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otherkinnews · 11 months

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Twitter promotes hatred against transgender people, furries, therians

Summary: Since buying Twitter, Elon Musk has been pushing the platform into fascist politics by either manually or algorithmically suppressing LGBTQ content, welcoming back neo-nazis who’d been banned, and boosting hate speech. This Pride month, he used the platform to promote a stream of an anti-transgender movie, What Is A Woman? (2022). The movie attempts to ridicule transgender people by comparing them to other groups, so it contains misinformation about furries: the litter box urban legend again. It also had an interview about therianthropy with Naia Okami, who rejected therianthropy again a few months afterward. The free stream gathered more than 62 million views that day, so it will be how many people first heard of furries or therians. Twitter keeps getting worse for marginalized groups, and now for furries and therians too. If you and your friends haven’t already migrated away from the nazis-and-transphobes site, we have advice on how to move to safer alternatives: Mastodon, Tumblr, Discord, Dreamwidth, and forums. We also have advice on media literacy skills, how to recognize nazis and transphobes on social media, how to guard against this happening in the future, how to support transgender rights, and some options for what to do with your Twitter when you leave. At the end of this article, we have a timeline of events that happened in this story.

Musk promoted an anti-transgender movie

Since last October, billionaire Elon Musk has owned Twitter, a social media site with 450 million users. He started June by pinning his quote retweet of an anti-transgender movie. He remarked, "Every parent should watch this." The movie is What Is A Woman?, by Daily Wire columnist Matt Walsh. The Daily Wire invited everyone to stream the 95 minute movie for free. It is a propaganda piece that uses misinformation to oppose the existence of transgender people. Until then, the movie had been behind a paywall. Media Bias Fact Check describes the Daily Wire as a right-wing news and opinion site that has medium credibility. The civil rights nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hate Watch has called Walsh and his boss “peddlers of fear and disinformation about LGBTQ people” (Wilson, Nov 22, 2022). Musk has been known for his transphobia since before he bought Twitter (Garofoli, San Francisco Chronicle, Dec 13 2022). NBC reported that the Daily Wire’s CEO and other anti-transgender influencers such as Robby Starbuck had demanded for Musk to make the site stop suppressing the movie for its hate speech. Musk complied. Walsh, who had released the movie in June last year, said “What a great way to ring in Pride Month.” (Tolentino and Ingram, NBC, June 2, 2023).

What is that movie, and why is it so harmful?

The movie’s title refers to how they spend the movie interviewing various people about what a woman is, with the goal to discredit the validity of transgender people. Matt Walsh and Justin Folk had a bad enough reputation that no transgender people or allies would willingly appear in their movie, so they tricked people into showing up. They founded a front group called the Gender Unity Project LLC, and used a registered agent to mask their connection to it. Their producer used a fake name when reaching out to people to interview. They advertised the movie and LLC to potential interviewees as being “about transgender and LGBTQIA+ communities, and the challenges they face in today’s culture” and that it would “[explore] the real lives of people in the LGBTQIA+ communities, and to shed some light on the topics of gender identity, and gender fluidity, in a way that will capture the attention of all Americans and be educational.” Transgender rights activist Eli Erlick discovered they were not who they seemed, and exposed them immediately.

The movie intentionally misrepresented and disparaged a variety of professionals and transgender individuals who Walsh misled into interviewing with him. He used deceptive editing and ambush interview tactics to make it look like the interviewees were either in complete agreement with his hateful perspective, or were contradicting themselves and didn’t make sense. He used the movie to push false claims about transgender people, including trying to connect transgender identity to sexual predation and implying that transgender individuals will regret transitioning or that transitioning is dangerous.

Far-right director Robby Starbuck plans to release a similar movie this summer, titled “It Takes a Village.” This will also be a hateful propaganda movie opposing the existence of transgender people. Starbuck, like Walsh, lied about the movie goals to potential interviewees. Erlick caught and exposed this trick even earlier than the last one. Starbuck’s team members misrepresented the project as “highlighting gender affirming care and the issues facing trans youth.” Erlick believes that Starbuck may have planned to arrest her should she have agreed to fly to Tennessee for the offered interview.

How did this movie misrepresent furries and therians?

A common illogical argument that bigots use to criticize LGBTQ people sounds something like this: “If we let women marry one another, then wouldn’t it be just as absurd if we let people marry animals? If someone can identify as a woman, wouldn’t it be just as absurd if someone identifies as an animal?” Walsh used that tactic in his picture book Johnny the Walrus. Walsh’s movie has segments about furries and therians, in an effort to say that saying you are a woman is as absurd as saying you are an animal.

In one segment in the movie, Walsh interviews Sara Stockton, a family therapist. She incorrectly tells him that furries have demanded litter boxes in schools. Reuters Fact Check has an article that debunks that part of the movie. It’s well-known to be an urban legend that has never happened in any school. Conservatives have circulated it for the past few years to satirize transgender students asking to use the restroom of their choice. An alterhuman community historian did a presentation about how the legend has developed (House of Chimeras, 2022). The legend is why a few of this year’s hundreds of anti-transgender bills in the US say they also oppose people who identify as animals. Those are Montana Senate Bill 544, North Dakota House Bill 1522, Oklahoma Senate Bill 943, and Indiana Statehouse Bill 380.

In the next segment, Walsh interviewed Naia Okami. Okami has frequently sought and accepted media publicity for the past decade, even with producers her peers advised her to avoid (Okami, Oct 18, 2022). Around the same time as when she interviewed with Walsh, she accepted interviews with two other far-right media known for their hostility toward openly transgender people such as herself: The Sun (Jan 23 2022) and Fox News (Feb 7 2022). In these three interviews, she described herself as a wolf otherkin and therian. When Walsh tried to get her to describe herself as transspecies, she “vehemently rejected” that, so Walsh didn’t use those parts of the interview in the movie (Okami, June 5, 2022). (Okami has never called herself transspecies, and had spoken against the word for years.) Instead, against her wishes, he referred to her as a “trans wolf,” a label that she never used and which makes her “want to vomit” (Okami, June 8, 2022). A few months after the movie came out, she announced that she no longer calls herself a therian. She said, “I will always be a wolf girl; but I am not nor do I want to be … a member of the alterhuman, therianthropy, or otherkin communities” (Okami, Oct 18, 2022).

Like many of the other interviewees, Okami has explained how she was interviewed under false pretenses by a producer who used an alias. She shared records of her correspondences with the producer. She was not aware that Walsh would be the one interviewing her. He asked “intentionally provocative and leading questions.” She was looking into taking legal action, because the movie used the appearances of herself and others without informed consent (Okami, May 21, 2022).

By the end of the day, Musk’s promotion of the free movie on Twitter had caused it to have more than 62 million views (Tolentino and Ingram, NBC, June 2, 2023). This may be how most people in the world first hear of anything like otherkin, therians, furries, or transspecies identity. This may contribute to more widespread attitudes that are misinformed about and hostile toward these groups.

Musk’s Twitter welcomes fascists while suppressing LGBT speech

Musk has a history of supporting antisemitic and fascist ideology and espousing anti-LGBT rhetoric. One of Musk’s first actions when he bought Twitter was to share an anti-gay conspiracy theory published by a right-wing news source about the October 2022 attack on Paul Delosi. Twitter under Musk rolled back content policy protections for the site’s transgender users. He has also been known to quote Nazis, has reinstated the Twitters accounts of multiple neo-Nazis who were previously banned for hate speech, and has transferred his Twitter CEO title to a former Trump appointee. On Transgender Day of Visibility, users noticed that Twitter’s algorithm flags tweets for sensitive content if they contain the words LGBT, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, trans, queer, gender identity, pronouns, or TERF. Meanwhile, it doesn’t flag the words gender critical (which is what many transphobes prefer to call themselves), Nazi, fascist, or fascism. The algorithm’s source code shows that it’s designed to suppress and hide tweets that contain external links, misspelled words (as happens when users to try to get around suppressed words), and all mention of Ukraine. If you wanted to stand your ground and use Twitter to speak up for good causes, that’s exactly what it makes sure nobody will hear.

