#when the new york times says this is too racist then you know it's hit rock bottom

[the-light-of-stars]

From a New York Times Article: The kind of protests the German Government is banning on grounds of being "antisemitic, islamist and terror-sympathising" :

Terrorist-sympathisers and Antisemites according to the German Government: Jewish people, children and people who say "war is bad"

Not to mention the ridiculous racism and dehumanisation of treating palestinian immigrants as some manner of mindless animalistic hivemind that would be "emotionalized" by protests and vigils mourning dead children, and banning protests on the grounds alone that people with palestinian ethnicity might be attending.

Meanwhile, from the same article:

[gloombeauty]

This is what Halsey posted the other day in her instagram stories. I posted it on my page, sharing my opinion how I didn't think Columbia Records would be happy to see this kind of anti-semitic messaging coming from one of their own artists. The entire Halsey fan community on this platform attacked and bullied me. I had to stop following them and block them. People who I thought were my friends. Horrible backstabbing anti-semitic monsters. All I stated were facts. The CEO and COO are Jewish. The A&R person at Columbia is Jewish. Clive Davis is the founder and is also Jewish. Halsey's manager is Jewish. But according to Halsey fans on here, that makes me a racist because I stated the fact these people working on Halsey's career are Jewish. It got so bad I had to change my name. Maybe you have better luck posting the facts.

First of all, you should never delete your opinion on your blog. If people don't like what you have to say, they can easily skim past your page or you can make them fuck off by blocking them.

I have no problem telling Halsey fans to go choke on a baklava before I click on that block button. The fact that Halsey fans in general lack their own personality and decided to be one of those "they/them" and "bi" this or that or whatever - just because their idiotic hero is all those things, is very telling. These people aren't even teenagers anymore. They are in their mid 20's - early 30's. They grew up with Halsey. The hilarious part of all this is that Halsey isn't any of those things. She's not bi and she sure as hell isn't a "they" but you know how annoying Millennials and Gen Z are. They find a problem and drama for everything. Halsey's whole brand has always been the annoying loudmouth obnoxious social justice warrior. You would think that having a kid would stop all that foolishness but no - she's chooses to be a one of those "they" people. Even after popping a baby out of her actual vagina.

In my opinion, Halsey is plummeting fast when it comes to her music career. She's lucky her makeup line is doing very well because as far as her music? That is a dead on arrival effort. I don't think Columbia will be able to pull a Capitol Records - taking an almost two year old song (Without Me) and throwing it into a new album (Manic) and stealing the hit single's successful streaming numbers and sales. That's how Manic didn't flop. But does anyone (outside of her psychotic fan base) truly gives a crap about Manic? Hell no. The reviews for that album were mostly negative. Pitchfork even said what an awful album it was and she went on Twitter wishing the basement where Pitchfork is located would crumble. What she didn't know is that Pitchfork is located at the Freedom Tower in New York City. That's the same location the Twin Towers use to be. The same Towers that were destroyed on September 11, 2001. How stupid did she look saying something like that? Very. She hasn't used Twitter/X as much as she use to after that. She was too busy exploiting Evan Peters on her IG at the time.

She had the gift of Trent Reznor and Atticus Finch producing her album and it bombed. Usually, everything Trent touches turns to gold, but what he produced for Halsey flopped. It flopped hard. A first in Trent Reznor's career. That means a lot of people just don't like Halsey. Imagine had it been Amy Lee instead of Halsey? It would have made a big difference.

Now, as much as Halsey's fans like to ignore this fact (or stay stupid - your pick) the people running her music career now are all mostly Jewish. Ron Perry, the present CEO for Columbia Records is Jewish. Halsey's manager, Jason Aron is Jewish. When Jason was posting about supporting Israel, donations, his family in Israel, etc. - Halsey's psychotic fans came into his IG page and started threatening this poor man's life. They were calling him an evil Zionist and other disgusting choice words.

Halsey's fans are demonic and yes, they are all antisemitic. Except maybe for a very small percentage like 0000.1% of the fanbase. The only Halsey fan that I seen on Tumblr that is normal, sane and not antisemitic is you. I'm sure out there, on other social media platforms there's more nice fans like you. The thing is, they aren't obnoxious or demonically loud as the antisemitic ones who scream "Free Palestine!!!" on every Halsey post.

That's why I feel Halsey posted this disgusting Gaza/Palestine propaganda garbage on her IG. To appease her disgusting fan base, who are 99% antisemitic. She's going to need them to buy/stream her new music. If she doesn't do well, Columbia will drop her in a heartbeat. The same way Capitol chose not to renew her contract. Capitol are dicks for what they have done to Katy Perry and Sky Ferreira, but look at all the money they spent on If I Can't Have Love, I want Power. Close to 25 million dollars - and it flopped! The next single she released So Good flopped. That's why they refused to renew her contract. I don't blame them at all.

So now, more then ever, she will need all her little antisemitic fans to support her new music.

Also, knowing that her manager is Jewish, why would she ever post something so disgusting against his people? I'm sure Ron Perry didn't celebrate that IG story either. He's probably sitting somewhere regretting that he signed her.

Do yourself a favor and block every single Halsey account on Tumblr. Trust none of them to be "your friend" because they aren't anyone's friend. Get a real friend in the real world. Finding friends on Tumblr isn't it.

[tallymonster]

This last episode of The Gilded Age made me cry AGAIN. this show is perfection and I am so here for what's coming next. Spoilers under cut cuz I have mutuals who arent caught up to the most recent episode. I'm not talking about EVERYTHING tho cuz I only remember the big parts tbh.

HOLY SHIT okay so first off, Peggy and the reporter guy whose name I always forget KISSED last episode!!!!

So glad Marian was like GIRL HE'S MARRIED TF?!

Also the whole thing with the school closing, like I cannot believe they would just close it because it's a school for black kids wtf 1880's New York!! You're supposed to be more progressive, but yeah stark reminder of the times we're in during the show.

The whole thing with Mrs. Russell and Mrs. Winterton being all petty with each other now that Winterton has some pull with the old guard who are leaving the Academy for the Met??? 🤌🤌🤌🤌🤌🤌🤌🤌🤌🤌🤌. HERE. FOR. IT. love the bargaining to get the center box. Like Winterton, girl, this is BERTHA RUSSELL.

oh and speaking of hbic Mrs. Russell, the Duke is coming to the Met omfg her whole world just ended right there!! The look on her face when Larry and Gladys were like " Hey, were off to the party, see ya!"

That fucking party too!!!! Omfg Dash, I cannot with you!!!!! To like invite everyone that you know to this solarium thing which, baller move btw I would love to have my own solarium in a garden like living the dream

Okay, so this party is popping off too like all the DRAMA

Gladys is getting hit on by ANOTHER bachelor, and Larry comes to the rescue like a protective older brother, we stan.

Oscar and Maud are hella cute together, like I know he's gay and kind of a fortune chaser, and I have a feeling she's got something going on with her...like idk there's just some slightly red tinged flags with her background...I guess we'll see...BUT they kissed too!!!!!! And it was so hot!!!! Like daaamn Oscar!!! I didn't know you could kiss a lady like that!!

So Dashiel puts the party together for the dedication of the solarium, but then as he's making a speech about it, he brings up Marian!!!

And then he starts going on this rant about moving back to NY to have his daughter grow up where he did and he didn't expect to fall in love

Y'all the look on Marian's FACE!!??? it was the same look I had too tbh

HE PROPOSED TO HER!!!!! AND AUNT AGNES WAS ALL ABOUT IT CUZ DUH

Omg and Aunt Ada and Forte were both like UH UH YOU DO NOT WANNA SAY YES WE CAN TELL!!!!

Like everyone was hella shocked and YALL THE SCREAM I SCREAMED WHEN THEY SHOWED LARRY'S FACE!!!! this poor man just got dumped by his boss/milfy widow just to come back to NY and see the other girl he liked get engaged. Big fat L for Larry.

Cut to Jack, he sent in for a patent for that clock piece he invented, and he gets denied because he's not part of a clockmakers guild or whatever.

Fucking Armstrong over here has to shit in his Cheerios and just talk mad shit like I cannot wait for her to say the wrong thing in front of Agnes. like you're on thin ice already because of all the racist shit you did and said to Peggy, Armstrong like what is your game plan???

So Mr. Russell goes to one of the union dudes houses. Like it's the same guy who came to his house but again, I forget their names

They talk for a min and it looks like Russell is having a small change of heart when he sees the man's family. The oldest son who doesn't look more than like 17 tells Russell that he's working in the mill too, to support his family.

Russell leaves and is greeted by a mob of people who work in the mills. Like they brought their families too so you see women with babies in their arms.

Rest of the episode is going back and forth between the smaller plots. Like Bannister and one of the other servants whose name I also forget seeing Church come back to the Russell home drunk, which ended up being that it was the 30th anniversary of the death of Church's wife who died so he got drunk.

Same small plot thing, Mrs. Astor, Mrs. Van Rhijn, and Mr. McAllister all come together to plot how to save the Academy since Winterton is taking a bunch of people and taking them to the Met.

Okay, now for the worst cry I had.

Forte and Ada come to visit Agnes after their honeymoon to Niagara Falls.He had been having some back pain and he went to some doctors

At first it was just like oh here's some pain meds to take care of it, let's go do some tests though.

Well....he goes to another specialist and he tells Forte that he has something more serious.

Cut to Marian coming to visit, she's thinking it's about her engagement to Dash, so she starts to talk about it with Ada

Ada was like "I didn't call for you?"

Forte comes out and says "I did. I need to talk to the both of you." And makes Ada and Marian sit.

Scene cuts to Marian rushing into the Van Rhijn house, Agnes, Oscar, and cousin Aurora are all there.

We find out that Uncle Forte as Marian calls him, has cancer. It's the kind that starts in the back and begins to spread. So it sounds like he has some sort of bone cancer?

Agnes immediately rushed over to Ada

Scene change and we go to Ada and Forte in his bed, she's cuddling him and telling him that they'll get through it. She starts to tear up which makes him cry.

The doorbell rings, and Ada goes downstairs

She sees Agnes there and she runs into her sister's arms.

The sobbing that Cynthia Nixon did here absolutely destroyed me.

Agnes saying to Ada, "I'm here. You've not to worry." Just reminded me of my brother doing that with me when our mom died and it broke me.

Agnes tried to get Ada and Forte to come to the Van Rhijn home but they said no

Props to Ada and Forte. Death with dignity will always be my stance and I think that's what is going to be implied here.

Mad props also go to Mr. Russell for not shooting the strikers. I think he's starting to have a change of heart with the robber baron tendencies.

All in all, GOOD EPISODE. MADE ME CRY. I LOVED IT. can't wait to see how the opening night will go lololol specially cuz Winterton doesn't know about Mr. Russell basically blackmailing the dude from the Met!! Ohohohohhooooo

[beardedmrbean]

Hey Huey zoomer, well magical negeroes was a flopped, but those poor black actors, they were pointing out the racist roles they were given throughout their careers. Especially justice smith

Wait

Oh he was in that recent dnd movie, which I heard will be a cult classic soon

Oh he was also in the Jurassic World sequel

Waaaaait, I seen him before

Like in a certain pop culture milestone that made him a household name

Oh right

HE WAS THE STAR OF DETECTIVE PIKACHU

(He also biracial as he played Ryan Reynolds son in it)

Sorry it just yes Hollywood put a lot black actors (and everyone else especially if they were from a poor backgrounds)

Also the white people in the trailer…while I’m estranged from them. My little sister still see our mostly white stepfamily as family. And the white people they bitch about seem upper middle class

…who probably are descendants of those social Darwinists weirdos. Not saying they are as racist, but yeah Hollywood and a lot of it structure was form during social Darwinism and Jim Crow America and yes many black people groups found success in Hollywood during those rough times.

And not to mention most civil rights activists was trying to let working class black people piss in the same bathroom as a white person much less being the heads of Hollywood

This trailer resonated me and a lot of other “marginalized groups” than magical negros did

https://youtu.be/i0MbLCpYJPA?si=JztSsnHBw827_-DU

Sorry like a critic said, this is stick of dynamite, did someone probe my brain with the pigeonholing white liberals did to black writers?

I see you American fiction crew members

I shall buy the 4k or blu ray when it out as a toast

But sorry for ranting…you know I started my creative trend after talking to an Indian woman about Rowling weird lore about American Wizarding society. Which eventually lead me to learning about the “Queen” of New York City Glided Age

Sorry probably it because I’m a midwestern and in general a lot of famous people from here are what Gilded Age Queen would call new money IE Micheal Jackson, Walt Disney, and Henry.

Perhaps another anon, hell I just realize something even both Disney channel cartoon and Sitcom pointed out how different a magical society in America would be due to our melting pot culture.

glad to hear it flopped at least, and the racist roles they've been given, this was one of them and it's not like they didn't accept them this isn't the 1930's where you're under contract with a studio and have to make what they tell you to make.

Don't know justice smith, but I'll take your word for all that.

who probably are descendants of those social Darwinists weirdos. And not to mention most civil rights activists was trying to let working class black people piss in the same bathroom as a white person much less being the heads of Hollywood

Upper middle class people be like that ya, you hit a certain point on the income tree and things like race, gender, and sexuality start to matter less and less as you shift towards how can I make more money off of all of these people.

Not a hard and fast rule, but it seems to happen a lot. Segment from a Trump interview in the late 90's I think it was talking about guys who like guys, he's just like 'I'm happy for them, not my thing but more power to ya'

Oh this is delightful also feels like something certain members of the black community would call racist, educated well spoken black man tends to get called all manner of awful things, hardcore leftists are some of the worst about it too.

But sorry for ranting…you know I started my creative trend after talking to an Indian woman about Rowling weird lore about American Wizarding society. Which eventually lead me to learning about the “Queen” of New York City Glided Age Sorry probably it because I’m a midwestern and in general a lot of famous people from here are what Gilded Age Queen would call new money IE Micheal Jackson, Walt Disney, and Henry.

Mrs. Astor had the money and the pedigree to do that, not that it's right to look down on people but as folks go that would have the ability to do that she's pretty high on the list.

Cathy Bates did a wonderful job as "The Unsinkable" Molly Brown in the Titanic movie, split the difference between old and new money, her still being uncouth and what not.

Not Duck Dynasty level, but they don't actually care if they fit in or not, also I imagine a bunch of that is an act.

Perhaps another anon, hell I just realize something even both Disney channel cartoon and Sitcom pointed out how different a magical society in America would be due to our melting pot culture.

That and guns, post on here about the American exchange wizard at Hogwarts that casts Glock-19 or something like that.

Also I'm gonna nominate the Bass Pro Shop pyramid as our school location.

[chloeworships]

I don’t trust Al Jazeera news but if this is true about the bomb then wow.

Also the shooters name was Thomas Matthew…. He goes by TOM.

I had received prophetic word for one of my favourite celebs, Matthew McConaughey but the dream was so faint. I couldn’t recall what it was in its entirety but it felt like a warning and I was waiting for the LORD to reveal more.

What this attempted assassination has done is open the floodgates to ANOTHER investigation of the Trump Organization which I don’t think they want. Right? WHO hated Trump so much they wanted him dead?

A Trump Presidency could be extremely dangerous for Americans, especially their political leaders and NO I will not

“Shut Up”

about this. Look at all that is happening, it is a blessing to have the LORD show us is hand before he makes a move or something happens (more on this later).

This was NOT an attack from the evil one. When Pelosi’s husband was attacked it was a demonic entity. This time, I saw a warrior Angel and showed him to you. To say otherwise is to call the LORD a liar.

There is soooo much to discuss. I just have not had a private moment to sit down with these tons of scriptures our LORD has shared with me 😭

PS. Forgot to add, that Trump’s life is not safe going forward. Ooppss.

UPDATE:

So ummmm Trump got hit in his ear and even though it was revealed to me he is a racist, I pray he heals. I didn’t notice until now in Psalms 94, the LORD spoke of EARS 👂🏾

People of God, I am done.

Also I misquoted when I said the “Chicago 5”. It was the Central Park 5 and I was just a little girl when this took place. My sincere apologies.

Trump took out $85,000 worth of ads to sway public opinion using the media to condemn these innocent young men who were both Black and Latino and helped turn New York into a hell hole. So when the LORD said “condemn the innocent to death”, you can imagine my horror at the revelation!!! I didn’t highlight the verse before it (verse 20). There was a reason I posted the scripture in its entirety.

😱 The article:

This is the very kind of JIM CROW laws that kept people of colour (OUR PEOPLE) in CHAINS ⛓️ and stuck in ghettos, economically oppressed and marginalized.

These YOUNG BOYS were innocent and Trump knew that, yet he went on this racially motivated attack against them. What kind of person condemns innocent young men to death? 👀

I know that people can change. Has Trump changed? Ask God.

I hope so for the sake of America, because you can’t be a fan of Trump if he’s a fan of Hitler who didn’t like people of colour ESPECIALLY Jews. White Nationalists don’t like Jews. Don’t you hear them? 👂🏾 Please tell me that you are hearing from the LORD too and your judgement is sound 🔊 people of God. I cannot bear to see the children of God being led astray or come to anymore harm 💔😔

“Trump is afraid” the LORD told me because he never thought this would happen to him.

Pray for America 🇺🇸 and know your candidates.

[the-firebird69]

We want the iron Cross thing and we want the Harley-Davidsons and we want the hard knock kick your 5150 and the stitch frame but really we want the Harley-Davidsons and yeah we don't want it to stop when you sit at the intersection that's stupid we end up taking those things out but really we got to build those but we can't we don't have any time and you start organizing it becomes a war he says he can do it and there we're losing the shops anyways but we're going to think about it

Trump

Let's see if we make them the max will get them but that's another point well we know is they're not invincible and be out and about sticking it in their face and they're afraid of that they don't like people doing that and yesterday morning he says to Trump what's the matter you don't like them sticking it up your ass and he said this it has a certain flavor well that's what I'm saying and without it what are you doing diddling each other so they don't want you to and he started to think about it again there's absolutely true this is going to be a major diddling thing.

Thor Freya

It's a find and it's important and now they know what they're doing they're going in there and didn't really get it and just having a hard time and now they're going to go in there and it's different what it is is about work and they can do what they want with work and things like that but they have to not over inundate themselves this is actually a smart thing to do actually I'm kind of enjoying this if he was a savings interesting too cuz I think he's saying that and I have proof and I'm going to send it to a couple people cuz it's one of my guys and he's saying that guy is brilliant and I know the code and he told me and it's weird cuz you can hardly hear him say it and he is saying it and he's looking in the mirror and this is what gets you they're bald because they're handling nuclear material and what are they doing that for so we get that too it's like they're making a spawns so people can go around and hit us including Max so they help make the bomb and they turn around and they're on the other side like Blockbuster will soon be in New York City this is going to be intense

Tommy f I'm fighting in full on and wfo and I see a lot of it and you guys need to get on the ball and on the stick and off me you're going to see what you don't want there's so many shifts they have like 45 billion ships and they're all class A and they go ahead and they start re-outfitting them immediately putting better Shields and weaponry so you better get with it and I can help and instead of getting hit and he says

He's definitely doing it and he has changed a little and is getting pushed around more it's hard to see for most people but he knows what they're up to and he knows he's in a lot of trouble and so he's kind of panicking and he's threatening too much but he's also got knowledge and it's very valuable an information because he's forced to get it and he knows about their greenhouses and you can talk about greenhouse gas if you like it doesn't make sense it's not the right term

Zues Hera

There's another one that's greenhouse gas and it doesn't make sense and I know what it means

Blonde guy getting a shave

We're going to war with these people already and a lot of other people are and this is going to work and it's going to do something and we needed to

Tommy f

We're going to have to ask for information now what he said was sparkling my mind he said no you're actually doing something right and you don't know it and I said what the hell is this and he got real happy and I can see myself in the film start talking about it to them this is going to go okay I mean it's horrible it's racism so weird situation but he says they are much much more racist and they are and what an act that's something to see and they wouldn't let him post the fight

Trump

[opedguy]

New York Times Says U.S. Heading to Civil War

LOS ANGELES (OnlineColumnist.com), Oct. 5, 2022.--Jan. 6 House Select Committee on the Capitol insurrection was always designed to hurt Republicans in the Midterm elections, promoting the idea that Trump supporters are ready-and-willing to commit treason and sedotopm on the U.S. government.  Today’s article in the New York Times repeats the same reports that followed the Aug. 8 FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, former President Donald Trump’s Palm Beach residence.  Old news is good news if it helps Democrats hold onto the House and the Senate in the Midterm elections.  Citing Internet chatter since the Mar-a-Lago raid the New York Times says that polls show that some 43% of the population believe that a civil war is in the U.S. future, largely from disgruntled Trump supporters.  Yet most of the Capitol rioters are already in prison or heading to prison, making you wonder about the New York Times story about a right wing civil war.

