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akwardlyuncool · 3 years

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Life As We Know It (2004-2005) - Review

Based on the 2003 novel “Doing It” by Melvin Burgess, Life As We Know It follows 6 High School Sophomores on their journey to actually “Doing It.” It’s mainly from the perspective of the 3 very ignorant guys, Dino (Sean Faris), Ben (Jon Foster) and Johnathan (Chris Lowell), but the girls, Jackie (Missy Peregrym), Deborah (Kelly Osbourne) and Sue (Jessica Lucas), don’t fall short on sharing some of their vast naivety as well.

I’m on a mission, not really, but a not-so-guilty-pleasure of mine has been to watch and discover a good chunk of all the late 90′s/early to mid 2000′s Teen/Twenty Somethings, Drama tv shows and movies. Yes we can blame Degrassi and The OC and Dawon’s Creek and any other generic suburban teen show with a non-generic Emo Soundtrack. All prime and all shows I own the soundtracks to.

I vaguely remember some Google search telling me that this show was a spin off to Dawson’s Creek, which turned out to most likely be a show called “Young American’s” and not Life As We Know It, but that’s how this show got added to my long list of shows in this category to watch. Since that search, probably after my watch of Dawson’s Creek ended, I’ve ear marked it as one to eventually get my hands on. I’ve owned the book forever, not knowing the connection, but when I finally started the search to be able to watch the show, that’s when I was made aware of the two being linked and also when I decided it was time to read the thing, cause you know #sourcematerial. That being said, I only made it to chapter 2 before putting it down, picking something else up and eventually getting a hold of the series DVD and deciding to consume that first.

Since I did just finish the show (all of it’s 13 episodes) I’m more motivated to pick the book back up, but let’s just say that one chapter I did read, felt like a lot for me, so hopefully I’ve been desensitized. However I might still be just as uncomfortable as I was before.

Long story short, here we are. High school was never this “cool” or eventful for me, but I crave this particular aesthetic so much. There was definitely parts of the show that felt like that awkward and cringe, but cool 2005 of my “dreams” and then other parts that felt like the massively uncomfortable and sometimes plain wrong humor, of the early 2000′s that we all want to chuck in the trashcan. I say this all the time, but I really do try and take these shows for what they are and not over analyze every move in them because I know if I do that with all my progressive thoughts of today, I would never be able to get any enjoyment out of them whatsoever. But...... that doesn’t mean I throw all my common sense out the window, I’ve just learned how not to let certain thoughts bring me down. (It’s basically how I was able to consume all of Sex and The City, in all of it’s problematic glory in 2020.)

Part of me wonders if this show and shows like it however, are actually any good or if I’m just holding onto that idealistic vision of TV show high school that I apparently love so much? Or maybe buried underneath all of it’s predatory behavior, misogyny and cheesy ideals of lust verses love, it works because it was swimming in the the easy part of deep end of the honesty pool. We talk about these shows like their so real and cutting edge for being open about sex and pain and life and in some ways they are when we’re 16 and living all of this, but again it’s just TV and I sure wasn’t living any of this. (Probably because of my religious upbringing though.)

“Final” Thoughts:

Basically what I’m saying, is that this show is good or decent to someone like me who unironically likes this sort of thing, but there has to be a reason it only had one season, barely got two bonus episodes and still ended before it had time to properly close out the season, let alone the series. Mostly generic, I just happen to still be pretty engaged the whole time.

Theme Review:

Gonna start reviewing theme songs with my reviews, cause it’s often one of my favorite parts.

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Sooner or Later by Michael Tolcher

The chorus to this song is the perfect 30 seconds to encompass this series. Facing the idea of being a naive know-it-all, but knowing that one day you’ll humble yourself and laugh about how ridiculous you once were, even if you haven’t realized that foresight yet. It’s coming of age perfection, even though it does ride probably a bit too on the noes.

PS: Micheal Tolcher and the album that this song is from “I Am” is totally giving me some Upbeat Emo, Secular Christian vibes, especially with songs like Sun Song, and I’m for sure diggin it. (This comes from a person who some of her favorite songs are I’ll Be by Edwin McCain and Come On Get Higher by Matt Nathanson, so you know where my stuff lies lol.)

Some Bonus Thoughts: (SPOILERS INCLUDED!)

*In no particular order.

I don’t know who made the “hot for teacher” romance a viable trope, but it’s so hard to laugh at, let alone ship in any capacity. (Please don’t ship that ish.)

They tried so hard to make it kinda a big deal as it ended, but also not a big deal by just laughing through and playing into the decades old teenage boy fantasy about getting with your teacher.

I still think Ben’s brother was trash for getting with her afterwards though. The situation is wrong, full stop, and although his brother is legally allowed to date/other, Ms. Young, he is still Ben’s brother at the end of the day.

It was also wild how Ms. Young acted so petty and jealous over some high school girls, like at 23 don’t you have better control over your feelings. (That’s all relative though cause her age didn’t manage for her to be too mature about much.)

I really enjoy Chris Powell’s teen drama roster cause he plays cute and nerdy really well. (Site: Veronica Mars, but his stint on Private Practice was great too.)

Yes. Sean Faris does in fact play the teen heartthrob in the movie The Sleepover, in case you watched the whole series and didn’t realize where his face had been until half way through, like me.

Don’t ask why but I spent most of the show thinking that Jon Foster was the same guy who played Ricky (Daren Kagasoff) from The Secret Life of The American Teenager.

I know communication is hard for a lot of teenagers, but so much of the relationship drama in this show could have been rectified if they only just talked to each other in a timely manner instead of playing the passive aggressive game the whole time.

I’m sorry but it’s hard for me to believe that Dino was so emotionally distraught that he couldn’t at the very least cry in Jackie’s face after he shows up at her house that night after he saw his mom cheating. I get him being traumatized and not want to go through with sex like they planned, but it took him over a week and many instances of being a full on jerk later before he decided some form of honesty was the best way to proceed.

Why does the alternative rock chick somehow always manage to be shown as the promiscuous rebel? Zoe was done dirty.

Just because you dress like 2003 Avril Lavigne doesn’t mean you have a predisposition to beer at high school sporting events and sexual openness in classrooms you don’t attend.

This show tried to be better by having two of them, but it’s obvious that, good or bad, fat-phobia is the reason Kelly Osbourne’s character (Deborah) wasn’t the one fully placed in that role.

Mia, Deborah’s mom was kinda in the wrong for getting with Micheal, but only because she considers both Annie and Micheal (Dino’s parents) friends and didn’t like keeping secrets from either of them. Rock and a hard place y’all.

Mia was also hella wrong for holding her grudge against her ex over her daughter’s head.

I think Jonathan was just as wrong in all the ways he was a jerk and a “cheater” as Dino and Ben, but that nice guy syndrome apparently made it so he didn’t get chewed out as hard in his character arch. Oh the things “nice guys” who may come off as slightly sensitive, only get slightly punched in the arm for.

Not gonna lie William Miller (Sue’s Dad) gave off total Black Republican vibes.

It is totally unrealistic for even the “nerdy” popular guys to have those kinds of abs. Just sayin.

Yes, we’re all fans of early-ish Peter Dinklage, but who else thought he shared too much about Dino’s issues with Dino’s mom?

I know he just wanted to call her out cause his main concern was Dino, but still it felt like it wasn’t his place to confront her.

I know back then you could only go so far with emerging teen sexuality, but this show could have had at least 2 more seasons easy.

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teddyshoney · 4 years

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So, in celebration of posting my 50th fic on AO3 this morning, I decided to make a masterpost of all my fics so far. I’m quite excited to get all of them in one place on Tumblr! I have written some stories that I recognize might squick some people out, so I will put those beneath the cut. Clicking on the title of the work or series will take you to the story or series on AO3. Each of my stories is posted on FF.net, too. Clicking on FF.net at the end of each description will take you to the story or the first story in the series for each series listed. (FF.net is rather infuriating in that there is no good way to mark stories in a series. If you have questions about series order on FF.net, feel free to message me, and I’ll help you out.) So, without further ado, here we go!

One-Shots:

It Was All Your Fault (9988 words) -- Finn and Puck are getting married! Mike and Kurt, their two best men, have put together a weekend excursion to celebrate the upcoming wedding, but they may not be the only ones planning something. (This really ended up being a Klaine story despite what the summary makes it sound like.) FF.net

Respect and Obey (8443 words) -- Blaine has always had a little trouble with his anxiety, and the pandemic is causing an attack. His Dom tries to help, but sometimes it's hard to shut off the voices in your head. (This is a D/s story with Dom!Kurt and sub!Blaine.) FF.net

Take a Chance on Me by Abba (1760 words) -- Blaine takes Kurt on a surprise outing that doesn't go as planned. (Written for Klaine Valentine’s Day Challenge 2019 but is a standalone work.) FF.net

I Could Fall in Love by Selena (1530 words) -- Blaine has had feelings for Kurt since the day that they met, but he doesn't think Kurt is in love with him. A few comments from Wes go to his head, and Blaine gets a surprise he didn't count on. *This story takes place while Kurt and Blaine are attending Dalton Academy and does not completely comply with cannon events. (Written for Klaine Valentine’s Day Challenge 2019 but is a standalone work.) FF.net

Whenever You’re Away From Me by Olivia Newton John (2921 words) -- Kurt's in New York, and Blaine is still in Lima. When Sam invites him to drive to New York with he and his dad, Blaine accepts, planning a surprise for Kurt. (Written for Klaine Valentine’s Day Challenge 2019 but is a standalone work.) FF.net

This Is the Time by Billy Joel (1009 words) -- Kurt and Blaine are supposed to be writing their wedding vows separately. But they're really struggling, and they both need just a little bit of comfort. (Written for Klaine Valentine’s Day Challenge 2019 but is a standalone work. I did not upload this work to FF.net. If I choose to in the future, I’ll add the link here.)

Christmas Cookies (2000 words) -- Kurt's headed back to work from the bakery when he bumps into a very upset Blaine. He decides his time is better spent taking care of his sad husband than at work, so they go home to work out Blaine's problem. (Written for Glee Potluck Big Bang Advent 2019 but is a standalone work.) FF.net

Series:

In Every Lifetime (314,220 words) -- This is a series that I’m writing with @jayhawk-writes. There are currently eight stories in this series, and we have plans for several more. We’ve been taking turns writing stories for the ‘verse. The series summary is: A series of connected AUs inspired by this line from Blaine's proposal: "It's always felt like I was remembering you from something. As if, in every lifetime you and I have ever lived, we've chosen to come back and find each other and fall in love all over again. Over and over for all of eternity." 1. The Unknown (864 words by me) -- Kurt and Blaine have a choice to make... FF.net 2. Domus Civita (62,612 words by jayhawk-writes) -- While on vacation to a city he's never been to, Kurt Hummel finds himself in a place that he recognized from his dreams. The person he always sees in those dreams is there, too, and they spot him and ask, “Is it really you?” FF.net 3. It Only Took an Hour (19,072 words by me) -- Kurt's been set up on a blind date at a bar that he hates. And the blind date is a no-show. There is this really cute boy that walks in, though, and Kurt can't stop watching him dance and flirt. The whole story takes place over the course of an hour with the exception of the prologue. FF.net 4. The Writing on My Skin (35,530 words by jayhawk-writes) -- Soulmates, when the younger of the two turns 16, both get a unique mark somewhere on their skin that will have or has had some meaning to them. They can write to each other back and forth by writing on their skin. Kurt Hummel has been waiting for his soulmate to finally turn 16 so that he would have someone to talk to about all of the things he can't tell his dad or other friends. Nobody really knows how bad the bullying has gotten at McKinley. He hopes that his soulmate can help him get through this tough time, but he has no way of knowing that Fate, and Noah Puckerman, will lead him right to his soulmate. FF.net 5. Nothing Can Keep Us Apart (44,467 words by me) -- Blaine is a Prince...well, he used to be. Now, he's just a lowly Peasant living in the city of Hucal, a kingdom under the rule of the man who ordered his father to be killed. Unexpectedly, Blaine falls in love with a boy, a boy who should be far, far out of his reach. And just as he thinks that things are looking up for him, Hucal goes to war, and Blaine must fight. Will he make it home? Will he get to marry his soulmate? Will they have their happily ever after? FF.net 6. The Silver-Scaled Mark (52,737 words by jayhawk-writes) -- Blaine is a half-elf living in a town of full-blooded elves. He doesn’t fit in and is bullied almost daily for his heritage. One day Blaine finds solace in the library and later finds a book that talks about the magic in his world. He is drawn to it and wants to learn all he can. After Blaine has consumed all of the books in his town, he goes off to college to become a wizard so that he can help protect those that are not able to adequately defend themselves. Once he has graduated, he finds that he and several companions are part of a prophecy that will help unite the races in his world. FF.net 7. When Worlds Collide (currently 70,521 words by me) -- Kurt Hummel and Blaine Anderson are soulmates and fairies; they have a wonderful little family, and Kurt is a successful author. When his daughters beg him to read his new book to them for a bedtime story, Kurt and Blaine relieve their pasts, and we learn exactly how they became soulmates and lovers in a most unconventional and unlikely way. (There are two or three chapters left to post of this story.) FF.net 8. Guarding the Shadows (currently 28,417 words by jayhawk-writes) -- Too distracted by their love for each other to make their own choices, Kurt and Blaine are thrust into an adventure they know almost nothing about. Born in mid-1600 London, they must overcome many obstacles including their financial barriers and their desire to find true love. However, there's a hidden piece of the puzzle they know nothing about: vampires. (This story is currently updating weekly on Saturdays.) FF.net

