#the skateboards aren't new products or anything

[skruttet]

what did they mean by this

[captawesomesauce]

Thoughts at 1040pm...

Oh so many thoughts!!....

We have been really productive this week. From getting the car washed and cleaning it out, to redoing the garage and taking a bunch of stuff downstairs and stowing it there!

Today we got our passes to the nature center renewed too, and mailed some letters, and put the new tags on the car!

Of course, we've done all of this while I've been dealing with just the worst stomach issue. Seriously just been awful - even by my standards!

Doc said to try konsyl, so we'll see if that helps... I took my first one tonight and it's so funny how differently W and I approached it. She was sucking on it... I just chewed like twice and bam gone. I don't know what's right or wrong lol.. but man it has a weird flavor... like apple citrus.

We'll see if it helps!

W is really happy how productive we've been. We've even gone for a few walks, and I hope tomorrow we'll go to the new duck pond. It's nice to get out now that the heatwave has sort of broken.

Hopefully all of you LA friends aren't doing too bad .. @tmarrr and @killsandthrills, I know it's been real hot by y'all!

W was wracking her brain trying to figure something out, work related. For 2 weeks it's been weighing on her, and really it was a logistical thing more than anything.

The other night she mentions it to me and the answer just came to me in a second and she's kinda happy and mad at the same time about that. LOL

I keep telling her not to stress about stuff, give it some time and then we'll work on it together :)

But yeah... she's still going ARRGHH!!! because I figured it out in a heartbeat lol.

Happy news this week - We've got some king crab legs and giant shrimp that i'm going to cook later this week.

Tonight I made breaded garlic pork loin chops that w loved.

We've been going through all of the Olympic sports and I think I've corrupted the poor girl. She LOVES summer because of gymnastics... that's her thing... but she never really explored the rest, so we've been going through them and well... let's just say @pandoranora2019 would be mad at us because soooooo many of them are just recess games!!!! LOL Let's see who can throw a rock the farthest! Watch me climb this wall real fast!!!! Wanna see me do a trick on my skateboard?!?!?! Dude... dude... let's be twinsies and hold hands and touch our toes as we dive from the really high board!!!!!!!

Oy.

The offroad bikes was cool to watch, shooting is boring as hell, we still don't understand the bike pursuit races... like wtf man... just GO!!!! Steeplechase is... interesting. Little kids watching horses race across the countryside go "I can do that!!!" Synchronized swimming just seems like wet cheerleader/dance squad lol.

It's just... a thing. It's recess.

Bring on the winter death games!!!!!!!

[jetwhenitsmidnight]

Skater Boy by Anthony Nerada

Source: Audiobook ARC from NetGalley

Release date: 6 February

Genre: young adult contemporary romance

If you like: queer coming of age, explorations of toxic masculinity, pop-punk, flawed protagonists trying to be better, Sk8ter Boy by Avril Lavigne but gay

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/5

Synopsis

Stonebridge High’s resident bad boy, Wesley “Big Mac” Mackenzie, is failing senior year—thanks to his unchecked anger, rowdy friends, and a tendency to ditch his homework for skateboarding and a secret photography obsession. So when his mom drags him to a production of The Nutcracker, Wes isn’t interested at all . . . until he sees Tristan Monroe. Mr. Nutcracker himself.

Wes knows he shouldn’t like Tristan; after all, he’s a ballet dancer, and Wes is as closeted as they come. But when they start spending time together, Wes can’t seem to get Tristan out of his head. Driven by a new sense of purpose, Wes begins to think that—despite every authority figure telling him otherwise—maybe he can change for the better and graduate on time.

As a falling out with his friends becomes inevitable, Wes realizes that being himself means taking a stand—and blowing up the bad-boy reputation he never wanted in the first place.

Content warnings

Explicit language

Bullying

Alcoholism

Underage drinking

Racism (as experienced by a Black love interest)

Past domestic abuse

Childhood trauma

Smoking (cigarettes + weed)

Homophobia

Physical violence

Review

Why'd Wes have to go and make things so complicated 😔🤘

I hadn't expected to, but I found myself relating to Wes quite a bit. His experience of being labelled as a bad kid, and then only being seen as such without being given the chance to break that expectation, as well as his feelings of anger and fear and powerlessness, that no one wants to listen to him, that he can't open up to people, that he's inferior and will never amount to anything, took me right back to primary and secondary school lmao. (I'm so glad I'm not a teenager anymore.)

