#so whatever we all say three years because 50-53 seems like it should be three years

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Calling the Republican Party the “party of fertilization,” former President Trump continues to make false claims in a recent interview with a Detroit TV station, while simultaneously taking credit for the overturning of Roe vs. Wade.

In an interview last week with FOX-2 Detroit following his Wednesday rally in Saginaw County, anchor Roop Raj asked Trump about the issue of abortion and how much it would impact the November election. The former president argued that the erasure of a 50-year precedent that provided women a constitutional right to an abortion was a positive development.

“I say what the people decide, and whatever it is, it’s within the state and what the people decide, and it’s working out,” said Trump. “For many, many years, people have said we’ve gotta bring this back to the states to decide, and that’s now working.”

Trump then outlined how different states were dealing with abortion rights, but appeared unaware that Michigan had already enshrined those rights in its constitution.

“All the states are deciding, and you know, for 53 years, people wanted to be able to get it out, Roe v Wade, get it out so the states can decide,” Trump said. “Your state [Michigan] will decide probably a liberal policy if it hasn’t already done it. … I think Michigan’s gonna actually be very loose. They’re gonna vote on it, and that’s gonna be the law.”

In 2022, Michigan voters overwhelmingly approved securing the right to an abortion and other reproductive rights, less than six months after the U.S. Supreme Court decided in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause no longer provided a federal right to an abortion. Three of the six votes in favor of that decision were made by justices appointed to the court by Trump.

Trump also told Raj the GOP was “the party of fertilization because we are for the women,” referencing one of the issues that resulted from the overturning of Roe vs. Wade, namely in vitro fertilization (IVF).

“We wanna help the women because they were gonna end fertilization, which is where when the IVF, where women go to the clinics and they get help in having a baby, and that’s a good thing, not a bad thing. And we’re for it a 100%. They tried to say that they weren’t for it. They actually weren’t for it and aren’t for it as much as us, but women see that,” said Trump.

The IVF issue came to the forefront in February when the Alabama Supreme Court, citing the Dobbs decision nine times, ruled that embryos had the full legal rights of citizens. That left IVF clinics facing costly litigation, prompting a temporary halt to the procedure in that state until it passed a law extending criminal and civil immunity to IVF providers and patients. But because the measure didn’t declare when life begins, clinics there are still moving away from providing the service out of litigation concerns.

Trump’s claim that “they weren’t for it,” presumably meaning the Democratic Party, is false. In fact, Democrats like U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois — a disabled veteran who used IVF to become a mother — had been warning since at least 2022 that IVF would be the next target of GOP-led legislatures and courts if Roe v. Wade was overturned.

Additionally, Senate Republicans have rejected attempts to protect access to IVF treatments, while a bill sponsored by House Democrats, H.R. 7056, the Access to Family Building Act, which would establish a federal right to access assisted reproductive technology, including IVF, remains bottled up in committee by the Republican-led chamber.

Trump continued to insist in the interview that abortion “was not that big of an issue,” and “should be largely taken off the table.”

He also continued to push the false claim that abortions were routinely being done in the final month of pregnancy, or beyond.

“Nobody wants to see abortions in the ninth month and the eighth month and the seventh month, and nobody wants to see abortions or, in this case, killing after the baby is born,” Trump told Raj. “Right now, that’s what the Democrats can do. They can have it in the seventh, eighth, ninth month, and they can kill the baby. In numerous states, they can kill the baby after the baby is born, and nobody wants that. Nobody.”

Since at least 2016, Trump has been making the claim of abortions in the final days of pregnancy or even killing babies after they are born, and it has been fact-checked time and again as false.

And according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, less than 1% of all abortions are performed after 21 weeks of gestation — in the fifth month of pregnancy.

Raj asked Trump about Florida’s six-week abortion ban that went into effect last week.

“You have to understand, every legal scholar from all over the country, all over the world, they said ‘You have to get abortion out of the federal government, you have to take it away from the federal government, give it to the states’, and now that’s what we’ve been able to do. We’ve given it to the states, and some states have already decided, and people are satisfied with it.”

While there were certainly scholars who believed Roe had been decided incorrectly, they didn’t represent a majority, much less anything close to unanimity.

“Any claim that all legal scholars wanted Roe overturned is mind-numbingly false,” Rutgers Law School professor Kimberly Mutcherson, a legal scholar who supported the preservation of Roe, told CNN, which quoted several other legal experts in fact-checking that assertion as false.

“The people within the states … they seem to be very happy with the way it’s working out,” added Trump.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, which supports abortion rights, since the overturning of Roe, 30 states have enacted abortion policies that range from restrictive to the most restrictive.

Raj also asked Trump about labor policies, unions, immigration and the war against Hamas in Gaza.

When asked about the success of union efforts in southern states, such as the UAW’s historic victory last month with Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga, Tenn., who voted by a nearly 3-1 margin to join the UAW, Trump instead talked about China building car plants in Mexico, insisted the public didn’t want all electric vehicles (EVs) and ended up in a diatribe against President Joe Biden.

“This character that’s destroyed our country, the worst president we’ve ever had, without question,” said Trump. “He’s destroying our country. What he’s doing with cars, he’s forcing the auto industry into China and other countries, and it’s so sad. And, by the way, Mexico is doing things that nobody can believe. They just started, and they’re doing them in conjunction with China, and it’s gotta be stopped. We can’t let that happen.”

Raj restated his question about growing union support in states like Tennessee that have been less than welcoming to organized labor in the past.

“Well, it could be happening,” Trump said. “I mean, it’s gonna be happening, but you gotta be very careful about what’s gonna happen in two years from now when China wants to take all of the jobs. Because frankly, then union or non-union, everybody’s gonna be hurt. Everybody.”

There have been concerns about Chinese automakers looking to avoid U.S. tariffs by building vehicles in Mexico and the Biden administration has addressed the issue. Last month, Reuters reported that under pressure from the U.S., Mexico was refusing to offer Chinese automakers incentives to build factories there such as low-cost public land or tax cuts for investment in EV production.

The report also quoted an official with the Office of the United States Trade Representative as saying the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which was negotiated during the Trump Administration, did not allow “a back door to China and others who may be seeking to access our market without paying … tariffs.”

On the topic of Israeli military attacks against Hamas in Gaza, in which more than 34,000 people have been killed according to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in Gaza, Trump was asked how he would try and end the hostilities, and indicated he would give Israel a free hand.

“You gotta finish it off fast. You gotta get it done, and then you gotta have peace. And we’ll make peace fast. But you gotta get your work done and you gotta have peace. You know that Oct. 7 was terrible,” Trump said, referring to Hamas’ terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians that killed about 1,200 people.

The interview closed with Raj asking Trump if he would debate Biden on statewide television in Michigan.

“If you can get him, I’m there. I’ll go anywhere he wants to go,” said Trump. “What he’s done to Michigan is so bad. What he’s done to our country is so bad. What other man, what other person, would allow 15, 16 million people right now in our country? They came from prisons and jails. They came from insane asylums and mental institutions, not from South America, from all over the world, they’re pouring into our country at levels that nobody’s ever seen. Drug dealers. One stat before we go, Venezuela was very crime-ridden. They announced the other day 72% reduction in crime in the last year. You know why? They moved all their criminals from Venezuela right into the good old USA, and Biden let them do it. It’s a disgrace.”

“But, sir, where are those numbers coming from?” asked Raj.

“I guess I get them from the papers in this case. I think it’s a federal statement or well, they’re coming actually from Venezuela. They’re coming from Venezuela. That’s where they can’t come from,” said Trump.

Punishing sanctions imposed against Venezuela during the Trump administration have been blamed as at least one cause of the mass migration out of that nation. Trump also didn’t mention that one of his last acts as President was to give Venezuelan exiles in the U.S. illegally protection from deportation.

#us politics #news #Michigan advance #Michigan #2024 #donald trump #trump administration #FOX-2 Detroit #Roop Raj #roe v wade #Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization #14th amendment #Due Process Clause #in vitro fertilization #abortion bans #Access to Family Building Act #abortions #reproductive rights #reproductive health #unions #tariffs #automobile industry #United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement #israel #Palestine #immigration #venezuela

[forestwater87]

Every episode of Camp Camp ranked: A very (non)objective list

It's well past the time of year when Season 5 of Camp Camp would've dropped. I fully understand and support it not coming out; the crew's health and safety are much more important than a comfort show.

However . . . man, would it be nice to have some comfort right now.

So I'm reliving the entire series! I've been known to share with the world a whole bunch of Spicy Hot Takes, but I've never really sat down and talked about my feelings about the show as a whole. 

And what's the best way to do that? Well, just ask Jenny Nicholson: a numbered list! That is, here's the series ranked from worst episode to best, because I want to get the negativity out of the way early and focus on everything I love (and because people enjoy complaining, so let’s frontload all that). 

The takes will be hot. The feelings will be intense. The post, I'm assuming, will be largely unread.

Let's do it!

Oh and duh, there are spoilers. I tried to keep it pretty chill, but you’ll want to have watched the whole show or just not care about spoilers before going forward.

Also slashes in the middle of “naughty words” are meant to prevent this from being kept out of the main tags. Who knows if it’ll work? I don’t.

60. Who Peed the Lake? (Season 4, epis/sode 3)

Ah, good ol' Pi/ss Lake (or as @hopefullypessimistic84​ calls it because she's funnier than any of us will ever be, “Pis/s Fe/tish Dot Com”). Terrible, one of the few I’d consider nigh unwatchable. I actually kind of love this episode for being such great shorthand for "the absolute worst one."

Who signed off on an entire episode centered around Sherlock Holmes meets a bad om/o joke? Give me names and addresses: I just want to talk.

59. Reigny Day (Season 1, episode 6)

And nobody was surprised.

I'll admit I'm more willing to defend this episode than many people, but it's not . . . like, good. It seemed okay when there were only 11 other episodes to compare it to, but now that there have been so many bangers, this comes across as extremely weak. 

And let’s just say the Na/zi jokes hit a lot differently in 2020 than they did in the summer of 2016.

I’m overall happy with the direction the showrunners have moved Dolph’s character in, and I can’t totally blame them for using a kind of humor that was fairly common in the pre-Trump era, but yikes, this has aged like milk. And it wasn’t even very funny at the time, so it aged like milk that was already pretty bad to begin with.

58. Squirrel Camp (Season 4, episode 10)

This is a dumb one.

Not much else to say; it’s just kinda stupid and lame.

57. Fashion Victims (Season 4, episode 13)

I love Sasha, but this is filler. Which isn’t in itself a bad thing -- I have a couple episodes near the top that could reasonably be called filler, and a valid argument could easily be made that “filler episodes” don’t actually exist in a show with no plot -- but as much as I adore the Flower Scouts and enjoy the handful of good moments we get in this episode . . . who cares? Does anyone really give a sh/it about anything that happens here? Does anyone get their life from this one?

I didn’t think so.

56. Foreign Exchange Campers (Season 3, episode 3)

I know, I know, your Russian waifu came from this episode. Why do you think it’s so low on this list?

Okay, for real: this is . . . fine. It’s fine. It’s fine? I’m not mad at it, it just feels tonally incongruous and not very memorable beyond the fact that the fandom got really weird and kinda gross about Vera. But the episode itself? There’s some cute stuff with Neil and Nikki being jealous, but for the most part it’s a big hunk of white bread with some super mild white cheese that’s kinda soggy from sitting in a bag for too long and getting all condensation-y. 

That is to say: it’s fine.

ETA: Space Kid does say “fu/ck.” I can’t decide if that’s a point in the episode’s favor or against it.

This is the last of what I’d call the “bad” episodes. Everything after this ranges from mediocre to mind-blowingly amazing. But whatever our failing tier of Camp Camp episodes is, it stops right about here. 

Onto the good stuff!

55. Night of the Living Ill (Season 2 Halloween episode)

I keep switching this with “Eggs Benefits,” which probably means they should be tied. But whatever, this is my list and I am in charge and I’ve finally decided, after like 5 changes, that I like this one a little bit less.

It’s a fun Romero parody with nothing I’d call bad. Really this one’s only so low on the list because I think it’s kinda icky, and looking at those green snotty faces makes me queasy. If you think this is a bad reason to put it near the bottom of the list, then make your own post.

54. Cameron Campbell Can't Handle the Truth Serum (Season 4, episode 11)

I . . . don’t remember this at all. I initially had it a bit higher because I tend to love things with Campbell in them, but then I realized that nothing about this episode stuck in my brain even a little bit. 

Oh, this is the “Dolph has autism” episode that made everyone either extremely happy or really mad? Okay. I guess that’s the most remarkable thing about it. Neato.

Cam, I love you, but this was just not the best use of your sleazy charm.

53. Eggs Benefits (Season 2, episode 9)

This is one of those episodes with enough cute moments and good ideas to save it from being totally unmemorable, and I mostly enjoy rewatching. Platypus being a mom is a fabulous idea, and pairing the campers the way they did was mostly really interesting and fun.

The Preston-Nurf stuff takes it down several pretty significant notches, though. It’s what the kids would call problematic, and while I normally enjoy how the show doesn’t skew away from darker themes and jokes, it didn’t really fit either of their characters and just . . . isn’t fun to watch. It’s not especially funny, it’s not especially tragic, it’s just uncomfortable.

52. Camp Campbell Wants YOU! (Season 1, episode 0)

Honestly, this would be a lot higher if it was a full-length episode. It’s funny.

The next 5 or so episodes fall under the “cute but not very memorable” umbrella:

51. Nikki's Last Day on Earth (Season 3, episode 4)

I love the ensemble episodes, so this was always going to score higher than any of the single-character “meh” eps. I didn’t see the twist coming, though I know a lot of other fans did. Textbook example of “cute but not very memorable” -- the Platonic ideal of that concept.

50. The Candy Kingpin (Season 3, episode 9)

A clever idea that plays on Max’s worst characteristics and then calls him out for them, while also giving Dolph some much-needed character development. Unfortunately, I don’t feel like it really picks up until the last third of the episode, leaving the rest just kind of sitting there.

49. Campfire Tales (Season 4, episode 13)

Who doesn’t love campfire stories?

That’s all I got. They’re campfire stories.

ETA: OH SH/IT THIS ONE HAS THAT REALLY SCARY STORY! Where David’s all like . . . Slenderman’d. Fu/ck, I didn’t remember that until I was writing out my thoughts for #35 or so. That definitely elevates it, but I’m too tired to try and re-decide where this should go, so just tie it with “New Adventure!”

48. New Adventure! (Season 4, episode 4)

New trio! Focusing on these 3 was a definite risk, and I think it really paid off. While the “plot” itself isn’t anything special, there are a handful of really great side gags (hi, Dirty Kevin!!!!) and it’s fun to see these three interact. They all get some nice character beats. It’s a good time.

47. Something Fishy (Season 3, episode 8)

This might’ve hit me harder if I’d actually seen The Shape of Water, but the send-up works fine without having more than the seen-the-trailer level of understanding. Gwen dresses pretty, which I love; Max sucks, which I also love. What drags this one down is mostly feeling like the surreal aspects of the comedy go a bit too far into the “what the fu/ck am I looking at?” territory without really . . . making an actual joke beyond “look! Wacky!"

Why is David at the opera with a bird? Why??

46. City Survival (Season 3, episode 11)

Literally do not remember a single thing about this episode except David getting mugged and being called a “homeless twi/nk.” That should probably rank it lower on the list, but David being a fluttery mother hen saves it for me -- as does the fact that it leads directly into one of my favorite episodes, and the single best story arc of the series.

Next set of episodes is what I’m going to arbitrarily call “okay! but like the good kind of okay, not the bad kind.”

45. Bonjour Bonquisha (Season 2, episode 7)

Max and Sasha masterminding a scheme is really fun; their dynamic is great (though it won’t be fully realized until Season 4), and heartbroken David is so tragically cute it actually makes my heart explode out of my chest.

Also I can’t resist a good “3 kids in a trench coat” gag.

44. Anti-Social Network (Season 2, episode 2)

Neil is very relatable and I don’t have much else to say about this one. It’s fun to see an episode that more heavily focuses on our nerdy science boy, and Max and Neil teaming up to save Nikki was really charming and sweet and set my Makkiel ship out to sea.

43. A Camp Camp Christmas, or Whatever (Season 2 holiday episode)

Why does this episode have a musical number? It’s not good.

Okay, that was mean. This is fun and cute and Gwen wears a pretty purple sweatshirt and Space Kid gives her a present and it’s really sweet. But that musical number is an instant fast-forward for me, sorry.

42. Preston Goodplay's Good Play (Season 4, episode 7)

We get some Preston character development! Awesome!

It’s done in a really trippy and surreal way that totally fits his character and heightens the drama of the episode! Awesome!

David has an apparently-tragic history of being a French mime! Not a good call! 

Next tier: Some good sh/it! (Tbh, these could all be put in just about any order; they might as well be one massive tie.)

41. Cookin' Cookies (Season 2, episode 11)

I love the Flower Scouts. I love Dirty Kevin. I love the idea of accidentally starting a dru/g empire. Another weird, borderline experimental one focusing on side characters, and I think it works better than “New Adventure!” because the scale of the melodrama is just so over-the-top.

The fact that this is in the bottom 20 but I have nothing but good things to say about it illustrates how dang good this show is. It’s only getting better from here, folks!

40. Romeo & Juliet II: Love Resurrected (Season 1, episode 7)

Preston is a terrible playwright. This makes sense, because he’s like 11, but he’s the kind of hilariously bad I wish I’d been as a preteen, because his play is absolutely bonkers. Max fucking with David is great, Tabii vs. Bonquisha is great, Bonquisha in general is a giant amazonian goddess and I want to be swept up into her giant arms. Neil is . . . a robot, for some reason?

So much fun!

39. Camp Cool Kidz (Season 1, episode 4)

I don’t love Ered’s characterization in this one, but there are a lot of wacky hijinks in this episode that I think make it really enjoyable. Max’s wide-eyed revolutionary naïveté is a fun change from his usual dour pessimism, and Nikki’s loyalty to Ered is both very gay and very charming. Plus we get to learn a bit more about how the camp operates (and fails to operate), and it’s a nice way to better establish the campsite as its own setting.

(Definitely think “Cool” should’ve been spelled with a K though. But whatever, I don’t write for the show.)

38. Scout's Dishonor (Season 1, episode 3)

The birth of Neeancy! The introduction of the Flower and Wood Scouts! Neil saying “cu/nt” -- one of the first and only truly shocking uses of profanity in the entire show! ZUKO!

I don’t know if my fondness for this one is rooted mostly in nostalgia or if it was actually really fun, but I enjoyed the he/ll out of it. Not as highly-rated as some other episodes mostly because it doesn’t really do anything, character or story-wise, but not every episode needs to be a massive game-changer that drowns us in feels. Sometimes it’s enough to have a fun romp, and this is very that.

37. Ered Gets Her Cool Back (Season 3, episode 2)

Awww, Ered. I have a soft spot for her, because I love the archetype of a spoiled bit/ch clearly still figuring out how to be a person and have friends. You really get the sense of her as a teenager trying to sort her shi/t out in this episode, which I would love to see more of. Her interactions with Nerris are top-tier, and I like that it’s a continuation of how her character’s been softening since Season 1 into this kind of big-sister figure.

Also, all the female campers in this show are lesbians. I do not make the rules.

36. Attack of the Nurfs (Season 4, episode 2)

I feel like this is a pretty underrated episode. But then again, I feel like Nurf is a pretty underrated character, so maybe that’s just my own personal bias.

I really enjoyed all the different iterations of Nurf, and I think Blaine did a killer job giving each one its own personality and life. It’s a fun episode that plays hard with cartoon physics (a 3D printer printing people! I love it!) and has a surprisingly moving ending.

At least, that’s what I think. Most other people seem to find this one pretty forgettable. Again: make your own da/mn list. I liked it.

35. Mascot (Season 1, episode 2)

This entire episode is memorable for so many things, but a few of my favorites:

David is established as kind of a di/ck.

Platypus arrives and kicks all the as/s.

Quartermaster is the best.

Nerris, Harrison, and Space Kid all get little moments to show off how cute they are.

Neil and Nikki bonding.

This:

34. Quest to Sleepy Peak Peak (Season 2, episode 3)

I love watching Nerris and Harrison bicker, and Neil and Nikki fit really well into their group. It reminds me of being a kid, and of playing Dungeons & Dragons (as an adult, because I’m so cool), and of summer . . . which is a really good thing for this show. There are a lot of funny one-liners, and it’s just a good dang time.

33. Quartermaster Appreciation Day (Season 2, episode 6)

I don’t think this one is all that well-loved, but I thought it was funny. There are literally zero important plot or character moments, but it made me laugh a lot, and that’s all I need a Camp Camp episode to do. 

I love QM, and the more we learn about him, the more confused and disturbed we end up being. What a fu/cking champion.

32. Arrival of the Torso Takers (Season 3 Halloween episode)

I lowkey hated this one when it came out, because I knew the Daniel stans were going to be exhausting. And they kind of were? But looking back, it’s a great way to reintroduce this motherfu/cker. He’s a lot scarier than he was the last time around -- but also less competent, which is a great way to kick him in the proverbial ba/lls -- and while I wish it had a lot more Gwen in it, it’s a clever and creative Halloween episode. 

31. Operation: Charlie Tango Foxtrot (Season 3, episode 10)

Charlie . . . Tango . . . Foxtrot . . . CTF . . . OH! Capture the Flag! I never got that before. Oh, that’s neat. I love this show.

Listen, every time the writers decide to take a risk and do something bizarre and creative, I’m going to be here for it at least a little bit. An entire episode told from the POV of the Woodscouts, explaining how hard they failed in all directions? A great gag where everyone in Petrol’s story talks in grunts? The return of Jermy Fartz?! Fantastic. 

30. Panicked Room (Season 4, episode 16)

Listen. I’m a sucker for my trash grandpa; anything Campbell-centric is probably going to be pretty good (except #54), because he’s just one of the most consistently funny and engaging characters. Good times are had whenever this terrible man is on the screen, and giving him a romantic backstory? A tragic romantic backstory full of mistakes and emotional damage?? One where he waited 17 YEARS for the love of his life???

We have no choice but to stan.

29. Party Pooper (Season 4, episode 15)

I’m so predictable. If you put Gwen in something, I will be happy. If you make an entire episode about how Gwen is under-appreciated and overworked and just trying to do her best despite the circumstances, I will dedicate my firstborn child to you.

Anyway, this episode is really sweet, and I liked the unexpected direction the writers took her relationship with her dad. He seems like a nice guy, they seem like they have a nice relationship, and . . . well, an episode about how hard it is to be an adult millennial hit pretty hard. Plus this was just a really pretty episode -- and not just because Gwen was in so much of it! Seriously, that night sky was a thing of beauty.

Also if you say a fuc/king word about Max and that godda/mn dog I will choke you out with your own intestines. Few things are more hilariously, annoyingly ironic than the fact that the entire fandom ignored and failed to appreciate Gwen . . . in the episode all about how everyone ignores and fails to appreciate Gwen.

28. Culture Day (Season 3 holiday episode)

Now, would it be arrogant to point out that I had the idea for a Culture/Heritage Day back in September 2018? Yes, especially since I don’t think the writers ever read fanfiction and it has literally nothing to do with this episode. Will that stop me? He/ll no it will not! I am a creature of ego! Read my stuff! 

Anyway, this is a really fun look at Neil’s background, personality, and relationships. Max looking out for him is just . . . oh my god, I cannot, I’ve written like 30 of these and my brain is starting to melt, but these two are so cute. I love arrogant Neil, and I love protective Max, and I love QM and Gwen fuc/king over the Flower Scouts to save the day. Everything about this episode is lovely.

27. Cameron Campbell the Camp Campbell Camper (Season 3, episode 7)

This should not be ranked so high (even if these are all essentially tied). This is a dumb episode based on a really, really dumb premise. 

But . . . I don’t know what to tell you. “Samboy Kidwell,” Max realizing he and Campbell are disturbingly similar and not liking what his future could look like, David’s “I’m not mad, I’m disappointed” face . . . this episode happens to hit all of my favorite things. It had a really good balance of heavy-handed moralizing and goofs, it was part of the most graceful lead-up into a finale the show has ever had, and I’m just all about it. 

Excellent job, Samboy. Count Olaf would be proud of your disguise.

There ends the “some good sh/it” tier. We’re starting to get into the really excellent stuff now!

26. Parents' Day (Season 2, episode 12)

I know. You want this to be higher. I hear you.

Honestly I’m kind of shocked it’s this high; it’s my least favorite of the season finales so far, and I had to push past a lot of prejudice to actually rank this where I think it deserves to be, as opposed to somewhere in the like mid-40s. Mostly because it gave fuel to the raging inferno of “Max has terrible parents and David should adopt him” headcanons, which I’ve detailed my problems with extensively in the past (in a post that, statistically speaking, none of you have read).

But, trying to be objective: is this episode actually any good?

Well . . . yeah, it really is.

So much work was put into giving each of the campers families that make sense with their characters and bounce absurdly well off of them, ranging from wholesome and adorable (Nerris’s family) to quietly tragic (Harrison’s parents), and they’re all designed so well; they’re fun to look at and fun to watch interact with the kids and each other. (The only exception is Dolph’s dad, who is both kinda lame and misattributes the cause of the weird Na/zi thing because it did not come from Germany, I assure you. But things with Dolph are always a little off, and I don’t really know how you would give him a backstory that actually works with the character, so they were caught between a rock and a hard place there.)

The drama of David having to choose between the man he considers his father and the camp he considers his home is really touching, and him and Gwen choosing to take a sad camper out to get pizza instead of covering for their boss’s a/ss is such a beautiful moment for both of them that I can’t really blame the fandom for losing their mind over it. Campbell’s arrest leading into the arcs of the next two seasons was great as well, and the finale left us all with this weird sense of foreboding because we didn’t know what was going to happen next; it was the only finale that actually ended on something close to a cliffhanger, while still being satisfying enough to keep us all from melting down.

Plus, it’s funny. Carl and Candy are really funny and the idea of Neil and Nikki’s parents boning is funny in a horrible way. The joke about Quartersister is funny. It’s a good episode.

Should this be higher? Maybe, but I can’t bring myself to put it above the rest of these episodes. Again: make your own list.

25. Mind Freakers (Season 1, episode 10)

The episode that launched a thousand ships. Assuming those ships are all Harrison/Neil, anyway.

It’s hard to talk about these Season 1 episodes because they feel so classic. Like, what is there to say? You’ve all seen it a couple dozen times; I’ve seen it a couple dozen times. Harrison is a di/ck, Neil is possibly an even bigger di/ck, and magic may or may not be real. (Though spoilers for literally every season: yes, magic is definitely real.) It’s so much fun watching these two smug as/sholes snipe at each other in an almost literal playground hair-pulling way that could very easily be read as flirtation. 

And the fandom did most certainly read it that way, at least for a little while.

24. Gwen Gets a Job (Season 2, episode 8)

It’s Gwen. What, was I supposed to not put it this high?

This was the first Gwen-centric episode, and it absolutely slaps. She’s pushed to the breaking point and responds by being a cold-hearted BAMF, and it got her some pretty significant hate from fans but I don’t give a fu/ck, I loved it. We got to see her all dolled up, and then we got to see her all disheveled, and both of those looks were gorgeous. David gives her a tiny fragment of the love and validation she deserves (I don’t know if this is when gwenvid started taking off -- I think it wasn’t really until “Parents’ Day,” or even Season 3 -- but I ate that s/hit up).

Also, again: job hunting post-2008. It’s a bad time, y’all. Camp Camp gets it.

23. Follow the Leader (Season 4, episode 6)

Yeah, I was kind of surprised at how high this landed, too. I guess I’m just a sucker for unlikely companionships, and these three have a great chemistry. The combination of competitiveness, sass, and reluctant admiration make their interactions a lot of fun. Their motivation of doing petty errands for Campbell for the sake of getting at the Box of Illegal Contraband is a great framework too, with high enough stakes to justify all sorts of wacky shenanigans without causing actual anxiety.

