#i have no idea how the television world works like is it official

[stardustcatcher]

Fluff Alphabet (Danny Wagner)

Pairing: Danny Wagner x Reader

Word Count: 4.2K

Warnings: y'all already know it's fluffy and sweet so make sure to brush after to prevent cavities, marriage, talk of babies, mentions of drinking and being drunk (just trust me), uhh and danny being the sweetest most bestest partner, let me know if i missed anything :)

AN: look at him up there,, doesn't he just look so boyfriend :,) i'm sorry this took a little bit longer, i was having a little bit of writer's block, but i did it and here she is! i love writing for danny, he's just peak romantic boyfriend material. as always, i hope you all enjoy and remember that all feedback (likes, comments, reblogs) is welcomed, appreciated, and encouraged. hearing back from you guys keeps me going :) i love you all <3

taglist

A ctivities - What do they like to do with their s/o? How do they spend their free time with them?

Danny’s favorite way to spend his time with you is just by simply being around you. Even just doing separate things while being in each other’s presence, you could be reading while Danny sits on the other side of the couch scribbling words down in his music journal. It’s one of your favorite things to do with each other, just existing together. Though that’s not all you do, Danny also loves to take you out to local shows, whether it’s bands or artists that he knows/is friends with or just some random show downtown, it’s like he’s immersing you in his world a little bit and he loves it. Since music is essentially his whole life, besides you, it's a fun way to include you in a way that wouldn’t be boring like just sitting in the studio while he works.

B aby - Do they want a family? Why/Why not?

Because he’s still young, kids aren’t in the forefront of Danny’s mind, but that doesn’t mean he never thought about it. He loves his parents, he has a very good relationship with them and has been told that having kids is one of life’s greatest joys. He’d love to experience that for himself, especially with you. He’s had dreams about a couple babies of his own, to give them the experiences he had growing up, though it’s safe to say that those dreams are a long ways away. He’s away for long periods of time, and it’s hard enough to be away from just you, he couldn’t imagine being away from his own hypothetical children. So he would ideally like a family, but not for quite some time. 

C uddle - How do they like to cuddle?

  Danny loves being the big spoon when you two cuddle. He’s large but gentle, your own personal teddy bear. His favorite is when you’re both laying in bed after a long day, a movie on the television, and your head is laying on his chest with his arm wrapped around your shoulder, tracing gentle shapes into the skin. Having you in his arms, protected from the outside world, the two of you locked in your own personal bubble is Danny’s personal happy place. 

D reams - How do they picture their future with their s/o?

Even before your relationship was official, Danny often found himself daydreaming about a future with you. Right when you met, you had wormed your way into his heart and mind and he knew that you were the one he wanted to be with for a long long time, preferably forever but that thought kind of scared him. He’ll often imagine traveling the world with you, taking you along with him to all the places his career lets him go. Whatever he does, he wants you right there with him. Danny wants to spend forever with you, and it took a little while for him to come to terms with that desire since you’re both still young, but the more he thought about it the more comfortable he got with the idea. Any future with you is his dream future. 

E qual - Are they the dominant one in the relationship, or rather passive?

At the beginning of your relationship, Danny was the more dominant one. It was before you two really found your groove with each other and that was just how it worked out, once you both fell into a certain level of comfortability and routine it became a relationship of equals. While around his friends, or social situations pertaining to him, Danny will assume the more dominant role. Though when around your friends or family, or events/situations for you, you’ll take the lead. It really all depends on the circumstance, Danny is very versatile and doesn’t really have a dominant personality in everyday domestic life. But if that’s something you need, if you’re having an off day or just need him to take the lead a little bit more, he has no issue doing that for you and it comes relatively easy. 

F eelings - When did they know they were in love?

Danny knew he was in love with you on your very first date. You’d been friends for a little bit at that point and he had finally mustered up the courage to ask you out, the elation and relief he felt was unlike anything he’s ever felt before. He drove you both out to a clearing near where he lived, it was somewhere he’d gone when he needed time away or he wanted to write, it brought him peace and was absolutely gorgeous. He had packed a picnic basket of all your favorites and guided you out into the clearing, hand in hand. As soon as he saw the smile spread across your face he knew he was completely and utterly in love with you. Hearing you gasp in awe at the beauty of the nature around you, watching you chase after butterflies and watch the sunset, he knew without a doubt that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with you next to him. 

G ratitude - How grateful are they in general? Are they aware of what their s/o is doing for them?

Danny is a very grateful person in general. He is grateful for the amount of opportunities he has been given to live out his dream, for all the cool places he’s got to go and things he’s been able to see, he thanks his lucky stars every day for everything he has and that also extends to you. He’s grateful for everything you do for him, whether that’s acts of kindness or things you choose to miss out on because of him. He know’s his life is not the most stable because of his job and you’ve had to miss out on being able to do or go to certain things because of who he is, and he acknowledges it every time, thanking you and also telling you that you don’t have to work around his schedule and life all the time, but you’re always happy to do it because he’s Danny and you love him endlessly. 

H onesty - Do they have secrets they hide from their s/o? Or do they share everything?

Danny has no secrets to keep from you, the only time he’d ever withhold information from you would be if he was planning something for you. He’ll tell you anything you want to know, he firmly believes that there is no point of secrets in your relationship. He’s not afraid to tell you anything and since he tells you everything it’s created a space for you to tell him anything as well. You both know that you can go to each other and say absolutely anything and there will be absolutely no judgement. 

I nspiration - Did their s/o change them somehow, or the other way around? Like trying out new things or helping them overcome personal problems?

You’ve definitely helped Danny come out of his shell and embrace himself. Prior to your relationship he was rather quiet and shy, happy to fade into the background and play mediator. With you around, he’s become more of himself, both on the outside (like expressing himself with his clothing or trying makeup) and on the inside (just becoming more comfortable with who he is as a person) and it’s something that he will never be able to thank you for enough. 

J ealousy - Do they get jealous easily? How do they deal with it?

  Danny is not a jealous person whatsoever, he’s only ever really gotten jealous once and it was only because another man was blatantly flirting with you in front of him. He claims to not get jealous because he loves you and knows that you love him. He knows you would never choose another person over him, you chose to be with him and only him, so why should he feel threatened by another when he’s already your first and only choice?

K iss - Are they a good kisser? What was the first kiss like?

You had been the one to initiate your first kiss with Danny. It was your birthday and instead of going out all you wanted to do was spend the day with him. You made him promise to not get you anything, not wanting him to spend money on you because you said “his presence was a good enough gift” but he didn’t listen. “Everyone should get to open something on their birthday” he had said, pulling out a little gift bag from behind his back. You lightly scolded him, reminding that you had said no gifts but he just told you to open it. Inside the bag was a book you had been wanting forever and a small box. You looked at him skeptically but he just urged you to open it. You carefully unwrapped the box and inside laid a necklace with a pendant that housed a pressed flower from the clearing where you had your first date. Tears welled in your eyes as you looked up at him, he was biting his lip, nervous that you wouldn’t like it or think that it was dumb. But you just threw your arms around him, squeezing him against you so tightly that you couldn’t breath. “You like it?” he asked when you pulled away. “I love it,” you whispered, hand caressing the side of his face before you gently pressed your lips to his. They were soft and warm, and he tasted like spearmint and the soda he’d been drinking. Danny was by far the best person you’d ever kissed, he tenderly laid a large hand on your jaw and smiled into your lips. It was perfect. 

L ove - Who says ‘I love you’ first

You were the one to say I love you first, and it had been kind of an accident. You’d been out on a date to a bar that Danny and the Kiszkas frequented, just a nice night to relax and let loose. Your job was stressing you out lately and Danny thought it’d be nice for the two of you to get out of the house for a little bit. Needless to say, you ended up indulging a little more than intended and passed out on the Uber ride back home. He helped you inside, making you drink some water and take some aspirin for the impending hangover the tomorrow would surely bring. He took such care with helping you change into some of his pajamas, knowing how much you loathed falling asleep in your outside clothes, and he even carefully wiped off your makeup with the wipes he kept in his bathroom just for you. He got himself changed and laid down in bed with you, and just as you were on the verge of sleep you cuddled into him. “You’re too good to me, Daniel,” you mumbled, cheek squished against his chest. “I love you.”

Danny’s heart skipped a beat and his breath got caught in his chest, not because he didn’t feel the same way, but because he’d been waiting for so long to say those same words to you. He didn’t want to scare you off or think it was too soon, but you’d beat him to it in your drunken haze. “I love you too, honey,” he pressed a kiss to the top of your head, but you were already deep in your dreams. He promised himself that “I love you” would be the first thing he’d tell you when you woke up. 

M emory - What’s their favorite memory together?

A memory that really sticks out in Danny’s mind, and one he finds himself coming back to often, is the first time that you saw him performing. It was relatively early in your relationship and his work was a part of his life he hadn’t shared much with you yet, not that he didn’t want to, the occasion had just never come up. So he had asked you to come the first show of their tour which started in Nashville, you’d been ecstatic having seen on social media how all the fans went all out for the concerts and even though you’d seen videos and heard Danny play, you knew it couldn’t compare to seeing it live and in person. 

When it finally came, it felt like you were just as hyped and full of energy as the boys, you watched in awe at all the people bustling around you, the fans in the pit and the seats all preparing for what seemed like the best night of their lives. It was already magical and the show hadn’t even started yet. Time ticked by and before you knew it, there was a crew member knocking on the dressing room door to tell them there was five minutes to stage, you could see the boys get even more excited as they gathered their things and followed security towards the stage. Right before he went on, you pulled Danny to the side and planted a kiss on his lips, whispering “Break a leg, rockstar,” before a security guard led you to the side of the stage where you’d watch the show. 

As soon as the music started it was like Danny was a completely different person, you felt the magic everyone had spoken about, how when they played they were their truest selves. During his drum solo, you screamed along with the crowd, Danny turning his head toward you while still pounding against the drums and sending you a wink and a smile. Danny felt that show was the best he’d ever played, and if you ask the rest of the band, they’d say the same thing. When it was all over, you’d felt like you were floating and as soon as Danny walked off stage, you launched yourself at him, arms circling his neck face buried in his neck no matter how sweaty he was. You grabbed his face and pressed your lips hard against his, ignoring Sam’s wolf whistle as he passed you. 

When you broke apart, Danny’ll never forget the look in your eyes—pure love and adoration. “You’re fucking amazing,” you whispered as his hands ran up and down your waist. His smile sparkled, he’d heard it before and never let other people’s praise get to his head, but it meant so much coming from you. He was over the moon happy to have shared another part of his life with you. 

N ickel - Do they spoil? Do they buy the person they love everything?

Danny doesn’t spoil in the sense of gifts, though he does buy you things when the urge strikes him, but he prefers to spoil you in terms of doing something nice for you. Whether that be a chore that he knows you hate or just doing something nice for you just because he feels like it. It’s how he shows he cares. 

O n Cloud Nine - What are they like when they are in love? Is it obvious for others? How do they express their feelings?

Danny absolutely glows with love while in your relationship, there is a genuine physical change. He’s already a happy guy, but there’s just a certain gleam about him when you’re together. Even his fans can tell that something is different about him, how happy he looks and how he’s always smiling. His bandmates/brothers obviously know, but even before he’d spilled the beans that he was seeing something, they could see a change in Danny. He plays better, his creative juices always flowing now that he has a muse. He tries not to talk about you constantly, knowing that it would surely be annoying to those around him, but sometimes he just couldn’t help it. When you’re around, Danny seems complete. He’s happy and smiley and everything always seems a little bit better. 

P et Name - What pet names do they use? 

Danny is very traditional in terms of pet names. Some of his favorites are honey, darling, and sweetheart. He enjoys the simplicity of them and feels as though they fit you well. You are his honey, his darling, his sweetheart. He uses pet names more than your actual name most of the time. He likes how blushy you get when he uses them in public, and how you’re so used to them that sometimes you don’t respond to your actual name when he calls. 

Q uirk - Some random ability they have that’s beneficial in a relationship.

Since he’s a tall man he uses his height to his advantage. He likes when you ask him to get things for you, so much so that he’ll purposefully place things higher up so you’ll call for him to get them. Getting you a mug from the top shelf and handing it to you with a kiss on the forehead never fails to put a smile on his face. 

R omance - How romantic are they? What would they do to make their s/o happy? Cliché or rather creative?

Danny is a hopeless romantic, he personally loves the clichés of romanticism and finds them to be the sweetest thing. Early in your relationship, a weekly date night was implemented and it will never be missed. Even when he’s away on tour you’ll have your date nights via video calls, he wouldn’t miss them for the world. There’s been multiple occasions when there were bouquets of flowers waiting for you at your job, a little note attached that read “just because I love you”. It warms your heart and warms his when he gets a text telling him how much you appreciate his little gestures. You weren’t sure how much you believed all the stereotypes of romance before Danny, but when he came into your life, it turned your whole view of it around. 

S upport - Are they helping their s/o achieve their goals? Do they believe in them?

If you say you have a personal goal that you want to achieve, Danny is automatically up and looking at ways to help that dream come to fruition. Not that he thinks you need his help, Danny finds you incredibly strong and talented, he believes you could do anything you put your mind to, but he wants to be however involved you want him to be. Danny wants nothing more than to be a part of your journey, whatever that may be. If you want him right by your side, holding your hand the whole time, that’s what he’ll be. And if you prefer him on the sidelines, cheering you on, he’s happy to do that too. 

