#I fucking hate it when people say they ‘learn so much from true crime podcasts’

[area51-escapee]

People want to be the main character so bad they want to solve a massive case with no training no experience no evidence nothing but an internet connection and their own wild theories. They are actively disappointed when these crimes are solved and they didn’t have a single hand in helping. They are actively disappointed when a crime is not as gruesome or twisted as their theories made it out to be. They make “in case I go missing” binders, not because there is a threat against their lives or well being but because they’ve become so rotted by true crime podcasts they’re convinced every person who looks their way on the street is plotting their kidnapping and murder. They are convinced every little occurrence is a sign that they are the next victim. An object on the ground. A wet gas pump. Somebody speaking another language than English. Asking for sources or questioning their story or showing proof that what they are saying is misinformation just gets you asked “why do you want women to get murdered????”. Somehow all they’ve learned from their true crime obsession is that every person who doesn’t fit their narrow view of “normal” is a threat to them and not that the authorities and legal system do not give a shit and regularly do not bother to do their job at every turn.

#I don’t believe true crime should be entertainment and I believe it can be good and informative #there are people /asking/ for more eyes on certain cases #asking for awareness to things that have gone ignored #but no yeah let’s make another Ted bundy documentary or some dumb shit like that #I fucking hate it when people say they ‘learn so much from true crime podcasts’ #but all they’ve ‘learned’ is to assume everyone they meet is a secret murderer

[lovinbarzal]

RANDOM HC FOR MY AU'S

masterlist | a/n please feel free to send in requests for these au's!

NEVER GROW UP ( ME94 )

- mark & mama cookie met after mark 'accidentally' cut a huge chunck of her hair off in their freshman year of high school. he claimed he had a muscle spasm

- when mama cookie found out she was pregnant, she immediately called mark out of panic.

- mama cookie's biggest craving while pregnant was mint ice cream and lime lays

- mama cookie is in school to be an infusion nurse and mark is always willing to be her patient.

- nez's first word was "uck" aka fuck. she said it after mark had lost his 4th round of uno with Luke, Ethan, Mackie, and Dylan. mama cookie was out with friends and he tried to desperately to get her to stop saying it before she got home.

- he failed.

- people (minus friend & family) didn't know about mama cookie and nez until their sophomore year of college when he hard launched them on insta

- when the team found out about mama cookie and nez, they were shocked. how was the most aggressive player in the BIG10 also a soft girl dad?

- Inez was in fact named after Blake Lively's daughter & mark loves to talk about it.

- "yeah, she's the blake to my ryan so why not have an inez?"

KING OF MY HEART (JH86)

- jack & darling hard launched on his draft day.

- "we are proud to select jack hughes" *turns to darling & full blown makes out with her for a solid 3 seconds*

- in the back of the shot you can see trevor fake vomiting

- darling stayed with Trevor during his rookie year before moving to Newark when Jack got injured

- they have a pregnancy scare like every 3 weeks. they think it's crazy that she hasn't gotten pregnant yet

- darling is the pickyist eater mf ever.

- like she hates when her food touches so she has those kid plates that separate the food

- she is a sucker for true crime and loves to listen to true crime

- jack is terrified of her sometimes cause of how much she listens to true crime podcasts. he's scared that one day she'll murder him and get away with it cause she learned from the mistakes of these other guys

OUR SONG (WJ53)

- sugar went to University of Michigan for a semester before moving to UTA

- wyatt gave y/n the nickname, 'sugar', because of her sweet tooth

- they met when sugar accidentally hit joe's car while trying to reverse park

- joe and wyatt were in the car

- wyatt took one look at her and freaked out cause he thought it was his fault

- they were both apologizing to each other and joe just stood there and was like 🤨🥹 cause he knew they were perfect for each other

- the rest was history

- once wyatt and she started to get a little more serious, she basically moved in with the Pavelski's and shared a room with wyatt

- sugar didn't tell anyone (minus tito) about wyatt and didn't plan on it but some paparazzi saw them together took some pictures which were published with headlines, "Y/N BARZAL NEW LOVER?! A HOCKEY PLAYER?"

- mat & liana called her and both were more mad about the fact that she told tito and not them than her actually dating wyatt

ENCHANTED AU (AF11)

- peach and adam met when she wanted a hoodie from luke and she just popped up uninvited into the sophmore house while the froshies were there

- he was like, "you're just gonna let the strange girl barge in🤨"

- she ended up staying and got really close with adam

- peach is closest with jack out of all of her brothers

- peach loves to sprawl out ontop on adam and just lay there

- their first date was a failed attempt at a picnic (adam forgot the food and then it started pouring on them)

- adam walks her to all of her classes even if it means he'a late

- peach's insta is private (sometimes she'll let some fans in) but she and adam have each others first intial in their bios, 'A<3' 'y/f/i 💞'

- they got hard launched after the frozen four when phil posted a dump of the trip they had all went on after.

- included was a picture of ethan and mark drowning each other but in the back you can see the two kissing

- phil took it down after numerous threats from peach

#enchanted au #our song au #king of my heart au #never grow up au #adam fantilli x reader #wyatt johnston x reader #jack hughes x reader #mark estapa x reader #umich hockey #x reader #jack hughes #mark estapa #luke hughes #adam fantilli #wyatt johnston

[changkyunsmilitarywife]

Obey Me! Headcanons

𝘓𝘶𝘤𝘪𝘧𝘦𝘳

- kins Hannibal Lector from Hannibal NBC

- has a secret Only Fans

- enjoys dishing out punishments & tying people to the ceiling a little bit TOO much

- big dick energy

- he also has big milkers

- loves MCR

- I can see him as a total emo or scene kid in the early 2000s

- wine mom

- whenever his brothers are loud he's like a teacher that says "I'll wait" with his arms crossed

- constantly gets his cape/coat thing flipped over his head by Mammon whenever he walks the halls

- forces his brothers to do community service stuff with him for 'family bonding'

- has a Keurig that Diavolo gave him

- sets the Thermostat to 10 degrees Celsius (50 Fahrenheit)

- “I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed” energy

𝘔𝘢𝘮𝘮𝘰𝘯

- deez nuts & your mom jokes

- unironically kins the Joker

- Kpop stan

- pretends to hate kids but actually likes them

- or he absolutely hates them. There's no in between

- unironically relates to Creep by Radiohead (but I think most people do so it's okay)

- plays Animal Crossing and owes lots of Bells to Tom Nook

- afraid of Barney, Big Bird & the Kool Aid man

- committed tax fraud at some point (if taxes exist in the Devildom idk)

- flat earther ☹️

- took him too long to learn how to tie his shoe laces

- or he just straight up doesn't know how

- uses axe as his choice of deodorant

- scared of spiders & bugs in general

- makes children cry (maybe that's why he doesn't like them or pretends he doesn't like them)

- he's a discord kitten for money

- cat fishes old men for money

- probably was one of "The Boys 😈💪🏻🦍🔫" at some point

- doesn't know how to swim

- bottom

- got his ears pierced at Claire's

- into bitcoin and cryptocurrency

- makes & sells shitty NFTs

��𝘦𝘷𝘪𝘢𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘯

- bullies kids online for fun

- wall puncher when he loses fortnite ☹️

- fucking sucks ass at Minecraft

- scared of Minecraft mobs esp the spiders

- discord mod....

- twitch streamer; secretly popular

- has a maid dress & wears it on stream

- participates in NNN...but fails

- when he says lol out loud he says it like "el oh el"

- had a nightcore phase

- his piss is a bright highlighter yellow color

- drinks G Fuel or Bang Energy

- "I have the power of god and anime on my side!"

- the weird kid who sits in the back of your class

- has the Creeper zip up hoodie

- unironically likes & listens to Bo Burnham

- "paper cut survivor 💪🏻" in his bio

𝘚𝘢𝘵𝘢𝘯

- goes live on tiktok or devilgram & reads bedtime stories

- wears cat ears

- secretly has a Wattpad account or a tumblr where he writes fanfics

- he probably writes smut too tbh

- runs a podcast

- the type to start drama at RAD with asmo because they're bored

- actually likes Macbeth 🤢

- your average nickelback enjoyer

- accidentally fell into an animal’s cage at the zoo when he was a kid

- likes americanos ☹️

- super passive aggressive

- has one of those weird millennial signs that say stuff like "girl boss" or "don't talk to me if I haven't had my coffee yet"

- cat meme/reaction pic user

𝘈𝘴𝘮𝘰𝘥𝘦𝘶𝘴

- runs one of those school 'tea' & 'confession' accs on devilgram for RAD

- very famous beauty guru

- has an only fans & twitter

- unironically likes the kissing booth ☹️

- the type to start drama at RAD with Satan because they're bored

- moans super loud during face time/on a call if someone else walks in your room

- if he was in It he would think Pennywise is hot and try to seduce him

- Light Yagami apologist (I mean me too he's hot sorry not sorry)

- watches Ru Paul's drag race

𝘉𝘦𝘦𝘭𝘻𝘦𝘣𝘶𝘣

- tattles on any of his brothers if Lucifer bribes him with food

- takes gym class to seriously, especially dodge ball

- plays cooking mama on his crappy old DSI

- Candy crush player (weirdly good at it)

- good at pole dancing

𝘉𝘦𝘭𝘱𝘩𝘦𝘨𝘰𝘳

- Radiohead stan

- likes fnaf & the lore

- hot topic or Spencer's employee

- con artist for fun

- avid True Crime podcast listener

- has the strawberry or chocolate cow scented pillow pet

𝘋𝘪𝘢𝘷𝘰𝘭𝘰

- has a folder in his photos that's just full of pictures of Lucifer

- has a prayer candle with Lucifer's face on it as a "joke" (or is it ?🤨)

- "blackmails" Lucifer with candids Diavolo took of him (mainly the shirtless ones he took when they were on vacation)

- he radiates energy of that one dad who tries to be 'hip'

- had to get bailed out of jail by Lucifer (Ik he's the prince but idc)

- says memes like "may-mays"

- he probably accidentally summoned the wrong person/human for the exchange program

- scared of roaches

- his favorite Disney movie is Ratatouille

- kins Remy the rat

- big mommy milkers

- has a pickle hate page on devilgram where he just posts pictures of pickles and slanders them

- King Julien

- also enjoys Ru Paul's drag race & forces Lucifer to watch with him

- pours milk before cereal

- has a pair of crocs that are decorated with jibbitz with Barbatos & forced Lucifer to get a pair so all 3 of them can match

- likes minion memes

- has a Burger King crown

𝘉𝘢𝘳𝘣𝘢𝘵𝘰𝘴

- weirdly good at hacking and coding??

- business major vibes

- or engineering major

- runs a tea devilgram acc where he reviews and rates different brands of tea

- malewife & girlboss energy

- goes on Omegle with Diavolo

- knows how to Doxx people

- takes Diavolo to Chuck E Cheese

- has those old lady candies in his pocket

𝘚𝘪𝘮𝘦𝘰𝘯

- actually a super horny mf

- he is not innocent as you think

- "that's what she said jokes" but says it in his head

- doesn't get worried when Luke is gone bc he knows that Luke will come back

- uses Facebook

𝘓𝘶𝘬𝘦

- has a burn book that features all of the demon brothers

- has Pokémon cards and is actually pretty good at the game

- Jiggly Puff is his fav Pokémon

- jumps around with a contorted face whenever he stubs his toe because he REFUSES to curse

- has the frog Build a Bear plushie

- knitting/crocheting master

𝘚𝘰𝘭𝘰𝘮𝘰𝘯

- sucks at card games so he subtly cheats with magic

- trolls on twitter or any app tbh

- Star Wars fan

- doesn't know how to drive

- or if he does know, he's just shit at it

- does magic at kids birthday parties

- likes Harry Potter but critiques it with how “inaccurate” it is

- turns the brothers into toddlers for fun

- he definitely banged Asmo at some point

- listens to Weezer

- uses Uno cards to do Tarot readings

#obey me #headcanon #headcanons #fanfic #lucifer #obey me lucifer #the great mammon #obey me mammon #obey me levi hc #obey me satan #obey me asmodeus #obey me beelzebub #obey me belphie #lord diavolo #obey me barbatos #obey me luke

[acup-ofawkward-andclumsy]

Hi! i’d like to request a matchup for a haikyuu character.

my pronouns are she/her (my name is Kylie)

my personality is pretty extroverted i don’t really have a problem going up to people and introducing myself, but i like to consider myself pretty friendly. my personality type is type 2 and my mbti is ESTJ. i think my strengths come from wanting to help people and be there for them (basically be a hype woman lol), and i love giving people my affection. im not super competitive, but i will be if i have to or if i want something TT i’m also really talkative (as you can probably tell), but i also get pretty quiet when i’m tired or upset. even though i’m extroverted, i like being alone or at least in silence where i can recuperate and recharge.

my gender preference is male

i’m asian with monolids, brown hair and dark eyes. i’m also pretty short i’m 5’0 and skinny.

my likes vary from playing video games, i’m really into valorant and acnh. i also like baking, but i hate cooking. i also like listening to true crime podcasts and ready true crime books, i’m studying to be a lawyer. my dislikes are mainly just small things like pet peeves, but i’m a really picky eater but i’m trying to expand that i promise TT

my hobbies are mainly watching youtube, studying, playing video games, and playing my viola. music is really important to me and it was my first true passion i had when i was around 8. i also really like having deep conversations. i’m not sure if that’s a hobby, but i do it often i just like learning more about people.

congrats on 40 followers and thank you so much!

YOU GOT SUGAWARA KOUSHI

Personality: He is an INFJ, you to are almost opposites! Except for the fact that both of you are sort of organized. But what can I say, opposites attract

➶︎You may be talkative, but he thoroughly enjoys it, he loves to listen to every single thing you have to say, and he remembers everything too!

You two would hype the Karasuno team all the time, giving everyone thumbs up or cheers of encouragement,you are basically the parents of the group

➶︎ He tries to remember the things you dislike eating and makes sure he doesn't include them in his cooking but also he tries to encourage you to try new things (Sugamama mode activated)

He listens to music with you often, though your tastes may vary, he still enjoys it and even likes some of the songs you show him

➶︎When you decide to show him the true crime podcasts you listen to, he won't sleep all night, mans is terrified of these sort of stories.

Small scenario:

You were sitting on the couch with Koushi, listening to a true crim podcast of Ted Bundy (a classic), you thought it would be light for a beginner like Koushi, but man were you mistaken. For the rest of the evening, Koushi kept a knife with him, even when you both went to sleep

...

"Kylie, psst, Kylie"

You woke up to little pokes to your shoulder, and your whispering boyfriend.

"Koushi what the fuck?!"

"I heard footsteps in the kitchen"

You sighed in relief thinking something was actually wrong

"It's noth-"

"No, I'm sure something is in there, and I'm going to protect you from it"

Your eyebrows knitted as you stared at the ridiculous scene before you, Koushi with a knife and PJ's wearing a protective casque ( or so he called it, when it was just a pot)

"Fine, but I'm going with you.)

Your footsteps echoed across the dark empty hallway of your apartment, upon entering the kitchen, Koushi slowly turned on the lights, and once he did, you both screeched in surprise, something was inside the cupboards and just fell on the floor. When you both calmed down, Koushi got close to who was snooping in the cupboards.

Turns out it was just your pet hamster that escaped from its container.

A song I would give you both

Hope you like it and feel free to request anything elsee (plus you are so cool and unique!!)

40 followers event

MASTERLIST

#haikyuu #haikyuu x reader #sugawara koushi #sugawara x reader #haikyuu fluff

[scvrllet]

If you're still doing these, could I get a 🎫 concert ticket for Harry Potter and Once Upon A Time?

Glad to have found your blog!!!

I'm Lucifer, but people call me Luci or Luce, I'm 21 (22 in September), I identifiy somewhere around the nonbinary category, but I see gender as something trivial. I'm a panromantic demisexual and prefer they/her pronouns. 6'3 tall, long wavy blonde hair, black eyes. I wear glasses and usually skirts with old band t-shirts (that I actually listen to).

I always have a bunch or rings around my fingers as well as multiple ear piercings. I'm super pale, to the point that people often ask me if I'm sick.

I'm introverted, but I can be a social butterfly if required. I love listening as much as talking. I never really talk about emotions/feelings but anything else I'mhappy to chat about. I don't really react to things apart from my facial expressions. The lift of an brow, a smirk or an eye-roll will let you know how I feel about things without verbal confirmation. I'm always calm and collected, and my voice stays monotonous no matter what ; I don't stutter, yell or scream.

I'm highly intelligent and very sarcastic, and rarely laugh outloud, but smirk a lot. I might come across as rude and blunt but on the inside I am a softie, just don't show it often.

I love literature (especially classic), arts and learning languages (I currently speak 18). I'm also musically very inclined. I study History and mythology. When it comes to hobbies, I read and collect lots of things things such as lighters, tarot cards, night lights, rocks/crystals and books.

I have four siblings and am the oldest, but I don't really keep in touch with my family that much. I have a few good friends (2 or 3) and I don't even really need much more.

I'm a Virgo, Slytherin and INTJ-A if that tells you anything.

I'm not athletic in the least, but am in good shape. My body is an hourglass figure and I also got a bunch of tattoos.

I have a bad habit of smoking, and usually having a glass of scotch or wine with me (but I never get drunk or even tipsy). I love spending time near water, but hate getting wet. I usually take long walks outside after midnight while listening to creepypastas or true crime podcasts. I love the genre horror overall, yet I rarely get scared. The only thing I'm scared of is being scared if something. And Santa Claus (<-- no idea as to why).

If I were to go on an ideal date, it'd hopefully be something original and not the cheese classics, but I wouldn't mind them either. I just want to experience new things.

I don't really celebrate holidays (e.g. Christmas, Ester) since I was raised in an atheist/witchcraft household.

If I still might add something, when it comes to relationships I'm never overly dramatic. I don't, as previosuly mentioned, yell or really even cry. I don't get frustrated or suspicious easily. If I see any inclination that my partner might be e.g. cheating on me, I ask them about it directly and will absolutely under no circumstanses go through their phone, computer or start stalking them. 

You wanted 3 random things, here :

1. I can't cook shit, I have set spaghetti on fire, cracked a pan in half and blown up a microwave.

2. I'm very unpredictable, but at the same time I like to stick to certain routines etc.

3. I've had my hair dyed more times that I can count with more colors than I know how to name.

Uhhh, I think that's all? I hope you have a good day :)

(🎫) CONCERT TICKETS - get a platonic or romantic ship/match-up from the fandom of your choice (max. two) along with a shirt headcanon

JOIN MY 4K FOLLOWER CELEBRATION

I ship you with....

Peter Pan

- Arriving on Neverland, in hindsight, was a mistake. Magic beans while very reliable were prone to mistakes every so often and so instead of appearing in the Enchanted Forest, you were on the beach of a large island. And what was the most odd of all, was not the strange feeling you felt upon arriving on the island, but the pair of eyes you could practically feel staring at you from the trees. Hoping that it was just an animal of some sort, you walked off the beach and headed to the path through the forest.

- Unfortunately for you, the feeling lingered, following you almost as you walked through the forest. Tall trees lined the path and every once in awhile you’d see some small animals scurry away. What seemed to stand out the most however were the silhouettes standing off in the side, deep within the trees but standing right below the sunlight for you to see clearly. There was four, than five, than six than......only one. Looking at your surroundings, you saw your footprints in the ground before you and it hit you. You’d been walking in circles the whole time and the silhouette was still there.

“Hello?” You called out, not sure as to whether or not the silhouette really was there.

Without a verbal response, the figure disappeared only to reappear a few feet in front of you.

You jumped back in shock but quickly regained your balance as you studied the person before you. It was a boy, looking to be around your age, with a questioning look on his face as he looked at you. “Who are you?”

“I could ask you the same question.”

“I asked you first!”

“And I’m in charge of this island!”

“You? In charge of an island? What is this Neverland?” You rolled your eyes at the possibility. Neverland was a place made up so that kids could fall asleep. Not a real place that you could visit.

“Yes it is, and I run things around here so tell me, who are you.” The boy replied, emphasizing his last three words as he spoke.

“As if, what’s next? You call your little Lost Boys to come prove to me?” You scoffed. To believe that you were on Neverland was already too much and all you wanted was to get home to the Enchanted Forest but it seems you’re stuck playing pretend with a boy who doesn’t want to grow up. A shame really

Smirking, the boy simply pressed two fingers to your forehead and before you could even say something, your mind went foggy and your vision was filled with black.

- To say you got off on a rough start was an understatement. The two of you were constantly at each other’s neck while he kept you on the island, the camp specifically, and didn’t let you leave due to belief that you were a spy of some sorts. Not that he had anything to hide. Not yet at least.

- As time went on however, the two of you had begun to form a friendship. It wasn’t anything big or odd, but it was definitely new. He’d be less of an ass to you and let you explore the island on your own (with some exception).

- Upon finding your out about your hobbies, he would discreetly try to surprise you with materials to help you engage in them even if Neverland’s magic still had some restrictions. He would still try to the best of his abilities.

I also ship you with....

Blaise Zabini

- Losing was one thing Blaise never took lightly. Competitive he was but even with his ambition and skill, it was the mundane things that revolved around luck that often made him lose. Like the stupid bet he made with Theo on whether Gryffindor would win or lose where the loser would have to make a full four course meal complete with drinks for all the Slytherins in their year. Unfortunately for him, he had lost unlike Gryffindor and now here he was, spending his Saturday afternoon in the kitchens and a cookbook Pansy had given him “to help”.

- Blaise didn’t know what he’d see upon entering kitchen. He was sure to see a few House Elves, perhaps he could ask them for help, but what he didn’t except was to see you standing in front of the stove with a pot spilt cleanly in half somehow and a fire burning below. And to make matters worst, you were simply standing there as if you had been frozen.

“Hey watch out!” He called out as a flame went up towards you. Pushing you out the way just in time, he managed to save you from the burn in return of him getting burned.

“Fuck.” He hissed out in pain. Gripping his arm as he put out the fire with his wand before dropping it on the ground.

Without a word, you simply grabbed your wand and waved it above his burn. You seemed to be muttering something, a spell of some sort, as a cooling sensation covered his wound. Looking down, he was shocked to see that the burn was actually healing.

“How, how did you.... Thank you.”

“I was practicing a charm, fire control, but thank you for the concern.”

Feeling sheepish for thinking that you didn’t have it under control, he ended up excusing himself from the kitchen to head back to his dorm where his friends immediately pounced on the chance to tease him for a variety of reasons.

- The next day, instead of going to Hogsmeade with his friends, Blaise stayed back at the castle to catch up on a paper he had failed to submit on time. Deciding on going to the library, sh was disappointed to see that almost all of the tables were taken. All but one in the far back corner. Quickly heading towards it, a sigh left his lips as someone dropping their book bag into the table beat him to the table: you.

“Oh did you need the table? I can leave if you’d like?”“ You said upon noticing him standing in front of the table.

“No, no it’s alright I just uh, planned on finishing a paper for Flitwick’s class.” He admitted.

“You can have a seat if you’d like, I’ll just be doing my own work and you can do yours.” You kindly offered and Blaise gladly accepted. He really need to finish this paper or else he’s be kicked off the Quidditch team so while he didn’t get the complete privacy he originally wanted, he’s fine with this.

As the two of you worked in quiet, occasionally Blaise would sneak glances your way which you ended up catching once.

“Hi.” was all you managed to muster out as you tried to contain the wide smile that wanted yo grow on your face.

Trying his best to not chuckle at your slightly flustered state, he mirrored your smile as he replied with a “Hello.”