I also empathise with how awkward Wes feels around Tristan, or when he's trying to talk to people who aren't his friends; not knowing the right thing to say, or when he says something that comes off as angrier or meaner than he intends—that's literally me, baby!

A part I don't relate to is the bullying. Wes is like, a legit bully, like pushing kids into the lockers like in american high school movies kind of bully. While he's not the main aggressor among his friends, it still kind of hurt to read about how he hurt people in the past. I liked how his character arc developed, with him facing up to his actions and apologising to his victims, although I do think he was forgiven pretty easily; I personally would have held a grudge until I died, but good for them!

At the start of the book I was worried that this would be a whole "find a bf and magically all your problems are fixed!" kind of story, but while Tristan is definitely a motivating factor for Wes to improve himself, I really appreciate that Wes was the one who decided to take initiative and begin the first steps to becoming better.

There's layers of complexity to Wes and Tristan's relationship, because (a) Tristan is Black, and so deals with racism that Wes could never understand, (b) Tristan is out and Wes is not, (c) Tristan is a perfectionist and has a goal and life plans, while Wes is flunking high school with no plans to apply for college, (d) Wes had an abusive childhood, and Tristan has loving supportive parents, and (e) Wes is poor and Tristan is wealthy.

These are a lot of issues to handle in one book, and while I feel like the author does a good job discussing and resolving most of these elements, there's one point that I feel didn't get fully resolved, and that's the wealth disparity between them. Wes is super aware of this, he constantly notices the differences between the way they live, which makes him feel self-conscious around Tristan.

Spoiler warning, but at one point Tristan dresses Wes up in like a pricey cardigan and a polo shirt to meet his parents, and later Wes is furious and leaves early because he feels out of place and insecure, and that Tristan is trying to change who he is. Later, they talk and Wes comes to the conclusion that he was over-reacting, which, yeah, he was. But Tristan never apologises and is like "you know I would never have made you change your clothes if I knew it would make you feel bad!" He also makes fun of one of Wes's friends, and Wes wonders if part of the reason why he doesn't want to introduce Tristan to his friends was because he felt embarrassed.

I feel like this is a pretty big deal, and an obvious source of tension, that doesn't seem to get fully resolved. Most of Wes and Tristan's discussions about their relationship revolve around Wes apologising, but Tristan, even though he never does so intentionally, never apologises for making Wes feel inferior in this aspect.

I also feel that Tristan was kind of one-dimensional. From Wes's perspective, Tristan is perfect and flawless, and he puts him on a pedestal, while Wes is the one messing up. Tristan's only flaw, as far is I can tell, is that he struggles with anxiety, but he never seems to show it to Wes, for all that he encourages Wes to be emotionally vulnerable with him. I would have liked it if Tristan messed-up, or needed Wes to support him or comfort him in some way (Wes does support him, at near the ending, but that doesn't really count), to balance out their relationship a bit, instead of always having Tristan encouraging him, and having Wes mess up and make up for it.

The climax of this book gets really chaotic, huge shit goes down, like life-ruining shit. He manages to work it all out in the end, but I feel that it came way too easily, especially the problems he had with his friends. I feel like it got dismissed as some sort of misunderstanding, like Wes was the one making a big deal out of nothing. Afterwards, he and his friends talk it out very maturely, but where was all that maturity when shit was going down!!

I realise that a lot of my review sounds like I'm complaining, but this is really worth a read! The way this book discusses toxic masculinity, emotional vulnerability, dealing with trauma (because Wes is very clearly traumatised) is so well-done, and you can tell from the author's note that he put a lot of love and thought into this book. I would discuss this more but this review would get very spoilery.

To finish off this review, here are some nitpicks! These are minor details and do not affect the overall story! Some of these are purely personal issues I have that may not apply to other people!