I want to see these characters forced to spend more time together. Please, RT, make that happen.

22. Escape from Camp Campbell (Season 1, episode 1)

In terms of numbers, this feels so low, but considering everything from about #45 on is ranked as at least decent, this is actually a pretty high rating. There are 21 episodes I’d call better than this, but these decisions were all pretty painful.

This introduces us to everyone! The main trio, the counselors, Mr. Campbell; we get a snapshot of the major personalities running around the camp, the major points of conflict (Max vs. David, primarily), the major building blocks of future episodes, setting, and relationships . . . 

Again, I don’t know how much of my love for this episode is nostalgia -- there’s a lot of squeeing at familiar faces and gags; this is the first time David gets hit by a bus!!! -- but it was a fun and funny introduction to a series that’s ended up being so important to me, and I’m so grateful this wonderful, quirky little show with its wonderful and quirky little premiere. 

Of all the episodes, I really can’t look at this one objectively. It’s too important.

21. The Fun-Raiser (Season 3, episode 1)

David and Gwen scheming is my ki/nk. They very rarely scheme together, but every single time their teamwork makes the dream work (or, more frequently, makes the dream fail horribly and have disastrous consequences) my soul flies out of my body and takes to the stars, where I write another 500 first chapters to gwenvid fanfics I’ll probably never finish.

This is a great follow-up to “Parents’ Day,” where we immediately see the consequences of the previous season finale and what happens when the one adult in the camp disappears. Mr. Campbell was a terrible adult, true, but at least he was smart enough not to steal QM’s hook. Like . . . whose plan was this? It was so bad. These two are hilariously incompetent sometimes -- often when their bad ideas are feeding off of each other, actually, a la this and “Space Camp Was a Hoax” -- and watching them frantically try and keep all their balls in the air is so great. 

The ending is satisfying, too; a bit graphic, in keeping with a show that tends to keep the violence limited to periodic spurts of bloodshed 1-2 times a season and mostly pretty mild the rest of the time, but between Max stepping up and fixing everything while still being his shi/tty self to our dear dumba/ss counselors getting their dumb as/ses handed to them (deservedly so, if we’re being honest) . . . it’s such a great note to begin a new season on.

20. Journey to Spooky Island (Season 1, episode 5)

A classic.

We get to meet our spooky boy Jasper, we get to watch the comedy trio play off each other and continue to sketch out the general contours of their friendship, and we get to see the Quartermaster with a big purple dil/do for a hand. What’s not to love?

19. The Butterfinger Effect (Season 4, episode 17)

CONTROVERSIAL HOT TAKES! GET YOUR CONTROVERSIAL HOT TAKES HERE!

I’ve already gone into some pretty intense detail about why I think this one is actually really good and carries the theme of embracing change that everything about Season 4 was centered around, but none of y’all read that so here it is in short: this episode is super funny, almost all of the campers’ transformations work really well as extensions of their characters while still being strange and surprising, and the fact that Nurf creates all of these problems by trying to solve them is deliciously fun to watch in a karmic sort of way.

Or maybe it’s just because any Nurf-centric episode is going to rank pretty highly for me. That is also possible.

18. Space Camp Was a Hoax (Season 2, episode 10)

Our camp counselors being bad people: it’s my drug of choice.

We get Space Kid tripping balls in what might be one of the funniest sequences in the show, the entire camp coming together to try and pull off the stupidest, most impossible task (and kinda maybe almost nailing it???), and once again the fun of watching Gwen and David scramble to keep from getting caught in their boss’s shit/ty lies is so great. And Lindsay’s voice acting is absolutely killer, even more so than usual. 

17. Jermy Fartz (Season 2, episode 4)

I get the sense this might be a somewhat controversial one. 

I’ve written before about why I think this episode is a lot of fun, but it mostly boils down to two things: watching the campers try (and fail) to be nice to the most bully-able person on the entire planet, and the essential likeableness of Jermy. 

No, really.

I think a lot of people were put off by Jermy’s general grossness, because . . . my god is he disgusting, but he’s also polite and good-natured, and seems totally self aware of how difficult he is to be around, without letting it make him depressed. He’s cheerful in a weirdly downbeat way that’s impossible to understand until you see him in action. He’s so matter-of-fact about his own awfulness in a way that I found entirely endearing. I don’t think I’d want him at my camp, either, but get that kid to a good dermatologist and gastroenterologist, teach him some basic hygiene and social skills, and you’ll have quite a little gentleman there.

I do however find it hilarious that apparently David got the type of tree wrong when making fun of Jermy. Not only is that a great moment for reveling in David being an as/shole, but he didn’t even have the right wood. F/ucking idiot. I love him so much.

These last ones are my favorites! (Well, duh, that’s how this whole ranking thing works.) Maybe not perfect, but just really good and with limitless rewatch value.

16. St. Campbell's Day (Season 4 holiday episode)

They Grinch’d Camp Camp. Those brilliant bast/ards, they really pulled it off.

Ignoring the fact that David is truly frightening-looking for most of the episode, this is a great bookend to Season 4, following up on the theme established in the first episode about how David is a flawed and selfish human being despite trying his best not to be.

This is another one I was surprised to find so high on the list, but the more I thought about it the more I realizes how good it is. David being a jerk is always one of my favorite storylines, and the fact that the trouble comes from him trusting Mr. Campbell too little instead of too much is a nice twist on the usual formula. Gwen coming to help him out despite a blistering hangover gave me aggressive shipping feels, yes, obviously. 

Between a lot of really funny little gags like QM’s failed satanic ritual and the genuinely touching moral about the importance of spending time with the people you love, it’s just a really lovely episode that gets just the right amount of maudlin for the holiday season. 

15. Jasper Dies at the End (Season 2, episode 5)

I kept switching this and “Dial M for Jasper”; it was a really difficult decision to make, figuring out where these two belonged. I think in the end, while the John Dies at the End reference was very, very good, this one loses me a little bit by being told from David’s perspective. Now, normally the more David is in an episode the more I’ll be likely to love it (see my #1 for proof of that), but his blinders when it comes to the camp and Mr. Campbell result in a really funny story, but one without the same emotional heft as hearing about what happened from Jasper’s point of view.

That doesn’t mean it’s not perfect for what it needs to be: each Jasper episode builds on the previous ones, and having the same intensity of “Dial M for Jasper,” where we learn how he died and how his relationship with David fell apart, would be weird and heavy at this point. In Season 1 we just found out he’s a ghost (and eagle-eyed viewers realized he’d been a camper with David); in Season 2 we find out how David views their friendship and time at camp; and in Season 3 we get Jasper’s perspective. It’s an absolutely wonderful raising of the stakes (for lack of a better term), but the one that packs more of an emotional punch is going to rank a bit higher than the one that’s mostly just for laughs.

That being said: there are plenty of laughs in this one. Everyone -- Griffin, Miles, Travis, the animators -- nailed this one, and it gets funnier every time I watch it.

14. Camporee (Season 1, episode 11)

AKA the episode where Forest realized she was in love with Gwen. 

What a great idea for an episode, seriously. Every coming-of-age story has a talent show or a competition or a big game -- something where the kiddos can show off their improved skills and teamwork to beat their bullies or whatever. And this show has both kinds of bullies: the popular girly girls and the violent muscleheads. What a great moment to pull everyone together and show how friendship can help us accomplish anything!

Except . . . of course that’s not what happens. Of course they’re absolute garbage, and of course teamwork isn’t the answer. Gwen is the perfect foil for David here, being the anti-teamwork, anti-Camp-Campbell adult who can perfectly and effortlessly undermine David’s relentless optimism. David wants so badly for his campers to live in the same coming-of-age summer movie he did as a child, and their staunch refusal to do that leads to a really heartbreaking closer to the episode, as well as lead into the next one. Everything about this, from the challenges to the setup to Gwen shouting “we are winning this FUC/KING trophy!” is just gold.

13. David Gets Hard (Season 1, episode 9)

We have David. We have Nurf. We have Gwen. We have Max trying to be helpful in the shi/ttiest way possible.

We have all the makings of a da/mn good episode. And they deliver. Not a very emotionally intense or moving one, but so, so funny.

12. Dial M for Jasper (Season 3, episode 5)

This isn’t the fate any of us expected for Jasper, and it’s not the fate of a lot of people wanted. But godda/mn it, it worked. The constant bait-and-switch the episode keeps playing with, where you keep waiting for something really dramatic and tragic to happen . . . and then the reality is that Jasper died because Mr. Campbell was stupid and careless, and it was all just a horribly sad accident.

It’s anticlimactic, but in a way that suits the series, both as a comedic counterpoint to all the hype throughout the episode and as a way to establish that Cameron Campbell is a bad man first and foremost through selfishness and laziness, not Daniel-esque sinister evil. Jasper’s death was totally avoidable and totally Campbell’s fault, and while that’s sad, it also adds a weird sort of lightness to the episode. David didn’t do something terrible to kill his best friend, Jasper didn’t kill himself, and without having actively chosen to murder a child (well, not this time), the door remains open for fans accepting Campbell’s later pseudo-redemption. It was just an accident, and Jasper was “haunting” David to tell him that he was sorry for how their friendship ended. That’s really sweet, actually.

I think it’s the best way this reveal could’ve gone, and I’m so impressed with how they pulled it all off.

11. Into Town (Season 1, episode 8)

This might actually be the only flawless episode in the entire show. I mean, I call a lot of them flawless, and I mean that on an emotional level -- “I love this so much I cannot see anything wrong with it” -- but this one is a masterpiece of storytelling. All the technical jumbo I’m bad at, like planting and payoff and tension and all of that, is just perfect.

I feel like this is the kind of claim that needs to be backed up with a long-as/s essay full of citations and video clips and references to, like, Joseph Campbell or something, but this is my 49th entry in the list so I am not going to be doing that. Besides, I don’t think my English degree qualifies me to critique film/animation; I don’t even entirely know half the terms I’ve used to compliment this episode. Someone else please explain why this is such a good one.

10. The Quarter-Moon Convergence (Season 4, episode 5)

I’ve mentioned in other entries that the weird, surreal humor sometimes doesn’t work; it feels too much like being odd for its own sake, and sometimes gets so distracted in being surreal that it forgets to include anything funny or meaningful. 

This . . . is not one of those.

Putting Harrison and QM together is a stroke of genius; the two of them are literally the most magical beings in the entire show, and using them as the conveyance for this great Lovecraftian horror-comedy was such a good idea. I don’t know if we’ll ever see these two interact in another episode -- honestly, this felt a bit like lightning in a bottle, and I have a hard time imagining what could possibly bring them together again -- but if this is the only episode we get, it is such a fantastic one.

Harrison makes a really good everyman, despite his powers; he’s just the right amount of confident and insecure to pull off that wide-eyed apprentice to QM’s grizzled wise mentor. (The fact that QM is objectively a terrible mentor is beside the point.) I still don’t entirely know what the two of them accomplished, but it feels baffling and momentous, with the perfect amount of gravity to make things extremely tense all the way through to the end.

Also, I guess God is an octopus? That’s kinda cool. I like octopuses.

9. Camp Corp. (Season 3, episode 12)

Another unpopular opinion? Oh ho ho, I am so contrary! I am Not Like Other Fans! I am the Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way, refusing to have the same opinions of all you prepz.

I know this wasn’t the most well-loved episode, but I think it did a really great job tying together story threads woven throughout Season 3: Max’s selfishness leading to him hurting other people, his growing realization that he cares about his friends and the camp itself, the parallels between him and Mr. Campbell (and the fact that they both get this redemption moment in the finale). 

This is the most Max-centric season, focusing on his flaws and character growth, and they pulled it off in a really organic way that felt faithful to his character, touching without being too maudlin. The fact that his feelings about the camp are echoed in Gwen, Neil and Nikki, the other campers, and even Mr. Campbell drives home how important the camp -- and David -- are to this strange little family. 

Each season, Max reluctantly becomes a better person, without changing the fundamental core of who he is. That’s a really hard putt for the writers and Michael, and I’m blown away every finale by how they so consistently nail it.

8. Time Crapsules (Season 4, episode 18)

Gwen-centric? Check.

Max learning how to be a better person while still being the bratty kid we know and love? Check.

Looks at one of the most under-appreciated character dynamics in the entire show (i.e., Max and Gwen)? Checkity check-check-check.

I don’t really have much to say about this one, which I should: it was considered a pretty serious letdown to a lot of fans, and I’m not sure how to explain why I loved it so much. 

Comparing Max from “The Order of the Sparrow” to Max from this episode is wild. It’s not like 2 different characters: they’re still very obviously the same cynical, self-absorbed 10-year-old trying to survive summer camp. But he’s become a more considerate friend and decent version of that kid, and it’s great to watch. The moment where he and Gwen go too far and immediately regret snapping at each other is still painful (on my god, the VAs in this show, they’re so talented), Nikki and Neil both get nice subplots about how they’re also growing up, and the ending is fuc/king hilarious, perfectly breaking the tension from Campbell’s speech, which is both beautifully done and important to hear, especially if you’re in a period of uncomfortable transition (like, say, in your late 20s, or living through about 5 different national and global catastrophes).

And okay, I found that speech on the wiki for this episode and it made me deeply emotional, so here:

Here's the thing: you've got to take your failures and make something out of them. Take Camp Campbell for instance: a lot of poor decisions went into making this place what it is today. Sure, somewhere along the line it maybe strayed from its path, not living up to the camp it wanted to be. At some point, the camp realized that the camp would never reach the end of its path until it was ready or until it gave up. So, if the camp wanted to keep embezzling money and dealing with foreign powers, so be it! But, at some point, it didn't anymore. I never saw this coming, but I'm starting to think this camp is the best it's ever been.

If this is the last episode of Camp Camp we ever get -- and for at least a little while, it looks like it’s going to be -- I can’t think of a sweeter, funnier, and more lovely bittersweet note for this show to go out on.

7. The Lake Lilac Summer Social (Season 3, episode 6)

And again: No one was surprised. 

This is the longest non-finale episode of the show, and it uses that time perfectly. Rather than having some big emotional moments and character arcs -- which are great, don’t get me wrong -- the writers use the extended time to build a series of shenanigans as complicated as Gwen’s matchmaking web, and watching her try to set up a series of dominos (with David, for once, being the responsible, level-headed one) is almost as satisfying as the catastrophic results. 

Neil and Snake steal this episode, even from someone as in love with Gwen as I am, and for an episode that’s largely about making fun of shippers, there hasn’t been one that launched nearly as many ships as this. Neil/Snake? Tabii/Erin? Max/Nikki? GWENVID?! It’s all here, and I am here for it.

It was also fun to get a traditional episode setup in a very non-traditional show. I assume this means the beach and/or hot springs episode is forthcoming. (No, Pis/s Lake doesn’t count. Obviously it doesn’t count.)

6. Keep the Change (Season 4, episode 1)

Again, this is an episode I’ve said a lot about in the past -- and I was pretty uncharitable toward Season 3, which in retrospect was very unse/xy of me -- but I stand by a lot of my opinions then: this is a fu/cking great episode.

David is an as/shole, Max is an as/shole, Campbell is an as/shole. No one escapes the as/sholery. David schemes, Max catches him in the scheme, Campbell gets drunk and kind of gay . . . I’m 54 entries into this list and I don’t have much to say anymore: it’s just really good and fun and I love it.

5. Camp Loser Says What? (Season 4, episode 9)

This is another one I kind of hated when it came out, and again for fandom-related and personal-grudge reasons.

Fu/cking Daniel. That motherfu/cker. He shows up for 12 minutes and Tumblr bursts into flames. Every single time.

However, it’s really hard not to love this one. Daniel-as-Trump is a clever but subtle -- I mean, for this show’s definition of subtle -- allegory, and it’s amazing how much this slimy freak and the Woodscouts slot into it. David is a bise/xual disaster with the absolute worst taste in men, Dirty Kevin and Daniel are onscreen together for all of 2.5 seconds and the kevdan shippers lost their minds, and Xemug looks like Megamind for some weird reason.

My only minor complaint is that the ending is a bit anticlimactic, but it plays on Daniel’s stupidity and the value of teamwork, so it’s a very small nitpick in an episode that mostly works like gangbusters.

4. Cult Camp (Season 2, episode 1)

Duh. There’s a really good song and we’re introduced to a charismatic, sinister, and totally dumba/ss villain. What’s not to like?

I don’t think I even need to say anything about this episode. Season 2 started off the summer by throwing a lit firecracker directly at the viewer’s face, and ignoring the fact that we as a fandom proceeded to eat each other, it’s impossible not to get caught up in the episode’s wild energy.

And dude, that song. Fabulous. Fu/ck Daniel, but thank god he’s around to be such a prickly little pri/ck.

Now for the top 3: Literally perfect, wouldn’t change a single solitary thing.

3. After Hours (Season 4, episode 8)

I’m not sure anyone loved this episode as much as me. But this is my list, and I will put this up at the top if I want to and you cannot stop me.

It’s much easier in a lot of ways to talk about the episodes I hated than the ones I love this much. What do I say besides “literally everything about this fills me with joy and my life is better because it exists”? I don’t know. The counselors are my favorite characters, and between Gwen and QM having the weirdest bonding experience, Gwen getting to meet up with people who care about her silly fanfiction, Mr. Campbell being the trash grandpa of my dreams, David getting in way over his head . . . it’s the episode I always wanted, and they made it work so well.

Also, I just discovered that “Gwen Isn’t Your Mother So Stop Asking Her to Rinse Your Dishes” is an actual song and I am overwhelmed with delight. Here, I’m embedding it as well as linking because it’s so good:

God. This show. What the fu/ck even is up with this amazing, weird-as/s show.

2. The Order of the Sparrow (Season 1, episode 12)

Duh.

The entire first season is a great time (except “Reigny Day”), but it’s a pretty low-stakes kind of great time. There isn’t much in terms of emotional depth until the very end of “Camporee,” despite some hints at darker themes in one-off jokes and quick asides, so this episode comes a bit out of left field, tonally speaking.

But that’s not a bug, it’s a feature; if the show had been this overtly emotional from the outset, this finale wouldn’t hit as hard, and the rest of the season wouldn’t be as funny. 

This manages to serve as a capstone to the conflict of the first season, building on episodes like “Into Town” and “Escape from Camp Campbell” in a way that feels totally natural for both David and Max’s characters while revealing new sides of them. It works because it’s so unexpected, but it doesn’t come across as incongruous with their personalities. It’s the first and only time David swears in all 4 seasons, and that line -- I don’t even need to say it, you know exactly what I’m talking about -- still gives me chills.

Also, Gwen sings the camp theme song. Impossible not to cherish.

1. The Forest (Season 4, episode 12)

I’m not sure if this one is a surprise or not. It might be the obvious first place, or it might be a bit of an oddball for some people.

I had a really hard time choosing between this and “The Order of the Sparrow”; I switched their places half a dozen times, and the difference in quality between the two is razor-thin. I think part of that is because it accomplishes a lot of what “Order of the Sparrow” does: puts David in a situation where he’s pushed to his absolute emotional and physical capacity, crushes every shred of hope he has left, and sees what he’s actually made of when you strip everything away. It’s much more dramatic this time around, but it’s the same basic concept.

And just like in the Season 1 finale, what we see is a man who’s determined to do good even when he isn’t rewarded for it, even when he’s actively punished for it. Who wants to love nature, and life, and make the world a better place -- despite his faults, his selfishness and thoughtlessness and anger, David proves that he is fundamentally kind. He’s not nearly as deludedly optimistic as he seems; he just refuses to stop trying.

Because somebody fuc/king has to.

I’ll admit, some of what puts this one in first place is that I’m a sucker for whump, and David really goes through the ringer. However, I also think it’s important to acknowledge the risk Joe Nicolosi took with writing this episode: it’s all centered around a single character, it’s darker and more viscerally bloody than any other episode in the show’s history, the art is focused on these grand sweeping backgrounds that must’ve taken forever to paint, and there’s very little talking in a show that runs 99% on clever dialogue. This could have so easily backfired -- and for some fans it did -- but it was brave and beautiful and breathtaking.

I’ve actually only watched this in full once. It’s really hard to get through; it’s just so intense and even disturbing. But if there’s one episode I'll remember for the rest of my life, even when I’m 80 years old and haven’t seen the show in years, it’ll be “The Forest.”

It’s funny how such a sharp departure from the format and style of the rest of the show somehow manages to perfectly capture the heart of it. Talk about a fuc/king achievement.

So what have we learned?

I don’t entirely know what the purpose of this whole exercise was. I think it was mostly to get myself a nice Camp Camp fix that came from something other than slogging through 20 different fanfic WIPs, and to remind myself of what a strange and fun ride the last 4 summers have been. 

I also wanted to take a moment to acknowledge what Camp Camp means to me. This show has been hugely important to me on a personal level: I met two of my best friends through this fandom, and I’ve never been more connected to a community or readers than I have with CC. I know I bi/tch about this fandom a lot, but it’s a big extended internet family, and I’m so happy to be a part of it. Going through all these episodes, getting the chance to ramble about the things I liked and the things I didn’t, was a great way to reconnect with a series and community that I love.

So . . . what have we learned?

1. Season 4 was all over the place.

Some of this has to be due to the sheer volume of episodes, but when I sat down and organized everything into tiers:

There isn’t a single category Season 4 doesn’t have at least one episode in. I was surprised to see how high a lot of them ended up; it really was the best and worst of the show so far.

For the fun of it, I decided to give a number to each placement -- 60 points for the #1 episode, 59 for #2, etc. -- and see how each season broke down. Because that’s that kind of thing I think is worthwhile, apparently. And . . .

2. Seasons 1 and 4 are really good, actually.

Well, I don’t think anyone’s surprised to see how well Season 1 stacked up; it was amazing. But I was surprised to see how much I ended up enjoying Seasons 3 and 4, when if you’d asked me before this little project, I would’ve said they were the most underwhelming. Maybe I messed up the numbers a bit -- I’m no mathmagician -- but not only are they all really close, but Season 4 was one of my favorites.

3. This entire show is really good, actually.

One thing that really struck me when I put it all together visually is how most of the episodes sit in the “good,” “really good,” or “amazing” categories. The amount of episodes that are memorable, fun, and/or emotionally resonant is crazy. I don’t now how many other tiny cult-hit web series can say the same, honestly, and all of the writers, animators, directors/producers/other people whose jobs I don’t really understand, and voice actors should be commended for their outstanding talent and hard work.

4. Thank you, Camp Camp.

It was a real pleasure to relive all of these episodes again and think about what they meant to me. It won’t be the last time I sit down and watch this show -- and it certainly won’t be the end of my being a shrieking fangirl over it -- but with this break, where we have to get through a blazing, extremely difficult summer without a new season to fawn over, it’s nice to stop and appreciate what a precious gem of a show this is.

I hope everyone involved with Rooster Teeth is taking a much-deserved rest and prioritizing their health and well-being. Thank you for creating something truly special, and I can’t wait to see what happens next.

#campcamp #camp camp roosterteeth #thank you RT Animation for giving me my life these past 4 years #cc david #cc max #cc gwen #i'm not tagging all the characters #campcamp masterpost #i really hope this doesn't get hidden from the tags but #guys this was a super intense labor of love please check it out #but also reading it is also a super intense labor so i get it if you don't XD

[nightowlfandom]

PROMPT LIST PART 4 2021 EDITION (NON- X RATED)

It...had been a long time coming I said this was coming....last year and it just didn’t happen. Until now! 

Rules- One, If a character you are asking for is depicted as high school age, then please be aware they will be written in a style that has them being 18 or older and most likely will not be written in a NSFW sense. I enforce this rule because while I do like writing for people, SFW or NSFW it’s just...what I like to do. I have every right to deny your request, please keep that in mind. Two....there is no rule two.

Here’s how you request- Choose 2- 5 prompts (No more than 5, no less than 2) and those will used to make a one-shot or two-shot depending on how long it gets. You need to tell me who you want me to write about (and if it’s an AU, then state that as well.) Then give me a short summary of what you want it to be about. (Example- You want a Vampire AU about Levi Ackerman with 2,5, 18, 27, and 45. Boom!) If you want smut, PLEASE SPECIFY! I won’t write smut if you don’t ask. Same with if you want a certain type of au or fluff/ angst. Just let me know.

Side note- I write a lot of AU’s and am pretty much open to whatever. Yandere, Tsundere, Office AU, Mafia AU, Vampire AU, Royal AU, Ghost AU, Magical AU -BItch I do everything. HOWEVER I WILL NOT WRITE non-consent, Incest (including step siblings), Underaged readers and anything along those lines.

I write for fluff, smut, AND angst. More fluff and smut but yeah. I also ask if you could say ‘please’ when you request because MANNERS PEOPLE!

Do I do ships- YES! Not often but if you ask I’ll do it.

Link to my masterlist here!

I write for various K-pop groups, animes, Voltage games/Otome Visual Novels, and Final Fantasy/Misc. If you need clarification on if I write for a certain character just go ahead and ask

By the way if you see some repeats from my last prompt list, just hushity hush! I liked them okay? It’s our little secret alright? I will NOT take requests from past prompt lists.

... (Actual prompts below the cut) ⬇️

...

1- Have you ever just wanted to...run away from it all?

2-  I’ve wanted to tell you this for a long time...

3- People like that are just jealous of you, you know that right?

4- Stop looking down, you’re too pretty to be that shy.

5- I know you’ve never done anything with anyone before…so I’m gonna make sure your first time is special!

6- You asked me to take care of it...so I’ll take care of it.

7- If anyone even THINKS about touching you, I’ll kick their asses!

8-Oh baby, I treat you like a maid because that’s basically all you are.

9- I love this new angry side of you, it’s so hot.

10- I think I’ll keep you as a pet! You’re fun to mess with.

11- Why can’t you just admit you have feelings for me?!

12- I love you. I-I said it! I just-...I love you so much Y/N

13- I’m not shy! I’m just not used to girls like you being so close to me.

14- Cute? Did you call me cute?!? 

15- Come on! We have so much to do today!

16- Do you want me to sing a song for you to help you get to sleep? Okay then...

17- Well you just kissed me and I don’t even know your name...wanna fix that?

18- Alright, alright! I’ll stop making fun of you okay? Just don’t leave.

19- Hmm, who you tryna’ look sexy for babygirl?

20- Don’t finish that sentence darling...it won’t end well for you.

21- Let’s cuddle and I’ll stroke your hair, okay?

22- I dare you to finish that sentence...

23- Is that my shirt?

24- We can’t be just friends...I’m too in love with you.

25- What. Did. They. Say to you? I won’t ask again.

26- S-so, I guess this means we’re together now?

27- I couldn’t stop thinking about you all day.

28- Shhh, be quiet. We can’t be too loud, babe.

29- When are you going to realize that I can treat you better than he could?!

30- Dance for me. I’ll sit right here and you put on a show, okay?

31- I know it seems like we’re moving too fast but I haven’t felt this way about someone in a long time...I think I’m in love with you

32- Do we have too!? I wore my comfy pants today!

33- If I cared enough to give that asshole the time of day I’d probably be in jail Y/N...

34- Do you think trying to make me jealous is a smart move sweetheart?

35- You’ve been avoiding me...why?

36- I got into a fight, not like I killed someone. Geez Y/N...

37- I didn’t know what kind of flowers you liked...so I got everything they had!

38- I bought takeout! It’s time for me to cheer you up, babe

39- I’d much rather hang out with you than those jerks, what do ya say?

40- *Trips and falls* Oh I’m sorry, I was just making sure I wasn’t dreaming. *flirty smile*

41- I’ll be the best boyfriend you’ve ever had! i promise.

42- How dare you say things about me that are 100% true! I am offended!

43- You know I can tell when you’re lying, right?

44- You know that feeling when it seems like you two are the only people in a room?...That’s how I feel right now.

