#you can explore dark subjects but the moment you start romanticizing them you! are a fucking creep!

[lightningfilledsaber]

I s2g every time I see posts that make good points and actually get notes on this app, the fucking op is a see en see-er or some shit

#mud rambles #like. theyll talk about thinking critically or making good points abt what is or isnt causing harm #and then i go to their blog and theyve got posts discoursing about how 'roleplaying rape is okay actually' like. HUH. #you cant talk about critical thinking or what is or isnt harmful and then turn around and spew 'fiction doesnt effect reality' #theres so much nuance to these kinds of topics so i try to always check op for that kind of shit #because the context of why someone is saying 'not everything that makes you uncomfortable is inherently wrong' is REALLY important LMAO #cause objectively thats a true statement! but if the person saying it thinks rape fantasies are. like. totally cool. LOL #it becomes a similar situation to terfs saying objectively correct feminist things. the context that theyre a fucking terf #changes the ACTUAL message and becomes what is essentially a dogwhistle #idk idk but i sure am fucking sick of it! #anyway this is your regular reminder that i DO NOT fuck with people who are into/cool w that shit! #you can explore dark subjects but the moment you start romanticizing them you! are a fucking creep! #youd think that saying 'romanticizing rape/incest/abuse/ect is bad' wouldnt be controversial but. lol. youd be wrong #i was literally called a nazi by someone on this stupid fucking website for saying literally that #it actually really sucks to see people romanticizing or LOL. FETISHIZING. my fucking trauma

[june-again]

＊*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*˚　Elk’s Angst ~ Masterlist + Extended AN　˚*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*˚＊

TW: each week of the sequence may explore a dark topic! Please pay attention to the warnings at each induvidual one to avoid triggers. Make sure you’re comfortable with the subject.

February 13: KUROO | wc: 1k | title: Escaping This Place

  Mr. Stark, Kuroo doesn’t feel so good. Kuroo doesn’t want you to go.

February 20: KENMA | wc: >700 | title: Guilty

  You can’t lie to Kenma any longer. You’re tired of him.

February 27: SUGAWARA | wc: >700 | title: Damage

 You hadn’t always hated Sugawara Koushi.

March 6: ASAHI | wc: >700 | title: Gloves

  Maybe you weren’t anything special. But to Asahi, you were.

BONUS: ATSUMU | wc: 1.1k | title: Rose Petals

  He still loved you, but it was obvious you were in it for his brother.

March 13: KAGEYAMA | wc: >700 | title: The Wrong Thing

  One conversation with a stranger changed his life. And that stranger was you.

BONUS: OIKAWA | wc: <700 | title: Over

  No team was guaranteed victory. He knew that better than anyone.

March 20: TENDOU | wc: >700 | title: Unlovable

  Was this a love confession? To him?

March 27: AKAASHI | wc: 1.2k | title: Your Piece

  Akaashi ending up at that piano was the best thing that could have happened.

April 3: HINATA | wc: >700 | title: The Wedding That Wouldn’t

  You didn’t belong at this wedding.

April 10: NISHINOYA | wc: 1.5k | title: Be There

  He never should have left.

April 17: DAICHI | wc: 1k | title: Your Way

  He’d didn’t understand, and if you got your way he never would.

MY ANGST REVIEWS: where i talk about what i hate about my writing and all the moments that made me melt.

ABOUT “Elk’s Angst”

When I started this sequence of stories, it was because my friend was brainrotting Kuroo and I wanted to make something that was really memorable with him. I think I succeeded, but something happened: I fell in love with writing the tone - angst. Yeah, you know, the cheap YA novel stuff. I guess it’s because I’m a teenager and I find that putting myself in character’s shoes really helps me understand people around me in real life. Writing has always been a hobby for me, but now it’s become a sort of coping mechanism. The idea that people will read something I wrote and be emotionally affected by it encourages me in a way; it makes me feel like maybe all my stupid, teenager-y feelings aren’t all that useless. It makes me feel like I should continue to write and express myself :D

When you read them, expect to find an exploration of different scenarios with Haikyuu characters, different emotions (some common, some far-fetched) that hopefully you can relate to or at least find some connection to. I love all the characters I write about - I wouldn’t choose to write about something I disliked. So while I may have the protagonist (you) or the character(s) express feelings of hatred, loneliness, envy, or loss, my intention is not to just try putting my favourite fictional people in difficult situations, and definitely not to romanticize these emotions or situations. I am just exploring, maybe, some of my own emotions I can’t deal with, or ideas I have that I just need to write about. It’s like an empathy outlet? I guess? Some may have happy endings, some may have open endings. I don’t want to call the other ones “sad endings” because they’re still points of change, and ultimately, change is usually for the better :)

NAVIGATION

#masterlist #haikyuu angst #kuroo angst #kuroo fluff #kenma angst #sugawara angst #asahi angst #kageyama angst #tendou angst #akaashi angst #haikyuu breakup #haikyuu fluff #elk's angst

[hawkinsschoolcounselor]

Okay. So I have a tough question. Considering you have a degree in Psychology. I wanted to ask you.

After everything our characters in ST went through and what they are still going through especially characters like Will, Mike and El. We are in the 80's where growing as a teenager must've been extremely diffucult (though one might say that every generation has a tough time growing up.). We are in a coming of age story very much centered around children and teenagers and whose audience is, for the most part, teenagers or young adults.

I really didn't know how to talk about it as this subject is a very sensitive one and I preferred to chose someone who is, to my knowledge, the most qualified in that field. Sorry if it adds a pressure on you, I really don't want you to have that but I wanted to take it safe as I know it is a difficult subject.

I have wanted the show to go back to it's more mature and raw elements.

Do you think there is a possibilty that Stranger Things might, in season 4 or later, explore the subject of suicide or suicidal tendencies ?

I am sorry, I know it is a tough question but since Stranger Things each season is touching more difficult themes each time. I'd figured that at some point a show like Stranger Things will have to talk about it. Of course it doesn't have to but it's the most logical thing for me. (Also Gaten in an interview said that the characters will deal with more mature subjects.) Especially since a lot of characters do a lot of self-sacrificing actions but it's never really touched upon except maybe Hopper and Billy.

Warning: This post contains discussion of suicide. This is a deep topic, but one worth discussing. I won't pretend to be some all-knowing expert on the topic of suicide, but, as a school counselor, it is something I have to be ready for. I am trained to spot the warning signs and to screen for the need for intervention. I've also personally grappled with this myself. I went through a period where I honestly felt like it was the only thing I could do.

I wish to start by speaking plainly and directly. If you have ever felt like you may wish to take your own life, or know someone who does, please get any available help.

Dealing with a topic like suicide on TV is an extremely delicate undertaking. It's noble to want to address a very real problem, but the last thing that needs to be done is for it to be romanticized. At the same time, it also can't be demonized. Real people grapple with this. It's a real danger to show heartfelt mourning after a suicide, as someone grappling with it may see it as a reason to go ahead with it. "Look how much people will miss me!" At the same time, treating it like some cardinal sin will only make people less likely to share suicidal thoughts with those who may be able to help.

I've written before that Will may consider suicide during the course of Stranger Things, so that’s who I will use for this hypothetical. It could just as easily be another character. The question is how can a fantastical sci-fi show like Stranger Things handle such a real life issue in an appropriate fashion?

I do feel like the show has so far done a very good job working reality into this sort of fantasy story. I can see it working out so long as they are careful to avoid either romanticizing or condemning it.

In my conceptualization, it will be a result of him discovering that he unknowingly created the Upside Down. Will would essentially blame himself for everything that has happened. To him, suicide would be the way to stop it all.

In real life, suicide has been found to have some common elements. I won’t go into an exhaustive list, but these commonalities include enduring psychological pain, looking for a solution to a problem (the solution being suicide), a desire to cease consciousness, and a sense of hopelessness or despair. Essentially, a psychologically tortured individual seeks a solution to their problems, and, since it seems so utterly hopeless, they decide that ending their life is the best solution. Granted, it gets a bit nuanced, but this is what it looks like from a general perspective. In most cases, it’s something an individual has put some thought into. Those thoughts are distorted, though, as an individual will almost tunnel visioned to the point that alternate solutions aren’t even considered, and it becomes more of a necessity than a desire to follow through with it.

In Stranger Things, it’s possible to map these same elements to the story being told. Many fans, such as myself, already see Stranger Things as using the sci-fi and horror elements of the show to illustrate psychological trauma. The threat of the Upside Down has steadily become more insidious and pervasive, growing from a solitary monster threatening the real world, to a possessed child commanding an army of monsters, to many townspeople being used as murderous puppets and parts of a grotesque amalgamation. It’s slowly taking over Hawkins, only ever being temporarily subdued until some new trauma brings it back worse than before. Suppressed trauma is manifesting as a consuming darkness (the Upside Down), which can be seen as a metaphor for depression. Imagine Will finding out it’s all connected to him, a result of him subconsciously trying to bottle up his trauma.

He already has the psychological pain, as it is (in my conceptualization) what’s manifesting all the supernatural horrors his family and friends have to deal with year and year. He’ll want a solution to it, and, in his moment of despair, will think that the only solution is to stop it at the source. Too many people have already died, and he’ll blame himself for all of them. He’ll decide that he needs to die in order to make it all go away. It’s not so much a desire as it is a necessity.

Now, I don’t think they’ll actually kill Will off. That would be an incredibly depressing ending, and it would more or less affirm that suicide is the only answer. I think he may attempt it, and it would take the love of his family and friends, as it always does, to save him. Ultimately, though, I feel it would be far more effective to use the narrative to show Will facing, accepting, and overcoming his past trauma. In doing so, Will would be able to end the threat of the Upside Down by making peace with it, with the help of his loved ones and professional treatment. 

In short, Will might see suicide as the only viable solution to an overwhelming darkness that just keeps getting worse. In the end, though, he’d be able to confront and make peace with that darkness, instead. How the Duffers would go about showing that is a better question for experienced writers.

I must have written and re-written this answer ten times. I’m still not overly thrilled with it, but I can’t keep stressing it. I hope it meets your expectations. This has been a touchy topic, and I tried to treat it with the seriousness it deserves. I hope the care I put into writing it comes across to those who read it.

If anyone out there reading this is currently facing their own darkness, please don’t try to bottle it up or take it on alone. It has a way of making you think you don’t have options, but you do. You just sometimes need other people to remind you of it and help you shine a light again.

#stranger things #stranger things 4 #will byers #tw: suicide

[maxbegone]

AND WE ARE BACK! 

Part two of the Schitt’s Creek Community Fic Rec is here! This time, we focused on celebrating our favorite AU’s! Once again, this is dedicated with love to the the authors of this community! Every participant chose one AU (which was a little hard to do for some) to share and why they enjoyed it.

Thank you to everyone who submitted!

@bestwisheswarmestregards​ // @brighter-than-sunshine​ // @danieljradcliffe​ // @devilstelephone​ // @fishyspots​ // @imargaery​ // @justwaiting23​ // @patrickbrewsky​ // @rockinhamburger​ // @roguebabyinyourstore​ // @rosebuddsmotel​ // @stuck-on-your-heart​ // @the-13th-wheel​ // @thedidipickles​ // @thisbuildinghasfeelings​ // @yourbuttervoicedbeau​

And a very special thank you to anyone who has ever written anything in this community! 

Everything is posted below the cut, and you can check out part one here! 

**As always, if I missed an author’s tumblr handle, please let me know! 

@bestwisheswarmestregards​

Odd Man Rush by @samwhambam​

It’s David and Patrick and Hockey! Three of my favorite things! Also the ending is one of my favorite endings. It’s so sweet! It’s part of the series score and all of the stories are so cute but this one is my favorite!

@brighter-than-sunshine​

Thanks For Choosing Bagged! by dinnfameron

I love this one because the dialogue is so adorable, and true to David and Patrick! I can totally see the characters getting involved in something like this, like a different version of a rom-com.

@danieljradcliffe​

Going Down by concannonfodder

This is one of the best stories of NYC!David and recently out Patrick while they're both trying to find themselves. It's beautifully written and my favourite part is that each chapter switches between David and Patrick's POV. It does a great job of highlighting the aspects of their personalities that we know and love but shows them to us in a new light.

@devilstelephone​

sustineo by @rockinhamburger​

The contemporary art discussions between Patrick and David are interesting and important to the story. Patrick still cares for and emotionally connects with David In a world that is so different than Schitt’s Creek. I liked that Sebastian Raine was the evil force without being included as a character.

@fishyspots​

Welcome to Cabaret by @vivianblakesunrisebay​

It's lovely from start to finish! In this 'verse, Christmas World didn't pull out, so David didn't get the lease for the general store. Instead, he gets roped into helping Moira with Cabaret, and meets Patrick (kind of) through that. I love the way this author writes. The dialogue is in-character, and the plot is wonderful and pulls out moments from canon and reimagines them in some truly inspired ways. I'm such a fan of all of this author's works; this was the first one I read, and it remains my favorite.

@imargaery​

David.; or, a Tale of Misapplied Sense by Siria

A Jane Austen D&P AU and it is BRILLIANT. If you're an Austen fan, you will be able to immediately pick up on how well this author adapted Austen's style, wit, character descriptions, and ability to whack you over the head with romance when you're not even ready for it yet. Siria is a very experienced fanfic writer, but writes for many fandoms, so I think that's maybe why it doesn't have that many hits? I'm so glad I clicked on it. I want to wrap myself up in this story. I want to make a podfic out of it. I want to put it on a t-shirt and wear it every day. Also, it's in a regency AU where homophobia isn't a thing, so you don't even have to worry about that. I want to tell you more, but that would spoil it. Just read the damn thing and thank me later.

@justwaiting23​

You Were the Ocean, I Was Just a Stone by @al-ex-an-d-er-hamiltons​ 

The image of a curly haired fisherman Patrick is enough but this whole fic is such a sweet concept. Their interactions in this are so reminiscent of the show but also so different because they already know each other vaguely, and I come back to this fic over and over just because it's the perfect mix of angsty miscommunication and fluff.

@maxbegone​

Known and Be Known by ahurston

As someone who tends to lean toward canon/canon-divergent stories, this was a refreshing take on an AU. Beautifully written and wonderfully raw, ahurston conveyed the vulnerabilities between both David and Patrick so wonderfully. “The mortifying ordeal of being known,” personified in fanfiction format. With humor and some wonderfully hot scenes peppered throughout, this fic was just brilliant from start to finish. I love when authors explore Patrick's insecurities and vulnerabilities - they aren't written about as often as David's are. I implore you to read this, if you're able.

@patrickbrewsky​

Bound by Symmetry by barelypink

They say write what you know. I instead read what I know. David is the accidentally fantastic teacher we all wished we'd had in high school, and some of us wish/hope we are or might be one day. This fic is a great exploration of combining everything David knows he is (creative, bright, v.knowledgeable about art) and all the things he thinks he's not (empathetic, a role model, great with kids, selfless, kind, & big hearted) The selling point quote: "And it feels good, David realizes, to have a job that means something, a purpose beyond himself. A place where he feels like he belongs, just like his students." (David Rose proves he is both a good and nice person).

@rockinhamburger​

Blackbird, Fly by distractivate 

This is a post-apocalyptic story about love, connection, and hope, with a central theme of growth from destruction. I could not put this one down; I read it feverishly in one sitting, desperate to soak up every word. I love this fic because it is what I like to think of as an exemplar for transformative works (one of ao3’s top values). I love the way the fic stretches toward the light in the dark. It makes me think: about the quintessential elements of these characters, what remains the same despite changed circumstance, and what inevitably shifts when these characters we know and love are faced with a situation far outside their experience or comfort. This story likely hits differently in 2020, when post-apocalyptic narratives feel much less distant than they might have just a year ago. And yet, all the more reason to read an incredible work about hope and resilience and transformation.

@roguebabyinyourstore​

Fifteen Hundred Miles by MoreHuman

Where do I even begin with this fic? I was at first skeptical about what reason David Rose would have to willingly subject himself to a trek through the wilderness out of his own volition. Well I’m so glad I ignored that admittedly stupid part of me because this is one of the mostly beautifully crafted stories I have ever read. Patrick and David are individually on their own journeys of self-discovery, but the way they help each other find what they sought... It’s breathtaking. Their feelings for each other bloom so organically over their time together that despite the circumstances laid out before them, the miles that they stumble and walk and run bring them miles closer to each other. Closer to the love that they both didn’t know they needed. The characters come alive and are identical to their canon selves. The dialogue and banter are spot on David and Patrick. The writing itself is superb. The tropes are incredible, the pining and *oh no there’s only one tent.* The slow burn is tantalizing but in a way that feels true to a genuine love story. The way the setting somehow breathes in tune with the characters, the way they leave messages behind in the trail register—conveying more than they can utter aloud— and the way their families communicate with them throughout their time on the trail through letters. All of the elements of this story ground it in universal truth, in feelings that are not only relatable, believable but demand to be felt. I can wax poetic until I am blue in the face, but really... Read this story. And then reread it a million times.

@rosebuddsmotel​

I Carry These Heart-Shapes Only to You by @ladyflowdi​ and @ships-to-sail​

There are over 180,000 words in this WWII AU, but not one of those words is wasted. It is gorgeous in its prose, and incredibly romantic without romanticizing the very real pain and tragedies of the era in which it exists. It's not an easy read by any means, but it's the kind of cathartic emotional journey that is more than worth it in the end.

@stuck-on-your-heart​ 

kiss from a rose by mihaly ( @davidroseshusband​ )

What can I say about this very special fic that would do it justice? In this story, Alexis stars in a Bachelorette-style dating show and it’s every bit as brilliant as it sounds. On top of the incredible characterization, there are little surprises at every turn, there’s pining, and of course, there’s love. Secret love, even. This fic is truly addicting – I promise you won’t be able to stop once you start reading, and it will leave you feeling so satisfied (and if you’re like me, a little misty)!!!

@the-13th-wheel​

Hold Me Like You’ll Never Let Me Go by @mooodlighting​

It is a wonderful short AU where Patrick and David where they meet at an airport after they get snowed in. It is cute, there is longing and pining that just make it a wonderful read!

@thedidipickles​

Beneath the Winter Snow by Distractivate

The writing is so utterly gorgeous all the way throughout that I frequently needed to take breaks to breathe. The author *perfectly* builds an Olympic world that I can totally see my favorite characters inhabiting, and the resolution is gorgeous. All of Distractivate's AUs are amazing, but this one still stands out.

