#it is The only quote unquote social media i ever want from a person...'whats your snapchat whats your instagram' shut the fuck up

[cinnaminsvga]

🌸 social media au where y/n posts a fake boyfriend application on twitter as a dare but ends up seeking something real in the long run (aka how to fall in love the zillennial way) 🌸

A/N: I know I said this update wouldn’t be written, but I decided to fix the little drabble I already had written and... It’s not as bad as I thought and now I’m moderately happy with it. Anyway... We’re entering angst city babey so please put on your seatbelts because we are SOARING! || W.C. 1.8K

prev // part 18 of ? // next masterlist here.

[updates every 6PM PST]

After sending his last text to you, Namjoon is only slightly surprised when he sees your caller ID flashing on his phone screen. When he looks at the time, he notices that it had taken you less than a minute for you to call him, no doubt ready to scream your head off at his outrageous suggestion. Admittedly, he knows that his idea might be a little outside of your comfort zone, but he believes you can do it. If his people reading skills are even remotely average, then he’s sure that it’ll work if you just—

“KIM NAMJOON! HOW IN THE WORLD DID YOU COME UP WITH THAT CONCLUSION?” Your voice is loud enough to burst an eardrum, but luckily, Namjoon had already expected your volume and had held his phone an arm away. In his nine-ish days of knowing you, he’s somewhat accustomed to your theatrics, though you’re still no match for Hoseok’s excited shrieks.

“Hello Y/N,” Namjoon hums, sitting up groggily from his bed. It’s a bit too early to go to sleep, but he supposes that your panicked screams are going to keep him up a little bit longer. “I feel as though you’re overreacting a little.”

“A little?” You scoff loudly, and Namjoon can imagine you pacing circles in your room. You did always seem a little fidgety when you two went out together. “Namjoon, you can’t just expect me to go on a date with Jungkook—“

“Why not? You guys go out all the time, don’t you?” Namjoon points out, smiling slightly at your exasperated huffs.

“Well, that’s different! Those were platonic hangouts! Just bros being bros!”

“Then change the context a little bit. You don’t have to ask him to be your boyfriend just to go on a date.”

“Namjoon, I know you’re a smart man but I don’t think your math skills are all that great,” you say brusquely. “That doesn’t add up! If I ask him on a date, then he’ll know I’m into him and—“

“And that’s a bad thing?” Namjoon interrupts, raising a brow. “Y/N, we both know you’re being a little unreasonable right now.”

You splutter for a moment, but you find that you’re unable to retort. Namjoon smirks, continuing, “Y/N, I know you’re worried that Jungkook might get swept away now that he’s quote-unquote ‘single.’ I get it. But if you’re not going do anything about it and suffer in silence, then he’s definitely going to leave. Besides, I already told you that he probably likes you back, judging from how jealous he got. You could probably even ask your friends and they’d tell you the same.”

You snort. “God, I’d rather die than talk about… love stuff with those freaks I call friends,” you cough out a laugh, muffling the sound before it can continue. Namjoon knows you’re a bit conscious of your “unflattering” snorts, but he just finds them cute. A lot of the things you don’t like about yourself are cute in Namjoon’s eyes. “I can’t even imagine going to any of them about this… They’d just bully me and make me do something I don’t want to do!”

“Isn’t that basically what I’m doing right now?” Namjoon laughs, giggling even harder when he hears your tired groan.

“Yeah, but you’re nice. Unlike those meanies,” you say. Namjoon hates to admit it, but he does appreciate being special to you, even if it’s over something trivial like this.

“You’re right. I wouldn’t force you to do anything you don’t want to do,” Namjoon starts. He can hear you humming in agreement, but he doesn’t stop there. “But, it is a suggestion. Seeing as how you don’t have any other idea how to solve this mess, I’d say go for it. What’s the worse thing that can happen?”

“Um? I get rejected? Hello?”

“You don’t have to let him know it’s a date, you know.”

“What do you mean? Namjoon, you should stop speaking in riddles because I honestly don’t have enough brain cells for this, clearly.”

Namjoon sighs. “I guess what I’m trying to say is… What if you fake date him?” When you don’t reply immediately, Namjoon is quick to keep talking. “Not that I’m asking you to stop fake dating me! What I’m trying to say is… Maybe try to rekindle the rumor that you and Jungkook are dating? He doesn’t have to know it’s a date, so long as everyone else thinks that you two are.”

“I… I guess?” You sound unsure, though Namjoon admits it’s kind of a long shot to begin with, not when you wouldn’t know the last thing about being subtle. He kind of wants to throttle you, in a gentle way. It’s honestly frustrating to see you like this, and he just wishes he could… Make the problem go away.

That would be easy. If Y/N just stopped pining after Jungkook, then he could just come in and—

His thoughts skid to a halt, nearly slapping himself to keep from going down that road again. Look at him, trying to help you with your mess when even he can’t get a handle on his own emotions. What is going on inside my head, he thinks sadly to himself.

“Listen, it’ll be really easy! All you have to do is text him and say, ‘Hey, wanna go have dinner with me tomorrow?’ but bring him somewhere nicer, perhaps? Then take a photo of him all dressed up and looking boyfriend-y and post it on Instagram. I’m sure that’ll shut people up.”

“Namjoon, I don’t know if you’re aware, but Jungkook’s definition of ‘dressing up’ is combat boots, a hoodie, and his god-awful backpack the size of Africa. He looks like a nerd.”

“I mean, you kinda dress alike…” Namjoon mutters, and he’s thankful that you don’t hear his slight slip-up. He clears his throat. “A-anyway, I’m sure it’ll be fine? I think it would be more suspicious if he wore a suit and tie or something. So long as you guys look cozy and comfy together, I’m sure people will take the hint. If worse comes to worst, I can maybe slip something to Johnny and he can retract his statement or something.”

“I hope to god that isn’t the case,” you say. Namjoon nods, before realizing you can’t even see him.

“Right. Well, I think everything should work out perfectly. Just ask him to some popular couples restaurant. Maybe the nice Italian place in Hongdae? Something more romantic, not necessarily fancy.”

There’s a pause on your end for a moment causing Namjoon to sweat a little, wondering if he might be overstepping. He does genuinely want to help you, though he hopes he isn’t actually weirding you out somehow. He’s not adept at handling love problems as much as he’s trying to appear to be, since he’s mostly using the romance novels he had read during his teen years as his sole source of reference. This is what I get for not dating for so long, Namjoon thinks, grimacing.

“Namjoon.” You break the silence, your voice quieter than before. Namjoon has to strain his ears a little, pursing his lips as he waits for your response. “Are you…”

Namjoon tilts his head. “Am I?”

Namjoon hears you hesitate, stuttering syllables over his phone speaker like you aren’t quite sure how to ask your question. “Do you remember when I asked you a few days ago if you were sure you don’t actually have a girlfriend?”

“Yeah?”

“I just… I don’t know how to say this without being weird, but I just want to say you’re great. Like,” you huff out a laugh, incredulous. “You’re just… The perfect package? You’re so kind and so sweet and it’s just? Almost mysterious how you don’t have someone special to call your own yet.”

Namjoon smiles wryly to himself, head bowed as he stares at his wrinkled bedsheets. “I suppose other people don’t feel the same way.” He tries forcing out a laugh, but it sounds a little strangled. His chest feels tight, strangely. Hopefully, you don’t notice.

“No, I highly doubt that! You’re literally the perfect guy. Any person would be lucky to have you as their boyfriend.” You sound almost indignant, like you can’t imagine anyone ever thinking badly about him. He almost wants to laugh, but he tightens his hands into fists instead, digging his nails into his palms and leaving crescents in their wake.

“Well then… I guess that makes you lucky to have me, then?” Namjoon nearly slaps his hands to his mouth, a cold tingle of embarrassment mixed with fear running down his spine. Did he really just say that— “What I mean is, erm…”

“N-no, I get you.” You’re giggling, but—is he imagining it?—you sound a little nervous to his ears. If he thinks hard enough, he can almost imagine you blushing, bottom lip trapped underneath your teeth. “I guess I am lucky to be your fake girlfriend, huh? Even for just a few weeks?”

“Yeah,” Namjoon breathes out the word, guilt washing over him like waves. Here he is, feeling things that he shouldn’t be, over a girl who was never his to begin with. There are seedlings in his chest, barely anything to write home about. But he knows—a gardener can see the garden even before the flowers have bloomed. Each day he spends with you is another day they get a chance to grow, and he’s afraid he’ll soon be overrun, unable to handle the forest that is bound to erupt. “Just a few weeks,” he echoes, unable to completely hide the sadness from his words.

“I guess I am just being melodramatic about everything, huh?” you say. It takes a moment for Namjoon to even remember what the two of you had been talking about, so caught up in his thoughts that he has to pinch himself back to reality.

“Think of it as a funny story to tell your grandkids,” Namjoon says.

You laugh, and Namjoon can feel a seedling sprout its first leaf. “Yeah. Definitely. God, I can’t even begin to think about kids… Not when I can’t even ask him out on a fucking date.”

“You can do it, Y/N.” Namjoon whispers. He flops back down onto his bed, eyes half-closed as he stares at his cracked ceiling. If he breathes quietly enough, he can hear the sounds of Seoul outside his windowpane. If he stops breathing altogether, he might be able to hear you across the city, your socked feet padding towards your bed, curling up into your own blanket.

“Thank you, Namjoon. Really.”

For what? Namjoon leaves that part unspoken. “You’re welcome,” he says instead. He drops the call, feeling a little emptier than before.

#bangtanarmynet #bts social media au #bts scenarios #bts texts #bts fake texts #bts imagines #bts x reader #bts #jungkook scenarios #namjoon scenarios #jungkook fake texts #namjoon fake texts #jungkook fanfiction #namjoon fanfiction #jungkook x reader #namjoon x reader #kim namjoon #jeon jungkook #bangtan

[notbecauseofvictories]

sarah, how can i even begin to talk my white middle class father out of my country's rising anti-immigrant and nationalist sentiment? i get very emotional arguing and it's not helping me get through to him at all. he's a rational, educated person but always convinced he's in the right and i have no idea how to approach this effectively

If you get a definitive, helpful answer to this question, please let me know. Particularly as someone who’s got her own white middle-class father, one thinks that men are genetically, innately Men (which is not a definition we created, but something ontologically real about that arrangement of DNA) and homophobia is something invented in the last decade or so (and so not something you can accuse the Catholic Church of practicing in the third century AD) and quote-unquote-activist judges are only ever liberals (never mind the Lochner court, or even the Rehnquist era).

…………..I have definitely cried after a frustrating conversation with my white middle class father about the Supreme Court’s decision in Masterpiece Cakeshop, so like. I get it. 

However, I have found there are a number of strategies that you can use with your Ideologically Opposed Loved One (IOLO) to start opening up these conversations to a genuine exchange of ideas rather than shouting at them across an impassible ravine full of recrimination.

1.) Let them talk. My mother is a dedicated hype-woman for Brené Brown, and is always recommending her TED talks to me. Now, while I disagree with Brown on some points, I agree that what she calls “rumble language” is a useful way of thinking about conversations with your IOLO. Rather than go for the throat, fight back, or point out how absolutely totally wrong!!! your IOLO is, ask them to explain themselves. Say, “I don’t understand.” Ask them to explain what they mean, when they say that immigrants are draining our social services. Have them tell you more about capitalism being The Best.

Let them talk. Let them talk at length, follow up with questions that clarify where they are and the space between you, because the next step is…

2.) Actually listen. My brain also goes “PING!!!” every time my white middle class father hits on a conservative talking point. It takes heroic effort not to snap “you know that’s what [Fox News talking head] said too,” or “deregulation has been a conservative hobby horse since Reagan,” or “just because you’re not willing to learn about history or interrogate your homophobia doesn’t mean I’m wrong.” But I can tell you: I have actually said those things out loud, and nothing shuts down a conversation like replying to an argument you’re not actually having.

It’s tempting to boil down your IOLO to the same back-and-forth you read about online. A reasonably informed liberal has a specter of an anti-immigrant nationalist in her head, along with that ghost’s best, most brilliantly burnished arguments. But unless your plan is to go back and forth with your IOLO and never agree on a starting point or make any progress at all….well, you’re going to have to listen to them specifically.

It’ll involve a lot of backing off, and letting them talk—asking rumble questions and then listening to the answer. Paraphrase what they said; if they push back by saying that’s not what they meant, then ask what they meant. Try to find those places where what’s preached on cable or through social media is different, is distinct, from what your IOLO believes.

Where they are, where they feel most strongly and in response to what they actually articulate, that’s where you want to apply pressure. Notice I’m not saying “shout at them until they get it.” Applying pressure is gradual, it’s a squeeze not a slap. It involves saying, calmly, “I don’t know if I agree with that,” or “What do you think about all that data that says immigrants contribute more to the economy than the social services they utilize?” It’s so easy to get angry and emotional---this stuff means a lot, this is important stuff---but shouting or crying or accusing is a slap. It unfortunately tends to shut down the conversation.

And that’s not productive, because the next step is:

3.) Apply pressure without anticipation of follow-through. I have been have the same 3 arguments with my father for the last 4-8 years. I can tell you that the beautiful fantasy where your IOLO comes to you and says, “You were right, I was a fool, you made such good points on October 12, 2019, that now I am saved and want to be an ally,” is a nonsense delusion. 

What you’re hoping for is a gradual erosion, like the sea beating against rocks. Eventually you’ll get sand, but mostly your job is to gradually push against an immovable object until it gives. Bit by bit. Grain of sand by grain of sand. Don’t expect to win every round, just state your case calmly and clearly, ask the right questions, and let your IOLO walk away with something new potentially fermenting in their brain.

It might take years. I’ve been talking to my mother about leftist issues for the last…half a decade; but it was only in the last six months that she (to my enormous surprise) went on a 5 minute rant about the fallacy of white suburbia. She actually uttered the phrase “redlining.” Sometimes, you just have to plant a seed, give someone a different argument, ask a question they didn’t realize was askable.

Destabilizing someone’s knowledge of the world is a process, not an event. And sometimes, amid all that tumult, it’s worthwhile to:

4.) Occasionally, let them be the expert (….just not in this). I had a few weeks’ vacation between my last job and current job, which I spent in my parents’ house. My father tends to come home for lunch—and since I was also there, we’d often have a casual conversation, talk about news or Netflix shows, his job and its frustrations. It was very normal, except for the one time I just….listened to him talk about the stock market.

Now, my dad is a dedicated investor and pays attention to all the details of the NASDAQ and the financial markets as a whole; he spends his free time reading books about investment and financial analysis. If he’d lived a different life, he might be manager of a mutual fund. This is his area, and when we started talking about whether the US might be headed for a recession—

I shut up. I honestly don’t know much about investing, but I wrestled every instinct I had to interrupt him or contradict him to the ground. I nodded. I active listened, echoing his points back to him. I did not interrupt, even when he started talking about the debt ceiling (something he and I disagree about).

And he noticed. I know he noticed, because when he and my mother came home after work, he mentioned our conversation to her. He was pleased and proud, both having had the opportunity to be the expert and teaching me something I ostensibly didn’t know. And the next time we argued, he was gentler, willing to consider my perspective since I had considered his.

When it comes to adult family, I think it’s easy to think of them as untouchable, unimpeachable and unchangeable, beyond any base emotional lures. Someone espousing an ideology you viciously hate and nothing more. But your IOLO is just as human as you are, and we all seek affirmation and confirmation. You want to win points to expend upon a future date? Let them have their victory. And later, claim yours.

#Anonymous #sarah gives advice

[virmillion]

Ibytm - T minus 37 seconds

Masterpost - Previous Chapter - Next Chapter - ao3

Words: 4,849

In the few days since Virgil walked out (on Logan, on the planning, on everything ), Logan has accomplished next to nothing. There were complications that kept the office closed a few days longer, all of which Logan spent pacing the apartment and sending countless unanswered texts to Virgil.

To get technical, Logan spent the first hour or so sitting at the table, motionless and staring at the papers. Next came a couple hours’ worth of punching the air, punching pillows, punching pretty much anything insignificant enough that it wouldn’t cause concern upon being punched. Following that little rage fest, Logan realized maybe he should try to talk to the runaway would-be groom. It started with one text every few hours, then once an hour, every half hour, and ultimately Logan threw his phone in a rage at (a carefully selected soft spot on) the couch and stormed into the bedroom to sulk.

Cut to now, where Logan is hunched over on the recliner and staring at his silent phone. Not one answer. Not even a read receipt. Nothing so small as social media activity, like a relationship status change from ‘engaged’ to ‘moving on and better for it.’ Logan briefly considers posting wanted signs around the building, but ultimately decides against it—mostly because his printer is broken. Finally, he snatches up his phone and does something he never would’ve expected of himself.

He calls Virgil.

This is an incredibly desperate last ditch effort, since Logan knows how much Virgil hates talking over the phone, but he’s desperate. The phone rings softly in his ear. One ring, two, three, four—

Someone picks up.

“Virgil, oh my gosh, I’m so glad I reached you, I didn’t mean any of it when I—”

The voice that interrupts him does not belong to Virgil. “Hey, Logan, this is Patton.”

“Patton? What—where’s Virgil? Why do you have his phone? Is Virgil okay? Is he hurt?”

“He—he’s fine, Logan. He’s perfectly alright, but he wanted me to ask you to, um, to stop texting him. And I guess to stop calling now, too. Please. Sorry.”

“Can you at least tell him—”

“No, I really—I don’t think that’s my place, really, to share whatever it is you want to tell him. I think you need to tell him yourself, and only when he’s ready to see you. On his terms.”

“Patton, I can’t exactly do that if I don’t know where he is.” There’s a kind of stilted silence, where only the muffled mumbles of Patton’s voice make it over the receiver. Logan can just barely hear the faintest s and t sounds, but that’s it.

A soft inhale makes it across and Logan’s breath catches in his throat, but his hopes immediately falter when Patton’s voice is the one to return. “He doesn’t want to talk right now.”

“But I need to talk to him about—”

“He doesn’t want to hear it. I’m sorry, Logan, but I really have to stick with what Virgil wants here. I think you need to hang up now.”

“Patton, wait, please, I need to talk to Virgil, I need him to hear—” Click.

Logan is pretty sure that’s the sound of his heart splintering into pieces. He glances at the list of recent calls, almost none of them outgoing. Micah, Cassidy, Micah, Joy, the main office line, Micah, Micah, Micah, Cadmium. Micah likes to call him with updates about the local restaurant scene. Logan holds back tears as he switches over to his recent texts, all to Virgil. He slumps on the couch, reaching out a hand to steady himself with every passing Cadmium, Cadmium, Cadmium, a never-ending list chronicling three years that he threw away in a few seconds because he didn’t agree with Virgil’s career choices and drove away the only person who seems to actually like talking to him or tolerate—

Logan switches to his contacts list. It’s not terribly long, and it matches his incoming calls almost point for point. The only additions are his parents and Roman. Alex refuses to give out their phone number when they can just borrow signal from whoever’s nearby. Saving minutes, to put it in their own words. Tough to save what you never had in the first place, but Logan is hardly one to talk.

He quickly rules out most of the people from the office as well as the building itself, as he doesn’t need to bother his coworkers on their day off. His parents certainly don’t need to worry themselves with something so trivial as this, and Cadmium is out for obvious reasons. He could probably bug the newer interns, but he’s felt awkward talking to them ever since the main huddle with Roman, Micah, Alex, Joy, and Cassidy fizzled out. A few years’ work together, all down the drain. He tries Joy first, given that they have that candy bar nickname deal going—or they did, though it’s been a while since they last did that pas de deux—but she doesn’t answer.

“I guess I do talk to Roman sometimes,” Logan reasons to himself. “Nowhere to go but up, right? Rock bottom Roman, don’t wear it out. Already talking to myself, so jot that down, surely I should mark this as being my lowest of lows. Don’t call yourself Shirley.”