#you didn’t mention romantic or platonic so i just made it platonic #long post #jens record shop #jens 4k follower celebration #(🎫) concert tickets #marvelousluci

[phoebehalliwell]

Pls write mini essays about phoebe + next gen and paige + next gen!!

word i’d said i’d to this then i forgot i’m doing it now i’m gonna start of with both phoebe & paige + their kids and then i’ll burn through the list

okay so for starters phoebe i think phoebe’s family wins like the “most functional” award it’s not like a landslide win y’know it’s not like piper and paige’s families aren’t function but this family is comprised of an empath advice columnist, a cupid relationship therapist, and three cupid-witches. like, they’re all kinds experts of communication and self-awareness and understanding and relationships and bond blah blah blah they being said of course they have their issues but in general it’s relatively smooth sailing there is of course the flipside when friction usually generate from the kids starts to spiral out of control and phoebe & coop will be like let’s use our words help us to understand you and where you’re coming from do some breathe exercises and the girls would be like no!! can’t we just argue like a normal family!!! can’t you just get angry at something!! but those are um few and far between. and of course like phoebe really really wanted to be a mom we all saw we all didn’t enjoy it but that’s very much canon she really wanted three daughters she got that so i think phoebe was very much like Prepared for motherhood (like as prepared as one could be). like it wasn’t like she thought it was going to be smooth sailing but like she was ready to face any challenges that could be thrown at her she was ready to put all of her love and effort into this one thing and i think for her like Mama Era from pj’s birth in 07 to peyton starting preschool in 2013 i think she really like almost exclusively worked from home she was really hands-in she was in all the mommy groups and the pta and the whatnot but like. y’know that’s like 6 years. and phoebe really loves her job. so i think she’d really have a career renaissance once all of the kids were in school i think she’d slowly start to dive back into column work i think this is when she’d start to write her book after the success of that one i think she wrote another one i think she has a fiction series posted under a pseudonym that is more of a ya magical adventure series (which paige designs all the covers for) i also think she and coop have a podcast together maybe run through the bay mirror maybe independent the point is she’s really popular (i also think she’d be the wealthiest out of the three sisters bc she makes bank and so does coop as a therapist for those not in the states therapy is like really fuckin expensive as i recently learned y’all do not know. it’s a bitch. but yeah they got money. but that’s not the point here. the point is she’s really popular). book tours, doing stuff with the podcast, guest appearances on a variety of tv shows, i think phoebe’s not like. at home a lot. or at least she’s home the least out of piper her and paige. and it’s not like her kids really mind like she is just a beam away and she always makes it to important events (and unimportant ones!) like she takes photos before every school dance and she throws birthday parties and she really dos try to make it to all of the kids soccer games but like. she’s not always just like. home all the time. and i think she’d really love to have a lot of emotional heart-to-hearts with her kids but that doesn’t always happen. if pj needs an emotional heart-to-heart, she’s gonna talk to her dad. is parker needs an emotional heart-to-heart, she’s gonna talk to pj. is peyton needs and emotional heart-to-heart she’ll position herself on the couch late at night when she knows phoebe will be coming home and just sorta sit there like waiting for phoebe to show up and go oh honey what’s wrong bc uhh peyton will not like. go to someone to talk about their problems. she has to wait to be asked. that’s just the type of person she is. lucky for her, phoebe’s an empath so she can like tell when baby peyton’s in distress but lbr she usually doesn’t need it because like peyton perches in such an Obvious manner like hi mom come comfort me please : ( even tho she’ll never like say it out loud. i think phoebe’s also like proud of her girls and their practicing of the craft bc she remembers how she felt about magic hell how she still feels about magic and she’s always telling them like follow ur heart and love is ur greatest strength (and the power of three will set you free, of course) bc her girls are cupitches y’know it’s more true than ever but like. lowkey tho. it fucking terrifies her. magic like takes, man. a lot of people she knows have died. and she just like. she doesn’t want to tell her kids no bc it was grams controlling nature that made her rebel so much so like she wants them to be able to come to her when they have a magical problem and she knows that if she tries to stop them or tells them they’re out of their league they’ll probably just stop telling her things so she doesn’t she tried to be supportive but jesus fucking christ he gets so scared sometimes. she gets so scared.

paige on the other hand had nowhere near the same experience with motherhood as phoebe bc well i think paige has the most complex relationship with motherhood set aside the fact that her kids are the only unplanned ones out of the entire next gen, she also like. she was a shit child. she was mean and violent and an alcoholic. she had committed so so many crimes before she was even 17. and she had a really good mom!! she had a mom who loved her and tried her hardest to support her and keep her from falling off the deep end who loved her unconditionally she had the best mom and she was still just a little shit! and i think that really fucks her up. like, looking back on it, she can’t imagine half the stuff she put her mom through. she was really cruel. and like!!! her mom was a good mom!! so paige doesn’t know she doesn’t know what she’s supposed to do. how she’s supposed to stop her kids from turning out like her. what can she do so she doesn’t have kids who end up exactly like how she was. henry isn’t like a load of help her bc henry Also never knew his parents and he jumped around from foster home to foster home and like never really felt like had a family until paige. and then like in his whole parole schtick he was definitely a hard ass he was definitely an Authority Figure bc hell that was the only way adults could get him to listen to them when he was a kid so he just kinda emulated that. however after meeting paige and really getting a feel for her whitelighter side and how she handled these situations i do think henry switched up his vibes he made the necessary changes. i also think like henry like no he wasn’t planning on having kids but i think he was really excited to become a father like he was gonna have a family like god he always wanted a family he was gonna teach his kids to play catch and he would host birthday parties stupid birthday parties with themes and balloons from safeway and friends there and goody bags the full kit and kaboodle like henry would fuckin go to bed each night dreaming about how he’s gonna do all these familial things he never got to do. bc he didn’t have a family. but paige did. she got all those things. and she was still fucked up!! so i think the conkclooshun paige landed on was that her mom tried to hard to like. like her mom saw her potential and always strived to push her to be that perfect version of paige that she saw her wonderful little angel when paige really wasn’t that paige wanted to be seen for what she was not some vision in her mom’s head and maybe that’s why she would like get drunk and steal a cop car bc she wanted her mom to see the girl standing right in from of her not an angel just paige. so paige was like. okay. i’m no gonna project onto my kids. they’re gonna be like “charmed ones” (there’s only two of them but w/e they’re really powerful witches) but i’m not gonna. i’m not gonna see them as that. i’m going to try to see them as they are and i’m going to be their Mom. i’m not gonna be some distant ethereal figure which is kinda how she felt a lot of the charges she brought to magic school viewed her bc she was this mythic charmed one and she was this she was that i think paige didn’t want to be her daughters’ whitelighter bc she didn’t want a “professional” relationship with them. there was no way she could advise her own kids the way she could advise her charges, she’s simply way too close to the situation. and she doesn’t want her kids to view her like that. she doesn’t want to be their whitelighter, she wants to be their mom. and um this really does work for the most part like she & her kids will like sit on the couch and just like yuck it up you know like the mitchell clan really is a tight knit they do all love spending time with her but. like her method of parenting really works with tamora. not so much with kat. kat’s a lot more witchy than tam is she’ll actively go out and seek out trouble she pursues the craft with a very similar hunger to what we saw in paige s5 and paige kinda hates it. like. god okay she gets it she gets it she really does. but kat’s a kid!! she’s just a kid and if she keeps looking for trouble she’s gonna get herself killed and i think whenever out god knows where doing god knows what paige just remembers that time she had to watch chris bleed out on the bed with nothing she could do. and how she- how if that happened to kat- she- she couldn’t go on anymore. that’s basically the fact of the matter. if she lost a child, she doesn’t know what she would do. give up. probably. and it’s again sorta like the inverse we see with phoebe’s free range demon hunting where paige gets so overprotective about it that kat just stopped telling her things. this gets doubled by the fact that you’re not my whitelighter, so why should you even care! and kat does view it as like a lack of faith from her mother (which is one of the reasons why kat and chris are so close) and she just wants to. she wants to prove herself. she wants her mom to see her for all that she could be, instead of just the place she’s in right now. and i do think as time passes paige learns to sort of let go of this control i think her and kat have the most difficult relationship but paige letting kat leave to take a gap year and explore the world was like a major step and kat acknowledges this to an extend she gets it was difficult for her mom but she really has no idea how much paige panicked how much it took every inch of her self control not to go out and drag kat back home because yes baby birds have to leave the nest eventually but these baby birds have a very high stab rate. um jumping over to her relationship with henry jr i think she does encourage his studying of the craft he is the most well read out of any of the next generation with wyatt taking a close second hell henry jr even knows like a bit of latin this kid is wicked smart And bonus round he’s aware he’s mortal. like yeah paige can kinda sense that it does ruffle his feather, but henry jr knows when to step away. again, henry’s really well-read. he’s brushed up on the family history. he knows the warren line is close friends with death. as a bit of a bonus round but also to give paige some peace of mind, she did give henry a basic charm that grants him the same high resistance that all witches are born with as well as cloaks him from magic bc like paige and henry sr both knew this mortal baby was gonna have a wicked high kidnap rate so they figured y’know best do all they can to Stop That from happening. the enchantment that henry jr has is a necklace it’s the same one paige wore throughout the show. bc i’d like to bring that back.

okay next gen time wyatt i think wyatt likes paige more than phoebe it’s not like a competition or anything it’s just gun to his head that’s who he’d chose bc paige really is like this witchlighter she walks the line between being charmed and being a whitelighter that wyatt can really take a lot of inspiration from he just doesn’t have that with phoebe phoebe’s a little bit more of like a love guru and wyatt’s got a weird relationship with love bc he keeps flinging himself headfirst into it and keeps getting bruiser bc of it what wyatt actually doesn’t know is almost all of the advice that has gotten him out of these troubling times has almost all been sourced from phoebe piper usually goes to her with advice when it comes to all that i mean i don’t think wyatt would like to know that post-breakup wyatt is just like kinda embarrassing he doesn’t want to know that’s being shared with the family of course he already knows he just doesn’t want confirmation

chris surprisingly closer with phoebe probably bc she’s an empath and again she has this whole free range witchcraft style that she has going if chris has a question he needs to ask somebody he’ll usually ask phoebe bc she’s the only one who won’t report back to leo bc again she’s an empath she gets it she knows what’s going on and she knows he just needs time and he and leo need some good honest communication paige also gets that but paige also watched chris die so yeah no she’s gonna snitch

melinda about and even tie melinda gets a lot of witchlightering advice from paige on finding harmony there but she’s also an empath she she spends a lot of time learning her craft from phoebe and how to focus that and apply that power to her witch/whitelighter abilities in ways paige can’t really teach her bc paige’s power is more physical that psychic/emotional. but it is like paige who gives her the groundwork on like. getting it. i think gun to her head if she had to choose she’d choose phoebe just because of those times they’d go out and do “field practice” where they go somewhere interesting and crowded and sense the wave of emotions and go out and try to pick out people from the crown it’s an art of drowning out the din and finding one you need to find a way of not getting lost in the sea of everyone else’s everchurning emotions which is nice bc it grants melinda a much wanted and needy control over empathy but it’s also nice bc it’s like. fun. phoebe always makes it fun they can always have a laugh.

tamora’s not like hella close with phoebe there’s really no reason for her to be however she is baby peyton’s favorite cousin (don’t tell the rest) simply because tamora’s both like studious and cautious and baby peyton’s tired of everyone running around trying to fight demons like what about normal life irl and stuff so i think tamora would definitely like tutor baby peyton this that and the other and so like phoebe really has like a sense of respect for tamora and tamora likes being over at phoebe’s y’know it’s not like peyton’s some snot nosed kid it’s fun she likes the vibes

kat has an appreciation for phoebe bc she definitely knows phoebe had a hand in helping her mom let go of her y’know that being said it’s not like she loves to spend time with phoebe phoebe’s both an empath and paige’s sister so like she knows that anything of note’s gonna be passed onto her mom (which isn’t like. entirely true. but it is kinda true). if kat’s gonna hang out with an empath she wants it to be one on her side so she’ll always pick melinda

henry jr okay so phoebe’s actually the opposite with henry it’s kinda like her and paige swapped places here bc paige trusts her son she knows he’s really well versed in magic blah blah blah and that he’s got y’know. common sense. he’s not gonna run into some situation half cocked and get himself killed he’s aware of his mortality. phoebe on the other hand did not raise henry so she doesn’t get him the way paige gets him; a large part of her free range ideology is the fact that her kids are basically little power loaded god their charmed and as an added boost they’re also half cupid they’ve been raised in the craft they’re insanely well trained so like. she knows that they’re capable. henry does not have their advantages. so i think phoebe really tries to hold him back isn’t quite the right word but like. it kind is. she doesn’t want him doing anything magical.

pj’s in the 07 baby squad even though she’d at the younger end of the scale so she was a grade behind mellie kat and tam but that little barbershop quartet’s p tight knit i don’t think she has like insane exposure to paige as i think cupids and whitelighter work very differently like at the most basic magical level and therefore paige’s halfling experience really doesn’t do that much to help her i think she likes paige alright but like. it’s nothing compared to like wyatt relationship with paige

parker always like runs towards danger she’s got an insane amount of energy and like a fire within her i think she’s always trying to push boundaries and break the rules eg with her cupid ring becoming an athame i don’t think she straight up asked paige bc like parker definitely views all adults as narcs but with this of that ilk parker bounces questions off paige which paige just always answers like really honestly like if parker asks a question that’s like really complex and strange paige won’t give her a roundabout answer she’ll just tell her what’s up and for that parker respects paige

peyton i think sees paige the most through tam i think she likes paige i think she’s definitely privy of the whole paige/kat situation bc like who is the family isn’t but i think she really kinda takes paige’s side her peyton thinks the real worlds insanely dangerous she doesn’t like looking for trouble and her heart lowkey goes out to paige bc she knows the whole thing with kat is a matter of love it’s just something that’s hard to work with

#wallah #next gen #charmed #charmed next generation #phoebe halliwell #paige matthews #💌 #margaretsminiessays #wyatt halliwell #chris halliwell #melinda halliwell #tamora mitchell #kat mitchell #henry mitchell jr #pj halliwell #parker halliwell #peyton halliwell

[snarkwrites]

08 | gangsta ; sweet pea

Notes:

SO.. I uhh... Got super into writing this recently. I just really liked where it was heading after part 7. Yes. Yes, I realize that literally no one asked for more of this but.. I wrote it. Might as well share it.

I need to amend what I said about this being non canon compliant. It does mention things that happen in canon. Some of them even.. Happen. But differently. And a little out of order as I saw they fit into my own personal timeline. Also.. I’m gonna throw in some totally of my own creation stuff into here as well. I don’t exactly know what all that’ll be yet, but.. Yeah.

This is the first of four parts I have already written and waiting to go. I know, I know.. Literally no one asked for this. But you’re getting it anyway.

Warnings:

non canon compliant - this is the biggest warning, so if you’re into things that follow exact canon plot you are… definitely not going to like this. angst & slow burn, heavy sexual tensionstarting now, actually - this is just so everyone who started reading this thinking the smut would transpire in a hurry knows that apparently, it is not. violence / swearing & fighting, possible underage drinking and other shenanigans- look.. it’s high school. shit happens. also apparently, my ofc Alyssa uses the word fuck like all the time?…eventual sexual content / a virgin original character- this one is self explanatory. yes, i plan to write a smutty chapter in this at some point. when? i don’t rightly know. it’s got a while before we get there.

Pairing:

Andrews!Sibling OFC, Alyssa x Sweet Pea

Other Parts:

[ one - two - three - four - five - six - seven -  soundtrack ]

Other Stuff:

[ faq - tag list doc ]

Tagging:

@brithedemonspawn​ is the only person on my Riverdale tag list. If you’d like to be tagged for this story by all means.. Please let me know. Please, I beg. It’d make me super duper happy!!!

                                             EIGHT.

“ Al?”

I turned down my radio and strained to hear. It almost sounded like Polly calling my name from the bottom of the stairs. I wandered over to my bedroom door, peeking out. Polly stood at the foot of the stairs, holding her twins on each hip. A smile played at my lips and I bounded down the stairs, launching myself into a careful hug. Fussing over the twins because I’d been dying to see them since the night Polly added me on Snapchat before everything went down the way it did.

She’d sent me a message that night, telling me she was pregnant and that she and Jason were leaving. She’d been planning to swing through Chicago with Jason and visit, on their way to wherever it was they’d planned to go. When it never happened and I didn’t hear from her again, I’d been worried for a while.

Then Betty realized that she’d been keeping in touch with me over Snapchat right after she went missing and she’d messaged me, asking if I’d seen Polly. When I told her I hadn’t and asked what was going on, she’d filled me in on everything.. Jason’s death and Polly’s fight with their parents and then Polly running away.

The rest filled itself in when I moved back in with my dad, for the most part. I found myself trying to stick close to Cheryl, because I knew she was taking it really hard. Because Jason had been like the third of us. Honestly, it hit me pretty hard too when I found out. Especially when Cheryl did that thing she always fucking does and tried to push me away. Tried to deal with it herself.

I’d given myself over to the thought Polly wasn’t ever going to return to Riverdale, so I was a little shocked that she was here. And staying under the same roof as her mom again.

“The last thing Betty told me was that you were living on a farm. I bet that was peaceful.” I stretched and smiled at her. Just imagining the lazy days that probably stretched on and on. The slow and quiet life.

Polly smiled, nodding. “I learned so much there.”

I nodded. “What was it like?”

We moved to sit on the couch and Polly began to tell me what she’d been up to. I listened, nodding and smiling. But the entire time she described this place, God help me, I found myself getting flashbacks to the true crime podcast I’d listened to about the Jonesboro cult. Or the Davidians from Waco.

I mean… it sounded harmless enough, but everything she told me about the place just made me think less of a commune and more of a cult type setting. And that had me worried.

The front door was being pounded on. When I heard Reggie calling my name through it, I grumbled. Polly gazed at the door and then at me. Smirking. “No way! I always thought you and Reggie would be cute together!”

“Whoa.. Let’s not get all happy.” I shook my head, frowning a little. Telling her in detail what actually happened and that we were broken up. She shook her head, frowning. “That’s a jerk move. Betty told me you were on the Vixens now?”

“Yeah. You know Cheryl. She’s always had a way of talking me right into shit I normally wouldn’t do. And Riverdale High didn’t exactly have a gymnastics team like my old school in Chicago, so I decided rather than go rusty and lose my edge, I’d join.” I shrugged, laughing and shaking my head. “It’s not so bad, I guess.”

She nodded to my outfit for the day. Ripped jeans, a Motley Crue t shirt and my favorite boots, my dad’s old plaid shirt. “You mean the other Vixens haven’t read you for filth for daring non conformity?”

“ Oh, there’s this one girl I’m dying to get my hands on when we do that powderpuff football game on Friday, but other than her, nobody really seems to care or notice? I’m just kinda.. There. Which believe me… is totally fine with me.” 

I bent down to pick up Dagwood so that Polly could feed Juniper because she was crying. Adjusting Dagwood to my hip, I made my way over to the door, throwing it open. Scowling up at Reggie, who was leaning against a porch post.

His gaze softened when he glanced at me. I bit my lip. Taking a deep breath to keep my patience. I knew he was hurting. I knew it was also totally his fault. But I was trying not to be mean.

“What do you want?”

“Are you seriously dating that fucking guy now? Princess, he’s only going to hurt you.”

“No worse than you already have. But no.. No Reggie, I’m not dating Sweet Pea. I just fell asleep in Mr. Keaton’s class and I happened to wind up leaning against the guy. Kind of happens when I stay up until 3 watching the Saw movies.”

He looked as if he didn’t believe a thing I said. I shrugged because honestly, I didn’t care if he believed me or not. Shifting Dagwood from one hip to the other. Bouncing him a little, giving a soft laugh when he grinned up at me. And raised his little hand to try and grab a handful of the ends of my hair.

“ That guy is bad news, princess. If I have to, I’ll talk to your dad. Anything if it means keepin you from gettin seriously hurt. Or worse, put in danger.”

“Reggie, you need to go.” I rolled my eyes. “I should get back inside. Get Dagwood back to his mommy.”

Reggie was giving me this soft look again. Nodding. Like he was lost in thought. I snapped my fingers in his face and cleared my throat. “You need to go, Reggie. I’m not kidding. The more you pop up and try to force me to deal with this, the less it makes me want to, okay? I need space. Time.”

“It’s just so hard, princess. Then I see you around with him and damn it, I hate the way I acted and the fact that I ruined everything.” Reggie admitted quietly. I nodded. “Just give me space.”

“I’ll try.” he promised, turning, walking down my porch steps. From the doorway, Polly spoke up.

“Sweet Pea.. He’s a Serpent, right? Jason mentioned him once or twice.” Polly asked as she reached out for Dagwood and gave me Juniper to hold.

I settled Juniper on my hip and gazed at Reggie’s retreating back. Sighing and shaking my head sadly. I just wish he’d understand that the more he tries to force himself on me right now, the less I want to deal with everything. And I don’t want to lose a friend.

I diverted my gaze and turned to face Polly, nodding. “Yeah. I got paired with him in Biology. It’s been interesting, to say the least.” I sank down to sit on a bench my father built, laughing as I shook my head. Cooing at Juniper. 

Polly cleared her throat. “Out with it, Alyssa Jean. I know that look too well, okay? And as your friend, I need to tell you now that the Serpents aren’t people you mess around with lightly. Not to mention, that whole thing with that guy Dave you had going in Chicago. The scary guy? The reason your mom freaked out and sent you here to live in the first place, most likely?”

“It’s nothing. It’s dumb.” I shook my head. Shifting Juniper around in my lap. Bouncing my legs a little to make her grin and reach up. “Dave was scary. And I’m starting to see that my mom did a good thing sending me here. I’m just glad he hasn’t tried to reach out to me.” I shivered a little, raising a hand to drag it through my hair. Gazing at Polly.

“The Serpents aren’t all bad.” I spoke up after a few seconds.

“Al, half of them already have rap sheets. I just don’t want you getting mixed up with them and getting hurt. Promise me you’ll at least give anything you’re thinking a lot of thought instead of just diving in and doing it?” Polly eyed me in concern. Mostly to appease her, I nodded.

“As far as Reggie.. I think he really regrets what he did.” Polly advised. Giving me a smile. Clearly trying to steer me in a particular direction. I know she was doing it with the best of intentions, but deep down, it struck a nerve or two. Because literally anyone I could think of save for Cheryl and Toni, they all seemed hell bent on steering me clear of Sweet Pea. Which was ironic, considering I really don’t see him ever even giving me a second look. Even more ironic when you stop to consider that it’s not like I’m openly throwing myself at the guy...Or that I’ve pretty much made up my mind that if I do feel anything for him, I can’t ever actually tell him, because it will ruin everything.

I opened my mouth to say something, but I decided against it. Polly gave me a soft smile, getting a dreamy look in her eyes as she spoke again. “The look he was giving you just now, Al.. If you gave him half a chance… you could be as happy as Jason and I were. Or as happy as I was raising my sweet angels at the Farm. You should come to a meeting with me.”

I shook my head quickly to that one. “I am.. Not into organized religion. I barely go to the services at the church here unless my dad really wants me to go with him. Besides.. We both know that I got up to enough sketchy stuff in Chicago that if I were to step foot in a religious building, lightning might just strike me down.”

“You weren’t that bad, Al. Everyone makes mistakes.” Polly laughed softly. Nodding to her twins as she mused, “Which one of us got knocked up, hm? And we both know how fast that gets you written off here.”

“ I know I wasn’t that bad, but also at the same time, it scares me now to think back and remember how much fun I had when I was in over my head, doing things I knew I shouldn’t ? As far as you getting pregnant and what this town thinks about it. Honestly, fuck ‘em. You and Jason were really in love. That’s what matters.” 

“We really were. But it was hard.” Polly admitted quietly. Adding as an afterthought, “ I really miss him sometimes.”

“Yeah. Me too. Pretty sure he’d have helped Archie drill Reggie’s head into the floor when it got around exactly why Reggie was even dating me to begin with. It was ridiculous. Took Jughead and Kevin to pull the two apart.” I gave a quiet laugh, shaking my head. 

