#london's burning is trending on twitter

[songofwizardry]

ok who had ‘multiple wildfires and grass fires in the UK due to the heatwave’ on their 2022 bingo card because I did not

#london fire brigade have declared a major incident bc there's several fires across the city #like there's a massive one off the A2 #multiple ones in parks in south london #and in more local news #there's a little one down the road from me #i don't think i ever recall seeing so many fire headlines before #this is not a thing that usually occurs #london's burning is trending on twitter #anyway i'm mostly posting this bc my year tags serve as a time capsule for me #and this is WEIRD and ABNORMAL and TERRIFYING and I would like it in my time capsule #we have broken so many temperature records it's ridiculous #and I am a broken record about needing infrastructure to cope with this #anyway #stay safe and hydrated out there pals #ukpol #2022 is an experience #uk heatwave #text post #my post

[thepastisalreadywritten]

Armageddon to wet lettuce: The phrases that defined 2022

Agence France-Presse, 5 December 2022

PARIS — A year of extraordinary upheaval, from the war in Ukraine to catastrophic natural disasters, AFP looks at some of the words and phrases that have defined 2022.

ARMAGEDDON 

With the war in Ukraine and increasingly strident threats from Russian President Vladimir Putin, the specter of nuclear warfare is stalking the globe for the first time in decades.

"We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis" in 1962, US President Joe Biden warned in October.

Experts warned of the most dangerous situation they can remember, with fears not limited to Russia: North Korean nuclear saber-rattling has reached new heights, with the world bracing for a first nuclear test since 2017.

LONDON BRIDGE 

At 6:30 p.m. on September 8, Buckingham Palace announced that Queen Elizabeth II had died, bringing to an end the longest reign in British history and sending shock waves around the world.

For 10 days, Britons paid respects to the only monarch most had known, following a carefully choreographed series of ceremonies.

The program of events, famously codenamed "London Bridge", set out in minute detail every aspect of the protocol -- down to BBC presenters wearing black ties.

In the event, she died in Scotland, meaning special provisions came into force -- Operation Unicorn.

LOSS AND DAMAGE

World leaders and negotiators descended on the Egyptian Red Sea port of Sharm el-Sheikh for the latest United Nations summit (COP27) on tackling climate change.

After a fractious summit, widely seen as poorly organized, a deal was clinched on a fund for "loss and damage" to help vulnerable countries cope with the devastating impacts of climate change.

Behind the institutional-sounding name lies destruction for millions in the developing world.

The COP summit was hailed as historic but many voiced anger over a lack of ambition on cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

WOMAN. LIFE. FREEDOM. 

The chant screamed by protesters in Iran following the death of Mahsa Amini, a young woman arrested by the Tehran morality police.

Protesters have burned posters of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and women have appeared in public without headscarves, in scenes scarcely imaginable before the uprising.

The demonstrations have lasted 3 months and appear to pose an existential challenge to the 43-year rule of the clerical regime.

BLUE TICK

The tiny blue tick (it's actually white on a blue background), which certifies users on Twitter, became a symbol of the chaos engulfing the social media platform in the wake of its $44-billion takeover by Elon Musk.

The mercurial Tesla boss announced that anyone wanting the coveted blue tick would have to stump up eight dollars, only to scrap the plan hours later.

A month on from the takeover, Twitter's future remains up in the air, with thousands of staff laid off, advertisers leaving, and its "free speech" platform hugely uncertain.

ROE V. WADE 

In an historic ruling, the conservative-dominated US Supreme Court overturned the landmark 1973 "Roe v. Wade" decision that enshrined a woman's right to an abortion.

The Supreme Court ruled that individual states could restrict or ban the procedure -– a decision seized upon by several right-leaning states.

Protests erupted instantly in Washington and elsewhere, showing how divisive the topic remains in the United States.

The overturning of "Roe v. Wade" became a critical battle in the US mid-terms in which candidates in favor of abortion rights won several victories. 

QUIET QUITTING 

One of the "words of the year" in Britain and Australia, the phrase refers to doing the bare minimum at work, either as a protest against your employer or to improve your work-life balance.

The trend, which has sparked debate about overwork, especially in the United States, appears to have surfaced first in a TikTok post in July.

"You're not outright quitting your job but you're quitting the idea of going above and beyond," said the post which went viral, drawing nearly a half-million likes.

WET LETTUCE 

As Liz Truss approached the end of her chaotic and short-lived tenure as British prime minister, the Economist weekly mused that her effective period in office had been "roughly the shelf-life of a lettuce."

The tabloid Daily Star leapt on the idea, launching a live web cam featuring said vegetable -– complete with googly eyes -- next to a picture of the hapless Truss.

Her premiership lasted just 44 days and featured a mini-budget that collapsed the markets and generated extraordinary political upheaval. In the end, the lettuce won.

TOMATO SOUP 

Environmental protesters seeking to draw attention to the role of fossil fuel consumption in the climate crisis hurled tomato soup at Vincent Van Gogh's "Sunflowers" painting at London's National Gallery in October, touching off a series of similar stunts.

Since then, activists have smothered mashed potato on Claude Monet and glued themselves to works by Andy Warhol, Francisco Goya and Johannes Vermeer.

For some, the campaigners are heroes bravely drawing attention to the climate emergency.

For others, the attacks are counterproductive and lose force by becoming commonplace.

A4 

Protests erupted in China, initially over COVID restrictions but later widening to broader political grievances, posing the greatest threat to the Beijing authorities since 1989.

The demonstrations became known in some quarters as the "A4" protests as protesters held up blank A4-sized sheets of white paper in a sign of solidarity and a nod to the lack of free speech in China.

© Agence France-Presse 

#Armageddon #Ukraine #Operation London Bridge #Queen Elizabeth II #COP27 #Mahsa Amini #Woman Life Freedom #Iran #Twitter #Blue Tick #Elon Musk #Roe vs Wade #Quiet Quitting #Wet Lettuce #Liz Truss #Tomato Soup protest #A4 China protest

[islamkarki]

Should Iranians tweet more in English? 

We had many attention-grabbing events around the world that translates into viral hashtags on social media such as the latest Iranian protests which have been one of the highlights of the 2022 world political scene and was covered by international news outlets. The coverage of major networks has helped to elevate the viral status of the event in addition to millions of tweets and posts of Iranians and the supporters of their cause. Nevertheless, would the Iranian revolution have gained more traction and virality if Iranian’s tweeted or captioned their posts in English? 

Various factors can determine if a hashtag inspires multiple sharing or goes viral. It was attributed to high arousal of feelings in the reader whether (Berger & Milkman, 2012). Iranian’s revolution is full of various emotions of fury, desperation, and hope simultaneously which Iranians flooded the internet with but largely in Farsi. Therefore, the events that took place so far in Iran starting from Iranian protests and the authority’s suppression of Iranians, thousands of imprisonments, and hundreds of victims should have attracted a worldwide nonstop response. It is an event of human rights similar to the global reaction sparked in the case of the Gorge Floyd when considering the large numbers of tweets with the hashtag Mahsa AMini, which was in Farsi. The increase of participation and shares or retweets of readers directly inspires extensive media coverage (Phillips, 2012). That could make and prolong the momentum of revolutions in our day and age. 

Another aspect to consider is the typical user experience in interaction with platforms and hashtags and how it could determine which tweets go viral or gets retweeted. The ideal user experience is to scroll, read, and sometimes pause to read comments or comment yourself retweet. Users going through the Iranian tweets would need to hit the translate button so many times in almost all tweets and that may cause an interruption in the flow of posts and that may put off some users. Therefore, if the original tweet or caption is written in English, more people wouldn’t have to translate it and that may keep them engaged in the subject being discussed as it may also increase the chances of posts/tweets getting shared. The aspect of translation accuracy is in question here as the original tweet’s sentiment might be lost in translation or the word count in twitter can render it or the hashtag unfathomable. Consequently, that may affect the degree of engagement it may attract. 

Our empathy and by extension, our online interactions with the Iranians or any human rights cause shouldn’t be conditional to the use of English language. However, many sensational messages travel worldwide via videos without the need of translation which was demonstrated in the videos of Iranian women burning their Hijabs in the streets or the latest trend of tossing off turbans of men in the streets. Both symbolizing the Iranians revolution against the Islamic state. Nevertheless, it is indeed in the age of reach and clicks so it remains crucial to make it possible for the masses to understand the events taking place if you need them to stay involved and active(Kormelink & Meijer, 2018).

References: 

Berger, J., & Milkman, K. L. (2012). What makes online content viral? Journal of Marketing Research, 49(2), 192–205. https://doi.org/10.1509/JMR.10.0353/ASSET/IMAGES/LARGE/10.1509_JMR.10.0353-FIG2.JPEG

Kormelink, T. G., & Meijer, I. C. (2018). What clicks actually mean: Exploring digital news user practices. Journalism (London, England), 19(5), 668. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884916688290

Phillips, A. (2012). SOCIABILITY, SPEED AND QUALITY IN THE CHANGING NEWS ENVIRONMENT. Https://Doi.Org/10.1080/17512786.2012.689476, 6(5–6), 669–679. https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2012.689476

[charlotteswebbbbb]

What's the vibe #3

Stamp duty and interest rates are going to mess with the rental market more until there's political intervention basically, I believe. Which could be at any time in the 2 years. But with the budget just release by the Chancellor, it's not looking good. I would say a big chunk of disposable income is going down even with the tax changes - the removal of the 45% income tax band. The pound/dollar parity is currently at (writing this on Friday, 400pm is $1.09, now Monday 1pm $1.07), even pound to euro being basically 1=1 (1.12euro) is quite worrying.

A few economists are saying that the UK is looking like an emerging economy and what happens in "emerging economies"? Mass inequality and I would even say social unrest - the trickles of we can see in strikes right now.

Headphones as accessories is a trend I wanted to touch on last week (pre my holiday). Every few months there's a new headphones on TikTok that is the headphones to buy, whether they're the Sony WH1000XM4 or Koss Porta Pros or AirPod Maxs. The Sony headphones are so popular the tag itself has 54M views for videos combined. I think some of this has to do with the back to reality, back to work, out in the world vibe that is going on. New Yorkers and Londoners probably would be most seen with this. Commuter chic!

(See also Martine Rose FW22) :)

sandy liang/loewe ss23

Corsets are still in - the popularity of brands like Miaou and during the fashion weeks. This connects maybe to the social restrictions of women at the moment - Roe Vs Wade, Iranian protests, misogyny in Seoul, etc

Fragility/femininity/trad Cath/purity - talked about last week but here it is in action (esp with balletcore)- Sandy Liang, MM6, Simone Rocha, Mirror Palais!

Rave / Punk

Realism - Back to life, back to reality

Space as an upcoming trend - Beyonce's Alien Superstar, sunglasses, 90s kid vibes

Workwear as formalwear now for mens -

Things to read:

The SSENSE FW22 Trend Report

Interesting thinkers:

Elijah - music wise, always gets me to think about how musicians can navigate a new music industry or just offers advice using his famous yellow posts on social media

Mat Dryhurst - music and technology, check out podcast Interdependence with partner Holly Herndon. He's done a lot of thinking about NFTs, Web3, AI - the future basically.