He keys in Roman’s number. There’s a ring, another, too many rings, way too many, and just as Logan is convinced he should hang up and sulk in silence some more, someone answers. Hopefully the person he actually called this time, and not a messenger middleman intent on crumbling his soul like a Nature Valley granola bar. Hopefully, even if it is another messenger, it’s not one of Roman’s rotating one night stands or something.

Logan really doesn’t know all that much about Roman.

“Go for Roman, what’s pop-rockin’?”

“Hello, this is Logan Walders, and did you steal that turn of phrase from Micah?”

“Ha! Please, Micah stole it from me. I’m the originator, he’s just a petty copycat.”

“Yes, great, very good, so the reason I called you—”

“Hey, can you believe the office is closed again? I mean, come on, right? Great news, yeah? I’ve been putting off this major project for, like, ever, and it’s not like I’m actually gonna use this free time, but hey, day off, you know? Hope we still get full pay.”

“Roman—”

“Plus, I know you’ve got those huge reports due up soon, and weren’t you trying to submit those forms for the training program before the early admission deadline?”

“Yes, but I wanted to ask you—”

“Or no, you already had the forms submitted, didn’t you? You were just waiting for Katie-Lee to give you the go-ahead, weren’t you?”

“ Miss Katie-Lee, and yes, but that isn’t why I—”

“Right, her, isn’t she great? Still can’t believe she gave me that promotion right after you, makes me think there was some kind of nepotism involved, since it came right after your triple boost up, y’know?”

“Roman!”

“What’s pop-rockin,’ my good man?”

“Roman, Virgil left.”

A beat of silence.

Another.

Another.

“Virgil did what?”

“Virgil—he—I said some stupid stuff about how he doesn’t work a quote unquote real job , and he walked out, and I don’t know what to do, and I can’t—”

“I’m on my way.”

“Wait, Roman, don’t just—” Click. Logan wonders whether he’ll ever be able to get through a phone call without having to hear that infernal noise against his will. Probably not any time soon, if ever.

So he sits. And he sulks. And he waits for the world to stop turning. And he sits. And he sits. And he sits and he sits and he sits and he sits and maybe a tiny little tear leaks out of his eye as he sits and he sulks and he wishes he could have Virgil beside him to make it all just go away. Like he did a couple days ago.

Eventually, there’s a knock on the door, and Logan just about leaps out of his skin before he realizes that Virgil wouldn’t be knocking, since he has his own key. Logan is not as fast in getting to the door as he could be once he realizes this.

Seeing Roman on the other side is more jarring than one might expect, until it’s considered what Roman has elected to wear on his day off.

An off the shoulder, deep ruby top, paired with a pale pink scarf, a plaid red jacket tied around his waist, and torn up dark grey leggings. To be honest, the high heeled white ankle boots just pull the whole look together. So maybe you can imagine Logan’s surprise when this is the first outfit he’s seen besides his own in days.

“Roman, what are you—how did you even know where my new address was?”

“Wow, you live like this?” Roman steps past Logan into the apartment, glancing around and ignoring Logan’s protests.

“I don’t—how did you get this address?”

“I make it my business to know where my coworkers live for impromptu surprise parties as well as emergencies, so there’s never time wasted trying to deal with travel apps and messages, y’know?”

“I never gave you clearance to see—”

“And I never asked, which was obviously the right move, as I’m here right now, when you so obviously need me.” Roman stops in front of the couch and turns to face Logan, holding his arms out to the side. Looking for a hug, apparently.

“What are you doing.”

“You need to hug it out.”

“I do not need to hug it out. What are you doing in my home.”

“Hug it out. I’m not leaving until you do.”

Logan throws his hands in the air and huffs, toeing the door shut and trudging his way into Roman’s boa constrictor hug. He freezes, melts into it for a split second, and pushes himself away. He also pushes away the urge to run back to the comfort of Roman’s arms, but we’re not talking about that right now. “So tell me how you got into my secure personal file without my permission or written consent.”

“Not important.”

“I really think it is, though.”

“Okay, but, like, it isn’t, though. What’s important here is what’s going on between you and Virgil.” Logan blinks, unaccustomed to Roman being the one to steer the conversation in the right direction. “So tell me what happened. Start with why you decided it wasn’t important that I hear about you getting engaged sooner, then skip ahead to why I’m here. Leave out the part about me accidentally-on-purpose stealing your address.”

Logan lowers himself to the couch again and lets it all out at once, trying not to notice how awful each word sounds as he hears it fall from his own mouth. “It’s stupid, isn’t it? It’s not like I can judge the jobs he chose to have, can I? I mean, he’s had these jobs longer than he’s known me, let alone how long we’ve been together. It’s all so stupid.”

“That’s not—it’s more complicated than that, and clearly you know it, or you wouldn’t have called me in the first place.”

“But I still shouldn’t have—”

“But you did, and you can’t take it back, and that’s okay, isn’t it? Because you would’ve had to talk about it sooner or later. You got it out of the way, and that’s all that really matters, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know. I just feel like the worst person in the world right now.”

“Low bar, but okay. You had the discussion—”

“More of a yelling match.”

“—and now you have to deal with the fallout. Do you know where he is right now?”

“Probably hating me and every word that’s ever had the misfortune of leaving my mouth.”

“Not a valid or accurate answer, my guy. You need to talk this out with him, and the longer you wait, the worse it’ll hurt when it heals.”

Logan cocks his head to the side and gives Roman a long look. “Since when were you allowed to be smart about this kind of thing?”

“Since it’s in my name. Roman-tic.”

“More like your name is in the word, I would say.”

“Well, anyway, you need to talk to him. Do you have an actual, legitimate idea of where he might be?”

“Somewhere with Patton, probably, since Patton picked up the last time I called Virgil’s phone.”

Roman jumps to his feet and bolts for the door, leaving a very confused Logan alone on the couch. “What’re you waiting for? Let’s go!”

“Go where?”

“Patton’s been my best friend since, like, diapers, basically. He doesn’t like to be on the phone when he’s on shift at the museum, so he’s probably at home. I think tonight’s his night with his kid, actually, but Ariel might be there, too. I’m over there, like, every third day. You should know that by now, I mean, we’ve had coffee together, like, so many times. Come on, man.”

Logan nods absently, his mind prompting him with a vague memory of when he saw Roman hanging out at the museum on that first real date with Virgil. Maybe he’s just a little too hysterical at the moment to keep track of the people he’s been friends with for over two years. It’s not as if Roman didn’t already mention Patton constantly before Logan even met Virgil. Logan just wasn’t listening back then.

He barely remembers to grab a jacket from the coat rack as he follows Roman out the door, shouldering it on as they thunder down the stairs. His new cardigan. How appropriate.

“My car’s right over there, you can hop in the passenger seat. It’s maybe a ten minute drive, tops, but you have to listen to my music. I’ve got a good rhythm going with this playlist right now.”

Logan complies, and most of the trip is just a blur as he runs over the possible scenarios that might play out here. Virgil hates him and dumps him and flees the country. Virgil hates him and dumps him and starts dating Patton. Virgil hates him and dumps him and starts dating Roman. Virgil hates him and dumps him and steals Miss Katie-Lee’s job to hold a sadistic kind of power over him. Virgil hates him and dumps him and that’s just how it’s going to be, and there’s nothing Logan can do about it.

It is not a very fun car ride.

Logan vaguely registers Roman shifting the car into park, but he’s too focused on the lines of cookie cutter houses to react to it. A bunch of prim little gardens along prim little buildings that probably hold prim little families that have never had prim little fights because their prim little parents hate their prim little husband’s prim little jobs.

He traces his eyes down the sidewalk, watching a squirrel chase an imaginary acorn. Maybe he’s actually watching the imaginary acorn roll up the tree looming over the road. Maybe the squirrel isn’t chasing anything at all. Who’s to say? Certainly not him.

“Logan?” Logan offers a vague grunt of acknowledgement. “Logan.”

“Yeah, buddy.”

“We’re here.”

“We are.”

“So you need to get out of the car now.”

“I do not need to do that.”

“You do.”

He does.

He takes his sweet time unbuckling and getting out, closing the car door as softly as possible behind him. “Whoops, ha, didn’t quite close all the way, let me just—”

“Logan,” Roman says firmly. He leans across the seat to close the door himself. “Go.”

Logan blows out a big breath with his cheeks puffed up, turning to face the prim little house—or is this one a little prim house? You know, the one with a cute little set of bright blue flowers around the personalized address sign to match the boxes of plumbagos and hydrangeas.

His feet, apparently more impatient than Roman, carry his body to the front door without his permission, and his finger lifts to the doorbell long before he notices how high his hopes have risen. He wonders whether someone could see them floating over his head if they looked close enough. The bell chimes a bright, lilting melody that rings in his ears, still echoing through the house when the door swings open to reveal Patton in pajama pants and bunny slippers.

“Hey, Logan.” There’s no cheer in his voice, and Logan thinks falling straight to the center of the earth sounds pretty good right about now. “What’re you doing here?”

“I, uh, Roman brought me.” Logan angles his chin toward the car, where Roman is sticking his head out the window.

“Hi, Patton!” he yells, waving his hand excitedly.

Patton waves back, then returns his focus to Logan, his demeanor shifting from cold to cheerful and back in an instant. “Virgil explicitly said he didn’t want you coming around. D’you remember that?”

“I know, I know, but just—can you give him a message for me?”

Patton folds his arms and clicks his tongue, running his eyes along the top of the doorframe. “I guess I could, but I can’t promise he’ll want to hear it.”

“I—I know that.” Logan hesitates, unsure how to say what he needs to say when he knows it’ll have to filter through Patton’s head, through Patton’s voice. Yeah, he trusts the guy, he’s gone out for coffee with him quite a few times before, but personal things are personal for a reason. He swallows. “I know he won’t want to hear it, but I still need to say it.”

“Might want to be quick about it. Think your ride’s getting kind of impatient.” Patton nods at the car, where Roman is enthusiastically dancing to a song Logan doesn’t recognize.

“Just—just tell him I’m really sorry, okay? I know that’s lame, and cheap, and doesn’t even begin to describe how awful and gross and terrible I feel about what I said—well, more how I said it, because I do think it’s a conversation we need to have eventually—but anyway, I need him to know I feel like complete crap for what I said and how I said it.

“I shouldn’t have been so harsh out of nowhere when he’s made it clear before that it’s not a conversation he’s ready to have yet, and I should’ve been more accepting of his terms, and I should’ve just accepted that I was having a rough day, and I unfairly took it out on him, and I shouldn't have blamed him, and I messed up so, so bad, and I know that, and I just really, really, really need him to know that I get that I made a mistake, and I was in the wrong, and I just need to talk to him again, even if it’s for him to yell and scream at me and tell me how awful I am because obviously that’s what I deserve, or I wouldn’t be here.” Logan exhales, a big, loud, broken noise, and shakes his head, and stares at his shoes, and wishes he were on Neptune right about now.

He glances to the side when he feels something soft and heavy come to rest on his shoulder. Patton’s hand. He follows the line up to Patton’s shoulder, his chin, his eyes, and pretends not to notice the water swimming there. Or wait, no, maybe that’s not Patton’s eyes welling up. Maybe it’s Logan’s. Neptune is only about twelve earth years away.

“It’ll be okay,” Patton murmurs, pulling Logan into a careful hug. “It’s gonna be okay, I promise.” Logan tries to stay stiff, to not accept the embrace from the person keeping him from the only guy in the world he wants to see right now, but he can’t really help himself. He buries his nose in Patton’s hair and sniffs and furrows his brow and tries to hold in the soft sobs as he chokes for air.

“Logan?” Logan is pretty sure his heart stops beating right about then.

He looks up and over Patton’s shoulder to see Virgil standing around the corner, arms wrapped around himself as if to keep warm. “Virgil, I—”

“Don’t, not yet,” Patton murmurs, pushing Logan away. He glances back at Virgil, his gaze a silent question, and Virgil lifts his chin ever so slightly. Patton looks to Logan. “I’ll be out here, give you some privacy.” His voice up until now, save for the initial coldness, has been relatively soft, but his grip on Logan’s arm is suddenly unbearably tight as he yanks him closer. Logan tries not to shudder at the feeling of Patton hissing a warning directly into his ear. “If I hear so much as a peep of distress from Virgil, I will not hesitate to have you thrown to the curb in ten seconds flat, so don’t you dare try me.”

Logan’s eyes go wide and he nods, flattening himself against the wall as Patton strides out. Logan glances at Virgil and is pretty sure he can feel his heart literally imploding. “Hey, Cad—Virgil.”

“Hey.” It’s all Logan can do not to sprint to Virgil and wrap him in a hug, but he manages to restrain himself. For now, at least. “You can come in, I guess.” Virgil turns on his heel and shuffles deeper into the house—presumably to the living room, where Logan follows silently.

In a big room with vaulted ceiling and comfy furniture, Virgil slumps on one of the larger couches and stares blankly at Logan, who stays standing. “Well? Say your piece already so you can go. What do you want to talk about?”

“I—everything, I think. I wanted to apologize.”

“Great. Do that and go.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Underwhelming. Great to see you again. Bye bye.”

“Wait, I didn’t—that’s not how I wanted this to go.”

“Then why don’t you tell me how you did want it to go, because so far, I’m not impressed.”

Logan forces a deep breath through his lungs and prays it’ll be enough to keep himself going. Somehow, he doubts it. “I was wrong to go off at you, and I get that, and I’m sorry. I still think it’s something we do need to talk about, but I shouldn’t have sprung it on you like I did, so I’m sorry for doing that to you.”

“Cool.” Virgil’s stiff response hurts worse than if he would just lash out or scream or something, and Logan kind of wants to scream himself.

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“You don’t have anything you want to say to me?”

“Logan.” Logan hates how cold his voice is. “I’m not going to apologize for walking out on an attack on my life choices just because it would soothe your ego.”

“Well, no, I wouldn’t expect you to do that, but aren’t you mad at me? Don’t you have anything to get off your chest?”

“Why yes, Logan, I am mad. Thank you for asking, and for considering my perspective for once. I’ll make sure not to let it get to my head. Or did you just wear that cardigan to make me feel better? Aw, Logan, you shouldn’t have.”

“Okay, so you don’t want to yell at me? Get loud, blow up, start screaming?”

“Not really. I know you made the choice to be a jerk, so I’ve made the choice not to deal with it. Pretty simple, really. I’d expect a rocket scientist genius like you to be able to figure it out, even without doing any actual rocket science.”

Logan elects to ignore that little jab. “You don’t want to yell, to let it out? It’s not important enough to you that you vocalize your anger? It’s not important enough for you to fight over it?”

“No.”

“ I’m not important enough to you that you’d want to fight over it?”

“That’s not what I said.”

“That’s familiar, isn’t it? Because when we were twisting my words around, you sure didn’t care about the letter of the language, did you?” Logan can feel himself getting hysterical now, louder by the second, but he doesn’t care. “Does it bother you to have your words twisted around and thrown back at you like that?”

“Sure it does, but why should you care? Not like it’ll harm your precious little office job.” Virgil’s calm, steady voice is only that much more infuriating, and Logan wants to throw something.

“Don’t you want to scream? To yell, to tear me to pieces?”

“Why?”

“Come on!” Logan is desperate now, balling his hands into fists at his sides, working the muscles in his jaw and wishing Patton would follow through on his little threat right about now. “I’m being such an ass to you right now, why won’t you fight back? Yell, scream, tell me how awful I am to say all this shit to you, about you!”

“Do you want me to do that?”

“Stop being so damn calm and just tell me how much I suck, how awful I am, how hard I insulted you, how hard I am insulting you just by being here when you told me to stay away and why I’m in the wrong and you deserve so much better than a pompous perfectionist who can’t handle even the smallest thing going wrong in his perfect world without tearing the whole production to pieces because one single variable has the nerve to go against the arbitrary grain!”

Virgil doesn’t even blink, his expression painfully neutral. Fewer emotions on his features than there are ripples on a frozen pond on a windless day.

“Scream! Yell! Curse or break or something or anything, I don’t care, but give me some kind of reaction, tell me we jumped into this engagement thing too soon and too fast, tell me I was wrong to blow up at you like that and like this so we can just get it over with and you can dump me and tell me how much you hate me and we can both be done with this mistake of a relationship!”

A painful beat of silence. Logan relaxes his fists, breathing heavily and wishing his face weren’t as pink as he knows it is. It always gets so blotchy, so messy, so horrible on the rare occasions he gets all worked up crying like this, an irrational, ridiculous mockery of his usual put-together facade. There’s a reason he doesn’t let himself break down like this when he can help it.

Evidently, he couldn’t help it this time.

He can’t even bring himself to look at Virgil, just trying to focus on a fiber in the carpet and sniffling quietly.

“You think this relationship is a mistake?” Virgil’s voice is soft, gentle, hesitant, and it’s enough to bring Logan to his knees. He sinks to the ground, ducking his chin to his chest and just letting his shoulders shake in the weighted silence. “Logan, do you really think we’re a mistake?” He feels his whole body shudder when Virgil’s fingers graze under his chin. “Logan, look at me.”

“I can’t.”

“Logan, look at me.”

“I can’t.”

Virgil doesn’t seem to hear this, or if he does, he doesn’t care, as he presses his knuckles softly against Logan’s adam’s apple. Logan chokes back a sob. “You think that us being together is a mistake?”

“I—I don’t—I can’t—”

“Hey. Hey, Logan, look.” Virgil waves his other hand in front of Logan’s face, the glint of the light catching on the ring around his finger. “Look at this, look, look here, you see?” He pulls the ring to the tip of his finger, not quite removing it all the way as he holds it before Logan’s eyes to show off the inscription. “‘I’ll bring you the moon.’ Remember when you promised me that?”

Logan hiccoughs. “I—yeah, yeah, I do. I do.”

“So you remember that you haven’t followed through on that yet.”

“I do.”

“So you know that this is just one little road block on a long trip that we’ve agreed to take together, and you know that I don’t think this is a mistake.”

“I don’t—”

“Logan.” Virgil’s voice is soft but clipped, pleading. “I need you to tell me that you know we aren’t a mistake.”

“I know we aren’t a mistake,” Logan tells the floor.

“Tell it to me .”

“I know we aren’t a mistake,” Logan tells Virgil’s left ear.

“To me, Logan. Please?”

“I—” Logan hesitates, his voice catching when he sees that glimmer in Virgil’s eyes. “I know we’re not—I know we aren’t a mistake.”

“Good.” Virgil’s voice sounds about as broken as Logan feels, and he slides off the couch to join Logan on the floor, wrapping him in a loose hug.

It’s not as extravagant as Roman’s, not as steadying as Patton’s, but it feels like home, and there on the floor in Virgil’s arms, Logan exhales.

#labhwrites #mine #i'll bring you the moon #ibytm

[timelock97]

Out of Order Love

Chapter Two: No Love-at-First-Sight BS

tomhollandxreader

Summary: It was meant to be a fun time in Vegas. Spending time with the best friend and celebrate getting done with college to turn the page to a new chapter in life. If only (Y/N) realized she would be turning a few extra pages by accidentally marrying her favorite actor.

Part 1

Word Count: 2,324

A/N: (W/Y/L)- Where You Live/ (Y/N/N)- Your Nickname

The sun is setting by the time I hug and say goodbye to Michelle and Allen. "Thank you for having us," I muse as I let go of Michelle. "It was wonderful to see you two again."

"Sweetie, it was our pleasure!" Michelle laughs.

Allen places a hand on my shoulder and gives it a squeeze. "You tell your Dad that I will be giving him a call within the next few weeks to discuss moving money around and buying new stocks." Allen began, he gives me a stern look before laughing. "Also tell him it was wonderful seeing you again."