Musk vows to criminalize transgender healthcare

Musk pushes his anti-transgender attitudes in more places than just in this platform he owns. He vowed that he will be “actively lobbying to criminalize” gender affirming care in individuals under the age of 18. He supports long-term imprisonment without parole for anyone who supports or assists in such care, including therapists (Thakker, New Republic, June 2, 2023). He can wield unmatched influence over politics because he is the world’s wealthiest person at more than $100 billion dollars (Toh, CNN, May 31, 2023).

What you can do

Leave Twitter and bring your friends. Musk, and the platform he has through Twitter, is a threat to our civil rights and our lives. Twitter is not a safe place to be, because it is increasingly being turned into a fascist platform. As long as you’re there, you’re handing money to fascists, even if you’re not paying a subscription (Solarbird, April 23, 2023). You can’t fight the normalization of fascism by continuing to contribute to a fascist space (Solarbird, Dec 7, 2022). If you work for free to be a content provider for Twitter, then you are supporting fascism. Remember a German proverb: “If one nazi sits at a table, and ten other people sit there talking with him, that’s a table with eleven nazis.” It will become harder to avoid sitting and talking with Nazis on Twitter, because Musk says he will get rid of the option to block users (Ngo, Washington Times, June 8, 2023). Many users have been migrating away from Twitter. We strongly advise that you do so as well, and help your friends migrate, too. You must, to protect your friends, and to quit supporting the normalization of fascism.

Follow relevant news, and sharpen your media literacy skills. Whenever a friend shares a news article with you, see what Media Bias Fact Check says about that news source, and see what Reuters Fact Check and Snopes have to say about its content. Avoid boosting or interacting with transphobes and nazis on social media by learning how to recognize their characteristic jargon and the “dog whistles” that they use to signal themselves to one another. See the Anti-Defamation League’s encyclopedia of hate group symbols. Here’s a list of dog whistles racists and nazis use, ones transphobes use, and more that transphobes use. We recommend following Solarbird’s Fascism Watch blog post series, where she has been keeping track of news about the rise of transphobia and fascism, with an eye on its rise on Twitter. If someone contacts you for interviews or media projects, your job is to research them and their previous work before you agree to anything. Document everything. If they turn out to be exploitative, spread the warning fast. Take some notes from how Erlick does it.

Donate to good causes and support marginalized peoples. Some reputable organizations that support LGBTQ people and their rights are The Trevor Project, GLAAD, Mermaids, Human Rights Campaign, and National Center for Transgender Equality, or other civil rights organizations, such as The American Civil Liberties Union. Be cautious about sound-alikes that impersonate good organizations, and use Charity Navigator to check their backgrounds. Boost and donate to your friends’ personal fundraisers for their health, legal expenses, and moving expenses. Donate to the social media platforms that you prefer, so they can afford to keep going. Support and mutual aid means more than just sending money to the right places. Listen to your friends who are LGBTQ or members of other marginalized groups. Educate yourself.

Mastodon is a better Twitter

What is Mastodon? From the perspective of a user, Mastodon looks and behaves very similarly to Twitter. If you’ve used TweetDeck or other front-ends for Twitter, then Mastodon’s layout will look familiar. Users can create short posts, use hashtags, boost other people’s posts, and follow one another… even if those other people are on different Mastodon servers. Each Mastodon server is independently run, and has its own rules and moderators. These servers communicate with one another via the Fediverse, an interconnected network of servers. This is similar to how you can use a Gmail account to send an email to someone on a Yahoo account: they’re on different servers, with their own rules and owners, but they can communicate with one another. This decentralization protects against the owners or users of a particular server being able to ruin the whole thing for everyone.

How do you sign up on Mastodon? Click on a server in the below list of ones that we recommend, and then click “create account.” If it says an invitation is required to create an account, ask a friend for one from that server, or try another server. Don’t get overwhelmed trying to choose the perfect server before you begin. After all, you can use it to talk to people on any other servers, if its moderators haven’t chosen to block those particular servers. If you join a server, and then you don’t like its rules or moderators after all, or if the culture there goes bad, then you can move to another server, automatically bringing your follow list with you. You can carry on your Mastodon experience without a pause and without getting stuck with moderators you distrust. We recommend these servers to our readers because they’re LGBTQ friendly, welcome various sorts of alterhumans, are opposed to hate speech, and are open to new users, though some require an invitation. They’re owned and maintained by ordinary hobbyists and volunteers who care, not corporations or evil billionaires. Later, consider chipping in a little money to support your favorite server, if they offer that option.

https://awoo.space - This server “isn’t aimed at any specific audience, though there are a lot of queer furries here for some reason.”

https://bark.lgbt - This server *is* aimed at queer furries.

https://beach.city - Lightly themed around the cartoon Steven Universe.

https://chitter.xyz - For furries.

https://dragonscave.space - This dragon-themed server is especially for users who are visually impaired.

https://equestria.social - For fans of My Little Pony. The moderators speak French as well as English. (By the way, you can find servers in whatever languages you want, which is great for immersion language learning.)

https://meow.social - For furries.

https://plural.cafe - For plural systems.

https://plush.city

https://tech.lgbt

https://weirder.earth - Moderator team includes people who are POC, LGBTQ, and plural. Good track record at standing up to racism.

How do you make friends and find interesting blogs to follow on there? No algorithm plays matchmaker for you. We use hashtags, which is the only part of a post that shows up in a search. Usually people put hashtags that describe themselves and their interests in their #introduction post to help find others who share those interests.

How do you stay safe on there? Anyone with technical proficiency can create a Mastodon server and use it for good or bad. However, the Fediverse’s very design makes it easy for you to avoid the bad. Some Fediverse servers say they prohibit hate speech, but have been disappointing at enforcing that. Their moderators are overwhelmed, and unfamiliar with the needs of BIPOC, so racism goes unchecked. Those are widely-recognized problems with the servers mastodon.social and mastodon.online, so we don’t recommend joining those ones. Some Fediverse servers choose to allow hate speech, such as BlueSky. If you join a server that blocks problematic servers such as these, then those entire servers won’t be able to communicate with your server at all, period. Think of the story of the nazi bar: if a bartender lets in just one customer who wears nazi insignia but is polite, then that customer will come back with his nazi friends, everyone else will leave, and it will have become a nazi bar. A bartender who doesn’t want to accidentally find himself running a nazi bar has to prevent that from happening by kicking out even that one polite nazi. The Fediverse uses the nazi bar phenomenon against the nazis. Bigots and those who welcome them get isolated into their own space, and out of yours. By blocking entire servers because they have nazis there, your own server becomes something like Twitter without the nazis (Solarbird, Nov 6, 2022).

Mastodon has another safety feature: built-in content warnings. There is a widespread requirement to CW for content that is sexual, disturbing, or a spoiler. Followers will only see what’s beyond the CW if they click to open it. That’s good consent culture, and it makes Mastodon less stressful to scroll through than Twitter. In your settings, you can also filter out posts that use words that you don’t want to see at all.

Tumblr is great if you liked retweeting

What is Tumblr? Tumblr is a social media site that hosts 572 million blogs. It’s less similar to Twitter, but it does have a feature like retweeting, called reblogging. Even better, you can add tags to what you reblog, so you can categorize and later find things you’ve reblogged. That makes Tumblr an ideal platform for circulating fandom content, art, and memes.