Alice was calling for Polly and Polly grumbled, raising up to peek out the window. “I better go over there and see what she wants. I wanted to come over. Maybe I can come by again later or something?” Polly asked as she gathered Juniper and Dagwood, re-swaddling them against her. I smiled, nodding. Following her to my door, letting her out and locking the door again behind me once I saw her disappear inside her parents house.

XXX

“They’re going to tear down South Side.”

The words had Sweet Pea tensing because it was just another thing he’d be losing. It wasn’t enough apparently, that he was living in the Wyrm because he had nowhere else to go. He didn’t have family willing to take him. His mother hadn’t spoken to any of them in years. He barely saw his mother as it was, she’d come home for a day, a week tops and then she’d be gone again.

He gazed over at Fangs, processing what Fangs was telling him. “First it was closing the school down. Then it was our homes. What next, huh? What else do we have to get taken?”

Jughead wandered into the Wyrm and Sweet Pea scowled a little. It didn’t matter how much Jughead was trying to do for the gang, what he was accomplishing was the opposite of what needed to happen. “The fuck is he doing here?” Sweet Pea nodded to Jughead.

“He’s one of us, man.” Fangs reminded Sweet Pea. Glancing at Jughead as Jughead made his way over. He’d probably just heard the news about South Side High too. Though Fangs didn’t see why it mattered

“Only because of FP. Cherry’s more one of us than he is. I still say the second we’re not useful he’s going to bitch out and turn his back.”  Sweet Pea grumbled.

Fangs chuckled, shaking his head. Sweet Pea hadn’t ever made a secret how he felt about Jughead. And he certainly hadn’t taken it easy on the guy when they initiated him into the Serpents not so long ago, either.

Jughead sat down next to where Fangs was standing, grabbing himself a drink from behind the counter and pulling the tab. Taking a long sip.

“We have to do something. They’re taking everything from us.” Jughead spoke up angrily.

“I’d like to point out they’re your friends.” Sweet Pea spoke up, a harsh tone as he glanced over at Jughead.

“I’d like to point out that we all know you have a thing for one of them. If you’re going to sit there and pin this on the North Side like usual, I mean. At least own up to that.” Jughead retorted, watching Sweet Pea’s fists clench and his face twist into an angry mask. Trying to keep himself from laughing as it happened.

Sweet Pea having feelings for Alyssa wasn’t quite as well hidden as the guy thought.

The only one who didn’t seem to be aware of it was Alyssa herself. It amused Jughead.

It did not amuse Alyssa’s brother.

And the two had already had several heated conversations about him hanging around Alyssa so much that Jughead had to intervene on more than one occasion.

“I keep telling you idiots I don’t. I’d trust her before I would you, Jones. If we’re going there.” Sweet Pea muttered.

“Whatever you say, Pea. Can we stop arguin? Maybe start thinkin about what the fuck we’re gonna do?” Fangs patted his friend on the shoulder and Sweet Pea glared up at him.

“A hunger strike. We chain ourselves to the school. They can’t demolish it if we’re not moving.” Jughead suggested.

Fangs and Sweet Pea shared a look. Neither were sure their idea would work. But maybe it could buy them some time. Or get attention to the issues at hand… The more attention they drew to the fact that certain people were trying to use their money to completely run an entire neighborhood out of town, the better their case.

“That’s not the worst idea.”

“I hate what I’m about to say.” Sweet Pea paused, grimacing as he added, “It’s not. It’ll get attention on what’s happening. I hated saying that, fuck.” 

“Let me go talk to the others. We’ll reconvene at 9 tonight?”

Fangs and Sweet Pea nodded and Jughead went to talk to some of the other Serpents.

“That killed you, didn’t it buddy?” Fangs teased Sweet Pea.

“Fuck you, Fogarty.” Sweet Pea snapped, grumbling to himself. “Doing somethin is better than just sitting back and lettin them take everything, I guess.” 

And at 9:30 pm that night, Jughead, Fangs, Sweet Pea and Toni as well as several other former South Side students met at their old school. Chaining themselves to the fence in protest.

#sweetpea fanfiction #sweetpea fanfic #sweetpea fic #sweetpea imagine #sweetpea imagines #my writing ; sweetpea #my fanfiction; sweetpea #my fics; sweetpea

[vocalfriespod]

Bilingualism is. It just is. Transcript

Megan Figueroa: Hi, and welcome to the Vocal Fries podcast, a podcast about linguistic discrimination.

Carrie Gillon: I’m Carrie Gillon.

Megan Figueroa: I’m Megan Figueroa. How you doing there, Carrie?

Carrie Gillon: Better today. Yesterday was rough. I mean, I’m pretty convinced that I have COVID, even though I have not been tested because I’m not sick enough to get tested. I don’t wanna walk around and infect other people unless I absolutely have to go to the hospital.

Megan Figueroa: Right.

Carrie Gillon: It’s been pretty mild. Then, yesterday, you and I had this awesome conversation with two guests – it’s gonna be in six weeks, probably – and it was an amazing conversation. But then afterwards I had lunch and then I just crashed, and I got much sicker, and I’m like, “Ugh!”

Megan Figueroa: You exert yourself and then there you go and get it.

Carrie Gillon: And exerting myself was just conversation. It’s just – oh, man. It just depressed me.

Megan Figueroa: I know. I have heard that a lot of people, they describe not being able to do any sort of task because it’s just too much. I’m like, “Oof.” I mean, that kind of sounds like the flu but in the way that people are describing it, it sounds like nothing I’ve ever experienced.

Carrie Gillon: For me, whatever this is, it is not the flu because all it did at first was just attack my lungs. I felt like they were on fire. Then, it was just more tight and I had some fatigue but not like flu fatigue. It’s just – I dunno. It’s very different.

Megan Figueroa: Yeah.

Carrie Gillon: Anyway, in better news, we have an email from, let’s see, I think it’s /silʌm/. So, “Hi. Big fan of the podcast. I was actually planning to send a message just last week to ask if you had any plans to do an episode about names, so I was really excited when I saw the title of the newest episode.” By the way, we got this email a while ago, and I meant to read it on the last episode and just plum forgot. That’s why it’s a little bit delayed.

“They’re something I’ve always been interested in and I wanted to share some things about my name(s) in case you found it interesting. I’m Chinese Canadian, Cantonese and Hakka specifically, and like many others, I grew up with a ‘Western name’ that I used in everyday life and Chinese ones that I use with my family. My name is pronounced super differently in Mandarin, Cantonese, and Hakka.” I’m not even gonna try because it involves tones and I really suck at tones. Anyway, there’s three different pronunciations.

“I’d been thinking about ditching the Western name for a while, especially since coming out as agender, since it’s very gendered and my Chinese name is gender neutral. I was hesitant because I didn’t know which Chinese name to use and I wasn’t really used to hearing non-Chinese speakers pronounce any of them. It’s a bit silly but seeing Hasan Minhaj correct everyone’s pronunciation of his name and seeing people reacting” – I think – “positively to that gave me a confidence boost and I’ve been using my Cantonese name full time for most of the last year. People have been pretty good about pronouncing it, although it took me a while to get used to hearing it without the tones.” Exactly! We’re not good at tones most of us who –

Megan Figueroa: Who didn’t grow up with it.

Carrie Gillon: Yeah, especially each tonal language is different too, right, so even if you speak a tonal language, you’re still gonna have to learn a whole new system. However, if you don’t grow up with it at all, it’s just really hard. “I went back and forth on the spelling between S-E-E and S-I for the first syllable and L-A-M and L-U-M for the second, but I think I’ve ultimately settled on S-I-L-U-M, although I’ve only been using this spelling for a couple months so I’ll let you know if I change it.” It’s fun. I love it.

Megan Figueroa: Oh, my gosh. I feel so happy that someone would share that with us. Thank you so much.

Carrie Gillon: There’s a lot more, but I think that’s the gist of it. That’s really great! We need to talk to people who are speakers of any of the Chinese languages. Silum mentions, for example, that people often haven’t heard of Hakka before, which is true. Most people haven’t. I only have because I’m a linguist.

Megan Figueroa: Right. And I haven’t at all and I’m a linguist.

Carrie Gillon: I’m also from an area with a lot more – I don’t know if this person is from Vancouver area, but there’s a lot of people from China in the Vancouver area. You do encounter more things. But they mention a language that I have never heard of before – Teochew? I’m not even sure how to pronounce it. There’s lot of Chinese languages and we’d love to talk with them.

Megan Figueroa: Yes. We wanna talk to everyone.

Carrie Gillon: There’s too many things.

Megan Figueroa: Consider this your invitation if people wanna reach out because there’re so many areas that we have not yet touched at all. Again, another reason why I feel so happy that they would share that with us because, yeah, learned a few things and then I get to hear something very personal about a listener. Awesome. That name episode was fun. It’s good to think back onto to it.

Carrie Gillon: Yes.

Megan Figueroa: Speaking of names –

Carrie Gillon: Ugh! Oh, god.

Megan Figueroa: I know. I mean, I hate to say it out loud to give it any sort of –

Carrie Gillon: I know, but you have to say it out loud to address it, sadly.

Megan Figueroa: So, “Chinese Virus” – [sighs] words matter.

Carrie Gillon: My favorite thing is that he’s like, “Well, we call it ‘Lyme Disease’” – how many people know that Lyme is a place?

Megan Figueroa: Yeah, I didn’t know that. Although, I knew “Lyme” wasn’t spelled like limes that you eat, but I’ve never really looked into why it’s L-Y-M-E.

Carrie Gillon: I’m certain about a decade ago I found out that there was a town called “Lyme,” and then I promptly forgot because that’s how little that matters. “Ebola” also is named after a location. But, note, it’s not an entire country in either of these cases. It’s not “US Disease.” It’s not – I dunno which part of Africa; I don’t remember – “Sierra Leone Disease” or something. It’s not an entire country, it’s just one location, which is maybe still problematic. I don’t know. But we don’t have the same racial associations at least. So, no, Trump, you’re wrong.

Megan Figueroa: And any person that wasn’t just a raging racist would see what was happening. There are literal hate crimes – physical hate crimes, verbal – all of these hate crimes that are being committed against people that others perceive to be Chinese. I’m sure they’re not even very discriminatory on this at all.

Carrie Gillon: No. Basically any East Asian or someone of East Asian descent. That’s all. They don’t know what a Chinese person looks like versus a Japanese person versus Korean.

Megan Figueroa: Any person that actually cared would step it back, but we all know he doesn’t.

Carrie Gillon: He has stopped – shockingly, he did stop call –

Megan Figueroa: Did he?

Carrie Gillon: Yes. He has stopped calling it the “Chinese Virus.” I don’t know why. I think maybe – he said something like, “Oh, it’s not okay to hurt Asian people” or something like that. Ever since then, he hasn’t used it. I’m pretty sure – unless he’s reintroduced it. But he definitely stopped.

Megan Figueroa: Well, who knows why, but the damage has been done because all of his little minions – supporters – are calling it the “Chinese Virus.” That’s not okay. I don’t know why anyone would feel like that’s okay.

Carrie Gillon: Because they’re racist. I mean, it’s not even a question!

Megan Figueroa: I know.

Carrie Gillon: I mean, as bad as that is, there’s actually something that’s even worse, in my opinion. Some people are calling it the “Kung Flu.”

Megan Figueroa: Oh, god.

Carrie Gillon: Yeah. It’s so gross, it makes my skin crawl.

Megan Figueroa: I haven’t heard that.

Carrie Gillon: Well, I haven’t actually heard it. I’ve only read it. But it’s definitely on Twitter, although less so recently. Around the time Trump was saying “Chinese Virus” all the time that was coming up a lot.

Megan Figueroa: Oh, my god.

Carrie Gillon: People are gross.

Megan Figueroa: People are gross. Words matter. That’s racist.

Carrie Gillon: We already have a name for it – COVID-19 or SARS-CoV-2, which is such a mouthful. “COVID” is better, in my opinion. Don’t, obviously – who among our listeners are gonna be calling it the “Chinese Virus”? Nobody. I don’t know what we’re –

Megan Figueroa: We’re just rage venting. Make sure to call people out if you do see it. It’s fucking racist. It’s gross. It implies that somehow some people are more susceptible or – there’s so many implications in calling it the “Chinese Virus” that are so –

Carrie Gillon: Blaming. It’s basically blaming all of Chinese people for a virus that comes from bats. Nobody got it on purpose. No one spread it on purpose. It’s just a thing that happens because we live in proximity to animals and sometimes animal viruses jump to humans. Sometimes, they mutate and then go human to human. It’s nobody’s fault.

Megan Figueroa: It’s definitely a blaming thing.

Carrie Gillon: Anyway, please – [Laughter]

Megan Figueroa: Let’s take a break from COVID-19 for a minute. Got a very special episode today. I talk with Drs. Jonathan Rosa and Nelson Flores. It was an amazing chat.

Carrie Gillon: It was pretty fun. And I wasn’t in this conversation because you guys were gonna talk about Latinx, and then you didn’t talk about it!

Megan Figueroa: I know.

Carrie Gillon: I could’ve been part of this conversation.

Megan Figueroa: I know. I’m so sorry! [Laughter] I thought we were gonna get – yeah. But, yes, you would’ve enjoyed being there, I’m sure. So, I’m sorry about that.

Carrie Gillon: It’s all right. It was very long, so I ended up cutting out a significant portion, which we are going to put in our bonus episode this month.

Megan Figueroa: Yes!

Carrie Gillon: If you wanna get access to that, and you don’t already have access, then you can join us at patreon.com/vocalfriespod at the $5.00 level.

Megan Figueroa: We forgot to say it at the end, so don’t be an asshole.

Carrie Gillon: Oh, yeah! That is true. Definitely. Definitely do not be an asshole.

[Music]

Megan Figueroa: We have Dr. Nelson Flores, who is an associate professor of educational linguistics, and we got a title change over here. We have Dr. Jonathan Rosa, who is now an associate professor because you were an assistant last time we chatted. That’s exciting.

Jonathan Rosa: Yes. I was recently promoted. I mean, now, technically, as to whether the promotion takes place in a couple of months – you know but maybe by the time the episode airs. But, yeah, it’s more or less a for sure –

Megan Figueroa: Okay. Nelson’s at Penn and Jonathan is over at Stanford. But you’re on sabbatical in Chicago right now, right?

Jonathan Rosa: I was in Chicago. Now, I am traveling for conferences and other things, so I’m actually here in the multilingual bastion of Miami – the fraught, let’s say, multilingual space of Miami.

Megan Figueroa: The theme of this almost could be misconceptions because both ya’ll are talking, that means there’s two of you. I think a lot of people didn’t know there were two of you. I feel like a lot of people think that either you’re one person, which is what I’ve seen on the internet, confusing ya’ll. And you said “married” or also “related” you’ve gotten too?

Nelson Flores: Yeah. I don’t think people know what to make of us. I think part of it is that we both have flower last names, and so people get the “Flores” and the “Rosa” confused. I’ve gotten “Nelson Rosa.” I know that Jonathan has gotten “Jonathan Flores.” I don’t think people know what to make of us sometimes because, of course, we’ve very close. We clearly have a lot of love for each other. But we’re also queer, and so I think people are kind of like, “There must be some type of marriage or something.” Just to clarify, we’re not married.

Megan Figueroa: Could it just be a marriage of ideas and love?

Nelson Flores: I mean, we’re academically married, I suppose, but not married in the heteronormative ways that people oftentimes mean it.

Jonathan Rosa: Let me say one thing about Nelson’s and my presumed inter-changeability, or perhaps a couple of things about it. In one sense, I think this is a very common phenomenon that happens with marginalized populations where people who are marked in particular ways based on race, gender, and sexuality, especially, there’s this sense that you’re all the same and you all could be a spokesperson for whatever set of ideas.

I guess, if I’m being generous, then I would say, “Oh, well, maybe because there are so few of us or because we’ve been positioned as the spokespeople for particular kinds of stances or ideas that we get equated with one another.” My much less generous take on this is that it demonstrates the ways that we get recruited to enact or inhabit these tokenized positions where, essentially, the kinds of contributions that we could make are already predetermined and the question is which of us is needed to make that contribution on which day at which time – this sort of thing.

I think it’s a very troublesome situation. It happens with a whole range of colleagues where we get equated with one another and the sense is just that we could all be one another – any distinctive contributions we might make. That has concrete kinds of consequences in one’s professional life but also in terms of broader political struggles. Professionally, when so much of what we’re up to – or the assessment of what we’re up to – is based on whether you’ve made a unique contribution and you’re equated with someone else constantly, then that can be tricky.

But on a much – I don’t wanna frame academics as the most marginalized or something like that or I don’t wanna say that the goal, then, is to secure the individuality of our contributions. It’s more politically that I’m interested in the ways that our contributions to the world or the kinds of struggles in which we could engage are really narrowly defined and constrained and that this equation of us or interchangeability is a reflection of that.

Megan Figueroa: I’m not even in ya’ll’s field and – because I’ve kind of gotten a little bit of a platform now speaking about these things, but I’m speaking about them personally, so I don’t study it in the way that you do – that I’m often included now when people @ you on Twitter. They’ll put me now, too. I love to talk about these things when it’s right for it, and if I’m emotionally available for it, but I noticed that ya’ll might not always be emotionally available for that and you get dragged into it a lot – “dragged.” I say “dragged.” But a lot of times it might feel like that, right?

Nelson Flores: I mean, I think Twitter in particular is an interesting platform. I mean, clearly, I love Twitter. I mean, it’s connected me to people like you, Megan, who I didn’t know before I was on Twitter. It’s connected me to a lot of interesting people, and I’ve learned a lot off of Twitter. At the same time, I think sometimes people take Twitter way more serious than maybe it’s intended to be. There’s this – like, I just write a tweet that’s kind of like an off the cuff tweet, and then people are like, “Send me 10 references to what you just said so that I can read up on it.”

And it’s like, “Well, you know, I’m not in class right now. I’m just writing some tweets.” If you wanna learn more about it, you can certainly google and do some of that work for yourself, but I don’t know if – almost coming from a sense of entitlement in terms of like, “You need to teach me this because your tweet made me uncomfortable. So, you need to further clarify what you mean so that maybe I can feel a little less uncomfortable with what you just said.”

I don’t think that that’s always coming from a bad place. I think people sometimes feel uncomfortable and they wanna know more. I just don’t know if Twitter is actually the best venue for doing that. Maybe they need to do some of the work for themselves rather than expecting people on Twitter to do extra labor and getting them to really understand things that maybe they really need to do the work for on their own.

Megan Figueroa: How does that play out for you in your job as a professor or as an academic that travels to conferences? Are you asked to do a lot of that emotional labor for people when it comes to Latinx issues?

Jonathan Rosa: Well, it’s interesting. I mean, I think that it requires us to do a lot of careful, strategic engagement where you say – yeah, there are invitations that ask you to represent a certain perspective or recruit you to represent a certain perspective. There’re also efforts to invite you to participate in mentoring activities that are based on a presumed shared experience. There’re some of these efforts that feel really substantive and meaningful where you say, “Okay, wait. There’s something that I have to say here that I think contributes to this dialogue or contributes to this bigger project.”

There’re other moments when you say, “Oh, they just want someone else to read the script. They just need another person to read the same script. Am I just gonna be that person today?” I’ll never forget when one of my mentors, Melissa Harris-Perry, who used to have her show on MSNBC, when she was leaving MSNBC based on some fraught relationships there, I’ll never forget when she was very public about saying that she was not going to be anyone’s little brown bobblehead. She was not going to be this ornamental piece and really an object.

I think that that’s the part that’s deeply concerning in some situations where you become an object, and you don’t have anything to say. The on-demand part of it is also tricky because I think we want to make meaningful contributions and we want to engage with publics, but there’s an accessibility issue that could be complex to navigate as well where you’re on the clock or on call or you’re expected to be the go-to person on such and such issue.

I found that has happened to me in certain situations as well where the expectation is that anything related to any language and identity issue I should just speak to casually. I worry. In some situations, some of my ideas about these topics – and this is why I appreciate Nelson’s comments about Twitter. Sometimes, I just wanna be irreverent. Sometimes, I just wanna make a joke about language.

I mean, I said it after the Joe Biden landslide victory on Super Tuesday that one of the things that’s most interesting to me about his success there is it demonstrates how irrelevant language is in some situations because, from many people’s perspectives, he’s been more or less incoherent in a range of situations. Yet, his incoherence has not prevented his political ascendance.

In some cases, I just wanna be flippant about language. And other moments, I’ve done a tremendous amount of research, and I wanna be careful, and I wanna weigh in on a debate in a nuanced way. But I think that the on-call part of things invites people to offer their opinion constantly as though they had carefully developed a serious perspective. In many situations, people haven’t developed that kind of a careful perspective and yet are asked to be the expert on something.

Megan Figueroa: Do you feel like there’s different work going into it when you’re being flippant? Because I feel like, sometimes, I’ll say something on Twitter or even around colleagues and I feel like it takes less emotional toll on me than if I really wanted to get into something. That’s why I feel like I really appreciate Twitter because, when I put something out there, I feel like I’m not actually having to do as much emotional work. I feel like I can get something quick out of there and then maybe someone will learn something.

But it always becomes more emotional. I had a tweet the other day that said – so this gets into the idea of semilingualism, which I wanna talk to ya’ll about. I said that that’s not a thing. You can’t have kids that end up in school and have low skill in both languages. That’s the idea of semilingualism. I wanna get into it with you. And someone retweeted me and was like, “I’d like to know what my language acquisition colleagues think.” And I’m like, “I’m a fucking language acquisition expert.”

I really sometimes wonder, “Oh, are they seeing my last name and all of a sudden I’m not taken as seriously because I’m too emotional about this?” I really, honestly, feel that sometimes. Do you have that happen as well?

Nelson Flores: I have been accused of being a bully.

Megan Figueroa: Which is so funny to me. You’re so kind. But, yes. [Laughs]

Nelson Flores: I think a lot of that stems from precisely my resistance to feel like I need to do the emotional labor of making people feel comfortable about what I’m saying. In particular, as a Latino scholar doing work in bilingual education, I’m particularly resistant to the idea that I need to make white people feel comfortable doing work in bilingual education. I put my work out there. I let it speak for itself. I certainly have never targeted anyone individually and personally insulted them, which is what bullying actually is, right? “Bullying” actually has an actual meaning.

As a gay person, I’ve experienced it personally as a gay person. I know what bullying is and I know that what I’m doing, which is working to dismantle white supremacy in how we think about issues in bilingualism, is not bullying anybody. I do think that there are these strong emotional reactions that people have to my work in both ways. I’ve also had people tell me that it’s given them a vocabulary for making sense of things that they kind of always knew didn’t make any sense and had visceral reactions against but really didn’t have a vocabulary for thinking about.

I mean, in the end, I think what it boils down to is that all researchers have emotional investment in the work that we do. It’s that people who are coming from marginalized positions, oftentimes, that emotional investment is marked in ways that it’s not marked for white researchers, but they also have an emotional investment, oftentimes, in whiteness and the objectivity that oftentimes ascribed to whiteness.

When that’s called into question, and the ways that Jonathan and I have called into question in our work, that oftentimes leads to strong visceral reactions. Oftentimes, people feel personally attacked when it’s really not a personal attack at all.

Megan Figueroa: Let’s ignore my sloppy definition. Will you tell me, Nelson, what semilingualism is?

Nelson Flores: Well, we can trace the discourses of semilingualism back to the origins of European colonialism. That’s something that Jonathan and I wrote about in our 2017 piece, which is essentially one of the primary mechanisms for dehumanizing indigenous populations, African populations, by calling into question their language practices and suggesting that their language practices were somehow illegitimate or subhuman.

