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ninja8tyu · 5 years

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My therapist told me once that a lot of people see therapists, but it doesn’t seem like that because it’s not like people tell others about it.

Now that I’m writing this, I question why snapshoting your lunch is more interesting than therapy, but I digress.

I’m going to tell you about what it’s like to go see therapists. It isn’t as bad as others make it out to be, and it means nothing bad to go see one; only that you are taking care of your mental health. Push away people who say that you’re demented.

I went through multiple therapists through childhood. I was never told why, but I can deduce it.

If it wasn’t the autistic breakdowns and anger issues, along with constant bullying and disproportionate retaliation (I still think it’s fair), I have no clue.

But before I do go on wholesome journey, I’m going to give an example in my life where a therapist (if that was a therapist; my memory only recalls an interview-like room, but it’s indeterminate if it was a therapist or not, as it seemed to be more of a questioning and interrogation rather than the therapy I know of, but i suppose it still applies, as people around my age at the time, I feel, would feel uncomfy talking to adults (I’m more comfy talking to adults than kids my age, just to note, according to other people and personal affirmation) and a therapist may seem intimidating because of the age gap or size difference) basically contributed to my anxiety and distrust in everyone.

Not to bring hate to that therapist, but at the same time, go back to the kitchen bitch, but how this therapist destroyed my trust is basically because I made a terrible joke. Being autistic didn’t grant me the normal ability to determine what was okay to say in certain situations the moment I was born, and I had to learn it throughout life. I think I was frustrated with my mom over my computer (which now I realize how deep my addiction to the web goes) and joked about an elaborate plan that would hurt my mom if she took it away.

Now, this joke was a joke because it was impossible to pull at my age. Putting myself in her shoes, I wonder what she would be thinking. Did she take the joke too seriously? Did she actually consider a 7 year old a threat to human life? Fuck if I know, but my mom was contacted, and boy, did I stop trusting them then.

In defense of her, that was still a threat, and therefore better safe than sorry. In attack towards her, your idiocy fucked me up enough to not make proper use of mental health professionals. The defense is weak in that my threat was empty and fangless. Weighing the options, I think that the dumbest option was chosen (which is why I doubt her status as a therapist: she’s clinically retarded).

So because of that incident, I didn’t really had a fun time with therapists after a very long time, up until high school.

From what my therapist said, it seems like people like me make the mistake that seeing a therapist and/or taking medication is a magical cure to depression and all our personality problems. I can attest to that.

They do not engage in mind-control or the mystical arts. They are more like conversation partners than anything else.

The mistake we make is thinking that something else will solve our problem, but the truth is that the change we want has to come from us. The therapists and medicine helps to aid it, not make it come to be.

I didn’t think that medicine or therapy would help me though, as before high school, I believed that I was right the entire time, and the world was fucked up.

Well, the world is still fucked up, sharing some of the reasons why I believed why that is plus more, but not all of it that ended up to be delusions.

I spent my time telling the therapists how I’m right, and explaining my reasoning. Lucky that I didn’t pass them off as mind-controlled too, and tried to debate rather than go flat-earther over global morality. I guess I assumed that I was powerful enough to wipe mind control or I could appeal to their reason and emotion to destroy the control, assuming it was there. Fuck if I know. I wanna know what that little brat that was once me was thinking as well. But I digress.

The therapists I saw, the visits don’t really stick into my head, but I recall them always suggesting new possibilities in my head. Rather than linear thinking, they suggested other thoughts that might have occurred with others. Now that I’m typing this, I feel that something I might have done back then in response was “well, it’s a stupid way of thinking, and they should go die” which would explain why I didn’t just become a better person then. It’s because I was more smarter back then than now. I overthink and try to live in theory, rather than see and know what is in front of me, and living in the world I know I’m in. After all, I can’t apply “everyone has good will” when I’m living in “everyone is out to get you, literally, just check your memories and the fact that they’re still doing it”. But I digress.

Eventually, therapy stopped. If I ever went to see a therapist, it was because I was in trouble. Saw my counselor too, who basically acted like one.

Anxiety and depression basically were gangbanging me during the time, and I was controlled by constant fear and wanting to kill everyone the first chance I got where no one would be left surviving. Never happened for obvious reasons. Also, the US didn’t give me nuclear codes. Nor did ISIS give me an AK. No one trusts me with a weapon, which is oddly funny and annoying. But I digress.

My mental state went to shit. I remember reading in a report where it included a history of my past “misconduct”, one event that I found funny was the fact that they recorded a threat I made. It included ripping someone’s mouth off and shoving it in their ear so they could hear what they were saying. I hold my child self in high regard for this reason, but at the same time, I also want to shoot him for doing stupid shit that I wouldn’t do in clarity. He’s still a legend in my eyes, but I digress.

My counselor wasn’t a therapist, but damn did she pull me out of a portion of my depression. She played a major part for putting trust in other people. Depression and anxiety took over, I didn’t want to hold it in anymore, and so I told her that she thought I was a nuisance, that she should just stop pretending to be nice, and just toss me aside. She said that she did care for me, though in an angry voice. She was mad that I put words in her mouth. But her words told me that people weren’t all out to get me, and that I’m not hated behind everyone’s backs. I didn’t think and still do think that people can’t lie when they are angry like that.

Then high school came. I had just about it with depression, and I asked to go see a therapist for antidepressants. I didn’t really trust therapists that much still, but somehow, that step made me effectively use the help I got. But yeah.

My therapist noted how the first time I met her, I was like “I’m just here for my magic drugs. Nothing else.” Funny, looking back at it. The therapy helped more than the antidepressants.

I managed to convince my “drugs are brainwash” parents (who are stupid and easily manipulative (often exploited by my brother to make me feel worse), which, even if they disagreed, an annoying child begging for it will always win against such parents, and while it never got to that point, I got the help) to let me get antidepressants (due to cheap price, studying effects of it, also my therapist helped) to help me get better.