@thisbuildinghasfeelings​

How Do We Get Back by @unfolded73​

This one deals with a literal alternate universe, which is the first thing I loved about it because I had never read a fic quite like it before. It's a beautifully written 60,000+ word masterpiece that definitely makes me feel ALL the feelings. In addition, it is absolutely riveting. I could not stop reading until I got to the end.

@yourbuttervoicedbeau​

Make It To Me by figmentof ( @rosesdavid )

Epistolatory fic is SO hard to pull off and the author does such an incredible job with the way the characters shine through even though we only see them interact via text message. This fic is my comfort food and I reread it regularly <3

Anonymous Recs:

Just Breathe by olivebranchesandredwine

I love this one because it's got Patrick as a yoga teacher (hot!) and shows David being proactive about anxiety and it's just such a lovely story.

Shall I Stay? by alladaydream ( @maybewecandreamalittle​​ )

This is so worth the 100k wordcount. 18-year-old David and Patrick sweetly leaning into first love, a lot of angst and pining in the middle that allow them both to heal and grow, and a heartfelt reconciliation. Plus, two bonus cherries on top with artist!David and a beautiful epilogue in which they (spoiler) live happily ever after. The tone and pacing of this fic is so good, and I always go back to it when I want to read something comforting.

Your Heart is Keeping Time with Me by @yourbuttervoicedbeau​

I haven't seen 50 First Dates, but this fic is better than the movie could ever be. The author's writing is so beautiful and her David who has amnesia and her Patrick who wants to help him are just PERFECT. I want more and more and more of this.

Once again, thank you to everyone who participated and thank you to every single person who has written something in this community! It would be wonderful to do a part three, but for now, enjoy some alternate universe fics! 

#schitt's creek #schitts creek #sc community fic rec #sc fic rec #sc fic recs #schitt's creek fic #schitt's creek fics #david rose #patrick brewer #david x patrick #bestwisheswarmestregards #brighter-than-sunshine #danieljradcliffe #fishyspots #devilstelephone #imargaery #justwaiting23 #patrickbrewsky #rockinhamburger #roguebabyinyourstore #rosebuddsmotel #stuck-on-your-heart #the-13th-wheel #thedidipickles #thisbuildinghasfeelings #yourbuttervoicedbeau

[intersex-ionality]

Hey I liked what you said about how some people make fictional depictions of violence or depict romanticized abuse or rape because it helps a victim process stuff. I sometimes have nonconsensual fantasies, does this help me process times I have been objectified or sexually harassed? I am sometimes afraid of writing dark fic maybe because of tumblr. You said you have talked about this before, would you mind giving me links to your previous posts about this? Sorry if I am bothering you.

You’re not bothering me at all, darling. 

Romanticization is a powerful artistic device, because it makes the monstrous bearable, perhaps even appealing. It acts as a scaffold that allows you to approach something extremely painful, without having to take on the weight of all that pain. It is, in some ways, similar to vaccination: a romanticized version of an indescribable horror is diluted, defanged, and rendered almost inert, so that you can expose yourself to it, explore the feelings it inspires, and be better prepared to approach that subject in the future.

This is especially useful for the survivors of trauma, but it can be beneficial to anyone. For example, if you work with a lot of survivors and the actuality of the horrors they lived through are too difficult, stomach-turning for you to think rationally through, artistic renderings of that trauma can be the baby-step that you take to begin earning how to better help people.

Artistic depictions of terrible things from the perspective of the abuser rather than the victim can also serve as important lessons. By showing people how major monstrosities are justified by the people committing them, people can begin to see if they’re justifying smaller horrors in the same way.

This is what it means to use art as a coping or processing tool: it lets you approach terrible things from a safe distance, at your own speed, and with absolute control.

Unfortunately, tumblr has decided my blog isn’t searchable at the moment, so I cannot easily lead you to past discussions I have had about the need for freely explored, unfettered art.

However, I can provide you with non-tumblr resources on the subject!

A guide to narrativizing traumatic experiences. Trauma narratives are a more direct form of exposure to your fears and traumatic memories than fictional narratives, as they deal directly with real-world events that affected you. As a result, fiction and art can be a gentler starting point for building up to a traditional traumatic narrative.

Art which explores traumatic experiences gives the victims back the sense of control that they lost during the event, by making them the ones in charge of how the art is formed.

Fiction which uses characters as self-expression and allows the writer to take control over the triggers of their trauma makes it easier for the writer to directly confront that trauma in later therapeutic work or life.

Writing about past trauma allows the writer to directly confront their own complex feelings about trauma, without having to deal with the potential repercussions of discussion about trauma, such as being accused of self-absorption or feeling-the-wrong-things, because there is no back-and-forth between the writer and a second part; the writer can say whatever they want or need to say unimpeded.

Artistic exploration of trauma quite literally bypasses some of the physical systems that cause traumatic memories to be so hard to confront with direct thought or through talk therapy.

Visual art in particular allows survivors to explore their own traumatized emotions and memories without needing to verbalize those experiences in a comprehensible way.

Just as journalling and semi-autobiographical fiction writing help non-traumatized people deal with daily stress, semi-autobiographical fiction writing can help trauma survivors deal with traumatic stress.

Reading other peoples’ depictions of traumatic events can help a survivor to contextualize their own experiences and give them guidance on healing, as well as reassure them that their feelings are natural and they are not alone in feeling them. In fact, reading other people’s depictions of trauma is one of the frst therapeutic practices human beings ever developed, with codified guides to therapy through stories appearing in antiquity, and with many of the surviving myths of ancient human cultures being about hugely traumatic events such as death, war, rape, etc. Known as bibliotherapy, the process of reading as therapy has been studied extensively and found to be especially helpful for anxious and depressed symptoms, and to be beneficial even when undertaken without direct therapist guidance.

So, basically, both the act of writing and of reading about horrible things can help a person to deal with their own traumas. This is also true the acts of creating or consuming visual art.

#Anonymous #romanticization #therapy #narratives #trauma #ptsd #coping skills #processing trauma #dark fic #darkfic #fiction #bibliotherapy #art therapy #writing therapy #reclamation #control #reclaiming control #trauma narratives

[yzssie]

OCEAN EYES Pt. 4

Characters: Loki/Reader(Y/N)

Chapters: 4/7

Warnings: smut and smut (dominant Loki), mentions of self-harm, a little angst (added some fluff to compensate it)

Short summary: You find yourself in the midst of another attack by Loki, but little did both of you knew that things will get complicated, a strange attraction to each other will change everything.

Words: 2.9k

Disclaimer: I DO NOT ROMANTICIZE OR ENCOURAGE SELF HARMING! Mental health problems are very serious and real. If you have any struggles and you want to talk with someone, I am right here and I truly wish to help you!

A/N: 

Late Valentine’s gift! Though it’s a chapter more, domestic to call it like that, the next one will be smutty /smirks/. Sorry for the cliffhanger T_T  Trouble coming up? What do you think?

Please do tell me if I mistakenly added you to the Loki/Tom tag instead of “FANFIC GONE... GOOD?” or if you meant to be added on the general tag and I misunderstood you want only for the teacher au. I said I have only a general tag list, but then I had a lot of tag requests only for “FANFIC GONE... GOOD?” so I am a little bit disorganized. Please mention which tag you prefer (the specific fanfiction or the general one for Loki and Tom), or if you want to be changed or removed from the list! SEND ME A MESSAGE OR COMMENT! Thank you and sorry darlings! 

Also, we are going to have the next chapter for “Fanfic Gone... Good?” next week, stay tuned! I wanted to make it slightly longer so I am currently thinking of expanding it in 3 chapters, that’s why I couldn’t double gift you this week! Thank you everyone for all the support, it means a lot to me!! SENDING LOTS OF LOKI LOVE!  ❤ ❤ ❤

*part 7 is out, check Masterlist*

You eye him while he takes his seat again and notice that the food was left exactly how it was before you threw your little fit. You get rid of that memory and aim for more basic and calm conversation in order to make up for whatever you two fought off.

“So… what is this?” you point to a plate which looked delicious.

“It's a rolled pastry with beef, vegetables, some you don’t know because they're Asgardian and cheese?” his eyebrows furrow at his explanation. “It sounds terribly normal but I have to keep it simple for your Midgardian tastes.”

“I'm fine with everything honestly. And I would like to know more about this one,” you take a bite of the roll and your eyes widen. “It's so goooood,” you throw your head back and Loki can't help but smile shortly at your overreaction.

“Ok, I would actually like to know about everything here,” your eyes scan the table and a hint of pride can be seen in Loki's glimpse. He feels pleased with your own satisfaction.

“There will be enough time.”

You look at him and can't help but feel content at his remark. This has to mean something, he wouldn't keep you with him just to toy with you, right?

“I recommend this,” his golden magic shoves a plate in front of you and you smile.

“It's beautiful.”

“The dish? Well, I wouldn't call it beautif…”

“Your magic.”

He raises an eyebrow and you cough.

“I mean, the colours and the way it works. Better than that blue thingy you have on your scepter.”

The Tesseract? Have you just assumed his magic is better than a cosmic box combined with an Infinity Stone? He shakes his head in amusement at your statement and continues eating his food. Sure, he worked intensely on developing his magic skills while he was “dead” and he reached a point where he can be called one of the best sorcerers in the nine realms, yet he also analyzed the Space Stone and he indeed grasped a better hold on its power. He took his time giving the fact that he was hidden from everyone over the assumption of being dead, but, even if he still needs time to comprehend them, he wanted to show off his new powers. And what wouldn't be a better target than the planet he almost owned and the race that caused his mother to sacrifice herself?

His hatred is paused by another satisfied sound escaping on your lips when you bring a piece of cake in your mouth.

“What did I tell you about…”

“I am sorry but I usually don't eat a lot. And since I wanted this cake so much I should refrain from eating much of a meal before it. You know, counting calories and macros, I bet you don't worry about getting weight and so on. Trivial things for a God right?”

“My strength requires a lot of replenishment.”

“Obviously,” you take another bite.

“I would much prefer you to be as replenished as I am than starving for such an idiotic human goal.”

You roll your eyes and take a bite from another cake.

“You know Loki, life on Earth is really hard. I mean, you underestimate the hardships a Midgardian goes through.”

“Is this why you hurt yourself?” he asks and you stop your fork from getting another piece of cake.

You're afraid to reach this subject with anyone, moreover with the God of Mischief.

“Let's make a deal,” his voice interrupts your thoughts but you still don't raise your head to meet his eyes, “You answer a question I ask and I will also answer one of yours.”

You finally look up at him and chew on your lip.

“I assure you that I can get all the information I need with only a touch, so you should be thankful that I am feeling a little bit… generous today.”

“Ok…” your fingers are starting to fiddle with the fabric of your robe and wait for him to start.

“Why did you self-harm?” the question sucks all the air from your chest and you gulp.

“Life,” the word barely escaped from your lips with a choke.

“You're testing my patience.”

“I'm sorry…” you whisper.

“What exactly in your life made you do that?”

Silence.

“Well, I did warn you,” his body vanishes and by the next second your back meets his chest, one hand wraps around your stomach and the other one sticks to your forehead. You feel a weird pressure trying to get in your head and you lean on Loki's shoulder when your memories start to project in your mind. From high school when comments about your appearance made you starve yourself, to college when you felt useless, stupid and hopeless, to your boring work life. The times your heart broke because of failed relationships, the times you felt your existence a failure to your parents and friends. Nights you barely slept, anxiety attacks, moments you let your blood flood the sink, scenarios on how you could just end your life… he watched everything. You pant when the memories stop and struggle to get away from his grasp.

“No…” a muffled sound meets his neck and he does something you both get surprised of: he hugs you tightly, warmness from his body taking over your, making you totally give in.

“Stop,” his voice is stern and you do as you're told. “I would have done it anyway, sooner or later.”

You lay in his hold absent-minded, realizing that he knows everything now. You are ashamed, embarrassed, you never told anyone details about your depression.

“I am… not exactly proud that I invaded your privacy in this forceful way and pained you by reminding of those…”

“You mean that you're sorry?” you would have laughed at his attempt to avoid this word if you weren't in the given situation.

“I do…” there's a long break and then a soft whisper, “Apologize.”

He would have never said that to a mere mortal. But he can almost feel all your misery radiating through your delicate frame. He now concluded how easily to break you are, not just physically but also mentally. There was a slight panic in his chest when he blood on your skin. He now has second thoughts on this whole matter. At first, he didn't mind breaking you, wrecking you, that was his plan, but now it’s different. Why? He keeps questioning his actions. Why? You're messing his plans, his… crave for power and domination.

“Well…” you shift awkwardly.

He clears his throat and let's go of you, even if the absence of your touch makes him sigh.

“I guess this didn't work as I wanted,” you sit back in your chair and drink a glass of wine to bear with another awkward exchange.

“Let's say I would prefer you not to drink a lot, it doesn't seem like you can handle alcohol,” his hand pushes the glass away. “I will answer some of your questions if you behave.”

You look at him standing to your left and search his eyes. God, how can someone have such a beautiful pair of eyes? The blue irises are like an unknown yet mysterious place that fascinates you, wishing you would never stop falling into their profoundness even if you know it’s dangerous.

“You're staring.”

“Oh, yes,” you break the eye contact. “So, we're in Asgard.”

He nods.

Great. You've been drifted to another realm, though it sounds tempting to explore.

“Probably somewhere pretty far from the palace you're supposed to be at.”

He nods again and sits on the chair near you, prepared for more nonverbal replies.

“What happened to you after the…” you pause, “Avengers crash and so on?”

“Nothing special. Imprisoned and then,” he takes his time to think the answer, “Freed by the oaf of my brother.”

“And what have you been up to?”

“Studying magic and getting stronger.”

“For?”

Good question. He wanted to attack Earth again, revenge his mother’s death but now everything seemed stupid in your company. But why? You are nothing but a mortal, as Thor's lover is. He somehow understands why his brother was so protective of Jane when the dark elves approached. But his mother… Did she also feel as Thor felt? As he still feels now? When she sacrificed herself for a mortal? Was it for Thor's happiness? 

Of course, the mighty real son of Odin and Frigga. 

No.

He wants to hit himself for a moment that he actually assumed his mother didn't care as much for him as she did for Thor. She was the only one, the only person in his life who truly loved him.

“You…” he snaps.

“For me?” your face contorts in bewilderment.

“No. What's it with you? Is this a trick? Are you sent by one of my enemies? By Father?” he jolts, hitting the chair on the floor and you yelp. “Tell me,” he grabs your chin threateningly.

“Loki… you took me here.”

“Yes, yes I did! Because there is something about you, something that attracts me. Did he cast some spell on you?”

“Loki please, calm down.”

“Calm down?! You dare to inflict me with your affection? Affection? For whom? For what reason?” he’s screaming now and you're shaking at his outburst.

“I'm…” your lip quivers but no words are coming out.

“You're what?” his fist pounds the table.

“Understanding you,” you finally manage to respond, making him frown.

“I know how you feel. You're misunderstood because of your actions. But those actions were simply a reflection of the pain you're going through.”

He laughs ironically, “Understand me? You?”

“I was in New York when you fought with the Avengers. And I saw… your eyes. It was for a couple of seconds while Thor evacuated the building. And I just… felt it… knew it from your eyes.”

“You're completely stupid.”

“Meeting you twice… I will not call it destiny, merely a chance to…”

“To?” his tone is low.

“Know your true self. I know it sounds crazy, who do I think I am? You're a God, I'm a very non-significant human, more non-significant as usual people are. I don't know, to be honest, I am also clueless about my actions towards you. They're just led by… my inexplicable feelings.”

“Feelings?” a strangled sound comes from his throat. “For someone who almost killed you? For a monster like me?” his pale skin changes to blue and the ocean you adore becomes crimson.

So that's how a Frost Giant looks. Nobody from Earth seems to be aware of Loki’s true identity except you. When you were hiding under an office for safety while Thor was fighting Loki, you overheard the small conversation between them, including Loki stating that he's a Frost Giant, a species which they both hated. Your eyes follow the lighter blue stripes on his face and can't help to trace them with your fingers.

Loki's eyes widen and for a moment he leans in to feel your touch but hastily grabs your wrists to stop you.

“I will freeze you.”

You chuckle. “In case you haven't observed, my body’s temperature is literally 15 Celsius degrees.”

He is not amused by your joke and your lips tighten.

“Ok… it was not appropriate for this mome…” your words stop when Loki's hands wrap around your waist and his head rest on your stomach, his Frost Giant form gradually disappears. Unsure about how your movements could push him away, you hesitantly bury your fingers into his hair and gently play with his long black curls. 

Your scent is taunting him, you feel like… a place where he'll always be welcomed back whatever happens, a place that waits for him, longs for him... You feel like home.

“You are not to discuss about this moment,” his voice is muffled in your embrace and you smile.

“Of course I am not,” you roll your eyes. “What will happen to your enormously evil reputation if words are out about cuddling with such a weak Midgardian?” you massage his scalp and he hums in approval.

“Can you show me around?” you mumble while you're still stroking his hair.

“Why would you give up your life to accompany someone like me?” he ignores your question and you take some minutes to finally respond.

“Because I have pretty weird standards as you might have already noticed.”

“Indeed,” he agrees and lets go of you. His hand tangles in your hair and pushes your lips onto his, gently tugging on your lower one. His hands travel to your thighs, your muscles tense at his touch. He grabs and wraps them around his waist, jolting you up on the table. Your arms tug his leather blouse, while the kiss is getting sloppy, slow, as if he has to retrace a lost map. His tongue is looking for yours which gladly joins his dance for dominance. You thought this kiss will steal your soul, you have never been kissed like this before, needy but in the same time steady, passionate. His fingers brush your back and you shiver in his arms, moment which he breaks the kiss.

“It's not entirely safe to do so… but take a quick shower and I will show you around,” he grazes his fingers on your right thigh. “A quick one.”

You nod and storm for the bathroom while Loki grins stupidly at your excitement.

What did I get into?

After what lasted like 10 minutes you return to the dining room where Loki sits on the couch, reading a book.

“What are these clothes Loki? Renaissance times much?”

“Those are Asgardian clothes.” He takes a glimpse at your figure and his gaze drops on your revealing shoulders marked by his bites. You squirm uncomfortably under his stare and he stands up.

“You would have to stay near me and don't touch anything or speak to anyone, understood?”

