#i get it right more often than wrong for sure but every time i unpick it i have to cut the yarn repeatedly | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

peakyblindersxx · 3 years

Text

whiskey buisness - john shelby x reader (part 2 of ?)

read part one here!

a/n: hey loves! i'm finishing up school rn, but i had to get this out and i'm about to start working on a tommy request immediately after i upload this. anyways, i'm so excited to post this series, it's incredible and i can't thank my bestie @stxdyblr-2k enough. she is a fucking genius :)

prompt: you can't get john out of your head. lo and behold, here he is.

warnings: fluff, mentions of smut, angsty af, soft john (ugh my heart)

Despite your best efforts, you'd been unable to stop yourself yearning for John Shelby. Your pokey flat now often lay empty; you were far too busy to mope at home due to your career as a personal assistant to a local solicitor who was allied with the Shelby's, attending rallies and lectures with Ada and the drunken nights you'd spend at various mansions, galleries and club openings with the "razor chasers" you'd become friendly with due to their refusal to leave Ada alone. Yet still, in those odd seconds of calm you seized over a cigarette, the first seconds after a bump of Tokyo, when you carefully applied your makeup, styled your hair or bathed, you'd think of him. The way the pads of his fingertips felt on your skin, how he’d muttered in your ear how pretty you looked.

But this was different to when you were dreaming about John at 15; he was no longer the allusive older brother of Ada who had a string of beautiful girls on rotation. He wasn’t a fantasy anymore. He was true flesh and blood, and for a moment he had wanted you.

It would be delicious if the whole situation hadn't left a bitter taste in your mouth. Of course you came back to Brum to only immediately fuck it up. The first night, and already you were so close to ruining everything? Looking back, now that you were so close with Ada once more, now that you knew who John had grown to be, that night was cringe inducing. Luckily, no one had seemed to catch on. Luckily, you thrived in the Small Heath rumour mill once again. All the gossip about you was mainly about your substance use, the lads you were seen curling up with outside nightclubs, your intelligence, your helpful nature, sometimes your questionable politics but that was all. John's was far darker, stories of blood, death and gasoline. Recently, the tales of his conquests had quietened, but only due to the lurid delight taken by the factory workers in talking about the recent blinding of some poor fucker who'd crossed the wrong person. Obviously, a lot of the detail had to be exaggerated for shock value and to boost the Shelby status, solidifying them as notorious throughout Birmingham city and its rural surroundings. There were murmurs everywhere about the violent John Shelby: ruthless, cocky, vengeful. It seemed impossible that the same man who cracked shit jokes just to see you smile, kissed you with so much desperation, and prioritised getting you off first could cause such harm without an ounce of guilt or shame to slow his swagger.

Whispers of war were far more constant, but then again, people would say anything for a reaction. You didn't bring it up with Ada. You refused to (openly) partake in mindless gossip on principle, yet you were hungry for information about him.

***********

You'd long forgotten whose wedding you were at. Some loyal blinder, a close friend of the Shelby's, the occasion calling for a large white marquee to be built onto one of Tommy's gardens, fully staffed with the best chef and service team money could buy (from a London restaurant at short notice; when Finn told you the extortionate figure Tommy had paid, your jaw had dropped). The cake, dress and decorations were stunning; you weren't sure exactly what the groom had done for the Shelby's but you could only assume the worst for what they'd splashed out on him.

However, thinking like that only spoilt your night: you'd realised at your fifth club takeover, now you repeated it like a mantra constantly. You'd quickly learnt every excess the Shelby's granted to those outside their circle were due to some perceived sacrifice for being associated with them. Well, that's what you chose to believe after John had sent a junior blinder to your office with a bouquet, the Monday morning after he turned you down. So, it was best to smile and take the shit, get paid, and get out as soon as possible. You were to keep your head down until then.

Yet, keeping your head down was difficult tonight. Ada had treated you to a shopping trip to London for the occasion this morning, Arthur forcing the junior blinders to tag along next to you on the train and trailing less than two metres behind you for hours. You missed the days when it was just you and Ada. It was far more simple without the stares whenever the two of you stepped out. Ada had gotten used to it, she'd devised her own methods of being completely alone; complex plans involving leaving a window open, knotting sheets into a rope and twisting her ankles. Not that she minded, she reckoned the suffocation of being a Shelby was much worse than a few bruised ankles.

You were wearing a clingy emerald green dress from some fancy French boutique you couldn't even pronounce, the diamond necklace sitting along your collarbone and the jewels dangling through your ears were on loan from Ada. You felt eyes unpicking you the moment you entered the after-party. Your arm was linked through Ada's as per usual, she looked equally stylish in a peacock blue number that set off her eyes, her delicate features perfected with makeup.

You'd quickly found your gaggle and began drinking and dancing the night away. Whispers about snow arose from your table, people disappearing to the toilets to rail a line on the bathroom counter, then to the dance floor or to the lap of the poor fucker who'd hold back their hair while they vomited in just a few hours. At least the Blinders were polite about it. Isaiah would kill them if they weren’t. You'd let your arm be tugged on various bathroom trips, treated among your group like secret missions although you weren't entirely subtle about it.

What you weren't aware of was across the marquee, you were being watched by the three men in your life who you'd never want to see you in this state: the Shelby's.

"Looks like Finn's taken your spot, John." Arthur yelled in John's ear over the loud music, gesturing to the youngest Shelby sat at the table next to you who was staring up at you in complete adoration as you chatted across him to Michael, seemingly arguing with him. By the looks of it, you were winning.

John pulled a face at Arthur. “Fuck off, old man. That'll never happen. Finn’s too young for her." He immediately regretted the words that had fallen out of his mouth, revealing far too much for his comfort.

"It's not impossible."

"He's just not right for her, yeah?"

"And you are?"

John didn't bother to bless him with a verbal response, instead flipping him off and downing the rest of his whiskey. "It's not like that."

"What's it like then? Because from where I'm sitting, it's pretty fucking clear, John." Arthur slurred, glass of whiskey sloshing onto his sleeve.

"You're too gone to even know you're chatting shit." John sneered, standing up, "I'm off for a smoke and some fresh air. Try not to fuck anything in my absence, both of you."

His brothers cursed him out as he left. John took a second to figure out his route, purposefully having to cross your path, gesturing for you to follow him subtly. He was surprised you came trailing after him, telling Michael that you weren’t done yelling at him and you’d be back. When you were both only metres from the marquee, he knew you were fucked. You were instantly bored, begging him for a cigarette, which he lit for you, shaking his head at your state.

"You're a fucking mess, love." He said, mouth sloping attractively to one side.

"Takes one to know one, John-boy. Where are we off to, then?"

"Somewhere fucking quiet, can barely hear myself think. Plus, you need to sober the fuck up, lass." He said, softly, as he walked across the dew soaked grass. You followed, heels in hand, holding your dress up as not to ruin it. He sighed, taking the shoes from your hands and wrapping his blazer around your shoulders, linking your arm through his for stability. He kept the distance respectful, but there wasn’t any denying the thick tension in the summer air between the two of you. Ahead, there was a small stone bench sat at the foot of one of Thomas' manicured gardens, and John offered his hand to help you sit. You made small talk and caught up on each other's lives, and you noted John only seemed to glow when you asked about his kids. He talked at length, the drink seemingly unhinging his jaw. There he was again, the John you knew and had admired for so many years. You could sit here forever, watching his blue eyes sparkle in the sunlight. Yet, it just wasn’t meant to be. You wished you could stop time just for a bit, give you enough moments to memorize the freckles on his skin.

"You know the night I first came home?" The alcohol and snow had loosened your lips. You were teetering on the edge of your boundaries, but you couldn't care enough to hold back.

"The night where absolutely nothing happened?" He joked, raising an eyebrow at you, cautious that you'd randomly brought it up in your state. "Sweetheart, this can wait."

He was warning you. For a second you managed to bite your tongue, but curiosity tipped you over the edge.

"But something nearly happened, right?"

"Y/N. Don't." He warned, his tone icy, suddenly distancing from you, hiding between an emotional boundary which he didn't wish to explore.

"John, it's just us. Can't we even talk about it?"

"There's nothing to talk about, though. You were off your face then, and now. That's fine. We know where we stand. It can't happen."

"I wanted to. I do want to."

"You don't. Trust me. You need a nice lad who'll marry you and look after you. Just need to keep your nose clean long enough yeah?" He teased, trying to lighten the mood, blue eyes begging you to move on.

Your head turned to face him, your face contorting in a mixture of confusion and irritation. "You don't get to tell me what I want or need. The last thing I want is to marry any lad, nice or not."

"I didn't mean it like that, right? Look, I just meant you deserve better than Shelby scum. You're going places you know? Don't settle for Small Heath." John responded with a pained sigh. He didn’t want to get into it with you; not here, not like this. He'd thought about it, naturally. You were constantly on his mind, yet only problems ever seemed to appear, never solutions. It was best for him to avoid you. Why the fuck did he drag you out here? Horrible idea.

"Your family isn't scum. Where the fuck did you get that from?" Your face was screwed up in genuine rage. "I-"

"Y/N, fuckin’ leave it."

His face had hardened completely now. He'd snapped at you. His voice hadn't raised, it was just the power he spat his order out with. You held up your hands in mock surrender, pointedly taking a cigarette from his front pocket and light it silently, not saying a word.

"Why are you so bothered, anyways?" He asked, breaking the silence like you knew he would. John always had to ask questions.

"Fuck off with that, John. I'm not in the mood."

"What do you mean?" He looked completely lost.

"We nearly had sex. Just sex, nothing else right?"

John remained silent.

"Would it be the worst thing in the world?" You asked, your voice wavering. It was hard enough to get the words out, let alone imagine the response.

"You're far too wasted to chat about this, love."

"John, I’m not-"

"I'm serious. You're fucking mashed like my brothers aren't you? Like all those other fuckers in there." He sounded genuinely angry. In the glow of the sunset he looked so much younger, so hurt and lonely. Why hadn't you noticed before?

He turned to you, eyes widened and shocked at his own outburst. "You're not the only one gone yeah? Ignore me, I'm fucked, sorry."

You reached out your hand and linked your fingers through his in silence, the warm evening wind ruffling your hair and dress, blocked from your skin by John's suit jacket which was wrapped around your shoulders. Not that anyone would notice or care. As long as Ada wasn't with you, you could disappear for hours without any alarm. There you sat in the tranquil last few moments of the day, your hand linked with John's, both beyond tipsy. You weren’t thinking properly but it felt right. You felt safe. You didn't want to have to return to the chaos of the party, to have to catch up on who your friends were currently trying to screw. None of that seemed to matter anymore.

Was it too much to ask for something to be simple? Maybe you didn't have to fuck him. Maybe just these small moments were enough. You laughed at the thought when it crossed your mind; neither you nor John were known for consistency or stability in relationships, you being admittedly rather inexperienced, only having been with a few men, and he had his fair share of escapades. But he was just so different. You wouldn't admit that he'd gotten your attention in any way than purely sexually (which surprised you to admit) and for fun, but you genuinely enjoyed his presence.

He was right though. It wasn't a good idea at all to hook up. There was far too much baggage for both of you to make it worth it.

Just once?

You glanced over at John. He rolled his eyes at you, but the edges of his lips were slightly upturned, his dimples faintly peeking through his defined cheeks.

Just once couldn't hurt.

***

The sky was streaked with shades of gold, amber and blood. John could feel the friction from your knee barely knocking against his, the pressure putting him on edge. In fairness, he had drunk heavily, and that's what happens when you let your guard down around beautiful women. He couldn't believe you had told him you wanted to have sex with him still. He'd chalked the whole situation down to a drunken mistake that would have progressed into a far more significant drunken mistake. Ada would never forgive him if he went for another of her mates. Especially Y/N. No matter if he said that Y/N could be different, that you wasn't just another conquest. But who'd believe him?

Far better to keep his mouth shut.

Far better to play safe.

As you were called back to the party by the gaggle of girls John vaguely recognised from hanging off the arms of other blinders, he realised (despite his state) that you were right. Having sex with you wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. In fact, it might be one of the best.