45- It’s you and me, not us and them. Fuck what they think.

46- You never told me you were in a band!!

47- You’re too cheeky for you own good, kid.

48- Stay a little longer?

49- Say you’re mine! Say it, say it, say it! *Insert giggle here*

50- I think you’ve lost your mind, but okay!

51- Damn, you look good in that dress.

52- Hi, I’m your next best mistake, what’s your name?

53- It breaks my heart to see you so sad.

54- You can lay on my chest if it makes you feel better.

55- Damnit Y/N! I’m trying to confess my feelings to you!

56- I had a dream about you.

57- I know you’re shy around my friends, but they love you!

58- I hate when we fight...let’s just calm down for a second.

59- I didn’t know you liked playing Cat and Mouse.

60- I may or may not have peeked in your diary...

61- Normal? Baby we’re the farthest from it.

62- Avoiding me won’t fix your undying love for me, many have tried but all have failed.

63- Just admit you’re in love with me Y/N...maybe we can have some fun later.

64- Of all the days to be stuck with someone, it’s you...ugh

65- Please never give up for me...or us.

66- Look at me when I fuck you...(I have a feeling this is gonna be a favorite)

67- Aww! Let me play a tune for you on the world’s smallest violin!! (I love spongebob lol) 

68- You never told me you could sing!!

69- Bend over this counter. I need to fill you up.

70- Babe...Lets just calm down. You’re making that face you make when you’re about to-

71- Let’s prepare a Hot Pot today! That always makes us feel better, right? (Hot Pot on a cold rainy day...YESSSS)

72- Me? You...want to be my girlfriend. You sure? Because I am a huge handful.

73- I want you to have my children...I want to be with you forever.

74- Come here girl, let me show you how much I love you.

75- I’ll give you a second chance to fix what you just said babygirl.

76- Everytime I leave you alone, you always make a mess.

78- What’s that thing you do with your neck when you’re mad? Yeah that neck roll thing! Teach me how to do that!

79- Let’s just relax and sleep in all day.

80- You sounded very serious on the phone. What’s up?

81- Yes, I am very awkward and yes I’m probably making this ten times worse than it already is....but 

82- You’re gonna make beg for forgiveness aren’t you.

83- How are we gonna fix this? Because breaking up isn’t an option Y/N.

84- I didn’t think you’d ever love me back...I’m so happy.

85- I wanna meet your parents!

86- Looks like someone could use a visit from the tickle monster!

87- I’d rather die than admit I have feelings for you! You’re disgusting and....perfect in every way,

88- Y/N, Y/N GET IN HERE! WE’RE ON TV!!!

89- Be mine?...I’m gonna keep asking until you say yes! 

90- Okay stop it already! People are gonna think I’m bullying you if you keep sobbing like that.

91- I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what’s wrong!

92- You’re acting like a four year old right now!

93- Calm down, I’m just giving you a massage.

94- It’s been awhile since...all that happened.

95- Sending memes at three in the morning is NOT productive!

96- Okay...before you get mad, just know I did it because I love you!

97- How many times can I make you blush today, I’m curious to know.

98- Sometimes it’s nice to just stargaze. It calms me down a lot.

99- I suppose this is a good time to mention that I can’t cook!

100- So...about that picture you sent me today....

101- Hm...why don’t you sit on my lap and tell me what you want.

102- I don’t have anything to hide. I’m an open book.

103- Ah! Don’t look at me! I’m not decent! No! Aaah!

104- I mean you could...come to my place! We could have a little date y’know.

105- Snail, Mouse, Pet, Underling, pick a name, Babes.

106- Y/N, I think we’re drunk. And as responsible adults, we should take our clothes off so we don’t suffocate!

107- Okay babe! Tell me all about your day....Your coworker did what?!!

108- I know you’re not asleep, Y/N.

109 - Are you crying because of me? Hm...I didn’t realize I have that effect on you.

110- That’s daddy to you, sweetheart.

ALRIGHT! THOSE ARE THE PROMPTS. GO CRAZY!

#anime x reader #anime imagines #anime lemons #anime smut #imagines #lemons #final fantasy xv imagines #ffxv lemons #diabolik lovers imagines #diabolik lovers x reader #kpop imagines #kpop x reader #BTS smut #kpop smut #ffxv smut #voltage imagines #Voltage games #multifandom imagines #various x reader #smut imagines #Noctis x reader smut #anime scenarios #billy loomis x reader #voltron lemon #fan fictions #nightowlfandom #Levi Ackerman lemon #x reader #Character lemon #fluff imagines

[seasickbaby]

Just a Kiss (II)

Pairing: Christopher x reader

Words: 1.7k

Summary: Christopher offers to help improve your *romantic* skills, and he isn’t kidding. When you agree, things escalate and feelings you tried to suppress resurface. 

A/N: Hola amores! Thank you so much for your patience with his fic. Ngl I don’t think this is my best writing but I wanted to get it up anyways. This chapter is short but I’m thinking about making this a series. Please come talk to me about this chapter and what you (want) think is gonna happen next! As always, feedback is greatly appreciated and keeps me motivated to write more. Also from now on my notes will go at the bottom! Enjoy!

You can read part one here: 

https://seasickbaby.tumblr.com/post/188487428355/just-a-kiss

------------------------------------------------------------

“I mean,,, t-tips…” You stutter, “Give me tips.”

Christopher clicks his tongue and leans back on the counter.

“Tips will only get you so far y/n… This is more of a hands on activity.”

You roll your eyes and slap his arm playfully. “Come on, I need a guy’s perspective. I could give you some in return.”

Chris, completely unfazed, just takes another sip of his beer. The lack of attention is bothersome so you cross your arms and pout your lip; inner five year old coming out when he doesn’t give you what you want.

Chris steals a side glance and chuckles. He then turns and, with a soft gaze, places a soft hand underneath your chin.

“No offense princesa, but what tips could you possibly give me?”

Forehead wrinkling, you force a laugh.

Wow, that was rude.

“Full offense Chris, but for how much you get gassed up about your skills, I expected more.”

This takes him by surprise. He was used to being teased by the other members, sure, but never about his ways with women. Everyone knew he was a ladies man. Even himself.

“Woah what do you mean?” Visibly hurt and confused, Chris pulls back his hand and dramatically places it over his chest.

You pretend you do not hear.

“Hmmm, maybe I should just ask Zabdi, I bet he won’t mind.” You shrug before hopping off the stool, “I’ve heard good things about him too.” You wink.

“Wait, wait, wait.”

His hand finds yours before you could walk away.

“Fine. I’ll help you, but first take back what you said.”

His ego got hurt, cute.

“And why would I do that?” You smile innocently.

He gives a small tug on your hand and brings you to stand in front of him, pulling you in between his legs when he hooks his hands behind your lower back. Eyes burning into yours.

Funny how people say that the eyes are the gateway to the soul. Most would say Chris is an open book; his outgoing, energetic personality makes it seem like such, but his eyes always spoke the words he never said out loud. Full of emotions yet never revealing too much, only showing what he wanted you to see.

You let yourself get lost in them every once in a while, never for too long. But right now, being so close in proximity, staring straight into his doe eyes, made you a little light headed.

Not even kidding, you could’ve kissed him again right there and then... if Erick hadn’t interrupted. The young one came over, ever so happily, and throws his arms over both your shoulders; the movement forcing Chris’ hands to let go of you.

“Ayyyy, compadres.”

“Erick your breath smells like beer.” Chris laughs as he sees you wrinkle your nose in the opposite direction of his face.

“Honestly, who even gave you alcohol you’re a baby!”  

“I am not! Tengo 18 años para su información. I’m a full grown, legal, adult!” Erick sloppily waves his hands in the air.

“Uh huh, we can see that.”

A couple minutes pass of the three of you standing there together, laughing and talking, until Erick stops mid conversation and gasps.

Listen to the song!” He instructs.

You and Chris both give each other a puzzled look as you try to listen over the crowd of drunk people.

“Que sordos… It’s El Guachineo!” He grabs your hand and starts to pull you out onto the dance floor, “Come on, let's dance!”

You swallow the last of your drink and the tequila pumps through your veins, making you feel bolder and confident. Perhaps it was the way Chris was looking at you or the one too many shots you took, you weren’t really sure, but you get the sudden urge to give in to Christopher’s temptations. Nervously biting your lip, you lean closer to him, and you’re sure going to regret this once you’re sober.

“Prove me wrong, and I’ll retract my statement.”

He could've not known what you meant, but the way his eyes widened made you think otherwise. You send him a flirtatious, yet sweet, smile before letting Erick drag you away.

There was never a dull moment when dancing with Erick. The way he flung his arms around everywhere and his facial expressions always had you laughing. Erick was a good dancer, no doubt about it, but he’s also a goofy guy, and that goofiness is multiplied by ten when he drinks.

Eventually the rest of the boys join you on the dance floor; everyone except Christopher. The longer you danced the longer you overthought the comment you previously made; anxiety begins builds up in your stomach. You try to push the thoughts away and instead focus on the boys in front of you, who were arguing over who was better at dancing bachata.

After what felt like an hour, you leave the group to look for Chris. You begin with where you last left him. Upon not finding him, you turn to the person most likely to have seen him last.

“Excuse me,” You smile at the barista, “have you, by any chance, seen a man with sloppy brown hair, tattoo sleeved arms, and looks like,,, a deer… kinda?”

“The Velez guy that was sitting with you over there?”

“Yes! That one.”

“He left not long after you and el otro muchacho went out to dance.” She gave you an apologetic smile.

The way your heart drops a little is unsettling, so you ignore the feeling and, instead, order one last shot of tequila before heading back to the hotel. You shoot the boys a quick text in the groupchat and head out of the club.

                                                                                                To: Thicc boyz + y/n

I’m going back to the hotel, have fun :)

From: Thicc boyz + y/n

Zabdi: Who’s taking you?

You’ve been drinking all night

                                                                                                To: Thicc boyz + y/n

I called an uber I'm fine

From: Thicc boyz + y/n

Richard: I’m coming with you

                                                                                                To: Thicc boyz + y/n

 I’m F I N E, enjoy your night

From: Thicc boyz + y/n

Richard: You’re drunk in a big city we don’t know, 

I'm not letting you go alone

                                                                                                To: Thicc boyz + y/n                                                            *not drunk & too late :P

Later, xoxo

You throw your head back on the Uber’s seat with a sigh and close your eyes, feeling a bit dizzy.

“Long night?” The Uber guy asks.

You sigh with a small laugh  “In a way.” Even though it was only two in the morning; at this time people are still drinking non stop.

“Well, I hope whatever is troubling you now resolves itself soon. Remember, everything happens for a reason.”

It was a small but sweet gesture. Maybe your troubles were a bit dumb but he made your feelings validated. Let’s just say, you got back to the hotel safe and sound and with a new friend: Ricky the driver.

The elevator ride to the fourteenth floor was slow and you couldn’t wait to finally relax. You open the door of your room and smile in relief when you kick your heels off. You took a shower, put on your favorite silk pjs, threw a robe over it and flopped on the bed to watch The Lion King (for the hundredth time) with a bowl of grapes. You were in the middle of singing Hakuna Matata when your phone rings.

A notification from Chris pops up.

Christopher:

Did you make it back to the hotel safely? [2:50 am]

Y/N:

I did, thanks for asking [2:51 am]

Where did you go tonight? [2:53 am]

Christopher:

I, uh, had to take care of a little problem [2:54 am]

Y/N

Oh? [1:54 am]

Christopher:

That you caused… [2:54 am]

Y/N:

I’m even more confused  [2:55 am]

Christopher:

Did you mean what you said before? [2:57 am]

Y/N:

What do you mean [2:57 am]

Christopher:

About,,, you know [2:58 am]

Christopher:

Proving you wrong [2:58 am]

Y/N:

Oh, I didn’t not mean it [2:59 am]

Your heart thuds loudly as you anticipate his response

Christopher:

Y/N you’re Richard’s little sister… [3:00 am]

Y/N:

Damn. Bitches just want to be good kissers and end up getting exposed to their brother… I’m bitches :( [3:00 am]

Y/N:

Just say you don’t like me and GO [3:01 am]

Christopher:

I guess I could teach you a thing or two [3:02 am]

That has you sitting up abruptly. Eyes scanning the text over and over. You feel your heart in your throat and, why is it extremely hot all of a sudden? You push yourself off your bed and pace around the room, unsure of what to do or say next.

Your phone dings with another text and you scramble to read it.

Christopher:

Come to my room. [3:05 am]

A101 [3:05 am]

You debate it at first. Coming up with multiple “what if’s” and a long list of things that could go wrong. But at the end of the day you knew this was a one time thing, no strings attached, and a way to practice. So why not?

You’re knocking on room A101’s door sooner than you expected. You look down at your shorts and curse yourself for not wearing something less revealing. A couple seconds pass, enough for you to change your mind, so you turn to walk away.

“A donde vas?”

A voice too familiar says behind you. You slowly face him, heart beating out of your chest and hands a tad clammy.

“Strictly for instructional purposes only?” You raise one eyebrow.

“Nothing more.” He extends his hand and you stare at it for a second before grabbing it. His lips part into a smile and yours return it. Chris pulls you into the room, letting out a small laugh as you trip over your feet. He reaches a hand up to brush through your hair, stopping at your jaw and tracing his thumb all the way to your lips.Your laugh dies down as you see Christopher’s eyes flick to your lips, tongue coming across them in a slow, sultry, motion.

Deep down, you knew you were crossing a line which you couldn’t come back from. And you were worried. Lowkey truly worried. Because there was so much on that line: your friendship with Christopher (one of your best friends), Christopher’s relationship with your Richard (his band mate and best friend) and your relationship with your brother. But all those worries vanish when Chris leans in to press a soft kiss to your forehead, your nose, and then the corner of your lips.

“Step number one.”

#this took ages to finish #i know its not the best #if you read it pls let me know what you think #part 3 will be up after the semester is over #cnco fic #christopher velez #Christopher velez fic #fan fiction #Chris fic #cnco #cnco blog

[captain-aralias]

Vampirism for fun and profit

We learned some good stuff about vampires from ‘Wayward Son’. Here’s a list, because like @sharkmartini​ says - it could come in useful. (To fic writers, I assume; not vampires who are new to vampirism.)

Big ticket items are obviously to do with ageing and the effects of vampire bites. I will also add in - the vampire thrall, which is a significant new ability we didn’t know about. 

Ageing and immortality: 

Lots of this obviously has to be taken with a pinch of salt, as it comes from Lamb who is not a reliable source. I assume it is the truth - but given that we have no proof, it could easily be ignored or disproved in fic or later books.

It’s strongly implied that vampires are immortal unless killed. Also, they either have very slow ageing or don’t age. 

Lamb implies repeatedly that he’s around 300 years old (when vampire society was very different), asks Baz how old he is “really”, and the NowNext vampires specifically want vampirism because it stops them ageing. 

"I pre-date choice. ... All my people understood was war and hunger, and demons who came in the dark." (Chapter 52)

Does vampirism stop ageing immediately? @krisrix theorises that it’s to do with drinking human blood, rather than animal blood, which makes sense to me. However, we might also hypothosise that since Lamb’s brother killed his parents before he went for Lamb, it’s possible he was much younger than the 34 he claims to appear to be when he was turned and has now aged to around 34.

There’s plenty still to play with here - Baz isn’t very good at asking questions about his condition, and did not get information about what loopholes exist. 

Lamb also claims that you can’t stop being a vampire, but presumably he has never tried:

"You won't feel so close to them, the Normals, once you've outlived your ties to mortality ... There's no unbecoming, Baz. There's no sidestepping your true identity. All the rabbits in the world won't change you back. They'll just leave you thirsty." (Chapter 52)

The Turn and other effects of vampire bites:

I was willing to challenge this one when we just had ‘Carry On’, although it’s presented as pure fact that Baz’s fangs will turn someone into a vampire. But of course he literally does not know. (Which is all the proof you should need that everything is up for grabs, unless Baz has experienced himself. And even then, we might be able to write it off later because he’s so isolated and doesn’t know how to be a vampire.)

Again - none of this is provable as once again nobody thinks to get any evidence for Lamb’s claims or Shepard’s hearsay. (Why not look up that guy who got bitten? Isn’t this relevant to your life, Baz?) However it seems likely that not all bites result in someone becoming a vampire.

"Oh I doubt he Turned him," Shepard says, smothering his chips in ketchup. "Vampires hate to Turn people. They either take a sip and let you go - or drain you dry"

Lamb says the same thing:

"So you don't Turn people?" "Rarely. Most of don't want the chaos and competition. Almost no one wants the responsibility." (Chapter 52)

However, it’s worth noting here again that when he talks about his brother he states that his brother didn’t want a “comrade”; he was “thirsty”. So it seems like if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can definitely Turn someone accidentally. 

If, however, you do know what you’re doing, you don’t have to kill or Turn. Again - we primarily hear from the vampire’s POV, but Lamb strongly and repeatedly implies that people like being bitten. 

"No need to leave a corpse when you can leave a satisfied customer, you know?" (Chapter 44)

"Because I didn't enjoy being bitten."  "Then someone was doing it wrong." (Chapter 52)

You could argue that this is supported by the sight of the Normal (?) girl Baz sees at the party, who does seem to be having a good time.

"A Very beautiful woman - a girl my age - stumbles past me, laughing. There's blood streaked down her neck" (Chapter 44)

Not entirely sure whether the guy who gets bitten later in the chapter is enjoying it, though, so ... again, room to play with whatever.

"The man's neck goes limp. His head droops back, his hat falls off. His eyes immediately glaze over. I've seen that face on a deer before." (Chapter 44)

Turn is always capitalised, btw. 

Different kinds of blood: 

Shephard notes that Baz looks greyer than the rest of the vampires:

Not as drained and ghostly. If this is what a vampire is supposed to look like, then maybe Baz is a vampire with an iron deficiency." (Chapter 53)

Lamb probably confirms that Baz’s colour and the kind of blood he drinks are related:

"No wonder you're so pale. You're malnourished."(Chapter 50)

The NextBlood vampires are probably all really new vampires (like - the last 10 years), but they don’t look like Baz. They look incredibly healthy and are almost certainly surviving on human blood they get from somewhere. They don’t drink blood; they transfuse. 

"They don't even drink, Baz - they transfuse. They won't touch anything that hasn't been tested frozen, and stored. I've heard they've started pasteurising.” (Chapter 50).

We also learned (and we learned this for sure) that you can fang-up or fang-down at will. (Chapter 50)

The smell of Simon:

Last time on ‘Baz doesn’t want to eat his friends but he also does’, he told Simon he smelt like bacon and cinamon buns (CO, Chapter 71) - although he might have been being metaphorical. (I tend to think not, but could be convinced.) Later, at the leaver’s ball, he says Simon’s smell has changed - and now he smells like “something sweet and brown. No more green fire and brimstone.” (CO, Epilogue)

This time we get a new description, although it tallies with the CO Epilogue.

Simon smells like the kitchen after you pop popcorn and melt butter. There's a singe to it, with a round, yellow, fatty feeling that sticks to the roof of your mouth. Bunce is sharper and sweeter - vinegar and treacle. (Chapter 14)

And when Simon is shot:

Simon's blood smells like brown butter. (Chapter 60)

Baz tries to block this out with Altoids, which he must buy specially from some sort of posh-person shop because I’ve never seen them on sale. 

They're very good for blocking out blood smells. Especially the spearmint flavour." (Chapter 55)

The thrall and other vampire abilities:

There’s not much to say about this, but I thought it came out of nowhere. And I know the gang had lots of worry about but no one was like, holy shit - vampires can do that??

Lamb did something to me. Hypnotized me or something. (Chapter 55)

In this particular case Shepard appears to those around him to be napping. (Is that all the thrall can do? We have no information.) It doesn’t feel good once it wears off.

I'm still a little hungover from my vampire thrall. (Chapter 50)

The other abilities are all confirmation of, or build on, things we learned in ‘Carry On’.

Advanced hearing: Lamb and Baz are both able to hear Simon’s heartbeat. (Chapter 52)

All senses are particularly advanced at night (which I think might be knew. We know they don’t like sunlight, but this seems to be more than that. Like - senses get better.) Although I treat this as the least trustworthy piece of information Lamb gives us as it’s just before the betrayal. (Chapter 54) 

Vampires move in a particularly stealthy way that is very noticeable: 

Vampires aren't especially beautiful (though some are). That's a myth, I think - vampire beauty. What they are is especially rich. And especially ... liquid. They move like oil, like shadows. Like cats. (Chapter 44)

General speed, strength, feeling like a brick wall if you punch them, faster healing (to go with not getting sick in CO). 

I know that I heal faster than other people. (More proof that I'm nota person.) But I've never really tested my limits. No one's ever emptied a shotgun into my chest or kicked me in the gut with steel-toed cowboy boots...

The worst I've been injured before this was when the numpties took me. I think my leg healed right away even then - but it healed wrong because I was stuck in that coffin.

Before that, there were fights with Simon. A few black eyes over the years, a split lip. I healed fast from those injuries, but so did he. I think Simon's magic used to heal him, even when he couldn't cast the spells to heal himself. (Chapter 37)

Vampire weaknesses: 

I don’t think much is new here, but as Baz remarks at the end, we certainly do know a lot about how to kill vampires. Some methods include: fire, beheading, being possessed by a demon and then getting a vampire to bite you, staking.

The vampire impaled on my axe handle has already started to wither. Like it was the magic in his heart holding him together. I pull back the stake, and he falls - a man-shaped pile of blood and boots and ashes. (Chapter 22)

Methods that don’t work include: gunshot and potentially most other weapons, although I can’t tell whether the Ren Fayre weapons are just terrible. (I assumed they were, and that this was hilarious.) 

There’s a bit more information about crosses as well. I thought Doctor Wellbelove had given Simon a specific vampire talisman, but apparently literally any cross will do, bonus points for silver. (Simon’s is gold.)

There are at least three people wearing crosses sitting near me. One of them must be silver; my nose won't stop running. (Chapter 9)

This makes me think that maybe what happened was that Simon said ‘my roommate’s a vampire, help!’ and Agatha’s dad was like, I don’t think so, Simon, but OK here you go - here’s a cross that will protect you from the, ahem, “vampire”. It was supposed to be a placebo, but since no one knows anything about vampires, Simon got back to school and Baz was like ‘argh, wtf is this??”

(N.B. It makes no sense to me that the cross thing is real, btw. Not all crosses are blessed, which means they’re just shapes. Why would vampires be repelled by a shape?)

Vampires get sunburnt. And go black, rather than red. (Chapter 16) Baz thinks it might not heal, but it does, just more slowly.

Baz, at least, can get drunk. Lamb implies that other vampires don’t - is this because Baz is a weirdo vampire, or because he just isn’t a big drinker? I assume the latter, but could be convinced of the former.

History and society: 

There’s a lot of stuff about the Las Vegas vampires, which I’m not recording because there’s lots of it and I’m mostly interested in this stuff for Baz-related fic and I’m assuming he will never go back to Vegas.

Are things like vampires being ‘tight lipped’ and vampires being ‘over the top’ specific to Las Vegas or the species? I assume it’s cultural and specific to the Vegas vampires.

Some famous UK vampire killings:

"I remember hearing, back in the fifties, that there wasn't a single one of us left in the UK - that Old Man Pitch had driven us out, like St Patrick driving the snakes from Ireland." (Chapter 44)

And of course Beatrix Potter apparently murdered every vampire in Lancashire.

You can apparently get a medal for slaying vampires. (Chapter 23) And all the shit the Mage did pales in comparison with him chatting to vampires. It doesn’t even seem to matter what he asked them to do for him (i.e. murder someone) - it’s literally just talking to them. (Chapter 37) The World of Mages is fucked up.

Baz doing other vampire stuff:

"Pork is the worst, sometimes I have to leave the Watford dining hall on days they served bacon" (Chapter 50)

Baz has also read Ann Rice and once ate his own dog. (Chapter 22)

That’s all I got!

According to the Kindle copy I have, the word ‘vampire’ (including vampires, but not vampirism) is mentioned 302 times in ‘Wayward Son’ compared to only 162 times in ‘Carry On’.

If you spot anything I missed, have other theories about vampires, or just want to talk about how Baz is a vampire, please let me know.

#wayward son spoilers #wayward son #carry on

[f4liveblogarchives]

Fantastic Four Vol 1 #223

Tues Apr 27 2020 [09:18 PM] Wack'd: And so the Four, plus Agatha and Gabriel, are off in the Pogo Plane to New Salem, in order to undo Nicholas Scratch's possession of Franklin. [09:19 PM] Wack'd: Who?! Who calls you that?!