T hrill - Do they need to try out new things to spice up your relationship? Or do they prefer a certain routine?

Danny likes a routine, he finds comfort in the stability of it. He likes the routine of a date night every week, your bi-weekly trips to the bookstore and coffee shop every other Sunday. His work life is often so hectic that it’s nice to come home and know that things will be the same there. Though there is also a level of thrill in your relationship, while he’s not necessarily a “risk taker” he’s up to trying anything if you’re right there with him. Say you see something you want to try, a new place you want to go, Danny is up for the adventure if it’ll bring you happiness and you’re next to him. 

U nderstanding - How good do they know their partner? Are they empathetic?

If empathetic was a person, it would be Danny. He’s very compassionate and sweet and understanding. He wants to be able to know you like the back of his hand, he feels like it would only bring you closer. And he does, Danny knows you better than anyone and he loves every part of you. All your little quirks and imperfections he knows and loves them. To him they’re all a part of what makes you the person you are. He takes pride in knowing you as well as he does, being so in tune with you lends a hand to your relationship. He’ll know when you’re feeling uncomfortable or cranky just by the look on your face. He’ll know when you’re happy and excited just by the way you move. How well he knows you is one of his favorite things and he considers it a privilege to be able to know you that well. 

V alue - How important is the relationship to them? What is it worth in comparison to other things in their life?

Your relationship with Danny is the most important thing in his life. He holds you above all and would never do anything to jepordize it. Your relationship is as important to him as his career and his music, you are his family and his love. You’ve made his life better and he can’t picture himself without you. You’re a team and there is no one without the other. You are the most important thing in his life. 

W edding - Do they want to get married? How do they propose? What would the marriage be like?

Danny had dreamt of getting married since he was a little boy, he remembers going to weddings when he was young and he always dreamed of having a love that great that he could share with friends and family. Before he proposed you two had spoken about marriage, just wanting to know if you both were on the same page. You had told him that you couldn’t really see yourself getting married until you met him, that was when he knew that he would marry you. When he proposes to you, it’s in that same clearing that your first date was. He’s very sentimental and knows that spot holds a special place in your heart and his. 

Your wedding is filled with family and friends, it’s everything you pictured and more. You hadn’t believed in marital bliss before getting married to Danny. You didn’t think you could possibly love him more than you did before, but you did. Your relationship is basically the same, just the added perk of being able to call him your husband. You didn’t need a wedding or a piece of paper to show that you loved each other, but being able to share that experience surrounded by friends and family was beautiful. Danny is the perfect husband and you wouldn’t have wanted to be married to anyone else. 

X OXO - Are they very affectionate? Do they love to kiss and cuddle?

Danny is very subtly affectionate while in public, a hand on the small of your back or in your back pocket, a kiss on the temple or cheek, nothing too crazy but he will always have a hand on you just to reassure himself that you’re there and alright. Though at home or around people he’s comfortable with, he’s on you like a fucking koala. Danny loves to kiss and hug and cuddle, he just loves love and showing how much he loves you. There will be multiple occasions when you two are just hanging out at home, watching TV and just relaxing, and suddenly he’ll hook a finger under your chin and kiss you. You’re always blushing and looking at him with a raised eyebrow when he pulls back, a look on your face that says “what was that for?”. He’ll always shrug and throw an arm around your shoulders, pulling you into his side. “Just wanted a kiss,” he’d respond in the sweetest voice, burying his nose in your hair. 

Y earning - How will they cope when they’re missing their partner?

Because there are times when he’s gone alot there are certain things you two have put in place to make it easier on both of you. When he’s home, you’re almost always together, so when he is away it can be very difficult. Even when he’s thousands of miles away, he’ll never miss your weekly date. He thanks the universe for facetime every day when he’s on tour since it's your main form of communication when he’s gone. There’s a facetime call at least every other day and on off days or days when he can’t find time to call you either because they’re so busy or because of the time differences he will text you all day and everyday. There will always be a goodmorning text and a goodnight text and some inbetween to tell you about his day or ask about yours. Even when you can’t answer immediately because of work or time zones, he’ll talk to you as if you’re right there next to him. It helps the distance not feel so great. 

Z eal - Are they willing to go to great lengths for the relationship? If so, what kind of?

Danny would crawl hands and knees to the ends of the earth for you, he didn’t know a love before you. Though he dreamed of it, all love felt like it just existed in movies. When you came along, he knew immediately that he would do anything to make you as happy as you made him. He would do anything to protect you, cherish you, and love you. Danny considers your relationship to be one of the best things that has ever happened to him, if not the best thing, and he would go to the moon and back to keep it. If you wanted the stars, Danny would go up into space and get them himself.

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taglist: @mintysammykiszka @peachpitpearls @alexxavicry @spark-my-nature @angelbabyyy99 @writingcold

#danny wagner x reader #danny wagner imagine #danny wagner fluff #greta van fleet x reader #greta van fleet fan fiction #gvf fic #gvf fanfiction #greta van fluff #greta van fic #babby writes #greta van fleet #danny wagner #josh kiszka #jake kiszka #sam kiszka

[itsclydebitches]

it genuinely surprises me that CRWBY wants to push this idea that the bees have been planned for ten years (idk if you're on twitter but yang's VA responded to someone who said 'wow this was planned for the past two years?' and she said '2? try 10' and an animator said something similar in another thread), because at least if they owned up about how they hadn't actually decided to do anything with the bees officially until fairly late in the game, they wouldn't basically be saying 'yeah we had this planned, we just never bothered to write anything confirming or alleging it for years because reasons'

it's just infuriating bc like you said, the straight relationships are not treated this way. pyrrha's crush on jaune, jaune's crush on weiss, and weiss' crush on neptune in the early volumes are all entirely unambiguous, despite none of them looking at the camera and spelling it out in dialogue. nora and ren's relationship is likewise unambiguous, or at the very least nora's interest in ren (leaving ren's feelings to take longer in the story to really be given form).

and EVEN IF we accept that they didn't want blake and yang to be aware of their own feelings for whatever reason (even if that's shoddily hamfisted in the narrative--they don't have any of the conversations they should have had post volume 6 to work through their feelings, leaving the confession in this limbo where it's simultaneously forced by the narrative and yet also like 'uh, duh? why are they so worried about confessing? what obstacles remain in their path that weren't clearly deemed unimportant by the fact that the story never cared to linger there?') there's zero excuse for the story not choosing to unambiguously confirm their sexualities.

blake could have had a conversation with ilia where she made it clear that she didn't return her feelings because her own lay elsewhere, not because she doesn't like girls (which would go a ways to alleviate some of the uncomfortable framing of ilia being the psychotic lesbian in love with her straight best friend and trying to kill her about it). yang could have had a brief crush on a girl in their beacon days, or talked about past relationships, etc. there's no reason for blake to be the first and only person yang ever shows true interest in, especially since blake has an unambiguous romantic history (with adam and also with sun).

especially since this is a world where, ostensibly, homophobia doesn't exist. (at least according to word of god) it's also not like this was a network television cartoon where they had to worry about BS&P or sneaking things past the censors! there were no censors to worry about! so if this was being planned for an entire decade, why doesn't it show?

I'm not on twitter, but I did see those tweets when they made their way over here. For the record, I personally don't believe it. I hate saying that because I'm not someone who enjoys accusing someone else of lying, but as you've established above, there is nothing in the story to imply that this was a decade long endeavor. I mean that quite literally. Yang eyeing the shirtless guys, Blake's entire romance-coded arc with Sun, the rejection of Ilia, Adam framed as a potential ex, Yang never once showing an interest in other girls, the lack of explanation for why they won't confess (AKA an established, long-term arc about one or both of them discovering their sexuality, coming out, overcoming homophobia, working through another relationship first, etc.)... The Blake/Yang subtext began late post-reunion - which isn't a bad thing! But why in the world would you pretend that it was in the works 5-6 years earlier?

I mean, we know one potential reason why. Right now, there's a lot of uncharitable conversation surrounding how the romance is being used to prop up a struggling show. So if you're hoping to draw in more viewers through your work's queer rep, it helps to present that rep as a celebratory achievement after a decade of work. It makes RT appear to have always been progressive and worthy of your time/money. There never was a fear of queerbaiting because this was planned from the get-go. There are no problems with the romance's writing because we knew this was the end goal from day one. No, no, pay no attention to how our queer employees are treated. Why would you doubt our allyship when we strove for a decade to bring you a queer main couple? Noooo, also please ignore that nothing was stopping us from giving you that in Volume One. Good romance has to be earned, remember.

My tone in the last paragraph heavily implies that I've made up my mind regarding why we'd get this narrative of the bee's development, but the reality is that I just don't know. Obviously. I'm not in the writer's room, I'm not in their heads, I will never be able to provide irrefutable proof either for or against that interpretation. But given how RWBY was written and given what RT has to gain from acting like this was always the end game (which is a lot), I think the most charitable reading (if not necessarily the most likely one) is that RT is subconsciously stretching the definition of "planned." Do I believe that they sat down at the start of Volume One, decided that Blake and Yang would be a couple, and then somehow spectacularly failed to write that story for the better part of a decade? No. Do I think it's possible that, given the nature of fandom, RT immediately picked up on the fact that people instantly shipped Blake and Yang (because they were partners, complimentary, if you've been in fandom for longer than five minutes you know that splitting the RW and the BY is easy picking), maybe joked about them and WhiteRose being a thing, spent a couple of years writing safe het romances while testing the waters, realized after 6-ish years that providing serious queer rep would prove more helpful than harmful to the show, stayed in the ambiguous 'Are they friends or something more?' stage to further cover their bases, and then at a time when the company was at its most vulnerable, give the fans exactly what they wanted, capitalizing on the gratitude by thinking back to those initial days of joke-y what-ifs and going, "Yeah! This has been in the works since the very start! That'll help get us renewed, right? ;)"?

...Yeah.

Honestly, a part of me doesn't care. Queer rep is queer rep, regardless of how it came about, and a few years from now the drama of it all will have begun to fad. From here on out, newcomers to RWBY will never have to deal with that potential queerbaiting. They'll start and end the show knowing that the rep exists and, likely, won't give a damn how it came about. But for those who do want to unpack that motivation, I'm personally of the belief that RT is stretching (at best) the definition of "planning" in an effort to make the company look as good as possible during this time. People are welcome to call me pessimistic and overly critical if they'd like, but I think it's important to keep in mind that RT is a company. They're not a bunch of home-bound fans writing simply for the joy of it. They're also not an individual, safely established author who can push the boundaries of their craft without fear of (much) repercussion. They're a company. Their job is to make money and though that doesn't preclude them from creating amazing art and taking great pride in their work, at the end of the day 99% of the writing decisions are based around what will bring in more viewers. I'd caution anyone to think critically about a saluting emoji and a very simplistic summary of - what we know having lived through it - was a very complicated situation.

#rwde #rwby #mymetas

[five-miles-over]

It's Loki's World and We're All Just Living In It

Pairings: President!Loki x reader

Summary: After having taken over the entire Western Hemisphere and calling it his "Midgard", your boss President Loki believes that he needs an excellent running mate for the upcoming elections. And who better a running mate than…his own variant?

President Loki commands the TVA, which is currently under the leadership of Agent Mobius, to bring the one variant that has managed to escape the president's radar. And your new job? Help the future vice president adjust to his new role.

Author's Note/Disclaimer: Since this takes place in New York, I'm using a few bits of American political jargon and briefly referencing the 2012 U.S. election. Please, please know that I'm only doing it just to give the reader an idea of how President Loki got his power. By no means is this meant to be a political statement, nor is it meant to offend any political party. It's just a fictitious scenario made purely for entertainment. 

That being said, this is my first time writing for President Loki. I hope you like it, and please feel free to leave constructive criticism. 

New York City - 2018

There was once a time when every country had their own ruler - Canada had a prime minister, while the United States and (almost) every country in South America had a president. It was a time when the Western Hemisphere wasn't a single continent known as Midgard, and the word was nothing but a word from Norse mythology that literally meant "Middle Earth".

The Battle of New York, which had taken place on May 4, 2012, was President Loki's first official victory. Not his first electoral victory, but his first victory as the leader of an army. Using something known as the Chitauri and a powerful scepter, Loki was able to make New York City fall at his feet. Literally. Almost no one in New York had even seen a Chitauri before , but by the end of the year, almost everyone with internet access believed in the existence of the Chitauri. Some even whispered that Loki threatened the most powerful voters with potential attacks from the Chitauri. 

But you knew that wasn't true. Anyone with half a brain cell knew that Loki won the American presidency through sheer charisma and a dash of Machiavellianism. And by convincing the American public that his party was the only one that would promise long-term happiness and satisfaction. But the real moment that led to his victory was when the National Broadcasting Company television network showed special coverage featuring endorsements for Loki given by the presidential candidates running against him. There was speculation among journalists and political analysts that the candidates were under some type of external influence - a form of coercion, if you will - though related rumors quickly faded. 