The Adventures of Josh, Jasper, and Liza (25,779 words in 3 works) -- In the first story of this series, Kurt and Blaine adopt three kids: Josh, Jasper, and Liza. This story is based on the movie Instant Family. The following two stories in that series recount a few days in their lives following the adoption. I plan to write more stories for this series. FF.net

Engaged for Graduation (8189 words in 2 works) -- This is a canon divergent series in which Kurt proposes to Blaine on the night of his high school graduation at the end of season 3. I have more stories planned for this series. FF.net

The Ander-Hummel Family (14,023 words in 6 works) -- This series is a continuation of canon. Rachel is Kurt and Blaine’s surrogate; we follow them through the pregnancy and some adventures after the baby is born. I am writing more stories for this series as well as finishing the last story posted in this series. FF.net

Klaine Is My Favorite Hallmark Movie (3320 words in 2 works) -- I didn’t intend for this to be a series but as I was trying to work on some stories for the Glee Potluck Big Bang Advent prompts, this series was born. In the first story, Kurt and Blaine talk about what they think their Hallmark movie would be like. Then, in the next story, they do a bit of roleplay for their Hallmark movie. I don’t know if there will be more stories in this series or not. FF.net

Blaine Has Fibromyalgia (4757 words in 2 works) -- I didn’t intend for this to be a series either. I wrote the first story about how Blaine got fibro in order to deal with my feelings surrounding the possibility that I might have fibro as well. The second story, which I just posted this morning, was born out of needing to deal with another situation related to fibro. I don’t know if there will be more stories in this series or not. FF.net

Below the cut is a list of my series that have some themes others might be squicked out by.

Puckurt Ageplay (25,736 words in 4 works) -- In this series, Puck starts dating Kurt and their relationship morphs into an ageplay relationship with Kurt as the little following Burt’s election to Congress. I have plans to add more works to this series. FF.net

Puckurt Needs Blaine (14,943 words in 1 work) -- This is a spinoff series in which Blaine joins the Puckurt relationship as a little. I have more works planned in this series. FF.net

Klainofsky (36,331 words in 4 works) -- In this series, Blaine calls Dave up one night out of the blue and tells him that he and Kurt are having problems in their relationship. This leads into an ageplay relationship with Dave as the Daddy and Kurt and Blaine as the littles. I have more stories planned for this series. FF.net

Blaine and Kurt (9376 words in 4 works) -- This is an ageplay series in which Blaine is the Daddy and Kurt is the little. I have plans for more stories in this series. FF.net

Kurt and Blaine (44,091 words in 6 works) -- This is an ageplay series in which Kurt is the Daddy and Blaine is the little. The first few stories are an introduction to their dynamic, but the third story, A Visit to Grandma and Grandpa’s, is where the series really starts to head in a specific direction, and we see the addition of Finn and Sam in a Daddy/little relationship as well. I plan to finish the last posted story and still have more stories planned for the series. FF.net

You and Me Plus Puckerman Spells Family (42,120 words in 5 works) -- This ageplay series follows Puck as the little and Kurt and Blaine as Papa and Daddy. Their dynamic begins when Puck shows up drunk at Burt and Carole’s. He’s recently broken up with Quinn again and due to his drinking has lost all his pool cleaning jobs. Having promised Finn before his passing that they would look out for Puck, Kurt and Blaine fly in from New York to bring Noah home with them to start his new life. I have plans for more stories in this series. FF.net

#klaine fanfic #in every lifetime series #teddyshoney #fanfic author #best friend writers #friends that write together stay together

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zachvillasource · 5 years

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interview | zach villa - schonmagazine.com

As the infamous Night Stalker, Iowa-born actor Zach Villa is a chaotic evil in the latest series of American Horror Story. Entitled AHS: 1984, the show plays off the hopes and tropes of the 1980s, incorporating elements from films like Friday the 13th and Halloween into a spine-tingling thrill ride. The chief villain of the series is Villa’s Richard Ramirez, a reality-based serial killer set on making the lead characters’ lives a living hell — quite literally.

In real life, however, Villa is an obvious contrast. A multihyphenate with a strong career across a range of disciplines, he first caught the attention of the mainstream from his collaboration with Evan Rachel Wood in the project Rebel and a Basketcase. Now, as AHS: 1984 keeps audiences around the world thoroughly spooked, Villa opens up to Schön! about growing up in Iowa, his willingness to collaborate with Taylor Swift, and the unexpected call that announced his role on American Horror Story.

How did you get your start in acting?

Well, I’ve been on stage since I was two, so the whole shebang started quite early. Acting, oddly, was an afterthought when I first started. I had been dancing and singing on stage for years, idolising great song-and-dance performers like Gene Kelly, Donald O’ Connor, and Sammy Davis Jr. when it occurred to me that I should probably focus on learning the craft of acting if I wanted to continue pursuing that particular path in the entertainment industry. I had focused intensely on two out of the three “triple threat” disciplines, so I guessed it was time that I figured out the third part. It was an accessory to being able to perform musical theatre roles more effectively, and I guess that backfired in a sense and became a more central focus as I developed.

Iowa isn’t the most common birthplace for a big-time actor. What does your family — and presumably other Midwestern relatives — think of your journey into Hollywood?

They are both thrilled and confused. Don’t get me wrong — my family is very happy for me, and while we have had our spats over the years about whether or not I should be pursuing a highly volatile, financial unstable career, they have ultimately come through and rooted for me and my success.

That being said, I think pursuing a career in the mainstream entertainment industry is a very singular experience. Unless you’ve lived it and hit the pavement in NYC, L.A., etc., it’s very hard to understand the day-to-day struggles of a performing artist. I think that certain regions of the country are — generally — a majority of media consumers as opposed to creators, and there is a disconnect between the public and those of us pursuing an arts career that propagates the fallacy of things being easy and breezy, since you don’t have to get up every day at 6 AM, go to the office, and then come home and make dinner. People see that lack of structure as undisciplined and fancy-free. Let me tell you, it’s anything but. Artists have to hit the pavement in a very different way that is highly varied from day to day, and that uncertainty introduces a unique kind of stress, in addition, to actually trying to be good at your job. I always say that booking work is my “job” as an actor, and when I actually book a gig, that’s where the job ends and the craft and career begins. Translating that to someone without firsthand experience can be infuriatingly difficult.

Where were you when you found out about landing AHS: 1984 and the scope of your role? What did you do?Who did you call first?

I was in the studio recording an audiobook — one of the many ways that this particular actor has been able to supplement their income, and it has been such a gift. I was waiting on the call, and I stopped narrating mid-sentence — much to the puzzlement of my audio engineer — and picked up. I got the news, opened the door of the vocal booth and leaned against the front wall, sliding down to a sitting fetal position, and started to tear up. I called a few close friends and family and walked around for the better part of an hour mildly freaking out. The studio staff secretly went and bought a bottle of champagne down the street, and after I finished my page quota for the day they surprised me with a toast. Then everything in my life became a blur.

Of course, without spoiling anything, what can you tell us about your role as Richard Ramirez in AHS: 1984?

Oh, that’s a very difficult question. Richard Ramirez was a real person. I am playing a character that shares his name and is informed by him and his history. Beyond that, you’ll just have to wait and see.

What was the most memorable moment from shooting the series?

I can’t say my absolute favourite without revealing secrets! But I’ll say that the encounter with the hiker in episode two was quite “fun” — if you can call pretending to murder someone “fun.” The makeup and FX team on the show is the best in the biz, and the blood rig that was used in that scene was just wild. It was messy and crazy, and [there was] high pressure to get it right in one take, and I loved it.

What’s your method for getting into character, both in the weeks and moments leading up to a shoot or performance?

I have to play these cards close to the chest. Some of it is instinct. I just feel as though I am inside the character’s head at some point after spending enough time with the material, but it’s different with each role.

Sometimes I need to know how they sound, sometimes it’s historical research. It’s ALWAYS spending an exorbitant amount of time with the script — that’s the golden rule for me. Whether its Shakespeare or the 200th episode of Friends, you have to start with the text as an actor, and the most minute differences in phrasing, punctuation, word choice, etc. are clues to how this person operates as a human being and in the world. I always come back to the text. Any other secret sauce that I do I’ll keep secret for now.

What’s been the most challenging part of playing a character like this?

I’ll modify the question to ask what’s the most important part of playing a character like this… and that, I think, is being able to let it go at the end of the day — which I don’t always succeed in doing. Sometimes after an intense shoot it takes me a minute to let go of the energy I was carrying around on set. I pride myself on being able to flip in and out, but that is challenging from time to time for me on this particular project.

If you could only watch one film and one television series for the rest of your life, which would you choose?

The Back to the Future Trilogy for movies and Battlestar Galactica for TV. Nerd alert.

Apart from acting (and dance) you’re also well-versed in music. How did you begin as a musician?

The same time that I started hearing it, so very, very early. Growing up with a dance studio attached to your house, you hear a lot of very diverse music over the years. That all seeped into my subconscious, and I was writing full-on symphonies in my head walking through the woods in Iowa when I was seven or eight years old. Mind you, I didn’t have the skills to put that into writing or notation — and still don’t, not for the symphonies anyway.

I learned how to read music by playing the violin in elementary school. I didn’t pick up a guitar or actually start producing original music in any tangible way until my junior year at Interlochen Arts Academy. There, my roommate Filip — a wildly talented self-taught metal guitarist and visual arts student from Macedonia — taught me things here and there, and I also taught myself by ear. The Internet, man.

Who are some other musicians with whom you’d like to collaborate?

St. Vincent. Top of the list. Blink 182 — a childhood dream. Jimmy Eat World. John Mayer but only if he lets me be in his next ridiculous green screen music video. Mac Ayers, Tears For Fears, Snail Mail, and oh, I dunno… Taylor Swift. Come at me.

Who are your biggest musical inspirations? And what have you been listening to lately?

Biggest? That’s tough because it changes with each project. Tower of Power is a huge influence for me. My first band was funk-based, and man, they are so groovy. If you don’t know, now you know go listen to them. St. Vincent. Jimmy Eat World. And, regardless of the drama surrounding this artist from time to time, John Mayer. He really is one of the great guitarists of our generation, and more importantly, the songwriting that he produces is top-notch. I’ve learned a lot from diving deep into his material over the years. Miles Davis, and jazz in general, is huge for me. Brain fuel. Listening lately to Sleater-Kinney’s new record, Knuckle Puck, and a lot of 2000s pop-punk.

What else can we look forward to from Zach Villa — be in 2019, 2020 or later?

World domination.

The track on the video content [for this shoot] is the first single — a tease if you will — of my new solo project. Go check it out. My band Sorry Kyle will be dropping a ton of music over the next few months if you’re into punk and emo.

And that’s just music. Acting-wise, post-AHS I’m waiting to see what comes down the pipe. I’m always creating. I want to be fluid in music, movement, film and TV, directing, etc. There’s no time like the present and the present is, well, now. So hang on tight.

#zach villa #ahs cast #american horror story #ahs 1984 #interview #photoshoots #*

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meta-squash · 4 years

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Lipstick Traces Review/Thoughts

(I wrote this 2 years ago but didn’t have a tumblr to post it to at the time)

So I’ve just finished reading Lipstick Traces by Greil Marcus. And it’s fucking long with so much information and I’ve been having a lot of thoughts. Some just about little specific things mentioned in the book, and some more about the themes of the book written in the 80s compared to our current epoch of technology and politics and art and culture industry etc.

I mean, a lot of the stuff in the book/the thoughts the book gave me are things I’ve rambled about before on tumblr. But I guess it’s stuff that’s still in my head, that still bothers me, that I still have no solution for, or that I can find cracks in my arguments for solutions.