I wrap my arms around his torso. "I will make sure to let him know." I let go before giving one last final wave, "Have a great night!" The two wave again from their front porch and watch as Emily and I walk back to our rental car and drive off. She and I sit in silence for a while before she sighs. "What is it, Em?"

"I can come with you tonight. I mean, if you want." She pauses to mess with the thermostat before continuing, "I don't want you to think you have to go through this mess alone-"

"I want you to be there." I chime in, grabbing her hand and squeezing it. I've known this girl since elementary school. She's the type of friend that if we stop talking because life gets in the way, when we see each other again it's like nothing happened. She's been there with me through the good, and the bad. "I think it'll help me not panic as much. Having someone to bounce ideas off of who knows how I am will make this go a little easier, ya know?"

"I'm glad." She laughs, "Also 'cause I wanna meet Tom and Haz." She shoots me a side glance before she continues, "Sorry, but they are hot.".

I chuckle and shake my head. "Shit, speaking of Tom," I pull my phone from out of my back pocket, "I need to let him know we are on the way." I pull up my recently added contacts and snort.

"What?" Emily says, shooting me a side smirk.

"His name in my phone is Current Husband." I laugh, Emily cackles harder beside me. I send a quick text saying 'leaving my family friend's, want us to come over now or later tonight? We are about 20 minutes out.' I lay my head against the headrest looking out the passenger side window. My phone pings.

Current Husband

You can come now, that's fine.

I'll have Haz bring you a pass so you can park in the parking garage in the back.

The Wife

Alright, I'll text when we are closer.

"He wants us to head straight there."

"Alrighty, well, fix our GPS then let's prepare ourselves for those cuties."

"Emily, this is serious." I complain as I grab her phone to fix Google Maps.

"I mean, they are seriously hot."

"Emily!"

-

Harrison met us in the parking garage and puts a pass on our front mirror before the three of us head up to the room. Emily squeezes my hand in reassurance, as Harrison unlocks the door before holding it for us.

Tom stands from his position on the couch, smiling when we enter. "Did you, uh, have a nice time?"

"We did, thank you. How's your head?" I counter.

He lets out a short laugh. "Better than when I woke up this morning."

Emily giggles next to me. "What are you giggling about, Em?" I question, folding my arms across my chest.

"You are such your father's daughter. Just casual conversation with a stranger," she waves her hand smiling at me, "No awkwardness at all."

"I mean," I giggle. "I did talk to that elderly guy in the elevator in New York on that school trip and found out he only spoke Italian. Now that was awkward." Emily laughs harder. I peek at Tom who has an amused smirk on his face. I gesture to Emily, "This is Emily, by the way. Emily," she looks at me still giggling, "This is Tom."

"Pleasure to meet you, Emily." Tom states with a small nod and laugh.

"Believe me, the pleasure is all mine, or should I say the pleasure is all-"

"Okay!" I cut her off while clapping my hands together, which causes the boys to laugh. A blush crawls up my neck and face and I clear my throat to attempt to alleviate my embarrassment, "So you wanted to discuss what we were going to do?"

Tom jumps into action, "Right, right." He gestures us to sit on the couch. Tom sits to the right of me, giving me a little space while Emily basically sits on top of me to my left. "I called my manager after you left this morning and talked with him about the situation." He takes a breath before continuing, "He thinks that it wouldn't be a good idea of us divorcing right away." He puts his hands up when Emily tries to interject, a small sound leaving her lips. "Let me finish explaining, there is good reason for it." He pauses to look back at me, "The fan base and press have gone crazy with the information. Curtis, my manager, believes that it would be a good idea to keep up the act for a while, then we can stage a falling out and go back to our normal lives."

"There is a lot more than just being quote unquote married." Emily cuts in finally, placing a hand on my shoulder and squeezing it. "What's the story, where are you two gonna live? There are so much paperwork that goes into marriage; plus, all the shit of divorce."

"That is why we are here." Tom counters, obviously annoyed, "I figured we needed to have our, uh, game plan and figure everything out." He sighs, running a hand through his hair as he looks at the carpet, "I know this isn't a great idea, but I know how the media can get, I don't want it to get bad for either of us."

"How long are you thinking we need to carry on this charade?" I question, fidgeting my fingers.

"About three months." Tom says, looking back at Harrison in reassurance, who nods.

"Curtis believes to make it look somewhat believable, you two go through the motions of living together and I guess find out you two are not as compatible as you two once thought. It's a mutual separation." Harrison explains shifting in his seat slightly.

"No one is going to believe that Tom bought her that thing." Emily points at the thin ring on my finger. "It just doesn't scream love, ya know."

Tom looks down at his own ring and makes a face. "Well, what do you suggest?" He taunts back.

"Why don't Harrison and Emily go to the nearest Walmart and buy better fake rings." I suggest, not wanting their banter to get out of control. "They are going to be cheaper than real ones and probably sturdier than any of the ones we would find in a coin machine." I look over my shoulder at Emily, "You know what kind of things I like, so I won't worry too much."

"And I remember your size, so that works too." Emily stands and stretches, "Plus it'll give you two sometime to figure out what caused you two to get married."

"We'll be back then." Harrison adds, standing and slipping his phone in his pocket. "What size ring are you Tom?" Harrison looks at Tom, who shrugs.

"I have no clue, mate."

"Just take his current ring, and we can just have the jeweler help us," Emily groans. Tom slips off the ring and hands it to Harrison before the two leave, leaving Tom and I alone.

I lean back so I'm no longer sitting sideways on the couch. "What do you want the story to be? Do we want it big and elaborate, or just simple?" I ask, tilting my head to look at him.

"Simple, so that way I can remember it, just no love at first sight bullshit, please."

"Okay," I laugh, rubbing my hands together. "How about, you and I met at the bar. You came over and pretended to be my boyfriend when some drunkard was trying to get me to come up to his room with him."

"We end up talking and find out we have a connection or have stuff in common?" He suggests.

"Yeah, then we have a little more to drink, just to make the story a little more believable." I chuckle and shrug, " And we both decide to get hitched."

"And of course, stupid me posts the damn picture to social media instead of keeping it a secret because the world must know of my newest accomplishment." He exclaims excitedly waving his hands in front of him in emphasis.

I laugh at his comment. "Perfect, we have our cover story."

"Yay," he says halfheartedly, he looks at me and for some reason we both laugh. "Well, I am thankful for one thing." He adds.

"What's that?"

"That the person I accidentally married happens to actually want to work with me instead of making this the most difficult thing ever."

"I mean, we could suffer together or make the most of it. And hey," I half-heartedly punch his shoulder, "We could become the bestest of friends in the end." That makes him smile. After a few minutes, I make another very important realization. "Um, Tom?" He looks at me to show that I have his undivided attention. "Where are we going to live? 'Cause I may have just graduated, that's the reason I'm in Vegas, but I start a job in like a month." He purses his lips and furrows his eyebrows.

"Hmm," he muses. "Well, I guess I am going to have to move in with you-"

"Yeah, we'll have to figure that out."

"Why do you say it like that?"

I look down not wanting to see the judgement in his eyes. "Because I still live with my parents, I went to a community college that was close to my house so I didn't have to worry about my own place."

"That's really smart," I look up at him to see him smiling. "I mean, it's amazing that they let you live with them so you could focus on school."

"Yeah, it really helped."

"Then it looks like your first taste of real freedom won't be as fun as it would be if you were alone."

"Nah, I honestly don't like being in a place by myself." I confess, running a hand through my hair. "I probably would have bought a dog, like less than a week moving in."

"Well, then I am glad to help you on your transition." He enthuses, making me smile. The two of us go back and forth talking about what needs to be discussed before Emily and I leave tonight, since her and I fly home the following morning. The sound of the door causes us to pull back from our current positions.

"Sounds like you two are making the most of the situation." Harrison boasts, throwing a bag at the two of us. Inside is a plain silver ring for Tom and a single studded, silver ring for me.

"Did I do good (Y/N/N), or did I do good?" Emily enthuses as she pretends to pull on a pair of suspenders.

"You know me so well, Em." I smile, then look at Tom. "Do you have scissors? I can cut the tag off of both of them then we can check and see if there is anything else we need to discuss."

"Yeah, let me grab them for you." He stands and begins to walk away before turning and puts his hand out. "Why don't I just take them then I can cut them."

"Smart." I whisper handing him the rings as he disappears into the small kitchen.

"You two figure everything out?" Harrison says perched on the arm of an armchair.

"Yup, we have our story. Tom is going to come live in (W/Y/L). I have as much information I need to fix all my paperwork once I get back, and we discussed that the only people that are going to know that this is a ruse are you two and Curtis." Tom walks back and hands me the marriage certificate and goes to hand me the ring, but stops. "What?" I giggle,

Tom laughs and gets down on one knee in front of me, which only causes me to laugh more. "Will you, (Y/N) Holland, take me as your partner in this ruse for the next three months?" He asks, trying his damnedest not to laugh, but fails in the end.

"I surely will." I reply giving him my left hand to slip the ring on. The two of us laugh harder until Emily interrupts.

"I hate to be a Debbie Downer, but (Y/N) and I need to finish packing."

"She does have a point," I sigh, slowly rising before walking to the door with the boys following. "I'll see you guys later, I guess."

"Have a safe flight." Tom says before awkwardly pulling me into a hug.

I hug him back causing him to relax, "I'll talk to you later." I say as a pull away, "I might need some advice talking to my parents."

"That's a worry for another day. Have a good night."

Emily and I wave one last time before walking back to the parking garage. She removes the tag and takes it back inside as I wait in the car. Well, at least everything is sorted out, now the next problem is telling my family what happened, because this secret can't just stay in Vegas.

Part 3 

#tomhollandxreader #tom holland #tomholland2013 #fakedating!tomholland #husband!tomholland #tomholland #accidentalmarriage!tomholland #CG writes

[scarletwitching]

I know you would probably hate this, but, what do you think makes House of M popular? How this comic cloud people's judgement? How it affect new readers/casual fans's views? What are the factors that draw people in and fixed their impression? Just some observation, some people seem to enjoy the touchy family "feels", some may just like heroes snapping(like it's so cool), and sometimes it's Power Parade(it's deemed disrepctful to say she is less powerful than someone else).

It’s popular(ish) in mainstream fandom because its effects lasted a very long time, which makes it seem important, and because it’s a mash-up of a couple of enormously popular and beloved storylines, Dark Phoenix Saga and Infinity Gauntlet, set in a then-new alternate universe. It’s two old things smashed together and combined with a new thing.

That’s the short answer. The long answer is… long, and it’s actually about the underlying reasons people are okay with some offensive stuff (because that’s what I wanted to talk about). I’m putting this under a cut so that, when people who don’t agree with me inevitably read it, I can link them to this.

There really is a country song for everything.

It maybe goes without saying, but this is a House of M post so it mentions, however briefly, the usual HOM-related subject matter: ableism, infertility, people on the internet glorifying genocide.

Everyone likes things that have somewhat unsavory elements or unfortunate implications. With superheroes, the whole thing is – forgive me – problematic. You can find meaning and value in parts of it, but something is rotten at the core. One of the uncomfortable aspects of speculative fiction fandoms is how terrible things become normalized. Because we’re only talking about fiction. That makes it okay, right? It’s tempting to parrot these notions of “good” queens and “rightful” kings or to go along with the canon logic that justifies violence and ignores the sovereignty of nations that aren’t the US.

I bring up that last one because, in modern superhero fandom, buying into the canon logic often means defending US imperialism under the guise of defending a specific character or story. There’s always a justification for it in-universe, so the way it relates to the real world becomes some extraneous detail that only a jerk would mention.

It’s the Thermian Argument. It doesn’t matter what the underlying message or consequences, however (un)intentional, are. It matters that I like Thing and any problems you find with Thing are the result of you not focusing on very specific details that make it “make sense” in the story. Remember the old Tumblr adage that you can like problematic things so long as you acknowledge the problems? I would just say you can like whatever so long as you don’t bury your head in the sand and scream, “It’s fine! You just didn’t pay attention to the story!!”

What I’m saying is that there’s a lot of justifying how bad literally every part of the story is by saying it all “makes sense” and so all criticisms are invalid. If a person is traumatized, it just makes sense that they would [waves at the entire story] do that. It’s very sad when your imaginary kids die, y’know?

The people who like House of M tend to cite its fetishizing gaze on women’s mental illness as a feature and not a bug. The fault in that argument is that, as far as I’ve seen, none of the people making this argument have Schizophrenia. Or Schizoaffective Disorder. Or any personal experience with psychosis whatsoever. At the very least, the vast majority of them don’t, so they’re not part of the group being misrepresented.  

The issue of what is “good” mental illness representation is complex. Sometimes, people who are struggling or have struggled relate to characters who lash out or do destructive things. People can find solace in imperfect places. Everyone’s just trying to get by in this hellscape, and if a comic made you feel understood or just plain better in some way, that’s a good thing. But It’s a very “I got mine” argument to focus on that and ignore how those stories might affect others. You can’t reclaim something that wasn’t insulting you in the first place. I find the claim that there’s something universal about Sad Wanda Crying unconvincing given how emblematic HOM is of media representations of psychosis. If you’re not always being portrayed as a serial killer, the weight of this story will easily fly over your head.  

Then there’s the not-small matter that the people being insulted – really, specifically insulted – by HOM are groups that aren’t a big part of public discourse. The severely mentally ill and people with fertility issues. Not that those are on equal footing, but they both have a certain invisibility and the idea that something might be hurtful to them is treated as a joke. Reproductive issues are intensely personal, and most people want to keep them private. There is a lot wrong with media representations of infertility, but if talking about it means opening up about your experiences, it’s no wonder people don’t want to or are only willing to in a receptive space.

Also, I suspect a lot of people didn’t read the X-Men stories that came after and are viewing this entirely from Wanda’s perspective. There’s something narcissistic about sad, sad, sad characters being sad about their sad, sad, sad life. It invites the audience to focus on that one person’s struggles – often as a stand-in for their own problems – and ignore everything else going on. This is one of the critiques of “manpain” storylines. There’s a layer of self-involvement built in. Killed a bunch of people? But they were sad! Sad, sad, sad! We’ve all got problems, man. The world breaks everyone. Not everyone kills Hawkeye two different times.

This is particularly true in spec fic where every backstory is a trauma conga line. Your fave may have suffered, but realistically, so did everyone else.

Redemption arcs can have that air of narcissism too. Woe is me, I have done bad. If they get really self-obsessed, you get The Very Worst Kind of Story, the one where the villain is someone who has been wronged by the “redeemed” character and they want revenge. It’s a way of appearing to confront the damage done while actually minimizing it and discrediting the victims. Protagonist-centered morality to the extreme. Only Good Victims™ matter, and therefore, the redemption seeker is exonerated. All charges dropped on account of the victim turned out to be a jerk!

(That’s not what this post is about. I watched a movie the other day that had this problem, and it gave me a lot of feelings. It was Power Rangers. Leave me alone.)

Getting back to what I said at the beginning, the thing that bothers me isn’t so much that people like something I don’t like. I agree with Grant Morrison’s assessment that HOM is lukewarm at best, but I can still see why someone might like it. The bigger problem is how people like quote-unquote problematic things.

Which is to say oh my god, you guys have to stop acting like genocide is cool and badass. Finding a story valuable is one thing. Claiming that Wanda is so awesome because she can warp reality and wipe out all the mutants and “when will your fave” is another thing entirely. It is not okay to brag about genocide. Ever.

EVER.

Not even when you’re talking about fiction.

I know that saying a character is more powerful is the unquestioned trump card of comics fandom, but 1) that’s iffy in the first place and 2) it’s especially bad in this case. I used to think of the “my fave is more powerful than yours” dick-measuring contest solely as an expression of Boys Club thinking, something juvenile that celebrates physical strength above all else. But there is something more insidious to this logic. Saying that having more power – by which you mean a greater ability to commit acts of violence and hurt others – is the same thing as having more value is disturbing logic. The way that superhero comics equate power with goodness is part of why they’re considered fascist. Every time you indulge this fantasy that having more power makes something better, that power is virtue, the spectral form of Alan Moore appears and hurls copies of Watchmen at your head.

Buying into this furthers one of the worst messages in the genre. I’m not saying anyone who argues over which character is more powerful is a fascist, but this logic should not go unexamined. Why does it matter so much which character is the better at inflicting harm than all the other harm inflicters? You can use the cheap argument that they’re heroes and they’re doing good, but superheroes are, to a worrying degree, used as avatars of the US military. They’re only unblemished, pure-hearted Social Justice Warriors™ if you don’t pay attention to any stories featuring them.

And when you’re not just arguing that being powerful is better, but that the act of committing genocide is a key part of that superiority?? That’s beyond disturbing. How can people not notice how terrible that sounds? Outside of the narrative and the twisted reasoning of superhero comics, what are you really saying when you say that? Might makes right is questionable enough, but when the expression of “might” is ethnic cleansing?

Someone, please explain the thinking that leads to these posts. I’m lost in a flurry of question marks. What compels a person to declare, openly, that what’s cool about Wanda is that she got rid of all the mutants? How does someone conclude that glorifying genocide is okay because it’s a fantasy genocide? Why do thousands of people reblog these horrifying posts?

Why?

Why?

WHYWHYWHY?

On second thought, don’t explain it to me. I don’t want to know.

#anonymous #answered #house of m #meta #comics meta #written by me

[orbemnews]

He's shaping the future of Spotify, one moonshot idea at a time The company hired Máuhan “M” Zonoozy as its first and only head of innovation earlier this year to do just that. Zonoozy previously worked at BCG Digital Ventures where he helped big corporations think about and adapt to the future. Now he’s doing that inside Spotify, helping the audio streamer identify what he calls “moonshot” ideas. He is reporting to Dawn Ostroff, chief content officer and advertising business officer. “What’s happening now is you’re collapsing the concept of linear radio into digital,” Zonoozy said. “It’s becoming multidimensional and becoming more interactive. I’m a believer that technology opens doors to creativity.” Zonoozy spoke with CNN Business about his role at Spotify, the power of audio and future formats. This interview has been edited and condensed. How do you think we got to a time in which there are millions of podcasts and a proliferation of attention paid to audio? For example, Facebook is now invested in it. Yes, we’ve had a huge flood of storytelling in audio formats, probably because A) it’s an innate cultural way of communicating that we’ve always been accustomed to B) I think radio is evolving from linear to digital and C) I see this hardware change, modality change. I think we are tip, tip, tip of the spear of what’s going to happen in this market. Do you think we’re at an inflection point — that there’s been a massive rise in audio platforms, devices and content, but we’ll see a downfall? Audio hasn’t gone away as video took over our multimedia consumption. I think the pie has only grown for audio as well. I certainly think the ebbs and flows of technology and of what is possible will lead — at least on the creator, entertainment side — lead new creators to try these new mediums because they’re creators and they’re creative. Maybe another way to think about it is: I don’t think of audio as purely entertainment. Currently I think the jobs done by audio are very entertainment-driven: it’s podcasts; it’s audiobooks; it’s music; social audio. But imagining a world ahead, the role of audio will evolve and change and consequently the jobs to be done will also change. It will become more nuanced in how we leverage audio in our daily lives. This year we saw the rise of live social audio. What do you think of it as a format? Do you think it will have longevity? I think the social audio space is super cool. I was early on with some of these platforms, and I remember texting all of my friends: “This is a wave.” I think Locker Room and Spotify’s acquisition of Locker Room is going to be incredible and going to be here to stay. What we’re seeing on these platforms right now is early interpretation of what that content could be and what those experiences can be like. I think we’re going to start seeing new monetization models and seeing new creators emerge. We’re going to start seeing new ways to distribute this content, whether that’s in live synchronous, asynchronous, on demand, different formats. I couldn’t be more excited about it. What are formats of audio that we haven’t even thought of yet? One thing that I’m seeing and excited about on the formats of audio is this concept of ambiance and presence. We’re seeing some technological innovation around spatial audio. I’m really interested in how does audio really lean into or take inputs from context and contextual situations to start feeding you content in more a helpful, useful way without it being quote-unquote on demand. I think we went from quite linear content to quite on-demand content. Social audio is live, but there’s this importance around what is the context in which content and audio is delivered. As audio becomes more ambient and there’s more smart speakers and you’re always in and all these things, I think new formats of audio will take context as an input to determine their output. The scary context example is speakers listening, but I think there’s so much more that can be done around it. You saw it in ad tech probably first. There’s so much personalization driven by location, past history, weather. I’m interested to see how media, especially when media starts to become more live and immediate, starts to leverage context as a way to become smarter about either delivery or creation of content. What are your top-three favorite podcasts, and why? “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” is my favorite podcast ever. I love Peter Sagal. I think he’s brilliant, and frankly, it’s because when I was a kid, “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” would be on the radio at my parents house, my friend’s parents houses. I grew up with this weird goofy NPR news joke show in the background. My second one: I’m a huge fan of “Dissect,” which is on Spotify. I was a big fan before it was even on Spotify so I was really excited it got on it. I love music, and I love how we get so deep and geek out on the nuance and the meanings behind some of this music, some of the artistry. It plays with my heartstrings. The third one is “Same Same but Tech,” which is a podcast I am fortunate enough to host and work on. It’s on Spotify, supported by BCG Digital Ventures, and the reason I love it is because I get to talk to some of the smartest people in the world and hear incredible stories about how tech is transforming how we live and our cultures. Do you think Spotify’s future is bigger than audio? I think an ambition to own one of our five senses is unbelievably big and exciting and crazy. It’s why I’m here and so happy to be here. I believe in this team and I actually think this leadership could accomplish so much if they wanted to beyond audio, but I think today’s focus is certainly let’s really dominate one of the coolest pillars of human existence, which is audio.Can you share some of your “moonshot” ideas or are they top secret? Yeah, I think for now it’s a little top secret. But I’m sure we can talk again in the future. Source link Orbem News #Future #He'sshapingthefutureofSpotify #hes #idea #Media #Moonshot #onemoonshotideaatatime-CNN #Shaping #Spotify #Time

[dipulb3]

He's shaping the future of Spotify, one moonshot idea at a time

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/hes-shaping-the-future-of-spotify-one-moonshot-idea-at-a-time/

He's shaping the future of Spotify, one moonshot idea at a time

The company hired Máuhan “M” Zonoozy as its first and only head of innovation earlier this year to do just that. Zonoozy previously worked at BCG Digital Ventures where he helped big corporations think about and adapt to the future.

