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radiosandrecordings · 3 years

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I would love to try and take a stock of the types of diegesis used in audio fiction and how it’s changed over time. It feels in more recent stuff like it’s fallen out of trend to have an in-universe reasoning for the story like “It’s a radio station you’re listening to” or “It’s old recordings you found!” just because that was such a saturated market towards the start of the AD boom that I feel like if you do that now people are going to presume you’re just trying to ride on the coat tails of one of them now (To the point where Night Vale and King Falls AM crew got in a twitter spat about similar themes). I think another reason it’s often passed over these days is just how much it confines your story, to the point where classic AD’s that had schtick’s for How We’re Hearing This like The Bright Sessions or Wolf 359 just gave up halfway through because it became too much of an inconvenience to justify the diegetic formula while still maintaining a good story and not having to shoehorn recording devices in, and this is something newer ones have learned from.

Giving an in-universe explanation really shapes your story for that reason if you commit to it. Night Vale always stuck to it to my knowledge in some form or another, wheras TMA made the tapes not just a fun layer of meta but crucial to the plot itself. Wheras you might have Zoo or Jar of Rebuke be tape recordings but the reasoning for them seems to be to justify the narrative style of having the main character sharing their inner thoughts diary-style, which creates engagement that you wouldn’t get if they weren’t airing their thoughts to something rather than just having us observe them living their life.

This can also play into sound design because if you have A Device That Is Recording, your whole soundscape is gonna be based around that. How close are people standing to it. Do they move closer or further away? Does the recording device itself move? Can you use panning here? Does the recording device itself emit a noise?

BUT these things do also come into play in something without an in-universe recording device, where often one character will be chosen as the POV and audio will be centred around them. This can be especially cool in something like Juno Steel or Kane & Feels where they lean into the noir genre and have a character monologuing for reasons that aren’t actually explained, you’re just expected to run with the non-naturalism because it allows you an insight into the character’s mindset. This can even involve panning and stuff such as the opening of Kane & Feels episode 2 where one character is monologuing to the listener and the other cuts in, interrupting their train of thought because, and they’ve recorded further away from the mic than the close up of the one monologuing because the character is on the other side of the room from the first, giving a sense of spatial proximity and immersion by letting us experience things how the POV character does.

Then you have things that sort of straddle the line of diegesis because they won’t have a reason they’re being recorded, but they’ll often have fourth-wall breaking elements like The Silt Verses being primarily read as if it’s a story being told to the listener by the character, even if there isn’t an explanation for this, it just is how the story is structured. It leans into being first person and supplements it with actual scenes scattered between. Or Paired, where it’s never stated but from the fact that we move with the character, and you hear bits of static and glitching when needed you’re lead to assume you’re hearing whatever is picked up by the recording device that is the character, but weirdly that’s never a confirmed thing because despite some scenes that mess with the formula and go for second person adressal to whoever is listening, it’s still a bit unexplained and not directly To An Audience

But of course these are just my personal insights from the AD’s I’ve consumed so I’d love to map it all out and see what the trends are for these sort of things, if creators give specifics reasonings for why they chose a justification or not. Because it’s not something that’s common in film or TV? At least to the extent of prevalence that it is/was in podcasts, and it’s not even really a holdover from radio dramas so I want to know what caused this surge when it came to podcasting. Was it just a case of looking at what everyone else was doing and copying a trend? Found footage was by no means a new genre when podcasts were starting to get big (Using 2012, Night Vale’s start date for lack of a better timeframe) but it did seem to have an uptick in popularity in 2013 in film according to wikipedia. It seems to be a technique almost always used for horror so the fact that a lot of AD is horror could contribute to it, but I think it might share a reason with why movies started to be made like that around the time, and it’s that it was cheap. It was a low budget way to frame things because it excused other production values. Your camera could be shaky, and your sound could be shoddy, and it was fine because you were supposed to believe it was recorded on a handheld camera or phone, it was all part of the framing. Most AD’s started recorded in someone’s bedroom on a tiny budget so they were gonna be poor quality, if you say “well it’s supposed to be, the character could only afford a £10 recording device (I could only afford a £10 recording device)”, or better yet you slap a tape whurring or radio static filter over it to mask the background fuzzy from an uninsulated room and you’re good to go.

.... Oh, what you thought there was going to be a summary or conclusion for this? Yeah so did I when I started writing it but genuinely I went down so many research rabbit holes I’ve forgotten what it was, so now it’s just an infodump <3

#My Post #Long Post

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inevitably-johnlocked · 3 years

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how does one know if they're ace or aro?

Hi Lovely!!

Ahhhhh, well, sadly this is a different experience for every individual, and I can only speak for myself. I am not Aro, so I can’t give you that personal anecdote, but I am ace.

You see, I grew up in a very conservative city, and went to catholic school, so you just... don’t think of anything other than boy and girl. Except I didn’t think of ANY of that at all. I thought maybe I was just a late bloomer. I got to college and still... nothing. Just what the HELL is wrong with me?

For me, growing up, I just... never understood why everyone was so obsessed with sex, and why making out never “turned me on”. I genuinely thought I was broken, that there was something wrong with me. I like being cuddled and hugged and just having emotional intimacy, but the second someone wanted to go beyond that, I was like “NOPE”, called a prude and a bitch, and that was that. I wanted all the aspects of a relationship but not interested at all in ever having the sex part of it.

But I never brought it up to my doctors, and I’ve never been in a serious relationship because “Hey, I’m broken, no one will want me anyway”, so I focussed on my career instead. I’ve essentially shied away from relationships because I didn’t want to explain to someone that “I’m broken, I only want cuddles, and it has to move at a snail’s pace”. So yeah.

This was all made worse by a mother who constantly told me “what’s wrong with you, why haven’t you given me grandchildren, HAH AHAHAHHA the movie “40 Year Old Virgin” is about you isn’t that hilarious??”

No, mother, it wasn’t.

What clued me into possibly being ace was actually really funny. It was when I got into the Sherlock fandom and people discussed Sherlock’s sexuality, and I believe it was Brönte who mentioned something about asexual Sherlock, since she was a literature major. "Asexual” is one of those terms I’ve heard, but didn’t really know anything about outside of what it meant.

This is where my almost-4-year sexuality crisis began. It has its issues, but I started my journey by reading up everything on Asexuality.org. EVERYTHING including the forums. Then I watched asexual TED talks (there’s one by the founder of Asexuality.org and another by a young person (sorry I can’t remember their pronouns) that are really good and informative) and YouTubers like Amelia Ace and Slice of Ace (Anthony Padilla actually has an interesting “I spent a day with” video with aces that I recommend, and youtuber Ash Hardell came out with a VERY good series I watched when I was learning about myself). Suddenly everything clicked. It was LITERALLY an “Oh.” moment. Then I learned about the split attraction model, which aces use to help clarify where they are on the spectrum, and about 2 years in, I suddenly realized that “Hmm. I’ve always said I want to be with ‘some ONE’ not some man” so I had another long think, did more research, and thought yeah, you know what? I don’t care about the gender presentation of who I end up with, as long as we’re happy and we enjoy each other’s lives.” So yeah that was a bit of a surprise to me.

Then I met other asexuals at 221B con.That was what sealed it for me: their advice and help and just genuine kindness and understanding of how I feel. I’ve NEVER had anyone say “yeah, I feel that way too!”, rather than “I just don’t understand how you can’t want sex. Everyone wants sex!”.

So now, I’m 2 years “out” to my online friends, I’m glad I’m not broken anymore, but let me tell you, it’s a fucking scary thing to go through at 34.

I still am not publicly out, but I don’t make it a secret that I go to Pride week and I support LGBT causes. And I never leave home anyway, and will probably be alone the rest of my life, but I feel at peace with myself, you know? Just simply KNOWING that I’m NOT broken is a fucking weight off my shoulders.

I know the running joke in the fandom is that “Sherlock Fandom Made Me Gay”, but honestly, there is a grain of truth in it. A lot of us just... don’t KNOW until we’re around other queer people. Which I wasn’t ever UNTIL I came here AND moved to a very liberal city. Everyone was very understanding and helpful, and in turn and in thanks, I was able to also help other lovelies who, like me, didn’t know and were scared.

So yeah, Lovely, for me it was a sense of “something’s different, but I’m not sure what”. And then a lot of research. I knew I wasn’t aromantic because I do desire and crave romance probably in the same way allosexual people crave sex... I wouldn’t know, I’ve never craved it, LOL.

Personally, I encourage everyone to just have a period of their lives where they learn about different sexualities and different types of romance. You always hear these stories about someone not knowing they were homoromantic until they had a roommate they fell in love with. One of my best friends found out he was trans in his mid-thirties... He just thought he was a tomboy who just... felt different.

It’s a different experience for everyone, Rory, and one that only you can discover on your own. Read up information, watch YouTubers, go down the wikipedia rabbit hole, and talk to other people in the various communities.

But let me tell you, Rory, remember this term: Split Attraction Model. Discovering this term helped me a lot on my ace journey. Remember Asexuality and Aromanticism are both very VERY wide spectrums and very VERY different things, and it’s going to take awhile to figure out where you belong. But once you do, I think you’ll be at peace. And it’s OKAY to not “settle” on a label. Please know that. Sexuality is fluid.

Good luck Lovely, and don’t hesitate to ask if you have any other questions. <3

#steph replies #asexuality #ace awareness week #about me #my life #chatting with lovelies #hey-im-rory

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timelordthirteen · 4 years

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Killing Time 25/35

Detective Weaver/Belle French, Explicit

Summary: A Woven Beauty Law & Order-ish AU. Written for Writer’s Month 2019.

Chapter Summary: Belle gets contemplative about her future with Weaver.

Notes: For my August Writer's Month prompt #6: Is that my shirt? This is a bit of filler that only vaguely progresses the plot, but it's necessary to setup Belle's frame of mind for what's to come. Also an excuse to write more flirty idiots because how could I not with that prompt?

[AO3]

The next day, Belle was still riding high on the revelation that Charlie Dunn, the second victim, was also adopted from Nevada.

She woke up early, and was already working and on her second cup of coffee when Weaver finally rolled out of bed around seven. Whatever had been causing her headaches and weird stomach issues, seemed to have left as suddenly as it came, which reinforced her belief that it was a mild bug from something she ate.

It was essential that they obtain the rest of the birth records on the victims as well as the Tremaines’ foster children. She spent most of the morning filling out request forms for the Clark County Clerk’s Office, one for each victim, one for Eloise, and one for her husband. They probably hated her by now, but if things panned out the way she thought they would, she would buy the whole office lunch on her. Her afternoon consisted of making inquiries locally for whatever birth records were available on the other victims. That had yielded little so far, aside from confirming that three more had been born out of state.

Weaver pushed the office door open, and Belle looked up from her laptop.

“We found Eloise Tremaine’s apartment,” he announced, walking over to the desk as he took off his leather jacket.

Belle’s eyebrows lifted. “Where? How?”

He set down a piece of scrap paper with an address on it in Detective Rogers’ handwriting. “Here, and it really helps once you know the victim’s actual name, and the name of the company that actually pays for the apartment.”

She frowned. “What company?”

Weaver dropped down into one of the chairs opposite her. “Robert Tremaine’s. Perrault Developments, Inc.” Belle’s frown deepened, and he continued, “which he inherited from his uncle, James Perrault.”

“Why do I know that name?” she asked, leaning back in her chair.

“I’m told it’s the name of the French guy who wrote Cinderella.”

Her face went through several expressions before she shook her head. “I’m surprised that you know that.”

He laughed. “I don’t. Rogers’s Googled the name and half the results were for Charles Perrault.”

Her lips curled. “So you two fell down a Wikipedia rabbit hole on your way to finding our victim’s residence?”

“Something like that.” He stretched a bit and rolled his shoulders, no doubt stiff from a whole day of driving around the city. “Anyway, the apartment was in the name of the company, and it never came up in any of our inquiries for missing renters, because the rent was still being paid.”

Belle leaned forward and rested her arms on the desk. “By a dead woman?”

“By an offshore account.”

“Of course.” She sighed. “Well, that explains why we couldn’t find any credit history on Eloise if she’s been living off the company money, and paying everything in cash or with the company account.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “We’ve got enough now to get all the information we want on Tremaine’s business. Maybe there’s some other connections to our victims from that.”

She picked up the paper with the address and did a quick search to see what part of the city it was in while he was talking. “Do we have access to the apartment yet?”

“Rogers is working on it. The landlord has already been notified, but he’s being a stickler for having the warrant before he lets us in.”

“Good for him, I guess.” Belle sighed again, and then pushed back from the desk. “I filled all the requests with Clark County, and found almost nothing locally for birth records. Damon, Chelsea, and Melissa, were all born out of state, but I don’t know where yet.”

“That’s something, though,” he said, trying to be encouraging. He knew how much she hated the tedium of paperwork and formal requests. “By next week we should have all of the records back, if not sooner. And tomorrow we get to see how Eloise Gardener lived.”

“I want to go with you.” She met his eyes with a stern look to let him know she was serious and would not be left back at the office while he and Rogers rooted through Eloise’s apartment. “I want to be there.”

He nodded in understanding. “Should have the warrant before lunch.” Then he smiled. “I think that’s enough for now. Ready to call it a day?”

She smiled back, already bending down to pull out her purse. “Yes please.”

He stood and lifted his jacket from the back of the chair. “I was thinking I’d make alfredo tonight.”

Pausing with her purse strap hanging awkwardly from her hand and one arm in her coat, Belle looked at him wide eyed, starting to smile. “That’s my favorite.”

Weaver licked his lips. “I know.”

Belle sighed and closed her eyes as her head fell forward, letting the hot water run down over her neck and shoulders.

It wasn’t an exaggeration to say she loved this shower. The bathroom had been a huge selling point when they first looked at the apartment, though that seemed like a lifetime ago. It had been too easy to settle back into a routine with Weaver, and while there had certainly been solace in the familiar, especially in the aftermath of being attacked in her own home, there was still apprehension. The conversation over the state of their relationship had never really taken place, and both of them seemed loath to rock the boat while so much was happening with the case, but she had been exploring her thoughts on the matter more and more.

Her session with Dr. Hopper had touched on it as well, and Archie had openly asked her if she wanted to reconcile officially with Ian. That was the penultimate question of course, and leave it to Archie to skip any formalities or attempts to ease into the topic. He knew her too well. Still, the idea made her smile.

A few months ago it would have earned a glare or a door slam, and a firm contradiction, so this was, by any standard, a great deal of progress.

Belle finished her shower and exited the bathroom in nothing but a towel. As she padded across the floor to the bedroom, Weaver glanced up from his laptop with a raised eyebrow and let out a low whistle. She threw him a look before she stepped into the bedroom and heard him chuckling as she closed the door.

Her skin felt tingly and warm, and she knew it was from more than just the water. The last couple of weeks she’d found herself almost distracted by her attraction to Weaver, and the pleasing banter and light teasing they had established between them only made it worse. She had to admit that he was different now than he’d been when they were first together, though she was uncertain what it meant. It made her want to stay, to get back together officially, in a way that left no doubt for either of them. But it also made her want to do all manner of naughty things.

Smiling to herself, she pulled on a pair of soft cotton pajama shorts and started digging in one of her bags for a shirt. Most of her work things were back in the closet, but with only one dresser, her casual clothes were relegated to a suitcase and two duffel bags. Frowning as she pulled out everything except what she was looking for, she reached into the inside pocket of the bag and pulled out something unexpected.

A small black box tumbled to the floor, and she hesitated for a long moment before picking it up.

Belle sat on the edge of the bed and swallowed hard, running her thumb back and forth over the soft velvet. She knew what was inside, but she hadn’t looked at it in a long time. With the way she’d been feeling towards Weaver lately, she wasn’t sure she should, fearful that it might bring up the wrong memories. Closing her eyes for a second, she flipped the box open.

The diamond sparkled even in the low light from the lamp on the nightstand.

She plucked it free, turning it this way and that, and making small shapes on the floor when it caught the light just right. Holding the band, she slid the tip of her finger in and out of the ring, feeling the smooth, cool metal. Before, in the weeks and months immediately after their divorce, she would take it out every now and then, and look at it. It usually resulted in her having a good cry and stress eating an entire sleeve of Oreos. She’d only brought it with her from her apartment because it was with her other jewelry, and though she’d known it was packed into one of the bags, it had been put out of her mind.

On impulse, she pushed it over her knuckle and settled it on the appropriate finger. Her hand flexed as she admired it, pleased that it still fit perfectly and didn’t look to be in any need of cleaning. She expected it to feel strange, since she rarely ever wore rings before she was married, and hadn’t on that finger since their separation. Bracelets and rings had always bothered her when she had to type or write, and throughout university and law school she was forever taking them off and putting them in her bag, finding them days later. But this ring had never been a hindrance, and she barely even noticed it as she worked. It wasn’t heavy or gaudy, and it didn't have so many facets and points as to snag her clothes.

