#there are days i am still furious that the world did not end in 2012 or 2016

[itstimeforstarwars]

I spent a decade fucking around instead of preparing for my future because the world was burning down around me and I figured there would be no future but now that I've lived a decade longer than expected I am begrudgingly trying to plan for a future I don’t believe in because if it's already gone on for an extra decade who’s to say it won't go on another fifty years.

[in-tua-deep]

20 for Vanya?

20. What-ifs/Alternate Timelines

I have a lot of what-ifs and alternate timelines for Vanya lmao, especially ones that prevent the apocalypse because I’m a sucker for a happy ending tbh

What if Vanya was included? Why not? Klaus’s powers weren’t useful for missions, Allison’s story for Claire was literally like “yeah Klaus got distracted by ghosts in the background lol” so it’s not like a kid without offensive powers couldn’t do it

you have rebellious Vanya aus, where she decides, like some neglected children do, so act out. If her father isn’t going to acknowledge anything good about her, she’s going to make him acknowledge the bad. Punishment might be the only time he pays attention to her, after all.

(let’s call this an au where the pills suppress her powers but not so much her emotions)

So you have an au where she sneaks out and joins the missions. She breaks into the mausoleum and picks Klaus up and stares her father down with a challenge in her eyes. 

Five vanishes, and Vanya gets worse. She plays her violin at 2 in the morning. She refuses to eat her broccoli. she teams up with diego to see who can piss dad off the most

(her and Diego actually get along very well in this sort of au, honestly)

Vanya gets out and plays the violin and gets angry. She plays with fury and fire and gets second chair, because Helen is actually really very good. But she makes Helen work for it. Helen isn’t secure in her position, she always knows that Vanya is a step away from taking it from her

and maybe that should make them enemies, but it doesn’t. They’re rivals. Helen respects the hell out of Vanya, and Vanya can’t help but admire the woman who makes the most difficult pieces look effortless

(RIVALS TO LOVERS: VIOLIN EDITION)

Vanya writes her book. Except she kicks down Diego’s boiler room door and is like “DIEGO”

“WHAT”

“I WANT TO WRITE A BOOK ABOUT HOW MUCH DAD FUCKING SUCKS”

“I’LL BE RIGHT THERE”

as one of the rebel kids, Vanya actually got along well with Klaus as well since she helped him sneak out and 100% also smoked at least some weed with him because it would piss off Reggie tbh though she didn’t get into the harder drugs like he did

(showing up absolutely plastered to breakfast when they were sixteen was hilarious even if the laps they had to run around the block were not)

anyway Klaus crashes at her apartment sometimes, with supervision, because she loves Klaus but he has a problem and has stolen from her before but he’s still her brother but regardless

Klaus-Diego-Vanya sleepovers where they brainstorm the book to shit talk their father. Honestly it’s kind of a blast. They all get super wine drunk and end up watching Mary Poppins together with some Very Loud Opinions about nannies in general tbh

klaus throwing popcorn at the screen: BOO WHY WAS OUR CHILDHOOD NOT A MUSICAL???

diego: idk if you can have cheery musicals about child soldiers

vanya: i mean if they can have a musical about child labor in factories and the starvation of the workers in oliver twist you could do something with child superheroes

klaus: EXACTLY thank you vanya

they publish the book (luther is uNHAPPY, vanya dedicates her book to ‘all my siblings who survived the Reginald Regime but especially those who didn’t’, and she gifts Reggie a copy that says “fuck you lol” and is signed by her, diego, and klaus), they continue living, they go to the funeral when reggie kicks the bucket

and then five shows up, feral and aching

and five tells vanya about the apocalypse, and vanya thinks about their father saying time travel messed with the mind, and then she thinks - fuck the old man he was wrong about her (ordinary, fuck that, she’s Vanya Fucking Hargreeves) and he was probably wrong about Five, too

and Five is wholeheartedly believed

“Let me call Diego,” Vanya says when Five tells her about the eye, “I bet he could totally wear a police uniform and get info about the eye. And if not, I’m absolutely sure Klaus could improvise a solution. He’s good at that.”

“Klaus??” Five asks, vaguely suspicious.

“We don’t talk about the Sleepover of 2012.” Vanya intones solemnly, and refuses to answer any further questions on the topic.

Harold Jenkins comes to the apartment and tries to woo Vanya or whatever, and Vanya is kind of like... “Look, Leonard. I can be your teacher for violin. It’s my job. But I am in a relationship. And also like, super gay. If you have a problem with that then I am not the teacher for you.”

Actually scratch Diego and Klaus getting called, which they do, Vanya looks at them and her thirteen year old brother and is like “wait. actually i know someone infinitely better to crack this case wide open.”

“Who?” Five, Klaus, and Diego all ask

“My girlfriend.” Vanya says proudly, called Helen up.

And Helen walks into the building like she’s at fucking war and has such demanding confidence that they just give her the information she seeks and apologize for inconveniencing her.

“Hey Vanya are we still on for date night tomorrow?” Helen casually asks after, and Five kind of wants to be her when he grows up honestly after watching her verbally eviscerate Lance or whatever the fuck his name is

“Yeah.” Vanya confirms, “Unless there’s other apocalypse stuff to do?”

“You take all the time you need, honey.” Helen says warmly, “After all the more time you take the less you have to practice.”

“I’m gonna destroy the concert piece and you know it.” Vanya threatens.

Helen sniffs, “Okay, whatever you say second chair.”

and then they kiss and Helen ditches and the others just kind of look at Vanya judgingly

“In fairness, she’s very hot and very talented.” Vanya defends herself.

Klaus nods sagely. Vanya nods back. He gets it. 

“Concert piece?” Diego asks, because he has priorities.

“Yeah, I’ve already asked for tickets for all of you and you will be attending Diego.” Vanya smiles prettily with all her teeth.

“When is it?” Five asks

“April 1st.” Vanya tells him, “And no that isn’t an April Fools joke. You will attend and you will marvel at my skill. And maybe run interference between Helen and Allison because I’m kind of afraid they’re going to rip each others throats out to establish dominance.”

“That’s the day of the apocalypse.” Five informs her.

“Not on my goddamn watch.” Vanya says, because her family will attend her fucking concert and they will make awkward small talk with her girlfriend and the fucking apocalypse has better lay down and get over itself because nothing can stop Vanya’s goddamn plans

“I can investigate Meritech more.” Diego offers, because Lance-or-whatever-his-name-is is clearly shady as shit, “I have police contacts I could go through. Hey Vanya, your concert tickets include a plus one?”

“They can.” Vanya shrugs.

“Sweet, let me see if Patch can come.”

“She’s way too good for you, bro.”

“Shut your goddamn mouth.”

Anyway the point is they all go home, and Diego goes to talk to his police contacts and Five is definitely at home for when Hazel and Cha-Cha attack the mansion, oops. 

“Whomst the FUCK.” Vanya yells, kicking Hazel in the crotch because she’s Vanya Fucking Hargreeves she knows self defense thank you very much

“Ah.” Five says. “Hazel. How’s it going.”

“Just peachy.” Hazel wheezes, “Why’d you betray the Commission?”

“Well, you know. They cut the dental. That was really the last straw.” Five says, sarcastically.

“The dental.” Hazel echoes back, nodding very seriously, “I fucking know. You know physical therapy isn’t even covered anymore?”

“No shit?” Five says, “I mean you’d think with a job as physical as ours...”

“I know.” Hazel howls, vindicated. 

“Five.” Vanya says, rolling her eyes, “The house?”

“Oh, right.” Five frowns, looking at Hazel, “I mean. Can you like, leave? And not come back?”

“‘Fraid not.” Hazel actually sounds somewhat apologetic, “You know what the Commission is like. They’re really gunning for you.”

Five nods, because really what did he expect, “Can you leave like, temporarily? I mean you’d pretty clearly outnumbered. I don’t even know where Cha-Cha is, but judging by the furious yelling she probably met our sister and brother and Luther is hard to kill. Trust me, if he wasn’t we would have killed him when we were like, eight. But for real, can you get out of our house? I mean. Storming the den? Seriously? What kind of information did they even give you?”

“They didn’t give us any information.” Hazel responds back, sounding appropriately outraged, “They didn’t even tell us you could teleport.”

“Well that’s just rude. You’d think they wanted you dead or something.” Five muses, “But seriously, get out of my house.”

“Yeah, that’s fair.” Hazel admits, and leaves, because honestly Hazel is chill like that and knows when he’s lost. And Hazel also has a lot to think about. Like the fact that the Commission sucks and doesn’t even have dental, and how pretty the donut lady is. 

and Vanya is just like... okay. Weird. Is that going to happen again? Probably? I mean. Okay, this day has already been so goddamn weird. This week, honestly.

And they keep getting attacked by the Commission. And Vanya finds out someone broke into her apartment and stole her meds. What the fuck. 

“Did your shitty assassin friends do this?” Vanya asks, waving an empty pill bottle.

“Why would they?” Five asks, honestly confused.

“Because they’re assholes?” Vanya says, honestly outraged.

“You got me there.” Five admits.

The combined forces of Diego-and-Patch (because Patch is actually thrilled that Diego is asking for help regarding an actual fucking crime) figure out that the eyeballs are being sold illegally

Klaus is not kidnapped so he’s fine, just tagging along and living his best life, however this also means that Klaus does not steal the briefcase and Hazel and Cha-Cha are fine

Vanya keeps Five close at hand because frankly she doesn’t want him to leave again and she did really miss him. Also if she does save the world she can lord it over Helen’s head forever. 

And so Five is around when Vanya’s powers manifest, probably because they just got targeted by commission goons again because they’re trying real hard to kill five and separate Vanya

“Holy SHIT.” Five says, very intelligently, “You have POWERS.”

“Wow. Gonna have to write a fucking sequel to the shit-talking-dad book.” Vanya says, honestly a little light headed.

And then Vanya finds out her powers are sound based.

“Oh no.” Vanya says, “Where the fuck are my pills. I am not relearning how to play the violin with-powers a few days before the big concert Five, what the fuck.”

“But you need to learn to control them!” Five protests, “They’re your powers!”

“They’re a goddamn inconvenience is what they are.” Vanya states, “I mean, what am I going to do with them? Stop a bank robbery with the Umbrella Academy? Yeah, no thanks, that ship has sailed and sunk to the bottom of the ocean Titanic style. I’ll figure them out when I’m not in danger of blasting the audience halfway across the continent.”

“Yeah.” Five admits, “That’s fair.”

“Besides, if I’ve been on that shit as long as I have, and it’s been a long time, I cannot even IMAGINE what quitting cold turkey will do.” Vanya points out, very sensibly, like a siblings who has watched Klaus go through withdrawal symptoms more than once.

“Maybe there’s extra at the manor?” Five suggests, “Pogo probably knows.”

“Oh yeah I bet Pogo knows something.” Vanya mutters maybe a little bitterly.

They go back to the mansion and the Commission is honestly pulling their hair out tbh, and they ask Pogo who kind of pales and is like “UHHHH YES I CAN GET VANYA EXTRA PILLS” and goes to get them from whatever stash

“Fucking sweet.” Vanya whispers, entirely done with this situation, “The only adult male role model I had and he hid my powers from me and betrayed me. Love that for us.”

Five shrugs, “I mean, you’re right. All of our adult role models were all kinds of fucked up.”

“You vanished when we were 13.” Vanya says, “Didn’t you find like, any other adults ever?”

“Oh let me tell you about the Handler.” Five says, and proceeds to do just that. Because let’s be real, the Handler was the only human interaction Five had after forty odd years alone it was pretty damn important

Vanya, on the other hand, has strong plans to eviscerate the Handler should the two ever meet because Five deserved way better than to be forcibly made into an assassin?? honestly fuck that woman

that’s it that’s the au

Vanya finds out she has powers and is like “i have a LIFE i don’t want to interrupt it with bullshit POWERS,,, also going cold turkey off my meds seems like a bad idea if I don’t want to deal with withdrawal symptoms during my concert for fucks sake, my gf would never let me live it down if i skipped”

so vanya takes her meds, does NOT destroy the world, makes every one of her siblings go to the concert and even invites Hazel and Agnes after Hazel betrays Cha-Cha to join team No-Apocalypse. 

and then introduces them all to her girlfriend

“Holy shit Vanya.” Helen deadpans, “Your family is all kinds of fucked up.”

“I know.” Vanya says, aggrieved, “It’s been a long fucking week. Want to go camping and help me figure out my cool sound based powers? Bet they’ll make me a better violin player than you.”

“I think the fuck not.” Helen hisses, always up for a challenge, “Let’s do this. Me and my violin vs. you and your dumb baby powers. You’re on.”

“FAMILY CAMPING TRIP.” Klaus hollers, with all the enthusiasm in his little heart.

“Holy shit this is going to be such a disaster, I just know it.” Diego mutters.

“Shut up, it’ll be nice.” Allison says, elbowing Diego with her pointy pointy elbows.

“It’s going to be a shitshow.” Vanya says serenely, because it is. That’s just who their family is. 

Wouldn’t have it any other way, though

[giftofshewbread]

Apostate

: By Candy Austin  

Published on:June 26, 2020

Hebrews 3:12 “Take heed, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief, in departing from the living God.”

In recent years, several high-profile Christians have chosen to turn their collective backs on God and walk away from the Faith. Famous Christians such as Musicians. Leaders, Authors, and Pastors, some even losing their faith to the point of committing suicide. This is nothing more than an ‘utter tragedy’ to say the least!

From CBN news: ‘Losing My Religion:’ What We Can Learn from Celebrity Christians Who Walk Away from the Faith

20 years ago, Harris’ book on Christians and dating became a best seller, and Harris became an instant Christian celebrity when he was only 21 years old. Harris served as lead pastor at a Maryland megachurch from 2004 to 2015.

He now renounces his earlier teachings on purity, saying they “contributed to a culture of exclusion and bigotry.” Harris has also apologized to the LGBT community for ways his “writing and speaking contributed to a culture of exclusion and bigotry.” He recently took part in a gay pride festival in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Last month Harris revealed in an Instagram post that he has left Christianity altogether. “I have undergone a massive shift in regard to my faith in Jesus,” he wrote. “By all measurements that I have for defining a Christian, I am not a Christian.”

Marty Sampson who wrote music for Australia’s Hillsong ministry years ago also recently posted doubts about the Christian faith on issues such as hell and suffering, saying, “I am genuinely losing my faith, and it doesn’t bother me.” – Source

From CBN News: Beloved Pastor, Mental Health Advocate Tragically Takes His Own Life

Jarrid Wilson, author, pastor, and founder of Anthem of Hope, tragically took his life Monday night, on the eve of World Suicide Prevention Day. – Source

From CBN News: Christian Singer Announces, ‘I no longer believe in God’: How You Can Experience Jesus More Personally Than Ever Before

Jon Steingard is a pastor’s son and a musician, singer, and songwriter. He has been the lead singer for the Christian band Hawk Nelson since March 2012.

Now he has made an Instagram announcement that is generating headlines: “After growing up in a Christian home, being a pastor’s kid, playing and singing in a Christian band, and having the word ‘Christian’ in front of most of the things in my life—I am now finding that I no longer believe in God.” –Source

To be honest, I have a hard time understanding how people who once supposedly lived their lives with and for God all of a sudden decide one day that they do not believe in Him anymore. How does one sing songs, preach, or write books for years at a time and supposedly for God’s Glory, all of a sudden do ‘an about face’ on Him?

All the while, some had made a considerable amount of money from their ‘supposed Faith’ which, in the end, when they decided to walk away, makes it seem that the whole time they were just faking it and ‘making merchandise of Him.’

Such is the case with our Prodigal daughters who will be 27 and 22 this year. These are grown women who still post rants for all to see, mind you, on their social media pages. Rants stating their ‘ungrateful dissatisfaction’ on their upbringing. Lamenting their lack in getting to ‘be their true selves’ because of the restrictions of living in a Christian home.

During their time as children, as I have stated in previous articles, we were in no way as strong in the Lord as we are now. Basically, we were like a lot of Secular Christian Families nowadays who still live like the world. Our girls were raised in church but were in no way made to attend every time the church doors were open. We taught them about Jesus, but we probably only read the Bible on occasion, at best.

Anyhow, nothing was ‘force fed’ or anything like they would have their social media friends believe. Once they became teenagers, our family did start to grow more in the Lord. Our girls seemed to enjoy attending Youth Camps and even wanted to do ‘Mission Work’ when the opportunity arose. They each had their own Bible and seemed to have their own genuine relationships with the Lord until they each fell in love with an atheist.

In recent years, though, as it seems by their posts, our raising them to know and love the Lord and to follow His Word apparently became ‘toxic’ to them. How dare we not allow them to be their own person as a child, with no restraints, and to ‘Do as thou wilt’!  How ‘unhealthy’ we were to want them to do things God’s way! By pointing them to God’s Word, that meant that we were somehow silencing their voice?! What kind of lousy parenting is that?!

All of a sudden it was a ‘detriment’ for them to grow up in a God-fearing home! Look at how much they missed out on by not getting to sin like everyone else! Wait… now that they have ‘apostatized’ and are ‘finally free’ from all of our Christianly toxicity, everyone on their social media needs to know that they have ‘triumphantly walked away’ from all godly hinderances!

Now they can ‘pursue their heart’s desire’ to the fullest extent, by having premarital sex every night, march in any number of gay pride and abortion parades, get drunk several times a week, smoke all the hookah pipes and weed as often as they like, indulge in all the secular movies, concerts, and music, and any other ‘ungodly pursuits’ they may have! Yay!

Whoo hoo! Now all of their social media friends can ‘cyber pat them on the back’ for they are ‘Free at Last, Free at Last; now they can Thank their Father the Devil that they are Free at Last! Being a Christian was such a burden! Mom and Dad who are total ‘Southern Baptist Bigots’ and their ‘quack’ Rapture beliefs can stuff it! We are Women now, and we are gonna do as we darn well please!’ (Tongues audaciously sticking out and devil-horn hand signs galore!)

Yawn… ‘pinky clap’ on their newfound independence as they ‘defiantly and proudly’ march down the wide road to destruction. Whoo hoo. Yay. We are so happy for you. Not.

‘Deeply saddened and frustrated’ does not even begin to describe where we are at in seeing all of this play out in our Prodigal adult children. The truth is, in these Last Days, we feel ‘utterly defeated.’ The enemy has robbed us of so much and keeps on doing so, no matter what! We cannot win for losing.

No matter what we do, we are perpetually viewed as the ‘bad guys.’ We could give all our love, approval, support, time, money, help, and gifts to them and still somehow we would be deemed as ‘the toxic Christian parents.’ Ultimately, we are despised and rejected, year after year; and, frankly, there is not much we can do about it… except Pray.

From Got Questions: Will there be a great apostasy during the end times?