You nod as he grabs your waist and your body feels weightless for some seconds before a weird sensation hits you and you hold onto his shoulders strongly. Your eyes shut close and your breath stops while his arms are now rubbing your back.

“We’re here,” he states and your legs go jelly but he holds you in place. “Breathe.”

He has just teleported the both of you in an Asgardian square but your body is not adjusting really well to his magic.

“I might throw up,” you gasp but a sudden warmth envelops your chest and you instantly feel better.

Did he just use his magic to make me feel better? Oh God, I'm starting to like him more than I already do.

“This is an Asgardian square, though it is not as fancy as it is in the center. We’re in a very reserved place in the mountains.”

You glance at him and gape at his changed appearance.

He rolls his eyes at your reaction, “I cannot be seen here, especially with someone like you.”

His features could be still seen slightly due to his blue haunting eyes which remained the same but he now he has shorter curly copper hair and a beard. His face is less visible from the black leather hood he wears.

“So are we shopping?” you smile widely while you take in the surroundings.

He grabs your hand and drags you back, almost sticking your body to his.

“There are some people here who can feel if someone is not Asgardian.”

“Are they dangerous?”

“They might be. My magic is covering your smell but I would prefer you close.”

You ignore his death stare and return your attention to the blue decorated stands with different objects. The sellers are wearing simple brown and beige clothes. You wouldn't know that they're Asgardians if you weren't on another planet.

“I actually do need some things like make-up? Skincare products? Comfy clothes?”

“I much prefer you naked, body and face.”

You roll his eyes and he tilts his head.

“Did you just…?”

“So if you can transport things,” you interrupt him, “Can't you like have a short trip to Earth and steal a Chanel make-up stand? Or a…”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I was just trying. I mean… since you would do this, at least let it be something expensive.”

“Choose whatever you want from here.”

“Loki… I have no idea what these are… what language is this?”

“Give her whatever she needs.” his gaze fixes the seller and a green glow flashes in her eyes.

“Of course, your majesty.”

Did he just cast a spell on her? Her mind-controlled gaze fixes on your face as she studies it. She quickly packs a few bottles in a box and she handles it to Loki.

“Let's leave.”

“Well if you can steal from a merchant in the square I assume you can do the same to a whole line of cosmetics which probably gains 100.000 times more than this woman.”

“Your tone pet, you better lower it and stop complaining,” he groans and grabs your waist to crash your body into his. For a moment you thought he would kiss you but it appears he’s sensing something and checks his surroundings from the underneath of his hood.

“Loki?”

“We’re getting out of here, now!”

Taglist opened (please mention which tag you prefer):

Loki/Tom Hiddleston tag: @drakesfiance , @cutiepotpie177 , @brokenthelovely , @heart-shaped-hell , @ultrailoveharrystylesblog, @mooncrow123 , @screw-real-life-i-pick-fandoms , @powerstrangerdacre , @darkprincessloki92     , @abrunettefangirlnerd , @little-moonbeam-666 , @youreawizardjulie , @writingmi , @lokislilslut , @abelstnbhd , @januarycalendargirl , @yuna-belikova @joyofbebbanburg , @timevortexheart , @captainrainbowpanda , @thesisterofthedevil , @unlikelytigerqueen , @loreleyfromouterspace , @bitchwhytho 

*crossed username means I cannot tag you for some reason :( *

#loki fanfiction #loki odinson #loki laufeyson #loki x reader #loki fanfic #loki #loki fic #loki marvel #tom hiddleston #tom hiddleston fanfic #tom hiddleston fic #tom hiddleston fanfiction #marvel #thor #loki smut #loki imagine

[bella-donna-energy]

Here we go!

After watching Part 2, I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by how Lilith and Zelda’s relationship plot lines were handled.

First of all, Zelda and Blackwood. I was so, so nervous that this relationship was going to be romanticized, but they made it very clear that they were using each other–and yes, Blackwood was using her, too. Blackwood is misogynistic and manipulative and that wasn’t toned down. I was a little disappointed with the Caligari spell, just because I wanted Zelda to turn out to be completely in control of things despite her family’s worries, but I also think it was a good shock for people still clinging to the notion that Blackwood loved her and wanted to save her when the Spellman family went down. No, he wanted to control her. And Zelda getting in over her head is important on another level, because that is often what abusive relationships are like: the person can be completely charming and indulgent and attentive when you’re dating, and things change the moment the knot is tied and they know you won’t be able to leave so easily. Honestly, the thing that bothered me most about the situation wasn’t them at all; it was Sabrina’s complete lack of reaction. With all her talk about saving Zelda from the marriage, how did she not storm up to Blackwood and demand to know what he’d done to Zelda the minute she saw her? I also didn’t like how her actual experience under the spell was brushed over. She was stuck in her head watching everything that happened. That must have been traumatic and infuriating and deeply upsetting, and Zelda never gets closure for that. Her last interaction with Blackwood is all about trying to get Leticia back. I really hope they don’t brush over it like they did with her self harm in part one. I hope part three really dedicates time to exploring her pain. I’d love to see her and Hilda talk about it--or even her and Lilith, since Lilith has been through similar abuse.

And for Lilith and Adam…I was actually really a fan, because they made it completely about her. While I still would have really liked the thing that gave her purpose to be non-romantic, like her fondness for the students of Baxter, I also recognize that it wouldn’t have worked, because whatever it was, was something she had to lose. Here’s the thing: she didn’t love Adam. Not the way a person needs to love another person to have a real relationship. She likes “playing” with him, he’s something that’s hers and hers alone. She loves that he makes her feel good about herself, and that’s really important for her. Lilith went straight from Eden to Lucifer with a few years of loneliness in between. She has never had anyone tell her that what she thinks is valuable and how she feels is important. Servitude really is all she’s ever known (and I’m furious with Sabrina calling her weak for that, but that’s a whole other post).

Adam pointed out positive things about her, sought her opinion, respected how she felt, and encouraged her to do things for herself. It was the first time she’d ever actually had completely control over something in her life–something she didn’t have to thank or feel indebted to the Dark Lord for. Experiencing that is what helped her realize that there was actually another option and that she wanted it. Having something to compare her relationship with Lucifer to made her see how awful it was. She actually started to hope. Lucifer taking Adam away is what finally shattered the illusion and made her realize that she would never be happy or have any power of her own as long as he was alive. Another thing I liked was that even after that revelation, it took her a long time to actually betray him, and that is also very realistic for abusive relationships. No matter how bad things are with the person, changing the situation can still be so much more terrifying–especially thinking about how much worse things will be for you if you try and fail. Support is so, so key, and that’s what we see in Lilith finally dedicating to a course of action once she has the Spellmans’ support. She didn’t change because of what happened to Adam; she changed because of what happened to her.

Overall, I think these plot lines were competent and realistic for their characters, and it has given me a lot more faith in the writing team to handle difficult subjects in an honest way and a way that respects their female characters.

#caos spoilers #caos #zelda spellman #lilith

[chiseler]

The Madness of Ken Russell

Critical thinking in Britain has always taken the view that Ken Russell was a wild, ill-disciplined talent who ultimately went artistically mad: this was also the view in the film industry. The only major disagreement was about when he went from being merely excessive to being balls-out crazy: different parties chose different tipping points.

(WAIT! WHO CARES ABOUT CRITICS?)

(Bear with me: in Russell’s case, the critical consensus serves as a valuable reverse barometer.)

Russell, a suburban boy, former merchant seaman and Catholic convert, made a few brilliant short films with his wife and fellow genius, costume designer Shirley Russell, before landing a job at the BBC’s flagship arts program, Monitor. His stint here taught him to fight, and placed him under the stern patronage of producer Huw Weldon, probably the only authority figure he ever respected. Many good fights were enjoyed. When Russell joined the program, there was an absolute ban on dramatization and re-enactment: the most he was allowed was to show a composer’s hands at the piano. By the time he finished up on the show, he’d managed to twist it out of shape to the point where he’d been allowed to make complete dramatic works in the guise of documentary. These TV plays are highly cinematic, kinetic and bold: like Kubrick, Russell had a love of both stark symmetry and dynamic movement. Control and its opposite.

Russell found actors he liked, including Oliver Reed, with whom he enjoyed a strange kinship: both were heavy drinkers, both affected a casual attitude to their work, though Russell was never ashamed to call himself an artist. Ollie became the John Wayne to Russell’s Ford (in a roiling, nightmare vision of classical cinema).

The point when Russell moved out of TV is the first moment his detractors choose to mark his decline into self-indulgent craziness. He made a modest, eccentric comedy, French Dressing (with mounds of inflatable girls piled up like Holocaust victims) and a wild, idiosyncratic spy movie, The Billion Dollar Brain, a Russophile anti-Bond movie full of flip humor and Eisenstein homages. Critics saw these films as work-for-hire, as perhaps they were, and largely discount them. They are quite brilliant.

Women in Love is counted by others as the last pre-madness film, and its relative sanity can be attributed to the control exerted by its writer-producer Larry Kramer. Russell’s excesses are held in check, it is argued, and the tension between its creators was productive. It’s a very good film, but I find it too sedate in places, though the vivid color and Shirley Russell’s bold designs, and some scenes of genuine wildness and invention stave off actual boredom.

The Music Lovers, his dream project, expanding the TV composer film to the big screen and color, is where a real case for craziness begins to be made: the choice to explore Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality now seems mature rather than lurid, but Ken is undeniably pushing the biopic into unfamiliar terrain: fantasies of decapitation by cannon-shot, a filthy madhouse, a demented honeymoon on a train rocking like the Starship Enterprise, complete with crotch shots. Maybe even worse, from the critics’ viewpoint, Russell, who had directed one TV commercial before walking away from that business in disgust, co-opted the visual language of the shampoo commercial to depict the images conjured by the composer’s music. Russell was in love with romanticism but saw through it too. Ironically, the filmmaker constantly castigated for unsubtlety injected an irony into the film that critics missed, taking the soppiness at face value and not seeing how the concealed satire blended perfectly with the overt caricature and phantasmagoric visions.

Still, the subject was respectable, but with The Devils, Russell managed a film maudit that took decades to be reappraised, and earned him criticism of a uniquely vociferous sort, admittedly in keeping with the hysteria of the film itself. An account – or channelling – of a 16th Century witchcraft trial in France, the movie didn’t so much push as cremate the envelope as far as sex, violence and blasphemy were concerned: Russell, who had converted to Catholicism in his youth, lost his faith while making this one, converting to an animist worship of the Lake District, a religion of his own devising. Well, he did have a substantial ego.

Russell was upsetting: apart from the torture, abuse and madness, the film threw in discordant tonal shifts, creative anachronisms and deployed all of his cinematic influences, which prominently featured Orson Welles, Fellini, Fritz Lang’s German silents, and the musicals of Busby Berkeley, which supplied the top-shots used to depict the rape of Christ on the cross, a scene cut by the censor and lovingly preserved by the director for a future restoration, still explicitly forbidden by the film’s backers, Warner Brothers.

Asides from his crisis of faith and crises in his marriage and his dealings with the studio, Russell was also knocking back the wine. “Better before lunch,” was his prop man’s characterization of the director. Production designer Derek Jarman recounted Russell asking him, “What can I do that’ll really offend the British public?” “Well you could kill a lot of people,” mused Jarman, “but if you really want to upset them you could kill some animals.” A plan was then devised to have King Louis with a musket blowing the heads off the peacocks on his lawn: the birds were to be fitted with explosives at the neck, like Snake Plissken, but Russell backed away from this extreme, even by his standards, approach, and instead had the target practice performed with a man dressed as a blackbird, and the King saying “Bye-bye, blackbird,” and Peter Maxwell-Davies’ remarkable score quoting the popular twenties song, and that infuriated the critics just as much as actual bird-blasting would have.

Less amusingly, Russell was also guilty of unsafe practices involving the naked girls and rowdy extras: the stories here get really dark. As does the film: a demented masterpiece that shows Russell for once engaging with the political: a film about corruption that uses physical disintegration alongside social and spiritual rot.

Just to confuse us even more, Russell made The Boy Friend the same year, an epic music and a miniature at the same time, allowing him to recreate Busby Berkeley’s pixilated fantasias in a seedy English theater. It’s light and charming, but Russell’s version of these qualities was not recognized by the critics, and it’s true that his wit is clodhopping, his whimsy grotesque, everything is overplayed, in your face: but you have to climb aboard the film, get into its spirit, and then it really is a very lovely reversal of the usual nightmare.

The seventies brought more composer films, Mahler and Lisztomania, and also the rock opera Tommy, which earned Russell slightly better reviews as his boisterousness was judged more in keeping with the material (critics, it seemed, could not stand the idea of a filmmaker responding to classical music for its passion and energy, its rock ‘n’ roll qualities, rather than for its assumed civilising effect). Russell got away with showing Ann-Margret humping her cushions while slathered in feculent chocolate sauce, shot Tina Turner with a 6mm lens to uglify her as she thrashed around a steel sarcophagus studded with hypos, and put Elton John on ten-foot platform shoes.

Lisztomania is another movie that’s seen as marking the decline into lunacy: its producer, David Puttnam, hugely impressed by Russell’s flare and his ability to shoot Mahler after half the budget fell through, felt that ultimately the relentless negative press knocked his enfant terrible off-balance. Instead of rolling over in submission, Russell perversely doubled down on the excess and became a parody of himself. And he had already been a parody to begin with (but a parody without an original, unless we take him as a combined burlesque of all his cinematic influences). I’ve always adored Lisztomania, which knows it’s going too far, knows its japes and conceits are ludicrous and indefensible, knows it can’t get away with Roger Daltrey as Liszt and Ringo Starr as the Pope. And just. Doesn’t. Care.

Valentino, which marked the end of the Russell marriage (there would be a bunch more), was dismissed by Russell as the fag-end of his first British period, “everything about it was bored and boring, including me,” but it’s actually rather good. Nureyev as Valentino (well, he was used to being called Rudolph), Russell as Rex Ingram wielding a megaphone the size of a cannon. The twenties, as lived by Rambova, Dorothy Arzner, Fatty Arbuckle, or as dreamt by Mad Ken.

Russell had made his career in Britain at a time when the industry was in collapse: he largely missed the explosion of energy that marked Swinging London, the British new wave, and the only kitchen sink he liked was the one he was always throwing in. Now, the domestic business seemed to have expired of ennui, senile dementia and blood poisoning, but Hollywood beckoned. Russell was bottom of a long list of directors who all turned down Paddy Chayefsky’s Altered States, a late-mid-life crisis film about sensory deprivation tanks and psychedelics which takes John C. Lilley and fuses him with Dr. Jekyll. Russell took it on despite being forbidden from changing a line of dialogue, but got his revenge by having his actors speak fast -- like Jimmy Cagney fast, not so much throwing away their lines as firing them like tennis balls. And by having them eat at the same time. And by expanding the hallucination sequences until they took over the movie, so that they were all anyone talked about. Druggie audiences would hang out into the lobby, Russell gleefully reported, posting a sentry in the auditorium who would yell “Hallucination!” whenever one was starting, and everyone would rush back in to get a hit of audiovisual delirium.

A bit like Women in Love, Altered States benefited from the creative clash between director and writer (who took his name off the script in protest at Russell’s backhanded fidelity), but the reaction among respectable types was mainly a theatrical eye-roll: the maniac was up to his old tricks. Crimes of Passion, starring Kathleen Turner and Anthony Perkins, was next, with she as a Belle de Jour career girl by day, working girl by night, he as an insane sex-obsessed preacher, some forgettable soap opera type as leading man, the whole thing soaked in neon colors and spliced full of Bearsley and Hokusai, whom the American censor duly deleted in horror. “They cut out anything to do with art,” observed the filmmaker.

And that was it for America, save occasional pieces for HBO, progressively more televisual, the locked-off symmetrical winning out over the kinetic. Russell returned to the UK to make theatrical features, and again you heard the cry off “Whatever happened? He used to be good!” Gothic dealt with Byron and the Shelleys and the birth of Frankenstein, and was fruity, literate, dirty good fun. The Rainbow was a return to Women in Love territory, on a lower budget and with less energy and star wattage: Russell declared it his best film since that imagined zenith, and a few critics wanly agreed. The Lair of the White Worm was another journey beyond the pale, thrusting some of the same actors into a ludicrous vampire and snake goddess phallic farrago with Hugh Grant and a kilted Peter Capaldi attempting to snakecharm with bagpipes. A vampirized policeman gets his head impaled on a deco sundial. Marvelous. And the sequence was rounded out with Salome’s Last Dance, which stages Oscar Wilde’s biblical wet dream in a Victorian brothel, an inspired no-budget solution and a film which, unlike Altered States, really respects its words, lingering over them, rolling them salaciously over its tongue. Add in also Ken’s episode of Aria, in which he stages Nessun Dorma as an accident victim’s operating room hallucination, with porn mag model Linzi Drew, a new Russell favorite, in the lead.

Time was running out, the budgets shrinking like a Fu Manchu death chamber, the ceiling pressing down and clearly constraining what Russell could achieve, despite his continuing ambition. Lady Chatterley’s Lover for the BBC scored huge ratings, and he was never asked back. Commercial television’s top arts programme, The South Bank Show, run by Russell’s old screenwriter from Women in Love, Melvyn Bragg, kept him going with more-or-less annual commissions: he’d come full circle, or did when he moved back to home movies, shot in his garden or in his favorite Soho pub, which he hoped to “flog on the internet.” The symmetry of the career, its ourobousness, is more pleasing to contemplate than it must have been to live, though the last marriage lasted and was happy, and the ever-moving critical pendulum had reached the place where people were starting to say that The Devils and some of the other seventies work was really good, actually.

I can admire everything up until the final home movies, and maybe I’ll come round to them: Russell was right to admire all his earlier films. He spent decades more or less brushing off French Dressing, then saw it on TV and thought, “This is a masterpiece!” which it is. But only a minor one compared to what was those around it. Seaside-postcard humor, musical comedy performances, pop art imagery, Wagnerian and Stravinskian soundtracks, a defiant rejection of subtlety. “I don’t believe there’s any value in understatement […] This is the age of kicking people in the balls and telling them something and getting a reaction […] Picasso was not restrained, Mahler was not restrained!’” His detractors thought he should be, possibly in a straitjacket and with megadoses of Thorazine, but Russell was a volcanic eruption in cinematic form, a purple-faced tyrant of the Stroheim school, a demonic force driven to possess reels of celluloid and make them glow in the dark with a sugar rush radiation that has yet to decay. He was too big, too vulgar, too beautiful, too nasty and too beautiful for a national cinema mired in lethargic literary-theatrical respectability. “The visual arts have never had a foothold in England,” he sneered.