Now, the concept of semilingualism itself emerges within the context of the Bilingual Education Act in the United States. It actually emerged originally in Scandinavia, but I’ll focus on the work in the United States. The term itself emerges in Scandinavia. Within the context of the Bilingual Education Act, which was passed in 1968, they were accountability metrics that had to be used to show that these programs were being successful. One of the things that they had to do was assess students to see if they were Spanish dominant or not because if they were not Spanish dominant, then they wouldn’t be eligible for most of these programs.

Some of these students were assessed and their assessment suggested that they were not proficient in either English or Spanish. The discourse that was developed by scholars at the time to make sense of that was to say that they were semilingual, that they didn’t have full competency in any language. That was quickly critiqued by other scholars who said you really can’t describe people that way. That’s not really a thing.

Then, the discourse shifted to the discussion of basic interpersonal communication skills, or social language, and cognitive academic language proficiency, or academic language. The discourse shifted towards they have BICS, or social language, but they don’t have CALP, or academic language. You can trace directly that discourse. I’m not making a leap there. Scholars who originally used the term “semilingualism” shifted towards a discussion of social and academic language.

Whenever we talk about social and academic language today, that’s really the legacy that we’ve inherited – a legacy of semilingualism, of suggesting that there’s something illegitimate about the language practices of racialized bilingual students.

Megan Figueroa: I just had a friend tell me that the latest TESOL conference, a major theme was semilingualism.

Nelson Flores: As a good thing or as a bad thing?

Megan Figueroa: I asked him. I said, “Were they debunking it?” although – even though we still have to debunk it in 2020. But he said, “No. I don’t think so.” He said that his friend was not happy.

Jonathan Rosa: Semilingualism. I think actually my experience with this conversation ties together the previous dialogue that we were just having about the ways that we’re positioned as ideological or overly emotionally invested in certain topics which then is presumed to distort our opinions on these topics. I was writing an article a few years ago that Nelson and I have been in conversation with about ideas related to semilingualism. I was writing about what I called, “ideologies of languagelessness,” that just framed certain populations as deficient in any language that they use. It’s not just certain populations. It’s racialized populations.

I think, for example, Nelson invoked the ways that the discourse of semilingualism emerged in Scandinavia. Part of what’s distinctive about how it gets enacted in the European context versus in the Americas and elsewhere is that it’s framed in the Americas as a highly racialized concept that maps onto a population across generations and is presumed to be somehow inherent to particular populations in ways that really articulate alongside race or in concert in with race.

This notion, for me, of an ideology of languagelessness is reflected in the ways that semilingualism is taken up in the United States, reflected in the ways that particular populations are framed as “non-nons” in the United States, or non-verbal in English and their so-called native language. “Linguistic isolation” is a category that was used by the census for about 30 years to designate certain households as lacking language altogether.

Megan Figueroa: That happens to real populations, too. That’s really offense. There’re deaf children that are actually experiencing language isolation, and yet this is where they’re using that.

Jonathan Rosa: It’s problematic in every direction. There’re people who are really being denied access to language learning and meaningful cultural opportunities that are mislabeled because of these sorts of stereotypes about isolation but also isolation in terms of the ways that it articulates in relation to policy. It’s messed up because it’s intended to serve as a tool for ensuring compliance with the voting rights act – to make sure that you have resources in languages other than English. You need to designate the number of households within a community that require those resources.

In order to access those resources in languages other than English, you have to be designated as “isolated” rather than designated as “using languages in addition to English.” I’ve found that these sorts of stereotypes map across a whole range of institutional contexts. In everyday discourse you hear people say, “So-and-So doesn’t speak English well. They don’t speak Spanish well.” In a school where I was working, the principal, who had a doctorate in education and was a Puerto Rican woman, one teacher said, “She speaks English like one of our ninth graders. From what I understand, her Spanish isn’t that good either.”

When I was writing about this, I said, “These are these ideologies of languagelessness that map onto people regardless of their credentials, regardless of what might seem to be their empirical linguistic practices.” The initial response to that article, when I tried to publish it, from reviewers was that I was ideological, that I was imposing an analysis onto these situations and imposing this idea, this attribution of deficiency that wasn’t really there. But for me, I was observing connections across all of these spaces.

I think that for scholars who are attentive to particular patterns of marginalization – that we’re drawing connections that aren’t observable from other perspectives and so we look like conspiracy theorists, or we look as though we’re over-generalizing, or over-applying, or over-reaching in our analyses when, in fact, I think part of what is so troublesome about normative social-scientific and scientific research more generally is that the kind of empiricism that it embraces recruits you to accept the world as it is and to naturalize that world and then to observe things in such a way that allows us to reproduce that world at the same time that we proport to just be noticing things that are happening within it.

For me, drawing connections across these patterns is essential to my critique of the way that this world has come to be structured. I’ve found that a lot of reviewers are unwilling or not inclined to engage in that kind of a critique.

Megan Figueroa: I had a moment of realization here too that that’s happening to me because I spent a lot of time in psychology because I did study psycholinguistics and do language development. It is fraught with really disgusting views of communities that they’ve marginalized. These are marginalized speakers and they’re always looking for disorder in some way.

I have a background, too, in speech and hearing so there are legitimate concerns to be had about children that do have language disorders, right, but that’s not what’s happening here. These are neurotypical hearing children that people are looking for a disorder at every turn and they’re finding it because it’s easy to find it when you’re looking – you’ll find evidence for anything that you’re looking for.

Every time I say something about this, I do feel like some people think I’m a conspiracy theorist and they’re saying – like, when I say, “Talk to your children however you want and however you feel comfortable with,” people think that that’s – they’re like, “We have all this evidence that suggest that some input is just not as good.” They really want that to live on.

Nelson Flores: Well, I think that connects back to the emotional investment in whiteness’s objectivity. I think that that really throws people off when we refuse to allow whiteness to be framed as objective. If your position is that these ways are better input because they’re more normative and they’re more aligned with whiteness, then say that. I would be okay with you. We would disagree, but at least you’re being honest with what your perspective is, what your ideological position is.

I always say – I own my ideological position. I own where I’m coming from, and I own my locus of annunciation. I just push other scholars to do the same thing. If you’re using discourses that come from the specter of semilingualism, then just own that ideological position and say what you’re essentially saying is that everyone should speak like a normative white person. That’s not progressive and that’s not liberal, so don’t pretend that you’re progressive or liberal if you’re actually promoting an agenda that supports white supremacy. At least don’t be disingenuous and try to proport that what you’re saying is some type of objective representation rather than an ideological one.

Megan Figueroa: Right. Exactly what they’re saying when they say, “No, there is a right way to speak to children,” is there is a white way to speak to children because that’s what we know of all of these studies on language development. I mean, I don’t know the exact number, but it’s in the 90% of – it’s been done on white, middle-class, suburban babies. Yeah. That’s one way of talking to children, but it’s not the only way. We are continually investing in speaking like white, middle-class parents when we say that these studies are basically how it should be for everyone. People don’t really like to hear that. You’re right. I’m realizing this now.

Sometimes, I still feel very naïve because I’m like, “Oh, well, they’ll just hear it once and then that’ll be enough,” like people will stop and reflect. That’s not what’s happening. I’m always a little bit surprised because I’m hoping that it just takes one moment of reflection and then you can start dismantling. We’re really invested in these things, in these ideas.

Nelson Flores: The challenge is that we continue to frame things as empirical questions that are really ideological questions. You can keep trying to disprove an ideology, but if it’s an ideology, it’s kind of, by definition, something that you can’t really disprove because people have really deeply ingrained investment in those beliefs. At this point, we’re not really having an empirical question.

I think, empirically, we have the data that shows that all communities have complex, rich language practices that they engage in, but people don’t believe it because they don’t wanna believe it because they have deep investment in these ideas that certain communities have more rich language practices than other communities. At that point, you can’t disprove white supremacy. If people are invested in white supremacy, then they’re gonna be invested in white supremacy. That’s the challenge that I think we’re trying to highlight in our work is what do we do in that context. How do we intervene in that context?

Jonathan Rosa: Part of, I think, what���s particularly challenging about this ideology is the way that it is associated with a liberal benevolence where the people who are perpetuating it are deeply invested in staking a claim to helping. They see themselves as really participating in projects that are progressive or even projects that are aimed toward social justice, this kind of thing. They really want to understand themselves as addressing the marginalized.

I think when Nelson was talking about having been called a bully in the past or this kind of thing, I think part of why some people are so off put is that even the remote suggestion that linguists – sociolinguists, linguistic anthropologists, applied linguists, psycholinguists – that we have, in fact, contributed to the problem. Many scholars want to understand themselves as the people who are solving problems, but I think one of the things Nelson and I – that brings us together in our work is our deep suspicion that many of the scholarly labels and categories and approaches have in fact emerged from the very systems of power that we’re trying to critique here.

I think we have a long way to go in terms of trying to unsettle some of these assumptions. I encounter this constantly, the sense – Ana Celia Zentella always says – a mentor of mine – always says, “The helping hand strikes again.” In so many of these situations, when we’re talking about bilingualism and multilingualism and standard language and academic language, just educational language learning, it’s the helping hand strikes again. It’s we wanna help the kids. We wanna help their families use more quality language with them. We wanna help them to become proficient users of such and such language.

I think when we keep pushing – and we always push – “What’s your theory of change? What is it that changes?” These families use language in this way, so this school institutionalizes language in this way to change these behaviors. Then, what happens? Then, people have access to a different world? Then, the structure of the economy transforms? Then, stable housing and living wages and political representation – then that emerges from language use? Or are we facing a fundamentally different kind of challenge? Should our critique, should our efforts towards promoting language learning and our engagement with language, be oriented towards those bigger challenges? Or should they be narrowly focused on changing people’s language practices in their homes, in classrooms – really changing the behaviors of the marginalized?

I think this so much of what Nelson and I have been trying to call into question – just fundamentally rethinking the project of educational language learning.

Megan Figueroa: We’re in the epicenter of funding for things like Closing the Word Gap. I’m like, if we spent that money towards universal housing or some sort of universal basic income, it would go way further than spending money on fucking trying to close the so-called word gap. But that’s where people wanna spend the money. That’s where funding agencies are funneling the money because, you’re right, they feel like they’re the helping hand that’s gonna fix the marginalized.

Another buzzword term that I wanted to bring up – “bilingual brain.” Jonathan, what is a bilingual brain?

Jonathan Rosa: It’s interesting. I was mentioning to both of you that I sometimes make flippant comments about these sorts of catchphrases. This notion of the bilingual brain, like the language gap or word gap, I’ve often had a knee-jerk reaction to it where I felt as though it were locating language within a cognitive system rather than within a historical and cultural system. To be clear, I’m really interested in the cognitive dimensions of language, but that’s not the primary focus of my research. It’s something that I’ve certainly studied and something that I respect research in this area.

However, sometimes, when I talk about it, I’m more concerned with the slogans, with the ways that it’s turned into this commodified project. As soon as it becomes a slogan, then very quickly we see which populations will benefit from that kind of a project of turning something into a commodity that you could achieve somehow. If this is a justice project, if part of what we’re up to is trying to address marginalization, then these notions of a bilingual brain, I don’t know how far that will get us.

Now, I was saying to you all that a colleague recently was pushing me on this to say, look, there’re different ways that that kind of notion has been developed within, say, psycholinguistics or within psychology of language versus, say, within neurolinguistics – neurolinguists who understand themselves to be more attuned to some of these cultural and historical issues and are not trying to promote the narrow view of what bilingualism is.

I will say I continue to be concerned, regardless of the meaningful work that people might be doing in these areas. I continue to be concerned abut the ways that “bilingualism” is defined and the ways that languages are separated from one another in order to reproduce this notion of bilingualism. I wonder what languages even count as legitimate in this research. When you’re staking claims to a bilingual brain, which languages are involved? Are they languages like Chatino that my close colleague Emiliana Cruz studies in Oaxaca in Guatemala? Which languages are we staking these claims to cognitive advancement based on?

That’s one piece of – yeah, just this notion of who is a legitimate bilingual such that we could study their brain. It frankly reminds me in my most – perhaps not my most critical take on it – but it reminds me of some of these genetic ancestry tests which proport to find race in your genes but, in fact, have to presume that race already lives in your genes in order to then find it there. If you understand race to be something historically constructed, then it doesn’t live in your genes.

Similarly, you have to presume that bilingualism lives primarily in the brain in order to then measure it – measure what it’s doing there. I think bilingualism lives between people not within people. My neurolinguistics colleagues were saying – the colleague who was pushing me on this – was sort of saying, “No, I understand brains to be across people not just within an individual” and that from the perspective of psychology, often, it's on that individual basis. So, I think that there are interesting debates to have. I continue to be concerned about the slogan though.

Nelson Flores: Of course, I agree with everything Jonathan is saying. This whole idea of a bilingual brain is still, from my opinion, coming from a monolingual perspective in the sense that most of the world is bi- or multilingual. Why are we exceptionalizing the, quote, “bilingual” brain instead of the quote, “monolingual” brain to begin with? Why aren’t we saying, “What are the unique cognitive traits of monolingual people who are the minority of the population?”

Maybe a bilingual brain is just a brain and it’s the monolingual brain that’s actually this weird thing that we need to study. Of course, I don’t actually believe that, but I feel like some of the discourse exceptionalizing bilingualism, when we reverse it and really think about, well, if we describe monolingualism in that way, that would be really strange. Yet, “bilingual” describes more of the world’s population than “monolingual.” What exactly are we doing there?

Of course, connecting to something Jonathan was saying before, the bilingual brain discourse, I would trace its origins to the classic Peal & Lambert study that found cognitive advantages to bilingualism. In that study, they threw out more than half of the sample because they weren’t appropriately monolingual or bilingual. From there on, we already inherited this idea of bilingualism that’s coming from a very normative idea of what bilingualism even is to begin with.

Then, I would add to that whenever we ask the question about whether bilingualism has cognitive advantages, it always opens up the question of whether there are disadvantages. It’s a slippery slope. If we’re willing to ask the question if there are advantages, then it opens up the question of whether there are disadvantages. I think that we shouldn’t do that. We should just say, “bilingualism is,” it just is. Most of the world is bilingual, multilingual, it’s just what human societies are. There are no advantages or disadvantages. It just is. We start from that perspective, and I think that would allow us to ask different questions about cognitive processes of language learning and whatnot.

Megan Figueroa: This is where we got ourselves into trouble because all of a sudden Pete, in all of these polls, people are saying that they think he’s the smartest and I really believe it’s tied to his so-called multilingualism. Then, you’re right that it’s so ideological because Spanish in Pete’s brain is beautiful and amazing, but in my father is somehow a deficit and they beat it out of him when he started school.

It was really frustrating to see that play out on the national stage. I’m like, “That’s what we’re doing” – a lot of academics are doing. We’re perpetuating this by asking these bilingual brain questions or what are the cognitive advantages. It always just seems to steer toward, okay, there’re cognitive advantages for people like Pete but, all of a sudden, it’s a disorder or deficit when it’s someone like my dad.

Nelson Flores: This is why, whenever people ask me to speak on my analysis of multilingualism and politicians, the first question that they wanna ask me is how good their Spanish is. I always say, “That’s actually not the question I’m interested in” because how good someone’s Spanish is is connected to the social status of that person. Whenever we begin to sort people into good Spanish speakers versus bad Spanish speakers, it’s always the most marginalized that are going to be most victimized and receive remediation for it.

I actually never – even though people insist that I do this all the time – I 1.) never evaluate the Spanish of white politicians and 2.) never say that they should never speak Spanish because 1.) I don’t have the power to tell them that they can’t. They can do whatever they want. They’re white. That’s kind of the definition of whiteness in the US. But I don’t think that that type of language policing is productive anyway. I’m more interested in how bilingualism is talked about differently depending on the race and social status position of people. That’s my primary focus in analyzing these things.

Yeah, Mayor Pete, people are like, “Wow! He speaks like a gazillion languages. Isn’t he so smart?” And I’m like, “Well, actually, you could go to many places in the world where people speak those gazillion languages, right, and they’re not positioned as smart in the same way.”

Jonathan Rosa: Part of what’s so striking to me about some of these popular discussions of language – whether we’re talking about Mayor Pete or if you’re talking about Donald Trump – if you’re talking about someone whose speech is seen as more sophisticated or more cognitively advanced and multilingual or you’re talking about someone whose language use from a liberal perspective is often derided as somehow non-grammatical or unintelligent, this kind of thing, that in each of those cases it seems to me again, as Nelson was saying – the discussions of language seem to miss the point in many situations. It’s less about language and more about a whole range of other issues that we’re not paying attention to.

These discussions about a particular politician – non-Latinx politician’s – use of Spanish in the United States often have nothing to do with what they’re actually saying in Spanish or communicating in Spanish. It’s more about the idea of Spanish that positions them somehow as a particular kind of person. As Nelson was saying, we get roped into playing the game when we start assessing how good their Spanish is and suggesting that, no, they should improve their Spanish. That’s not the point. The point is to ask why it is that, based on their position, this ends up being advantageous for them or seems to become framed as a benefit.

Similarly, with Donald Trump, I think a lot of the discussions about his language use miss the point fundamentally when people are saying, “Ugh! We need a more respectable, intelligent person in office.” Well, you’re totally missing the point. Donald Trump is a television show host and a celebrity and he’s very effective at those roles. His performance of being a buffoon in some situations or being a clown in some situations is very politically strategic just like George W. Bush was very politically strategic in his dissimulation in certain ways. He comes from –

Megan Figueroa: In his folksiness, right?

Jonathan Rosa: In his folksiness. He comes from an incredibly wealthy family with access to a range of educational opportunities and then plays off of this persona – an imagined folksy persona. I think we miss the point sometimes when we critique or celebrate language use. We’re not paying attention to the performance that’s happening. We should be thinking about what makes those performances possible, what makes them valuable, and what makes them strategically useful. Perhaps, we should be attacking that system rather than just focusing narrowly on language use.

Nelson Flores: I think that’s something that you were talking about. The idea of Spanish in liberal politicians is an interesting one because, oftentimes, I think Pete did this, and Joe Kennedy and Tim Kaine, where they use Spanish to directly speak to Dreamers, which is interesting because of course the whole narrative around Dreamers is that they grew up in this country and so their English is just fine. Of course, not all dreamers are Latinx and wouldn’t be expected to be Spanish-speaking anyway.

They’re not actually directly addressing Dreamers there. They’re directly addressing white liberals who feel good about themselves because a politician is bilingual. It’s not actually serving what would seem to be the explicit – what they’re saying explicitly is not actually what they’re communicating because they actually don’t need to communicate in Spanish with Dreamers. It actually doesn’t make sense because a lot of Dreamers wouldn’t understand what they were saying anyway. It’s just to show – look at me! I speak Spanish.

That’s where I say, “Well, you don’t get a cookie.” People took my “You don’t get a cookie” as to be like “White people shouldn’t speak Spanish.” It’s like, well, no. If they’re speaking to the Spanish language media and are trying to actually engage a Spanish-speaking audience, that’s great! But to randomly do it in a speech of people who are not Spanish-speaking, to an audience that you’re imaging is an audience of Spanish speakers who most of them probably – or many of them – are probably not Spanish speakers, then that’s disingenuous. That’s more you want the props for being bilingual rather than you’re using your bilingualism to actually communicate with a marginalized community who may actually benefit from knowing more about your policy positions.

Megan Figueroa: Well, I really appreciate both of you being here. I mean, I know it’s hard for you to see each other, I’m sure. I heard that you’ve never skyped together.

Nelson Flores: Yeah! We never skyped together. We text a lot, and I said – on occasion, we’ll talk on the phone if we set it up in advance. We put it on our calendars. But we do audio. I said we’re old millennials. We don’t do the FaceTime stuff. Oh, last thing. Something else that people confuse us. People think I’m an anthropologist because Jonathan is an anthropologist. Just to clear the record, I am not an anthropologist and I don’t really have any particular investment in contributing to the field of anthropology, though I find some of the frameworks helpful.

Megan Figueroa: Okay. Yes. [Laughter]

Nelson Flores: I mean, I get interpolated as an anthropologist a lot now. That’s only because of the collaboration with Jonathan.

Megan Figueroa: Or the fact that they just think you are Jonathan.

Nelson Flores: Right. I think that that’s – I mean, I’m not hating on anthropology. It’s just not my training, it’s not my discipline, and I don’t have any particular vested interest in that disciplinary perspective and its contributions.

Jonathan Rosa: We see you, Nelson. Welcome. [Laughter]

Nelson Flores: I haven’t gone to the dark side of linguistic anthropology.

Jonathan Rosa: We see you Nelson!

Megan Figueroa: Next time we chat in a year from now, you’re gonna be like –

Nelson Flores: I’m gonna be like Boas. Yes, Boas is my godfather.

Megan Figueroa: [Laughter] Well, thank you, again.

[Music]

Carrie Gillon: The Vocal Fries podcast is produced by me, Carrie Gillon, for Halftone Audio, theme music by Nick Granum. You can find us on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram @vocalfriespod. You can email us at [email protected] and our website is vocalfriespod.com.

#linguistics #linguistic discrimination #sociolinguistics #educational linguistics #Spanglish #transcript #anthropological linguistics

[friendshiptothemax]

Hey guys! Sorry for taking a while to get back to this! Spent time hanging out with my fam, but now I’m back. My episode party in LA was pretty sweet except that the grill caught on fire and we had to extinguish it out! My parents’ party in Texas was also awesome. My dad didn’t know I was coming, and when my best friend and I pulled up, he started to tease her for being early before he saw me and he got all choked up!! Also my high school creative writer came, and my dad’s best friend showed up in Red cosplay (and when we opened the door he was down on his knees facing away with his hands behind his head and said he’ll only talk with Elizabeth Keen, which was v. funny). An awesome episode weekend all around! I also loved the reception from you guys – I got a lot of really sweet comments from you that I really appreciated. You guys are the best!

Now a few little BTS details that I promised:

The thing I’m most proud of that made it into episode 618 is the Weepies song at the end. Something a lot of people know The Blacklist for is our music – JB loves to pick out the perfect songs for each episode. I put The Weepies in my very first draft and was delighted to see them make it all the way to the final cut – it’s actually quite a high honor from JB, that he likes my taste in music!

My other favorite thing is the Ms. Pac-Man stuff. When I started writing the outline, all that was written there from Aram when Ressler gives him the quarters is “What’s this?” I think Aram is a really fun character, and I wanted to give him something more distinct to say, so I put Aram saying he used to hold the high score in Ms. Pac-Man. What is really cool about that is the second part, at the end of the scene, where Ressler calls it back, was added by the Johns later. It was a fun “yes-and” – they saw my original joke, and they liked it enough to build on it! Even more flattering? They’ve shot a callback to it in another scene this season! I’ve created a part of Aram’s character, y’all!

So a few notes on the development of the episode. Typically, when lower-level writers/assistants pitch for the show, we don’t know the specifics of where the plot will be in that episode. We might know the general arc, but not exactly what the B/C/D stories in the episode will be, and I was no exception. My idea was specifically that there was a true-crime podcaster who was killing people to make it look like the crime was resurfacing. The seed of this idea was my love for this true crime explosion that’s going on right now (if you love Serial, Making a Murderer, the Keepers, etc, my go-to recommendation is Criminal, which is a really excellent podcast). What intrigued me is that you listen to a true crime podcast, you are putting an extreme amount of trust the podcaster to give you all of the facts – when they might have biases you don’t realize.

My original idea had what I called the “wrong things for the right reasons” ending, where in the end, we find out that Tobias is innocent, the professor is guilty of the original murders, and Kimberly has been committing the new ones because she fervently believes the police got the wrong guy and is willing to go vigilante to correct their mistake. This is what I pitched in the room, BUT, from pretty much that first pitch, JB got really excited by what I call the “spiderman-pointing-at-spiderman.jpg” ending, where Kimberly kills people because she believes Tobias is innocent, but after she gets him out, she learns that he really did do the original murders.