Just once?

He watched your figure disappear back into the marquee, waiting for you to turn back and look for him. You do. He would have done the same if it was him.

Maybe just once wouldn't hurt.

***

to be continued!

#john shelby fluff #john shelby #john shelby x reader #john shelby imagine #john shelby reader insert #peaky blinders fluff #peaky blinders imagine #peaky blinders

566 notes · View notes

thedreadvampy · 3 years

Note

Tbf on the Martin thing while i know that's not what you meant the reason alot of people got pussy was cause it was right about the time they'd been an issue with acephobia in the greater fandom already and the way you phrased it tbh did really feel like you were equating ace!Martin and Martin being infantilised in a post about martin being infantilised being bad. Basically it kinda sounded like you didn't want people hc-ing Martin as ace because it was infantilising (which also then linked back to some shit that happened with ace discourse) and the post blew up a bit and that mixed with you Knowing Jonny and you coming off pretty aggro or not wanting to give a straight answer on what you meant (or that's what people felt you were doing) yeah that's why that went that way.

Tbf I'm not really interested in relitigating who was right and who was wrong in that particular argument, I feel the way I feel and other people feel differently and I think everything's pretty much already been said like six months ago. I asked because I couldn't remember what happened not because I was longing for the days of pointless arguing.

however because I can't resist digging myself deeper Ever I'll relitigate it anyway under the cut

I have little to no involvement with the wider fandom so I'm not sure how their acephobia was on me in any way

I could have worded the post better but I maintain it takes a pretty bad faith reading of the post to think that my problem is with ace Martin hcs when I specifically said both in the post and the tags and further clarifications that I was talking about the way that people desexualise fat, queer and abused people OUTSIDE of ace hcs

I have said about a zillion times that me knowing Jonny doesn't mean I know shit about TMA and that we've literally never talked about it. which being the case it is pure wild that people think it's a reasonable reason to treat me like some sort of voice of authority.

I have also said about a billion times and will say again that people aren't in fact entitled to demand a full accounting of a stranger's opinions out of the blue. like it is, in fact, confusing and surprising to me the degree to which people took personally the idea that a stranger could be annoyed or disinterested in discussing something that they wanted them to talk about. that's why I keep thinking there must be more to the anger about me from certain users. but like nah apparently 90% of the reason people get pissed off at me is either a) Using The Wrong Tone To Talk To Myself On My Personal Blog which they interpret as attacking them personally or b) Not Being Constantly Available On Demand To Answer And Reanswer Questions That Shouldn't Even Be Questions In The Full Knowledge That Any Poor Wording Will Be Treated As Malice. Sorry, my tone's getting a tad aggro again, I do recognise that, but I find it really frustrating to have it consistently treated as deeply inherently suspicious and/or malicious to not immediately rattle off a perfect answer to "questions" which are fairly thinly veiled traps. like there is no good answer to "what's your opinion on ace people." "ace people exist" is not a matter of opinion and I could just say "ace people are valid and good and fine uwu" which is like. True. but also utterly trite and validates the idea that point in a random stranger's inbox to grill them about Which Minorities Are Valid Uwu is in any way an acceptable or boundaried way to behave. Which I don't believe it is, and treating it as if it's a totally normal and fine thing to do just to get people to leave me alone would be pretty unprincipled imo.

Like I say I've said all this before, I'm just retreading old ground. But in terms of the Why Did This Blow Up, yeah I hear what you're saying but even trying to step back from my own experience and view this from outside, I'm still pretty surprised that a kind of shittily worded post at a bad time (from a blog that was pretty detached from the wider TMA fandom) followed by an Insufficient Disavowal of extremely nebulous accusations of acephobia, ended up being such a big thing.

Like literally. the majority of the messages I was getting were i n c r e d i b l y broad and vague. they said things like "what's your opinion on ace people" and "are you an aphobe" and I repeatedly answered them saying "I mean ace people exist and are my friends and comrades, what's the question?"

And I hope that when people raised specific issues about my actual conduct I answered them. I certainly tried to, to the best of my abilities - like I got a bit defensive initially but I agreed that my wording in the Martin post was poor and I did my best to clarify my intention (which had been to say "IF WE ASSUME THAT Martin isn't aroace," which I thought was a fair assumption when from context I was talking about a Martin being written in sexual or romantic relationships, but which I phrased as "Martin isn't [list of items including aroace]" bc as with most of my posts I wrote it in one go without reading it back). I kept saying that if people were specific about what was wrong with my conduct specifically, what they wanted explained and what they wanted me to change, I was happy to discuss that, but I wasn't happy to give some sort of Simple Definitive Answer to broad questions that were not mine to speak authoritatively on and which I often was like "I can't even begin to tell you my opinions on the answer until we unpick the question a LOT" (like. yes I could say honestly that I believe that ace/aro people are queer as a topline answer but if we go any deeper than that then we need to unpick what queerness is, what aro/aceness is, what context we're talking in, what is meant by queer spaces, etc etc and it's not something I would feel honest giving a yes/no answer to when a lot of people mean a lot of different things by the question, some of which I agree with and some of which I don't.) And it's not helped by the fact that when I have tried to answer questions in a way which feels honest, which inevitably gets long and ramble bc that's how my brain works, people have repeatedly got really hostile not because of what I say but because I've written an answer longer than "yes I fully agree with every possible permission of your point." like literally I have had people rant about how I'm being defensive or dodging the question when a) they haven't actually read my answer by their own admission and b) I'm literally. answering the question. it's fundamentally baffling to me that giving a short unnuanced answer with the intent of getting someone off your back is seen as less "dodging the question" than giving a paragraphs-long thoughtful and inconclusive answer. like this isn't a fucking debate. I'm not here to win an argument. I'm here to think about what I believe and why, and sometimes an honest answer is neither simple or conclusive.

idk man this post is actively unhelpful to everyone but me, but while I don't WANT to relitigate this every time I mention it I DO want to be absolutely clear that I have thought about all these things at length. some things were my fuckup, some things I stand by, but I still think it ended up with a response wildly disproportionate to the actual mistakes I made.

(which were there. evidently. but it seems like a very strange and spiralling way to react to "person who words things ambiguously and doesn't always give immediate clear responses to broad questions about complex issues")

#'what we're not going to do is persistently relitigate things'#*proceeds to write Another Billion Word Essay relitigating things*#apologies friends i have 0 self control #btw anon for clarity: where i say 'you' it's an impersonal you i don't mean. you. as a person.#I'm not going like YOU ANON YOU DID ALL THIS #but i am uhhhhhhh like yeah? i know all this reasoning? i just think they're bad reasons?#which i explained like. multiple times. they're all to me pretty based in a way of thinking i just can't wrap my head around #where there's like. no boundaries between individual and community actions and everything is personally addressed to You The Viewer #even if it Very Explicitly Isn't #like it's really. really hard for me to account for because i can't understand how you get to that headspace #(again impersonal you)

7 notes · View notes

letterboxd · 4 years

Photo

Human Resources.

Kitty Green talks to our London correspondent Ella Kemp about “putting the audience in the shoes of the youngest woman in a toxic work environment” in her new film, The Assistant.

The long-undervalued job of a Hollywood assistant has come into stark relief thanks to recent events, and the stories that are being told of assistants’ experiences, working conditions and pay rates are jaw-dropping. (Episode 422 of the Scriptnotes podcast is well worth a listen.)

Filmmaker Kitty Green was well ahead of the conversation; her first narrative feature, The Assistant, quietly premiered at the Telluride Film Festival last August (and the Berlinale in February). Dubbed by many as ‘the first post-#MeToo movie’, it is a remarkable portrait of a young woman navigating just another day in the office. Except this is not just another office, and so many things are wrong about this day.

Starring Julia Garner (Grandma, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Electrick Children) as Jane, the assistant to the predatory head of a New York-based film studio, the story zooms in on the details of her routine—the tedious tasks, the belittlement from her colleagues, the oppression from her mostly faceless boss—with such laser-sharp vision that by the end we feel we know Jane deep in our bones.

Green has previously directed the documentary features Ukraine is Not a Brothel (2013) and Casting JonBenét (2017), the latter a meta-documentary that also hones in on the neglect and exploitation of young women, albeit under a different light (it is now streaming on Netflix). While Green’s documentary experience bears fruit in her attention to detail, the narrative form of The Assistant allows for a focus on mundane tasks and micro-reactions that documentary might not have access to.

Various Letterboxd reviews mention the anxiety-inducing way The Assistant allows us to watch Jane “probe her place in the established, tacit system of complacency… knowing that everyone around her is motivated by self-interest to pretend it doesn’t exist” (Josh Lewis). “Green encourages her viewers to pay close attention to what’s really going on beneath the surface,” (KristineJean) in “a horror movie of soul-sickening ambience” (Scott Tobias).

Though The Assistant’s film festival run was cut short, and the closure of cinemas around the world hurts for a lot of us, there’s something about the claustrophobia of social distancing and the intimacy of the small screen that maybe suits this picture. Nevertheless, seeing the film in a cinema in ‘the before time’ highlighted for Alyssa Heflin the ocean of different opinions that can come from misunderstood subtext: “Watching this in a room where you can hear people snickering at the girl and asking what the point of all this is adds a certain extra… incendiary level to an already deeply angry viewing experience.” Indeed, discomfort and crossed wires seem to define the messages at the core of The Assistant.

Kitty Green talks to Ella Kemp about the influence of Chantal Akerman, the infinite watchability of Julia Garner, and the oddness of growing up with a Nazi-free edit of The Sound of Music.

Jane (Julia Garner) takes another call from the boss in ‘The Assistant’.

The Assistant is your first fiction feature. The subject matter feels so immediate—what made you choose to not make a documentary of this, given your track record in that realm? Kitty Green: I went to fiction film school, and I made fiction short films. I then found work in documentary, so I made two feature-length docs. With this one, I was looking at exploring the micro-aggressions, the tiny moments, gestures, looks, glances, behaviors that often go overlooked when covering the #MeToo movement. We often talk about the bad men and the misconduct, but this is more about a cultural, structural problem. So I was hoping to amplify the more quietly insidious behavior that we need to address if we really want things to improve. A fiction film allowed me to hone in on details—close up—and the way you can take an annoyance through the emotional experience, putting the audience in the shoes of the youngest woman in a toxic work environment.

How did you decide to keep the timeframe to just one day in Jane’s life rather than fleshing it out over a longer period? The lead character is in such a complicated position. It’s such a difficult set of circumstances, the machinery that this predator has created around himself. I wanted to untick that, to discuss how difficult it is to be a young woman in that environment. So the day, the routine, was really important. What she was experiencing, how she was experiencing it; every task she did I gave equal weight to. Whether she was photocopying, binding something suspicious, you experience it as you would if you were in her shoes. That was important to me.

I had my fists clenched the whole time, when she’d be eating cereal, or washing up mugs, waiting for something awful to happen. Totally. It’s exploring misconduct, but it’s also looking at a whole spectrum, from gendered work environments, toxic work environments, through all these environments that support predatory behavior. I was interested in what the entry points are, without conflating those issues and being able to explore all the cultural systemic things we need to unpick to move forward.

The film is so focused on Jane, played by Julia Garner. How did you choose her? The script is pretty bare when it describes who she is, she’s just Jane. I didn’t have anyone in mind, really. I told my casting agent that we’re watching this character do the most mundane tasks, so it was important that she was striking. I said I needed someone infinitely watchable. I had seen Julia in The Americans and I remembered being struck by her, so I immediately wanted to meet her. She really understood the script, it worked out beautifully. We got to create the character together, we had a month of rehearsals where we really went through where she was emotionally at any given point, and Julia is wonderful so it was great.

Matthew Macfadyen and Kitty Green discuss a scene in ‘The Assistant’. / Photo: Ty Johnson

And Matthew Macfadyen—his character feels so crucial and his performance so pivotal, even in just one scene. What were you looking for when casting him? I’ve been a fan of his for forever, but I hadn’t seen Succession. Apparently the character has some similarities? I’ve only watched Succession in the past week… Somebody had to send me a clip to prove he could do an American accent! Matthew really brought something to that character and took it to another level. It’s so insidious what he does. He and Julia worked so beautifully together, it just got better and better every time.