I asked someone on tumblr as an anon who I knew was taking antidepressants, and the key thing I took was that the drug is not going to instantly cure me. It isn’t an instant happy pill. It’s a clutch that helps you move through life. Some people even life with depression, never really getting rid of it completely, but they learn to live with it regardless.

My experience with taking antidepressants were introductory, or for mild depression (just to note, I have dysthymia). It made me less dead on the inside. Didn’t make me happy, but I noticed a lack of apathy.

I don’t think the drugs worked because of my more severe depression, and the more obvious reason: my family was making me miserable and suicidal.

You can’t get over depression when people are continuing to put you down. I’m finding a fond interest in murder and torture because of them. I want to get over it, but if I have a toxic family who counteracts any help I get to my mental state, then what’s the result going to be? Hint: I don’t get better.

Family therapy is out of the question, and getting professional help for the biggest fucker contributing to it (brother) is too, since “mind-control” and “government conspiracy” and “I’m crazy, literally, being autistic and all”. So yeah. 17 years wasted wallowing in depression because of a shitty state in a shitty country and shitty family. If I haven’t expressed my rage for my family and those who have made me miserable enough, just take it as true that if I have the ability to, I would enact something that would put a number of people countable on two hands through the type of hell that rivals the holocaust and gulags with their tens of millions of people who suffered in terms of inhumanity and immorality. I digress.

And then I cut myself for the first time. Thanks to my big brother. My mental state was no longer stable, and also the start of when I get kicked out of two discord groups consecutively.

I was still too scared to tell my therapist more about my life out of fear that I’d be sent to a mental hospital, so I went onto the internet, where I could vent about my problems and express my rage anonymously and safely (ignoring hackers and the like).

During this time, I learned a lot of things that really hit me and hurt damn badly, and I couldn’t really blame half of them because it was quite literally caused by me. Venting around on the web didn’t turn out so good.

I’m worth no more than shit to someone I know to be intelligent, whom I had assumed before then that only geniuses could understand the pain I went through. The person here also went through rough shit, possibly worse than I ever had. I had no excuse nor explanation to myself why this is other than that it is what it is, and what is, is that I’m worth below that of manure.

Then I joined a community full of degenerates. The thing that hits me lightly is that I got rejected by a bunch of misfits in society, who are literal nazis, hypocrites, criminals, rejects, et cetera. I want a majority of the people in there dead. I learned a few things like that the people with power are the people you must obey, or you will suffer. I learned that corruption isn’t given a damn about. Systems will gladly run on immorality, so long as it isn’t moral yet. I earn that people are actually willing to us any amount of effort to put up facades to be nice while they absolutely despise you behind their backs.

Alternate accounts let me find some of things people have said while I was banned. I hated it.

I’m pretty sure some of my fits of rage online are on some cringe comp, but I digress.

And then my weekly visit with my therapist came around. My mental state becoming worse and worse, starting with my brother who actively makes me miserable, to being banned from places I felt belonging to because of my mental instability, I had no fear of going to a mental hospital.

Better there than with a shitty family that makes me miserable. I couldn’t care less what drugs they inject into me, so long as it helps me.

I walked in, telling her that I no longer fear going to a mental hospital. I’m going to be honest. There is nothing good left to lose. Just the bad is left to lose, and I’m begging on the inside to lose them.

And then I cried. Told her about how I felt worthless, powerless, useless, a waste, how miserable my life felt, and so on and so on.

I expressed my rage, and how I hated them. I wanted them dead. I never deserved this. What did I do to deserve this? Why give birth to me to make me go through hell? I never asked to be born, and yet people are treating me as if I decided to be born in hell.

Yeah, death threats I made. I’m lucky my therapist didn’t just call the FBI and sick ‘em on me. She was understanding, and knew I was going through a bad time. Not everyone gets the same treatment, I understand, but I have a point here.

The thing I feel about letting it all out, is that because I let it all-out, I’m open to judgement, and therefore correction. My therapist talked with me, I put out my thoughts, she did hers, and the problems begin to become solved. Though, having an interest in psychology and sharing basic knowledge of it helped exponentially. Also, working on emotional intelligence helped too.

I feel that most people don’t really talk about their problems, and they never resolve themselves. They may hold some kind of opinion or thought that would be really bad to have if a situation popped up where they applied that. And when it pops up, they then make a bad decision. But of course, they can’t talk to anyone about them out of fear of judgement.

I feel that therapy works best when you’re honest and unafraid of judgement. You have to be willing to put out your thoughts and let them be vulnerable, and accept when you’re wrong. Also, mental hospitals aren’t that bad, apparently. They do inject strong drugs for people with certain conditions, but that’s because they’re fit to deal with side-effects better than at home or in a standard check-up hospital. Other people’s words, not mine. I haven’t been to one yet.

For me, my problem was to come to terms with the world I believe to be corrupted, and personal problems. I asked why are there killer cops? Why on Earth is the school system built where it rewards bullies but punishes victims? What is the universal cause that turns people bad? Am I the bad guy?

My solution was to let my thoughts be open to be judged and criticized. And it worked for me.

I think I should say that it may not work for you if you go see a therapist. It may not be the best person that would help you, or that you still need time to mentally prep yourself.

As for me, I’m probably not going to see my therapist any more. I’m scare that she’s putting up a kind facade, but actually hates me. I don’t want to be a bratty nuisance that still couldn’t get better after two years and coming back to old issues. I just fear that being true.