Mostly what I took away from this book was a giant feeling of conflict and ambivalence and uncertainty. It is, ultimately, a book of regret. It’s a book that explores these artists and movements and ideas and people that made a series of tiny but huge impacts to art and creation, who could have made a huge revolutionary change, but whose small revolutions were lost to time. It is a book about anger or frustration that incites a change, an avant garde, and how that anger fizzles out or is smothered and forgotten. It is a book about the cycles of history and how the new, the angry, the ones pushing back, are always eventually suppressed. In a 1994 quote Richey said, essentially, that you only really get remembered if you’re an Einstein or a Newton– a person who creates or discovers something that is such a massive revolutionary change that it affects the way the world is perceived and how it is believed to function. This book talks about those who aren’t Newtons and Einsteins. Those artists that made little waves that changed a few but didn’t change enough.

And it’s simultaneously fascinating and exciting and depressing, reading and thinking about this. That this book is a book of regret written in the 1980s, and 35 years later things have only gotten more extreme, and the regret can only feel heavier. The anger is still there, too, but it was more potent in the 80s and 90s, it had more potential. Now the anger is becoming impotent, or trapped. Either the meek inherited the earth and forgot what it was like to be meek, or the ones who inherited the earth were strongmen wearing the masks of the meek and the ambition of the avant garde.

Honestly, the biggest takeaway I got from this book is how drastically things have changed. How the way the book compares the Dadaists to the original punks is a fairly close, similar type of comparison, with similar movements, ideas, ideals, messages, and actions. And how the comparison to both of those with any sort of movement that might happen in the next decade or so will be massively, drastically different because of how much culture has changed, media has changed, access and accessibility has changed, government, education, class awareness, and on and on. How, honestly, I’m not sure if there could be another movement like the dadaists and like the punk scene, because to be reactionary and avant garde and revolutionary is something very different these days.

Already Greil Marcus discusses speed and the culture industry. Which makes sense, since his primary theoretical sources are Guy Debord and Theodor Adorno. But it’s fascinating to see these theories–both written and published in the 40s and 60s–being used to critique and analyse culture and art back then, much closer to the texts’ inception. Those theories were new-ish in terms of being put into words back then. The idea of the prison of capitalism, the labor that turns the proletariat into machines and then sells them back to themselves, the speed and change of media, the homogenous nature of entertainment and pop culture. All of that was relatively new, at least in terms of being stated outright.

And people were frustrated! People have always been frustrated! The Dadaists were frustrated by the war they didn’t want to participate in, and then in the monotony of the post-war expectations that everything go back to normal, when nothing was normal. They were frustrated by the Modernists, by the Expressionists, by art becoming something that gave you Status rather than something that you just did because you had the urge. Punks were frustrated with the economic and social malaise, the labor issues, the failed ideals of the hippies, art and music stagnating, the lack of platforms for them to express themselves. But they were able to use art to express that anger, that frustration, that feeling of nihilism or of glee at meaninglessness, that feeling of “fuck it, we have nothing so let’s do what we want.” Both generations did it in different styles, but both threw convention out the window, focused on what was taboo, what was weird, what was scandalous, what they wanted to say but society didn’t want them saying.

What’s interesting about the book is that it expresses admiration for this, for the daring and avant garde and original and clever and badass nature of both Dada and Punk ideals/styles/philosophies/actions/etc. But it also expresses regret. Regret that it only lasted so long. That it didn’t leave any major effect on art or politics or life or society (that is, aside from what capitalism stole or what minor underground movements admired or were inspired by). That it was stolen by capitalism. That it inevitably fell apart as time moved forward.

But for those glorious few years….

And what it made me think of, which (like I said) Marcus talks about quite a bit, is the effect that the culture industry and the speed of culture/media/news had on both movements. For the Dadaists, it was more about the speed of the news and also just blindly making, with no knowledge of a goal or ultimate desire, that resulted in the group eventually separating into other factions and the movement petering out into other artistic ideas and styles. The Dadaists were reacting to the war, to the newness of certain parts of culture, to the personal conflicts between artists. The punk movement was more affected by the ever-increasing speed of culture and media as well as news. Things were moving faster. Styles and ideas were coming into fashion and then becoming old hat more quickly. Punk started out as avant-garde, as a refusal to conform, as an excuse and/or reason to speak out and act out and express oneself. Especially in communities that weren’t being heard. It started out as a way for individuals to force society to acknowledge them. And then capitalism and the culture industry got their hands on it and began to use it as a marketing ploy, as fashion, selling punk back to the masses it was intended to belong to.

It’s pretty obvious that the world has sped up immensely since the 1970s– media, news, and culture industry included. Things that are new on Monday are old by Friday. Memes that are hilarious and circulate social media for weeks are dead by the time companies try to capitalize on them (see: Zumiez etc making Grumpy Cat shirts etc). Music or films that are popular fall out of popularity in just a few weeks, unless they’re vapid pieces of media or unless the creators/artists continue to hype themselves over and over again in different ways. It is impossible to create focused critical art because there is always so much going on in the news and in world politics or social issues; everything is so intertwined it’s impossible to pick out certain things to criticize. Artists and art movements and things of meaning and import fall by the wayside. It’s hard for me to imagine an avant garde or artistic movement within a community growing in popularity and staying strong for long enough to really make an impact or a difference. And the speed of the news is insane now. Things are only big news for a few days before vanishing under the avalanche of new stories and new events. Things stay big news within the communities that care about them (ie Black Lives Matter, Flint MI, Grenfell, DAPL, etc) but not within the eye of the media. News changes as fast as a feed can refresh.

I also have the feeling that art doesn’t have as much power. Subliminal marketing power, sure. But the last few art pieces I remember hearing even random people talking about were Shepard Fairey’s 2008 portraits for the Obama campaign, Ai Weiwei’s Han dynasty vase smash (which was from 1995 but came back into the spotlight in the mid-2000s for some reason) and Yayoi Kusama’s infinity mirrored room. It’s hard now, with the constant barrage of information and images and sounds, to figure out what is important and impactful art, and what is rubbish (or advertisement). It’s also hard to figure out what to focus on when making critical art: what moments or events in politics and current events will be remembered long enough to be used in critique; what will people remember and be affected by? Maybe hindsight is 20/20 tunnel vision or the gaze towards the past is tinged with roses, but it seems as though art had a larger significance. Barbara Kruger, for example. The Sex Pistols, The Guerilla Girls, Robert Mapplethorpe, Keith Haring, Annie Liebowitz, and (obviously) Jenny Holzer. All used their art to critique various current events, social/political/global issues. They had an effect on viewers in their time as well as after it. It seems as though, now, there’s no during-and-after. There is only during (like Shepard Fairey’s portraits).

A big reason for that, I think, is because of the disintegration of Dadaism and Situationism due to speed and capitalism. Basically, Situationism was created to force those going about their daily lives to stop for a second and think about their situation, to make a moment of “real living,” to jolt people out of the stupor of the daily grind and make them remember. Remember they’re alive, remember they shouldn’t be living a life of a drone, remember they’re consuming things they’re being told to instead of doing what they want to. And those moments were created through graffiti, through the detournement of taking normal comic strips and rewriting dialogues to critique the world, through the music and fashion of punk, which shouted out the flaws in society without caring that it was supposed to be kept hush-hush, through visual art that confronted the viewer with critiques (like Barbara Kruger or Jenny Holzer), etc etc. But now, do something like that and you’re called “edgy” and mocked. Why? Probably because of the likes of Banksy. I say this because Banksy often creates graffiti pieces that probably should or would have meaning, or should or would make you stop and think. Except that they’re pieces by Banksy, famous for being edgy, whose pieces are worth thousands or millions of dollars. Who rarely actually has a statement, except money-making. How many of us howled with laughter when he made that nightmare-Disneyland piece? Because it was edgy and unoriginal. Because we already know we’re living in a slowly growing dystopia, and being told that by a guy who benefits from said dystopia and gets so much money from criticizing it is bullshit.

It’s also because it feels like there’s nothing new under the sun. Now, Greil Marcus kind of talks about this. The punk movement expressed this too. The nihilism that nothing is new, that everything has already been said. But it did so gleefully, embracing the nihilism in order to laugh at it and point it out and roll in that glee. There is nothing new to be said, they thought, but there are new ways to say it. Because we’ve been saying things for centuries but nothing has changed, except the way it gets said. The problem now, in the 21st century, is that nothing new under the sun is now nothing new under the sun and that can no longer be used as a statement. “It’s all already been done, just say it in a new way” is no longer good enough. Ideas have to come out of a vacuum— except if they come out of a vacuum, they’re either never noticed or they’re appropriated by the media and capitalism.

Basic Adorno, basic culture industry theory. But Adorno would have a fucking aneurysm if he could see how his theory holds up in the 21st century compared to 1944. And honestly, that is a terrifying sentence to type. That Adorno and Horkheimer published Enlightenment as Mass Deception in 1944, that they were noticing this in the 1940s. And every point in their essay has only increased exponentially since then.

Greil Marcus hints at the whole “punk is dead” thing throughout the book without actually saying those words. I don’t think the phrase really existed as a buzzword type thing when the book was published. But I think the points and ideas expressed in Lipstick Traces kind of say what my thoughts have always been on that idea. Punk is dead, and punk is also not dead. Punk is dead; its looks and sound were stolen by the media and by capitalism and sold to the masses, sold back to the kids who created and popularized it. Punk was the sound and creativity and style of the kids who had nothing and wanted to be everything, so they made it all themselves. They created their own style and said what they wanted to say. High fashion stole it, television stole it, department stores stole it, ad agencies stole it, and sold it back. “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” Punk is dead, as an original movement, as an original fashion. But! But, punk thought is not. Punk as an ideal, as a philosophy, as thought, is very much alive. Punk, as the idea that you make your own, that you use your own creativity and express yourself the way you want to. That it’s passion and not necessarily talent that matters. That wearing what you want, saying what you want, confronting the issues that need confronting, being whoever you are so long as you’re not hurting or fucking over an innocent person, that’s still very much alive. The original punk fashion has been stolen. But punk fashion still exists, in people that make their own clothes or wear strange things even though they get stared at. Punk in art still exists, in people that make their art for themselves, or who make art with friends despite knowing they might go nowhere, just because they have the passion. Punk music is the same. The ideals and thought is still thrumming and alive. Its parent has been consumed by consumerism, devoured by capitalism and marketing and fashion. But the orphaned offspring is still hiding and alive.

And yet there’s another ‘but.’ The depressing one. Which is that it feels as though punk, in the early, original days, gave the youth a label, an identity. This goes for plenty of other youth movements as well, and art movements, etc etc. But these days it seems a community identity hardly exists. And it’s hard to push a movement, create a feeling of community or solidarity, without some sort of shared identity. Perhaps the label of “Millenials” and “Gen Z” are the closest we’ve come so far. But those are so broad, and so often used in a derogatory fashion (although, I suppose, so were “punk” and “mod” and “hippie” and “teddy boy” etc etc).

And I also think that everything is so fast now, and moments are so fleeting, events are so quick to be forgotten, that it is hard to impress an idea or affect change or put an artistic statement or movement out there for long enough to make a true impact. I would say that maybe a large amount of the generation(s) banding together to make a statement would do something, would make that change. But Black Lives Matter was made up mostly of Millenials, young people, people under the age of 35. And yet it slowly petered away into almost nothingness with no changes.

But the kids of the next generation, Gen Z, do give me hope. Like that other person’s post going around says, they’re pissed, they were raised on a steady diet of dystopian literature with strong main characters, they’re highly aware of the state of politics and the job market and the economy, they’ve seen how fucked Millenials are and they know it’s not going to get much better for a while. And maybe they’re the next ones, the next to say “fuck it, we have nothing and we are nothing, let’s do whatever we want because we haven’t got anything to lose”. And maybe the millenials will join.

That’s what I hope. That’s what Greil Marcus’ book seems to be trying to say. That these sorts of movements don’t always have massive, lasting effects in the grand scheme of the world and society. But they leave cracks, and fragments, and shrapnel, and artefacts, for the next generation or the next movement to find and use. That dadaism might have faded away and punk might be dead but the dadaist yell is still echoing and punk thought is still very much alive. And it’s up to us to hear it, to use it, to find the crack in the culture industry and capitalism and society and somehow find the next avant garde, the ideas and movement that will stick and create an identity for unfettered expression, if only for a little while. That “the moment of real poetry brings all the unsettled debts of history back into play,” and it is up to us to figure out what we have to do or say to ignite all of that history and to wield its power. And how we can make our own history or try and settle the debts of the past.