The Bible indicates that there will be a great apostasy during the end times. The “great apostasy” is mentioned in 2 Thessalonians 2:3. The KJV calls it the “falling away,” while the NIV and ESV call it “the rebellion.” And that’s what an apostasy is: a rebellion, an abandonment of the truth. The end times will include a wholesale rejection of God’s revelation, a further “falling away” of an already fallen world.

The Greek word translated “rebellion” or “falling away” in verse 3 is apostasia, from which we get the English word apostasy. It refers to a general defection from the true God, the Bible, and the Christian faith. Every age has its defectors, but the falling away at the end times will be complete and worldwide. The whole planet will be in rebellion against God and His Christ. Every coup requires a leader, and into this global apostasy will step the Antichrist. We believe this takes place after the church has been raptured from the earth.

Jesus warned the disciples concerning the final days in Matthew 24:10–12: “At that time many will turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each other, and many false prophets will appear and deceive many people. Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold.” These are the characteristics of the great apostasy of the end times. – Source

Bottom line, Jesus tells us to love our enemies, do good unto them, and pray for those who despitefully use and persecute us. We need to also pray for all the high-profile Christians who have walked away from the Lord in recent years.

Pray that the god of this world would be hindered or stopped from blinding the minds of those who are perishing! That God would grant them and all our Prodigals salvation before it is too late! For Apostates and Prodigal sons and daughters to come to their senses and come back home to God the Father, sooner rather than later!

Time. Is. Ultimately. Running. Out.

Until next time… Maranatha!

(JESUS = THE WAY, THE TRUTH, & THE LIFE)

Candy Austin

*My 2cents worth here, as the Tumblr Author of this page, (giftofshewbread) I just wanted to say, I myself, love the lord, but it’s been a hell of a battle with the flesh & spirit, to become a follower of Christ, it’s the greatest journey you’ll ever endure & it’s truly a battle within, like they say, ‘The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak,’ and it certainly is.  God help us all, I myself wrestle a lot in these past few years, it’s not been easy and I’ve called out God and I’ve been furious with Him and not trying to come from a selfish part of me, just one that is very battle weary and people have become so ugly/cruel/wicked and in my situation, it’s been extra hard because of being alone, not much for fellowship, just thru internet and it’s very meager and so, it’s been a very lonely journey, oh I know the Lord is with us, but yet, we are human and so much to learn, it can just sure be a solo feeling and hard time of it.  Well anyways, holding on, but Lord, Maranatha, Amen !

Leho Lechem 

[mostlysignssomeportents]

#5yrsago Aaron Swartz was no criminal

Dan Purcell, one of Swartz' lawyers, writes about the spiteful and unreasonable charges that led to his suicide—and MIT's gutless support of his prosecutors.

I am a lawyer in San Francisco with a firm called Keker & Van Nest. I was one of Aaron's lawyers in his criminal case, in 2012 and early 2013.

I didn’t know Aaron that well, and our interactions were always colored by the fact that he didn’t really want to be talking to me. I was a criminal defense lawyer after all, and the only reason we knew each other was because he was facing a federal criminal indictment under the CFAA (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act) for computer fraud.

Those of you who knew Aaron don't need me to tell you what kind of person he was. Brian Knappenberger's excellent movie, "The Internet's Own Boy," will tell you more about Aaron than I could. But one thing Aaron was not was a criminal, and I'm here to clear up a few misconceptions you may have about what he did and what he was charged with.

One thing that drives me crazy is when people refer to his criminal case as a case about "hacking." And they do it in sort of a pejorative, scary way. And it's just nonsense. Aaron was, of course, a hacker in the broad sense of the term: he was an innovative thinker, looking for creative ways around problems. But in the criminal sense of the word, as somebody who breaks into a secure computer system for nefarious purposes, Aaron was no hacker, and he didn't do anything like that.

One thing that Aaron strongly believed was that the advances, the discoveries and the secrets we’ve collectively unlocked over the past millennia, about how the world works, belong to all of us. Aaron greatly resented people or entities who try to lock up scientific knowledge and keep it away from general use, so they might monetize it for personal gain.

You might be surprised at how much money is being made in this world by entities that follow just that business model. They take things that are in the public domain, and take them out of the public domain, and then charge for access to them. One field where this happens a lot is academic publishing. Obviously, there is so much information in so many books that it’s not practical to just have physical copies of them all. Digitizing all that data is an easy solution, and indeed there are many places to look up scholarly content online. But when you go to try to do that, you'll generally find that there's a subscription fee, or you can't access them unless you are affiliated with a certain institution. They're in the public domain—meaning that everyone is entitled to read it—but they’re not actually public or available for public use.

This bothered Aaron. It bothered him a lot. And he had fought against this problem throughout his life. He wanted to teach the system a lesson. So, he went to MIT, a university that had, and still has, one of the most permissive computer networks in the world—certainly for an institution of that size. At the time he did what he did, in 2010-2011, anyone in the world could walk onto MIT’s campus. With or without a student ID. With or without any affiliation with MIT at all. They could log on to MIT’s system as a guest. They didn't have to use their real name. And then they could do whatever they wanted on MIT's system.

One thing that MIT made available to its users was access to JSTOR, an online database of scholarly materials. So anybody in the world could go to MITs campus, they could get on to JSTOR, and they could download articles from JSTOR. Anyone.

That’s what Aaron did.

He went to the MIT campus, like anyone could have done. He logged onto the system, like anyone could have done. He went on to JSTOR, like anyone could have done. And he downloaded articles.

That is not hacking. That is walking through a door that MIT, the owner of the door, deliberately left open for anyone to walk through.

Of course, the story's not exactly that simple, because Aaron didn’t want to take the time to manually download thousands of articles, which would have been impractical. He wrote what experts have confirmed was a fairly simple computer program to automate the downloading. So he left his laptop behind, and he went on his way. He downloaded the files, but he didn't steal anything; he used the access freely given at MIT. All the articles that he downloaded stayed in the JSTOR database. They were still available to anybody with access to JSTOR. If you have a JSTOR subscription, and you go to the database, they are still there today. He didn't deprive anybody of access to that material.

After a while, JSTOR noticed the downloading activity and JSTOR shut down access to their database from MIT’s network. For a few days, nobody could get onto JSTOR using the MIT network. That was an inconvenience, for sure, but it was temporary, and MIT’s access to JSTOR was soon restored.

What Aaron did, whether you call it a prank or a consciousness-raising exercise, was not a crime. He downloaded a bunch of articles he was permitted to access using an automated program that made it easier. The idea that anybody could think that was a crime was insane to me. Was it inconsiderate? Possibly. Many acts of civil disobedience and conscious-raising are, and I think Aaron probably would have pleaded guilty to that.

JSTOR was the ostensible victim here, but JSTOR made it clear from the start that they didn't see this as a Federal case. They didn't want Aaron to be prosecuted; they just basically wanted it to be over.

So, why all the fuss? Why did this terrible thing happen?

The first reason is prosecutorial discretion. The prosecutor was Steve Heymann, the head of the Computer Crimes division of the United States Attorney’s office in Boston. You’ll hear a little from him, and a little about him, in Brian’s movie, but I have nothing good to say about him. You might ask, like I did, what Aaron’s actions had to do with “computer crimes.” Aaron hadn’t broken into a secure network and stolen credit card numbers. He hadn't stolen anyone's healthcare data. He hadn't violated anyone's privacy. He hadn't caused anybody to lose any money. There are things that are "computer crimes" that we all recognize are invasive and dangerous, and this was not one of them.

But Steve Heymann did what bureaucrats and functionaries often choose to do. He wanted make a big case to justify his existence and justify his budget. The casualties be damned.

Unfortunately, he had a lot of weapons on his side, in addition to having the power of the Federal Government. He had the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which is an over broad federal statute that has been made more broad by federal prosecutors trying to stretch its terms. But under the indictment in Aaron's case, the government still had to prove that Aaron had gained unauthorized access to a computer system. Our defense was really pretty simple. There were going to be other nuances, and we were going to talk a lot about Aaron’s motivations and the type of person Aaron was, but our bottom line was going to be that Aaron had done only what MIT permitted him to do. He hadn't gained unauthorized access to anything. He had gained access to JSTOR with full authorization from MIT. Just like anyone in the jury pool, anyone reading Boing Boing, or anyone in the country could have done.

We hoped that the jury would understand that and would acquit Aaron, and it quickly became obvious to us that there really wasn't going to be opportunity to resolve the case short of trial because Steve Heymann was unreasonable.

Of course, after Aaron's passing, it's really easy for them to say "35 years. That was a bluff. It was never gonna happen." That was not what they were telling us. Heymann always insisted on a sentence of hard time in Federal Prison. We said, "this is really a very trivial thing. Can't we resolve it with probation or some other thing that made a little more sense and would make it possible for Aaron to go on with his life?”

He said "no." He insisted that Aaron plead to a felony and serve prison time. And of course, what he said, as prosecutors often do, is that if we go to trial, it won't be so easy, and if we lose, well, this is a tough judge, and the prosecution is going to recommend a very difficult sentence. Aaron may end up having a term of years.

These after-the-fact statements they're making in the media, to try to make them seem more reasonable? That's all they are.

It really goes to show you how much power prosecutors wield in our Federal system. They dictate the charges that are brought. They dictate how serious the sentence will be, because the sentence depends on how the crime is charged, and there are sentencing guidelines that limit the judge’s discretion. And if a prosecutor has bad judgment, as Steve Heymann did—blowing out of all proporition a harmless effort to point out a problem with how public-domain information is being locked up—there isn't a lot you can do about that other than fight, and the consequences can be terrible.

The second reason for this terrible outcome is MIT.

As a defense attorney, I never expect the prosecutors to do the right thing, but I did expect MIT to do the right thing. JSTOR, as I said, came out and said "We don't want to see Aaron prosecuted. We consider the matter closed." MIT never did that. MIT carries a lot of water in Boston. I don't know if they could have stopped Heymann from prosecuting Aaron, but they could have done a lot more than they did.

MIT is an institution that was known for creativity, for hacking, for pranks, for pushing the boundaries—and for showing that good can come out of it. In this case, they responded like a typical corporation. They were entirely gutless. They were supplicants to the government, and they did whatever they could to help the government's case. They were not cooperative with us. A lot of people in the MIT community are furious with MIT, and I think they have good reason to be.

There's no question that Aaron paid a price because of who he was, because he was in the habit of sticking his thumb in the eye of the government, of challenging things, and of challenging certain things that were happening that weren't fair. He was an activist, and he wasn't afraid to ruffle a few feathers.

We'll see what the FOIA requests come to. I don't think there were orders from on high to hurt Aaron, and that Steven Heymann was just the arm of the law. But there's no question in our society, those that go along, get along better, and Aaron wasn't willing to go along, much to his credit.

In the end, the whole thing makes me very sad. It is sad for all of us that Aaron is no longer with us. Sad for his family and friends, most of all. I’m sad I didn’t have the chance to try to help him, and walk him out of the courtroom a free man. We could have done that, and it was certainly what he deserved. But I'm glad to honor Aaron's memory, and to think about what we can do for our own sakes, and our country’s sake.

Photo: Wikipedia

https://boingboing.net/2014/11/18/aaron-swartz-was-no-criminal.html

[noelgarcias]

[ tommy martinez, cismale & he/him ] did you know that NOEL GARCIA was on full disclosure? yeah, apparently the TWENTY FIVE year old CHEF was hiding HE’S LIVING UNDER A FALSE IDENTITY TO AVOID HIS PAST. i never would’ve expected it from our resident ARTISAN. i wonder how they’ll deal with this, considering how PASSIONATE & STUBBORN they are. // written by pepper: twenty three, est, she/her.  

it is i, pepperoni mcpony back once again to bring you yet another messy ass muse. i am once again on that new muse juice, but also kind of on the recycled muse juice like i’ve used this fc and this name before but it didn’t work out, so i’ve changed a lot about him and revamped him and so now he’s better than every babeeyyy. down bellow will be a bit about noel, or rather dante if we’re being technical. you can just call him noel though. full disclosure (badum tss sdkjsdkj) this is gonna be messy as hell, because noel’s inspo is more scattered than percy’s but we’re gonna push through folks.

BIO ;

okay so noel’s family is kind of inspired by the quinns (from ‘you’ on netflix), the castillos (from how to get away with murder) and like henry gouldings family in crazy rich asians. 

dante isaac campana was brought into the world in madrid spain with a silver spoon dangling out of his mouth. you’d never guess from looking at him, what with his hobo chic style and generally unkept appearance but it’s the truth. he came in this world out of a well paid surrogate as the second child of the infamous sofia and gabriel campana. and he wanted for nothing because of it, his parents made sure of that.

gabriel was a ceo and sofia was a wildly successful author, and from the moment noel could breathe his parents had his whole life set up for him. after all they wanted their son to be successful and they planned to make sure of it. a hefty trust fund in his name, to be accessible at the age of eighteen. a place in the family business that he would fill the moment he finished university. they even had an arrangement for who noel would marry eventually, before he was even old enough to understand what the concept of marriage was. it was all planned out for noel without the slightest bit of input from noel himself, and dante  was just supposed for accept that. the funny thing is at first he did.

after all he was young and he had no reason not to. he loved his parents deeply at first, and they probably loved him in return, even if they had a bit of an odd way of showing it. dante’s parents were the type to shower their children in superficial affection. buying them things. kissing and hugging them when there was someone around to see. encouraging them only when it came to pursuits that they approved of. sure noel could draw, and learn guitar, and learn piano, as long as those things were just hobbies. as long as he didn’t forget the plan because The Plan was law.

dante only became aware of how conditional his parents love for them was when his elder sister started to slip under the pressure they put on her shoulders. anya campana was about fifteen at the time, and dante, six years her younger, had to watch as his sister crumbled. anya had always cared too much about what their parents thought of her, about impressing them and making them proud. it didn’t help that her parents made it clear that they would not accept anything less than excellence. the pressure drove anya to substance abuse, just to take the edge off, just to make things easier. it wasn’t long the weight of their parents expectations had drove anya to a full on addiction, all in the pursuit of success. but of course when dante’s parents found out they had no sympathy for her. only disappointment. their father had every plan to make anya, his eldest, the head of the company when she came of age, but that ‘slip up’ cost her the role. instead the position would be given to dante, and anya would be sent quietly to rehab. it was an eye opening experience for dante, honestly. to see just how replaceable their parents saw them.  

the truth is the campanas were fake. plastic. sure they smiled in the public eye and the relationship between the siblings at least was genuine, but the truth was gabriel was cheating on sofia when he thought no one was looking, and sofia had openly slapped each of her children across the face at least once, usually when she got a bit too much wine in her. the older dante got the more and more he felt his love for his parents becoming more of an obligation than anything tangible. 

when dante was thirteen, around the time anya’s second stint in rehab, all hell broke loose in the campana household. initially dante thought that his mother had uncovered one of his fathers many affairs again, but instead it was much worse. his mother had discovered his father had an illegitimate child with dante’s favourite childhood nanny of all people. considering sofia couldn’t have children herself (hence the surrogate for both of the campana children) and even gabriel was struggling with impotence, this was a shock and a slap in the face. only emphasized by the fact that dante’s ex nanny had passed away, leaving dante’s father as the kids legal guardian. 

and so suddenly dante had a younger sibling. it was a situation that took getting used to but it wasn’t long until dante adored them, and the feeling was quickly mutual. while dante’s father could barely interact with the child without inciting his wife, and dante’s mother treated them with coldness, dante and his sibling became painfully close due to circumstance. 

for years it went on like that. the three campana siblings all attempting to impress their parents for different reasons. his youngest sibling to feel less like an outsider, dante just because he knew no other way, anya because she desperately wanted to get back into their parents good graces. but anya never could do anything quite right, always somehow ended up messing up spectacularly and publicly. until one day, anya disappeared.

dante and his younger sibling were the first to notice. his parents just assumed that anya was on another bender, and when the siblings brought this to their attention that’s exactly what they said in reply. but they were wrong. in 2012 anya campana was kidnapped and held for a ransom of one billion dollars. dante can still remember getting the ransom call. he can still remember the sheer panic, the cold fear. and he can still remember his father refusing to pay the money. trying to negotiate with the kidnappers, as if anya’s life was just another deal. he can remember begging his father just to pay the money, because it wasn’t like they didn’t have it. but his father was convinced he could get the kidnappers to lower the price, or that the police would find anya before he had to pay it. they didn’t. anya campana died in the winter of 2012 at the hands of a couple of common criminals, all because their father apparently had his own idea about the worth of each of his children. 

dante was furious and disgusted and grieving. his sister, his confidante and likely one of the two people in his life to love him unconditionally, was gone. dante officially snapped when his mother had the audacity to write a book about the experience. by the time the book was picked up by a publisher, dante had packed his bags, liquidated his trust fund, taken his younger sibling and fled spain with two new identities for them both. his sibling was under the age of eighteen at the time, so the campanas really could have called the police and reported dante for kidnapping, but dante knew that his parents wouldn’t risk making a scene so soon after the spectacle that anya’s death was. he and his sibling would be safe for a while as long as they laid low. and they did. dante -- now known as noel garcia-- and his sibling moved to san francisco and have been keeping a low profile ever since. 

honestly, noel adapted to the american dream like a fish to water. having a new name, having no one in this continent knowing who he was, finally being out from under his parents thumb -- it was all so freeing, and noel really dove head first into that feeling. ever since he’s just been living the life he always dreamed of having. doing exactly what he wants and nothing less one hundred percent of the time (which is exactly how and why he got married, and is still married honestly). he lives his life on pure free spirited impulse one hundred percent of the time, with exception of rare show of responsibility he puts into helping raise his younger sibling. he tries to live his life in a way he hopes would make his sister proud. he’s determined to live enough for the both of them. 

somehow, despite the multiple private investigators his parents have undoubtedly sent to find them, they’ve remained undetected. that is until full disclosure decided to expose him. now noel is just waiting for the day one of his parents shows up at his door demanding he come back to take over the family business. he isn’t looking forward to it, but he is kinda looking forward to finally telling them to fuck off, which is really the only silver lining. 