The next six years were nothing short of revolutionary. President Loki celebrated his victory with great pomp, relocated the president's office to New York City from its traditional place in Washington D.C., declared May 4 to be a national holiday known as Revolution Day, got married, introduced a group called the Time Variance Authority as his new personal police, and seduced the world leaders into "joining hands" with the United States. By 2015, nearly three years after Loki was elected as President of the United States, Loki was also the President of Mexico, Canada, Honduras, Puerto Rico, Brazil, Argentina, El Salvador, Haiti, Suriname, Guyana, and Greenland. (His long-time dream was to take over the British royal family one day, but that plan would require much more than honeyed words of diplomacy.)

2015 was also the time you joined President Loki's staff as one of his closest assistants. While growing up, you had fantasized about what it would be like to live and work in the city that never sleeps, but never in your wildest dreams did you think that you'd be employed by a president, let alone a politician. 

To say that working in Loki Towers was challenging would be an understatement. From eight in the morning to nearly five-thirty at night, you were constantly on your feet delivering coffee to some of Loki's "senators" (who were former members of S.H.I.E.L.D.), sending emails to set up some of the President's appointments, planning decadent parties with no budget limit (aka orgies) for the President's delight, and attending political discussions with the President himself. 

While the job paid well, almost a hundred American dollars per hour, it wasn't always the most dignified. Like today's encounter:

"Mister President?" You knocked on a smooth mahogany door belonging to the president's office. "Mister President?"

"Open, don't take too long." 

You opened the door to find President Loki sitting on his ebony throne…with a model with a pixie cut, wearing a black mini pencil skirt and a green bralette with diamonds, straddling his hips. 

"I've been learning the secrets of Victoria," Loki purred, running his pale hand along the backside of the model. With a single tug, he untied the knot tying her bralette from behind.  

Not flinching, you took a sharp breath instead. "Agent Mobius from The Time Variance Authority is in the lobby waiting for you."

"Wait five minutes. Then send him in."

You swiftly closed the door with a slam, and a smirk formed upon Loki's lips. Something told you that he enjoyed getting under your skin from time to time. But it was pretty hard to hate him. 

President Loki, even though he partied more than any other president in history, was a surprisingly good president. He was able to clear every country's debt, reduce the price of petrol, and even prevent the U.S. from entering a new recession. However, he was fully conscious of the five assassination attempts against him and the members of the government who envied his political success. As King Henry IV would say, "uneasy lies the head that wears a crown." Yes, that's right. President Loki wore a small crown with horns, which his haters called a 'symbol of Satanism' and a 'threat to democracy.' All they received in return was a maniacal laugh that made some of them wet their pants. The president knew they weren't worth his time, nor were they bound to live long.

Fifteen minutes after leaving Loki's personal office, you were seated at a long table in the center of a conference room. A man with salt-and-pepper hair held a few manila files in his hand, and stood at the head of the table while the president sat nearby. Soon, each and every seat was filled by Loki's campaign managers, a few trusted senators, and assistants like you.

President Loki cleared this throat and gave the room a smile. "I understand you all know why we've gathered here now."

The room murmured in agreement, and Loki silenced them by giving the screen on the wall a sharp tap.  "We have six more months until the next elections come, and my running mate has proven himself to be incompetent."

"Well, what would you expect when hiring an alligator to be your vice president, sir?" The man with salt-and-pepper hair chuckled. No one in the room joined in Mobius's quiet laughter.

"I certainly was not expecting to lose my right hand, Mobius." Loki held up a prosthetic hand that was shinier than most glass buildings were in the summertime. 

One of Loki's campaign managers, a tall man with shoulder-length blonde hair in a black suit, leaned forward. "We need to recruit someone quickly…perhaps the missus?"

"No, no. She's busy being angry at the world. How could she possibly be a vice president? I have a hard time getting her to show up on time to our parties." The president scoffed, earning laughter from the room. "I've decided to bring someone like-minded, obedient, intelligent, handsome, and full of mischief. Someone who will bring…variance to my campaign."

The campaign managers murmured in awe amongst themselves.

"His name is Loki as well," the president smugly said. "Which is precisely the reason why I've called Mr. Mobius, the head of the TVA, here today. He's going to explain how we'll bring Loki, or rather Mr. Laufeyson as we shall call him."

Mobius politely thanked the president before explaining to the rest of the room how the Time Variance Authority worked. The TVA worked to monitor the multiverse, pruning various timelines if they ever became too dangerous to humanity. And since there were branching timelines, each and every person had variants, or alternate versions of themselves. Under the new operation mandated by President Loki, the TVA was responsible for gathering variants of the president, or "Loki's" as they were collectively known. Some of the variants agreed to support President Loki, while others violently opposed him.

But until now, there was one variant who'd managed to go unnoticed, mainly because this variant hadn't caused much damage except for a few shenanigans on Midgard. And because this variant was busy constantly fighting the Avengers. 

"Since Mr. President believes that Mr. Laufeyson is capable of being a suitable running mate, we are going to bring him from his timeline into our timeline."

"Couldn't have said it better myself, Mobius." President Loki gestured for Mobius to be seated.

You raised your hand, and leaned in closer. "But wouldn't doing this cause a Nexus event, since Mr. Laufeyson isn't meant to come into contact with us?"

"Then we create a tiny little multiverse of our own," President Loki simply said. "Nothing to worry your pretty little head about."

"We'll keep an eye on the variant, and the TVA - " Mobius quickly paused, noticing the words he'd just said. "I mean, Mr. President here has the final say, but the TVA will keep an eye on him. Make sure he doesn't do too much damage to the Sacred Timeline."

"The Sacred Timeline can go to hell for all I care." President Loki dismissed. "Send a group of your strongest Timekeepers, Mobius. We need to take him from his timeline before he's imprisoned in Asgard. While he's still in New York with the Tesseract."

"I can have them sent in fifteen minutes, Mr. President." Mobius stood up from the table, gathering his files.

President Loki turned to you. "And you, darling. I'm placing you in charge of my vice president's welfare once he arrives here."

"Like a bodyguard?" You raised an eyebrow.

"No, sweet darling." The president shook his head. "You'll show him around, make sure he's settled in his apartment, and look after his schedule."

"So you want me to be his assistant too."

"I want you do to do as I tell you," President Loki commanded.

"Of course, Mr. President." You rose from the table, and the president's blue eyes twinkled with a dark gleam.

President Loki triumphantly kissed the TVA agent's lips, cupping Mobius's cheeks. "We are on the edge of a golden world!"

#president loki x reader #president loki #loki fic #loki fanfic #loki series #loki x reader #loki laufeyson #loki #loki show #loki odinson #loki of asgard

[ultravioletfuture]

ULTRAVIOLET VISIONS: Perfect Dawn, Bandcamp Friday, and New Releases

Happy Bandcamp Friday UVF!!! I hope you've all been well and are ready for the start of the upcoming cycle of new UVF releases! We''ve got a ton of things to talk about in this week's blog, starting off with the long awaited announcement of the upcoming debut album from TRUMAN! and portal.rwb's (aka me!) new alias Lunar Data Garden!

"Perfect Dawn" by Lunar Data Garden

The announcement was posted on the Lunar Data Garden's Bluesky page in tandem with the Blue Moon and the beginning of the next lunar cycle. The first single from the record "Back To You Pt. 1" will drop on the night of the New Moon, September 15th, and the full album "Perfect Dawn" will release on the night of the next full moon, September 29th. Lunar Data Garden (aka LDG) is a data safe haven, where any and all past data signals can be decoded and given a new life. The Garden is overseen by the two moons: Natura being the Lunar body of the natural world, and Digitura being the physical manifestation of the digital world. When the orbit of the two moons come together in parallel, we achieve an event of transcendental harmony, a Perfect Dawn. Lunar Data Garden has been a project that Truman and I have had in the works since December last year. After working with Truman on the "hello gravity! 떨​어​지​는 (Deluxe Edition)" release on UVF, and after finishing "ULTRAVIOLET CATHARSIS", we have been working on and off on what we have titled "Perfect Dawn". The album is a beautiful blend of both Truman and I's respective styles, and embraces a very Y2K aesthetic. We started off by back and forth sending each other sample ideas and aesthetic images until we started to finalize what our sounds or visuals would be. The first glimpse of LDG could be found at the end of my Skylive 2023 live set, where I played the track "Secret Place" off Perfect Dawn, as well as officially announcing the collab between Truman and I. Over the 9 months, we have been dying to share what we think is a fresh new take on the Vaporwave genre and we can't wait for you all to hear! "Perfect Dawn" is scheduled to release on Friday, September 29th with CDs and Minidiscs available on ULTRAVIOLET-FUTURE.

NEW ALBUM RELEASES

This week's blog post happens to line up on Bandcamp Friday, so I thought I'd review and recommend some albums on Bandcamp you should all check out and support today <3.

"Peacock Tail of Rainbow Magic" is the latest installment in the Afterdeath Television discography. This album opens up with this beautiful, kaleidoscopic intro "Kill Your Ego Before You Enter" that is just filled with atmosphere and just feels like the audio equivalent to a breath of fresh air. The album is very much in this sorta "Prog Vapor" lane similar to a lot of newer releases from death's dynamic shroud. "Is It Love" is this epic blend of vocal samples from so many different sources that some how all stay together as a cohesive idea. I love the track "Compass Play (Sky Seams)" with its super groovy bass and infectious vocal samples. The track centers around this Demi Lovato sample until the song finally explodes around the halfway point into this dramatic break-beat filled climax. Overall, I love how effortlessly Afterdeath Television is able to blend so many different samples together and form something new in the end. Favorite Tracks: Compass Play (Sky Seams), Crystal Moon

"Dense Object Forest" by out://0f//bounds is the brand new release to come out of the side alias of fellow UVF artist, Two Circles. Dense Object Forest is 10 tracks of Ambient-Electronic VGM styled Vaporwave. The opener "Trailhead (​花​柄​)" welcomes us into this new world with its bubbly arpeggio sample that ping pongs in between your brain. The 2-part self titled tracks feel like the background music to some kind of RPG where you're just standing idly by in some kind of forest village. I love the deep soothing chords in the track "Refracting Crystal Cavern" that are accompanied by this drum loop that just drives the whole thing forward and puts you in a trance throughout the whole experience. The track "Lamp Light Off" is such a beautiful way to close off this album and say goodbye to the little world that was created before it. It's main melody is like a lullaby putting you to sleep and having you reflect on your time spent travelling through this Dense Object Forest. I am always stoked to new music come from both out://0f//bounds and Two Circles. If you haven't checked out any of their work, I highly recommend you start here! Favorite Tracks: Trailhead (​花​柄​), Refracting Crystal Cavern, Lamp Light Off

Other Bandcamp Friday Recommendations

"Species of Crystalline Genesis" by Life Silence Genesis is easily one of the craziest vapor-related releases I've discovered recently. Dropping back in April 13, 2020, this album features production from Claud Sheffner, Métropolita, and Palmer in this insane fusion of Plunderphonics, EDM, and Glitch Pop. I found this album just digging around through the Vaporwave/Plunderphonics tab on Bandcamp and was instantly hooked upon hearing the first track "I Know It". This track boots up with this EDM style riser and these Miley Cyrus vocal chops that glitch and distort while building up to this huge climax, where these high pitched vocals squeal as if at the top of a mountain. Many tracks through out the album feature samples that sound vaguely familiar until they become warped and contorted. The track "Minus Blossom" is another highlight track with its simple sample loop until we gradually stretch the sample into unfamiliarity in this grand glitchy Vapor-trap epic. I'm absolutely in love with how this album maintains balance through the chaos and how it's able to blur the lines between cohesion and incohesion. I highly recommend people check out this album as well as the rest of the music from this artist, seeing that they seem relatively unheard of. Favorite Tracks: I Know It, Deep Haze, Minus Blossom, Slow Decay, Sideways In Time

"Connections" is the most recent project to drop from fellow UVF artist, scarecrow_back in April this year. Easily being my Album of the Year so far, Connections shows scarecrow_ combining everything about their music into one jam packed, eclectic Vapor/Electronic odyssey. The production on this album is scarecrow_ at their best while continuing to come up with so many new and fresh song ideas. "Full Of Color" is exactly as described with its grand drums and bursts of glitchy vocals panning through your ears. "Conciliation Programme" feels like a celebratory opening after this world Full Of Color has been opened. I love how "...and Never Will Be" is a call back to their older release "Never The Same" with the use of the same samples as the insane track "Reality Breaker". "Combined" has this beautiful synth progression following this main Ariana Grande sample until the track breaks down at the midway point and shifts unexpectedly in classic scarecrow_ fashion with this break-beat section that closes the track off perfectly. "Relentless" has been a favorite of mine since it was showcased back with the teaser of the album. The beginning is so melodic and beautiful as this lullaby-like melody starts to build and fade away when the mid section comes in. The track slams through with these abrupt sample chops and transitions into this groovy dance beat. The track flip flops back and forth until these growling Dubstep-like synths come in that somehow still blend together with the earlier elements of the track. Honestly, I can't possible encapsulate any of scarecrow_'s music perfectly in a blog post so I highly recommend you all to check this release out for I'm sure you are going to be blown away. Favorite Tracks: Full Of Color, Conciliation Programme, Combined, Relentless

ULTRAVIOLET-FUTURE & portal.rwb

Thank you all for checking out this week's UVF blog! I've been on vacation from work these past two weeks, while simultaneously planning out the upcoming months for UVF releases, finishing up Perfect Dawn, and getting things ready to print the 1st Edition UVF Magazine, so it's been a super busy time for me. The only thing I ask this Bandcamp Friday is to support the label in any way and check out my solo music as portal.rwb/flx. I've been trying to balance running the label as well as continuing to make more music as an artist, so any support means a ton to me <3. Any purchases made today go 100% to UVF and get split 50/50 with the artists, without the cut from Bandcamp, or you can even tip any amount here on our Tumblr page! Make sure to also join us over at our discord to keep up with the community and to be in the know for any future releases on the label. Thank you all again, please support your favorite artists, and I hope to see you all in next weeks blog <3! -portal from UVF

#vaporwave #music blog #electronic music #plunderphonics #art #bandcamp #indie music

[gacmediadaily]

Tis the season for Christmas movies and holiday spirit, and Great American Family is celebrating with a Thanksgiving weekend full of romantic premieres. Nestled between My Christmas Hero with Candace Cameron Bure and A Christmas for the Ages with Natasha Bure and Cheryl Ladd (See 11 Photos of Cheryl Ladd Today That Prove The ‘Charlie’s Angel’ Star Doesn’t Age), Danica McKellar and Damon Runyan get into the holiday spirit with A Royal Date for Christmas.