Whatever the Internet chatter on right wing extremist groups saying they’d look forward to civil war after the Aug. 8 Mar-a-Lago raid, there are dwindling numbers not ready to go to prison for Trump or anyone else.  Trump’s base, so-called MAGA supporters, are diwindling minority, less that 30% of the electorate, not enough to put Trump in the White House for a second time.  Independents and crossover Democrats are too jaded with Trump’s antics to give him another shot at the White House.  So all the chatter in the New York Times or Washington Post is all about scaring enough Black and Latino voters into thinking that white supremacy groups are a threat to U.S. democracy. President Joe Biden tried to help the cause Sept. 1 calling MAGA supporters “semi-fascists,” in another one of his non sequiturs.  Biden follows the Democratic National Committee [DNC] talking points that Republicans threaten democracy.

Chatter on the Internet means nothing other that certain fringe white groups vent their anger about  U.S. society.  Chances of another Jan. 6 riot are slim-and-none, not because enough white voters aren’t angry enough but because they just aren’t organized enough to make any difference.  New York Times raises the prospects of civil war to scare minorities into voting for Democrats, even though Biden has the world closer to WW III than ever before.  Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said Aug. 29 that if Trump were charged with mishandling classified documents there would be “riots in the streets.”  While condemned by his Senate colleagues on both sides of the aisle, Graham has a case of wishful thinking, knowing that Trump backers know what happens when the step out of line after Jan. 6.  Graham knows there’s not enough organized white roups to make any difference let alone riot.

Rioting in the streets is a wholly-owned monopoly of Black-leftist groups around the U.S.  If they think a civil rights violation take place, they give the green light to their followers to riot, loot, arson and create mayhem around the country.  Black-leftist groups, using the banner Black Lives Matter, get away with any type of violence or criminal activity in the name of civil rights.  What happened Jan. 6, 2021 at the Capitol was an aberration of a few hundred rioters following a concession speech by Trump on the National Mall.  Trump had sour grapes after the election because he couldn’t believe he lost to “Sleepy Joe Biden,” someone he ridiculed for the 2020 campaign.  Trump lost the election because Democrats did a better job demonizing him than his party did of selling Republicans.  Trump lost because a majority of voters saw him as a racist who botched the Covid-19 global pandemic.

Only Trump with his colossal ego thought there was no way he could lose the election.  But any serious look at exit polls show most voters had enough of Trump antics, seeking a change in 2020, even if it meant choosing the lesser or two evils.  With the National Debt hitting over 31 trillion and federal budget deficits reaching $2,54 trillion, inflation runs at 40-year highs, killing the U.S. economy for the foreseeable future.  Whatever Biden has done to wreck the economy, he’s done an even worse job with U.S. foreign policy. Never before has the U.S. been at war with the Russian Federation and on the verge of war with China. For those reasons alone, Biden should have been impeached long ago, knowing that he’s unfit to manage the economy and U.S. foreign policy.  Can you imagine, Biden told Rev. Al Sharpton recently that he has every “intent” to run in 2024.

All the recycled stories about new Internet chatter about a possible civil war is designed to scare Blacks and other minorities into voting for Democrat candidates.  One month before the Midterm election, Democrats and Republicans are jockeying for position, hoping to get out their base on Election Day.  Keeping Jan. 6 in the news or the prospects of civil war is precisely the DNC’s talking points heading into the Midterms.  Democrats don’t want voters focused on the abysmal U.S. economy and war in Ukraine now threatening to morph into WW III.  Democrats don’t want their constituents complaining about gas prices and runaway inflation but those are the facts in today’s America.  DNC wants its candidates focused on Roe v. Wade, not Biden’s train-wreck in the economy and U.S. foreign policy.  Reports indicate lately that voters are focusing more on pocket books than on abortion.

About the Author    

John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news. He’s editor of OnlineColumnist.com and author of Dodging The Bullet and Operation Charisma.

[samnyangie]

This is an interview of rsl on the play ‘white people’, and other things. I thought it was interesting that he briefly shares on his view on racial history.

______________________________________

Twenty Questions: Robert Sean Leonard

by Toby Zinman

Philadelphia City Pages

January 27, 2000

Philadelphia Theatre Company’s premiere of White People, by J.T. Rogers, brings actor/heartthrob Robert Sean Leonard to town. Tall, lanky and khakied, with bespectacled brown eyes that hardly ever meet mine, he talks with thoughtful eloquence, charming modesty and youthful earnestness.

His film career was kickstarted with Dead Poets Society in 1989, and he won renown for his Claudio in Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing. His stage career has been illustrious: Nominated for a Tony in 1993 for his performance in Shaw’s Candida, he went on to play Valentine in Stoppard’s Arcadia on Broadwayand most recently appeared in the celebrated Broadway revival of O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, which starred Kevin Spacey.

You studied history for five years at Fordham, and in White People you play a history professor. How connected do you feel to this part?

As far as his passion for history and his belief that education and connections between the past and the present have the power to heal and explain life, I understand. I think you can only go forward by going back. For me, the study of history is the essence of the future — when you study history and you see the connections — you make the connections to the present. So in that way, I connect to this guy quite a bit.

I gather from what the playwright has said that he’s trying to universalize the discovery of latent racist feelings. Is there resonance in that for you?

I know I have felt anger and rage in a city [New York] that is multicultural and therefore difficult at times. Race is a part of my life, the history of racism, the history of blacks, the history of Native Americans and others — growing up in New York it’s a part of your life every day. There are a lot of things in this play I identify with — and a lot of things I don’t.

You seem to prefer plays where language is central.

There are a lot of plays that have been huge successes that I never even saw; they seemed just too loud to me. I’ve read plays I thought were just too vulgar for me, I didn’t want to say those words every night. I’m much more used to doing Eugene O’Neill and George Bernard Shaw and Shakespeare and Stoppard and Tennessee Williams — this has been my career up until now. I’ve done some new plays but not many.

To me what’s remarkable about writing — it’s so simple it almost seems silly to talk about it — Garrison Keillor once wrote a piece about a boy slamming his door open on the first day it had snowed, seeing his breath puff out in front of him and running down the steps, making a snowball, and throwing it and hitting the stop sign right in the middle of the O and jumping as high as he could and running down the street. That’s what I wish for all of us, Keillor said, being excited that it’s morning, and that it snowed. Every great book I read is someone who’s older than me telling me what’s important, what not to miss, what to remember.

How did you get interested in acting?

I was 9 and my mother painted signs for a theater company, and I hung around with her, in Ridgeway, NJ, and I fell in love with the people and the paint and the lights. They started throwing me on stage whenever they needed a kid. The first role I had was The Artful Dodger in Oliver when I was 13. I thought the actors were idiots, doing vocal warm-ups, having affairs, but the crew was cool— they smoked and climbed ladders.

When I was onstage I was embarrassed so I tended to say my lines as quickly as I could so I could get offstage. A friend of my father’s saw me and I guess because everyone around me was trying so hard and I was trying so hard just to leave, that I guess he thought I was natural or I must have appeared to be gifted because I wasn’t "acting." So he put me in this acting class. I don’t know why I went — I was excited by the attention, sure, but I certainly didn’t have a love for it. But it was exciting going to New York once a week and then this small agent started sending me out for auditions, and at 14 I was working for Joe Papp at the Public Theater.

I heard you’re making a new movie directed by Ethan Hawke called The Last Word on Paradise. Can you tell me about that?

I just stopped shooting it. Ethan and I met on Dead Poets Society, we had a theater company in New York and one of the things we did was — it would be lovely to say discover, but what we did was stole this beautiful writer named Nicole Burdette and she wrote a screenplay about the Chelsea Hotel. It’s all our friends — me and Uma [Thurman], Frank Whaley, Steve Zahn, Marisa Tomei as well as Natasha Richardson, Lou Reed, Isaac Hayes and Kris Kristofferson. When your friend says, ‘I want to direct a movie,’ you just say, ‘When do you want me to be there?’ The movie goes from sunrise to sunset, although time is unclear in it — even what decade it is. Steve and I are the most modern characters; we play musicians, inspired by Bob Dylan and we come to the Chelsea where he had been.

When will it be released?

I don’t know — Bravo made it, and I guess if it’s any good, they’ll release it. If it’s not good, they’ll just show it on TV.

What’s your life like when you’re not working?

I have two dogs and a girlfriend named Gabby [a classicist specializing in Sanskrit and Greek] and yesterday I had the greatest day off — we went to Barnes & Noble and the Zen Palate and took a nap and watched Ally McBeal — jeez, as the Sondheim song says, "What more do I need?"

It sounds like you can still throw that snowball at the O.

_____________________________

Robert Sean Leonard in ‘White People’

[no-reply95]

I thought the "j*p tart" story was almost certainly apocryphal though? Francie's the only first-person source, she's one of the least reliable sources in all of Beatledom, and neither John nor Yoko ever made mention of it when they were really pushing the "the Beatles/Paul were horrible to Yoko" narrative, which all seem to suggest that Francie made it up.

Hi anon, thanks for the ask! :)

I agree that there are many reasons to doubt the reliability of Francie's account.

Based on Francie's testimony, not only was she a witness to the J*p tart incident but so was John, Yoko and Paul. Of course, it makes sense that Paul would never publicly out himself as a racist, but why did John and Yoko (to this day) never even vaguely mention this incident? Especially in the dumpster fire that was 1970 & 1971, you would have expected John and Yoko to jump at any opportunity to outline all the ways that Paul, especially, had treated them badly, it was definitely their M.O. at the time to frame themselves as the victims of the Beatles/Paul's misogynistic racism, take the following quotes from Lennon Remembers for instance:

How would you characterize George’s, Paul’s and Ringo’s reaction to Yoko? It’s the same. You can quote Paul, it’s probably in the papers, he said it many times at first he hated Yoko and then he got to like her. But, it’s too late for me. I’m for Yoko. Why should she take that kind of shit from those people? They were writing about her looking miserable in the Let It Be film, but you sit through 60 sessions with the most bigheaded, up-tight people on earth and see what its fuckin’ like and be insulted – just because you love someone – and George, shit, insulted her right to her face in the Apple office at the beginning, just being ‘straight-forward,’ you know that game of ‘I’m going to be up front,’ because this is what we’ve heard and Dylan and a few people said she’d got a lousy name in New York, and you give off bad vibes. That’s what George said to her! And we both sat through it. I didn’t hit him, I don’t know why.

I was always hoping that they would come around. I couldn’t believe it, and they all sat there with their wives, like a fucking jury and judged us and the only thing I did was write that piece (Rolling Stone, April 16th, 1970) about “some of our beast friends” in my usual way – because I was never honest enough, I always had to write in that gobbly-gook – and that’s what they did to us.

Ringo was all right, so was Maureen, but the other two really gave it to us. I’ll never forgive them, I don’t care what fuckin’ shit about Hare Krishna and God and Paul with his “Well, I’ve changed me mind.” I can’t forgive ’em for that, really. Although I can’t help still loving them either.

What were their reactions when you first brought Yoko by? They despised her.

From the very beginning? Yes, they insulted her and they still do. They don’t even know I can see it, and even when its written down, it will look like I’m just paranoiac or she’s paranoiac. I know, just by the way the publicity on us was handled in Apple, all of the two years we were together, and the attitude of people to us and the bits we hear from office girls. We know, so they can go stuff themselves.

John Lennon, Lennon Remembers Rolling Stone Interview, 1970

So the above quotes were about a year and a half after the J*p tart incident and at the height (or near height) of John's anger at Paul, when he's highlighting all the terrible slights that both he and Yoko faced at the hands of the other Beatles, all he can say for Paul was that "You can quote Paul, it’s probably in the papers, he said it many times at first he hated Yoko and then he got to like her. But, it’s too late for me." and rather than calling out specific actions that Paul did against them as a couple or Yoko specifically, as he does for George, John describes the fact that a lot of the actions against them "even when its written down, it will look like I’m just paranoiac or she’s paranoiac". If Paul had really left a racist note to Yoko and admitted it in front of John and Yoko, when John is at his rawest emotionally and has an agenda to paint Paul in the worst light possible, why doesn't he throw him under the bus and expose him, like he exposed George? Why would their actions against John and Yoko make them seem paranoid? Paul writing, and admitting sending a hate note to Yoko would be a clear case of him treating John and Yoko terribly so that, for me, is one of the biggest reasons why Francie's account is suspect.

There are also other minor points to her story that don't add up to me. Why, after going to all of the trouble of typing up the hate note and leaving it somewhere where John and Yoko would find it, would Paul then just admit to writing it, under no duress? Also, as a Brit myself, the use of "hot shit" in the message is also a bit of a red flag. Referring to something as "hot shit" or something as "the shit" are Americanisms, so it's a bit weird that Paul would have used language like that in the note. There's also the relevancy of the fact that Paul and Francie had a short lived relationship and thereafter Francie has consistently tried to denigrate Paul and exalt the ballad version of John and Yoko, it would definitely be in her agenda to make Paul look as bad as possible and support the view that John and Yoko were only the victims of Paul's tyranny.

However, all that being said, I wasn't living in Cavendish in the summer of 1968 with John, Yoko and Paul, Francie Schwartz was. It's possible that the incident happened as Francie described but for whatever reason John and Yoko agreed to never publicly mention it, maybe they kept quiet on it because Paul kept quiet about John supposedly trying to hit Linda when she was pregnant or maybe John was scared that if he outed Paul as a racist that he would burn bridges irrevocably (although HDYS kinda blows that theory to pieces). Francie was undoubtedly a witness to a lot of things that happened around the Beatles around that time and that's why her quotes on Paul have been used extensively in numerous books. The fact of the matter is that aside from Love Me Do, The Authorised Biography and a few small interviews up to 1968, Jane hasn't spoken about her relationship with Paul and probably never will, definitely not in the detail that Francie did and Linda also never went in to the level of detail that Francie did in her book, albeit for a much shorter time period than Linda's 30 year relationship with Paul. I can see why authors who have been starved of material on the man behind Paul's public façade have lapped up Francie's insights for decades, she's one of the few people alive who not only had the ability to lift the lid but did so, with apparently little fear of recrimination. I've heard Lewisohn mention Francie's story in a podcast interview in the past (Think it was the Beatles Naked Podcast) and he gave her views a lot of credence so when volume 3 of his books comes out in 2050, definitely expect Francie to be heavily featured in the character profile drawn up for Paul.

To be clear, I think it's fine to use Francie as a source but authors should be presenting Francie's account for what it is, unverified eye witness testimony, not as fact. We'll see how authors tackle the J*p tart episode in future books, hopefully with the work done by Erin Torkelson Weber they'll be more of an emphasis on the responsible use and presentation of sources so we'll see how this is handled going forward...

[westcoastrry]

Can’t Help If This Is Us

Hello friends. I’ve worked super hard on this fic. I’m not a fast writer so this took my while and I’m super happy with the way it turned out! Special thank to my bestie @harryforvogue​ . I wouldn’t know how to spell or about even write if it wasn’t for her so thanks you ugly fart face.

Also I wrote this entirely for free so all I ask is for feedback. I would really appreciate it and would love to hear your thoughts!

literally mate please let me know your thoughts. PLEASE. I beg.

WARNING: there is smut in this and mentions of the mafia.

I hope you enjoy reading Kiara and Harry’s story as much an I enjoyed writing it. 11.5k words

A fic about Kiara, a normal girl who works at a coffee shop in the upper east side of New York, where she meets Harry. A man who is caught up in a job he doesn’t want but is working hard to craft a better life for himself.

Fuck me like you wanna make love

Call me when you wanna stay in touch

Lie together just to gain trust

Say what you wanna say, can't help if this is us

Moving to New York was a fresh start for Kiara.

It’s only been a couple of months, but she has grown accustomed to the city.

She has an apartment in a not-so-great part of town, but it is close to her University, and the view from her balcony isn’t too bad. She is a coffee connoisseur, so when her pregnant friend and neighbor, Trina, helped her get a job at a cafe on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, how could Kiara truly not make the best of her newfound city life?

“An Americano please?” a deep British voice asserts.

Kiara’s cleaning off the steamer about an hour into her morning shift when the man with long chocolate curls speaks to her. Kiara has been working here for a month, and some very high profile people have come to the shop, but Kiara has never seen this man, but he sure looks important. He is in a suit, all black, and the only accessories are the multitude of rings he has on his fingers. The rose one catches her eye first, then the big gold H.S letter rings. Those are his initials? What is the point of that? Is this man obsessed with himself?

“Americano?” he says more lightly, snapping Kiara out of her thoughts.

“Sorry, I- Americano,” Kiara stutters.

Kiara isn’t one to get easily flustered, but how can she not be when this six-foot sexy man was towering over her in a suit, asking for black coffee.

Only real men drink black coffee.

She works around the machine expertly until the man’s voice interrupts her. “You’re new here?”

“Yeah,” she responds, swiping a curl off her forehead. Managing her naturally curly type four hair in the bipolar New York weather has been a challenge. Most days, she wears her thick hair in a bun, or when she can afford to get it done, box braids. “Started working here a month ago.” Kiara hands him the coffee in a brown to-go cup.

“Hmmm. I’m here all the time. I’m sure I would have noticed a new pretty employee.”

“Guess I’m not all that pretty then,” Kiara fires back, handing him a receipt with a pen to sign.

Harry doesn’t really know what to say to that because he actually does find Kiara pretty. He likes that her face is an even brown color with a few beauty marks. He likes the color of her light brown hair, and he really likes the sound of her voice. It’s sort of angelic, even when she is snapping at him.

Harry smugly hands Kiara his hefty card (the first indicator that this man has money) and signs the receipt. He drops some cash on the bill.

“That’s your tip. By the way, I do think you’re pretty.” His eyes flick down to her name tag. “Kiara.”

Kiara rolls her eyes at the man. He probably walks around life getting everything handed to him because he’s rich, white, and hot.

Screw him and his stupid cute dimple, Kiara thinks to herself. She goes to grab the receipt he signed and see’s two fifty-dollar bills stacked on each other.

Her mouth forms into an “o” shape. A hundred dollars on a three-dollar coffee? What sense does that even make? This had to be a mistake.

“Hey Kiara, are you okay?” Trina, who’s waiting tables today, asks. She has her brown apron tied over her baby bump with a few crumpled receipts and pens tucked in the pockets.

“I just got tipped a hundred dollars,” Kiara says, still shocked.