PERSONALITY ; 

god who knows folks like i said dkjsdjksd noel is a mess in my brain

PASSIONATE THOUGH! god he’s so passionate, like noel just feels everything on 10 one hundred percent of the time. The type to get teary eyed over a dead bird, but also the type to like stay up five days straight working on a project because he can’t get it out of his mind

despite this thinks romantic love is a straight up myth lmao because of his parents relationship, so we love a contradictory king. a bleeding heart but also a philiophobe. 

nurturing honestly? but only with people he actually cares about like his sibling and wife. a dad friend i suppose. 

but also impulsive. like the type to suggest going to vegas on a whim and get WILDLY FUCKED UP DRUNK, but also that really coherent drunk who can be doing body shots one minute and be trying to gently coax someone else to drink water the next. 

thinks he’s funny! sometimes he is tbh. very sarcastic honestly.

a big ol’ flirt just naturally. also bi, so equal opportunity for everybody. 

very touchy feely tbh because he’s a tactile person.

a live and let live kinda guy like actually,,, so close to a hippie that percy is triggered. 

a bit promiscuous but he’s okay with it. he’s a hoe but he knows it you know. 

the most generous person when it comes to money and kindness. the type to sit down with a homeless person and end up giving them his jacket, five hundred dollars, and a new outlook on life. 

the type to hold a grudge until the day he dies, but also the type of person who can’t NOT help someone who needs help you know. like he hates his parents but if his mother called him tomorrow like i want to see you one last time before i die, he would fly out to spain to see her smh he might not talk to her the whole time because he’s petty and like ‘there, you’ve seen me’ efjkdsfj but he’d do it. 

very liberal. literally can’t talk to conservatives without wanting to physically fight them. has definitely gone to a protest and gotten arrested for punching a nazi. luckily was released before the whole living with a fake identity thing could be found out. 

HEADCANNONS ;

alright now onto the fun stuff.

deaf in his left ear and has been all his life. it’s kind of difficult for him to hear a specific person talking in a crowd of too many people, especially if you’re standing on his left so he might straight up text your instead. also if you’re standing on his left side in general, he might turn to face you better to hear you.

noel’s occupation is a chef at a restaurant but in truth at heart he’s an artist. like his art is his heart, and it’s actually very popular and he gets a lot of offers from people wanting to buy it but he can never part with anything he’s made so he always refuses the offers, no matter how much money the customer is bidding. he has refused offers on grounds such as ‘i didn’t like the vibes he was giving off’ or ‘that asshole was wearing a jack johnson shirt’ or even, once ‘pretty sure i saw that guy in a dream once. he fucking sucked.’ so most of his art decorates his and evie’s apartment instead, and he’ll even give some to friends for free. noel actually wants to become a full time artist but considering how picky he is about who actually buys his art, it’s unlikely because he’ll literally make no money. hence, being a chef. no matter what noel enjoys seeing people enjoy his food, so it works out. 

actually learned to cook from his family chef, and hasn’t really had time to get any professional training but he really wants to. he has absolutely snuck into culinary school very briefly before just to sit in on a few classes. just pretended he went there and made a bunch of friends and learned a lot of stuff, and even taught some culinary students a few things. but he was eventually discovered and kicked out rip, but it was a great time while it lasted.  

honestly pretty good at anything having to do with his hands, hence the artisan label. noel is the type of person who knows nothing about like mechanics but can like fix something if you put it in front of him. likes to make furniture as a hobby so hit your boy up if you want a sexy chair. also makes sculptures and does a bit of pottery, like your boy has his fingers in more than a few pots

intelligent in the way that he just has a lot of pretty well informed opinions like if you want a fun fact don’t go to noel but if you want a good insightful conversation he’s your man.

a big defender of the environment.

has a bunch of tattoos. i imagine him with at least one sleeve and he’s probably starting another. is seriously considering a neck tat. his parents would hate it and that just makes him love it more.

honestly got married a bit because it was a choice he got to make for himself that his parents had no control over. the thought of his parents still believing he will be playing into the arranged marriage they had laid out for him only for him to tell them he already married his bandmate was super satisfying.

doesn't do drugs at all, the most hell do is smoke weed. used to see his sister at her worst (aka withdrawal symptoms, two overdoses) and so he doesn’t even want to be close to anyone who does drugs, cause he can’t do that again. 

if you watch jenna marbles i want you to know that noel is julian in the kitchen and julian in the kitchen only

surprisingly has a green thumb? can revive almost any plant with relative ease

never learnt how to ride a bike tbh

surprising the type to get into physical fights when he’s drunk, which he hates, because it reminds him of his mother. 

WANTED CONNECTIONS ;

younger sibling ; if you’ve guessed that i’m going to put a wc into the main for noel’s younger sibling than you’ve guessed right but if anyone here wants it before i put the message into the main let me know!

claire to his brad ; ... please. i’m begging here. noel is a chef but i haven’t decided where and i really want him to have a chef friend or baker friend who he just messes around with in the kitchen. maybe they even make amateur funnily little gourmet-makes-esque youtube videos where noel doesn’t show his face because he doesn’t want his parents to see but sdkjsdkj he’s like julian behind the camera, making comments and having a good time. give me this.

a virgo ; speaking of julian, noel does have julian energy and so he therefore probably needs a jenna. please give him someone to help with his impulse control. someone to say, hey, maybe you shouldn’t deep fry that turkey in a huge vat right outside your apartment in the middle of may. maybe you should just take a nap. you know?

a love hate relationship ; honestly i just want someone who noel actively despises but still helps out anyways. like he doesn’t like who they are a person, but he can’t leave them alone, because they’re usually in some sort of trouble and unfortunately noel just can’t watch people implode. 

one night stands / hookups / previous dates ; noel’s marriage is open but since he was keeping his whole marriage a secret in the first place these people probably wouldn’t have known that at the time sdkjsdkj but noel is perfectly willing to explain that now that full disclosure has exposed them and he’s got no more secrets to keep. 

a best friend ; or two! i’d love a bromance for him and another close friendship that doesn’t have to be a bromance, just someone who he’s really close to. 

okay this has gotten hella long so i’m gonna stop now but like this if you want to plot and i’ll come running! and to anyone who got all the way to the end of this... you’re the real mvp. <3

[doomedandstoned]

Rage of Samedi Keep It Slow, Heavy, and Evil in New Video

~By Mel Lie~

I can say with certainty that these five German raging "Pfälzern devils" are even more on fire at the moment than usual...or in other words they are burning like hell and I’m absolutely with them!

The South German Voodoo-Barons RAGE Of SAMEDI have shouted out the news, that they will bring us to our knees with their new album 'Blood Ritual' (2020) on January 17th, released by Argonauta Records (pre-order here)

Rage of Samedi is based in Zweibrücken/Rhineland Palatinate, Germany, and originally founded in 2012 as a side-project, which relatively quickly turned out to be a main project. The band mates of this hellbent voodoo chamber, Lou Cifer (voice), Sam D. Durango (guitar/backing vox), DixieKing Boehme I (guitar), Nick "Scrios" Perkele (bass) and Ian O‘Field (drums) have underpinned their scene presence in the last year with impressive work and have thus acquired a cult fan base.

So whilst we pawed our hooves for almost three years, hungering for new stuff, Rage of Samedi stepped on the gas! They milled over a huge load of live stages, by supporting bands like Eyehategod, High Fighter, Mantar, Monolord, King Witch, Ten Ton Slug, raged down the Malta Doom Fest in 2017 as well the Freak Valley Festival in 2018 and used this time intensively honing on their musical authenticity.

This does not in any way mean that they wanted to reinvent themselves but they worked on topping off their typical monstrous and raw Rage of Samedi sound.

If you take a look at the new work 'Blood Ritual' (2020), you will unmistakably notice that they have succeeded in doing so damn well! Their sound, inspired but not imitated by the spirit of the ancient Doom Gods of the '70s and '80s, compared with a good deal of furious sludge, a stunning raging (core) voice and occasional strolling on musical side-paths of similar genres is and remains edgy and angular but nevertheless a finely well-rounded masterpiece.

By signing a worldwide deal as first German band on Argonauta Record’s growing roster, they hit another big goal on their path.

I caught these Barons of Samedi for an awesome voodoo-session on behalf of Doomed & Stoned and if you can spare some time, follow me in the interview and take a look behind the scenes of Rage of Samedi. Check it out as you take in the world premiere of the music video "I Spit Hate"!

An Interview With Rage of Samedi

Hey guys! I‘m thrilled as punch to meet up with you here! How do you feel, with the knowledge in the back of your mind that in a few days, your new baby will see the light of day? I reckon you're about to catch fire, don't you? (laughs)

Yeah! Nice to meet you, too. Thanks for giving us the chance for that interview. Indeed, we’re really burning to bring out that record!! It’s been a while since the last one and it’s cool that we have Gero and his Argonauta Records as a label in the background that gave us all the freedom and time to write Blood Ritual.

What is the background of your new album in connection with the overall progress of the band?

Sam: Blood Ritual is the first album where Nicolas and Thorsten were actively parted in the songwriting process. That’s a big development how the songs are sounding and the guitars are working together. We stayed on that point that we’d like to bring in all our influences in our writing process and Nicolas and Thorsten are a big step forward in the quality of the songs.

What distinguishes 'Blood Ritual' (2020) from your last album 'Children Of The Black Sun' (2016)? Are there differences, and if so, which ones and why?

Sam: We recorded the guitars on "Children Of The Black Sun" completely live together. For the new album we got back to tracking the stuff one after the other again, 'cuz the live recordings brought so many problems in the mixing process and we were already a bit under pressure with the release date for C.O.T.B.S. so we couldn’t start again. C.O.T.B.S. was a torture to mix and master. We all thought we have to be parted in the mixing process. And I think we threw the shit away for about ten times! (laughs).

Blood Ritual is completely produced and mixed by our bass player Nicolas Perrault. At the beginning it was hard to follow all his instructions, for example changing my complete guitar sound and all that stuff, but damn, listen to that record!! I’d never do it another way anymore. I mean, Nicolas took that stuff, closed the door, worked for two weeks around the clock and came to rehearsals with that awesome mix. The first time we all are 100% happy with it. BOOM!

The mastering we gave to Collin Jordan at Boiler Rooms, Chicago. He already worked with bands like ‪EyeHateGod‬ and Lord Dying, so he knew exactly what to do with our stuff.

Can you please tell us all you have in mind about the meaning of "I Spit Hate", the appetizer we got as an exclusive release, for our listeners?

Lou: "I Spit Hate" is ment as a "Nazi Scum, Fuck Off" song. We write a lot of social and political critical stuff and we’re always using drastic words, that’s how "I Spit Hate" came to be. Easy as that.

Which of you is responsible for the lyrics? And what are the main themes they deal with and what inspires you?

Lou: I’m the one who is writing all the lyrics. I’m something like an old punk rocker (laugs). Maybe the reason why we always criticize society. (Laughs) Most time the guys working on our songs, I’m with them at rehearsals and the writing process inspires me. Sometimes the other guys give me some inspiration with one or two lines of text or some poems or what else and I work the stuff out or fill them in in my own lyrics.

As most of the big bands in the scene we also can say that we're getting a lot of inspiration from authors like Lovecraft, King and all the others. So some of our lyrics don't have that biggest meaning, just are telling a fantastic story.

Please tell us the story of how you came together as a band.

Sam: We knew each other before the band, but just from seeing each other at some gigs and stuff. Then end 2011, I played a hometown show with my former band where I was on vocals and guitar. Lou and Ian opened up with their acoustic project Leaf&Booze that evening for us. Ian on guitar that evening. A few weeks later Lou and me talked about that I wanted to start a project where I just can play guitar and I asked him to go on the mic there. He told me that Ian is normally a drummer and he asked our former bass player Paul McKay to be with us. So we started. After a few rehearsals we knew this will be more than just that planned side project.

After the first album 'Sign' (2014), Dixie King came to the band as 2nd guitar player, ‚cuz with two guitars we had a lot more possibilities in writing riffs and working them out. Shortly after Paul left the band for some personal reasons. Nicolas said he could help us for some live shows. He already helps us for nearly five years.

When Dixie left in case of his job and all the stuff around we asked Thorsten who we all know for a lot of years before. We hoped he will join because he was everyones absolutely first choice and he did. At the moment it couldn’t be better!

I know, you guys have shared the stage with some awesome band mates, right?

We had the luck to share the stage with a lot of cool bands, also some of our biggest idols who inspired us for doing what we do. Coolest thing is that we became close friends to some of them, as there are Lord Vicar. When you can say that Kimi Kärki and Chritus Linderson played your EPRelease Party with you, can it get any better? They are some of the nicest people we have ever met on the road! Also the irish sludgers in Ten Ton Slug became best buddies. We love you guys!

For example, our third show ever we played with Karma To Burn, followed by shows with the almighty Crowbar, Dopethrone, Mammoth Mammoth, Toner Low, High Fighter, and King Witch we met when we played the Malta Doom Festival in 2017, and organized some shows with them in Germany after that.

To name some others: Sasquatch, Monolord, Eyehategod, Mantar, and so many many more. In '18 we played the legendary Freak Valley Music Festival here in Germany. A planned show with The Obsessed' had to be cancelled in case of WINOs visa problems for the EU, but we hope we can catch this up in the near future.

I am curious, is there a special band story? A special experience that you had together as a band? Maybe a funny story that you still laugh about today?

Ian: Oh my god! There are a lot!! (laughs). We’re on the road as much as we can and there are happening some weird and strange (drunken) stuff. One time Dixie was so fuckin’ drunk before the show, that he played just another gig. He was on stage with us, but just played different songs for the whole show! Further on just a few tags like running naked through London and pissing all over a $250,000 car. We should be ashamed!

Let's have a quick look at the choice of your band name! If I informed right, is Baron of Samedi a creature from the haitian voodoo cult, right? What inspired you to choose this name?

Ian: We liked to choose something that seems to be dark and creates a kind of mystery, but also something with a positive meaning. Baron Samedi was the perfect option for this. He is a so called LOA, which means he’s like a mate to the venerated Voodoo god and the protector of the dead.

You are impressive, hard-working guys and also very present for your fan community. How do you balance this with your daily life? So what do you do in your life if you are not Rage Of Samedi? Maybe the two of you would like to tell a little bit about their private life? - My name is... and my hobbies are... (laughs)

Sam: Yeah. It’s nearly a full time job if you wanna do it right. I’m doing most stuff around the managing and booking. But I wouldn’t do it if it wouldn’t be fun and the band and my dudes are worth every minute of it. Two of us are working in the social area. Ian is a computer scientist, but you could have guessed by yourself. Look how pale his skin is and how red his eyes are!! He always sits in darkened rooms and hates the sun! (laughs)

Nicolas: I’m what you call a full time musician and tattoo artist. Check out my ‚All That Jazz‘ Tattoo! Best in handpoked stuff! (smiles)

Lou: It's nice to have a tattoo artist in the band, and with Phil one in the roadcrew.

Nicolas: Beside Rage Of Samedi, I’m doing my solo stuff as kind of Singer/Songwriter, but I hate this as description. I’m more doom and experimental then what you await from a typical singer/songwriter.

Thorsten: My job is the most important!! I’m working at a very famous brewery!

What are the things that have carved out of you the person that you are?

Life and Booze!

Sam: Letting the fun beside, I can tell that my family and my band/music are the most important things in my life. My wife and my son are my greatest and biggest supporters and made me who I am today! I love you!

I really like your cover artwork! Who designed it and is there a special meaning to it?

Sam: The cover artwork is made by Xavier Gonzalez at ‚No Master Studio‘. It’s completely hand painted (outside and inlay). He just got some tags from us like Voodoo Cult, Blood Ritual as album title. Then we gave him free hand in doing it, and we were smashed when we saw it and it was clear that we take it 1:1. Drastically and in small words it shows todays change of society who is praying to their false idols and dying after an unnecessary life!

Lou: And we wanted naked butt cheeks and a penis on it (laughs) and a beheaded guy!

Sam: He said "penis"! You're going into Facebook-Jail for this, Lou!

Are there any other music projects you are involved in?

Nicolas: I‘m doing my solo stuff, also playing at A Million Tiny Suns (alternative metal) and 114 (German rap).

Lou: Ian and I still have Leaf&Booze as an acoustic project.

Thorsten: I‘m part of Ampersphere, an alternative rock band where I‘m also on guitar and I play bass guitar at Zoahr. This is a psychedelic rock band and I proudly can say that we made it to the Doom Charts last month with our 1st album 'Axis'

Thank you guys for this thrilling voodoo-session, it was a great pleasure to meet you here! Do you have any last words for our listeners that are burning on your soul and that you want to get rid of?

We’d like to thank you, Mel. Just a big shout out to ALL our supporters who are with us, all the bands we met on the road and became friends!!!! We appreciate that so much. Special shout out to our roadcrew and buddies Ducky and Phil. Without you we’re nothing! Metal, Love & Peace!

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[pandawritesmanythings]

Halfrid // Part 3

Platonic!Loki x Teen!Reader

Summary: Your life has always been dictated by the fact that you are smarter than most adults. This has made you antagonize many of them, it isn’t your fault that you are just citing facts! However, when the god of mischief becomes your friend, are there enough facts you can cite to prove his innocence?

Warnings: None, just no Loki this chapter, sorry!

Word Count: +3000k

A/N: Wow! A lot of people responding positively to the last part! I’m really glad you guys are enjoying it. I am opening the tags list in case anyone wants to be notified when the next chapter comes out!

TAG LIST IS OPEN!!!

NEW YORK 2014

The streets were filled with the usual buzz that surrounded New York. In the distance, the sounds of construction jolted you awake.

You had fallen asleep in your desk again. You sighed and rubbed your hands all over your face, wiping some of the dried salivae away from your mouth.

Your computer was still on and running, its fans warming up the area where it was sitting. With two fingers you slid through the pad and wrote the password on the lock screen.

It opened to the essay you had been working on last night. You smiled while reading it, your teachers had praised you before on your essays, and you were really proud of this one. Quickly you clicked the share button and sent it to your personal account and to your teacher.

You pushed your chair with wheels away from the desk and hopped off it when you reached your closet. You pulled out a simple sweater and jeans, your black flats and pulled your backpack over your shoulder. You rushed to the bathroom and quickly brushed your teeth.

Your parents were getting ready to get to work. They still hadn't forgiven you for 2012, but you knew they would get over it soon. At least they didn't hang it over your head every time you walked into the room anymore.

"Good morning munchkin!" Your dad called from the kitchen, the blender sounding off.

"Good morning dad!"

"You almost ready for school?" Your mom asked kissing your forehead.

"Yep. I already finished my essay and I left my project on my locker, so I'm good for today." You chirped taking your place in the table and placing your backpack by your chair.

Your mom was typing furiously on the keyboard of her own laptop, even though her expression remained calm. Trying to catch a glimpse you leaned in to see what she was doing.

As soon as she felt your curious gaze on the document, she snapped it closed. 

"Come on mom! Let me see!" You whined.

"No. Finish your breakfast, this is not something for you to meddle with." She seriously stated, her brow furrowed.

You deflated in your seat, a long breath of air coming out of your lips. "I was just curious..." You mumbled.

"And where did your curiosity lead you to, last time?" She rhetorically asked.

You hid your face in your arms trying to avoid her fiery gaze.

"Why do you have to make my appetite go away?" You asked muffling your voice in your arm.

"Stop mumbling and eat your breakfast. I'll pack it if I have to, but you aren't leaving the house without at least a bite out of your sandwich." Your mom seemed to be very final about this, completely ignoring the fact that it had been two whole years since New York, and yet she didn't trust you had become more careful.

A mom's mind must be one of the most complicated ones. You only saw the annoyance that her attitude brought you, but under it, there was an honest and sincere worry for your safety. 