My mental state is beginning to deteriorate as a result of being stuck at home with a mentally and emotionally abusive family over the summer. I had starved myself for a short duration (~16 hrs) before realizing that was stupid, and I was basically suggesting to kill my body in an attempt to prove a point (a human can last months without food, but it wouldn’t be worth losing brain development time, especially my life, since I know they wouldn’t be more nicer even if I starved myself).

Also, still no psychiatrist visit for some fucking reason. Medicine can help, but with a family that thinks drugs are products of the devil, it’s more likely for me to go on a psychosis than them ever consider that drugs aren’t that bad. Also, fuck the US for putting a bad name on drugs and the drug war. Literally, not even medical drugs like antidepressants that can help people get better are safe from the toxic culture it bred. Also fuck DARE. You increased drug addiction. Go fuck yourselves. Also fuck the cops for being biased against the mentally ill and the “special” ones. Fuck the system for the same reason. Fuck the world for still thinking they’re morally upright when they still do immoral acts. Fuck the people who let it happen for any reason. Fuck this snowflake society that can’t do anything but complain, because a revolt would be too much work for their fragile asses. Fuck the political system and the government for working based on who pays the most, seldom morality and justice. Fuck my family for being stupid and abusive. Fuck society and how they think that if it isn’t the worst that it could be, then you have no right to complain and correct your problems. Fuck political correctness and how it prioritizes being unoffensive over actually solving problems. Fuck the UN for being incompetent.

#therapy #psychology #my stories #sfw

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vaultt-tec · 7 years

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How did Fallout 1 ever get made?

PCGameN sat down with the Fallout 1 team and discussed its making.

This is in a read more because it is SUPER long. I added it all here but click the link and read it on their site, there are more pictures!

Tim Caine was at PAX when he first saw Vault Boy as a living, breathing entity - it was a cosplayer of 16 or 17 years old, hair gelled to replicate that distinctive swirl. ‘This is weird’, he thought.

Feargus Urquhart remembers walking into Target and seeing that same gelled haircut and toothy smile, not on a fan this time, but emblazoned across half a metre of cotton. ‘How is it that a game that we all worked on somehow created something iconic?’, he wondered. ‘How did it show up on a t-shirt in a department store?’

Related: the best RPGs on PC.

In the years since, Bethesda have taken Fallout into both first-person and the pop culture mainstream. Vault Boy has become as recognisable as Mickey Mouse. The series’ sardonic, faux-’50s imagery now feels indelible, as if it has always been here. But it hasn’t.

It took the nascent Black Isle Studios to nurse the Fallout universe into being, as an unlikely, half-forgotten project in the wings of Interplay, where Caine and Urquhart were both working in the ‘90s. The pair helped create one of the all-time great RPGs in the process.

“The one thing I would say about Interplay in those days, and this isn’t trying to pull the veil back or anything like that - there was just shit going on,” Urquhart tells us. “It was barely controlled chaos. I’m not saying that Brian [Fargo] didn’t have some plan, but there was just… stuff.”

One day, Fargo sent out a company-wide email to canvass opinion. He wanted Interplay to work on a licensed game, and had three tabletop properties in mind. One was Vampire: The Masquerade. Another was Earthdawn, a fantasy game set in the same universe as Shadowrun. And the third was GURPS, designed by Games Workshop’s Steve Jackson.

The team picked the latter, overwhelmingly, because that was what they played in their own sessions. But GURPS wasn’t a setting - it was a Generic Universal RolePlaying System. And so Interplay’s team had to come up with a world of their own.

“I would send out an email saying, ‘I’m in Conference Room Two with a pizza’,” Caine says. “And if people wanted to come, on their own time, they could do it. Chris [Taylor, lead designer], Leonard [Boyarksy, art director], and Jason [Anderson, lead artist] showed up.”

Interplay at the time was almost like a high school, as map layout designer Scott Evans remembers it: incredibly noisy and divided into cliques. Caine was building a clique of his own.

Traditional fantasy was the first idea to be dismissed. The team actually considered making Fallout first-person, a decade early - but decided the sprites of the period didn’t offer the level of detail they wanted. Concepts were floated for time travel, and for a generation ship story - but one after the other, they were all pushed aside and the post-apocalypse was left.

“One thing I didn’t like was games where the character you’re playing should know stuff that you, the player, don’t,” Caine says. “And I think the vault helped us capture that, because both you the player and you the character had no idea what the world was like. The doors opened and you were pushed out. And I really liked that, because it meant we didn’t have to do anything fake like, ‘Well you were hit on your head and have amnesia’.”

There was plenty about the Fallout setting that wasn’t as intuitive, however. Players would have to wrap their heads around a far-future Earth and a peculiar retro aesthetic, even before the bombs started dropping. The question of how Fallout ever survived pitching is answered with a Caine quip: “What do you mean, pitch?”

For a short while, Interplay had planned to make several games in the GURPS system. But soon afterwards they had won the D&D license, a far bigger property that would go on to spawn Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale. As a consequence, Caine’s team were left largely to their own devices.

As for budget - Fallout’s was small enough to pass under the radar. Although Interplay are best remembered for the RPGs of Black Isle and oddball action games like Shiny’s Earthworm Jim, they had mainstream ambitions not so different to those of the bigger publishers today. During Fallout’s development they were primarily interested in sports, and an online game division called Engage.

“It was almost like a smokescreen,” Urquhart explains. “So much money was being pumped into these things that you could go play with your toys and no-one would know.”

Which is exactly what the Fallout team did, pulling out every idea they’d ever intended for a videogame.

“Being just so happy and fired up that we were making this thing basically from scratch and doing virtually whatever we wanted, we had this weird arrogance about the whole thing,” Boyarsky recalls. “‘People are gonna love it, and if they don’t love it they don’t get it.’

“Part of it was a punk rock ethos of, every time we came up with an idea and thought, ‘Wow, no-one would ever do that’, we always wanted to push it further. We chased that stuff and got all excited, like we were doing things we weren’t supposed to be doing.”