Woman’s World sat down with McKellar in an intimate interview and in addition to previewing her onscreen romance with Runyan, she got personal about why she loves making feel-good movies like A Royal Date for Christmas, how she handles holiday stress and what helped her find herself after The Wonder Years. Plus, she reveals she’ll be live tweeting Saturday’s premiere and offers two stocking stuffer ideas!

Danica McKellar has herself a Royal Date for Christmas

Having starred in ten Christmas movies and countless rom-coms on the Hallmark Channel, Lifetime and now Great American Family, 48-year-old McKellar understands why so many of us need our fix of holiday romance — and family-friendly romance, in general.

“We live in a very challenging time,” McKellar tells Woman’s World in an interview on November 21st. “In some ways, the world seems to have lost its mind. It’s nice to help create this safe haven for people. I love these movies, and I love putting positivity into the world.”

The actress — who is also delighted to be an executive producer, involved in everything from scripts and props to editing and music — adds that films like A Royal Date for Christmas offer more than pure escapism.

“I believe we are modeling aspirational behavior,” McKellar maintains. “A lot of the stuff on television is pretty dark. These movies show struggles and dilemmas, and even frustrations, but everyone is trying to solve them in earnest. You don’t see people just trying to take advantage of each other. Nobody wishes evil or harm on anyone else. Everyone’s just trying to do their best. It’s so refreshing.”

What we can expect from A Royal Date for Christmas

In her newest holiday flick, McKellar plays Bella — a stylist who stumbles into a fairy tale romance without even realizing it. The holiday tale begins when Bella agrees to not only dress a handsome Brit who’s lost his luggage (Runyan), but also be his “official plus one” for the highbrow events he’s attending while in town. After Bella accepts with good humor, she’s stunned to realize her demanding new client “Stefan” is actually Stefan William Francis Brown, the Duke of Tangford!

Like Bella’s coworker, most viewers will immediately recognize the chemistry between these two strangers. Bella and Stefan, however, can’t see past their own histories and drama.

“This movie is about healing each other and how the holidays can bring up stuff that you can either ignore or you can look at and face,” McKellar teases. “I love seeing healing and redemption onscreen. It’s such a gift.”

“I felt like this movie would only work if we found a costar who is emotionally available,” says McKellar. “That’s not so common for the guys in these movies! But when we were talking about casting, I remembered working with Damon [in 2018’s Very, Very, Valentine, alongside General Hospital’s Cameron Mathison]. He was the guy I didn’t end up with and in the breakup scenes, he got emotional. So I said, ‘He’s tall, with this very royal look. And he’s the guy because he can go there, emotionally.’”

McKellar adds that once she and Runyan reunited for A Royal Date for Christmas, “it was easy to connect with him because of how big his heart is, and how he just wears it on his sleeve.”

McKellar’s secret to a merry blended Christmas

While the holidays are about cheer, we can all face challenges during this time — just like the characters in A Royal Date for Christmas. For McKellar, one of those challenges has been balancing her real-life blended family.

“My son’s father and I are divorced, I’m remarried, and we all celebrate Christmas together,” McKellar shares. “It’s going pretty well these days, but there were a few years where it was not. I had to kind of get over myself and say, ‘My ex’s wife is one more person to love Draco.’ If you keep your kids in mind, you can have a nice holiday. It’s a challenge… but it’s worth the effort to keep reminding yourself!”

During the hectic season, McKellar reveals her secret to maintaining her calm is her solitary, late-night gift-wrapping ritual.

“I don’t want to be around anyone else when I’m wrapping presents — and not just because what I’m wrapping might be for them,” she shares. “I line up my Great American Family Christmas movies and wrap my presents. It’s a meditative time for just me. It’s my quiet time.”

Danica McKellar reflects on graduating from The Wonder Years

For some fans, McKellar will always be tied to her The Wonder Years character Winnie, not to mention Fred Savage’s character Kevin — and the beautiful brunette admits that after the show wrapped in 1993, it wasn’t easy to find herself. At the time, she was a teen eyeing a degree in film. Instead, she graduated from UCLA summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics, in 1998.

“I’ve always loved solving puzzles and anything that’s a good challenge,” McKellar reveals, and after one college-level math class, she was hooked. “It didn’t come easily but I loved it. And I found this new identity.

“As a child actor, when your show is over, you’re trying to figure out who you are and you think your value is attached to this thing that doesn’t exist anymore,” McKellar continues. “That’s hard for an adult, but for a teenager, it becomes, ‘Am I worth anything?’ Math was my answer to that. It made me feel strong, capable, and glamorous.”

Even as McKellar has continued to build her career in Hollywood, she’s also released 11 math books for kids of all ages – and today, that educational work feels even more important to her. “Because of the pandemic and a lockdown, kids have fallen behind,” she explains. “I like to be part of the movement to help them catch up and get back on track.”

While her books may be the perfect holiday gift for the little ones in your life, the Daily Dose of Dharma DVD that McKellar made with her mother could just work for the adults in your life. “They’re 20-minute yoga and meditation segments, and they’re just so healthy for you,” McKellar says. “They’re great stocking stuffers for women any age!”

#danica mckellar #a royal date for christmas #great american family #great american christmas

[mariacallous]

Over the past decade, Beijing has invested heavily in trying to upgrade its major state media outlets such as China Global Television Network (CGTN), Xinhua News Agency, and China Radio International (CRI), and to make them seem more professional. It has tried to normalize them to audiences as little different from the BBC, CNN, or Al Jazeera—most likely Beijing’s preferred model—a station based in an authoritarian state but producing respected work.

For years in the 2010s, China hired respected foreign reporters to staff bureaus of outlets such as CGTN in the United States, Europe, Africa, Southeast Asia, and other places, and initially gave them a bit of room to cover interesting stories—as long as those did not directly affect China. The global journalism market is terrible: Between 2001 and 2016, newspaper publishing in the United States lost more than half the jobs in the industry, a higher rate of loss than in coal mining, not exactly an industry of the future. China’s outlets found many willing and credentialed reporters to join. Today, the Chinese government’s funding for state media dwarfs that of any other country’s state media funding, including that of the United States. In 2018, CGTN reportedly spent around $500 million to promote the network in Australia alone; it has also engaged in extensive promotion in Europe and North America.

In an effort to expand its influence within the domestic politics and societies of other countries, China in the past decade dramatically expanded other tools of influence as well, which I chronicle in my new book, Beijing’s Global Media Offensive: China’s Uneven Campaign to Influence Asia and the World. These have included the use of disinformation online, payments to politicians to spout pro-China ideas, control of Chinese student associations in many countries, the funding of programs at universities, and other tactics.

But state media has been central to China’s efforts to influence other countries, control information about and protect the party, and gain what Chinese leaders and officials have called “discourse power” to amplify China’s narratives about its policies, its party, its leader, and its role in the world. Beijing’s cause is helped by a global environment in which resources for quality media are decreasing, democratic and authoritarian leaders alike are demonizing media, and publics’ trust in journalism is falling. Such a set of circumstances would seemingly make it easier for Chinese outlets to win readers, listeners, and viewers.

Yet China’s state media (excluding local-language Chinese media within specific countries), other than Xinhua, has hardly been a triumph for President Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), even with money gushing in.

Indeed, Xi’s bold goal to wield state media power globally, a priority noted in CCP documents, has not worked to great effect—and that goal is fading even faster as the world sees the failure of Xi’s China model, which was heavily advertised in state media abroad. China’s global influence efforts, fueled in part by state media, have not prevented publics in many countries from souring on Beijing’s increasingly assertive diplomacy; being angry at the initial cover-up of COVID-19; fuming at how China increasingly uses economic coercion against other states, even tiny ones like Lithuania; or seeing the flaws in China’s own politics. In public opinion studies released in 2020, 2021, and 2022, such as those conducted by Pew, opinions of China in states from Sweden to South Korea to Australia turned sharply negative. Negative views of China reached historic highs in many states.

What evidence shows how China has failed to use state media effectively? China’s biggest state media outlets, other than Xinhua, have not sold many programs abroad or gained noticeable audience shares in most countries. China’s training programs for journalists, while rapidly expanding (at least before zero-COVID), have not created a shift in how foreign reporters cover China.

Take one example, the appeal of Chinese TV show exports globally. South Korea, a far smaller country, regularly outpaces the value of Chinese TV show exports. South Korea also has exported increasingly successful films and scripted shows—as well, of course, as one of the most popular bands in the world.

Similarly, while China ranked second in the Lowy Institute’s annual Asia Power Index, Beijing’s lofty numbers come mostly from its high rankings in economic relationships, diplomatic influence, and future power. The Asia Power Index’s measures of China’s influence over the region’s information landscape, including the influence from state media, show far less impressive results. The Lowy study uses influence maps based on internet search trends to assess Asians’ interest in regional media outlets. These maps have shown that CGTN is only the 10th-most popular broadcaster in the Asia-Pacific, and its reach is a fraction of outlets such as CNN. The maps show that CGTN’s “reach is inconsequential,” as noted by the coordinator of the influence maps. Other Chinese outlets save Xinhua also fare badly on these influence maps.

Using the Freedom of Information Act, I obtained more than 20 studies, produced by Gallup as a contractor for the U.S. government, of viewing habits in countries in Africa, Southeast Asia, and South and Central Asia, among other regions. They generally show that even though Chinese state media are widely available in many countries, they usually attract minuscule viewership or listening numbers. In Laos, for instance, a country on China’s border with a growing population of Chinese speakers, one Gallup study of viewership in Laos found only 1.2 percent of the country’s population regularly watched Chinese broadcasting, a much lower figure than those who watched Voice of America or Radio Free Asia or Thai channels.

Chinese media outlets’ audience shares and perceived credibility lag behind local news sources, the BBC, and other Western broadcasters even in regions like Africa, where public opinion toward China is not as negative. In Ivory Coast, for instance, CRI has expanded its programming, but the Gallup study I obtained shows that CRI was listened to by less than 1 percent of Ivorians weekly, among the worst figures of any radio station’s reach in the country. (The BBC was listened to by 13.7 percent of Ivorians.) In Nigeria, a bigger target for Chinese state media, both CGTN and CRI performed abysmally in a similar Gallup study. In Nigeria, CGTN had 3.7 percent viewership, a quarter the audience of the BBC.

Even in Kenya, the hub of CGTN operations in East Africa, Chinese outlets have fared poorly. Studies suggest most Kenyans who consume news do not even utilize Chinese state media.

These figures are consistent with the still-low audience shares of CGTN, CRI, and state media outlets, save Xinhua, in many other regions of the world. In Asia, Chinese broadcast and radio state media outlets have not reached a large audience. A Gallup study of the weekly reach of television stations in Vietnam found that CGTN was only watched by 0.7 percent of Vietnamese adults, far less than the BBC, CNN, France’s TV5 Monde Asie, and South Korea’s Arirang TV. Two-thirds of Vietnamese who watched the BBC said they trusted that outlet a great deal, but only about 7 percent who watched CGTN said the same.

In Western democracies, too, in Europe and North America, CGTN has largely fizzled. In the United Kingdom, which has a sizable audience of people who are fluent in Chinese, a study found that CGTN was being watched by a minimal number of Britons—even before the British government kicked CGTN off the air in 2021 because it did not have autonomy from the Chinese state. Similarly, though CGTN launched a European subsidiary in 2019 via its London hub, it has made few inroads into the continental European market. And throughout Latin America, including in several large democracies, CGTN’s Spanish-language channel has significantly expanded the number of households in which it is available over the past decade but has not proved popular. A comprehensive study of CGTN-Español, CGTN’s Spanish-language channel, by Peilei Ye and Luis A. Albornoz, suggests that the Chinese government usually releases information only about the size of the audience CGTN potentially reaches—the number of households it is available in—and not the actual audience, most likely because the actual audience size is embarrassingly low.