Since 2012, your mom had become more overprotective of you. She had given you a phone and a computer, but they were constantly monitored. If you were on a website you shouldn't be in or downloaded any information that didn't come from an official website, she would get a notification. And let's just say since the attack on New York you haven't been particularly keeping out of trouble.

As you took a bite out of your sandwich and scooped some yogurt out of a cup into your mouth you heard your mom sigh behind you.

She placed her head on her hands, rubbing her sides as if she had a headache. "Darling... My little girl. Why can't you be like others?" She asked, not in an accusatory tone, but one of a very tired mother. She hated having you on such a tight leash, but trust was earned and you hadn't earned it.

"What? You want me to be boring and dumb like my classmates?" You asked in disbelief.

"No! That's not what I meant. I just..." You mom was obviously at a loss for words. So your dad swooped in to save her.

"I think your momma is just tired of you getting in trouble kiddo." He smiled putting a platter of sliced oranges on the table and a homemade strawberry smoothie. "She wants you to go out and play on the hydrants during the summer, and be curious about the world. Instead of only researching it on Wikipedia." He smiled slyly.

"But that's boring!" You retorted. "You know what's fun? Figuring out how to get hidden files from the FBI." You giggled. 

Your mom groaned but your dad just laughed. "Oh, love. She's going to be a great agent someday."

"She's not going to end up entering your business, Frank." Your mom deadpanned him.

"But what if I wanted to?" You butted in.

"I still wouldn't let you. You already cause a lot of trouble by yourself. I can't imagine what you would do with actual authorized access to verifiable sources." She frowned as she opened her laptop and resumed her furious typing, this time letting the frustration bleed onto her face.

You angrily took another bite of your sandwich and downed your smoothie. "I'm done." You jumped out of your seat and slumped your backpack on your shoulder. "See you later." You frowned at your mom and she raised her head to look at you.

She looked worried. You walked up to her, biting your lip. 

She brushed a strand of hair away from your face. "I love you, sweetie. I just want you safe, okay? Please forgive me if my way of showing it is sometimes a little..." She struggled to find the words.

"A little mean?"

A light chuckle left her lips. "Yeah, something like that." She kissed your forehead and looked in your eyes. "Have fun today. I love you."

"I love you too." You smiled.

As you turned around to say goodbye to your dad you found him leaning on the threshold of the kitchen entrance. He smirked at you and you rushed and hugged him by the waist.

"I love you, kiddo." He ruffled your hair.

"I love you too, dad!" You smiled up to him.

As soon as you let go, you waved them a final goodbye, grabbed your anchor shaped keychain, and ran out the door rushing to school.

You said hi to Mrs Alianza, your tenant, and ran out the front door. You walked with a pep in your step, humming a tune to yourself.

The sounds of constructions and particular smells of New York greeted you. The usual people did their usual commute. Store after store was speckled with familiar faces, all of them buying, selling, and working as every other day.

The way to your school wasn't that long, which is why it was one of the only things your parents trusted you enough to do by yourself. You would walk up the street, make a right and at the end of that street was your school. The scent of the Starbucks hit your nose when you passed by the open door. You really wished you had money so you could buy yourself some hot cocoa. The weather of the last few days of September was nicely fresh, but since it was usually colder in the mornings the sweetness and wariness of the chocolatey goodness was just what you needed.

But since you were broke as the hobo down the street, you walked past it and headed to your destination. Prison.

Your school was an old building, it looked really fancy on the outside, but had the same crappy classrooms as any other public school had. The halls were filled to the brim with students who were chatting the start of their day away. You, however, just walked straight into your class. Mrs Peyton wasn't there yet, so you decided to simply sit down and open your assigned book. And yes, you had already read up to were your teacher told you, but what else were you going to do right now? Talk to people?

The seat next to you was usually empty, which is why it surprised you when you saw another girl sitting there.

Ok, you are a social incompetent. But please try this time to be relatable. Or at least not scare her off. You bullied yourself.

"Hey," You snapped your book closed and gave her an awkward smile. "A-Are you new here? I've never seen you before."

She looked taken aback by the fact that you were talking to her, but she also awkwardly smiled and nodded.

"Oh, well... Welcome!"

There was a heavy silence between the two of you. Mainly because you didn't know if to ask a question, or let her talk or ask you a question. Your mind kept rolling around to try and make this disgusting silence disappear.

"U-Um..." You struggled. "So, have long have you lived here?"

She looked at you weirdly. This is why I'm a social outcast. You thought.

"All my life? I just transferred schools." 

WELL, I DIDN'T KNOW THAT. HOW WAS I SUPPOSED TO KNOW THAT. You inwardly screamed.

"Oh! That's cool. What school were you attending before?" You asked as you repeated inwardly: Please don't say Visions. Don't say Visions.

"Visions Academy." SWEET MOTHER OF ICICLES-! "It was the best school I have ever attended."

"Ah. Why did you come here then?"

She looked at you as if it was an obvious answer. "My parents think I need to experience The Real World." The did an exasperated gesture. "What does that even mean!?" 

"Well, maybe they want you to see the other side?"

"And mingle with peasants? I would rather die." She huffed.

"Well, you are technically mingling with one." You pointed to yourself.

"Oh, no. I know you are, I just see you and don't think you'll remember what I tell you in a couple of days." 

Did she just call me stupid? You tried to maintain a calm and collected face.

"You don't look like the social type, so I guess you don't care that much for people's problems and grievances." She swatted the air with her hand. "To be honest. I wasn't even that popular in my other school. But if others know I was studying there, maybe I'll finally be popular!" She beamed as if it was her goal in life to be the centre of everyone's attention.

You had two options. Forget this annoying and self-absorbed girl, or make something out of this.

"Have you ever heard the phrase, A fake friend and a shadow only come by when the sun shines?" You looked at her and she shook her head. "It's Benjamin Franklin. Great guy. You might have heard of him."

That got a snort out of her. "Yeah, I have."

"What do you think that means?" You thoughtfully gazed at her.

She looked at you blankly for a second. "I... Don't know...?"

You adjusted yourself in your seat. "A shadow is by your side when the sun is out, just like a fake friend will. But disappear when the clouds roll by. A friend can do the same if they don't care for you and only care for your popularity. You think they'll stick around when the hard times come?"

It left her thinking. She was silent for a minute, looking everywhere except where you were sitting. Something told you that there was more to this girl than you initially thought. Just as she was going to answer you, Mrs Peyton arrived in the classroom and the bell ringed.

You didn't see the girl for the rest of the day.

The girl. Wow. You really had to start asking for people's names first, didn't you?

When your last period was over the bell rang and kids started filing out of the classrooms. Then you saw her.

She was wearing a pink skirt, as short as the dress code allowed her and a pink sweater with a white dress shirt neck coming out of the neck of the sweater. Yeah, she definitely came from a prep school. She contrasted highly with you. Yet, she pushed off the wall and approached you meekly.

"I was thinking about what you said." She claimed. "The truth is... I don't know what I am truly doing here. I don't know how long will I stay, but I just wanted... The validation I guess."

You smiled at her, sympathetically. "So, what do you really want?"

"A friend."

"I... I think I do too." You smiled at her.

"My name is Ashley."

"Mine is (Y/N)"

MONTHS LATER

You had no idea where this had come from. And honestly, neither did Ashley.

You were just one day chatting about the fact that the Avengers were the only guys without cooties in the whole world. They were actually super cool. You laid in your bed listening to Ashley talk about why Thor would beat Iron Man in the blink of an eye.

"I mean. It makes sense, as smart as Stark is, he doesn't level out with Thor's powers." She finalized the rant that you were barely paying attention to while you re-searched about them online. No. You weren't stalking. That's creepy.

"But that's where you are wrong. His source of power comes from his hammer. Right?"

"I guess?"

"Then look." You turned the laptop to her and showed her the security feed you were watching. "If we are talking combat, yes he is great. But so is Stark." 

In the feed Thor tried to lift his hammer just to not being able to and giving up, melting in a puddle of despair. "See? Without his hammer, he is basically defenceless."

"He still can fight. Without the suit Stark isn't much more, isn't he?"

"No no no. That's where you are wrong. Stark has the brains. Thor has the brawns." You smirked. "If Tony had to manage to beat Thor without his suit, I think he would find a way. He is way too intelligent for his own good."

"Maybe. But if there is something we can agree with, is that Cap is the whole package." 

You both flopped onto your mattress laughing at that. "That is America's good soldier!" You laughed.

"His butt, tho." 

"EW. NO. DISGUSTING. SHUT UP." You slammed her with a pillow.

You both kept laughing for a bit longer and slowly your laughs became more breathy and ceased being so loud and frequent. You slowly sat up.

It had been a while since you had thought about the 2012 incident. But seeing that footage from Thor and all that talk about mind versus brawn got you thinking... What was Loki doing here anyway? He definitely wasn't the brawns. And the way he got defeated was... Almost comical. But when you talked to him, he came across as a very thought inducing and mysterious guy. And being honest, no bad guy tries to dominate if he doesn't have a clever plan.

"You ever think about the villains the Avengers have to defeat?" You asked, your mind wandering.

"I barely do, honestly." She got up too and placed you pillows back into place. "I just like to think about how many lives they save. I know that they can't save everyone, but I am pretty grateful for the fact that this world is still here. I don't think we would be if it wasn't for them."

"Yeah... Yeah. You're right."

But after Ashley left you were still thinking. Your mind was going in circles. You had always been bad at social interaction, but the only two people you had ever felt truly comfortable talking to were Ashley and, strangely, Loki. How? You had just talked for a few minutes with him, but you could recall what he told you that day almost completely.

So that is how it started. You brought out your personal notebook and wrote down:

The 2012 Incident

And wrote all you could remember about your exchange with him. All you could remember about the ship, how you entered his cell. Your conversation. You repeated the events in your head over and over again until you wrote everything down. Over the next few days, you analyzed all you wrote, over and over again.

Your teachers noticed.

"Are you okay, (Y/N)?" Mrs Peyton asked as you wrote down ideas for the latest essay in her class. You had been spacing out for too long.

"Um! Yes, I'm good. Just... Writer's block, you know how it is..." You stumbled over your words. She didn't look convinced, but still, she gave you a tight lip smile and continued on to help students who were stuck.

A couple of days later you heard your name being called through the teacher's radio.

"(Y/N). Miss Jennifer wants to see you."

Ashley shot you a worried look, it wasn't often that you were called to your adviser's office. But you gave her a slight nod and got up your seat to go to the adviser's office.

You were surprised to see your father sitting there. "(Y/N), dear. We are happy you could join us."

"Is everything okay?" You questioned.

"Yes. Of course." Miss Jennifer reassured you and pointed towards the chair so you could sit down.

"We have had many comments lately on your daughter not being able to fully concentrate in classes. We just wanted to know if there is anything you would like to tell us, darling?" She said as nicely as she could.

Your dad raised an eyebrow in your direction.

Oh, crap. How were you going to explain this? You couldn't just say that a psychopath that you once crossed roads with had been occupying your thoughts.

"You see. Sometimes I want to write about many things, and if I get an idea for something I... Kinda space out. Sorry if I have worried anyone." You tried to answer, your voice sounding more confident than you actually felt.

"I see." She wrote something down.

"Has it been affecting her grades? I know she is smart, but she does have a tendency to lock herself in her head." You dad ask concerned.

"Well, although she has certainly been distracted, there is nothing wrong with her grades. She astoundingly completes her work. Besides her spacing out, her teachers don't fault her much on anything." She tried to calm your dad down. "I called this meeting, firstly to address this subject and make you aware of it Mr. (Y/L/N). However, there is one more matter I wanted to discuss."

"Well?"

She proceeded to show us in her laptop a scholarship program. "I know that (Y/N) is still quite young, but I think this would be an excellent outlet for her imagination." She slid a pamphlet towards us and continued to explain. "See, the WRITE Scholarship is based on talent, and not grades. Some start writing their entrances since they can hold a pencil, but I think that you have enough experience to start trying. You must turn it in, as of late, the last month of your senior year. Some write short stories, but some of the most successful are those who turn in essays about things that interest them. For example, a girl last year won by turning in an essay with proof and facts of how HYDRA had infiltrated so quietly into SHIELD. It won her the scholarship and she went to the college of her choice to keep learning what she loves."

It left you speechless. A scholarship that would fully pay for all your college expenses if you turned in an essay that blew their minds? It was like a dream come true. And you could write about anything. Anything at all.

Miss Jennifer kept talking and gushing about it, but you had already heard enough. There were so many possibilities as to what you could do.

But your mind kept going back to that girl who had investigated HYDRA. What if you could do the same... But examining why did the Incident of 2012 happen?

To Be Continued...

[neighbours-kid]

Oh, 2019, What A Year You Were.

It is now a bit before 6pm on January 01, 2020. I just finished unpacking after coming home from my short holiday escape to Berlin for New Year’s with my best friend and frequent travel buddy. My feet are tired, my back hurts, and I’m sitting in bed now, thinking back on this last year and, it’s kind of hard for me to decide if it was a good year or less so.

My 2019 was not as eventful as my 2018. There was no large adventure to speak of like going to New York City for six months, or having to adjust back to life in Switzerland after that. 2019 was just…..uni. The same old trudge of going to class and thinking about texts that should be read (but wouldn’t be), the same old treading water without direction, stuck in one place, unsure what comes next. Or, at least, that’s what it feels like looking back on it.

When I did this looking back the last time, 2018 was not quite over yet. It was still December, I had a few more days of uni to go, all the Christmases and other celebrations still before me. At that point, I had no idea that I would meet a couple of people at the Christmas Party of our English Department and that these people would be largely responsible for tipping the scale of 2019 into ‘good’.

But I did. I did meet these lovely people I get to call something akin to family today. It’s only been a year, and I can’t quite believe it. Found family has always been my favourite trope in storytelling, and this little group of weirdos is exactly that. And to quote my favourite little alien creature, this is my family. I found it, all on my own. It’s little, and broken, but still good. Yeah, still good.

These people are not perfect, they’re not flawless, they’re not angels. But they have more humanity between them than I’ve seen in a long fucking while. We’re all broken people, none of us is any better than the next, but we have heart. And I love them all so fucking much. They have all coloured in parts of my year in their own colours and I could not be happier about it. They’re a bunch of fucking weirdo nerds, but they’re my bunch of fucking weirdo nerds.

* * *

This year was, while largely uneventful, also very special in its own way. You know, after talking to my doc to get a date for a transgender consultation, my plan was basically to wait until I got it all lined up nicely, got my first shot of testosterone and then be like "hello world, this is happening, and if you have anything against it, whoops, too late.” Well, it didn’t quite work out like that. If you’ve been keeping up with this blog or my life in general, you know that my anxious ass decided to have a nervous break in the middle of January and come out to literally everyone then and there. And you know what? It’s good.

I’m not where I want to be, not at all. After January, I had expectations for 2019, I had hopes and dreams, wishes and plans. Unfortunately, that lead to a series of events that is tipping the scale of this year into ‘bad’. I wrote about this extensively before, but the process of starting testosterone is a long and tedious one and I am still not where I want to be, even after this entire year, but I currently see a shiny dot on the horizon that looks very promising in that department, and if everything goes as it should, it won’t be long now until I can start with the hormone treatment.

2019 started me down a road of self-discovery that is more open and public than it was before, and I am glad for it. But I don’t want to linger on that part of my year for too long. Let us look back for a while, relive some moments here and there.

On the train home from the airport today, I thought about what I did exactly one year ago. After everyone who had been at my place for New Year’s had left around lunch time on January 01, 2019, I had sat down in front of my TV and started a very movie and tv show heavy year. Over the course of this entire year, I noted down every movie and tv show episode, every short film and comedy special, everything that I watched. It…..added up quite a bit, to be completely honest. Let’s see….

For reference, I had holidays during January and half of February, as well as June all through August and half of September, and then again from the 21st of December onward. My marathon didn’t quite subside during university, but at least I didn’t binge quite so much.

In total, I watched 178 movies, 10 short films, and 685 episodes of 34 tv shows. That is 300h12 in movies, 1h38 in short films, and roughly 519h47 in tv show episodes. (Yes, I did just spend way too much time looking up all the run times…) That is a rough total of 821h37 for this year. That’s like….a bit over a month of time spent watching stuff. 1/12 of my year spent in front of a screen. Not entirely sure how I feel about this number.

I know that for some this might sound a bit excessive, but to be honest? There is so much more I want to watch and if I could do completely as I please, these numbers would look a lot different.

Here is, with the exact intention of being a big mess of a block, all the movies I watched in 2019. I highlighted a few that stood out to me especially. Not just because I liked them very much, or because they were particularly excellent, just because….they made me feel something different, I guess. The oldest movie I watched was Grease (1978) and the newest would be the comedy special John Mulaney and the Sack Lunch Bunch from this year. I started my year with Night at the Museum (2006) and ended it with season five of Leverage.