Shaking her head, she quickly pulled it off and set it back in the box, and put the box back in the inside pocket where it had been before going back to looking for her nightshirt. Strangely, she kept looking down at her hand as she rummaged through the laundry basket. After being on her finger for only a minute or so, it made no sense that her hand would be missing the ring’s presence.

With a huff, she gave up trying to find the shirt that matched her shorts, and turned around to look for something else to wear, when her eyes landed on something of Weaver’s that had been mixed in with her laundry. She picked up his very faded and well worn Celtic Football Club shirt, and immediately pulled it over her head. The fabric was soft from years of wear and washing. It might have been her imagination, but even though it was clean there was the faintest hint of his scent on it and she pulled it up to her nose and inhaled.

Smiling, she opened the door and stood there, leaning against the doorframe until she was noticed.

“Is that my shirt?” Weaver asked, setting the laptop down on the coffee table.

Belle shrugged one shoulder and sauntered towards him, letting her desire add an extra sway to her hips. “Is it? It was in the laundry basket with my things.”

“Hmm, was it…” he said, leaning back on the sofa as a grin curved his lips. “Maybe that’s because you’re always stealing it.”

Her eyebrows lifted. “Are you accusing me of a crime, Detective?”

His throat bobbed as he swallowed, watching her step around the coffee table to stand in front of him.

“Do you want it back?” she asked, putting one knee on the sofa beside his hip.

“No,” Weaver replied, licking his lips. “Looks better on you than it ever did on me.”

She brought her other knee down and straddled him, holding her body away from his. He held her waist, already bunching the shirt as she leaned over him. “Too bad.”

"Why's that?"

She felt his hands slide down to her backside and then up, lifting the shirt as his palms moved up her back. His hips shifted forward, and she allowed him to pull her down just a little as a low ache settled in her core.

Her lips brushed his, teasing him with the wet heat of her breath. “I was going to tell you to come and take it.”

#rumbelle #rumbelle fic #woven beauty #woven beauty fic #my woven beauty fic #fic #killing time #lindsay's august writer's month 2020 #awm 2020

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amwritesstuff · 5 years

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What You Want (Kirishima/Reader) Lemon

Y’all ever start looking things up on Wikipedia and just go down some really weird rabbit holes that lead to sex toys you’ve never understood the point of because they just seem painful? And then proceed to get a smutty story idea for it?

----

As a pro Hero of several years, Kirishima was well schooled in hiding his nervousness out on the field. In the bedroom? Not so much. It was just such an intimate setting and he really wanted to please you. You supposed that was in part what made him so gung-ho when you brought up wanting to try something new, but you'd been dating him long enough to know better. The closer you got to performing the deed, the more jittery he became.

You were knelt between his legs, adjusting his soft penis and scrotum into an adjustable cockring. He was watching you intently, squirming a bit in his bindings as you gently handled him. You pulled back once finished, looking up at him.

“There. How's that feel? Do I need to loosen it any?”

“N-no, it feels…” he pulled a face as he took in the sight of his cock and balls being held away from his body by the small band. “Fine.”

You sighed, rubbing your hands soothingly on his inner thighs. “Eijirou… Eijirou, look at me. You don't have to do this just because I wanted to. I can take it off if you're uncomfortable.”

“N-no! I want this! I-I want to last longer for you,” he looked at you so earnestly, cheeks taking on a lovely shade of pink. This man. He was always trying to outperform himself for you. You smiled softly.

“And I want you to enjoy yourself, hun. It's why I suggested it.” Slowly, you began to move up his body, giving light pecks up his torso as you went. “You do so much to make sure I'm satisfied and ask for nothing in return. That ring makes you last longer so it can intensify your experience.”

His breathing became increasingly more akin to panting, grunting as you lightly bit a nipple, gasping as you nipped his collar bone, groaning as you gently sucked a sweet spot below his ear until you finally stole his breath entirely from a slow kiss. Your hands moved over his neck to the back of his head, cradling him up to you, as you were now hovering above him on your knees from his seated position.

This was such a different pace then what he was used to with you. You were impatient and insatiable when it came to your own pleasure, which was why he was always seeking ways for himself to last longer. To pull as many orgasms from you as he could before he spent himself. It wasn't always easy. Even before he started at UA, he had quite the stamina stockpile, Hero training had increased it exponentially. But, you… god, your sex drive was through the roof.

Not that he was complaining, far from it, but it was sometimes difficult for him to keep up with you after a long day. You had started backing off when you had caught on to his fatigue, scolding him for not telling you he was tired. He had gone on about not wanting to deny you and pulling pouts he knew you had a hard time saying ‘no’ to. You stood strong though, ever as stubborn as you were, not wanting him to wear himself out for your sake. Instead, you chose to put aside your needs and take care of him.

It was during the first time you had done this -dozing off as your hands worked absolute magic on his back- that he realized how good you were to him. How unworthy he was of someone to pamper him like this while not obtaining the pleasure that they had originally sought, because he was too tired. He vowed to do better.

He took control in the bedroom, even if he was beneath you, quickly learning what made your toes curl. You liked to be dominated, held down, eaten out with vigor, bitten hard enough to leave marks and bruises, talk that was absolute filth, fucked hard and fast, overstimulated, and being filled to the very brim with cum. Kirishima's pride as a man wasn't going to let him give you anything less than what you desired; what you damn well deserved. And seeing you fall apart every time, knowing he was the cause of it, made him feel at his manliest.

However, he gave nothing up when you tried to ask what he enjoyed. His reasoning was that you took such good care of him on a regular basis; putting up with his insecurities that he still struggled with, as well as the stress of him being in a job that often put his life on the line. The least he could do was pleasure you how you wanted.

You weren’t having it. You had to find what he liked at a slow pace though, making him think it was a possible kink you wanted to try for yourself. It was all paying off now. You found that he liked it slower, more sensual. Building up to the finish with close affection and warm praise. A far cry from your preferences, but this man fucking deserved his wanton desires, and you were going to give it to him as best as you could.

When you pulled away, he instinctively tried to follow, wanting more of you. He let out a small whine when he failed to touch you from his hands being bound behind him, opening his eyes to plead with you. Were those bindings not in place to keep him from easily overpowering you to fuck you as you liked, you would have given in. While you knew him touching you was one of those things he loved, you couldn’t allow it. Not now, but…

“Tell you what,” you ran your nails over his scalp. “I’ll untie you if you prove you’re a good boy.” The widening of his eyes was accompanied by a lovely blush spreading over his cheeks.

And the nudge of something at your leg.

You couldn’t help but let out a little giggle. “Oh? Do you like the sound of that? Well, it shouldn’t be too hard for you,” you moved to suck at the increasing pulse at his neck. “You’re already such a good boy for me, aren’t you?” He groaned as you lightly bit him, tilting his head slightly.

“Hmm, yes, you are. Listen to those sounds you make for me,” you moved back to look him in the eye, words taking a more serious tone. “Just a reminder, if you start going numb or feel anything uncomfortable down there, you let me know immediately, alright?” You smiled coyly at his quiet nod, pushing yourself to his lips, hovering ever so close to them. “No, no, don't go back to being quiet now. I want to hear everything. Don’t you dare keep those noises to yourself. I want to hear what I do to you. Can you do that for me, Eijirou?”

His agreement came out in a breathless whisper as he quickly claimed your mouth. He attempted to make the kiss hot and passionate, which you almost let him get away with. You'd pull away each time you felt he was too aggressive until you were gently nuzzling one another, sharing soft pecks.

You kissed him slowly once more, delicately sucking his lower lip, pulling it with you as you sat back to take him in. His hair was down, wonderfully framing his flushed face, his blush traveling down to his chest that was heaving just so, mouth hanging open to allow his heavy breath to puff past his swollen lips. He was leaning forward to follow your kiss, eyes not quite closed and eyebrows furrowed.

God, this was probably the hottest you've ever seen him.

You waited for him to come back to his senses, opening his eyes to see you biting your lip as you looked him over, your own face betraying your ravenous want. He swallowed, feeling a bit embarrassed under your hungry gaze. His eyes zeroed in on your mouth. Your taste lingered on his tongue, but it wasn't near enough to satisfy him. He craved more of you and knew he was doomed to forever crave you the second you shared your first kiss.

He blinked stupidly at your finger suddenly on his forehead. You didn't realize that his awed gaze was from how radiant you appeared to him, your light laugh and gracious smile filling his chest with such a warm sensation.

“Did you hear me?”

“Ah,” he grinned cheekily up at you to try and hide his embarrassment. “Sorry, I didn't. Guess I was too caught up in remembering how lucky I am to have you.”

This caught you off guard. Dirty talk was always a turn on for you, be it receiving or giving. But that statement paired with that genuine loving look made you think that you might need to reevaluate your kinks. How did this man so easily twist you up in a jumble without realizing he was doing it? You were supposed to be seducing and pleasing him, damnit!

You cleared your throat in an attempt to regain your composure. You needed to get back in control, so you captured him in another long slow kiss. You didn't pull away entirely when you ended it.

“I asked, what do you want me to do?” He seemed to be having a hard time comprehending.

“... What I want?” You chuckled lightly, moving to take an earlobe between your teeth. His breath hitched.

“That's right,” you cooed softly, pushing your body flush against his, reveling in the sound he made. “Tonight's about you. What,” you kissed below his ear. “Do,” his strong jaw. “You,” his slightly stubbled chin. “Want?”

You hovered over him again, holding his face as he owlishly blinked up at you. His expression said it all. He was conflicted. He'd given for so long that now when the choice was before him, he wasn't sure. You figured you could try to help him out.

You smiled lovingly. “What have you wanted me to do to you that you've never asked for? It could be something that I've even suggested.” His face was reddening. Good, he had something in mind, but just wasn't saying it. “Come now, Eijirou. Be a good boy and tell me-”

“Suck me!” He lurched forward with such vigor, nearly yelling it in such earnest, that you almost toppled off his lap. It was your turn to blink down at him in bewilderment. He seemed to sense that his answer might have been a bit much, starting to curl into himself.

“S-sorry, I, uh…”

“No! No, it's alright! I just wasn't expecting that level of enthusiasm. I'm all for it, though!” And truly you were. It wasn't like you had never sucked him off before, you had plenty of times, but it was usually as a quicky. It never really came about during your longer sessions, as he was always too busy being focused on you.

You gave him a quick kiss. “Honestly, I like how your cock tastes, and I'm excited to find out if it's any sweeter with that cockring choking it.”

He turned a red that rivaled his hair, making a strangled noise as you practically dropped to the floor. That was the insatiable sex fiend he knew and loved.

Kirishima let out a breath, closing his eyes to calm his jitters as he waited for the wonderfully familiar pleasure of you devouring him. You knew just how to work him to make him cum and with his member straining in its binding, he was gleefully anticipating how this would go.

He sighed as your hands ran over his thighs, nails ghosting up his abdominals. He tensed, feeling your breath at his base. He opened his legs a little wider, unknowingly scooting his hips forward. Oh, he was more than ready to feel your mouth take him!

What he was not ready for, was the bite on his tender inner thigh.

His yelp came from surprise as it wasn't hard enough to really hurt. He looked down, finding your eyes closed, sucking gently on his bite. Your nails were ever so slightly scratching his pelvis, close to the cockring.

You dislodged yourself with a pop, giving a gentle kiss to the darkening spot. His breath caught when you opened your eyes to gaze up at him. There was a look in your eyes. One he wasn't sure he liked.

“I-I thought you were going to, um…” You raised your eyebrows for him to continue. Why was this so difficult all of a sudden? The last time he had this much of a problem with sex talk was when he first found out how dirty you liked it.

He had to break away from your gaze, it being a little too much at the moment. So, he focused on his dick instead. And, honestly? After catching sight of himself he didn't know if he could look away.

He knew he was hard, but this… He was an angry red, darker than his hair, swollen past his normal girth, and the slight curve that he had was almost straightened. They hadn't really done anything, but he was already leaking enough for it to be dribbling down his side.

This was… Fuck, this was erotic. He could only watch as he became harder from just looking at himself, his cock straightening out fully. He only pulled his eyes away when your face appeared beside him. He groaned at the sight.

You smiled up at him teasingly. “I've gotta say, red is definitely your color!”

He was more than ready when you pulled back, knowing full well you were positioning yourself to go down on him. And, fuck was he ever ready for it.

He let out a whine when you bypassed his cock entirely, latching your lips on the juncture of his leg and pelvis, and sucked. He grit his teeth in frustration when you moved to the other side, biting down then sucking. You did this several more times, sometimes getting right at his base, once or twice placing a little kiss to his tight balls, but never truly touching his ache. The brushes of your hair and skin on his cock while you worked around it was a torturous type of teasing that was driving him mad. And you took your agonizingly sweet time.

He was a squirming, panting mess, thighs and lower abdomen littered with hickeys when he finally uttered out a word.

“Hm?” You detached yourself from the space under his ball sack. “What was that?” You were a bit breathy yourself.

“Please…” Fuck, he was on the verge of tears. He needed some kind of relief. “Please…”

He chanced a glance at you when he didn't feel anything happening. You were staring at him wide eyed, mouth slightly open. Face redder than before. His voice grew needy, cracking in desperation.

“Babe, please, touch me. Suck my cock! Shit! Let me go and I'll do it myself!” Your eyes widened further. “I-is that what you want? To watch me make a mess of myself and cum all over? O-or, do you want me to beg? Babe, I'll beg! I'll beg so pretty! Just please! Fuck me- GahAA!”

His head shot back in a throaty wail as you took his cock fully into your mouth, swallowing around him as best you could when you felt him reach your throat. It was a little challenging since he was bigger than normal. You would manage, you were determined to. You started at a steady pace, trying to keep his hips from bucking. Easier said than done. Perhaps you had played with him a little too long.

He shouted out in frustration, followed by the sound of his bindings ripping from his quirk. You were jerked up, squealing as he roughly positioned you on his lap. Yeah, you played too long. But, this was a learning experience, and now you knew-

You arched in a silent scream as Kirishima slammed you onto him with no warning, gripping your hips tightly to keep up with his sudden frantic pace. He was already girthier than average, but with the cock ring trapping his blood flow, he was stretching you much wider.

He began slowing both of your movements almost as suddenly as he had started pounding you. Lost in your lust, your original plan was gone from your mind, whining and desperately trying to move quicker. However, he had a firm grip still, keeping you from any attempt of doing so.

One hand traveled up your back and into your hair when he felt you had calmed enough. He pulled you as close to him as he could, your arms wrapping around his shoulders. His other hand moved to your lower back, rubbing small circles with his thumb. He kept you like that for an agonizing amount of time, just holding you to him while his cock twitched deep inside you.

You caught your breath, mewling into his ear for him to do something. Anything! He shushed you, placing light kisses to your shoulder. “You said this was for me, right?” his voice was quiet, having a little growl to it that sent a shiver down your spine. “All for me… So, I’m going to have you how I want.”

His hands moved to your hips, guiding you to move, increasing your pace little by little. He settled on a speed akin to a crawl, causing you to whimper pathetically at the near lazy pace. He was more than strong enough to keep you from trying to go faster.

There was a fleeting thought that this must have been what he had been feeling during your teasing. And that's what it was to you. Teasing. Wonderful, tortuous teasing. When you had finally stopped struggling did you begin to really take notice of the feel of him moving around you. Moving in you. There was a warmth building in you that you had never noticed during sex before.

You had the sudden urge to be closer to him. A need to be closer. Just to feel more of him. Your arms wound tighter around his neck, hands fisting his limp hair, pulling yourself to him until your chests were rubbing together, your light breaths puffing in his ear.

You let out a strangled gasp as your body convulsed in an orgasm that you were unaware had been building. You had been so wrapped up in the new sensations of the slow, sensual dance that you were completely blindsided by it. So much so that you nearly slid off his lap. His grip didn't let you get far though, still moving your hips leisurely on his cock through it all.

Kirishima let out a hum of approval as you came down. He gently bit and sucked at the juncture of your neck, groaning out little praises of how good you were doing at this pace. How might you deserve a little reward.

He leaned back from you enough to see your face, tightened his grip, and began rapidly bucking up into your swollen pussy. It was like going from zero to eighty. You weren't ready for the suddenness of it. It sent you reeling, crying out, and tensing entirely in overstimulation. It was much closer to your preferred pace. Now gripping his shoulders, you also leaned away from him, tilting your head back to try and give yourself more leverage to move at your rhythm, only to have his hand force your head back down.

“No, no,” he breathed, locking those burning red eyes to yours. “Look at me. Don't you dare look away.” While breathy, his voice was commanding, compelling you to obey.

You watched his face contort, eyebrows forming a slight crease in his effort to keep pace. His ears, cheeks, and neck were flush such a pleasant rosy color. His lips were pulled back to show off his teeth that were just enough apart for his grunts and groans to clearly be heard as they grew louder. He as working to keep his eyes open and on you. And he was very much enjoying what he was watching.

