#italy lockdown | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

growingstories · 2 months

Text

Male model

Male model Darren had always dreamed of walking the runways of big fashion shows in Italy and Paris, showcasing the latest designs from top designers. And his dream came true. Darren was known for his chiseled features, sharp jawline, and perfectly toned physique. He was the epitome of what the fashion industry considered the ideal male body. However, everything changed when the world was hit by the devastating COVID-19 pandemic.

As the first four weeks of lockdown began, Darren found himself confined to his home. With no photoshoots or fashion shows to attend, he started to spend most of his time indulging in comfort foods. The lack of physical activity and the stress of the situation caused him to gain weight rapidly.

Weeks went by, and Darren found himself down on his luck. His once slender body was now a bit plumper, and his modeling career was suffering. But fate had something different in store for him. A fast-food chain, Big Burger, impressed by his unique transformation, decided to approach Darren. They wanted him to be the face of their brand, capitalizing on his relatability to the general public. The offer was tempting, promising a hefty paycheck and a chance to regain his popularity.

Darren, despite his reservations, decided to take the offer. He thought that once the campaign was over, he could go back to his old life and lose the extra weight. Little did he know that this decision would gradually change the course of his life. In an attempt to shed off some excess weight, Darren embarked on a weight loss journey. With the help of a personal trainer and nutritionist, he managed to lose 5kg. However, just as he was beginning to see progress, his manager had other plans for him.

Another campaign for Big Burger, this time promoting their new burger known as "The Big Burger," was on the horizon. The company insisted that Darren put on more weight to portray their idea of the perfect consumer. Reluctantly, he agreed, knowing that it would mean sacrificing his own happiness for financial gain.

Also other food companies started sending him an array of mouth-watering treats and samples to promote on his social media channels. Darren found himself overwhelmed by the constant influx of food while struggling to maintain his weight and image. Nevertheless, his manager saw this as an opportunity and suggested that Darren start a podcast reviewing food products around the world.

As his career skyrocketed, Darren's weight ballooned. His previous model clients refused to book him for their campaigns, citing his size as the main reason. Deeply frustrated, Darren began to long for the glamour and success he once had. He confided in his manager, expressing his desire to lose weight and get back in shape.

Sympathetic to Darren's concerns, his manager arranged a deal with a reputable gym to help him shed the excess weight. However, just as he was getting ready to embark on his journey, Big Burger offered him an enticing three-year contract. They promised him stability, incredible earnings, and fame, but the condition was that he couldn't lose weight. Struck by the allure of financial security, Darren reluctantly accepted the offer, believing that he would be able to lose weight once the contract was over. Month by month, he had photoshoots for new products, made social media posts, and received an abundance of food and meals sent directly to his doorstep.

His fame grew, not as a fashion model but as the food reviewer he unintentionally became. The money kept rolling in, but Darren grew increasingly unhappy with his appearance. He was kut of breath fast and tying his shoes became a workout at itself. He decided to secretly visit the gym and after only a few weeks he lost 10kg.

During his next photoshoot, the photographer was surprised by Darren's leaner appearence. The pictures turned out to be fantastic, but just as he was basking in his success, he received a call from the big boss of Big Burger. The boss warned Darren that if he continued losing weight, his contract would be terminated. In an attempt to fail his weightloss regime, a big box of sweet snacks arrived at his doorstep, accompanied by a note expressing apologies for their strictness.

While guilt washed over him during his indulgence in the snacks, Darren found solace in the gym. He focused solely on building muscle without engaging in any cardio exercises. The boss's presents continued for weeks, and as a result, his muscles popped, and his belly grew once again.

Instead of feeling dejected, Darren grew happier with his newfound bulkiness. He decided to embrace his weight and the attention he received at the gym from other big men who admired his strength. Every few days, he received surprises from Big Burger and other food chains, all expressing their happiness and love for him.