Why has China’s state media—other than Xinhua, which I’ll come to later—failed so badly? It simply produces, in the Xi era, content that is too boring, staid, and timid. In an era more restricted than the 1990s, one in which China has today become much more authoritarian, state media reporters now instinctively tailor their stories to ensure they do not anger anyone at headquarters back in Beijing, which makes for weak and bland reporting.

CGTN reporters note that while they had more freedoms six or seven years ago, now the biggest focus in their minds is whether the stories will prove acceptable to the top leadership in Beijing rather than news consumers in foreign countries. This is “domestic signaling,” as the Guardian called it in an exposé of China’s soft- and sharp-power efforts—“telegraphing messages [via reporting in state media] that demonstrated loyalty to the party line in order to curry favor with senior officials.”

This does not make for exciting journalism. Further, a considerable part of the state media’s efforts to reach foreign audiences was designed to advertise China as a developmental success story—Xi was the first recent Chinese leader to openly embrace a Chinese model of development. But the past three years of China’s disastrous zero-COVID strategy, protests, supply chain disruptions, and serious economic slowdowns—all visible to the world, and even more so now that protests are raging in China—have undermined that main prong of the state media’s foreign messaging.

Chinese state outlets are going to find it harder to gain audiences as many leading democracies put roadblocks in their way. These have included the United Kingdom pulling CGTN’s license and the United States forcing state media to register as agents of foreign influence, which drives away U.S. national and Chinese national reporters who do not want to be tagged as influence agents. Some democracies have created commissions or legislation designed to closely examine foreign investment and influence inside their borders, such as Australia and Singapore. European states, too, are assessing ways to better monitor foreign investment and influence in media and information sectors.

Xinhua, alone among China’s biggest state media outlets, has expanded significantly while also boosting its global audience and gaining some credibility. Beijing has placed a high premium on modernizing Xinhua and getting foreign news outlets to use Xinhua stories by signing content-sharing deals, in the process legitimizing Xinhua to some editors and readers. Xinhua has inked many such deals, including for stories in many languages other than Chinese, and because it covers so many topics unrelated to China, its reporters sometimes have more room from Beijing to operate. It is likely that, in the next decade, with the pandemic forcing more outlets to cut staff, and with media outlets around the globe continuing to suffer financially, the appeal of signing deals with Xinhua, a cheap or free newswire, will only increase. Indeed, Xinhua could become China’s most powerful information weapon.

As of this writing, Xinhua has not yet forged enough connections to consistently write the first draft of global news stories, as wires do. Since some major outlets such as the BBC and the New York Times do not regularly use Xinhua stories, distrusting them, Xinhua still does not circulate as widely among elite publications as stories from Reuters or The Associated Press or Bloomberg. But that may be changing rapidly. In recent years, Xinhua has inked cooperation agreements with major global and regional newswires, including Agence France-Presse; news services in Australia; Germany’s Deutsche Presse-Agentur; Poland’s Polish News Agency; Class Editori in Italy; Le Soir in Belgium; Athens News Agency in Greece; RAI, Italy’s public broadcaster; and ANSA, Italy’s leading wire service.

And on many occasions, in places where it has a massive manpower advantage, like Southeast Asia and, of course, China itself, Xinhua is beating competitors to stories or is covering stories competitors do not have the resources to cover. As Xinhua grows (and offers its service free to many outlets in developing countries), and as other newswires struggle financially, the Chinese newswire will get to more stories first—and earn editors’ and publishers’ trust. It is rapidly opening bureaus. By early 2021, Xinhua had a reported 181 bureaus globally. This would give Xinhua a reach close to that of The Associated Press, which has around 250 bureaus worldwide, or the BBC, which is a giant in Africa, Asia, and other regions. Meanwhile, the Chinese newswire has a massive advantage over most of its competitors in that it does not have to make a profit.

Xinhua also is attempting to boost its credibility in other ways in Southeast Asia and other areas physically close to China or where populations have relatively positive images of China. In Southeast Asia and Africa, where Xinhua has poured resources into expansion, the Chinese state newswire can cover stories that may not get mentioned by other media organizations such as Reuters, The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, or large international newspapers with foreign staffs. One former U.S. official analyzing China’s expanding state media called this a “hyperlocal approach,” a strategy focused on offering detailed stories in regions that some global outlets ignore.

Eventually, if governments and news organizations do not put roadblocks in its place, Xinhua copy, via content-sharing deals, will appear in more and more news outlets, shaping public and elite opinion in a growing number of countries, as it already does in places such as Thailand. A range of evidence shows Xinhua’s growth in size and influence. There, Xinhua has signed content-sharing deals with many top Thai publications, including those of the Matichon Group, the most-respected Thai-language news organization. These deals have allowed China to shape news narratives in Thailand, where many more Thai outlets now run Xinhua copy. Overall, not only is China portrayed more positively in the Thai media than in the past, according to many Thai journalists, but serious critiques of China are vanishing from many Thai outlets.

A range of evidence shows Xinhua’s growth in size and influence. The Lowy Institute’s maps of digital influence in Asia show Xinhua is making inroads across the region. Indeed, the maps show that Xinhua has become the second-most-influential news agency regionally, behind only The Associated Press, and that Xinhua is making significant gains in influence in the media environment of several Northeast Asian and Southeast Asian states. And unlike with, say, a television station that a viewer has to actively turn on, and probably knows the channel, most print or online readers do not check the bylines of news articles—making it easier for Xinhua copy to slip through to readers.

Notably, media outlets have been signing deals to carry Xinhua even in countries where the U.S. government—and private nonprofits hailing from democratic states—have invested heavily in promoting the creation of a vibrant local media. In Afghanistan, for instance, where donors including the United States have plowed money into the local media, an International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) report shows that Xinhua has inked contracts with 25 to 30 Afghan media outlets. These deals include ones with the biggest television stations and websites in the country.

The IFJ report notes that China’s content-sharing deals have helped reshape journalists’ messaging about Beijing in multiple countries, including those known for robust local journalism. Its survey of Philippine journalists found that China’s increasingly close links with the Philippines’ state television, the Philippine News Agency, and the Philippine Information Agency, built through content-sharing and training programs, are having an effect on Philippine news outlets’ coverage of China.

Indeed, China’s closer links to Philippine media, and the spreading use of Xinhua in the Philippines, are depriving Philippine news consumers of independent reporting on Beijing. These shifts are depriving Filipinos of independent coverage even as Beijing squeezes the Philippines in the South China Sea, and even though the population as a whole in the Philippines has not become markedly more pro-China. “The way they write their stories now, they reflect the way how Xinhua or how the state media in China is writing their stories,” one Philippine journalist told IFJ. “It’s normally propaganda.” Another told IFJ, “Instead of getting insights on journalism from free countries like the United States, United Kingdom, Western Europe and even Japan, they [journalists in the Philippines] are learning state control.”

Xinhua is gaining readership in many states through such content-sharing deals, or simply because more news outlets are choosing to use Xinhua stories. And as Xinhua buys access—and gets into more websites, newspapers, and magazines—its stories will become as ubiquitous as those of The Associated Press. Then Xinhua, still a state company, still a propaganda organ that provides intelligence briefings to top Chinese leaders, will be able to shape even more of the world’s news coverage. It is indeed the only true weapon, among China’s state media, that has come of Xi’s grand desire for more control over global “discourse power.”

If Xinhua, inking more and more content-sharing deals, is able to write the first draft about stories outside of China, which is what wires provide, and set the tone and parameters for international coverage by other outlets, as wires do, it could have a huge effect on how the global public understands the news. As The Associated Press and Reuters have done for years, Xinhua would be able to initially define many news stories for the world—a dangerous proposition for free and independent media and for honest coverage of China.

[ylizam]

tagged by: @chainofclovers

last song: The Loneliest by Måneskin

last show/series: that I finished watching? hmm, High Fidelity. I think. ooh, or Only Murders in the Building (obviously only through the most recent season, but yes).

currently watching: oh gosh what am I not watching? (plenty, obviously, as there is SO MUCH tv these days.) Abbott Elementary is a delight and a must-watch for me every week; I watch it the morning after it airs, and it’s the best way to wake up. the Laws and Order are my bad-for-me copaganda programs, and I spent a bunch of them yelling at everyone not to trust the police but also, look, Olivia Benson and I go way back. I’m enjoying Queer for Fear and Interview with the Vampire so far. Stars Trek: Lower Decks and Prodigy (when the latter comes back). General Hospital. And sometimes Days of Our Lives (it’s not my soap, but I like some of the characters and I’m trying to support the show in this strange, streaming world it’s in). 

favorite color: orange

sweet, spicy, or savory: yes, and. 

currently reading: Honey in the Marrow by Emily Waters (okay, technically I just finished this, but I was reading it when I was tagged so). This is Real and You are Completely Unprepared by Rabbi Alan Lew. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (re-read). Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (re-read). The Oleander Sword by Tasha Suri. fanfictions when they cross my path (mostly SVU lately tbh). 

what i'm working on: hahahahaha. ha. (which is to say that I have been so stuck, so very blocked, on just about everything, even though I have so many things I want to write and I really need.) (but now I have one exchange fic with a hard deadline and then Yuletide so hopefully those will help.) anyway in addition to like seventeen million ideas and things I’ve abandoned and may return to one day but also who knows, these are the official five things for now:

my femslash exchange fic. (it’s a secret.)

the TNG fic I’m co-writing with @summervillen (the goal is to finish before the Picard season 3 premiere date).

the original soap opera romance thing(ies: I have an idea for one story set in the 1980s, at the heyday of the genre, and one set current day when shows have been canceled and gone to streaming etc.; so it’s a duology, I guess?). the first one is fake dating for PR and whatnot. the second is a second chance romance for a background pairing in the first. 

the SVU Olivia Benson Becomes a Vigilante fic of the Cabot/Benson/Stabler variety. which stalled dreadfully during summer hiatus times, but I am feeling more excited about now that it’s network television season again. 

the Holby City remix fic that I’ve started and re-started and started again many times over the years, and which I really want to finish because I feel like I’ve never gotten any Berena closure for myself and also like I’ve slipped away without meaning to and would like to return.

currently obsessed with: the opening of Wolf Hall (“So now get up.” ugh, I want to roll around in it. it’s so good. I just, how did she do that? how is it so visceral, so there?). soap operas, as form, but also the history and cultural impact and fandom of; the watching of; the way you can grow up watching one, grow up and watch the characters age alongside you, racing ahead through life (sometimes you even get a character around your age that they don’t SORAS, and you grow up with them) (sometimes you get to watch a character age and still have adventures, romances, lives, and sometimes a character will devolve into someone who only shows up to talk to their—her, usually, because even in a genre where you get older woman living full lives, there’s still that pesky societal misogyny at play—grown child or grandchild); the shift from the heights of the daytime soap in the u.s. to now; the cancellations of shows and how that hurts (the way so many of these shows weren’t preserved over the decades, the film destroyed or taped over or whatever). the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation. (found family!) Kira Nerys and where she is now (or in the future, post-DS9, post Lower Decks; where she is now, whereas now is however many years post-DS9). Into the Woods. Russian Doll. apples. 

tagging: anyone who wants to answer these.

#meme #about me

[nat20marketing]

Welcome back to this week’s Nat 20 Marketing!

We are reaching the final stretch of this blog. It has been quite an exciting journey throughout, for I have learned a lot more about IMC itself through in-person lectures and activities, as well as outstanding real-life examples.

One thing I noticed during this whole journey is the frequent creative brainstorming processes that happen behind the scenes. As a creative person I’ve always been since childhood, I have absolutely enjoyed the opportunities this path has led me to so far.

This brings me to this week’s topic on traditional media for marketing and advertising.

Before we get into the juicy part of this blog post, let’s talk about what traditional marketing is.

We are so used to digital marketing these days on our smartphones, tablets, and computers that it is very easy to overlook traditional marketing channels like the television, newspapers and magazines, billboards and advertisements printed on vehicles, expos, and conventions, etc.

The reality is that there is likely never a point in time we can completely abandon and move on from traditional marketing means, because we are humans, and we are social creatures. We go out for school, work, social activities, and many things else. They may seem insignificant in our busy lives, but they are still information our brains gather passively as we move along with whatever we may be doing. Just like digital advertisements, it takes a few times before our brains can fully register and retain the content in our minds. When we are surrounded by the same advertisements over and over, it is more likely that we will recall the brands in the future when we need any goods and services from those lines of business.

In the past, I have always thought that traditional marketing is relatively boring because, in my perception, this type of marketing is just advertisements on printed media. I will admit that I don’t read a lot of newspapers or magazines myself, and I have so easily dismissed the advertisements around me as I go on with my day because I am simply so used to seeing them all over the place. What I do not notice is that my subconscious has been silently soaking up all this information like a sponge every day. The constant and regular exposure to these advertisements, as I revisit them when I commute back and forth, functions the same way as we view the same advertisements on social media repeatedly in intervals.

On top of these passive advertisements placed around us, there are still other meaningful methods to get the brand’s products out into the market.