Jaime Brooks - super cool musician and writer has done this amazing interview with Embedded on Substack - I think Jaime's got an amazing brain and also does a column for The New Inquiry on streaming services.

I basically had this twitter convo on Thursday night with Mat Dryhurst which was in response to his response on this Guardian article and it really got me thinking about how music is a public good and how musicians especially in the UK talk about burn out and mental health issues. (See also the Music Minds Matter charity becoming a single focus charity with 30% more enquiries). And he suggested NFTs as a solution - I said that they have a high barrier to entry.

I also said that certain things need a PR redo - not that I 100% believe in web 3 but I do think it's coming aggressively, artists, creators want solutions and answers to things right now and I think if the believers and architects of bigger things in Web3 want the general public on board, it's best to do this now than later.

Which also begs the question of is this exclusive? Inclusive? Isn't crypto just luxury on a grander scale? How will social media work on web 3?

Note: 1 ETH = 1186.62 GBP

Starting points for #4:

War in Ukraine and it's effects

Still the looming idea of blackouts - candles popularity?

Telfar?

Predictions:

Next year will be the year of the eyes - eyelashes, eye brows being big, better, bold, eye shadow

#what's the vibe #vibe #parsed

[path-of-my-childhood]

Taylor Swift: ‘I was literally about to break’

By: Laura Snapes for The Guardian Date: August 24th 2019

Taylor Swift’s Nashville apartment is an Etsy fever dream, a 365-days-a-year Christmas shop, pure teenage girl id. You enter through a vestibule clad in blue velvet and covered in gilt frames bursting with fake flowers. The ceiling is painted like the night sky. Above a koi pond in the living area, a narrow staircase spirals six feet up towards a giant, pillow-lagged birdcage that probably has the best view in the city. Later, Swift will tell me she needs metaphors “to understand anything that happens to me”, and the birdcage defies you not to interpret it as a pointed comment on the contradictions of stardom.

Swift, wearing pale jeans and dip-dyed shirt, her sandy hair tied in a blue scrunchie, leads the way up the staircase to show me the view. The decor hasn’t changed since she bought this place in 2009, when she was 19. “All of these high rises are new since then,” she says, gesturing at the squat glass structures and cranes. Meanwhile her oven is still covered in stickers, more teenage diary than adult appliance.

Now 29, she has spent much of the past three years living quietly in London with her boyfriend, actor Joe Alwyn, making the penthouse a kind of time capsule, a monument to youthful naivety given an unlimited budget – the years when she sang about Romeo and Juliet and wore ballgowns to awards shows; before she moved to New York and honed her slick, self-mythologising pop.

It is mid-August. This is Swift’s first UK interview in more than three years, and she seems nervous: neither presidential nor goofy (her usual defaults), but quick with a tongue-out “ugh” of regret or frustration as she picks at her glittery purple nails. We climb down from the birdcage to sit by the pond, and when the conversation turns to 2016, the year the wheels came off for her, Swift stiffens as if driving over a mile of speed bumps. After a series of bruising public spats (with Katy Perry, Nicki Minaj) in 2015, there was a high-profile standoff with Kanye West. The news that she was in a relationship with actor Tom Hiddleston, which leaked soon after, was widely dismissed as a diversionary tactic. Meanwhile, Swift went to court to prosecute a sexual assault claim, and faced a furious backlash when she failed to endorse a candidate in the 2016 presidential election, allowing the alt-right to adopt her as their “Aryan princess”.

Her critics assumed she cared only about the bottom line. The reality, Swift says, is that she was totally broken. “Every domino fell,” she says bitterly. “It became really terrifying for anyone to even know where I was. And I felt completely incapable of doing or saying anything publicly, at all. Even about my music. I always said I wouldn’t talk about what was happening personally, because that was a personal time.” She won’t get into specifics. “I just need some things that are mine,” she despairs. “Just some things.”

A year later, in 2017, Swift released her album Reputation, half high-camp heel turn, drawing on hip-hop and vaudeville (the brilliantly hammy Look What You Made Me Do), half stunned appreciation that her nascent relationship with Alwyn had weathered the storm (the soft, sensual pop of songs Delicate and Dress).

Her new album, Lover, her seventh, was released yesterday. It’s much lighter than Reputation: Swift likens writing it to feeling like “I could take a full deep breath again”. Much of it is about Alwyn: the Galway Girl-ish track London Boy lists their favourite city haunts and her newfound appreciation of watching rugby in the pub with his uni mates; on the ruminative Afterglow, she asks him to forgive her anxious tendency to assume the worst.

While she has always written about relationships, they were either teenage fantasy or a postmortem on a high-profile breakup, with exes such as Jake Gyllenhaal and Harry Styles. But she and Alwyn have seldom been pictured together, and their relationship is the only other thing she won’t talk about. “I’ve learned that if I do, people think it’s up for discussion, and our relationship isn’t up for discussion,” she says, laughing after I attempt a stealthy angle. “If you and I were having a glass of wine right now, we’d be talking about it – but it’s just that it goes out into the world. That’s where the boundary is, and that’s where my life has become manageable. I really want to keep it feeling manageable.”

Instead, she has swapped personal disclosure for activism. Last August, Swift broke her political silence to endorse Democratic Tennessee candidate Phil Bredesen in the November 2018 senate race. Vote.org reported an unprecedented spike in voting registration after Swift’s Instagram post, while Donald Trump responded that he liked her music “about 25% less now”.

Meanwhile, her recent single You Need To Calm Down admonished homophobes and namechecked US LGBTQ rights organisation Glaad (which then saw increased donations). Swift filled her video with cameos from queer stars such as Ellen DeGeneres and Queen singer Adam Lambert, and capped it with a call to sign her petition in support of the Equality Act, which if passed would prohibit gender- and sexuality-based discrimination in the US. A video of Polish LGBTQ fans miming the track in defiance of their government’s homophobic agenda went viral. But Swift was accused of “queerbaiting” and bandwagon-jumping. You can see how she might find it hard to work out what, exactly, people want from her.

***

It was girlhood that made Swift a multimillionaire. When country music’s gatekeepers swore that housewives were the only women interested in the genre, she proved them wrong. Her self-titled debut marked the longest stay on the Billboard 200 by any album released in the decade. A potentially cloying image – corkscrew curls, lyrics thick on “daddy” and down-home values – were undercut by the fact she was evidently, endearingly, a bit of a freak, an unusual combination of intensity and artlessness. Also, she was really, really good at what she did, and not just for a teenager: her entirely self-written third album, 2010’s Speak Now, is unmatched in its devastatingly withering dismissals of awful men.

As a teenager, Swift was obsessed with VH1’s Behind The Music, the series devoted to the rise and fall of great musicians. She would forensically rewatch episodes, trying to pinpoint the moment a career went wrong. I ask her to imagine she’s watching the episode about herself and do the same thing: where was her misstep? “Oh my God,” she says, drawing a deep breath and letting her lips vibrate as she exhales. “I mean, that’s so depressing!” She thinks back and tries to deflect. “What I remember is that [the show] was always like, ‘Then we started fighting in the tour bus and then the drummer quit and the guitarist was like, “You’re not paying me enough.”’’’

But that’s not what she used to say. In interviews into her early 20s, Swift often observed that an artist fails when they lose their self-awareness, as if repeating the fact would work like an insurance against succumbing to the same fate. But did she make that mistake herself? She squeezes her nose and blows to clear a ringing in her ears before answering. “I definitely think that sometimes you don’t realise how you’re being perceived,” she says. “Pop music can feel like it’s The Hunger Games, and like we’re gladiators. And you can really lose focus of the fact that that’s how it feels because that’s how a lot of stan [fan] Twitter and tabloids and blogs make it seem – the overanalysing of everything makes it feel really intense.”

She describes the way she burned bridges in 2016 as a kind of obliviousness. “I didn’t realise it was like a classic overthrow of someone in power – where you didn’t realise the whispers behind your back, you didn’t realise the chain reaction of events that was going to make everything fall apart at the exact, perfect time for it to fall apart.”

Here’s that chain reaction in full. With her 2014 album 1989 (the year she was born), Swift transcended country stardom, becoming as ubiquitous as Beyoncé. For the first time she vocally embraced feminism, something she had rejected in her teens; but, after a while, it seemed to amount to not much more than a lot of pictures of her hanging out with her “squad”, a bevy of supermodels, musicians and Lena Dunham. The squad very much did not include her former friend Katy Perry, whom Swift targeted in her song Bad Blood, as part of what seemed like a painfully overblown dispute about some backing dancers. Then, when Nicki Minaj tweeted that MTV’s 2015 Video Music awards had rewarded white women at the expense of women of colour, multiple-nominee Swift took it personally, responding: “Maybe one of the men took your slot.” For someone prone to talking about the haters, she quickly became her own worst enemy.

Her old adversary Kanye West resurfaced in February 2016. In 2009, West had invaded Swift’s stage at the MTV VMAs to protest against her victory over Beyoncé in the female video of the year category. It remains the peak of interest in Swift on Google Trends, and the conflict between them has become such a cornerstone of celebrity journalism that it’s hard to remember it lay dormant for nearly seven years – until West released his song Famous. “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex,” he rapped. “Why? I made that bitch famous.” The video depicted a Swift mannequin naked in bed with men including Trump.

Swift loudly condemned both; although she had discussed the track with West, she said she had never agreed to the “bitch” lyric or the video. West’s wife, Kim Kardashian, released a heavily edited clip that showed Swift at least agreeing to the “sex” line on the phone with West, if not the “bitch” part. Swift pleaded the technicality, but it made no difference: when Kardashian went on Twitter to describe her as a snake, the comparison stuck and the singer found herself very publicly “cancelled” – the incident taken as “proof” of Swift’s insincerity. So she went away.

Swift says she stopped trying to explain herself, even though she “definitely” could have. As she worked on Reputation, she was also writing “a think-piece a day that I knew I would never publish: the stuff I would say, and the different facets of the situation that nobody knew”. If she could exonerate herself, why didn’t she? She leans forward. “Here’s why,” she says conspiratorially. “Because when people are in a hate frenzy and they find something to mutually hate together, it bonds them. And anything you say is in an echo chamber of mockery.”

She compares that year to being hit by a tidal wave. “You can either stand there and let the wave crash into you, and you can try as hard as you can to fight something that’s more powerful and bigger than you,” she says. “Or you can dive under the water, hold your breath, wait for it to pass and while you’re down there, try to learn something. Why was I in that part of the ocean? There were clearly signs that said: Rip tide! Undertow! Don’t swim! There are no lifeguards!” She’s on a roll. “Why was I there? Why was I trusting people I trusted? Why was I letting people into my life the way I was letting them in? What was I doing that caused this?”

After the incident with Minaj, her critics started pointing out a narrative of “white victimhood” in Swift’s career. Speaking slowly and carefully, she says she came to understand “a lot about how my privilege allowed me to not have to learn about white privilege. I didn’t know about it as a kid, and that is privilege itself, you know? And that’s something that I’m still trying to educate myself on every day. How can I see where people are coming from, and understand the pain that comes with the history of our world?”