(And yet…. And yet…. And yet I can’t help but doubt that the speed of the world will allow this to happen. And yet I want to believe that something can be done to create critical work that sticks. And yet how do you make critical work without it being eaten up by the culture industry and disappeared into homogeneity. And yet we have technology and creative mediums now that we didn’t in 1977. And yet punk is dead. And yet punk thought is not. And yet, and yet.)

#lipstick traces #greil marcus #misc meta #lipstick traces meta #book meta #punk #punk history #music history

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dazstormretro · 5 years

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My Final Retro Memories - Sept 1999

Now in my final year at uni me and a group of mates had decided to move out of our dilapidated student house and return to dorms for one final blowout. So in the September of 1999 with my bags packed and both my PlayStation and N64 boxed up I arrived back in Derby to finish off university in style.

Unfortunately as the year progressed the workload on my university course increased dramatically leaving less time for video gaming. Saying that I still tried my best to fit in the odd hour here and there. My next purchase would be Final Fantasy VIII in the October of this year on the PlayStation (probably not the best choice when your trying to write a dissertation!)

Having loved the previous instalments in the series I was looking forward to this particular title with great excitement. I must have invested a good chunk of time into FF VIII but unfortunately due to my course work stacking up and the stop/start nature of RPG progression the game eventually ended up on the shelf, yet another uncompleted Final Fantasy game.

Feeling I needed a change of pace and having recently watched Saving Private Ryan next up was Medal of Honour. A brand new game created by Steven Spielberg which would kick off the trend for WW2 first person shooters on consoles. Medal of Honour was indeed a fantastic addition to my PS1 collection. Taking on the role of Lieutenant Jimmy Patterson I soon found myself being completely immersed in war-torn Germany. With many varied objectives and missions to complete I must have played through this game countless times over the coming months, I especially enjoyed the sniper based stages, taking out Nazi soldiers with the perfect headshot was extremely satisfying.

Throughout 1999 and into 2000 I consumed yet more episodes of the X Files, enjoyed watching Peter MacNicol in Ally McBeal and first came across Spaced created and staring the very talented Simon Pegg. Crammed full of nerdy references to tv shows, movies and video games Spaced was (and still is) such a great show featuring zany characters, hilarious scripts and summed up the late 90’s to a tee.

Fast forward to June of 2000 and my university career had finally come to an end and I was thrust out into the real world to try and carve out some kind of career for myself. Having a full time job defiantly effected my gaming time during this period. I stopped buying the latest gaming magazines, new consoles past me by and most of my spare time was taken up with girlfriends and socialising.

Not being on the pulse of the latest console releases during this time may have actually worked to my advantage as in the July after saving up some cash I purchased Perfect Dark for my N64. Launching late in the N64’s life meant a lot of people missed out on Rare’s latest first person shooter.

Being a massive fan of Goldeneye which I had played to death the year previous Perfect Dark was an obvious choice. I remember it took me a good few weeks to save the £60 needed to purchase the title plus some extra cash to buy the memory expansion pack which was needed to play the game, increasing the consoles RAM storage capacity to 8 MB.

Once again I would jump into this game with both feet, playing and replying missions over and over. In fact I would play this game on and off for the next two years up until I finally sold my Nintendo 64. Like Rare’s previous shooter you took on the role of a secret agent (this time a female lead called Joanna Dark) and set about completing various missions armed to the teeth with futuristic weaponry and later in the game a sidekick alien by the name of Elvis?

Still to this day I enjoy a quick half hour session on Perfect Dark, taking out enemies with the Laptop Gun, launching grenades into glass elevators with the SuperDragon and watching the blood fly.

Perfect Dark was my last memorable exciting gaming purchase from back in the day. As a kid the anticipation of receiving a new game to play was overwhelming. Reading reviews over and over, researching every last bit of detail all while counting down the days until it’s release was so exciting. At the point of buying Perfect Dark I might have been in my early 20’s yet I still remember that buzz of finally receiving my copy after saving my hard earned cash over the summer.

That Christmas there would be no video gaming related items, instead I had asked for a Sony portable mini disk as my main gift. Gaming was once again starting to take a backseat with only the occasional Perfect Dark shooting rampage occurring.

Everyone has their own perception of what they class as retro. In my mind my retro gaming memories finished around 2001 when I sold my N64 and handful of games for beer money at a local videos games shop (a regret which I still have to this day). I would go onto purchase Final Fantasy IX on release in the February of this year but this wouldn't last long before also being traded in and like my N64 my PlayStation was soon after sold to help fund a lads holiday to Greece. I do remember going over to my mate Robs house the day he purchased a Sega Dreamcast and playing multiplayer Power Stone well into the early hours which was great fun but not enough to convince me to once again join the side of Sega. By mid 2001 I was consoleless and and it would remain that way for over a year. This was the first time since receiving my Sega Master System back when I was eleven that I didn’t video game.

By no means was this the end of my love for video games, far from it. In late 2002 I would once again join the console generation after purchasing a PS2. Over the coming years I would continue play games in my spare time owning such systems as the PS3, XBox, Wii and most recently a PS4 and Nintendo Switch. In fact my interest in video games (both modern and retro) is just as involved now as it was in my teens. Granted my multi-player gaming sessions have dwindled over the years and that initial excitement of getting a new game or console doesn’t have the same appeal that it once did but video games still rule in my book.

Nowadays my gaming time is evenly split between actually playing games and both reading and watching YouTube videos relating to the latest gaming news or retro perspectives. I also enjoy whipping out an old issue of Mean Machines or Super Play once in a while to get a little nostalgia kick. Only time will tell if this hobby will continue into my later years but as of 2019 I can’t see any signs of it slowing down.

So that’s the end of my my retro gaming memories. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading about my adventures in the world of video games, maybe it’s even helped spark a few gaming memories from your own gaming past? I must admit I’ve thoroughly enjoyed casting my mind back and reliving some of these amazing times from my childhood.

Since first playing Roland on the Ropes on my brothers Amstrad 464 back in 1988 which lead to my Sega Master System the following Christmas I’ve been hooked. I feel very lucky to have lived through so many momentous gaming moments over the years. From the UK launch of the Mega Drive to the Super Nintendo, the now famous Sega vs Nintendo wars, the heyday of the video games magazine, the 90’s arcade scene through to the launch of the first PlayStation. These are just a few examples of how great the 1990’s were to a young gamer like myself, exciting times indeed.

Anyway that’s enough waffling from me, it’s back to my man cave to see if I can remember how to play Goldeneye with that bloody controller!

#1990s #nostalgia #retro gaming #video games #playstation #n64 #Final Fantasy #Perfect Dark

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hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger · 5 years

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Please shut up about Marvel having too much continuity

That’s a phrase I hear thrown around endlessly by fans, ‘fans’ and comic creators themselves.

Continuity is bad we need to get rid of it or cut it down because it’s too intimidating to readers.

This is provably untrue.

Exhibit A: The Marvel Cinematic Universe

The MCU has been running since 2008. As of this writing there are 20 movies in the MCU with more on the way and I don’t even know how many short films and episodes of various TV shows.

Now sure, the movies are mostly self-contained and don’t require you to check out any of the other stuff. The same is true of the Netflix MCU TV shows

True but the other TV shows (like the long running Agents of SHIELD) aren’t so self contained. The Netflix shows do trade off of events in other Netflix shows. And even if you confine it to the movies you still have those 20 movies.

And sorry but if you wanna check out the latest of the 2-3 Marvel movies out in any given year being asked to watch twenty films is a lot of continuity to ask of someone. Far more than is reasonable and honestly for a new viewer it might as well be as intimidating as 50 years of comics.

And the harsh truth is... a lot of people just don’t do that when they go see a Marvel movie. But it’s also true that most people seem to like Marvel movies.

How is this possible?

How could they possibly enjoy the latest instalment in a film franchise without having seen everything before?

Well this video about Avengers Assemble raises two key explanations.

The gist of things is that Avengers Assemble in part traded off of the modern way we consume media and trusted people could Google or Youtube what they needed to know to ‘get’ the movie. See the endless number of articles and videos explaining what audiences ‘need to know’ before they check out the latest MCU film or revealing telling things in movies they’ve already seen. An example would be all the articles explaining who Thanos was after his mid-credits tease in Avengers Assemble.

However the video’s other more salient point is that Avengers Assemble, like the movies leading into it and in fact the movies after it, was actually written to be accessible on it’s own.

Sure you get a more rewarding experience if you checked out everything beforehand, but it’s not necessary.

Even in a bonanza like Infinity War, in 2018 everyone is aware of who most of those characters are in the first place and even if they aren’t they know who a few of them are and can thus get invested in the movie for them.

It’s kind of like every movie is written with the belief that it’s someone’s first...which is exactly how Marvel used to write all of their comics!

Exhibit B: The DC Animated Universe

Before Marvel made film history DC made animation history by replicating the shared superhero universe of DC comics in animation.

Comprised primarily of Batman the Animated Series, Superman the Animated Series, Batman Beyond, the Zeta Project, Static Shock and Justice League (with some seasons rebranded under different names and status quos) the DCAU lasted from the early 1990s until the mid 2000s with easily in excess of 100 episodes between the shows. Which doesn’t even count the tie-in comics, video games and more significantly four animated films.

All of these shared continuity in particular in the Justice League TV show where of course virtually every DC character from earlier in the DCAU cropped up alongside a massive amount of new ones.

What made things even more complicated was that Justice League was released after Batman Beyond, a show set in the distant future of the DCAU, meaning the show was even drawing upon continuity from stories that chronologically took place way later.

Confusing right?

Well...not if you go by the ratings, critical acclaim and strong fan following.

Let me stress the DCAU predated the easier access to the internet we have today, it wasn’t until the DCAU was wrapping up that its various shows began to get complete home releases.

It is extremely unlikely that everyone or even the majority of the viewership of any given DCAU show were fully aware or up to scratch on the continuity of the DCAU as a whole.

And yet the DCAU was extremely successful.

In fact Justice League was so successful that it was renewed twice after originally intended to wrap up the DCAU as a whole. And both attempts drew upon older continuity, especially the second of these two attempts.

Exhibit C: The market for superhero info books

Fun fact, I’ve worked for D.K. books which has made a lot of comic book based info books diving into the (mostly in-universe) history of the various characters.

The first of those books I know of was Spider-Man: the Ultimate Guide published about oh...in 2001.

It’s fourth and newly updated edition was released last year.

In fact with the surge of superhero popularity D.K. had to make more guidebooks than ever before, so many in fact that they had to drop some.

Here is some inside baseball but to capitalize upon Thor: Ragnarok there was supposed to be an ultimate guide book all about Thor but due to producing stuff for Spider-Man, Guardians of the Galaxy, Wonder Woman, Black Panther and Justice league the project had to be dropped.

Guidebooks about individual franchises were not even the only types of info books D.K. did.

They’ve recently published what amounts to an encyclopaedia about the entire Marvel Universe since the 1940s!

And by the way, these books aren’t aimed primarily at the established/older hardcore fan.

They are aimed at a mass audience, chiefly kids who’ve maybe seen the movies, cartoons or read a little about the characters and now want to go deeper. And they are sold in general book stores as well as comic book speciality stores.

And they’ve been doing this since 2001...internationally!

So OBVIOUSLY there is thriving market for the large in depth histories of these characters. Clearly people love the idea of there being wider lore for them to explore.

It’s not even a phenomenon exclusive to comic book nerds, just ask Lord of the Rings fans!

Exhibit D: the DC Universe

If you count absolutely everything, there has been in truth at least six different versions of the DC universe since it began in 1938.

That means on six separate occasions DC has chucked out aspects of their history and in theory made it more accessible to readers because hey, there is less history for you to read now. Their biggest attempt of recent years was in the New 52 in 2011.

And yet in general Marvel has systemically outsold DC comics and especially did so during the New 52 when the DC as whole suffered massive sales losses linked in no small part to their decision to reboot their universe and throw out the history readers had invested in.

Exhibit E: Soap operas

Soap operas that are intended to last indefinitely rarely (if ever) have facilities to enable viewers to catch up on older episodes across their massive sometimes 1000+ episode count. And even if they did such options wouldn’t have existed before the 21st century when DVDs and digital media and recordable TV isn’t what it is today.

Yet these soap opera kept running and running and running sometimes for decades?

How? They couldn’t have maintained the same viewership across that entire time.

Could it be that the new viewers of these soap operas just tuned in and rolled with it/the soap opera were written in a relatively accessible way so that they continued the ongoing plots whilst allowing new viewers to jump on ship at any time?

Exhibit F: The 1980s-1990s

The notion of Marvel’s long continuity being a bad thing, of being a problem hampering them is dependent upon the idea that after a point there is just too much history in the way of readers to jump on board. The Marvel Universe has lasted since 1961 after all*.