The Spiderman ending stayed for a really long time! We were well into breaking the episode when we realized it didn’t really work – it made the final two acts SO CLUNKY. There had to be a scene where they each realized the other was a murderer, learned why the other did it, and we got their perspective on how they felt about the other being a murderer. Which was A LOT. It also left us without an innocent person for the FBI to be rushing to save (we call this the “muffin”).

At one point earlier on we had discussed the version where Kimberly had been the killer all along, which I hated when we initially discussed it. I couldn’t get my head around why, if she’d gotten away with it all of those years ago, she would not only return to her old ways, but also make a podcast about it? It seemed like a very broad villain move to me. But then, when we were banging our heads against the wall trying to get the Spiderman ending to work, someone suggested that she had done all of this, from the very beginning, out of love for Tobias and suddenly it was like *angels singing sound effect* and everything fell into place!! It’s funny how that works sometimes – I’m sure some of you fic writers can relate! Sometimes it seems really hard until just one little puzzle piece makes it all work. And thus you got the ending you saw on screen.

In my position as script coordinator, I name probably about a quarter of the characters on the show, so I didn’t have a ton of names in the bank that I really, really wanted to use, but I did get a few special ones in there. Tobias is for Tobias the Animorph, who I knew I was going to get a tattoo of to celebrate my first episode (he doesn’t have a canon last name, but I have used Tobias Carlyle in fic before). Kimberly is for my college roommate, who has done some radio work. I wish I could have used her full name, but her last name is REALLY FUCKING METAL. Imagine that her name is, like, Kimberly Swordsteel. It’s not quite that, but you get the idea. I knew the Johns would never let me get away with using it, so I just gave her a random last name (she was still honored!). I wish I could have named the professor after one of my faves, but since he was a creepo obviously that would not be a compliment, so I named him after Anne McCaffrey, the author of Dragonriders of Pern. Everyone else is just a jumble of first and last names from my Facebook feed.

Anyway, I hope you liked it! I had a great time writing it and an even better time watching it on the TV! I decided I wanted to be a TV writer back in 2007 when I was in the height of my Heroes fandom, so that I can say I wrote an episode of something on NBC twelve years later is pretty fucking surreal! As I’ve said in other places, James Spader is a master of his craft, and it was an absolute honor to have him perform words I wrote. I couldn’t have been luckier for my first episode.

I’m also really excited because I’ve been asked to record DVD commentary for this episode, which I’m looking forward to! :)

#the blacklist #the blacklist script coordinator #the blacklist episode writer #episode 618

[themonochromesystem]

Podcast Recommendations

Criminal

-true crime/nonfiction -Episode Numbers: 117 at the moment -Updates: every other friday -Episode Length: 20-45 minutes on average -Review: 10/10. I looooove this podcast. It’s by far my favorite and I’ve been listening for like 2 years. It’s a true crime podcast, but it isnt only murder or violent crime. It’s stories of “people who’ve done wrong, been wronged, and/or gotten caught somewhere in the middle.” It’s on spotify, apple podcasts, stitcher, and google play. (maybe soundcloud) -Potential TWs: Certain episodes may contain very triggering content, but they say in the beginning/show notes if it’s particular bad. Any other warnings would be the normal crime related ones, but there are *many* sfw non-triggering episodes.

Crime in Color

-true crime -Episode Numbers: 67 -Updates: every friday -Episode Length: the beginning 30 are 20-40 minutes, the newer ones are around an hour -Review: 10/10. This is also an Amazing podcast! It’s about people of color in crime, victims, perpetrators, and anyone who got mixed up in it all. ~~also one of the people who runs it is from maryland lmao~~ It’s amazing to hear about people who get looked over in the true crime world. My asian ass is very happy! The beginning episodes aren’t the best quality, audio-wise, but still has good stories. It’s on soundcloud, apple podcasts, stitcher, and google play, but not spotify. -Potential TWs: Again, anything that has to deal with crime and bigotry (hate crimes are covered). Not many aren’t potentially triggering, but it is good if you are okay with that.

Wine & Crime

-true crime/comedy -Episode Numbers: 124 -Updates: every thursday -Episode Length: 1-2 hours, but it has sections (background of the topic, and 2 cases usually) -Review: 9/10 solely for the length lmao. This is the funniest podcast aight. Three friends drink wine and go over crimes. The have a lot of episodes on a lot of topics (foreskin forensics anyone). They lighten the mood with humor and anecdotes and rant about the “fucking patriarchy”. Really, if you can stand the length, it’s amazing. It’s on apple podcasts, spotify, google play, and soundcloud. -Potential TWs: they cover pretty dark cases and swear a lot lmao. Violent crime and alcohol tws are the main ones, but there are some episodes without violent crimes.

Ear Hustle

-Nonfiction/Prison -Episode Numbers: on their 4th season, 40 episodes right now -Updates: every wednesday right now, but they do seasons -Episode Length: 30-45 minutes -Review: 8/10 If you want to hear about what life is like in (american) prison, from prisoners, this is the podcast for you. This is a really good and informative podcast on everyday life in prison. It has a serious, but still light-hearted, tone. It covers lots of current issues, I’d highly recommend it! -Potential TWs: There are a lot for this one. Violent crime (they talk to murderers aight) and lots of swearing. They have a warning in front of every episode, but use discretion. 

Welcome to Night Vale

-Supernatural/Fiction/Slight Horror? -Episode Numbers: 150 -Updates: the 1st and 15th of every month -Episode Length: 25-40 minutes, sometimes longer -Review: 10/10 the only fiction i’ve ever kept listening to. You’ve probably heard of it before and it’s quite popular. If you haven’t, it’s the radio show of a supernatural town. It’s very funny and has a Queer Main Character!!! I love it okay. It does have a slight over-seeing plot, but it’s still easy to listen to. It’s available on apple podcasts, google play, radiopublic, stitcher, and spotify. -Potential TWs: some slight horror, but that’s about it. Really nothing too bad, it rarely ever swears.

Ologies

-Nonfiction/science -Episode Numbers: 92 -Updates: every tuesday -Episode Length: 50-90 minutes -Review: 10/10 if the episode is something you’re interested in. The host is great and she’s so funny. She interviews someone in a specific field of science each week and it’s very easy to listen to. Topics have included, victimology, ludology (video games), felinology (cats), and so much more.Available on apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, and im pretty sure google play. -Potential TWs: on average, nothing. Certain episodes like victimology or sexology may have some, but there isn’t anything usually

This Podcast Will Kill You

-Nonfiction/science -Episode numbers: 29 -updates: every 2 weeks -episode length: around 30-60 minutes -Review: 9/10 if you’re interested in immunology/epidemiology. If you wanna learn about infectious disease, this is the best podcast. They talk about diseases from rabies, to the flu (which i started listening to when I had the flu coincidentally), and lots of other ones.There’s humor, alcohol (they make a themed drink every time), and 2 badass ladies with Ph.Ds!  It's on apple podcasts, google play, stitcher, overcast, spotify, and art19 -Potential Tws: if sickness and slightly graphic descriptions of them, don’t listen. If you’re good with that, nothing else really.

#podcasts #podcast recommendations #true crime #my post #criminal #ear hustle #crime in color #wine & crime #ologies #wtnv #this podcast will kill you

[acidwaste]

hey so it seems i’ve forgot to do a l o t of tag memes, and i’m lucky i drafted a big bunch of them! lots of questions overlapped so i did my best to answer in different ways, sorry for the lateness! also @ the people that tagged me here, i wouldn't hesitate to kill for you

@natcaptor / @gayspaced

name: leon or lionel!

nicknames: literally the only nickname I’ve been referred to is “big gay” and like. word!

gender: im pretty sure im a guy, i have been kinda 🤔🤔🤔 abt my gender identity since around november-ish though

star sign: sagittarius!

height: 6’1! i’m told that I’m tall but my uncle is 6’7 so...

time: 3:36pm rn! ive been watching video essays and binging music all afternoon

birthday: december 9th!

favourite bands: animal collective, beach house, camp cope, car seat headrest, death grips, fleet foxes, florence + the machine, gang of youths, glass animals, gorillaz, hop along, iceage, idles, kero kero bonito, mgmt, miike snow, modest mouse, run the jewels, superorganism, the avalanches, the cat empire, the go! team, the mountain goats, the wombats, xiu xiu

favourite solo artists: alex lahey, anderson .paak, ariana grande, billie eilish, bjork, cashmere cat, charli xcx, courtney barnett, cupcakke, d.r.a.m, eric taxxon, frank ocean, gfoty, hatchie, janelle monae, jeff rosenstock, joanna newsom, jorja smith, jpegmafia, kacey musgraves, kali uchis, kendrick lamar, khalid, kimbra, lorde, mac demarco, madeon, mick jenkins, mitski, oneohtrix point never, perfume genius, ravyn lenae, rina sawayama, serpentwithfeet, sophie, st. vincent, sza, vince staples

song stuck in my head: caramelo duro | miguel // kali uchis! its a bop, miguel is one of the few singers that can convincingly make sex jams

last movie i watched: deadpool 2! it was even better than the first, which is a feat in itself ngl

when did i create my blog: december 2016??? i only started using it properly in february last year tho

last thing i googled: “im in my mums car broom broom.” dont @ me

do i have any other blogs: yeah, plenty actually!! i have blogs for aesthetic (@moltenstar), general inspo (@wverns), flight rising (@szarising, kinda inactive?), and overwatch (@blackhardts) tbh the vast majority of my ‘sideblogs’ are just saved urls H

do i get asks: when i say stupid shit like “rung has the ass of a dilf but the dick of a cockroach”

why i chose my url: that one panel where kobd have a vacation at the acid wastes because fuck its finally canon babey!

following: 1,767, which is kinda horrifying!!

followers: 890?? somehow??? thats almost One Whole Thousand and i don't even make content

average hours of sleep: around 6 or 7!! n e v e r more though

lucky number: 43 and 64!!

instruments: i'm too poor to afford music lessons or instruments jsbddsjknfs

what am i wearing: a grey shirt and nothing on my bottom half so my [redacted] is hanging tf out, i should put on some damn clothes

dream job:  oooo uhhh, i’m studying to get an education degree rn because i’d love to teach children (around grade 3-4s preferably because i'm too jittery to handle anyone younger and older kids probs won't listen to me as much as i lack plenty of assertiveness), but!! i’d honestly love to be a musician, one of those underground ones that get lots of critical acclaim

dream trip: one day i wanna gather up some friends and just go on a road trip! idm where we go to, as long as we just have fun and just! adventure!

favourite foods: rare steak, mashed potatoes, eggs, and energy shakes made with like. fruit / cheese / yoghurt / oats / chia seeds ! protein is a large part of my diet

nationality: new zealand, but living in australia

favourite song right now: best part | daniel caesar // h.e.r - gosh i need to re-listen to daniel’s album again, i don’t remember this beautiful song being there and that’s a crime

@damndesi / @novarebel / @luciform-philogynist

APPEARANCE - I am 5'7 or taller - I wear glasses - I have at least one tattoo (but I am getting a tā moko in December, I believe) - I have at least one piercing (planning to get a nose ring, like a bull!) - I have blonde hair - I have brown eyes - I have short hair - My abs are at least somewhat defined (b a r e l y) - I have or had braces

PERSONALITY - I love meeting new people - People tell me I am funny - Helping others with their problems is a big priority of mine - I enjoy physical challenges - I enjoy mental challenges - I am playfully rude to people I know - I started saying something ironically and now I can’t stop saying it - There is something I would change about my personality

ABILITY - I can sing well - I can play an instrument - I can do over 30 pushups without stopping (barely) - I am a fast runner - I can draw well - I have a good memory - I am good at doing math in my head - I can hold my breath underwater for over a minute - I have beaten at least 2 people arm wrestling - I can make at least 3 recipes from scratch - I know how to throw a proper punch

HOBBIES - I enjoy sports - I’m on a sports team at my school or somewhere else - I’m in an orchestra or choir at my school or somewhere else - I have learned a new song in the past week - I exercise at least once a week - I have gone for runs at least once a week in warmer months - I have drawn something in the past month - I enjoy writing - Fandoms are my #1 priority - I do some form of Martial arts

EXPERIENCES - I have had my first kiss - I have had alcohol (tastes like shit) - I have scored a winning point in a sport - I have watched an entire TV series in one sitting - I have been at an overnight event - I have been in a taxi - I have been in the hospital or ER in the past year - I have beaten a video game in one day - I have visited another country - I have been to one of my favorite bands concerts

MY LIFE - I have one person that I consider to be my Best Friend - I live relatively close to my school/work - My parents are still together - I have at least one sibling - I live in the United States - There is snow where I live right now - I have hung out with a friend in the past month - I have a smart phone - I own at least 15 CDs - I share my room with someone

RELATIONSHIPS - I am in a Relationship - I have a crush on a celebrity - I have a crush on someone I know - I’ve been in at least 3 relationships - I have never been in a Relationship - I have admitted my feelings to a crush - I get crushes easily - I have had a crush for over a year - I have been in a relationship for over a year - I have had feelings for a friend

RANDOM - I have break-danced - I know a person named Jamie - I have had a teacher that has a name that is hard to pronounce - I have dyed my hair - I’m listening to a song on repeat right now - I have punched someone in the past week - I know someone who has gone to jail - I have broken a bone (do fractures count?) - I have eaten a waffle today - I know what I want to do in life - I speak at least two languages (not fluently) - I have made a new friend in the past year

@smstransformers

age: 16

birthplace: auckland, nz

current time: 4:19 pm rn!!!

drink you last had: i just skulled half a liter of water whoops

favourite song: jesus etc. | wilco if we're talking abt an all-time favourite

grossest memory: accidentally swallowing a bee when i was seven years old (somehow nothing bad happened?)

horror, yes or no: not unless it’s an incredibly tame horror t b h, my threshold for scariness is very low

in love: i believe so!

jealous of people: lots of times, over really dumb things

love by first sight or should I walk by again: i believe that infatuation can exist at first sight but true love not so much. wish that could happen tho :C

middle name: shane!

siblings: my sister is eight years old, and my brother is seven!

one wish: EZ, make my anxiety disappear, i’d have a much more productive life

song i last sang: jupiter | haiku hands

time i woke up: 7:13, woke up immediately because i usually like to wake at 6:30

underwear colour: blue + purble

vacation destination: auckland / kingston / sydney!

worst habit: not remembering to make my goddamn bed, it looks like garbage

favourite food: mashed potatoes….

zodiac sign: sagittarius !!!

@alyonian

relationship status:

at the moment i’m single! and while being in a relationship sounds brilliant, the last two relationships i was involved in? didn’t work out to say the least, lucky i’m still young

favourite colour:

it’s been emerald green for the longest time but orange seems to be dethroning it at a steady pace

lipstick or chapstick:

i haven’t used chapstick since i was six but i probably should use it again, water is my substitute rn fdghdgh - and i haven’t ever used lipstick in any capacity? so i’d have to go with the former

last song i listened to:

the space traveller’s lullaby | kamasi washington - i’m trying to get through his second album rn (i left off on the second disk yesterday) and while everything he makes is undeniably amazing, it’s? a three hour album? i don’t have the attention span for his spiritual jazz, as great as it is

last movie:

monsters inc is playing on the television right now, i’ll go with that! the animation aged kinda badly but it’s still such a fun movie! sidenote: james p. sullivan? a childhood crush, so this gives me memories

top 3 tv shows/podcasts/comics:

i rarely, if ever, venture into these forms of media but! if i had to answer, i’d say;

unbreakable kimmy schmidt / parks & recreation / luke cage

taz / mbmbam (i havent like. watched a full episode of either but they seem cool,)

tf idw / …………. yeah that’s it, i’ve never read anything else. probably should!

additional favs:

my friends, writing (in theory), listening to video essays, learning music theory + instruments and understanding audio production software

top 3 bands / artists:

HHH okay if i had to limit my choices to just three artists, uh. lorde, the mountain goats, and sophie. i couldnt even fit janelle in i hate th is

----------------------------------

@alyonian

color(s): light colors are always nice and pleasant, though anything peachy and sandy are the best! orange (specially pastel orange) is like. the best thing

last band t-shirt i bought: usually merchandising is very expensive and i dont have the money to accommodate that, but like. i do recall having a wiggles shirt when i was five. i wore it all the time, shjdjgsksd im sure that counts

last band i saw live: i almost went to splendor in the grass last year with family, which wasn't only cool since i’ve never been out of the state since i immigrated - the festival was in queensland, which is around a two hour flight from victoria - but the lineup was pretty fuckin lit too! the xx, haim, peking duk, tash sultana, future islands, vallis alps, a.b original,, i was p excited! unfortunately my uncle fell ill and so they had to give the tickets to extended family :( otherwise, i haven't been to a single concert in my life

last song i listened to: street fighter mas | kamasi washington - up to this song on the album and i really fuckin dig this! also the video is hypnotizing

last movie i watched: monsters inc is about to finish and up next is monsters university! which like…. honestly, this is an extremely unpopular opinion but, i like it just as much as the original? my opinion might be skewed because i’m a monster [hugger], but i like everything abt the movie! except for the finale of the scare games and the last five minutes of the movie, both were just. dreadful.

last three tv shows i watched: if aggretsuko counts that’s the last series i watched of my own volition, which is a miracle in itself considering that’s legit only the second anime i’ve watched to completion (the first being shirokuma cafe, which i probably need to re-watch). otherwise, the last two shows i had beared witness to were thirteen reasons why and queer eye bc my cousin put them on! that first show i could completely do without but queer eye is iconique

last 3 characters i identified with: grimlock (legit. all of them), urdnot grunt (mass effect) and vector the crocodile (sth), i’m not sure what this says about me other than Big

book(s) i’m currently reading: i’m reading ‘maus’ by art spiegelman at the moment, for the third time i believe? i believe my classmates are supposed to be writing an essay on this next term and shit, this novel is heartbreaking, i haven't been this emotional when reading a book than… ever, really. it’s a recommendation of the highest caliber

@victorion

name: leon / lionel, i picked up the second name because i was in a server with an admin that was also a Leon™

nickname: besides ‘Big Gay’ i also have the nickname ‘lemon lion’ which is! nice!!

zodiac sign: archer man

height: Tall™

language(s) spoken: english / some maori + italian

fav fruit: watermelons (only when in season)

fav scent: the smell of a freezer tbh? it just smells Nice i don’t know how to properly explain it

fav season: spring! the breezes are welcoming without being overbearingly freezing

fav color: ornge,,,,

fav animal: SHARKS + CROCS + FERRETS

coffee, tea or hot chocolate: tea! with some milk tho

average hrs of sleep: too little

fav fictional character: One character?????? uhhhhhhh……. like. biggest cc right now is either idw skids or oz from monster prom

no. of blankets you sleep with: depending on my mood but i’d say the average is like, 3??

fav songs: i quickly whipped up some songs i listen to

fav artists: i came to the realization that i like acts that are considered ‘bad’ like maroon 5/drake/lil yachty etc in specific doses… i wouldn't call them good yet, but! i have no beef and thats good

fav books: remember ‘where the wild things are’??? that shit was like. literal childhood, man.. :happytears: i really need to look for a copy again

@thonany-klieme

name: leon / lionel, interchangeable really

gender: male, im probs an nb guy

star sign: sagittarius!

height: 6’1

sexuality: gay??? im not sure, im mostly attracted to other guys but i have had very brief crushes on girls + nb people? sexuality’s confusing so im gonna just latch to the gaybel (gay label) for now

lock screen image: its the album cover of 1992 deluxe by princess nokia, tho it was “T Hanos” a few days ago since i change it often - my home screen is venom but his torso says ‘fuck machine’

ever had a crush on a teacher: no??

where do you see yourself in ten years: ideally i’m teaching kids math n english, realistically i’m probably going down with the political climate

if you could go anywhere, where would you go: new zealand!! or the netherlands

what was your favorite halloween costume: halloween is not big at all where i live, the only time i tried trick or treating was when i was like 7?? i threw a bedsheet on myself and pretended to be a ghost, though since there were no eyeholes + the sheet was blue, it looked more like i was just a moving lump

last kiss: never had one

have you ever been to las vegas: nah and i dont plan to?? how do you handle regular days of 40C wtf

favorite pair of shoes: i have this pair of jandals that ive worn for a fair bit longer than my other pair of shoes, tho i only wear them in summer + very warm nights

favorite book: ngl its. ‘the very hungry caterpillar’ by eric carle. i just, love it alot and i cant explain w h y

#acid.txt #this took a while but :wahoo:

[mmidnightdiary]

We burn old bridges to build new ones.

I recently took up the courage to actually listen to fewer crime and horror commentary podcasts and listened to a full audiobook. The subtle art of not giving a fuck. It's true that we tend to judge a book by its cover because the content was different than what I expected.

I honestly do not know what I was expecting but the book was challenging for me to understand because I have never really sat down and listened or read anything that could help me in any way.

This is a lengthy one so, good luck reading with me if you cared enough!

In the end, it's really hard not to give a fuck about something because you will care about something, eventually or you actually do. I became comfortable with being different and caring about something much more important than focusing my energy on the things I should have said and not. I've learned to give a bit less of myself and all this time, I was doing things for the better of myself.

When I felt angry, I always took a step back because I didn't want to hurt the people I love. I knew that what I would say would come out of anger or my anxiousness, I am emotional, we all are and people always forced me to jump out of my comfort zone to tell them immediately what was wrong or what bothers me about them. I always had to reflect first, "should I really tell them or is this something I could just brush off because it doesn't really matter?", "if I tell them, would this benefit our friendship? will it make it stronger or will this make it weaker?" all of these ran through my head when I should have just accepted that these people will do wrong things to me unintentionally but would I have known? I mean, they should have. They always did. I could always say I should have known better, but during those times, would I have when I was always upset with them? We just had to accept that we aren't for everyone, I did bring everyone together but they hated each other in the end, now everyone acts like they like each other, after countless times getting complaints and shit. I always knew everyone was fake and I am no different. I wish I just didn't involve myself in them.

The book taught me that all this time, I wanted people to know who I was from the inside out so that they wouldn't hurt me and I wouldn't mean any harm to them as well, I was just a person who wanted friends from the start, I never had ill intentions, to begin with, but people did twist that enough to make it seem like it. I learned that even if I did people didn't accept who I was and I should have been okay with it. I'm comfortable to know that I'm glad people did because the bad weeds took themselves out. I can't always be an important and life-changing presence for people without looking like bitch or a joke.

If I didn't go through this painful time and learn from it, I would still be doing the same thing and I guess i'm thankful for that. Thank you for giving me enough reasons not to trust people easily and taking their words with a grain of salt because people will always find a way to hate me or dislike me, hell even find things to disagree with me and that's okay, just get the fuck away from me. If you don't like me then just go away.

When I was younger, I always believed that friends were family because that's what the movies and shows taught me. We share our experiences in life and we love the company we get with people, even for a few hours of hanging out. The outcome for a positive experience, I did need to go through a negative experience and accepting it is hard but in the end, we learned from it and we walk away from it. Everything in life is temporary, the happiness and kindness people give won't be the same as next time because that's how we are. When we give too much fucks to give everyone and everything starts to feel like we need them to be comfortable and happy at all times, I always wanted people to like me and that was the problem. The pain, the loss is inevitable and we should let go of trying to resist that.

We burn the old bridges with people who hurt us so we can build new healthy relationships with newfound friends. I know I said that I wouldn't like to have friends anymore but, in time I'll be ready to open up again.

#diary

[sun-downer]

Why are there so many fucking fancy ass cars parked in this mother? Fucking broke ass building parking lot. The APM Debbie's out 30 cars in his goddamn parking lot. Oh, so first of all, you were allowed to pass a police car. Second of all, no one has ever been pulled over by a Patty wagon. No offense, but what the fuck?

