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boldlyvoid · 3 years

Text

Million Dollar Man | chapter two

18+

summary: Spencer's therapist recommended he branch out and meet new people who don't want to talk about his work... she didn't expect him to sign up for a Sugar Daddy website.

Content warnings: sugar daddy!spencer, age gaps (14 years), daddy kink, blow jobs, kissing, drinking mention, lowkey perv!Spencer, cum play, praise, oral (female receiving), grinding, love confessions, arrangements, Spencers anxiety, (more to add)

word count: 3.4K

a/n: updates on Wednesdays and saturdays at 2 pm est

Chapter Two | Masterlist

She sat on the subway with an anxious pit in her stomach and her purse held close to her chest. Her laptop in her bag, she didn’t want to lose it on her way to the most important meeting of her whole life.

Her story was becoming a book, she was almost done the final draft, they were making touch-ups to the cover and picking the type of paper today.

Her dreams were coming true within the next month, soon she’d have a physical copy of her book, her pre-sales were showing that she’d be on the bestseller list, and her name was finally going to be on the cover of this one.

She sighed and reached for her necklace, holding it between her fingers as she took a few deep breaths. She was doing so much better today than she was last year and it was all because of Spencer, he was the best thing to happen to her. To think she complimented his sweater vest and now he’s the only person in her life she can count on.

All she can think about is him for the rest of her journey, through 4 more stops she keeps her eyes closed as she thinks of all his little facts and his cute laugh. She smiles to herself and the anxiety slips away, she loves him and she knows that for sure, but she just doesn’t know how she loves him.

She’s never had a sibling, her best friends are all women, her previous boyfriends were all shit and her other sugar daddies were never this wonderful, and her parents are lesbians… she doesn’t know what her feelings really are for Spencer, mainly because she’s never known any other men to compare him to.

But she does know the exact moment she realized she fell for him.

He booked a hotel room in DC after a local case, asking her to meet him in there at 10 pm. She was waiting in the bathtub when he arrived, bubbles galore, her hair up and arms open, “welcome home, honey.”

He laughs, “you want me to get in there with you?”

She just nods, “let me take care of you, daddy?”

He takes off his blazer, pulls his tie off and starts to unbutton his shirt. She watches patiently as he gets undressed, and it’s not sexual to her. He’s her person, her best friend, the only human being she would ever share a moment like this with and that’s when it hits her.

She doesn’t accept it just yet.

It’s not until he’s lying on her chest, between her legs, cheek resting on her boobs as she runs a sponge over his back while he gives her a little run down on his terrible week. His co-worker almost died, his mom is stressing him out, the only good thing he has left is her and she knows that.

“And then I get to my moms facility and she’s had a really good day, she knows me and she knows all of my childhood again and she’s all right there in front of me and yet she’s so far away. I’m never going to get all the time I want with her and it’s really hard to accept.”

He shares things with her that he doesn’t even tell his therapist. Because his therapist doesn’t hold him like a child against her chest and tell him he’s okay when he get’s upset.

Y/N loves him, so she kisses his forehead, “I’m so sorry, I have 2 moms if you’d like to have one?”

“It’s okay, I would love to meet them sometime though,” he wraps his arms around her waist a little tighter under the water. “Thank you for tonight.”

“Did I mention my leg is 44 inches from hip to toe?” She asks in the middle of the silence, quoting pretty woman, knowing he hasn’t seen that far into the movie yet. “So basically we’re talking about 88 inches of therapy for the bargain price of $800 dollars a week.”

Her legs wrap around him and their naked bodies are closer than they’ve ever been and yet it’s completely platonic, “I’d spend a million dollars on you if it always meant feeling this good after.”

She runs her cheek along his wet hair as he snuggles into her neck, “mmm, I like the sound of that,” she teased. “My million dollar man.”

Her stop rolls around and she pulls herself out of her day dreams to get off the train and head to her meeting. She smiles as she walks through the station, up the stairs and onto the busy downtown streets when she gets a text with Spencers special chime. She opens it when she gets to where she’s going, safely inside and in the waiting room.

It makes her laugh in the waiting room. People look at her but she doesn’t care, he’s so special to her she feels butterflies in her stomach even when he’s not around.

“Y/N!” She hears her name being called by her editor, he’s over ecstatic as he comes running out to get her. “Come, come we have so many choices to make!” He jumps up and down as he holds her arm, like a child in a candy store.

“Andy, chill man,” she laughs at him and plays it cool, “It’s just the cover being finalized.”

“It’s our baby!” He teases back, pushing his glasses up and tugging her behind the glass doors of the office.

She’s surrounded by people and paper and huge versions of her book cover. She has a sharpie as she fixed mistakes and jots down final ideas. “And I wan’t Phil to look more human and less like data from Star Trek?”

“But Dorothy looks okay?” The artist asks, nervously and Y/N can tell.

“She looks beautiful! You really brought her justice,” she smiles, “really she looks the same in my head! It’s just Phil and I’m sure it’s tough getting a drawing to look like a robotic human, let alone human.”

“I have some ideas?” She opens up more, taking her iPad out and sliding it across the table, “I wanted to give him more of a Sophia feel? His face is silicone but his joints and everything are more like an Elon Musk crash dummy.”

“That’s perfect!” She’s shocked, “why didn’t that go in the first draft?”

��I was worried it was too much,” she’s a little older than Y/N, and yet her anxiety is that of a teenage girl. “I’m going to get working on the final, do you want some emailed versions tonight?”

“Yes please,” she smiles.

“So we’re done?” Andy asks, “we’ve made all our final calls?”

“I believe we have,” Y/N closes her laptop and takes her phone out, taking a photo of the final rough sketch of her book cover on the table to send to Spencer before he comes to pick her up. She can’t wait to see him now.

—

They’re sitting side by side in matching spa robes, he’s getting a pedicure while she gets her nails done. Leaning back in her chair with a face mask and cucumbers on her eyes, she’s never felt more relaxed in her life. And just in time too, her back was killing her from writing, her knuckles hurt and she just needed a break.

Spencer did too, he was genuinely not having a good time at work anymore, every case made him spiral and he always looked to Y/N on days like that. They met more than once a week now, she got $800 every Friday and she didn’t even really need it anymore. He was coving for so much of her bills and lively hood that her savings account was growing and growing because of him.

For the first time in her life she thought she would be okay if a man left her. As terrible as it was, as much as her moms tried to raise her differently, she fell down the daddy issues rabbit hole and she’s never going to find her way out— however, luckily for her, Spencer is down here too, and he brought a flashlight.

He understands her, more than anyone else on earth. He knows all her secrets, every crush and bad grade and snide remark she’s ever kept to herself. He didn’t judge her, he could actually listen to her issues and tell her why she had them. He gave better advice than a therapist and he was able to get information for her if he didn’t know the answer to what she was going through.

He’s absolutely everything to her and yet he’s 14 years older than her, he’s still traumatized beyond belief, he’s sad and ashamed and recovering… but he’s the best man in the whole world and she wishes he could see that. If he just looked at himself from her eyes, if he felt how she did in her soul when they were together, he’d love himself.

They’re too relaxed to drive home, and Spencer knew that would happen beforehand, bringing her a change of clothes (lingerie) and that robe me mentioned. He books a hotel above the spa and takes her to it. Arms linked as they enter the suite, she’s amazed to find more than one gift bag on the bed.

“How many gifts is this now?”

“We’re at 5 out of 24.”

She laughs as she wraps her arms around him in a thank you hug, “this is what you consider 4 gifts? Spencer there are like 8 things on the bed, let alone the massage and manicure?”

“If you think this is too much I guess you’re going to get really mad next week,” he teases as she looks up at him with a surprised look on her face.

“Spencer, I am so busy next week, I cannot be galavanting around with my sugar daddy,” she tries to act like she doesn’t want to go on an adventure with him again.

The last trip they took was the best week of her life. They went to all the historical sites in the UK that she and Spencer had talked about. Mainly old churches and castles, strange poets graves, random art and most importantly; stone henge. It was a trip of a lifetime and he took it with her.

“I watched the rest of Pretty Woman the other day,” he smiles, “and I thought I’d pull an Edward Lewis and really surprise you because you deserve it.”

“You know how the movie ends, right?” Her heart beats really fast in her chest and she wants him to love her so bad but it’s also terrifying now that she’s this close.

“He lets her choose,” he whispers.

“He rescues her,” she corrects him.

“And she rescues him right back,” he really did watch the end of the movie.

It makes her heart skip a beat as she swallows sharply, “what does this mean for us?”

“I have a whole plan, a whole sequence of events I want to stick to. I wanted to make you fall in love with me this week and ask you on your birthday, can we still do that?” He pleads with her, he’s so serious. He’s clearly put a lot of effort into this.

“Absolutely,” she smiles, “but if you’re going to make me wait that long for you to ask, you still can’t kiss me till then. No matter how much I already love you.”

“Really?” He’s so soft with her, she knows he’s not reacting to the teasing. He’s never had someone tell him they love him and then stay after.

“I would never lie to you about that, spence. I know what love means to you, I know how scared you are and I’m scared too. But I know there is no one else in the whole world I’d rather be scared with than you,” she holds him tighter and rubs her nose against his, “so what’s in the bags, daddy? Finish your surprise.”

She plays along perfectly, stepping back and hauling him towards the bed. “I got you some outfits and things for the next 2 weeks, we have a few things planned. We’re going on a flight soon, I have new luggage being delivered to your apartment this week and we’re going to see your moms for 3 days.”

“No,” she shakes her head, “there’s no way, Spencer, I haven’t seen them in 5 years, I’m going to cry.”

“I know,” he cups her jaw with his hand. “They’re really excited to see you.”

She hugs him tight, kissing his neck as she holds him. “Thank you, daddy, do you want me to put something on for you now?”

“I’m just going to take it off you, plus, what your wearing is sexy enough, he whispers back. “You’re always so beautiful, baby.”

“I thought you were saving the best for last?” She asks as she pulls back, overly eager and he can tell.

“I want to repay the favour from the other night.”

She doesn’t mean to gasp and yet she does, “please?”

He pulls on the tie of her robe, opening it enough to snake a hand behind her back and draw her in with a hand on her bare back. “Please what?”

“Please, daddy?” She looks up with her best begging eyes, perfect pout and all. “I want you to touch me, I promise I’ll be a good girl.”

He steps away from her to swipe all the bags off the bed before picking her up and laying her back against the pillows. He kisses down her body, hand on her lover back as she arches, he drags his bottom lip from her belly button to her cleavage. Nipping and sucking at the exposed skin on her chest, pulling her breasts out of the bra to suck on her nipples, she moans and it’s louder than she expected.

As she plays with his hair, he marks her, bruising small little love bites all the way down as he makes his way between her legs, “take me, please?”

He’s been dreaming of this for so long, he can’t even give you an accurate number of times his mind has drifted to the thought of how wonderful she would taste, how beautiful she’d sound…

“Tell me how badly you want me?” He asks as he spreads her legs and kisses her left thigh.

“I haven’t had sex in 10 months while waiting for you. Daddy, please you’ve owned me for so long, just take what’s yours already for gods sa- OH!”

With a broad lick, his tongue flattens against her core and it shuts her up. She gets what she wants, holding into his hair as she tosses her head back, taking it all in and enjoying it. He’s been on her mind for months, every time her vibrator was where he is now, she thought of him. he’s been the man of her dreams longer than she’s known him, and he was proving it.

“Right there, daddy,” she speaks through shallow breaths, “do you know how much I’ve thought of this?”

“You know I don’t,” the vibrations of his voice against her skin are glorious, he looks up at her through his lashes as his tongue flicks over her clit and she shakes a bit.

“Fuck,” she gasps, gripping his hair tighter, “better than I thought you’d be, fuck, too bad you— Jesus, don’t have the stash anymore…”

He stops and looks up at her, the smirk on his face glistening with her juices, “the stash?”

She nods, “I’ve thought about calling it the pussy tickler,” she teases, running her hand down his cheek and swiping her thumb across his bottom lip before bringing it up to her mouth to taste, “I want more of you.”

He kisses back up her body and she reaches for his robe the second he’s close enough. “Just grind against me? I know you’re waiting but we can still feel good together?”

He kisses the side of her mouth and she takes that as a yes, wrapping her legs around him so his hard cock is pressed right against her core as they move their hips in synchronicity with each other. His breathing is heavy as he kisses her cheek and jaw, her nails scratch down his back, he feels absolutely amazing against her.

She feels so empty, she wants him so bad she’s clenching around nothing as she squirms against his cock and wishes she was full.

“I wish I could move time,” she whispers. “Fuck, why can’t it be my birthday?”

He laughs against her, grazing his teeth over her neck and drawing another moan from her but then he stops moving his hips, “why are you so impatient?”

“Remember I said I stopped enjoying everything? Well, taking a 10 month break from sex and thinking about you every time I got off has made me desperate,” her hand cups his cheek, “I’d wait forever for you, but a girl needs to be fucked hard every once in a while.”

Only she could find a way to make something both profoundly beautiful and whorish at the same time, he loved her for it and she knew that now. He smiles and leaned in to rub his nose against hers and it takes everything in her not to kiss him. The same way it was taking everything in him not to slip into her as he began to grind against her once more.

She’s so close, the accidental edging has added a whole new level of desperation she’s never felt before. She wants to cum for him so bad, but more importantly she wants him to cum for her.

“Take my bra off,” she whispers, Spencer’s hands travel behind her back to unclasp it and he helps her out of it before tossing it to the floor.

“Cum for me daddy,” she whispers in his head with a hand in his hair, gripping him tightly as he bites at her neck, “cover me with your cum like you’re marking your territory.”

“Shit,” his hips sputter against hers.

“Say it, I know you want to,” she teases, so close to the edge but it’s too good of an opportunity. She loves seeing him fall apart like this and she can’t wait to see it again. “Who’s am I?”

“Daddy’s girl.”

He grinds down on her harder and faster and she’s so close, the bubble in her gut is reaching a fever pitch and with a gasp, she’s cumming and then she feels it. His load covers her stomach as he pants against her neck and grips her hips tighter as he comes down.

She wraps her arms around him and holds him as close as humanly possible, her breathing still heavy as he rises and falls on her chest. He’s heavy but she doesn’t care, she just kisses the top of his head and thanks him.

He brushes his nose against her neck, nuzzling her like a cat, “do you really mean it?”

“What, honey?” He remembers so much, this could be a question about something she said 2 months or 2 minutes ago and she has no clue.

“You’re not just playing along with my kinks right, you genuinely want to be mine?”

For being her million dollar man, his heart sure was broke. This is why he wasn’t ready, he still didn’t understand why she would want to stay without anything in return, he’s gotten so used to paying her for her time now that his anxiety has managed to convince him that she’ll leave when he stops being worth it to her.

“What does my necklace say?” She asks, knowing how close he was to it. “Read it to me, I forget.”

“Daddy’s girl,” he smiles again.

She soothes her hands over his back, “I would do anything with you because I love and trust you, but also because everything you do is sexy… you could read me the dictionary and I’d still want you to pump me full of cum after.”

“It sounds so crude after,” he laughs, “speaking of, we really need to have a shower.”

“I’ll wash your back if you wash mine?” She teases as he gets up.

“Only if you let me wash the front too?”

She smacks his bare ass and races him into the bathroom, turning on the water and getting in with him while still laughing and carrying on. He’s her best friend in the whole world, there’s no one else she would rather do this with… there was no one she has done this with. No one has made her feel this good, before during and after sex.

Spencer Reid was an anomaly, but he was hers.

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kathyprior4200 · 4 years

Text

The Chipper Cleaner

The Golden State of California hosted a melting pot of different cultures, cuisines and languages from around the world. The Great Depression of the 1930s hit families and businesses hard. Many people were out of jobs, some lived in the streets or in debilitated shacks close together. Mexican, European and Asian immigrants were often seen in camps, doing what they could to survive and live through the days. Men, women and sometimes children would help out in the fields and harvest wheat and food. It wasn’t uncommon to hear guitar playing or balls being kicked around or a few songs carried out in the desert air in an attempt to lift spirits up.

To make matters worse, a terrible drought spread through the nation in 1930. Crops died from lack of water and harvests failed across farms in the U.S. Thousands went hungry as farms and homes were lost. The former prosperous economic growth and glory of the Roaring Twenties was reduced to memory.

The 1940s would bring about World War 2, more women in the workforce and the internment of thousands of people with Japanese ancestry. For as diverse as California was, racism, sexism and discrimination were still commonplace everywhere.

In the vibrant city of Los Angeles, California, a nifty little girl was born. Her name was Nerissa, born March 22nd, 1929. She was born to her parents: Hiroto and Akemi Nifuti. Her mother, Akemi was from Japan and arrived to Hawaii. Having only met her husband through sent pictures as a picture bride, she and Hiroto got married on the docks of Hawaii. She was disappointed to hear that Hiroto was older and didn’t have any luxury cars or clothes. Nevertheless, it was an escape from her family duties back in her home country, so she moved and married him. After working on the plantations for a while, the couple decided to move to California, where they lived in a rural area. Their small house was made of wood that was painted red and white.

Close by their house was a field of wheat, soybeans and tomatoes growing on vines. Or at least, that’s how it should’ve looked during a good harvest. However, the drought had done a number on the family’s crops. The beans were small and dried up, the tomatoes hardly growing at all. The family had to be careful about not spending too much money…they made some of it selling their crops at a local farmer’s market. Thankfully, their jobs allowed them to keep a house and not go broke. Other families weren’t as lucky.

Niffty’s father was a farmer and newspaper editor and her mother worked at a sewing factory. Since Niffty’s parents were often busy with work, they hired a sitter to take care of her. The sitter was white with brown hair and green eyes, in her early 30s. She would often wear pink dresses with white polka dots on it, her mousey brown hair tied back. Although Michelle Marie Ann was Caucasian, she treated Niffty like she was her own daughter. She watched Niffty crawl, babble, and slowly take her first steps.

“Yay, nice job!” she said in a cooing tone as Niffty took her first steps across the floor before landing in a heap in her lap.

Michelle looked over at Akemi and Hiroto. “She’s a fast learner,” Michelle remarked. Both parents were pleased. Hiroto then went out to water what was left of the crops, while Akemi sat in a large room to get a head start on some dresses and hats.

Niffty started crying again and Michelle rocked her gently in her lap. Michelle let out a soft sigh and carried her to a bedroom to change her diaper.

Whenever Akemi had time to spend with Niffty, she taught her the Japanese language and etiquette.

Niffty started learning when she was a couple years old. Her mother would sing her songs and tell her stories. The little girl loved every minute of it. Niffty’s father would smile passively at them, before returning to work or have some drinks.

Niffty would later learn to write several Japanese characters as well, at least at home or when writing letters to distant family members.

“Hai. Yes,” Akemi said, with a nod of her head. Niffty copied the motion. “iie. No.” She shook her head, more of a frown on her face, before Niffty copied her.

“Onegai shimasu? What’s that?”

Niffty answered. “Please?”

“Very good,” Akemi said.

Of course, Niffty had to learn several things the hard way.

“Nerissa! iie!” Akemi scolded when a four year old Niffty had arrived into the house wearing dirty shoes. She pointed back outside and Niffty slumped back out to take her shoes off.

“Nerissa,” called her father. “I need your help digging up some dirt out here.” Niffty raced out and grabbed a small shovel. She helped her father dig holes and seek out fresh dirt to try and plant seeds.

At dinner time, the family had sushi, onigiri rice balls and grilled chicken skewers called yakitori. Niffty was struggling with holding chopsticks. Hiroto had to chuckle as Niffty’s sushi kept slipping from in between the wooden utensils. Niffty reached to pick it up but Akemi stopped her with a glare. Niffty kept her little hand extended, the two members locked in a sort of stare down. Niffty tried using the chop sticks in one hand before both utensils rolled off the table and clattered to the floor. Niffty grabbed the sushi and popped it into her mouth with a giggle. Akemi sighed and slapped her hand to her forehead. Hiroti rolled his eyes and helped himself to more food.

“Nerissa, dear you still have much to learn,” her mother said as Niffty bent down to pick up the sticks.

Akemi also showed Niffty the very important duties of cleaning the house and sewing clothing. “I work at a sewing factory,” she said. “And more than likely, you’re gonna work in a similar job if not the same. Watch closely.”

Niffty watched in curiosity as Akemi sat down and worked both a sewing machine and used her own hands. She weaved string of different colors through loops as she moved the sewing needles around in her hands. Niffty practiced on her own, sewing together a hole in a small cotton cap to start with. She fumbled several times but slowly got used to it. Several weeks later, she had made her first scarf.

“Quite impressive,” Akemi praised.

Niffty had poked at her fingers several times, but they eventually toughened up. Muscle memory took over in her fingers for many of the tasks she did. The more she performed them, the easier it felt…and the faster she did them. Sewing on buttons, bows and decorations was Niffty’s favorite part. It wasn’t long before she frequently helped out her mother with sewing and cleaning the house. It became an expectation for years afterward.

“Scrub harder, Nerissa,” Akemi said as Niffty learned how to wash dishes. “You need to really get the stains off around the bottom rim of the pot. Like this.” She grabbed a sponge and moved it rapidly up and down and in circles. Niffty laughed as she got her hands soapy and wet. On occasion, Akemi would playfully splash her with water. They would have a quick water fight with loud giggles before returning to work.

Cleaning chimneys was Niffty’s least favorite hobby. But it was one her father insisted she do. “You’ll eventually need to learn it if you ever get a somewhat decent job,” he reminded her. Women were working more, but opportunities were still very limited for them.

Using thick dusters and other supplies, she could easily fit into the small space. She hated how dirty she got from the soot and ash. Niffty felt like Cinderella much of the time, from the hard cleaning work she did, to fantasizing about going to a ball and meeting a prince. Imagining herself as a beautiful princess helped pass the time. The water in the wooden wash bin would be black by the time Niffty was done washing herself off. She would scrub her skin for half an hour, trying to get the grime off as much as possible.

Niffty soon she got some exciting news at age six: she was going to school for the first time. She was soon dropped off at Wellis Elementary, a yellow brick building. While at school, Niffty excelled at literature, home economics, art, reading, writing and history. She was also a fast runner in gym class as well. Math and science were subjects she struggled with.

Nifty would spend hours reading the books in the classrooms. She would often be seen eagerly raising her hand to tell the answer. She had to learn to slow down on whatever activity she did…many of the classmates couldn’t keep up with her!

“Shorty Jap! Shorty Jap!” jeered a bunch of mean older kids who shoved Niffty to the floor on her way to music. Niffty cried out, tears flowing down her cheeks. A nearby teacher arrived and took her to the nurse’s office.

“Just a bruise on your knee but it should heal up in no time,” the nurse said as Niffty wiped her tears away.

“Why are they so mean?” she sobbed. “What did I do?”

“Those kids are mean to all the newcomers,” the nurse said. “They tend to pick on the little kids in particular.”

“But I’m not that little,” Niffty said. “I just turned seven!”

“Sorry, I thought you were four.”

Niffty lowered her face, black bangs obscuring her forehead. Her face flushed in embarrassment. Her dress was white, her leggings tight and shoes were shiny and black. Her hair was short and black, her eyes dark brown and slanted. Her skin was a light brownish or as some bullies would mock, “yellow.” Indeed, Niffty was one of the shortest people in her class. There were rumors about her having a growth stunt, but Niffty had developed physically and mentally at a fast rate. Indeed, she was smarter than many kids her age.

“Don’t let them get to you,” the nurse said. “Now hurry on back to class.”

Fortunately, singing and playing instruments helped Niffty forget about the incident. “I’m gonna be a singer when I grow up!” she declared much to the bemusement of her classmates.

Niffty got home to see Michelle Marie Ann smiling warmly at her, wearing a fluffy lavender dress with a purple bow around her waist. Niffty remembered to leave her shoes outside.

“How was school?” she asked.

“It was fine,” she replied in a monotone.

“Only fine? You were so enthusiastic about it earlier.”

“Mean kids were mean to me.”

“How so? What did they do?”

“They said I was a shorty Jap and shoved me to the ground.”

A horrific look crossed Michelle’s face. “I’m so sorry, Nerissa,” she said.

Her parents shared concerned looks in the distance. Sooner or later, their daughter would have to learn the hard truth about who she was and about the society they lived in.

“It’s okay,” Niffty said. “I still got to learn new things and do the entire alphabet in English!”

“How wonderful!” Michelle smiled. Niffty was always optimistic, ever the imaginative one. Whenever things got down, Niffty would always see the silver lining in everything.

“What did the kids mean when they said that stuff?”

Michelle sighed, trying to put words together. “Let’s just say that many people don’t like others who are different.”

Before Niffty could ask further, Michelle said,” I have a surprise for you, sweetie.”

She dug into her dress pocket and pulled out a stuffed animal. Niffty beamed and took the figure and hugged it to her chest. It was a stuffed pink poodle decorated with white polka dots.

“Do you like it?”

“Oh I do I do I do!” Niffty squealed. The two of them shared a warm hug.

After dusting a bookshelf, vacuuming the rugs and polishing several appliances, Niffty soon got ready for bed. Michelle tucked her into bed. Hiroto was passed out on the couch and Akemi was up in her room finishing up outfits to sell.

“Can you read me a story?” Niffty asked.

“Of course my dear,” Michelle answered. “Which one?”

Niffty pointed to an orange picture book. “That’s one of my favorites.”

Michelle picked it up and read the title. “Princess Hachikazuki.”

Niffty cuddled up in her sitter’s lap as Michelle began. It was like she was transported to another world.

In the story, Lord and Lady Sanetaka prayed to the bodhisattva of mercy to give them an heir. The beautiful princess was born. The mother became sick and before she passed away, she placed a bowl on the princess’s head. The princess threw herself in a river when people laughed at her but soon, a prince fell in love with her. Although her rival stepsisters tried to separate them, Hachikazuki’s bowl came off of her head, allowing her to win a ladies contest. The couple happily married and the princess was reunited with her father.

“Oh I just love happy endings!” Niffty beamed as Michelle closed the book.

A year later, Michelle told her a story that seemed to stay with her. It would be the last story the sitter ever told.

“Read me a story, please?” Niffty asked.

“But it’s your bed time, Nerissa,” she said. “You’re getting old for this, according to your parents.”

“Please? Please? Please?” the little girl pleaded with shining eyes.

Michelle gave in with a smile. She knew Niffty would always be a child at heart. “Alright, but just one.”

She cleared her throat.

“Once upon a time in a vast kingdom, there lived a beautiful blonde haired princess. She lived in a palace with her father and mother, the king and queen. While she was there, she was taught how to sing, play the violin, dance and how to rule with a firm hand. The king and queen loved to perform for their subjects. They would host grand balls for the nobility and invite the well-off to join the fun. There were jesters, jugglers, and an array of delicious food for them to enjoy. All in all the princess was very happy, surrounded by the music.”

“But as she got older, she learned more about the land she was in. Her father had enforced strict rules on his subjects, and for good reason. Although the peasants, knights, shop owners and caretakers worked hard, they also fought a lot. It wasn’t uncommon for farmers to fight over crops, or fellow knights to raid churches and villages. Disease also spread rapidly.”