She also accepts some responsibility for her overexposure, and for some of the tabloid drama. If she didn’t wish a friend happy birthday on Instagram, there would be reports about severed friendships, even if they had celebrated together. “Because we didn’t post about it, it didn’t happen – and I realised I had done that,” she says. “I created an expectation that everything in my life that happened, people would see.”

But she also says she couldn’t win. “I’m kinda used to being gaslit by now,” she drawls wearily. “And I think it happens to women so often that, as we get older and see how the world works, we’re able to see through what is gaslighting. So I’m able to look at 1989 and go – KITTIES!” She breaks off as an assistant walks in with Swift’s three beloved cats, stars of her Instagram feed, back from the vet before they fly to England this week. Benjamin, Olivia and Meredith haughtily circle our feet (they are scared of the koi) as Swift resumes her train of thought, back to the release of 1989 and the subsequent fallout. “Oh my God, they were mad at me for smiling a lot and quote-unquote acting fake. And then they were mad at me that I was upset and bitter and kicking back.” The rules kept changing.

***

Swift’s new album comes with printed excerpts from her diaries. On 29 August 2016, she wrote in her girlish, bubble writing: “This summer is the apocalypse.” As the incident with West and Kardashian unfolded, she was preparing for her court case against radio DJ David Mueller, who was fired in 2013 after Swift reported him for putting his hand up her dress at a meet-and–greet event. He sued her for defamation; she countersued for sexual assault.

“Having dealt with a few of them, narcissists basically subscribe to a belief system that they should be able to do and say whatever the hell they want, whenever the hell they want to,” Swift says now, talking at full pelt. “And if we – as anyone else in the world, but specifically women – react to that, well, we’re not allowed to. We’re not allowed to have a reaction to their actions.”

In summer 2016 she was in legal depositions, practising her testimony. “You’re supposed to be really polite to everyone,” she says. But by the time she got to court in August 2017, “something snapped, I think”. She laughs. Her testimony was sharp and uncompromising. She refused to allow Mueller’s lawyers to blame her or her security guards; when asked if she could see the incident, Swift said no, because “my ass is in the back of my body”. It was a brilliant, rude defence.

“You’re supposed to behave yourself in court and say ‘rear end’,” she says with mock politesse. “The other lawyer was saying, ‘When did he touch your backside?’ And I was like, ‘ASS! Call it what it is!’” She claps between each word. But despite the acclaim for her testimony and eventual victory (she asked for one symbolic dollar), she still felt belittled. It was two months prior to the beginning of the #MeToo movement. “Even this case was literally twisted so hard that people were calling it the ‘butt-grab case’. They were saying I sued him because there’s this narrative that I want to sue everyone. That was one of the reasons why the summer was the apocalypse.”

She never wanted the assault to be made public. Have there been other instances she has dealt with privately? “Actually, no,” she says soberly. “I’m really lucky that it hadn’t happened to me before. But that was one of the reasons it was so traumatising. I just didn’t know that could happen. It was really brazen, in front of seven people.” She has since had security cameras installed at every meet-and-greet she does, deliberately pointed at her lower half. “If something happens again, we can prove it with video footage from every angle,” she says.

The allegations about Harvey Weinstein came out soon after she won her case. The film producer had asked her to write a song for the romantic comedy One Chance, which earned her second Golden Globe nomination. Weinstein also got her a supporting role in the 2014 sci-fi movie The Giver, and attended the launch party for 1989. But she says they were never alone together.

“He’d call my management and be like, ‘Does she have a song for this film?’ And I’d be like, ‘Here it is,’” she says dispassionately. “And then I’d be at the Golden Globes. I absolutely never hung out. And I would get a vibe – I would never vouch for him. I believe women who come forward, I believe victims who come forward, I believe men who come forward.” Swift inhales, flustered. She says Weinstein never propositioned her. “If you listen to the stories, he picked people who were vulnerable, in his opinion. It seemed like it was a power thing. So, to me, that doesn’t say anything – that I wasn’t in that situation.”

Meanwhile, Donald Trump was more than nine months into his presidency, and still Swift had not taken a position. But the idea that a pop star could ever have impeded his path to the White House seemed increasingly naive. In hindsight, the demand that Swift speak up looks less about politics and more about her identity (white, rich, powerful) and a moralistic need for her to redeem herself – as if nobody else had ever acted on a vindictive instinct, or blundered publicly.

But she resisted what might have been an easy return to public favour. Although Reputation contained softer love songs, it was better known for its brittle, vengeful side (see This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things). She describes that side of the album now as a “bit of a persona”, and its hip-hop-influenced production as “a complete defence mechanism”. Personally, I thought she had never been more relatable, trashing the contract of pious relatability that traps young women in the public eye.

***

It was the assault trial, and watching the rights of LGBTQ friends be eroded, that finally politicised her, Swift says. “The things that happen to you in your life are what develop your political opinions. I was living in this Obama eight-year paradise of, you go, you cast your vote, the person you vote for wins, everyone’s happy!” she says. “This whole thing, the last three, four years, it completely blindsided a lot of us, me included.”

She recently said she was “dismayed” when a friend pointed out that her position on gay rights wasn’t obvious (what if she had a gay son, he asked), hence this summer’s course correction with the single You Need To Calm Down (“You’re comin’ at my friends like a missile/Why are you mad?/When you could be GLAAD?”). Didn’t she feel equally dismayed that her politics weren’t clear? “I did,” she insists, “and I hate to admit this, but I felt that I wasn’t educated enough on it. Because I hadn’t actively tried to learn about politics in a way that I felt was necessary for me, making statements that go out to hundreds of millions of people.”

She explains her inner conflict. “I come from country music. The number one thing they absolutely drill into you as a country artist, and you can ask any other country artist this, is ‘Don’t be like the Dixie Chicks!’” In 2003, the Texan country trio denounced the Iraq war, saying they were “ashamed” to share a home state with George W Bush. There was a boycott, and an event where a bulldozer crushed their CDs. “I watched country music snuff that candle out. The most amazing group we had, just because they talked about politics. And they were getting death threats. They were made such an example that basically every country artist that came after that, every label tells you, ‘Just do not get involved, no matter what.’

“And then, you know, if there was a time for me to get involved…” Swift pauses. “The worst part of the timing of what happened in 2016 was I felt completely voiceless. I just felt like, oh God, who would want me? Honestly.” She would otherwise have endorsed Hillary Clinton? “Of course,” she says sincerely. “I just felt completely, ugh, just useless. And maybe even like a hindrance.”

I suggest that, thinking selfishly, her coming out for Clinton might have made people like her. “I wasn’t thinking like that,” she stresses. “I was just trying to protect my mental health – not read the news very much, go cast my vote, tell people to vote. I just knew what I could handle and I knew what I couldn’t. I was literally about to break. For a while.” Did she seek therapy? “That stuff I just really wanna keep personal, if that’s OK,” she says.

She resists blaming anyone else for her political silence. Her emergence as a Democrat came after she left Big Machine, the label she signed to at 15. (They are now at loggerheads after label head Scott Borchetta sold the company, and the rights to Swift’s first six albums, to Kanye West’s manager, Scooter Braun.) Had Borchetta ever advised her against speaking out? She exhales. “It was just me and my life, and also doing a lot of self-reflection about how I did feel really remorseful for not saying anything. I wanted to try and help in any way that I could, the next time I got a chance. I didn’t help, I didn’t feel capable of it – and as soon as I can, I’m going to.”

Swift was once known for throwing extravagant 4 July parties at her Rhode Island mansion. The Instagram posts from these star-studded events – at which guests wore matching stars-and-stripes bikinis and onesies – probably supported a significant chunk of the celebrity news industry GDP. But in 2017, they stopped. “The horror!” wrote Cosmopolitan, citing “reasons that remain a mystery” for their disappearance. It wasn’t “squad” strife or the unavailability of matching cozzies that brought the parties to an end, but Swift’s disillusionment with her country, she says.

There is a smart song about this on the new album – the track that should have been the first single, instead of the cartoonish ME!. Miss Americana And The Heartbreak Prince is a forlorn, gothic ballad in the vein of Lana Del Rey that uses high-school imagery to dismantle American nationalism: “The whole school is rolling fake dice/You play stupid games/You win stupid prizes,” she sings with disdain. “Boys will be boys then/Where are the wise men?”

As an ambitious 11-year-old, she worked out that singing the national anthem at sports games was the quickest way to get in front of a large audience. When did she start feeling conflicted about what America stands for? She gives another emphatic ugh. “It was the fact that all the dirtiest tricks in the book were used and it worked,” she says. “The thing I can’t get over right now is gaslighting the American public into being like” – she adopts a sanctimonious tone – “‘If you hate the president, you hate America.’ We’re a democracy – at least, we’re supposed to be – where you’re allowed to disagree, dissent, debate.” She doesn’t use Trump’s name. “I really think that he thinks this is an autocracy.”

As we speak, Tennessee lawmakers are trying to impose a near-total ban on abortion. Swift has staunchly defended her “Tennessee values” in recent months. What’s her position? “I mean, obviously, I’m pro-choice, and I just can’t believe this is happening,” she says. She looks close to tears. “I can’t believe we’re here. It’s really shocking and awful. And I just wanna do everything I can for 2020. I wanna figure out exactly how I can help, what are the most effective ways to help. ’Cause this is just…” She sighs again. “This is not it.”

***

It is easy to forget that the point of all this is that a teenage Taylor Swiftwanted to write love songs. Nemeses and negativity are now so entrenched in her public persona that it’s hard to know how she can get back to that, though she seems to want to. At the end of Daylight, the new album’s dreamy final song, there’s a spoken-word section: “I want to be defined by the things that I love,” she says as the music fades. “Not the things that I hate, not the things I’m afraid of, the things that haunt me in the middle of the night.” As well as the songs written for Alwyn, there is one for her mother, who recently experienced a cancer relapse: “You make the best of a bad deal/I just pretend it isn’t real,” Swift sings, backed by the Dixie Chicks.

How does writing about her personal life work if she’s setting clearer boundaries? “It actually made me feel more free,” she says. “I’ve always had this habit of never really going into detail about exactly what situation inspired what thing, but even more so now.” This is only half true: in the past, Swift wasn’t shy of a level of detail that invited fans to figure out specific truths about her relationships. And when I tell her that Lover feels a more emotionally guarded album, she bristles. “I know the difference between making art and living your life like a reality star,” she says. “And then even if it’s hard for other people to grasp, my definition is really clear.”

Even so, Swift begins Lover by addressing an adversary, opening with a song called I Forgot That You Existed (“it isn’t love, it isn’t hate, it’s just indifference”), presumably aimed at Kanye West, a track that slightly defeats its premise by existing. But it sweeps aside old dramas to confront Swift’s real nemesis, herself. “I never grew up/It’s getting so old,” she laments on The Archer.