God damn it. That was energy. Holy shit. That's a lot for Monday morning. Hey everybody. What up? It's the no offense, but what the fuck podcast? I'm your host? Marvin Martinez. And as always my future ex-husband is with me a bunch of Agra. How are you doing? Until I got

Yeah. That's just, that's just what happens when you go to Japan, people just, it's just what everybody does. Speaking of perfect hair. Uh, Maki, Kaji, the godfather of Sodoku died at 69. He nailed it. 69. Oh shit. Yeah. He was good with numbers. He was good. He's like, I'm going to go out on a math joke. Oh yeah.

And you know what? The next one's pretty hard to get four twenties, pretty hard to reach. Even for like Japanese people. Cause you know like this. Yeah. Japanese, you wouldn't refer about your Japanese people. What are we doing here? Let's see. I gotta, I gotta Google up the Google. I get the joke about them.

Right? We used to be allies where you, are you going to teach the history? No, but Japan and in Japan. You guys bombed Japan because they were part of like our crew, basically. Like they were homeys with the Nazis. Yeah. Yeah. Also not read, they would do known thing, but you know, they were also homeless. They were like, what up respect, yo shit.

What do you respect the most about, uh, the Japanese? What do you it currently? I like historically. Oh, overall, just Metta overall. Hmm. I guess I do love, I dunno, respect, but I love that. Like people in Japan tend to be very, very, like, let's not, let's not be seen when they're on the outside. Right. They just like try to behave in a way that nobody looks at them.

But then once you get to the house, they have like the weirdest hobby. Yeah, I collect pickled eggs. I have a whole two apartment bedroom, two bedroom apartment, and like one bedroom. It's only two collecting pickles. Yeah,

I get it. I got stint. You know, who else has says they got soldier boy claimed to own a tare and a tar. He said, that's the how corporations work, dude. I sit in the subway in the morning and I'm about to read me this manga. That's all about weird team and girls that are formed it in 20, but look 12 sniffing each other's hands.

And I'm gonna just read that shit out in the open. That's what I. I did that. Uh, I did that D and D that's my that's my group. I started a girl band idol group of bards as like, you know what, I'm not, I'm going to, they're not going to play the backing music. They're going to actually know how to play instruments.

You know what I'm saying? Uh, let's see what else happened, Taliban? Uh, Taliban said women should stay home because soldiers aren't trained to respect them.

And, and the other women said fine, but, uh, you can't be subscribed to early fans anymore. So you do know that. I don't know, am I the only person on the planet who kind of looks at the Taliban and goes like, you know what good for you guys? Like, I know you're doing a horrible, I mean, it's going to be horrible for a lot of people, but good on you.

I don't know. You beat you beat America, dude, whatever. Like, you know, you guys just stuck to your shit. You're like, no, we want to miss treat our women. We will not have this weird women human rights, bullshit. We will stone the gays get out. You know what Taliban, I respect your Fortnite strategy. You stuck around and you, you, you went to the MPC that told you where the last storm circle was.

And you found that perfect Bush in the last spot. And you just waited in that Bush full shield, full health, just a fucking desert Eagle in your hand, just waiting for that last guy, crouched, you sat there for 35 fucking minutes in that Bush, and then Taliban, you came out of that Bush and you shot the last guy left.

When he, when he was like, there is no other earthly goddamn place this guy could be, why would any shitbag be hiding in a Bush? You come out of that Bush and shoot that guy in the face. Taliban. Good on you. I know, right? Like, holy shit. They took their time. They waited it out, but then they were like, you know what?

No, now the shit, I just read something about it tomorrow, today in the morning, I didn't actually pay attention. Well, I just saw like a headline that I already forgot, but I think now they own all of Ghana's Stan. Again, like they're in control of that. Ooh, getting this sweet, sweet drama. I like, Hey, this, ah, shit, shit.

I'm so pissed. Fuck you guys on there. Is that place ever going to not have war? Like, is that going to happen within like the next 50?

But it doesn't matter what they're fighting over. It's just sand. Yeah. More fun stuff. Leaders of the proud boys centers of five months in jail says, uh, he only got five months. Cause you promise to only burn American flags from now on, um, black lives matter flag. He was, he was charged for burning a black lives matter flag and having high capacity ammunition, route, uh, devices when asked why he needed so many bullets.

He said, my penis is really tiny and I want to look really cool. Is that what he says? And the store only gave out ammo in two sizes, mother issues and compensate for something. And they were fresh out of, I didn't kill my wife. So did he actually say. Ah, damn cause that was

like this guy rules, dude, and all this shit. But wait, one of the, that doesn't mean that this is true. This is true. What convicted? He stood up in the courtroom, pointed up the FBI and screamed. I learned it from me. He actually had a turns out. He had a long history of snitching for the FBI. Actually. He was actually a snitch.

Yeah. Okay. But like, hold on. So one of those isn't there, right? No, but wait a second, one more riff. I like, I like, I, I did research cause you showed me the German article. I was like, they were so tame about it. It was like two, it was like two paragraphs. I click on the Miami news top new times. And it's like a, it's like a five page, like origin story.

Like he's like a bro. And it's like, he's like all American Dan and they use like a good picture of him. It's hilarious. It's so it's the only article about this to where it's not him wearing a flak jacket, like ready to just like shoot anybody. Like, wait, actually anybody. I, I need to get this, this, this bothers me too much right now is burning a BLM flag, a crime

bullets. Cause like I get, if he doesn't, if he's not allowed to have those bullets, I fine. Burning a flag. Is, is that an issue because like I'll burn a flag today. Uh, they burned a bit, I think, I think burning black lives matter, like it was considered like a hate crime, but I don't think they could, I don't think the ground for that was actually like, I think they tried to get them for a hate crime on that.

I don't actually okay. Fucking Australia news. Thanks for not giving me that's where the German newspaper was tamed because they actually stay objective. They only reported the facts and none of the like, like anecdotal bullshit. So it only turned out to be two paragraphs it's like, yo, this white supremacist called Luis Herrera or whatever it is.

Yeah. Uh, douche bag, Mick douchey, dag bag pants has been sentenced to 155 days in prison by a quarter in Washington, confess a pro. He could fast to property damage and possession of weapons, weapon accessories in the proceedings. Uh, the remainder of the sentence under 85 days will be suspended for a three-year period.

He didn't bring his own flag. He just burned one. That was somewhere okay. That, that I get that there's no, there's no, there's a mention of a flag. That's the property damage and nothing else makes any sense. So I feel like if he burns somebody else's flag. Yeah. That's a problem. But if I buy a BLM flag and I want to burn it, I will.

God damn do. So that is within my rights.

You know what I mean? Yeah. I'll burn it. I'll I'll dance on top of it. I'll do it exactly. As Ms. Gatsby says

that was a perfect, my mouse died right. When I was trying to get to the truth. Let's see. Okay. Let's see what he does. Yeah. Uh, so he has to pay a thousand dollars fine and $345 compensation to the, to the church that had, uh, property damage. He was involved with the burning of a, of a banner. It wasn't a flag.

It was a banner that was stolen from the church by members of his group. So he's getting sued for property damage. It's not because it's a crime it's property damage, but the article is misleading in that way. Then the one that you read before was like, well, he's in jail for burning a black lives matter.

It's not that it was misleading. It's that they weren't directly like laying out. Like if the second paragraph what he's fucking is, you know, it didn't say anything about thousand dollars and all this bullshit. No, but it did say at that I was summarizing, I wasn't actually reading that article when I said that.

Oh, okay, cool. So you just insinuated that you asshole, he's proud to be a boy. No. The article was in Sydney, winning that they kept like they're doing this weird moral argument thing. And I was like, okay, fuck up and tell him what the fuck is happening. So he just admitted to it and yeah. Yeah, yeah. So he admitted to it in an interview with the Washington post and then they arrested him.

Cool. I'm good with that. Yeah. So it's bullets, by the way, you shouldn't burn black lives matter flags, but if it's your own thing, you can burn stuff that belongs to you. That's what you choose to do with your property. Do whatever the fuck you want. Like you can have, you can go buy a PlayStation five and burn it for like Tik TOK content.

I'm okay with that. That's all I'm trying to say here, not big enough. Tik TOK content soldier. Boy did actually literally claimed T O and Atari on his, uh, I think it was Instastory or tech dog or something. And, uh, he like showed his contract. Everyone's like, uh, you don't know how to fucking read. You just have a million dollar contract with a target, Haley about you owning it.

And then Atari, like, they literally were like, yeah, we have a CEO. Uh, we're a corporation. We have like a board of C like, go, like, that's not how companies work. I've had, he like ripped up the contract like a day later. And, uh, well actually it turns out Atari ripped up the contract after they found out soldier, boy has less than 4,000 people watching his IQ.

There are only, there are only 3,500 people watching his IgG live, where he was like, fuck you at tiring. Like, what's you, you obviously don't have as many fans as you think you do soldier boys. So then again, to be fair, I've only ever watched one single IgG life in my entire life. And it was like a rocket beans thing that were playing hide and seek.

And like everybody that was hiding, um, like had their Instagram feed on. So you could like watch them hiding and then you could on your computer watch, like the, the guy searching for them and shit. So that was fun. And I partook in for like five minutes and playing around with that. And then, yeah, I closed Instagram again.

Cause it's gay. Uh, speaking of gay, Joe, Biden's on the run again. Uh, Joe Biden, uh, apparently apologized to a lab after he made their mini brains go bald because, uh, he was, he was stunning, his white, white nuts. Uh, and, uh, so, and, and the rays from his nuts bounced off of a mirror and bounced into the lab, uh, 12 miles away.

So, uh, he was paying damages. Yeah. They're making many brains and labs and they're starting to see. Yeah. Apparently one of them saw race jumped in front of a train. Um, let's see,

one of them looked upon the United States and its state of affairs and it killed itself. That's beautiful. Uh, that is beautiful. One of 'em, one of them realized it didn't have a cumbersome Dick and murdered itself. Um, one of them woke up and felt like it was female. It shine at itself. One of them, uh, realized it's perpetuating the patriarchy and it's still Rogan.

Uh,

We're coming for you, baby boy, they made, they use a company made, they felt bad for Val Kilmer after his documentary. And they made a, a voice for him based on all of his, uh, you know, performances and stuff. All the speaking of documentaries, I watched some crazy thing on Netflix the other day called the push.

You ever heard of the push to be a poop joke? No, I sorta, it's not, although it is right there, but it's so was this like British mentalist guy and like in the intro, what he does is he has like some dude call into a coffee house and be like, hello, my name is Mr. Police officer. In high ranks of you, whatever.

He gives him like a fake title and fake name, but like he pretends to be a police officer on the phone and the coffee shop workers, like you hustle what up? He's like, oh, do you see a woman dressed like that? And that, and that we, we were told she walked in. He's like, yeah, well you see her having a baby.

That's not her baby. She abducts babies. Dah, dah, dah, dah. What we need you to do is like distract her pretended I'm a call you on your phone. Pretend like you got a call on the landline, get her to get the phone. And then you take the baby and you walk out the store so we can collect the baby. He's trying to see if he can make a person it's not an actual card and was trying to see if he can make the person commit a crime, but just like giving him certain excuses, like, well, I'm talking to the police on the phone.

Do you know that? For sure. You don't know that that's an actual cop. So just like by giving him like an, a story that he has no knowledge about whether or not it's true, he just goes with it because he doesn't, it seems so big that he doesn't want to go against it. So, so, but that was just the big, is it?

Mungus partsy dicks. You know what my boss has got a huge cock. Right. Cause he subscribed to them famous. Yeah. Yeah. Join our picture. Be early, get on the ground floor. Yeah. Well, you'll be the guys that like, look in two years, you want to be the guys where we interrupt the stream or whatever we're doing and go like, oh my God, yo it's Marco HD.

What up my board. Cause like you've been here since day one. So you know, you wait, should we live stream? This? Is that what you're saying? We should maybe start soon. We should get on Twitch to the just talking thing. Maybe. I don't know, maybe, but we'll take them off. It's all set up. It's all set up. Uh, you know, push thing.

What it was about at the end was it was trying to get a guy to commit a murder. Basically. They were trying to get a guy to kill a person. Yeah. Well, everything was acted out, but it was like this gala thing. And they just made him like, get deeper and deeper. Like within like 20 minutes, the guy was hiding a body,

hit a body. He's like, no, look, when the event is over, we'll call his wife. I swear to you. And he's like, oh, that seems fair.

He said, you dropped in front of you. You're not going to call an ambulance. It's not been five minutes. Well, he did yell at me twice. Like they made sure that the guy was kind of an asshole before and shit. And like, they just gave him all these excuses. But yeah, I'm not going to tell you how it ends, but like he's basically gonna, they want him to get to push that guy off of this, like the roof at the end of it all.

That's like the plan here, you know, incriminate himself to a point where he's like, this is the only way out I need to shove this guy. Dude. I don't know, man, if, if, cause like I always imagined myself and like, you know, if, if there's a game show or whatever, like how could I win here? And like in that one, if you, if you go through that at the end, do you like, what does that say about you?

You were willing to kill a guy. You know what I mean? Isn't that sort of like attempted murder because you did think that you were going to kill the guy. That's like the literal that's like intent to murder, I think is, I think it's like a separate crime actually.

That might be like, like if, if it wasn't for like, if they didn't sign that, uh, what's your McCall it, then it's all actors and shit. Yeah. So like, if it, if it was just him by himself, like that's like conspiracy to commit a murder and stuff like that. Yeah. My question is just like, does the fact that it's all actors remove the fact that he was w because, you know, they would, the actor, the actor was never in any danger, you know, by the time that he would have been put, there was never, I'm saying, if you're going to do a show like that or whatever, the, like, you, you have lawyers that make him sign an like, sign, some kind of agreement where it's like, it absolves you of all that kind of, because like you're controlling the situation.

But outside of that, if it, if he was just like, If it was just some dickhead that was like, cause like if it's just somebody manipulating someone into doing something that's, that's Charles Manson. That's why Charles Manson's in jail forever. Yeah. Because he like, you've manipulated people into doing something, but actually doing it himself.

But what I'm saying is do those contracts really absolve him from the fact that he was willing to put a murder, a person? Well, the guy in the documentary, I get that it's legally. So I'm just saying like, it doesn't really though he's absolved because they're all actives and he did that. But, but, but if he figured out, but if he like actually, so catch this, if he some, if somehow for some reason that stunt fell through and he ended up actually literally murdering them, then it's on the production company.

The production company would go to jail. And so like, so like, and so like he might get manslaughter, but he wouldn't get, like, he wouldn't get like homicide he'd get, like, he would get some, like, acting in a way that, that expand it. It's like, look up whatever the it'd be like coerced manslaughter or something, reckless behavior assumption like that, or, yeah, I don't know.

Yeah, we could, we could, uh, I don't know, call a lawyer, find a lawyer, learn Instagram. Let's ask a bunch of murder questions. Yeah. I mean, I don't want to ask a lot of questions about like, um, international waters for when we have our mansion. We can do what we, we can, uh, you can actually find a lawyer that does a free, a free zoom consultation.

Could we get just like Casa is ask him dumb questions. Like, what do I have to do to do a class action? Is it a class action lawsuit? If I want to Sue every, uh, manufacturer of led headlights and uh, backlights cause the lights on the back on the, the brake lights on the back of cop cars are absurdly bright for no reason at all.

Here's my question. If it's just me and Bontrager, and we let's say abductor person, but then we drive out into open waters. What are we legally allowed to do to set human? Just legally, not morally and just hypothetically obviously, but we get married. How long do we have to wait till we get divorced that we can be called ex how long do we have to stay together before it becomes funny.

Funny? Yeah. Like the window is either the shortest divorce. Right. So like within an hour or some shit, just to make it funny, if it's that short, it would just get a node. That's my thing. I think it would get a note. Sure. Yeah. But if it gets to, now we have to go through, we can't go through an actual divorce.

No, but if we get a note, that's what I'm saying. If we get into note, then you're not my area. Oh, you're going to, you're going to sign a prenup then. Cause I think I own more shit. Just signing prenups. We're both signing prenups. No, I wouldn't have a few toilet paper. Oh, I want, uh, at least half of that woodwork behind you, like, come on, I'll take like one of those doors with the weird man on it.

I'll take whatever is weird cars, man doors. That's the one half of the manga that you find back there. And I was not a half colorful, so I thought those were dildos that no that's like mangoes and books and stuff. And, uh, um, right. No, right here is the game of Thrones, but. And their racist, approximations guitar.

For some reason, I don't actually play a guitar, but like, it's here now. So whatever it looks here, you better start playing it. Dude. I'm going to earn enough to do when people come over so I can go like a damn do they do like a two for five to six seconds long thing. And I go like, guys, guys, come on, come on, come on.

I keep forgetting, go to the storage to get my guitars. Cause I have that game where like you can plug in a real guitar.

Use that a problem plugs, plugging things in China wants to restrict the online play of their teenagers, or I think everybody, I'm not sure if it might just be kids, but, uh, yeah. And, uh, and there's, there's a, there's a mass flooding at the borders of everywhere. That's not China, Chinese teenager. So I guess don't really like, they're trying to restrict your place.

So it's like three hours a week of online play and, uh, yeah, the Taliban promises that Chinese teenagers can play as long as they want, if they join us. So, yeah. Cool. They even get like 72 virgins if they do it, right? Yeah. Yeah. They get 72 versions, but yeah, all they have to do is just keep the room clean and promising not to tell mama they are.

Yeah, problem is they don't tell them the other, the 72 virgins, that's just at the Chinese. Compared to sticking in that room with him, basically slave camp. They're all Virgin Virgin. So I heard that you got like a little bit of a class for me, professor Bont, ERG, two more news stories. The, the drug liberation front, uh, was handing out clean heroin to stop overdoses on, uh, Canada's uh, drug overdose day.

That does sound like something Canada wouldn't do. Yeah, because I guess there was like a lot of fentanyl deaths. Don was conflating it saying it was more than COVID deaths. I was like, I don't know about all that. Yeah. She's not the person that I would run to for like factual numbers on things, but who knows?

I don't know. She talks to a lot of guys who knows things. Do you think that people that go to the beaver trap to get drunk and cheap fucking rum or whiskey or like smart people? Is it, was that called the beaver trap? I have no idea, but that was the most Canadian born name I could think of in like, you know, the time I had, Ooh, do you know how to speak French?

Uh, here we go. Wait, chat. So when I point to you, you're going to, you're going to say a thing step, but you get there. Okay. So in Vancouver, a Vancouver man bites dog, it was a police dog, mad bites, police, dog, after screaming.

I think it was cash will reign Supreme. I don't know the CA  the, uh, th the, the cat, the, the, the, the man was a suspected, uh, cat, dog, separatists. I hate those fucking old school. Can't get over, like re mixing some races together. You know, you know how adorable it is when the little kitty cat sleeps on a big dog?

God damn it, dude. I heard, uh, some people, uh, suspect this cause conspiracy theories. They think he was actually a tail disguised as a man in attempt to, uh, wag the police.

like a late night. He's just been bothering me for like the last 20 minutes. And now I just can't now I got it. What is going on here today? All this time. My dog, man, Korea is working on a new gas weapon. I guess he has more than just far it's coming out of there. Am I right guys? I'm all right. Sorry. Okay.

Uh, welcome to news feud. Uh, let's see, take a guess. Uh, today's today's topic things founded, Joe Biden's pockets. Take a guess. What do you think

says is limped on the boat? Uh, no, but we have, uh, rockets, which I guess again, I guess, uh, survey says, oh no dementia pills, but we do have pair of sunglasses, which I get to guess again, um, um, um, nacho cheese chips, but they're, let's see if the board says it. Let's see if the board says it. Survey says, Nope, I see it says another pair of sunglasses, but you'd like to guess again.

It's weird. I don't like it, I guess one more time. Okay. Fine.

Survey says it actually says a third pair of sunglasses. That's ridiculous. Joe, possibly go that he needs that many things last. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Uh, another round new topic. Uh, the topic is we surveyed, we surveyed families all over America and they think the top results in Ryan Reynolds search results are no, no.

We actually actually called Google. We got these straight from Google. I'm kidding. Fuck. Fuck families. So we, uh, these are Ryan Reynolds, Google search results, top search results in the past week. Uh, what let's let's hear a guess about Ryan Raynaud's or things that he himself Googled. Yeah. Yeah. Ryan Reynolds.

Yeah. Ryan rhinos Googled. Okay.

Is there a gluten in water? Is there a gluten in water? Is it on the board? It's a survey says, uh, how to promote aviation gin. Would you like to guess again? How do you become Hugh Jackman? Let's look at the survey survey says, oh, really close. Uh, where does Hugh Jackman live? It's pretty close. Pretty cool.

Pretty good. Pretty good. I want to take one more swing at this. I'm going to take one more second. Here we go. Here we go. Here you go. Why wait? No, no, no, no. I know it now. I know it now. I know it now. Horrible. Romcoms comma who's hiring question mark. Go show me. Survey says, Ooh. It actually says, uh, who is married to Ryan Reynolds.

He needed to know. So

actually, okay. I got one more. I got one more. I got one more in me. Okay. Yeah. How much is Ryan Reynolds worth? He wants a nice, says. Oh, it actually says how many dildos are too many dildos at once.

Uh, festival. Uh, I still believe in having like a John wick room, but just for sex stories. So like a panic room that you deco with some nice led lights, which is full of sensors, man. Shit. Yeah. Like, so you like that game? I made. I think when I, I think when I say paid it up, a woman said family feud and I was like, yeah, I'll make it better.

She didn't know how to write for it. She left like, write the prompts for it. It's like, no, like, stop, like stop getting so hung up on like the new story. Now we have to like, be funny. You're allowed to like, put like gossipy. Yeah. Ryan Reynolds, shit in it. Like, why are we talking about Joe Biden? Um, he's the president like it's topical.

Like it's topical. These people are alive. He's funny. He's weird. I like him. So if you were to do a family feud show about the news, what would you, what would your topic be? We'll just survey topic B oh, COVID no questions. I want to see the world burn. A

Google question is COVID a hoax. And I say maybe. Okay, one last way. Is this the last news story at resident? Yeah. One last news story. Uh, I got here, uh, FTC is investigating McDonald's ice. Uh, the claims that McDonald's ice cream machines are always broken, uh, said all the ice cream machines, I'm always broken.

Like my marriage. Uh, I'm always broken like your marriage. I don't know. FTC side with, McDonald's saying the employees come it's just too sticky to reliably. Make an ice cream. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a problem in Germany to, yeah. Seth Rogen com has gotten stuff. It did get tweeted. Tweeted. If the ice cream machine is broken, what did I just eat?

God doing this again?

I'm right back in it. It's like I left Vietnam just to go back to Florida, but now I'm fighting like a private Alicia somewhere in the woods. Why is this happening? I should put Joe Biden and then I can put anybody in there. Oh,

Oh,

that's nice. All the Steelers happens to win after an, after an, the crazy turnaround at the end, some say they stole it.

I can't. In other news on your German website, Qubole under the tub, uh, under, uh, the Taliban women only expect bad things said women everywhere else. Um, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Tweeted. If women only expect bad things, what did I just eat?

Fucking Seth Rogan. I bet. Like, I bet he here's what happened with that whole James Franco thing, right? The, the James Franco thing, right. You know, the, the, he had this weird school of like hot chicks basically only that he would try to like, Hey, hot chicks, James Franco, like an acting horse or something.

And it was mainly like attractive ladies. And like, he would have like really sexual scenes with him. He was basically just gaslighting them all to fucking him. It was cool. Okay. But then like Seth now, Seth Rogan went like pretty hard to get, but Seth Rogan one's so hard against it after like being James Franco's boy for like forever that it just kind of feels like it was doing the same exact fucking thing.