The foolishness in this mentality is that it wholly fails to recognize that catching up on and keeping up with even 20-25 years worth of comic book history is such a daunting task that it might as well be 55 years!

And yet in the 1980-early 1990s the comic book industry was over all healthier than it is now despite there already being a huge amount of history and lore to most Marvel characters.

In fact easily the most popular Marvel franchise of the 1990s was the X-Men which was THE most complicated and convoluted franchise Marvel had at the time.

Compounding the challenge new fans allegedly had to face was the fact that reprints, trades, info books and internet based resources to help them catch up or learn the wider histories either didn’t exist or weren’t what they are now.

There comes a point when getting a grip on 55 years of history when you have endless resources to help you do that and instant access to those stories on your phone is infinitely easier trying that with 20-25 years of history when you have next to nothing.

But there were MORE comic book readers in the 1980s-1990s than now and they were able to jump into the long running narratives decades into their histories.

How is this possible?

Because back then Marvel practiced a mantra preached by Stan Lee himself.

Every comic is someone’s first.

So every comic pushed the characters stories on but also made sure they invited new readers along for the ride too.

Exhibit G: Myself

When I was 12 I began watching the Justice League cartoon show and fell in love with all those characters, only slowly realizing that the Superman and Batman of this show were the same ones I’d seen on Batman the Animated Series and those 6 episodes of Superman I’d seen years ago. I didn’t even know who Darkseid and Brainiac were? It didn’t matter they were clearly big deal bad guys and I loved their 2 episodes in Justice League. I loved Justice League Unlimited even more even though I didn’t realize it was capitalizing upon plot threads set up in yet more Superman episodes I’d never seen.

When I was 11 one of my best friends who was nowhere near as much into comic books as I was showed me his new book. Spider-Man the Ultimate Guide. In it was pages and pages about Spider-Man, his powers, his costumes, his friends, his foes and his history over all. I needed my own copy of that book and re-read it multiple times because wow I didn’t know Spider-Man was once buried alive and there was a Spider-Man in the future and this one time Spider-Man battled the Juggernaut and it was awesome and this other time Spider-Man turned into the Lizard and the Hulk!

When I was 10 I read my first ever Spider-Man comic book and began following the character religiously.

This comic book was Peter Parker: Spider-Man #75.

This was the very last part of the very last story arc in the single most convoluted Spider-Man story of all time, the Clone Saga, with even that one issue drawing upon and referencing continuity from 27 years earlier!

And yet it hooked me.

All those things hooked me.

Because it’s not about how much continuity you have.

It’s about how you choose to use it or not use it when crafting a compelling story.

#Marvel #marvel comics #DC #DC Comics #MCU #DCAU #DC animated universe #marvel cinematic universe #Spider-Man #Clone Saga #batman the animated series #superman the animated series #justice league #justice league the animated series #justice league unlimited #batman beyond #static shock #Avengers 2012 #Avengers Assemble

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lilacpisces1-blog · 5 years

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What I Love This Week

This week was a good one. James turned 4 months old, had a healthy 4-month checkup at the pediatrician, and we marked the four year anniversary of It Was Me All Along! Oh and I changed out of my pajamas and into what many would consider to be “normal” clothes on 4 out of the 7 days, which was really something. To celebrate, I’m starting a new series here where I share all of my recent favorites: things I’ve read, watched, listened to, bought, eaten…you get the idea. Here goes nothing:

Read

“The Weight I Carry: What it’s like to be too big in America” by Tommy Tomlinson This piece in The Atlantic is an excerpt from his forthcoming book The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man’s Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America https://amzn.to/2RlFzRv (you can preorder now; it comes out 1/15/19). It’s sincere and moving and so, so worth the read:

“I’ve never been anything but fat. Is there something in the fat version of me that also makes me likable and creative and a decent human being? Are the best parts of me all knotted up with the worst? Is there some way to untangle it and keep just the good stuff? Most of the time I think of my fat as a husk—something I have to shed so the best part of me can come out. But sometimes I wonder if I’m more like the shells you find on the beach, where the outer part is the attraction, and the animal inside is dull and shapeless.”

Daily Annoyances for Most People Are Catastrophic for Poor People by Linda Tirado My mother has held at least two jobs for as long as I can remember. I cannot say that I know what it’s like to be dirt poor, but I do know what it’s like to struggle, to have your one family car repossessed, and to worry regularly about the lights getting turned off. All this to say, I have a tremendous amount of compassion for anyone who struggles financially. This article is an excerpt from Linda Tirado’s book, Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America and it’s both necessary and devastating.

“It is impossible to be good with money when you don’t have any. Full stop. If I’m saving my spare five bucks a week, in the best-case scenario I will have saved $260 a year. For those of you that think in quarters: $65 per quarter in savings. If you deny yourself even small luxuries, that’s the fortune you’ll amass. Of course you will never manage to actually save it; you’ll get sick at least one day and miss work and dip into it for rent. Gas will spike and you’ll need it to get to work. You’ll get a tear in your work pants that you can’t patch. Something, I guarantee you, will happen in three months.

When I have a few extra dollars to spend, I can’t afford to think about next month—my present day situation is generally too tight to allow me that luxury. I’ve got kids who are interested in their quality of life right now, not 10 years from now.”

Watch

90 Day Fiancé Just before I had James, I got sucked into the madness that is 90 Day Fiancé on TLC. And once I gave birth, I sped through 5 seasons in a blur. The show is fascinating, to say the least. If you’re not familiar, it’s about men and women who fall in love with people who live in other countries (sometimes they meet while on vacation or on a religious mission, but most often they meet on online dating sites) and through a K1 Visa, the fiancé is able to come to the U.S. for 90 days. They must marry within that timeframe or else the fiancé must leave the country. I suppose what’s most consuming about the show is trying to determine how real these relationships really are and what led these people to them in the first place.

Listen

Armchair Expert podcast I’ve been listening to podcasts for 11 years now, which translates loosely to me considering myself a bit of a podcast connoisseur. I’ve listened to thousands of shows and episodes on topics that range from comedy to health to parenting. I discovered the Armchair Expert podcast, hosted by actor/comedian Dax Shepard, at the start of 2018, and have since listened to every episode, falling completely in love in the process. As an interviewer, Dax is a natural. Whether he’s speaking with an actor friend or an expert in a given field (ethics, writing, parenting, etc.), he’s able to create a casual, comfortable conversation. He’s curious, thoughtful, and honest, all of which matter quite a bit to us listeners, especially since he’s not one to shy away from sensitive subjects. What I love most about Dax is that he’s endearingly human, quick to reveal his own flaws and to reconsider his own beliefs.

*Favorite episode: Jonathan Haidt

Wear

Nordstrom Moonlight Pajamas Up until this year, I spent every night of my life in pajamas that I can only describe as mortifying (Exhibit A (my favorite): an oversized t-shirt my parents got me on a trip to Canada in the mid-2000’s that read, “Somebody who loves me very much went to Calgary, Canada and got me this shirt,” and bumblebee-print pants). And while this feels very deeply ‘me,’ I’ve always wished I were someone who wore, I don’t know, nice pajamas I guess? The trouble was, every time I went to buy some, I pulled back, thinking of half a dozen other things I’d rather spend the money on. Then I had a baby, and started spending my entire life in pajamas, so I bought two pairs and I’ve never looked back. These pajamas are soft and comfortable while still being pretty darn good looking.

Find

Sunbeam Heated Throw Daniel has gotten me a lot of special gifts over the past 15-ish years, but I don’t know if I’ve ever liked any of them quite as much as the heated blanket he got me this year. Before your eyes roll all the way back in your head, wait! This could change your life.

For some reason (likely genetic poor circulation that’s been handed down to me), I get really cold as I fall asleep. Or at least I used to. But not anymore. I put this soft fleece blanket on top of the covers on my side of the bed and turn it on the “preheat” setting 10 or 15 minutes before bed. By the time I crawl in, it’s toasty. The blanket itself isn’t the prettiest thing in the world, but it has 10 heat settings and automatic shut-off after 10 hours. I use it every night!

Make

12 Healthyish Winter Recipes Sweet Potato Toast Superfood Green Smmothie Bowl 3 Ways to Cook Trader Joe’s Frozen Cauliflower Gnocchi (No Thawing Required) Chicken Cobb Lettuce Wraps

Note: This post contains a few affiliate links.

Source: http://www.andiemitchell.com/what-i-love-this-week/

#read more #see more #check it out #interesting #learn more

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hermanwatts · 4 years

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Sensor Sweep: Kull, Star Trek, Dying Earth, Doc Vandal

Publishing (Pulp Archivist): The market is contracting, without signs of stopping, from at least the mid-2000s generational handover. Digital and its different margins have likely kept some of these magazines in business far longer than print runs can justify. It’s almost to the point where the established science fiction “fandom” does not and should not be the audience. There are 300 million people not reading science fiction short stories. The editor who can figure out how to reach even 0.0001% of that will be the king of science fiction.

Gaming (Walker’s Retreat): In other words, WOTC’s being pozzed again. Do not give money to people who hate you. Do not buy WOTC’s products new. Not for D&D. Not for Magic. Not at all. Buy used if you must, but otherwise give your money to those making their own versions of the game (legal thanks to the Open Game License making D&D open source 20 years ago). What would those be? A short list includes: Adventurer, Conqueror, King.

Science Fiction Community (Kalimac): The news has been getting out, both within and outside the SF community, that Alan Beatts, owner of Borderland Books in San Francisco, has been credibly accused of physical and sexual assault by women close to him. I’ll leave out the details; you can read them at the above links.

D&D (RPG Pundit): They say that Oriental Adventures is full of stereotypes and needs to be cancelled. And well, yes, it is full of stereotypes and not an authentic historical setting. Every other D&D setting is also full of stereotypes and not an authentic historical setting too!

Fantasy (Fantasy Literature): Kull, for those unfamiliar with the character, made his first appearance in the August 1929 issue of Weird Tales magazine, in the story “The Shadow Kingdom,” so no, Howard most certainly did not get his inspiration for the regal name from 1933’s King Kong. Howard would go on to write 13 more stories dealing with the character (plus one poem), but only two of those were published before his suicide death in 1936. The Lancer volume, sadly enough, is complete with the exception of two of those 14 tales.

Star Trek (Superversive SF): cannot count the number of STAR TREK novels I have read over the years. Not as many recently as I used to, in fact, no new ones in a few years. It’s the old story, when you’re young you have all the time but limited money. When you’re older, you have the money to pursue your old hobbies like a demon but limited time. In the library, I stumbled across this Next Generation novel entitled Available Light and decided to give it a whirl. I’ve not read any new ST novels in a long time, so based on the back blurb, this one seemed like a great piece to dive back in with.

Cinema (Tulsa World): Today is the day to celebrate #Harryhausen 100. While we’re at it, let’s celebrate the lives of two people: a special effects legend and an Oklahoma cowboy who are connected by one movie at the dawn of their careers. Ray Harryhausen was the genius behind a form of stop-motion animation that brought all kinds of beasties to life in movies like “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms,” “20 Million Miles to Earth,” “One Million Years B.C.,” “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad,” “Clash of the Titans” and a series of Sinbad flicks.

Fiction (Grubb Street): Song of the Dying Earth: Stories in Honor of Jack Vance, by a LOT of people you’ve heard about, edited by George RR Martin and Gardner Dozois, with Art by Paul Kidd. TOR Books, 2009. Provenance: Christmas present, probably 2009 as well. I came to Jack Vance late in life, which is a bit of a surprise given that D&D is hip-deep in Vancian notions, tropes, and outright, um, borrowings. But once I struck his Dying Earth series, in the form of a massive compendium, I was delightfully hooked by his mannered approach to far-future fantasy, and of course, when a massive tome by a cluster of big-name authors came out in his honor, I had to get it and consume it.

Comic Books (Wasteland & Sky): omic books need to bring back all-ages comics as the standard. They have not been primarily aimed at children since the 1970s, and it has shown in declining sales. Comic books are an inherently juvenile format and that is their strength. Old comics and the classics could whip through plot points, action scenes, and wild settings within a single issue all while telling a complete standalone story.

D&D (Sacnoth’s Scriptorium): So, a few years back there was a campaign to build a Gary Gygax memorial statue in his home town of Lake Geneva. I think I even blogged about it at the time; I certainly tried to buy a copy of the memorial booklet intended to help fund the project, a collection of E.G.G.’s posts in a gaming forum, called CHEERS, GARY.