Your eyes were half open, struggling to keep contact with his when your body wanted to throw itself back in pleasure. Your skin was too hot, numbing your nerves to anything but his cock pounding up into you. Your lips were parted just enough to let out your growing whines until it dropped open in a loud, gasping moan. Kirishima couldn't last after witnessing that display, pulling you into a sloppy, heated kiss as he spent himself deep into you.

Your heated make out simmered down to light, affectionate pecks as you both relaxed into one another. He held you close, hips still twitching in the aftermath. He still didn't let you go as he flopped back onto the bed, causing you to let out a little squeak of laughter. The two of you stayed like that for a few moments, simply basking in the presence of each other.

“So,” you started, pushing yourself up to look at him. “What did you think?”

He gave a breathless laugh. “Honestly? I, uh… heh,” he looked a little sheepish. “I really wouldn't mind using it again.”

#Kirishima Eijirou #lemon #kirishima eijiro x reader #kirishima/reader #kirishima x reader #my hero acadamy

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josephkellywriter · 4 years

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MIND MAP TUTORIAL – PART ONE

Read this post on Wordpress...

There are a lot of guides out there about how to create mind maps, and this will be another one! I work in a pretty free form way, so I hope my take on this method will be a bit different from your average mindmap.

Again for this tutorial, I will use Scapple. I highly recommend it– it’s simple to use, and has such a generous trial that you might never have to buy it. (It only counts days as days of actual use.) If you do want to buy it, it’s quite cheap and anyone doing NaNoWriMo can get a discount. You can use your favorite mind map software for this technique, make it in Photoshop or even do this on paper.

My mind maps begin with humble origins. I just free associate words related to my theme. I was creating a mind map for my vampire story, so I just thought of themes and images that had been floating around my head. When I found topics particularly notable, I capitalized them and made them red. I drew some loose associations, but my focus is identifying the main themes of my story.

From there, I took each broad topic and began listing associated ideas. For example, being a vampire story, I took extra time on ‘vampires.’ I thought of their physical and emotional traits, and related objects. You could be more messy than this if you like.

Here I’ve done this with blood, trying to group and expand where I can. Don’t be afraid to get weird and tangential. It was fun to go from blood all the way to a dam; you never know where your imagination might take you.

For this technique, I tried to think of good (or neutral) and bad versions of concepts, and then symbols to demonstrate. I would be very unlikely to use even half of these, but it was interesting to think of the ‘good’ side of imprisonment as being hugs!

Try taking ideas from their very broadest to the most specific. Starting with plague, I broadened it to disease, and further to entropy. What other concepts could be grouped? Think about each topic, and what it might say in a general sense, what philosophical statement might you make about it.

Here’s another way to free associate I found very fun. Once I’d chosen my main themes and images, I stacked them as a list, and made a copy. I offset the second stack by one, and then thought of them as (thing 1) + (thing 2) Once I’d gone through the list, I moved the second one up a place, and continued until I’d looped all the way around.

For example, LOVE + SICKNESS is obvious enough, as well as heart break. CRUELTY + LOVE could be abusive relationships. NIGHT + FAMILY could allude to being snug in a family home at night. You might end up with more kooky things too. For BLOOD + NATURE I came up with tree sap! Try to push yourself as much as you can to list more than you normally would. Those last few weird things you pull out of yourself could be something very special.

Now that I had a big jumbled list, I started tying them together into a more traditional mind map. Connect your main topics first, then start connecting more tangential ideas, and draw even more from there. In order to not just have an unreadable tangle, if I wanted to connect an idea to something on the far side of the map, I just added a note (SEE: TOPIC X) I kept all the ideas I came up with, and just faded the ones I ruled out. (In Scapple, you can hit Ctrl+Shift+F to do this automatically.)

When I came up with a specific idea RE: my story, I would add a note and leave it unconnected. I also made notes of any important facts I discovered, like that the association of hemophilia with royalty did not appear until the 19th century.

On I went, using Wikipedia to come up with even more associations. I use what I call the ‘three click rule’, where I won’t go over three clicks deep into a topic before stopping myself. In reading about Judas, I discovered the term ‘potter’s field’, which led me to reading about grave robbing. I might bend the rule if I end up somewhere really interesting, but I try to restrain myself to not fall down too much of a rabbit hole. (More on that later!)

Once you’ve ended up with a decent amount of material, look over the wild mess and make notes of the most interesting ideas you’ve come up with. Try to think about how you could use them in your story. Even the simplest connections could be interesting. I learned that part of a nail is likened to a crescent moon; maybe that will come up in my story. I’ll write more about mind mapping but I hope this gives you some insight into my technique.

#mind maps #tutorial #writing #inspiration

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talix18 · 4 years

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November 8

(There's a lot of padding in there.)

I have no free time today in front of a keyboard so I should be writing. Or working. Or listing all the things I forgot as I was half-heartedly packing. Or listing all the things I need to do before I leave so Mom isn’t disgusted when she comes to take care of the cats (Clean The Toilet). I managed to overpack without buying anything new but predictably, am not happy with any of it. This is one of my least favorite qualities about myself. Mom always hated shopping for jeans with me but I find my resistance to packing is incredibly annoying. I’m good at making sure the laundry is done so all of my options are open, but terrible at knowing what I will want to wear once I’m wherever.

I also managed to completely overlook shampoo and body wash on my first round of packing, which doesn’t bode well.

Is there some kind of rule against contractions I don’t know about? Word keeps putting blue squiggly lines under my contractions as if I don’t know what they are. I understand that writing all the words out will boost my count, but it’s not how people tend to talk.

Among the amenities at the retreat center where I’ll be this weekend is a working farm with baby animals. Yes, please, I would like to play with all of the baby animals. When life is complicated and ugly, baby animals are easy and adorable. My sister will be jealous when she sees the pictures with which I intend to spam her.

My sister is one of my best friends and I’m grateful for her every day. I’m not sure she would have chosen the way our lives have played out this far, but she is also unmarried and child-free (that part I’m pretty sure she’s okay with). If she dates, she doesn’t talk about it much with me, but I haven’t seen her in a relationship in over ten years. It was a brutal one. First love, first boyfriend, first break-up all in her mid-20s. Although my romantical adventures have been largely, um, unsuccessful, I am glad I got used to the idea of heartbreak young. (Even the song that turned me from a pop princess to a rock goddess was “Bringin’ On The Heartbreak” [MTV was born when I was in eighth grade and was my obsession for the next five years.])

Def Leppard is how I met my first boyfriend! We were in ninth grade, he was in my homeroom (both of our last names start with “H”), and he was wearing a tour shirt promoting the band’s second album. I was entranced. “You’ve seen them?” (Wanders off down a Randy Rhoads rabbit-hole.) I remember the conversation included something about Ozzy Osbourne and Randy Rhoads; either he’d seen them or was supposed to right after Randy died. Wikipedia tells me that Def Leppard opened for Ozzy at Merriweather, which is probably where A saw them; Randy Rhoads and all. (Now I am irrationally jealous at missing a show 38 years ago.) That’s probably where he got the shirt that made me talk to him; the shirt I made him leave with me when he moved away.

I should probably blame all my romantic misadventures on Def Leppard. They were a “heavy metal” (The lead singer joked “light alloy”) band that appealed to a slightly rougher crowd than I hand previously hung with. A introduced me to drinking beer in the woods by the elementary school (I was all of 13 or 14). The cops came and we ran to his apartment – his bedroom was on the ground floor and we climbed in through the window. We made out for a while to the Scorpions’ “Lovedrive”. A was a bad boy, and it took me a long time to get the taste for them out of my mouth.

A called every few months and my stomach would do flips at the sound of his voice. Did he ever actually say he was coming back for me or did I just make that part up?

My next boyfriend showed up when I was a senior and wreaked havoc on and off for the next seven years. He was a serial cheater and a pathological liar against which I had absolutely no defenses. I was a goody-goody. Teacher’s pet type. There was a pivotal moment one adolescent summer when the decision I made set the course for the rest of my life. I was hanging out in town with one of the tougher girls and her friends, trying to figure out how to smoke, and noticed it was 9:15. Curfew was 9:30, and I was easily a mile from home. I knew that showing up late would mean trouble. Was I going to say “fuck it” and keep hanging out?

I ran my ass off to make it home on time. Goody-goody. This probably kept me out of a lot of future trouble.

I fell hard for S – he was charming and charismatic and sang “Dixie Chicken” and made me laugh. He went to the Catholic boys’ school and was friends with my friend MB’s older brother. By that time I was solidly British pop new wave with some hard rock on the side (much like MTV itself). For the next absurd amount of years either he cheated on me or with me – he knew I would always be there. Until the night when he told me that he knew I was never going to find anyone who loved him like I did and he was ready to commit, but he had to tell me something first. His ex was pregnant and it was his. That was it for me. Finally. “Dixie Chicken” still gets me, as does the taste of Marlboro Reds and Bazooka bubble gum. (I started smoking when he broke up with me the first time.)

After my first college boyfriend (a good guy who is still married to the woman he dated after we broke up), I decided I wasn’t going to let anyone get close anymore. I was done with love; I was going to be one of those distant women who could never be possessed and never get hurt. I imagined veils and fog. If it was good enough for Stevie, it was good enough for me. At that time the idea of “if you want what someone has, do what they do” didn’t include the caveat of perhaps “asking if it was what they wanted and would they make the same choices again.” (I’m not saying Stevie’s not happy with her life, but 30 years ago she may have gently steered me another way.)

My old team leader just came by to chat and now my roll is slowed. She and I have worked together since I started here 17 years ago. My mind is starting to wander since I’m out of here soon.

I do want a partner – for practical reasons as well as romantic ones. I hate thinking that all the good sex is behind me, for one thing. It would be awesome to have help around the house – to have someone motivated to get something done when I just can’t get it in gear. (Much like this writing day. It was so easy yesterday!) (Five hundred more! Push through!)

I’m already annoyed because I’m not going to get my active minutes in today. It’s hard to be compulsive and unmotivated at the same time. I hate the feeling of being rushed – of not having enough time to get everything done. I want to get on the road before 4:30 because it’s Friday rush hour and I’m going around the beltway but I also want to clean the bathroom, scoop the litterboxes, and collect all of the paraphernalia I’ve forgotten to pack. It will be ridiculous if I have to level up a suitcase to go to a yoga retreat. Which is going to be interrupted by my service commitment, which is my decision, but ugh. I would prefer not to.

I’ve had an absurd amount of coffee today! The ideas should be flying out of me!

But where does a forty-ten-year-old meet people if not at work? There are people in all the meetings I go to but hardly any I’m interested in dating. My current working theory of relationships is that you should to the things that interest you. Whomever you meet along the way will have at least one interest in common. The problem with this theory is that carried to its logical conclusion, I’ve been in the wrong place for the past blah blah years. I must not be doing what I should be doing if I’m not meeting people I’m attracted to.

I mean, I know it’s all a crapshoot and our lives are run just as much by chance as by anything else. I can’t even complain about the cards I’ve been giving because I am way privileged. That’s something it took me way too long to figure out. I am a white woman who has always been housed and clothed and fed. I’m cis, I’m mostly heterosexual, and my body still does almost everything I ask of it. I have very little room to complain. I know that complaining about mental illness is something of a luxury – look at all the things going right that would otherwise take priority.

I have to thank the Internet for introducing me to people I would have never met otherwise. Yes, there are many cons to this big-data-driven lifestyle and I panic when my smart phone stops working. Social media absolutely has its negatives, but the people that I’ve met there are none of them. I met my first collection of Webpeeps thanks to FARK.com, but it was LiveJournal and Tumblr that expanded my world view.

(Does one last sentence complaining about being short on word count count as more words? I feel like it’s been all stops and starts today after the Randy Rhoads rabbit hole.)

(P.S. I’m ready to go - plus one big bag - at 3:50. I am the worst.)

#nanowrimo #f**k fifty

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mineofilms · 3 years

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The 3As of The Delusional Mind

I have been thinking about writing this BLOG for a while now. It took me a little bit of time to really sort my thoughts out on this subject, as one could see some of the things I will say here, EVERYWHERE… Especially on the INTERNET and that is how this all came to be…

As I usually do, I am crawling down the YouTube Rabbit Hole and I stumble upon this video, “The Bizarre World of Fake Martial Arts,” from YouTuber - Super Eyepatch Wolf. The video is about 30-minutes and in most cases I would not sit through a video of this length on this subject for more than a few minutes. However, after a few minutes I was hooked on what Wolf was presenting here. With 1.22 million subscribers I felt like this cat knew what he was talking about. The video has 6,577,655 views and was uploaded on February 1st, 2020. It has 241,000 Likes over 4,100 dislikes at the time I started writing this blog. So, yeah, all the stats are there to show this video would be something I may get something out of and I did. In a lot of ways it isn’t much different than how I attack subjects.

Now the video is about “The Bizarre World of Fake Martial Arts,” but that is only the label, the thing that is being discussed; the example. This video is really about:

Delusional people…

Their Delusional Behavior…

How they are able to convince people the delusion is real…

How SINISTER it really can be…

The format is just describing how this is associated to Fake Martial Arts People. If you all have the time to spare, the video is a must watch. It connects a lot of dots about how batshit crazy people can be and we allow them to be that way. We basically give them a pass to behave this way. I have never believed this is acceptable. We have become such a society full of pussies that many times people’s insane/delusional behavior gets a free pass. So, let us dig into the 3A's of the delusional mind:

Acceptance…Attention…Appreciation.

Delusional people require these “3As” from ALL people, ALL the time and now our society is becoming like this. We do not usually associated the 3As to people like this. We use buzz words like, “Attention Whore,” a “One Upper” or“Drama Queen.” We’ll use other medical terms like ADHD (Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder) to describe this sort of behavior, but rarely will we refer to these people openly as delusional. If you watch a lot of YouTube of people acting crazy and/or senseless out of the blue with little cause to generate that effect then you might label people “delusional” more often…

Most people know someone like this, either in life or on social media; especially social media. Hell, a lot of the end fighting on social media these days is usually a direct result of a delusional person saying some crazy-outlandish-shit to post; or comment on a post that triggered someone. They posted and/or commented with the intent to trigger… Not just, so it happens to be something triggerable. No, they want you pissed off or feeling insecure.

You do not dare call out delusional person on social media for being delusional. They will troll you and break every single word down to try to find some sort of witty angle that they can come at you with to show you are wrong about them. They will continue to harass you until you give them an acceptable reply, ala Acceptance, Attention, Appreciation. AKA you buy into their delusional fantasy. If people didn’t give these people a free pass back in the day or even now, before they could hide behind the INTERNET, perhaps we would have less sinister delusional people out there.

“There is no delusional idea held by the mentally ill which cannot be exceeded in its absurdity by the conviction of fanatics, either individually or en masse” ~Hoche

“Absurdity by conviction,” to me, defines the delusional. Talk to a few conspiracy theory people about what they believe in. They are completely convinced what they believe is real. It is their conviction about it that is scary as it defies logic, common sense and most of the time real-actual-facts about said subject.

In pretty much every blog I write and the concept of “facts” comes into play I tend to explain it the same way. You cannot base real theories on Pseudo-Science, where is,“Pseudo,” literally means, “not genuine; spurious or sham.” AKA not real…

A fact, by definition, is a theory… A theory is (an unproven fact, and educated guess without verified testing), that is later tested to be NOT FALSE.

That is what a FACT is. I use the basic 1+1=2 analogy. Theory… 1 of something + 1 of something, = 2 of something.

Go and test that theory in all the ways you can ADD a 1 of something to another 1 of something, the answer is?

Well, in this case its easy math. So say we test it 10,000 times. In 10,000 tests of different varieties we get the same answer, 2.

By that process, the scientific method, this theory is now a FACT. Here is the Wikipedia entry for a FACT...

Granted, as more complicated theories come forth more complex testing, variables, more complicated mathematics, and such come into the equation. So it isn’t always this simple. It’s almost always never this simple…

Acceptance – (Psychology) - a favorable attitude toward an idea, situation, person, or group . After reading this textbook definition of acceptance I have a sour feeling Cancel Culture will take these few words and expand on it to a point that there will be this textbook of psychology and a second one just for this word. It is the very feeling/emotion about this that is the problem. If everyone sees reality differently and unique to them, which is true, just not on a perceivable level, then why do people feel they need more acceptance than has been given to them?

I was, for a lot of years, on the outside of a particular bubble, while heavily inside others, or passively in others. I never wanted/needed more from the ones I was passive and heavily entrenched with. However, I always felt like I needed more from the bubble that I was on the outside of. After a time, I stopped caring and treated all bubbles the same, which was confusing at first for my peers, family, friends, girlfriends; girlfriends especially… It went against what most of us were taught about how we treat situations like this.