But it's like, if you're, if you're actually my friend, here's how this is going to go down. I'm going to throw you under the bus and then I'm going to pay you 11. Hi, cool. He got money for this. And he was like, deuces wrote us a joint dude.

Amen. By the way, I was listening to an audio book of game of Thrones in German. And I hate how they say the names. They, they read them like antique Germans would. So like Janey, isn't just Jamie he's Hyman

who are say, who are you talking about to real generous, but who's generous. Let's say, don't know you mean to an era that sounds so unattractive, but they talked about the, the, by the way, he's called Drogo is so much less rapey in the book. Holy shit. Why did it make him so rapey in the movie, like in the TV show,

Well in the book, he like, they sit together naked for like an hour or something. They just sit there. He just undresses her and stuff, but like slowly and it's always with the more like stuff and go thing. And then like they just chill for an hour. Then he just starts like gently touching her overall. And she starts like getting excited.

It ends with him like picking her up and putting her on his lap. Right. And then going no, because like the only more he knows is no. So you've asked her like, no, and she like grabs his hand to put it to the place where she got wet and then said, yes. So like, it's very different than in a TV show where he just buckles her over.

She says, no, he throws a right back around and just like bounces into her. Like it's. Yeah. It's interesting. I now question, why the fuck they made it so raping the TV show because like, you know, he just goes, no.

The books open shit so much, but like, it's like, it's like, it's like they needed some, some reason for her to go crazy or something, but like they fall in love afterwards. So it's like, it's done. They could have just made it this way, the way that it was in the book, because like it has to do with her, like for the first time, because she was so afraid of everything and shit, before they go way more into that.

Like you can tell him the TV show that she's a skirt, skirt, little girl, Scarlet girl, but she's a skirt. You don't see why she's that scared as much because you don't hear her inner monologue and shit. So, I mean, I guess our parents were murdered. She was shipped over somewhere. Her brother keeps beating her up every day.

It makes sense that she's kind of a scared little chain. When you hear about Sansa, just live in the life.

Was awesome in the books even more so right before, you know, everything turned to shit.

Oh, what, what was, uh, like little flower, I mean, not little flower, a little finger stuff. Oh, in, in the show, I don't like it. The last season. What's different. What's different in the book. I'm not that far yet. I am still on the first one. I just got them this weekend, this weekend. I just started reading the books for real.

Okay. Cause I, like, I figured if I got bored in feast of crows or the one after it, I'm like curious for pepper. I have, I have all the audio books that they have out. Because I'm like, I'm like curious for some of the shit that's been theorized that didn't happen in the TV show, but like, that's been theories for like a long time.

So like, uh, I forget his name, but bran the kid that like goes cripple, uh, he like gets carried. He finds this other kid that comes with the sister and they like get him over to the, to the guy in the woods, you know, behind the wall that Oak, that third eye Raven or whatever his name is, Raven. He's a Raven with eyes when he dies.

I'm just going to call him, leave him with the 3i, Raven, the Raven with eyes. Exactly. Every rape and that's. That's awesome. I like it. So like the theory is that he eats the kid Brahm without knowing like they turned the kid. Cause he has like four senior abilities also lightly, but he's not like strong.

So like they make him into a paste that Brahm eats and then gets stronger with his like vision powers and shit. It's like a whole weird consultant, the conspiracy of the masters and all that shit. Oh, they, he ate one of the children or the forest or whatever. No, no, no, no. The there's like a kid that he goes, oh man, I can show you the F you saw the TV show that he ate the weird kid.

Well, he, didn't not knowingly eat the weird kid, but yeah, like the chill, cause he liked disappears within those caves. All of a sudden, not there's no mentioning of him anymore. It just happens. He just don't get mentioned anymore. All of a sudden. And then like brand has to hear this weird, weird wood paste or something, but like, like it tastes like blood.

He does, he describes the taste of blood as he's like eating. Okay. Well, yeah, but if he died, where's the corpse. Why does nobody talk about him anymore? Ever like even a sister, I guess we'll have to put that in the chat. We'll I mean, the, you know, the discouraged we'll look into the wow. Watch those episodes because those episodes were fucking weird.

Yeah. The, the episodes it's more based on the Joe. Jim was his name. Um, it's more based on the, on the, that's what I'm saying. I'll see what they, what they do in the episode. And then I'll see, I'll try to figure out where it is in the books because yeah, I was listening to you. I have like a video on YouTube that explains it.

I hope. Well, all right. How, what time are we at? What are we, what are we looking at here? Hi, I'm Chad. Yeah, on the recording. I mean, I forgot to record, press start on the we're good though. We talk to a lot of stuff, right? I bet you it's only 20 minutes long. We didn't do any improv games. Okay. So, oh, we, yeah, we can still do some, you pick a profession.

Wait, pause it first for one second, because I need to tinkle.

And then I said the duck flew across the restaurant. That was flawless. Let's do another one. Let's do another one. Uh, okay. So P pick a profession, um, lawyer. All right. So we're two lawyers and a lawyers office. And, uh, we're, we're just chilling in the break room, I guess. Yeah. How about that? Hey, how you doing?

Not too bad. Just hanging out much appointment today, but you got a lot on your plate. I wish I had a lot more on my plate. Right? Becky's ass Becky, look at her. She is bigly, but like, what's your favorite jiggle part of her though? Um, objection. I enjoy nothing. That just goes on hair.

Oh, thank you for the ugly dude.

Never have that conversation. I need to pick a less professionally. I, uh,

I actually, uh, she, uh, Becky. I, I donated my sperm to Becky. She's going to have my kid technically. Huh? How did that happen? Oh, she just asked, she just asked. She wanted to like, she's like, you know, I want to do like the insemination thing. Like we can do the fuck thing, but it's, you know, it's easier to just do the, the juices if like she, like, you can choose the thing and I'll do the insemination at the doctor so that my family feels like it's like, uh, you know, actual a semen donation, but we could just fuck on the side.

So I F we fucked and then I did the, I did the Jews in the cup. Okay. And did you sign, did you ever sign any contracts that legally forbid her from later on abusing you as the father? Oh, yeah, of course. Okay. Okay. Okay. She drew them up. They're actually pretty good. The papers were pretty fucking silent. I checked them out.

I actually ended up, I had added a line or two. She was trying to like catch me on a, on a tense in the third paragraph, second clause. You know how it is, but I fucking, you know what I mean? I added that extra comma. She thought she could fuck me over, dude. She taught, she could fuck me over. Get the fuck at a, this guy is Columbia educated.

You thought you could take them? Huh? Community college graduate. Or you do it. Isn't that like? Yeah. Wait, what are you asking if Columbia college is a community college one, right? No, no, no. I'm saying she's the club community college graduate. How dare she question? Yeah, of course. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good one.

Let me, it's like, okay. It's not like a top tier. It's not like, yeah, but it's okay. It's okay. People are like, oh, you went to Colombian. People say it like that. Okay, but not like, oh, you went to Columbia, but yeah, they're definitely not like, fuck Columbia. There's no. Is it hardwood? Uh, yeah, I guess if you're going to go like, yeah, you want to go Ivy?

Ivy? I think Columbia is a no, I was, I was so wasted. I don't even know what kind of school Columbia is. Honestly. It could have been like, uh, it could have been. Where were you? What college did you go to? Uh, I went to brown. Ooh. You know, college is bad, but it's just named after a collar. Well, in the garden of all fucking universities, only one I could get into, I can get into, I went to circle university.

We had, we had a big rivalry going with triangle. It was great. Yeah. Yeah. Did you have good parties of circle? Yeah. Yeah, but to be honest rectangle, they, they would just be crazy if they were the wild south. Fuck you. What'd you go circle. I was circled, dude. You did not fucking go to circle. Give me a real co give me a real college.

A piece of shit. I didn't go to college. Germany doesn't work that like university here is more for, for if you want to become a lawyer or shit like that. Yeah, you're a lawyer. No, no. I stopped doing that a year ago. I didn't pass the bar. I just scanned my way into here. What are you joking? Obviously, dude.

Come on.

I was going to have to report you to fucking, uh, Roger were there. Oh my God. Come on. You know me? I'm I'm the office prankster. I was literally pulling up the, uh, secretly report and employee for not going to college. Yeah. That's it's weird. That's the function on the app? How much does that happen in his office?

Well, we're lawyers. So a lot. You gotta, you gotta fuck your, your friends over when you can. It reminds me of that kid. Dr. Fi love. Dr. Love the, the 16 year old, just Dr. Love. It was just this like 16 year old who pretended to be a gynecologist.

He wanted to finger women. Huh? I wish I could have represented that kid. That's the dream man. Getting a teenager off. Speaking of getting a teenager off, what's your favorite case? To be honest right now, I like the Lieberman case. It's, it's just really favorite case that you've won. Oh, my favorite that I've won.

I guess I liked that. I liked that bad girls club case that I represented. That was the best girls club. Yeah. You know, the girls that, that Sue back girls club, because they were like, they were like, dude, you can't just throw us into a room and feed us with drugs and booze for like a week. And then like get angry at us when we fight.

That's like not how this shit works. And I like, I represented, you know, backgrounds, but obviously, so I made sure these bitches didn't get a single cent. It was awesome on what grounds? Well, they signed a contract and they didn't agree to civilized behavior. You know, they broke the car. She got them on breach of contract.

Yes, they're classic. Oh, so, you know, the judge was an old white male and these women were all minority. So I walked in there, I saw that and I was like, oh my God, classic Frederico, getting them on a fucking breach of contract. And you know, these girls use Slaby Federico. These girls are never going to be able to pay, but that does not matter.

I won the case and I get paid. You know what I mean? You gotta do your pro bono for the hot girls. I get it. Oh yeah. I'm going to pro bone. These girls. Yeah. Laura is our gross. Let's get back to where. Alright. Okay. So now, yeah, so you see how easy improv is. Let's do another one. Now you choose something, but choose a spot.

Um, spot a profession, like a job and, and event that happens. Actually, I, I pick the event that happens. Something's going to happen throughout that. It's going to happen with us, with the profession, hit us, hit us with the professional. Um, we are, uh, let's see, everyone says the same seven professions. Let's see.

Uh, we are,

were like, those were like those people who like, uh, like suck people. We suck the fat out of people. We're like suck the fat technicians. Okay. So we're just assistance to a guy in a like office. Okay, cool. Cool. Well, not the head honchos there. They're still a doctor, but we're the guys that just do the,

so like the plastic surgeon guy, he comes in and he marks up the body, like, this is the fat is the fat. And then so like, then we just cut the hole and suck it out. He's like, he like marks it out and we suck out the fat equals back in and he, and then he like adds the structure and stuff. We're we're, we're just the fat removers.

Okay. Okay, cool. What happens is a cockroach flies against the outside of a window. Improv works. It's an event. We're going to build it into it. Don't worry. And now give us the location. Yeah.

Where we're going to do a scene, an improv scene, uh, here at second city. Can I get a suggestion, but just so you know, there's going to be an event, an event happening. I am going to take a shit. Yeah, just being in the scene. That's fine. Probably works. Let's just do that. It's called. Yes. And why can't you just, you can't even, I can't.

Yes, Andy, because we have to fundamentally agree of the game here. Right? Remove improvising. You don't have it. Like you don't we'll do what you have a cockroach. You can be like, you can be like we're at an event, like could be like, and a cockroach. Like, what is that? I just wanted that to happen. But you, you could make, you could start the scene off by saying, Hey, look at them.

Agreeing with you. Let's move this over to you. You haven't, you haven't read this book. You haven't read this book over. Have you read any books down? I can't read. I never learned, I think I just know a lot of words that I memorize what they look like, but I don't know anything. Making books sounds. I'm going to book right back at you.

You better book. That's the sign of a big ass, but whatever fine, fine. We'll do, there's going to be an event. No, no more event. Let's just go with,

where are we? What are, where are we? We're fat suckers. Suckers. Yeah. Well, we're fat suckers. You choose the place. We just at the job at the job, we're just at the scene of the happening, you know, it just right. Maybe it's like we're maybe it's like the, like the person's like knocked out and we're sucking the fat.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. We're double w we're double sucking it cause we want to get out early. Okay. Okay. God damn it. This way too much fat to sock on this piece of shit, huh? Yeah. You know, honestly, honestly, I think I've, I've like the second time I've seen her back this month. It's crazy, dude. Dr.  he's fucking he's he's so he's so, uh, he's he's, he's pretty good.

I don't know. He, it, the asses he makes, I wish he'd put a little like, like, like, like, like, you know, like a nice juicy ass should sit. It should be kind of like, like a peach or something. I feel like, but I feel like there should be a slight flatness. Like they use it, you know what I mean? Like, I want an ass that's you?

I know. Yeah. Oh yeah. You like broken you like, like broken women, you know, broken button creates perfection and you're just like, I want a little used to it. You know, I don't like a brand new car. A little bit. I like a little bit of a, like, this is where the ass sits on things. And, but it's still really jiggly.

I wouldn't really want to improve. It's really got the slab. You've always been the kid that starts enjoying his shoes two weeks after owning them. You know what I mean? You like walked in stuff. You like, you like your shoes walked in. That's just, that's just you. That's what that means. I like my shoes and walked in when stuff's like worn out.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, that's always been you. Yeah, I guess you're right. I wish I could finish this. I wish I wish I could hire someone. I'll do it two weeks. You'll do it. I'll I'll I'll the judges in every shoe. Uh, 11, maybe 11 and a half dude. Come on. I forget half an inch. You know how important that is?

Fred, Fred tried to practically buy Jillian my shoe. I was like, I hardly noticed like that it's dry. Like there's nothing on there. It's not like there's a gob. I felt like it was like little, it was like a little drop, like, you know, so I rent, uh, so back when I was in high school, basically. Yeah, that will be high school for you a second, doing a side rant while we're out the job, sheriff, I don't know what side right side right side of an improv scene is what you're tracking, but it's no, it's outside of the it's it's a real life.

It's a pocket dimension inside of it's a pocket dimension side rant inside of the improv scene. So you've pressed. So you've, you've pressed pause on our improv scene to do a side rant in another dimension, just so we can it watching this on a TV screen right now, full screen, like that scenery, right?

That's just sucking out the bitch. It would pause and it was out of the picture and reveal that there's two people watching this and now they talk. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, I had this best friend at the time Simon and he had a bigger brother, Nico. Now whenever ne he, Nico wouldn't hang out with us usually. But whenever he did, he, he had a weird thing about him where he had to like outdo us on everything.

So we would just fuck with him by doing stupid shit. And then he would try to do stupid or shit. Right. So like, I dunno, we went to like the, there was this weird playground thing that had like this really tall. Um, like what's it called lately? Something to climb on. There's like a tower and we, we jumped off like the, almost the highest possibility that like gave you.

So of course he went to the roof of it to jump off of it. Like he broke his leg, it was hilarious. Um, and he would always do dumb shit like that. Right. And one time we had this kid that we used to fuck with a little bit, way too much. Actually we believe this kid, but he had fun doing it. Like he, he would bully himself all the time.

So, and I liked it. Um, but his mom was a whore, like a massive for that was like, it was legit. She went to five different parent teacher evenings. With like five different baby daddies, like five different dudes that would just bang in her. It was retarded. Um, so one day we went there, we wanted to mess with him, like, you know, just fuck around, get him, let's go outside.

Let's also make him do dumb shit. But like, he didn't open the door. He wasn't reacting. If anything, we threw like little rocks at his window. Apparently he was asleep or he wasn't there. Who knows. So since we didn't get to fuck with him, Nico had the weird feeling that he needed to make this evening epic and do something crazy.

So he proceeded, like they had their shoes outside of the house. Like, like on the back door, we would just always go into the backyard. That's how you, you know, you're supposed to basically enter as, as friends, you just went through the back door and they had like a roof above it and shit, but it was outside and they had their shoes there and like a little terrorists, I guess, to sit down and shit.

So he just grabbed one of his shoes and just pooped in the street.

Draws the line just to be like, it was way too gross. And we all threw up just may 16 and shit and had drank a little, it was dumb. But then on Monday, the kid came to school with those shoes on. Now, I don't know if they were washed, I'm assuming at the very least stretched out. Like our alter Eagles are doing to that bitch.

But yeah, I'd get, I'd get some new doctors Shoals and I'd, I'd soak them in the bathtub for seven days. I just charging them. I touch them. I use the stick to put them on a fireplace where you have to keep them. Your parents are like, I'm not getting new shoes. How don't give shit. You give me new shoes.

Motherfucker is pooping. My shoes. Don't forget. I come from a family. That's like wealthy back in the day. We were like pretty. Decently wealthy. I'm saying he's poor, obviously. Yes. We're poop shoes. He wasn't before they had like a nice house and car and shit, his mom was making good money, which is probably why she was warring around because she was like, dude, I don't need no man to support me.

I can just get me something. Imagine this, imagine this improv scene inside of a side rant.

Uh, so, um, I'm the mother come to me with your poop shoes. Let me try to get into the character because I know him Mo oh, wait, wait. Just so you know, just so you know, our relationship. One time he came to school and his story was last night. My mom came into my room to yell at me and I just like pitched back at her.

Right. We just fought for a loop. And then she said, shut up you son of a bitch. Listen to me. So that's why we called him his mom a bitch too. Okay. So just so you know, he knew the character from the story. Come on, mom, mom, mom, mom, for my shoe. All right. Didn't know mom. There's little shit in my shoe. Yeah.

But like, what's the problem though? You don't know how to clean it. Mom, mom, mom, mom. I'm going to, is it your poop? Whose poop is the moms on my boom? Let me see poop. Is it that smell like the clean boy? First of all you're grounded for knowing whose poop it is. First of all, what, what do you, what, what do you want, what do you want?

Do you want tips on how to clean the poop out? Like figure it out please. Can I get, like, I don't know, boiler the paper, what are you a poop of? My shoe. Uh, geez, God, shut the fuck up. Why are you bothering to you? Such a, such a wimp. I'm trying to think of a clean poop out of a shoe, OxiClean, OxiClean, and shut the fuck up you.

How old are you? How fucking old are you? Shut the fuck up. Shut the fuck up. How old are you? So we have some Oxyclean I guess you could use, don't put, don't use all of them use like five Clorox wipes. Shut the fuck. You know, what do I look like? Your made you pooped in your shoe. You're going to clean the poop out.

So here, go get the fuck you. I hate you. Throws poop shoe against wall runs away. It is legit. How that way, I guess you're going to school with no shoes.

You don't break the improv scene and say, what happens? How fucking dare you. I was still in that seat, bitch. You don't just leave you. Don't just jump back here. Get the fuck back here. You little snap. Fuck you, bitch. You thought you show up. You throw a poops through a poop, a shoe against my fucking house.

I don't whore around this town for nothing little snapshot. You're going to go back. Take the poop shoe off that wall. You're going to clean the fucking wall. First. You got to take your poop shoes, fucking out the fucking side. I don't know why he brought you to get the carrot hit to the fucking house. Go fuck yourself.

It's an improv scene. You don't, you don't critique me. The character I'm playing. I'm the mom, you're the son critiquing the character. I brought this out TV that his mom was watching TV on just in the living room. He just poked it out and just took it into his room. Cause he was like, yo TV is better. And his mom was like, oh, okay, prophecy, it's called improv.

See, this is the first time his mom ever grew a fucking miracle just cause I know the kid and you know, just like I just instantly had a picture of him in my head. Just walking into school with no shoes on. Well, lucky you have those shoes. Then he just walked in barefoot. When day do you tell your school while you're walking?

Like in midway, like in a rainy day, like just. Yeah, fucking leaves everywhere. It's great. Actually, you're a, what's your shoe size? Where would I? My fucking pink tennis shoes. You dumb shit. Fucking take it. The shit to your shoes. It's just some sun. I rule it already, but improv scene of them suffer in front of my eye.

Um, and it was beautiful. That's the power of it. But also also the guy that once in Germany, I don't know what you do in the U S but in Germany, when you'd write a test and you get it back, you end that lesson, you go through it and she gives you basically the right, correct answers for everything that you have to write down.

So like he w he wrote all of the down, he was like, yo teacher, You forgot a page on my car, on my like, test, you didn't even correct. And pass it down to you're like, dude, are you really going to try to do this? And he was like, no, you got it. Look at it. It's all there. It's all correct. I just heard it. She's like, look, I'm going to give you one more chance to just quit this and go sit the fuck down.

Or it's going to have to be a thing. And he's like, no teacher come on. He would get whiny as fuck. And then I he's like, okay, look, you wrote this in like black pen. Right. But, but this page that you just brought to me, the entire test was written in black pen, but this patient's supposed to be in the middle.

All of a sudden is in blue ink and look at this and she just legitimately used her fingers, move, swipe over it. And it like, you know, smudged a little because it was fresh. She's like, are you dumb? You like playing with me? So yeah, it was, it was great. He just like, and he just stood there and started crying, left the room and yeah, didn't return that day.

He just came back the next day. Pretended like nothing happened. He was funny. All right. So yeah.

so would you use your discount to get anything? Honestly, yes. I want like some liposuction right on my leg, like right above my Dick, that area, make it a little bigger. You know what I mean? Just by like sucking out the fat from over there. Just gain like an extra inch. That'd be cool.

Why don't you just get your Dick bifurcated and then he can make both of your Dick's bigger. Oh no, I want that. I want my

trifurcated no, I don't need, I don't need a pitch deck.

Oh man. You

know, I kind of want a peace sign deck. Can you cut it in a piece? Spread like this? Yeah, no, like the actual sign that will be like, you know, circle a circle and a Pitchfork, you know, that peace sign. It actually stands for death. Hmm. Can you put cock rings around my penis and like arrange them to look like the Olympic.

Rings. I mean, you could put cock rings on your Dick to look like the Olympic rings. You don't need a plastic surgeon for that, but I want them permanent. I want they're like built into the bottom of it. Oh no. Your Dick will fall off. You have to take the cock rings off at some point. No, but I just want them to like work into my skin, like piercings.

Basically. There can be holes that I can take them out of for a short time and shit. Yeah. Like ribs for his pleasure. You want like Dick?

I know a guy who could do some body modifications. Yeah. He'll like, he'll like put a USB drive in your head.

No, not, not like Neuralink. It's like a, it's like an encrypted Bluetooth drive thing. And what does it do for you? Uh, you just store data on it. You can like Bluetooth that to people if you want. Oh second, like, oh, okay. That's stupid. It's pretty stupid because you have to like put a USB drive. It's like put a USB stick into it to like upload more stuff into it that looks done.

It's that's now, man, are we still sucking the fat out let's switch sides, which is huge.

Holy shit. This bitch. Huge dude, dude, dude, we're almost off the arms. We have to go to the stomach dude. And then we have to do the ass and legs. This is going to be a while. There's a reason we both were doing this, but, but man, I need to get out of here early today. Yeah. What are you doing? I got a grinder Dade.

I mean, Tinder. Yeah. Who is he? She, she, um, I don't know. Totally fine. Oh, cool. It's cause it's Grindr. It's Lucio. He's Brazilian. Can't fucking wait for us. He plays soccer on the beach, according to his photos. Lucia. Yeah. He sent me like a Dick and an asshole picture within like the first conversation ever.

So yeah. Yeah. Like that was the first thing he wrote me. It was just pictures. And I replied with a soft penis than an erect penis and my own ass. So, so then he wrote a kissy face. I wrote a smiley with like heart eyes and then he sent like a clock and I just wrote tonight. Yeah. Now we, that, it's so simple when you're just fucking, you're not going to like go to get ice cream or something.

I mean, we might get some ice cream afterwards.

I know, but where are you fucking at? Oh, my place. Oh, okay. That's all I trust. Spring-ish stranger over. Yeah, but like that's alive, dude. You just gotta like have a stranger over you. Fuck him. Eat his ass out and he'd throw them out. Maybe order a pizza. If he's chill.

Yeah. I can have some pizza.