For most DND enthusiasts, anime, movies, and video games are easily the common go-to entertainment aside from tabletop games. I’d like to talk about video games in particular this time. There are many conventions and in-person events across the world yearly that showcase upcoming games developed by both indie teams and AAA companies. Some games offer a free demo if you visit their booths, and you can decide whether you want to buy the games when they officially launch in the future. These playtests are also used as a critical source of instant feedback from a large pool of players of different ages, genders, and preferences. Developers can easily collect data and modify their games to better fit the expectations of their potential players, who are going to be their customers. If the team decides to listen to and adopt the feedback provided by the players, it can build positive relationships with the players. This is beneficial in the long run and creates strong brand loyalty.

Now that we’ve covered the gist of what traditional marketing is, I want to go over how we can get creative with them using a couple of examples I learned about last week.

Let's start mashing traditional marketing with the future!

The first example would be the KitKat billboards that give you a massage when you lean your back onto them. I would have never thought of this idea. It is truly out of the box and brings technology into these plain advertisement billboards you can so easily find at bus stops and train stations. While I cannot say how the massage experience really feels because of the unconventional limitations to these massage devices that were installed inside the billboard, it is most certainly the uniqueness of the experience that would leave people a long-lasting impression. People would remember that KitKat once did this campaign, and I think it aligns well with the value the chocolate tries to deliver. It is a snack we would eat when we want to relax for a bit. It is a convenient snack we can have on-the-go.

The second example would be Canadian Tire’s marketing campaign on their pet products. It is extremely creative and smart for the team to focus their attention on the pets instead of only on the pet owners. The team created these scented promotional devices to attract dogs when they are on their walks with their owners. These devices are also tailored to attract them visually, in colors that they can easily discern, as it is commonly known that dogs are born with colorblindness. Much more is done throughout the campaign to bring more dogs (and their human friends) to shop at Canadian Tire. With this example, it is so difficult not to realize that sometimes we don’t always have to market our products to the ones who are paying, but also to the users. Be it your children or your fur companions, it is proven time and time again that marketing campaigns creatively designed are far better than generic advertisements.

That being said, these campaigns are often far more costly. It is truly an investment that takes time, effort, and money. Sometimes, it may even be a risky one, and may not even be well-received!

Before we end this week’s post, I’d like to try out this handy dandy poll function on Tumblr! We’ll be back at Nat 20 Marketing next week with the topic of “The Power of Personalization”.

#integrated marketing communications #traditional marketing #marketing #business

[5-7-9]

I actually liked coodot’s cancer plotline, for inspiration for my own reclamation AU purposes.

So S1 or the Prequel (featuring Eddie! Or Edward) Where Riddler’s debut is hacking into the television for his puzzle show… only this happened AFTER Joker first did it, so the public thinks he’s some “Joker copycat.” Obviously infuriated by this, he sets Joker as a (one-sided) rival! I read a fic that i can’t remember, where Eddie was a fan and his first meeting with Joker was in Arkham but he was completely disassociating, the day after Eddie officially stopped caring and thought he sucked but Joker was present mentally there this time being just as annoying as he usually is but this time slightly interested. Yeah, Eddie never was a fan in my version, but i liked the idea of Joker disassociating (in my AU Joker usually disassociates in Arkham and that’s the explanation as to why he doesn’t leave as quickly as easily it seems).

Anyway, Eddie does his usual interactions and teamups with rouges, being abused in Arkham, that stupid misdiagnosis of OCD is given + other wrong diagnosis's (but this time on purpose by me), and is generally annoying to everyone. He’s not given lots to work with in the prequel besides being convenient for Batman to do vigilantism, so I’m skipping over to-

S2 or the main story: Eddie’s experiencing the new resurgence of Arkham Asylum, getting to do more bonding with the patients that doesn’t involve manipulation or insulting or just to hear his own voice. He gets a proper re-diagnosis, this time he has autism with NPD!!! Leland gets to him with his daddy issues, and the whole ableism and bullying thing makes more… sense now. (In this world, i tried smashing the original Batman’s 1940 date with slightly current-er 2000s together, so the timeline’s going by real life standards but faster and combined with the unrealistic elements) (So actually autism is a new-ish concept) (Still, even with that context, it doesn’t excuse how Arkham’s “doctors” just fucking suck). Anyway, better coping mechanisms! Whoo!

Eddie actually decides to get properly released, since it seemed really easy? He’s partaking in the Wayne’s charitable jobs for unemployable people like ex cons and maybe immigrants and others idk. (I saw a fic do this, but i swear i thought of the idea before i saw it, but haha coincidence). Most of the rouges are apart of this program, so there’s fun shenanigans to happen there. Actually, most of the rouges are also part of the all inclusive queer group from that bar, i think i mentioned that already tho. Eddie fits in pretty nicely with the queer group, people actually support and praise and hype him up awwwww.

Eddie actually joins a different group distanced from the activists and queers, he joins a coding or nerd(?) club. He meets Barbara, a STEM(?) graduate(?), that managed to impress him somehow (i haven’t figured out the why yet). They end up working with each other for some mystery/puzzle solving (anti-villain) (poor Gordon 💀).

So the cancer part is real, and everyone is sad about it. There’s an entire not-birthday party set up just to celebrate him before he passes away. (I wanted Eddie to feel important without needing him to prove it).

So this is where Lois and Luthor actually comes in. Lois was having a pretty successful anti-Lex campaign, his reputation was getting to an uncomfortable point… Until Luthor dropped the fucking “I found the cure to cancer” BOMB!!! So, the media doesn’t know what to think, neither does anyone else (don’tcha just hate it when that shitty guy does a good thing?). Eddie was one of the guys that got cured, so he’s unfortunately indebted to Lex.

I think that’s all i got for now

#My reclamation AU

[wrestlingisfake]

AEW Fake Rankings, 4/1/2023

Men's singles division - babyfaces

Kenny Omega (IWGP United States champion)

Adam Page

Adam Cole

Jack Perry

Ricky Starks

Wardlow

HOOK (FTW champion)

Konosuke Takeshita

Matt Hardy

Action Andretti

Men's singles division - heels

MJF (AEW men's world champion)

Chris Jericho

Bryan Danielson

Sammy Guevara

Powerhouse Hobbs (AEW TNT champion)

Samoa Joe (ROH television champion)

Daniel Garcia

Juice Robinson*

Jeff Jarrett

Jake Hager

Unranked: AR Fox, Ari Daivari, Darius Martin, Jack Cartwheel*, Jay Lethal, Mark Briscoe, Parker Boudreaux, Preston Vance, Serpentico, Starboy Charlie*, Swerve Strickland

* Not listed on AEW's official roster

The next world title program looks to be a four-way with MJF, Perry, Guevara, and Darby Allin. Whether that headlines the May 28 pay-per-view remains to be seen. I could picture the four-way being on one of the "special" editions of Dynamite, like Mother's Day Mayhem or Earth Day Slam or whatever they might call it. It feels like Adam Cole is being set up for a big babyface push, so maybe MJF vs. Cole will headline 5/28. But for now it's too soon to be sure.

To make room for all these new faces in the world title picture, AEW has moved a lot of the established top guys into multi-man feuds. Omega and Page are separately dealing with the entire Blackpool Combat Club (Danielson, Jon Moxley, Claudio Castagnoli, and Wheeler Yuta), while the Jericho Appreciation Society is regrouping against the House of Black. Wardlow is probably going to return to chase Hobbs, but to get there he'll likely have to cut through the new QTV group. Hook seems to be busy beating everybody in the Firm one-by-one. Starks's feud with Robinson may or may not lead to fighting the entire Bullet Club.

AEW has not yet announced a "Blood and Guts" double cage match for 2023, but this is usually around the time of year they'd start setting that up. At this point, they're spoiled for choice as to which multi-man feud to put in the cage, not to mention the whole Outcasts storyline in the women's division. I suppose some of these feuds could be blown off with Stadium Stampede, or Anarchy in the Arena, or Clobbering in Catering, or whatever they call it.

Men's tag team division - babyfaces

The Acclaimed - Max Caster & Anthony Bowens

Lucha Bros. - Penta El Zero Miedo & Rey Fenix (ROH tag team champions)

Darby Allin & Sting

Keith Lee & Dustin Rhodes

John Silver & Alex Reynolds

Evil Uno & Stu Grayson

Men's tag team division - heels

The Gunns - Austin Gunn & Colten Gunn (AEW tag team champions)

Matt Menard & Angelo Parker

The Kingdom - Matt Taven* & Mike Bennett*

Varsity Athletes - Josh Woods & Tony Nese

Unranked: Harv Shira* & Gurv Shira*

* Not listed on AEW's official roster

Following the Lucha Bros. ROH tag title victory, I'm still uncertain how much separation we're going to see between the AEW and ROH rosters. It feels like several AEW acts (such as the Kingdom) have been earmarked to primarily work ROH-branded shows, but very few of them have actually stopped being featured on AEW. It may take a few more months to get the brands separated...if that's even what Tony Khan wants to accomplish, that is.

The top two-on-two programs right now look to be the Acclaimed vs. Menard/Parker and the Gunns vs. FTR (Dax Harwood & Cash Wheeler). My hunch is that FTR will win the tag titles and move on to a big match with the Acclaimed. If FTR doesn't win their April 5 title match, they've vowed to leave AEW. Would that send them to ROH full-time, or would they just leave altogether? Either way I have no idea what shape this division will take.

Men's trios division - babyfaces

Orange Cassidy (AEW international champion) & Chuck Taylor & Trent Beretta

Dalton Castle* & Brent Tate* & Brandon Tate*

Men's trios division - heels

John Moxley & Claudio Castagnoli (ROH men's world champion) & Wheeler Yuta

Malakai Black & Brody King & Buddy Matthews (AEW trios champions)

Kip Sabian & The Butcher & The Blade

* Not listed on AEW's official roster

The trios division is in flux right now. Everyone in the Dark Order has been laid out by Moxley's group, so it's not clear which of them will be available for a trios match (with or without Adam Page). With the Young Bucks on the shelf, Kenny Omega is torn between teaming with other guys or going it solo. The Jericho Appreciation Society had a trio ready to go, but Sammy Guevara's pursuit of singles gold probably changes the formula. I'm guessing Jericho & Hager & Garcia challenge the House of Black, but that's not certain yet.

I'm a bit surprised we never see Jeff Jarrett, Jay Lethal, and Satnam Singh make a run as a trio, considering they're all inseparable anyway. But then, Singh is rarely put in the ring, so my guess is they don't think he's anywhere close to ready.

Women's singles division - babyfaces

Jamie Hayter (AEW women's world champion)

Taya Valkyrie

Willow Nightingale

Skye Blue*

Emi Sakura

Women's singles division - heels

Jade Cargill (AEW TBS champion)

Toni Storm

Saraya

Ruby Soho

Marina Shafir*

Leila Grey*

Unranked: Ava Lawless*, Nicole Matthews*

* Not listed on AEW's official roster

Aside from Valkyrie chasing Cargill, the women's division now revolves around the Outcasts (Storm, Saraya, and Soho) vs. Hayter, Britt Baker, Nightingale, Blue, and Riho. Assuming Baker's back issues don't keep her sidelined, the heels need a couple more women to back them up. I'd go with Marina Shafir and Nyla Rose, since they're already a duo, and Nyla would end the narrative of "ex-WWE heels vs. AEW originals," which isn't helping anything.

No TV/PPV matches in 30 days, but had a Dark/Elevation match: Aaron Solo, Athena (ROH women's world champion) Big Bill, Boulder*, Brady Booker*, Bronson*, Brandon Cutler, Brian Cage (ROH trios champion), Charlette Renegade*, Christopher Daniels, Ethan Page, Isiah Kassidy, Julia Hart, Lance Archer, Lee Johnson, Lee Moriarty, Luther, Nick Comoroto, Nyla Rose, Peter Avalon, QT Marshall, Riho, Robyn Renegade*, Sonny Kiss, Zack Clayton*

No televised AEW matches in 30 days: Anna Jay, Anthony Ogogo, Bandido, Brian Pillman Jr., Britt Baker, Brock Anderson, Cash Wheeler, Dax Harwood, Fuego Del Sol, Leva Bates, Luchasarus, Madison Rayne, Matt Sydal, Michael Nakazawa, Miro, Ortiz, PAC, Penelope Ford, Red Velvet, Rush, Satnam Singh, Scorpio Sky, Serena Deeb, Shawn Dean, Shawn Spears, The Bunny, Trench, Yuka Sakazaki

Part-time/Semi-retired: Billy Gunn, El Hijo Del Vikingo* (AAA mega champion), Jeff Cobb*, Kyle Fletcher*, Mark Davis*, Mark Henry, Mark Sterling, Paul Wight, Paige Vanzant, Rebel, Stokely Hathaway, Sonjay Dutt

* Not listed on AEW's official roster

Inactive

Abadon (shoulder - collarbone fracture)

Andrade El Idolo (left shoulder - pectoralis tear)

Christian Cage (storyline - "buried alive")

CM Punk (left arm - triceps tear)

Colt Cabana (unspecified injury)

Danhausen (right shoulder - pectoralis tear)

Dante Martin (left leg - unspecified injury)

Eddie Kingston (storyline - "quit" AEW, jumped to ROH)

Griff Garrison (unspecified injury)

Hikaru Shida (finger - unspecified injury)

Jeff Hardy (suspension - DUI)

Kris Statlander (left knee - ACL tear, lateral meniscus tear)

Kyle O'Reilly (neck - herniated disc)

Leyla Hirsch (knee - ACL tear)

Marq Quen (unspecified injury)

Matt Jackson (arm - partial biceps tear)

Nick Jackson (storyline - "separated shoulder")

Santana (left knee - unspecified injury)

Tay Melo (back - protrusion)

Thunder Rosa (back - unspecified injury)

#aew #fake rankings

[more-than-a-princess]

@scarlxtleaves asked: How physically affectionate is your muse with their partner? What personality trait/type does your muse find most attractive? Would your muse prefer a spontaneous date night, or a planned night out?