Grease (1978), My Neighbour Totoro (1988), Die Hard (1988), Batman (1989), Die Hard 2: Die Harder (1990), Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995), Othello (1995), Mission Impossible (1996), Mary Reilly (1996), Wilde (1997), Animated Epics: Beowulf (1998), Mission Impossible II (2000), Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Fast and the Furious (2001), Ocean’s Eleven (2001), Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001), Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002), Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), Heartlands (2002), xXx (2002), 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003), Underworld (2003), Bright Young Things (2003), Timeline (2003), The Deal (2003), Ocean’s Twelve (2004), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), Laws of Attraction (2004), Dirty Filthy Love (2004), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005), Kingdom of Heaven (2005), The League of Gentlemen’s Apocalypse (2005), The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006), Underworld: Evolution (2006), Mission Impossible III (2006), Inside Man (2006), Night at the Museum (2006), The Da Vinci Code (2006), The Queen (2006), Die Hard 4.0: Live Free or Die Hard (2007), Music Within (2007), Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007), Ocean’s Thirteen (2007), Zodiac (2007), Iron Man (2008), Twilight (2008), Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (2009), Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009), Twilight: New Moon (2009), The Damned United (2009), Fast & Furious (2009), Sherlock Holmes (2009), The Holiday (2009), Angels & Demons (2009), Underworld: Rise of the Lycans (2009), Inception (2010), The Bounty Hunter (2010), Twilight: Eclipse (2010), Alice in Wonderland (2010), Tron: Legacy (2010), Megamind (2010), Valentine’s Day (2010), The Expendables (2010), Red (2010), Eat Pray Love (2010), Iron Man 2 (2010), Beautiful Boy (2010), Fast Five (2011), Fright Night (2011, twice), Resistance (2011), Few Options, All Bad (2011), Jesus Henry Christ (2011), Twilight: Breaking Dawn - Part 1 (2011), Mission Impossible IV: Ghost Protocol (2011), Pitch Perfect (2012), Twilight: Breaking Dawn - Part 2 (2012), White House Down (2013), Admission (2013), I Give It A Year (2013), Escape Plan (2013), The Adventurer: Curse of the Midas Box (2013), Furious 6 (2013), A Good Day to Die Hard (2013), Red 2 (2013), Begin Again (2013), Saving Mr. Banks (2013), Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb (2014), Kill the Messenger (2014), The Monuments Men (2014), Midnight in Paris (2014), Paddington (2014), The Imitation Game (2014), Maleficent (2014), Chelsea Peretti: One Of The Greats (2014), John Mulaney: The Comeback Kid (2015, twice), Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation (2015), Far From the Madding Crowd (2015), 7 Days in Hell (2015), Furious Seven (2015), Assassin’s Creed (2016), Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016), Patton Oswalt: Talking for Clapping (2016), Ali Wong: Baby Cobra (2016), Nocturnal Animals (2016), She Loves Me (2016), Passengers (2016), Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer (2016), xXx: The Return of Xander Cage (2017), Michael Bolton’s Big, Sexy Valentine’s Day Special (2017), Brad’s Status (2017), Home Again (2017), Murder On The Orient Express (2017), Christmas Inheritance (2017), Paddington 2 (2017), You, Me & Him (2017), Beauty and the Beast (2017), Trevor Noah: Afraid of the Dark (2017), Dave Chappelle: The Age of Spin (2017), Dave Chappelle: Deep in the Heart of Texas (2017), Patton Oswalt: Annihilation (2017), Jack Whitehall: At Large (2017), Hasan Minhaj: Homecoming King (2017), Katherine Ryan: In Trouble (2017), Mission Impossible: Fallout (2018), Slaughterhouse Rulez (2018), The Fate of the Furious (2018), Love, Simon (2018), Ocean’s 8 (2018, twice), Bad Samaritan (2018), John Mulaney: Kid Gorgeous (2018, twice), Hannah Gadsby: Nanette (2018), Daniel Sloss: Dark (2018), Daniel Sloss: Jigsaw (2018), Trevor Noah: Son of Patricia (2018), Ali Wong: Hard Knock Wife (2018), James Acaster: Recognise (2018), James Acaster: Represent (2018), James Acaster: Reset (2018), James Acaster: Recap (2018), Apostle (2018), The Holiday Calendar (2018), The Princess Switch (2018), The Christmas Chronicles (2018), Captain Marvel (2019, twice), Shazam! (2019, twice), Avengers: Endgame (2019, twice), Pokémon: Detective Pikachu (2019), The Hustle (2019), Rocketman (2019), X-Men: Dark Phoenix (2019), Men in Black: International (2019), Tolkien (2019), Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019), Isn’t It Romantic (2019), Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (2019), Jenny Slate: Stage Fright (2019), Wanda Sykes: Not Normal (2019), Katherine Ryan: Glitter Room (2019), Simon Amstell: Set Free (2019), Adam Devine: Best Time of Our Lives (2019), Let It Snow (2019), Last Christmas (2019), Klaus (2019), Always Be My Maybe (2019), The Knight Before Christmas (2019), The Good Liar (2019), Hustlers (2019), Star Wars: Rise of the Skywalker (2019), Murder Mystery (2019), John Mulaney and the Sack Lunch Bunch (2019)

TV shows are going to make up a block a bit less intimidating, but here goes. Again, highlighted what stood out to me especially.

The Gifted, Friends, NCIS, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Money Heist, Riverdale, The Punisher, Broadchurch, Elite, Doctor Who, Dramarama, Agents of SHIELD, Pokémon Indio League, Good Omens, The Chef Show, Jessica Jones, Halt and Catch Fire, The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, The Simpsons, 30 Rock, The Good Fight, Sean’s Show, Gallowglass, Animals., The Spoils of Babylon, Pobol Y Cwm, Masters of Sex, Prodigal Son, Criminal UK, The Politician, Leverage, His Dark Materials, Zona Rosa, Derry Girls

Some old favourites in there. Some new ones too. I won’t list the shorts because I don’t particularly care for them. I watched them solely for binging-through-someone’s-filmography reasons.

So yeah, as you can see, a very strong year when it comes to the visual medium. I just really love movies and tv shows so much. I love this kind of storytelling, this particular form of it. There’s so much artistry there, so many talented people. I still very much would love to work in the movie world at some point. Inspires me greatly. Always has.

* * *

2019 was not just a year of sitting glued to a TV screen, not at all. I’ve been some places too, got to do and experience some cool stuff.

In April I was able to take a few days off and go to Lugano with my dear friend and relax for a little while. We also met up with one of the lovely people I’ve met through twitter, which was great fun and we’ve spent a fantastic day together (eating food I still catch myself thinking about at least twice a week).

In June I went to Pride in Zurich with my friends, which was also a wonderful experience all together.

In July I was able to go to Cologne for half a week for CCXP, where I got to see some great panels and meet some great people. And, most importantly and also the reason why I went, I got to meet Zachary Levi again, take a picture together, have a wonderful conversation while he signed something for me, and experience an incredibly inspiring panel where I got to ask him a question that he took the time and patience to extensively answer. I treasure these moments, just as I treasure all our previous meetings and the friends and experiences that have come with it. Seeing him again after two years was definitely the highlight of the year, and it’s a strong weight of the good part in the scale that is 2019. He’s always a highlight, the dude. I can’t wait until I get to see that face again.

Also in July, I joined a few friends for a weekend at a medieval festival in Germany, which was also a very interesting and good experience.

And now at the end of the year, I spent a few days in Berlin, visiting museums and bookshops and generally touristing about with my dearest friend, celebrated New Year’s with her in the only way we know how: with good wine, food, warmth, and a tv show we both love and hold dear.

I also shouldn’t forget the two parties I attended of our university’s English Department, and the Halloween party a friend organised, and the birthdays I attended over the year, as well as the Christmas I spent with my friends at my place.

All these things, all these little bits add up and add up and ultimately I want to think that 2019 was a good year. I am so glad this year is over, but looking back I find so many good things that have happened, so many wonderful experiences, and I wonder, why? Why am I so happy it is over? Why am I so desperate to move forward, to turn the page, to start a new chapter, a new book?

I don’t know. I really don’t know.

* * *

For this new year, for 2020, I have a few wishes. I’m not really one to make resolutions, because I know exactly I won’t hold myself to it, but I have some things I’d like to do, like to try.

2019 was my year of movies and shows. I won’t stop watching things, I’ll never stop watching things. But for this year, I want to put my focus elsewhere. This year, I’d like to try and read all the books that have amassed themselves in my possession, that I haven’t actually read yet. It’s doable, I don’t own enormous amounts of books yet. I want to try that. I want to try to read more, to find that passion and attention span again that I had as a kid. I might try to blog a bit about it, just so I have something to hold me accountable. We’ll see. But I just really want to read more. Carry a book everywhere I go.

I know that 2020 is bringing me another step closer to becoming my truest self. I have my next appointment with the hormone specialist early in February, and if I am not entirely mistaken (or something is drastically changed) I will be able to start taking hormones then and there. Starting testosterone is going to be exciting and interesting, and I am very much looking forward to it. What I want for myself this year, is to take it easy. Be kind to myself in this journey. Let myself be gentle. I always have so many expectations for myself, and I really just want to try and…let myself be, let myself just live and experience things as they come. No expectations.

This first half year of 2020 is also the time I will be writing my Bachelor thesis and, hopefully, by summer I’ll have my degree. It’ll be a tough but I hope also rewarding time for me. Having to shift the way I write papers (quick, barely researched and sourced, not even remotely re-read, always started mere hours before the deadline) to something more useful for a thesis, something fitting for a thesis, is going to be challenging. Keeping my head in the right space, keeping the focus and doing the work, it’s all going to be hard for me. But I have faith that I will find a way to reign in my scatterbrain and flick the hyper-focus switch into something that will be sustainable for the time I have to write my thesis in.

Speaking of my thesis, there is something I have not mentioned yet, that strongly informed my experience of 2019. Good Omens is the book I’ll be writing my thesis about (specifically a queer theological reading of it) and Good Omens was the story that has shaped my year. I re-read the book at the beginning of term and once the mini-series came out at the end of May, I did not really think about anything else since. This book and this show are so incredibly important to me, and it is, after a long while of nothing even remotely getting there, the first thing that has captured my attention so strongly, that it has outlasted my one-month hyper-focus ability and shows no signs of stopping any time soon. And that I am so incredibly grateful for. I wasn’t sure if I could still do it. Have an interest, have passion for something, for longer than a month. So many things I tried and loved and done, and after a single month, I dropped them like a hot potato and never touched them again. But Good Omens came and took me by my hand and lead me into the promised land. Especially since the show came out, I feel like a changed person. I have talked about it to no end, and I could go on forever now too, but I’ll just say this for now: This story of an angel and a demon crossing the divide that is their differences, coming together in love for the world, for humanity, and each other, this story means everything to me, and it has given me so much. Nothing is ever going to change that. That is irrevocable. And I know that 2020 won’t change that fact. I have faith that this passion will continue on and will inspire more positive change in me. It’s already started bringing me back to writing and drawing, so I know that it will lead me somewhere.

There is so much more I could say here, now, about 2019, about 2020. About my plans and my wishes, my dreams and the things I ought to do. But I think, I’ll leave it at that, for now. I tried this monthly blogging last year for the first time, and I think I’ll try to continue doing it. So, you can expect to read more of my thoughts on all kinds of things.

For now, however, let me say this: 2020 can be anything you want it to be. 2020 is yours to shape, yours to create in, yours to manage, yours to use. I want my 2020 to be gentle, to be taken one step at a time, to be experienced to the fullest, to be lived and felt and actively experienced. Sure, bad things can happen, bad things can always happen. But it’s your decision what happens next.

In 2020, I want to start loving more unapologetically. Do good, recklessly. Be kind, always. Not just to others, but to myself.

…

I have faith in us, you know? Humans. There’s so much hope there, still. 2020 might just as well show it.

…

Happy New Year, everyone. I hope it’ll be a good one for you.

[flakandforay]

The Truth Untold Theory

overall: interesting that bangtan decided to have a song called ‘전하지 못한 진심’ = The Truth Untold in one of their more recent comebacks which would be ‘Love Yourself: Tear’ with their title track called: Fake Love. 

warning(s): mentions of death 

⇝ theory masterlist 

theory: now delving deeper inside this, if you look closely at the lyrics of the song, it exactly depicts the story of Smeraldo which were released on blog posts 2 years ago when they have the comeback of Love Yourself Her - a smeraldo blog was set up as such and they actually told the story and history of the smeraldo flower and its relationship to the florist ( the owner of the shop ) 

but what was interesting was that later on before the comeback of Love Yourself Tear, this smeraldo blog was taken down and the latest post was that they are currently renovating and would come back soon, as it was meant to be a blog to show the opening of the store around August but was delayed. 

170903 // 2.06AM KST

we are shutting down everything temporarily

due to personal circumstances, the opening of the flower shop and blog operations would be temporarily postponed. to the people looking out for us, we want to give our thanks and apologies to you.

( trans: the smeraldo blog is put on hold for now and seemed to have deleted the other blog posts )

Post 

now, fast forward to the upcoming comeback of the Love Yourself Answer, the smeraldo blog was somehow magically brought back to life, as if it was back in business but rumours had it that the blog posts were slightly altered, but the gist is remains quite the same ( hence the idea as though they are time travelling etc; the idea of changing events ). 

comparing the content of basically the smeraldo blog, the same posts were being uploaded just a year later. ( as if they went back into time )

anyway, in the past before i could even translate everything, i managed to translate a few of the blog posts before it was taken down. ( masterlist here ). 

the 1st blog post mainly introduces about the blog and about the florist’s adventures into finding the smeraldo, mainly saying that it’s a flower that is part of a love story. 

170709 // 4.21PM KST

[1st ever story] the fate of smeraldo, the prologue story

hello. im ‘testesso’ the florist.

i started this blog because i wanted to introduce the flower, smeraldo. i just want to let you know in advance that i am preparing to open a flower shop that specializes in smeraldo in the middle of september. however you might think of it, this blog may be seen as its meant for publicity, i think ive ever met that this smeraldo ( shop ) is not a simple business.

my first connection with smeraldo dated 5 years ago. during that time, i was studying abroad in north dakota, in far north america. while in america, we participated in the academy’s <Flower 2012> that opened in virgina for a week. it takes a flight that is more than 5hrs from north dakota to virginia and no less than 7hours from my dorm to school.

[TSA’s caption: The Smeraldo Academy (TSA) that researches and specializes in the smeraldo. Beneath it is the academy’s facebook link]

but when i entered the distant event hall, I discovered a placard that said 'the origins of playing cards’. <Flower 2012> had already ended last week at the event of the academy at the time of america’s playing cards. i wrote the wrong date in my diary. at that time, it’s absurd to think that all are connected if i look back at it. i was so tired that i couldn’t afford to move anywhere else so i sat down and listened to the speech. fortunately, the speech was interesting as it was talking about future career of a florist and the connections between flowers was very exciting. of course as expected, it’s… 'smeraldo’

as you know from seeing the picture, the smeraldo carries a warm feeling. the romantic petals that are magical and subtle colours, and don’t you think there’s some kind of sad meaning behind it? that’s right. smeraldo is a flower with a passionate and heartaching story behind it. the story can be said by “non potevo dire la verità”, that means 'inability to convey sincerity’ in italian. speaking of flowers in love stories, can you guess whether it was sad?

in the future, through this blog about smeraldo, let me unfold the story about this flower gradually in the playing cards.

the 2nd blog post mainly talks about how the florist wishes to bring in Smeraldos for his shop etc 

the 3rd blog post talks about how the Smeraldo was first discovered so there is nothing much here. 

it is the 4th blog post that it becomes more important.  

170720 // 1.56PM KST

[4th story] the smeraldo legend

everyone, can you confidently say that you're beautiful? in the past, i was blinded by a door that said 'i am beautiful.' ive also been blinded by a door that said 'im not beautiful' and to some extent, you can choose which door to pull and enter. everyone, what do you think you would do? im going to tell you something now, starting the entangled love story of smeraldo.

the story of smeraldo is estimated to have begun from 15th century-16th century, in a rural village in northern italy. there's a small solitary castle in 'Sita Di Smeraldo' (La Città di smeraldo). there was a man with a really ugly appearance living there.

▲ the estimated village of 'Sita Di Smeraldo' in northern italy

there was not quite as much information about the man. 'the illegitimate child of the duke of Florence, the duke who fell in love with the gardener's daughter who gave birth to an illegitimate child, the man's mother died at the time of childbirth, and the wife and children of the man tried to kill the man, and so the duke sent the man away.' though there were full of rumours, none of them were claimed to be true.

the man alone hid himself in solitude at the old castle. because of the hatred and jealousy he received upon his birth and growing up, he didn't open his heart to anyone, when anyone tried to approach him, he would hid himself away angrily. his only joy was to grow flowers in his garden. one day, a woman appeared near the vicinity of his castle. the shabby woman picked up the heels of the garden fence, climbed over it and stole some flowers. the man was furious at first, and spent all night protecting his garden. but when he fell asleep for a while, the woman started to pick flowers again. the nights continued like that night, the man pretended to be a joe and observed the returning woman. curiosity killed the cat. the man waited for the woman, and one day decided to follow her. with the woman wrapped in a cloak, the man followed her to a place, the man found out that the poor and sickly woman was selling the flowers to earn a living.

the man wanted to help the woman. he wanted to teach the woman personally how to grow the flowers, and how to grow beautiful flowers. but he couldn't get ahead of her. the woman herself would be scared of him, it was obvious that she wouldn't love his ugly appearance. in the end, all he could do was to plant and grow flowers so that in a matter of time, she would stay in the garden.

the man decided to make a flower that does not exist in the world. the woman started to sell the expensive flowers that she made. after many consecutive failures, the man finally succeeded in making a flower that does not exist in the world, filling his garden with those flowers.

but when he started on this, the woman stopped showing up. no matter how long he waited, the woman did not appear at his garden, the troubled man went down to the village. and so the woman was found to have died.

and up till here, this is the story of smeraldo. i don't know if this really happened, but whoever saw the flower does not know whether it's made up. but every time i look at the smeraldo, i recall the story of it and think of it. if the man had the courage, would he have shown his face and expressed his sincerity? of course, the woman might have been scared and run away, even get mad. to have bravery is easier said than done.

actually, i have a similar experience. it's about the friend that i met at the playing card event at the academy in the previous post. i actually had a crush on him. he was a very bright, cheerful person. after hearing the news of the discovery of the smeraldo, he received the story related to the flowers, and promised me that we would go together to Sita Di Smeraldo. he told me to go with him if he really didn't mean anything to me.

even now, i recall and think about that day. the expression on his face that was full of courage and expectation, with big, short and quick steps and strapping on a knapsack, he excitedly grabbed an opportunity to reserve a plane in schedule.

i will never ever forget that moment. and even though a lot of time has passed, it is still a raw wound that will not heal.

this is of utmost importance. because it is exactly what is being relayed in the song ‘the truth untold’. 

the most important post of all is the 7th one. the story of the florist being almost identical to how the Smeraldo flower was made and then put into a song by bangtan. 

170813 // 2.02PM KST

[7th story] ‘the truth untold’

Actually, I'm not from a very wealthy family. I also had a hard time studying in America. I was a foreigner, henceI was not fluent in English, and I couldn't afford to have a great future.

On the day we promised to go on a trip to Italy, I waited for that friend at the airport and saw her get off the bus with a handsome and wonderful man over the glass door. I hid myself right away. Why did i do that? I don't know...I just hid myself reflexively and turned around and walked away. 'That's it then. I couldn't have tried to make her to go on a trip to Italy with me. For her, I was just a poor foreigner who didn't know anything.' That was my feelings then.

She called while I was walking, but I didn't answer. I stared at my face in the mirror in the airport toilet. Then, I turned off my cell phone and got on the plane. I booked the same flight, so I thought she would be there with him somewhere on the plane, but I didn't find her. I just wished for it. I don't know how much I wanted her to look for me around the plane. But until the plane crossed the Atlantic and landed in Italian airspace and got off at the airport... No one came to see me.

▲ Pictures taken while waiting for her at the international San Francisco airport in America

Sita di Smeraldo remains a painful and happy memory for me. The flowers were so beautiful that I cried. And that night something strange happened. I woke up with a strange sound while sleeping in a private house. There was a bed just below the window, and I could hear someone knocking on the window. The room was on the second floor and it was quiet outside. The time was past midnight and the curtain was pulled down so I couldn't see what was outside the window.

It wasn't scary or fearful, but it was still strange. I thought I'd woken up and open the window on the second floor, but I didn’t. I was forced to sleep, thinking that it would be better for the branches to shake in the wind and hit the window, but I couldn't sleep very well. I laid still for a long time listening to the sound, as if holding something back.