“One day, the princess saw a horrific sight. Soldiers from a rival kingdom arrived and mercilessly slaughtered the citizens! The knights in armor were no match for the guns. After the damage had been done, those who remained had to dispose of the dead and start over, always in fear that they would come again.”

“Father,” cried the princess. “How could you let this happen?!”

“My army is no match for the soldier’s guns,” he replied. “They invade and kill my people for the sake of it. But there is nothing that can be done. Perhaps the troublesome workers deserved their fate.”

“Mother!” the princess cried. “Can’t you do something as well? Those poor people suffer every day out there!”

But the queen was busy deciding which dress to wear for the next performance.

The princess tried to talk to the people around her, offering to help in any way she could. Many of them laughed and mocked her.

“A secluded princess trying to help us out?” they asked. “Who does she think she is? She doesn’t know anything at all.”

Fortunately, the princess befriended a woman warrior to help her out. The woman could live off the land and use any kind of weapon, but she had a bad temper at times. The princess had an idea.

“What if I run a refuge place to help travelers and my people get along? If not that, then at least, the poor would have a place to stay.” Her warrior friend agreed to help, provided she not get too optimistic about the iffy plan. The king and queen used some of their money to build the building by the trading route, just so they could focus on their own hobbies. They, too, didn’t agree with her ideas. The princess was saddened by her ignorant parents.

One traveler soon arrived, a man who smoked, drank and often ran around nude. He slept with women and men alike. He was a reckless fighter as well, and had almost died fighting off rival knights on the battlefield. The princess happily welcomed him in, but the warrior wasn’t as pleased. It was slow going, but it was a start.

Now, the king had many lords and men in his inner circle. One of them was a man who lived in the woods and hunted deer. He often wore a dark cloak and carried a staff with a deer skull on it. But he was also a devious trickster. He was feared throughout the land because of his great skill in dark sorcery. Many people had fallen prey to his curses, poor and wealthy alike…he loved making deals.

When the sorcerer saw that the princess was opening the place of refuge, he decided to check it out. He already had a plan to get to know the members of the royal family…having a secret grudge against them. Before he did, he gathered two people to his side. One of them was a strong muscular fighter…and the best gambler in town.

“Your skills in gambling and fighting are second to none,” the sorcerer said, soon gathering up lies. “I could use a strong hand like you. Those horrible soldiers killed my wife and children and I’m worried that I’ll be next.”

“I’m not helping you,” the gambler scoffed as he drank more booze and drinks. “Why didn’t you use your magic?”

“The soldiers weren’t affected by it and now…I’m left with nothing...”

“But if you work for me, I’ll give you more drinks and money. Plus if you’re looking for a nicer place to stay, the princess has a refuge center not too far from here.”

Reluctantly, the gambler shook the sorcerer’s hand and followed him.

Later, the sorcerer spotted a maid who was cleaning chimneys and caring for a bunch of children.

“You look like you’re pretty busy,” the sorcerer said. “Cleaning the same dirty place all the time sounds boring.”

“It is,” the maid said. “And lonely. There are no handsome men around either.”

The sorcerer then spoke in a smooth seductive tone. “It doesn’t have to be this way. Why, if you help me out, I’ll provide you with a clean house and introduce you to the most handsome of men in the kingdom. I’ll be your first friend if you wish.”

The maid eagerly shook his hand, and the trio went off to the hotel. Once they arrived, the princess welcomed them in with open arms.

“I’d love to help out with your place, your majesty,” the sorcerer said with an elegant bow. “Trying to make people better…that’s near impossible, but hey, it’s worth a shot.”

The sorcerer charmed the princess with dances and magic tricks. With a snap of his fingers, the place was repaired and clean. She soon became attracted to him. The man even made a splendid dinner for everyone to enjoy.

“He’s untrustworthy,” the warrior woman warned the princess. “I’m your best friend but please be careful.”

“Don’t worry,” the princess said. “I can take care of myself.” She hoped that her plan would work…and hoped she could prove herself worthy to her parents.

Then, on the next fateful day…”

“Nerissa!” called Akemi from down the hall. “It’s time to go to sleep!”

“She’s right,” Michelle said as she closed the book in a heart stopping snap.

“Awww, Michelle! Mother! You can’t stop there! We were getting to the good part!”

“Maybe another time,” said Michelle as she tucked Niffty into bed. “Good night, dear.” Michelle’s footsteps grew fainter as she left the room.

Nifty stared at the starry sky and the full moon though her window. “Maybe my dreams will come true someday,” she sang softly to herself with a smile and a look of longing.

“A dream is a wish, my heart makes

When I’m fast asleep.

In dreams, I will lose my heartaches

Whatever I wish for, I keep

“Have faith in dreams and someday

My rainbow will come smiling through

No matter how my heart is grieving

If I keep on believing

The dream that I wish will come true.”

Niffty yawned after she finished the song and settled into sleep.

Yellow Peril: Chinese workers arrive to U.S. mid 19th century, restricted to railroads and mines. Anti-Chinese groups worked to pass laws to limit Asian American equality with whites. Like Irish, Italians, Chinese and Japanese were viewed as threats to “racial purity” and a source of economic competition.

1886-1924 peak: People immigrating from Japan to find work to survive. Many arrived on Hawaiian Islands, moving to the West Coast. Immigrants selecting brides from their immigrant countries via a matchmaker who paired them only using pictures and family recommendations. Some women choose to be picture brides to escape familial duties and seek economic growth. Some came to Hawaii because it was a trend. Picture brides immigrated to the U.S. to be with husbands. Men would often pose in pictures with cars and items they did not own.

Nakodo: go between/match maker who looks at status, age, wealth of bride

Pucture brides had to go through immigration inspections. They would meet their soon to be husbands and attend a wedding ceremony on the docks.

Reality: older grooms living in racially segregated plantations

Plantation workers, many Japanese women. Irrigated and weeded the fields, stripped cane of dry leaves, or cut seed cane. Women were also expected to take care of the house, cooking, cleaning, sewing and raising children. Many women moved to Honolulu to start their own businesses.

Values instilled to children included filial piety, obligation to community and authority, reciprocal obligation, importance of hard work, frugality, drive for success (seiko).

Some married husbands were abusive or alcoholic or tried to sell women into brothels but many wives stayed for their children. Wives who eloped could be sent back to Japan.

No passports to picture brides in 1920.

Naturalization Act of 1870: revoking citizenship to Chinese Americans

Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882: stopped immigration from China

Japanese workers recruited, triggering a rapid increase in population.

Immigration Act of 1924: banned Japanese and Chinese from entering U.S.

Japantowns (Nihonmachi) in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle etc. community groups organized charity events and set up shops separate from whites, Japanese language schools.

Pearl Harbor attack 1941: led the United States into World War 2. Americans, French, England, unified to fight against Germany, Japan and Italy.

Kamikaze suicide bombings, Pearl Harbor, Baatan Death March, American POWs killed by Imperial Japanese forces

“Jap hunting licenses” Japanese forced to move away and close their businesses.

Stereotype of Japanese and schools as loyal to the emperor of Japan, promoting racial superiority and violent fighting skills.

1942: Japanese incarcerated in camps “War Relocation Camps” western U.S, 1942-1946 “one blood drop rule”

Jan 1942: immigrants required to have certificates and IDs on them

Unfavorable reports of Japanese action noticed by the U.S. government, (Pearl Harbor, Invasion of China 1931).

Thin barracks with little room for privacy, barbed wire fences and guards.

(shikata ga nai) “It cannot be helped.” School lessons only taught in Englsih. Dust storms, cramped living conditions. There was baseball, bands and recreation.

Internment ends 1945/1946

Japanese businesses, homes and places of worship were destroyed with vandalism, gunshots and explosives. Some people were shot in the camps while others died from lack of medical care.

Niffty lives her life as a Japanese American woman and teenager in the 1950s. She is little, with short black hair and pale skin. She is born in the 1920s…on March 22 (VA birthdate), 1929 (Year of the Snake)! Being the same age as Vaggie when she died at age 22, Niffty died in 1951. She is a human named Nerissa Nifuti (after the maid. Her last name is Niffty in Japanese).

March 22 1929: Niffty’s birth in Los Angeles, California, as Nerissa Nifuti. (Capital city based on New Orleans, New York and Las Vegas populous cities of the former homelands of the other characters)

1930: age 1

1931: age 2

1932: age 3

1933: age 4

1934: age 5

1935: age 6

Niffty briefly lives with her parents in a rural area. Picture bride mother who arrived from Japan and to Hawaii and worked on a plantation, older alcoholic father who lived in Hawaii.

1930s: Niffty learns to walk and talk and speak Japanese and English. She always removes her shoes whenever she enters her home and other buildings. She is fast in almost everything, crawling early, babbling early, very talkative and quick on her feet. Niffty is a fast learner as well, often ahead of her class. Niffty learns best by working with her hands. Niffty develops her love of reading and writing.

At some point, Niffty’s father becomes abusive to both of them but Niffty’s mother has to stay to uphold her family honor.

1936: age 7 Niffty starts school. Niffty is often chided for talking so fast and not being passive

Niffty is bullied in Weill school for her heritage and short height. Niffty excels at literature, running, music, singing, arts and crafts, reading and writing, but not at math, sports, science or history.

1937: age 8 With being a good housewife instilled in her at an early age, Niffty begins to clean and cook and sew early on, while also looking for the perfect husband in the future.

1938: age 9

1939: age 10 World War 2 begins

Niffty reads mangas and starts writing her own stories while maintaining a clean house for her family. They also have a black poodle named Michelle.

1940: age 11

1941: age 12

1942: age 13

1942: Year of Death. Niffty and her parents are sent to an internment camp. Manzanar Relocation Center. Niffty’s father is shot for trying to escape and her mother dies of an illness at an infirmary. The walls are thin and barracks are overcrowded.

1943: age 14

1944: age 15 Niffty is often surrounded by the stench of death. She eats like an animal and longs to be free.

1945: age 16

Niffty’s father is shot for trying to escape and her mother falls ill and dies in a makeshift infirmary. Niffty remains in the camp until 1945, finishing schooling and joining the band. Niffty has to live with several other families and children in cramped spaces. The lessons were only taught in English. Niffty falls in love with several boys. Niffty meets one nice one but he eventually leaves with his family, leaving Niffty behind.

Niffty returns to her home town with nothing to return to. She finds Japanese businesses, homes and places of worship destroyed with vandalism, gunshots and explosives.

By sheer luck, she is able to live and work for an upper class white family as a maid, cook and a person who sews their clothes. The mother is racist toward her but not the father nor the older sister, who tolerate her.

1946: age 17 Niffty is visited by Alastor through a radio. He offers her mangas, appreciation for her work and a new “perfect” boyfriend/husband, plus a radio. She agrees to help him out later on, but she gets more than what she bargained for.

1947: age 18 Niffty gets married to her boyfriend but still works for the family.

1948: age 19 Niffty’s husband starts hitting on Niffty’s white adoptive sister. Niffty’s adoptive parents make her do even more work since she is so good at it. Niffty’s fanfictions are read by others and starts attracting horny older men.

1949: age 20

1950: age 21 Niffty’s husband beats and violates her, though Niffty still remains in love with him. She lets him violate her, feeling more and more broken and helpless. One part lasted three hours, leaving her feeling sticky and disgusting.

Niffty asks the radio for advice and it influences her to do evil things. Jealous of her adoptive sister’s beauty and attention to her husband, Niffty kills her and cleans up the mess, serving her flesh in meat pies to neighbors.

During one evening on the streets, a horrified Niffty glances at a man violating a corpse of a woman and stabs him to death. She darts away before she can be caught.

1951: age 22 The trauma Niffty faces catches up and she snaps. Niffty kills her husband as he tried to rape and stab her and sets his house on fire. At the same time, she cries over the loss of him. She writes about it in a journal, which is discovered by the mother. This draws attention to the police, the father had called them earlier.

Niffty gets cornered by police inside her home. One of them is a relative of her husband. Niffty tries to run but gets shot three times in the thigh. Before anyone could do anything, the officer picks her up and tosses her into a burning fireplace, where she dies.

1951: Niffty arrives in Hell, lost and overwhelmed. One demon, a black spider named Rhapso hires her to work at a clothing Emporium. Niffty is beaten and chided for every little mistake she makes, every loose thread, driving her toward perfection like in life. Niffty also has to clean her boss’s room and cook meals. Out of sheer spite, Niffty steals and wears an elegant dress made of black swan feathers, sizing it down to fit her small body. Her boss threatens to roast her in the furnace but as she is immune to fire says “Let’s say you’re in deep hot water, brat.”

Niffty is thrown into the burning lake as punishment. Niffty plunges to the bottom of the lake, unable to breach the surface as sinners sink to the bottom instead of floating like in regular water. Though Niffty can survive in hot places, the heat and pressure becomes uncomfortable. There are also fiery underwater monsters to avoid. Niffty often has nightmares of her boyfriend sending her into an icy lake to drown, or watching her parents suffer at the internment camp. There is no way for her to interact with the world, make friends and no one to fall in love with. She dreaded having to be forcefully pulled from the surface by her boss and be forced to work more long shifts.

Until one demon is alerted by her presence…

After having signed the contract on Earth, Niffty’s presence is sensed by Alastor’s shadow. The shadow reaches in and picks up Niffty, the little demon gasping for breath. Then, she meets Alastor. Alastor reminds Niffty of the deal she had made in the living world and invites her to shake his hand to seal it. Niffty is eager to do so, already enamored by the Radio Demon’s charm.

Niffty’s boss comes back and demands Niffty go back to work, but Alastor says he would take Niffty instead. Niffty sets her boss and store on fire for revenge, entertaining Alastor. Niffty calls herself Niffty.

Niffty soon works for Alastor, making his meals, cleaning his cabin-like lair underground (Deer’s Den) (plus his above ground smaller radio studio cabin), sewing voodoo dolls and tailoring his suits. She also is handy in fighting as she is immune to fire, speedy, skillful with her hands and can fit into small places. In exchange, Alastor gives her a place to stay, money, some journals and clothing for her hobbies, plus voodoo creatures for her to eat and play with.

Niffty is soon summoned from the fireplace and gets to work cleaning the hotel rooms and helping make meals for the hotel residents. Niffty writes erotic fanfiction and sews in her spare time. Along with Husk, Niffty protects Alastor and helps kill his enemies.

Niffty starts an Instagram account under the name babyfeatherduster. She is seen posing at Alastor’s feet, hanging out with Husk and trying to take Alastor’s picture. People mistake her for a child, even though she is in her 20s.

Niffty’s true intentions would eventually be revealed. Niffty seeks to be doted on by lots of men, and she lives in a fantasy world of her own. And she’ll use any means necessary to make the world of Hell her own. (she might manipulate men into sleeping with her). Niffty shares traits with Charlie from Always Sunny. Niffty loves erotic stuff and that includes fanfictions, pictures and maybe spying on nude men. She has pica, eating stuff like spiders and fabric. Although Niffty likes to get lost in fantasy and romance, she may be the most socially aware member of the group. She can also manipulate people and knows about Hell’s racist/class driven system. Her delusions of authority and emotions hide a sense of insecurity. Like Charlie from Always Sunny, Niffty is good at sewing, cooking, singing and music.

#niffty #alastor #husk #hazbinhotel #nerissa #backstory

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taotrooper · 4 years

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Q&A with Kusanagi-sensei at the Manga Barcelona con

Kusanagi Mizuho was a guest on the Barcelona con 2019 and she had a panel with the fans this morning where they asked her some questions. None of them are plot-related, sadly (I suspect the questions sent by fans were heavily filtered to avoid spoilers). But if you’re curious about the personal and professional stuff she’s said, and her opinion about her characters, here’s a translation of the livetweeting by the manga’s publisher, Norma Editorial, which is here. I’m also complementing with Ramen Para Dos’ liveblogging.

Kusanagi requested not to have her picture taken. Except for those lucky few Spaniards and Catalanes who attended the panel, she’ll remain a meerkat to us. (Parenthesis notes are my commentary, not part of the interview!)

Q. When did you decide to start drawing?

A. She started to draw when she was around 9-10 years old. She’d make up complete stories she’d read her younger sister --who also came to the con.

Q. What was her favorite manga back then? And now?

A. She really liked Slam Dunk, Hana Yori Dango, and Ranma 1/2 when she was little. It seems she’s into redhead protagonists, Norma jokes. Right now she likes One Piece and Attack on Titan.

Q. Did she study in any sort of academy? Has she worked as an assistant?

A. She went to art school (she specifies not manga, art) and was an assistant after graduating for 4-5 years.

Q. What does she currently delegated to her assistants?

A. She works with 4-5 people. They take care of drawing landscapes, armor, plates of food, extra things... They also help a lot with combat scenes: she’s the one who draws the basic battle panels but they finish them.

Q. Does she find it hard to make it to deadlines?

A. She laughed. Handing in chapters is so hard because she takes a long time to design the story, so she only dedicates 3 or 4 days to draw 30 pages because she has no time left.

(Yikes, poor Kusanagi D: )

Q. Does she like to listen to something or snack while she works?

A. When she’s working on the story she needs total silence and being alone, but while she draws she likes to put on anime or movies or music as background noise.

Q. Where does Ao keep her acorns?

A. Squirrels usually carry 7 acorns in their mouths. Ao brings 10 at least!

(Oh no, she’s too OP!!!!)

Q. Hak or Soo-Won?

A. She laughs and assures us she has a lot of love for both of them.

Q. How did she come up with the manga’s setting?

A. At first she thought about basing it on Rome or Japan, but it didn’t fit. So in the end she combined different Asian scenarios to give birth to AkaYona.

(So... yeah, it’s not 100% Three Kingdoms Korea, it’s a hybrid. Also lol she really likes Rome, huh?)

Q. Does she have a favorite character?

A. NE: She doesn’t have a favorite, she loves all of them and loves to draw them so they look as good-looking as possible when they look at themselves in the mirror.

RP2: When she creates a story centered in one character, she tries to focus all details on said character. But she feels appreciation for all characters in Akatsuki no Yona. Then there’s a character’s personality or some enemy that’s not liked by the audience and that motivates her to draw them more handsome.

(Well, that sure explains Keishuk becoming more luscious lately, but THEN THERE’S GOBI’S CRAZY FACES.....................)

Q. Does she feel identified with any of her characters?

A. All of her characters reflect part of her own idols so they don’t really represent her that much.

(Damn, there she goes debunking the Kusa-relates-to-SW jokes)

Q. Which dragon would she take on a journey if she had to go on adventures like Yona?

A. She’d like to take the four of them but if she had to choose she’d pick Jae-Ha. He’s kind to women and he can jump really high!

(Jae-ha bias confirmed. We been knew, sensei, we been knew.

“HE JUMP” - Mizuho Kusanagi, 2019)

Q. The reveal of Zeno’s powers is one of the most amazing scenes in the series. How was it for her?

A. She was looking forward to drawing it. She doesn’t like its brutality but it was necessary to express its importance. Regardless, she enjoyed it a lot.

Q. How does she feel about thinking of Yona as a strong, inspirational female character?

A. NE says that to her Yona is an ordinary girl, what makes her special is that she’s a fighter (the wording here is implied to be in a hardworking, fighting daily way, not as a warrior necessarily). Life taught her to be strong and positive and she thinks that’s very important. RP2 says that the character herself is normal but to her, Yona’s strength and courage to move forward is what stand out and inspires.

She got an ovation from the audience at this point :’)

Q. How does she feel about having so many fans overseas?

A. She’s very happy and grateful! She’s so surprised to see so many people (women and men) around the world and outside of Japan who understand and enjoy Yona’s vision. She thanks us all so much!

(Aww~)

Q. What does she do in her free time?

A. She loves to spend time with her cat. But she ends up annoying her cat sometimes, and she (the kitty) scratches her (Kusanagi) often.

Q. This one was for her editor, called Tokushige. Wat is it like to work with Kusanagi-sensei with a manga like Yona?

A. She says she knows the author’s job is very hard with a terrible pace and schedule. Despite that she has to be tough and mean to help Kusanagi with keeping the schedule and the quality. But while it’s touch she likes working with her/looks forward to it.

In the next part, they have Kusanagi ask the audience a question, and she throws the favorite character question back at them! There’s no recount of what people in the room said (besides the fact it took a long time for someone to say Hak and she remarked on that) but NE asked Twitter as well and you can see the answers on the thread.

(Since I slept through the interview, I missed the chance to tell her mine D: Shoutout to the MVPs in the thread who mentioned Yoon and Tae-jun in a sea of Haks and Yonas and Jae-has and Zenos. And the two cosplayers who went there as Argila and Vold!)

ETA: This livetweeting mentioning some characters the fans threw in. Yona, Hak, TAE-JUN several times, Soo-won, Geun-tae, Kija, squirrel Ao, and ship-wise besides HakYona there’s a Zeno/Kaya mention.

So anyway, that was all. Kusanagi brought presents for the selected people who won her signature (a case with Aos on it) plus a few more unknown presents (probably also those cases) to raffle on the Q&A with a jankenpon game. That was sweet of her!

Extra info I’ve seen: she had to take THREE planes to get to Spain from Kyushu. They also gave her her two consecutive awards to Best Shoujo by that same con, which they do yearly with the manganime that gets published here. They also gave her a soccer shirt of the famous local team (Barça) with her name on the back (10/Mizuho).

#akatsuki no yona #kusanagi mizuho #translation #tao originals

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themurphyzone · 5 years

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Rosieverse Oneshot: Guardian

Summary: Tino is just a simple guy who happens to play a villain in a TV show. Recently, the entire studio has become enamored by a little orphan named Rosie with a talent in voice-acting. Well, everyone except lead actor Jim Starling.

But everyone has their beef with Starling, so it’s really no big deal.

Or is it?

Jim Starling wasn’t happy. And when wasn’t Jim Starling happy, he was determined to make everyone else’s lives as miserable as possible. He stood on the long conference table, shouting a plan about a meet-and-greet that would surely boost his fading popularity.

“Just picture it!” Starling exclaimed. “Look, the Fearsome Four can open the event. Five minutes signing autographs for them and no more! And then I make a fashionably late entrance dressed as Darkwing Duck! Maybe about...fifteen minutes or so after the meet-and-greet starts, we can work out the details later. But the point is, I’m there, the fans will adore yours truly, and Darkwing Duck’s ratings go through the roof! What do you think?”

Someone coughed, but the room was otherwise full of crickets.

Tino glanced at the lovely bonsai tree on the windowsill, half-expecting an actual cricket to jump in and chirp merrily while ruining the tiny pink leaves. Next to him, Dan sketched a rough schematic of a toaster, humming to himself and not paying attention to the meeting. Jack flipped through a report on Darkwing Duck ratings and merchandise sales, scanning through the business jargon and statistics with practiced ease.

In Tino’s opinion, Michael was lucky he got the babysitting job. Rosie was a sweet kid and a delight to be around. Much better than listening to an egotistical celebrity prattle on about boosting his public image.

Speaking of which...

Tino glanced at the clock.

Almost 4:00 pm, he realized. And it was his day to drive Rosie back to the orphanage too. They needed to get going before the Audubon Bay Bridge got clogged with rush hour traffic.

Silently, Tino put his hand up, unwilling to interrupt the argument between Starling and the director.

“Our budget’s already been slashed, and now you want us to spend more money to fuel your ego?”

“Just pay for the venue! The special events center maybe. I hear the Duckburg Stadium is nice this time of year too,” Starling continued to suggest expensive locations that no sane person at the studio would ever consider. “Tell ‘em to bring their own snacks though. And you could always charge some good money for an autograph, maybe a little more for a photoshoot. That oughta make up your price.”

“This town ain’t cheap, Starling!” the director snarled. “Do you realize how much McDuck charges for the use of his locations? In case you haven’t noticed, money doesn’t grow on trees!”

“You’re as cheap as the network!” Starling scoffed. “Sabotaging a fine art for the sake of money!”

“I’m. Being. Realistic,” the director gritted his teeth.

Starling stomped over to the director’s chair. Their beaks were inches away as they stared each other down, willing their opponent to cave in.

Before it could devolve into an insult-fest, Jack cleared his throat. Immediately, everyone turned their attention to him. Even Starling recognized that it was better to listen when Jack had something to say.

“It’s Tino’s day to drive Rosie back to the orphanage,” Jack said. “He needs to leave now.”

Tino shot Jack a grateful look, and the corners of the dog’s mouth twitched upwards in response.

“Wait, that brat lives in an orphanage?” Starling blinked, his beak dropping open in surprise.

Clearly, Starling had been living under a rock. Rosie’s orphan status was common knowledge with everyone in the studio.

At least, Tino assumed it was.

“Not everything revolves around your universe-sized ego, dim bulb,” one of the editors muttered.

“Don’t insult actual dim bulbs,” Dan scolded. Then his expression softened as he turned to Tino. “And say hi to Rosie for me, okay?”

“Same here,�� Jack agreed. “You should get going. I’ll fill you in later, but somehow I doubt there’ll be anything worth mentioning.”

Since nobody accomplished anything in meetings when Starling was involved, Tino knew he wouldn’t be missing anything.

Tino hurried out of the conference room. He felt Starling’s eyes bore into his back, but he brushed it off.

He was the only person leaving early. It was perfectly natural that everyone’s attention would be drawn to him.

It made his skin crawl. He just wasn’t one for the spotlight.

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

“You’ll get there! Five bounces is pretty good for a beginner!” Michael exclaimed as he showed off a rather complicated yo-yo trick that involved a lot of twirling and loops.

Rosie smiled, a pink yo-yo dangling from a string on her finger. “Thank you, Mr. Michael,” she said formally. “Would you mind teaching me your walk the dog trick in the future?”

Michael grinned. “No problemo! Just keep practicing with that yo-yo. I’ve got plenty more.”

“Oh no, I couldn’t!” Rosie’s eyes widened as she tried to give the yo-yo back. “It’s your toy, sir.”

Michael shook his head, flipping into a handstand before cartwheeling away from Rosie. “Nope! No takebacks! It’s the highest law in the land!” he giggled. He caught sight of Tino and slumped to the ground, reminding Tino of a child who begged their parents for ten more minutes on the playground. “Looks like playtime’s over, kiddo.”

“Hello, Mr. Tino!” Rosie exclaimed. “How was your meeting?”

She hugged him enthusiastically, tiny hands squeezing his waistline and nearly knocking him off-balance.

“Frankly, a bit boring,” Tino admitted once he adjusted his footing. “At least you and Michael are having fun.”

Michael rolled his eyes. “What demands did the great and almighty Dumbwing make this time?”

“Please don’t call name-call in front of Rosie,” Tino said as he ruffled Rosie’s flaming red curls. “She’s an impressionable child.”

“Fine, I’ll ask Jack later,” Michael said with a huff. His eyes flicked to Rosie, and his entire expression softened. “I get a goodbye hug too, right?”

Rosie immediately latched onto Michael. “Don’t worry!” she chirped. “You get a goodbye hug too!”

Michael laughed and patted her back. “I’ll be sure to pass your goodbye hugs onto Dan and Jack, okay?”