[09:19 PM] Bocaj: His barber [09:19 PM] Umbramatic: the narrator apparently [09:20 PM] Wack'd: There are other "here's how the crew is doing" panels but they're all roughly what you'd expect. Ben angry, Sue determined, Reed thinking, Agatha contemplating fate [09:21 PM] Bocaj: Shake it up, the fantastic four [09:21 PM] Wack'd: Johnny musing on how he's never seen Reed and Sue this intense before besides the thirteen other times he's never seen them this intense before [09:21 PM] Bocaj: Pfft [09:22 PM] Wack'd: Reed and Sue have a moment where Sue gets kinda weepy and Reed reassures her that he'll do everything he can [09:23 PM] Bocaj: Shake it up, the fantastic four book [09:24 PM] Wack'd: How have these fuckers not been consigned to the dustbin of history already

[09:24 PM] maxwellelvis: Because Scratch hasn't yet. [09:25 PM] Wack'd: Even if I concede there are some cool designs, which...eh?... this is the first sign of personality they've exhibited in like three storylines [09:25 PM] Umbramatic: i'm a sucker for nagas but i dunno how to feel about the snake arms

[09:25 PM] maxwellelvis: Gazelle looks a little less Marge Simpson-y this time. [09:26 PM] Wack'd: The lack of yellow skin helps [09:26 PM] Wack'd: Anyway Nick possesses the lion dude and recruits them back into his dark army [09:27 PM] Wack'd: And reveals his master plan, which is to bring back the...essence???...of the Dark Realm to torment humanity [09:27 PM] maxwellelvis: I too am puzzled at how many reappearances these glorified minibosses are getting. [09:27 PM] Bocaj: That’s how I feel about zodiac [09:27 PM] Bocaj: In avengers [09:28 PM] Wack'd: I think seven is too many distinct henchpeople for a villain to have, also, especially in a team book and especially if they're always gonna be a group [09:28 PM] Wack'd: Like there's so much wacky happening here but it just kind of cancels out back to boring [09:28 PM] maxwellelvis: And I do mean glorified because the law of conservation of ninjutsu means they should not have handled the Four as easily as they have in the past. [09:29 PM] Aleph Null: @Wack'd the seven deadly sins? [09:29 PM] Wack'd: The Salem Seven [09:29 PM] maxwellelvis: I could understand that if they had to fight them all one at a time in a series of progressing battles up a tower, but [09:29 PM] Wack'd: Anyway Nick possesses the folks guarding the Seven's cell and lets them out [09:30 PM] Bocaj: I could get behind a shonen style tower climb mini boss squad fight [09:30 PM] Wack'd: Dude seems to be getting a lot of mileage out of possession and it's making me wonder why he even needs a physical form? Though I guess that's not really his goal since he's doing the whole "release the essence of the Dark Realm" thing [09:30 PM] Wack'd: Still though he doesn't seem particularly weaker in this form than he did on earth. He might as well have never been banished at all [09:31 PM] Bocaj: You had one job with several distinct tasks under it, Agatha! [09:31 PM] Wack'd: The Seven, now free, decide they have some free time before the plot kicks in and decide to torture some civilians for shits and giggles [09:32 PM] Wack'd: Really just Nick used to establish what everybody's shtick is with some actual breathing room, which, y'know, finally, but one row of panels each is not a lot [09:33 PM] Wack'd: Vakume (the solid grey one) makes a tornado that sucks air out of everyone's lungs [09:33 PM] Aleph Null: that doesn't sound right but i don't know enough about wind physics to say otherwise [09:33 PM] Wack'd: It's magic, they don't have to explain it [09:33 PM] Aleph Null: ...then why is the tornado necessary? why not just cast a fuck you no breathing spell? [09:33 PM] maxwellelvis: STYLE [09:33 PM] Wack'd: Looks cool [09:33 PM] Wack'd: But not cool enough to screencap [09:33 PM] Wack'd: Vertigo (the Pam Grier one) uh...gives everyone vertigo [09:34 PM] Bocaj: Ah like Zaheer [09:34 PM] Wack'd: Actually I guess that's it because we cut back to the Four [09:36 PM] Wack'd: This is a perfectly prefunctionary, even good, "Ben knows what it's like to be othered" speech, but I'm losing it at it being deployed in defense of Baby's First Dungeons & Dragons Character

[09:38 PM] Wack'd: And I can make that joke because my first Dungeons & Dragons character, before orc vampire and dragonborn stage magician, was in fact a mysterious loner with strange powers who keeps to the shadows. I know from whence I speak [09:38 PM] Umbramatic: pffft [09:38 PM] Umbramatic: i don't think mine was that weird [09:38 PM] Wack'd: I am deliberately and specifically not saying it's weird [09:38 PM] Wack'd: It is super boring [09:39 PM] Bocaj: I’ve been thinking the whole time [09:39 PM] Bocaj: Is this just nick fury doing Dresden larp? [09:39 PM] Wack'd: It is, I assume, everyone's first Dungeons & Dragons character [09:41 PM] Wack'd: Anyway I looked up Gabriel--sorry, *Devil Hunter*--to see if I should bother caring about him. Turns out he's not a new character, but the lead in a short-lived magazine-format book from the mid-70s called *Haunt of Horror*. [09:41 PM] maxwellelvis: I went with Eberk, because clerics were busted as shit in 3.5e [09:41 PM] Wack'd: Written by--and you might wanna sit down for this--Doug Moench. [09:42 PM] Bocaj: Ha [09:42 PM] maxwellelvis: No. Say it ain't so. [09:42 PM] Mousa The 14: Of course [09:43 PM] Wack'd: These two Fantastic Four issues are his first appearances since then, and his last for twelve years before he briefly resurfaces as a recurring Hellstorm supporting character in the early 90s. [09:44 PM] Umbramatic: wow [09:44 PM] Mousa The 14: “I mean, we have the IP, we may as well use him!” “Yeah, but why tho?” [09:44 PM] Wack'd: He has since the only been seen in Marvel encyclopedias. [09:44 PM] Umbramatic: welp [09:45 PM] Bocaj: I still think he’s larp Nick Fury [09:45 PM] Wack'd: Fair [09:46 PM] Wack'd: Anyway, the team arrives in New Salem, where Scratch reappears inside Franklin to say more mean stuff. [09:46 PM] Wack'd: I would assume he's been quiet because he's been busy possessing loads of other people, but no, Gabriel is important

[09:47 PM] Wack'd: Johnny then feels bad for writing him off as a moody loner cliché since he was actually doing shit apparently [09:47 PM] Mousa The 14: Good grief, what a joke [09:48 PM] maxwellelvis: Why's he EMOTING so hard in that second panel? [09:50 PM] Wack'd: (Oh if anyone cares the red haired lady who placed the cryptic phone call is also from Haunt of Horrors and also appears in Hellstorm's 90s book. She dies) [09:50 PM] Mousa The 14: As women do apparently [09:50 PM] Wack'd: Back to the story at hand. It is time for a fight scene [09:51 PM] Wack'd: And then a capture scene [09:51 PM] Wack'd: It's a good thing this book has so much dumb minutia in it or I woulda been done half an hour ago [09:52 PM] Wack'd: So the team is placed on an alter and Franklin's powers are used to bring forth the Dark Realm [09:53 PM] Aleph Null: this is a fantastic four comic right? [09:53 PM] Aleph Null: just checking [09:53 PM] Wack'd: Yeah but this is not terribly off spec for them [09:53 PM] maxwellelvis: Yes [09:54 PM] maxwellelvis: Also we were still in the middle of the Satanic Panic at the time. [09:54 PM] Wack'd: Fantastic Four doesn't really have a consistent tone or manner of threat. They're from the 60s, they'll do whatever [09:55 PM] Wack'd: Gabriel and Agatha use their combined power to turn the Four into a literal love bomb to defeat Nick Scratch's hate

[09:56 PM] Aleph Null: My Little Superheroes: Friendship Is Magic [09:57 PM] Wack'd: This is a nice scene but I'd be a lot more convinced if Nick Scratch didn't try to murder Agatha gruesomely every previous time he appeared

[09:58 PM] Wack'd:

Ben: That wuz the easiest fight we ever had...and it wuz the best weapon we coulda used.

[09:59 PM] maxwellelvis: "We contributed the bare minimum to our own story!" [09:59 PM] Wack'd:

Agatha: Nicholas, you must be punished...severely. I hav erred on the sign of leniency in the past.

[09:59 PM] Wack'd: agatha you banished him to a nightmare dimension but okay [09:59 PM] Mousa The 14: Yeah but she didn’t kill him [10:00 PM] Mousa The 14: They’re magic people, nightmare dimension is really more if a time out for ‘em [10:00 PM] Wack'd: Honestly the "Dark Realm" was originally called "the World Beyond Worlds" [10:00 PM] Wack'd: So I assumed it was a Yu-Gi-Oh "Shadow Realm" thing until this story [10:01 PM] Wack'd: And so Nicholas' punishment is to become like the humans he so despised [10:02 PM] Wack'd: And Agatha decides to stay behind to be an ambassador to her people on behalf of non-magic folks to maybe cut down on future genocide attempts [10:03 PM] Wack'd: 

[10:03 PM] Bocaj: Awwwww.....www?? [10:04 PM] Wack'd: Even as the modern age creeps closer, silent panels are still kind of a rarity [10:04 PM] Wack'd: It's smart to deploy one here [10:04 PM] maxwellelvis: "Hey, how 'bout a little sugar for Gabriel?" [10:04 PM] Umbramatic: awwww [10:05 PM] Wack'd: He just kinda...vanishes [10:05 PM] Wack'd: Reed assures us he probably has his own way home [10:05 PM] maxwellelvis: He doesn't need the company of people with no sugar for him. [10:05 PM] Bocaj: Pfft

#1980 #Doug Moench #Bill Sienkiewicz #The Main Book

[watchingninjago-archive]

Season 3, Episode 1 - The Surge

Ah, good old S3. The one that I continually bring up as the first season Zane dies in, because a) the writers seem to love killing him, b) can the writers not do that that is incredibly rude

Well, that happens in the finale. I’ll let my dread build up for the occasion, then. Until then, we’ve got a good season to get through.

[22:10] oh what the hell!!! new intro!!!

[21:49] that fucking slaps

[21:39] The ultimate battle… where Lloyd got eaten by a dragon and then had the magical energy dragon he was riding explode the dragon he was eaten by.

[21:19] Huh. Looks like the “wait this is lego who gave them the right to be this dramatic” part of me finally kicked in. But man, that’s gotta suck for them to rebuild.

[21:09] Oh hi, dude in a wheelchair. That looks a bit… precarious.

[20:59] Wait, why New Ninjago City? That New ____ bit applies generally when it’s a seperate city or location, but named after an older city or location, like New York, New Mexico, New Zealand (Zeeland), etc. If you’re just rebuilding, it doesn’t make sense to add that, as it’s still the same city. Ninjago City was badly damaged by the earthquakes, but it wasn’t to the point of having to start completely over, right?

[20:57] Hovercar! --- wait. What’s the timespan for this?

[20:57] Huh. The ninja can move on with their lives for now, at least.

[20:42] Okay, we’re now watching Jay sneak up on somebody singing in the shower.

[20:39] Hi, Kai!

[20:35] Huh? What’s going on?

[20:33] Kai’s a teacher! Neat. And you can have hovercars, but god forbid we use a whiteboard.

[20:26] Zane and Cole are also teachers! And… and what do you mean on the friiiiiehwHY IS HE GLITCHING OUT

[20:18] Jeez! Not cool, kids!

...god i want to see a tacky poster explaining to the kids not to remote control the teachers please and thank you

[20:13] Ah. The wonders of education.

[20:03] I am going to fight a kid again.

[19:55] Oh! Sensei Wu took over Darkly’s!

[19:51] Jay’s a teacher too! I guess that just leaves Lloyd, Nya and Garmadon as characters who’d be majorly impacted by the end of the Age Of Ninja unaccounted for. I’m assuming Misako’s off doing research or something.

[19:57] your fave is problematic: cole steals his co-workers’ food from the fridge

[19:41] Oi. Where can I get that giant tea making machine?

But like… yeah. The ninja excl. Lloyd are like… adults. Maybe acting a bit like teens from time to time because kids show but… they’re adults with jobs and crap. That’s a very weird thought.

[19:33] Man, I love me them group dynamics

[19:22] Well, Lloyd’s doing a bit of award receiving, it seems.

[19:15] Nya’s a teacher too! So I guess that leaves Garmadon unaccounted for.

[19:06] Huh. That’s… not a good sign for Jaya this season. I’m a fan of Jaya so that’s, I dunno. Disappointing.

 [19:00] Man, they’re either still in the Constant Threat mindset or are just really desperate to let loose on SOMETHING. Considering the kids they have to teach… it could be either.

[18:48] Aaaw! Jay’s geeking out about Borg Industries. 

[18:45] Also the camera’s… really spinning. Really wants me to get that vertigo experience.

[18:42] Zane just snapped and kicked Jay in the leg. DJdfngjd

[18:34] Oh, look at you, Kai. Being all… cynical. I mean, you don’t really have a lot of past to go off of, y’know? The world was only made like… three generations ago. And also somehow a few thousand years ago…. What even is this timeline?

[18:30] Welp.

[18:24] Also, if you took the field trip on a dragon you do run into a lot of safety risks.

[18:20] god he’s desperately trying to be One Of The Kids… Cole this is the one time you’re not an eternal mood but I forgive you

[18:16] Also, Nya in the bg smiling at first but then just…  dying inside

[18:15] oof

[18:07] But like… huh. I’m guessing it’s been a while since the events of S2. Logically in real life it’d be up to maybe a decade between seasons, but more likely it’d be a year or two at most, which is still a while.

[17:49] Man. NNC looks pretty cool.

[17:31] Well, I’m sorry sir, we can’t all have hovercars!

[17:29] Wait! It’s the postie. Man, that guy’s seen some crap.

[17:20] Cole remains just… frighteningly buff. I’m scared that if I shook his hand it’d break mine.

[17:09] (Wu) “Besides, it’s not like we can’t find where we’re going.” YOU SURE? Because I’ve gotten lost sometimes trying to find certain entertainment slash casino slash hotel complexes that will remain unnamed and it takes up like half of the Yarra in the city

[17:07] Okay, nevermind. That’s definitely like a beacon among the hills.

[17:04] Like… it’s very tall.

[16:59] ouch

[16:54] PIXAL???? I’VE HEARD OF YOU AND I LOVE YOU ALREADY

[16:42] Oh my god her voice is so relaxing though??? Like robotic, certainly, but not at all like jarring? Is that a weird thing to say? 

[16:36] (Pixal) “What does ‘Zane’ stand for?” That’s just his name, m’am

[16:33] I mean, I hear Pixane is a thing that happens here? And I can understand the relationship part being rushed (god that is gonna be painful huh) but if I see Zane having a crush on Pixal I don’t really care. I don’t like how crushes usually somehow mean We’re Gonna Hook Up Soon but to be honest I don’t even have any form of romantic attraction, am human, and am having a bit of a crush on Pixal right now. He can do whatever, man.

[16:25] Welp! But goddammit, if it sets off my romantic repulsion I’m going to fight my brain, it’s! in! his! rights! to! crush! on! Pixal! Goddammit brain let me have fun here

[16:20] wait wait wait I just… man only in Lego can Pixal get away with having half her chest exposed.

[16:12] Okay I realise what I just said about Zane having a crush on Pixal but c’mon this is getting creepy what she’s on about now. NNC is reading more and more like a dystopia by the second when you think about it. Everything is connected. It’s being fed to Borg Industries. If BI isn’t doing good then what the hell would this mean?

[16:05] I- I. I mean, what DOES power him?

[15:36] WaaaAIIIIT. THIS ISN’T GOOD.

[15:16] Wait. Is this licensed? Also fucking… video games…

[15:05] “They have a Perfect Match console!” nsddhgiufsjd like that one Choices game? Also I heard we’re having a love triangle somewhere but this soon? What the hell, writers?

[15:00] UHHHH WHAT THE HELL. GODDAMMIT WE ARE NOT DOING SOME SORT OF AUTOMATED SOULMATE CRAP GET THAT SHIT OUT OF HERE.

[14:54] THIS IS CREEPY AS HELL… IS THIS SUPPOSED TO ALL BE *GOOD?*

[14:53] No. No, we are NOT doing this.

[14:50] I am going… to go commit... murder. None of you can stop me.

I am going to die before I get through this episode, jesus christ, let’s continue,

[14:49] PLEASE. MAKE IT STOP.

[14:47] WHHHHHY!!!!!

Usually I avoid anything with any romance in it like the plague (which is 99% of YA fiction aka stuff in my demographic) let alone LOVE TRIANGLES and now I’m seeing why Terrible Writing Advice has it as a running gag! If you’re not familiar with the channel, it’s exactly as labelled. It’s an author giving you advice on what NOT TO DO as stuff to do (but blatantly the first category). A running gag is that The Love Triangle Is Awful Author JP Fixall, which indicates how much the real JP hates them.

[14:44] (everyone gasps almost horrified at the results) THAT’S HOW I’VE BEEN FEELING FOR THE PAST HALF AN HOUR YOU GOOF! THIS IS A TEN SECOND SEQUENCE.

[14:42] WeLPPP WE HAVE TO DO THIS SHIT THEN

[14:34] Hey, Mr. Borg! So about that matchmaking machine you have in the video game floor downstairs… can we talk about that?

[14:32] Oh my god, I can’t even enjoy the episode because of the stupid love triangle I’m dreading.

[14:22] djdjdjd he really had to call out his parents for naming him that

[14:20] Why are you all acting so shocked? That looks cool as shit.

[14:07] UMMMMMM????? I’M SORRY WHAT

[14:01] Holy shit, um… they just killed him. They killed Zane’s dad between seasons, jesus christ.

[13:38] Man, but like. Huh.

[13:27] (Cyrus) “I’m glad it’s just you four.” UHHH

[13:15] It’s… a statue?

[13:11] (Kai) “Oh wow. It’s a statue. Of yourself.” I’m telling you that!

[13:04] UHHHH CYRUS? CYRUS YOU’RE JUST GONNA WHISPER IN KAI’S EAR ABOUT HOW HE NEEDS TO PROTECT THE OTHER NINJA FOR NINJAGO’S SAKE AND JUST… LEAVE IT THERE

[13:01] Oh, well, “them”, but I assumed it was the ninja based on context. Whatever it is.

[12:53] What the fuck is going on?

[12:22] Wait, since when did Kai hate technology? Was that something else from the pilot episodes? And… whelp, it’s broken.

[12:15] Ooooh. This isn’t good.

[11:53] Whelp! Time to protect them blades!

[11:49] OUCH

[11:19] And this is why you don’t build over where the Overlord was defeated, presumably. It curses the damn place.

[11:01] Man… those are some angry machinery.

[10:57] JESUS CHRIST THEM TOO??? PIXAL??? GUYS YOU’VE GOT KIDS WITH YOU

[10:23] Christ, why were they even allowed in there? This is a massive WorkSafe violation.

[10:13] God, I love the new technology based aesthetics we’re getting here though. I will confess, I love me them tech. I don’t really have the brains for it, but I wouldn’t deny it being cool as shit.

[10:10] Well! Let’s do this!

[10:06] Also, as always, the soundtrack slaps.

[9:51] And the music’s been updated to fit the technology theme of the season! In the previous two seasons, we got a lot of the classic Cinematic Orchestra (probably not the name but still). Now we’re doing a more techno beat… kind of thing

[9:48] (Zane) “It’s not sharp! Why even call it a blAde?” 

[9:37] And thus continues the long tradition of the ninja almost falling to their deaths.

[9:29] Ow.

[9:27] Man, you really should find a stop to your fall soon.

[9:23] Conveniently placed … what do you call em

[9:16] Well!!!

[9:05] The Overlord’s back.

[8:52] Oh. Oh no.

[8:43] (laughs nervously) what the fuck?

[8:31] Man, this is really just going downhill. I knew there was something severely off with NNC!

[8:26] thROw mE!

[8:17] HELL YEAH!!!

[8:10] Oh! Hell yeah! Vehicles!

[7:47] Welp!

[7:28] Pixal what the hell

[6:47] Hell yeah!!!! Also, goddammit I CALLED IT NNC WAS REALLY OFF

[6:26] Man! You’re really ready to go kick some ass, huh? I literally cannot blame you.

[5:25] Wow! This is actually really wild and I’m really into it.

[4:47] So! New vehicles! Mainly to sell merch but man is this a fun way of doing it!

[4:10] god i love this show!

[3:30] uhhh what just happened

[3:26] Lloyd! thank you!

[3:20] And now they’re group hugging him!

[3:16] Shiiit. That goddamn Overlord.

[2:42] Alright! Let’s see what happens now!

[1:43] Oh!!! I guess the technoblades are with the ninja! This was just a false flag.

[1:30] OOOOH. IT WASN’T.

[0:52] god like… to Lloyd, all of the other ninja are the Dad Friend like… stop collecting dads Lloyd. you’ve got too many. put a few back.

[0:49] Oh god. Cyrus.

[0:38] OH NO

[0:26] Kids show! Now with 80% more body horror and 70% more useless romantic subplots!

#ninjago #jaime sobs over ninjago season 3 #the surge

[orion98]

1 through 170

You absolute sicko. I’ll do it

1. A few inches taller wouldn’t hurt

2. Dragon

3. Shorts and t shirt or full assassins creed outfit

4. Ocarina of time or og smash bros

5. Star Wars oc, political rant, self introspection

6. Warning: this person can be bought with food. Especially boneless chicken

7. Dnd is the only true sandbox game

8. Phlegmatic or Melancholic. Maybe both

9. Yes

10. No

11. Straight

12. Arizona iced tea

13. Dog person but my personality and habits are more like a cat tbh

14. Elf

15. Outside Xbox and outside xtra. Please check them out I love them

16. 5’8

17. Maybe Jacob? I’m pretty happy with my name

18. Roughly 160 pounds

19. I believe there are supernatural spirits but I think they’re just demons trying to deceive people. I don’t think that spirit in one’s house is actually their grandma. [see how Saul visited a witch in the Bible]

20. Space. Scary things with too many teeth exist in the ocean. Space is cool yet can still have that element of terrifying horror of endless abyss

21. Yeah

22. People looking over my shoulder at what I’m doing on my phone, people hearing what I’m listening to

23. Diurnal (that word sounds fake and I don’t believe it exists)

24. Orion obviously

25. That one star next to the moon. It’s the moon’s buddy

26. Googled it. Nope. Don’t like that.

27. Fear of heights, ocean, endless abyss, spiders

28. I think the planet naturally changes no matter what we do and while we should still take care of it, I think the planet would win in the end anyways

29. No

30. The old justice league animated movie. The one that started the animated show

31. Depends on what it is. See previous phobias

32. Like 17. In the past few years one of my cats got out and got pregnant three separate times so yeah

33. 2 because they made me answer every one of these

34. Blue?

35. Idk, a lot of the popular places don’t interest me that much

36. California

37. Hazel

38. Introvert

39. No

40. Depends on who’s asking ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) I’m Kidding. Hugs

41. My mutuals

42. My family

43. No

44. No

45. No

46. Don’t have one right now. Used to have some though

47. Scratch on a chalkboard, high pitched tipping from small dogs, the roar that the camel divine beast in breath of the wild makes

48. The sound my dog makes when he’s excited

49. No

50. No

51. Right now it’s Travis willingham and Laura Bailey. They’re married so it adds a whole other layer when one is a villain and the other is a hero in full metal alchemist

52. This was asked before???

53. Like I want to make anon answer all these questions. Tired

54. Current color is fine right now

55. When I got saved

56. Anything that gets my mind off whatever is working me up. Outside Xbox, food, walking the dog

57. No

58. It means I like Orion

59. Funny, introverted, polite

60. No

61. When they don’t have anything I want to see or when they don’t act decent towards people they disagree with

62. Memes or respectful discourse

63. The kind of person who listens to you, adds onto what you say, includes you in what’s happening, etc.

64. Dogs, dragon, lizards

65. @korosensei-404 @astrofunny1337 @daphenomenal-1

66. (ง’̀-‘́)ง

67.

68. Mediator

69. Gemini

70. No. He does say hi by lifting his paw though and that’s adorable

71. Shorts and a t shirt

72.

73. No

74. My eyes are sensitive to the sun. If I’m outside during the day then I need sunglasses to function

75. No

76. Why wouldn’t I?

77. No

78. Never done either

79. The prideful attitude that people have and think they’re better than everyone else

80. Dragons

81. None

82. Helping people

83. My sister or my dad. A few people on the internet

84. “It’s living up to the expectation tbh”

85. 91

86. I don’t think so, I’m not sure

87. Yes

88. No. I have long legs

89. alexandrite

90. I would want to be a dragon but my personality is definitely a cat

91. I have no idea so I’m just gonna say daisy

92. That one McDonald’s near my church. They never get my order right

93. Not even one. I don’t like coffee

94. Read minds

95. Yeah

96. Winter

97. Maybe 30 seconds?

98. Any one of the number of discourse people who’ve decided to bully people who simply disagree with them.

99. My old youth pastor. He actually made a YouTube channel recently and I was going to make a post about it

100. Chick Fil a

101. Tennis shoes

102. LA California

103. No

104. Mercury

105. ALWAYS

106. Not really

107. No

108. How people see me

109. No

110. It’s probably in this ask tbh

111. Any math question

112. No

113. Yeah they’re cool

114. Depends. Cloudy days make it seem gloomy but sunny days blind me because it’s so bright

115. No one

116. Never thought about this so that one that can look like a dog

117. Blue. Why would I want it different?

118. No

119. Their laugh

120. Fruits

121. Sleep

122. Sky

123. Sweet

124. Either one

125. No

126. The toxic people

127. The people I’ve made friends with

128. How many pillows would it take to fight the moon

129. Always find something to laugh about after crying

130. The anon who sent this ask maybe

131. I can’t smell. It helps when I have to pick up dog poop. It doesn’t help when I can’t smell delicious foods or things

132. No

133. Computer

135. Neither

136. Lobed? Idk what this means

137. No

138. 6-8

139. Jimbo

140. No

141. No

142. Good

143. Either one. Both are great

144. Injustice and being punished for a false accusation

145. English

146. Girls

147. No

148. My height?

149. I always try to cheer people up or make them laugh

150. Bold of you to assume I want to talk to anybody

152. No. They have good quizzes but bad politics

153. Don’t have one

154. No

155. No

156. My voice

157. People examining my work

158. I’m not a liar, can’t remember any big ones

159. 127

160. Over 4,400

161. 23 in this one

162. I like almost every post I come across so it’s a lot and I’m on mobile so I can’t see the number right now

163. Idk

164. Short hair but it’s getting long and I need a hair cut

165. Idk

166. It helps people all around the world

167. Yeah

168. No

169. No

170. Yes

TL;DR? That’s fair

#long post #ask

[lookbackmachine]

Disney Afternoon Part 2

The Disney Afternoon Pt 2

Subscribe: 

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-look-back-machine/id1257301677?mt=2

0:00:00 Speaker 1: The Disney Afternoon hit an unexpected hiccup a few years earlier that was finally starting to rear its ugly head. Eisner and Katzenberg would try to strong-arm their former boss Barry Diller, which would lead to unexpected new competition. In 1988, Eisner bought a television station in Los Angeles that eventually became KCAL. With his new station, he obviously wanted to air Disney product. There was a problem. They were already airing the Disney Afternoon on Fox affiliates, Barry Diller's network.

0:00:32 S1: According to DisneyWar, Eisner had Katzenberg call Diller. In Diller's recounting of the discussion, Katzenberg said, "We want to renegotiate the Disney Afternoon, and we're taking away the LA market." Diller was shocked. They had a contract. "That's not fair," he protested. "I know you bought an LA station, but give us two or three years to replace this. Let's be reasonable." Diller called Eisner, who refused. "We were there for you when you needed us," Diller reminded him, pointing out that he'd bought the original programming for Disney Afternoon. Eisner still refused. "Okay then, we're out of business," Diller said. Fox promptly dropped the Disney Afternoon from all of its wholly owned stations and encouraged its affiliates to do the same. Still, that wasn't what put Diller over the edge. Even though he felt Eisner had betrayed him, it was when Disney sued Fox on antitrust grounds claiming Fox was trying to monopolize children's programming and then complained to the FCC that Fox was a morally unfit broadcaster with programming like the Simpsons.

0:01:35 S1: When Disney lawyers approached Diller about a possible settlement, Diller said the only settlement he'd consider was an apology. Disney ended up dropping the suit in 1992, but Diller told David Geffen, "I'm never going to speak to him, Eisner, again." Fox would launch its own kids programming in 1990, which would eventually cut into Disney's ratings with the cultural phenomenon Power Rangers, not to mention Batman, the animated series, and Animaniacs. Power Rangers was a show that no one wanted. It was turned down by everyone, and then became the show everyone wanted and wanted to replicate. Premiering in August of 1993, by December it was the biggest kid show by far. According to the Baltimore Sun, it was averaging a 12.5 on weekends with kids two to 11. Fox's X-Men was doing a 10.0. And it was first on weekdays. It was doing a 7.5 rating. Second was Fox's Animaniacs with a 5.6, and the highest rated non-Fox show on weekdays was Bonkers with a 4.5. Also in 1994, Power Ranger toy sales would reach nearly a billion dollars. At their highest height, Ninja Turtles had done only $450 million in sales.

0:02:50 S1: The butterfly effect was now spreading its wings, and the Disney Afternoon would take a hit, as did the future of syndication as networks realized they should be promoting their own IPs instead of other companies. It would even happen to Fox when Warner Brothers would take its popular hits, Batman and Animaniacs, and put it on their own WB network. And it wasn't just network competitors anymore, cable had entered the market as well. Nickelodeon had popped into the world of animation and their first three cartoons, Ren and Stimpy, Doug, and Rugrats had all been big successes. The syndication window was closing in the not too distant future, but for now Disney Television Animation was about to change with the times.

[music]

0:03:43 S1: Greg Weisman, creator Gargoyles.

0:03:46 Greg Weisman: The pitch for Aladdin, that I pitched to Eisner, it was just one poster shot of Aladdin and the Genie and three words, "Aladdin the series". He's like, "Sold." That was it. And I knew that. In other words, going in, it was like I could have given this whole pitch on Aladdin, but I thought anything I say would only give him a reason to say no. Aladdin's this huge movie. Let him imagine what the show is.

0:04:11 S1: Tad Stones, creator of Darkwing Duck.

0:04:14 Tad Stones: At the end of Darkwing, I said, "Okay, now Darkwing worked much closer." I think I can get even closer with my next show, which was going to be a science fiction show. Again, a comedy. The staff loved it, but the boss did not. I never got to pitch it to Michael and Jeffrey. You know, had a meeting, I said, "Oh, I'm gonna get a chance to do it." And it was like, "No." They wanted me to do Aladdin. Now, Aladdin was done by Ron Clements, John Musker. I said, "I used to room with... In the same office as Ron Clements." I mean I was literally four feet away from him. "Let me talk to those guys." With Aladdin there was the other thing that I did the first direct to home video, Return of Jafar. And all I was trying to do was keep our budgets up. And I thought, if there's one more source of revenue that comes in from our shows, this would be the excuse to not cut budgets or give us the money we need to pull off some of this stuff. I called up Home Video and said, "Technically, when I do this four part episode pilot to set up the show, technically it's the sequel to Aladdin. Are you interested?" And the guy took it to the higher ups and they were not.