Ken!

Life is not a Ken Loach movie. It is a Ken Russell movie.

by David Cairns

#David Cairns #The Chiseler #Ken Russell

[missinnocentscarlet-archived]

🌹 Maki’s Follow Forever 🌹

I am very happy to announce that this blog has officially hit 50 followers; in all my years of RP that has never ever happened to me. It took me years to even get to 30, and now in only just over six months, I have reached over 50. I’d like to thank a few of you personally, because without you I honestly would not be here writing Scarlet again, and getting much farther into her character than I ever have.

I got really sappy n gay so this is going to be under the cut.

@airheaded-donuts | @hopeful-luminaries

God, Bri,, you’ve stuck around for a while haven’t ya? We first really started to RP together in like...early 2015? Maybe late 2014.  It was my Junior year of high school, and now I’m half way through college for my bachelors degree, and I’m so happy that you’re still around.  I absolutely ADORED Scarlet and Souda’s interactions three years ago, and I still love them now.  Bri, you’re one of the most patient and understanding people I’ve come across on this platform, and I really can’t thank you enough.  I’m so glad that you have rekindled your muse for Souda, and I really look forward to what shenanigans these two will get into now.  It’ll be hard to beat accidentally getting married in Vegas, but I believe we can surpass that.

@clowndictator

Ashe, without you my blog and characters would not be nearly as developed as it is now.  Within the first week of starting this blog, you swooped me into the Shared Verse and introduced me to a group of wonderful, accepting people.  Because of you, I reached about 20 or so followers within my first month of making this blog, whereas on my last two blogs it took me years to achieve that number.  I honestly cannot thank you or repay you enough for all that you have done for me, but god dammit I’m gonna try.  You’re always so accepting to hear even my wildest ideas, and it’s so amazing that I can come to you at 3 am and talk about how Scarlet is kin with Frankenstein’s monster, or repeatedly cry to you about Van Gogh, or compare Ouma to Dali.  You don’t shy away from darker subjects, and while you don’t romanticize them, you still find ways to have a wonderfully dark humor that I sincerely love.  I feel like I can talk to you about literally anything and I won’t be judged, and I love that.  You always have such great ideas on how to develop parts of Scarlet’s stories that I neglected or didn’t think of to put much thought in, and because of you I have thought of entire new subplots I wish to explore.  

@embersiisms

Sonali, oh my God. I’m not really one to personally believe in divine intervention and all that, but I still find it amazing that the both of us returned to RPing at nearly the exact same moment, and were able to pick things up right where they left off.  Honestly, its so amazing to me that I can just disappear for an entire year and return and be met with the same enthusiasm I was greeted with two years ago.  Thank you for sticking around after all this time, and greeting me as if no time had passed at all.  I know I take a long ass time to reply to threads and PMs, but know that I’m still extremely excited to see Jack and Scarlet’s friendship blossom.

@multi-muse-dorms

Heather, you’re another OG partner, my friend.  We’ve been talking and writing for years together, and I’m so happy that you are also still active on here.  When I saw that you had archived your blogs, I was really worried that you had left, but I’m glad that’s not the case! You’re a great friend, even outside of RP, and I’m so glad to have met you.  I want you to know that I’m here for you if you ever need anyone to talk to, or if you ever need any advice.  I feel like a proud parent that has watched their kid grow up; we started RPing when you were a freshmen or sophmore in high school I’m pretty sure, and now you’re in college!  I’m so very proud of you and how far you’ve come, and I look forward to see where you and your muses will go on from here.

@tulpacest 

Shamu... god what can I say that I already haven’t? I gush about you so much there’s almost nothing left to say.  First, thank you for just existing.  When I first stumbled upon your blog as I was playing ndrv3, I first only saw your analysis posts, which are all so extremely detailed and well written I was so blown away at how knowledgeable you are about so many different aspects of Japanese culture; I can only dream of anthropology becoming as natural to me as it is to you during my studies.  Then, I saw your threads, and after a year of closing down my last blog and straight up saying I would not be RPing Scarlet again, I felt a muse for her.  I had forgotten what it was like to stumble upon a RP blog and find a muse that would fit perfectly with your own.  Your writing and handle on Korekiyo’s character was, and continues to be, so phenomenal that I literally revived a muse I thought I’d never write for again, a muse I had not written for in over a year.  Thank you so so much for giving me and Scarlet a chance; I don’t care how slow burn our thread is, whether it’s due to how fickle Scarlet or Korekiyo can be with building interpersonal relationships, or if it’s because life gets in the way; we have so many wonderful interactions planned out that I will always be excited to see where things go, no matter how long it takes to get there.  You are such an amazing friend, that I feel like no matter how long the gaps in our conversations are, we can pick up right where we left off as if no time passed at all.  I appreciate that you tolerate my repeated, random and sporadic ramblings about...the most random shit lol.  I’m normally extremely anxious to send ideas, musings, theories, etc. to people in fear that I will come across as too pushy, excited, or just come across as loud and annoying.  But you always respond with great enthusiasm to all of my points; I feel like I can truly be myself with you, that I don’t have to hold back or censor myself in fear of scaring you off with just how excited I am for Scarlet and Korekiyo to develop alongside one another. You put such great care into Korekiyo, and I highly respect all of the work you put in to be faithful to him and his philosophy on life and death.  It is truly amazing to see just how passionate you are about this string bean, and I both love you and how you have developed him beyond “let’s think of every creepy thing ever and slap it onto one boy.” I am ecstatic to see all of the antics our kids get into unfold.

Other people I greatly appreciate/love dearly/admire/I wish to get to know better:

@allxtherightplaces | @antonverloc | @hopeful-hugz-danganronpaau| @playfulcrow | @rouranta | @rubiieyed | @scarlctta

#🌹 | ooc #{ hi im gay and i love u all. even if ur not tagged i love u }

[topweeklyupdate]

TØP Weekly Update SPECIAL TRENCH EDITION (10/6/18)

Ya’ll have had time to listen to the album. Some of you have it memorized already. So let’s pick apart Twenty One Pilots’ latest project track-by-track, explore the new themes and sounds that the band is exploring in this era, and also catch up on all of the latest news to come out in just the last two days.

This Week’s TØPics: 

A Complete Look at Trench

My Blood Music Video

Twenty One Pilots to Return to the American Music Awards

New Interviews About the Album

Picking Fights with Gaga? (Not Really, No)

And MORE!

Track Analysis:

Before we get started, we should acknowledge Trench’s wonderful liner notes, which besides boasting some stellar artistic design reveal a great deal of important information about this album. First, the overall cohesion of the album, like with all of the band’s albums save for Blurryface, can be attributed to the shared vision of the same production team on every track. The impact of Paul Meany on this entire album should not be understated: Paul co-produced every track save for “Levitate”, which he is instead given main credit for with Tyler listed as co-producer. He is also given writing credit on half of the album for his arrangements, again including “Levitate”. We musn’t forget the other heroes: the album was mixed by Adam Hawkins and mastered by Chris Gehringer. Also, the “thank you”s are both touching and occasionally very funny (“And to our haters, we know you liked stressed out.”)

I’ve already expressed my thoughts and reactions to the four previous singles in prior updates, so feel free to look back at them to fill in the gaps. 

“Morph” starts us off real strong with an absolutely stellar groove (thanks, Paul). Lyrically, the track features Tyler ruminating on death, considering its inevitability, worrying over its proximity, and questioning what comes after. It’s the most he discusses faith on Trench; Tyler considers looking “above” for answers a “blind belief”, but he still chooses it anyway, with some reservations. Ultimately, Tyler resolves to “morph to someone” else, to stay on the defensive against the insecurities leveled at him by Nico and keep moving forward. The song also features a “Judge”-esque shout-out to our boy Josh Dun within the stellar ending run- fitting, considering just how good his drums sound on this track in particular.

“Chlorine” is a definite highlight off the album, as it constantly mixes up flow and structure while never losing it’s laid-back psychedelic groove and its consistently excellent metaphorical examination of Tyler’s strained relationship with fame. I’ll be singing that hook forever. And the bridge. And that ending break-down that definitely sounds like a No Phun Intended sample. This thing’s a bop, potentially the best track on the whole project- and that’s really saying something.

“Smithereens” is an odd duck that feels like it doesn’t quite fit in on Trench but is nonetheless a very sweet and enjoyable tune. I mean, it’s love song that snuck onto this album that’s literally about writing a love song and sneaking it onto an album; I have to commend Tyler for being ballsy, clever, and artistic with his grand romantic gesture. I also have to commend Mr. Meany for sneaking that beautiful woodwind section in.

Before I even heard the album, I knew “Neon Gravestones” was going to be the stand-out track for a lot of folks. Rock Sound had promised that this would be the song that saves people’s lives, and hopefully it will. Tyler’s spoken word musings regarding celebrity suicide were always going to be controversial, and publications like The Atlantic and Alt Press have already questioned exactly what he means to say with the song. As someone who just recently lost a loved one to suicide, even I’ve struggled with this song’s message somewhat. Does Tyler disrespect the memory of those that have passed by telling us not to glorify them in death? It skirts close to the line a bit, and he certainly could have gotten a bit more specific in how he suggests we should react. But he reigns it back from the edge, as Tyler so often does when discussing mental illness, by placing the focus on his own lived experience. “If I lose to myself” is the most gut-wrenching lyric Tyler’s written in ages, and it really sells that this idea is something that Tyler truly wrestles with in dark moments. We really do have to de-romanticize suicide if we want to have a chance against it, and I’m proud of Tyler for taking those steps in a public way that can also help others. And the production? Simply bone-chilling.

“The Hype”, aka “Wonderwall” meets “Bittersweet Symphony”, is another highlight. Simple lyrics, sure, but comforting ones. Particular praise goes to the ending, when the echo effects layer onto the vocals and the ukulele comes into mix. One of many great “night-time driving down the highway” songs on this half of the album.

“Cut My Lip” is pretty easily my least favorite song on the album, which is not meant a harsh criticism at all. The overall vibe is very enjoyable, and I especially love how Tyler says “contusions”, but the song is just twice as long as the lyrical content actually warrants. It really is largely saved by Josh’s intricate drumming and Paul’s intervention with the reverbing psychedelic synths: it sounds just as sick as the rest of the album in those respects.

The last two minutes of “Bandito” may just be the best part of the entire album; Paul (I assume it’s Paul) really outdid himself with that composition. The rest of the song is great, too, with “I’m still not sure if fear’s a rival or close relative to truth” in particular standing out as an all-time Tyler Joseph lyric. I can’t wait to hear this live... God, I hope this is played live...

“Pet Cheetah” is... weird. But with a name like that, we expected as much, and it only makes all the more sense when considering the subject matter: writer’s block. Tackling that subject head on really seems to have given an extra boost to Tyler’s creative energies: his rap verse is straight-up fire in terms of both wordplay and passion. All in all, a fun curiosity to come back to when we want to remember that time Tyler wrapped about naming a cheetah after acclaimed British action star Jason Statham.

“Legend” is one of those songs that really is beyond criticism by virtue of its subject matter: Tyler mourning the loss of his grandfather. I do wish the song was given a bit more polish around the edges, but it still boasts a gorgeous horn section, and the rough sound helps demonstrate that this was a deeply personal project that we’re privileged to be able to hear at all.

“Leave the City” is the perfect ending note for this project. As Zane Lowe said, it never fully reaches the crescendo it seems to be building to, and all the better for it. The inclusion of a call to “stay alive”, now directed inward toward Tyler himself, remains a powerful rallying cry of hope, even while it expresses a sense of resignation to knowing our personal battles may never end. There’s no clear answer, only the promise that we are not left alone to face what the future holds. And that’s enough.

Taken all together, Trench was not the album I was expecting, and not at all in a bad way. There was relatively little in the way of “Jumpsuit”’s harder edge, nor was it as obtuse and concept-dedicated as the initial marketing had indicated. But it was still incredibly daring and ambitious, tackling song-structures and concepts that few pop artists (if we can still call them that) would dare approach. While I would have loved an album much more strictly dedicated to telling the story of Dema, I don’t know if most people would have, and that kind of railroading would have prevented Tyler from getting as personal and deep as he does here. There are ideas and individual lyrics on this project that have left their mark on me like few pieces of music have since... well, Vessel. It might not match that album in my own heart, but it might also objectively be the best thing they’ve ever done. 

Major News, Releases, and Announcements:

Shockingly, we’re not even close to done. As reported in the last update, the album’s release was accompanied by the release of an all new music video for “My Blood”. Unlike the prior three videos, this narrative takes place completely outside the world of Dema and Trench, featuring two rebel brothers dealing with all that suburban teen white boy angst (been there) and attending a real funky Halloween party in skeleton onesies, all leading up to a satisfying Fight Club revelation.

The video is also the first one since “Tear In My Heart” to not be directed by Mark Eshleman or Andrew Donoho. The Clique’s new friend Tim Mattia has been directing some major music videos since 2012, including Troye Sivan’s Blue Neighborhood project, Fetty Wap’s “Trap Queen”, and major singles from The 1975, Zedd, Chris Stapleton, and many more. You can definitely tell the difference from the aesthetic (particularly Tyler and Josh being relegated to a glorified cameo). Still, it was a refreshing change of pace, and I look forward to seeing if it helps the song pick up any momentum at radio. 

Upcoming Performances:

American Music Awards, Microsoft Theater, Los Angeles, CA

Capacity: 7,100

On Thursday, we reported that Tyler and Josh would be signing copies of Trench in Hollywood this coming Monday. Turns out they weren’t just looking for some California sunshine- they’ll be performing at the American Music Awards. This marks their first professionally filmed performance this era and their first award show performance since... well, the last AMAs, where they put on a stellar show. Current reports state that the band will be playing “Jumpsuit”, but I would not be at all surprised if they mashed it up or tried to do something clever and attention-grabbing. Whatever they play, seeing the boys back playing live will certainly do wonders for promoting Trench- and it will definitely make me happy.   

Other Shenanigans:

Oh, we’re still not done. Irish radio station Today FM aired an interview they held with Tyler back on the Complete Diversion media day. The interviewer is brilliant and asked a bunch of thoughtful questions that show that he’s done his homework and cares for the band and its fans. Highlights include:

Tyler says that he doesn’t want to talk too much about the “easter eggs” of the marketing campaign (probably referring to dmaorg.info) because he feels it might take away some of the punch.

Tyler shares some very wise words about being aware of the cyclical nature of mental health and self-improvement. He didn’t end the album with a definitive answer because he has recognized that, in our individual journeys, we regularly get sent back to Square 1 and then are left all the more discouraged because we feel the effort is futile. Tyler suggests that awareness that will happen in advance- and that we are all doing it together- will help us to get back to the place we fell from more quickly each time. 

Tyler says that it’s incredibly “heavy” to hear fans say they saved their lives, and that he’s tempted to brush it off rather than deal with that weight. However, they recognize that their platform has given them a responsibility to serve their audience.

When confronted by the possibility that folks wouldn’t like the new imagery, the band had to fall back and just do what they thought was cool. They were so relieved by how well the Complete Diversion show went and how receptive everyone was to them.

The band will absolutely be moving forward with this Trench story- it’s not done yet, not by a long shot.

Australian music site Music Feeds also published a text interview with the band that’s another must-read:

Tyler discusses how Trench is largely meant to represent the “space between spaces”. He was particularly feeling strange about leaving Blurryface to approach this new album, so he channeled that struggle with finding yourself in a liminal space into the music.

He’s hinted at it in the past, but I believe this is the first time Tyler bluntly says that Blurryface is Nicolas Bourbaki.

Tyler jokes that they filmed in Ukraine because the workers don’t take lunch breaks and it saved them money.

Tyler says that all of the songs on the album “completely destroyed him”, but says that “Legend” was the hardest of all because of the subject matter and how he was still developing it as his grandfather passed.

Josh is looking forward to playing “Morph” live because of how different the drum pattern is from their previous work.

Tyler’s still listening to a lot of Death Cab for Cutie, while Josh is mostly just listening to podcasts like Lore.

“You can’t touch a hole.”

Also, in case you missed the title image, the band made a cute joke about A Star Is Born, whose soundtrack is increasingly looking like it will knock Trench away from a #1 debut. Some Lady Gaga stans are mad about it, I guess, but come on, that picture is hilarious.

-

Listen. We’ve been here for a long time. You’ve done a lot of reading of my inane ramblings. I was going to sum up some of the early reviews for the album, but I think I’m going to save that for the next time. Hopefully I’ll be able to include the opinions of a certain Melon... Catch you Friday.

Power to the local dreamer.

|-/

#twenty one pilots #trench #my blood #tyler joseph #josh dun #jumpsuit #levitate #morph #chlorine #smithereens #neon gravestones #the hype #nico and the niners #cut my lip #bandito #pet cheetah #legend #leave the city #a star is born #lady gaga #top weekly update

[cstesttaken]

Cool It: You Don’t Have to Be on Every Social Media App

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

03.14.17

11:30 am

CHRISTOPH NIEMANN

Do I have to try every social media app?

You’ve Got Mail starred Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan and was an awful movie. I watched it in a hotel room recently and found myself thinking about you—thinking about all of us, really. To summarize: It is 1998. Hanks is the cocky, hard-charging scion of a massive Barnes & Noble-ish bookstore chain, about to open a new location on the Upper West Side. Ryan, meanwhile—vulnerable, sappy, like a human kitten—owns a tiny children’s bookstore nearby called the Shop Around the Corner. Ryan’s shop is everything that Hanks’ is not: quaint, neighborly, beloved. And, of course, it stands to be crushed by this encroaching tentacle of Hanks’ Machiavellian empire.

There’s a lot of anxiety in the air. Thematically, the film is concerned with what modernity (symbolized by Hanks and maybe also his high-octane girlfriend, who literally shouts, “Hurry, hurry, hurry!” at her espresso machine) might be doing to our souls (symbolized by Ryan and her boyfriend, who is referred to at a party as the “greatest living expert on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg”). This anxiety is everywhere. It’s a shame kids don’t know what handkerchiefs are, someone says. When office workers play solitaire on their computers, it’s lamented as “the end of Western civilization.”