How do you sign up on Tumblr? You can sign up on Twitter with just an email address, without sharing other personal information. Tumblr allows for users to have one primary blog, and as many side blogs as they want. You can customize the appearance of your blog using HTML and CSS. On desktop, install the browser extension xKit Rewritten and play with its settings to improve your experience of Tumblr.

How do you stay safe on Tumblr? You can curate your experience with blocking and filtering. Use tags to give content warnings, which others can use to filter your posts, and view them only if they consent to see that content. For that to work, don’t censor words. You can hide posts that use certain words, which helps you filter out posts from users who hate LGBTQ. Here’s a guide for how to do that. And another guide with screenshots for how to do that in the settings, and another guide. On desktop, install the third-party browser extension, Shinigami Eyes, which often helps warn you that a Tumblr account is known to express anti-transgender views.

How do you make friends and find interesting blogs on Tumblr? Tumblr tags are great for that. Use this web address, and replace the word “food” with some other key word for any topic that interests you: https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/food?sort=recent It will show you the most recent posts that people have tagged with that word. The accounts you follow will often reblog from other users, and you can use those as leads to find other interesting blogs.

Discord has many ways to communicate

What is Discord? Discord is a combination of many forms of communication in one. It supports group chat rooms, private messaging, voice calls, video calls, and streams for both one-on-one direct messages and for groups. It isn’t similar to Twitter at all, but it’s fantastic for talking with friends and meeting new people. All Discord servers are all required to follow Discord’s Community Guidelines, which bans hate speech, harassment, and violent extremism. Many plural systems enjoy using a bot on Discord, PluralKit, which lets you create something like separate accounts for each of your system members, without having to sign in and out.

What servers might you join? Discord allows for the creation of servers based around specific interests and groups of people. Servers can be tight-knit private groups, or huge public groups, or anything in-between. Most servers have a specific theme or focus that they adhere to. There are some excellent servers about being alterhuman. Ask your friends for recommendations and invitations to these and other servers.

Dreamwidth.org is the best social blog site

What is Dreamwidth? Dreamwidth is a social blogging platform based off of code from Livejournal. If you used Livejournal long ago, Dreamwidth will feel like home. If you’ve only used Twitter or Tumblr, you can adapt to the differences soon enough, because it has an especially well made FAQ. (Here is a collection of more info about how to use Dreamwidth, written for people who are more accustomed to Tumblr.) Dreamwidth focuses on creating your own original content and interacting with other folks’ original content in personal blogs and in “communities,” which are group forum blogs. Dreamwidth’s design is ideal for long pieces of writing, serialized works, and conversation threads. Because of this, many blogs that are especially active on Dreamwidth today are those that focus on fan fiction, role play, personal diaries, and essays, but you can put nearly any kind of subject matter there.

How do you join Dreamwidth? On the front page of Dreamwidth.org, click “create free account.” (Paying a subscription to help support the site will give you a few perks, but a free account is just as functional as a paid one.) Make up a username. Tell your email address and birthdate, which you can keep private in your profile settings. You can customize the appearance of your blog. We strongly recommend you use Solarbird’s theme that makes your blog mobile-friendly.

How do you find friends and interesting blogs on Dreamwidth? You can discover more blogs that focus on things you like by adding a list of interests to your profile, searching for others who put those interests in their profiles too. You can look at the Latest Things (the newest posts and tags by all users). You can also use Dreamwidth to follow the news! Dreamwidth has a built-in RSS feed reader, so you can use it to subscribe to content from other sites. Many sites offer RSS feeds: major news sources, comics, subreddits, Tumblr blogs, AO3 tags, and more. YsabetWordsmith regularly features interesting active communities in her FollowFriday tag. For the alterhuman readers of our blog, we recommend joining these communities:

Dreamwidth_therians: A members-only group for therians and otherkin.

Fictionkind: A members-only group for fictionfolk to discuss their experiences based on prompts.

Otherkin: A public group for otherkin.

Otherkin_haven: A members-only group for otherkin.

OtherkinNews (that’s us!): A volunteer-run blog for sharing news for otherkin, therianthropes, fictionfolk, plural systems, and all sorts of alterhumans.

PluralArchives: Citations of plural and pluralish phenomena collected in one place.

PluralStories: A searchable catalog of plural and pluralish stories.

TheriThere: A comic about therianthropes and otherkin.

Forums make great community spaces

If you simply want a place to talk with friends about shared interests, consider web-based forums. Each forum has its own rules, moderation teams, and features. Search for forums that are built around your fandoms or other interests. We recommend these for alterhumans:

Alt+H Forums: A quiet forum hosted by Alt+h, a nonhuman advocacy group. It is about alterhuman experiences as a whole.

Draconity: A forum focused on dragons specifically. It had a site-wide update in 2022.

Draconic: This forum for dragon otherkin has been running continuously since 1998.

Nonhuman National Park: A forum focused on inclusion and intersectionality of nonhuman, alterhuman, and plural identities.

What do you do with your Twitter after you leave?

Some people choose to delete their Twitter account completely. This erases all their tweets and connections to other users. Any conversation threads with this user will have pieces missing. That can interfere with other users’ archival efforts. Erasing your tracks that thoroughly can also make it difficult for your friends and followers to discover where you disappeared to and why.

If you don’t want to delete the account altogether, then sign into it once every 30 days, to prevent it from getting automatically deleted for inactivity. You don’t need to post anything: just sign in (Twitter, inactive account policy). Some people use a third-party tool to automatically delete all or most tweets. Removing content from the site is a good way to withdraw support from it. However, some users report that their deleted tweets come back later.

Should you leave your account public, or set it to “protected”? That status makes it so all your tweets, followers, and followed users can only be seen by users who you manually accept as your followers. Pros: this mostly prevents unwanted interactions or follows from random users, while leaving behind a signpost to let your friends know where you disappeared to and why. Cons: privating can interfere with others’ efforts to archive conversation threads just like if the account had been deleted. Archival tools can only pick up your tweets if they’re public. -- Appendix: A timeline of events related to this article

2022 January. The Gender Unity Project, LLC, invites transgender people and allies to interview in a movie. Meanwhile, Okami has interviews in The Sun, and UK breakfast TV show This Morning.

2022 February 7. Okami’s interview on Fox News. On the same day, Erlick publicly exposes that the Gender Unity Project is deceiving transgender people into interviewing with Walsh.

2022 March. Walsh publishes Johnny the Walrus, a picture book about a child being pressured to become a walrus, in parody of transgender children.

2022 May. Okami blogs a public statement about her involvement in What Is A Woman? with documentation of how they deceived her into showing up to it.

2022 June. Walsh releases What Is A Woman? Okami writes a detailed criticism of that movie.

2022 October. Okami announces that she no longer calls herself therian or otherkin. Musk buys Twitter and immediately posts an anti-gay conspiracy theory. He lays off thousands of employees, many crucial to the maintenance of the site software. He invites many users back to Twitter who had previously been banned for being nazis and white supremacists (Washington Post, Nov 11, 2022). Anticipating that Twitter will soon crash and/or become effectively a far-right site only, thousands of users leave or prepare to leave Twitter, filling their profiles and pinned tweets with links to where to find them on other social media sites.

2022 December. To discourage this, Twitter introduces an algorithm that prevents users from putting links to other social media sites in their profiles, and threatens to ban users for doing so.

2023 March and April. Users notice that Twitter’s algorithm suppresses tweets that contain external links, misspelled words, or mention of Ukraine. It suppresses LGBT related words, but not fascism related words. Twitter’s policy stops protecting transgender users against harassment. Even news agencies are quitting Twitter, such as NPR and PBS.