Romantic Relationship Headcanon q's - Accepting for Fluff Friday!

How physically affectionate is your muse with their partner?

In general, Sonia, particularly in her younger years, is an affectionate person. She adores giving her friends and family hugs as a teenager, at least in private. Double cheek kisses are also the standard greeting for members of the Royal Family when greeting fellow members of the family.

As an adult, her physical affection amongst her friends and family is a bit more restrained, which is expected of her (her parents were mostly not of the 'pick up your crying child and hug them' variety: that was nanny's job). But with a partner, Sonia has to make the Great Realization from 'doesn't get that this person likes them/she likes this person' to 'GETS IT. They've made it painfully direct and obvious. The feelings are mutual!' I think of it like a switch that's suddenly flipped.

Sonia is very good at reading people for most things: romantic interest in her is the main exception. Unless someone is Kazuichi levels of directness in showing their interest (and Sonia despises his reasoning for liking her in the first place), she will likely not pick up on it. This person is simply being nice, that person is being friendly, etc. This is partly due to her family's specific codes of conduct where courting/dating are concerned (drilled into every member of the aristocracy, but commoners would likely have no idea about the protocol) and the fact that, for the most part, her exposure to romance has been through media: books, television, film. Sonia can easily recognize flirting when it's scripted. When it's happening to her, it usually goes right over her head.

There's also the nagging voice at the back of her mind that constantly asks: who would actually want to date me/romance me/love me/marry me if they knew, really knew, what royal life and my family are like?

That being said: once she's made that Great Realization? She very much enjoys sneaking in a kiss here, a hug there, a cuddle whenever she doesn't have to be awake terribly early. Good days and bad days alike, she prefers to begin and end them in her lover's arms, or they in hers. Sonia just needs it to be behind closed doors if it's not appropriate for public view: a held hand, a hug, or a discreet/quick kiss here and there, especially after the Royal Family has officially announced a romantic relationship/suitor for the Princess is acceptable: making out in a public space is definitely not. Sonia likes to keep parts of her life private: so much of her life is available for public consumption and scrutiny. She values the parts she keeps to herself and shares with those she loves so much.

What personality trait/type does your muse find most attractive?

Probably kindness, with self-confidence not too far behind. Sonia finds people who are inherently kind to be very attractive. It might not be worn on their sleeve, it could very well be buried beneath plenty of prickly layers to keep others from noticing it, but that usually does little to deter her from finding it. Sonia detests snobbery, particularly snobbery that comes from wealthy individuals towards the rest of the world: in her view, money and family name do not guarantee someone to be a good person. In her experience, it often corrupts them.

But people who actively work to help their communities/businesses/city/country/etc? Who give back, who care about things other than themselves and their own self-interests? Terribly attractive.

An innate self-confidence (no braggarts, but she doesn't find crybaby teens and adults terribly attractive either), an inclination towards adventure and exploration, determination/motivation, a (preferably warped) sense of humor, and shared/common interests are also attractive.

Would your muse prefer a spontaneous date night, or a planned night out?

Yes. The important words here are: night out. Sonia enjoys both, having someone plan a date for/with her (especially if it's something that they enjoy, she enjoys, they both enjoy, or they're eager to try), or something entirely spontaneous (within reason. She does have rules to follow. Mostly. She bends a lot of them), she's mostly just happy to spend time with her partner. Particularly away from royal life, if possible: she needs to remember that she is a person worth putting first, not just a princess, which can be difficult sometimes.

That said, it's hard to ignore how much she likes things that get her adrenaline pumping: roller coasters, exploring decrepit haunted places, horror movie marathons, etc. Soothing activities are enjoyable too, but after adhering to a schedule and all sorts of regulations that control nearly every aspect of her life? A little bit of adrenaline is a welcome change.

#more-than-a-princess answered #more-than-a-princess headcanons #scarlxtleaves #(romantic relationship headcanon q's meme) #(Thank you for the ask!) #(for someone so intelligent she can be very dumb sometimes)

[preternatura-aa]

Canada’s Drag Race: Canada VS The World Review

This post has spoilers for Canada VS The World and CAST spoilers for Rupaul’s Drag Race All Stars 8, also take this as a general spoiler warning for the franchise as a whole.

So I’ve been working on a huge Rupaul’s Drag Race review project where I review episodes based on specific criteria and I figured I’d post my ratings of the most recently finished season as well as share some of my thoughts on the vs the world series and the eventually the wider franchise. I’d like to use this review to introduce and demonstrate the rate system as well as provide some cool write-ups.

I rate each episode in four categories, 1-5 for each. These are the basic categories I believe make a good episode of Drag Race:

Funny - Self explanatory

Fashion - I consider only official runways, seeing as challenge outfits are usually supposed to be silly and it’s hard to judge the two things at once

Fun - I usually consider the actual structure of the episode in terms of production for this, are the challenges interesting, was the runway category a good idea how did the contestants act on the episode in response to these things, etc

Fierce - Rated based on emotional resonance. This can mean storylines, lip-syncs, drama, narrative/production decisions, other contestant behavior. Kind of an “X-Factor” category.

My Canada VS The World Rate Table

I found Canada VS The World to be pretty disappointing overall. Only 2 seasons into the VS The World franchise, WOW has announced Rupaul’s Drag Race Global All Stars. Based on that info, it seems to me like VS The World is over. It was an interesting experiment but it may be too tall an order to continue to fill. It must be borderline impossible coordinating different production studios in different countries and contestants allegedly straight up refusing to be on non-RuPaul hosted seasons. Then again, who knows.

I won’t lie, I was excited for Canada VS The World. After the glorious dumpster-fire of UK VS The World I was genuinely interested in how the contestants would react to the season ruiningly cut throat gameplay of the franchise’s first entry. Unfortunately- they reacted in the most boring way imaginable.

All in all, both production and cast decided this season needed to be insanely positive. To be fair, this may have been the safest decision with the way the season played out. Storylines and werk room chatter usually center around somewhat surface-level discussions of mental health and social justice topics. Do not get me wrong, I’m not some kind of edge-lord idiot that can’t handle those kinds of themes- the thing is, there was just very little else going on. The issue is that it was often the only thing anyone was interested in talking about.

Here’s the thing- reality television is hard to make. I’m not saying the contestants should have had stupid fights and fought each other all the time or that production should have caused conflict. I just think there weren’t many interesting narratives present at all until the end. There’s an element of this that is kind of just random. A lack of interesting narrative in the real world during filming just happens sometimes and that’s fine, but it doesn’t mean the season is going to be interesting to watch. It’s a lot of people talking about their “truth” and their “journeys” (Icesis specifically did this a lot). Maybe this is just a me thing but over-reliance on pop-health/wellness language like this usually annoys and bores me. Especially when it’s in service of branding and marketing.

Arguably the most satisfying and interesting narrative through-line was Silky Nutmeg Ganache’s story of overcoming her fan-perception from her two previous Drag Race seasons. It’s interesting to hear the contestants talk about the consequences of their appearances on reality TV and I felt like it was a responsible and surprising production decision to focus on it so heavily. Then again- if the best part of a season is based on other seasons... that may not be the best sign. Combined with her clearly improved runway presentations, it was all the more anticlimactic when she did better in the final lip-sync (imo) and still didn’t win the whole thing. I guess production thought Ra’jah D O’Hara was a safer bet. Silky was the star of CVTW for me.

Silky Nutmeg Ganache for the Queen of The World Category

Canada VS The World revealed some innate problems with the VS The World format (originally created for Rupaul’s Drag Race All Stars 2). The Lip Sync For Your Legacy format basically forces the cast to play nice with each other every single week- or face the wrath of both their fellow cast and online fandom. This format can create some pretty insane television moments (see Manila Luzon’s All Stars 4 elimination, Pangina Heals and Jimbo’s UKVTW eliminations, etc). I think the shorter episode counts of VS The World are why it’s not working as well and why the queens of CTVW seemingly refused to play dirty or to play interesting. 10 episodes gives much more breathing room for relationships and conflicts to develop over time, 6 episode season are simply too over and done with for anything that interesting to happen without throwing off the seasons. 

UK VS The World’s shockingly competitive gameplay early on ruined the season in the long-run since the finalists who did really well for the first half of the seasons were almost all eliminated, spelling disaster for viewers as the finalists weren’t very many contestants who had actually excelled at the competition. CANVTW has the opposite problem, nobody wanted to repeat the previous season’s mistakes and therefore there’s zero strategy or drama in the eliminations. Basically what I’m saying is this format doesn’t work in these micro-seasons.

Another issue that makes this even worse is Icesis Couture’s self elimination. It felt tonally strange threw the season w a y off as well as eliminated one of the few frontrunners, leaving only a couple contestants who had done very well to be finalists. I’m absolutely not invalidating Icesis’ decision to quit, I think it’s cool as fuck of her, but the season was just so much less competitive after she left- and likely pushed Rita Baga into the top as the Canadian finalist. This effected the my rate of the season pretty negatively overall as I don’t enjoy Rita Baga’s humor or runway presentations. 

Rita Baga for the Y2GAY Category

It’s clear to me that there was kind of an unspoken agreement among all the contestants to play the game basically the same way, leading to very few interpersonal conflicts and very little tension as a viewer- the elimination decision each episode was unanimous for god sake (for the first time in Drag Race h e r s t o r y). It just wasn’t engaging and it was hard to care at all in early episodes since the gap between who was performing well and who wasn’t was so wide. 

The scrappy fun of the previous the seasons of Canada’s Drag Race felt present for sure, but it was severely missing the teeth that makes reality TV interesting to watch. Boring storylines, over-reliance on sappy werk-room segments, confusing judging decisions and overdone challenges made 4/6 episodes of this season receive below average (below 3) scores. Thankfully the finale episode was a lot of fun and somewhat satisfying despite the absolutely detestable finale format of Lip Sync For The Crown- but I’ll write about that in another post. It was full of nice moments and fun production decisions as well as contestant performances. I loved Monet X Change showing up, I loved Victoria proposing to her girlfriend, I liked when the rest of the cast came back, and I loved the final lip sync.

On the winner: Ra’jah O’hara is the first multinational triple-season complete winner arc, which is unprecedented so far on Drag Race, but I have a feeling we’ll be seeing more of these in the future. Ra’jah was my pre-season pick, but I felt her All Stars 6 showing was more deserving of a crown- and I don’t like wins that feel honorary or based on extra-textual context. They are lame.

Ra’Jah D Ohara for the Plaid Girls Club Category

I feel like I’ve been harsh, so here are some

Things I liked:

- Victoria Scone was great on this season and I’m glad we got to see a lot of her even if I don’t always like her sense of humor.

- The cast was one of the most diverse ever, which is very cool. It’s important for the art form and for the show to showcase as wide an array of points of views and aesthetics as possible, there’s still a long way to go though obviously though.

- The finale episode

- Silky, Ra’jah, and Icesis on the runway

Final Stats:

The lowest possible score is 1, the highest is 5. These averages are calculated from each of my rates in each respective category in each episode.

Funny: 2.5

Fashion:  3.166666667

Fun:  2.333333333

Fierce:  2.833333333

Overall Score:  2.708333333 on a scale of 1 to 5

Afterword:

Those acting challenges are still SO HORRIBLE I don’t even know how they could fix them at this point. It’s just kind of an inherently bad structure for a challenge I think. Also the humor of the US judges is bad but I’m not sure it reaches the soulless phoning in of the Canadian drag race judges. Part of my idea for rebooting the show includes abandoning those stupid fucking runway comments the judges are always making. Genuinely makes the show hard to even watch sometimes. I’ve heard some people watch this on mute.

I don’t think Canada VS The World was very good overall but I guess I’m happy Ra’jah finally has a crown.

#The Ultimate Drag Race Franchise Stat Project #rupauls drag race #rupauls drag race all stars #drag race #canda's drag race #canada vs the world #drag race vs the world #drag race spoilers #rupauls drag race spoilers #the plan is to do more of these #i have done these rates for 25 seasons of drag race so far #so mostly i just need to do write ups

[shivaforouzesh1994r]

"The Joy of Science" Professor Jim Al-Khalili

I want to talk about a podcast I recently listen to it and tell a short brief about the researcher and what I learn from.

Link: https://soundcloud.com/bridging-the-gaps/the-joy-of-science-with-professor-jim-al-khalili

The title of the podcast interested me to find out how can we enjoy about science.

Topic: "The Joy of Science" with Professor Jim Al-Khalili

Who is the guest? Jameel Sadik "Jim" Al-Khalili (born 20 September 1962) is an Iraqi-British theoretical physicist, author and broadcaster. He is a professor of theoretical physics and chair of the public engagement in science at the University of Surrey. He is a regular broadcaster and presenter of science programmers on BBC radio and television, and a frequent commentator about science in other British media.