Wes is stated to be a punk, and a lot of this book (the title, the chapter titles, the marketing) is about pop-punk, or scene music in general. But Wes doesn't seem to listen to pop-punk? The only band he mentions listening to is Metallica, which, last I checked, is a metal band. He wears a Linkin Park t-shirt once (huge slay) and mentions the My Chemical Romance reunion (double slay), but that's about it. He seems to be more of a metalhead tbh, which there's nothing wrong with, but I was hoping for more pop-punk references. (This sounds greedy, since almost every chapter title is a pop-punk reference, and I did appreciate that, but I wanted more!!)

I didn't vibe with the audiobook narrator. I'm kind of (very) picky about audiobooks, so the fact that I didn't dnf shows that he did a decent job at least, but I feel like he missed the mark on narrating the dialogue. Sometimes I couldn't tell the difference between Wes's internal narration and when he was actually speaking which was confusing, and the narrator also read everything in this sad, hesitant sort of voice, which works for the overall vibe of the story, but makes the happy, lighthearted moments in the book feel sad as well.

Minor spoiler, Wes's mom got him and his friends tickets to see Metallica, but later they start growing apart and the concert is never mentioned again (unless I somehow missed it?), so its unclear if they did go to the Metallica concert. I need to know if they went, because if they skipped out on it due to their beef, I will be very sad on their behalf.

[wroteonedad]

The Teenage Smokers Collection

The first time I ever looked at anything Ed Templeton had done was when I was trying to figure out how I wanted my first photobook to look like. What type of paper I wanted to use, heck how heavy I wanted the paper to be. There is so much thought and process which goes into creating a photobook, a zine or any form of physical media that displays the work that you have created. Ed Templeton was no stranger to this. You see Templeton is a little bit of a dabbler, being a skateboarder, photographer, contemporary artist and vegan activist all at the same time. You name it, he has made it.

In 1999 Templeton published a breakout Zine titled 'Teenage Smokers', the whole project is pretty self explanatory. He took photos of teenagers smoking and the point of it was to explain that any of these images featured in the Zine are timeless based on the fact that there will always be teenagers smoking. I wanted to reflect on this project in particular, especially in a time where the vape is becoming more popular and more accessible to teenagers everywhere.

I feel as though there has always been something so cool about smoking. Not literally smoking and all the terrible effects it has for your health, but instead more how glamorised it was. We have only just began to enter a new era where it's no longer seen plastered over the pages of magazines, super models aren't photographed walking the streets holding a cigarette in their hand the way they used to. Actors are no longer smoking on TV shows, this mostly down to new legal rules in TV studios. Look at the way all of the characters looked on Twin Peaks chain smoking anywhere and any time, they all looked so cool. It just wouldn't really have the same effect if they were huffing a Lost Mary would it?

People back in the day looked so cool smoking that even David Bowie has a whole Instagram account dedicated to him smoking the cancer stick. But I'm trying to figure out why it was so cool in the Ed Templeton selection of images. Was it the rebellion, looking cooler because you simply didn't care and smoked because you enjoyed it or was it something such as lighting up a cigarette was the difference between being a child and being an adult?

But also, why do teenagers look so cool smoking too? I feel it has to be the sense of fashion, the attitude it feels like we receive from looking at these images. The way it feels that most products that have ever been created feel like they are being made for a teenage audience. It feels like there's a shamelessness to it.

The very first edition of Teenage Smokers was presented as more of a zine. A small collection of smoking teenagers, these people mostly photographed around the skateboarding park where they would take breaks every so often to light one up. The softcover book itself was only 36 pages long and mostly consisted of Polaroid images.

Templeton described the notion of how he came up with the concept in the first place; the idea of him once as a kid thinking that smoking looked really cool. He tore a piece of paper which was length wise long enough to be a cigarette, stuffed it with grass from the front garden, set it on fire and toked it. He explained that the 'cigarette' he had just tried tasted like glass and from that moment on, he couldn't understand how teenagers would indulge in the pain just to look cool. The first edition zine is the most interesting in terms of its full creation. Low budget because he barely had any money, only 36 pages and once that original collection was sold out, they never sold again.