Now he’s doing that inside Spotify, helping the audio streamer identify what he calls “moonshot” ideas. He is reporting to Dawn Ostroff, chief content officer and advertising business officer.

“What’s happening now is you’re collapsing the concept of linear radio into digital,” Zonoozy said. “It’s becoming multidimensional and becoming more interactive. I’m a believer that technology opens doors to creativity.”

Zonoozy spoke with Appradab Business about his role at Spotify, the power of audio and future formats.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

How do you think we got to a time in which there are millions of podcasts and a proliferation of attention paid to audio? For example, Facebook is now invested in it.

Yes, we’ve had a huge flood of storytelling in audio formats, probably because A) it’s an innate cultural way of communicating that we’ve always been accustomed to B) I think radio is evolving from linear to digital and C) I see this hardware change, modality change. I think we are tip, tip, tip of the spear of what’s going to happen in this market.

Do you think we’re at an inflection point — that there’s been a massive rise in audio platforms, devices and content, but we’ll see a downfall?

Audio hasn’t gone away as video took over our multimedia consumption. I think the pie has only grown for audio as well. I certainly think the ebbs and flows of technology and of what is possible will lead — at least on the creator, entertainment side — lead new creators to try these new mediums because they’re creators and they’re creative.

Maybe another way to think about it is: I don’t think of audio as purely entertainment. Currently I think the jobs done by audio are very entertainment-driven: it’s podcasts; it’s audiobooks; it’s music; social audio. But imagining a world ahead, the role of audio will evolve and change and consequently the jobs to be done will also change. It will become more nuanced in how we leverage audio in our daily lives.

This year we saw the rise of live social audio. What do you think of it as a format? Do you think it will have longevity?

I think the social audio space is super cool. I was early on with some of these platforms, and I remember texting all of my friends: “This is a wave.” I think Locker Room and Spotify’s acquisition of Locker Room is going to be incredible and going to be here to stay. What we’re seeing on these platforms right now is early interpretation of what that content could be and what those experiences can be like.

I think we’re going to start seeing new monetization models and seeing new creators emerge. We’re going to start seeing new ways to distribute this content, whether that’s in live synchronous, asynchronous, on demand, different formats. I couldn’t be more excited about it.

What are formats of audio that we haven’t even thought of yet?

One thing that I’m seeing and excited about on the formats of audio is this concept of ambiance and presence. We’re seeing some technological innovation around spatial audio.

I’m really interested in how does audio really lean into or take inputs from context and contextual situations to start feeding you content in more a helpful, useful way without it being quote-unquote on demand. I think we went from quite linear content to quite on-demand content. Social audio is live, but there’s this importance around what is the context in which content and audio is delivered. As audio becomes more ambient and there’s more smart speakers and you’re always in and all these things, I think new formats of audio will take context as an input to determine their output.

The scary context example is speakers listening, but I think there’s so much more that can be done around it. You saw it in ad tech probably first. There’s so much personalization driven by location, past history, weather. I’m interested to see how media, especially when media starts to become more live and immediate, starts to leverage context as a way to become smarter about either delivery or creation of content.

What are your top-three favorite podcasts, and why?

“Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” is my favorite podcast ever. I love Peter Sagal. I think he’s brilliant, and frankly, it’s because when I was a kid, “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” would be on the radio at my parents house, my friend’s parents houses. I grew up with this weird goofy NPR news joke show in the background.

My second one: I’m a huge fan of “Dissect,” which is on Spotify. I was a big fan before it was even on Spotify so I was really excited it got on it. I love music, and I love how we get so deep and geek out on the nuance and the meanings behind some of this music, some of the artistry. It plays with my heartstrings.

The third one is “Same Same but Tech,” which is a podcast I am fortunate enough to host and work on. It’s on Spotify, supported by BCG Digital Ventures, and the reason I love it is because I get to talk to some of the smartest people in the world and hear incredible stories about how tech is transforming how we live and our cultures.

Do you think Spotify’s future is bigger than audio?

I think an ambition to own one of our five senses is unbelievably big and exciting and crazy. It’s why I’m here and so happy to be here. I believe in this team and I actually think this leadership could accomplish so much if they wanted to beyond audio, but I think today’s focus is certainly let’s really dominate one of the coolest pillars of human existence, which is audio. Can you share some of your “moonshot” ideas or are they top secret?

Yeah, I think for now it’s a little top secret. But I’m sure we can talk again in the future.

[easyhairstylesbest]

Lauren Oyler on Writing a Book 'Good Enough So People Can't Hatchet-Job You'

Lauren Oyler is the kind of literary critic who makes thin-skinned writers think twice about putting their thoughts onto the page. She once questioned if New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino had ever met someone who wasn’t pretty (yikes!) and asserted that the best-selling novel American Dirt could have “perhaps used a little more self-doubt” (…fair). With bylines in the London Review of Books, New York Times, The Baffler, and more, Oyler often reflects on online phenomena like the popular rise of astrology and the destabilizing effect of social media on our collective mental health. More than one of her pieces of criticism have gone viral, a feat for the genre in its own right, but all the more extraordinary for their lack of sensationalism. Though her critique is often sharp-edged, it does not sacrifice nuance.

Now, she’s turned efforts to her own novel, Fake Accounts, which distills much of her critical musings into a timely premise, with a protagonist who feels like someone you follow on Twitter—an Internet writer who lives in New York City. The unnamed narrator discovers that her boyfriend of several years has been hiding a second life as a popular online conspiracy theorist on the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration, but as she roves the sea of pink pussy hats at the 2017 Women’s March that same weekend, her boyfriend dies in a freak accident before she can confront him. Left in a social media-hazed mania, the narrator flees to Berlin, embarking on a truly deranged online dating spree and other expat follies.

The book mirrors details from Oyler’s own life—a writer, often for the internet, who lives part-time in Berlin—and parodies the contemporary literary trends she often critiques, like autofiction and the fragmented structure popularized by Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, to explore the tension and lack of distinction between our real and online personas. If, like much of the population, you are addicted to social media, the book resonates in a very specific way.

ELLE.com talks with the author about how she deals with her inner critical voice, her lukewarm feelings about social media detoxes, and how she found empowerment in blurring the lines of her online persona through fiction.

I first heard about your book after seeing a tweet from Emily Gould that calls you an “enormous bitch” but then praises the novel as “unimpeachably great.” How do you unpack a comment like that?

Ha! I don’t think Emily meant that being a bitch is a bad thing necessarily. We’re so used to seeing more or less positive criticism or only tepidly questioning criticism, but not a ton of harsh book criticism, so I seem like more of a bitch than I think I am. But I mean, that’s totally what I was going for—make the book good enough so people can’t hatchet-job you, right? That’s what everybody is going for, I hope.

I imagine that task was really challenging as someone who reviews books. How were you able to shut off those critical voices and write?

I think a lot of people are probably feeling pressure from hypothetical critics now. Social media puts everybody in this position where you’re constantly imagining how something is going to be taken the wrong way, or the least generous reading of something that could possibly be made. How likely is it that someone will make it? There’s an aspect of the novel where the narrator is constantly anticipating the reader’s thoughts, and she is trying to justify her thinking or how she’s behaving. So I think that’s a broader issue and not just related to the fact that I’m a “bitch.” [Laughs]

AKA critic! Reading your criticism, I have been struck by the level of authority you assume—as a writer, I always struggle with “what’s my right” to say any of this. I’m curious where that comes from for you.

I think it does come in part from growing up in a place where people were not quite interested in the same things I was. I grew up in Hurricane, West Virginia, a small town between Charleston and Huntington, and I was not a total misfit, but I wasn’t encouraged the way I might have been if I had gone to a nice private school in New York City. I had to learn to trust my process of thinking through objections and criticism and shoring up all sides—because I do feel, and maybe some people would disagree, that I think quite a lot about things before I say them, and that’s part of where the sense of confidence comes from. But I do have social media-inflicted paranoia.

You’ve written a lot about social media as a critic—what made you want to approach the topic from a literary standpoint?

There’s this idea that floats around periodically that the realist novel is not equipped to respond to the pace and technology of the day, and you can’t put the Internet in a novel and have it still be literary because the Internet is inherently tacky and ephemeral and nothing on it matters and everyone on it is kind of stupid. We have this idea about literary fiction, that it has to be very elevated and concerned with the greatest issues of human life, but I think the compulsion to be sort of ephemeral and the willingness to be stupid in public without thinking much about it is a very human impulse. I was interested in this idea of the realist novel and the quote-unquote “traditional novel” that is supposed to be inimical to the Internet and social media.

What was your writing process like?

When I started thinking about writing this novel, the voice didn’t come to me immediately. I was really struggling with it. And then I wrote a version of the first paragraph, which has this much more cynical, slightly complicated tone with an inherent ironic quality that is really appealing to me, and then went from there.

One thing I thought about a lot is the possibility that people will read the book autobiographically in some way and take something about me from the protagonist. I started to feel very empowered by that, building up this fake persona that was still definitely connected to my real self.

That sounds absolutely terrifying to me.

I think it’s personally empowering because I don’t think I care if someone thinks a certain detail or one of the things the protagonist says is attributable to me. It may be attributable to me, or it may not be, and keeping both possibilities alive throughout the text is something I was concerned with. I think what is compelling about experiencing art and also making it is that it allows you to create your own agency. You can, within the confines of the work, do more or less whatever you want. I think it’s very important for people to have at least one sphere of life where you can sort of control how it works.

I have listened to and read a lot of interviews with authors who get frustrated with the notion that some part of their novel is autobiographical, and they have a point, but I also think the process of writing a novel is one in which you are pulling all sorts of things from your life. You only have what’s in your mind, what you can imagine or experience. Now, increasingly, we live in a time where we just know a lot about each other, and what I try to show in the book is that the construction of online persona versus the construction of a quote-unquote “real persona” is a very fluid process. You can’t point to any one thing and say that’s real and that’s fake. There are definitely things that are straightforward lies, but there are lots of ways to fudge things without lying and, in some way, you’re being more truthful by not being completely honest, which is the nature of fiction traditionally—that it’s saying something true by saying something false.

As a literary critic, how do you hope your book is received?

First of all, I know this is a trick question, but I hope it’s not just seen as a commentary on social media, because I think that discussion of social media even now can be siloed, like, “Oh, that’s what’s happening on the Internet. That’s an Internet writer.” I would ideally not be considered a quote-unquote, “Internet writer.” I would be considered a writer, one of whose themes is the internet.

“I started to feel very empowered by that, building up this fake persona that was still definitely connected to my real self.”

Has your relationship to social media changed since the pandemic?

I’ve got to say no, but that’s because I didn’t have a job before, so I was always on the computer at my house and I continued to be on the computer at my house. I’m kind of disappointed that I haven’t had an awakening that allows me to get off it for good. I did take a five-month break last year, and that was sort of nice, but it didn’t change me as much as I hoped. I obviously get quite a lot out of social media—my career definitely has a lot to do with having been on Twitter for ten years—and I think it’s very fascinating just to watch people and see what they do on it and how they respond and interpret things. It’s an amazing opportunity to watch this many people just behave.

What books or authors do you think people should read more of?

As far as contemporary authors go, I think Miriam Toews deserves much more attention. I loved Patrick deWitt’s novel French Exit, which didn’t get very much attention when it came out (and looking it up just now, I had no idea it was made into a movie). More people can always be told about The Last Samurai and Helen DeWitt (no relation to Patrick, I think). Joan Silber, Percival Everett. I think it’s safe to say that most authors in translation who aren’t extremely famous deserve more attention; it’s hard to go wrong with translated books in the U.S. because so few authors get translated, and the ones who do are usually some of the most renowned authors in their own countries. Which is a problem, because in the U.S. we have no idea what’s going on with contemporary literary culture in other countries, but it’s a useful way to narrow your search. Daša Drndić, Jenny Erpenbeck, Alina Bronsky (I liked The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine). Tove Ditlevsen’s memoirs, The Copenhagen Trilogy, are being reissued by FSG in January, and I wrote about them and loved them. I still think about the book Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami, who has a few other books out here, too.

Annie Werner Annie Werner is a writer from Texas living in New York.

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Lauren Oyler on Writing a Book 'Good Enough So People Can't Hatchet-Job You'

[mrsrcbinscn]

Script Excerpts: Franny’s Top Albums of 2019

[playlist]

tl;dr: A selection of script excerpts from a video on Franny’s YouTube channel called “My Favorite Albums of 2019″. Pretend I finished this in December like I wanted to and that January isn’t nearly over okay

Her channel doesn’t have a super regular upload schedule. She doesn’t feel like adding ~~~youtube personality~~~ to her long list of wikipedia page job titles. And she keeps her social medias (YouTube, Twitter, Instagram) firmly in the “this is for fun” part of her mind. She doesn’t make any sponsored videos or posts on social media but when the mood strikes she’ll upload videos about music, music history, current trends in the industry she’s noticing and her thoughts on them, album reviews, and her favorite content to make is videos where she signal boosts several lesser-known artists in one video and fangirls over how much she loves them and why y’all should, too. 

INTRO: Susadei*, hello, and welcome to my channel, where I, Franny Sor Robinson, share my pesky lady opinions about music on the internet.”

*susadei is the informal way to say hello in Khmer, Franny’s first language

TOPIC INTRODUCTION: It is almost Christmas, which means! It’s time to talk about my favorite albums of 2019. As always, this list is in no particular order, because I believe that especially when talking about multiple genres of music - which we’re going to today - music isn’t something you rank on a linear bad, worse, worst, good, better, greatest scale. 

RULES: Now, the rules!

The album can’t be one I had a part in “And I don’t just mean not a Franny Sor Robinson, Seoul Hanoi’d, or Dara & Danny album. I am an active songwriter and composer even durin’ years I don’t personally release an album. I have co-written substantial amounts of, or entire tracklists, on several albums where I don’t sing or play an instrument on the recorded album, but I’m all over the credits. I think I do enough shameless self-promotion leading up to, and shortly after, the release of anything I work on. So as much as I loved working with Sariya Ibekwe - who is a fabulous Nigerian-American jazz singer - on her debut album this year, I co-wrote a good amount of that album. But, I’ve already talked about Sariya’s album extensively this year, and will link to it in the description box below anyway.

The album can’t be by a close personal friend of mine “I would spend these videos talking only about my friends’ releases if I didn’t have a strict no cronyism rule in these yearly roundups. I hype up, like, Daniel, Vanessa, Yulia, Delia, Lora, Andreas’s, and so on’s stuff whenever anything new drops, so they already got their signal boosts.”

Beyond those two rules, that’s really it. So without further stalling, let’s get into it.

Traveling Mercies by Emily Scott Robinson

The first album I want to talk about is Traveling Mercies, by North Carolina singer-songwriter Emily Scott Robinson - no relation, but oh my god, I wish. I’d love to just meet her, once. She’s so talented, I just - ugh! Anyway.

Emily Scott Robinson is a country singer whose first album, Magnolia Queen, came out in 2016 but I didn’t come across it until after I fell in love with Traveling Mercies. Daniel Maitland - the other half of Dara & Danny - sent the Spotify link of this album to me, and I just ate it up. Her songwriting gets me good, y’all. Her imagery is somethin’ else, her voice has the clarity of Alison Krauss, and her ability to deal with some very heavy themes poetically without sort of...glorifying? or trivializing? them is unreal. 

I should trigger warning this upcoming bit for discussion of sexual assault, so if you’d like to avoid that, I’ll put a timestamp right here [points] for you to skip to. I’ll give you oooone more second to skip, and...okay. 

I had a hard time listening to The Dress at first, because whenever I consume any media that deals with sexual assault, I have to mentally prepare myself. Even the song I wrote about my own experience with it, I don’t - I don’t perform it. Very rarely, I will. It was a write it, record it, release it for your healin’, and try to be done with it kinda thing. But once I psyched myself up to listen to it, The Dress pretty much immediately became one of my favorite songs on this album. I do sometimes have to skip it if I’m not feelin’ up to it mentally, but it. It is a beautifully written song about a very ugly thing, and I think- I think its a wonderful thing that she wrote that song.

[...] and then there’s my favorite song on this entire album, the one that honestly gave me a moment of “oh. OH, she went there.” Pie Song. It starts out by literally, she’s literally singin’ about how to bake a pie, and it made me so nostalgic for home, because I remember being taught by my friend’s mom to make a pie just like that. Don’t skimp on butter for the crust, add a little moonshine, but then she just, the next line goes right into the chorus and its, “but nothing you can make, can make you good enough, if you’re cooking for a man that doesn’t love you.” When I first heard that shift in the song - honey, when I tell you my chest just [both hands go up to her chest] it was powerful. Even though it isn’t the saddest or heaviest song on the album, it’s my favorite. The clear imagery - I could smell the pie she was singing about, I could feel the flour on my clothes - , the plot twist. 

Among the songwriting circles I’m in, this album is pretty popular with them for her songwriting. We go absolutely bananas for it.

Her songwriting is gonna take her places. I really can’t wait to see what she comes out with next. I’m a fan. I love her. SO much. 

WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP WHERE DO WE GO? by Billie Eilish

This is probably the most quote unquote, mainstream album on this list. Billie’s undeniably a known name, and rightfully so! 

This album, y’all? Amazing. Flawless. True art.  I’m always hesitant when my son tells me what the Kids TM are listening too, because I usually- mm. Far be it from me to gatekeep music, to say what’s good and what’s bad, so I’ll just say that it. Usually isn’t. My, uh, my thing. It doesn’t appeal to me, and that’s fine!