Sherlock Holmes (Black Gate): If you mention the term Gothic to most people, it’s likely to conjure visions of teenagers dressed in black, wearing black nail polish and Doc Marten boots. Someone a few years older may think of drugstore paperback racks filled with book covers featuring women in nightgowns running away from sinister mansions. But Gothic originally refers to a type of architecture, an overall aesthetic of the macabre, and a genre of fiction popular in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Gaming (Heavy Metal): Scorn is a long-awaited first-person shooter based on the art of H.R. Giger and, to a lesser extent, Zdzisław Beksiński. It’s been in development for years; developer Ebb Software dropped a drool-inducing teaser trailer in 2016 and a gameplay trailer in 2017. There have been video games — lots of them — based on the Alien movies, but this one is specifically Giger, so expect to see more of the creepy, twisted sexual side of his art than you got in the Xenomorph movies.

Pulp (The Pulp Net): While Doc Vandal is influenced by Doc Savage, he has some other influences. And a big difference is that his stories are not set in our world, but in the 1930s of an alternate world that has a steampunk element where zeppelins are everywhere, aliens exists (with hidden cities on Earth, as well as the Moon), and there are other science fictional elements. Doc Vandal is an inventor and adventurer, assisted by three people: Vic, Gus and Gilly.

Robert E. Howard (Messages from Crom): The Cthulhu Stories of Robert E. Howard. Coming in September! The Great Old Ones Return… In the early twentieth-century, in the pages of Weird Tales and other pulp magazines, H.P. Lovecraft created the Cthulhu Mythos and offered it to his friends, creating a shared mythology for much of their weird fiction. Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian, was one of those good friends.

Popular Culture (Bronze Age Babies): Doug: Hi, my name is Doug, and… well, I’m addicted to the Planet of the Apes. There – I said it! Are you happy now? Welcome back to the BAB, everyone! We are pleased to be in your company today, and also excited to have been asked once again to participate in this summer’s Super Blog Team-Up. “Expanded universe” is our topic, so we are running with that across three blogs. Our premise here is that the variety of products available to kids in during the era of the Bronze Age of comics allowed our imaginations to make leaps into new territory for our favorite Apes characters.

Art (Silver Key): A big name in fantasy role-playing/Dungeons and Dragons art passed away yesterday—Jim Holloway. Jim was not my favorite D&D artist of all time—I might have to go with Bill Willingham or Erol Otus—but he was one of the 5-6 most iconic and prolific of the silver or “commercial” age of TSR, circa 1981 and on.

Tolkien (Tolkien and Fantasy): I believe that there are only two instances where J.R.R. Tolkien was interviewed on film. The first dates from 1962, and the second from 1968. The first, by John Bowen, was conducted on 10 December 1962, in black-and-white, for the BBC television program “Bookstand”. The episode was broadcast two days later, on Wednesday, 12 December, from 10.15-10.45 pm, though the Tolkien segment took up less than nine minutes.

Science Fiction (Marzaat): Scientific Romance in Britain 1890-1950. Well, I’ve known about this book for years, but it was pricey on the second hand market, but I got it for Christmas. A lot of science fiction crit books from the 1980s I’ve purchased recently seem to be deaccessioned from university libraries. This one came from the Columbus College Library in Columbus, Georgia. It seems to have been checked out only once, in 1995. That matches Brian Stableford stating, in his essay “The Profession of Science Fiction” that he only sold “157 copies in the UK, not counting remainders”.

Fiction (Mostly Old Books): The First Quarry doesn’t dwell on an origin story but rather shows the young hitman being fully formed as a cold-blooded and intelligent killer as he accepts his first assignment after being recruited by The Broker – killing a college professor and destroying his manuscripts. The story takes place in Iowa in the early 1970s, the years that I came of age, and I was impressed and highly amused by all of the pop culture references from that era.

Pulp (Pulpfest): When Ned Pines was asked by The American News Company to start a chain of pulp magazines that it would distribute for him, he knew he needed an editor. The young publisher requested Frank A. Munsey employee, Leo Margulies, to be the managing editor of his new enterprise. With the country gripped by the Great Depression, the two men came up with a daring idea for the rough paper market: a ten-cent pulp magazine. Standard Magazines, better known as “The Thrilling Group,” launched THRILLING DETECTIVE, THRILLING ADVENTURES, and THRILLING LOVE in late 1931. Each sold for a dime.

Art (DMR Books): Matthews created a considerable amount of artwork depicting Elric and various other characters from Michael Moorcock’s stories. Moorcock said that “Rodney captured the images and invention, having a larger space to work with on the posters and calendars. He was brilliant, for instance, on the quirky End of Time stories and I love his inventiveness.”

Sensor Sweep: Kull, Star Trek, Dying Earth, Doc Vandal published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/

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patheticphallacy · 4 years

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Helllllo! I’m back!

For everyone who keeps up with my blog, I’ve only been gone for two weeks. In reality, I wrote every single post that’s come out in April mid-March, so I haven’t written a single post since Quarantine properly kicked in. Wow.

As is usual for me, I really just needed a break. I’ve spent 4 weeks playing Stardew Valley and listening to audiobooks, and I can’t even be mad about it. It’s really rejuvenated my creativity, and it’s given me some new ideas on how I want to do wrap ups for this blog.

What better way to come back than with a Weekend Reading post? As you might have guessed from my absence, I’ve barely made a dent in the OWLs TBR I made. So… I’m just gonna do the OWLS for two months. Rules mean nothing to me.

My laptop is also really buggy at the moment, so I won’t be able to spend as long writing blog posts. I’ll aim for my usual 1 or 2 reviews a week, but the amount of ‘long’ posts I can manage will probably be cut down until I have enough money to get a new laptop for writing!

1. Dig by A.S. King

Dig was actually recommended to me in a webinar I took part in, hosted by Reading Glasses and Professional Book Nerds.

I asked for books with nihilistic teens and dark humour; I was recommended Dig and Glory O’Brien. I’m only two or three chapters in, and the chapters are super short, so I know I’ll breeze through it.

2. Imaginary Friend by Stephen Chbosky

This is my current audiobook listen, and boy is it a long one!

I’ve been listening to it on 2.5x speed so it won’t take me too long to get through what’s left. But that’s still over 300 pages, which is about 12 hours of listening, and just feels like way too much. I don’t think this book has anything unnecessary in it, honestly, I just wasn’t prepared for the sheer size of it.

3. Kappa Quartet by Daryl Qilin Yam

This will probably be the first book I finish this weekend on Friday.

It’s ‘weird fiction’, and by weird, I mean it’s very weird. The way characters are connected, with recurring characters throughout, is honestly incredible. It feels almost seamless in how it’s done, and I’m so glad I took my friend’s recommendation to read this!

4. Horror: A Literary History edited by Xavier Aldana Reyes

I’ve been steadily making my way through each essay in this collection for a few weeks. Each essay is literally just a breakdown of horror throughout history, focusing on American and British horror.

I’ll have to find other non-fiction for going outside of Western literature, and I feel like it’s a real shame that there weren’t added essays by experts on this fiction, since the stories and beliefs of other cultures– oral storytelling being a major part of their long ancestries– have been appropriated so frequently by Western horror authors. Even one or two essays focusing on this writing would have been a helluva lot better than the ‘0’ in this, and there’s a shocking lack of non-white authors even mentioned in what was presented.

They mention ‘horror adjacent’ work so often, even going on long explanations of how horror’s roots are more in the gothic and the feeling of horror, rather than cliches and tropes, for a long time, and yet they barely spend any time on Beloved by Toni Morrison, which is an incredibly important text within the ever-changing horror genre. I’m not sure it’s even mentioned in the chapter on horror between 1970-2000. It’s just highly disappointing!

5. Rules for Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson

You may know this as Eight Perfect Murders. The title change is exactly like The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle; i.e., completely fucking pointless.

Based on the premise– which reminded me a lot of one of my favourite crime shows, Castle– you think this is going to be a lot more exciting than it really is, considering someone is literally committing murder. It’s all tell, with absolutely no show. I don’t think the reader is ever left to find things out by themselves, without some massive infodump, and I’m just glad this is a quick read so I can cross it off my list in another 100 pages.

YES! I’m finally carrying on these series! I haven’t read One Piece since August of 2019, and Haikyuu!! since May of 2019, which is, frankly, disgusting, considering both are favourite series of mine. I ended up buying a Shonen Jump subscription, so I have access to 100 chapters of manga a day for only £2 a month. The price was lowered to combat the rise of piracy within the industry, and researching into it has just made me realise that this is the best way to consume my manga from now on.

Shonen Jump actually has a lot of the longer series I read, so I’ll be reading those on there. I’ll still be keeping up with My Hero Academia physically, but it saves a lot of money on over 150+ volumes of other series I would have otherwise had to buy. I can afford £2 a month, and I’ll put money into manga with the volumes I’ll no doubt buy of what I can’t find on Shonen Jump!

I hope everyone is doing okay during this quarantine!

Thank you for reading ❤

Goodreads|Twitter|Instagram|Letterboxd|Patreon

Weekend Reading #4: I’m Back! Helllllo! I'm back! For everyone who keeps up with my blog, I've only been gone for two weeks.

#book blog #current reads #currently reading #tbr #weekend reading

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guidetoenjoy-blog · 5 years

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Don't let your entertainment backlog build up and stress you out

New Post has been published on https://entertainmentguideto.com/must-see/dont-let-your-entertainment-backlog-build-up-and-stress-you-out/

Don't let your entertainment backlog build up and stress you out

Image: vicky leta/mashable

There is simply too much entertainment happening all the time. There’s new movies all the time. New TV shows and series. New podcasts. New video games. New books. It never ends.

With the proliferation of online streaming services and platforms that allow indie creators to publish their work online, there’s more entertainment to stuff our eyes and earballs with than ever before. It just keeps coming, and pretty quickly everything starts to pile up and become difficult to follow.

One September evening you think to yourself, “I’ll catch up on The Walking Dead during the winter break, watch these episodes before the mid-season premiere,” and all of a sudden you’re six seasons behind, you have a new job, you’ve moved into a new place, and you no longer recognize 80 percent of the characters.

SEE ALSO: These actors love playing superheroes

And it’s not just the new things. Surely everybody reading this has a list they’d like to get to in the near-future. Maybe you missed The Wire and want to go back and watch. Maybe you never got around to checking out The Godfather or Citizen Kane. Maybe you bought Bioshock for $2 on Steam and just never really got started on it. Maybe you haven’t read the Bible yet.

At one point in my life, I had a notebook where I wrote down a bunch of movies that I wanted to watch. There were dozens. Sure I got around to seeing some, but I still haven’t seen Citizen Kane, Jaws, Memento, The Shining, or about 100 others that I’d like to watch. Don’t get me started on all the critically acclaimed movies from the past five years that I haven’t caught up on.

I haven’t watched The Sopranos, Twin Peaks, True Detective, or Archer. I haven’t read The Da Vinci Code. I haven’t played Half-Life 2, Mass Effect, or Earthbound despite owning all of them.

But I’ve stopped caring. Because you know what? It doesn’t matter.

If you let it, entertainment will make you feel like you’re in a constant game of catch-up

At this point in time, there’s too much content being pumped into pop culture on a daily basis. There’s no way to keep up with everything that’s deemed important by the dominant culture.

The average American doesn’t watch absolutely every Marvel movie and TV show that comes out. The majority of people on Earth don’t watch Game of Thrones. Some people haven’t read a single Harry Potter book. A lot of people never listened to Serial.

And that’s ok.

It’s ok that you missed a Thor movie and never got around to watching The Punisher on Netflix. There’s no rulebook that says you must have watched this much content or played this many games to participate in society.

There’s not enough time in the day to stay on top of absolutely everything. It’s ok to be selective and only watch, play, read, and listen to the things that you think will bring you the most joy.

For a while, when people asked me if I’d seen the latest movie or played the latest game, I’d feel guilty when I said no. Aside from the fact that it costs a lot of money to go to the movies and buy new games, there just wasn’t enough time in my life to see every Oscar-nominated movie and play every critically acclaimed indie and AAA game.

SEE ALSO: Play your favorite retro games at work

I used to force myself to play and watch things that I just wasn’t in the mood for because I felt like I was supposed to. A few years ago, I tried to play the Nintendo 3DS remaster of 2000’s The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, but it just wasn’t sticking with me and I had too many other things going on. It weighed on me that I never finished it.

If you let it, entertainment will make you feel like you’re in a constant game of catch-up.

I got to a point where I was constantly feeling guilty, constantly feeling like I was behind on everything. I had to let go.

I’ve never felt better.

I am behind on a dozen podcasts and I don’t care. I still haven’t seen Spider-Man: Homecoming and that’s fine with me. I haven’t gotten around to playing Cuphead and that doesn’t faze me. I haven’t watched a second of The Good Place and I don’t really plan on changing that.