“You go, girl!” Trina enthusiastically shouts. “Who was it? A regular?”

“I’m not sure. I’ve never seen him before. Brown curly hair, dressed in a nice black suit-”

“Oh, that’s Harry,” Trina smiles. “Everyone loves Harry. He is a cutie. Been getting coffee here for a long time. He owns the strip club down the street.”

“I’m sorry. The dude owns a what?”

“A strip club bar type thing,” Trina shrugs. “Very fancy. It’s pretty much only for the elite. He is super nice. Everyone loves him here! He bought me a crib and this fancy high-tech stroller when he found out I was pregnant.”

“Yeah, well, he is kinda a dick if you ask me,” Kiara mutters under her breath.

“He tipped you a hundred dollars, and you’re calling him a dick?” Trina curiously questions.

“He called me pretty! And he had this arrogant ambiance to his voice. And what is with all the rings? It’s tacky.”

Trina places her hands on her hips.“Oh, just say you find the man hot! It’s okay to admit you find Manhattan’s most eligible and rich bachelor hot. I don’t blame you. I would get on it if I wasn’t thirty and pregnant.”

“I’m not admitting anything. Besides, I don’t have time for men. Men just cause problems.”

“Oh, you're telling me?” Trina points to her bulging belly. Kiara snorts at her friend and starts to walk away to grab more coffee beans from the storage, and Trina follows closely behind her. “You need to have some fun! Loosen up. Get your head out of that textbook. You have been living next to me for three months, and I haven’t seen you invite not one boy over! I know that vibrator you use is tired.”

Kiara grabs the box of coffee beans and turns back around to face Trina. “My vibrator is doing me just fine.”

Kiara’s whole life has been centered around academics. She was a really smart kid growing up. She had a good start to life too. However, Kiara’s wholesome childhood took a turn at twelve when her Dad died in a car accident. The accident was horrific for her entire family, but it hit her mom the worst. Her mom went from being a well respected physician's assistant, to being a drug addict, and Kiara had to grow up at the tender age of twelve just to take care of her mother. Around the age of fourteen Kiara’s mom got shipped off to rehab, and she ended up weaving in and out of foster homes until she was eighteen. Kiara realized that she never wants that to happen to her future family. She has been working hard on her academics because she hopes to have a stable income, so she can give her future kid the life that she never had.

It’s not like Kiara didn’t want to go and mingle around. Meet a new guy, have a one-nightstand, maybe even possibly fall in love. However, the dating scene as a brown skin woman in a whitewashed part of the city isn’t as easy as it sounds. Kiara doesn’t teeter the line of looking ethnically ambiguous. She is clearly a Black girl. Caramel skin, tight curls, full lips, and wide hips. Kiara likes these traits that she carries. In fact, she loves them, but men don’t. Specifically, men that aren’t her race. Not to mention that Black men are hard to come by in this particular part of city.

The simple fact is most white men don’t like Black women.

It’s even arguable that Black men don't even like Black women.

And Kiara is okay with that. She doesn’t need to be approved by a bunch of white people, nonetheless ones with penises. She just wishes she had more options to date within her race, or at least find someone who genuinely liked her.

Maybe that’s the reason why Kiara doesn’t want to go out and find a man to have some fun with. She knows he’s going to be white, and she will have to endure hundreds of questions about her race and her hair or meet racist parents, and she has done that all before.

So, for now, instead of explaining this to Trina, her very white friend, she will just blow off her questions about why she isn’t sleeping around or why she doesn’t entertain the idea of going to bars to find cute boys.

+++

The next day Kiara is off work. She spends her day sitting in her bed, in red pajama shorts and her university sweater, studying for her midterm. She got through quite a bit but is still a little worried about not getting an A. About an hour into her studying, she hears bickering from Trina’s apartment.

“I don’t know what you are being so shy about. Just ask her! You are great with girls.”

“No, I’m great at fucking girls. Trying to establish a genuine connection, I haven’t done that in a while.”

“I believe in you! Now go!”

Knock

Knock

It’s another guy that Trina has been trying to set Kiara up with. Trina does this about every other month. Very rarely does Kiara entertain the idea and sleeps with them, because she is bored, but it usually doesn’t go further than that.

Kiara opens the door to her apartment and there stands Harry. He is holding a boutique of red roses in one hand, and his other is behind his back. The suit he is wearing today is slightly different. Same silhouette, but this time the suit is brown. Kiara finally gets a good look at this man, and fuck.

Green eyes, full bright pink lips. Wide shoulders and defined biceps that show he does work out but isn’t a gym rat.

Gucci loafers. Now, this is an interesting man.

“What are you doing here?”

Harry nervously gestures to the flowers in his hand. “I brought you this.”

“You just came here to bring me flowers?”

“I also brought you this,” Harry pulls his hand from behind his back and shows a bottle of wine he got when he went on a business trip in Napa. He was saving the wine for a special occasion, like the next time he would go visit his mom, but this is more than a special occasion in Harry’s eyes. He is trying to swoon this girl.

Kiara smiles at him and grabs the wine bottle. If it’s one thing Kiara has learned in her adult life is that she loves wine. She usually only gets the cheap stuff from the liquor store down the street, but Kiara has never seen this bottle before.

She walked to her kitchen, leaving Harry staring at her dumbfoundedly. She pulled out two wine glasses from her kitchen cabinet.

Normally Kiara wouldn’t entertain this. Especially since she has a test to study for. However, she can’t lie and say she hasn’t been worked up...sexually.

“Alright, you brought me wine. You are welcomed in.”

Harry follows her inside the apartment, feeling a bit awkward. Usually, Harry never found himself at a girl’s place. He always took his one-night stands back to his house and had his assistant, Trevor escort them out in the morning.

Harry was nervous because this wasn’t a one-night stand. This was him bringing wine and flowers to a girls’ apartment, which he barely knows.

Just like Kiara, Harry also hasn’t been in the dating scene in a while. He has been busy with work, and it’s not easy what he does.

“So why did you come all this way to bring me wine?” Kiara asks Harry, pouring some wine into a glass and handing it to him. “I know you don’t live in this part of the city.”

“I don’t.” Harry sits on the barstool by the kitchen countertop. “I told you I thought you were pretty. Nice place, by the way.”

Kiara looks for the sarcasm on Harry’s face when he compliments her one-bedroom apartment but doesn’t find any. Kiara’s apartment isn’t ugly. But it probably is nothing compared to what Harry lives in.

Kiara takes a gulp of her wine. “It’s kinda trash actually. This is the ghetto.”

“You go to Columbia?” Harry asked, noticing her university sweater.

Kiara takes one more gulp of her wine, finishing off what is left in her glass. She was going to answer Harry’s question. She really was. But she got a good look at his bone structure. The way his jaw is a perfectly angled line. The way his Adam apple moves when he takes a sip of his wine. Even the way his fingers glide against the glass.

She begins to wonder how his fingers would feel against her.

“Kiara?”

That was it for Kiara because she doesn’t think she can keep herself composed in front of this beautiful rich man.

Instead of pouring her wine, Kiara grabs the bottle and starts to chug the wine like she is a trucker drinking a Samuel Adams.

Her lips remove from the bottle with a pop sound. Harry is now staring at Kiara completely taken aback by her actions. “What are you really here for, Harry? Sex? Because we can cut the small talk part.”

“Maybe I actually like you, Kiara.”

“You don’t like me.”

“Who told you that,” Harry counters.

Harry watches closely as Kiara struts towards him.

“I thought you were into blonde models?”

“Where are you finding this information from?” he questions.

“Google.”

Harry smirks. “So you’re googling me?”

“You know, if you wanted to know more about me, you could have just asked.”

Kiara cut him off with her lips attached to his. She wanted him to shut up, but she also wanted to kiss him.

Killing two birds with one stone.

Harry’s lips move in sync with hers, and he places his ringed hands on her back, pulling her closer to him.

If Kiara is being honest with herself, Harry’s lips feel like magic. It’s been a while since Kiara has kissed a guy, and she feels butterflies in the pit of her stomach.

“Kiara, what are we doing?” Harry mumbles into her mouth.

“We are gonna go back to my bedroom, and you are going to fuck me. Hard.”

“A-are are you sure about that?” Harry stutters on his words.

“We both know you didn’t come here to take me out on some date. So let’s just do this.”

Harry should have confidently responded and said, “No, Kiara, that is not why I’m here. I’m here because I actually find you attractive, and I know you have been working at the shop for about two weeks now but I have been very nervous to ask you on a date.”

However, his mouth went dry because Kiara threw off her sweater and her perky boobs sat fully on her chest.

“Kiara-”

“You know,” Kiara rests the palm of her hands on his muscular chest. Kiara has the upper hand and she sees it in the way Harry was staring at her, gaping at her actions. She loves being this bold. Upper chest bare for a man who is practically drooling over her boobs. Kiara likes to be in charge, but only for a little bit. After a while she wants to be taken care of. In bed that is. “For a man of such little words, you are talking so much right now.”

Harry grabs both of her wrist, but keeps her hands placed upon his chest. He knows his heart is racing a mile per minute. Kiara feels it and for a second she thinks to herself that there is no way she is causing this man's heart to skip beats.

Kiara stands up on her tippy toes and lets her tongue dart out to touch right below Harry’s ear suckling on the spot until it turns a nice red shade. She detaches her lips with a pop.

“You want this,” Harry whispers.

“I need this,” Kiara responds back.

“Tell me what you need Kiara.”

Harry’s right hand brushes over her bare breast, causing her to buckle a bit and stumble onto Harry’s chest.

“Hold yourself up, love, and tell me what you need.”

“I need you to fuck me,” Kiara whines.

With that, Harry holds Kiara's hips and roughly turns her away from him. Her hands went out and to grab at the granite countertop, holding herself up as much as she possibly could.

“How do you want it, hmm?” Harry whispers, quickly shrugging off his blazer and undoing a few buttons from his shirt. He begins to place wet kisses along the back of her shoulder. “I can fuck you right here, bent over the counter top. Or I can take you to the bed.”

“Here,” Kiara choked out through a moan.

“Can you handle it?” Harry teasingly asked her.

“I can handle it.”

“Can I take off your shorts?” Harry asks in a more serious tone.

“Mhmm, yes please.”

Harry shimmies down Kiara’s shorts. He takes the time to run his hands over her ass. The contact of her hot skin and Harry’s ice cold rings feels good to Kiara. She wants him to spank her, but she isn’t exactly sure what Harry is into and now she wishes she was sober enough to vocalize what she likes in bed so her needs can be met.

“Let's get a good orgasam out of you. Can I eat you?”

“Yes. God Harry, you're teasing me.”

“Not teasing,” he reassures her. “Just wanna know what you like.”

Harry gets down on his knees and opts for pushing her gray panties to the side instead of taking them off. Her core is glistening in her arousal and the smell alone makes Harry’s dick twitch in his boxers.

“Stop staring at it and-” Kiara cuts her sentence off with a yelp because Harry has attached his plump lips to her clit, giving her small kitten licks.

Kiara doesn’t really prefer to be eaten out. Most men's mouths don’t really do it for her. However, Harry is doing a very good job at keeping her legs shaking. She wants to turn around and look at him, but everytime she tries he delves deeper and deeper in her core, until she can barely hold herself up.

“M’mmm. A little higher please?”

Harry smirks against Kiara’s core because the little please she added to the end of her request tells him that she is slowly letting go of the tough exterior she puts up.

“Here? Is this good?”

“Yeah. Fuck right there please.” Kiara grips at the counter harder until her fingertips turned white.

“Been eating your veggies, huh?” Harry talks against Kiara’s core, the vibrations making her shudder. “You taste good love.”

Kiara is unable to respond because Harry is really going at it. His hands tightly grip Kiara's hips. His face is completely buried in her cunt, and he feels a slight ache in his jaw from the motions he makes with his mouth.

He continues to lick over her swollen folds, and then wraps his lips around her clit, which makes Kiara arch her back and push onto him. She is a panting mess, mouth wide open, eyes pinched together. She begins to thrash around but Harry grips even tighter at her hips.

“Stay still love.”

“I can’t,” she whined. “I’m gonna cum.”

“Why don’t you ask to cum?”

Kiara chokes on her spit slightly when Harry pulls his mouth from her pussy, and dips a finger inside of her. “Am I not entitled to an orgasm?”

“You are if you wanna be good for me.”

“Well if you're looking for a good girl I think you have come to the wrong place-”

Harry adds a second finger to her, which shuts Kiara up. “Ask nicely and you can cum.”

“I didn’t know you were gonna be so-”

“So what?” Harry asks her.

“Dominant.”

“You're lucky I’m not spanking you.”

“What's holding you back?” Kiara challenged.

Harry gets up from off his knees, and his free hand reigns down a heavy smack on her ass.

“Ask me nicely,” Harry demands, slowly pumping his fingers in and out of her.

“No.”

Smack.

“Ask nicely Kiara. I can do this all night.”

Kiara snaps her head back to look at Harry. “No.”

Smack.

Smack.

Smack.

The three spanks that Harry had given to Kiara were much harder than the first. So hard that Harry started to see an outline of his hand print.  

It's when Harry gives her one more smack and pushes his fingers deeper into her, hitting a sensitive spot that Kiara gives in.

“Fuck, Harry please just let me come,” Kiara struggles to say with a couple tears falling from her eyes from being so wrapped up in pleasure.

“Say sorry.”

“I’m sorry. So damn sorry. Please, I'm so close.”

Harry laughed at how her personality has done a complete one eighty. She went from being a complete brat to now begging him for an orgasm. “You are?”

“Yes please.”

Once Harry feels her pussy tighten around his fingers he pulls them from inside of her. “I don’t think you are that sorry.”

Kiara let out a whimper at the loss of connection. Her legs are still shaking and she almost slipped off the counter but Harry was quick to catch her.

Harry's strong arms snaked around to the front of Kiara’s stomach, letting her stumble back into her arms. She felt Harry’s hard cock press up against her raw ass.“Easy now.”

Usually, Kiara would give Harry some witty comments, but right now she is too worked up from being so close to her orgamsm. She feels a bit fuzzy, not sure what to do next. Her core aches and all she can think about is getting off.

Her hands go down to rub at her clit, but Harry quickly smacks it away.

“That's my job tonight alright? You gonna let me fuck you? You're gonna be good so I can get you off properly.”

Kiara nods her head.

“Verbal consent Kiara.”

“Yes please.”

“Good girl.”

Harry’s smug voice echoes in her ear as he places wet open mouth kisses along her neck. Harry is really enjoying himself. She felt him smile against his neck when he started to coax soft moans out of her.

Kiara weakly pushes Harry's head away from her neck.

“Doll, are you okay? Did I hurt you?”

“No, I'm good. Can we just take this to my bedroom?” Kiara politely asks. “I think I will be more comfortable there.”

When Harry gets a good look at Kiara, he can tell he has pushed past the first layer of her tough exterior. He knows there is probably much more fight and sass in her, but right now she looks vulnerable.

“Yes of course we can,” Harry held his hand out and Kiara willingly took it as he led both of them to the bedroom.

When they arrive, Kiara sits at the edge of her queen sized bed, and Harry lets go of her hand. She whines a little at the feeling of Harry’s hands slipping away from her.

Harry chuckles at the girl. “Let me just take my shirt off darling.”

Kiara watches closely as Harry’s fingers undo the buttons one by one. His silk shirt gilded easily off his toned shoulders. He made his way to sit at the top of Kiara’s bed leaning against the headboard, and Kiara crawled on her hands and knees toward him.

“Christ,” Harry mumbled under his breath.

Harry spreads his legs wider, which allows Kiara to sit comfortably in his lap. She let her hands roam up and down his tattoos starting with the birds on his collar bone. She then notices the butterfly right above his tummy. When she places her left hand on it, tracing the wings, Harry sighs contently at her touch. It’s a comforting touch, one that he has never experienced with his one-night stands.

Harry breaks a sweat on his forehead when Kiara continues to trace his tattoos. His broad chest stops moving up and down because he begins to hold his breath. He isn’t really sure what she is doing, but it feels good. Good enough for Harry to exhale and relax into the bed.

For Harry, sex with girls usually got directly to the point. Of course, there was foreplay, but not to any extent like this.

Having someone else’s hands on your body is a part of sex. However, this feels much more intimate than that. He’s got that feeling of butterflies in his stomach when Kiara begins to run her hands all over his body. It felt like he was in high school again, having sex for the first time and being so nervous because you don’t know what to do. But in this case, the nerves and butterflies don’t come from a lack of knowledge of the female anatomy. It comes from being completely enamored by the beauty this one girl holds.

And for just a second, Harry questions if he deserves this to feel the way he feels right now. Warm and a little drunk on the feeling of love. He doesn’t love Kiara, at least not yet anyway. But he feels like at this moment, Kiara cares for him. And even if she doesn’t care for him, he wouldn’t mind existing in this false reality he has created in his head for a really long time.

Something about having his body touched in such a vulnerable way is making him feel things he has never felt in his life.

“You have a lot of tattoos,” Kiara points out, fingers still tracing his butterfly tattoo.

“Yeah, I have been collecting them over the years.”

“Which one was your first one?” Kiara asks curiously.

Harry brought Kiara’s delicate hands up to the swallows on his chest.

“These ones,” Harry’s voice shakily said. Kiara takes her index finger and begins to trace the birds.

“How old were you?” Kiara asks, keeping her eyes looking at the birds.

“Sixteen,” is all Harry says, trying to keep his past where it belongs. In the past.

“That’s young. You don’t regret any of them?”

“No, actually. I think they all tell a story. Sure, some of them are stupid, but they all got some meaning behind them.

Kiara innocently brings her hand up to his cheek, cradling his face. “You gotta tell me about them one day. You have so many.”

“Mhmm,” Harry hummed in response.

“Let’s kiss some more,” Kiara suggested, wiggling her hips in Harry’s lap to find a comfortable position.

Harry nodded his head in response letting his lips touch Kiara’s, but not yet giving in to her request. His hands find their way to her lower back, and Kiara’s hands now have made their way up to his shoulders.

“You look good. You know that?” Harry says against her lips.

Kiara now has a grin on her face and blushes at Harry as if she has never received a compliment in her life.

Kiara brushes a brown curl off of Harry’s face with her index finger, “You can’t give me compliments while I’m buzzed off of wine because you might make me fall in love with you.”

Harry smiles. “Why don’t I just fuck you like I love you?”

Harry realizes what he said and awkwardly takes his hands off of Kiara’s body, nervously running his hands through his hair.

Kiara see’s the worried look on Harry’s face, but she is just a tad bit too intoxicated to process the weight of Harry’s words.

“Or you could let me fuck you,” Kiara bodly suggests. “I just haven’t done it in a while, so you might need to take over when my legs get sore.”

Harry nods, his forehead pushed upon Kiara’s. He kisses her again, and is taken by surprise when she lightly bites on his lip. She then gives a quick kiss to the corner of the month, and then his throat. She leans over to kiss his collar bones, and Harry takes the opportunity to grab a handful of her ass.

He then slowly peels her underwear off of her. He drags it slowly past her thighs looking down at her soaking wet core.

“You’re wet,” Harry mummers into her ear.

Kiara cups Harry’s dick through his boxers, and slides them off of his hips.

Harry groans in pleasure when he feels her hand touch his hard dick that is leaking pre cum.

“Don’t get too cocky now,” her hand lazily pumps at Harry's length, which she finds to be quite impressive in size.

“Kiara, don’t forget who is in charge here,” Harry grits through his teeth.

Kiara dips her head down to lick at Harry's heavy balls, she then continues her way up to his shaft until she makes her way to his tip and suctions her lips around the pink swollen flesh.

