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#I didn’t even know the Hip Teen Slang when I WAS a hip teen are you kidding?
marzipanandminutiae · 2 years
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“you don’t like the proliferation of terms like Unalive outside of TikTok because you realize that you’re aging out of youth culture and it makes you uncomfortable!”
no I don’t like it because there’s something INCREDIBLY dystopian about being forced to soften terms for basic parts of the human experience like death and sex (and even more so terms for oppressed minorities- call me a “le-dollar sign-bian” and I will bite you) purely because advertisers and corporations demand it
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pascalpanic · 3 years
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Mirdal’ika (Din Djarin x f!Reader)
Summary: Reader takes care of the Razor Crest and the child while Mando is out hunting. When Mando doesn’t return when he’s supposed to, the book-smart reader has to learn some street smarts and help her Mandalorian.
WC: 4.6k
Warnings: violence, cussing, mentions of blood
A/N: Okay, I’m a nerd, a certified nerd as if that wasn’t clear. This is my love letter to the nerds out there, to the ones who had their first kiss a little late, who stayed in and read books rather than partying. I love you, you’re cool. Italics are for emphasis and internal dialogue, but in some places also to show that another language is being spoken. Hopefully that’s clear! Oh, also: mirdal’ika is a word of my own creation. No Mando’a word exists for “nerd” that I could find, so this is my interpretation of the language using my best etymological skills!
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mirdala= intelligent, clever -’ika = suffix meaning small or little mirdal’ika = intelligent little one; Mando’a slang meaning nerd.
Growing up, you were the kid who had her nose buried in a book at all times. You rarely interacted with the outside world. While the other children on Tatooine made sandcastles or played games, drawing in the sand, you read encyclopedias and fact books, learning about the other planets in your systems and other cultures. Your fixation at age 12 had been on Mandalorian culture, fascinated by the warriors that were like faraway, mythical knights to your young self. As a child enraptured by fairy tales and stories of intergalactic heroes like Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa, you’d somehow always been enchanted by the bad-boy type, the dark and mysterious man who reluctantly saves the day, more along the lines of Han Solo. Naturally, the fact that Mandalorians never showed their face was mysterious, and you’d admit that you dreamed of being swept away by the Mand’alor and having the privilege of being the sole person to see their face, of being a queen and finding true love. You later moved on to research other cultures, even teaching yourself various galactic languages should you ever get the chance to travel. That didn’t seem likely, growing up on a planet where the only claim to fame was Luke Skywalker’s brief residence a few towns over. Your knowledge of Mandalorian culture was part of what made you so special to Mando, your employer-friend-coworker-roommate-co-parent whose name you had yet to learn. You never asked questions of him. Never asked him to take off his helmet, never asked him what was under it, never asked anything too personal, understood that the helmet could only come off in front of members of his clan. You’d cut him off and finish a sentence when he’d explain something of his customs to you, stunning him with your knowledge. He liked it, and by association he liked you. You had bore much of your life story to him, and he gladly would’ve given you some of his. He had come to like you, to trust you even, but you never asked. For fear you wouldn’t want to hear it, he held back. You even spoke Mando’a, though he didn’t know that. It always brought a smirk to your face as he’d turn his back after calling you some sweet words in his native tongue, thinking you’d be oblivious. It shocked you at first; you didn’t expect such a stoic and silent man to be so openly flirtatious, but after a while it most certainly grew on you. You would tease him equally in another tongue, calling him handsome or dashing in Pak Pak or Bothese. It was fun, the way he’d try to guess what you were saying, usually assuming it meant something negative.
With your vast knowledge of languages, you’d both expected that you would be able to interpret the words of Mando’s adopted son, that his babbling would be easily deciphered into some species’ tongue. Eventually you realized that he wasn’t speaking a language yet, simply regurgitating syllables like any child would. He was a baby, after all. You set out to make it your mission to teach the child languages when Mando was away, and he had begun to identify the meaning of words, even if he couldn’t say them himself. He could identify body parts on himself, you by your name, and Mando by his; well, the name you called him, which you knew wasn’t his real name. Mando had taken you on as a crewmate for the Razor Crest a few months ago now, and you still knew next to nothing about the beskar-clad warrior. He was a forward man, so you assumed he would tell you things when he was ready. That’s about all you knew: he was a man, and he was a Mandalorian. He wanted to tell you everything, especially the fact that he had been enchanted by your intelligence and wit since the first time he met you, stopping on Tatooine for a bounty and encountering you when he asked a fellow villager who the most knowledgeable person around was. The tiny green thing he held was a menace, and you cared for him while the Mandalorian man went and hunted his bounty. The child was hesitant to leave you, getting attached after a quick few days of staying in your hut, and the man had decided you could be valuable. Just before he walked through the door, he turned and offered you a job. You were shy when you accepted, and had nursed a crush the whole time you two had traveled together. You couldn’t believe the situation, just like in those trashy novels you’d read when you were interested in his culture. Now that you lived with him and the tiny green thing, you stayed aboard his ship while he hunted and cared for the kid, cleaned, fixed up the piece of junk, and generally ran the almost-household. It was enjoyable; you liked the man, especially once you came to find his sense of humor similar to your own, and you absolutely adored the child in your care. Your little ragtag crew fell into a rhythm after the first month or so: Mando would leave on a hunt for a few days. While he was gone, you’d play with the baby, feed him and care for him. You washed the blood and dirt from the man’s clothing and the child’s bile from the clothing belonging to you and the baby, taught the child new words, and generally… well, raised him. The baby felt like your child when you two were alone, but when the Mandalorian came home, he was the only thing visible in that child’s round black eyes. It was all about him, sitting in his lap, babbling incoherent words to him, playing with him. Luckily for you, the Mandalorian is on a hunt. You and the child sit in the bed compartment; you lie on the mattress and the child rests in his mesh hammock above the entry. At the last port, you picked up as many books as possible to entertain both you and the child. He loved listening to your voice, and so you happily read aloud to him as you rest together. The Mandalorian should be home tonight, you figured, since he told you that this was a rather easy bounty and that it should take him no more than 3 days. It’s now a couple hours after the third day, but you’re sure it’s fine. The child’s eyes droop closed as you read to him, flawlessly translating the book from the Pak Pak it was written in. The Basic words pour from your mouth, and the little thing gives a gentle yawn before curling up with his favorite blanket and silver ball and passing out. Looking up, you laugh at the sight softly and transition to reading in your head. Not long after the kid falls asleep, you follow. It was unintentional, but reading soothes you, and the perfectly cozy bed that smells like Mando draws you in further and further until sleep washes over your body. You hug one pillow to your chest as you sleep, imagining it was the man’s body you cuddled up against. - Mando is 24 hours late. You’ve been pacing in the ship since you realized it’s officially a day later than he said he’d be back. Dammit, you’re going to find that man. You’re not unaccustomed to violence, having been in scuffles as a child and teen, fighting off Jawas or unsavory men in Tatooine cantinas. You need to track him down and find him. First, you go up to the cockpit and look at the comm watch he gave you. It has a two-way tracking device; one for him to find you, and one for you to find him. Mando has the technology to see where you are built into his vambrace. You, however, have nothing. After searching the cockpit, you find and crack open a tracking fob he used in the past. You open the back of the comm watch, finding the bit with the tracker and wire it to the fob. As you connect two wires, the fob suddenly blinks with light. Laughing at the fact that you made it work, you relax a little. Now you can track the Mandalorian man down. After slipping the fob into a pocket of your pants, you scoot back down the ladder and to the cargo hold’s back wall: Mando’s arsenal. You can do this, you tell yourself, and dare to open Mando’s personal armory built into the wall. You strap a holster to your thigh, adding a vibroblade there. A belt with two guns rests on your hips. An ammo belt drapes across your chest, settling between your breasts and pulling your black tank top tight, the back of the leather sash holding Mando’s backup pulse rifle. You take a look in the mirror of the refresher, and you have to admit that you look badass. Weapons and homemade tracker at the ready, you set out to find him. You leave the baby with a trustworthy woman at the hangar, one who has babysat him before for Mando, then enter the bustling city. - Following the blinking and beeping of the fob, you find your way to the opposite end of the city, to a building located near the outskirts. It’s run down and looks abandoned. It makes perfect sense that someone would hide here. As you approach, the beeping of the fob encourages you; the Mandalorian is definitely here. You disable the sound on the fob and slip it in your pocket, grabbing one of the blasters from your hip. As you approach, the building is silent. The roar of the city is quiet but present, and you slip through an open doorway quietly. You scan the rooms, blaster held in front of you and ready to shoot. You take inventory of the first floor and find nothing. The staircase looks terribly old, and you wince as you take your first step onto it and it makes a noise. Now or never, you tell yourself and quickly run up the steps, knowing the noise can’t be avoided, so you’d better make it quick. You reach the top of the steps, pulling out your other blaster, and find a male Twi’lek standing over  a pile of silver and black on the floor. Mando. He’s most definitely unconscious, maybe even- no, he can’t be dead, you can see his slow breathing and the way it makes his body rise and fall. “Fuck,” you say out loud, and the Twi’lek turns towards you. The man is large, much larger than you. He’s overweight and dressed in combat clothes, his face battered and bloody. Your heart sinks as you realize this man is the bounty Mando was going for. You need to start thinking on your feet, and quickly. The man starts to move toward you and you hold out both blasters. “Easy there, nerra,” you tell him in Twi’leki, calling him ‘brother’ to attempt to put him at ease. It doesn’t have the effect that you hoped. “Why are you here?” he asks back, also in Twi’leki, reaching for his weapon. “Don’t draw,” you threaten and inch closer. He was a bail jumper, Mando had informed you before he left, but not for a petty charge; he had escaped in order to avoid several charges of murder. He was a former bounty hunter, who Mando had encountered once. The idea strikes you. “I’m here for him,” you say and nod to the lump of beskar behind the man on the ground. “There’s a bounty on his head. I… heard whoever turns him in gets to keep the beskar too,” you say, raising an eyebrow as you look at him. “You going for him too?” The Twi’lek man shakes his head. “No. He was coming for me. Thought he could beat me.” You seize this opportunity. “From what you look like, I don’t think anyone could. This one is worth a lot of credits. Enough to run away to a pleasure planet… twice over,” you say, inching closer. Mando makes a soft groan and it breaks your heart as he gains consciousness. He must notice you; he starts to moan out words, but you know he can’t speak or he’ll expose you both. “Silence, Mandalorian,” you say again in Basic, words holding acid. “Twice over… let’s bring him in together. Find some wonderful planet to share that bounty on…” you offer, raising an eyebrow and slowly creeping closer to the man. “What’s your name?” You ask. He tells you his and you tell him yours, then give him a seductive smile. The man’s face falls into a smirk. You put both blasters in your belt once more and his posture relaxes fully. “Sounds wonderful to me, beautiful.” “Wow. For a jaded bounty hunter, you’re more foolish than one could ever believe.” Before the man can process your words, you’ve slung the pulse rifle over your shoulder and pull it into position. You shoot a pulse and it finds its target in his chest. He groans in agony and falls backwards, directly on top of Mando. Wincing for the man beneath the hulking Twi’lek, you grab a blaster, shooting the man in each leg. “Mando, hey, it’s me,” you tell him as you roll the behemoth from on top of him. “I’m here,” you murmur. He starts mumbling back, but it’s in Mando’a. That makes sense, you suppose, that he’s reverting in such a moment of crisis. “How hurt are you?” you ask, beginning to speak Mando’a to him in hopes he’ll understand you better. Mando’s brain works through the fog, hearing your words and recognizing that it’s you. “Real bad,” he groans out, speaking his native tongue. You touch his elbow, unprotected by beskar, and he whines. “No, no,” he whimpers, sounding almost like a child. You sigh. This was going to be harder than you expected. “Fuck, how am I going to get you out of here?” The brain function that the Mandalorian has left is your saving grace. “Speeder bike. Hidden down there. We can get on.” “Yes, but how are we going to get you downstairs?” He doesn’t respond, simply groans in pain. If this was going to work without immense pain on his part, some kind of miracle was going to need to happen. “I’m going to drag you down the stairs as carefully as I can, okay? We’ll let gravity do the work. Do you have a good arm?” “The left one… so clever, so smart, pretty girl,” he breathes out, words rasping. You blush at the words but chuckle. He’s in so much pain there’s no way he can think straight now. “I’ll go get the bike, then we’ll get you down there.” This is the hard part, you think to yourself. First, you run down the steps and search for the speeder bike Mando mentioned. You find it and sigh in relief. It’s a piece of junk, but it should do. You position it at the bottom of the stairs and then run up them again. “Okay, this is going to hurt. Can you roll yourself?” “No, shoulder’s all fucked up,” he mumbles and you groan. “Well, I’ll have to drag you on the good one. Get ready.” Taking his good arm, you begin dragging him towards the steps. He groans and you wince. “I’m so sorry, you’re doing so well,” you tell him as you move him. “Here we go.” Once he’s at the top of the steps, you hold him under his armpits, blushing at how close you are. He’s so strong, even injured, and you smile softly to yourself. You lower the two of you down the stairs with careful movements and manage to hold him long enough to get him seated on the speeder bike. He leans forward onto the handles. “One moment,” you tell him. Running up the stairs once more, you shoot another pulse into the bounty. He gives a dazed nod, clearly not understanding anything through the pain he’s in. You can’t let Mando leave this man behind. You’re sure he’s unconscious, so you repeat the same movements as before but with next to no gentleness. You toss him on the back of the speeder bike, where the gunner would sit, and tie him down with ropes before covering him with a blanket. “Alright, back to the ship as quick as we possibly can,” you inform Mando and get the speeder to a door wide enough to fit it through. Once it works, you hop on between Mando and the handlebar and start it up, moving as quickly as you possibly can. Soon enough, you’re back at the hangar that holds the Razor Crest. You enter the back way, using the speeder bike entrance. You hop off quickly and park it by the Crest. “Stay right there, I’m going to get this asshole into the carbonite,” you tell Mando. His consciousness hasn’t been clear for at least a day. He didn’t even process the fact that you had grabbed the bounty. “What? You got him?” “One of us had to,” you tease, enjoying the fact that the two of you are finally conversing in his native tongue. You’ve always loved Mando’a, the way the words sound rolling off your tongue. You untie the man, still unconscious, and haul him up the ramp of the Crest. You’ve seen Mando work the carbonite freezer once or twice, and you hope you press the right buttons as you force the man onto the slab. “Come on, baby,” you murmur to the machine, hoping it’ll work. With one final button, there’s a hiss and cold air blows from it, freezing him. You sigh in relief. You return to the main hold and pop out a cot for him to lie on. Running back down the ramp, you find the dazed Mandalorian in the exact spot you left him in. “I’m going to carry you into the ship,” you tell him, grunting with effort as you lift his practically deadweight body off of the side and into a standing position. You drag him up and immediately shove him onto the cot. “Fuck, I’m sorry,” you cringe as he moans in pain at the contact with the cot. “One more thing and we’ll get some bacta in you.” The owner of the hangar is waiting for you outside the ship, holding the kid, both confused by the commotion. You very quickly and hurriedly explain to her that everything is fine now, thank her and pay her a generous amount of credits, and rush back onto the ship with the baby. “Keep the speeder!” You shout behind you as you close the ramp. - A full day and a half later, the Mandalorian awakens from a deep slumber with a pounding headache. He sits with a jolt, which only makes the headache worse. He looks around to find that he’s in the Razor Crest, the familiar hum indicating that he’s in hyperspace. The events of the past few days begin to manifest in his memory and he groans, lying back down on the cot. You climb down from the cockpit as you hear him stirring and find him on his side. “Good morning,” you say softly as you sit on the edge of his cot, the kid in your arm. You set the child down and he toddles off elsewhere.  “You were out for a good day and a half,” you tell him and stroke his side softly. “How do you feel?” “Like shit,” he groans, rolling to his back again. He’s hyper aware of your touch, the way your fingers drag down his- oh shit, he’s shirtless, armorless- skin, avoiding the bruises. “You… thank you,” he says, gravelly voice soft. It sinks in that he’s wearing just a pair of shorts and his helmet. You must’ve undressed him, cleaned and bandaged his wounds. His breath catches in his throat. You nod and stroke his good arm. “Of course. That’s why you brought me on, isn’t it?” you tease. He chuckles, but it’s clear that takes effort. “Really, thank you. And you got the bounty too! Shit, mesh’la, I-” he says as he starts to sit, but you push him back down with a hand to his chest, caressing the side of his beskar helmet. “Nayc, stay down,” you tell him, chuckling softly. “Rest. I’ll bring you some water and go back up to the cockpit so you can take off the helmet,” you say with a soft smile, standing and going to where you keep the food and water bottles. As you move, he mulls over the events that led him here. He got knocked down and beat by the man that was supposed to be his bounty. That never happened. You came to rescue him and- wait. You just told him no, nayc, in Mando’a. In fact, you were speaking Mando’a to him the whole time you rescued him, reassuring him and directing him in his native tongue, which he had no idea you spoke until just now. You return with a nutrient bar and water bottle, setting them next to his side on the cot. “I’ll head back up-” you start to say, but he stops you by grabbing his wrist. “You speak Mando’a,” he says simply, looking up at you with wonder behind his mask. “Yeah,” you chuckle and admit, face flushing with warmth. His is equally heating beneath the beskar. He sits up slightly but instead you come to his level, sitting on the edge of the cot and pushing him down with a firm palm to his chest. He chuckles softly. “So you’ve understood me every time I’ve called you beautiful,” he says, a tinge of shyness in his modulated voice. Nodding, you tuck a stray hair back from your face. “I… yes, I have,” you nod, giving him an awkward smile. “I hear you talk in Mando'a in your sleep too, sometimes.” Even his chest is flushing with warmth now. You look away, at a corner of the ship “You talk about your life. People from your past.” The silence hangs between the two of you, your hand still resting in the center of his chest. You slowly drag it to his good shoulder, and down his arm. He clasps your hand in his when it reaches his fingertips. “Have you heard the name Din?” He asks in his native tongue, and you shake your head softly, truthfully. It never came out. “That’s… my name. Din, Din Djarin,” he admits to you, hand squeezing yours softly. You gasp softly, not expecting that information from him. A smile settles on your face after a moment. “Well then. Hello, Din.” You lean down and press your forehead to where his lies beneath the metal. A keldabe kiss, you know, the most intimate gesture a Mandalorian can do. It truly melts his heart, the organ pumping frantically in his chest. “Hello to you too, gorgeous. Wait,” he stops and pushes your face from his, gently. He returns to speaking Basic with a chuckle. “How many languages do you speak?” You look upwards, mentally counting. “Uh. 8 and a half. I’m still not finished with Ubese,” you say and turn back to face him, a shy smile gracing your face. “Wow. You’re a mirdal’ika,” he tells you, the smile evident in his voice even though you can’t see it through the mask. Separately, the syllables make sense. You understand the direct translation, but it’s odd, and you cock your head to the side as you look down at the Mandalorian- no, Din. “Little clever one?” You ask, unsure if you heard him correctly. “Yes, well, that’s the direct translation. It’s really more of a slang term.” “For?” “In Basic… I believe the equivalent would be… nerd.” “Din!” You squeal and laugh, smacking his good shoulder lightly with a backhand. “Excuse me, that’s rude,” you chuckle, the smile growing even wider on your face as you look down at him. He doesn’t respond for a moment and you give a soft sigh. “Well, you need to drink that water. I’ll head back up to the cockpit,” you tell him, really meaning to leave this time, the smile falling. Once again, as you stand and try to move, he grabs your arm. “I… I think I’m going to need help with that,” he admits, almost ashamed. “Please. Stay.” You nod, but then realize what it implicates. “No, Din,” you sigh, shaking your head. “I can’t do that to you, you and that helmet, it’s… it’s your everything, I couldn’t possibly-” “Please, cyare,” he asks in his native tongue again, and your heart melts. “I want you to see me. I need you to see me.” Heart pounding, you take a beat before you respond with a nod. You sit down once more, hands slowly tracing up his sides, then his chest and up to the base of his helmet. “You’re sure. Positive,” you ask. “Of course I am.” With a nod, you allow him to bring his hand to the side to unlatch the lock. Once it releases, he lifts his head just above the pillow and you slide off his helmet, catching the back of his head with one hand and easing it back down to the pillow. You make sure the helmet rests on the floor before you finally look at him. He’s gorgeous, truly. His tanned skin, which you saw when cleaning his wounds, is covered with dark stubble and a mustache on the lower half of his face, broken by two plush lips. Your fingertips trace his jawline as you take in his softly hooked nose, his dark eyebrows, his dark and messy hair, but most importantly, his eyes. His eyes are a beautiful chocolate brown, set gently into his face and looking at you like you’re a shimmering supernova, no, something even more beautiful. For a moment, you get caught up staring at him. “You’re absolutely beautiful, Din,” you mumble in Mando’a. He just gives a soft smile and murmurs his thanks. After you finish staring, you shake your head quickly. “Sorry, the water,” you chuckle nervously, turning to grab it from your other side. Din’s hand catches the side of your face. “The water is a secondary need,” he says softly in Mando’a, turning your face back to his. “I took this off for something else.” His eyes hold a question as he looks up at you. You bite your lip for a moment before breaking into a smile and nodding. The Mandalorian pulls your face down to his, and, ever so gently, your lips finally meet, real and warm and absolutely delicious. You sigh softly, putting a hand on the side of his face too. His lips are softer than you’d expected, while yours are just as beautiful as he dreamed about at night. You both continue for a moment, his hand drifting to your neck, completely lost in each other. A moment later, you pull back and giggle. “I have to admit something, Din,” you tell him and lovingly stroke the side of his face. “It better not be that you’re secretly engaged,” he asks teasingly, a soft smile on his face and raising an eyebrow at you. “No,” you laugh and run your hand through his curls, carding your fingers between the surprisingly soft locks. “That…” you gulp and look away before looking back at him. “Was my first kiss,” you admit and bite down on your bottom lip. He laughs softly but there’s love in his eyes. “A girl as beautiful as you never dated when you were younger? Never went out and flirted with her classmates?” You shake your head. “I was generally too busy at home, reading or teaching myself the language of the man who’d eventually be my first kiss.” You both laugh at that and you grin. His hand rests on the side of your face, gently sweeping his thumb across the skin beneath his fingers. “Of course you were. My little mirdal’ika,” he laughs, bringing your face to his to kiss you once more.
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whatisgoingonpaul · 3 years
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Lost boys backstorys
I made a post while ago on my ideas of the boys past but now I want to update it. I just want you to know I’m still a firm Prequel lover/follower however we don’t get much info on the boys Pre 1906, so that’s what this is for! However personally I would have had more Max so this is going to be both pre 1906 but also include relationship with Max a bit.
I am also including my personal ideas on Last names and age. However I am under the idea that they wouldn’t know/take their last name seriously if the did know it cause- ya know. Orphans. This is going to be lengthy and I’m going to pin it, not just because I want it seen but also to remind myself in fic writing (when I don’t follow these ideas in a fic it’s gonna be Marked as Au- as I’ll probably be messing around with a different past.)
I’ll be doing appearance but only physical as there’s some stylistic changes. For clothing? Honestly so thinking workers clothes/cowboy esc
Also! Their stories are all going to kinda intertwine so I’d there’s not enough info under one theirs a solid chance there’ll be more for them under someone else’s!
David Hardy-
Age(as of 1906): 19
Born: 1887
Appearance: Average height, his hair a dirty blond- near reddish and is around shoulder length. Bearded. (Think doc but with slightly updated clothing)
Backstory:
David Is the only of the boys to grow up with at least one of his parents, living with his mother until her death when he was around 7. They lived in a decent, though cramped little space in San Francisco, by the docks. His father worked on and off- a not so stable style ending in him getting involved in not doing saviory things - getting arrested. His mother worked as a washerwoman. David worked the streets awhile, as a young child now left alone, he learned to pickpocket and live off what he could manage. It was around this time he had found Marko- doing the same thing he was - though arguably less effectively do to his more sporadic nature. At around age 10 the two became extremely close and rather inseparable, Marko even looking up to him despite being the older of the pair. However david wasn’t one to living completely criminal like... he did NOT want to be his father, which lead him to not drinking , EVER. (Even as a vampire he still doesn’t do alcohol.) he poked towards more honest work, also forcing Marko into doing the same , which he wasn’t exactly thrilled about- but did anyway. Tried. David did a lot of work on the docks, odd jobs and stuff like that- but it never paid even half as good as nabbing a wallet or cheating at cards. He wouldn’t be his father- he’d be better- better then all the nobody’s. More level headed then Marko though  ambitious, big headed and still wildly child like- eventually Paul , Dwayne and Jasper joining the pair. Well now, David had himself a full on gang. Never robbery, not that far. The group pickpocketed , cheated at any sort of game or match, that sort of thing... they were still young after all. Smart enough not to go wild like some famous bandit (Though David will admit to his slight admiration of Billy the kid.). He’s a quick learner, and when he learns something- he learns it well- becomes a damn near expert. When he is good at something he is good at it. He is the leader out of the groups mutual respect towards him , quick thinker. Notable flaws: Huge ego, hopeless romantic.