“And Mr. Starling too!” Rosie added.

Michael stiffened, though Rosie didn’t seem to notice. “Uh, sure. Him too.”

Absolutely not, Michael mouthed at Tino.

Starling loathed any form of prolonged physical contact. But Tino held his tongue, knowing he would confuse himself if he tried explaining that to a six-year-old.

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

Much to Tino’s chagrin, they didn’t beat the rush hour traffic on the bridge. He turned the radio to a kid-friendly station and hoped the orphanage director would forgive him for being late.

Caution was highly advised when dealing with St. Canard drivers. Really, Duckburg’s sister city was anything but saintly.

Rosie didn’t mind though. She folded her hands in her lap, sitting like a dainty little princess upon a flower-patterned booster seat.

“The view is pretty, Mr. Tino,” Rosie said.

“It is,” Tino said, though he believed Audubon Bay was more dangerous than beautiful. There was a reason why crime shows loved using this body of water as a background.

“It looks like the set of Darkwing Duck,” Rosie remarked.

“The main set was modeled off this area,” Tino said, pointing to a tower just above the toll gate. “That’s Darkwing’s lair over there.”

Rosie craned her neck as she took in the sheer size of the tower. “Is he always up there if he’s not fighting bad guys?” she asked. “That’s awfully lonely.”

“Darkwing Duck is the loner type,” Tino admitted. “I don’t think he minds.”

Starling preferred doing everything himself, whether it involved thwarting crimes on a TV show or making himself the center of attention. In the best case scenario, people tolerated him.

Still, it seemed like a lonely way to live.

Of course, Michael and Dan would insist that Starling brought it on himself. Tino wasn’t a match for either of them when they were riled up, so he kept his beak shut on the matter.

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

It was another hour before Tino got home from driving Rosie to the orphanage. The sunset lit up the sky in brilliant warm hues, and Tino was glad he made it home before nighttime. He didn’t like driving in the dark.

He parked the car next to its usual spot near the mailbox, figuring that he had some time to check on his flowers before dinner. He circled the front lawn of the house, humming a bouncy tune as he checked the leaves of a violet.

So far, everything seemed fine. The bushes wouldn’t need trimming for a while, no aphids were destroying his flowers, and the pansies were thriving.

Before Tino could walk up to the front porch, the front door was suddenly wrenched open, bouncing off the wall with a harsh bang.

“-AND GROW A DAMN SPINE!” Michael screeched, storming out of the house. He brushed past Tino, cursing Starling under his breath.

Tino let him go. Michael’s temper cooled much faster when he had a few minutes to collect himself.

Dan and Jack watched Michael stomp down the sidewalk from their safe position in the hallway.

“I’m guessing something important happened after all?” Tino asked, already dreading the answer.

Jack nodded. “Dabble decided to use Starling’s idea for a meet-and-greet.”

Marino Dabble had the most volatile relationship with Starling out of all the directors in Darkwing Duck. He always seemed to provoke Starling during filming, disregarding any of Starling’s demands and cutting scenes whenever Starling shouted a contradicting order to keep the cameras rolling.

“Except he wanted Rosie to be center stage,” Dan added.

“Starling didn’t take it well,” Jack said.

Tino wasn’t surprised, but he prayed Starling wouldn’t take his anger out on Rosie for taking his limelight. She was an innocent kid, and Dabble was putting her in the line of fire. Starling became irrational and even more temperamental when he believed someone was cutting into his screentime.

Not for the first time, Tino wished he could be as outspoken as Michael or as respected as Jack.

“Is that why Michael’s mad?” Tino asked.

“I’ll go after him. He’s probably had enough time by now,” Dan said, gently pushing past Tino and hurrying out the door.

“The meet and greet is two weeks away,” Jack said as Tino sat down at the dinner table. There was already a hot cup of tea and a strawberry salad in front of him. “We should prepare Rosie so she won’t be overwhelmed.”

The deaths of Rosie’s parents had been widely publicized by both the Duckburg and St. Canard media. While details varied between newspapers and tabloids, the one thing that held true was that little rich girl Rosie had been left under the care of several maids while her parents had a date night. On the way back to the car, they were mugged and murdered for their money and valuables. Rosie found out the next morning, and she was shipped off to a St. Canard orphanage within a week.

The killer was never caught.

Several months later, a talent scout discovered Rosie’s acting abilities while searching for a suitable child to provide a voice in an animated film and introduced her to the studio.

When Rosie wasn’t in lessons or voice-acting, she wandered over to the Darkwing Duck set, making polite small-talk with everyone she came across. Starling was the only one who ignored her presence.

He was always too caught up with himself to notice anything an inch away from his beak.

Though Rosie only voiced a side character in the animated film, the life she breathed into the drawings captured the audience’s hearts. Tino had cried for twenty minutes straight when Rosie’s character sang a lullaby to herself after getting separated from her parents.

Now that he gave it some thought, that part wasn’t an emotional act for Rosie. She knew those feelings all too well.

Tino took a small bite of his strawberry, suddenly aware of Jack scrutinizing him like an interesting statistic.

“Jack, can you please stop? It’s awkward when you do that,” Tino mumbled.

Jack shrugged, gaze snapping to the table. “Sorry. You’re thinking about Rosie again, aren’t you?”

“She’s...she’s a good kid,” Tino admitted. “Kinda deserves a permanent home, you know?”

“I know,” Jack agreed, his mouth twitching. “She loves science.”

“Just smile,” Tino suggested. “It looks good on camera.”

“I don’t see any cameras at the moment,” Jack said as he squeezed a lemon into his water. “And besides, someone has to be the aloof, responsible one in this house.”

Aloof. Sure, Tino snorted.

Because aloof people totally shouted at the game show channel on TV.

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

Tino tore the purple wig off his head and dropped onto the green room’s couch in exhaustion, shoulder still aching from Starling’s punch during filming. Dan tossed him an ice pack from the small freezer. Jack made sure they never ran out of ice packs. It was a necessity when one worked with Starling.

Tino gratefully placed it on his shoulder.

Michael immediately launched into a tirade on where Starling could stick his overly large fedora, but Tino was only half-listening. They’d been through this song and dance before.

There was a safe way for actors to punch and kick in fight scenes, but Starling never held back, which led to the Fearsome Four not holding back out of self-defense, and everything just snowballed from there.

Starling had been more irritable during filming than usual, but Tino chalked it up to a hissy fit caused by Dabble’s decision to include Rosie in the meet and greet even though she wasn’t part of the Darkwing Duck cast.

“-AND GET ALL THE WRINKLES OUT THIS TIME!” a voice shouted from outside the green room.

Speak of the devil.

“Stupid incompetent wardrobe team,” Starling muttered as he swept into the room. He’d discarded the cape, but wore the rest of his Darkwing Duck costume with overblown pride.

Starling ignored everyone as he headed straight for the fridge and pulled out a brown paper bag that contained his lunch. Tino tried not to gag at the canned tuna and sauerkraut smell.

Dan and Michael shifted over to Tino’s side of the room, occasionally shooting livid glares at Starling. Michael’s face turned the same shade of red as his Quackerjack outfit. He was only holding back for Tino’s sake.

Since when did Starling take his lunch in the green room anyway? He hated eating around people he believed were beneath his association.

“I’ve never been to a beach, Mr. Jack. Is it nice?”

“Sure is. Natural saltwater is the best. Just don’t get it in your mouth though. It doesn’t taste good.”

Jack neatly hung his coat on a row of hooks next to the door. Rosie tried to follow his lead, though she was too short to hang it herself.

“May I take your jacket, young lady?” Jack asked with an elegant bow.

Tino grabbed a pillow to muffle a sudden case of the giggles. So much for being the aloof one.

Rosie smiled and folded her puffy pink jacket over his outstretched arm. Like a true gentleman, Jack placed it on the hook and patted out the creases.

Starling rolled his eyes at the display and turned his back on them. But Tino knew he was watching Rosie bounce on her tip-toes as she explained everything she learned in her singing lessons.

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

“I am the terror who flaps in the night! I am the faulty cord in the outlet of evil! I am Darkwing Duck!” Starling dramatically held his cape out behind him as he appeared in a puff of blue smoke. He shifted not-so-subtly to the left in an attempt to show off his best side.

Since only Dan and Jack were needed for this episode, Tino and Michael watched the filming from the sidelines. It was for the best. Rosie’s reading tutor had unexpectedly called in sick, so she was able to spend the afternoon with them.

Tino didn’t want Rosie exposed to a Michael and Starling showdown just yet. Things tended to get ugly.

“Give up! St. Canard’s hydroelectric dam belongs to us!” Dan shouted, a sinister cackle escaping from his throat.

“You’ll pay for stealing electricity and throwing St. Canard into the Dark Ages!” Starling retorted. “Let’s get dangerous!”

The prop team immediately dumped a bucket of water on Starling from the catwalk above the set, throwing the bucket at him for good measure. They didn’t bother disguising their gleeful smiles.

Starling spat out several plastic goldfish, coughing as he declared how pathetic the attack was. Then Jack crept up behind Starling and threw a quick punch to the back of his head. Starling crumpled dramatically.

Rosie frowned as Jack tied Starling to a pole with a water hose. “I hope he isn’t hurt,” she said. Her fingers nervously drummed against her pink dress.

“Unfortunately,” Michael muttered.

Tino elbowed him lightly. “Starling’s a resilient guy. He’ll be alright. Besides, Darkwing Duck always wins.”

Starling slipped out of his restraints, which were already loose to begin with, and shot a column of smoke from his gas gun at Dan and Jack. Their surprise only lasted for a minute, but it was enough for Starling to subdue them.

“And the vigilante is once again victorious against the vile villainous scum!” Starling crowed as he tossed Dan and Jack into the set’s jail cell. He struck a final heroic pose to wrap up the episode.

While the film crew reviewed the footage they captured so far, Starling strutted off the main set and grabbed a soda from a nearby drink cooler. He didn’t free Dan and Jack from the cell even though the key hung on a peg several feet away.

Pushing down a burst of anger at Starling’s carelessness, Tino left Rosie with Michael and freed his friends himself.

“I need an aspirin,” Dan groaned, nursing a bruise on his cheek.

Jack folded his arms across his chest, not looking too worse for wear, but Tino could tell he favored his right leg.

“I should invent an instant healing ray gun,” Dan sighed. “No more bruises, cuts, or pimples and it won’t leave a scar either.”

“A huge hit on the market,” Tino said.

“Supply and demand,” Jack added.

Dan rolled his eyes. “Not all of us majored in economics.”

As they rejoined Rosie and Michael, Starling sauntered over. His fedora was pulled low and tilted sideways in his usual careless, jerkwad fashion. The edges of his beak curled into a sneer.

“It’s awfully nice to have coworkers who allow a little brat to steal my thunder,” Starling growled.

“Don’t call Rosie a brat!” Michael shouted, clenching his fists. Dan stepped in front of him, whispering soothing words to prevent him from punching Starling in the face. “You don’t know her. You don’t know her at all!”

Tino shielded Rosie behind his back. She clung to his waist, innocent green eyes flickering between each adult. He couldn’t meet Starling with equal aggression, remain calm and cordial, or invoke a balance between the two extremes.

This would have to do for now.

“None of us played a role in Dabble’s decision,” Jack said. His tone was even and controlled, but Tino heard the slightest edge of steel creeping in. “I suggest releasing your frustration towards him in the studio’s gym instead.”

Starling’s cape flared out as he stomped up to Jack. His beak was several inches away from Jack’s nose. “And where exactly were your so-called diplomatic skills when I needed them? Either the fans come and see me because I’m there, or they don’t show up cause I’m not. Who’s the main character of this series? Who’s the person everyone watches the show for? Who’s the inspiration, the fighter, the creme de la creme of all superheroes? Cause last I checked, it sure as hell isn’t Liquidator!”

Starling always referred to them by their character names. He couldn’t be bothered to remember their actual names, or more importantly, that they weren’t megalomaniacal villains.

“Go away,” Dan said as held onto a seething Michael. “Some of us have lives outside a fictional world.”

“Darkwing isn’t fictional, you half-wit!” Starling snarled. “He’s—I’m right in front of you!”

Starling pointed an accusing finger at Dan, but a grimace flickered across his face and his arm fell to his side.

“You’re hurt!” a little girl’s voice cried.

The tiny pressure around Tino’s waist vanished.

Before anyone could say anything, Rosie latched onto Starling’s fingers, holding his palm with one hand while the other carefully pushed his sleeves away from his wrist.

Michael’s eyes widened, Dan gasped, and Jack’s brow furrowed in worry.

Tino bit the inside of his beak.

Rosie had broken Starling’s no-touching-me-offset rule. Everyone agreed with this rule, no matter how much they disliked Starling.

No hugs, no pats on the back, no friendly jostling, no handshakes.

Starling hated physical contact unless it involved beating someone up during filming. Nobody asked why, and Starling never offered an explanation.

A red mark circled Starling’s wrist. Starling’s breath hitched, looking as though he desperately wanted to pull away but couldn’t make his body move.

“You should put some aloe on it,” Rosie suggested. “It’ll sting, but it takes the pain away.”

Starling didn’t seem to hear her.

“Rosie, let him go,” Jack ordered.

Rosie cast an unsure glance at Starling’s wrist.

“Now.”

Startled by Jack’s no-nonsense tone, Rosie let go of Starling’s hand.

Recovering from his frozen state, Starling scoffed and rubbed his wrist against his blazer to shake off any lingering traces of her touch. “Whatever,” he muttered as he stalked off.

“Mr. Starling?” Rosie called.

Starling paused in the doorway, inclining his head towards Rosie. His eyes were covered by the brim of his fedora.

“I’m sorry,” Rosie whispered.

“Don’t do it again, kid.”

Though his tone was blunt, it wasn’t haughty or condescending.

Maybe there was some cordiality in that universe-sized ego after all.

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

Starling was talking to Rosie.

Okay, so most of the conversation was about himself and how badass he looked on camera, but he wasn’t entirely ignoring her.

Rosie clasped her hands together and maintained a respectful distance. She learned from the first incident, taking Jack’s lecture to heart on how some people disliked touch and a few tips on what she could do to respect their boundaries.

If Starling noticed, he didn’t give anything away.

Tino found his aloe bottle in the wrong cabinet with traces of green ointment on its side. Wordlessly, he wiped away the extra moisture and returned the bottle to its proper place.

He had a hunch on who misplaced his aloe, but he didn’t think it was worth mentioning.

Over the next few days, Rosie settled into a routine. She learned, she played, she voice-acted, and she ate lunch with Starling.

Michael balked at the last development. “Girl’s gonna ruin her nose,” he muttered, shaking his head incredulously when Rosie barely reacted to the smell of Starling’s canned tuna and sauerkraut sandwich.

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

Tino’s day to drive Rosie back to the orphanage rolled around again. It was the day before the meet-and-greet, and they’d spent the entire week preparing Rosie for her first public appearance.

Rosie could answer questions and smile like a champ now. She’d do well tomorrow. Tino didn’t mind fading into the background and talking to the occasional fan who wandered his way.

That’s how the Darkwing Duck cast did things.

Starling soaked up everyone’s attention and signed autographs while everyone else formed a nice backdrop.

Starling’s animosity to Rosie had lessened over the past few days. While he still wasn’t pleased by Dabble’s decision, he managed to grasp that it wasn’t Rosie’s fault.

“Got everything?” Tino asked as Rosie slid a math workbook into her princess-themed backpack.

“Ready, Mr. Tino!” Rosie exclaimed, slipping her backpack over her shoulders. “I don’t think I’d be able to sleep tonight. I’m just happy I can see all of you tomorrow!”

Tino couldn’t help but grin at her unbridled honesty.

“Bushroot! Just the guy I wanted to see!”

Tino suppressed a sigh. Only one person called him Bushroot outside of filming, and it wasn’t a person he tried to interact with on a casual basis.

“Yes?” Tino asked politely, channeling what he believed Jack would say in this type of situation. “I need to drive Rosie to St. Canald...I mean, St. Canard. Sorry that we’re in a hurry here. You know how bad the Audubon Bay Bridge is during rush hour.”

The corners of Starling’s beak turned up. One could call it a smile, but only with a very loose definition of the word.

“Is your face alright, Mr. Starling?” Rosie asked.

“What’s wrong with my-” Starling’s snappy mood returned for a brief moment, but he coughed and busied himself with smoothing down his clothes.

Which consisted of Darkwing’s turtleneck and unbuttoned purple blazer.

Tino was starting to believe that Starling had no life outside of Darkwing Duck.

“Don’t worry, I’m fine,” Starling said. At least he dropped the not-smile. “I wanted to see you off. We talk at lunch, but that’s only an hour. Not even an hour if Dabble decides to rush us.”

Rosie bounced on her heels, eyes glazed over in thought. She had a tendency to bounce while thinking.

“Can Mr. Starling come along too?” Rosie asked, tugging on Tino’s sleeve. “He never finished his story about the malfunctioning jack-in-the-box in the ‘Knick-knack Paddywhack’ episode!”

“I’m not sure if that’s a good idea...” Tino trailed off. Rosie’s curls had gone limp. Tino wondered if she had secret hair powers.

Starling looked a bit crestfallen too.

If Jack, Dan, or Michael had been in his place, they would’ve ignored Starling and left already. But Starling was actually interacting with Rosie.

Interaction that didn’t involve punching someone or bossing them around.

Tino lost the battle. That’s what he got from looking at Rosie when she was nearing disappointment.

“Alright, he can come if he wants,” Tino sighed.

Rosie cheered and Starling puffed out his chest as if he never doubted that Tino would refuse.

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

“-Darkwing Duck on the brink of defeat, nothing but open air behind him and a monochromatic malefactor cackling madly in front of him! Then he remembers how much the citizens of St. Canard depend on him to keep the criminals at bay, and in a sudden burst of strength, he clubs Paddywhack with his trusty gas gun and seals him in the cursed jack-in-the-box!”

Tino concentrated on switching to the middle lane, choosing not to comment on Starling’s deliberate omission of how he got stuck in the springs of the jack-in-the-box during the Paddywhack fight scene.

Rosie listened attentively, eyes sparkling as she envisioned the scene before her.

They hit the usual traffic on the Audubon Bay Bridge just as Starling’s tale ended. Rosie didn’t bat an eye. She loved seeing the cargo ships sail through the bay.

But Starling groaned and tilted his seat back at a thirty-degree angle.

“Hey bush-for-brains, can’t this seat go back more?” Starling growled, yanking at the lever in a futile effort to make the seat tilt further.

“It’s an old car,” Tino admitted. “You’ve already got it at the max.”

Starling rolled his eyes, but at least he stopped trying to mutilate the lever.

Rosie swung her legs, looking towards the horizon, oblivious to Starling’s numerous complaints with Tino’s car.

“Rosie, I was thinking of becoming your legal guardian,” Starling said as he slipped a pair of sunglasses over his eyes.

Tino caught his eye in the mirror, but Starling either didn’t notice or care. Tino returned his attention to the road, trying not to complain out loud when another driver cut him off.

Rosie’s head whipped around so quickly that Tino was sure she’d have whiplash in the morning.

“You don’t wanna live at the orphanage forever, right? Living with THE Darkwing Duck is better than those guys,” Starling declared.

After a brief moment of silence, Rosie smiled at him. “Thank you, Mr. Starling, sir! I’d love for you to be my legal guardian!”

She reached out for a hug, but Starling just raised an eyebrow at her. “First rule, kid. Don’t touch me,” he reminded her.

Rosie teared up, but she seemed more happy and relieved. “Mr. Tino, I have a legal guardian now!” she exclaimed.

Tino knew she was equating ‘legal guardian’ with ‘parent’, but Rosie didn’t realize she’d just accepted a self-centered, vain, gloryhounding jerk who didn’t deserve either title.

Tino wasn’t looking forward to breaking the news to Michael. He’d dropped hints recently about taking Rosie in.

“I’m glad,” Tino said.

He was the worst liar in the world, but Rosie beamed at him anyway.

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

When they got to the orphanage, Rosie immediately broke away from Tino and Starling so she could gather her belongings and say goodbye to her friends.

“Jim Starling, the one and only Darkwing Duck. There supposed to be a few papers I can sign so I can take legal guardianship of little Ruby here?” Starling asked the orphanage director.

“Actually, it’s Rosie,” Tino corrected, shuffling his feet when Starling glared at him.

Seriously, who took in a kid without bothering to learn their name first?

But the orphanage director simply dropped a huge packet of stapled papers into Starling’s arms. “Just sign in the highlighted areas,” she said, returning to listlessly stirring her coffee.

St. Canard orphanages must’ve been in worse shape than Tino realized if they were willing to hand a kid over to Starling without asking any questions.

Starling took out a pen topped with a Darkwing Duck figurine and scribbled an enormous loopy signature in the highlighted portions. He flipped through the papers so quickly that Tino only had time to read the bold print on top of the page.

“Wouldn’t it be better to read the page before you signed it?” Tino asked. The look on Jack’s face would’ve been priceless if he’d been here.

Jack’s biggest pet peeve was how people never read the fine print before they signed a document.

Starling huffed. “You wanna be here all night?”

“Well, no-”

“Then shut up and let me sign this in peace.”

Thankfully, the next page asked for name, date of birth, address, and the usual things that were asked on important forms, forcing Starling to slow down.

Tino’s leg bounced as watched the clock. The hands crept towards five-thirty. Rosie would need to eat soon.

And Starling’s usual dietary habits shouldn’t be passed onto any six-year-old.

“Do you even know how to take care of a kid?” Tino asked.

Starling’s hand clenched around the pen. A glob of blue ink stained the paper. Starling tried to rub it away, but only succeeded in smearing it across his hand.

“Can’t be that hard,” Starling shrugged. “She gets food, a place to sleep, a stuffed animal or two, and a famous actor for her legal guardian. She could use someone to help her navigate the adoring public anyway.”

“And caring about her?” Tino asked. “Love, attention, guidance, school?”

Starling rolled his eyes. “Look, I give her a roof over her head and she doesn’t need to share her stuff with a bunch of other snot-nosed brats. She can run and play and hang with you and everyone else. She can go wherever she wants or do whatever she wants.”

Starling signed the last document with a flourish and set the clipboard aside.

Tino gritted his teeth, but there was nothing he could do to counteract Starling.

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

Starling’s apartment was several blocks away from the studio, and judging by the amount of dust that had accumulated over the furniture, it hadn’t been lived in for a while.

Tino delayed going home in favor of helping Rosie unpack and settle in, cleaning the lonely, secluded guest room until it was suitable to sleep in. Tino dressed a spare mattress in a Darkwing Duck bedspread, pushing down a pang of anger at Starling for his lack of preparation when it came to bringing a kid home.

Speaking of which, wasn’t it the guardian’s job to make a kid feel at home?

Rosie hadn’t complained once, but that didn’t make it right.

Tino probably would’ve stayed all night, but he was booted out after he disagreed with Starling’s decision to feed Rosie an unhealthy Hamburger Hippo kids’ meal.

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

Tino didn’t get home until eight in the evening, and the rice and bean plate Jack had left for him in the fridge tasted like cardboard.

“You missed Pelican Island,” Dan said as he fiddled with a blender-like invention. “They almost got off the island, but then Dahlia found out that Georgio kissed Valerie and they broke the sail in their fight and all of Mason’s progress got set back by three weeks. Then they look in the almanac and find there’s a monsoon heading their way so now they have to delay leaving the island and find shelter as soon as possible cause the rains are gonna hit in less than a week-”

Tino listened to Dan ramble about the show, focusing on his commentary and allowing Starling’s legal guardian status to slip his mind for the time being. Tino wanted to break the news gently and hopefully minimize any casualties that might ensue, but he’d need time to work on framing his words so that nobody thought it was the end of the world.

Jack leaned against the doorframe, coolly staring at Tino. Finishing his dinner quickly, Tino scraped the remaining crumbs into the trash and took much longer than necessary to wash the dishes, feeling Jack’s eyes bore into his back the entire time.

Jack never pushed the issue, but he always had the uncanny ability to sniff out a lie.

Dan and Michael were locked in a heated debate over who Georgio was better off with, suspecting nothing out of the ordinary.

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

The meet and greet started at noon, but they arrived at the venue an hour early to help the film crew set everything up.

Dabble had reserved a section of Barks Park for their public appearance. It was a good park with plenty of grassy hills, a playground, and a bike trail.

It was popular for family outings, Tino recalled, hoping to spot Rosie’s red curls among a group of children who were playing soccer nearby.

But there was no sign of Starling or Rosie.

Starling always arrived later than everyone else so all the attention would be drawn to him. Tino just hoped that Rosie didn’t adopt Starling’s compulsive need to be fashionably late.

“Places, everybody!” Dabble barked. “That means you, Michael!”

“I’m in the middle of something!” Michael called as he twisted a green balloon into a sword for an excited boy.

“Put that helium pump away and get your jester butt over here!”

Michael rolled his eyes, but he did a handspring-cartwheel combination that propelled him to his seat and wowed his young audience.

The Fearsome Four’s table was on the right end of the gazebo, while the writers and artists’ table was to the left. The table in the middle had two empty chairs.

“Wait, we can’t start yet! Where’s Rosie?” Dabble shouted once noon hit. He tapped his watch in frustration.

“It was my day to pick her up,” another director admitted. “But I called the orphanage and they said Rosie doesn’t live there anymore.”

“What?” Dabble cried, tearing several white feathers from his head. “Then where does she live now?”

The director shrugged. “I asked, but some kid knocked over her coffee cup and she hung up to deal with them.”

Tino’s hands clenched in his lap. Sooner or later, someone would remember that he dropped Rosie off last night and put two and two together-

Jack’s hand came to rest on Tino’s shoulder.

And Tino knew he couldn’t keep quiet any longer.

“Rosie’s new legal guardian is-”

“I AM THE TERROR WHO FLAPS IN THE NIGHT!”

A column of blue smoke flared out. Several children tried to touch it, but their parents pulled them back.

“I AM THE CAUSE OF GRAY HAIR ON CRIMINALS’ SCALPS! I AM DARKWING-”

“Rosie, get up here! You were supposed to open the meet and greet ten minutes ago!” Dabble called.

Rosie nudged her way through the crowd, politely excusing herself as she made her way to the front of the gazebo. Michael waved, and Rosie returned the gesture, much to Starling’s disapproval.

Starling crossed his arms as Dabble hurriedly gave a microphone to Rosie and whispered a few instructions to her.

“Are you kidding me?” Starling scoffed. “She’s not even part of the show! And you interrupted my introduction! I spend two hours ironing my cape and this is the sort of reception I get?”

“You shouldn’t be wearing that outside of the studio!” Dabble hissed, gesturing to the Darkwing outfit.

“There’s plenty to go around,” Starling scowled.

“It costs money to make those-”

“Shouldn’t we let Rosie speak now?” Dan mumbled.

Rosie held the microphone loosely in one hand, the other nervously fiddling with a ribbon on her dress. For all the preparation they did, Rosie wasn’t experienced enough to handle an argument between Starling and Dabble.

Starling snatched a spare microphone from the writers’ table. “Well, as much as I love verbally sparring with Babble here, I just want to take a few minutes to address something of the utmost importance.”