It’s all so heavy-handed. But here’s the thing: As the bitter Hanks-Ryan bookstore rivalry escalates on the street, Hanks and Ryan are falling in love with each other via email, anonymously. They meet in some kind of chat room and begin emailing each other relentlessly, pouring out their feelings and the poignant whispers of their simpleton hearts. It’s dramatic irony, you see—they love each other in cyberspace, hate each other in meatspace—and the filmmakers milk it for all it’s worth. Scene after scene cuts back and forth between Hanks and Ryan, reading emails on their laughably briefcaselike laptops. Every time that cheery voice tells them “Welcome. You’ve got mail,” it’s a Pavlovian cue that flutters their stomachs and tingles their privates. It’s hard to think of two happier people in the history of film.

But you know what? Joke’s on them. Because what Hanks and Ryan do not know, and can’t possibly predict, is that the same series of tubes that’s serving as a conduit for their love will soon obliterate both their businesses! Soon they’ll both be irrelevant! They’re just too blissed out by each other’s electronic mail messages to recognize that this thing in front of them—this Internet—is also a merciless destroyer of worlds.

Reader, they are us; we are them. We’re blind to the transience of so many things we feel attached to, or else we are so attuned to their transience that we don’t allow ourselves to get attached. The truth is, even as I type this, laughing and smirking at You’ve Got Mail, I understand that someone in the near future will be similarly laughing and smirking at me. (“Typing?!” they’ll say.)

Are you obligated to try new social media apps? Not at all. Use what you enjoy. Try what you think you’d enjoy. Or don’t. You alone get to map out the borders of your online life. But you are, I think, obligated to stay open to exploring new social media apps—to keep yourself from becoming too jaded, too dismissive—and to always entertain the possibility that one of them might become meaningful and useful to you. I mean, I sunk a lot of time into Friendster back in the day, and I don’t regret it. I recognize that, like Hanks and Ryan, I was merely living contentedly in the present, without knowing that the magic of that moment would inevitably crumble—or even worrying about whether it might.

“Sometimes I wonder about my life. I lead a small life … And sometimes I wonder, do I do it because I like it or because I haven’t been brave?” Ryan typed that, sent it to Hanks. Now I’m putting the question to you.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

03.10.17

11:00 am

Christoph Niemann

I’m horrible at emoji—it’s like a foreign language for me. I always get “???” replies from friends. What should I do?

In 1918, a moderately but fleetingly famous Belgian man named Jean Pierre Pierard published an intriguing column in an American newspaper. Pierard was an actor, sometimes billed as “Le Colosse,” since he happened to weigh 342 pounds. (He was just a tremendous, tremendous fellow.) He was also the “Most Married Man in the World,” and this was the particular expertise with which he was writing. What does it mean to be the Most Married Man in the World? Well, at the time, Pierard was on his 23rd wife. Since 1886 he’d averaged one marriage every 1.4 years. But still, he felt strongly that “it is not good for man to be alone.”

This is the most important thing for you to know about Pierard—and I mean you specifically, my weird emoji-aphasic friend: Jean Pierre Pierard loved being married. He loved the institution of marriage—held it in the highest esteem—and felt a strong obligation to defend and venerate it against anyone who was starting to view it with the least bit of cynicism. “I believe in marriage,” he wrote. Deep down in the hallows of his giant being, the man was a romantic. And an optimist. And nothing about the clumsiness with which his optimism or romanticism kept colliding with reality was going to drain those feelings out of him. ��It may surprise you to hear it,” Pierard wrote, “but it’s the truth, that every one of these 23 times I’ve taken out a marriage license I’ve done so with the same glow of hope and faith that I had the first time.” Being married brought him joy, so he kept getting married, even if he was lousy at it. Then he kept getting married some more.

I assume that you see where I’m going. It should be obvious, especially since I’ve written it all in not-fun alphabet letters. You’re correct that emoji are essentially a foreign language. So the only way to increase your fluency in them is with real-world practice—which is to say, by failing a lot, but paying enough attention to your failures to learn from them, and by asking more skillful speakers, people you feel totally supported and unjudged by, for help and safe opportunities to practice. But most important, don’t let anyone, with their snide ???s, spoil the pleasure those emoji bring to you. Don’t be ashamed!

OK? Just one more thing about Pierard: For a time, he attempted a career as a professional wrestler. It seems like the ideal job for Le Colosse—he could just fall on people and flatten them—and yet he was terrible at this too, maybe even more terrible than he was at marriage. Because he was ticklish—tremendously ticklish. He simply could not “permit of any contact with his ribs while wrestling,” The New York Times wrote, without being debilitated by his own giggling. All that his opponents had to do, no matter how small they were, was flutter their fingers around Le Colosse’s colossal midsection, topple him, and hold him down for the count. It was basically over before it began.

And, honestly, that’s how I’d love to picture you: joyously thumb-typing your syntactically jumbled, incomprehensible kissy faces, fires, whales, and eggplants without a care in the world, pinned on the mat but laughing and laughing and laughing. Do that and you’re .

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

03.09.17

11:00 am

CHRISTOPH NIEMANN

My girlfriend got me a Fitbit, but the data makes me feel lazy and ashamed. Do I have to keep using it?

I was in my kitchen the other night, slow dancing with my toddler before bedtime, when the Coldplay song “Fix You” came on—a song, I remembered reading, that Chris Martin wrote for then-girlfriend Gwyneth Paltrow after her father died—and I found myself feeling genuinely bummed, all over again, that Chris and Gwyneth had split up. I wondered what had torn them apart or whether—as these things often go—they hadn’t been torn apart but slowly undone by some dark, unspoken dissatisfaction or resentment that gradually multiplied until there was so much cumulative darkness between them that it blotted out whatever had been luminescent about their love. And that’s when I thought about you and your girlfriend and your Fitbit.

I also thought about Steve Etkin. Etkin is an engineer by training and by temperament who enjoys walking. And so a year ago, his daughter, Jordan, bought him a Fitbit. It seemed like the perfect gift. “I started receiving daily updates,” she told me, “about the number of steps he walked, the stairs he climbed. After a few weeks, I was like, ‘Hey, Dad, you’re really treating this like a job.’ ” (She was also like, hey, Dad, I don’t need all these updates.)

Anyway, it got her thinking. And, because she studies consumer behavior at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, she designed a study to test whether, as she put it to me, trackers like Fitbits have the capacity to “suck the enjoyment” out of previously pleasurable activities. Guess what. They do.

Etkin’s study was published in the Journal of Consumer Research. She ran a series of six experiments. In one, for example, she gave her subjects a 16-pack of Crayolas, then made a big show of tracking how many shapes one group colored in while letting others color freely, unencumbered by quantification. She did similar experiments with walking and reading, and in every one discovered the same basic result. “Measurement led participants to color more shapes, walk more steps, and read more pages. At the same time, however, it led people to enjoy coloring, walking, and reading less.” In short, people did more but felt worse doing it. Tracking redefined fun activities as work.

One problem here is that by focusing on quantifiable outcomes, trackers can diminish intrinsic motivation, which makes people stick with activities. Therefore, “measurement may sometimes actually undermine sustainable behavior change,” Etkin writes. Those insurance companies giving Fitbits to their policyholders might be shooting themselves in the (demotivated, stationary) foot.

But you know all this. It’s precisely the cycle of incentivizing and disincentivizing, of judgment and anxiety, afflicting you: that feeling that you can never take enough steps or unlock enough REM sleep. (“When you try your best but you don’t succeed … When you feel so tired but you can’t sleep.”) And, as it afflicts you, it widens the emotional space between you and your girlfriend—it feeds a smoldering grudge, because she handcuffed you with this thing. She tried to fix you, my friend. But her fixing made you feel more broken.

So you’ve got to talk to your girlfriend and take the Fitbit off, even though Etkin’s research suggests this is the worst thing you could do. (When people start tracking then suddenly stop, the fun is still ruined, but they also lose the benefit of increased output—a double whammy of underperformance and joylessness.) But who cares? It could be the only way for you and your partner to remain consciously coupled.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

03.08.17

7:00 am

Christoph Niemann

When my 5-year-old asks a question, is there a difference between looking it up in a book and just using my phone?

Recently, I watched David Kwong do some sleight of hand in a crowded theater lobby. Kwong is a magician who often consults on Hollywood films. (When a director needs, say, Jesse Eisenberg to learn a magic trick, they send him to Kwong.) Anyway, Kwong sauntered over to a guy with a deck of cards and asked him to pick one.

Honestly, I don’t know how to describe what happened next. For 30 minutes, Kwong made cards materialize in outrageous, stupefying ways, as though he were nonchalantly sliding them in and out of a parallel universe. Someone’s card flew out of the deck, spinning through the air. Another turned up in a guy’s back pocket—and not just in his back pocket, but buried deep, between his wallet and a bundle of crumpled receipts. Kwong asked someone to rip a card into four pieces, then hold them in his fist; when he opened his hand, the card was reassembled!

Maybe this doesn’t sound that impressive, written down. We all know card tricks are a thing. But the way Kwong kept relentlessly confronting us with the impossible—seeing this sorcery at close range—seemed to not just entertain people but to make them feel vulnerable and a little scared. People mewled and screamed, “No!” One poor man was reduced to crouching on the floor, laughing so euphorically he couldn’t catch his breath. (OK, that was me.) The guy with the ripped-up card in his fist refused to open it at first, shaking his head like a child terrified to look at his boo-boo, afraid of what he’d find. “He has total power over us,” one woman said quietly, gravely. She sounded creeped out. It was so much fun!

Now, I’m sure everyone in that crowd wondered how Kwong was doing it, but it’s a rare bird who goes home and actually labors to understand the mechanics of how such tricks are engineered. (Those rare birds become magicians—it’s how Kwong got his start.) Most of us perceive magic tricks to be unreplicable, to violate the reality we inhabit. They’re, you know, magic.

To a 5-year-old, phones are magic. The internet is magic. An older kid might be able to understand the technology and infrastructure involved, the nature of Wikipedia, and so on, but for a child so young, the answer just appears, miraculously, like a playing card yanked from a bystander’s back pocket. Leafing through a book together, by comparison, is a more collaborative, tactile, self-evident process. It’s a journey toward the answer, one that your child gets to go on.

What I’m talking about is the difference between learning and being told, between answering a specific question and getting a child excited about answering it on their own. It’s fun to amaze your 5-year-old, sure. But it’s more gratifying to set your kid up to one day amaze you.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

03.06.17

11:00 am

Christoph Niemann

Is flirting on LinkedIn less weird than on other social media? After all, it can vouch for you in a substantive way.

Whoa. Hang on. Let’s first poke at the premise of your question, because the implications here are huge. Notice how you casually presume your résumé offers a more substantive representation of your basic humanity than, say, all the tweets you’ve tweeted or all the digital artifacts amassed on your Facebook page. Think of the photos on Facebook alone: You in a rowboat with the gentle-looking man playing a banjo whom we understand to be your deceased (too young) father. You being silly—but not obnoxiously silly, just innocently, endearingly silly—in the Halloween aisle of a big-box store. You tagged in a photo of that kid you mentored that one summer, as he graduates from Berkeley. You climbing a goddamned mountain! Like, with pickaxes and stuff!

Do these not substantively communicate the substance of your life? Don’t they “vouch” for you to potential dates as a safe, noncreepy, sufficiently together human being, a sympathetic soul tumbling through the fundamental experience of being alive and looking for companionship? Or is that better captured with a line like this: “January 2013-November 2014, Senior Operations Associate, Mobitly Inc.”?

You seem to think it is. And I’ll admit—begrudgingly—that you may have a point. Because the lines have been blurred between our work lives and our emotional lives, our careers and our intrinsic selves. We subconsciously gauge a person’s character by their professional standing, and our experiences and attitude toward our work aren’t only sometimes relevant to our love lives. In fact, the two can feel crucially interwoven: The best startup founders are those who operate out of passion and devotion and with a kind of hyper-monogamous obsession. On the other hand, we all feel obligated to work on our relationships with the same myopic, idealistic intensity. And it can feel natural to apply the lessons we learn relating to people in one realm to our relationships in the other.

Take, for example, Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn’s CEO. I confess, I’m not a LinkedIn user, but I’ve been reading up on Weiner and, I have to say, he seems like a wonderful guy—a principled, thoughtful man who says very grounded, Jerry Maguire-type things like, “I’ve never been title-driven; for the most part, I’ve been purpose-driven.” He also reads books by the Dalai Lama, contemplates the difference between compassion and empathy, and practices mindfulness techniques like “being a spectator to my own thoughts,” which enhance his ability to relate to and motivate his employees. He calls his style “compassionate management.”

In an essay he wrote a few years ago, Weiner described leaving work one evening, feeling proud of the strides he’d made as a compassionate manager, only to be felled by the epiphany that he’d been very uncompassionately neglecting his wife. He was working so hard, he wrote, that at night, “when my wife would try to bring up her day, or talk about the things we need to get done, I would reflexively say something to the effect that it had been a long day, I was exhausted, and could we talk about it some other time?” In other words: “For as hard as I worked to manage compassionately at the office, I was not always actively applying the same approach with my family.” So Weiner applied the same compassionate management style to his marriage and made things right.

I worry that sounds off, like the emotionally tone-deaf insights of a stereotypical tech baron. But trust me, the way Weiner explained it, it sounded cool—real. (And know this too: Worried that I’d gush in this column about Weiner’s coolness and realness only to learn later that Weiner is actually not cool and not real and is, in truth, as imperious as Genghis Khan or a Grade A, misogynistic, steroidal jerk, I sat down and Googled “Jeff Weiner LinkedIn jerk” and was happy to find, as the first result, a post singling him out as a “counterweight” to the industry’s many other CEO-jerks. So that was reassuring—even if the post was published on LinkedIn. But even that can be interpreted as a testament to Weiner’s character, because it was Weiner, I learned, who had the vision to expand LinkedIn from a bland résumé farm into a successful publishing platform.)

I’ll go even further. I wouldn’t be surprised if a man as smart as Weiner already knows all this, knows that we live in an age where one of the prime, romantically reassuring things about another person—the thing that “vouches” for them best as a potential mate—is that they’re a trustworthy, hardworking, successful employee. And therefore, he also secretly knows that LinkedIn could be the ultimate dating site, though he wisely stops short of saying it. Instead, he just dog-whistles about that potential to attentive users and eagle-eyed investors, thus preserving the opportunity to pivot the company explicitly in that direction should the climate change and the need arise. Recently, for example, he told an interviewer, “Our core value proposition to members is to help them connect to opportunity,” and touted “the power of this as a platform to enable capital”—especially “human capital”—“to flow where it can best be leveraged.”

Isn’t he talking about dating, about setting people up? When Tevye and Golde’s daughters sang, “Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match,” weren’t they basically asking a kind of social networking platform to send their own human capital flowing toward whichever shtetl boy would give it the highest valuation and invest? Why shouldn’t you flirt on LinkedIn? Why shouldn’t love be one of the opportunities LinkedIn connects us with?

So, yes. You are right. And you’ve taught me a lot—you and Jeff Weiner both. I can see clearly now how we’ve all tied ourselves into a knot of careerism and affection and equity and sex, and maybe that’s just the way it has to be. I’m remembering now what happened when Jerry Maguire—the real Jerry Maguire—showed up in that living room, shivering, trying to win back his wife, who also happened to be his business partner at their new sports-agenting startup, how he told her, “You … you complete me.” But, more important, there was the line he slipped her right before that famous line. Suddenly, in the middle of his monologue, he was compelled to say, like a man giving a keynote at a conference, “We live in a cynical world, a cynical world, and we work in a business of tough competitors.”

Why? Why include that? What could Jerry Maguire possibly have meant? I think he meant: The internet is full of sinister strangers. It’s a hostile place in which to offer up your soul. But here I am. Look at me. View my profile. I’d like to connect with you on LinkedIn.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

03.03.17

11:00 am

Christoph Niemann

I work in a casual tech setting and I’m shocked by how much everyone swears. Should I say something?

Imagine what it was like to be a Puritan in 1642. You’ve come to America. The landscape is crude and endless; the soundtrack, all hissing insects and howling wolves. “Everything about the place seemed godforsaken,” writes the natural historian Tim Flannery in his book The Eternal Frontier. That lawless emptiness is why you’re here—it means freedom. But in all free and empty places, there’s also room for wickedness to grow. Everybody in your little settlement is aware of this, which is why they panic when, one day, someone happens upon a young man named Thomas Granger having sex with a horse.

It’s worse than you thought: When confronted, Granger rapidly admits he’s also had intercourse with three cows, two goats, five sheep, and a turkey. This behavior is so savage—and feels like such a threat to the ethical society you’re laboring to build there in the wild—that you respond with a campaign of ruthless cleansing. You round up each animal Granger has had sex with and force the young man to watch while you slaughter it. (Not the turkey, though; for some reason, Flannery notes, no one bothers with the turkey.) And since you can’t tell which of the village’s sheep were the particular sheep Granger penetrated—his descrip­tions are imprecise—you herd every sheep in front of him, like a police lineup, and force him to ID the five in question. Then you kill those five sheep too. Then you kill Granger. Then you throw all their bodies together in one big pit.

Now, fast-forward 373 years. Let’s talk about you.

It’s easy to imagine you, hunched in your tech company’s open floor plan, forced to sit on an inflatable ball or perhaps issued one of those iconoclastic standing desks without a chair at all. You are a wary pilgrim on the wild, godless edge of America’s economic frontier. And, as such, you under­stand that the foul language your colleagues are using isn’t just unpleasant but morally precarious; if it continues unchecked, it could lead you all—your entire industry, really—to much darker places. You know, just as the Puritans did, that this kind of impropriety needs to be nipped in the bud.

That’s how you feel, right? Well, you’re wrong.

You’re not the Puritans. You’re the kid shtupping the cows. Because the lesson of the Granger story—as I read it—isn’t that morality always wins. It’s that the mob always wins. The majority’s norms always beat back and outlast the minority’s. And the mob can be cruel: They’ll kill the thing you love right in front of you, then dump you in the ground.

I think you need to go along with the mob.

Does it matter if my kid’s handwriting is terrible?

Well, I happen to love handwriting. I think it’s curiously fun to look at and a considerable, if mostly esoteric, value-add to the written language—even in an era of tablets and smartwatches and speech-recognition software. But does it matter if your child writes illegibly? My answer is no, probably not. Handwriting is an old technology—about 5,000 years old. And as with newer old technologies (muskets or floppy disks or cars with human beings driving them), some people may inevitably feel a tinge of melancholy watching it sputter into oblivion. And yet the truth is that humanity has always replaced old tools with new ones, and often, once we’ve pushed through the emotionally charged transitional phase and come out the other end, everything feels fine again.