Marko Connelly-
Age(as of 1906): 20
Born: 1886
Appearance: on the shorter side, golden - darker brown hair in this fluff of ringlets it’s long about just past his shoulder blades and typically tied back. Usually dirty somehow (Think Poli but with longer hair and updated clothing)
Backstory:
Born to a rich family , one of those who moved from east to west and actually did make it big. He was a pretty little thing, more a doll to his mother then particularly a child- only taken from Nanny to be dotted over or photos taken. However around the age of 3 or 4 things had tipped, scandal! Missing. That is what the newspapers said anyway he was found missing- was it that he was given away? Or stolen? He was never particularly a child to be quite or sit still or anything such as that... so who is to say? Marko doesn’t remember a lick of that either way as he was far far to young for it but he does remember being alone. This is how he had grown his attachment to birds, they always stuck around. He grew comfortable with being alone, having himself to depend on, getting good at grabbing what he needs- A mansion is stark contrast to dirty winding alleyways. He was always cursed with his looks- even filth covered at 6 he could make sad eyes and tend to swindle whatever he wanted... but he wasn’t completely quick. He’d get in trouble, his face memorable he could rarely pass the same trick again. At 11 David came across him, the two started working and living together (that is where they could find a place to sleep.) he sort of gained this complex. He felt he owed David , in some strange sense he became attached at the hip- a helper, a second- almost servant like the guy had saved his life and he is now the others. It didn’t help that at a young age, Marko had developed what was come to be understood as a deep crush- at times as teens this was reciprocated. As loyal and loving as he was to the other male he wasn’t nearly as cautious, as rule following... he had come to despise authority, to despise the fancy, the rich all of the crowd. He was never sure why. Even regular work got on his hate list... but he gave in and would try to do a normal amount pf work.. it never really worked as there was something, how he would sass, how he looked or smelled or spoke (neither him nor David really spoke ‘proper’ English - meaning no slang or accent). Around when Paul came things started to shift in the group, more mouths- more work and more thinking. Oh yea David and his thinking. Marko is a bit hostile right off the bat when it comes to people he doesn’t know, eventually he cracks and will be more loyal to you then to anyone you’d ever know. He opened up to Paul, a lot sooner then he would have thought the guy was funny and sweet - lil stupid too. David had this grand idea of a little gang, naturally Marko was all for it because illegal activity is fun- it was like a game to him. A liked stealing from pockets and playing distraction for David, as time grew he began to hate how young and gentle his face appeared to be. He LOATHED absolutely appalled the pity glances he would get, the hand outs the whole “oh you poor fragile little dear 🥺” he hated being babied and still does. He hated the stares he got on the opposite direction ... at first, it was funny, it was nice to be wanted in that sense rather then some baby. However... it grew creepy, it wasn’t women or a fella his age...it was more the gaze of older men. Marko detested it so much- he KNEW he’s seen what some of the guys... even younger then him ended up doing- he could see the occasional look in david’s eye. No he would never really consider....no. Paul was more his shoulder to cry on, someone to go to , to ramble to to speak with and just be with. The two were touchy, always leaning against eachother or grabbing their arms, laughing or sleeping or- eventually it became more then casual, it was serious. The two started ‘dating’ at some point- none of them were ever serious on titles but it was good to put a word to it.
Paul campbell-
Age (as of 1906) : 18
Born: 1888
Appearance: tall and lengthy, he has a mole on his left cheek, he has stubble/shadow opposed to a beard. He’s also usually dirty, dirty blond , long hair think Buffalo bill with volume and his hairline not receding
Backstory:
Grew up in a orphanage, hundreds of kids all stuffed together into a few rooms, often sharing beds and everything else. He was never a still child, he would always figit and move and shift - whenever he’s supposed to be quite or still like lessons or Mass he just couldn’t. This - got him most of the attention from the mistresses and overseers- much more quick to slap then to explain... he was docile , quick to flinch and try and stop. Never worked well. Once you get to 7-8ish you work if not adopted by a decent age. Sweeping, factory work he tried it all. He was particularly desensitized to violence at a extremely young age while working in a textile factory- he’s seen a kids arm come clean off. Terror turns to fascination eventually. At some point he’d stopped returning at night finding David and Marko at 15, he started hanging with them- it was safer in numbers that sort of thing- Paul could read a bit , David could write a bit- the three worked it out together. always so distracted- the others learned right off the bat he wasn’t built for pick pocketing no matter how hard he begged about it. Instead he’d do real jobs- sweeping , fighting, placing crooked bets that sort of thing. He always complains. A massive softie since he was young, Paul can’t quite handle being on his own- he’s used to having at least one other person around him at all times causing him to get quite hooked onto the other boys. He hovers around the same places. He is also a fan of dancing- Paul- is music obsessed the moment he heard the first noise of any sort of music he was hooked. He is one about fun- being restrained from it for so long as a child- always to sit out and watch or to think about whatever he did.. oh. Dancing, drinking, drugs, clubs, all of it is his kind of deal- he would drag the others with him when they had a bit of extra cash to deal with. Dwayne and his brother, when they joined on he was instantly accepting, unlike Marko he didn’t have the deep seeded trust issues, he was immediately touchy and happy to share a joke or a comment no matter the glares. He is the one to get Dwayne to lighten up a little bit, to smile he loves to see that smile :). He got around to dating Marko, when they finally put a label on it he was really giddy about it, making jokes and comments- he adores the little names like ‘sweetheart’ or ‘bo’ - he eventually gets around to just plain ‘sugar’ . Marko is the one who really entertains Paul’s love for dancing, the two of them trying to get the others to do something lighten up- eventually their pawing would bare fruit. Paul makes the best out of the worst situation, even if they end up sleeping on the beach more often then not- he somehow makes it seam alright. Except that one time he had gotten sand in Dwayne’s eye and all hell broke lose. He is the current youngest member of the group after Jaspers passing.
Dwayne Maher
Age (as of 1906) : 22
Born: 1884
Appearance: Tall, muscular , tanned(I will establish this now but Dwayne is Native American.) long Black hair with burnet highlights, reaches half down his back.
Backstory:
Born out more Midwest unlike the others he was not born in San Francisco, eldest son of a decent sized family of four kids. Do to conflict he and his younger brother skipped town, skipped state and fled to California.. better options you know?. He’s strong built, hard working and good with his hands though, rather playful most of the time. He looks after his younger brother closely, when there is work they work the same place, when there is not they both still do the same. Quickly took to David and the gang , having a tight knit bond with each of them. He was sort of the muscle - if there was trouble, he knew how to fight and it would likely work better then the knives the boys carried around or the gun David could barely shoot. It was Paul who got him to open up more, about himself and just to speak in general, he’s much more under his breath and jokingly commenting then he is saying something out loud- however if he dislikes something or thinks it stupid you WILL know it. Like David he carries the occasional thought of caution, however he’s not nearly as quick to worry. Maher is not his actual last name , nor does he ever mention it- he simply uses this one when it’s needed as some sort of identification or document. He’s surprisingly good at money, he ends up counting with David and is better at budgeting no matter how he may want or need something. He doesn’t speak on his past as he tries to make it seam he has little of one, he likes to make things mysterious he finds it amusing.
Jasper Maher-
Age (as of 1906) : 16
Born: 1890
Died: 1906
Appearance: shoulder length black hair, typically tied back and braided , tanned, string bean.
Backstory:
The younger brother of Dwayne who is much much more open on how he grew up, casually mentioning things he learned from his parents of his brother (he doesn’t remember his parents that much.) young hot shot sort of kid who’d much rather have action then he would some serious job, loud, energy filled and one for violence- however he’s surprisingly sweet. He often got himself and his brother into trouble. He was a quick and fast young child who grew surprisingly closest with Marko, the two having a habit for breaking every possible rule they could manage together. Their close friendship lead to Marko naming one of his birds after Jasper long after his passing.
Max-
Unknown age but he is seen as extremely old and powerful
Relationship with the boys:
After finding them he has decided to take them under his metaphorical and physical wing, acting as a sort of guardian. Food, clothing, shelter, he was everything the boys didn’t have and was surprisingly inviting in the beginning. ‘I do this for you, you on occasion do this for me’ sort of deal. He wasn’t a leader so much as he was a usual figure, the boys knew and understood him to be above them... so they followed you know? The whole new vampirism thing and the clueless kids- he had to explain and show nearly everything... especially to David, he wasn’t so much harsh to him as he was strict- more of a lead by example sort. Honestly he was father like in a strange sense- that someone is almost like a parent but very much your boss. See... with Max’s strength, there’s this almost automatic level of control- you can’t say no to him. You literally can’t not do what he asks (some supernatural level messing-). There’s something dark about him, in him that the boys still don’t understand in the 80s- but it scares them. It’s strange, it feels unlike him... he seams just like a Dorky , sweet man until...
Some random thoughts that don’t really fit anything
The boys are explicitly religious, past what you’d hear in passing or remember from growing up. Saying “oh god” and respecting religious officials are about what you’ll get
Whoopsies! This was a extremely long post lmao. Sorry for the long read but I could go on and on about them this was just a small blurb to all of it. If you ever wanna hear more do tell me. Also tell me if I should add tw for anything as I know I got a little dark at some points.
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athenasbloodyspear · 3 years
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Say Something to Stop Me: Chapter 3
Writing Master List | Say Something to Stop Me Master List
Please note: This fic describes depression, anxiety, panic attacks, past/referenced non con and domestic violence. Please read at your own discretion.
The next month at the compound passed much better than the last. You started training with everyone in the gym again and actually paid attention to your exercise routine.
Bucky had come to find you one morning in your room, a few days after the Peter incident, and had reiterated to you that he didn’t want to push you to talk about anything, but that he was there for you if you needed him. You had thanked him, blushing all the way up to your hairline when you thought about how you had clung to him and sobbed into his chest. He had just tucked his fingers under your chin to make you look at him. “Don’t be embarrassed. I’m glad I could be there for you when you needed me.” You didn’t have any words, so you had just nodded. Then you’d both gone down to the gym for a long morning of training. The place on your chin where his fingers had gently held had tingled all morning.
Tony sent you out on a couple of really easy missions to scope out a few buildings. It was just you wandering the busy streets of a few towns in Russia. Even though it was devastatingly cold, it felt good to be out and working again. Your head felt clear, you had a purpose and something to focus on.
The two appointments you had with the therapist so far seemed… fine. The first was very formal and slightly uncomfortable. You were a person who had to keep their cards close to their chest their whole life, and spent a good portion of time only telling the smallest amount of the truth you could get away with. You were constantly juggling secrets, so spending an hour just talking about yourself was not something that came naturally.
The second appointment was a little better. You didn’t know if you’d ever feel comfortable actually talking about what happened to someone you didn’t know, but you had opened up a bit about feeling lost, like the world is duller lately and she seemed to think that was something that lots of people struggled with. It was enough to lift a little bit of weight off your heart.
You finally finished all of the Fast and the Furious movies with Peter and had started spending the evenings in the common area eating dinner and sharing drinks with everyone. You were still more quiet than usual, but you supplied the occasional joke (usually at Sam or Bucky’s expense) and generally just started to enjoy yourself a bit more.
One evening, just about a month after your panic attack, you were all settling down for a movie in the common space. Everyone was going to watch the Lord of the Rings series together after Tony and Sam had been appalled to discover that no one (not even Peter) had seen any of them.
You were tucked on the couch between Bucky and Peter with a movie theater size bin of popcorn on your lap. Between the teen boy and the super soldier grabbing hand fulls, the tub was almost halfway gone and you hadn’t even hit play yet.
“Jesus you monsters! Don’t eat it all before the movie even starts.”
“It’s not our fault you’ve been making us wait for 15 minutes.” Peter said through a mouthful of half chewed popcorn.
“Ew Peter! Swallow before speaking please. We’re waiting for Tony. He’d be pissed if we started without him.” You snarked back as you stood to go pop more popcorn.
Heathens. You thought to yourself, rolling your eyes.
“Hey Friday?” Peter yelled at the ceiling. “Where the fuck is Tony?”
You heard Steve mutter “language” under his breath across the room. Sam threw a pillow at him. Bucky dropped his head back onto the couch and cackled.
“Shut up grandpa.” You threw over your shoulder.
As you started to turn back around you caught the blue of Bucky’s eyes staring at you. He still had a huge smile on his face, but his eyes were scanning down the length of your body. His gaze paused somewhere around where you knew the top band of your Calvin Klein underwear was peeking out over the top of your sweats. You felt your whole face flush a bright red, your body temperature skyrocketing.
Bucky’s eyes drifted back up and locked with yours. He gave you a small smirk before turning back around to berate Steve for being a stick in the mud. It didn’t seem possible, but your blush seemed to spread across your chest and you could feel a small amount of sweat build on the back of your neck. What the hell? You closed your eyes and shook your head a bit to try to clear the flush from your body.
Calm down and just pop popcorn.
Just then Friday's voice spoke up “Tony is in the elevator on his way.”
“Thank fuck.” Sam said, which caused more grumbling from the lounge chair occupied by Steve. You giggled quietly to yourself as you poured some popcorn kernels into Tony’s fancy popcorn popper.
You turned to grab some butter from the fridge and almost slammed nose first into a rock hard chest. Two arms wrapped around your biceps to stop your forward momentum. Bucky chuckled softly.
“Whoa princess. Need any help?”
“Uh. Can you grab some butter?” You lifted your eyes off the small bit of skin showing above the neckline of his shirt (was he wearing a gold chain???) and locked eyes with him.
He looked at you for a second, the corner of his lip curled into a lopsided smirk. “Sure thing, Doll.”
He let go of your arms and turned to the fridge. You found your eyes scanning the rippling muscles of his shoulders and down the expanse of his back to his slim hips. It felt like you were peeling velcro apart when you finally forced your eyes to return to the popcorn machine.
Oh my god. Get your shit together.
Suddenly the door to the common room swung open “I have a surprise for you!” Tony’s loud voice called from the doorway.
Then you heard a booming voice (one you hadn’t heard in just about a year) bellow “I’m back midgardians!”
You swung around, jaw practically on the floor, to see if it really was who you thought it was. “THOR!” You squealed. You ran at him full steam. His rumbling laugh almost brought tears to your eyes as you launched yourself into his arms. He picked you up and spun you around. You pulled back to look at him with both palms on either side of his face. “How are you here? Why are you here? Is everything okay?”
He laughed, still holding you about a foot in the air and said “Well, Heimdall had brought me news that my bestie had begun to reside in the compound” you giggled when Thor used the term for best friend you had taught him the last time he was here “And I realized I had not returned to learn of your stories for over a year. It is about time that we ‘overturn the tea,’ is it not?” At this you, Peter and Sam absolutely lose your minds laughing.
“What?” Thor asks “It is time, is it not?”
Steve, Bucky and Tony are looking at the three of you in very obvious confusion. Between wheezing and fits of giggles you finally squeak out “It’s spill the tea, Thor.” This causes Peter to fall into another fit of laughter.
“What do you mean, ‘spill the tea’? Is that a game?” Steve asks.
Thor finally sets you down and turns to Steve while You, Peter and Sam try to catch your breath. “Lady Y/N taught me that midgardian phrase. I am told it means to tell dramatic stories, often those that involve your enemies.”
“Oh my god, Thor I missed you so much.” You laugh and hug him again. He wasn’t kidding, you two were besties. He was so interested in midgardian slang, movies and music and it seemed that most of the time you were the only one who had the patience to teach him things. Whenever he visited you two were basically inseparable and he never failed to make you laugh.
“What were your plans this evening, bestie?” You thought Peter might have an asthma attack or something if Thor kept making him laugh this hard.
“We’re watching a movie! Would you like to join?”
“Indeed!” Thor bellowed. He finally stepped away to great everyone else, giving big bear hugs to everyone. You wandered back to the kitchen to collect the popcorn that Bucky had finished making.
“I didn’t know you and thunderman were that close.” Bucky commented as you grabbed the giant bowl from his hands.
“Well, we don’t see each other that often, but he’s such a sweetie.” You snag a handful from the bowl and shove your face full of popcorn.
“Hm.” Bucky mumbles. He’s looking at the ground by his feet. He seems almost… upset?
“C’mon. We can finally watch!” You give him a little hip check before walking back into the living space. You plop down on the couch, this time between Peter and Thor. Bucky takes a spot in a lounge chair next to Steve. You notice his eyes snag a little too long on the blonde giant next to you.
After the movie is over, and some heated debates between Tony and Thor on which character is the best, you all decide to order some pizza.
You’re struck again at how wonderful it feels to just spend the evenings with your best friends, drinking beer and eating pizza, laughing at the stories Thor tells about Asgard.
When you were living off site, you didn’t have any friends besides… Him. It was supposed to be your little slice of the world separate from your life working with Shield. You tried to keep everything as compartmentalized as possible, but it was hard to make friends when you never really left the apartment and couldn’t be honest with anyone about who you really were. You hadn’t ever realized how lonely you had been for the 3 years you’d lived away from the compound until now. The energy of a room full of your favorite people was intoxicating.
Everyone was standing in the kitchen around the island, drinking beers and chatting. Vision and Wanda were sitting on the couch a few feet away being absolutely adorable. Thor, Steve and Bruce were swapping stories at the end of the island. Nat, Sam and Bucky were picking on Peter. You couldn’t keep the smile off your face.
You had just cracked open a new beer and started pouring it into a pint glass when Thor spoke up from across the counter.
“So, Y/N, what became of that man Elijah with whom you lived?”
Oh. Shit.
Mid-pour the beer slipped through your fingers and crashed to the counter. Beer went everywhere. Your hands and forearms were covered in sticky residue. Instantly your heart rate spiked and it was all you could do not to let your knees buckle and collapse right there onto the tile.
“Oh. Uh…” You mumbled out. You had to place your palms flat against the counter to keep your hands from shaking. You stared at the kitchen counter top where your glass sat between your hands, trying to force oxygen back into your lungs. It was silent for a bit too long and you could hear the drip drip drip of beer falling from the counter onto the kitchen floor.
“You lived with someone?” Wanda asked from the couch, looking very perplexed.
No one had really known about it. Tony knew, of course, because he needed “a damn good reason” for you not to live at the compound when you first got added to the team, but you had begged him to keep it a secret. Peter sort of knew, only because when he would drop by sometimes he could sense there was someone else in the apartment.
Thor knew because he had brought Asgardian liquor with him one time and you had stayed up on the couch in the compound and gotten hammered and it just sort of slipped out. You’d said something like ‘Oh he’s gonna be pissed when I don’t come home tonight’ and then Thor had questioned you and you’d just sort of… spilled. Well, not everything, but he got most of it.
You just… hadn’t told anyone else. It had started because Elijah had asked to be kept separate from your working life. He didn’t want your relationship overshadowed by “super people” who “didn’t have any idea how to be normal.”
As the years passed, it just started to be a habit, that you would keep secrets from Elijah about what you did at work, and you kept Elijah a secret from everyone.
You could feel everyone in the room staring at you.
“I’m sorry Lady Y/N… I was not aware that everyone did not know you lived with your fiancé.” Thor said softly from the other side of the counter. You winced. You could feel black spots forming in your vision as you tried to keep your breathing normal.
“It’s okay. Um. Yeah. That uh… didn’t work out.” You squeaked out. You couldn’t lift your eyes up to look at anyone. You were focusing all of your energy on not falling apart in front of them.
There was more silence, everyone in the room clearly reeling from learning that not only had you lived with someone for three years, but you were supposed to have married a man none of them knew. The only sound was the continual drip of beer off the edge of the counter. You couldn’t take it anymore.
With a choked “excuse me” you bolted from the room.
You missed Peter saying your name and getting up from his chair. You missed Nat pushing his shoulder back down with a whispered “let her be Peter.” You missed Thor looking at Tony and saying “I should not have said that” and Tony shaking his head and rubbing his eyes. You missed Sam staring down at his hands on the counter, lost in thought. You missed Wanda and Vision sharing a look. You missed Bucky launch himself from his seat to follow you, and Steve snagging Bucky’s arm to stop his forward momentum.
~0~
You crashed through the door to your room and flung it shut behind you. Leaning your back against the door, you slid down to your butt, hugging your knees to your chest. You started rocking back and forth and tried to slow your breathing down. You knew, after talking to your therapist, that this was a panic attack. In the logical half of your brain, you knew you weren’t dying, that no one was trying to attack you or kill you. You knew you could breathe oxygen just fine.
However, it definitely felt like you were dying.
You kept trying to heave oxygen in, but the longer you sat there the more your brain spiralled. You just kept thinking of the silence. The clear feeling of hurt that radiated off your friends, your family.
Your brain warped that silence, filling it with false ideas of your friends sharing accusatory glances. Of their hatred seething from them. Of their distrust and dislike of you bubbling to the surface. You scrubbed at your face. “No no no no” a mantra falling from your lips.
This wasn’t real. Your brain was trying to convince you that they hated you, but they hadn’t done any of the things your brain was trying to tell you they had. They weren’t like that, they didn’t find out things about you and immediately decide you weren’t worth it.
You leaned your head back against the door, knocking it a few times against the wood, trying to clear your brain. You couldn’t think about what happened. You couldn’t change it, you just had to focus on breathing now.
Easier thought than done.
There was a soft tap on the other side of the door, causing you to jerk forward reflexively, like you’d been burned.
“Hey sweetheart. Are you… okay in there?”
Bucky. Oh god. Not again. You refused to let him hold you again while you got nasty snot all in his mechanical arm. It simply wasn’t an option. You opened your mouth to tell him to get the hell away, but the only sound that came out was a small choked cough.
Ah. Right. You couldn’t fucking breathe.
“Hey, it’s okay. If you want your space that’s totally fine. I’m just… gonna sit here, okay? So you’re not alone. I’ll be right here, on the other side of the door, if you need something. Just try to breathe, okay?” Bucky murmured from the other side.
You were on your hands and knees now, staring at the door, gasping like a fish out of water. You could see the shadow of his feet just on the other side. You saw the light shift as he must have sat down. You heard a soft “thump” as his back hit the door.
There was something about that soft thump that instantly stabilized your racing heart. This was… good. There was no pressure of trying to talk to him or having him look at you while you were panicking, but you knew he was there. It was calming in a way you didn’t fully grasp.
You sat back on your feet and stared at your hands in your lap.
“If your hands tingle, I always find that if I tap each finger to my thumb one at a time, it helps.” Bucky suggested softly through the doorway. You tried it. Tapping one finger tip to your thumb at a time, starting with your pointer. Once you got to your pinky you reversed the order. After a few times, you realized your breathing had evened out and you could see more than just the tunnel vision in front of you.
You looked back up at the door. Bucky’s shadow still hovered just under the frame.
You cleared your throat and croaked “Thank you.”
“Anytime.”
You stayed there for a while longer, shifting your weight to one side and swinging your legs around to extend them in front of you. Eventually you laid back on the floor of your room and stared at the ceiling again. Your breathing was even and slow, and your muscles finally felt like they had lost all the tension.
You let your eyes fall shut as you melted into the rug underneath you.
~0~
You woke with a start, dreams of angry brown eyes and a messy flop of blond hair haunting you as you sat up in bed.
In bed.
How did you get here? The last thing you remembered was laying back on the entryway rug and closing your eyes…
Bucky.
You groaned and covered your face with your hands. Not again. At some point, you were really going to have to stop breaking down in front of him.
It was then that you remembered him giving you the advice of tapping your fingers to steady yourself. He had said something about him doing it… there was a sick feeling in your stomach thinking about Bucky suffering alone through that.
You stepped out of bed and went to take a long scalding shower before getting dressed. You should find Bucky this morning and thank him… again. You threw on a pair of sweatpants and a matching cropped sweatshirt, shoved your feet into your sneakers and stepped into the hallway.
“Friday?” You asked softly.
“Yes?” Friday’s lilt came down from above. She sounded softer than usual, almost like she was matching your sound level.
“Where is Bucky?”
“Agent Barnes is on the training level.”
“Thank you.”
You took the elevator down and stepped into the gym. It seemed like everyone was up early and in the gym this morning, crowded around the sparring mats.
“What’s going on?” You asked as you stepped up between Nat and Wanda to look at whatever it was that everyone else was watching.
They didn’t have to answer you, it was quite obvious. Thor and Steve were wrestling to the absolute death in the center of the mat. Steve was putting up a really good fight, but it looked like Thor had him beat.
“Oh my god.” You chuckled. Of course, everyone wanted their shot at sparing with the demigod, especially the super soldiers. It was rare to have a chance to spar with someone who was stronger than the serum made you, so every time Thor came he always did a few rounds in the ring.
You watched as Steve tried to wrap his legs around Thor and flip him over, but Thor had such a good wrap around Steve’s waist it just wasn’t going to happen. Thor brought one arm up and wrapped Steve in a vise-like headlock.
“Yield, little man. I have bested you.” Thor boomed out.
Steve hesitated, but eventually he tapped Thor’s forearm, signalling defeat.
Thor hopped up and started bouncing on his toes. “It was an exceptional attempt Captain, but you have gone soft since I’ve been in this realm.”
Steve groaned as he dragged himself up from the floor. “That, or you’ve somehow gotten stronger.”
Thor’s eyes popped up and found yours with a mischievous glint in them. Not unlike the one you’d seen in Loki’s eyes many times.
“Ah, Lady Y/N has awoken! Just in time for me to crush her into the floor!” Thor chuckled and beckoned you onto the mat.
“My god, Thor…” You groaned, pulling your sweater off over your head revealing your signature calvin klein sports bra you had thrown on that morning.
“I know I’m a god my lady, but the question is, what will you be?” Thor snarked at you. You just rolled your eyes.
“I’m not really dressed for this currently.” You retort, pulling your sneakers and socks off and tossing them to the side of the ring. You catch Bucky’s eye from where he sits just outside the ring. He looks like Thor has already thoroughly beaten him this morning, all sweaty and panting.
I want to lick the sweat off his chest.
Your head twitches involuntarily at the thought that just popped up unprompted in your mind. Behind you, you hear Wanda snort.
Great.
You send a small smile in his direction, to thank him for last night, he nods in recognition as he takes a big gulp of water from his water bottle. You turn to Thor and raise your fists in front of you.
“Alright big guy, lets see how long I can last.”
~0~
It’s surprisingly long, actually. What you lack in brute strength, you make up for in agility. According to Peter, you lasted two whole minutes longer than Bucky and five longer than Steve.
Doesn’t matter, you still feel like you’ve been hit by a truck. Or lightning.
You’re standing in the middle of the ring, hands on your knees, trying to catch your breath when Thor places a hand on your back.
“Lady Y/N, I would love to accompany you to your room for some of the ‘girls day’ time.”
You chuckle. Thor loves doing facemasks and drinking champagne with you on your couch while you chat about anything under the sun. He asks nearly every chance he gets.
“Sounds great” you pant “Go shower and meet me up there in 30?”
“I will make haste.” Thor winks and turns to go.
You take a few more seconds to catch your breath as everyone goes back about their own workouts or heads up stairs. When you lift your head, Bucky is still packing up his gym bag just outside the ring.
“Hey, Buck?”
He looks up “What’s up?”
“I just… wanted to thank you. For last night. I know you probably have questions--”
“I don’t want to hear anything you’re not ready to tell.” Bucky cuts you off. “And don’t worry about it. Whenever you need me, I’m there.”