She has had to learn not to pre-empt disaster, nor to run from it. Her life has been defined by relationships, friendships and business relationships that started and ended very publicly (though she and Perry are friends again). At the same time, the rules around celebrity engagement have evolved beyond recognition in her 15 years of fame. Rather than trying to adapt to them, she’s now asking herself: “How do you learn to maintain? How do you learn not to have these phantom disasters in your head that you play out, and how do you stop yourself from sabotage – because the panic mechanism in your brain is telling you that something must go wrong.” For her, this is what growing up is. “You can’t just make cut-and-dry decisions in life. A lot of things are a negotiation and a grey area and a dance of how to figure it out.”

And so this time, Swift is sticking around. In December she will turn 30, marking the point after which more than half her life will have been lived in public. She’ll start her new decade with a stronger self-preservationist streak, and a looser grip (as well as a cameo in Cats). “You can’t micromanage life, it turns out,” she says, drily.

When Swift finally answered my question about the moment she would choose in the VH1 Behind The Music episode about herself, the one where her career turned, she said she hoped it wouldn’t focus on her “apocalypse” summer of 2016. “Maybe this is wishful thinking,” she said, “but I’d like to think it would be in a couple of years.” It’s funny to hear her hope that the worst is still to come while sitting in her fairytale living room, the cats pacing: a pragmatist at odds with her romantic monument to teenage dreams. But it sounds something like perspective.

#taylor swift #interview #by taylor #the guardian #lover era #lover album #not sure how I feel about the interviewer's approach...there's a lot of irony in it #but a fun read for us nonetheless

[sumayyahwrites]

Fashion in the time of COVID

WILL THE PANDEMIC LEAD TO A MORE ETHICAL, SUSTAINABLE INDUSTRY?

"We went way too far. Our reckless actions have burned the house we live in. We conceived of ourselves as separated from nature, we felt cunning and almighty. We usurped nature, we dominated and wounded it."  

Alessandro Michele, Creative Director of Gucci

Gucci's creative director Alessandro Michele posted 1,200 words of poetic, impassioned diary excerpts on Instagram, making one thing abundantly clear, Gucci, and possibly the fashion industry as a whole would never be the same again.

The COVID-19 pandemic hit the fashion world hard, gravely impacting all of its global capitals. Even before the virus struck, the industry was ailing. What happens now that no one's compelled to dress up from the waist down? And with our precarious place in the world coming into sharp relief, shopping for season “must-haves” seemed not only frivolous but immoral.

In March, Vogue partnered with the Council of Fashion Designers of America to set up A Common Thread, a pandemic-relief initiative that has raised $4.9 million to date. By May, more than 1,000 companies applied for aid, with even the biggest names on the precipice of an uncertain future.

In the interest of damage control, there has been industry talk of pushing the unreleased 2020 collections to 2021. It's curious that this requires we literally disavow the concept of fashion itself; that amorphous behemoth that tells us whether midi skirts are in or out this season.

With no end in sight to this state of flux, could this be an opportunity for the industry to ask itself some serious existential questions?

THE PROBLEM WITH FASHION

"We didn't respect the planet until now and in a way this [pandemic] is a message and unfortunately it's a very, very heavy message. Change had to be done. Everyone thought that the change would happen gradually, but that's not the case. Change has to be done now, and done quickly."

Sara Maino, Deputy Editor in Chief of Vogue Italia  

Before the fashion world spiralled out of control, you had four seasons in the four major fashion capitals - London, Paris, New York and Milan. But the emergence of fast fashion accelerated the situation to a dizzying degree. Brands were sucked into the vortex of insatiable consumer demand. The pressure on luxury and high-street alike to drop new trends at higher speeds and lower costs had designers in a hamster wheel trying to outpace the copycats. "We were out of breath", admits Gucci’s Alessandro Michele, referring to fashion's unrelenting schedule of up to eight collections per year.

In her book, 'Fashionopolis: The Price Of Fast Fashion And The Future Of Clothes', Dana Thomas takes an unflinching look at the catastrophic environmental and human cost of this obsession with newness. Fast fashion refers to the production of masses of cheap, trendy clothes at breakneck speeds. Thomas refers to this as "a dirty, unscrupulous business that exploited humans and Earth alike".

Fashion is one of our biggest global polluters, "responsible for nearly 20 per cent of all industrial pollution annually" and "10 per cent of the carbon emissions in our air". Deep down, we knew our clothes often were made by desperate people in unthinkably dire situations; how could we forget the Rana Plaza disaster in Bangladesh that took the lives of more than a thousand factory workers? Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic has made the human cost of fast fashion devastatingly clear. Crowded, unhygienic environments coupled with exploitative employment and a shady supply chain left brands with no accountability and employees with no pay.

According to Thomas, we buy five times more clothes than the previous generation, with the average garment being worn only seven times before being thrown on the scrap heap. There's no escaping the pangs of guilt that many of us experience with these suspiciously cheap garments. However, there is also no denying that slow fashion can be prohibitively expensive.

Should caring about the environment be a privilege afforded only to the haves, with the blame being placed squarely on the have-nots? And should the onus fall on the consumer to fix the deep-seated problems in the fashion industry or should corporations take responsibility for their exploitative behaviour?

THE SEASON OF DISCONTENT

"At a certain level, most of us were forced to make what the industry told us to make, but it's already proven that the industry is broken. We will now concentrate more on making what we want to make and how we want to make it."

Sonia Carrasco, Fashion Designer and Brand Owner

There are calls for reform, with designer Dries Van Noten urging leading industry figures to sign an open letter setting out some demands. Van Noten wants to reduce the number of runway shows, and the preposterous volume of clothing produced, and sell collections in real-time. That is: bikinis in S/S and coats in A/W. Have you ever been shopping for summer staples, only to find all the season's rejects already relegated to the sales rack? Fashion moves at its own pace darling, a pace at odds with customers' needs. Van Noten says this is about making collections "more environmentally and socially sustainable" with a move towards sustainability throughout the supply chain with less product, less waste and less travel.

Not that Chanel is paying attention, taking customers and press to Capri for its Cruise 2021 pre-collection in June, in the midst of the COVID pandemic. The French fashion house is resolutely old guard, announcing it will stick to six shows: two ready-to-wear, two couture, as well as cruise and Métiers d'Art. Chanel is not alone, with Dior also showcasing its cruise collection physically in Southern Italy.

In response to COVID-19, the British Fashion Council and the Council of Fashion Designers of America released a joint statement, echoing many of Van Noten's concerns. It urges brands, designers and retailers to slow down, with appeals for changes that will benefit customers, improve the wellbeing of the industry and have a positive effect on the environment.

FASHION IN THE TIME OF PANDEMIC

"I try to ask myself what is the meaning of my actions. It's a vital and urgent questioning for me, which demands a careful pause and a delicate listening."

Alessandro Michele, Creative Director of Gucci

The big players in luxury fashion produce between six and eight collections per year, spending an eye-watering amount of money on each show. But is fashion week, with all its excesses and spectacles, gone for good?

The pandemic has led to a cascade of reflection and introspection, and fashion's big players were not unaffected. Saint Laurent announced plans to '"take control of its pace and reshape its schedule". Alessandro Michele has reduced the number of Gucci shows from five to two, nixing both seasons and gender. He writes: "I will abandon the worn-out ritual of seasonalities and shows to regain a new cadence, closer to my expressive call. We will meet just twice a year, to share the chapters of a new story".

After the cancelling of June's men's fashion week in Paris, Louis Vuitton disregarded both the industry's European home-base and its calendar, taking its latest men's show to Shanghai, a big change that signals a significant move towards a consumer-first approach. Which makes perfect sense with shoppers from Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America accounting for the bulk of luxury sales. Is it time to admit that Eurocentric fashion shows are so last season?

Many brands have gone "phygital", which is the somewhat awkward portmanteau describing the hybrid of physical space and digital technologies. With Shanghai and Moscow both fully embracing digital for their fashion weeks in March and April, and Helsinki adopting a purely digital format with innovations such as 3D shows. If more fashion houses go off-piste with localised, digitally amplified events, this could be the death knell for fashion week as we know it.

Another big IRL fashion event on the calendar is the Met Gala, an annual fundraising gala for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute in New York City, and the most-watched fashion/society event of the year. It's usually an occasion for a (very) select few to dress-up in response to the year's theme, in a grand display of fashion as art, with the results ranging from the sublime to the ludicrous. This year it was postponed.

The show must go on, as they say, and it was a group of Gen-Z internet kids known as High Fashion Twitter (or 'hf twitter', because they're too cool for CAPS) hosting the biggest fashion party of the year. On May 4th, instead of the exclusive, highly branded, extremely profitable, marketing opportunity the Met Gala has become, hf twitter brought us an inclusive online celebration of self-expression and diversity. Whether dressing themselves, collaging or using other visual means, the guests shared their 'looks' on Twitter with the hashtag #HFMetGala2020, taking fashion out of the hands of the establishment, if only for a day.

High Fashion Twitter is a loosely structured mix of fashion fans and aficionados, who share inspiration and knowledge while being vocal about industry issues such as representation, sustainability and accountability. And for the event, they purposefully excluded any brands they deemed problematic, such as those known for cultural appropriation.  

FASHION AND SOCIETY

"I understand that, for many, the purpose of a fashion magazine is about escapism, about providing beautiful images of beautiful people in beautiful clothes […] But there are moments when this feels weird. And this is one of those moments."

Emanuele Farneti, editor-in-chief of Vogue Italia

The effects of a global disaster of this magnitude amplified many social justice issues, notably resulting in the backlash over tone-deaf comments from fashion brands about the Black Lives Matter Movement, or their conspicuous, deafening silence. There was nowhere for the industry to hide.

While taking any political stance wasn't de rigueur for most major fashion houses, it's now not only accepted but expected to be in touch with issues facing the wider community. In fact, for some, this out-of-touchness is seen as impossibly callous in a world confronted by human tragedy and economic devastation.

There have been attempts to meet the moment, with efforts such as Vogue's new web series "Good Morning Vogue", fashion's self-proclaimed "wake up call". If the last decade has shifted the discourse around issues such as racism and climate change, then the global pandemic has accelerated it.

FASHION GOING FORWARD

"Through the creation of less product, with higher levels of creativity and quality, products will be valued and their shelf life will increase. The focus on creativity and quality of products, reduction in travel and focus on sustainability […] will increase the consumer's respect and ultimately their greater enjoyment in the products that we create."

The British Fashion Council

Driven by a new generation of socially and environmentally conscious consumers who care where the things they buy come from and where they'll end up, brands have upped their sustainability game. And with the threat of this pandemic acting as a call to action for the fashion industry to slow down and scale down before we find our selves facing a much bigger existential threat.

COVID-19 has caused a significant shift in the mindsets of both brand and consumer, teaching us all to slow down and reset. And should this pass, the things we learnt to value, such as our health, our freedom and hopefully our planet, may eclipse our desire for any conveyor belt of trends.

[lesegames669]

How to connect your pc to your tv for gaming

What Are The Most Well-liked And Ifluential Gaming Blogs Of Uk?

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[hms-chill]

RWRB Study Guide: Chapter 7

Hi y’all! I’m going through Casey McQuiston’s Red, White & Royal Blue and defining/explaining references! Feel free to follow along, or block the tag #rwrbStudyGuide if you’re not interested!