Harry looks down at the Kiara, who is giving him those innocent eyes, as if she doesn’t have his entire dick in her mouth

“Oh fuck me,” Harrys rolls his eyes, and lets his head fall onto the headboard.

“I will. But let me suck you off first.”

Kiara passes her thumb over his dick, and kisses all around the tip. She licks him up and down before taking him into her mouth entirely, making sure to make eye contact with him.

Harry places his hand gently over Kiara’s head, asking permission to touch her. She blinks at him signaling to him that it's okay.

He took a rough grip to Kiara’s brown curls, moving her head up and down in a steady rhythm.

“That's it,” he encourages as Kiara suckles on his tip. “Fucking hell.”

She pulls her mouth from Harry's length and gives him a few sharp tugs.

“Slow down,” Harry pants. “Want to be inside of you when I come. Can you handle it?”

Kiara swings one leg around Harry’s lap, her core just inches away from Harry’s throbbing dick.

“Yeah I can.”

“Well what are you waiting for?”

Kiara slowly slides down on Harry’s dick, and his hands cling to the sides of hips, coaxing her on her way down. Harry groans at how tight and snug she feels around him.

Kiara is about halfway down when the blissful feeling starts to hit her. She tightens her grip on Harry’s shoulders biting her bottom lip.

“What's wrong? Thought you said you could handle it.”

Bravely, in one push Kiara glides right down Harry’s dick.

Harry groans with pleasure as soon as she makes it all the way down. His hands go out to grip her ass, and help her bounce up and down.

“That's it. Good girl. You like it when I call you that?”

“Yes,” Kiara responds, picking up her speed so that her tits move up and down with her.

“What do you want me to call you? I can call you my good girl, a slut, or whore. Which one do you prefer?”

“A whore,” Kiara is slightly embarrassed at what this man is doing to her, but she is so wrapped up in the lust of the moment that she really couldn’t care less.

“You're my dirty little whore, hmmm?”

Harry cranes his neck down to place a kiss on her tongue, lapping his tongue over her soft skin that smells like a floral scented perfume. He moans softly into her neck and squeezes at her fleshy hips.

“Yes.”

“Say it.”

“I’m your dirty little whore,” Out of nowhere Harry thrust his hips up to meet hers. “Fuck, Harry!”

Harry placed a wet kiss behind her hair before speaking, “How about you get on your hands and knees for me. I can fuck you like that.”

“Okay,” Kiara withdraws herself from him with ease due to how wet she was. She props herself on her hands and knees and arches her back for Harry.

Harry places a hand on her lower back. He rubs the tip of his dick over her wet folds before pushing in.

Harry moves slowly at first, testing out the waters to make sure he isn’t hurting her. Her sweet moans are only egging Harry on, and he is sure he isn’t gonna last another five minutes inside of her.

“Please Harry. Fuck me faster please.”

Harry hands grips on Kiara's fleshy love handles. It is a little tight for her liking however the pain is quickly drowned out by the intense pleasure she begins to feel.

This is a dirty shag. Harry is pounding into her at such an extreme pace that Kiara can’t even get a full moan out. Her little “uhhhh’s” and “nggggs” only encourage Harry on.

Kiara’s orgasm hits her first and it's just as blissful as she thought it would be. Legs trembling, her arms are no longer propping herself up, instead her right cheek is pushed up on the bed, and a bit of salvia is foaming out of her mouth.

“I’m gonna, oh god Kiara. Just give me a sec- fuck!”

Harry’s orgasm shortly follows and it's just as euphoric for him as it was for Kiara. This was one of the most satisfying sexual encounters Harry has had in a while and he wants to enjoy every second of being buried in Kiara’s warmth.

Harry was about to pull out from her but when he looked down at where they were connecting he realized how fucked he was.

Not only did he not wear a condom, but he most definitely came inside of her.

“Fuck,” Harry mumbles under his breath.

How could he be so careless? This has never happened to him. Harry has had quite the extent of sexual partners and he makes sure to always use a condom.

He wants to blame it on the wine but he didn’t even finish his glass.

“I need a second,” Kiara tiredly whispers, panting.

“I didn’t use a condom.”

“I’m sorry?” Kiara says still coming down from her high.

Harry runs his hand through his tangled hair nervously, “I didn’t use a condom. I haven’t had sex in almost a year though. I get tested regularly too. I’m sorry it just slipped my mind. I can run out and get you some plan B.”

“It's okay,” Kiara responds. She turns her head around to look at Harry. “Do you mind pulling out now though?”

Harry looks down at his dick, and then looks up at Kiara. “Oh yeah shit uhh.” He grabs on to Kiara’s hips and slowly pulls out of her.

“I haven’t had sex in like six months by the way,” Kiara slowly turns herself around to face Harry who has now tucked himself back in his boxers. “It could be longer honestly… it's been pretty dry here until now.”

“Yeah, same. Busy with work and what not.”

There is a moment of uncomfortable silence. Kiara has the sheets up to her bare breast, and Harry is not only taking in the raw beauty of the girl in front of him, and still beyond shocked he forgot to put on a damn condom.

“Well, I can get you some plan B. I think there is like a Target down the block from your apartment.”

“No, it's fine!” Kiara responds way too quickly. “I mean like, Trina has a stash in her car. I can steal from her in the morning. You don't have to rush out if you don’t want to. It’s not safe to drive at night, and you probably have such a long way to go.”

“You want me to stay?”

“Is that a bad thing?”

Harry shakes his head. “No...errr it's not. I would really like to stay.”

“Okay well I’m gonna pee. And clean myself up. I can bring you some water?”

“Water would be great.”

Kiara nods at him, standing up so that her white sheet is wrapped tightly around her body. She knows that there is no reason to hide from Harry. He just took her from behind and called her a whore, but Harry isn’t just any man. He is a man who looks like a greek god, and fucks like one too. So Kiara couldn’t help but be a little self conscious.

Kiara quickly comes back with two glasses of water. She has even changed into an old ratty T-shirt and a fresh pair of underwear.

Kiara hands Harry a glass and he takes a sip, “You know,” she starts, crawling into bed next to him. “If you told me you fuck like that maybe I wouldn’t have put up a fight at the cafe.”

Harry blushes, setting the glass on the nightstand next to him. “Didn’t plan this, you know. Not that I mind. Trust me, I like this.”

“I would be lying if I didn’t say I thought you were cute.”

“Oh,” Harry playfulls wiggles his eyebrows, scooting himself closer to Kiara on the bed. “Please do tell me more.”

Kiara pouts at Harry until he places a kiss on her bottom lip, another sloppy wet one on her cheek. He grabs at her sides, tickling her.

“Har- Harry! Stop, please!” Kiara begins to laugh uncontrollably. She even attempts to pull Harry’s enormous hands from her body but has no luck.

“Okay, okay,” she gives up, Harry pulling his hands off of her. “It was the whole curly hair, suit thing. I love a man in a suit, and you know you got an Americano. You have good taste in coffee.”

Harry smiles. “You make good coffee.”

Kiara hums awkwardly, not making eye contact with Harry, instead opting to stare at his mermaid tattoo with abnormally large tits.

“I like your hair too,” Harry speaks up. “It frames your face nicely. It was the first thing I noticed about you.” Harry’s ringed hands make their way to the top of Kiara’s thigh, rubbing her soft skin. “Then it was all the pins you had on your apron. You have a lot.”

“Oh. Yeah I’ve been collecting them over the years.”

“You had one that said, ‘Don’t be a damn.’ What does that mean?”

“I’m not sure,” Kiara shrugs, breathing out a relaxed sigh. “It was like my third year of undergrad. I studied abroad at the University Of Edinburgh, in Scotland and this guy who had a jewelry shop said it to me. The next day I came back he just gave me the pin and told me to always keep it with me.”

Harry smiles at Kiara with adornment, “I have family in Scotland. I’m from London though. Grew up there with my mum most of my life.”

“What brought you to New York then?”

“School then work. I went to Columbia,” Harry says, giving her the shortest answer possible. “I noticed you had it on your sweater earlier…. You know before you tore it off.”

“Shut up!” Kiara groans, striking Harry’s chest. “But yes I do go to Colombia. Just for my teaching credentials. I want to teach history.”

There is a beast of silence. “Are you sure if I stay the night? I don't want to intrude-”

“I want you to stay the night.”

Harry’s heart warms because no girl has ever said that to him. The feeling of butterflies swarming around in his tummy has come back, and he knows his cheeks are heating up in embarrassment.

“Alright.” Harry pulls Kiara’s body closer to him which makes her squeal in surprise. “Only if you keep me warm for the night.

+++

Harry is awake before Kiara.

Harry is used to waking up early for his job, and usually, he would be on his way to get his morning coffee and then head on down to the club.

However, he just can't leave the girl he just fucked last night.

Her breaths are short, and he can feel her heart thumping against his chest. She was properly attached to him, and Harry really liked it. Having her this close to him.

He takes the time while Kiara was asleep to not only watch her sleep peacefully but look at all the artwork she has displayed on her walls. There are no family pictures that Harry can spot, just a picture of her and Trina on her desk. It looks like they are at some club. Trina has a drink in her hand that looks like she is about to spill and Kiara is downing a shot.

Kiara stirs a bit in her sleep and Harry watches as she slowly blinks her eyes open.

“You're warm.” She blinks. “Do you want breakfast?” Kiara offers, nuzzling herself in the crook of Harry’s neck. “I make a really good omelet.”

Harry laughs. “Kiara I really can’t keep up with you.”

Kiara begins to innocently pepper kisses all over Harry’s neck. “What do you mean?” she pouts.

Harry groans once Kiara sucks on a sensitive right beneath his jawline. “For starters, you didn’t like me at all when we first met. Then we fucked because you claimed I was here just for sex. And now you are offering to make me an omelet.”

“What are you here for then?” Kiara presses.

Harry sighs, looking down at the pretty girl all tangled up in his arms. Harry knows exactly what he wants. He is twenty-seven and he is really looking for love. A life-long partner who he can come home to after a hard day at work. A partner who makes getting up in the morning all worth it. Someone who he can take out on dates, maybe even take to meet his brother.

He wants to take a leap of faith with Kiara. He wants to ask her on a date, however, he can’t bring himself to do that. He doesn’t want to put this girl in harm’s way because he likes her.

And it's not even about Kiara getting hurt. He would never let anything physically happen to the people he cares about in his life. It’s honestly about the hurt she would experience if something happened to him.

“I-”

Harry is interrupted by Trina barging into the bedroom.

“We will be late for the train if you don't get your ass up! You always sleep in--” Trina pauses once she realizes her best friend is wrapped up in her other best friend’s arms. “Oh fuck.” Trina points back to the door. “I’ll wait outside for you.”

“Shit,” Kiara grumbles to herself. “I forgot I had work.”

Harry watches as Kiara frantically pulls her underwear up her body. When she realizes Harry is staring at her, she turns around to slide on her black lace bra.

Harry isn’t trying to be that much of a dick, staring at Kiara while she is getting changed. It's just that her ass is littered with marks from his heavy handy, and a light bruise on her loved handles from holding her securely on his lap, while he pounded into her.

The bruises were tainted with the memory of last night, and Harry notices how every little mark told the story of their rough and passionate sex. Looking back on it Harry doesn’t know if he was too rough with the young girl. He doesn’t like that it was possible that he may have hurt her.

“You need to go,” Kiara demands, pulling her jeans on, and then her white shirt.

Harry picked up his white button-up shirt off the floor and threw it over his shoulder. “Kiara, was I too rough? Maybe you should put something on the bruises--”

“I’m going to be late for work Harry,” she snaps.

“Are you mad?”

Tears well up in Kiara’s eyes and this is very unusual for her. She never cries. She is not even sure why she is crying. She pauses for a moment not answering his questions.

“I’m fine,” Kiara answers with her back still facing away from Harry.

“You’re crying, Kiara.”

“I’m not!” Kiara yelled, throwing her hands up in the air turning around. “I- I’m just a little overwhelmed.” Kiara’s breath gets caught in the back of her throat. “I have school, and I work full time, and I’m interning at this elementary school...and that…” Kiara points to the bed. “That was the best sex I have ever had, and now I look like a complete freak.” She wipes a tear with the back of her hand. “I look like a complete freak because all we did was have sex and now I’m crying. It doesn’t have much to do with you I think. I’m just a little stressed.”

That was a complete lie and Kiara knows it. At this moment, she could care less about school or the stress of work. Its that empty feeling you have after sex knowing that this isn’t a forever thing. Harry will go back to being Harry, and she will go back to being Kiara. It is simply just sex...nothing more.

Harry gets off the bed in just his unbuttoned shirt and boxers. He tests the waters by placing a comforting hand on her back. “Is there anything I can do?”

“Just show yourself out please.” Kiara walks away from Harry’s hold, grabbing a scrunchie off her desk, and her purse. “I have to go.”

Harry doesn’t stop her. He knows that if he stops her he is gonna want to kiss her. Then he is gonna convince her to come back to bed with him, and he can’t do that. For her sake.

+++

“Are we not gonna talk about it?” Trina asks while she is driving her SUV.

Trina and Kiara usually take the subway together. It works out much cheaper for the both of them, but they can’t be late for work. Not during the Monday rush. Kiara is in the passenger seat pulling up her hair and frantically covering up a few hickies on her neck from last night. Trina is driving just a little bit above the speed limit, trying to make sure they both get there on time, and also worrying about her best friend who isn’t her usual bubbly self.

“There is nothing to talk about, other than I need some plan B,” Kiara replies dryly.

“You're joking.”

“Nope. Pass me your purse.”

Trina keeps one hand on the wheel and hands Kiara her purple purse from the back seat.

“Kiara you had sex with my best friend. Unprotected sex.”

“Exactly just sex,” Kiara shruged, digging up the pill from the bottom of Trina’s bag. “And I’m your best friend!”

“You are both my best friends!” Trina argued. “You know the poor boy actually likes you right?”

Kiara rolls her eyes. “Did he tell you that?”

“Yes! Actually, he did! More than once!”

“He is lying. I’m just a normal broke student. And him? He is a fucking rich man but he looks like a literal greek god! Trina you know I googled him. His past girlfriends are models! White, skinny blonde models. I’m not white, skinny, or blonde!”

“He was a party boy in the past!” Trina retorts. “He likes you, okay? He just has trouble communicating his feelings. I know you like him too. You just have this strange idea in your head that you are not good enough for him! Which is ridiculous.”

“It's whatever,” Kiara huffs, pooping the pill in her mouth and swallowing it, “It was a hook-up. A simple one night stand.”

“It’s okay to want something more Kiara.”

“He doesn’t want something more! It's so painfully obvious,” Kiara throws her hands up in the air.

Trina knows how stubborn her best friend is. It's why they get along so well. They both have this hot headed temperament. However, Kiara never really likes to give herself time to relax. She likes to be busy but it is clearly taking a toll on her mental health.

“Let me take you out drinking after work.”

Kiara turned her head towards her friend and smiled. “Thank you. Now we are speaking my language.”

+++

While Kiara’s working, a part of her secretly wishes that Harry would show up for his americano. She is trying her hardest to convince herself that he is not worth her energy or time, but the sex is still fresh in her mind and it doesn’t help that her body is showing evidence of what took place last night.

There is still that dull satisfying ache between her legs, the sound of Harry calling her a dirty whore plays on rewind all day. She is practically daydreaming about having sex with Harry again while making coffee.

Harry was the first man to meet her needs in that manner. Sure she has cum during sex a couple times, but it wasn’t anything mindblowing. In fact her orgasms were usually underwhelming, but with Harry he knew what he was doing. His dominance was a complete turn on.

And sure Kiara could be fuck buddies with Harry. But she thinks she deserves a little more than just casual hookups. She wants a relationship because at the end of the day, she wants to build a family. A family that makes up for her broken one.

Kiara has sat down and contemplated this before. Is it inherently selfish to want to fix her childhood trauma with a family of her own, but fuck. Can you really blame her?

+++

When Kiara gets home she quickly changes into a simple black dress. It hugs her curves nicely and it's the dress she usually pulls out when she used to go clubbing with Trina (which has come to a halt because of her pregnancy).

The subway ride to the club is filled with laughter and Trina having to help Kiara actually get on and off the train (because she pregamed at the apartment).

Once they got to the club, Trina walks up to the front of the line with Kiara.

The bouncer's eyes lit up as soon as he saw Trina, “Hi Trina. Umm, should I tell Harry you are here? James is also here too. I can let him know as well.”

“Harry is here?” Kiara questions.

Trina whispers in her ear, “Yes, this is his club.”

“I’m gonna need more drinks if I have to look at his stupid face again.”

Trina playfully rolls her eyes, “Yes, you can let James and Harry know we are both here.”

The bouncer pulls out his walkie talkie and opens the door for Trina and Kiara.

Kiara supports herself on Trina’s arm as they walk into the club, “You didn’t tell me we were going to Harry’s club?”

“I know, I thought you might put up a fight about it.”

She probably would have put up a fight about it, however she wouldn’t actually mind seeing Harry's stupid, beautiful looking face again.

The club itself is beautiful. The ceilings are covered with mirrors, and hanging down from them were stunning crystal chandeliers. The chairs are red, and glass tables are placed strategically in each booth. There is also a bar with some red stools, and a huge red door near it.

“What’s back there?” Kiara asks.

“The strip club. But we don't need to go over there. C’mon you wanted some wine, didn’t you?”

Trina and Kiara made their way to the bar and a heavily tattooed girl with a name tag that says Drew is working on the opposite side of the counter mixing drinks.

“Hey, Trina! What are you doing here? You can’t drink.”

“It’s for my friend, Kiara.” Trina gestures to her Kiara, who drunkenly waves back at Drew “She will take some wine, something sweet. I’ll just have some sprite”

Drew grabs a wine glass and puts it on the table before walking away. “Coming right up”

“James is that new guy you are seeing, right?”

“Yes. He works for Harry.”

Kiara has heard Trina mention James on multiple occasions. She even thinks he has come to the cafe a couple of times for lunch, but Kiara can’t put a name to the face. She is unsure if Trina and James are dating, but she is not sure how far she should pry. She does briefly remember Trina telling her that James does not care about Trina being pregnant. In fact Trina told her one day during their thirty minute break at work that James is just happy to be a part of Trina’s family.

“Mhmm. So Harry owns this club?” Kiara asks, taking a sip from her wine that Drew provided for her.

“Yeah. He owns a few more too. I believe it's a family business or something?”

Kiara sighs before downing the rest of her wine. “Just eat the fucking rich already.”

“Kiara? Trina?”

Kiara spins around on her chair, holding up her second glass of wine that Drew had given her and made eye contact with Harry.

He looks breathtaking. Hair neatly combed out of his face, tailored suit, ring decorated fingers that Kiara thought was repulsive, but now she can't stop thinking about how they feel against her heat.

“Trina, it's Wednesday,” Harry sternly told her, pressing two fingers to the bridge of his nose, slowly breathing in and out, trying not to lose his temper at his best friend.

“Are you not happy to see me?” Kiara says, standing up. She almost trips on her heels but Harry grabs her arm.

Kiara places her hand on Harry’s cheek. “I know you have to be happy to see me. You don’t fuck someone like that unless you hate them or love them. And who could hate me?”

“Okay!” Trina chippers up, grabbing her friend and bringing her back to the barstool. “Maybe we should get some water in you, okay?”

Harry is flustered because way too much is happening at once. Harry has told Trina multiple times that Wednesdays are not a good time to show up at the club. He has his meetings on Wednesday, and dangerous people are always floating in and out of the club talking business with Harry. He just wants to keep Trina and Kiara safe.