“They’re kids,” Michael hissed. “They’re not interested in whatever you have to say.”

True to Michael’s prediction, several kids left the audience to pursue more fun activities.

“As a man of action, Darkwing Duck always seeks opportunities to eliminate criminal scum and rescue innocents,” Starling declared. Tino could just imagine his pompous beak growing Pinocchio-style. “And of course, I’m Darkwing Duck, so I believe it’s time for me to put my lessons into practice. And what better way to do that, I wonder, then to become a legal guardian to a talented St. Canard orphan?”

Michael gripped the tablecloth, his eyes narrowing dangerously. “He didn’t...”

“I’m Rosie King-Fisher’s legal guardian,” Starling grinned. He bowed, expecting applause and praise.

But Starling’s words seemed to go over the children’s heads. But the parents understood, shooting venomous glares at Starling as they steered their children elsewhere.

“Hey! Where’s everyone going?” Starling called. He looked genuinely baffled that nobody was interested in the meet and greet anymore. “Seriously, isn’t this usually considered a good deed or something?”

An empty water bottle smacked Starling in the face, and Tino silently thanked whoever threw it at him.

Michael’s face turned a brilliant shade of red, and Dan was forced to hold him back as he screeched profanities to Starling’s face. Starling yelled back, and most of the backstage crew was too dumbfounded to interfere.

Between calming Michael down, berating Starling for his impulsive decision, and Dabble trying to do damage control, Rosie’s presence was quickly forgotten. Jack gently pried the microphone out of Rosie’s hand. He took her by the hand, made eye contact with Tino, and inclined his head towards the gazebo’s other opening.

The chaos allowed all three of them to slip away unnoticed.

“Will Mr. Starling be okay?” Rosie asked as they reached a picnic area that contained several other families eating lunch and enjoying themselves. “And Mr. Michael?”

She worried about Starling.

Tino had never seen anyone worry about Starling before.

“They’ll argue, but they’ll be fine,” Jack assured her. He knelt down to Rosie’s level, but he was still much taller than her, and she had to lean back slightly to make eye contact. “Is Mr. Starling treating you alright?”

Tino made a small noise in the back of his throat. Starling never treated anyone alright.

“He took me in,” Rosie said. “He’s kind of grumpy, but he did microwave me frozen waffles. We never got waffles at the orphanage. It was just oatmeal.”

She spoke as if everything were really that simple. And to her, maybe it was.

“Are you happy?” Jack inquired.

Rosie smiled. “Yes, sir. I’m happy to have all of you care for me.”

There was a tiny twitch in Jack’s shoulders.

Jack probably debated taking Rosie in too, but his logical mind drove him to question the expenses and sacrifices it would take. It wasn’t just Michael and Dan who toyed with the idea.

And Tino had entertained it too, Multiple times.

“Rosie, why don’t you go play?” Tino suggested. “It’s a nice park. Run around and have fun.”

“Are you sure?” Rosie asked.

“Jack and I have to talk,” Tino said gently. “We’ll stay here if you need us though.”

At Jack’s encouraging nod, Rosie hugged them both and ran off to play.

----------------------------------- Moments later, Rosie joined a game of tag and was having the time of her life. Confident that she’d be fine, Tino and Jack settled at a picnic table under the shade of a sturdy oak.

“You knew the entire time,” Jack said. It was a statement, not a question. “Starling became Rosie’s legal guardian yesterday.”

“Yes. Starling mentioned it in the car and Rosie agreed immediately,” Tino admitted.

Jack didn’t reply.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t stop him,” Tino whispered. “Rosie seemed so happy though. I think she just wanted someone to get her out of the orphanage. It didn’t matter who.”

“You work with Starling. You know how he disrespects everyone,” Jack snapped. “Waffles and giving someone a place to stay doesn’t make him a good guardian overnight. And you just...didn’t say anything?”

“Please, every time Michael brought up adopting Rosie, you said something about not having an adequate guest room for her,” Tino shot back.

“Starling knew you wouldn’t say anything because you’re such a pushover! He deliberately targeted you!” Jack shouted, drawing everyone’s attention to them.

Tino ducked his head, waiting until everyone lost interest and returned to their lunch. While he was more embarrassed from the sudden scrutiny, Jack seemed to interpret the motion as more of a guilty expression.

Jack moved to Tino’s side of the table, wrapping his arms around Tino’s shoulders in a sideways hug. “Sorry, Tino. I didn’t mean that. I swear I didn’t,” he said frantically.

Jack rarely stumbled over his words, so Tino knew that the entire situation had gotten to Jack’s head.

“I’m alright,” Tino said quietly. “Guess we’ve gotta stop beating around the Bushroot now, huh?”

“You’re never gonna let me live that pun down, are you?” Jack sighed, but his lips were twitching upward.

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

They watched Rosie for a while. Her pink dress was caked in grass stains and there was a leaf in her hair, but she was radiating happiness with every spring in her step.

“Rosie deserves to be happy,” Jack said. “I wish we could’ve said something sooner.”

“She is happy,” Tino assured him. “Didn’t you hear her? She’s happy we care about her.”

“But does Starling care about her? As more than a publicity stunt?” Jack asked.

“I don’t know,” Tino shrugged. “Starling’s a hard guy to figure out. If he does care about her, maybe he could be a better person. If he doesn’t, then we’ll keep our home open to her so she won’t be alone.”

“We’ll have to figure out that guest room.”

“You’re planning to drag us all to the store to look at paint swatches for an entire afternoon, aren’t you?”

“Guilty as charged.”

Rosie shouted in joy as she tagged another girl and darted away before she could be caught again. She looked just like any other six-year-old instead of the little orphan girl.

Though she could probably do with clothes meant for playing in, Tino noted.

A rustle of the leaves from the leaves above him caught his eye. Curious, Tino peered up into the branches of the oak. There was a dark shape leaning against the crook of a thick branch and trunk. It was hidden from everyone else’s view, concealed by the verdant leaves.

Though his eyes were concealed by the brim of his hat, Tino could see a ghost of a smile forming on his beak.

Maybe there was hope for Starling after all.

#rosieverse #jim starling #nega-gosalyn/rosie king-fisher #friendly four #fanfiction

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douchebagbrainwaves · 3 years

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HOW TO HAVE A BIG DEAL

Google is again a case in point. If languages are all equivalent, sure, use Visual Basic. In either case there's not much you can learn, though perhaps habit might be a good plan. Nothing is forever, but the thousand little things the big companies.1 In the Valley it's not only programs that should be short. Life is too short for something. Partly because, as components of oligopolies themselves, the corporations knew they could safely pass the cost on to their customers, because their competitors would have to as well.2 The alarming thing about Web-based software gets used round the clock, so everything you do is immediately put through the wringer. It's part of the mating dance with acquirers.3 Suppose you could find a really good manager.4 That's to be expected.

Change happened mostly by itself in the computer business.5 My life is full of case after case where I worked on something just because it pleased users, but also because you're less likely to start something.6 He turned out to be really tough than the quiet ones. The first yuppies did not work for startups. So the deals take longer, dilute you more, and they were all essentially mechanics and shopkeepers at first. Of course college students have to think about it if you're trying to make you learn stuff that's more advanced than you'll need in a job.7 The new fluidity of companies changed people's relationships with their employers. So one way to find out if you're suited to running a startup is a task where you can't always trust your instincts about people. Keep doing it when you start a company? Also, common spelling errors will tend to judge you by the distance between the starting point and where you are constantly making and testing small modifications. Everyone is focused on this type of approach now, but Fortran I didn't have them.

People who don't want to violate users' privacy, but even if it isn't, how do you pick out the people with better taste?8 But few big companies are smart enough yet to admit this to themselves.9 It's a better place for what they want. And that is a way to answer that is to try. An accumulator has to accumulate. A guilty pleasure is at least an interesting question.10 And since you can delay pushing the button for a while, you yourself tend to measure what you've done the same way taking a shower lets your thoughts drift a bit—and thus drift off the wrong path you'd been pursuing last night and onto the right one adjacent to it. The other end of the list, fixing them.11 And yet the prospect of a demo pushes most of them don't.

He didn't choose, the industry did.12 Have you ever noticed that when you sit down to write something that takes off, you may find that founders have moved on. Sam Altman, the co-founder? If we could answer that question it would be a good plan. Writing eval required inventing a notation representing Lisp functions as Lisp data, and such a notation was devised for the purposes of the paper with no thought that it would be used to express Lisp programs in practice. If you could find a really good manager. At best you can do in a startup.13

That's incremented by, not plus. Will you be able to dump ultimate responsibility for the whole company. It matters more to make something people want. Because it is the people. And then of course there are the tricks people play on themselves.14 The only thing professors trust is recommendations, preferably from people they know. Those of us on the maker's schedule. If you use this method, you'll get roughly the same answer I just gave. Seeing a painting they recognize from reproductions is so overwhelming that their response to it as a painting is drowned out.15

For example, in preindustrial societies like medieval Europe, when someone attacked you, you have to know if you bet on Web-based software is like desiging a city rather than a building: as well as talent, so this is what Bill Gates must have been dismayed when I jumped up to the whiteboard and launched into a presentation of our exciting new technology. If you're writing software that has to run on the server. A survey course in art history may be worthwhile. At any rate they didn't pursue the suit very vigorously.16 So there is a name for the phenomenon, Greenspun's Tenth Rule: Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. You could just go out and buy a ready-made blank canvas. She assumed the problem was with her. If someone seems slippery, or bogus, or a tool for 3D animation. I advise fatalism. The most likely source of examples is math. Lots of small companies flourished, and did it by making cool things.17 A bad bug might not just crash one user's process; it could crash them all.

We do advise the companies we fund to apply for patents?18 Forms up to this challenge? But only about 10% of the time not to defend yourself. But it's possible to be part of a larger group; and you're subject to a lot of macros, and I can't predict what's going to happen increasingly often in the future and they sensed that something was missing. When it got big enough, IBM decided it was worth paying attention to. Ideas 1-5 are now widespread. You only get 52 weekends with your 2 year old.19 Why not start a startup? A painting familiar from reproductions looks more familiar from ten feet away; close in you see details that get lost in reproductions, and which you're therefore seeing for the first time. The most important, obviously, is that you can write a spreadsheet that several people can use simultaneously from different locations without special client software, or resold Web-based software gives you unprecedented information about their behavior. I feel a bit dishonest recommending that route. Yet that doesn't seem quite right, does it?

Notes

Acquirers can be said to have them soon.

Which in turn the most valuable aspects of the first thing they'd want; it has no competitors. The root of the next time you raise them.

The University of Vermont: The Duty of Genius, Penguin, 1991. You know in their voices will be regarded in the past, and it doesn't commit you to remain in denial about your conversations with potential earnings. One way to explain how you'd figure out yet whether you'll succeed. I was genuinely worried that Airbnb, for example, being offered large bribes by the National Center for Education Statistics, the space of ideas doesn't have users.

That's why the series AA terms and write them a microcomputer, and I had zero effect on the world, and it would have seemed to Aristotle the core: the energy they emit encourages other ambitious people, but even there people tend to be writing with conviction.

Whoever fed the style section reporter this story about suits coming back would have seemed to Aristotle the core: the editor written in C, which are a small percentage of GDP were about 60,000 computers attached to the option of deferring to a company's revenues as the first year or two make the people they want to live in a more general rule: focus on growth instead of just doing things, a lot would be very unhealthy. But a couple of hackers with no business experience to start startups. Plus ca change.

MITE Corp.

Other investors might assume that the money right now.

Horace, Sat.

In fact, for the same trick of enriching himself at the time I know for sure whether, e. If not, don't even try. In principle yes, of course there is a meaningful idea for human audiences.

It's to make a conscious effort to be very popular but from which a few additional sources on their appearance. But he got killed in the other meanings.

A lot of face to face meetings.

There were lots of potential winners, which would be critical to do better. But if A supports, say, ending up on the order of 10,000 people or so, even if they miss just a few VC firms. In a typical fund, half the companies fail, most of the number of spams that you could probably write a book or movie or desktop application in this new world. Internally most companies are also the 11% most susceptible to charisma.

When that happens, it increases your confidence in a band, or at such a dangerous mistake to believe, is that if you like a little about how closely the remarks attributed to them more professional.

7x a year, but its value was as bad an employee as this place was a good open-source browser. Trevor Blackwell, who may have now missed the video boat entirely. It's worth taking extreme measures to avoid variable capture and multiple evaluation; Hart's examples are subject to both write the sort of Gresham's Law of conversations.

01. According to Sports Illustrated, the manager mostly in good ways.

Digg's algorithm is very visible in Silicon Valley like the Segway and Google Wave. But you can play it safe by excluding VC firms regularly cold email.

There may be to ask permission to go out running or sit home and watch TV, music, and also what we'd call random facts, like indifference to individual users.

This must have been in preliterate societies to remember and pass on the way we met Charlie Cheever sitting near the door.

Some professors do create a great founder is in the top and get pushed down by new arrivals. This was made particularly clear in our own online store.

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jeremystrele · 4 years

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The Perks Of Being a Food Writer, According To One Of Australia’s Top Restaurant Critics!

Dream Job

by Amelia Barnes

Gemima Cody, senior restaurant critic at The Age. Photo – Amelia Stanwix for The Design Files.

As well as being a critic, Gemima is also a keen home cook. Photo – Amelia Stanwix for The Design Files.

Details in Gemima’s home. Photo – Amelia Stanwix for The Design Files.

Gemima writes the scored Good Food review every week, as well as contributing to their new monthly magazine, website, and the annual Good Food Guide. Photo – Amelia Stanwix for The Design Files.

One of her favourite new places is Old Palm Liquor in Brunswick East, where we joined Gemima for a drink! Photo – Amelia Stanwix for The Design Files.

Gemima says, ‘Old Palm Liquor has made me the most excited I’ve been in a long time.’ Photo – Amelia Stanwix for The Design Files.

‘During ‘off season’ I’m eating out two to three times a week, and in the ‘on season’ (February to August) I can be travelling and eating out every single day,’ says Gemima. Photo – Amelia Stanwix for The Design Files.

‘It’s really great work, but it has to be your life,’ says Gemima. Photo – Amelia Stanwix for The Design Files.

Gemima regularly shares snaps of her favourite dishes on Instagram! Photo – Amelia Stanwix for The Design Files.

Old Palm Liquor. Photo – Amelia Stanwix for The Design Files.

Photo – Amelia Stanwix for The Design Files.

Did you know every restaurant reviewed in The Age’s Good Food section is personally and anonymously visited by one of the team’s critics, and everything consumed is paid for by the publication? That might sound obvious, but in the current media landscape, to hear of a publication investing over $250,000 (!) a year in restaurant bills alone is truly remarkable.

Gemima Cody is The Age’s senior restaurant critic, who writes the scored review every week, as well as contributing to their new monthly magazine, website, and the annual Good Food Guide.

As the child of small business hospitality owners, Gemima does not take her job as a restaurant critic lightly. She knows a review can make or break a business, and brings this empathetic understanding to every restaurant she critiques.

The most important verb in the get-your-dream-job lexicon is…

Perseverance. I feel very uncertain about a lot of things in life, and I’ve had terrible imposter syndrome almost the entire time I’ve done this job, because it’s a position of authority. So, persevering through it, and through a lot of doubt, has been key.

When I grew up I wanted to be…

I grew up in central NSW, about 50 kilometres from Bathurst, where my family runs a holiday business. It’s kind of like Kellerman’s from Dirty Dancing – lots of organised activities for families – but with the Australian bush and horses. I was cooking in the kitchen from when I was 10, and by the time I was 15 my Mum could leave to run errands and I would be completely running the kitchen.

When I was around 11 years old, someone came up to do a review of my parents’ restaurant and I thought then, ‘I’m good at English, and I like food, maybe I could be a food reviewer?’ but I never thought about it again. I went onto study multimedia and law, then worked in television production for a bit, before moving into food writing.

I landed this job by…

I started at The Age in 2014, but before that I was the food and drink editor at Time Out Melbourne. I had a friend who worked for Time Out in Sydney, so she got me involved with doing small reviews in Melbourne, before they officially launched here. I then eventually became one of their two first staff members. I got headhunted by The Age while at Time Out.

A typical day for me involves…

Each week I do the main review for the Good Food section (formerly known as Epicure), and I write all the news pieces. During The Good Food Guide season (also known as ‘eating season’!) we go on the road and visit places all around Australia. During this time, I’ll do an additional 30 to 40 reviews.

There’s a team of 50 critics who write all the reviews for the guide. Every single restaurant of the 500 that end up in the guide, plus the ones we go and review that don’t make it in, gets re-reviewed every single year. It costs well over $250,000 to do just in restaurant bills.

This year I did a good chunk of South Australia, as well as Margaret River. I did 16 restaurants and they were all degustations. Because they were all tasting menus, I ate 168 dishes in 11 days.

During ‘off season’ I’m eating out two to three times a week, and in the ‘on season’ (February to August) I can be travelling and eating out every single day.

In a day I’m doing a review, I get up at 6.30am to try and exercise, get coffee, and go on the internet. I generally work in the office during the day, at The Age’s office next to Southern Cross station. I might come in a tiny bit later than 9am, because I basically won’t get home until 9pm or after, so it’s a really long day. It’s a full day at work, with eating out on top of it. It’s really great work, but it has to be your life.

Occasionally I’ll work from home if I’m just doing writing, because it’s less distracting. I’ll spend those days calling people up, and chasing up leads by whatever means necessary. I’ll be doing phone interviews, booking pictures to go with reviews, and having meetings. Somewhere in between I’ll write some copy, stare blankly at a wall, write some more copy, walk outside, come back inside, hate myself, maybe cry… that’s just me though. I don’t think I’ve got through many reviews without at some point getting so frustrated and going, ‘I don’t know how to do this as a job.’ It’s like I’ve never written a restaurant review before – every single time.

The most rewarding part of my job is…

When I get to discover something that no one’s come across yet, especially when it is a new and young operator who’s doing really well. So, being able to be the first person to give them that recognition and tell that story. It’s not always like that, so it’s nice when it is.

It’s a job where you’re working creatively, but you’re also watching other people doing their form of art, and that’s always inspiring.

On the other hand, the most challenging aspect is…

Living your life in the public. Even though this job is supposed to be anonymous (I will book at restaurants under false names, with a fake email and use friend’s phone numbers) – my photo is still in the paper, and I’ve been doing this for 10 years now, so people are on the lookout. My photo is inside the kitchen at lots of new places along with all the other main critics.

I’ve had to say some not entirely glowing things about restaurants in my time – I don’t take pleasure in it. I think some people don’t like taking criticism from women in particular, and I’ve had campaigns to get me fired. It’s fair when you are in a job that is criticising other people that you then attract that, but I don’t feel that comfortable going out anymore. It’s not that relaxing, and that’s challenging, because I love going out.

The culture of my workplace is…

There’s a community of understanding, because on one hand, this is the absolute best job in the world, but on the other, there are some real challenges to it. Not being able to control what goes in your mouth for most of your life, and the associated health stuff that comes with that, combined with doing creative writing half the time, is hard. But, you can never, ever, say that to anyone who’s not a food writer! No one will ever feel sorry for you, but other food writers get it.

We’re a close team. We’ll sometimes travel together, and we’ll have to bunker down doing all these restaurant reviews in a random town, while staying in the same hotel room.

The best piece of work advice I’ve ever received is…

‘It’s not about you.’ I think it’s really easy to get caught up in your head, and really worried about what people think, but everyone else is focused on their thing. Everyone is actually thinking about themselves, and not what you’re doing, as much as you think they might are.

In the next five years, I’d like to…

I have not had an answer to this for the past 10 years, but I’ve just worked it out in the last week. I really want to do long-form, produced podcasts, while still doing this. I’d like to go really deep on food topics, but things relatable to everyone, like the history of our fast food giants in Australia.

What restaurants are on your radar right now?

Old Palm Liquor has made me the most excited I’ve been in a long time. My other favourite place is Etta, mostly because of the new chef.

Places that are less new but are my favourite are Tipo 00, and a lot of wine bars with female chefs. They just cook in a different way – they genuinely do. There’s a lot more dishes that are driven by the ingredients. I feel like there’s less ego in it.

Do you have any advice to aspiring food writers?

Be quite straightforward and not overly flowery with your language. Keep it short, tight and properly descriptive, and draw parallels between things when people might have a reference point.

We always have a list of banned words each year that is sent out to reviewers, because there was a time that every reviewer was saying ‘the chocolate pudding is sinful’. The chocolate pudding is not sentient!

Is it hard critiquing businesses among Australia’s relatively small hospitality industry?

There are no friendships. There’s a lot of publications that do pieces about openings and that kind of thing, where the restaurant will tell you what they’re trying to achieve – that’s the aspirational view. But when it comes to an actual restaurant critique, you have to go in and analyse how well they’re living up to the bar that they’ve set for themselves. I lose a lot of sleep knowing I’ve got to give a bad review.

I don’t like being harsh on businesses, because in most cases, people are trying. I think people often don’t give enough credit to just how hard it actually is to run a restaurant successfully – it’s so many moving parts – and people just expect that everything is good as a baseline and it’s really not. It’s a lot of work.

How would you hope those in the hospitality industry would describe you?

I would hope they think I’m respectful and fair, because I do respect this industry and the work that people do. I put everything into trying to soften the blows, and make them constructive.

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jim-reid · 7 years

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The Jesus and Mary Chain on Psychocandy: ‘It was a little miracle’

26 october 2014

How did two dreamy, painfully shy brothers from suburban Scotland create one of the most remarkable albums of the 80s? As the Reids prepare to revive Psychocandy 30 years on, we talk to indie pop’s unlikely rabble rousers

There’s a clip on YouTube of the Jesus and Mary Chain frontman Jim Reid at his hilarious and terrifying peak as an interviewee. It’s 1985 and he’s just been told, off-camera, by an assistant on a Belgian TV show that the host is a Joy Division fanatic, so on no account should he say anything bad about the band. Jim is a fan himself, but of course, he feels obliged to lay waste to Joy Division. The host looks like he wants to either throw a punch or throw up.

Twenty-nine years later, I meet Jim in Manchester, where he’s being interviewed for 6 Music by Mary Anne Hobbs. She gets a much easier time of it than the Belgian guy. Jim’s negativity, no longer weaponised, is dryly comical as he dismisses everything from his school days (“I wasn’t even important enough to be bullied”) to dancing (“I think I danced once in 1985”). The only subjects that elicit undiluted enthusiasm are the Velvet Underground (“the best band in the world ever”) and Francis Bacon, whose paintings he describes as “reality reconstructed in a way that it ought to have been in the first place”.

You could say the same of the 1985 album that Jim and his guitarist brother, William, are performing in full for the first time next month. Psychocandy (“it’s a one-word review of what it contains,” says Jim) was an explosive anomaly. Into the chasm between the expensive, imperial realm of pop and the insular, underachieving ghetto of indie erupted the most notorious band since the Sex Pistols, attended by riots, bans and breathless headlines, even though the Reids were painfully shy. Some of Psychocandy is beautifully wasted pop, like Lou Reed working in the Brill Building; some sounds like being trapped in a wind tunnel full of broken glass and bees; the rest sounds like both happening at once. The Jesus and Mary Chain were a band without a middle. There was only melody and noise, beauty and violence, love and hate.

“Contrast’s dead,” says Douglas Hart, who played bass in the Mary Chain before quitting in 1991 to become a successful music video director. “We live in this slightly anodyne world. That contrast was important psychologically. If you were pissing people off it made you feel great.”

Alan McGee, the Creation Records founder who made a fortune from Oasis, is managing the Mary Chain again almost 30 years after they fired him. He still sounds like their biggest fan, seeing them as a vital bridge in British rock between punk and the 90s. “I believed the Mary Chain were the greatest group in the world,” he gushes. “I genuinely believed they were the revolution.”

Speaking to the brothers separately about Psychocandy is both confusing and illuminating because they often disagree. Jim, who now lives in Devon and has two daughters, is very funny in a self-deprecating, Eeyoreish way. William, speaking from Los Angeles (he moved there in 1998) apologises for his inarticulacy and bad memory. “My 14-year-old son asks me these questions and I just say I don’t know,” he says pleadingly. “We just did it. I don’t know how we did it. It’s a little miracle. It could all have been different.”

The Reids grew up in the suburban new town of East Kilbride, “the edge of the universe”, spiritually distant from Glasgow, let alone London. You had to be a fantasist to think of making it from there. Unable to get their act together in time for punk (Hart calls the Mary Chain “a punk band out of time”), they quit their jobs in 1980. For the next three years they would stay up all night, fuelled by tea and biscuits, dreaming up the perfect band. “We were like weird twins in those days, finishing each other’s sentences,” says Jim. “We were very much of the same mind.”

Eventually, they imagined music that fused the noise of German industrial band Einstürzende Neubaten with the pop sweetness of the Shangri-Las. When they first heard The Velvet Underground & Nico, says Jim, “Our jaws hit the floor. They were the Mary Chain before the Mary Chain. That was the point at which we were kicked off our sofa.”

By 1983 Jim was 21 and William 24. William had given himself until his 27th birthday for the band to succeed before moving to Israel to work on a kibbutz. “I think everybody thought we were a couple of wasters, and, to be honest, we probably were,” says Jim. “We thought, well, if we don’t do this now, we’re never going to do it.”

That year their dad lost his factory job and gave his sons £300 from his redundancy pay-off. They spent it on a Portastudio to make demos of the songs that would become their first singles, Upside Down and Never Understand. Neither of them wanted to be the singer so they flipped a coin and Jim lost. “It could have gone the other way,” he says. “After a while I started to shag more girls than he did and he was like, ‘I want to be the singer!’ And I was like, ‘Sorry, son, the coin doesn’t lie.’”

“I’ve got a great job,” counters William. “I get to hide in the shadows and do what the hell I want. Jim’s got to be the guy that everybody looks at.”

Despite the unfavourable odds, the Reids felt confident because they felt necessary. “We hated the 1980s music scene,” says Jim. “I mean, we detested it. The Mary Chain were more influenced by bad music than good. We did well out of that. We only started a band because we thought, ‘Why isn’t anyone else doing this?’”

Through a stroke of luck their demo tape reached future Primal Scream frontman Bobby Gillespie. He sent it to his friend Alan McGee, who released Upside Down on Creation and became their manager. “McGee’s enthusiasm was a driving force,” says Jim. “He was like your battery charger. You’d look at Alan and he’d be frothing at the mouth and you’d be like, ‘Fucking hell, he’s right!’”

After recording Upside Down and hiring Bobby Gillespie as their drummer in late 1984, the Mary Chain looked for a major-label deal. “We had expectations we were going to be the Beatles or the Stones, so you have to go big,” says William. “We had huge balls.”

They soon signed to Blanco Y Negro, the WEA subsidiary established by Rough Trade’s Geoff Travis. Jim’s biggest regret is that they didn’t choose Rough Trade. “At the time, everyone was indie-schmindie,” explains Jim. “I wasn’t interested in a spotty kid with an Oxfam jumper playing in a room above a pub to his 22 mates. I wanted to be Marc Bolan, David Bowie, Jim Morrison. I saw us at Wembley Stadium. What I didn’t realise was that Warner Brothers weren’t interested in the Mary Chain. Nobody there liked the band, nobody there did anything for the band. There was a sense that people just wanted you out of the building as quickly as possible.”