How did you feel watching Succession now and seeing Matthew as Tom Wambsgans? Tom still feels different somehow. But I’ve had a good time watching it, he’s so great. There are parallels for sure!

The language you use in the film is so careful, so much is in the subtext. How do you build tension from these empty spaces? We had a great visual team who were lighting it in an interesting way. There was a lot of oppressive fluorescent lights. The sound was also very important—we had an amazing sound designer, Leslie Schatz, who does a lot of Todd Haynes’ stuff and Gus Van Sant’s. He’d done Elephant, which I thought was phenomenally sound designed. He sent out a team to record every kind of buzz, hum, whir, and we created a lot of tension in that soundscape. It heightens these moments when you can really feel the hum of the fluorescent lights or the alarm of the copier. Things like that are authentic to the world, so it doesn’t feel like you’re manipulating an audience, but they do add a dramatic tension.

During The Assistant’s various film festival screenings so far, audience reactions have been quite varied. Some people find it uncomfortable, some have found it funny. What would you hope an audience member would take from it? Who found it funny…? That’s a strange reaction, and a little terrifying. I think it makes some men uncomfortable and maybe their reaction is to laugh as a way to hide that discomfort. I get a lot of men come up to me afterwards and say, “There are things in that film that maybe I have done.” Those conversations are really important. There’s a scene where the men lean over Jane’s chair and correct her email, little things like that which can be quite patronising even if a lot of men think are helpful. But there’s a point where they cross a line, where maybe it isn’t helpful anymore and it’s a little insulting. I’ve had a few people who are bosses with their own assistants who have watched the film and have said they’re going to treat them a little better, and that maybe they’re wrestling with their own guilt. I think those conversations are great.

Julia Garner prepares for a take on the set of ‘The Assistant’. / Photo: Ty Johnson

What is your favorite one-woman-show performance, where one female actor entirely carries the film? A big influence on The Assistant was Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. It’s just one woman going about her housework. I remember seeing that in film school and being bowled over by it, I’d never seen anything like it.

Do you have a favorite scene that has ever taken place in an office environment? Offices… I mean, I love The Office? I watched it in preparation for this, even though there’s seemingly nothing in common except for the ways of the photocopier…

It’s important to inhale that kind of comedy while working on something more intense, right? For sure, that helps.

What is your favorite on-screen argument? I watched a lot of them to prepare for the HR scene, as it’s a confrontation between two characters. There’s a scene in Steve McQueen’s Hunger, which is a seventeen-minute dialogue. It’s an incredible scene. It’s not an argument but still some sort of confrontation. I was interested in scenes like that which are really long and stand out from the rest of the movie. James Schamus, one of my producers, made a film called Indignation, which has a confrontation between two characters, which also influenced the structure of what I was doing. I also just watched the latest episode of Better Call Saul in which there’s a sixteen-minute confrontation, which I thought was pretty remarkable.

What was the first film that made you want to be a filmmaker? To be honest I’m not sure. I got a video camera when I was eleven, and I started playing with it in our backyard, making little movies. It wasn’t that I saw a film and tried to replicate it necessarily. But I do have a strange story…

I had a copy of The Sound of Music in which my father had edited out the Nazis, because he was worried I’d be scared of them as a kid. So I have this strange 40-minute version of the film that ends at the wedding scene… And I always thought that was The Sound of Music, and then in high school I figured out there’s this whole other storyline I never knew existed. I guess that taught me the power of editing! I had to go back and rewatch what I’d seen, and it definitely made me think of the craft more as a viewer.

‘The Assistant’ is available to watch on VOD platforms (including Hulu) as of late July.

#kitty green #the assistant #directed by women #female director #independent film #telluride film festival #virtual screening #virtual release #metoo #payuphollywood #hollywood assistant #timesup #juliagarner #matthewmacfadyen #patrickwilson #succession #bettercallsaul #chantel akerman #letterboxd

10 notes · View notes

sunflowerstrays · 6 years

Text

it’s nothing personal // park jinyoung // pt 2

master list (pt 1)

park jinyoung x reader.

words: 2.3k.

genre: funny, fluff (??), angst (kinda??)

—

“So, tell me everything I ought to know about you,” you say as you sit between Jackson and Jaebum, brushing your skirt down and holding the notepad in front of you. In your hand is a pen, ready to scribble down anything worth noting in a way that none of the boys that will realise, and beneath the notepad is your mobile phone that is recording the entire conversation.

“Do you not know a lot about us already?” Yugyeom asks, “I mean, didn’t you research us prior to applying?”

“Of course I did!” You exclaim, making Jackson laugh at your sudden outburst. “But everyone knows that, I want to know more about you as humans. Tell me about everything, from your favourite colour to the way you like your coffee and more. We are going to be working together for a long time, right?”

“Well, I guess you’ve got a point,” Yugyeom says, sinking back into his chair as Youngjae beside him shines to life.

“So, my favourite type of hot drink is actually tea, but like those really cool flavoured ones you can get,” Youngjae begins, and like that and without knowing it, he saves your neck and does you the hugest favour. You keep glancing between Jaebum, Jinyoung and the rest of the boys, all whom bar those two seem to have wholly accepted you. They are really hesitant and shut off towards you, making you equally as nervous to be around them.

All of these horrible thoughts keep flying through your head; what if they find out, or are on to you? What repercussions will that have? Are you going to be kicked out of JYP, and later TMZ, left to fend for yourself and your daughter?

“But honestly I just love Coco more than anything, even Jaebum,” it’s Jaebum’s reaction to Youngjae’s comment that drags you out of your spiral. You break into a smile despite not hearing half of what Youngjae had said.

This is how the majority of the morning plays out; unsuccessful. You find out nothing that is of any use to you - Bambam had a girlfriend back when he was six, and Yugyeom gets tipsy after three glasses of wine. Nothing that would ruin their career, and save yours.

Disgruntled, you follow them to their dance studio when they go ahead to rehearse for their upcoming tour. You know that you will find absolutely nothing out about them by watching them perform to a mirror and camera, but it was worth a shot at least.

Watching them practice though was mesmerising, to say the least. They all moved with such fluidity and professionalism that made you question why you were doing this again; you could clearly see how passionate that they were about their jobs, their careers, their lifestyles, that you wanted to cry thinking about what you were going to do eventually.

It made you feel a little better about not getting anywhere with the research so far.

Throughout the practice some of the boys would come and sit by your side for a break, and that was your only opportunity to speak with them all privately and see what they had to say about anything. You’d subtly try and quiz them on political questions, but for the most part they didn’t hold an opinion, or at least nothing worth bringing down an entertainment company about.

It wasn’t until Jinyoung took his break and decided to take you on a tour of the building that you made good use of your time.

“Don’t have too much fun!” Jackson would say loudly as Jinyoung held the door for you, with his younger friends giggling between themselves. You could sense the daggers that Jinyoung was sending them as he shut the door behind himself.

And surprisingly, it isn’t as bad as you thought. In your head Jinyoung was very cut off, cold and quiet, but on his own he was actually rather pleasant and friendly. He would smile and chat encouragingly with some of the trainees walking around the building, and would always greet the other members of staff. You were making a mental note of everything he did, wanting to know everything about him.

You’d be lying if you didn’t feel drawn to him; you weren’t sure whether it was his good looks, his charming charisma with those around him, or something else, but he was so interesting and mysterious and like a story you had to unpick apart to understand. You wanted to understand Jinyoung, and not just so you could dig up some dirt on him.

“You’ve asked us a lot of questions about us,” Jinyoung says as he buys both you and him a coffee from the cafe in the bottom of the building. You smiled at the way everyone regarded him with such honour and admiration, and wondered what it felt like to be that admired and loved. No one, bar your daughter, gave you such high valued opinions. “Tell me something about you. Something that no one knows.”

“My favourite colour is orange,” you say, indicating to your orange converse and making Jinyoung break out into a bright smile. You giggle as you take your drink, following him out of the cafe.

“Something that not a lot of people know,” Jinyoung reminds you, making you blush beneath your makeup. You chew your lip for a second, trying to think of something that isn’t a lie but won’t reveal too much about yourself.

“Once I wanted to be an actress. My grandma took me to see a musical once, and that is what I wanted to do,” you finally confess, making Jinyoung regard you in a slightly different light. “But my lifestyle and upbringing didn’t really permit such ambition dreams, so a translator is where I sit.”

“I think that’s beautiful,” Jinyoung says, pulling you up a flight of stairs and taking you onto a private little balcony. “It’s a shame that you couldn’t get that sort of.. Dream in motion, I guess.”

That’s when you feel it all hit you like a brick of pure overwhelming guilt, anger and sadness. Guilty because your sole purpose for making friends with Jinyoung and the rest of got7 was to ruin their company into savage threads. Anger because you right now, you wanted to genuinely befriend Jinyoung, tell him how much you appreciated his soft words and kindness towards you. Sadness because once this was all over, he would hate you.

How had you grown so attached to him in one day?

This is when you decide you need to cut yourself aside from Jinyoung and his friends. Don’t get too close, don’t become too friendly, because in the end you’ll result in hurting. This hits you in the gut, because you realise finally if you pull this off, you’ll quite possibly be one of the most hated people in Korea.

“Why the quiet?” Jinyoung asks as he finishes the last of his drink, looking to see that you’ve barely even touched yours. “Did I do something? You were so chatty with the other boys.”

“No!” You exclaim, “It’s just… this whole thing is so different and new to me, and I’m not entirely used to it. You have been so nice to me and it’s a little baffling?”

“Did you think I was going to be horrible then?”

Yes. Cut off and cold. “No, I just didn’t know how well I’d get on with everyone. It feels like we’ve just clicked- that sounds so weird, Jinyoung I’m sorry.”

“Ah no y/n it’s cute,” he says, flicking your nose as the two of you stare across the city.

Seoul was beautiful. Despite it’s heavy pollution, often rainy days and countless near death experiences with public transport that you have suffered, it was one of your favourite places. You had hated growing up as you had, but it was worth it if it meant you got to visit Seoul every day for work.

The thing that crushed you about this city though is that it was where dreams were made; yet here you were, having yet to achieve your full potential and dreams whilst being on track to crush others. Jinyoung was busy beside you looking over the city, entirely oblivious to the war inside of you currently, as you questioned all of your morals.

Were you actually capable of doing this? Of ruining a group of boys and their dreams?

“Jinyoung,” you say, sparking his attention and snapping him from his daydream, “there’s something I need to tell you.”

You aren’t sure why you said that; there was no way you could tell him what you was doing. He’d hate you - and you didn’t know why, but the thought of Jinyoung hating you was making your chest hurt.

“What’s wrong, y/n?” Jinyoung asks, turning to face you as you stare into the last of your coffee. You were going to throw up- there was no way you could do this.

Just try and miss his shoes.

“I wanted to be a journalist,” you spit out, forcing some of the truth out of you, “as well. Actress or journalist.”

“Oh,” Jinyoung looks panicked for the briefest second, so brief that you weren’t sure if it was even there. “Well, why don’t you try and pursue such a career now? You could easily go back to school and do it again.”

“But I haven’t got the money, or time,” or childcare, and also I am already a journalist. You are a spider, with your web being the lies that you are tangling Jinyoung and his friends - flies - in. Innocent flies that were just on their way, and you were going to kill them.

Metaphorically, at least, you only needed to end their career and not their lives. But you wasn’t sure if you could do either; after all, you were a just a small town journalist and were definitely not ready for the big screen.

—

“I think it looks really good on him,” you speak up suddenly, making all of the boys raise an eyebrow at you. You raise a hand and indicate to Jaebum, who was currently dressed in tracksuit bottoms, a mesh shirt that Bambam had forced him to wear, and his bucket hat. You couldn’t see his eyes, but there was a smirk on his face that you were going to play to your advantage. “I mean, he’s got a great body. Flaunt what you’ve got, baby.”