0:05:25 TS: Then they put out Aladdin on video. Again, it broke records. They made a huge amount of money, and I called the guy back and again restated what I was doing. And this time he took it to the top and they were very interested. And we had a story meeting with my boss where he gave all sorts of notes. And I said, "Well, we got... That's a lot to pull off. We have to do that by March 14th or whatever the date was." He said, "Why?" I said, "Well, Home Video was willing to put this out on literally video at that time." And he said, "That's gravy. Do these notes and if you get them done in time, that's fine." And I had to be told this later by people who were in the room 'cause I had forgotten that I had said, "Okay we have to take those notes, but it also has to be done by this date so I can get it to Home Video."

0:06:11 TS: We did. And Return of Jafar was made for $3.5 million and it made something between $180 and $200 million domestic out on video. This may be apocryphal, but I was told that it was the first quarter where the company wouldn't have grown. Well, I don't know what, ten percent or whatever the number was, and I guess a bunch of executives had bonuses tied into profit growth. Evidently that was the first quarter that there wouldn't be bonuses, and then suddenly everybody got a bonus, and it was because of Return of Jafar, that out of nowhere this thing came in and making all this money. And that started the whole direct to video thing.

0:06:53 TS: All I was trying to do was to keep our budgets up. The stories involving the bonuses, they tried to do things like Lucas had with Star Wars had given everybody involved points or some sort of bonus, so they had X amount of money and they divided it up so everybody got something. And what that led to is whoever was last in line, some of the lower level people, got a bonus, a check of $50 or $100, whatever. People who basically were in the department who didn't work on the show, and all that did was piss them off 'cause they knew how much the movie had made. I got $14,000 and I told that to Ron and John. Now I was not an idiot. I knew that the only reason why the movie made that much money is because they had done an incredible Aladdin, and I remember telling that to them and their reaction was, "You got ripped off." And I realized, yeah, in live action terms, if you do a crappy spinoff of something that made a lot of money and your crappy spinoff makes a ton of money, you get a five picture deal and a new car in your driveway as a present from the studio. In animation, I was happy to get the bonus. But get a pat on the back and then you move on, do something else for us.

0:08:09 S1: Jymn Magon, writer.

0:08:11 Jymn Magon: Disney's had a definite style there for a while, of... I think we cornered the market in the comedy adventure genre. When Disney execs felt like they needed to branch out, I felt like the formula fell by the wayside. And it's like, "Hey, look what John Kricfalusi is doing on Ren and Stimpy. Let's do something like that. Hey, look what Warner Brothers is doing with superheroes. Let's do something like that." And I felt like, "Oh, this is interesting." Obviously, we're branching out, trying new things. But it felt weird to me that where we had before had been sort of chopping our way through the jungle, creating our own path. Now we were sort of following other people's paths, copying them. And that always seemed odd to me. But anyway, department does what the department does over the years, and the changes, and the new policy, and it gets worse or it gets better. And is it Disney? Yes, because it's Disney TV Animation. They're Disney and this is the show they're doing. It becomes part of the canon, you know.

0:09:15 S1: In 1994, Variety reported that Disney was spending $50 million to boost its afternoon, which resulted in two new series, Shnookums and Meat, and Gargoyles. Gargoyles, Aladdin, and Shnookums helped cut into the lead of Fox, but there was a larger problem that television animation was about to encounter. Disney's syndication contract with networks ran only through 1997, meaning that other networks could produce their own shows and make more money. This would leave Disney Animation without a home because Disney didn't own a network. In fact, earlier in the year, they had tried to buy NBC but failed. Total viewership was also in decline during this period, which had to do with VCRs, computers, and video games offering alternatives to television. And to add to the uncertainty of 1994, Jeffrey Katzenberg left the company and he left because he was fired by Michael Eisner.

0:10:12 S1: In a walk in Aspen together, according to Katzenberg, Eisner promised him that if anything happened to Frank Wells, Katzenberg would take over Wells's role as president. Eisner would later say that Katzenberg misunderstood this conversation. Unfortunately, something did happen to Wells. He was killed in a tragic helicopter crash on April 3, 1994. But business stops for no man, and Eisner went back on his word and did not put Katzenberg in Wells's position as president, nor did he name him as his successor. To make matters worse, in a white glove slap to the face to Katzenberg, Eisner took on the role of president himself. This led to a further deterioration of their relationship and Eisner gave Katzenberg his walking papers. Eventually Eisner also refused Katzenberg part of his contract, which stated Katzenberg would get two percent of all profits from any of the projects he had worked on at Disney.

0:11:08 S1: So, like all great Hollywood love stories, they went to court. At one point it came out that Eisner had said he hated that midget, referring to Katzenberg. The case could have been settled for $90 million at one point, but instead it was eventually settled for $280 million in Katzenberg's favor. And then to further complicate matters, Katzenberg went on to form DreamWorks with Spielberg and David Geffen. In the midst of all that, Shnookums and Meat, a funny cartoon show, was being made. Bill Kopp, animator.

0:11:40 Bill Kopp: And then I got a call from Disney Television, which I had never heard of. I didn't even know they had it. And Gary Krisel and Bruce Cranston made me an offer. They said, "Hey, we need some new funny stuff and we really think your eat show is funny, and can you come and do a funny show?" And I was like, "Well, like what?" And they were like, "Whatever you want." Seriously. I didn't have to pitch anything. They were just like, "Just come over and we'll do whatever comes out of your head." It was incredible. So I had a sketchbook full of stuff, and I just came in. And they said, "Well, how about a cat and a dog?" I said, "Okay." We started with that, and that must have been 1992 or 1993, something like that. I forget. Pitching at Disney now. I'm not saying [0:12:22] ____. I mean, it's legendarily hard. It's like running a gauntlet. There's all these people in these giant buildings and you just got to carve your way through. And then once you do get into development, you're gonna be there for a year or two just trying to get it through. My experience was, we had lunch and the next week I was there with a contract.

0:12:40 BK: There was no feeling of pressure or ever like, "Oh my God, the wheels are coming off." It never was like that. And we had a saying that Disney [0:12:49] ____. It's like, "Well, if something's... If something crashes, well, I'll just throw money at it." You know. Nobody bothered us. When they said, "You can do whatever you want," they never brought it up. I remember sitting in the editor room with Gary Krisel, who was a great guy, and he'd look at some of the rough animation coming back. He'd look at me and he'd go, "Is that funny?" And we're like, "Yeah, that's funny." He just trusted us, and it was awesome. Now, Jeffie came over one day, as he frequently did, while we were kicking it around. And I said, "The cat's kind of abrasive. So let's give him the opposite kind of name," you know, Shnookum, 'cause he was kind of a dick. And then we were just like, "What the fuck are we gonna call this dog?" We had no clue. Just nothing. And Jeffie came up with the name, and I think we were actually barbecuing something, which we also frequently did. And I think he just said, "Meat." And we had the design already. And I said, "Fuck, that's it."

0:13:40 BK: Shnookums and Meat. A little confusion came when they made the SpaghettiOs though. I had a can of them around here, they finally just deteriorated. I had to get rid of it, it was gonna explode. And it said, "Shnookums and Meat." It was like SpaghettiOs. The lawyers were like, "No, no, no, man. You gotta say that it's not meat. It's not a meat product."

0:13:58 Shnookums: Hey, what happened to your head?

0:14:00 Meat: Hey, what happened to your head?

[music]

0:14:07 Shnookums: Oh my gosh, my brain's gone.

0:14:10 Meat: Oh no, mine is to. What we gonna do Shnookums, what we gonna do? We don't have any brains.

0:14:21 Shnookums: Now, let's stay calm. I don't think you have too much to worry about, but I know I do. They couldn't have gone far.

0:14:27 BK: Right after the first two shorts went on to [0:14:29] ____ said, "Okay, let's make it a whole half hour. What else do you got?" And I just pulled out the Pith Possum, and the Tex Tinstar bit was gonna be a space serial called Guy Guy and the Space Vigilantes. We were all set to go, and then I got a call from John Kricfalusi, and I had Fontanelli there, you know, all of Kricfalusi's guys, [0:14:47] ____ was there. A couple... Eddie Fitzgerald. And John called me. He goes, "Hey man, I heard you're expanding your show, but can you maybe not do a space thing?" Actually, it was like getting a call from the Godfather. He was like, "Yeah, don't do a space thing." And I was like, I go, "Why?" And he goes, "Well, 'cause I'm working on one. I've been working on it for a while." Actually, Fontanelli brought that up to me too. So I just turned it into a western, which was easy because I was happy to accommodate. But I guess he never sold his space thing.

[music]

0:15:14 Speaker 8: Pith Possum. At one time an ordinary laboratory possum. He was changed forever by an experiment gone wrong, an experiment that endowed him with ultra possum-like abilities, turning him into Pith Possum, super dynamic possum of tomorrow. Maintaining his secret identity by cleverly disguising himself as Peter Possum, copy boy for a great metropolitan tabloid. He defends truth, justice, and the forest critter way for the good citizens of Possum City.

[music]

0:15:56 Speaker 9: Let me just grab what I have in store for you. The rope that holds you up Tinstar, will soon be burned through by that candle. When you fall, you'll land head first on this trampoline, which will send you flying into the pen full of rabid badgers. As you go down the ramp inside the pen, this torch will be knocked over, igniting the trail of gunpowder burning toward that cannon. Your barrel will roll toward that cannon and your head will become stuck. The gunpowder will burn the cannon's fuse and the cannon will fire. The blast will ignite the waterproof fuses on the dynamite surrounding your head. The cannon will shoot you through the roof of the barn, and then down into this giant tank full of man-eating sharks. The sharks will eat you. Then the dynamite will explode. The whole mess will be blown skyward and your remains will fall into this envelope, which I will place on a boat bound for Tunisia. So long, Tinstar.

0:16:48 BK: Anyway, and that was Shnookums and Meat, but again, that was so busy and I was the only writer. I wrote all 39 of those because I didn't know any better. After the show was on the air and we were done, Jeffie and I sat around. I went to Hawaii for six weeks to recuperate. I came back and they were just like, "Well, we don't know about the second season." And I mean, Shnookums and Meat was not... It was amazing that they let us do it 'cause it's not Disney, really. Well, it's not out of line, but it's weird. So we were just sitting there waiting to get the word, and I mean the writing was on the wall. I was like, "Yeah okay, there goes that. What are we gonna do next?" And I was there still getting paid. I developed other stuff. Jeffie and I were like, "This is gonna crack, man. What are we gonna fucking do now?"

0:17:34 BK: We didn't have a plan. And then, what happened was they said, "Oh, sorry boys. You're through." And we were like, "Ah fuck, okay well, at least we got that out." I mean that was three in one, dude. You got Pith and Tex, and Shnookum and Meat was actually our weakest link in the thing. And that was the only part that was foisted on us. But right after they canceled it, that was when Gary Krisel and Bruce Cranston left to go to Dreamworks, and we were like, "Ah." And it was like a sad goodbye and stuff.

0:18:06 BK: A new executive moved in, and we just weren't part of their plan. Because... And rightfully... They didn't know what to do with us. We were like a weird thing that, they were like, "Huh? Now what with these guys?" But we had a good time. I think we sort of knew in the back of our heads, it was like, "Wow, this will never last here." It isn't Disney material. The real story of that time was they were trying to keep up with Margaret and Fox Kids, and they were right to try crazy things. To their credit, they really, they stuck right by it. And then they... And Gary and Bruce did the same for us at DreamWorks when we went to do Toonsylvania.

0:18:42 S1: Greg Weisman, creator Gargoyles.

0:18:44 GW: We had the Disney Afternoon, which we viewed as sort of like the dragon that you had to feed a virgin to every six months. So every six months, we'd go up in front of Michael Eisner. In those days, Michael personally chose the shows. And we would pitch him six or seven shows. And he knew he always had to pick one to put into production. He could pick more than one, but he had to always pick at least one.

0:19:10 S1: Jymn Magon.

0:19:11 JM: Yeah, what we would do is every week, we would have this writer's meeting that I think it was Wednesday mornings, and it was like any new writers out there, any new talent, any new ideas, it was always looking for what are we gonna pitch? What's the next big thing? And of course, like everything in Hollywood, it was basically, what was the most recent hit film? With Star Wars, Indiana Jones, whatever. But people would come in and they'd pitch all kinds of things. And the things that were noteworthy would get... I'm not sure we did artwork on all of it, but at least we had a list of shows that we would take to the meetings with Eisner and Katzenberg and say, "Okay, this is called Wonder Weenie. It's about a guy in a hot dog suit that gets kidnapped and taken to another planet, where they think he's a hero 'cause of his television commercials." And it was like, Gong. [chuckle] "No, next." And we would just do that. We would come up with these sort of one, two sentence pitches and they would go, "Nah, or yeah."

0:20:13 S1: Greg Weisman.

0:20:14 GW: We were all sort of keeping an eye on Batman, and sort of seeing was this going to be a success or not? It was a serious drama on cartoon, and would that work? Because the conventional wisdom is it always has to be comedy, and often it's a pendulum and that conventional wisdom swings back into the forefront all the time. But Batman was working, it was working so well they tried it in prime time, and then it didn't work in prime time. And so the desire for us to do something along those lines sort of waxed and waned, often with Batman's ratings. And we didn't have superheroes in our camp so to speak, so we didn't wanna do Batman, we didn't wanna copy that, but we wanted to try and do something different. But that's not how Gargoyles came about at all. Those are almost two separate discussions that dovetailed later.

0:21:08 GW: Gargoyles was initially developed as a comedy adventure, very much inspired by and along the lines of Gummi Bears, Disney's Adventures of the Gummi Bears, which was a show we were really proud of, created by a guy named Jymn Magon. We thought was great. It had this very rich backstory and we thought it didn't get enough respect, and we thought that the main reason for that was because there was brand confusion with Care Bears. Care Bears was a sort of sacchariney sweet, kinda awful show, from my point of anyway. But the brand confusion was understandable because both shows featured cute, cuddly, multi-colored bears. Gummi Bears wasn't that. It was an adventure show. It was funny. It was exciting. It had a great comedic villain in Duke Igthorn and great sidekick in [0:21:54] ____, and great characters, and just a lot of fun. So we set out very consciously to create a show in that vein with the same sort of rich backstory, but that would get more respect. So everything in the 90s, the sort of buzz word was everything had to be edgy. Instead of doing cute, cuddly, multi-colored bears, we did cute, cuddly, multi-colored gargoyles. Gargoyles having been something that fascinated me since I was in high school.

0:22:23 GW: And we thought that's edgier. And instead of setting it in medieval times, we'd have this rich medieval backstory, but we'd set it in the present. We'd have gargoyles have a spell cast on them and they'd wake up in the 20th century, and that seemed edgier too. And so we thought, we can do this kind of show and have this fun comedy adventure with Gargoyles. So we put together a pitch, and we pitched it to Michael Eisner, and he passed. But we really liked the show and my bosses, Bruce and Gary, both really liked it. And they were like, "Well, take another pass at it." So I showed it to a number of people, just the original comedy pitch, to try and get some feedback and see what else I might do with it. One of the people I showed it to was Tad Stones.

0:23:06 TS: Gargoyles had a long history of things that are in a direct line that ended up with Gargoyles. And some of them didn't involve Gargoyles at all. They were gremlins, or whatever. The last thing I'd been playing with I think was a Three Musketeers version of these gargoyles. I had just seen the rough cut of Beauty and the Beast. So again, I'm instrumental. I'm not a genius, at least not in that meeting. Greg had asked me in just to talk about things and be in the discussion with his assistants basically. Again, he was an executive. And I said, "What if he was the last of the gargoyles? This could be your Beauty and the Beast 'cause you've already got the female there." He is one of the fastest thinkers I've ever seen. While he's watching a movie, he is analyzing, dissecting it. And walking out of a movie he'll have all sorts of comments, where I'm going, "Well, I thought the colors were nice." Anyway, he was on to something, he kind of said to his assistant, "Okay, you follow up on the Three Musketeers angle. I wanna work on this."

0:24:07 GW: And that really clicked for me. And so I created the character of Goliath with the artist Greg Guler, and we took the whole show, the whole comedy development and put it through the prism of Goliath and came out the other side fundamentally with the show that made it on the air. And we were so enthusiastic about it, we came up with all these concepts for villains and adventures and stories and put together this huge long pitch and pitched it to Eisner six months after we'd pitched it the first time. And he passed, killed it. And so I thought it was done. We tried. It wasn't the first time I'd pitched a show and it had gotten killed. And the next day we had what we called a postmortem meeting. In those days, Jeffrey Katzenberg was... And Michael ran the whole company, but Jeffrey Katzenberg was head of the studio. And so Jeffrey had been in the meeting with Gary and Bruce and I, and we were having this postmortem meeting where we were discussing actually the shows that Michael had said yes to and what the next steps would be. And so after having this discussion about the yes shows, we all got up to go. And as I'm about to go, Jeffrey said to me, "Oh, and you're gonna work on Gargoyles some more, right?"

0:25:20 GW: And Bruce and I sort of looked at each other, and I was like, "Well no, Michael killed it. He killed it as a comedy. He killed it as a drama. I don't know what else we'd do with it." And Jeffrey said, "Oh, Michael didn't kill it, he just thought it needed more work." Now I had been there the day before, and I knew that he had killed it. But what this was telling me was that Michael may not have liked it, but Jeffrey liked it. And in those days Jeffrey wasn't gonna contradict what Michael had said, but he still felt it was worth pursuing. I also found out later that Gary had talked to Jeffrey about the need to diversify the Disney Afternoon from the standpoint of all we had in those days were very similar, funny animal comedy adventure cartoons, and that if we just kept doing that over and over again, eventually the audience would get bored with those kind of cartoons. No matter how good they were, they'd just get bored with them. And we had to bring other types of things in, which led to shows like Goof Troop, which was really more sitcom than comedy adventure. Shows like Shnookums and Meat, which was more sort of Tex Avery short cartoons, and Gargoyles.

0:26:36 GW: And so we went back to the drawing board for a third time to try and figure out how we were gonna pitch Gargoyles for a third time. And we looked at the show that we had, and we thought, "Nope, this is the show. We don't wanna change the show at all." So the problem isn't the show, the problem is the pitch. And what you realize is that we had just put way too much into the pitch. It had diffused it all and gotten confusing and we hadn't been crisp and clear. So we just pulled things out, things that we eventually did use in the show, but we pulled all these elements out and really narrowed it down to the key idea, which frankly, was the Beauty and the Beast idea.

0:27:16 GW: It was this relationship between Goliath, the lead gargoyle, and Elisa, the cop, who befriends him in the 20th century after he wakes up. And we very much played it like Beauty and the Beast, which actually was a movie that had done very well for Disney recently. So six months later, we pitched it to Michael a third time, and this time they bought it. We had added nothing to this pitch, we just subtracted. I'd reordered a few things. We may have redrawn a card or two just to clarify an idea, but there was nothing new, it was just shorter. Jeffrey turned to me and said, "You added a lot to that pitch didn't you?" And I said, "Yes, I did." And that was history. We went on and made the show.

0:28:03 Speaker 10: One thousand years ago superstition in the sword ruled. It was a time of darkness, it was a world of fear, it was the age of Gargoyles. Stone by day, warriors by night. We were betrayed by the humans we had sworn to protect, frozen in stone by a magic spell for a thousand years. Now, here in Manhattan, the spell is broken and we live again. We are defenders of the night. We are Gargoyles!

0:29:01 GW: And so, yes, relative to Goof Troop it's dark, but I don't think of it as dark. There's tons of humor in that show. The color palette is rich, full of blues and purples and magentas and neon. It's not a dark show either visually or thematically. It's fundamentally a show about a guy, Goliath, who's an optimist, who believes that the world can be a better place, that bad things happen but they can be fixed, that the next generation can do better or that we can make it better. And so it's got a fundamentally optimistic tone to it. In terms of supervision, the advantage there was that I'd been the executive at Disney for five years when we went into production. I often compare it to a lunatic asylum, TV animation, in that there are inmates and then there are trustees, and the trustees are actually also inmates, but they're considered by management to be less crazy.

0:30:07 GW: So they give the trustee a stick, a baton to keep the other lunatics in line. And so that's how I sort of see my role on Gargoyles. I was the lunatic most trusted. So because of what was going on, both in the larger company and at TV Animation, there were a lot of shows in crisis for various reasons. And because of that and because I was in charge of Gargoyles, which I produced with Frank Paur, we were both producers, but from an executive standpoint it was still me. I was the lunatic most trusted at Disney TV Animation, so they kinda left us alone. And I remember at one point, Frank and I had lunch with Gary during season two and Gary said, "I wanna apologize to you guys. I have not been paying attention to Gargoyles at all. We've had other things going on. How is it going? What's going on? How's it going on the show?"

0:30:54 GW: And we said, "Well, it's going pretty good. Schedule's tough, but we're managing and we're happy with how things are turning out." He's like, "Great. What kind of stories are you doing?" So we started telling him about that and at one point we told him about Xanatos and Fox getting married and having a baby. And he goes, "Whoa, whoa. I wouldn't do that. You can't have the bad guy have a baby. You can't have the bad guy raising a kid. You gonna take the kid away from him? That'll be bad. And if you don't take the kid away from him then you got a villain raising a kid. Don't do that one."

0:31:23 GW: And we were like looking at each other and then I say to him, "Well, we already did it." So there was this long pause. And Frank and I are both sort of like what's gonna happen here? Is he gonna still reject it and force us to sort of tear the whole show apart and start over? And you could sort of tell he's thinking the same thing, like he doesn't like this idea at all. But on the other hand, this was the one show that was going smoothly, and if he rips it all apart, then he's gotta get another show in crisis. So after this long pause, he says to us, "Well, don't dwell on it." I said, "Okay, we won't dwell on it." Whatever the hell that meant, but so we didn't. I mean we didn't do it, we didn't change anything, but that was the kind of thing, we had very little supervision because of where I had come from. We pretty much made the show that Frank and I wanted to make and had almost no interference whatsoever.

0:32:25 GW: Gargoyles was sort of superheroes done without flagging that they're superheroes. No tights, no capes. For all intents and purposes that was the genre we were doing. A year or so later, I was in a meeting with Eisner where he announced his desire to buy Marvel, and I watched his corporate strategic guys talk him out of it and say, "Marvel's a disaster. They've got their rights sold all over the place. So you'd buy the company and then find out you can't make a movie about Spiderman because they've tripled sold the rights to three different companies. And Fantastic Four is being held by this company. And blah, blah, blah, blah."

0:33:05 GW: Now of course, years later Bob Iger just bought it anyway, and yeah, couldn't do X-Men, couldn't do Fantastic Four, couldn't do Spiderman, at least not at first, bought it anyway. Of course, it's been a huge success for Disney. But Eisner was talked out of it that day. So he turned to us, to Gary and Bruce and myself and says, "Can we use Gargoyles to start a Disney superhero universe?" And I said, "Yeah." And we began developing spinoffs, which we would do backdoor pilots for during season two of the show. But by the time those things got on the air, Jeffrey had left the company. Rich Frank had left the company. Frank Wells had died. Bruce had left the company. All the main supporters of Gargoyles had gone, and so that notion of using Gargoyles to launch Disney's own superhero universe sort of fell away.

0:34:01 GW: But for, I don't know, three or four months, it was like this is what we've got to do 'cause we can't buy Marvel, and Warner Brothers has DC. And on one level, and I don't think we even appreciated it at the time, but the great thing about Michael himself picking the shows was that everyone in every division got on board or got out of the way. In the years that followed, when Michael stopped picking the shows personally, those decisions began being made by committee. You found you had to get literally unanimous vote in order to sell a show. You needed not just one important person to say yes, or two or three, but literally you needed something like eight or nine people to say yes. And if even one said no, the others would jump off the show. And it became much harder to sell. So Michael was sort of the last of the moguls from my point of view, and we didn't appreciate it at the time 'cause there were so many shows he passed on that we thought were great, but what we didn't get was yeah, that may have been so but the shows he picked we got to just make. And that hasn't been the same in most places since then.

0:35:12 GW: I think what happened was, is that over time, there was this sort of sense within the corporation that Michael was micromanaging, not from us per se. I don't think it had anything to do with TV Animation, but just in general. And there was this sense that he had to start giving some things up. One of the things he gave up was choosing the animated series, but he didn't invest that power in another individual. Again, sort of became a decision by committee, a committee where any one person could derail something.

0:35:40 Speaker 11: Five-eights today to close at 42 and five-eights, one day after the company announced the resignation of Disney studio's chief Jeffrey Katzenberg. While rumors run rampant about where Katzenberg will end up, Disney chairman Michael Eisner said today, the company will likely produce fewer films.

0:35:57 GW: Jeffrey left. Rich Frank left. A lot of this was in the wake of Frank Wells's death, which was a tragedy in it's own right, but also destabilized the company. Roy Disney was not happy with Jeffrey. Ultimately, not happy with Michael either. So ultimately, both departed and Gary had at least a couple job offers that I know about, maybe more. I think Jeffrey wanted him at DreamWorks and had an offer out to him, and then when Bruce Cranston left to go to Dreamworks, Gary decided that DreamWorks would be a good place to sort of work with Bruce again and reform that team. So Gary also picked DreamWorks. So you had Jeffrey, Gary, and Bruce all at DreamWorks. Those were the three guys who I'd worked with. So at Disney, everyone sort of assumed that I'd be going to DreamWorks.

0:36:50 GW: When my deal was up at the end of the second season of Gargoyles, that I'd leave and go to DreamWorks. And I didn't actually want to. I wanted to stay and do a third season of Gargoyles. But it became this self-fulfilling prophesy. They were so sure I was gonna go to DreamWorks that they stopped inviting me to meetings, 'cause they thought of me as I was already spying for DreamWorks or something. It was kind of ridiculous. But they didn't make a job offer to me until a week before I was leaving, at which point, I did end up going to DreamWorks because I didn't have any other job offers. A week out they finally made an offer to me too late. So I went. And they really kind of made it clear that I wasn't welcome there anymore.

0:37:36 GW: In November of 1995, I wanna say, they came to me, and said they wanted me to do the third season of Gargoyles but they were offering me a demotion from producer to story editor. They said the show was going to be animated at Deak, but Deak had a very bad track record in those days in terms of the look of the thing, and that it would be pre-produced there as well. And they gave me a schedule in November of 1995, where the first script was due in October of 1995. And I looked at the schedule. I said, "Well, do you have a time machine? Because I don't know how I'm supposed to go back and deliver a script in October when it's already November and we haven't started." And they're like, "Well, we know that schedule's gotta be adjusted, but we wanted you to see where it had to end so you'd have to catch up. Not instantaneously, but by the end of the season you'd have to catch up." And so it felt to me like they were asking me to preside over the demise of the show. That they were reducing the budget, reducing the quality of the animation, reducing the quality of all the preproduction, giving us an impossible schedule, and then asking me on top of all that, to take it to motion.

0:38:57 GW: And we didn't even talk about money. That... We didn't even get to that. I just said, "Look, I need the weekend to think about this." And they said, "Great. Take the weekend." And then I came in Monday and they had hired my replacement already. And I said, "What the hell?" And they said, "Oh well, you can still say yes. You're a... We just figured we needed someone in case you said no." Which basically said they were trying to get me to say no. They were trying to make the deal so horrible that I'd say no. So I just said, "Fine, I'll walk away." And so I winded up going to DreamWorks, and they all sort of patted themselves on the back and said, "See, we knew he was gonna go to DreamWorks." But of course they're the reason I went to DreamWorks 'cause they basically kicked me out. Not literally, but basically.