But I- the first couple seconds of ‘bad guy’ got me payin’ attention, at ‘all the good girls go to hell’ I was just like Wow, capital W, and ‘bury a friend’ had me floored. Billie Eilish’s album is probably one of the most interesting, unique, and complex albums I’ve ever listened to. I really- I love this album.

Walk Through Fire by Yola

We’re back in the underground country music scene because of course we are! Yola is a fantastic singer from Bristol, England. On iTunes this album is classified as rock, but her EP titled Orphan Offering was under country, and her music has a very americana-indie-country feel.

Yola’s voice is the best part of this album but that’s not to knock on the music and the songwriting because they are also amazing. I can’t talk about this album and not talk about Yola’s voice, specifically, though. Her voice is like a warm cup of ginger tea on a cold day. It’s husky, and bluesy, on some songs kinda jazzy, and the musicality she displays on the album is really dynamic. She’s soft and smooth, then she’s belting out some high notes, but she’s not spending the entire album hittin’ you over the head with her belting. She really gives you a sampling of what all she can do on this album.

My favorite song off this album is Shady Grove it’s just - it’s - I love everything about it. The string section. The sitar sound. The gentle percussion, and ohhh my good god, the melody is just beautiful. It makes me wish this album was out when my son was little, because [pouts] its a song that reminds me of the song I used to sing to him when we first adopted him, and I’d just kinda hold him in my arms ‘n sway and sing to him. It’s such a beautiful song, it isn’t even the deepest or most profound song on this album but it is the most beautiful song to me musically. And I was want to hold a baby and sing it to the baby, so bring me your babies. Gimme.

Seneca by Charles Wesley Godwin

I’m going to get into this album in a second, but first. We all know I am a slut for odes to one’s roots. I made a whole video talking about how despite its memeability, John Denver’s Take Me Home, Country Roads is actually a masterpiece. The short film I co-wrote and co-starred in with the director Lydia Viravong, a Lao-American I grew up with, is filmed and set in our hometown and based on our mothers. The Dara and Danny album ‘Progidal Children of Clayton County’ is a loveletter to me and Daniel’s hometown in Clayton Count, Georgiay. 

And that’s exactly what the album Seneca is. Seneca is an album about West Virginia. Charles Wesley Godwin grew up in Morgantown, West Virginia, a coal minin’ town. The Seneca Creek ran through his back yard, his daddy was a coal miner, mama’s a schoolteacher - he had a very quintessential coal mining town upbringing. And you know, your upbringing shapes you and this album is all about his love for where he comes from.

The imagery in his songwriting is just [chef’s kiss] perfection. And as someone whose affection for her roots is just as strong, I really - this album made me emotional as all hell. A lot of it is really sad, if I’m being honest, but that’s also because its so honest. For example,  the song Coal Country, tells the story of how West Virginia’s coal industry was the lifeblood of the West Virginia mountains, praises the union heroes of the Battle of Blair Mountain, and laments that in place of prospects for West Virginians, there’s now only food stamps and opiod addiction. 

Seneca Creek...the full version is beautiful, but the acoustic version gives mechills every single time. He wrote it about his grandparents’ love story from when they met in ‘49 to when his grandmother got sick and died in ‘94. It reminds me of Holly William’s 2013 song Waiting on June. It isn’t the happiest song, but even after the verse where the wife’s passed away, the chorus following it isn’t sorrowful. It just goes 

We built a home by Seneca Creek And raised ourselves a family I worked on the farm, you worked the store We had everything we'd ever hoped for

The narrator of the song is just talking about how he lived a simple life with the love of his life. That’s what the song is about, ultimately. And that’s beautiful. It makes me really, really feel lucky to be married to my husband when I listen to it, because for me, that’s what being married to him is like. 

Strawberry Queen is ro-man-tic as HELL! It’s about his WIFE, and as someone who is also trash for their spouse and writes way too many cheesy-ass love songs about him....I love it. It’s beautiful. I cried a little but don’t tell anybody I have emotions.

The last sad one I want to mention is Sorry For The Wait. It is a beautiful song where the narrator’s been killed in a mine explosion and he’s telling his wife not to cry for too long, that he’s buried in the clay and so will she someday, and he’s sorry for the wait. The third verse gets me bad. 

When you miss talkin' at me, holler t'wards the mine It's amazing how your voice echoes inside When the winter breeze tugs at your hair Jus know that it's me with a grin standing there

I’m not! Okay!

 HONORABLE MENTIONS: 

Before I talk about the final album I want to gush about, I do want to mention four albums that I truly enjoyed but in an effort to not make this video go on forever and ever, I didn’t write a whole explanation about why they’re so great. But I really do think deserve a shoutout!

LOVE + FEAR by Marina

Divinely Uninspired To A Hellish Extent by Lewis Capaldi

Closer Than Together by The Avett Brothers

Wildcard by Miranda Lambert

Farmland by Gabe Lee

I can’t believe I haven’t plugged this guy yet because Gabe Lee’s album is fuh-king amazing. Gabe Lee is a country singer from Nashville whose sound you can tell has been influenced by classic country, modern americana, and like classic singer-songwriter types like Bob Dylan. It’s hard for me to interpret 100% of the time what his lyrics are about because at times his writing is pretty abstruse - oooh, pull out your thesauruses, kids - but the imagery in vivid. Its easier for me to talk about what this album makes me think of and how it makes me feel than to outright tell you what its all about. Farmland makes me think about drivin’ out in the woods in my high school boyfriend’s pickup to makeout and drink beer under the guise of deer hunting; or trying to sneaky-clean my muck boots after cuttin’ school to go fishin’  with my brothers; or pulling into a gas station in the middle of nowhere and handin’ some cash for pump one to a clerk that looks like he’s been there since the invention of petrol. There’s this grit to it that’s plain at the same time. Like there’s nothin’ particularly rebellious about skippin’ school to catch some fish, but it’s gonna get you muddy and sweaty. 

The music is very simple and that’s one thing I like about it. It doesn’t feel overproduced, it just feels very classic. Like this album would easily have been made in 1979, 2009, or 2019. The standout song on this album, to me, is Last Country Song. Daniel [the other half of the bluegrass-folk-americana duo Dara & Danny] thinks its Eveline, which is another one of my favorites. The most fun song on this album? Lyra, for sure. I have a lot of feelings about this album, I love this album, and I really hope you give it a listen.

Also, y’all know that as an Asian woman in country music - well, kinda. I got one foot in jazz, and one foot in bluegrass-americana-country-southern-folk, and then I got a hand in indie - [jump cut] LOOK, genre is a social construct, okay? I make whatever music I wanna make and you can like it or hate it. What was I talking ab-- oh! Gabe Lee!

Right, so, y’all know, clearly you can see, I’m very Asian. [*gasp*, puts on a generic American accent] What do you mean you’re not white? [normal voice] Shocking, I know. I like to highlight other artists of color as often as possible, but of course I’ll signal boost whoever I think is fantastic. But whenever I come across another Asian artist in these [air quotes] “white people” genres, I get really excited. And Gabe Lee is Asian-American, which again, we don’t see very often in country music, or like, other genres that we consider “Americana.” So yeah, I think that’s really cool.

#&&...hc

[bluegrasshole]

do all the get to know your author questions bc they're all good and i can't pick

ko…. you need to work on your decisiveness (but thank you)

1) is there a story you’re holding off on writing for some reason?

i mean.. not really. i had decided not to write any more fanfiction to focus on an original story i started but then… i wanted to get used to the setting, work through some personal stuff… kind of warm myself up while still writing the other one… so i’m writing a nurseydex lighthouse story like i said i would

2) what work of yours, if any, are you the most embarrassed about existing?

my entire fanfiction.net account is bad. so so so bad. and surprisingly recent. also i HATE my early zimbits stuff, but of course one of them is like my second most popular piece so i can’t delete it. like really hate. and it’s frustrating because i have good stuff from that time period, so i don’t even fucking know what was going through my mind.

3) what order do you write in? front of book to back? chronological? favorite scenes first? something else?

chronological but i tend to go back and add things obsessively. i like getting the skeleton down first just to get the basic plot and know where i’m going, then i go back to add in details – the meat of the skeleton if you will… and you know i like details

4) favorite character you’ve written

any dex is my favourite, but also specifically jack from samwell gentlemen’s hockey because he cracks me up, and i really loved writing parvati in that one parvender piece. 

5) character you were most surprised to end up writing

camilla? in strange lovers i didn’t even know i was writing camilla until i realized like 3k in that my character who i’d named millie and was blonde was in fact… camilla. she snuck up on me

6) something you would go back and change in your writing that it’s too late/complicated to change now

oh… i do go back and fix things often (in strange lovers i went back to rewrite parts of ransom’s character and his role months after i originally posted it because i realized i had written some pretty shitty stuff regarding black men) but, meh, row upon row is always one i’d like… want to go back and fix, especially the rushed ending, but i can’t go back and change it now because it’s been read by too many people…

7) when asked, are you embarrassed or enthusiastic to tell people that you write?

super embarrassed. only my best friend knows because she’s also a writer but i still don’t feel super comfortable talking to her about it. we’re getting there with each other. she doesn’t write fanfiction ya feel though i think she’s read some

8) favorite genre to write

lmao idk i like writing comedy but plot is hard so i don’t often do it. character studies i guess, AUs, angst

9) what, if anything, do you do for inspiration?

music, and listening to people tell stories about themselves or others, just being around people is inspiring to me. i recently went to a show that was a mix of folk music and storytelling about prince edward island? and it was incredible i left there feeling so invigorated

10) write in silence or with background noise? with people or alone?

i do most of my writing in a café a minute from my apartment, with or without music depending on if my wireless headphones are dead or not, always w a blended matcha latté

11) what aspect of your writing do you think has most improved since you started writing?

oh man. i mean since i started writing in like, 2010? i mean, everything, obviously. but since 2015 – christ. still everything? well, definitely verb tenses/points of view/epithets/general structure and technique, definitely better at rhythm though that took some serious work and a couple stories focussed solely on rhythm and flow. i think i’m much better at nuance now – weaving different themes together to make at least a semi-coherent story… and general prose, i think. finding a balance between minimalism and appropriate imagery. i’m more comfortable playing around with grammar then i used to be. idk, i think my voice has just overall developed into something clearer and distinct from others.

12) your weaknesses as an author

plot and dialogue-heavy scenes. i like writing dialogue and i think the lines themselves are good usually, i just have a hard time, like finding the balance between dialogue, dialogue that has to accomplish something, and prose. and writing a neat point-a-to-point-b plot is a losing battle

13) your strengths as an author

i’ve been told setting, and i think that’s about right. i get obsessive about crafting like, a complete world where it feels like there are things that happen outside of the plot and the main characters. building fucking lore into the setting is the most fun for me. i think the details make the story.

14) do you make playlists for your current wips?

heeeelll yeah

15) why did you start writing?

idk i spent a lot of time on the internet and all the quote unquote cool kids were doing it. i was in a RP where we were all pretty close friends (still follow them on all social media including fb) and we just like, wrote each other fic. i was pretty good at writing before then (for a kid) and even was runner-up for a national award or something in grade six? i barely remember what it was for but i do remember the piece was called “autumn’s opus” and it was comparing the seasons to an orchestra or a piece of music idk. it was pretty killer for an 11-yr-old if i do say so myself

16) are there any characters who haunt you?

oh i don’t know about haunt but i do get sad about jack and kent all the time

17) if you could give your fledgling author self any advice, what would it be?

read your dialogue out loud to see if it sounds natural (it probably doesn’t) and put dooooown the epithets. it’s lazy writing and you don’t need them. and reread reread reread reread. in different fonts, different colours, on differents days, out loud, by different people… reread!!

18) were there any works you read that affected you so much that it influenced your writing style? what were they?

absolutely anything by fluorescentgrey but especially her historical AUs, familiar’s character designs and rawness, waspabi’s dialogue and humour, montparnasse’s prose and tenderness, misandrywitch’s everything, and this piece which inspired a tattoo and pushed me to start experimenting with my own writing a couple years ago… among many others

19) when it comes to more complicated narratives, how do you keep track of outlines, characters, development, timeline, ect.?

oh i usually just give up halfway through that’s how

20) do you write in long sit-down sessions or in little spurts?

usually i go to the café and sit for like 5 hours and if i get a few hundred words out of that i’m happy

21) what do you think when you read over your older work?

ugh it’s so bad and shitty and i hate it all

22) are there any subjects that make you uncomfortable to write?

well, yeah. i don’t like writing about religion so i just… don’t, much. strange lovers had the most religion of anything i’ve ever written. and i’m cautious about writing about race though i’ve done it a few times… i don’t super like writing traditional coming-out stories because i just don’t care all that much so i’ll usually twist them around somehow if they’re necessary. 

23) any obscure life experiences that you feel have helped your writing?

all of my life experiences inform my writing. that’s not me being facetious i just mean that i really like listening to people tell stories and telling stories myself and gossiping etc that i think it’s clear that i prioritize that in my writing

24) have you ever become an expert on something you previously knew nothing about, in order to better a scene or a story?

ah yes coal mining in 20th century nova scotia lmao

25) copy/paste a few sentences or a short paragraph that you’re particularly proud of

the very first paragraph from my nurseydex wip: 

There are days where you think you could lose yourself in the fog and there are days where you wouldn’t mind. When you wake and it’s there eating the world up, surrounding it all like a living thing, voracious, and it’s even hungrier at night, and the only thing that reminds you you belong to the earth and are tied to it like the oldest and most solid daybeacon in the harbour is the horn, loud and long and haunting and filling. And the light. The light, the light, always the light.

#ask #laughingthelaughiest #my writing

[thedecidedgamer-blog]

Internet Culture and GamerGate

Mob mentality rules the internet. Say the wrong thing, give a differing opinion, or sometimes do nothing at all and the mob will find you. Abusive language, death threats, and more quickly follows. In 2014 an event happened that shook up the gaming industry as well as the internet in general. It was called GamerGate. This is the first episode in a series that I will be discussing internet culture, why it has been so bad, where it originated, and how it all explains the current cultural climate, including how Donald Trump became president.

Here's my patreon page if you want to support the podcast, as well as all of my social media and website:

https://www.patreon.com/thedecidedgamer

https://www.instagram.com/thedecidedgamer/

https://twitter.com/TheDecidedGamer

https://www.facebook.com/Thedecidedgamer-357816271327700/

[email protected]

http://www.thedecidedvoter.com/

As always thank you to my buddy Daren for providing the intro and outro music please subscribe to their channel on Soundcloud here: @ghostisland or the specific album it came from here:  darnfelski.bandcamp.com/ Rough Transcript:

What’s up gamers, this is the TheDecidedGamer podcast, and I am Justin White. The Alt-right, hypersensitivity, white supremacy, Pepe the Frog, cuckservatives, GamerGate, Russian influences, Steve Bannon, Milo Yiannopoulos, Mike Cernovich, a completely dysfunctional political system, Men’s Rights Activists, Mob Mentality all over the internet. Donald Trump as President. How did we get here? Why are these things I just described known by most in the gaming world, and more and more, known by the public at large? Why were there men with Tiki Torches walking through Charlottesville? Why are women threatened by rape and murder on the internet?  Over the next few episodes I’m going to explore how the United States got here and how societal analysts have narrowed their scope on these issues far too much. This isn’t a 5 piece puzzle, it’s a 5,000 piece puzzle. And like with every puzzle, we must start with the corners first and work our way in until we can see the main picture. In this episode we’re going to find one of the corner pieces.

  President Donald Trump. It’s been almost 10 months since he was sworn into office. This is a gaming podcast however, so you may be wondering what this has to do with video games. Well. Everything, really. Trump is the culmination of an incredible amount of circumstances. For most, his election was a surprise. Sure, there were some who forewarned, or supporters of his that were confident all the way through, but for the most part it was assumed somebody like Donald Trump could not win the presidency in the United States. I was one of those people. I had countless conversations with my wife, mother and sister-in-law, friends, people on the internet, that usually went something like this: I don’t think the people of the United States would elect somebody like him. Now sure, I had lot’s of reasoning behind it. I’m an economics graduate and international relations student. Hearing Trump speak about either makes my head feel like it’s about to explode. Have you played Shadow of Mordor or Shadow of War? You know how Talion can make their heads pop? It’s like that. But, why was it so widely assumed that a loud, rude, openly abusive towards women, non-public servant, unabashed rich racist could not win the presidency? An incredible under-appreciation for many things, the first of which we’re going to discuss today: Internet culture.

  The most significant moment in internet culture and how it relates to today’s mob rule mentality that infests places like twitter, Facebook, reddit and other places happened in 2014. This moment in time dramatically impacted the internet as a whole, and laid important foundation for the 2016 presidential election, and generally explains why today’s social media feels like a cancer that at times seems like it is in remission, but is always ready to flare up at any given moment.  It was known as GamerGate.

I’m sure most people who listen to this podcast have a general idea of what GamerGate was, but a short synopsis is due, though I know my target demographic will whole heartedly disagree. I only ask that you remain patient. I am very open to discussion, and there are plenty of ways for you to interact with the podcast, but we are now 3 years removed from the event, and much has been revealed in that time. I am not going to use names of the people involved as it can either bring up sensitive issues for the victims, or help promote abusers, and I am interested in neither circumstance occurring. Also, for my purposes here, I want to concentrate on the result of what happened.

 In August of 2014 a young man posted a close to 10,000 word manifesto of sorts on some gaming forums. In this lengthy piece, he describes a girlfriend that he alleges has cheated on him with five different guys. His ex-girlfriend is an indie game developer. He also alleges in this piece that one of the guys that she cheated on him was a video game reviewer and that his ex traded sex for a positive review. This is an important part of the story, so it is vital to remember.

I’m going to pause here for a second, as I believe it incredibly important to point this out early. This stunt was done as revenge for a breakup. The world has no right knowing any personal details of this young couples life. Even if the woman in question had done what is alleged, that was between them. There is no righteousness here, it was designed to hurt the other person, and was posted in places that the boy in question knew would hurt the most. Since the posting of the quote unquote manifesto, it has been revealed that no such review of the woman’s game exists. From the very beginning of this story, whatever righteousness that people pretended to have was built on a false foundation. But, in the end none of that mattered. The damage was done, and it was done as intended.

The post is quickly deleted, but it does not matter. As we have learned in the past couple of years, anything that gets posted on the internet is never really gone. It soon finds its way on to other gaming forums, as well as 4chan, and continues to spread like wildfire. Before she knows it, the woman begins receiving threats from around the internet. Warning for those listening, the next few quotes are deeply disturbing, and if you have experienced abuse on the internet, or have kids listening please listen with caution, or skip forward. “I am going to hunt you down and behead your ugly face, you disgusting cheating feminist whore. See you soon, slut.”

“If I ever see you are doing a panel at an event I’m going to, I will literally kill you. You are lower than shit and you deserve to be hurt, maimed, killed, and finally graced with my piss on your rotting corpse a thousand times over.”

“Next time she show’s up at a con/press conference, we move. We’ll outnumber everyone, nobody will suspect us because we’ll be everywhere. We don’t move to kill, but give her a crippling injury that’s never going to fully heal and remind her of her fuckup for life. A good solid injury to the knees is usually good to this. I’d say brain damage but we don’t want to make it so she ends up too retarded to fear and respect us.”

She gets literally thousands of messages like these, as does anyone associated with her. She gets hacked, accounts of all kind are taken over, nude photographs stolen and posted all over the internet, anyone who speaks out on her behalf receives the same treatment. Her life is threatened on multiple occasions, including people posting her home address and saying that they are going to show up there and rape and kill her. Dead animals are left in her mailbox. The life and career she had built is destroyed in the matter of a few days.