“Thanks,” Jaebum replies, amusement in his tone. “Next comeback, boys?”

“Unfortunately not all of us are that lucky to look so good in jogging bottoms and a mesh shirt, Jaebum, but you do you,” Jinyoung chuckles, crossing one leg over the other as he sits beside you. Following your micro-confession on the balcony, in which you nearly ruined his nice shoes with your extreme guilt, Jinyoung had shown you the rest of the building before returning to dance. The boys had all wiggled their eyebrows when the two of you had returned in a manner that made Jinyoung roll your eyes and you burn bright red, but that was when something had hit you.

Chaeyoung had recently joked about you sleeping with any of the GOT7 members for information. Perhaps you wouldn’t have to go that far, but if you were able to get under their skin one way or another, you’d find out that information. You’d be trusted, accepted even more so, and this would kick the whole process into motion much faster.

The only issue was getting one of them to spark an interest in you.

So, being the actress you lied about wanting to become, you had disappeared into the toilets before returning to the boys, and had made subtle changes to your appearance. Anything that would make you more attractive in their eyes, but you had a horrible feeling it wasn’t working.

Also, you were terrible at flirting. Everything came out as being too awkward and odd, or just you being sweet. Never had you been successful at flirting with a boy, and today was not that day either.

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” you say calmly, resting a hand on Jinyoung’s knee as you turned to face him. He stiffened ever so slightly, and you weren’t sure if you had overstepped your boundary. Yugyeom and Mark had noticed the interaction and shared an odd look, confusion in their eyes. “I’m sure you’d look equally as beautiful.”

“But we all know who would look best,” Jackson says, returning to the room wearing a mesh shirt himself. You couldn’t help but blush at this, and with a giggle you took away your hand. Jinyoung’s eyes followed the movement, his cheeks suddenly flushed and arms in his lap.

Perhaps this was it. Some moral, ethically sane part of you was desperate for it not to be. There was no way you could lead Jinyoung, or any of the boys, on in this way, but times were tough. Every time you were beginning to question your activities, you’d be reminded of the black market deal hanging over your head. You dared step a toe out of line, and it was all over for you and your little girl.

And no matter how attracted you were to Jinyoung’s cold and calculating figure, you’d never give up anything for her.

—

i’m so bad at updating, oof-

30 notes · View notes

tumblunni · 6 years

Text

What do you guys think about the names Dustin and Darcy for my protagonists in Let's Go?

Cos i really wanted to play the co op mode thing by myself, just so i can pretend this role in the plot is filled by two siblings and have a bit of fun roleplaying that. But i dunno yet how the co-op works and whether you'd be able to customize the avatar of the second player or if its just the default trainer? Or can you only play co-op if you have two separate games? Im planning to buy the other version anyway once i get more money, so it could be fun to play my first version with sibling one and then the second playthru is sibling two's turn to shine!

Oh and the whole reason i wanted to do this is cos i wanna try out the customization features to make some ocs now that there's no competitive online stuff unless you pay a subscription fee (LOL NO THANKS). Like..i always felt like i HAD to make my character me in xy/sumo/usum, otherwise its like lying online? But of course i cant actually make me because theres no nonbinary option or even remotely ambiguous outfits for either gender. And you cant have wild hair colours while i dye my hair 24/7 irl lol. Its silly cos like 95% of the gym leaders and other characters ingame have anime hair colours yet the player has to be normal? So yeah i cpuldnt really enjoy making this innacurate defanged version of myself yet i didnt feel like i was allowed to just make up a new character either. Closest i could do was give myself white hair like my old trainersona when i was 12, lol. I mean i guess thats my 'real hair colour' underneath the dye right now, if you think about it that way?

OH GOD PIKACHU CAN HAVE A LITTLE TUXEDO AND BOWLER HAT HOLY FUCK IM SORRY TO INTERRUPT THIS BUT I WAS WATCHING THE IGN REVIEW AND THEY SHOWED PIKA BOWLER HAT PLEASE GO GOOGLE THAT VIDEO JUST FOR THAT 1 SECOND OF NEW FOOTAGE OF MY BEAUTIFUL CLASSY BOYE

okay where was i

Yeah! I think sibling trainers could be a good and unique way to handle a rival! Like having them be your sibling already establishes that rivalry. But it can be a soft and nice rivalry! I wanna go with that fun version rather than the full on angry exaggerated sibling rivalries you often see in kids media. Like i know that some people legit dont get on with their siblings and some people can even have a very gary esque full on rivalry thats sorta 'love to hate' or like..tsundere pretending you hate them. But personally i never had experience with that, i can never relate to those 'tfw u hate ur sibling and theyre always an asshole but lolll u love them anyway' posts. I only got to live with my little sister for a little while due to the catastrophe of abusive parenthood that was my childhood, and i lost contact with her forever when she was very young so i doubt she'd even remember me. *sigh* But like i don't think i only love her so much because i miss her! People say newborns and toddlers are the most bratty so like you'd think if i was gonna ever find her 'annoying' i would have done it back then. I was always just mega proud of her and whenever she'd be 'bratty' i'd be cheering her on and trying to protect her from mom. And when she'd try and pull pranks on me or practise play-fighting or whatever i was just like 'lol thats legit funny' and taking play-falls so she felt better about herself. Like we didnt have much power in that household so i felt like encouraging her pretending to be a wrestler would help her feel like she had some sort of control in some part of her life i guess? And just i wished i was allowed to roughhouse and run around and be all 'unladylike' and just enjoy BEING A KID when i was a kid, yknow? I always had legit fun being with her and legit enjoyed it and was legit proud and legit never annoyed. I just dont understand 'yeah she's annoying but i love her anyway'. I was only ever her rival as a play-rival to help encourage her to like.. Enjoy the things she enjoyed. Feel like someone else cared. I only ever acted like 'ha ha baby stuff yeah sure i hate hanging out with my sister" cos i thought i was SUPPOSED TO. I always felt so guilty doing it and so dissappointed cos id rather hang out with her than be a boring stereotypical teen tbh. I dunno, maybe this isnt typical for siblings and its just a sign of how badly we were raised? I was just real fuckin lonely and absolutely loved having a family member who loved me for the first time since my grandma died. Same reason i always used to act all 'i am too cool i totally am not soft for my lil sister' around my lil sister's dad. I really wanted him to love me too! I used to say swear words at him cos i thougjt he would thibk i was Cool And Adult?? I have soooo many cringe moments from that phase of my childhood. Man it hurts to think that i never actually did get to become that positive influence that protected my sister from my mum and let her know she was loved. Cos i was sent to live with my dad when she was like 5ish? And never saw her again and now im too scared to try and reach out to her again because 1: she probably doesnt even remember me, 2: theres a chance she believes my mum saying i was some horrible asshole who abandoned the family, 3: even bigger chance that contacting her could mean my mum finding me again and big fuckin risk of further abuse. Plus the awkwardness of introducing my trans self when she'd remember me as her sister and all. Sigh! All i can do is hope that her cool dad eventually got custody of her, and that he didnt turn out to be a secret bastard like when i met my own dad. He seemed good, but then again i was just a lil kid and my dad seemed good at first. Sighhhhhh...

SO UMM YEAH WOW I MADE MYSELF SAD

Anyway the point is that whenever i write siblings i'd rather write 100% unapologetic super loving love cos its wish fullfillment for me. This is also why in/cest shipping is a massive beserk button for me, good wholesome family relationships are REAL FUCKIN IMPORTANT and how DARE you corrupt that shit! Some people would fuckin KILL to have that wholesome family!!

Anyway lol thats why i'd like a Wholesome Rivalry for these sibling ocs! Like they challenge each other to contests along the way just for fun, and they react all 'wow my sis is the BEST' when you beat them, so hard feelings at all. And you dont JUST do rival stuff but also sometimes just hang out and have fun cos you missed each other. And if anyone threatens your sibling then THAT is the only time you see the Serious Sibling Power! Rival moments: ha ha lol bet ya cant beat me ooo im a scary villain LOL I CANT KEEP A STRAIGHT FACE HAHA! Giovanni punches your brother: *stony cold death glare from hell as tricksy prank sis turns into an unstoppable vengeance engine* Oh, but also the only other time they'd be serious is in their final battle together! Like most of the 'rivalry' is just competing to make the adventure fun and to help each other get stronger. But if sis/bro ever actually legit said they really want to fight to find out who's the best, and its like..important to help their self confidence, then i think bro/sis would respect that and go all out. Taking a fall and letting them win would be the most disrespectful thing of all! Oh, but i do think there would be one kind of battle like that during the story? Like in one of the more low stakes faux-rival fights the sibling actually does try and let you win, and the challenge is to try and lose against all odds. High stakes super failure battle!!! Imagine the evil team in the background like 'wtf' as these two run the most aggressively slow race of all time! XD

Oh and i kinda thought about different personalities for the two of them based on who you pick? Like i did like that aspect about brendan/may in RSE compared to other 'unpicked option becomes rival' characters in later games that didnt even have one personality let alone two. It just sucks that the personalities they decided to give them were 'female rival is super self concious and thinks youre better than her because youre a boy' and 'male rival is super ego and thinks he's better than you because he's a boy'. Boooo!

So instead of that the personalities i was thinking for these two would be less sexist lol. Male sibling Dustin is basically Wally so far? I need to develop him a bit more to make him a bit distinct, i mean its not like every single shy dude is identical. I'm thinking maybe mix him with all the wasted potential in Brendan? Like in the game they slightly hint at him having the ONE non stereotypical trait of liking cute teddy bears, and that made me think about how much better his whole plot would have been if it actually criticized his sexism and said that he only behaves that way cos he's overcompensating for being bullied for being 'feminine', yknow? And then in the manga they actually DO write him as super feminine, and even as a contest star who loves fashion and dressing up his pokemon! But then GAHHH they present it as some sort of fuckin 'character flaw', like he's shown to be selfish and superficial because of it. And the backstory is that him and the female protagonist used to be 'normal' until a traumatic event. Brendan was a Natural Fighting Prodigy until he saved his female friend from a wild pokemon and was so traumatized that he never wanted to fight again, while she wanted to learn to fight so she'd never need to be protected again. But this is not only presented as Wrong Ways To Be Gender but also like.. Fighting their natural instinct which still comes through?? Like male protag hasnt fought in YEARS yet whenever he's forced to fight he's just magically better at it than female protag who's been practising all these years to become his equal. Ha ha silly girl you can never achieve that! All you get is this patronizing 'well if you just tryyyyy girly things im sure you'll like it' plot and then you get rescued by him in the end because OF COURSE you do. Sigh! I cant believe they made me hate that pairing even more than the games did! So yeah i dont really wanna write Dustin as a jerkass who's secretly got synpathetic motives of internalized homophobia/sexism, cos i feel thats a plot very specific to my perceptuons of Brendan and id basically just have to make Dustin a clone of him and he wouldnt be able to shine on his own merits. Instead i'm just thinking of writing him as a 100% sensitive soul, and he still faces predjudice for not being that bigoted idea of an 'ideal man' but really the fact he doesnt bow down to their demands proves that he's the bravest person here.