0:39:44 GW: I ended up writing the first episode for them, which they gave to other people to add it into whatever. So the version that got on TV was, I thought, a mess, but still better than the other 12, which were done by good people, but good people who didn't know the show and didn't have time to familiarize themselves with the show. And so those last, that last season of Gargoyles, the fans and I just don't even count it as canon to the series. And we look at the comic book series that I did years later as the sort of true third season. I watched the third season. I watched every episode exactly once. That's not quite true, I watched the one that I wrote more than once, not a lot, but the other 12 I watched exactly once each and made myself do it. I don't know why, but I did. It was very painful for me on a lot of levels, not just again, not just because I didn't think they were very good, which I didn't, even though I know a lot of good people worked on them, but characters were just behaving out of character. And the stories just weren't up to our standards. And it was just a different show.

0:40:57 S1: The original Mighty Ducks movie was made because Eisner's kids liked hockey. So it got a green light. And based on the success of the movie, which the company termed market research, Eisner bought an expansion NHL team and promptly named them the Mighty Ducks. And with that purchase came an addition to the television line up. The Mighty Ducks, the Animated Series, premiered in September 1996, and Joe Barruso, and animation veteran, served as a director and supervising producer.

0:41:27 Joe Barruso: The reason I was able get a job at Disney, and went from Deak to Disney I think had more to do with the fact that the show that I had directed and produced, Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego, had won an Emmy in '95 as the best children's animated program. And it was one of the first shows that they called edutainment because it had this emphasis on providing real information, whether it was historical or science, in combination with an entertaining story. It was a detective-type story where a couple of younger kids were pursuing Carmen Sandiego. It was based on a computer game that was very popular at that time. They were looking for someone specifically for Mighty Ducks at the time. They needed a producer and director. And so yeah, I went and interviewed specifically for that project.

0:42:20 JB: In the initial meetings they showed me what they had done to that point and it wasn't a lot. It's funny, thinking back on it, it had started because Friends was very popular at that time, hugely successful at that time, so they wanted something like Friends. I remember them pitching it to me that way, and I thought, "Oh well, that's interesting." In the development that I'd seen to that point, when it was the Friend's concept, it was like we had in the show ultimately, it was human characters with duck heads, so it was sort of breaking with Disney tradition in terms of DuckTales and things that were clearly Donald Duck type characters. This was a new twist on the ducks for them. And that wasn't tremendously interesting to me, but then I can't recall at what point it shifted and became more sci-fi based, you know heroes in the image of sort of Ninja Turtles. And that's when David Wise, the editor, came on board.

0:43:22 JB: It was clear it was gonna go that direction. He had had a great deal of experience with Ninja Turtles, editing those shows, so he brought all that thinking and that expertise in terms of that particular genre, in going in that direction. He bought all that. That's when I was excited about... Sci-fi had always been a big interest for me and then anime was just getting really a lot of attention at that time. It really caught my interest, so that when we started talking that way, I was like, "Oh well, this will be great. We can use anime influences on this." But yeah, I think the old school that was there, because it was ducks, was a little uncomfortable. But our character designer, Greg Guler, he had had a longstanding relationship with Disney TV, and so he had done it all. He really knew it inside out. At the same time he had a great interest in superheroes. His background, he had originally come from comic books, so his first love was superheroes. So here he had a chance to combine Disney ducks with superheroes, so it was really a perfect opportunity for him. He was just a fantastic artist. So it all sort of came together.

0:44:32 JB: I was relieved that it was moving away from sort of a Friends sitcom to something more sci-fi and hero based. All our influences in terms of doing the art were harder edged. We never really got to go as far in that sci-fi direction as we would have liked to, but the way it's done is in terms of the development and art direction, it's sort of a consensus. So you have to put it in front of a whole bunch of people. And that included at the time, that included Michael Eisner and Michael Ovitz. We had meetings where they reviewed the artwork, and so they would have their input. I was kind of reaching for one end of the spectrum, and them pulling us back to something that was a little more comfortable. I was pleased that we were able to go as far as we did, given what they had done with ducks to that point.

0:45:24 Speaker 13: Six hockey playing ducks appear out of nowhere and suddenly six vigilantes in comic book get-up start showing up whenever there's trouble. Spill it. Where are they from? Another planet?

0:45:36 Speaker 14: Not another planet babe. A whole 'nother universe.

0:45:40 S1: And in this universe, there's a planet inhabited entirely by ducks.

0:45:45 Speaker 15: They called it Puckworld in honor of their greatest hero, the legendary hockey player, Drake DuCaine. He was the ultimate team captain. He saved Puckworld from a horde of conquering aliens, called the Saurian Overlords, hundreds of years ago.

0:46:00 JB: Michael Eisner, he was excited about it because he was excited about the hockey team. So here was just an opportunity to promote it.

0:46:07 Speaker 16: Well, this is sad news indeed for Duck fans. It looks like the Mighty Ducks season long winning streak may be coming to an end. They're tied with the Maine Quahogs with forty seconds remaining at Quahog Center. John Luke [0:46:20] ____ is aiming to score again. Oh, a spectacular save by the Mighty Ducks goalie, Wildwing. You know, not only are these ducks mighty, they're really ducks.

0:46:36 JB: Interesting thing that we did, which was sort of unconventional, was after the shows would come back animated, we would of course assemble them. It was decided that they were not funny enough. I would spend large amounts of time each day sitting with two comedy writers who would rewrite the shows. And rewrite jokes into the shows. And we would sit and we would have to make sure, because the shows were already animated, we would have to make sure that the new lines would work with the mouths that we already had. So, it was a grueling exercise of... They're trying to be funny, trying to... Coming up with jokes, but we had to make sure that they could work in the animation, as it was already completed. That was different, yeah, maybe one in ten were actually worth all the time and energy.

0:47:29 S1: So these hockey playing ducks were attacked by a dinosaur named Dragaunus. Am I hearing you right?

0:47:36 S1: You're bright, you got it babe.

0:47:38 S1: Beautiful. I could have stayed home watching sci-fi chiller theater, but this is much funnier. All right, what happened next?

0:47:48 JB: It was kind of disappointing that it went away just after 26 episodes 'cause there really was a big push behind it. The Disney marketing machine and merchandising machine was behind it entirely. And Mattel was on board entirely for the toy line. And I guess it was the second largest toy line in Canada, second only to Star Wars at that time, which makes sense 'cause it was hockey. And I know for a fact that Mattel was disappointed that it went away 'cause they had planned years of it. It never did horribly, but some weeks it would be just average, but other weeks it would be doing really well, so it was a surprise when we didn't get more episodes. I had worked my whole life towards the point of having the opportunity to do the traditional look, and a big thrill for me was to finally be at Disney, which was a personal goal. And so I was happy that I was able to do Mighty Ducks and sort of kick it up a notch in terms of duck properties.

0:48:47 S1: Jymn Magon. The last show the Disney Afternoon would produce was Quack Pack, a descendant of DuckTales, but with the nephews as teenagers and Donald as the parental figure instead of Uncle Scrooge. It should have been a perfect ending to Disney's run, but some things are not meant to be.

0:49:04 JM: I did move after the Goofy Movie into development on Duck Days, which eventually became Quack Pack. By that time, the whole mindset of the studio was changing. People that were valuable before were being sort of pushed aside and people that weren't valuable were being elevated and there was a lot more what I call baby suits showing up, middle management who were making decisions, creative decisions about things, people who had never made a single frame of film were making decisions. And it just got very strained, and it got so strained that I eventually said I need more money or I'm gonna go somewhere else, which was very, very difficult for me because I loved Disney. I thought I would retire from Disney, and it just didn't happen.

0:49:58 JM: From then on it was just like, I can't even follow what they're doing anymore. Well, it was part of the deal breaker. We were trying something new. We said, "How are we gonna do a series with Donald Duck when nobody can really understand Donald?" He's fine in a short where he goes, "Oh brother," or, "What's the big idea?" That kind of stuff. But to do dialogue is crazy. To try and hang a show on someone that you can't understand was gonna be very difficult. And we had some radical ideas and management looked down their noses at us. And I remember at one point our producer on the show, Larry Latham, was listening to management spouting about something or another. He looked over at me and he just, he did the throat cut, like cut, I'm out here.

0:50:51 JM: And shortly after that Carl Gears and I, who were the executive producers on the show, we just said, "We're happy to continue working on this, but we can't be running the show because management doesn't believe in it." And management said, "Okay fine." They never even called us and said, "What's wrong?" Accepted our statement and, which was basically a big, you know, forget you. And it was like, "Well, they don't care about us anymore." Like I said, that was sort of a turning point, for me anyway. I think it was a turning point for the department as well. But anyway, and I left shortly after that. We had a terrific run, and then just things felt... Started to get weird, that's all.

0:51:36 JM: And again, I can't put my finger on it, but to me, it had a lot to do with we stopped doing what we were good at and started following other people's leads. Every show we did was like number one in its slot, and so it wasn't like, "Oh ratings are slipping, let's do something different." To me, that genre, that style of Disney comedy adventure could still be going as far as I know. But it was like, "No, let's do Shnookums and Meat, and let's do Gargoyles. Let's do things that look like other studios." It just felt wrong to me. But again, I'm not in charge, I don't make those calls, I just, I'm a stupid ass show developer and story editor. I don't get to make the big decisions.

0:52:18 S1: Dean Stefan, writer.

0:52:20 Dean Stefan: And then of course Quack Pack was originally called Duck Days. The way I hear it, and I don't know, 'cause you know. It could be not exactly true, but I think it's true. Jymn Magon and, I think, Carl Gears were set to develop it, and much like Tad Stones was locked in his office for about six months or so when I first started, coming up with Darkwing Duck and all the artwork or whatever. Jymn and Carl were figuring out the show for Duck Days or Quack Pack. And at the time, Home Improvement was a big hit for Disney ABC, and they got the idea that Donald would be like the Tim Allen character. And he would have Huey, Louie, and Dewey, much like Tim Allen was the harried dad of the three kids. And the conceit was gonna be 'cause Donald couldn't really, he didn't have that many phrases he could say that... Disney actually had a list from the 30s they would hand to us, say, "These are the phrases that are recognizable, that Donald said." Because there just weren't that many words that you could make out, the way he talked.

0:53:26 DS: So their conceit was that he would have been a tailgunner in some kind of war and nobody could understand his instructions, so the military sent him to allocution school. And he would learn to speak clearer so that now he could do the sit-comy stuff with the kids and they can interact and stuff like that. So they had this whole thing worked out based upon the harried dad interacting with... And the way I hear it, they went to pitch to Katzenberg and the whole table of Disney suits. And they said, "Okay so, in this Donald, he went to allocution school because nobody could understand him in the military. Now he can speak a lot clearer." And that's about as far as they got.

0:54:07 DS: And Katzenberg says, "Wait, you wanna change the duck? You're gonna change the way Donald Duck talks?" And that was pretty much the end of the pitch, so that was it. So six months of work down the drain, 'cause without that they didn't really have a show. So then it became just really harried and it became Daisy Duck would be a roving reporter, and the kids would be tagalongs and Donald would almost be comic relief. You'd cut to him in the hammock doing gags and stuff like that. And it was a weird time at Disney 'cause we were between shows. And I think I wrote the Bible for Quack Pack, but I guess the show was okay. I'm not sure how it did in relation to the other ones. I don't think of it as one of the great ones.

0:54:49 S1: Jim Peterson, writer.

0:54:51 Jim Peterson: The origin of it is kind of muddled a little bit 'cause it kinda went through a whole bunch of different creative hands. So there was, I think it was originally Jymn Magon's project, and then he ended up leaving Disney. And Carl Gears took over. And then Carl got taken off the project and it was turned over to Kevin Hopps, who was our original story editor on Darkwing. And on the artistic side, Toby Shelton was running it, and they had kind of very different views of just between the two of them, how they wanted the series to run. And Toby really loved classic Donald Duck cartoons, and he kinda wanted to take it that way. And Kevin was more, it seemed, more on the sit-comy kind of stuff. We came in. There had already been a couple scripts written, but we ended up rewriting on what would become essentially the first episode, which was where Donald Duck gets drafted back into the Navy, of course, for some bizarre reason.

[music]

0:56:14 JP: The one that came out, kind of was still watchable was an episode called "The really Mighty Ducks". In it Huey, Dewey, and Louie become superheroes and Donald becomes a super villain called the Duck of Doom. And the whole battle is just about Donald trying to get the boys to clean their room, and they're doing everything humanly possible to, or duckly possible I suppose, to avoid cleaning their room.

0:56:41 Donald Duck: Clean this room or else.

0:56:47 Speaker 20: Clean our room? The nerve of some people.

0:56:50 Speaker 21: We're much too busy.

0:56:52 Speaker 22: We got a million things to do.

0:56:55 S?: We got nothing to do.

0:56:57 JP: And when Duck Days was winding up, it was an era where Disney was letting go of all of their staff writers. During the Bonkers run, they were also doing a couple other series at the time. So there were like 51 staff writers at that point, at Disney TV Animation. And when we finally left at the end of Duck Days, there were less than ten. So part of the reason was that Disney lost their market when Fox acquired the rights to the NFL. And a lot of stations that were independent and carrying the Disney Afternoon, signed up with Fox and had to drop the Disney Afternoon for the Fox cartoons. But at the time, that was our perception on the executive explanations for why the affiliates were dropping the Disney Afternoon. So that and also, at the same time, Turner acquiring Hanna-Barbara. Then he let go of all of the staff writers and decided to go freelance, and Disney kind of followed suit on that 'cause there were a bunch of writers available on the freelance market that didn't used to be available.

0:58:01 S1: In 1997 Disney purchased ABC, which was the final nail in the coffin for what had been known as the Disney Afternoon. Not only was that over, syndication was basically over as well. With their new network, Disney went full Nickelodeon, even bringing in Geraldine Laybourne who headed the Nickelodeon network. And Disney Television Animation changed quickly in response.

0:58:24 S1: In an attempt that the press called The Nickelodeonization of Disney, they bought Doug out from under Viacom and brought in Joe Ansolabehere who helped develop Hey Arnold! And Paul Germain who co-created Rugrats, to launch Recess, which became the flagship show of Disney's One Saturday Morning. With One Saturday Morning, Disney would retake the title of the number one kids block. The shows were far different than what had been done in the past, and the familiar faces that had transformed television animation like Gary Krisel, Greg Weisman, Mark Zaslove, and Jymn Magon, no longer wandered the halls. But a few were still there. Tad Stones.

0:59:02 TS: They had a luncheon at the rotunda restaurant where they invited the key people in the department, key creative people in the department were all there for the executives to introduce themselves. And Jerry Laborne, [0:59:17] ____ that she's talking about her direction. And she says, and obviously they had worked this out before. Says, "Dean, I hate ducks." And then that was Dean Valentine, and he replied. "I hate ducks too." Which was basically crapping on 80 percent of the people in the room, to say nothing of you would not have been offered a job because there would be no job to be had if it wasn't for those shows that you're currently crapping on. I was luckily on vacation during that luncheon. I don't know how I would have reacted. I wouldn't have said anything, but I might have walked out, which would've had the same effect. But it was totally disrespectful.

1:00:00 TS: You can certainly say, "You guys have done a fantastic job. And now the market's changing, we want to do something entirely different and we're looking for new ideas, and here's the ideas we're starting with." It's like, "Why do you have to piss on something to move forward?" So that was, again, this... They had a pitch, they had a strategy. Upper upper managment had signed off on it. So it's just basically, here's our show runners and some of you are gonna be working on these shows and some of you are not. So it's just a management thing. It's not like a slow evolution. It is just, "Hey, this is what we're doing now." And it's like, "Okay, are we doing any more of that?" "No, we're not gonna do any more of that, but we're still gonna do those feature spin-offs 'cause they're still doing well."

1:00:45 TS: That's that, you know.

[music]

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-look-back-machine/id1257301677?mt=2

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Writerblr Questions!

I actually decided to do one!! Reblog and answer the questions to get to know each other! :) 

1. Favorite place to write. - Anywhere. If I can write there, I love it! 2. Favorite part of writing. - I can write whatever what I want for whatever reasons I want. 3. Least favorite part of writing. - WRITERS BLOCK 4. Do you have writing habits or rituals? - Hmm. Not really. I just sort of go with the flow, I guess? Write when I want to write and write what I want to write when I want to write it. 5. Books or authors that influenced your style the most. - I have so many I would need three different Tumblr accounts to encompass them all. Seriously. But I do like mostly fantasy/romance authors! 6. Favorite character you ever created. - I will reveal characters on this writerblr so I want to keep them a secret a bit longer ;) 7. Favorite author. - Refer to question 5. 8. Favorite trope to write. - I know there is a huge debate about them but I really like the Chosen One trope. 9. Least favorite trope to write. - Love Quadruples and Beyond. I can deal with a triangle but I don’t like to write a more complicated love feud then that! 10. Pick a writer to co-write a book with and tell us what you’d write about. - Well, @duskblue-art! And thats a secret! For now ;) 11. Describe your writing process from scratch to finish. - Um.....Words? I put words down. I type. I eat. I cry. I do it all again. 12. How do you deal with self-doubts? - Breathe and power through them. They don’t last. And I promise: your work is perfect! 13. How do you deal with writers block? - This nasty little bug....It struck me for 5 years and I’m just now getting back into the game of things! But it will pass. My best advice is keep writing, keep believing in yourself, and if you need a break fro it all, take one! Writers block will pass. 14. What’s the most research you ever put into a book? - 2 years. 15. Where does your inspiration come from? - The Thought Monster in my head. Literally just regurgitates ideas right and left. 16. Where do you take your motivation from? - My readers. Current and present. I don’t just write for me. I write for those who want to read my writings. 17. On avarage, how much writing do you get done in a day? - Here we go. Anywhere from nothing to 8,000 words a day. 18. What’s your revision or rewriting process like? - It’s my child and I’m scared to break it. That should give you a decent picture! :) 19. First line of a WIP you’re working on. - Sometimes, Heaven got a bit boring. 20. Post a snippet of a WIP you’re working on. - If only one choice, one moment, one decision, one encounter had or had not happened then what existed in that span of time? In that single moment of balance where you have a choice is where Fate rests it’s hands. 21. Post the last sentence you wrote in one of your WIP’s. - “Your move.” 22. How many drafts do you need until you’re satisfied and a project is ultimately done for you? - However many it takes! Each work is different and requires different amounts of drafts. 23. Single or multi POV, and why? - Single and because switching too many POV’s can be confusing. I prefer either 1st Person or 3rd Person. 24. Poetry or prose, and why? - Poetry! 25. Linear or non-linear, and why? - Depends on the book or writing! Sometimes, non-linear is better and at other times, linear is preferred. 26. Standalone or series, and why? - Oh my god both! But I do have a soft tender spot for series. After all, when is the end REALLY the end? 27. Do you share rough drafts or do you wait until it’s all polished? - Only with my trusted friends and chosen beta readers.

28. And who do you share them with? - Refer to question 27! 29. Who do you write for? - My readers and myself. 30. Favorite line you’ve ever written. - Oh wow. There are so many WIP’s I have floating around I couldn’t honestly be bothered to look through them all to find one XD 31. Hardest character to write. - Non emotional characters. I am a very emotional person so therefore I have problems disconnecting to write stoic sort of characters! 32. Easiest character to write. - BRING ON THE FEELINGS MAN!! 33. Do you listen to music when you’re writing? - No. Most of the time I will play music, pause, then write. Then so on and so forth. 34. Handwritten notes or typed notes? - Typed. 35. Tell some backstory details about one of your characters in your story. - Sorry, can’t yet! 36. A spoiler for story. - Dragons. 37. Most inspirational quote you’ve ever read or heard that’s still important to you. - When the world says, “Give up,” Hope whispers, “Try it one more time.” 38. Have you shared your outline of your story with someone? If so, what did they think of it? - Only with my co-writer. We came up with it together and we both love it and can’t wait to share! 39. Do you base your characters of real people or not? If so, tell us about one. - Sometimes. Mostly not. One character in a current WIP is based loosely off my deceased grandfather as he was a very big part of my life. 40. Original Fiction or Fanfiction, and why? - BOTH!! Fanfics are my life. 41. How many stories do you work on at one time? - Pfft. How many documents can Windows open at a single time? 42. How do you figure out your characters looks, personality, etc. - Literally, I just guess. I sort of throw their looks together and then fine tune them as I work on the plot of the book. I spend days and weeks just plotting. Character designs, plots, ideas, etc. 43. Are you an avid reader? - YES. 44. Best piece of feedback you’ve ever gotten. - Any feedback is good. 45. Worst piece of feedback you’ve ever gotten. - I was once told I should give up writing and never think about being an author. 46. What would your story look like as a tv show or movie? - Hmm never really thought about it. I’m not too sure I can think of anything at the moment!

47. Do you start with characters or plot when working on a new story? - All of it. At once. Over days and days of thoughts. 48. Favorite genre to write in. - Romance/Fantasy/Drama 49. What do you find the hardest to write in a story, the beginning, the middle or the end? - Honestly? The middle. 50. Weirdest story idea you’ve ever had. - Oh gods. @duskblue-art name one XD 51. Describe the aesthetic of your story in 5 sentences or words. - Nothing is as it seems. 52. How did writing change you? - In what ways hasn’t it changed me? I am who I am because I can create these words and put them on paper. This is the first time I have gone public with anything I have wrote and connected to a writing community. So I would say writing has changed my life. 53. What does writing mean to you? - I cannot stress enough how much it means to write. I absolutely love it. 54. Any writing advice you want to share? - It will get hard. You will feel down and you will hate what you write. Don’t give up, please. Keep your head up. Keep writing. And breathe. It will be okay. You are a great writer. From the time you get an idea to every word you write to every slam of the pen when you can’t. You. Are. A. Writer. And no one can tell you otherwise. You are a writer, your words are great, your ideas are beautiful. You can do it.

#writing #writerblr #my first answers #i'm new #hi #writer #new writer on tumblr #nice to meet you all #will reveal more later #lots of wip #i mean tons #im drowning in them

[deadcactuswalking]

REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 26/12/2020 (LadBaby, Boris Johnson, Ed Sheeran)

It’s Boxing Day in the UK as I write this and I’m pretty tired but we still have to review those charts regardless, especially this chart as this is the Christmas chart – at least it’s being paraded around as such – and hence we have a Christmas #1. For the third year in a row, family vlogger, pseudo-comedian and amateur musician, not to be confused with DaBaby, Mark Ian Hoyle – more commonly known as “LadBaby”, has bagged the #1 for the holiday season. Every time I’ve covered the Christmas #1 it has been this guy and, yeah, I’m tired of it. At least this year he felt some stiff competition, and hey, the songs’ proceeds do go to charity. Oh, yeah, and this guy is the third act to have three Christmas #1s in a row, putting this nobody from Nottingham with a barebones Wikipedia page and a couple million YouTube subscribers on the level of the Beatles and Spice Girls. God, the UK Singles Chart never fails to amaze me. Anyway, that’s arguably not even the biggest story here so let’s start REVIEWING THE CHARTS.

Rundown

As I said before, this is the “Christmas week” so throughout the UK Top 75 there are a lot of holiday songs re-peaking or reaching new peaks, before dropping off entirely the next week. Let’s start as we always do by listing the drop-outs from the chart, of which there are quite a few notable ones. Most of our top 40 debuts from last week are gone, like Taylor Swift’s “champagne problems” and “no body, no crime” featuring HAIM, as well as “Show Out” by Kid Cudi, the late Pop Smoke and Skepta. We can also say goodbye to “Sunflower (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse)” by Post Malone and Swae Lee, finally after 54 weeks and a surprise return earlier this month, in addition to other top 10 hits like “you broke me first” by Tate McRae, “See Nobody” by Wes Nelson and Hardy Caprio and “What You Know Bout Love” also by Pop Smoke, as well as some more minor hits like “Wonder” by Shawn Mendes, “Lonely” by Justin Bieber and benny blanco, “Train Wreck” by James Arthur, “Golden” by Harry Styles and “Plugged in Freestyle” by A92 and Fumez the Engineer, but I can see almost all of these rebounding hard next week so I don’t think there’s much to worry about here. For fallers, since Christmas has really consumed everything about this chart this week, we have some big ones that’ll find themselves back in the top 10 or at least top 20 next week like “positions” by Ariana Grande at #19 (the first non-Christmas non-debut song to appear on the chart, by the way), “Sweet Melody” by Little Mix at #20, “Whoopty” by CJ at #22, “34+35” by Ariana Grande at #28, “WITHOUT YOU” by The Kid LAROI at #31, “Prisoner” by Miley Cyrus and Dua Lipa at #35 alongside “Midnight Sky” also by Miley at #36, “willow” by Taylor Swift off the debut to #37, “Get Out My Head” by Shane Codd at #38 and “Paradise” by MEDUZA and Dermot Kennedy. We also have “Therefore I Am” by Billie Eilish at #43, “Really Love” by KSI featuring Craig David and Digital Farm Animals at #45, even “HOLIDAY” by Lil Nas X at #49, “Mood” by 24kGoldn featuring iann dior at #54, “Loading” by Central Cee at #59, “Head & Heart” by Joel Corry and MNEK at #60, “Monster” by Shawn Mendes and Justin Bieber at #64, “Blinding Lights” by the Weeknd at #66, “Dynamite” by BTS at #67, “Lemonade” by Internet Money and Gunna featuring Don Toliver and NAV at #72, “Levitating” by Dua Lipa with the biggest fall down to #73 and finally “No Time for Tears” by Nathan Dawe and Little Mix at #74. To put the dominance of holiday music on the charts in perspective, if we take the songs that are not either explicitly Christmas-related or a clear Christmas #1 campaign (i.e. LadBaby), the song at #38 would be at #10 and our #1 would be “positions” by Ariana Grande at #19. “Whoopty” by CJ, that entered the top 10 last week and dropped to #22 this week, would be at #3. There are 11 songs in the top 40 that never made an effort to take advantage of the holiday season. When we get into some of our debuts, it’ll be even clearer how big Christmas is in British pop music. Anyway, let’s skim through our gains and returning entries, most of which are Christmas or Christmas-related. For returning entries, we have the comically awful “Lonely this Christmas” by Mud at #71, last year’s scam attempt at a Christmas #1, “River” by Ellie Goulding at #69, “The Christmas Song (A Merry Christmas to You)” by Nat King Cole at #63 (which I’d appreciate more in the top 20 like it is in the US every year – this is a classic), “2000 Miles” by the Pretenders at #62 (again, incredible song that deserves a higher holiday peak each year), “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” by Darlene Love at #58, “Santa’s Coming for Us” by Sia at #55, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” by Sam Smith at #53 and for whatever reason, “Holy” by Justin Bieber featuring Chance the Rapper at #41. In terms of notable gains – and I stress notable, since a lot of higher-up Christmas songs had small gains but still good performance - we have “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” by the Jackson 5 at #57, “Let it Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow!” by Frank Sinatra at #56, “White Christmas” by Bing Crosby at #52, “Baby it’s Cold Outside” by Brett Eldredge and Meghan Trainor at #51, “Forever Young” by Becky Hill at #50 (both off of the debut), “Baby it’s Cold Outside” AGAIN by Michael Bublé and Idina Menzel at #47, “Love is a Compass” by Griff at #46, “Feliz Navidad” by Jose Feliciano at #44, “Cozy Little Christmas” by Katy Perry at #42, “Let it Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow!” AGAIN by Dean Martin at #39, “Sleigh Ride” by the Ronettes at #34, “Christmas Lights” by Coldplay at #33, “Santa Baby” by Kylie Minogue at #32, “Mistletoe” by Justin Bieber at #29, “Jingle Bell Rock” by Bobby Helms at #27, “Wonderful Christmastime” by Paul McCartney at #26, “Holly Jolly Christmas” by Michael Bublé at #25, “All You’re Dreaming Of” by Liam Gallagher at #24 (thanks to a Christmas #1 campaign that crashed and failed), “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” by Andy Williams at #23, “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” by John Lennon and Yoko Ono with the Plastic Ono Band featuring the Harlem Community Choir at #21, “One More Sleep” by Leona Lewis at #18, “Merry Xmas Everybody” by Slade at #17, “Underneath the Tree” by Kelly Clarkson at #15, and finally, “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” by Justin Bieber illegitimately notching a spot in the top 10 at #8. Finally, we can get onto the new arrivals, although something about this next one tells me that we won’t be in line for anything all that good.