It was around lunch the next day that she called. No, it wasn't her who called. It was her brother. She had an accident at the airport where she was chasing someone in a hurry, and her breathing became unstable a little after midnight last night, and she ended up leaving the world.

Before I left my dorm that day, I opened the window next to my bed. The sunlight came in, and there was a colony of Smeraldo flowers. As I looked at the flowers and felt the wind passing by in the sun, I felt as if I was standing next to her by the window looking at Smeraldo.

▲ Painful and happy memories, the beautiful scenery of Sita di Smeraldo.

On my way home from the United States and from the airport, I heard some news that I had been looking forward to for a long time had been achieved. It was the fact that the Smeraldo flower shop in Korea was approved by the Smeraldo Society. Because Smeraldo is a rare species, the association strictly manages its overseas sales and so on, and it was approved by me to apply to the association later on. Later, three years have passed since the opening of the Smeraldo flower shop in Korea, but I decided to think that the news from the conference was the last message she gave me.

And that's how she gave me the (non-potevo de la verità) and went to a different world. This is the special relationship that I talked about in the first post.

but for easier reference, i have also placed the lyrics of the song right here. 

This garden is filled With blossoming loneliness I tied myself To this sand castle filled with thorns

What is your name? Do you even have a place to go? Oh could you tell me? I saw you hiding in this garden

And I know Your heat is real Your hand picks the blue flowers I want to hold it but

This is my destiny Don’t smile on me Light on me Because I can’t go to you There’s no name to call

You know that I can’t Show you me Give you me I can’t show you my weakness So I’m putting on a mask to go see you But I still want you

A flower that resembles you Blossomed in this garden of loneliness I wanted to give it to you As I take off this stupid mask

But I know This can’t go on forever I must hide Because I’m ugly

I’m afraid So pathetic I’m so afraid In the end, will you leave me too? So I’m putting on a mask to go see you

What I can do is To make a pretty flower That resembles you Blossom in this garden, in this world Then breathe as the person you know But I still want you I still want you

Maybe back then If I had just a little more Courage And stood before you Would everything be different now?

I’m crying At this sandcastle That’s disappearing And breaking down As I look at this broken mask And I still want you

But I still want you But I still want you And I still want you

Reference: Colour Coded ©

now, let’s look at each section of the song one by one. it is exactly the story of the Smeraldo legend in which the man whose appearance he refused to show to the woman who he grows to love ( despite her stealing his flowers ), he wears a mask so not to scare her away etc. 

the idea of the man just out of reflex hiding from the woman as such and the ending that she died before he could even confess that he loved her - that’s the truth untold. 

yet, if you compare with Fake Love, there is some semblance of the Smeraldo flower here as well. 

널 위해서라면 난 슬퍼도 기쁜 척 할 수가 있었어 널 위해서라면 난 아파도 강한 척 할 수가 있었어 사랑이 사랑만으로 완벽하길 내 모든 약점들은 다 숨겨지길 이뤄지지 않는 꿈속에서 피울 수 없는 꽃을 키웠어

=

If it’s for you I can act like I’m happy even when I’m sad If it’s for you I can act strong even when it hurts Hoping love will be perfected with only love Hoping that all my weaknesses will be hidden In this dream that won’t ever come true I grew a flower that couldn’t be blossomed

Reference: Colour Coded ©

just like the man in the Smeraldo legend, he created a flower that couldnt be blossomed by anyone else. that was how much effort and love he has for the woman that he barely knew the name of. he only knew her as someone who was sick and sold flowers for a living. 

now, see this is related to a whole love story, not so much of the HYYH period, and remember the articles posted regarding the highlight posters were meant to talk about love, in a way this is an extension of the HYYH era but now the idea of love, relationships and dating is now involved and not so much between the brotherhood that we all thought it was just about before especially with Prologue. 

[Photo Source] Bighit Entertainment  Credits: maxine ☕️ DO NOT REPOST ©

[historiesofabody]

two unsent messages, july 2020

1.

I should stress that this is not an email you should rush reading, as it requires careful room for consideration. It touches frequently on violence and assault. I've spent a month drafting and redrafting this, trying to get what I'm saying exactly right, so I hope you can give it your time.

*

I hope you understand that I am glad that we are strangers. That our lives are, in every practical sense, disconnected. When you were asking me about my creative work, about my family on May 14th last year, I felt almost physically unable to answer.

I realise, however, with a deep sadness, that I've written to you 6 seperate times over the last three years. It seems far too many times, considering we are strangers, and you've so rarely replied.

I've never questioned why I feel this need to contact you though, regardless of how exhausting or humiliating it's become.

To me it's obvious that our interaction was very much an injury. It's always made sense to me that it requires healing, that it is not unfair of me to ask you to contribute to that process.

But I've gauged from your difficulty responding that you don't quite feel the same.

When you haven't answered, I have had to try answering for myself.

I don't think you could imagine how much time I have spent reflecting and considering your past behaviour - I have no other choice.

How these messages I write to you arise from months of rumination, research, processing; how much I've read and written over the last few years; how much therapy I've struggled through and struggled to pay for, how much I've alienated friends and loved ones with cyclical theories and endless anxieties, how much time, how many people, how many work opportunities I've genuinely lost because of the demands that healing entirely alone has placed on me.

When I emailed you impulsively a few days after we met last year, so angrily and so honestly, all I wanted was for you to feel pain, feel something like I did. It had only just hit me that you had spent that whole two hours somehow still avoiding the reality of what you had done.

(Because you called it 'what I did to you' when you meant sexual assault, abuse, manipulation. The only time you named a specific act of violence was me scratching you. You made no attempts to relieve me of the shame your violence left me with.)

You should know that any time I've called you an abuser, a rapist, it's not even because I think you're oblivious, that you need to be informed of these facts. I do think you know it, otherwise you wouldn't have looked so scared of me.

But I sent that furious email in May 2019 because I knew it would shut that connection down, end our conversation and put a distance between us that felt temporarily safe.

Because meeting you again was like having a wound re-opened. To look at you and see how little my pain had really touched you after everything I had gone through was uniquely devastating.

Of course, by November, I had cycled back around to needing input from you, regardless of the contradictions this threw up. I can imagine it was confusing. I am not entirely surprised that you did not respond,

Our interaction makes so much more sense to me when I remember that we were always deeply incompatible and monumentally useless at communicating. I don't think I've ever trusted you to be honest with me, to be brave or insightful – perhaps this has been an impediment to meaningful change.

I have expected the worst of you for so long now I don't have any other way of approaching you. At the same time, I'm compelled to keep hoping you'll surprise me. Some of this is a result of our traumatic bonding, some of it is I think a specifically personal radical hopefulness that no amount of disappointment can extinguish.

*

For some people who have experienced abuse, silence is healing. For me, as I have told you time and time again, your testimony, your honesty, your vulnerability has always felt so important to me, so needed and it is something you have consistently held back on or directly avoided.

I remember even as far back as 2012, trying to speak to you on the phone about what had happened between us.  

I need you to understand that the grace I have continuously offered you over and over and over again for almost a decade - to hold a space for your insight, for your perspective - has only ever been met with your refusal, denial, minimisation or silence.

When I contacted_ in 2017, I was almost ready for her to tell me she already knew. Whatever withholding from your future wife that you were once in a violent relationship is called – 'moving on', concealing, misrepresenting, lying – to me, it's the only proof that our relationship left you with far more of a 'legacy' than you have ever wanted to admit.

My own revisitation of our relationship has never been a choice. Have I ever explained that carefully enough? Does that make sense to you?

Back then, you were the one who stressed I needed to 'live in the moment', that all that mattered was what happened when we were physically together.

It's a painful turn of events then, that now our violence still lives in my body. I remember being hit, I remember being held down, I remember how you could make me flinch, I remember hurting you, I remember wanting to hurt you.

This email, and every time I have ever begged for your insight for the last decade, is a direct consequence of that violence – our violence - and yet I have been left entirely alone with it.

*

I know you're not exactly the same person who treated me so viciously when we were teenagers, which is not to say I believe you are entirely transformed, simply that time and life and a loving relationship has changed you as such things also changed me.

The one thing I did not prepare for before we met was that, regardless of the past decade, I would only be able to feel the way I had so often felt around you. Conflicted, distressed, on edge, angry.

It's clear I remain angry at you, even now.

This anger is why I don't think that we should meet in real life again. The way that my body and mind responds to your presence suggests that no meeting could feel like closure, and perhaps you feel the same.

.....

[Attempt 2.]

Every time I write to you, it brings me such feelings of discomfort, such huge, familiar shame. In my head, you are living blissfully untouched by our past violence, and when I re-appear, I bring it with me.  

If we lived in a world where we were taught different approaches to addressing violent relationships, to value justice and healing, I don't think I would feel such shame. I don't think you would have found it so difficult to respond to me, either. I think you might've even helped me out with this in 2012 when I first asked to speak on the phone with you, rather than us dragging this out over a decade.

This will be the seventh time I've written to you in three years? I've tried so many tactics, but I've never been able to be vulnerable enough to state what I need from you. I've always hoped you would offer it, because that's what would've felt right, restorative even.

I don't think you understand how much I've needed your testimony. And I don't mean the story you tell yourself in your head, what you told _, what you told me all those times in a state of denial and shame.

The only reason I am so certain that you remember, you do know what happened between us is because I know, and I remember. Does that make sense? Because we were both there, and it happened to each of us. Because we often talked about how we could never talk about it to anyone other than each other.

However, any messages between us or spoken conversation we've ever had, from 2011 to May 14th last year, I have watched you lie to me, and to yourself. Lying doesn't have to be conscious, of course; minimising, denying, blanking out memories, all point to an inability to tolerate painful reality rather than because you enjoy my confusion and distress.

I assume you've done this because I did it too, for a long time. And I know that asking you to revisit experiences that cause you pain, that cause you shame, that make you want to literally run away as you ultimately did when we met last year, is difficult, is so much to ask.

If I've learnt anything over the last ten years, it's that I can't change how I feel about you. I will always be injured, disappointed, angry. I will keep grieving what was lost. What I feel like I can change however is this sense that I am always fighting with you for the truth. That I feel like a liar. That I feel alone with what happened between us when that's not really the case.

I'm asking you to write in your own words whatever it is you have thought and felt about what happened between us, specifically during that time, perhaps in the years since, perhaps about September 2017 and other times I have contacted you, if that feels important.

If you agree to do this, I do understand it might take weeks, months.

On May 14th you said to me you felt like you were playing a game where the rules kept changing. You felt like you couldn't say anything right.

I agree now that I was trying to control everything; it's a protective mechanism, you've done the same in your own way.

But I am now in a position where I don't have the same controlling idea of what I specifically need you to say or how I want you to say it.

What I need is proof of your emotional engagement, your meaningful reflection, your work. I don't want you to write what you think I want to hear, but rather for you to offer the perspective and insight my experience of you has been so lacking since 2010.

If you do agree to do this, I do have two conditions that I need you to accept, if this is going to help us.

I need you to be completely honest, to the best of your ability, even if it pains you to do so. You can say whatever you need to about how you felt/feel about me or what I've done, if that means you are being honest.

And I need you not to minimise or deny what happened. I need you to ruminate deeply on the violence – which means you need to put in the work of remembering, naming and reflecting on it.

I need you to write about hitting me, about manipulative, controlling behaviours, about us fighting. I need you to write the words sexual assault and show that you have reflected on your actions. You don't need to censor your words, because the uncensored reality is already a part of my life.

I understand memory is complicated, especially painful memories. I have been reminded on multiple occasions by friends and family of interactions between you and I that I've previously completely forgotten. Perhaps you will need to look back on messages, diaries, if they still exist.

I can be as patient as is necessary, because this is important. Like I said, I understand that this could take a very long time to produce, and perhaps it should.

I think the key here is that this testimony allows me insight into your feelings from a safe, mindful distance. It will be something to rely on and trust in. Something detailed and thoughtful that lets me rest. Something that allows me to believe you. Something that you have put time, effort and reflection into that I can respect you for.

Something that leaves you vulnerable too, not so that I can hurt you, but so that we are finally on an equal footing.

I hope that you have it in you to understand why I still might need that.

*

If you were to write such a document for me, I couldn't promise you that you would be giving me closure. I couldn't promise you it will make you feel better or redeemed or less ashamed. I couldn't promise you I would never contact you again, although I hope it would.

I can only tell you that it is what I have needed and that, until you didn't reply to that email I wrote in a state of such reckless distress that I was essentially directly giving you an opportunity to isolate and hurt me, I have never trusted you enough to ask.

I can tell you that if you were to tell the truth, the contents of that document would frighten me more than anything, because I have been trying to live in denial too, I have tried to forgive us, I have tried to delete memories and repress feelings, and I've failed, because denying reality is such a fractured and therefore impossible way to live.

*

I understand you might need time to think this over or to discuss/share this message with trusted people.

If you conclude that you can't help me with this, I just need you to tell me as directly as you can because then I can begin to process and accept it.

If you are able and want to do it, even if only at some point in the future, then please let me know too.

The potential for a world where neither of us harm or are harmed in the way we once did to each other is sometimes the only thing that keeps me going, and it's this hope that has led me to writing to you again.

Thank you for reading.

Sincerely,

D.

[lookiemyonlinediary]

who

I was born on sunny midday to infamous high school lovers. My first two names were given to me by my godmother and the bible. I am this couple’s first daughter and was raised in a small village in our hometown.

Having parents younger than most kids of my age, I grew up joining beauty pageants because my parents had the time, effort and energy for it. Now, I do not want to think of myself as an untalented child as that is very degrading, but in every talent portion, all I could offer was modeling (excuse yourself, Kendall Jenner). But you know, it was cool. So, whatever.

Although it was not a bad thing and has not been an insecurity (because why would it be?) of mine, strutting on the runway and looking pretty are not the sole elements a young girl should possess and have knowledge of. *hair flip* I recollect memories of being stuck in traffic because of the rain while we were on our way for a VTR of a shampoo commercial. Yes, that is right. My parents also tried to test out my acting skills. I became their little Barbie doll for quite some time. I have fond memories of waking up late at night seeing my mother and father make costume and props for me. It is still one of my beloved memories as a child. The various pieces of cloth, sequins, and glitters stashed in our living room were always a pleasant view for me because those were the days that my parents were still together.

I was seven-years-old and it was New Year's Eve when my father and I had "the talk." We were in the dining area of my grandparent's house on my mother's side; it was while the whole family was having their Media Noche at the terrace, it was while I was hearing the sound of fireworks and merry laughter of people outside the house. I sat there on his lap not knowing what to say. It was a mere blank stare at a distant.

Unfortunately, my younger brother who arrived three years later after I was born was still not enough to keep their relationship together. I felt broken and shattered but there was nothing that I could do as I do not hold the lives of my parents. They are individuals as I. No one owns anyone. I do not own them nor do they own me. (I remember a similar line was spoken in the movie Out of Africa, 1986, I just cannot find an excerpt of it for the love of God)

At the age of seven, I obliged myself to constantly keep an open mind and endure the fact that I am unlike every other kid that I knew at that moment. It took some time and although I am not entirely sure how that seven-year-old girl managed it so well, I am just glad that she did.

"What do you want to be when you grow up?" the principal of our school asked us on one of our daily discussions with her every week. She visits us in our classroom making sure we are all learning from our teachers. She has been really a second mother to me considering I have been studying in her school since I was in the nursery. "An astronaut!" I cheerfully answered. I heard it echo through the sea of voices saying, "I want to be a doctor!" A nurse!" "A teacher!" She noticed my answer and started to become concerned.

I kind of get it. I mean, a young girl in her first grade in a third-world country living in a small town without even having the technology that we have now, when did she even discover the word astronaut? "Your principal talked to me and said that you wanted to be an astronaut when you grow up. Why?" my mother asked. "It is because I want to travel through space!" And believe it or not but that is the truth. I have always been fascinated by clouds, skies, stars, and planets. I admire her paying attention to every single one of us and having awareness with our problems at home but no, I was not going through a psychological effect from my parent's separation. I did not want to travel through space because I wanted to be alone (although, maybe now I do.) *cue tears*

The revelation is, I was flustered to say that my actual aspiration in life is to be a cashier lady (right?!) as all of the other kids were speaking up about big careers so, you know? I knew I just had to level up my answer. I cannot be the poorest aspiring bitch in the class.

I started my first schooling years in that specific school located in our village. Alongside having medals for academics, I also have awards at home for winning declamation contests and beauty pageants. I was hailed as the first Queen of Hearts of our school. Everything was great for my little life until the day came that I had to transfer to a wholly different school.

It was when I was about to enter the fourth grade in elementary that I had to shift because my school only happen to provide education for until third grade. My parents decided it was time for me to grow out of my comfort zone so they put me in a school that is a tad far away from home. I remember being timid and discouraged because I grew up in a school where the floor had tiles, the rooms had air-conditioners, and the bathrooms had light bulbs. I was not a little princess anymore. Everything good has vanished since then. It was the start of a new chapter of my life. My fairytale story ended right there because it is where I first encountered bullies.

The school I transferred to was small and although it attempted to acquire some charming and genuinely admirable teachers, it was filled with the horrors of students who do not bathe regularly and seem to be more than happy to use offensive words on an everyday basis. No, I was not transferred to a public school. My parents were still paying a heavy amount of money for that Christian school and Lord is my witness with how disgusted I was.

I was not only bullied (and punched, too) by a boy who has never seen a toothbrush in his entire existence on Earth but also by an old teacher who says "pee-cha pay" instead of "pizza pie" and gets deranged every single time for no reason at all. She was the first teacher to shame me in class for my body and also the first person who screamed cuss words at us at the top of her lungs. Aside from having a mother who is at work most of the time, a father who resides in Manila and no one to talk to about my problems at school, I started writing in my diary and pouring all my emotions in it. One day, my mom read it and she became furious that she threw it at me because she cannot accept the reality that her baby girl is starting to bear the brutality of the world and no mother was found during those instants. Since then I have not written any poem nor essay about my sentiments because I am still fearful that people will look at me uncomfortably once they see me from a different perspective. It was at that phase of my life that I had no outlet for my emotions and all I could think of was how to escape from my self.

It was hell not only at home but also at school. After a year, I learned to settle as my focus was moved onto a different matter. I had crushes, boys had crushes on me, boys from the upper grade had crushes on me and then the prettiest girl in the classroom decided to make me her best friend as she was starting to get insecure with the attention I was getting. She unquestionably failed to make me her shadow as I gracefully stood there with medals delivering our graduation speech. I was a salutatorian with a new best friend, a keen suitor and an amazing friendship with our adviser.

If my elementary years were a rollercoaster ride, my high school life can be characterized as a painfully awkward bad romantic-comedy film yet with satire humor. It was a huge insulting mess.

I started my first year in high school at an academy. Just like any other freshmen, I was excited to finally live up to my Glee and High School Musical fantasies. Sadly for me, I was thirteen and those fictional characters were not. I cannot get pregnant with a football player and ask people what time is it. I joined the English club and continued with my artistry in acting. I also wrote poems and composed songs because my father granted me a guitar as a graduation gift.