And then I'm thinking maybe the female sibling Darcy is the older one and is a bit "gary ish"? Like eitjer way you still have a friendly and loving siblingness, but she's a bit more of a sass who is tsundere about admitting she loves her bro. But i dont think she's the cold or grumpy sort of tsundere, more like a trickstery tomboy? Bombastic loki jock sis! She can only be a bit abrasive with her bro cos she wants to teach him to be tough even when she's not there to protect him. But sometimes she can mess it up and make him feel like he has to change his personality in order to be tough, rather than letting him know she supports him in being "unmasculine" and just wants to help him find the confidence to stand up to people who bully him for it. Like she feels like she is 'weaker' than him in the sense that she worries too much about what people will think if she expresses her real emotions, yknow? Like theyre both suffering from toxic masculinity! He's suffering from the standard form where men who are too 'soft' are beaten down into that mould. Ans she's suffering from the problem where 'masculine' girls feel like they have to be '100% masculine' in order to be allowed to be themselves at all. Like back when i was a kid and before i came out as trans i always used to try and pretend to like sports ans like..cliche macho shit where you Cant Admit You Care About Your Friends and also i wasnt allowed to like ANY feminine things at all. I had to either follow the stereotype of femininity entirely or follow the opposite stereotype, i wasnt allowed to just reject stereotypes and like what i actually like. So yeah me realizing i wasnt really a girl has led to me embracing more 'girly' things than back when i thought i was one! So i think Darcy would have a similar arc but like..the cis equivelant? Just finds people who arent such judgmental pricks and stops having to conform to either of those stereotypes in order to keep fake friends who dont really give a shit about her. She can have a plot about both forced feminine and masculine stereotypes being equally limiting, rather than that shitty 'being masculine is a prison uwu every woman will be happier embracing her love of makeup' shit. That dominant narrative just made me feel like i was somehow wrong about myself whenever i didnt like 100% Of Sports All The Time, i must be somehow girly if i liked even ONE girly thing yet i needed hundreds of proofs if i wanted to be masculine. And like i wasnt just allowed to be neither! I wasnt allowed to like parts of both! I wasnt allowed to BE GODDAMN TRANS!!! So yeah i dunno if i'd go whole hog and make this character a trans man or a nonbinary person tho? I think she's just actually a cis girl who happens to be sporty and brash and likes a lot of 'masculine' fashion and hobbies. And she's just been made to feel self concious about it, as if she cant possibly REALLY be that unless she likes Every Single Boy Thing and wins at Every Single Challenge. Does anyone else remember that shit too? The girls have to win Every sports game against the boys in order to be 'one of the boys' but if you lose even one of them it somehow proves that you're inferior. Even though the boys lost 50 billion games to you and that doesnt prove theyre inferior! Like man she has sooooo many 'gary rivals' in her school life, thats why she loves going on this adventure with a kind brother rival who actually respects her! So her resolution would just be her staying the same but being more confident about it and saying fuk u to those fake friends. Same as her brother's plot, just they both face different specifics to the way this sexism affects them, yknow?

Oh but yeah when i did finally learn about LGBT stuff and realize i was trans it was Big Amazing cos even in the rare stories about Its Okay To Be Yourself it still left me feeling weirdly empty when the girl decides that yes she does wanna be a girl in the end. So i get that these plots might come off as queerbaiting if i write them badly? I need to make sure to make it clear that these characters 100% want to be seen as this gender and its just other people being fuckfaces and trying to define what their gender has to mean. I think maybe i'll try and mitigate this potential misunderstanding by adding different sorts of lgbt content. And, well, also cos i just want lgbt content in all of my stories because i am lgbt, of course! I'm 100% sure that Darcy is gay, and i think also maybe possibly Dustin is trans? Like, his plot is about being mocked for being a 'feminine' boy, but its also even more personal for him because he's a trans boy and he feels like he needs to change his personality in order to pass/he isnt really real because his personality doesnt fit the stereotypical image of a man. Like if you'd looked at the two of them back when they were identical twins, you probably would have expected Darcy to end up being trans if you were the sort of person who believes those basic ass stereotypes about 'boys who play with barbies and girls who play with trucks'. Or i mean maybe its the other way around and Darcy is a trans girl who still has a 'masculine' personality according to stereotypes? Or even both of them are trans and both face being told that they arent real because they dont fit the perfect stereotype of a trans person according to cis perceptions? Or maybe i'm overcomplicating things with all of this and it'd just muddy the message i guess. I might just keep it to them both being cis but also both of them like girls. And i can always apply my trans and other LGBT headcanons to other characters along their adventure.

Anyway LOL im rambling too much!

#lets go bunni #bunni plays lets go

7 notes · View notes

tangle-of-ivy · 7 years

Text

This Is Why You Can’t Have Nice Things

This is my entry for @sdavid09‘s Whale of a Tale Teller “What If?” Challenge! My fandom was “Psych”, my character was Carlton Lassiter, and my prompt was “What if Carlton Lassiter accidentally handcuffed himself to his desk drawer?” I had writer’s block for a really long time, so I churned this out with only one day left to submit. It’s not as polished as I would like, but I’m still glad I got to participate. :)

Words: 2,207

Fandom: Psych

Pairing: Carlton / Female Reader

Genre: Fluff and humor

Head Detective Carlton Lassiter refrained from slamming his fist on his desk again in frustration. It wouldn’t solve anything. And that very move was what had gotten him into this mess to begin with. Though if anyone had asked, he would have blamed shoddy handcuffs. That and, to nobody’s surprise, Shawn Spencer.

He checked the time on the bottom of the computer screen again and groaned. It was now 1:26 am and he’d officially been stuck for over two hours. Glancing over at the policemen on the night shift across the open office area, he was relieved to see that they were still oblivious to his predicament. One was cleaning his weapon while debating with his partner over whose turn it was to make a food run, and several others were working their way through piles of paperwork. None of them seemed surprised to see him working this late. He’d done it often enough in the past. However, this time it was not by choice.

Carlton searched through his drawers for the umpteenth time and even checked his pockets again. He had to reach awkwardly around with his left hand to reach his opposite side. He found nothing useful. Sighing, he dug at the key hole with the thumb-tack he’d been using, but it was too short to do much of anything. He cursed Spencer under his breath.

Earlier that evening he had been continuing one of his favorite hobbies of proving wrong any manufacturer who claimed their handcuffs were unpickable. He’d attached one cuff to the handle of his desk drawer, then began using a paperclip on the lock. He wasn’t quite stupid enough to cuff himself before having at least one or two trial runs first. As he’d worked, most of the officers had gone home for the night. Juliet had left early for a girl’s night out with one of her friends. It was a fairly good pair of cuffs. He’d been stumped for over an hour.

The chief had a meeting with Spencer and Gus. Before they left, the psychic had passed by his desks to make a few of his characteristic bad puns before going to get corn dogs with his friend. Lassie had ignored him and continued with his task. It was only later, as he laid the second cuff on his desk to get a better look at the mechanisms that he saw the gift Spencer had left him. The large snow globe with a close-up and unflattering selfie of Spencer made him jump and let out a rather undignified squeak of terror. Carlton quickly kicked his trash can over and gave the globe a fearful push so that it tumbled into the bin with a crash.

After snapping at the officers who were looking over at him with concern, he wiped his face with a shaking hand. His anger soon replaced his fear.

“Dammit, Spencer!” he swore, slamming his right fist down on his desk.

Unfortunately for him, the second cuff was still laying open there. The foolish movement had two results. His wrist landed on the metal, causing the two claws to swiftly close together and lock with a snap. At the same time, the paperclip flew out of his hand and skittered across the floor, far out of reach.

He stared at the links that now connected him to his desk. After the shock wore off, he muttered a long string of curses under his breath and swore to get Spencer back for this. He’d been there ever since, using whatever he could find to pick the lock. However, his first thumb tack had broken off in the key hole, making it twice as difficult. He’d tried the ink cartridge of his pen, but it was too thick. He’d even used the lead from his mechanical pencil, which was of course too weak and broke right away. The second thumb tack was all he had left, and it was too short to reach the tumblers. His stomach grumbled as time wore on, but he stubbornly continued working at the problem.

“What have you done to yourself now?”

The amused, feminine voice surprised, but didn’t startle him. He laid his head down on the edge of the desk and groaned childishly. This was not the predicament he would have chosen her to find him in.

Laughing, she came around his desk, and placed a soothing hand on his shoulder.

Y/N was a forensic analyst who worked in the lab across the hall from Woody’s morgue. Carlton and her had known each other since high school. They’d gone their separate ways for college, but ended up back in Santa Barbara and reconnected years later. They both got jobs at the same police station and their friendship grew over years of working cases together. She handled analyzing the evidence and he caught the bad guys. After his separation from his wife, and then his divorce, Y/N had helped him cope. She’d kept him from diving too deep into his work to escape his pain. She’d dragged him out for concerts, breakfast, swimming, work outs, movies, museums, even picnics. He loved his job. But eventually he conceded that he needed a break every now and then to keep his mind sharp when he was working.

Lately, he’d been enjoying her company more than usual and had only recently figured out why. He hadn’t thought much about dating since his divorce, so it wasn’t unusual that it had taken a while for him to diagnose his own symptoms. It wasn’t just simple attraction. He’d invested all he had into making his marriage work and its failure had turned him even more cautious. Yet somehow, Y/N had wormed her way past his defenses. If it had been intentional, he would have pulled away the instant he realized his feelings for her. But he’d watched her carefully, and finally come to the conclusion that she was unaware of the effect she had on him. She didn’t realize that her blunt honesty made him trust her without thought. Her comfort and empathy were never insincere, and her teasing could lighten his darkest moods.

However, despite these conclusions, he was still unsure about what he was going to do. He was pretty sure he knew what he wanted to do about it. But whatever confidence he’d had with women had left him when his wife did. At the moment, he was at a stalemate; his heart arguing with his head. He was desperately hoping from a sign from her, which was rather hypocritical since it was her lack of an agenda that made her so appealing.

Y/N’s hand on his shoulder was a welcome touch. It soothed some of his anger that had been simmering for the last few hours. But he was still rather embarrassed at the situation she had found him in.

“I didn’t DO anything. This is all Spencer’s fault!”

“Isn’t it always?”

“Pretty much.”

“Did he leave you that?” She pointed to the broken snow globe in the trash.

Carlton ground his teeth. “Yeah.”

Y/N waited, but he didn’t elaborate.

“Based on the chafing around your wrist, the obviously ineffectiveness of your lock picking tool, the paper clip I stepped on coming over here, and the noise coming from your stomach, I’d say you have been stuck here for quite a while.”

“Always the analyst.”

She chuckled at his wry tone.

“Where’s the key.”

“On top of the filing cabinet in the corner.”

“Why didn’t you ask someone to get it for you?”

He glared at her over his shoulder as she retrieved the key. She laughed at his expression.

“You’re too stubborn for your own good.”

“Thank you.”

Y/N rolled her eyes as she tried to unlock the cuffs. The key wouldn’t fit all of the way into the hole.

“What did you do to these things?” she asked, gently turning his wrist. She took a small flashlight that was attached to her key ring and used it to get a better look. “Is that pencil lead? And…the point of another tack?”

“Maybe.”

She sighed and went over to Juliet’s desk. Rummaging around she came back with a lock picking kit.

“I gave her this for Christmas last year.” She unrolled the pouch and pulled out several small tools. Kneeling beside his chair, she set to work on the lock.

Lassie let himself relax as he watched her work. He enjoyed the excuse to be near her. Her arm pressed against his and her hands gripped his wrist gently in order to get the best angle. Her hair released the smell of her raspberry shampoo.

“I thought you were spending the evening with Detective O’Hara.” He said softly as she worked.

“Nah. She’s hanging out with her friend Martha. They were going to get pedicures, eat, and go see a late movie.”

“They didn’t invite you?”

“They did. But I had already offered to help at a foster kid fundraiser. It was an ice cream social, and I was on too much of a sugar high to go to sleep when I got home. You’re not the only one who racks up a lot of over-time. I saw your car in the parking lot and thought I’d stop by up here and say hi before going down to the lab.”

Carlton smiled, crookedly.

“And to send me home to bed, no doubt.”

She laughed.

“You were here before I was this morning. You need to take a vacation.”

“I hate vacation.”

“Too bad. I’m going to talk you into taking one sometime soon. If only for the sake of the other detectives.”

He raised an eyebrow at her.

“What would I do on vacation.”

“I don’t know. Sleep in. Read a book. Go to the beach. Travel.”

“Sounds boring.”

“I guess it can be boring if you’re alone all the time.” She pondered the problem as she worked. “I’ve been planning on taking some time off. We could do some stuff together.”

If he wasn’t sitting so close to her, he may never have heard the slight note of forced casualness in her tone. It was barely enough to notice, but he latched onto it and probed.

“You’d want to spend your vacation with me?”