Crêpe-eating tourists (157): Crepes are a thin, flat pancake traditionally filled with sugar, but commonly filled with other toppings. They are an iconic French dish and are popular with tourists both for this reason and because they are typically inexpensive.

Place du Tertre (157): A square in Paris, it is in the Montmarte district, which is known for its art history.

Crusty baguettes (157): Baguettes are a French bread that is meant to be crusty on the outside and soft on the inside.

Le Monde (158): The most popular French newspaper.

Fromagerie Nicole Barthélémy (158): A famously wonderful cheese shop in Paris.

Parisian cheese shop (158): French cheese are known for being fancy and especially good.

Pisces (159): A zodiac sign known for being compassionate, artistic, and intuitive. (more)

NYU (159): New York University.

The Met (159): The Metropolitan Museum of Art, a famous art museum in New York.

Joanne (160): JK Rowling, who wrote the Harry Potter books, and has been pretty consistently homophobic and transphobic on twitter. 

Freddie Mercury (161): Lead singer of the band Queen, Mercury never officially came out, but he had long-term relationships with both men and women and was known for his camp performances, and there are claims that he was “openly gay”. His flamboyance and camp performances, as well as his relationship with partner Jim Hutton, essentially demanded that people simply take him as he was. He died of complications from AIDS in 1991, one day after admitting openly that he had been diagnosed four years earlier. (More)

For context within the book, he wrote “Don’t Stop Me Now”

Elton John (161): A famous British musician. He came out as bisexual in 1976, then as gay in 1992. He and his husband, David Furnish, became civil partners in 2005, the day they became legal in the UK. They were officially married on the ninth anniversary of their civil partnership, the year that gay marriage was legalized within the UK. (More)

Bowie (161): David Bowie, who was a bi British musician and actor who, in 1976, described his bisexuality as “the best thing that ever happened to me”. His wife (who was also bi, and with whom he often shared partners) claimed that he had a relationship with Mick Jagger, though his bisexuality has been consistently erased, both during his life and since his death. (More)

Again for book context, Henry’s dog is named for David Bowie

Jagger (161): Mick Jagger, an English singer/songwriter and member of the Rolling Stones, known for his promiscuity. As mentioned above, he and Bowie pretty clearly had a relationship, though his Wikipedia makes no mention of queerness. (More)

Oakley Street (161): A street that runs through an affluent borough of London.

Stonewall (161): The Stonewall Inn in New York City is a gay bar. The riots against police brutality there in July of 1969 are heralded as the beginning of the gay rights movement.

SCOTUS decision in 2015 (161): The Supreme Court ruling that legalized gay marriage across the US.

Walt Whitman (161): An American poet who wanted to become The American Poet and saw himself as the quintessential American. His poetry often deals with his queerness, and he absolutely slept with Oscar Wilde in the late 1800s. 

Fun fact; he is celebrated in the movie The Dead Poets Society, which is incredibly popular with Sad Gay English Majors and which Henry would definitely have seen.

Laws of Illinois 1961 (161): In 1961, Illinois became the first state in the US to repeal its sodomy laws.

White Night Riot (161): A series of riots in San Francisco protesting the lenient sentencing of the man who killed Harvey Milk, the first openly queer politician. The riots were the most violent queer uprising since the events at the Stonewall.

Paris is Burning (161): A 1990s movie celebrating drag ball culture in New York. It celebrates in particular queer communities of color in the late 1980s, when the AIDS epidemic was at its peak.

“If I die of AIDS...” (161): This is a real photo; you can find it here. The man’s jacket could refer to a form of protest called “die-ins”, where people with AIDS would go to a homophobic politician’s office or another public place where they were refused treatment and simply not leave until after they died. (see it here)

Chop my own tit off (162): Fun mythology fact; the Amazons (warrior women from Greek mythology) actually did this to make themselves better archers.

H fucking W (162): George HW Bush, a former US president.

George (163): George Villers was the boyfriend of King James the I/VI, and Prince George, Duke of Kent, was rumored to be in a polyamorous relationship in the 1920s. 

Edward (162): Edward II was a famously gay king. He was may have been "wedded brothers" with Piers Gaveston and may have also had a relationship with Hugh le Despenser the younger following Gaveston's death. (More)

James (162): The British king known for translating the Bible and being just... indescribably gay and very deeply horny. He promoted his boyfriend, George Villers, to the highest non-royal position in the UK within a few years of starting to date him. James’s friends actively tried to set him up with hot guys for their own political gain.

Alexander (163): Alexander Hamilton was an incredibly bi founding father. He’s remembered for founding our current national banking system, having the first ever American sex scandal, and for literally never shutting up or knowing how to stop being A Lot All The Time. 

Catalina (164): Catalina is an island near Los Angeles. On a more meta level, St. Catalina was a respected writer.

June (164): June Carter Cash was an American singer/songwriter/director/comedian.

Tricky Dick (164): Richard Nixon, a president remembered for wiretapping his opponent.

Taft (165): 27th president of the United States.

Eisenhower (165): 34th president of the US.

Baby (166): this is what Henry’s mom calls him; I wrote a thing about it here.

Daily Mail (166): A trashy British tabloid.

Lollapalooza (167): A music festival in Chicago known for setting fashion trends and having lots of drugs.

Joni Mitchell (167): A singer/songwriter known for her innovative use of the guitar, including unique tunings, chords, and a unique fingerpicking/strumming style. (Listen here)

Cocaine (168): A highly addictive drug. It is snorted, smoked, or injected, and while it makes people feel more confident or forget their problems, the highs from it last only up to about 30 minutes, which often drives people to take it more frequently. Side effects (aside from addiction) include a loss of appetite, irritability, and increased mental health issues. 

Spitfire (168): Someone with a quick temper or willingness to fight.

High as a kite (169): Someone who’s “high as a kite” is on a lot of drugs and is still enjoying the high.

Clean (169): Drug/alcohol free.

Stiff upper lip (170): Ability to seem determined or hold it together in the face of hard times.

A levels (170): A UK test taken for admittance to college, similar to the ACT/SAT in the US

Henry V at RSC (171): Henry V is a Shakespearean history play about the life of Henry V, especially focused on the events of the Hundred Years’ War. RSC, or the Royal Shakespeare Company, is a Shakespeare theater company in London.

Travis County (171): The Texan county where Austin is located.

Surfside (171): A beach in Texas.

Adderall (172): A prescription drug taken for ADHD but commonly abused by students to help them stay awake for all-nighters or focused for unhealthily long study sessions. However, given McQuinston’s claim that Alex has undiagnosed ADHD, it likely helped him to be able to focus and helped his brain work the way it was expected to.

Almond milk (vs. dairy) (173): Texas has a huge dairy industry, and almond milk is not great for the environment.

The Gun File (173): American gun law is so deeply broken.

WASPy Hunter’s Harvard pencil cup (175): Harvard is a prestigious college in Boston; it has a reputation for being mostly rich white folks.

Iron curtains of gerrymandering (175): Gerrymandering is a form of drawing lines for voting districts to disenfranchise marginalized voters. It is a form of skewing elections to keep power in the hands of the powerful that divides marginalized votes, making people of color or poor folks the minority in their districts, therefore erasing their votes on a broader scale.

Vision-boarding his funeral (175): a vision board is typically made to inspire someone to pursue a goal.

Parks & Recreation (175): A popular American sit-com focused on the parks and recreation department in a small town in Indiana. 

Leslie Knope (176): a Parks & Rec character. One of her defining traits is an aggressive, overwhelming love for the people in her life.

Mid-century rug (177): Mid-century furniture and style is characterized by lots of color and playful patterns (following the more reserved WWII period in the 1940s); it is rising in popularity again as a classy yet fashionable look.

J14 (178): A teen fashion/celebrity magazine.

Sacramento Bee (178): The largest newspaper in Sacramento, CA.

Southerness (180): In positive lights, the American South is known for its genuine, warm, unselfish hospitality.

Jane Austen my life (180): Jane Austen is a British author whose novels star lower/middle class women who fall in love with rich men. They typically try to avoid these men for large portions of the book, or at least have rather negative feelings about them due to a misunderstanding or other failure to communicate.

LSAT (181): the test taken for admittance to law school.

Carmarthenshire (183): A largely agricultural county in South Wales. As a tourist destination, it is known for its wide range of outdoor activities.

Llwynywermod (184): A royal estate in Carmarthenshire, the biggest building of which is a renovated three-bedroom farmhouse. It is surrounded by the rolling green hills common to south Wales.

Finals (in the US) (185): At US colleges, a semester’s final tests (typically worth up to 30-40% of a final grade) take place the week after classes end.

Stamp on his forehead at The Tombs (185): Tombs is a bar near Georgetown. According to reviews, and “Tombs Night” parties, where students celebrate their 21st birthday and get their foreheads stamped at the end of the night, are a Georgetown tradition.

Jumped in Dalhgren Fountain (185): Dalhgren Fountain is in the center of Georgetown’s campus. Swimming in it is a Georgetown tradition.

Summa cum laude (186): “with greatest honor”.

Ceviche (186): A seafood dish native to Peru that spread to Mexico, where it contains lime, avocado, chili peppers, onions, and cilantro.

Palm Room (187): The gateway to the West Wing, the area of the White House where most politics happen.

Hoe Dameron (190): A reference to Star Wars character Poe Dameron, a rebel pilot and the first Latino main character in the series.

Prince Buttercup (190): Princess Buttercup is the heroine/love interest in The Princess Bride, 

West Hollywood (190): One of the most prominent gay neighborhoods in the US.

“Call Me” (191): The most popular song of 1980; it was originally written for the film American Gigolo and inspired by the film’s opening sequence of a character driving along the coast of California. (Listen here)

“So Emotional” (191): An absolute bop about enjoying being in love. (Listen here)

“Don’t Stop Me Now” (193): A Queen song where Mercury sings to both a man and a woman; it’s a huge bop. (Listen here)

In-N-Out (194): A fast food restaurant/burger chain native to California and unavailable in other states.

Animal style (195): Animal style burgers are an In-N-Out staple; it includes the typical burger toppings, along with mustard fried into the patty, pickles, onions, and extra spread.

French-fries-dipped-in-milkshake (195): a truly god-tier American dessert tradition.

“O captain, my captain” (196): A reference both to the idea of a lacrosse team captain and to Whitman’s poem, “O Captain, My Captain” (as mentioned above, Whitman was a deeply gay American poet).

Burberry (200): A posh British brand of clothing known for its classy, traditional pieces.

Cats that caught the canaries (200): A cat that caught a canary is a person who looks smug or satisfied.

Mother hen (201): A “mom friend” or someone who will do everything they can to look out for people they care about, sometimes to the point of it being annoying.

—-

If there’s anything I missed or that you’d like more on, please let me know! And if you’d like to/are able, please consider buying me a ko-fi? I know not everyone can, and that’s fine, but these things take a lot of time/work and I’d really appreciate it!