As I have gotten older I do not feel I need/want anything from any of the bubbles I currently perceive. I do not mean that literally as much as it sounds, but that longing to be part of the bubble I was outside of, yeah, that, isn’t there anymore. I believe, it started when I was young and it took this many years/time for the result to happen, nearly a lifetime or at least, a very large portion of one.

The delusional ones, go in the extreme opposite direction. The older they get, the needier they get. If a person is fixated on you, for whatever reason, it is hard to convince them otherwise.

Subtle, usually doesn’t work very well.

Remember, these people are seeing you in a completely different light than how you see it. It’s so radically different it is that difference that makes one uncomfortable, “creeped-out.” They want you to accept them, they are desperate for you to accept them. That is what makes it scary. You do not know the exact extent of their delusion or delusional state and why they are so heavily convicted with this power of belief that seems to leave you stupefied.

“The analogy I like is this; imagine being able to see the world, but you are deaf, and then suddenly someone gives you the ability to hear things as well, you get an extra dimension of perception. We must remember that we do not observe nature as it actually exists, but nature exposed to our methods of perception. The theories determine what we can or cannot observe... Reality is an illusion, albeit a persistent one. It is entirely possible that behind the perception of our senses, worlds are hidden of which we are unaware. The belief in an external world independent of the perceiving subject is the basis of all natural science. Since, however, sense perception only gives information of this external world or of "physical reality" indirectly, we can only grasp the latter by speculative means. It follows from this that our notions of physical reality can never be final. We must always be ready to change these notions - that is to say - the axiomatic basis of physics - in order to do justice to perceived facts in the most perfect way.” ~Albert Einstein

Attention – (Psychology) - The concentration of awareness on some phenomenon to the exclusion of other stimuli. Attention is awareness of the here and now in a focal and perceptive way. If you have ever dealt with a delusional person on a regular basis you will notice trying to talk about details from the past, be it a story they told you or things in their life, they always seem to never either remember it clearly or they really work hard to change the subject of the conversation. It is all about here and now with them. Its always onto the next manipulation. The next con… The next delusion…

It is about; look at them, fixate on them, pay attention to them,now… Not yesterday or tomorrow, past and future, but “here and now in a focal and perceptive way.” It could be they have to be up in your personal space all the time, you must text them before you go to bed or go to work. It is always attention on them and what they are doing… All the things that you do for yourself must be in direct relation to their self-serving nature.

You must comply with their delusion…

Appreciation – Since in textbook form, appreciation does not have a specific definition in relation to psychology; the word is used many times to describe a person’s emotional state indirectly over directly like the other 2As… However, appreciation is still defined as; “Acknowledging the value and meaning of something—an event, a person, a behavior, an object—and feeling a positive emotional connection to it.”

To “try” and put this in some sort of every day context; the celebrity Instagram posts that are about, being humble and their dreams coming true because of all our support as followers and/or fans, feels like an effort to get people fixated on a person’s accomplishments. The constant political and social takes “some” in the celebrity community takes is always shifting the focus one what “they” are “doing” for “others,” but they do not want to take credit for it but its all over social media. Their face is everywhere…

More self-serving feelings.

In the video, “The Bizarre World of Fake Martial Arts,” all the delusional people being profiled are people in their respective world’s, the leader of their mini cult of followers. The Master, the sensei, your boss, your best friend; perhaps a girlfriend/boyfriend. All people at that could be considered the head of the table; when it comes to people you are surrounded by.

What do we know about people that are in positions of power?

They always seek appreciation for what they do and more specifically what they do for you… You ever borrow some money from a friend? Not a lot of money but a little bit. Even after you pay the friend back. They never let you forget that you asked them for help and that they were the one that helped out. Not someone else, but them. It was them; they want you to know that and never forget about it. They turn around and use that against you too. Anytime they need something, which now, all the sudden, seems like it is more often now since you asked for help from them.

And this is where we come to; “How they are able to convince people the delusion is real…” And… “How SINISTER it really is…”

Predators come in all forms. At a young age we put the face of a monster on the face of the human predator that stalks us. To a child, the human predator is a monster. Sometimes, how the ignorance of a childlike mind can be the most honest thing in the Universe.

In the caveman days all you had to do was overpower the one you wanted to prey on and the fear would cripple them into submission. As the centuries came and gone people got smarter, able to think for themselves under distress and problem solve. That didn’t eliminate strength, power and aggression, but it could no longer 100% of the time work all the time. We invent martial arts and self-defense in general. We invent knives, mace, tasers and guns. Things change. The predator also got smarter. They figured out what a lie can do and if they can make a lie passable as a truth they could use that to manipulate their prey.

However, this technique has a fatal flaw… It only works on the weak-minded. It isn’t that all predators out there are master manipulators. Some are, sure, but you cannot manipulate someone who doesn’t take what you have to say as 100% truth and delusional people require that you do. If you do not believe them or in them then this trick won’t work well. It might for small things here and there, but it won’t work indefinitely.

I have straight up destroyed life-long friendships with former friends; because they were delusional people, and I couldn’t buy into their bullshit anymore. As a friend, a real friend, one tends to stand by their friend, especially when they get heat on them. However, I, personally, have never been a very self-serving personality. I mean this in; I do not do whole lot for others just because or just because they asked, begged, whatever. It isn’t in me to be that way, naturally.

I do things for the people I care about that I know care about me, and if I am not sold at that level, you are not going to sell me on it. So, I have always have one foot in and one foot out with those types of friends. There were a few instances where time got in the way and I couldn’t get rid of said friend till the timing was right. Mentally though; I had checked out as being someone they could manipulate on a reliable basis. Delusional people require you to believe in them and if you do not they have very little mental power over you. These are the few instances that they may leave you be as they only want the 3As from people they can sell the delusion to. If you do not believe them, in them and in their delusion. You do not have with which what they seek most.

Time can, and will, get in the way of critical, logical, thinking…

The prey of the delusional tend to be people that are a little down about their status in life. Be it depression, be it a weight thing, a popularity thing, whatever it might be. They do not feel ACCEPTED and they want to belong. The prey usually are people/kids who lack either/or/both the confidence and the knowledge to really decide for themselves if what this person is, is real or not. They want to believe so badly. They want to believe because they themselves have been convince by the delusional that without their help they will not be able to overcome…

This is exactly how I was trained to be a salesman in the fitness industry. I trained to be personal trainer, because I wanted to help people get through these rough patches in their fitness goals. As I once had people around me to get me where I had been at my pinnacle. Was I out to make a million dollars? No… I knew I was taking about a 50% pay cut going into fitness over doing what I was already doing. What I was already doing, I hated.

I felt so deflated every day…

Drive an hour to work. Work for about 40% less than the industry standard but does double, triple the work for 8-10 hours in an industry full of self-serving personalities that were all about 3As, all the time, as customers. Drive an hour home. Try to squeeze in my own gym time which ended up becoming obsessed about. Basically it was the only time/thing I did that genuinely made me happy and happy about myself. I wound up doing nearly 3 hour workouts, because I was so miserable with my current job. That was how I got involved in the fitness industry.

Flash-forward and all the gyms’ taught me to be was a delusional piece of shit. How to learn about people’s weaknesses and use that to convince them that they cannot achieve their fitness goals unless they sign up with my “personalized training / diet package.” It should be noted we were not allowed to technically teach them anything about diet. Actually that would have been counterproductive to get them to sign back up after their 6 weeks was done, with only moderate gains. Where we are taught to shift blame to them. As we cannot control what they do, eat, after they leave the gym. Hence why, even if qualified to, not to get overly suggestive with dieting.

Anyone that does fitness as a lifestyle knows what you put in your body, when, is far more important than what routine you do and how often you attack your body physically in fitness. Diet, Rest, Exercise is what most Doctors tend to say. Notice the word Diet frequently comes first and not because D is before E or R…

So the fitness industry is part of a mass-delusion. I have written about fitness in the past, a lot, and about how the industry is a hideous fashion show of itself. Just go on Instagram for a few minutes under a few fitness related hashtags, you’ll see. I was heavily involved in training all sorts of people and selling products, both in person and over the INTERNET. I was more than happy when I finally said, FUCK YOU, to the Industry. I lift now, only because it still gets me like it did the first time I lifted as a kid.

I was fooled about the fitness industry, because delusional people tried to get me to buy into this mass-delusion. I did what they said, but I never believed in it. Ultimately; that was what freed me from this going next level and actually changing me. Changing me to become the predator.

I wanted none of that.

I went back to jobs that made me miserable over losing my humanity. So when I talk about the 3As like this I do feel like I have some perspective here about how delusional minds work. My professional life, my personal life, even in my dating life.

It’s everywhere… People want to belong… People want to feel accepted…

When they don’t most of their life and someone comes along, makes a lot of huge claims on how they can make their life better that is the person a delusional predator wants to consume. You see all these older women being Catfished by people overseas for money and its all the same. The woman is lonely… She doesn’t feel good about herself. What does it say about her confidence if she is willing to let it all out on the line with a complete stranger she cannot see, really talk to or interact with? All she literally sees are texts on a screen. It is her fantasy and delusion that makes her believe that this could be real. There are plenty of signs in the internet dating world to tell if a person is real or not. If their intentions have any credibility to them. It isn’t that much different than the real world.

People behave like people.

If a person really cares about you they will do things to show that. Not just words on a screen, empty promises, but people will believe in what they want to believe. Even if you have proof, facts and other compelling data the person won’t believe you. That is how serious they hold onto these delusions.

Do not allow a delusion personality corrupt your mind. They will poison you, turn your reality upside down with a whole lot of nonsensical logic that they demand you to accept at face value without question. If you see this and are not 100% confident in yourself find someone who is to deal with that. You cannot convince them they are wrong. Only someone 100% not a believer in this specific delusion is able to defeat the delusion.

Sometimes KARMA comes when you least expect…

One of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought. ~Albert Einstein

The 3As of The Delusional Mind by David-Angelo Mineo 9/29/2021 3,604 Words

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edtechlg · 3 years

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YouTube & The Twitter Adventure

This week’s adventure took me into familiar territory, Youtube.com. I’ve always used videos from YouTube to enhance my classroom lessons, create extension activities, add supplementary resources to make lessons accessible to different types of learners, and even learn how to do things myself outside of the classroom. It is amazing to me how little the platform has changed over time, but still is one of the most widely used across all demographics. While I had always looked to YouTube videos for easily accessible information, I had never considered that both my students and educators were using it as anyone would a typical search engine. Even though I use YouTube as a go-to for information in both my personal AND professional life, I have never really seen it as a research tool, and I would bet that most of my colleagues in education have a similar view of the platform. So this week I used YouTube to do a little research on a topic that is still fairly foreign to me… Twitter.

I stated before my distaste for Twitter, but I’m willing to admit some of the malice I am experiencing still may be due to my lack of knowledge on the platform. So, I used YouTube to research how to use Twitter more effectively. Maybe that will help remedy the problem. I went down the proverbial rabbit hole of Twitter Basics videos which led me to all different types of strategies for posting times and days. Then, I came across Syd Lance who had some content posted about using Twitter analytics to increase your followers. I totally understand the irony of a guy with just over 700 followers on YouTube giving advice about social media marketing, but he had some pretty interesting suggestions for manicuring your online presence. I won’t give away all of his suggestions, but he did mention the necessity of using an outside platform like Hootsuite to manage posting times. This seems to be the biggest theme I’ve recognized throughout Twitter is catching users at the right time. The most valuable lesson I learned from this portion of my YouTube research was to meet your audience where they are, and this is completely transferable to the classroom. The whole reason we are bringing tools like Twitter and YouTube into the classroom is to engage students. As social media turns engagement into a science, teachers need to understand these strategies to push back with engaging content of their own on platforms that students use for leisure to blend content with non-academic media. This makes it easier for students to engage with the content and enables students to interact with it for reasons other than purely academic where the stakes are not as high and students are more willing to take risks.

As an Instructional Technology Specialist, all of this talk about engaging students with Twitter took my thoughts back to engaging teachers through the use of Twitter. Admittedly, Twitter is not as widely used among some (shall we say) more experienced educational circles, but a good chunk of teachers do engage with the platform to score ideas from EdTech or curriculum experts. Younger teachers are more likely to use Twitter to search for articles and resources related to instruction, but older teachers like myself are still stuck to Facebook, Pinterest, or Instagram. This variety of use necessitates some sort of multi-platform publishing program like the aforementioned Hootsuite. As I began to discuss with my colleagues when teachers engaged with social media, most reported lunch time as a ubiquitous catch up period for social media scrolling. If I want to catch more teachers at a time when they are looking for resources and information about lessons, activities, etc. during the week after 7 would also be a perfect time to post for those social media brain breaks that are all too common during grading/planning sessions. I would also be able to catch that Pre-Monday panic by posting Sunday afternoon when most teachers are planning for the week ahead. After seeing how much I can learn about Twitter from using YouTube, I had some ideas about using YouTube in the classroom for things other than supplemental or engaging videos.

When opening a unit on research or even just a new concept, rather than curating the content that students will interact with when introducing a concept, a teacher can use YouTube by having students search for a research topic or concept. Students mostly encounter general information that is very comparable to a typical lecture during a hearty round of YouTube searching. Since most YouTube content is secondary information, students can compare similarities and differences from the videos they watched while exploring the topic. Then, students should determine which information they learned is most important to the topic or concept being introduced. Most likely the information that is shared and repeated in the most YouTube content will be the most important information pertaining to the given concept.

Any good content creator will list the references they used to create their content. Students can take this YouTube exploration one step further by finding the referenced sources provided in the YouTube videos to try and get closer to the source materials. Teachers can help students identify important figures and thinkers related to the research topic or concept that is being taught by identifying and tracing the reference sources to their originators.

One major issue to consider when trying to use YouTube in the classroom is that it is so popular with teachers, students, parents, and everyone else that it is typically highly restricted within school networks. Make sure potential research terms or typical tags are added to your campus/district’s allowed list, and do this ahead of time. There’s nothing that derails student engagement with a topic faster than legitimate searching being blocked because an algorithm can’t differentiate academic searching from off-task searching.

All in all this experiment with YouTube has just reminded me of how much appreciation I have for the platform. For something that has so much use for academics I don’t immediately associate it with being academic. Much like Wikipedia has grown out of its unreliable source moniker through crowd-sourced editing, and platform fact-checking, YouTube has formed a compendium of resources that has garnered credibility from the community. If this tool is so ubiquitous that we all go there for every day how- to’s, then using YouTube is a life skill. We should be encouraging our students to use this tool to prepare them for life, because you can always find a video about how to do it on YouTube.

#youtube #edtech #etec527

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emilyplaysotome · 6 years

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Dating Diaries - Chapter 4 - One Day

Inspired by real events, Emi enters the dating world after her long term relationship ends. Determined to move forward, she starts dating and quickly finds herself in over her head.

In case you missed it, here are the previous chapters:

Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3

I paced like a caged lioness in my now spotless apartment.

I’d cleaned every inch of it in anticipation of Kazumi’s arrival, and as our reunion became more and more imminent, the anxiety within me began to spiral out of control.

On this particular visit, we’d planned for him to stay with me in my apartment - rather than get a hotel room which seemed like a waste.

I already regretted that decision seeing as how I was mentally preparing to ask Kazumi straight up how he felt about me. With no hotel room available, should the answer be the one I didn’t care for I’d be forced to suffer through a night with a man who had rejected me.

This would be the fifth time we saw each other in real life.

It would be the third month of knowing each other as we communicated most days over TalkTime. I knew that my feelings were starting to become something real, and at times I felt as if I were on a runaway train with Kazumi as the conductor.

I’d taken the time spent away from Makoto (who was on holiday but still texted), before Kazumi’s arrival to reflect and had realized that our whole nebulous relationship had played out on his terms up until this point.

Granted, I had not explicitly made any demands but it was obvious that he was in charge. We spoke on his terms - when he had time, not when I wanted to.

He made me wonder how he felt about me - if I was just a fling or maybe something more...

...and I needed to know if I could be something more because my heart was beginning to hope.

Hey Sunshine! I’m almost at your place - do you need me to pick you up anything?

No, that’s sweet but I’m really nervous. Just hurry up and get here already...

To that Kazu sent me a selfie of himself in the cab he was currently en route in, along with the caption, “How can you be nervous over such a simple guy with such a simple smile?”

You had to laugh at the fact that an award winning author with an impressive wikipedia page and tragic life story would dare call himself “simple”, but that was just another reason I adored him so much.

He was full of contradictions and always fun.

You’re the least simple person I know. See you soon.

On our second date, Kazumi had made the trip from Kyoto to Tokyo under the guise that he had “meetings” to attend. He had gotten a hotel room for himself and texted me the day of to his arrival to ask if I was around.

His visit had come after 2 weeks of being apart and texting everyday.

He’d told me that he missed my eyes, and hands, and smile the day after we’d met. From there he’d ask me about my day, or tell me about his, always letting me know that I was beautiful and that he missed me despite barely knowing me.