The team laugh at the idea that Fallout might have carried some kind of message (“Violence solves problems,” Caine suggests). To these kids of the ‘80s, nuclear holocaust felt like immediate and obvious thematic material. The game’s development was guided by a mantra, however.

“It was the consequence of action,” Caine puts it. “Do what you want, so long as you can accept the consequences.”

Fallout lets you shoot up all you want. But if you get addicted, that will become a problem for you, one you’ll have to cope with. The team were keen not to force their own views onto players, and decided the best way to avoid that was with an overriding moral greyness. The Brotherhood of Steel - in Fallout 3, a somewhat heroic group policing the wasteland - were here in the first game simply as preservationists or, more uncharitably, hoarders. Even The Master, the closest thing Fallout had to a villain, was driven by a well-intentioned desire to bring unity to the wasteland. His name, pre-mutation, was ‘Richard Grey’.

“Everyone needed to have flaws and positive points,” Taylor says. “That way the player could have better, stronger interactions whichever way they went.”

Although the GURPS ruleset eventually fell by the wayside, the Fallout team were determined to replicate the tabletop experience they loved - in which players don’t always do what their Game Master would like. They filled their maps with multiple quest solutions and stuffed the game with thousands of words of alternative dialogue. “The hard part was making sure there was no character that couldn’t finish the game,” Caine says.

Fallout’s dedication to its sandbox is still striking, and only lately matched by the likes of Divinity: Original Sin 2. It was a simulation that enabled unforeseen possibilities.

“I am shocked that people got Dogmeat to live till the end of the game,” Taylor says. “Dogmeat was never supposed to survive. You had to do some really strange things and go way out of your way to do so, but people did.”

During development, a QA tester came to the team with a problem: you could put dynamite on children.

“Where you see a problem…,” Urquhart says. He is joking, of course, yet the ability to plant dynamite - achieved by setting a timer on the explosive and reverse pickpocketing an NPC - became a supported part of the game and the foundation of a quest. This was a new kind of player freedom, matched only by the freedom the team felt themselves.

“We were really, really fortunate,” Boyarsky says. “No-one gets the opportunity we had to go off in a corner with a budget and a team of great, talented people and make whatever we wanted. That kind of freedom just doesn’t exist.

“We were almost 30, so we were old enough to realise what we had going on. A lot of people say, ‘I didn’t realise how good it was until it was over’. Every day when I was making Fallout I was thinking, ‘I can’t believe we’re doing this’. And I even knew in the back of my head that it was never going to be that great again.”

Once Fallout came out, it was no longer the strange project worked on in the shadows with little to no oversight. It was a franchise with established lore that was getting a sequel. It wasn’t long before Boyarsky, Caine, and Anderson left to form their own RPG studio, Troika.

“We knew Fallout 1 was the pinnacle,” Boyarsky says. “We felt like to continue on with it under changed circumstances would possibly leave a bad taste in our mouths. We were so happy and so proud of what we’d done that we didn’t want to go there.”

Fallout is larger than this clique now. Literally, in fact: the vault doors Boyarsky once drew in isometric intricacy are now rendered in imposing 3D in Bethesda’s sequels. And yet Boyarksy, Taylor, and Caine now work under the auspices of Obsidian, a studio that has its own, more recent, history with the Fallout series. Should the opportunity arise again, would they take it?

“I’m not sure, to be very honest,” Taylor says. “I loved working on Fallout. It was the best team of people I ever worked with. I think it’s grown so much bigger than myself that I would feel very hesitant to work on it nowadays. I would love to work on a Fallout property, like a board game, but working on another computer game might be too much.”

Boyarsky shares his reservations: that with the best intentions, these old friends could get started on something and tarnish their experience of Fallout.

“It would be very hard for us to swallow working on a Fallout game where somebody else was telling you what you could and couldn’t do,” he expands. “I would have a really hard time with someone telling me what Fallout was supposed to be. I’m sure that it would never happen because of the fact that I would have that issue.”

Urquhart - now Obsidian’s CEO - is at pains to point out that Bethesda were nothing but supportive partners throughout the making of Fallout: New Vegas, requesting only a handful of tiny tweaks to Obsidian’s interpretation of its world. “I’ve got to be explicit in saying we are not working on a new Fallout,” he says. “But I absolutely would.”

Caine has mainly built his career by working on original games rather than sequels: Fallout, Arcanum, Wildstar, and Pillars of Eternity. But he would be lying if he said he hadn’t thought about working on another Fallout.

“I’ve had a Fallout game in my head since finishing Fallout 1 that I’ve never told anyone about,” he admits. “But it’s completely designed, start to finish. I know the story, I know the setting, I know the time period, I know what kind of characters are in it. It just sits in the back of my head, and it’s sat there for 20 years. I don’t think I ever will make it, because by now anything I make would not possibly compare to what’s in my head. But it’s up there.”

#fallout #fallout 1 #fallouts 20th birthday #happy birthday gamedude #fallout nv #obsidian #news

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adambstingus · 6 years

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Parkland Teenagers Taking on the Worldand Winning

We haven’t heard the last from survivors of the deadly February school shooting in Parkland, Florida. Dozens of the high school students who were thrust into a mortality crisis before they could order a beer at a bar have graduated from teenage angst to social justice, and they’re continuing to sing truth to power while pulling together to help one another to heal.

Recently, Sawyer Garrity and Andrea Pena, the teenage songsters who wrote “Shine,” the anthem of their movement #MSDstrong, performed in Washington, D.C., at the Fords Theater annual gala. They sang directly to Vice President Pence and FLOTUS, demanding change in gun laws. Then they joined a chorus of classmates from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School to sing at the New York Public Theater’s annual gala, following the chorus’ surprise appearance at the Tony Awards that won them a rousing standing ovation.