—–

Chapter 1 // Chapter 6 // Chapter 8 

#rwrb study guide #rwrb #red white and royal blue #alex claremont diaz #henry fox mountchristen windsor x alex claremont diaz #henry fox mountchristen windsor #bea fox mountchristen windsor #june claremont diaz #nora holleran #pez okonjo #English Major Brain™ #English Major Brain™️ #rwrb analysis #red white and royal blue analysis #rwarb #rwarb analysis #rwrb fic ref #rwrb reference

[theydontknowaboutusimagines]

Your Love - Harry Styles AU - Part 27

Part 26

“Pop - Singer Y/N has had her share of relationships, but her newest one is one that really sticks out. Recently the four-time Grammy winner has been pictured with a mysterious young man while on holiday with her fellow band members. After some quick research, the young man was identified as Harry Styles, an intern at BBC Radio. 

It is rumored that the two met a few months back when Y/N was a guest on the Breakfast Show, where Styles was also an interviewer. We aren’t sure how long the two of have been together or what exactly the status of their relationship is, but it’s definitely different from Y/N’s previous beaus.” 

Harry sighed as he scrolled the article he found on Twitter. The photos of you and him had made it into a trending topic. He was back in London now, while you were finishing up some business in LA. He would be going into work tomorrow and he wasn’t sure what that would entail now that his relationship with you was out in the open. He would also be seeing his mother and Gemma since their conversation on the phone and the pictures being released. 

When Harry arrived at the studio, he wasn’t exactly shocked at the amount of paparazzi waiting outside the entrance. He was, however, shocked that they were shouting at him. 

“Harry! Harry! What’s it like dating a celebrity?” 

“Do you think she’s using you?” 

“Are you using her? 

“Harry look over here!” 

“Can we get a picture?” 

“Can we get your thoughts on Y/N?” 

The studio security guard walked out to Harry and helped him walk inside. Harry gulped once he was inside. His face flushed with both annoyance and embarrassment. 

“Well, that’s new,” Frank, the security guard said. 

“Yep,” Harry sighed. “Thanks for that.” 

“Not a problem,” he nodded. 

**

Harry made his way to the studio and as soon as he walked in, everyone stopped mid-sentence looking over at him. Nick walked over quickly and pulled him into the other room. 

“Shit has hit the fucking fan, mate,” he sighed. “They’re not happy.” 

Harry sighed running his hands over his face, “I didn’t ask for the cameras outside.” 

“You think that’s what they’re mad about? Okay, yeah, they’re a bit pissed about that, but they’re more pissed over your relationship with Y/N,” he sighed. 

“What? Why? I thought we established this wasn’t that big of a deal when she and I first started seeing each other,” he said. 

“Well, that was before your fucking face was plastered over every bloody magazine and social media outlet,” Nick sighed. “And the fact that they’ve named the studio... it’s... our phone has been ringing non-stop. Fans have been calling in and saying some interesting... uh, things about you.”

“Fuck... I didn’t think any of this shit would happen,” he said. “I’m sorry. What do they want me to do?” 

“They want you to take a few days off to see if this shit will calm down a bit... and they’ll decide from there,” Nick said. 

“Wait, what? Are you saying I could lose my internship over this?” He whispered. 

“If this was your job... it probably wouldn’t be as a big of a deal...but since you’re only an intern...” Nick said. 

“Basically I can get fucked over,” Harry snapped. 

“Mate, I’m sorry. I’m gonna do all I fucking can to make this better,” Nick said. 

“Thanks, mate,” Harry said. 

**

As soon as Harry left the studio, he went back to his flat and changed into his gym clothes. He was pissed and needed to let out some steam. He went straight to the gym. When he got there, he grabbed some gloves and went over to a bag. He started punching the bag as hard as he could, not caring about the burn in his arms. 

He kept up that speed for almost an hour before finally calling it quits. His whole body ached from the tension while sweat dripped down his face and onto the floor. He gulped down an entire bottle of water while he wiped a towel over his face and neck. 

When he walked out, there was a couple of paparazzi following him. 

“Fuck off!” He snapped as he walked down the sidewalk. 

At that moment, he wished he had a car to get into and drive away, but he was stuck walking back to his flat. 

“Come on, we just want a few pictures,” they said. 

“Fuck off,” Harry glared. “I’m not going to fucking tell you again.” 

“Ooh, touchy, touchy,” the guy said. 

Harry stopped, turning around to face him, “Look, I didn’t fucking ask for you to follow me. I’m a fucking nobody, so there’s no story here. Now, get a real fucking job and fuck off.” 

“Well, when you’re fucking one of the biggest stars of this generation, there is always a story,” he smirked. 

Everything from that day had built up inside of him and the adrenaline from his workout was still coursing through his veins which is probably why his fist connected with the paps face before he could even realize what he was doing. 

#One Direction Imagines #Harry Styles Imagines #Your Love #Harry Styles AU

[coughscent1-blog]

How to Soothe Sore Feet

This post contains affiliate links. Visit our Disclosure page for details.

Wondering how to soothe sore feet? Whether you’ve been sightseeing all day, attending trade shows, or have spent a long day at an amusement park, these tips will help you feel better!

One of the fastest ways to ruin the trip of a lifetime is by wearing amazingly cute shoes that are oh-so uncomfortable. It may sound anti-travel fashion, but the reality is that practical footwear trumps trends when it comes to travel. If you find yourself in discomfort at the end of a long sightseeing day, follow these tips on how to soothe sore feet on the go!

Toe Stretcher & Separator

Stretch

You’ve been walking all day through the streets in Buenos Aires, London, or Bangkok; it’s no wonder why your feet are silently complaining! Heels, especially, can cause pain in the ligaments and tendons of your ankles, and you may need to soothe your sore feet after a long day.

Take a seat and perform a gentle, two-minute stretch starting from the tip of your toes. Once you’re done, push your feet high up against a wall to get a full, long stretch. This practical little trick works wonders!

One reader says, “I love using Yoga Toes for a deeper stretch!” while another reader suggests to “elevate your feet above your head, about a 30% angle, at night. You can use a suitcase or something similar to prop your feet up on while you read or sleep. It allows the feet to heal better and reduces swelling.”

You can also use a tennis ball or small hard object to roll it under your foot, Make sure to get the sides and tops along the ankles. There are tiny muscles and fascia that tighten up, and can be broken up and released with the rolling pressure.

Make sure to always pack a pair of comfortable shoes to avoid discomfort to begin with!

Dr Teal’s Pure Epsom Salt Soaking Solution

Soak in the Tub

We’ve heard of foot baths but most of us hardly use them. These baths are more than aromatherapy; they can be essential for relieving our feet of tiredness and aches. Take a warm bowl of water and add some essential oils to soothe soreness.

Here’s a plus: did you know that foot baths can help cure other foot problems too?

Rule of thumb: 8-10 drops of oil per 2 gallons of water.

Milk and Water. This rich, creamy soak will give you a relaxing experience. Not only that; milk’s moisturizing properties will rejuvenate the skin and will make your trotters look younger!

Tea Tree Oil. Mix tea tree oil, lavender oil and sandalwood oil in the bowl of water. The antiseptic property heals your feet and the anti-fungal content of Tea Tree will cure you of athlete’s foot.

This homemade foot bath contains a few drops of lavender oil in a bowl of water. The aroma gives you a refreshing feeling

Who doesn’t love the cool, minty feeling of this foot treatment? You’ll need essential oils such as peppermint, eucalyptus and chamomile for this bath. This mix heals your burning feet, giving you a refreshing effect due to the peppermint’s properties.

Hint: Epsom salts are a relaxing scrub and portable for travel, too. Pack a bit in a ziploc bag and use it after a long day on your feet!

One reader says, “the reason epsom salt works is that it is magnesium. If you are swelling at the end of the day your electrolytes are out of whack. If you are walking more than your average and in a different climate (and especially those people pounding their water) you are losing those natural salts. The water cannot do its job if you do not have the electrolytes. Sodium (salt) Magnesium and potassium (eat your veggies) are important. This also helps with cramping and restless legs.”

AHAVA Mineral Foot Cream

Moisturize

One of our simple tips on how to soothe sore feet is to travel with lotion or moisturizer with cocoa butter that helps hydrate tired, worn-out feet. Apply foot balm containing beeswax or Argan oil; these make your feet feel smooth and supple after a trip.

One TFG reader recommends Biofreeze pain relieving gel. She says to slather it on your feet, wrap them in towels and then put them up. Her mom suggested this after a day of walking in New Orleans and her feet felt great the next day!

Relief Arnica Massage Oil

Get a Good Foot Massage

Oriental medicine studies have developed natural ways of healing with Reflexology, which make use of pressure points that correspond to different parts of the body. A good massage will help lessen the pain in your feet and body.

Indulge mid-trip in a local treatment – the perfect pampering experience while traveling! You can also give yourself a foot massage using a massage oil.

NatraCure Cold Therapy Socks

Use Hot and Cold Water

This popular, practical treatment may be your simplest solution for how to soothe sore feet. Get two bowls; one with cold water and one with hot water (make sure it’s something you can tolerate). Dip your feet into each bowl for a 2-minute period then switch.

The bath opens and closes your veins, allowing proper blood circulation and thus, relieving you of your sore feet. One reader says, “go find a cold river or run an ice cold bath and soak your feet. It helps with the swelling! I will warn you as someone who just started this practice last week it’s gonna hurt (felt like a never ending foot cramp but my foot wasn’t cramping), but it really does help!”

When you’re on the go, you can also use therapy socks, which provide a compact gel ice treatment in one tidy product.

On of the most unexpected ways to alleviate sore feet is to wear compression socks. You can do this after a long day on your feet!

What are your tips on how to soothe sore feet? Share in the comments below!

For more tips on travel shoes, please read:

Hope you liked these tips on how to soothe sore feet. Share it with your friends on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. Thanks for reading!

Source: https://www.travelfashiongirl.com/how-to-soothe-sore-feet/

[mfculinary]

30 Michelin stars Chef Joel Robuchon passes away.

French celebrity chef Joël Robuchon will be remembered for many reasons: earning more than 30 Michelin stars, creating the world's best mashed potato, and hurling a plate at a young and "difficult" Gordon Ramsay.

The chef, who has died aged 73, later revealed it was the only plate he had ever thrown during a decades-long career that saw him open restaurants across the world.

But it could have been quite different.

He initially wanted to be a priest.

Luckily for food-lovers everywhere, Robuchon discovered a passion for cooking while working alongside the nuns as a student at a seminary, and at the age of 15 entered his first kitchen as an apprentice.

The rest, as they say, is history.

'Chef of the century'

Robuchon died from cancer in Switzerland on Monday, according to Le Figaro newspaper, more than a year after being treated for a pancreatic tumour.

He was born in Poitiers in 1945, the son of a mason and a stay-at-home mother.

The luxurious dishes he would go on to create - langoustine and truffle ravioli, or slow-cooked pigeon with foie gras - would give no hint of this humble beginning.

But one of his most famous and beloved recipes was for the humble mashed potato - or pommes purée - which, rumour has it, is a 50-50 mix of potato and butter.

His dedication to creating the world's best mashed potato is perhaps not surprising. Robuchon was renowned for his perfectionism and for using few ingredients, keeping preparation simple and moving away from the excesses of French nouvelle cuisine - a healthier form of cooking.

"The older I get the more I realise the truth is: the simpler the food, the more exceptional it can be," he told Business Insider in 2014.