Months turned into years, and Darren became unrecognizable. With his size constantly increasing, his bank account overflowed with money, but he was no longer content with his appearance. He missed the glamour of his past life and the feeling of confidence that being fit and healthy had brought him.

Darren felt a mix of guilt and determination as he stared at the feast before him. He decided to channel his guilt into motivation, guilt for enjoying the snacks to the fullest but not giving up on his fitness journey. He immediately went to the gym and worked out without any cardio, craving the unity of his mind and body. This cycle continued for two weeks. His muscles bulked up, and his belly expanded as he consumed all the snacks provided by Big Burger. He received unwavering support from his followers and fans on social media, celebrating his transformation in every post.

Embracing his new body, Darren made a life-altering decision. He chose to let go of social standards and expectations and embraced his weight. With every passing day, he became more confident and happy in his frame.

Surprises from Big Burger, along with other food companies, kept flooding in. They admired Darren's loyalty and dedication to their brand, constantly sending him food and treats. His fame solidified not only as a male model turned food reviewer but also as a symbol of unabashed self-acceptance.

With every passing day, Darren's fame and bank account grew, but it was his inner happiness that truly bloomed. He had discovered that being comfortable in his own skin was worth more than any fashion show or modeling contract.

#fictionalweightgain #maleweightgain #maleweightgainstories #weightgain #weightgainstories #fictionalstories #wg fantasy #wg fiction #exjock #aiweightgain

225 notes · View notes

eveningepiphany · 1 year

Text

masterlist ✭

hello and welcome to my official masterlist! this will be updated regularly with every new work i post. thank you for all your ongoing support, all my love <3

the list is rather short at the moment, however it will continue to grow over time and we’ll definitely get a few series in here!

feel free to send in requests here

[*] indicates smut

—ONESHOTS (2022)

sick

Y/N is looking after harry when he’s got a bad case of the flu, and even though they’re both just friends, it’s clear they see each other as more than that.

and they were roommates*

when harry and Y/N have gone from longtime best friends to roommates, the lines that have been slowly blurring since their teen years are beginning to disappear altogether.

hotel room*

harry & Y/N are friends but it’s a love hate relationship with so much tension you can hardly breathe. this tension isn’t any better when they get stuck in a hotel room together for the night. and it only has one bed.

mistletoe*

[part one] [part two*]

you’re with the band at anne’s house the week of christmas and harry points out you’re both standing under a mistletoe.

—ONESHOTS (2023)

learn to knock*

not knocking on your door has led to harry walking in on you… with your hand between your legs.

lessons*

sitting on harrys couch, he gets it out of you that you have never intimately touched someone else, and he offers straight up for you to learn off him.

far from sober

[part one] [part two]

you’re incredibly drunk, and when you are it comes with you having an obscene lack of a filter. harry being the sweetheart he is, is trying to get you back into your hotel room in one piece. he was not ready for you to be so touchy.

manbun*

harry and you are about to fuck in the back of his car, and you want his hair out for it. little do you know how much he likes a bit of hair pulling.

butterfly*

you’re on a holiday with your family and family friends— including harry— who hasn’t had a shirt on this whole time and things amp up quickly in your hotel room.

reconnect*

lockdown is tough on both you and harry. you miss the feeling of physical touch so much you start chasing to fill that void in one another.

innocent*

while on the couch, harry ends up with innocent y/n on his lap, and she gets unexpectedly very worked up over his thigh being under her, and he does something about it.

tease*

seeing harry tonguing his guitar last night has you finally admitting the state he puts you in. and that’s never good when you’re a tour photographer. especially now you have photographic evidence of the moment.

go with it

your ex boyfriend— someone you never want to talk to again— is searching for you at a party. trying to do anything to deter him or get away, you spot harry, and a plan comes to fruition.

SERIES—

welcome to the final show

you take a beautiful sign to the final show and have the sweetest interaction with harry. then somehow bump into him in italy 2 days later. leading to an exchange of numbers, and a lot of falling in love.