A few days before he’d arrived I had a sneaking suspicion he might try and visit as he covertly attempted to figure out what my plans were that weekend via TalkTime. When he did show up, the thing that surprised me most was when he bashfully admitted that the real purpose of this trip was not work meetings on Monday but to see me again.

I remember being happy and also incredibly freaked out that he would go so out of his way for me - a woman he’d only met once.

Mostly though, I was happy.

Neither Shizuo, nor any other man I’d ever met had done something so romantic on what seemed like a whim, and even though I made it clear that I was not going to sleep with him, I still ended up spending the night - talking and cuddling with him until I fell asleep in his arms.

We didn’t see each other for three weeks after that.

While apart, we continued to talk but he admitted that he was not able to keep up with my texting. What used to be in-depth, hour long conversations became a bit more infrequent but with that said, I didn’t mind.

I got used to his weird old-man texts.

For a writer, Kazu was pretty funny over TalkTime.

Whenever he was upset he’d used multiple “!” and whenever I sent him something he liked (for example my corporate headshot for our company website) he’d use extra consonants to try and express that he thought I was pretty (”wowwwwwwww” he’d said).

These little Kazu-isms filled my heart with warmth, and I giggled over how pure they were in a sense, especially considering the fact that they were coming from a 40 year old man.

There was one night that we were talking when Kazu told me I’d become special to him.

It had been out of left field to a degree - I’d told him that I’d read a book of his finally and as a result had gone down a bit of an intellectual rabbit hole which led me to an article that I thought he might appreciate.

Sunshine...I am so happy my words make you think like this :) I am looking forward to reading this article.

You don’t have to but you might like it. I thought it was a good “truth is stranger than fiction” companion to your murder mystery.

I will read it! I want to say this too...I know that I’m going to care about you forever and I hope that I’ll be able to keep you close to me in some way...even if you find some young man you like better than me.

I can’t see liking anyone more than you Kazu.

I’d meant that too.

A week after that exchange Kazu came to Tokyo and it was during that visit when I’d learn about his “other lady” in Kyoto per my request. I respected and appreciated his transparency with me, and because it was obvious that he was honest despite the discomfort in having to be, I felt safe enough to sleep with him.

Before Shizuo I’d been with a few other guys, but being with Kazumi was like a completely different experience for me. It was passionate and animalistic, but somehow also kind and loving.

When he left I found myself feeling happier than I’d ever been in my life, and a week later he came back, noting that he “had to see me again before a month of [his] book tour.”

That fourth date was when he really started to open up to me.

While in his arms he quietly told me about his childhood, and how at 7 years old his parents had died in a car accident. As a writer, he was able to go into detail about his grief and trauma surrounding the incident and I found tears quietly streaming down my face as he spoke.

He also told me about his first heartbreak (though not in detail), and how in some ways that was just as difficult as losing his parents. He quietly explained (and apologized) for keeping people at arm’s length for fear of growing too close and losing someone special.

“I’ve lost too many people in my life Sunshine...but I can already tell that I don’t want to lose you.”

Those moments are the reason why I held on to Kazumi in his absence.

They’re the reason why I pined for him despite the fact that he was unable to be as “present” as Makoto had been in the week we’d been together.

They felt deeper...but at the same time words are pretty, but actions speak louder.

Knowing that there were many moments that Kazumi was in Kyoto or elsewhere using the app we’d met on (thanks to public geotracking) plunged my heart into darkness. I knew that it had only been four dates spread over 2 months, but if he had asked me to be his I would have said yes without a second thought.

Why did he feel the need to go out with others if I was someone he was sure he didn’t want to lose?

He was maybe lying...

...or just selfish.

These were the thoughts that plagued me while apart from him, and I knew that on this fifth date I would need to get answers - even if it meant that this would be the last time I’d ever see him.

The intercom rang and I could feel myself shaking with nerves as I buzzed him into my apartment building. I slowly unlocked the door, preparing myself to see him after a month.

What if he looked different? What if he thought I looked different? What if we didn’t -

“Sunshine...”

Kazumi looked at me with those kind eyes of his that were never quite the same in the photos we sent each other while apart. He held out a bouquet of flowers for me (tulips to be exact) and with a grin added.

“It came with flower food. Very advanced.”

“Kazu...”

I could feel myself starting to shake.

My nerves were getting the better of me, and I could feel affection welling up to the point I wondered if I should tell him that I wasn’t just starting to fall for him, but that I had already fallen.

Kazumi gently rested the flowers on the small table in my foyer and closed the front door behind him before taking me in his arms.

“I missed you so much Sunshine. I missed this so much.”

“Me too.”

I don’t know how long we stood there, but I knew that I was the happiest I’d been all week.

I knew that unless something went awry, I was just going to fall more hopelessly in love with the man in front of me and because of how deep I already was in, I needed to know how he felt or run the risk of setting myself up for heartbreak so soon after Shizuo.

I know it sounds dramatic, but that moment at my door I wished that time would stretch on in a way that allowed me to live in that moment for longer than I’d be able.

I found myself so scared that the answers wouldn’t be what I wanted, and that this was the last time I would be near him like this. That moment of being able to feel him and hold onto him was a moment that let me love him and pretend that he might love me too.

However, time doesn’t work that way and before I knew it he pulled his body away from mine before kissing me gently.

“You’ll get a real kiss once I’ve eaten and your nerves have calmed.”

I nodded, unable to speak, still shaking from the anxiety.

“I found a curry place around the corner from here - is that ok?”

“Yeah.”

“Ah Emi. My sweet Emi. I really did miss you.”

The walk over to the restaurant was uneventful.

I’d managed to stop shaking and had started psyching myself up to deliver a speech of sorts where I would tell Kazumi that I couldn’t figure him out and that I wanted him to be honest about what his feelings were towards me.

I prepared myself for my biggest fear, which was that he would say I was fun and cute and if this stopped being fun for me he would understand.

“Kazu...”

“Alright. I know what I want - do you know what you want?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh boy,” he said with a chuckle. “I know that look of yours...”

“I...”

“You’ve got all the time in the world with me today Emi - let’s order first and then you can say as much as you want, alright?”

He reached across the table and took my hand in his, rubbing the back of it gently with his thumb. It reminded me of our first date, when we’d sat together at a restaurant and he’d somehow managed to do the same thing despite the fact that up until that point I hadn’t let a man touch me since Shizuo.

For some reason that day, I’d let him and with a mischievous smile he’d asked me if I liked the way he touched me.

I did then, and I did now.

When the waiter had left us, I took a deep breath and delivered my speech to Kazumi.

I told him that I couldn’t figure him out. I told him that he hid his feelings too well behind his words and his playfulness. I told him that I was starting to feel a lot for him and that I was frightened - convinced at times that I was just a young plaything to him that was nothing more than an exciting fuck, which in turn helped him to feel youthful again.

I asked him what he wanted from me.

What this was exactly and what his ideal scenario was with us.

And then I waited - my eyes glued to a spot on the table for fear of what his expression might be.

“Sunshine...”

“What?”

“Sunshine...look at me.”

Kazumi’s gaze was soft and sweet, and I felt myself relax a little under it.

“I don’t take a train 6 hours just because you’re good in the sack. I mean you are...but that’s not why I do it.”

“So why then?”

“Mmmm why indeed...”

“Kazu stop - I’m serious. I know you’re seeing that...other lady and I’m just confused why you bother when you have someone in the same city. And that’s not even a jealousy thing - it just doesn’t make sense to me.”

“It’s simple. I really like you Emi. I want you in my life - I can already tell that you’re someone who is going to be really special to me.”

“But what’s your ideal in all this? Like...I know you’ve said you don’t want to know about if I’m seeing anyone but do you care if I am?”

“Of course. I don’t want to know because I think I’d go mad with jealousy.”

“But then...I just don’t understand what you want.”

“What I want...I guess...maybe one day when you feel more ready, and when I’m ready...you’d be my girlfriend. I’d visit you here and you’d come to Kyoto to see me.”

"But what about...”

“There’s no future there for me, just fun...but you’re not there yet anyway right? That ex of yours...you’re not over him.”

Kazumi was right, but in that moment it just felt like a bit of an excuse. That said, I had no real retort.

The waiter took advantage of my pause to deliver our food, and with a big smile Kazumi exclaimed, “wow this looks great!” before taking a bite.

We ate in silence for a bit before Kazu looked at me with a serious expression and asked, “You’re not satisfied, are you? Tell me Sunshine - what do you want?”

“Huh?”

“What’s your ideal? If you could have things your way - what would that be?”

It was obvious - a world in which Kazumi lived full-time in Tokyo and was committed to dating me and only me. However, that wasn’t reality and if I thought about it, I found that my chest tightened ever so slightly at the thought of rushing into another relationship so quickly after Shizuo, and with that my bottom lip began to quiver on its own.

“I don’t know. I feel so confused.”

“Emi...it’s okay. There’s no rush. I’m not going anywhere...”

“I just...I don’t know what it is about you Kazu. You scare me so much. In the past when I’ve felt this way it’s never been reciprocated and I just feel like there’s gotta be a catch or something. I’m so scared you’re going to break my heart and after Shizuo - I just don’t think I can handle it. So please, if you’re the good person I think you are, and if there’s any chance you’re going to hurt me let’s just say goodbye after today.”

“Don’t say that. That’s too sad - please, don’t say that. I’d be heartbroken if you stopped talking to me.”

I knew he was serious by the way he looked at me. He could tell that I was starting to pull away, tempted to cut and run, and he grabbed my hand the way I liked, lacing his fingers through mine and giving it a squeeze.

“Don’t go anywhere, okay? Let’s just enjoy this together.”

At that moment, something changed for me.

I think it was due to the fact that it was obvious that he meant what he said. At the very least I was not just some plaything and his feelings for me were incredibly real.

I had a hard time believing that I consumed his thoughts as much as he did mine, but at least I knew I was there somewhat.

It’s hard to be in the presence of the great Kazumi Kagami and not enjoy yourself. The ease in which he brings people out, and to that point, the ease in which he allows me to feel comfortable as myself soon had me back to normal.

By the end of our meal I was laughing and grilling him about all his adventures on the road.

I learned about the nights out with his publisher, heard funny stories, and got travel and restaurant recommendations as he happily disclosed what he got up to while we were apart without realizing that many of those nights I figured his silence meant that he was with another woman.

Instead I learned that he often would drink with Kotoko (his editor) and the people who organized each event, often returning to his hotel room in the early morning and ending his day by reading whatever it was I had sent him via TalkTime.

With a playful twinkle he took my hand as we left the restaurant to walk around my neighborhood and whispered, “Reading your texts made me feel a little less lonely in that room every night.”

That sentiment alone made me feel loved, and soon all the concerns I’d had about continuing down this path with him had melted away.

We were back to being our happiest, best selves together as we enjoyed the park near my apartment before watching a film, and finally heading home for the night.

Every moment was filled with affection from Kazumi who either held my hand, or my waist, or kissed my cheek as we went from place to place. He not only had an ability to get me to relax and be myself but to make the person I was feel special and loved.

And perhaps it was for that reason alone that come nightfall I felt in my heart that I loved him.

At the time, it wasn’t a scary thought but a nice one.

I had been so skeptical that I could ever be capable of feeling something like that again after Shizuo had betrayed me so deeply, yet I found myself naked in the arms of a man I’d grown to love after a few short months and in a way far deeper, and more honest than I ever had with Shizuo.

From the second I’d met Kazumi I’d felt this instant spark. Nothing had to be worked on - it was like magic.

I thought that kerosine and fire feeling would quickly wear off yet every time we were together it was the same and it had stretched on far longer than I thought it possible.

For the first time in my life I wondered if it was possible to convert that elusive instant connection into something that could stand the test of time.

Kazumi nuzzled my neck and I squirmed in his arms until I was facing him again. Our eyes locked, and my giggles subsided and instead were replaced by a deep feeling of contentment I don’t think I’ve ever felt before. I stared deep into his eyes, which at the moment reflected back the same placid feeling I was experiencing.

My hand acted on its own, cupping his cheek before gently stroking his hair, eventually pushing it back and off his forehead. I then lovingly touched the hair on the side of his head, and then the back of his neck as I brought his face closer to mine and kissed him in a way which I hoped would communicate my feelings without words.

I don’t know when it was that we fell asleep after that.

We quietly talked for a bit about our past relationships and once more, Kazumi opened up about the loss of an ex girlfriend (in far more detail this time) who was the root of why he was so noncommittal. At the time my back was to him but I could hear the hurt in his voice and felt a tear trickle down his face onto mine.

“You deserve a guy with a lot less baggage Sunshine.”

“You know a very smart man once told me that every experience you’ve been through, good or bad, makes you who you are today. And I really like the person you are today so I don’t mind.”

“Emi...I’m not used to having my own words turned on me...”

Kazumi buried his face in my hair by my neck and I felt his body as it held me tight, letting go of all the quiet tears he’d been holding inside.

Intimacy is a funny thing.

Some people mistake sex for intimacy, but what we experienced that night was intimacy in its truest form. Both of us allowed each other to be fully naked in front of the other, and as we opened up we were relieved to find that the person beside us did not push us aside, but instead pulled us closer.

Having experienced real intimacy with Kazumi reminded me of how superficial my current relationship with Makoto was.

This was not to say Mako and I could not achieve something deeper, but in that moment if I had to choose there was no real choice.

It was Kazumi.

It’s always been Kazumi.

That realization only made his departure that much more difficult.

“I wish I could keep you,” I muttered sadly, clinging onto him in my foyer.

“I’ll be back soon enough. I can’t have you getting sick of me.”

“I’d never get sick of you. You’re too weird, and funny, and handsome.”

“Emi...my beautiful Emi. My heart - I’m so happy we met.”

He kissed me again for a final time before leaving. It was a long, drawn out sweet kiss that tricked me into believing he loved me as much as I loved him.

We had not said those words, both cognizant that it was far too soon to say something so serious, but my heart whispered them as we kissed.

“Goodbye.”

“Not goodbye - see you soon Sunshine.”

An hour later I was coming down from the high of seeing Kazumi.

In the middle of our movie date, I’d covertly checked my TalkTime in the bathroom and saw Makoto had let me know he was back in Toyko and was hoping to meet up. I told him that I had a friend from out of town visiting, but that I could meet him the following day (Sunday).

We quickly made plans and I felt like a bit of a player as I’d returned to Kazumi.

All this had occurred before we’d shared such an intimate night together, and now that I had another date in a few hours I found myself conflicted.

I didn’t want to lead Makoto on, but technically we just started seeing each other.

Would I have to disclose what I’d been up to? He knew that since my ex (who cheated on me) I had rebounded with someone else and not gotten tested. Kazumi’s status was the same - one additional partner and protected sex.

Either way, I couldn’t in good conscience go on a date with Mako until I showered and changed my sheets...

...just in case.

I took my time getting ready and thinking things over. I was so in my head that I didn’t realize I had pending messages - one from Kazumi and two from Makoto.

I opened Mako’s messages first:

Hey! I’m looking forward to seeing you again :)

Do you still want me to come over around 7?

I wasn’t sure. Seeing Kazumi reminded me how much I liked him and it was so hard to think about shifting gears and seeing Makoto even though I knew we had something together as well.

Not wanting to decide in that moment, I opened Kazu’s text:

Thanks for being so sweet and kind and beautiful and funny.

It was sweet and ironically not super elegant for a man who was a brilliant writer.

For some reason, as my heart swelled, I found myself compelled to open the app I met Kazumi on. He was only in town for a few more hours and we’d been apart two at most.

I wanted to believe that after our weekend he wouldn’t need to log in.

He would feel so full of love and affection that a dating app would be the last thing on his mind, however when I went to see his profile my heart sank.

He was on and only a few miles away.

I knew that he was not mine and that I was not his.

I knew that I was a hypocrite, seeing as how I used the apps still and even worse, had another young man waiting in the wings to see me.

Despite understanding that logically, my emotions got the better of me. Not wanting to feel like the “loser” in the situation I found that fear gripped me in an uncontrollable way and I wrote back to Makoto:

I was just thinking of all the reasons why I’m happy we met. 7 works - see you then.

Read Chapter 5

So...I’m curious if you guys have experienced what our MC is going through. These apps seem to create the perfect environment for jealousy and paranoia to flourish. Has anyone ever confronted someone they were seeing about always using them? Do you think Emi should ask Kazumi why he’s always on?

As always, I hope you guys are enjoying them as much as my purely fictional works and that you’ll comment and share with thoughts.

If you’re feeling really generous I hope you’ll consider buying me a coffee!

Thanks for reading and if you want to be untagged just let me know!

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Thanks for reading and let me know if you’re not tagged and would like to be!