He mentions science is different from other areas because it’s like a process and it's important to society to know what science is? He believes science is a broad thing and hard to define it.

Quantum mechanics is interesting and unique in science. In science in general you have a theory or hypothesis which gives some explanation about the world and you test it and carry out a great experiment and observations and gather data to see how we accurate it.

He said: Science is about being curios about what we don’t understand.

The part that caught my attention was about ideas that may have an influential effect on society when it deals with rational truth about how the world really is then we should examine why we believe what we do? And compare the scientific theory with conspiracy theory and that’s why I continue to listen to that podcast.

About the information coming to us so thick and fast, professor Jim believes it is difficult for people who trying to be rational. People shouldn’t believe what they see in the internet and it is a big challenge how we deal with that. He moves the discussion to the impact of social media on science and what we can see as knowledge in the world and how we have to choose between what we face as knowledge.

Professor Jim" Al-Khalili talked about research in the field of open quantum system.

Relevant link :

[psitrend]

Interview with Yun Rou, author of Mistress Miao

New Post has been published on https://china-underground.com/2020/09/25/interview-with-yun-rou-author-of-mistress-miao/

Interview with Yun Rou, author of Mistress Miao

Yun Rou (formerly Arthur Rosenfeld) is a Daoist Monk and author of Mistress Miao.

He received his academic education at Yale, Cornell, and the University of California and was ordained a monk in an official ceremony at the Chun Yang Daoist Temple in Guangzhou, China. His work has appeared in Vogue, Vanity Fair, Parade, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, WebMD, Fox Business News, and numerous other websites and newspapers. His more than 20 award-winning non-fiction books and novels of magical realism focus on philosophy, history, compassion, and culture and have been repeatedly optioned for film in both Hollywood and China. From 2010 – 2013, he hosted the hit (reaching 60MM households) national public television show Longevity Tai Chi with Arthur Rosenfeld. The American Heart Association profiled Yun Rou as an inspirational resource in 2016. Monk Yun Rou began his formal martial arts training in 1980 and has studied with some of China’s top Chen-style tai chi grandmasters. In 2011 he was named Tai Chi Master of The Year at the World Congress on Qigong and Traditional Chinese Medicine. In July 2014, Yun Rou joined the heads of the five tai chi families on the dais, representing American tai chi, at the International Tai Chi Symposium in Louisville, Kentucky. He teaches in Southern Arizona, South Florida, and around the world.

How did you come up with the idea of Mistress Miao? Where did you start from?

In addition to being a writer and an ordained Daoist monk, I am a 41-year martial arts practitioner and teacher. I specialize in Chinese internal styles such as taijiquan, baguazhang, and xingyiquan. Traditionally, taiji has relied upon a spear system invented by a woman, Yang Miao Zhen, who developed spiraling techniques to make her spear play more accurate and powerful. She was so successful that her system lived on long after she died and was used by the legendary general Xi Ji Guang against invading Japanese pirates and also to defend the Great Wall. Yang herself became a famous ruler of a portion of northern China during the Mongol incursions and the Southern Song Dynasty, one of the few female heads of state in Chinese history. Even so, she is relatively unknown. I became fascinated with her while learning her spear system, which I practice daily. There is very little biographical information available about Yang—her love life, her beauty, and her ability to defeat all comers is about the size of it—so much was left to my imagination. The more I thought about her, the more I loved her and wanted to give her literary life. 

Mistress Miao by Yun Rou, Publisher Earnshaw Books

Who and what influenced you as an author? 

I had a sickly childhood. Books gave me an escape from suffering and I read constantly. I was initially entranced by Tolkien and the world he created in LORD OF THE RINGS, then moved on to fantasy and science fiction as many kids did in those pre-streaming days. At the age of 9 I declared I wanted to be a writer. I was inspired by Sir Walter Scott’s IVANHOE, a book full of chivalry and knights. I remember telling my father that a writer was like a god in deciding who lives and who dies, who marries whom, who is rich and poor, sick and well, strong and weak.

I was first published in national magazines like VOGUE and HOUSE AND GARDEN in the US back when I was an undergraduate at Yale University, studying the Russian literary classics in their original. Dostoevsky, Lermontov, Pushkin, Gogol, Chekhov, and Tolstoy were early influencers. After college, I fell under the spell of crime fiction and spent years in that genre. I wrote some well-received detective novels and even sold a series to CBS television back in 1990. After Thomas Harris wrote SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, all crime writers were challenged to delve deeper into the darkness in a way I could not reconcile with my burgeoning spiritual path. DIAMOND EYE, a novel about a United States Postal Inspector who uncovers a snuff-film ring was my last foray into the category crime fiction. I turned to magical realism in the tradition of the Nobel laureate, Gabriel Garcia Marquez after that. In magical realism, the writer does not have to build a world like a writer of fantasy does, but rather inserts magical events into a world that is real and recognizable. That juxtaposition of the real and the fantastic can powerfully underscore the true nature of reality. Writers like Mark Helprin, whose A SOLDIER OF THE GREAT WAR might just be my favorite of all Western novels, do so to great and memorable effect and have been important influences on me.

Where does the interest in the Chinese culture come from?

I was a seeker even as a young boy. When I caught a turtle on a river in Connecticut, I envied the creature the ability to see both above and below the waterline, to understand what was going on in that world down below as well as in the world above, my own world. I rendered the spiritual nature of that early questing in my recent release, TURTLE PLANET, which is a form of modern spirit writing. I was always interested in knowing what was really going on beneath the surface of life and I turned to great teachers, including those whose volumes peopled the bookshelves of my philosophy-devotee mother. I read some of the giants of Western philosophy but those from the East resonated more with me. Even though I couldn’t understand books on Zen or Laozi’s DAODEJING I had the sense that there was something special there for me.

My father was perhaps the most famous heart specialist in the world for three decades or so, with the result that our Manhattan apartment was frequented by the people who ran the world: princes, kings, queens, captains of industry, scientists, and other thought-leaders, artists, Hollywood stars, and more. I noticed that although these folks possessed everything we are all taught to want—fame, power, money, beauty, influence—most of them didn’t seem particularly happy. Seeing them made me wonder if I was being sold a bill of goods about what was important in life. I wondered whether I was also being sold a bill of goods about society, religion, capitalism, nationhood, and more. All that wondering led me back to the Asian classics.

At the same time, the New York City of my childhood was a rough place. Gangs roved the streets and picked on kids like me. I was routinely mugged, followed, and harassed on the way to and from school. My sense of helplessness was enhanced by having grown up in a second-generation Holocaust survival family and having lost so very many relatives to Hitler. I really wanted to be the kind of person (as childish an ambition as it now seems) who could not be forced to do anything against his will. When Bruce Lee appeared on the big screen and David Carradine’s TV show KUNG FU aired on the little one, I began to fantasize about being able to take care of myself, to no longer be a victim, and to repair my ailing health. I became interested in Asian martial arts, and through them found better access to philosophical teachings. From there it was just a tiny jump to a fascination with ALL of the traditional Chinese culture.

What was the hardest part of writing Mistress Miao? How long did it take you?

In a few of my recent novels, YIN – A LOVE STORY, THE CROCODILE AND THE CRANE, MISTRESS MIAO, and the forthcoming YANG, I make ancient times and traditional ideas relatable by alternating between past and present in the narrative. This requires a lot of attention to detail and flow so that the reader doesn’t get lost, and, I hope, some artfulness in seamlessly weaving together themes, tropes, and plot points. It’s a challenging literary format but it really chips away at the intellectual and emotional distance between the reader and times long past. I spent a couple of years on MISTRESS MIAO and am happy with the way it came out. I believe readers will find it a unique story and Miao herself as an unforgettable character.

Who are Salomon and Lulu? What is the connection between the fate of the characters and the past and the present?

I riffed on the historical Yang Miao Zhen so as to create not only a martial arts master but a sexual omnivore who is both open to adventure and committed to finding the soulmate she reportedly had in real life. In Yang’s modern incarnation (Daoist and Buddhist themes both abound in my books) those appetites and proclivities are reprised a woman named Lulu. Solomon is her husband. When disaster befalls their new marriage, he steps up, willing to do whatever it takes to save the life of his wife, even if that means traveling to China and putting himself very much in harm’s way.

How much of you and from your personal life can we find in the book?

More than I wish was the case, I’m afraid. When I was a medical student, my wife at the time was brain-damaged and paralyzed in a car accident that happened in front of me. Details of her experience, her suffering, and the roles of those around her inform my portrayal of Lulu’s trials and the feelings Solomon has during that difficult time. On a happier note, I’d like to think that my descriptions of the martial arts sequences, including Miao’s training, are richer, more textured, and more accurate thanks to the decades I’ve spent in my own martial pursuits. My travels in China, too, added verisimilitude to my descriptions. I know that my spiritual studies helped me to render a world in which concepts like reincarnation and shamanism play a prominent role in the proceedings.

What is your next project?

I’m very much enjoying working with Earnshaw Books on these Chinese-themed projects. The level of enthusiasm and support I get is the best I’ve enjoyed in a long writing career. Now that I’ve penned a few of these works of magical realism and twin, complementary worlds, it might be time to engage some pure Asian fantasy. I’m imagining the sort of story that gets made into some of the fantastic TV offerings coming out of China right now, the best of which are based on fantasy novels. I’m excited at the prospect of world-building in the vein of George R.R. Martin’s GAME OF THRONES but in a fictionalized, Asian-flavored version. Perhaps even a series. Stay tuned!

Featured image by Angela Alvarez

#Daoism, #Fantasy

#daoism #fantasy

[sappyhat]

It's political everywhere online!!!! Digital citizenship (Part 1) on Reality TV (W4)

The online vernaculars from many social media platforms have their say on the digital media platform. It would come under any mediums, whether it be heavy discussion threads, podcasts, streams, etc. All the matters to put their voice out there. It might seem that those are just users gossiping, but Graham and Hajru (2011) think of it as citizens performing political talks, and thus fulfilling their "civic responsibilities" on the Internet - their digital citizenship.

Political talks are all about how our world and governments work, but then everything is political. Though it is not communicated via an official and formal platform, everything comes from even the smallest idea of an online discussion forum is considered political talks. We talk about our experience, concerns or interests, and that fortunately is reflected, agreed upon or challenged by others. Such prevalent inputs create what is called political threads (Graham & Hajru 2011.) And since everything could be the problem, everything could be political. Reality TV shows.. could also be the problem to talk about.

Like many other forms of media, reality TVs become people's favorite subjects for discussion. It has been a while, actually. Witnessing a boom in 2004 (Kavka 2018), many scholars have been actively studying this presentation of what is so-called "reality". Why is that?

Such nature of Reality TV represents what is suppose to be "real", "authentic", the representation of real life. The reality within these entertainment mediums are what triggers the "civic practices" of the audiences, as they would expect real-life situations, thus generating valuable content for online users to discuss about. The appearance of George Galloway on Big Brother circa. 2006 raises a great wave of discussions around this matter. Most of the triggers revolve around the fact that such a high-profile character could bring themselves to make an appearance on a national television entertainment show, and Galloway's current debates that step on other formal political issues. However, these rare occasions are not the only trigger for political talks. Things like lifestyles, behaviors and other elements relating to the characters in Reality TV itself (Graham & Hajru 2011 p. 22-25.) This is to show that individuals committing to their civil responsibilities take part in political talks/discussions on the basic matters that closely relate to their lifestyles, decisions and ethics (rather than governing and formal politics).

But.. is it actually "reality"?

Though the discussions revolve around what supposed to be "reality", Reality TV producers may have a different say to this. L'Hoiry (2019) explains how Reality TV shows run on the basis of "interactive economy", an engagement-oriented method that somewhat shifts what is supposed to be the real representation of the characters into what it is believed to gain the most attention from the audiences.

More viewers => More income

However, L'Hoiry explains how instead of questioning the vague representation of reality on Reality TV shows, they rather enjoy distinguishing such ambiguity. This triggers more discussions, and the fact that Reality TVs are still promoted as "reality", such discourse will never stop.

Personally, I find it triggering for characters to act differently from how they really are in real life. Rather they are demand characteristics that drive them to behave in a way, reality tv shows should put more effort in reducing such line between what is real and what is acting.

The discussion about such matter is rather opposite. Having to figure out and discuss about how Reality TV's characters reflect the actual life of us citizens generally keep us thinking: Am I the same as them? Should I be doing such things?

Such questions will also lead to engagement in digital politic discussions, as mentioned above.

Reference

Graham, T. & Hajru, A 2011, Reality TV as a trigger of everyday political talk in the net-based public sphere, European journal of communication (London), vol. 26, no. 1, SAGE Publications, London, England, pp. 18–32.

Kavka, M 2018, ‘Reality TV: its contents and discontents: Reality TV: its contents and discontents’, Critical Quarterly, vol. 60, no. 4, pp. 5–18.

L'Hoiry, X. 2019, Love Island, social media, and sousveillance : new pathways of challenging realism in reality TV, Frontiers in Sociology, 4. 59: https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2019.00059

#mda20009 #reality tv