The musical partners invited me later into their pocket-sized hotel room in Times Square, aghast at the shrinkage of space in our island city.

“Is this what a New York apartment looks like?”

For months, the dominant emotion in their lives was sadness. Then anger: “We’ve gone through an experience that someone who’s 80 might not have gotten close to going through,” exclaimed Sawyer, “so they can’t lecture us on what gun laws should be because they haven’t gone through this!” She plucks at the strings in her jeans. “But lately, I’ve been feeling inspired.”

And as of this week, the two drama students have started volunteering at Camp Shine, a ground-breaking summer camp program that families of the school have launched to help the children heal through the arts. “We had to find a way to keep these kids together,” says Wendy Simon Garrity, mother of Sawyer.

Her instinct was spot-on. Children of trauma most often shut down; they can’t express their feelings, so they withdraw into numbness, or wrestle with the inner crisis of fight or flight. When the families connected with Jessica Asch, a board-certified trauma therapist at New York University, she endorsed their hunch.

“The antidote to trauma is community,” Asch believes. “We have to meet these kids where they are and keep them together.” Her broad experience in working with adolescents, veterans, and other PTSD sufferers including Holocaust survivors has shown her how effective it is to use various art therapies to encourage trauma victims to be in touch with their real feelings and to find support in the embrace of their fellow survivors.

“‘In the beginning, the only people who supported the civil rights movement were a few whites and mostly African Americans,’ Sawyer said. ‘It was them against the world. And that’s how it feels—it’s just us teenagers against the world.’”

“Parkland has had so much media attention, these kids haven’t had an opportunity to be messy, they’ve been so busy performing,” for their cause, says the psychologist. An academic research study will be conducted on the Parkland program by the trauma center at University of Miami. The long-range hope is it will result in a curriculum that can be made available to other communities shaken by their children’s exposure to violent death.

At the camp, Garrity and Pena are joined by 35 students, six of them among the wounded, who are being guided in music therapy, art, drama, and storytelling and other relevant artistic expressions such as graffiti and photography that are therapeutic for victims of trauma. Their charity, Shine MSD, has raised just enough money to provide a two-week camp. They hope to attract donors who will fund another month of the camp to reach all the traumatized students. The program is designed by some of the nation’s leading creative arts therapists, and it is thus far supported by the royalty fees earned by their song “Shine” on iTunes, and from donations by a few celebrity benefactors like Miley Cyrus.

The two girls told me the story of how their celebrated anthem came to be.

Last Valentine’s Day had started out for 15-year-old Andrea Pena in an exchange of gifts with her boyfriend. At school everyone was cracking jokes about being single, passing around a box of Pringles and saying, “I’m a single pringle.” When a weird second fire alarm sent her and Sawyer and scores of kids and adults outdoors, the girls joked, “Oh, Culinary burned down,” referring to kids in the Food Services department who often burn while they learn.

The words “Code Red” drove them back inside. Sawyer Garrity, then 16 and all of 5-foot-1, jumped over a table to get into an office in the Drama Department that turned out to be full of windows. For the next hour and half, she and Andrea and 10 others crouched beneath a desk while hearing the shots and screams of friends’, sounds that would never be muted in their minds. Seventeen people, including teachers, lay dead.

I asked them, as many do, “Do you think you can, through your art and music, convey the reality to others that his might happen to you, to your school, to your children?” Sawyer replied solemnly, “I don’t think we could ever push the feelings that we felt onto other people. No one can relate unless it’s happened to you or to your child.” Both girls admitted that when their drama teacher, Melody Herzfeld, tried before the shooting to rehearse them into imagining how they should respond to a gunman’s attack, they paid no attention.

“Oh, it’s never going to happen here,” they thought.

The first two days after the massacre, the girls had spent in solitary anguish, slouched in their separate homes, Andrea bent over her Yamaha keyboard (“I’ve never had a big fancy piano”), Sawyer glumly picking at her guitar. She has been writing songs since she was 6 years old. Her father, Joe Garrity, told me he’d scratch his head when his little daughter would emerge from her bedroom and say, “I’ve got the bridge!” But Sawyer, who will be a senior this fall, admitted to me that she had never taken her guitar seriously until she faced a mortality crisis decades before she was ready to cope. The two classmates began texting each other.

“We have to do something,” Sawyer wrote.

Andrea, a rising junior, fiddled around with a few chords on her keyboard. “This could be something,” she thought. She didn’t dare voice the intention of writing a song; she had never done that before. So she sent Sawyer a voice memo of a riff. It touched something in the baby-faced girl with spigots of curls falling over her eyes. Sawyer played those chords again and again until some lyrics popped into her mind.

“You, you threw my city away…”

She texted them back to Andrea, the granddaughter of people who fled Castro’s Cuba and found refuge in Puerto Rico (though young Andrea never wanted to learn Spanish when her kindergarten friends in Florida teased her for her accent).

Andrea sent another voice memo, more chords. Sawyer’s sorrow suddenly released a powerful chorus of resistance:

You’re not gonna knock us down

We’ll get back up again

You may have hurt us

But I promise we’ll be stronger

A couple of days later, they got together and finished off the song as if it all came naturally.

They first shared “Shine” with the public at a town hall a week after the massacre. With 15 minutes to teach the lyrics to a chorus before performing, they weren’t even aware that CNN would be broadcasting their song to untold millions around the world, beyond the 7,000 in their audience. But they had been well taught how to hold presence during a performance. And they had words ready to stake their claim to being, not just authentic, but real:

We’re, we’re gonna stand tall,

Gonna raise up our voices so we never, ever fall

We’re done with all your little games

We’re tired of hearing that we’re too young to ever make a change.