This was a coordinated attack. What people did not know at the time was that guys from 4 chan, 8chan, reddit, and other places planned and coordinated these attacks. Chat logs from IRC channels show that they discussed how to hack her, who her friends and family were, and where to release information to cause the most damage. They also understood that they needed to give the internet something else to focus on. This is where the hashtag GamerGate comes from. The allegations from the exboyfriend that she traded sex for a positive game review, which again never existed, prompted the attackers to focus on what was called ethics in gaming. People in the gaming industry doing reviews for friends, paying for positive coverage, etc. It’s not that these things do not exist at some capacity, but the people who started this entire endeavor were attacking and abusing people, understanding that publicly they needed to make it about something else. They even discussed donating to a charity to give their so called movement good PR. All of this based on a lie and trusting a story from a random guy trying to get revenge on his ex girlfriend.

The attacks on the original woman, as well as many others, still continue today. Gaming websites like Polygon and Kotaku were under constant attack in their comment sections from the same mob. GamerGate received coverage from the mainstream media like CNN and MSNBC. The Guardian, Washington Post, and the New York Times all ran stories about it.

  At the time this seemed like a concentrated issue. But there had been something simmering waiting to explode for years. Internet culture had been metastasizing for some time with anti-feminine ideology, Men’s Rights Activism, and much more. GamerGate was just the perfect moment in time where it all came together. In 2017 we see this type of abuse everyday. Mob mentality rules places like Twitter. A couple retweets from the right people, or wrong people, and somebody is getting ambushed from all corners of the internet. This happens no matter what type of ideology you subscribe to. What led us to GamerGate and how the internet currently functions? What was happening in the years leading up to 2014 and GamerGate? And how did the circumstances come together so perfectly and become so potent?

Next week on TheDecidedGamer podcast.

  Check out this episode!

#gaming #podcast #twitch #youtube #sony #playstation #PC #xbox #microsoft

[synodicatalyst]

some thoughts on.....opinions or something uh

i think that people need to like...learn to understand and respect that other people can Have Opinions Different From Yours like. it genuinely came as a kind of shock when i was on twitter and one of my (older. like, in their twenties) mutuals was talking about issues. like, they were talking about trans issues at one point and they were talking about some notorious trans person who was a dick about something else or something (maybe to do with nb genders) and they were like, yeah. this person is an asshole. but they’re also trans and therefore you can’t invalidate their thoughts and experiences, even if you want to completely disregard everything that they have to say. like, they’re a person too and are autonomous and obviously have had a set of experiences Unique To Themselves so you can’t just say shit like ‘well i’m just gonna block my ears and ignore everything they say’ because if you DO that, then that is, first of all, hypocritical to a sad extent, and secondly, it leaves no room for growth or understanding for EITHER party.

another example of this was with like, internet friends and mutuals and stuff and they were expressing their own personal opinions on something like.... i think it was related to fandom dynamics or something. and anyway they said their bit and followed it up with something like ‘feel free to discuss your own opinions and stuff with me, and know that even if our views and practices differ that doesn’t make me respect you any less’

my final example is when they learnt that TERFs existed. he asked what it was and a bunch of us just said stuff like, yknow, transphobic people under the guise of feminism, and he’s like, alright. but instead of just being like “eh” and leaving it at that (he’s trans and intersex too) he went on to examine like, the popular arguments and stuff of actual TERFs which is like....wow. it takes a lot of chill to be able to read over all of the bullshit that TERFs spout and just kind of go ‘hahahaha ok wow these people believe this shit and there are a lot of holes in their arguments’ and like. the way that he went ahead and collected his own info first and thought about it properly and came to his own conclusion is like, really important

like. wow. it made me realise that people like that dude are the best off in this world, because, alright. tumblr is, in fact, a community that runs off a really fucked up and roundabout system. the stark black-and-white morality thing going on is super harmful, in that it invalidates the fact that people are individuals with autonomy to think and feel and come to conclusions of their own, and it just doesn’t take into account that people who’ve had vastly different social and cultural experiences will have! different! opinions! and world views! and getting caught up in purist morals and this lack of understanding (aside from the fact that it’s like, exactly like my experiences with dealing with conservative church ideals, just.......on the gay side) is only going to lead in unhealthy conflict.

in the real world, not everyone is caught up in this same game of “moral purity” that tumblr (and honestly, i hate using ‘tumblr’ like this, but i genuinely have not witnessed this bullshit on any other social media platform ever) likes to enforce. let’s be real; there are so many more people out there than that. chances are, the people you push away for being quote unquote Problematic for some small breach of something stupid are actually.....really nice people? who just haven’t like, been educated enough or have experienced....the same experiences? i have friends who have....slightly different views on things as I do. i have like, straight friends who are still dealing with their own fair share of internalised homophobia, who have said kind of dumbass things in the past but i dont condemn them for that? i just try to point out where they’re being insensitive or ignorant and that’s that. their continued progression in learning and growing is admirable in that they’re willing to change and adapt, which is a sore contrast to a lot of the people i’ve seen around and met on here. the fact that they can have different opinions on things to me doesn’t make them any less of a valuable friend? it doesn’t change the fact that i value the companionship of the friends i have in real life immensely? they’ve helped me through so much, and i enjoy spending time with them, the Slightly Ignorant Of The Sociopolitical Whatevers People, just as much as i enjoy spending time with my friends on here, even if the people on here are like. “more woke” or whatever.

i’m not defending anyone, nor am i endorsing anything. i acknowledge that people can and will be shitty and they won’t listen no matter how hard you try, and some people you just wont be able to deal with, and yeah. shutting out those people is fine. but no-one’s gonna grow (especially not you) if you make yourself a little bubble of Everyone Thinks The Same As Me and refuse to see anything or think anything else. 

anyways what i’m trying to say is just....chill out. its not worth being violently negative towards other people for super tiny reasons, it’ll just exacerbate the problem. also start acting like grown adults at some point ....please.....acting petty and overreacting is exactly what tiny 6-year-olds do. i know we all like to make jokes like ‘yeah but im an asshole. im a bitter and mean gay. i’m just a 5 year old at heart’ or whatever but........that’s? a kind of shitty poor excuse ? to be? unneccessarily mean? to other people? 

#please like if u read! #hexa.txt #uhhh this got a bit long but just a bit of a discussion i guess #feel free to disagree or w/e im not gonna get mad or anything thats like. completely missing the point of this entire post #under a read more just cause its long #edit: please dont reblog

[lingthusiasm]

Transcript Lingthusiasm Episode 7: Kids these days aren’t ruining language

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 7: Kids these days aren’t ruining language. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 7 show notes page.

[Theme music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics. I'm Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: and I'm Gretchen McCulloch. Today we're going to be talking about kids these days and how they're not ruining language. But first we have an exciting announcement. Lingthusiasm is on Patreon! Yay!

Lauren: Yay! So if you want more Lingthusiasm every month, or an opportunity to ask us your burning linguistics questions, or you just want to help us keep the show running sustainably, doing things like paying our producer and our web hosting fees, and the person who writes our transcripts, then you can help support us on the Patreon and that directly allows us to keep the show running in a sustainable manner.

Gretchen: Yeah, and if you're wondering if we can upgrade our mics, or have guest linguists to interview, or maybe even a live show...

Lauren: Live show! Yes! We want this to happen too!

Gretchen: We really want this to happen, we want to hang out with you guys. The answer is ‘yes’ we would like to do all these things but we can't do it alone.

Lauren: The cool thing about Patreon is that it allows us to keep this space advertising free for everybody. So the main episode every month will always run without advertising, so every time you don't hear an ad trying to sell you a web building tool or something to eat or something to read.

Gretchen: I think we should really take ads for like sketchy 'teach yourself a language in three days' courses, I think those would be really reputable to associate ourselves with.

Lauren: Definitely - we don't have to do that though because we've set up the Patreon and we think it's a much better way for us to keep doing the show and for you to keep enjoying the show.

Gretchen: And if you want to listen to our bonus episodes our first one is about swearing. So we decided not to swear in the main podcast because we want people to be able to put it on at work or around kids so instead we're really letting loose in the Patreon episode! So if you pledge you can listen to that right now.

Lauren: You can listen to us talking about our swear acquisition histories and words that sound like swear words in other languages.

Gretchen: Among other things. We had so much fun recording that episode that I put it on to check that the levels were okay and end up listening to the whole thing even though half of it was my voice.

Lauren: Were you like 'that's a really good point Gretchen!'?

Gretchen: Yeah I was like 'you make such good arguments!' ‘me too!’ ‘I feel so connected!’

Lauren: Our second bonus episode is going to be about how to self study linguistics, which has been chosen by our Patreon supporters, and we are really excited to have that up later in the month.

Gretchen: Because we already have Patreon supporters! We only mentioned the Patreon on social media and there's already been a bunch of people who have pledged us. So thank you for that if you're already one of those people, and if you’re just hearing about it now, it's a thing! Maybe you'd like to do that.

Lauren: It’s at patreon.com/lingthusiasm or you can follow the links from Lingthusiasm or basically anywhere else, we've tweeted and facebooked about it a lot.

Gretchen: Really obnoxiously! And also if you can't pledge, we have totally been there, we know what that's like, and we are keeping the main episodes free. It's also super helpful if you can rate us on iTunes and recommend the show in general -- we've been doubling in listeners every month so that's really cool.

Lauren: It really is mind-blowing and it's so great that other people are enjoying the show we're so pleased that you are on board with us. Thank you for listening, thank you for getting your friends to listen. Thank you for rating us on iTunes - it's apparently a thing you have to do as a podcasts is be really into getting people rating you on iTunes, but we're just really glad that you're listening.

Gretchen: Actually, I want to correct the doubling in listener part -- we actually increased infinitely the first month because we started with zero listeners.

Lauren: Good sciencing Gretchen, good sciencing.

Gretchen: Just so no one writes in to correct my math!

[Theme music]

Lauren: We've already got to the punch line of today's episode but we want to make sure that you leave knowing full well that kids are not ruining language. It's okay everyone, the kids are okay.

Gretchen: The kids are okay, the English language is okay, the other languages are more or less okay, but if they aren't it's not the fault of the kids. One of the ways to put complaining about kids language these days into some context is to look historically at the types of things that people used to complain about kids doing, and whether those came to pass and if so whether everything was ruined. Spoiler: the answer is no!

Lauren: Because complaining about the youth goes back a long way. Like, it goes past the current generation of people who are complaining about the youth and goes back basically to the beginning of written records in Western history.

Gretchen: I imagine that people were complaining with youth before written history, we just don't know about it.

Lauren: One of the most early objectors that we have record of complaining about what the youth are up to these days is Socrates, who complained that all of this newfangled technology called writing was making people forgetful and lazy in terms of learning things, because they no longer had to commit them to memory they could just read them.

Gretchen: Those kids, they don't recite Homer like they used to.

Lauren: It kind of reminds me of the anxiety around modern technology, when parents are really concerned that children aren't learning to read properly because they're reading on screens instead of paper.

Gretchen: Now that we have the Google who even remembers anything.

Lauren: Mmm exactly, we always blame the technology.

Gretchen: But yeah Socrates was saying the same thing about writing at all.

Lauren: Which I kind of liked because all of these people who worry about the youth of today that they're not respecting writing the way they used to, it's like well, back in the day no one even respected writing, so you're not being pedantic *enough* really.

Gretchen: And even post-Socrates, there's a long period of not very many people being literate.

Lauren: Yeah, exactly.

Gretchen: This idea that everybody writes is quite new and really specific to a minority of the world's languages today - they are the minority that have the most speakers, but many of the world's 7,000 languages get along quite well as purely oral and verbal without any written kind of standard.

Gretchen: I think that when we think of languages that are oral languages we also don't think so much about how English also made a transition from being a purely oral language to being both written and oral. That's something that happened in the Middle Ages gradually with fits and starts and there's not as much preserved from the English oral tradition as there might be, I mean there's Beowulf, but there's stuff we've lost there too.

Lauren: It would just be so great to have an audio video documentary of Old English. Someone needs to invent time travel.

Gretchen: This is what I would do if I had time travel. I would go back to all of these different places and times and like document their languages, obviously.

Lauren: That is the first thing we'd do.

Gretchen: I mean, if you can go way back, you could see if you could find the hypothetical Proto-World, like the ancestor of all of the human languages. Was there just one? Were there several original languages? Can we go back and find this? When was it?

Lauren: Time travel is really the only way that this is ever going to get solved.

Gretchen: Yeah, that's definitely my highest priority, and then you could go back and find like specific proto-languages like proto-Indo-European.

Lauren: I love that this is top of your to-do list.

Gretchen: I have thought this through! I have thought of this before.

Lauren: I love the like first grant request after they've invented time travel is you being like 'gonna take my audio recorder, let's go!'

Gretchen: Yeah!

Lauren: So we can't go back that far to see what people were complaining about the kids doing but we can still go back pretty far in written records, and you have some historical records right?

Gretchen: Yeah, so in addition to Socrates there's a bunch of people complaining about Latin errors that people were making in kind of medieval Latin and being like 'these people they speak terrible Latin, they write terrible Latin' and a lot of those so-called errors became totally common and unremarkable conventions in the Romance languages, in French and Spanish, Italian and so on.

Lauren: Oh yeah all of the Romance languages are really quote unquote ‘corrupted’ forms of Latin but now we think of them as really fancy.

Gretchen: Yeah. My favourite example - so I actually put a call out on Twitter for this because I just had a feeling that somebody must have complained about this at some point when English and French were kind of mixing together after the Norman conquest and Dave Sayers who's a linguist came to the rescue and pointed out that this historian, Bokenham, in 1440 has this long complaint. You can kind of understand it because it's Middle English at this point right, but I will not try to read the Middle English. I'll just read a part of the translation which says 'and this corruption of Englishmen in their mother tongue begun as I have said in the everyday admixture of first Danish then Norman, was greatly augmented and increased after the arrival of William the Conqueror by two things' and so on and so forth and then skipping to a later part of the paragraph 'and seeing this the rural people saw that they might seem to be the more esteemed and honourable and the more easily opened to the acquaintance of the worthy and the great, abandoned their mother tongue and laboured to be able to speak French, and thus in the course of time barbarise them both and spoke neither good French nor good English'.

Lauren: Ha! I love it so much! So basically the English we have now that is maybe a third lexical items borrowed from French would just upset this guy a lot.

Gretchen: This guy was really mad, and I mean the ironic thing is of course he uses some French words in his complaint.

Lauren: Ahh yeah but they're the ok ones.

Gretchen: Yeah, he uses words like 'corruption' and 'familiar' and 'augmentation' and 'honourable' and all of these words come from French in his complaint.

Lauren: That is so good.

Gretchen: but he's still really annoyed by this - 'they barbarise them both and speak neither good French nor good English'.

Lauren: Also known as modern English.

Gretchen: Yep sorry, sorry guys!

Lauren: That is so good. So, peeving about how people are speaking today and how the modern generations are ruining language is a thing that we have a long and studied history of.

Gretchen: But in 500 years or in a thousand years it's going to make you look like you didn't know what you were doing, so why not just skip that and not peeve in the first place!

Lauren: so people have been complaining about the way people talk for a very long time. But what I also find quite fascinating is often the things that people complain about young people doing aren't necessarily just done by young people, and a lot of the complaints about features of language that people find irritating are often found across their own generation as well but for some reason they kind of focus on young people doing it.

Gretchen: Perception bias isn't a thing right?!

Lauren: Perception bias is, like, a massive thing here and 'like' is a really great example of this because there are some uses of 'like' that people find irritating but have been used for hundreds of years.

Gretchen: Yeah so there's a linguist who is kind of the—

Lauren: She's like the boss of 'like'.

Gretchen: she is like the person who knows things about 'like' and her name is Alexandra D’Arcy and she's a linguist at University of Victoria in BC and she has done a whole bunch of stuff about 'like'. She's looked at different people's uses of it, perceptions of it, she's just come up with a book called '800 years of like', which is about how like has an eight hundred year history, I haven't read the book yet, I assume it's good.

Lauren: She's really great and I love this, she's done quite a few interviews and I've read some of her shorter stuff so I feel confident in saying that the book would be good.

Gretchen: Yes, she's done a great interview with Lexicon Valley, so you can check that out if you'd like more podcast things. And she's talked about 'like' and one of the points that she's made in one of her papers is that it's not randomly inserted. So one of the things that people have as a perception of 'like' is 'oh people are just throwing it around randomly and inserting it randomly'. She says no, you can actually characterize a bunch of different functions that it has and where each of those go with respect to other kinds of words. So there's the approximate of 'like' which is the one when you say 'what are we having for dinner?' 'Oh I don't know, like, pasta' which doesn't commit you to having specifically pasta but something in that general domain. Or there's quotative 'like', which is one of my favourites, which is when you say 'and then I was like' 'and then she was like' to introduce reported speech.

Lauren: I find it so useful.

Gretchen: It's so useful. The cool thing about quotative 'like' is that you can use it to introduce some things that's not a direct quote. So you can say something like and 'I was like.' and then you can make a facial expression. Or you can use it to introduce what you're thinking rather than what you're saying, so you can say something like 'and I was like I can't believe this but I said 'oh really how interesting', so you can use the kind of manage the dichotomy around various different ways that you could react or that you could say in response to something. So it had a lot more subtlety than 'said'.

Lauren: The evolution of 'like' and the fact that a lot of people use many of the uses. but young people continue to innovate interesting and stable uses of it, shows that people are really clever at language and that it's a very creative thing to do, but there are these like red flags that just go up for people when certain things happen and it is often only when young people do it. So an older person may use like in many similar ways but it flies under the radar.

Gretchen: yeah. I think one of my favourite responses to the quotative 'like' thing is an XKCD comic we'll link to, and it’s dialogue, and the first person says 'I found this article on the linguistics of quotative 'like,' like when you're like she was like'. It featured a quote from a linguist Patricia Cukor-Avila' - I don't know if I'm saying that right - 'eventually all people who hate this kind of thing are going to be dead and the ones who use it are going to be in control' and then the other character says 'wow linguists are pretty hardcore!' ‘I think she means dead from old age. I'm gonna start saying 'like' more just in case!’ So every linguist of my acquaintance posted about this being like 'we are hardcore, we're totally hardcore, thanks for recognising this xkcd'.

Lauren: but I think this touches on an important thing that often gets lost or has historically gotten lost in the rhetoric around linguists being descriptive, it's a chicken and egg thing. What we're saying is 'this is what people do, isn't it an interesting phenomenon' and that's interpreted as linguists saying 'this is a good thing to do, so do it'. We're saying 'No, it's good because it's interesting to us'.

Gretchen: It's there, it's just it's a reflection of what exists.

Lauren: And us saying that it's actually interesting and complex and has its own rules doesn't mean that we're necessarily advocating that you have to do this.

Gretchen: But I think we'd be putting our fingers in our ears and closing our eyes and going 'na na na na na I can't hear you' if we say 'oh this doesn't exist so we can't analyze it because it doesn't fit with our idea of what English should sound like'.

Lauren: I think it's also important to acknowledge that just because we notice it's a phenomenon doesn't mean that we don't still encourage people to use appropriate language in appropriate domains. So something like quotative 'like' is I think completely acceptable, I use it all the time and I find it really useful but I definitely wouldn't encourage a student to use it in an essay, or in a formal email to a colleague at work.

Gretchen: I think if I saw that in a novel I would still be surprised, you know novel tend to use 'said' still for dialogue tags but I think that, you know, language has multiple registers and multiple styles that are used in different environments but that doesn't mean that one of them has to be wrong, like we have different types of clothes that we wear for different situations that doesn't mean that there’s only one kind of correct clothing. “You must be wearing a three-piece suit and if you're not wearing that you might as well not even be wearing clothes at all!” 