He’s finished putting things in his bag and starts to walk away. Something in you really doesn’t like that he’s moving away from you and you scramble to come up with something to keep him here, even for a second longer.
“Do you want to grab dinner?” You blurt.
He stops with his back to you for a moment before spinning around. “Dinner?”
“Uh…” Oh yeah. Real smooth. Really normal of you. “Yeah. Like, maybe we could go to that bar down the street tonight… and catch up?” You bite your bottom lip. You feel like such a freak right now. You’re asking him to dinner? Really?
Bucky’s eyes dart to your lips for a moment before bouncing back up to your face, but it’s noticeable enough that you instantly blush. You can feel the blood racing up to your face and you have to actively resist the urge to cover your cheeks with your hands. Why is it so hot in here all of a sudden?
Bucky smirks at you and then clears his throat. “Yeah, sure. Sounds good. 7:00? We can take my bike.”
“Yeah perfect.” You choke out. “I’ll see you in the garage.”
“Great.”
He turns and leaves, once he’s far enough around the corner you slap a hand to your forehead and double over again. Oh my god. You were going to ride on the back of Bucky’s motorcycle to the bar down the street tonight and have dinner.
This should have felt normal. He’s Bucky. He’s your friend. You used to go grab breakfasts and coffees all the time together.
But something about this dinner felt way different. Your heart was hammering in your chest.
Oh god. What were you going to wear?
~0~
Thor scared the shit out of you when you stepped out of your bathroom wrapped in a towel thirty minutes later.
That’s right. Girl time.
“Jesus Thor.” You placed a hand on your chest as you gaped at the demigod sprawled on your couch.
“I know that guy! Isn’t he the son of a midgardian god?” Thor quips back, unperturbed by how badly he spooked you. “You left your door unlocked. I brought up all of the bottles of champagne that I was able to uncover in Tony’s not-so-secret chamber of wine. I thought you could decide which to begin our afternoon with.”
You laughed at that. He had indeed. There were easily twenty bottles of champagnes of different vintages on the table near your entry. Tony had a massive wine cellar that he always said was for “special occasions only.” Thor being here was pretty special, so hopefully he didn’t get too mad if a few of these bottles went missing.
“Let me put on some comfy clothes and grab some face masks.”
After you had dressed, applied a beautiful green tea facemask all over Thor and your faces and popped a bottle, you finally settled on the couch with Thor.
“Lady Y/N, I first want to apologize for bringing up something that you had shared with me in private in the presence of the team. I was unaware that it was something you desired to keep a secret from everyone. I’m honored that you shared something personal with me and I am deeply sorry for not respecting the way I should.”
You blinked at Thor. You’d almost forgotten that he had been the one to bring up Elijah last night. You’d thought so much about Bucky’s back against your front door and going to a dive bar with him tonight that you’d managed not to worry about the events of last night.
“It’s totally chill Thor. You didn’t know. I also… don’t really know why I kept it from them? I just hadn’t said anything so I was just caught off guard and didn’t know what to say. You know?”
“Yes! You did look quite upset. Did something unfortunate come between you?”
A mirthless laugh escaped your lips. You stared into the glass of bubbles in your hand. “You… could say that.”
“Is this one of those topics that you’d prefer to discuss, or one that you’d prefer to leave to your own heart?” Thor reached out with his foot and tapped your knee with his toes.
You smiled before lifting your eyes to his. “I think I’d like to keep it in my own heart for now. I’ll tell you someday, okay?”
Thor lifted his glass of champagne in your direction “To many more afternoons of scattering the tea!”
A giggle exploded out of you “It’s spill Thor! Spill!” You lifted your glass to clink with his, relaxing into the couch.
~0~
At approximately 6:48 in the evening you decided you simply were too antsy to stay in your room and stare at the ceiling for a minute longer.
You had a wonderful afternoon of “girl time” with Thor. He had stayed for a few hours, telling you about all the silly court drama that he knew was happening back in Asgard. It had felt so… normal. It was glorious.
After he left, you brushed your hair and looked at yourself in the mirror for probably twenty minutes before deciding against any makeup.
It’s just two friends going to dinner.
You had thrown on a pair of black combat style pants, a white t-shirt and a leather jacket over top. Casual, but still a little nicer than the sweats you had been wandering the compound in for the last two months. You still hadn’t fully wrapped your mind around why you were so nervous.
You take a deep breath, shove your feet in your combat boots and decide to just head to the garage now. You don’t want to keep him waiting, and you can just admire Tony’s cars while you wait.
The elevator drops you off in the lower level where all of the team's personal vehicles are parked. As you step out of the elevator, the door to the stairwell opens to reveal none other than the man himself. Bucky.
He looked… amazing. There. You admitted it. He’s wearing a pair of jeans, a black henley unbuttoned enough to confirm that he did indeed wear a gold chain and that he had a small scar at the top of his right pec.
As he walked he tossed a faded leather jacket on and the movement gave you a brief glimpse of skin where his shirt rode up.
Did this garage just raise in temperature by like 20 degrees?
You fought the instinct to fan yourself.
“What’s the matter with you princess? Cat got your tongue?” He chuckled as he breezed past you toward where his Harley Davidson was parked in the corner of the underground lot. His shoulder just barely brushed yours as he passed.
Somehow, you found your voice. “Do you always take the stairs?”
He didn’t turn around to respond “When the elevator is occupied.”
Well. That was… logical. Duh.
“Get your little ass over here, I’m starving.” He called behind him as he approached the bike.
You felt yourself blush from your hairline down to your toes. “Excuse me?”
“I said get your little ass over here so we can get to that bar and order.” He spun around and gestured to the bike, like he was a presenter on a game show showing you your prize. He patted the leather seat twice. “Your little ass goes here.”
“Right…” you mutter under your breath. God what the hell is wrong with you? You walk over to his bike in silence. He throws one leg over the machine, straddling it and hitting the kickstand. You paused momentarily beside the bike. “So, no helmets?”
Bucky turned to look at you over his shoulder with a smirk on his face “Sweetheart, you’re superhuman.”
You just rolled your eyes at him as you finally swung your leg over the side of the bike. “Doesn’t make road rash hurt any less…”
He chuckled as he reached back to grab both of your hands “I’ll take care of you, doll.”
He pulled on your wrists until you slid forward a bit on the leather seat. Your hips were now slotted against each other, your chest melded against his back, your thighs in line. He wraps your hands around his abdomen so that your hands rest on the planes of his stomach. Then, he pats your hands twice, softly muttering “Hold on tight.”
You squeeze your eyes shut and rest your forehead between his shoulder blades. You could hear the door to the underground garage rumble open. You took a deep breath before whispering “Okay…” into his back.
Bucky punched the gas and you took off into the crisp evening air.
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thriftshop-faith · 4 years
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Please be aware and cautious of the user Sugarqoffee [manipulative, gaslighting, claimed I should have gotten raped by now]
Let’s begin this story with the simple fact, this individual came TO ME, asking for an invite into my pro-ship discord. 
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Now, I’ve tried my best to go through people’s blogs a bit before giving them an invite, and from all that I got from this individual’s blog was that they really liked Steven Universe and Warrior Cats. 
I didn’t see any sign that they were unstable and, just in general, an Anti. 
Now due to the a mod banned them for the incident that happened, I couldn’t save any receipts of it on the discord. **EDIT: A mod managed to capture one screensnap before banning the individual
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The issue came up when they asked if certain ships could be censored or marked as spoiler-- and like, no. We can prevent people from discussing a ship in a PRO-SHIP discord. I was going to try and explain that we expect a certain level of maturity from our members in regards to managing squicks and NOTPs. 
In all of my advertisement of the Discord, I made it very clear that the discord welcomed any and all fictional ships. 
@sugarqoffee​ then proceeded to ask the discord, which many of the members and some of the mods are victims/survivors of abuse/csa-- if they condone pedophilia and abuse... because we refused to give into their wishes for basically censoring and blacklisting certain ships that they believe condones the fact they were abused by their father [allegedly] 
After that, the mod banned them straight away. 
This is where the shitshow begins, with @sugarqoffee​ coming back onto tumblr to DIRECTLY engage with me and start shit by accusing me of condoning certain things, promoting, you know-- the whole fucking spiel Antis give.
Understand I’m showcasing the entire conversation because I want transparancy of what happened, and to show exactly what kind of person @sugarqoffee​ is
***Note that this does not mean you can go and harass them. I want you to avoid them at all costs-- just block and ignore. You know how I feel about harassment and suicide baiting-- don’t fucking do it.
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Fiction literally does not promote “stuff like that.” 
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They appear to blame a lot of things onto others, and project heavily.
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These characters are not yours-- they are for everyone to enjoy and to play around with. If you don’t like it, leave, or blacklist it, or block the user.
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She reacts quite negatively to be calling her parents [and her allegedly abusive father] bad and practically failures at raising this brat.
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Which is true, fiction is not even close to having near as much impact as nature vs. nurture. 
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Oh trust me, it’s about my mere existence making them uncomfortable-- even though I repeatedly told them if I’m making them uncomfortable, why don’t they just, fuck off? Block me?
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Tumblr has never, was never, made for kids. This website is primarily for an adult audience. 13 is just the minimum Tumblr would be fine with when it comes to minors-- not children, no, but teenagers. 13 year olds are not children, they are adolescents.
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They tried to claim me reblogging artwork of maxvid [two fictional characters] as being pedophilia [aka child porn]
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No, it isn’t. 
What is Pedophilia?
Profile of Child Predators [Pedophile vs. Child Molesters]
“Pedophilia is an ongoing sexual attraction to pre-pubertal children.   It is considered a paraphilia, a condition in which a person’s sexual arousal and gratification depend on fantasizing about and engaging in sexual behavior that is atypical and extreme. Pedophilia is defined as recurrent and intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors involving sexual activity with a prepubescent child or children—generally age 13 years or younger—over a period of at least six months. Pedophiles are more often men and can be attracted to either or both sexes. How well they relate to adults of the same or opposite sex varies.” [x]
“A pedophile is a person who has a sustained sexual orientation toward children, generally aged 13 or younger.   Blanchard says, “Not all pedophiles are child molesters (or vice versa).”
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It’s true, if you really believe something is child porn, then you report it to the FBI-- you do not confront the person by copying the image and sending it to them. You can literally be charged for obtaining and distributing child porn.
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The FBI has actually made posts about not reporting cartoons or things that are obviously not child porn-- it mucks up their job in shutting down child predators and molesters. 
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Oh, someone’s finally showing their ass, aren’t they?
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Ah yes, using self harm to make people feel sorry for you and a way into manipulating them.
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Someone doesn’t like being told no, and not being able to manipulate people into doing as they say.
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That is usually how you get into liking a ship, good fanart and fanfics.
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That is not proof. 
Also, kids shouldn’t be online unsupervised.
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Not all kids are as stupid as you are, @sugarqoffee​
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Tumblr may not be a porn site, but it is an adult website. 
Again, children shouldn’t be on tumblr, or online unsupervised.
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13 year olds’ are adolescents, not children. 
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This is the stats of user base in 2014
13-17-year-olds (aka minors) only make up 15% of this site’s user base.  Meanwhile, the site has always allowed adult content. This means that staff is trusting you to browse appropriately, and to take responsibility for your browsing using the tools they have given to you (like blocking, and filtering search results).  They are allowing you to be here under the assumption that you are mature enough to handle it.  Your behavior is only showing staff that they might want to raise the minimum age limit (which is 17+ for mobile users, by the way)
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And these are recent stats of user base
Due to its fast-pace communication style, multiple mediums and heavy use of sometimes specific imagery, pop-culture references and slang, Tumbler is unsurprisingly most popular among young Millennials. As of December 2016, almost half of Tumblr users in the United States were aged 34 years and younger, with 18 to 24 year olds accounting for 25.7 percent of U.S. Tumblr audiences. [x]
Notice how they don’t even include those below 18 years old.
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This statistic shows the age distribution of Tumblr users in the United States as of December 2016. As of that month, 23.9 percent of U.S. Facebook users were between 25 and 34 years old. The largest user group were 18 to 24 year olds with a 25.7 percent share.
Here’s an even more recent graph of theirs:
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Percentage of U.S internet users who use Tumblr as of January 2018, by age
43% age 18-24
34% age 25-34
26% age 35-44
16% age 45-54
8% age 55-64
4% age 65-75
2% age 75
Takeaways: while the biggest demographic slice is the youngest one, as you might expect, approximately one-third of adults aged 25-34 are on tumblr, and one-quarter of adults aged 35-44! Only 16% of adults aged 45-54, but that’s still a significant number. The number of Baby Boomers on tumblr is almost one in ten for the 55-64 age range!
“But surely the exclusion of under-18 users is messing up the data, there must be way more young teens than middle aged people.”  Not according to the 2014 demographics, which found as many people age 55+ as it did 13-17 year olds.
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It’s not hip to take statistics into consideration y’all.
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....Did ya catch that? Do you maybe need better clarification? 
Here’s @sugarqoffee​ clarifying herself just in case you missed it!
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This is essentially the “Oh you’re a sex worker, I thought you’d be fine with being raped.” or “Well you’re wearing such revealing clothing, you must have wanted it?”
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While I may be using some pretty bad language right about now, I think it’s safe to assume I’m only acting like a grade-A jackass is because they told me I should have gotten raped to death by now, because, ya know, I’m a pervert and I’m so stupid.
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and so, here I am! Making the post, making sure people on here beware @sugarqoffee​ and to block her on site. 
She apologized to me-- though if you could call it that, since she just right after told my friend @blue-exorsexist​ to kill himself because he wouldn’t apologize for... nothing??
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So I am just going to say the apology is hollow. 
Now I could also touch on to her friend she tried to sic on me, but perhaps I’ll save those receipts for another time. 
Please avoid this individual, they are unstable and extremely manipulative. Do not engage, simply block.
@mg-dl​ @asmellybee​ @fandomsense​ @king-kong-raisin-bran​ @franziska-after-success​ @takashi0​ @rainbowloliofjustice​ @werewolf-cuddles​ @pewishforships​ @tired-user​ @theassholeantiarchive2-0​ @such-justice-wow​ 
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transstudiesarchive · 4 years
Text
Madi Lou (and trans+ artists, too!)
Playing off the idea of "T4T" (trans seeking trans, typically associated with the terms found on the app Grindr) I wanted to compile a playlist of trans/nonbinary/gender non-conforming artists that are present in a variety of genres and gender expressions/presentations/labels.
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/52OZ896qRkAM2oqUwbtd5P?si=OQpd8kqSRnGGKcWe6XLcSw
"Maker - Acoustic” by Anjimile
Anjimile is a “queer and trans songmaker/lover boy with a heart of gold” based in Boston, MA
"Emasculate" by Dorian Electra
Dorian Electra is a gender-fluid pop musician who likes to become a “genderless clown” in their extravagant makeup and campy aesthetics.
"800 db cloud" by 100 gecs (Laura Les)
Laura Les, part of the duo 100 gecs, is a trans woman previously known under her project Osno1 (I felt it personally prevalent to include her song “How to Dress as Human” but could only find the link through Youtube)
"Heartbreaker" by Ah-Mer-Ah-Su
In her 2018 album STAR, Ah-Mer-Ah-Su wanted to tell the story of her black trans identity--a story typically connected to struggle and coping with extreme opposition from society at large. “For me, this album simply means that I’m a black girl with something to say. I have a story, and I’ll tell it through my music.” (billboard, August 2018)
"HRT" by Girls Rituals
Devi McCallion has worked in a number of projects centered under her label blacksquares. Her trans identity is touched on in such projects as Cats Millionaire/Mom, blackdresses, and Girls Rituals.
"Trans Femme Bonding" by Tami T
Originally starting her glittery electronica sound under the name Tami Tamaki, Tami T describes many aspects around the love for/between trans femmes // “So fucking brave, so fucking femme”
"Nonbinary" by Arca
Alejandra Ghersi, better known by her stagename Arca, came out as nonbinary and goes by she/her and it/its pronouns. 
"Bitch Pudding" by KC Ortiz
Rising in the Chicago hip-hop scene, KC Ortiz wants to be known that she is no different than any other rapper. “I cringe when headlines say ‘Trans Rapper.’ That ain’t me...The only times that even crosses my mind really is when I think about because I’m trans I gotta be dope.” (Art Music Fashion Life, June 2020)
"Faceshopping" by SOPHIE
Sophie Xeon made her breakthrough in Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides, becoming a known name after producing for artists like Charli XCX. She is very reclusive and has a smaller public image, contrary to her Louis Vuitton Spring/Summer 2020 appearance. (I have also discussed her imagery/lyricism of this song in 5th Avenue’s podcast--you should give it a listen to hear about other great queer artists!)
"Unkillable" by Katie Dey
“I was born inside this body and I’m stuck there/I’m a storm inside a rotting false construction” (Transition from “solipsisting” into “stuck” on Katie Dey’s debut album Asdfasdf)
"I'm Not 'Supposed' to Be Anything" by She/Her/hers
Emma Grrrl (and the occasional appearance of her friends) describes herself as sad grrrl pop-punk. “When I hear that a trans teenager shared one of my songs with their parents and it helped them to understand their experience, I just can’t imagine anything more validating or fulfilling than that.” (arena, June 2018)
"Gotta Gimme Your Love" by Sateen
Sateen is the band formally made up of the lesbian power couple Miss Sateen and Exquisite. Originally famous and sensationalized as a “hetero drag couple,” Exquisite came out as a trans woman and shifted the projection of their music and relationship into making disco for a new generation.
"TRANSylvania" by Kim Petras
Known famously on German television for medically transitioning in her teens, Kim Petras’ assertation in her identity as a trans woman gave her much of the internet presence and platform to successfully kick off a music career. “I hate the idea of using my identity as a tool...It made me the person I am and that’s a big part of me, but I think music is about your feelings and your fantasies and it goes deeper than your gender or your sexuality.” (billboard, 2018)
"Breakdown" by Torraine Futurum
Making waves in the fashion industry before walking in New York Fashion Week, Torraine Futurum says she aims to “do whatever the fuck I want to do on this Earth -- and it’s going to be excellent.” (them., 2018)
"I Am America" by Shea Diamond
“I knew at a very young age I loved to sing. My voice was effeminate and I remember feeling afraid to sing in the church choir...Desperate to find the financial means to transition to my true gender, I committed a crime in 1999 and was sentenced to 10 years in a men’s prison. I was afraid that I could possibly die in a prison system designed to ensure correctional jobs over human lives...I began writing ‘I Am Her’ as a statement to a world that said I shouldn’t exist.” (TEDxKC, 2018)
"Body and Soul" by teddy<3
Teddy Geiger has known many lives in popular culture from teen idol, romantic lead, to sought after producer. “I didn’t know anyone who was trans...I had very little connection to that, so it wasn’t really until maybe three years ago I started actually painting my nails and going out. Nobody cared if I was femme.” (Rolling Stone, 2018)
"Genderqueer Love Song" by Schmekel
“Schmekel means little penis is Yiddish, and is a play on the fact that all four members were born female but ow identify themselves on the masculine side of the gender spectrum. It’s an appropriate name for a band that started as a laugh.” (New York Times, 2011)
"Queer Kidz" by Ashby and the Occeanns
Ashlynn Barker is a trans/nonbinary musician based out of Chicago. They write songs about trans issues, queer identity, mental health, and video games.
"Cis Girls" by Dyke Drama
Sadie Switchblade of the band G.L.O.S.S. (Girls Living Outside Society’s Shit) came out with this “transparent” side project. “It’s pretty transparent...The songs are either about trans girl problems or dykey lesbionic friendships.” (Pitchfork, 2016)
"Femme Bitch Top" by Tribe 8
“When the trans-dyke neofeminist rabble-rousers known as Tribe 8 make music, not even heaven is safe.” (SF Gate, 2006) The San Francisco LGBT Film Festival entry “Rise Above” is a rock-documentary anomaly I highly recommend taking the time to watch.
"They / Them / Theirs" by Worriers
“You’ve got a word for one, So there’s a word for all. // The smallest things have become Which side are you on? // What if I don’t want something that applies to me? // What if there’s no better word than just not saying anything, anything?” The trio of gender-neutral pronouns
"Gender Nightmare" by Art Projects
“That’s not my face on the license picture // You call my name as it is on paper // As it will still be // When they write me up a eulopy” (Genius Lyrics analysis you want to click in on)
"Male Gynecology" by Shoplifting
A revival of riot-grrrl manifestas, the album Body Stories “brims over with precisely the kind of heartfelt, politically-charged fervor that’s far more likely to save rock. (Pop Matters, 2006)
"Third Gender" by Good Asian Drivers
“Sometimes my gender is chilling out inbetween, but most of the time my gender is FUCK YOU mind your own business!” → Please please please listen to the lyrics of this song, this is a wonderfully politically charged bop carried with heart and bass and punk spit.
"True Trans Soul Rebel" by Against Me!
Laura Les came out with her release of the album Transgender Dysphoria Blues and furthered this message in Against Me!’s album Shape Shift with Me. She was one of the first trans people I saw openly continue to pursue a passion despite previously having works “pre-transition” out in the world.
"If I Were You" by Claud
“Sometimes it’s more important to write from a perspective different from your own in order to touch on important things. People always tell me that I’m brutally honest and I think it’s because I don’t hold back on anything...it’s refreshing to hear something said that you want to say yourself, but just couldn’t.” (Popsugar., 2019)
"If You Knew This Was About You, You'd Deny It" by Wargo
A trans woman solo-acoustic based out of Virginia, Wargo’s sound is directly influenced by the punk scene of the east coast. She likes to call her style “Appalachian Power Pop.”
"I DONT TRUST U ANYMORE" by Left at London
Coming to a place of internet recognition through such vines as “hahaha I do that” Nat Puff’s indie pop project Left at Londed (shorted as /@/) dives into the heart of “what it means to navigate the current political world as a queer person, while still remaining accessible to the general public.” (“About” on /@/ website)
"Body Was Made" by Ezra Furman
“My body was made this particular way // There’s really nothing any old patrician can say // You social police can just get out of my face // My body was made” (Body Was Made music video is a quirky and fun stylistic retelling of these lyrics) Ezra Furman identifies as trans and bisexual and uses he/him and she/her pronouns.
"Complicated" by The Cliks
Lucas Silveira shared that the band’s name derived from two ideas; using The like iconic bands The Beatles and The Rolling Stones and Cliks as a portmanteau of the slang terms clit and dicks. (In The Life interview, 2009)
"Upper West Side" by King Princess
“Although [Mikaela Mullaney Straus] identifies as a genderqueer lesbian, King Princess doesn’t necessarily want her music to be placed in the ‘queer pop’ box.” (MTV, 2019) Who isn’t bored of the heteronormative narrative?
"Make Me Feel" by Janelle Monáe
“I consider myself to be a free-ass motherfucker. I want young girls, young boys, non-binary, gay, straight, queer, queer people who are having a hard time dealing with their sexuality, dealing with feeling ostracized or bullied for just being their unique selves, to know that I see you.” (NewNowNext, February 2020)
"body cast" by Dua Saleh
A Sudanese refugee, Dua Saleh nurtured their love for poetry in the beginnings of their Minneapolis music career. They came out as nonbinary while in their second year at Augsburg University but have said “I always been on gay shit.” (them., May 2020)
"Mercury" by CJ Run
“With a deep understanding of pop sensibility, and enough hooks to last a lifetime, CJ Run’s music is the inner monologue of a black queer 20 something in the 21st century.” (Propelr)
"Dancing With Stranger" by Sam Smith
“When I saw the word non-binary, genderqueer, and I read into it, and I heard these people speaking, I was like, ‘Fuck, that is me.’” (Vanity Fair, March 2019)
"SkindeepSkyhighHeartwide" by Lawrence Rothman
Lawrence Rothman is a gender fluid artist, musician, and producer. Looking into their Google Image results yields the visual evidence of the nine personas Rothman refers to as “alters, each one offering a different lens for their creative use.” (NPR, November 2018)
"Extended Vacation" by Ryan Cassata
Ryan Cassata is the first openly transgender musician to perform at Warped, winning the Ernie Ball Battle of The Bands contest twice (both in 2013 and 2015*). He has spoken out about American Idol attempting to exploit openly transgender people to pander to a broader audience banking on new forms of media “diversity”. *I saw him in Mountain View, California in 2015 and you have no idea how happy a newly out genderqueer 16 year old was to stand on stage behind a proud trans man singing on a bumping stage.
"Let My Baby Stay" by Amandla Stenberg
This entire article is great in explaining why Amandla’s openness on their pronouns outside of this website might have harmed them for the future of their career.
"Dolla in My Titty (Part 1)" by Peppermint
Best known as the 2017 runner up on the ninth season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, Peppermint made her musical debut in Head Over Heels becoming Broadway’s first out trans woman to play a lead roll.
"Gender Bronoun" by Human Kitten
“What is unstable And what is real // This is a question that i ask myself on a daily basis // Are my emotions genuine Or are they just the result of my neural passages sending my chemicals back and forth” → “Caught i’m between two completely separate identites Who Can’t agree on anything // And i can’t even decide on which one’s me”
"Wow in the Now" by Honeybird
Honeybird is a musician and composer based in Bologna, Italy. Their mission is to listen to intersectional LGBTQ+ community voices and transform the daily struggle into songs.