Sure, I stay current with a lot of things (I am an entertainment reporter after all), but I don’t lose sleep anymore if I don’t finish a new game quickly or miss the theater run of a new movie. I watch This Is Us. I saw Black Panther. I am currently playing the new God of War. But that’s a drop in the bucket.

For every one thing I consume, there are a dozen things I never touch. Add to that all of the stuff that came out before I was born or missed while I was busy doing something else, and that list is absolutely insurmountable.

My life probably won’t change that much whether I watch La La Land or not. And neither will yours.

Whether your entertainment backlog is a constantly updating list you have stashed away in the back of your mind or a an actual physical wishlist of things you want to consume, I urge you to get rid of it, especially if it’s causing you stress. In these trying times, we don’t need anything else weighing down on us.

It’s important to remember that entertainment is just that: Entertainment. Movies, shows, games, books, podcasts; they’re all there to entertain us and help us escape from the everyday stresses of real life. If you turn entertainment into a task, it is no longer entertaining.

And that sucks.

WATCH: How sound effects for your favorite movies are made

Read more: http://mashable.com/

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nickapata-blog · 6 years

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Who watches news these days?

Last weekend I went back home to Brampton to spend sometime with my parents and friends. On Friday, after my COMM 3P18 seminar, I caught the next bus headed to Toronto and headed on home. When I finally arrived at home it was around 6:00 pm and I came home to my father doing what he always does at 6:00 pm, which is watching the CTV evening News show. I decided to sit down and watch the remaining of the News show. As I was watching, I said out loud to my dad that, “I couldn’t remember the last time that I actually sat down in front of the television to watch the news”, my dad responded by saying “ Nick you always hated the news and plus your generation aren’t as concerned with the news like my generation is”. My dad wasn’t necessarily completely right, he was right about me always hating watching the news particularly when I was younger, however he wasn’t right about my generation not caring about the news, especially due to fact that I was well aware and informed about every topic that the news reporters were reporting at the time, However, how I receive my news is different from my dad.

When I was younger my parents would always watch the news around my sister and I, and all I could remember was always seeing bad news such as murders, kidnappings, robbery and etc., this made me very frighten as a child. I remember around the early to mid 2000’s there was a lot of violent crime occurring in the Jane and Finch area due to the war between the local gangs. There was a high amount of murders happening, and the news obviously kept reporting it. As a child all every time I heard the news reporter mention the area Jane and Finch it was related to a murder or something related. Therefore I used to be terrified to visit my cousins who used to live in the Jane and Finch area. I was so scared to a point where I had to sprint from the car to into my cousin house or I thought I would of got shot. However, in reality the chances of you getting shot walking to your car to your front door was slim, and if you weren’t in a gang the chance was even much slimmer. However when I was younger, I was numb to that because I was consuming the news passively. Passive audience members consume their media; barely paying attention, willingly accepting opinions, be controlled, and not creating content or interacting with content. This is why I hated the news, because I was allowing the news to control and form opinions on topics that I didn’t know much, and majority of the time those opinions were derived from a place of fear. And I allowed the news to create and control my opinions on particular topics, because I viewed the news as a very credible source, and if I saw it on the news it had to be true, no questions asked. However, being a passive audience member back then, as majority of use were passive audience member back then. Social scientists historically preached that audience was passive while during traditional media. Due to the lack of options of media, we often believed what we heard from the media because that was society only credible source. However as time emerged, technology continued to advance, and soon did our Internet, and we eventually underwent a paradigm shift where we went from web 1.0 to web 2.0. The major difference between web 1.0 and web 2.0, is that web 1.0 is not user-generated meaning prosumers cannot exist within that web. However, in web user were able to interact with one of each other, create content, share content, like or dislike content and so on. With this shift happening, now “there is a misleading assumption to define the audience in terms of passive recipients related to old media” (Agirre. 2016) and we are no longer passive audience members when consuming traditional media. Now, I do agree with this statement to a certain extent, with the introduction of web 2.0 everything became more “multidimensional and interactive” (Agirre. 2016) and I experience this first hand. Like I previously stated, I cannot remember the last time I watched the news on the television, but yet I am update with my news. This is because I receive my news from the web, mostly social media and websites. I follow a handful of news outlets’ twitter accounts, along with reliable social media editors. A lot of the time I am able to receive my news Twitter specifically, and receiving it from Twitter is highly convenient due to the 140 characters limit, meaning you have to get straight to the point and keep it concise when reporting news on Twitter, which allows users like me to able to keep up with the updates regarding a specific news topic in minimal amount of time. Twitter is a good app for reporting news updates due to “Twitter’s capability to deliver up-to-date breaking news at warp speed even in the absence of the media” (Wasike. 2013). This was evident even when I was watching news with my dad, because while the news was on I was scrolling through my Twitter timeline, which is when I saw a Tweet about the slave trade that is currently occurring in Libya, which was the talk of social media for the past few days. However, when I was watching the news with my dad I was waiting to see of they would mention anything about the slave trade and they ended up not covering that until today (November 29th), which just shows that Twitter is able to report and cover news at a faster rate than the television shows can. However when receiving your news from Twitter and other social media platforms, it can be misleading at times due to the character limitation. However news on Twitter can be more than misleading at times because the fact that editors and creators can often personalize their tweets. Wasike’s Framing news in 140 characters: how social media editors frame the news and interact with audience via Twitter, his findings conducted that TV news stations’ Twitter accounts had 263 personalized tweets compared to 212 non-personalized tweets versus print media Twitter accounts that had 218 personalized tweets and 248 non-personalized tweets. This shows that these tweets are user-generated and often user-generated content can be biased based on the creator’s personal views and beliefs. However even with that being said, I still believe twitter is the most reliable and effective way to receive news due to the quickness of the news, the amount of users covering the same topic, and because I am always able to do more extensive research and gain more insight about the topic myself. The fact that we are able to check and do our own research about anything is one of the reason we are no longer passive audience members anymore.

Like mentioned previously, while I watching the news with my dad I was scrolling through my Twitter timeline, and even though by me scrolling through my timeline technically makes me a passive audience member towards the television, however due to the fact that news channel usually reports and covers news trending and the most important news and twitter is a feed filled with users’ opinions on trending and popular topics, a lot of the time what I was passively listening to from the television, I was reading actively on my timeline. Now, since my secondary screen’s content is related to my primary’s screen’s content, I am active audience member because I am able to form a constructive opinion, if I choose to I can also interact or share the news topic with other users, therefore making me an active audience member. Arrgie found in his study Active audience?: interaction of young people with television and online video content, one of the components that he asked his participants is if they had a second screen opened, and was the second screen related to the content on the primary screen. Arrgie founded that “74% of participants never carried out those activities” (Arrgie. 2016). This means, although we are in the web 2.0 era, we can still be passive audience members while consuming traditional media, however as consumers we always have the option to because an active consumer and since we have that option, it is no longer acceptable to say that we are passive audience members when watching television and that we are active audience members when surfing the Internet, it is impossible to create a typology for these consumers these days. However, due to the fact that there is a lot of people just like me and prefer receiving their news from new media as oppose to traditional media, and this is slowly but surely killing the TV industry and one of the “complicated challenge for the television industry of changing a “passive” medium into an active one” (Arrgie. 2016). I witness, the news station attempting to make their program more interactive, after the consumer report segment was done, a screen now popped up prompting users to their consumer report topics to the station so the company can cover it. By doing this, the station is trying to include the users watching this back at home, work or wherever and trying let them think that they have somewhat have a creative input of what the news show should cover.

After I was done watching news with my dad, and eating dinner with both of mom and dad, I said to them “ that I am going to my bedroom to watch game of throne” which is a new show I decided to start watching after all my friends been raving about it for years. Anyways my mom responded by saying “ I thought game of thrones was a book, one of my co-worker was reading it today actually and was explaining it to her”. I laughed and brushed her off as I said to her that “ game of thrones is one of the most popular television shows airing at this current moment, your co-worker is probably reading hunger games”. Then my mom began to name some characters that she was able to remember, and I was able to surprisingly recognize, which is when my dad finally intervened and said “you’re actually both right, game of thrones started as a book series in the 90’s and later adapted into a television series”. This was news to me, as I was under impression that Game of Thrones was an original series and not adapted from book. But the fact that my mother was able to name some characters such as Jon Snow from the book and I was able to identify them from the television show, showed how we’re currently in a matrix media. Matrix media is when different resources all contribute to create a cohesive narrative, so for example when I watch Games of Throne, somebody read the book, some people read the Game of Thrones reddit, but regardless where we gathered our Game of Thrones information from, we will able to have a conversation about Game of Thrones. However the matrix media is something that is able to come about due to the convergence culture that we are collectively appropriating, and convergence culture refers to where “consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content.” (Jenkins, 2006). This matrix media and convergence culture also explains why news on Twitter is effective, due to the fact that Twitter will not be the only place we will learn about something we actively care about, because we are in matrix media where able to seek and gather more information from different resources.

Works Cited Agirre, Idoia Astigarraga. “Active Audience?: Interaction of Young People with Television and Online Video Content.” Communication & Society, vol. 29, no. 3, 2016, pp. 133–147., doi:10.15581/003.29.3.133-147.

Curtin, M. (2009). Matrix media. In G. Turner & J. Tay (Eds.), Understanding television in the post-broadcast era (pp. 9-19). Oxon: Routledge.

Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture: where old and new media collide. New York: New York University Press.

Wasike, Ben S. “Framing News in 140 Characters: How Social Media Editors Frame the News and Interact with Audiences via Twitter.” © 2013, Global Media Journal -- Canadian Edition, vol. 6, no. 1, 2013, pp. 5–23.

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theotternerd · 7 years

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Warhammer 40,000 8th Edition Review

Before I get started on this review, I just want to put a few things in the open.

1. I started playing Warhammer 40K in 2005 at a buddy’s house. This was still the transition time of going from 3rd Edition to 4th Edition and I believe that only the Space Marines and Tyranids had gotten their Codices (yes, that is the correct pluralization of “codex”) updated at that point for the new rules.

2. I love the 40K lore. Like, a lot. It’s part of the reason why I still love the series, despite having not played it for close to six years. The lore and fluff draw me in, and I love reading all about it from not only the Index Astartes articles, the Codices, or any other article previously posted on the mid-2000s GW website, but also the novels, some of which have been written by some of the best sci-fi/fantasy authors.

3. I am not a fan of Games Workshop as a company. This is a company that over the past seven or so years has tried to do everything it can to destroy any remaining customer goodwill it had. This is a company that was vehemently anti-consumer and anti-competition (seriously, up until VERY recently you couldn’t buy GW products from third parties that had an online shopping cart system). But, I recently saw this...

The game YOU asked for (my emphasis, obviously). Maybe something at GW has changed in the last year or so, because this is a sign of things moving in a better direction.

As with any new 40K system release, I get curious. I want to love the game, but over the years the game has been an arms race to the bottom (GW’s bottom line), and I really can’t afford to buy and maintain a decent-sized army anymore. However, I do buy the box sets that usually release with each edition, and that’s what I did, but we’re not going to start with that. Nope, let’s look at the rules of this new edition first.

The core rules to the game have been simplified.

A LOT.

I’m talking about slimmed down to the point where it fits on a 5″ x 7″, front and back, four-panel pull-out. These eight pages of rules comprise of everything you need to know in order to play a game, pretty much the six phases of a turn:

Movement

Psychic

Shooting

Charge

Fight

Morale

The descriptions of each phase is easy to read, easy to understand, and there’s almost no weird lexicon that you have to decipher. This is exactly what new payers need, not twenty pages describing every phase in minute detail.

That being said, there are no distinctions anymore between any type of unit in the game, infantry or cavalry, beast or vehicle. There aren’t full pages describing what a close combat weapon does versus a power weapon, or detailed descriptions of what every single weapon keyword means. Everything is boiled down to its essential elements and I feel that this is the sort of basic rules that the game has always needed.

The bulk of the rules section of the new rulebook is actually about how you set up different types of battles, whether it be a pick-up game, a tournament, or even a narrative campaign. They even brought back the idea of detachments from 6th/7th Edition with no emphasis on any particular detachment composition. This is a serious departure for me as I learned the force organization chart and drilled it into my head. Sure, it’s pretty much still there, but enough small changes have been made that it fits way better. Also, it allows Codices to have their own unique detachments that fit the lore of that particular force better. It’s an overall win-win in my book.