Take, for example, a woman named Kristin Gulick in Bend, Oregon, who often has trouble reading messages scribbled by her chronically illegible office receptionist. “Yesterday I tried to dial a number that she’d written down, and I couldn’t read it,” Gulick told me recently. “I had to go back out and ask, ‘What does this say?’” And the receptionist was just like, ha ha ha, I know my handwriting’s terrible—you know, giggling the annoyance away. Was Gulick peeved? Yes. But was this a fireable offense or some irrevocable inconvenience? Not even close. In fact, Gulick really had no choice but to laugh the whole thing off too. “Thank God she’s good at other things!” she said, and life went on.

So there’s your answer. But who is Kristin Gulick, anyway? So glad you asked!

Handwriting may be one of those fundamentally human abilities—one that binds us to our own identities.

Gulick has been an occupational therapist for 28 years, specializ­ing in arms and hands. She’s in private practice now, but shortly after 9/11 she found herself working at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC. A recent government report disclosed that more than 1,000 of the 50,000 soldiers who’ve been wounded in action in Iraq and Afghanistan—2.6 percent—have come back missing limbs, and Gulick was there to greet some of the first ones, helping them work around their loss and rejoin their life. Part of this work involved “transferring dominance” from one hand to the other; if a righty lost their right arm, say, they needed to learn to be a lefty now. And part of that was relearning handwriting—even just enough to fill out the deluge of hospital forms and sign their name.

Gulick found a total dearth of tools and curricula. Really, there was nothing. While she encouraged people to use first-grade handwriting primers early in her career, they were full of infantilizing penmanship exercises involving anthro­pomorphic animals. These books were not only unhelpful but degrading: Having lost a limb, many of these people were already feeling vulnerable and diminished. Now they were being treated—literally—like children. Gulick and an officer in the Army Medical Specialist Corps, Katie Yancosek, decided they could do better. “We’d give them exercises about balancing their checkbook and not about a little bunny or whatever,” Gulick said. The result was a six-week program, laid out in a workbook called Handwriting for Heroes. (The third edition was published this year.)

Look, I don’t mean to play some righteous, wounded-veteran card and make anyone feel bad. But I think we all see where this is going: It’s easy to write off handwriting only because most of us take it for granted. But I listened to Gulick talk about handwriting for a while, about what the ability to jot off a simple grocery list or be-right-back note for your spouse—functional but maybe also aesthetically pleasing or expressive, something you have created—does for a person’s sense of self-sufficiency and pride after working hard to regain that skill. How handwriting, really, may be one of those fundamentally human abilities—one that binds us, in a tiny way, to each other and to our own identities.

Your child won’t feel anything remotely like that sense of loss if they let their handwriting go to seed. Their lives will move forward in standardized fonts. If they absolutely have to write anything by hand, it may be disordered and illegible, but they can just laugh it off and explain (or text) what they meant. And that’s why I’ll stick with my first answer: It probably doesn’t matter. But I also think that, if we’re prepared to let handwriting go—to not care how ugly it gets—we should, at least, take a second to think about how beautiful it can be.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

03.01.17

11:00 am

Christoph Niemann

The same person keeps accidentally pocket-dialing me. Should I confront him?

Let's zoom out for a second: For more than 40 years, scientists have been debating whether we should be actively sending messages into outer space or just using projects like SETI to listen for messages sent to us—and not just whether we should broadcast anything, but what and how. Do we shoot out a bunch of math, to show aliens we understand math? Do we send pictures? Music? And if so, what math? What pictures? What music? There have been scientific workshops to hash this out in Toulouse, Paris, Zagreb, Houston, and Mountain View. There have been peer-reviewed journal articles with titles like “The Art and Science of Interstellar Message Composition.” It's a big, messy, excruciatingly meticulous back-and-forth.

And yet—all this time, while all those eggheads have been arguing—gobs and gobs of our satellite transmissions, television broadcasts, radio shows, and cell phone conversations have been quietly, sloppily spilling into outer space. It's all just oozing off our planet and into the cosmos like so much electromagnetic sewage—a phenomenon scientists call leakage. In other words, we're already beaming messages into the void—weak signals, but millions of them every day, without even realizing it or being careful about what we say. We are butt-dialing the universe!

Now say someone out there actually picks up that call. Wouldn't you like to know? Yes, it's embarrassing to realize we've made that sort of clumsy connection. But isn't it always just a little bit nice to know we've made a connection at all? So my advice is: Tell this person. Tell him he reached you. Tell him you were there.

CHRISTOPH NIEMANN

Is it unethical to crowdfund a project I don't totally believe in?

A month after the Boston Tea Party, in January 1774—with the idea of rebellion gaining momentum in Boston and patriots feeling more powerful than the remaining loyalists in town—a strange character who called himself Joyce Junior started stoking that new sense of boldness on the streets. Junior walked around elaborately costumed, like some anarchist harlequin, and posted flyers threatening any “vile ingrates” who were still loyal to the crown. Loyalists should be punished, he wrote. And he slyly suggested precisely how, signing his treatises: “Chairman of the Committee for Tarring and Feathering.”

Ten days later, a low-level British government customs official, John Malcom, got into an argument with a well-known patriot shoemaker on the street.

One thing led to another, and soon an angry mob had “swarmed around [Malcom's] house,” wrote Nathaniel Philbrick in his book Bunker Hill. Very quickly, all of Boston's frustration and resentment with England began to come down on this one middling bureaucrat. The rioters bum-rushed Malcom's home with ladders and axes. Once inside, they lashed him with sticks, then pushed him on a sled for hours through the snowy, unlit streets and bitter cold, collecting more irate Bostonians as they went. The mob mocked him. They threatened to cut off his ears. They beat him and beat him. Soon more than a thousand people had joined in. They ripped off Malcom's clothes. They coated his skin with steaming tar. They covered him with feathers.

The abuse went on for hours. When they finally dumped Malcom in front of his house, Philbrick wrote: “his frozen body had begun to thaw, his tarred flesh started to peel off in ‘steaks.’”

It was awful—all of it. And apparently, it was particularly distressing to Joyce Junior, the Wavy Gravy-esque performance artist who'd threatened British loyalists with tarring and feathering in the first place—the man who'd hammered that idea into the public consciousness, inspiring all that brutality. We know Junior felt culpable, because he immediately started doing damage control, scrambling to disown his idea. Junior issued another statement. It began: “This is to certify that the modern punishment lately inflicted on the ignoble John Malcom was not done by our order.”

Now, I don't think this project you want to crowdfund is likely to inadvertently encourage an angry mob to parboil an innocent man in his own flesh, then blanket him with feathers. But it's important to remember that ideas are volatile, powerful things. And so are crowds. They have a way of infecting each other and taking on a life of their own. So all I'm saying is, be honest—be real. If you only kind of think it's a good idea, it's OK to say so. The crowd will decide for itself if you're right. And it may surprise you.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

02.28.17

11:00 am

Christoph Niemann

My dad leaves incredibly embarrassing comments under every photo I post to Facebook and Instagram. What should I do?

Let’s face it: Dads are embarrassing. I remember, a couple of years ago, reading a newspaper story about a boy named Brooklyn who was so distressed by the prospect of his friends catching sight of his dweeby father that he insisted his dad drop him off around the corner from school and stay out of view. Why was this a newspaper story, you ask? Don’t millions of mortified children do this every day? Yes, and that’s my point. In this case, however, the dad in question was David Beckham.

See, dad-­barrassment is universal—a condition of existence, like the weather. What matters is how well we endure it: whether we slough it off or allow it to seep inside us.

Consider another famous dad: Teddy Roosevelt. Yes, that guy—America’s first presidential man’s man. This is a guy who hunted bears and lions, who got into bar fights with cowboys, who resigned as assistant secretary of the Navy to actually fight a war rather than just plan one. Teddy Roosevelt loved war. War was his jam. As the historian Alexis Coe told me recently, “He treated everything like a battlefield.” In October 1912, Roosevelt was about to give a campaign speech in Milwaukee when a would-be assassin shot him in the chest. The bullet ripped through the copy of his speech in his pocket. There was a big bloody wound. Still, Roosevelt spoke for more than an hour, like a wounded infantryman still bayoneting people on the battlefield.

I’d called Coe after listening to the podcast , which she cohosts with former Daily Show head writer Elliott Kalan. Their Roosevelt episode suggested that Teddy’s warmongering machismo was bound up in his dad. During the Civil War, Roosevelt had watched his father, Theodore senior, pay for a surrogate to fight in his place. For Teddy, Coe says, “this was always a great source of shame. His celebration of masculinity and war, his romanticization of war as an experience to all men, is a reaction to his dad.” And if, to overcompensate for this excruciating embarrassment, Roosevelt felt compelled to speechify for over an hour while his torso hemorrhaged, then that’s his decision. But it also affected his own parenting.

Roosevelt had four sons, and he wanted his boys to be the valorous warriors his own father hadn’t been. When World War I broke out, the youngest, Quentin, memorized an eye chart to ensure he’d pass his exam and be able to serve. He was, in short order, shot down and killed by the Germans. Roosevelt was crestfallen. “To feel that one has inspired a boy to conduct that has resulted in his death has a pretty serious side for a father,” he wrote. He died himself six months later.

But the misery he wrought continued. One son, Archibald, had his knee ripped apart by a grenade. Another, Ted Jr., was wounded in France, then died of a heart attack while serving in World War II. Kermit, Roosevelt’s second son, served in both wars, then ultimately shot himself in the head on a base in Alaska.

You wrote because you didn’t like some comments on Instagram and Facebook. I’m talking about shame and war and death. It’s hardly fair, you’ll say, and you’re right. But this story shows, I think, that dad-­barrassment is a powerful and unpredictable force; it warps the imagination, it pollutes the soul. The perpetrators are, inevitably, also victims.

By all means, ask your father—gently—if he wouldn’t mind toning down the comments. Tell him to text you privately instead, if you’d prefer. But ultimately the onus is not on your father to stop embarrassing you, but on you to reconcile the embarrassment you feel. I worry you’ve started seeing your father primarily as an engine of embarrassment, not as a complex human being entitled to express his wit, his playfulness, his love.

So, stomach it. Take the bullet, carry on.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

02.27.17

11:00 am

Christoph Niemann

I’m an omnivore, but are there animals that are just too intelligent to eat?

During high school, I went to visit a friend in Louisiana. Because I was a Northerner who’d never been to the South, I was given a lot of exotically Southern stuff to eat, like alligator and rattlesnake. Then came the big Louisianan feast: heaps of spicy crayfish, which we savagely twisted the heads off of then washed down with gallons and gallons of Dr Pepper.

When I got up to go pee, one of the men at the table told me to be sure to wash my hands first. He said it with a tinge of darkness, a whiff of trauma. He explained that it was unwise for a man to go from handling spicy crayfish to handling his penis. He’d been careless once and paid the price. So I washed my hands. But I still remember how worried I was, unzipping, and how hesitantly I moved my hand down, like a kid playing Operation, dreading that horrible bzzz. I’d absorbed the trauma vicariously, but my anxiety was real.

I thought of this when I read that researchers at the University of Bordeaux in France detected a similar kind of intelligently learned anxiety in crayfish. (After suffering a trauma, the crayfish were reluctant to venture into brightly lit, risky areas.) The scientists also found they could alleviate that anxiety by giving the crayfish a Valium-style drug. And while the scientists were careful not to embellish these findings with any anthropomorphic presumptions, I think we all sense the underlying epiphany here: Crayfish are a little more like us than we expected.

These days, it seems, everybody wants to know how smart their meat is. There are all kinds of startling farm-­animal-cognition studies. We know that cows enjoy solving problems and have been known to jump into the air excitedly when they finally crack a tough one. Chickens are exceptionally good at delaying gratification, understand small numbers and basic physics, and can adroitly manage the thermostat of their coop. Sheep can remember and recognize as many as 50 human faces without making a mistake. Pigs excel at videogames played with special pig joysticks. And even opossums—yes, some people eat them—turn out to be excellent maze runners. One study ranked opossums’ “probability learning” skills second only to humans’ and higher than dogs’. Opossums! Those things that do very little and look dead most of the time!

The upshot, I’d argue, is that all animals are likely too intelligent to eat. Whether you go on eating them, with that knowledge, is up to you. You probably will. I do—proof that intelligence may be massively overrated.

Should I worry that my kid can’t spell? Does spelling matter anymore?

Did you hear about Thomas Hurley III? He was on Jeopardy! last year as an eighth grader—a likable kid from Connecticut with Peter Brady bangs and a blue dress shirt buttoned up to the jugular. He lost. And he lost, in part, because in Final Jeopardy, he wrote “Emanciptation Proclamation” instead of “Emancipation Proclamation.”

Does spelling matter anymore? Honestly, I don’t think so. I mean, initially, even schoolmarmy Alex Trebek read right over Hurley’s mistake. As a defiant Hurley told his local newspaper, “It was just a spelling error.”

Then again, spelling isn’t just about communicating. The culture still views it as a sign of intelligence, diligence, and sophistication. Bad, lackadaisical spellers are not looked at kindly. And neither was Hurley’s contention that he’d been “cheated.” (“Learn how to accept defeat, kid, or you will be disappointed for the rest of your life,” one Facebook comment read.) Clearly, autocorrect and other technologies have started a slow sea change, and maybe one day the persnickety spelling police among us will all have died out and we’ll be free to spel thingz howeEVA weeeeeeeeeee wonte. But, until that day, allowing your kids to blow off spelling may empower them to go against a societal norm without considering the day-to-day discomfort and judgment it could bring: the consequences for them but also for you, their parent.

“He was a little stunned by it,” Hurley’s mom said after the defeat. “He felt embarrassed. It was hard to watch.”

Should I give myself a weekend phone time-out? What if I miss important work?

What kind of job do you have? What kind of boss do you have? How tolerant? How demanding? One possibility is that you’re a senior adviser to the secretary of state, and your inability to be reached during a flare-up by a North African paramilitary group—because you’re lying in a park with a kale-and-bee-pollen smoothie and that copy of The Goldfinch you’ve been meaning to get to—leads to a severe diplomatic misstep and a weeks-long umbrage carnival on Fox News that can only be quelled by the semi-ritualistic firing and public shaming of the bureaucrat responsible: i.e., you. Another is that you’re a beverage distribution middle­man, and your boss—who happens to be triple-checking stuff at the office on a Saturday night because he’s going through a divorce and doesn’t know what to do with himself—discovers a niggling glitch in your paperwork that may have sent an extra case of Fresca to Denver, but because your phone’s off he calls Greta, and after a couple minutes of digging she assures him that all the Frescas are, in fact, where they need to be.

See the difference? You’ve given me absolutely no information—just dashed off your question as quickly as possible without a second of reflection. And this suggests that you’re whizzing recklessly through life and, still accelerating, throttled by permanent urgency. You need a break. Your soul needs a break. I have no idea what the consequences might be—how could I?—but I think you should switch off that phone.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

02.24.17

11:00 am

Christoph Niemann

I read that mice injected with blood from younger mice improve on cognitive tests. Should I bank my blood?

So yeah, I went and read about this too. I read that for years scientists have been taking an old mouse and a young mouse, putting them next to each other, and stitching their circulatory systems together, just like jump-starting a car. Then they let the blood of one mouse circulate through the other—a process called parabiosis. And introducing the young mouse's blood—or even just introducing one particular protein found in the blood, called GDF11—to an old mouse does all sorts of wonderful stuff: It allows the old mouse to run longer on a treadmill. It changes the old mouse's brain in ways that suggests its memory has been improved. I read that it even rejuvenates a crusty old-mouse heart. Like, voilà! The heart isn't crusty anymore.

I also read that a Harvard scientist named Amy Wagers was “already working to commercialize” GDF11, which is found in human blood too. And this was the eye-opener for me: Even as scientists are always cautioning the media that it's way to soon to speculate about their studies' implications, one of these scientists—the one named Wagers, aptly—was already placing her bet.

Good for her, I say. I'm all for capitalism! But I'm also all for hematological self-determination. (Or, say, blood freedom.) I'd hate, one day, to have to pay some multinational corporation for a synthetic knockoff of my own younger self's blood—the very stuff that was pumping through my body for decades without costing me a damn cent. What a dystopia that would be! There'd be kids on the corner with clipboards, asking for donations so Americans for Hematological Self-Determination could sue these corporations. There'd be Blood Freedom teach-ins and Blood Freedom protest songs—which would be hard because “Blood Freedom” really doesn't rhyme with much.

So my answer is yes, absolutely. Stockpile your blood now, as much as can be squirreled away at the proper temperature. Just in case. Think of it as a tiny hedge against the Wagers of the future.

I get a lot of swag from startups—messenger bags, fleeces, hats, T-shirts—and my girlfriend makes fun of me for wearing it. Which is the douchiest to wear? Like, is a fleece cooler than a hat?

Look, I don't care what you wear, but I do think that a startup fleece is definitely not cooler than a startup hat, because a startup fleece puts the name and logo of the startup in closer proximity to your heart than a startup hat would. My instinct is, keep this stuff away from your heart. Far away. The closer to your heart, the douchier.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

02.23.17

11:00 am

Christoph Niemann

My best friend dropped our Snapchat streak, and I’m hurt. What should I do?

Oof. I know how it feels. Streaks are magic; streaks are wild. There you are, you and your bestie, slinging those pictures and videos back and forth, getting that sacred pendulum of digital adorableness and hilarity moving between you, and you start to feel momentum, don’t you? A rhythmic bond—a fellowship, a closeness—taking hold. You’re in it together! And, better still, that little flaming number keeps ticking up, higher and higher. You’re watching your progress, reciprocally micro­dosing the endorphins. Then suddenly, all that excitement stops. You send a snap, and no snap comes back. It’s a gut punch. It’s over. You’re dropped.

Like I said: Oof. I empathize. And yet I can’t claim to understand the hurt of being dropped nearly as well as Maica Folch, who has been literally dropped and literally hurt from the dropping.

Folch is an aerialist in San Francisco who spent much of her adult life working as a trapeze artist. She started when she was just a teenager. Has Folch ever been dropped? Yes. Yes, she has. And, somewhere beneath the acute pain of impact, did she also feel something akin to the abandonment and resentment you’re dealing with? No, she did not.