"I Don't Love You Anymore" by ANHONI
“My closest friends and family use feminine pronouns for me. I have mot mandated the press do one thing or another...I think words are important. To call a person by their chosen gender is to honor their spirit, their life and contributions. ‘He’ is an invisible pronoun for me, it negates me.’” (Flavorwire, November 2014)
"Robert Frost" by Mal Blum
“Now I’m looking at the ground because I don’t want you to leave // I know it’s co-dependent But I think it’s kind of sweet // Out of every person in this city I could ever meet // Leaving feels like losing But I’m learning what I need”
"Dysphoria" by Saint Wellesley
“Binding my chest and biting my tongue Wearing boxers never fixed anyone” → “And this is the last time I’ll allow my ribs to be swollen // And I’ll grow out my hair And pretend I don’t care And maybe my ribs are broken” → “Dysphoria’s a bitch I wanna kick her in a ditch // It’s not fair to wanna itch All of the places that don’t fit”
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sandersidess · 5 years
Text
Mexican (American) Virgil
SO YES I AM PROJECTING AND I RELATE MORE TO VIRGIL HERE THROUGH MY CHILDHOOD/TEEN YEARS/EVEN NOW SO LET US BEGIN MY PEEPS (and sorry if i project too much) Inspiration to do this is thanks to @ierindoodles from their Brazilian Patton post and @really-sleep-deprived-nerd from their Argentinian Roman post
Virgil is slightly light skinned compared to his family, and he does get teased about it and has learned not to take it to heart
He has immigrant parents and will fight anyone who disses on immigrants and will be proud of how hard working his parents are
Grew up in a mostly mixed Latino community, but stays away from the kids because some are just rude thanks to their ignorant parents who are toxic also
Will not admit it, but he does love chisme and just pretend to have music playing as his mother and aunt talk
He will get involved if it’s good and exaggerate his expressions and even stir up whatever is happening
IS A TALL BOI
His dad is slightly jealous of his height
Not a big fan of soccer never got the appeal of it but does enjoy some basketball 
Loves loves LOVES making tamales with his mother during the Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday
He enjoys when his family comes together, and that they can talk freely and just be together for a few days
He does hate how toxic his family can get and just needs to stay away
Has two brothers, one older than him by four years and three months and the other younger the same amount of time also
He did close off more during his teen years, and his parents didn’t understand but didn’t do much because they just didn’t know
Was an outcast at that time, and he only started to open up more during his junior year of high school with his mom mostly and then with his father
Came out gay in a Sam’s parking lot at 15 because his parents teased him that he likes boys (and yes this happened to me, but i came out as bisexual)
His parents were shocked and didn’t respond, but the next day they hugged him and he cried and his parents promised to learn and be less ignorant (Virgil during years helped them out with questions but were always accepting)
He is fluent in both english and spanish, but struggles with spanish as his parents put him in a school at the age of 2 1/2 so he can learn english first than spanish
He does messing with his parents on speaking Spanglish as it frustrates his mom at times (his dad is just laughing in the background)
Has some trouble writing it also
Talks super fast in spanish and will not slow down unless you tell him to
Especially when he’s passionate about something and explaining it to his parents
Hates Hates HATES when people say Cinco de Mayo is Mexican Independent Day 
“But that’s when Mexico won against the french!” “Okay, but that was Puebla” “Oh, but you still throw a fiesta?” “No, not all Mexicans celebrate it, usually only people of Puebla. Google is free by the way”
He does not know how to dance (well he does know how to move his hips) and was a mess when asked to be a chambelan for his best friend’s quinceñera 
But he will dance with his mom when she plays classic old songs she used to listen when he was a child
He does love Banda MS and will listen to their songs along with K-Paz and Vicente Fernandez (and more) (he will pretend to hold a tequila bottle when listening to him)
His dad actually has a picture of him doing so and has it as his home screen
He is a proud First Gen high school student and college student (his older brother dropped out of school)
He cried and cried during his graduation and hugged his parents tightly and promised to make them proud
I am projecting too much oops
He will enjoy watching his mother cook as she pays so much attention to what she adds and will ask questions
Though he never has has never stepped foot in Mexico, his parents from Guerrero (Chilpancingo and Acapulco) tell him how it is and he does hope to go one day once the violence has calmed down
Will always say how proud he is about who he is and will bash anyone who even tries to bad talk about latinos
Back to food, is very, VERY picky about mole and barbacoa de pollo and enchiladas and hevos a la mexicana, because he is very used to his parents food and will cry inside when he hears how his friends (non-poc) judge the food he brings
Loves the like the slang words his parents say and use it on his friends
Also just loves messing with his friends
“Ama! Tengo hambre!” “Haste de comer, huevon!” “Ya no me sirbe nada!” “Mira pendejo-” (cue Virgil laughing and running to his room)
Has been victim of the chancla and will tell his mom to try out for baseball 
Loves his family so much and will die and kill for them
406 notes · View notes
kibanafuji · 4 years
Text
27/12/2019
sleepless nights, and then one more // ft. @obstatune​
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He’d let them see too much. A tired face he’d hoped they wouldn’t notice. But they did. He insisted it wasn’t too bad, but...
[nezu opened a new conversation with kibana]
[nezu >> kibana]: hey man [nezu >> kibana]: I mean this in the least weird way possible but I was actually really good at singin marnie to sleep if you think that might help, I’m actually pretty close by today
[kibana >> nezu]: gonna admit i did just picture full on screamo lullabies which would be interesting to say the least [kibana >> nezu]: ineffective but interesting
He thinks for a moment. The truth of the matter is that he didn't get any sleep. He's afraid it's gonna get worse, too.
[kibana >> nezu]: yeah alright [kibana >> nezu]: little sleepover, pay you back with breakfast, how's that sound?
[nezu >> kibana]: heh. I mean I probably could, if that’d help more. [nezu >> kibana]: sounds great. I’ll bring you some more salami too this time, slommy whore [nezu >> kibana]: I think they make vegan salami too. I’ll look. we can have a real rager with it
[kibana >> nezu]: omg your so woke king [kibana >> nezu]: slommy night with the lads
While he waits for Piers, Raihan is working on making himself look... slightly more presentable. He looked tired in that selfie but it's much worse in person. ... This is probably as good as he's gonna get. So long as he smiles, he won't look too... horrifically tired, hopefully. Oughta clean up a little too, while he's got time. He continues idly talking over Chattr, though eventually his messages begin to drop in frequency--- mind’s too tired to handle both.
[nezu >> kibana]: 😔👊🥖 [nezu >> kibana]: no salami emoji so we got bread [nezu >> kibana]: 🐉🥖🎤🥖
[kibana >> nezu]: just spent far too long trying to find this one mad lad meme and can't for the life of me find it wanted to send it like "let's recreate this but with salami"
[nezu >> kibana]: whatever it is I’m down [nezu >> kibana]: we could make the all women are queens video but with salami instead of light sabers
[kibana >> nezu]: i thought putting me to sleep meant letting me have a nap not euthanizing me via laughter-induced suffocation
[nezu >> kibana]: well you know what they say [nezu >> kibana]: if he breathe [nezu >> kibana]: ... [nezu >> kibana]: he’s a THOT
[kibana >> nezu]: by that logic if you die by suffocation do you get your virginity back?
[nezu >> kibana]: shit you know what I don’t actually know the logistics there
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Piers is only a route over from Hammerlocke, so thankfully there’s no need to take a flying taxi to make it there. As promised, he has two varieties of salami in his bag, along with his ukulele and a blend of tea that always helps him get to sleep. 
“Rai! I’m here!” He calls, but shoots off a quick text too, just in case. 
[nezu >> kibana]: outside! And I picked up the slommy. in for a wild night I’m sure
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Raihan is further inside, cleaning up his bedroom, but Flygon opens the door for him; it's done this before, even takes in packages for him sometimes. This is roughly when Raihan sees the DM, and mutters an "oh, shit." 
Right, he guesses this will have to do-- his room isn't too bad, but it's messy by his standards... Whatever. He heads out to go open the door for Piers-- 
but Piers is already inside. And he hasn't put his "i'm not that tired" face on. He quickly remedies that, though, the moment his brain recognizes what his eyes took in. He's good at that, good at hiding. He just has to hope Piers didn't spot him before fixing it. 
 "'ey mate. Flygon let you in, eh?"
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Piers smiles brightly as he sees Flygon open the door. “Heh. Didn’t bring Sylveon with me this time, so you can rest easy. Thank you, by the way.”  He offers him a pat on the head. 
 It takes a minute or so for Raihan to make it in, but it’s immediately apparent how tired he actually must be, even from across the room. Piers pretends not to notice. 
Raihan is like him. He doesn’t want anyone to worry about him. He’d probably outright reject Piers’ help if he knew he did worry. 
“Ey! Yeah, hope that’s alright.” He pulls Raihan’s share of salami out, waving it. “And as promised!”
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"Aww, hell yeah." 
A grin stretches across his face but quickly transforms into a yawn that he hastily hides with his elbow. 
"Right, gimme that, gonna deepthroat the shit out of i--" Raihan can't finish the last consonant before he starts laughing. There is one benefit to being sleepless: everything that is funny in the first place is infinitely funnier when you're delirious.
"Still couldn't find that picture, by th' way. Got Rotom lookin' for it, though I'm startin' to think I 'allucinated it." He waves Piers over to the kitchen, opening the fridge. Likely due to him simply being tired, he sounds more... Hammerlocked than usual. He's never been one to speak in any way that didn't come naturally, and his tone is exactly as it usually is, so it certainly still sounds like Raihan; but the difference is notable nonetheless. "Want somethin' t'drink?"
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"Aww, changin' the subject because you can't deepthroat it?" Piers teases, handing off the salami before following Raihan into the kitchen.  He's a lot better at hiding his concern than Raihan is at hiding the fact that someone should be concerned about him.
"Water's fine, if you've got that sort of thing in Hammerlocke." He says.  "Otherwise, whatever game of thrones style norse mead you have in here'll do fine."
He looks back into the other room at Flygon, trying to gauge if Raihan's pokemon are worried too, or if this is something that happens often.  "Whenever you're ready to sleep, too, we can do that.  Don't feel like you need to wait up for me."
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It's a testament to how out of it he is that he doesn't have much to say in response, just offering a few (genuine, but low energy) chuckles. 
 His Pokemon are worried, sure, but they seem too much like they know what to do-- be nice and quiet, leave Raihan mostly to himself, let him wind down, and hope he can get to sleep. At this point they even know to turn off any lights Raihan forgot about. 
 "Nah, was thirsty anyway..." He grabs two cups and since the fancy bastard has a fridge with a water dispenser and ice machine he's got two glasses of delicious, refreshing water in a jiffy. Hot water might make you sleepier, but god, there's no better drink to him than fresh cold water. He drank right out of a spring during winter once and it was heavenly. 
 He sets both cups down on the breakfast bar and hops up on a stool. He looks like he's about to say something but he's promptly cut off by another yawn. 
 "... Don't worry 'bout it, a lil longer isn't gonna hurt..."
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Piers gratefully takes the glass, leaning up against the bar, well aware that Raihan’s stools are most likely specially made for someone who is 6’8. The last thing he really wants to do is flail around like an idiot trying to get up there. 
 “Not worried, really.” He lied. “Just puttin’ it out there. Don’t want you stayin’ up for my sake.” 
 He takes a sip. “I was serious about makin’ the thot video at some point. Maybe in the morning. Should do Uh...’numbers on the gram’ as the youth say.”
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Snrk. "Gonna get liked an' 'retwittered' like crazy. Go totally 'infectious'. Definitely super hip with the teens, me. Know all the slang." 
 The stools do adjust, with the sole issue being that you've already got to be on it for you to lower the seat-- either that, or Raihan has to prop a leg up on it and hope it's enough weight that the lever on the underside will actually do anything. He doesn't plan on sticking around in the kitchen for very long anyway, so if Piers is fine with standing the dumb stools are staying where they are until he replaces them the second he gets the chance. 
 "Nah, just got a ritual, y'know? Like t'stick with it, even when I'm dead tired." The ritual is good, the routine is good. Pavlovian logic and a lot of melatonin are his main weapons against sleeplessness-- so long as he follows the steps, he'll get sleepy, and he'll hopefully fall asleep. 
 The ritual also helps him stay awake, when he finds himself not wanting to sleep. But not sleeping is easier than sleeping, no matter what he does. 
 He considers adding that he also needs a drink to take his sleep meds, but decides against it. Someone who doesn't regularly have sleep problems would get knocked out real quick with a dose of Benadryl, so getting to sleep would hardly be an issue. Takes more than that to down an insomniac dragon, though. 
He downs the rest of his water, refills it, then with a short glance at Piers to follow along once he's ready, shuffles along towards the hallway leading to his room. He stops partway there, though, jerking a thumb at a door. 
 "Yer room for t'night, by the way." He opens it to let his guest take a peek-- a big cozy bed, what looks like a door to its own bathroom, even has a TV set up. "No game system in 'ere, you can 'ead out to the livin' room for that, if you want. Got cable, though!"
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"Oh, that's what we call it! Perfect.  I'll make sure to "retwitter" the video once it "gets contagious."" Piers laughs, only vaguely aware of the actual nuances of any social media platform besides Myspace.
Raihan looks exhausted, but Piers can't rush him, as worried as he is.  Nothing keeps a person awake like feeling like they need to be asleep.
With a bit of relief, Piers follows.
He doesn't mention that the bedroom is bigger than the one he has at home, but he does smile.  "That's perfect, thanks man.  Hope I don't wake you up yellin' at the TV, though.  Get kinda heated when I'm watchin' food network.  Hopefully you've soundproofed the room. Heh."
Piers quickly thumbs through his bag and pulls out his ukulele again before setting the rest of his things inside the door.  "I'll be quieter with this, though. No screamo lullabies, unless that's what you're into.  I'd be happy to oblige if it was."
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"Your surname secretly Ramsey or summat?" Raihan jokes. "Now that I think 'bout it, Gordon Ramsey'd be right at 'ome in Spikemuth, wouldn't 'e?"
He's definitely curious about screamo lullabies, but he's thinking too slowly right now to formulate a thought in time. He ends up just opening the door to his own room, and heading in--- and making a quick turn towards the bathroom, where he'd stored his sleep meds for tonight. Out of the way, so hopefully Piers won't take notice.
He'd already ripped the labels off of all the bottles that weren't prescription a long time ago. Just in case. He quickly and quietly swallows his nightly sleeping pill, and then quickly tucks a few tabs of melatonin under his tongue.
And then he washes his face and takes out his hair ties like that's all he was doing in there. He runs a hand over his hair sideways, to loosen up his dreads a little now that they aren't tied back, and walks back out to go take a seat on his bed. He's silent, hoping it'll be taken as him just zoning out due to sleep deprivation; in actuality, he's waiting for the sublinguals to dissolve.
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"Somethin' like that." Piers says.  "Fuck, he really would.  I'd love to add someone like him to the band.  Screamin' that much takes uh...lotta breath support.  I could totally see it."
Piers doesn't look as Raihan heads into the bathroom, but he has some idea of what he's probably trying.  Again, he knows not to address it.
Growing up, Marnie was a closed book.  Piers learned quickly to nurture and protect the small bits of vulnerability willingly given to him without pressing.  So if that's something Raihan wanted to talk about later, they would talk.
For now, he waits for Raihan to get out of the bathroom, quietly crossing his legs to sit on the floor and tune his ukulele.
"I have a list of songs I used to use, but if you had anything in mind, I could probably figure it out."  He says, trying not to stare too much now that Raihan has his hair down.  "And don't worry.  I'm kind of a night owl myself, so I won't get sleepy on ya if this takes a bit."
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"Nah, nothin' in p'ticular." The lack of enunciation is easily excused with him being tired-- honestly, it's actually influencing it more than the sublinguals anyway.
... He's really starting to feel like Piers is... noticing, though. That he can tell.
It's not the medication that he's worried about most. ... Honestly, if he happens to open his mouth too wide, he'd be downright enthusiastic to inform him he uses melatonin tablets, because those things melt into white goo, and even for a closed-off person like Raihan he'd rather confess to being an insomniac than look like he'd just taken a load in the mouth or something...
In any case, he'll have to hope he's wrong, and that he's just imagining it.
Right. He takes a moment, goes over things in his head. Did he forget anyth...
... Shit. He's only now realized Piers is sitting on the floor-- he forgot to get something for him to sit on.
... Too late now, though, he supposes. He feels bad about it, but... he does need sleep. And if he thinks too much, moves too much, he'll lose the chance.
... Oh, that's it. Something else felt off, unfinished-- because something had fallen off his bed, and was stuck between it and his nightstand. He puts the little plush Goomy back next to his pillow, where it belongs, and lays down on his side to face Piers.
Only as an afterthought does he toss a blanket over himself-- he'd prefer not to, he feels vaguely embarrassed about getting all tucked in and cozy so his mate can sing him to sleep when Raihan is supposed to be an adult (despite the fact he'd gladly do this for someone else and not see a problem with it), but... He's fucking freezing, and the weighted blanket helps him sleep, so he pulls it on. Casually, though.
"Mkay... Piers, use Sing... status move, but let's hope it's super effective anyway..."
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Piers laughs.  "All else fails, I'll go catch a Jigglypuff or somethin'.   Shouldn't take too long."
He's plucking the strings softly now.  For a few moments, it's just that.  But then he starts to sing.
It's quite the opposite of how Raihan saw him sing before - his tone is airy and gentle, a sound that precious few have ever heard from him.  Only Marnie.  Marnie and Raihan.
The songs he wrote for Marnie are probably too much.  Hell, they're too much even for her at times, and he has to tell her that he wrote them about someone else.  So he sings a different one - a lullaby that doesn't ask anything of him.  Doesn't ask him to lean on Piers, or to open up to him, or to let him keep him safe.  He will if he wants to.
At one point, he fades out the instrument and sings by himself.  Only for a verse.  It's almost as though he got so lost that he forgot to keep playing.  It's a choice, of course.  But not necessarily one he planned before.
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He wasn't expecting it to work so quickly.
But it does.
And quicker than he's experienced in years, he notices all the signs he's going to fall asleep soon, but without all the steps he usually needs to take-- no careful repositioning of his body, no focusing on thinking about one specific topic to keep his mind from becoming too busy and waking him up. No routine. A few minutes, rather than an hour or longer.
And yet, he's a little unhappy about it, if only for the fact that once he's asleep, he can't listen to him sing anymore.
His eyes are still slightly open, but a memory occludes his vision. The image is vague, but the feeling, it's nostalgic, warm-- he wants to remember clearer, he wants to see it.
If he closes his eyes, maybe it'll be...come... ...  ...  ... bunkbed, it's... the bunkbed...... he sees it now ... ... ... 
Quiet, steady breathing, and nothing else. 
(Sure would be a shame if that changed at some point.)
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Piers sings a few more songs.  Just as soft, just as gentle - making absolutely sure that Raihan is actually asleep.  He's more than happy to keep going all night if he has to.
Once he's almost sure - he pauses, then sings one single line from Raihan's favorite song, Weenie Man.  No laughter.
Confident that he was successful, Piers stands up and makes his way to the room he's staying in.  He changes into the pajamas and slippers he brought with him, then tucks himself into bed and turns on the TV.  Food Network.  Cupcake wars.
He stays awake just long enough to root for the little vegan girl to win, then falls right to sleep.
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Some hours later, the TV switches on by itself.
It isn't set to a channel, but the volume setting is rising without any input from the remote---
And then suddenly, it's playing a movie.
... Or, part of one.
Over and over and over again.
A character saying a single word.
"Help-- Help-- Help-- Help-- Help-- Help-- Help-- Help-- Help-- Help-- Help--"
It keeps it up until Piers is awake, and as soon as he is, and as soon as he's conscious, it begins flicking between different moments in the film.
"Rye-- Hann-- needs-- Help-Help him-- Please-please..."
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"Wh...hello?" Piers calls out in a daze, almost certain he's having a nightmare at this point.  But he rubs his eyes, and the TV is skipping.
It takes a few seconds.
Then he recognizes Raihan's name.  But why--
...Rotom.  It has to be that.
What an absolutely brilliant Pokemon. But he'll think on that later.  Now, he's stumbling out of bed, still half asleep, and before he can even catch his balance, he's running right to his room.
Piers swings the door open.
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It's silent. 
Silent, aside from the sound of breathing-- quiet, very quiet, yet erratic in its tempo.
Rotom flies into the lamp on the nightstand and it flickers on. The light reveals Raihan; he's upright... somewhat. He isn't lying down, but he's hunched over, head in his hands.
Body, trembling.
Fingers, twitching.
Jaw, agape.
And eyes that are wide, wide open, but might as well be blind.
That expression of sheer terror, of horrified realization, isn't one that the foot of his bed could possibly cause.
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"Rai..." 
Piers should think about what to do next.  Weigh what must be happening with what would be appropriate to do in a situation like this.  Especially because he's never seen this happen before.
Marnie had nightmares.  This was something else.
He moves faster than his brain can tell him not to. Before he knows it, he's kneeling in front of the bed, placing himself directly into Raihan's line of sight.  He's unsure what to do with his hands - touching Raihan suddenly could startle him to the point of trauma, so he settles on resting them on the bed next to him.
"I'm here."  He says softly, expertly masking the alarm in his voice.  "I'm here, Raihan."
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Not another one... Not another one, he doesn't want to lose another one... He only has so many left that that don't turn into that...
There are tears pouring from his unblinking eyes.
Eyes. Eyes Staring at him. Don't look ■•》~♤ie
Aaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhh Don't look, please He doesn't want you to see him like this
...
Rotom is back in Raihan's phone. It's showing Piers a picture. Two, in fact. Instructions.
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Rotom knows Raihan better than Piers ever will. Probably better than anyone ever will, save his other pokemon, possibly.  So when it tells Piers what he needs to do, he only hesitates a bit.
He doesn't want to touch him without asking.  But there isn't a way to ask.  And Raihan is terrified.
So Piers swallows his inhibitions.  All he can give Raihan is the best he can do.  That's what he owes him.  And if he's wrong, and Raihan hates him -
...
He takes one last look at Rotom, and then moves to the bed.  He's shaking, too.  But as instructed, at least he thinks, he gathers Raihan in his arms.  Pulls him close.  Reaches around to rub his shoulders.
"I'm not goin' anywhere."  He says. "I'm here. I'm here."
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Inhale... exhaleinhale in ha le    exh   ale
"..."
He's coming back. He's coming back now, back to the present, back to...
"... ■■■ie...?"
The first ■ letters don't make it out of his mouth-- and it's a good thing, too. He doesn't want her to see him like this.
Only those last two letters of her name make it out, perhaps aided by him suddenly snapping into
his room. Warmth. Embrace. P
ier
s
"... h...hhi...hhs...?" It's an attempt to say his name.
He's
...
God damn it.
He's got no hope of hiding. Every other time he's already hiding by the time this happens, but this time, he...
... He... ... ... This has all been too much for him Far too much 
...
it's been a really long time since someone last held me after a nightmare...
...
Raihan moves his feeble, shaking arms, and he's suddenly, even suddenly to himself, clinging onto Piers-- Piers is shaking too, he's-- He wants to scream, but he doesn't want to and he can't want to-- A whimper, a very faint whimper, all he can manage--
"... nh..."
... pathetic. 
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Piers is really, really good at hiding what he feels. Even to himself.
He doesn't remember feeling after his mom's death.  He remembers Marnie.  He remembers existing to make life better for her.  He remembers swallowing everything.  Because if Piers doesn't hurt, he can't burden others with it.
But that was distant.  The knowledge that she had passed was something he could separate from himself.  This...
...This is  breaking his heart. 
Raihan clings to him, and he's sure he can feel the way Piers is starting to choke, too.  Even then, he holds him tighter.
"Don't have to say n'yth..."
...His voice cracks.  Piers takes a second.
He's an expert at this.  Raihan needs stability, and Piers will let his lungs tear themselves to shreds before he denies him that.
"I've got you."  He says.  "You don't need to say anything."
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But he wants to. He wants to, but he can't.  It drives him fucking crazy. He can't stand it. He's so pathetic. 
 Rotom nudges his hand, knowing full well that there is a want-- but he can't get himself to let go, either, to take his phone and tell him what he wants to say.
He needs to calm down first.
Just... calm down. Calm down, ■■■ ■■■■'■ ■■■■■■■ ■■■■■... ■■■■. ■■ ■■ ■ ■■■■ ■■■■, ■■ ■■■■■ ■■■■ ■■■■ ■■■■.
... But even when he starts to calm down, it just makes the sorrow deeper.
Another memory has been corrupted by... the other memory. Another memory, finite, only eight years' worth, that he won't be able to think about anymore, without also seeing that awful red splattered pooling on white 
"...n... hh--"
He inhales sharply and grips Piers tighter. Raihan's body is suddenly very, very tense. ... No... no, no... have to stop... thinking about it. 
Anything else, think about... absolutely anything else.
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Piers keeps holding him.  Even closer. 
There's a lot he can offer him, but not yet.  Not until he's stable.  Now, he just reaches up with one hand and gently rubs the back of Raihan's neck.
He starts synchronizing his own breath to Raihan's - for the most part, that is.  A trick his Sylveon used on him the one time he had a panic attack in front of her.  Once they're synched, he starts to gradually slow his own breath down, hoping Raihan's might follow.
"Would it help if I sang again?"  He whispers, nuzzling his face into Raihan's shoulder without thinking about it.
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... 2 minutes, 45 seconds.
... It's excruciating every time, but that's a lot... faster than normal. 
 It helps that it's Piers. 
 Piers, of all people, he... He doesn't want anyone to know, to know, to know, but Piers has a little sister too Strong-willed, focused... A sister he cares about who he'd do anything for, protect no matter what, never ever make a mistake like raihan did Maybe  even if he knew if he found out then at least someone would finally yell at him  for being such a fuck-up that would be nice 
 ... He doesn't respond. But after a while, his grip has softened, too. And Rotom comes back, and this time, he takes his phone.
He doesn't let go of Piers entirely. Rotom knows what he wants to type, and corrects it for him.
It soon floats over to show Piers what he wanted to say-- what he kept trying and failing to say, and what he wants to say now that he's calmer.
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Piers nods after reading Rotom's note, but doesn't fully let go, either.  He wants to stay, wipe Raihan's tears away, keep him company so he doesn't slip into a nightmare again -
...But that's not what Raihan needs.  He might want Piers around, but he wants his dignity more.  (Not that Piers would ever think less of him for this, or think him pitiful or pathetic, but he understands.  He gets it.)
"You have nothin' to be sorry for."  Piers says softly.  "I mean it.  You're the strongest person I know.  That hasn't changed.  I promise."
He does pull back, just a bit.  Then, just to make sure this wasn't an issue of Raihan wanting him to stay but being too embarrassed to ask -
"I can go, if you want some privacy.  But I'll stay if that'd help.  Gladly."
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His hands don't move. They give way with Piers's movement, but they don't let him go completely.
"..."
He closes his eyes, tightly. Tears had still been flowing quite steadily until then, but as soon as his lashes part back open, he isn't crying anymore.