2023 May. To discourage this, Twitter starts banning accounts that have been inactive for a short amount of time.

2023 June. Musk quote-retweets and pins the Daily Wire’s free stream of What Is A Woman? The same day, he vows to lobby for the imprisonment of therapists who support transgender youth.

About the writers: Alterhuman community historians and archivists House of Chimeras, Page Shepard, N. Noel Sol, and Orion Scribner collaborated on this article. Thanks to Solarbird for her Fascism Watch blog series, which helped us find news sources for much of what has been happening with Twitter.

This article is also on the Otherkin News Dreamwidth.

#long post #very long post

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ericdeggans · 1 year

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My Best TV of 2022: A (Unexpectedly) Long List

This is not a problem I expected to have, early in 2022.

Back then, the quality of TV shows was so disappointing, I considered writing one of those cranky, old-school critic’s columns complaining about how the glut of shows in our modern, streaming-fueled media environment was ruining everything.

I should have just waited around a bit. Because, even though I was mightily disappointed by some of the biggest TV projects on the docket – everything from CNN+ to Lords of the Rings: Rings of Power (the repetition in the title should have been warning enough) – lots more TV shows surprised and delighted me this year. Too many to fit on a top ten or top 12 list.

In fact, there were too many to fit on this excellent roundup prepared by me and five other critics at NPR.org (we each got about eight choices). And I will fess up now – I didn’t vibe with FX’s Reservations Dogs in its first season, so I didn’t keep up with the second and it’s not on my list. Many apologies to devoted fans of a show I’m very glad exists and so many love. But I’m not among you devotees (at least not yet).

Here's my list of fave shows from 2022, in no particular order. It’s by design very subjective, so I welcome debate, but it’s about what touched ME on TV this year:

Andor (Disney+) – Started slow, but turned into a masterful reinvention of the Star Wars universe, focused on the gritty, merciless beginnings of the Rebel Alliance. Who knew a Star Wars show with no lightsabers, no Jedi Knights and no Force could be just what the franchise needed? REVIEW

Atlanta (FX/Hulu) – The last two seasons, both released this year, weren’t nearly as impactful as its first two. But this show remains an excellent showcase for creativity and ambitious storytelling in portraying the lives of a quartet of Black millennials.

Here’s a Q&A I moderated w/Atlanta cast and producers at SXSW

youtube

Better Call Saul (AMC) – This Breaking Bad spinoff stuck the landing in series finale that capped both the origin AND ending stories of criminal lawyer Saul Goodman. REVIEW

Abbott Elementary (ABC) – Sidesplitting mockumentary-style comedy about teaching in a Philadelphia school that is so good, because it’s absurd humor is so close to the actual truth. PROFILE of star Quinta Brunson.

The Patient (Hulu) – Steve Carrell delivers his most impressive dramatic role as a therapist interrogating his own messy personal history while kidnapped and forced to help a serial killer. REVIEW.

The U.S. and the Holocaust (PBS) -- Star documentarian Ken Burns reveals how antisemitism in America busted the myth that the U.S. was always on the side of the angels as Adolf Hitler took power in Germany and began implementing his Final Solution.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (Paramount+) – Focused on the Starship Enterprise 10 years before James T. Kirk would take command, it’s a welcome return to a rollicking, adventure-a-week series that recalls the spirit of the original Trek series better than any other modern reboot/revival. REVIEW

Severance (Apple TV+) - for review, click here

Only Murders in the Building (Hulu) - REVIEW

Euphoria (HBO) - for review, click here

A League of Their Own (Prime Video) -REVIEW

This is Us (NBC) - interview w/creator Dan Fogelman here

Sidney (Apple TV +) - REVIEW here

Under the Banner of Heaven (FX/Hulu) - for review, click here

We Own This City (HBO) - for interview w/EP David Simon, click here

Barry, season three (HBO) - for review, click here

Stranger Things (Netflix) - REVIEW

We Need to Talk About Cosby (Showtime) - PCHH discussion here

Harley Quinn (HBO Max) -

The Sandman (Netflix)

As We See It (Prime Video) - REVIEW

The Good Fight (Paramount+)

The Dropout (Hulu) -

The Crown (Netflix) - DISCUSSION here

The Handmaid’s Tale, season 5 (Hulu)

Ozark, season 4 (Netflix) - REVIEW here

Ms. Marvel (Disney+)

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humanveil · 9 months

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you’re in a clown car with hugh dancy <- me logging on to the illegal stream of nbc i use to watch law and order svu live when new eps are airing so i can watch along with the gays and the girls in the us but there’s still ten minutes before it starts so i catch the end of the world’s worst law & order mothership reboot ep where i stare in disbelief at dead eyed clean shaven lawyer hugh dancy and wonder how badly he needs to pay his bills because why on earth is he doing this

#niche audience post #terminal svu brainrot

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girlactionfigure · 1 month

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🔅Sun night - ISRAEL REALTIME - Connect to Israel in Real Time

🔻Today’s peaceful attempts to kill the Jews..

Rockets - Hezbollah - at Even Menachem, Zarit, Shomera, Shtula

Rockets - Hezbollah - at Hanita

Rockets - Hezbollah - at Sasa, Matat

▪️NETANYAHU SAYS.. “We approved the operation plan for Rafah, including evacuation of the population. We will operate in Rafah, it will take a few weeks.”

▪️ISRAEL CULTURE CONFLICT.. when current discussions over whether to go to hostage negotiations with the extreme Hamas ran into Shabbat and involved Shas party (charedi) leader Ari Deri, a senior officer made a joke “the hostage team can’t go because it is not Pikuah Nefesh (risk to life) for overriding Shabbat”…

This was IMMEDIATELY reported by the media as “Shas’s Ari Deri says sending the hostage negotiation team shouldn’t happen on Shabbat because it’s not Pikuah Nefesh”. (Unspoken statement: the charedim care more about Shabbat than about the hostages’ lives.)

Opposition Yesh Atid lead MK Lapid said “if this isn’t Pikuah Nefesh, what is?”

Amit Segel (Ch. 12): it was NOT Ari Deri who said it, it was a senior officer making a joke. And the negotiation team STILL hasn’t received permission to go, showing the delay had nothing to do with Shabbat.

▪️IDF BUILDS.. an observation tower inside Gaza.

▪️HOSTAGE - CEASEFIRE TALKS.. The head of the Mossad will leave for Qatar A political source: "Hamas has climbed high trees, they are preparing to expand the fighting.”

▪️PROTESTS UPDATE.. one of our readers noted that we reported protests in the tens to hundreds by distraught hostage families and supporters, and mainstream publications subsequently reported thousands - as the protests were later taken over by anti-government protestors. Reader was upset that he understood small protests, and read about bigger ones. I noted we can only report what’s happening at the time we report - no future news… yet, and that for Israel, this was a small protest vs. when the public is serious about an issue.

The mainstream media LIVES for maximizing such events - the “if it bleeds it leads” approach. Your nervous eyeballs ARE their business, making them MONEY. However, recent polls made clear these protests are only slightly supported BUT are being interpreted by our enemies as NATIONAL INSTABILITY, WEAKNESS, INTERNAL DISSENSION. It is irresponsible and DANGEROUS to play these up.

▪️US CLOUD KOOKOO LAND.. John Kirby, communications for the National Security Council: “We have been watching this very closely and we haven’t seen evidence that Hamas has pilfered off a lot of the humanitarian assistance in a nefarious way. We do not support a major military operation in Rafah without a viable plan to ensure the safety of 1.5 million displaced people.”

▪️NATIONAL REMEMBRANCE DAY CREATED.. 24th of Tishrei aka Oct. 7 will be a national day of remembrance of the massacre, those who were martyred and those who fell defending us all.