“Drew put all their drinks on my tab,” he tells the dark-haired bartender. “Trina, did you drive here?”

“No, we took the subway,” Trina answered.

Harry sighed frustratingly. “Okay. I'll take you two home. Just don’t leave here until I come get you.”

“Harry,” Trina starts. “I'm sure we will be fine. It’s not that big of a deal. James is here anyways--”

“Trina please.”

It's the crack in Harry's voice that caused Kiara to stop drinking her wine and look up at him.

Trina shoots Harry a look of sympathy. “Okay fine. We will stay here until you're done.”

Harry exhales the air he was holding in, a nervous habit he is still trying to break. “Okay. I will be done soon.”

“What's got his panties in a twist?” Kiara snorts as Harry walks away.

“I’m not sure actually,” Trina responds. “He is always stressed at work. I’ve been trying to get him to take a break for ages, but pulling that man away from his job is an impossible task.”

“He always seems so tense.”

Trina laughs, “Yeah maybe you can help him with that.”

“Well I see you have been helping his fellow associate...James.” Kiara wiggles her eyebrows at Trina.

Trina dramatically sighs. “Don’t even get me started on him.”

“What? I thought things were going great!”

“They are!” Trina assures Kiara. “But I’m still not sure what he wants. I’m pregnant and thirty. I really don’t want to fool around anymore. I want to settle down. The baby is coming soon and I won't have time for hookups and flings. He says he doesn’t mind that I’m pregnant, but he hasn’t said he wants a relationship with me.”

“Why don’t you just be upfront with him and ask?”

“Because I don’t want to scare him off!”

“You deserve someone who is upfront with their feelings, Trina. You are never gonna know until you ask.”

Trina sticks her index finger in Kiara’s face. “I’m not doing shit until you figure out what's going on with you and Harry.”

“Fine I’ll admit. The dick is good.”

Trina squealed. “I knew it, you filthy whore!”

“I'm just a little nervous. What if he is just hooking up with me for some weird black girl fetish? What if he is a racist?”

“I can tell you that's not Harry.”

“Am I ready for this?”

Trina takes a sip of her sprite. “I dunno. You know the answer to that question, not me.”

“Well I don’t know, and you don’t know. So that's my cue to keep drinking.”

Trina rolls her eyes and is about to tell Drew that this will be Kiara’s last glass of red wine until she makes eye contact with a man walking towards them.

“Fuck,” Trina grabs her purse then grabbed Kiara’s wrist. “Don’t talk to him okay? Just don’t look at him and maybe he will go away--”

“Trina... Haven’t seen you in a while.” The man's voice is heavy and dark. When Kiara looked up at him the first thing she noticed is that he is extremely well dressed, with a bling out watch on his wrist. “Who is the lovely lady you brought with you?”

“Leave her alone Dorian.” Trina says.

“What's your name?” The man reaches out to touch Kiara’s lower back but she flinches away.

“Don't touch me! Who do you think you are?”

He raises an eyebrow at her. “Feisty. Pretty too. You are one of Harry’s girls?”

“Excuse me? One of whose girls?”

“Are you not a dancer for the club?” the man asks in a condescending town that sets Kiara off.

“Oh hell no. You know damn well I’m clearly not stripping so what is it that you want from me?”

Trina leans into Kiara’s ear. “Kiara please leave it alone,” She grabs her wrist but Kiara quickly pulls it out of her grasp. “Let's just go.”

“No, let the girl talk Trina. She has quite a mouth on her anyway. Maybe she can put it to a much better use.”

Slap

Kiara’s hand connects with Dorian’s face before Trina could stop her. Trina knows her friend has a temper but so does Dorian. The slap slightly echoes over the music and gains a few people's attention including Drew, who stops mixing her drink and keeps her eyes on Dorian, who clenches his jaw and fixes his suit on his shoulders, trying to regain his composure.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” he mutters quietly.

“And what the fuck are you gonna… Ow!” Dorian roughly grabs Kiara wrist and drags her towards him.

He holds her hand above her head. “You don’t know who you are messing with. Do I need to show you?”

“Are you out of your fucking mind?” Kiara begins to squirm. “Let go of me before I kick you in the crotch--”

“Hmmmm. Maybe I should teach you a lesson. Don’t think Harry would mind if I borrowed one of his girls.”

“Refer to me as one of Harry’s girls one more time and I will do more than just slap you.”

“Dorian. Let her go.” Kiara’s eyes float from the man holding her wrist to Harry who is stalking up to her with a man right next to him. His voice was deep and assertive. Something Kiara never thought Harry to be other than when he was in bed.

Dorian lets Kiara’s wrist go and she stumbles back a bit towards Trina.

“Harry!” Dorian loudly greets. “I was just telling one of your whores she needs to watch that mouth of hers.”

“She is not a dancer, Dorian.”

“Oh, is she not? Such a shame,” Dorians eyes shamelessly rake Kiara up and down. “With a body like that I’m sure she could attract some clients for you.”

Kiara launches at Dornian but Harry is quick to grab her this time pulling her into his chest.

“Behave. Please,” he whispers in her ear.

“Dorian, you need to go.”

“Harry, you know better than that. Came here for my money. Come here every Wednesday to get my payment.”

“Well, you're not getting it today. Come by tomorrow.”

“Funny you say that since you know the history between me and your father--”

“I don't give a fuck about the history between you and my father!” Harry seethes stepping closer to Dorian. “You don’t see him here do you? I made you a deal. You will get your money, just not tonight. You don’t get to threaten my friends and then just demand money.”

“You don’t want to test me boy--”

“No, you don't want to test me. Not tonight. Leave.”

Dorian smirks at Harry before raising his hands up in defeat. “I’ll be here tomorrow. If you don’t have my money there will be problems.”

Harry watches Dorian walk fully out the door before turning to Trina and Kiara. “Both of you. My car now.”

“What just happened?” Kiara questions.

“Trina just take her to the car.”

+++

The car ride back to Kiara’s apartment is silent. Kiara sits in the back confused as to why Trina and Harry kept whispering to each other. A whole conversation is happening and Kiara’s trying to keep up, but she can only get bits and pieces of what the two are saying.

“I might be still drunk but I can hear you know.” That is a lie.

Harry’s eyes glance up to the rear view mirror. “Are you okay Kiara? He didn’t hurt you right?”

“No but I did hurt him. Slapped him. And if you didn’t come and interrupt I was about to kick him in the balls.” Kiara hiccups at the end of her sentence.

“She is right,” Trina agrees. “She is more of a fighter than she leads on to be.”

“Exactly!” Kiara yells. “So if you would have given me the chance I would have fucked him up.”

Harry, who was clenching his hand at the wheel during the whole drive, lets go and smiles. “I believe you Kiara.”

+++

Harry makes sure to walk Trina into her apartment safely, before helping Kiara to hers which was a challenge in itself because she can’t even walk in a straight line.

“Woah,” Harry says, wrapping his strong arms around Kiara’s waist trying to keep her balance. “How about you sit down on the bed?”

Harry helps Kiara walk into her bedroom and he slowly sits her down on her bed. Her hair is completely ruined, her dress slightly bunched up at her hips and her lips gloss slightly smudged. Harry thinks she looks beautiful. He is staring a little too long before he realizes he should help her take off her heels.

He gets down on one knee and his fingers begin to work on the claps of Kiara’s heels until she wraps her leg around Harry’s neck and pulls him closer to her thigh.

“Wine makes me horny.”

“I know,” Harry pushes himself away from her, no matter how tempting she looks, and goes back to undoing her heels. “But I think it would be smart if I get you to bed.”

“Why was that guy asking you for money?”

“Asking me anything but that.”

“Okay. Did you mean it?”

Harry slides one heel off her foot and looks up at her. “Mean what?”

“When we met.” He grabs Kiara’s other foot. “You said I was pretty. You meant it?”

Harry is silent for a couple seconds, his voice low. “Of course. Why would I be lying about that?”

Kiara shrugs as Harry glides her shoe off. “Guys are assholes. Well most guys are.”

“Mhmm. Where can I find some clothes for you?”

“Top drawer.” Kiara points at her dresser right in front of her bed. Harry walks over to get some clothes and places them on the side of her bed. “When I moved here I hooked up with this one guy from my class. I thought there was something going on between us ya know? He was nice at first. So I was gonna ask him if he wanted to go on a date because well, at that point we were hooking up. Turns out he had a girlfriend.”

“Sounds like a dick. Can I unzip your dress?”

Kiara nods her head and stands up hastily, turning around so her back is facing Harry. “I feel like I’m never good enough to be the girlfriend.” Harry listens closely as he zips Kiara’s dress slowly. Her delicate skin has goosebumps on it. When he gets all the way down to the top of her butt he pushes the dress off her shoulders, and allows her to step out of it.

“I’m good enough to hook up with. But never good enough to meet the parents or keep around longer than a couple weeks.” She turns around to face Harry, and grabs the shirt he picked out for her, throwing it over her head, and ignoring the pair of sweats he brought her, opting to stay in her underwear.

“So do you find me pretty in a fuckable way? Or do you find me pretty enough to keep me around longer than a few weeks?”

“Do you want me to answer that? Because you are really drunk, and my goal isn’t to scare you off.”

“Yes please,” she hiccups. “If you want to fuck around lets just be up front about it. Think I’ve gotten my hopes up about too many guys and I just wanna know.”

“Well I always think it's time for me to settle down,” Harry explains to her. “I’m twenty seven and my mum will not stop bugging me about it.” He laughs but Kiara stays silent. “I guess dating is just a bit confusing for me.”

“Confusing?” Kiara questions, tugging at the bottom of her shirt to make sure it is covering her butt.

“I really didn’t expect to be around this long. I’ve done a lot of stupid stuff Kiara, stuff that I really shouldn’t have done because it put my life at jeopardy. I think I never settled down because I didn’t think I was able to.”

“And what about now? Do you think you can settle down.”

Harry inhales and exhales quickly. “I’m not sure.”

“Okay.” Kiara turns her back to Harry and walks to her bed. She is definitely disappointed in his answer, but she knew she shouldn’t have gotten her hopes up.

“That doesn’t mean I don’t want to keep seeing you Kiara,” Harry quickly responds, breathlessly. “I want to take you to dinner.”

“You don’t have to pity me Harry-”

“I’m not pitying you,” Harry cuts her off. “I like you Kiara. You're a nice girl, beautiful too, and I mean that. My life can be… menacing to say the least. I like you enough not to drag you into my bullshit.”

Kiara tiredly rubs her eyes with the back of her hands. “What exactly is the bullshit?”

“It's my family business and my family… Well, they are interesting people.” That is all Harry could tell her without explicitly saying, “Instead of going into finance with my business degree from Columbia, I had to join my dad’s mafia and fix all his mistakes while he lives in a mansion, even though all I have ever wanted was to have absolutely nothing to do with the “‘family business.’”

“You seem like you don’t want to talk about it.” Kiara is now sitting with her knees up to her chest on her bed and Harry is towering over her small frame.

“No. I’m not a big fan of my past. But I want to get to know you, and you can get to know me. I’m busy with work, and sometimes it's hard for me to open up, but I’d really appreciate it if we took this slow.”

Kiara pouts. “So that means I can’t convince you to stay the night? Even if I suck you off?”

Harry smiles at her. “No.” He places a kiss on her forehead. “But I will come get you tomorrow at seven for dinner. Does that work?”

“Yes it does. Thanks for bringing me home tonight.”

“Anytime. I mean that.”

Kiara flips over to her side, hands resting underneath her head. “Drive safe.”

Harry is unsure about his life. In fact he is unsure about leaping into this with Kiara. He knows they aren’t dating, and that's good for him. He needs time to figure out his life. He knows if he wants to be in Kiara’s life, he has to pay off his fathers debt’s and get out of the mafia, or else he will never truly have the life he wants.

Right now, he can see a future with Kiara. He can see himself waking up next to her, making breakfast. He can see himself enjoying a domestic life with her.

He knows he can’t have that right now. But he sure is gonna work like hell for it. For her.

[antiporn-activist]

The Children of Pornhub

Why does Canada allow this company to profit off videos of exploitation and assault?

By Nicholas Kristof, Opinion Columnist, Dec. 4, 2020, New York Times

This article contains descriptions of sexual assault. It’s also really long.

Pornhub prides itself on being the cheery, winking face of naughty, the website that buys a billboard in Times Square and provides snow plows to clear Boston streets. It donates to organizations fighting for racial equality and offers steamy content free to get people through Covid-19 shutdowns.

Yet there’s another side of the company: Its site is infested with rape videos. It monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags. A search for “girls under18” (no space) or “14yo” leads in each case to more than 100,000 videos. Most aren’t of children being assaulted, but too many are.

After a 15-year-old girl went missing in Florida, her mother found her on Pornhub — in 58 sex videos. Sexual assaults on a 14-year-old California girl were posted on Pornhub and were reported to the authorities not by the company but by a classmate who saw the videos. In each case, offenders were arrested for the assaults, but Pornhub escaped responsibility for sharing the videos and profiting from them.

Pornhub is like YouTube in that it allows members of the public to post their own videos. A great majority of the 6.8 million new videos posted on the site each year probably involve consenting adults, but many depict child abuse and nonconsensual violence. Because it’s impossible to be sure whether a youth in a video is 14 or 18, neither Pornhub nor anyone else has a clear idea of how much content is illegal.

Unlike YouTube, Pornhub allows these videos to be downloaded directly from its website. So even if a rape video is removed at the request of the authorities, it may already be too late: The video lives on as it is shared with others or uploaded again and again.

“Pornhub became my trafficker,” a woman named Cali told me. She says she was adopted in the United States from China and then trafficked by her adoptive family and forced to appear in pornographic videos beginning when she was 9. Some videos of her being abused ended up on Pornhub and regularly reappear there, she said.

“I’m still getting sold, even though I’m five years out of that life,” Cali said. Now 23, she is studying in a university and hoping to become a lawyer — but those old videos hang over her.

“I may never be able to get away from this,” she said. “I may be 40 with eight kids, and people are still masturbating to my photos.”

“You type ‘Young Asian’ and you can probably find me,” she added.

Actually, maybe not. Pornhub recently was offering 26,000 videos in response to that search. That doesn’t count videos that show up under “related searches” that Pornhub suggests, including “young tiny teen,” “extra small petite teen,” “tiny Asian teen” or just “young girl.” Nor does it necessarily count videos on a Pornhub channel called “exploited teen Asia.”

I came across many videos on Pornhub that were recordings of assaults on unconscious women and girls. The rapists would open the eyelids of the victims and touch their eyeballs to show that they were nonresponsive.

Pornhub profited this fall from a video of a naked woman being tortured by a gang of men in China. It is monetizing video compilations with titles like “Screaming Teen,” “Degraded Teen” and “Extreme Choking.” Look at a choking video and it may suggest also searching for “She Can’t Breathe.”

It should be possible to be sex positive and Pornhub negative.

Pornhub declined to make executives available on the record, but it provided a statement. “Pornhub is unequivocally committed to combating child sexual abuse material, and has instituted a comprehensive, industry-leading trust and safety policy to identify and eradicate illegal material from our community,” it said. Pornhub added that any assertion that the company allows child videos on the site “is irresponsible and flagrantly untrue.”

II.

At 14, Serena K. Fleites was an A student in Bakersfield, Calif., who had never made out with a boy. But in the eighth grade she developed a crush on a boy a year older, and he asked her to take a naked video of herself. She sent it to him, and this changed her life.

He asked for another, then another; she was nervous but flattered. “That’s when I started getting strange looks in school,” she remembered. He had shared the videos with other boys, and someone posted them on Pornhub.

Fleites’s world imploded. It’s tough enough to be 14 without having your classmates entertain themselves by looking at you naked, and then mocking you as a slut. “People were texting me, if I didn’t send them a video, they were going to send them to my mom,” she said.

The boy was suspended, but Fleites began skipping class because she couldn’t bear the shame. Her mother persuaded Pornhub to remove the videos, and Fleites switched schools. But rumors reached the new school, and soon the videos were uploaded again to Pornhub and other websites.

Fleites quarreled with her mother and began cutting herself. Then one day she went to the medicine cabinet and took every antidepressant pill she could find.

Three days later, she woke up in the hospital, frustrated to be still alive. Next she hanged herself in the bathroom; her little sister found her, and medics revived her.

As Fleites spiraled downward, a friend introduced her to meth and opioids, and she became addicted to both. She dropped out of school and became homeless.

At 16, she advertised on Craigslist and began selling naked photos and videos of herself. It was a way to make a bit of money, and maybe also a way to punish herself. She thought, “I’m not worth anything any more because everybody has already seen my body,” she told me.

Those videos also ended up on Pornhub. Fleites would ask that they be removed. They usually would be, she says — but then would be uploaded again. One naked video of her at 14 had 400,000 views, she says, leaving her afraid to apply for fast-food jobs for fear that someone would recognize her.

So today Fleites, 19, off drugs for a year but unemployed and traumatized, is living in her car in Bakersfield, along with three dogs that have proved more loyal and loving than the human species. She dreams of becoming a vet technician but isn’t sure how to get there. “It’s kind of hard to go to school when you’re living in a car with dogs,” she said.

“I was dumb,” she acknowledged, noting that she had never imagined that the videos could be shared online. “It was one small thing that a teenager does, and it’s crazy how it turns into something so much bigger.

“A whole life can be changed because of one little mistake.”

III.

The problem goes far beyond one company. Indeed, a rival of Pornhub, XVideos, which arguably has even fewer scruples, may attract more visitors. Depictions of child abuse also appear on mainstream sites like Twitter, Reddit and Facebook. And Google supports the business models of companies that thrive on child molestation.

Google returns 920 million videos on a search for “young porn.” Top hits include a video of a naked “very young teen” engaging in sex acts on XVideo along with a video on Pornhub whose title is unprintable here.

I asked the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to compile the number of images, videos and other content related to child sexual exploitation reported to it each year. In 2015, it received reports of 6.5 million videos or other files; in 2017, 20.6 million; and in 2019, 69.2 million.

Facebook removed 12.4 million images related to child exploitation in a three-month period this year. Twitter closed 264,000 accounts in six months last year for engaging in sexual exploitation of children. By contrast, Pornhub notes that the Internet Watch Foundation, an England-based nonprofit that combats child sexual abuse imagery, reported only 118 instances of child sexual abuse imagery on its site over almost three years, seemingly a negligible figure. “Eliminating illegal content is an ongoing battle for every modern content platform, and we are committed to remaining at the forefront,” Pornhub said in its statement.

The Internet Watch Foundation couldn’t explain why its figure for Pornhub is so low. Perhaps it’s because people on Pornhub are inured to the material and unlikely to report it. But if you know what to look for, it’s possible to find hundreds of apparent child sexual abuse videos on Pornhub in 30 minutes. Pornhub has recently offered playlists with names including “less than 18,” “the best collection of young boys” and “under- - age.”

Congress and successive presidents have done almost nothing as this problem has grown. The tech world that made it possible has been mostly passive, in a defensive crouch. But pioneering reporting in 2019 by my Times colleagues has prodded Congress to begin debating competing strategies to address child exploitation.

Concerns about Pornhub are bubbling up. A petition to shut the site down has received 2.1 million signatures. Senator Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican, called on the Justice Department to investigate Pornhub. PayPal cut off services for the company, and credit card companies have been asked to do the same. An organization called Traffickinghub, led by an activist named Laila Mickelwait, documents abuses and calls for the site to be shut down. Twenty members of Canada’s Parliament have called on their government to crack down on Pornhub, which is effectively based in Montreal.