Just as my life was going well, our school principal abruptly decided to mix students with better grades among the "rotten tomatoes." Also, these are not my own words, that is how he called them. So then as fate decided it, I am going to spend my year in a class with one of those rotten tomatoes a.k.a. my old best friend from elementary. I tried to have a decent friendship with her since I am by nature a good person but then I do not know how her mother raised her as she cold-heartedly betrayed me, flirted with my crush, made the girl who despised me her new best friend and no, it does not end there, steal my brand new watch. I am still amazed at all the time she had. I was one of those students with inherent bad luck that got moved to their section. It is where all the evil students lurk. Luckily for me, I still had the best time of my life as I tried to tutor some of them at the same time associate my studies with boys and new found friends from that section. As regretful as it may sound, I guess I enjoyed their company way too much and by the end of the year, I found myself blending in by becoming a rotten tomato as well.

Onto my second year in high school, my parents decided to move me again because I was not on the honorable mention. I spent my sophomore year in a college school. It was 2012 and this is when my life turned upside down. This is when I became one of those white high school girls born from chick flicks in the 20th century that I have grown to watch on cable. I was thrilled to eventually enter a school that is larger than life and farther from home. I finally became a stereotype.

I became free; too free that I started cutting classes just to hang out with friends. Too free that I adequately used my phone inside the classroom and had to get my grandmother to school every time I get in trouble. Too free that I had extreme fights because of nasty boys. I represented our section for Miss Earth and embarrassed myself by not knowing the lyrics nor the chords to the song I was singing (although I won Miss Photogenic.) I was not a rebel nor a cool kid. I just hated everyone and had frequent arguments with my mother. I met a lot of sexually active fourteen-year-olds. I had major counseling from our adviser.  I had sexual and paranormal experiences at school and for the first time in my life, I received a failing grade. I was 72 in Algebra and I fainted when I told my mother about the bad news.

On my junior year, it was time for me to repent. I knew what I have done and now they are transferring me to a school that is embarrassingly smaller than my friend's house. #Shook is an understatement for what I have felt. Again, I was moved from one section to another. This time I was from the rotten tomatoes. Our History teacher felt pity toward her three new pretty students that she decided to adopt us onto her star section. It was another year of adjustment and God knew how mentally and physically tired I was. The only good thing that happened that year was my consistency of a considerable grade and so my parents made me stay there for the senior year.

My last two years in high school went like a harsh breeze. I fought with someone (as usual.) I was asked to prom. I had a teacher aiming to me pull me down on his level (until this day, I still have no idea why he hates me for wearing my hair in a bun.) I was perfecting quizzes again and I managed to have a steady high grade. I graduated peacefully with no zygote in my womb and it was time for me to pack my bags and finally move to the city with my father.

As someone who grew up in a city within a province, the real city overwhelmed me. Catcallers are scattered everywhere. Smoke-belching vehicles and smokers do not take consideration of your life. Backpacks are not backpacks anymore since it is placed on your chest to avoid thieves and perverts. And a jeepney can lull its passengers to sleep because of this infamous traffic in a specific avenue.

I was ready to enter either this college or that university except I have my father who wants me to enter the university he went to. And to state the obvious, I failed. I took another entrance exam for this other university only because my father said it is the second-best of what he wanted and also that he will buy me a car. No, he did not. And no, it was not the second-best.

My whole life my parents tried to protect me and made sure I am safe and comfortable so I was provided with school service. You do not get any of that once you are in a university.

My first two semesters in our college I Iearned how to drink, party and go home at six in the morning while writing love letters to my crush who is an activist including becoming a consistent Dean's Lister. The next two semesters, I learned that the subjects are not getting easier, and the professors are only getting feistier. I fully shut down and resided in a dark place on my mind for the whole year. I was at that stage that I did not know who I was or who I wanted to be. I was scared. I was forcing myself to figure out who I am before I turn eighteen because I am frightened to go older each year and not see the life I envisioned for myself. I joined a mass organization to have a new light in my life. A musical play that I starred in also freed me from my mind during that phase. Life is not getting easier and I wish I could still simply say that I want to be an astronaut so that I could travel through space. Now, I am currently in my third year of college. I recently just finished an extensive workshop on theater arts and I am more inclined now to know the lives of the masses and the struggles of being a woman in a patriarchal society.

Cruel people can prowl anywhere. Bad memories are inevitable. I welcome sadness with a big hug and accept defeat with honor. And although I am only dancing to melancholia, the Universe has still chosen this sperm with an X chromosome to see what beautiful madness the world is. I ought to seize it.

[girlieinterns]

My name is Maxine Musto and I am an intern here at Girlie Action Media.  Today, I am proud to announce the return of our Professional Confessional series.  This week, I had the opportunity to speak with Eric Sussman about his past work as a tour manager, his current position in local government, and the importance of hard work.  Check out the interview below:

Maxine Musto: If you had a Wikipedia page, what would the synopsis be?

Eric Sussman: I am from the wilderness of Northern Maine, but I fell in love with music and left to pursue a career in rock and roll.  I spent ten years as an international tour manager and then as an artist manager, before pursuing a Masters degree in International Leadership and then a career in emergency management.  But that’s the really boring career version.  The fun version would say something like, “I like to drive my car cross country and long walks on the beach and I’m a Taurus.”

MM: I’m a Pisces!  We get along.  Tell me about where you currently work and what you do there.

ES: I currently work in local town government for Provincetown.  I am the town’s new emergency manager and transportation coordinator.  I head 2 different departments.  It is a relatively new position, but this is a community that has been very specialty made for several years now.  Provincetown is a summer resort town at the very end of Cape Cod.  It is America’s oldest arts colony.  And it is a very popular vacation destination for the LGBTQ+ community.  It’s paradise, a queer artists’ paradise.  But it is also a very interesting community to pursue my current path in.  Emergency management, on the local to the national level, is the protection of life, property, and the environment from natural hazards to man-made incidents.  There are five sectors of emergency management: planning, preparedness, negation, response, recovery.  Here in Provincetown, I am the new emergency management coordinator working to prepare, prevent, mitigate, respond to, and recover from natural hazards or man-made incidents.  Being a very large LGBTQ+ destination, we have very large events all summer long for a number of different populations, so I spend my time trying to save us all.

MM: That’s beautiful.  Can you tell me a bit about your time as a tour manager?

ES: My time in the music business was incredible.  I think my time as a tour manager made me the person I am today, and also helped me get my current job.  We don’t have mayors in small towns like Provincetown, we have town managers.  I was hired by the town manager, who told the rest of the committee, “If this kid worked in rock and roll, he can do anything.”  And I believe him.  Tour management taught me everything.  I was rather fortunate.  My very first tour, when I was 27, was with Snoop Dogg across Canada.  I was a young dude and this was my first gig.  We were in ice hockey arenas playing to 30,000 people every night.  It was amazing.  From Snoop, six months later I was managing Fiction Plane, the main support band for the first ten months of the Sting and The Police reunion tour in 2007.  After The Police tour, I was managing Black Kids for one year.  I went all over the world with them.  Between all of this, I was doing small tours with Amanda Palmer and the Dresden Dolls.  When I decided to stop touring, I became Amanda Palmer’s artist manager.  And I believe if I had not gotten the touring experience first, I would not have been a very effective artist manager.  Being a tour manager is the best education.  You are learning about every aspect of the business every single day because you are coordinating all the bands moving parts.  You are dealing with management, the label, merchandisers, businesses, business managers, publishers, publicists, tech teams, road crew, promoters, reps, and agents.  It was a fast and furious introduction to the business and it really gave me an introduction to be an artist manager later down the road.  And it was hard work, but it was good work, work I really liked doing.  They often say the tour manager is the first one up and the first one to bed.  There were a lot of nights where I got four hours of sleep because I was at it all day long trying to make these tours happen, but it was worth every minute.  I loved my work.

MM: What was your favorite part about working with Amanda Palmer?

ES: I’ve known Amanda for many, many years.  I first fell in with the Dresden Dolls when I was in college, back in 2002.  One thing I always loved about Amanda Palmer and the Dresden Dolls was the power and the relationship they had with their audience.  As a kid who loved music, it was nice to find a band that had that kind of magic and familiarity.  I really liked what they meant to people, and how powerful that relationship was.  So, it was an honor to start working for her when I was a kid.  I was just a fan in the audience, and we got friendly because I was hanging out in the front row.  And that turned into a, “Hey, help us do some label stuff,” and “Hey, hang these posters,” and “Hey, can you sell merch at this show?” Our relationship grew from there over the years.  As Amanda’s manager,  I am pretty proud to say that Girlie Action and I were there through probably one of the greatest, most prolific moments in her career.  The 2012, 2013, 2014 album cycle was a large chapter in her story.  That is also when we had the Kickstarter campaign that broke every record, followed by a Ted Talk from that.  So to be able to go on that journey with that artist through all these big moments was really exciting. It required a lot of work, and I think we all lost a lot of sleep, but it was worth it.  To this day, I am still proud of all the work we all did during those few years.

MM: That sounds like an incredible time.  Name an artist or band you think everyone should know.

ES: There are two bands that are my Instagram hashtags all the time.  One is a 90s indie rock band called 764-HERO who came out of the pacific northwest indie scene in the late 90s.  They used to tour with Modest Mouse, but never quite hit it the way Modest Mouse did.  I love them with all my heart.  The other band is called The Rock*A*Teens.  They’re also mid-90s college indie rock.  They are a Southern-fried, Atlanta, Georgia, symbolic circus rock.

MM: If you could have dinner with anyone, living or dead, who would it be?

ES: Paul Robeson.  He’s a brave man.

MM: What advice would you give to people who are interested in working as a tour manager or artist manager?

ES: I look back on my years as a tour manager, and they were some of the most rewarding years of my life.  They were also some of the most difficult.  I think it’s really important that people realize that tour management is still a job.  Rock and roll might seem like a great way to travel – it is.  Rock and roll might seem like a great way to party – it is.  But underneath it, you also have to do a good job and work hard.  If you want to be taken seriously, you have to behave seriously.  I think it’s important to remember that it’s a lot of hard work.  But if you’re really serious about it, you commit to it, and you do good work for people, you can have a fantastic career.  Take it seriously, work hard.  Your career depends on it, your artist’s career depends on it, the third parties and vendors and the other stakeholders, their careers depend on it.  Tour management itself is a lot of responsibility and a lot of people are depending on you to be good at your job, so take it seriously.

[ladyakahiko]

So something happened to me a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve been searching for the correct words to use to express it.  I have a very busy week ahead of me and I’d like to get this all out of my mind so I can focus on the tasks ahead.  However, before I get into this, a little backstory is necessary.  This is going to be VERY long, so bear with me.

Summer of 2008--I was taking a biology class at my local community college.  There was a quiet guy who sat in the back of the room, looking rather awkward.  Sometimes he didn’t have partners for his labs.  I honestly felt kind of bad for him, so I made an effort to reach out and have a conversation when our class went on a field trip to Kensington Park.  Nothing major, just little niceties and general small talk.  I didn’t really think anything of it at the time.

Fast forward to winter of 2009--our group of friends in community college always spent time hanging out in hallway next to one of the auditoriums in the main student building.  We had our laptops out and we were planning a huge spring break trip to Canada (because we were all at least 19 but not yet 21 and wanted to go there to drink).  Many people also hung out in this area, it was a popular spot for all the nerdy gamers.  While planning the trip and asking who was in, lo and behold the guy from my summer biology class comes up and says “I would be interested, here’s my number.”  None of us really hung out with him that much, aside from the random rounds of Super Nintendo (we had TVs from the A/V department hooked up back there) or some Settlers of Catan.  We thought it was a little creepy that he invited himself on such flimsy terms, so we didn’t call him.

Moving ahead again, to the fall of 2009.  Many people from our central group of friends at community college transferred out to Western Michigan University.  Some ended up coming the same semester as me, others waited until later.  I was really excited and enjoying my orientation with new friends, when suddenly I see him--community college guy.  He greets me, saying “wow, we’re both here, what a coincidence, huh?”  I kind of nod in agreement, but feel slightly creeped out nonetheless.

This time let’s go a little further forward, to spring of 2012.  There was a big group of us nerds who all always spent time in the main floor lounge of our dorm building.  Community college guy was among them, but I didn’t think anything of it.  He enjoyed playing Magic: the Gathering which we often were playing, so it just seemed natural for him to be around.  But right before the end of the school year, I had a crush on one of my good friends from this group.  Long story short, we liked each other, things got complicated, other girls entered the picture and there was a big dramatic night at one of the local clubs that we were all out dancing at.  The next morning, I get a text from community college guy, saying: “well now that (crush) is out of the way, would you consider dating me?”  I was extremely pissed off by his tactless attempt to pick me up THE DAY AFTER something so horrible happened.  I told him no and firmly expressed my shock and anger, but he comes back with “but we both came out to Western Michigan from our community college!  Did you ever think that maybe it’s fate?”  I nearly threw up, and worried about what exactly his intentions were for coming to WMU in the first place...

A few months later in the summer of 2012, he asks me out again.  I’m feeling very exhausted by his attempts so I say, “fine.  One date.”  Thinking that if I act like an uninterested bitch the whole time, maybe he’ll get the message and finally leave me alone.  He responds back, “okay, when can you drive to (town) to meet me?”  I still lived in our college town to work over the summer, he went home.  He asked me out and then expected ME to drive nearly two hours to come meet him.  I was furious and told him there was no way I was going to do that.  In retrospect, caving in and saying yes that one time was probably a disastrous idea...

Go forward one more year to spring of 2013.  College graduation ceremony, we made it!  I’m there with my best bro Stephen, and we see (guy) in the crowd too so we invite him to join us.  We all joke around through the ceremony and make fun off our exes who also happened to be graduating on the same day.  After the ceremony we go back to our old dorm building to take pictures together.  (Guy)’s parents are beaming and seem overly excited to be taking pictures with me in them... I think nothing of it though and just focus on my post-graduation plans.

Move on to the fall of 2014.  I’m in Japan!  I made it!  My childhood dreams were finally coming true.  I posted information about applying for the JET program and other ALT dispatch companies for any friends who might be interested in the program.  (Guy) shows interest, asks me a few questions, and to proofread his application essay.  It was pretty terrible and I didn’t have time to fix every little thing, I figured he didn’t really have much of a chance of getting here to Japan anyway since he didn’t study anything remotely related to education or Japan in his university days.  I gave him what help I could and was not at all surprised when he didn’t get an interview.

Not long after this, I’m planning my trip home for Christmas 2014.  (Guy) begins to message me asking when I’ll be free during my visit.  I say that I have many people to see in Kansas and in Michigan, so I probably won’t have time to see him (a gentle way of saying that he’s not high enough on my priority list to get time with me).  He then continues on, he wants to know the dates I’ll be home, when I’ll be visiting Kalamazoo, when I’ll be in my hometown, etc.  He’s REALLY pushing to see me.  Finally, I just lose it and send him a very strongly worded message about how I’m not interested in him, how I’ve said no multiple times, and that will never change.  I then blocked him on every social media outlet we were connected on.

When I’m actually home for Christmas 2014, he calls my US phone on several occasions to try to reach me.  His number was still saved so I ignored it each time.  At the end of this trip I was finally able to permanently deactivate that phone so he couldn’t contact me anymore.

Move ahead to some time in 2015--he makes a new Facebook account and tries to add me.  I immediately block him and report the account to Facebook for harassment.  Of course Facebook does absolutely nothing.  I tell mutual friends who are connected to him to keep an eye on him and let me know if he posts anything creepy related to me or Japan.

In late 2015/early 2016 my best bro tips me off to the fact that (Guy) is still trying to apply to be an ALT in Japan.  I freak out and contact my inner circle of friends in Japan and let them know the story, and ask them if they would have my back if this guy ever showed up.  Most of my friends thought I was overreacting and just told me some BS things to calm me down.  I could feel how annoyed they were with me, and I was frustrated that they didn’t seem to take my worries seriously.

Now this.  This photo.  A screenshot from a few weeks ago, when I looked at my phone for the first time that morning and saw (Guy)’s name there.  Shocked didn’t even begin to cover it.  Before I blocked both accounts, I looked at his Facebook page to see that he is STILL attempting to apply as an ALT, with a caption “I will apply every year if I have to!”

I’m at a loss of what to do.  This has been going on for NINE YEARS.  No one seems to take me seriously when I express how scared and worried I am.  Everyone assumes “oh there’s an ocean in the way and he can’t possibly get accepted to Japan anyway.”  But what if he does?  He’s not giving up on this.  I have nightmares sometimes about meeting him at an ALT welcome event in my region, and in the dreams I just always freeze.  I don’t know what to do.

Saying “no” didn’t work.  Going across the world didn’t work.  Will this even stop when I’m married?  Is marking myself as the “territory” of another man the only way to stop (Guy) from pursuing me?  Or will he wait around in the shadows, hoping that my relationships go sour so he can spring in the next day again?

I have so much good going for me in my life in Japan, I don’t want it to be sullied by this worry anymore.  There’s seemingly nothing I can do because he’s not physically stalking me, and online forums only tell me to “go talk to the person.”  I can’t go the JET office or any other ALT companies and tell them not to let someone into the country.  I’m powerless to stop him from finding me if he gets to Japan.

By posting this, all I want is for my fears to be warranted.  I want someone to take me seriously.  I know there’s probably no way for me to wave a magic wand and make this all go away, but on days when I’m worried or when I have another new Facebook account of his staring me in the face, I just want someone to wrap their arms around me and tell me that I’m okay.  Tell me that I’m not alone in this.  Just offer me a hug and a shoulder and a place to take refuge.  That’s all I want, and all I need <3

[10oclockdot]

Intermission

(a free response to my favorite tumblr piece in ages: Aphelis's Seven Samurai Interrupted, an exploration of the ontology of the intermission)

2001. "I'm not so sure what he'd think about it," says the astronaut. And then, a vertiginous surprise, like something holding us up just fell away: White noise, The 2.35:1 frame irised down to a peephole, Telephoto, POV, panning: through HAL's eyes as he reads their lips. The moment of consciousness. But then, a more vertiginous surprise: A deeper, more silent void than even outer space: A black screen, outside the narrative. Fade in:

The mind races--- wait, no, wait-- NO! A film floating glacially, reel after reel, suddenly bursting with intrigue only to be shut off, suspended, abandoned, adrift, uncertain... But in the audience, a hundred virtual guess-movies still play.

Early 1990's. When I was a kid, my mom sometimes rented The Great Race or It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World for me and my sister. Two very silly films that came on two VHS's each. I remember there being overtures, exit music, intermissions. I remember pressing fast-forward. In the VHS era, we made our own intermissions.