[part one]

[part two]

[part three]

[part four]*

pirates gold

being a royal, you always knew you were meant to keep your wits about you. despite never fitting into your status, a lapse of your judgement leads you to getting taken captive by a group of pirates, and their captain, Harry.

[part one]

Insatiable*

harry is a prince, natalia is a spy for his court. both of them can’t stand one another, but natalia having to take any direct information she learns about the attempt on his life directly to him seems to put the pair in an interesting dynamic.

[part one]

#harry styles #harry styles imagine #harry styles oneshot #fanfiction #masterlist #harry styles fanfiction

2K notes · View notes

art · 1 year

Photo

Creator Spotlight: Pablo Lobato

Pablo Lobato was born in Trelew, Patagonia, Argentina, in April 1970. He studied graphic design at Universidad Nacional de La Plata, as well as Painting and Engraving. He moved to Buenos Aires to work as a graphic designer in the editorial field. After five years, he got bored and decided to give one more chance to his true love: portraits. Represented by Anna Goodson, he started working as a collaborator in magazines and newspapers: Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, Wired, New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, TV Guide, and The Village Voice, among others. His work has been featured in Illustration Now Vol.3 and Portraits! by Taschen editorial. Lobato has taken part in numerous collective exhibits in Argentina, the United States, Italy, Chile, and Portugal.

Check out our interview with Pablo below!

Can you take us through a day in the life of working on a project like Wendell & Wild?

I worked on this project during the lockdown because of the COVID pandemic, so I was home all of the time. My days consisted of zooms with director Henry Selick, work, play with the kids, work, make dinner, watch a series on Netflix, work, and more work. While everyone was trying to figure out what to do with their free time, I was working like never before.

What was the inspiration behind the character designs in Wendell & Wild, and which character was the most challenging or interesting to develop?

Each character was inspired by different people or things. Wendell and Wild are caricatures of Keegan Michael Key, and Jordan Peele. The inspiration for Kat was a blend between the Afropunk movement and ancient African masks. Manberg could be an Israeli Marlon Brando.

What do you wish you had known when you first started out creating art that you know now?

How to be a character designer!!! This was my first time, so I had to learn in the process.

What is one habit you find yourself doing a lot as an artist?

I find myself looking for new things all the time, finding new directions to go in, and making mistakes.

How many unfinished/WIP pieces do you have? Care to share a sneak peek..?

Hundreds!!!!!

How has your style developed over the years?

At the beginning, my work was very sketchy—very rough. Then, I started using the computer, and everything was cleaner and more geometric. Now, I think I’m going back to more organic shapes.

What does your work set up look like?

It’s a mess. Please don’t ask me for pictures. I will never show it.

How has technology changed the way you approach your work?

It was a big change when I first started using the computer. But technology keeps growing, and I’m using the same old software as 20 years ago.

Who or what on Tumblr inspires you and why?

I appreciate the diversity that Tumblr has. Thousands and thousands of different art projects popping in front of your eyes. It’s like a brainstorm on your screen.

Thank you so much for stopping by, Pablo! Check out his work with Netflix’s Wendell & Wild over at @netflix!

#creator spotlight #artists on tumblr #pablo lobato #wendell and wild #netflix

1K notes · View notes

denimbex1986 · 12 days

Text

We are lucky to be alive in the age of Andrew Scott, an actor of extraordinary breadth, skill and sensitivity, who can terrify as Jim Moriarty in Sherlock, make us fall in love (inappropriately) as the hot priest in Fleabag and cry in All of Us Strangers. He can also astonish, last year playing eight parts in a stage adaptation of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. He recently became the first actor to win the UK Critics’ Circle awards for best actor on stage and screen in the same year. And his latest project, Ripley, is a beautiful and chilling adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel The Talented Mr Ripley, with Scott playing the lead, dominating all eight one-hour episodes. It’s been a wild, crowning year for the 47-year-old Irish actor. But in March his mother, Nora, died of a sudden illness; she is who Scott has credited as being his foremost creative inspiration. His grief is fresh and intense and for the first half of the interview it seems to swim just beneath the surface of our conversation.