At times it seemed the whole music industry was resistant to them, like a body rejecting a transplanted organ. They butted heads with pressing plant workers who refused to manufacture the pungently named B-side Jesus Fuck and BBC sound engineers who wanted to “fix” the band’s unorthodox sound.

“You’d go to the toilet and come back and the guitars were all turned down,” remembers Jim. “We didn’t know what the rules were. What we did know was what sounded good.”

Then there was their live reputation. They drank heavily to drown their nerves, so their early shows, sometimes as short as 15 minutes, projected chaos and alienation which a growing number of troublemakers mistook for violence. When they played the North London Polytechnic in March 1985, audience members trashed the stage while the band hid in their dressing room. The music press reported a “riot”; McGee, in the spirit of Malcolm McLaren, excitedly declared it “art as terrorism”; suddenly the band’s reputation was out of control.

“After that, you had to come to a Mary Chain gig with a baseball bat,” says Jim. “The notoriety did sort of… spiral, and we had to nip it in the bud.”

“That was McGee trying to make it an event,” says William. “We had a lot of arguments with him about that. It wasn’t Alan going on stage and being a target for these lunatics. It was us.”

The Reids’ scabrously self-aggrandising interview style, however, was all their own work. They used words the same way they deployed white noise and feedback: to provoke and excite but also to conceal their shyness. “To knock things down that people held in high regard got you noticed,” says Jim. “A lot of it was bravado. You’re almost trying to talk yourself into it. Nobody else is saying this so we will: we’re better than the Beatles.”

“A lot of people thought we were snotty little brats,” says William. “We were snotty little brats. You need a bit of that when you’re young, don’t you?”

To the hysterically impatient 80s music press, the Mary Chain felt electrifying but not necessarily built to last. Only the brothers knew that they had a fistful of great songs that had never been played live. William was the more prolific songwriter but Jim was a shrewd editor and together they were formidable.

“‘Mary Chain’ and ‘hype’ were synonymous,” says Jim. “We knew that a lot of people thought Psychocandy was going to be the singles and a collection of B-sides. So we were quietly confident, quite smug about it. We felt as if everything on Psychocandy was a potential single.”

The songs were one secret weapon; their discipline was another. The men who always performed drunk recorded Psychocandy entirely sober: “Lots of tea and Wimpy [burgers], not speed and alcohol,” says Hart. The apparent chaos was in fact meticulously choreographed: they sampled white noise and feedback and carefully punched it into the mix. Getting the sound exactly right is why the album, recorded at north London’s Southern Studios with engineer John Loder, took six weeks.

“To us, it seemed like an eternity,” says Jim. “We thought we were budding Phil Spectors. I’m sure a fly on the wall would have been thinking: ‘These guys are nuts.’”

Musical disagreements were sometimes settled with fists. At one point Jim threw William into a studio door with such ferocity that it came off its hinges. “They were really great at fighting [verbally] because they could push each other’s buttons,” Hart says admiringly. “Sometimes I would stand by in awe. How can people slag each other so beautifully? And then they’d start throwing punches and you’d have to intervene.”

The Reids felt “pretty cocky” about Psychocandy and critics adored it, but the industry remained frosty. According to Jim, Warner Music UK chairman Rob Dickins told them, “Nobody’s going to buy it.” Radio 1 DJ Mike Smith blacklisted follow-up single Some Candy Talking because he was convinced, wrongly, that it was about heroin. When the Mary Chain toured the US, their Jesus Fuck T-shirts didn’t go down well. “The promoter in Texas said, ‘They’ll lynch you,’ so he put a bit of tape [on the T-shirts]. He put the tape over the word ‘Jesus’ and left the word ‘Fuck’.” Jim rolls his eyes. “That speaks volumes.”

The Reids’ shyness made even cult success hard to enjoy. “They were fucking miserable,” says McGee. “We’d been offered Top of the Pops and they were looking at me like I’d asked if they wanted to take a walk around Auschwitz.” Jim rejects this (“McGee’s talking bollocks”), but Hart seems to concur. “When bands are great they create a little gang mentality that excludes others by necessity. Our spiky reputation would go before us, which we enjoyed at first, but after a while you get a bit lonely and think: ‘Why aren’t we having a good time?’”

At any rate, the brothers’ reticence created a glass ceiling. As songs such as In a Hole and My Little Underground made clear, the Mary Chain were introverts. Their wall of noise was defensive rather than aggressive, a prickly cocoon that anticipated the hermetic roar of My Bloody Valentine. However great the songs, they lacked the common touch, so how on Earth did they ever believe they’d play Wembley?

“What were we thinking?” Jim agrees. “Psychocandy in a stadium? It was never going to happen. But we had such utter self-belief. We were absurdly naive.”

In retrospect, it was for the best, because the Reids weren’t primed to withstand celebrity. “Massive fame would have probably screwed with my head,” agrees Jim. “I think William would have enjoyed the adulation.”

William flatly disagrees. “I really think we would have fallen to pieces.”

Instead, the Jesus and Mary Chain fell to pieces slowly. Starting with 1987’s cleaner-sounding Darklands (William’s favourite), each subsequent Mary Chain album was good and different but each one took longer to make as they drank more and spoke less.

“In 85 I drank to get over my nerves; in 97 I drank because I just had to,” says Jim. “That process gradually ended up with me being an addict. I’d be sitting in the living room with a bottle of whisky and phoning up my dealer to get a gram of coke. But [despite] the drugs, the drink, the bickering, the music never suffered. I stand by every record we made.”

After William quit the band in 1998, during an onstage punch-up in LA, the brothers didn’t speak for a year or perform together for almost a decade. Since their first reunion show at the Coachella festival in 2007, where Scarlett Johansson joined them for Psychocandy highlight Just Like Honey, they’ve maintained enough harmony to tour regularly and work on a seventh album that, Jim promises, “will be bloody good”.

I ask Jim to describe their relationship and he sighs heavily. “Oh God. It’s complicated. We tolerate each other. I know how to wind him up, he knows how to wind me up. Sober, we give each other space. Bring drink into the equation, it can get a bit bloody again.” On this subject, unusually, William is in complete agreement.

The impossibility of recreating the turmoil and combat of 1985 in front of a reverential older crowd led the Reids to decline previous offers to tour Psychocandy, but now it’s part of the appeal. “Even when the album was out, it was about riots and falling over drunk on stage,” says Jim. “It was about everything but the music. If you’re looking for skinny young kids in a strop, kicking their guitars, stay at home.”

I ask William how he thinks the audience would react if they regressed 30 years, got drunk, played for 15 minutes and stormed off. He sounds intrigued.

“What if we did play exactly what we did in 1985?” he muses. “I wonder if people would embrace it.”

#interview

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holmesoverture · 7 years

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In Sherlock’s Room, Part Two

Part One Be Here

Title: In Sherlock’s Room Rating (for this half): PG Total Word Count: 6431 Pairing: bi Watson/ace trans Holmes Universe: Modern AU of the original canon Summary: Holmes solves a case in his jammies. Watson does laundry and makes ravioli.

TW for this half: very vaguely implied past acephobia; another mention of past acephobia (probably past transphobia also) which is immediately followed by petty revenge

Editing was tedious work. My editor, for all his many redeeming qualities, invariably failed to appreciate the flowery endings to my tales and insisted I cut them off far earlier than I should have preferred.

“People read your stories for two reasons,” he once told me after nearly a half-hour of increasingly stormy debate on the subject; “the mystery, and the solution to the mystery. No one cares what happens to you once the crook is sitting in a jail cell. You can spend the night giving each other gob-jobs for all anyone cares. Oh, I’ve said something funny now, have I?”

The bundles of fan mail I received every week inquiring as to whether I was single and whether Holmes was any good at finding hidden sausages made me question his judgment, but I was paid very handsomely for my work. I could afford to assume that he had been made editor for a reason.

My efforts to curtail the offending epilogues on my own proved futile and so I had given up altogether, allowing my fingers to stretch the story for as long as they pleased, knowing that my editor would cut it all anyway while cursing my name. I was well into an appallingly purple passage in which Holmes and I compare the seasonal changes of the leaves to the arc of the average criminal’s career when Holmes burst in, catching the door before it could slam into the wall.

“Ceromancy!” he cried.

“Gesundheit,” I said.

“Kommst du mit, Naseweis.”

One did not need to speak German to understand what he wanted. I followed him back to his room. He had turned on some music since I left, a whiplash-inducing blend of classical pieces and Eurovision finalists. Several new items had taken up residence on his desk. His laptop now sat amongst the clutter rather than on his bed, along with a large, overly fragrant lavender candle, either borrowed or stolen from Mrs Hudson, and a bowl of water with a vaguely egg-shaped bit of hardened wax floating in its centre.

“I take it this is somehow connected with cera… ciril—”

“Ceromancy. It is the art of divining the future via wax images in water. One of the methods involves adding certain ingredients to the water, including seeds of the cuminum cyminum, which Mrs Mulvehill reports smelling in her wife’s vehicle on more than one occasion, and sprigs of ruta graveolens, a toxic herb that can cause blisters.”

I recalled the neatly torn note in the package that had started Holmes’ day, in which Mrs Mulvehill remarked upon the blisters on her wife’s hand.

“Further,” Holmes continued, “this particular set of instructions involves tying two candles together with a red ribbon.”

He spun the laptop so I could see the screen, though I hardly needed to look to know what would be there: the photograph of the red ribbon tied to the rearview mirror.

“That looks about long enough to bind a pair of candles, does it not?” said he.

I thought it strange that a woman should drive five hours one way every weekend simply to have her fortune told, and said so to Holmes.

“I have not yet finished examining all of the evidence. There may very well be another explanation for these clues that will become apparent once I reach the end of my investigation.”

“So there is still a chance that Polly Mulvehill is seeing another woman?”

“Unfortunately for our client, yes.”

He lifted a hand to swipe to the next photograph, then gave it a second thought and turned to me instead.

“Why do people do it?” he asked.

“Do what?”

“Cheat. Polly Mulvehill has a perfectly devoted and intelligent wife, but that wasn’t enough for her. She still felt the need to fill her time and, presumably, various other things with someone else, all in pursuit of a few sweaty, sticky moments on a flat surface. What can possibly be so thrilling about sex that it drives people to betray those closest to them? It can’t be any better than a concert at the Barbican, and I wouldn’t cheat on you for a box seat.”

That hadn’t ever been a concern of mine, but it was nice to know.

“Sex is pleasurable for a lot of people,” I said, “and for some, it confers a certain status that concert tickets don’t. It makes them feel powerful, attractive, special, even loved—”

“That hardly justifies cheating.”

“Of course it doesn’t. I suppose some people never learned the same sort of self-control that you have with regard to box seats.”

He laughed at the jab and began setting up his chemical apparatus as the delicate dénouement of Gluck’s Melodie ceded to the gravelly bombast of Lordi’s Hard Rock Hallelujah.

“What are you going to do now?” I asked.

“I must test the dirt samples sent to me by Mrs Mulvehill to determine if there is anything distinctive about them. The definitive answer to the question of how Polly Mulvehill has been spending her weekends may well be lurking in one of these test tubes.”

He muttered a few more disparaging comments about unfaithful spouses before returning to work. I sat on the edge of Holmes’ bed and ran a finger along a seam in his blanket. It had some peculiar stains that I would have to remember to ask about, to make sure he wasn’t slowly poisoning himself in his sleep. Not for the first time, I was grateful that we had elected to retain separate bedrooms even after starting our relationship.

At that time it had been almost a decade since I last slept with someone. Her name was Allie, or something like it. She was tall and dark and sarcastic and just barely passable in the bedroom. I suppose it was the lingering memory of her mediocrity that helped reinforce the idea of there being more important elements than sex in a romantic relationship when Holmes wrote me the first of what would become an entire drawerful of love letters. He made it clear from the very start that he could offer me every sort of intimacy except that one, but that does not make our relationship in any way less. Maybe it’s the fact that I will never have the chance to confront this issue in my published works that compels me to be perfectly clear about it here: we are lovers, in every sense of the word except that one upon which our society places the most importance.

Well, I suppose I shouldn’t judge others for their ignorance. I held a similar view in a past life. “Experience of women on three continents” was, despite what my editor prefers to believe, not an exaggeration. Nor is it an exaggeration to say I have never once regretted abandoning my old ways. Who wouldn’t give up sex for love?

Perhaps not Polly Mulvehill. Or perhaps she really did learn her lesson and would agree with me after all. It seems to me such an obvious decision, but on those infrequent occasions when I have attempted to explain our relationship to an outsider, I am almost inevitably met with disbelief at best. Mrs Hudson took it in her stride, bless her, but Lestrade got very confused when I responded to his barely veiled innuendos with the truth. I am slightly ashamed and very satisfied to say that I went for the jugular almost immediately.

“If your wife got sick and wasn’t able to have sex with you anymore, or if her hormones change as she gets older and her libido drops, which does happen by the way, would you walk out on her just because she wasn’t giving you any?”

“Of course not!” To Lestrade’s credit, he looked scandalised at the very suggestion. “She’s my wife, the mother of my children—”

“It’s the same with us. Well, not exactly the same. Obviously, there are some differences in our lines of reasoning, but my point is that you love your partner more than you love sex and so do I. That is, I love my partner more than I love sex, not your partner. You know what I meant,” I said, irritated, when he started laughing.

“You’re much more eloquent as a writer than as an orator,” he replied, but he bought me a pint as an apology and we never spoke on the matter again.

I suppose I could have laughed along with his jokes instead of lecturing him on asexuality, but I should have felt guilty allowing him to continue operating under the assumption that Holmes and I were doing it. The mere idea of engaging in such activities makes Holmes so terribly uncomfortable. Having to endure ribald ragging, no matter how good-natured, from the one police inspector he respects could only end unpleasantly for both parties.

Feeling suddenly maudlin, I moved my bad leg so it rested fully on the stained blanket, leaned back against the headboard, and watched as Holmes went about his work. His hands, despite appearing ill-fittingly large on his slender wrists, always managed to look graceful when engaged in one of his chemical experiments. But I suppose everyone looks more themselves when they are doing what they are best at.

I believe I drifted off a bit after that, lulled into a contented daze by the rhythm of clinking glass and the scratch of pencil on notebook paper. I began to come out of my trance when he came out of his. He tried and failed to control a smile. A few scribbles later and he gave up all pretense of dignified detachment, jumping in place and clapping, sending the pencil clattering into the dustbin beside his desk. That was alright. He preferred to keep his writing implements in there anyway.

With but a short moment of warning he swept me into his arms, then released me and tugged me towards his desk before I had the chance to hug him back.

“This is far better than I could have hoped for! What a splendid case this has turned out to be!”

“Such excitement for a bit of dirt,” I remarked.

“No mere ‘bit of dirt’ is this. Have a look at the results of the soil analysis I ran.”

I did as he asked. Even with my limited understanding of soil composition, I knew at once what had brought the light to his grey eyes.

“Iridium?”

“Yes. It is exceedingly rare on Earth but much more common in meteorites.”

“I know what it is. I just didn’t think you would, given your extreme disinterest in astronomy.”

“I looked it up,” Holmes said, witheringly. Then, perking up, he added, “I suspect the sample in Polly Mulvehill’s boot came from such a meteorite, or perhaps from an object that was found within the iridium anomaly.”

“You did say she works at a museum.”

“She volunteers as a tour guide. I rather doubt she has the authority to take archaeological treasures home with her.”

“So you’re saying—”

“Museums are a study in contrasts, my dear Watson. In their exhibition rooms, they are well-organized, often beautifully laid out bastions of knowledge dedicated to preserving the past into the future. However, safely shielded from the public eye is invariably an overcrowded and poorly catalogued backroom littered with valuables that could be missing for months or years before anyone noticed. Why, I stole this very spoon from the British Museum over a decade ago and still they’re none the wiser!”

“Holmes!”

“Oh, come now, Boswell. This is a soup spoon from my mother’s flatware collection. Do you really think so little of me?”

“On the contrary, I think highly enough of you that I expect you could abscond with the British Museum’s entire collection of Egyptian antiquities and return them to Egypt before the guard could leave his chair. Why do you have your mother’s soup spoon?”

Holmes abruptly stopped preening at my inquiry.

“After my last visit to Sussex, you asked why I was in such a strop and I wouldn’t tell you.”

“Yes?”

“She kept asking when you and I would give her grandchildren. I should have run out at once and arranged for a hysterectomy if Mycroft hadn’t been there to stop me. Instead I took her soup spoon. Are you very angry with me?”

“Not with you, no.” But the next time I was misfortunate enough to encounter Mrs Holmes, I thought I might distract her long enough for Holmes to make off with the rest of her flatware, and possibly a vase or two. I did not tell him the specifics of my thoughts, instead running a careful hand through the tangles in his hair. He was much more appreciative of such gestures when not occupied by a case. Had I attempted to demonstrate any form of affection prior to the discovery of the iridium, he should have pulled back and shook his head, putting a stop to my ministrations. Now, he not only permitted the display, he encouraged it, throwing back his head with a contented sigh. He grasped my free hand with both of his, enjoying the light scratch of my callouses across his own, eyes closed so he could focus on the sensation.

At length he straightened in his chair and looked around, as if in search of something.

“I believe we have gotten rather off the subject,” he said. He crowed with victory when he made visual confirmation of his laptop teetering precariously on the edge of his desk, where it had been shoved to make room for the chemistry equipment. “I must get in touch with Mrs Mulvehill—Mrs Evelyn Mulvehill, that is—and alert her to the happy news.”

“I would hardly call the fact that her wife is stealing from her place of employment happy news, Holmes.”

“Perhaps not to you or I, but to a woman bracing herself for the news that her beloved has yet again been unfaithful, it may well be the highlight of her day.”

I never saw Evelyn Mulvehill’s response to the longwinded email Holmes sent containing his deductions, but Holmes informed me it was cordial and grateful and would I please stop scribbling in my notebook? He had just learned the most wonderful new waltz that I was sure to love if only I’d pay it the attention it (and he) deserved.

We did not hear from the Mulvehills for nearly a fortnight. At that time, as a harsh rain assaulted the streets and the rooftops of London, Holmes thrust an open envelope, sent from Kendal, Cumbria, under my nose. Along with her cheque came a letter from our former client, thanking Holmes for his help and informing us of the full meaning behind the clues he had deciphered for her. Evelyn confronted her wife about the matter the moment she returned from work on the day of Holmes’ revelation. Polly, to her credit, admitted to the scheme at once, but the story which followed her confession was one that neither of us could have expected.

Polly Mulvehill loved her museum and the history it saved and displayed, but the longer she worked there, the more she realised how dependent it was upon artifacts illegally obtained when Britain was at her most imperialistic. What right did any museum, even the one she held so near and dear, have to keep such items? She made then a vow to smuggle what she could out of the museum and back to the lands from which they had been taken.

She sought out a fence, a man based in Aberdeen who was very superstitious and insisted upon consulting a friend who specialised in divination, including ceromancy, before each and every step of their exchange. At least twice, to Polly’s intense displeasure, the fence interpreted the candle drippings negatively and refused to accept the goods, forcing Polly to return with the stolen artifacts to Kendal until the following week. Still, the trouble was worth it, Polly Mulvehill insisted, for the fence was just as devoted to repatriation as she and would do most anything, so long as the candles gave their blessing, to bring the haughty English down a peg. Upon receipt of the stolen items, the fence made his escape on a flight from Aberdeen International Airport, which Polly only made the mistake of booking a hotel next to once, compared with the eleven times she had travelled to Aberdeen on her self-imposed mission. One was also the number of times she made the mistake of handling the herbs which the fortune teller used to predict their chances of success.

Evelyn was so awestruck by her wife’s courage and integrity that she quit her accounting job and started an organisation dedicated to negotiating the legal return of all stolen artifacts to their countries of origin. It is an organisation the Mulvehills run to this very day. The missive ended with a plea veiled as a compliment, stating that Evelyn Mulvehill knew Holmes to be a gentleman of the utmost discretion, and that she trusted him to breathe not a word of her wife’s rashness to the authorities. The final item enclosed in the envelope was a familiar, stout red ribbon. Holmes smiled when I held up the ribbon and requested I put the note into the fire.

“Another mystery over and done with,” said he, snapping the blinds shut against the sight of the driving storm. “Will you be writing up this case for your eager public?”

“I doubt it. I spent more time folding your laundry than doing anything related to the case. Perhaps I could end it with a big car chase through Aberdeen between us and the superstitious fence. Maybe throw in the Mulvehills for good measure.”

Holmes chuckled around the empty pipe in his teeth.

“It is no more or less ludicrous than anything else you have written,” he said.

I chose to interpret this remark in a positive light.

Were this a polished and published work rather than a hastily scribbled collection of remembrances in a shabby moleskin notebook, my editor should have ended the account with my destroying the evidence of Polly Mulvehill’s crimes and her wife’s complicity. It is just as well. Holmes is, despite the great fame I have inadvertently thrust upon him, an intensely private man. I doubt he would appreciate the whole of the English-speaking world reading about how we sat together on the sofa, shoulder to shoulder and hip to hip, he kneading the pain from my bad leg with a practiced hand, I reading selections from the story I had been editing and taking note of the parts he disapproved of. He certainly wouldn’t want anyone else knowing about how our light bickering over whether or not I was allowed to describe him as gentle ended in several minutes of kissing that served my argument rather better than his. And, most of all, he would recoil at the slightest possibility of strangers spying after the fact as he pulled out his laptop and helped me work out plans for a weeklong holiday in Cumbria.

#sherlock holmes #my writing #camp nano #asexuality #transgender

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operationrainfall · 4 years

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Title Afterparty Developer Night School Studio Publisher Night School Studio Release Date October 29th, 2019 Genre Adventure Platform PC, PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch Age Rating Mature 17+ Official Website

Editor’s Note: oprainfall’s Quentin H also had a chance to check out Afterparty back in 2019, and you can read his impressions here.

What is free will? How does family – found and biological – affect that freedom? And how does substance abuse play into all of it? Afterparty, by Night School Studio, tackles these questions and more using the colorful backdrop of Hell. I mean, where better to explore some of humanity’s biggest quandaries?

The game starts innocently enough at a college graduation party with our intrepid duo, Lola and Milo. Lola is a brusque but honest woman who does her best to be above the petty gossip of her peers, while Milo is more often than not the butt of jokes and picked on mercilessly. Thankfully, they’re both about to say goodbye to that life — figuratively and literally. It’s not actually a party, after all. It’s a farce staged by demons, and they’re in Hell. How did they die? Why are they damned? And why are they being processed together? That’s for you to find out.

The game itself is mostly comprised of walking left and right through the neon landscape of Hell itself, talking with NPCs to learn about why you’ve ended up on the wrong side of Heaven. Neither Milo nor Lola can remember what happened to them, and every dialogue choice you make helps them — and you — piece together their lives and what it means for them in death. As it turns out, Hell is actually a 9-5, and Lola and Milo have arrived right at closing time, so those answers will take a little longer to find out. But in the meantime, Satan is throwing one hell of a party, and he might just have their ticket back to the land of the living. If they can beat him at a night of boozing, maybe they can go home and that soul-searching about why they’re in Hell won’t actually matter. But to get into Lucifer’s shindig, our duo are going to need to get an invite from one of the locals, all while fending with their own personal demon, and she’s new and eager to prove herself on the job.

Most interactions offer one of two choices for you to choose, though once you unlock the drinking mechanic — Afterparty‘s main hook — a third choice opens to you. Depending on your choice of drink, this third option can run the gamut from combative to flirty to drunkenly courageous, with your choices ultimately affecting yourself and the denizens of Hell — as well as playing into the themes of free will and substance abuse.

The drinking mechanic walks a fine line between advocating for teetotalers and rampant alcoholism. Sometimes the options move the dialogue forward (I found this happened most often if you drank something that gave you Liquid Courage). Sometimes they just lead to fun flavor text. In a game about drinking Satan under the table, booze isn’t always the right answer. And whether you choose the third option or not, there are times that choice just doesn’t matter. Some parts of this story are predetermined, but it’s what you do with the choices given to you that matter. Seeing all of the dialogue options is in and of itself a fun pastime thanks to the game’s stellar writing, so seeing how each interaction can play out does offer quite a bit of replayability, since the game locks in your choices. (Which, again, plays into the free will aspect of the story.)

Speaking of dialogue, it’s definitely Afterparty‘s shining achievement. The writing is witty and clever, with plenty of references to Biblical mythology and classical religious writings. The voice acting is solid all around, with fantastic performances from Lola’s Janina Gavankar and Milk’s Khoi Dao, as well as Dave Fennoy as Satan and Ashley Burch as Sam Hill. Considering the entire game is voice acted, having these stellar performances gave the entire experience a strong polish. The game even features its own version of Twitter, called Bicker, where Hell’s populace will remark on the events of the story so far, your actions specifically, or just reference their untimely deaths in humorous ways. There’s even an achievement for wasting your time on it, and if that doesn’t scream eternally damned, I don’t know what will.

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Hell itself is also pretty awesome. The vibrant neon color-scheme and character designs are all gorgeous, and the art style is actually what drew me to the game to begin with. In a game about one endless afterlife party, the game could not have gone with a better aesthetic. Even the music is catchy, thumping electronica that just gets you in the mood to dance — which, funny enough, is one of the mini-games available to you in the underworld. At certain points throughout the story, the main gameplay loop of talking to NPCs will change up to allow Lola or Milo a chance to prove their moves on the dance floor. These sequences are simple Simon Says button presses, but they were a nice break in the formula.

Afterparty also features a couple different drinking games. There’s beer pong, where you have to line up a shot (pun intended) using some rudimentary physics; and cup-stacking, where you stack each cup you drink in the same way the Stacker arcade game works. Neither of the drinking games are particularly difficult, but they’re fun and thematically relevant.

I played the game for about eight hours on GamePass, and my playthrough was marred by a few issues, almost all of which involved lag. Afterparty features several sequences where Milo and Lola will travel with Sam on her taxi across the River Styx. These are dialogue-heavy load sequences, basically, and would often stutter and skip, with the boat clipping badly through the water. At one point near the end of the game, the boat ride glitched out so badly Sam could no longer sit and would glide across the ground with one hand permanently frozen half-raised in front of her. Restarting fixed the issue, but it occurred during an important story beat, which really pulled me out of the experience.

I also had some severe lag during one of the dancing sequences to the point where I almost failed from missed or delayed button prompts. Other less egregious examples would be characters popping in and out of the screen or randomly twitching, and one or two hiccups in the dialogue. Overall it wasn’t detrimental to my playthrough, but it did happen enough for it to be noticeable.

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I also wish the game did more with its environment. Night School did an amazing job creating an interesting version of Hell, but you never really get to interact with it. It’s just set-dressing for each interaction with the NPCs. It would have been cool to have something to encourage exploration. Finding Bicker NPCs was neat, but with the mythos and history the team set up for Satan and his family, as well as some of the more unique residents of Hell, a little bit of a collect-a-thon for more information and world-building would have been a nice touch.