The audience response was rapturous. But the most touching moment for the girls came when the news anchor of CNN, Jake Tapper, came down to their dressing room and told them, “That was the most moving song I’ve ever heard.”

Belonging to a rather nondescript new generation, the girls told me they don’t even know what their “name” means—“It’s just a letter. Gen Z.”

I suggested they should be called Gen Now.

“I like that,” Andrea said. Sawyer chimed in: “I like that one.”

They recalled Jimmy Fallon saying at the school’s graduation ceremony, “Everyone’s saying you guys are the future, but I feel like you guys are the present.” They liked that, too. I proposed they might belong to a Third Culture generation.

“I definitely think so,“ Sawyer said. “Not just because of our awareness of gun violence, but also the way we’ve been speaking up for Black Lives Matter and LGBT rights and all. We’re so open to new culture now and more willing to listen—and we’re not as closed off and ignorant about other people. It’s like we’re coming together and embracing each other more than anything before.”

But of course, it’s not unlike anything that came before. And the girls have recently recognized that—it’s called the civil rights movement. And they want to build on it.

“In the beginning, the only people who supported the civil rights movement were a few whites and mostly African Americans,” Sawyer said. “It was them against the world. And that’s how it feels right now—it’s just us teenagers against the world.”

But they both notice more and more adults coming to their performances and wanting to learn from them, just as they find themselves learning from their parents’ generation and their fearless protests against the Vietnam War. “There was nothing ever like that before, where young people and then people in general were coming together and standing together,” Sawyer mused. “So powerful.”

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/parkland-teenagers-taking-on-the-worldand-winning/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/182923245687

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samanthasroberts · 6 years

Text

Parkland Teenagers Taking on the Worldand Winning

The musical partners invited me later into their pocket-sized hotel room in Times Square, aghast at the shrinkage of space in our island city.

“Is this what a New York apartment looks like?”

The two girls told me the story of how their celebrated anthem came to be.

“Oh, it’s never going to happen here,” they thought.

“We have to do something,” Sawyer wrote.

“You, you threw my city away…”

Andrea sent another voice memo, more chords. Sawyer’s sorrow suddenly released a powerful chorus of resistance:

You’re not gonna knock us down

We’ll get back up again

You may have hurt us

But I promise we’ll be stronger

A couple of days later, they got together and finished off the song as if it all came naturally.

We’re, we’re gonna stand tall,

Gonna raise up our voices so we never, ever fall

We’re done with all your little games

We’re tired of hearing that we’re too young to ever make a change.

Belonging to a rather nondescript new generation, the girls told me they don’t even know what their “name” means—“It’s just a letter. Gen Z.”

I suggested they should be called Gen Now.

“I like that,” Andrea said. Sawyer chimed in: “I like that one.”

But of course, it’s not unlike anything that came before. And the girls have recently recognized that—it’s called the civil rights movement. And they want to build on it.

Source: http://allofbeer.com/parkland-teenagers-taking-on-the-worldand-winning/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2019/02/19/parkland-teenagers-taking-on-the-worldand-winning/

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allofbeercom · 6 years

Text

Parkland Teenagers Taking on the Worldand Winning

The musical partners invited me later into their pocket-sized hotel room in Times Square, aghast at the shrinkage of space in our island city.

“Is this what a New York apartment looks like?”

The two girls told me the story of how their celebrated anthem came to be.

“Oh, it’s never going to happen here,” they thought.

“We have to do something,” Sawyer wrote.

“You, you threw my city away…”

Andrea sent another voice memo, more chords. Sawyer’s sorrow suddenly released a powerful chorus of resistance:

You’re not gonna knock us down

We’ll get back up again

You may have hurt us

But I promise we’ll be stronger

A couple of days later, they got together and finished off the song as if it all came naturally.

We’re, we’re gonna stand tall,

Gonna raise up our voices so we never, ever fall

We’re done with all your little games

We’re tired of hearing that we’re too young to ever make a change.

Belonging to a rather nondescript new generation, the girls told me they don’t even know what their “name” means—“It’s just a letter. Gen Z.”

I suggested they should be called Gen Now.

“I like that,” Andrea said. Sawyer chimed in: “I like that one.”

But of course, it’s not unlike anything that came before. And the girls have recently recognized that—it’s called the civil rights movement. And they want to build on it.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/parkland-teenagers-taking-on-the-worldand-winning/

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winstonhcomedy · 6 years

Text

HDWDTW? 12/12-12/15 “They Have Alien Pubes on the Wall?”

What a fun weekend of shows cutie pies. So let’s get right into it baybees!!!

Thursday night I had a show all the way in Harrisonburg Va. It was a show put on by Dawn Davis Womack (clean/christian comedian) at Restless Moons Brewing. I have never done this show before, but I am a little nervous because I am supposed to be doing 20 minutes clean. This isn’t a church clean set, but anytime I am asked to do clean I always worry that I’m going to slip up and really upset/offend the booker.

I get there and I”m on the show with my buddy Paige Campbell. We get there a little early and do some joking around. Paige and I are shooting the shit talking about how worried we are about it being a clean show. He looks to our left and they have paintings of naked alien women with full bush. He says, “Yes make sure you guys don’t say the f word, but if you have some time please check out our alien pube exhibit.”

Dawn gets there. We talk about some of the other shows we have coming up. I pointed her in the direction of some other bookable clean comics. She mentions a cool opportunity she has, and all in al we are having a good time.

The host of the show and other half of X2 productions (they put on the show) Steve McClay showed up. He is a super nice guy, and made sure to ask everyone for their credits before the show started. Paige and I’s buddy Christopher Cantrell also showed up, and got to do a guest spot on the show. I asked to go early so I could try to make it to Crozet to do a guest spot on JR Stoffels show at Pro Re Nata.