▪️BIDEN ANGRY.. (NBC) From “sources”: Biden became angry after receiving low results in public opinion polls in Michigan and Georgia due to the nature in which he is conducting the war in Gaza.

▪️FLOOD WARNING.. danger due to the rainy weather expected in the next two days starting from Monday afternoon until Tuesday 18-19 March, in the southern region. Stay away from stream beds, flood zones, etc.

▪️ECONOMY MINISTER, WAR PROFITEERS.. Puts out a black list of food companies that raised prices during wartime and calls on the Israeli public not to buy products from companies that appear on the blacklist: Strauss, Osem, Wizkosky, Yachin, Zuglobitz, Beit Shita, Achuva, Shistubitz.

#Israel #Realtime War Updates #October 7 #Operation Swords of Iron #Hamas Massacre #Israel/HamasWar

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mariacallous · 2 years

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In recent weeks, as the defamation trial brought by Johnny Depp against his ex-wife Amber Heard has continued to overshadow nearly all other news stories and dominate the main social-media platforms, I’ve noticed that the normal people in my life—the ones who have not had the Law&Crime Network live stream of the proceedings running on their laptops since it began, in April—are often under the impression that the case is impenetrably complex. They aren’t entirely wrong: Depp-Heard 2022, playing at least through the end of this week in Fairfax, Virginia, is the sludge pit of an outlandishly toxic relationship. But so much of the online chatter about the trial is noise rather than signal; it has obscured how simple the core matter is, and how that simplicity makes the case all the more bizarre and tragic.

Depp’s fifty-million-dollar defamation claim against Heard rests on the first part of one sentence, which she published in an op-ed in the Washington Post in December, 2018: “Then two years ago, I became a public figure representing domestic abuse, and I felt the full force of our culture’s wrath for women who speak out.” It is incontestable that, two years earlier, Heard did indeed appear on the cover of People magazine with apparent facial injuries and that, around the same time, she obtained a temporary restraining order alleging domestic violence against her husband; she was photographed leaving the courthouse with what looked like a bruise on her cheek. She also has a trove of text messages, witness statements, and photos of injuries—which, she says, corroborate her allegations of abuse. The careful legal vetting of her Post op-ed may be evident in the wording: Heard calls herself a “public figure representing” abuse, not a victim or survivor of it; she does not name Depp, nor does she specify a type of abuse. (Depp has denied ever hitting or assaulting Heard; she is countersuing him for a hundred million dollars.)

As for whether Heard has “felt the full force of our culture’s wrath,” a quick glance at Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, and other platforms, where she is cast as the Medusa of Sunset Boulevard, may settle the question. The precise demographics of the pro-Depp coalition are diverse, if uncertain in their exact proportions: bots, shitposters, men’s-rights activists, women who were in middle school when “Edward Scissorhands” came out. According to Wired, the hashtag #JusticeforJohnnyDepp has surpassed ten billion views on TikTok. Parody videos of Heard’s emotional testimony are already a TikTok cliché. The conservative site the Daily Wire spent tens of thousands of dollars to promote mainly anti-Heard content on Facebook and Instagram about the trial, per a story in Vice World News. (The Daily Wire has not commented on the story.) NBC News has reported on the YouTube creators who pivoted to anti-Heard videos when they realized how much users and the algorithm liked them.

But that half-sentence in the Post—that’s the whole case. That’s fifty million dollars. Depp lost a 2020 defamation lawsuit against a British tabloid, the Sun, which was far more brazen in its language—it called Depp a “wife beater”—and, despite the United Kingdom’s strict libel laws and a reversed burden of proof, the High Court in London found the vast majority of Heard’s claims to be “substantially true.” And yet, earlier this month, the presiding judge in the Virginia case, Penney Azcarate, rejected Heard’s motion to dismiss. Azcarate cited “evidence that jurors could weigh that the statements were about the plaintiff, that the statements were published and that the statement was false, and that the defendant made the statement knowing it to be false or that the defendant made it so recklessly as to amount to willful disregard for the truth.”

The evidence that jurors must weigh varies widely in its apparent relevance to Depp’s defamation claim. Just today, the jury and viewers at home were treated to closeup views of Depp’s bloody finger stump, injured in a domestic fracas in Australia. Earlier in the trial, we saw images of the deranged, slut-shaming messages that Depp scrawled in paint or blood using the selfsame freshly injured stump. There are also Depp’s texts sent before he married Heard—in which he calls her a “worthless hooker,” jokes about how he’ll “smack the ugly cunt around,” and, at one point, shares a brainstorm with the actor Paul Bettany: “Let’s drown her before we burn her!!! I will fuck her burnt corpse afterwards to make sure she’s dead.” There’s footage of Depp trashing a kitchen and audio recordings of him telling Heard, “Shut the fuck up. . . . Don’t fucking pretend to be authoritative with me. You don’t exist.” Depp, to review, is the plaintiff in the defamation trial, and the one whom most of social media is rooting for.

It should be acknowledged that Heard, at times, has made questionable statements about her relationship with Depp and its aftermath. Both Depp’s legal team and the #JusticeforJohnny and #AmberTurd armies on social media have focussed on flawlessly gorgeous photographs taken of Heard after alleged severe beatings and, especially, on her claim that she appeared on James Corden’s late-night talk show with “two black eyes” and a nose that she suspected was broken. On the other hand, two pieces of evidence that her detractors hold up to allege that it was Heard, in fact, who was abusive—an audio recording in which she admits to hitting him and another in which she mocks any claim he might make of being a victim of domestic violence—both sound uncannily like fragments from a DARVO scenario, in which an abuser denies what he is doing at the same time that he deflects and projects his behavior onto the person he is abusing.

You don’t have to trust Amber Heard to look at twelve words in a newspaper column and wonder why they serve as an invitation to listen to her sobbing incoherently in an ugly argument with her unmoved spouse, or to read texts in which Depp calls her a “gold digging, low level, dime a dozen, mushy, pointless dangling overused flappy fish market.” You don’t have to like Heard to sympathize with her when one of Depp’s lawyers, Camille Vasquez, who cross-examines all of the defense witnesses in a tone of incredulous contempt, repeatedly confirms with her that she did not seek medical attention after some alleged incidents of violence; or, on redirect, when Heard’s flustered lawyer, Elaine Bredehoft, is unable to formulate questions that would permit Heard to defend herself. (Vasquez has taken fearsome advantage of what appears to be Azcarate’s unusually rigid application of hearsay.) You don’t have to believe everything Heard says to be startled when a Law&Crime guest, the defense attorney Lara Yeretsian, wonders aloud, after hours of Heard’s testimony, why she stayed with her alleged abuser—a question so exhaustively asked and answered over decades of work by domestic-violence advocates that it inspired an activists’ hashtag eight years ago. “It’s a question that I’m sure a lot of people are asking today,” Yeretsian said.

The longer the trial slogs on, and the more that various third parties profit from it, the more difficult it is to fathom Depp’s motivations for instigating it. He and his supporters say he filed the suit to clear his name, but it has put more terrible behavior of his on the record than any scrubbed and ghostwritten op-ed could do. In fact, if you spend enough time inhaling the sulfurous fumes of the Depp-Heard live stream, what it starts to resemble most is a high-budget, general-admission form of revenge porn, an act in which the person with the upper hand in a relationship forces the other to be complicit in the sharing and dissemination of raw, vulnerable, literally sensational moments for the delectation of an unseen audience. One of the hallmarks of revenge porn is the way it freezes its victim in time, a plight that Heard summoned at the end of her direct examination. “I want to move on with my life,” she said. “I want to move on, I want to move on, I want Johnny to move on, too. I want him to leave me alone.” But the consequences of his legal action against her will never leave her alone. This is who she is now—the victim of an unprecedented Internet pile-on, a bruised face on an iPhone, a woman who makes people laugh when she cries.