“They made money off my pain and suffering,” an 18-year-old woman named Taylor told me. A boyfriend secretly made a video of her performing a sex act when she was 14, and it ended up on Pornhub, the police confirmed. “I went to school the next day and everybody was looking at their phones and me as I walked down the hall,” she added, weeping as she spoke. “They were laughing.”

Taylor said she has twice attempted suicide because of the humiliation and trauma. Like others quoted here, she agreed to tell her story and help document it because she thought it might help other girls avoid suffering as she did.

IV.

Pornhub is owned by Mindgeek, a private pornography conglomerate with more than 100 websites, production companies and brands. Its sites include Redtube, Youporn, XTube, SpankWire, ExtremeTube, Men.com, My Dirty Hobby, Thumbzilla, PornMD, Brazzers and GayTube. There are other major players in porn outside the Mindgeek umbrella, most notably XHamster and XVideos, but Mindgeek is a porn titan. If it operated in another industry, the Justice Department could be discussing an antitrust case against it.

Pornhub and Mindgeek also stand out because of their influence. One study this year by a digital marketing company concluded that Pornhub was the technology company with the third greatest-impact on society in the 21st century, after Facebook and Google but ahead of Microsoft, Apple and Amazon.

Nominally based in Luxembourg for tax reasons, Mindgeek is a private company run from Montreal. It does not disclose who owns it, but it is led by Feras Antoon and David Tassillo, both Canadians, who declined to be interviewed.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada calls himself a feminist and has been proud of his government’s efforts to empower women worldwide. So a question for Trudeau and all Canadians: Why does Canada host a company that inflicts rape videos on the world?

Mindgeek’s moderators are charged with filtering out videos of children, but its business model profits from sex videos starring young people.

“The goal for a content moderator is to let as much content as possible go through,” a former Mindgeek employee told me. He said he believed that the top executives weren’t evil but were focused above all on maximizing revenue.

While Pornhub would not tell me how many moderators it employs, I interviewed one who said that there are about 80 worldwide who work on Mindgeek sites (by comparison, Facebook told me it has 15,000 moderators). With 1.36 million new hours of video uploaded a year to Pornhub, that means that each moderator would have to review hundreds of hours of content each week.

The moderators fast forward through videos, but it’s often difficult to assess whether a person is 14 or 18, or whether torture is real or fake. Most of the underage content involves teenagers, the moderator I spoke with said, but some comes from spy cams in toilets or changing rooms and shows children only 8 to 12.

“The job in itself is soul-destroying,” the moderator said.

Pornhub appears to be increasingly alarmed about civil or criminal liability. Lawyers are circling, and nine women sued the company in federal court after spy cam videos surfaced on Pornhub. The videos were shot in a locker room at Limestone College in South Carolina and showed women showering and changing clothes.

Executives of Pornhub appear in the past to have assumed that they enjoyed immunity under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects internet platforms on which members of the public post content. But in 2018 Congress limited Section 230 so that it may not be enough to shield the company, leading Mindgeek to behave better.

It has doubled the number of moderators in the last couple of years, the moderator told me, and this year Pornhub began voluntarily reporting illegal material to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. After previously dragging its feet in removing videos of children and nonconsensual content, Pornhub now is responding more rapidly.

It has also compiled a list of banned content. I obtained a copy of this list, and it purports to bar videos with terms or themes like “rape,” “preteen,” “pedophilia” and “bestiality” (it helpfully clarifies that this “includes eels, fish, octopus, insects”). Diapers are OK “if no scatophilia.” Mutilation depends on context but “cannot depict severing parts of the body.”

So while it is now no longer possible to search on Pornhub in English using terms like “underage” or “rape,” the company hasn’t tried hard to eliminate such videos. A member called “13yoboyteen” is allowed to post videos. A search for “r*pe,” turns up 1,901 videos. “Girl with braces” turns up 1,913 videos and suggests also trying “exxxtra small teens.” A search for “13yo” generates 155,000 videos. To be clear, most aren’t of 13-year-olds, but the fact that they’re promoted with that language seems to reflect an effort to attract pedophiles.

Moreover, some videos seem at odds with the list of banned content. “Runaway Girl Gets Ultimatum, Anal or the Streets” is the title of one Pornhub video. Another user posts videos documenting sex with teenage girls as they weep, protest and cry out in pain.

While Pornhub is becoming more careful about videos of potentially litigious Americans, it remains cavalier about overseas victims. One Indonesian video is titled “Junior High School Girl After Class” and shows what appears to be a young teenager having sex. A Chinese sex video, just taken down, was labeled: “Beautiful High School Girl Is Tricked by Classmates and Taken to the Top of a Building Where She Is Insulted and Raped.”

“They’re making money off the worst moment in my life, off my body,” a Colombian teenager who asked to be called Xela, a nickname, told me. Two American men paid her when she was 16 for a sexual encounter that they filmed and then posted on Pornhub. She was one of several Pornhub survivors who told me they had thought of or attempted suicide.

In the last few days as I was completing this article, two new videos of prepubescent girls being assaulted were posted, along with a sex video of a 15-year-old girl who was suicidal after it went online. I don’t see how good-faith moderators could approve any of these videos.

V.

“It’s always going to be online,” Nicole, a British woman who has had naked videos of herself posted and reposted on Pornhub, told me. “That’s my big fear of having kids, them seeing this.”

That’s a recurring theme among survivors: An assault eventually ends, but Pornhub renders the suffering interminable.

Naked videos of Nicole at 15 were posted on Pornhub. Now 19, she has been trying for two years to get them removed.

“Why do videos of me from when I was 15 years old and blackmailed, which is child porn, continuously [get] uploaded?” Nicole protested plaintively to Pornhub last year, in a message. “You really need a better system. … I tried to kill myself multiple times after finding myself reuploaded on your website.”

Nicole’s lawyer, Dani Pinter, says there are still at least three naked videos of Nicole at age 15 or 16 on Pornhub that they are trying to get removed.

“It’s never going to end,” Nicole said. “They’re getting so much money from our trauma.”

Pornhub has introduced software that supposedly can “fingerprint” rape videos and prevent them from being uploaded again. But Vice showed how this technology is easily circumvented on Pornhub.

One Pornhub scandal involved the Girls Do Porn production company, which recruited young women for clothed modeling gigs and then pushed them to perform in sex videos, claiming that the videos would be sold only as DVDs in other countries and would never go online. Reassured that no one would ever know, some of the women agreed — and then were shattered when the footage was aggressively marketed on Pornhub.

Girls Do Porn was prosecuted for sex trafficking and shut down. But those videos continue to surface and resurface on Pornhub; last time I checked, videos of six victims of Girls Do Porn were on Pornhub, which continues to profit from them.

One of the Girls Do Porn women I saw on Pornhub is now dead. She was murdered at 20, allegedly by an angry ex-boyfriend who is about to go on trial. I’m not disclosing her name because she should be remembered as a vibrant college athlete, and not for a sex video that represented her most mortifying moment.

VI.

So what’s the solution?

I had expected the survivors to want to shut down Pornhub and send its executives to prison. Some did, but others were more nuanced. Lydia, now 20, was trafficked as a child and had many rape videos posted on the site. “My stomach hurts all the time” from the tension, she told me, but she doesn’t want to come across as hostile to porn itself.

“I don’t want people to hear ‘No porn!’” Lydia told me. “It’s more like, ‘Stop hurting kids.’”

Susan Padron told me that she had assumed that pornography was consensual, until a boyfriend filmed her in a sex act when she was 15 and posted it on Pornhub. She has struggled since and believes that only people who have confirmed their identities should be allowed to post videos.

Jessica Shumway, who was trafficked and had a customer post a sex video on Pornhub, agrees: “They need to figure out who’s underage in the videos and that there’s consent from everybody in it.”

I asked Leo, 18, who had videos of himself posted on Pornhub when he was 14, what he suggested.

“That’s tough,” he said. “My solution would be to leave porn to professional production companies,” because they require proof of age and consent.

Right now, those companies can’t compete with mostly free sites like Pornhub and XVideos.

“Pornhub has already destroyed the business model for pay sites,” said Stoya, an adult film actress and writer. She, too, thinks all platforms — from YouTube to Pornhub — should require proof of consent to upload videos of private individuals.

Columnists are supposed to offer answers, but I struggle with solutions. If Pornhub curated videos more rigorously, the most offensive material might just move to the dark web or to websites in less regulated countries. Yet at least they would then not be normalized on a mainstream site.

More pressure and less impunity would help. We’re already seeing that limiting Section 230 immunity leads to better self-policing.

And call me a prude, but I don’t see why search engines, banks or credit card companies should bolster a company that monetizes sexual assaults on children or unconscious women. If PayPal can suspend cooperation with Pornhub, so can American Express, Mastercard and Visa.

I don’t see any neat solution. But aside from limiting immunity so that companies are incentivized to behave better, here are three steps that would help: 1.) Allow only verified users to post videos. 2.) Prohibit downloads. 3.) Increase moderation.

These measures wouldn’t kill porn or much bother consumers of it; YouTube thrives without downloads. Siri Dahl, a prominent porn star who does business with Pornhub, told me that my three proposals are “insanely reasonable.”

The world has often been oblivious to child sexual abuse, from the Catholic Church to the Boy Scouts. Too late, we prosecute individuals like Jeffrey Epstein or R. Kelly. But we should also stand up to corporations that systematically exploit children. With Pornhub, we have Jeffrey Epstein times 1,000.

[qqueenofhades]

Everytime I read "Nicolo di Genova" my brain glitches and I read "Nicolo do Genovia" instead so /whispers/ Kaysanova Princess Diaries AU?

...yes. Did someone say Gay Champagne Romcom? Because that is my Brand.

Nicolò is an Italian-American graduate student living in New York City with his widowed Italian mother and working on an engineering degree at NYU. He was thinking about joining the priesthood for a few years and recently dropped out of seminary and is feeling that Millennial Crisis that all of us know about. He has gone on a few Tinder/Grindr dates, but it’s hard enough to meet someone in this city even when you’re not a gay ex-priest engineering student living in his mother’s rent-controlled apartment in Morningside Heights because have you seen the property prices in New York. Plus WHENEVER he brings a nice boy home, HEY PRESTO there’s his mom waiting eagerly up in the front room, “NICOLÒ WHO IS THIS HANDSOME YOUNG MAN, DOES HE HAVE GOOD PARENTS, IS HE A CATHOLIC NICOLÒ” and of course that instantly kills any kind of romantic mood. Nicolò is like “let’s just go over to yours PLEASE.” But he tends not to see his dates again anyway, and it’s equally depressing, and it’s nice that his mom isn’t homophobic or anything, but he’d like to just meet someone without his mother instantly planning the Big Fat Gay Italian Wedding, and yes he knows this is a nice problem to have but STILL

Anyway, then of course the Dead Dad Circus rolls into town, and Nicolò learns that he’s not actually the son of a nice hardworking Italian immigrant, but of His Serene Highness Prince Domenico Grimaldi of Genovia, who wouldn’t you know it, has recently died too young from cancer and left no legitimate heir except the result of his rebellious teen fling with a cocktail waitress in Capri – which would be, you guessed it, Nicolò. While Nicolò is still processing the horrifying mental image of his mother being a cocktail waitress in Capri and having to look up Genovia on a map, the rest of the royal machine is kicking into overdrive. This involves a very awkward meeting in a very fancy Manhattan hotel with Nicolò’s magnificent but rather out-of-touch royal grandmother, Her Serene Highness The Queen Mother Maria Elisabetta Henrietta Julia Victoria Mignonette Grimaldi of Genovia. She’s basically Julie Andrews because obviously. She informs Nicolò of his Solemn Duty to return to Genovia and become Prince Nicolò and eventually be prepared to take the throne and submit to a fascinating life of minor European royal family ribbon-cutting duties. Oh, and getting married and producing more heirs to the throne, on pain of breaking a thousand-year-old bloodline, though she doesn’t say this out loud. Her loyal right-hand man, driver, and general bodyguard/fixer/man about town, Sebastien le Livre aka Booker, gives Nicolò various sympathetic looks but does not interrupt.

Nicolò obviously freaks out and runs off to call up his best friend at NYU, Andy. Andy is some indeterminate degree of years older than him, in some indeterminable stage of her Classics PhD, and sometimes says weird things like how badly the Library of Alexandria had already been defunded by the Roman emperors before it finally burned, like she was there and holds a personal grudge about it. She is a cranky vodka-drinking lesbian who rides a motorcycle, gets them into periodic scrapes, and understands his shit dating life. She deeply empathizes with all his “I’m not going to run away and leave my life in New York to become part of some creakingly antique regressive imperial monarchic system of racist and homophobic oppression, NO SIR!” Fight the power, Nicolò. Fuck those guys.

Of course, however, Julie Andrews Grandmother Maria prevails and Nicolò is forced to take Prince Lessons, which he hates but tries to be a good sport about, because, well, he’s Nicolò and he’s a good person. He is then whisked off on a private plane to Genovia, because they want to see him in situ before they make a final decision on accepting him as their prince. There of course we have the high-life palaces and parks and snooty clueless aristocrats who look at Nicolò like he’s a prize racehorse and have absolutely zero clue, none, nada, about the real world. Just as Nicolò is about to firmly decide that this is a complete crock of shit and he’s going back to NYU, he meets….

Prince Yusuf “call me Joe” al-Kaysani.

Joe is a minor member of one of the Middle Eastern royal families, some fictional tiny Gulf kingdom that is super SUPER oil rich. He has a title and a lot of money but doesn’t have a clearly defined role in the family, other than that he’s been ordered not to embarrass it. Nicky does not know this when they first meet, but obviously it’s not possible to be an out gay prince in a conservative Arabian-peninsula Islamic kingdom, and therefore the fixers have arranged for Joe to be publicly dating a daughter of the Malaysian sultan, Quynh. (We are making her Malaysian in this instance so she can also be Muslim and hence an appropriate match for Joe.) Except Princess Quynh is also hella lesbian and is getting the same thing out of the fake dating with Joe that he is, i.e. throwing people off the scent of their real selves. They spend their time together in private eating popcorn, commiserating about their lives and crazy royal families and the press invading their privacy, watching romcoms, and Judging the Straights. They’re actually best friends and text each other all the time, so at the royal function where Joe runs into the stiff and nervous and clearly overcompensating New Guy who’s evidently the New Prince of Genovia, and oh my god Q he’s the Most stuck up person I’ve EVER MET, Quynh is the first to hear ALL about it. She immediately suspects that Joe doth protest too much.

Meanwhile, Nicky meets Nile Freeman, another young American (from Chicago, obvs) who is working at some important EU institution currently headquartered in Genovia. They also hit it off and Nile tells Nicky about the things she wants to do to help change the world and why she’s here, and he is moved by her kindness and altruism and remembers that that was what he wanted too, and why he joined the priesthood in the first place. He opens up to her about the shock of learning the truth about his now-dead dad and the crazy whirlwind he’s been sucked into and how he doesn’t know what to do, and their friendship is beautiful and we love it.

Meanwhile, of course, Nicky and Joe keep running into each other and getting on each other’s nerves, Nicky is thisclose to calling up Booker and ordering him to deport Joe because why is he always here (Booker, of course, will eventually become a secret ally in helping them see each other, but that is not quite yet). There is some Shenanigan where they end up both getting into trouble, Grandmother Julie Andrews is not amused, and finally they are forced to sit next to each other for a whole state dinner and Be Polite, because Genovia is trying to forge better relations with Joe’s kingdom. (Genovia is tiny, ancient, and broke, Joe’s kingdom has obviously a ton of money, there are old historical ties between them, some Genovians traveled to the kingdom in the past, Genovia’s trying to improve its human rights record and take in more refugees, etc. Nile is also helping with this last). So Nicky and Joe get ordered to fake a highly convincing bromance and pretend they’ve been best buddies all along (think Red White and Royal Blue) and that means they have to actually learn about each other and spend time together and ugh, he’s a spoiled rich playboy brat, and ugh, he’s a clueless American who thinks he’s better than us, and…

Oh no.

Yes, of course they fall in love, they deny it as hard as they can, Nile and Quynh and Booker are all increasingly exasperated by their attempts to pretend they’re not, and finally they kiss and make love and admit their feelings and that they want to be together. Then of course they get outed by some scheming evil cabinet minister (Merrick) who doesn’t want Nicky to become king and disapproves of him dating (gasp) a MUSLIM WHO IS ALSO A MAN, and there’s a huge scandal and a ton of drama and the usual Romcom Breakup Angst as they decide whether they can still see each other. Andy flies out to Genovia to comfort Nicky, Booker has a Word With The Queen, and Joe hides in his room until Quynh (along with Nile, who she’s met and hit it off with) appears to tell him that he has to be brave, she’ll help.

Anyway, etc etc., Drama, “I love him no matter what, if you don’t accept him you don’t accept me and your STUPID BLOODLINE CAN CHOKE” speeches from Nicky, Julie Andrews sees the light, they decide that Nicky and Joe can keep seeing each other, and it’s all rather sweet. There’s a lot of public relations to be managed and whether Joe’s family is going to disown him and what this will mean for the whole international relations thing, but… one thing at a time.

Nicky agrees to become Prince of Genovia as long as he can be with Joe, Joe decides that hey, he likes Nile too and there’s plenty of meaningful work to be had here and the three of them can join forces to do good things and he’s going to stay, and the Genovian public obviously comes around and loves them. Nobody can find Princess Quynh. It’s rumored she ran off to America with a cranky vodka-drinking PhD student of indeterminate age and was last seen on the back of a motorcycle heading west.

Everyone lives happily and gayly ever after.

The End.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Who owns the covid vaccines?

A key idea from sf is “all laws are local, and no law knows how local it is.” Prisoners of our own time and place, it’s hard not to feel like we’re living in the only possible world, is if everything around us is inevitable and natural — and any change is “unnatural.”

But anyone who’s ever dabbled in multi-agent modeling (sims where “individuals” each have their own goals and aversions) knows there are lots of stable configurations that a big, complex system can fall into, and re-rerunning the same sim produces wildly different outcomes.

14 months ago, we hit STOP on our big, complex system and now the US is about to hit START again. It will not be a return to “normalcy,” because the old normal wasn’t inevitable. There are lots of other ways we could get along. And frankly, the old normal sucked.

A key way in which Old Normal sucked was the way that monopolists were able to style themselves as heroic entrepreneurs whose great rewards were commensurate with their great risks — when in reality, the risks were always socialized and only the gains were privatized.

That’s an area where a new normal is long overdue, and that new normal is being born in the controversy over public access to covid vaccines.

Helping the poor world manufacture its own vaccines is the obvious right thing to do.

Not just because vaccine apartheid is slow genocide, but also because the longer billions of people are infected, the greater the chance that one of them will incubate a vaccine-resistant, even more deadly mutation.

MRNA vaccines are wild: compared to conventional vaccines, they can be manufactured with 99.7% less capital and 99.9% less physical plant, and mRNA production facilities can retool to make new vaccines 1,000% faster.

https://coronavirus.medium.com/manufacturing-mrna-vaccines-is-surprisingly-straightforward-despite-what-bill-gates-thinks-222cffb686ee

Moderna’s own assessment is that new mRNA facilities can be built in 3–4 months. There’s no good scientific or humanitarian reason to object to patent- and know-how transfer to the Global South, where vaccination is currently projected for 2023/4 (!).

https://apnews.com/article/drug-companies-called-share-vaccine-info-22d92afbc3ea9ed519be007f8887bcf6

We’ve just experienced the collapse of the racist lie — peddled by Big Pharma, Bill Gates, Howard Dean and other vaccine apartheid apologists — that poor brown people are too primitive to make vaccines.