Eventually the show starts and we have a pretty solid crowd of about 30+. Steve goes up and gets the show rolling and has an ok set, but everyone is paying attention. After his set is Cantrell’s. He does ok too. It is weird because this is the first time I’ve seen him work super clean (not that he’s incredibly dirty) and you can definitely tell. He had some jokes work well, but others they either didn’t get or weren’t on board with the subject matter.

Working clean is tough because when someone says clean it can mean a lot of different things. They could mean absolutely no sex jokes, no swearing, just no f/c/n word, there could be certain topics they don’t want covered 9-11/holocaust/cancer/aids/rape/sex/death, or if its a church they might want church related material. So when you are going earlier in a show, you might not know what that crowd exactly wants. So I was happy to have a couple people go in front of me so I could get a good read on the room.

I am super blessed and lucky to be able to work clean. I prefer being somewhere in the middle of clean and dirty just because that is more authentic to who I am, but I like working clean. I appreciate the challenge of it, and I do enjoy doing shows anybody can enjoy.

Dawn goes next and she keeps the show rolling. The crowd is into it, but they haven’t been cracked open yet so I am super nervous. I work clean so infrequently I am alway afraid I don't have enough material, or I'm doing such old material I know I won’t have a great time either. So this set I decided to try a lot of stuff I had never done clean before.

I went up and had a really dope set. I did some jokes I hadn’t done in a super long time and they worked. I also did some new stuff and they worked as well. I did about 22 minutes and honestly I only lost them a few times on a couple topics (scientology for a minute/owing china money). Moments of those jokes worked, but the rest of the set was way better. I’d give it a B. Definitely room for improvement, but I am definitely proud of that set.

I was running late and hopped in my car and headed to Crozet. I went as fast as I legally could, and got there two minutes too late to go up. Which is ok. I got to hang with JR, Abdulla, Keaton Ray, Brock Hall, and I got to watch Jesse Jarvis do about 30 to close out the show. He had a hot set and apparently the whole show was amazing.

After the show a dude who had seen me before came over and told me he loved my comedy and that he actually knew people I went to hs with. Turns out they were at this show. So I got to catch up with part of the Gantt family (a dope family that sent their kids to the same school I did). It was really awesome catching up and they said they’d catch another show in the future. This was a great way to end the night. I headed home in a great mood.

The next night I had a show in Lorton Virginia. Rahmein Mostafavi booked me to do a feature set in front of Baltimore comic Tommy Sinbazo (laughfinder podcast)!

The show was at the Workhouse Arts Center which apparently used to be a prison that they converted into a venue for the arts. I got there and immediately was surprised at how dope this place was. I walked in and got to catch up with Tommy and Rahmein. Two incredibly talented, funny, and kind dudes. We shot the shit while Rahmein finished setting up for the show.

When the show started Rahmein was really working his ass off to get this crowd into it. There was about 30+ people here, and they weren’t a bad crowd. It just seemed really hard to get them on board with stuff. Rahmein did his best, and set me up pretty well.

I went up and had what felt like a horrible set. I did about 23 minutes and I felt like half of it worked. It was one of those sets where you do a joke and it kills, then you try to ride that momentum but you lose them and have to start back over from scratch.

I had some jokes hit super hard, but I was battling with this crowd for the entire time. They didn’t want to give me anything. All in all though after listening back to it. I did better than I thought. I definitely lost them a few times, but I won them back and even closed super strong which felt good. I didn’t want to leave a shit stage for Tommy. I got off stage and Rahmein and Tommy were both complimentary. For the room that night it was a pretty good set. I’d give it a C.

Tommy went up and had a super good headlining set, but it was obvious he had to work his ass off too. He closed well, and I got to catch up with them for a little bit more after the show before I headed home to get a good nights sleep before having to go to my cousin’s wedding the next day.

Sunday was a chill day. I got brunch with some comics, and went by 2nd and Charles. After this I went over to Brandon Beswick’s house and waiting for Kate Carroll to get there since we were all riding down to Cozzy’s together to do the improvised standup show (audience writes topics that comics have to riff on while on stage) that Holly Owens was running at Sunday Funnies.

The drive down was super fun. I love both of those folks a lot. We chatted bout some stuff going on in the scene, our thoughts on comedy, and what’s it like having a bunch of new comics in the area. It was super productive and a good chat. Lot’s of good laughs, and lots of insight.

We get there and legit there are some super dope people on this show. It’s like a ton of my favorite comics from down there. Just good, funny, people who are great to talk to. I got to catch up with one of my favorite dudes in the whole world Garret Barnes and pitch him the idea of he and I ripping off John Mulaney and Nick Kroll’s “Oh Hello” by being two older southern gentlemen and call it, “Oh hey y’all”!

The show starts and because Kate has a show in RVA to get back to, we three go first. Brandon had a super fun and weird set. He did a bit on 11/6 (9/11 flipped upside down) that didn’t kill but it tickled me quite a bit. Then Kate follows up and actually had a suggestion that played into one of her bits.

I went next and had so much fun. I had the topics of natural disasters, asians, gnnorrhea, waxing, and Samsung vs iPhone. I had fun riffing on all of these, it got playful, weird, and offensive which is exactly how I wanted it to be. I’d give this set a B+. After this we rode back, and I kept dozing in and out of sleep I was so tired. All in all an amazing weekend of shows!!!

OH BAYBEES THANKS FOR READING!! I love you all very much. Hugs and kisses and I’ll see you cuties soon!