“We go through so many different types of emotional weather all the time,” he says. “And even on the saddest day of your life you might be hungry or have a laugh. Life just continues.” We are in a meeting room in his management company’s offices, talking about his ability, in his work, to modulate between emotions, to go from happy to sad, confused to scared, all within a matter of seconds. How does he do it? Scott laughs. “I would say that I have quite a scrutable face — is scrutable a word? — which is good or bad depending on what you are trying to achieve. But my job is to be as truthful as possible in the way that we are, and I don’t think that human beings are just one thing at any particular time. It is rare that we have one pure emotion.”

It’s an approach that is particularly appropriate for the playing of Tom Ripley, an acquisitive chameleon who inveigles his way into the lives of others (in this case Johnny Flynn, as the careless and wealthy Dickie Greenleaf, and his on-off girlfriend Marge, played by Dakota Fanning). “Ripley is witty, he is very talented. That’s gripping, to watch talent. I can’t call him evil — it is very easy to call people who do terrible things evil monsters, but they are not monsters, they are humans who do terrible things. Part of what she [Highsmith] is talking about is that if you dismiss a certain faction of society it has repercussions, and Ripley is someone who is completely unseen, he lives literally among the rats, and then there are these people who are gorgeous and not particularly talented and have the world at their feet but are not able to see the beauty that he can see.”

The show was written and directed by Steven Zaillian, the screenwriter of Schindler’s List. It’s set in Sixties New York and Italy, and filmed entirely in black-and-white, its chiaroscuro aesthetic evoking films of the Sixties — particularly those of Federico Fellini — while also offering an alternative to Anthony Minghella’s saturated late-Nineties iteration that starred Matt Damon and Jude Law. This has a darker flavour. “I found it challenging,” Scott says, “in the sense that he’s a solitary figure and ideologically we are very different. So you have to remove your judgment and try to find something that is vulnerable.”

It was a tough shoot, taking a year and filmed during lockdown. Scott was exhausted at the end of it and had intended to take a three-month break, but delays meant that he went straight from Ripley into All of Us Strangers. “Even though I was genuinely exhausted, it was energising because I was back in London, I was getting the Tube to work, there was sunshine,” he says. “I found it incredibly heartful, that film, there were so many different versions of love … I feel that all stories are love stories.”

All of Us Strangers, directed by Andrew Haigh, is about a screenwriter examining memories of his parents who died when he was 12. In it Scott’s character, Adam, returns to his family home, where his parents are still alive and as they were back in the Eighties. Adam is able to walk into the memory and to come out to his parents, finding the words that were unavailable to him as a boy. Some of it was filmed in Haigh’s childhood home, and there was a strong biographical element for him and his lead. Homosexuality was illegal in the Republic of Ireland until 1993, when Scott was 16. He did not come out to his parents until he was in his early twenties. I ask if he was working with his own childhood experiences in the film. “Of course, so in a sense it was painful, to a degree, but it was cathartic because you are doing it with people that you absolutely love and trust. I felt that it was going to be of use to people and I was right, it has been. The reaction to the movie has been genuinely extraordinary — it makes people feel and see things, and that isn’t an easy thing to achieve.”

The film is also a tender and erotic love story between Scott’s character and Harry, played by the Irish actor Paul Mescal. The two found a real-life kinship that made them a delight to watch on screen and off it, as a double act on the awards circuit. “I adore Paul, he’s so, so … continues to be …” Scott pauses. “Obviously it’s been a tough time recently and he just continues to be a wonderful friend. It’s everything. The more I work in the industry, I realise, you make some stuff that people love and you make some stuff that people don’t like, and all really that you are left with is the relationships that you make. I love him dearly.”