Lauren: I don't know, I wear my tuxedo around the house all the time! And that's part of, I mean I don't want to draw attention to our own languages because people have to listen to it but I definitely don't speak like I talk to you on the podcast in the same way as I do in a job interview, and we're probably even more informal when we're not trying to be articulate for podcasting.

Gretchen: Or like with children, or with a pet or something, like you talk differently. But I think it's also worth pointing out that what we think of as formal and correct and so on when it comes to language is also based a lot on the existing power dynamics that happen in our society. So the type of English that we think of as the best English, it's not like anyone did a survey of all the English's and they analysed them for like their expressive capability and they were like 'after a sober consideration of the merits we've decided this one.'

Lauren: I think it one thing we probably should've flagged earlier on in the conversation is we're talking mostly about age based differences even though they're somewhat arbitrary here, but of course there are other socio-linguistic factors that this interacts with and there's gender - there's level of education and there's race and there's different dynamics happening in the UK and the US. All of this interplays, and I think sociolinguists, especially the ones who look at variation in different groups have always been really great at acknowledging a lot of these factors.

Gretchen: Yeah. But we come into this saying 'well the type of English that's been considered the best is the kind that's you know modelled on Latin that's spoken by upper-class British dudes from like the 1800s, and that's a very particular type of English, it has no more particular merits than any other one but there are people who wanted to be associated with that type of group have been--

Lauren: Perpetuating that standard.

Gretchen: Exactly.

Lauren: Which is more or less accessible to different people and we acknowledge that and that's why it's important to teach, I think, the idea that there are genres and there are audiences, and the variety of English that you might speak at home or to your friends is not necessarily less valid, it's just not the ‘genre appropriate’.

Gretchen: Yeah, it's complicated because a lot of people get taught in school 'okay this is the right way to do things' or this is what' you need to do' and on the one hand you can say okay well the schools trying to give you the skills to survive in the world where people are going to judge you based on your language but they're also perpetuating the ideology that makes it okay to judge other people based on their language.

Lauren: Yeah, and I used to be a bit of a peever and like feel like I kind of knew these three things about language but actually because I'm rubbish at spelling and because I've often had not the kind of default ‘best accent’ quote-unquote as an Australian in other contexts I kind of learnt really quickly that, like complaining about the way other people use language wasn't going to get me very far because I'm not always that standard at it myself.

Gretchen: Yeah I think there's a lot of stuff around the Canadian accent, because it's not quite the same as the U.S., but Americans tend to have a very caricatured idea of what constitutes a Canadian accent. And then having a Nova Scotian accent within that I also have non standard features. But I think when I was initially interested in language it often gets conflated, the idea that ‘oh you're interested in linguistics so you must also be interested in like judging people's grammar’.

Lauren: Yeah I got a bunch of those books from people early on.

Gretchen: And you know if I meet people at parties and they're like 'oh you're a linguist I guess I better watch how I talk around you!' I'm like 'no no no please don't!' - well, I mean, I'm interested in what you're doing but like I'm going to analyse your vowels, I don't want to criticise you for them.

Lauren: That's the thing I find interesting is these like complaints about language tend to centre on the same things again and again. Whether or not people use 'like' all over the place is one of them, people are really obsessed with 'literally', literally obsessed.

Gretchen: Hyperbolic literally. I mean hyperbole is a thing, hyperbole is a real thing that people do. I don't think anyone complains that saying like 'I told you once I've told you a million times' like suddenly no one understands what million means anymore.

Lauren: Yeah, you know like everyone's pretty chill about fabulous meaning that something's pretty good these days. No one's like 'I'm sorry but it doesn't pertain to fables why are using the word fabulous'.

Gretchen: I mean, to be honest I actually don't think we're being pedantic enough about 'literally', because it literally means pertaining to a letter, and so if you're not using literal to mean pertaining to the alphabet I think you're using it wrong.

Lauren: If you are not struck down by absolute pure awe, the thing is not awesome.

Gretchen: True, true! But also awesome and awful mean the same thing and like if you use them to mean different things you're, you know...

Lauren: Yeah, so once you start it's like a levelling up right, like you start and you're like 'oh language has rules and here are a few I've learnt and I'm going to be judging other people for not also knowing these secret club rules'. And then you learn that actually all language is somewhat arbitrary and changing all the time. And a lot of things that people take as hardcore rules and don't like other people not doing were at their own time like arbitrary, non-standard uses and then you feel a bit more relaxed about things.

Gretchen: Yeah, like etymology is really fun, I like learning where words come from and 'oh these three words actually have this hidden connection' -- that's really interesting, it’s just not the “true” meaning of the word. There’s a nice graph by Rob Drummond that illustrates this, which we can link to, and it kind of shows that when you start learning things about language often your knowledge about language and your pedantry increase in lockstep with each other and then at a certain point your knowledge about language levels off for a bit - it's a stylised graph - and your pedantry just massively increases, and then as you keep learning more you realise there's actually no point in being pedantic about it and in fact your pedantry goes right the way down. And instead you start getting really annoyed by people who are who are annoyed about language as your knowledge about language keeps increasing, and so trying to move as rapidly as possible into that final stage.

Lauren: It's pretty zen over this side I have to say.

Gretchen: It's really good for your blood pressure to not be a pedant!

Lauren: Yeah. A lot of what we've been talking about as well has been presuming that it's older people complaining about what younger people do, but Allie Severin at Monash University did a really great thesis on looking at older and younger people who have feelings about non-standard grammar usage and things like spelling “there” “their” and “they're”. And some people move through to this trajectory younger or older

Gretchen: Mm-hmm and it's not exclusively an age thing, I mean, it's also gender, it's also race, it's also class, it's level of education. You spend five or ten years figuring out 'okay this is how you should use it' then in reward you can get very self-righteous about apostrophes when it comes to other people. And that's been very good for my sense of relaxation and sense of calm to be like 'actually what I'm really interested in is just tracking the decline of 'whom' and the bizarre circumstances under which people use it to try to sound fancy even when that's not historically the right environment'. It becomes an interesting question -- you can say “let's look at this analytically.” One of the ones that I'm tracking is the combination of 'a lot' with no space, because historically we've done this with the words like 'alright' and 'albeit' and 'altogether'.

Lauren: And 'a lot' is heading that way too.

Gretchen: It's heading that way, for perfectly good historical reasons -- it's not used like 'a (pause) lot'.

Lauren: We've kind of touched on the fact that a lot of these changes that happen that people decry are often indicators of creativity and they can be predictors of actually good language skills. So Nenagh Kemp has been doing, I have a post from 2011 here but she's been doing some work at the University of Tasmania over the years looking at the texting skills and literacy skills of young students, and as a general predictor just because a student is really using a lot of informal language in their text messages doesn't mean that they're going to be using that in classrooms as well. If they're educated in using the right language for the right audience, they can generally show good literacy skills, and they're capable of using one type of language with their friends and another in testing situations. So just because people do use non-standard forms in some context doesn't mean that they're actually bad at language.

Gretchen: I'm going to invoke XKCD again, I can't believe I get to to cite XKCD twice in the same episode, but there's another XKCD comic which we'll also link to, where one character says 'Another study found that kids who use SMS abbreviations actually score higher on grammar and spelling tests' and the other characters says 'Well why on earth is that a surprise? Imagine kids suddenly start playing catch literally all the time. Everywhere they go they throw balls back and forth, toss them in the air, hurl them at trees and signs nearly every waking hour their lives, do you think their generation will suck at baseball because they learn sloppy skills?’.

Lauren: It's true, it keeps you playing around with language more and thinking about it more often.

Gretchen: And I think that being reflexive about your own languages is something that can also happen in an informal setting. If you think about sending a text to someone that you have a crush on or that you need to break up with these are very high stakes social interactions -- you might get three friends to read over your texts with you and say 'do you think this struck the right note, like is this what I should be saying, did I use the wrong thing?'

Lauren: 'should there be a full stop there?'

Gretchen: Yeah! Someone tagged me on Twitter in a thread about sitting on a train as she was watching a middle-aged woman composing an entirely emoji text that had various combinations of happy emoji, you know like the party one, and the smiling face, and the heart, and so on and she composed and composed and deleted this text several times with different combinations of emojis because she was trying to strike the right aesthetic balance. And I think that if you think of good writing as writing that is self-reflexive and accomplishes its goals, I think that people are doing a lot of that when it comes to texting or other types of internet and media communication.

Lauren: And often it can be hard to figure out the generation that is using the non standard forms, and why they're using them. So I have a really nice example from my family where I have text messages from my mid-20s sister and my late 80s grandfather, and my grandfather was the one using all the short forms and half-finished sentences and really kind of flexible slangy language because he learned to do telegrams in the war so he's used to really shortened forms, and smashing those really awkward non-smartphone keys is really hard for him. Whereas my sister uses a swype keyboard so it's easier for her to use standard language in that context so you get the inverse of what people generally presumes happens across generations.

Gretchen: Mm-hmm and even the kids saying -- I heard this from David Crystal, who'd been talking to some high school kids and they said 'oh we don't use these textisms any more because that's what our parents do and that's not cool!' Nobody wants to be like their parents.

Lauren: Yup! So it's driving standardised language in text messages.

Gretchen: Another way that you can look at writing quality is in sheer number of words, because obviously if you write the most words that is the best. I'm kidding a little bit here, but there's a really interesting study that looked at this, Andrea Lunsford and Karen Lunsford looked at a longitudinal study of student writing across the decades and so they looked at papers from like American college students, first-year University students in 1917, 1930, 1986, and 2006.

Lauren: Cool, what a spread.

Gretchen: Yeah, so it's almost a hundred years of different points in what students in first-year composition writing classes are doing, and they found a couple really interesting things. One is that they found that the essay writing, the number of words per essay, has increased by 10 times.

Lauren: What?!

Gretchen: Yeah! So in 1917 the students wrote an average of a hundred and sixty two words per essay.

Lauren: That's not an essay that's a paragraph!

Gretchen: Well it was written by hand in like big fountain pens so I guess it looks like it an essay!

Lauren: Yeah yeah, fair enough.

Gretchen: And in 1986 they wrote 422 words, and in 2006 they wrote over a thousand words.

Lauren: Wow.

Gretchen: And so then the number of words they've written is greatly increased, but what's interesting is that the number of errors stayed remarkably constant over 100 years. So students in are making the same number of errors, but they made different errors.

Lauren: Okay, that kind of makes sense.

Gretchen: So in the earlier studies the biggest, biggest error was spelling errors. But now the students aren't making spelling errors anymore because they’re computer processing their papers, and they have spellcheck now. So now the biggest error became wrong word -- they're using spellcheck but they pick the wrong word. Another thing that's changed is what the writing instructors prioritise, because how they decided whether something was an error, is they had a bunch of University professors mark the papers, the professors decided what to consider an error and one of the big errors that showed up in 2006 was incomplete or missing documentation, meaning they did the citations wrong - but in 1917 they weren't even expecting students to write citations!

Lauren: So ‘the kids, doing okay’ is basically the take away.

Gretchen: The kids are doing okay.

Lauren: Once you become aware of the fact that a lot of this change isn't as strongly generational as we think it is, and it often actually shows really positive things about younger people's language use, it seems like quite a bizarre thing to be so hung up on complaining about what the kids are doing these days.

Gretchen: I think language is a thing you can project a lot of your other worries on, so any worries you have about the kids you can project on their language. So I want to coin a term, Lauren, can I coin a term?

Lauren: Okay this is your one term that you can coin for this episode, go

Gretchen: I think there's a problem when it comes to people dismissing the ideas contained in an argument because it's coached in terms that are not prestigious linguistically, so saying that 'you said something and you've used an apostrophe wrong in it so I can dismiss what you've said because you used the apostrophe wrong' without engaging with whether or not the argument itself is good. Or conversely 'oh you made this argument and you said it in eloquent terms so I should give it more more credence'. And I think this is a logical fallacy, and I think this is a logical fallacy that's kind of like an ad hominem attack where you say 'oh well you're ugly so your argument isn't good' I want to call it an 'ad vocem' attack, which is when you attack someone's voice instead of their argument.

Lauren: I feel like I'm more compelled by your argument because you've used this fancy Latinate term that you've made up.

Gretchen: I needed to take advantage of my misspent Latin education.

Lauren: I don't even know if it's /vokem/ or /vosem/.

Gretchen: This is what I love, it's like there's no right way to say it, it could be /vokem/ it could be /vɑsem/, it could be /vɑkem/, I don't know! There's like four right things! If you criticize someone for the one they pick you're doing it!

Lauren: So are you default required to always vacillate and choose a different one each time just to keep people on their toes?

Gretchen: Yeah! I've been thinking about this term because we were planning this episode and I was thinking 'I think there should be word for this' and I'm very inconsistent myself with how I say it and I think that's great, I think that there's allowed to be multiple competing standards. If you want to engage in an argument in good faith, the way to do that is not to be persnickety about how someone saying it and say 'what are the ideas, do they have merits?'. Someone can be an eloquent orator and still have terrible, terrible ideas. But if you name it as logical fallacy and if you coach it in the terms of like 'oh it's Latinate, it's fancy' then maybe that's something we can borrow, some prestige from Latin to say 'nobody wants to do a logical fallacy!' Like this is a thing that we should recognize in ourselves. And if you are someone who likes calling people out on stuff, the fun part is by switching over to being more tolerant about language you then get to call out all the people who are being critical about it instead of the people who are using apostrophes correctly, so you still a group of people to get annoyed at, but you get to feel like you're contributing to a more positive cause.

Lauren: I think it also means that you can give people more useful feedback on language use, so instead of saying 'don't use this form' you can say 'in a formal essay don't do this, you can still use that in text messages'.

Gretchen: You can say things like 'the conventions of the genre are as follows, if you'd like to not follow the conventions of the genre that's a decision you can make, but you should be aware that this is what the conventions are'. 

Another takeaway is if you look at what kids actually do when they're exposed to fragmented or incomplete linguistic input, they actually create full-fledged languages from kind of bizarre or difficult linguistic circumstances.

Lauren: A really famous example of this that we have is Nicaraguan Sign Language, and the fact that we've taken until episode 7 to talk about it it's actually pretty impressive because it's such a great go to anecdote for linguists, and such an amazing thing that happened. In the 70s and 80s in Nicaragua there was a change in policy that meant that a lot of deaf children suddenly came together at school instead of being isolated and using their own home sign or maybe a little local village sign language. And they came together and these children over the course of a couple of generations went from all having kind of only a rudimentary communicative system to developing what is now considered to be a fully fledged language, which is Nicaraguan Sign Language. And there are around three thousand users of sign language now, it's got its own ISO language code, and the great thing is it's been studied since its birth. Since the 1970s, there have been people watching the evolution of this language and how children can use limited resources and inputs to create something really sophisticated.

Gretchen: Yeah, so it teaches us a lot about the human and the human child capacity for language and what you can do with that. So if ever we have disrupted or interrupted linguistics transmission it's actually going to be the kids that save us. They're not going to bring us back to what we had before but they're going to make a fully fledged linguistic system that's capable of complex ideas and complex thoughts. And this brings us back to a point from episode one where we talked about the language of space.

Lauren: And our space babies!

Gretchen: And how the American and the Russian astronauts and cosmonauts use each other's languages and use this hybrid English-Russian pidgin to communicate with each other. But because all the astronauts so far have been adults this is kind of an incomplete, fragmented English-Russian hybrid space pidgin. However, if and when we go to Mars, the astronauts and the cosmonauts might get together and have some space babies.

Lauren: If there were children...

Gretchen: Then these space babies would grow up exposed to space pidgin and they would turn it into space creole.

Lauren: And it would actually develop more sophisticated grammatical structures, the children wll take the input that they get and turn it into a more fully fledged linguistic system. So the kids in space are going to be okay.

Gretchen: The kids in space are going to be okay, the kids on earth are going to be okay, we're all okay. Also, someone needs to write this story about space babies, I would like to read it.

Lauren: I would definitely love to read about babies in space standardising English-Russian pidgin into a creole.

Gretchen: Write us about space babies, this is what I want to see!

[Theme music]

Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all of the things mentioned in this episode you can go to Lingthusiasm dot com. You can listen to us on iTunes, google play music, SoundCloud or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr, and you can support this podcast at patreon.com / lingthusiasm. I can be found @GretchenAMcC on Twitter and my blog is All Things Linguistic.com.

Lauren: I tweet and blog as Superlinguo. Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our producer is Claire, and our music is by The Triangles. Stay Lingthusiastic!

[Theme music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

#linguistics #language #podcast #transcript #transcripts #language change #descriptivism #Prescriptivism #peevers #ad vocem #episode 7

[buddaimond]

Kristen Stewart talks fashion, fears, text etiquette - and 'Personal Shopper

by Fiona Williams 18 Apr 2017 Q: With Personal Shopper you give us an insight into that rarefied world of high fashion, and how it works.

There are a very, very small group of people who actually go and shop at Chanel showrooms and those people are the real “other worldly” wealthy people. It’s couture, it’s delicate, handcrafted, really precious one of a kind works of art so you are investing in an artform when you go and buy their stuff.

Chanel does stand separately from most of the others - they are an independently owned company, still, which is the last of the luxury brands. And you feel that. There is a genuine, very compulsive faithfulness to aesthetic and care for that aesthetic. They really do stand apart from the people who do it for farcical reasons. A lot of people want to look like they appreciate an aesthetic and beauty but… Some people look at a sunset and it brings them to tears. Some people don’t look twice. It’s a really human spiritual thing to be moved by an image. So within fashion, those people really stick out because those who don’t have it are there because they want to be popular, they want attention. They want to be looked at in a certain way and it validates them in some way to be looked at. That’s actually very empty. It’s just really easy to tell the difference between the two.

Q: You’re back working with Olivier again. How was it different this time? How did you build on what you’d learned about each other from Sils Maria?

The roles are very different, for one thing. Olivier and I have a great relationship because we really ‘see’ each other. I feel like he really understands me and I don’t really have to explain myself to him. We usually agree. There’s a great, real friendship and a closeness that provides a trust that, like, just puts you in the perfect position to explore a difficult subject and always feel like you’re going to be caught by this safety net if you ever really, truly, fall too hard. And that only got deeper on the second go around.

Also just by nature of the movie, it’s so much more sad and you know, Sils Maria was bittersweet and a little bit tumultuous between those two characters, and there was pain in that, but it wasn’t as deep and as fundamental as the pain in this movie. It didn’t bring into question things that don’t have answers and that’s what this movie is about. It’s really about finding peace in not knowing where we’re going to end up and who are are and whether or not our reality is just our perception or whether it’s something that we share. We’re never going to know that. But it’s worth asking the question. It’s worth being aware of it. For both of us, we found that you need to be so raw in order to address those things. We’re just so close now. We’ve been through so much together now that we have those footholds to base a relationship off of, and we’ll only go deeper.

Q: What was it like to have an iPhone as your co-star in so many scenes? How did you approach that and try to make those scenes interesting?

Oh God, what you can project onto an iPhone and into messages from somebody can sometimes be so one-sided! I was basically playing with my own version of myself. Also I felt like anytime there was going to be a close-up or an insert of the messages, it should feel like a close-up of me. You should feel the tension in my hands. You should feel every typo. Every choice in punctuation should speak volumes, because it is a new language that we’ve all sort of written ourselves. You have a different text voice, whether you capitalise something. Or put a period on it, or put a lot of spaces in between something, it says a lot! This is this sort of new language that’s interesting. That... [motions texting, with intensity]... I mean… [laughs]

Q: Are you a big texter? Ever feel like you need a digital detox?

I’m not constantly reaching for my phone. I have a personal Instagram that allows me to stay connected to people that I don’t see on a regular basis, but I don’t have social media, I don’t have this heavy phone addiction. So I’ve never had to detox from it. There are times I find myself reaching for my phone for no reason and I just literally, go, ‘What are you looking for? Nothing!’. When i notice myself doing that, I realise that i’m actually just bored and that I should occupy my time with something else.