We like order a pizza.

It'll be awhile.

All of it, but she's just going to eat it in a fucking sleep. Oh shit. You right. How about this? You up the, the, the dosage. So she's out and I'll order the pizza. There's not enough dosage on this planet. Even if we kill this bitch to make her not eat pizza, I'm looking at her. We've been at this for 27 hours.

We're barely done with the video. Yeah. Steve, by the way, should we get, take talks? No, right now that's crazy. We don't believe in China. No, we shouldn't get tic-tacs and that's fucking, I didn't. I'm like you already have one and you've already sent me the videos. I know I never did. And I will never do that.

He did it. I saw it. I'll do anything for love. You're like, look at it. I did it.

Uh, I, yeah, I guess this has been no offense, but what the fuck? Don't don't don't touch your children. Don't unless they, I mean, dude, I mean, touch your children, but just like appropriately, like high five, you kid. Oh, you can. High-five the newborns. Yeah. In the face, right? Like one of the cries about the public, you just go like, Hey baby.

I five. Oh sure. I thought she was supposed to, I thought sunlight gives you cancer. So you're supposed to like put kids in a closet and like, not let them see any light and then like capita and then like have them only watch Kung Fu movies, like 24 hours a day. You're thinking of when you thinking of, when you go to the store and you leave them, locked in the car with all windows up watching a stupid movie.

So they're distracted and then it doesn't. Oh yeah, it makes sure that make sure the car's turned off and there's nowhere in Nevada abortion, the late term abortion, but Nevada abortion. I don't know why he just called it. She just called it a Levada abortion. Yeah. People are ruthless out there. Yeah, dude.

People in Nevada, you don't have notice. We see Nevada, I guess this is it. We're saying goodbye. How do we, how do we, what we started figuring out how to just add a sign off. It's your job. If you do it, um, accurate. Bye.

[riskeith]

hi again!!

shooting games huh? i’m a big softie i mostly play among us, animal crossing, zelda and sims.. shooting games are way to hectic for me i tried and nope! didn’t work lmao. (i know but gaming on the phone can be bleh but if you recommend it i’d happily check it out!)

my winter break is gonna be until january 2nd. i have to study and write an essay during the break so not rly a break, sigh. still, no classes so i’m not complaining. wbu? hopefully you get a longer break. and it does usually snow but climate change has been fucking insane it’s like fall weather here still..? not to sound stalkerish but i think you live in aus, right? you must have warm weather now hehe lucky u ):

AW smart girl, congrats! celebratory hug mwah!! i do love true crime a lot i mainly chose this path bc of that. idk if u know the anime case closed but i used to watch it a lot as a child and it just made me fall in love with solving crimes.

BIOMED!! you’re so smart that’s so intimidating haha... 😳 also taking japanese sounds so fun, what are your skills like? congratulations on finishing ur first year, what did you think of the uni life? (did you get to fully enjoy it despite covid and everything?)

now i’m interested, when did you get into tdbk? 🥺

dude!!!!!!!!!!! amaya and janai are my fucking life!!! i think about them all the time and the potential they have. they give us that juicy enemies to forced companionship to friends to lovers and it makes me CRY. 😭 as far as the boomerang scene, i think it was jack de sena and the writers that wanted to pay homage to atla? they worked together before on alta so 🥺 there’s some end credit art too that’s literally callum doing sokka’s poses 🥺 SOREN BEST BOY!! yes yes yes his redemption arc was well deserved. his father has always treated him like shit bc he wasn’t magically included like claudia and it makes me glad to see him realize that now. if you want more content there are some graphic novels out. especially through the moon which takes place between season 3 and 4... <3

thank you for the reassurance.. 🥺 it means a lot hearing that come from you. as long as you’ll have me i’ll keep talking to you. who knows maybe if i’m brave enough someday i’ll just direct message you... <3 hope you’re keeping well too angel! <3

henlo~!

aw nice!! among us scares me AHAHHA anything with like.. having to lie or deduction (mafia, werewolf, spyfall) i’m just like nope. could never be an actor ahahah. (honestly i recommend genshin to everyone. you, whoever you are reading this go play genshin! that being said marriage anon i haven’t tried it on mobile so i’m not sure how it feels, and i’ve heard it gets people’s phones running super hot so be careful of that! i wouldn’t fault you for not trying it out idk that i would either if mobile was my only option lmao)

noooo that’s such a short break that sucks! is it more of a mid semester break then? since you still have work to do. but yes i agree 1000% that no classes is worth it ahah. and i have a 3 month break woo!! 🥳 icb i get this at the end of every uni school year but at the same time is it worth all the suffering i must go through before that comes fhdjcnks

:o!! autumn weather isn’t bad right, at least it’s not cold? (unless you like that—i for one hate the cold brr) and noooo not stalkerish at all! i’ve got that listed in my bios and mention it now and again so it’s ‘common’ knowledge :) it is definitely warm! it was pretty hot earlier this week but it’s cooled down now~

AHH thank u 😭💘 ooo is that also called detective conan? i’ve never watched it but ik it’s very popular! if you’re interested, there’s a true crime podcast called casefile that i highly recommend, it’s very good!

HFKSNFKS no need to be intimidated pls rest assured i’m very Dumb in other areas fjjdsjsn. and japanese is fun! i think my skills are okay it’s kinda my bludge subject tbh so i lowkey neglect it and don’t memorise all the vocab i should lolll でも大丈夫です！(but that’s alright!) ((tho i would argue it isn’t ha)

fun fact, i had one (1) day on campus this entire year! so i don’t think i’ve got much to say about what uni life is like, bc i didn’t get to experience it 😔 (i even missed orientation AKA free food and goodies, so sad) online learning was an Experience to say the least. hbu? has uni been impacted a lot?

i believe i got into tdbk in the break between s3 and s4, from a manga chapter! all it did was show the two of them together and instantly i was like “they shall be my everything from now” 😆 i don’t even think there was anything that spurred it on, they really just snatched me up by looking good wow

when amaya and janai held hands in front of the dragon queen i was like omg?? are they??? and when i asked my cousin she said amaya had signed “[janai] thinks i’m cute but won’t admit it” earlier and i was like ohhhhhhhhhmg 🥺

i love that!!! will def have to go watch the credits for those references heheh. ngl sometimes when callum spoke i was just thinking about sokka lollll. exactly!! so good of soren to stand up for himself and also apologise to callum and recognising the fault and reasons behind his behaviour.. legend! and oooo i’ll give the graphic novels a look!

of course!! this is the highlight of my tumblr experience rn and i have you to thank for that 💗 whether you end up DMing me some day or not i’ll still always be here through asks 😩 so don’t stress! if anyone has a problem w it i’ll fight LOL. hope you have a great day~ 🤗

#marriage anon #wowclunaanswers #long post

[sftswigan]

Manchester gutter punks, The Battery Farm, talk to us about horrific crime inspiring a song and how they just had to form this band...

We’ve got frontman/guitarist Ben from the band.

Alright Ben, can you tell us about the band. Who plays what and how the band got together?

Hallo! We are The Battery Farm, four gutter bastards from Manchester playing gnarly, seething punk rock music.

Ben Corry on Vocals and Guitar, Dominic Corry on Guitar, Paul Worrall on Bass, Sam Parkinson on Drums. Me and Dom formed this band from the ashes of a band we'd previously been in together for 8 years. At the point we formed The Battery Farm we were in a low place, feeling like failures, feeling defeated by this thing that we'd built for years just imploding, feeling angry and scared and hopeless at the utter state of the world. We basically decided to do this in the pub one night when we felt like we had absolutely nothing to lose. It was formed as a desperate reaction to two lives and minds spiralling out of control in a hostile, hateful world.

That must have been tough but, seems like it’s worked out well and the band from what I can tell is going from strength to strength. How soon did you find the remaining members, Paul and Sam? What have they brought to the band?

It has actually. Helpfully, it was a fertile environment from which to create. The first wave of songs - stuff like I Am a Man - are the purest distillation of that sense of lashing out, that sense of desperation we were feeling at the time.

We found Paul pretty much straight away. I'd known him for years through Manchester's Fringe theatre scene, having been in a couple of plays with him. He'd come to see me in a play, I knew he was a musician as well as an actor (although I don't think I'd grasped just how good he is), so I asked if he fancied playing bass for our new band. Sam we actually didn't know before the band, and it took a little longer to get him in. He works for the same company i do and I'd heard he was a drummer, so I got his contact details, asked him if he fancied coming for a rehearsal with us. It all clicked, and the rest is history.

Paul and Sam bring a massive amount to the band. They lift the songs me and Dom write and add a very particular combination of power and melody which you'll be hard pressed to come by very often. They're fucking ace and they know what is good for the song. No ego, no fucking about. They know what's important.

Sounds like you needed that new band to form quickly and to find drummer and bassist when you did you was very fortunate. I watched an interview of you and Dom recently and you talked about inspiration for songwriting and I was interested in where 97/91 came from. When it comes to writing where do you first look to for ideas?

Yeah we did, finding a drummer was comparitively difficult and I think if we'd have really struggled then we honestly would have just given up on it. 97/91 came about after I read an article about the murder of Suzanne Capper in Moston, north Manchester, which is where me and Dom grew up. I'm not going to go into details but if you look it up you'll see that it's the most horrific thing you've ever read. It stuck with me for weeks afterwards, and part of that was because I knew the streets where it had taken place and the community in which it had taken place. The houses it happened in - numbers 97 and 91 - are still there to this day. I got to thinking about why I reacted so viscerally to that story in particular; atrocities happen every day and we don't bat an eyelid, not really. It had such an impact because I was so familiar with the setting, so familiar with the type of person involved. It was too real. 97/91 explores the idea that we make a trade-off in our lives, one which enables cognitive dissonance that shields us from the impact the mass, relentless violence of the world. It also means that when something evil happens in a familiar setting the impact is much greater.

How can it only be real when you can see it? 97/91 isn't necessarily about the Capper murder itself, but the murder is a jumping off point to explore the faustian pact at the heart of the human condition, the one that keeps us sane but also ebbs away at our souls.

Our ideas just literally come from trying to explain our perspective on the world, we don't necessarily make a conscious effort to look in one place for ideas. We just write about whatever moves us. That can be mental illness, corrupt political systems, or the fact that I've never been to Gorton, which is literally the title of one of our new songs.

I find reading about crime stories really interesting, it’s madness what goes on in this world! This is one I’m not aware of but this must have been difficult to write about with it being so close to home? I love the anger and aggression in your music and lyrics.

You mentioned being an actor earlier, do you think this has an influence on your performance as a front man?

Yeah I went through a short phase of listening to true crime podcasts earlier this year but i had to stop bec it was all too grim. It was difficult to explore the ideas that particular incident led me onto but the endgame wasn't to just write about the murder itself, so I suppose keeping that in mind kept my head clear and made things easier.

Honestly, i try to keep any ideas of acting and theatre separate from the band. The actor thing can be frustrating at times because people conflate that with what I do in the band and think that everything must be a performance of some kind, which it isn't. The whole idea of putting The Battery Farm together was that it could give us an outlet to express ourselves honestly, and to me the stuff I do as a frontman is just an honest reaction to what I'm singing and what it makes me feel. I try not to overthink that aspect of it because I feel like to do so would water it down. It needs to be raw, it needs to be stark, it needs to be reality. If it's an actor's performance I'm not really getting anything out of it.

It’s amazing how reading/listening to one can lead on to another one. But yeah hard to shake off once you’ve learned about them.

You’re performance on stage seems very honest and I love to see in a frontman.

Moving on to the music scene...Manchester in particular is buzzing at the minute. Did the band find it easy to slot in? What’s been your favourite gig up to now?

We did actually. We knew a couple of people anyway from being in previous bands but until now I'd always found the Manchester scene a little unfriendly. It's totally different now. Not only is it overflowing with incredible, original, exciting new bands but it's also full of amazing people, and in the year we've been gigging we've made some wonderful friends. There's a proper sense of inclusivity and community, a lack of ego and aloofness that wasn't there before.

My favourite, and I think the others would agree with me, is our first headline set which was at The Peer Hat last November. It was an Abattoir Blues night and they're always amazing. The venue was packed to capacity and the atmosphere was electric. It was the kind of big, simmering sweatbox that seems impossible to imagine in the current climate. I want every gig we play to be like that one.

Yeah it’s great to see bands appreciating each other’s music and plugging their stuff on social media etc. I love going to Manchester for a gig. It’s a great time for guitar music in the UK at the minute with bands like Idles, Fontaines DC and Sports Team doing really well. And also The Blinders bringing album 2 out very soon!

That gig sounds like a great night!

When all this is over and we get some normality back...what are the bands plans?

Well, we're heading into the studio later this summer to begin work on... something. Beyond that it's hard to say because like everyone else we can't really make plans at the moment. Like everyone else we're pretty much having to make it up as we go along. We do have gigs booked for November and December but whether they'll happen or not remains up to fate. Everything going to plan, we may be in for an exciting end to the year. Maybe.

Gonna be very exciting for all bands and music once gigs/recording etc can happen again isn’t it.

Got so many new bands I want to see. Have you discovered any new bands during lockdown? If not, what have you been listening to?

Lockdown's actually been really fruitful in terms of new bands releasing amazing stuff. I've been listening to a lot of Tinfoils recently, they're a delight! Also been loving new stuff from Cold Water Swimmers, The Red Stains, Richard Carlson Band, The Maitlands, loads of stuff. I've also recently discovered John Shuttleworth, a comedy singer from Sheffield who does weird Phoenix Club-type songs about stuff like margerine and vans. I love stuff like that, real end of the pier nonsense.

I love Tinfoils and down to have them on here in Wigan but then lockdown came. The other bands I’m aware of too but not the solo artists you’ve mentioned.

Yeah Tinfoils are great. John Shuttleworth has been around for years i think. I can imagine he won't be to everyone's taste. Richard Carlson Band are actually named after the actor Richard Carlson, who was in The Creatire From the Black Lagoon. There is no Richard Carlson in that band! They're absolutely ace, they released their debut single a few weeks ago and I've had it on repeat.

I’ll be sure to listen to your recommendations, love finding new music to listen to.

We’re coming to the end of the interview now, I’ve just got a couple of questions. You’ll get two options, you pick one answer...

Winter or summer?

Sex Pistols or The Clash?

Roast dinner or Chinese?

Film or Book?

Winter

The Clash

Roast Dinner

Book

Thanks for having me! Hopefully see you soon

Thanks Ben for taking the time to chat to us. Hopefully we’ll cross paths at a gig soon.

If you want to listen to the band please go and follow them on social media and their music is on Spotify etc.

#Batteryfarm #97/91 #Manchester #Punk #SFTSWIGAN #Youtube

[head-and-heart]

4x04 Personal Highlights

So I know that there has been a lot of negativity surrounding this past episode, but I would like to point out that it was far from being all bad and I would say it was a hell of a lot better than episode four from LAST season (aka. my least favourite episode of this show, ever) there was actually some good shit buried in this episode that I would like to address.

Never too much positivity, right fam?

Okay, I’ll get to it.

1. “Bellamy should be back by now.”

I mean, it’s self-explanatory. Even the C/exa queen is writing us some Bellarke shit .. hmm, I wonder why? Maybe cause she has to? Maybe cause Bellarke is becoming canon? Huh, weird.

2. Monty being a total babe and trying to comfort Clarke

It only serves to make the absence of his name on The List that much more painful, but I love seeing Monty trying to cheer Clarke up. He’s such a beacon of light. @the-ships-to-rule-them-all and @abazethe100 talked on their podcast about how its not just Monty’s brain and skills that make him invaluable, but who he is at his core - a source of optimism and support. He holds people together. I thought it was worth mentioning because @theskyboxpodcast is always good, but I especially loved that bit.

3. Devon’s acting

The writers truly could not have picked a better actor to play Jasper. He kills it, over and over and over again. Devon is the perfect mix of humour and tragedy that makes Jasper so heartbreaking and unique. He brings life to this character in a way that few actors could. That scene in the rain perfectly demonstrates this.

(UNRELATED: I’d love to see how Jaha was managing out on that lake when he heard about the acid fog. The possibilities are never-endingly humourous.)

4. Kane calling out Octavia

This scene was soooo validating because its the first time that Octavia’s actions have TRULY been called out. And it wasn’t just a brief call-out, it was an entire lengthy scene dedicated to why Octavia’s actions are NOT being supported by the narrative and are NOT right or honourable. 

“A warrior knows when not to kill. Lincoln taught you that. You seem to have forgotten.”

FINALLY RECOGNITION THAT A WOMEN WITH A SWORD IS NOT ALWAYS BADASS AND EMPOWERING. IT TAKES MORE THAN THAT. IT TAKES HONOUR

And to those of you who were screaming about Octavia never dealing with the consequences of her actions after ... what? 4x02? YOU COULDN’T WAIT TWO EPISODES??? WHY DO YOU JUMP TO CONCLUSIONS WHY DO YOU TORTURE YOURSELVES? Short rant concluded. This was a top-knotch scene. 

5. LUNA

She is so gorgeous and her voice is so soothing. She makes every episode better just be existing.

6. THE ISLAND IS SO COOL

I’M SO GLAD THAT ALIE’S MANSION IS NOT THE ONLY THING WE GET TO SEE OF THIS ISLAND. THE WHOLE INTRIGUE SURROUNDING BECCA AND HER LAB AND THE DRONES AND THE “MUTANT LINE” AND THE MYSTERIOUS THINGS THAT ALIE’S SECURITY IS “PROTECTING” THEM FROM IS SO INTERESTING AND ITS SO DIFFERENT FROM ANYTHING THIS SHOW HAS DONE BEFORE AND BOY AM I EXCITED TO FIND OUT WHAT’S GOING ON AND EVERYTHING TO DO WITH THIS STORYLINE. AND ALSO I, AND A LOT OF OTHER PEOPLE, TOTALLY PREDICTED THAT THEY WERE HEADED BACK TO ALIE’S ISLAND TO FIND A LAB OF SOME SORT BACK IN THE HIATUS SO GOOD-WORK TEAM. NOTHING GETS PAST THIS FANDOM, I SWEAR.

7. Jackson being a total babe and helping out Raven this episode/showing compassion and concern

So I’ve seen people shipping it and I am ... oddly, not opposed??? I mean, he’s sweet and that banter was nice and he’s a doctor which means he’s probs smart and also can help her out with her pain (kinda) and it will never happen but I CAN DREAM OKAY? 

Also, Jackson is Jackson’s only name. I’m sorry, I don’t make the rules. You will never hear me referring to Jackson by any other name. #dealwithit

8. “Save us all” sounds like “keep us all clean” in Trigadesleng because apparently Grounders know their priorities

I guess this explains why L.exa had that deep conditioned shit last season while Clarke was progressing through her slow but steady evolution into a dirty mop

9. “I’ve never met a line I wouldn’t cross.”

Richard you get the best lines. And you slay them every time.

10. MURPHY AND RAVEN’S DYMAMIC

I’M SO EXCITED. Lindsey and Richard are both a thrill to watch and they’re both so sassy and their history is just ... WOW. They haven’t had many scenes together ever since that KILLER scene in the dropship where we learned Murphy’s backstory which is a total crime because THEIR CHEMISTRY SERIOUSLY FLIES THROUGH THE ROOF.

I do think Murphy was trying to get on Raven’s good side when he grabbed her and helped her to safety and it was definitely for his personal motives, but I do also believe that a large part of him wanted to do it as an attempt to make up for fucking up her life so bad as well. It’s such an interesting dynamic to watch.

Just want to clarify that I don’t ship it because ... y’all he literally shot her and paralyzed her why do you do this?? But I definitely want to see more of them on my TV screen

11. Dad!Kane cupping his son’s face

Need I say more?

12. “Warriors don’t reveal their secrets.”

AND ECHO LOOKS AT BELLAMY BECAUSE HE DIDN’T CAVE AND REVEAL THEIR SECRETS BECAUSE MY BOY IS SO STRONG 

13. Ice Nation is SO much more interesting than Trikru

BYEEEEEEEEEEEEE

14. “Remember that time we welded your dad’s furniture to the ceiling? Now THAT was a prank.”

I WOULD SAY SO MONTY LMAO THIS IS SO EXTRA AND I LOVE IT

CLASSIC JONTY I CAN CLEARLY ENVISION THEM DOING THIS

15. “You’re not God, Clarke. You don’t get to decide who lives and dies.”

Hmm ... that’s an interesting line. Almost like it might be ... I don’t know ... A major theme of the show or something?

Also A++ delivery Devon. Kudos.

16. This show is SO GOOD with moral dilemmas

They truly do bring their A-Game every season. The List is just one example of these so-called moral dilemmas. There truly is no right choice. Clarke was pragmatic, everything she did made SENSE. But was it moral? Was it humane? That’s another story, and it’s one these writers are not afraid to tell.

17. Monty and Clarke’s interactions are all so on point

“You’re the one going too far and using the same old justification: it’s all for my people.”

ANOTHER MAJOR THEME ALERT

Monty is spilling the tea this episode and while I understand Clarke’s mindset and sympathize with her for dealing with the pressure on her shoulders, everything that Monty said in this scene was absolutely 100% true, and it’s going to come into play in Clarke’s character arc this season, I am sure.

18. Raven’s struggle with her leg is so real

Kim perfectly captured the struggles that Raven has to deal with and how her leg, while limits her physical ability, certainly does not limit her determination, her skill, and her brain. 

19. “What if the fight is all we are? We torture, kill, betray. We pretend we’re more than that just to make ourselves feel better, but it’s a lie.”

I love this line so much. This episode encapsulates so many themes and big ideas of the show (and it grapples with morality in hugeeeee ways) and I’m loving it.

20. “You’re not a prisoner, Luna. You have a choice.”

Raven putting her gun down and saying this to Luna is SO important, especially when you think about how Clarke tried to force the flame on her in 3x14. Free will was a major theme last year and I’m glad to see it paying off now.

21. Jaha swooping in and stealing that crowd

Listen. I know that there are many conflicted opinions on Jaha and I know that lot of people hate him. But I have never been more intrigued. His story this season is sooo interesting. I have no idea what to expect from him. I feel as though he is so disconnected from the other characters at this point in the narrative that he’s a complete wild card. Do I trust him or not? Should I? What are his motives? What knowledge does he have that the other characters don’t?

He’s so fascinating to me in that he is completely unpredictable. His story this season could break off in just about any direction. 

This scene was really fun to watch. Clearly, Jaha’s years of being a Chancellor comes in handy with a crowd. He knows what to do, what to say, to sway them. It reminds me of Bellamy, in a way, actually. Say what you will about Jaha, but he has a way with words and he knows how to inspire people. I can’t wait to see how this goes. 

(I totally think that lottery is bullshit and I think that Jaha realizes this, but he’s manipulating the crowd. We’ll see how this blows up in our faces later.)

“The people need to feel like they have a say in their fate.”

Another interesting line that I enjoyed. Just wanted to point it out.

22. “It’s the only choice you gave yourself. If you think you have the best idea, you have to convince people, not lie to them. Or lock them up.”

So choices and free will and truth and morality are all big focusses of this episode. People seem to overlook how much great thematic stuff is in 4x04 but there’s a lot and it’s great.

23. Becca’s lab is bomb AF

24. BOB MORLEY DESERVES A FUCKING EMMY PLEASE AND THANK YOU

25. “Take me home.” 

BECAUSE EVEN AFTER ALL THIS TIME ARKADIA AND THE SKY PEOPLE ARE STILL OCTAVIA’S HOME BECAUSE THAT’S WHERE BELLAMY IS (or so she thinks) AND HELLO YES I’M STILL EMO

#I ENJOYED THIS EPISODE A LOT MORE ON MY REWATCH #SO I'M GONNA BE ALL CAPS ABOUT IT #the 100 #the 100 season 4 #the 100 4x04 #posts by moi