Scott and Mescal were also both notable on the red carpet for being extraordinarily well dressed. Scott loves fashion and has a big, well-organised wardrobe that he admits is in need of a cull. “I don’t like having too much stuff. I really believe that everything we have is borrowed — our stuff, our houses, we are borrowing it for a time. So I am trying to think of people who are the same size as me so I can give some of it away, and that’s a great thing to be able to do.” One of his favourite labels is Simone Rocha. “I love a bit of Simone Rocha. What a kind, glorious person she is. I just went to her show.” Fashion, he says, is in his DNA. “My mother was an art teacher, she was obsessed with all sorts of design. She loved jewellery and jewellery design. Anything that is visual, tactile, painting, drawing, is a big passion of mine, so I have tremendous respect for the creativity of designers.”

Today Scott is wearing Louis Vuitton trousers and a cropped Prada jacket, dressed up because he is collecting his Critics’ Circle award for best stage actor for Vanya. I ask how it feels to have won the double, a historic achievement. “Ah …” he says, looking at the table, going silent, having just been so voluble. “I’m sorry …” His voice cracks a little. “It’s bittersweet.”

At the ceremony Scott dedicated the award to his mother, saying of her “she was the source of practically every joyful thing in my life”. Is it difficult for him to carry on working in the circumstances, I wonder. “Well, you know, you have to — life goes on, you manage it day by day. It’s very recent, but I certainly can say that so much of it is surprising and unique, and there is so much that I will be able to speak about at some point.”

He is looking forward, he says, once promotion for Ripley is over, to taking some time off, going on holiday, going back to Ireland for a bit. He has homes in London and Dublin. To relax he walks his dog, a Boston terrier, dressed down in jeans and a hoodie “like a 12-year-old, skulking around the city” or goes to art galleries on the South Bank — he was considering a career as an artist until he was 17 and got a part in the Irish film Korea. He goes to the gym every day, “not, you know, to get …” he says, flexing his biceps. “More that it’s good for the head.” He is social, likes friends, likes a party. When I ask if he gave up drinking while doing Vanya, which required him to be on stage, alone, every night for almost two hours, he looks horrified. “Oh God, no! Easy tiger! Jesus … Although I didn’t drink much, I did have to look after myself. But we had a room downstairs in the theatre, a little buzzy bar, because otherwise I wouldn’t see anybody, so I was delighted to have people come down.”

Scott was formerly in a relationship with the screenwriter and playwright Stephen Beresford and is currently single, although this is not the sort of thing he likes to talk about. He is protective of his privacy, not wanting to reveal where he lives in London, or indeed the name of his dog — but he swerves such questions with a gentle good humour.

He is famous on set for being friendly and welcoming, for looking after other people. “The product is very important, but most of my time is spent in the process, so I want that to be as pleasant and kind as possible. I feel like it is possible to do that, that it is an honourable goal.” He is comfortable around people, with an easy charm — no one I have interviewed before has said my name so many times. And although when we talk he sometimes seems reflective or so very sad, there are also moments when he is exuberant, silly, putting on accents. “I feel like, as a person, I am quite near my emotions. I cry easily and I laugh easily, and there is nothing more pleasurable to me than laughing.”

Scott was raised a Catholic and is no longer practising, but says his view about religion is “ever changing — I definitely have a faith in things that cannot be proved”. When he was younger and felt overwhelmed, just before or after an audition, he would go to the Quaker Meeting House in central London and sit in silence, something that made its way into the second series of Fleabag, in which Scott’s priest takes Waller-Bridge’s character to that same meeting house. “It’s just around here,” he says, standing up, looking out of the window at Charing Cross Road. “When Phoebe and I first talked, we met at the Soho Theatre. We talked about love and religion, we walked all around here. And I said, ‘This is a place I go,’ so we called in and there was no one there, so we sat in there and we talked. It was a really magical day.”

Scott says he sees all the different characters that he has played as versions of himself. “It’s like, ‘What would this version of me look like?’ rather than, ‘Oh, I’m going to be somebody else.’ You filter it through you, and you discover more about yourself. I think that is a very lucky thing to be able to do, to find out more about yourself in the short time that we are here.”

69 notes · View notes