"I never try to marry more than three flavours in one dish. I like walking into a kitchen and knowing that the dishes are identifiable and the ingredients within them easy to detect."

Robuchon made his name in the early 1980s after opening his restaurant Jamin at the age of 36. Within a year it had won a Michelin star. Over his career, Robuchon would amass 31 such stars - the most of any chef, ever.

Less than a decade later, in 1989, he was named "Chef of the Century" by Michelin's rival restaurant guide, Gault Millau.

It was around this time that an aspiring Scottish chef joined his kitchen.

Gordon Ramsay, Robuchon later told The Telegraph, was a talented chef, but had a "difficult" attitude - and did not apparently take kindly to being told he had not made a dish of langoustine ravioli properly.

"I told him so and Gordon reacted in a very arrogant manner," he recalled. "This time, it really got on my nerves and so I threw a plate at him."

It was, he added, the only plate he threw in his career. Ramsay does not appear to harbour any hard feelings, posting a tribute to his former mentor after hearing of his death.

In 1995, at the age of 50, Robuchon decided to retire - but that did not seem to mean taking things easy. Instead, he turned his attention to television and hosted several culinary shows on French TV.

But he couldn't keep away from the kitchen and a few years later he unveiled plans to open more affordable eateries inspired by Japanese sushi counters.

Over time, trends change. In more recent years, he told the Michelin Guide in June 2018, he had created healthier dishes. Last year, the French chef revealed he had lost more than four stone (27kg) in weight after ditching butter and oil from his diet to deal with high cholesterol, high blood pressure and high blood sugar.

He leaves behind a legacy not only in his restaurants - there are currently 12 branches of L'Atelier, including in London, Tokyo, Las Vegas and Beijing - but also in the cooking school he created near the town where he was born.

It was, he told the Michelin Guide, something very close to his heart.

"There is a very famous proverb that goes something like this, 'when an old man dies, a library burns down'," he said. "I have seen so many good chefs - some famous, some not - who have gone and, with them, a part of knowledge and tradition is lost and nobody can take it back."

His legacy was at the forefront of many people's minds as they paid tribute to him on Monday.

French government spokesman Benjamin Griveaux described Robuchon on Twitter as a "visionary leader" who would "continue to inspire a young generation of chefs".

The culinary world has lost some of its biggest names over the past year following the deaths of celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain and American food critic Jonathan Gold.

In January France also mourned the loss of Paul Bocuse, known as the "pope" of French cuisine. Robuchon was seen attending his funeral in Lyon.

[endormifleurs]

Some For The Road

Ashton Irwin drabble? Oneshot?.. I haven’t written in a while, my autocorrect is off, and I’m bad at catching errors. Brace yourself.

so, basically, what i was thinking of was, uh

AH FUCK I CANT BELIEVE YOUVE DONE THIS!

hem, mings,

so sorry omg. lets get started with this

basically, a rundown of my idea for this was that you’ve been dating ash for a while now and this is the first time he’s gonna be going on tour while he’s with you. you can’t exactly come along because of your occupation/college/university responsibilities so he’s off alone without you for the first time. he gets... curious. he stops calling, he stops answering your calls, perhaps out of guilt for doing something?(one)(s)

ash cheats.

thats what he does.

if that will upset you please dont read further. be safe.

“Are you sure you’re alright, Ash? You haven’t returned my calls. And the only time I hear from you it’s a voicemail from some ungodly hour and you sound like you’re drunk. Please call me back... I love you...”

“Y/n... It’s been five weeks. I don’t think he’s going to call you back.” Lydia said quietly while scratching her arm. “I know that isn’t what you want to hear, but maybe you have to hear that...” Lydia didn’t meet her eyes.

Y/n bit her lip and tried to hold back the tears threatening to pour down her face as thoughts ran through her head. Finally, Y/n met Lydia’s eyes. “You don’t think this is his way of dumping me, do you?” Y/n’s eyes begged Lydia to tell her otherwise.

“What? No!”

“But, how do you know that?”

“I don’t,” Lydia rose from the armchair and made her way over to Y/n to place her hand on her shoulder, “But, if that is what’s happening I will fly out there and beat his ass.” Lydia paused and thought it over.

“Actually, I’m going to beat his ass nonetheless.”

“For what?”

“Not contacting you at all except a drunken voicemail with some girl’s voice in the background that definetly wasn’t Crystal.”

“Wait, why don’t you think it was Crystal?”

“Well, for one she sounded like she was French.”

Y/n looked even less hopeful than before. “You think he’s cheating?”

Lydia took a deep breath. “...Maybe.”

Y/n shook slightly, holding back the waterfall in her eyes.

“Hey, hey. Y/n, come on. Don’t cry. You don’t get to cry over him.”

“I... I don’t think I can help it.” Y/n said softly as a single tear escaped.

“Listen, how about we beat him to the next tour destination, live it up in London until he gets there, and then confront him.”

“Okay.” Y/n said with a small huff.

“Did you grab your passport?” Y/n questioned once Lydia opened the door.

Lydia’s eyes widened and she quickly turned back into the house. Y/n chuckled when she heard her friend’s sneakers squeak on the floor.

When Lydia got back she was breathing heavily and holding her passport triumphantly.

“Does Naomi know we’re ready?”

Lydia facepalmed.

“Naomi we’re ready!” She called out to her sister.

The girl suddenly came into view covered in paint. “Do you care if I get paint in your car?”

“I don’t care I just don’t want to miss the flight.”

“Okay cool,” Naomi reached out for the keys and Y/n passed them off.

In the car, Lydia plugged in the aux to her phone.

“I’m gonna shuffle my soundcloud?”

“Sure. Go for it.” Y/n mumbled.

As soon as Lydia hit shuffle, Lie To Me began playing.

Y/n visibly tensed.

“Sorry! I’ll reshuffle”

“Great.”

Like Satan himself was controlling the shuffle, an acoustic version of English Love Affair burst through the speakers.

All the girls in the car starting laughing.

“We got great seats! We have so much leg room!” Lydia gushed.

Y/n stayed silent.

“Ash and I met on a plane...”

Lydia gave her a look that was a cross between side-eye and pity.

“Sorry to be a downer. It just feels like the end. Also, I’m bummed out because you let She’s Kinda Hot play and Ash’s solo came on and I nearly cried.”

Lydia huffed. “Sorry. Let’s just...” Lydia paused trying to think of something. “Do something to take your mind off of it?”

“Like what?”

“Play twenty questions!”

“What are you, a seventh grade fuckboy?”

Lydia laughed out loud.

“That was the longest flight ever oh my gosh.” Lydia said while rubbing her hand down her face.

“I know rig-”

Y/n got cut off by a fan yelling across the airport.

“Isn’t that Y/n? Ashton’s girlfriend?”

“Oh no..” Y/n whispered.

The group of four girls ran over.

“Are you here to join the guys on tour?”

“Uh, actually I’m just paying Ash a little visit. Don’t tell anyone, I want it to be a surprise.” Y/n quickly came up with.

“Oh! Okay! Bye!”

With that, the girls left.

“Hm, that was easy...” Lydia mumbled.

“You’ve also never dealt with fans...”

The day before Ashton and the rest of the gang got to London, the pair were hanging out in their hotel room on their phones.

Lydia was scrolling twitter and decided to check the 5sos tag.

Her heart sank.

“Drummer of 5 Seconds Of Summer Ashton Irwin Spotted With Multiple Women In One Night.”

She clicked the link and it brought her to a news article with attached pictures of Ashton and various girls kissing. One in particular had the bottom half of the photo blurred and Ashton look like he was receiving a... service...

“Oh my gosh...”

“What?” Y/n looked up from the movie she was watching on Netflix. (It was Lemonade Mouth btw)

Lydia couldn’t figure out how to tell her friend what she just read.

“Um... I literally don’t want to do this, but I have to..”

“Spit it out, Lyds!”

“Go on the 5sos tag on twitter...”

Lydia refreshed and she saw that the hastags #ashtonthecheater #bringy/njustice and #respectwomen were trending.

She looked over and Y/n’s eyes were brimmed with tears.

“Hey, Y/n-”

“No.” Y/n shook herself off and she gained a fire in her eyes.

“This prick won’t even know what’s coming to him.”

Y/n whipped out her phone.

“What’re you doing?” 

“Calling Cal.”

“Um... For what?”

“Making sure Ashton is gonna be somewhere.”

“Wh-” Y/n cut off Lydia with her finger.

“Hey Calum!”

“Oh, I’m- I definitely could be better.”

“No, I’m not sick.”

“I need a favor.”

“Do you think you could make sure Ashton stays off social media?”

“Yeah. Bye Cal.”

Y/n set her phone down.

“What was that about?”

“Showing him what he’s missing out on now and slapping the shit out of his annoyingly attractive face.”

It was seven now and Bust The Windows was playing.

Y/n zipped her jeans up and flattened out her top whilst looking in the mirror.

“You look great.” Lydia commented. “That dick-bag is getting what’s coming to him.”

“Should I reapply my lipstick? Its smeared on my cup...”

“He might think you kissed someone, keep it that way.” Lydia smirked.

Y/n rolled her eyes.

She stared into her own reflection and still couldn’t help but feel sadness. She poured her heart out to him and this is what he gave her in return? She shared her secrets with him and he shared his lips with others. This was just plain cruel.

“You ready to go?” 

Y/n hesitated a second more. Finally, she nodded. “Yeah. I am.”

“Do you have the backstage passes?”

 Y/n lifted the lanyards up.

“Okay, great. Let’s get going.”

Once the first song started, Y/n’s heartbeat quickened.

There he was, innocently playing the drums towards the back of the stage.

She felt Lydia’s hand rubbing her shoulder.

She was in for a long couple hours.

The boys were in the middle of their final song when Dave came to get the girls.

“Calum told me about your... Situation. Would you like to go now?”

Y/n took a deep breath. “Yes.”

The girls followed Dave backstage and he showed them to where they could wait for the boys to come out.

Y/n couldn’t stop fidgeting.

“Calm down, Y/n/n. Once it’s over we can eat all sorts of ice cream. I’ll buy you f/f.”

Y/n nodded.

Then, they heard the boys finish up the song and the crowd screaming while they walked off stage.

“ohmygodohmygodohmygod.”

“Y/n.”

“Sorry.”

Then, she saw him. Still as angelic and heavenly looking as ever. It killed her.

Then, Luke looked over. He looked very confused. (Elevator music... pfft)

He tapped Ashton and pointed the pair out.

When their eyes locked, her heart stopped.

Soon enough he was right there, hugging her.

“What’re you doing here baby?”

It felt so nice she almost didn’t shove him off. It broke her heart, but she did.

He was so caught off guard that he stumbled back. 

“I’m-” Her voice caught in her throat. It was so much harder with him right there, beautiful eyes gazing into hers with confusion. Her stomach still fluttered around him. Despite what she knows he did. “I’m here to break up with you.”

He flinched.

“What?”

“I’m not repeating myself.” Her words were like steel.Cutting like a blade.

“Why?” He almost seemed guilty. Maybe piecing together why she was truly here.