NEW ARRIVALS

#70 – “I’ll be Home” – Meghan Trainor

Produced by Meghan Trainor

...for Christmas. She’ll be home for Christmas. I guess she just can’t finish sentences, even though her cover art has the full title. Anyway, this is a 2014 original Christmas song that went nowhere except Sweden. It’s not anything like the Bing Crosby and wasn’t nearly as successful, mostly because it’s a jingly, inoffensive ballad tacked onto a silly Christmas EP that also features Fifth Harmony and Fiona Apple of all people – who probably should have charted her track instead – as well as the deluxe edition of that debut record Title that nobody liked. At least in this, she’s not going for a faux-retro style, or at least one that I can find the inspiration for, and is just singing over this oddly jaunty piano melody – which sounds pretty albeit bland – as well as some swells of strings and acoustic guitar that do work sonically. The content implies that Meghan Trainor is in contact with Santa Claus personally, and that he gave her the advice to be home with her lover this Christmas and... that’s why this charted, isn’t it? Well, it’s not her fault – it’s not a “stuck with u” moment, but it is dodgy that she decided to put this on her own Christmas record that was released in October of this year, which can’t seem unintentional. I’d be lying to say this isn’t a pretty little tune from Trainor and her voice does fit this instrumental, but a jazzy rendition from someone with a deeper, smoother voice, would work wonders with the content. Oh, and that Christmas record features guest appearances from both Earth, Wind & Fire and Seth MacFarlane, as well as her dad, because, you know, sure, 2020.

#65 – “Gnat” – Eminem

Produced by d.a. got that dope

I can’t tell if I’m underestimating Christmas or overestimating Eminem when I say I expected an album bomb – or whatever that equivalent would be in the UK and our land of silly chart rules – from the deluxe edition of his pretty damn terrible album, Music to be Murdered By. This 3/10 trainwreck consists of two hours I’ll never get back of either great beats wasted by Eminem’s corny, stiff flows and painfully unlikeable delivery or obnoxious, unlistenable beats that are dated enough for Eminem to start going on his Relapse “killing women in funny accents” shtick, which was awful then and even worse now when he tries to replicate it. Marshall, you’re 48, and I know that you’re just “messing around” but if you’re going to treat the album as a cinematic masterpiece within the album and its thematic Alfred Hitchcock interludes, you have to understand that the audience will see it as that way as well, so you having fun and being painfully unfunny in the process over cutting-room-floor trap instrumentals cannot slide. At least Kamikaze had some genuine anger and dare I say some actual balls in how it tackled controversy and dissed everyone he could think of off the top of his head. The last record was angry and bitter, this one’s just tired and lazy, and that’s before we get into some of the ugliest bars, instrumentals and cadences Slim Shady’s ever put on record, which is especially present on “Gnat”, a lightweight trap banger with some acoustic guitars not dissimilar to those that would appear on a Lil Baby mixtape, complete with questionable bass mixing and really bad hooks. On the verses, he sends a death threat to Mike Pence, but on the chorus, his bars are “like COVID” because “you get them right off the bat”. I don’t know about you, but in 2020, I don’t want to hear Eminem harmonising with producer tags, making topical and insensitive pandemic references, or spitting sex bars with coughing ad-libs. Before the beat switch, his flows are some of the sloppiest and drawn-out he’s ever used, and yes, I’ll admit, that second beat is a lot better and Em kills it over that instrumental – but only for a brief moment before we have a third beat, which Eminem is pretty great over, especially with that sax and sweet piano keys overlaid with hard 808s and Eminem’s rapid-pace, quick fire flow... and then he raps the chorus again and I want the song to end as quickly as it started – thankfully, it does end rather abruptly. Just wasted potential all throughout – if that beat switch and flow was a guest verse on damn near anyone else’s record (Em has made tracks with Don Toliver of all people, and he could work), this could be great. For now, Em, you know Kris Kristofferson? I think you should Piss Pissofferson. Forever. Look that up, by the way, that’s a lyric on the record because of course it is.

#61 – “In the Bleak Midwinter” – Jamie Cullum

Produced by ???

I had only briefly heard the name “Jamie Cullum” before this, but he is an English jazz-pop singer and pianist who’s basically useless and uninteresting but, hey, at least he has a radio show on BBC Radio 2. Sure, I mean that might have been the reason that Amazon Music picked him up for an exclusive project for which this is the biggest single. It’s not on Spotify, it’s not even on Genius, and it’s barely on YouTube but since it is, I should tell you that this is his first charting single since 2009 and it’s a remarkably uninteresting rendition of a Christmas carol done a lot better by Jacob Collier – and that one’s on Spotify – so yeah, your sleepy piano arrangement and tone that makes you sound like Robbie Williams half the time and Beck the other, doesn’t interest me. Goodbye.

#30 – “Afterglow” – Ed Sheeran

Produced by PARISI, Fred Again and Ed Sheeran

If we inexplicably remove everything Christmas-related on the chart, Eminem’s “Gnat” would have debuted at #20, and this new track from Ed Sheeran, already stunted from being released on an unconventional day, would have hit #5. Regardless of chart position, Ed Sheeran’s back with his first solo single since Divide. Yes, I’m purposefully ignoring that collaborative project he put out in 2019 because as far as I know, it doesn’t exist. At the end of the year, when things are looking as if he could start touring again, Sheeran predictably releases his lead-off single. This song in particular is a heartfelt ballad from Ed to his wife, who he wishes to be there forever and even if they aren’t together at any moment, whether he’s touring or they separate for whatever reason, he’ll “hold on to the afterglow”. I won’t lie, it’s a really sweet and convincingly sold love song from Ed, even if it’s not anything new, it does feel like a different approach since he’s a newly-wed man now. Although I’m not a fan of this somewhat muddy mixing that somehow messes up just a guy and his acoustic guitar, making what should be a really pretty, ethereal and mellow track sound almost ugly, which doesn’t flatter Ed and his limited delivery at all, especially when he starts getting multi-tracked in the second verse and whooshing sound effects of strings pop up in the mix, and, yeah, it just sounds cheap and gross at this point, which is really a waste of incredible content and a great performance from Ed, who sells everything as well as he can. I understand how this is supposed to be down to Earth, so a perfect mix wouldn’t make sense, but if you’re going to make him harmonise with his own background vocals and even show signs of belting, give him some more grandiosity and go full out instead of restraining him so that it just sounds jarring. With a different mix this could be one of Ed’s best tracks since the melodies are on point, the song feels really heart-warming and sincere, especially coming from Ed to his wife, but we won’t get a remaster anytime soon, I imagine, so for now this is just pretty damn good. I love the cover art as well, painted by Ed himself, and released alongside the single as a bit of a Christmas gift to fans, as well as the start of what I’m pretty sure will be a promo cycle. If this is a good peek into what that album will sound like, it’s safe to say I’m more than excited than ever to hear from Ed Sheeran.

#5 – “Boris Johnson is a Fricking Jerk” – Kool & the Gang

Produced by ???

Okay, so the song’s calling Boris Johnson something stronger than a “fricking jerk”, and the song is decidedly not by soul legends Kool & the Gang, although I’d love for that to happen sometime. This is a family show, of course, so we have to take some liberties. This track originates from a comedian from Basildon, Essex of all places, and whilst we don’t know his name, the songwriting credit on Spotify is given to contemporary British poet Wayne Clements so maybe he’s behind this, who knows? Whether he is or not, I can tell you the history behind this comedian’s music, as he has been making crude short singles about controversial topics in British society and politics for a while, including some about Nick Clegg that charted, although never higher than #63. He retired in 2016 but after writing an autobiography, the guy’s back and he released a compilation of punk rock tracks, all of which are small and profane, with a “band” of puppets that I also can’t name. State-controlled Russian television networks – because, sure, again, it’s 2020 – say that he will start touring in 2021, mostly because he’s finally reached that mainstream audience with this family-friendly tune about Boris Johnson. Here’s how Vick Hope and Katie Thistleton introduced it live on air during the mid-week chart reveal.

Now at #19, we've got a track about Boris Johnson that has so many bad words in it, we can't play it on daytime Radio 1.

Ah, you cowards. Wait... Anyway, I’m pretty happy that the British public can stick it to Boris and the heartless Tories that follow him and currently rule the country, even if it is all a bloody stupid joke from an anonymous punk rocker. We can dig into Boris for his failures on Brexit, mishandling of the pandemic, disgraceful reality-star-esque personal life, that he wasn’t even born in the UK yet is basically a nationalist, his history of Islamophobic commentary, his crap excuses for journalism back in the 2000s or even his clown-nose, blonde bowl-cut “hair style” he adopts whilst addressing us on live television feeding us lies and misleading statements that turn into retcons the next time he has to address the nation, whether it be on Brexit or COVID-19 tiers and regulations, both of which are a confusing mess to both sides of Europe that exist to drift us away from where we should be going as a nation, and further into the realm of political party tribalism that we know absolutely does not work in the States and that we mock the Yanks for. We’re more than the sick man of Europe, we are the America of Europe. I guess you could say Ireland is our Canada, but we don’t even have a Mexico to make us look better, we just have other western, central and northern European countries that may be flawed but are far ahead of whatever the hell this shell of a union is in 2020, less than 80 years after the creation of our National Health Service. People will look to pundits and newsreaders like Piers Morgan, entertainers like Phillip Schofield, war veterans and charity-givers like Captain Tom Moore, and even politicians like Boris Johnson, as the “heroes” of Britain’s 2020 but it’s increasingly clear that absolutely no-one is a hero, and it’s the people’s right to be upset. Hence, nearly exactly a year after Boris Johnson cheated his way into power by smear campaigns and elitism, we have this song debuting at #5. Unfortunately, the song doesn’t go into any of that. It just repeats the title in an anthemic – and considerably agreeable – refrain that is an undeniable punk hook. The riffs and guitar work here isn’t of any interest, but the guy’s delivery is powerful and furious, so I’ll give the song credit: it’s not just correct but it’s really good, especially for a one minute runtime. He also released some satirical MIDI-level synth-pop remix with gross Christmas sleigh bells and hi-hat skitters, because, say it with me, it’s 2020. I wouldn’t recommend the album though, it overstays its welcome by the time you get to “Jesus Died of a Stranglewank”.

#1 – “Don’t Stop Me Eatin’” – LadBaby

Produced by who cares?

I can’t get mad at this lazy “parody” of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” about sausage rolls, or even its Ronan Keating remix, which is LadBaby doing a favour to Ronan Keating, if anything. Sure, my blood boils with the idea that this incompetent Internet personality from the East Midlands – which I think I’m sadly also able to describe myself as – got the #1 over Mariah Carey, or even that Boris Johnson diss track, but it’s going to the Trussell Trust and it’s ultimately an inoffensive, vaguely happy track that even gets the vegans involved. I, for one, prefer “Boris Johnson is a Sausage Roll”, a version of our #5 you can – and should – play on the radio even after Christmas. I don’t have anything more to say about this guy so piss off, LadBaby, you can’t even get the album cover right to the song you’re parodying, thrice in a row.

Conclusion

Best of the Week is definitely going to the Somethings for “Boris Johnson is a Something Something”, with an Honourable Mention to Ed Sheeran’s “Afterglow”. I can’t bring myself to give a charity single Worst of the Week so I’ll spare LadBaby the honour and grant it to Jamie Cullum for his greedy Amazon exclusive trite, with a Dishonourable Mention for “Gnat” by Eminem, for just being wasted potential all across the board. Next week, everything Christmas-related will be gone and we’ll get a bunch of returns and hopefully some new, interesting returning entries. We might even get the impact of Playboi Carti’s long-anticipated album – and I hope so because it’s fantastic – but that’s wishful thinking. Anyways, I hope everyone had a happy holiday season. Here’s our top 10:

Thank you for reading. You can follow me @cactusinthebank for more rambling about pop music and occasionally politics, and I’ll see you next year.

[hgfstreamchats]

Cry Baby Lane

thenightetc 08:25 PM hELLO!

thenightetc 08:25 PM ...*Hello!

highglossfinish 08:25 PM Hello!

thenightetc 08:27 PM No sound--or rather the sound seems to be a mic

highglossfinish 08:27 PM Better?

thenightetc 08:28 PM Same.

highglossfinish 08:28 PM Now?

thenightetc 08:28 PM There we go!

highglossfinish 08:28 PM Excellent!

thenightetc 08:29 PM Why indeed.

highglossfinish 08:30 PM Spor.

Starscreamillar joined the party.

thenightetc 08:32 PM The narration is making me think this is a parody

thenightetc 08:32 PM Hello!

Starscreamillar 08:32 PM Greetings

highglossfinish 08:32 PM Just in time!

highglossfinish 08:32 PM Apparently it was real and meant for human children, and scared them all so much they never aired this again.

Starscreamillar 08:33 PM ... Crybaby lane.

highglossfinish 08:33 PM And it became something of an urban legend, but no, it was real.

Thebes joined the party.

thenightetc 08:35 PM Hmmm.

Starscreamillar 08:35 PM This soundtrack is not inspiring fear.

Thebes 08:35 PM brings back memories tho

highglossfinish 08:35 PM No, no it is not.

thenightetc 08:35 PM Does the video keep pausing for anyone else, or is it just me?

thenightetc 08:35 PM Not constantly, but frequently

Thebes 08:36 PM not for me

Starscreamillar 08:36 PM It seems to be running fine for me?

thenightetc 08:36 PM On my end, then.  Bah

thenightetc 08:36 PM I'll close a thing or two

highglossfinish 08:36 PM So will I, just to be sure.

thenightetc 08:37 PM Nah, I doubt it's to do with you

Thebes 08:37 PM such scintillating dialogue

thenightetc 08:38 PM This guy's a real winner

thenightetc 08:38 PM Gee I wonder if anything bad's going to happen to big bro there

Starscreamillar 08:38 PM The xylophone really sells it.

highglossfinish 08:39 PM Sobbing mutilated freak infant ghosts and xylophones. That's the kind of movie we're in for.

thenightetc 08:40 PM Yech.

thenightetc 08:40 PM Why does that tombstone look like a dick

thenightetc 08:40 PM Who is buried THERE

highglossfinish 08:40 PM Someone fun.

thenightetc 08:41 PM That one in particular looks about 20

Starscreamillar 08:42 PM If a teenage boy invites you to the cemetary after dark, there is a 50% chance he will try to steal your skin.

highglossfinish 08:43 PM And a 50% chance he'll try to steal your bones.

thenightetc 08:43 PM hahahah

highglossfinish 08:43 PM What an unpleasant bunch of children.

Starscreamillar 08:43 PM I hope someone steals their skin.

Thebes 08:44 PM I mean, at least some part of them would be of use

Thebes 08:45 PM STOCK SCREAMS

thenightetc 08:45 PM ikr

thenightetc 08:45 PM PFFF

thenightetc 08:46 PM "maybe we should go"

highglossfinish 08:46 PM Back to the surfer music.

thenightetc 08:46 PM "maybe someone else was out here with a hidden speaker?"

Starscreamillar 08:46 PM Glowing worms love surfer music.

thenightetc 08:47 PM So is the twist that the evil twin is the one buried there :thinking:

Starscreamillar 08:47 PM Perhaps they were both evil twins.

highglossfinish 08:48 PM The real evil twin was inside of us all all along.

Thebes 08:49 PM I gotta narrate out loud

Starscreamillar 08:49 PM That would check out.

thenightetc 08:50 PM aw, no

thenightetc 08:51 PM Now I'm all sad because the dog's clearly a goner

highglossfinish 08:52 PM Bring back the dog!

thenightetc 08:52 PM being possessed or whatever

thenightetc 08:53 PM Jesus christ.

highglossfinish 08:53 PM I hate humans.

thenightetc 08:53 PM oh yeah the wind always sounds like crying children

Starscreamillar 08:54 PM Who does not enjoy scaring children?

thenightetc 08:54 PM Sigh.

thenightetc 08:54 PM Yeah we got that.

highglossfinish 08:56 PM Well put, human baby.

thenightetc 08:56 PM Haha, what.

Starscreamillar 08:56 PM What is with these worms?

highglossfinish 08:57 PM And why do they sound like some universe's variant of Starscream?

thenightetc 08:57 PM carl's gonna get his ass kicked by a ghost

Starscreamillar 08:57 PM I resent that.

highglossfinish 08:57 PM You know it's true.

Starscreamillar 08:57 PM Just because it's true does not mean I have to like it.

thenightetc 08:57 PM There, there.

thenightetc 08:58 PM Wait... is his buddy like 7?

Thebes 08:58 PM wow. WOW

Starscreamillar 08:59 PM Oh no...Oh it just keeps getting worse.

thenightetc 08:59 PM Jeez

highglossfinish 08:59 PM Somehow, it just keeps getting worse.

Thebes 09:00 PM what a mature, parental response

Starscreamillar 09:01 PM Is this just ghostly mischief because some idiots said nonsense at a random grave? That's the whole movie?

thenightetc 09:01 PM Guys.

Starscreamillar 09:01 PM And then they were killed by a train.

highglossfinish 09:01 PM While surf music plays.

thenightetc 09:01 PM Don't play chicken with a train.

thenightetc 09:01 PM It can't stop.

Thebes 09:02 PM WE HAVE WORM SIIIIGN

highglossfinish 09:02 PM This is a horrible town full of unpleasant people and I want to see every last one of them dead.

thenightetc 09:02 PM Er...

thenightetc 09:02 PM So it can possess multiple people?

thenightetc 09:03 PM Walk without rhythm!

Starscreamillar 09:03 PM That is an unrealistically spacious grave.

highglossfinish joined the party.

thenightetc 09:04 PM Look, sometimes you just have to spring for the extra large coffin.

highglossfinish 09:05 PM One of the perks of kast was that I never had to worry about losing the stream chat, and yet here we are.

thenightetc 11:05 PM I've got it.

thenightetc 11:05 PM No worries!

thenightetc 11:06 PM "Sure, I COULD go missing for our missing children, but what if I DIED?"

highglossfinish 11:06 PM Scratch that, I no longer hate humans.

thenightetc 11:07 PM Ohhh dear

highglossfinish 11:07 PM I can see why this was never aired again, but not because it was in any way frightening.

thenightetc 11:07 PM Same.

Starscreamillar 11:08 PM Why is not a strong enough word for this.

highglossfinish 11:08 PM Nothing about any of this is right.

thenightetc 11:08 PM Wut.

thenightetc 11:09 PM "You know.  For a dead guy."

thenightetc 11:10 PM Sure, whine about the cost AFTER you've gotten the service.

Starscreamillar 11:10 PM Stiffing the funeral home seems like a good way to get tossed in a pauper's grave when it's your turn.

thenightetc 11:11 PM Ha.

thenightetc 11:11 PM You called it.

thenightetc 11:11 PM "well, it said 'muller' right on the tombstone"

highglossfinish 11:12 PM ...

thenightetc 11:12 PM Wow.  Who could have guessed.

Thebes 11:13 PM oh, it SOUNDS bad, does it

Thebes 11:13 PM SEEMS LEGIT

Starscreamillar 11:13 PM Raising the dead caused a problem... surely raising more dead will make things better!

thenightetc 11:13 PM f

thenightetc 11:14 PM "what did HE say happened"

thenightetc 11:15 PM So he's just going to leave it at that, huh, not going to give his side

thenightetc 11:15 PM with the bull and the train and all

Starscreamillar 11:16 PM We know he is evil, he was watching atomic explosions for fun.

Starscreamillar 11:17 PM That is stupid.

highglossfinish 11:18 PM All of this is stupid.

thenightetc 11:18 PM Surely the reason not to cut too close to the stone is that you could damage the blade or cause an accident

Starscreamillar 11:19 PM Please, murder him with a paperclip. It would be funny.

Starscreamillar 11:20 PM Drat.

thenightetc 11:22 PM Wait, why not have the older guy do it

thenightetc 11:22 PM watch the ROAD, idiot

Starscreamillar 11:23 PM What even is this movie?

thenightetc 11:23 PM Also, guys.  It's a hearse.  There is probably only one in town.

thenightetc 11:24 PM It is very recognizable, is what I'm saying.

highglossfinish 11:24 PM This movie has very little to do with a baby ghost.

thenightetc 11:24 PM Damn, is everyone in town possessed by an evil ghost

thenightetc 11:25 PM That's fair.

thenightetc 11:26 PM Oh shit, are they going to get the cop hit by the train

Starscreamillar 11:27 PM How convenient.

thenightetc 11:27 PM Yeah but your brother was already a shithead.

Starscreamillar 11:28 PM Hit him with the car.

rose110 joined the party.

thenightetc 11:29 PM But this is like... a cornfield?

thenightetc 11:29 PM Wouldn't it get cut every year?

LetsCum joined the party.

thenightetc 11:30 PM Let's not.

thenightetc 11:30 PM I love how the harvester was just... ready to go.

thenightetc 11:31 PM f

Starscreamillar 11:31 PM Swathers love the taste of human meat.

thenightetc 11:31 PM God, it's like they're going to start a musical number.

Thebes 11:31 PM oh, right, teen girl squad.

thenightetc 11:32 PM "uh, the evil ghost that is clearly possessing all of you"

highglossfinish 11:32 PM This is uncomfortable.

thenightetc 11:33 PM Very

thenightetc 11:34 PM God, what if the magic plant in question was like, the tree

thenightetc 11:34 PM Good luck pulling THAT up!

Starscreamillar 11:37 PM Who wrote this, and why did they think it was a good idea?

thenightetc 11:38 PM lol really

Thebes 11:38 PM I could not begin to guess

thenightetc 11:39 PM "why, does it look like something happened"

highglossfinish 11:40 PM Charming.

highglossfinish 11:40 PM And very stable.

thenightetc 11:40 PM What a great sibling relationship.

Starscreamillar 11:40 PM That would be murder.

Starscreamillar 11:41 PM And this was a weird movie. Even for awful children's movies.

highglossfinish 11:41 PM I don't think the world was missing much when this was considered a "lost film."

highglossfinish 11:42 PM Hmm, Let's Game it Out seems to be on a hiatus. Any suggestions to close on?

Thebes 11:42 PM what's the bakery that only brrings pain

thenightetc 11:43 PM Also, https://pastebin.com/rMN8akyA

thenightetc 11:43 PM Oh!

thenightetc 11:43 PM Just a sec

thenightetc 11:43 PM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blcKeLDDzSM  and

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUD3P4MGmb0

highglossfinish 11:44 PM Thank you!

thenightetc 11:47 PM See?  It's thematic!

Thebes 11:47 PM they're just trolling him, aren't they.

highglossfinish 11:48 PM Dear Unicron.

thenightetc 11:49 PM I'll BET it was popular.

Starscreamillar 11:49 PM Ken is wearing a lot of eyeshadow.

highglossfinish 11:50 PM I'll say.

thenightetc 11:50 PM They invited two out of those three back.

highglossfinish 11:52 PM That one's Smokescreen.

thenightetc 11:52 PM Gotta specify it's a dry kiss.

highglossfinish 11:53 PM Very important.

highglossfinish 11:54 PM Amazing.

thenightetc 11:54 PM Right?

Thebes 11:55 PM did we ever end up watching the second What's That Name skit?

Thebes 11:55 PM Norman the Doorman

Thebes 11:56 PM omg

thenightetc 11:56 PM Well, there WAS a terrible sequel.

Thebes 11:57 PM also, we are getting a cartoon prologue

highglossfinish 11:57 PM Are we really?

thenightetc 11:57 PM Oh... good........

highglossfinish 11:57 PM That could certainly go either way.

Starscreamillar 11:57 PM Indeed..

highglossfinish 11:57 PM "Jaws-like movie."

Thebes 11:58 PM apparently it's about the adventures of young shop owner and how he comes into possession of Gizmo and supernatural shenanigans

thenightetc 11:58 PM Oh!

Starscreamillar 11:58 PM .... Hmm.

thenightetc 11:58 PM Up for https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3Zq4Zbsrj8 ?

highglossfinish 11:59 PM Absolutely!

thenightetc 11:59 PM Yessss.

highglossfinish 12:00 AM I like where this is going.

thenightetc 12:01 AM This is what I intend to attempt the very instant I have a computer that can run Planet Coaster

thenightetc 12:02 AM I like the river of blood.

highglossfinish 12:02 AM I'm liking the stock photos.

Thebes 12:03 AM it's the exact right lack of fucks to give.

thenightetc 12:07 AM They're here for the cotton candy.

highglossfinish 12:07 AM Who wouldn't be?

thenightetc 12:09 AM Banker: so what do you need this loan for

Starscreamillar 12:09 AM Goo.

thenightetc 12:10 AM Could enjoy.  You know, theoretically.

highglossfinish 12:10 AM On paper.

Thebes 12:11 AM possibly

thenightetc 12:12 AM My god.

highglossfinish 12:14 AM Stuffs.

thenightetc 12:15 AM Oh god.

thenightetc 12:17 AM You don't even have to take away the ladder!

highglossfinish 12:17 AM How efficient!

highglossfinish 12:17 AM "The most exciting thing since T."

thenightetc 12:19 AM

thenightetc 12:19 AM Can't imagine why someone would be nauseous from being turned upside down over and over for an hour!

highglossfinish 12:20 AM It's a mystery!

thenightetc 12:21 AM Not to actually ride it, of course.  They just want to look at it.

thenightetc 12:22 AM There IS.

thenightetc 12:26 AM Heh.

highglossfinish 12:27 AM This is fantastic.

Starscreamillar 12:28 AM Excellently evil.

thenightetc 12:28 AM It really is.

thenightetc 12:30 AM If you do, it's the shark tank for you.

highglossfinish 12:31 AM Planet Coaster doesn't let you do this and therefore it's not worth the time or money.

Starscreamillar 12:31 AM Tsk tsk.

highglossfinish 12:31 AM Well, that was amazing!

thenightetc 12:32 AM It WAS.

highglossfinish 12:33 AM Well, that was a perfect note to end the night on.

Starscreamillar 12:33 AM I agree. Thank you for streaming, it was good to catch the madness once again.

thenightetc 12:33 AM Yes, thank you for hosting!

highglossfinish 12:33 AM Thank you for coming!

thenightetc 12:33 AM And here was the pastebin of the part of the chatlog you lost https://pastebin.com/rMN8akyA

highglossfinish 12:34 AM You're a saint.

thenightetc 12:34 AM Do you have the rest?  It doesn't seem to disappear for me.

highglossfinish 12:35 AM I do!

thenightetc 12:35 AM Good, good.

thenightetc 12:35 AM Goodnight, then!

highglossfinish 12:37 AM Good night!

Thebes 12:37 AM good night!

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Two of the biggest questions in the aftermath of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death are, “Will whomever President Trump chooses to replace Ginsburg be confirmed?” and “How will the nomination and confirmation process affect the 2020 elections?” Those two questions are, of course, connected. And the place where they really intersect is the U.S. Senate.

The Senate will play a pivotal role in deciding the answer to the first question, but its members will also be on the receiving end of whatever political fallout the fight to fill Ginsburg’s seat kicks up. So let’s look at both the confirmation process and the electoral process from the perspective of senators.