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liuglobal · 7 years

Photo

A conversation with a refugee.

by Gwen Lindberg

While spending ten days in Germany, the sophomore class of LIU Global had the opportunity to go on a walking tour of Berlin led by a man from Syria. Another man from Syria, Husam Rajab, joined the tour, and I spent most of the following two hours, and the lunch and talk after, listening to him speak about his experiences in Syria. The following is my attempt to share with you his story as he shared it with me.Husam was living in Damascus at the time, studying medicine at the university, when bombed a funeral and killed six people. The people of Damascus were outraged. The entire city went to the next funeral, a total of more than 240,000 people. This was the first big demonstration in Syria, and it began a ceaseless tide of violence. Every week, the same thing happened; thousands of people went to a demonstration, there was a shooting, and the Syrian government attempted to keep the dead to prevent funerals and burial rights, as a sign of disrespect and an attempt to dissuade the people from continuing such behaviour. Husam wore a black armband in support of the people.He first went to jail in 2012. They came to his university and beat him and his friend in front of everyone. He was only in jail for one night, but he was beaten so much through those 24 hours that his entire body was blue. Afraid of what would happen if he was sent to jail again, he left school and joined the Red Cross.Assad’s regime attacked hospitals, first aid, first responders, and ambulances. After the first missile, Husam would run out into the streets with the Red Cross, while everyone else ran back inside. The second missile would come in five minutes. Each time this happened, with each injured person he found, he would make the decision: who lives, and who dies.In 2013, he was there during the first chemical attack. “It was a day I never want to remember,” he told me, as we crossed a street and walked around construction on a sidewalk. With the Red Cross, he watched people shake and foam at the mouth, and then die. There was nothing he could do. His friend went into a building to bring people who were hiding outside. “He went in five times, and each time he brought someone else back. The sixth time, he did not come out.”Despite what looked like emptiness in his eyes and voice, Husam somehow managed to convey a desperation that has kept something inside him burning. He told me how 1500 people have died from sarin gas. UN investigators were there, but they didn’t seem to care. He left the Red Cross at the end of 2014, after three years, because he couldn’t stay and continue under siege, working everyday with nothing. He tried to go back to finish his final year at school, after the university sent him a piece of paper granting him passage through the city.In order to get back to the university, he had to cross several checkpoints. He got through the first one by showing his paper, while people on either side of him were shot by a sniper. He was in a camp for two days, and the secret service took all his information, daring him to continue to study. During one of these examinations, a man went up to him and asked if his name was Husam. They talked for five minutes, and the man told him he was okay since he had his paper.He was taken out of the city and into a building where he was questioned for fifty minutes. The men were polite, clean, and respectful, before sending him with some other men down to the basement. There, he was told to put his face to the wall. The men beat him, though “it was nothing bad.” He didn't understand why he was there.He was told to strip in front of a room with more than 300 people. He stayed there for nine days; “I never decided which was worse, sleeping or interrogation.” The men used his story against him, saying he would die there, and he would never see the sun again. Everyone had to sit in a very particular way, kneeling with their heads down and their hands behind their back, or else they were beaten by the guards. “There was the constant sound of men screaming. They would come back without clothes, bloody, dead inside. People were dying from nothing.”The second time he was taken out of the basement, they said his background checked out. He still couldn't see anything, but he was moved to another room with sixty people, with two people taking up a square foot. He stayed there for two months, and nothing happened. “There was only reasonable hitting there—it was okay.” He didn’t see sunlight for three months. He kept telling the truth, but nothing worked. While telling this part of his story to the whole group, he joked about using those months to get fit. But earlier, when he was recounting this part just to me, he said those three months were death. “I was not alive, I was dead. So was everyone else.”After the three months, they told him he could leave, but he wasn’t free; he had to join the military. After explaining that all the police and jail keepers are corrupt, he told us he paid the officer more than 1.000 USD to close his eyes for a moment. He managed to escape, and he hid in Damascus with a friend for four months. After hiding from the regime for four months, he knew he had to leave Syria. He was told if he did something, the secret service would take his mother. If he joined the regime, they would set his family free. But he knew that the city of Damascus is like a big jail, with snipers and bombs at every corner; there was no way for them to get to his mother. They were just contradictory, empty threats, he explained; “If you go in[to the regime], you will never go out.” He managed to pay 1.500 USD for a new passport, and found a taxi that would take him, for 600 USD, through a checkpoint to a boat headed for Lebanon.The boat was actually going to Turkey, so he and 50 other people were forced onto an inflatable raft. He ended up in Greece, and then walked across the country to Hungary where he took a train to Dusseldorf and finally arrived in Germany. He spent the following 20 months being moved around Germany, and he is really excited to finally be settling in Hamburg where he can start studying in October. Traveling around for so long has been extremely difficult. The Germans “see all refugees as the same,” no matter where they are from, what they have experienced, or what skills they have, and those have been difficult preconceptions to overcome. He has been disappointed time and time again, as his Syrian medical license was not accepted in Germany, so he has to go back to school to get a new license. It is a new start, though, and he has hope that this time, things will be better.We thanked him for telling us his story. “People should know,” he responded. “People cannot know now, because they cannot believe that this is happening. Maybe this could help, this could go to the heart. We have nothing.”Twenty minutes after privately recounting some of the more brutal details to me, Husam sat listening intently to me and some of my classmates exchanging stories from the summer. Laughter filled our conversations, and with tea in one hand, forgotten napkin in the other, Husam was captivated by my friend’s account of climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro this past summer. Thoroughly impressed by her commitment to such a demanding experience and laughing alongside her self-deprecating jokes, I was amazed and dumbfounded by how Husam could set aside his past, filled with brutality and pain on a scale I cannot imagine, and focus on the struggles and triumphs belonging to a completely different person on a completely different spectrum.And so, three months later, I find myself sitting here, writing this article. I hear his words echoing in my head. “It is a Holocaust, not a fight. We are just dying. There is nothing for us to do.”This is the one thing I can do. I can write what I remember. I can put words to the voice I still hear in my head, and I can try to help Husam tell his story.

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