(The Great Race and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World were long films. Now I wonder whether my mom chose them to give herself a long intermission from me.)

1996. The first tape of The Right Stuff ended with Glenn saying, "I plan on being the first man to ride the rocket." The second tape began with a montage of test rocket failures. Convenient, since that's the only part I really wanted to watch. Had there been an intermission there, cut for the tape? Wikipedia tells me The Right Stuff had an intermission. I check my blu-ray, but I can't find one. Where had it been? Where has it gone? Was this the erasure of an absence or of a presence?

Wiki tells me that Fantasia had an intermission, too. I don't remember it. I do remember, however, that my parents always fast-forwarded through the dinosaur part and the Bacchus part the rare once or twice we watched it. Drinking was bad, those were false gods, evolution was a lie. Like I said, we made our own intermissions.

2004. In college, I watched Persona for the first time on possibly the worst VHS tape ever made. A 16mm transfer that might as well have been made by pointing a camcorder at the screen, with white on white subtitles. Partway in, the action abruptly stopped and a card appeared on screen reading, “Please wait a moment while we change reels.” I remember it taking about a minute.

2007. In grad school, I TA'd for an introductory film history class. The Birth of a Nation was, of course, pure suffering for all the students in that 150-person room. (Seriously, everybody. If you must teach Griffith in Intro to Film, figure out the learning goal. Continuity editing? The Lonedale Operator. Poetry? The Country Doctor and maybe The Musketeers of Pig Alley. Film as fine art? Intolerance. Lillian Gish's acting? Broken Blossoms. If you want to talk about the racism, show scenes, but don't waste the 3 hours.)

Anyway. I've heard laughs during Keaton and shrieks during Un Chien Andalou and even a hushed gasp at the end of Citizen Kane. But I've never heard as pained or as abject a moan as the one that issued from every mouth in that room when the title card told them:

2009. A road trip to the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio, to see Jennifer Reeves's When It Was Blue play on film, from two projectors hitting the same screen. A hallucinatory Brakhagian ocular explosion for over an hour, except for a few minutes in the middle when both projectors were turned off. Black screen, dark theater. Big, lush music played. An intermission? No one left their seats. A pause to change reels? But the experience continued as the music played, and I kept my eyes trained ahead. What was it, then? It was my favorite part.

2012. A last-minute road trip up to Ann Arbor, Michigan to see one of the rehearsal performances of Philip Glass's opera Einstein on the Beach. It's an over-five-hour affair: 4 acts plus 5 "knee plays" designed as bookends and links between the acts. But the Knee Plays are not intermissions. Instead, the audience is invited to create their own intermission wherever they need it. I never left my seat. Neither did any of the other music nerds I went with.

2015. Chicago, for the 70mm Hateful Eight roadshow. The theater was packed with drunk, agitated people. The overture didn't shut them up. The intermission didn't calm them down. I was willing to believe that the film was building to something; but the second half proved me wrong. Over three hours of meaningless cruelty, pointless bloviation, gratuitous bloodshed. Like the film stock itself, was the intermission simply a compensatory gesture? The act of a filmmaker trying to make a bad project seem important? My friends and I talked about it for hours. We couldn't save it.

(Then again, maybe The Hateful Eight just came out a year too early. After the 2016 election, a meditation on hate and division, especially a grotesque, unredeeming one, feels timely.)

My parents voted for Trump. They'd always been Evangelical Christians (Cruz was their candidate) and they raised me as one. I don't know whether I resent their vote more for its idiocy, its bigotry, or for its absolute nullification of their values. I left the church for good around 2010. My mom still believes I'll come back.

My dad and I built model rockets together when I was a kid, but we gave it up when I went to college. We said goodbye to the hobby and figured it was all over. But it turns out it was just a break; a couple years ago we got back into it. I think that return gives my mom hope that one day I'll "find my way back" to the church. The Evangelical allegiance to Trump convinces me again that there's nothing to come back to.

2000. dc Talk, the biggest Christian band of the 90s, announced their indefinite hiatus with a greatest hits album called "Intermission." As the years went by, the intermission stretching ever longer, I sometimes pondered whether that name was a put-on. The Eagles in reverse: They didn't take a vacation, they broke up. Now I learn that dc Talk is getting back together in 2017 to play a single Caribbean cruise. Looks like there was nothing to come back to.

2007. I watched the 1965 film The Bedford Incident, which ends with the accidental launch of a nuclear missile, then white noise.

I was so furious at this ending that for years I fantasized about teaching a screenwriting class in which I would assign the students to replace "The End" with "Intermission" and write treatments for the "second half" of the movie. Where intermissions do not exist, it becomes necessary to invent them.

Because what is an intermission? It's a signpost on a journey. You're halfway there. It's a reminder of artifice: that the story was designed. Fear not, the artist is in control, and the artist will lead you back out. It's terror (because we do not yet know) but also hope (because someone does).

     Mittere: to let go.      Inter: between.      Intermission: to let go of something, but only for a time;      that is, "between" holding it and picking it back up again.

The intermission is eschatological. It proclaims, this is NOT the end. This is just a break. For two millennia, Christianity has been in intermission, awaiting the Second Coming. The second act. The intermission proclaims that an absence is really a presence. That a designer left a gap here for a purpose. That it's not just meaningless silence. "I am going there to prepare a place for you."

Where intermissions do not exist, it becomes necessary to invent them.

[rilenerocks]

This photo of me was taken in 1968. I was a little bit shy of my 17th birthday which would arrive in late spring. My country was reeling. Martin Luther King had been assassinated and furious protests roiled through cities which were literally on fire. That was only the beginning. Just before my high school graduation, Bobby Kennedy was killed. The war in Vietnam was escalating. The Black Panthers were rising. I was wide-eyed and questioning authority, processing my political views  and choosing my future ideological path. That summer, I worked downtown in the Chicago Loop. The Democratic National convention came to town, and with it, streets became lined with police dressed in riot gear. “Tumultuous” feels like a relatively mild adjective to describe the city’s affect. I’d come out of my office at the end of my work day and pass the officers in their blue helmets, holding their billy clubs and slapping them against their opposite hand. A force designed to intimidate.  There were raucous demonstrations and  rollicking concerts in Grant Park in which the atmosphere turned violent. I wasn’t beaten or arrested, but just the same, the adult I was evolving into was molded by all these events. By the time I started college that fall, I was working my way into a political ideology, built on a mostly liberal home education, which ultimately led me to more radical views. It’s no coincidence that 1968 has been studied and restudied as a pivotal moment in modern history. The issues of racism, sexism, classism and anti-war activities occupied my college years. Who I became, the principles at the center of my essential humanity, were forged during those years. Becoming an adult, a wife and partner, a friend and parent, and an ally for victims of oppression, all stemmed from the central philosophy that I chose for myself back then. I participated in demonstrations during that convulsive time and beyond it. I ran, so fleet footed back then, from local and state police in my community and also in the nation’s capital. I was arrested. I remember a great about those heady days in which I thought me and those who agreed with me would change the world. It’s 52 years later. The world is in the grip of a viral pandemic. I’m approaching the end of my seventh decade on this planet. My life has been crammed with a great deal of beauty and joy, ugliness and sadness, fulfillment and disappointment. Luckily for me, my little personal life has been a source of all that is positive. I’ve had great love and a wonderful family. I’ve not been hungry or unclothed or homeless or unsafe. But my social justice aspirations have fallen short many times over. The battles waged back then, and the struggles to achieve fairness, equity and respect throughout my country and the world, still loom large. In fact, in many ways, the mountain of problems seems even higher to me now than it did way back then. Maybe it’s because the time ahead for me is shorter, which makes things seem so daunting. Daunting and repetitive. How can the same wretched issues remain so deep and unchanged? Maybe the pandemic has made things seem worse, given the scary claustrophobic nature of this time. I’m not really sure. All I know is that the murder of George Floyd, on top of all the other murders of black people which have continued steadily throughout my lifetime, has unleashed a fury and an anguish that’s hard to stop thinking about. That makes sleep hard to come by. That brings empathy, sadness, questions and more questions. That brings the intense need for systemic change in our damaged and eroding democracy to heated urgency. I’m wishing I could talk with Michael, my passionate partner and teacher of American history, with whom I shared the same world view, and who could help me navigate this incredibly complex time of both physical and health challenges which feel so overwhelming.

I’ve been looking at my Civil War bookshelf. I got started studying that war when I was about twelve years old. Someone gave our family books about Abraham Lincoln. I read them over and over. I remember the admiration I felt for this smart, self-taught man who represented my home state and wound up freeing the slaves. Or so it seemed. I still can recall that he died at 7:22 am on the morning of April 15th, 1865, not even a week after the surrender of the Confederate army, the end of the war. “Now he belongs to the ages,” they said. At my own tender age, I thought the Civil War had really ended. But as years went by, and I began to read more books, and to witness the inequities experienced by black Americans, I realized that the war never really ended and that in fact, it was still being waged, sometimes more overtly, sometimes more covertly, but waged just the same. That in fact, it is endless. Despite everything that’s been written about states’ rights and other random motives for the war, to me it’s always been about slavery. Pure, simple and unrelentingly true. I kept on reading, book after book. I could never fully absorb the fact that people stood opposite each other for four years, blasting each other to bits because one side wanted so desperately to retain control of its work force, looked upon as no better than subhumans. Granted, there are complexities deeper than that for some of those long ago people, but in the end and to this day, racism is as American as the proverbial apple pie.

In the spring of 2016, Michael was four years out from his initial diagnosis of his relentless Merkel cell cancer. He’d been through 55 radiation treatments, 20 injections of chemotherapy, a hideous oral targeted therapy and ultimately, immunotherapy. All of these assaults on his body had bought him periods of time when he was healthy. We both knew that his cancer would reappear eventually. After he got through his treatments in 2012, we took a trip to Sanibel island after he finished school in June, 2013. When fall came with its wicked metastasis, he went through 18 weeks of chemo. With no idea how long he’d be cancer-free, we headed back to the Florida Gulf Coast for restoration of both soul and body. But once that was over, we decided that he should think carefully about all those dreams on his wish list, the places he’d hoped to have time to see in his future retirement. One of those bucket list items was the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. Luckily for us, our shared appreciation for history made these trips a simple get. Off we went to Memphis in the spring of 2016 for the profound history, the music and the barbecue.

It’s hard to describe what it’s like approaching the Lorraine Motel if you were a cognitive person alive when Martin Luther King was assassinated. I can’t count how many times I watched the scene on that balcony after he was shot, when Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young and others stood pointing in the direction from where the bullets had come. As with the scenes from the Kennedy assassination, those images are burned into my brain. I barely got through the front door when the weeping began. The barbaric weapons of slavery on display, along with the texts, photos and actual artifacts of oppression are powerful and painful. Our time spent there wasn’t as much learning something new as it was being forever altered by the proximity to the instruments of horror. I feel lucky to have shared that experience with Michael.

And now here we are today. Michael is gone. Endless racism is still here. Only a week ago, George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis. The country is teeming with rage and the current administration is behaving like we’re headed toward a police state. I truly fear for democracy. The surreal nature of this reality, coupled with the still-circulating virus, is hard to describe. To say things feel pretty weird is a serious understatement. I spend a considerable amount of time feeling I’ve time traveled back to the 1960’s and I know I’m not alone. Sometimes because of the lockdown measures, it kind of feels that way. Today, a protest was planned for my community. At first, I thought I’d go, as I’ve gone to other demonstrations throughout my life. Too-many-wars protests, women’s rights protests, anti-gun protests, and now a black lives matter protest. Then I was worried about being in a crowd with the virus concerns as I’m old enough to be in “the most likely” death group. What about my kids and grandkids who would be devastated if something happened to me just a few years after losing Michael? Thirty minutes before the gathering, I was still pulling weeds in my garden. In the end, I realized I needed to be there, virus or no virus. Sometimes you just have to live your principles no matter what. As I walked the few blocks to the meeting place, I realized that most of the people around me, headed in the same direction, were young enough to be my grandchildren in addition to children. That was okay. They get to see that the gray hairs still have something to say. I found my own family there and we had a shared political experience which I’m proud to say, wasn’t the first one. What I wish is that it could be the last one. That the endless time of protesting could finally come to an end.

  Endless This photo of me was taken in 1968. I was a little bit shy of my 17th birthday which would arrive in late spring.

[oltnews]

Jennifer Lawrence plays the role of 'Katniss Everdeen' in THE HUNGER GAMES. Lionsgate Lionsgate announced a film version of Suzanne Collins Hunger Games prequel, The songbirds and snakes ballad. Fresh out of the press, Lionsgate has announced plans to shoot Suzanne Collins' To come up Hunger Games prequel, The songbirds and snakes ballad, in the next Hunger Games movie. Director Francis Lawrence, who succeeded Gary Ross after the premiere Hunger Games and directed the next three installments (Catch fire in 2013, Mockingjay part I in 2014 and Mockingjay part II in 2015), is back in the director's chair, with Michael Arndt who writes the screenplay and Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson who produce. No, I have no idea when it will be released, but keep an eye out for available locations before Thanksgiving. The book, slated for May 19, is said to be a story of origin for the villain Coriolanus Snow, starring the possible tyrant at the age of 18 before becoming the genocidal president of Panem. Yes, there have been online discussions about the potential "problematic" notion of highlighting a handsome white guy who ends up becoming the bad guy, and it's no secret that I think the Hunger Games the property must vacate as long as it is early. At the very least, I would say that people presented themselves for the brand character (Katniss Everdeen by Jennifer Lawrence) as much as for the source material, just as they presented themselves for Harry potter and for dusk especially because of Bella and Edward. This is one of the main reasons why Harry potter and dusk turned into cinematic sensations everything (among others) The Seeker: The Dark is Rising, Mortal Engines, The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones and The donor no. People introduced themselves to renowned characters more than the IP or the plot, although an easily explained plot ("children forced to kill other children for television entertainment", "a vampire and a teenage girl fall in love with each other "young boy goes to boarding school for wizards") translates better than convoluted plots of Divergent and the Maze Runner sequelae. In addition, they wanted to see Katniss kick ass and save the proverbial day, to the point where audiences declined when the films moved away from the "hunger games" and started to really dig into politics and entertainment criticism. / media simply implicit in the first two films. Mockingjay Part I ($ 337 million in Canada and $ 767 million globally) and Mockingjay Part II ($ 282 million / $ 648 million) suffered comparative decreases from the first two films as the films moved further away from the "pretty cute girls and boys" gadget that looks stylish and then kills each other for TV sports ". Many moviegoers obviously didn't care about politics or the thematic context and just wanted to watch the hot guys indulge in the very kind of distraction from the bread and circuses that the movies were trying to criticize. This theatrical decline of Hunger Games (408 million national dollars and 654 million global dollars) and Catch fire ($ 424 million / $ 865 million), as well as the presidential election of a budding dictator, seem to imply that the audience did not understand the point (or took the big turn of the fourth film as a parable "Hillary Clinton is evil") or don't don't care about the surface thrills, which is part of the reason why few of us really talk much about the property. However, the source material is not necessarily responsible for the reaction of the consumer, and The hunger Games remains the latest “new to cinema” franchise to shoot leading blockbuster numbers. As I feared in 2015, anything that scored in the range of $ 750 billion to $ 1 billion (or more) was either animated, or a redesign / pursuit of a previously successful property or (in the case of MCU and DC Films). You can say that Jumanji: Welcome to the jungle (a 22-year-old sequel to a movie that earned $ 365 million and reached $ 962 million worldwide) is the closest exception to the rule we've had, and it's possible that John Wick: Chapter 4 could go supernova abroad when the time comes and save alongside Impossible mission and Fast furious, but it is completely speculative. Everything else that has climbed endlessly and beyond since late March 2012, just six weeks before The Avengers changed everything, was either "new" comic book movies (Black panther, Aquaman, etc.) of established cinematographic universes and redesigns or suites (Jurassic World, Star Wars, The Hobbit, Fast & Furious, Fantastic Beasts, etc.) previously successful cinematographic properties. And since then, Lionsgate has had nothing like this except the fifth and final dusk film ($ 819 million) in late 2012 that they distributed after purchasing Summit Entertainment. the Now you see me movies grossed $ 350 million and $ 334 million in 2013 and 2016, while John Wick: Chapter 3 soared to $ 322 million last year and the original, without deductible La La Land danced to $ 441 million in 2016/2017. There is certainly nothing at the $ 650- $ 865 million scale of the four Hunger Games movies. This is not a criticism, as Lionsgate is generally not known for mega-blockbuster tent poles, and it is not a standard to which they should be held regularly. The hunger Games arrived at exactly the right time, with Jennifer Lawrence at the peak of fame, the media all worshiping the "strong, fierce" Katniss Everdeen as a counterpoint to dusk"Will, passive, beholden to a boy" Bella Swan. None of these descriptions is correct and the Hunger Games the films were fascinating as portraits of Katniss struggling with her mythological version created by the media, just as Lawrence was dealing with balancing her true self with the character "cool girl" created by the media. Katniss was not the greatest American hero just because she occasionally fought and shot arrows here and there, and Lawrence was not the ideal "cool girl" simply because she ate burgers and stumbled in stairs. The fourth and last Hunger Games The film showed the cruel fabrication of what it really was, which is why I was disappointed to see it play (only compared to its predecessors) relatively poorly. Of course, this was previewed by my audience's reactions to the first film (cheering when kidnapped children murdered other kidnapped children) and the horribly ironic festivities from the red carpet premiere for the second film (and probably the others ) that looked like high-profile propaganda broadcasts from the Capitol. Like, relatively speaking, the reaction of fans (vocal minority) to Iron man 3 and The Last Jedi, the relative rejection of the most political and deconstructionist Hunger Games the movies (and it's not like the first two were subtle in terms of politics) brought out an audience that really just wanted bread and circuses and / or comforting fantasy tropes. So I can't help but wonder, even assuming the book is solid and powerful reading, how does a new Hunger Games will be received. To be fair, there is a difference between "Here's a new Hunger Games prequel "and" Here's a new Hunger Games frankness, "as I imagine curiosity will do for at least the" first "film. After all, fantastic beasts and where to find them earned $ 817 million worldwide before Grindelwald's crimes dropped to (still solid, poor domestic total and audience buzz aside) $ 659 million worldwide two years later. I am sure we will have more information once people have read the books. And just because I hate to consider the real thematic heritage of the four originals Hunger Games movies don't mean that the movies themselves were bad or that their intentions were immoral. Sometimes you do Fight Club and people come out thinking Tyler Durden is a hero and "Project Mayhem" sounds like a good idea. As for the humanization of the villain, this can prove to be less "problematic" and more "culturally irrelevant". As we've seen in the past four years, the bad guys are sometimes closer to the Cobra Commander than to Anakin Skywalker. https://oltnews.com/will-the-public-still-care-about-hunger-games-without-jennifer-lawrences-katniss-everdeen-forbes?_unique_id=5e9f32c8386a1