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medusasbush · 5 months

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read november 2023

Queer Fans Remember ‘Merlin’ 15 Years Later, The Gayest Show That Wasn’t Gay

Kim K's new nipple bra ad is greenwashing

thotscholar: a working theory of proheaux (woman)ism

Can Britney Spears ever truly be free?

Culturally Accepted Misogyny: Joan of Navarre to Amber Heard

mom jeans: on hand-me-downs and where resourcefulness meets identity

How To Watch A Movie

Hannah Waddingham says she was 'waterboarded' for 10 hours filming Game of Thrones torture scene

‘The Last of Us’ Has A Pretty Big Problem With Pinkwashing

The Not So Hidden Israeli Politics of 'The Last of Us Part II'

Dating as a Digital Performance

The Elements Of Appeal

No, That’s Not a Hit Show

The Algorithm is a Lie: Debunking One of the Biggest Myths About Netflix and Streaming

The Algorithm is Still a Lie Debunking (Yet Again) One of the Biggest Myths of the Streaming Wars

Mean Girls (Regina's Version): re-recordings, covers, and the merits of a thunderdome remake

The Instagram wellness influencers spreading climate misinformation

Google shares 36% of its revenue with Apple

Why Are CNN, ABC, and NBC Reporters Embedding With the Israeli Military?

How E-girl influencers are trying to get Gen Z into the military

8 Writers on Taylor Swift and the State of Music Journalism

What does Taylor Swift owe the planet?

When War Sells Serum

golden, million-dollar babies

Bring back websites

The world of fake live singing on TikTok

Blackout Tuesday, Social Media Activism and the Corporately-Owned Platforms That Control Our Tools

Meta's doing another referral traffic bait-and-switch

#s #read lists

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magnumpihq · 1 year

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Ratings and articles about ratings.

Here’s a longer guide to ratings, what they mean and why we shouldn’t panic about them as well as the articles.

During the save campaign a media outlet has reported that renewal will come down to ratings and Magnum P.I. gathering new viewers and better ratings. That statement is a bid of a double-edged sword.

The show has gathered new viewers, mainly seen on social media as new friends slide into the new warm and fuzzy blanket that is the comfort show called Magnum P.I. We also left some viewers behind on CBS, which is perfectly natural. CBS is known to be a ratings giant, in large part to the general audience CBS gathers that simply turns CBS on no matter what is on. Think background music that consist of explosions and gunshots. These viewers are the ones we haven’t managed to bring over to NBC and we weren’t going to be able to bring them over anyway.

But let’s look at some things in more detail.

What are ratings?

Ratings are a measuring system, by which networks gage the audiences interest in their shows. Based on ratings advertisers also decide what ads to place and potentially how much they pay for it, which is income for the networks. The sales demographic (18-49) is specifically interesting to those. Networks as well as the companies have access to far more data than the simple sales

Are our ratings bad?

Simply said, no. For a Sunday show on NBC in our timeslot our ratings are solid. Even the recent ‘drop’ in numbers is just a reflection of the competition currently on. Sundays are some of the weaker days in terms of ratings. At the moment Sundays generally don’t gather stellar ratings across the board. Every show and network suffers from this downturn (Hello streamer competition, anyone?)

Why did we suffer a drop in ratings in the recent weeks?

Simply said: Competition and natural viewing behavior.

March Madness is an event people watch live (as are Oscars, but March Madness much more so). These people record their shows instead of missing the game. March Madness also consistently ran overtime a little. People don’t just switch to other channels to catch half an episode. If they haven’t set a recording they will watch on Peacock.

It’s also somewhat natural for shows to lose a few viewers along the way. The reasons are as many as you can possibly imagine. Some lose interest, some have a different working schedule, lose access to NBC, aren’t in the right mindset to watch, have to go to the hospital, stubbed their toe, die (yeah, people annoyingly do that in which case their rating isn’t counted).

Where is everyone who saved the show and why aren’t they watching?

It’s a frequent complain and one that is perhaps the most stinging to the fans that have become active to try and save the show. It’s also an unfair question. A little over 14000 people signed the petition, only a fraction of those have donated to the fund, a handful have organized initiatives (billboard, anyone). You will have to subtract international viewers here, who have made up a large portion of that number. As you can see those specific fans are around – if they can. The international fans have no way of contributing to ratings other than social media engagement.

What ratings do we need to get renewed?

Impossible for us to tell. Ratings are only one factor in a large grid of data that NBC has access to and we don’t. We like having control, I know, but in this case we don’t have any.

Data we don’t have but that factors into renewal decisions:

Production cost (including rent for stages, compensation for cast, crew and so on)

How much money the ads actually make

How much money product placement in the show brings in

Number of people streaming

Contract requirements for the ads

Social media engagement (beyond the cold numbers) and the value they put into it

Projected ratings and expectations

To make it simple: A show that has high production cost and high ratings can still be canceled if the income the show brings doesn’t match the cost of producing it. Shows with lower ratings can still be renewed if there’s a solid profit.

Why do ratings look so different on a Sunday than a Friday?

Viewer behavior and circumstance. Friday is the beginning of the weekend, a lot more people have time to just kick back and watch TV, whereas Sundays people prepare for the new work week, maybe go to bed early. The reasons are endless, but it comes down to this: Sunday ratings and Friday ratings are wildly different overall. More people watch Friday in general, so our numbers would be higher there, too, but our Sunday ratings do reflect the higher ratings we would have on a Friday, translated to the circumstances on a Sunday.

We would have better ratings on a Friday, why doesn’t NBC put us back on a Friday?

It comes back to the data we don’t have. Yes, we performed well on a Friday, but NBC has analysts who thought it would be most beneficial to have Magnum P.I. on a Sunday. They had a reason to put it there. Also we would have likely experienced a rating drop on Fridays, too. Mainly because, as pointed out, the people who habitually watch CBS, wouldn’t watch NBC now.

CBS has a much higher rating than we do. Should we be worried?

No. NBC won’t make renewal decisions based on what CBS does. NBC makes decisions based on how their own shows do. Ultimately the shows that bring (and are projected to continue to bring) good profit, not ratings, are likely the ones that will be renewed. So don’t look to other networks, we’re not in direct competition with them for a timeslot at NBC, we’re in competition with other NBC shows. And among them we’re far from the worst performer. (And again, we have very little data in order to gage profitability)

Why are articles reporting so negatively about the shows ratings?

It’s simple journalism. Similar to shows, articles have a bit of a rating system behind them: Clicks. Highly clicked articles = more income.

Now as yourself which headline are you more likely to click and which article are you more likely to read through:

Magnum P.I. plummets to a new all-time low.

Magnum P.I. has 0.5mil viewers less this week than last week.

You’re more likely to click the first one, because it tickles your emotions, in this case in a negative way. The same way the content does. This type of language grabs you more, which increases click rates and the chance that you read the entire thing through, which is what they want.

Ultimately they pick the language to manipulate you into a reaction, not because it reflects their opinion or the meaning of the ratings. The content is the same, though: The ratings dropped.

Matt, who almost writes daily articles about Magnum P.I., is a great example for it. I am sure we all remember when he had headlines during the save announcing statements by a star of the show only to click the article and realize it was just talking about a recent social media post by a cast member which we had already seen. The objective here is, like with every other website: Gather clicks. In this case by tickling your curiosity. It’s nothing more, nothing less.

The reason why the articles sound negative is simply to get you to react. They in no way reflect NBCs opinions, nor are they able to tap into more data than we do, which is the ratings. All they have is a bit of experience with previous shows, but when it comes down to that, they consistently point out that Mangum P.I.s ratings are a win for NBCs Sunday line-up.