Electoral concerns will play a big role in the confirmation process

Republican Sens. Cory Gardner of Colorado, Martha McSally of Arizona and Thom Tillis of North Carolina are the three GOP incumbents most in danger of losing reelection, according to FiveThirtyEight’s Senate forecast. In fact, they’re all underdogs at the moment. Two other GOP senators, Susan Collins of Maine and Joni Ernst of Iowa, are in toss-up races. On the other side of the aisle, Democratic Sen. Doug Jones of Alabama is also facing an uphill battle for reelection.

The outlook for incumbent senators up for reelection

Chances of winning reelection according to FiveThirtyEight’s “deluxe” forecast, as of Sept. 20, 2020, at 9 p.m. ET

State Incumbent Party DEM CHANCES GOP CHANCES Rhode Island Reed D 100% <1% Massachussetts Markey D 100 <1 Delaware Coons D 100 <1 Oregon Merkley D 100 <1 New Jersey Booker D 99 1 Illinois Durbin D 99 1 Virginia Warner D 99 1 New Hampshire Shaheen D 99 1 Minnesota Smith D 93 7 Michigan Peters D 81 19 Arizona McSally R 78 22 Colorado Gardner R 69 31 North Carolina Tillis R 62 38 Maine Collins R 53 47 Iowa Ernst R 44 56 Montana Daines R 35 65 Alabama Jones D 28 72 Georgia Perdue R 27 73 South Carolina Graham R 16 84 Alaska Sullivan R 14 86 Texas Cornyn R 12 88 Louisiana* Cassidy R 3 92 Mississippi Hyde-Smith R 5 95 Kentucky McConnell R 4 96 South Dakota Rounds R 1 99 Idaho Risch R <1 100 Nebraska Sasse R <1 100 West Virginia Capito R <1 100 Oklahoma Inhofe R <1 100 Arkansas Cotton R <1 100

*In Louisiana’s Senate election, multiple candidates from each party will be on the ballot on Election Day. If one candidate gets at least 50 percent of the vote, that person wins the seat, but if no candidate clears that bar, the top two vote-getters advance to a runoff election. This table shows the chance that Bill Cassidy will win reelection rather than the chance that any Republican will win the seat.

Given that it’s the final stretch of the campaign and all these senators are at risk of losing their seats, you can bet that electoral factors will be weighing heavily in however they decide to vote on Trump’s nominee and the process to confirm her.1

Even senators with safer seats, including Republicans Steve Daines of Montana, David Perdue of Georgia and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, will be trying to figure out how the Supreme Court vacancy factors into their races. And as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Graham would be leading the confirmation hearings for a Trump Supreme Court nominee. (Ernst and Tillis are also on the committee.)

Before we can make any firm conclusions about how the politics of this will play out, we’ll need to wait for Trump to make his pick and for more polling to come out, but out of the gate it seems as though Collins, Gardner and Jones have the most to lose in this process.

The confirmation fight is likely to be highly partisan and highly polarized — and it’s likely to be a major part of the discussion in the campaign’s final weeks. Democratic voters almost universally oppose anything Trump does, while Republican voters almost universally support the president. Trump and many prominent Republicans are demanding that any nominee be voted on — implying that they will support a confirmation vote before the November election or one after the election even if Trump loses to Joe Biden. Meanwhile, Democrats are largely united in their view that whichever candidate wins the presidential election should choose Ginsburg’s replacement. So all 100 senators are going to be pressed on the question, “Should whoever wins the presidential election choose Ginsburg’s replacement?” The senators themselves (and probably voters too) will know that the position of the Democratic Party is yes and the position of the Republican Party is no.

Having a highly partisan issue dominate the political debate is problematic for Jones, Collins and Gardner in particular because all three senators are running for reelection in states where the majority of voters are aligned with the other party. At the same time, breaking with their party on a high-profile issue like this could annoy their base, which would also make it harder for them to win reelection.

Take Trump’s approval rating in each of these states. The president is significantly more popular in Alabama (57 percent approval, 40 percent disapproval, per Civiqs) than he is nationally (42 percent approval, 55 percent disapproval per Civiqs; 43-53 per FiveThirtyEight’s average of a number of polls). Trump’s net ratings in Maine (-23 points) and Colorado (-19 points) are significantly worse than his national standing. And in Arizona (-11 for Trump) and North Carolina (-8), the president’s standing is fairly similar to where he is nationally.

These general electoral dynamics have perfectly predicted the reactions of these senators in the days since Ginsburg’s death. McSally and Tillis are among the Republicans who already announced that the Senate should vote on a Trump nominee, whether the president wins the election or not. That makes sense for them — on a highly partisan issue like this in a closely divided state, the safe bet is to just stick with your party. (Perdue, in Georgia, has also said he supports Trump’s nominee moving forward, regardless of the November election results.)

In contrast, Collins (in blue-leaning Maine) has adopted the Democratic position — that the winner of the presidential election should choose Ginsburg’s replacement.

Gardner and Jones have been noncommittal so far. That makes sense too — their choices are basically to either annoy their party’s base or annoy the clear majority of the electorate in their states. Neither stance is ideal, so it’s not surprising that they are hesitant to say anything.

In the end, the vast majority of senators will stick with their party

No matter what their electoral considerations are, however, expect most senators to align with their party. That’s what usually happens on high-profile issues.

For example, the confirmation vote for Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination was also on the eve of an election (Oct. 6, 2018). West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin, up for reelection that November in a very pro-Trump state, broke with his party to vote in favor of Kavanaugh’s nomination. But the other nine Democrats who were up for reelection in 2018 in states that Trump won in 2016 voted against Kavanaugh.2 The one GOP senator up for reelection in 2018 in a state Hillary Clinton won in 2016, Dean Heller of Nevada, also voted the party line, supporting Kavanagh.

Overall, Manchin was the only Senate Democrat to back Kavanaugh; Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski was the only Republican who didn’t support him.3 (More on Murkowski in a bit.)

Similarly, on the Trump impeachment votes in February, senators up for reelection this year aligned with their parties instead of their states’ politics when the two conflicted. (Collins and Gardner opposed both articles of impeachment, whereas Michigan’s Gary Peters and Jones voted in favor of both articles.) Utah’s Mitt Romney was the only Republican to vote for Trump’s removal, which all Senate Democrats supported. (More on Romney in a bit.)

What explains this? First of all, senators may put their personal ideological views ahead of their electoral considerations, particularly on judicial nominations. After all, it’s likely that a Republican senator would be fairly aligned with someone like Kavanaugh on most issues while a Democratic senator would be opposed. Second, the electoral effects of these kinds of votes are not totally clear. For example, Montana is more Republican-leaning than Florida, but Montana Democratic incumbent Jon Tester won reelection in 2018 while longtime Florida Democrat Bill Nelson lost. (Both voted against Kavanaugh.) Manchin voted for Kavanaugh and won, but it’s not clear he won because he voted for Kavanaugh.

Third, members of Congress, particularly those in states where they are not electorally safe, must consider their futures if they lose those elections. And the career incentives for politicians usually point toward sticking with your party on key votes. Jones was a prominent U.S. attorney, so it’s easy to imagine him serving in some legal post in a Biden administration if he should lose reelection in Alabama in November and Biden should win. But Democrats would probably be less eager to put Jones in a high-profile role in a Biden administration if Jones had voted for Kavanaugh, opposed impeachment and spent the weeks before the 2020 election urging the Senate to hold a vote on Trump’s nominee to replace Ginsburg.

Senators like Gardner and McSally who have been down in the polls for months are probably aware that they are unlikely to be in Congress next year. So they might be positioning themselves for lobbying jobs (which usually involves maintaining strong relationships with the people in your party who are still in Congress) or future runs for other offices. So to keep doors open to them in GOP circles, Gardner and McSally may align with their party’s general posture in this nomination process, even if that approach slightly reduces their chances of winning reelection.

Murkowski and Romney will really matter

Murkowski has broken with her party in two major ways in the Trump years: opposing the push to repeal Obamacare and opposing Kavanaugh’s confirmation. Romney’s impeachment vote was arguably one of the biggest rebukes of a sitting president from a member of his own party in recent history. So it would not be surprising if they didn’t align with Trump on this issue.

Murkowski said over the weekend that Republicans should not fill Ginsburg’s seat before the election. That is similar to the stance being taken by Senate Democrats and Collins, but not exactly the same. Murkowski has not ruled out supporting the confirmation of a Trump nominee postelection — even if Trump loses in November. Speaking of that possibility …

Preelection commitments could change postelection

The disagreement between the parties is really over who gets to pick the nominee (Trump or whoever wins the election), not over the timing. I doubt Democrats will strongly object to Republicans confirming a new justice in late November or early December if Trump has clearly won the presidential election.

That said, the considerations for individual senators are much different. Collins, in the context of her reelection campaign, is suggesting that she would not support Trump picking a nominee if he loses the election. But if Collins herself loses reelection and a vote on the nominee comes up in December, her pledge to Maine voters isn’t binding. She might feel comfortable reneging on it. It’s not just Collins — there is no guarantee that preelection statements from senators mean much postelection.

Also, the postelection period might have another wrinkle. Since McSally was appointed to her Senate seat, Arizona law suggests that her Democratic opponent, Mark Kelly, could be seated as soon as late November if he wins that race. The math for Republicans is harder if they must confirm a judge with a 52-48 majority instead of a 53-47 one, so I would assume that they would push for a vote while McSally is still there.

Based on what we know right now, here’s the most likely way that the dominoes will fall: Trump chooses a nominee this week. The Senate holds hearings in October, but there is not a vote on the nominee before the election. Biden beats Trump. In the postelection, lame-duck Senate session, 50 Republican senators and Vice President Mike Pence combine for 51 votes to confirm Trump’s nominee, with the 47 Democrats, Collins, Murkowski and Romney in opposition.

I’m not predicting all this will happen — there’s plenty of time for things to change — but that’s the picture we have right now. We can expect a lot of drama over the next few weeks, but in reality, only one question really matters: How many sitting Republican senators will prevent a sitting Republican president from adding a sixth Republican-appointed justice to the Supreme Court, giving the party a dominant majority on the court for perhaps a generation? The answer is, of course, not very many. But there might be four.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Perry Bacon Jr.

[h-eckers]

101 Writing Prompts

1. “I didn’t know you two were related.” “We didn’t either.”

2. “I’m not saying I’m gay, but I would be if they were asking.”

3. “I’ve tried my hardest to fall for you, but it’ll always be them.”

4. “I don’t think anyone’s ever said that to me before.”

5. “I didn’t even want to come to this party. You lied to me about the pinata.”

6. “Spin the bottle is such a cliché. I’m in.”

7. “I have to go in there with you? I didn’t sign up to play 7 minutes in hell .”

8. “That’s not how you pronounce my name and I’m not even sure you tried.”

9. “Are you new here?” “We’ve been in the same math class for six years.”

10. “You really shouldn’t touch that… I told you.”

11. “I recognise you. Do you have a dog.”

12. “ You’ve never seen Harry Potter? ”

13. “Can’t we just lay here for a minute?”

14. “We have to stop running into each other like this.”

15. “Is it weird if I say that your dad’s really hot?” 16. “I know it’s 2am but can we meet up?”

17. “I don’t know how we ended up sleeping together but I know I’m mad about it.”

18. “Whatever you do, just don’t tell anybody!”

19. “I don’t come here often, it brings back unwanted memories.”

20. “They told me I’d forget about you; that I’d move on but it’s been three years and here I am.”

21. “I’ve waited so long for this moment, but now it’s here I don’t know how to feel.”

22. “You can’t just say that and then disappear!”

23. “I always hear my neighbour playing this beautiful music, but I’ve never actually met them.”

24. “Would it be alright if I pet your dog?”

25. “I’m so sorry to bother you this late but an owl got in my house and I have no idea how to get it out.”

26. “We can’t call the police! They’ll never believe us!”

27. “Why are you buying plane tickets? Are you leaving?”

28. “I swear I’ve seen them before in a dream.”

29. “I don’t want to be your partner either but we have to get this assignment done.”

30. “I never hated you, you just make me feel things I don’t understand.”

31. “It’s your fault, and I don’t think this is something you can fix.”

32. “This isn’t easy for me either.”

33. “I would never do this to you if I didn’t have to. You know that, right?”

34. “Can you at least promise me that?” “I don’t think I can, not this time.”

35. “I’m sorry but it’s very hard to focus when you’re dressed like that.”

36. “On a scale of 1 to 10, how hard to you want me to hit you?”

37. “I’d be scared if I were you.”

38. “You can’t go in there alone .”

39. “This seems like a lot of effort to go to for a mediocre joke.”

40. “Delete that picture right now or Mr.Snuggles gets it!”

41. “You didn’t go through my photos did you?!”

42. “Uhhh, I went through your photos and I have some questions.”

43. “I swear to god, if you tag me in one more bad meme I’ll make you regret it.”

44. “I really want to kiss you right now. I know I shouldn’t, and somehow that makes me want it more.”

45. “You have individual ringtones for everyone? What’s mine?”

46. “ Why wouldn’t you lock the door? ”

47. “Did you know kissing burns calories?” “I’m happy with my weight, thanks.”

48. “Your bad pickup lines aren’t cute, they’re just bad.”

49. “I’ll give you fifty bucks if I can take you to Christmas dinner and tell my family we’re together. They always ask if I’m dating and I can’t have that conversation again.”

50. “I don’t think you’re ever too old for trick-or-treating.”

51. “We’re dressing up for Halloween this year and that’s final.”

52. “I forgot what we were fighting about in the first place.” “I didn’t.”

53. “Fuck you.” “Not with that attitude.”

54. “90% of people admit to having at least a slight bondage kink, and 10% are lying about it.”

55. “I don’t understand why you won’t just use a map on your phone.”

56. “You know my house has a door? You don’t always have to use the window.”

57. “The truth is, my friends dared me to ask you out, but I’m really glad they did.”

58. “You know, I was joking in that birthday card when I said I’d help you hide a body.”

59. “Can we please turn off this song.” “But it’s a masterpiece .”

60. “I’ve known you for two years and I think I’ve been saying your name wrong the whole time.”

61. “Wow, you really are blind!” “Thanks for the update, can I have my glasses back now?”

62. “It might be petty but you borrowed my pencil three weeks ago and I’m gonna need it back.”

63. “I think they have a crush on you, which sucks because I’m kinda into them.”

64. “Just go and talk to them, they dont bite!” “What if biting turns me on? If they dont do it then what’s the point?”

65. “You can’t say that in front of children!”

67. “Seven years old is practically an adult.”

68. “Dude I ordered this on eBay and you have to see what they sent me.”

69. “I didn’t realise it meant so much to you.”

70. “I wish I was sorry, but I don’t regret any of it.”

71. “My friend thinks you’re cute, personally I don’t get it but this isn’t about me right now.”

72. “Not everything is about you!” “Untrue.”

73. “You can pry it from my cold, dead hands.”

74. “This is why I hate family dinners! It always gets awkward.”

75. “This can only end two ways and neither of them are pretty.”

76. “Not everything can be butterflies and rainbows! Things get hard sometimes, that’s just how it is!”

77. “My mom told me I shouldn’t talk to strangers, and you’re definitely strange.”

78. “I can’t believe you fell asleep when I was showing you my favourite movie of all time.”

79. “You shouldn’t be out here alone, it’s dangerous.”

80. “I could lie here with you forever. I wish I didnt have to leave.”

81. “Everything’s changing and I hate it! I liked the way things were.”

82. “You look so incredible, if that didn’t look so good on you I’d probably tear it off.”

83. “Do you think they noticed that we left?”

84. “The funny thing is, you could have fixed this and you didn’t even try.”

85. “Did it hurt when you fell from heaven? I’m only asking because it hurt when I did and I thought I might have done it wrong.”

86. “That was super cheesy and I’m lactose intolerant.”

87. “You didn’t tell me you were gay!” “You didn’t tell me you weren’t.”

88. “Your friend told me you had a crush on me, I just wanted to let you know your friend is a snake.”

89. “Are you staring at me or are you staring past me?”

90. “If you we’re a guy/girl would you go out with me?” “I am a guy/girl.”

91. “Sounds stupid. When are we doing it?”

92. “Can we tell my parents that I’m at your house, just incase they get suspicious?”

93. “This is the part in the movie where we kiss or one of us dies. My fingers are crossed for option one.” “Speak for yourself.”

94. “I’m offended that you don’t have more faith in me but, honestly, it’s understandable given past experience.”

95. “Its just a blind date! What’s the worst that could happen?” “I could literally die.”

96. “I would light myself on fire to keep you warm and you wouldn’t even hand me a coat if I were freezing.”

97. “I trusted you, and so I guess I should have seen this coming.”

98. “I had a really weird sex dream about you and I’m not sure how I feel about it, honestly.”

99. “Okay, but this is the last time I bail you out!”

100. “All I know is that if you don’t tell me to stop I’m going to kiss you.”

101. “I’m not sure when it happened, but I fell in love with you, and it was the best thing I’ve ever done.”

#these are dumb #but i was really bored #writing #prompts #writing prompt #fandom #imagines #riverdale imagines #fanfic #fanfiction #riverdale fanfic

[raventons]

99 q/a for 2017

1.    What’s the toughest decision you made today? To get out of bed after a 3 hour nap.

2.    What’s the toughest decision you made this year? I would say turning around at the airport, not going to Moscow, deciding my mental health is more important than that trip. However, I was just following my fear, which is quite an easy feeling to follow. And I have not once found myself second guessing that call. I am not one to dwell too much on decisions like that. I honestly contemplate more about what I’m having for dinner, or what underwear to buy – and I always end up regretting or celebrating those decisions more.

3.    What’s the toughest decision you ever made? Once I spent over an hour deciding if I wanted carbonara or caciatora. I went with caciatora, and that day I learned that if you are in doubt, you should always go with what your dinner company orders. My dad got carbonara, and it was out of this world. If you order the same thing as your date, it might still be the lesser option, but at least you will not know what you are missing. As an intellectual, this is one of the conclusions I’m the most proud of.

4.    What have you forgotten? Almost all the math I was taught in high school.

5.    If you were guaranteed the answer to one question, what would it be? I would love to know who is answering me, and how they got the ability to answer any question ever.

6.    What’s it like being you right now? Better than it has been. A lot better. I’d say good.

7.    What makes you nostalgic? Lenny Kravitz, long car rides, the soundtrack of midsummer murders and the smell of old Swedish cabin in a Småland forest (we all know that smell).

8.    If you had two hours left on earth what would you do? Sit close to my parents, and talk about our life together. And tell them how grateful I am and how happy they’ve made me.

9.    What’s the most beautiful word in the world? The Swedish Blockchoklad or the Russian Nemnoga

10. Who makes you laugh more than anyone? Alex, no doubt.

11. What did your father teach you? How to show affection, how to make people laugh, how to interact with strangers, how to put together a good outfit, how to cook and pretty much everything I know on economy and religion. And how much it means to have amazing parents that never, not even once, let you down.

12. What did your mother teach you? How to not give a shit about anyone’s opinion, how to appreciate simplicity, how to be a storyteller, how to calm down when afraid, how to love without giving yourself up, how to be badass and pretty much everything I know on literature, self-esteem and really bad British crime stories. And how much it means to have amazing parents that never, not even once, let you down.

13. What’s the best gift you’ve ever given? An orange moose I gave to my dad. It was really cheap and dumb, but he had just been diagnosed with a chronical disease (he is much better now) and everything just seemed to fall apart. So I did what any good daughter would do, I bought him a stuffed animal. It made him smile. And he still keeps it by his bedside. It’s called the vomit moose, since that was the most… obvious symptom at the time.

14. Best gift you ever received? My friend Lin gave me a card once with pictures and drawings of us. I love it and still have it ten years later.

15. How many times a day do you look in the mirror? Way too many.

16. What do you bring most to a friendship? I’d like to think I am funny. I talk too much, and always about the wrong and often quite strange things, but when I’m in the right mood and they’re in the right mood; I’d say I am funny.

17. If 100 people in your age group were selected randomly, how many do you think they’d find leading a happier life than you? Very few if we are talking happy as in privileged. I am so very lucky and have had so many fortunate turns in my life.  

18. What is or was your best subject in school? Social science.

19. What activity do you do that makes you feel most like yourself? Writing.

20. What makes you feel supported? I do. (Wow, I am actually quite proud of that answer, but it is true. Sometimes I look for help or motivation in others, but confidence and shit I truthfully only find in myself).

21. Whom do you secretly admire? Secretly? No one. I admire a lot of people, and I think I make sure to tell them.

22. What time of the day do you feel the most energetic and what do you usually do in those moments? Noon. Usually waste that energy on procrastination.

23. What’s something you never leave home without? Pants.

24. What’s a recurring dream you have? Teeth falling out. Or organs. I quite often have nightmares about some stuff that is supposed to be inside or attached to my body suddenly isn’t.

25. What makes you feel safe? Blankets and tea.

26. What’s the best thing that ever happened to you? Discovering international law as my field of work.

27. What do you want people to say about you once you’re gone? That I was smart.

28. What’s the coolest thing about science? Well… let’s go with nature science, because my field of research is not cool at all. I think it’s about the fact that nature is there. It’s not something we invent or solve, it’s something we discover. It’s all written, all the answers are out there somewhere. All the equations, all the numbers, they all correspond to a reality we only see fragments of. It’s like humanity is reading a book together, and the physicists and biologists flip the pages. And for each chapter we find out more and more about how the world around us works.

29. What’s the best money you ever spent? My skinny, black jeans.

30. What��s a bad habit you have? Listening to bad music. I don’t want to support sexist or racist producers. Still here I am, having my playlists filled with pop about grabbing pussies. I’m also weirdly addicted to marzipan.

31. What are you grateful for? My professors and a free education.

32. Whom are you envious of? Almost everyone. But it varies, passes and comes back. It depends on the day. Or the hour.

33. What’s an image you’ll never forget? Well, I have to go with a few summers ago when me and a former classmate ended up skinny dipping in a sunset down at Österlen. But actually, the first thing that came to mind was the real holocaust footage that was included in the TV-show The Promise. I had to leave the room, could not finish the series and I still think about it quite often.

34. Describe a near-death experience. My brain thinks I have one daily, but I don’t think I’ve ever had one. Once I got my luggage lost in Russia, and we had to drive around downtown St Petersburg for hours in a shady cab. It was all fine and no hostile environment what so ever, but when I tell the story it really sounds quite near-death.

35. If you had a clone, what would you have the clone do? Dishes.

36. What’s your idea of Heaven? A lot of cozy spots by windows with rain outside. Good food, good tea and good conversation. A book shelf would be nice too.

37. What’s your idea Hell? Bad food, bad tea and bad conversation.

38. When did you know? Did I ever?

39. What can you do better? I could be more structured. I literally have no routines at all.

40. When are you most yourself? When I am alone, covered in loud music.

41. What superpower would you most like to have? Time travelling but without all the complicated world-war-shit to come with it.

42. If you were granted three wishes, what would you do with the second wish? Fix up the UN.

43. What is your actual superpower? I am very, very analytic. I am also amazing at app games.

44. If you won 100 million dollars, what would you buy first? I would love to own a goat. But well, that’s more of a management problem than an actual money problem.

45. What's the best sound in the world? Waves. Or someone biting in chocolate.

46. What’s perfect about your life? My parents. And Amanda. She is a wonderful person. 

47. What song do you sing only when you’re alone and what memory does it bring back? Min Kärlek av Shirley Clamp. And there is no memories connected, it’s just fucking brilliant.

48. Describe a moment you were so embarrassed you wanted to disappear. When I was 8 we had a quiz in class, and I answered cow instead of turtle (I will NOT tell you the question).

49. How many times a day do you think about money? Every time I use it.

50. Who has been the biggest influence on you in your relationship to money? My parents.

51. What's one thing you're certain of? Cows don’t have shells.

52. Describe one of your colossal failures. I think I just did.

53. What makes you cringe? People trying to make memes a thing you can refer to in real life.

54. What does your inner voice tell you? To shut up. I tell it the same.

55. What crime have you considered committing? I don’t even bike without a helmet. I am a pussy.

56. What's great about your mom? Her hair is amazing.

57. What’s great about your dad? His hair is not so very amazing (and I inherited it) but he has other good qualities. He collects post-cards for example. That’s pretty cool.

58. Which day would you gladly re-live? The day in third grade when I won the egg-cracking championship at our school.

59. What are you awesome at? Egg-cracking, obviously.

60. What do you want people you meet for the first time to think about you? That I seem decent.

61. When were you most afraid? Berlin, 2014.

62. What are you terrible at but love to do anyway? Sex, probably.

63. What weapon would you carry during the Zombie Apocalypse? An axe or a sword. Or a nuke, if bad goes to worse.

64. Which of your five senses would you keep if you could only keep one? I would like to hear shit.

65. What’s something you love to make? Pancakes.

66. What do you cook better than anyone? This weird ass pasta with butter. It’s unhealthy but so damn good.

67. What do you wish you’d invented? The airplane. Or well… the flying machine or whatever it was called when it was invented.

68. What would you like to invent? A new UN system.

69. Out of 100 random people, where would you rank yourself in terms of your intelligence? Pretty high.

70. Where do you want to be right now? Venice.

71. If you could be someone else for a day who would it be and why? Graham Norton. He seems so happy. And he is funny and smart and his job seems to be really cool.

72. What makes you feel powerful? My Hans Zimmer playlist.

73. What’s the meanest thing you’ve ever said? Considering how empty my brain is right now, I think it has done quite some work on supressing those memories.

74. What’s the meanest thing someone has ever said to you? Actually, most people are nice. I don’t think anyone has ever been really mean to me. Sometimes I get hurt, when people say I am pretentious or annoying. But the only reason they say that (and the only reason it hurts) is it’s true.

75. What three words would you have on your grave stone? Let me sleep.

76. What’s your first thought when you wake up? Let me sleep.

77. What’s one thing you wake up to in the middle of the night worrying about? Usually if I have cancer in the prostate since I need to pee ALL the time. But then I remember I am a female.

78. If you could tell someone something anonymously, what would it be? I would tell my cousin Johan to never be insecure about anything. He is probably the most awesome, complete and admirable person in the world.

79. Whom would you like to forgive and forget? The people who made two and a half men.

80. If you could get rid of one of your responsibilities today, what would it be? Dishes.

81. What type of person angers you the most? Extreme right wingers who grew up in a place where they had a choice. Of course you can’t blame people for reacting to the environment around them, and get affected by their culture – but people who grow up with access to information and without oppression – how on earth did you make those conclusions?  

82. What is your greatest strength? I’m confident about my intellect.

83. What is your worst weakness? I’m insecure about pretty much everything else.

84. How do you show your love for others?  Tiny surprises. It can be buying them flowers, cleaning their apartment or just answering a two years old text and apologize for forgetting their existence.

85. Why are you here in this room right now? It’s 10 degrees minus outside.

86. When is a time you forgave someone or were forgiven for something? I forgave myself for not doing the dishes. It felt good.

87. What’s the biggest mistake you ever made? Talking too much. I always talk too much. It’s not one big mistake at one certain event. But it keeps on happening and I never fucking learn.

88. What are you hiding? Nothing.

89. What’s your unanswerable question--the question you seem to always be asking yourself? Can there be true objectivity?

90. What are you ashamed of? My fetishes.

91. What is stopping you? Panic attacks. Or walls, mostly.

92. What’s a secret you have? I really have no idea what I am going to do with my life.

93. How do you secretly manipulate people to get your way? I don’t do this on purpose, but I’ve noticed it happening without actively thinking about it. I usually express a will to rely on people, and come across as weak and fragile, making them think I need their help and protection – when I am really just better of on my own.

94. When was the last time you apologized? This morning.

95. What is the biggest lie you tell yourself? That I am a cool and mysterious person that people look up to.  

96. What’s the moment you left childhood behind? Probably when I moved out from home and went grocery shopping for the first time. Deciding if I needed milk or not was my first ever adult decision.

97. What's missing from your life? Structure. And home cooked meals.

98. Do you believe in a higher power? No.

99. What are you ready to let go of? About half my closet and my fear of flying.