She carefully avoided his eye as she spoke. “Only if you want. Doesn’t have to be anything big. I…I like hanging out with you.”

Was this his sign? He wasn’t sure. But suddenly, he didn’t care. He was taking the chance.

“You said once that you went camping with your dad a lot as a kid. When was the last time you went?”

She paused in surprise.

“Not for at least six years. I thought you didn’t like camping.”

“I’ve been a few times. I don’t think I did it right though.”

“Why not?”

“Well I…I mostly went to test myself. You know, to see if I could survive out there if I needed to.”

“And could you?”

“Yes. But I definitely didn’t have fun doing it.”

“Did you take much with you?”

“I took a tent and other equipment for the first few days. Then I left it behind and tried to make do with only a few items for a day or two, just to test myself.”

Y/N glanced back at him.

“I could give you a few pointers…if you’d like. I know a really great place to set up camp. There’s a beautiful spot not too far away from it with a waterfall that you can hike to. Do you think you could put up with no work and just me for company for a few days?”

Carlton met her eyes and smiled a rare, genuine smile.

“Yes.”

Y/N smiled back, her eyes shining. She quickly turned back to her task, but not before Lassie saw her blush. His heart swelled and he couldn’t stop himself from grinning broadly.

There was a click, and the cuff sprang open at last.

“There you go!” Y/N examined the inside of the lock. “I’m afraid these cuffs are busted for good though. See? This is why you can’t have nice things.”

“You’re nice.”

The words escaped him before he thought better of it. Y/N turned from putting away her tools to look at him. Now he was the one blushing as he waited for her response. Slowly, she smiled.

“You want me?” she asked. Then her smile dropped as she sputtered. “That’s not…I didn’t mean it quite like that. I just meant…uh…”

Somehow, her hesitation swept his own away. He reached out and gently took her hands, which she was wringing in her discomfort.

“I’d like to spend some more time with you. After that…we’ll see what we both think then. But I have high hopes.”

He waited for her to smile at him before pulling her in for a hug. They’d embraced before, but this was different. She buried her face in his shirt collar and one of his hands came up to stroke her hair. He saw one or two of the detectives looking over at them, but found that he didn’t care.

Feeling daring, he pressed a soft kiss to her hair.

“Thank you, Y/N.”

Carlton felt, rather than saw, her smile.

“Anytime.”

#psych #carlton lassiter #lassie #lassiter #detective lassiter #taleteller's what if challenge #fanfic #writing challenge #dammit spencer!#reader / lassie #reader/lassiter #reader/carlton

107 notes · View notes

thesmallworldofsamizayn · 7 years

Text

An analysis of John and Paul’s artwork

I haven’t seen any analysis or comparison of the visual art of these two anywhere, and I do think it’s an interesting topic. So, I got a little carried away with the idea. Not a comparison of quality, mind, but an emotional one, and one which reveals their attitude to this kind of creative process.

Firstly the similarities: John and Paul both employ that kind of scraggly humour you see them use in their early interviews, and in In His Own Write in their art. It’s witty in a languid, musing way, particularly in John’s case, but I think there is an element of it too in the surrealist style of Paul’s work. With fairness to both of them being musicians first and artists quite a low second, their master of the medium is not the highest it could be, but that is not really the point. Certainly neither one cares much if a likeness is correct, and both of them create emotive works rather than representational works (well, Paul might have done some representational stuff I haven’t seen because it’s not online... but I doubt it’s really representational).

Let’s start with Paul. Technically, he has the upper hand in terms of craftsmanship of an artwork, if only due to the fact that the media he grapples with are far more complex than the pen and ink John prefers (oil, for instance). He fills every inch of his canvas with colour, he shades, he creates whole scenes rather than sketches. Every one of them feels in some way like a project, never a throw-away scribble as no doubt John considered much of his work. Every scene is also different, and many focus on different subjects, if any. Some depict real objects, others do not, and all of them have a piece of soul trapped inside. There is an anxiety in several, in the sickly bright colours, indefinable shapes, smeary brush strokes, and sometimes in the facial expressions of his figures. I actually find a fair number of his paintings uncomfortable to look at: they do weird things with colour, and they look, as I said, restless. But this is not a criticism: they are challenging paintings, and if not to the rest of the world, they are very important to him.

They are expressions of his feelings, and a product of his age (he only started painting in 1983). It seems to me that a lot of Paul’s demons go into these pictures, where they normally do not go into his words. They are almost entirely indecipherable, abstract looks at his subconscious, and like Paul himself they betray an inner depth without telling you what exactly that inner depth IS. Therefore they are harder to unpick than some of John’s work. The gloominess of some of them takes me a little by surprise, as does the sound understanding of the medium. Like many I assumed that John was the artist and no one else. There are a few paintings which have more logical backgrounds, like his pictures of the queen or of Linda. As in his music, empathy is the driving force: he draws as he writes, eternally inspired by the lives of others and coy (or perhaps just unsure) about his own life. If there are any self-portraits I cannot find them.

Now we move onto John, the minimalist. His drawings are almost brutally quick in some places, and achingly tender in others. He prefers blank ink to any other medium, presumably as it enables him to get something out quickly and with little hassle or practice: a direct pipeline to whatever he’s feeling in that moment. He tends to draw portraits or people more than anything, and unlike Paul he is prone to draw the same composition repeatedly - rather like how he “finds a note and hammers it home” when writing music, in his own words. Oh, and nearly all of these compositions are self-portraits or portraits of his family. So far I’d say these discrepancies between Lennon and McCartney are to be expected. But also, unlike Paul, there is an abiding sense of peace and simplicity in John’s drawings, particularly his family pictures, which were drawn in the late ‘70s. I find it hard not to smile a little looking at some of them: him and Yoko embracing, Sean between them, his own face looking passive and peaceable with round glasses, and often a soft wry smile. What is wrong with this picture? Is the title of one. It’s a challenge: nothing is wrong, you’re supposed to say, it’s a happy family.

There are two ways to interpret this. One is that John was genuinely experiencing peace and joy with his wife and son, and wanted to capture that joy through pictures. Every time he felt grateful for his life, he drew another portrait. The self-portraits are introspective, questioning, and despite being full of energy and character, are hopelessly blank as the eyes are invisible behind the glasses. The other way to interpret, the more cynical way, is that these are attempts to soothe himself, convince himself that things really are great. There is much to suggest that he was not really feeling on top of the world between 1976 and 1980, being away from music, and away from Yoko a lot of the time, shut inside his apartment. As usual with John’s frustrating mind, I am inclined to believe a little of both interpretations. It is also possible that for every happy drawing there are three angry or depressed ones, which Yoko prefers not to show the world. But it seems to me that these pictures are John, unusually, looking for the good in his situation, rather than the bad. He counts his blessings, and his blessings take the shape of Yoko, Sean and himself.

It’s strange that even in their art, there is this fearful symmetry. Where Paul is charming and upbeat in music, John goes growly and bluesy. Where Paul is frenzied and enigmatic in his art, John becomes open, unburdened and simple. But I don’t think that this is to be taken as a contradiction to their personalities. Because in John’s artwork there is, amidst the peace and weirdness, that knowing smirk, the wit and awareness that he is right. He doesn’t need to draw different things. He knows what he wants, he knows what he knows, and nothing’s gonna change his world. And in Paul’s work, the dominant flavour is one of experimentation: what if I tried this, or that, or these together. He pushes himself out, technically and physically exerting himself (those paintings are massive, John’s are probably about A5 in size) to create what he can.

I’m sure there is more to say on this. I haven’t really expressed it as well as I could, so I’ll just leave a couple of pictures for comparison. Here’s Paul’s painting, Unspoken Words, and John’s drawing, Real Love. They both give satisfaction in their own way, Paul’s in the proof of his emotional complexity and John’s in the honest expression of peace and happiness… And both (unsurprisingly) in their natural ability to translate feelings into art so fluidly. Personally I prefer John’s stuff, just on an aesthetic level, but that’s just my personal taste.

#john lennon #paul mccartney #meta

2 notes · View notes

storyunrelated · 7 years

Text

Ga-Ga, Goo-Goo

Uh...

I think some of the wording in this is going to get me followed by some unsavoury bots but, you know, it is the way it had to be.

[Life is complicated, but the solution is standing right outside the door*]

*That description tells the poor people NOTHING about what they can expect...

‘Doom!’ said the newspaper in big, bold, scary letters. Jeremy tutted, clucking his tongue and rolling his eyes.

The newspaper had been saying the same sort of thing for a while, albeit in different ways. Today was a little less subtle than usual to be sure, but wasn’t far different in tone. Jeremy tutted again. It was all going to shit, apparently.

The world was in dire shape indeed if what he read was anything to go by, and he saw no reason not to believe it. Why would a newspaper that wanted him to buy it tell him lies? He could see no reason why that would ever be the case. Clearly what they were warning him about was one-hundred percent real and based on solid, sourceable evidence. It was all there in black and white (with pictures. Lots of pictures).

Foreigners were marauding across the country, pillaging and despoiling all and sundry. According to the paper it was happening in the street outside his house at that very instant. He looked, but could see nothing, so presumably it was happening a little further up and out of sight. Dreadful business, to be sure. Damn interlopers.

Some problems were homegrown, however. The poor frothed and seethed up from the gutters, wrongly claiming all the things that Jeremy knew only hard-working people like him deserved. Food. Shelter. Water. A life with the minimum of hardship. These vultures circled the carcass of a society that they were vaguely responsible for the decline of and for some reason expected a handout. Just because they were ‘human beings’ with ‘inherent value’. Jeremy couldn’t stand such malingerers. If he hadn’t been retired he would have done something about it.

And then there were the women! And the gays! And all the other disparate groups who were not like Jeremy. With their likes and dislikes that he did not share and so could not empathise with. How was he supposed to feel sympathy for the plight of those unlike himself? At what point did that make sense? Clearly they were beneath notice and their problems were mere distractions.

All these groups and more were the ones at fault. Clearly. Jeremy had had a sneaking suspicion this had been the case and he was happy to see reality - reported to him via the medium of a non-biased, objective and thoroughly honourable newspaper proprietor - coming out in support of his views.

It was oddly comforting to know that someone was to blame for all the woes assailing the nation. The alternative – that reality was a complex web of interactions oftentimes too intertwined to be easily unpicked and explained – was simply too horrifying to even bother contemplating. How could anyone live in such a world? Who would they point to accusingly when things went wrong?

Things happened and someone had to be at fault for them happening. Jeremy wanted it to be as simple as that, and whoever wrote the newspaper he liked buying was only too happy to oblige. ‘Blame is our game’ was, indeed, the motto they had proudly printed on their frontpage. It had been in Latin previously, but that had been deemed too elitist. Plans were in the works for the words to be replaced with pictures soon, as part of a push to simplify the paper even further.

The prototype for the new edition was two pages, one with a smiling face and the other with a frowny one so the reader could flip between the two at leisure. Tests were positive so far, with many reporting that the newer, slimmer, sleeker version gave the same news-reading experience as the old broadsheet with far less of the wasted space.

(In practise the two pages would be accompanied by seventy-four pages of advertisements. That was just a given.)

But Jeremy didn’t know about any of that. All he knew was that today was worse than yesterday.

In spite of everything that had been done to try and fix the country it still insisted on being broken. They’d stripped workers of their rights, forced the disabled into work they were often physically incapable of doing, made higher education impossible to enter for anyone below a certain level of class and wealth, thrown foreigners off cliffs (the White Cliffs, obviously), rolled back women’s right and also LGBT rights while they were at it, sold off every scrap of forest left, the land registry and indeed anything that stood still for too long. But for some reason society continued to suffer.

No-one could come up with an explanation to this, or at least no-one anyone wanted to really listen to. Whiners never had answers, only ‘explanations’, for whatever those were worth. Jeremy and his ilk wanted a solution, preferably one that looked like it was taking immediate effect even if it was doing absolutely nothing.