In 2015 came a brand new release of Teenage Smokers 2, a brand new hardback cover featuring nothing except for an illustration of a hand with painted red nails as a cigarette burns. The book itself doesn't have a correlation with the original zine, rather it is a whole new book of original images that were taken after the release of the first. I feel as though Templeton could have left Teenage Smokers as its own singular project, for that one zine to be the only format of work to ever exist on the piece. It keeps it original, especially with the whole original set of works being created in the 90s; times have changed so much since that it could have been left as a standalone.

It is interesting for one artist to simply use smoking as its main subject in all of the images, it doesn't feel deeply thought out at all. There doesn't feel like there was a deep research project that came with the works behind the scenes. It feels more of a spur of the moment, as if Templeton waited for these people to come along and carried his camera with him at all times to ensure he got the shots he wanted. To be able to see so many people from so many different passages of life all come together through their passion for skateboarding and their hobby of smoking is an oddly wonderful thing, something that is so simple yet so effective for their community. I truly don't think there is much to say about these images other than they're fact they're nice,,, my lecturers would have hated me looking at an image and just saying they're nice, but they are. It's so refreshing to me to be able to look at a set of photos and just agree that they're simple and effective. They work well as a collection and they also work well as their own separate shots.

[the-firebird69]

Watch "Elton John - Tiny Dancer (Official Lyric Video)" on YouTube

Little people that completely lose put it up a bunch of times who are the world after they figure out what they're saying. What the saying is because of his little b**** Jen I lost my husband and here is things I'm taking too hok. Is my husband is dust we had to consider it because he was unrecognizable that's what it was when he died trying if it was yesterday. And the three girls single now, what's up boy with coming to grab you. Finally they found some guys already I got high with them another bad sign. One girl do what to do inside elly smashed the windshield of her brother's car. And we wondered about it what was the house to the place right away I'm going to use we figured out something she said it about him and he doesn't know it what does so we do we prepped and we hitter hard to the teeth came flying out out there it took them all.

She's mad because the skateboard devices aren't fast enough that's what you're saying to I said yet other problems you should make a complete list Google who do you think you are a little s*** you going up against someone who's the Mastiff massive Army demons that don't you read and you want everything cuz my skateboard sucks I vented you never paid me for you're too sweet loon no you're dead person you're stupid person you don't fuc dumb fuck.

She turns around looks and says I don't care anymore we're going to say it but that's very nice we're going to kill every single person so your people to stand up and no matter where the other dead for real stupid. What I'm saying is we don't care anymore that's twice the reason that the first one was to eradicate you because we have no choice now so we'll check because of you after you dead.

She said up for an hour and said why I said is in trouble this is how you did and that whole speech was just so we could get all your assholes around you thank you you moron so you did kill em All We got to her and it's not Jenna but Ellie but it's close and she died and that's it sounds good people are stupid defeating The Offspring out there there's tons of them coming out the song happened yesterday it would get what they're doing he wanted to show people he says this how dare you live off people who are productive lives and care about life who know you so smart and doesn't care about their own. green outfit she what's up with that skyd says you're right about something we really don't care that much let's get back to you that's what i do. She says you need to hear our opinion and suggest nothing to hear what's one sentence long and doesn't mean anything so that you're not very bright. She reaches out and says if I had a gun I'd shoot you I said you probably wouldn't get the drop on you will see old ladies would be dead if you tried. you hear from you your bleeding hearts your dumb ass excuses your dumb reasons that we're all guilty they'd killed you all is coming for you old idiot bitches. Shoots up words for because he does that again then she breaks down crying and says they never let us know anything we ruined it a lot of us can tell it is he is happy it's so bad.

It was Max fault can I find out all the problems and what was wrong with this Mac wife is such an abused me it's a lost no matter what just got through this program has no face or conference that I would overcome him he has no understanding that I have anyting and he is worried right then the kid in the streets of Calcutta because they have to watch out for a new stuff he's a moron.

We decide something he's not that bad but he's pretty stupid I need some heritage the most things because he sincerely this wasn't cold crap so it looks like he doesn't know anything about us but he has info and Intel what is right that's his behavior just puts his head down and starts flying against the wall who's who just died cuz of cork but that's because of him. This is North Port to I'm probably not going to make it this is over my head but I did it.

Thor Freya

Zues Hera

Olympus