#Kazumi Kagami #makoto morimachi #my last first kiss fanfic #liar! uncover the truth fanfic #voltage fanfic #my last first kiss #voltage games #voltage romance sims #voltage inc #voltage fan

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writtenlastminute · 4 years

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A Descent into the Dark and Gritty

I should explain the article this week is definitely more of a commentary than anything else and that these are my own opinions and do not reflect the opinions of everyone on this website. “I recently got into True Crime Podcasts” is possibly a very common statement these days. Nowadays, people are inundated with options on practically any way you consume media. Youtube? Top 5 and Buzzfeed Unsolved. Netflix? Making a Murderer. Podcasts? My Favourite Murder. These are just the popular offerings. I come from a family of lawyers, and whether I liked it or not crime and law was a common topic of conversation around the dining table. We often talked about cases. Even the media my family consumed leaned towards crime fiction or true crime.

When I was growing up I recall watching several documentaries on various crimes. I don’t remember when I stopped, probably after I discovered I didn’t like blood, thanks to fictitious shows like Casualty or a poorly advised dive into horror. Alternatively, perhaps it was when I realised that these documentaries were real events that happened to real people. However, by the time I was a teenager I didn’t like true crime one bit and would often leave the room if it came on. Even into my early twenties, I swore off crime novels, even fictitious ones like Gone Girl as “just not my thing”. So you may be wondering how I got back into true crime. The short answer is Tumblr. For two years I was bombarded with Gifs and memes of a tall gangly man and his shorter friend yelling at ghosts, demons and “connecting two dots”. Around this time I had a roommate who was really into True Crime, who I will call Beth. Beth does not have a stomach of steel, but would occasionally stop our endless scroll through whatever streaming service and ask can we watch documentaries on grizzly things like the Slender Man attack. We did and while I felt squicked out I was not too horrified. I moved away and last October I gave in and watched Buzzfeed Unsolved. (Turns out Beth also watched Buzzfeed Unsolved and this season we sent messages to each other comparing what we believed happened in the cases.) One of the episodes for Buzzfeed Unsolved was actually an advert for I am the Night. When I looked it up, I realised it was about the infamous Black Dahlia murder and produced by Patty Jenkins and Chris Pine. I like Wonder Woman so during the start of the lockdown I decided “Why not?” and binged the show over three nights. While I was looking up the show I noticed there was a mention of a podcast on the Wikipedia page and decided it wouldn’t hurt to listen. I am obsessed with finding out what is true in an adaptation of real events so this seemed interesting to me. So I listened. Looking back at my recent journey through the rabbit hole of the true crime genre, I am unsure how to feel. To a certain degree, hearing about these crimes seems pervasive for both the victims and their families. They’ve lost loved ones in violent ways and now every aspect of their lives and that of the victims is under speculation. I feel sorry for their families and friends having to hear their loved ones’ death talked about so flippantly. They aren’t allowed to grieve in peace. Most of the time, these are normal people who don’t expect or want fame. Most of these murders or crimes, especially the famous ones, are horrendous or creepy and I don’t just mean how they died or what they went through beforehand. Why would people do that to another person? However, I feel I have no place to complain; I am listening to this stuff in my bedroom. If I have a nightmare, I have my cat and some tea. However, for other people these are hells they may never or will never escape. Despite this, it makes it all the more inspiring when you hear the stories of the survivors. For someone to have survived these things and come the other side is an impressive feat. Hearing these stories inspire hope more than most fictitious stories do as these are real people, not trained to deal with death or fictional heroes. The fact that people can survive these events is optimistic. If people can do that, they can survive a lot of things. It means there is hope and people can exist after trauma. Read the full article

#Opinion #Podcast #TrueCrime

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lanadelreyfiles-blog · 7 years

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Lana Del Rey: Wild At Heart ‘Is this the mysterious Lana Del Rey?’ — set to release her era-defining fifth LP, pop's dream-queen shoots the LA breeze with grunge hellraiser Courtney Love. Editor's Note: This interview has been condensed from the print edition. Courtney Love’s gravelly voice is unmistakable on the line next to Lana Del Rey’s syrupy sing-song: “Is this the one and only Courtney Love?” It’s been a while since any of us has heard from Del Rey. She’s calling Love from her home in California a few weeks after releasing “Love”, the booming, lounge-y first single off her upcoming fifth studio album, Lust for Life. Although Del Rey’s last record, Honeymoon, was released only a year and a half ago, that particular span has felt like forever. An anti-anthem of sorts, “Love” takes into account turbulent times, offering commiseration as opposed to call-to-action. Lines like “the world is yours and you can’t refuse it” slip under a ringing chorus that proclaims, “You get ready, you get all dressed up to go nowhere in particular.” The video rockets a group of teenagers, current-day devices in hand, to a vintage-rendered outer space. It’s a message that could easily be mistaken for nihilism. A month earlier, though, Del Rey pre-empted criticism by Instagramming the Nina Simone quote, “An artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times.” Which is perhaps what Del Rey does best. Lust for Life could be called the next chapter in a long-running investigation into era-non-specific youth qualifiers that started with the self-directed video for her breakout single, “Video Games”. That song perfectly crystallised a mood and a moment, splicing an at-home aesthetic heretofore only found in webcam vlogs with imagery of a 1950s red carpet, an iPod billboard, and Paz de la Huerta falling in front of paparazzi. While Del Rey often insists that she’s lost in reverie, obsessed by the past, her music is a poignant reflection of a generation that continues to resist expectations. It’s a study, too, of femininity in general. For isn’t womanhood itself, she appears to ask, steeped in anachronism? Both Lana Del Rey and Courtney Love write about irresistible institutions – Hollywood, mainstream acceptance and powerful men. The heartbreaking twist of each narrative is that the singers will always be outside the circles they describe desiring. While Love deftly played the unfiltered outsider as frontwoman with Hole through the 90s, in the age of infinite footnotes, Del Rey has taken up the role of oblivious misfit, more prone to a pout than a scream. Two decades apart in age, similarities between the two women (who played eight shows together in 2015 for Del Rey’s Endless Summer tour) are irrefutable. What if Love had come of age when Del Rey did, when every professional move she made was documented on Wikipedia within moments? Or if Del Rey grew up in a time when she would have to petition for music reviews, even as the wife of a huge rock star? Would one more closely resemble the other? Either way, each has become a Cassavetes-esque tragic figure in her performed world, toeing the line between outlying cult hero and revered pop star. “People ask me about musical similarities between our stuff,” Del Rey says to Love, who is calling from a movie set in Vancouver. “I just know it’s the kind of music I listen to all the time: when I’m driving, or when I’m alone, or when I’m with friends.” You can buy a copy of Dazed’s latest issue here. Taken from the spring/summer issue.

Lana Del Rey: So, we could just talk about whatever... Like those burning palm trees that you had in the ‘Malibu’ video. I didn’t think they were real! Courtney Love: Back when rock’n’roll had budget, you mean? Oh my God, Lana, setting palm trees on fire was so fun. You thought they were CGI? LDR: Yeah. CL: God, you’re so young. I burned down palm trees. In my day, darling, you used to have to walk to school in the snow. So, since I toured with you, I got kind of obsessed and went down this Lana rabbit hole and became – not like I’m wearing a flower crown, Lana, don’t get ideas – but I absolutely love it. I love it as much as I love PJ Harvey. LDR: That’s amazing because, maybe it’s slightly well documented, but I love everything you do, everything you have done – I couldn’t believe that you came on the tour with me. CL: I read that you spend a lot of time mastering and mixing. Is that true on this new record? LDR: Oh my God, yeah, it’s killing me. It’s because I spend so much time with the engineers working on the reverb. Because I actually don’t love a glossy production. If I want a bit of that retro feel, like that spring reverb or that Elvis slap, sometimes if you send it to an outside mixer they might try and dry things up a bit and push them really hard on top of the mix so it sounds really pop. And Born to Die did have a slickness to it, but, in general, I have an aversion to things that sound glossy all over – you have to pick and choose. And some people say, ‘It’s not radio-ready if it isn’t super-shiny from top to bottom.’ But you know this. Whoever mixed your stuff is a genius. Who did it? CL: Chris Lord-Alge and Tom Lord-Alge. Kurt was really big on mastering. He sat in every mastering session like a fiend. I never was big on mastering because it’s such a pain in the butt. LDR: It is a pain in the ass. CL: I think my very, very favourite song of yours – you’re not gonna like this because it’s early – is ‘Blue Jeans’. I mean, ‘You’re so fresh to death and sick as ca-cancer’? Who does that? LDR: I have to say, that track has this guy (Del Rey collaborator) Emile Haynie all over it. I remember ‘Blue Jeans’ was more of a Chris Isaak ballad and then I went in with him and it came out sounding the way it does now. I was like, ‘That’s the power of additional production.’ The song was on the radio in the UK, on Radio 1, and I remember thinking, ‘Fuck, that started off as a classical composition riff that I got from my composer friend, Dan Heath.’ It was, like, six chords that I started singing on. CL: You have that lyric (on the song), ‘You were sorta punk rock, I grew up on hip hop.’ Did you really grow up on hip hop? LDR: I didn’t find any good music until I was right out of high school, and I think that was just because, coming from the north country, we got country, we got NPR, and we got MTV. So Eminem was my version of hip-hop until I was 18. Then mayb I found A Tribe Called Quest. CL: Have you met Marshall Mathers? LDR: No. Sometimes he namechecks me in his songs. I called the head of my label (Interscope CEO) John Janick and I was like 'OK in this last song (Big Sean's "No Favors") when Eminem says 'I'm about to run over a chick, Del Rey CD in’. Did he mean he wanted to run me over or was he listening to me while he ran someone over?'. And John was like, 'No, no he was listening to you while he ran someone over' and I was 'Ok, cool.' CL: You got namechecked by Eminem? oh my god that is a jewel in the crown. LDR: Just a little ruby. CL: Yeah, it's not really a diamond, but it's a ruby. LDR: Not like touring with Courtney Love. That's like an Elizabeth Taylor diamond. CL: You know, I met Elizabeth Taylor. I was with Carrie Fisher at (Taylor’s) Easter party and she was taking six hours to come downstairs. LDR: I love it. CL: I looked at Carrie and I said, ‘This is not worth it,’ and Carrie said, ‘Oh, yes it is.’ So we snuck upstairs and, Lana, when you go past the Warhol of Elizabeth Taylor as you’re sneaking up the stairs and it says ‘001’, you start getting goosebumps. And then you see her room and it’s all lavender, like her eyes. And she’s in the bathroom getting her hair done by this guy named José Eber who wears a cowboy hat and has long hair, and I’m like, ‘What am I doing here? I’m not Hollywood royalty.’ And the first words out of her mouth are, like, ‘Fuck you, Carrie, how ya doin’?’ She was so salty but such a goddess at the same time. LDR: She was so salty. The fact that she married Richard Burton twice – and all the stories you hear about those famous, crazy, public brawls – she was just up for it. Up for the trouble. CL: So back to you. What I hear in your music is that you’ve created a world, you’ve created a persona, and you’ve created this kind of enigma that I never created but if I could go back I would create. LDR: Are you even being serious right now? I don’t even know if your legacy could get any bigger. You’re one of the only people I know whose legacy precedes them. Just the name ‘Courtney Love’ is… You’re big, honey. You’re Hollywood. (laughs). CL: You know what, darling? I started real early. I started stalking Andy Warhol before I could even think about it. And you kind of did the same, from my understanding. That ‘I want to make it’ thing. And there’s nothing wrong with that. LDR: No, there’s not. There’s nothing wrong with it when you do the rest of it for the right reasons. If music is really in your blood and you don’t want to do anything else and you don’t really care about the money until later. It’s also about the vibe, not to be cliched. And the people. I think we had that in common. It was about wanting to go to shows, wanting to have your own show – living, breathing, eating, all of it. CL: Can I ask you about your time in New Jersey? Was that a soul-searching time? LDR: Oh, I don’t even know if I should have said to anyone that I was living in that trailer in New Jersey but, stupidly, I did this interview from the trailer, in 2008. CL: I saw it! LDR: It’s cringey, it’s cringey. (laughs) CL: You look so cute, though. LDR: I thought I was rockabilly. I was platinum. I thought I had made it in my own way. CL: I understand completely. LDR: The one thing I wish I’d done was go to LA instead of New York. I had been playing around for maybe four years, just open mics, and I got a contract with this indie label called 5 Points Records in 2007. They gave me $10,000 and I found this trailer in New Jersey, across the Hudson - Bergen Light Rail. So, I moved there, I finished school and I made that record (Lana Del Ray a.k.a. Lizzy Grant), which was shelved for two and a half years, and then came out for, like, three months. But I was proud of myself. I felt like I had arrived, in my own way. I had my own thought and it was kind of kitschy and I knew it was going to sort of influence what I was doing next. It was definitely a phase. (laughs) CL: But you have records about being a ‘Brooklyn Baby’. You can write about New York adeptly and I cannot. I tried to write a song about a tragic girl in New York, going down Bleecker Street – this girl couldn’t afford Bleecker Street, so the song made no sense, right? (laughs) I did my time there, but it chased me away. I couldn’t do it because I wouldn’t go solo. I had to have a band. LDR: I wanted a band so badly. I feel like I wouldn’t have had some of the stage fright I had when I started playing bigger shows if (I had) a real group and we were in it together. I really wanted that camaraderie. I actually didn’t even find that until a couple of years ago, I would say. I’ve been with my band for six years and they’re great, but I wished I had people – I fantasised about Laurel Canyon. CL: I wanted the camaraderie. The alternative bands in my neighbourhood were the (Red Hot Chili) Peppers and Jane’s (Addiction). I knew Perry (Farrell, Jane’s Addiction frontman) and I went to high school for, like, ten seconds with two Peppers and a guy named Romeo Blue who became Lenny Kravitz. I remember being an extra in a Ramones video and he stopped by, when he was dating Lisa Bonet from The Cosby Show and it was a big deal. LDR: See? You didn’t really see that in New York. When I got there, The Strokes had had a moment, but that was kind of it. LA has always been the epicentre of music, I feel. CL: LA is easier. People have garages. And then as you go up the coast, in Washington and Oregon people have bigger houses and bigger garages, and people have parents. I didn’t have parents, and you – well, you had parents, but you were on your own. LDR: Yeah. You know that song of yours (‘Awful’) that says, ‘(Just shut up,) you’re only 16’? I think there are different types of people. There are people who heard, ‘What do you know? You’re just a kid,’ and then there are people who got a lot of support (from the line), like, ‘Go for it, go for your dreams.’ (laughs) And I think when you don’t have that, you get kind of stuck at a certain age. Randomly, in the last few years, I feel like I’ve grown up. Maybe I’ve just had time to think about everything, process everything. I’ve gotten to move on and think about how it feels now, singing songs I wrote ten years ago. It does feel different. I was almost reliving those feelings on stage until recently. It’s weird listening back to my stuff. Today, I was watching some of your old videos and this footage of you playing a big festival. The crowd was just girls – just young girls for rows and rows. I was reminded of how vast that influence was on teenagers. And – going back to enigma and fame and legacy – you know, those girls who have grown up and girls who are 16 now, they relate to you in the exact same way as they did right when you started. And that’s the power of your craft. You’re one of my favourite writers. CL: You’re one of mine, so, checkmate. (laughs) LDR: What you did was the epitome of cool. And there’s a lot of different music going on, but adolescents still know when something comes authentically from somebody’s heart. It might not be the song that sells the most, but when people hear it, they know it. Are you a John Lennon fan? CL: When I hear ‘Working Class Hero’, it’s a song I wish to God I could write. I wouldn’t ever cover it. I mean, Marianne Faithfull covered it beautifully, but I would never cover it because I think Marianne did a great job and that’s all that needs to be said. LDR: I felt that way when I covered ‘Chelsea Hotel (#2)’, the Leonard Cohen song, but when I was doing more acoustic shows, I couldn’t not do it. CL: I don’t have your range. I’ve tried to sing along to ‘Brooklyn Baby’ and ‘Dark Paradise’ and this new one, ‘Love’. You go high, baby. LDR: I’ve got some good low ones for you. You know what would be good, is that song, ‘Ride’. I don’t sing it in its right octave during the shows because it’s too low for me. But I’ve been thinking about doing something with you for a little while now. Then after we did the Endless Summer tour, we were thinking we should at least write, or we should just do whatever and maybe you could come down to the studio and just see what came out. CL: When we were on tour, our pre-show chats were very productive for me. LDR: Me too. That was a real moment of me counting my blessings. I just wanted to stay in every single moment and remember all of it, because it was so amazing. CL: Likewise. It was really fun coming into your room. My favourite part of the tour was in Portland, getting you vinyl that I felt you needed. (laughs) LDR: When you left the room, I was just running my hand over all the vinyl like little gems, like, ‘I can’t believe I have these (records) that Courtney gave to me, it’s so fucking amazing.’ And we were in Portland, too. It felt surreal. CL: Yeah, I don’t like going there much but I went there with you. We have this in common, too: we both ran away to Britain. If I could live anywhere in the world, I’d live in London. LDR: If I could live anywhere in the world other than LA, I’d live in London. In the back of my mind, I always feel like I could maybe end up there. CL: I know I’m going to end up there. I know what neighbourhood I’m going to end up in, and I know that I want to be on the Thames. I subscribe to this magazine called Country Life which is just real-estate porn and fox hunting. It’s amazing. OK, so, if you weren’t doing you, what would you do? LDR: Do you have a really clear answer for this, for yourself? CL: Yeah, I would work with teenage girls. Girls that are in halfway houses. LDR: That’s got you all over it. I’m selfish. I would do something that would put me by the beach. I would be, like, a bad lifeguard. (laughs) I’d come help you on the weekends, though. CL: Do you like being in Malibu better than being in town? LDR: I like the idea of it. People don’t always go out to visit you in Malibu. So there’s a lot of alone-time, which is kind of like, hmm. I’m not in (indie-rock enclave) Silver Lake but I love all the stuff that’s going on around there. I guess I’d have to say (I prefer) town, but I’ve got my half-time Malibu fantasy. CL: The only bad thing that can happen in Malibu really is getting on Etsy and overspending. LDR: Oh my God, woman... (laughs) Tell me about it. Late-night sleepless Etsy binges. CL: Regretsy binges. OK, so, lyrically, you have some tropes and one of them is the colour red. Red dresses, scarlet, red nail polish... I kind of want to steal that. LDR: You need to take over that, because I think I’ve got to relinquish the red. CL: Well, I overuse the word ‘whore’. LDR: You take ‘red’. I’ll trade for ‘whore’. I’m so lucky. CL: I love this new song (‘Love’). LDR: Thank you. I love the new song, too. I’m glad it’s the first thing out. It doesn’t sound that retro, but I was listening to a lot of Shangri-Las and wanted to go back to a bigger, more mid-tempo, single-y sound. The last 16 months, things were kind of crazy in the US, and in London when I was there. I was just feeling like I wanted a song that made me feel a little more positive when I sang it. And there’s an album that’s gonna come out in the spring called Lust for Life. I did something I haven’t ever done, which is not that big of a deal, but I have a couple of collabs on this record. Speaking of John Lennon, I have a song with Sean Lennon. Do you know him? CL: I do, I like him. LDR: It’s called ‘Tomorrow Never Came’. I don’t know if you’ve ever felt this way, but when I wrote it I felt like it wasn’t really for me. I kept on thinking about who this song was for or who could do it with me, and then I realised that he would be a good person. I didn’t know if I should ask him because I actually have a line in it where I say, ‘I wish we could go back to your country house and put on the radio and listen to our favourite song by Lennon and Yoko.’ I didn’t want him to think I was asking him because I was namechecking them. Actually, I had listened to his records over the years and I did think it was his vibe, so I played it for him and he liked it. He rewrote his verse and had extensive notes, down to the mix. And that was the last thing I did, decision-wise. I haven’t mixed the record, but the fact that ‘Love’ just came out and Sean kind of finished up the record, it felt very meant-to-be. Because that whole concept of peace and love really is in his veins and in his family. Then, I also have Abel (Tesfaye), The Weeknd. He is actually on the title track of the record, ‘Lust for Life’. Maybe that’s kind of weird to have a feature on the title track, but I really love that song and we had said for a while that we were gonna do something; I did stuff on his last two records. CL: Do you have a singular producer or several producers? LDR: Rick Nowels. He actually did stuff with Stevie Nicks a while ago. He works really well with women. I did the last few records with him. Even with Ultraviolence which I did with Dan (Auerbach), I did the record first with Rick, and then I went to Nashville and reworked the sound with Dan. So, yeah, Rick Nowels is amazing, and these two engineers – with all the records that I’ve worked on with Rick, they did a lot of the production as well. You would love these two guys. They’re just super-innovative. I wanted a bit of a sci-fi f lair for some of the stuff and they had some really cool production ideas. But yeah, that’s pretty much it. I mean, Max Martin – CL: Wait, you wrote with Max Martin? You went to the compound? LDR: Have you been there? CL: No. I’ve always wanted to work with Max Martin. LDR: So basically, ‘Lust for Life’ was the first song I wrote for the record, but it was kind of a Rubik’s Cube. I felt like it was a big song but... it wasn’t right. I don’t usually go back and re-edit things that much, because the songs end up sort of being what they are, but this one song I kept going back to. I really liked the title. I liked the verse. John Janick was like, ‘Why don’t we just go over and see what Max Martin thinks?’ So, I flew to Sweden and showed him the song. He said that he felt really strongly that the best part was the verse and that he wanted to hear it more than once, so I should think about making it the chorus. So I went back to Rick Nowels’ place the next day and I was like, ‘Let’s try and make the verse the chorus,’ and we did, and it sounded perfect. That’s when I felt like I really wanted to hear Abel sing the chorus, so he came down and rewrote a little bit of it. But then I was feeling like it was missing a little bit of the Shangri-Las element, so I went back for a fourth time and layered it up with harmonies. Now I’m finally happy with it. (laughs) But we should do something. Like, soon. CL: I would like that. That would be awesome. Lust for Life is out this spring.