He's not strong at all. Not when it's his own emotions. But if he's too weak in front of people, they're going to think he can't be strong for them. That they can't rely on him.
That's not an option.
... And now he has to consider if he'd seem less strong if he did ask him to stay. Even if he didn't talk at all-- not about what just happened, that is. Would asking him to stay be
... Piers probably... already thinks Raihan's weak, doesn't he? After all, he... he came here, and... ... Why does that feel a little bit... relieving? ... Must be because he's so tired. He'll... he'll fix it later. He'll try, at least. For now, though... he feels like if he isn't just a little bit selfish right now, he isn't going to be able to keep himself together for the rest of this awful, awful period.
He doesn't say anything. But he moves his arm, and he takes the glass of water still on his nightstand. It's still cold. Rotom flies off somewhere momentarily while he slowly takes a drink. He's hoping once he's finished, he can... speak again.
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He's careful not to move too suddenly.  It's obvious that this is hard enough for Raihan without Piers assuming what he wants or needs. 
 He doesn't press, either. Just sits quietly as Raihan drinks.
...
He wants to stay.  He wants to be there for him.  To take care of him.  If it were his choice, that's what he'd take.  But it isn't.
Piers doesn't know exactly what happened.  Or what Raihan feels.  But he knows, at least vaguely, what it's like to feel like he needs to hide it.  And how that can override almost anything else.
He's silent, patiently waiting for Raihan to get his bearings before he tells him what he needs.
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It's refreshing, and it clears his head a little. ... He's pretty thirsty, actually. He wonders why for a moment, but then he remembers he did just cry his damn eyes out. Shouldn't be surprising he's a tad dehydrated.
He... he's still having a bit of trouble. Come on, Raihan, get it together...
Rotom is back. ... Oh. It's possessing his Switch so it could carry it ov It smacks him right in the face with it.
"Geh!?"
... He has spilled water all over himself.
"... You're a little shit," he says, affectionately, a faint smile tugging at his lips as he gives the floating device a gentle bop on what he thinks is probably where Rotom's head should be--
... Oh. He's got his voice back.
... He's also... covered in water, but more importantly, he can talk.
"... S... sorry. Again." His hand travels upwards, rubs the back of his neck... and then Rotom sets its vessel down in his hand before popping out of it again, and after a moment's thought, Raihan speaks up again. "... Wanna play Snipperclips?"
With that offer comes the same friendly smile he's always got. The same tone, too. His eyes are still a little puffy and red, and there are still tears drying on his cheeks... and he's acting like nothing even happened.
If it weren't for the remaining evidence, if he'd had the chance to clean himself up a bit, no one would be able to tell anything was wrong. Not unless they knew him too well, or were too perceptive.
His will is strong enough to compensate, though, and he knows how to avoid giving a real answer without having to lie, either. Fake the vulnerability, only say as much as he needs to so he doesn't seem like he's trying too hard to cover up how he really feels, like he never feels less than good, because people wouldn't want to be helped by someone like that, but also make any problems sound like they aren't severe enough to warrant someone getting worried about him-- hopefully, at least.
you can still lean on me, see? i can pull myself together well quickly, so... even though i look pathetic right now, and even though i was pathetic earlier... i'm only weak when it's just myself.
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"AAAah!"
He's not sure if this is the appropriate response, but he laughs.
He really can't help it.  The water gets on him, too - not like it got on Raihan, but enough that it jolts the last remaining sleepiness out of him in one quick move.  It's dissolved a lot of the tension, too.
Not that he was uncomfortable, but Raihan seems more at ease, now.  That's what matters.
...
The thing is, Piers is that perceptive.  (Music alone doesn't draw Team Yell to his side so loyally.  It's charisma.  It's empathy.  It's being good with people.)
Raihan isn't okay.  And this probably isn't the first time this happened.  But the side of him he let Piers see a moment ago has been rescinded, and he respects that.  If he feels safe, maybe-
...But he owes Piers none of this.  So he lets it slip from his hands like sand.
"Snipperclips!  Never played it, I'll probably be pretty bad..."  He says with a smile.  "Sure you could show me the ropes, though.  Or wipe the floor with me.  That might be more fun, actually.  I'm pretty good at being a professional ego boost."
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"... Pffhaha. Nah, man, it's a puzzle game, got co-op 2 player," he responds, then after a pause, grins mischievously. "Well, most of the time, it's cooperative."
Oh, he fully plans on attacking Piers the moment they clear the level. That's half the fun of Snipperclips: spamming the snip button until you clip so much off of the other player that they disappear, completely without warning at the end of every stage. Since Piers has never played it, he's not going to complain about always being the smaller-shaped (and thus disadvantaged for the battle) piece until it's far too late.
Yes, it's a little mean, and he doesn't deserve it, especially not after what happened mere moments ago.
... But come on, how can he resist? He usually loses the snip battle because he's so satisfied at the end of completing a puzzle he forgets that Leon's about to come at him like a fucking rabid weasel and literally tear him to shreds.
Raihan hops out of bed. First, let's pop the controllers off and stick the Switch in its little docket so they can play on the TV-- there we go. "'ere, pick what colour you want," he says, tossing the JoyCons in the general direction of the bed. They're a custom set, one controller being light blue and streaked with yellow and orange, and the other purple streaked with red and pink-- reminiscent of a sunrise and a sunset, respectively. Rotom flies towards the TV and disappears into the electronics again to get the console and game prepared for play.
A moment later, he also tosses a towel to Piers from the bathroom. Since he's already covered in water, it isn't much of a deal if he gets more water on himself, so he might as well wash his face again and make himself look less miserable.
Once he's done with that, he heads back out and walks to his dresser on the other side of the room. Wet clothes aren't very pleasant to sit around in, and he's soaked. So with very little thought about it, he pulls his shirt off. The motion flows in such a way he feels a bit of stiffness in his muscles, so he lets the action transition into a quick stretch, and the dragon tattooed on his back almost looks alive. The motion of his spine makes the dragon's body slither, the flex of his shoulderblades expands and collapses the wings; the artstyle isn't particularly realistic, but it doesn't have to be for it to look like an extension of his body.
He tosses his shirt in the laundry basket and starts rummaging around for a new one.
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As Raihan gets up, Piers awkwardly looks around the room.  It definitely wouldn't be weird to get settled on the bed, and it would actually probably be weird to dip down to the floor at this point, but it's not like Raihan actually invited him to sit there - then again, the bed is huge, and it's not like they didn't share a very close moment only a second before - then again, Raihan didn't ask -
...
Stop overthinking.  Stop.  Stop. Idiot.
So he turns, sitting up in Raihan's bed, facing the TV.
Yeah. That was definitely worth the stress.
Piers picks the purple controller, waving it a bit to get a feel for it.  He's only ever played the wii.  This feels nicer.  "Heh.  Got to get me one of these sometime.  Didn't know they came in pink!"
The controller isn't even completely pink.       Piers is just on edge.
...
Well.
Heh.
Heh.
So, Piers notices the tattoo.  It's gorgeous.  It looks like it must've hurt like nothing else. It isn't surprising that he has it - but -
...Okay.  He's going to call a spade a spade here.  Raihan is hot.  This is a secret to exactly zero people.
But Holy Shit, my guy.  Holy shit.
Piers shakes his head.  He's good at this, too.  One moment of being completely floored by how attractive his friend is won't set him back too long.  It happens.
“...That tattoo is sick."  He says, hoping that the earnestness in his voice comes through as being genuinely interested in the artwork alone and not...well.  The canvas it's painted into.  "How uh...how long did that even take?"
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"Oh, yeah, you can get 'em in all kinds of colours! Those ones're custom, though. I 'ave a few different pairs, sorta got into collectin' em. Or at least the ones that look particularly neat."
... Snrk. Yeah, he's got to wear this one.
He glances over his shoulder when Piers speaks up again, blinking twice.
"Oh, heh. Thanks," he smiles, running a hand over the back of his neck again. "Yeah, took a damn while. Not to mention I was 15, and... obviously, seein' as I don't have any others, my first tattoo. It's a tradition for us vault guardians to get one, though, so cool as it is--" He reaches behind himself and taps a finger near the tail of the dragon, where the tree branch blooms yellow, hanging above a field of purple flowers. "--that was the only part of the design I 'ad anything to do with."
Raihan tugs on the shirt he selected, and turns back ar--
Goku, lovingly embroidered over the right breast, stating "My Caprisun is MINE So eyes on your OWN WOMAN".
"I mean, don't get me wrong, I'd probably 'ave something similar even if it weren't part of the job. Definitely the wings, at least." He continues without commenting even a little bit on his choice of clothing, hopping up onto the bed and sitting cross-legged next to Piers. "But I'd like to get another, maybe somewhere a little more visible. ... And design the whole thing myself this time, too. Been thinkin' about what, though, and where. I got a few ideas, but... all the designs I've got in mind are pretty meaningful to me. Don't want to be haphazard about the placement, or the design, or in choosin' an artist."
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Piers wonders if it would make him completely out of his mind to go ahead and get custom joycons and no switch.  If he's going to be hanging out with Raihan more... 
 ...That's assuming, again.  Eh.
“Makes sense, mate.  Don't think I could've handled somethin' like that at 15, though."  He says.  "Love to hear more about the vault sometime!  Only know uh...well, what's made public.  I know it's significant.  And for a better reason than that fuck-ugly mural that used to stand in Stow-On-Side."
...Raihan is.
...
...He's really, really good at hiding. It's almost like what he saw didn't happen.
And Piers tells himself he's more than ready to move on with him.  He's done it with Marnie before.  And with himself, more often.  But there is something in the room that hangs over them like a heavy fog.  He keeps breathing it.  Raihan isn't okay.  Raihan isn't okay.
Shut up.
Let him wait until he's ready.
...
But...he won't be.  Probably.  Piers knows this.
Because Piers never was.  And that's something he's only distantly, detachedly aware of.  Like seeing someone in a dream, with a different face, and knowing them anyway.  Seeing his own pain but feeling none of it.  By choice.
By choice.  Not for himself.  For other people.
Shut up.
Shut up.
Two instincts are fighting tooth and claw inside of him.  Both equally fed, both equally violent.  Let him be, the time isn't now, and the person isn't you and please, please, please let me take care of you.
"Ay, I can give you the number of the girl who did mine."  Piers says despite himself.  "She might know a few other artists, even if that's not the style you're goin' for.  I'm sure anythin' would look good on you, though.  Especially that shirt."
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The physical pain of the tattoo was little compared to how it felt when his sister was taken from him.
He chooses not to respond to the first remark.
"I'd love to!" ... pff. "If we were housing a slab of pavement with a child's chalk drawing on it that they drew in 1993 and treating it like it's actually got incredibly important historical value, I'd be destroying the vault, not guarding it."
Raihan isn't okay, but he doesn't need to be okay to convince someone he is-- or at least convince them to leave it be. Ignore the Donphan in the room until it gives up and leaves. It just takes patience. He has plenty.
"That'd be wicked," he grins. "Thanks, mate. ... You just put an idea in my 'ead about getting a tattoo of Goku and his Capri Sun."
The vault is locked shut.
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mst3kproject · 5 years
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The Choppers
It’s teenage crime spree time!  With Arch Hall Sr. writing and producing, Arch Hall Jr. starring, and Bruno VeSoto supporting, the result is sure to be MST3K-worthy. All it’s missing is Ray Dennis Steckler, but I guess one can’t have everything.
America’s youth is its greatest resource, and those youth are in danger of growing up into criminals.  Witness our antagonists here: Cruiser, Torch, Ben, Flip, and Snooper. They drive around in a truck full of chickens, taking apart random cars and selling the pieces to Moose, a grouchy and unscrupulous junkyard owner.  The cops are baffled, but sooner or later the young thugs are bound to make a fatal mistake – and theirs comes when they girl they decide to sexually harass turns out to be the secretary of an insurance investigator.  At around the same time, Moose gets tired of their attitude and decides to turn them in.  Looks like the Choppers have chopped their last, uh… chop, I guess.
I’m sure you all want to know whether Arch Hall Jr. sings in this movie.  He does, but not until forty-five minutes in when I really had begun to hope I’d escaped him.  The piece is actually kind of catchy although not particularly memorable, but I may be in a forgiving mood because the first musical number in the movie was so much worse.  It’s performed by an elderly guy who works at Moose’s junkyard, and not only is he a bad singer, but what starts out sounding like a boy scout campfire ditty turns out to be a mournful country song about his divorce.  It made me long for the comparatively sweet strains of I Love You Vickie.
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The photography here is notably terrible.  Almost the entire movie takes place outdoors in harsh desert sunshine because I think they didn’t actually have any lights.  Indoor scenes are kind of dim and night scenes are completely indecipherable – although I think somebody didn’t believe a practically pitch-black screen was enough to convince us it was night, because there are also lots of loud cricket noises.  There’s a bit where the Choppers vandalize a guy’s car because he took their parking spot and it’s almost impossible to see anyone’s faces or tell who’s talking.
The acting is sort of indifferently bad. Arch Hall Jr. is Arch Hall Jr., where everything he says sounds kind of stagey and dumb, and nobody else is much better.  The twenty-somethings playing the young criminals use hip slang in a way that suggests they have no idea what these words actually mean.  Arch Hall Sr. continues to believe he can build his son into a teen heartthrob, and so he shows us things like Cruiser’s pasty chest and belly as he lounges by a pool.
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You say you didn’t need that screencap? Well, I didn’t need the shot it came from.
Most of the screen time in the movie is spent on the Choppers as they take apart cars, play or listen to bad music, argue with each other, and harass women.  The supposed heroes aren’t on screen nearly so much, but that’s okay because they are stunningly un-likeable.  There are a couple of bland cops, but the ones who are really our protagonists are inept insurance investigator Tom Hart and his nagging girlfriend Liz.  Tom comes across as an oblivious dope, while Liz constantly whines that she’s tired of fighting crime and wants to go home and eat.
Tom never redeems himself, but Liz gets a couple of moments.  She’s the one who notices that feathers keep turning up at the crime scenes, and when she recognizes Cruiser’s car at a drive-in she is able to keep him staring at her boobs long enough for her to memorize the license plate number. Naturally at the climax, she is not present and Tom, who did pretty much nothing all movie, gets all the credit for catching the gang.  The movie doesn’t make anything out of this because it doesn’t see anything wrong with it.
Which of course brings us to the fact that The Choppers hates women something fierce. There are only two we can actually be said to meet: Cruiser’s empty-headed girlfriend Gypsy (I know a bot who would be righteously angry at this name choice) is there to hang around in a bathing suit and be dumb.  The movie can’t decide how much she does or doesn’t know about his criminal hobbies – she seems to help vandalize the car in the parking lot, but then becomes the damsel in distress at the final shootout.  Liz nags, mocks, and generally treats Tom terribly, and at the end her competence is treated as his accomplishment.
Several of the five boys have backstories that depend on absent fathers – Cruiser’s was killed in WWII, Torch’s is an alcoholic, and Snooper has had a series of uninterested stepfathers.  The implication is that a single mother cannot possibly raise a boy.  He needs a father to turn him into a man (this is as near as stated aloud when a reporter attempts to interview Torch’s drunken father on the radio).  The only moment involving a woman that doesn’t reek of misogyny is when the boys harass a waitress and she blows them off.
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If we’re gonna talk about fathers and sons… this is another movie Arch Hall Sr. made to try to build up his son’s career, and another movie in which the two of them are at odds.  They never actually meet in The Choppers, but the reporter played by Hall Sr. comments on how intelligent and talented the boys are and how much they could have accomplished if they’d only had the chance to live up to their potential.  Once again, it’s really, really tempting to try to do some psychoanalysis here, as if Arch Hall Sr. was using his films to tell the world how disappointed he was with his son.  I don’t know these people, of course, but that’s definitely the impression I get.
The main theme in The Choppers is one I’ve already dealt with, the idea that a boy without a father will become a criminal, stuck forever in the stage of life where rule-breaking is fun and consequences are things that happen to other people.  There seems to be a level on which the boys have adopted Moose as a sort of substitute father – he has encouraged and taught them in their criminal endeavours, and while he and they argue and threaten each other, they are honestly shocked by his eventual betrayal.  In the end, Moose abandons them just as their biological fathers have done.
There also seems to be some attempt to talk about class. All the Choppers seem to come from underprivileged backgrounds except for Cruiser, who has a backyard pool and a fancy car.  This puts him in the same category as Paula from The Violent Years, in that we’re given no good reason why he does this besides what his says to the reporter at the end: “we had a ball.”  Like Paula, Cruiser is the leader of the gang, but unlike her, he does not participate in the actual crimes.  Instead, Cruiser and his fancy car serve as lookouts – his upper-class origin allows him to be in charge without having to get his hands dirty, and there are signs that the rest of the boys resent this.  When they are all cornered at the end, it’s Cruiser who suggests giving up while Torch prefers to go down fighting.  Unlike the others, he’s not sufficiently invested in this to die for it.
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What the movie is trying to say here is that money is not a substitute for good parenting, and privileged boys can still fall into crime if their fathers aren’t there for them.  What it manages to imply is that even in crime being rich gives you a head start and can make you a leader regardless of actual leadership qualities.
So this movie is really, really bad, and doesn’t deal very well with its thematic material – but that’s not to say there’s no entertainment value to be found here.  It’s never funny when it tries to be, of course. There’s an attempt at a running joke with Snooper wondering if he’d be more attractive to women if he wore contact lenses, which will make you shudder if you know what contact lenses were like in the 50’s and early 60’s.  The humour that works in The Choppers is naturally the unintentional kind, to be found in the bad acting and the unwieldy chicken truck.
My favourite moment is when Cruiser, talking on a candy-striped walkie-talkie the size of a dachshund, tells his cronies to give the police “the farmer routine”.  Flip and Snooper immediately pull a couple of cowboy hats out of fucking nowhere and put them on, and I almost did a real-life spit take.  This feels like the kind of thing that would have fascinated the Best Brains.  I can imagine Joel, Crow, and Tom whipping their own Stetsons out from under the theatre seats to wear for the rest of the scene (Servo would have needed help with his) and every subsequent appearance of a cop being greeted with, “quick, put on your cowboy hats!”  It would definitely be the stinger.
Talking about having a favourite Arch Hall Jr. movie is like talking about having a favourite kind of turd to eat, but insofar as the statement means anything, The Choppers is my second-favourite of his movies I’ve seen so far.  It’s less misogynistic than Eegah! (not a high bar) and doesn’t have nearly as much crappy music as Wild Guitar (accomplished by simply having less music).  My favourite Arch Hall Jr. movie is The Sadist, which I actually don’t consider bad enough for this blog.  In The Sadist Hall Jr. played a serial killer, and he was pretty terrifying.  If he’d had more roles like that (with directors who were not his father and could actually coach good performances out of him) he might have been a decent character actor.
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angeladoeswhat · 5 years
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My Thoughts on “Be More Chill” OBCR
So, I have a lot to say: Overall, i love it. It’s just going to take some time to get used to. But you know what also took some time to grow on me? The Two River Recording so yeah. I’ll start with my favwite things:  Here we go
 I love Tiffany Mann so much, her vocals were amazing and just everything about her makes me smile.
 Britton’s parts, all of them, are just perfect, like ths actually gave Jake depth unlike the Two River version, I appreciate that.
 ‘Do You Wanna Hang?’ actually grew on me? At first it made me a bit uncomfortable but now, with the added dialogue, i find it more of exposing Chloe’s insecurities, and Katlyn did this perfectly, balancing the angry, drunk and comedic tone.
 The additions to ‘Upgrade’ made me love this song and boost it super high up on my favorites list, these changes were smart. Jake & Christine’s dynamic is interesting too, a good type of interesting. I just wish there was still somehow the “C-C-C-Come on! Jeremy can’t you see?....” part. It was catchy.
 ‘Sync Up’ is a good song both with the music and the exposure of the cast’s personalities & insecurities. It makes one relate to the character or understand a character more.
 I swear Michael was high during ‘The Play’. And if he is, I love it. It makes his whole “Michael makes an entrance!’ so much more understandable.
 Jer Bear is a fucking canon nickname, yes.
 As much as adults may think the use of slang is too cringy or a failed attempt at “being hip,” it’s actually really accurate to how high schoolers (for me anyway) talk. I’m not joking. It’s nice to see that Joe & the crew are correctly showing the mindsets of actual teens.
 Everything about Lauren Marcus’ parts were great, with Brooke’s use of French in order to impress Jeremy, since she’s under the impression that he likes French girls due to Madeline. And the connection between Brooke & Jeremy about being sick of being “Player 2″ was nice.
 ‘Smartphone Hour’ is still one of my favorites, it’s super catchy, the vocals are great and it’s just so funny, especially with the context of the costumes.
Jason Tam is just so awesome. At first the surfer voice annoyed me but now I kind of understand it better and have grown to accept it. And Jason’s vocals... I love him so much. That’s all there is to it.
George. George Saladbar Salazar. His obvious love for the character, the show and the rest of the cast & crew is shown even just by hearing his voice. It’s incredible how he’s chosen to stay with the show, smiling and being so grateful & humble. He, as an overall person, is simply astonishing.
I’m in love with the new ‘Voices In My Head’ because the intro sounds like a video game about to load a file and it’s the final few cut scenes. And Christine’s “You ready?” is the best.
Jason SweetTooth Williams is probably my preferred Mr. Heere. His voice has a certain element that just screams paternity. (Maybe because he IS a father, I’m not very sure about Paul Whitty, I don’t keep up with him unfortunately.) And the lyric change breaks my heart but in the vest way because it shows how Mr. Heere finally takes a step back to realize how Jeremy feels.
‘A Guy I’d Kinda Be Into’ still remains to be my favorite song. The now calmer, soft acoustic guitar gives the song a more “teenage vibe”. Like it’s just a crush to others but to Christine, she’s never felt this way before, she’s curious yet cautious.
The band. They all outdid themselves. ‘Jeremy’s Theme’ is now super haunting yet mesmerizing. Every song is just so well done and my respect for them has only grown.
Okay now we come to my least favorite things, but the pros definitely outweigh the cons. These are just minor things that just stood out to me. 
The biggest urk for me was the rhythm change for the chorus of ‘I Love Play Rehearsal’. In the the “Be More Chillegal” videos, the actress for Christine did the same thing and I was not a fan of it. For some reason it just rubbed me the wrong way so to hear it in the Broadway recording was a bit of a turn off, but at the same time, it somehow represents Christine’s frantic & random energy sparks.
Throughout the entire recording there were some moments where a beat of silence would’ve done wonders and other times where they weren’t exactly needed. The best example is during ‘Michael in the Bathroom’ after the whole “Knock! Knock! Knock! Knock!” part where Michael says “But I can’t hear knocking anymore.” It may be just because I’m used to the beat of silence in the Two River production but I just feel like it would’ve added a nice element of build-up to the song.
While we’re on the topic of ‘Michael in the Bathroom’, it definitely will take some time to get used to it. Similar to my thing with ‘I Love Play Rehearsal’, the note difference in the line, “Michael flyin’ solo!” didn’t sit right with me. I can’t exactly pinpoint what it is. But overall I think George was able to have MITB 3.0 on par with the original which is difficult to do with anything.
Last thing, it’s Michael & Jeremy’s voices. Specifically for Michael, how it’s now higher, it makes him seem more innocent which is nice. But it also makes Michael more susceptible to certain fans just throwing him under the “Soft Boi” label, not acknowledging his struggles and growth. With Jeremy, I think Will R. is a great Jeremy because of how relatable he’s able to have Jeremy be. How obviously nervous and frantic he is, but also trying not to offend anyone or make mistakes. It’s very similar to how I, personally, am when I’m anxious or on the verge of a panic attack. My issue is how whiny Jeremy can sound at times. Not characteristically, just how he either talks or sings. There’s nothing to do about it, it’s how Will sings and it doesn’t make me love him any less, it’s just my one nit pick about Jeremy. Nobody’s perfect, fiction or not.
I still love the album but I just listened to it today so it will obviously take a couple of listens to get used to it. I hope that I didn’t offend anyone in any shape or form, that’s not my intention at all. I do not intend to bash on the album either, I love it but like anything, there are flaws. Thanks for taking the time to read my sort of professional review and have a good day/night!
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thewestmeetingroom · 3 years
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Ep. 51 – Time Is On The Line: A Conversation with Cola H.
Broadcast Feb. 27, 2021 • 57:36
SPEAKERS
Cola H., Braeden, Marco
[Intro music – “Best Intentions” by Vic Adamo]
 Marco  
Peace, everyone. This is Marco Adamovic aka Vic Adamo and this is a Hart House Hip Hop Education Takeover of The West Meeting Room broadcasting live on CIUT 89.5 FM. We're on Dish with One Spoon Territory in Tkaronto and grateful for the opportunity to be here. Working with our campus partners and community Hip Hop practitioners, Hart House Hip Hop Education supports values of representation, collaboration, and social justice, as we explore the key principles of Hip Hop and its importance in our everyday culture. Google Hart House Hip Hop Education to learn more. Our first podcast led us to the homie Colanthony Humphrey aka Cola. H. Cola draws outside the lines and paints his own path in music and in business. The Toronto-based multi-instrumentalist, producer and songwriter enjoys the abnormal and adds his own color to punk rock as the drummer of the OBGMs, touring exclusively as the drummer for Sonreal, and Hip Hop collaborations with Clairmont the Second and DijahSB. We talked about how he got into music, connections between Hip Hop and Punk, the Oooh Baby Gimme Mores in 2020, who he's become by the risks he has taken, some of the best and worst advice he's heard in the industry, and a whole lot more. We also put together a Cola H. playlist from the tracks he dropped in our conversation, so make sure to go check that out on Spotify. And without further ado, let's get into my conversation with trailblazer, role redefiner and master collaborator Cola H.
 Marco
I am joined by the one, the only Colanthony Humphrey aka Cola H., aka world conqueror, aka
airport loiterer, game spitter, show killer. Is there anything you don't do my man?
 Cola H.  
Man, I don't sleep properly anymore.
 Marco  
Okay, well, that makes sense. Welcome, man. Welcome to the podcast. We're blessed to have
you. How are you doing?
 Cola H.  