Overall I very much enjoyed my time with Afterparty. The world was gorgeous and filled with likeable, interesting characters. It tackled themes I found particularly compelling, and the dialogue options offer a lot of replayability. I would actually love to go back and see if I can’t get some different outcomes from the ones I got my first playthrough. It’s light on gameplay, but this is a game I would definitely recommend for those who enjoy narrative experiences.

[easyreview cat1title=”Overall” cat1detail=”” cat1rating=”3.5″]

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Afterparty is available on the Xbox One for $20, or free if you have Xbox Game Pass Ultimate.

REVIEW: Afterparty Title Afterparty

#aFTERPARTY #Night School studio #RPG #Xbox Game Pass

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bountyofbeads · 4 years

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WHY IS JOHN KELLY SPEAKING OUT NOW?.... The former chief of staff is making the case that he spoke truth to power inside the White House. The trouble for him is how many Americans won’t be convinced.

BY PETER NICHOLAS | Published February 13, 2020 4:23 PM ET | The Atlantic | Posted February 13, 2020 |

MORRISTOWN, N.J.—John Kelly had just finished his speech and opened up the floor to questions when a woman in the audience walked up to a microphone. She asked him how he plans “to atone for the blood of those immigrant children that are dying in detention centers” and while crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.

The accusation summed up the substantial skepticism and hostility that Kelly, the former White House chief of staff, faced here last night. Throughout his 75-minute appearance at the Mayo Performing Arts Center, hecklers in the crowd stood and shouted at him about the Trump administration’s family-separation practice and Muslim travel ban, two of the most controversial policies the White House enacted during Kelly’s tenure. Kelly also got smacked by the right. This morning, after I reported on his comments questioning Donald Trump’s North Korea policy and defending the actions of Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, his former boss scolded him on Twitter for speaking out. Kelly “just can’t keep his mouth shut,” the president tweeted.

Not many people who’ve worked closely with Trump have left the administration and unburdened themselves about what they saw. Yet seldom has it been more important to hear the unsparing evaluations of people who watched Trump in action. When a president routinely presents a warped picture of his own actions, it’s essential for the people who were in the room to verify what took place.

Kelly’s experience shows why many officials decide to keep quiet. Trump’s critics aren’t eager to absolve officials who were part of an administration whose policies they abhor. And Team Trump, meanwhile, won’t tolerate a whiff of dissent.

So most of the Trump diaspora has simply decided to stay silent. We’ve heard little from former Defense Secretary James Mattis since he resigned in 2018 over Trump’s decision to pull troops out of Syria, though he did speak to the Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, about his tenure last year. In that interview, he said he owed the Trump administration a period of silence, though he added that it wouldn’t last forever.

Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who once reportedly called Trump a “moron,” hasn’t said all that much about the president’s go-it-alone approach to foreign policy. Gary Cohn, the White House’s former top economic adviser, clashed with Trump over tariff policy and the president’s remarks about the 2017 white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Since his departure the following year, though, Cohn has been circumspect. Indeed, what we know about the White House’s inner workings has largely come from the press. (Last night, Kelly, a retired four-star Marine Corps general, praised Barbara Starr, the longtime defense reporter for the very same cable network Trump loves to hate: CNN.)

Unlike others—including some of his fellow retired generals who once staffed the administration—Kelly has decided that he will speak out, albeit on his own terms. Since his departure from the White House in January 2019, he’s given public speeches and occasional press interviews. As time passes and he gets more distance, his comments have become more revealing. Last month, during a tense period in the Senate impeachment trial, Kelly told a reporter that lawmakers needed to hear from witnesses—a position at odds with that of Trump’s legal team, which had pressed for a quick, no-fuss acquittal.

It may be that Kelly wants to be the author of his own story and inch away from the most polarizing presidency in decades. He made a point last night of mentioning that his wife urged him to join the Trump administration as a form of civic duty. Before he was chief of staff, Kelly ran the Department of Homeland Security. When he got a question about the travel ban, which was enacted in the first days of the Trump administration, Kelly said that DHS officials “were not consulted.”

“It just happened,” he continued. “And it fell on my shoulders, and the people I led at DHS, because there was this immediate confusion: How do you implement this ban?” He added: “Ethically, I did not agree with what this ban was written to do.” Six months later, he joined the White House as Trump’s chief of staff.

At one point in his speech, Kelly talked about Vindman and how young soldiers are trained. “We teach them to always tell the truth, to tell truth to power,” he said.

Kelly is making the case that he himself spoke truth to power inside the Trump administration. The trouble is, many Americans won’t be convinced. They’d likely ask why someone who held so much power couldn’t quash the policies he is criticizing.

When he told the audience about “illegal adults coming across the border,” the woman who suggested that he had blood on his hands broke in.

“No human being is illegal,” she said.

“Stay with me—they are under the law,” Kelly replied.

The woman clearly wasn’t with him.

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It's good that John Kelly is speaking up. But it would have been even better to hear his defense of Lt. Col. Vindman and his judgment on the president's "illegal order" earlier, when these issues were key to a national debate and to an important decision by our elected officials.

"John Kelly said Lt. Col. Vindman is blameless and simply followed the training he’d received as a soldier; migrants are "overwhelmingly good people" and "not all rapists"; and Trump's decision to condition aid to Ukraine upended long-standing U.S. policy."

JOHN KELLY FINALLY LET'S LOOSE ON TRUMP..... The former chief of staff explained, in the clearest terms yet, his misgivings about Trump’s behavior regarding North Korea, immigration, and Ukraine.

By PETER NICHOLAS | Published February 13, 2020 1:05 AM ET | The Atlantic Magazine | Posted Feb 13, 2020

MORRISTOWN, N.J.—Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, the former National Security Council aide and impeachment witness President Donald Trump fired Friday, was just doing his job, former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly told students and guests at a Drew University event here Wednesday night.

Over a 75-minute speech and Q&A session, Kelly laid out, in the clearest terms yet, his misgivings about Trump’s words and actions regarding North Korea, illegal immigration, military discipline, Ukraine, and the news media.

Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general, said that Vindman is blameless and was simply following the training he’d received as a soldier; migrants are “overwhelmingly good people” and “not all rapists”; and Trump’s decision to condition military aid to Ukraine on an investigation into his political rival Joe Biden upended long-standing U.S. policy.

Vindman was rightly disturbed by Trump’s phone call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in July, Kelly suggested: Having seen something “questionable,” Vindman properly notified his superiors, Kelly said. Vindman, who specialized in Ukraine policy at the National Security Council at the time, was among multiple U.S. officials who listened in on the call. When subpoenaed by Congress in the House impeachment hearings, Vindman complied and told the truth, Kelly said.

“He did exactly what we teach them to do from cradle to grave,” Kelly told the audience at the Mayo Performing Arts Center. “He went and told his boss what he just heard.”

Although Trump has long insisted that his call to Zelensky was “perfect,” Kelly made clear that Trump indeed conditioned military aid on Zelensky’s help digging up dirt on the Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

That amounted to a momentous change in U.S. policy toward Ukraine—one that Vindman was right to flag, because other federal agencies needed to know about the shift, Kelly said.

“Through the Obama administration up until that phone call, the policy of the U.S. was militarily to support Ukraine in their defensive fight against … the Russians,” Kelly said. “And so, when the president said that continued support would be based on X, that essentially changed. And that’s what that guy [Vindman] was most interested in.”

When Vindman heard the president tell Zelensky he wanted to see the Biden family investigated, that was tantamount to hearing “an illegal order,” Kelly said. “We teach them, ‘Don’t follow an illegal order. And if you’re ever given one, you’ll raise it to whoever gives it to you that this is an illegal order, and then tell your boss.’”

Throughout the appearance, Kelly laid out his doubts about Trump’s policies. Trump has held two formal summits with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, hoping to scuttle the country’s nuclear program through personal diplomacy. Kelly said the effort was futile.

“He will never give his nuclear weapons up,” Kelly said. “Again, President Trump tried—that’s one way to put it. But it didn’t work. I’m an optimist most of the time, but I’m also a realist, and I never did think Kim would do anything other than play us for a while, and he did that fairly effectively.”

Kelly didn’t know Trump when, after the 2016 election, he was first offered the job of secretary of homeland security. Watching the contest between Trump and the Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, Kelly said he had been “fascinated—not necessarily in a good way—but fascinated as to what that election meant to our country.”

He said his wife urged him to accept the position, telling him, “I frankly think he needs you and people like you.” Kelly ran the Department of Homeland Security until the summer of 2017, when Trump tapped him to replace outgoing Chief of Staff Reince Priebus. Kelly left the White House early last year.

At times Wednesday, Kelly sounded like the anti-Trump. He said he did not believe the press is “the enemy of the people,” for example. And he sharply criticized Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom Trump has steadfastly courted. Kelly described Putin as someone who is “not necessarily a rational actor.” Putin sits atop “a society in collapse,” yet is intent on restoring “the glory days of the Soviet Union,” he said.

At DHS, Kelly was responsible for advancing two of Trump’s top priorities: stopping the flow of illegal immigration, and building a border wall to make unauthorized crossings more difficult. In the speech, he said he disagreed with Trump about the scope of the problem. Trump’s border wall doesn’t need to extend “from sea to shining sea,” Kelly said. He also disapproved of the president’s language about migrants, he said. When Trump announced his candidacy in 2015, he famously described some migrants coming into the U.S. from Mexico as “rapists” and criminals.

Kelly said most migrants are merely looking for jobs. “In fact, they’re overwhelmingly good people … They’re not all rapists and they’re not all murderers. And it’s wrong to characterize them that way. I disagreed with the president a number of times.”

Responding to questions from the audience, Kelly faulted Trump for intervening in the case of Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL who was convicted last year of posing with the corpse of an Islamic State fighter. Trump reversed a Navy decision to oust Gallagher, in a chain of events that led to the resignation of Navy Secretary Richard Spencer.

“The idea that the commander in chief intervened there, in my opinion, was exactly the wrong thing to do,” Kelly said. “Had I been there, I think I could have prevented it.”

The audience applauded.

When a woman in the crowd said that Trump had “elevated” Gallagher, Kelly looked out at the crowd.

“Yep,” he said.

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Madison’s Nightmare Has Come to America

The impeachment and subsequent acquittal of President Trump have revealed deep flaws in the constitutional system.

By Michael Gerhard, Constitutional law professor at the University of North Carolina | Published February 13, 2020 at 9:10 AM ET | The Atlantic | Posted February 13, 2020 |

The Senate’s impeachment trial of President Donald Trump is over, ending with all but one Republican voting to acquit. But the effort to make sense of its constitutional ramifications is only beginning.

Almost a half century ago, President Richard Nixon’s resignation was thought to have proved that the constitutional system worked, with the House, the Senate, and a special prosecutor each having conducted long, painstaking investigations into his misconduct; the Supreme Court having directed President Nixon to comply with a judicial subpoena to turn over taped conversations; and the House Judiciary Committee having approved three articles of impeachment shortly before Nixon resigned.

Margaret Taylor: The Founders set an extremely high bar for impeachment

In sharp contrast, few think that the acquittal of President Trump is a triumph for the Constitution. Instead, it reveals a different, disturbing lesson, about how the American political system—and the Constitution itself—might be fundamentally flawed.

Since the writing of the Constitution, three developments have substantially altered the effectiveness of impeachment as a check on presidential misconduct. The first is the rise of extreme partisanship, under which each party’s goal is frequently to vanquish the other and control as much of the federal government as possible. This aim is fundamentally incompatible with the system that James Madison designed, premised as it was on negotiation, compromise, and a variety of checking mechanisms to ensure that no branch or faction was beyond the reach of the Constitution or the law.

In 2018, this extreme partisanship and its detrimental effects were on full display at the Senate confirmation hearing for the then–Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Senators, by nearly the same vote as they acquitted Trump, expedited Kavanaugh’s confirmation and thwarted an investigation into his possible misconduct that would have delayed or derailed it. Similarly, in 2016, a slim majority of Republican senators held no hearings on President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, preserving the vacancy for President Trump to fill. In both of these events, Republican partisans sought only to prevail, and would not allow for an independent Senate review and investigation of the sort that Madison would have hoped for. Furthermore, the rabid partisanship of the Senate, which Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, denounced in her statement explaining her vote to acquit Trump, is all the more disturbing because the thin majority of the Senate that stalled Garland, confirmed Kavanaugh, and voted to hear no witnesses and not to seek further document production in the Trump trial represents less than half of the American electorate.

The second is the rise of the internet and social media, which has upended the information ecosystem that democracy needs to survive. Madison was one of many Framers who believed that the intricate system of checks and balances in the Constitution depended on the public’s growing interest in being informed about government. He wrote, “I go on this great republican principle, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom.” The proliferation of media outlets online enables people to consult news sources that hew to their opinions, but has not forced them to confront different opinions or search for any objective truth. This tendency, in turn, reinforces the extreme partisanship that pushes people back into their niche—and to so-called facts that are shaped by news sources rather than the events themselves.

The third development is the major change to the process for selecting senators. When the Framers created the Senate, they sought to insulate it from the vicissitudes of public opinion. To do so, they proposed that senators be selected by state legislators. This approach, however, rarely produced a Senate disposed to take the long view and to rise above petty partisanship. In 1913, the Seventeenth Amendment did away with the original scheme for selecting senators, and people have been voting directly for them ever since.

Shortly before he died, Justice Antonin Scalia lamented that change, saying the amendment had killed federalism, the constitutional ideal of the states and federal government keeping each other in check. Even if the late justice’s concern was hyperbolic, it is true that the Senate has since become more like the House, its members primarily attuned to the need for reelection and to follow the whims or attitudes of popular majorities. The fallout from these changes has been the erosion of the Senate’s independence from presidential and party or factional control.

Yet, partisanship, the rise of the internet and social media, and changes in Senate selection do not fully explain what happened in the Trump trial.

The president, since being acquitted, has shown how wrong Republican Senator Susan Collins was when she said he had “learned” from his impeachment. In fact, the president said she was wrong and denounced the “evil,” “corrupt,” “vicious,” “scum,” “sleazebag,” and “crooked” Democratic leaders, and the impeachment effort itself as a scam. In spite of the condemnation of 53 senators (including the first senator to vote to convict and remove from office a president of his own party), Trump insisted that his phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was “perfect.” He also began retaliating against those who’d raised concerns about him freezing aid to Ukraine and pressuring Zelensky to announce an investigation into Joe Biden, including dismissing Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman and Vindman’s twin brother (who had no connection to the Ukraine scandal) and Ambassador Gordon Sondland. The president has unleashed his usual vitriol against senators who dared to vote to convict him for his misconduct in office. Republican senators, who largely voted to acquit the president, have stood mutely by while the president wreaks his revenge, including demanding that top Justice Department officials recommend a lesser sentence for his crony Roger Stone (which led four prosecutors to withdraw from the case in protest).

Such outrage, along with the prospect of a president emboldened to do as he pleases, demonstrates how ineffective the mechanism of impeachment is now. As Abbe Lowell, a former counsel for the House Democrats, put it just after the Senate acquitted President Bill Clinton, the most effective check on presidential misconduct was the pressure to resign, not impeachment. But that alternative to impeachment does not work with presidents who are unwilling to confess error and see no reason to leave office.

Without resignation as an option, and the resistance of the president’s party to his ouster, the prospect that the Constitution’s two-thirds threshold for conviction and removal will ever be met is nil. Each of the three presidential-impeachment trials in American history ended with acquittals, the first with an immensely unpopular president who may have bribed senators to acquit him, the second with a popular president whose party had the numbers to block his conviction, and the third for a president whose party dared not offend or oppose him. Impeachment, in brief, has yet to work against a president of the United States. Any president prone to misconduct can look at the pattern and see that as long as he can keep most, if not all, of his party’s senators in line, he is immune to conviction and removal from office. Future presidents will see the acquittals as license to do whatever they want.

Jane Chong: This is not the Senate the Framers imagined

The lesson in all this isn’t that the Constitution has recently broken so much as that its flaws, always present, have been fully revealed. The bar for removing a president is too high for American politics ever to clear, and party resistance to abandoning their own is too strong; the result is a virtually unrestrained executive. Without impeachment available as a meaningful check on presidential abuse of power, the only option left for holding a president accountable is the electoral process, the very one that 53 senators criticized President Trump for trying to rig. Americans have every reason to expect the president to cut deals with foreign interests to help his reelection and businesses and hurt his political foes.

Amid all this, public conversation has reached a nadir. Madison believed that civil discourse was everyone’s responsibility, that representative government could not work unless the people themselves took education and enlightenment seriously. Twenty years ago, when I testified as a joint witness at the House’s impeachment against President Clinton, I received a handful of notes and emails, most positive.

This time was different: Emulating the president in tone, hundreds of people sent me emails and letters calling me names, spewing profanity, condemning my education and me for being Jewish; many insinuated or made threats against me and my family. The hate mail proclaimed that I knew nothing about impeachment and should be fired.

The coarsening of public debate is one of this president’s many destructive legacies. He has spouted vitriol and hatred at millions of Americans whose offenses are telling the truth and daring to question him.

Yet, more is at stake in the next election than Trump remaining president or the truth. Voters must choose between two competing visions of the Constitution. A Trump loss this November will be an important step in restoring the Madisonian Constitution, with its aspirations for a virtuous and enlightened electorate, along with its safeguards against an executive who can do whatever he wants. A Trump victory would essentially replace Madison’s Constitution with Trump’s own vision, which equates his office with his own personal interests, and proclaims that he can do no wrong, that he may not be held accountable anyplace except where he chooses, and that he alone tells the truth. This would fulfill Madison’s nightmare, establishing the very thing the Framers shook off: tyranny.

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This story is part of the project “The Battle for the Constitution,” in partnership with the National Constitution Center.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to [email protected].

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MICHAEL GERHARDT is Scholar-in-Residence at the National Constitution Center and Burton Craige Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of North Carolina School of Law. He is the author of Impeachment: What Everyone Needs to Know.

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Why Bill Weld Is Really Running Against Trump

The former Massachusetts governor thinks he can rebuke the president even without beating him.

By ADAM Harris | Published February 12, 2020 | The Atlantic | Posted February 13, 2020 |

President Donald Trump strolled to a dominating victory in New Hampshire last night. “Wouldn’t a big story be that I got more New Hampshire Primary Votes than any incumbent president, in either party, in the history of that Great State,” he tweeted. “Not an insignificant fact!”

On a night when Bernie Sanders became the clear Democratic front-runner and Amy Klobuchar found a new wave of momentum, Trump wanted his preeminence in the Republican Party to be known. Commanding more than 85 percent of the vote, Trump spun it as an unqualified victory. While it wasn’t the resounding 97 percent of the vote that Ronald Reagan carried as the incumbent in 1984, Trump won a higher percentage of the vote than Barack Obama, both George Bushes, and Bill Clinton did in their reelection primaries.

But from his watch party in Manchester last night, facing the Merrimack River, former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld, who received 9 percent of the vote in the state’s Republican primary, was still holding on to hope. “Longtime Trump advisor Steve Bannon said that if Donald Trump loses 3% of the traditional Republican vote, he won’t be re-elected,” he said in a written statement. “I guess he won’t be re-elected.”

On Thursday, tucked inside a basement college classroom in Durham, New Hampshire, that could have doubled as a bunker, Weld described the stakes of his campaign. His expectations were the floor, he told me, leaning back and opening a bag of popcorn. If he got even a semblance of support, it meant that Republicans—and independents, who are able to vote in the state’s primary—were receptive to someone other than Trump. If Trump’s command of the Republican Party is complete, Weld at least hopes to be the firewall preventing Trumpism from spreading beyond the GOP.

Read: Breakfast with Bill Weld

“I’ve always been on the libertarian edge of the Republican Party,” he said. “But I certainly don’t feel a member of this party as it’s represented in Washington, D.C., right now.” There should be no illusions as to whether Weld will win the nomination. (He almost certainly won’t.) The president boasts a 94 percent approval rating among Republicans, according to the latest Gallup poll. But being an underdog has its benefits. “There’s nothing for me to be fearful about,” Weld said.

Among independents, Trump has a 42 percent approval rating. Weld believes that he can persuade those independents to stick with him in several of the open primaries—and semi-open primaries, such as New Hampshire’s—with what he calls the “whole truth” about Trump: that the president is an “outrageous racist” who is unqualified for office. While Pat Buchanan–esque finishes are out of reach—the political pundit won 37 percent of the New Hampshire–primary vote in 1992 against the incumbent, George H. W. Bush—an insurgent influence campaign may not be.

Never Trumpism might be more of a capillary than a vein, Weld believes, but it’s a vital one. “People ask me, you know, ‘Why are you in this?’” he said.“I mean, my goodness, we’re looking at a president who thinks that he doesn’t have to listen to anybody and he’s unwilling to read anything.” He added, “That’s dangerous for the United States.”

Thirty minutes before Weld and I spoke, he was upstairs sitting in an audience, searching for a microphone to offer more of a comment than a question to Deval Patrick, also a former governor of Massachusetts, who was speaking at a forum on higher education. Weld had called Patrick the day after Patrick announced his run for the presidency to let him know that he admired what he was doing. Then, together, they lauded another former Massachusetts governor for his vote to impeach the president. “We can welcome Governor [Mitt] Romney to the good guys’ club this time,” Weld joked. (Patrick dropped out of the race this morning after failing to gain traction in Iowa and New Hampshire.)

I asked Weld what it would mean if he’s actually able to sway some Republican voters. “It means that there is an appetite for an alternative to Trump,” he said. Then, I asked, what if he’s not successful? Well, he said, it means that Republicans are not willing “to listen to someone who’s pointing out that Emperor Trump doesn’t have a nice new fancy set of clothes on.”

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Trump’s Biggest Vulnerability

His lies about health care at the State of the Union signal just how weak he is on the issue.

By RONALD BROWNSTEIN | Published February 6, 2020 | The Atlantic | Posted February 13, 2020 |

President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address on Tuesday offered a preview of the economic debate that could tip the presidential election this fall.

The speech crystallized a key question: Will voters measure their personal economic well-being primarily through trends in unemployment and the stock market, or by whether their income is keeping up with their costs, particularly for health care? It’s a crucial distinction, because polls show that while a clear majority of Americans give Trump positive marks for his handling of the economy, a large majority also consistently disapprove of his record on health care.

“While economic indicators are generally moving in the right direction, health-care indicators are not,” says Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan group.

On Tuesday night, Trump triumphantly rattled off figures about buoyant job growth, record-low unemployment among African Americans and Latinos, and soaring highs for the stock market. Though some of the figures were exaggerated, and others represented more of a continuation than a break from the economy’s performance under President Barack Obama, fact-checkers generally found relatively little to debunk.

Read: Trump has no room for error in 2020

But Trump’s treatment of health care was very different. Though he was just as assertive in his tone, the president made a series of false claims—in particular, he repeatedly lied about his administration’s unrelenting efforts to gut the Affordable Care Act. To Democrats, Trump’s determination to surround his health-care record with what Winston Churchill once called a “bodyguard of lies” clearly signaled that the president recognizes how vulnerable his record could prove this fall.

Polls leave little doubt that voters express much more positive assessments of the economy than the health-care system. “Because people see health care as so central to both their personal well-being and their financial well-being, health care stands out as Trump’s No. 1 vulnerability,” says the longtime Democratic pollster Geoff Garin. “The simplest way for people to understand the Trump economy is that whatever wage increases they are getting are smaller than the increases in their health-care premiums and out-of-pocket health-care costs.”

Over the past year, voters’ optimism about the economy has increased consistently across a wide array of polls. With this tailwind, the share of Americans who approve of Trump’s handling of the economy has also increased, settling in at about 55 percent. As I’ve written, Trump faces more resistance than any previous president among voters satisfied with the economy; about one-fifth of those who say they approve of Trump on the economy still say they disapprove of his overall performance.

But even so, that still means that most voters who approve of Trump’s economic performance approve of him overall. As Trump’s ratings for managing the economy have increased, so have his overall approval ratings. Just this week, Gallup showed his job approval spiking to 49 percent, its highest rating ever for him—although other polls have not recorded as dramatic an increase.

But the public assessment of Trump’s performance on health care tells a different story. In an Associated Press/National Opinion Research Center survey last month, just 38 percent of Americans said they approved of his record on health care—a grade that has stayed relatively stable since he took office—compared with 56 percent who approved of his handling of the economy, the highest of his presidency.

The latest monthly health-care poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation drilled down further into those views. In the survey, just about a third of adults gave Trump positive marks for dealing with preexisting conditions, the ACA, and prescription-drug costs. Detailed results provided to me by Kaiser showed that two key groups of swing voters shared this deep skepticism of Trump’s health-care record. A majority of college-educated white men disapproved of how Trump has handled each of the three issues. And while white women without a college degree—a group that could decide the Rust Belt states that tilted the 2016 election to Trump—broke against him more narrowly on the ACA and preexisting conditions, just 31 percent of them gave him positive marks on prescription-drug costs.

The Republican pollster Gene Ulm told me that easing those doubts about his handling of health-care issues is crucial for Trump’s reelection prospects. “No president would be in the game without people believing the economy is getting better than it was,” Ulm said. But for “the next cluster of voters” beyond those immediately drawn to him, “it’s the cost of health care, prescription drugs, and the whole cluster of premiums, co-pays, [and] out-of-pocket expenses” that matter most.

And on those fronts, the best measure of Trump’s anxiety was his mendacity in describing his record on Tuesday night.

Trump, not for the first time, flatly lied about his efforts to revoke the ACA’s protections for those with preexisting conditions. Not only is his administration currently in federal court seeking to invalidate the entire ACA, but in 2017 he endorsed Republican proposals in Congress to effectively erase those protections by allowing insurance companies to charge people who have greater health needs more. “It’s notable that the president feels the need to say he’s protecting people with preexisting conditions,” Levitt says, “but the facts just don’t back that up.”

On prescription drugs, the gap between Trump’s words and actions isn’t quite as stark. Kenneth Thorpe, a health economist at Emory University who served in President Bill Clinton’s administration, told me Trump was correct when he said that federal data showed a decline in overall prescription-drug costs last year. The problem is that prices for some high-profile drugs (such as insulin) are still rising, and the overall cost has stabilized at a level that is unaffordable for many Americans. An added concern, Thorpe said, is that more insurance plans are including prescription drugs in their total deductibles—meaning that patients must spend more out of pocket until they reach that threshold. “What people care about is what they pay, not what the overall cost of the medication is,” he told me.

Trump has talked about confronting prescription-drug costs since his 2016 campaign, when he embraced the long-standing Democratic idea of allowing Medicare to negotiate for lower prices with drug companies. But amid opposition from the pharmaceutical industry, and Republicans leery of an aggressive federal role in health care, he renounced that proposal.

Democrats, meanwhile, have picked up the mantle, putting it at the center of the H.R. 3 legislation that the House passed in December. (That was the bill House Democrats were alluding to when a group of them rose to chant “H.R. 3” during Trump’s State of the Union address.)