#Lana Del Rey #Courtney Love #Dazed #Magazine #Interview #Editorial #2017 #Lust For Life

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magic5ball · 4 years

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Nature Trail to Hell Arc II: Watt Outta Hell (6)

Chapter 6: If there’s One Thing You Should Take Away From This Chapter, It’s this: Never Mess with another Man’s Waifu

My (after) life flashed before my eyes. They say the Underworld is full of unholy torments, blasphemous acts that can only be properly described by edgy teenage horror writers using an online thesaurus (the book, not the dinosaur). But I know what I know, and let me tell you, the Underworld has no fury like a ticked off F-Bomb. If I had any hope of making it out of that room alive, it depended on some swift thinking.

Or just curling up on the floor and crying like a newborn baby. That was also an option.

F-Bomb raised a claw dramatically. “My Moon senses were tingling, telling me you were touching my girl! And my Moon sense is never forkin’ wrong!”

“I-it was an accident!”

“Like forkin’ Hell it was! Now, forkin’ A-Hole might object ta what I’m about ta forkin’ do, to do, but down here, it’s my forkin’ playground. And if you mess up my forkin’ waifu, then you better be ready to get the forkin’ horns of forkin’ death!” His whole body turned red, shaking like a volcano.

But I never did get those horns. You know why? Because right before he was about to lunge, I backed up against the bed, and by some crazy chance, that dumb pillow girl landed on top of me. There was a loud whoosh as all the angry air the little raptor was holding back swept out of him to Lord knows where.

“Huh? Whaddya mean it was just an accident?”

“Well, y-yeah, it-“

“Shut it, ya dorkbag! I was talkin’ tamy girl!”

Then he moved back a foot and bowed his head in shame. “My apologies, dear, I promised I wouldn’t swear in front of you.”

For the second time that day, my mind was blown. F-Bomb was talking to a pillow, but more importantly, he’d gone an entire sentence without saying the, well, F-Bomb. Fact is, I wasn’t even sure the raptor in front of me was F-Bomb anymore. It was more like someone wearing his skin. (Something that actually happens in the underworld, by the way.)

“Still…” he continued, flashing a claw. “He does know our secret now. I could always make it out ta be an ‘accident’ if I have to.”

He paced around the room, lost in thought.

“But you’re right. A-Hole might find out. And if A-Hole finds out, he’ll go snoopin’. And if A-Hole goes snoopin’, he might find this place. And if A-Hole finds this place…” F-Bomb shuddered.

Around this point, I decided to play the situation. “Yeah, what she said. You’ll be in big trouble.”

The little raptor sighed, taking in a long, slow breath. Reluctantly, he extended a claw. “Alright, T-I mean, Watt. Welcome to the F-Cave.”

I got up- carefully, so I wouldn’t move Sailor Moon too much- and shook, expecting F-Bomb to slice my wrist at a moment’s notice. It never happened.

Instead, F-Bomb walked over to his pillow, readjusting her on the bed. He finished it off with a quick peck to her cheek. Glancing at me, he said “Alright, Watt. Time for your initiation.” He took a ketchup packet from a corner of the room and squeezed a bit into our hands. I shook, still too scared to see what would happened if I disagreed. Though not scared enough to ask

“But wait, aren’t we both in A-Hole’s gang?”

“No dip- er, dummy. This is my secret gang within the gang. Population: best girl and yours truly. I’m thinking of calling it gangception.”

I started inching toward the door, wanting to get out of this lavender scented potential death trap, but F-Bomb beckoned me. “What’re you so eager to leave for? I haven’t shown you around yet!”

I was already creeped out as it was, so the polite was he said it really rubbed me wrong. Still, I didn’t trust my legs to run out in time, so I decided to cooperate. What happened next was what I can only describe as the worst kind of boredom: the kind where it isn’t exciting enough for time to pass quickly, but not dull enough to be remarkable in a weird way. Even when he wasn’t trying to hurt me, torture was ingrained in the little guy’s soul. And this particular torture involved going to every single cheap manga, DVD, and figurine in his collection; giving me an hour long lecture on Every. Single. One! To this day, I’m surprised it didn’t take half a century to get through the first shelf. (Though it might have, considering the weird way time works in the afterlife.) And the way he went about it could only be called insidious: first he’d show me a DVD, then he’d make it sound interesting, hooking me in. But as time wore on, the more dull and convoluted it would get, yet dumb old me would be strung along, hoping it would pick up again, only to be met with soul-crushing disappointment. Somehow, I fell for this like 500 times before I wised up. Also, F-Bomb might have spoiled more plot points than a Wikipedia entry. To make things worse, I couldn’t have F-Bomb catch on to me, so I had to nod, saying “yeah” and “uh-huh” in hope he wouldn’t notice. I don’t know what guardian angel came to my aid, but whomever it was, they helped me make it through. Though even the head nodding started to wear on me, to the point I felt like I was just repeating myself the way F-Bomb’s…”animu” I think it was called, repeated action scenes. Unlike most of those animu though, my persistence (albeit a forced one) paid off when F-Bomb took a cardboard box lined with plastic wrap out from under the T.V. table. Inside were what looked like Lucky Loops marshmallows, but I happen to be an expert on the matter (I wrote an entire essay on the subject in second grade. The teacher gave me an F but I knew it was only because I didn’t use our spelling words for that week.) and knew these were no purple moons, blue horseshoes, or blood red rabbit’s foots. If anything, they were of the rip-off store brand variety. But I also remembered some stuff D-Bag once told me, about the drugs we dealt with, and more importantly, the ones so horrible not even A-Hole would get within a mile of them if he could. My eyes widened in realization.

“This is- this is-“

F-Bomb cocked a smile, though it looked more like someone had slashed a thin slit across his long face. “Dang straight, Watt: this is WEEB.”

#My writing #Nature Trail To Hell #velociraptor #anime #sailor moon

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tomruffproject-blog · 7 years

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100 Days, 100 Albums

Hi Friends: As some of you know, on January 1st, I decided to embark on a little musical adventure of discovery, that I colorfully referred to as #100days100albums. That project is coming to an end on April 10th, and I wanted to share some thoughts... Back to the beginning, I did this for a few reasons… a long commute… a failed, fantasy football season and presidential election that left me wanting absolutely nothing to do with any podcasts whatsoever for a while… a newly acquired subscription to Apple Music, and all the albums that are available… and, a planned “lighter-touring-year” for many of my bands. I already had a pretty sizable music collection - spanning classic rock, 90s, jam bands, and a lot recently discovered jazz. The bulk of my listening is typically a combination of live shows and albums from my favorite bands (the top 5 being Dave Matthews Band, Phish, the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, and Pearl Jam - in no particular order, but there’s also a lot of “2nd-tier” favorites as well). You won’t find any albums by the “big-5" on this list, because this project was about taking a break, but you will find some albums from that “2nd-tier”. The original plan was to revisit a lot of albums, that I hadn’t heard in years, but I set a goal of listening to AT LEAST 100 albums that I had never heard in their entirety before. That means that I may have known certain songs from those albums, or, I may have known nothing at all. As I start to write this (with a few days to go), I’m up to #108 (Innervisions by Stevie Wonder, if you were wondering), and by the time I publish this, I am hoping to get in a few more (Updated on 4/10 – I did). In addition to the official list of “new" albums, I did manage to get to another 30+ of those “revisits”, which are not on this list, but if you’re wondering, included a lot of Led Zeppelin, the Who, Pink Floyd, the Doors, etc. As for where the albums that are on the list came from - I asked friends, family, and co-workers for suggestions - and did my best to get to as many of them as possible. I reached for albums that I had read about or heard about that sounded interesting. If you’re looking at this list, and thinking “where’s Abbey Road, Dark Side of the Moon, Music From Big Pink, and Let It Bleed, etc.?” - you won’t find those on here - or many others - as they’re just already favorites. What I did do... I dug deeper into the back catalogs of bands that I didn’t know as extensively as I thought I did (i.e. Neil Young, and solo McCartney and Lennon). I consulted the "Rolling Stone Top 500 Albums of All Time" list for ideas… and I looked at some of my wife Alexis’ favorite artists and albums. She’s credited with getting me to listen to all 12 Billy Joel albums in time for the upcoming Dodger Stadium show, as well as some R.E.M., Elliot Smith, and Simon & Garfunkel among others. When I found something I liked, I went down a rabbit hole. That’s why you’ll find a lot of repeat and similar artists in here. For every album I listened to, I read the Wikipedia article, and well, you start clicking, and next thing you know you’re reliving the British invasion…

You’ll notice that there is no jazz on this list. I spent a large part of 2016 (especially the fall and holidays) in that space, and intentionally stuck to rock with this. I’ll get back to jazz soon. Also, I didn’t review these individually, and I’m not going to, but I did want to highlight some things that I learned… 1) My tastes are flexible, but also kind of are what they are. I discovered new bands and albums that I now love, but if I didn’t really care for a genre before, that didn’t really change. That being said, I completely appreciated everything I listened to in the last few months. 2) I didn’t really intend to focus this much on classic rock - but, when you research albums you "should have heard", most of them are... classic rock. Maybe next time I’ll dig a little deeper into indy, or maybe rap… 3) Although so many of my personal favorite albums come from the CD era (being born in 1980 will do that), the compact disc was actually, IMO, the worst thing to ever happen to the album - not digital downloads and streaming. Why? Easy - 60+ minutes is entirely too long… not just because of attention span - but also, because it takes a really special album to maintain quality for that long (aka no filler tracks). It’s no coincidence that so many of the "greatest albums of all time" come from an era in which 38-45 minutes was the standard, and I think it’s great that in the iTunes era, albums have gotten shorter again. There is less expectation of length, when you don’t have to “fill a disc”. 4) You’ll notice that I went through waves of specific artists and/or genres. I listened to a lot of psychedelic rock. I got on a Clapton kick (with Cream and Derek and the Dominos), and, I dug deeper into Jimi Hendrix, Warren Zevon, Bruce Springsteen, Dr. John, and most importantly Bob Dylan. I was actually surprised by how many of their biggest albums I had never actually listened to all the way through before. 5) The 80s will never be my favorite era of music - and this applies to both 80s artists, and, albums by classic rock legends that were put out in the 80s. The production, the synthesizers… in general, just not for me. 6) I still don’t love punk, but I am really glad to have listened to a few albums. Can totally hear the influence on Pearl Jam, and other bands I do love. 7) The 60s was by far my favorite decade of this project - and I feel like I could easily find another 100 albums to dive in to. 8) I put all of these albums on a playlist to shuffle - so although I’ve only listened to most of them in their entirety once - I’ve been getting to know a lot of these songs and artists a lot better. Now that I’m done, I can go back and re-listen to some of the ones that I really want to get to know better. 9) Here’s a few unexpected stand out albums/artists of note:

-Allen Toussaint - Southern Nights (Track 1, Last Train is a new favorite. Interestingly, this was the first album, I listened to.)

-Soul Coughing - Ruby Vroom (The best band I never knew I should have loved. Thanks to Dave Matthews for having plugged them on a live album)

-Spirit - 12 Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus (Don’t let the name trick you - this album is amazing.

-The Zombies - Odyssey and Oracle (One of the stand-out albums from my tear through the British Invasion.)

-The Revivalists - Men Against Mountain (A new favorite modern band, which will be in heavy rotation for summer 2017.)

-Neil Young - On the Beach (I had never heard of this one, and it’s very chill. My favorite of the “new to me” Young Albums)

-New Pornographers - Twin Cinema (Dug this enough to grab their new release that came out over the weekend.)

-Chuck Berry - Berry On Top (I’ll be honest; I looked this up and listened to it the day he died.)

-Paul McCartney - McCartney 2 - (Noteworthy as the worst post-Beatles album by far - just listen to “Temporary Secretary” and bust out your WTF Emoji.)

-David Bowie - Hunky Dory (Which features my favorite Bowie song - Life On Mars. 2nd only to Ziggy Stardust IMO.)