It’s 1987, Barcelona. Dress rehearsal, the day before a big aerial dance performance. Folch has been hoisted 80 feet off the ground in a meticulously engineered elastic harness. And yet not so meticulously, because there’s been a miscalculation with the rigging and, before Folch can comprehend what’s happening, she sees the floor racing toward her.

She is falling, most likely to her death. And it’s just like everyone says: “I saw the movie of my life,” she tells me. She hears her gasping colleagues calling out as she speeds down at them. What happens next is unexpected, and yet it happens so naturally. “I was so peaceful,” Folch says. “And I fell down like a feather.”

She hits the ground. She bounces. Bounces! Remember, she’s basically tied to an enormous rubber band, and this serene feather of a woman bounces so high that she’s able to grab a rope up there and steady herself. “If I had freaked out and come down with an intense energy,” Folch says—if she’d stiffened and steeled herself—her body would have shattered. Instead she was bruised, like a fallen apple, but “didn’t break a bone.”

And here’s the most helpful part of the story: It never occurred to Folch, after being dropped, to feel jilted or angry. “When something goes wrong,” she says, “there is no one to blame.” It’s a kind of aerialist credo, really—put loyalty and trust first. You say to each other, “I love what I do, I love doing it with you, and if I start doing it with you, it’s because I trust you,” she explains.

“We don’t live in a perfect world,” Folch says. Carabiners fail. People fail. Friends don’t always return your snap. And it’s probably not because they don’t love you but likely just because none of us, zipping around on our phones and in real life simultaneously, swinging like trapeze artists between these two platforms of frenetic distraction, can be expected to do it all perfectly or to recognize the many distant and private emotional burdens our little snaps might bear. We will let each other down. It’s just a fact. But we all deserve some slack, some good faith—especially from our best friends.

The secret to a thriving trapeze partnership, Folch says, is not necessarily forgiveness but refusing to think of the inevitable disappointments of life as requiring forgiveness in the first place. “You create unconditional relationships. There is pain. There is guilt. But you don’t disappear from the picture.”

And so my answer is: Move on. You’re fine. Learn to love more. Learn from Folch, who knew, deep down, how to handle being dropped and how to bounce back too.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

10.28.16

7:00 am

Christoph Niemann

I pictured this Nest Cam looming over you—pictured its one dark eye, unblinking—and I immediately thought of that nasty old Cyclops who terrorizes Odysseus and his men in The Odyssey. What was his name? What was the story, exactly? I figured I better reread that bit.

In a nutshell, Odysseus and his men are returning from a long, atrocious war. Landing for a stopover on the island of the Cyclopes, Odysseus confesses he’s at a loss to understand this mountaintop-dwelling race of one-eyed savages: They don’t fear the gods! They have no laws! They are just too alien to be intelligible; Odysseus sees them only as “brutes,” beneath his regard. So he leads his men into a cave—the home of one particular Cyclops who isn’t home—and ransacks it. They build a fire and help themselves to all his many cheeses.

Well, the Cyclops—his name is Polyphemus—is pretty ticked off when he returns (the original “Who moved my cheese?”). And Odysseus suddenly turns diffident and cloying: “We’re at your knees in hopes of a warm welcome,” he tells the Cyclops. But does he apologize for what essentially amounts to home invasion? No, he does not. Instead, he demands a gift! That’s right, Odysseus asks the giant for a “guest-gift,” the giving of which, he explains, is a mandatory and sacred custom between guests and their hosts, as dictated by his Greek gods.

Let’s pause the narrative right there. I was sure the story had something instructive to say about what happens when the expectations of a guest and the expectations of his host don’t match up. Because your problem seems to be that you expect privacy, while your hosts expect to continue protecting their home with the latest Wi-Fi–enabled surveillance tools. They’d like to keep their minds at ease; you’d like to keep their eyes off your privates. And I felt obligated to defend their interests—privilege them—and conclude that the host-guest power dynamic is tilted toward the host and that, like it or not (and in your case I certainly wouldn’t like it either), being a guest means accepting a degree of powerlessness. Keeping the camera running is disrespectful to you, and creepy, but maybe that’s just how it’s got to be.

But then, back in The Odyssey, things escalated. Polyphemus bashes two of the men on the ground of his cave until “their brains gushed out all over,” then rips off their limbs and eats them. So Odysseus sharpens a stake, heats it in a fire, and stabs it through the Cyclops’ single peeper. It’s an ugly story, in other words. And its ugliness snapped me back to reality. Because you are not some pea-sized Odysseus trapped in a terrible colossus’s cave. You are a human being staying in another human being’s house, and part of what makes us human is our willingness to engage in empathic back-and-forths to reconcile conflicting expectations. We compro­mise. We try to act decently toward each other.

And suddenly I pictured you, alone in another person’s cavernous house, with that ominous, unyielding eyeball trained on you 24/7, and I imagined how vulnerable and exposed you must feel—how stripped of self-respect—and also how resentful. Because why else would the first solution that occurred to you be, essentially, to blind the camera? No, you don’t have a right to do so. But couldn’t you take a more obvious, less defiant tack? Couldn’t you just respectfully ask your host to deactivate the camera? Or to program it around your daily schedule, so it only flicks on when you leave?

I really don’t think it will be a hard conversation to have; part of me assumes it never occurred to the homeowners how uncomfortable leaving that camera on would make you feel. But I get it: Sometimes we stew for so long that we get lost overthinking these things. Maybe what we learn from Homer, ultimately, is that not every problem is epic.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

09.25.16

6:40 am

christoph Niemann

My cat will only drink from a running tap—not even a cat fountain. But I live in a drought-stricken state. Help?

You’re familiar with the Misfits, I assume. They are iconic, the so-called horror-punk band that played hard and demonically fast while singer Glenn Danzig—a huge, dark creature from New Jersey with a forbidding curtain of long black hair—screamed. Danzig’s songs had titles like “Skulls” and “Die, Die My Darling” and, of course, “Mommy, Can I Go Out and Kill Tonight?” That last one could, arguably, be read as a bloodthirsty anthem written in solidarity with America’s imprisoned house cats because, as the world would eventually discover, Danzig is a cat fancier.

A few years ago, pockets of the Internet had a good laugh at Danzig’s expense when a photograph surfaced of him walking out of a grocery store carrying a tub of Fresh Step kitty litter. (If you don’t understand why this was funny, one incredibly left-brained commenter on the site Metalsucks.net provided this analysis: “It is funny because it is something of an ironic satire to see someone who has widely been written about as an offbeat satanist buying kitty litter.”) Danzig himself had another take: “Why do people even care?” he shot back. “Why are they wasting their lives on this?” He had a point. People laughed at him for not being punk enough; he outpunked them all by not caring.

“Glenn Danzig is my spirit animal,” Daniel Quagliozzi told me recently. Quagliozzi is the proprietor of Go, Cat, Go!, a feline behavioral consultancy in San Francisco; he comes to your house and troubleshoots your cat problems. DQ, as he’s known, also grew up in New Jersey and spent his formative years deep in the punk scene, whipping his then-­mohawked head around to the Misfits. “They don’t want to be told what to do. They don’t want your hands on them or their lifestyle,” DQ explains—and this, he adds, is precisely what he appreciates about cats as well.

“I relate to them. I relate to their F U attitude toward society. They make you wonder, ‘Why the hell did I invite them in the house in the first place?’” In fact, DQ has regularly seen owners of defiant felines reduced to “wearing shrouds of cardboard to protect themselves from their swatting cats, or carrying water pistols or air horns to blast their cats away.” One guy resigned himself to keeping the litter box on his couch, because that’s where the cat insisted on pissing and crapping. All too often, DQ says, people are “just not ready for the hostile takeover.”

When I asked DQ about your problem, he let out a long sigh and said, “The running water thing is so … God.” There are countless reasons why a cat would demand a running faucet. “Maybe the water in the bowl is stale or not the right temperature, or the bowl might be too small and it’s creating whisker stress.” (Yes, whisker stress: Google it.) Maybe the cat feels more secure on the counter. “Or it could be boredom.” Maybe your cat leads such a dreary life that trickling water qualifies as fun.

My advice? Hire DQ. Fly him in if you have to; frankly, the guy’s aptitude with cats blew me away. Otherwise, he suggested trying to “mimic what’s happening in the same location.” Start by putting a recirculating fountain next to the sink; often, DQ says, we overlook the importance of location when assessing cat problems. (Maybe, for example, your cat just wants its water separate from its food, or up off the ground.)

But most of all: Steel yourself for confrontation—for a kind of protracted, brutal brinkmanship. Your cat isn’t likely to go on strike and die of thirst, DQ says, but any change you make will likely leave the animal “anxious and unsettled.” And that is “definitely going to be harder on the guardian than it is on the cat.” That is, the cat will try to own you—belittle you. Find your inner Danzig and flip the script.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

05.24.16

9:00 am

I think someone is hate-retweeting me. She has 25K followers! Should I call her out?

Easy. Couldn’t be easier. Hate-favoriting and hate-retweeting is childish behavior. So if you want to be bold, by all means call her out. And if you want to be less bold but perhaps more effective, just block her: Game over.

And yet, can I be honest? This may be the most subtly perplexing question I’ve ever had to pretend to be a know-it-all about. Because if I push just a bit on your premise, it all goes soft. I can see ancillary dilemmas, qualifications, and niggling unknowns pile up until the kind of clear, objective truth I’m required to find gets hopelessly boxed in. There’s a lot here to pick apart. Let’s start with the corrosive, discombobulating nature of spite.

Ever heard of the Spite Fence? Go back to 1876. San Francisco’s Big Four—the four main bazillionaire railroad barons—all decided to build mansions on a scenic, empty hilltop: Nob Hill. At least, it was mostly empty. Bounded within the large property purchased by one of these magnates, Charles Crocker, was a little house on a small, separate parcel owned by an undertaker named Nicholas Yung. Crocker wanted Yung gone; Yung wouldn’t sell. Crocker, bewildered that his money hadn’t made this inconvenience go away, kept making offers. Yung kept declining. So Crocker—overcome with spite—started a flame war. Or a wall war.

Crocker built his mansion. Then he built a 30-foot-high wall on his land that effectively surrounded Yung’s property. It shut out the light. It shut Yung in. It was ridiculous looking, and people came from all over to gawk at it. There was a kind of class war brewing in the city at the time, and one activist pamphlet singled out Crocker’s fence as a “very obnoxious” symbol of “the domineering spirit” of the wealthy. The San Francisco Chronicle called the Spite Fence an “inartistic monument of resentment” and a “memorial of malignity and malevolence.” Yet Yung—the simple undertaker, just wanting to live his life, in his house—didn’t sell. The undertaker was himself essentially buried, though still aboveground. But he just took it, took the high road, and let that towering manifestation of Crocker’s out-of-control id speak for itself. Yung never even retaliated, though he thought about it. His wife said, “There are some things to which people like ourselves do not care to stoop.”

You must feel like Nicholas Yung: tweeting through your life in a pure, happy-go-lucky way, only to see a wall of spite building up in this other person’s timeline, one hateful retweet at a time, to rebuke you. And like I said at the outset: How nasty that is; how immature. But why do you think these likes and retweets are hate-likes and hate-retweets, as opposed to supportive likes and supportive retweets? What would lead you to this conclusion? I can’t help but wonder if there’s something you’re not telling me—if you yourself worry there’s an arrogant, airheaded, obnoxious, or self-congratulatory tone to what you’re tweeting, the sort of attitude that typically elicits that kind of resentment online. Are you, for example, relentlessly issuing tidbits like “So lucky my baby sleeps for 12 hours each night!!!!!! Almost enough time for tantric sex with my amazing partner!” or “Just had lunch with Bon Jovi! #blessed”?

I’m not saying you are. I’m just wondering. Honestly. I don’t want to blame the victim. My point is, the victim of one kind of obnoxiousness can be a perpetrator of another. You ought to give that a hard think and figure out which side of this Spite Fence you’re actually standing on, before you poke your head over and start shouting.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

04.07.16

11:00 am

Christoph Niemann

Two stories. Try to hold them together in your mind.

The first involves a man named Muki Bácsi, at a Hungarian wedding in 1879. Muki was a drunk, apparently, but a beloved and awe-inspiring one. He was the region’s “champion drinkist,” according to the London Telegraph. And so, arriving at the wedding banquet, Muki found a tremendous 3-pint glass at his place and was told that, as the party proceeded through toast after toast, he was expected, each time, to suck this hulking receptacle dry, then fill it up again.

Muki sighed. “Lads, I am about to die,” he began. He was certain he was on the verge of a stroke, and the last thing he wanted was to flood his ailing innards with wine. And yet, Muki also knew he was at a gosh darn wedding and that weddings are specially charged, sacred days that temporarily reorganize the universe entirely around love and joyousness and mirth. Muki considered this, considered his glass, and pushed a great gust of air out of his weathered lungs. His lips formed that air into words: “So be it! A man can die but once!” And then Muki started to drink and drink. He drank until 2 in the morning. Then Muki asked to be carried to a bed, groaned once, and died. He was, the paper reported, “the merriest wedding guest of them all.”

The second story is shorter: In 1912, Elizabeth Lang shot a woman dead in Indiana. The case was open-and-shut, according to The New York Times. Elizabeth offered a clear confession. “She said I was ugly. She said I was old. I killed her for that, and I am not a bit sorry for it,” she told police. If it sounds extreme, it is—I’m not going to excuse it. And yet, monitor the slight shift in your own understanding and feelings when I reveal that this incident occurred at Elizabeth’s wedding.

It’s possible these stories aren’t entirely true—that they are, instead, the truth extruded through the melodramatic, yellowish journalistic conventions of their time. But even as fables, they offer some relevant lessons.

From Muki, we learn that the ideal wedding guest is submissive. Making the day a success requires that, to some degree, everyone subsume their needs and join with a larger collective spirit of conviviality. We guests arrive when we’re told to. We wear what we’re told to. If Abba comes on, we dance to Abba—even subpar Abba, like “Fernando.” We do these things because we care; it’s the Muki in us.

And from Elizabeth, we learn never to piss off the bride and groom. Even as all of us guests work to put our individual feelings aside for the day, we must understand that the bride and groom’s desires can become grotesquely elephantine and should be allowed to carry extra weight.

These are extreme examples, of course. But you are not being asked to festively drink yourself to death. You are being asked to use a hashtag on Instagram. And if you didn’t use the hashtag, and the bride murdered you for it, that would be nuts. So no, I can’t claim you are “required” to use the hashtag. But whatever your objections, using it seems like such a trivial sacrifice. The couple is merely asking for help gathering your photos into a larger virtual collection, easily viewed by them, their guests, and their would-have-been guests (excluded by head count costs, travel expenses, family feuds, and so on).

Hashtags can be dumb. I get it, I do. But this hashtag genuinely feels like a force for good. Like the wedding itself, it’s a mechanism for bringing people together. Why stand in its way?

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

02.10.16

4:35 pm

Christoph Niemann

I’ve declared evenings and weekends a digital holiday. Should I set up an email autoreply to let people know?

Compassion. Sensitivity. Openness. Tolerance. I’d like to think that these are the core values of the Mr. Know-It-All column—the imperturbable foundations on which, every month, I try to build this tiny chapel of words. I’m not going to lie: This job is intimidating! Your questions come ricocheting into my inbox from WIRED HQ, sweeping toward me like a flurry of screeching bats from the mouth of a dark cave. And it’s up to me—only me—to lasso one of those unruly mammal-birds and tame it, transmute it into something more approachable, a gentle, sweetly singing canary whose song is Truth. Admittedly, sometimes it goes better than others. (Like that weird bat-and-canary bit—that one kind of got away from me.) But my feeling is, if I approach your questions with an open heart—if I try to locate, within that cryptic line or two you’ve submitted, some glint of shared humanity and try to understand you—then I cannot fail.

But I don’t understand you. I just don’t. I read your question on Friday evening, after a hectic week. I typically like to get an early jump on knowing-it-all, but I figured—just this once—I could mull over your question all weekend and bang out a thoughtful answer just before it was due. Then I thought to myself: “Why wouldn’t you set up an email autoreply?” I assumed I was missing something.

I fell asleep wondering what it might be—wondering about you. I slept very well. On Saturday I woke up to discover my car was dead in the driveway. I jump-started it. Then my sister-in-law visited. I made some soup. Sunday: took my kids on a hike, learned to use a chain saw, caught a few minutes of The Bourne Ultimatum, cooked a so-so chicken dish.

Now it’s Monday morning. The sun is rising; the column is due. I still don’t understand you. Do you have a justifiable reason to not set up an autoreply? I can’t imagine one. (How much of an inconvenience can it be? It’s automated!) I also wondered if, in a society where we all seem slavishly and often necessarily tied to our devices—where so many of us feel perpetually on call—you worry that your obstinate rejection of email every weekend will come off, to the rest of us, as a preposterous, selfish luxury. Does an automated email responder rub your privilege in our faces?

Yes, maybe a little. But guess what else it does: IT TELLS US YOU’RE NOT THERE. Imagine if I’d reached out to you for clarification on your question on Friday. Now imagine me waiting for a reply, consulting my phone as I continued to turn your question over in my mind. Imagine how that would have colored my weekend—impinged, just a bit, on my enjoyment of my family, my soup, my chainsawing, my Jason Bourne, my chicken. And, as you depleted my various joys with your unresponsiveness all weekend long, imagine how I might have come to resent you for it.

But I don’t resent you. Because, although you say you’ve declared your weekends a digital holiday, you’ve so far only declared it to me. And thanks for that. It saved me some hassle. Me and you are totally cool.

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Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

02.09.16

4:40 pm

Christoph Niemann

How long should you wait before shutting down someone’s Facebook account after they die?

“This is for all you lovers out there.” That’s how it begins—one of the most existentially horrifying moments in American cinema.

I’m talking about the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance in Back to the Future, in which we see a temporally displaced Marty McFly onstage, sitting in with the band on “Earth Angel” with a guitar, while his teenage parents, George and Lorraine, move toward their first kiss.

This is it: the precise, excruciatingly brief moment in which the cosmos will offer up the possibility for them to fall in love—a doorway they can step through or not step through. But if they do, it’s a straight shot from here through the sinews of the spacetime continuum to marriage, and to Marty’s birth, and to all the circumstances of life that Marty had always mistaken for the one and only, inviolable reality. But he’s wising up now. While traveling through time, he’s learning that his life, like all of our lives, is only an exquisite and provisional fluke—a haphazard product of so many collisions and coincidences that were never guaranteed. Up on the stage, he’s about to be confronted with this truth in a deep and terrible way.