Why aren’t streaming numbers released?

Internal decision, but maybe this quiets your mind: Procedurals like Magnum P.I. are known to have great streaming numbers. They’re one of the best performing genres on streaming platforms. One of the reasons for that is how easy one can get into the plot at any point due to the stories contained within an episode. Magnum P.I. and all the other procedurals are a show where you can watch an episode without context of previous seasons and still enjoy it due to the mystery of the day. From there maybe the serialized aspect makes viewers go back. Or they continue to watch. But our streaming numbers could very well be good.

Does the drop mean it looks bad for renewal?

No. Right now what you want to look at is context: Magnum P.I. brought NBC the strongest Sunday ratings in years. Our decline is happening within the context of a sport event/natural decline and NBC will have expected it. Other than that our ratings are stable.

We also consistently adjust upward from the preliminary ratings we get on a Monday to the final ones we get the week after. That means something.

Ultimately we will not be able to judge our renewal chances on the ratings alone, due to the multitude of factors (and there could be more) I already mentioned.

There is no point in getting overly worried about ratings. We can’t control them! No matter how much we want to.

What we can control is this: If we can watch it and have our view counted, do. Engaged with the official accounts on social media and enjoy the show. There’s really nothing more we can do.

#magnum pi #ratings

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sassy-ahsoka-tano · 2 years

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I Got You Babe

Character/Fandom: Steve Binder - Elvis (2022)

Requested: yes - anon

Prompt: You witnessed the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. The first person you can think of to call is an old flame, Steve Binder. When he picks you up and brings you to NBC Studios where Elvis is filming a tv special, you remember just how much Steve means to you.

TW: Mentions of death, depression, a little trauma

Rating: Pg-13 || Word Count: 3016

A/N: i'm in love with this fic and also with dacre thank u

🦋 mila

─────•~❉᯽❉~•─────

You sit down, gripping the arm of the chair with white knuckles. Your heart is still pounding in your ears, sending painful shocks through your head. After heaving a few shaky breaths, you reach over for the telephone and lift it to your ear. You dial in the number you’ve memorized by heart and twist the phone chord around in your fingers as you beg, pray, and plead for an answer. After a few rings, the other line clicks on and static fills the space between you.

“This is Steve Binder with NCB Studios," the familiar voice crackles through the phone speaker and you sigh in relief.

“Steve, it’s Y/N. I-I didn’t know who else to call,” you say as you try to gulp the tears away.

“Y/N, it’s good to hear your voice,” Steve replies. “Are you…alright? Is something wrong? How can I help?”

You smile weakly at Steve’s willingness to just jump right in. He’s always been like that, for as long as you’ve known him. And it's one of the things that made you fall in love with him so many years ago.

“I…I assume you’ve heard the news?”

“About Bobby Kennedy? Of course. I’m not sure what to do with myself, honestly. I…working feels so wrong when our country is bleeding out like this.”

You nod vigorously even though you know Steve can’t see you. You grip the phone with both hands, closing your eyes and giving in to your brain as it replays the scenes over and over again.

You were there when it happened. You were just walking across the street, just passing like it was any other old day. The gunshot ricocheted through your body as if you were the one who’d been hit. Your eyes immediately flashed to follow the people along the street, sprinting and screaming. You hadn’t been able to see much, thanks to the crowd which had gathered around. But when two people shifted with the most unfortunate timing, you’d seen enough. There was no question as to who had been assassinated. Everyone was shouting and repeating that “Bobby Kennedy’s been shot!” You didn’t know what to do, so you stood, frozen, and watched as they loaded his body into an ambulance and sped off toward the hospital.

The bang, the blood, the screams…all of those terrible images continue to flash in front of your eyes. They're all so vivid, as if you're watching them happen in front of you again.

You don’t want to worry Steve, but you truly hadn't known who else to call. He was the first person you found yourself wanting to speak to as you stumbled back into your house and crashed onto all fours on the floor of your living room. You scrunch your nose as your face screws up with grief, tears threatening to spill from your eyes. You grip the phone and take a shaky breath.

“I was there, Steve,” you say.

But you've said it so quietly that you aren’t sure whether Steve has heard you, especially after several moments of silence follow.

“I was there,” you repeat, a bit louder this time.

“Y/N, I’m so sorry,” he finally replies before sighing loudly.

You know that sigh. You envision him leaning over his desk, elbow propped on his knee, fingers stretched across his forehead. It's a position you’d seen many times when you were together. It always came out during stressful evenings at the studio.

“It’s not your fault, Steve. There’s nothing you could have done. I just…” you glance up at the ceiling as the images roll through your brain again. This time, you aren’t strong enough to stop the tears which begin to stream down your face all at once. Your breath shakes so loudly that he can probably hear it on the other side. “I just didn’t want to be alone.”

“You won’t be. I’m coming to pick you up.”

“Steve, that’s like an hour drive from you. You-”

“End of discussion. I’m leaving now. I hate to ask this of you, but would you mind if we came back to the studio? I have a really important guest star that I sort of need to be with. If that’s too much, I’m more than happy to take off early and stay at home with you.”

“No, no. The studio is fine. Maybe I can help. It’ll get my mind off of…what happened.”

“One hour, I’ll be there.”

He doesn’t even wait for you to respond before clicking the phone back onto the receiver. You slowly place your own line back into its position on the side table and curl up on the couch. You don’t want to wait an hour, but the thought of running into Steve’s strong arms is enough to keep you satisfied for the moment. You reach for the remote to turn on the television but stop when you realize that all of the coverage will be showing the very images you're trying to escape. Instead, you lie down on the couch and close your eyes.

The shrill sound of the doorbell is what awakens you. Shocked and disoriented, you stumble off the couch and rush toward the door. You unlock the latches and swing it open to reveal Steve, dressed in a beautiful blue velvet suit. Your eyes quickly trace down his figure which is familiar in some places but strange in others. He’s bigger, stronger than the last time you’d seen him. His hair is much longer, falling in chestnut waves across his forehead and neck. He wears a blue ascot tied expertly around his throat which leads your eye perfectly down onto the exposed skin between two flaps of fabric on his chest. You gulp and allow your eyes to connect with his.

As soon as they do, you can see the concern in his expression. His eyes are bloodshot, red with what you assume were his tears after watching Bobby Kennedy die on national television. His eyebrows are pulled upward and his lips look red and swollen. His hair is disheveled and his face drawn. He looks like he hasn't slept in five days.

“Hi,” he says quietly.

“Hi,” you respond in a voice barely above a whisper.

You both stand still, staring at each other for a moment while you each wait for the other to make a move. Finally, Steve holds out his arms, stepping into your house. His small gesture is all it takes to break you. You fall into his arms, gripping onto the soft fabric of his jacket. He gently maneuvers you onto the ground, pulling your body into his lap. He wraps one arm around your shoulders and the other rests on the top of your head, stroking your hair. He doesn’t say anything but his presence is enough.

Your shoulders wrack as the tears flood out of your eyes and onto his clothes. His fingers methodically tense and relax on your head. This is something Steve has always done. You can’t explain why, but it’s oddly comforting. Maybe because it reminds you of what you two used to be, the good times you had together. Once you’ve finally gotten ahold of yourself, you pull back and wipe your eyes with a sniff.

“Sorry, I just need to change really quickly, if you don’t mind. And then I’ll be ready to go.”

You move to stand, but he grabs onto your fingers.

“Don’t be sorry. And take your time. I have a surprise at the studio which I think you might like,” Steve replies, offering a weak smile. You return it, your mind dancing around the word surprise.

You quickly change into a more comfortable outfit and rake your fingers through your hair to make yourself as presentable as possible before returning to the living room. Steve’s back is turned to you as he examines some of the framed photos you have propped up on a bookshelf in the corner.