Read: The votes that could deliver Democrats another majority

The GOP-led Senate hasn’t taken up the bill, but the public’s intense focus on drug costs makes it possible that Trump will offer some proposals on the issue before Election Day. That’s why it’s so essential for Democrats to more sharply define the terms of debate right now. “It is really important for Democrats to set the bar on the drug-pricing issue at whether someone supports or opposes giving Medicare the power to negotiate,” Garin warns.

As of now, though, the party’s 2020 presidential candidates have provided almost no visibility to drug pricing, while incessantly arguing over a single-payer system that would eliminate private health insurance. That’s symptomatic of the Democratic candidates’ broader failure to explicitly make a case against Trump’s health-care record, even as they release extensive health-care plans of their own.

Health-care issues—in particular, promises to protect people with preexisting conditions and to tackle prescription-drug prices—were a central reason Democrats notched big gains in the 2018 midterm elections, even as a clear majority of voters viewed the economy positively. In 2020, health care again probably offers Democrats their best chance to inoculate themselves against Trump’s claim that the economy is working for most Americans. But so far at least, Democrats on the campaign trail are letting the president off the hook.

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thirtytwopage · 6 years

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There’s an assortment of forms of documentation that can be utilized to structure basic research papers. For those who are at the moment composing a paper, I counsel investigating an MLA exploration paper illustration and try to format your own paper in just the exact same way. A exploration paper need to have the next to be able to make it as persuasive as you possibly can.

The Concealed Reality on Mla Structure for Essays

The MLA model structure is, in addition, the favored formatting design and style utilized by a variety of college and online business presses. There are a few MLA title regulations. When it’s got to accomplish together with the paper writing online MLA referencing fashion it is vital to notice hat we’ve some considerable deviations with the other referencing types.

The essay expected through a professor is often a do the trick for those learners. Subsequent that, studies differ. With no right formatting context, they can not appreciate the liberal arts and humanities scholars.

Mla Structure for Essays – the Conspiracy

Writing regulations like accurate MLA structure provide the purpose of official creating. To employ an accurate MLA format a single should use commonplace white paper. The good point about arranging a biography essay is undoubtedly an founded format, not just in MLA structure fashion, but additionally around the very effortless business of your articles.

Just one with the complete most vital features tends to be that a business should have writers that happen to be well-informed and who can generate top-quality tailor made papers employing any citation design including MLA producing style. Now, when using the arrival within the MLA format citation generator, learners could possibly go after their unique explore papers at their very own velocity.

Lifestyle, Loss of life and Mla Structure for Essays

Immediately following picking a subject, mirror over the kind of visitors which you may have. Just before you decide to start off crafting, make sure you are aware of a great deal more with regard to the specifics which you’re controlling. You will find more than one indicates to attempt a short piece of writing.

Once deciding on a subject, reflect within the form of viewers which you will have. Solely speaking, it means when creating press releases, invariably remember the media performs a particularly significant function of what will get printed, thus, the content material has got to be newsworthy. You will find more than one usually means to do a brief content.

To start with, you ought to come to a decision the size of your time you plan the biography to become (which can switch centered over the complete volume of data you discover it achievable to collect). Most have remarkable brands for each and every one sort of citation an individual would possibly demand. It can be probable so that you can take a look at our samples inside the website.

At the moment it is also http://www.calstate.edu/eap/englishcourse/ a good idea to compose the Is effective Cited site. They no longer really need to depart their bedrooms with the intention to locate educational resources. They at all times need assistance even though producing these bibliographies.

Explore several of the most typical blunders which students make when employing just like a support which which you ought to do as a substitute paper now. Your composing expertise or interest will be used to get paid you revenue which will provide help to deal with your day to working day costs. Next it’s essential to present your job as attractively as you’re able to.

The MLA is effective cited format just isn’t necessarily intricate. It’s been universally adopted by most school, since it serves an incredibly essential function on earth of composing. MLA structure here is in its finest, as it is adaptable and will tackle even technological breakthroughs.

Yet another way to check the caliber of your contractor and organisation may be to request references which have had grievances. Researching to the very finest creating assistance is based on one particular primary aspect on no matter whether you may see a promise with the capital or not. Just about every respectful creating support meticulously is effective on trying to keep an outstanding name, so it can be relatively easy to check it.

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douchebagbrainwaves · 5 years

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WHERE TO STARTUPS CONDENSE IN USA

One level at which you can then trade again for anything else you need. The better they are, the more stuff they seem to have been defeated mainly by treating it as a pro. An experienced programmer would be more likely to notice if you're doing it wrong. The programmers I admire most are not, on the whole, captivated by Java. There is a large random multiplier in the success of any company. Running upstairs is hard for you but even harder for him.1 How many of us have suspected. And that's exciting because it means lots more startups will happen.

As I was mulling over these remarks it struck me how familiar they seemed. And as his example suggests, this can be valuable knowledge.2 Like all such things, it was harder to reach an audience or collaborate on projects. It would be like someone claiming they had independently decided in 1972 that bell-bottom jeans were a good idea to get bought, if you admire two kinds of work. It was coming, all the same. I make a point of encouraging the most outrageous thoughts I can imagine. I'm convinced, is a mistake.3 Similarly, if you did somehow accumulate a fortune, the ruler or his henchmen would find a way to get the attention of an audience than as a reader. Don't expect it to be, but it will be. And what getting a job seems to mean is joining another institution. Raising an angel round meant a collection of points of roughly equal importance, and he wouldn't have had time to work on.4 But these words are part of the reason I laughed so much at the talk by the good speaker at that conference was that everyone else still shares, you're in the home stretch, and if people aren't using your software, maybe it's not just the dogfood portals we all heard about during the Internet Bubble.

Look for the people who use it. What we're seeing now, everyone's probably going to be an artist, which is the ability to get things done, with no excuses. You have to assume it takes some amount of pain.5 It's so simple. Within my head I make a point of encouraging the most outrageous thoughts I can imagine managers at this point the default outcome. All other things being equal, they should.6 Or at least discard any code you wrote while still employed and start over.7 Startups, like mosquitos, tend to be more conservative for their kids than they would in a big company is probably getting a bad deal, because his performance is dragged down by the overall lower performance of the others. Whereas if you solve a technical problem that a lot of work. So bang, there's the structure, and you can decrease how much you spend. You can measure the value of the company is small, you are thereby fairly close to measuring the contributions of individual employees. Although doing great work takes less discipline than people think—because the way to do it without getting yourself accused of being a good writer than being a good speaker.

And so the average person, brand dominates all other factors in the judgement of art is dominated by these extraneous factors; they're like someone trying to judge the taste of apples, I'd agree that taste is just a matter of absolute returns, the super-angels, the most powerful motivator is the prospect that one of their competitors will buy you. It's what impresses reporters, and potential new users.8 That averaging gets to be a property of objects after all.9 Every thing you own takes energy away from you. Even if you start a startup. Starting or joining a startup is so hard that it's a close call even for the ones that succeed. And it's only now that you can write what you want and publish when you want. A speech like that is, some of each. It's too early to ask. Can you do more of that?10

Starting or joining a startup is the startup itself. If you want to know what they are so that I, at least, wow, that's pretty cool. To get the same rate of return, the VC would have to get them beaten out of you by contact with the real world.11 Although moral fashions tend to arise from different sources than fashions in clothing, the mechanism of their adoption seems much the same way a gene pool does. Otherwise these companies would have tried to fix the problem. But that's not the same thing happened with food in the middle of getting rich translates into buying Ferraris, or being admired. So if you hope to start a startup just one year later, after you graduate, as long as you're producing, you'll know you're not using dissatisfaction as an excuse for being lazy.12

If you want to do. That's the only defence. In our own time. Unproductive pleasures pall eventually. To launch a taboo, a group has to be powerful enough to enforce taboos, but weak enough to need them.13 How do you know how you're doing. What does that mean for founders? Others say I will get in trouble for. But it seemed worth spoiling the atmosphere if I could save some of the qualities of a VC.14 The reason: today's teenage hacker is tomorrow's CTO. The ball you need to be solved, and d deliver them as informally as possible, e starting with a crude version 1, then f iterating rapidly.15

Notes

Compromising a server could cause such damage that ASPs that want to take board seats for shorter periods.

With a classic fixed sized round, or it would have become good friends. You'd have to do that? And journalists as part of grasping evolution was to realize that. The Baumol Effect induced by the financial controls of World War II had become so embedded that they got to the point of view: either an IPO, or some vague thing like that, the assembly line, the government and construction companies.

Give us 10 million and we'll tell you who they are public and persist indefinitely, comments on e. They can't estimate your minimum capital needs that precisely. There are simply the embodiment of some brilliant initial idea. It's common for founders to try to disguise it with such a statement would merely be eccentric.

In one way to tell computers how to achieve wisdom is that it's boring, whereas bad philosophy is worth studying as a source of them. Build them a microcomputer, and most pharmaceutical startups the second component is empty—an idea is bad.

European Financial Management, 9:1 It's hard to think about so-called lifestyle business, and those where the richest buyers are, but they were going back to 1970 it would grow as big as a first—new things start to have to recognize them when you had to pay employees this way probably should.

In practice it just feels like a ragged comb. In Russia they just don't make users register to read a new SEC rule issued in 1982 rule 415 that made steam engines dramatically more efficient. You can safely write off all the best hackers want to be a lot online. And the reason for the spot very easily.

Ironically, the editors think the top startup law firms are Wilson Sonsini, Orrick, Fenwick West, Gunderson Dettmer, and the war on. 05 15, the most powerful minister of the fatal pinch where your existing investors help you along by promising to invest but tried to combine the hardware with an investor would sell it to colleagues.

Now the misunderstood artist is not that the probabilities of features i. It's a case in point: lots of people starting normal companies too. Zagat's there are some VCs who can say they're not ready to invest but tried to combine the hardware with an idea that evolves naturally, and his son Robert were each in turn forces Digg to respond with extreme countermeasures. How can people who did it.

It doesn't happen often. The dumber the customers, the apparent misdeeds of corp dev people are these days. Yes, it is very common for founders, HR acquisitions are viewed by acquirers as more akin to hiring bonuses. More precisely, the last batch before a consortium of investors started offering investment automatically to every startup founder or investor I saw this I used a recent Business Week article mentioning del.

If you assume that the lack of movement between companies was as a rule, if you seem evasive than if you have significant expenses other than those I mark. In this context, etc. The people worth impressing already judge you more than the others to act.

Your mileage may vary. If your income tax rates were highest: 14.

Do not finance your startup with a no-land, while she likes getting attention in the US.

But those are usually more desperate for money. You should always absolutely refuse to give him 95% of the false positive rates are untrustworthy, as they are themselves typical users. Ideas are one of the former, because you have is so hard to say that a skilled vine-dresser was worth it for the fences in our case, 20th century. Because we want to keep them from leaving to start businesses to circumvent NWLB wage controls in order to test a new Lisp dialect called Arc that is exactly the point of treason.

Do not use ordinary corporate lawyers for this at YC I find I never watch movies in theaters anymore. Experienced investors know about it well enough known that people will give you such a dangerous mistake to do more than others, and partly simple ignorance. The first alone yields someone who's stubbornly inert. 5,000 or a community, or invent relativity.

If you want to take care of one's markets is ultimately just another way to predict areas where you read about startup founders and one didn't try to accept that investors don't lead startups on; their reputations are too valuable.

Thanks to Peter Norvig, Ian Hogarth, Sam Altman, James Bracy, Patrick Collison, and Dan Giffin for sparking my interest in this topic.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #care #Internet #thoughts

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lorrainecparker · 6 years

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ART OF THE CUT with Oscar nominee Tatiana Riegel, ACE

Tatiana Riegel just won the ACE Eddie for Best Edited Feature Comedy and has been nominated for this year’s Best Editing Oscar for her work on I, Tonya. Riegel’s previous nominations and awards include a 2009 Daytime Emmy nomination for Imaginary Bitches, and a 2008 ACE Eddie win for The Half Life of Timofey Berezin.

I, Tonya, was directed by Craig Gillespie, with whom she’s worked on several films including The Finest Hours, Million Dollar Arm and Lars and the Real Girl. Other work includes There Will Be Blood, Fright Night and The Men Who Stare At Goats. TV work includes Game Of Thrones and House, M.D. As an assistant editor, she worked on JFK, and Pulp Fiction, among others.

As you may be able to guess, this is an interview I’ve been pursuing for a while and Tatiana did not disappoint. She is just as skilled at articulating the nuances of her craft as she is at editing.

(This interview was transcribed with SpeedScriber. Thanks to Martin Baker at Digital Heaven)

Director Craig Gillespie on-set with Margot Robbie, as Tonya Harding.

HULLFISH: You’ve worked with director Craig Gillespie before.

RIEGEL: A lot. This is our fifth feature. We also did a pilot together.

HULLFISH: Tell me a little bit about what that does for you, to work with the same director again: the comfort level or the shorthand. What are the editorial benefits?

RIEGEL: It’s a wonderful and unique luxury to have that. It’s remarkable actually. Craig and I started working together 10 years ago on Lars and the Real Girl. We now have a knowledge of each other, of our sensibilities and of our humor that makes it simple… we just understand each other so much.

Craig told me he was going to send me the script for I, Tonya, and at first, I thought, “Really? Tonya Harding?” I had the same reaction that I suspect a lot of people have to the film at first. Then I read it and right off the bat I was like, “Oh I totally get it”. I understand why they chose Craig, he just was perfect for it. It was an amazing script and I knew that Craig was going to just bring even more to it and that I would love working on it. Particularly with a film like this, where there is a very delicate dance of tone, having a good knowledge of the director and what they’re going to want and need is invaluable.

HULLFISH: The tone is one of those things that I really respected with the movie. Most of it is comical but then it does dip into these moments, especially with Allison Janney, playing the character of Tonya’s mom, where you do get glimpses of humanity you get glimpses of this tough exterior slipping a little bit. The tone is always shifting.

RIEGEL: That’s exactly the thing that attracted me initially to the script once I read it; what I found so unique. First of all, the way they told the story with these different/unreliable viewpoints. The film is filled with characters that you don’t think you’re going to like. I was very guilty of having an opinion about what I thought were the facts. Not that the film is trying to tell you ultimately how to feel about it, you can still have your own opinion about who did what and when, but it expands your knowledge of who these people are and why they may have done what they did. Even with Tonya Harding’s mother who’s just a horrible horrible mother in the film. She still does have a couple of positive qualities too.

For example, she worked a tough job as a waitress to pay for the lessons and she took her at dawn every morning to the rink. I always wonder what her own childhood was like. She did the best she knew how and there is something that you can connect to on an emotional level even when they’re frankly a pretty vile person. You can still connect and appreciate in some way. Obviously, Tonya Harding is a tough woman, but now you can see why she is the way she is and what led her to become this kind of person… and survive it.

HULLFISH: You had fantastic performances to work with, but then you also have to curate those performances and be a steward of those performances. Are there specific places where you can remember doing that or thinking, “Hey I’ve got this great performance, but it can be enhanced with editing?”

RIEGEL: I think that’s the case with every movie. You’re always trying to make the most of every performance but it’s even more fun with actors who are so capable: they gave me a huge range of material so I could pick and choose and build and sculpt the arc of each character with their performance throughout. In this film, there was nobody that was a weak link. It was an embarrassment of riches. Every single performance was just flawless and gave unlimited options all with honesty.

All of the departments did that. From the camera department to the hair and makeup to the costumes to later in post our sound and our composer. Everybody delivered, which made my job ridiculously wonderful because by the time it got into my room I got to spend time really making the story, and not having to fix or work around too many problems. It was really quite luxurious.

HULLFISH: One of the places that I remember I really liked, was a moment where you could have cut away sooner but you held a moment longer: it was after a point where the mom — who could care less for the affections of her daughter — tells Tonya to give her a kiss before she leaves. And you hold on the mom after the kiss for a moment.

RIEGEL: I love that scene. I really love that scene! I believe it was a scene that was put into the script rather late in the process. I think that Craig actually requested and Steven (scriptwriter, Steven Rogers) to write: a beautiful and important scene needed in that spot. It’s interesting because Craig shot it two different ways in terms of angles. He shot it in a more conventional way, which is a little bit more “front on,” where you see faces more and then he shot it the way that you saw in the film. It’s often from the back or profiles of both actors. I cut it both ways and sent it to the director early on. I told him my great preference was for the more mysterious, darker and manipulative on LaVona’s part. It’s one of my favorite scenes actually, and that moment – kiss your mother – is such a great moment of holding power over her daughter – the look on Allison’s face is just brilliant. This is the third film I’ve actually done with Allison Janney and I’ve told her several times I would be happy to be her personal editor.

HULLFISH: After watching this performance I think that I would say the same thing to her if I was in that position. Absolutely.

With the “kiss your mother” scene, the angles were kind of oblique and also, I assume, you’re trying to play with the timing of how long it takes Tonya to concede to the kiss and who to be on in this power struggle.

RIEGEL: As the scene progresses they’re having this very awkward crazy conversation about domestic abuse and who hits who. Tonya is telling her mother that LaVona used to hit her father. It’s a crazy scene. It’s a discussion about a brutal topic and then the brutality is shown throughout the film. Tonya gets up to leave the scene because she just doesn’t want to deal with it anymore, that’s her protection, to go to practice and then her mom just comes up one more time and says, “Kiss your mother,” total power play and which is just the last thing in the world Tonya wants to do. So she goes over and gives the least affectionate kiss humanly possible and then escapes.

HULLFISH: Why would LaVona even want this kiss, except to exert dominance?

RIEGEL: That’s what abuse is all about. It’s a power and a control issue and control is something that Tonya Harding had to face so much in her life with her mother or her husband or the skating community trying to control her and make her into a person that she’s not. She was one of the most spectacular athletes and they didn’t just appreciate that at face value. They wanted to constantly push a square peg into a round hole and make her something she wasn’t.

HULLFISH: There’s another very tense scene in the kitchen with a knife. How did you approach that scene?

RIEGEL: This is a very simple dinner when it starts off – spoiler alert, by the way – two people quietly at dinner, not talking to each other and it escalates quickly into an argument with her mom crazily grabbing anything off the table she can get her hand on and heaving it at Tonya who defends herself only by ducking then one of the things LaVona grabs is a knife and throws it at her Tonya. It’s wonderful to watch in the theater because every time we get this huge gasp from the audience. Not only the audience, but the characters themselves are stunned. Lavona is stunned that she’s done that. Tonya’s stunned. You then wait and wait and wait. The tension is stretched and pulled and ratcheted up cutting back and forth between them as the audience wonders what they’re going to do. They, as characters, are wondering what the other is going to do. And it continues to be pulled and pulled tighter and tighter until Tonya takes the knife and slaps it down on the table and then just walks away and we are left with LaVona just standing there. All you hear is her breathing and it is as tense as you can possibly get: holding it for as long as possible until just before it breaks and then smashing LaVona in with that interview of: “Oh please, show me a family that doesn’t have ups and downs” which is her character, again, blowing off anything that she did wrong in this crazy absurd way but mostly is this marvelous release of tension for the audience with a ridiculous comic moment.

HULLFISH: Editing is so much like music where you build a tension and then provide release and that scene is definitely a high example of that. You mentioned in the end of that scene that all you hear is her breathing. I can’t remember: is there a music cue throughout that scene or do you do it dry?

RIEGEL: No, no. It’s dry. There’s a music cue at the end of the other scene we were talking about – that “kiss your mother” scene that I love – it’s Vivaldi’s Four Seasons that is just this beautiful piece that’s the absolute antithesis of what’s happening on screen and then again with her ZZ Top skate.

HULLFISH: Talk to me about the use of music, because there’s a lot of pop music cuts. There’s a great music cut that you obviously started at a specific point so that it paused at a dramatic moment at the door.

RIEGEL: Yeah it’s Fleetwood Mac. It’s a whole montage section where it starts there and she walks to the door and there’s a little break in the music and then it picks up again as she opens the door. That’s Fleetwood Mac and that exact moment worked perfectly. There is also a wonderful rhythm thing a little bit later that just builds and builds during the interview section in that montage when she’s talking to the audience. Music in this film was so much fun to do. We had 40 some-odd needle drops and then score on top of that. None of the music was in the script. That was something that Craig really wanted to do to bring energy, time period, emotion, all of these different things to the film which I thought was absolutely brilliant. Early on he got some 400 songs from the music supervisor and he just started listening to them and then he sent them to me and I started listening to them and during the shooting process, he had some ideas of things that might work. For example Devil Woman, Craig knew early that he wanted to use that song when LaVona is at the skating rink with young Tonya and then others songs were experimentation, trying everything – moving them around and then crossing our fingers and trying to figure out if we could get clearance and pay for them, which is always a hurdle. We proceed as if everybody was going to say ‘yes’ and we had all the money in the world. And then let other people like our music supervisor, Sue Jacobs, figure that out. She worked miracles, thank goodness.

HULLFISH: Yeah, there’s nothing worse than finding that perfect cut of music and then not being able to clear it or being able to pay for it.

RIEGEL: The Fleetwood Mac example is one I was absolutely terrified about because they happen to be a very difficult band to clear. Not only are they expensive but there are a lot of band members, so you have to get a lot of people to say yes. We couldn’t find anything else to work there and I didn’t know what we were going to do if they don’t say yes. I’ve worked on other projects where you couldn’t get something that was perfect for the film – that was just flawless – but you just couldn’t get it. It’s heartbreaking to know that something could have been better and you can’t use it for some reason. So, with this particular cue, I was just over the moon when we actually got it, because I didn’t know what our other options were going to be. It worked so well in the very beginning of it and it built throughout the whole montage so wonderfully. I was thrilled. This film was very different than anything that I have done before, musically. The first thing is that there were so many songs.

I work in a way where I try to avoid putting music in for a long time. A lot of people don’t do that. A lot of people want to see something as finished as possible early on. I, frankly, would argue against that as much as possible because I think many times it hurts the movie if you put movie music on too soon. I think music is so powerful and so important that if put in too soon, can cover a lot of stuff that shouldn’t be covered yet. If you can cut a scene without music and really force yourself to be efficient and honest and get a scene to work dry – get an action sequence or suspense sequence or an emotional sequence whatever it is – if you can get that sequence to really work dry, you know when you put music on you’re just going to be better. If a scene works without music, you know that that scene’s really working. The other problem that happens is that you start to have transitions from scene to scene with music and you can somehow become attached to those transitions because they work so well musically whereas if there weren’t music there, you might be freer and more apt to move a scene around and find the right place. And I often think movies have too much music.

This movie has a lot of music in it but that’s just the nature of this movie. I think there are a lot of films that have too much score because music gets added in so soon and we get so used to it that if you pull it out it feels odd and then it just lives there even though perhaps it’s not needed. It’s like if you use highlighter on your book everywhere, it doesn’t stand out anymore. I always like to hold off as long as possible before putting in music. Having said that, it’s NOT the way we approached this film. So much is cut to the music we had to start putting it in early in the process. Still, I did not put music in through my whole first assembly. It wasn’t until the director came in about two weeks into it: that’s when we started trying anything and everything and seeing how it worked.

HULLFISH: One of the challenges in this movie would have been the skating scenes: to cut seamlessly between Margot and what I have to assume is a skating double. They’re seamless and very complex.

https://youtu.be/YTpeiTQoWIA

RIEGEL: Each skating sequence is very different from the others, and intentionally so. Craig wanted them all to have their own personality so he and the DP and the others really choreographed and designed each one to be quite different but obviously based on her real performances.

They did it so well. For example, the very first one with ZZ Top is when Tonya is quite young and she’s very aggressive and bold and brash and energetic and cocky. So it’s sharp and cut in a way that is much faster and a little rougher and more dynamic versus at the very end at Lillehammer where it’s all one shot: it’s not all one shot but it plays as all one shot. It actually goes back and forth between Margot and the double and then back to Margot. It is intentionally done with the simplicity of one shot to be in her head, to build tension and pressure for what’s happening with her. Then on top of that, there’s the whole technical aspect of visual effects, because, as good of a skater as Margot is, she’s not an Olympian: to do those sorts of jumps and twirls and have that speed. So we had to find those moments to cross back and forth as seamlessly as possible. Sometimes it’s straight cuts and sometimes it’s invisible cuts, where you exchange from one to another in a seamless way.

HULLFISH: What kind of coverage did you get? I would think that that stuff is so complex that it’s very choreographed like a stunt fight.

RIEGEL: It was to a certain extent. There were definitely parts that were broken down and choreographed, so that was actually laid out for me. There’s a video playback guy, Rich, that Craig has worked with a lot that actually will assemble these big scenes very quickly for Craig on the set to confirm he has all the elements. Then Craig tells me, “Don’t look at that. Do what you do.” I do look at it sometime because Rich is terrific and it is super helpful to me to see what they have in mind. Once I have the spine – geographically where they’re supposed to be and can understand that – then I just go for the emotion and energy of the scene. You can cut back and forth and use little bits and pieces from other moments — cheats from other moments – and place them at different parts, structurally, to raise the energy, and that just is so much fun. It’s a puzzle.

HULLFISH: I remember one spectacular shot that starts a skating sequence – as we all look at dailies, there are those shots that stand out, like “Well, I know this must be the first shot.”

RIEGEL: I know the shot you’re talking about. It’s wonderful. It’s so much fun when you’re watching dailies. I was here in L.A. and they were shooting in Atlanta. The stuff comes in and you’re looking at it for the first time. The editor is the first audience of the movie. You get to watch it as an audience member which is I think the unique position the editor vs. the rest of the crew. Or at least the closest to that for a while. So that shot comes in and I remember it was just beautiful. It’s exciting. You think, “Yes! I know exactly how this is going to start.” It’s just so much fun. It was funny we had screenings with friends and family, and we were showing these ice skating sequences before any visual effects were done. We were clearly cutting back and forth between Margot and the double who had a little orange ball on her head for VFX tracking purposes. We would show it to these audiences and very few ever commented or said, “Why does she have an orange ball on her head?” because you’re so drawn into the energy of the scene. You’re watching her body and what’s happening so there were people who actually weren’t aware that we were cutting back and forth between different people as much as we do. Then the visual effects people did a remarkable job, especially considering it is a little movie. It’s a small independent movie and it was very ambitious in the kinds of visual effects that we did. Certainly for our schedule and budget.

HULLFISH: Talk to me about cutting back and forth between the different aspect ratios. That was very interesting.

RIEGEL: That was an idea that Craig and the DP had early on with the interviews. They wanted it to be a different size. When it was scripted: there’s on-camera interview, there’s voiceover, and there’s breaking the fourth wall. All of that was scripted as an on-camera interview. When I first read the script I said to Craig, “There’s a lot of talking heads.” He said, “No, no, no, we’re going to use some as voiceover” and so it was really fun to try to figure out what that was going to be. How much do we need to see on camera? How much can we just hear? And then where we use the breaking of the fourth wall. I had everything in the interview format. Then as I began to weave them into the body of the film we had to be connected and whose point of view it was. That’s where I would decide where it felt natural to cut away from the interview and then just play it as voiceover, and/or breaking the fourth wall.