You know the scene, right? It turns on an obnoxious redhead who tells George to “scram,” then cuts in between him and Lorraine and sweeps her away. Slowly, a warped and nightmarish score rises over “Earth Angel.” Marty becomes disoriented, diminished. His strength—his selfhood—is draining out of him as, out on the dance floor, that insufferable ginger cackles and whips Lorraine around like a rag doll. He is dragging Lorraine farther and farther from George—and dragging our universe (or maybe all of this is proof of a multiverse?) farther from its capacity to produce Marty’s life, diverting the sacred headwaters of his personal history.

Marty’s compromised hands batter his guitar, making a discordant mess of “Earth Angel.” He raises one hand and watches it turn … translucent! His face is stupefied, powerless. Somehow Michael J. Fox—that cocky scion of 1980s precociousness—pulls it off: this look of violated innocence and panic, of a carefree boy suddenly thrown down and dying on the battlefield of time.

What is happening to Marty? Doc Brown has already explained the process: Marty is being “erased from existence.” Stop and think about those words for a second. They are horrifying. (A thrash metal band from Belfast called Scimitar even wrote an abrasive, ear-­pummeling song called “Erased from Existence,” inspired by this scene. It’s very hard to listen to.) But the worst part isn’t even that Marty himself is being erased. The true, piercing horror comes when he looks at the photograph slipped through the strings of his guitar: the one of his brother and sister and him standing against a low rock wall. Earlier in the film we’ve seen the images of his two siblings vanish from that photo, and now Marty’s image is fading too. This is what it means to be erased from existence. And this is what frightens me most: not just that Marty is vanishing but that all evidence of his life will vanish. No one will know who he was, because—here’s the thing—he wasn’t.

You ask how long you should wait before shutting down the Facebook page of a loved one who’s died. I ask why you’d ever want to delete it. Consider the ripple effects—the many ways their absence would be felt across that platform, on so many other ­people’s pages and their community’s collective, digital memory. Everything the deceased had said, not just on their own page but on others, would be gone. And so would everything people had said to them. They’d be instantaneously untagged from hundreds or even thousands of other people’s photos, exiled into some anonymous interloper status: a nameless human void.

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Source

https://www.wired.com/2017/03/kia-social-media-apps/

[princeyogurt]

Real Ghosts

Ghost stories seem to follow me wherever I go. I've heard a lot of them and I've been through a couple myself. Whenever I am getting ready to tell a few to a new listener I usually start with something I read in a book by Glen Grant. This is the jist of it... Why do we get chicken skin when we hear ghost stories? You tell a funny story, nothing. You talk about the traffic, nope. Perhaps you get a tickle here and there but never the same chill down your spine that you get from something scary. There is a good reason for this. It is said that whenever you tell a ghost story, nearby spirits will gather around to listen. The chill you feel is from their presence. As for many things when dealing with supernatural tales, you'll have to just take my word for the fact that I've had 'experiences'. But spend some time allowing me to explain how I was able to convince myself that these things actually happened and maybe you'll believe in my ghosts too: Friend: http://www.blumhouse.com/2017/03/20/this-footage-of-a-morgue-door-slamming-by-itself-is-the-creepiest-thing-youll-see-today/ I mean, chances are it's not real. But it's pretty rad. Me: Right around 1:08 the flashlight goes right over a fishing wire looking string in the hinge of the door. Otherwise, it's a cool story. If I had created this gag, the door and lights would have been less repetitive and more randomized. Also, I would have given them one good jump scare right when they got up close to it. Gotta bring it a little harder. Nice effort though. I am the last person that wants to discredit a good scare, but this one was rather obvious. I'd be happy to share a video that I believe to be genuine ghost footage if that sort of thing interests you... Friend: Yes pleassssse Me: https://youtu.be/g428ZB1KrgE It doesn't seem like much... but I have my reasons. Friend: Do tell Me: This is a clip from Syfy's 'Destination Truth'. I watched this show religiously. Not because it was any good. Let's just say it was on my queue. (I watched all the ghost shows.) I actually found the host to be a real jerk to people in other countries and seemed to be blatantly acting (poorly, at that) when reacting to "events". Total fake show, but a good time waster none the less. This episode (Season 2, episode 11) in Aokigahara Forest was different however. Aokigahara is a Japanese forest famous for people commiting suicide... a 'haunted forest' from the description. You've probably heard about it. If not, Vice did a good documentary on it. There is manga and movies related to the subject as well. Located under the shadow of Mt. Fuji, It is a well known and troubling fact that it is the second most popular location in the world to commit suicide. The first being The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. People go there, camp out for a few days and find a place to end their life. It is believed that the forest became morbidly romanticized as a suicide spot in a popular novel called 'Kuroi Jukai' (roughly translated: Black Sea of Trees) where two lovers commit joint suicide together. The forest is also infamous for being very easy to get lost in as the trees grow thick and twisted on an uneven landscape and it is a massive area. This is a genuinely creepy place. Here is a very informative article on the subject for your purusal... http://lifeforaforest.com/tag/kuroi-jukai/ Anyways, back to that ghost show. There is a scene where the host told the camera guy to stop filming just in case something too inappropriate for t.v. was found and he proceeded to go further into the area. Just prior to this moment, they had found an abandoned campsite containing some personal belongings including a wallet and some other effects. This is typically a bad sign because that means the occupant may have come there to die and had since left the area to do so. It also suggests that the caretakers of the forest haven't been to this spot to clean up the area. So at the time of filming, the crew were probably the first to discover this campsite. The host seemed to suspect these things but proceeded anyway. When he returned to the cameraman, the look of fear on his face was troubling. Sickly and ashen... totally at a loss for words. They didnt say what happened, or perhaps didn't have the heart to, but it seems to me that he saw the dead body of a recent suicide. This was the first time watching this show where I saw the host showing a genuine emotion. Besides further discrediting every other episode he ever did, it was very revealing and intriguing at the same time. They headed back immediately to their base camp seemingly ready to just be done filming for the night. The act was over. They were way out of their element. While all this was going on, one guy was left alone back at base camp. He had set up a ring of cameras in a clearing to get a view from all sides of himself in the center. I think this was in part because they knew they weren't alone in the forest, having encountered some college students with headlamps that were on an exploration to find dead people... for fun. So having cameras pointed in all directions while being by yourself must have given some comfort in a somewhat hazardous situation. He was already dead silent and bug-eyed with anxious attentiveness staring into his screens looking for any sign of movement... when he saw the ghost. As he captured that footage he looked paralyzed. He just gawked. Once again, genuine emotion... fear. The video clip I posted above begins when the host and crew are returning to the base camp. The host says it was freaky out there and the guy at base camp says he caught something weird on the camera. They all watch and watch it again. It is a white misty figure, as the video description says, that seems to rise up out of the ground and sit back down until it dissappears. I believe the cast were all genuinely shocked during this filming and that the footage is also genuine. I say this not because I am easily convinced of this sort of thing, because I am not, but because I have seen this same phenomenon with my own eyes. I usually would have simply brushed this off as a camera trick or fx... but watching this ghost on film reminded me of a personal experience. Upon my first viewing of this episode, I was just as terrified as the people on the show. It validated something I had partially written off as an over-active imagination. Something broke inside my head and made me say to myself, "It was real." Having this knowledge thrust upon myself was troubling. I will explain why this had me so shaken up and why anyone reading this should be wary, especially if you've had an experience similar to mine. (The video isn't the best quality so I highly recommend watching this from a dvd or a good stream, you can judge for yourself after you see it more clearly. But for now, hear me out.) Long before I watched this episode, I was working at a little coffee shop at 225 Bush St. in San Francisco. Since I worked there the location has gone through many different companies. However, there is still a coffee shop there in case you're in the area and wanting to see it for yourself. It was a very tall, beautiful, art deco style building which is a common thing in S.F. Besides having to walk through the empty foggy streets during the small hours of morning to open shop... the store itself wasn't that weird. The basement, however, was a bit ominous. This may not seem relevant, but I want to explain a little about the San Francisco underground as I have some random first-hand encounters with it. As far as I know, I have never met anyone really knowledgeable about the underground passages beneath the streets and old buildings. Having lived and worked there my whole life, you'd think someone would have broached the subject once or twice. Maybe the lack of knowledge is because a lot of buildings built after the big earthquake just walled up the entrances and the new tenants just never saw them. It's kind of an enigma to me and it makes me believe my experiences may be somewhat unique. My late cousin was always getting involved in these weird tech start-ups in the 90's when the internet was still experimental. These companies would buy out large historic warehouses, get them up to code, and set up shop for a few years. His endeavors were always way over my head, but getting to walk around these dingy time-capsules before construction had started was interesting. This one building in particular had a large lower level that stretched underneath the sidewalk. You could see people's feet passing overhead in the ceiling where these little glass circles were laid into the street above. Another level down was the basement. This is where it got strange. It looked like a normal creepy warehouse basement. Dusty, dead rats, poor lighting... etc. While I was fascinated by each illegible scrap of century old paper, my cousin didn't seem very interested in the museum of debris. He wanted to show me something the rest of the crew hadn't seen yet. We walked around a few dark corners and he flicked a lightswitch on inside an old storage closet. Behind some mildewy boxes was a hidden door that led into some weird underground tunnels. He said he hadn't gone inside but said it had been locked up for a long time and he was the only one with the key. Not knowing much about it, he had held off exploring it, at least until he had some good flashlights. You could tell he had thought a lot about it already. The entrance was covered by a ratty piece of wood with rusty hardware and was slanted at an odd angle. It had tiny, uneven steps leading downward. The inside was dark and the clay-like cement seemed like it was shaped by hand. I saw a path that just disappeared into nothing. As I pondered into the gloom, the worst feeling came over me. Where the rest of the building was just a bit old and dirty, this room was just menacing. I couldn't explain the bad feeling... it was an overwhelming dread. Eventually my cousin asked if I was interested in checking it out with him when he got more equipment. He seemed uncomfortable asking his co-workers and was anxious about going inside alone. I said it wasn't an ideal afternoon getaway and refused. He locked it back up and we went to lunch. I forgot all about that day until a decade or so later when I was on a date in the city. I was shopping with my lady for Christmas decorations at a fancy ornament store. A friend had told me about a nice cheese shop nearby and we walked over to check it out. It had been a long day of exploring the city, and we anticipated a bit of traffic on the ride home so I decided to ask about a restroom before going back to the car. An employee pointed me in the right direction... behind a curtain at the back of the store, down some stairs to the only door on the right. As I headed down, I was about to turn the knob into the bathroom when a dark sensation washed over me. All of a sudden it felt like someone had turned a furnace on full blast. There was no vents anywhere which meant it was just my nerves. Wondering what was causing me to have such a fearful reaction, my eyes became fixated on the path in front of me. The stairs kept going down at an odd angle past the bathroom door. I followed them out of pure curiosity about my fear. It was uncanny... the odd shaped doorway, the tiny stairs. It was an entrance to the underground. It had to be. Seeing this freaked me out badly for some reason. Everything was painted nicely and they probably just modified it to have a cold cellar for wine or whatever. But, hell... I couldn't wait to get out of there. It was a very, very freaky feeling. I left the store on wobbly legs. My lady was perplexed by my behavior but I couldn't shake off the anxiety until I was well away from the store. Once we were in the car I explained what I had seen and how it reminded me of the basement in my cousin's building. We both agreed it was a little strange but we both ultimately shrugged it off and headed home. In the past, I had been prone to panic attacks and would occasionally get an eerie feeling that someone was watching me when I was all alone. I had gotten very used to these events and had adapted myself to gain control of my emotions. I would also see shadows that looked like people. These would appear in places like inside windows and dark, cluttered areas, mainly just out of sight. A part of myself had learned to just ignore it and attributed them to day dreaming and anxieties. Just don't focus on it, I'd say to myself. I would not let my emotions overcome logical sense. It was normal. But, no matter how good I became at being able to just go about my day without paying attention to these things, they still persisted. If any of this seems like something you've also experienced... please pay attention. So, at the coffee shop on Bush st. I was the opening manager. While the barista prepared coffee and pastries, I did the inventory and grabbed supplies for the rest of the day. This place was small, no office, no equipment room. Therefore, all the supplies were stored in the basement. The only way to access the basement was with the freight elevator. I'd have to ask the security guard to buzz me down and he would just silently regard me with a curt, brooding nod... and off I went. For some awful reason, every damn time, the elevator had to first go up one floor and then proceed two floors down in order to get to the basement. To this day I still think it was just the security guard having a bit of fun at my expense. Pressing an extra button out of boredom, sending me to the 2nd floor... what a goof. But then again, maybe the elevator was just wired funny. Perhaps he always pressed the right button, but it just did what it wanted to. That explanation makes me think that his somber nod was more out of concern than out of complacency. Remember, this was usually around 5am, the world was still dark and the 2nd floor was darker. Every time the elevator door opened onto that stagnant, unoccupied hallway, it felt like an infinity before the door would close again. My panic sense always perked up in those moments. In my head, over and over again, I imagined a pale corpse-like hand catching open the door at the last second, bringing me face to face with unknown horrors. Trapped and insane with fright, the unnaturally elongated arm approached... This obviously never happened, but you see how an overactive imagination works now? Happy thoughts, right? When finally proceeding to the basement, I was usually laughing at myself. The basement, which was very clean and well furnished if not a little plain, opened up to a small U-shaped room that attached to an open hallway. From there it split off for about 100 ft. in both directions. It was dimly lit only from the glowing exit signs near the elevator. This left deep stationary shadows at either end of the long halls. In order to get to the storage area I had to walk about 25 ft. into the dark hallway and turn left into an unlit room which served as an employee area: large kitchen area, locker room and some storage closets. Once I flicked on the light in that room, the gloom dissipated and I could finally see where I was going. At some point in the future, I would love to tell you how that manual light switch would randomly fail as I took a few steps into the employee lounge, thrusting me once again into complete darkness. And about the little black figure with long hair that poked it's head out from the locker room doorway and stared at me while trying to unlock the storage room. But, so many stories... so little time. What really bothered me was that first long hallway I had to walk down. Whenever I walked into that hallway I felt that someone was there with me. A real 'eyes on your back' tingling feeling. Absolutely no one was in the building at this hour, but nonetheless, I had a vivid, lurking presence of eyes watching me intently. Having a little experience with this sort of feeling and trying to stay rational, I surmised that I could have easily just been freaking myself out. I am a decent skeptic. The qualities of a good skeptic when dealing with the unknown require that they will always question and seek out the truth, while never, ever discounting the possibility of something actually being paranormal. In other words, stay open-minded but don't blindly believe either. If you maintain this mentality, the truth has a way of letting itself be known to you. As I had trained myself to do over the years, I made a conscious decision to not look directly at the spot where the feeling was coming from. I did this for weeks. Until one day... curiosity got the best of me. I couldn't shake the possibility that something ghostly was actually staring at me from the end of the shadowy hallway. It was an instinctual feeling... a survival mechanism. Every morning when I passed it to grab supplies, it nagged at me. This particular morning, I was feeling a bit brave. I just casually decided to poke at the unknown and see what I would see. So... I paused. Standing dead still, I slowly craned my head upward and looked into that shadowy corner... ...and it looked back at me. Huddled in that corner was just a simple shadow. A shadow I had seen dozens of times. I knew it's shape and it's hue. But as I stared, something primal clicked inside of me, I felt it acknowledge me. Then it moved. I stood perplexed as the huddled mass rose into a small, vaguely human figure... then a tall dark figure... then a dark figure towering all the way up to the ceiling. Fear. Just fear. I don't remember walking to the elevator doors, I only remember mashing the buttons and praying that door would close as fast as possible. My ears rang and my heart struggled to keep up with my breathing. I imagined that the door would open to the same floor over and over again. I felt the shadowy thing growing larger and larger as it came down the hall. It was beyond terrifying. The elevator worked optimally, at least my body pressed the right buttons at the right time whether or not I remembered pressing anything at the time. I emerged out of the ghastly vacuous unknown and back into the real world. Once back in the store I told my co-worker that we didn't need any cups today, but if he wanted to go get some then he was on his own. I gave him my key. I got over the incident rather quickly. Like I said before, I wasn't wholly convinced I had actually seen anything until watching that episode. The white figure in Aokigahara Forest could have been a carbon copy of my ghost. That is why I knew it was a real ghost. I tried to avoid the storage room until there were people around and the lights were turned on. I never looked into that corner again though. Months later the store got shut down for district-wide downsizing. On the last day my manager (now my close friend) told me the store was haunted. I had never told him of the wierd things that I had seen prior to that point. I almost slapped him for not telling me sooner but he explained that he didn't want to scare me, having lost employees in the past due to strange events. I got him to tell me everything. Before I started working there, his now girlfriend and another girl were closing the store. After setting the alarm, they stepped out in front of the large store windows to chat. When they glanced inside the store, a man was standing behind the cash register smiling at them. They were rightfully creeped out and called the cops. With police escort they re-entered the store. The alarm was still engaged and there was no one inside. The cameras didn't show anything either. They found nothing. The girlfriend changed stores soon after that and the other girl quit the next day. There was also the guy who's position I took over. He was eating his lunch in the employee lounge when a soda can rolled to his feet from the locker room when he was eating lunch. He figured it just rolled off of a shelf back there and he dutifully put it back on the shelf and returned to his meal. A few minutes later, the can quietly rolled back to his foot. He ended his lunch early and eventually ended his employment. My boss said that he had a similar thing happen to him in the break room. He was sensitive to spiritual things but didn't want to be, which is one of the main reasons I believe him. He also had had the lights turn off on him randomly. At that point I told him about my experiences. We became fast friends after that. This experience opened my eyes and taught me to trust my instincts. The subconscious is a powerful tool that helps you decide things without you realizing it. It can save your life. I have since recounted all of the times I had been brushed by the supernatural and found validity over and over again. I cannot with certainty convince myself otherwise anymore. This is just one story of mine. I can only imagine what awful thing lived in the tunnels my cousin found. He never spoke of it again to me. But I know he must have gone down there... This is my warning to you... Believe or don't believe, but if you have no intention on coming face to face with the unknown... please do not look outside of your peripheral vision. Do not focus in on the spot that the feeling is coming from. But if you do... if curiosity overcomes you... perhaps you'll have your own ghost story to tell. And I'll be waiting to listen to them. Be safe out there in the unknown good friends.