“You know what you’ve done. You know how you broke us.” As she uttered the sentence, her voice and heart broke simultaneously

He chewed his lip, “Baby-”

“No. Not anymore. You ruined that with infidelity.”

His brows furrowed, it seemed like he was searching for something to say.

The rest of the boys had walked over and began eavesdropping. (Luke and Lydia hugged upon greeting each other ;) )

“Wh- What makes you think I cheated on you? I could neve-”

“It’s all over the internet, there’s pictures and everything.”

“Those are ol-”

“No they aren’t.” She glared at him.

He sighed deeply.

“Why’d you do it?”

His eyes scanned her body for the first time, stopping in places. “I was.. Drunk, lonely..”

“That isn’t an excuse and you know it.” Y/n snarled.

“I’m sorry.”

“Bullshit.”

Michael stifled a chuckle.

“I still love you?”

Next thing you know Ashton was clutching his burning face and Calum was trying not to laugh.

“Ow!” He whipped his head up.

“You don’t get to say that. Not after this. You don’t get to try to make it better.” Her face grew red and tears formed in her eyes.

“We’re done.” 

Once they were in the car, she broke down.

Omg how was it guys??? I love feedback omg

tell me how you feel??

give me constructive criticism i need it trust me.

please lmk!!!

thanks for reading xx sav 

#5sos #5 seconds of summer #ashton irwin #ashton 5sos #ashton fic #5sos imagine #angst #love my angst omg #afi #afi 5sos #5sos afi #ashton fletcher irwin #ashton drabble #ashton 5 seconds of summer #i love ash i promise #so sorry #5sos3 #younblood themes tbh #younblood #5sos youngblood #5sos fic #5sos drabble #5 secs of summer #ashton x reader

[coopdigitalnewsletter]

19 Aug 2021: Code red for humanity. Personalised funerals. Remote work.

Hello, this is the Co-op Digital newsletter.

[Image: IPCC]

Code red for humanity

“Unless there are immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, limiting warming to close to 1.5°C or even 2°C will be beyond reach.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its latest report on climate change. The press release is here. The full report is here - very detailed, very doubled-checked. A good, quick version is the summary for policy makers - a punchy read. And a good third-party summary is here: The era of rapid climate change has begun.

Here is Co-operatives UK on the IPCC report:

“It’s clear ‘business as usual’ is not a viable response to the climate emergency. Global government action is needed, but we don’t have to wait. Businesses – and indeed every single one of us – can take action today to reduce our carbon footprint. Many of our co-operative members are already making changes – from The Co-op Group developing the first compostable plastic bag to Greencity Wholefoods trialling deliveries by electric trike to reduce diesel emissions. We want to see all businesses, from PLCs to community businesses, following suit to take action for climate change.”

Co-op Group and climate change: 

5 steps we’ve taken towards our sustainability ambitions in 2021.

And our wider climate plan. (Though after reading the IPCC report, you may think: every organisation’s plan needs to be more ambitious.) 

Co-op Power is the biggest energy buying co-operative in the UK - it helps businesses save money and source energy in an ethical, sustainable way.

We know that our world has been borrowing from future generations, leaving them what we might euphemistically call a “carbon debt” that’s constantly growing and already hard to pay back. Delay kills and speed is everything. It’s warming rapidly, and almost everywhere. It’s going to get worse before it gets better. Net zero carbon globally is needed as soon as possible. Carbon offsets aren’t going to be enough (some of those carbon-capturing forests are burning right now). Fossil fuels need to stay in the ground. Fixing it means more than just fixing energy (ecosystem degradation, water shortages, food security, biodiversity loss and more are also critical), though fixing energy is a good place to start. 

You should improve the insulation of your home, yes, but the speed of response required means that the meaningful change will have to come from institutions. If you thought digital transformation was spiky and disruptive, wait til you see carbon transformation. It is going to feel like the sudden reinvention of many things we take as given today - jobs, education, housing, industry, families, society, the world. And it has to be done fairly, and we have to work so hard and so fast at it. Because home is always worth it. We have no choice.

Previously: climate change right in front of you, the climate/carbon plans of the larger supermarket businesses in the UK.

Retail news

Lidl is launching a “scan as you shop” pilot in south west London - first scan-with-app move by a discounter?

Warhammer maker Games Workshop hands staff £5,000 bonus after lockdown sales surge - UK firm praises workers for “exceptional performance” during pandemic.

Woman sues McDonald's after Big Mac advert 'forced' her to break Lent - as she’s suing for the equivalent of £10, this seems like a PR opportunity for McDonald’s in Russia.

Interesting comment on supermarket executives joining NHS Test and Trace, ending with: 

“Because surely maturing a new public health service needs a different kind of leadership to establishing new infrastructure and logistics at speed? It’s a bit like [Test and Trace] is perceived to be a massive pop-up shop, not a semi-permanent public service.”

Remote work works, if workers have power

Two views of remote work. If workers have some power, remote work unleashes productivity and places additional value on results, rather than managerial politics. A couple of quotes from it:

Remote work makes who does and doesn’t actually do work way more obvious. [...] Remote work empowers those who produce and disempowers those who have succeeded by being excellent diplomats and poor workers, along with those who have succeeded by always finding someone to blame for their failures. It removes the ability to seem productive (by sitting at your desk looking stressed or always being on the phone), and also, crucially, may reveal how many bosses and managers simply don’t contribute to the bottom line.

But if workers have no power, it probably looks different, maybe like this:

“For workers with little power – who lack either a union or a high-demand skill/experience mix – "work from home" is a thin euphemism for "live at work." Not only do you provide your boss with rent-free space in your home, he gets to colonize your whole house and family.”

That second quote is from a good and entertaining rant about power and warehouse, white collar and gig workers living in a work panopticon. Of course, employers with office workers are still working things out. Ocado will allow staff to work remotely from abroad for one month a year. Google is cutting pay for those who don’t go to the office on the grounds that “we always pay at the top of the local market based on where an employee works from” - raising the question of whether you could get a pay rise at Google by moving to Ashgabat in Turkmenistan.

Personalised funerals

Trend: personalising your funeral. First, the ceremony: "My wishes, my way" - how the rise of funeral personalisation is helping to celebrate the lives we live. Co-op research finds that 35m want their own farewell to be a celebration of the life they have lived. 75% of the nation who would like to have a funeral now feel comfortable talking about their wishes. 20% of Britons would like their coffin personalised.

Second, the memorial: cremations are increasingly popular, so it follows that it’s becoming more popular to turn someone’s ashes into a different and personal kind of memorial - stones, diamonds, vinyl records, soil… there’s a startup for every idea.

Previously: startups in life and end-of life planning.

Federated co-operation

Co-op Foundation and Luminate are partnering with Noisy Cricket and Paper Frogs to deliver the next phase of the Federation programme. Co-op alum Linda Humphries says:

“We’ll be challenging the ways tech and data reinforce inequalities and encouraging co-operation. We want digitally-enabled products and services that are inclusive, respect people’s rights and safeguard their privacy.”

Various things

Hundreds of AI tools have been built to catch covid. None of them helped. - Some have been used in hospitals, despite not being properly tested. But perhaps the pandemic could help make medical AI better.

NHS Data Injection: Will It Hurt? - Should British patients be worried about their medical data being placed in a central database?

The slow collapse of Amazon’s drone delivery dream - mass redundancies and job transfers as it winds down a huge part of its UK drone delivery business.

Some English schools are using AI to help students catch up after Covid-19 - the AI personalises learning.

Why apps get worse: “No Product Manager in history has ever said “This seems to be working pretty well, let’s leave it the way it is.” Because that’s not bold.” - the downside of bias to action? (and not all product managers, surely).

Co-op and Co-op Digital news

Reflections on the first year of our degree apprenticeships.

Thank you for reading

Thank you friends, readers and contributors. Please continue to send ideas, questions, corrections, improvements, etc by replying or to @rod on Twitter. If you have enjoyed reading, please tell a friend! If you want to find out more about Co-op Digital, follow us @CoopDigital on Twitter and read the Co-op Digital Blog. Previous newsletters.

[sycriptouk]

Ethereum Price Surges As London Hard Fork Goes Live https://bitcoinist.com/ethereum-price-surges-as-london-hard-fork-goes-live/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ethereum-price-surges-as-london-hard-fork-goes-live

Ethereum EIP-1559 recently went live on August 5th. The long-awaited London Hard Fork arrived just on time at block height 12,965,000. EIP-1559 represents a big step in the move to ETH 2.0. Following the launch, the price of Ethereum has soared in response. Over the past 24 hours, the price of ETH has jumped over 6%. With the coin looking to continue this upward trajectory as more ETH are burned out of existence.

EIP-1559 was meant to change Ethereum’s fee structure. So far, the upgrade is working as intended. Transaction base fees are being burned as transactions are carried out on the network. Starting what might be the beginning stages of ETH becoming deflationary.

Related Reading | Here’s The Reason Behind The Spike In Ethereum Gas Fees

The price surge shows investors continued faith in the Ethereum project. Investors continue to hold on to their coins despite price dips in the market. While demand for ETH looks to be on the rise following the launch of EIP-1559.

ETH Fee Burn

Starting from the launch of EIP-1559 at 12:33 PM UTC, ETH fees have continued to be burnt. The burn rate continues to increase the more time passes. After about 12 hours following the launch, the burn rate was at 2 ETH per minute. Now the Ethereum network has seen ETH fees burned at a rate of 3 ETH per minute in the past 24 hours.

Related Reading | Reddit Moons Now Worth More Than Dogecoin In Impressive Takeover

Over 4,000 ETH have been burned since the launch of EIP-1559. Amounting to over $11 million worth of coins taken out of circulation forever. The burn continues to be one of the most-watched events in the crypto market space currently. With a number of websites reportedly crashing following the high influx of people clicking in to watch the burn.

With less ETH being put into circulation, it increases the value of the coins already in the market. Which translates to price surges like the one currently being experienced in the price of Ethereum.

Ethereum Price Surges With EIP-1559

The price of Ethereum has surged up to break the $2,700 range following the launch. An impressive 6.6% price increase in the last 24 hours. ETH price had been trending up recently leading up to the launch. With a couple of run-ups spread over the past week-and-a-half in the market. Most of the significant price increases happening during the weekends.

ETH price surges 6% following launch of hard fork | Source: ETHUSD on TradingView.com

Despite this price increase, ETH’s total market cap continues to be sluggish. Speculations were the London Hard Fork would see Ethereum gaining more market share. Thereby increasing market dominance. Which would lead to an increase in the market cap of the digital asset. But that has not been the case.

Related Reading | What Is Ethereum EIP-1159? Your Guide To Launch Day Lift-Off

The crypto market received the launch of the hard fork positively. Twitter trends around the world included Ethereum, hard fork, and EIP-1559. Investors and non-investors alike discussed what this fork would mean for the market. And more importantly, what it would mean for the future of ETH.

There is no doubt that the hard fork spells good news for the network. The hard fork launching without being pushed back again shows that the project is currently on track with the current timeline. And the network is one step closer to moving completely to ETH 2.0.

Featured image from Blockchain News, chart from TradingView.com

#IFTTT #Bitcoinist.com