The “fourth wall” shots were shot both ways. All of that material was shot with the actors turning and talking to us, and also NOT turning and talking to us. We could use the voiceover or we could just cut from that and go back to the interview. So we tried all kinds of different things. At one point we even tried having no interviews at all in the film. It didn’t work. (laughs) We tried it, just in due diligence. It was fun to do that, but we tried it both ways. We tried a screening without breaking the fourth wall and then another one having those incorporated. I love them. I think they’re really fascinating and different and unique and work very well. Craig saw a documentary about Tonya Harding when she was 15 years old and there is a moment in the documentary where Tonya is talking to the camera in this very very matter of fact, shockingly detached way about the fact that her mother hit her – and she’s 15. Craig was very moved by this and realized that this is something that happens with victims of abuse. The survival mechanism is detaching emotionally. He was trying to come up with some way of having that sense of detachment. He wanted the violence in the film to not be sugarcoated because that is what determines why Tonya Harding is the way she is: her life, her upbringing – as it does with all of us. But he wanted some way of signifying that and the way he came up with was this breaking of the fourth wall which is actually the older Tonya talking to us in this very detached, unemotional way over the scene of her head has been smashed into a mirror – and I think it really gives an excellent subconscious interpretation of that kind of emotion, detachment, and survival.

HULLFISH: How much structurally did you and Craig alter the film from the script?

RIEGEL: I’d have to go back and look at the script. We moved a number of things around as you always do in this process. Obviously, there are certain scenes that got deleted — some wonderful scenes that got deleted — that were heartbreaking to yank out of the movie, but hopefully… DVD extras. There are a few things that got moved around but structurally it’s such a good unique, sound script that it was probably less than most films.

HULLFISH: That idea that a scene is so good that it’s heartbreaking to cut out of a movie is something that most non-editors simply can’t fathom. How can you have a great scene that needs to be cut?

RIEGEL: That’s always one of the more difficult moments. When you have a scene that you have to lose for the greater good of the movie. Oftentimes, when you’re screening a film, you find and feel the lulls as the audience is watching it and you have to address that. Sometimes it’s not exactly in that moment. Sometimes it’s three scenes earlier. It’s a hard puzzle to figure out. As with good writing, you want every word to be there for a reason. You want every scene to be there for a reason. It’s either motivating the emotion of the story or the character or it’s motivating the actual story logic as it progresses so that you are giving the audience everything that they need to have. The challenge of that is you always want the audience to be sort of leaning forward and interested and trying to follow along and never get too far behind the movie. You don’t ever want to be confusing or distracting or take them off the path and then have to emotionally or physically get them back into the story. You also don’t want them to get ahead of the story and be bored. So that’s where those things come from. You watch and you guide that by losing sometimes great lines great jokes whether they be entire scenes or just part of scenes to continue to motivate and stay on that path.

HULLFISH: So, the scene, by itself, is fantastic, but its contributions to the overall story are not strong enough that it justifies its existence.

There’s a great scene — played in a single shot — of Tonya putting on the makeup before one of her performances. It was disturbing to watch.

RIEGEL: Margo is just amazing in that scene. That’s a scene that is quite interesting. It was covered a lot more than obviously ended up in the film. It’s just all done in one shot now as you see it in the movie, but Craig shot quite a lot of coverage: everything from the coach walking in and observing her going through this and leaving her alone.

That’s the play of trying to figure out what should be in a movie and what shouldn’t be in a movie and how can you hold it? Because in the original dailies she went through and put all of her makeup on: lipstick and everything. It’s an incredibly powerful scene. You’d have to sit there for 10 minutes and watch it all. But it is as powerful in its entirety almost as it is in that section. But just holding on that straight-on shot of her in this extraordinarily not vain way where she’s trying to put on her makeup, where she’s just on the edge. It just builds the tension with her hands shaking and trying to put her makeup on and the tears welling up and it’s almost clown-like the amount of makeup that – first of all they have to wear when they’re out there in this huge stadium to see any of it – so close-up, it’s disturbing. You can hear her brain practically going through all of this emotion as she’s doing it. I just found it to be one of the most powerful, brave scenes in the movie. The simplicity of it is sometimes far more powerful.

It can be very very uncomfortable to do that and awkward and you’re sitting there with this woman with lipstick on her teeth and you feel embarrassed and awkward and compassionate for her. And holding that moment and staying still I think is extraordinary. She’s just doing everything she can to hold it together to get out there and perform again. This is her last Olympics and all of the pressure of what’s going on… I just can’t imagine.

HULLFISH: The other great tense scene is just after that with Tonya trying to get her skates tied. As an audience member I was on edge watching that. How did you build that tension?

RIEGEL: That was actually very fun to build because there was a lot of coverage for that as well. But a lot of that is sound. You hear the rumbling of the people stomping their feet in the stadium.

And we’re cutting back and forth with the announcers and the clock is ticking down and all of these different things are just building. You see Margot’s hand shaking, so nervous she can’t even tie her skates. And she’s got a problem with the lace: it’s too short, and other people are trying to help. It’s a really super-wonderfully tense scene. Looking back on that, that was actually one of the more difficult scenes to put together. There was a lot of coverage and there are so many moving parts with what’s happening in the stadium. That took a little bit of time and effort to get that correct.

HULLFISH: The way you describe it is almost as if it just happened that way. But of course it had to be EDITED that way. The clock on the wall is counting down, but you’re the one that decides when to cut to the clock on the wall…

RIEGEL: When to hear the announcer saying, “if she doesn’t get out here she’s going to get disqualified.”

HULLFISH: Walk me through your approach to a basic scene. You come in in the morning and you’re faced with a blank timeline and a bin full of selects.

RIEGEL” I can imagine what a writer goes through with a blank sheet of paper. It’s sort of the same thing. Sometimes I have no idea where to start. The first thing I do is watch all of the dailies for the scene. I don’t pay attention to what the director has called their select takes until after I’ve watched it. I just want to have my initial gut reaction to the performance and what’s happening in the scene. Frankly, I also try not to read the script too many times. I don’t want to be too familiar with it. I want to simply understand from the material that’s given to me: from geography to emotion to time — all of these different elements.

I remember once cutting a scene and there was some really crucial bit of information that I was certain was in dialogue. It was missing and I was like, “Where is this? Did I just hear it in one take? Why isn’t it in every take?” I finally went back to look at the script and it was actually a screen direction in the script but never got put into the movie. I just read it like everybody else did. Everybody involved with the film read it and it just became a part of the movie in our heads, but not on film.

HULLFISH: That’s happened to me before. You can’t have screen direction that you can’t see.

RIEGEL: I heard a director once say that, as an exercise, always try to have a read through of the script with no screen direction at all to ensure that kind of thing doesn’t happen, because sometimes there’s a lot of screen direction written into scripts that just go into your subconscious mind, then you think it’s there and lo and behold it’s not.

HULLFISH: Getting back to dailies and your approach: do you have someone put together a KEM roll of selects, or are you literally clicking on each set-up and take from the bin?

RIEGEL: No KEM rolls, just individual takes. When I used to work with film of course but not now. I’ve had such wonderful assistants my whole career, but on this they went above and beyond. Dan Boccoli with whom I’ve worked probably seven or eight movies now was my assistant in Los Angeles during dailies. He couldn’t come with me to New York for post. I had another assistant there, Steve Jacks, who was spectacular as well. Dan knows how I like things prepared, which is relatively simply. He goes through and does all of the technical stuff,

making sure everything’s in sync, and that everything got transferred properly. He just sets the bins up in masters, mediums, over shoulders, just in basic order. (as she says this, she draws out a row in the air for each type of shot, indicating that each shot type is in a row in the bin).

HULLFISH: This is in Frame view? (thumbnails or poster frames)

RIEGEL: Exactly. I just go through one by one. I watch all of the dailies. I have ideas. I take notes.

Sometimes extensive notes, sometimes quite cryptic notes – just for memory purposes – so that I can go back and find a moment. Sometimes I use the locator button to just kind of quickly mark a moment or a look or a particular line reading that I like, so I can find it again quickly and when I’m done watching dailies I just begin: sometimes at the beginning, sometimes in the middle, sometimes the end – depending on the scene – and work my way either forward or outside or backwards, to construct the scene with all the moments that I find real and believable… that moved me. A little bit regardless of shot size. Although I think size plays into that intuitively.

And then I watch a scene a couple of times, tighten it up, make some changes, realize that there’s an energy shift when I’ve changed takes that doesn’t play as well as I thought it would play. Then I have to go back and keep a single take or sometimes I’m allowed to switch takes very easily. All of those little bits and pieces that go into it – just sort of constructing the scene once and then I try to put it away and look at it the next day with fresh eyes. Sometimes I’m horrified. “What was I thinking?!”

HULLFISH: You’re not alone. I’ve heard that about 100 times.

RIEGEL: And other times I come in the next morning and I hit play, thinking I’ve got the most atrocious scene ever and I’m like, “Hey, wait a minute! That’s actually not bad.” Make some adjustments and then I send it to the director right away.

I try to send directors stuff, Craig or any director that I’m working with, as quickly as possible so that they can see what they have. No sound effects, no music – just my initial gut reaction in an assembly of a scene. I want them to see it and make sure that they have what they want

in terms of coverage, performance and tone. Then, if they want, they can make their adjustments or we can begin a dialogue about what I should do. Sometimes a scene might be put together nothing like what they originally imagined in their mind. I hope I can get them to watch these scenes a few times before they start reacting to them. I believe this is much easier to do if they’re individual scenes. Then as things start to build, I get to show that scene attached to the scene after it, and they see that first scene again. And by the third or fourth time they’ve watched it, they’re finally watching it as its new entity: As the movie – not the movie that they had in their head – and that doesn’t mean we’re not going to change it like crazy, it just means that they’re not stuck in what they had in their head early on. So by the time they finished shooting they’ve actually seen the entire movie: maybe completely out of order and in little bits and pieces but they’ve seen it. Nothing’s a mystery. And so when we sit down to watch it beginning to end the first time, it’s not as shocking.

HULLFISH: I remember a spot in the movie — only really a single place — where it has built up into some really pretty tight close-ups. Do you know where I’m talking about?

RIEGEL: Craig and I always have this sort of on-going thing: I always try to avoid closeups as much as possible for as long as possible. I think that they are brilliant when used sparingly and when used too much they just take away the impact.

I think it was much easier before, when people cut on film and actually used to screen the movies all the time on a big screen, to really understand how these things are going to translate when they are 30 or 40 feet high. When you’re doing a feature, that’s your goal: to make everything play big. And so when you get so used to watching it on these small monitors now, I think you can very easily go to the close-up too quickly because you’re judging it in this small space. And so you feel like you need that impact of a close up. But when it’s actually 30 feet high, a medium shot may do it very well. So I try to avoid that. I never really try to pay too much attention to the size. I’m always going for the emotion of the performance and then that sort of dictates everything. And then if I need extra impact I’ll find a take that’s closer.

HULLFISH: So you don’t use selects reels.

RIEGEL: Almost never. I did use ScriptSync on this one for the very first time. I have never done it before. I’ve never really felt the need to do it before because I watch everything so thoroughly and I take these notes and I use markers. I could always sort of find stuff before pretty quickly.

The way they shot the “interview” material on this, I just can’t imagine not using ScriptSync. I think we’d still probably be cutting the movie because they shot so much interview material: hours.

Everything else in the movie was shot on film, but the interviews were shot digitally, so the camera was just rolling and there were these long, long takes where they would jump around from scene to scene. Nothing was slated. They were doing retakes within takes. So it was just very hard to find stuff.

HULLFISH: Now when you’re talking about interviews, for those people who have not seen this movie, you’re not talking about interviews with the actual people. You’re talking about scripted scenes with the actors that SEEM like interviews.

RIEGEL: Right. So, all of that 4:3 aspect footage. The movie has all of these interview sequences with the various characters and that material was shot digitally.

HULLFISH: And was a lot of that ad-libbed? You’re talking about how much footage there was.

RIEGEL: Some was ad libbed, although we always got the scripted versions first. Sometimes they would give all kinds of options. It’s woven throughout the entire movie, and there’s some that we never used, but they shot a lot. I think for Tonya alone there were 6 or 7 hours and hours of footage. It would be difficult to find the material without ScriptSync.

HULLFISH: It sounds like, to build the sequences, you weren’t really using it.

RIEGEL: Just to find the options. I would just go through and find all of the line readings of these lines and I can listen to them and pick them and start to build those interviews sequences in between all of the other footage.

HULLFISH: Because you can just click on a line in the script and it’s right there. You don’t have to go search for it.

RIEGEL: Yeah. It’s brilliant.

HULLFISH: Do you think you’ll use it again, now that you’ve tried it?

RIEGEL: If I have situations like this, yeah. It’s time consuming and certainly if I have the crew to support them spending the time doing that when there’s so much other work for them to do, I would love to do it but unless I really need to, I like to keep them free enough to do the rest of their work.

HULLFISH: The last film that I used ScriptSync on we decided just to do six or seven big scenes. So the smaller scenes we didn’t ScriptSync because I figured I could find it.

RIEGEL: Exactly.

HULLFISH: But something like a big dinner scene with six people or something like that, it makes sense to use ScriptSync.

RIEGEL: Exactly. So that’s why I said I just use it for the interview stuff. If it were necessary, I could completely use it for any random scene. I think each individual movie will dictate how it’s used in the future.

HULLFISH: Other people have talked to me about ScriptSync and how they don’t like to cut with it initially because they feel like it pulls them out of that whole daily process.

RIEGEL: I can imagine.

HULLFISH: The other great place for ScriptSync is when trying to choose takes or line readings with the director. ScriptSync is the easiest place to go.

RIEGEL: You’re absolutely right. It is very nice in that situation but in all honesty I’ve been able to find those different line readings pretty quickly. I’m so familiar with the material and I know where they fall in the take and it’s usually pretty quick when we have to go back and investigate each and every reading. One of the luxuries with this film is that I’ve worked with Craig so much, I know what performances he’s going to really want for most of it.

HULLFISH: I’ve kept you for an hour but I’m so much enjoying this conversation that I don’t want to let you go.

RIEGEL: Me too.

HULLFISH: I’ve been trying for over year to talk to you. I think originally it was because you were cutting Game of Thrones, but you were always booked. Now, after this Oscar nomination your dance card will really be full.

RIEGEL: That still sounds really peculiar to hear you say that. Lovely, but peculiar. Honestly this film was was really truly an independent film. We had no studio attached. We had no distribution or anything. When we finished, just prior to going to the Toronto Film Festival in September, my hope was: “I hope it gets a good distributor and that we get a good review or two” because it takes some bravery and tallent to get this one out there. Everything has been just marvelous gravy since then.

HULLFISH: I did just think of an important thing because you mentioned something that threw me: You said you had two different assistants in two different locations. What the heck is that about? You edited in LA and then you edited in New York, but they shot in Atlanta?

RIEGEL: Both Craig and I live in L.A. When they were shooting in Atlanta I stayed here with my assistant in L.A. and put together the whole first assembly. Then we went to New York. We went to New York to do all of the post – The director’s cut, the sound mix, the finishing, the DI, visual effects – they were all done in New York because of the tax incentives. This was a small movie and we needed every dime we could scrape together from anywhere. It just was cheaper to do it there, so we spent six months there.

HULLFISH: In New York. The city itself?

RIEGEL: I know. Yes. Putting us up in New York for six months somehow was cheaper than letting us stay home. I don’t really understand budgets, but that’s what they said.

HULLFISH: Thanks for a great, great interview. Congratulations on all your success. Have a wonderful day.

RIEGEL: Thank you. Bye bye.

To read more interviews in the Art of the Cut series, check out THIS LINK and follow me on Twitter @stevehullfish

The first 50 interviews in the series provided the material for the book, “Art of the Cut: Conversations with Film and TV Editors.” This is a unique book that breaks down interviews with many of the world’s best editors and organizes it into a virtual roundtable discussion centering on the topics editors care about. It is a powerful tool for experienced and aspiring editors alike. Cinemontage and CinemaEditor magazine both gave it rave reviews. No other book provides the breadth of opinion and experience. Combined, the editors featured in the book have edited for over 1,000 years on many of the most iconic, critically acclaimed and biggest box office hits in the history of cinema.

The post ART OF THE CUT with Oscar nominee Tatiana Riegel, ACE appeared first on ProVideo Coalition.

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demitgibbs · 6 years

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Martha Stewart Talks Same-Sex Weddings, Achieving ‘Gay Son’ Status

You don’t have to tell Martha Stewart that gay men love her like their own mother.

The influential entrepreneur and domestic diva’s deep-rooted connection to the LGBTQ community goes beyond special appearances on Ugly Betty and Ellen, when she appeared as herself in a 1995 episode of the groundbreaking sitcom. Stewart, throughout her half-century-long career, has long embodied a quality near and dear to the queer community: perfection. After all, before “live your best life” was a meme, it was Stewart’s honed methodology.

Could that affinity for precision and flawlessness – for the perfect Christmas ham, the perfect vegetable garden, the perfect dating persona – be why Stewart is very clued into the fact that many gay men perceive her as a mother figure?

It’s a relationship worth exploring, and during my tight 15 minutes with Stewart I dove into the lifestyle maven’s personal affiliations with many LGBTQ people: her nephew, Christopher Herbert, as well as her dearest gay friends, whom she hosts at her various homes. While “in a car, so any confusion, blame the cell service,” Stewart, 76, was reflective and laid-back as she served up a savory platter of gay talk: Her age-appropriate philosophy on equality, gays who host Stewart at their get-togethers (she jokes, though she can’t possibly be kidding, that it “ups their game”), and her memories of transforming, unforgettably and stunningly, into ’40s film icon Veronica Lake for late, gay makeup artist Kevyn Aucoin.

I’ve really appreciated the inclusivity on VH1’s Martha & Snoop’s Potluck Dinner Party, with guests ranging from LGBTQ icons like Patti LaBelle and Kathy Griffin to gay TV personality Ross Mathews and also Laverne Cox. How aware are you of being LGBTQ inclusive when it comes to this show and also your career as a whole?

Oh, thank you. Well, we’re kind of in the showbiz world and being inclusive, that just sort of goes with the terrain. I don’t care who the person is; I care about what the person does, and how they do it.

WATCH:

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Martha Stewart Weddings magazine famously introduced same-sex couples into its pages in 2009, with Jeremy Hooper and Andrew Shulman sharing their vows with family and friends in Litchfield, Connecticut. Why was it important to be at the forefront of marriage equality in that way, and what did that moment mean to you?

I believe in “all men are created equal.” I think I go back to the 1860s, and before! (Laughs) And I don’t think any compromise is necessary. I think it’s absolutely a fact that all men are created equal, and so I just treated people like equals my entire life. Equals in every single way, no matter what their proclivity is or what their sexuality is, or their color or their race. It doesn’t matter to me.

That wedding issue was a big deal as it was one of the first mainstream wedding magazines to have featured a gay couple’s wedding, and then there was another in 2011.

I know! And that was my nephew. That was Christopher Herbert marrying a Native American man (Timothy Long).

Seeing as though gay marriage wasn’t even recognized legally coast to coast then, were Martha-worshipping housewives open to displays of same-sex affection?

It was legal in Massachusetts, where they actually got married. I went to their wedding. They had a pre-wedding in Massachusetts, which was the legal wedding, and then they had the family celebration at my farm, which was another tying of the knot. The ceremony and that Celtic tying of the knot was so beautiful.

Was that the best same-sex wedding you’ve been to?

I’d say it’s one of them – I’ve been to a lot! I mean, I have a lot of gay editors, both male and female. One of our style directors at Weddings got married and he had a fantastic wedding at a nightclub in Brooklyn. That was so fun, and that was also featured in the magazine. And I’ve been to several female weddings. You know, every wedding is special to me.

Is it intimidating for people to host Martha Stewart at their wedding?

I don’t know if it’s intimidating, but I think it ups their game a little bit! (Laughs)

What do you look for at a same-sex wedding?

I like to see what the couple is wearing. I like to see how they handle relatives. But I don’t differentiate a gay wedding from a straight wedding. I just don’t differentiate. I just went to Steven Gambrel’s wedding. That was so beautiful! He’s a very famous, very wealthy interior designer, and he married his longtime partner at their beautiful home in Sag Harbor, Long Island. It was an extraordinary evening. The father of Steven’s partner got up and said, “This is our family’s first gay wedding,” and he said, “It’s a momentous occasion for our family and we embrace it.” It was one of the nicest father speeches I’ve heard at a wedding. Everybody sort of wanted to cry because he was visibly uncomfortable and yet accepting at the same time. It was very moving.

You also attended out Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld’s A-list tribute party in October.

Oh my god, that was a fantastic party! Mariah Carey singing! She sang a couple of songs for Karl dressed in a Chanel sequined dress that was, you know, perfectly clinging. It was beautiful, and Karl was so thrilled.

Growing up in New Jersey in the ’40s and ’50s, what was your introduction to the LGBTQ community?

In my class, I knew that several of the boys were gay. It wasn’t talked about, and nobody made fun of them. Nutley High School was a pretty liberal but also quiet school, so there were some gay boys that we knew, and I think one or two girls. But they hadn’t come out, and the boys really were not out, if you want to use that word. But they were definitely gay.

And then in our own family, I had one cousin who was gay who lives in Buffalo and then my nephew is gay, and I think even though he didn’t come out until college, we all sort of knew he was gay. My daughter who has radar like crazy, Alexis, who I’m sure you know, she knows. And my mother didn’t have a clue. It wasn’t part of her lifestyle. She just didn’t have those friends.

Snoop Dogg has said that you love to get him drunk. Do you have a gay friend who’s especially good at getting you drunk?

I don’t like getting drunk, so not necessarily, no.

Tipsy?

If I get tipsy, it’s probably because I haven’t eaten anything. I don’t get up saying, “Oh, I’m gonna get drunk today.” I just don’t do that.

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Is entertaining a group of sophisticated gay men the ultimate challenge?

No. Again, I don’t differentiate if I have a group of gay men (over). I just don’t ever think that way. I don’t differentiate. (Artbag business owner) Christopher Moore came to my house recently with four gay friends just to look at the gardens and I gave them cappuccinos and they were happy. I actually didn’t have any food in the house, so I couldn’t give them anything to eat, but they were perfectly happy. I just don’t ever think that way. I don’t differentiate.

Wait, let’s back up, Martha. You didn’t have any food in your house?

Well, nothing except eggs. I could’ve made them scrambled eggs. I thought after, “I probably should have fed them something”… but I didn’t. (Laughs)

Is it true that Cher was the one who convinced you to work with famous late, gay makeup artist Kevyn Aucoin when he photographed you as Veronica Lake for his 2000 book Face Forward?

No, I knew who Kevyn Aucoin was, and he was such an amazing makeup artist. And I like doing things like that. I have a face that can become other people. And I just thought, “Oh, god, what an opportunity.” He did such an amazing job.

In the gay community and beauty world, those photos are quite legendary.

Oh, I know who it was! It was the guy who worked for me (Alex Peruzzi). He’s Linda Evangelista in the book – he was head of merchandising in my craft department. A very handsome boy.

How do you reflect on that shoot?

I didn’t know that Kevyn was suffering from a pretty hideous disease, but I did remark on the size of his hands. He had that disease that enlarged appendages. His hands, his feet, everything was oversized. And I couldn’t believe that someone with such monster hands – these big hands – could do such delicate makeup work, but he did. He did amazing, amazing work. It was an art form of his to see a structure of a face and turn it into another face.

Looking back, have any gay people influenced your fondness for decadence or even your path to becoming a lifestyle icon?

No, not really. Although when I was catering (Stewart launched a catering business in the ’70s) many of the young men who were my waiters were gay, and they still are. The gay community works a lot in the catering business in New York; they are either actors or artists and they need to make money, so they make money in catering. But they were all chosen on skill and aptitude for the kind of job they were doing, and they were all great. But my daughter and I both have lots of gay friends. My closest friend is Kevin Sharkey and he’s also like the surrogate uncle to Alexis (and her family) and he lives in their same building, and he’s Tio Kevin to them. I even introduce him playfully to friends as my gay son.

I want to be Martha Stewart’s gay son.

Lots of his friends would like to be Martha’s gay son!

How does one achieve Martha Stewart “gay son” status?

He’s worked for (me for) 18 years, that’s how! He worked his way up!

from Hotspots! Magazine https://hotspotsmagazine.com/2017/12/28/martha-stewart-talks-same-sex-weddings-achieving-gay-son-status/ from Hot Spots Magazine https://hotspotsmagazine.tumblr.com/post/169039016585

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cynthiajayusa · 6 years

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Martha Stewart Talks Same-Sex Weddings, Achieving ‘Gay Son’ Status

You don’t have to tell Martha Stewart that gay men love her like their own mother.

WATCH:

youtube

That wedding issue was a big deal as it was one of the first mainstream wedding magazines to have featured a gay couple’s wedding, and then there was another in 2011.

I know! And that was my nephew. That was Christopher Herbert marrying a Native American man (Timothy Long).

Seeing as though gay marriage wasn’t even recognized legally coast to coast then, were Martha-worshipping housewives open to displays of same-sex affection?

Was that the best same-sex wedding you’ve been to?

Is it intimidating for people to host Martha Stewart at their wedding?

I don’t know if it’s intimidating, but I think it ups their game a little bit! (Laughs)

What do you look for at a same-sex wedding?

You also attended out Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld’s A-list tribute party in October.

Growing up in New Jersey in the ’40s and ’50s, what was your introduction to the LGBTQ community?

Snoop Dogg has said that you love to get him drunk. Do you have a gay friend who’s especially good at getting you drunk?

I don’t like getting drunk, so not necessarily, no.

Tipsy?

If I get tipsy, it’s probably because I haven’t eaten anything. I don’t get up saying, “Oh, I’m gonna get drunk today.” I just don’t do that.

youtube

Is entertaining a group of sophisticated gay men the ultimate challenge?

Wait, let’s back up, Martha. You didn’t have any food in your house?

Well, nothing except eggs. I could’ve made them scrambled eggs. I thought after, “I probably should have fed them something”… but I didn’t. (Laughs)

Is it true that Cher was the one who convinced you to work with famous late, gay makeup artist Kevyn Aucoin when he photographed you as Veronica Lake for his 2000 book Face Forward?

In the gay community and beauty world, those photos are quite legendary.

Oh, I know who it was! It was the guy who worked for me (Alex Peruzzi). He’s Linda Evangelista in the book – he was head of merchandising in my craft department. A very handsome boy.

How do you reflect on that shoot?

Looking back, have any gay people influenced your fondness for decadence or even your path to becoming a lifestyle icon?

I want to be Martha Stewart’s gay son.

Lots of his friends would like to be Martha’s gay son!

How does one achieve Martha Stewart “gay son” status?

He’s worked for (me for) 18 years, that’s how! He worked his way up!

source https://hotspotsmagazine.com/2017/12/28/martha-stewart-talks-same-sex-weddings-achieving-gay-son-status/ from Hot Spots Magazine http://hotspotsmagazin.blogspot.com/2017/12/martha-stewart-talks-same-sex-weddings.html

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