You know what? I'm doing, I'm doing good. I've had a good start in the morning. Started out,
you know, kissing my baby, of course, having a little coffee, and speaking to my therapist, and
now I'm speaking to you. This is great.
 Marco  
That's amazing, man. Yeah, ya know, I always I always love the chance to chat with you, man
for so many reasons. First of all, I want to say congrats on the Outsah tape man, you dropped
just yesterday.
 Cola H.  
Oh, thank you. Thank you. Yeah.
 Marco  
Can you tell us a little bit about the tape and what the past 24 hours has been like, since you
released it?
 Cola H.  
Oh, for sure. Um, so Outsah is a song like Outsah, like, just the spelling of it's supposed to be
outside. But it's kind of like a little bit more of a slang to it. Joey always used to say that to us,
like when we, he would be outside of the studio because you've got to be let in if you don't have the key, right. And the whole meet me outside comment, like the whole meet me outside, you know, catch these hands outside, like for anybody that's trying to overstep. That's one of the songs that Denz wrote. Like, in fact, I'd probably say one of the yeah, one of the first songs that he wrote for the album, The Ends. And, yeah, since making it we've like, since being in the
band, basically, we've always had a little, we've had, I mean, our roots are in Hip Hop, but we
just happened to make a punk rock band. And we wanted remixes to it, so the boys asked me to help chop it up and put it together. So I produced both of those remixes. And we asked, we
asked the homies Oxymorons. They're from New York, to hop on. And they were also
putting feelers out. And we got Femdot from Chicago. What we really wanted to do was we
wanted to unite city to city, like, you know what I mean. Let you know you could catch hands
anywhere, you know. And it didn't happen, but it didn't happen in the way we tried to make it
happen. But it's all good. You know, Chicago, New York, and what like, you know what I mean? Chicago, New York, and Toronto, like are represented. And we got my little brother Clairmont the Second on the remix with Femdot as well. So, yeah, it just feels good to collab with artists that you respect and that you dig. So especially when it comes out like this tape, you know?
Marco  
I want to start at the beginning with you and I want like, I want to understand how you came to
music, when you started making music, and if you can just kind of take us back and let us
know kind of how you started your journey.
Cola H.  
Alright, no doubt. Uh well long long ago - No I’m just joking. But my dad is a musician, and we
grew up in the church, like most Black families, especially here in Toronto, or like pretty much
anywhere in the States. So I grew up watching my dad sing and play piano and be, you know,
the choir director. And I remember, I must have been like three or four years old, and I hopped
on the drums, because I saw drummers before that and I was like, I know I can do that. And lo
and behold, I did it. My dad bought me a kiddie drum set, and I never looked back. And I've
been involved with music ever since. Mainly, you know, my formative years, I was playing in
church all the way up until like, I'd probably say, last year before the pandemic, I was playing in
church, whether it be drums or keys, which I learned a lot later in my teens. But that's how I
started my musical journey. My first paid gig that ever came to me, I was I was working at a
community health center. But my boss at the time, La Bomba, Paula Gonzalez, she was
throwing a show because she's actually known as a not only a graffiti writer, but as a bassist.
And she needed to put a band together. And she hired me and Denz for keyboards and
guitars, and that was our first paid gig ever. And I think I was, I think I was maybe 15 years old.
Yeah. And that's, that was my intro into like, being a professional musician.
 Marco  
So first of all, you and Denz go way back.  
 Cola H.
Oh, yeah.
 Marco
Denz is a co-founder, right? You guys are co-founders of the OBGMs?
 Cola H.  
Yeah, I’d even credit him even more so than that. Like I basically say, it's the brainchild. Like
The Oooh Baby Gimme Mores, The OBGMs, that's the brainchild of Denz's. And I was right
there. Originally, we were trying to be like The Neptunes, right, like a production duo. But
we wanted to do something different. Because at that time, everybody and their mom was
rapping, like, you know, like its, like grandmas are rapping and this person rapping and that
person rapping. And like I'll even go as far as to say as we were still elite, like in terms of skill in the rap world, in terms of the people that we were up against. But it was just kind of like, what's a better way to gain attention in that way - Like, you know, you know, what, what was the Neptunes? The Neptunes was a band. They were N.E.R.D.. And that's what we did, we created a band, we leaned a lot harder, like we leaned a lot more into the harder side. And yeah, me and Denz started out as a two piece.
 Marco  
How did you come to developing that rougher sound, that more distorted sound, that more
intense, aggressive sound?
 Cola H.  
Yeah, that's a great question. So I think it's a number of things. So Denz wanted to introduce
me to Rock and Roll. And at that time, like, you know, living in York Square, like in Toronto,
which was like, very, very hood at that point. Like, you know, and you’d kind of get jumped, like
really in any hood, like at that time, you would get jumped if you were listening to rock music,
right? Like, and I feel like the only acceptable ones were like Billy Talent and Nirvana with
Smells Like Teen Spirit. Those were the only like two bands that were kind of accepted in the
rap world at the time with the people that we were around. So anyway, you know, Denz was
listening to all this stuff. I'd say a deeper catalog of rock. Like, you know, he introduced me to
the Arctic Monkeys, which like, they were hard as fuck at the time, excuse my language. And
then like DFA 1979. And like, the whole reason I got into Hip Hop was because of the danger.
Right? So like, I just began to start leaning into like, you know, even harder stuff. Like, you
know, So for an example. You know, Nirvana's In Utero is like probably one of their biggest
albums. But I was into Bleach more, just because it sounded rougher around the edges - it
sounded more dangerous. Like it was you know - and danger is kind of like the reason why I
leaned so far into like punk rock and rap in the first place, right. Like, and that's probably due
to the fact that I was raised in the church, a relatively conservative family. Like maybe trying
to separate myself from that is exactly what got me into the danger in music in the first
place, you know.
 Marco
Favourite track on Bleach?
 Cola H.
Man, like probably No Recess, man. That shit is [sings Noooo Recess!] It's so good. It's so
good. But, but there's so, there's so many good ones right? Like, with Nirvana you kind of can't
miss. Like you can literally touch any track and people will completely understand why you love
it. You know what I mean? But that's, that's probably my favorite track. Like, without a doubt I
was singing it just in the car the other day. I was blasting my stereo to 100 like, Oh, it's a mess
when I’m in my car, just enjoying tunes. Yeah, man
 Marco  
You know, I've seen you. I've seen you guys live a number of times. I remember actually the
first I saw you live was a, I forget, it was a bar on college. And that was when I
first saw  the infamous mosh pit that y'all used to fuck with.
 Cola H.  
Yeah.
Marco  
Where Denz would just take both sides and throw them together in this mosh pit. And I was struck by the energy that you had. And, you know, listening to The Ends, I'm also seeing a lot, lot of, well you guys say, you know, it’s Nirvana shit, it’s Jimi Hendrix shit, right? And it seems like you guys leaned into that a little bit more for The Ends, which dropped last year 2020. Y'all did a live stream from Horseshoe which was dope af.
Cola H.  
Thank you. Thank you.
Marco  
Yeah, it was. And especially at a time in the pandemic, right. Like, just walk us through the
process of like, how you came up with it, what it means to you. And obviously, it was
received, like it made a huge splash. So yeah, just walk us through The Ends man.
Cola H.  
Well, The Ends has a number of different concepts. Like, I'd say a lot of them are probably like,
emotional anger. Like, you know - so The Ends, like, the end of bad relationships. The end of
not putting music out for a number of years since our last release. Like the end of like, you
know, people trying to walk all over us. The end of like, it's a number of those very, very, very different things, right? Like, that's why it's called The Ends. And The Ends, like, if you look at the back cover of the vinyl, or the front cover of the Outsah tape, right? That's where the OBGMs was started - in The Ends, that that building that’s atop like, that's where those are, The Ends. Those are The Ends that we’re from. Like, so it's a number of different concepts rolled up into one. The process of creating The Ends, I would say it took years, and it took years for a number of reasons. A lot of those lean on Denz and that's not blame. He went through what any artist goes through. Denz, like, a lot of times, because our art is on display, essentially what you're doing is you're leaving yourself on display. There's a reason why lyrics to a song gets used in court and scripts to a movie doesn’t right? When you're an artist, you bare your soul, essentially. It's your pulpit. But anyway, when you bare your soul, and it's not received in the way that you want people to receive it, like, you know, especially when you've been gunning as long as  – I feel like we've been making music together for like 18 years. And I feel like the band has been together for about like - me and Denz - like this band's Inception was what 2008 / 2009. So we're in our 12th and a half year. Like, you know, and when you've been gunning for that long, and people like - you're not famous yet, like or maybe not even fame -  but you're not respected yet. Like, you want to step away from it because you're just like, am I even writing good songs? Right? So Denz needed that time and I, you know what, after speaking countless
conversations about it with him, like I understand. I understand that he needed that time. That
time is very, very valuable. And then when he was back, we are back writing and we got
Dave Schiffman involved who's behind like countless records that the world knows. I feel
like he did like three or four of the Bronx’s records. Alanis Morissette, like a lot of
people don't even know that he worked on Jagged Little Pill and like, you know, Haim. Like, It
spans all across the board. And he's from the school of Rick Rubin you know, which
immediately perked up my ears for a number of reasons, right. Like the same guy who's behind Beastie Boys and LL Cool J at the same time, like will absolutely be able to understand us, right. Like especially if you’re from that school. So we got Schiffman on board, and he came here and we recorded for about a month, a month and a half, and we got The Ends.
Marco  
You dropped your first, your first EP was Interchorus back in 2009. And that was just you and
Denz, which I, which I remember actually, I actually I have the physical CD of that.
Cola H.
Wow!
Marco  
It's all love man. And I was listening, obviously listening to all the records just kind of, you know, in advance of chatting with you and I think fundamentally like, there are certain things that have changed. But the fundamental sound still sort of stays there, like the grime, the danger. The only difference, I think, and you also on each album, you kind of you went from two members to four members to now down to three. And you know, you're mentioning all this sort
of change, the changes and different ways that the band has sort of has ebbed and flowed. So it sounds like the essence is still there.
Cola H.  
Yeah.
Marco  
But with The Ends, y’all just like, you're just unapologetic.
 Cola H.  
Yeah.
Marco  
At this point, you are unapologetic. And I think it comes through in a big, big way. What about
this current three piece made it so that The Ends made this kind of a splash and impact in this
unapologetic way?
 Cola H.  
Well, I think after a while, and this solely comes with time. With time, you begin to realize that
you can spend time trying to get the attention in different sort of ways, whether it's like
somebody's like, Oh, you gotta have this type of tune, or you gotta have that type of tune. And
then I don't know, somewhere along the line you turn 30. And then you're kind of just like, yo, I
don't care what anybody says, like this is how it's going down. And this is what we're going to
do. Now, even with like the writing, I can't ever say that in the writing process certain things
have solidified, because, like, as a writer of music, I feel like that process is always going to
change. Maybe the one thing that solidifies now is the fact that we never - at least, I mean, it
remains to be seen - but I don't ever want to go a year without, I don't ever want to go a month
without writing a song. You know what I mean? Like, I mean, we could probably talk about this
later, but like leaving a corporate job solely to work on music alone, right. The professional
doesn't have the time to be like, uh, you know, I'm not really feeling the vibe right now. It's like,
when you have to crank out work, you got to crank it out. Because like, your time is on the line,
money is on the line - even more so time, time is on the line. And when time is on the line, you can't sit down. And when you work for yourself, you cannot sit down. So when it comes down to that, like I think that's probably the only thing that has solidified. And to speak to going from two members to four members to three, the big change in that is - so we split amicably, like when we went from four to three, like we still got love for Jem. It's just that Jem’s sensibilities lean more towards the pop side. And that doesn't really benefit the sound of The OGBMs. So, it was an amicable split. Te's still doing crazy, wicked stuff. Like he releases his own solo music. And he was touring with Zaki Ibrahim before the pandemic. So it's just like, yeah, we still got nothing but love for him. And to come back to The OBGMs. When things go from four to three, like, the less numbers, the easier it is to crank out because you don't have to go through a number of people to sort of, you know what I mean, complete a song. Right? Whether it's an idea that somebody likes or somebody doesn't like or whatever.
 Marco  
Yeah, for sure. I want to get into the transition from full time work to full time musician for a
number of reasons. But I want to, I want to stay a bit on The Ends,
particularly because you dropped The Ends in 2020.
 Cola H.
Yes.
 Marco
And there was a lot going on in 2020. I would call it you know, I mean, sort of more of a global
racial reckoning. Right? And I think you also dropped a new podcast. Shout out OBGMs Band
Practice.
 Cola H.  
Oh, thank you so much.
 Marco  
And So the one thing I want to talk about is the - what you call lazy comparisons - that the
industry is making when it comes to The OBGMs and to The Ends. You've been called, you’ve
been called Bad Brains. And I know you've shared the stage with Bad Brains and your sound
couldn't be any different.
 Cola H.
Yeah, exactly.
 Marco
So do you want to talk to us a little bit about, about what that's been like, and what insights
you've had as a result of that?
 Cola H.  
Um, so, yeah, it's, it's really, really tough to be, you know, a person of color in - how do I
construct this best - it's really, really tough to be Black in a majority white space that is not
ready to see, like what we do. And when they're not ready to see what we do, they instantly try
to make comparisons to other Black people. And, you know, I can't blame, you know, a casual
fan for not having the breadth of knowledge, or even the catalogue of knowledge like to
be able to compare us properly, right? I realize what we do is extremely different than what a
lot of other people do. And because of that, like, they're just trying to look for something. And we do this just commonly with a bunch of things. Like, you know, we try to make comparisons to things that we recognize so that we're able to categorize them. So that when we refer to other
people, we can, like, we know what to expect. The problem with it being journalists is you
are paid to analyze, right? You are paid to analyze, and if it's music, you're paid to analyze the
sound, right? If it's how we look like, I mean, the only comparison that we have with Living
Colour, and that we have with Bad Brains is that we're Black. Soundwise, like the fact that we
do Rock like or are in the Rock space is the only comparison that you can make. If you listen
to the music and all you can pull is Bad Brains, then that means you haven't listened to it. So
that's the problem that we have. It does, it still makes it hard, right?
 Marco  
What inspires you in the current moment that we're in, because I know, for example, you've
you know, the launch of The Ends, you've been hosting a lot of conversations with other
artists. You know, Denz has been doing a lot of work on hosting conversations with artists
around issues of race, around issues of social justice. And what are you finding that is inspiring
in this moment, even though that there's a lot of work still to do?
 Cola H.  
I think what's inspiring is the fact that I think with everybody being home, people are finally
willing to listen. For a long time, I mean, there's this great joke where it's just like, have you
heard? Like, the police are beating up Black people again. I don't know if you've paid attention
in the past 400 years to the news! Like, you know what I mean? But it just feels like within the
last year with like George Floyd and all that, like, it feels like people are finally willing to admit
that there's a problem, and that it's a big problem. And it's a problem that has existed forever.
I'd say that's inspiring. The fact that people are willing to talk. And this goes beyond just, you
know, violence against communities of color. Like it's right up to tolerance, right? Like, I mean,
it feels only yesterday that like, you know, the amount of of slurs that we would throw around,
like, you know, pertaining to different communities, that that was acceptable. And now it's not
acceptable, right? The fact that in this day and age, where even like what's known as the
casting couch mentality is being destroyed. Change is what's inspiring, right? Like, all
these different things like the you know, the Me Too movement that's inspiring all these
different things that are inspiring. It shows that like, you know, life can change for the
better. That's what's inspiring me the most. I wouldn't think that it would be any different for
Denz or Joe.
 Marco  
The words, you know, in that context, music is so much more important, because you
mentioned that you're putting yourself out there and you can't separate yourself. And you can't
separate the music from who you are in that instance. And I think that's another strong
connection that exists within something like The OBGMs and specifically, you know, with you
having this background and medium of both Hip Hop and punk. And so you've got these
sort of two critical forms of expression. What do those two genres or words mean to you in the
context of music being more than just entertainment?
 Cola H.  
It meant, like, culture. Like, I mean, we say subculture like for these things, but it's culture. Like
these are the driving forces of culture, right? And even at that, like, I feel like, at least now, as
I'm growing older, I'm realizing that it means so much more than just these two words. Like Hip
Hop is more than just like, you know, graffiti, and breakdancing, and MCing. Like, it's, it's a way
of life, right? It's like, I don't walk around saying like, Oh, this is so Hip Hop like as much as I do, like saying, yo, this is punk rock as fuck. But it's just like, it becomes a way of life, like the way how you approach certain things, right? I feel like that's what those things mean to me, right? Like going completely DIY is so punk rock. Right? Not taking no for an answer, being completely in your face is so Hip Hop. Like, it becomes the way that you breathe, the way that you walk, the way that you talk, the way you consume information, the way you exert information, right, the way you express yourself. That's what those two words have meant, and like, continue to mean and it continues to evolve as like both those genres, both of those ways of life evolve. And as my mind continues to evolve, you know.
 Marco  
Facts, man, facts. So, you know, there's a piece there on risk that I think, you know,
putting yourself out there, but also everything that's wrapped up in both of those. I mean, to call
them genres is to really simplify what they mean. But when you're embodying something like
that in such a way, you're taking a risk. And so I want to go back to the risk that you took when
you jumped from full-time work to full-time musician and, you know, maybe some
insights that you could offer, you know, folks listening or things that you look back on and
you're like, I'm so glad that I did this. Or just the process of learning and learning more about
yourself as you took that risk.
 Cola H.  
Yeah, definitely, um, the risk. So I'll never forget it. So while I was at my desk working, I got
two offers. So first of all, I just started managing my baby brother, right? Well, he's not a baby
anymore.
 Marco  
Shout out Clairmont the Second.
 Cola H.  
Yeah, Clairmont the Second, shout out to Clairmont the Second. He's not a baby anymore. He's a full grown adult now. But at the time, he was still in his teens. And we had gotten offered, we had gotten offered a publishing deal for him. And because I was sending through my own music to this publishing company, I had gotten offered a publishing deal as well. And then not only that, but at the time the band, The OBGMs, we were in talks with a record label. And things were looking very, very good. And, you know, I was speaking to my dad, and then, you know, I had some time to think. And I said, you know what, I think if there was ever a time to make a jump, if God is telling me to jump now, it's right now. So I jumped. And I handed in my two-week resignation. And I went to work on the last day of work. I went in on a Monday, which people wouldn't normally do. But I said I'm working on the 15th. That's what it's gonna be. And I was going to be proposing to my wife on the Wednesday. All in the same day, when I got home, the publishing deal fell through because there was miscommunication, which turned into a little bit of a back and forth. So, both publishing deals fell through. And the record deal fell through all on the same day, on the Monday. And on the Wednesday, I was proposing to my wife, and my now wife, and you know, at first I was a little scared. I was like, oh, what did I just do? And I went, and I spoke to a mentor of mine. And you know, he basically said, you know what, give
it a year and a half. And if you come out, and you don't have money or like, you know, the
biggest loss that you can have is going back to work and say, man, that was a crazy, it was a
crazy, like year and a half that I had. Or you can be me. And him, at the time, like, if you see his production credits, biggest pop stars in the world. I'm not even gonna mention them. But it's just like biggest pop stars in the world. So that's the advice I rolled with. And two weeks after I
proposed to my wife, she said yes, obviously. And I was in an event. I was sitting
down, like looking at this film. And I was like, you know what, I'm gonna be okay. And here I am, I'm okay. And I'm still doing my thing, even in the midst of the pandemic. I'm a full-time artist. You know? Sometimes you just got to take the risk. It's never going to happen the way you want it to happen. I think that's the biggest takeaway that I've had from this whole process. It won't happen exactly how you see it, but it can still happen if you're motivated to push it
towards happening. So here I am - Professional Artist.
 Marco  
No doubt man, no doubt. And yeah, kudos to you man for pushing through.
 Cola H.
Thank you.
 Marco
In terms of, you know, the entertainment industry, the music industry. I want to float this, float
this question to you - What's the best piece of advice you've heard someone either give you or
give someone else? And what's the worst piece of advice you've heard someone give you or
somebody else?
  Cola H.  
The best piece of advice that I've ever been given was at the start, from that same mentor that I
was just telling you about. He said, you know, I had sat with him a week after like, you know, a
week after I quit. And I was just like, look man, I want to figure this out. He's like here's what
you need to know: nobody in this industry knows what they're talking about. We're not talking
about like administrative like duties and stuff like that. We're talking about what's hot and
what's not. Right? The executives, they'll try to convince you that they know everything. The
record labels will try to convince you that they know everything. They know what's hot. They
know how to make a record pop. They know what's poppin’ in the streets. The truth is, is that
they don't know. They have a formula. And that's what they're concerned in making big. Nobody saw, like at the height of his popularity, no one saw Tekashi 6ix9ine coming, right. I mean like, and I'm not promoting Tekashi 6ix9ine when I say it, but they didn't see it coming. No one saw
XXXTentacion coming, you know. And even right on top of it, no one saw Chance the Rapper
when he was at his height of heights, coming. And like look what they all did. They all changed
the game in some sort of way. And like, that's, that's just the reality. But record execs, industry
professionals, including myself, will try to convince you that they know. And they don't. That's
the best piece of advice I got. The worst piece of advice that I've heard was actually just
recently. An artist manager was talking to a panel. And you know, I don't want to smack them
down too much. But basically, what they said was sometimes you just want people to listen to
you and you want them to like be wearing your merch, right? So if you have to buy a shirt at $10 and sell it at $12 and you make a $2 profit, just do it. I personally think that's horrible advice. And the reason why I think it's horrible advice is because artists have been taught to demean their price and undervalue themselves in order to get seen for so long. And I think when it comes to the music business, you do not get successful by undervaluing your product. You want people to take you serious. There's a reason that when Nipsey Hussle was selling his album for I think it was either $100 or $1,000 a piece. There's a reason he sold out. It was
beyond good music. It was, it was the fact that he valued himself that much more. And I feel like it's a, it's in bad practice to teach artists to undervalue themselves to get a little bit further. Like to be real with you, and I don't want to get too far into this, but that's exactly why the casting couch mentality exists. Like it comes from undervaluing yourself, your person. Anytime you undervalue yourself, you will fall for the banana in the tailpipe. Like you will fall for the things that will eventually slow you down, for the things that will make you feel dirty about yourself. That's what's gonna happen, right? So you don't ever want to undervalue your craft. The thing that you think that you're better than others at, the thing that makes you you, if you ever shortchange that you will shortchange yourself all your life. Or you might get what you want. But you will always feel that and you won't be able to sleep at night. You know what I mean? And that's just how I feel about that.
 Marco  
If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything.
 Cola H.  
You'll fall for anything, and how many people do we know have fallen for things that they
shouldn't have fallen for? It's countless, you know what I mean? And it's just like, we need
artists to value themselves otherwise, like, you know what I mean, everybody will be
undervaluing themselves. And it's just not worth it.
 Marco  
Facts, man. One question I have is around communities and being a part of a community.
Because I know, you know, particularly West End. I know you've been, you've been repping
West End since before it was cool to rep West End of Toronto.
 Cola H.  
Yep. Very, for a very long time. Yep.
 Marco  
And I know, you know, and you seem to, you seem to drop features that no one’s expecting and then all sudden, it's like, oh shit, Cola is up on this too, right? So, talk to me - a couple of things: One is just the importance of community when it comes to, you know, culture, when it comes to working in creative spaces. And the other is this dynamic in Canada and in Canadian music about, you know, not whether it's more important, but you know, everyone says, you need to get out of Canada, to become successful. And so, you know, how, what do you make of that?
 Cola H.
Right. Well, on the community aspect. A community that you love and that loves you will always prop you up no matter what. It's, it's just inevitable. They will always prop you up. And if they truly love you, they will tell you when you're sidestepping. They will tell you when something was wack, because the incentive is to get better. Right? So for like, for the West End, right - so I grew up at Keele and Eglinton, York Square, right - We used to have rap battles all the time. And like those rap battles, it wasn't something where we were fighting each other. It was something like, yo if we really, really want to do this, we gotta be better than the next person. So I gotta be better than you. And your incentive is to be better than me. And essentially - actually, that's how me and Denz met. We met through our sisters, right. And, and we met through beat battles, right. To the point where we partnered with each other and just worked on becoming better producers. But the incentive is to be better than each other but for the betterment of the both of us, right. So that's the importance of community. And if it's making you guys better, that's the importance. It's kind of weird now though. Like, I feel like people rep certain hoods or whatnot, and it's not necessarily a thing where they're trying to make each other better, right. It's more so they're trying to, you know, battle with each other in a negative way. But, I mean, that's for another story. Now, to come to your second question, which was going to the States in order to make it. I completely still wholeheartedly agree with that statement. Like, the reality is this. Like, I'll just use Clairmont, for example. Clairmont the Second is a Juno nominated, three times in a row Polaris prize long-listed, a Prism prize award-winning director. Like Clairmont has all these accolades. For the past year, Clairmont has been featured on multiple United States playlists. The majority of his plays come from the United States. The thing is, is that Canada is far too small and like there's not enough Hip Hop fans here, right? And the biggest music market in the world is the United States. Maybe you don't need to be big in the United States. Maybe it's somewhere in Europe. But in terms of Canada, there is just not enough people here. Like maybe, like you know, a popular act can be a million-dollar band here, maybe. But like, you know, two black guys and a half-Iranian half-Irish guy like being a million-dollar Canadian band, like only operating in Canada? I don't think that's very much so possible here.
 Marco  
So what is, I mean, what is Toronto's place in the modern music industry then? Because I
mean, there's a lot of, I mean, Toronto has blown up for the past 10 years, right?  
 Cola H.
Yeah, for sure.  
 Marco
And everyone wants to say that it's Drake, it's because of Drake. But, you know, anyone that,
anyone that's been paying attention knows that the foundations had been built for a long time.
What makes Toronto so unique in terms of the music that's coming out of the city?
 Cola H.  