Going back to the book, 42% of the rulebook are the actual rules. This is another departure from previous editions (except for maybe 7th, but that was a three book set and one of them was just the rules) as the rules usually made up about one-third of the book. The other two-thirds were the lore and a hobby section. Also, previous editions put a small primer section before the rules, usually to help you get in the mindset, and then the lore was after the rules, with the hobby stuff in the very back. The lore section is now in the front of the book, before the rules, and consists of 58% of the book’s contents, while the hobby section was completely omitted for 8th Edition. Again, this seems like a good move on GW’s part because they have entire books you can buy about how to make terrain, paint models, etc.

With the removal of the hobby section, which was honestly just porn for wargamers, the book has been slimmed down to 288 pages, which is impressive considering the 4th Edition rulebook was also 288 pages (5th Edition was 320, 6th Edition was 440) and included hobby information.

Datasheets seem to be the thing GW is doing now, and the rulebook addresses this at the very beginning of the rules section. Datasheets were first introduced in the Apocalypse expansion, late in 4th Edition’s life cycle. Datasheets were typically used for superheavy vehicles and unique, high-power characters, like Primarchs. But sometime during the life cycle of 6th or 7th Edition, GW decided to package datasheets in all of the model boxes, which I think was a brilliant move. Want to buy some models but don’t have the Codex? No big deal, here’s how the unit works!

One of the newer aspects of these datasheets is the Power Rating. For more casual games, the power rating can generally indicate how powerful a unit is, and both players can compare overall army strength by the overall Power Ratings.

Also available right now as a bundle are the army indices, which lets you get started right away with the new edition. Each one focuses on a particular area, with the Imperium getting two books, Chaos getting one, and Xenos getting lumped together into two indices. Each one is pretty big and provides datasheets for every unit in the game at this point, except for Forge World models. The lack of Titans is upsetting, but understood.

Final Thoughts I was startled a bit by 40K’s 8th Edition. I was seriously thinking that GW was going to screw the pooch on this and just keep going on with making a new edition every 4-5 years, alienate certain players by not updating factions they play, and simply make the rules even more complicated, but...

GW did a great job listening to the fans. It really seems like they’ve decided to regain all that goodwill they lost years ago. Hell, they regained some of it when I saw The War Store newsletter saying that you could now order GW products through their website, not having to call or send an email for orders (seriously, that’s how we had to do it back in the day...up until a month or two ago).

The rules are super streamlined, which is great for teaching new players. The datasheets make starting an army incredibly easy and they are great references during play. Right now, I’m just waiting to see what the first Codex looks like, because that will be the real telling point for the life cycle of 8th Edition. But, until then, this is looking real good.

Website: https://www.games-workshop.com/en-US/Warhammer-40-000 Price: $60 ($40 for eBook), $125 for the Index set or $25 for each Index ($20 for eBook), $104 for eBook bundle of Rulebook and Indices Players: 2+ All images © Games Workshop.

#warhammer 40k #warhammer 40000 #8th edition #review

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goocy · 7 years

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Reading log

Current book: Energy and the wealth of nations, Chapter 1

This is a very long chapter with lots of mixed topics, so I’m grouping my quotes.

Economics:

“The idea that possessing more money makes you better off is central to the economic theory of consumer behavior, which in turn is an underpinning of modern economic thought. There is no clearly convincing evidence that it is true.”

“Banks in the 1920s loaned out far more money than they actually had as assets (i.e., “money in the vault” or ownership of houses) to cover the loans.“

That early? I thought fractional banking was first introduced in the 1980s.

“The tight oligopolies constructed from the 1890s onward controlled destructive price competition and allowed large corporations to control their rivalries by means of mechanisms such as price leadership, market division, and use of advertising. Stable oligopolies competed on the basis of market share, not price.“

“Increased productivity is normally assigned to technological progress. What is less understood is that labor productivity increased in direct proportion to the amount of energy used per worker hour.”

“Stagflation (unemployment and inflation), which was difficult to explain by means of standard Keynesian theory, is easy to explain from an energy perspective.”

“Corporate profits also decreased from nearly 10% in the mid-1960s to a little more than 4% by 1974. Things seemed bad for both capital and labor.”

“The ‘Limit to Growth’ reports in 1973 implied that the human population appeared to be becoming very large relative to the resource base needed to support it and that it appeared that some rather severe “crashes” of populations and civilizations might be in store. Most economists did not accept the absolute scarcity of resources. The return to growth, they said, was just a matter of implementing a series of proper incentives and market-based reforms, as well as dispensing with the dangerous ideas of absolute limits.”

“In 1981, declining oil prices reduced general inflation.”

“Initial shortfalls in oil would lead to price increases, which would lead to economic recession, which would lead to a reduction in demand and lower oil prices, which would lead to economic recovery, which would lead to a new cycle. This basic pattern seems to have been exactly what has happened from 2004 to at least mid-2011.”

Society/Politics:

“In 1968 a state-supported health initiative for the elderly called Medicare was passed into law to supplement the retirement insurance program (Social Security) created during the Great Depression. For the first time, being old no longer meant being poor for the majority of American workers.”

“In 1979 the editors of Business Week opined that to restore the nation’s affluence labor would have to learn to accept less.”

“Reagan instituted supply side economics, an approach associated with increasing the rate of exploitation of natural resources by decreasing government environmental and other regulations. This constituted a sharp turn to the right in American politics.”

“In the United States, conservatives under Reagan opposed, for example, government programs to generate energy alternatives, believing that market forces were superior for guiding investments into energy and everything else.”

“Clearly conservatism alone could not fully explain England’s success, as nominally socialist Netherlands was also doing very well economically at that time fueled by the vast Groningen gas field.”

“The collapse of the Soviet Union was actually mostly a consequence of the partial collapse of Soviet oil production over the previous three years, greatly reducing the reve- nues that went to the central government and leading to many problems such as the inability to pay military pensions.”

“The new Bush administration called for the drilling for oil in the Alaskan Wildlife Preserve.”

“When the stock bubble disappeared in 2000, many large companies were found to have placed not nearly enough money into their pension funds.”

“If the US were to pay of its national debt of 8 trillion by producing and exporting US products, it would take an estimated 64 exajoules to produce those goods. This energy is equal to 10 billion barrels of oil, or half of the US’ known remaining oil reserves.”

“If national debt becomes too burdensome one way out of this problem is hyperinflation.”

“The incredible thing about oil and gas is the almost complete absence of an understanding of its importance to the average American, and their failure to understand how critical it is to our economy.”

Energy:

“The East Texas field, the nation’s largest ever except for Prudhoe in Alaska, was discovered in 1930, the first full year of the Depression. Oil was cheap, but there was virtually no market for it.”

“U.S. [conventional] oil production peaked in 1970 and became subject to supply shocks.”

“In 1973 the United States (and much of the world) experienced the first energy crisis. Americans became subject to gasoline lines, large increases in the prices of other energy sources, double-digit inflation and the highest rates of unemployment since the Great Depression.”

“Inflation-corrected gasoline prices, the most important barometer of energy scarcity for most people, ...”

“It takes the energy of about a gallon of oil a day to feed each American, about 80 barrels of oil to provide an undergraduate education at one of our colleges, and the energy equivalent of about ten gallons per day to keep us supplied with all the goods and services that we demand through our economic activity.”

“The net effect is that each of us today has some 60–80 ‘energy slaves’ doing our bidding.”

Agriculture:

“The primary sources of nitrates [in the 1800s] were manure, the large deposits of bird guano found off the South American coast, and the sodium nitrate deposits in the Atacama desert. Peru and Chile had fought the Guano Wars over access to the bird droppings.”

“Nearly 80% of the atmosphere is nitrogen (N2) but this nitrogen is very difficult to access because of its triple bond. Until 1909 only the tremendous energy of lightning or some very special algae and bacteria could break these bonds.”

Could these bacteria and algae be an interesting alternative for fertilizer production...?

Cover picture by Philip Kirk

#energy #wealth #history #economy #society #agriculture

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type2diabetestreatments-blog · 7 years

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Stacey McGill, A Girl's First Friend with Diabetes -- Now in eBook

New Post has been published on http://type2diabetestreatment.net/diabetes-mellitus/stacey-mcgill-a-girls-first-friend-with-diabetes-now-in-ebook/

Stacey McGill, A Girl's First Friend with Diabetes -- Now in eBook

When I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes 19 years ago, the very first person I met was Stacey McGill of Stoneybrook, CT. If you are a woman diagnosed with diabetes between the late-80s and mid-90s, she was probably one of the first diabetics you met, too.

The thing is, she's not a real person. Despite her being the first person "like me" who made me feel less alone with my diabetes, Stacey is actually a fictional character in the beloved book series, The Baby-Sitters Club. You know, the series about four friends who form a babysitter's club for their small, fictional town in Connecticut. The girls have many adventures, learning about life, love and friendship.

The series by Ann M. Martin spanned 217 novels between 1986 and 2000, and there was also a 1995 movie and a short-lived Disney series. Even though the series is now a quarter-century old and much of the diabetes tools and technology have changed, I still find the themes of the books incredibly pertinent to today's teenagers, and even adults!

We have so few diabetic characters in popular media, but now it's even easier for today's kids and teens to get to know Stacey and her babysitting club; book publisher Scholastic recently announced that it's re-released the first 20 books in the series on e-reader! Each book also includes a letter from the author about the inspiration behind the story. The books are completely untouched, so while some of today's kids might wonder why Stacey doesn't use an insulin pump, they'll relate to the emotional ups and downs of living with a chronic illness. Some things are just timeless.

For those who haven't met Stacey, she's your typical 13-year-old girl. She loves boys, clothes and hanging out with her friends. She also loves math, and serves as the Club's Treasurer. And like your typical teen, she also doesn't want her friends to know about her diabetes. But when they do find out, they are wonderful and supportive, and Stacey and her friends become amazing role models for taking care of your health and accepting one another for our differences. Not that Stacey's diabetes is always easy to control... In book #43, Stacey becomes depressed after her parent's divorce, and starts indulging in chocolate, stops managing her diabetes, and she lands in the hospital. I think this is a great example of how life can make diabetes so difficult to deal with, but that we have to keep pressing on.

When I was diagnosed at 8 years old, I'll admit that I was a little judgmental of Stacey! I was still under the watchful eye of my parents, and didn't understand why Stacey wouldn't take care of herself or why she would want to hide her diabetes from her friends. Of course, once I reached the same age Stacey is in the books, I realized how annoying it is to have everyone know there is something wrong with you, and to have to "be different."

Recently, I had the pleasure of interviewing author Ann Martin about her experiences writing the character of Stacey. Here's what she had to say:

DM) What inspired you to use diabetes in The Baby-Sitter's Club? Did you know someone with diabetes?

AM) Yes, when I began working on the series, I had two friends with diabetes, one who was not insulin-dependent and whose diabetes was well under control, and the other who, like Stacey, was insulin-dependent and had some difficulty controlling her condition. Both were inspirations for the creation of Stacey's character.

What was the process of learning about diabetes? What did you find most surprising or interesting?

I learned from my friends, of course. Also, my college buddy Claudia who's a physician (and for whom Claudia Kishi is named), vetted the manuscripts that dealt heavily with Stacey's diabetes. It was when I was researching diabetes for the series that I learned the term "brittle diabetes." I hadn't heard it before, and it influenced the way in which I wrote about Stacey.

How did you decide when and how to incorporate the illness into the stories?

That Stacey would be challenged by diabetes was a part of her character from the beginning. Before I wrote the first book in the series, when I was defining the main characters -- their personalities, their families, the challenges they face -- and outlining the first four books, I decided that one of the characters would face a physical challenge. Because of my friends, I was interested in diabetes and wanted to write about it.

Stacey has become a role model for teens and young adults with diabetes. Any memorable encounters with readers?

I've heard from quite a few readers, young and old, with diabetes who have been inspired by Stacey, and who have said they felt less alone when they read about a character who faced the same difficulties they did. I've also heard from several young women who said that after reading about Stacey, they realized they probably had diabetes themselves, told their parents, and were able to get to the doctor for proper help.

Isn't it incredible that Stacey was able to help real-life girls get themselves properly diagnosed? I thought that was amazing!

With the recent re-issuing of these books, hopefully even more kids and teens can be inspired by Stacey's D-story. There's also a Facebook app for The Babysitter's Club, where you can learn more about the books and also take a quiz to find out which babysitter character you are.

I, of course, am Stacey! (And I swear I didn't even rig the results!)

Disclaimer: Content created by the Diabetes Mine team. For more details click here.

Disclaimer

This content is created for Diabetes Mine, a consumer health blog focused on the diabetes community. The content is not medically reviewed and doesn't adhere to Healthline's editorial guidelines. For more information about Healthline's partnership with Diabetes Mine, please click here.

Type 2 Diabetes Treatment Type 2 Diabetes Diet Diabetes Destroyer Reviews Original Article

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