions, are over 8 hours away. I could also attend book signing events but all of the others that I want signatures from are either not doing events or are doing ones not within a close driving distance for me. That might change as the year progresses, but for now I'm not expecting to be able to accomplish this goal and will instead invest my time in completing a reading challenge, which I was not able to accomplish this year. Another goal for 2019 is to read more diverse books. I want to read more books with POC people as POV characters, or disabled characters, or on the LGBTQ spectrum. I think I've been progressively getting better about that over the years but where I really want to focus on is more diverse authors. As you can see from the statistics section my reading from last year was heavily skewed toward white authors. I want to change that and work toward at least having more POC authors, and almost all the brand new books on my TBR pile are from POC authors and I'm excited to get to most of them (although all authors I've read this year so far are Caucasian). I would also like to read more books by authors that are diverse in other ways beside their ethnicity but it's more difficult to identify those things. Like last year there's only a few couple authors that I'm pretty sure qualify in that way, but I'm not absolutely sure. My final reading major reading goal of 2019 is to get through half of my reread TBR pile. About half way through last year, I decided to go through all my books that I hadn't tabbed and reread them. I wanted to do this for a few reasons. I have a small bookshelf and large container and that's about all the room I have for books, including my non fiction ones. As I read more new books and find new series that I enjoy, that means that there will need to be more room. So rereading books will hopefully help me be able to tell which books I should keep and which ones I should give away. I also want to reread all these books in order to better review them and have a fresh opinion of them. At the beginning of this year I have about 50 books, and I know I'm not going to get through them all this year, so I set a more realistic goal with tackling half of my TBR which would be about 25 books. The last thing I want to talk about is the reading challenge's I'm currently participating in. On Goodreads I have set the yearly amount of books I read to 50. That was my goal last year, and I ended up reading 80 books, so I think setting it at 50 again is something I can manage. I'm also doing the PopSugar 2019 Reading Challenge, which I tried to do last year but failed to complete. How I want to accomplish that this year is by always reading a book that is can be applied to one of the prompts, that way I'm knocking out these prompts as quickly as possible. The last reading challenge I'm doing is a group on Goodreads called The Reading Frenzy, which I joined toward the end of last year. They have several monthly reading challenges, but this year it has been announced that every month there will be a pick my TBR Reading Challenge, which means every month you will be randomly matched with a person, and will pick one book for the other to read that month. I look forward to doing this, just because I like that random element to it, and this will help my slim down my Goodreads TBR (as long as I can get a physical copy of the book). So that sums up my 2018 reading year as well as what all I hope to accomplish in 2019. I look froward to it, and hopefully it's going to be a good year for everyone.  

Thank You Everyone

Keep Calm and Keep Reading