Q: What did you think about the ghost story aspect of the film?

When I read the script, I kind of missed the fact that it was a ghost story, because my character, the way she was written, wasn’t that afraid. There was such fervent curiosity that drove her towards the ghosts that I didn’t find them scary in the script. I thought that there was just like a need for questions to be answered, and that need overpowered any fear-based impulse. Then when we got to make the movie... the unknown is terrifying and I don’t care who you are. That was much more theoretical, that idea of not being afraid. It was something that i could implicate conceptually, but literally, on the day, nobody could face those things and not be literally, physically, shaken by it because it’s like, I mean it is scary! It’s really scary. It’s just that while I was reading it, I didn’t realise that it was such a - quote-unquote - horror movie.

He really goes for some effective scares

I know, right?! But to be honest, I still find the scarier parts of that movie are when you can see someone suddenly aware of the fact that we’ll never know where we are or who we are necessarily. Those moments where Maureen starts reeling, and things become incredibly uncertain? Those are debilitating, anxiety-inducing, physically stifling thoughts. I know that feeling. I was like, ‘God, I’m so happy I’m not in one of those places, I’m so happy that I’m not um, in that right now’. Because I’ve had moments like that where I’ve been racked with absolute physical manifestations of anxiety, and it was just like, the only way to get out of that is to go for a run or to physically get yourself moving and really exert your physicality and get yourself out of your brain. Because you’re never going to find the answer. Again, it’s finding peace in the not knowing and finding an appreciation for whatever it is that connects us, and i know it is something invisible, it’s worthwhile because it makes you feel less alone. And that’s really what we’re all hoping to do anyway.

Q: On the subject of physicality, I notice you’ve made Maureen intensely tactile. She’s always gripping at belts, and scrunching up these beautiful pieces of jewellery as she inspects them. How did you work that in as a Maureen mannerism? Why does she do that?

I think Maureen’s attracted to things that she’s ashamed to be attracted to. So she’s aggressive with them. These really delicate necklaces, she’s so taken by them but she’s feeling guilty about it, so she almost wants to harm them. Do you know what i mean?

Not personally, but sure.

Because she’s not the most self-assured person and she has so many aspects of herself that don’t typically go together, finding a balance in that is kind of the struggle of the movie. There’s one side of her that’s purely animalistic and very feminine and really just embodies... She’s like a tigress. She’s like a really sensual, immediate, impulsive animal, but there are also other times where she’s so moored by thought and those defences go up immediately. And those defences are very hard and very masculine and androgynous because she misses her brother. She’s half a person and she’s trying to emulate him. It’s like there was a strength that he had that she doesn’t have without him, and she’s trying to do an impression of him in order to feel strong and it’s just not her. It’s sad to watch that kind of thing, it’s clearly just somebody that’s trying to hide.

Q: You’ve played a lot of celebrity assistant roles lately, with this, Sils Maria, and also recently, in the Woody Allen film. Are you referencing relationships that you have with people who work with you?

Yeah, it’s funny role reversal. I know that job inside out. But I don’t have a personal shopper. That’s not a very common job. [Grabs at blazer] These clothes that we wear to press conferences and red carpets and stuff, they’re all lent to us. I don’t have people going out and buying opulent elaborate pieces for me for my own collection, it’s an interaction with that artform which is temporary and within the context of promoting a movie.

Q: Some celebrities seem to use fashion as an escape, or a bit of armour, for want of a better word. You seem really connected to the clothes you wear, though.

Absolutely, I think when clothes really can do their job, they’re the opposite of armour, they can make you feel like you don’t want to hide, and you’re the true version of yourself in the right outfit.

Some people don’t have much interest in it, and some people don’t have very defined taste. A lot of actors really just don’t care, so they hire people that do, to help them. But me? I really like it. The reason I’m not ashamed of that is because it’s coming from a really true place. I don’t find it to be superficial at all. I think that when I put on the right garment I feel like a truer version of myself. I feel there are stories to tell with clothes, and when you find people that feel the same way, it’s really fun to work with them.

I think it’s pretty obvious when there’s the opposite of that - it’s obvious when people are drawn to that world because they want attention. I don’t want to look good because I want everyone to stare at me; I want to look good because I want to feel like myself. It’s about feeling like you, and clothes can help you achieve that.

http://www.sbs.com.au/movies/article/2017/04/17/kristen-stewart-talks-fashion-fears-text-etiquette-and-personal-shopper

Follow the author here.

#Kristen Stewart #Personal Shopper Movie #Olivier Assayas #Fashion and Acting #SBS Australia

[5hfanfiction]

January 18,2017 (IV)

“I love her.”

Camila’s POV

I suddenly wasn’t feeling so well anymore, her words hit me like  ton of bricks. Everything she was saying was all leading up to my demise. ~i sigh~ How could I have been so stupid, so stupid to actually think she would want to be with me. After everything I’ve put her through, after everything I’ve put US through. It all makes sense ya know, her pulling away, me pushing her away. Saying I wanted to spend more time in the studio when in reality I was just trying to get away from her. Unintentionally I was pushing her more and more towards Lucy, this is all my fault. I-

“Camz, please talk to me. We’ve been giving each other the silent treatment for so long now. I know you, and I know you are probably blaming yourself because you were basically avoiding me for the better part of last year-.”  How does she know me so well? I ask myself. She’s still talking but I can’t hear what she is saying, all I see is her lips moving and wishing so much to place mine on hers. “Camz!”….“Listen, I….think we should go get this interview started, they are waiting for us.” I quickly try to move past her but again she knows me through and through and grabs my wrist to stop me- part of me wants to do the cliche thing and crash my lips against hers just like any romantic movie scene would go, but this isn’t a movie…this is my life - she looks me in the eyes as if she’s trying to read me I hope I’m not giving anything away. “Camz, don’t you want to talk about this?” I smile, “No, we’ve had them waiting long enough, really. I’m happy for you and I don’t want to argue, or try to decipher anything Lauren really. It’s clear that you’ve moved on and I’m happy that you are happy. Let’s go!”

“Hey guys it’s Dinah, hi I’m Camila, I’m Ally, hey it’s Normani, hi I’m Lauren. And we’re Fifth Harmony”

Interviewer: “Wow, it’s so great to hear that introduction again, I know I as a Harmonizer from the start I was really excited for this intro and you guys just made my dreams come true! So thank you for that.”

Ally: “Awe you are adorable no thank you for having us, we’ve loved Billboard from the start so definitely thank you guys for all the love and support you’ve given us throughout the years.”

Interviewer: “Of course, always a pleasure to have you ladies in our studio, together or separate which has been the case the last few times, with that being said Lauren congratulations on the success with "Back To Me” it’s been on repeat in our studio and on my phone, car and home constantly! It’s killing it on the chart as well so congratulations!“

Dinah,Camila,Ally,Normani: "Sameee, it’s a bop!” “So Good!!” “raindrop, drop top, it’s a bop!” -They all laugh hysterically, just like old times.

Lauren: “ gosh! Thank you so much! Much appreciated!”

Interviewer: “ok, now while we are the topic of you guys being separated, there have been a ton of speculations as to the reason for you Camila leaving the group”

-I nodded-

Interviewer: “Would you like to elaborate on that?

Camila: "Well, yes there were a ton of speculations of my leaving. Most if not all were false. The statements made by our management at the time were false, I didn’t have my representatives tell the girls I was leaving. I did that on my own, we had a quote unquote meeting where we all put all our cards on the table with personal and professional relationships we’ve had at that time. I was very hurt with the way they had put out such a harsh statement like that and with the icing me out of things such as accounts,and appearances so quick. This very day one month ago was the official day all of our contracts were "unattached” so to speak. I’m sure the other girls can elaborate that from their own perspective too - I looked to the other girls who all nodded- I as well as the rest of the girls were very much wanting to do solo projects, I guess in retrospect I was just more vocal about it than you guys were. There are definitely things I wish I could have done differently in the journey we’ve had together -at this point I was speaking to the girls more so than the interviewer- but I don’t regret anything. - I giggled- It’s been the most disastrous blessing in disguise. - Lauren smiles at me, and I smile back - The real reason for my leaving though is not what everyone thinks it is.“

Interviewer: "It’s not? Well please clarify it’s why we are all here. Some of the few speculations we’ve gotten were mainly of feuds between you and other members of the group. i.e feuds with Normani and Ally for you wanting to go solo. Feuds between you and management for the same reasons of wanting to go solo. Also feuds between Lauren and yourself for speculations of a personal relationship gone wrong.”

Normani: “ The "feud” between Camila and I is non existent, I love this girl. She is my sister. Like she said we’ve been through a journey together and though I won’t lie there were arguments but those are normal, nobody is 100% happy all the time. Everyone has their disagreements and fights but those can all be solved. Yes her wanting to go solo was a surprise, her debuting her single was an even bigger surprise mostly because we were blindsided by it. We had no idea she had actually laid out a track and was premiering it. When the world found out about the single we did too. It would have been nice to hear directly from her, not a fan who tagged me in the cover art. But it’s not like she avoided us about it, after the fact she got us all together and told us apologized for not having us hear it from her first but she told us and we supported her. Sure I was pissed at first but not to the point that the band would break up over it.“

Ally: "Same here, we would have liked her to have taken a different approach on it but thats really what it came down to. She messed up but she stepped up and took whatever backlash she had to because at the end of the day she’s an artist. We all are and we at times have to fight for the art that we want to express to the world. We as a group have done it for songs on our albums, and she was doing it for her own art. We love Harmonizers we really do, they are the true ride or die fans. But I think that sometimes they forget that we were FORMED into a group. It’s not something any of us initially aspired to be. We all auditioned for X Factor as solo artists, and at the time we fit best as a group and it’s brought us success that has given us the opportunity to be on a platform that we otherwise wouldn’t be in. I personally owe everything to this group." 

Ally smiled and reached over for my hand which I gladly took and squeezed hers as well.

Interviewer: "and what about with management?”

Dinah: “Well as we confirmed with you guys, we were given a different and more equal contract within our same label. With this new contract that the four of us are really excited about it gives us more creative freedom in terms of writing our own songs, more voice in performances and visual ideas for videos. Also with this new contract we are focused and committed to Fifth Harmony as a group but we also are legally able to pursue solo endeavors. Which was verbally told to us in our previous contract but legally we actually couldn’t. That was one of the downfalls our old management had with Camila." 

 Dinah also reached for my hand and I gladly took it. I knew that the girls and I had some unresolved issues we had to speak on and I knew that this would help but wow did I need to hear this from them. I not only reiterated to me their feelings towards me but it showed me how much I missed them. I spent so much time trying to separate myself from the whole "group” thing that I lost my way and lost my friends a little bit. I’m so glad I have them back and that they actually want me back. I couldn’t be happier with them than I am right now, well at least for now. Then the interview took a turn towards relationships. 

Interviewer: “So Lauren how did you feel when your bandmate was getting essentially hate on social media for doing a solo project and then you yourself comes out with a solo project?”

Lauren: “First off, I and we all support Camila 100% and to reiterate what Ally said earlier we all came into this wanting to be solo artists so it’s not crazy to think that eventually we all want to pursue a solo career in whatever field we decide to pursue it in. As for the hate she got on social media I think and she can speak for herself but I think it was the beginning of not feeling like she was a part of this group - she pauses- among other things…. - she composes herself- the fans are a big part of who we are. We wouldn’t be anywhere without our fans, having said that we want the fans to support ALL of us in no matter what we do. We are no strangers to social media, our fans are very hip on keeping us up to date on things even before we are sometimes. - she chuckles looking over to the rest of us -  I didn’t think it was fair to her, she had worked really hard to bring out something that she was proud of and people shitted on it because it didn’t have Fifth Harmony attached to it. I felt hurt for her and I didn’t like it, she knows how we all felt and she and I had a heart of heart about it. At the end of the day we all support each other in whatever we do, Mani with the dances, Camila with her songs, and whatever else we each decide to do.”

Interviewer: “ I love all this, like I said I’m a Harmonizer from day one and this is making me so giddy right now! I love you guys and seeing you all here together and hearing how you guys are stronger than ever even though you are not together as a group anymore but this chemistry is giving me so much life! Speaking of chemistry, can we address ‘Camren’?”

…..

A/N: ahhhh hopefully this is good. let me know!?! - if you want to follow i’m also on wattpad the story on there is called “I needed you guys” follow me on there I’m  @LernJergi_H4rmony

#UPDATE #series #camren #normally #laurmani #caminah #alren #normila #camally #norminah #laurinah #dinally #humour #romance fluff #submission #january 18 2017

[hub-pub-bub]

Growing up in the Dominican Republic, Adriana Herrera was always a voracious reader, tearing through books from all different genres. But when her mother gave her a box set of romance novels about an Austrian princess that had been translated into Spanish, Herrera discovered a genre that, decades later, still provides "a particular type of comfort read".

She tore through young adult romance novels in her teens and came back to romance stories in her late 20s while serving as an aid worker in Latin America and Africa.

"It always was a great place of self-care for me to read stories that I knew would have a happy ending and where there was a real focus on the heroine and her happiness and the things that were important to her, and the hero trying to be better so they could get a happy ending," Herrera told Al Jazeera.

Armed with a "craving to see characters that centered on my experience and that could resonate with my particular likes," Herrera, 40, decided to write her own books. The result is a four-part collection called Dreamers, and the second installment of that series - a book called American Fairytale - was released on May 20.

Three of Herrera's books are queer romances, and the fourth focuses on a heterosexual relationship. Herrera's writing falls into a literary genre known as Own Voices. Coined by young adult author Corinne Duyvis on Twitter in 2015, this term refers to works in which the "protagonist and the author share a marginalised identity".

Romance novelist Adriana Herrera's writing falls within the 'Own Voices' genre of book publishing [Adriana Herrera]

Resonating with readers

Romance novelist Adriana Herrera's writing falls within the 'Own Voices' genre of book publishing [Adriana Herrera]

A number of #OwnVoices books have skyrocketed to fame recently, especially in the young adult and middle-grade genres.

Author Angie Thomas has two books on The New York Times' young adult bestseller list. One of them - The Hate U Give - is about an African-American teen who watches a police officer shoot her childhood friend. It has spent 116 weeks on the list, and there, it was recently joined by other Own Voices titles including Elizabeth Acevedo's With the Fire on High and Tomi Adeyemi's Children of Blood and Bone.

Readers hungry for Own Voices stories have compiled lists of them on Goodreads, a social website for book enthusiasts. And they've used social media to call on the publishing industry to produce more titles.

The industry is taking notice. The lineup for BookExpo America, a major publishing industry trade event taking place in New York City this week, features a number of panels focusing on diversity.

But publishing companies have generally been slow to catch up to demand, in part due to a lack of diversity within the industry itself.

'We know those voices need to be heard'

In 2015, Lee & Low Books, an independent, minority-owned children's book publisher in the United States, surveyed more than 13,000 employees at 35 publishing companies and eight review journals as part of its first Diversity Baseline Survey.

The survey, which looked at race, gender identity, sexual orientation and disability, found that the publishing industry was overwhelmingly white, straight and non-disabled.

That lack of diversity may explain why works by talented writers of colour and authors from other marginalised communities have failed to find significant traction with mainstream publishing companies or have failed to be widely promoted.

Herrera has seen that reality firsthand. When she started writing her books in 2017, "there was only a certain amount of traditional publishing that you could even get a contract with, because gay romance wasn't something that could be quote-unquote mainstream," she said. "That in and of itself is a problem, because it's kind of the unwritten rule that queer stories don't have a place in the general mainstream market or sitting on the bookshelves next to the historicals."

“...it's kind of the unwritten rule that queer stories don't have a place in the general mainstream market...” – ADRIANA HERRERA, ROMANCE NOVELIST

In response to the lack of diversity in traditional publishing houses, some smaller, independent companies have cropped up to fill the void. Katie Rose Guest Pryal and Lauren Faulkenberry founded Blue Crow Publishing in Chapel Hill, North Carolina three years ago and publish between five and six titles per year. They said their company "actively seeks out" Own Voices stories - and three of the seven authors they have published so far have fallen into that category.

"When we founded Blue Crow, we wrote a mission statement with five principles to guide our work. One of the principles goes like this: 'We believe that all authors deserve a voice, especially those whose writing the publishing world has so often turned its back on,'" Pryal and Faulkenberry told Al Jazeera. "We feel that mainstream publishing has historically marginalised a lot of voices out there, and we know those voices need to be heard."

But it isn't enough to just put that message on Blue Crow's website and wait, they said.

"If a publisher does not actively seek them, then you will not find them. If you do not reach out to organisations of writers of colour, for example, or disabled writers, then you will not see submissions by marginalised writers," Pryal and Faulkenberry explained. "It isn't enough to simply have your door open. You have to show that you are receptive, that you will actually give those manuscripts a fair read. Marginalised authors are gun-shy, and for good reason."

'A lot of barriers to certain stories'

Herrera said she and her agent ultimately went for a digital-first publication with Harlequin, a major romance-novel publisher that is now part of HarperCollins, but "the conversation didn't even go to a place where like, sure, we could get a print deal, we could get an advance or anything like that".

“...mainstream publishing has historically marginalised a lot of voices out there, and we know those voices need to be heard.” – KATIE ROSE GUEST PRYAL AND LAUREN FAULKENBERRY, FOUNDERS, BLUE CROW PUBLISHING

"It was kind of like, this is what it is, you just know that if you have written this kind of romance, you just won't get a bigger deal," she added. "Things are changing, but I feel like there are still a lot of barriers to certain stories."

Those barriers definitely exist in the romance genre: in its more than 30-year history, no black author has ever been awarded a RITA, the top honour from the Romance Writers of America. And young adult readers accustomed to that genre's wide Own Voices landscape will be disappointed with the selection when they graduate to the romance genre, Herrera said.

"Young adult is leaps and bounds ahead of us," she explained. "When they come into adult romance, they are not going to find stories that are organic to their lived experience. They are not going to find stories that are about being queer, about being gender-fluid, about being a person who is living at the intersection of marginalised identities."

Herrera's books give voice to just those sort of characters, featuring "four childhood friends who are all Afro-Latinx from the Caribbean and grew up together in the South Bronx," she said. All four titles explore the immigrant experience, something Herrera has lived since coming to the United States in 2002 at the age of 23 for graduate school.

"When I started writing the books it was 2017, and the narrative around the place of immigrants in the US was beginning to feel really hard, so I just wanted to write stories that didn't necessarily present a story of toil. I wanted to write [about] people that were thriving and people that were striving," Herrera explained, adding that she feels characters of colour in fiction seem to have to "earn their happily ever after through brokenness, and I really wanted to pull that out of the narrative and present people that were striving to be best."

Herrera said that as a bisexual woman who came of age during the AIDS epidemic, discovering LGBTQ romance novels was powerful for her. "To see LGBTQ stories that weren't about people dying a horrible death or horrible things happening to queer people was something really, really impactful for me," she said.

'Write past those barriers'

Lee & Low is currently collecting data for its second Diversity Baseline Survey this year to see if if the publishing industry has moved the needle on staff diversity.

But the industry conversation surrounding Own Voices is not without contention. A broader debate is taking place over whether it is necessary for authors to share the identities of their protagonists in order to produce compelling stories.

For their part, Pryal and Faulkenberry believe it is a mistake to view Own Voices as excluding mainstream authors.

"What Own Voices does, rather than limiting writers who want to write stories of people whose experiences are unfamiliar to them, is encourage writers who have been barred from writing about their own life experiences. These writers have been barred by traditional publishing gatekeepers, but with Own Voices, they have a chance, even if it is a small chance, to write past those barriers," they said.

"Without the Own Voices movement, marginalised writers might otherwise have avoided writing about their marginalised experiences," they added. "After all, mainstream publishing is still very white, straight, normate, what have you - from editors to agents to authors. And they prefer stories with main characters who look like them."

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