“I’m ready,” you say and he jerks around to face you.

“Sure, uh…” he awkwardly hovers for a minute before striding forward to open the door for you.

You thank him and walk through, shutting and locking it behind you both. He’s parked right out front, so it only takes a few minutes to get in and take off toward NBC Studios in Burbank. You curl up against the window with your back facing Steve and close your eyes again, trying to get some rest. He turns the radio on low but the broadcast keeps getting interrupted with news reports and updates. You block them out the best you can over the next hour and are thankful when you finally pull up to the studio. As you wake yourself up, Steve rushes around to open the door for you. You thank him and he offers you his hand, which you accept.

He leads you inside, holding every door for you and smiling each time you glide past him. As shitty as you still feel, his intense need to be a gentleman is making you feel a bit better already. Before you enter the last set of doors, Steve pauses.

“Remember how I told you that I had a surprise for you?” he asks and you nod. “Well, we’re doing this special and the star of the show is Elvis Presley. He should be in here working on a new song.”

“Elvis? Wow…” you reply breathlessly. “That must be cool.”

A smile, a genuine one, breaks across Steve’s features for the first time since you’ve been together. You can’t help but return it, tilting your head to take in every angle of his charming face. The additional few years of age look good on him. He’s even more handsome than you remember.

He, once again, opens the door for you to step through. You do and freeze in the doorway when you see that the Elvis Presley is, in fact, there. He’s laying back on some pillows on the ground, holding a sheet of paper up to his eyes. You tense as you feel Steve’s hand sliding around your back to support you.

“Hey everybody, this is Y/N. This is Bones Howe, who you’ve met before, and Elvis Presley,” Steve says, gesturing with his arm as he introduces everyone. “Y/N…is gonna be helping us out today since Margaret went home hours ago.”

You sheepishly wave at them both as Steve gently pushes you toward a couch across from the piano. You assume Margaret is probably the secretary and, although you have no secretarial experience, you’re happy to help.

“Nice to meet ya,” Elvis murmurs with a small smile.

As you sit, you feel heat creeping into your face. He is incredibly handsome in person, even more than he is on tv. But when Steve begins talking to direct the session, your eyes stick onto him and stay there. You watch his eyes light up when Elvis begins to sing. You watch his mouth as he takes a drag from his cigarette, his plump lips expertly holding the stick between his teeth. You watch his hands as they shuffle through papers and drag across his chin and lips. You miss him. You feel a longing for him, even though he’s right here in the room with you.

Even though you’re supposed to be the secretary for the night, you aren’t asked to do a single thing other than hold a sheet of paper for Elvis for a few minutes. You feel incredibly lucky, just getting to be an observer of the magic that’s currently happening in such a small room in NBC Studios. Every so often, you and Steve make eye contact across the room. Each time, you both share a small smile. A few times, Steve winks and you bite your lip.

There comes a time during the morning when all that can be done is Elvis replaying and practicing the lyrics until he has them down. At that point, Steve makes his way over to you and sits down on the couch with a sigh. You glance over at the clock to see the hands gesturing to 4:15. The realization draws a yawn out of you, and you press your fingers to your lips. You’re curled up, your knees pulled tightly into your chest.

You glance over at Steve to find his eyes already on you. He offers a small smile and reaches out to place his palm on your cheek. You don’t mean to but your body leans into his touch, and you close your eyes. His hand is warm on your skin and you want to jump out of your place on the couch to wrap your arms around him and kiss his beautiful pink lips. But you banish the thought, just happy to be in his presence.

“How are you feeling?” he asks quietly so as not to disturb Elvis. His hand slides from your cheek and you sigh.

“Better. Much better, thank you. This is amazing. What you’re doing here.”

“Thank you,” Steve smiles, averting your eyes. You think you see a little bit of a blush settling on his cheeks.

“No need to thank me. I’m just telling the truth. You know, I always knew that you’d do something great. You were always so driven, so dedicated. So good at what you do. That was part of the reason I…”

You trail off, unable to finish your thought. The reason I love you, was what you mean to say. But, despite the fact that you had dated for a few months several years ago, neither of you had ever gotten the courage to say those three little words.

“The reason what?” Steve presses. When you glance up into his beautiful blue eyes, they’re sparkling. They flick between both of your eyes as he searches for your answer.

“The reason I called you. Because I knew that you’d understand. And I think I made the right choice.”

“Alright, folks, well I think we should wrap it up for now,” Bones’ voice interrupted your conversation. “EP, you’re sounding great but get some rest so you’re not completely exhausted tomorrow.”

Elvis nods, thanking Bones and Billy Goldenburg, the piano player. As he, Bones, and Billy are leaving, Elvis turns toward you and Steve. He speaks so that only the two of you can hear him.

“Try and get some rest in, lovebirds,” he winks with a mischievous smile as he leaves the room.

Your eyes widen but you say nothing, glancing down at your knees with a nervous gulp. A few moments of silence pass before Steve turns to you.

“So what did you think of the song?” he asks awkwardly and you chuckle.

“I love it. I think it’s really powerful. It’s sort of a song that only Elvis could sing.”

“I agree.”

A few more awkward silent moments pass.

“Um, do you,” Steve’s head drops as he chukles, “do you remember when, um, we were at that bar and they were picking people out of the crowd to sing in front of everyone? And they picked us, of all people. They wanted us to sing ‘I Got You Babe’ by Sonny and Cher?”

Your eyebrows furrow as you try to remember what he’s talking about. Suddenly at the mention of Sonny and Cher, all of the memories come flooding back to you. You slap your hand against your mouth and laugh out loud.

“Yes, of course I remember! Oh, that was a disaster,” you reply and Steve laughs. “You were horrible!"

“Me? What about you? You forgot half of the lyrics!”

“Okay but at least I could hold a note, Steve!”

You've both rotated now, turning to face each other. You've also leaned in, so your knees are touching and faces are only a few inches apart. Steve has absentmindedly taken your hands in his, intertwining his fingers with yours.

“You’re beautiful…” Steve’s exrpression flattens as he realizies what he’s said. Your smile also fades, leaving your lips hanging open in surprise. Silence settles, although neither of you break the intense eye contact you’re sharing.

“Y/N…”

“Yes, Steve,” you whisper, leaning forward ever so slightly.

Your eyes flick down to his lips and then to his chest. The ascot has been discarded and his jacket removed. His blue silk dress shirt is mostly unbuttoned now, and you long to run your fingers down his smooth chest, to grab onto his skin, to feel it against yours. He reaches out, placing one hand on each side of your face. His eyes dart around you, drinking you in.

“I love you. I should have said it a long time ago, but I just was scared. I loved you so much that the thought of you not loving me back physically hurt. I was afraid that you wouldn’t want me, and I just-”

“Steve, Steve, Steve,” you whisper, bringing your hands up to cup his face. You smush his cheeks a little to get him to stop speaking. His eyes recenter on yours and he gazes into you. “I love you, too. I always have. Why do you think you were the first person I called? The first one I thought of? Because you’re the one I want to be there when I need someone. You’re the one I want.”

He jolts forward, pressing his lips onto yours. You yelp with surprise but quickly kiss him back, winding your hands around his neck and threading your fingers into his soft chesnut hair. His hands slide around your waist, pulling you closer to him. His lips are perfectly soft, tasting like cigarette smoke in your mouth. When you pull back, you press your foreheads together and giggle.

“I love you so much,” he says. “Sorry to keep saying it but I just wanna say it all the time now. Every second of every day.”

“No complaints from me,” you respond and chuckle.

He smiles and presses his lips to yours again, leaning back onto the couch and pulling you down with him. Yeah, you definitely made the right call.

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