What good was a solution that took time to work? The problems plaguing them were plaguing them now, not in a few years time when sensible decisions taken in the present would start to bear fruit. How was that difficult to understand? Who wanted to have to wait to fix something? Where was the point in that? You might be dead by then! And you were all that mattered, so who would ever waste their time so?

And so Jeremy had made a decision. He was tired of living a life of constant worry, incessantly hounded by his brain nagging him to actually stop and think for a moment. It was exhausting. He could only fend off the thoughts for so long on his own. They scratched at the edges of his mind and threatened to make the full scope of events and the world clear to him. Terrifying.

Thankfully for Jeremy he had found just the remedy.

Leaping to his feet from his chair (or rather, lurching slowly) he allowed his newspaper to fall dramatically by his feet, startling the dog, who blinked. As far as the dog had been concerned today was just another lazy day of doing nothing and to see such a sudden burst of activity from Jeremy was unsettling to say the least. Jeremy strode towards the front door.

“What’s happening, Jer?” The dog asked, scampering along beside his master. Jeremy snapped his fingers.

“I’ve made a decision, Rufus! I need a change. The world is going to shit and it’s the only thing left open to me,” he said, unbuttoning his shirt as he moved towards the hallway.

“A decision, Jer? Sounds important,” Rufus panted, folloloping along.

“It is important, Rufus! There’s a solution to the plague of doubt and worry that weighs like a blanket across the land!” Jeremy said, shedding his shirt and hopping along as he removed first his shoes, then his socks. Trousers next as he moved towards the front door. Beyond the frosted glass, a figure loomed.

“A solution, Jer?” Rufus asked. As deep-rooted as trust in his master ran, Rufus did have to admit to a certain level of worry. This was all just sudden, and there was something about that looming figure that made Rufus uncomfortable.

“A solution, Rufus. Some might see it as a step backwards, as regression - but I assure you it is the right way to go.”

By now Jeremy was stark bollock naked. There was nothing attractive about this and the world had no pressing need to see it. This did not stop him opening the front door.

Standing on Jeremy’s front step was a man. A very large man. Something about him was just off. Maybe it was his distant, glassy stare. Maybe it was the way he looked to have been carved from a side of beef, coated in lard and then wrapped (too tightly) in skin. Maybe it was a combination of all of these factors.

Maybe it was how wide he smiled when he saw Jeremy.

“Come here,” the man said, spreading his arms wide.

“Daddy!” Jeremy bawled, leaping up and being caught by the man who pulled him in close, cradling him as one might cradle a baby. The giant man reached down with one hand and tore open his string vest, allowing Jeremy precious skin-on-skin contact.

“Comfort me, daddy!” Jeremy wailed, nestling into the man’s bosom, suckling warm ale from a raw teat. He grizzled as chubby, greasy fingers stroked his hair.

“It’s the foreigners’ fault,” the man said and Jeremy cooed, dribbling. Everything felt so much more simple, so much safer in the big, strong arms of the man.

“It’s the poor’s fault,” the man said and Jeremy cried tears of joy, soiling himself as every part of him relaxed. Not his fault. Someone else’s fault. And they knew who’s fault. They could fix it. They could punish the people who’d made his country bad. It wasn’t his fault.

If the giant man was unhappy about having just been urinated upon he showed no sign, continuing to gently rock Jeremy in his arms, cooing a hateful lullaby of blame.

“This doesn’t strike me as a practical, long-term solution, Jer,” Rufus said, cocking his head as wee pattered down. He was but a simple dog with simple dog thoughts, but his misgivings were strong.

“Silence, hound! Me and daddy are having a moment! He’s making me feel safe!” Jeremy snapped before sinking back into the enormous sense of comfort that came from surrendering all rational thought to someone nice and big and strong.

“We’ll go back to how things were at an indeterminate point in the past, when things were exactly how you’d like them to be and everything worked perfectly and the world was safe and simple.”

“Oh God yes Daddy yes please,” Jeremy babbled. He wished he could climb inside this wonderful man, just to be closer to him. Every word he said was the sweetest thing Jeremy had ever heard. He could almost feel his brain curdling in his skull. It was bliss.

“Well whatever you say, Jer,” Rufus said, padding back inside the house. He trusted his master knew what he was about. And if he wasn’t, he’d stick with him anyway. It was the dog thing to do.

Jeremy did not hear this. He didn’t hear anything other than the thudding heartbeat of the man cradling him and the words being poured into his ear.

“I’ll keep you safe and I’ll look after you. I’ll protect you from the big scary world by smashing it into chunks you can understand and eat as simple, easy morsels. You’ll never have to worry about anything else ever again,” the man said. Jeremy just nodded, feeling the man’s ruddy flesh rubbing against his face. It was like rubber, only turgid and room temperature.

“Oh that sounds good,” he said.

“And if you ever for one instant try to think for yourself I’ll rip your tongue out and nail it to the Cenotaph, because I am a patriot.”

“Of course you are Daddy that’s the only reasonable thing to do,” Jeremy yawned, falling asleep in the man’s arms as he was carried off and away and far from the concerns of the real world.

Rufus later starved to death waiting for him to come back.

What did you expect to happen?

END

#Ga-Ga Goo-Goo #Writing #Amwriting #Short story #Short #Writblr #Writeblr

1 note · View note

anneedmonds · 5 years

Text

Sex On Tape: Call To Police!

Yesterday I did a bit of sifting through my junk mail folder. I rarely remember to do this but apparently – now and then – you should. I say this because last year I missed four incredibly important emails and each time it created quite an awkward work situation; in two of the cases the person involved thought I was ignoring them and in the others I completely missed out on some rather nice opportunities.

So now, every week or so, I skim through my junk email folder and check that there’s nothing interesting and/or urgent from legitimate senders who have somehow been blacklisted by my Mac Mail. It’s usually just a few dozen of messages from shoe companies, phone card top-up providers and cosmetics manufacturers in China who seem to think I’m a makeup brush retailer. Sometimes they are from scammers saying I’ve won money or I need to send money or I need to do something else that always – quite frankly – seems like a bit too much effort. Nevertheless, if I’m stuck for things to do (ie: I have loads of stuff to do but don’t want to do it) then I quite like to spend a few joyous minutes searching for threatening emails and then reading them out with comedy voices. These emails are never actually addressed to me – in the last week I’ve had emails sent to Tonya Recommends, Emily Farr and – amazingly – Peaches McTaff – but still. They’re in my box which means I own them. (On a sidenote, I’d love, more than anything, to meet someone called Peaches McTaff.)

Anyway, I got sent the below and it really tickled me. Especially the “I’ll call to police!” part. It made me go right back to the start of the email and re-read it all in the voice of Aleksandr Orlov from Compare the Meerkats.

I have to say that scamming emails, though obviously pretty dark in intent and potentially destructive in the wrong hands, are often very amusing. The malapropisms, the typos, the hilarious phrases that have simply become lost in translation; I worry about cyber crime a lot, but there’s nothing like a ridiculous email to lighten the mood.

This one, as you’ll find out, relies on the recipient being something of a racy internet user – watching saucy vids and, I assume, doing various things to themselves whilst they watch them. I can genuinely say that I have never watched sexy films on the internet, mainly because I’d rather spend hours on Rightmove looking at houses I can’t buy (floorplans are my porn, baby!); but if I did, then I’m not sure I’d do stuff to myself in front of the computer. What if I was accidentally connected to my mother via Skype? What if, somehow, I was uploading myself onto Facebook Live?

If there’s one thing you can take away from this post, it’s this: don’t do any naughty business in front of your computer without taping over your spyhole first. (“Taping over your spyhole” might sound like a euphemism: it’s not. I mean the camera hole in the top of the computer and if you didn’t know that was there, I suggest you spend an evening acquainting yourself with your machine. Again, not a euphemism.)

So here’s Aleksandr and his scam – I’ve made some notes in brackets as we go along.

“I’ll begin with the most important. [Please do.]

I hackled your device and then got access to all your accounts… It is easy to check – I wrote you this email from your account. [He/she didn’t.] Also I have an old password for the hacking day: xxxxxx.

[OK let’s pause already: what is the hacking day? Is this another one of those “national days of” celebrations, like #nationaldoughnutday or #worldunicornday? Should we be celebrating hackers?]

Moreover, I know your intim secret, and I have proof of this. You do not know me personally, and no one paid me to check you. [To be honest I’m quite disappointed that nobody paid to have me checked. Am I worth so little? I feel like a television baddy when they find out that the price on their head is only $2000.]

It is just a coincidence that I discovered your mistake. In fact, I posted a malicious code (exploit) to an adult site, and you visited this site… [Nope, not me. Now Aleksandr, had you written to me and said “I posted a malicious code to a Velux blinds discount site, and you visited this site…” I would have been properly worried.]

While watching a video Trojan virus has been installed on your device through an exploit. This darknet software working as RDP (remote-controlled desktop), which has a keylogger, which gave me access to your microphone and webcam. Soon after, my software received all your contacts from your messenger, social network and email. [I have no idea what most of this means but the Trojan, Darknet and Keylogger now residing in my device make me feel slightly uneasy. They sound tough and mean, like they might all carry those hammers with spikes sticking out of them. Is my laptop screen the portal to another – Lord of the Rings style – universe?

“Darknet? Darknet, you imbecile! Come closer and bring me the Orb of Clustertron.”

“Y-y-yes, Trojan sire. Here it is, the Orb, oh mighty one.”

“Darknet! Where is the Orbal Octicular Augmentor?”

“The…the what sire?”

“The Orbal Octicular Augmentor, fool! You know, the looking glass that makes viewing the Orb possible!”

“The…magnifying glass you mean? Keylogger has it, sire…”]

At that moment I spent much more time than I should have. [To be fair, Alek, I spend much more time than I should have doing a lot of things. Don’t beat yourself up about it.] I studied your love life and created a good video series. [Oh thank the lord – can I buy it off you please? Creating original Youtube content that people actually watch is killing me off. If you have video and I’m the star, I’ll pay good money.] The first part shows the video that you watched, [Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper singing Shallow, live. I know it must be that because I watch it multiple times a day.] and the second part shows the video clip taken from your webcam (you are doing inappropriate things). [This is probably true, to be fair.]

Honestly, I want to forget all the information about you and allow you to continue your daily life. And I will give you two suitable options. Both are easy to do. First option: you ignore this email. The second option: you pay me $700(USD).

[Third option: you turn it into a blog post and make everyone read out my email in the voice of one of the meerkats from the Compare the Market.]

Let’s look at 2 options in detail. [OK.]

The first option is to ignore this email. Let me tell you what happens if you choose this path. I will send your video to your contacts, including family members, colleagues, etc. This does not protect you from the humiliation that you and your family need to know when friends and family members know about your unpleasant details. [Most confusing sentence structure I’ve ever seen – I can’t even unpick the meaning from this mess.]

The second option is to pay me. We will call this “privacy advice.” [Or extortion, but carry on.] Now let me tell you what happens if you choose this path. [Does it take me through Fall Forest, over Winter Mountain and out to Summer Lake like in Dora the Explorer?] Your secret is your secret. I immediately destroy the video. [Uh huh.] You continue your life as if none of this has happened.

Now you might think: “I’ll call to police!” [No, I don’t think anyone will actually think this because it’s not a sentence that exists. The grammar is completely incorrect. Still, this is my favourite line in the whole of your email. I like to imagine lots of people reading the same scam and then looking up from their screens and saying – “I know! I’ll call to police!”

“Pauline? Pauline! Come up here. I’ve got something shameful to tell you.”

“What is it Bob? Tell me you haven’t been vacuuming your penis up the hoover hose again?”

“Worse, Pauline. Much worse. And someone has filmed it, that’s the bad thing.”

“Oh Bob, when will you learn, love?”

“He’s threatening to take it public if I don’t pay seven hundred dollars.”

“What are you going to do, Bob?”

“I don’t know Pauline, I just don’t. If work see me using the office-issue hole punch to gently pincer my testicles whilst wearing a scuba diving mask I’ll never hear the end of it.”

“I wondered where the hole punch had gone Bob! I needed to file the electricity bill and I had to just rest it in the ring-binder, untethered!”