The new talking point? “CHINA! CHINA! CHINA!”

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/15/how-to-rob-a-bank/#roll-the-dice

Whether it’s racist lies about the Global South or New Cold War hysteria, the underlying ideological story is the same: exclusive patent rights and the (spectacular) profits they yield are the foundation of lifesaving medical innovation.

That is, fate has placed among us a tiny cohort of collosi, endowed with the superpower of inventing the future. But for all their creative might, these saviors-in-potentia have the fragile temperaments of toddlers, and if they’re denied their due, they’ll abandon us to die.

“Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.” The true mRNA vaccines theft isn’t entrepreneur-inventors who face robbery by the public sector — rather, those “entrepreneurs” have enjoyed billions in public subsidies, and now insist they owe nothing in return.

So much public investment went into the covid vaccines that it’s hard to account for it all. The GAO thinks that Uncle Sam coughed up $18–23b in direct subsidies. BARDA pumped in $19.3b.

https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20210512.191448/full/

The USG picked up the tab for non-clinical studies of new covid vaccines ($900m), and also shelled out for Phase III trials ($2.7b).

Moderna got $53m for production capacity, part of $100m in direct capacity contracts to pharma, backed with $2.7b for contract manufacturers.

J&J got a $1b pre-order from the USG; Moderna got $4.95b, Pfizer (which touts its lack of public subsidy!) got a $5.97b guaranteed order.

That’s just the latest round of investment. BARDA has been backing mRNA vaccine research for years, pumping billions into the project.

Pharma’s claim that it doesn’t owe us anything in return makes no sense, even by the companies’ own logic. They say that markets produce wonders because they reward canny risk-taking with vast fortunes.

By that logic, the public — who assumed the majority of the risk in developing vaccines — are the angel investors in this high-tech unicorn, and the pharma companies are the VCs who came in with some late capital to help scale up a sure thing.

It’s neither good business — nor legal — for early minority investors get squeezed out by latecomers.

But, of course, the government isn’t a business. Our democratic institutions direct our national productive capacity to R&D in service to human thriving, not profit.

Public investment in R&D isn’t a business in the same way that having kids isn’t a retirement plan: we have kids because we love them and want them to thrive. If they care for us in our dotage, that’s great, but if you treat your kid as an ambulatory 401k, you’re a monster.

I first encountered these ideas when serving as an NGO rep at WIPO alongside Jamie Love and Knowledge Ecology International. Love helped create the Access to Medicines Treaty and has been fighting the pharma industry’s self-serving story of fragile genius for decades.

In an interview with Janine Jackson at FAIR, Love lays out the plain case for an IP-waiver to enable poor countries to make their own vaccines, like the undeniable truth that this would “definitely expand the production and supply of vaccines.”

https://fair.org/home/government-money-thats-gone-into-vaccine-development-is-being-privatized-by-a-handful-of-companies/

Love also recounts the kind of public subsidy that went into covid vaccine production (for example, Pfizer’s boasts of free enterprise entrepreneurship omits the €400m from Germany and €100m from the rest of the EU).

Pharma’s claims of philanthropic largesse are wildly overblown. Pfizer told its shareholders it expects $26b from covid vaccines in 2021; Moderna’s projecting $20b (Moderna’s CEO’s personal net worth just hit $5b).

All that before pharma companies jack up the prices for “their” vaccines, in the years to come when we all need annual boosters, when the price will go from $10 to $175/dose, for a vaccine that costs $0.10/dose to manufacture.

The case for public access to vaccines and the case against pharma as a necessary or even laudable force for good is so thin, it’s remarkable that it’s persisted this long.

But as Love points out, the ideology that knowledge-monopolies are moral has some powerful backers.

Bill Gates is a prime example. Gates has been committed to enclosing commonly created knowledge and turning it into a monopoly — in service to coaxing our toddler-genius-collosi into action — since he was a teenager, writing petulant letters to computer hobbyists.

Today, Gates — a convicted monopolist — directs one of the world’s great fortunes (“behind every great fortune…”), and he mobilizes his capital to prop up the story of necessary and benevolent profiteering.

The Gates Foundation, for example, donates millions to “independent” media outlets (as well as partnering with public media like the BBC), and as Love describes, this has a chilling effect on negative reporting on Gates, the Foundation, and its ideology.

Like the time Love got a Washington Monthly reporter interested in a critical story about how the Gates Foundation’s grants influence its media coverage — only to have the reporter’s editor kill the story because they’d just applied for one of those grants (!).

Gates is a true ideologue, a relentless campaigner against any public access to public goods, in every domain, not just software. He’s been at it a long time, leading the charge against Nelson Mandela’s demand that South Africa be allowed to manufacture its own AIDS drugs.

Love: “Gates is a smart guy; he’s not the only smart guy around or smart woman around. I think people need to listen to other views. And, actually, Gates has sort of a mental block about these issues, and so some of his arguments just don’t add up.”

But all laws are local, and multi-agent systems have many stable configurations. On Friday, the New York Times editorial board — long a voice for strong corporate power — published an editorial and accompanying package strongly endorsing vaccine waivers.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/14/opinion/biden-covid-vaccines-world-india.html

The Times notes that the global economy is losing trillions due to lockdown, and that these loses will mount for so long as vaccines aren’t universally available.

But it also makes an ethical case, calling vaccine apartheid a “moral failure.”

It warns of political instability and the potential for states to topple if something isn’t done, pointing to the pitched battles in Colombia (in which death squads are now murdering leftists with impunity and posting snuff videos to social media as a boast — and a warning).

Beyond advocating for vaccine waivers, the Times backs Public Citizen’s plan to spend $25b ramping up domestic, publicly owned vaccine production facilities to make vaccines to be given away free or at cost to poor countries.

https://www.citizen.org/article/25-billion-to-vaccinate-the-world/

That effort will produce 8b vaccine doses, “enough to vaccinate half the planet.” And it will provide booster shots and new anti-variant vaccines into the future.

The future is coming. Lockdowns are lifting. The rich world is inching toward an emergence from emergency. But normalcy isn’t returning — thank goodness. The whole world deserves (and requires) so much better than normal.

Image: Quapan (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/hinkelstone/49920420853

CC BY https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[the-firebird69]

JOKER 2: Folie à Deux – Full Trailer (2024) Lady Gaga, Joaquin Phoenix M...

I know something he's ending up in the mental hospital and it is an analogy to our character and my character in his character and he goes in there and he gets out and by killing them but they are saying that it's actually my husband and they say it's towards the end like told you I'm just getting small and that's what they are going to try and do in New York City and what he says is I don't think so and they did it with other movies in the past and they did not succeed at their stuff but it's going to be the thing that it's looming and the blame other people but sometimes they plan to do these things so I am worried

Hera

The lady is not supposed to be say this but F them we don't like those places they're evil they never do a damn thing for you and you let things go your bills to places your ass your group needs you you have to do things and people screw around with you from other groups and it's a waste of time I'm tired of this b******* if you people do this to me you're in a lot of trouble he says it too A lot of people died at Saint Elizabeth to get him out and people are killing people to get him out and you people are nuts the military went to UMass and it's Trump you're an idiot and the military went there and you put him into Westfield State westborough and you get slaughtered and just keep doing it he's not sure if the macs having it done, he correctly then says that they put me in there to rile up Clinton who is Trump who's in and out of the stupid mental hospital going to court shaved his teeth so he people had him do that and also to get mad and I saw it too he says what do I do this is you can't do much in here so you got out and you was doing stuff but he was trying to put me in here so we don't get stuck and other stuff so you fell down again a little but really they're doing it and they're messing around with our friend here and threatening him and analogy to try and capture his people and they did it for a while and they say they'll do it again and they're not really taking into account what he can do that's the nature of this movie and his parents were telling him and he's doing things they're not clown things it's very serious. The whole world is at their doorstep and they will not back off this stupid act of theirs they won't stop saying the stupid stuff it looks really bad when you confront one with it and it's weird to like a Medusa it's something with a computer and it's like a virus that sneaks up on it and then recedes and someone say it's close it's a system that does it but that's what these Max I like in the mirror is twofold Claudia said they come from behind and it's true you can locate them near you the other thing is to look at the past and examine your life and how things happened and they have a weakness there this guy does it all the time he's constantly doing it I was answering questions they don't think anyone can do anything about what happened and we know he can this is horrible to say about someone and it's me and my husband that they're talking about

Lily

They're very gross people and they're very racist against us and him but really they want to do this put us down after having us come out this way thousands of years ago and I can't sick of it it's wrong

Jaquin Phoenix

You don't like to say you hit it on the money that's what we plan to do and you going around with your friends feeding your friends and you look awful we plan to do that too

Macs

It's a precursor for another movie and it might be Harley Quinn too

Thor Freya

Olympus

[popculturebuffet]

Lilo and Stitch Crossovers: “Morpholomew” (American Dragon Long): Stop Trying to Make Am Drag a Thing (Commisson Done For WeirdKev27)

Hello all you happy people! And welcome to a brand new retrospective/story arc/thing from yours truly, comissoned directly by WeirdKev27. If you’d like to comission your own review or set of reviews like this one, it’s 5 bucks. Just contact me via my ask box or direct messages on this very blog or my discord technicolormuk#6550.

With Shadow Into Light in the books, Kev decided he wanted to comission something not duck related and a bit smaller as a buffer before the next big arc, ALL of three arcs from season 2 of Ducktales, and decided to go with something he suggested to be a while back as a possible future retrospective: The Lilo and Stitch Crossover episodes! 

That’s right for the next three weeks, with TWO reviews this week since I had a spot open up and Kev paid for this one in full and way in advance, we’ll be taking a trip to Hawaii to visit everyone’s faviorte little girl, her best friend/pet/killing machine as they try to find homes for his 625 cousins. 

I loved Lilo and Stitch when I was a kid: Disney admitely got their hooks in me on that one with their cool prequel comics in disney adventures. These comics set up the movie, showing Jumba creating Stitch and the events leading up to both getting captured. The movie did not disapoint with cool character designs, a drop dead gorgeous recreation of Hawaii, and a really heartfelt, heartbreaking and heartpumping story of loss, family, and ving rahmes voicing one of the few heroic child services workers i’ve seen in a medium, a refreshing change of pace. The film is a masterpiece and I really do need to watch it again sometime. 

Given the series was a huge hit and that thsi was before the big lull in the late 2000′s and early 2010′s where Disney refused to make any tv shows based on their movies, a series followed, given a lead in by the direct to video movie Stitch.

The movie set up the basic premise; 624 capsules containing Jumba’s previous experiments, cousins as Stitch calls them, ended up raining over Kauai, awakening when dropped into water or any other liquid. Lilo and Stitch, with help from Jumba, his live in boyfriend Pleakley, her tought but fair sister Nani, and her boyfriend David, who dosen’t show up as much as i’d like but is my boy so he gets a mention here. But anyways our heroes try to reform the various engines of distructoin who all have unique powers and find them their one place they truly belong. 

So yes the show was a Mons-type show clearly captalizing off pokemon.. but the slice of life setting as opposed to the shonen style of most shows following in pokemon’s wake, gave it it’s own unique feel: while our heroes did fight, it was more about shenanigans, adventures and what not with these unique creatures and the purpose is very heartflet: Lilo simply wants to give these guys the same kind of love and support she’s given Stitch and a chance to do good. 

Opposing them is Gantu, the shark bounty hunter from the first film who, now out of a job, is working for Dr. Hamstervile, an imprisoned sceintest and a character I really don’t like that much as he’s not funny or a genuine threat or both and feels like a waste of time. Thankfully he’s not the focus and Gantu is instead partnered with 625, my faviorite Lilo and Stitch character. 625, as the name suggests, is stitch’s immediate prototype.. but unlike Stitch is too lazy and peaceful to be a real threat and isn’t even really a villian despite being on Gantu’s side. He’s busy making samwitches, his calling to the point when he gets a name in the finale movie it’s naturally Ruben, and snarking at gantu. He’s sadly not in this one but hopefully it’s JUST this one. 

As you can tell I liked this show a LOT at the time. I haven’t watched it since, mostly because disney scarely replayed it after it’s run, but it was vibrant, fun and intresting and a nicely laidback and creative take. The fact I came into the franchise with the comics and thus 625, who was introduced there in fact, and had a hunger to know more about the other experiments certainly helped. It was great fun. 

But while I grew up with the show and the four shows it teamed up with, i’ve never seen these episodes before these reviews. I wondered why for years as I caught the tail end of the kim possible one and saw images ocasionally, but never saw them. 

Turns out it’s because in general Season 2 got screwed over. While Season 1 was pushed out the door fast and aired at a rapid pace Season 2.. was portioned out over several years, and the Recess crossover one, the last one aired and the last one i’ll be covering never even got to Disney channel, only airing on ABC kids, DIsney’s saturday morning block at the time I rarely watched. I did watch it’s predecessor one saturday morning though. Good stuff. 

Since I couldn’t find any making of stuff for why these episodes happened, my best guess is DIsney wanted some cross promotion, and the shows used were chosen because they were the most popular at the time and honestly all 4 represent some of disney’s best, with Recess being in heavy reruns at the time, hence i’ts conclusion despite the show being finished before Lilo And Stitch the movie came out, let alone the series. 

So yeah i’m taking this ride for the first time.. but I was happy to. While Kev pays for a lot of my work, I still have to accept the idea.. and this was a great one. It allows me to cover 5 amazing series and gage how much people would want to see reviews of said series on this blog in one fell swoop.

So to kick us off we have American Dragon: Jake Long, a series I waited forever to come to Disney + as I loved it at the time, badly need to rewatch it (Been busy ), and find it genuinely great: It’s a great teen superhero story about the magical protector of new york, with a charming lead, a great setting and horrifcally great villians in the violently racist magic creature hunting huntsclan.. and their top agent who happens to be jake’s love intrest Rose. It’s really excellent and i’m glad it’s now widely avaliable for all to see. I will say ahead that all four shows in this crossover arc are excellent, and were fine choices for this. 

So what happens when an action comedy about a hip hop teenage dragon meets a slice of life show about aliens? Find out under the cut. 

So we open at a fancy hotel where Lilo’s bringing lunch to her sister Nani when she runs into.. Keoni Jameson. 

The second I remembered this kid all the hate just came flooding back, coursing through my veigns. Just pure liquid hatred for this little perosnalitiless little punk. Keoni is Lilo’s crush and local “stupid white audience stand in”. He has no real personality other than “generic cool kid” and “likes skating”, and just sucks the air out of the room anytime he’s in an episode. Keoni is part of a recurring problem in cartoons across the ages, one that’s slowly going away: the bland love intrest. Intorducing a character whose only traits are being cool for the lead to fawn over with usually no intent of either getting the two togehter or just ending it. IT’s annoying, it was in a good chunk of my childhood, I wish it’d stop. I cannot tell you how many shows used this trope. There were exceptions, American Dragon Jake Long actually used it well by not only making Rose a fleshed out character..  but making her jake’s nemisis in their other lives, and thus making things increidbly difficult on both once the truth comes out, with Jake grappling with if he can trust her or not and Rose grappling with the slow relization eveyrthing she was taught her whole life was wrong.

And again I have seen GOOD storylines using this as a tool: Dipper and Wendy ended with her having been aware teh whole time, but simply not knowing how to let him down given the age gap, and Regular Show rebounded the best from it: it turned the stop and start relatoinshpi of Mordecai and Margret’s relationship into a character flaw for him, openly explored it.. and ended up having him work past it and actually date her for a bit. Before she moved away, he got an even better love interest, then they destoryed the relationship in the worst way posisble and I wil lbe getting to that at some point. Some point. 

So yeah even at the time it was done better, hindsight haas only made it worse and it made watching the first few minutes tough because I had to keep pasuing because I hate him so damn much. He just adds NOTHING to the show and is a blank yanwing void from which no good came out of and I was terrified he’d be in the rest of the episode. Thankfully while he drives the plot he’s only in this scene.. but it’s still one more scene than both 625 and Pleakly got. yeah both are missing, as is nani. 

I did uncover one fun fact that made things a bit easier though: The crew ALSO hated Keoni. No really. Disney forced the character on them as they wanted an audience surrogate, and this abomination is what popped out. They DID NOT want him here and likely only used him as mcuh as they did because Disney forced it on them. And Disney would NOT learn from this as Star Vs got saddled with Alphonso and Ferguson soley because of network mandate. The two aren’t TERRIBLE characters but they aren’t great and feel as tacked on as they were. And part of this does fall on the crew: you CAN twist a stupid mandate like this to work well: Joe Murray was asked to add “A female character with a hook”, as in some sort of dumb gimmick to Rocko. He used those words, meant to create a superfical girl power cardboard cutout.. and created the wonderful Dr. Hutchenson, a bright cheery doctor, the series best sidecharacter.. and someone with a hook hand. But I won’t go too hard on them: they probably didn’t have as much room to manuver and the fact Keoni was sitll being shoved into episodes in season 2 tells me they likely had a set number of episodes he had to show up. I’m suprised they didn’t demand they have characters ask “Where’s Keonie?” any time he wasn’t in an episode. He was unecessary and it comes across with a massive chunk of unforutnate implications: that they didn’t think a series with a mostly hawaiann cast would work, that they wanted at least one other “nice” white character to offset myrtle instead of having the only major white character be a bully and antagonist, and that they thought tehir mostly white audience coudln’t enjoy a series without a white character, which as someone who was in the target demo at the time, I call bullshit on. As I said I hated him then, I hate him now and his involvement is the worst aspect of this episode. 

So after Lilo fawns over him for a bit we find out this chonk of wood’s purpose in the episode: to set up the plot. There’s a massive Skate Competition coming to town with the prize being a really cool skateboard.  This plot point itself.. I don’t mind. Jake is a skater, it’s part of his character and one of the things he loves doing in what minsicule spare time he has. And while it was a common trope at the time having a character skateboard really dosen’t harm most works. We’ve gotten great characters like Jake, Jackie Lynn Thomas, Branwen and Ronnie Anne Santiago out of it, and it feels like natural parts of the character, and frankly An Extremley Goofy Movie wouldn’t be NEARLY as awesome without having skateboarding bizzarley attached to the plot via the college x-games. Granted somtimes you get Rocket Power out of the deal but that’s the price you pay for the good stuff. I only regret it’s involved because Keoni has to be there and I had to pause multiple times to get through his scene. He’s just a sampler platter of terrible decisions made in 2000′s cartoons and he irritates me more than this guy. 

And anyone whose read my Loud House reviews can tell you that is a high bar to clear. 

So naturally Lilo wants to enter the Hawiann X-Games to get the board for Keoni. Though I will give the writers credit for having Stitch voice their thoughts and the audiences thoughts by having him take Keoni’s picture and throw it in the garbage. Where he belongs. 

Lilo’s not great at it as they practice.. and said practice naturally ends up waking up a new experiment, 316.. who i’m just going to go ahead and call Morpholomew. Stitch eventually catches him though like many of the experiments he’s not actively malevelolent and is easy enough to get home. 

Jumba gets to his schitck of breaking down what the experiment of the week does: In this case Morpholomew is  a shapeshifter though he has a VERY intresting twist on those powers: while he can naturally morph himself into anything he’s seen or has a picture of, he can do the same to anyone he touches. It dosen’t effect their voices, but otherwise it’s a perfect recreation. 

So Lilo instead of finding him a home right away.. decides to wait until after the compettition because we need him for the plot. 