-13th Floor Elevators - The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators (Another “band I wished I’d heard of years ago - if you like psychedelic rock.)

-Frank Zappa - Hot Rats (The album opens with Peaches en Regalia - one of my favorite Phish covers, and is like everything I love about jazz done with rock. Very cool.)

And finally, there’s a lot that I couldn’t get to in the past 100 days, but I’ve got some summer tours to follow, and 2017 albums to focus on for a while. I’m going to try to keep this going with #FullAlbumFriday for a while. Here’s the full list of “first-time" albums, in order from January 1st to April 10th…

1 - Allen Toussaint - Southern Nights 2 - Billy Joel - Piano Man 3 - Allman Brothers Band - Idlewild South 4 - Car Seat Headrest - Teens of Denial 5 - Billy Preston - I Wrote a Simple Song 6 - Soul Coughing - Ruby Vroom 7 - Little Feat - Waiting For Columbus 8 - The Doors - The Doors 9 - New Pornographers - Twin Cinema 10 - Billy Joel - Turnstile 11 - S.C.I. - 'Round the Wheel 12 - Spirit - 12 Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus 13 - Dr. John - In the Right Place 14 - Jimi Hendrix Experience - Are You Experienced? 15 - Simon & Garfunkel - Sounds of Silence 16 - U2 - Joshua Tree 17 - Crosby Stills, and Nash - Crosby Stills, and Nash 18 - Billy Joel - 52nd Street 19 - Cat Stevens - Tea For the Tillerman 20 - The Doors - Strange Days 21 - The Zombies - Odessey and Oracle 22 - Bruce Springsteen - Born In the U.S.A. 23 - The Byrds - Sweetheart of the Rodeo 24 - R.E.M. - Up 25 - Billy Joel - The Stranger 26 - Frank Zappa - Hot Rats 27 - Luther Allison - Bad News Is Coming 28 - Jimi Hendrix Experience - Axis Bold of Love 29 - Mother Love Bone - Mother Love Bone 30 - Yes - Close to the Edge 31 - Allman Brothers Band - Brothers and Sisters 32 - Warren Zevon - Warren Zevon 33 - Billy Joel - Storm Front 34 - Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers (Self-Titled) 35 - Cream - Wheels of Fire 36 - Soul Coughing - Irresistible Bliss 37 - Buffalo Springfield (Self-Titled) 38 - The Velvet Underground - Velvet Underground & Nico 39 - Cream - Disraeli Gears 40 - Billy Joel - The Nylon Curtain 41 - Lee Baines III & the Glory Fires - There Is a Bomb in Gilead 42 - Paul McCartney - McCartney 43 - The Meters - The Meters 44 - Janis Joplin - Pearl 45 - Derek & the Dominos - Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs 46 - The Revivalists - Men Against Mountains 47 - Traffic - Mr. Fantasy 48 - Elliott Smith - Figure 8 49 - Buffalo Springfield - Buffalo Springfield Again 50 - Billy Joel - An Innocent Man 51 - Santana - Abraxas 52 - The Hollies - Evolution 53 - The Byrds - Turn, Turn, Turn 54 - Dr. John - In the Right Place 55 - Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers - Long After Dark 56 - Bob Dylan - John Wesley Harding 57 - Violent Femmes - Violent Femmes 58 - The Decemberists - The Crane Wife 59 - Warren Zevon - The Envoy 60 - Neil Young - On the Beach 61 - 13th Floor Elevators - The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Elevators 62 - Elvis Costello & the Attractions - Armed Forces 63 - The Yarbirds - Roger the Engineer 64 - David Bowie - Station to Station 65 - Iron Butterfly - In-a-Gadda-Da-Vidda Baby 66 - Bob Dylan - Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan 67 - Van Morrison - Astral Weeks 68 - Ry Cooter - Into the Purple Valley 69 - Chet Atkins & Mark Knopfler - Neck and Neck 70 - Bob Dylan - Blonde On Blonde 71 - Jimi Hendrix Experience - Electric Ladyland 72 - Talking Heads - Speaking In Tongues 73 - Billy Joel - River of Dreams 74 - Jeff Beck - Truth 75 - The Doors - Waiting For the Sun 76 - Radiohead - Hail to the Thief 77 - Soundgarden - Superunknown 78 - Paul & Linda McCartney - Ram 79 - R.E.M. - Document 80 - Jefferson Airplane - Surrealistic Pillow 81 - The Rolling Stones - Aftermath (UK) 82 - Yes - Fragile 83 - Chuck Berry - Berry Is On Top 84 - Moby Grape - Moby Grape ’69 85 - Bob Dylan - Bringing it All Back Home 86 - R.E.M. - Out of Time 87 - Peter Gabriel - So 88 - Huey Lewis - Sports 89 - The Ramones - Ramones 90 - Alabama Shakes - Sound & Color 91 - David Bowie - Hunk Dory 92 - Billy Joel - Cold Spring Harbor 93 - Talking Heads - 77 94 - Dire Straits - Brothers In Arms 95 - Rush - Moving Pictures 96 - Bob Dylan - Desire 97 - Bruce Springsteen - Nebraska 98 - Flaming Lips - Transmissions From the Satellite Heart 99 - Creedence Clearwater Revival - Cosmo's Factory 100 - John Lennon - Plastic Ono Band 101 - Creedence Clearwater Revival - Willy & the Poor Boys 102 - Johnny Cash - At Folsom Prison 103 - Marvin Gaye - What's Going On 104 - David Bowie - Diamond Dogs 105 - Sex Pistols - Nevermind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols 106 - Frightened Rabbit - Pedestrian Verse 107 - Allen Toussaint - Sweet Touch of Love 108 - Stevie Wonder - Innervisions 109 - Ryan Adams - Heartbreaker 110 - Bruce Springsteen - Darkness on the Edge of Town 111 - Talking Heads - Remain In Light 112 - Elton John - Goodbye Yellow Brick Road 113 - Neil Young (Self Titled)

Special thanks to everyone who gave me suggestions over the last few months, and to anyone who is still reading this!

As for this week… it’s Pearl Jam week, in honor of their Hall of Fame induction…

-Tom

*Apparently I am not the first person to use this #100days100albums hashtag...

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dmmowers · 7 years

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My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?

I fell down an internet rabbit hole the other day. You know the one I'm talking about: you're checking your e-mail and your Facebook, doing nothing in particular, when suddenly you see a story that you're a little interested in. You click on it. The next thing you know, you've read four more stories and looked up and several minutes have passed without you even realizing it. The first story I looked at was from The Guardian, a British newspaper, and it was an account of the funeral of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. In her eulogy for Jobs, his sister-in-law told the gathered mourners that Jobs said goodbye to his family, looked at them, and then, just prior to his death, looked off into space and said, "Oh wow. Oh wow."

The next thing I knew, I knew that president John Adams' last words on July 4, 1826 were "Thomas Jefferson lives still", even though Jefferson himself had actually died earlier in the day. Pretty soon, I knew a lot more famous celebrities' last words. Some people said mundane things right before a sudden death. Others said funny things: Comedian Groucho Marx's reported last words were "This is no way to live." Humphrey Bogart said, "I never should have switched from scotch to martinis." Some people said things that made it sound like they were delirious. The poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, when asked by her husband how she felt, said, "Beautiful." Emily Dickinson said, "I must go in, for the fog is rising."

The rabbit hole didn't stop there.A handful of people's last words came in circumstances that allowed them to know that death was coming, and they managed to say something profound. William Henry Seward, who was Secretary of State under Abraham Lincoln, was asked whether he had any last words, and he said, "Nothing, except, love one another." John Wesley, the Anglican priest and founder of the Methodist Church, said: "the best of all is, God is for us."

The last words of Jesus Christ as reported by Matthew's gospel, on the other hand, are none of these things. One might think someone with such good self-awareness, and such commitment to his mission as the Messiah, might tell us, "This is not the end of the story," so that we know that something else is coming. Maybe he would say, "I have triumphed" so that as we look at the horror of the cross we would know that we were looking at something other than the most horrific execution of a convicted criminal.

I. [much in this section was helped by F.D. Bruner, Matthew: The Churchbook (Matthew 11-28) section on 27:45-50.]

But this kind of comfort is not at all what Jesus gives us in Matthew's account of his passion. Matthew gives us the last words of Jesus as a primal scream, an anguished question arcing out against the black sky. "Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?" My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? My God, my God why have you abandoned me? If you look on Wikipedia for Jesus' last words, you'll find them listed there as "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." But those are not the last words Matthew's gospel gives us. Similarly, there is no "Into your hands I commend my spirit" in Matthew. There is no "it is finished" in Matthew. There is no forgiveness of the thief on the cross next to Jesus in Matthew. Matthew chooses to leave out words included by other gospels, leaving us on purpose with the haunting last words, My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?

Jesus' last words, as Matthew presents them, are not a summary of his teaching or a reassurance of the very few of his followers who actually went with him all the way to the cross. They are not self-assured. They are not collected. The last words are a screamed prayer. Jesus addresses his Father, even though he can no longer feel his Father's presence. Jesus apparently can only feel the weight of sin, the weight of darkness, the blackness of what humanity does to each other when it thinks no one is watching, both before Jesus and after. Jesus feels the weight not only of those who would use chemical weapons against their own people, but also of all those who use violence in a misguided attempt to bring about peace. Jesus feels the weight of those of us who yearn for an extramarital affair and so for the destruction of our families, or the weight of those who would yearn to destroy our own wellbeing through crash dieting or binge eating or boundless hours at the office, losing ourselves as we try to earn more and more money to buy things that we do not need and will not make us happy.

This abandonment is a hard thing to conceptualize, because God is at work in our world through the Holy Spirit. Even when we are at our worst and our lives are a mess, the Holy Spirit works in us to draw us to God's love and grace, and to draw us towards living in ways that promote our healing and wholeness, spiritually and otherwise. Even when we feel far from God, when we experience genuine, human, self-sacrificial love, we can feel God's presence; we can feel Jesus' presence through the Holy Spirit.

The crushing abandonment Jesus feels is something else entirely. Even the creation around Jesus responds to the absence of God's presence. Darkness overcomes the whole land as the weather mirrors the reality of what is happening on the cross. As one commentator put it: "Jesus has been without human support since the garden of Gethsemane, but he still had the Father. This darkness, however, is the deepest darkness of all. Jesus' lifeline has been cut. He dies before he dies. This is Jesus' descent into hell." (Bruner, Matthew vol 2, 754). Many commentators of the early church were in fact so disturbed by this notion that they argued that God didn't actually abandon Jesus on the cross, rather it was only that Jesus felt that God had abandoned him. Either way, it makes little difference to the tortured man upon the cross.

And so Jesus, completely alone, abandoned by his followers, feels abandoned by his God. The only people who are around are one guy who mercifully gets Jesus a drink and the rest of the crowd, who ask whether Elijah is coming to save him. Jews thought Elijah was the patron saint of lost causes, and more importantly, that before the Messiah came, and before the Day of the Lord came, Elijah would come to prepare the way. "Jesus, they think, has such an enormous Messiah-complex [and] is so caught up in proving himself in his delirious narcissism, that even now all he can think of is proving himself Messiah; he is calling Elijah to put in a last-minute appearance, not only to prove him but also to save him. So they think. Thus the last words Jesus hears before his death are words of profound misunderstanding and cynicism." (Bruner, 751). Jesus is thus abandoned by God and mocked by onlookers, and his last words are a terrified prayer asking why God has abandoned him.

II.

This is a terrifying passage of Scripture to read. It is hard to contemplate that this king, whom all Jerusalem hailed with glory, laud and honor, was now condemned to death by the same crowds who shouted Hosannas a few days before. We see how fickle human nature is, how susceptible we are to hearing only the last voice that spoke to us. So fickle are we that "the Son of God came into the world, and in response the world's best religion and its most advanced government combined to kill him." (Bruner, Matthew Vol 2, 754.)

I have been around mainline Protestants long enough to know that many in our churches are deeply confused about sin. Many people believe that sin is something like the concept of karma - what goes around comes around. If you do right by other people most of the time, and you don't do anything heinously evil, and you get to church when you can, many people think that you don't really have a problem with sin, that you are not a sinner. Because somehow in that scheme the good deeds outweigh the bad ones. This, in turn, leads to lots of confusion about Jesus' crucifixion: when we get to Palm Sunday and Holy Week, there are a lot of people who have a hard time believing that the suffering and death of Jesus was for them - for the truly evil people of the world, sure, but not for us good Episcopalians.

But this perspective about sin is simply and gravely mistaken. Sin is not about having good deeds and bad deeds on a scale, and it's not about karma, and it's not about highlighting how evil someone like Hitler was and saying that the rest of us are basically okay. That's an American gospel if I've ever heard it, but it's not Christianity. All of us are born with an innate human tendency to break things: to break creation, to break ourselves, to break our relationships, to break other people. Unless you are a lot holier than me, you too know the perverse pleasure of scoring points in arguments by hurting those we love best. That is what sin is, friends. St. Paul says in Romans 5:6, "While we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly." Christ died for sinners. Christ died for the enemies of God. Christ died for us and indeed for all creation.

Because we did nothing to deserve this intervention, Christians cannot ever think that we are better than other people. Maybe we take pride in being superior, well-bred Episcopalians who keep their church looking nice and their worship services lively. Maybe we take pride in not being like those undocumented Mexican immigrants, or like the people who we see in the paper shooting heroin with their kids in the backseat of the car. But we're all enemies of God, we are all sinners, we are all desperately in need of grace. The heroin addict, the undocumented worker, the people we say we're better than: all of those people are in the same boat with us. All sinners, all enemies of God, all under the just judgment of God for our wrongdoing. And what we all need is this man, crucified for us. III.

Matthew says that Jesus' cry from the cross was "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani," and it's the only time in Matthew's gospel we get Jesus' words in the Aramaic language, the only time Matthew slips out of Greek to give us the actual words Jesus speaks in the language Jesus spoke them. It's almost as if Matthew is trying to say that there is so much good news in these words that he doesn't want to translate them. So much good news in the tortured cry of the dying man: it is, as Paul wrote in I Corinthians, "scandalous to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks," but it is for us the word of life.

It is Jesus' death that brings about the wholeness of the world. We see this even in the passage this morning. As soon as Jesus dies, the veil of the temple is torn in two. No longer will the worship of God be contained to one place, tightly controlled by religious Jews for the benefit of them and their people. The veil being torn is God's condemnation of the temple system, and a declaration that the worship of God will be open to all people, Jew and Gentile, and that God will no longer dwell in one place but in every place where people call upon the name of Jesus. The tearing of the veil is also judgment proclaimed on the system of sacrifice: no longer will sacrifices be needed, because Jesus has offered himself as the "once for all sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world." He is the Lamb of God who was slain: lesser sacrifices are no longer necessary. The justice that we all yearn for when wrongdoing occurs is found finally and completely in the self-giving of Jesus on the cross.

The earth shook and rocks were split as creation trembled in a testimony to the shaking of the cosmic order. After Jesus was raised again, those who had died came out of their tombs and appeared in Jerusalem, showing that the death of Jesus was not simply for us who come after him, but for those who died before him. Jesus' death is what takes all of us enemies of God and makes us friends of God. Jesus loved this creation enough to offer himself as the once-for-all sacrifice and to suffer the worst imaginable death so as to conquer death. That is the good news in Jesus' final cry from the cross.

IV.

And it is good news for our world and for us. When God raises Jesus from the dead that first Easter morning, he vindicates Jesus' offering: Jesus' resurrection is the proof that the crucifixion gives us life. The crucifixion calls into question every way that we might earn favor with God through our own efforts, it calls into question every human accomplishment, every source of pride, every moment that we might want to think of ourselves as superior; it tells us that our wholeness is achieved entirely by God acting in our place, going through the most horrible death so as to be present with all people who die horrible deaths. Jesus' last words from the cross are a question to show that not only did Jesus become human to make our human nature holy, Jesus became human to ask the very same human questions we might ask. If we ever find ourselves without answers to important questions, Jesus is with us, because Jesus has himself asked unanswered questions. If we ever ask a question and don't know if God hears us, Jesus is with us, because he has been there. If we ever unjustly suffer, Jesus is with us, because he has been there, and his being there has changed everything about what it means to be a person.

We no longer need fear death, or the grave, or the absence of God, because in experiencing death and the grave and the absence of God, Jesus has defeated them, and has promised to walk with his people through them. Jesus takes upon himself the judgment that we rightly deserve and makes all of his people, no matter how unkempt, no matter how addicted, no matter how poor, no matter what ethnicity or immigration status, friends of God.

So Jesus' last words are not in fact a summary of his teaching. Nor are they a final command to his followers to carry on his legacy. But "Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?" are indeed for us words of victory: a prayer of trust in God, even when it felt like God had abandoned him; a descent into hell, into the absence of God, so that we might never again be absent from God; a submission to death, so that we and all creation might nevermore submit to death. Thanks be to God.

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