“Sorry Pauline, I really am. I just don’t know what to do. Any ideas?”

“Hmm. I know!”

“What?”

“I’ll call to police!”]

Undoubtedly, I have taken steps to ensure that this letter cannot be traced to me, and it will not remain aloof from the evidence of the destruction of your daily life. I don’t want to steal all your savings. [This sentence is proof that Google Translate is never your friend] I just want to get compensation for my efforts that I put in to investigate you. [Flipping Poirot, here!] Let us hope that you decide to create all this in full and pay me a fee for confidentiality. You make a Bitcoin payment (if you don’t know how to do it, just enter “how to buy bitcoins” in Google search)

Shipping amount: $700(USD). Getting Bitcoin Addresses: xx (This is sensitive, so copy and paste it carefully) [Oops. I replaced it with an XX. This is like when you opt to use the Safari strong password and then the computer forgets it and it was something like Sf%!!hjkh6789cdDcDD34?4 and you are locked out of Gmail forever.]

This is a one-time offer that is non-negotiable, so do not waste my and your time. Time is running out.

Bye!”

I think that the sign-off might be my second most favourite part. So cheery! So familiar! I sort of wish that he/she had signed off with a name, no matter how fake.

Bye!

Leslie xx.

The post Sex On Tape: Call To Police! appeared first on A Model Recommends.

Sex On Tape: Call To Police! was first posted on February 6, 2019 at 10:41 pm. ©2018 "A Model Recommends". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact me at [email protected] Sex On Tape: Call To Police! published first on https://medium.com/@SkinAlley

0 notes

meditationsinausterity · 6 years

Text

Losing Shame and Using Guilt

Anyone who knows me well enough will know i'm fascinated by the specificity of language. I had a lecturer tell me once that the more precisely you can express yourself, the better you'll be understood. Granted, he was talking about getting to grips with Derrida, but the underpinning sentiment of being understood caught at my very core. As a result, I'll often, mid-sentence, correct myself if the word is not exactly what I mean, particularly in terms of expressing emotion. I get frustrated if I can't make the exact clarification I want to express my point, but in the process of correcting myself I usually arrive at the point I'm driving at. I'm sure we all do this to a certain extent, or the qualifier 'Do you know what I mean?' wouldn't be so prevalent in everyday speech.

I do it in my support sessions all the time when I'm asked how I feel - I take the approach that I need to get as much out of these sessions as possible to progress with my week, my general recovery. If I'm not making every effort to understand and be understood, I don't see the point, do you know what I mean? One such time was after a particularly horrific binge, that saw me physically injured and put the nail in the coffin of my short-lived but long-suffering relationship at the time, where I was asked how I was feeling about it. I said: 'Guilty. But I think it's normal to feel guilty. I don't mean the kind of guilt that paralyzes you and stops you doing anything. I mean the kind of guilt that makes you ask the questions, tell the truth to yourself, and try to learn. There should be another word for it.'

I thought about this conversation while I was walking to the job centre this week, anxious as fuck, and trying to talk myself out of feeling guilty. 'There should be another word for it' kept rolling over my brain, and I scrabbled to think of something until I realized I'd been wrong in the session. What I was feeling after that binge, WAS guilt. what I was feeling on the walk to the job centre, the 'I shouldn't be doing this' breathlessness that made me want to just go home to bed, was shame. And the penny started to drop as to why they were different feelings when I examined the two situations.

On the way to the job centre, my feelings of shame weren't directly coming from anything I did, am, or genuinely believe. Shame can only exist in the light of other people. As a society we're pretty good at shame. There's body-shame, slut-shame, poverty-shame, and probably loads more ways other people make people feel like shit. Shame is a tool used to police others according to the norms of, usually a majority. As a society, the fact these terms exist for different ways in which certain majorities enact this policing shows we're slowly growing into that realization. Shame, and its younger, less crippling cousin, embarassment, can't exist, without other people. If you have a shameful secret, it doesn't technically become shameful until you speak it to anybody else. More prosaically, if you fart in a lift alone there's no shame until someone gets in at the next floor.

I felt ashamed of going to apply for jobseeker's allowance because of how it would have looked to someone on the outside: I'm young, able bodied, adept with people, energetic, and have a work ethic; so what fucking right have I got to ask for help when it ought to be easy for me to get a job? I could hear the imaginary 'you should be ashamed of yourself' in my head, stopping my little trainers in their tracks. Because shame creates paralysis. Shame is what's going to stop you doing something you maybe really need to do, or even just want to do.

There's no arguing with shame if you treat it as something that springs directly from the inside of you. I realized the key to stopping shame from stopping me lies directly in that voice, that 'You should be ashamed of yourself'. For a start, I can tell it's not my own convictions at play here, because I don't call myself 'You' - other people do, when they're not mispronouncing my name. So if it's not me, who the fuck is talking? Once you've asked that question you've already created an access to whatever the external narrative is that's influencing the shame. In the case of me and the job centre, we can cite tabloid hysteria, my working class upbringing, and coming from a long line of proud women who struggle to accept help from anybody; a real tasty blend.

The other key disarming tool here is 'should' - the singlemost efficient way to convey obligation that i know. Think about the amount of times you've bailed on something and explained yourself to someone else by saying 'I should go, but...' That 'should' is the point of tension between what people expect of you and your desires and intentions. Asking 'WHY SHOULD I?' a la an angry teenager, as I did on my walk, may be the fastest and most explosive way to deal with external shaming narratives from stopping me in my tracks. The answers to 'why should I?' are never convincing to the person who questions the power of 'should', which is why the last resort is always 'Because I said so', which, let's face it, never convinced anyone ever. Asking 'why should I?' is a fast and powerful way of undermining all the reasons you are being shamed.

So shame, once you unpick what it is, is simple to counteract. Which is good, because it's the thing that stops people doing what they need to in order to get help. Guilt, however, is more complicated. And I'm going to posit a theory, in no doubt a stupidly long-winded way, that guilt is not there to stop you from doing things, but is in fact a motivational emotion.

I was wrong in my session. There was no better word for what I should have been feeling than guilt. Because guilt is directly related to your inner self, to something you did or didn't do, or say. Guilt was absolutely the right word for how I felt after that binge, because I had done things I knew were wrong. And I knew them to be wrong in accordance with what I genuinely and fundamentally believe in myself, for the simple reason that if i didn't believe I shouldn't be resorting to drinking to blot out anxiety and pain, then why was i engaging in therapy to break that pattern? or, put more plainly and simply, despite all my endeavours to do the right thing lately, I had massively fucked it up, by myself, and guilt is the way in which my mind was holding me accountable for what I had done wrong, by holding it at the forefront of my mind and not allowing me to concentrate on anything else.

And, to go back to what I said earlier about shame being an external process that can't exist without other people, you can be perfecty capable of feeling guilty all alone. To go back to my fart in a lift metaphor, If you fart in a lift alone, and then get out, you'll feel guilty about leaving that fart in that space to fester because you know you did it. You feel guilt because you're to blame. Guilt without culpability already has a name: paranoia. To apply this to my situation; even if nobody had known about my binge and it hadn't affected anybody else (which was emphatically not the case), even if I hadn't sat in a room telling somebody else all about it, I would still have felt guilty. Because I would have known I'd done wrong. But it would have been a kind of double guilt; the guilt of my own culpability, underneath the the guilt of not revealing it, which i'm going to rename 'concealment anxiety' for clarity.

I once read somewhere that 'we're only as sick as our secrets', and in terms of this kind of double-layered guilt, I genuinely believe it to be true. When I sat in the office talking about the binge, there was a definite sense of pressure relief, like the first door of an airlock opening. But the removal of the concealment anxiety is only the first door; it doesn't free you, it just lets you breathe and focus. Concealment anxiety is why problem pages everywhere are crowded with letters asking if people should reveal their adultery to their partners - the uncertainty stems from the knowing it would provide that rush of relief vs. the fact it won't remove the guilt that comes from the actual culpability. Telling the truth about what you did can only remove the concealment anxiety, it can't remove the guilt of culpability.

The reason I use the metaphor of breathing space and an airlock is because until you untangle concealment anxiety and guilt, you can spend a long time in that pressure zone, confusing the two. My therapy, this blog, the practices I'm putting into place to reach out to more people and to be honest about everything, they're all ways in which I've realized i was existing in this dead, hidden zone where all the things i was doing to harm myself were hidden. And that environment was slowly making me sicker, and more isolated, and withdrawn. I wasn't admitting to my actions, which meant I was stuck alone in this space, at eye level with my guilt at all times, and unable to address any of it because I couldn't focus.

Breaking that first seal by gritting my teeth hard and admitting to all the things I was guilty of to people (professionals and loved ones alike) provided me the breathing space I needed to look at the real guilt in a more focused way. The guilt that, as I put it, 'makes you ask questions, tell the truth to yourself, and try to learn.' And it was chronic, in this situation. I say chronic because guilt is visceral, it's a physical emotion. You feel sick, your heart pounds, you sweat, and if you're me, your posture goes totally insular and you can't look anyone in the eye (I'm pretty sure this is also what dogs do). Guilt is your mind's equivalent of putting a huge billboard in front of all your other emotions saying 'YOU FUCKED UP. YEAH, YOU. WHAT ARE YOU GONNA DO ABOUT IT?'

And that, I think, is the key function of guilt. On first glance it seems like an unfair emotion - you can't undo what you did wrong, because what's done is done, so the 'what are you gonna do about it?' can seem overwhelming. But guilt's 'what are you gonna do about it?' doesn't have to be interpreted as a threat; it's your mind's way, at least I think, of saying, 'you did something horribly wrong, and now we need to focus on ways to make sure you don't do it again.'

((DISCLAIMER: I'm not, here, disregarding the fact that if you did something to hurt somebody else, you should say sorry, or try to make amends, but I am not dwelling on that, because a sorry can't fix anything, and sometimes the amends aren't possible. That's not to say they're not a necessary part of facing up to what you're guilty of, as I certainly said my sorry to the concerned party, meaning every single word of it (as I'm sure he was fully aware), but knowing in the pit of my stomach that no matter how heartfelt the sorry was, it wouldn't fix the damage I'd done. No matter how fundamentally important it is to say and mean, never has any sorry I've ever said had any more power than words ever have over actions.))

But back to that 'what are you gonna do about it?' - That's what's made me see that guilt can be a motivational emotion. For a start, there's the fact that it's so sick-making and anxiety-inducing that you would, in its throes, probably do whatever it takes never to feel it again. And I think that's no coincidence; warning signs are eye-burningly bright, sirens are ear-splittingly loud, because urgent messages need urgent attention. But the process of guilt, the constant reminders; I am finding, the more I notice and interrogate my thoughts; often take the form of ways in which you could have done things differently. I used to think that this was just my brain compounding things by telling what a fucking idiot I was, but now I'm starting to realize that actually, these alternate-plays are not nasty mind tricks, they're useful tools for me to interrogate, using direct example, why I didn't do things differently. I'm using guilt as a motivational tool, by letting these replays provoke questions, and therefore answers, that inform my future decisions. I'm still working on it, but it's very effective. It is literally the emotional equivalent of 'learn from your mistakes'. Guilt isn't your enemy, guilt is your teacher. It's just that it's the teacher you thought was really savage at school who you only grew to respect when you realized that they got shit done (not unrelated: Hi Mrs. Pearman, hope you're well!)

That was probably more long winded than anyone needed it to be, but we all have these negative emotions, and I'm starting to learn that engaging with them is both practical (because they're not fucking going anywhere unless I get lobotomized), and useful (because they have more to tell me than that I currently don't feel very good). So I'm going to become shameless (or more so, as anyone who has encountered how chill I am with being seen naked will attest), I'm going to be as honest as I can to stop that concealment anxiety airlock from closing me in and stopping me breathing again (a decision I've already committed to), and when I am to blame for something, I am going to let my guilt guide me into examining why the hell I did it in the first place, to stop me doing it again.

#personal blog #recovery #guilt #shame #anxiety #emotion #tl;dr #musings

0 notes