So at the Skateboard Competittion Lilo tries to enter, but finds she’s too young.. but since she has a picture of Keoni, which is a nice way to use her photo hobby from the movie for plot reasons and thus dosen’t feel like an ass pull. Why Keoni’s not in town to skate is as his dad left because it’d be too crowded.. even though the event is at the resort he owns. 

So while Lilo commits identtity theft, our guest star appears. He’s cool, he’s hot like a frozen son, he’s young and fast he’s the chosen one, people i’m not braggin, i’ts the American Dragon. Jake is here for two reasons: the first is that Grandpa Long got reports of magical creatures out in the open, so naturally they need to look into that. It’s a clever way to get him, along with Grandpa, Fu, Trixie and Spud, over to Hawaii. The Dragon Council would defintely be suspcious hearing about this, and my guess to why they hadn’t sent another dragon over is they simply dont’ have one on the islands. As for why the Huntsclan didn’t get involved in any way, it’s simply too public for them.  With the magical community in new york, they don’t have to worry about exposure because neither side wants it, so neither side can out the other. Here with a bunch of creatures out in the open it runs the risk of the Hunstclan being dragged into the light.. and given the populace dosne’t care about the “magical creatures” alongside them, it would make them look like the monsters they are. 

Spud and Trixie tagging along also makes sense besides “they needed them for the plot”: While they’d obviously want to come to Hawaii, the skate competition is likely Jake’s cover for why he’s there, as well as one for why it’s just him and grandpa going with a couple of his friends so they don’t have to deal with manuvering around jake’s dad. That sad them never TELLING jake’s Dad is it’s own can of worms as it feels cruel, made things harder for jake and there was no real reason not to. At worst he’d want Jake to stop for his own saftey but given ther’es an active threat in  the huntsclan for the first season and a half, NOT helping people would be the right thing and I feel he’s a sensible enough man to understand eventually. 

And it’s stuff like this that already makes this crossover really work for me: they don’t really have to strain to get Jake over there or tell the audience heavily, the blanks fill in themslves. Or I am but that’s because it’s my job and I love doin it. 

So everyone goes off to their corners; Jake to do a few practice runs, Foo Dog to bet on his friend because of course, Trixie and Spud to go to the beach (even though Spud’s terrified of sharks so I question why Trixie needs him for this), and in a delightfully adorable subplot, finds a lady to woo: local fruit stand vendoer and crankly old lady Mrs. Hasagawa. 

I am here for this subplot: While Grandpa not focusing on the mission is weird for him that’s the entire point.. and their just really cute together. He’s smitten with her entirely because he sees her chewing out one of the people running the contest for making her sign too small. And he performs one hell of a romantic gesture by, while everyone’s back is turned, using his dragon fire to make an add for her on the skate ramp itself, and they have a lovely montage of their time together.. which also weirdly includes grandpa using his dragon fire on stage inf ront of everyone which makes no sense for his charcter but is so cute and does feature david I really don’t care. The writers of Lilo and Stitch probably weren’t deeply familiar with the show and likely just wanted a fun gag. Could be wrong there but it’s cute. He continues to act grossly out of character by trying to avoid going home at the end.. but again I find it simply because he’s in love, they have genuine chemstiry and I like to think they stayed in touch and he retired out there at some point once Jake was old enough to handle things himself. This may not be a ship I expected to support going in but I will die for it going out. 

So back to the main plot, Lilo uses Keoni’s body to imitate him which... she’s only loosely called out on and realizes is bad by the end only because she gets stuck in another body. And that’s not even getting into the fact she BREAKS UP WITH KEONI’S GIRLFRIEND. Yes really.. she just does that to get her out of the way. She comes around and realizes she was wrong and tries to fix it which would be fine.. if hte episode didn’t try to cop it out by revealing “Oh she’s not his girlfriend, she’s just someone who keeps telling people that”. It just feels lazy and dumb and a way to keep Lilo’s crush on Keoni for reasons I DO. NOT. GET. But the identity theft is just brushed aside by everyone: Keoni never finds out, and Jake just brushes it off. The real issue is more her trying to bribe keoni into likng her which while something kids need to learn is not the only thing she did wrong here. It feels like they didn’t think all the implications out here and it hampers the episode

Speaking of which as Gantu captures Jake, he sees him transform into dragon mode and assumes he’s the experiment, Jake’s charactization is pretty shallow.  And why yes it DOES feel weird writing sentences about a character with the same name thank you for asking. I wasn’t expecting a deep character piece or anything: This is a guest spot, the writers here are not the same normal ones for American Dragon. That’s fine. The problem.. is that they clearly did not get Jake. Grandpa being partly out of character is half the joke, Trixie actually gets a really nice moment towards the end, and Spud.. is eh. But out of them Jake just feels like a basic character description: He likes hip hop, he likes skateboards, he calls himself Am Drag despite that sounding like a good name for a drag act but a terrible name to shorten your title, he fights.. that’s it. 

While jake is all of that in the main series, he’s also a kind young man who while sometimes irresponsible does the right thing when the chips are down.  He’s someone weighed down by a responsiblity he didn’t ask for, often makes his life more difficult and often finds himself in trouble because his mother and grandfather won’t bother to tell his dad he’s a dragon. Yes that part still bothers me, and I don’t see why we couldn’t just have a superhero show where both parents know. But regardless this just dosen’t feel like Jake , like they just watched the intro and that was it. Jake feels more like a plot device in his own crossover. 

That being said there is some good stuff: The minute Jake realizes some Sci Fi stuff is going on instead of hte normal magic stuff he tells him “The am drag’s show isn’t about sci fi” a nice meta bit and then breaks out. Meanwhile Lilo takes on his form.. and ends up stuck after badly botching her run again, as Gantu finds the real shapeshifter. 

We get the best stretch of the episode from here though: Lilo awkardly tries to play jake and like jake we get a nice meta nod to how diffrent their show is as she’s worried about his belief in magical creatures.. and is startled out of her charade when Foo Dog talks, a really nice bit especially since it’s tame compared to the weirdness he deals with. Spud and Trixie have questions... only for Jake to show up and his agressive behavior leads to the best bit of the episode: Jake Vs Stitch. The catlyst is understandable: jake has no idea why Lilo’s taken his identity and Sttich is just protecting his best friend from harm. The animation is fluid, the fight is fun and quick and uses both’s powers stellarl. Whle “two heroes get into a misunderstanding and then fight” is a well worn cliche at this point, it’s moments like this that show why: you get to see two heroes who in this case never have interacted before or sense, duke it out, why each is special and it’s fun to watch. 

Lilo breaks it up, and admits to the whole thing.. including the whole give Keani the board stuff. While Jake and Spud, being awkard with girls and a loveable moron don’t see the problem with that Trixie gets a moment to shine. As far as I can remember she really didn’t get much on the show proper so it was a nice suprise to see her mentor lilo her, telling her trying to give someone gifts to love you is not okay, she should just be herself all that good stuff. It’s a nice character stuff and tha’ts the kind of character interaction this episode needed more of. 

With the misunderstandings washed away our heroes team up and storm gantu’s ship leading to another great sequence as Stitch rides on Jake’s back while the two keep him busy and Lilo gets turned back, Trixie complimenting her dress “Thanks I have 10 just like it at home”. It’s such a sweet and genuine moment” They head back out and gantu semeingly grabs morpholmew from where they hide.. only to find out when he gets back it’s spud, our adorable little blob monster transforming Gantu into a bunny and our heroes leaving. How does Gantu get out of being a bunny?

But it’s a nice enough gag. So we end the episode. We get another nice gag as grandpa had himself and his lady transformed to try and avoid going home, and Jake is fine with having lost out on the board what matters is he made a friend. Sadly we did not get a followup in ADJL., but spud does name our experiment, Morpholomew. 

We end on Morph getting his home: a costume shop where he gets paid in fried chicken, he was shown to enjoy it throughtout the episode and changes people into things. It’s a nice little button to the episode and one of the funnest parts of the show was figuring out where the experiment would end up at the end. 

Final Thoughts:

This episode is a really mixed bag. There is some good character interactions, two tremendous fight scens and Trixie gets a chance to shine for once if only for a scene or two, and the clashing genres end up making for some great jokes> The shows do go well together as while Lilo and Stitch is more laid back both have slice of life elements. And hasgawa X Grandpa is just oto cute for words. 

The episode is held back by Jake and Lilo’s lackluster characterizatons: Jake is simply the theme song as a character, which in theory is awesome because that theme song slaps but in practice is pretty lame, and Lilo is selfish and irresponsible even for her in a way that dosen’t feel at all convincing. It drags down what’s otherwise a fun crossover and Morpholomew is truly a unique and wonderful experiment. Still if you like either show it’s worth a watch even if you have to suffer through Keoni for it. It’s worth it.. I just wish it was better and hopefully the next 3 will keep the good parts but take out the bad. Granted this was produced last so I could be wrong, but here’s hoping.  Oh this episode also featured Miranda Cosgrove as the girl who claims to be Keoni’s girlfriend. This is also Keoni’s last episode meaning I do NOT have to worry about accidently running into him. Thank fucking christ. 

Next Time On American Dragon Jake Long: Jake’s dad drags him and his friends on a camping trip and Jake ends up encountering the Jersey Devil. Now all they need is a sexy lady devil cake to lure it out... what it worked for the Cake Boss. And yes that happened, Allison Pregler did an episode on that episode. Check it out. 

Next Time On Lilo and Stitch Crossovers: It’s the family, the family, proud familllyyy as the Prouds take a vacation at Peakly and Jumbas bed but not breakfast and we get some kind of squirrel demon for our experiment of the week. We also get Wizard Kelly appearing...

See you at the next rainbow. 

[noa-nightingale]

Steven Lim Appreciation Week: Watcher-era Steven

We are celebrating Watcher-era Steven and I want to talk about Hidden Narratives for this day of Steven Lim Appreciation Week!

From the description: “Steven Lim speaks with Asian American leaders across industries about how the coronavirus has impacted our community.“

There are six episodes and one of them is also on youtube. Keep in mind that these episodes were created in March/April 2020. More on that at the end of the post.

Quick disclaimer, I am not Asian American and it would be inappropriate for me to lead any kind of conversation about this podcast; therefore I attempted to keep this relatively surface-level. But I have to admit that I got carried away with this pretty quickly and I am not sure if I stayed in my lane. It was meant to be a short, appreciative post but it got out of hand - if I overstepped boundaries, please let me know.

A warning, this podcast deals with heavy and difficult topics, including racism, grief, pain, people losing their businesses, people hurting. It is also very focused on people coming together and how they can help each other - but these topics are still not easy. I still wanted to write about it because I think that Steven deserves all the appreciation in the world for his work.

The first words that come to mind when thinking about this podcast are “heart” and “dedication”. It has a lot of heart - and despite the not always happy topics, it is such a wonderful, beautiful podcast. You notice the hard work Steven put into it, the passion, the care.

In the intro of the first episode he said he was nervous when he made the podcast but that he hoped that people liked it because it would make him feel good. He explained where the idea came from: His friends talked about how the virus effected their livelihood, and he felt hurt and helpless. And he realized that he could share their untold stories.

Episode 1: How Coronavirus Shut Down A Restaurant in 24 Hours

In the first episode, Steven talks to his friend Deuki Hong, chef and owner of Sunday Hospitality Group, whose restaurants shut down in March 2020. He talked about the emotional impact of things happening so fast, trying to keep his employees safe and worrying about his team, having to question a lot of things he had been taught, and having to deal with the uncertainty.

Steven mostly asked questions and listened. Deuki Hong had to make some difficult decisions, and Steven was never judgmental about it - the podcast allowed for a very honest conversation about a very difficult situation.

The first episode very much was about trying to look out for each other, and that is a sentiment that continues throughout the entire podcast.

Deuki Hong said near the end of the episode: “When people are hurt, they just want someone to talk to, a shoulder to cry on, whatever that is, so be that person, just be kind, cause yeah, there’s a lot of hurt people right now.”

There is a GoFundMe set up for the team called Sunday Family Dream Fund. It is still open and has not reached its goal - the first episode of Hidden Narratives came out in March 2020 and the last donation to the GoFundMe was 8 months ago, so I am not really sure what the current state of affairs is. (I will come back to this at the end of my post.)

Episode 2: Why This NYC Restaurant Is Staying Open In A Pandemic

Steven mentions in the beginning of the second episode his “close emotional connection to the food industry” and that it is one of the reasons he started his podcast with two stories from two different restaurants. He also wanted to look at the topic of keeping the restaurant(s) open vs. closing it from two perspectives, and says that he does not know if there is a right or wrong answer.

Steven talks to Jimmy Ly, chef and co-owner of Madame Vo and Madame Vo BBQ. Jimmy Ly made the decision to keep his restaurants open. Steven started the conversation with: “Jimmy, thank you for sharing your story and I hope that those listening can gain a little more compassion, a little more empathy and a little more understanding.”

I found it touching that Steven’s first question was “How are you doing?” - it was asked in a way that allowed for an honest answer. This is also something he continues throughout the podcast, and it is very obvious that Steven is a very thoughtful and considerate person.

Jimmy Ly talked about his decision and for him, too, it is about his staff and his obligation toward them - the wanted to take care of them. Steven summed it up with “It is a choice for them between their livelihood and their safety”.

He talked about the measures they took to keep their staff as safe as possible and about adapting to the situation as best as they can.

Jimmy Ly said, if somebody on his team contracted the virus, he would shut his business down. It was obvious that none of the decisions he had to make and has to make are easy. They also talked about how Asian owned business were hit the hardest, and the drop in business for many.

The end of the episode got emotional - Jimmy Ly talked about how people who had to close their small businesses would most likely not be able to open them again. He said he and many others worked hard and that it is unfair that they could lose everything.

Steven talked about the impact Madame Vo had on him and that he could tell that Jimmy Ly cared about his restaurant, staff and customers and the food and that he poured love into it. Jimmy Ly said that Madame Vo means family to him.

The episode description includes the link to the Madame Vo website - Madame Vo Kitchen is still open while Madame Vo BBQ is “temporarily closed”.

Episode 3: FBI Warns Asian Americans Of Racist Outbreaks Due To Coronavirus

In the third episode, Steven talks to Benny Luo, the founder and CEO of NextShark, about the surge of racism against Asian Americans. He said despite growing up one of the only Asians in his school and being attacked for it, he has never seen so many Asian Americans being attacked in his life before.

From the description: NextShark is “one of the leading sources of global Asian and Asian American news”.

Benny Luo talked about the cases of racism against Asian Americans rising and that him and his team work the hardest they have ever worked in the history of the company to be able to report the stories.

He also talked about the impact of being confronted with those stories regularly - that it is psychologically draining but that his team feels a responsibility to do this work and that he is proud of his team.

Benny Luo told about someone writing to the team about the momentous moments happening for Asian Americans in the past years - and how it felt like it all came tumbling down. He said it is hurtful but that he also hopes it will be a time in history where the entire Asian community will come together.

But he also highlighted the good - there are people doing important work, in the medical field and in other fields, and it is important to be proactive - and these stories should be covered too.

Steven called the conversation “enlightening and therapeutic”. Benny Luo said to Steven: “You’re a creator, you’ve been a representative for us, being an Asian face on a really really big platform and (...) you doing interviews like this with me and you speaking up, I mean, those things have a lot of impact so no matter what it is, I think that you’ve made a big contribution in helping advance us forward.”

Here is the NextShark website.

Episode 4: On Andrew Yang And How Proving Our "American-ness" Won't End Racism

The fourth episode deals with the controversial op-ed by Andrew Yang that advises Asian Americans to show their American-ness to combat racism. Steven said that he was hurt by his words but also by the way Andrew Yang was treated as a result.

In the episode, Steven talks to Taylor Weik, a Japanese-American writer who wrote an article in response to the op-ed. From the description: “Taylor shares more context on why Yang's call-to-action was dismissive to the history of Japanese-Americans and details the negative impacts of Yang's article on the Asian American community.“

In his reflection of the episode, Steven said he did not know how to feel when the article came out - he did not agree with Andrew Yang and he thinks what he said was harmful but people also dismissed all of Andrew Yang’s previous accomplishments. Steven said he can understand the outrage. He said that he thinks that Andrew Yang can learn and that they can grow as a community.

It was clear that this was a difficult topic for Steven but he did his best to have a balanced and fair conversation and to not condemn.

Episode 5: Why American Healthcare Workers Aren’t Safe From The Pandemic

In the fifth episode, Dr. Shuhan He, an emergency doctor and the co-founder of GetUsPPE.org, talks with Steven about the shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) for healthcare workers.

They had a conversation about what exactly PPE is and why it was so hard to get. They not only talked about the importance of PPE in hospitals but also in nursing homes. Another topic was the importance of wearing masks.

Steven said: “A lot of people are grieving and (...) I’ve been feeling a lot of pent-up sadness and I don’t know how to channel the energy.” He asked how people can help.

Here is the link to Dr Shuhan He’s organisation GetUsPPE. Once again Steven mentioned people coming together and doing good.

Episode 6: Should Churches Gather During a Pandemic?

The sixth episode is very personal to Steven - his Christian faith is the most important thing in his life. He talks to Pastor Drew Hyun, pastor and leader of Hope Church Midtown in New York City. Steven attended Hope Church when he was still in New York.

They talked about churches gathering - Pastor Hyun’s churches are meeting remotely. He said that people were missing connectivity and that’s why they decided to make services interactive and using Zoom instead of having live streams. They also switched their style of services to a style that would allow more interaction.

Pastor Hyun said what makes the situation so painful is that people share the collective grief but are still physically isolated. Steven asked how people are doing spiritually - Pastor Hyun said there was a hunger, and that people are starting to think about faith and life and God.

He said they would not be gathering because they want to be a loving community - a loving community would serve the vulnerable, deliver food to the elderly, raise money for small businesses, serve non-profits. He wanted to lean into love and generosity.

Steven talked about the challenges with his own faith - why would God allow such a devestating thing? He said he can at least channel all the energy of grief, and that giving back has been therapeutic for him. He also mentioned that churches are now more accessible than ever.

They talked about some churches not being willing to stop gathering in person - Pastor Hyun said it is a grief to him and that the most loving thing that churches can do is not to gather.

Again, the end of the episode got emotional - Steven asked how Pastor Hyun personally was doing and he told about how he tried to support the restaurant of a friend and walked out of it crying. He said it would be easy for him to fall into despair and cynicism - but that he clings to the thought that God will do something. He talked about people suffering and how hard it is to watch - and that the situation is challenging.

Steven said he would keep him in his prayers. Pastor Hyun said: “Thanks for what you’re doing and I think it’s beautiful - you’re telling the stories of pockets of light in the midst of what’s happening.”

In his reflection, Steven said that he had been struggling with the situation every day but where he can find joy and peace and confidence is God and the belief that God has a plan for him.

A few closing thoughts: I admire Steven’s dedication. I think this quote from the end of episode 3 sums it up: “I spend my evenings editing this, it’s not part of our overall business plan and probably, you know, we’re losing money from it. It’s not supposed to be my priority. But I’ve been given the green light by my co-founders, by my head of development to continue making this show.”

That’s incredible hard work right there. And it deserves to be recognized.

The podcast was created in the early stages of the pandemic. I don’t know how the people who shared their stories are doing now, about a year later. I would love to have some updates - I thought about doing some research myself and create sort of a follow-up but, again, I don’t know if I am the right person to do it.

To conclude this already too lengthy post, I want to return to the main themes that could be found in all episodes: Coming together, helping each other, creating support, being kind, channeling negative emotions into positive actions, making positive changes.

That’s what Steven is doing with this podcast and with the rest of his work, and it is very very impressive, commendable and inspirational.