I think, I think it's a lot of things. And I would absolutely argue the fact that it is because of
Drake, to be honest with you. And like I would argue that, and I feel like there's a number of
things here that make Toronto that great. Drake didn't need to rep us like on top of that. Like
Drake repped us and I think it's because he truly loves this city. And I think this city has
something to be jealous of. For the fact that there are so many first-generation kids here, so
many immigrant families here. Like I feel like it's, and it's from all different places, like in the
world, right. Majid Jordan like is another example. I feel like every single Black artist that you
see from this city that has gone on to do amazing things, like, none of their parents are
Canadian. They're all from somewhere else. So I feel like the mixing of all those different
cultures to bring up these kids who grew up, all in the, in the same place, I think that's what
makes Toronto like a great breeding ground for talent. I mean, all my friends, like so many
of my friends are like, they're all talented, all first-generation, and all have interesting lives
beyond just making music. And that's what makes the music that much better. You know what
I'm saying? I think that's what makes Toronto unique and special. And I think that's why Drake
loves it. I feel like that's why, like, once again, I think Drake is instrumental to the economy of
Toronto. Like, beyond music, but definitely, like, when he said, "Weston Road flows," All my
Weston people were like, yo, we're taxing everybody at Caribana. ‘Cuz they're gonna want
tours of Weston. Like, not just the strip, but just the whole entire Weston community. You know, I mean, we’re gonna be taxing people out here. Like, if they come out here trying to, you know what I mean? And nobody would have known about Weston. They wouldn't have known about Weston if Drake didn't say it on his records. You know, it's just a fact.
 Marco  
No, and it's a great point. I mean, you know, leveraging that platform to really put a spotlight on
specific areas, specific issues. I mean, I think there's a lot that, you know, your work with
OBGMs and Drake have in common. I mean, you're leveraging that culture to rep a city, to rep
just to rep period, right?
 Cola H.
Absolutely.  
 Marco
In terms of who's in your ears right now, who do we need to be listening to?
 Cola H.  
So in terms of - it's a bunch of people, right. Like, I'm listening to a ton of music right now. Yves
Tumor is probably like - Heaven for a Tortured Mind. Great album. I encourage everybody to go
listen to that album. That album, like was probably one of my most played albums of the whole
year. I'm listening to anything that comes from DijahSB, another artist from here, Toronto.
Clairmont the Second of course. And shameless plug, The OBGMs. Everything that is The
OBGMs you need to be listening to that. Other than that, like I'm finding new music every day. I
just took in Illuminati Hotties’ latest album and they're doing some really really cool musical stuff
there. In terms of rap, 1TakeJay. I'm really really enjoying the off-the-beat-type rap flow, where
it's kind of like, and it's really, really popular in the West Coast. And I think 1TakeJay is from out
there. And, like, I really, really enjoy that. Like you're kind of on the beat, but you're kind of
really not on the beat at all. And there's something about it that's just so swaggy about it that I
really really dig. And as a drummer, too, right, being able to drum within the pocket but off the
click, like oh, there's something so sick about that. And who else. I really really like G Perico's
voice. I think he sounds almost like a modern day DJ Quik. Larry June is also another one.             And like to be real with you, I've been listening to like a ton of 80s R&B funk. Like a ton. Like
S.O.S. band. Like S.O.S. Band is probably my favorite. But like Mtume is another one. Cherelle,   Alexander O'Neal, anything that Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis have produced, I highly, highly
encourage everyone to go listen to it, because it's just filled with number ones, their entire
catalogue, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. They're my favorite producers in the whole world. And I hope one day meet them.
 Marco  
Wicked man. What are two songs and one album that are forever part of your life soundtrack?
 Cola H.  
I'll start off by giving this album that I love. It's not a rock album, but it kinda is – Funkadelic,
Let's Take it to the Stage. When I was 16 years old, and Denz was trying to convince me to be
in a rock band. And I said, hell no. I stumbled upon this documentary on PBS. With them
playing, or it was a, it was a documentary about Parliament Funkadelic. And, like, you know,
they transitioned from being just like an R&B band to a funk band to like moving into rock and
roll. Let's Take it to the Stage was a pivotal album that basically said we're here to stay and
we're here, meshing these, these two things together. And that's an album I can't live without.
In terms of songs. Hmm. S.O.S. Band, Tell Me if you Still Care. It helped me discover the
softer side of who I was. Not everything is about like, you know, loudness and you know, trying
to be seen. Tell Me if you Still Care by S.O.S. Band, produced by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis.
Yeah. And Pull Out by Death From Above 1979. It’s just completely, like, offensive, completely
loud. And just like, the type of energy that I was just like rolling with in my early college years,
which made me want to get even harder with this music shit.
 Marco  
And then in terms of other tracks, what in your own, in your own catalogue? So music that
you've worked on or been a part of, what are some of the most meaningful tracks to you?
 Cola H.  
Triggered by the OBGMs. Like, that's a meaningful song because it's hard. And it's everything
that when I wanted to get harder with music, like it's everything that I thought we would sound
like. That's one track in my catalog that I'm like yes. Another one would probably have to be
Clockout. It's the song with me and Clairmont on his last, on his latest album. I produced that
song, and like I got the second verse on it. It's just, it just shows like that both of us got lyrical
skill and can still bounce off of each other, and let it be a family affair and still be like, just a
complete banger. And lastly, I'd probably say New Money, which is like a solo track of mine.
 Marco
Ooh, la la.
 Cola H.
Yeah, Ooh La La. Yes. New Money. Like, there's not a bar in there that's not true. And it's just,
it feels like what Toronto feels like to me. You know, that's my Ode to Toronto.
 Marco  
So like a lot of artists have sort of said that 2020 was a year for strategizing because of the
impact on the the arts community. You were obviously busy AF. And so what are some final
thoughts on music in 2021 and sort of where we find ourselves globally? Locally? Like, you
know, obviously, you're going to be releasing some music. So that's exciting. Anything else
you want to share about? Just final thoughts on music and either 2021 or beyond?
 Cola H.  
Yeah. So like, I think if 2020 showed us anything, it's that the world can be shut down for a
multitude of reasons. And I think if you're taking this time to strategize, good. But if you're not
taking this time to, to actively still maintain attention, or learn a new skill, you will suffer when
the world does come back, if it ever comes back. I think people that are waiting - like it
showed, it showed us this. If you wait, you will wait. Like period. There's never going to be a
right time for anything. The right time is right now. Right? What are you doing right now?
What's happening right now? What are people watching right now? What are people doing
right now? If you do not add more skills to your arsenal, and if you are only waiting for the right
time, you'll die out. Like there's just no way that you'll survive in this day and age. Because like
the reality is like, I'm not sure our normal world comes back. I'm definitely not sure. And I know
that sounds bleak. But like, I mean we booked a few things for 2021. But the reality is, is like it’ll
probably get canceled, you know. And I think anyone that thinks live music is coming back in
2021 is not paying attention to the signs that things are going horribly wrong right now. So the
thing is, is like, how are you going to survive this rat race next? And it's - you know what it's not
by doing? Waiting. So don't wait. Right now is the time. That's my final thought.
 Braeden  
Could I ask one question?
 Marco
Sure!
 Cola H.
Oh, please.
 Braeden  
It seems like behind your work is this like really intricate fabric of relationships and you
collaborate with a lot of people. You have band members. You're in the music business with
your brother. You're in a marriage with someone. Like, these relationships have so many
layers and so much depth and complexity. And so I just wonder, like, what do you think is
essential in moving through those relationships and sustaining those relationships in a good
way?
 Cola H.  
I’ll say it like this. Communication is essential in moving forward in a relationship. But not only
communication, it's understanding what the relationship is. So when I say understanding the
relationship, relationships start for different reasons. And they usually end because somebody
broke code as to what the relationship was. Like, I feel like a lot of us don't understand
relationships to the extent that we should. Relationships are basically – they’re social contracts
as to how you interact with somebody. And the moment that changes, the relationship can
either change or end. And, like, I think as long as you understand like why it started, and how it
started, and you're willing to make it evolve through communication, of course. A relationship
can sustain the worst, like the absolute worst of what life has to offer. You know, and I think
that's why I've been able to roll with Denz for so long. That's why I'm in business with my
brother. That's why essentially, my wife is like, she's not just like - she describes herself as my
biggest fan. But I think she's way more than that. She's my business partner, like, just in life,
you know what I mean? Like, you know, you know, we're new parents, right. And like, even the
things that we introduce our child to, or even right down to how we communicate in front of her.
Like, maintaining a relationship, all that is key, like, so it's knowing why you got together and
and communicating so that the relationship can continue to flourish.
 Braeden  
I guess if I could follow up with something personal?
 Cola H.
Of course. Please.
 Braeden
Like, well, just, you know, being so - and I guess I'm asking from a place of being in a similar
context - like, when, when you're married to someone and you’re business partners, and you’re
co-parenting, and maybe you have, I don't know, creative sides, or creative work that
intersects. But then you're also in a domestic partnership, and also a romantic partnership. It's
like you're wearing all these different hats. And sometimes it's hard to know which hat you're,
you're speaking from, like, and they have competing interests. And so I'm just like wondering if,   like, do you, have you sort of acquired, are you learning like a new language, or bringing in a  new set of tools into like, I guess, learning the interplay between all those different hats you        have to wear?
 Cola H.  
I think, I think what it is, is we’re learning a new set of tools. So marriage is not for everyone, I
completely believe that. And it's for me, and it’s for my partner, like it's for both of us. Like we
chose each other. And like, that's why we're still happy today. The reason why we love each
other is because we love each other for who we are, right? But the reason why it works so
well, is because the way we communicate. We know that we'll be able to grow together. So
whether it's being business partners, whether it's buying property together, whether it's raising
a family together, like you know what I mean? Whether it's, or even right down to who's gonna
do the dishes, and who's in the living room. Like, you know, all those things, those all just
become tools. They become assets that you use, like, in order to accomplish whatever you
need to accomplish. But the thing is, is like, they're just tools, but they add on to our
relationship. We know we can continue to grow together. And that's why we continue to grow
together.
 Braeden  
Thank you for sharing.
 Cola H.  
Oh, no problem. No problem. By the way, great questions. Completely unexpected, but really,
really dope.
 Braeden  
Yeah, well, like it kind of, you know, what made me think of it is when you mentioned Dave
Schiffman, like earlier in the conversation. Like, there's kind of, there's like these invisible
relationships that happen behind the scenes that no one else sees.
 Cola H.
Mm hmm.
 Braeden
And, and I'm just like, I'm interested in that aspect of just yeah, people's sort of like, the
intimate realms of people's lives that lead to the work you never really see.
 Cola H.  
Can I expand on that actually?
 Braeden  
Yeah.
 Cola H.  
Now that, now that we're talking about it, like, I feel like a lot of times, especially as artists,
because it's a lonely road, and because a lot of the times you find yourself alone. You find
yourself being extremely introspective. I feel like great artists are very introspective. You forget
that you need people. But like, even with everything that we're seeing in this in this world, like
happening right now, where it kind of seems like everyone's mad at each other, right? You
know, whether it be for political reasons, racial reasons, whether it be class reasons. But the
reality is this. We need each other, we all need each other. Like, even right down to me talking
shit, like people need people. We can't go it alone. Like, I mean, if we try to go it alone, or
without particular communities, our minds don't expand. And right now there's a fight to keep
things the same, or the fight to change things. And like, you know, there's two people leaning
on on two different sides. But really, if we came together, and you know, we work together
towards a common goal and that's like, advancing humanity, you know, we would be so much
further than we are right now. People don't value each other as much as they should. And that’s
where the big problems lie, you know?
 Braeden  
Yeah, I feel like trust is really the only currency.
 Cola H.  
It really really is. It really is. Trust me. Yeah.
 Marco  
That's awesome Braeden. Just a quick plug - everything OGBMs, everything Cola H.,
everything Clairmont the Second, OBGMs Band Practice wherever you get podcasts.
 Cola H.
Yup Yup
 Marco
Cola man, as always, it's a pleasure. We appreciate you and just wish you so much more
success and a brighter fire that burns in 2021.
 Cola H.  
Oh, my bro, thank you so much. I really really really really appreciate you guys having me. And
like yeah, I said before, Cola H. on everything just look up "dieforcola". So dieforcola.com,
@dieforcola on everything and that will lead you to Cola H. and that is me. Thank you for
having me.  
 Marco  
Peace
 Cola H.  
Peace
 [outro music plays]
 Marco  
That was my conversation with Colanthony Humphrey aka Cola H. You can check him out on
social media @dieforcola. I want to give a big shout out to Braeden Doane for her support in
producing today's episode. Look out for another Hart House Hip Hop Education takeover
coming soon. In the meantime, check us out at harthouse.ca. I'm Marco Adamovic. Peace.
0 notes
jenniferstolzer · 7 years
Text
Time to begin a long overdue education
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I have never seen Buffy before. I traded @bewareoftrees​ ... I would watch all of Buffy and she would watch all of Babylon 5. So here I am!
I won’t liveblog summaries, but I will give jokes and guesses and observations so if you want to come along (or not) the tag is going to be #jen watches.
ep1 Welcome to Hellmouth
I like that this is picking up where the movie left off, although I believe these people are 16 like I believe this “authentic teenage slang speech.” Ah the late 90s...
Tony Head! My bro! My favorite Night Surgeon. I was biased from the start but I’m gonna guess he will PROBABLY by my favorite character. This will be cemented if he ends up knocked out at any point.
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I do come with some knowledge of this show, unfortunately as much as I like Willow already, I’m gonna brace myself for impact. Joss has slain my heart before. 
David Boreanaz is still hot but I’m sorry dude, you are way too puppy dog to be menacing and your dialog is atrocious. All the vampire dialog is atrocious. I’m gonna believe this is b/c it set a standard. Can’t forget this show is a milestone for modern fiction writers. 
oh crap this dvd is old enough yo have to pick episodes individually. The past sucks. 
2, The Harvest
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Angel starts what I’m gonna guess is an illustrious career as a sad, cryptic puppy. 
Was 90s fashion ever attractive?
Holy crap the show just used the “jumpscare” sound from Illbleed and everywhere else. I’m recognizing all these sound effects. Someone bought the classic horror kit I think. 
a dudebro who can’t close his mouth swings in from the side in computer lab and I laugh and laugh. 
I didn’t see Jesse becoming a vampire coming, perhaps I should be paying closer attention. He of course gets super sexual assaulty when he’s a vampire and Cordelia is totally into unhealthy relationships so she’ll let him touch her hips and inhale hissing breaths in her ear. No problem. 
“Bring me the first” says Luke. //other vampires bring out an innocent black man. Me: uncool.
“Jesse is dead. You have to remember, when you see him you are not looking at your friend, you’re looking at the thing that killed him.” - Giles
Willow saved him from a vampire! These two are the best. Tag team it awkward booknerds.
The Vampire growl sounds like they’re burping really loud. Glad to know the evil vampires are still stupid enough to get faked out. 
3 Witch
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Giles is so offended that Buffy wants to be a cheerleader. How is it that he is more accurate to me in highschool than anyone else. Good news... as a grownup I’m totally on Buffy’s side. Let her cheer. She’ll be a smash at the gymnastics. 
AND we begin with body shaming. Cordelia is talking to Willow now which is weird. And Willow herself I think either got skinnier between episodes or they were dressing her in liek 10 layers of clothes in the two opening eps. Then this other girl comes in and Willow is like “You lost a lot of weight” and the first girl is like “Had to.” Ugh. How about I just grate my spare tire off with an industrial file. 
Hooray for Buffy putting out the fire and saving the girl :) Doing something is so against the teen girl stereotype. 
Amy just exposition barfed all over Buffy about the huge crush she has on her own mom. I’m glad they’re highlighting this body weight thing as an unnatural fixation but that’s just for the crazy witch mom, not for the universe which is who is usually concerned with how girls look in cheerleading costumes. (forgive me, I have a stink about body standards)
“It’s so cool! You’re like a guy! My guy friend who knows about girls stuff!”
I like barbies as voodoo dolls. And I love the twist that Amy is super totally evil.
Ah! Xanders “you’re a guy” got turned around on him. Hurray!
OMG BODY SWAP! It’s the worst Freaky Friday but I approve of them surprising me with it. Great job Buffy!
You punched Willow out you bitch! Oh and Xander too but You PUNCHED her OUT. She’s so evil! OH CRAP NOW SHE HAS AN AXE!
So cute shy Giles so embarrassed about his first spell casting. Then Willow runs in with a bat. Yeah, I’m going to like this show I think. 
and ep ends with psychological horror
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4, Teacher’s Pet
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Xander is struggling with his toxic masculinity standards. Apparently how many times he’s scored is up for debate so he has to go pretend to threeway to regain status in his alpha male society. Gag. 
Meanwhile Angel is over here being perfect boyfriend material, super hot, wearing a white tank with blood all over his arms. He gives her his coat. Gag again! Lol. We’re hitting a very wide gamut here. 
Xander falls for a woman who looks weirdly like the mom from the last episode. 
Blane just sexually harassed his substitute teacher. I’m convinced now that last ep was fatshame episode, this ep is sexual aggression the episode. 
“I’m gonna carb up for my one on one with Ms French this afternoon.” Ick gross much?
Evil sexy woman ate Dr. Gregory’s head b/c she’s a preying mantis. Being sexually attractive is a weapon women possess against men so desperate to fork a fertile woman that one of the characters is literally called the “fork guy” in this episode. 
Someone give an emmy to the random bum. 
Giles is not immune to sexy substitute, but he’s got enough sense to appreciate without turning into a blithering idiot. 
Oh wait, Cordelia is still here for the body image hangups I see. 
By the way, all this crit about alpha male/ femme fatale nonsense is not a crit on these characters, it’s a writing hangup. Plots, tropes, and cliches are those things b/c they’re over used and this is the late 90s after all.
“I understand, I met someone and you’re jealous.” Xander is projecting so hard as he’s on his way to fork his teacher, just saying. 
Even if she wasn’t a praying mantis this woman needs to be arrested. She’s sexually harassing the hell out of this 16 year old boy as he stumbles all over himself trying to prove his societal preconception of masculinity. He was a half second away from doing the right thing and saying no to the hot woman b/c it’s bad touch 101 but then he got drugged and passed out. Close but no cigar, X.
Willow has had a crush on him this whole time. It wasn’t subtle at all. 
I’m glad that Blaine is rightfully horrified by the concept of being raped and murdered. That’s the correct response. Write men who can think with more than their dicks. Men are well-rounded people too. 
Mantis affects are “awesome” lol. Looks like someone I know. 
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(apparently it’s more than just a joke. That’s the same costume used for both shows. I snarked about it looking like Na’Grath and it actually IS Na’Grath. And the actress was in B5 as well... omg the blending of universes is starting. @bewareoftrees did I give you Babylon 5 or did you give ME Babylon 5? HAAAAH)
Willow talks about how nice it is that the boys are being conscious with their bodies and continue to proves that she’s the best. Also Dr. Gregory was a virgin I guess. Thank you, show, for not making a joke out of that. 
Disk 1 Summary
It’s a fun show. It’s got some kinks to work out still but I can def see the promise. Will def keep watching.
24 notes · View notes
pinelife3 · 4 years
Text
Music I Can’t Understand
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Getting into hip hop in my late teens was like learning a new language: slang, cars, food, drugs, brands, gangs, locations. For example:
What does it mean to be sitting on 44s?
44 inch rims on your car - highly coveted, a desirable rim size.
What about coming from the 504?
The area code of Hollygrove, New Orleans: the neighbourhood Lil Wayne grew up in.
Please double cup me?
Kindly serve me lean in two double stacked Styrofoam cups.
Ice cream paint job?
Cars again - clean exterior with creamy white leather interior.
Finna hit a lick?
Fixing (intending) to rob a liquor store.
Wavy Brazilian?
Human hair grown from the scalps of the fine people of Brazil, harvested, treated and then sold to be used in wigs and weaves. The hair has a natural wavy texture and is typically long and dark.
Cop dome? 
Receive a blow job. Confusingly, I’ve also heard ‘domed’ to mean shooting someone in the head. 
Chopper?
You might be thinking of a helicopter or a motorcycle, but in hip hop a chopper is almost always a fully automatic weapon - I guess because it cuts people down?
A bird?
A kilo of drugs, typically cocaine.
Beyond the slang, I also found some of the accents difficult to understand. Lil Wayne speaks in a hoarse, treacly voice, he’s usually fucked up, his word association is crazy, he loves puns, and he rapidly jumps from topic to topic. So, initially, listening to Wayne was like trying to speed read Shakespeare. It took me a while to be able to properly tune in and listen to the lyrics - but when I did, I found hip hop so rewarding and fun. This is all from one song:
‘Cause I’ll serve anyone like a blind waiter
I work out in my office, guess I’m fit for business
Your flow never wet, like grandma pussy/ I’m always good, like grandma cookies
You niggas best not slip, Ice Road Truckers
I also appreciate the trite but appealing throwaways:
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felt like rockstar, might die later idk
(Music critics under the misapprehension that rappers didn’t glorify hard drugs and depresso partying before Future need to go back to school.)
I have memories of rapturous repeat listens of Good Kid, Maad City, trying to decode the story. Falling in love with the mythology of Kanye. Digging through forums. Listening to famous classics and thinking I was the first to uncover an unknown treasure, like an oblivious archaeologist. The golden age of Big Ghost’s blog. MF DOOM super fandom. Discovering old artists online and stuffing my ears with their back catalogs. Visiting country towns and thinking ‘I bet no one here has even heard of Aesop Rock’ like a smug fuck. Pouring over lyrics on genius.com. Sweating profusely at gigs. Hoarding mixtapes from DatPiff. Weirdly, I associate a lot of my fondest hip hop memories with being by myself on my laptop. 
The interface hasn’t changed one bit:
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Over time, though, I’ve gotten bored with hip hop. I feel like I haven’t really fallen in love with anything released since ~2014. Piñata might be the last hip hop album that really worked on me (exception: the Hamburger Helper album Watch the Stove from 2016). Even To Pimp A Butterfly has serious issues: listen to “Mortal Man” and tell me it’s not the corniest shit ever. The extended butterfly/chrysalis/caterpillar metaphor throughout the album is like bad high school poetry. For a while, I thought my cynical outlook on modern hip hop was just a product of getting older and being wistful for the music I liked when I was younger. But now I’ve decided that this is a problem solely between me and hip hop, because I still find music that I get obsessed with. But that music is exclusively Celtic.
youtube
I would timebox my Celtic music obsession to the past year or so, but Spotify went to great pains to inform me that Enya was my artist of the decade, so this must have been latent within me for some time. 
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When initially dipping my toe in the Celtic genre, I started with instrumentals and songs sung in English, but I’m waist deep now and have started listening to Gaelic music. It’s like birdsong: I don’t know what they’re saying, but I like the way it sounds. Throaty, clear. Choking, sweet. Windswept, warm. Profound, unknowable. Ancient, important. Echoing, intimate. They could be singing about stale muesli bars and stubbed toes for all I know. 
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(If you don’t listen to these songs - especially the one below - I don’t think this blog post will work on you. See please listen.)
Take the song “Thig An Smeòrach As t-Earrach” (above). Obviously ‘Thig An Smeòrach As t-Earrach’ sounds like something Gollum would hiss under his breath, but I find the song itself practically spiritual. Gaelic is so foreign - the words bear no similarity to words I’ve ever heard before - but I feel like I still understand what’s being said. It’s like a fiery angel has appeared at the foot of your bed and is telling you something important: but the angel is so beautiful and bright, your eyes are watering. You can hardly look. And you certainly can’t listen. But the message is burned in your brain. You didn’t understand a word, and wouldn’t know how to repeat what the angel said - but you understand their meaning perfectly.
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Do you think the past or the future is more important? And not in terms of your own life (e.g. will your retirement be better than your time in high school) - that’s chickenshit, that’s two turns in early game Civ V, that’s low stakes table. No, I mean in terms of the whole timeline of the planet: neolithic magic in stone circles, valleys where no human has ever walked, unturned stones beneath deep water, dead languages. Should we protect the physical remnants of history or privilege the possibilities of the future? Would we crush Grecian pottery if it unlocked clean, sustainable power which allowed us to create AirPod batteries which never lose their charge? Without even asking, I will tell you that anyone making Celtic music thinks the past is more important than the future. And while you listen to Celtic music, you will agree. 
Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.
Celtic music is humanist, but ancient humanist. It is not interested in what Elon Musk is doing, it doesn’t care what shirt you’re wearing, or whether you’re an Episcopalian vegan, or if you can finish The New Yorker crossword puzzle, or really any modern concerns - at least, I don’t think it cares. In a way, I don’t care what they’re saying, because I like the way it makes me feel: peaceful and romantic and connected to something eternal and profound. Like when a huge rock is warm to the touch. These are underrated feelings.
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thesffcorner · 5 years
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Emergency Contact
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Emergency Contact is a contemporary novel written by Mary H K Choi. It follows 2 characters: Penny, a freshman at UTC who wants to be a writer, and Sam, a boy who works and lives in a coffee shop nearby and wants to be a documentarian. The two meet by accident, but when Sam has a panic attack that he mistakes for a heart attack, Penny helps him, and they become each other's emergency contacts. Soon however, both realize their relationship might be deeper than that. This was an odd novel: it started off pretty engaging, but lost a lot of the steam towards the middle, and though the ending picked up pace, the actual climax left me somewhat dissatisfied. However, even though my reading experience wasn’t great, there were still elements of this book I enjoyed a lot. It seems the book is pretty polarizing, and I think there are two main reasons for it, so without further ado, let’s talk about them. 
Writing: Writing is subjective, and as such I tend to avoid talking about it, unless it’s noteworthy. Well, here it’s definitely noteworthy. It’s what I like to call ‘quirky, modern prose’; think mumblecore in films, but in novel form. The characters are up to date with modern slang, jargon and internet culture, and as such they speak in a very exaggerated manner; when they text they use a lot of shortcuts, barely any punctuation, their thought process is very ‘raw’ and sometimes more than a little iffy with the jokes, and just in general it’s a style that I don’t think many people will like. It’s hard to explain without examples, so here are 2: “Okay, they weren’t full on frontal - bless. Mark was still sixteen, and Penny didn’t need the FBI landing at her college dorm for kiddie porn. They were risque though. Each went slightly beyond the treasure trail. [...] Penny was even sure he Facetuned at least one, which was a quality she simply could not respect in a man.” (pg. 14) “Oh my God, Penny. Stop being so emo. Are you going to make us talk about feelings?” asked Mallory “Seriously, you are so homeschooled sometimes” (pg 296) I dare you to show that to someone over the age of 40 and expect them understand any of it. There are several problems with this. First, I like a book that’s about teenagers, and sounds like what teenagers actually speak like. I’ve heard from people younger than me, who’ve read this book, and didn’t like it because of the way it’s written; they thought it didn’t sound authentic, and tried too hard. I personally didn’t find this to be an issue; I thought both Penny and Sam, as well as the rest of the characters for the most part spoke like people do today, but keep in mind I’m 24, and have been out of college for at least a couple of years. Second, and what actually bothered me, is that this style of writing was exhausting to read. On the one hand, seeing as we are trapped inside the heads of two incredibly anxious, over-thinkers, it made sense that their internal monologues were likewise overwritten and exhausting, but it made for a really unappealing reading experience. I shouldn’t feel like I’ve been run over by a tractor every time I read more than 2 paragraphs of a contemporary romance; a lot of the time it almost felt like Choi was writing on a dare to show someone how hip with the times she was. Which is fine, but I’d like to actually get to know Penny and Sam, without having to waddle through endless apathy and jargon. The third thing, which even I had some issues with, were the risque jokes. Look, I was a teen. I know how it was; you’d say whatever offensive thing comes to mind to get a reaction; it’s basically part of the universal adolescent experience. Except a) Penny is 18 and in college, and Sam is 21; and b) they are still risque jokes even if they are said ironically. It’s a catch 22; you want to subvert tropes and make fun of stereotypes, but you still have to write those tropes and stereotypes. So I completely understand why you’d be turned off by jokes about underage porn, calling men who cry ‘pussies’, calling people who are awkward ‘homeschooled’ or making racist and xenophobic jokes. It’s authentic, but it’s not fun to read. Characters: My last point about the writing, leads nicely into what I know a lot of people had issues with (and at points I did too) which were the characters. Let’s start with Penny. Penny is both very funny and infuriating to read from. At times she reminded me of myself when I was her age; constantly anxious, judgmental, with a superiority complex stemming from being the smartest and most read person in class, someone who doesn’t fit in and purposefully isolates herself even more to cope. To top it off, she has a strained relationship with her mother, an unpleasant experience with men, and generally prefers communication over text. There were so many things that she did and said that I just couldn’t stand, and a lot of them, were things I would’ve done and said when I was her age. As such, while I didn’t like Penny, I can’t say she isn’t a well written, well rounded, authentic character. This could lead into a bigger debate about protagonists, but in my opinion, the protagonist needs to be fully fleshed out and well written, more than they need to be likable, and this is especially true of female protagonists, since they are rarely allowed to be flawed. My issues with Penny were more that I didn’t feel like she changed by the end of the novel, and a lot of her flaws were never even addressed, let alone resolved, as well as some of her truly bad behavior. Like I said Penny is often judgmental, and the book implicitly sides with her, even though lots of times she’s blatantly wrong and draws conclusions based on stereotypes. A good example is the scene where she arrives at UTC, and a girl asks about her lipstick; I’m sorry, but when are we going to stop demonizing girls for enjoying make up? The girl is friendly and nice to her, and Penny still concludes she’s vapid and dumb because she asks about PENNY’S LIPSTICK. There’s a scene later on where she decides to meet Sam without the lipstick on, because I guess ‘that’s her authentic self’ and like fuck off. Wearing makeup doesn’t make you inauthentic or dumb, and you just KNOW, that if Penny were a boy, or a boy asked about her lipstick, y’all would be praising this book about how progressive it was. Then, there’s the whole subplot with Jude and Mallory. Mallory was equally as judgmental and annoying as Penny, so their rivalry was understandable, but Jude was nothing but nice and kind to Penny the whole book, and Penny repays her by hiding and lying to her about the one thing Jude asked her not to do. Jude calls her out on her behavior, and gets rightfully pissed, but then she still forgives both Penny and Sam so easily, even though they treat her like shit for the whole book. Moreover, I didn’t even get the sense that Penny was genuinely sorry to cause Jude pain, or felt bad for lying; she was just scared that Jude wouldn’t talk to her anymore, which was incredibly shitty and selfish, and the book never makes her face any real consequences for it. The same can be said about her relationship with her mother. All of her monologues, internal and otherwise, about how terrible her mother was just because she was hot, young, and flirts a lot were exhausting. I get that Penny was angry at her mother for trying to be her friend instead of parent, but you know what might help you solve that Penny? TALKING TO HER. This woman pays for your education, lets you choose exactly what you want to do, which is not something many people have the privilege of, clearly loves and cares about you, and has genuinely done nothing wrong, for you to hate her as much as you do. Especially, in comparison to Sam’s mother who is an actual monster. The fact that she drives to the hospital, and then doesn’t see her mother, constantly brushes off her calls and texts, doesn’t go to her ACTUAL BIRTHDAY was just ridiculously shitty behavior, and again, she never really gets called out on it, or suffers any consequences, even in the end when they have their big make up scene! The only thing I liked about that scene was Celeste calling out Penny’s behavior towards her peers; that she doesn’t have friends not because everyone hates her, but because she considers everyone beneath her because they don’t match up to her ridiculously high standards she holds everyone to. I wish someone told me that when I was her age, but man, was her character hard to read from. But honestly, Penny was a gem compared to Sam, who I wanted to punch multiple times. Beware, some SPOILERS about Sam inbound. First off, Sam is possibly the most unfortunate character I have ever read about in books; his backstory is so sad, so beyond dramatic, it was like he walked straight of the set for Days of Our Lives. He has an alcoholic and a hoarder mother, grew up perpetually poor, is constantly starving, is himself a borderline alcoholic and is still in love with a manipulative, abusive ex-girlfriend. There’s also false pregnancies, him failing out of community college to protect a Dreamer and panic attacks. That’s… waaay too much drama for one person. And to make matters worse, a lot of the issues Sam has, are self-inflicted, and it’s very hard to root for and sympathise with someone who consistently makes the wrong decision about everything. First off, Sam works in a coffee shop, and lives rent free in the attic of said coffee shop. The owner even pays him more than minimum wage, and lets him eat and drink coffee at the shop. And yet, Sam is constantly broke and starving, because he forgets to eat, doesn’t feel like it, has no money because he spent it on alcohol (even though he’s sober) or expensive dates with Lorraine. How am I supposed to root for him? He saves enough money to enroll in a documentary film-making class at a community college, and instead of using this as an opportunity to truly make a good documentary, get it to play at student festivals, and local film fests and connect with other artists in the area (since y’know, they live in AUSTIN), he shoots at the last minute, doesn’t get realizes until the ABSOLUTE last minute, and realizes that his subject and his mother are unregistered Dreamers. Are you telling me, that someone who was a FILM MAJOR doesn’t understand how releases work, and didn’t bother to check what the university’s policy on authorial rights are before he enrolled in the class? ARE YOU KIDDING ME? So he fails the class because he refuses to submit the film. He doesn’t DO anything with the film; we don’t find out if he intends to submit it to festivals, screen it, or anything of the sort he just fails the class because he’s either the stupidest director ever or the most noble guy in Austin. Then there’s Lorraine. Oh boy. Firstly, Sam’s absolute obsession with Lorraine was infuriating. I don’t find it fun or engaging to read about someone who is so naive and thoroughly manipulated, and I am forced to watch them endure an abusive, self-destructive relationship for chapters on end. Sam doesn’t love Lorraine; he’s obsessed with her. It’s not ‘love’ to know absolutely everything about the other person, and expect them to do the same; it’s not love to be completely codependent on the other person. As much as Lorraine was a bad person, so was Sam because he refused to see how destructive his behavior and their relationship was to him. Then, there’s the pregnancy. Why was it in the book? It’s fake, so there are no real consequences. Abortion is immediately dismissed as an adoption, even though objectively neither of the two are capable of being parents, with Lorraine refusing to go to an OBGYN, drinking though she might be pregnant and generally acting like the spoiled brat she is, and Sam having 17 dollars to his name, no real job, no prospects and no sense of responsibility. Sam could’ve easily realized his relationship to Lorraine was toxic without involving a potential child, and honestly his belief that a) Lorraine would somehow change or want him back, or won’t cheat on him just because of the baby and b) that her ridiculously rich and prejudiced family would allow him anywhere near that baby were borderline delusional. But the thing that pissed me off the most about Sam, was that he doesn’t get any resolution! We never find out what he does about his alcoholic mother, or the massive debt she had incurred in his name, there’s no comment on the fact that because of that he’d never be able to get a credit card, lease an apartment or buy a car; since he fails his course we never find out what he wants to do next or if he still wants to be a filmmaker, we never find out what happens with the documentary. All we get is that he’s now dating Penny. Yay. Some Good Things: I did gives this book 3 starts, so here are some good things. I liked Penny’s writing class and her professor, as well as what we see from their class discussions about who gets to write whose story. I also enjoyed Penny’s Anima story and the Korean couple; I thought the connection between the virtual baby and her phone being a metonymy for Sam was great. Andy was also cool, and I liked the banter he has with Penny; he was smart and funny, and I appreciated that we actually got some female-male friendships in this book. Jude and Mallory were also great; I especially liked Mallory’s speech about cows and mothers, and that she was presented as a confident if a bit overbearing person. Bastian was also cool, as were his mother and buddies. I enjoyed the fact that he was this boy trying to prove he was a man, but he was also a talented artist. I honestly wish the book had more to do with him and Sam, than Sam’s actual main plot. Speaking of Sam, I did like that he cried, was vulnerable and had hobbies that aren’t stereotypically male, while also being very much a man. He has tattoos and they are shown to be cool instead of ‘edgy’; I think the last time I saw that was probably Divergent. Yikes. Conclusion: Again, I find myself only half-recommending a book. There are good things in here; it’s just that the reading experience wasn’t great, and some of the character drama went a bit too far for it to be believable. If you think you’d have issue with any of the things I mentioned then skip this book; but if you don’t mind any of it, then you very well might love this. It’s a polarizing novel for a reason.
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geneeste · 7 years
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Timeless fic: Improvisation for Beginners (1/1, Lucy/Wyatt)
So I wrote this in a hurry last night, thinking today was Friday (it was that kind of night). Then today was just…a day. But! Here is this silly little thing for you, I hope you enjoy it. It very nearly didn’t have a title. Continued thanks to @bethanyactually​, without whom this fic wouldn’t make much sense. Rated Teen for smooching.
Few notes: Somewhere in this thing is an easter egg. Enjoy responsibly. SNAFU = Situation Normal: All Fucked Up
Lucy is well into her third drink when she notices Wyatt on the phone at the bar. He’d gone to get them another round–including one for Rufus, whenever he decides to show up–and Lucy is waiting in their booth in the very noisy pub, just passing the time by watching normal people talk with normal friends and family from their normal lives.
“Normal” in that they have no idea about the shadowy organization controlling their lives, or that time travel is actually something a small group of people do on a regular basis.
Lucky jerks.
Wyatt is making his way back to their table, efficiently juggling his phone and her drink in one hand, and two bottles of beer in the other. She adds that item to her already long list of Impressive Things About Wyatt Logan: remarkably good with his hands.
If she blushes and avoids looking at him after that thought, well, he just doesn’t need to know why.
Wyatt sets their drinks on the table, then holds up his phone as he slides into the booth opposite her. “It’s Rufus.”
Then she hears Rufus’ voice on speaker. “Hey Lucy.”
“Hey Rufus,” she says, frowning at Rufus’ grinning picture on the screen. “Where are you? We were expecting you an hour ago.”
“Yeah, sorry about that,” Rufus’ tinny voice says. “I was just telling Wyatt that the Lifeboat’s OS is throwing a hissy fit, and I got called in to try to calm it down.”
Lucy chuckles. “You talk about it like it’s a toddler you’re going to put in time out,” she says, then barks a laugh, looking up at Wyatt. “Get it? Time out?”
“That’s funny,” Rufus says carefully, and then, “Hey Wyatt? How much has Lucy had to drink?”
Wyatt’s mouth turns up with amusement and he shakes his head. “She’s fine. She’s having a good time,” he replies, and something deep and warm in his voice makes her flush a little.
Or maybe that’s the booze. Whatever.
Not wanting to draw anymore attention to how much she’s had–she deserves that Around the World cocktail, damn it–she swiftly changes the subject. “Do you want us to come keep you company? We can finish this last round and come over.”
“Nah. There’s literally nothing you can do here, and I’m going to be elbow-deep in code for a while. I’ll just see you tomorrow. You guys aren’t driving, right?”
“No,” Wyatt assures him. “We’re Ubering.”
“Good. Have a beer for me, okay?”
“Will do,” Wyatt says. “See you, buddy.”
“Bye Rufus,” Lucy says, sliding her new cocktail over, having sucked the last one dry.
Wyatt clicks the screen off after Rufus ends the call, then turns the phone over on the tabletop. He eyes her empty glass, then raises his eyebrow at her. “Is it just me, or are you hitting the hooch pretty hard tonight?”
She tries (and completely fails) to look innocent, shrugging with practiced ease. “Not really. Just happy to have a free night.”
He just looks at her calmly, like he’s going to wait her out all night if he has to, and she caves like an overeager spelunker.
“Fine,” she says, shoulders sagging. “My mother has apparently been trying to contact me again. My old phone is basically DHS property now, so Christopher has been giving me updates on the messages, and I know I’m going to have to deal with her eventually, I just don’t know how, and it’s…,” she stops, trying to find the right word. “Well, it’s just a SNAFU, isn’t it?”
His other eyebrow joins the first one, raising in surprise. “Listen to you and your appropriate use of military slang.”
That makes her smile. Just a little bit. “You were bound to rub off on me eventually,” she says, and feels a blush spread from head to toe when she realizes what she’s said.
Wyatt smirks and tilts his head at her, gaze going speculative. “Is that right?”
Still red (which she blames on the cocktails, because she is not usually a blusher), she huffs impatiently. “You know what I mean.”
His head tilts further, and he leans in. “Do I?” he teases, his tone all flirtation this time.
“Yes, you do,” she says, well on her way to flustered, and she pushes him back to his side of the table, managing not to let her hand linger on his chest, despite the urge. “Besides, you’ve had the same number of drinks I have. What’s your excuse?”
“Just trying to keep up with you,” he says, smiling. It lights up his eyes. “Plus, I’m bigger than you and beer has less ABV. Don’t worry, I can handle myself.”
“I’ve noticed,” she says lustily into her drink before she can stop herself.
Wyatt makes a choking noise, and when she looks up it’s clear he’s trying not to laugh, eyes mirthful and lips pressed together. But the tips of his ears are also red, and she finds that oddly delightful.
“I think that’s my cue,” he declares, reaching over and pulling her already mostly-empty glass out of her hands. “I’m cutting you off.”
“But–” she starts.
Getting out of the booth, he reaches a hand out for her. “It’s getting late anyway,” he says.
She sighs, but lets him pull her up. He grabs his leather jacket off the hook on the side of her bench and shrugs it on, then gets hers and holds it up for her. She turns around and tries not to read anything into the way he helps her into it and pulls her hair out from under the collar, fanning it out around her shoulders.
When he’s done, she’s breathless, and he’s barely even touched her.
She turns around to face him and he’s watching her, and things are pleasantly fuzzy but she thinks she can see something like hunger in his eyes. It doesn’t make her feel any less breathless.
“Ready to go?” he asks.
She nods, not trusting her voice, and he leads her out of the pub with a hand low on her back.
It’s quiet outside; the pub is in an older part of town, further away from the clubs that are so busy this time of night, so it’s really just the two of them out there on the dimly lit sidewalk. Wyatt’s got his phone out, probably ordering their Uber, so she lets herself be fascinated by the way her breath clouds in the cold air until he’s finished.
They’re standing quietly and companionably, but the tension from inside the pub followed them outside, and Lucy feels it like a pull in her stomach. It’s not long before she can’t stand the silence anymore.
“I’m sorry about, you know, all the drunken sexual harassment in there,” she says, looking up at him, and takes a deep breath. She can see her breath drift over Wyatt’s chin on her exhale–when did he get so close?
“It’s only harassment if I don’t like it. Did you hear me complain?” he asks, and his voice is low and gruff, and it is doing things to her she’s probably not ready for.
Probably. “Still,” she says, and she can’t help but sneak a look at those full, attractive lips of his anyway. “I should probably limit myself to two drinks from now on. Wouldn’t want to make Rufus uncomfortable.”
“Lucy,” Wyatt murmurs, eyes most definitely not on hers either, “Rufus isn’t here.”
“No,” she replies, and that pulling sensation in her stomach is spreading up, tugging her closer to him with every too-fast beat of her heart. “No, he isn’t.”
She doesn’t feel fireworks when their lips touch. It’s more like what blooming flowers must feel, opening up to air and warmth and the light of a full life. It’s way more dramatic than fireworks somehow, and it’s probably the leftover buzz amplifying her feelings, but Lucy is almost overwhelmed by the immediate rush of awareness, of rightness that comes with Wyatt’s kiss.
And they’ve barely gotten started.
The kiss transforms from tentative to insistent in an instant. Wyatt’s hands are in her hair, and he’s walking her backwards until her back meets a hard surface, and by the rasp against her jacket and the change in light, she’s guessing he’s moved them into one of the slightly more private brick alcoves next to the entrance to the pub, but she doesn’t care enough to look. Not when he’s moving one hand out of her hair and under her jacket to slide over the thin material covering her stomach.
She gasps, and he immediately takes advantage, deepening the kiss. The pressure is right but the angle isn’t quite, so she pushes up on her toes, and then it’s so perfect she whimpers. (She can’t remember the last time she whimpered during a kiss.)
Wanting to feel him too, she finds his sweater and pulls it up until she can get her hands under it and on his skin. His hisses into her mouth, and she feels his abs clench under her fingers, and the reaction makes her temperature skyrocket. She wraps her arms around him, digging her fingers into the taut muscles of his back.
He grunts, and suddenly he’s got one hand bunching her jacket against her back to press her closer, and his other is gliding down over her body to grip her knee and yank it up around his hips. The new position allows him to grind his hips into hers, and he does, hitting a sweet spot that makes her cry out.
He kisses down her neck while she gulps for air, and everything’s fine–everything’s wonderful, in fact–until a noise manages to pierce the bubble of lust that’s enveloped her. Opening her eyes, she looks over Wyatt’s shoulder to find the source.
Finding it, she sighs. “Wyatt, wait,” she says, trying to focus and get his attention, although his nipping at her jaw isn’t helping her do that. “Wyatt, we need to stop.”
To his credit, he stops as soon as her words register. He’s breathing hard when he pulls back. “Sorry, I’m sorry. We shouldn’t be doing this when you’re drunk. Or against a wall on the street. Sorry, you’re right, I shouldn’t have–”
“No, I just mean–” she points over his shoulder. “I think our Uber is here.”
He freezes at that, and then groans. “Shit,” he says, but he’s laughing, and he drops his forehead to her shoulder.
She cards her fingers through his short hair, and she feels him shiver in response, turn his head to nuzzle her neck, and she really doesn’t want to move, but–
Wyatt’s phone starts to ring in his pocket.
He chuckles and straightens up and away, putting a few inches between them. “Probably the driver.”
She nods. “Probably.”
“Likely trying to tell us he’s here so that we can get going.”
She nods again, smiling. “Very likely.”
He searches her face in the shadows. “Where should I tell them we’re going?”
“I don’t know,” she tells him truthfully. When his face falls, she grabs his hand. “But don’t we make it up as we go anyway?”
A slow grin wipes away the tension on Wyatt’s face. “Aren’t you the one who told me we shouldn’t improvise on the fly?”
Lucy moves past him toward the waiting car, using her grip on his hand to bring him along. “Like I said, you’re rubbing off on me.”
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mathangigram-blog · 7 years
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Interview (2005): M.I.A.'s been on the move. The sounds she's encountered have become her own.
It's hard to say which is more interesting: M.I.A.'s background or her music. Beginning as a youth on the run from authorities, continuing as a teen refugee in London and now as an artist with what is likely to be one of the most written-about albums of 2005, the 27-year-old daughter of a Sri Lankan rebel has lived a tragic yet extraordinary life. Already, M.I.A.'s electro-Bollywood-hip-hop has generated gargantuan interest among pop tastemakers, all of it based on a single song. "Galang," named one of last year's 10 best singles in Rolling Stone's critics' poll, is an intensely rhythmic culture clash that draws heavily on American gangsta rap and Hindi film, Jamaican dancehall, Europop and multiculti gibberish. The song exploded in the U.K. a little more than a year ago. It began washing up on American dance floors last summer and is now bubbling up to radio. M.I.A.'s debut album, "Arular," out next month on XL Recordings, is a more in-depth exploration of the singer's refugee eclecticism. From start to finish, it is an unstoppable riot of sound, weaving London street slang with Sri Lankan nursery rhymes, world politics and personal experience. Vacillating between attitude and innocence, her songs are tough- talking raps, but they're softened by a Hindi vocal style that ends lines of lyrics with curlicue upswings. M.I.A.'s recent sold-out performance at the Knitting Factory Hollywood was equally iconoclastic. Waving her hands in the air and self-consciously pacing the stage before a DJ, swirling lights and background videos, she was half hip-hop bravado and half "how did I get here?" "It kind of shocked me that there were so many people that knew the songs," M.I.A. says the next day. "My album's not out." Singing along is no easy feat, laden as the songs are with Cockney slang. Perhaps some in the audience were working off the lyric sheet one enterprising fan was selling at the club. Seeking out a sliver of sunlight in the dark Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel dining room, M.I.A. seems oblivious to the buzz surrounding her and her music. Feminine and model beautiful but entirely down to earth, it's clear she hasn't bought into her impending fame and is taking it all in stride. Stardom, after all, is just the next stop in a life that has, quite literally, been all over the map. Few Western pop singers have lived as chaotically as M.I.A. and who would have wanted to? Her formative years were a steady progression from bad to worse, going from poverty to persecution to war and alienation before she was able to turn it around. A father's influence Born in London, Maya Arulpragasam, as she was then known, moved to Sri Lanka with her family when she was 6 months old. It was 1978, and tensions between the country's two ethnic groups were growing. M.I.A. and her family were among the minority Tamil population in a country dominated by Sinhalese; her father was part of a militant group seeking independence. Rebel activities kept her father separated from the family and her family on the run for the next decade. When civil war broke out, they relocated to India, living for a year and a half "in a room surrounded by five miles of empty land," she says. "When it rained, it flooded. You'd have to basically swim through with snakes going past. My father's idea of safety was sticking us in the middle of nowhere where the army couldn't get us but without water, food, medication and money." With her family close to starvation and her sister sick from typhoid, an uncle helped move M.I.A.'s family back to Sri Lanka. In their native country, they at least had a support system, even if the war was in full swing. The area where they lived was regularly bombed, including the convent where M.I.A. went to school. Several failed attempts to flee the country ended with M.I.A. and her family moving to India, then London. Her father stayed behind. It's this core experience that drives much of the lyrical content in "Arular," which is her father's name. "For years when I moved to England, I was so embarrassed about being Sri Lankan and never talked about it," says M.I.A., an acronym for "missing in action." "The reason I started talking about my life is because I'd gone out thinking I was British for so long, I felt I owed it to inform myself on what was happening to the people I left behind. On a personal level, I feel guilty that I got away and so many kids didn't." M.I.A. returned to Sri Lanka in 2001. She was hoping to make "a random film about Tamil youth" and, in the process, sort out her feelings over the ongoing conflict in her parents' country. She returned to London more confused than ever. Much of the Tamil population today is starving and restricted to refugee camps, she says. The rebel group her father helped form is now considered a terrorist organization. "In the '70s, these people set out with ideas to be revolutionaries and fight for independence and struggle for freedom. All these real romantic notions," she explains. "Those terms don't exist anymore. Who would you call a terrorist? Who would you call a revolutionary today? I don't know." It's a timely question, and you can hear her trying to sort out the answer throughout the record in songs exploding with bombs, where glitchy electronics mimic machine-gun fire. By the end of the album, she turns the question to listeners: "You can be a follower, but who's your leader?" It's clear she's uncomfortable with those who blindly follow. Her entire life has been a struggle against the prevailing culture, and her personality and musical taste have formed accordingly. M.I.A. was 10 when her family settled in a housing project in London. Until then, her only contact with music was Bollywood films, television theme songs and bootleg tapes of Michael Jackson and Boney M. In England, she had a radio and a lot of cultural catching up to do. Madonna and Bananarama were her guides. Then her radio was stolen. Her ear turned to the hip-hop booming next door. "I looked through the window, and it was a 19-year-old kid and his mates would roll up in a car. It just seemed so cool, like a secret club," she says. In 1988, rap still held a sort of outsider appeal that immediately connected with the young South Asian transplant. M.I.A. didn't understand English, but she connected with the rhythm and look of Public Enemy, N.W.A and other artists she would later appreciate for their politics. M.I.A. never intended to be a rapper, or even a musician. She wanted to be an artist. As a student at St. Martin's Art School in London, she began exploring film. But when an art gallery asked her to contribute work to a show, she branched out to painting, channeling her Sri Lankan experience into candy-colored stencils of tigers, palm trees, hand grenades and warplanes. "I always grew up on the border of everything and not quite being let in," she says. "I was concerned about what I wanted to say but didn't really care how it came out." It was her paintings that brought M.I.A. into contact with Justine Frischmann, former leader of the rock band Elastica, who commissioned her to create the cover art for its 2000 album, "Menace," and a video for the single "Mad Dog God Dam." Frischmann also asked M.I.A. to accompany the group on its U.S. tour, videotaping their shows. Electro pioneer Peaches was touring with the band and encouraged M.I.A. to begin experimenting with the primitive sequencing machine that had become her stock in trade � a Roland MC-505. She predicted M.I.A. would be singing along to the beats she was building one year later, but M.I.A. resisted. Tone deaf and lacking the self-confidence to front her own band, she recruited four singers for the job. None of them worked out. "All of them were doing R&B. All of them wanted to be like Beyonc�," she says. "I thought that I did what I did because I couldn't sing � that when other people did it, they were going to do it better, but my stuff had a certain thing to it. They couldn't even understand what I was doing." Read more: http://mia.boards.net/thread/54/interviews-2005#ixzz4eBx6Zk2l
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